Hero of the Imperium, page 64
As things settled down, however, I began to find the assignment as congenial as could be expected. Whatever state of readiness his men might be in, and time alone would answer that, General Kolbe at least seemed competent enough. True, he’d never seen any actual combat, apart from a few occasions when the PDF had been mobilised by the Arbites to put down the sort of civil disorder that flares up from time to time pretty much anywhere in the Imperium, but he was methodical, incisive and bright enough to listen to advice. It was at his suggestion that we went back through the archives with the benefit of hindsight, trying to see if there was any possible link between some of those previous incidents and nascent cult activity.
‘At least if we can find a connection, that’ll give us some idea of how long they’ve been active on Adumbria,’ he pointed out.
Zyvan nodded slowly. The three of us, Vinzand and Hekwyn, the senior arbitrator on the planet, were cloistered in a heavily-shielded conference suite in the high-class hotel Zyvan had commandeered as his headquarters. If nothing else the place was extremely comfortable, as befitted his status, and I’d lost no time in grabbing a room for myself there too. After all, I was supposed to be liaising closely with his staff, so it made perfect sense for me to hang around there now that my regiment was half a hemisphere away.
‘Up to a point,’ he agreed. ‘Although it would be safest to assume they’ve been infiltrating here for a generation at least. Possibly several.’ The three Adumbrians looked shocked at that, even more so as I concurred.
‘It might be worth checking the starport records for the last century or two as well. Chances are that the local cult was founded by a handful of heretics arriving from offworld.’
Hekwyn, a stocky man with a shaven head and the pallid complexion of most Adumbrians, paled even further. ‘That would be millions of names,’ he said.
Vinzand nodded. ‘Possibly as much as a billion,’ he agreed drily, with the indifference to large numbers common to Administratum functionaries. He made a note on his datapad. ‘I’ll have my staff look into it. But frankly I’m not hopeful.’
‘Neither am I,’ I admitted. ‘But right now we’re critically short of hard data. Even a shred would help.’
‘I’ll have my people follow up from their end,’ Hekwyn offered. ‘We monitor the cargo areas closely, checking for contraband. It’s possible we might have netted a heretic or two along with the smugglers.’
‘Excellent.’ Zyvan nodded. ‘Any leads from your street sources?’
Hekwyn shrugged. ‘Vague at best. There have been a few incidents, gang fights and the like, but if there’s an agenda behind it the pattern’s hard to read.’
‘I’ll take a look at it,’ I said. My years of paranoia have given me the ability to sometimes see connections that others with a less finely honed survival instinct might miss. I turned to Kolbe. ‘Any unusual incidents involving the PDF?’
‘If you mean have we been infiltrated, nothing’s come up so far to suggest that.’ His voice was level. ‘But given the amount of time these heretics may have been active we have to assume that cultists have penetrated the command structure.’ My respect for the man rose even more. Most PDF commanders in my experience would have been outraged at the idea, vehemently denying the possibility and refusing to allow a proper investigation.
‘I meant have any of your units come under attack?’ I said. Since the strike against the Tallarns four days ago we’d been braced for more similar incidents, but the second boot resolutely refused to drop. Of course we’d tightened security since then, so the heretics wouldn’t find so soft a target again, but somehow I thought that was unlikely to deter them. With the Guard regiments on a state of alert and the PDF providing a plentiful supply of easy targets spread out across the entire shadow zone, they ought to be next in the firing line by any reasonable logic. Of course reason and logic aren’t exactly high on the entry requirements for a Chaos cult, so second-guessing them is never going to be easy, unless you’re as bonkers as they are.
Kolbe shook his head.
‘Since you’ve raised the matter,’ Zyvan said mildly, ‘what precautions are you taking against infiltration?’
‘We’re running thorough background checks on every officer, starting at the highest level and working back down the chain of command.’ He essayed a wintery smile. ‘I’m pleased to report that so far I appear uncompromised.’
‘And who investigated the investigators?’ I asked, the palms of my hands beginning to tingle as a bottomless spiral of mistrust and suspicion began to open up beneath my feet.
