Hero of the Imperium, page 68
‘Stay close,’ I ordered, getting everyone organised around us, so that however Jurgen was doing it we all got the benefit. As a bonus, that put a fireteam on either side of me, so I wouldn’t be the first in the firing line whether the heretics hit us from the front or behind. I got them moving fast enough after that, albeit with a few furtive glances back at the pictures as we left, and to my relief they began to focus on the mission again. ‘And stay sharp. We could be facing warpcraft in a place like this, so be ready for anything.’ As I’d expected, the prospect of facing sorcery had them so keyed up that I don’t think they’d have been distracted by the living embodiment of the murals other than to chuck a frag grenade into the room.
‘This reminds me of something,’ Jurgen remarked as we advanced cautiously along a corridor decked with soft, colourful wall hangings. ‘There’s an odd smell in the air I think I recognise.’ As always the irony of his words was lost on him. ‘Can’t quite place it, though.’
‘Slawkenberg,’ I said, with a sudden rush of realisation. The scent in the air was like the perfume Emeli the Slaaneshi sorceress had worn the night she tried to feed my soul to the monstrosity she worshipped, and a cold chill of dread squeezed my heart. Even after more than a decade (or now, after more than a century, if I’m honest) I still woke from my slumbers occasionally with images of that baleful seductress trying to lure me to my doom resonating in my head, as if the tendrils of Chaos were still reaching out to try to draw me in. I hadn’t had that dream in months, though, and an irrational flash of petty resentment at the prospect of further nightmares rippled through my mind.
‘Clear.’ Penlan ducked back into the corridor after investigating a room full of cushions and pillows which had no discernable function that I could see,44 and motioned us onwards. I’d been heading directly for the centre of the dome, on the assumption that whatever was going on here would be well protected, and the lack of resistance so far had me on edge. Of course that could just mean that our diversion was working far better than I’d expected it to, but in my experience battle plans seldom survived contact with the enemy.
‘That’s it. Nothing.’ Penlan waved us forward into an empty storage area, bare save for a single luminator and the stained glass mobile beneath it which shifted with the air currents sending ripples of rainbow light around the room. It had clearly been used quite recently, though, as it was free of dust.
‘Damn.’ I hovered by the doorway, mildly irked to find my deduction proven hollow, and nagged by a vague sense of something being wrong about the shape of the room.
It was probably this moment of indecision which triggered what happened next, as I was in Penlan’s way as she stepped back, still keeping the space covered like the good soldier she was. Lost in thought and trying to decide which new direction to try, I failed to move out of her way fast enough, nudging her elbow. Her finger tightened reflexively on the trigger of her lasgun, sending a hail of las bolts flying across the room and the rest of the squad diving for what cover they could.
‘Sorry.’ Her face flamed scarlet, bringing out the old flash burn scar she’d acquired on Gravalax, while her subordinates scrambled to their feet, grinning at the sight of her living up to her nickname.
‘No need,’ I said, seeing the need to restore her authority without delay. ‘It was my fault entirely.’
From somewhere up the corridor I could hear the sound of running feet as someone came to investigate the noise. Great. So much for sneaking around and getting what we’d come for without anyone noticing. ‘Everyone inside!’
I spoke not a moment too soon, as las bolts and stubber rounds began to pepper the rockcrete around the doorway and the troopers deployed to meet the new threat. A knot of armed cultists either extravagantly dressed or hardly dressed at all spilled out of the side corridors, getting in each other’s way to a most satisfying extent and providing us with a target-rich environment of which my companions immediately took full advantage.
‘Overlapping fire lanes. Keep their heads down and we can hold out here indefinitely,’ Lustig said.
‘That’s a comfort,’ I told him. ‘But I don’t think we’re going to have to.’
Judging by the voices in my comm-bead, fourth and fifth squads, along with their escorting sentinels, had finally arrived to join the party outside. With the cultists drawn away from the doors to meet the unexpected threat within, Grifen and her troopers were already sweeping aside the sporadic resistance left around the main cargo bay and pouring into the dome.
