The Greater Good Read online

  ‘I sit corrected,’ El’hassai said, raising his eyes from the cloacal world beneath us to the cold, clear void surrounding it. A few of the uncountable pinpricks of light bespattering the sable backdrop were moving against the luminescent smudge of the bulk of the galaxy, and he gestured towards them. ‘The picket ships appear to be taking up their positions with commendable alacrity.’

  ‘They do,’ I agreed, although the fleet’s deployment was nothing to do with me. The Naval contingent had their own commissars assigned to them, who would be sufficiently versed in three-dimensional tactics to understand what was going on. Nevertheless, I strongly suspected that most of the vessels we could see were actually cargo haulers, feeding the insatiable appetites of the furnaces below with raw materials or carrying away the spoils of their labour to half a hundred worlds[48]. Of more immediate concern were the troop ships carrying the Imperial Guard contingent, which should have made orbit by now, and begun ferrying soldiers to the surface ready to begin fortifying the hives. Precisely how we were going to manage that was still proving a major headache, as we had barely enough manpower to protect even one of the population centres below, let alone all of them; but at least there was little prospect of us running out of ammunition.

  Before the conversation, or my thoughts, could turn in a more pessimistic direction, a familiar odour heralded the arrival of my aide. ‘Bit of a mess,’ he remarked, glancing out of the viewport.

  ‘Forge worlds generally are,’ I reminded him, and he nodded, with a sniff of disapproval.

  ‘Like that last one we went to,’ he agreed. ‘Cak everywhere.’ Then he shrugged. ‘I dare say it’ll be better indoors.’

  ‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ I said, hoping he was right. ‘I take it the shuttle’s ready?’

  Jurgen nodded. ‘Lord General’s compliments, sir, and he’d like to see you aboard it at your earliest convenience.’

  ‘Not his exact words, I’m sure,’ I said.

  Jurgen shuffled his feet. ‘That was the gist of it,’ he said doggedly. It would have been unkind to press him for further details, as he was evidently attempting to spare my feelings and, knowing Zyvan as well as I did, I was more than capable of filling in the blanks for myself in any case.

  ‘Then we’d better not keep him waiting,’ I said, turning to El’hassai, who still seemed mesmerised by the starfield beyond the armourglass. ‘Will you be joining us, ambassador?’ Truth to tell I was in two minds about asking, but protocol demanded that I did, and at least if he tagged along I’d be spared the necessity of regurgitating our discussions with the Mechanicus for his benefit at a later date. Not to mention feeling a lot more comfortable knowing where he was.

  ‘That would be the most efficient course of action,’ the tau agreed, turning away from the suppurating planet below and falling into step at my elbow as we made our way to the docking bay. The corridors were crowded with Guardsmen and Navy personnel, who stepped aside, with varying expressions of bemusement, hostility or repugnance at the sight of the xenos, but El’hassai ignored them all. For my own part, I barely noticed, commissars hardly being welcome anywhere they went, but Jurgen returned scowl for scowl, clearing a path for us as effectively as Zyvan’s bodyguard of storm troopers would have done.

  It seemed we were to travel aboard Zyvan’s personal shuttle, which was fine by me: its deeply padded chairs and carpeting were a great deal more comfortable than the hard seats and metal decking of the more utilitarian transports I was used to taking to and from orbit, and I knew from experience that the drinks cabinet was well stocked.

  ‘Forget your vox-bead?’ the Lord General greeted me, as we walked up the ramp. Then his eye fell on El’hassai, a couple of paces behind, flanked by the bodyguards who’d joined him as we’d entered the hangar bay. ‘Envoy. Good of you to join us.’ If his demeanour was anything to go by, however, he would have been perfectly happy for the tau to have remained aboard the ship.

  Sure enough, as I settled into my chair and accepted the amasec Jurgen poured out for me, Zyvan leaned closer, and lowered his voice. ‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’ he asked, sotto voce.

  ‘We’re meant to be in an alliance,’ I reminded him, equally quietly. There was little chance of being overheard above the rising note of the engines, but you never knew with xenos[49], so I kept my voice low nevertheless. ‘The cogboys know we’ve got a delegation aboard, so why not let him sit in on the initial meeting?’

