[Caiphas Cain 03] The Traitor's hand Read online

  A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

  THE TRAITOR'S HAND

  Sandy Mitchell

  IT IS THE 41st millennium. For more than a hundred

  centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden

  Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the

  will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the

  might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass

  writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of

  Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for

  whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that

  he may never truly die.

  YET EVEN IN his deathless state, the Emperor continues

  his eternal vigilance. Mighty battleflects cross the

  daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route

  between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican,

  the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. Vast

  armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds.

  Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes,

  the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their

  comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and

  countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant

  Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus

  Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their

  multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the

  ever-present threat from aliens, heretics,

  mutants - and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold

  billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody

  regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times.

  Forget the power of technology and science, for so much

  has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the

  promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim

  dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst

  the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and

  the laughter of thirsting gods.

  Editorial Note:

  To my great surprise, not to mention personal satisfaction, the first two volumes of material from the Cain archive which I have prepared for circulation among those of my fellow inquisitors who may care to peruse them have been quite widely read; although it must be said that many of my colleagues appear to regard them as tight entertainment rather than the more serious food for thought I originally intended, finding it hard to believe that an imperial commissar could fall so far short of the ideals he was meant to embody. Given his public reputation I find this incredulity easy to understand, but thanks to our personal association, I can assure my readers that he was indeed very much as he depicts himself in these memoirs. I would point out, though, that perhaps as a result of his own awareness of these shortcomings, he does have a tendency to judge himself a little more harshly than he might actuality deserve. Hitherto I've concentrated my efforts on some of Cain's encounters with alien enemies of the Imperium, although in the course of his long career he crossed swords with all manner of warp-spawned monstrosities as well, confounding the dark designs of the Ruinous Powers and their mortal minions on numerous occasions. It seemed fitting, therefore, especially given the interest in the previous volumes from inquisitors of ordos other than my own, to select one such incident to prepare for wider dissemination.

  I was aided in this decision by the fact that it follows on chronologically from the previous two extracts, although Cain's tendency to record his memoirs piecemeal, as different anecdotes occurred to him, means that the original material forms a somewhat extended digression. This happened in his account of the famous incident during the 13th Black Crusade, when he was dragged out of retirement to defend an entire world with little more than a handful of his Schola Progenium cadets. That will have to wait for a subsequent volume, of course; in the meantime, I believe I have successfully filleted the material relevant to the Adumbria campaign and present it here as a reasonably coherent narrative in its own right.

  Like the earlier extracts, these events look place during Cain's service with the 597th Valhallan and cover the fledgling regiment's first encounter with the forces of Chaos. A particular point of interest is Cain's description of the ordinary troopers' reaction to the Great Enemy and the form its machinations took, which I hope will sound a much-needed note of caution to those of my readers who might fall prey to the pernicious tenets of Radicalism.

  Since, as usual, Cain is infuriatingfy vague about most things which don't affect him personally, I have continued to insert extracts from other sources where necessary in order to present a more rounded account of events on Adumbria and in the system surrounding it. Unfortunately, as before, some of these are the logorrheic meanderings of Jenit Sulla, for which I can only apologise in advance; were any other alternatives available, you can be sure I would have used them.

  In accordance with the previous volumes, I have broken Cain's largely unstructured narrative into chapters for ease of reading, and once again I have been unable to resist prefacing them with a selection from the collection of quotations he maintained for the instruction and amusement of his schola students. Other than this I have confuted my interpolations to the occasional footnote, leaving Cain to tell his story in his own inimitable manner.

  Amberley Vail, Ordo Xenos

  ONE

  'The wider he smiled and called us friend, the tighter we clung to our purses.'

  - Argun Slyter, ''The Wastrel's Stratagem'', Act 4 Scene 1

  I'VE HAD MORE than my fair share of unpleasant surprises over the course of a century or so of fighting the Emperor's enemies, whenever running away and hiding from them wasn't an option, but the sudden appearance of Tomas Beije in the corridors of the Emperor's Beneficence is one I still can't recall without flinching. Not because the situation was particularly life-threatening, which I suppose made it unusual enough given the kind of surprises I usually got, but because of the associations the memory of it still triggers: a curious amalgam of anger at his subsequent pig-headed stupidity, which almost ended up handing an Imperial world to the Ruinous Powers neatly gift-wrapped with a pretty pink bow, and, more importantly, could have resulted in my ignominious execution had events not turned out as they did; and the flood of unpleasant memories his presence stirred up in me at the time. I hadn't liked him when we were commissar cadets together at the Schola Progenium and I suppose I would have disliked him still if I'd spared him so much as a single thought in the years since we were judged fit to inflict ourselves on a regiment somewhere and sent off elsewhere in the galaxy. (Or in my case, I strongly suspect, handed a scarlet sash and politely shown the door because it seemed the easiest way of keeping my tutors from resigning en masse.)[1]

  'Ciaphas.' He nodded a greeting, as though we'd always been on good terms, and a smile as sincere as an ecclesiarch distributing alms in front of the pictcasters smeared itself across his pudgy features. 'I heard you were on board.'

