'Trust? Trust's got nothing to do with it. I just don't want them out of my sight!'
- General Karis, after promising full access to his command bunker to the local
PDF commanders on Vortovan.
'ARE YOU SURE about this, commissar?' Kasteen asked, clearly as troubled by the prospect
as I was. She and Broklaw had joined me in my office at my request, and I'd filled them
in on as much of the assignment I'd been handed as Amberley would permit. I sighed
deeply.
'No, I'm not,' I admitted. 'But the inquisitor was quite insistent. These are the troopers
she wants.'
'Well, we'd better give them to her,' Broklaw said. 'At least they'll be off our hands at
last.' Kasteen nodded, clearly cheered by the prospect.
'That's true,' she conceded. Despite my best efforts to arrange their transfer to a penal
legion, the Munitorium was proving as slow and obstructive as usual, and didn't seem
the least bit inclined to send a ship all the way out here just to pick up a handful of
cannon fodder. Normally, that wouldn't have been a problem, I'd simply have found
space on the next outbound freighter or something, but Gravalax wasn't exactly the
hub of the Segmentum, and even what little shipping there normally was had almost
dried up as the political situation deteriorated. Even if the worst-case scenario I'd been
shown on the hololith didn't come to pass, it looked as though we were going to be
stuck with the five defaulters until we returned to Imperial space, which was going to
be months away at this rate.
Which, in turn, had meant they were our responsibility for the foreseeable future,
which wasn't exactly what I'd had in mind when I cheated Parjita out of his firing
squad back aboard the Righteous Wrath.
'And on the plus side,' Broklaw went on cheerfully, 'at least we won't be losing anyone
we'll miss.' He stopped suddenly, realised what he'd just said, and floundered in a way
I would have found comical under any other circumstances. 'Not you, commissar,
obviously. I mean, we would miss you, but I'm sure we won't. Have to, I mean. You'll
be back.'
'I certainly intend to be,' I said, with more confidence than I felt. I still hadn't been able
to think of a plausible reason to wriggle out of the assignment, so I'd bowed to the
inevitable and started trying to find ways of ensuring my own survival instead. None
of the troopers could be trusted, that much was certain, but Amberley seemed
confident enough so my best bet was to stick close to her and hope she had a plan of
some kind. On the other hand, chances were that Orelius's luckless bodyguards had
thought the same thing. Like most hivers, I was comfortable enough in a tunnel
complex unless someone was actually shooting at me, so maybe the most prudent
thing would be to get conveniently lost at the earliest opportunity and make my way
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back to the compound after a reasonable interval had passed. Then again, if I did that
and Amberley survived she wouldn't be terribly pleased with me to say the least, and
the prospect of hacking off an inquisitor wasn't one to contemplate lightly.
The upshot of all this was that I'd spent a largely sleepless night vacillating about my
non-existent choices until sheer exhaustion had tumbled me into old nightmares of
fleeing from gleaming metal killers down endless corridors, heaving grey masses of
tyranid chitin roaring in towards me like a tide of death, and a green-eyed seductress
trying to suck the soul from my body in the name of the Chaos power she
worshipped. And probably others too, which I was glad not to recall on waking.
Jurgen appeared at my elbow, presaged by his usual miasma, and poured me my
habitual bowl of tanna leaf tea. Instead of withdrawing as he normally did, though, he
hesitated next to my desk.
'Was there something else, Jurgen?' I asked, anticipating some routine query about
paperwork I couldn't be bothered to deal with. If I was going to die today, I wasn't
going to waste my final hours filling out forms in triplicate. And if I didn't, which I
swore to the Emperor I was going to do my damnedest to achieve, he could sort it out
for me while I was gone. That was supposed to be an aide's job, after all. He cleared
his throat stickily, and a faint expression of nausea ghosted across Broklaw's face.
'I'd like to go with you, sir,' he said at last. 'I wouldn't trust any of those frakheads
further than I could throw a Baneblade, if you don't mind me saying so, and I'd feel a
lot better if you'd let me watch your back.'
