I looked desperately around for help. The skitarii had troubles of their own, and weren’t about to come to my aid, that much was clear. There were noticeably fewer of them in the melee round the shuttle ramp than there had been a moment ago, although there was a gratifying number of genestealer cadavers there too. The fight for the landing pad had developed into a grim game of attrition, with too much at stake for either side to stop short of complete victory or annihilation. I parried another pair of swipes from the broodlord’s scything claws, one after the other, backing desperately away from the implacable killing machine.
Then a familiar odour materialised at my shoulder, followed by the welcome sight of Jurgen raising his lasgun to spit another stream of fire in its hideous face. Hardly had he squeezed the trigger, however, doing little more than making our monstrous adversary flinch, than the powercell ran dry. ‘Duck!’ I yelled, in the nick of time, and he did so, evading the clashing jaws by what seemed no more than a handful of centimetres.
I looked round desperately for some way out, or, failing that, some means of distracting the creature, and my eye fell on the Magos Senioris, doing his utmost to look as inconspicuous as possible for someone swathed in a gold-embroidered, vivid crimson robe. He’d gone to ground behind a bank of switches and dials, from which thick, insulated cables ran towards the lift, and the germ of an idea began to form. ‘Dysen!’ I yelled. ‘Can you close the roof from there?’ If something happened to prevent the lift from rising, the ’stealers would be forced to break off, either piling aboard the shuttle before it was too late, or diverting their attention to deal with the new problem; which would be hard luck on Dysen, I suppose, but at least the skitarii would be able to give watching his back their full attention again.
‘That would mean overriding the blessed safety protocols,’ Dysen protested, his expression resembling an ecclesiarch who’d just overheard someone suggesting that perhaps Horus had been a bit misunderstood. ‘Without proper tools, incense or unguents!’
‘Does this seem particularly safe to you?’ I called back, hacking desperately at the thorax of the broodlord, doing little more than scratching a gouge in the thick chitin which protected it, and the tech-priest nodded briskly.
‘Your logic appears sound,’ he conceded, exuding a tangle of mechadendrites from somewhere under his robe and plugging himself into the controls. Short as the conversation had been, it had distracted me at a crucial moment. I just had time to register Jurgen’s warning shout, when a huge, taloned hand shot out and made a grab for me. I evaded frantically, almost making it, but the clutching fingers grabbed the hem of my greatcoat, yanking me upwards with an audible ripping of cloth.
I hung there for a moment, kicking and wriggling and making random swipes with my chainsword, hoping to at least fend off a strike from the huge claws which I knew for certain would disembowel me. Then the overstressed stitching gave way. I plummeted a couple of metres to the metal floor, landing hard despite instinctively exhaling and going limp to cushion the blow, and looked up, half dazed, to see a huge mouth ringed with razor-sharp teeth descending far too fast to have even the faintest hope of avoiding. Nevertheless, I tried, scrabbling frantically backwards, raising my chainsword instinctively.
‘Commissar! Stay down!’ a new voice called, deep and resonant, and loud enough to echo around the vast chamber. Before I could even think of mustering a reply, let alone raise my head to see who had spoken, the unmistakable roar of a bolter deafened me. The broodlord’s thorax erupted into a swamp of offal as a hail of explosive bolts tore into it, ripping its left-hand scything claw clean off, and it leapt back, away from me.
I sometimes feel as though my entire life has been nothing but a succession of mostly unpleasant surprises, but even as inured as I was to the unexpected, I must confess to having been taken aback by the sight of my deliverer. A Space Marine in Terminator armour was plodding into the hangar, the storm bolter in his right hand still smoking from the discharge which had so discouraged the genestealer patriarch. Twin rocket pods were mounted above his shoulders, and he turned towards the melee with calm deliberation. ‘Skitarii, disengage!’ he called, his voice carrying easily over the din.
‘That’s one of the Reclaimers,’ Jurgen said, as though the Adeptus Astartes’ sudden appearance was in no way remarkable.
