Greater Good

by Sandy Mitchell

  ‘We’ve all been under a good deal of strain,’ I said diplomatically, although privately I doubted that the Space Marines considered anything untoward about the situation. They spent their whole lives facing the enemies of the Emperor, and were hardly likely to get excited about the latest ones to be wandering across the sights of their bolters.

  ‘Perhaps you would care to inspect the pens?’ Sholer asked, addressing his remarks to me, although a brief inclination of his head included Yail in the invitation. ‘Perhaps that would go some way towards alleviating your concern.’

  ‘Perhaps it would,’ I said, although I doubted it very much.

  The pens were located a few levels beneath the meeting room, and, as I’d anticipated, the temperature of the air there was noticeably lower. I shivered, grateful for the recaff I still clutched, and the warm salt-grox bap Jurgen had managed to procure from somewhere on my behalf.

  ‘You see?’ Kildhar said, with the air of someone pointing out a self-evident truth. ‘The specimens are totally secure.’

  ‘They certainly seem to be,’ I conceded. We were looking down into a sheer-sided square shaft lined with ceramite, too slick for the scuttling mass of gaunts to get a foot or claw-hold on, from behind the reassuring screen of a slab of armourglass thick enough to have shielded the driver’s viewing slit of a Leman Russ. Below us and above them a steel mesh roofed the chamber, crackling every now and then as a portion of the charge it carried leaked across in the cool, damp air, in case they managed to find a way up regardless. ’Stealers would have been up and through it in no time, of course, but the gaunts were less well adapted to climbing.

  ‘I felt it prudent to restrict our researches to hormagaunts, for the time being,’ Sholer said, ‘given the relative ease of being able to confine them.’

  ‘Prudent indeed,’ I concurred tactfully, which I suppose it was if you were really bound and determined to go ahead with this courting of disaster. Termagants were able to shoot at you, genestealers had already proved more than adequate to the challenge of freeing themselves, and most of the other creatures on ice were either able to burrow their way to freedom, strong enough to break straight through the walls, or could channel the will of the hive mind, none of which were particularly tempting prospects right at the moment.

  ‘Then I see no reason not to put the newly acquired ones in the adjacent chamber,’ Kildhar said, returning to her theme with a vengeance. Yail and I turned to Sholer, hoping he’d be able to convince her to finally drop the matter, but to our mutual surprise he seemed to be wavering.

  ‘The hormagaunts, perhaps,’ he said thoughtfully, while Yail and I looked at one another in mingled consternation and disbelief.

  ‘You said yourself the risk was unacceptable,’ I expostulated, and the Apothecary nodded pensively in reply.

  ‘I did,’ he said slowly, ‘but, on reflection, Magos Kildhar still presents a compelling argument. Time is unquestionably of the essence, and our work would proceed more quickly and effectively with the facilities of the analyticum to hand.’

  ‘What about the other specimens?’ Yail asked, an instant before I could. ‘Should they be purged?’

  ‘Absolutely not!’ Kildhar said. ‘We can leave them aboard the harvester for the time being, and study them there as best we can.’

  ‘Ready to be absorbed into the swarm the moment the second wave hits,’ I said, making no effort at all to hide how I felt about that.

  ‘We can take appropriate precautions,’ Kildhar said, ‘like we’ve done with the specimens in storage. I’ve already instructed the harvester captain to remove the dampers from the motivator power core. If it becomes necessary we’ll be able to detonate it, and sterilise the entire load.’

  ‘That might work,’ I conceded, reluctantly. No wonder the captain had looked so fed up.

  ‘It will,’ she assured me, probably mistaking agreement for acquiescence.

  I turned to Sholer. ‘Does that mean you’ve got the freezer rigged too?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ he told me. ‘Magos Dysen’s suggestion was essentially sound. The reactors have been reconfigured to vent raw plasma directly into the chamber, vaporising everything within it almost instantly. The only time-consuming part of the process was digging pressure vents to the surface, to give the expanding steam somewhere to go.’ He permitted himself a thin smile, not an expression I normally associated with a member of the Adeptus Astartes. ‘It would be somewhat ironic to destroy the shrine in order to save it.’