I was touched and I don't mind admitting it. We'd been campaigning together for the
best part of thirteen years by that point, and faced innumerable perils together, but his
loyalty never ceased to amaze me. Probably because the nearest I've ever got to the
concept myself is looking it up in a dictionary.
'Thank you, Jurgen,' I said. 'I'd be honoured.' A faint flush crept up from behind his
shirt collar, which, as usual, was open at the neck and stained with something that
probably used to be food. Kasteen and Broklaw looked suitably impressed, too.
'I'd best go and get ready then.' He sketched a salute, about turned with the closest I'd
ever seen him get to precision, and marched out, his shoulders set.
'Remarkable,' Broklaw said.
'He has a strong sense of duty,' I said, feeling cautiously optimistic about my chances
of survival for the first time since Amberley dropped her bombshell. We'd been in
some pretty tight spots together over the years, and I knew I could rely on him
completely, which is more than I could say for anyone else in the team.
'He's a brave man,' Kasteen said, seemingly surprised by the idea. Most people tended
to avoid him, put off by his appearance and body odour, and the vague sense of
wrongness he exuded, but I'd been close to him for so long I'd got used to seeing past that to his well-hidden virtues. Though I was the last person you'd normally expect to
appreciate them.
'I suppose he is,' I said.
'WELL, THERE THEY are,' I said. 'They're all yours.' Amberley nodded, and walked
along the line of troopers, meeting their eyes one by one. They were as sullen a bunch
as I remembered, gazing back at us in silence.
I'd had them marched to one of the storage sheds in our sector of the compound at the
double, and was pleased to note that none of them seemed particularly out of breath,
so their weeks of confinement hadn't left them as out of condition as I'd feared, but
then, I don't suppose they'd had much to do except exercise anyway. They'd looked
vaguely surprised when I dismissed the guards, except for Sorel, whose expression
never seemed to change whatever happened, and stared at me as I sat casually on a
nearby crate.
'I promised you a chance to redeem yourselves,' I said. 'And that chance has now
come.' That got their attention. Velade looked vaguely apprehensive, Holenbi baffled
as always, and even Sorel seemed to take slightly more interest than usual. Kelp and
Trebek just stared at me, but at least they didn't seem inclined to go for one another
again. Perhaps it was my personal charisma, or my unmerited reputation, but it was
most likely the laspistol in the holster at my hip which I'd visibly left unfastened for a
quick draw. I gestured to Amberley, who stepped forward from the shadows, the black
cloak she'd worn before rendering her almost invisible until she moved. 'This is
Inquisitor Vail. She has a little job for us.'
Velade gasped audibly as Amberley raised her hand, and her electoo flashed into
visibility. Dressed in black as she was, she fit the popular conception of an inquisitor
far more closely than the sultry lounge singer that I'd first encountered, or the cheerful
young woman I'd been getting to know, and I could tell that most of them, at least,
were properly intimidated.
'What kind of a job?' Trebek asked. I waited for Amberley to reply, but after a moment
I realised she was leaving the briefing to me. Not that I knew much more than the rest
of us, of course, but I'd pass on everything I could. The longer they survived, the
longer I could hide behind them from whatever was waiting for us in the tunnels
below.
'Recon,' I said. 'Into the under-city. Resistance is expected.'
'Resistance from who?' Trebek asked. I shrugged.
'That's what we're supposed to find out.'
'I take it we aren't expected to survive,' Kelp cut in. Amberley met his eyes, staring
him down.
'That rather depends on you,' she said. 'The commissar certainly intends to. I suggest
you follow his lead.'
'It's not going to make any difference to us anyway, is it?' Velade asked, with
surprising vehemence. 'Even if we get through this one alive, we've only got another
suicide mission to look forward to.'
'I'd worry about that later if I were you,' I said. But Amberley was nodding slowly, as
though she was being perfectly reasonable. I certainly wouldn't have mouthed off to
an inquisitor in her boots, but I suppose she felt she had nothing to lose in any case.
'Good point, Griselda,' she said. Velade and the others looked a little taken aback at
the use of her given name. I recognised the technique as a subtle piece of
psychological manipulation, quietly enjoying the chance to watch an expert at work.