I nodded, having recognised the yellow and white heraldry with which I’d become so familiar on our ill-starred voyage in pursuit of the Spawn of Damnation as soon as I’d seen it. ‘I should have realised,’ I said. ‘We saw the artefacts from the space hulk downstairs. Who else could have brought them here?’
‘Who else indeed?’ the Space Marine said, casually reminding me of their preternatural hearing, and discharged a rocket towards the greatest concentration of genestealers, while the surviving skitarii scattered in response to his order. It detonated in the centre of the group, scything down a handful of the loathsome creatures in a burst of shrapnel, and he began to follow up, dropping the survivors with quick, precise bursts of bolter fire.
‘Interface engaged,’ Dysen said, reminding me of his presence, which, under the circumstances, had rather slipped my mind for a moment or two. With a loud clunk the roof above our heads began to grind, painfully slowly, closed.
‘Excellent work,’ I encouraged him, wondering if the gap would close fast enough. ‘Can they still raise the platform?’
‘Of course not,’ Dysen assured me, still basking in the flattery if I was any judge. For all their prattle about being above mere human reactions, the average tech-priest has always been remarkably susceptible to it in my experience. ‘They’ll never be able to get off the ground now.’
Which was tempting fate, if ever I heard it. With a banshee howl almost loud enough to drown out the screaming engines, the wounded broodlord charged forward like a Khornate berserker, scattering the reforming skitarii, who, to my relief, were once again screening the Magos Senioris and myself from any further harm. It thundered up the ramp, pursued by another burst of bolter fire from the Terminator, which made a satisfactory mess of the genestealer stragglers, but failed to inconvenience its primary target any further. The shriek of the engines rose another octave in pitch, and, to my horror, I saw the shuttle begin to rise from the surface of the pad.
‘They’ll never make it,’ Jurgen observed, as though offering an opinion on the outcome of a finely-poised scrumball match, his eyes flickering between the slowly ascending shuttle and the incrementally narrowing gap in the ceiling.
‘If that thing crashes in here, neither will we!’ I said, gesturing urgently towards the door. ‘Magos, can you disengage from the controls?’ Not that I cared particularly, but it looked good to ask.
‘The process is now irreversible,’ he assured me, the mechadendrites disappearing back into the recesses of his robe as he spoke.
‘Then let’s move!’ I said, suiting the action to the word, and running for the doorway as fast as I could, trying to look as though I was taking point in case there were any laggardly genestealers still about who might have missed the bus. The others were hard on my heels, the skitarii forming up around Dysen again, who showed a remarkable turn of speed for someone so weighed down with all the scrap embedded in him.
By the time we’d made it to the corridor, the gap in the roof was noticeably smaller than the length of the shuttle, which seemed to be fluttering around the hangar like a bird trapped inside a room.
‘We have them,’ Kyper said, with what sounded like vindictive satisfaction, despite the lack of inflection in his artificially generated voice. He and the skitarii levelled their weapons[91], clearly anticipating a stampede from the shuttle as soon as it grounded, and determined not to let any of the ’stealers find their way back inside the shrine.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, as the pilot pulled the shuttle’s nose up, and triggered the main engine. A backwash of heat roiled across the floor, knocking the skitarii who’d been incautious enough to take up position opposite the gap in
the wall from their feet, and charbroiling the scattered cadavers around the empty landing pad. The solitary figure of the Reclaimers Terminator remained standing, however, the searing wind appearing not to inconvenience him in the slightest, detritus and body parts swirling about his impassive form. ‘It’s just going to make it.’ And, indeed, it looked for a moment as though the almost suicidal gamble was about to pay off. The shuttle was practically standing on its tail, accelerating upwards through the narrowing aperture, but there still seemed to be a metre or so of clearance around its reduced profile.
The Terminator thought otherwise, however. The missile pods above his shoulders elevated to track the fleeing target, and a flurry of rockets streaked through the air, impacting on the main engine and the fuselage around it.
