Cains last stand, p.19
Cain's Last Stand, page 19
No one did, so I made for one of the vacant seats on the Inquisition side of the line. I’d already as good as declared my covert allegiance to the organisation in any case, so there was no point in dissembling further, and there was no seat on the only neutral table edge, opposite Felicia, anyhow. I took the closest empty chair to where she was sitting, partly because it was obvious that her opinion would have a great deal of influence on the assembled tech-priests, and partly because that placed me as far as possible from the young man with the glassy expression and the unruly thatch of brown hair sitting almost opposite the skitarii captain. I’d met enough psykers in my life to be wary of them, even a sanctionite, as he clearly was. Just as well I’d left Jurgen outside, I thought.
‘In case you don’t know,’ Felicia said, with just enough seriousness for me to be sure that she was treating my presence here as a bit of a joke again, ‘this is my old friend Ciaphas Cain. Hero of the Imperium, Liberator of Perlia, all that stuff you see on the statue plinths.’ She cocked her head quizzically. ‘And, apparently, a covert acolyte, working for Inquisitor Vail. Care to clarify that, commissar?’
‘As much as I can,’ I said, doing the open honest face again. I was well aware of how much the Inquisition group would enjoy their little cloak and dagger games, and how fiercely they’d jockey for position in their shadowy hierarchy, so it would be as well to hint that I knew stuff they weren’t privy to. ‘Though I’m not really an acolyte as such. Inquisitor Vail’s a personal friend, and I’ve occasionally been in a position to help her out a bit, that’s all.’ The hard-faced man on my left nodded thoughtfully, clearly convinced that I was far deeper into the inner mysteries of the Ordo Xenos than he was. ‘Knowing this, her last emissary asked me to pick up where he left off, when he was forced to leave the system during the first incursion.’
‘I’ve read the report,’ Hard-face said evenly. After a moment he stuck out a hand. ‘As we seem to be skipping the introductions, I’m Terie Makan, head of project security.’ He exchanged an awkward look with the skitarii officer. ‘On the Inquisition side, obviously. Captain Yaitz handles things for the Mechanicus.’
‘Sieur Makan.’ I shook his hand, adjusting the smile a little. The look that passed between the two men had told me a good deal, mainly that they were willing to co-operate with each other, but with a certain degree of reservation on both sides. To everyone’s surprise, I then nodded to Yaitz, down the length of the table. ‘Captain Yaitz. I look forward to working more closely with the two of you.’ Their almost identical expressions of surprise told me that this was an equally unexpected development for both men.
‘Are we to infer from that remark that the ridiculous idea your rogue trader friend proposed has been shelved?’ one of the tech-priests asked.
I nodded. ‘Magos Tayber has been good enough to show me the assembled artefact,’ I said, Felicia’s formal title sounding slightly strange issuing from my own mouth. ‘It’s quite clear to me that there’s no realistic prospect of removing it to a safer location now, at least in the time we have available.’ A mingled air of relief and smugness began to radiate from the cogboy side of the table, and a faint tingle of alarm began to manifest over in the Inquisition section.
‘Then we need to take steps to ensure its security,’ Makan said, looking uncomfortably like a man who’s just bitten his own tongue.
‘Precisely why I’m here,’ I assured him. ‘Whatever happens, we must keep the Shadowlight out of Varan’s hands. Even if that means destroying it ourselves.’
I half expected the room to erupt at that point, but instead all I could hear was the faint hiss of indrawn breath from around the table. (Well, most of the table. I suspect some of the tech-priests were beyond such human frailties as breathing.)
‘That would be very much our last resort, of course,’ I said, after a moment, and everyone relaxed again.
‘I’m not entirely sure that we could destroy it, even if we wanted to,’ one of the tech-priests ventured after a moment. ‘It’s already survived aeons of geological upheaval, without so much as a scratch. I hardly think a conventional explosion would do it much harm.’
‘Killian seemed to think a plasma bolt might hurt it,’ I ventured hopefully.
