'That we fail to find the emergence point at all, or any clue as to its whereabouts,' Yaffel said, looking at me as though I was a simpleton.
'And what are the chances of that?' I asked, refusing to be deflected. If I could get them to realise the mission was hopeless for themselves, it would circumvent any amount of arguing later on.
'Somewhere on the order of three per cent,' the wavering magos told me, looking as perturbed as though that was a real possibility.
'Why so high?' I asked, before reflecting that perhaps sarcasm wasn't particularly sensible under the circumstances, neither Gries nor Yaffel having shown much of a sense of humour about our quest. If either was offended by my flippancy, or even noticed it, come to that, they gave no sign, however. Yaffel merely gestured to the hololith, where the glowing green funnel was still projected over the starfield.
'We've been able to refine our estimates,' he said, 'but only so far. Given the flow of the current we're now in, our destination could be any one of these three systems, with a probability of seventeen, twelve and thirty-two per cent respectively. Other, less likely, destinations are here.' A rash of icons appeared throughout the cone, a few in planetary systems, the vast majority in the deep gulf between them. As I regarded these, I felt a faint shiver of apprehension; if we ended up in the void between the stars, and for some reason the warp engines failed to respond to Drumon's ministrations, we would all surely die in the fathomless dark, centuries from succour even at the best speed our vessel was capable of in the material realm.
'What if we return to the orkhold and re-enter the current after your calculations are complete?' Gries asked, as calmly as if committing suicide like that was a perfectly reasonable proposal.
To my horror, Yaffel nodded. 'I've considered this,' he said, his tone so even that they might merely have been discussing the weather, rather than condemning us all to certain death. All of a sudden, making a run for it in a saviour pod was beginning to look positively attractive.
'My estimate of a ninety-seven per cent probability of success was predicated on us having done so.'
'We'll have to lay over and resanctify the system before we try that,' Drumon said firmly. 'A lot of the machine-spirits are still traumatised, and need to be healed before we can take the ship into combat again.'
'So it looks as though we'll just have to carry on looking for the Spawn's next emergence point for the time being,' I said, trying not to sound too relieved. If we found it, all well and good; either the hulk would be there, or we'd carry on searching, and either way there'd be no reason to return to an ork-infested hellhole. On the other hand, if we didn't, at least I'd have nine days or thereabouts to find a plausible excuse to leave them to it - and failing that, there was always the pods. 'What are our chances of success under the present circumstances?'
'No more than seventy-two per cent,' Yaffel said gloomily, and I resisted the temptation to throw the nearest heavy object at him, with what I still consider a heroic feat of self-control. I'd come out ahead on considerably longer odds than that, on innumerable occasions, and said so. If I'm honest, I was almost giddy with relief, but still in sufficient control of my faculties to refrain from telling the desiccated tech-priest precisely what I thought about his willingness to sacrifice the lot of us just to tidy up his sums.
'Let us hope your confidence is justified, commissar,' Gries said dryly, and on that encouraging note the meeting came to an end.
WITH SO MUCH at stake, it was hardly surprising that the next few weeks were more than a little tense. I whiled away the time as best I could with one piece of makework after another, relishing my daily exercise with the practice drones, and a couple of sparring sessions with Drumon, who seemed as relieved to get away from his duties as I was. Though he never said so directly, I soon inferred that the orks had left a considerable legacy of damage behind them, and the task of coordinating the repairs was an onerous one. Despite my best efforts to ignore them, Yaffel's words had left me feeling unsettled, and although I knew the chances of being dragged back to the orks' domain on a suicidal attempt to make his calculations come out right were remote (practically non-existent if I had anything to do with it), I couldn't shake a nagging sense of disquiet, which refused to leave me entirely except when I was engaged in physical exercise.
Perhaps as a result of this, or perhaps because electrocuting a mob of orks seemed to have put her in a better mood, I found myself spending more time with Mira again. I can't claim to have enjoyed her society as much as I had done back in Fidelis, but her enthusiasm for mine seemed undiminished, and as I've noted before, my opportunities for social interaction aboard the Revenant were somewhat circumscribed. To be honest, I'd been a little wary of renewing our association at first, a faint voice at the back of my mind still insisting that this was a bad idea, for reasons I couldn't quite articulate, whenever I could be bothered to listen to it. But as the days passed, and she kept the virago side of her personality under better control, I began to feel a little more comfortable around her. Perhaps too much so; otherwise I'd certainly have paid more attention to the itching in my palms, which continued to flare up from time to time in the middle of apparently innocuous conversations.
There was one in particular which sticks in my mind, although the full significance of it didn't really occur to me at the time. Spurred on by our recent encounter with the greenskins, I'd been telling her a few colourful lies over a leisurely supper together about my supposedly glorious campaign to liberate Perlia from their kindred, and been duly rewarded by oohs and aahs of wide-eyed credulity in most of the right places - then she looked at me over the rim of her goblet as though taking aim.
'Haven't you ever thought about doing something else with your life?' she asked, in the studiedly neutral fashion she tended to adopt when trying to pretend she didn't care about the answer. I shook my head, in some perplexity, completely taken aback.
'Haven't you?' I asked in return, knowing that my question was equally ridiculous. Mira had been born into the ruling family of an Imperial world, destined since birth to take a hand in the governance of it, and her education and upbringing had no doubt been predicated on that assumption; she was no more in control of her own destiny than I was. From the day I'd been earmarked as a future commissar by a schola progenium functionary with a twisted sense of humour[76], my destiny had been set in stone, just as surely as Mira's, but without the limitless wealth which had no doubt made her adolescence a great deal more comfortable than mine.
'All the time,' she said, to my surprise, an unexpected air of wistfulness entering her tone. Then she smiled, as if to make light of the revelation, and shrugged, setting up interesting oscillations in the clinging gold fabric of her favourite gown - which still made her look like a joygirl if you asked me. (Not that I considered that aspect of her appearance much of a disadvantage.) 'But I've never had the chance.' She glanced slyly at me. 'Not until now.'
'Being offworld, you mean,' I said, managing to look as though I was interested without too much difficulty. This was a happy knack I'd acquired early enough in life to make my time at the schola more tolerable than it might otherwise have been, and which had served me well in my subsequent career.