Vainglorious, p.8
Vainglorious, page 8
‘Not a problem,’ I assured him, lengthening my stride a little to keep up, although Morie had shortened his so much he seemed to be practically ambling, not a gait I normally associated with a member of the Adeptus Astartes. ‘So where are we going to now?’
‘A different shrine.’ He glanced up at Morie, as though wondering how much it would be prudent to say, and the brother-sergeant inclined his head, giving his tacit approval. ‘Where we produce weapons and other necessities for Sergeant Morie’s Chapter.’
‘Should be producing them, anyway,’ Morie said. He smiled at me, with little humour. ‘I assume from your presence the Imperial Guard have been equally disappointed?’
‘You assume correctly,’ I assured him, wondering for a moment whether to mention the suspicions Vorspung had confided in me, before deciding to hold my tongue for the time being. There was no telling who else might be listening, or how for that matter, in a place like this, and Vorspung might react badly to having his confidence breached. ‘But I’m sure between us we can get to the bottom of the problem.’ I glanced meaningfully at the tech-priest as I spoke, but if he took my meaning he was in no hurry to act on it. Instead, he led us down a wide stairwell,[51] which brought us, after negotiating a couple of airlocks, to the hangar we’d set out to reach in the first place.
‘Is that the aircar you mentioned?’ I asked, indicating a four-seater gravitic sedan, decked out in the usual red livery of Mechanicus vehicles,[52] the silver cogwheels emblazoned on the driver’s and front passenger doors putting its ownership beyond any possible doubt. A brace of cargo haulers, roughly double its size and far less sleek and shiny, were parked nearby, being poked and prodded by enginseers, but other than that we appeared to have the place to ourselves.
A couple of servitors plodded past, laden with equipment for the work parties, ignoring our presence completely, their feet ringing loudly on the metal grilles covering the floor. Glancing down, I noticed the void between the mesh and the rockcrete beneath it was stuffed with utility conduits and faded prayer slips, the latter presumably having been discarded during the routine maintenance and reconsecration of the vehicles passing through the facility.
‘It is,’ Vorspung confirmed, leading us across the open space towards the aircar, performing an impromptu arabesque to avoid a scuttling CAT as he did so, and entirely failing to look as though he’d meant to do that. He threw out a hand towards the vehicle, as if hoping to pass off the momentary loss of balance as an extravagantly proprietorial gesture. ‘Yours for the duration of your stay.’ He paused, as if struck by a sudden thought. ‘Can you pilot it yourself?’
‘At a pinch,’ I said cautiously. Normally I left the driving to Jurgen, on the entirely reasonable grounds that if I was going to die in an embarrassing tangle of metal at least it wouldn’t be my fault (and with my aide in the driving seat any danger to life or limb would be rendered much greater to everyone else in the vicinity, thus tilting the odds of survival further in my favour). But his entrenched antipathy to aerial travel of any kind meant that his almost uncanny ability to persuade ground vehicles to perform far beyond the limits envisaged by their designers would definitely not be replicated in this case. I had a passing familiarity with the controls of a standard aircar, not to mention some hastily acquired expertise in not crashing them while being shot at, but, if I’m honest, decades of being ferried around by underlings had left my piloting skills rudimentary at best. ‘I have to admit I’m a bit out of practice, though.’
I glanced at Jurgen, who’d already gone a paler shade of grimy, and decided it would be better to not even ask.
‘I can pilot a Land Speeder,’ Morie offered unexpectedly. ‘An aircar seems to be more or less the same.’[53]
‘There are one or two similarities in their handling characteristics,’ Vorspung agreed diplomatically, ‘but under the circumstances, perhaps I should be the one to take the controls.’
Jurgen muttered something which might have been ‘works for me’ but, judging by his pallor, probably wasn’t.
‘Then we should proceed with all due dispatch,’ Morie said, taking a step or two towards the aircar, then coming to a halt as it suddenly dawned on us that, having been designed for passengers of normal stature, its roof was roughly level with his hips.