‘Killian was an imbecile,’ Makan said, which seemed to be something everyone agreed on, Inquisition and Mechanicus alike. ‘He didn’t have the faintest conception of what he was dealing with.’
‘Lunatics seldom do,’ I pointed out evenly. ‘Which brings us back to the Chaos horde about to descend on this planet. They’re about as mad as you can get, by definition, and you can be sure Varan won’t hesitate to muck about with the thing if he manages to get his hands on it.’ I paused. ‘And even if, by some miracle, he does resist the temptation, Abaddon most certainly won’t.’
‘The Despoiler?’ The young psyker spoke for the first time, his voice faintly reedy, as though listening to some distant music in his head. ‘You think he has a direct hand in this?’
‘Who knows?’ I shrugged, trying to seem bluff and businesslike, and mask the terror which had almost overwhelmed me at the thought of attracting the attention of the worst piece of walking malevolence to hit the galaxy since Horus’s day. ‘Varan undoubtedly answers to him, at any rate. All the warmasters do.’
‘True.’ Yaitz nodded in agreement. ‘The one advantage we still have is that they’re presumably unaware of the device’s existence.’
‘Unfortunately, that might not be the case,’ I said, provoking another windstorm of wordless consternation around the table. ‘Our best intelligence would indicate that Perlia has been deliberately targeted by Varan’s flotilla. No one in the defence force has any idea why, but I think we all know what there is here which would tempt a raiding force to cross almost the entire galaxy in an attempt to reach it.’
‘But how could they know about the Shadowlight?’ Yaitz asked, with a pointed look at Makan. ‘It’s supposed to be one of the most securely kept secrets in the segmentum.’
‘It is.’ The security man nodded briskly. ‘But secrets have an uncomfortable habit of getting out. Innumerable people have rotated through here in the last few hundred years, from both our institutions. It would only take one to let something slip, or fall into the hands of the enemy.’
‘I can assure you, no servant of the Omnissiah would ever be so indiscreet,’ Yaitz said frostily.
‘My money’s on Killian,’ I said, stepping in quickly to defuse the incipient argument. In fact I had no idea how the secret had got out, nor did I particularly care, but I’d been a commissar long enough to know that division in our own ranks would be worth an extra company of traitor marines to the enemy. ‘He was sponsoring a Chaos cult on Pererimunda, to recruit potential psykers for his lunatic scheme. If any of them survived the purges, they could have spread the word.’
To my relief, everyone around the table seemed to be buying it, accepting Killian as the designated scapegoat without further argument. ‘What really worries me is the prospect of Varan, or Abaddon, or anyone else for that matter, picking up where he left off. They wouldn’t hesitate to turn out wyrds in industrial quantities if they could, and Emperor alone knows how much harm that could do.’
‘It would destroy the galaxy,’ the young psyker said quietly, his voice somehow resonating all the more for its lack of volume.
‘Master Sparsen may be exaggerating,’ Makan began, ‘but…’
‘I’m not exaggerating in the least,’ the pale young man assured him. ‘The power of the warp would flow through them, untrammelled by the wards the blessing of the Emperor places in the minds of his true servants. Aside from the harm they’d do directly, many would become possessed by daemons and worse, allowing the full horrors of the empyrean to rampage unchecked among the stars. Within two generations, the Eye of Terror would grow to swallow us all.’ His voice was no louder than before, but it was the expression of absolute horror on his face that convinced me. Here was a man who gazed into the depths of the warp on a daily basis, and wouldn’t be lightly moved by what he saw there, and he was clearly convinced that he spoke no more than the literal truth.
‘Then let’s make sure it doesn’t come to that,’ Felicia said calmly, and the young psyker nodded.
‘That would be best,’ he said quietly.
‘If we can’t remove the Shadowlight, and we can’t destroy it, we’ll just have to make sure the enemy can’t get their hands on it,’ I said evenly. ‘Captain Yaitz, perhaps we could confer afterwards about our options for defending this installation. I’m sure you have some ideas in that regard.’
‘I do.’ Yaitz nodded. ‘And I’m sure your own experience of engaging the enemy here would prove invaluable in assessing them. You probably have some suggestions of your own, too.’