Amberley smiled, suddenly, the full force of her capricious personality manifesting
itself again.
'All right, you need an incentive. If you make it back in one piece, you have my word
you won't be transferred to a penal legion. How's that?'
A total pain in the fundament so far as I was concerned. The paperwork alone would
be a nightmare, not to mention the morale and disciplinary problems which would
undoubtedly ensue from trying to integrate such an insubordinate rabble back into a
line company. I wasn't about to undermine my own authority by having it verbally
overridden by an inquisitor in front of them, though, so I stayed quiet. Maybe I could
get them transferred to another command, or assigned somewhere relatively harmless
after she'd gone. The local PDF could certainly use a professional training cadre to
bring them up to scratch once this mess was sorted out, and we were hardly likely to
be coming back to GravalaxÖ
'All of us?' Holenbi asked, clearly not quite believing his own ears. Amberley
shrugged.
'Well, she did ask first. But I suppose so. Wouldn't be much of an incentive for the rest
of you otherwise, would it?'
No one answered, so I resumed the briefing.
'An undetermined number of hostiles are holed up down there. Our job is to find out
how many, their disposition, and what they're up to.'
'Do we have a map of the tunnels?' Kelp asked. For what it was worth, they seemed to
be focussing on the mission at least. I turned to Amberley.
'Inquisitor?' I asked. She shook her head.
'No. We didn't penetrate very far the first time before we were forced to retreat. We
have very little idea of their extent, or what's down there.'
'Who's we?' Trebek asked.
'My associates,' Amberley replied. Trebek glanced pointedly around the shed.
'I can only see you.'
'The others were injured. That's why I need you.' No mention of the dead ones, I
noticed, which was probably just as well. It wouldn't fool the troopers anyway, they
knew enough about firefights in confined spaces to realise that not everyone she'd
gone down there with would have made it out.
'So, to recap,' Kelp said, 'you want us to go into an unmapped labyrinth, looking for
something you think might be down there, but you don't know what, protected by an
indeterminate number of heavily armed guards, and the last time you tried you were
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the only one who made it out in one piece.'
'That about sums it up, yes.' Amberley admitted cheerfully. 'But you are forgetting one
thing.'
'Which is?' I asked, already sure I wouldn't like the answer.
'They know I'm on to them now.' She smiled, as though it were a tremendous joke. 'So
this time they'll be expecting us.'
'Another question.' Sorel spoke up for the first time, puncturing the sombre silence.
'Your generous offer notwithstanding, you've obviously chosen us because we're
expendable.' His voice was as flat and colourless as his eyes. 'I assume you're not
expecting many survivors from this little excursion.'
'As I said before, that rather depends on you.' Amberley nailed him with her eyes. 'I
certainly intend to come back. So does the commissar.' She'd got that right, at least.
'And your question is?'
'What's to stop any of us putting a las-round through your head and disappearing over
the horizon the first chance we get?' His wintry gaze swept the other prisoners. 'Don't
tell me you're not all thinking about it.'
'Good point.' Amberley smiled, the amused expression I'd seen before back on her
face. If it disconcerted Sorel he gave no sign of the fact, but it certainly worried the
others. She jerked a thumb in my direction. 'There's always the commissar to get past
before you can reach me, of course.'
'And I'll execute any one of you who even looks like they're thinking of making a run
for it,' I promised. I would, too, because they'd have to kill me as well if they were to
have a hope of getting away with it, and that would be a highly undesirable outcome
from my point of view.
'Even if you could take us both,' and the amusement was abruptly gone from her
voice, 'and I sincerely doubt that, I've lost count of the number of people I've met who
thought they could outrun the Inquisition. But you might as well give it a try if you really
want to.' Then the undercurrent of mirth was back in her voice. 'After all, there's a first
time for everything.'
I smiled too, to demonstrate my confidence in her, but none of the others did. Sorel
nodded, slowly, like a debater conceding a point.
'Fair enough,' he said.
