The Greater Good

THREE

‘They’re up to something,’ I said, delighted to feel the deckplates of an Imperial vessel underfoot once again. The fact that it was Zyvan’s flagship, and therefore the most heavily armed ship in the flotilla, only added a little zest to my relief at finally making it off Quadravidia in one piece.

‘Of course they are,’ Zyvan agreed. He’d met me personally as I’d stepped off the shuttle in the hangar bay, much to my surprise; but it was pleasant to see him again, and he seemed to feel the same about me, although the purpose of my visit was far from social. ‘They’ve said nothing else since they first spoke to you?’

‘Nothing about their reasons for calling a truce,’ I said, raising my voice a little over the clatter the boots of his personal guard were making as they trotted ahead of us, clearing the corridor like a braid-bedecked dozer blade. Light from the overhead luminators ricocheted from their polished helms and hellguns, held ready for use despite the fact that we were among friends. I doubted that the captain and crew were all that happy about heavily armed Guardsmen waving guns about in their vessel, but protocol demanded it, and I for one was hardly going to complain, given the number of assassination attempts Zyvan had already survived[17]. ‘Just the usual bickering about the details.’ Details which Braddick and his staff had dealt with, leaving me free to seek more congenial diversions. ‘I’m afraid I can’t fill you in on those, I’m a bit behind on the paperwork.’

‘How is your man, by the way?’ Zyvan asked, as we reached the door to his personal quarters. ‘Recovering well, I trust?’

‘I’ll convey your good wishes,’ I told him. Jurgen was probably still sulking about being left behind, but the medicae had recommended light duties for a while, and being jolted around in a shuttle would hardly have helped his convalescence. Besides, I wanted him back in the bunker, so I’d know at once if Braddick did anything rash, like turning his newly-acquired firepower on the tau while their backs were turned. Throne knew, I’d be tempted in his shoes.

‘I heard what you did, going back for him like that. Not many men would,’ Zyvan said, leading the way into his state room while the storm troopers took up position outside to guard the corridor.

‘He’d have done the same for me,’ I said, truthfully enough. Evidently the tau diplomats had been talking to their Imperial counterparts already, and another spurious tale of my gallantry was doing the rounds. I settled into a comfortably padded seat, and accepted the goblet of amasec which Zyvan’s steward had already poured for me with a nod of thanks; it never hurt to get on well with the servants, particularly in my covert avocation as Amberley’s eyes and ears. I’d gleaned quite a few nuggets of information that way over the years, to my own benefit as well as hers.

‘No doubt,’ Zyvan said dryly, taking my modesty for granted, and firmly cementing the story in his mind as he did so. He accepted his own drink, and the steward bustled out, closing the door with a satisfyingly resonant thud. No chance of anything we said being overheard now. ‘I’d like you to sit in on the initial meeting.’

‘I could do that,’ I agreed, readily enough. The Commissariat would expect a report anyway, and if I didn’t agree to be their observer, one of the other commissars attached to the task force would be handed the job. I hadn’t met many, but most of the ones I’d conversed with would cheerfully urge a full-scale invasion of Quadravidia if the tau didn’t pack up and leave, a course of action which was bound to end badly. Besides, I’d had dealings with the tau and their vassals before, and couldn’t quite shake the feeling that something wasn’t right about all this; when the other boot dropped, I wanted to be there to hear it.

‘That would be most helpful,’ another voice put in, and I turned, to find a face I recognised; narrow, serious, and sporting a faint scar inflicted on a night I’d rather have forgotten.

‘Donali.’ I rose to shake hands, both surprised and pleased to see the senior diplomat I’d first met on Gravalax, the same night as Amberley, some sixty years before. ‘You’re heading the delegation?’

‘So it seems.’ He smoothed a non-existent crease from the front of his immaculate robe, regarding me with the air of calm deliberation I recalled so clearly. ‘You look well. Surprisingly so, for a man in your profession.’

‘I’ve been lucky,’ I said, with rather more sincerity than I’m used to. ‘And I could say the same about you.’ His hair was a lot greyer around the temples than I remembered, but then so was mine; hardly surprising, given the number of times something had tried to kill me since the last time we’d spoken.