I motioned to Jurgen. ‘If you wouldn’t mind clearing the corridor?’
‘With pleasure, commissar.’ My aide grinned at me as he levelled the melta. ‘I’m afraid I forgot the marshmallows again, but heretics toast better anyway.’ He squeezed the trigger and a gout of thermal energy ravened its way down the narrow passage, vaporising everything in its path in a most satisfying manner. The few surviving heretics shrieked and ran, and a moment later a crackle of lasguns told me they’d stumbled into fourth squad.
‘Try to take a couple alive,’ I reminded everyone again, and was reassured a moment later by Magot’s cheery tone.
‘Don’t worry, sir. Got one here in one piece. She’s leaking a bit, but she’ll survive.’
‘Good,’ I said, feeling that things were finally beginning to go our way. Lustig and the troopers were already following up the opening Jurgen had made, running up the gently steaming passageway heedless of the damage the occasional greasy patch of heretic residue was doing to their boots, eager to fall on the defenders at the main door from behind. I was happy to leave them to it; I had no intention of putting myself in the way of any stray rounds at this stage of the game if I could help it.
I was just turning away to follow a little more sedately when I noticed something odd about the wall where Penlan’s las bolts had hit. They’d penetrated it completely, whereas the las-bolts the heretics had been shooting at us had been stopped completely by the outer wall of the room. Suddenly the nagging sense of wrongness I’d felt about the shape of the space made sense to me; there was a false partition here, designed to conceal something.
Dismissing my first impulse to let Jurgen solve the problem with his melta, in case it took any crucial evidence directly to the Emperor along with the wall, I cast about carefully for some kind of panel or catch, feeling absurdly like the hero of a haunted house melodrama. I could find no trace of one, however, and at last I motioned him forwards, hoping that the weapon wouldn’t do too much damage to whatever was behind the partition.
‘Wait,’ I said, just as he raised the melta and prepared to fire it. For some reason, perhaps the way his shadow fell across the wall, the outline of a panel had suddenly become visible.45 I looked at it more closely, wondering how I could possibly have missed something so obvious, and within moments had determined the method of opening it.
‘Emperor on Earth!’ We both reeled back, gagging from the stench which poured out of the narrow space, and after a moment spent recovering our breath we leaned forward cautiously to peer inside. Jurgen produced a luminator from somewhere and shone it round the room thus revealed.
The first things we noticed were probably the bodies, how many we couldn’t tell, flesh and bone seared and warped by sorceries I didn’t want to imagine. Most disconcerting of all was that what remained of the faces bore expressions of what I can only describe as insane ecstasy. Jurgen, imperturbable as ever, swept the luminator beam around the walls, picking out arcane sigils which made my eyes hurt and compelled my gaze to skitter away like waterfowl bouncing from a frozen pond.
‘Don’t think much of the decor,’ he said, with commendable understatement.
I nodded, swallowing hard. ‘There have been foul sorceries done here,’ I said. ‘The question is, what and why?’
‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t know, sir,’ my aide replied, taking the remark as literally as he did everything else.
‘Neither would I, thank the Emperor,’ I said. This was a job for Zyvan’s tame psykers, and no business of honest men. Or me. I turned away with a sense of profound relief. ‘Close it up and leave it for the experts.’
‘With pleasure, sir,’ Jurgen said, leaving the chamber of horrors as rapidly as he could and helping me manhandle the access panel back into place with almost indecent haste. Recalling the trouble I’d had finding it in the first place, I unwound the scarlet sash of my office from around my waist and wedged it into the gap before closing it, so that it hung from the wall like a jaunty flag.
‘There,’ I said. ‘That should do it.’ To my surprise the simple job had left me trembling with reaction, as though exhausted.46 I had little time to muse on this, though, because Sulla was yelling in my comm-bead.
