The Greater Good

FIFTEEN

The news that the tyranids were on their way swept Fecundia like one of the bone-scouring winds continually ravaging the surface, and did about as much damage in the process. Most of the Guard units held steady, of course, largely due to the fact that the majority of regiments on planet had never encountered the scuttling horrors before, and I spent several days inspecting outposts and garrisons to spout encouraging platitudes, assuring them that if they could face down orks, eldar, and the dupes of the Ruinous Powers they could certainly send the hive fleet packing. The Death Korps were the exception, as in so many things, having lost scores of their number to a splinter fleet the year before, but, typically, were too heavily dosed up on combat drugs to care. As usual, the only thing that seemed to bother them was the prospect of not taking enough of the enemy with them when they fell[104]. Needless to say, this was an attitude I found hard to understand, but quite comforting, given that I fully intended to keep them between me and the onrushing horde.

The real damage the news did was among the civilian population, of course. I must admit the cogboys managed to hold up surprisingly well, most of them making a reasonable fist of hiding their apprehension, but the foundry workers had no such inhibitions about expressing their emotions, and Kyper and his skitarii spent as much time suppressing riots as they did preparing the planet’s defences. Most of the thralls who weren’t out causing trouble preferred to spend their time in the temples of the Omnissiah praying for deliverance, although I gather they drifted back to the production lines quickly enough once the tech-priests started telling them He’d find the job a lot easier if they built up a good stockpile of arms and ammunition first.

The only good news was the arrival of the battered remnants of the scout fleet, which reinforced our orbital defences a little, followed in short order by a steady stream of warships from all across the sector. Within a month Fecundia was surrounded by a hundred vessels[105], which went some way towards easing my mind. If Kildhar’s enhancements to the sensoria really worked as well as she seemed to think, it would take a very determined assault to land anything on the planet capable of hurting us.

Of course determination was practically synonymous with the ’nids, so I didn’t rest entirely easily, not least because she and Sholer still had their collection of deep-frozen death and destruction stashed away beneath the foundations of Regio Quinquaginta Unus, and, despite their reassurances, I was far less sanguine about it not thawing out at the worst possible moment than they seemed to be.

A concern I’m bound to say that Zyvan shared, and voiced aloud the morning I wandered into the operations centre aboard the flagship to find him staring at the hololith in a thoughtful manner. The festering globe of Fecundia was surrounded by glittering fireflies, colour coded to differentiate the warships from the cargo haulers, and I nodded in an approving manner. The net seemed as tight as we could make it, and anything attempting to land would have a hard time getting down unvaporised.

‘Heard anything from Madrigel?’ I greeted him, still clinging to the hope that the ’nids would realise the pickings were better among the tau, despite the improbability of such a development, and he shook his head.

‘Nothing good,’ he said. ‘None of our astropaths can detect a thing.’

‘Then we’re inside the shadow,’ I said, while a prickle of apprehension danced across my scalp.

‘We are.’ Zyvan nodded grimly. ‘There might be a few more ships on the way in, but we can’t count on that. And, bar any news they bring if they do turn up, the next thing we’ll know is the arrival of the ’nids.’

‘Then we’ll just have to hope Kildhar knows what she was doing to the auspexes,’ I said, feeling an almost irresistible urge to thumb my palm as I spoke.

‘I just hope she knows what she’s doing in that bloody meat locker,’ Zyvan rejoined. ‘They still haven’t worked out how the genestealers escaped, and that was bad enough.’

‘Sholer should be keeping an eye on her,’ I said, trying to sound less apprehensive than I felt. I hadn’t known the Apothecary all that well aboard the Revenant, having been unconscious for most of our time together[106], but he seemed to take his duty as seriously as any other Space Marine, which was about as reliable as you could get. ‘And the other Adeptus Astartes have got the analyticum pretty well locked down.’

‘Well, you’d know, I suppose,’ Zyvan said, sounding far from convinced. ‘You’ve served with them.’

