Duty Calls, page 14
‘Better step up our alert status,’ I suggested, and Kasteen nodded tightly.
‘Already on it. Whenever they show themselves, we’ll be ready.’ She nodded at the hololith. ‘Irrational I know, but I half expected them to start pouring out of the woodwork as soon as the shadow arrived.’ Her tone was light, but in the slightly forced way that revealed an element of barely-contained fear. Knowing the regiment’s history, I could hardly blame her for that: both the former units that now made it up had been chewed to pieces on Corania. Kasteen had been a mere company commander at the time, and had ended up being saddled with the responsibility for an entire regiment by the simple fact of being practically the only senior officer to survive. It was the merest good fortune that she’d turned out to be so levelheaded and gifted a leader.
‘Me too,’ I admitted, and we shared a moment of wry amusement, although I don’t suppose she thought I was anywhere near as sincere as I actually was. I’d fought tyranids before too, and the idea of facing wave after wave of genetically engineered killing machines was a sobering one to say the least.
‘We stopped them before, we can stop them again,’ Broklaw said briskly, and we all nodded gravely as though we believed it.
‘Colonel.’ A vox operator looked up from her control lectern, and waved to attract our attention. ‘A message from the lord general.’
‘My office. Put it through.’ Kasteen acknowledged the woman briskly, as though the moment of hesitation had never been, and led the way towards the metal staircase giving access to the mezzanine. As we hurried up the clattering stairs she glanced back at Broklaw and myself. ‘Looks like it’s going to be sooner rather than later.’
In that, to everyone’s unspoken relief except mine, she was completely wrong. Zyvan’s voice was clipped and incisive as he acknowledged her greeting.
‘Colonel. Is Commissar Cain with you?’
‘He’s right here.’ She glanced across at me, and I tapped the comm-bead in my ear, joining the conversation.
‘How can I help you, general?’ I asked, trying to ignore the faint flutter of apprehension that flickered in my gut. In my experience, whenever someone powerful and well connected asks for you by name, it seldom presages anything good.
‘I’ve a message from Inquisitor Vail,’ Zyvan said, almost succeeding in masking his irritation at acting as an intermediary. It made sense, though. If she still wanted to keep her presence on Periremunda a secret, there could be fewer more secure lines of communication than going through the lord general’s office. ‘She’s on her way to Hoarfell, and wants you to meet her at the aerodrome.’
‘You can tell her I’m on my way,’ I said, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. Even the prospect of seeing Amberley again wasn’t quite enough to outweigh the near certainty that she was about to drag me deeper into whatever it was she was really here to do. Refusal being completely out of the question, though, I took refuge in the public persona of Cain the modest hero. I turned to Kasteen and Broklaw, who both looked vaguely stunned by this unexpected turn of events, not to mention a little awestruck by the sudden reminder of my exalted connections. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to manage without me for a while,’ I told them.
‘We’ll manage,’ Kasteen assured me gravely, as if my presence there would make the slightest difference to her battle plans. ‘Any idea what this is all about?’
‘Not a clue,’ I admitted, trying to sound as though the prospect wasn’t almost as terrifying as facing the ’nids. I shrugged, in as carefree a manner as I could contrive. ‘I’ll tell you when I get back, if it’s not too highly classified,’ I said breezily, hoping I’d live long enough to get the chance.
The journey to the aerodrome was as brief and eventful as such trips generally were with Jurgen driving, our scout-pattern Salamander carving its way through the civilian traffic as though they were enemy foot soldiers although with fewer casualties. Jurgen was as familiar with the sturdy little vehicle as he was with his lasgun, and although his approach to driving was as robust as ever, we never actually hit anything sharing the road with us. We came pretty close at times, but since we were surrounded by armour plate, and the civilian traffic wasn’t, neither of us found the occasional near miss unduly alarming.
As we rattled and roared our way along the main access road to the landing field, leaving a turbulent wake of profanity and blaring clarions behind us, I noticed that the melta he habitually carried when things got even more dangerous than usual was tucked into the driver’s compartment beside him. He was clearly expecting trouble too, which was no bad thing.
