Ghost legion, p.7
Ghost Legion, page 7
‘Get frekked, shortarse,’ Harrus growled. He’d lost his mask and rebreather on whatever that acid mud world had been called – Gavran had never cared, and couldn’t remember – and now his face was a haphazard mess of scar tissue, like someone had slapped camouflage paint on him but had forgotten to make it much of a different colour to his natural flesh. It hadn’t been enough to incapacitate him, but he’d whined incessantly about it while his face slowly cooked.
‘Sarge,’ Gavran said, nodding to Pious Phinea. ‘What’s the word on drop-time?’
‘There isn’t one,’ Phinea replied, turning her surprisingly intense stare on him. Chem-Dogs rarely talked about the crimes that had landed them here – bragged, yes, but rarely talked – but Gavran could easily imagine what Pious Phinea might have done. She was fifty-something years of sinew and prayer and greying hair, and was happy to tolerate foul language and debauchery, but would only give her troopers one warning about taking the Emperor’s name in vain. On the second offence, she would slit your throat herself, and not blink while she did it. Gavran had seen her do it, right in front of him, to a five-year veteran who’d apparently had his first warning three years prior. Phinea didn’t forget.
‘So we’re just expected to sit in here for hours?’ Harrus protested.
‘Possibly days,’ Morten replied cheerily. ‘Get comfortable.’
‘We’re in-system,’ Phinea said. Even her voice sounded like it was rifling through the back alleys of your mind, looking for heretical thoughts. ‘That means the enemy’s here, and they may attack the Tyrant. We’re embarked so the drop-ship can get underway at a moment’s notice if anything happens to the transport.’ She sat down amidst the mess of drop-rigging. ‘But if the fleet can fight its way to wherever our landing zone is, then, yes, Harrus, it could be days.’
Harrus grunted in frustration, but knew better than to blaspheme about it. Beside him, another Chem-Dog sat calmly, hands folded in his lap and eyes closed. Gavran looked him up and down: ragged mine uniform, regulation-issue rebreather, standard battered Chem-Dogs lasgun, which, from the look of it, had not even had its previous owner’s blood properly cleaned off before it had been passed on. The only unusual thing was the long sword he wore under his backpack, jutting up above his right shoulder, which looked like an officer’s weapon.
‘Who’s the new guy?’ Gavran asked Phinea, jerking his thumb to indicate the subject of his question. The rest of their squad were arriving now: Thlate, Yuven, and Big Mo had been with them before their last deployment, whereas Sorry and Keel were the only survivors of Fourth Squad, had linked up with them after that mess with the bunker and the heavy stubber, and had since been merged in permanently.
‘That’s Drass,’ Phinea replied. ‘Lieutenant assigned him to us just as we were boarding, he takes us back up to quota.’ She nudged Drass. ‘Say hello, trooper.’
A foolish man would have said ‘hello, trooper’, which would have told the rest of them all they needed to know. It wasn’t like they’d shank him as soon as they hit surface, but no one liked a smartarse. Annoying or useless squad members in the Chem-Dogs quickly found themselves on the wrong side of an equation which saw their backs left unwatched and their equipment shared out amongst everyone else as soon as they met the Emperor, as it was euphemistically termed (even Phinea allowed that, on the basis that it referred to Him-on-Terra watching over them all).
Instead of marking himself out as a fool, Drass simply opened his eyes and nodded to them as a collective. He had close-cropped blond hair, a short, slightly darker beard, and unremarkable grey eyes. Gavran had seen a hundred like him, and that was fine. So long as he was solid and dependable, they could get on with the business of killing the enemy and looting the bodies.
‘Nice sword,’ Sorry said, reaching for the pommel. ‘Looks like–’
Drass’ hand flew up and knocked Sorry’s away. ‘Don’t touch my stuff.’
