The Greater Good

FOUR

Outside the confines of the shuttle, the hangar seemed bigger than ever, a bleak metal plain stretching into the distance for roughly a kilometre[25], unrelieved by anything other than the occasional protruding fuel line or deactivated loader. The residual chill, which had seeped in along with the vacuum accompanying our arrival, hardly made the place seem any more welcoming, although Jurgen seemed happy enough with being able to see every breath we exhaled.

After exchanging salutes and a few words with the Guardsmen we’d observed through the Aquila’s viewport, my aide and I began to trudge towards the hatchway they’d indicated, leaving them and their opposite numbers to glower at one another across the echoing void.

Even though I knew there was little risk of active hostilities breaking out before we reached it, the veteran storm troopers assigned to Zyvan’s personal guard being far too disciplined to start anything, I must confess to feeling a distinct sense of relief as we approached the airlock set into the wall ahead of us[26]. The demiurg could be touchy, especially if the tau weren’t around to keep an eye on them, and standing around in the open made me feel dangerously exposed even at the best of times.

The temperature rose to more comfortable levels almost as soon as the hangarside door thudded closed behind us, which improved my mood no end, although my renewed equanimity lasted no longer than the time it took for the further door to open. Instead of the solid metal bulkheads I’d been expecting, the walls of the corridor beyond were of smooth, blue-white polymer, reflecting the pale refulgence of tau luminators. Clearly this part of the station was firmly in enemy hands.

‘Commissar Cain?’ A young woman in a pale-grey kirtle was waiting for me, an elaborately braided scalplock reaching halfway down her back. If anything, her appearance was even more disconcerting than the decor. ‘The other delegates are waiting for you in the conference suite.’ Her Gothic was flawless, though marred by the peculiar lisp with which the tau inflected it.

‘Then I must apologise for my tardiness,’ I replied, masking my discomfiture with the greatest of ease. If nothing else, I’ve had plenty of practice of doing that over the years. In truth, though, I was profoundly shaken. I’d known intellectually, of course, that the tau had annexed a number of human worlds in the last couple of centuries, and that their inhabitants had embraced the insidious creed of the so-called Greater Good, but I’d never thought to meet one of the heretics in the flesh, unless it was at the business end of a chainsword.

‘No apology is required,’ the woman said, with a courteous inclination of her head. She was damn good at her job, I had to give her that. She hadn’t even blinked at her first sight of Jurgen[27]. ‘Please follow me.’

‘With pleasure,’ I assured her, with rather more gallantry than accuracy, as I fell into step at her elbow. Were the tau hoping to put us at our ease by her presence, or was it supposed to rattle us, leaving us more inclined to make an error? Either way, I was damned if I’d give them the satisfaction of reacting in any way other than the appearance of perfect calm. ‘May I present my aide, Gunner Jurgen?’

‘Of course.’ She nodded at him, as though I’d just introduced an item of furniture. ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance.’

‘And you are?’ I asked, convinced now that she was as practised a dissembler as I was.

‘Au’lys Devrae, Facilitator of External Relations.’

‘Tau personal name, Imperial family one,’ I said. ‘Interesting combination.’

‘Quite common where I come from,’ she assured me, with a smile most men would have taken for genuine. ‘A blend of both, to remind us of the Greater Good.’

‘And where would that be?’ I asked, trying not to sound as though I meant to earmark it for virus bombing. Clearly her home world was well past due for liberating, although whether a population where heresy had taken such firm root could ever be guided back to the light of the Emperor seemed a moot point to me.

‘Ka’ley’ath,’ she said, before apprehending the name meant nothing to me. ‘Our ancestors called it Downholm[28],’ she added helpfully.

‘Still doesn’t ring any bells,’ I admitted. While we’d been talking, we’d progressed deep into the heart of the station, finding the same patchwork of tau and Imperial systems wherever we went, which I suppose applied to Au’lys too.

‘It’s a big empire,’ she said, failing to take offence, and provoking the first genuine smile from me; but I suppose most of its denizens must have been ignorant of just how small and insignificant the tau holdings were compared to the scale of the Imperium, or they would never have dared to challenge us in the first place[29]. ‘Just through here.’ She gestured to a doorway, no different to my eyes than any of the others we’d passed, apart from some inscription in the blocky, rounded sigils of the tau alphabet.

‘You’re not joining us for the briefing?’ I asked, and the woman shook her head.

‘I’m no warrior,’ she told me, with a hint of amusement. ‘I happened to be on my way up here, so I offered to escort you.’

‘For the Greater Good,’ I said dryly, but she only nodded, either missing the sarcasm or choosing to ignore it.

‘In a small way,’ she agreed. ‘But I was also curious to meet some of our kindred from beyond the empire. There are stories, of course, but you never really know how true they are.’

‘Then I hope we lived up to your expectations,’ I said, doing my best to hide my amusement.

