The Greater Good

SEVEN

The first thing to strike me as we strode down the ramp was the smell, a thick, sulphurous humidity which slapped me in the face like a flannel soaked in tepid swamp water. The heat boiled up around us through the stinking air, rising from the manufactoria below in urgent, foetid thermal gusts, as though the forges themselves were constantly breaking wind. Even forewarned as I was, I coughed, almost gagging, envying the tau warriors their respirators in earnest now.

‘Smells a bit,’ Jurgen observed, oblivious to the irony as ever, while I fell into place beside Zyvan and the small knot of aides who had accompanied him. Not trusting myself to reply, and breathing as shallowly as I could, I merely nodded.

The landing platform was smaller than I’d realised, barely large enough to hold the shuttle, and my already good opinion of our pilot was raised another notch. The craft’s nose was only a handful of metres from the wall, close to where the inviting illuminated rectangle of the doorway gaped open, while the starboard landing skid was even closer to the vertiginous three-kilometre drop into the heart of the furnaces. With a shudder, I realised the outer edge was without a balustrade or even a handrail to check a careless misstep, and resolved to keep the bulk of the utility craft between me and oblivion. Clearly, the tech-priests who worked here regarded a sense of self-preservation as superfluous to requirements.

‘Nicely done,’ Zyvan congratulated our pilot over his vox-bead, and turned to me. ‘He put us down where we can use the shuttle as a windbreak.’

‘For which we should all thank the Throne,’ I agreed, feeling my greatcoat flapping like a pennon in the gale-force gusts passing the hull. Without it, I’d have been hard-pressed to remain on my feet. An alarming vision of being picked up and flung into the void by the turbulent air flashed through my mind, and I suppressed it firmly.

‘Welcome,’ the officer in charge of the skitarii detachment said in the flat drone of a vox-coder, making the cogwheel gesture generally favoured by followers of the Machine God as he did so. ‘Centurion Kyper, Primus Pilem, Cohort Fecundia.’ Like most of the skitarii I’d come across in the course of my erratic progress around the galaxy, he looked more like a heavily-augmented ogryn than anything human, his musculature bulging with chemical enhancement and interlaced with bionics.

‘At ease,’ Zyvan said, not bothering to introduce himself; if Kyper didn’t realise at once who he was, he had no business being there. He gestured in my direction. ‘Commissar Cain is accompanying me, along with the tau envoy, and his escort.’

‘Tau envoy?’ Kyper echoed, sounding as surprised as his even mechanical buzz allowed. I could see little of his face inside the hood protecting it from the elements, and most of what I could was too metallic to allow any expression to register, but I didn’t need to look him in the eye to realise he was rattled. He began chirruping rapidly in binaric to his two companions, both of whom were dwarfed by the hulking combat servitor at the end of the receiving line. ‘We were not informed of this.’

‘It was a last-minute decision,’ I said, my voice rasping through the thin coating of ash, and no doubt other less savoury substances, obstructing my larynx.

‘He must remain on the shuttle,’ Kyper said firmly.

‘That’s not your decision to make,’ Zyvan snapped, in the tone of a man to whom putting obstructive underlings in their place had long ago become second nature.

‘Is there some difficulty?’ El’hassai asked, appearing at the bottom of the boarding ramp, his words punctuated by small, precise coughs. He addressed the skitarii directly. ‘My diplomatic credentials have been fully approved by–’

‘Unsanctified presence,’ the combat servitor cut in, lumbering into motion. ‘Purge and reconsecrate.’

‘Call that thing off!’ I bellowed, in my best put-the-fear-of-the-Emperor-into-’em voice. But before Kyper could move an augmetically enhanced muscle, the construct had raised its autocannon arm, and rattled off a burst of heavy-calibre rounds which whined and ricocheted from the now badly dented boarding ramp. El’hassai scuttled back up it with commendable alacrity, and the servitor plodded forward, heading towards the shuttle with murder obviously in mind.