‘Or perhaps not.’ Vorspung turned his head, and gestured at the little knot of enginseers clustered around the nearest of the utility vehicles; like the aircar, it was floating a few centimetres above the deck plates, a faint and irritating humming emanating from its repulsor arrays. One of the enginseers poking at it responded with a wave of his mechadendrites and came trotting towards us, with a chirrup of binharic as he approached.
‘Please communicate in Gothic, for the benefit of our guests,’ Vorspung admonished him, and the young tech-priest, who was still low enough in the Mechanicus hierarchy to have more flesh than metal showing above the neck, actually blushed visibly.
‘My apologies.’ He made the sign of the cogwheel, which Morie returned, to his evident surprise.[54] ‘How may we be of assistance?’
‘Are either of those cargo haulers ready to fly?’ I asked, edging a little further away from Jurgen, whose nervousness at the prospect of getting airborne was beginning to thicken the air around both of us already.
‘That one is.’ The young tech-priest indicated the blocky utility vehicle closest to us, on which he and his fellows had been focusing their efforts. The others, I noted with some amusement, had stopped whatever they were doing to peer curiously in our direction, making only the most token attempt to pretend to be engrossed in the vehicle’s inner workings. ‘We’ve just completed the preflight checks, and renewed the votive seals of airworthiness.’
‘Then we’ll take that instead,’ Vorspung decreed, setting off towards it. I followed, seeing no reason to delay our departure any further, my nose giving me all the assurance I needed that Jurgen had fallen in behind me as usual. Nor, for that matter, did I need to see Morie to know he’d joined us, his footfalls shaking the deck plates with every stride.
‘Of course, magos. But…’ The young man hesitated, his unmodified voice rising a little, in spite of his best attempts to maintain the unemotional delivery expected of a member of his calling.
‘Is there a difficulty?’ Vorspung asked, in a manner calculated to convey that there’d better not be, without actually saying so.
‘Not with the conveyance itself,’ the young tech-priest hurried to assure him. ‘But it has been scheduled to deliver replacement capacitors to the atmospheric engine in sector three-sigma-tethra. Without them, the efficiency will be reduced by–’
‘Then take the aircar instead,’ Vorspung interrupted, displaying a degree of testiness unusual in one of his calling. ‘The internal volume will be sufficient, will it not?’
‘I believe so, magos,’ the young man said, glancing at the sleek and shiny aircar with an expression that suggested his birthday had come unexpectedly early. He returned his voice, which had risen noticeably in pitch, to the even monotone expected of him with a clearly audible effort. ‘The crates are sufficiently small to fit on the passenger seats.’ He pointed to a stack of boxes against one of the walls, the same shape and size as the ones lasgun powercells generally came in.[55]
‘Then I suggest you commence loading with all due dispatch,’ Vorspung said. ‘Those capacitors won’t deliver themselves.’
‘Of course.’ The young tech-priest gestured to his companions, who immediately stopped whatever they were doing, and moved away from the utility vehicle they’d been clustered around.[56] The servitors abandoned their toolkits and plodded over to the pile of boxes, which they began moving methodically to the aircar, where a couple of the junior tech-priests presided over the process of stowing them.
‘This looks more suitable,’ Morie said, ducking only slightly as he squeezed in through the double doors at the rear of the larger vehicle. The cargo hauler wobbled a little as the gravitic emitters tried to compensate for the sudden addition of his weight, then stabilised as he stopped moving and sat on a metal bench running fore to aft along one side of the hold, evidently intended to do double duty as either a shelf for cargo or makeshift seating as required. The metal groaned audibly but barely deformed, leaving him perched a little awkwardly on the narrow bench, his knees level with the aquila embossed across the chestplate of his armour. Jurgen followed him inside, taking the opposite bench, propping his lasgun upright between his knees and leaning against it as though in need of support; which, with the immediate prospect of taking to the air, he probably was.
‘Commissar?’ Vorspung took a couple of steps towards the cab at the front, obviously expecting me to join him, then hesitated. ‘Unless you would prefer to ride with your companion?’