‘Commissar! They’re abandoning the dome.’
‘Say again?’ I asked, unable to credit what I’d been hearing. There was nowhere else for the surviving heretics to go out here, and insane as they undoubtedly were, choosing to freeze to death rather than surrender or die fighting didn’t make any sense at all. Then the idea of a suicide bomb flashed into my mind, and I was running full tilt for the nearest exit. ‘Everybody outside!’ I yelled. ‘They may have rigged the place to blow!’
In fact they hadn’t, but the fear of it leant wings to my feet so that I was outside in time to be as startled as the rest of us.
‘Incoming arial contact, closing fast!’ the auspex operator cut in, his voice tense. I narrowed my eyes against the flurrying snow, fitting the goggles into place and wiping them clear with trembling fingers. A small knot of heretics was wading through the drifts towards the clear area, exchanging sporadic fire with fifth squad and trying to keep the swooping sentinels at bay with what looked to me like a couple of krak missile launchers. They weren’t having much luck, but they were managing to hold them back out of effective flamer and multi-laser range and I could see why Shambas hadn’t ordered his pilots to close the distance. The traitors were obviously finished now, and they might as well wait for them to run out of rockets before moving in.
The shriek of powerful engines tore through the skies overhead, and a vast, dark shape blotted out the starlight as it passed.
‘It’s a cargo shuttle,’ Jurgen pointed out unnecessarily. ‘Where did they get one of those from?’ It was a good question, but academic at the moment.
‘Target their engines.’ Sulla ordered, an instant before I could, but it would be a futile gesture at best. Even a civilian shuttle is ruggedly built, and a couple of lascannons and a handful of heavy bolters won’t do much more than scratch the paintwork.
‘Frak that,’ Shambas retorted. ‘Jek, Karis, go for the flight deck.’ The two designated sentinels reared back on their haunches for maximum elevation and spat luminescent death at the approaching shuttle. It was a desperate gamble, and for a moment I thought they might just do it, but the armourcrys protecting the cockpit is tough enough to take the stresses of re-entry; even a couple of lascannon bolts wouldn’t be enough to penetrate it. One struck home, however, leaving a vivid thermal bloom across the previously transparent surface, and the two sentinel pilots began a good-natured argument about which one of them had inflicted it.
It was enough to break the shuttle pilot’s nerve, however, and the engine noise rose in pitch as the main boosters ignited, powering it back up towards wherever it had come from in the first place. A howl of disappointment rose from the little knot of heretics as they watched their expected deliverance disappear as suddenly as it had arrived, then, as the followers of Chaos so often do, they began to argue bitterly among themselves. One group threw down their weapons and began to trudge wearily back towards the dome, their hands in the air, while the others began firing at the encircling troopers with even greater desperation than before. And, inevitably, some of them began to gun down those of their fellows who were attempting to surrender.
I watched for a few moments, until the inevitable conclusion had played itself out, before trudging back to the command Chimera more troubled than I would have believed possible before setting out on this assignment. True, we’d found what we were looking for, but instead of giving us answers, it just seemed to have opened the way to even more questions.
Editorial Note:
As so often in his memoirs, Cain’s tendency to elide the details of what he regards as uninteresting threatens to deprive what follows of some much-needed context. I have accordingly felt the need to insert some additional material at this point, which I hope will prove illuminating.
From Sablist in Skitterfall: a brief history of the Chaos incursion by Dagblat Tincrowser, 957 M41.
Despite the fears which understandably gripped most of the world in the weeks following the heretics’ daring and unexpected attacks upon the newly-arrived expeditionary force, the traitors chose not to show their hand again for some time. With hindsight we can quite clearly see that this was simply because their short-term objectives had been met; the security forces were compelled to waste incalculable man hours and precious resources preparing for a campaign of guerilla warfare which never materialised, and the longer it failed to do so the more firmly convinced those in authority became that this was because the cults they were facing were small, weak and poorly organised.
