The Greater Good

TWENTY-FOUR

By the time I’d finished bringing Zyvan up to date, the sun was beginning to wester, painting the metallic walls of the conference room a shade uncomfortably reminiscent of blood. The revelation that Kildhar’s pet genestealers had effectively been given the run of the place for the past sixty years had had a predictably seismic effect on everyone, from the Lord General on down. There was no telling how often one of the beasts had sneaked out of the holding pens to pass on the taint to an unwary cogboy, and everyone going about their business in the corridors seemed to be eyeing one another with thinly-veiled suspicion. Fortunately Regio Quinquaginta Unus was about as isolated as anywhere could be on this benighted ball of slag, but an awful lot of people had passed through it in the last six decades, and tracking them all down was proving to be an interesting challenge for the local Arbitrator’s office[168].

‘They’ve started mass genetic screening in the main population centres,’ a hololithic facsimile of the Lord General told me, flickering a little, apparently seated in the middle of the table which occupied the centre of the room. Fortunately, he was only about a third of his actual size, so he fitted quite comfortably. ‘Starting with the most strategically vital institutions.’

‘Have they found any hybrids or implants yet?’ I asked, and Zyvan shrugged his insubstantial shoulders.

‘Not yet. Twelve thousand down, twenty billion to go.’

‘Not good odds,’ I said, but that was the whole point of the tyranids sending their genestealers out ahead of the hive fleet. Quite apart from the damage their puppets could do directly, if they became numerous enough to thoroughly infiltrate a planet’s population, the diversion of resources required to track them down would put a serious dent in the overall defence effort.

‘What about the shrine?’ Zyvan asked.

‘Some good news there,’ I told him, knowing he could use some. ‘We’ve already screened half the cogboys, and they’ve all been clear so far. One or two of the others are still unaccounted for, so the skitarii are running a level by level search in case they’ve gone to ground somewhere.’

‘Our most probable hypothesis, however, is that they were assisting the mass breakout,’ Sholer put in, ‘and were all killed along with the ones on the shuttle.’ He’d been the first to be screened, of course, and, as I’d expected, turned out to be free of taint. For all I knew, his modified genes would simply have eaten any ’stealer attempt to subvert them in any case[169].

‘That’s something, anyway,’ Zyvan said, not bothering to ask if we’d had the skitarii scanned. They’d been the first through the gene lab, after Sholer and his brother Adeptus Astartes, that went without saying. He coughed, a little delicately. ‘And Magos Kildhar?’

‘Was definitely tainted,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know how or when she was implanted herself, but it was probably some time before the serfs were.’

‘Brother-Sergeant Yail is reviewing the mission logs for that period,’ Sholer added, ‘but our chances of success are not high.’

‘Then let’s concentrate on the present,’ Zyvan said, bringing us back to the business at hand. ‘Have you secured the bioship fragment?’

‘It’s still in the cryogenitorium,’ I told him. ‘Something that size, there’s not a lot else you can do with it.’

‘I’ve given instructions for it to be dug out and revived,’ Sholer put in, earning a scowl from Zyvan, before adding ‘subject to the agreement of Magos Dysen and yourselves, of course.’

‘I have to say I’m not sure about that,’ Zyvan said, and I nodded my agreement.

‘Neither am I,’ I admitted. Sholer and I had already discussed the matter, and, not for the first time, expediency was pushing me in a direction I’d rather not go. ‘But we have to face facts. The hive fleet was desperate to destroy the node, and that’s the first time we’ve seen one running scared of anything. We need to know why.’

‘I agree,’ El’hassai said, appearing next to the Lord General by increments, as he edged his way into range of the hololith projector. Sholer and I exchanged concerned glances, wondering how long he’d been lurking there, and how much of the preceding conversation he’d overheard. All of it probably, as Zyvan didn’t look at all surprised to see him. Come to that, there didn’t seem much point in trying to exclude the tau from our deliberations anyway, as we were supposed to be allies, and any tactical advantage we were able to come up with here would probably work just as well for them in the defence of Dr’th’nyr (although, since the warp shadow around the tyranid fleet was blocking our astropaths from passing on the information to the one accompanying Donali, whether they found out about it in time would depend entirely on how fast El’hassai’s own channels of communication were). ‘This is an unprecedented development, and understanding it could not help but advance the Greater Good.’ He was standing behind Zyvan now, so his image no longer flared into insubstantiality around the sleeves of his robe, but the top of his head was losing focus instead, wavering in a fashion which made him look uncannily like an ornamental candle with a smoking wick.

‘Your support is greatly appreciated,’ I assured him, keeping a straight face with something of an effort.

‘And your recommendation will be taken into account,’ Zyvan added, stopping noticeably short of anything which smacked of ‘and acted upon.’

