The Greater Good Read online

  Donali nodded. ‘They call themselves Facilitators. Not an exact translation of the tau phrase ku’ten vos’kla[31], but close enough. They move in after a world’s been annexed, helping what’s left of the local authorities to rebuild the infrastructure, and nudging everything towards promoting the idea of the Greater Good.’

  ‘So if Devrae’s already here, the tau must have thought Quadravidia was in the bag,’ I concluded.

  ‘Wrapped up, and ready to hand to the ethereals,’ Donali confirmed.

  ‘Which rather begs the question of why they changed their minds,’ Zyvan said.

  ‘Looks like we’re about to find out,’ I said, as a flurry of activity near the door caught my attention. A tau in an ornately decorated robe, its intricate intertwinings of multicoloured thread no doubt an indication of his status for those able to decode them, was just entering the room, surrounded by a retinue of lackeys thick enough to obscure most of him from view. Many of them clutched thin, flat devices I assumed to be data-slates, and all glanced in our direction with varying degrees of curiosity, apprehension, and disdain. None of them had anything which looked like a weapon, but I knew better than to take that at face value. ‘Our host has arrived.’

  Donali nodded. ‘Someone senior from the water caste. Not sure who, but a fast courier boat arrived in-system last night. I’m told they’ve brought the latest information with them.’

  ‘But not, I presume, what that information is,’ Zyvan said sourly.

  Donali shook his head. ‘The water caste like to keep the cards in their hands hidden for as long as they can,’ he said.

  I turned, leaning as far as I dared on my precarious seat, trying to get a better view of the half-hidden diplomat, but just as his face was about to emerge from the scrum the familiar figure and odour of Jurgen loomed up in front of me, blotting out what little I could see of the approaching delegation. ‘They’ve got tanna[32], sir,’ he said, in pleased surprise, handing me a delicately worked tea bowl brimming with the fragrant infusion. For want of anything better to do, I took it and sipped, savouring the delicate flavour[33] of the drink.

  ‘I remembered your fondness for that particular beverage,’ a tau voice told me, and I rose to my feet, extending a hand in greeting. If I’m honest, I hadn’t recognised the sound of it, all tau vocal cords mangling Gothic in pretty much the same way to my ears, but I never forget a face that’s nearly got me killed.

  ‘El’hassai,’ I said, the sixty years since I’d last seen the tau diplomat falling away like so many days the moment I got a clear sight of him. No doubt one of his own kind would have detected signs of aging, Throne knows I’d acquired more than my own share, but he looked pretty much the same to me. ‘I’m pleased to see you so well.’

  ‘And I you,’ El’hassai responded politely, shaking the proffered hand just gingerly enough to let me know he hadn’t forgotten the augmetic fingers lurking beneath my glove, before turning to Donali. ‘Erasmus. It’s been far too long a time.’

  ‘It has indeed,’ Donali said levelly, although I’d wager he was as surprised as I was to be greeted by our old sparring partner from Gravalax.

  ‘Lord General,’ El’hassai went on, not missing a beat. ‘A great pleasure to meet you at last.’

  ‘No doubt.’ Zyvan inclined his head courteously, his impatience manifest. ‘I look forward to hearing what you have to say.’ Like me, he’d spent many years cultivating a bluff, no-nonsense public face, which robbed his bluntness of any implied offence; or at least it would have to any Imperial citizen familiar with his reputation. No point in leaving anything to chance, so I stuck my oar in too, diverting the tau’s attention as quickly as possible, in case that aspect of the Lord General’s personality had somehow been omitted from the briefing slate[34].

  ‘I must confess, I’m curious too,’ I said, sipping the tanna again, with a fine show of appreciation for our host’s thoughtfulness. ‘Especially since you roped me in as your messenger boy.’

  ‘Hardly that,’ El’hassai assured me, although I wasn’t fluent enough in tau body language to tell if I was being patronised or not. From what I remembered of him, his good opinion of me was genuine enough (I’d saved his life, so it damn well ought to have been), though, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. ‘But your presence was a fortuitous coincidence we were happy to take advantage of.’

  ‘Any time,’ I assured him blandly, adding ‘but I still think they could just have picked up the bloody vox,’ sotto voce to Zyvan and Donali as the tau diplomat wandered away towards the hololith. Neither had time to reply, although Donali made an interesting choking noise in the depths of his goblet.

