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

  And we weren't to be left waiting long. Within moments I heard the shriek of their engines, even through the thick armoured hull of the Chimera, a sound which was shortly to be terminated by the ice-shaking impact of their landing. One shuttle at least would not be returning to the vermin-laden vessel whence it came, as it had the misfortune to fly in directly over the heads of third platoon, who welcomed it as warmly as one might expect with the combined firepower of their heavy weapons and Chimera-mounted bolters.

  'It's down and burning,' Lieutenant Roxwell reported, unable to keep a note of satisfaction from his voice, and under the circumstances I could scarcely reprove him for that. Even before I could give the order, he began moving his squads in to mop up the survivors, of which there were to prove far too many for comfort. Like the ones who had attacked us before, they fought like men possessed, heedless of their own safety or sound tactical doctrine. The fight became bloody, but their overconfidence was our strongest weapon, save for our faith in the Emperor of course, and it wasn't long before our superior competence and fighting spirit began to tell.

  The second shuttle landed over two kilometres away, near the mine workings, but we had anticipated that, and first platoon were waiting for them, ready to give them the bloody nose all who dare to raise arms against the Emperor so richly deserve and invariably receive. Nonetheless, their charge was ferocious and our line buckled in places, allowing them to break through into the town itself before fourth platoon could move up to reinforce the gallant warriors of first.

  Thus it was we found ourselves faced with two hordes of fanatics rampaging through Glacier Peak from opposite directions, firing indiscriminately at Guard troopers, praetor riot squads and unarmed civilians alike. Indeed, some even seemed to prefer the slaughter of innocent victims to facing our guns, cowards that they were.

  The time was right for a bold initiative, and I ordered my unengaged units to consolidate around my command vehicle in the town square, where the twin thrusts of the enemy could be met simultaneously and held apart. For were they to meet and converge, the combined horde would undoubtedly have been able to wreak far more damage than either had managed alone. In this we were aided by two circumstances no one could have readily anticipated; the single-mindedness of the invaders, which allowed first and third platoons to wrap around their flanks and harass them all the way in, and the unexpected intervention of the underground cult we had spent so much time and effort attempting to expunge since our arrival on Adumbria.

  It may be recalled that, as Commissar Cain was the first to point out, the invaders and the insurgents we had been engaging prior to their arrival appeared to owe their allegiance to rival Chaos Powers, and this was to be confirmed in the most unexpected fashion, as motley groups of armed civilians appeared in the streets to harass the invaders. I'm pleased to report that our women and men made no distinction between them, gunning down this breed of heretic whenever they appeared as eagerly as they did the crimson-uniformed foot soldiers of the traitor infantry, but the insurgents never retaliated in kind, concentrating all their efforts on killing the minions of their hated rivals even as they fell to the cleansing las bolts of the Guard. For my part, it must be said, I was considerably taken aback by their fixity of purpose, finding in it proof of the insanity which must surely be the state of mind of all who turn their gaze from the Emperor's fight. Nevertheless, they served a noble purpose, however base and corrupt their souls, for their intervention must surely have hastened the inevitable victory of the heroes I had the privilege to lead.

  At the risk of appearing immodest, I have to say that my strategy worked: both arms of the invasion force met our solid centre and were successfully repulsed. Unable to break through, they were easily surrounded by the pursuing elements of first and third platoons, who used the superior mobility afforded by their Chimeras to good effect, and were utterly annihilated in gratifyingly short order.

  It was, it must be admitted, our great good fortune that all the invaders who attacked Glacier Peak were on foot, since many of their other units were equipped with vehicles of their own. Indeed, the group which assaulted our base was supported by a battle tank, which Commissar Cain disabled single-handedly during his inspirational marshalling of our forces there, and the main force which landed west of the town, to be met by the bulk of our own troops, had a couple of tanks and a handful of armoured transports. These were disabled in pretty short order by fourth and fifth company, who had concealed their heavy weapons teams in ambush prior to the traitors' landing, and their victory, I'm gratified to report, was no less complete than ours, despite the greater numbers involved on both sides.

