The Greater Good

TWENTY-FIVE

‘Looks like we’re a prime target,’ I said, trying to keep my voice level, as the number of contact icons grew around the glowing rune marking our position in the hololith.

‘We are,’ Yail agreed, sounding as happy as a Space Marine ever is when faced with overwhelming odds, which isn’t exactly cheerful, but a lot more sanguine about it than I generally am. No doubt because, from their point of view, it’ll either result in a heroic victory or a glorious last stand, both of which will go down well in the annals of their Chapter.

‘They’re targeting the bioship fragment,’ Sholer said, sounding almost as concerned about his lump of meat as our own safety, which I have to confess was my main concern at this point. ‘What’s our state of readiness?’

‘As good as it can be,’ I told him, knowing he’d be as aware as I was of just how inadequate that was likely to prove. ‘The skitarii have finished laying minefields, and are dug in around our perimeter.’ Rather them than me, I added silently to myself.

‘My battle-brothers and I will be joining them,’ Yail added, ‘as soon as the tactical situation has become clear enough to know where we will be most needed.’

‘What about the Land Speeder?’ I asked, turning my attention to the pict screen, across which the darkened dunescape was scudding. The scout vehicle had been flying round in circles for the last hour or so, sending back increasingly pessimistic reports about the number of creatures heading our way from the scattered spores – not just vanguard organisms like gaunts and lictors this time, but scores of termagants, and the larger warrior forms to herd them. This time we’d be facing an army capable of coordinating itself and shooting from a distance, not an instinct-driven swarm desperate to close. There were even a few unconfirmed sightings of larger creatures, capable of taking on an armoured vehicle, if we’d had one, or, more cogently, tearing their way through whatever defences we’d manage to put in place before they arrived. Formidable as the walls of the shrine were, they’d been built to withstand an assault by nothing more threatening than the elements[170], and I couldn’t see them holding for long against a brood of carnifexes determined to breach them.

‘Standing by to provide fire support,’ Yail assured me. After some discussion, we’d agreed that the fast-moving flyer would be best employed once the expected assault began in trying to pick off the larger creatures coordinating the others, in the hope of disrupting whatever strategy they were attempting to use against us. That would entail remaining fast enough, and high enough, to avoid any ground-to-air fire the swarm might bring to bear, of course. We could only hope that the superior range of the heavy bolters and missile launchers, and matchless marksmanship of the Adeptus Astartes, would be equal to the task.

‘What about the landship?’ I asked, catching sight of the harvester still parked alongside the shrine, like a dinghy bobbing next to a wharf. ‘Can we use that to evacuate the tech-priests?’ Who would, of course, need a military escort to ensure their safety, a job for which I considered myself the prime candidate.

‘That has already been considered,’ Sholer said, ‘but their chances of getting through are extremely low.’

‘I imagine so,’ I said, having thought as much, but it never hurt to ask. The huge, lumbering machine would be an easy target for the swarm, which would simply keep pace alongside, throwing bodies at it until they tore their way through the hull. After that, it would all be over. ‘Then what do we do with it?’ I added. ‘It’s blocking our fire lanes, and giving them enough cover to mass for an attack.’

‘Detonate the reactor,’ Yail said. ‘The specimens caged inside will attract others, so if we time it right, we should take out a considerable number of the attacking swarm.’

‘The crew’s already been evacuated into the shrine,’ Sholer added.

‘Glad to hear it,’ I said, as if I actually cared one way or the other. ‘How are you getting on with defrosting the bioship fragment?’

‘Slowly,’ Sholer admitted. ‘It’s been dug out of the ice, but we needed heavy lifting equipment to move something that size, and our analyticae simply aren’t big enough to get it into. We’ve had to move our equipment into one of the storage bays in order to study it.’

‘Show me,’ I said, calling up a three-dimensional plan of the shrine on the hololith as I spoke. It sounded like the perfect place to avoid, and I wanted to make sure I stayed as far away from it as possible. Sholer poked the controls, and highlighted a large, vaulted area near the top of the structure. I stared at it in surprise. ‘I thought you’d keep it down in the sub-levels.’

‘The higher the better,’ he said, ‘as the tyranids don’t appear to have any flying creatures among them.’