  ‘If you think they’ll wear it,’ Zyvan said, shrugging.

  ‘Why wouldn’t they?’ I asked, in honest bemusement.

  Zyvan shrugged again, and took an appreciative sip of his amasec. ‘Why do the cogboys do anything?’ he asked, reasonably enough.

  Our descent was as smooth and untroubled as we could have hoped for, the buffeting as we entered the atmosphere mild enough even for Jurgen’s sensitive stomach; but then Zyvan’s personal pilot would have been one of the finest in the fleet, so that was hardly surprising. The view of the world through the viewports hardly improved as we approached it, the thick clouds of corrosive smog I’d seen from orbit blanketing the ground until we’d almost reached the surface for which I could only be grateful, judging by the brief glimpses of what awaited us that I was able to catch through the occasional gap.

  At length, bright, flashing luminators stabbed through the murk, guiding us towards the landing zone, and I began to discern the vast bulk of the primary manufacturing complex below and around our hurrying shuttle, looming out of the smog like a volcanic mountain range. The light of the beacons was joined by innumerable others, speckling the oppressive mass of artificial cliff faces surrounding us, or carried aboard the shoal of other air traffic among which we moved, like minnows skirting the ramparts of a reef. A not unapt comparison, I suppose, as, like a reef, the hive had accreted gradually, by the actions of uncountable individuals, over thousands of years. Eventually, it would wither and die, the resources it had been put here to plunder exhausted, and the Mechanicus would uproot themselves and begin again on some other lump of rock unfortunate enough to possess something they wanted[50].

  ‘Aren’t we heading for the main shuttle pads?’ I asked, as, with a surge of acceleration which left Jurgen looking distinctly green around the gills even by his standards, our pilot lifted us out of the main traffic, to soar majestically over the rising peaks of the hive range.

  ‘The magi running this place want to keep our meeting discreet,’ Zyvan said, and I nodded, approving. Trying to work out an effective strategy was going to be hard enough as it was, without getting bogged down in official receptions and all that sort of thing. Especially as tech-priests weren’t exactly renowned for throwing a good party.

  ‘Where, then?’ I asked, and Zyvan gestured towards a spire, topped with a cogwheel icon big enough to have parked a Baneblade on each of the spurs[51].

  ‘The Spire of Blessed Computation,’ he said, squinting at the data-slate in his hand. It was a plain, military field model, incongruously drab against the garish dress uniform he’d put on for the occasion, but he was, as ever, more concerned with the practicalities. I’d often thought that he’d prefer to do without any of the ornamentation and ceremony which surrounded him if he could, but he was just as trammelled by the protocols of his position as I was by mine. I must have looked puzzled, because he added, ‘it’s where most of this miserable rock’s run from.’

  ‘Good choice, then,’ I said. The closer we were to the cogboys’ command centre, the easier it would be to liaise with them.

  ‘I’m glad you approve,’ Zyvan said, not entirely joking.

  The spire was so close by now that it was blotting out much of the hive, its upper storeys becoming clearer as we glided towards it through the ocean of murk. The sun was barely visible, discernable only as a luminescent disc, dim enough to look at directly, glimmering wanly through the clotted brown clouds walling us off from the rest of the universe so that we were almost entirely reliant on the luminators to see where w
e were going. I thumbed my palm[52], and hoped the pilot had a reliable auspex. From this distance the sides which had seemed so smooth from a couple of kilometres away looked gnarled, like the bark of an impossibly tall tree, encrusted with thousands of protruding substructures, vents, antennae, and work platforms. Servitors and spirejacks, armoured against the hellish conditions of the open air, swarmed around it, doing Emperor knew what.

  ‘That must be it,’ Jurgen said, with a sigh of relief which gave me the full benefit of his halitosis, and prompted a brief, envious glance at the full face helmets sported by El’hassai’s fire warrior escort. I followed the direction of his gaze, and found we were descending towards a small landing platform, jutting from the vertical face of the spire, one of many such lost among the myriad of excrescences.

  ‘Looks that way,’ I agreed, narrowing my eyes to peer through the curdled air. Landing lights were flashing, guiding our pilot in, and striking flickering highlights from the augmetic enhancements of the honour guard of scarlet-uniformed skitarii lining up beside the doorway leading inside the tower. A thought struck me, and I glanced at Zyvan in some consternation. ‘They surely don’t expect us to step outside, do they?’