  ‘Thank you for your attendance,’ El’hassai said, turning to face the room, his voice cutting easily across it. The murmur of conversation died away to an expectant silence, broken only by the faint humming of the recirculators, and the rather less faint sound of Jurgen’s jaws making short shrift of the finger food on the side table. ‘No doubt our offer of a truce has been cause of a fair amount of speculation,’ at which point he glanced in the direction of the Imperial contingent in a manner which, in a human, I could only describe as arch, ‘but I’m sure you’ll agree our reasons for it are sound.’

  ‘I might, if you ever got round to telling us what they were,’ Zyvan muttered. Then his expression changed, as an image appeared in the hololith. ‘Emperor almighty!’

  ‘And all His saints,’ I added, feelingly. The image was crystal clear, almost as though the horror it depicted was present in the room with us, although if it had been the chamber would have needed to be bigger than the entire orbital. Leprous hide thicker than the armour of a battleship, pocked with ineffectual weapons fire, loomed up at us out of the depths of space, spinning below our vantage point like a biological moon. Beyond the horizon of chitin, other, massive creatures of the same monstrous ilk swam through the void, surrounded by clouds of lesser organisms too numerous to count.

  ‘A tyranid fleet,’ Zyvan said, raising his voice to address the room, although the sudden eruption of gasps, murmurs, and muttered prayers to the Emperor among the Imperial delegation made it abundantly clear that we’d all recognised it for what it was. He indicated the larger bioships. ‘Kraken and escorts.’

  ‘Mostly,’ El’hassai said, in remarkably even tones. ‘The large one in the foreground would appear to be a leviathan, although the image we have of it is only partial.’

  I stared at it, trying to take in the full scale of the horror before me, like a mountain made flesh. Or, given its environment, an asteroid might be a more apposite comparison. My mind flashed back to the burning, dying thing I’d glimpsed in the midst of the eruption on Nusquam Fundumentibus, where we’d been forced to sacrifice an entire city to kill a crippled cousin of this monstrous thing; that had seemed huge enough, and I’d seen only a fraction of its mass.

  ‘Where did this come from?’ I asked, realising as soon as I’d spoken just how many ways so imprecise a question could be misinterpreted, but El’hassai seemed to grasp my meaning well enough.

  ‘This is the last transmission from an exploration vessel, lost in the Coreward Marches[35] a little less than two cyr ago.’

  ‘About eighteen months,’ Donali murmured, for the benefit of those of us unfamiliar with the tau calendar. ‘Twenty at the most.’

  ‘And you’ve only just got it?’ I asked, trying not to sound too sceptical.

  El’hassai nodded, a gesture he seemed to have picked up from his prolonged contact with humans[36]; I remembered him doing the same thing on Gravalax. ‘The vessel launched a courier drone[37] shortly before it was destroyed,’ he said. ‘The images you’re seeing now were uploaded to it in real time.’

  I watched with horrified fascination as innumerable tiny pustules swelled up on the body of the bloated horror beneath us, then burst, spewing clouds of spinning organisms into the void. Thousands upon thousands of them, their hardened carapaces protecting them from the cold and vacuum of space, fangs and ta
lons and bioweapons poised for massacre. I’d faced innumerable horrors spawned from the tyranid hive fleets myself, but never anything so hideous as these: half warrior, half boarding pod, all implacable killing machine. Some were carrying creatures I recognised – genestealers, termagants and raveners for the most part, encysted behind semi-transparent membranes – while others seemed to be more than sufficiently lethal on their own accounts.

  ‘Why don’t they just fire the main engines?’ I asked; if I’d been the tau captain I’d be halfway to the Ghoul Stars by now.

  ‘According to the telemetry recovered, the engines were at full power by this point,’ El’hassai said soberly. ‘We conjecture that the vessel had been immobilised in some fashion; the stresses on the hull would be consistent with constricting tentacles or gripping claws.’

  Zyvan nodded. ‘Seen that a few times,’ he agreed. ‘They ram a ship, latch on, and send in the killers.’

  The onrushing swarm was filling the hololith by now, each detail more ghastly than the last, and I must confess to a feeling of relief as the image finally disappeared in a burst of static.

