Defender of the imperium.., p.34
Defender of the Imperium Omnibus, page 34
Another gaggle of troopers scurried in and out of Kasteen’s cubbyhole with chairs to go along with the desk, and we all sat, looking out over the floor of the warehouse again. She’d chosen well, I thought, one of a line of glass-fronted cubicles on a mezzanine gallery roughly halfway up the wall facing the big doors fronting the loading docks. From here she’d have a commanding view of everything going on in the main body of the building.
And outside it, too, at the moment; the doors were open, admitting a steady stream of laden troopers, lugging boxes from the backs of the trucks backed up to the loading bays, and a flurry of snowflakes from the open expanse of rockcrete outside where our Chimeras were snarling their way through a thin film of freezing slush. By Valhallan standards, of course, it was warm enough, most of the men and women I could see still in their shirtsleeves, some of which were even rolled up. It was chilly for me, though, and I was as grateful as ever for my commissarial greatcoat, into which I huddled, trying to ignore the draught punching its way in through the open door. Abruptly the chill breeze became imbued with the odour of month-old socks left to marinade in compost, and my aide appeared in the gap.
‘Tanna, sir?’ he asked, depositing a tray on the newly installed slab of wood between us.
‘Thank you, Jurgen,’ I said, accepting the fragrant beverage gratefully, while he handed tea bowls to Kasteen and Broklaw, who held their breath almost by reflex as he moved closer. They sipped their drinks thoughtfully, and I tried to restrain the impulse to gulp mine, feeling the warmth spreading gradually through my body as I swallowed. Jurgen refilled my bowl.
‘You’re welcome sir.’ He handed me a message slate. ‘This came in for you a few minutes ago.’ I took and scanned it, and glanced up at the two officers.
‘Well,’ I said, trying to restrain my sudden flare of enthusiasm at the prospect of being able to skive off to somewhere a bit warmer for a while. ‘This might give us a few answers, I suppose.’
‘Who’s it from?’ Kasteen asked, her surprise showing in her voice. We’d only been dirtside for a few hours, hardly long enough for anyone on Periremunda to be aware of our presence yet, let alone send us messages.
‘The local arbitrator,’4 I said. I skimmed the slate across the desk, so she could read it. ‘He wants to discuss jurisdictional protocols, in case our boys and girls get a little over-exuberant in their off-time.’ This was a common enough request when a Guard regiment or two pitched up on a planet somewhere, so that when the troopers started getting into mischief (which they invariably did, or my job would have been pretty pointless) everyone involved knew whether they should be handed over to the local courts, the military provosts, or directly to the Commissariat.
Of course you’d probably get as many different answers to that as there were commissars on the planet, but in my case I always asked for any of our troopers who got into trouble to be remanded directly into my custody, a habit I’d got into right at the beginning of my career with the 12th Field Artillery, and seen no reason to break in the years since. For one thing it fostered the impression among the troopers that I cared about their welfare, and would always go out of my way to take care of one of our own, which was good for morale generally, and for another it gave me a good excuse to leave the regiment in search of more congenial activities on a fairly regular basis. On the occasions I couldn’t be bothered, or was genuinely too busy, I could always rely on Jurgen to take care of the paperwork. I shrugged. ‘I suppose I could just call him back, but…’
‘You’re thinking of going in person?’ Kasteen asked.
I nodded. ‘I’m sure he’d appreciate the courtesy, and it never hurts to make a good impression.’ Not to mention the fact that the planetary capital was a good couple of thousand metres lower, and a damn sight warmer, than Hoarfell, where we were currently stationed.
Broklaw looked concerned. ‘Get some rest first, at least,’ he counselled. ‘You’ve been on your feet since we made orbit.’
