The only bright side to the whole sorry mess was that Mira was so impressed with my apparent heroism she insisted on spending the few remaining hours before my departure in a protracted and strenuous farewell, which came close to making my imminent demise seem almost worth it. As I trudged across the hangar floor to our waiting Thunderhawk, though, the prospect of taking a few happy memories to my grave with me did little to offset the leaden weight of dread now freighting my stomach.
'Commissar,' Drumon greeted me as I approached. 'Good news. The vox relays with the CATs are functioning well, in most cases, and there appears to be no genestealer activity in the vicinity of our landing point.'
'Excellent,' I said, trying to appear relaxed, enthusiastic and quietly confident, and probably failing dismally in every respect, before the full import of his words filtered through my trepidation. 'What does ''in most cases'' mean, exactly?'
'Three of them are failing to transmit any data,' Drumon expanded. 'We infer that they materialised too deeply inside the derelict for the vox signal to reach through the hull.'
'Definitely not ripped apart by genestealers, then?' I asked, trying to sound as though I was joking.
'That seems most unlikely,' Yaffel assured me, scooting across to join us, and I found myself wondering how well he was going to fare if the Spawn of Damnation was as chewed up as wrecked ships usually seemed to be[104].
Drumon nodded. 'If they were disabled by enemy action, they would have transmitted some data back before we lost the link,' he pointed out, and, somewhat reassured, I echoed the gesture.
'One did,' Yaffel said, with perfect timing, and my burgeoning confidence wilted again like a Tallarn salad. 'But I can confidently rule out aggression by a genestealer as the cause.'
'I'm delighted to hear it,' I said. 'And the reason for your confidence would be...?'
Yaffel quivered a little, although whether it was from suppressed indignation at my manifest scepticism, or the vibrations set up in the deck by the synchronised plodding towards the Thunderhawk of our Terminator escort, I couldn't rightly have said. 'The CAT in question was equipped with motion sensors,' he said. 'Nothing could have approached it within twenty metres without registering, and nothing did. So, unless you're aware of a genestealer capable of travelling in excess of ninety metres a second, in order to overwhelm the response time of the auspex to movement within its vicinity, simple mechanical failure seems far more likely.' He seemed genuinely put out by the admission, which I suppose was only to be expected, having noted on previous occasions how loath tech-priests generally were to admit that anything might go wrong with their precious contraptions.
'Stealers are hellish fast,' I agreed, 'but not that quick.' Another thought struck me, and I seized on it eagerly, seeing a last, faint hope of avoiding this ridiculous enterprise. 'I don't suppose any of your mechanical moggies were able to tell if there's anything fit to breathe over there?' The Reclaimers wouldn't care one way or the other, of course, and for all I knew everyone in the tech-priest contingent had been fitted with augmetic lungs, but I most definitely required something with a dollop of oxygen in it to keep me going. I'd tried breathing vacuum once before, and that was novelty enough for one lifetime.
'They were,' Drumon assured me. 'Both composition and pressure are well within tolerable limits for an unmodified human.'
'Well, that's nice to know,' I said, as the air in my immediate vicinity became marginally less wholesome, announcing the arrival of my aide.
'Sorry to keep you waiting, sir,' Jurgen said, with a salute-like wave in the general direction of Drumon, a compromise he generally fell back on when unsure precisely where someone connected to the military stood in relation to his own somewhat nebulous position[105], and a businesslike nod to Yaffel. 'I was preparing a flask and a few sandwiches, in case you got a bit peckish later on.'
'Thank you, Jurgen,' I said, and although it would have taken a lot more than a quick slurp of tanna to perk me up at that point, I felt my spirits beginning to revive nevertheless. As I've remarked before, his phlegmatic demeanour and apparently boundless confidence in my leadership, however misplaced, was curiously heartening. His lasgun was slung from one shoulder, in an apparently casual fashion which belied the speed with which he could reverse and use it, and, as ever, he seemed perfectly willing to follow me on this absurd escapade with no more thought for the risks involved than he would have employed on a foray into the kitchen in search of a snack.
