Duty Calls, page 6
‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘It’s not Guard or PDF.’
‘It’s a convent,’ Keesh explained, evidently surprised that I hadn’t recognised the sigil. ‘The Order of the White Rose[23] keep a small chapter house here, blessing Periremunda with their presence.’ He shrugged. ‘That is indeed fortunate for us, under the circumstances.’
‘Quite,’ I said diplomatically. That was all we needed, a bunch of psalm-singing fanatics in power armour getting in the way of a properly co-ordinated military response. I hadn’t had much personal contact with the Ecclesiarchy’s orders militant in the past, but on the few occasions I had done, I’d found their undeniable martial prowess so closely allied with the worst kind of Emperor-bothering tunnel vision that deploying them effectively in anything resembling a coherent battle plan was all but impossible. The best you could hope for was to point them in the vague direction of something important to the enemy, shout ‘heretic!’ and leave them to it. If you were lucky they’d put a useful dent in the opposing forces, and even if they didn’t, at least you’d got them out of the way before they started preaching at you.
‘I’m sure we can find something useful for them to do,’ Amberley said, clearly no more convinced of that than I was.
Something about the way she spoke started the palms of my hands itching again, and I looked at her narrowly, a sudden ghastly suspicion beginning to stir at the back of my mind. ‘There’s something else you haven’t told me, isn’t there?’ I asked, meeting her gaze. After a moment she nodded.
‘There is, but it’s still highly classified. You can tell your colonel, and Major Broklaw if you see fit, but if it goes any further than that before the official briefing I’m going to be quite seriously put out.’
‘I see.’ I nodded, not wanting to picture the consequences of Amberley losing her temper. ‘And this information is?’ I was by no means sure that I wanted to know, but I could hardly back down now without losing face. I was certain Amberley had more than an inkling of my true character by this time, but Keesh certainly still believed the legend of Cain the Hero, and disabusing him looked like being a very bad idea.
Amberley took a decorous sip of her recaf. ‘You heard Rakel back in the tunnel,’ she said, and I nodded. It had seemed like the usual gibberish at the time, but now, knowing what I did about the scale of the infestation, her words made a horrifying kind of sense.
‘She said something about a shadow,’ I said, trying to look as though the mouthful of amasec that followed those words had simply been a thoughtful pause rather than an attempt to hide a panic-stricken gulp, ‘and that it was hungry.’
I stared at the rash of icons marking the known and probable ’stealer cults, scarcely daring to believe the conclusion I couldn’t help drawing from the evidence. ‘They’ve started calling, haven’t they?’
‘They have.’ Amberley nodded in confirmation, placing her recaf cup on a nearby occasional table, as apparently unperturbed as if we’d merely been chatting about the weather. ‘Rakel noticed it a few days ago. That’s why we raided the nest, hoping to disrupt it by taking out the patriarch.’
‘Has it worked?’ Keesh asked, and to my inexpressible relief Amberley nodded.
‘To some extent. The telepathic network between the ’stealers and hybrids is still in place, of course, but without the brood lord to act as a link to the hive mind it’s not acting as a beacon any more.’ She shrugged. ‘Of course this was only the strongest signal, but we can hope the other nests are so much weaker they’re not getting through yet. Maybe that will give us enough time to shut them down too.’
‘If Rakel can stand the strain,’ I said, feeling an unexpected pang of sympathy for the psyker. True she had a voice like fingernails on a blackboard, and was almost completely round the bend even on a good day, but being subjected to the unholy keening of a genestealer feeding call in her head couldn’t have been an awful lot of fun. And to have to go actively seeking it again, Emperor knew how many times, seemed an awful lot to load on her fragile mind and chubby shoulders. ‘I take it that was why she was with you?’
Amberley nodded. ‘Led us right into the heart of the nest,’ she said, and grinned. ‘They couldn’t have been expecting visitors, there were hardly any guards in the way.’