  ‘It won’t be for long,’ he assured me. ‘Magos Dysen says short-term exposure to the atmosphere is quite harmless.’

  ‘Quite,’ I said, inflecting it like assent, while ruminating on just how much imprecision the simple little word might be reflecting. ‘It’s all right for him, he doesn’t have lungs to frak up in any case[53].’

  ‘Not biological ones, at any rate,’ Zyvan said. But before we could debate the matter further, a faint tremor in the hull plating told us that the pilot had landed with just as much skill as I would have expected, and the time for conversation was past.

  SEVEN

  The first thing to strike me as we strode down the ramp was the smell, a thick, sulphurous humidity which slapped me in the face like a flannel soaked in tepid swamp water. The heat boiled up around us through the stinking air, rising from the manufactoria below in urgent, foetid thermal gusts, as though the forges themselves were constantly breaking wind. Even forewarned as I was, I coughed, almost gagging, envying the tau warriors their respirators in earnest now.

  ‘Smells a bit,’ Jurgen observed, oblivious to the irony as ever, while I fell into place beside Zyvan and the small knot of aides who had accompanied him. Not trusting myself to reply, and breathing as shallowly as I could, I merely nodded.

  The landing platform was smaller than I’d realised, barely large enough to hold the shuttle, and my already good opinion of our pilot was raised another notch. The craft’s nose was only a handful of metres from the wall, close to where the inviting illuminated rectangle of the doorway gaped open, while the starboard landing skid was even closer to the vertiginous three-kilometre drop into the heart of the furnaces. With a shudder, I realised the outer edge was without a balustrade or even a handrail to check a careless misstep, and resolved to keep the bulk of the utility craft between me and oblivion. Clearly, the tech-priests who worked here regarded a sense of self-preservation as superfluous to requirements.

  ‘Nicely done,’ Zyvan congratulated our pilot over his vox-bead, and turned to me. ‘He put us down where we can use the shuttle as a windbreak.’

  ‘For which we should all thank the Throne,’ I agreed, feeling my greatcoat flapping like a pennon in the gale-force gusts passing the hull. Without it, I’d have been hard-pressed to remain on my feet. An alarming vision of being picked up and flung into the void by the turbulent air flashed through my mind, and I suppressed it firmly.

  ‘Welcome,’ the officer in charge of the skitarii detachment said in the flat drone of a vox-coder, making the cogwheel gesture generally favoured by followers of the Machine God as he did so. ‘Centurion Kyper, Primus Pilem, Cohort Fecundia.’ Like most of the skitarii I’d come across in the course of my erratic progress around the galaxy, he looked more like a heavily-augmented ogryn than anything human, his musculature bulging with chemical enhancement and interlaced with bionics.

  ‘At ease,’ Zyvan said, not bothering to introduce himself; if Kyper didn’t realise at once who he was, he had no business being there. He gestured in my direction. ‘Commissar Cain is accompanying me, along with the tau envoy, and his escort.’

  ‘Tau envoy?’ Kyper echoed, sounding as surprised as his even mechanical buzz allowed. I could see little of his face inside the hood protecting it from the elements, and most of what I could was too metallic to allow any expression to register, but I didn’t need to look him in the eye to realise he was rattled. He began chirruping rapidly in binaric to his two companions, both of whom were dwarfed by the hulking combat servitor at the end of the receiving line. ‘We were not informed of this.’

  ‘It was a last-minute decision,’ I said, my voice rasping through the thin coating of ash, and no doubt other less savoury substances, obstructing my larynx.

  ‘He must remain on the shuttle,’ Kyper said firmly.

  ‘That’s not your decision to make,’ Zyvan snapped, in the tone of a man to whom putting obstructive underlings in their place had long ago become second nature.

  ‘Is there some difficulty?’ El’hassai asked, appearing at the bottom of the boarding ramp, his words punctuated by small, precise coughs. He addressed the skitarii directly. ‘My diplomatic credentials have been fully approved by–’

  ‘Unsanctified presence,’ the combat servitor cut in, lumbering into motion. ‘Purge and reconsecrate.’

