The Greater Good

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.

‘What other research?’ Zyvan asked, getting in just ahead of me this time and evening the score.

Kildhar smiled, in a fashion I found far from reassuring. ‘I suggest Commissar Cain conducts the initial inspection,’ she said. ‘After all, he made the work possible in the first place.’

I approached Kildhar’s analyticum with mounting trepidation, the tech-priest having been remarkably unforthcoming since her disquieting remark in the conference chamber, but I concealed it well. I was damned if I’d give her the satisfaction of appearing intrigued or disconcerted by it. Instead, I passed the long walk through echoing corridors, many of which still bore the mark of the genestealers’ rampage, in small talk with Yail, asking about my former acquaintances among his Chapter, most of whom it turned out he’d never met[93].

‘Bit of a mess,’ Jurgen remarked, as we skirted a section of floor marred by scorch marks, bolter holes, and some disquieting stains.

I nodded in agreement. ‘Any idea how the ‘stealers got out?’ I asked pointedly, and Kildhar shook her head.

‘That has still to be determined,’ she said, probably trying to think of an underling she could plausibly pass the blame on to. ‘Many of the data recorders were damaged in the breakout, so it isn’t clear how they managed to circumvent the security protocols.’

‘I doubt they had to try very hard,’ I said dryly, ‘given that they can claw holes in ceramite.’

The parts of Kildhar’s face that were still fleshy enough to do so flushed, but whether in embarrassment or anger I couldn’t tell Before she had a chance to speak and settle the question, Yail’s baritone chuckle echoed around us like someone lobbing boulders down a well, drowning out any riposte she may have made. ‘You have a point, commissar. But perhaps the question we should be asking isn’t how they got out, but why now?’

‘I see what you mean,’ I agreed. With their formidable combination of the purestrains’ brute force and the hybrids’ intellect, the whole brood could probably have broken out any time they liked. ‘They must have sensed the approach of the hive fleet.’

‘That would be my conclusion too,’ Yail agreed.

‘Every precaution was taken,’ Kildhar insisted. ‘The containment pens were surrounded by energy barriers as well as physical ones.’

‘To which the power supply was interrupted,’ Yail added, ‘by means as yet unknown, thus providing a salutary lesson in the perils of underestimating a foe.’

‘Not a mistake I’d imagine your Chapter would be in the habit of making,’ I said, giving in to the childish impulse to tease Kildhar a little more, but I couldn’t help feeling she deserved it, if her hubris had indeed been responsible for costing so many innocent lives. People in the Guard had been shot for much less, some of them by me.

‘They wouldn’t,’ the sergeant agreed, handily overlooking the leading role they’d taken in delivering the xenos abominations to Fecundia in the first place.

At which point we reached our destination: a thick metal door, like many of the others we’d passed, and at first sight equally unremarkable, unless you counted the number of biohazard warnings pasted to it. None of the others had had a genecode reader welded to the locking plate, however, nor a pair of Space Marines in full tactical armour standing guard outside. Both had their helmets on, their sinister yellow beaks[94] turning to watch us as we approached. Yail stopped to exchange a few words with them, confirming that the last of the stray ‘stealers had been tracked down and eliminated, much to my relief, while Kildhar got her genes scanned.

The door clicked open, proving that she was definitely her, and she gave me a tight smile as she passed through. ‘This way,’ she said, unnecessarily.

After all that build-up, the chamber inside seemed remarkably prosaic, so far as I could tell. I’d been in enough Mechanicus shrines to recognise the general layout, even if I had no idea what most of the humming, clicking, and flashing devices were supposed to be doing. The usual bright metal cogwheel was welded to the wall, and various liquids slurped and bubbled their way through labyrinths of glassware on a couple of workbenches. A handful of red-robed acolytes were trotting about poking things and staring at pict-screens, while a servitor or two took care of the tedious stuff. The only thing to strike me as a little unusual was a pervading scent of counterseptics and biological decay, pungent enough even to eclipse Jurgen’s body odour until I got used to it, forcing me to glance back over my shoulder to make sure he was still with me.

