Hero of the Imperium, page 73
The Adumbrians present nodded with more than a trace of smugness. Dimarco shrugged, with interesting effects on her dress and what I could see of its contents. ‘I couldn’t tell you why this is, though.’ She glanced almost imperceptibly at her fellow psykers.
‘It seems to be something to do with the orbital dynamics,’ Malden said dryly. ‘The fact that the world is rotationally locked sets up a resonance in the warp, which bends the currents.’
‘Something of an oversimplification,’ the astropath said, her voice surprisingly young. ‘But unless you can feel them directly, it’s the closest you’re likely to get.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Kolbe said. ‘You mean these currents are shifting?’
Dimarco sighed loudly. ‘What have we just been saying? Of course they’re frakking shifting!’ As her voice rose in pitch I began to realise she wasn’t just being a snotty pain in the arse, she was genuinely worried; probably more so than she’d been in a long time. (And when you consider she’d been serving on a battleship, which had undoubtedly been shot at a few times, that would be saying something.) ‘Three times since we got here. Big, sudden shifts. Which, in case you haven’t been paying attention, is something which definitely shouldn’t be happening.’
‘Three times?’ I asked, before I could stop myself, and the woman’s night-black eyes were on me again, spraying contempt like the barrel of a hellgun. Before she could say something trite and obvious, like asking if I was deaf, I nodded thoughtfully and continued to speak, overriding any sarcastic comment she might be about to make. ‘Can you give us a precise time on that?’ The effect was quite satisfying, I have to say: a faint moue of puzzlement flickered across her features, and she bit back the words she’d been preparing to fling with a faint choking sound.
‘Not precise, no,’ she said. She turned to the astropath. ‘Faciltiatrix Agnetha?’
The blind woman nodded. ‘Since the first one was what cut us off from the rest of the fleet68, I can tell you to the second. The others I’d need to check if you want more accuracy than within an hour or two.’
‘That would be fine,’ I said, a sudden sinking feeling telling me I’d just made an intuitive leap I really didn’t want to be right about. Unfortunately I was: the most recent shift in the warp currents had happened earlier that day, shortly before our eventful raid on the Sejwek house. (The other attacks had all gone without a hitch, of course, including the one on the warehouse I’d been so keen to avoid: the heretics had already moved the weapons out, and the place was deserted when the PDF got there. The only consolation was that at least I’d survived the mess I’d got myself into, and had inadvertently boosted my reputation for sagacity and courage into the bargain.)
‘So,’ Zyvan said, looking as perturbed as I’d ever seen him, ‘the heretics are doing something to affect the warp currents. The big question is why.’
‘With respect, my lord,’ Malden said, ‘the big question is what. If they really are responsible for this, we’re dealing with a level of power far greater than any mortal psyker could possibly wield.’
The growing sense of apprehension I felt curdled in my gut. There was an obvious answer to that, and I didn’t want to be the one to state it. Nobody else seemed willing to verbalise the thought, though, despite the number of ashen faces around me who had presumably reached the same conclusion.
‘When you examined the room we found in the hab dome,’ I said at last, ‘you said you thought some of the sigils there were part of a summoning ritual. Did you find any similar ones in the Sejwek house?’
‘We did,’ Malden said. ‘Almost identical.’ He permitted himself the ghost of a smile. ‘It’s hard to say if they were exactly the same, as your method of entry erased a few.’ Along with the wall they’d been painted on, of course.
‘In your opinion,’ Zyvan said, clearly reluctant to hear the answer, ‘could they have raised some kind of warp entity with sufficient power to affect the currents?’
‘It’s possible.’ The young psyker nodded. ‘There are daemons strong enough to do that.’ An audible gasp of horror rippled around the room as he casually used the word everyone else had been so carefully trying to avoid. Dimarco looked as though she was about to be sick, and I could hear Hekwyn muttering one of the catechisms under his breath. ‘I doubt you could hold on to one that powerful, though, at least for long.’
