'What better opportunity to observe, then?' Yaffel asked, as though bestowing an enormous favour. 'You can monitor the communication channels just as effectively through your comm-bead while you accompany us, and see the recovery operation at first hand while you're about it.'
'A chance not to be missed,' I agreed, masking the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach with the ease of a lifetime's dissembling. He still seemed dangerously sanguine about the chances of a genestealer attack to me, but at least we'd have a squad of Terminators to hide behind, and from what I'd seen of the ease with which they'd cleansed the nest under Fidelis they wouldn't be got past easily. I could still have refused to go, of course, but that would have meant sacrificing a measure of Drumon's regard, and with it my undeserved standing among the Reclaimers. So, as ever in that kind of situation, I resolved to simply make the best of a bad job, and be prepared to make a run for it at a moment's notice.
As it turned out, though, my fears appeared to be unfounded, at least to begin with. After leaving the docking bay we made surprisingly good time, the corridors free of clutter and detritus for the most part, although the occasional ceiling panel had fallen, and some of the deck plates were sufficiently corroded to present a trip hazard to the unwary. In one or two places there were signs of more serious obstruction, but these had been removed from our path by the vanguard of Terminators, and no serious obstacles to our progress remained.
The only other sign that our companions had come this way before us was the channel of disturbed dust along the centre of the passageway, and the occasional cyclopean footprint, picked out by Jurgen's luminator. His was the only one kindled, leaving the echoing darkness to wrap itself oppressively around us. I had no problem with this: our environment was sufficiently close to the underhives I'd grown up in for all my old instincts to have returned, the way sounds rebounded from the surfaces surrounding us and the feel of stray air currents against my face more than compensating for the lack of light, and I was perfectly happy not to be making myself an obvious target by carrying one. Drumon, I was sure, had no need of a luminator to find his way in any case, his helmet being stuffed with artificial senses to supplement his own, and no doubt the tech-priests had sufficient augmetic eyes and the like between them not to bump into things and each other too often.
We came across one of the Terminators within a few moments of setting off, his back to the corridor, facing one of the side passages, his twin-barrelled bolter aimed down it in a reassuringly steady grip. As we carried on past him, Drumon pausing to exchange a few words with his comrade, I realised for the first time just how bulky the heavy armour was; even the Techmarine looked relatively slight standing next to it. The Terminator, by contrast, filled almost the entire width of the narrow passageway, the hunched shoulders rising up behind his helmet brushing against the ceiling, and for the first time I began to wonder if perhaps we'd have been better off with a lighter, more nimble escort. If the worst came to the worst, these lumbering behemoths would block the constricted corridors like corks in a bottle. I don't mind admitting that chills of apprehension chased one another down my spine at that thought, my morbid imagination being able to picture the consequences of being unable to shoot past our guardians, or dodge round them to flee unhindered, all too well.
'Any signs of movement?' I asked, as I came abreast of his back, and the Terminator responded at once, his voice echoing slightly in my comm-bead as it overlapped with the one issuing from the external speaker of his armour.
'A few faint auspex returns, very tenuous,' he told me. 'No visual contact.' Which pretty much confirmed my earlier guess about the sensorium links in his helmet.
My palms began tingling again. 'How distant?' I asked.
'They're reading at about three hundred metres,' he told me, apparently quite unconcerned. 'If they're there at all.'
'Just auspex ghosts,' Yaffel said confidently. 'Nothing to worry about.'
'Ghosts?' Jurgen asked, sounding mildly curious, and no more perturbed than usual. 'Are the wrecks haunted?' He swung his luminator around for a moment, as if hoping to find the shade of some long-deceased crewman dripping ectoplasm on the bulkheads.
'It's a theological term,' Yaffel explained patiently, 'for a false reading, which looks like a genuine trace. Even the most conscientious of machine-spirits will sometimes be mistaken, or perhaps be moved by a sense of mischief inappropriate to the sanctity of their task.'
'Or perhaps there really is something out there,' I said, drawing my laspistol. The gesture may have been futile, but the weight of the weapon in my hand felt comforting, and I stretched my senses, listening intently for sounds of scrabbling in the dark.
'If there is, it'll just be vermin,' Yaffel assured me easily, with a faintly supercilious glance at my drawn sidearm, 'or cables moving in the air current from the recirculators.'
'Vermin that's spent countless generations exposed to the warp?' I wondered aloud. 'Emperor alone knows what that'll have evolved into.' Or what it lived on, come to that. Foraging wouldn't exactly be easy in an environment composed mainly of metal, which was why the genestealers tended to hibernate between systems. (At least according to the archives Gries had authorised my access to, and remarkably thin they'd turned out to be, considering this particular space hulk had first been reliably identified almost two thousand years ago[115].)
Yaffel subsided, looking a bit less sure of himself, although I had little enough time to enjoy my minor victory. I voxed Drumon, sure that he'd been paying at least partial attention to the conversation. 'Any change in the readings from the CATs?' I enquired.
'Still no sign of movement in their immediate vicinity,' the Techmarine responded at once, confirming my guess. 'But another one just ceased transmission.'
'In the same way as the first?' I asked, feeling a sense of vague disquiet.
'Precisely,' Drumon confirmed. His helmet swivelled towards Yaffel.
'It should be recovered for examination. So high a failure rate may point to an unforeseen environmental factor.'
'That may be the case,' the tech-priest conceded, sounding more than a little unhappy at the possibility. 'But our highest priority has to be the recovery of the cogitator core.'
I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of the data-slate Yaffel had produced. A deck plan, familiar from the hololith aboard the Revenant, was displayed on the tiny screen, our position marked precisely where I'd expected us to be, and a speckling of icons around us picked out the cordon of Terminators. A wider scattering of coloured dots a little way beyond them, most of which were moving slowly and erratically, just had to be the CATs; the one nearest to us was both stationary and limned in red, indicating that it had just malfunctioned.
'That goes without saying,' I said, thinking rapidly. If Jurgen and I branched off at the next cross corridor, always assuming we could squeeze past the Terminator guarding it, we'd reach the downed mechanism in a handful of minutes. It wouldn't be hard to manhandle it back to the Thunderhawk, and we could spend the rest of the time before our departure with several centimetres of ceramite and a reassuring amount of firepower between us and the genestealers infesting this deathtrap, instead of roaming around a pitch-dark labyrinth waiting for something to pounce on us. 'But Drumon has a point too. If there is something about the hulk affecting our devices, there's no telling what could fail next.'
115
Or perhaps not quite so remarkable, considering the relative rarity of the occasions on which it had both popped out of the warp in an Imperial stellar system, and someone had been on hand to take auspex readings. If anyone had tried to board it before the Reclaimers, they left no record of the attempt; not even in the rather more comprehensive archives maintained by the Ordo Xenos.