‘You certainly did,’ she assured me, although for some reason she seemed to be looking at Jurgen as she spoke, then she ambled away down the corridor without so much as a backward glance.

‘Heretic,’ Jurgen muttered, the minute she was out of earshot, fingering the butt of his lasgun as though tempted to use it.

‘Quite,’ I agreed, envying him his uncomplicated response to things. The encounter had disconcerted me more than a little, and I still couldn’t shake the conviction that that had been precisely the point. I took a deep breath, adjusting my face, and approached the door Au’lys had indicated. ‘Come on. Let’s find out what all this is about.’

Au’lys had called the room a conference suite, but it was like none I’d ever been in before. There were aspects of it I recognised, of course, like the softly glowing hololith display suspended in the air, but the image inside it was crystal sharp, instead of wavering like the ones I was used to, and the edges formed a perfect sphere, instead of hazing away in a diffuse blob. It took me a moment to pick out the projection unit from among the other mechanica ranged about the room, as there was no sign of the tangle of power cables and optical links I would have expected, nor of any tech-priests ministering to it. The hololiths I was used to needed constant adjustment, anointing, and the occasional devotional kick to remain focused. It also didn’t help that everything looked the same: flat, glossy surfaces mounted at an angle in rounded lecterns, with glowing runes appearing and disappearing on them pretty much at random.

The biggest surprise was the absence of a table, which would have formed the focal point of any Imperial conference chamber. Instead, it seemed, we were expected to perch on round, padded seats, which were scattered around the carpet like fungus erupting from a lawn. About a dozen of these were occupied, by roughly equal numbers of humans and tau, with about half as many again left vacant. All the humans I could see, sitting or standing around the periphery, wore Imperial garb, so I assumed any other turncoats among the xenos contingent were being kept tactfully out of sight.

Leaving Jurgen to join Zyvan’s bodyguard, and investigate the refreshment table on my behalf, I claimed a seat between Donali and the Lord General, who smiled at my attempt to perch on the blasted thing without slithering off.

‘They’re comfortable enough, once you get used to them,’ Zyvan assured me, before wobbling a bit himself, and glancing sardonically at Donali. ‘So I’m told.’

The diplomat, of course, looked perfectly at ease, but since he’d spent half his life liaising with the tau, he’d had plenty of time to get used to their peculiar taste in furnishings. He inclined his head in greeting. ‘Commissar. We were beginning to think you’d got lost.’

‘I had an excellent guide,’ I assured him. ‘Au’lys Devrae. I take it you’ve met?’

‘Our paths have crossed,’ Donali said blandly.

‘And you never thought to mention there were human traitors among the invasion fleet?’ I asked, perhaps a little more bluntly than was polite. This was evidently news to Zyvan, as his eyebrows rose quizzically, and he gazed at the diplomat in a fashion most men would have found intimidating to say the least.

‘She isn’t attached to the fleet,’ Donali explained. ‘I gather there are humans under arms among the empire’s forces, just as there are vespid, kroot, and others, but they wouldn’t be deployed against the Imperium[30]. They fear the resulting bad feeling would impede efforts to find a diplomatic solution here.’

‘To say the least,’ I agreed. The abhorrence most Guardsmen felt for traitors and heretics would make it almost impossible to rein them in.

‘But there are humans here?’ Zyvan persisted.

Donali nodded. ‘They call themselves Facilitators. Not an exact translation of the tau phrase ku’ten vos’kla[31], but close enough. They move in after a world’s been annexed, helping what’s left of the local authorities to rebuild the infrastructure, and nudging everything towards promoting the idea of the Greater Good.’

‘So if Devrae’s already here, the tau must have thought Quadravidia was in the bag,’ I concluded.

‘Wrapped up, and ready to hand to the ethereals,’ Donali confirmed.

‘Which rather begs the question of why they changed their minds,’ Zyvan said.

‘Looks like we’re about to find out,’ I said, as a flurry of activity near the door caught my attention. A tau in an ornately decorated robe, its intricate intertwinings of multicoloured thread no doubt an indication of his status for those able to decode them, was just entering the room, surrounded by a retinue of lackeys thick enough to obscure most of him from view. Many of them clutched thin, flat devices I assumed to be data-slates, and all glanced in our direction with varying degrees of curiosity, apprehension, and disdain. None of them had anything which looked like a weapon, but I knew better than to take that at face value. ‘Our host has arrived.’

Donali nodded. ‘Someone senior from the water caste. Not sure who, but a fast courier boat arrived in-system last night. I’m told they’ve brought the latest information with them.’

‘But not, I presume, what that information is,’ Zyvan said sourly.

Donali shook his head. ‘The water caste like to keep the cards in their hands hidden for as long as they can,’ he said.

