Duty Calls, page 9
For an instant I wondered if we were going to make it. Then my boots impacted on frost-slick grass, and I lost my balance, falling heavily to my knees. For a panic-stricken moment as I scrabbled for purchase I thought I was sliding back over the rim of that terrible abyss. Then my hands caught hold of a bush clinging tenaciously to the edge of the world, and my heart began to slow. I took a deep breath, my aide’s familiar miasma informing me that he’d made it too, and staggered to my feet.
‘There she goes,’ Jurgen remarked conversationally, seating himself on the remaining stub of wall as the blazing dirigible scraped the top of the undamaged sections on either side of the breech we’d made, dislodging a small avalanche of bricks as it went. My breath caught in my throat, and I found myself thankful I hadn’t been able to see just how far the flames had spread during our wild ride across the apron. They were licking greedily all round the promethium tanks, the metal glowing red with the heat, and disaster must surely be imminent.
Slowly the wounded behemoth toppled into the abyss, faster and faster as the last remaining vestiges of gas escaped, weighed down by its own lethal cargo and the swinging plumb bob of our gallant Chimera.
‘Ciaphas! Are you there?’ Kasteen asked in my ear, and I took a deep breath, steadying my voice as best I could.
‘I’m fine,’ I assured her, ‘Jurgen too.’ Something rumbled like distant thunder, and a moment later a blast of heat scorched past our faces, flashing the snow around us into steam. Far below, the clouds glowed ackenberry red, as though the sun were somehow setting beneath our feet. I took another deep breath, trying not to cough as I inhaled the warm mist surrounding us. ‘But I’m afraid we’re going to need another Chimera.’
EDITORIAL NOTE:
The following is appended without comment, other than that it was typical of innumerable other such effusions published at the time.
From Periremunda Today: The News That Matters to Your Planet, 224 933 M41
COMMISSAR HERO SAVES DARIEN!
FIERY APOCALYPSE AVERTED!
Sources close to the Arbites office in Principia Urbi[31] have confirmed the rumours, rife since midmorning, that the terrorists waging their despicable campaign against all that is good and holy on our Emperor-blessed globe have been thwarted in their most audacious attack to date by none other than Commissar Ciaphas Cain, the celebrated Hero of the Imperium, whose recent vow to personally crush the traitors in our midst did so much to hearten our beleaguered citizenry.
The valorous commissar was present at the aerodrome in Darien when a promethium tanker, whose crew had been infiltrated by the heretic scum, was directed towards the heart of the city in a suicidal attempt to detonate the cargo it was carrying, obliterating both a strategically vital starport and over a million innocent lives. Acting on the instant, with never a thought for his personal safety, Commissar Cain attached a mooring rope from the dirigible to a nearby tank, driving it over the lip of the plateau, and dragging the deadly cargo to its destruction scant moments before the explosion, which would have dealt so mortal a wound to that defenceless community.
Fortunately for Periremunda, and the Imperium of which our beloved homeworld is such a vital part, Commissar Cain was spared by the Emperor’s grace from sharing in the fate of those whose fell design he so heroically thwarted, escaping unscathed to continue his unrelenting quest to uncover and eliminate His Divine Majesty’s enemies wherever they may be hiding.
Commissar Cain’s outstanding courage and devotion to duty was witnessed by Colonel Regina Kasteen, the statuesque redheaded Valkyrie who commands the regiment to which he is attached. Asked if there is any truth to the rumours of a romantic liaison between them, she coyly declined to comment[32].
CHAPTER NINE
News, it seemed, travelled fast on Periremunda, and once again I found myself wondering if Amberley had given it a little nudge[33]. When we arrived at the aerodrome on Principia Mons we were almost immediately surrounded by a scrum of pictcasters and printscribes baying like orks about my supposed heroism back on Hoarfell. Luckily Kasteen and I had retained our escort, despite the loss of the Chimera, and we were able to walk through the horde unmolested, while Lustig and his troopers kept them at arms length by the judicious use of gun butts and profanity. Perhaps equally fortunate, from my point of view, was the fact that the Valhallans regarded the climate this low down as uncomfortably sultry to say the least, which meant they’d discarded their greatcoats, and Kasteen’s light summer dress uniform showed off her figure to considerable advantage, thus deflecting a fair amount of attention in her direction.