‘Get back in the air!’ Zyvan voxed the pilot, but he’d cut the engines as soon as we’d landed, no doubt anticipating a long and tedious wait for our preliminary discussions to be completed, and we all knew there was no way the shuttle could lift before the servitor got to it.

I retuned my vox-bead just in time to hear the pilot acknowledge the order. ‘Powering up,’ he said, and the main engines burst into life with a roar which rattled my teeth. ‘Fifteen seconds to take-off thrust.’

‘We don’t have fifteen seconds!’ I snapped. ‘The damn thing will be aboard by then! Raise the ramp!’

‘I’m already trying,’ the pilot informed me, his voice ringing with the forced calm of an expert in a crisis. ‘That autocannon burst disabled the servos.’

‘Then take it out!’ I ordered, with an eye on the chin-turreted multilaser beneath the cockpit.

‘I can’t target it,’ the pilot told me, with the air of a man following bad news with worse. ‘It’s already inside the range.’

‘Then we’ll have to do it!’ I turned to the skitarii. ‘Open fire, or call it off. Your choice.’

They chirruped at one another in consternation for a moment.

‘With regret, commissar, we can do neither,’ Kyper told me. ‘The unit is programmed to protect the spire from unauthorised entry, and damaging it would run counter to the tenets of the Omnissiah. I can request the appropriate termination codes from a higher authority, but…’

‘Oh for frak’s sake!’ I expostulated, drawing my sidearm. Taking on a fully armoured combat servitor went against all my instincts of self-preservation, but if El’hassai died, I knew who’d get the blame; he wouldn’t even have been there if I hadn’t invited him. I cracked off a couple of shots at the construct’s armour-plated back, with nothing more in mind than diverting its attention long enough for the pilot to get into the air, before bolting for the safety of the doorway. But even as I turned, the portal hissed shut, trapping us on the narrow landing stage. ‘Now what?’ I snapped, exasperated.

‘The machine spirits are sealing the spire in response to the weapons fire.’ Kyper said.

At which point the flaw in my plan became obvious. The servitor turned, ponderously, and brought its weapon arm around to point at me. ‘Hostile action initiated,’ it droned. ‘Retaliate. Retaliate.’

I jumped for my life as a line of autocannon rounds chewed up the rockcrete towards me, Zyvan and his aides scattering away from the line of fire like startled waterfowl, and rolled to my feet, cracking off another shot, hoping to hit something vital. No such luck, of course, anything vulnerable was tucked well away behind the armour plate.

‘Allow me, sir,’ Jurgen said, opening up with a burst from his lasgun. Predictably, it had little effect, although it did check the thing’s progress for a moment as it swung to let off a burst in his direction, which whined and ricocheted from the landing skid behind which he’d taken refuge. Then it turned back towards me, apparently intent on dealing with one thing at a time[54].

‘Requesting shutdown codes, authorisation Alpha Beige Zero Zero Seven Six Eight Cantata,’ Kyper said, apparently over some internal vox-link. ‘Urgency utmost.’ At least he was finally doing something, but unless he did it fast, it was going to be too late for me.

I dived aside again, chips of rockcrete from the near miss stinging my face, and came up facing the shuttle, just as the pitch of its engines rose to a scream. Brown fog swirled around my ankles, made turbulent by the backwash, and I ran towards the jammed ramp as hard as I could. It was a desperate gamble, but at the moment it looked like being the best of a lot of bad options, most of which were liable to end up with me dead.

‘Lifting now!’ the pilot called, and I leapt desperately for the rising slab of metal, feeling the edge of it slamming into my midriff, driving the air from my lungs (which, considering its quality, was probably no bad thing). At which point I became all too aware of the pistol in my hand, which rather precluded grabbing hold of anything else.