I turned, leaning as far as I dared on my precarious seat, trying to get a better view of the half-hidden diplomat, but just as his face was about to emerge from the scrum the familiar figure and odour of Jurgen loomed up in front of me, blotting out what little I could see of the approaching delegation. ‘They’ve got tanna[32], sir,’ he said, in pleased surprise, handing me a delicately worked tea bowl brimming with the fragrant infusion. For want of anything better to do, I took it and sipped, savouring the delicate flavour[33] of the drink.

‘I remembered your fondness for that particular beverage,’ a tau voice told me, and I rose to my feet, extending a hand in greeting. If I’m honest, I hadn’t recognised the sound of it, all tau vocal cords mangling Gothic in pretty much the same way to my ears, but I never forget a face that’s nearly got me killed.

‘El’hassai,’ I said, the sixty years since I’d last seen the tau diplomat falling away like so many days the moment I got a clear sight of him. No doubt one of his own kind would have detected signs of aging, Throne knows I’d acquired more than my own share, but he looked pretty much the same to me. ‘I’m pleased to see you so well.’

‘And I you,’ El’hassai responded politely, shaking the proffered hand just gingerly enough to let me know he hadn’t forgotten the augmetic fingers lurking beneath my glove, before turning to Donali. ‘Erasmus. It’s been far too long a time.’

‘It has indeed,’ Donali said levelly, although I’d wager he was as surprised as I was to be greeted by our old sparring partner from Gravalax.

‘Lord General,’ El’hassai went on, not missing a beat. ‘A great pleasure to meet you at last.’

‘No doubt.’ Zyvan inclined his head courteously, his impatience manifest. ‘I look forward to hearing what you have to say.’ Like me, he’d spent many years cultivating a bluff, no-nonsense public face, which robbed his bluntness of any implied offence; or at least it would have to any Imperial citizen familiar with his reputation. No point in leaving anything to chance, so I stuck my oar in too, diverting the tau’s attention as quickly as possible, in case that aspect of the Lord General’s personality had somehow been omitted from the briefing slate[34].

‘I must confess, I’m curious too,’ I said, sipping the tanna again, with a fine show of appreciation for our host’s thoughtfulness. ‘Especially since you roped me in as your messenger boy.’

‘Hardly that,’ El’hassai assured me, although I wasn’t fluent enough in tau body language to tell if I was being patronised or not. From what I remembered of him, his good opinion of me was genuine enough (I’d saved his life, so it damn well ought to have been), though, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. ‘But your presence was a fortuitous coincidence we were happy to take advantage of.’

‘Any time,’ I assured him blandly, adding ‘but I still think they could just have picked up the bloody vox,’ sotto voce to Zyvan and Donali as the tau diplomat wandered away towards the hololith. Neither had time to reply, although Donali made an interesting choking noise in the depths of his goblet.

‘Thank you for your attendance,’ El’hassai said, turning to face the room, his voice cutting easily across it. The murmur of conversation died away to an expectant silence, broken only by the faint humming of the recirculators, and the rather less faint sound of Jurgen’s jaws making short shrift of the finger food on the side table. ‘No doubt our offer of a truce has been cause of a fair amount of speculation,’ at which point he glanced in the direction of the Imperial contingent in a manner which, in a human, I could only describe as arch, ‘but I’m sure you’ll agree our reasons for it are sound.’

‘I might, if you ever got round to telling us what they were,’ Zyvan muttered. Then his expression changed, as an image appeared in the hololith. ‘Emperor almighty!’

‘And all His saints,’ I added, feelingly. The image was crystal clear, almost as though the horror it depicted was present in the room with us, although if it had been the chamber would have needed to be bigger than the entire orbital. Leprous hide thicker than the armour of a battleship, pocked with ineffectual weapons fire, loomed up at us out of the depths of space, spinning below our vantage point like a biological moon. Beyond the horizon of chitin, other, massive creatures of the same monstrous ilk swam through the void, surrounded by clouds of lesser organisms too numerous to count.

‘A tyranid fleet,’ Zyvan said, raising his voice to address the room, although the sudden eruption of gasps, murmurs, and muttered prayers to the Emperor among the Imperial delegation made it abundantly clear that we’d all recognised it for what it was. He indicated the larger bioships. ‘Kraken and escorts.’

‘Mostly,’ El’hassai said, in remarkably even tones. ‘The large one in the foreground would appear to be a leviathan, although the image we have of it is only partial.’

I stared at it, trying to take in the full scale of the horror before me, like a mountain made flesh. Or, given its environment, an asteroid might be a more apposite comparison. My mind flashed back to the burning, dying thing I’d glimpsed in the midst of the eruption on Nusquam Fundumentibus, where we’d been forced to sacrifice an entire city to kill a crippled cousin of this monstrous thing; that had seemed huge enough, and I’d seen only a fraction of its mass.

