Within a couple of days of the Guard's arrival, however, I was beginning to find the prospect of a bit of Mechanicus austerity considerably more appealing. Governor DuPanya had kindly put the bunker under his home at the disposal of the expeditionary force 3 , which meant I was dealing with general staff matters pretty much non-stop. Predictably, everyone from regimental commanders and their commissars on up wanted to meet me, get my opinion on matters I'd never heard of and ask if I could perhaps suggest to the Astartes that they move these pressing concerns to the top of their To Do list. If it hadn't been for Jurgen deflecting the majority of these requests with his usual combination of stubbornness and literally minded adherence to protocol, I'd never have been off the vox to Gries at all. Even Mira's presence was starting to seem scant compensation for the never-ending litany of requests, complaints and data-shuffling.

  I had no doubt, from what I'd seen of the Astartes during our voyage here, that their patience with this kind of confusion would be limited at best, so you'll no doubt appreciate my surprise when Gries voxed one morning to request a meeting with the governor, and the senior Guard officers, at his earliest convenience. As it happened I was having breakfast with Mira at the time, and she looked at me quizzically over the plate she'd just stuffed with salt grox, coddled eggs and some local species of smoked fish.

  'What do you suppose he wants?' she asked, and I shrugged, quietly fascinated as usual by the amount of food she seemed able to pack away without any noticeable ill-effects.

  'I suppose we'll find out soon enough,' I said, sipping my cup of tanna 4 gratefully, Jurgen had brought a supply with him, and I hadn't realised quite how much I was missing the stuff until it was back. 'We needed to get him in for a joint strategy meeting anyway. Probably a lot easier if he thinks it was his idea in the first place.'

  'Perhaps,' Mira agreed, slightly indistinctly. 'But why wouldn't he come if you asked him anyway? I thought we were all supposed to be cooperating.'

  'Astartes like to cooperate on their terms,' I told her, punctuating my words with sips of the fragrant liquid. I had no doubt that they were zealous servants of Him on Earth, but whatever alchemy made them more than human undeniably set them apart. Perhaps if I hadn't been so affected, both physically and mentally, by my experiences on Interims Prime, I might have interacted with them to a greater extent on our journey here, and found more common ground than I had, but somehow I doubted that. The closest thing to a personal connection I'd been able to forge was with Drumon, and he'd been more interested in the necrons and their infernal devices than anything approaching the social niceties.

  'Who doesn't?' Mira asked, reasonably enough. I couldn't think of an answer to that which didn't sound trite, or smug, so I took refuge in my breakfast and simply shrugged.

  * * *

  TO GIVE THE governor his due, he lost no time in setting up the conference Gries had requested. As I entered the command bunker, the taste of tanna still fresh in my mouth, I was pleasantly surprised to see Orten there, apparently at DuPanya's invitation. Having him on hand as a source of local knowledge would be useful, and save us the bother of rebriefing him later in the unlikely event of us needing the forces he commanded for anything. I nodded an affable greeting and exchanged a few words, noting with quiet amusement how my friendliness towards him seemed to change the attitude of a number of the Guard officers present from indifference or barely concealed disdain to a slightly forced cordiality. They would have had little enough time for the PDF even if a fair proportion of it hadn't been shooting at their men, of course, but under the circumstances, I wouldn't have been all that surprised if at least some of them hadn't suspected Orten of being a hybrid himself. 5

  Rather more surprising was Mira's presence, wearing another of her wedding-cake uniforms, but at least this time she'd had enough sense to pack the cleavage away where it wouldn't distract anyone. She smiled at me as I came in, although if any of the assembled officers noticed, they had the good grace not to appear to take it for anything other than a perfectly natural infatuation with the dashing hero I was popularly supposed to be. I made my way over to the girl and her father, acknowledging the greetings of the Guard officers I was acquainted with, or who wished to foster the impression that I was.