‘I take it the ’stealers didn’t get out this way,’ I said, and Kildhar shook her head.

‘Their pens are… were on the level above,’ she told me.

I nodded; we’d descended rapidly in a clanking, rattling lift, but my instinct for remaining orientated in enclosed spaces was working as well as ever, and I already felt certain that we were now far below the shrine’s foundations. Behind the stark metal panelling surrounding us, and which acolytes of the Machine God were so unaccountably fond of, would be nothing but bedrock. Unless you counted the warren of air ducts, power conduits, and service shafts that the ’stealers had used to effect their escape, of course. ‘So this is your mysterious line of research,’ I said, trying not to look totally flummoxed.

‘This is just routine tissue analysis,’ Kildhar corrected me, allowing herself a most unmagos-like moue of scorn. ‘The research is through here.’ She conducted Jurgen and I through the bustling analyticum towards an unprepossessing doorway which, on first entering, I’d assumed led to a storeroom or the necessarium[95]. As we passed through it, however, I found my pace faltering, while a barely suppressed gasp of astonishment dribbled though my lips, rendered visible by a sudden onslaught of bone-chilling cold.

We were on a high metal bridge over a deep natural cavern, every surface of which was rimed with frost. Since whoever had built it apparently shared most Fecundian tech-priests’ distaste for handrails, I determined to watch my step carefully. One slip and I’d plunge to a messy and painful death. Jurgen, of course, was completely unconcerned, as sure-footed on the thin coating of ice as he would have been at home on Valhalla.

‘Nice to see your breath again,’ he commented, as though this was a good thing. ‘Why’s it so cold?’

‘That, I’d imagine,’ I said, pointing at the huge, humming tangle of pipes and metalwork at the other end of the gallery. ‘It looks like a refrigeration unit.’

‘It is,’ Kildhar said, apparently miffed that a mere unmodified human could spot the obvious. ‘The specimens here have to be kept frozen.’ She kept walking as she spoke, as blasé about the slippery surface underfoot as my aide.

‘At least they won’t be walking out of here,’ I said, although the shiver I felt down my spine at her words wasn’t entirely due to the cold.

Kildhar apparently didn’t feel that that particular sally merited a reply, merely leading the way towards an open elevator platform at the end of the bridge.

I took my place as close to the centre of it as I could, while the tech-priest engaged the controls and, with a lurch which nearly took my feet out from under me, we descended some fifteen or twenty metres to the floor of the cavern. This proved to consist entirely of ice, which crunched beneath my boot soles as I stepped out on to it, thin crystals of the stuff spraying away from my tread like flakes of finely drifted snow. The top of the ice was encrusted with hoar frost where the moisture in the air was continually freezing, although, beneath this thin layer, the rest was as transparent as glass. It was hard to estimate its depth, as the ceiling-mounted luminators overhead reflected back in dazzling patterns, but at a guess the bedrock floor of the cavern was at least as far again beneath our feet as the depth we’d descended from the bridge above.

‘Commissar,’ a new voice greeted us, unquestionably another Space Marine by its timbre, and I turned, to find an armour-clad giant emerging from a modular hab unit that had been set up within the shadow of the walkway above. This one was unhelmeted, as indifferent to the bitter cold as my aide, and, to my astonishment, bore a face I recognised. ‘It has been a long time since our paths last crossed.’ Six and a half decades, in fact.

‘Sholer,’ I said, extending a hand in greeting. ‘The years have treated you well.’

‘You too, evidently,’ the Reclaimer said, engulfing my proffered glove in his own gargantuan grip. ‘I trust the fingers are still satisfactory.’

