The Greater Good

TWENTY-SIX

Sholer’s makeshift analyticum turned out to be pretty much as I’d expected: a large, echoing space the size of a shuttle bay, the cargo pallets usually stacked there either pushed into the corners or pressed into service as improvised tables and workbenches, at which crimson-robed acolytes of the Omnissiah were toiling away diligently, doing Emperor knew what. Cabling ran everywhere, with the typical cogboy’s indifference to either trip hazards or the danger of accidental electrocution, although I suppose the latter would hardly inconvenience anyone with so high a proportion of mechanical to organic components. If anything, it would probably perk them up a bit[173].

The middle of the chamber was dominated by the bioship fragment, a vast chunk of necrotising meat, which towered more than twice my height. In fact it would be no exaggeration to say that it was roughly the size of a Baneblade overall, though less firmly defined. Noisome fluids seeped from it constantly, trickling into a hastily-drilled hole in the floor, from which a steady splashing sound indicated that they were being collected in a vat of some kind[174]. Needless to say, the stench was indescribable. The whole thing was studded with metal spikes driven deep into the mound of flesh, from which a forest of wires ran to banks of instrumentation, the displays of which were being intently studied by Sholer and his gaggle of assistants, a few of whom I recognised from the analyticum downstairs.

‘Commissar,’ he greeted me, with manifest surprise, as I bustled in, Jurgen at my heels. It was, perhaps, a measure of how overpowering the stench was that I had to turn to make sure my aide was still there. ‘I assume your presence means an unexpected development?’

‘It does,’ I assured him. I’d petitioned the machine spirit of my data-slate to keep watch on the tactical information we were uploading to Zyvan’s command centre aboard the flagship, and handed it over hurriedly, with a nod towards the kopje of diseased flesh looming over us as I spoke. ‘We think this thing’s jamming the influence of the hive fleet. I need to know how, and if we can exploit it.’

Sholer glanced at the slate for a moment, assessing the tactical data as rapidly and comprehensively as only an Adeptus Astartes could, then handed it back, with a cursory nod. ‘Intriguing,’ he said, and turned to one of the flickering data displays. ‘The main instances of disruption appear to correspond with neural activity on these frequencies.’ The regular wave patterns dissolved into meaningless static, and Sholer frowned. ‘Equipment malfunction,’ he said. ‘Hardly surprising, given how quickly it was all moved and reassembled.’

‘Jurgen,’ I said, divining the probable cause[175], ‘could you find me a recaff somewhere? And you’d better get something for yourself while you’re about it. It looks like being a long night.’

‘Of course, sir,’ he said, and slouched out. The display steadied.

Sholer gave it a couple of extra whacks to be on the safe side, and turned back to me. ‘This is a very promising line of enquiry.’

‘Which is going to be terminated in pretty short order, if the creatures outside have their way,’ I reminded him. ‘How can we use it now?’

‘We’d need to boost and transmit the signal,’ he told me, clearly intrigued by the possibilities; something I’d have found a good deal more encouraging if he wasn’t still treating it as an abstract problem to be solved for the fun of it, rather than the urgent matter of our survival. ‘Unfortunately, transmitting a psychic signal isn’t quite as simple as sending a vox.’

‘Use a psyker, then,’ I said. ‘You’re not going to tell me an installation as sensitive as this one doesn’t have an astropath on staff?’

The Apothecary nodded.

‘Of course there is,’ he agreed. ‘But I don’t see what good it’ll do. She won’t be able to read a thing from it, let alone act as a relay. The warp shadow’s got us completely cut off.’

‘No harm in asking her, though, is there?’ I demanded, with rather more asperity than I’d intended.

‘None whatever,’ Sholer said.

