The Greater Good

SIXTEEN

I had little enough time to concern myself with conditions on the ground, however, as it soon became clear that our chances of reaching it intact were diminishing with every passing second. I could see only two or three of the spiky bioships[114] from where I sat, although I had no doubt that many more were uncomfortably close. All were taking fire from every ship that could get a clear shot at them, and probably a few that couldn’t, judging by the frequency and violence of the evasive manoeuvres our pilot was making. By now the first faint tendrils of the upper atmosphere were reaching up to claw at our hull, so even the internal gravitic compensators weren’t enough to prevent us from being shaken about. Jurgen groaned audibly as we corkscrewed through what felt like a complete barrel roll, a spread of torpedoes passing all around us to impact on the closest of the spaceborne monstrosities, but fortunately for both of us managed to retain control of his breakfast.

‘It’s breaking up!’ he gasped, no doubt happy to have something to take his mind off the miseries of motion sickness, even if it was the prospect of imminent death. For a panic-stricken moment I thought his hypersensitivity to our hurtling progress had allowed him to spot some flaw in the fabric of the shuttle that was about to doom us all, then my eyes followed his, and I realised he meant the tyranid ship the torpedoes had just gutted. Fragments of flesh and ichor, already flash-frozen into deadly missiles hard enough to penetrate our hull if they struck at this velocity, fountained out into space from the site of the wound, and the dying drone lurched, plummeting into the atmosphere less than a kilometre away, still spitting out spores as it went. Then it began to charbroil from the friction of the air, its chitinous exoskeleton sizzling and crisping as it spiralled in towards the ground.

‘Brace yourselves!’ Our pilot just had time to shout a warning before the atmospheric shockwave hit, sending our Aquila tumbling like a ration can kicked by a careless boot. How Jurgen remained outside his last meal was beyond me. The effort must have been truly heroic, and I have to admit to relieving my feelings with a volley of profanity which would have made a courtesan blush. In my defence, I can only say that it seemed to me at the time that it was either then or in front of the Emperor, and I already had more than enough ground to make up in that regard without letting rip at the occupant of the Golden Throne as soon as I arrived. Sparks flew from overstressed electrical circuits, and stress fractures cracked open around welded joints, but the enginseers had evidently done a good job of consecrating the circuit breakers of the gallant little craft, as, despite my fears, nothing burst into flame. Just as well too, as we’d never have made it to the extinguishers without breaking our necks.

After a subjective eternity of noise and random motion our course steadied a bit, and I became aware of Zyvan’s voice in my earpiece, demanding to know what was going on in tones of quite gratifying concern.

‘We’re all right,’ I assured him, hoping to convince myself of that at least as much as the Lord General. ‘Just crashing a bit.’ Which, given the number of times I’d marked my arrival on a new world by making a dent in it, was perhaps a little more sanguine than it sounds. I’d managed to walk away from all the previous occasions, after all (or, to be more accurate, limped, crawled, or run like frak, depending on how likely the impact was to be followed by an explosion), and our pilot seemed to know his business. He still had some measure of control, and our engines appeared to be functioning as well as could be expected under the circumstances. All in all, it seemed to me, we were most likely to get away with nothing worse than a hard landing; certainly nothing to compare with our concussive arrival on Perlia, or almost literally world-shattering one on Nusquam Fundumentibus.

‘Glad to hear it,’ Zyvan said, after a short bark of what sounded suspiciously like hastily stifled relieved laughter. Once again, it seemed, my baseless reputation for sangfroid in the face of danger was getting another fillip.

‘We’re being sucked into the slipstream of the bioship,’ our pilot cut in, either unaware of, or indifferent to, the fact that I was already voxing on another channel. ‘I haven’t enough power left to break away clean.’

‘Why not?’ I asked, a renewed shiver of apprehension breaking through my carefully constructed optimism.

‘Diverting most of it to the on-board gravitics,’ he explained, which was more than good enough for me. If he hadn’t been, Jurgen and I would have been little more than a stain on the bulkhead by this time.

‘Probably best to follow it down anyway,’ I said, trying to sound as though it was a sound tactical choice rather than putting the best face on something that couldn’t be avoided. Never let it be said that Ciaphas Cain ever shirked the call of duty, at least when a Lord General was listening in. ‘Some organisms might survive the impact,’ (something I’d put money on, knowing the ’nids) ‘and the ones from the spores will probably rally there.’ Also a pretty safe bet, based on my previous encounters with tyranid swarms. The synapse creatures would be attempting to coordinate the rest into a cohesive horde, while the others would be impelled by instinct to seek out their guidance. A little bit of aerial reconnaissance should be safe enough, enhancing my spurious reputation for leading from the front without actually having to put myself in any physical danger for a change, especially if we could pot a few with the Aquila’s autocannon[115] into the bargain.