‘No longer than anyone else,’ I said, contriving to look as if I was stifling a yawn. In truth I wasn’t all that tired, having managed to catch a short nap on the shuttle trip down, which had not only refreshed me a little but had conferred the added bonus of avoiding Jurgen’s inevitable discomfiture at being airborne in an atmosphere. I’d never known him to actually be sick, such a thing being beneath the dignity he fondly imagined was conferred on him by his exalted position as a commissar’s personal aide, but his anxiety about the possibility tended to combine with the physical nausea to make him sweat like an ork, which in turn would ripen his habitual bouquet to quite an astonishing degree. I shrugged. ‘Besides, it’s too good a chance to miss. If anyone can tell us what’s really going on here, it’s the local arbitrator.’
‘Good point,’ Kasteen said. ‘If you think you’re up to it.’ She looked at me narrowly. ‘Anything you can get out of him is bound to be more reliable than the pap we get through the usual channels.’
‘My thought exactly,’ I said, ‘and the more we know about what we’re facing here, the better we’ll be able to deal with it.’ Words that were to have something of a hollow ring, in retrospect, but at that point I had no idea just how little anyone really knew about the true state of affairs on Periremunda, apart from a handful of people who knew altogether too much for comfort.
Editorial Note:
Although Cain is reasonably explicit about the topographical peculiarities of Periremunda, he only bothers to be so when they impinge in some manner on his own experience; something which is, of course, entirely consistent with his attitude throughout the archive. I have therefore interpolated the following extract, which I hope will make much of what follows a little more readily comprehensible.
From Interesting Places and Tedious People: A Wanderer’s Waybook by Jerval Sekara, 145 M39
Like many worlds with unusual characteristics, the early history of Periremunda is shrouded in conjecture and legend. One can be reasonably certain that it was originally discovered some time around the middle of M24 by the explorator Acer Alba, only to be promptly forgotten again due to his untimely demise, probably in an affair of honour over the affections of a courtesan. Following the rediscovery of Alba’s notes by Magos Provocare, a tireless challenger of the unknown whose unorthodox views frequently attracted the opprobrium of his peers, the planet was eventually colonised in the early years of the 27th millennium.
What makes it worthy of the discriminating wayfarer’s attention, at least for a short while, is the fact that by any reasonable definition of the phrase the world as a whole is uninhabitable. The equatorial regions are not so much hot as literally molten, the rock itself bubbling from below the ground in a constantly shifting sea of liquid magma, while the rest of the surface is a desiccated desert in which nothing seems able to live. There are, however, scattered pockets of habitability, no less comfortable than other, more Emperor-favoured worlds. Vast plateaux, too many to count, soar upwards from this arid foundation to heights sufficient to take them into the cooler air where life itself is possible, and hundreds of the larger ones, which can stretch for tens of kilometres across, boast cities, farms, and manufactoria equal to those of the fairer globes most of us are pleased to call home.
Climate and temperature are more a matter of altitude than geography here, enabling the jaded traveller to experience a wide variety of environments with little more effort than that required to hire an aircar and chauffeur, although, as is so often the case with backwater planets, some caution is advised when attempting to find accommodation, as even the most prestigious local establishments can, on closer inspection, turn out to be somewhat basic in the facilities they offer.
TWO
In the event, the arbitrator was suitably flattered by my request to discuss our business in person, not least, it seemed, because my reputation had preceded me as it so often does, and scarcely another hour had passed before I found the ground dropping away beneath me once again. Jurgen had managed to secure us seats on a courier shuttle with urgent business in Principia Mons5, his manifest pride in being able to find us transport so quickly only partially mitigated by the realisation that having done so meant having to get airborne again for the second time in one day. Nevertheless he bore this travail with the phlegmatic stoicism with which he accepted everything else, only the thickening of the air around him and the whitening of his knuckles mute testament to the discomfort he felt even before we’d left the pad. (Although, being Jurgen, I suppose it would be a little more accurate to say that his knuckles went a paler shade of grime.) It would probably have suited both of us better if I’d left him behind, but protocol demanded that my aide accompany me on an official visit to an Imperial official of such exalted rank, so we’d both have to make the best of it, Jurgen trying to ignore the discomfort of his rebellious stomach, and me trying not to picture the reaction of the arbitrator when I turned up with him in tow.
