Vainglorious, p.3
Vainglorious, page 3
‘Updating the course data now,’ the tech-priest added, and a rune appeared at the corner of the screen. ‘Can you see the red icon yet?’
‘I can,’ I confirmed, wondering how I was supposed to use the information. A glance through the viewport showed me nothing but canyons and outcrops of metal now, tiny moving dots of light marking the positions of utility pods and void-suited hulljacks scrambling to get out of the way of what, to them, must have seemed like the wrath of the Emperor about to descend. Then I noticed a red, blinking light, half obscured by a vox-antenna, in a position which seemed to correspond to the location of the rune on the pict.
‘Good.’ The pilot was back. ‘You need to use the attitude thrusters. As you fire them, the ship will turn, and the reticule will move across the screen. Once the icon is centred, you’ll be heading straight for the hangar bay. Easy, right?’
‘If it were that easy you wouldn’t be on your current stipend,’ I said, hoping to keep everyone focused by showing some respect for their skills, ‘but I’ll do my best.’ I reached out for the quartet of switches. ‘Here goes.’
‘Port, starboard, ventral, dorsal,’ the pilot interjected hastily, ‘front to back. Got that?’
‘I hope so,’ I said, holding the second switch down for an experimental second. The rune began drifting along the bottom of the screen, almost agonisingly slowly, so I flicked the fourth one too. This time the icon began a leisurely rise up the screen as well, moving diagonally towards the outer ring of the reticule. ‘It seems to be working.’ A brief memory of playing games on a data-slate after lights out at my old schola floated to the surface of my mind, and I dismissed it abruptly. I’d never been much good at them, and the last thing I needed to do now was dent my confidence.
‘Good,’ the pilot said, ‘but lining up a bit faster would be better.’
‘Faster it is,’ I replied, feeling somewhat on top of things, and returned my attention to the switches. The icon moved across the screen a little more rapidly, clipping the edge of the target, and drifting past. ‘Frak.’
‘You need opposite thrust to slow or stop,’ the pilot said, an unmistakable sense of urgency beginning to suffuse her voice, in spite of an obvious attempt to suppress it. ‘Nothing to slow you down in space.’
‘Apart from the Ocean Orchestra,’ I said, stating the obvious before anyone else could, and hoping they’d think I was joking. I could see the entrance to the hangar bay through the viewport now, the shuttle approaching it at an oblique angle that meant I’d either miss it altogether or collide with the side wall or the deck as soon as I was inside. I juggled the switches again, moving the icon around, my frustration rising by the second; a couple of times I actually managed to centre it, only to see it drifting away from the crosshairs as I overcorrected or mistimed a steadying thruster burn.
‘Retros again,’ the pilot instructed, and I triggered them, slowing my approach, although the vast slab of metal in front of me still seemed to be increasing its proximity with worrying speed. Red lights began to flash, and alarms blare, but I had no time to think about those, or even acknowledge how annoying they were. The entrance to the hangar bay oscillated wildly across the viewport, and I gave up entirely on the pict display, concentrating completely on the external view. ‘Full retros, now!’
I squeezed the trigger again, my other hand still darting from one switch to another, and by luck or the Emperor’s grace I managed to get more or less lined up in the nick of time. With a sound not unreminiscent of someone hitting a cathedral bell with a sledgehammer, the shuttle caromed off the starboard rim of the external door, bounced a couple of times on the deck plates, and slithered to a halt against the far wall.
‘I’m down,’ I said, trying not to sound too winded from the impact of my sternum against the console, and realising a little too late that the seat had been fitted with crash restraints. The massive doors behind me began to grind closed, and void-suited crew members swarm into the hangar. ‘How do I turn these bloody alarms off?’
The tech-priest responded with a series of instructions that seemed to work, and sudden silence descended, broken only by a faint and worrying hissing sound. After a moment of panic reason reasserted itself, assuring me that any breaches in the hull couldn’t have been enough to vent my atmosphere into the near-total vacuum of the hangar bay or I’d already have been too busy being dead to notice, and I started to breathe a little more easily. A few moments of blissful quiet later I began to notice a rising swell of bumps and clanging from outside, as the damage control party got on with controlling the damage, which meant the atmosphere in the hangar was getting thick enough to breathe. I popped the hatch, sucking thin, chill air gratefully into my lungs.