‘Might be best to let them congregate,’ Zyvan said, ‘then take the lot out from orbit.’

‘If the Navy’s got time,’ I said. ‘They seemed a bit busy the last I saw.’

‘They still are.’ Zyvan sighed regretfully. ‘But relay the coordinates anyway, you never know. It’ll help get some ground units there, if nothing else.’

‘Will do,’ I assured him, then settled down to enjoy the rest of the flight as best I could. (Which I’m bound to admit wasn’t all that much.) At least the buffeting was beginning to die down a little, as the pilot broke through the maelstrom of turbulence into the pocket of dead air behind the plummeting bioship. It was crisping up nicely, so far as I could see through the heat-hazed air, smoke and steam billowing around it while greasy flames licked greedily at its leading edge. Fragments the size of a Chimera kept breaking off it, each more than capable of swatting us from the skies if it hit, and our pilot was forced to evade several times as these lethal pieces of scurf came rather too close for comfort.

Between the heat haze, which tinted the horizon the colour of ackenberry preserve, and the cloacal palette of the landscape below, it was hard to tell where the sky ended and the ground began, so I was taken by surprise when the incinerating corpse beneath us suddenly disappeared in a cloud of ejecta. ‘Impact!’ I voxed, to show I was paying attention, while fist-sized nuggets of the Fecundian surface began to rattle against our hull. Not that they were the worst of it by any means. We were flying though a plume of particulates, among which they were the largest chunks, the vast majority of it being made up of gravel and dust, admixed with a generous dollop of pulverised flesh. ‘It’s down!’ More or less, anyway; most of it was still bouncing, and breaking up into ever smaller portions as it did so.

At which point I began to detect a worrying change in the note of our engine, which began to waver alarmingly in pitch. ‘That doesn’t sound good,’ Jurgen said, displaying his gift for understatement to its fullest, and I felt a sickening lurch in the pit of my stomach as the Aquila dropped like a stone. A second or so later it rallied, clawing its way back towards the sky for a moment, only to falter a second time.

‘Brace for impact!’ our pilot called, quite unnecessarily, as I’d already been in similar positions far too often for comfort, and knew an impending catastrophe when I saw one. I was already strapped in about as securely as I could be, so I simply held on and hoped for the best, nudging the barrel of Jurgen’s melta a little further away from my chest with the toe of my boot. I’d just seen a shipload of ’nids being barbequed, and had no desire to share their fate at this stage.

The Aquila struck the ground hard, driving the breath from my lungs in a single explosive oath, lurched, slithered, and came to rest in an oddly anticlimactic lack of fire, flood, or rending metal. I inhaled deeply, and instantly regretted it; quite aside from Jurgen’s proximity, the cabin was evidently no longer airtight, admitting eye-watering amounts of what passed for an atmosphere around here. I tapped the vox-bead in my ear, but could raise nothing but static. Evidently the Aquila’s vox system was down, or at least unable to relay transmissions. Which, coupled with the lack of sound or movement from the cockpit, was disquieting to say the least.

‘Door’s jammed, sir,’ Jurgen said, to my complete lack of surprise, giving the thick metal panel separating us from the flight deck an ill-tempered kick. It would be hopeless attempting to hack through it with the chainsword, and using the melta in such a confined space would probably incinerate us with the backwash, not to mention the pilot, so I gave it up as a bad job and turned my attention to the rear access ramp[116]. Reaching it entailed scrambling up the steep slope the floor had become, canted a little to starboard, but the ridging in the deckplates gave us a firm enough foothold for the purpose.

‘This is stuck too,’ I said, leaning my full weight on the emergency release handle. Jurgen joined me, and, after a moment or two of concerted effort, and a few heavy blows with the butt of his lasgun, we managed to loosen it enough to crank the hatch open a centimetre or two. Immediately the passenger compartment became full of thin, powdery dust, suffocatingly thick, and the stench seeping in from outside redoubled. Choking, I fumbled my sash from my waist and tied it around my nose and mouth, obtaining a measure of relief thereby, although my lungs continued to ache and there seemed nothing I could do for my stinging, streaming eyes.