No ONE HAD anything constructive to add, so after a few more desultory questions
about the mission parameters (the answers to which all boiled down to ''Emperor only
knows'' in any case), I led them outside to where Jurgen had a Chimera waiting, its
engine running, and tried to look confident. I would have preferred my usual scout
Salamander, given the choice, but there wouldn't have been room for the entire team
aboard it, and besides, the fully enclosed passenger bay would discourage any lastminute attempts at desertion, or so I hoped.
'Your equipment's already aboard,' I told them, standing well back until they'd
embarked, like an ovinehound shepherding a flock through a gate. (Although the
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canines tend not to use laspistols to emphasise the point, of course.) Five bundles of
kit were waiting for them, each one wrapped in a carapace vest with a name stencilled
on it, and they all picked out their own as they boarded.
'Check it carefully,' Amberley told them. 'If there's anything missing you won't get a
chance to come back for it.'
'Discharge papers?' Trebek said, raising a tension-relieving laugh from Velade and
Holenbi.
'Something's wrong here,' Kelp said, shrugging into the body armour. 'It fits.
Quartermaster must be slipping.' It was an axiom among the Guard that kit only came
in two sizes - too large and too small.
'I had a word with him,' Amberley said. 'He assured me that there wouldn't be any
complaints.'
'I'll just bet he did,' Kelp muttered.
'Hellguns. Shady!' Velade hefted her new weapon, looking incongruously like a juvie
on Emperor's day morning. As a regular line trooper, she was only used to handling a
standard-issue lasgun, the more powerful variant normally being reserved for stormtroopers and other special forces. At least her evident enthusiasm for her new toy
seemed to be keeping her apprehension in check.
'Nice,' Kelp agreed, snapping a powercell home with practiced precision.
'We thought the extra punch might come in handy,' I said. Amberley had suggested I
replace my battered old laspistol with the handgun version of the heavier weapon, but
after some hesitation, I'd demurred. I'd got so used to it over the years that it was more
like an extension of my own arm than a weapon, and no amount of added stopping
power would compensate for the different weight and feel of a replacement throwing
off my instinctive aim. In a firefight, that could mean the difference between life and
death.
I'd grabbed a set of the body armour, though, and wore it now, concealed beneath my
uniform greatcoat. It felt a little heavy and uncomfortable, but a lot less so than taking
a las-bolt to the chest.
'It just might,' Trebek agreed. She was busily hanging frag grenades from her body
harness. Most of them had a couple, along with smoke canisters, luminators, spare
power packs, and all the other odds and ends troopers carry into the field. The
exception was Holenbi, who carried a medpack in place of the grenades, but his
expertise in battlefield medicine made him more valuable patching the others up if the
necessity arose. And if it came down to grenades in a confined space, we were pretty
much fragged in any case, so a couple more or less wouldn't make any difference.
'You can take the brute force approach if you like.' Sorel sighted along the length of
his long-las, and made a minute adjustment to the targeter. I'd taken the trouble to find
the weapon that used to be assigned to him, knowing that a sniper gets as attached to
his weapon as I was to my old pistol, and that he would have customised it in a dozen
subtle ways to improve its accuracy. 'I've got all the edge I need right here.' He must
have realised the strings I'd had to pull to obtain it for him, because he met my eyes at
that point and nodded, a barely perceptible thanks. I was astonished. Up until then I'd
been convinced he had no emotions at all.
'Just make sure you keep it pointed in the right direction,' I said, with enough of a
smile to take most of the sting out of the warning. It was still there, though, and an
expression I couldn't quite identify came close to surfacing on his habitually impassive
face.
'I could use a few more pressure pads,' Holenbi said, inventorying the medkit with the
speed of long practice. I gestured to the primary aid box bolted to the Chimera's inner
bulkhead.
'Help yourself,' I invited. He burrowed rapidly through it, scavenging several items
which made the bag on his belt bulge, and stowed a few more in other pouches and
pockets, discarding a couple of ration bars to make room for them.
'Better eat that,' Velade advised, taking the seat next to him. 'You'll only get hungry
later if you leave it.'
'Yeah, right,' he agreed, breaking one in half and offering the rest to her. She took it
with a smile, their hands touching for a moment as her fingers closed around it, and
Amberley grinned at me.
