1_For_The_Emperor

by Sandy Mitchel

  EPILOGUE

  Stories are much tidier than real life. Stories have neat, happy endings, but all you ever really get is unfinished business.

  – Janni Vakonz, holo director.

  I'd seen little of Amberley in the week that followed our adventures in the undercity, but we both had plenty to keep us occupied over those few days, so I hardly found her absence surprising. Jurgen was still recovering slowly so I'd lost my principle buttress against most of the tedious minutiae of my job, and found my workload drastically increased as a result. Add to that the fatigue and minor injuries I'd sustained, and I did little else apart from eat, sleep, and shuffle datafiles. Divas dropped round one evening

  with a bottle of amasec, which provided a pleasant enough diversion, and filled me in on the latest gossip (which, after the last time, you can be sure I did my utmost to ignore; no point in taking any chances).

  'No one can understand it,' he said at one point. 'The tau are just pulling out.' I'd heard as much from other sources, most of them a good deal more reliable thanks to my connections in the lord general's office, but I nodded nonetheless as I poured us both refills.

  'Well, that's xenos for you,' I said helpfully. 'Who knows why they do anything?' It still didn't make much sense when Donali explained it to me, but he seemed to know what he was talking about, and Amberley confirmed it later, so it's the best I can do.

  You see, peculiar little devils that they are, they don't seem to value the objective of the fighting purely for itself, the way we do. As best as I can understand it, they reckoned that if we were that determined to pitch into a meat grinder war to hang on to this worthless mudball, we might as well have it. They'd go off and do something more productive until we got bored or complacent or distracted, and come back for it later when we couldn't put up a decent fight for the place.1 And in the meantime,

  1 A little vague, but substantially accurate. Tau tacticians tend to take the long view, withdrawing to regroup whenever they meet stronger resistance than they were expecting, or, as in this case, the situation proves to be more complex than anticipated.

  there was the hive fleet to worry about, assuming it was actually out there. (Which, as we were subsequently to discover, it most certainly was.)

  So, as you can appreciate, I was pleasantly surprised when a message arrived from Amberley inviting me to dinner at a discreet waterfront restaurant in a quarter of the city which seemed to have escaped the worst of the fighting; even more so, given that I'd never expected to see her again. (Just how far off the mark that assumption was you'll find ample evidence of elsewhere in this memoir, as I've already mentioned.)

  'How's Jurgen?' she asked, over a mouthwatering smoked vyl crepe. Touched by her solicitude, I filled her in on his recovery, and asked how her associates were getting on in return. (Reasonably well, as it turned out: Rakel was up and about and as bonkers as ever, and Orelius had already returned to his ship.)

  She nodded at the news. 'I'm glad to hear it. He's a remarkable man.'

  'He's certainly unusual,' I agreed, savouring the local vintage she'd obtained from somewhere - light and piquant, it complimented the food wonderfully. She smiled at that.

  'More so than you realise.' Something about the way her tone changed alerted me, and I began to pay more attention to her words. This was more than mere small talk. 'I don't think we'd have made it out of the tunnels without him.' I thought back to my desperate duel with the patriarch.

  'If he hadn't scrounged that melta from somewhere-' I agreed, but she cut me off before I could finish.

  'That isn't what I meant. Do you know what a blank is?' I must have looked baffled, because she went on to explain. 'They're incredibly rare; about as rare among psykers as psykers are compared to the rest of us.'

  'You think Jurgen's a psyker?' I asked, laughing in spite of myself, and inclining my body slightly to the left to give the waiter room to remove my plate. The idea was so ridiculous I just couldn't help it. But Amberley shook her head.

  'No. Quite the reverse. He's a blank, I'm sure of it.' I echoed the gesture.

  'You've lost me,' I admitted.

  'Blanks are like anti-psykers,' she explained. 'They can't be affected by psykers or warp entities. They block telepathic communication. You saw how the patriarch reacted to him…'

  'It seemed to get disoriented when he got close to it,' I said, remembering. 'And Grice was desperate to keep him away.' Amberley nodded.

  'Exactly His presence disrupted the brood telepathy.'

  'That explains a lot,' I said, recalling a number of incidents over the years which had seemed no more than mildly puzzling at the time, but which I now realised formed a pattern, confirming my aide's resistance to psychic attack. 'How long have you known?'