‘Eminently,’ I assured him. The augmetic digits on my right hand had been grafted on by him, in the apothecarion aboard the strike cruiser Revenant, after my fortuitous deliverance from the necrons of Interitus Prime. ‘I’ve a good deal to thank you and Drumon[96] for. I trust he is well.’

‘As do I,’ Sholer agreed, in a manner which made it clear that this was more of a pious hope than a realistic expectation. ‘No doubt we shall receive news when the Spawn of Damnation is relocated.’

‘He was still aboard when it returned to the warp?’ I asked, unable to keep the incredulous horror I felt at the prospect entirely out of my voice.

Sholer nodded. ‘When it became clear that transition was imminent, an expeditionary force was landed aboard in the hope of keeping the hulk in Imperial hands at its next emergence point. Contact has yet to be re-established.’ And wasn’t likely to be either, after all this time. Chances were it had emerged in the path of the oncoming hive fleets, or in the heart of an orkhold, or, just possibly, was still drifting among the warp currents.

‘The Emperor protects,’ I recited, to fill the awkward silence, and found myself hoping that in this case, at least, it would turn out to be true. Then the reason for his presence began to percolate through my surprise at finding him here at all. ‘You’re the Apothecary that Kildhar’s been working with?’

‘He is indeed,’ Kildhar told me. ‘Which is why you were given permission to visit Regio Quinquaginta Unus in the first place, despite the reservations of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The advice of a Space Marine is never to be taken lightly.’

‘I’m gratified to hear so,’ Sholer said, turning away. I fell into step beside him, trotting a little awkwardly on the slippery surface to keep up with his greater than human stride. ‘Although, it seems, we are to explain our work here to non-specialists despite my reservations.’

‘And mine,’ Kildhar added. ‘The Magos Senioris, however, is most insistent.’

‘As is the Lord General,’ I reminded them. ‘If we’re to defend this world against a hive fleet, we need every scrap of information which might have a bearing on that.’

‘Our research here is purely theoretical,’ Kildhar said, a trifle tetchily. ‘We’re attempting to refine our understanding of the tyranids’ genetic mutability, but that won’t make them any easier to shoot at.’

‘Unless they break free and go on the rampage,’ I pointed out, a little irritably myself if I’m honest. The bitter cold was giving me a headache, and the steady succession of surprises wasn’t exactly helping my mood.

‘There’s no fear of that with these specimens,’ Sholer assured me, with a gesture towards the ice at our feet.

I glanced down, and recoiled instantly in shock. A huge, gaping mouth lay less than a metre beneath my boot soles, large enough to have swallowed me whole, and I flinched aside instinctively. The huge, serpentine form of a tyranid trygon lay embedded in the transparent ice, inert and unfeeling, apparently dead. But then we’d thought that about the frozen army of such creatures we’d found on Nusquam Fundumentibus. I had no doubt that if this one thawed out, it would be burrowing its way to the surface in search of a snack as fast as its cilia could carry it.

‘Where the hell did that come from?’ I asked, relinquishing my instinctive grip on my half-drawn weapons. ‘Dysen said there hadn’t been any tyranid landings.’ The little voice in the back of my mind began chanting What else haven’t they told us?, just as it had in the conference room, but with a harder, more insistent edge.

‘There haven’t,’ Sholer assured me, no doubt divining that I’d be more inclined to take his word for it than Kildhar’s. ‘These specimens have all been acquired from offworld, and were brought here in a completely dormant state.’

‘Hence the construction of this facility,’ Kildhar put in, determined to have her two coins’ worth, ‘to ensure they remained that way.’

‘What happens if the power cuts out?’ Jurgen asked, clearly sharing my reservations. ‘We’ve seen frozen ’nids before, and they were up and at us the minute the ice melted.’

‘It can’t,’ Kildhar assured us. ‘The refrigeration plant is equipped with multiple redundant backup systems. The power supply could only be interrupted by an accident catastrophic enough to level the whole shrine.’

