[Caiphas Cain 03] The Traitor's hand Page 16

  TWELVE

  'Hurry up and wait.'

  - Guardsman's traditional summation of the process of deployment

  THE JOURNEY BACK to Glacier Peak was as tedious as I'd expected, despite being relatively short, the lord general having taken the trouble to put another flyer at my disposal. Within twenty minutes of us having become airborne, the rectangle of sky beyond the viewport had darkened to the perpetual night of the coldside, relieved only by the glimmering of the stars above, and I watched the blue-tinted landscape below us rippling away with a sense of ennui I could only put down to the dispiriting realisation that the crisis was finally upon us. Even the excellent amasec in my hip flask, which I'd taken the opportunity of replenishing from the lord general's private stock before we left, was insufficient to raise my mood. I found myself watching the skies for some sign of motion, despite knowing full well that the enemy fleet was still too far away for any of the vessels to be visible yet.

  It was only as we began to descend towards the landing pad that I sat up and took notice of the scene below us, the vast familiar bulk of a dropship seeming to fill the entire field of compacted ice. Our pilot seemed competent enough, though, making a final approach and circling around the space-going behemoth in order to give us a better view of it. (Or so it seemed; no doubt he was merely trying to find somewhere to set down.) Under the constant glare of the luminators I could see a steady stream of vehicles the size of my thumbnail rumbling up the loading ramps, directed by arm-waving ants. At least Kasteen was on the ball. There was no point waiting until the traitors actually arrived before getting our rapid reaction force poised and waiting. I found myself nodding approval as our skids hit the permafrost at last and I went to rouse an ashen-faced Jurgen (who, true to form, had relished our short flight not at all).

  'The dropship arrived about three hours ago,' Kasteen confirmed as I entered the relative warmth of the command centre, brushed a couple of centimetres of snow from the brim of my hat and sent Jurgen off to find me some tanna.

  'As we didn't know how soon you'd be back, Ruput and I thought we should make the assignments without waiting for your input.' She was perfectly within her rights to do so, of course. Technically the regimental commissar is only supposed to scrutinise command decisions and suggest alternative courses of action if they have grounds to believe that the fighting abilities of the unit are being compromised. The habit we'd got into of including me in preliminary discussions and tactical meetings was a purely informal arrangement.[69]

  'Quite right too,' I said cheerfully, masking a faint sense of being left out of things which vaguely surprised me. 'Which company did you pick?'

  'Second,' Broklaw told me, looking up from the hololith, which was jumping just as badly as I remembered, presumably no one had bothered to get a tech-priest in to bless the thing in my absence. (Then again, our enginseers were probably too busy getting our vehicles into fighting trim to bother with trivia like that.) 'None of their platoons were assigned off-base when the dropship came in, and they've already had a bit of practice at rapid deployment here.'

  He grinned at me, and after a moment I realised he was referring to our impromptu rescue of the Tallarns on the day of our arrival. So much seemed to have happened since, I found it hard to believe it had only been a couple of weeks ago.

  'Good choice,' I said, turning as Jurgen's returning odour told me my tanna had arrived. I took the drink gratefully and let the mug warm a little feeling back into my non-augmetic fingers. (The pilot had had to set the flyer down some distance away, and it had been a long, cold walk back to the command centre.) 'I'm sure Sulla's got her platoon's Chimeras stowed already.'

  'And is offering helpful advice to the other platoon commanders,' the major confirmed dryly.[70]

  'So what's the news from HQ?' Kasteen asked.

  'We're neck deep in it, as usual.' I sipped the tanna gratefully, feeling the fragrant liquid warming me gently from the inside out. 'You've seen the latest sitreps?'

  The colonel nodded, her red hair bouncing gently against her shoulders. 'Enemy fleet inbound, ETA around three days from now. Heretic sorcerers playing frak with the warp and possibly a daemon on the loose. Oh yes, and Emperor knows how many smuggled weapons in the hands of an as-yet undetermined number of insurgents hiding among the civilian population. Have I left anything out?'

  'Not really,' I said. 'Unless you count the fact that the Navy doesn't seem to have enough firepower to stop the enemy fleet before it gets here.'