  'Governor,' I said, greeting him first, as protocol demanded, before nodding to Mira. 'Colonel. An unexpected pleasure.' Which it was. She'd said nothing about tagging along when she'd left my chambers an hour or so before, and must have got changed remarkably quickly, at least by her standards. Many of the Imperial officers milling around us seemed confused by her presence, as even if they accepted her military rank as real, which I doubted any of them did, it was by far the most junior in the room. She smiled again, but before she could reply, DuPanya cut in, as dextrously as I might have pinked an opponent with my chainsword.

  'My daughter is here as my potential successor, commissar 6 ,' he said. 'In these days of uncertainty, it's important for her to be kept abreast of policy matters, in case she has to take over the reins of government.'

  'Of course,' I said, nodding gravely, as if there was any government worth a damn on Viridia at the moment other than jumpy Guardsmen with lasguns, who'd apply whichever fragments of the occupation code 7 they remembered so long as nothing or no one looked like threatening the safety of their squadmates, and use their weapons indiscriminately if their paranoia was sufficiently tweaked. (Which, under the right, or wrong, circumstances, wouldn't take much, as a rule.) 'But I'm sure we all hope it won't come to that.' I certainly would if I was a Viridian, anyway.

  'Quite.' DuPanya glanced at his daughter, apparently picking up my implied meaning without effort, and moved the discussion on to safer topics. 'What do you think the Astartes want to discuss?'

  'I've no idea,' I admitted, trying not to sound as though it rankled. We were, after all, supposed to be on the same side, but, as I've mentioned before, the Astartes were a law unto themselves, and confided as much or as little in their allies as seemed to suit them. At least, that was true of the Reclaimers, and I've no reason to suspect that it doesn't hold true for the other Chapters as well 8 . 'But I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.'

  We didn't have long to wait, either. At the appointed hour, almost to the second, the synchronised clash of armoured feet against rockcrete I'd come to associate with the Astartes echoed through the bunker, shaking a thin film of dust free of the support beams to sprinkle everyone lightly with synthetic dandruff, and all eyes turned to the main doorway. After a moment or two, in which the clattering and the vibration increased to levels just short of uncomfortable, Gries appeared, flanked by a couple of his companions from the squad which had accompanied him before 9 . A moment later, I had a real surprise. Drumon was trailing a pace or two behind them. Even if he'd still been wearing his helmet, which was hanging from a pouch-filled belt at his waist, next to a holstered plasma pistol, I would have recognised him instantly by the metal claw at his back, the jointed arm to which it was attached folded neatly away parallel to his spine. He was carrying a scabbarded sword on the opposite side to his pistol, with an activation rune of some kind in the pommel. He was evidently used to employing them in tandem, in the same fashion I used my chainsword and sidearm, and I smiled involuntarily, amused to have found another small thing which the towering Techmarine and I appeared to have in common.

  Catching my eye, Drumon returned the smile and nodded a greeting, which clearly astonished those among the assembled officers who noticed it even more than it did me. In fact, I was so taken aback, I took a moment to register the red-robed tech-priest gliding smoothly in his wake, like a gretchin after an ork 10 . I had no idea what the tech-priest's presence portended, but I was pretty sure it was nothing good.

  'Captain.' DuPanya stepped forwards to greet Gries, who glanced down at him, then removed his helmet, hanging it at his hip as Drumon had done. Seeing the two men together, I was put incongruously in mind of an adult, tilting his head to listen patiently to an importunate child. 'To what do we owe this unexpected pleasure?'

  'We have been conferring with the acolytes of the Omnissiah,' Gries explained, without preamble. 'Magos Yaffel believes he has identified the source of the genestealer taint.'

  That got everyone's attention, as I'm sure you can imagine. The room, which had gone quiet enough when the Astartes appeared, stilled completely. I could hear little but the susurration of my own breathing, and I'm pretty sure a few of the others stopped even that for a moment. Fortunately, before anyone could turn blue, Drumon and the tech-priest commandeered the hololith, coaxing it into life with a few dextrous touches of their ceramite gauntlets and mechadendrites respectively, while murmuring the litany of activation. We all crowded round, trying to look as though we weren't using our elbows on purpose to obtain a better view, and I did my best to ignore the proximity of Mira, who was taking advantage of the huddle to get considerably closer to me than decorum would normally permit with others present.

