Until our Thunderhawk left the docking bay, I'd had no idea how close to the space hulk the Revenant had moved; but almost as soon as the sturdy gunship moved out of the shadow of the hangar doors, the vast derelict was filling the viewport, like a misshapen metal asteroid. As our pilot boosted us away, on a parabolic trajectory towards the shattered hull of the Redeemer-class vessel somewhere on the far side of the vast conglomeration of scrap, the strike cruiser shrank rapidly, diminished by distance, while the dimensions of the space hulk seemed largely unchanged. I found myself reminded of the tiny fish that accompany oceanic leviathans[109], then, rather less comfortably, of the lesser bioforms which swarm about the massive bulk of a tyranid hive ship.
Though I tried to pick out some of the more identifiable features I remembered from the hololithic image Drumon and Yaffel had shown me, the effort was futile. I'd seen spacecraft from the outside before, of course, but in every case their hulls had been limned by a myriad of light sources, from the huge luminators guiding shuttle pilots into the hangar bays to the sputtering sparks of the welding torches in the hands of the void-suited tech-adepts pottering about on the hull, not to mention the warm, welcoming glow seeping from uncountable viewports. The immense bulk of the Spawn of Damnation was utterly dark, however, as bleak and inhospitable as the void itself, so that despite its size and solidity it seemed an insubstantial phantom, appearing only as a hole of greater darkness against the glittering backdrop of the stars.
After a few moments the glowering shadow had expanded to encompass the entire viewport, and I felt an overpowering sense of vertigo, as though we were falling down an infinite abyss ripped into the fabric of the universe. I gripped the armrests tightly and listened to the hammering of my heart, which for a moment or two seemed to drown out the perpetual howl of the Thunderhawk's engine[110].
It was only at this point, perhaps because we were so close by now, that I finally began to pick out patterns in the darkness, deeper shadows which spoke of fissures in the accretion of detritus below us, and the faint gleam of reflected starlight striking highlights from peaks and promontories in the horizon of twisted metal.
'Magnificent!' Yaffel breathed, apparently in all sincerity, and I found myself reflecting that there was never a heavy object around to throw when you really needed one.
'Let's hope you still think that when you've got a pack of genestealers snapping at your heels,' I said, momentarily forgetting that he didn't have any, and with a touch more asperity than politeness and protocol would normally have allowed.
'Our Terminators should be able to keep them at arm's length, at least,' Drumon commented wryly, rousing himself from his trance in time to forestall whatever riposte the tech-priest might have been about to make.
'Bolter range would be better,' I said, inflecting it like a pleasantry, and nodding to convey my gratitude to him for helping to smooth over a potentially awkward moment.
'Better for some,' the nearest Terminator put in, raising a hand to display the fearsome claws I'd last seen ripping apart an artillery piece. His helmet swivelled in my direction, the voice issuing from it imbued with the calmness which comes from unshakable confidence. 'Arm's length suits me.'
'I'm pleased to hear it,' I replied politely. 'In my experience, the one thing you can say for genestealers is that there are always enough to go around.'
'Well said,' the sergeant I'd last seen in the ruins of Fidelis put in. 'If they turn up, we'll be ready.'
'They're not going to turn up,' Yaffel said, with an edge to his voice which might have been irritation if tech-priests hadn't been supposed to be above such things. 'The corridors around the beachhead are completely free of the creatures. None of the CATs has registered any movement.'
'Then where the frak are they?' I asked, not unreasonably.
'In hibernation, probably,' Yaffel said. 'If there are any left alive at all.' Though he wasn't exactly built for shrugging, he made a creditable effort, which his shoulder harness effectively neutralised. 'We're only inferring their presence, after all, from the infiltration of Viridia. It's possible the infestation came from another source entirely.'
'Possible,' Drumon conceded, 'but hardly probable.'
'Be that as it may,' Yaffel said, effectively conceding the argument, probably because if he did bother to work out the odds as he usually did it would have demolished his own position[111], 'there's no reason to suppose that there was ever more than a handful of the creatures on board.'
'Can I have that in writing?' I asked, once again allowing something of the agitation I felt to imbue the words with rather more testiness than I'd intended. 'If there really are 'stealers aboard the hulk it's because the tyranids put them there, and they never bother with just a handful of anything when a few hundred will do.' As it turned out, even that was a woeful underestimate, but as I was still in blissful ignorance of that particular fact, my initial guess worried me more than enough to be going on with.
Any further debate was cut short by a few uncomfortable moments as the engines fired again, and the Thunderhawk pitched abruptly, its nose coming up as the pilot aligned it with whatever was left of the old Redeemer's docking bay. Then the gunship's external floodlights came on, throwing the wilderness of metal outside into clear visibility, and an audible gasp rose from the little coterie of tech-priests, despite most of them no doubt feeling such blatant displays of emotion were a trifle infra dig in the normal course of events.
Not that I could blame them for that. In its own way, the metallic landscape was quite awe-inspiring, though undeniably bleak. It spread out below us, filling the viewport to the jagged horizon, a wasteland of bent and buckled hull plates, sheared structural members and what looked to me uncomfortably like the wreck of a utility craft of a similar size to our Thunderhawk. Whatever it was had impacted too quickly for much to remain identifiable, but there was a wrongness about the proportions of the pieces of tangled wreckage which made me suspect it had been of xenos manufacture. Before I could draw Drumon's attention to it and ask his opinion, however, it had passed out of sight, and our descent had become even more precipitous.
Having been through more docking runs than I could count, even in those days, I gripped the armrests of my chair just as the pilot rolled us vertiginously around, the on-board gravity field fluctuating uncomfortably for a second or two as it synchronised with the local one and established a subtly different direction for down. Now, instead of descending, we appeared to be approaching a solid wall of fissured metal, and, despite knowing intellectually that our pilot was more than competent, I tensed involuntarily for an impact my hindbrain insisted was about to come.
It didn't, of course. No sooner had Jurgen's muttered imprecation about the flight crew's parentage faded into the echoes around us than the exterior of the derelict disappeared, to be replaced by the walls of a docking bay.
'This appears to still be functional,' Yaffel said, his tone adding an unspoken ''I told you so''.
'It does indeed,' Drumon agreed, 'but appearances are often deceptive.'
'Quite so,' Yaffel agreed. 'But we should be able to get the doors closed and the chamber pressurised without too much difficulty.' The hull-mounted luminators were reflecting brightly back from walls of age-dulled metal, their buttresses more slender and finely wrought than those I was used to seeing aboard Imperial vessels, and the arcane mechanisms scattered about the periphery of the docking bay seemed somehow simpler and more compact. What this meant I had no idea, beyond a vague notion that our intrepid hunters of archeotech had been pipped to the post, and that anything useful had probably been salvaged by others generations before; but Yaffel and the others didn't seem in the least bit downhearted, chirruping away to one another nineteen to the dozen, and pointing things out with fingers and mechadendrites like juvies in a confectionery store.
109
Something he may have witnessed for himself during the battle for the floating hives of Kosnar.
110
More likely the engine had been throttled back, allowing the gunship to coast, while the pilot corrected its attitude in preparation for docking.
111
Quite. The probability of the genestealers in the Viridia System having originated somewhere other than the Spawn of Damnation is in the order of 0.35%, according to my savant Mott, who has a considerable aptitude for this kind of statistical analysis. Or any other kind, come to that, which is why he's been barred from innumerable gaming establishments, particularly when accompanied by Cain.