  I hadn't envied Zyvan the call on that one. I didn't really understand the problem, naval tactics not being the kind of thing I generally paid attention to, but the main thrust of it seemed to be that the traitors had split their forces. In the kind of warfare I was familiar with, which was all about taking or holding ground, that would have been a fatal mistake, but it seemed things were different on a system-wide scale. Apparently it takes spacecraft so long to get anywhere that once they're drawn out of position they'll never get back to it in any reasonable time frame, so the sort of mobile reserves we generally relied on to bolster a sagging line wouldn't be an option.

  When I left, the lord general was still discussing things with his captains, wondering whether to try intercepting one group at a time and risk some of them getting through, or to keep his handful of warships in orbit where the enemy could strike at leisure and almost certainly break through somewhere by concentrating on a weak point.

  'Neck deep sounds about right,' Broklaw agreed cheerfully. He turned back to the hololith, bringing it into focus with a practiced thump, I was beginning to think he might have missed his vocation. 'Any thoughts on our own dispositions here?'

  Well, I hadn't really, or at least none that he and Kasteen hadn't already had themselves, but the discussion was calming, and I eventually went off to bed feeling considerably happier than I'd expected to. Come what may, I thought, the 597th was as ready for action as it could possibly be, and everything else was in the hands of the Emperor.

  AFTER THE RIGOURS of the day you'll no doubt appreciate I was pretty exhausted, and even my spartan quarters in Glacier Peak seemed pretty comfortable by the time I shed my clothes and collapsed into bed. I fell asleep almost at once, but my sleep was to be far from restful. I awoke some time later with a pounding headache, dazed and disoriented, my quarters suffused with a familiar odour.

  'Are you all right, sir?' Jurgen asked from the door, and with a curious sensation of deja vu I realised he was holding his lasgun ready for use. I blinked gummy eyes open, yawned loudly, and became suddenly aware that I was holding my laspistol (which, from long habit, I had carefully stowed where I could draw it without leaving the bed[71])

  'Bad dreams,' I said, trying to chase the elusive fragments of imagery which were scuttling away from my conscious mind as I became progressively more wakeful.

  Jurgen frowned. 'The same as last time, sir?' he asked. The casual question hit me like a jolt of electricity. I nodded slowly, the dim recollection of green eyes and mocking laughter beginning to surface through the throbbing fog in my skull.

  'I think so,' I said, becoming steadily more convinced that I had indeed been dreaming of Emeli again. I supposed this was hardly surprising after encountering another of her kind, but even so I found the notion unsettling. I tried to recall the details, but the harder I tried the more elusive they became. 'It was the sorceress again.' I shrugged. Unsettling as it was, it had just been a dream after all. Nevertheless, I found the idea of going back to sleep distinctly unappealing.

  'Could you get me some recaff?'

  'Of course, commissar.' Jurgen slung the lasgun across his shoulder and left the room, leaving me to drag myself into the shower.

  At length, feeling marginally refreshed, I wandered back to the command centre. There was nothing really for me to do there, but as always the sense of waiting for the enemy to make the first move was subtly unnerving, and I found the bustle of troopers going about their business and the constant clamour of message
s coming in and out reassuring; it meant that we were ready for whatever might be about to happen.

  (Or so I thought at the time; as it turned out no one sane could possibly have predicted the magnitude of the threat we were actually facing, and a good thing too. If I'd had even an inkling of it I'd have been catatonic with terror.)

  I wasn't the only one reluctant to rest either: as I snagged a mug of tanna from the urn in the corner and turned to face the room, a flash of red hair caught my eye and I made my way over to Kasteen's desk. She was sprawled back in her chair, her feet on the desktop, snoring faintly. Unwilling to wake her, I turned away, intending to catch up on some of the routine disciplinary reports which were no doubt cluttering up my own desk by now, but she was too good a soldier not to be roused by a nearby footstep.