I barely had time to swear before I felt myself slithering back towards the lip of the drop. Flailing desperately, I managed to get a grip on one of the retaining bolts with my free hand, which left me dangling like a half-landed fish, while the panorama of the hive wheeled vertiginously below me. Why I didn’t simply let the laspistol go, I have no idea, but by that point I was probably too terrified to have opened my fingers if I’d tried.

‘Hold on, sir!’ Jurgen voxed, which struck me as the single most superfluous piece of advice I’d ever received. Then the servitor opened fire again, the heavy calibre rounds stitching a line of impact craters along the underside of the ramp, missing my wildly kicking legs by far too narrow a margin for comfort, and I divined the reason for his warning. Why it should have continued to take its spite out on the shuttle, instead of turning on my aide the minute it had a clear shot at him, I’ll never know, but it continued to target us with the single-minded vindictiveness of an ork[55].

‘Starboard engine hit,’ the pilot said, his veneer of professional detachment sounding thinner than ever, and the shuttle lurched sickeningly, almost dislodging my precarious hold. My shoulder muscles were screaming in protest by now, my arm feeling as though it was about to come free of its socket. A plume of thick black smoke, looking perfectly at home in what passed for an atmosphere around here, began seeping from the engine pod, whirling away to play with its friends rising from the furnaces so far below. If I fell, I’d probably be immolated before I hit the ground (or the roof of something, at any rate), which was hardly the most reassuring of thoughts. ‘I’ll have to set down again.’

Crushing me like a bug in the process. ‘Stay airborne!’ I yelled desperately, hoping to appeal to his sense of duty. My own predicament was hardly likely to give him pause, commissars hardly being the most popular of figures among the military[56]. ‘If you land, that thing’ll kill the ambassador!’

‘It’s land, or crash,’ the pilot said stubbornly, ‘and he certainly won’t survive that!’

‘Your concern for my welfare is most gratifying,’ a familiar voice cut in, raised over the whine of our abused engine, the roar of air buffeting into the confined space above the ramp, and the metallic whine and clatter of another fusillade from below. ‘But I believe I shall be adequately protected.’ A slender, four-fingered hand[57] wrapped itself around my wrist and pulled, with surprising strength. He wasn’t able to haul me onboard entirely by his own efforts, of course[58], but I got enough of a boost to shift my centre of mass firmly onto the wildly bucking ramp, and after that it was relatively easy to haul myself to safety.

‘Thank you,’ I said, making it to my feet with some difficulty, and shoving the laspistol back in its holster at last. There was no more time for conversation, though, as the landing platform was growing ever larger, the murderous servitor continuing to blaze away at us as we descended. It seemed our pilot was too busy trying to get us down in one piece to retaliate with the multilaser.[59] I stumbled as the shuttle lurched again, and clutched reflexively at El’hassai for support, fortuitously dragging him aside as the stream of autocannon rounds chewed up the bulkhead where he’d been standing a moment before. ‘I hope this protection of yours is ready when we hit.’

‘It is,’ El’hassai assured me, and, looking round, I saw that the pair of fire warriors had accompanied the tau diplomat onto the ramp. Each drew a thin line from somewhere in the recesses of their armour and clipped them firmly around stanchions at the top, freeing their hands to handle their weapons. A second later, twin plasma bolts streaked from their pulse rifles, impacting squarely on the rogue servitor.

‘Good shooting!’ I called, even though they probably didn’t understand a word I said. Encouraging the troops had become an ingrained habit by now, particularly when I was in the firing line. ‘That’s put paid to it!’

My elation turned out to be somewhat premature, however, the Adeptus Mechanicus having done the job of building the thing rather too well. The construct staggered under the barrage – which, I noted with approval, Jurgen was adding to with the dogged determination I’d become so familiar with over the course of our long association – then recovered, attempting to raise the fused stump of its autocannon once again as it recovered its balance.