‘Commissar. Colonel.’ Nyte was waiting for us at the entrance to the concourse, looking a bit frayed around the edges but reasonably fit under the circumstances, surrounded by a knot of armed justicars. Clearly he was determined not to make the same mistake twice, and I began to regret the loss of our Chimera a little less. He nodded a formal greeting, pointedly ignoring Jurgen. ‘I hadn’t expected you to bring quite so large an escort.’
‘I could say the same,’ I riposted, conscious of the number of eavesdroppers surrounding us, and determined to play the part everyone seemed to expect of me. Mentioning the reason for our mutual caution was, of course, out of the question. I nodded towards the exit. ‘Shall we go?’
‘By all means,’ Nyte said, leading his superfluous justicars outside. To my surprise, instead of the groundcar I’d been expecting, the squat armoured shape of a Rhino was waiting for us, its engine grumbling, and the aquila symbol of the Adeptus Arbites fluttering from pennants bedecking it in a manner that reminded me at once of Keesh’s ill-fated limousine. He looked at it dubiously. ‘I’m not sure there’ll be room for everyone.’
‘Team one[34] can ride outside,’ Lustig volunteered, with a glance at the colonel. ‘Keep our eyes open for any sign of trouble.’
Kasteen nodded. ‘That should be perfectly satisfactory, shouldn’t it?’
‘Of course,’ Nyte said, his tone managing to convey precisely the opposite. While the designated troopers scrambled up top, finding convenient stanchions to hang on to, the rest of us clambered inside through one of the side doors, which clanged shut behind us with reassuring solidity.
I glanced round, orientating myself almost at once. It had been some years since I’d last set foot in a Rhino, but the layout was almost the same as the ones I’d hitched a lift in from time to time during my brief period of attachment to the Reclaimers, apart from the fact that the benches were fixed at a more comfortable height for mere humans instead of the armour-clad giants of the Astartes. In their vehicles I’d always found my legs dangling in the manner of a child attempting to sit in an adult-sized chair, which had always left me feeling oddly self-conscious. The ceiling was as high as I remembered, though, with more headroom than I was used to in a Chimera, in order to accommodate the greater bulk of Astartes power armour. The only real difference I noticed was the weapon rack on the bulkhead dividing the crew and passenger compartments. Instead of bulky bolters, too heavy and ill balanced to be wielded effectively by anyone with muscles unaugmented by techno-sorcery, it held riot guns, tanglers, and stubbers.
‘Are we taking the same route as before?’ I asked, as we jerked into motion, and Nyte shook his head.
‘The highway’s still closed for repair.’ He directed a wan smile at me. ‘It seems we put quite a dent in it.’ I nodded, realising he didn’t want to mention Amberley’s presence here in front of the common troopers, and probably his own people as well, come to that.
Kasteen nodded too. ‘Commissar Cain’s told us all about it,’ she said, with just enough stress on the ‘all’ to settle any doubts he might have had as to whether I’d taken her into my confidence. Nyte inclined his head, taking her meaning at once, and Kasteen carried on with all the smooth assurance of a diplomat evading questions of policy. ‘I’m glad to see you’ve recovered so quickly from your injuries.’
‘I’m well enough to carry out my duties for the arbitrator,’ Nyte assured her. Jurgen muttered something about data shuffling and watering the office plants, which I pretended not to have heard.
After a relatively short period of jolting around inside the APC, which was no more uncomfortable than most rides I’d had in one, and a considerable improvement on many (at least no one was shooting heavy ordnance at it) we came to a halt and the hatch clanged open. I followed Nyte and Kasteen outside, to be greeted by a somewhat windswept Lustig.
‘No sign of any trouble,’ he reported, saluting both me and the colonel in one fluid movement.
‘Best get your people together, and go and find something to eat,’ I said. I suspected, rightly as it turned out, that the briefing was going to go on for some time. I glanced at Kasteen. ‘We should be safe enough in here.’
