Vainglorious, p.2
Vainglorious, page 2
Mavin chuckled again. ‘Not as such,’ he said, ‘although we do have need of a commissar willing to take up residence there for the foreseeable future. One, as I said, not afraid of a challenge.’
‘Challenges go with the job,’ I said, still trying to fathom what he was driving at, ‘and I doubt anything there now will be quite as daunting as the one I had to deal with on my last visit.’ Which just goes to show how much I knew.
‘This would certainly be different,’ Mavin agreed. ‘One of the new Imperial institutions I mentioned is a Schola Progenium. Which means we will, of course, be needing a dedicated commissar with an impeccable service record to take charge of the commissarial cadets, and prepare them for service in the field.’
‘I’d hardly call my service record impeccable,’ I said, masking my astonishment behind the sort of show of modesty he’d probably be expecting. ‘I’m immensely flattered to be considered, naturally, but surely someone a little more by-the-book would be more suitable?’
‘The book’s one thing, ducking las-bolts quite another,’ Mavin said. ‘And, to be blunt, your proven ability to do the latter counts for a great deal more than being able to quote the litanies of command verbatim. If you can pass on a bit of your knack for surviving the battlefield to our successors, everyone will benefit.’
‘I can’t argue with that,’ I said, having had no intention of doing so in the first place. The Emperor, it seemed, was finally buying me a drink for doing His work for so long, albeit reluctantly, and I certainly wasn’t about to turn it down. But on the other hand, it probably wouldn’t do to seem too eager. ‘How long do I have to consider it?’
‘How long do you think you’ll need?’ Mavin responded, reasonably enough. ‘We’d like you to start by the turn of the year, but if you decide against it we’ll have to start considering other candidates. So the sooner the better, really.’
‘Well,’ I said, doing a fair job of feigning indecision, ‘it’s a tremendous honour, and I’m bound to say the chance to leave a lasting legacy of service to the Imperium is tempting, to put it mildly. But I wouldn’t feel right about accepting without speaking to the lord general first. We’ve served together for a long time, and I owe him that much at least.’
‘I’d expect nothing less,’ Mavin said, no doubt thinking he had me convinced, and could afford to show a little forbearance. ‘I’ll look forward to hearing your answer.’
‘I’ll let you know tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I happen to be dining with him this evening, and, as you say, it’s in no one’s best interests to spin these things out.’
Mavin’s face twitched again in another probable smile. ‘Until tomorrow, then,’ he said.
TWO
I’d seen Coronus from orbit so often the sight barely registered any more, but this evening, through the viewport of the shuttle bearing me towards a convivial interlude aboard the lord general’s flagship, the vista seemed altogether new and delightful. Zyvan and I had been as close to friends as our respective positions in the Astra Militarum allowed for several decades by this point, meeting whenever we could to enjoy one another’s company; and, apart from being shot at a good deal less frequently, being able to get together over the dining table or the regicide board more often was the thing I most appreciated about my attachment to his general staff.
Coronus Prime was not, I have to say, a particularly prepossessing world, being devoted almost entirely to the needs of a transient population merely catching their breath before being plunged back into the never-ending maelstrom of warfare which constituted life in the Imperial Guard. Most of the dayside was hazed with dust, raised by the constant arrival and departure of shuttles and drop-ships without number, obscuring a surface almost entirely covered by installations of one sort or another.[11] Conversely, the night hemisphere glowed softly from innumerable luminators, only a few dark lesions marking the position of wilderness areas reserved for training and live-fire exercises. On this occasion, however, I found myself quite charmed by the prospect, noticing subtle graduations of colour and shading which had quite escaped me before.
In short, I was in a remarkably good humour, a sensation I have to say I found both unfamiliar and faintly disquieting. Having lived with the prospect of imminent death for so long, and having escaped from it so narrowly on so many occasions, I was finding my unexpected good fortune almost too good to be true; try as I might, I couldn’t quite still the nagging little voice in the back of my head insisting that something was bound to go wrong sooner or later.
And, of course, I was right about that, although even in my most pessimistic imaginings I hadn’t expected things to go ploin-shaped quite so quickly.
My first intimation of trouble was the laconic voice of the traffic controller aboard the Ocean Orchestra,[12] which echoed faintly in my comm-bead. Out of long habit, and because I’ve never liked surprises, I’d been monitoring the exchanges, and something about the words sent a faint, premonitory tingling through the palms of my hands. ‘Shuttle two-seven-niner, correct course by one decimal three degrees x, zero decimal zero-four degrees z.’ I was no expert in three-dimensional navigation, but it seemed to me that it was quite a severe course adjustment over such a short distance; we could only be a handful of kilometres from the starship by this time, and on my previous visits the servitor manning the flight controls had remained nailed to the correct trajectory like a bead on an abacus.