Though I’ve never been particularly comfortable in the company of astropaths, I was more than happy to see this particular one, who strolled into the analyticum with complete confidence, stepping over the cables lying in wait for the unwary without so much as a flicker of her sightless eyes. Like most of her kind, her age was indeterminate, the skin of her face etched with faint stress lines, although the faint stubble on her shaven head was dark where it shouldered its way through the tattooed icon of the Emperor, no doubt intended to invoke his protection. ‘You must be Cain,’ she said, turning her head in my direction, and adroitly sidestepping a scuttling CAT as she did so.

‘I must,’ I agreed, debating for a moment whether to extend a hand in greeting, before deciding against it. Her preternatural senses would probably make her aware of the gesture, but if they didn’t, I’d look like an idiot. Then she extended hers, to precisely the right position for me to take with the least amount of difficulty. ‘Good of you to come.’

‘It’s not as though I had a lot else to do,’ she said, with a faint smile, as I released her hand after a perfunctory shake. Even through my glove, I thought I could feel a faint tingling sensation, although I suppose that could have been my imagination. Without Jurgen around I felt unusually vulnerable, even though I knew intellectually that she couldn’t read my mind directly. I’d made sure my aide was occupied elsewhere, however, as his presence would have been sure to disrupt proceedings. I’d known psykers have a seizure in his vicinity, and even if our astropath wasn’t simply poleaxed by his aura of psychic nullity, she’d certainly recognise him for what he was, a development Amberley was sure to take the dimmest of views of[176]. ‘Clementine Drey.’

‘We need you to transmit something,’ Sholer explained, and Clementine’s face took on a puzzled expression, deepening the delicate tracery of barely-perceptible lines across her face into full visibility, adding a couple of decades to her apparent age in an instant.

‘I can’t push a message through the shadow,’ she said, as though explaining to a child that space was black.

‘We know,’ I said. ‘We just want you to send it out there regardless.’ If I’d said we wanted her to contact the hive mind, she’d probably go completely to pieces, leaving us no better off than we were now.

‘Transmit blind?’ Clementine asked, apparently unconscious of the irony, and looking no happier. She clearly wasn’t an idiot, and probably had an inkling of what we were after. She turned, looking uncannily as if she was studying the bioship fragment with her sunken eye sockets. ‘You want me to try contacting that?’

‘Could you?’ I asked, trying not to sound too eager, and she shook her head.

‘There’s nothing there. It’s like…’ she paused, groping for an analogy. ‘It’s like a hole in the room. There’s just nothing to sense, like a fragment of the shadow itself.’

Sholer and I looked at one another. I don’t know how he was feeling, but I was close to despair. How could the astropath pass on the signal from the bioship fragment when she couldn’t even perceive it? Then my eye fell on the array of instrumentation, and their scurrying, red-robed attendants.

‘Can you read those instruments?’ I asked, hardly daring to hope.

‘Of course.’ Clementine looked puzzled again, though how she was able to perceive them at all was beyond me. ‘It’s simply data flow. The kind of thing I encode for transmission all the time.’

‘Can you do it in real time?’ I asked, and her expression began to border on the scornful.

‘Easily,’ she said.

‘Right now?’ I asked, thumbing my palm for the answer I wanted to hear.

‘Find me a seat,’ Clementine said, in a resigned tone. She turned her head. ‘And I’d appreciate a little privacy. The process can be unpleasant to witness.’ By which she meant unpleasant to experience, if I was any judge, having had more than a little experience of polite misdirection myself. Sholer went off to chivvy the rest of the cogboys away, while I heaved a couple of the smaller crates around to screen off the main workstation from eyes other than our own.

By the time I’d finished, Clementine had settled in a chair before the lectern, staring through the pict screen as if she could see the individual electrons pinging about in it. For all I knew, perhaps she could.

‘Commissar,’ Jurgen’s voice sounded urgently in my comm-bead. ‘The ’nids are finishing off the last of the ones we thawed out, and most of them are moving on the shrine.’ His words were punctuated by the hissing roar of the melta firing. ‘Some have already broken through in the lower corridors.’