  ‘Call that thing off!’ I bellowed, in my best put-the-fear-of-the-Emperor-into-’em voice. But before Kyper could move an augmetically enhanced muscle, the construct had raised its autocannon arm, and rattled off a burst of heavy-calibre rounds which whined and ricocheted from the now badly dented boarding ramp. El’hassai scuttled back up it with commendable alacrity, and the servitor plodded forward, heading towards the shuttle with murder obviously in mind.

  ‘Get back in the air!’ Zyvan voxed the pilot, but he’d cut the engines as soon as we’d landed, no doubt anticipating a long and tedious wait for our preliminary discussions to be completed, and we all knew there was no way the shuttle could lift before the servitor got to it.

  I retuned my vox-bead just in time to hear the pilot acknowledge the order. ‘Powering up,’ he said, and the main engines burst into life with a roar which rattled my teeth. ‘Fifteen seconds to take-off thrust.’

  ‘We don’t have fifteen seconds!’ I snapped. ‘The damn thing will be aboard by then! Raise the ramp!’

  ‘I’m already trying,’ the pilot informed me, his voice ringing with the forced calm of an expert in a crisis. ‘That autocannon burst disabled the servos.’

  ‘Then take it out!’ I ordered, with an eye on the chin-turreted multilaser beneath the cockpit.

  ‘I can’t target it,’ the pilot told me, with the air of a man following bad news with worse. ‘It’s already inside the range.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to do it!’ I turned to the skitarii. ‘Open fire, or call it off. Your choice.’

  They chirruped at one another in consternation for a moment.

  ‘With regret, commissar, we can do neither,’ Kyper told me. ‘The unit is programmed to protect the spire from unauthorised entry, and damaging it would run counter to the tenets of the Omnissiah. I can request the appropriate termination codes from a higher authority, but…’

  ‘Oh for frak’s sake!’ I expostulated, drawing my sidearm. Taking on a fully armoured combat servitor went against all my instincts of self-preservation, but if El’hassai died, I knew who’d get the blame; he wouldn’t even have been there if I hadn’t invited him. I cracked off a couple of shots at the construct’s armour-plated back, with nothing more in mind than diverting its attention long enough for the pilot to get into the air, before bolting for the safety of the doorway. But even as I turned, the portal hissed shut, trapping us on the narrow landing stage. ‘Now what?’ I snapped, exasperated.

  ‘T
he machine spirits are sealing the spire in response to the weapons fire.’ Kyper said.

  At which point the flaw in my plan became obvious. The servitor turned, ponderously, and brought its weapon arm around to point at me. ‘Hostile action initiated,’ it droned. ‘Retaliate. Retaliate.’

  I jumped for my life as a line of autocannon rounds chewed up the rockcrete towards me, Zyvan and his aides scattering away from the line of fire like startled waterfowl, and rolled to my feet, cracking off another shot, hoping to hit something vital. No such luck, of course, anything vulnerable was tucked well away behind the armour plate.

  ‘Allow me, sir,’ Jurgen said, opening up with a burst from his lasgun. Predictably, it had little effect, although it did check the thing’s progress for a moment as it swung to let off a burst in his direction, which whined and ricocheted from the landing skid behind which he’d taken refuge. Then it turned back towards me, apparently intent on dealing with one thing at a time[54].

  ‘Requesting shutdown codes, authorisation Alpha Beige Zero Zero Seven Six Eight Cantata,’ Kyper said, apparently over some internal vox-link. ‘Urgency utmost.’ At least he was finally doing something, but unless he did it fast, it was going to be too late for me.

  I dived aside again, chips of rockcrete from the near miss stinging my face, and came up facing the shuttle, just as the pitch of its engines rose to a scream. Brown fog swirled around my ankles, made turbulent by the backwash, and I ran towards the jammed ramp as hard as I could. It was a desperate gamble, but at the moment it looked like being the best of a lot of bad options, most of which were liable to end up with me dead.

  ‘Lifting now!’ the pilot called, and I leapt desperately for the rising slab of metal, feeling the edge of it slamming into my midriff, driving the air from my lungs (which, considering its quality, was probably no bad thing). At which point I became all too aware of the pistol in my hand, which rather precluded grabbing hold of anything else.