‘Where did this come from?’ I asked, realising as soon as I’d spoken just how many ways so imprecise a question could be misinterpreted, but El’hassai seemed to grasp my meaning well enough.

‘This is the last transmission from an exploration vessel, lost in the Coreward Marches[35] a little less than two cyr ago.’

‘About eighteen months,’ Donali murmured, for the benefit of those of us unfamiliar with the tau calendar. ‘Twenty at the most.’

‘And you’ve only just got it?’ I asked, trying not to sound too sceptical.

El’hassai nodded, a gesture he seemed to have picked up from his prolonged contact with humans[36]; I remembered him doing the same thing on Gravalax. ‘The vessel launched a courier drone[37] shortly before it was destroyed,’ he said. ‘The images you’re seeing now were uploaded to it in real time.’

I watched with horrified fascination as innumerable tiny pustules swelled up on the body of the bloated horror beneath us, then burst, spewing clouds of spinning organisms into the void. Thousands upon thousands of them, their hardened carapaces protecting them from the cold and vacuum of space, fangs and talons and bioweapons poised for massacre. I’d faced innumerable horrors spawned from the tyranid hive fleets myself, but never anything so hideous as these: half warrior, half boarding pod, all implacable killing machine. Some were carrying creatures I recognised – genestealers, termagants and raveners for the most part, encysted behind semi-transparent membranes – while others seemed to be more than sufficiently lethal on their own accounts.

‘Why don’t they just fire the main engines?’ I asked; if I’d been the tau captain I’d be halfway to the Ghoul Stars by now.

‘According to the telemetry recovered, the engines were at full power by this point,’ El’hassai said soberly. ‘We conjecture that the vessel had been immobilised in some fashion; the stresses on the hull would be consistent with constricting tentacles or gripping claws.’

Zyvan nodded. ‘Seen that a few times,’ he agreed. ‘They ram a ship, latch on, and send in the killers.’

The onrushing swarm was filling the hololith by now, each detail more ghastly than the last, and I must confess to a feeling of relief as the image finally disappeared in a burst of static.

‘At this point,’ El’hassai said evenly, ‘we believe the main reactor overloaded, although there is no way to tell if this was deliberate, or how much damage the explosion inflicted on the leviathan. We may hope that it was sufficient to kill or cripple the hive ship, but in any event, many of the swarm will have survived.’

‘And become aware of the presence of prey,’ Zyvan said.

‘Precisely,’ El’hassai agreed. He did something to the projection controls and a fresh image appeared, a star map studded with familiar constellations. Little icons popped up, marking Imperial, tau, and unclaimed worlds; although it went without saying that their idea of these categories didn’t entirely coincide with ours. This was hardly the time to reopen old quarrels, though, so I refrained from saying anything, although I was pretty sure I could hear Zyvan’s teeth grinding. ‘The message drone was recovered here,’ a fresh icon appeared well within the boarders of the Tau Empire, ‘last kai’rotaa–’

‘About two months back,’ Donali murmured quietly.

El’hassai continued speaking, as if unaware of the comment. ‘–and our preliminary analysis of its data places the encounter with the tyranid fleet somewhere around here,’ he concluded.

Another icon appeared, and Zyvan shook his head in perplexity. ‘That can’t be right,’ he said. ‘The main tyranid incursions are coming in from the Rim[38].’

‘They have done until now,’ I said, my eye falling on the marker pinpointing Nusquam Fundumentibus. The dormant brood we’d discovered there had to have come from somewhere, and the fleet the tau had blundered into certainly seemed close enough to have sent out a scouting party several millennia ago. ‘But it wouldn’t be the first time an isolated splinter fleet popped up without warning.’

‘Our experience also,’ El’hassai agreed. ‘In view of the evident risk, we sent scout vessels to backtrack the message drone, and found that the tyranids have indeed altered their course.’ A line began to extend from the point where the luckless explorator crew had first encountered the hive fleet, towards the position of the drone’s recovery.

‘They followed it,’ I said heavily, the coin dropping. Which was hardly surprising; the tau had done pretty much everything they could to attract the ’nids short of handing them a menu and a map.

‘They did,’ El’hassai confirmed. Another icon flared. ‘The scout fleet encountered them here, and engaged a few of the outlying bioships before being forced to withdraw. If they continue to advance at the rate they have been, they’ll be into the border region in a matter of weeks[39].’ The line extended itself, cutting back and forth across the wavering one between the two powers.

‘That puts over a dozen inhabited worlds at risk,’ Zyvan said, in the tone of a man determined to get all the bad news out of the way in one go. ‘If the fleet absorbs that much biomass, it’ll become unstoppable.’

‘Which is why we propose putting aside our present dispute,’ El’hassai said, nodding gravely. ‘The Greater Good demands it.’

Zyvan was nodding too, still trying to absorb the implications. ‘I believe it does,’ he agreed.