The Greater Good

TWENTY-TWO

‘They’re completely out of their minds,’ I told Zyvan over the vox-link, heedless of whether the transmission was being monitored or not. ‘Now we’ve made sure of that, I need a shuttle here as quickly as possible.’ Before the inevitable happened, the shrine was overrun, and everyone got eaten, including me. No point in sounding as though I was making a panic-stricken run for it, though, even if I was, so I added ‘I’ve wasted enough time away from the real war as it is.’

‘Don’t worry, Ciaphas,’ Zyvan assured me, a trace of amusement in his voice, ‘you’ll be back here before the next wave hits. You’ve fought the ’nids more often than anyone else I can think of, and I’ll need your insights in the command centre when we take them on again.’ Which came as a relief. Despite my misgivings about being aboard a spacecraft with a tyranid fleet incoming, it would still be preferable to being stuck on the ground once the full force of the invasion was unleashed. If the worst came to the worst, and the fleet was forced to cut and run, I’d escape along with it instead of being marooned on a world doomed to be devoured. Unless the scuttling horrors I’d glimpsed on the tau explorators’ pict-cast got to me first…

Torn between two terrors, I vacillated indecisively for a moment, before reason reasserted itself. I was definitely in danger here, now, from Kildhar’s reckless insistence on bringing the creatures she’d rounded up inside, and it was pointless worrying about anything which only might happen in the future.

‘I’ll be waiting on the pad,’ I said, and Zyvan chuckled, clearly believing me eager to get back in the fray.

‘You’ll get pretty bored,’ he said. ‘The Navy won’t have a shuttle free for a while yet. Everything’s on rearming and resupply runs, before the ’nids hit us again. A personnel pick-up’s pretty low priority, even if it’s for you.’

Nads, I thought. It sounded as though I was going to be stuck here for several hours at least. No point in sounding petulant about it, though, Cain the Hero was supposed to put duty first at all times, so I just put my cheerfully resigned voice on instead. ‘Goes without saying,’ I said breezily. ‘Just try not to get stuck in without me this time.’

‘We’ll do our best,’ Zyvan assured me, ‘and we’ll let you know as soon as your ride’s on the way.’ Which was all I could reasonably hope for, I supposed.

‘Sorry to bother you, sir,’ Jurgen said, his characteristic odour wandering into the room which had been made available to me a second or two before his corporeal presence. Like most Adeptus Mechanicus guest quarters I’d been obliged to avail myself of over the years, it was clean, ergonomically laid out, and curiously dispiriting, the closest thing to a human touch being the devotional cogwheel icon in a niche in the corner. ‘Apothecary Sholer thought you might want to look in on the gaunts in the pen.’

‘I suppose we should,’ I said, somewhat heartened by the observation that he was still lugging the melta around, instead of leaving it in the adjoining room, which had been put at his disposal. Zyvan and the admiral[158] would want as full an account as I could give them of whatever the Mechanicus and the Reclaimers were getting up to, and observing the safety precautions they’d put in place to contain the newly-arrived specimens might put their minds at rest, although, in all honesty, I doubted that it would do the same for mine. This whole undertaking had Catastrophe written all over it, and the best I could hope for was to be long gone before everything fell apart.

I can’t deny that with my aide and his melta at my shoulder I felt a little happier than I otherwise would have done given our destination, even going so far as to nod an affable greeting to a few of the skitarii patrolling the corridors in tense-looking pairs. They’d clearly been briefed to be ready for trouble, which was something of a comfort, knowing I wouldn’t be left to face the worst alone if (or more likely when) it happened, although I still clung obstinately to the hope that I’d be gone before it did.

Kildhar and Sholer were waiting for us in the observation gallery, and I glanced into the pen below us as I entered, expecting to see the same milling mass of hormagaunts I’d looked down on the last time I was here. Instead of pacing, or sitting randomly about the floor, though, all were clustered in one corner, their heads raised, as if testing the wind.

‘What’s the matter with them?’ I asked.

‘Just what we were discussing,’ Sholer said. ‘We have not observed this behaviour on any previous occasion.’