Kolbe nodded. ‘A good question. So far they’ve been investigating each other, two teams independently verifying the loyalty of a third. It’s not infallible, of course, but it should go some way towards preventing fellow cultists covering for one another. If there are any there in the first place, of course.’
‘Of course. And in the meantime they’ve got us chasing our own tails, diverting Emperor knows how many resources and man hours…’ I broke off, suddenly sure that this was the main reason for the cultists alerting us to their presence by attacking the Tallarns in the first place. But if that was their agenda, we had to go along with it; any other course of action would be impossible. I voiced my suspicion and Zyvan nodded.
‘I’d come to the same conclusion.’ He shrugged. ‘But that’s Chaos for you. A hidden agenda in even the most irrational-seeming action.’ He sighed in irritation. ‘Why is there never an inquisitor around when you actually need one?’28
I kept quiet at that remark, having discovered more about the Inquisition and its methods than I’d ever wanted to know, since becoming Amberley’s occasional cat’s-paw, but reflected that just because you can’t see them it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not there. A thought which brought little comfort, stoking as it did the sense of paranoia that had already got me in its grip.
‘We’ll just have to do the best we can with what we’ve got,’ I said, unsure as ever just how much Zyvan knew about my tangential activities as a reluctant agent of the Inquisition. He must certainly have been aware of the personal relationship between Amberley and myself, and he was definitely astute enough to realise that it probably went further than the merely social, but had never asked and I wasn’t about to volunteer the information.29
‘Quite so.’ Zyvan stood and stretched, walking around the conference table to the small one at the side of the room holding a pot of recaff, some tanna tea for me (which nobody else would touch, but he knew my fondness for the stuff and was considerate like that) and a selection of snack foods. It was a common enough thing for him to do, especially as the conference had already been going for over an hour, but this time it was to save his life. ‘Can I get anything for anyone else while I’m up?’
Before I could ask for some fresh tanna, the sludge at the bottom of my cup having turned unpalatably tepid, the window erupted in a hail of bolter fire which shredded the seat the lord general had vacated a moment before. I dived for cover, heedless of the shower of glass splinters still falling all over the room, knowing the explosive projectiles would wreak havoc with any of the furnishings I might seek refuge behind. The only option was the wall itself, beside the shattered window, and I flattened myself against it, drawing my faithful old laspistol as I did so.
I didn’t have to wait long for a target. A rising whine outside the building abruptly terminated in a crump of impact which left my ears ringing, and the nose of an aircar ploughed through the gap of the window frame, wedging itself fast. It was an open-topped model, I noted absently, the interior luxuriously appointed in furs and fine leather, the metal of its bodywork filigreed with gold decoration, mangled beyond recognition by the impact with the side of the hotel. The driver slumped over the brass handle of the grav regulator as I shot him through the head, making a real mess of his elaborate coiffure, and his front seat passenger bounded over the wreckage like a man possessed, brandishing the bolter.
I looked round for my companions, but only Zyvan and Kolbe were reacting, both drawing bolt pistols and seeking a target. Vinzand was huddled in a corner, his face a bloodless mask of shock, and Hekwyn was down, bleeding heavily from the stump of where his left arm used to be.
‘Help him!’ I shouted, and the paralised regent moved forward to try and stem the flow of blood before the arbitrator expired from shock. I had no more attention to pay to either, though, as bolter boy brought up the cumbersome weapon as smoothly as if he were wearing Astartes armour. I fired, the las bolt blowing a bloody crater in his bare torso and obliterating a tattoo which had made my eyes hurt. I expected him to drop, but to my astonishment and horror he just kept coming, giggling insanely.
‘Frak this!’ I dropped and rolled as he aimed the bolter at me, staying ahead of the stream of explosive projectiles by a miracle as they gouged a line across the wall. The firing abruptly ceased with the bark of two bolt pistols almost simultaneously; the man with the bolter seemed to explode, spraying bloody offal around the room and doing the expensive wallpaper no favours at all. ‘Thank you,’ I added for the benefit of the two generals, and drew my chainsword to meet the charge of the rear seat passengers, who had spent the second or so it took to dispatch their comrade clambering over the driver’s corpse. A space this confined was no place for firearms in a general melee, the chances of hitting a friend instead of a foe far too great.