‘I’d say we’ve all been lucky,’ Donali said. ‘If you hadn’t been on Quadravidia, the tau might well have decided against opening negotiations.’

‘Me?’ I said, in honest astonishment. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t see what I’ve got to do with it.’

Donali settled into a seat between Zyvan and myself, and reached for the decanter the servant had left on the polished obsidian table, laid siege to by the chairs. ‘The tau still remember your part in resolving the Gravalax incident,’ he said.

‘Do they?’ I asked, an uncomfortable chill overtaking me. The stand-off there had ended in humiliation for the xenos, and if they were still carrying a grudge about it, I’d have to start looking over my shoulder.

‘Indeed. They speak very highly of your integrity, and your commitment to the Greater Good of the Imperium.’ Donali sipped at his drink, at just the right moment to mask any facial expression accompanying the words.

‘So they had every confidence that you would relay their message, and get someone in authority to listen to it,’ Zyvan added.

‘Couldn’t they just have voxed?’ I asked, ‘instead of chasing me across half the city?’

‘At that point they had no idea it was you,’ Donali said. ‘Fortunately their vox intercepts had made them aware of your presence somewhere among the Imperial forces, and the on-board cogitator of the battlesuit you encountered had instructions to look for an officer who matched the facial features of an old pict from Gravalax.’

‘I see,’ I said, recalling the targeter beam sweeping across my face, and trying not to think about how close we’d come to the xenos machine spirit having nothing recognisable left to read. ‘But voxing would still have been easier.’

‘I’m not sure General Braddick would have listened,’ Zyvan said dryly, and I had to concede the point. By the time I’d got back to the bunker, Braddick had concluded that the sudden cessation of the tau bombardment was the prelude to an all-out assault, and it had taken a fair amount of persuasion, not to mention shameless trading on my inflated reputation, to argue him out of sallying forth in a glorious do-or-die, pre-emptive counter-attack; which would have had precious little of the ‘do’ about it, given the forces ranged against him.

‘So where are we supposed to be meeting them?’ I asked. ‘Peakhaven, or somewhere in the occupied zone?’ Given the choice I’d have opted for the latter, as the tau held most of the temperate areas and I’d got heartily sick of the bracing mountain air in the capital by now. Besides, it never hurts to get a good look at your enemy’s resources while they’re not shooting at you. I had fewer qualms about venturing into the stronghold of the foe than I normally would, as, by and large, the tau can be trusted to observe the terms of a truce; they’re devious little buggers right enough, but hoisting a white flag to lure you into a crossfire doesn’t sit well with them[18].

‘Neither,’ Donali said, to my surprise. ‘The Lord General has expressed some disquiet about the opportunities for intelligence gathering afforded by a tau presence within the Imperial zone, and my opposite number from the water caste[19] has similar concerns.’ Which, as I’d been considering precisely that myself, I could hardly quibble with.

‘Where, then?’ Zyvan asked, leaning forward to pour himself a refill.

‘One of the abandoned orbital docks,’ Donali said. ‘We can secure it easily enough, and it’s not as though it’s needed for cargo handling at the moment[20].’

‘Works for me,’ I said, assessing the pros and cons, and settling instantly on the major advantage from my point of view. If the whole thing went ploin-shaped and the war kicked off again, I’d be sitting comfortably above it for once.

‘Me too,’ Zyvan said. ‘I’ll ask the Navy to station a warship alongside then we can blow the whole thing to scrap at the first sign of treachery.’ An idea I liked the sound of a lot less, but Donali was already nodding in agreement.

‘The tau have already indicated that they’re taking a similar precaution.’

Both men looked at me, and I plastered a wry grin on my face, wondering if perhaps I should find some pressing reason to palm the job off on one of my commissarial colleagues after all but even before the thought had time to form fully, I dismissed it. Zyvan and the tau both wanted me there, and if I pulled out, chances were the xenos would pick up their ball and go home, we’d all start shooting at each other again, and I’d get the blame for snatching defeat from the jaws of compromise. ‘That should keep everyone honest,’ I said instead, resolving to make sure I knew where the saviour pods were before anyone had a chance to open their mouths.