'Aww,' she mouthed, her back to them. 'How sweet.'
Maybe to her, I thought, but to me it was little more than another potential
complication in a catastrophe just waiting to happen. I quelled my irritation, and
picked the remaining bar off the bench.
'She's got a point,' I split the bar with Amberley. 'Better stock up with carbohydrates
while you can. You'll be burning a lot of energy soon enough.'
'You're the expert,' she said, as though anyone else's opinions mattered a damn on this
foolhardy expedition. She sniffed at the grey fibrous mass, and bit into it cautiously.
'You people actually eat this frak?'
'Not if we can help it,' Velade said.
'Then I'm definitely surviving this.' Amberley swallowed the remains of her ration bar
with a grimace of distaste. 'No way that's going to be my last meal.' The troopers all
laughed, even Sorel, and I marvelled again at her powers of manipulation.1
By playing
the civilian outsider, she'd reinforced their sense of identity as soldiers with great
subtlety. I doubted whether it would be quite enough to weld them into a cohesive
unit, but that wasn't really an issue on this assignment. All that was necessary was that
they work well enough together to get Amberley the intelligence she required. And me
out in one piece, of course.
There were still far too many weak links for my liking, though. Kelp and Trebek were
professional enough to put their rivalries aside for long enough to get the job done, I
hoped, especially with an inquisitorial pardon up for grabs, but the way they kept avoiding eye contact with each other was a far from encouraging sign. And whatever
was going on between Velade and Holenbi might just be enough for them to put their
concern for each other ahead of the mission objective, or the survival of anyone else.
Like me. And as for Sorel, well, he flat out gave me the creeps, and I was determined
not to let him get anywhere I couldn't keep an eye on him. I'd met psychopaths before,
and he had all the hallmarks. He wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice the rest of us to save his
own skin, of that I was sure.
And then there was Amberley. Charming as I found her, she was still an inquisitor
above all else, and that meant that all we were to her was a means to an end. A noble
and important one, no doubt, but that would be of little comfort to me when the black
bell tolled.1
So it was little wonder that my palms were tingling as I closed the tail ramp and
activated my combead.
'All right, Jurgen,' I said. 'We're ready to go.'
THIS TIME, THERE were no waves and cheers as we left the compound, although I had no
doubt that the rumour mill had spread the news of our departure just as far as before. I
was quietly relieved by that, to be honest, as this was to be no easy victory for our
newly forged regiment to take pride in and celebrate. This would be a desperate
struggle for survival, I didn't need my itching palms to tell me that. Although how
desperate, and against how terrible a foe, I still at that time had no inkling. (And that
was a mercy, let me tell you. If I'd known then what awaited us in the under-city of
Mayoh, I would probably have broken down in hysterics from sheer terror.)
As it was, I masked my concern with the ease of long practice, and kept a stern eye on
the troopers, hoping any agitation I felt would be mistaken for vigilance. To my relief
they seemed to be settling, focussing more on the mission now that it was underway,
and if they weren't exactly on the same wavelength yet, at least they weren't jamming
each other.
That reminded me I hadn't reported our departure to Kasteen yet, so I retuned my
combead to the command frequency and exchanged a few words with her. As I'd
expected, her mood was sombre, and she wished me luck as though she thought I
might actually need it.
I was beginning to find the tense atmosphere inside the vehicle a little claustrophobic,
not to mention being rattled around like a pea in a can by Jurgen's habitual driving
style, so I popped the turret hatch and stuck my head out for some fresh air. The
sudden rush was invigorating, almost taking my cap with it as I emerged, and I
checked the heavy bolter so I'd have an excuse for staying out there for as long as I
could. It was primed and ready, of course, Jurgen having done his usual thorough job,
so I was able to settle back and enjoy the spectacle of the local civilian traffic
swerving out of our way. There seemed to be a lot of it,
I noticed, particularly in the main boulevards, but there was no obvious pattern to the movement. There was just as
much going in each direction, and when I glanced down the crossways, they all
seemed choked as well.
