‘This course of action is premature,’ Sholer said, as a clockface appeared on one of the pict screens, counting down seconds with what seemed to me to be unnecessary eagerness. He turned to the tech-priest. ‘Abort the venting.’ With a relieved nod, the red-robed minion took a step towards the lectern.
‘Stop right there,’ Kildhar said, cold and determined. ‘I’ll decommission anyone who goes near the vent controls.’ She drew a bolt pistol from the depths of her robe, a master crafted one if the finely wrought chasing of the devotional iconography was anything to go by, and the tech-priest stopped moving as abruptly as if she’d already pulled the trigger. At this range she stood a fair chance of penetrating the Space Marines’ armour, let alone my tender hide, and I hoped she knew enough about the weapon to avoid discharging it by accident.
Of course, you don’t point a gun at a group of Adeptus Astartes and expect them to just stand there making idle conversation. In a heartbeat, three bolters and a bolt pistol were pointing right back at her, while the genetorium acolytes scurried for whatever cover they could find. Jurgen began to raise the melta too, but I forestalled him with a gesture. If anyone so much as hiccoughed, Kildhar would be reduced to shredded scrap and offal in a heartbeat, and I didn’t see any point in barbecuing the remains into the bargain. Besides, there was a lot of delicate equipment scattered around the place, all of which probably needed to be kept in one piece if the almost inconceivable energies of the fusion reactor were to remain confined. I hadn’t the slightest objection to the ’nids being vaporised, but the notion of sharing their fate was considerably less attractive.’
‘Magos,’ I said, trying to keep my voice pitched to a conversational level, ‘this hardly seems necessary.’
She turned a glance of withering scorn in my direction. ‘Haven’t you worked it out yet?’ she demanded. ‘It all fits!’
‘Of course,’ I said, the pieces clicking into place at last, leaving me wondering how I could have been so blind. ‘You were on the Spawn of Damnation too. No wonder you seemed so keen to preserve the implanted serfs, and bring them back here.’
‘I’m not sure I follow, sir,’ Jurgen said, his brow furrowing and dislodging a few flakes of skin in the process.
‘The serfs weren’t the only ones brought into the brood mind,’ I said. ‘They let themselves be brought to Fecundia, knowing the most senior of the people ostensibly studying them was a part of it as well. And the so-called research was just an excuse to allow them to build up their numbers.’
‘Exactly,’ Kildhar said, the muzzle of her bolt pistol rock steady. ‘Far more quickly than they could ever have done while trying to remain concealed among the general populace.’
‘That’s how they got out, too, isn’t it?’ I asked, almost blinded by the obvious. ‘The genecode readers around the secure area were set up to recognise the print of someone whose genes had already been subverted. Every genestealer and hybrid in the shrine could simply walk through the door whenever they liked.’
‘Then why didn’t they?’ Yail asked, looking ready to pull the trigger at any second. Not something I wanted him to do until I was sure I had all the answers; our alliance against the tyranids was shaky enough as it was, and if it turned out I was wrong, then its collapse could doom us all.
‘Because they were waiting for the hive fleet to arrive,’ I said. Now I was thinking about it in a wider context, it was no wonder the carapace markings of the gaunts Kildhar had brought in seemed familiar – they were the same as the ones on the genestealers that had done so much damage on the upper levels, and that I’d fled in terror from in the darkened labyrinth of the Spawn of Damnation.
‘That’s right,’ Kildhar said, chipping in at just the right moment. ‘They must have hoped to make it to the hives, and disrupt the defence effort.’
‘Didn’t they tell you?’ Sholer asked, sarcastically.
‘I’m not the corruptfile traitor!’ Kildhar shouted, all attempts at tech-priestly detachment long past. ‘Why would I have upgraded the fleet auspexes if I wanted the tyranids to invade?’
‘Because that’s what implanted genestealer victims do,’ I said wearily. ‘I’ve seen it before. They fight alongside you as hard as anyone, until the brood mind exerts its influence. Most of the time they don’t even know what they are. But the brood mind’s still in there, nudging them now and again.’ I turned to Sholer for confirmation. ‘Who was it who kept arguing in favour of bringing the gaunts inside?’