  ‘At this point,’ El’hassai said evenly, ‘we believe the main reactor overloaded, although there is no way to tell if this was deliberate, or how much damage the explosion inflicted on the leviathan. We may hope that it was sufficient to kill or cripple the hive ship, but in any event, many of the swarm will have survived.’

  ‘And become aware of the presence of prey,’ Zyvan said.

  ‘Precisely,’ El’hassai agreed. He did something to the projection controls and a fresh image appeared, a star map studded with familiar constellations. Little icons popped up, marking Imperial, tau, and unclaimed worlds; although it went without saying that their idea of these categories didn’t entirely coincide with ours. This was hardly the time to reopen old quarrels, though, so I refrained from saying anything, although I was pretty sure I could hear Zyvan’s teeth grinding. ‘The message drone was recovered here,’ a fresh icon appeared well within the boarders of the Tau Empire, ‘last kai’rotaa–’

  ‘About two months back,’ Donali murmured quietly.

  El’hassai continued speaking, as if unaware of the comment. ‘–and our preliminary analysis of its data places the encounter with the tyranid fleet somewhere around here,’ he concluded.

  Another icon appeared, and Zyvan shook his head in perplexity. ‘That can’t be right,’ he said. ‘The main tyranid incursions are coming in from the Rim[38].’

  ‘They have done until now,’ I said, my eye falling on the marker pinpointing Nusquam Fundumentibus. The dormant brood we’d discovered there had to have come from somewhere, and the fleet the tau had blundered into certainly seemed close enough to have sent out a scouting party several millennia ago. ‘But it wouldn’t be the first time an isolated splinter fleet popped up without warning.’

  ‘Our experience also,’ El’hassai agreed. ‘In view of the evident risk, we sent scout vessels to backtrack the message drone, and found that the tyranids have indeed altered their course.’ A line began to extend from the point where the luckless explorator crew had first encountered the hive fleet, towards the position of the drone’s recovery.

  ‘They followed it,’ I said heavily, the coin dropping. Which was hardly surprising; the tau had done pretty much everything they could to attract the ’nids short of handing them a menu and a map.

  ‘They did,’ El’hassai confirmed. Another icon flared. ‘The scout fleet encountered them here, and engaged a few of the outlying bioships before being forced to withdraw. If they continue to advance at the rate they have been, they’ll be into the border region in a matter of weeks[39].’ The line extended itself, cutting back and forth across the wavering one between the two powers.

  ‘That puts over a dozen inhabited worlds at risk,’ Zyvan said, in the tone of a man determined to get all the bad news out of the way in one go. ‘If the fleet absorbs that much biomass, it’ll become unstoppable.’

  ‘Which is why we propose putting aside our present dispute,’ El’hassai said, nodding gravely. ‘The Greater Good demands it.’

  Zyvan was nodding too, still trying to absorb the implications. ‘I believe it does,’ he agreed.

  FIVE

  After a bombshell like that, there wasn’t much to do except return to Zyvan’s flagship and work out our strategy, while the tau went into a huddle of their own to do the same. Although, as they’d already had a couple of months to think about it, I was sure they’d have most of their preparations well in hand by now.

  ‘We can’t just abandon Quadravidia,’ General Braddick urged, leaning his weight on the arms of one of the reassuringly solid chairs around the main data display. He was evidently sufficiently unimpressed with the opulence of Zyvan’s private quarters, and the presence of the most senior Guard officer in the Eastern Arm himself, to be inhibited from speaking his mind. We’d convened in the operations room of the Imperial flagship, a space apparently converted from a cargo bay or munitions store[40], judging by the amount of hastily-welded ducting and jury-rigged cables cluttering up the place. Just like home, in fact, to an old campaigner like me, who trusted utility over aesthetics, particularly where warfare was concerned. The corridors leading to it had been carpeted and paintings and holoprints strategically placed over the most unsightly blemishes in the paintwork, as befitted its occupation by someone of Zyvan’s exalted status, but he liked his workspace to be as uncluttered and free of distraction as possible.

  ‘We won’t,’ the Lord General assured him, appreciating plain speaking as he always did. ‘But you’ll have to hold on here with no more than a token garrison.’