Jurgen followed my lead, rapidly wrapping his head in a towel he produced from somewhere within his comprehensive collection of webbing pouches, rather to my surprise I must confess, as that was hardly an item I would have associated with him in the normal course of events. ‘Getting it now, sir,’ he assured me, leaning into the handle with renewed confidence, and being rewarded almost at once with a slightly wider gap and a fresh influx of sand.

My aide’s optimism notwithstanding, it took us an appreciable time to widen the aperture sufficiently to wriggle through, which I did with all dispatch, having entirely lost patience with the choking tomb we’d been confined to for so long[117]. My eyes were met by a vista of complete and utter desolation: Throne knows I’ve seen some Emperor-forsaken hellholes in my time, but this was up there with the worst of them. A desert of rust-coloured sand[118] undulated away in every direction, unrelieved by anything save the glowering clouds of distant sandstorms, none of which, I was relieved to note, appeared to be moving in our direction. On the far horizon the looming mesa of a hive, its upper slopes shrouded in the smoke from its forges, was the only thing appearing to offer any hope of rescue or relief, although I didn’t put our chances of reaching it much higher than non-existent. It must have been a hundred kilometres away at least, across terrain so lethal even the Death Korps treated it with respect.

I extended a hand to help Jurgen up, and he passed me his lasgun and melta, leaving himself free to scramble out of the crippled Aquila relatively unencumbered. Instead of doing so, however, he vanished again, with a brief ‘Hang on a moment, sir,’ and began rummaging energetically through the equipment lockers. Leaving him to his scavenging I returned my attention to the horizon, reminded all too strongly of the ork which had attacked me during a similar moment of inattention after our precipitous arrival on Perlia, and having no intention of being taken by surprise on this occasion.

It might have been my imagination, but I was sure I could see movement in the distance. I blinked my stinging eyes as clear as I could, and shaded them with a hand. A thick pall of dust still shrouded a large portion of the landscape, marking the site of the tyranid ship’s demise, and I stared at it suspiciously, unable to make out anything more inimical than wind-driven sand and yet I couldn’t discount the knowledge of what that cloak of dust concealed.

‘Found a few things,’ Jurgen said, scrambling up beside me. ‘Might be useful.’

‘They might,’ I agreed, taking a quick look at the collection of survival gear he’d found. A collapsed habitent, awkward to carry, but essential if we decided to strike out from the crash site; attempting to sleep in the open here would be all but suicidal. A handful of ration packs, enough to keep us going for a couple of days, longer if we were careful, and about five litres of water. At the sight of the cool, clear liquid, I was immediately seized by a raging thirst, which I knew better than to slake; we’d need every drop before we were done, and my sand-abraded throat would just have to wait for relief for as long as I could stand it. The only other item I could see any immediate use for was a primary aid pack, which reminded me… ‘Better check on the pilot, I suppose.’

Jurgen nodded, clearly thinking precisely what I was: if he was in any condition to have joined us, he definitely would have done by now. He certainly hadn’t been fixing the vox, the bead in my ear remaining as silent as ever, despite me having cycled through every frequency I could reach.

On the verge of clambering down from my perch on top of the Aquila, I hesitated. I still couldn’t be certain that I’d imagined the movement I thought I saw, and I didn’t need the persistent itching of my palms to tell me I needed to be positive one way or the other before we moved off. I asked Jurgen for the amplivisor he usually carried, and raised it to my eyes.

The first direction I looked in was the crash site, of course, but if there were any ’nid survivors there, they were remaining under the cover of the debris cloud raised by the impact of their arrival. After a few minutes of intense scrutiny, I’d still seen nothing moving but dust eddies. I was almost beginning to breathe easier, despite the bitter experience of decades, and the almost literal unbreathability of the air, when I decided to sweep the horizon just to make sure.

‘Frak,’ I said, feelingly. Something was definitely moving, between us and the looming ramparts of the hive – not close enough to make out yet, but definitely in large enough numbers to raise a visible plume of dust in their wake, whatever they were. Heading in our direction, too. I swept the lenses to left and right, and this time, far closer, was able to make out the unmistakable six-armed silhouettes of a small brood of genestealers, then, about a kilometre beyond them, the larger profile of a lictor, flickering like a badly-tuned pict-caster as its chameleonic skin attempted to mimic the constantly-changing clouds of dust blowing about it. ‘We need to move.’

‘Right you are, sir,’ Jurgen acknowledged, as matter-of-fact as if I’d just asked for a fresh bowl of tanna. Slinging the bulky melta behind him, and holding his lasgun ready for use, he slithered down the tilting hull of the crippled Aquila, taking the bulk of our supplies with him. A moment later I followed, after a last, apprehensive look at the moving dots in the distance.