There was no one else in the galaxy I’d rather have covering my back if we turned out to be right, and the heavy weapon had made a crucial difference to our chances of survival on more than one occasion.
I’d taken what precautions I could as well, fitting fresh power cells into my chainsword and laspistol, and strapping on the carapace armour I’d acquired on Gravalax beneath my greatcoat, which concealed it nicely.
‘Do you think that’s them now?’ Jurgen asked, swinging us around a wallowing heavy transporter with what looked like the guts of a shuttle engine protruding perilously from the flatbed on every side, and I ducked reflexively as a tangle of pipe work thicker than my forearm all but brushed the cap from my head. He took his hand from the throttle for a moment, to point a grime-encrusted finger at a sleek Aquila class shuttle descending on the pad we’d been told to head for.
Ignoring the eloquent hand gestures of the startled driver behind us, I nodded. ‘Must be,’ I said. In keeping with her desire to remain incognito as much as possible Amberley tended to avoid plastering her personal transport with Inquisition sigils, but the crimson and grey colour scheme was a fair indication of its ownership to anyone familiar with the organisation she worked for. I found myself wondering for a moment if the presence of a space-capable shuttle meant that her old associate Orelius was orbiting patiently somewhere above our heads, but doubted that. Periremunda was a small and provincial kind of place, and the presence of a rogue trader in the system would hardly have gone unnoticed for long[48]. I glanced at my chronograph. ‘She’s punctual, at any rate.’
I should have known better than to verbalise the thought. As I’ve mentioned innumerable times before in the course of these memoirs, Jurgen’s adherence to protocol had a tendency to border on the obsessive. Now, no doubt considering it in some way essential to be waiting on the pad when the shuttle grounded, he accelerated, flinging me back against the heavy bolter on its pintel mount, and scattering the gaggle of PDF troopers manning the checkpoint at the aerodrome perimeter. Glancing back, I saw one of them yelling excitedly into a vox unit, but at least none of them had the wit to fire at us[49], which was an unexpected blessing. Thanking the Emperor for small mercies I clung to whatever handholds I could find, while Jurgen slalomed us around an obstacle course of fuel bowsers, slack-jawed enginseers, and cargo-handling servitors as though trying to avoid an incoming artillery barrage shell by shell. My comm-bead crackled.
‘Commissar Cain, this is Darien Down.’ The traffic controller’s voice was tense, which was hardly surprising under the circumstances. The poor frakker probably thought we were about to be blown halfway to the Golden Throne again, and I was in another frantic dash to avert disaster. ‘Is there an emergency we should be appraised of?’
‘Everything’s fine,’ I assured him, with all the soothing sincerity I could muster while my fillings were being shaken loose by Jurgen’s driving. ‘Vital military dispatches to collect, that’s all.’
‘I see.’ He clearly didn’t, but then in my experience civilians never really expect to understand military matters. All that mattered to him was that whatever I was up to had nothing to do with the safety of the starport, and that was that.
Despite Jurgen’s heroic efforts the shuttle touched down a few seconds before we reached the pad, its cargo ramp descending as it came, so that the lip of it kissed the rockrete a mere heartbeat behind the landing skids. I looked at it expectantly, waiting for Amberley to appear at the top of the dull iron gradient, but the cargo compartment remained empty, and the engines continued to scream, throttled back just enough to keep the whole thing from lifting again. Recognising the telltale signs of a pilot prepared for a rapid dust-off in a hot LZ,[50] I ducked instinctively below the level of the armour plate surrounding me, my eyes scanning our surroundings for any sign of a threat.
‘Get aboard as fast as you can,’ Amberley’s voice said in my ear, and taking her words as literally as he did any other instruction Jurgen gunned the engine again, hurtling towards the narrow ramp at a speed anyone else would have regarded as insane.