  'What?' She sat up straight, brushing her hair from her eyes with her left hand, the right hovering just above the butt of her bolt pistol. 'Ciaphas?'[72]

  'It's all right,' I said. 'Sorry to wake you.' I handed her the mug of tanna, feeling she needed it more than I did. 'Haven't you got a bunk for that sort of thing?'

  'I suppose so.' She yawned widely. 'I was just resting my eyes for a moment. Must have dozed off.' She grinned. 'I suppose you'll have to shoot me for sleeping on duty now.'

  'Technically,' I pointed out, 'you should have been off duty hours ago. So I suppose I can overlook it just this once.' I shrugged. 'Besides, can you imagine the sheer number of forms I'd have to fill out?'

  'I'd hate to put you to that much inconvenience,' Kasteen agreed gravely. She stretched and stood up. 'So, did I miss anything?'

  'Haven't a clue,' I admitted cheerfully. 'I've only just got here myself.'

  Rather than get involved in a conversation I'd rather avoid, I resorted to a half-truth. 'I couldn't sleep.'

  'I know how you feel,' Broklaw said, appearing round a partition with a half-eaten sandwich in his hand. 'It's the waiting that gets to you.' He seemed as edgy as the rest of us, in that curious adrenaline-fuelled state where you feel too tired to rest.

  Despite myself I felt a smile beginning to spread across my face. 'Well, we're a fine example for the lower ranks,' I said. 'Jumpier than a bunch of juvies on Emperor's Day Eve.'

  'Except it's the heretics who are going to get the presents,' Broklaw said, with undisguised relish. 'Death and damnation, gift-wrapped by the 597th.' I can only assume it was the lack of sleep we were feeling, because the remark struck us all as hilarious, and when the hololith flickered into life with the image of the lord general the first thing he saw was the three of us howling with laughter like a bunch of drunken idiots.

  'I'm pleased to see morale in the 597th remains high,' he remarked dryly, as we sobered up and the two Guard officers tugged their uniforms back into shape. He raised a quizzical eyebrow. 'Although I'm surprised to see you all awake at this hour.' He wasn't, of course; he was an old enough campaigner to know exactly how we all felt.

  'The feeling's mutual,' I said, being the only one of the three of us who could converse with him without being hamstrung by protocol. The palms of my hands were tingling again, whatever he wanted at this time of night, it wasn't a social call. 'What's happened?'

  To my surprise, the image split, Colonel Asmar appearing on the opposite corner of the display. No doubt we had appeared in his at the same time, as his face betrayed a flicker of hastily-masked hostility before he could compose his features again.

  'Commissar.' He nodded once, ignoring the others, which at least told me which one of us Zyvan wanted to talk to.

  'The Tallarn 229th have discovered something perturbing in their sector,' the lord general explained. His own face took on an expression of barely-masked exasperation. 'A little late in the day, but I suppose we must be thankful for what we can get.'

  'The Emperor provides what we need,' Asmar quoted from somewhere, 'not what we want.'[73]Zyvan's jaw tightened, barely perceptibly. 'What I want are regimental commanders who undertake search and destroy missions when ordered to, instead of going through the motions and doing the least they think they can get away with, and commissars who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty.' My ears pricked up at that, you can be sure. I hadn't a clue what had riled him so much, but it was clear that Asmar, and probably Beije, had hacked him off in no small measure. Probably by spouting Emperor-bothering gobbledygook instead of following orders, if I was any judge. But if the Tallarn's skiving had been backed by his commissar there wasn't a whole lot the lord general could do about it, of course.

  'We'll be pleased to help in any way we can,' I said, grabbing the opportunity to stir it as eagerly as you can imagine.

  Zyvan nodded. 'I don't doubt it.' The implied rebuke to Asmar was about as subtle as an ork breaking wind, and the Tallarn colonel's face coloured slightly. 'I was hoping for your input on this, as you seem to have had the most experience of the enemy's sorcerous activities.' To my carefully concealed delight Asmar looked distinctly nervous at this point, and made the sign of the aquila.

  'I've shot a few heretics and raided a couple of their hideouts,' I said, conscious of the unmerited reputation for modest heroism that Zyvan expected me to maintain. 'But I think any credit should go to the troopers with me. They did the bulk of the fighting, and not all of them were as lucky as I was.'