‘It has to be now,’ I said, as Sholer rejoined us. ‘The other group’s on the way up to kill this thing.’ As if to underline my words, the muffled roar of a bolter echoed from somewhere beneath my feet.

‘They’re in the lift shaft,’ Yail’s voice chimed in, unnecessarily, as my innate sense of direction had pinpointed the source of the firing. I pictured the wide, deep void, plunging all the way down to the lower levels, providing the invading tyranids with the most direct route possible to where we were sitting.

‘How long can you hold them for?’ I asked, drawing my weapons.

‘Long enough, I hope,’ Yail replied, before cutting the link, no doubt having a good deal more to concentrate on than idle conversation.

‘Ready,’ Clementine said, looking far from happy, as the sounds of distant firing redoubled. ‘I’ll just keep echoing whatever comes in through the feed, although Throne knows what you expect to pick it up.’ Her mouth moved, in some litany peculiar to her caste, then her body spasmed, as though she was throwing a fit, every muscle locking rigid with startling suddenness. She slipped from the chair, smacking her head on the edge of a nearby crate, and opening an ugly wound, which Sholer moved to staunch. A thin trickle of drool, admixed with blood from her bitten tongue, oozed slowly from the corner of her mouth.

‘I’ll tend her,’ Sholer said, looking up, and catching sight of me with my weapons at the ready, no doubt assuming I was desperate to join the fray, instead of just paranoid about being caught by the first ’nids to make it through the door. Come to think of it, there was only one entrance to the chamber. Once they got inside, my chances of getting out would be minimal, and the huge, putrescent mass of their prime target would be drawing them like kroot to carrion. ‘You may join the defensive line.’

‘If you’re sure,’ I said, careful not to overplay the gallantry to the point where I’d be incontrovertibly stuck here.

‘Completely,’ Sholer said, and drew his bolt pistol, more than ready for the fray. Seizing my opportunity, I sprinted from the room.

The corridor outside was full of panicking cogboys, running around in a fashion uncannily reminiscent of the aftermath of the escape of the genestealers. Confusingly, as many seemed to be running towards the sound of the Reclaimers’ bolter fire as away from it, something I at first attributed to a misplaced desire to get stuck in with the improvised weapons most of them were brandishing. Looking around, I saw everything from hastily adapted tools to simple lengths of piping weighted to create heavier clubs, often supplemented with a spike or two, vicious enough to have gladdened the heart of any ork. A few carried more sophisticated armaments, perhaps scavenged from repair shops or hastily assembled from scratch, with bolt pistols and makeshift grenades fashioned from lubricant cans being popular choices. One fellow had even provided himself with a crossbow, which wouldn’t have looked out of place in the scavvy camps of the sump[177].

Having no desire to meet any tyranids head-on myself, I forced my way through the crush away from the sounds of combat, only to discover my error, for a living nightmare was blocking the corridor ahead of me, screeching in furious frustration as it battered against the ceiling and walls with leathery wings. It seemed I’d been right, and the invading hive mind hadn’t taken long to deploy gargoyles against us. I raised my laspistol, cracking off a couple of shots as it rose above the heads of the cogboys blocking my line of fire, but all that succeeded in doing was drawing its attention to me, which was far from what I had in mind.

Dropping the tech-priest it had been savaging, it swooped towards me, bringing up its fleshborer to vomit a charge of deadly beetles in my direction. Fortunately its aim was disrupted by a cogboy showing rather more initiative than good sense, who flung a weighted line at it, which wrapped around the forelimb wielding the living weapon and jerked it aside at the last possible instant. The rain of frantically chewing mandibles pattered harmlessly against the wall of the corridor, only a few strays and ricochets finding living flesh to burrow into. And, given that it was so liberally laced with metal, much good it probably did them[178].