‘That’s drawn its teeth, at least,’ Zyvan voxed, with clear approval. I caught a glimpse of his hand hovering over his sidearm, undoubtedly itching to draw it and take a crack at the thing himself, but it was going to be hard enough smoothing things over with our hosts already, without him blowing holes in one of their toys as well.

Then the deckplates beneath my feet rose up as the shuttle smacked into the landing stage with a bone-jarring impact, throwing El’hassai and myself to the floor. The tau just had time to shout something in his own tongue, though whether it was an urgent enquiry about how his compatriots were faring, or simple profanity of the sort I was giving voice to, I had no idea. The shuttle bounced, struck the pad again, and finally came to rest, the deckplates canted at an odd angle.

‘Good landing,’ I voxed to the pilot, the palpable relief in my voice dispelling all possible suspicion of sarcasm.

‘Better bail out while you can,’ he responded, popping the emergency seals in the cockpit as he spoke and scrambling down a rope ladder to the deck. The shuttle shifted slightly as his weight dropped away from it, and with a thrill of horror I suddenly understood why the little craft was tilted at so sharp an angle. In his hurry to get us down, and with his control of the ship impaired by the damage the rogue servitor had inflicted, the pilot hadn’t been able to land entirely on the platform. We were teetering on the edge, buffeted by the irregular gales rising from the depths below, and it only needed a particularly strong gust to overbalance us altogether.

‘Acknowledged!’ I snapped, then turned back to El’hassai, who was staggering to his feet alongside me. ‘We need to get out now. This bag of bolts is going over the side at any moment!’

‘Ra’sncr’ns and Gl’den’sn,’ he replied, which flummoxed me for a moment, during which I examined him surreptitiously for any visible signs of head trauma, before I followed the direction of his eyes and realised he was talking about his bodyguards. ‘Are they dead?’

‘They’re definitely not well,’ I replied, hurrying to the nearest, whichever it was. He (or she, I’ve never found it that easy to tell, even without the body armour, and it only matters to another tau anyway) was hanging slackly from the cable they’d used to brace themselves with. Unable to work out how to detach it, I simply drew my chainsword and severed it with a single swipe, catching the comatose warrior as he fell. He stirred feebly as my arm closed to support him, which at least answered one question, although if I’m honest, under the circumstances, I’d have preferred to find a corpse I could abandon at once without losing face. Unwilling to waste any more time, I hefted him across my shoulder, and turned to see how El’hassai was doing with the other.

The second warrior seemed able to walk, thank the Throne, although he was leaning on El’hassai heavily enough to slow them both down, which meant I was three or four paces ahead of them as I jumped the metre or so to the smooth rockcrete of the landing deck. With sixty-odd kilos of xenos[60] weighing me down, my landing was far from elegant, which was hardly surprising, all things considered. Just as well, too; as I stumbled, a whining chain blade slashed through the place where my head would have been. I recoiled reflexively, dropping the fire warrior in the process, and rolled under another swipe. The servitor turned to follow me, its left leg dragging a little, which let me open the distance between us nicely.

‘I can’t get a clear shot, sir!’ Jurgen yelled, from the direction of the doorway. Everyone else was clustered around it, arguing and gesticulating, which was bad news from where I was standing. Even if they managed to get it open, I’d never reach safety through the crush. I’d just have to keep holding the construct off, and hope for the best.

‘I have obtained the shutdown codes for the unit,’ Kyper droned, not before time if you asked me. ‘Transmitting them now.’

‘Much obliged,’ I told him, rejecting the pithier alternatives which had occurred to me in the interests of diplomacy, and took up a guard position with my chainsword. I might as well look suitably heroic now the worst of the danger was past, and there was no telling how long the shutdown order might take to kick in anyhow. Just as well I did, too. No sooner had I got the blade up than the blasted thing took another hack at me, which I parried purely by reflex. Sparks flew as the whirling blades clashed, and I stepped back again, ducking under the raised nose of the shuttle. ‘Soon would be good.’

