Defender of the Imperium Omnibus, page 98
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ I said, walking forwards, Jurgen at my side, the melta ready for use again in his hands. The closer we got, the more distressed Donal seemed to become. ‘I thought you were dead.’
‘I wish I was!’ Donal said, with unexpected vehemence, tearing his coat off and flinging it into the nearest concentration of flames. As it singed, then combusted, with an acrid tang of burning fibre, I was just able to see that the Imperial icons on it had been desecrated with Chaotic sigils, like the body armour of the defectors I’d fought before. ‘I can still feel the taint, gnawing at my mind…’ He seemed on the verge of losing it, so I took another step closer, Jurgen dogging my heels as always.
‘Commissar Donal, report,’ I said, injecting a little of the parade ground into my voice, wondering even as I did so if it was the right approach to take. Fortunately it was, old habits and learned responses kicking in, to override whatever it was which had wrought so bizarre a change in him. ‘What happened after we left the palace?’
‘It was Varan,’ Donal said, his voice sounding as though it was forcing its way past a blockade in his throat. ‘He spoke to us.’ His face contorted, mirroring the battle going on in his mind between two diametrically opposed viewpoints. ‘He just told us the truth was lies, and the lies became truth.’
‘He’s gone barmy, sir,’ Jurgen said, as constitutionally incapable as ever of reconciling a paradox.
‘Not exactly,’ I said, the mental image of a spreading tumour that had occurred to me back at the command post returning with renewed force. Up until now I’d been taking it for granted that Varan had psykers in his retinue, which he very likely did, but what if he was a psyker himself? One with a very specific, and very dangerous, talent… A cold thread of terror wrapped itself around my heart, and began to constrict. If I was right, and he was on his way to the Valley of Daemons in person, then there was nothing I could do to keep the Shadowlight out of his hands, every ally I’d been able to cozen and dragoon here another potential recruit to the enemy cause, furthering his chance of success. ‘Oh frak.’ With an effort, I turned my attention back to Donal. ‘How close did he get before he affected your mind? Yours and the Governor’s?’
‘He was in the room,’ Donal said, looking and sounding more like a fever patient in the grip of delirium by the minute.
‘Quite close, then,’ I probed, hoping for clarification. If he needed to be within a handful of metres to pull off his party trick, that wouldn’t be too bad…
‘Line of sight,’ Donal gasped, the residue of the warmaster’s influence evidently waning in the face of Jurgen’s ability to nullify psychic phenomena. ‘And earshot. Anyone who can see and hear him…’ His face contorted again. ‘They filled the scrumball stadium with prisoners: PDF, civilians, anyone they could round up. The minute he spoke, he had them all…’
Wonderful, I thought. All he has to do is step off the shuttle, grab an amplivox, and we all go over to the enemy. Even positioning sharpshooters wouldn’t help; they’d have to see him clearly to get a shot, and unless they were deaf he’d have turned them into puppets before they could pull the trigger. Even earplugs probably wouldn’t help, if the effect was psychic rather than physical.
There was only one thing left to do, to evaluate just how grave the threat was, and I found myself reluctant to do it; Donal had suffered more than enough already. But he was a commissar, I’d made him one myself: he’d understand, if anyone would, the stern dictates of duty.
‘Jurgen,’ I said, ‘take three steps directly away from Commissar Donal.’ Most men, no doubt, would have at least expressed some measure of curiosity, but, true to form, my aide simply complied with the instruction.
Donal twitched, his arm coming up, and the laspistol wavering indecisively in my direction. ‘Death to… the servants…’ he gasped, then just as I was wondering if I’d found out what I needed to know too late, and at too high a price, a trace of his old character reasserted itself. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said, with a hint of the self-assurance I remembered, ‘it’s just too strong to fight for long. Kick his arse for me.’ Then he snuggled the muzzle of his laspistol under his chin, and pulled the trigger.
‘What happened?’ Manrin asked, as Jurgen and I re-emerged from the burning remains of the downed shuttle, my weapons once more hanging from my belt. ‘Did you kill them all?’