‘Thank you all,’ I voxed, ‘you did a magnificent job,’ which was no more than the truth, as well as being the kind of thing I’d be expected to say.
Ignoring the inevitable protestations that it was nothing, they’d only been doing their duty to the Throne, the Omnissiah and the Navy, I looked around the hangar, taking in the deep gouges in the deck where the shuttle had hit, and shuddering at the thought of how close I’d come to death. Exposed conduits were emitting sparks and foul vapours in roughly equal proportions, and though everyone around me seemed to know what they were doing, that was a combination which I was understandably keen to get as far away from as possible. Gathering my dignity and straightening my cap, I made for the nearest exit as fast as I could manage without appearing to hurry.
‘Ciaphas.’ To my faint surprise, Zyvan was already waiting for me on the other side of the airlock, what I could see of his face behind his luxuriant beard undeniably troubled. ‘You’ve certainly lost none of your flair for the dramatic entrance.’
‘Much as I’d like to take the credit,’ I said, ‘I can’t for this one. Purely an accident, I’m afraid.’
‘I’m sure it was meant to look like one,’ Zyvan conceded, while his personal guard formed up around us, their gold-plated hellguns at the ready.
‘If it wasn’t an accident,’ I said, the palms of my hands beginning to tingle again, as they so often did when my paranoia kicked in, ‘then what was it?’
‘An assassination attempt,’ Zyvan said, as though merely remarking on the weather.
THREE
‘I’m still not convinced,’ I said, a couple of hours later, feeling greatly fortified by the culinary expertise of Zyvan’s personal chef. I swirled the dregs of a post-prandial amasec around the bottom of my goblet, and stared thoughtfully at the gently rotating bulk of the planet below us. ‘Most of my enemies are dead, and the rest are a long way from Coronus.’ Not much of the Ocean Orchestra’s superstructure was visible from here, but I’ve always had a reasonable knack for orientation,[17] and I found it faintly disconcerting to realise I was sitting almost exactly where I would have died if the malfunctioning servitor had continued on its original course.
‘A fair point,’ Zyvan conceded, leaning forward in his armchair to proffer a refill. I held out the goblet, and drew it back comfortably replenished. ‘Assuming you were the intended target, of course.’
‘Meaning that you were,’ I said. That, at least, was comforting, if a little insulting – if I ever do meet my end at the hands of the Emperor’s enemies, I’d like to at least know they meant it, rather than considering me nothing more than collateral damage.
‘Throne knows it wouldn’t be the first time,’ Zyvan said, with a glance at the stuffed heads of several previous would-be assassins adorning the walls of his private sitting room. Not all of them were present, of course, having been left in too many pieces to be worth preserving, but it was a respectable haul none the less. I’d even contributed a few to the collection myself, most notably the Slaaneshi cultists who’d rudely interrupted a strategy meeting at his headquarters on Adumbria not long after our association had begun, and an ork kommando who still wore the same expression of stupefied astonishment it’d adopted at the moment my chainsword had sheared through its neck.
‘Nor the last, probably,’ I agreed, savouring the drink. ‘But why would anyone take the risk of coming after you here?’
Zyvan shrugged. ‘I’m sure we’ll find out. Unless you’re right, and it really was an accident.’ Since finding out one way or the other wasn’t my job, and there were people on his staff for that kind of thing, I decided to move the conversation to safer ground before it occurred to him that I might be able to offer some assistance in getting to the bottom of the matter.
‘So,’ I said, after pausing just long enough to look as though it had been weighing on my mind despite the conversation moving on to other topics in the meantime, ‘what do you think of the Perlia job?’