‘Like an exploding power plant?’ Jurgen suggested, and the tech-priest nodded, clearly wondering if he was mocking her, or simply getting the matter straight in his head.

‘Which is hardly likely,’ she said.

‘Quite,’ Sholer agreed, leading the way across the ice again, pointing out one specimen after another like an elderly dowager fussing over her collection of tea bowls. ‘Over here we have the most basic bioforms, hormagaunts, termagants, and the like. The synapse creatures are in the far corner, and the burrowers you’ve already seen…’ And, indeed, other serpentine creatures, some as large as the trygon I’d trampled on, others small enough to infiltrate a line of fortifications and fall on the defenders from behind, were still underfoot as we trudged through the thin scattering of frost.

‘Where did you find them all?’ I asked, no more enthused by the discovery that an entire army of the hideous creatures was right beneath our feet than you might expect. I was already sure I knew the answer to that, Kildhar’s words upstairs taking on a new kind of clarity, but it wouldn’t hurt to be sure.

‘Nusquam Fundumentibus, of course,’ Sholer confirmed. The two systems weren’t exactly neighbours, but were close enough to make the journey through the warp as straightforward as such things ever were. ‘There were a great many organisms which never revived, and the Adeptus Mechanicus there showed no inclination to study them in situ.’

‘Hardly surprising, under the circumstances,’ I put in dryly, ‘given how many of their colleagues got eaten.’

‘The analyticae of Fecundia are unsurpassed anywhere in the sector,’ Kildhar said, sounding affronted, ‘which the Nusquan Mechanicus are well aware of. They were more than happy to cede the study of these creatures to us.’

Jurgen muttered something which sounded suspiciously like ‘I bet they were.’

‘So what’s the main line of your enquiries?’ I asked, hoping I’d been in time to drown him out, but doubting that I had. Sholer, at least, had the preternatural hearing common to a member of the Adeptus Astartes, and Kildhar probably had some augmetic enhancement which worked just as well. ‘In simple terms, so I can convey it to the Lord General and his staff in language we can all understand.’

This time it was Kildhar’s turn to subvocalise, but since she was much better at it than my aide, all I was able to catch was something to do with blunt crayons.

‘Our primary focus is on the mechanism by which the hive mind is able to maintain control of the swarm,’ Sholer said. ‘If we were able to disrupt that, depriving it of the ability to coordinate across a wide area, it would give us a significantly enhanced tactical advantage.’

‘It certainly would,’ I agreed, momentarily dazzled by the prospect. ‘And are you able to?’

Sholer shook his head. ‘Our work is at a very early stage,’ he said. ‘But we believe we can identify some of the neural pathways involved.’

‘Oh,’ I said, trying and failing to conceal my disappointment.

‘Thanks to you,’ Kildhar said, a curious half-smile on her face, which left me feeling distinctly uneasy. She pointed downwards, right where she was standing, and, despite a sense of foreboding which grew stronger with every step, I plodded over to join her. ‘We have all the high-grade neural tissue we could wish for.’

I stared down at a seared and blackened piece of meat, about the size of a Baneblade. Raw flesh was livid around the necrotic patch, still seeming fresh despite the damage done to the far side, and I was incongruously reminded of a rare steak, charred on the outside while all but untouched within. ‘What the hell is it?’ I started to ask, but then fell silent as a memory intruded. Something huge and living, on the verge of taking flight, falling back into the volcanic eruption Jurgen and I had triggered at the near cost of our lives. ‘Holy Throne, that’s a piece of the bioship!’

Kildhar nodded. ‘One of its cortical nodes. Most of it was too badly burned to salvage, but some fragments of it fell on the ice fields and were frozen quickly enough to preserve the tissue. This was the largest and most cohesive piece.’

I tried to speak, to verbalise my utter horror and abhorrence, to ask how they could possibly have been so staggeringly stupid, but the words just wouldn’t come. All I could do was stare at the hideous mound of flesh, which had the potential to destroy us all.