‘They’re all dead,’ I answered, keeping my voice as neutral as I could. There was no point in relieving my feelings by taking them out on the militia. ‘But I got the information I needed.’ I finished folding the sash I’d given to Donal, such a short time ago, and stuffed it into a convenient pocket. The sounds of firing from over the ridge had stopped, I noted with a detached corner of my mind, and listened to the voices in my earpiece for a moment. Their general tone was self-congratulatory, and after checking that no more of my cadets were among the casualties, I turned back to Manrin. ‘Send your people home.’
‘Begging your pardon, sir, but we’d like to volunteer to assist,’ Jaq said. Before my conversation with Donal, I would probably have taken him up on it, but now I felt that every extra body standing between Varan and the Shadowlight was an extra opportunity for him to get his hands on the blasted thing. Not for the first time, I found myself wishing that whoever had dug it up in the first place had had the common sense to just bury it again.
‘Your zeal is both noted and appreciated,’ I said, ‘but the battle is over. The war, however, goes on, and your place is in Chilinvale, defending your homes and loved ones.’
‘Very good, sir,’ Manrin said, with a faint trace of relief, and began rounding his people up. After a few moments they disappeared into the darkness, and I realised for the first time that night had now fallen in earnest. Shortly thereafter I heard the sound of a truck engine bursting into life, then fading away in the general direction of the town, leaving me alone with my thoughts as Jurgen and I began to plod up the hillside.
The night was cloudless, thank the Emperor, and the faint glimmer of starlight, supplemented by the spectacular display of the debris belt, the fringes of which left streaks of fire across the sky every few seconds, was more than enough to see by. We moved cautiously nevertheless, as I had no wish to turn an ankle on the uneven ground, or catch my boot in the fibrous undergrowth. Our slow progress seemed frustrating at the time, although, looking back, I have no doubt that it saved our lives.
As we approached the crest of the ridge, a flicker of movement caught my eye, and I gestured my aide to stillness. Something was reflecting the starlight, a faint glimmer of blue-white against metal, and suspecting that it might be the barrel of a gun, perhaps being carried by an enemy fleeing the battle, or who had made their way to safety from the shuttle crash, I raised the amplivisor.
The reality was a thousand times worse. Humanoid figures, sculpted in metal, but which moved with sinister purpose, and an inhuman, fluid grace that somehow made them even more terrifying. They walked, unhurried, along the ridge line, the leading one carrying a device of some kind, with which it swept the valley below. The others were armed, the unmistakable silhouettes of gauss flayers held ready for use, the sinister necrotic glow which would normally have revealed their presence masked by a shroud of some flexible metal fabric.
‘Necrons,’ I told Jurgen, in a barely audible whisper. The fears, which I’d sought to dismiss for so long were grounded in reality after all. After an indeterminate time, which was probably no more than a few minutes, for all that it felt like a lifetime, the leading automaton stopped moving, consulted the device in its hand, then raised its other arm, pointing in the direction of the shrine. ‘And they seem to have found the Shadowlight.’ Hardly surprising, given their mastery of warp technology, and the amount of energy we’d released that afternoon.
‘That’s not good, is it, sir?’ Jurgen asked, with his usual flair for understatement.
‘No, it’s not,’ I agreed. The necron scouting party remained as immobile as the statues they resembled for another instant, then vanished, with a faint crackle of energy and displaced air. So far as I could see, it was now a race between Varan and the metal horrors to reach the device first: leaving us squarely in the middle. Any way I looked at it, our chances of surviving the next few hours had just dropped from slim to negligible.
TWENTY-FOUR
‘It seems we’re out of options,’ Rorkins said, with a glance at the hololith. I’d cleared the command centre of all but our most senior people, and those of us left were an ill-assorted group, for the most part staring at the contact runes marking the progress of Varan’s airborne armada as though they could be diverted by willpower alone. Unfortunately they couldn’t, and by my estimate would be right on top of us within the hour. Just before dawn, in fact, the warmaster being nothing if not predictable in his tactics. ‘Evacuation is clearly impossible.’