‘Magos Kildhar,’ he said, in tones of deadening finality.
‘Precisely.’ I turned back to the distraught tech-priest. ‘You have to admit, you did precisely what the hive mind wanted you to do. Bring its meat puppets into the shrine, so it could try to neutralise the one thing on the planet it’s afraid of.’
‘But I’m me!’ The hand holding the bolt pistol was trembling now, Sholer square in its sights. ‘He’s the one who damaged the locking mechanism and let them into the cryogenitorium!’
‘An accident,’ Sholer said dismissively.
‘Of course you’d say that!’ Kildhar laughed, a short, ragged bark, with an edge of hysteria. ‘You’re the one who approved my request to study the implanted serfs in the first place. Covering your tracks!’
‘A ridiculous assertion,’ Sholer said. ‘I was accompanied by my battle-brothers on every occasion I boarded the hulk. Or are you asserting that entire squads of us have been implanted?’ I glanced sidelong at Yail, trying to judge how he was taking all this, but I didn’t know him well enough to pick up any subtle cues he might be trying to suppress.
‘You’ve certainly given us a lot to think about,’ I said levelly, maintaining eye contact with Kildhar as I spoke. Truth to tell, I didn’t know what to believe by now, other than that the vital thing was to keep all her attention on me. Jurgen and I were half-concealed by the towering bulk of the Adeptus Astartes in their power armour, and I took advantage of that to signal to him with my hand. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him nod, almost imperceptibly, and begin to move away, after propping his melta against a convenient lectern. ‘But then, you’re the one hell-bent on killing the bioship fragment. If anyone’s doing what the hive fleet wants, right now, it’s you.’
‘Precisely,’ Sholer said. ‘We have to continue our researches to the last possible moment.’
‘The risk is too great,’ Kildhar insisted, with a quick glance to the rapidly diminishing numerals. ‘And if you’ve been implanted, that’s the hive mind talking.’ On the verge of making a dive for the control panel, Jurgen hesitated, and drew back. For a second, I must admit, it crossed my mind to simply shoot her, but if a stray round destroyed the lectern, there was no telling what might happen. For all I knew the reactor might run completely out of control, levelling the entire shrine, instead of simply belching the tyranids to vapour[165]. If my aide was going to seize his chance, I had to get her full attention, and keep it for a few vital seconds.
‘I could say the same,’ the Apothecary rejoined, accurately, but unhelpfully given our current circumstances.
‘When did you last have an augmetic upgrade?’ I asked, and a flicker of confusion appeared in the tech-priest’s eyes. Clearly, whatever she’d been expecting me to ask, this wasn’t it.
‘I don’t know. A while back. What does it matter?’
‘A magos of your seniority usually has far more visible enhance-ments,’ I said. If I’m honest, I was more or less guessing, although that certainly seemed true of the cogboys I’d encountered before.
‘I’ve been busy,’ she snapped.
‘For how long?’ I asked. ‘Since your time on the Spawn?’
‘I don’t know.’ Confusion was being replaced by doubt, now. ‘Upgrades… system log…’ Her eyes unfocused for a moment. As they did so, Jurgen grabbed his chance, leaping for the control lectern behind her, and pushing as many switches as he could reach back the way they’d been before. The lights went back to green, the clock on the pict screen vanished, and the sir
en stopped howling in the bowels of the building.
‘Stop it!’ Kildhar turned on him in a fury, bringing up the bolt pistol to fire. Before she could, I took her square in the middle of the chest with a laspistol round. Reckless, you may say, with the panel still behind her, but with Jurgen’s life in the balance I simply took the shot, and worried about the possible consequences later. She staggered, and stared at me in outraged astonishment, charred wiring sparking and popping inside her ribcage. ‘You couldn’t… you shouldn’t… last upgrade…’ The bolt pistol fell from her nerveless fingers. Jurgen swooped, like a raptor on a vole, scooping the weapon up, and stuffing it into one of his collection of pouches for safe keeping[166]. Then Kildhar’s eyes cleared for a moment. ‘You were right. Sixty-three years ago.’