  SIXTEEN

  'Life's a journey. Shame about the destination.'

  - Argun Slyter, ''Well, What Did You Expect? '', Act 2 Scene 2

  SUCH WAS MY relief at our deliverance from imminent destruction that for a moment or two I did little more than catch my breath, slumping to the cold metal floor of the cargo bay as the surge of skyward acceleration continued. I had precious little time to reflect on it, however, since my comm-bead was full of voices demanding to know what in the warp was going on.

  'We're aboard the dropship,' I told Kasteen as quickly as I could, conscious that my short-range personal vox wouldn't be able to stay in contact with her for very long. 'It was the only way to keep it safe.' And myself, of course, which I must admit had been my main priority.

  'Better stay airborne,' she advised. 'Things are still a bit hot around here.' As we were later to discover, the battle below us was almost over, but at the time no one had the benefit of hindsight, and discretion seemed the most prudent course of action. The dropship and the troopers it contained were a vital part of Zyvan's defensive strategy, and losing it now after it had escaped destruction so narrowly would have been embarrassing, to say the least.

  That was advice I was happy to follow, you can be sure, the traitors having neglected to bring any aerospace support, so everything in the sky apart from their landing craft belonged to us; a fact which the PDF fighter pilots appreciated no end, enjoying themselves hugely at the expense of the lumbering shuttles. Predictably they ran out of targets before very long, and reverted to strafing the traitors on the ground with scarcely less enthusiasm.

  'That might be best,' I conceded, with as much reluctance as I could feign.

  'Although I must admit it rankles a bit to be sitting on the sidelines while you do all the work.'

  Kasteen laughed. 'I'm sure the lord general will find something to keep you busy before long.'

  The pleasantry punctured my happy mood, you can be sure of that; up until then I'd been too concerned with feeling relieved at having escaped the worst of the fighting to think any further ahead, but of course she was right. Any time now we'd be on our way to a war zone. Oh well, there was no point in fretting about it, I'd just have to take things as they came, just as I always did, and trust to my well-honed survival instinct once we got there.

  The pilot was still yammering away on another channel, demanding to know precisely what was going on, so I responded to him next, if only to shut him up.

  'Stay in a holding pattern for now,' I said. 'I'm on my way up to the flight deck to brief you.' Not that I needed to see him in person, of course, but it was damned uncomfortable in the cargo hold, and I had to retune my comm-bead to use the ship's vox as a relay instead of the rapidly-receding set in the regimental HQ. Besides, it made him feel important, which is always a good way to get what you want out of people.

  As I might have predicted, my presence aboard made a considerable impression on the troopers we passed as Jurgen and I made our way through the passenger compartments. The news rippled ahead of us, so that by the time we arrived at Detoi's command group, seated next to the flight deck as they had been on our eventful descent from the Emperor's Benificence, the captain was smiling in our direction.

  'I thought you might not be able to resist tagging along,' he said, jumping to the conclusion which my reputation t
ended to encourage. 'So I saved you a seat.' And indeed the ones Jurgen and I had occupied when we first arrived on Adumbria were still vacant. (Which isn't as surprising as it sounds. The dropships were designed to carry a full company, which in some regiments can mean six platoons instead of the five the 597th habitually fielded, at least during my time with them, and our platoons normally consisted of five squads instead of the six theoretically allowed for by the SO&E).[90]

  'Very kind of you,' I responded with a carefully composed smile, and deposited Jurgen in one of the vacant chairs.

  'So where are we going?' Detoi asked. He looked surprisingly fit, considering, but I suppose the prospect of action had perked him up. That, or the realisation that Sulla was out of his hair for good.

  'Not entirely sure,' I admitted. 'I'm on my way to talk to the pilot now.'

  The flight deck was cramped, of course, which was why I'd decided to leave Jurgen outside. Apart from the fact that I had no desire to be fending his elbow or the barrel of the melta away from my ribs every five minutes, being in a confined space with him was trying enough at the best of times, and I was used to it; for all I knew the pilot might be sufficiently distracted to plough us into a mountain or something.