  'Since the first time I saw him,' she admitted. 'When Rakel had a seizure while he was trying to help her into the Salamander.' A terrible suspicion began to form.

  'You're going to recruit him, aren't you?' I said. 'If he can face down daemons and sorcerers you're not going to leave him buried in an obscure Imperial Guard unit.' She was smiling again, as though something amused her.

  'The Inquisition is an odd organisation, Ciaphas,' she said. 'Not like the Guard, where everyone's united against a common foe, and you can rely on your comrades and your command structure.' I wasn't sure what she was driving at then, but I've had rather more dealings with the Inquisition since than I'm comfortable with, and believe me, it makes sense. lust take my word for it, and hope you never have cause to find out. 'We're not very big on sharing our sources and resources, because we never really know who else in the ordos we can trust.' As you'll appreciate, astonishment barely begins to cover what I felt listening to those words. 'So, no, I think for the time being I'd rather leave him where he is. It's safer that way.'

  'Safe? In a front line Guard unit?' I thought she was joking at first, until I got a good look at her eyes. Blue and guileless, they shone with a sincerity that would have been impossible to fake. (Believe me, I'm an expert at that.) She nodded again.

  'I'll be able to find you again if I need you. Either of you/ And I was so caught up in the moment that the full implication of those words never struck me

  at the time. 'But if I take him on as one of my staff he'll attract attention. The sort I'd rather avoid.1'

  'I see.' I didn't really, but the main point seemed to be that I wouldn't have to worry about losing my aide after all, at least in the short term. And it also hadn't escaped my notice that while he was around I wouldn't have to worry about any passing psykers ferreting out secrets I'd rather leave buried. I started in on my toffee cream dessert with well-deserved enthusiasm.

  'Good.' Amberley grinned again, the mischievous expression I found so appealing back on her face. 'Besides, Rakel's hard enough to deal with at the best of times, without passing out on me every five minutes.'

  'I'm sure,' I said. The silence stretched awkwardly for a moment, so I made an attempt to change the subject. 'You've heard about the tau withdrawal?' She nodded.

  'El'sorath still insists that the world is theirs by right, but they're agreeing to respect the status quo for the time being. I guess they blinked first.' She shrugged. 'Besides, they're spooked by the idea of a hive fleet moving in, even if they don't want to admit it. They've had a few skirmishes with splinter fleets in the last couple of centuries, and they're under no illusions about what a full-scale invasion would

  1 Like Radicals with an agenda, or Ordo Malleus fanatics looking for daemon-fodder for their next crusade. Not my department, thank the Emperor.

  mean.' Neither was I, and I shuddered at the thought. 'Hanging on to one small planet doesn't mean much in the face of that, especially if it would weaken their response to the greater threat.'

  'Speaking of which…' I coughed delicately. 'I'm still not entirely sure those pathfinders… You know…'

  'Who cares?' Amberley sipped at her wine appreciatively. 'If they were, then at least it'll draw the hive fleets down
on them instead of us a few generations down the line. And in the meantime, we can exploit the chaos in the tau empire for our own ends/

  'Good for us, then,' I said. I raised my own glass. 'Confusion to our enemies.'

  And kudos to our friends.' Our glasses clinked together, and Amberley grinned at me again. 'Here's to the beginning of a beautiful friendship.'

  Not to mention half a lifetime of running, shooting, and bowel-clenching terror, of course. But looking back, I have to say she made it well worth the effort.

  [And on that somewhat ego-boosting note, this extract from the Cain Archive comes to a natural conclusion].

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sandy Mitchell is a pseudonym of Alex Stewart, who has been working as a freelance writer for the last couple of decades. He has written science fiction and fantasy in both personae, as well as television scripts, magazine articles, comics, and gaming material. His television credits include the high tech espionage series Bugs, for which, as Sandy, he also wrote one of the novelisations.

  Apart from both miniatures and roleplaying

  gaming his hobbies include the martial arts of

  Aikido and Iaido, rifle shooting, and playing the

  guitar badly.

  He lives in a quiet village in North Essex with a

  very tolerant wife, their first child, and a small

  mountain of unpainted figures.

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