'Inquisitor,' I subvocalised, switching to the channel Amberley had given me earlier. I
hadn't seen any sign of a bead in her ear, but that didn't surprise me. For all I knew,
she'd disguised it in some way, or was stuffed with augmetics that did the same job.
(And a great many others, as I was to discover over the course of our association.)
'There seems to be a lot of civilian activity. Anything we should be aware of?'
There was actually a great deal we should have been aware of, of course, the
conspiracy we tracked was far more extensive and dangerous than we had imagined,
but at that point, I was still blissfully ignorant of how much trouble we were in.
'Probably lots of things.' Amberley sounded wary, though not particularly concerned.
'But we'll just have to make do with what we know, and proceed with caution.'
Easier said than done with Jurgen driving, I thought, but she was the expert. I watched
as he swerved us around a slow-moving cargo lifter, its flatbed jammed with civilians
carrying hastily assembled bundles of possessions. Probably just spooked by our raid
on the Heights, but the implications troubled me. I began to look out for similar sights,
and found several in the space of a handful of seconds. I voxed Amberley again.
'It's looking like refugee traffic up here,' I said.
'Intriguing,' she responded, a note of curiosity entering her voice. 'What would they be
fleeing, I wonder?'
'Nothing good,' I said, speaking from bitter experience, although in truth it wouldn't be
that unexpected for anyone who could to be leaving the city by now. The political and
military situation was still balanced on a knife-edge, and it wouldn't need someone of
Mott's intellect to deduce that things would be a lot healthier somewhere else if it all
boiled over. No harm in checking everything, I thought, so I hopped through the
tactical frequencies, finding a lot of garbled traffic on the PDF net. Very little of it
seemed to be making sense, though.
'Commissar,' Kasteen's voice cut in suddenly. 'I think you should know. We've just
had instructions to go to combat readiness.'
'Who from?' Amberley interrupted before I could respond. I suppose I might have
resented her butting in, let alone monitoring my supposedly secure messages, but right
then I was too busy swinging the bolter round and taking the safety off. A thick
column of smoke was visible ahead of us, rising from a burning truck in the middle of
the road, and the traffic was beginning to stall and gridlock as panicked drivers tried to
find a way around it or turn back. Bright las-bolts were scoring the air, but who was
shooting and what they were aiming at remained obscured behind the smoke.
'By order of the governor,' Kasteen said.
'Imbecile!' Amberley said, along with some qualifying adjectives which I'd last heard
in an underhive drinking den when someone turned out to have more than the
conventional number of emperors in their tarot deck. I began to suspect that Governor
Grice's political future was going to be short and uncomfortable. 'We'll have the tau on
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our arses like flies round a corpse.'
'I think we already have,' I said. Something was moving inside the smoke, fast and
agile, twice the height of a man. It wasn't alone, either. There were more of them
moving back there, and the whole pack of them was surrounded by little darting dots. I
suddenly remembered the flying platters we'd seen at the tau enclave, and that they
were armed too.
Abruptly, unnervingly, the leading dreadnought (the same type El'sorath had called
battlesuits) swung its head in our direction, and turned, a pair of long-barrelled
weapons mounted on its shoulders coming to bear. We were still a long way away
from being an easy target, but I've always been cautious, so I hailed our driver.
'Jurgen!' I shouted, 'get us out of here!'
By way of reply, he swung us abruptly towards a narrow alleyway, crushing a raised
bed of ornamental shrubs beneath our left-hand tread, and barging a small, sleek
groundcar out of the way. The driver's volley of profanity was drowned out by a
sudden thunderclap of displaced air as something hit the front of an omnibus right
where we'd been a moment before, reducing its entire nose to metallic confetti before
raking the length of it, blowing a tangled mass of wreckage, blood and bone out of the
back. Before I could see anything more, we were behind the shelter of a building, our
hurtling metallic shell gouging lumps out of the walls, our tracks leaving a trail of
burst and flattened waste containers in our wake.
'Emperor's bowels!' I said, stunned by the narrowness of our escape.
'What was that?' Amberley asked, her voice almost drowned out by the complaints of
the troopers around her. I tried to explain the best I could, still shaken by the range and
accuracy of the weapon deployed against us. 'Sounds like a railgun,' she said,
apparently unperturbed. 'Nasty things.'