‘They’re sensing the presence of the new specimens,’ Kildhar said, the effort of modulating her voice all too plain; she was positively skipping with excitement[159] at the prospect of putting her theories to the test.

‘And speaking of which,’ I said, ‘they would be where?’ The adjacent pen was empty, so far as I could see, unless they had a particularly well-camouflaged lictor stashed in it.

‘On their way,’ Kildhar assured me, and moved over to a control lectern set in the wall beneath the slab of armourglass. She poked a couple of switches, and a panel in the wall of the empty pen slid aside, to reveal a dark tunnel beyond. A moment later a torrent of hormagaunts bounded into the chamber, and the hatch slid quietly closed behind them. ‘They’ll be disorientated for a few minutes,’ the magos biologis went on, ‘exploring the boundaries, and searching for a way out.’

‘They don’t look disorientated to me,’ I said, as the whole pack of them swarmed across the pen, throwing themselves against the wall separating them from the gaunts in the adjacent one. Those too had perked up the minute the newcomers had arrived, and begun attacking the barrier with their scything claws, seemingly undeterred by their compete lack of success in getting through.

‘Fascinating,’ Kildhar said. ‘They’re trying to join up, creating a larger group.’

‘Which would be a really bad idea,’ I reminded everyone, just in case they’d forgotten that somewhat basic fact.

‘Indeed it would,’ Sholer agreed, his attention almost entirely on some incomprehensible stream of icons and text, rushing across the pict screen in front of him too fast to be read. He glanced briefly at Kildhar, who seemed even more engrossed if that were possible, her eyes fixed unblinkingly on the blizzarding data in front of her. ‘I’m picking up enhanced activity in the basal ganglia of all the monitored subjects.’

‘As am I,’ the magos responded, ‘although since there was only time to attach external instrumentation, results from the fresh specimens will be less comprehensive and possibly less reliable.’

‘Would one of you mind explaining what’s going on here?’ I asked, adding ‘in layman’s terms,’ a trifle hastily as Kildhar opened her mouth to respond.

‘We are attempting to monitor the brain activity of the creatures, which has changed significantly since the two groups became aware of their proximity to one another,’ she told me. ‘A task of considerable complexity,’ she added after a moment’s pause, meaning so shut up and let us get on with it.

I looked down, catching a glimpse of small metal boxes about the size of data-slates riveted to the carapaces of several of the new batch. The ones from the freezer weren’t so adorned, although I thought I could detect some damage to the chitin of their heads, as if minor puncture wounds had been recently inflicted, and only partially healed[160]. ‘They seem pretty agitated,’ I said. Both groups were still attacking the wall between them with single-minded diligence, fortunately failing to make much of an impression on the thick slab of ceramite.

‘As I predicted,’ Kildhar said, ‘they feel compelled to join together. If they do, their brain activity should synchronise.’

‘Just as well they’re not going to,’ I said, just as she flicked another switch. The wall between the two cages began to sink into the floor, and both sets of gaunts grew even more frantic, if that were possible, leaping and scrambling over one another in their efforts to be the first over the top. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘Gathering data!’ Kildhar snapped. ‘We could be on the verge of saving the galaxy!’

‘And you could be on the verge of killing us all!’ I riposted, lunging towards the controls, but Sholer was faster, stabbing the switch with his ceramite-encased finger. In his haste he overdid it a little, denting the lectern, and eliciting a shower of sparks from the abused array of controls. The descending wall ground to a halt, rose a few centimetres, and stuck, still low enough for both sets of creatures to surmount easily.

‘This was not agreed to!’ he rumbled, his voice deepening even more than usual.

‘It’s the obvious next step!’ Kildhar riposted. ‘We need reliable data on the blending of consciousness within the swarm!’

The two of them glared at one another, while I hovered indecisively, wondering how best to intervene without becoming the lightning rod for the heightened emotions of both. Kildhar would be relatively harmless, despite the augmetics she was no doubt stuffed with, but an angry Space Marine would be a force to be reckoned with, preferably from a considerable distance. On the other hand, this was all being recorded for later analysis, and it wouldn’t look good for me to be caught flat-footed, instead of doing something decisive to bring them back to their senses.

‘Are they supposed to be killing each other?’ Jurgen asked, snatching everyone’s attention.