‘Not yet,’ I said, ‘but they will.’ One thing certain about the ’nids was that whatever problem you presented them with, they’d have a creature perfectly adapted to dealing with it spawned and ready to go within hours.

‘The chamber connects to the main cargo lift,’ Sholer said, pointing to a wide shaft extending all the way from the lowest sub-level to the flight deck on the roof. ‘We can return it to the cryogenitorium easily enough if we have to.’

‘Good enough,’ I said, hoping I sounded as though I meant it. If we had winged organisms fighting their way down from the hangars, and the bulk of the swarm scrambling up from below, we’d have nowhere to go in any case. I turned back to Yail. ‘Better get all the non-combatants into the mid-levels, and be ready to seal off the lower ones,’ I said. That should buy us a little time if the swarm broke through. Or, more likely, I tried not to think, when they did.

‘I agree,’ he said. ‘Although we should arm as many of the acolytes as we can. It will make them feel less vulnerable, and lack of accuracy is hardly going to be an issue if the swarm does gain entry.’ Which was an understatement if ever I heard one.

We didn’t have long to wait for the first attack, which came less than an hour later. The night beyond the sheet of armourglass making up one wall of the shrine’s main operations centre was suddenly lit up by a series of vivid flashes, like far-off lightning, accompanied by a low rumbling sound which made the window vibrate almost imperceptibly. In fact, I’d never have felt it, if I hadn’t had my fingertips pressed against the slick, transparent surface as I craned my neck for a better view.

‘Looks like they found the minefield,’ Jurgen opined, handing me a more than welcome mug of recaff.

I took it, and nodded my thanks. ‘It does,’ I said, opening a vox-link to Yail, who was off somewhere in the darkness looking for ’nids to pot. ‘Contact in sector three,’ I told him crisply, then added ‘but I imagine you noticed that,’ in my best wryly humorous tone, as though I was eager to be out there with him. But someone had to watch the hololith, keeping an eye on the overall tactical picture, and for that job, to my vastly unspoken relief, we’d had a wide choice of me. I’d fought the ’nids before, and could pick out the patterns of movement that betokened an incipient charge, or a flanking attempt, better than anyone except possibly Yail, and his place was alongside his battle-brothers, not sitting out the fight in relative safety. His sense of honour would never have permitted that.

‘We have it covered,’ he assured me, although from the hololith display it looked more like he and the rest of the Reclaimers were just offering themselves up as an appetiser for the first ’nid arrivals. His last couple of words were almost drowned out as the speeder howled in from the south, unloading a blizzard of fire into the heart of the milling swarm, and pulled away again in the nick of time, rolling to avoid a barbed strangler pod fired by something in the press below. The living warhead burst in mid-air, spewing out an expanding mass of razor-edged tendrils which plummeted back into the heaving crowd of deadly organisms, ripping those it entangled apart with its fearsome thorns, which didn’t seem to disconcert the others in the slightest.

I could make out very little of the horde surrounding us, the encircling mass reduced by the darkness to a single amorphous stain on the landscape, which seemed to seethe like an angry sea as highlights struck briefly from one piece of chitin or another. I found myself obscurely grateful for the lack of clarity, as seeing that unstoppable tide of malevolence for what it was, and being able to pick out individual creatures within it, would have been far more unnerving.

‘Commissar,’ one of the red-robed acolytes manning the lecterns called, somehow managing to inject a tone of apologetic diffidence into his mechanical voice, ‘it appears we have a problem.’

‘No, really?’ I asked, tearing myself away from the window with some reluctance. The inexorable creep of the advancing wall of death beyond it had become curiously hypnotic. Then, reflecting that sarcasm wasn’t exactly calculated to inspire already terrified civilians, I plastered a smile on my face, as though I’d meant it for a joke. ‘Are we running out of recaff already?’

‘A serious problem,’ the cogboy insisted, predictably having had the sense of humour bypass common to his kind. He was carrying a welding torch in his mechadendrites, the makeshift weapon, and hundreds more like it, having been the closest we’d been able to come to Yail’s suggestion of boosting morale by arming the tech-priests, and poked at the dials and switches in front of him with calloused and stubby fingers. Something about the intensity with which he was working worried me, and I hurried across the wide, high room, Jurgen trotting at my heels.