‘Take cover!’ I yelled, quite unnecessarily under the circumstances, and threw myself flat behind the comforting solidity of the wall. The rear half of the shuttle exploded, a sheet of vivid flame boiling like an incandescent thunderhead across the hangar, and the entire vast building seemed to shudder around me. Searing heat and a hurricane force wind blasted down the corridor, whirling loose equipment, wall panels, and a couple of stray servitors away with it, then the blazing fuselage crashed back to the hangar floor, shaking the walls once again with the impact.
Klaxons began to blare, and fire retardant foam began to issue from concealed nozzles, drizzling down on the inferno below like a thick, sticky snowfall. Specialised servitors activated, sallying forth from their niches to battle the flames, directing jets of the stuff into the hottest patches.
‘That’s put paid to ’em,’ Jurgen said, with mordant satisfaction. I began to nod my agreement then froze, the gesture half-completed. Unbelievably, something was moving in the heart of the blaze, half-concealed by the leaping tongues of fire, the dense clouds of smoke, and the blizzard of foam. Something moving towards us with evident purpose.
My hand fell to the laspistol I’d just shoved back in its holster – although what good it could do against something capable of surviving a crash like that was beyond me – but before I could draw it, and make an utter fool of myself in the process, the smoke cleared a little and I realised it was the Terminator, plodding clear of the catastrophe he’d caused, parting the flames like a curtain before him. I craned my neck upwards, fixing my eyes on his helmet, nestled below the raised, hunched shoulders of the bulky armour. A moment later the faceplate hinged open, revealing its occupant, who extended a huge armoured gauntlet, large enough to have crushed my ribs with a single squeeze.
‘Commissar Cain,’ he rumbled, in the deep, resonant tones of a typical Adeptus Astartes. ‘An honour to meet so staunch a friend of our Chapter.’
‘The honour is mine, to have served alongside it,’ I lied shamelessly. ‘Though I must confess to finding your presence here something of a surprise.’
Before he could reply to that, another voice broke in, which, in its own way, took me equally aback.
‘Brother-Sergeant Yail,’ Kildhar said, trotting down the corridor towards us, her red robe flapping with the agitation she was failing so dismally to conceal. ‘Have the specimens been successfully reacquired?’ She glanced at the furnace beyond the door, and her shoulders slumped. ‘I see not.’
‘Specimens?’ I looked at her, then back to the hulking Space Marine, who wasn’t exactly looking shifty, but rather gave the impression that he would have been if the ability to do so hadn’t been genetically engineered out of him. ‘I think you’ve got some explaining to do, magos.’
THIRTEEN
‘You’ve been breeding the damn things?’ Zyvan expostulated, with a glare across the conference chamber at the Adeptus Mechanicus side of the polished steel table fit to freeze helium. El’hassai, seated next to him, looked equally grim, if I was able to interpret his expression with any degree of accuracy. Kildhar, still chastened from a long and uncomfortable tête-à-tête with Dysen while we’d waited for the Lord General and his retinue to arrive, quailed visibly, and the Magos Senioris emitted a burst of static from his vox-unit which sounded uncannily like an irritable clearing of the throat he probably no longer had. ‘And why were we not informed of the presence of an Adeptus Astartes unit on Fecundia?’
Yail, who had divested himself of his Terminator suit in favour of the lighter and more comfortable tactical armour worn by the majority of his brethren[92], smiled sardonically. He alone remained standing, partly because none of the chairs in the typically spartan conference room Dysen had put at our disposal could have taken his weight without buckling, but mainly, I suspected, because that way he loomed over everyone else even more impressively than usual. Besides which, as I’d observed before, Adeptus Astartes seldom seemed to sit anyway. ‘We are not, properly speaking, a combat unit,’ he said.
‘I’m sure the genestealers you incinerated would be delighted to hear that,’ I replied, feeling the need to lighten the mood a little.
Yail’s smile became a little more good-humoured. ‘Forgive my imprecision. Every battle-brother is ready to fight, of course, whenever that becomes necessary. But that isn’t the reason we’re here.’
‘Then what is?’ Zyvan asked, curbing his temper with an effort probably only I knew him well enough to appreciate. He was never going to be particularly pleased about being dragged down to the surface from the flagship to begin with, particularly after the rocky start we’d had, but to discover that our hosts had been keeping secrets from us despite their promises of co-operation had been disconcerting in the extreme. However forthcoming they were from now on, there would always be a nagging little voice in the backs of our heads, wondering what else haven’t they told us?