Not a consideration for the heretics, of course, who all seemed completely out of their skulls to begin with, on ‘slaught unless I missed my guess, the distended veins in their flushed faces being a dead giveaway. I sidestepped a rush by a woman naked except for a leather mask, gloves and thigh boots, and kicked her in the back of the knee, bringing her down just as she aimed the stubber in her hand at Zyvan. No time to worry about her after that, as a fellow built like a Catachan in voluminous pink silks swung a power maul at my head. I ducked it, blocked with the chainsword and took his hand off at the wrist. By luck or the Emperor’s blessing the maul kept going, pulping the head of the stubber girl as she rose to her feet, and I spun round to take the third assailant in the midriff, a willowy youth of indeterminate gender in a flowing purple gown and far too much makeup.
He or she came apart in the middle, giggling gleefully and scrabbling forward on blood-slicked hands, trying to recover the laspistol that had fallen to the floor as they dropped. I kicked out, driving the sundered torso back, my boots slipping in the spreading lake of blood, but even enhanced with combat drugs, the human frame can’t last too long in that state: the eyes rolled back in their sockets and after a few more twitches the hermaphrodite lay still.
Which left only one, the muscleman in pink. Catching a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye I ducked, drove my elbow back into a midriff which felt like rockcrete, and reversed the humming blade in my hand to stab backwards under my own armpit. It spitted him nicely, opening up his entire ribcage as I withdrew the blade and turned, swinging the weapon to take his head off. This was a bit of a grandstanding gesture, to be honest, but probably necessary for all that. I’d seen before what ‘slaught could do, and it was quite possible the fellow would have continued to fight until he bled to death in spite of his wounds.
‘Commissar!’ Zyvan called, from over by the door, and I looked up to see the other four on the verge of leaving the room. Gradually it dawned on me that the whole fight had been over in less than a minute. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Fine,’ I said, as nonchalantly as I could, holstering my weapons. ‘How’s Hekwyn?’ Not that I cared particularly, but it wouldn’t hurt my reputation to seem more worried about someone else now that I was safe again.
‘Vinzand’s stemmed the bleeding.’ Zyvan was looking at me oddly, and for a moment I wondered what I’d done. ‘I’ll be recommending you for a commendation for this.’
‘Absolutely,’ Kolbe chimed in, while I tried to mask my astonishment. All I’d done, as usual, was try to save my own neck. ‘I can see your reputation for selflessness is richly merited. Holding them off single-handed like that, so we could attend to Hekwyn…’ So that was it. My impulse to seek shelter by the wall had put me between the heretics and the others, and they thought I’d done it on purpose.
I shrugged as modestly as I could. ‘The Imperium needs its generals,’ I said. ‘And you can always get another commissar.’
‘Not like you, Ciaphas,’ Zyvan said, using my given name for the first time. That was truer than he knew, of course, so I just looked embarrassed and asked after Hekwyn again. He was looking grey, even for an Adumbrian, and I was mildly relieved to see a medic among the squad of Zyvan’s personal guard who were doubling along the corridor towards us, hellguns at the ready.
‘You can stand down,’ I told them. ‘The lord general’s safe.’ No point in not gently underlining my supposed heroism while I had the chance.
The Guard commander looked a little embarrassed, having taken almost two minutes to respond to the first sound of gunfire, but the hotel was huge and Zyvan had insisted on seclusion for our conference, so I suppose it wasn’t really his fault. In any event, he made up for it by dispatching Hekwyn to the medicae with commendable promptness and insisting that Vinzand went too: by now the regent was showing signs of shock, which I couldn’t really blame him for, being a civilian and not really used to this sort of thing.
‘How did they get past our security cordon?’ Zyvan asked.
The Guard commander had a short, somewhat intense conversation with someone on the other end of his comm-bead. ‘They were broadcasting the appropriate security codes,’ he confirmed after a moment. Kolbe and Zyvan exchanged glances.
‘I suppose that answers the question of whether the PDF has been compromised at any rate,’ I put in.
