Cains last stand, p.13
Cain's Last Stand, page 13
‘Not in a battle line, no,’ Visiter agreed, seeming unperturbed at the prospect. ‘But there’s another way.’ He held up his scribblings, which I’m bound to admit meant nothing to me. ‘If we station them out in the halo[38], or one of the asteroid fields, powered down, they’ll be almost impossible to detect. Once the enemy start movin’ in towards the planet from the outer system we can mount hit and run raids against their flanks, pickin’ off their transport vessels; Emperor willin’, that should keep a lot of their troops from makin’ it down to the surface.’
‘That sounds suicidal to me,’ Rorkins said. ‘The transporters will be protected by warships. I can’t ask you to sacrifice your crews on a desperate gamble like that.’ No one challenged the implicit assumption that the commodore was now in charge of all our spaceborne assets, and I didn’t expect them to.
Visiter shook his head, looking faintly amused. ‘No one’s gettin’ sacrificed on my watch,’ he assured us. ‘Leave the fleet tactics to me.’
‘Fine, then.’ Rorkins smiled bleakly. ‘Now all we have to worry about is getting the PDF to function like they’re supposed to.’ He glanced in my direction. ‘Are any of your cadets up to the job?’
‘They’ll have to be,’ I told him. ‘They stood up well enough to the tyranids, which augers well. But we’ll need a lot more than ten to keep the rabble you’ve inherited up to the mark.’ Maybe Nelys would get to shoot someone for cowardice after all, I thought grimly.
‘I was hoping you’d attach them to the headquarters staff,’ Rorkins said, to my quiet relief. The thought of scattering them around the planet, to take care of themselves as best they could, had been mildly disturbing to say the least.
‘That shouldn’t be a problem,’ I agreed. ‘I was planning to get them started on the intelligence analysis.’ That was part of their training, and should keep them out of trouble while I sneaked off to the Valley of Daemons to try and secure the Shadowlight. Of course, what I did with it then, assuming I could persuade the Mechanicus to part with the wretched thing where Orelius had already failed, Emperor alone knew; but I’d worry about that when the time came.
‘Good.’ Rorkins nodded again, and turned to Julien. ‘I trust I can rely on you to help co-ordinate some battlefield strategies?’
‘You can,’ the Celestian assured him. ‘And once we get back to the schola, I’ll get some of my senior novitiates to form a mobile reserve. They’re raw, but they can still heft a bolter.’
‘Good,’ Rorkins said, considering it. The Sororitas novices had half a dozen suits of antiquated power armour between them, rather more battered and utilitarian than Julien’s set, which they used for practice drills; poor as they undoubtedly were as such things went, they would still be quite formidable against lasguns and flesh. ‘Any other suggestions?’
‘We could try calling for help,’ the Governor suggested dryly. In all honesty, I’d forgotten he was there for a moment, engrossed as we had been in trying to find a way of defending the planet. We all looked at him blankly. ‘We do have astropaths on Perlia, you know.’
Remembering the source of Brasker’s rumour mongering, I nodded slowly. ‘Of course we do. But it may not be much of a help.’ That was a considerable understatement. Astropathic communication was somewhat hit or miss at the best of times, and with the warp currents stirred up by the malevolent forces haemorrhaging from the Eye of Terror, and the vast shadow cast across them by the tyranid hive mind, we’d have about as much chance of getting through to the sector fleet as if we’d scribbled a note to them and flung it out of the airlock of an Aquila. Nevertheless, as I’d found on many previous occasions, a slim chance is infinitely better than no chance at all, so I shrugged, and spread my hands. ‘Worth a try, though. Someone out there might be listening.’
Of course, as it turned out, something was listening, very carefully, for some very specific signals, but fortunately for my peace of mind I remained in blissful ignorance of the fact.
‘I’ll give the instructions,’ Trevellyan said, leaning back in his chair. ‘Is there anything else I should know?’
‘Not at this stage, your excellency,’ Rorkins said tactfully. We still couldn’t rule out a hidden cabal of Chaotic sympathisers gnawing away at the roots of government, don’t forget, which was why we’d decided to take over the defence of Perlia ourselves: unlikely as it seemed that the Governor was a member of such a conspiracy, there was no telling who he might talk to. ‘I’ll send you a full report at the earliest opportunity.’