‘Maybe they didn’t have to,’ Agnetha suggested. ‘If it was cooperating with them voluntarily…’ Her voice trailed away, leaving us all to contemplate the same uncomfortable thought. What possible bribe could tempt a daemon to work alongside human cultists, and what blasphemous goal could they conceivably have in common?
‘Does that mean the thing’s still at large somewhere?’ Hekwyn asked, regaining his composure with a visible effort.
‘They can’t stay in the material world for very long,’ I reminded him. ‘It’ll be back in the warp where it belongs by now.’ I turned to Kolbe. ‘Probably thanks to the heroic sacrifice of your troopers,’ I added. ‘From what I heard they were giving a good account of themselves.’
Actually it sounded like they were panicking and dying horribly, which was what you’d expect under the circumstances, but if we were really facing a threat that terrible the more I could do to boost morale the better.
‘Until the next time they summon it,’ Dimarco said limply, the arrogance well and truly knocked out of her by the realisation of what we were facing. (But not for long, of course – she was a navigator after all.)
‘Assuming they do,’ Zyvan said.
‘Of course they will,’ Dimarco rejoined, no doubt taking some comfort in being able to contradict someone. ‘If they’d already succeeded in whatever they’re trying to do we wouldn’t be sitting around here discussing it, would we?’ Which sounded like a fair point to me.
‘Can any of you take a guess at what that might be?’ I asked, trying to project an air of calm reassurance the way they’d taught me at the schola.
I certainly wasn’t feeling either calm or reassured, you can depend on that, but the familiar routine of maintaining morale helped me at least look as though I was coping.
Agnetha narrowed her sightless eyes thoughtfully. ‘Disrupting our communications, obviously,’ she said. ‘But they managed that the first time.’
‘Cutting us off physically from the rest of the fleet,’ Dimarco said, clearly fighting to keep her voice level. ‘When I look at the currents directly, it’s as if they’re brewing up into a localised warp storm, centred on the planet. They’re already getting too turbulent to navigate easily.’
‘That doesn’t make sense, though,’ Kolbe objected. ‘They’d be cutting us off from their own invasion fleet too.’
‘Perhaps that’s the idea,’ I suggested. ‘Let them in, and then close the door before our reinforcements get here.’
Malden looked dubious. ‘That would require some pretty good timing,’ he pointed out. ‘And the warp isn’t that cooperative.’
‘Well, maybe they know something we don’t,’ Dimarco snapped, looking more like her old self with every passing minute.
‘No doubt they do,’ Zyvan said. ‘But we know things that they don’t, too.’ He turned to Hekwyn and Kolbe. ‘We need to track down every lead we can squeeze out of the sites you raided. The rest of the cult must have gone to ground somewhere.’
‘We’re already following up on that,’ Hekwyn assured him. He exchanged a glance with Kolbe. ‘We’ll find them, don’t worry.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ Zyvan said. ‘But we’re running out of time. If they really are trying to stir up a warp storm to bottle us in, we’ll be sitting waterfowl for their invasion fleet.’
It was probably not the most tactful thing he could have said, under the circumstances. Vinzand and his civilian advisors started muttering among themselves, and Dimarco let out a strangulated squeak.
‘Well let’s make sure it doesn’t come to that,’ I said. Emperor help me, I was beginning to run out of soothing platitudes already, and the meeting looked like it was going to go on for hours yet. In reality, though, it was about to be abruptly terminated.
‘Excuse me, sir.’ One of Zyvan’s aides approached him, a comm-bead visible in his ear and a data-slate clutched in his hand. ‘I think you should see this.’
‘Thank you.’ Zyvan took it and studied the screen, his expression unreadable. My palms started tingling again. Whatever the news was, it had to be bad. After a moment he handed the slate to me.
‘What is it?’ I started to say, but the words choked themselves off as I glanced down the page, the breath freezing in my throat as surely as if I’d just stepped into a Valhallan shower.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the lord general said gravely, ‘I’ve just been informed that our picket ships are engaging the enemy in the outer system. As of this moment Adumbria is under martial law. All Guard and PDF units are to be placed on full invasion alert.’
