A demand for civilian evacuation of the cathedral world Madrilline? Lansung. Why discuss what you no longer had the ships in range to deliver?
A motion to restrict Chapter Master Koorland’s ‘disruptive’ access to Naval facilities, and, reading between the lines, the Lucifer Blacks? It had the patrician fingers of the Paternoval Envoy all over it. Smiling archly, he skimmed ahead. The only downside was that Helad Gibran no longer owed him a favour. He held the page and frowned in thought. Here was an interesting omission.
A report of mass starvations in Albia Hive. Basic provisioning was the duty of the Administratum, but he didn’t think that Ekharth had the spine for this kind of backroom politicking. Juskina Tull of the Chartist Captains, perhaps.
He glanced up to the dais.
Juskina Tull looked waxen under the podium lights, haunted by an enfolding horror that was so much worse from the other side of her glassy stare. Host to a magnificent gown of tented lace and emeralds, she had barely moved in half an hour. Just a telling blink of the eyes whenever the screams became loud enough, near enough, to escape the weapons fire. She wasn’t hearing screams. She was hearing cries for blood.
No.
Definitely not Tull.
The other lords were still working their way to their seats.
Gibran, Paternoval Envoy of the Navigators, and Sark, the otherworldly Master of the Astronomican, were ushered into their allotted seats by plush-liveried Senatorum staff. Spread in his chair at the opposite end of the dais, Anwar of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica watched his fellow abhumans with a deep, probing gaze. The uncanny walked down Vangorich’s spine with fingers of ice. Seated beside the Imperium’s most powerful sanctioned psyker in full Astra Militarum dress uniform, the Lord Militant, Abel Verreault, attempted to make small talk.
A choir of cherubs and servo-seraphim hovered around the carved Albian oak podium doors. Beneath the dragonfly chirr of hymnals, Ecclesiarch Mesring and Lord Admiral Lansung entered together. Lansung had lately taken to porting his great bulk around with the aid of a silver cane, but his physical deterioration was barely noticeable beside that of the Ecclesiarch. Mesring looked feral. His hair was wild. His surplice was unpressed and clearly the same that he had worn to the previous week’s session. There were purpling wine stains in his beard. The two men were arguing heatedly about fleet deployments to the Tang Sector, something that continued well after Senatorum aides had adroitly manoeuvred them to non-adjacent seats.
Provost-Colonel Chabil Sarrihya rolled her eyes as if despairing of the behaviour of children, checked her wrist-chrono augmetic, and continued pacing. Her superior in the Adeptus Arbites, Vernor Zeck, had unilaterally absented himself from Senatorum business once civil disobedience had spilled into the Sanctum Imperialis, and had preferred not to return since. His deputy had no resort to such sanction and knew it. So she paced back — clipped turn — and forth in front of Fabricator General Kubik. The representative of Mars was almost as still as his counterpart from the Merchant Fleets, mechadendrites tapping on his chair’s arm interface in binarised counterpoint to the Provost-Colonel’s steps.
Ekharth’s timid appeal for order earned him a sharp look from Udin Macht Udo.
The Lord Commander of the Imperium, commander-in-chief of its incalculable assets of war and peace, simmered lamely in his grand throne. The slow pinkening of his face was accentuated by his shaved head, and the way the darkening turned the old scar that crossed the left side of his face and neck and through his milky eye an almost luminescent white. Though separate from and above any single military arm of the Imperium, he wore the starched white grand admiral’s uniform of his previous career in the Navy. It practically burst with medals and overcompensation.
It was pathetic.
Only the Inquisitorial Representative was still absent.
‘I suppose we could always just execute them all,’ suggested the woman seated at Vangorich’s right.
‘A little extreme, perhaps.’ A passing thought temporarily brightened his mind. ‘But tempting.’
Commandant Ursula Cage of the Schola Progenium was a striking woman. As the joint senior commissar, she was a feared individual. The utilitarian lines of one of Terra’s ancient noble houses shaped her face. Her hair was the shade and texture of gunmetal. She sat forwards, barely on her seat at alclass="underline" summary justice in potentia.
‘Name me one who doesn’t deserve it.’
‘Verreault means well.’
With a short, hard laugh, Cage reached inside her greatcoat’s breast pocket and handed him a data-slate. It was a high-level briefing document with an Astra Militarum ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ stamp emblazoned across each page. The kind that were intercepted, copied, and subtly rerouted to Vangorich’s desk about ten thousand times each day. He seldom read them personally. He made an exception for this one.
It was the usual bad news — worlds lost or, suddenly unresponsive, presumed so — but there were bright spots if one looked hard enough.
Some dogged defending of an ice world called Valhalla had checked one front of the orks’ push into the Ultima Segmentum, and a small force of Ultramarines had successfully disabled an attack moon in orbit of Calth. Added to the one brought down by Admiral Lansung at Port Sanctus, and another by a combined force of Blood Angels and Novamarines, that made three confirmed kills.
Three. In a galaxy-wide incursion. No wonder they were losing. He didn’t need another classified internal document to tell him that.
‘The orks are getting sophisticated,’ murmured Cage. ‘Their choice of targets suggests a network of supply lines, resource processing centres and communication hubs that we’ve not seen before.’ She smiled coldly. ‘Or so the Progenium Tacticae tell us.’
‘This wasn’t in the unredacted agenda packet.’
She cocked an eyebrow. ‘Everyone knows orks can appear intelligent in battle. I know. But in war?’ She shook her head. ‘The Lord Militant would have been laughed out of the Senatorum.’
Vangorich glanced over his shoulder as a squad of Lucifer Blacks in enamelled black carapace powered up their shock glaives and ran for the main doors. They were wearing yellow armbands. Vangorich had never seen anything like that in the regiment before. He filed a mental note to look into it.
‘Why are you showing this to me?’ he asked.
The Lucifer Blacks thumped through the transport-sized oak doors. Suddenly, the sound of bolter fire was very close indeed.
‘Operational freedom,’ said Cage. ‘I have a certain amount of leeway. There are Progenium schools in the orks’ path, Tempestus regiments that the Lord Militant doesn’t know about, but you? I’m willing to bet you have agents in the area so deep even they don’t know who they are.’
‘This reputation of mine will get me into trouble one day.’
‘I was told you had a sense of humour, Grand Master. One of many things I disapprove of.’
‘And who told you such a thing?’
‘Wienand.’
‘You’ve spoken to Wienand?’
She ignored his question. ‘We can’t beat the orks without them.’ She nodded towards the lords on the dais. ‘But with organisations like ours we can slow them down.’
‘Leave it with me,’ Vangorich murmured, noncommittal, passing the slate back to the aide sitting in the pew immediately behind him.
Then, along with several hundred others in a hall built for half a million, he turned towards the sudden acrimony spilling from the dais.
Udo was rising, pulling the creases from his uniform in a clink of brass, and then glaring milkily from his throne.