‘If we are to begin investigating the bioship fragment,’ Sholer reminded us, ‘then the sooner we begin, the better. Time is most definitely of the essence.’

‘Absolutely,’ I agreed. The sky beyond the armourglass window was beginning to turn purple, the colour of a fresh bruise, mottled with the first few stars to come out, most of which were probably orbiting warships, reflecting the light of the disappearing sun like a constellation of small but deadly moons. The onset of night intensified my apprehension; although the chances of an unsuspected tyranid horde scuttling out of the darkness were miniscule, and the shrine was protected from the approach of anything inimical by auspex arrays of quite staggering sensitivity, my primal hindbrain was preparing to huddle round the campfire with a nice sharp rock close to hand. ‘So far as I’m concerned, the sooner you get on with it the better.’

‘I concur,’ El’hassai said, from the relative security of a couple of hundred vertical kilometres away.

‘And Dysen tells me he trusts your judgement,’ Zyvan said to Sholer, in the tone of a man who knows a passed buck when he hears one. He sighed, heavily. ‘I still have my doubts about the wisdom of this. But under the circumstances, I don’t see that we have any choice. Do the best you can.’ He smiled, bleakly. ‘I suppose we can always sterilise the site from orbit if it all goes to the warp.’

Which, considering I was still standing there, was hardly the most cheering thing he could have said.

‘Any news of that shuttle?’ I asked, hoping the association of ideas wouldn’t be too obvious. ‘There’s nothing I can do here, apart from get under the Apothecary’s feet, and we’ve still got a war to fight.’

‘Last I heard, the Navy had some flight time freeing up,’ Zyvan said. ‘We can probably get a shuttle away to pick you up in the next couple of hours.’

‘Best news I’ve had all day,’ I told him accurately, still gazing out of the window across the darkening landscape. Night was falling in earnest now, and I traced the faint trail of a shooting star somewhere out over the desert. There would be plenty more over the next few nights, as the debris from the battle in orbit spiralled in, incinerating as it plummeted through the atmosphere towards the ground.

Then I stiffened, my eyes narrowing. The first bright streak across the sky was followed by another, and another, falling as thick and fast as rain in a thunderstorm. I turned back to the hololith, my panicked questions dying on my lips. Zyvan was standing, talking to someone outside the range of the projection field, while the insubstantial figure of the tau diplomat hovered on its fringes, flickering in and out of existence like a warp wraith trying to cling to its handhold in reality.

‘Something’s wrong,’ Sholer said, his eyes still fixed on the miniature drama being enacted on the tabletop.

‘Very,’ I agreed. ‘Take a look outside.’

‘Holy Throne!’ he said, succinctly. ‘That looks like–’

‘The second wave’s just hit,’ Zyvan informed us. ‘Far heavier than the last one.’

‘Of course,’ I said, recognising the typical tyranid tactic. This time round they’d try to get enough organisms on the ground to really stretch our dirtside defences, gathering the information they needed to completely overwhelm us on the next try, or the one after that, or the one after that. In the meantime they’d be creating beachheads, allowing the swarms to grow, and begin harvesting the biomass they needed to swell their ranks still further. I tried to make my next remark sound like a joke, already knowing the answer, but clinging to the hope that it wouldn’t be the one I expected. ‘I take it my lift’s postponed?’

‘’Fraid so,’ Zyvan said, taking the pleasantry at face value. ‘You’ll have to sit this one out too.’

But, as I stared at the flickering lights in the sky, I didn’t think for one moment that that would be an option.





From The Crusade and After: A Military History of the Damocles Gulf, by Vargo Royz, 058.M42.

The second tyranid assault hit Fecundia with a ferocity the beleaguered defenders could scarcely withstand, losing several of the lighter vessels to acid or bio-plasma discharges even before the fleets closed. Through these gaps in the defensive line poured uncountable numbers of mycetic spores, each loaded with lethal organisms, infecting the planet below like viruses finding a vulnerable host, while the living starships tried to engage the survivors at close quarters with claws and tentacles, or launched boarding parties in an attempt to harvest the crews.

Though faltering, however, the line did not break, the gallant starfarers of the Imperial Navy retaliating with lance, broadside and torpedo, tearing the hearts out of untold numbers of the void-spawned abominations. Even the merchant vessels still in orbit used their relatively puny armament to good effect, forming themselves into ad hoc squadrons whose combined firepower was sufficient to cripple, and in a few cases kill, those tyranid monstrosities incautious enough to consider them defenceless.

Nevertheless, the battle in space was a close-run thing, and could easily have had quite another outcome had it not been for the unexpected and decisive intervention of Commissar Cain who, at the point the battle began, had more than enough to concern him as the invasion of the surface got under way.