Relieved at the fortuitous interruption, I turned to look. My aide was right – the creatures in the newly-combined pen were tearing into one another with all the ferocity at their command, and, as they were hormagaunts in a feeding frenzy, that was a lot. Ichor and viscera sprayed everywhere, as the scuttling nightmares snapped and slashed at one another in what looked to me like an indiscriminate orgy of bloodletting.

‘They should not,’ Sholer said, looking down thoughtfully at the carnage below, his anger replaced by curiosity as quickly as flicking a switch.

‘I don’t understand it,’ Kildhar said, a note of bewilderment entering her voice. ‘All the data we’ve gathered suggested their minds should have meshed as soon as they came together.’

‘Perhaps they require the mediation of a synapse organism to facilitate the melding,’ Sholer suggested.

‘Maybe they just don’t like each other,’ Jurgen said, cutting to the essentials as always.

‘Maybe they don’t,’ Sholer agreed, to my considerable surprise. ‘We’ve always thought of the tyranids as a single, unified threat, but there are some magos biologis who theorise that the different hive fleets compete for prey[161]. A contention I find myself far less sceptical of now than hitherto.’

‘Because these are definitely from different fleets,’ I said, the coin dropping. Looking down at the ichor-flecked melee, I found myself able to distinguish the combatants easily enough by sight: the gaunts from the freezer had the same speckled patterning on their thoraxes I recalled so well from Nusquam Fundumentibus, while the new arrivals had darker banding on their carapaces, and the edges of their scything claws. Something about that combination of markings seemed vaguely familiar too, come to think of it, although I couldn’t put my finger on where I’d seen it before. By that time I’d encountered tyranids on a dozen occasions at least, and the bewildering variety of colour and shading I’d seen exhibited by the creatures had become thoroughly mixed up in my mind.’

‘Quite so,’ Sholer said.

‘We have to stop them!’ Kildhar expostulated, staring downwards at the charnel pit beneath our feet. ‘Before we lose the lot!’

‘Good luck with that,’ I said, having no inclination to try separating the combatants. In fact, the more of each other they killed, the better I liked it. The newcomers were definitely getting the best of it, although that was hardly surprising, given that they outnumbered the others by almost two to one. As I watched in horrified fascination, the last of the thawed-out gaunts fell, its head wrenched from its body, while a second assailant slashed its torso open from gushing neck to the root of its tail. ‘Perhaps they’ll calm down a bit now while they feed.’

‘They don’t look very hungry,’ Jurgen said with a faint note of surprise, which I could hardly blame him for. In our experience hormagaunts were little more than voracious appetites on legs, and I expected them to begin gorging themselves on the cadavers of the fallen at once. The half-dozen or so survivors of the short and vicious melee in the holding pens seemed to have other ideas, however, ignoring the bounty of carrion their efforts had won in favour of flinging themselves against the wall opposite the partially-retracted barrier which had separated them from their recently-thawed adversaries.

‘They don’t,’ I agreed, as they began attacking the wall, as single-mindedly and fruitlessly as before, so far as I could tell. ‘Now what are they up to?’ Something about the location they’d chosen made me uneasy, although I couldn’t have said why. So far as I could see it was a blank panel, no different from those on any of the other walls, but something had attracted them straight to it.

‘They’re trying to get the access tunnel open,’ Kildhar said, sounding completely bewildered. ‘But they should be acting purely on instinct, not showing signs of reasoning ability!’

‘Perhaps they don’t know that,’ I said, dryly. Then a more alarming thought struck me. ‘The panel will hold, won’t it?’

‘Of course,’ she assured me, with complete confidence. ‘The locks can only be opened from up here.’ She gestured towards the lectern, bearing the scar of Sholer’s gauntlet, from which a thin wisp of smoke was still rising. Her expression wavered. ‘Oh.’

‘Brother-Sergeant Yail, meet me in the cryogenitorium,’ Sholer rapped out, assessing the situation at once, and already on his way to the door. I glanced downwards, my worst fears realised: even as we spoke the gaunts had managed to get the sliding panel partially open, and a ridged and sinuous tail disappeared through the gap as I watched. ‘Commissar, will you join us?’