‘Of course you will,’ Trevellyan said, with a faint smile, no doubt divining that such an opportunity was unlikely to arise in the foreseeable future. ‘Then if you’ll excuse me Sister, gentlemen, I’ve a rather pressing appointment at the sanitorium in Havendown. Rather too many of our citizens found the war arriving a little early last night, and it wouldn’t do to neglect my pastoral duties to the survivors.’
‘With a pictcaster crew in tow, no doubt,’ Rorkins said sourly, once he was sure the Governor was out of earshot.
‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘We need something to boost morale among the civilians, and if he’s willing to take on the job, good luck to him.’
‘Fine.’ Rorkins nodded, his mind already returning to business. ‘Then let’s concentrate on the military situation.’ He glanced around again, making sure that we weren’t being overheard. ‘I’ll be making a big show of moving into the main command bunker at Rytepat, but I’ll be spending as little time there as possible. For all intents and purposes, I want to run things from the schola progenium; if there really is a heretic cell in the high command, I want it insulated from any sensitive tactical information.’
‘That makes sense,’ I agreed, while Visiter and Julien nodded quietly. ‘And since the enemy clearly knows where the main defence headquarters is in any case, let’s not make it easy for them by being in the middle of a target zone when they arrive.’ One quick orbital bombardment would be all that it took to succeed where last night’s commando raid had failed. Reflecting that if it hadn’t been for the fortuitous circumstance of Orelius’s presence in the skies over Perlia, and the damage he’d been able to inflict on the incoming fleet, we’d probably have a flotilla of gunboats over our heads raining death and destruction from the skies right at this moment, I shuddered inwardly.
‘The ground’s more defensible there too,’ Julien added. That was a worrying thought, in its way; she was right, but the mountainous terrain which would work so well to our advantage in staving off an assault would also leave us with nowhere to go if the enemy did succeed in breaking through.
I pointed this out. ‘Maybe we should be factoring in some contingency plans for an evacuation too,’ I added. ‘Glorious last stands are a lot more fun in the history books than in the flesh.’
‘I’ll work somethin’ out,’ Visiter promised, leaving me feeling a little bit more encouraged.
‘Well then,’ Rorkins said, with what seemed to my uneasy mind rather too much relish, ‘if no one’s got anything else to add, let’s go and save the planet.’
As things turned out, of course, it wasn’t going to be quite as simple as that.
EDITORIAL NOTE:
Despite Colonel Rorkins’s cynicism, Governor Trevellyan’s pictcast did prove remarkably effective in soothing the understandable degree of alarm among the civilian population following the first enemy attack. The following is a partial transcript of the address he made from the main medicae facility in Havendown that morning, after visiting a few of the more photogenic casualties, and it seems to have succeeded in bolstering civilian morale, at least in the short term.
The cowards who carried out this unforgivable atrocity, and others like it around the globe, have severely underestimated the citizens of Perlia if they think such acts of barbarity will sap our resolve. On the contrary, it only serves to increase it, as the last invaders who dared to set foot on our Emperor-blessed world found to their cost. Scarcely two generations have gone by since the Liberator’s army swept the greenskins from Perlia; an army made up not primarily of professional soldiers, but of ordinary citizens, like you and I, caught up in extraordinary times.
I know I can rely on you all to display the same fortitude as our illustrious forebears did; and with Cain the Liberator once more poised to take up arms, I have no doubt that we will prevail once again.
The Emperor’s blessing be upon you all.
CHAPTER TEN
I spent the rest of that day, and the following night, in a fever of carefully-concealed impatience. I could hardly turn round to Rorkins and the others and say ‘See you later, I’ve got a little errand to run for the Inquisition, best of luck with the invasion while I’m gone,’ so I threw myself into the preparations as energetically as I could, and waited for an opportunity to sneak away on some plausible-seeming pretext. To say that I chafed at the delay would be something of an understatement: I was acutely aware that we had no idea how long it was going to be before the enemy fleet arrived, and however much time we had, it wasn’t going to be nearly enough.
