And it was a, not the. Everything was contingent.
What emerged, and how, was in the lap of the gods.
The blinding light of teleportation faded, the disembodied sense of half-remembered dread following slowly, like blood trickling through a drain. Koorland’s primary heart was pounding, as though he had been engaged in some extraordinary struggle that he could not now recall. The teleportation chamber was gone. In its place, displayed by his suit’s auto-senses in augmented definition, was a dank, flame-lit room.
The ruddy heat of open stoves was reflected in the beaten metal fronts of cabinets, from the brutally large blunted implements that hung on pegs from the walls. Half-heartedly mopped-up bloodstains smeared the floor and the surfaces. Pots bubbled, ill-fitting lids chattering. A hunk of meat, what looked like a sawed-through stretch of vertebral column dipping from the end, dripped fat onto a sizzling element and rotated on a jerky mechanical spit. Koorland’s armour recorded the intense heat while insulating him from it, and the effects of the uncertain light were evenly filtered and restored.
The smell, however, was all too readily imagined.
Asger Warfist lowered his lightning claws. A wary sniff crackled through the unit vox, instinctual in spite of the total environment seal of Tactical Dreadnought armour.
‘This is no throne room.’
Ullanor — Gorkogrod
Inquisitor Wienand tapped her foot impatiently as a gang of servitors broke open a crate and spilled wirefoam cladding across the floor. It contained a portable vox-caster. Another was being installed directly opposite, part of two banks of units being wired up in series. Inquisitorial technical staff opened diagnostic channels and made expert reconfigurations inside open panels stuffed with what looked, to Wienand, like tangles of cabling. A magos supervised, hunched under his — or her, difficult to tell — acid-stained red robes. The occasional flicker of a servo-appendage switched across to furiously undo and redo someone’s work.
‘Castellan Clermont’s strike force coming under heavy fire in sector Twelve-B,’ said one of the vox-operators.
‘Twelve-B?’ said Wienand. ‘Do they plan to take the palace on their own? Redeploy Kill-Teams Godwyn and Phobos to clear the adjoining blocks, and raise the castellan if you can.’
‘Yes, Representative.’
The vox-breaking interference between surface forces and fleet was something that Imperial forces had been forced to contend with during the previous invasion. At Wienand’s insistence, and Asger’s approval, something had been done about it.
The chamber that her small command detail had occupied as a surface monitoring post was a level between levels in one of the hundreds of gretchin hab-towers that prickled the cityscape in the palace’s immediate vicinity. To supply their ork overlords with workers, Wienand assumed. Terra was organised with similar considerations in mind.
This particular floor was unoccupied, empty but for thick shock-absorbent clamps and structura-mimetic columns that enabled this structure and others like it to remain upright through the awesome stresses of tectonic rearrangement or subspace translation. The tower was the tallest in the battlezone that wasn’t part of the palace itself, and had been selected for that reason. Servitors and techno-magi trailed clumps of cabling and complex adaptor tablets behind them to exposed wall panels. From there, they cross-connected Wienand’s equipment through the tower’s own messy electrical system to the dishes, antennae and non-geometric pylons that flourished over the spiretop like fungoid weeds.
Veritus would have found the cross-wiring of technologies a borderline act of heresy. But that was why the ancient inquisitor had remained on Terra, and let her operatives do the work that he could not.
From the lower-level access ramps there came the sputtering hiss of superheated metal. A servitor with a melta-tool fitted to its wrist in place of a hand and a fuel canister integrated into its spinal column welded the zig-zagging door seal together, calm under fire as only a thorough lobotomisation could make something that had once been human. The muffled roar of two twin-linked heavy bolters from the other side of the door did not trouble it in the least.
The fate of the two Praetorian-class servitors was of far less concern to the servitor than it was to Wienand.
‘I seem to recall Lord Warfist telling you to observe from behind our assault.’ The Deathwatch sergeant, Kjarvik Stormcrow, stood with crossed arms, deliberately in the middle of a team of workers trying to assemble a tactical hololith where he was standing. His long bone-braided hair spread over the dark curves of pauldron and gardbrace. Several weeks aboard Abhorrence had acclimated Wienand to the stature and bearing of the Adeptus Astartes. But they were all far from alike. The Black Templars held themselves tall, unbending, like pillars of rockcrete with proud, human faces. The Space Wolf was not like that. He was ever so slightly hunched over, an animal at its ease, his annoyance at Umbra being drawn from active assignment to safeguard the Inquisitorial Representative on as-yet-untried authority an unguarded glimmer in his inhuman eyes.
‘Do you always do as Lord Asger tells you?’
‘Often,’ said Kjarvik, then grinned.
Wienand made herself smile in turn. She might just win these warriors’ respect yet.
‘Initial soundings from the auspex,’ said Raznick, veering loosely between the hurrying workers to approach.
He was wearing a long coat over a dull-green flak jacket surplus to some regiment or other from the Ullanor Veterans. There was a brace of pistols holstered at his hip, needle and las, and a sleeve for a power maul. The battery pack for a two-person refractor field was clamped over his right buttock, the emitters set into a pair of braces worn over his ballistic vest. Bodyguarding for the Inquisitorial Representative was testing work at the best of times.
Kjarvik regarded him like a bear at once amused and annoyed by the barked challenge of a dog. The Inquisitorial aide swallowed and turned to Wienand.
‘Issachar has the ork fleet engaged, but is keeping them at arm’s length. Losses appear light on both sides. Alcazar Remembered and her escorts are in geostationary orbit above the corridor opened up by the Deathwatch.’ A nod to Kjarvik that the Wolf acknowledged with a snarl. ‘From the power signatures, it looks as though one teleportation cycle has been completed.’
‘Koorland’s first squad is inside,’ Wienand summarised.
‘On schedule.’
Wienand frowned. She wasn’t ready to start taking Koorland’s undemonstrated ability to outwit the Beast on faith. ‘We should have them on vox by now.’
‘We’re almost finished here, Representative,’ said one of the workers at the hololith array.
A dozen men were busily boxing up the device’s exposed innards while a second magos canted the final start-up rituals. Eldon Urquidex helped where he could. The magos biologis limped slightly. A string of bionic vertebrae now ran down his neck, a gunmetal accoutrement to match the left arm, the right hand, and the surgical plates in his skull.
The hololith powered up. Ullanor’s wrinkled topography flickered into being as a spectral green overlay, rapidly filling up with blips as it liaised with the auspexes to present troop dispositions. Wienand watched the shift in the tide of Veridi red with her heart in her mouth. Her first thought was to instruct the adept to shut the device down and begin his rituals again. Its spirit had been improperly awakened. It had to be. Only her trust in the two magi’s superior knowledge kept her from doing so.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Kjarvik grunted.
‘The orks are disengaging, falling back towards the palace fortification.’ The voice was Raznick’s, his summation unnecessary. Wienand had eyes, and the great withdrawal of red across the hololith like a receding tide spoke for itself.