‘And leave you on your own when you’ve been such an attentive host?’ I said, with every appearance of affability I could summon up. ‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’ Not when the alternative was spending an indeterminate amount of time in a confined space and close proximity to an airsick Jurgen, anyway. I felt a fleeting moment of sympathy for Morie, before the reflection that a veteran Space Marine had probably had a great deal worse than that to put up with in the course of his career elbowed it aside, and I swung myself up into the passenger seat of the cab with a passing display of enthusiasm. ‘Besides, it’s an excellent opportunity to remind myself how one of these things is supposed to work.’
‘A commendably efficient use of the journey time,’ Vorspung said, settling into the driver’s seat and pulling a toggle on the dashboard which closed the doors behind us. A couple of runes flashed green, assuring us that the passenger and cargo compartments were both sealed and pressurised, and the magos began running through a brief checklist of the systems he was powering up.
‘Atomic batteries to power – turbines to speed…’ He glanced in my direction. ‘Fastening your seat belt would be advisable.’
‘Of course,’ I said, tugging my chainsword around so that the scabbard wedged more or less comfortably between the door and the thinly padded seat. ‘Safety first.’
‘Taking precautions against avoidable injury is always prudent,’ Vorspung agreed, feeding power to the gravitic emitters; a couple of the tech-priests who’d so recently been working on the vehicle leapt for their lives as it lurched half a metre forward, before coming to a sudden halt again. Taking the point, and ignoring the sudden explosion of Valhallan profanity in my earpiece, I buckled the crash restraints with almost indecent haste.
‘Ah,’ said Vorspung. ‘Forgot the inertial dampers.’
‘Easily done,’ I said, already beginning to wonder if we should have tried to squeeze Morie in here after all and let him have a go. But Vorspung seemed to be gaining in confidence, so I held my tongue and memorised the position of the door latch in case I needed to bail out in a hurry. ‘Just for the sake of conversation, when was the last time you flew one of these?’
‘Forty-seven years ago,’ Vorspung said. ‘But I can assure you my memory files remain completely uncorrupted.’ He poked at a rune or two, with a disconcertingly hopeful air. ‘There, that should do it.’
‘It would seem so,’ I agreed diplomatically, as something went pleep! and the vehicle rose a little on its repulsor field. ‘But perhaps we should wait for a moment?’
‘That would be prudent,’ Vorspung said, with a glance to our left, where the great bronze door sealing the pressurised hangar from the outside world was grinding slowly open, to reveal the ridgeline beyond. The tech-priests and servitors were moving away from the aircar, which was already heading towards the portal with an alacrity that struck me as distinctly unwise in such a confined space, their robes and purity seals fluttering in the gush of escaping air. ‘A collision this early in our progress would be extremely embarrassing.’
‘Indeed it would.’ I nodded, suppressing the impulse to ask by which point he felt one might become acceptable.
The young tech-priest we’d spoken to waved to his compatriots from the driving seat of the aircar in a manner rather more exuberant than I normally expected from a wearer of the russet robe, and hurtled out into the open air, almost leaving a layer of paint on the still-opening door as he went.
Vorspung emitted an odd sound from his voxcoder which might have been a tut. ‘The impetuosity of youth,’ he commented, with a shake of his head.
‘No doubt he’ll grow out of it,’ I said, as we began to glide smoothly forward, following the aircar out into the open skies beyond. He was clear of the complex perimeter already, banking in a smooth arc above the enclosing hills to head out across the plain, and Vorspung began to gain altitude as well, taking us over the landing pad still occupied by the Reclaimers’ Thunderhawk.
‘Provided he is sufficiently cautious in the interim,’ Vorspung agreed, as the bank turned into a barrel roll. No sooner had he finished speaking than the hurtling aircar was ripped apart by a suddenly erupting fireball, the remaining cloud of debris slamming into the valley wall a handful of metres below the ridge crest.
‘Emperor on Terra!’ I expostulated, thoroughly shaken by the thought that had it not been for the bulk of Morie’s armour derailing our plans, we would have been aboard the vehicle ourselves. ‘What just happened?’
‘A very good question,’ Vorspung said, his eyes unfocusing for a moment as he inloaded the data, which I have to admit to finding faintly alarming given that he was in the pilot’s seat at the time. ‘According to the telemetry feed, there was a systems failure in the secondary power coupling.’ He looked at me significantly as he came back to himself. ‘It has every indication of being a regrettable accident.’