And seen them torn to shreds by the genestealers infesting the Spawn of Damnation; not the most comforting of thoughts, so I suppressed it firmly. Even more firmly than the associated idea that it would take a lot more than Yail and his combat squad[107] to keep a swarm that size bottled up if it decided it would rather be somewhere else.

‘How are the Navy contingent?’ I asked, looking again at the cloud of contact icons surrounding the leprous image of the forge world beneath us. A few warships were accompanied by runes indicating that they were still under repair, which was hardly surprising. Pretty much the first thing most of the captains had done was take advantage of the orbital docks to bring their vessels up to peak fighting efficiency, which was fine by me. The vast majority were registering as fully armed, crewed[108], and ready to get stuck in, which was something of a relief, but only a partial one. I’ve never been all that keen on being aboard a spaceship under fire, particularly since my mercifully short attempt to breathe vacuum aboard the Hand of Vengeance, and the pict images of the horrors which had overwhelmed the tau explorators were still far too fresh in my mind for comfort as well. The thought of playing tag with those things around the corridors of the battleship[109] was far from inviting, and I couldn’t help wondering if, formidable as it seemed, the fleet would be enough to check the advance of the tyranid hive.

Zyvan shrugged. ‘Impatient,’ he said, which didn’t surprise me either. Most of the admirals I’d met were firm believers in carrying the fight to the enemy, an ethos the Navy as a whole subscribed to wholeheartedly, and I didn’t imagine twiddling their thumbs in orbit waiting to be shot at would sit at all well with the majority of the fleet.

‘Have the analysts got anywhere with the intelligence the scouts brought back?’ I asked, which was as close as I felt like coming to asking the real question on my mind: was the hive fleet big enough to give the matelots a bloody nose, or would the first assault be pushed back in short order?

‘Still chewing through it,’ Zyvan said, a remarkably tactless choice of words under the circumstances. ‘But we know there’s at least a couple of leviathans among them. Possibly more, judging by the number of smaller bioships the imagifers recorded.’

Which was far from good news. Our only chance of killing one of the void-swimming giants would be to swarm it, and that would mean clearing a path through its screening escorts first. Large as the fleet around Fecundia was, it would be a very closely fought engagement indeed if it came down to that.

‘We need an edge,’ I said, uneasily aware that I was echoing Sholer’s words of justification for keeping his precious specimens intact. Maybe it was time to press him and Kildhar for some results.

‘We do,’ Zyvan said, unenthusiastically, coming to the same conclusion. ‘Think you can get some simple answers out of your Apothecary friend?’

‘Not if he doesn’t want to give us any,’ I said. My good standing with the Reclaimers had already won us more concessions than anyone else would have got out of a member of the Adeptus Astartes determined to mind his own business, but I was under no illusion that I could push that any further than I already had. ‘But it wouldn’t hurt to ask.’ It was beginning to dawn on me that a diplomatic errand to consult Sholer in person would be just the thing to get me out of the firing line when the fleets engaged.

‘Then ask, by all means,’ Zyvan said, his enthusiasm for the proposal probably having as much to do with being able to get on with the war without having a scarlet-sashed backseat driver querying his every move[110] as with any expectation of a satisfactory answer.

‘I’ll get right on it,’ I said, in blissful ignorance of the consequences to come.

To my relief, commandeering an Aquila was simple enough this time around, the locals having been considerate enough not to disrupt my travel plans with any more destructive mishaps. The atmosphere in the hangar bay was markedly different from our last flight, however, the tiny utility craft awaiting us dwarfed by the Furies and Starhawks[111] being fuelled and armed all around it. Jurgen and I walked towards our transport through a maelstrom of frantic activity: deckhands lugging armoured cables as thick as an ork’s forearm, small trains of warheads trundling past on wheeled trolleys and the stomping bulk of Sentinel power lifters, all reducing our progress to an erratic waltz, as we changed direction with every step to avoid a fresh obstruction. Servitors were everywhere too, of course, carrying loads too bulky or dangerous to be handled by the unaugmented, and there seemed to be an inordinate number of red-robed Mechanicus adepts about the place, chanting litanies, burning incense and sanctifying the systems of the spaceborne weapon platforms on which our very survival was so shortly to depend.