‘Nevertheless, I want everyone given clear instructions to fall back to the shuttles if the worst happens,’ I said. We’d never manage to squeeze Grouber’s troopers, Felicia’s people, and the Inquisition contingent into the one we’d arrived in, along with our own schola cadets and instructors, but the enemy had thoughtfully provided us with a trio of reasonably intact spares, a couple of which Sprie’s fellow naval cadets could pilot to safety if push came to shove.
‘But what about the Shadowlight?’ Felicia demanded. ‘It must be protected at all costs!’ I’d thought long and hard about revealing the secret of its existence to Rorkins and Julien on the nerve-shredding walk back to Grouber’s Chimera, during which every stray sound had made me start nervously, wondering if the metal killers had returned, but on balance I felt that their previous connections to the Inquisition made them sufficiently trustworthy, and if they were going to die in the next few hours, at the very least they deserved to know why. Felicia and Makan had been less than thrilled by this decision, as you can imagine, but it seemed to me that if we were going to have even a prayer of keeping the Shadowlight out of Varan’s hands, we all needed to be singing from the same psalter.
‘I’ve got Yaitz rigging demo charges around the chamber it’s in,’ I said. ‘If we have to pull out, we can collapse the whole shrine on top of it. Digging the thing out again after that’s going to be a major operation, which should buy us enough time to organise a counterattack.’
‘Blow up the shrine,’ Felicia said, in a dangerous monotone. ‘Perhaps you should just call in an orbital strike, and make really sure of the job.’
‘Nothing Visiter has is accurate enough,’ Rorkins said, apparently taking the remark at face value, and what was left of the tech-priest’s face took on an expression which would have intimidated an ork. ‘And even if it was, he couldn’t get into position past the enemy warships.’
‘Which the Navy can take care of as soon as they get here,’ Julien put in impatiently. ‘Let’s just stick to the point, shall we?’
‘It’s a last resort, of course,’ I reassured Felicia. Realistically, I didn’t think any of us were likely to be around to press the button in any case, but that wouldn’t stop me trying my hardest to be wrong.
‘So was blowing up the dam,’ she said pointedly, reining in her temper with an effort only I knew her well enough to recognise.
Fortunately, at that point, the hololith flickered, and Visiter’s face appeared. ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ he said, taking in the array of faces staring at his image with some surprise, ‘but we’ve had another interestin’ development.’
‘Has the task force arrived?’ Rorkins asked eagerly, and Visiter shook his head.
‘No sign of ‘em yet, but we’re scannin’ on all frequencies. We’ll let you know as soon as they drop out of warp.’ His image flickered for a moment, then steadied again. ‘Which is how we spotted this. There’s a ship hidin’ in the debris belt. We only spotted ‘em because they began powerin’ up a few minutes ago.’ The picture in the hololith flickered, then changed, to a shape I recognised all too well despite the passage of more than seventy years; if it wasn’t the vessel which had obliterated the Omnissiah’s Blessing in orbit around Interitus Prime with a single energy burst, stranding me on the desolate tomb world surrounded by necrons, it was certainly another of the same class. Visiter’s voice continued behind the picture. ‘Class unknown,86 but it’s only the size of an escort. We can take it easily enough.’
‘Absolutely not!’ I said in horror, picturing the result of such an attempt all too easily. The fragile SDF boats would be reduced to their component atoms in a single volley. ‘Don’t even think about engaging it.’
‘Looks like we won’t get the chance anyway,’ Visiter said, with a trace of regret. ‘The heretics have spotted it. A couple of their destroyers are moving to intercept.’ He kept the pict feed running, the starfield behind the necron vessel moving slightly as the long-range imagifiers panned a little to keep it in view. A moment later it lashed out with the tendrils of flickering energy I remembered so vividly. ‘Target destroyed,’ Visiter said, his voice flat with shock. A moment later the raider fired again, and dispatched the other warship with equal ease. ‘Now it’s movin’ towards the rest of the enemy flotilla. I don’t know how it expects to take on the cruiser, though.’