  Braddick smiled, mirthlessly. ‘No change there, then.’

  ‘Except that the tau will be pulling out too,’ I reminded him. The hololith in front of us was wavering in the reassuring manner I was used to, and I nodded my thanks as an enginseer muttered a benediction and thumped an already dented panel with a mechadendrite, bringing the starfield back into focus. ‘They’re transferring their assets to reinforce the defences of three of their systems along the edge of the Gulf.’ As I gestured, they obligingly flared a rather bilious shade of green.

  ‘The three closest to the projected line of the tyranid advance.’ Braddick nodded, to show he was keeping up, although he had no need to demonstrate his tactical acumen; his record was more than sufficient to do that. ‘Are they leaving a token garrison here too?’

  ‘They say not,’ I told him. ‘They consider the risk of a misunderstanding escalating into a resumption of hostilities to be too great.’

  ‘So they’re just going to pack up and leave,’ Braddick said, not bothering to hide his scepticism. ‘After all the effort they’ve made to take the place?’

  ‘The tau are nothing if not pragmatists,’ Zyvan said. ‘There’s no point in them expending any more resources to hang on here, if doing so costs them three other worlds lost to the ’nids.’

  ‘Who would then be strong enough to devour Quadravidia whoever holds on to it,’ I pointed out. Braddick nodded again, clearly liking that idea no more than we did.

  ‘Envoy El’hassai has assured us that their troops will complete the withdrawal long before we’re ready to vacate the system,’ Zyvan said. In fact they’d already begun to leave, with about half the strength of the besieging army on its way to defend the vulnerable outposts along the border by now. ‘Another three days should see Quadravidia firmly back in Imperial hands.’

  ‘Thank the Throne,’ Braddick said feelingly, for which I could hardly blame him. A couple of weeks ago he’d been staring defeat in the face, and this unexpected deliverance certainly had a whiff of divine intervention about it; even for a die-hard cynic like me.

  ‘One thing you might care to keep an eye on,’ I said, keeping my voice as neutral as I could; but Braddick was no fool, and fixed a steely eye on me at once.

  ‘What haven’t I been told?’ he asked, with an understandable touch of asperity.


  ‘The tau have made an offer of reparations, which His Excellency the governor is minded to accept,’ I said, in my most diplomatic tone.

  ‘Because His Excellency the governor is a self-obsessed, inbred imbecile, who can’t see the trap for the honey,’ Zyvan added, not diplomatically at all.

  ‘What sort of reparations?’ Braddick asked, in tones which told me all too clearly that he shared the Lord General’s opinion of the Emperor’s anointed representative on Quadravidia.

  ‘Assistance with the reconstruction effort,’ I told him. ‘Resources, expertise and civilian advisors to coordinate everything with the Administratum and the Adeptus Mechanicus.’

  ‘Preaching subversion and heresy the whole time, no doubt,’ Braddick snorted.

  ‘No doubt,’ I agreed, ‘and I’d keep a particularly close eye on a bunch of human renegades calling themselves “Facilitators” if I were you.’

  ‘You can count on it,’ he assured me, before turning back to the hololith. ‘What’s the wider strategy?’

  ‘The only one that makes sense,’ Zyvan said. A world on the Imperial side of the border flared crimson, indicating the presence of an Adeptus Mechanicus holding[41]. ‘Fecundia provides half the arms and ammunition in the sector[42].’

  ‘If we lose it, we’re frakked,’ I agreed, contemplating the display. ‘And it’s the nearest Imperial world to the tyranids’ line of advance.’

  ‘Assuming the tau have extrapolated their course correctly,’ Zyvan said, a note of caution entering his voice. Neither of us could see what the xenos would have to gain by feeding us false information, but that didn’t mean they weren’t being selective about what they passed on. Throne knew, I would be if I were in their shoes. He manipulated the controls, kicked the lectern, and the line of the hive fleet’s projected course extended.

  I nodded, in grim satisfaction, as it almost clipped one of the tau worlds highlighted in green. ‘If they bypass Fecundia, then the tau will be next on the menu,’ I said. ‘Meaning we can fall back to the Sabine Cluster while they bear the brunt of the onslaught. That should give us more than enough time to dig in, in case any splinter fleets or stragglers drift coreward across the border.’