  'Commissar.' He glanced up from the polished wooden panel, inlaid with winking runes of inordinate complexity, and adjusted a large brass handle which I took to have something to do with our altitude as I felt the deck shift subtly under my feet as he did so. 'What's going on?'

  I filled him in, while one of the tech-priests sitting at lateral panels of their own made the necessary adjustments to my comm-bead. (The other kept up the constant round of prayers and incantations apparently necessary to keep the engines functioning smoothly.) When I finished my account, resisting the urge to embroider it as I knew from long experience that a plain tale, plainly told, impresses people more than any amount of heroic posturing, the pilot nodded.

  'Lucky you were there,' he said. 'A shell through the cargo hatch would have finished us all for sure.' He shrugged, dismissing the thought. 'I still need a destination, though.'

  'Better maintain the holding pattern,' I said, playing for time. There were precious few significant targets on the coldside, which meant we were as far from combat as possible under the circumstances, and I wanted to prolong that happy state of affairs for as long as I could. 'I'd hate to inconvenience the lord general by sending us off on a wild pterasquirrel chase.'

  It was at that point, of course, that fate chose to intervene. I'd no sooner tucked my comm-bead back in my ear than a vaguely familiar voice began trying to raise me.

  'Cain,' I responded, still trying to place it.

  'Commissar. Glad to hear you're still in one piece.' The voice was drowned out for a moment by what sounded like an explosion. 'Sorry about that. They're trying to get across the bridge by the starport.' There was a short rattle of bolter fire. 'Of all the choke points in Skitterfall I have to end up back here. Ironic or what?'

  'Kolbe,' I said, placing the young praetor at last. 'What can I do for you?'

  'I thought it was the other way round. Excuse me a minute…' He was interrupted by a burst of incoherent screaming which sounded like the warcry of a Khornate fanatic and which terminated abruptly in a thud of a power maul on full charge and a gurgle which sounded distinctly unhealthy. 'Well he's not getting mine… Sorry commissar, where were we?'

  'You seem to have some kind of message for me,' I prompted.

  'Oh yes. Arbitrator Hekwyn said you wanted to be appraised of anything unusual around the equatorial sea. I had a quick skim through the reports, but there's nothing you wouldn't expect, given the current state of emergency. I was just starting on the maritime stuff when we were mobilised to back up the PDF here.'

  'What maritime stuff?' I asked, a faint tingle of apprehension beginning to work its way up my spine. My palms were beginning to itch again too, always a bad sign.

  'There's quite a lot of shipping on both seas,' Kolbe said, sounding surprised.

  'Didn't you know?'

  It hadn't occurred to me, being a hive boy born and bred; I'd just assumed the seas were large areas of open water, of no real use to anyone, and dismissed them as dead ground. But of course as they both stretched between the hotside and the coldside going around them, particularly the equatorial one just opposite Skitterfall would be more trouble than it was worth, and bulky cargoes wouldn't travel by air or suborbital. In short, the Adumbrians needed ships, and that meant the sorcerers could get to where they needed to be to complete their plans without any trouble at all.

  'Can you transfer the maritime datafiles?' I asked, sprinting back into the passenger compartment and snatching a slate from a startled Detoi. Fortunately, young Kolbe wasn't too busy splatting heretics to transmit the information, and it began to scroll across the screen with startling rapidity.

  'What are we looking for?' the captain asked.

  'Anything anomalous.' I shot him a rueful smile. 'Not a lot of help, I know.'

  'If it's there we'll find it,' Detoi promised, and started working through the list with the aid of his subaltern. I hurried back to the flight deck and tapped the shoulder of the cogboy who'd adjusted my comm-bead.

  'I need a channel to the lord general's office,' I told him. To my pleased surprise he didn't argue, inputting the priority codes I'd given him as though it were a purely routine operation.