Perhaps it was for that reason that I turned my attention to the landscape falling away beneath us, getting my first real glimpse of the planet that we’d come so far to protect. I knew intellectually that we were perched on the highest and most desolate plateau of this patchwork world, but seeing the reality from the air brought the strangeness of our position home to me in a manner that no amount of background briefing would ever have been able to do. Hoarfell was huge, so many kloms6 across that disembarking from the drop-ship had felt like stepping out onto any other planet in the Imperium. Now, as our shuttle banked away to the south-east, I found myself able to appreciate the sheer scale of it for the first time.
The first thing to attract my attention was the field at which we’d landed, and which, like most of the other dirtside facilities scattered across the face of the planet, combined the functions of a star port with those of an aerodrome for the local traffic. This was, of course, considerable, given the peculiar topography of the place. With very few exceptions, where adjacent inhabited plateaux were both close enough and sufficiently similar in height to allow the construction of viaducts between them, taking to the skies was the only way to shift anything from one tiny island of life to another. As a result the amount of air traffic criss-crossing the globe was truly staggering, given its relatively modest population of a mere billion or so. Even on the short trip to Principia Mons, which took less than an hour, I caught sight of innumerable other aircraft, ranging from two-seater skycars to wallowing cargo dirigibles the size of warehouses, around which swarms of smaller planes buzzed like insects.
As we rose above the city of Darien, the densest concentration of citizens on Hoarfell, I found myself being put in mind of the firewasp nest I’d stumbled across on Calcifrie (which had turned out to be remarkably useful in deterring the party of eldar reavers pursuing me at the time, but I digress), a never-ending swarm of bright metal insects swirling about the landing pads as they receded into the distance. Though the densest concentration of aircraft was hovering above the aerodrome there were plenty of others buzzing around the rest of the city, private skimmers and aircars for the most part. I made a mental note to suggest to Kasteen that we get our Hydras deployed as soon as possible; rather too many pilots were crossing the space above our garrison for my liking. In the event, of course, she was well ahead of me, and by the time I returned she’d already imposed an exclusion zone in a wide enough radius around us to seriously irritate the local traffic controllers.7
As we rose higher, away from the city itself, I was able to get a better view of the landscape surrounding it, a wilderness of snow and ice through which hills and escarpments in muted tones of black and grey rose to pierce the leaden clouds above them, so that it was hard to tell where rock ended and vapour began. Somewhere out there was the highest point on the planet, but which of the vague blobs in the distance it was I couldn’t tell even if I’d cared.
Then, suddenly, with shocking abruptness, the landscape vanished. I just had time for the briefest of glimpses of a sheer cliff face of quite staggering proportions receding into the depths beneath us, which were swallowed by the all-enveloping murk, before we were cocooned in a bubble of mist that wrapped itself around our fragile little craft and blotted out the world.
Happily, our first sight of Principia Mons was far more propitious. As we descended the clouds grew thinner, merely whitening at first, until finally they broke altogether, allowing shafts of bright sunlight to break through, and revealing a sky of quite remarkably vivid blue. (Or so it seemed to me, but then I’d been stuck onboard a succession of starships for most of the last few months.) Jurgen seemed no more uncomfortable than usual, so I left him to his own devices, and glanced out of the window again, eager to see what the absence of clouds would reveal.
It’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve seen some remarkable sights in my time, from the spires of Holy Terra itself to the aurorae of Fabulon, but the landscape of Periremunda was in a class of its own. Beneath us the last vestiges of rain evanesced into vapour, rising again to form more clouds without ever reaching the sere and barren surface of the world below, where bare, baking rock alternated with oceans of drifting sand.