Even inured as I was to his cavalier handling of the little vehicle by a decade and a half of familiarity, I found myself flinching as we bounced up the metal incline, our spinning treads millimetres from the edge, and into the tight confines of the miniscule cargo bay. Even now I find it hard to believe that we didn’t just bounce off the bulkhead facing us, but as always my aide had judged it to a nicety, slamming the abused gears into reverse, and bringing us to a halt with barely a centimetre to spare. As he cut the engine our pilot fed full power to his own, and I felt a familiar surge of acceleration at the base of my much-abused spine. As I clambered out I caught a final dizzying glimpse of Darien Down receding into the distance before the rising ramp thudded into place, and sealed us in. I took an unsteady breath, redolent of Jurgen.
‘Nice driving,’ Amberley said, entering the narrow hold through a door in the forward bulkhead.
Jurgen scratched his head, beaming at the unexpected compliment. ‘Thank you miss,’ he said, blushing beneath the grime.
Amberley smiled at me, and I returned the expression as best I could. She was dressed in a skin-tight bodyglove, which would normally have been more than enough to raise my spirits, but unlike the one I’d seen her in at the Arbites building in Principia Mons this one was midnight black and festooned with sockets and truncated power cables. It just had to be the dermal interface layer for her power armour, and that realisation was enough to start my palms tingling in earnest. Wherever we were going, she thought she was going to need it.
‘I always thought it was impolite to keep a lady waiting,’ I said, trying to sound as relaxed as I could, and Amberley grinned at me, probably not fooled for a second.
‘Come on through,’ she said, indicating the door behind her. ‘You might as well be comfortable while we get where we’re going.’
‘Which is where, exactly?’ I asked, following her into a compartment that might almost have been the lounge of a small hotel suite, if it hadn’t been for the sets of crash webbing on the generously padded seats. I dropped into the nearest, one of a group around a crystal-topped beverage table, and Zemelda leaned across it to deposit a welcome goblet of amasec in front of me, still apparently playing the servant with undiminished enthusiasm.
‘Thought you might need this,’ she said.
‘You thought right,’ I agreed, swallowing half of it too quickly to fully appreciate so finely aged an example of the distiller’s art, and taking in her appearance with vague surprise. Like Amberley, the former snack vendor was dressed for trouble, in dark fatigues stippled with hive-pattern camo[51], a bandana of the same material keeping her hair, which seemed brighter and greener than ever by contrast, out of her eyes. Her laspistol was holstered openly at her waist, and a couple of frag grenades hung from the utility vest around her torso, next to a wicked looking combat blade. Amberley dropped into the seat opposite me, and smiled indulgently at her protégé.
‘Our little girl is growing up,’ she said cheerfully.
‘So I see,’ I said. I glanced around the compartment, the barren wastes of the Periremundan landscape hurtling past beneath us too quickly to distinguish any details, the occasional plateau there and gone in a mere flicker of shadow. Most of her entourage were here, Pelton dressed almost identically to his green-haired girlfriend and cradling his autorifle protectively, while Simeon glowered at us from the corner, twitching a little now and again as his automatic implants regulated the flow of chemicals coursing through his system. His shotgun was across his lap, and he kept touching the spare magazines of reloads hanging from the bandolier across his chest, muttering something too low to be audible, but which had the cadences of the prayer of accuracy. Rakel stood next to him, her face even more strained than usual, directing a pained and venomous glance behind my head. My nose apprising me of the reason, I turned to Jurgen. ‘Perhaps you’d better check out the Salamander,’ I suggested. ‘We might need it when we land.’
‘Very good, sir.’ Jurgen’s arm twitched in the vague semblance of a salute, and he vanished through the door in the bulkhead. As he disappeared behind the thick metal plating Rakel’s expression relaxed into something approximating her usual air of distraction, and she nodded as though listening to a conversation only she could hear.
‘The wind’s blowing again,’ she said, ‘and its teeth are sharp.’