Recalling my own frantic duel with the patriarch of the Gravalax cult, chainsword against claws quite capable of ripping their way into a Baneblade, I shook my head ruefully.
‘I don’t suppose they thought they needed any,’ I said, as insouciantly as I could. ‘In my experience a brood lord can take care of himself.’
‘He made a fight of it,’ Amberley agreed, the flicker of darkness in her eyes momentarily at odds with the conversational tone of her voice. ‘But the suit helped, and the others kept the purestrains off my back while I finished him off.’
Despite her casual air, I couldn’t help picturing something of the horror of that pitched battle in the shadows beneath our feet, and nodded slowly. She and her companions had been lucky to get out alive, and there was no guarantee that they’d be so fortunate the next time. Of course if she hadn’t, or hadn’t been monitoring the justicars’ vox frequencies and heard what was going on as they neared the surface, Jurgen and I would both have been killed as well, and events on Periremunda would have taken a very different course.
‘But she can still feel the shadow,’ I said, returning to the psyker’s words. ‘Does that mean…’
‘Yes.’ Amberley nodded bleakly. ‘We’ve cut it off all right, but the signal’s already been heard. We might have bought ourselves a little more time to prepare, but there’s a hive fleet on the way, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.’
EDITORIAL NOTE:
Since not everyone reading this will be as familiar as the members of my own ordo (or for that matter Cain himself) with the state of the tyranid threat as we perceived it in the early 930s of M41, the following extract may prove helpful, particularly in elucidating the precise role of the genestealer infestations which generally precede the onslaught of their hive fleets.
From The Abominable Chitin: a Concise History Of The Tyrannic Wars by Arten Burrar, 095 M42
For most of the concluding quarter of M41 it was possible to believe that the tyranid threat to the Imperium had been, if not completely eradicated, at least effectively contained. True, isolated splinter fleets from Hive Fleet Behemoth continued to appear from time to time throughout the eastern fringe, tiny shards of the all but unstoppable juggernaut of destruction that had been halted at such terrible cost by the Ultramarines in the desperate battle to save Macragge, but, formidable as they were, they could generally be dealt with by the combined might of the Navy, Astartes, and Imperial Guard. Only rarely did they succeed in overrunning a world completely, but every time they were able to do so, replenishing their store of biomass in the process, they grew in strength. Thus the prevailing strategic doctrine, from the defeat of Behemoth in 745 right up until the horrifying discovery in the last decade of the millennium of two new fleets, each alone greater and more lethal than their predecessor by an order of magnitude, had simply been to seek out and eliminate every trace of these diabolical organisms wherever they could be found.
Given the vastness of the Imperium, and the unimaginable gulfs between the stars composing it, it was hardly surprising that these splinter fleets were to prove more than a little elusive. The tireless defenders of the Emperor’s blessed domains did have one significant advantage, however, which enabled them to predict the appearance of these swarms with a fair degree of success.
It will be remembered that one of the first and most shocking discoveries made after the appearance of Behemoth was the presence of genestealers among the bewildering variety of organisms encountered by the gallant defenders of the Imperium. The insidious nature of these creatures had long been known: worlds without number had been infested with their changeling progeny, and only the vigilance of the Holy Inquisition, rooting out such cancers in the body of the Imperium with the ceaseless diligence for which we should all give thanks[24], preserved many more from being irretrievably contaminated. For the first time it became apparent that these creatures were in fact the vanguard of the hive fleets, seeking out worlds ripe for plunder, and in some way calling down the tyranid hordes to feast upon them.
For decades the exact mechanism by which this was achieved remained a mystery, but after Inquisitor Agmar’s perceptive analysis of the Ichar IV incident, presaging the appearance of Hive Fleet Kraken, much that had previously been little more than conjecture at last became clear. It seems that when a genestealer brood successfully infiltrates the population of a human occupied world (or, for that matter, one tainted by the presence of one of the lesser sentient races such as the orks, tau or eldar), it remains hidden, quietly building up its numbers and influence until it reaches some critical proportion of the population at large. Then the brood’s telepathic link becomes so powerful that it begins to radiate outwards through the warp, acting as a beacon to the malefic entities that spawned it.
