I could turn this to my advantage, I thought, as I filled Gries in on this development as succinctly as I could. 'I'm about as much use here as a heretic's oath at the moment,' I concluded, almost in the same breath as Yaffel reporting that if the blasted space hulk was anywhere in the system we weren't going to find it now, so we might as well move on as soon as the little ork problem in the enginarium had been dealt with[63], 'and we can hardly leave her wandering around on her own under the circumstances. If you've no objection, I'll go and escort her back to her quarters.' Which ought to leave me well out of the way if the greenskins attacked the bridge, as I still expected them to at any moment.
'Of course,' Gries said, apparently taking my evident eagerness to get out there for a thinly disguised desire to bag a few orks.
'May the Emperor walk with you.' He made the Mechanicus cogwheel gesture again and turned away to discuss the tactical situation with the shipmaster, no doubt relieved to know that Mira wouldn't be blundering in to distract everyone at some crucial point in the battle if I could get to her first.
I left the bridge as quickly as I could and trotted down the main corridor leading away from it, my weapons in my hands. I was pretty sure I knew which route Mira would take from the guest quarters, and was confident of being able to intercept her without too much difficulty. As I reached the first junction of the corridor, I found a contingent of the ship's crew setting up a lascannon on a tripod, while others settled behind a makeshift barricade with lasguns in their hands, and I began to wonder if my decision to leave the bridge had been a trifle hasty, but there was nothing to be done about that now; and at least I had another bolthole to run for if the greenskins turned out to be between me and the relative safety of the guest quarters after all. Feeling mildly reassured by that, I moved on, after exchanging a few words with the petty officer in charge.
They were the last people I saw for some time, however. The corridors seemed eerily silent, the Chapter serfs I was used to seeing passing to and fro on errands of their own absent about more urgent business, and my footfalls echoed on the deck plates more loudly than they normally did, unmuffled by the ambient sounds of other activity. It seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time to find Mira, and I was on the point of giving up and retracing my steps, in the belief that she must have got lost in the labyrinth of interconnecting passageways, when I finally became aware of the sound of footsteps other than my own.
I tensed, taking a firmer grip on the hilt of my chainsword, and flattened myself against the metallic wall of the corridor. I was close to one of the maintenance hatches, which riddled them at intervals. Pointless attempting to seek refuge in one of the utility areas in this case, though, as the hatches were all kept securely locked, and I hadn't yet found a plausible pretext to ask for the access codes. After listening intently for a moment I was able to reassure myself that the footsteps were too light to be those of orks, and, in any case, if the voices in my comm-bead could be relied on, the greenskin boarding parties were all being successfully engaged elsewhere around the ship.
Thus reassured, I stepped out of concealment in the recess containing the utility hatch, just as Mira strode past, her expression grim. She was not, I surmised, pleased to see me.
'I suppose you think this is some kind of joke,' she began, before registering the weapons in my hands and moderating her voice a little.
'What are you carrying those for? You can't just open a window and take a shot at the enemy.'
'I won't have to,' I told her shortly. 'They've boarded us. Where's your gun?'
'Still in my portmanteau, of course.' She scowled pettishly. 'Your rank little imbecile didn't bother to mention that particular detail, just the attacking ships.'
'He didn't know anything about the boarders until I told him a couple of minutes ago,' I said shortly. Her description of Jurgen was undeniably accurate, but it irked me nonetheless. 'Come on.'
'Where to?' Mira, it seemed, wasn't about to let the trivial matter of a horde of greenskins on the loose divert her from the more pressing concern of her irritation with me and my aide for disturbing her rest.
'Shouldn't you be off shooting orks or something?'
'Maybe I should,' I said, on the point of turning away and leaving her to it. After all, I could always tell Gries I hadn't found her in time if the orks caught up with her before we eliminated them all. 'I just had this rather strange notion of making sure you were safe first.'
'Did you?' Her expression softened, and for a moment I remembered why I'd liked her, until her corrosive personality began to leak out around the edges. 'So what did you have in mind?'
'Getting you back to the guest quarters, to start with,' I said, beginning to move off in the direction from which she'd come. It seemed she had enough sense to follow me without urging, for which I was grateful; the last thing I needed under the circumstances was a further round of bickering.
We hurried back through the eerily deserted corridors, our footfalls ringing loudly despite all we could do to muffle them, and Mira glanced at me with a trace of the bravado I remembered from the day we'd first met. 'Remind you of anything?' she asked, and I nodded.
'We do seem to be making a habit of this,' I agreed, just as the shipmaster's voice suddenly burst into my earpiece, effectively dispelling any inclination I might have had to swap further banter.
'Incoming. Brace for impact.'
'Hang on to something,' I said, and it seemed Mira trusted my judgement enough to do so without further argument. She took hold of the handle of another of the ubiquitous utility hatches, and looked at me quizzically. 'Another wave just got past the guns.'
Before she could formulate a reply, the deck trembled a little beneath our feet, a faint vibration barely perceptible through the soles of our boots. Mira let go of the metallic protuberance and took a step towards me, her testiness evidently intensified by the anticlimax and the sense of having been made to look foolish. 'Well, that was hardly-' she began, just as a deafening clangour of brutally maltreated metal assaulted my ears, drowning out whatever else she might have been about to say. The deck rippled beneath my bootsoles, and a section of the ceiling appeared to decide it would be happier as a wall, swinging down to meet the deck plates in a shower of sparks and trailing conduit.
'You were saying?' I asked mildly, as Mira scrambled to her feet and glared at me as though the whole thing was somehow my fault.
'A gentleman would have helped me up,' she told me witheringly.
'Hands full. Sorry,' I replied insincerely. Only an idiot would relinquish either of the weapons I was currently holding under the circumstances. Now don't get me wrong, I've as much time for chivalry as the next man when there's something to be gained by it, or at least nothing to lose, but an impact that big must have meant that a boarding torpedo had hit no more than a deck or two from us, which put the greenskins far too close for comfort so far as I was concerned. I tapped the vox in my ear. 'Cain to bridge, hull breach in Section K, deck fifteen or thereabouts.'
'Acknowledged,' a calm voice replied, conspicuously unaccompanied by any sounds of combat, and I began to regret my impulsive decision to leave there even more strongly. 'Your current position?'
'K fifteen,' I said. 'Escorting the Viridian envoy to safety.' Which sounded a lot better than putting as much distance as I could between me and any greenskins who might have been aboard the projectile. It never occurred to me to question whether they'd survived an impact which would have reduced a human to a small, unpleasant stain[64]. I'd seen more than enough of their ability to shrug off almost as much damage as a power-armoured Space Marine on Perlia to be certain that some at least would be pulling themselves out of the wreckage even as I spoke. I glanced at the tangle of collapsed and twisted metal which effectively barred us from our original objective now, and gestured to Mira with the hand holding my laspistol, back the way we'd come.
64
Something of an exaggeration: orks are considerably more robust than humans, but not quite to that extent.