[Caiphas Cain 03] The Traitor's hand Page 5

  'Try not to shoot the praetor,' I added. If he had any pertinent information he might as well share it.

  By this time he'd drawn close enough to be clearly seen, and his pursuers were beginning to come into focus as well. There seemed to be about a dozen, a motley collection of groundcars and light cargo haulers for the most part, and I began to relax, sure of our ability to take them. Not only did we have them comfortably outnumbered, we had overwhelming superiority of firepower on our side to boot.

  'Fire at will,' I ordered, and opened up with the bolter at the line of vehicles beyond the praetor. The others followed suit with enthusiasm and a fusillade of lasbolts arced off into the semi-darkness, glowing brightly as they went. A second later the full-throated roar of the auto-cannon joined them as Jurgen clambered up beside me to trigger it.

  The results were most gratifying, the leading vehicles in the fast-moving convoy breaking and scattering, one of them leaking smoke. The range was still extreme, of course, so we were lucky to hit anything, but these were civilian vehicles rather than the armoured targets we usually shot at, so even a glancing blow would be enough to put them out of commission.

  'That'll give them something to think about,' Sulla said with some satisfaction, as the praetor slid to a halt next to us, his face white. I looked down at him and introduced myself.

  'I'm Commissar Cain, attached to the 597th Valhallan,' I said, trying to look as friendly as I could. 'If you have any information about what's going on I'd be pleased to hear it.'

  'Kolbe, traffic division.' The praetor pulled himself together with a visible effort.

  'There's a major disturbance going on down by the star-port, some gang fight we think. Our riot squads are responding, but…'

  'It's worse than that,' I told him. 'Heretic insurgents have attacked a Guard unit. But it's all under control.'

  I hoped it was anyway. There seemed to be a lot more activity at the other end of the bridge than I'd anticipated, and with a shiver of apprehension I realised that each of the groundcars which had been pursuing Kolbe contained several people.

  It was hard to be sure at this distance, especially in the twilight, but they seemed to be dressed for some kind of carnival. I revised my initial estimate of their strength upwards, trebling it at least. Sporadic return fire began, wildly inaccurate for the most part, but a las-bolt struck the armour plate protecting our crew compartment. I ducked reflexively, dragging Kolbe into more solid cover. 'Jurgen, if you would…'

  The autocannon roared again, to be joined by the heavy bolters of the two Chimeras. This gave the heretics facing us serious pause for thought and they scurried for cover with gratifying speed. Gratifying, but worrying. This wasn't the sort of behaviour I'd expected from confederates of the Ravagers, who if my guess about their patron power was right, should have been charging forward obligingly ready to be cut down by our massed firepower.

  'We've got them,' Detoi reported suddenly, his voice loud in my comm-bead.

  'Complete surprise on both streets. The Tallarns are mopping up the survivors.'

  'Good.' That was something at any rate, even though I was aware of the irony; if I'd gone in with the main attack I'd have been safe by now. There was no time for regrets, though, as the heretics seemed to be recovering a bit of courage, and some rather more purposeful fire began to pepper our armour plate, Jurgen responded enthusiastically and it was a second or two before I could reply. 'We're meeting a little resistance out here on the flank.'

  'No problem, commissar,' Sulla cut in. 'I'm bringing first and third squads round to flank them.' I was relieved to hear it, if we could keep our assailants pinned just a little while longer we'd have them bottled up nicely.

  It was at that point that Kolbe spun round, a bloody crater opening in his chest, and I turned to see a bizarre figure aiming a laspistol into the open crew compartment of the Salamander. It was a young man, the cut of his clothes leaving very little doubt about that. He was swathed in silks of a vivid pink which did nothing for his colouring. He was flanked by a similarly armed young woman with dyed green hair, whose costume seemed to consist of little more than leather straps (and damn few of those), and an elderly gent in a crimson gown clutching a stubber, whose pomade verged on chemical warfare. Other shadowy figures were in the gloom beyond them, clambering up from below the bridge.