‘I imagine so,’ she replied, a trace of amusement flashing in her eyes.
We’d come to rest in an underground bunker, no doubt in the rock beneath the Arbites building, where a number of Rhinos like the one that had brought us here were parked. They looked blocky and functional in the harsh light of the luminators suspended from the ceiling, their weapon mounts gleaming where highlights were struck from them, and a couple were being fussed over by enginseers. A thick adamantium blast door was sliding closed behind us, sealing the exit ramp. ‘I had no idea the local law enforcers were so well armed.’
‘This equipment belongs to the Arbites,’ Nyte informed us, leaving one of his subordinates to take care of Lustig and his troopers, and leading the way down a rockrete-lined corridor behind a more conventionally sized door. ‘We’re only granted access to it in the event of a major civil emergency.’
‘I imagine the present situation more than qualifies,’ I said, and he nodded soberly.
‘I’m afraid it does.’ Anything more he might have been about to say would have to be kept to himself, however, as a cheerful voice hailed us from somewhere up ahead.
‘Ciaphas. You made it after all.’ Amberley was waiting beside a plain wooden door, which might have led anywhere. She was simply but strikingly dressed, in a mottled grey tabard over the sort of bodyglove I was more used to seeing on Arbites officers, although hers was a rich, deep red rather than midnight black. Her hair was drawn back into a ponytail with a ribbon of the same colour, which almost exactly matched the rubies set into the eye sockets of the tiny skull in the centre of the stylised letter ‘I’ of the Inquisition sigil that hung around her neck, wrought in gold and no larger than my thumbnail. ‘You look surprised to see me.’
‘I am,’ I admitted, ‘and very pleasantly too,’ which happened to be the truth, and her smile spread a little.
‘You’re a shameless flatterer,’ she said, ‘but thanks anyway.’ She pushed the door open, and stepped through. ‘I’m afraid we don’t have much time to socialise, though.’
I followed, finding myself in a corridor almost ankle deep in carpet, lined with portraits I assumed depicted the luckless arbitrators previously assigned to this backwater world (unless they’d been shipped in as a job lot when Keesh or one of his predecessors took over the building). Tapestries depicting notable judicial decisions or quoting some fine point of law in High Gothic filled the spaces between, so that glancing back I was unable to tell where the service door by which we’d entered the public side of the building had been located. Amberley slowed her pace a little, to fall into step beside me, and took my arm.
‘Nice work this morning,’ she said. ‘If that fuel barge had gone off it would have made things rather awkward.’
‘It certainly would have been for us,’ I said. Amberley shook her head, and her eyes clouded for a moment.
‘I’m talking about the bigger picture. If things are as bad as we think they are, we’re going to need Darien.’ She squeezed my arm in a friendly fashion, and grinned again. ‘Not to mention our assets there.’ She nodded at Kasteen as she spoke, implying that she meant the regiment, but her eyes were resting on Jurgen, who was a pace or two behind me as usual. Noting that, I felt a faint, premonitory tingle in the palms of my hands as the thought occurred to me that there was a lot about this situation I still hadn’t been told. But then that’s what this briefing was supposed to be about.
Before I could formulate an adequate response we’d entered a wide lobby, and Amberley had paused before a pair of ornately carved double doors, from behind which I could hear a muted babble of conversation.
‘Here we are,’ she said, standing aside. She might have been about to say something more, but the vox unit built into the pendant around her neck chimed softly, and a faint voice murmured something I couldn’t quite catch. ‘She’s absolutely sure?’ she asked, and listened again. ‘I know, she’s never exactly clear, but… I’ll be right there.’ She returned her gaze to me. ‘I have to go. Planet to save, you know how it is.’
‘Aren’t you staying for the briefing?’ I asked, bemused.
Amberley shook her head, with a trace of amusement. ‘My presence here’s a secret, remember? I’m not about to stand up on a stage in front of half the planet.’ She shot a dazzling smile at me, her eyes sparkling with mischief. ‘Don’t tell anyone I was around; I’d hate to have to kill you.’
‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t have to as well,’ I assured her, trying to sound as if I was joking, and not entirely sure that neither of us was.
‘I’ll try and catch you afterwards,’ Amberley said, hesitating on the verge of turning to go, ‘and if I can’t, I’ll be in touch as soon as I can. You’ll understand a lot more when you’ve heard what Keesh has to say.’
‘I’ll look forward to it,’ I said, and reached out a hand to open the door.
‘This is as far as we go,’ Nyte said, stepping forward hastily to bar Jurgen’s progress. ‘The briefing’s restricted to personnel of command rank only.’ Jurgen’s habitual expression of placid imbecility began to harden into the mask of obstinacy that had kept admirals and generals on hold until I could be bothered to deal with them, and he gave Nyte a withering look.
‘I go with the commissar unless he tells me otherwise.’ Conscious of the barely-concealed smirk on Amberley’s face, I nodded judiciously.
‘Technically you’re right, of course,’ I told Nyte. ‘Jurgen’s military rank is too low to permit him to accompany me.’ In actual fact it was about as low as it was possible to get and still consider him a Guardsman rather than a piece of ancillary equipment, but that was beside the point. ‘However, since he’s here as my aide, he’s a representative of the Commissariat rather than the Imperial Guard, which means he has carte blanche to go anywhere his duties demand. Is that not the case, inquisitor?’
‘Indubitably,’ Amberley agreed, keeping a straight face with some difficulty.
‘I see.’ Nyte coloured a little, no doubt regretting having started this conversation in the first place. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then.’ He disappeared down the corridor, and Jurgen looked at me placidly, all trace of truculence gone.
‘Anything I can do for you, commissar?’
I shook my head. ‘Nothing springs to mind,’ I admitted.
‘Very good, sir.’ He commandeered one of the sofas scattered around the place with a sigh of satisfaction, and fished a thermal flask of tanna and a porno slate out of his collection of pouches. ‘I’ll wait for you here then, shall I?’
‘That’s probably best,’ I conceded. After all, he’d had a busy day of it so far, so he might as well put his feet up while he could. Suppressing a twinge of envy, I turned to Kasteen, and gestured towards the door. ‘Shall we?’
‘By all means.’
I swung it open, with a last regretful look at Amberley’s departing derriere, and we stepped through together.
The noise was the first thing to register, a babble of overlapping voices that echoed from the domed ceiling overhead, and then my eyes caught up with my ears. We were in a large amphitheatre, tiers of well-padded seats falling away to a podium on which Keesh was already seated, chatting to the unmistakable figure of Lord General Zyvan, the military leader of our little expeditionary force. He clearly remembered me from Gravalax. Glancing up, he made eye contact briefly, and inclined his head in greeting. Of course this just drew everyone else’s attention to us, and several scores of heads turned in our direction, the ambient noise dropping off considerably as the assembled notables registered the presence of the hero of the hour. I glanced around, looking for somewhere to sit, while every eye in the room swivelled in my direction.
‘Commissar,’ Zyvan said, a friendly smile elbowing its way past his neatly clipped beard. ‘A pleasure to see you again.’ He nodded to Kasteen. ‘And you too, of course, colonel.’
Suddenly aware that we were the only two people in the room still standing, Kasteen nodded formally. ‘My lord general,’ she said, her search for a seat becoming as unobtrusively urgent as my own.
‘Allow me.’ A nearby techpriest budged up a little, making room for the two of us, and Kasteen and I slipped onto the bench beside him gratefully. His robe concealed a few odd, solid protrusions, which nudged me uncomfortably from time to time, but at least I wasn’t standing there like a practice target on the firing range any more. His lower jaw had been replaced with metal, a grille of fine mesh where his mouth should have been, but in spite of being unable to smile he nodded a greeting, which seemed sincere enough, and his voxcoder unit managed to inject an affable tone into his speech. ‘Magos Lazurus, at your service.’
‘Commissar Cain,’ I replied, as if he hadn’t already known, and indicated my companion. ‘And Colonel Kasteen, of the 597th Valhallan.’