‘Well, I suppose we could blow up the dam again,’ I said, being careful to inflect the remark like a joke, ‘but I suspect they’ll be ready for that.’ I know I would be, if I’d heard about the earlier battle on this site, and if Varan and his confederates hadn’t already, they certainly would do almost as soon as they set foot on Perlia. Cain’s Last Stand, as the locals both flatteringly and erroneously insist on calling the engagement, is a legend on this generally rather dull little world, and has spawned innumerable books, pict dramas, holos and picturestrips, each one more exaggerated and inaccurate than the last.
‘We’ll set some demo charges anyway,’ Felicia said decisively, taking me aback rather, given how stroppy she’d been the first time I’d breached the dam. It seemed that time, and greater responsibility, had grafted a stronger streak of pragmatism into her, along with all the augmetic junk. ‘If they’re dumb enough to fall for it again, we might as well be prepared to take advantage of the fact.’ She gazed levelly at the assembled tech-priests, as if waiting for a challenge to her authority. None of them spoke, but most of them were clearly far from happy at the prospect. ‘We can always build another dam, but there’s only one Shadowlight.’
‘Thank the Emperor,’ I muttered, rather more loudly than I’d intended, and turned to Makan. ‘I’d like you to sit in on the discussion too,’ I added. ‘I’m sure you’ve done a thorough threat assessment, which ought to cover most of the likely scenarios.’
‘Everything from the orks coming back to a hrud migration,’ he assured me, ‘or a coup d’état by tau-backed secessionists. Lines of approach, infiltration of the staff by enemy sympathisers, you name it.’ Aware of the hard stares being directed at him from all quarters of the room, he shrugged defiantly. ‘I’m not saying anyone is a traitor, just that I’ve drawn up contingency plans for dealing with that possibility, along with anything else I could think of. It’s my job.’
‘Which we should all thank the Emperor you take as seriously as you so clearly do,’ I put in, smoothing over the awkward moment as effortlessly as my training and lifetime of experience allowed me to. ‘Does anyone else have anything to add that might be useful?’
‘Only that the completed device is far more than a psychic amplifier,’ Felicia put in. She glanced around the table, waiting for a challenge again, and relaxed almost imperceptibly when one failed to materialise. The next time she spoke it was directly to me. ‘We’re still far from understanding its true purpose, but we are beginning to form some tentative conclusions.’
‘That’s right,’ another of the tech-priests chimed in. ‘As Magos Tayber might have explained already, the Shadowlight component draws directly on the power of the warp, which appears to be why it can boost or activate latent psychic abilities.’
‘She has,’ I confirmed. ‘Go on.’
‘The rest of the device seems to be a system for focussing that energy,’ Felicia said, giving her talkative underling the sort of look I used to reserve for Gunner Ehrlsen, my most regular disciplinary problem back in the relatively carefree days I’d spent in the 12th Field Artillery. ‘What it was originally intended to achieve we’re still not entirely sure, but if we’re right, it can alter the very fabric of reality.’
‘Holy Throne!’ I said involuntarily, seeing Sparsen’s horrifying vision of the future suddenly transformed into a relatively optimistic picture by comparison. Instead of taking the better part of a century to annihilate the galaxy, it seemed the Shadowlight could do the job in little more than an eye blink if it fell into the wrong hands. Whatever Felicia might have to say about it, or Amberley too, come to that, I determined then and there to find some way of destroying the cursed thing before it was too late. ‘Why would anyone build a monstrosity like that?’
‘Out of fear,’ another Inquisitorial delegate chimed in. She was a sharp-featured young woman in the habit of a sister of the Ordo Dialogus, presumably charged with the thankless task of making some kind of sense of the chicken scratches I’d observed on the tablets lining the walls of the chamber in which the Shadowlight now resided. ‘We know from some of the fragments recovered at other sites across the galaxy that the Ancients were at war. Who or what with we have no idea, although some scholars have speculated that the character most frequently associated with the enemy can be transliterated into Gothic as Katarn or C’tan.’