  That didn't surprise me. By that point in my career, my reputation preceded me wherever I went, smoothing the way in a fashion which often made my life a great deal easier, and, as if to balance things out in some way, periodically dragging me into life-threatening situations of bowel-clenching terror. No doubt by now, three days out from Kastafore[2], the entire ship would be aware that Cain the Hero of the Imperium was aboard, and either pretending not to be impressed by that sort of thing or trying to find some way of scraping an acquaintance in order to further their own careers by coat-tailing on mine. Well good luck to anyone daft enough
to try the latter, I thought.

  'Beije.' I returned the nod curtly, irked by his use of my given name. We'd never been friends at the schoia and I resented the presumption now. Come to think of it, I don't recall that he'd ever had any friends, just a small group of cronies as pious and self-righteous as he was, always whining on about the grace of the Emperor or running to the proctors with tales of the minor infractions of other students. The only time anyone was ever pleased to see him was on the scrumball pitch, where he got tackled enthusiastically at every opportunity whether he had the ball or not. 'I had no idea you were part of this little jaunt.'

  The smile curdled a little as he registered the snub, but he was bright enough to realise that making an issue of it in public wouldn't be a good idea. The corridors were filling with senior Guard officers, the black coats and scarlet sashes of a handful of other commissars among them, all drifting towards one of the recreation halls where the lord general himself was expected to brief us in a few minutes' time. Not in person, of course, as he'd be travelling in some style aboard the flotilla's flagship, but the tech-priests had apparently rigged up some method for him to pictcast all the vessels in the task force simultaneously before we made the transition to the warp.

  'I'd hardly describe facing the enemies of humanity as a jaunt,' he said stiffly.

  'It's our holy duty to preserve the Emperor's blessed domains from the merest taint of the unclean.'

  'Of course it is,' I replied, just as unable to resist teasing the pious little prig now as I had been nearly thirty years before. 'But I'm sure he wouldn't mind if we had a bit of fun while we're doing it.' Of course, facing whatever horrors might be waiting for us wherever we were going was about as far from my idea of fun as it was possible to get, but it was the sort of thing a hero was supposed to say and it went down well with the crowd around us, most of whom were trying very hard to look as if they weren't listening to the conversation.

  'I'm sorry to interrupt your socialising, commissar.' Colonel Kasteen cleared her throat and glanced at her chronograph with studied nonchalance. 'But I believe it would be impolite to keep the lord general waiting.'

  'Thank you, colonel,' I responded, grateful for the intervention and conveying that fact with a glance no one else present other than Major Broklaw, her second-in-command, would have been able to pick up on. Our years of service together[3] had given us a rapport which came as close to friendship as our respective positions allowed and which helped no end in the smooth running of the regiment.

  'This is your colonel?' Beije asked with undisguised incredulity. Kasteen's jaw knotted with the effort of reining in her instinctive response, which from long experience I expected to be short, pithy, and anatomically improbable.

  Happy to return the favour she'd just done for me, I nodded. 'She is indeed,' I said. 'And a damn good one too.' Then I laughed and patted Beije on the back, which I remembered from our days at the schola was something he'd always detested. 'Surely you haven't forgotten how to read rank insignia?'

  'I hadn't noticed them,' he muttered, his face slowly crimsoning. Well, maybe that was true. Kasteen had quite a spectacular figure, in a trim, well-muscled sort of way, and perhaps he hadn't bothered to look that high. 'She was standing behind you.'

  'Quite,' I said, unable to resist prolonging his discomfiture a little longer by making introductions. 'Colonel, may I present Commissar Tomas Beije, an old classmate of mine.' Kasteen nodded a formal greeting, which Beije echoed a little over-eagerly, trying to make up for his lapse in good manners. 'Beije, this is Colonel Regina Kasteen, commanding officer of the 597th Valhallan. And Major Ruput Broklaw, her executive officer.'

  'Commissar.' Broklaw stuck out a hand for Beije to shake, which he did after a moment's hesitation, wincing as the major closed his grip. He'd tried the same thing on me the first time we'd met and I'd been grateful for the augmetic fingers on my right hand. 'Any friend of Commissar Cain is always welcome in our quarters.'

  'Thank you.' Beije retrieved his hand, although whether he was astute enough to realise Broklaw's tone effectively ruled him out of that general invitation was unlikely. Trapped by social convention, he flapped it vaguely at the two men flanking him. 'Colonel Asmar of the Tallarn 229th, and Major Sipio, his second-in-command.'