  'Ciaphas.' Zyvan greeted me with the faintly abstracted air of a man who's really hoping that you haven't got bad news for him because he's got enough of that to deal with already. 'I hear you've hijacked one of my dropships.'

  'It's a long story,' I told him. 'But I think we might need it. There are ships in the equatorial sea. The sorcerers could use one to get right where they needed to be in order to complete the ritual pattern.'

  'Believe it or not that had occurred to us,' Zyvan said. 'But Maiden said it wouldn't work. There needs to be some physical connection with the solid surface of the planet. It's a psyker thing.' His voice took on a tinge of amusement. 'I'm afraid you're whistling up the wrong fungal pod this time.'

  'If you say so,' I said, far from convinced. The pattern was far too neat and I trusted my paranoia; it had kept me alive this long after all.

  Zyvan's voice took on a harder edge. 'I do. Our immediate priority has to be the defence of the capital. I'm bringing in you, the Tallarn and the Kastaforean rapid reaction companies, and dispatching a tank squadron from the 425th Armoured. If you can deploy behind the invaders and cut them off we can put an end to this.'

  'Until the Slaaneshi raise their daemon again and finish doing whatever the hell they're doing to the warp currents,' I said. I still had no idea what that might be, which was probably just as well, but I was pretty sure that would be the end for all of us in any case. 'I can't believe you're just going to ignore the possibility.'

  'Of course I'm not going to ignore it.' An edge of frustration was entering the lord general's voice. 'But we've still got nothing to go on. Once we do, we'll take them down. But I'm a soldier, not a bloody inquisitor. I can only fight the enemies I can see!'

  I couldn't really argue about that. After all, it was his army, and we were visibly up to our armpits in Khornate loonies. And after all those weeks of trying to uncover hidden enemies, he probably wasn't the only one to feel something of a sense of relief at finally having a target to shoot at.

  'Transmit the coordinates,' I said. 'Our pilot will lay in the course.'

  I returned to my seat surprisingly troubled. On the one hand, the assignment seemed easy enough, and I've never had any problem about shooting enemies in the back. In fact, I prefer it: it's safer. But I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that the real danger lay elsewhere and if we didn't seize the initiative soon we'd never get the chance.

  'What's a mineral dredger?' Detoi asked, looking up from his data-slate, still ploughing through the reports I'd inflicted on him.

  'Haven't a clue,' I told him. 'We don't get them in the hives
, that's for sure.'

  'Or on iceworlds,' the captain said. He busied himself for a moment, calling up the briefing files on local customs and culture I hadn't been able to summon any interest in reading aboard the troopship. 'Oh, that's interesting. They're floating manufactoria, which scoop up mineral deposits from the floor of the ocean and process them on the spot. Apparently they can do that here because the seas are so shallow.'

  'Physical contact with the solid surface of the planet,' I said, a chill of nameless dread working its way unpleasantly up my spine.

  Detoi nodded. 'I suppose so, technically speaking…' his voice trailed off as he noted my expression.

  'What drew your attention to the dredgers?' I asked as evenly as I could.

  The Arbites logged a mayday from one, about the time the invasion started. Under the circumstances they didn't have time to follow it up.'

  'Show me,' I said.

  The transmission had been short and abruptly curtailed, but whoever had been on the other end of the vox had just had time to mention pirates before they'd been cut off. I pointed to the transcript. 'See that? Pirates. Not soldiers, not invaders. Someone either boarded them, or there was a mutiny among the crew.'

  'I see.' Detoi nodded slowly. 'Sounds more like the cultists we were fighting before.' Then he shrugged. 'Unless it really was pirates, just out to loot the place.'

  'Not the sort of thing that happens on Adumbria,' I pointed out. 'Where would they go to sell the ore? There's only one starport, and that's locked tight at the best of times.' I found the co-ordinates from which the mayday had been sent, and the palms of my hands tingled more strongly than ever. They were almost exactly on the opposite side of the planet from Skitterfall. Precisely where Maiden had said the final ritual would have to take place if the sorcerers were to succeed in their heinous plans.