‘Never heard of them,’ I said, with some relief: at least it wasn’t the damned necrons.
‘Both sides appear to have been wiped out in the war,’ the sister said. ‘Complete mutual annihilation. Only the occasional relic of the Ancients survives, and nothing at all of the C’tan[60]. But there are legends among the eldar which might possibly have their roots in that conflict. Of course the pointy-eared limpwrists are too far up their own fundaments to share any useful knowledge with us lesser breeds, but we have managed to find a few bits of information which might be relevant through some rather unorthodox channels.’
Meaning Inquisition assets, presumably. It wasn’t entirely unknown for individual eldar to co-operate with members of the Ordo Xenos on very rare occasions: Amberley spoke their tongue tolerably well, and I recalled her mentioning that she’d learned it on one such enterprise, the details of which she never confided in me[61], so I assumed that the forthright sister had been able to make use of some similar line of contact. She’d probably get on well with Julien, I thought fleetingly, before returning my mind to more pressing concerns.
‘Information about the Shadowlight?’ I hazarded, more to give the impression that I was still on top of things than because I expected to be able to understand the answer.
‘Possibly,’ the sharp-featured sister said. ‘According to some rather obscure passages in the Lay of Kelce, the Ancients may have attempted to tap into the power of the warp directly, in an attempt to defend themselves against their enemies. Some eldar scholars even believe that it was this which first unleashed the curse of Chaos on the galaxy.’
‘A far-fetched piece of speculation, which Sister Rosetta seems to take considerably more seriously than it warrants,’ Felicia said firmly, receiving a most unbeatific glare in return.
‘Given how old and powerful the artefact undoubtedly is, it would be unwise in the extreme to ignore the possibility, that’s all I’m saying,’ Rosetta said, with the air of someone who said it quite often.
As I considered the full import of her words, I felt my bowels turn to water, and had to muster all my willpower not to let my consternation show on my face. Just when I’d been thinking the situation couldn’t possibly get any worse, too. ‘It seems to me that whether it’s true or not, you should be proceeding with the utmost caution,’ I said carefully.
‘Don’t worry, we are,’ Felicia assured me breezily, which signally failed to make me feel any better. I knew her headstrong streak of old, and had little doubt that if all seemed lost, she’d take a chance on activating the thing just to see what happened. Worse still, Emperor help me, I’d probably let her, if there seemed to be the slightest chance that it might work.
Well, that was a problem for another day. Right now, as Felicia had pointed out back on the piazza, so soon after our arrival, Jurgen and I had a war to get back to.
I nodded thoughtfully. ‘It seems to me, then, that we’d best leave you to your researches.’ After all, they hadn’t managed to blow up the galaxy so far, despite decades of doing their best, and if there was even the remotest chance that Felicia and her people could find a way of using the device reasonably safely against our enemies, we might still be desperate enough to try it once the invasion started. Even if there wasn’t, it would keep them occupied, and out from under my feet. I glanced at Makan and Yaitz as I rose. ‘I presume there’s somewhere we can thrash out our defensive strategies without bothering everyone else, gentlemen?’ And get Jurgen out of the corridor before Sparsen encountered him, more to the point.
‘My office is nearest,’ Makan said, clearly prepared for an objection from his opposite number, but Yaitz simply nodded his agreement.
‘It would save a little time,’ he conceded, evidently prepared to co-operate to the best of his ability.
‘Good,’ I said, in my best Cain the Hero manner. ‘Then let’s get to it.’ I nodded at Felicia. ‘No doubt I’ll see you again before we leave.’
‘You will if you don’t want to walk back to Chilinvale,’ she agreed cheerfully. ‘That car of yours looks as though it’s going to be difficult to start.’
EDITORIAL NOTE:
Evidently Cain, or, more likely, Jurgen, did manage to find some form of transport, because by the time his narrative resumes his ostensible tour of inspection has concluded. Typically, he is as vague as ever about the passage of time, but from other references in the text we can infer that roughly three days have passed in the interim.