The Guard commander frowned. ‘I’m sorry, sir, perhaps I wasn’t quite clear. The codes identified the vehicle as belonging to a member of the council of claimants.’
‘Find out which one and have him arrested,’ Zyvan ordered. The commander saluted and trotted away. The lord general turned back to Kolbe and me. ‘This is just getting better and better.’
‘It doesn’t make sense, though,’ I said, the palms of my hands tingling again. We were missing something, I was sure of it. ‘If they have someone that highly placed it would be madness to expose them simply to carry out such a risky attack. They must have known their chances of success were minimal.’ And that was putting it mildly. Five untrained civilians, however fanatical, could never have prevailed against a roomful of soldiers. True, the death of Zyvan would have crippled our command structure, but even so…
‘Clear the building!’ I shouted, the coin dropping. This was a diversion, it had to be. The main attack would be somewhere or something else, and the instinctive paranoia jabbering at the back of my skull told me what that was most likely to be. Despite the clear breach of protocol, I shoved the two generals heavily in the small of the back. ‘Run like frak!’
‘Evacuate the building,’ Zyvan said levelly into his comm-bead and started running down the corridor.
After a moment Kolbe followed, with an astonished glance in my direction. I might have felt a moment of satisfaction at the sight, as there are precious few men alive who can say they’ve given orders to a lord general, let alone had them obeyed, but I suppose he was a bit more inclined to listen given my commissarial status.30
As I watched them go, every fibre of my being urged me to sprint after them, or ahead if I could barge my way past in that narrow corridor cluttered with expensive nick nacks on delicate tables, but I forced myself to remain where I was. If I was wrong about the threat I perceived and the whole idea had been to force us out into the open, I’d be running headlong into a trap, and I didn’t dare take that chance; despite the risk, I had to be sure. I turned and ran back in to the conference suite.
The room was as big a mess as I remembered, the wreckage of the aircar filling my vision as I clambered over the splintered remains of the conference table, slipped in some spilled viscera and scrambled into the shattered vehicle. The dead driver was in the way, so I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pitched him backwards out into space, where he fell the thirty or so floors to the rockcrete below. Belatedly I remembered that Zyvan’s entire headquarters staff would be milling around down there by now, and hoped he didn’t hit anyone, least of all the lord general; that would have been the crowning irony. (As it turned out, he burst harmlessly on a porch roof, so that was all right.)
No point trying to pop any of the maintenance hatches, as the metalwork was buckled beyond all hope of repair, so I thumbed the selector of my chainsword to maximum and sliced through the thin sheeting with a fine display of sparks and a screeching sound that set my teeth on edge. Heedless of the raggedness of the tear and the concomitant risk to my fingers (the real ones anyway), I levered the makeshift flap aside, taking as much of the pressure on the augmetics as I could.
I stared into the engine compartment, my bowels spasming. My guess was right.
‘The powercells have been rigged to blow,’ I said into my comm-bead. ‘Get me a tech-priest – now!’ There was no time to run, of that I was certain; I’d never make it out of the building in time. It was even debatable whether I could have made it if I’d fled with the others, who would barely have made it as far as the fire stairs by now.
‘This is Cogitator Ikmenedies,’ a voice said in my ear, with the flat unmodulated cadences of an implanted vox unit. ‘How may I assist you?’
‘I’m looking at a timer,’ I told him, ‘attached to what looks like the promethium flask of a flamer. They’ve both been taped to the powercells of the aircar which rammed the building. The timer has less than a minute to run.’ The wire connecting it to the powercells had been jarred loose by the impact, I noticed with a sudden thrill of horror. If it hadn’t been for that it would probably have detonated almost as soon as the heretics hit the building. As it was, the timer was running in intermittent jerks, counting off a few seconds then pausing for a couple before resuming its inexorable march towards zero. ‘I need you to tell me how to deactivate it.’ For an instant I found myself wondering if the fault would give me enough time to get clear after all, but logic overrode the impulse to flee with the stark truth that doing so would just get me far enough for my shredded corpse to be entombed under most of the building when it collapsed.