‘What?’ I asked, finding the display in front of him as incomprehensible as I’d expected. Jurgen leaned in for a closer look at the wobbling dials, his brow furrowing in bafflement, and the cogboy flinched, apparently still in possession of his sense of smell.

‘I’m getting traces of movement in the cryogenitorium,’ he said. ‘Something’s moving around down there.’

‘Frak on a stick,’ I said, seeing no reason not to express my disquiet in the most forthright possible terms. If anything, the short burst of profanity seemed to reassure the cogboy, probably because he’d been worrying about bothering me unnecessarily. ‘They’re waking up!’ I retuned my comm-bead. ‘Apothecary, we’re reading movement in the deep freeze,’ I said. ‘Is the node waking up?’

‘Not as such,’ Sholer said, ‘that would imply a sense of individual consciousness, which tyranids don’t possess.’ Not for the first time, I found myself regretting that it wasn’t possible to strangle someone over a vox-link. ‘But we are registering cortical activity, which is increasing in strength by the minute.’

‘Then that’s what’s reviving the specimens,’ I concluded.

‘A reasonable hypothesis,’ he conceded. ‘But most are too deeply embedded in the ice to free themselves.’

‘They don’t have to,’ I reminded him. ‘You’ve got burrowers down there. They’ll break it up enough for the others to get out.’

‘Then we have a serious problem,’ Sholer said.

Before I could congratulate him on his acuity, the entire room seemed to tremble, while a deafening rumble shuddered through my bones. A vivid fireball blossomed beyond the sheet of armourglass, against which debris clanged and clattered, leaving a few faint chips and streaks even in that phenomenally tough surface.

‘There goes the harvester,’ Jurgen remarked, in conversational tones.

‘We’re pulling back,’ Yail voxed, almost at the same moment. ‘We can’t hold them any longer.’

‘Then don’t try,’ I advised, after a quick glance at the hololith. The noose was tightening all around us, and unless they moved fast, they’d be cut off within a handful of moments. The Land Speeder was swooping and diving beyond the wide window, covering their retreat with strategic blurts of fire, and by the light of the burning landship I could see an unstoppable tide of chitin sweeping towards our fragile bastion from all directions. ‘As soon as you’re inside, we’re sealing the lower levels.’

‘Acknowledged,’ Yail said, not bothering to ask why. If he’d been monitoring my conversation with Sholer he’d already know, and if he hadn’t, I was pretty sure he’d be able to work it out. ‘We’ll be with you in ten.’

As it turned out, it was a couple of minutes more than that before the towering bulk of the Space Marine was looming over me again, his Terminator armour looking even more battered than before. Several of the rockets were missing from the shoulder-mounted launchers too, which in itself stood as mute testament to the ferocity of the fight he and his comrades had put up.

‘I’m recording more movement below,’ the welder-wielding cogboy piped up from behind his lectern, and I tilted my neck to converse with Yail.

‘Looks like you got back in the nick of time,’ I said. I turned back to the hololith, and called up the schematic of the shrine Sholer had shown us in the conference room so short a time before. Several internal doors were marked in red, to my considerable relief. ‘All the doors have been welded shut.’

‘That’ll buy us a breathing space,’ Yail agreed. ‘We’ll set up pickets here, here, and here.’ He indicated a couple of choke points, where corridors intersected. ‘Reclaimers here, and skitarii there.’

‘This junction would be better,’ I said, my innate affinity for complex corridor systems kicking in, and indicated an alternative to one of the points he’d suggested. ‘If the ’nids get into the ducting, they can bypass a post here.’

‘Good point,’ Yail said. ‘We’ll deploy there instead.’

‘Better hurry,’ I said, ‘it won’t take them long to climb half a dozen levels.’

‘But they’re not climbing,’ the cogboy put in. ‘Look.’

His instrumentation made no more sense to me than it had done the last time I looked, but Yail seemed able to read it without too much trouble. ‘No, they’re not,’ he said. ‘Can you transfer this to the hololith?’

The cogboy nodded, and a moment later contact icons began to appear, clustered in the lower levels of the schematic. ‘Best I can do,’ he said.

