The creature with Pol Cohran’s face concealed the body of the engineering ensign he had just murdered in a tool locker, and entered the massive engineering chamber containing the Armaduke’s Geller field device. He’d had to kill three times to get this close. The ship’s drive sections were not specifically secure or patrolled, but access or activity by anyone who wasn’t officer class or engineering division was immediately noticed. The first crewman had died because he’d seen Cohran. His body was now incinerating in a promethium furnace and Cohran was wearing his grimy overalls. The second and third crewmen had died because Cohran had needed to extract deck plan specifics and information about the drive deck layout. One was now crumpled at the bottom of a coolant drain, and the other had just been hung by the throat from a hook between stoking shovels and furnace tongs.
Sound and vibration in the Geller field device chamber was oddly disconcerting. The air was dry, and there was a considerable static field that made his skin prickle. There were rubberised handrails around the chamber so that crewmen could earth themselves and not cause a shock or spark fire off the metal surfaces.
He could feel the throb of the machine in his gut, the pulsing of its operation in his sinuses and eyeballs. The device, a piece of technology vital to all warpship function, generated a subatomic field around the ship, a bubble of realspace that protected the vessel from the vicissitudes of the aether around it. Once the warp engines had breached the veil of the warp, a starship depended on its Geller field to insulate it from the lethal and corrupting touch of the immaterium by maintaining a psychic ward.
Cohran knew he was in a position to end it all. Sabotaging the Geller field device would take some doing, and would probably require the use of something explosive or combustible, but he was more than capable of procuring and using either. If he could collapse the Geller field while the Armaduke was still in the warp, then the ship would perish. It would be torn apart by the unreality storms of the raw aether, shredding in an instant. Either that, or the daemonic essence of the warp would find form and intrude into the ship, or the minds of the occupants. Unwarded, the ship would be vulnerable to the spawn of the Realm of Chaos, and everyone aboard would know only the extremity of madness before the Ruinous Powers devoured them.
Then everything would be gone and done, and finished, the pheguth and his treachery, the threat that treachery represented, this whole vainglorious undertaking. The creature wearing Pol Cohran’s face would have completed the mission he was charged to perform by his master, Rime, and his master’s master, the Anarch. He would have finally stopped the Imperial Guard’s determined efforts to deploy the pheguth Mabbon Etogaur against the armies of the Gaur.
But during his address, Gaunt had betrayed other secrets. The target was Salvation’s Reach. That intelligence needed to be communicated. More importantly, they were due to make conjunction at Tavis Sun. They would be rendezvousing with Battlefleet elements, possibly one of the considerable crusade fleet packs that were maintaining Imperial superiority in this part of the sector.
To destroy the pheguth and his handlers, and the Armaduke along with it, that was a victory. To achieve all that and cripple a Battlefleet division, that was a truly worthy opportunity.
A more subtle form of sabotage was needed. A more insidious piece of manipulation. His master had taught him well, trained him to improvise imaginatively in just such circumstances, to make the best use of elements at his disposal for the greatest effect.
Cohran opened the casing of the control circuits that governed the empyroscopic rotors.
He was not going to collapse the Geller field. He was simply going to alter its rhythm.
Something, somewhere, trembled.
‘What was that?’ asked Shipmaster Spika.
None of the bridge crew answered him directly. Copious quantities of data shunted through their connective links and displayed across the monitor plates. The air was filled with the dry scratchy voices of vox links talking to each other.
He’d felt a minuscule vibration, an almost subliminal palsy. It had come to him through the deck, through the data-stream of the ship, one tiny aberrant shudder in a constant vortex of noises and rhythms and pulses and information.
He consulted his data viewers and asked questions of his cogitators. Nothing seemed wrong, nothing out of place, not within the margins of operation, and certainly not given the temperamental and mercurial nature of an old warpship like the Highness Ser Armaduke.
Spika sat back and thought. It had probably been nothing, or a fleeting glitch that had corrected itself.
But it was a nothing he hadn’t liked at all.
Cavity 29617 was cold. Merrt had been waiting there for about half an hour, unwilling to practise or set up shots, unwilling to leave.
He sat at one end of the long chamber, arms hugged around the old rifle.
‘You are here. Good.’
Sar Af was standing behind him. Merrt got up quickly.
‘You gn… gn…. gn… told me to come back,’ he said.
‘And you have proven you can follow instruction,’ said the White Scar.
He reached out a hand and grabbed Merrt by the jaw and throat, turning Merrt’s head to the side. Merrt struggled again.
‘Let me gn… gn… gn… go!’
‘This jaw. It is definitely your problem,’ said Sar Af. ‘You are being defeated by your own concentration. Your focus is so intense that as you fire the gun, it stimulates–’
‘Yes. Yes! You told me all this gn… gn… gn… yesterday!’
Sar Af let him go.
‘It is physically impossible for you to shoot well.’
Merrt swallowed.
‘Again, you told me so yesterday. Did you ask me back just so you could gn… gn… gn… humiliate me?’
Sar Af stuck out his chin, as if considering a response. He turned away.
‘Set up a shot,’ he said.
Merrt stood for a moment, then picked up several tin pots and walked the length of the cavity. He set the pots out along the top of the block and walked back to where the Space Marine was waiting.
Sar Af had produced something from an equipment pouch. Merrt realised that it was a disposable shot injector just a second before the White Scar grabbed his head again and jammed it into his jawline, behind his left ear.
The pain was considerable. Merrt cried out and staggered backwards, his eyes watering.
‘What the feth are you gn… gn… gn… doing?’ he asked.
‘Just wait.’
Sar Af took the injector and tossed it away.
Merrt had a lancing pain in his ear and a horrible warmth spreading through the line of his throat and his jaw. He started to gag slightly as the numbness increased.
‘Attend to yourself,’ said Sar Af. ‘You are drooling.’
‘What have you gn… gn… gn… done to me? What gn… gn… gn… was that stuff?’
‘Muscle relaxant,’ said the White Scar innocently. ‘Quite powerful, I suppose. A tranquiliser. The sort of stuff a medicae would use for pain control. During an amputation, for instance.’
Clutching his throbbing, disturbed face, Merrt looked at the Space Marine in horror.