‘Right behind you,’ I said, unable to think of an excuse to refuse on the spur of the moment that wouldn’t have sounded feeble, even to me. I hurried out after him, Jurgen a reassuring presence at my heels, leaving Kildhar staring dumbly down at the mess below, clearly still wondering what could possibly have gone wrong.

The cavern beneath the shrine was just as cold as I remembered it, and the surfaces underfoot just as treacherous. Fortunately, the route Sholer took to get us there terminated on the surface of the ice, instead of forcing us to take our lives in our hands at the top of the narrow and slippery bridge, bringing us out through the structure from which he’d emerged the first time we’d spoken on this world.

‘Over there,’ Jurgen said, pulling ahead of us on the frozen surface, as sure-footed as only a Valhallan could be in sub-zero temperatures. The gaggle of gaunts were clustered together a hundred metres or so away, flailing at the ice with their scything claws. ‘Looks like they’re digging.’

‘Trying to revive something,’ I said, remembering the gaunts we’d seen on Nusquam Fundumentibus doing precisely the same thing. On that occasion they’d released a particularly large and unpleasant bioform, which had tried to make a meal of me, the squad I was with and our transport vehicle, and would almost certainly have done so but for the intervention of a passing Valkyrie pilot with a warhead or two to spare. The thought was not a pleasant one.

‘Or kill it,’ Sholer said, putting on a burst of speed to keep up with Jurgen, something his power armour made look ridiculously easy. I floundered in their wake, not entirely unhappy to have a Space Marine standing between me and the murderous beasts, but reluctant to fall too far behind in case we were flanked. If I got cut off from the others I’d become easy meat, torn apart before my companions had a chance to intervene.

Not that the hideous creatures looked about to charge, still utterly intent on using their grotesquely elongated forelimbs as pickaxes, but it never paid to be complacent about ’nids, as I’d already had occasion to reflect. I drew my weapons, both fully recharged and ready for use, feeling a good deal more comfortable as soon as I felt their familiar weight in my hands. Jurgen had the melta on aim, and let fly at the nearest. The shot went wide, which was hardly surprising given that he was firing on the run, but it caught one of the others a glancing blow, raising a cloud of steam as the ice around it flashed into vapour. The mist hung for a moment, blanketing everything, reducing the brood to an inchoate mass of barely-seen movement.

‘Here they come!’ Sholer warned, drawing his bolt pistol in a single smooth motion, and planting a couple of explosive-tipped rounds in the middle of the thorax of the first gaunt to burst from the shrouding fog. Jurgen dropped to one knee, steadying his bulky weapon, and took down another, renewing the fog in a fresh burst of steam as he did so.

‘Use the lasgun!’ I told him, cracking off a couple of shots of my own at the nearest dimly-seen shadow, which had no effect at all that I could see. ‘The melta’s giving them too much cover!’ Not to mention the risk of a near miss thawing out even more of the hideous creatures. Having caught up with my companions, I stood back to back with Sholer’s reassuringly impregnable-seeming bulk, swinging the chainsword in a defensive pattern designed to protect me from anything rushing suddenly out of the murk.

‘Right you are, sir,’ Jurgen agreed, imperturbable as ever, dropping the melta as he spoke. The emitter hissed as it touched the ice, creating another, small patch of mist, which began to disperse quickly. I just had to hope the cover he’d inadvertently created for our assailants would do the same before they could take full advantage of it. A moment later the crackle of his Guard-issue small-arm, firing short, precise bursts, echoed across the artificial ice field.

As the mist lifted, we began to see our targets more clearly. Unfortunately, that meant they could see us equally well, which was far less encouraging. The whole pack of them began to bound forwards, thick drool slithering from their gaping jaws, flecks of it freezing around their muzzles alongside the blood and viscera deposited there during their brief scrimmage in the holding pens.