  'Quite,' the lord general said, buying it wholesale. 'But you have the experience in intelligence assessment and you've fought the Great Enemy before.'

  'True,' I said, nodding my head. 'So what's the information our gallant Tallarn comrades have uncovered?' Asmar looked a little suspicious at that, no doubt realising I was taking the frak, but prepared to take the question at face value. (No doubt he had some pious quotation to cover that as well.)

  'One of our rough rider patrols encountered a nauga[74]hunter this morning,' he began. 'He mentioned seeing traces of activity near some caverns to the north of our position, so they went to take a look.' Zyvan's expression was hardening by the moment, I noticed. 'What they found there was…'

  Words seemed to fail Asmar for a moment, and he made the sign of the aquila again. 'Unholy,' he concluded at last, his face paling.

  'Let me guess,' I said. 'Bodies, twisted in some foul fashion, peculiar sigils painted on the walls?' Asmar nodded. 'Did your troopers encounter any resistance?'

  'No,' Asmar said. 'The place was deserted.' If he made the sign of the aquila much more, I thought, his fingers were going to fly away. 'But the miasma of evil was palpable.'

  'Lucky for them the daemon had already gone,' I said, unable to resist prodding him again. I was rewarded by an expression of unmistakable terror flickering in his eyes. I turned my attention to Zyvan. 'It sounds as though we've found the site of the third ritual.'

  'That was my conclusion too,' the lord general agreed.

  'This could be the break we've been looking for,' I went on. 'If Maiden can examine a site uncontaminated by battle damage, he might be able to determine precisely what the heretics are up to.'

  'He might,' Zyvan agreed. 'If Colonel Asmar and Commissar Beije hadn't taken it upon themselves to destroy the site before he had the chance.'

  'It was the only thing to be done,' Asmar insisted. 'Is it not written in the Meditations of the Saints that the shrines of the unholy must be cleansed with the fires of the righteous?'

  'And is it not written in the manual of common sense that trashing an enemy installation you've had the luck to capture intact before it can be properly examined for useful intelligence is the act of a cretin?' I responded, unable to credit that anyone, even Beije, could have been quite so stupid.

  Asmar flushed angrily. 'I know my duty to the Emperor. When I stand before the Golden Throne to meet his judgement, my conscience will be clear.'

  'Wonderful,' I said. 'I'm delighted for you.' I returned my attention to Zyvan. 'So in sum, all we know about the enemy's activities on the hot-side is that they were definitely there.'

  The lord general nodded. 'That's about it,' he agreed.

&nb
sp; 'Where is ''there'', exactly?' Kasteen asked.

  By way of an answer, Zyvan leaned forward to manipulate some controls we couldn't see, and Asmar's face was replaced by a rotating view of the planet from orbit. A single contact rune marked the position of the heretic shrine, which, on this reduced scale, seemed to be on exactly the opposite side of the planet from Glacier Peak. She nodded. 'Hm. That's interesting.'

  'What is?' Zyvan asked.

  'It's probably just coincidence, but they form a triangle. Look.' She pointed out Skitterfall, where the other shrine had been. Sure enough, the planetary capital was equidistant between the two points.

  'There's no such thing as coincidence where sorcery's concerned,' I said. 'It must be significant somehow.'

  'Only if you draw the line from us to the Tallarns directly through the core of the planet,' Broklaw pointed out. 'Would that make a difference?'

  'Emperor alone knows,' Zyvan said. 'We're dealing with warpcraft, so little details like a planet being in the way might not matter to them. I'll talk to Maiden and the others, see what they think.' He nodded thoughtfully. 'Well spotted, colonel.'

  He seemed on the verge of cutting the link, so I stepped in quickly.

  'One other thing,' I said. 'Any word from the fleet yet?'

  Zyvan shook his head. 'The warp's still too churned up for the astropaths to get a message through. When or if they arrive is in the lap of the Emperor.'

  'About what I expected,' I said. He cut the link. Kasteen, Broklaw and I looked at each other in silence. After a moment, the major put what we were all thinking into words.