As I regained my balance, another vehicle drew up smoothly alongside our abandoned Salamander, and I felt a strange unease descend upon me. It was a groundcar, long and sleek, its armourcrys windows polarised to the same glossy black as the bodywork. For some reason I was put in mind of the blank, reflective faces of the metal killers I'd fled from on Interims Prime. Which I'd almost rather have faced again, if my sudden intuition about the car's passenger turned out to be right.
It was. A uniformed chauffeur, in a livery I'd come to know well since my arrival here, unfolded himself from the driver's compartment and glided round to the rear door. As he opened it Mira emerged, the sudden change in her expression a clear indication that the vehicle was soundproofed as effectively as it was shielded from the vulgar gaze of the hoi polloi, and waved cheerfully in my direction.
I waved back, masking my relief at her evident good humour with a faint smile meant to convey pleased surprise, and she came trotting over, grinning like a puppy who's just discovered how to open the meat locker. She'd evidently got tired of playing soldiers, as she'd discarded the dress-up uniform in favour of something a little more feminine: an indigo blouse, low-cut, like pretty much everything else in her wardrobe, and a crimson knee-length skirt, which, like the blouse, was fashioned from some material that shimmered slightly as the light caught it. In the turbulence thrown up by the Thunderhawks idling thrusters it rippled constantly, so that Mira seemed to be clothed by a nimbus of rainbows. Her footwear was surprisingly practicaclass="underline" calf-high boots made from the hide of some local animal, although I doubted that their original owner had been quite so fluorescently pink.
'Mira,' I said, exhaling a little more strongly than I intended as she enveloped me in a hug which would have cracked an ork's ribs. 'It was kind of you to come and see me off.'
'I'm not.' She grinned again, and with a definite sense of foreboding I belatedly registered the fact that the chauffeur was removing what looked like almost as much baggage as the tech-priests had accumulated from the car. 'I'm coming too. Isn't that a wonderful surprise?'
'Wonderful doesn't even begin to cover it,' I said truthfully.
NINE
PERHAPS FORTUNATELY, THE ear-splitting noise inside the Thunderhawk after it took off made further conversation impossible. There were the headsets Veren had drawn my attention to on the journey down, of course, but the last thing I needed was Mira vox-casting the details of our association across an open comm-net, so I made sure the one I gave her just prior to our departure was switched off before handing it over. Though grateful for the aural protection it offered, I declined to activate mine, either: I had no interest in anything the tech-priests might have to say, and I knew from long experience that Jurgen would simply lapse into sullen silence the second our skids left the ground, too preoccupied with holding on to his last meal until we reached the turbulence-free zone beyond the atmosphere to respond to anything short of a life-threatening emergency. Or possibly an acute lack of tanna. In any event, he was hardly a sparkling conversationalist at the best of times, so I wasn't exactly left feeling deprived.
All of which left me with far too much time to brood. I'd had a few moments before we lifted to ask Mira what the frak she was doing here, although of course I was rather more circumspect about the manner in which I phrased the question, and she'd smiled in a manner I found distinctly disturbing. Before she could answer, though, the tech-priests had started trooping aboard, and Jurgen returned to inform me that our kit was properly stowed, so I'd had little option but to follow the herd and hope everything had a rational explanation. Mira certainly wasn't behaving in the usual fashion of people bidding farewell to their home world, gazing at it through the viewports as long as they could, trying to burn the image of it into their memories in the near certainty of never seeing it again, preferring instead to smile at me in a manner uncomfortably reminiscent of a bored eldar reaver looking for someone to torture to death to pass the time. Perhaps she simply lacked the imagination to grasp what embarking on a voyage through the warp actually meant. Even if she did return home, the chances were that decades, or even a century or two, were likely to have passed, and that she'd be as much of a stranger to the altered Viridia as an offworlder setting eyes on it for the first time[48].
Predictably, I didn't get another chance to broach the subject until after the Thunderhawk had docked with the Revenant, after a journey Jurgen had probably found mercifully brief. The strike cruiser was still orbiting Viridia at a relatively low altitude, barely beyond the point where the first faint wisps of upper atmosphere would begin to drag at her hull, no doubt to facilitate the use of her teleportarium, or allow her weapon batteries to strike at targets on the surface in the unlikely event of her Space Marine complement requiring a little additional assistance. It still seemed long enough to me, though, and it was with a great sense of relief that I heard our engines throttling back, and the series of metallic clangs which preceded our arrival. What Yaffel and his tech-priests found to amuse them, I have no idea. Perhaps they conversed among themselves, in the peculiar manner of their kind, or just remained absorbed in communing with their data-slates.
I didn't have much opportunity to talk to Mira after we disembarked, either. To my pleased surprise Drumon was standing at the bottom of the ramp, and exchanged a few words of greeting with me, before striding on to confer with the tech-priests and begin examining the equipment they'd brought with them. By the time I'd completed the pleasantries and looked round for Milady DuPanya, she'd already snared a couple of faintly stunned-looking Chapter serfs, who'd evidently been incautious enough to wander within hectoring range, and was holding forth to them in great detail about the correct disposal of her luggage. I decided to leave her to it, and went to separate Jurgen and Gladden, the factotum who'd been assigned to look after me on the voyage here, who were already squabbling over the matter of who should be responsible for my kit with belligerent tenacity and icy politeness respectively. Apparently no one had expected me to bring my own aide, let alone one who looked more like a Nurgle cultist than a member of the Imperial Guard, so his arrival had caught them on the hop, rather.
By the time I'd sorted that one out, Drumon and the tech-priests had disappeared about whatever business they had together, and the pile of luggage Mira had brought with her had diminished to something approaching portable. I lingered while the last of it was thrown onto a trolley which looked as though it was more usually employed to rearm the Thunderhawks, and fell into step beside her. 'I give up,' I said lightly, contriving to look as though I was joking. 'What did you say you were doing here?'
'I'm the official representative of the Governor of Viridia,' she said, grinning impishly at me from under her fringe. 'My father's sent me to assess whether the space hulk remains any kind of threat to our system.'
'How can it?' I asked, no doubt looking and sounding as baffled as I felt. 'It's been gone for a century and a half, and it's hardly likely to come back.'
'But it could have left other threats behind, as well as the genestealers,' Mira said, in tones which made it abundantly clear that she didn't believe that any more than I did. 'We'd be failing in our duty to the Viridian populace if we didn't make every effort to ensure their safety, particularly now.'
'So your father asked you to come along on the hunt for the Spawn?' I enquired, trying to keep my scepticism from becoming audible in my voice.
Mira grinned again. 'I sort of volunteered,' she said cheerfully, taking hold of my arm.
48
It was also possible, of course, that Cain's suspicions about her true age were correct, and that this wasn't the first occasion on which she'd boarded a starship.