In the event I didn’t need to make sure of an escape route, as everyone was on their best behaviour; although that didn’t stop me from doing so anyway. By this stage in my career, finding the quickest way out of any new place I found myself in had become second nature, which rather accounted for the fact that I was still around to be paranoid.

Both warships assigned to what was euphemistically referred to as ‘diplomatic protection duty’ were stationed several kilometres from the orbital, due to the high concentration of debris still clustered around it. The cloud of detritus was so dense, in fact, that nothing much larger than an Aquila could approach the void station without being pounded to pieces; accordingly, as we approached the huge, and somewhat battered structure, our transport bobbed and weaved like an inebriate, as the pilot was forced to make constant course corrections to avoid a collision.

‘That’ll take some clearing up,’ Jurgen commented, peering through what seemed to me under the circumstances to be a pitifully thin sheet of armourglass at the spiralling chunks of jagged metal beyond. Many were rimed with frost, where some residual atmosphere had frozen around them, and I tried not to think too hard about the explosive decompression that had undoubtedly accompanied its deposition. Finding myself morbidly wondering how many of the motes of flotsam catching the light of the sun rising from beyond the edge of the world below were the cadavers of those too slow to have reached the closing bulkhead doors, I nodded, hoping a little conversation would distract me[21].

‘I imagine it will,’ I agreed. I’d been in two minds about bringing him, but was grateful by now that I had. His recovery was almost complete, and if the niggling little voice in the back of my head was right and the tau were up to something underhand, there was no one I’d rather have watching my back. Besides, he’d been grumpy enough about being left behind for my little chat with Zyvan and Donali; another perceived slight would have prolonged the sulk for weeks. ‘But at least it’ll make it hard for anything to sneak up on us.’

‘Anything big,’ Jurgen replied, after a moment’s reflection. ‘But it’d make it really easy to slip one of those drone things through without anyone noticing. Auspex’ll be well clogged.’

‘Quite so,’ I said, not best pleased to have been handed something else to fret about. Offhand, I couldn’t see any reason the tau would bother to do something like that, of course, but then I suppose that would have been the point. ‘Can you see the void station yet?’

Jurgen shook his head. ‘I thought it was on your side.’

‘Your side was my side a minute ago,’ I reminded him, just as the pilot tucked us into another roll, this time around a larger than usual piece of junk, which looked as though it had once been a pressure vessel from a fabricatory, or possibly a storage tank for liquids of some kind. Either way, it was longer than our Aquila, and eclipsed the sun for a moment. When the light returned it was from a new and unexpected angle, dazzling me. As I blinked my eyes clear, the orbital finally came into view.

I’d seen plenty of similar structures over the years, of course, although since our crippled starship had glanced off the anchorage above Nusquam Fundumentibus in its headlong plunge to the surface, the sight of one always brought with it a momentary surge of unease. I waited for the unwelcome sensation to pass off as it usually did, but the sense of disquiet refused to leave me, and after a while I realised it wasn’t going to. Not until I had a much better idea of what was going on, anyway.

‘It’s a bit of a mess,’ Jurgen said, unconscious as always of the irony; but on this occasion I had to concede that he had a point. The tau had attempted to board the orbital during the first wave of their initial attack, hoping to deny the SDF the chance to resupply and refit there[22], but had underestimated the defenders’ resolve: vastly outgunned, and faced with certain annihilation, the captain of the last surviving gunboat rammed the primary docking arm, reducing both it and his vessel to high-velocity shrapnel and taking a respectable tally of tau Mantas with him[23]. The resulting mess had forced both sides to abandon the structure, although I gathered that the tau had been making diligent efforts to repair it prior to their unexpected offer of a ceasefire.

As our shuttle drifted closer, the full magnitude of the damage the void station had suffered became progressively clearer. What had appeared from a distance to be nothing more than minor blemishes on the hull gradually grew, revealing themselves to be vast chasms torn or burned through the sheathing metal, or blown out by internal detonations. Through these jagged rents the equally ragged edges of interior decks could be seen, the damage going deeper than our running lights would penetrate.

