'Commissar.' The sergeant nodded a greeting, no doubt wondering if he or any of his men were in trouble, but determined not to show it. Very few Guardsmen are pleased to see a red sash, which no doubt accounts for the inordinate number of my colleagues felled by friendly-fire accidents. 'We weren't toid to expect you.'
'Probably because I had no idea any of our people were down here,' I said, noting the faint stirring of relief among the soldiers. 'My aide and I are on our way to the aerodrome.' I smiled at the troopers, who were still keeping us covered. 'You can stand down. We're not hybrids or 'stealer puppets.'
'Of course not,' the sergeant agreed, stepping forwards, a trifle nervously, with a portable auspex. 'But if you wouldn't mind indulging me, sir? I'm sure you wouldn't want us to neglect our orders.'
'By no means,' I agreed, reholstering my laspistol and climbing down to the roadway so he could take his genescan a little more easily The unit beeped, and a rune flashed green, after which everyone looked a little more comfortable, particularly once Jurgen was confirmed to be a reasonable approximation of a human as well. 'You're to be commended for your caution.'
That went down well, as I'd known it would. There are far better ways of managing troops than simply putting the fear of the Emperor into them, as I try to convince the young pups in my care these days, in the vague hope that their careers will last a bit longer than their first night patrol.
The sergeant nodded. 'That's the worst thing about fighting 'stealers,' he agreed. 'You never know who might turn out to be a hybrid or an implant. Squadmate of mine turned on us on Keffia, just like that, no warning, been with us since basic. Had to shoot him myself.'
'I was there too,' I said, not wanting to remember too much about it. 'Similar thing happened. Bad business all round.'
The sergeant shrugged. 'I never liked him, mind. And I got his stripe. For showing initiative. So it could have been worse.'
I smiled again. 'You're a born optimist, sergeant. The Guard needs men like you.'
'Kind of you to say so, sir.' And, Emperor help me, he actually blushed. 'But you'll have to go round, I'm afraid. The street's impassable.'
'We'll get through,' Jurgen said, with quiet confidence, taking the statement as a challenge, as I'd known he would.
The sergeant shook his head. 'I doubt it,' he said. Jurgen might have been about to argue the point, but subsided, at a look from me.
'Impassable how?' I asked, and the sergeant shrugged.
'It's not there,' he said simply. Well, that sounded distinctly peculiar, so I left the Salamander with its engine running, and walked off down the rubble-strewn carriageway. For the first hundred metres or so, nothing seemed to have changed, the ravaged cityscape looming over me, and my bootsoles scraping against the smaller chunks of debris littering the 'crete.
Then the road ended, as sharply and abruptly as if excised with a knife. For a few metres the road surface became rippled, like a hardened lava flow, then simply dropped away into a broad pit, some three or four metres deep. It may seem incredible, reading this now, but my first thought was simply how lucky we'd been to have run into the troopers when we did; if they hadn't flagged us down, we might well have discovered the hole by falling into it. Then, as I began to take in the way the edges of the buildings around me had also melted and flowed like candle wax, realisation belatedly hit. This was where Mira and I had fought our desperate battle beneath the ground, and come so close to extinction before the Thunderhawk had torn the roof off to allow the Terminators to come to our rescue.
I can't be sure how long I stood there, reliving the horror and marvelling at the precision of our saviours, before a familiar odour brought me back to myself.
'That's a big hole,' Jurgen commented, materialising at my shoulder, his lasgun held ready for use as always.
I nodded. 'It is indeed,' I agreed, picking out the tunnel the pure-strains had emerged from at last. Nothing was left of the creatures which had attacked us, save a few greasy stains on the rain-streaked rockcrete below; some of the Terminators had carried flamers, and made sure that every last one had been consigned to the pyre before they broke off. I couldn't help wondering how many more of the xenos spawn still lurked beneath our feet, though, or how many apparent innocents still carried their taint. But that wasn't my problem any longer, thanks to Gries and the libratory tech-priest Yaffel.
'It'll take some filling in,' Jurgen added, after a moment or two of further deliberation.
'I'm sure it will,' I said, turning away at last, before my imagination could start playing tricks with the echoes. 'Can you find your way round it? We've still got a shuttle to catch.'
Jurgen nodded. 'Leave it to me,' he said.
THANKS TO MY aide's usual robust driving style, the unexpected detour didn't detain us overmuch: we reached the landing pad just as the Thunderhawk I'd arrived aboard, or its identical twin I'd noticed in the hangar bay, roared in over our heads and snuggled itself down between the blast walls like a raptor returning to its nest. Mine wasn't the only head turning to follow it: the scores of Guardsmen and Navy hands scurrying about the place were undoubtedly accustomed to the ceaseless arrival and departure of Valkyries, Aquilae and Throne alone knew how many other types of shuttle, drop-ship and combat craft, but the distinctive silhouette of the Astartes vessel grabbed their attention at once.
Jurgen, fortunately, remained as phlegmatic as ever, apparently considering it nothing more than a ship like any other, and weaved his way through the distracted ground crews with his usual aplomb, missing cargo haulers and foot sloggers by a typically narrow margin. Fortunately the noise of our engine, and the idling Thunderhawk, drowned out the comments which followed us, although the gestures which accompanied them were more than sufficient to convey their gist.
As he steered us through the slalom of blast walls surrounding the pad[45], it became clear that Jurgen and I weren't the only guests of the Chapter intending to embark for the Revenant that afternoon. Magos Yaffel was there too, oscillating even more than usual in the backwash from the idling thrusters, accompanied by a handful of tech-adepts, and a couple of servitors, which were busily engaged in transferring an unfeasibly large collection of boxes and bundles aboard. As Jurgen coasted the Salamander to a halt, and began collecting our kit together, I hopped down and nodded a cordial greeting to the cogboys[46].
'Magos,' I said, raising my voice a little to be heard over the screaming engines, 'I wasn't aware that you'd be accompanying us.'
'The Omnissiah directs our footsteps along the path of knowledge,' Yaffel replied, cranking up the volume of his voxcaster to overcome the din. Refraining from pointing out that in his case that would be singularly difficult, I merely nodded, as if the evident quotation[47] meant something to me. 'And the potential store of data to be reaped on this endeavour is incalculable.' At the time I thought his words to be no more than a simple figure of speech. If I'd known then what he was driving at, I'd have clambered back aboard the Salamander and told Jurgen to head for the horizon with all the speed he could squeeze from it (which I've no doubt would have been considerable). As it was, however, I merely exchanged a few more reflexive pleasantries, before following my overloaded aide to the bottom of the boarding ramp, and dodging out of the way of a servitor on its way back for another load of whatever Yaffel and his cronies considered essential on the voyage.
45
Intended to reduce the sound of the vertical thrusters, which would always be loudest at takeoff and landing, and contain the worst of an explosion in the event of an accident.
46
A faintly derisive nickname for acolytes of the Machine-God, common among Imperial Guardsmen, apparently derived from the cogwheel symbol of their calling.
47
From Soylens Viridians for the Machine-Spirit, a populist work intended to make some of the principles by which the Adeptus Mechanicus operates comprehensible to the vast majority of us with little understanding or interest in technotheology: a no doubt laudable aim, which it signally fails to achieve, being too abstruse for the lay reader, and too simplistic for even the lowliest tech-priest. Its author, unsurprisingly, was Magos Yaffel, one of the handful of people actually to have read it.