‘Sorry,’ Sorry said instantly, and everyone laughed. Sorry was a timid little frekker – no one knew his real name, just the thing he said most often – but he was a fierce fighter, even if he did it with a grim-faced expression that said he’d much rather be anywhere else in the galaxy, and that got him the respect that meant no one picked on him. Drass held Sorry’s gaze for a moment longer, then nodded again as though satisfied that the matter was settled.
Gavran thumped his arse down next to Drass. ‘You killed before?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You good at it?’
Drass shrugged without looking at him. ‘Good enough.’
And that was good enough for Gavran. No one liked a braggart, either.
Durathi Xel swam in an ocean of data. Great currents of information swept back and forth, giving form and function to the smallest nanobyte and weaving them into a grand whole. Most individuals were as blind to this ocean as they were to what Navigators called the Sea of Souls – Durathi could call up one hundred and thirty-two instances of that term being used for the warp by members of the Navis Nobilite in official correspondence, personal diary entries, and poetic texts – but it was in many senses just as real, and just as crucial. Without the warp, humanity would be stranded as countless pockets of light amidst the dark, cold galaxy until it was inevitably overrun, but the same thing would occur without the free flow of data. Astropaths might be crucial for long-range communication, but no astropath could keep the two hundred and seventy-four voidships of Battle Group Kappa-Omega-Six-Nine-One in perfect synchronicity as they thundered through the Sertraeus System. Troop transports, cruisers, frigates, escorts, bulk haulers, fuel barges, Mechanicus maintenance scows, and all the other miscellany of the Imperium’s war machine, kept in contact and combat order by data. It was a beautiful dance, and Durathi Xel had the privilege of watching it.
‘Xel!’ a voice barked from the seat next to her on the turbo-shuttle that was currently conveying them to the main briefing room of the Daughter of Faith.
‘Yes, colonel?’ she replied instantly. Colonel Harpe was an annoyance in one respect, since he existed outside the flow of data and therefore she had to perceive and understand him in a more mundane fashion, but he was utterly necessary in many others. She scanned over her files again: Harpe, Jordaneus Kallam; age sixty-seven Terran standard years; colonel of the Savlar 59th Chem-Dogs for fifteen years; no connection to Savlar, instead educated through the Schola Progenium system and inserted into the regiment at command level due to the unsuitability of criminals for high rank. Trooper death rates under his command in the field were above the average recorded for the Astra Militarum as a whole, but below the average for other penal legions.
Durathi spent a millisecond checking those files against her last saved access of them, and found that they still matched. That was good; one could never be too careful when it came to data corruption.
‘Are the crims all embarked?’ Harpe asked. Durathi checked, then checked again.
‘Affirmative, colonel. The last transport for rank-and-file troopers and armoured transports closed blast doors just under one minute ago.’ She had learned not to be more exact than that to an unplugged: if she gave a truly accurate figure, it was incorrect by the time the words had left her lips and their brain had interpreted the sounds. Durathi hated being inaccurate, but being only vaguely accurate was better than being precise but wrong. If only Harpe had been plugged into the dataflows then she could have provided him with an answer that was correct to the millisecond, although had that been the case, he would not have needed to ask her at all.
‘Good. At least they can only steal from each other in there,’ Harpe grunted. ‘How many infractions did we have on the ship this time out?’
‘Forty-seven counts of theft, of which twenty-four were of rations and seventeen were of equipment from other regiments, five of malicious wounding, one of impersonating an Imperial commissar,’ Durathi replied promptly.
Harpe winced. ‘Any commissar in particular?’
‘Fowle, sir.’
‘Could be worse,’ Harpe grunted. ‘At least she probably only executed whichever fool tried it, rather than anyone who happened to see them do it as well.’
‘Affirmative, sir.’
‘All in all, not the worst voyage we’ve had,’ Harpe conceded grudgingly. ‘Still, I feel better knowing they’re all locked in, and the bastard heretics will be the ones who have to deal with them next.’ He hesitated for a moment, in a manner very unlike a colonel of the Astra Militarum. ‘Xel, you don’t… happen to have any more information on exactly what manner of heretic we’re going to be facing, do you?’
