Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘Ready whenever you are, milady,’ the familiar voice of her personal shuttle pilot echoed through the vox-receiver in my ear, and Amberley nodded, with a hint of impatience.

‘We’ll be boarding any time now, Pontius. Just waiting for Flicker.’

‘Be right with you,’ Pelton’s voice cut in, right on cue. ‘Just coming into the hangar.’

‘Finally,’ Zemelda added, though not over the link – noticeably more testy since the analgesics had begun to wear off.

I turned towards the personnel door by which we’d entered the echoing vault of the cargo bay, intended for the use of crews and the occasional passenger, only to find nobody there apart from the demi-squad155 of blue-and-gold-clad household guards slouching around trying to look as if they knew which end of their hellguns to point forwards. Their presence had come as no surprise this close to the gubernatorial mansion; indeed, I’d have been astonished if they hadn’t been there, although what use so few of them would have been against an eldar attempt to invest the summit of the spire was beyond me. Hold the xenos off for the handful of seconds it would take them to die in the attempt, probably, while Fulcher was whisked off to safety somewhere.

‘He’s over there,’ Rakel said, pointing, from the other side of our group, about as far away from Jurgen as she could get while still remaining in earshot. Since this was uncharacteristically short, pertinent and unburdened with peculiar metaphor – not to mention delivered in a voice which could strip the enamel from your teeth – I found myself turning in the direction she’d indicated. Somewhere in the middle distance a convoy of battered utility trucks was entering the hangar bay and rumbling towards the heavy cargo shuttle squatting on its pad.

‘Can you sense his presence?’ I asked, feeling faintly uncomfortable at the idea.

Rakel stared scornfully at me. ‘I’ve got eyes,’ she said. ‘And he’s waving.’

‘Second truck, sir,’ Jurgen added helpfully, and I squinted in the direction of the oncoming vehicles, finally spotting a civilian in the cab of the one he’d indicated. Everyone else in the convoy seemed to be wearing the blue-and-gold uniforms of Fulcher’s gubernatorial troops, and I must confess I felt a momentary panic at that sudden realisation, wondering if the eldar were about to breach the spire and these were hastily despatched reinforcements for the token guards I’d noticed before. A second or so later, though, reason reasserted itself and assured me that Kasteen or Broklaw would have voxed a warning long before the eldar got within striking distance of where we stood.

‘That’s a lot of cargo,’ Yanbel remarked, before returning his attention to the trio of heavy servitors trudging towards Amberley’s garish passenger shuttle laden with boxes and crates, stuffed with Throne knew what. Most of it, I strongly suspected, would turn out to be lethal, or otherwise useful in the hunting of heretics. The largest one – twice the size of the others and festooned with prayer slips hoping to attract the favourable attention of the Machine-God – I was certain contained Amberley’s precious suit of power armour, and felt considerably relieved that she would be taking it with us. Not quite as relieved as I would have been to have seen her wearing it, as there’s precious little in the confidence-boosting stakes to compare with a well-nigh invulnerable Valkyrie blazing away with a storm bolter standing between you and harm’s way, but under the circumstances I’d take what I could get.

‘Yes, it is,’ Amberley said thoughtfully, and tapped her comm-bead. ‘Flicker. What’s in those trucks?’

‘Relief supplies,’ Pelton’s voice replied, and her eyebrows rose a fraction, in carefully modulated surprise. ‘I interrupted a briefing at the mansion when I went to talk to Defroy. The orbitals only have limited food reserves, so the governor’s ordered supply runs to supplement the rationing.’

‘A token effort, with the maintenance of civilian morale as its primary objective, I strongly suspect,’ Mott put in, ‘given that, even fully laden, it would require several thousand flights of a vessel that size a day to keep a population of seventeen million adequately fed, not to mention that the attrition rate from enemy action would–’

‘You might very well think that,’ Pelton said dryly, ‘but I couldn’t possibly comment.’