  'We've been flanked ourselves!' I yelled, swinging the bolter around, but by now they were too close and I couldn't depress the barrel far enough. I dived to one side just as the trio opened fire, but fortunately they lacked any real idea of how to handle a weapon and their shots went wild. I hit the rockcrete of the roadway, rolled by instinct, and came to my feet drawing my trusty chainsword. That might seem a bad choice against guns, but under the circumstances I thought it best. From such a close range I'd have little chance of aiming my laspistol on the fly, and the more I closed the distance the less likely my opponents would be able to either.

  By sheer chance I was close enough to bring the blade up, already thumbing the activator as I gained my feet, and took the girl's left leg off at the thigh. She fell, fountaining arterial blood, and giggled. No time to worry about that, people do strange things in extremis after all, and I already had another target - pink boy was aiming his pistol at Jurgen, who had given up on the autocannon and was beginning to bring his standard issue lasgun up to fire from the hip. He wasn't going to make it in time, so I gave him the extra second he needed by lopping his would-be killer's hand off at the wrist, letting the gun fall harmlessly to the ground.

  'Oh, yes!' The man was clearly deranged, an expression of ecstasy spasming across his face. 'Again!' Then his head exploded as Jurgen found his aim.

  'No! It's my turn!' Greenhair called, slipping in the pool of her own blood as she scrabbled towards me. She raised her laspistol, but before she could pull the trigger the pomade bomb stepped in between us, raising the stubber.

  'Age before beauty, my love.'

  'Frak this. You're all insane!' I kicked him in the stomach, sending him sprawling back over the girl, and drew my laspistol with my other hand. A quick burst of rapid fire saw to both of them, and I turned, expecting to see a full battle raging, but it had all gone quiet again. Roughly a score of bizarrely-dressed corpses lay on the rockcrete, most of them bearing the telltale cauterised craters of lasgun wounds. Sporadic firing from the other end of the bridge and the familiar growl of Chimera engines were enough to tell me that first and third squads had arrived and were enthusiastically engaged in mopping up the rest of our assailants.

  'How's Kolbe?' I asked, after making sure none of our troopers were down.

  The squad medic glanced up at me, her expression impatient, and went back to tending him. 'He'll live. His armour took most of it.'

  'Good. We'll need to debrief him.' I glanced at the scattered corpses around us. 'I don't suppose there'll be many of these frakheads left to interrogate.' As if to underline the point, the firing at the other end of the bridge suddenly ceased, and Sulla gave me a cheerful thumbs up.

  'All clear,' she reported. 'No casualties.'

  'Good.' I was just beginning to relax again when I became aware of a faint rumbling in the rockcrete beneath my feet. I glanced up, back down the highway, and saw a dozen more Chimeras approaching at speed. 'Now what?'

  The lead vehicle slowed as it approached and a familiar figure appeared at the top hatch, waving us imperiously out of the way.

  'Clear the road.' Beije yelled. 'Our colonel's under attack.'

  'Already taken care of,' I told him, stepping out of the shadow of the Salamander so he could get a good look at me and I could savour the expression of pop-eyed astonishment that spread across his face. 'Check your command channel.' He listened to his comm-bead for a moment, his jaw clenching. I smiled.

  'No need to thank us,' I added.

  Editorial Note:

  Given Cain's usual disinterest in the intricacies of the political situation then prevailing on Adumfiria, or indeed anything, e
lse which didn't concern him directly, I felt the following would prove helpful in placing much of what follows into some kind of context.

  Unlike most popular histories of this kind, it's substantially accurate, the author having been given access to as many of the official records as were deemed fit for public consumption as part of the planet-wide commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of these events, and having taken the time and trouble to interview as many of the surviving participants as he reasonably could.

