The Last Ditch Page 3

  ‘Are you sure you’ll need both of those?’ I asked, with a nod at the weapons he carried. His lasgun was slung, as it always was, where he could grab the grip and squeeze the trigger in a heartbeat, while the melta he’d acquired on Gravalax hung across his back, to minimise the amount of time he’d spend getting the clumsy weapon hung up on low ceiling fixtures and the kind of narrow doorways which tended to be all too common on vessels of this type.

  Jurgen shrugged. ‘Our kit’s packed up ready for loading,’ he pointed out reasonably. ‘I didn’t have anywhere else to put it.’ Meaning the melta, of course; like any Guardsman, or Guardswoman for that matter, he’d as soon be parted from his right arm as from his lasgun.

  ‘Fair enough,’ I agreed. After all, I was carrying a pair of weapons myself, although rather more discreetly; my chainsword and laspistol were as much a part of my uniform as my sash and my cap, and I’d have felt distinctly undressed without either.

  Perhaps because of the amount of firepower we were carrying, the crew members we passed in the corridors seemed reluctant to engage us in conversation, even after we’d gone some considerable distance from the areas of the ship in which we’d been billeted. I’d been aboard enough starships to have some idea of where the bridge was, however, so we had no need to ask directions; which was probably just as well, as most of the people we encountered seemed too engrossed in keeping the Fires of Faith’s ramshackle systems functioning to be distracted. If any of them seemed unduly apprehensive, I put that down to the weapons my aide and I carried so openly: only with hindsight did I begin to wonder if that had indeed been the reason.

  Shipboard security was apparently as lackadaisical as the maintenance schedule, and I was just beginning to think we would get all the way to the bridge unchallenged, before our way was finally barred.

  ‘Crew only,’ an officious woman snapped at us, popping out of a nearby doorway, presumably in response to the clattering of our boot-heels on the misaligned deckplates beneath our feet. Her jacket had a bit of fraying braid on one sleeve, so she may have been an officer or somesuch in the vessel’s internal hierarchy, or perhaps it had just been there when she acquired it. In either event, she regarded us in a supercilious fashion, as though our instant deferral to whatever authority she imagined she had was a foregone conclusion.

  ‘Transit observation detail,’ I replied, in a tone which remained just on the right side of politeness, even if it was lobbing rocks across the gap. ‘Captain Mires should be expecting us.’

  ‘He never said nothing to me,’ the woman said, scowling. My aide smiled, in what he fondly imagined was a reassuring manner, and our would-be obstructor blenched. ‘Down there,’ she said, pointing. ‘Big door, with “Frak off, this means you” on it.’

  ‘Thank you, miss,’ Jurgen said, determined to be on his best behaviour.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ the woman said reflexively, clearly astonished at the discovery he could speak, and now even more disconcerted if that were possible. ‘Just got to go and...’ she made an indeterminate hand gesture, ‘you know, adjust the um, whatsits.’ She beat a hasty retreat back to her lair, leaving Jurgen and I to continue our progress unmolested.

  ‘Well done, Jurgen,’ I said. ‘Very diplomatic.’

  ‘This must be it,’ my aide said, as we came to a halt before a stark metal doorway, on which the welcoming message we’d been told to expect had been daubed in red paint, and in something of a hurry judging by the irregularity of the brush strokes. There was a fairly graphic picture too, presumably intended to forestall interruption by the illiterate, which looked both painful and anatomically improbable.

  I nodded, and pushed open the door, announcing our presence with a squeal of ungreased hinges.

  ‘Can’t you read?’ Mires greeted us, rising from his control throne, his beard bristling belligerently. For a moment I thought he was alone, the crew members I’d expected to see bustling about the place apparently absent, but a moment later I was able to pick out a number of hunched figures poring over the instrumentation mounted in a line of control lecterns behind him. A good many of the posts were dark and unmanned, and a couple more attended by servitors, which looked as decrepit as everything else I’d seen since we boarded. The chamber itself was as highly vaulted and echoing as most ship’s bridges I’d visited over the years, but the degree of illumination was considerably lower; like the corridors, several of the overhead luminators were broken, while others flickered in a manner which clearly indicated that their own failure was merely a matter of time.