  ‘Quite so,’ I said, less reassured than I would have liked. ‘These vents. Not large enough for anything to crawl up, are they?’

  ‘Credit us with a little imagination, commissar,’ Kildhar said. ‘Of course they’re not.’ She hesitated. ‘Well, some of the smaller ones might fit, I suppose, but we’ve put grilles on the ends of the shafts. And it’s not as if anything’s going to be moving around down there anyway, they’re all frozen solid.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘But I’m just as worried about things getting in from outside.’

  ‘If they do, they’ll be vaporised along with the others,’ Yail pointed out. ‘But I’ll make sure combat servitors are posted to cover the tops of the shafts anyway.’

  ‘Then I believe we’re in agreement,’ Sholer said, although he seemed to be the only one. ‘We’ll move the hormagaunts Magos Kildhar collected into the adjacent holding pen, and continue our researches for as long as we can.’ He turned to Yail, who still seemed to me to be torn between loyalty to his Chapter and plain common sense. Unfortunately, as it always will for a Space Marine, loyalty won.

  ‘I will see to the security arrangements,’ he said, plainly not liking it.

  ‘Then we have little to worry about,’ Sholer said, inaccurately. He turned back to Kildhar. ‘I wish it understood that, although I may have been swayed by your arguments for the moment, I will sterilise every last specimen the instant I see even a hint of a danger to this shrine and the people within it.’

  Kildhar nodded, tightly. ‘I would expect nothing less,’ she said.

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘They’re completely out of their minds,’ I told Zyvan over the vox-link, heedless of whether the transmission was being monitored or not. ‘Now we’ve made sure of that, I need a shuttle here as quickly as possible.’ Before the inevitable happened, the shrine was overrun, and everyone got eaten, including me. No point in sounding as though I was making a panic-stricken run for it, though, even if I was, so I added ‘I’ve wasted enough time away from the real war as it is.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Ciaphas,’ Zyvan assured me, a trace of amusement in his voice, ‘you’ll be back here before the next wave hits. You’ve fought the ’nids more often than anyone else I can think of, and I’ll need your insights in the command centre when we take them on again.’ Which came as a relief. Despite my misgivings about being aboard a spacecraft with a tyranid fleet incoming, it would still be preferable to being stuck on the ground once the full force of the invasion was unleashed. If the worst came to the worst, and the fleet was forced to cut and run, I’d escape along with it instead of being marooned on a world doomed to be devoured. Unless the scuttling horrors I’d glimpsed on the tau explorators’ pict-cast got to me first…

  Torn between two terrors, I vacillated indecisively for a moment, before reason reasserted itself. I was definitely in danger here, now, from Kildhar’s reckless insistence on bringing the creatures she’d rounded up inside, and it was pointless worrying about anything which only might happen in the future.

  ‘I’ll be waiting on the pad,’ I said, and Zyvan chuckled, clearly believing me eager to get back in the fray.

  ‘You’ll get pretty bored,’ he said. ‘The Navy won’t have a shuttle free for a while yet. Everything’s on rearming and resupply runs, before the ’nids hit us again. A personnel pick-up’s pretty low priority, even if it’s for you.’

  Nads, I thought. It sounded as though I was going to be stuck here for severa
l hours at least. No point in sounding petulant about it, though, Cain the Hero was supposed to put duty first at all times, so I just put my cheerfully resigned voice on instead. ‘Goes without saying,’ I said breezily. ‘Just try not to get stuck in without me this time.’

  ‘We’ll do our best,’ Zyvan assured me, ‘and we’ll let you know as soon as your ride’s on the way.’ Which was all I could reasonably hope for, I supposed.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, sir,’ Jurgen said, his characteristic odour wandering into the room which had been made available to me a second or two before his corporeal presence. Like most Adeptus Mechanicus guest quarters I’d been obliged to avail myself of over the years, it was clean, ergonomically laid out, and curiously dispiriting, the closest thing to a human touch being the devotional cogwheel icon in a niche in the corner. ‘Apothecary Sholer thought you might want to look in on the gaunts in the pen.’