‘What kept you?’ our pilot greeted us, with a cheery wave through the armourglass cockpit canopy, his voice crackling a little through the comm-bead in my ear.

‘Sightseeing,’ I replied briefly, in no mood for banter, but well aware that distracting him with a visible show of annoyance was hardly the best way to ensure our safe and speedy delivery to our destination. The pilot nodded, taking the hint, and went back to checking his instrumentation, while my aide and I strode aboard and took our seats.

Our departure was as straightforward as these things ever are, the deckplates on which the small vessel was parked falling away gently beneath us, seemingly in concert with the rising pitch of the engines. Slowly we began to move towards the gaping maw of the inner lock gates, the metre-thick slabs of metal grinding closed as we passed through them. As usual, it took several minutes to extract the air before their outer counterparts started moving apart, gradually revealing a speckling of pin-sharp stars, most of which were promptly occluded by the cankerous face of the forge world below. During this enforced wait the pilot kept us hovering, balanced in place on the manoeuvring thrusters, which greatly raised my opinion of his skills. It would have been no easy task in the cross-currents created by the air pumps, and most shuttle jockeys would have set down on the deck to make life a little easier.

We drifted out into the void at last, surrounded by a faint puff of ice crystals from the residue of air the pumps had been unable to extract, and I looked about us, noting the visible signs of readiness to face the oncoming storm. A squadron of Furies coasted past with flaring engines, one of the groups screening the flagship from enemy drones, and, glancing back, I could see a score or more others clamped to the hull, awaiting the call to action[112].

Everywhere I looked in the sky, it seemed, a loose star was drifting, its motion obvious against the fixed backdrop of the galaxy: the unmistakable spoor of a spacecraft, too far away to make out, but betrayed to the naked eye by the light reflecting from its hull.

‘There’s a lot of them,’ Jurgen remarked, although whether this was intended as reassurance or simply an observation I had no idea.

‘Good,’ I said, turning my attention to the world towards which we were descending. It looked no more inviting than it had on any of the previous occasions I’d done so, the portions of the surface visible between the thick clouds of airborne waste resembling nothing so much as rotting offal. Even the lights of the hives had little chance of punching through the murk, which was being stirred up across half the southern hemisphere by one of the periodic storms capable of laying waste to entire continents (assuming the vast midden had anything so clearly identifiable as a continent to lay waste to, of course). Nevertheless, I couldn’t help trying to pick out our destination, or, at least, its general location.

Occupied as I was in this futile endeavour, it took me a moment to realise that our pilot was throwing us around in a rather more violent manner than usual. Fortunately the Aquila’s internal gravity field was remaining steady, or Jurgen and I would have been flung against the bulkheads hard enough to have broken bones. As it was, the rapid oscillation of the planet across the viewport was my first clue that things were beginning to go as wrong as they usually did.

‘What’s happening?’ I voxed the pilot, trying to keep an edge of testiness from my voice. It seemed as though he had his hands full, and none of the reasons that I could think of for that made distracting him now a particularly good idea.

‘We’ve got incoming,’ he told me, in a voice which didn’t have to add so shut up and let me get on with my job to append that particular message. Leaving him to it seemed like the best idea, so I switched channels and spoke to Zyvan instead.

‘Kildhar’s modified auspexes are picking something up,’ the Lord General told me, in tones of some surprise. ‘They started returning echoes about thirty seconds ago, and the Navy scrambled everything they’ve got to intercept.’ Which explained the violent manoeuvring, at least; our pilot must have been jumping around to get out of the way of the fighter squadrons.

‘I can’t see anything,’ I said, inanely I suppose in retrospect, as my chances of picking anything up with the naked eye would have been miniscule. ‘Have you mobilised the ground forces?’