‘Because the screening prior to the augmentation process would have revealed the genetic contamination,’ Sholer said, handing his own bolt pistol to Yail. Faint scuffling sounds behind the lecterns indicated that the tech-priests were getting their courage back, or were more worried about the consequences of leaving the machine spirits to fend for themselves for much longer than they were of emerging from cover, and a few nervous heads began to appear above and around the serried ranks of instrumentation. ‘I should be confined until it’s determined whether I too have been polluted.’
‘If you think it’s necessary,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think there’s much chance of that.’ Space Marines had their health checked down to the molecular level on a regular basis. ‘And the magos?’
I turned back to Kildhar, bringing my laspistol into line for a clean headshot. I’d granted the Emperor’s Peace[167] more times than I cared to recall, but still I hesitated. The tech-priest met my eyes.
‘Wait,’ she husked. ‘Valuable specimen. Study me…’ Then her eyes rolled up in their sockets, blood loss and trauma from the chest wound taking the matter out of my hands. Perhaps fortunately; to this day, I couldn’t tell you what decision I would have made.
‘Preserve the body for dissection,’ Sholer said, as he left the room, accompanied by one of the helmeted Reclaimers.
‘I’ll take care of it,’ I assured him, relieved to note that Jurgen had retrieved his melta, and was covering my back once again. Right now, he was the only other person on the planet I felt I could trust.
TWENTY-FOUR
By the time I’d finished bringing Zyvan up to date, the sun was beginning to wester, painting the metallic walls of the conference room a shade uncomfortably reminiscent of blood. The revelation that Kildhar’s pet genestealers had effectively been given the run of the place for the past sixty years had had a predictably seismic effect on everyone, from the Lord General on down. There was no telling how often one of the beasts had sneaked out of the holding pens to pass on the taint to an unwary cogboy, and everyone going about their business in the corridors seemed to be eyeing one another with thinly-veiled suspicion. Fortunately Regio Quinquaginta Unus was about as isolated as anywhere could be on this benighted ball of slag, but an awful lot of people had passed through it in the last six decades, and tracking them all down was proving to be an interesting challenge for the local Arbitrator’s office[168].
‘They’ve started mass genetic screening in the main population centres,’ a hololithic facsimile of the Lord General told me, flickering a little, apparently seated in the middle of the table which occupied the centre of the room. Fortunately, he was only about a third of his actual size, so he fitted quite comfortably. ‘Starting with the most strategically vital institutions.’
‘Have they found any hybrids or implants yet?’ I asked, and Zyvan shrugged his insubstantial shoulders.
‘Not yet. Twelve thousand down, twenty billion to go.’
‘Not good odds,’ I said, but that was the whole point of the tyranids sending their genestealers out ahead of the hive fleet. Quite apart from the damage their puppets could do directly, if they became numerous enough to thoroughly infiltrate a planet’s population, the diversion of resources required to track them down would put a serious dent in the overall defence effort.
‘What about the shrine?’ Zyvan asked.
‘Some good news there,’ I told him, knowing he could use some. ‘We’ve already screened half the cogboys, and they’ve all been clear so far. One or two of the others are still unaccounted for, so the skitarii are running a level by level search in case they’ve gone to ground somewhere.’
‘Our most probable hypothesis, however, is that they were assisting the mass breakout,’ Sholer put in, ‘and were all killed along with the ones on the shuttle.’ He’d been the first to be screened, of course, and, as I’d expected, turned out to be free of taint. For all I knew, his modified genes would simply have eaten any ’stealer attempt to subvert them in any case[169].
‘That’s something, anyway,’ Zyvan said, not bothering to ask if we’d had the skitarii scanned. They’d been the first through the gene lab, after Sholer and his brother Adeptus Astartes, that went without saying. He coughed, a little delicately. ‘And Magos Kildhar?’
‘Was definitely tainted,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know how or when she was implanted herself, but it was probably some time before the serfs were.’
‘Brother-Sergeant Yail is reviewing the mission logs for that period,’ Sholer added, ‘but our chances of success are not high.’