I braced myself to meet the charge, hoping my duellist’s reflexes would be enough to prevent my head from being lopped off by a swipe from the first gaunt to get within reach, but the bone-chilling cold was getting to me in earnest now, stabbing through my torn and tattered greatcoat and slowing my movements as it leached the warmth from my blood. I cracked off a couple of shots from my laspistol, more in the hope of making them flinch than of actually dropping one, although in my experience once a gaunt got the scent of prey in its nostrils it would take a lot more than a las-bolt flicking past its ear to distract it. Jurgen managed to down one of the scuttling horrors with a sustained burst from his lasgun, which must have drained the powerpack faster than he liked, as he let it fall to the ice and snapped in a fresh one in a single fluid movement, never taking his eyes from the rich selection of targets bearing down on us as he did so. Sholer’s bolt pistol barked again, and an elongated head exploded, the body it was attached to continuing to bound forwards a couple of paces before crashing to the ice in a spray of dislodged crystals and rapidly-congealing ichor.

‘There are too many of them!’ I gasped out, raising my chainsword to parry a slash from the leading gaunt. They’d split up as they charged, sweeping round to flank us, just as I’d feared a few moments before, but now all three of us were encircled, not just me. Somehow, being about to die in the company of friends didn’t seem much of an improvement, although I supposed it would afford me the chance for a few last words. Not that anyone would survive to remember them, and the best I seemed able to come up with at the moment was a heartfelt ‘Frak off!’ at the one trying to close its jaws in my throat as I ran it through with the whirling blade, ripping the weapon free in a spray of viscera as I spun to meet the next attack. Just as I feared, my reflexes seemed painfully slow, and I’d have been an instant too late, losing my head for my pains, if I hadn’t slipped on the frozen surface and stumbled at the last possible minute. The scything claw I’d meant to parry passed over my head instead, and I made to rise, striking up into the gaunt’s momentarily-exposed underbelly.

‘Stay down!’ a new voice called, boosted by a helmet-mounted amplivox, and I did as it suggested, getting a mouthful of ice crystals as I tried to present as low a profile as possible. The distinctive hisss-crack of bolters being discharged, overlapping in short bursts, assaulted my eardrums, and I rolled clear as the shredded remains of the gaunt I’d been about to strike at dropped to the ice right on the spot I’d been a second before.

I rolled to my feet, to find Yail and a couple of his brother Adeptus Astartes double-timing it towards us, the muzzles of their bolters still smoking from the barrage which had taken down the whole pack, missing my companions and I by what would have seemed a miracle to anyone less familiar than I with the phenomenal standard of their marksmanship. Jurgen was getting back up too, brushing the ice crystals from his uniform, and bending to retrieve his precious melta, which I could hardly fault him for, as it was far more effective against the ’nids than his lasgun. (Anywhere it wasn’t going to help them hide from us, anyway.)

‘Sergeant Yail,’ I said. ‘Pleased to see you.’ Which barely began to cover it, of course, but I had a reputation for sangfroid to maintain, and now the danger was past there seemed little point in being overly effusive.

‘As am I,’ Sholer said. ‘I expected your response to be a little less tardy.’

‘My apology for any inconvenience, Apothecary,’ Yail said, his tone devoid of any trace of sarcasm which I could detect. ‘It took us a moment to get through the security systems.’

‘I thought you were supposed to have complete access?’ I said, surprised, and Yail nodded.

‘We are. However, Magos Kildhar ordered a complete lockdown of the lower levels, and that impeded our progress.’

‘Well, I can’t fault her caution,’ I said, ‘although her timing leaves a lot to be desired.’ Something started nagging at me as I spoke. Given her recklessness in bringing the gaunts into the shrine in the first place, not to mention the genestealers she’d been breeding, this sudden rush of common sense to the head seemed uncharacteristic to say the least. But perhaps the shock of what had happened had made her sit up and smell the recaff (a mug of which I could really have done with about then).

‘Any idea what the gaunts were trying to dig up?’ Jurgen asked, passing me a flask from which steam rose invitingly into the frigid air. If I hadn’t been aware of his remarkable psi-damping abilities, I’d sometimes swear the man was a mind-reader.

‘Not yet,’ I said, edging cautiously towards the cracked and pitted ice they’d been attacking so single-mindedly. They hadn’t had time to get very deep, thank the Throne, barely scratching the surface in fact, but it was pretty clear what they’d been after. I tilted my neck to get a clearer look. ‘Throne on Earth, it’s the bioship fragment!’