Although the unprecedented size of the Ichar IV infestation made it the first occasion on which this signal became readily detectable by astropaths across the subsector, vindicating the theory beyond all possible doubt, some inquisitors of the Ordo Xenos had already speculated that precisely this mechanism was at work, and a few even claimed to have used sanctioned psykers to successfully disrupt it on more than one occasion[25]. Even those who doubted the truth of the matter, or proposed alternative explanations, were forced to accept the incontrovertible fact that wherever a genestealer cult grew strong enough to begin moving openly against the Imperial authorities a hive fleet was liable to show up within a matter of months. It thus became a matter of policy for both Munitorum and Admiralty alike to monitor such outbreaks closely, and move as many resources as could be spared from other battlefronts to the vicinity of these worlds with all due dispatch.
It must be remembered, however, that our glorious Imperium is huge, and not all the worlds so threatened were fortunate enough to be relieved in time.
CHAPTER SIX
With all that to digest, you’ll appreciate my return to Hoarfell was a grim one, my mood not exactly lifted by the fact that when I eventually left the Arbites building I immediately found myself surrounded by a gaggle of halfwits from the pictcasters and printsheets waving imagifiers in my face and shouting increasingly fatuous questions at me. How they’d known I’d be there I had no idea, but I harboured a pretty strong suspicion nonetheless. Amberley’s presence on Periremunda was supposed to be a deep, dark secret, so a genuine Hero of the Imperium (at least so far as anybody else knew) hanging around in the general vicinity would prove to be an invaluable distraction. In any event I hid my irritation with the ease of a lifetime’s dissembling, and trotted out a few platitudes about my original reason for being there. (Which, under the circumstances, I’m sure you’ll appreciate was far from being the most important thing on my mind at the time, but it still needed sorting out nevertheless. In the event, I’d got Jurgen to hand all the paperwork over to someone in Keesh’s office, reflecting that at least it’d give Nyte something to do while he was lounging around the place recuperating.)
‘Have you any comment to make about this afternoon’s terrorist attack on the starport approach road?’ someone shouted, and I smiled blandly for the pict recorders.
‘Anyone who threatens the Emperor’s loyal subjects in any way is nothing less than a heretic in my book,’ I said, deciding to play the bluff soldier, which I knew the civilian sheep would lap up. I struck a heroic pose, one hand on the hilt of my chainsword. ‘I don’t care how well hidden the traitors think they are, they’ll be rooted out, and made to pay the full price of their treachery. You can be certain of that.’ All good rabble-rousing stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree, the sort of stuff I’ve been spouting by rote since I got my scarlet sash, and I never expected anyone to take it seriously; not seriously enough to try to kill me, at any rate.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. At the time I thought no more of the incident, dismissing it as just another minor annoyance in what was shaping up to be a pretty bad day overall, despite the unexpected pleasures of seeing Amberley again so soon and working my way through Keesh’s collection of well-matured amasec. After deflecting a few more questions with vague but reassuring platitudes, I followed Jurgen to the somewhat less luxurious car Keesh had laid on to take us back to the aerodrome, my aide’s distinctive miasma parting the scrum of squabbling news gatherers almost as effectively as a burst from his lasgun would have done, and made the most of the sombre journey back to rejoin the regiment. I had a strong suspicion that it would be the last hour or so of relative peace and quiet I’d be able to enjoy for a long time to come.
‘Genestealers,’ Broklaw said, nodding slowly, with the expression of a man who’d just bitten into a bitterroot pastry thinking it was filled with sweetbriar. At least he didn’t say ‘Are you sure?’ which a lot of men in his position wouldn’t have been able to resist, but both he and Kasteen knew me well enough by now to know I wouldn’t exaggerate about something like that. (Or at least they believed I wouldn’t, which amounts to the same thing.) ‘I suppose we should have guessed.’