  ‘It’s been a few minutes since the last time I did,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think I’ve lost the knack in the meantime.’ I stood aside to let Mires get the full benefit of Jurgen, noting his startled flinch with a well masked sense of satisfaction. The low light levels set off my aide’s unusual appearance to perfection, imparting a sinister aspect to the expression he fondly imagined was one of sober dignity, while the flickering glow from the large pict screen depending from the ceiling struck highlights from the weapons he carried, making them the immediate focus of everyone’s attention. ‘My aide, Gunner Jurgen. We’re here to observe the transition.’

  ‘Oh.’ Mires looked from one of us to the other. ‘Right.’ He tried to seize the initiative again, with a nervous glance in Jurgen’s direction, his fulsome facial hair not quite managing to conceal his growing discomfort at the realisation my aide was standing between him and the recirculators, wafting a steady draught of his unique bouquet in the direction of the control throne. ‘I’d forgotten about that.’

  ‘Then I’d advise you to refamiliarise yourself with the appropriate Munitorum protocols,’ I said. I hadn’t a clue what they were, any more than he did, but Mires didn’t need to know that, of course. Throne alone knew why he’d been entrusted with conveying a Guard unit into a war zone in the first place25.

  ‘Good point,’ he said, trying to sound conciliatory. He reseated himself with a fine show of brisk efficiency, breathing a little more shallowly through his nose. ‘Preparing for transit in... How long to transit, Kolyn?’

  ‘Throne knows,’ one of the bridge crew said, screwing up his eyes against the smoke rising from his lho-stick, not bothering to raise his head from the instrumentation to reply. He banged the control lectern irritably with the heel of his hand. ‘Told you we should have paid extra to have the unguents blessed.’

  ‘Is there a problem?’ I asked, feeling the palms of my hands beginning to tingle, in the manner they always did when my paranoia started kicking in ahead of any visible threat.

  ‘Course not. Everything’s fine,’ Mires assured me, a little too loudly and forcefully to be as reassuring as he’d obviously hoped.

  I shot another glance at the crewman, who thumped the console again, and looked at the flickering dials with a palpable air of relief.

  ‘That’s got it,’ he said, working the smoking stick to the corner of his mouth, and thumbing his palm for luck26. Seeing the gesture, I tapped the comm-bead in my ear.

  ‘About to transit,’ I voxed on the general command channel. ‘Better brace, it’s liable to be rough.’

  Well, I wasn’t wrong about that. Hardly had I finished speaking than the familiar sensation of nausea which always accompanied moving between the warp and the materium swept over me, leaving me gasping. Over the years, and innumerable journeys between worlds, I’d got reasonably accustomed to the discomfort, but on this occasion it felt very different; as though something had wrapped itself suffocatingly around me for a timeless instant, then suddenly torn, allowing me to breathe again. The closest comparison I could think of was the moment the Hand of Vengeance had been ripped out of the warp in the Perlia system by a cabal of orkish psykers, but at least on this occasion I’d been spared the crippling headache which had accompanied the sensation.

  ‘What the hell do you call that?’ Mires demanded, rising wrathfully to his feet, and taking a couple of steps towards the luckless Kolyn. ‘You want the cargo to think we can�
�t run our own reaming ship properly?’ Suddenly aware of what he’d just said, he glanced in my direction with a faintly apologetic air. ‘No offence meant.’

  ‘None taken,’ I assured him untruthfully. The tingling in my palms was intensifying, although at first I could see nothing to account for the unease which refused to loosen its grip on me. The pict screen was showing the stars again, instead of scrolling runes, so we’d emerged from the warp, at least; I presumed one of the pinpricks of light was the sun we were now orbiting, far out on the fringes of its gravitational influence, but at this distance it would appear no different to any of the others. Struck by the obvious thought, I searched the projected image for a sign that something inimical had followed us through, but if anything had done it was smart enough to keep out of sight of the hull mounted imagifiers.