'Could it have damaged us?' I asked, making sure the spare ammo boxes were in easy
reach. There was nothing ahead of us now except more panicking civilians, but I
wasn't planning on being taken by surprise twice, you can be sure.
'Easily,' she replied cheerfully. 'Even at that range it could have gutted us like a fish.'
'The Emperor protects,' Jurgen said piously. Well He hadn't done a hell of a lot for the
bus passengers, I thought, but decided it wouldn't be tactful to say so. He'd only take it
as a sign that we were important to His ineffable plan anyway.
'Who were the tau engaging?' I asked.
'The PDF,' Kasteen said. 'Who else? We're getting reports in that some of the loyalists
have mutinied, and opened fire on the tau compound. The diplomats are trying to calm
things, but the bluies are claiming they have a right to retaliate, and have entered the
city. They're engaging every PDF unit they come across.'
'What about the Guard?' I asked, already sure I wouldn't like the answer.
'The governor's orders are to contain the situation by any means necessary. The lord
general is asking for clarification.' Playing for time, in other words. If the Guard units
entered the city, they'd be caught in the middle, with half the PDF unreliable, they'd
become a target for both sides. My stomach lurched, and for once, it wasn't due to
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Jurgen's driving.
'Well, that's it then,' I said, the words like ashes in my mouth. 'We've run out of time.'
The war so many people had sacrificed so much to avoid was upon us at last, and it
seemed there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it.
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Thus it was, spurred by the workings of a vast, malign conspiracy, the entire world
was rent asunder in an orgy of fratricide which shames the survivors and their
descendents even to the present day. If anything at all can be said to have been learned
from these terrible events, it must surely be this, that however benign they may
appear, the alien is not to be trusted, and that turning aside from the word of the
Emperor in even the smallest respect is the most certain route to damnation for us all.
It must have been the belated realisation of this which spurred the loyal cadre of
Planetary Defence Force regulars into turning on the traitors in their midst, taking
heart from the salutary way in which the Imperial Guard had dealt with the alienlovers who had dared to desecrate the streets of an Imperial city with open rebellion.
Their patriotic fervour at last aroused, His Divine Majesty's most loyal servants began
to cleanse the hideous stain on their honour in the only way possible, by shedding the
blood of those whose craven panderings to the aliens in their midst had led the whole
planet to the very brink of the abyss.
At first, the renewal of martial spirit was sporadic, beginning with the arrest of those
unit commanders whose loyalties were, for one reason or another, suspect. Inevitably,
however, faced with the threat of exposure, those whose souls were stained with the
guilt of collaboration resisted, proving their black-heartedness by opening fire on the
heroic defenders of Imperial virtue. The rot spread exponentially after that, until
almost every PDF unit was engaged on one side or the other, indeed, such was the
confusion that many were unable to tell friend from foe and simply engaged every
other unit they encountered indiscriminately.
Under these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the most fervent of the
loyalists lost no time in placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of those
ultimately responsible, the xenos themselves, and resolved to rid our world of the taint
of their presence without further delay. These heroes of legendary proportions, whose
names would undoubtedly ring down the ages of Gravalax forever more if enough of
their bodies had remained intact to identify, turned on the corruption at its source and
threw themselves against the very citadel of the invader.
Alas, faced with the overwhelming firepower of this redoubt of the unholy, they were
cut to pieces, but the damage had been done. Aware for the first time of their own
vulnerability, the tau advanced into the city to slaughter the righteous, and the very
future of Gravalax hung in the balance.
Throughout these events, one question remains unanswered. Why did the Imperial
Guard take so long to respond? Accusations of cowardice are clearly ridiculous, if not
treasonous, the lord general's reputation alone being sufficient to belie them without a
moment's thought. Once again, the only credible explanation is that of conspiracy,
some dark machination hindering their deployment for reasons we can only guess at.
As to the hand behind that conspiracy, a careful sifting of the evidence once again
points us firmly to the shadowy presence of the rogue traders.