‘Observers,’ Yail said. He hesitated, no doubt balancing our need to know against the traditions of his Chapter which, from what I recalled, tended to be long on keeping their own counsel, and short on being forthcoming with outsiders. No wonder they got on so well with the cogboys. ‘For some centuries, the Reclaimers and the Adeptus Mechanicus have been working in concert. We seek out archeotech, when and where we can, for them to analyse, in return for knowledge we can use to fight the Emperor’s enemies more effectively.’
‘And you’re here, now, because?’ Zyvan prompted, making it clear he wasn’t going to be impressed, intimidated, or fobbed off.
Yail looked surprised for a moment, then carried on, acknowledging the interjection with a courteous nod of the head. ‘One of our Apothecaries has been exchanging information with Magos Kildhar. He is accompanied by several Techmarines, keen to further their studies of the Omnissiah in this most hallowed of places, and an escort of battle-brothers, which I have the honour to command.’
‘Wait just a minute,’ I cut in, an instant before the Lord General could explode. Zyvan’s high rank notwithstanding, the Reclaimers still seemed to have a better opinion of me than anyone else in the Guard contingent, and my interrupting would be a lot less likely to put the brother sergeant’s back up. ‘You mean you knew about Kildhar’s pet ’stealers?’
‘Of course they did,’ Kildhar said. ‘They supplied us with our first specimens.’
‘That is correct,’ Yail agreed. ‘A working party of Chapter serfs was ambushed by genestealers about sixty years ago, aboard the Spawn of Damnation. By the time they were recovered, most of the survivors had been implanted.’ Precisely what the Serendipitans and I had most feared, of course, but by that time it was far too late to say ‘I told you so’.
‘Before they could be cleansed, one of the Adeptus Mechanicus delegation assisting the cataloguing of the finds requested permission to study them.’
‘And that would be you, I suppose,’ I said, with a glance at Kildhar, hardly less warm than the one she’d received from Zyvan a few moments before.
‘It was,’ she confirmed, her voice not quite as even as a tech-priest normally strove to achieve. ‘The opportunity to study the breeding cycle of these creatures in secure conditions was almost unprecedented.’
‘Excuse me,’
El’hassai put in quietly from our corner of the table, ‘but all our information indicates that a tainted individual must mate with a normal member of their own species to pass on the altered genes. Is that not so?’
His intervention led to an audible intake of breath from among the Mechanicus contingent, or at least from those members of it who still had their own lungs. The tau diplomat’s presence in the most secure and secret shrine on the planet must have galled them intolerably, but we needed the xenos support against the tyranids, and that was the end of it. Any attempt to exclude him after so momentous a revelation would have undermined the entire alliance, so the seething cogboys just had to lump it.
‘It is,’ Kildhar said, after an uncomfortable pause, during which it became clear that no one else was going to talk to the xenos, and, if the amount of chirruping in binaric was anything to go by, all the other tech-priests were of the opinion that it was her fault he was here in any case. ‘Fortunately, we were able to source sufficient felons scheduled for harvesting for servitor components, and use those.’
El’hassai went a peculiar shade of grey. ‘A difficult decision,’ he said evenly. ‘But the Greater Good sometimes demands hard choices.’
Kildhar nodded stiffly, apparently appreciating someone speaking civilly to her, even if it was a xenos heretic she’d probably rather see burned. ‘Some debate about the appropriate use of resources was involved,’ she allowed, ‘although the acquisition of knowledge inevitably takes priority over mere utility.’
‘I would appreciate a copy of your findings,’ El’hassai said at last, after a pause during which he took several deep breaths for some reason.
‘I have made it clear to Magos Kildhar that I expect complete disclosure,’ Dysen said, his even mechanical drone not quite managing to conceal his reluctance. ‘And full reports on every other line of research she is currently conducting.’ Needless to say, I felt a distinct shiver of foreboding at those words.
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