‘We need more bodies,’ Julien said, ‘it’s as simple as that.’ We’d run into each other in the refectory, grabbing some long-overdue food and recaff on the fly, and talking as we ate. She’d discarded her power armour for the time being, although she kept her bolt pistol handy, and carried a chainsword almost as battered and ill-used as my own wherever she went. Most of the other instructors were going about the place armed, too, generally favouring the hammers and shock mauls which seem to appeal to the Emperor-botherers[39], while the administrative staff opted, more sensibly, for firearms. Even Brasker was sporting an autopistol, somewhat surprisingly engraved with icons of the saints in gold filigree, which he kept stashed in a pocket of his robe, where it deformed the material with a noticeable bulge.
‘You’re right,’ I agreed. The report she’d just shown me made depressing reading. Her original estimate, that the PDF was down to a quarter of its usual strength, had turned out to be a little on the pessimistic side, but not by much. ‘The question is, where do we find them?’
‘You seemed to manage all right during the ork invasion,’ the Celestian said dryly.
‘That was different,’ I said. ‘The entire continent was overrun, and occupied. Anyone who’d survived that had already gone through hell: it was just a question of giving them guns, pointing them at the greenskins, and telling them it was payback time.’ I smiled grimly. ‘And despite what you might have seen in the holos, the core of the force was always PDF veterans; the civilian militia just get most of the attention because they’re seen as more romantic for some reason.’
‘Of course they are,’ Julien said. ‘Everyone wants to think they could be a hero too, if the chips were down.’ She smiled at me, and shook her head. ‘You don’t really understand the civilian mindset very well, do you?’
‘It’s not my job to,’ I told her, trying not to sound too defensive. I’d met a few civvies over the years, of course, even one or two I quite liked, but I’d been in a military environment ever since a schola like this one had spat me out in the direction of the Commissariat, and most of the ones I’d come into contact with had seemed almost as strange as the tau. (Although at least none of them were grey.)
‘Well, trust me, it’s something we can use,’ Julien said. I shrugged, willing to take her word for it. Her sisterhood moved among the proles as a matter of course, at least the non-militant parts of it did, so it seemed reasonable to assume she knew what she was talking about. ‘Or you can, at any rate.’
‘I might seem dense,’ I said, draining the dregs of my recaff, which had sublimed to bitter sludge in the bottom of the mug, and making a mental note to send Jurgen to fetch me some tanna, ‘but I don’t see how.’ Despite my best efforts I failed to suppress a yawn. Dawn was already tinting the sky beyond the windows a rich, smoky blue, like Amberley’s eyes, and I hadn’t had any sleep since the previous night. I’d been far more exhausted on countless campaigns before, of course, but I was beginning to think I was getting too old for all this.
‘It’s easy,’ Julien said, with a faint smile of sympathy, but then she was half my age, and no doubt all fired up with holy zeal into the bargain. ‘You just make a pictcast or two, asking for volunteers to form a new militia. They’ll turn out in droves.’
‘And get slaughtered,’ I pointed out. ‘We won’t have time to train them, that’s for sure.’
‘They’ll get slaughtered anyway, as soon as the heretics arrive,’ Julien said. ‘You know that as well as I do.’
I nodded soberly, conceding her point. I’d seen the aftermath of Chaotic incursions before, many times, and if there was one thing I was certain of, it was that the concept of non-combatants didn’t even exist for the degenerate pawns of the Ruinous Powers. If some of their victims took a few of the invaders with them, it would buy us a little more time, if nothing else, and I’ve never been averse to a bit more cannon fodder standing in harm’s way ahead of me.
‘It’s worth a try,’ I said. ‘I’ll get Jurgen to make the arrangements.’
‘Good man.’ Julien smiled encouragingly. ‘Then you might want to start putting the fear of the Throne into some of these regimental commanders while you’re waiting.’ She brought up some more reports about the PDF’s state of readiness on the screen of her data-slate, and I groaned inwardly. Even from a quick skim, which was all I had time for before she shut off the power and stowed it in a pouch at her belt, alongside her holstered bolt pistol and several spare clips for it, things looked pretty bad.