This impression was abruptly dispelled by Commissar Cain’s personal discovery of a hidden shuttle pad, cunningly concealed on the coldside within easy striking distance of Glacier Peak. It became instantly apparent that the conspiracy was far stronger and more organised than had previously been suspected, and that all they had done before was with the aim of diverting attention from this most insidious of threats. Who knew how many of their confederates had managed to infiltrate Adumbria undetected, and what manner of vileness they’d brought with them? Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that many within the Council of Claimants became convinced that the vanguard of the enemy fleet was already among us, awaiting their moment to strike.
Such a prognosis was, of course, needlessly alarmist, but there were few on Adumbria, and even fewer among the Imperial forces ranged in its defence, prepared to discount the possibility entirely.
To: The Office of the Lord General, by the grace of His Most Divine Majesty, protector of that part of the Holy Dominions known as the Damocles Gulf and Adjacent Sectors to Spinward.
From: Commissar Tomas Beije, charged by the Office of the Commissariat with the maintenance of True Fighting Spirit among his most loyal and fervent warriors of the Tallarn 229th.
My lord general,
I have received this day, 273 937 M41, your recent communiqué regarding the discoveries made by my colleague Ciaphas Cain and his rabble of a regiment, and perused it with interest. You may rest assured that in the opinion of both myself and Colonel Asmar, there is absolutely no likelihood of a similar rebel foothold being established on the so-called ‘hotside’ of Adumbria under the very noses of His Divine Majesty’s most loyal and fervent warriors.
Nevertheless, as you are at pains to point out, additional caution is never a bad thing; I have accordingly given my approval to Colonel Asmar’s proposal to widen the range of our perimeter patrols by up to five kilometres and have urged the priests of our company to say additional benedictions invoking the Emperor’s guidance of their footsteps. In the unlikely event of such heretical deviants polluting that part of the divinely-appointed realm given over to our charge, our soldiers will undoubtedly be led straight to them by The Emperor’s Grace as a result of this intercession.
I trust that this will prove sufficient to ensure the success of our Holy task.
Tomas Beije, Regimental Commissar.
Thought for the day: Faith is the strongest shield.
EIGHT
‘Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.’
– Imperial Guard tactical manual
It was a grim little group we made as we convened in a conference suite at the lord general’s headquarters, virtually identical to the one we’d been using when our last meeting had been so rudely interrupted. Fortunately the hotel he’d commandeered possessed several, so the partial demolition of the other one during the heretics’ botched attempt to assassinate Zyvan had turned out to be a minor inconvenience at best: in the manner of plush hotels across the galaxy it was almost impossible to tell the difference between the two rooms. Even the little side table of refreshments was in the same place I remembered it.
There were a number of significant details which had changed, though, the most noticeable one being the fact that we were now on the ground floor and a battery of Hydras were parked outside with orders to shoot anything that crossed the perimeter no matter how authentic its clearances seemed. The sight of the anti-aircraft guns reminded me of the earlier incident and I asked how the enquiries into that were progressing.
‘Slowly,’ Zyvan admitted, helping himself to a cyna bun from the table in the corner. Famished from the trip back from Glacier Peak, which had been undertaken with gratifying speed aboard a flyer dispatched to collect me by the lord general himself, I lost no time in following his example. ‘We arrested the owner of the aircar, of course, but he maintains that it was stolen without his knowledge.’
‘I suppose he would,’ I said. ‘Anyone we know?’
‘Ventrious,’ Zyvan said, to my complete surprise. The aristocrat had struck me as a pompous idiot, of course, and a damn sight too eager for power, but that pretty much summed up the entire breed in my experience, and try as I might I couldn’t picture the red-faced buffoon I’d seen throwing a tantrum in the council chamber as a Slaaneshi cultist. He’d have looked ridiculous in pink, for a start.
‘And you’re satisfied with his story?’ I asked.