The gargoyle screeched again, and rounded on my unexpected deliverer, its stinger-tipped tail thrusting towards his or her abdomen[179]. One good turn deserved another, particularly with so many witnesses around, so I lashed out with my chainsword, severing the barb before it could penetrate and bringing up the weapon on the backswing to slash at the hovering terror’s exposed underside. ‘Hold on!’ I called encouragingly, although the tech-priest showed no sign of letting go, hauling grimly on the line like a fisherman with the biggest catch of their entire life. A gout of foul-smelling entrails spattered the floor and my much-abused greatcoat, confirming once and for all that it was past salvaging, and the gargoyle battered at me with its leathery wings, trying and failing to bring the fleshborer to bear once more. Seeing its head turn, I ducked, letting the crown of my cap take the gobbet of venom it suddenly spat with the intention of burning my eyes out, and retaliated with another swipe of the chainsword. This time the screaming blade slashed the wing open from top to bottom, spilling the air, and the creature fell heavily to the floor, fluttering about in the slick of its own innards like a sparrow taking a bath.

‘Finish it!’ the tech-priest urged, the even mechanical voice somehow imbued with bloodlust, and leapt forwards, pinning the fleshborer under a mechanical foot with such weight and energy that the sculpted flesh burst like a ripe fruit. That was all the urging the others needed, and they fell on the downed creature like a pack of sump rats on a corpse, hacking and bludgeoning it to paste with club and blade.

‘They’re almost at the top of the shaft, sir,’ Jurgen reported, the sounds of combat echoing hollowly in the background through the tiny vox-receiver in my ear, and I vacillated for a moment before responding. The gargoyle could have been alone, but I doubted it, and if one had found its way inside from the landing platform, the rest of its brood wouldn’t be far behind. Even if they weren’t, there was nothing on the flight deck capable of taking to the air, and I’d simply choke to death in the miasmal atmosphere[180] if the airborne monstrosities didn’t get me first. On the other hand, perilous as joining the defence of the lift shaft would be, at least I’d have Jurgen’s melta and the surviving Reclaimers to hide behind.

‘I’ll be right there,’ I replied, as though I’d never had a moment’s hesitation, and trotted away in the direction of the shooting.

To my surprise a lot of the red robes surrounding me came along too, their blood and lubricants all fired up, apparently eager to bag another ’nid or two, now they’d had a taste of bloodshed. Which was fine by me – the more the merrier, particularly if they were standing between me and the swarm.

I glanced into Sholer’s sanctum as we swept past, but he was still crouched over Clementine’s spasming body, partially obscured behind the screening crates. Even if he was aware of my presence, he seemed too busy to acknowledge it, so I just kept moving, my comet tail of cogboys streaming out behind.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said, as I joined Yail, a couple of Reclaimers, and Jurgen, all of whom were lined up along the Chimera-sized doorway to the freight elevator[181], which had been cranked open to allow them an unrestricted field of fire. Fortunately the hive mind was only throwing creatures capable of climbing against us, which ruled out anything with ranged weapons, but for every hormagaunt or purestrain ’stealer which went plummeting back into the depths, another dozen kept right on coming. ‘Gargoyle got in the way.’

‘I know,’ Yail said, ‘the Land Speeder’s trying to keep them away from the hangar,’ which at least accounted for the absence of the other Reclaimers[182].

I don’t mind admitting I quailed a little as I looked down the vertiginous drop to the sub-levels so far below. The walls of the shaft were seething with chitin, scuttling upwards with malevolent purpose, their rending and scything claws clacking together in an almost deafening cascade of crepitation. The defenders kept pouring fire into them, which I lost no time in adding to with my laspistol, but for all the effect we were having we might just as well have been lobbing rocks. ‘Can’t we get the platform moving, and scrape them off?’ I asked, taking the back of the head off a particularly persistent genestealer with a lucky shot clean through its gaping jaws.

‘We already did,’ Jurgen informed me, sending a melta blast through the torso of another, the thermal backwash sending a couple of the others tumbling back down the shaft by way of a bonus.