‘They’re as ready as they’ll ever be,’ Zyvan said. The trouble was, we’d both fought tyranids before, and were under no illusions about what that actually meant. I realised then that he must have been simmering with frustration, an unwilling spectator to a spaceborne clash of arms he couldn’t influence or participate in: perhaps the most galling position possible for a warrior of his prowess and tactical acumen.

‘Any sign of–’ I began, then broke off as something from a nightmare howled past the viewport[113]. ‘Holy Throne!’

It was hard to focus on, seeming to consist mainly of spines and talons, each larger than our shuttle. The one thing I could say for sure was that it dwarfed the pack of fighters snarling and yapping at its heels, still peppering its back and flanks with lascannon and missile strikes as it passed out of sight.

Then, without any warning at all, the void lit up, the main batteries of the warships all firing at once. And they had plenty of targets to choose from. The flickers of a thousand impacts, as energy beams and torpedo volleys struck home against steel-hard chitin, dazzled my eyes, and our pilot’s voice was in our ears again. ‘Hang on back there,’ he counselled. ‘It’s going to get rough.’

I bit down hard on the sarcastic rejoinder which had almost escaped my lips, and did as I was bid, cinching the seat restraints a little tighter. Jurgen did the same, his face paling slightly beneath its usual carapace of flaking skin, no doubt fearing for his delicate stomach, not something which usually troubled him until we were well within a planetary atmosphere. His knuckles were white around the melta he carried across his lap, and I found myself hoping he’d remembered to leave the safety on: the last thing we needed at this stage was to vaporise a chunk of the fuselage by accident.

‘Sounds as if they’ve arrived,’ he said, craning his neck for a better view of the carnage beyond the viewport. The tyranid bioships were retaliating in kind, lashing out with tentacles to ensnare the smaller vessels, and spitting gobbets of something corrosive which burned and melted hulls from a safer distance. The Navy seemed to know what they were doing, though, I had to give them that. I caught a brief glimpse of the lance batteries of a cruiser slicing through the tendrils holding a destroyer in place, but before I could see the smaller vessel turn vengefully on its tormentor our Aquila lurched vertiginously, and began plunging towards the surface of the planet.

‘What was that?’ I asked, my sudden flare of alarm overriding my resolve not to bother the pilot unduly before we were once again standing on a solid surface.

‘Haven’t a clue, but it nearly got us,’ he snapped, and the starfield beyond the sheet of armourglass began to do somersaults. ‘We need to get into the atmosphere fast.’

Well he wasn’t getting any argument on that score, I can assure you. The tyranids were in space, and anywhere they weren’t was fine by me. The view outside began to steady once again, as the pilot angled the Aquila for atmospheric entry, and I took my last look at what I gather is now commonly referred to as the first battle of the Siege of Fecundia. I’d be the first to admit I’m no expert on the complexities of fighting in three dimensions, but I’d been involved in a fair few ship-to-ship actions over the years, and it seemed to me that we were more than holding our own. Most of the tyranid ships seemed relatively small, about the size of our destroyers or light cruisers, although I had no doubt that they had far worse in reserve; this was a scouting raid, meant to size up our defences in preparation for a stronger assault, a tactic I’d seen the swarms on the ground use innumerable times. Just my luck to be caught in the middle of it, in a light utility craft, liable to be swept from the sky with a single volley.

‘They’re launching fighters,’ Jurgen said, with an apprehensive glance at the nearest drone ship. I twisted in my seat, impeded by the crash harness I’d tightened a few moments before, and felt the breath catch in my chest.

‘Those aren’t fighters,’ I said, ‘they’re mycetic spores.’ I tapped my comm-bead, using my commissarial override code to cut in on whatever vox-traffic might be going on among the Imperial Guard units on the surface; bad manners to interrupt, of course, but under the circumstances I didn’t think anyone would object. ‘All ground units stand to,’ I broadcast, trying to sound appropriately calm and dignified, instead of frightened out of my wits. ‘Spores incoming. The tyranids are on their way.’