‘Then let’s concentrate on the present,’ Zyvan said, bringing us back to the business at hand. ‘Have you secured the bioship fragment?’
‘It’s still in the cryogenitorium,’ I told him. ‘Something that size, there’s not a lot else you can do with it.’
‘I’ve given instructions for it to be dug out and revived,’ Sholer put in, earning a scowl from Zyvan, before adding ‘subject to the agreement of Magos Dysen and yourselves, of course.’
‘I have to say I’m not sure about that,’ Zyvan said, and I nodded my agreement.
‘Neither am I,’ I admitted. Sholer and I had already discussed the matter, and, not for the first time, expediency was pushing me in a direction I’d rather not go. ‘But we have to face facts. The hive fleet was desperate to destroy the node, and that’s the first time we’ve seen one running scared of anything. We need to know why.’
‘I agree,’ El’hassai said, appearing next to the Lord General by increments, as he edged his way into range of the hololith projector. Sholer and I exchanged concerned glances, wondering how long he’d been lurking there, and how much of the preceding conversation he’d overheard. All of it probably, as Zyvan didn’t look at all surprised to see him. Come to that, there didn’t seem much point in trying to exclude the tau from our deliberations anyway, as we were supposed to be allies, and any tactical advantage we were able to come up with here would probably work just as well for them in the defence of Dr’th’nyr (although, since the warp shadow around the tyranid fleet was blocking our astropaths from passing on the information to the one accompanying Donali, whether they found out about it in time would depend entirely on how fast El’hassai’s own channels of communication were). ‘This is an unprecedented development, and understanding it could not help but advance the Greater Good.’ He was standing behind Zyvan now, so his image no longer flared into insubstantiality around the sleeves of his robe, but the top of his head was losing focus instead, wavering in a fashion which made him look uncannily like an ornamental candle with a smoking wick.
‘Your support is greatly appreciated,’ I assured him, keeping a straight face with something of an effort.
‘And your recommendation will be taken into account,’ Zyvan added, stopping noticeably short of anything which smacked of ‘and acted upon.’
‘If we are to begin investigating the bioship fragment,’ Sholer reminded us, ‘then the sooner we begin, the better. Time is most definitely of the essence.’
‘Absolutely,’ I agreed. The sky beyond the armourglass window was beginning to turn purple, the colour of a fresh bruise, mottled with the first few stars to come
out, most of which were probably orbiting warships, reflecting the light of the disappearing sun like a constellation of small but deadly moons. The onset of night intensified my apprehension; although the chances of an unsuspected tyranid horde scuttling out of the darkness were miniscule, and the shrine was protected from the approach of anything inimical by auspex arrays of quite staggering sensitivity, my primal hindbrain was preparing to huddle round the campfire with a nice sharp rock close to hand. ‘So far as I’m concerned, the sooner you get on with it the better.’
‘I concur,’ El’hassai said, from the relative security of a couple of hundred vertical kilometres away.
‘And Dysen tells me he trusts your judgement,’ Zyvan said to Sholer, in the tone of a man who knows a passed buck when he hears one. He sighed, heavily. ‘I still have my doubts about the wisdom of this. But under the circumstances, I don’t see that we have any choice. Do the best you can.’ He smiled, bleakly. ‘I suppose we can always sterilise the site from orbit if it all goes to the warp.’
Which, considering I was still standing there, was hardly the most cheering thing he could have said.
‘Any news of that shuttle?’ I asked, hoping the association of ideas wouldn’t be too obvious. ‘There’s nothing I can do here, apart from get under the Apothecary’s feet, and we’ve still got a war to fight.’
‘Last I heard, the Navy had some flight time freeing up,’ Zyvan said. ‘We can probably get a shuttle away to pick you up in the next couple of hours.’
‘Best news I’ve had all day,’ I told him accurately, still gazing out of the window across the darkening landscape. Night was falling in earnest now, and I traced the faint trail of a shooting star somewhere out over the desert. There would be plenty more over the next few nights, as the debris from the battle in orbit spiralled in, incinerating as it plummeted through the atmosphere towards the ground.
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