His flak armour was partially obscured by a tangle of pouches and webbing, containing Emperor alone knew what (apart from a flask of tanna and some sandwiches, of course, although their precise location was anybody's guess), but by now we'd served together for so long that something would have seemed seriously amiss if he was prepared to venture into the field without it. 'Your timing's impeccable, as always.' Which wasn't exactly true, but no one else seemed quite ready to leave either.
'We might as well board,' Drumon said, leading the way up the ramp and into the bowels of the Thunderhawk. Seeing no further reason to delay, I followed suit, Jurgen trotting at my heels. Yaffel stayed where he was, hovering anxiously, while a couple of loading servitors with the Adeptus Mechanicus sigil proudly displayed on their tabards plodded towards the Thunderhawk bearing brass-bound boxes, for all the galaxy like an apprehensive habwife watching the family porcelain being heaved into a pantechnicon by carters. What they contained I had no idea, and cared even less, beyond inferring that they had something to do with the tech-priests' scavenging expedition[106].
The interior of the passenger compartment seemed rather less commodious than I remembered, around a dozen Terminators taking up quite a lot of room[107], but we found seats with little difficulty - and this time I made sure that I got hold of a headset before strapping in. The seat Drumon had steered me to, before settling into his own, between the looming bulk of the Terminators and the red-robed tech-priests twittering away to one another in Binary, had a clear line of sight to a nearby viewport, through which I watched Yaffel directing the stowage of the last of his baggage before scooting up the ramp to join us.
No sooner had he done so than the boom of the closing hatch, felt rather than heard over the rising racket of the engines, echoed through my bones, and the suffocating sense of apprehension I'd fought so hard to dispel swept over me once more. Like it or not, I was committed, about to set foot aboard a warp-spawned deathtrap, and however devoutly I might wish it, there could be no turning back.
I DON'T SUPPOSE the short hop from the strike cruiser to the Spawn of Damnation took more than a handful of minutes[108], but it seemed an eternity to me, my apprehension growing with every passing second. To distract myself, I flicked through the frequencies the headset could pick up, but none of the conversations I overheard made much sense: the Mechanicus contingent seemed content to continue warbling at one another in their own private language, the Terminators were absorbed in one of the pre-battle litanies peculiar to their Chapter and Drumon seemed to be meditating, no doubt praying to the Omnissiah to provide a sufficiently juicy stash of archeotech to make the absurd risk we were running worth taking. Since Jurgen was never exactly a sparkling conversationalist at the best of times, I was effectively thrown back on my own company, with nothing to occupy my mind apart from the ominous view through the panel of armourcrys facing me.
104
Ironically, despite his ambivalence towards her, Cain still seems to consider Mira more officer than civilian at this point - unless he's deferring to her diplomatic credentials.
105
Ironically, despite his ambivalence towards her, Cain still seems to consider Mira more officer than civilian at this point - unless he's deferring to her diplomatic credentials.
106
It's hard to be sure from Cain's vague description, but it's possible that these were portable cogitator cores, intended to download the data from the venerable archives aboard the derelict prior to attempting to salvage the system physically. That way, the information would survive, even if the mechanisms themselves proved too fragile to remove intact.
107
Since the Codex Astartes specifies an upper limit of ten men to a Space Marine squad, including Terminators, we can infer that either two smaller squads were present, or a single one had been reinforced by attached specialists of some kind. Since the most likely individual to have been accorded the honour of a personal suit of Terminator armour would have been a Librarian, who would undoubtedly have reacted to Jurgen's presence in a noticeable fashion, we can be reasonably confident that the former alternative was the case; which ties in with Cain's earlier description of a specialised assault squad working in concert with a regular formation of Terminators. If, of course, his habitually vague estimate of their numbers can be relied on.