‘Retrying,’ Kyper said, the single word sending an understandable chill through me. ‘The servitor’s communication nodes appear to be compromised by battle damage.’

‘No kidding,’ I said, deflecting another lightning-swift blow, and hacking hopefully at the construct’s exposed innards on the backstroke. The tau weapons might not have stopped it, but they’d cracked its shell like a cooked crustacean. I was rewarded with a foul-smelling spray of mingled ichor and lubricants, but the thing barely slowed, and I dodged another slash in the nick of time, ducking around the landing leg beneath the nose. As the servitor’s blade slammed into it, the whole shuttle shifted, with an ominous grating sound, and I started back, only to find myself a mere three or four strides from the brink of the abyss.

There was little time to worry about that, though, as the servitor continued to close, ignoring the steady plinking of lasgun rounds against its back. Jurgen was losing no time in resuming the offensive now that the strut was affording me some cover from the occasional stray round which missed the target. The crackling, spark-spitting servitor and I became locked in a lethal waltz, hacking and slashing at one another around the thick metal obstruction, spinning this way and that in an attempt to find an opening in the other’s defences, or parrying a sudden unexpected blow. A game in which I had the advantage in the short-term, instinct and intellect keeping me ahead of the construct’s limited repertoire of pre-programmed moves, but an advantage which would be swiftly eroded as I tired in the face of its unrelenting onslaught.

As I continued to trade blow for blow with the mechanical killer, El’hassai finally jumped clear of the teetering shuttle, his floundering arrival on the landing deck accompanied by the other armoured warrior. The flurry of movement in the corner of my eye as they hit, staggered and fell snatched at my attention for a potentially fatal second. Only reflexes honed in uncountable practice drills and far too many encounters like this one preserved me from decapitation. As it was, I raised my own blade in the nick of time, without conscious awareness of the movement, to deflect what would have otherwise been a lethal outcome to the moment of distraction.

‘Get out of the way!’ I yelled, aware only that they were now blocking Jurgen’s line of fire. The tau seemed to interpret this as concern for their welfare, however, as El’hassai turned to wave briefly in my direction before helping his companion back to his feet. As he did, I noticed the safety line still hanging from the fire warrior’s equipment pouch, and a desperate idea began to form. ‘Ambassador! The cable!’

‘The cable?’ El’hassai asked, his voice issuing from the comm-bead in my ear, and I blessed Zyvan’s foresight in giving him limited access to our vox-net. ‘What of it?’

‘Can you get it off his armour?’ I asked, the simple question punctuated with blows and parries to such an extent it felt diced into its component syllables. Quick on the uptake, El’hassai wasted no time in a verbal reply, merely fiddling with some kind of catch and holding up a small box, about a palm’s width across, as it came free. ‘Good! Chuck it over!’

Well, he did his best, but he was a diplomat, not an athlete. The little box arced through the air in my general direction, clanged from the underside of the ominously groaning shuttle, and clattered to the rockcrete terrace about three metres away, rather too close to the edge of the drop for my liking. ‘My apologies,’ he said, with a final glance over his shoulder at me and his comatose compatriot, before scuttling for the door as fast as his companion’s stumbling gait would allow.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said, certain that he wasn’t exactly going to lose a lot of sleep anyway. I feinted to the right, as though about to break left, hoping the construct would react as predictably as I thought it would. Luckily it did, taking a ponderous step round to the left to intercept the real movement. Which I never took, carrying on the rightward lunge after only the most fractional of pauses, praying to the Emperor I wasn’t about to take on a chainblade with my teeth.

Maybe He was listening for once, or maybe it’s true what they say about fortune favouring the foolish, but by the time the servitor realised I wasn’t where it thought I was going to be I’d hit the rockcrete hard, my outstretched hand scrabbling for the tau’s cable reel. For a moment I thought it was sliding out of reach, but I batted it back with the edge of my chainsword, feeling the toes of my boots slipping out over the abyss for a heart-stopping moment; then the strangely-shaped lump of polymer was in my hand, and I scrambled back from the edge, breathing hard.