‘I suspect that will become clear at the briefing, sir,’ Durathi said neutrally.
‘I’m aware of that, lexmechanic,’ Harpe said, with what Durathi could tell was slightly strained patience. ‘However, you have shown yourself to be extraordinarily perceptive in the short time since I added you to my staff. I was hoping you might be able to give me a heads-up, as we say. All I know is what I see and hear and read, whereas you’ve got…’ He waved his hands vaguely. ‘…all this invisible data that you can interpret.’
Durathi made a note of the fact that Harpe had at least some understanding of the noosphere. ‘I am sorry, colonel, but my rank only allows me access to certain tiers of information,’ she said out loud. ‘The rest is encoded in ways that a mere adept cannot decipher.’
‘Pity,’ Harpe grunted. Durathi said nothing more, because although every word she had just uttered was accurate, it was not necessarily true. That was a distinction many people would not truly appreciate, and although she suspected that Colonel Harpe might be one of them – you couldn’t give a speech to the soldiers under your command about how the Emperor protects without understanding the difference between something that was true and something that was demonstrably accurate – that didn’t mean he would like it. Durathi had been assigned to Colonel Harpe to be a very efficient and useful data-adept; that was what she was going to be, and that was all she was going to be.
For now.
The turbo-shuttle braked to a halt, and the doors creaked open. Durathi disembarked with the rest of the colonel’s command staff, and followed them as they made the short journey on foot to the imposing, baroque doorway of the main briefing room. The room was already bustling with bodies and awash with chatter, as well as subtle titbits of data flying back and forth as information was received, reshaped, and sent on again. This was only to be expected, given that there were no fewer than forty-two distinct Astra Militarum forces represented here – grand companies, siege armies, regiment musters, and more besides – along with the Knight House of Firehame on their penance march, the representatives of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and…
‘There you are,’ said Canoness Preceptor Paola Domican of the Order of the Ebon Chalice, forging through the crowd like a thundercloud to stand directly in front of Harpe. She was a forbidding sight in her jet-black power armour, which was bedecked in devotional scripts and hung with censers of sacred incense. Although she was no taller than Harpe, the fleur-de-lys backpiece of her armour’s power pack rose a clear foot above her head. The severe, jaw-line ice-white bob was not unusual amongst the Orders Militant, and the stylised capital ‘I’ tattooed on her right cheek marked her service in her youth in the warband of an Ordo Hereticus inquisitor, but it was her face that made the greatest impression. Largely plain-featured – by which Durathi meant that facial mapping suggested no individual element deviated from the recorded human average by more than twelve per cent – a sense of religious zeal nonetheless emanated from the canoness with an intensity that bordered on physical force. Even Durathi, focused on the purity of data as she was, got the impression that to displease Paola Domican was not far short of displeasing the Emperor Himself.
Which, given that the Canoness Preceptor had been awarded the title of Grand Commander of the entire battle group despite the forces under her direct command being fewer than a thousand combatants amongst millions, was essentially one and the same thing in practical terms. Truth and accuracy, again.
Colonel Harpe was certainly not willing to push his luck in such matters. Bold of heart and robust of spine, able to keep and order discipline within his regiment of tens of thousands of homicidal criminals, he nonetheless ducked his head meekly. ‘Apologies, Canoness.’
‘I knew that your soldiers were a feral rabble,’ Domican said in clipped tones. ‘I had hoped for better from the officers. Take your place, and we shall commence.’ She turned on her heel and strode back the way she had come, gesturing and shouting orders as she did so. Clearly, the Canoness Preceptor was not much given to delegation, at least when she was in the same room as those she intended to command.