  From Sablist[21] in Skitterfall: a brief history of the Chaos incursion by Dagblat Tincrowser, 957.M41

  THE DEATH OF Governor Tarkus on 245.936.M41 could hardly have come at a worse time, expiring as he did little more than a year before the Great Enemy made their move against us. Indeed it has been suggested by many commentators that this was too fortuitous to have been entirely coincidental, and much time and ink has been expended on fruitless speculation about whether a conspiracy actually existed to assassinate him, who the participants might have been and why no evidence of who to blame has been uncovered in the two decades since. This last fact, in particular, has been seized on by the more rabid of the conspiracy theorists as a kind of proof in itself of their wilder speculations, since they seem to believe that the complete absence of anything concrete to confirm their suspicions merely proves the efficiency of the ensuing cover-up.[22] Confining ourselves to the incontrovertible, therefore, we should merely note that Governor Tarkus died of what at the time were recorded as natural causes entirely consistent with a man of his advanced years who had a wife and two known mistresses all over a century younger than he was, and move discreetly along.

  In most cases of this nature, the succession of his heir would have been a mere formality. Unfortunately, Tarkus died without having provided one, provoking a discreet but ferocious free-for-all among the noble houses of Adumbria, a situation exacerbated by the fact that, thanks to almost two centuries of energetic fornication by the erstwhile incumbent, all were able to present candidates with some plausible claim to being related by blood.

  In order to prevent the day-to-day business of running the world from grinding to a halt entirely, a compromise of sorts was eventually reached: the highest-ranking member of the Administratum on Adumbria was appointed Planetary Regent, with wide-ranging executive powers, pending the eventual resolution of the welter of claims and counterclaims to the vacant throne. Since the Administratum were doing most of the actual work, this left the situation pretty much as it had been, except that the Regent was expected to refer for approval all matters of policy to an ad-hoc committee made up of all the rival claimants before taking a final decision. Since few of them could be persuaded to agree on anything and most disliked each other intensely, it will be readily appreciated that achieving anything significant became virtually impossible.

  And into this quagmire of inertia came the news that a Chaos raiding fleet was about to attack the planet, followed shortly be the arrival of five regiments of Imperial Guard and a squadron of warships.

  It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that panic ensued.

  FOUR

  'If you don't expect gratitude you'll seldom be disappointed.'

  - Eyor Dedonki, Memoirs of a Pessimist 479.M41

  'THERE'S NO DOUBT about it,' Lord General Zyvan said, pausing for emphasis and sweeping his gaze around the council chamber. 'The threat to your world is even greater than we feared.' The assembled great and good of Adumbria, or to be more precise the rich and powerful, which in my experience is less often the same than it ought to be in a fair and just galaxy, reacted pretty much as I'd expected. Some looked as though they'd developed severe indigestion, some went pale and the majority just stared at him with the same expression of bovine incomprehension which I'd seen so often before in people so used to sycophancy that they simply lacked the intellectual capacity to take in bad news delivered in plain language. There were about a dozen of them, all drawn from the local aristocracy so far as I could tell, although what qualification they had other than that to be there was beyond me; the lack of a chin, perhaps.[23]

  The only exception was the man chairing the meeting, who had been introduced as the planetary regent; that was a new one to me, but I heard enough to gather that he was in effect the acting governor of this Emperor-forsaken backwater, so I smiled affably at him when he caught my eye. He smiled back and nodded, so either he was a lot less stuck-up than the collection of aristocratic by-blows surrounding us or he was aware of my reputation. Surprisingly, he was wearing the gown of some high-ranking bureaucrat, but at least that meant he had some idea of how things actually worked, so I resolved to keep an eye on him. His name, I gathered, was Vinzand, and being handed the job had come as something of an unpleasant surprise to him, which I found comforting, as in my experience the last people who should be given any real power are the ones who actually want it.

  'You're referring to the attack on your soldiers, of course.' He nodded, smoothing back the white hair which still hung thickly around his face and hitching up the arms of his crimson robe, which seemed to be a couple of sizes too big for him. I was incongruously reminded of Jurgen and suppressed a smile, which seemed wholly inappropriate under the circumstances. 'I trust the wounded are recovering well.'

  'Fine, thank you,' Colonel Asmar said, scowling at me. I had no idea why he should be so sniffy about having his bacon saved, other than that he might have been embarrassed by feeling beholden to another regiment, but that was just stupid. Under the opposite circumstances we'd have welcomed the assistance, and if he'd rather have ended up as traitor bait, more fool him. It went deeper than that, of course, but at the time I didn't have a clue what was biting him.