‘Look out, sir!’ Jurgen warned as I rose to my knees, and I turned to see the servitor plodding after me with relentless determination, shouldering the landing strut as it strode past. With an ominous grating sound, the precariously balanced shuttle shifted again, and I distinctly felt an answering shudder in the rockcrete. The servitor swept its blade down, spraying me with gravel and chippings as the whirling teeth ground through the rockcrete, and I scrabbled backwards. As I rose to my feet my head clanged painfully against the sloping metal belly of the stranded shuttle, only the padding of my cap preventing me from being stunned by the unexpected blow. This was bad. I was hemmed in, with no line of retreat.

‘How do I work this thing?’ I voxed, parrying yet another triphammer blow from the relentless machine, shuffling sideways in a crouch to retreat as far beneath the tilting hull as I could. The servitor was unable to stoop, and I hoped it wouldn’t be able to reach me so easily there.

‘Pull out as much line as you need, and lock off with the safety catch,’ El’hassai told me, as though this was something everyone should know. I tugged at the end, experimentally, and found the reel inside the little box ran free, without a hint of snagging or friction. A small indented switch near the hole snicked into place as I prodded it, and the whole thing locked up solid. So far, so good. ‘Releasing it again will rewind the cable automatically.’

‘That won’t be an issue,’ I assured him, fumbling the box around in search of something else to press. ‘How do I get it to stick?’

‘The flat side of the casing will adhere by molecular bonding if you activate the upper control, the pad at the end of the cable adheres if you activate the lower,’ El’hassai explained, with commendable brevity.

‘Got it,’ I said, parrying another mechanically predictable swipe from my lumbering opponent as I spoke, wondering how long my luck would continue to hold out. I slapped the flat side of the little box against the underside of the shuttle, convinced as I did so that I could feel the whole vessel shifting slightly under my hand[61], and squeezed the button El’hassai had indicated. To my vague surprise, it held[62].

Now for the difficult part. Pressing the second button, I swung the end of the cable, in an arc in front of me, whipping it back and forth in a figure of eight, using the cable to fend off the construct. As I’d hoped, it reacted at once, swinging the stump of its autocannon around to entangle the line, intending to reel me in to a messy encounter with its chainblade. Timing the movement exactly, I swung up my own weapon to deflect the blow, and rolled out beneath it, coming to my feet behind its elbow. Despite the temptation to get in a parting blow, I dug my toes into the rockcrete and ran as hard as I could towards my companions.

‘The shutdown procedure is still failing,’ Kyper said, sounding as disgruntled as possible with a mechanically filtered voice.

‘Then forget it. Just get the bloody door open!’ I snarled. Finding the unconscious tau in my way, and all too aware of the audience clustered around the door, I resisted the temptation to hurdle him and keep going, opting instead to stoop as I passed and grab an arm. Dragging him with me hardly helped my progress, needless to say, and I turned, expecting to see the servitor bearing down on me again. To my relief, though, it was right where I’d left it, anchored to the downed shuttle, well out of chainblade reach. I began to relax.

‘Be right with you, sir,’ a familiar voice said, and I was joined by Jurgen’s body odour, followed an instant later by the man himself. He took the tau’s other arm, which speeded us up nicely.

‘Thank you, Jurgen,’ I said, as we reached the locked portal. I turned, just in time to see the shuttle shift, with a loud groaning of overstressed metal and the shriek of rending hull plates. Then, almost too quickly to register, it had gone, vanishing over the lip of the abyss, dragging the servitor with it.

‘One thing I’ll say for you, Ciaphas,’ Zyvan said, after a moment of horrified silence, which was eventually broken by a reverberating boom from somewhere near the base of the spire. ‘You really know how to make an entrance.’