Blast, I thought. After all I’d been through today, I wouldn’t even get the dinner I’d been hoping for.
Editorial Note:
As usual, Cain takes little interest in anything which doesn’t affect him directly, so his own narrative jumps rather abruptly at this point. Accordingly, I felt it best to insert some material from other sources in order to present a more balanced picture of the overall situation.
From Sablist in Skitterfall: a brief history of the Chaos incursion by Dagblat Tincrowser, 957 M41.
If the first blood of the ground campaign had gone to the Valhallan 597th, the credit for the first victory of the conflict in space must surely be given to the crews of the picket ships patrolling the outer reaches of the shipping lanes. To fully appreciate their courage and that of their squadron commander Horatio Bugler, we must bear in mind that they were hopelessly outnumbered by the approaching invaders, and knew it; their job was simply to report as much as they could of the size and disposition of the enemy fleet and escape with their lives if they could. That they did so much more is a shining testament to the fighting spirit of the Imperial Navy and Captain Bugler’s outstanding qualities as a tactician and leader of men.69
With only two frigates at his disposal, his own Escapade and the equally lightly-armed Virago, he somehow managed to cripple three of the enemy vessels before withdrawing, having sustained only minor damage to both ships.
From Flashing Blades! The Falchion-class frigates in action by Leander Kasmides, 126 M42.
An interesting encounter occurred during the attempted invasion of Adumbria, a minor trading world on the fringes of the Damocles Gulf, by traitor forces in 937 M41. Two Falchions had been left on picket duty in the outer system when the main invasion fleet emerged from the warp. The Escapade under the command of Captain Bugler and the Virago under Captain Walenbruk were both all but untried at this time, having been attached to a task force sent to the Kastafore system a few months before directly from the shipyards at Voss. There they saw little action, having been relegated to extended patrol duties in lightly-contested regions; probably because, as a relatively new class of vessel, the fleet commanders had little idea of their capabilities, preferring to rely on the more familiar Sword-class ships at their disposal.
They were to prove their worth beyond any doubt in this engagement, however, being confronted by an armada of a dozen or so enemy vessels. Fortunately, the vast majority turned out to be armed merchantmen, carrying the ground forces intended to overwhelm the planet, but even so, the sheer weight of numbers would normally have been expected to overwhelm two lone frigates. By adroit manoeuvring, however, they were able to attack the enemy from behind, where none of the freighters could direct return fire, blowing two of them apart with torpedo volleys before concentrating their primary batteries against a third, gutting it completely. At this juncture, the escorting warships began to return fire, and the Escapade and Virago boosted away before they could close the range sufficiently to inflict any significant damage.
This might be considered unfortunate, as two of the enemy ships were positively identified as Infidel-class raiders; the very design which was stolen by traitors from the shipyards at Monsk, and the attempted reconstruction of which had resulted in the development of the incomparable Falchion class. A duel between these very different siblings would have been the first recorded clash of the two classes anywhere within the sector; as it was that epic confrontation would have to wait a little longer, until the Sabatine incident some seven months and over a hundred parsecs away…
TWELVE
‘Hurry up and wait.’
– Guardsman’s traditional summation
of the process of deployment
The journey back to Glacier Peak was as tedious as I’d expected, despite being relatively short, the lord general having taken the trouble to put another flyer at my disposal. Within twenty minutes of us having become airborne, the rectangle of sky beyond the viewport had darkened to the perpetual night of the coldside, relieved only by the glimmering of the stars above, and I watched the blue-tinted landscape below us rippling away with a sense of ennui I could only put down to the dispiriting realisation that the crisis was finally upon us. Even the excellent amasec in my hip flask, which I’d taken the opportunity of replenishing from the lord general’s private stock before we left, was insufficient to raise my mood. I found myself watching the skies for some sign of motion, despite knowing full well that the enemy fleet was still too far away for any of the vessels to be visible yet.