‘So trying again would just bring them up faster,’ Yail added, punctuating his words with a burst from his storm bolter, which sent half a dozen gaunts after them in bite-sized chunks.

‘They seem to be moving fast enough already,’ I said, feeling a bit of heroic understatement would go down well about now.

A faint explosion echoed up the shaft. One of the cogboys had got over-excited and lobbed a home-made grenade down it, no doubt having calculated where in its trajectory it was likely to explode[183], showering the ’nids with bits of broken metal.

‘Not as fast as they were,’ Jurgen observed, as though the matter were only of passing interest.

‘They’re slowing down?’ I asked, a sudden flare of hope rising within me, and my aide nodded.

‘They were sticking to the shadows before, using cover. Now they’re just climbing straight into the line of the guns, so we’re holding ‘em off more easily.’

I tapped the vox-bead in my ear. ‘Sholer,’ I said, trying not to sound too exultant, ‘it seems to be working. Is Clementine still transmitting?’

‘So far as I can tell,’ Sholer said. ‘She’s suffering continual seizures, each more violent than the last. Any one of them could prove fatal.’

‘Then we need to finish this fast,’ I said.

‘I concur.’ Yail’s head inclined a little, that being as close as he could come to a nod encased in the clumsy Terminator suit, and he triggered the remaining rockets in his cyclone rig in a single salvo. A second or so later a firestorm boiled up the shaft, crisping the chitinous horrors clinging to the sides of it even as they were shredded by the hail of shrapnel from the frag charges, and we leapt for our lives as the backwash boiled out through the open door. I hit the metal flooring and rolled, the furnace heat of the overlapping explosions searing my back, and came up, my laspistol pointed at the smoke-blackened portal. Only Yail still stood where he had been, protected from the fury of the blast by the finest armour known to man. After a moment, he spoke. ‘We have prevailed,’ he said simply.

‘We have?’ Strangely unwilling to believe it, I moved slowly to the edge of the abyss, and looked down. Sure enough, the only movement I could see was a few wounded stragglers squirming back into the vents at the bottom of the shaft which had evidently provided them with ingress.

‘Looks like it,’ Jurgen said, sending them on their way with a burst from his lasgun, his unique personal odour already beginning to displace the smell of charred flesh and scorched metal in my nostrils.

‘The gargoyles are also fleeing in disarray,’ Yail informed us, unable to keep a note of satisfaction from his voice.

‘Excellent,’ I said, doing a slightly better job of sounding businesslike; but then I’d had a lot more practice at hiding my feelings. I activated the comm-bead again. ‘You can tell Clementine to stand down.’

‘Unfortunately, I can’t,’ Sholer said, his voice tinged with regret. ‘As I anticipated, her last seizure proved fatal.’





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

Commissar Cain’s flash of inspiration, and Astropath Drey’s heroic sacrifice, were to have a far wider effect than either could possibly have anticipated. The inexorable advance of the hive fleet in orbit faltered as the coordinating intelligence lost control of the individual bioships, which began to react instinctively to their current circumstances instead of in pursuit of a wider strategy. The Imperial vessels, on the other hand, were still able to support one another, a tactical advantage they lost no time in exploiting. Rallying as many ships as he could, Admiral Boume began to directly engage the leviathans, which had been left vulnerable, though far from helpless, by the loss of their escorts, killing one and mauling the others so badly that they were forced to flee.

With their loss, the tyranid organisms on the ground reverted to their instinctive behaviour for the most part, only able to act as one in the presence of the synapse creatures sent to herd them, which, of course, became prime targets for the subsequent hunt. Though rumours persist of a few isolated organisms still lurking in the wastelands and the depths of the hive sumps, no reliable sightings have been recorded for nearly three decades, and Fecundia today is officially classified as cleansed. The Imperial Guard garrison established in the wake of the incident, and the indigenous skitarii, remain on the alert, however, for any signs of a fresh incursion.