Durathi filed into place with the rest of the colonel’s command staff, exchanging polite nods and brief code-splurts with the data-adepts of other officers, in the manner of subordinates everywhere whose job it was to insert as much information as possible into brains ill-disposed towards receiving it. This was her role.
For now.
Cinereous was liquid shadow, a shard of the night. She was everything and nothing. It was not that she was not there, because millennia of evolution had left humans extremely adept at noticing things pretending that they weren’t there. To move like a predator was to invite notice. Cinereous moved like the shadows on the wall, like the jerking door that stuck no matter how many devotional prayers were said to its machine spirit, like the distant steps of a ship orderly – but not an officer, not a commissar, never anything that would cause the heart rate to rise and the senses to sharpen. She was fluid, ready to flow into whatever form was necessary; and yet she was hollow, waiting to be filled by the essence of whatever she needed to be.
At this point, people were ready to ask questions. Everything was being assessed and measured, readied and prepared. Counts were being made and tallied, names were being checked. Later, when the killing started, the only question that anyone would truly be asking was ‘How do I get out of this alive?’, and then no one would have time to look too closely into the business of counts and names. By that point, Cinereous would have moved on.
She secreted herself in the crawlspace of a drop-ship and activated her vox. It was far more advanced than standard Imperial-issue – long-range and tight-beam, and virtually unnoticeable to anyone except the intended recipient. If anyone else did detect the transmission, then it would appear to be nothing more than a ghost signal, perhaps the faint echo of something broadcast decades ago, and light years away.
‘I am in position,’ she murmured, her voice the whisper of circulated air through a grating.
‘Acknowledged,’ came the reply. It was a simulated voice formed by the mental processes of the sender interacting with specialised equipment, since they would not be able to speak in their current situation. Cinereous could have left the communication there – she had given all the information that was required, and knew it had been received – but something nudged at her. Although she was hollow, that did not mean she was entirely devoid of curiosity. Or rivalry.
‘And the other?’ she asked.
‘Also in position.’
Cinereous nodded to herself. She had expected no less, but it was best to check in order to avoid unpleasant surprises later on.
Surprises that were unpleasant for her, at least. She was in the business of providing them to others.
-183.28.01
Solomon had summoned all his commanders to a council of war. It was not, as yet, proving to be a particularly encouraging experience.
‘The outer system’s hardpoint defences are primarily configured for repelling aeldari pirates,’ Krozier Va’kai said, gesturing to the hololith in the Unseen’s war room. This part of the hulk had been an Imperial ship once, and the walls and fittings were familiar enough, unlike the decidedly xenos feel of some of the other sections. ‘Our forces stationed out there are similar in nature – fast-moving and well armed. But they are hunters, not ships of the line. Sertraeus is used to dealing with raiders, not… this.’
‘This’ was the ugly mass of blue dots hammering its way through the system towards Sertra. It was an Imperial battle group in full flight, well over two hundred ships of varying sizes.
‘Can we bring them to battle?’ Solomon asked. He didn’t think it was likely, but Va’kai was the void combat expert.
‘We can sit in front of them and let them smash us apart, if that is what you mean,’ the admiral of the Unseen answered with a snort. ‘Or we can harry them from the sides and achieve precisely nothing.’ He spread his hands. ‘I do not have the fleet strength to stop them, and that is an end to it.’
‘What about this vessel?’ Jarvul Glaine demanded. ‘Even the largest Imperial ship is a flyspeck in comparison!’
‘The Unseen is a beast, but she was constructed as a hidden base of operations,’ Va’kai said. ‘She has a lot of guns, but she’s not that heavily armed for her size, and not optimised for combat. The Mechanicum unified the power sourcing as best they could, but we are still trying to run half a dozen separate systems as one, each originally configured in a radically different manner. The Imperials might have to pound at us for a week before they could physically blow us apart, but if I tried to face them down with the Unseen alone then we would quickly take enough damage to knock the systems out. After that happens, we are just a large hunk of metal which cannot shoot back, that they can simply steer around.’