  Failing to spot any traces of an external threat, I began to study our surroundings more closely, beginning with Mires, who was continuing to chew out his luckless subordinate with a vehemence and imaginative use of profanity which drew a nod of admiration from my aide. Entertaining as I might otherwise have found his diatribe, however, this was hardly the time to stop and appreciate his verbal dexterity. Unbidden, my hands dropped to the weapons at my belt.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Kolyn protested, finally managing to squeeze a word in as Mires paused for breath. ‘The Geller field fritzed as we came through.’

  ‘Did it fail?’ I asked urgently. I’d faced daemons before, and had no desire to do so again; the Adumbria incident was far too fresh in my memory for that.

  To my relief, Kolyn shook his head. ‘Just wobbled a bit.’ An edge of anger entered his own voice, echoing that of his captain. ‘I’ve been telling you the wards need reconsecrating for months.’

  ‘Fine.’ A thin beading of sweat had become visible on Mires’s forehead, as it started to sink in just how close his fecklessness had come to damning us all. ‘I’ll get an ecclesiarch on it as soon as we dock.’

  ‘You’d better,’ Kolyn said, in the tone of a loyal subordinate finally pushed to a decision he has no intention of being argued out of, ‘but I’m still jumping ship as soon as we dock.’ A few of his shipmates nodded, clearly bent on going with him. ‘You don’t rut around with the warp.’

  ‘You’re sure nothing could have followed us through?’ I persisted, my own instinct that something was terribly wrong refusing to accept his assurances, and the brief hesitation before he nodded did little to calm my fears.

  ‘Full status report,’ Mires said, making a belated attempt to look like a captain at last, and after a fractional pause the officers around him began to comply, some grudgingly, a few with the brittle eagerness of subordinates noting a sudden unexpected vacancy in the command chain.

  ‘There,’ Mires said, as the last of them finished their litanies of gibberish, ‘nothing to worry about. Everything’s fine.’

  ‘What about the rest of the stations?’ I asked. ‘No one’s watching those.’

  ‘Because they’re not important,’ Mires said, gesturing irritably at the nearest servitor, which had continued to twiddle knobs and poke levers with single-minded diligence throughout the little drama unfolding on the bridge. ‘Do you think I’d leave those things in charge if they were?’ He could clearly read the answer to that in my face, because he went on as though the question had been purely rhetorical, addressing the thing directly. ‘Sigma seven, report.’

  ‘All systems functioning within acceptable parameters,’ the thing droned through its built-in vox-coder, and Mires turned back to me with a ‘told you so’ smirk.

  ‘What about the other one?’ I asked, giving it my full attention for the first time. Like its fellow, it was as decrepit as one might have expected, metalwork tarnished, and the fleshly components exhibiting a distinctly unhealthy pallor. Instead of staring dumbly at the lectern in front of it, however, it seemed to be quivering, as though in the grip of an ague. I drew my weapons in an instant, and Jurgen, following my lead as always, levelled his lasgun at it.

  ‘Stop!’ Mires shouted, horrified, before either of us could pull the trigger. ‘It does that all the time. Jaren, give it a whack.’

  The nearest crewman, one of the faction with an obvious eye on Kolyn’s current job, strolled over and complied, fetching the thing a heavy blow against its reinforced cranium with a dented spanner evidently kept there for the purpose. The shuddering ceased, although the half-living construct showed no sign of returning to work. It simply stood there, its misshapen head turning slowly to scan the bridge, while Jaren hovered at its shoulder, clearly debating whether or not to repeat the operation.

  ‘Resume designated duties,’ Mires said, in the loud, slow manner required to instruct most servitors to do pretty much anything.

  ‘Input initiated,’ the vox-coder droned, while its head, having turned to the right as far as it could go, began a slow traverse in the opposite direction. I’ve never been particularly spooked by servitors, unlike some who find them deeply disturbing, but the measured, deliberate movement seemed watchful, somehow, as though the shambling assemblage of flesh and technotheology was assessing us.

  ‘What input?’ Mires demanded. He rounded on Kolyn. ‘Have you been retasking the bloody things behind my back again?’

  ‘Why would I do that?’ Kolyn snapped turning to look at the servitor with irritated bafflement. ‘Specify input.’