‘It’s good enough,’ I assured him, and turned to Yail. ‘They’re in the plasma vents.’

‘Some of them, anyway,’ the Space Marine agreed. ‘I doubt many will fit.’

‘They won’t have to,’ I reminded him, the picture of the huge serpentine burrower I’d found myself standing on the first time I’d visited the cryogenitorium fresh in my mind. ‘The trygon will leave them a tunnel to follow.’

‘Why are they heading for the surface?’ Jurgen asked. ‘They usually want to attack us as quick as they can.’

‘Because there’s more prey to be had outside,’ I said, with a sudden flare of realisation, ‘and the ones attacking us are just as eager to kill the bioship node. We’ll keep for both of them.’ Which was hardly a comforting thought in the long term, but if it gave us a respite now, I wasn’t going to argue.

‘There’s the first one,’ Jurgen said, returning to the window and looking down at the landscape below. Ignoring the sudden assault on my sinuses which joining him entailed, I stood next to him, and followed the direction of his grubby forefinger. As I did so, something fast and scuttling flung aside the grating it had just ripped from the nearest vent, and leapt at the unprotected back of the gun servitor still doggedly guarding it from the encroaching swarm. The construct fell in a flurry of slashing blows, flesh, bone and metal parting like morning mist, and its slayer bounded off into the darkness. ‘’Stealer, you reckon?’

‘Could be,’ I said, as a dozen more bioforms swarmed out of the narrow opening, and followed their fellow. A brood of termagants, outnumbering them at least two to one, and being herded by one of the hulking warrior forms, turned their fleshborers on them, bringing the first few down, then the purestrains were among them, slashing and tearing at their prey.

‘Structural breach,’ the cogboy said, and for one terrifying moment I thought he meant that the swarm below had changed their minds and decided to come after us instead. But the icons on the hololith were moving out, beyond the subterranean boundaries of the shrine.

‘The burrowers are loose,’ Jurgen remarked, as though commenting on the weather, and a moment or two later I saw something monstrously huge surfacing within the heart of the swarm, knocking uncountable scuttling horrors from their feet. Some fell into its gaping maw, others were mashed to paste beneath its gargantuan coils, then it was gone again, leaving only an eddy of disorientated abominations on the surface to mark its passing.

‘They seem to be targeting the synapse creatures,’ Yail said, and I nodded.

‘Just the same tactics we’d employ,’ I agreed, although the two swarms seemed able to exploit one another’s vulnerabilities with an instinctive speed and precision we could only gasp at. ‘But this can’t go on for long.’

‘It can’t,’ the Adeptus Astartes sergeant agreed. ‘We just have to hope that the loser weakens the victor sufficiently to tip the odds in our favour.’

‘It’ll have to tip ’em a long way to keep this place secure with little more than a mob of cogboys waving sharpened sticks,’ I said, ‘even with you and your men to lead them[171].’

‘And you,’ Yail reminded me.

‘We’re just prolonging the inevitable,’ I said, switching the hololith back to the overall strategic view to emphasise the point. ‘So long as that bioship fragment is here, they’ll just keep on coming.’ The scrimmage in orbit seemed just as desperate and bloody, the hive fleet pressing the Navy hard, although at least it looked as though no more spores were falling. I switched the view again, to the region surrounding us. ‘There are more ’nids inbound all the time.’ I zoomed the image, taking in a cluster of contact icons scuttling towards us as fast as their legs could carry them. ‘This group could have joined the assault on the main hive, but it’s coming here instead.’

‘We need reinforcements,’ Yail said, scanning the datafeed for any unengaged units, and coming up as empty as I had.

‘Or we need to evacuate,’ I added. He looked at me as though I’d suddenly started talking orkish, so I waved an expansive hand, taking in all the tech-priests surrounding us. ‘This place is full of non-combatants, whose ministry is desperately needed to keep the forges running. If nothing else, we have to ensure their safety.’ And mine too, although I didn’t think it politic to mention that.

‘Fecundia is being overrun by tyranids,’ Yail said, still sounding bemused. ‘We are hardly likely to find a safe refuge for them anywhere else.’