Uncountable firefly sparks moving in and around these stricken areas puzzled me for a moment, until, as we approached the small lighted region on one edge of the city-sized structure where warmth and air awaited us, one drifted close enough for me to recognise it. It was a smooth-sided drone, of the kind I’d become all too familiar with on the battlefield, although this particular specimen was equipped with a welding torch instead of armament; it floated past the viewport, followed a moment later by a couple more, carrying girders and flat sheets of construction material in articulated manipulator arms.

‘That must be where we’re going,’ I concluded a few moments later, spotting a bay door cranking open to admit our approaching Aquila. The habitable zone stood out clearly now, enough to discern a few details even from this distance: the warm, golden lights blazing from viewports and docking bays standing in stark and poignant contrast to the dark, dead bulk of the station to which it clung. Welcoming as it looked, I still felt a shiver of apprehension. Smooth, curving, tau-constructed surfaces clung to the solid Imperial structure beneath like fungus to a decaying tree trunk, where the xenos had repaired and replaced the original architecture, tainting it with their inhuman presence. Clearly they’d intended to stay, claiming the entire orbital for their own, before whatever it was they were concerned about had prompted them to sue for peace on the very threshold of victory.

There was little time for such dispiriting reflection, however, as before long we were on our final approach, the great portal looming up to swallow our tiny shuttle. The hangar beyond was absurdly large for so modest a vessel, it having been intended for heavy lift shuttles capable of lugging a Titan around[24], and able to accommodate several at once to boot, so the Aquila seemed dwarfed by the cavernous space surrounding us. A few moments later the hull reverberated to the clang of our landing gear making contact with the deck, and the whine of our engines died away.

So great a volume took several minutes to pressurise, and I spent the time gazing at our surroundings as best I could though the haze of frost which formed instantly across the viewport as the thickening atmosphere met a hull chilled to near absolute zero by the vacuum of space. The tau renovations didn’t seem to have spread as far as the interior of this particular hangar, and I took heart from the familiar sturdy girderwork surrounding us, the oppressive sense of wrongness I’d felt at all those smooth curves clinging to the surface of the station receding a little. There was even an Imperial aquila dominating the far wall, its spreading wings poised to enfold the vast chamber in the protection of the Emperor.

About a dozen other shuttles stood in serried ranks nearby, the Imperial ones close to our own, while the unmistakable rounded hulls of their tau counterparts were stationed on the opposite side, ironically appearing to receive the benediction of the Imperial icon behind them. Through the gradually melting rime obscuring the viewport I could see movement, which at first I ascribed to vacuum-hardened servitors tending the air pumps, or perhaps simply wandering vaguely in search of the cargoes they used to lug about. But as the temperature rose and the armourglass cleared, their true nature became apparent. Void-suited Guardsmen, their heraldry and the hellguns they carried marking them out as members of Zyvan’s retinue.

‘The Lord General must be here already,’ I remarked, confirming my guess almost at once as I caught sight of his personal shuttle, half-hidden behind an adjacent Arvus, and Jurgen nodded.

‘And he don’t trust the xenos any more than we do,’ he added, with every sign of approval.

‘I think that’s mutual,’ I said, catching a glimpse of similar movement among the xenos shuttles across the wide expanse of clear decking between us. ‘They’ve posted guards too.’ The armoured figures seemed unusually squat for tau, and a moment of further observation revealed the reason. ‘Demiurg, by the look of them.’ Which finally confirmed the long-standing rumour of a contingent of the blocky xenos accompanying the tau fleet.

‘Doesn’t matter who they are,’ Jurgen said, reducing the political complexities to their most basic as readily as he usually did. ‘If they get in the way they’re kroot fodder.’

‘Quite so,’ I said, hoping it would turn out to be that easy. Then the hiss of the pressure seal breaking informed me that the atmosphere was now dense enough to breathe, and that it was time to disembark. I adjusted the angle of my cap to one I hoped my reception party would consider appropriately heroic, and began to descend the ramp.