  ‘I suppose we should,’ I said, somewhat heartened by the observation that he was still lugging the melta around, instead of leaving it in the adjoining room, which had been put at his disposal. Zyvan and the admiral[158] would want as full an account as I could give them of whatever the Mechanicus and the Reclaimers were getting up to, and observing the safety precautions they’d put in place to contain the newly-arrived specimens might put their minds at rest, although, in all honesty, I doubted that it would do the same for mine. This whole undertaking had Catastrophe written all over it, and the best I could hope for was to be long gone before everything fell apart.

  I can’t deny that with my aide and his melta at my shoulder I felt a little happier than I otherwise would have done given our destination, even going so far as to nod an affable greeting to a few of the skitarii patrolling the corridors in tense-looking pairs. They’d clearly been briefed to be ready for trouble, which was something of a comfort, knowing I wouldn’t be left to face the worst alone if (or more likely when) it happened, although I still clung obstinately to the hope that I’d be gone before it did.

  Kildhar and Sholer were waiting for us in the observation gallery, and I glanced into the pen below us as I entered, expecting to see the same milling mass of hormagaunts I’d looked down on the last time I was here. Instead of pacing, or sitting randomly about the floor, though, all were clustered in one corner, their heads raised, as if testing the wind.

  ‘What’s the matter with them?’ I asked.

  ‘Just what we were discussing,’ Sholer said. ‘We have not observed this behaviour on any previous occasion.’

  ‘They’re sensing the presence of the new specimens,’ Kildhar said, the effort of modulating her voice all too plain; she was positively skipping with excitement[159] at the prospect of putting her theories to the test.

  ‘And speaking of which,’ I said, ‘they would be where?’ The adjacent pen was empty, so far as I could see, unless they had a particularly well-camouflaged lictor stashed in it.

  ‘On their way,’ Kildhar assured me, and moved over to a control lectern set in the wall beneath the slab of armourglass. She poked a couple of switches, and a panel in the wall of the empty pen slid aside, to reveal a dark tunnel beyond. A moment later a torrent of hormagaunts bounded into the chamber, and the hatch slid quietly closed behind them. ‘They’ll be disorientated for a few minutes,’ the magos biologis went on, ‘exploring the boundaries, and searching for a way out.’

  ‘They don’t look disorientated to me,’ I said, as the whole pack of them swarmed across the pen, throwing themselves against the wall separating them from the gaunts in the adjacent one. Those too had perked up the minute the newcomers had arrived, and begun attacking the barrier with their scything claws, seemingly undeterred by their compete lack of success in getting through.

  ‘Fascinating,’ Kildhar said. ‘They’re trying to join up, creating a larger group.’

  ‘Which would be a really bad idea,’ I reminded everyone, just in case they’d forgotten that somewhat basic fact.

  ‘Indeed it would,’ Sholer agreed, his attention almost entirely on some incomprehensible stream of icons and text, rushing across the pict screen in front of him too fast to be read. He glanced briefly at Kildhar, who seemed even more engrossed if that were possible, her eyes fixed unblinkingly on the blizzarding data in front of her. ‘I’m picking up enhanced activity in the basal ganglia of all the monitored subjects.’

  ‘As am I,’ the magos responded, ‘although since there was only time to attach external instrumentation, results from the fresh specimens will be less comprehensive and possibly less reliable.’

  ‘Would one of you mind explaining what’s going on here?’ I asked, adding ‘in layman’s terms,’ a trifle hastily as Kildhar opened her mouth to respond.

  ‘We are attempting to monitor the brain activity of the creatures, which has changed significantly since the two groups became aware of their proximity to one another,’ she told me. ‘A task of considerable complexity,’ she added after a moment’s pause, meaning so shut up and let us get on with it.

  I looked down, catching a glimpse of small metal boxes about the size of data-slates riveted to the carapaces of several of the new batch. The ones from the freezer weren’t so adorned, although I thought I could detect some damage to the chitin of their heads, as if minor puncture wounds had been recently inflicted, and only partially healed[160]. ‘They seem pretty agitated,’ I said. Both groups were still attacking the wall between them with single-minded diligence, fortunately failing to make much of an impression on the thick slab of ceramite.