‘Anywhere else has got to be safer than the ’nids’ primary target,’ I countered. I gestured towards the tactical display again. ‘The main hives are being successfully defended, at least for the moment.’

At which point, I finally heard a welcome voice in my ear. ‘Ciaphas,’ Zyvan asked, ‘are you still there?’

‘Hanging on,’ I replied. ‘Watching a little tyranid civil war from the windows.’ It was still raging unabated, although sooner or later the superior numbers of the invaders were bound to tell. Not far away a brood of carnifexes was charging ponderously home against the flanks of a transplanted tyrannofex, which staggered and fell, retaliating with a withering barrage of fleshborers which began to devour its attackers instantly. Maddened with the pain of their wounds, the hulking slabs of muscle and bone staggered drunkenly, and charged again at random, crushing a group of their own hormagaunts as they went. ‘Quite a pleasant change to see them ripping into one another.’

‘No doubt,’ the Lord General said, sounding strained, ‘but we’re not so lucky. We’re barely holding on up here, and the leviathans at the heart of the fleet have just come into auspex range. Unless we can come up with something in the next couple of hours, it looks like we’re finished.’

‘So I take it evacuating the civilians will be out of the question?’ I asked, getting precisely the answer I expected.

‘You take it right,’ Zyvan said, sounding appropriately touched by my non-existent concern for the non-combatants; but under the circumstances I could hardly ask about being able to make a run for it myself. In the unlikely event of getting out of this undigested, I had a reputation to maintain, and if a chance did come up to save my own neck, it’d be a lot harder to take if I’d undermined Yail’s trust in me beforehand. ‘The Navy’s got its hands full, and even if we could get a shuttle away, it’d be downed before it hit the atmosphere.’

‘Then we’ll hold on as long as we can,’ I said. Which was all good sinew-stiffening stuff, just the kind of quietly understated declaration of resolve someone like I was supposed to be was supposed to say in situations like this. I glanced at the hololith, seeing the swirl of the internecine battle to the death unfolding like a clash between storm fronts. ‘We’ll upload our tactical data, and keep it coming in real time. If we do go down fighting, the analysts might be able to make something out of it.’

‘Standing by to receive,’ Zyvan said, and cut the link, rather hastily, I thought[172].

‘A good suggestion,’ Yail said. ‘I’ll advise Apothecary Sholer to prepare whatever results his researches yield for transmission too. It would be regrettable if any useful information was lost at the last minute.’

‘It would indeed,’ I said, thinking it would be a damn sight more regrettable if I was. I spoke absently, though, my attention almost entirely on the ebb and flow of the contact icons in the hololith, as my subconscious struggled to bring something about them into focus. I glanced out of the window, where the epic clash of chitin was still illuminated by the flickering glare of the immolating harvester, translating the movements of the icons into those of the actual creatures, and realisation suddenly struck, like one of the secondary explosions going off around the wreck. ‘Look at that!’

‘They’re giving it some, all right,’ Jurgen agreed, completely missing the point, which was nothing new, but Yail was looking puzzled too.

‘All I can see is tyranids killing one another,’ he said, with a faint air of resentment, as though he didn’t see why they should have all the fun.

‘But it’s how they’re doing it,’ I said. I pointed at a particularly egregious example. ‘Look at those termagants.’ A brood of the invaders was firing its fleshborers at an advancing tervigon, the towering creature’s thick armour plating shrugging the incoming hail of deadly beetles off with almost contemptuous ease, although several of the newly-spawned termagants scuttling around its feet fell, while the others returned fire with fleshborers of their own. Abruptly the target brood scattered and ran, taking what cover it could.

‘That’s typical instinctive behaviour,’ Yail reminded me, still none the wiser, and I nodded.

‘But they had one of the big warrior forms with them,’ I said, pointing it out just before the tervigon bit it in half, chewing and swallowing its impromptu snack with every sign of relish. ‘It should have been directing them, overriding the instinctive response.’

‘It should.’ Yail nodded, in sudden understanding. ‘The presence of the node from the bioship must be inhibiting the hive fleet’s ability to pass on instructions.’

‘Jamming it, like we do with enemy vox-channels,’ I agreed. I made for the door, with a fine show of decisiveness. ‘We need to talk to the Apothecary right away.’