  'Commissar Cain's timely intervention undoubtedly turned the tide,' Zyvan said, to my great satisfaction, and Kasteen grinned at me. We were seated together with the other regimental colonels and their commissars at a long table along one side of the council chamber, leaving Zyvan and his staff to take the place of honour on a small stage in front of the delegates, who all sat behind data lecterns like a bunch of overgrown and overdressed schola students. The other Valhallans were next to us, of course, on our right, then the two Kastaforean regiments, with Asmar and Beije at the other end, as far away from Kasteen and I as they could possibly get. This suited me fine, as it happens.

  Vinzand was sitting almost opposite us, where he could watch the lord general and his own aristocratic parasites with equal attention, surrounded by low-ranking Administratum drones who seemed to be taking copious notes of everything said and done. The only other person there who seemed to stand out was a lean looking fellow in military attire, a plain grey uniform unornamented by anything other than rank pins I was too far away to read, who watched everything with pale eyes of a similar hue to his clothing.

  'There have been protests from the Order of the Imperial Light,' Vinzand said mildly, 'concerning damage to the fabric of their property and the loss of a great many squinches.'

  Having tasted the things at almost every meal since our arrival, I felt that to be no great loss, but tried to look as if I cared. 'Please feel free to convey my strongest regrets to them,' I said. 'But under the circumstances I felt I had no other choice.'

  'No other choice?' Beije bristled at me, his face purpling. 'You desecrated a holy shrine! What in the Emperor's name were you thinking?'

  'I was thinking that your colonel and his men were about to be butchered by heretics,' I said. 'How could a loyal servant of his divine majesty stand back and let that happen?'

  'We would rather have perished than have our survival bought at the price of blasphemy,' Asmar said, his voice censorious.

  I fought down a flash of disbelieving anger. 'We'll know better next time,' I said as blandly as I could, and had the quiet satisfaction of seeing his jaw clench at the same time as Zyvan suppressed a grin.

  'Our sappers are already over there repairing the damage,' Kasteen put in helpfully, not wanting to miss the chance of giving
Asmar another poke in the ribs while she could. 'Perhaps you could spare a few of yours to help them?'

  'We have little time for fortifications,' Asmar said, 'other than the citadel of our faith in the Emperor. We do not trifle ourselves with mere physical barriers.'

  'Fair enough.' Kasteen shrugged. 'We'll get the priests to bless a few of the bricks in your name if you like.' Her face was so straight even I wasn't sure if she was joking for a moment, and after glaring suspiciously for a second or two Asmar nodded.

  'That would be acceptable.'

  'Good.' Zyvan nodded. 'Then if we could get back to the main point, it seems we could be facing a war on two fronts. As the raiding fleet approaches, we can expect more attacks from their confederates aimed at hindering our ability to respond.'

  'How great a threat are these insurgents?' Vinzand asked.

  By way of reply Zyvan gestured towards me. 'Commissar Cain is probably the best man to answer that. He's fought more of the agents of the Ruinous Powers at close quarters than anyone else in my command.'

  I stood, shrugging laconically. 'I've had help,' I said, playing up to my reputation for modest heroism and enjoying the ripple of amusement which swept through the room. 'Usually from an army. Nevertheless, I suppose it's true I've seen heretics and their machinations more often than most.' I stepped out from behind the table so that the gormless aristos could see me properly. Most of them looked agog at the prospect of a briefing from a Hero of the Imperium.

  'Then I'm sure your observations will prove most enlightening,' Vinzand said in a tone of voice which didn't need to add ''so stop playing to the back row and get on with it''. I began to suspect that there was more to the regent than just a fancy title.

  'By all means.' I nodded. 'Chaos cults are insidious, and they can spring up practically anywhere, sucking in the basest and most degenerate specimens of humanity. Their greatest threat, however, is that as they grow they bring in more recruits who may remain unaware at first of precisely what it is they're joining; they may think it's a street gang, a political movement, or a social club for those with a particular kind of sexual deviancy. Only as they grow more corrupted by their patron power do they realise the full extent of what they're now a part of, and by that time the lies and illusions are too strong. They've become damned and they don't even care.'