  ‘As I predicted,’ Kildhar said, ‘they feel compelled to join together. If they do, their brain activity should synchronise.’

  ‘Just as well they’re not going to,’ I said, just as she flicked another switch. The wall between the two cages began to sink into the floor, and both sets of gaunts grew even more frantic, if that were possible, leaping and scrambling over one another in their efforts to be the first over the top. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Gathering data!’ Kildhar snapped. ‘We could be on the verge of saving the galaxy!’

  ‘And you could be on the verge of killing us all!’ I riposted, lunging towards the controls, but Sholer was faster, stabbing the switch with his ceramite-encased finger. In his haste he overdid it a little, denting the lectern, and eliciting a shower of sparks from the abused array of controls. The descending wall ground to a halt, rose a few centimetres, and stuck, still low enough for both sets of creatures to surmount easily.

  ‘This was not agreed to!’ he rumbled, his voice deepening even more than usual.

  ‘It’s the obvious next step!’ Kildhar riposted. ‘We need reliable data on the blending of consciousness within the swarm!’

  The two of them glared at one another, while I hovered indecisively, wondering how best to intervene without becoming the lightning rod for the heightened emotions of both. Kildhar would be relatively harmless, despite the augmetics she was no doubt stuffed with, but an angry Space Marine would be a force to be reckoned with, preferably from a considerable distance. On the other hand, this was all being recorded for later analysis, and it wouldn’t look good for me to be caught flat-footed, instead of doing something decisive to bring them back to their senses.

  ‘Are they supposed to be killing each other?’ Jurgen asked, snatching everyone’s attention.

  Relieved at the fortuitous interruption, I turned to look. My aide was right – the creatures in the newly-combined pen were tearing into one another with all the ferocity at their command, and, as they were hormagaunts in a feeding frenzy, that was a lot. Ichor and viscera sprayed everywhere, as the scuttling nightmares snapped and slashed at one another in what looked to me like an indiscriminate orgy of bloodletting.

  ‘They should not,’ Sholer said, looking down thoughtfully at the carnage below, his anger replaced by curiosity as quickly as flicking a switch.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ Kildhar said, a note of bewilderment entering her voice. ‘All the dat
a we’ve gathered suggested their minds should have meshed as soon as they came together.’

  ‘Perhaps they require the mediation of a synapse organism to facilitate the melding,’ Sholer suggested.

  ‘Maybe they just don’t like each other,’ Jurgen said, cutting to the essentials as always.

  ‘Maybe they don’t,’ Sholer agreed, to my considerable surprise. ‘We’ve always thought of the tyranids as a single, unified threat, but there are some magos biologis who theorise that the different hive fleets compete for prey[161]. A contention I find myself far less sceptical of now than hitherto.’

  ‘Because these are definitely from different fleets,’ I said, the coin dropping. Looking down at the ichor-flecked melee, I found myself able to distinguish the combatants easily enough by sight: the gaunts from the freezer had the same speckled patterning on their thoraxes I recalled so well from Nusquam Fundumentibus, while the new arrivals had darker banding on their carapaces, and the edges of their scything claws. Something about that combination of markings seemed vaguely familiar too, come to think of it, although I couldn’t put my finger on where I’d seen it before. By that time I’d encountered tyranids on a dozen occasions at least, and the bewildering variety of colour and shading I’d seen exhibited by the creatures had become thoroughly mixed up in my mind.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Sholer said.

  ‘We have to stop them!’ Kildhar expostulated, staring downwards at the charnel pit beneath our feet. ‘Before we lose the lot!’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ I said, having no inclination to try separating the combatants. In fact, the more of each other they killed, the better I liked it. The newcomers were definitely getting the best of it, although that was hardly surprising, given that they outnumbered the others by almost two to one. As I watched in horrified fascination, the last of the thawed-out gaunts fell, its head wrenched from its body, while a second assailant slashed its torso open from gushing neck to the root of its tail. ‘Perhaps they’ll calm down a bit now while they feed.’