Zyvan laughed heartily, clearly as mellowed as I was by good food and better drink. ‘I think it’s a terrible idea. I’ll never find another commissarial liaison officer with half as much common sense as you, or fighting spirit come to that.’ Which made him half-right, I suppose. ‘You’ll leave a big hole when you go. But of course you should take it. If anyone’s earned an honourable retirement, it’s you.’
‘I am inclined to take them up on it,’ I admitted. ‘But if it leaves you in the lurch…’
For a moment I feared I’d overplayed my hand, but the lord general simply laughed again. ‘See, that’s typical of you, Ciaphas. Always letting your sense of duty have the upper hand. We’ll manage.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ I said. For what it was worth, I had enough clout among the Commissariat for my recommendations to be listened to when it came to appointing my replacement, and I’d be able to make sure he wasn’t stuck with the sort of overly enthusiastic meddler who’d question his decisions and generally get in the way. There were more than enough of those, naturally, but they tended to get assigned to line regiments, where they either learned better very quickly or died heroically in the name of the Emperor, sometimes at the hands of the enemy.
‘How soon will you be leaving?’ Zyvan asked, in the manner of someone trying to appear as though the answer weren’t particularly important, and not quite succeeding.
‘Apparently they’d like me in post around the turn of the year,’ I said, quietly flattered that he was obviously going to miss me, and making it clear that I’d still have time for a few more raids on his dinner table before we finally parted company. But, of course, that wasn’t his real reason for asking.
‘So you’d have time for a small side trip on the way?’ Zyvan leaned forwards a little in his chair, a habit he tended to fall into when confiding in someone.
‘I might,’ I agreed, wondering what he was driving at. ‘Where did you have in mind?’
‘Eucopia.’ He paused, expectantly.
‘Never heard of it,’ I said, my sense of bafflement increasing. ‘Should I have?’
‘Not unless you’ve been playing cards with the local tech-priests,’ Zyvan said, with a hint of amusement. My skill with a tarot deck was not entirely unknown to him, which, I suspected, was one of the reasons he preferred regicide when we found time to socialise.
I shook my head, acknowledging the jest. ‘No fun when they don’t have any currency,’ I replied, not entirely truthfully, although I’d certainly found being able to supplement my stipend by sitting down with a few suckers who still thought games of chance had something to do with luck more than a little handy over the years. I’d even found enough acolytes of the Cult Mechanicus who sufficiently relished what they thought of as an interesting practical exercise in probability theory to give me a pleasant evening or two’s diversion now and again, although, as Zyvan had intimated, the pickings had been slender in the extreme.[18] Their skitarii, on the other hand, were soldiers as much as they were cogboys, and a fair few of them retained a soldier’s fondness for losing what little money they had in the name of recreation.
‘It’s a forge world,’ Zyvan said, clearly noting the raising of my eyebrow as he spoke. Forge worlds were strategically vital to the Imperium, and correspondingly among the most well-known systems in the sector. This one, however, I’d never heard of before. ‘Or, at least, it’s going to be.’
‘I see,’ I said, thinking I did. ‘Just been tagged by an explorator fleet, has it?’ I was vague on the details, but I knew the Mechanicus had scout flotillas out all the time looking for resource-rich systems to pillage. But that didn’t make a lot of sense, now I came to think about it – if Eucopia was between here and Perlia it had to be well within the borders of the Imperium, not somewhere out on the fringes which would probably need a small crusade to annexe; not to mention fending off interlopers with an eye on the planet’s bounty for themselves, like the jokaero or the squats.
‘Quite recently,’ Zyvan said, with a hint of amusement. ‘It’s been on their to-do list since just before the turn of the last millennium,[19] but recent events have rather forced their hand.’
I nodded, catching his drift. ‘The hive fleets,’ I said. Despite the best efforts of the Astra Militarum, Astartes and Navy alike, not to mention our somewhat shaky alliance of convenience with the t’au, the tyranids were driving ever deeper into the Eastern Arm, and that was playing havoc with our supply chain. More than one forge world around the Gulf had fallen to the scuttling horrors in the last decade, not to mention a double handful of Imperial manufacturing worlds, whose bustling hive cities had no doubt struck the encroaching fleets as the ’nid equivalent of an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord. ‘How soon can they start cranking the weapons out?’