‘It won’t have to,’ I said. The necrons I’d seen teleport away must have gone somewhere, and that vessel was the obvious destination. And if it had a functioning warp portal, then everyone aboard the Undefeatable was as good as dead. ‘They’ll teleport boarders across.’
‘They’ll do what?’ Visiter just had time to say, before his image vanished from the hololith, fragmenting in a shower of static. A moment later the display reset itself, reverting to the tactical summary we’d been looking at before the commodore contacted us, the icons of the enemy an ominous increment closer to our position.
‘What happened?’ Julien asked. ‘Are they still there?’
‘The transmission was disrupted,’ Felicia told us, after listening to her internal vox for a moment. ‘By a massive burst of warp energy.’ She smiled thinly in my direction. ‘Not our fault, this time.’
‘Those ships have a warp portal aboard,’ I said. ‘The necrons must have activated it.’
‘The who?’ Felicia asked, sounding bewildered. Makan undoubtedly knew what I was talking about, he was Ordo Xenos after all, but Rorkins and Julien clearly didn’t recognise the name either, which was hardly surprising.
‘They’re xenos,’ I said, cutting the explanation as short as I could. ‘I’ve had a few run-ins with them before, but there are precious few who can say the same and still draw breath. They make the ’nids look almost harmless by comparison, and they’ve been infesting the galaxy for long enough to have been around when the Shadowlight was made. I saw a scouting party of them up on the ridge last night, and I don’t think they’re here for the fishing.’
‘Then how come I’ve never heard of them?’ Rorkins asked, reasonably enough under the circumstances.
‘Because most of the people who’ve encountered them are dead,’ Makan said. ‘They seem to exist purely to kill. There have been rumours about them for centuries, but the first hard evidence only emerged in 897, in the aftermath of an attack on a Sororitas facility.’
Julien’s face paled. ‘Sanctuary 101,’ she said, and Makan nodded. The name meant nothing to me, but the Celestian’s expression was now suffused with righteous anger. ‘Then let them come, and meet their retribution.’
‘You may or may not get the chance for that,’ I pointed out, ‘but Varan will most definitely be here before dawn.’ I was far from casual about dismissing the necron threat, as you can imagine, particularly as I was the only one present with the faintest idea of just how formidable the metal warriors were, but from my point of view there was no point in even trying to make plans to deal with them: how can you defend against an enemy which can teleport at will, into the heart of your defences, and phase casually through the walls when they get there? In my experience, the only chance you had against them was to run and hide, or concentrate your fire against one unit at a time, in the hope of knocking enough of them down to buy the time to move on to the next one and repeat the trick, before half of the damned machine creatures got back up and came at you again. In either case, you just had to wait for them to make the first move. Varan, on the other hand, was a clear and present danger I could do something about, and I intended to do so.
‘And you think you know how to see him off?’ Felicia asked.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ I admitted. ‘But I don’t think you’re going to like it.’ Well, I was right about that, something the storm of protest from everyone present as soon as I’d voiced the thought made abundantly clear, but since the warmaster’s horde would be on us within half an hour, and no one could think of a better alternative, despite my fervent wish that somebody would, I’d just have to go through with it. Sighing, I walked to the nearest vox-unit, those damned cables catching at the toe of my boot as usual, and peered at the dials. ‘Anyone know what frequency the enemy’s using?’ I asked.
‘Here, let me.’ Felicia bustled over, no doubt happy to have found some kind of displacement activity, and fiddled with the dials for a moment. ‘Try it now.’
A voice floated into the room, sounding surprisingly calm and businesslike, calling for an update on the state of readiness of a unit which, according to the last Perlian PDF roster I’d seen, should have been guarding the Governor’s palace, but which was now evidently inbound with the rest of Varan’s bewitched army.
I picked up the microphone, and hesitated, a million doubts rising up to assail me, then fought them down with grim resolution. Feeling as though my tongue was coated in ash, I began to transmit. ‘This is Commissar Ciaphas Cain,’ I said, ‘for Warmaster Varan, requesting a personal meeting to discuss terms of surrender.’