  'I'm sure you recognise this,' the tech-priest began, in the reedy tones of a voxcaster in need of repair. Like many of his brethren, he'd apparently replaced his vocal cords, and a great deal else, with augmetic systems. As he spoke, he moved slightly, oscillating back and forth like a drunkard attempting to keep pace with the floor; after a moment or two I caught a glimpse of metal beneath his robe, and the coin dropped. The lower half of his body had been removed completely, leaving his torso resting on a metal plate, which in turn was supported by a thin steel tube, attached to a single, fat-tyred wheel. No doubt there was a gyroscope somewhere to impart stability, but, if so, it seemed barely adequate to the task, necessitating constant minor adjustments of balance to keep him from toppling over.

  Everyone nodded as an image of the Viridian stellar system appeared, the planet we were standing on marked with the green rune which, somewhat optimistically, identified it as now being safely back in Imperial hands. Most of the significant offworld habs were similarly tagged. This was not surprising. The Reclaimers left behind on the Revenant had hardly been idle while the war on the ground was going on, and had retaken the largest rebel stronghold with an ease which had disinclined most of the others to make a fight of it, while the strike cruiser swatted any of the System Defence boats which failed to strike their colours as casually as it had taken care of the one which had been foolish enough to attack us when we'd first emerged from the warp. Only a few red icons marked die-hard dissidents, which quite effectively pinpointed the offworld sites where the 'stealers had managed to gain a significant foothold, and I was pleasantly surprised at how meagre they were 11 .

  'A hundred and forty-seven years ago,' the tech-priest went on, apparently indifferent to our nods and murmurs, 'a flare of warp energy was detected in the halo 12 . Analysis at the time suggested an object of considerable mass had emerged, and a System Defence boat was dispatched to investigate. Perhaps fortunately for them, however, the object disappeared back into the immaterium before they were able to provide more than a few long-range sensor records.' Drumon did something at the control lectern, and the image changed to an indistinct blob which looked like nothing so much as a diseased tuber to me. There seemed to be nothing particularly threatening about it, but DuPanya's face had paled. Mira glanced at her father, looking concerned about someone else for the first time since I'd met her.

  'The space hulk,' the governor said heavily, and that got a reaction, you can be sure. Gries's shattered visage twitched into the semblance of a frown, and he gazed at DuPanya like a schola tutor faced with a pupil stumbling over the catechism.

  'You were aware of this?' he asked, his voice rumbling through the bunker like a distant earthquake.

  DuPanya nodded. 'Of course,' he said, recovering fast. 'But as it was only in-system for a few hours, we felt the risk it posed to our security had been negligible. We kept the SDF on alert for a while, but with nothing to shoot at, there didn't seem much point in prolonging the watch.'

  Concealing my surprise that he was apparently into his second century, which I suppose I should have expected, given what I'd already deduced about the nobility's fondness for juvenat treatments, I nodded judiciously. 'That's understandable,' I said, wondering for the first time if Mira was really quite as young as she appeared, and deciding I didn't much care either way. 'If there were greenskins aboard, I'm sure you would have noticed.'

  Several of the Imperial officers smiled at the understatement, an ork invasion hardly being noted for its subtlety, but it seemed Gries had as little time for flippancy as he had for anything else which wasn't about slaughtering the enemies of the Emperor. 'Such complacency was negligent in the extreme,' he said.

  DuPanya flushed. 'We could hardly remain on alert indefinitely,' he pointed out, a trifle defensively. 'The populace would have been panicked, to no positive effect. And it's not as if our defences were set up to counter this kind of insidious infiltration in any case.'

  Gries didn't have to say ''Perhaps they should have been''. His silence was emphatic enough. To dispel the tension hanging in the air, and forestall any recrimination which was likely to be ripened by it, I stepped in to restore our unity, like the good little commissar I was supposed to be.

  'All of which rather begs the question of how the 'stealers got planetside at all,' I said, as if I really wanted to know the answer.