  ‘Input continuing,’ the machine-thing said, and Throne strike me down if I’m exaggerating, but I could swear I heard a glimmer of expression in that flat mechanical voice. An echo of contempt and spiteful amusement. Ignoring Mires, and heedless of whatever he might have to say about it, I squeezed the trigger of my laspistol.

  I can’t say I’ve had to take potshots at servitors all that often in the course of my long and inglorious career, most of the things wanting to kill me having been composed of flesh and blood (or something not too dissimilar: unless you count the necrons, of course, or some of the bizzare denizens of the warp, which aren’t exactly living in any conventional sense), but I’d been faced with combat models programmed to make a mess of my uniform on more than one occasion. That experience came in handy now, guiding my aim to one of the more vulnerable points, where the neural modulator was plugged in to the base of its skull. (A system which would have been armoured on a combat model, of course, but which civilian ones left easily accessible for routine maintenance; although I doubted that those aboard the Fires of Faith would have benefited much from the arrangement.) The las-bolt hit it square on, with a satisfying shower of sparks, and a spatter of blood and lubricants.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Mires bellowed, while Jaren squealed like a startled gretchin and jumped back, gazing down in slack-jawed astonishment at the mess on his shirt.

  Instead of falling, the servitor turned to face me, its eyes alight with malign intelligence, the ruined mechanism seeming to liquefy and meld with its necrotic flesh. Power cables tore free from the lectern it manned, wrapping themselves around its limbs, while cancerous growths sprouted around and between them, absorbing the crackling flails into its body. ‘Input complete,’ it announced smugly. ‘I’ve arrived.’

  ‘Look out!’ I shouted, but it was too late: the cables snaked towards the fleeing Jaren, who jerked for a moment as the current coursed through his body, before falling insensible to the deck. Unsure whether he was still living, or merely twitching by galvanic reflex, I put my next las-bolt through his head before returning my aim to the abomination taking form in front of me: it was too late to save his life, but I might still have been in time to preserve his soul.

  Jurgen, of course, had needed no urging to open fire himself, and was directing burst after burst of las-bolts at the deformed monstrosity. Jaren’s body was being dragged towards it, still surrounded by a nimbus of crackling energy, as much witch-fire as electricity if I was any judge27; before my horrified gaze, it too began to flow, like melting wax, blood, flesh and bone going to redoubl
e the size of the biomechanical horror in front of us.

  ‘Daemon on the bridge,’ I voxed, my voice cracking with panic. ‘We need backup. Lasguns won’t stop it!’

  ‘What can we do?’ Mires asked, all bluster gone, staring at the thing in slack-jawed horror.

  ‘Run,’ I said, preparing to do the same, and wondering if I’d need to use my chainsword to get through the little knot of panic-stricken crewmen blocking the door. ‘Unless you want to be next on the menu.’

  Unsurprisingly, he didn’t, and joined the general exodus, while Jurgen and I kept peppering the abomination before us with ineffectual las-rounds to cover the civilians’ retreat. Which, as I’ve already admitted, was hardly my first choice of action; but I had a pretty good idea that the more the daemon fed, the stronger it would become, and saving Mires and his rabble from becoming warp spawn munchies would make an appreciable difference to my own chances of getting off the Fires of Faith with skin and soul intact. Besides, under the circumstances, the closer I could stick to Jurgen the better, and by great ill fortune we’d ended up furthest from the door.

  ‘Frak this,’ Jurgen said, with what seemed to me at the time to be commendable understatement, and unslung the melta. Hardly the most suitable thing to be using on the bridge of a starship, surrounded by arcane mechanisms of all kinds, but any collateral damage we might do would be a problem for later; whereas the daemon was most definitely a problem for now. I’d faced such things before, though not often, thank the Emperor28, so I knew we couldn’t kill it; but if we could inflict enough damage on the ghastly thing it would be drawn back into the warp. I closed my eyes by reflex as Jurgen pulled the trigger, and felt the backwash of heat as the glare of the discharge punched through the thin layer of skin to leave pinpricks of light dancing on my retina. Blinking them clear, I could see a few scorch marks on the metal components of the writhing abomination, but no sign of damage to its flesh, which was continuing to flow like congealing fat, twisting itself into ever more bizarre forms.