Zyvan chuckled. ‘Straight to the point, as always. But that’s the problem. They should have begun full-scale production over a year ago.’
‘So why haven’t they?’ I asked, reasonably enough under the circumstances.
The lord general’s brow furrowed. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. All we’re getting is a few token shipments and endless excuses. Even the magi here are getting fobbed off whenever they try to look into it.’
‘Sounds like tech-priests,’ I said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘Put two in a room and you get three schisms. They’re probably still arguing about which incense they need to burn over the on button.’
Zyvan shook his head. ‘It’s nothing like that. At least not this time.’ He pushed a data-slate across the abandoned game board between us. I glanced at it, seeing the image of a typical mid-ranking member of the order, which is to say more metal than flesh, their original gender indeterminate. ‘The archmagos sent this fellow, Tyron Clode, to make some discreet enquiries on-site.’
‘So what did he find?’ I asked, with a faint presentiment of the negative answer to come.
Zyvan shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. No one’s seen or heard from him since he got off the shuttle.’
All of a sudden the evening’s meal seemed to double its mass in my stomach.
‘And you want me to pick up where he left off?’ I was no stranger to covert activities, of course, generally at Amberley’s request, but they’d never sat particularly well with me. That sort of thing generally made enemies, and I’d far rather face mine on a battlefield, where I at least had some idea of who was out to get me and which direction they were likely to be coming from, than have to periodically check my shoulder blades for a dagger hilt.
‘Not exactly,’ Zyvan said. ‘But I don’t need to tell you how badly the Militarum needs the weapons we’ve been promised. Not to mention the Navy and the Adeptus Astartes, who my sources tell me are having similar problems. Perhaps a goodwill visit from someone of your reputation will persuade them to stop frakking about and get the job done.’
‘Perhaps it will,’ I agreed, although privately I rather doubted it. In my experience cogboys seldom even listened to one another, let alone outsiders with most of their original organs intact. I could hardly refuse, though, not if I wanted to continue enjoying the lord general’s hospitality until my departure, so I merely nodded judiciously and helped myself to another goblet of amasec while I still had the chance. ‘I’ll poke around a bit, see what I can find.’ Although if I’d had the faintest idea of what was waiting for me there, I’d have headed in the opposite direction as fast as the warp could take me.
Editorial Note:
Since Cain glosses over the details of his journey to Eucopia, picking up his account of events shortly after his arrival in orbit around the embryonic forge world, this seems like as good a place as any to add some background information to supplement his own comments about conditions there (which, typically, are largely confined to complaints about those aspects of it he finds personally inconvenient).
As my usual source for such additional information, Sekara’s well-known travelogue A Wanderer’s Waybook, has nothing to say about the place, having been published approximately a millennium and a half before initial attempts at colonisation commenced, I’ve fallen back on a rather less readable substitute – Appendix 47(b) of the Initial Report on Potential Exploitation of the Resources of the World Eucopia and of its Associated Planetary System, paragraphs 2,416 to 2,418 inclusive.
The world itself is technically within the habitable zone surrounding the system’s primary, but only just. Given the freezing temperature, the thinness of its atmosphere and the lack of photosynthesising organisms capable of altering its composition to something breathable, substantial augmetic modification would be required to any and all potential colonists to enable their survival on the planet’s surface. Accounting for the density of population required by a functioning forge world, the diversion of manufacturing resources on the scale required to achieve this option would be prohibitive.
Accordingly, it is recommended that initial settlement should take place entirely within sealed enclaves, allowing the first wave of colonists to live comfortably while commencing the construction of the required manufacturing facilities and the planetary engineering infrastructure necessary to render the wider environment capable of supporting life unaided. Initial estimates would indicate that this could be achieved within a timescale of approximately two millennia, with full terraforming completed by the third or fourth century of M43, unless unexpected difficulties are encountered.