‘Which means it probably wasn’t one,’ I said, never having been slow to pick up a hint when the most paranoid interpretation seemed possible.
‘It was widely known that that particular vehicle had been assigned to your exclusive use,’ Vorspung said. ‘And such a mishap, while possible, is extremely unlikely.’
‘That’s what they said about the lord general’s shuttle,’ I said, feeling a faint chill at the base of my spine. I didn’t believe in coincidences, at least not when they followed hard on the heels of one another, and I found myself wondering if Zyvan had really been the target of an assassination attempt aboard the Ocean Orchestra.
What if it had been me all along?
NINE
‘A reasonable inference,’ Vorspung agreed, when I voiced the thought aloud. He slowed the cargo hauler, and turned, bringing us around in a wide arc to begin following the ridgeline towards the plume of smoke and pulverised rock marking the site of the crash. Quite what assistance he expected to be able to render was beyond me, though: both explosion and impact had clearly been unsurvivable.[57] ‘Particularly given the suspicions I confided in you earlier.’
‘But how could someone from Eucopia have tried to have me killed on Coronus?’ I asked, in some bemusement. I glanced back at the complex below us. A double handful of flyers were already swarming into the air from hangars and landing pads scattered around the tangle of buildings, their airframes festooned with lifting gear and fire suppressants. There were figures moving on foot as well, scrambling up the steep slope towards the wreckage of the aircar, though from this distance it was hard to tell whether they were tech-priests or servitors. Probably a few of both, I thought. ‘Or why, come to that.’
‘Heresy spreads,’[58] Vorspung pointed out. He came to a halt, hovering over the crash site, gazing down at it with a faint air of bemused hope, which gradually flickered out as it became obvious the only things still moving amid the wreckage were flames and smoke. ‘Messages and personnel have been travelling between shrines in both systems for decades, members of our hypothetical cabal no doubt among them.’ Giving up the search for survivors as self-evidently futile, he started the cargo hauler moving again. ‘And as for your second question–’
‘Commissar,’ Jurgen’s voice interrupted, buzzing slightly in my vox-bead as usual. ‘Are we turning back?’ The tone of hope in his voice was so pronounced I felt a little guilty about disappointing him.
‘I’m afraid not,’ I said. ‘Just a slight delay.’
‘Is the situation serious?’ Morie asked, cutting in on the same frequency.
‘Not for us,’ Vorspung assured him, returning his attention to the controls. He seemed to have been right about not having lost the knack of piloting over the last few decades, as the vehicle responded smoothly, taking us up and over the ridgeline, out of the way of the approaching salvage parties. I’d expected him to give our companions a succinct summary of the accident, and its aftermath, but instead he resumed his conversation with me as though it had never been interrupted. ‘It’s not exactly a secret that you have the ear and full confidence of the lord general. The probability of him selecting you to make discreet enquiries here once the Imperial Guard began to take an interest would be well in excess of eighty per cent.’
‘I see,’ I responded reflexively, while I thought about the implications of that. The only reasonable inference was that I’d been targeted simply as a precaution, which spoke volumes for the ruthlessness of whoever was behind all this. In my experience, conspiracies spanning more than one world were never good news, especially when they seemed to have it in for me personally. It was why I tended to pass any indications of that sort of thing I came across to Amberley at the earliest opportunity. My chances of being able to do that undetected on a planet full of tech-priests, any one of whom might be a heretic with access to the comm-net, however, seemed remote in the extreme. What’s more, any attempt would almost certainly redouble their efforts to do me harm (not to mention reveal my avocation as an occasional, and invariably reluctant, agent of the Inquisition, which I was certain[59] Amberley would take rather a dim view of). Better, then, to bide my time, affect to write off the incident as a regrettable accident, and keep my wits about me until I got off this Throne-forsaken rock and could report it in relative safety. On the plus side, I supposed, at least my hurt feelings about being merely collateral damage in an attempt on Zyvan’s life had been soothed.