  'Magos, I'm sure a man of your erudition has been able to work it out?' The wobbling half-man looked as pleased as it was possible to with a face composed largely of metal. The acolytes of the Omnissiah are supposed to be above petty human emotions, but I've noticed they seem as susceptible to flattery as anyone else.

  'The balance of probabilities would seem to favour an opportunistic boarding by mineral prospectors in search of booty,' he piped, his thin tones in marked contrast to those of the Space Marine captain. 'The halo is full of small vessels, which the SDF crew would have found extremely difficult to distinguish at the range they were, given the masking effect of the hulk and the profusion of cometary debris registering on their auspex.'

  That sounded plausible enough to me. It would only take a handful of people to be implanted for the taint to take root, growing stronger with each generation of hybrids, and the crew of a small vessel would do nicely for starters. Particularly if they had room aboard for a purestrain or two, to hurry the process along a bit.

  'Which raises another alarming possibility,' I said. 'Given the amount of cargo entering and leaving the system, and the number of vessels carrying it, how sure can we be that some of these abominations haven't taken passage to other parts of the sector, intent on spreading their corruption as widely as they can?' The expressions of the senior officers surrounding me were all the indication I needed of just how much none of them liked that idea.

  'That seems unlikely,' Drumon interjected, to everyone's visible relief, 'although it would be prudent to send an astropathic message to the appropriate authorities in the nearby systems.'

  'I concur,' Gries agreed. 'Genestealer cults generally remain focussed on subverting one world at a time.' Well, I supposed he'd know, being the greatest local expert on the enemies of the Imperium, and the best way of scraping them off its collective bootsole.

  'A more pressing concern is the hulk itself,' Yaffel put in, with the unmistakable air of a man dragging everyone back to the point. 'Wherever it goes, it will continue to infect inhabited systems.'

  'Not to mention the ones it's already been through,' I said. I glanced round the bunker, finally managing to catch the eye of the senior intelligence analyst among the general staffers. 'We'll need to search the records, try to find other sightings that match-'

  'We have already identified it,' Drumon assured me, the faint trace of amusement I recalled seeing aboard the Revenant during my convalescence surfacing briefly again. 'It's the Spawn of Damnation, first sighted in 447.M36, in the Spinward Drift. Or, at least, first sighted by anyone who survived to make a report. Its movements are as well-known as any piece of warp flotsam.'

  'Well, that's a comfort, at least,' I said, trying to sound as though I meant it, and hadn't been disconcerted by the name. Who chose it, and why they can't call these things something a little more cheerful, is beyond me 13 . 'It's a shame we can't warn whoever it's heading for next.'

  'Unfortunately, given the nature of the warp, such a prediction cannot be made,' Yaffel said, not quite managing to inject an edge of regret into his mechanical monotone. 'However, it may be possible to follow the hulk to its next destination.'

  'How?' DuPanya asked, quite reasonably under the circumstances, while Mira merely pulled a face at me, and made a surprisingly vulgar gesture indicative of mental derangement. Privately, I agreed with her, but if the Astartes were taking this nonsense seriously, the least we could do was hear the fellow out.

  'By entering the warp at the same point the hulk did,' Yaffel said, 'and following the current. We've examined the logs of numerous cargo vessels which entered and left the Viridia System over the last century and a half, and the indications are that the flow of the immaterium in this region of space and time have remained reasonably stable.'

  'Reasonably stable being something of a relative term,' Drumon interjected again, dryly. 'Following the wrong current will take us to a different system entirely. But we have a good Navigator aboard the Revenant, and he considers the gamble a reasonable one.'

  'Not to mention the calculations I've made, which should narrow down the possibilities considerably,' Yaffel added.

  'Then, forgive me if I'm wrong,' DuPanya said, 'are we to infer that you intend trying to track down the Spawn of Damnation in your own ship?'

  'We do,' Gries said flatly. His head turned, sweeping his gaze across the assembled officers. 'The Imperial Guard should be capable of resolving matters on Viridia now the back of the rebellion has been broken. Once the operations we currently have under way are concluded, we will depart.'

 

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