‘At least we’ll know what to look out for,’ Kasteen said, taking the bowl of tanna Jurgen was handing to her as she spoke. We’d convened in her new office, which was starting to look positively lived-in already, with a litter of data-slates across the surface of her desk, and a stack of empty tanna bowls teetering precariously on one edge. The command post below was looking a bit more businesslike as well, auspexes, vox units and cogitators up and running, and the usual complement of troopers scurrying about. Most of the enginseers had disappeared, which indicated that they’d got all their gadgets working as well as they ever did, and gone off to tend to our wargear, which was always a comforting prospect. The last thing we needed if the enemy mounted a surprise attack was to find half our kit malfunctioning.
I nodded, taking my own drink, and stifling a yawn. Despite my assurances to Kasteen and Broklaw before setting off for Principia Mons, the strenuous activities of the day were beginning to catch up with me. At least the loading doors in the distance had been closed, so the howling draught I’d noticed before was absent, but it had evidently been snowing constantly in Darien the whole time I was away, and the room was distinctly chilly so far as I was concerned. I warmed my fingers around the bowl gratefully. (Apart from the augmetic ones, of course, which could barely tell the difference.)
‘Pass the word down to the troopers discreetly,’ I advised, ‘and not a word to the local PDF.’
‘Of course,’ Kasteen said, leaning back in her chair. We all knew that if they’d been compromised, which was a pretty safe assumption given how widespread the ’stealer infiltration clearly was on Periremunda, tipping them off that the game was up would be certain to spark a mutiny among the contaminated units. Far better to gather what information we could quietly, pinpoint the infested ones first, and strike before they realised we were on to them.
‘It sounds as though the inquisitor knows what she’s doing, anyway,’ Broklaw said.
Knowing Amberley as well as I did, and having already gleaned a little more than I was comfortable with about the way the Inquisition functioned (but a good deal less than I was going to discover before the battle for Periremunda was over), I found this far less reassuring than the major evidently did. I felt it would be unfair to disabuse him, however, not to mention unwise, so I held my tongue.
‘Did she say anything else?’ Kasteen asked, eyeing me narrowly through the steam from her tanna bowl.
Until then, to be honest, I still hadn’t made up my mind whether or not to share Amberley’s final bombshell with my comrades, but now she was asking me directly I couldn’t see any good reason to withhold it. I trusted the two of them as much as anyone apart from Jurgen, and at least I wouldn’t be the only one fretting about the news.
I nodded slowly. ‘She did, but it isn’t to leave this room.’ I looked at them each in turn, underlining the need for discretion with all the subtlety of a second-rate actor playing to the back row of the gallery. ‘She told me specifically that you two were the only other people I could trust with the information.’ Kasteen and Broklaw nodded solemnly, barely even bothering to hide how smug they felt at being let in on a secret most of their superiors would remain blissfully ignorant of for the next few weeks. Of course their satisfaction probably didn’t last more than the next couple of minutes, but that was hardly my fault. I made a show of glancing at the door, to make sure it was closed, and the expressions of eager expectation grew on my colleagues’ faces.
‘You can rely on us,’ Broklaw said.
‘That’s what I told the arbitrator. Inquisitor Vail, of course, knows that already,’ I said.
Kasteen inclined her head at the implied compliment. ‘You can assure her that her confidence wasn’t misplaced,’ she said. I was never quite sure how much of my personal association with Amberley she’d deduced, but she generally seemed to take it for granted that we were at least keeping in touch, and may have suspected that I was one of her loose association of covert agents. (Which of course I was from time to time, since there was no way of getting out of it: I’m sure most of the men in the galaxy are familiar with the sinking feeling that accompanies the words ‘Do you think you could do me a little favour, darling?’, but when the woman asking the question is an inquisitor it’s even less wise than usual to say ‘No’.) At least if she did think that, of course, it diverted attention from Jurgen, who was probably the biggest asset Amberley possessed, as well as the most unlikely-seeming candidate for the job.