‘I’m glad you’re feeling better,’ I said diplomatically, resolving to keep Jurgen out of the way as much as possible. Not that I really gave a frak about the barmy little spook, of course, but she was armed again, and I didn’t want her becoming so agitated by his presence that she might think of alleviating the discomfort of it by using her laspistol. For one thing my aide’s peculiar gift had saved my life several times already, and I had every expectation of it continuing to do so for as long as he remained around, and for another I didn’t fancy the idea of her popping off a gun in such a confined space. It wouldn’t breach the hull, of course, that was proof against the heat and stresses of re-entry, never mind a puny little lasbolt, but it could easily ricochet off the metal, putting my life in danger.
Mott was sitting at the table too, a mug of recaf in his hand, and a vaguely expectant air hovering about him that seemed to indicate that he was itching to start explaining what we were all doing here as soon as Amberley let him. Yanbel was in a corner next to the small door leading to the flight deck, doing arcane things to Amberley’s power suit, which loomed over everything like an Astartes captain at a garden party. As everyone’s presence registered with me, the obvious question occurred (apart from ‘what the frak are we doing here,’ of course, which I knew better than to ask a second time. I knew Amberley well enough by now to know that she’d explain what was going on when she was good and ready, and no power in the galaxy could hurry her up).
‘Who’s flying this crate?’ I asked.
Amberley shrugged. ‘Pontius, I think,’ she said, as though the name would mean anything to me.
Pelton flicked a stray lock of hair, which had escaped his bandana, out of his eyes. ‘Ex-Navy, like most of the boss’s crew. He’s good. If he has to he can fling this thing around like a fighter in a furball.’
‘Then let’s hope he doesn’t need to show off his skills,’ I said, assimilating this latest piece of news as calmly as I could. So, Amberley had her own starship. Well, it wasn’t that surprising, I suppose, inquisitors need to get where they’re needed as fast as possible. It simply hadn’t occurred to me before now, probably because the first time I’d met her she’d been with a rogue trader, and since then I’d somehow assumed she just used the authority of her office to commandeer a vessel whenever she needed one[52].
‘That rather depends on what we find when we get there,’ Amberley said, getting to the point at last.
‘Which would be where, exactly?’ I asked, sipping the remains of my amasec, and trying to look as relaxed as possible.
Amberley gestured to Mott. ‘A mining station, on one of the lowest of the plateaux. Caractacus will explain.’ She smiled indulgently at her savant. ‘After all, he uncovered the lead we’re following.’
‘Thanks in no small measure to you, commissar,’ Mott began, in his dry pedantic voice. ‘Your request for access to the Arbites files was answered in the fullest possible fashion, and one of the items appended was the working notes of the medicae who performed the post mortem examination of the psyker who attempted to assassinate you.’
‘I thought you’d already seen the autopsy report?’ I asked Amberley, and she nodded.
‘Of course. Keesh passed it on as soon as it was completed, and there was nothing in it to help us, or so it seemed at the time. What Caractacus has been looking at, though, is the data the report was compiled from, and it seems the medicae missed something significant out of the final summary.’
‘Deliberately?’ I asked, and Amberley shook her head, her blonde hair sweeping across her shoulders.
‘Probably not. Keesh is investigating, of course, but it looks like a genuine oversight.’
‘Quite understandably, too,’ Mott put in. ‘There were merely trace amounts, barely detectable, and our medicae colleagues could hardly have been blamed if they’d missed them entirely. That they did not was the greatest good fortune, even though they failed to realise the importance of the discovery.’
‘Traces of what?’ I asked, suspecting I was going to regret prompting the savant for an answer. Luckily, however, the question seemed to be specific enough not to have triggered a quincunx of random associations.
‘There were minute particles of dust in the cadaver’s lungs,’ Mott said. ‘All quite normal, of course, but a few showed unusual characteristics. Cross-referencing them with the geophysical data of Periremunda, it became quite obvious to me that he had to have visited one particular plateau in the relatively recent past.’
‘Where there’s a mining station,’ I said. I nodded thoughtfully. ‘Isolated, self-contained, a long way from civilisation. What would he have been doing there?’