It was only as we began to descend towards the landing pad that I sat up and took notice of the scene below us, the vast familiar bulk of a dropship seeming to fill the entire field of compacted ice. Our pilot seemed competent enough, though, making a final approach and circling around the space-going behemoth in order to give us a better view of it. (Or so it seemed; no doubt he was merely trying to find somewhere to set down.) Under the constant glare of the luminators I could see a steady stream of vehicles the size of my thumbnail rumbling up the loading ramps, directed by arm-waving ants. At least Kasteen was on the ball. There was no point waiting until the traitors actually arrived before getting our rapid reaction force poised and waiting. I found myself nodding approval as our skids hit the permafrost at last and I went to rouse an ashen-faced Jurgen (who, true to form, had relished our short flight not at all).
‘The dropship arrived about three hours ago,’ Kasteen confirmed as I entered the relative warmth of the command centre, brushed a couple of centimetres of snow from the brim of my hat and sent Jurgen off to find me some tanna.
‘As we didn’t know how soon you’d be back, Ruput and I thought we should make the assignments without waiting for your input.’ She was perfectly within her rights to do so, of course. Technically the regimental commissar is only supposed to scrutinise command decisions and suggest alternative courses of action if they have grounds to believe that the fighting abilities of the unit are being compromised. The habit we’d got into of including me in preliminary discussions and tactical meetings was a purely informal arrangement.70
‘Quite right too,’ I said cheerfully, masking a faint sense of being left out of things which vaguely surprised me. ‘Which company did you pick?’
‘Second,’ Broklaw told me, looking up from the hololith, which was jumping just as badly as I remembered, presumably no one had bothered to get a tech-priest in to bless the thing in my absence. (Then again, our enginseers were probably too busy getting our vehicles into fighting trim to bother with trivia like that.) ‘None of their platoons were assigned off-base when the dropship came in, and they’ve already had a bit of practice at rapid deployment here.’
He grinned at me, and after a moment I realised he was referring to our impromptu rescue of the Tallarns on the day of our arrival. So much seemed to have happened since, I found it hard to believe it had only been a couple of weeks ago.
‘Good choice,’ I said, turning as Jurgen’s returning odour told me my tanna had arrived. I took the drink gratefully and let the mug warm a little feeling back into my non-augmetic fingers. (The pilot had had to set the flyer down some distance away, and it had been a long, cold walk back to the command centre.) ‘I’m sure Sulla’s got her platoon’s Chimeras stowed already.’
‘And is offering helpful advice to the other platoon commanders,’ the major confirmed dryly.71
‘So what’s the news from HQ?’ Kasteen asked.
‘We’re neck deep in it, as usual.’ I sipped the tanna gratefully, feeling the fragrant liquid warming me gently from the inside out. ‘You’ve seen the latest sitreps?’
The colonel nodded, her red hair bouncing gently against her shoulders. ‘Enemy fleet inbound, ETA around three days from now. Heretic sorcerers playing frak with the warp and possibly a daemon on the loose. Oh yes, and Emperor knows how many smuggled weapons in the hands of an as-yet undetermined number of insurgents hiding among the civilian population. Have I left anything out?’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Unless you count the fact that the Navy doesn’t seem to have enough firepower to stop the enemy fleet before it gets here.’
I hadn’t envied Zyvan the call on that one. I didn’t really understand the problem, naval tactics not being the kind of thing I generally paid attention to, but the main thrust of it seemed to be that the traitors had split their forces. In the kind of warfare I was familiar with, which was all about taking or holding ground, that would have been a fatal mistake, but it seemed things were different on a system-wide scale. Apparently it takes spacecraft so long to get anywhere that once they’re drawn out of position they’ll never get back to it in any reasonable time frame, so the sort of mobile reserves we generally relied on to bolster a sagging line wouldn’t be an option.