‘I’ll get one of my cadets to prepare a summary,’ I said. I’d already thrown most of the intelligence analysis their way in any case, as it was a useful exercise for them, and was far too tedious to bother with myself even if I had been able to find the time to deal with it.
‘Good idea. And while they’re doing that, try and get some sleep,’ Julien advised. ‘You’re going to have to look like a hero, not some starport dreg on a bender.’
Tactless as her advice may have been, it was undoubtedly sound, and I decided to follow it. In the event, of course, I was only able to grab a couple of hours sleep, but I’d spent long enough in the field over the years to be well aware of how much difference even a cat nap could make, so, assisted by the large bowl of tanna and the plateful of salt grox and eggs Jurgen had thoughtfully provided on rousing me, I was feeling reasonably compos mentis when Kayla and Donal turned up in my study with the first summary they’d managed to distil from the raw intelligence I’d turned over to them the afternoon before.
‘It seems the colonel was right,’ Donal said. ‘Apart from the attack on Rytepat, the landings seemed pretty much at random.’ He passed me a slate, on which he’d helpfully marked the positions of the ensuing engagements. ‘The red ones are the confirmed contacts, and the yellow ones unconfirmed.’
‘Unconfirmed?’ I asked. ‘I thought we’d tracked all their trajectories before they hit.’
‘The PDF claim they did,’ Kayla said, a tone of scepticism clear in her voice. ‘But these two landing sites were deserted when they finally arrived to contain them.’ She indicated the pair of yellow icons, which, I noted with a shiver of unease, were both on the eastern continent, although far too distant from the Valley of Daemons for the hidden Inquisition facility to have been their targets. ‘The reports of the officers in charge are as comprehensive as you might expect.’ Again, from the tone of her voice, she clearly hadn’t expected very much.
‘Let me see,’ I said, paging through the datafiles until I’d found them. They were every bit as waffling and self-justificatory as I’d anticipated, and I dropped the slate on to my desk after no more than a moment of desultory skimming. ‘What’s left after you strip out the buck-passing and arse-covering?’
‘Very little,’ Donal said, somehow managing to convey a degree of world-weariness astonishing in a lad of his years. ‘There were signs of a heavy landing in both locations, but the shuttles were substantially intact, even if they weren’t particularly airworthy any more. There were no bodies found at either LZ, which implies that the occupants disembarked normally, despite the impact. The lieutenant in charge of the platoon which responded to the landing in the Barrens claims to have found a lot of trampled ground and expended power packs: he ventures to suggest this might indicate that the intruders got into a firefight with someone. The platoon which went to the other site doesn’t even report that.’
‘They wouldn’t,’ I said. The second site marked in yellow was in the middle of the desert which sliced across the continent, and I remembered all too vividly how the constant wind would erase any traces of a human presence with drifts of sand within moments when the conditions were right. ‘But we’d better warn any settlements close to those areas that they might be about to get visitors.’ That would be all we needed, wandering guerrilla bands of Chaotic infiltrators coming and going more or less as they pleased.
‘Who could they have got into a firefight with, in any case?’ Kayla asked, and Donal shrugged.
‘The lieutenant suggests orks,’ he said, as though delivering the punch line of a joke he didn’t think was all that funny. ‘They do have occasional outbreaks in the region, apparently, and he’s certain that none of our people were around to engage the enemy.’
‘They sound like remarkably tidy orks,’ I said, trying to suppress a sudden mental image of blank-faced metal killers. ‘If they’d jumped the heretics, the place would have been littered with bolter shells.’ Not to mention bits of heretic.
Trying to ignore the tingling in my palms, I paged through the report again, a little more carefully. This lieutenant, Tyso by name, had been quite thorough, it seemed, if only to deflect the possibility of being blamed for letting Throne alone knew how many heavily armed raiders loose on the province. He’d even attached a few picts, and a diagram pinpointing the precise locations of the dropped powerpacks, which, to my resigned lack of surprise, all seemed to be from standard-issue lasguns. More Madasan defectors, then, in all likelihood, which was hardly a prospect to relish. Instead of obvious cult warriors sprouting horns and extraneous limbs, we’d apparently lost track of trained soldiers who could pass unremarked among our own people, wreaking Emperor knew what havoc along the way.