  I glanced back at Kasteen and Broklaw, amused at the contrast between the two groups. While the Tallarns were both short and dark-complexioned, swathed in the loose tunics of their desert home world, the Valhallans were about as physically different as it was possible to be. Kasteen was wearing her red hair drawn back in a pony tail, blue eyes as clear as the skies above the ice fields of her home world, while Broklaw's flint-grey gaze perfectly mirrored the night-dark hair which framed it. In deference to what they considered to be the stifling heat outside the areas assigned to us, which, as usual, they'd had refrigerated to temperatures which left the breath smoking, they were dressed in simple fatigues, only the rank pins on their collars denoting their status. So to be fair, I suppose Beije could have been forgiven for not realising who they were at first, but that wasn't going to stop me enjoying his embarrassment.

  'A pleasure.' I nodded to the two officers. 'You have a formidable reputation as warriors. I look forward to hearing of the glorious victories of the Tallarn people.'

  'We prevail by the grace of the Emperor,' Asmar said, his voice surprisingly mellifluous. Beije nodded, a little too eagerly.

  'Yes, absolutely. Faith is the strongest weapon in our arsenal, after all.'

  'Maybe so,' I said. 'But I'll still take a laspistol to back it up.' It wasn't the wittiest remark in the galaxy, I'll admit that, but I was expecting at least a smile. Instead, to my surprise, the Tallarns' expressions hardened imperceptibly.

  'That would be your choice, of course.' Asmar bowed formally once and turned away, followed by his number two. Beije hesitated a moment, as if debating whether to go with them straight away, but just couldn't resist getting the last word in.

  'I'm afraid not everyone shares my appreciation of your sense of humour,' he said. 'Our Tallarn friends take their faith very seriously.'

  'Well good for them,' I said, beginning to understand why no one had shot him by accident yet. By luck or somebody's good judgment, he'd been assigned to a regiment of Emperor-botherers as humourless as he was. Of course, at that point, I didn't know the half of it; they had Chaplains like the rest of us had Chimera drivers, all of the kind that make Redemptionists look well-balanced by comparison.[4] Had I realised the consequences that were to flow from the impulse to irritate Beije and unwittingly offending his friends in the process, I suppose I'd have held my tongue, but at the time I remained in blissful ignorance and went into the briefing feeling rather pleased with myself.

  Because of the delay in the corridor, Kasteen, Broklaw and I were among the last to arrive, but once again my reputation worked to our advantage and a trio of seats had somehow been kept clear for us despite there being not quite enough to go round. Beije and his Tallarns, I noticed in passing, were among those squeezed in at the back, standing uncomfortably and gazing resentfully at us as we made our way down to the front of the auditorium.

  There were five regiments in all aboard the Emperor's Beneficence, an antedeluvian Galaxy-class troopship which seemed to be kept functioning entirely by the constant activity of her tech-priests and enginseers, and the senior command staff of all of them came to a tidy total; most had sent their entire complement to save the effort of repeating the exercise later on, and I was able to spot all of our own company commanders and their immediate subordinates scattered among the crowd before I sat down.

  Apart from us and the Tallarns, the ship was carrying a Valhallan armoured regiment whose Leman Russes I had been delighted to see stowed in the hold next to ours (and who in turn seemed equally pleased to have found themselves travelling with another unit from their home world) and a couple of infantry regiments newly raised on Kastafore. The officers from there were easy to spot, thanks to the newness of the
ir uniforms and the expressions of alert interest they directed at everything which caught their attention (most of which seemed to be the women from the 597th).

  The cogboys[5] had been busy, there was no doubt about that. Wires and cables snaked across the floor of the chamber, being tended to by white-robed acolytes chanting the appropriate rituals of activation, terminating in what I recognised as a hololithic display unit of remarkable size and complexity. At the moment, it was projecting a rotating image of the Imperial eagle, which hazed and sputtered in the familiar fashion of all such devices, accompanied by jaunty music of staggering vacuity.'Did anyone remember the caba nuts?' I asked, reminded of a public holotheatre, and a few of the nearby officers chuckled sycophantically. After a moment, the hum of conversation died away as the lights dimmed, the senior tech-priest ceremoniously kicked his control lectern and the familiar face of Lord General Zyvan replaced the aquila, looming down at us like an out-of-focus balloon. After a moment of heated discussion among the tech-priests, somebody yanked a couple of wires out of their sockets and the music stopped abruptly, enabling us to hear him.

  'Thank you all for your kind attention,' the balloon said, its voice sizzling with static. It had been some time since I'd spoken to the lord general in person, our paths having crossed rarely since our first meeting on Gravalax about six years before, and most of those occasions had been fraught to say the least, occurring as they did in the middle of either a war zone or a diplomatic crisis. Nevertheless, we'd always got on tolerably well and I respected his concern for the welfare of the men under his command, which, since they included me, I thought was a decided asset in a military leader. 'No doubt you've been wondering why we've mobilised in such a hurry following the success of our campaign against the orks on Kastafore.' A few of the officers from there raised a cheer, which trailed off into embarrassed silence.