Once we flew over a sandstorm, which would have stripped the flesh from the bones of an unprotected man within seconds, kilometres high, but still so far below us as to seem like a thin film of dust seeping across the planet’s surface. The eye-stabbing flicker of electrical discharges sparked and flashed deep within it, an uncanny echo of the rolling sonic boom that trailed in the wake of our hurtling aircraft. And in all directions, as far as the eye could see, rose columns of rock, each separated from its nearest neighbour by tens or hundreds of kilometres, to stand proud and alone, like the trunks of some immense petrified forest.
From above they seemed refulgent, glowing with life, in stark contrast to the magnificent desolation surrounding them. As we passed close to a few I was able to discern forests and lakes, hills and valleys, and the unmistakable signs of human habitation, all preserved in miniature, like the vivaria sometimes maintained by curious children or noble dilettantes.
We must have crossed or skirted some dozen or so of these remarkable spires on our journey, although most flashed past so quickly I barely had time to take in any details. Some were relatively open, appearing to support agricultural communities of some kind, while others seemed completely overgrown, choked by a profusion of tangled vegetation that only a Catachan could love. A few seemed to support communities the size of small towns, while others, barely a kilometre across, seemed completely uninhabited.
I dredged up from somewhere the statistic that roughly eighteen thousand of the plateaux scattered across the planet held a population of some sort or another,8 and shuddered at the logistical problems that implied for the Imperial Guard forces waiting to be deployed in their defence. Even split down into individual squads, which would be absurd, a mere dozen regiments could never hope to cover a fraction of them. All we could do was wait, and hope our enemies showed their faces openly somewhere we could concentrate our forces against them. A pretty forlorn hope, of course, if they knew what they were doing, and what little indication we’d had so far seemed to confirm that they did. If ever a planet seemed ideally suited for guerrilla warfare, Periremunda was it.
Perhaps fortunately I had little time for any more such pessimistic musings, as Jurgen finally roused himself with an expression of hopeful inquiry.
‘Do you think that’s it, sir?’ he asked.
I nodded. ‘Must be,’ I said. There could only be a few truly urban areas on a world like this, and I doubted that any of the others would be quite as dense as this one. A faint tremor passed through the airframe of our tiny craft as, once again, we became slower than the sound of our passage, and the pitch of the engines fell, allowing us the leisure to contemplate the city as we drifted in towards the landing field.
Principia Mons was, in many ways, gratifyingly familiar, the surface of the plateau covered in the sprawling jumble of hab units, manufactoria, temples and other such structures that can generally be seen on the approaches to any reasonably populous city throughout the Imperium. A few open areas remained unbuilt on, chiefly bordering the precipitous drop edging this peculiar eyrie. There were a handful of parks scattered across the outer fringes of the city, and a further one almost in the centre, which seemed to have a fortified enclave of some kind in the middle of it9, but for the most part the place seemed completely urbanised.
As we approached I could see that the top kilometre or so of the spire had been honeycombed with tunnels, leaving structures and industrial units clinging to the side of the rock. The effect was not entirely unreminiscent of a hive, and I felt a faint warm glow of nostalgia at the thought.10 It didn’t last long, though, being swiftly replaced by the realisation that despite its elevated position the planetary capital possessed an undercity to rival that of a more conventional community. In my experience troublemakers tended to gravitate into them like sump rats down a waste pipe, where they were Horus’s own job to winkle out again.
Not my problem, though, I told myself firmly, having had more than enough of that sort of thing on Gravalax and Simia Orichalcae. In any case my place was with the 597th on Hoarfell, which, cold and uninviting as it was, at least had the advantage of being comfortably free of tunnels where heretics might go to ground. I had no more time for such musings, however, as a sudden surge of pressure against my spine told me that the landing thrusters had just cut in, and within moments, it seemed, we were back on terra firma, to Jurgen’s eloquently unspoken relief.