Telling myself I was being overly cautious, even though that was a habit which had kept me alive against almost impossible odds for decades, I rose from my seat and made my way towards the cockpit, my boot soles seeming to sink almost ankle-deep in the pile of the carpet. One of the perks of being given most of the Militarum resources of the Eastern Arm to play with[13] is that your living arrangements can be made a good deal more comfortable than those of the average line trooper, and Zyvan had certainly learned that lesson well. (Though since he’d done more than his fair share of mud-slogging in his younger days I certainly didn’t begrudge him the odd luxury now, especially as he was more than happy to share them with me.) His personal shuttle was, accordingly, as well appointed as that of the average planetary governor, although in rather better taste, its utilitarian bulkheads hidden behind carved wooden panelling (along with a selection of amply stocked decanters and other such aids to whiling away a tedious journey), into which lacquered Imperial aquilae and images of the more martially inclined saints had been carefully inlaid.
As I reached the icon of the Emperor concealing the doorway leading to the flight deck, the traffic controller tried again, his voice as calm and measured as anyone trying not to betray a rising sense of alarm. ‘Two-seven-niner, correct your course at once. Confirm.’
‘Course confirmed, trajectory nominal,’ the uninflected tones of the servitor in the pilot’s seat responded, with the mechanical obstinacy of its kind.
That definitely wasn’t comforting, so I shouldered the door open and hurried into the cockpit, dropping into the co-pilot’s seat next to the one currently occupied by the amalgam of metal and flesh currently in charge of the ship. Typically, it took no notice of my presence, its gold-plated fingers immobile on the control lectern in front of it.
‘Shuttle two-seven-niner, I repeat, correct course by one decimal three degrees x, zero decimal zero-four degrees z. At once.’
To my immense lack of surprise, the servitor simply responded by parroting back the same assurance that we were following the preprogrammed course we quite clearly weren’t.
‘This is Commissar Cain,’ I voxed, seizing the initiative, since no one else was going to. ‘The bucket of bolts flying this thing seems to be malfunctioning. What can I do to reset it?’
‘Commissar.’ The air of relief infusing the traffic controller’s voice was far from reassuring – he obviously felt that my mere presence had averted the problem, which I suppose it would have, if I’d had the faintest idea of how to fly a shuttle. Unfortunately, I’d always left that sort of thing to the Navy or, at a pinch, a suitably qualified servitor or civilian, and although I’d been in the cockpit of one a number of times I’d usually been too preoccupied by incoming fire or an imminent impact to pay much attention to whatever the pilot had been doing. ‘Can you take the controls?’
‘I wouldn’t know what to do with them,’ I said, biting back the more pithy rejoinder which first came to mind. At that point, you understand, I was still more irritated than seriously worried, the starship we were approaching little more than a brighter point of light among the myriad hanging in orbit, or burning steadily in the firmament beyond them. It seemed to be growing brighter and larger by the moment, though, so if I was going to do anything, it would have to be fast.
‘We’re getting a pilot up here to talk you through the landing procedure,’ the traffic controller said. ‘And a tech-priest.’
‘I don’t think I’ll have time for a ritual of maintenance,’ I jested, to mask the sudden flare of apprehension I felt. Bringing a shuttle into a landing bay is a job for an expert, or a dedicated machine-spirit, and I was by no means confident in my ability to handle it.
‘You’ll need to take the servitor offline,’ the unmistakable drone of a voxcoder cut in, indicating that at least the acolyte of the Omnissiah had arrived promptly. ‘Otherwise it’ll continue to follow the course you’re on.’
‘Which is what, exactly?’ I asked. ‘Am I going into an independent orbit?’ The question I really wanted to ask being, ‘Am I going to get incinerated in an uncontrolled re-entry?’ of course, but I didn’t want to think about that possibility too much.
‘You can bring the course up on the pict screen to your left,’ a new voice informed me, a woman this time, her brisk manner somewhat undercut by slight breathlessness. ‘Just select “trajectory” from the on-screen playbill.’
After a moment’s fumbling I did as I was bid. ‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Oh indeed,’ the woman agreed. ‘You’re on a collision course with the flagship. So we’d best get this done, right?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Otherwise everyone’s day gets a crimp put in it.’ The projected impact point was some distance from the docking bay we were supposed to be heading for, and a maddening sense of familiarity nagged at me for a moment, before I forced it aside. This was no time to be getting distracted.
‘Mostly yours,’ the pilot said, with the forced cheeriness of someone trying to take the edge off bad news, and knowing it’s not going to work. ‘You’ve got about three minutes before the point defences[14] tag you as a threat and open fire.’
‘Incorrect,’ the tech-priest interjected. ‘The targeting auspex array has been taken offline for routine maintenance and reconsecration. Leaving you seven minutes to avoid the impact.’
‘Then let’s not waste them,’ I said, adding, ‘You’d better get everyone you can to the saviour pods to be on the safe side,’ because people expected me to say that sort of thing.
‘That would be futile,’ the tech-priest droned, ‘as they too have been–’
‘Fine, then let’s just get to it,’ I interrupted, wondering if there was a void suit aboard – but if there was, I probably wouldn’t have time to even find it, let alone clamber into it before we hit, and suffocating slowly adrift around Coronus didn’t strike me as a particularly pleasant way to go in any case. ‘How do I deactivate the servitor?’ A couple of ideas occurred to me even as I spoke, and I found my hands drifting to my laspistol and chainsword, but checked the impulse before drawing them. Using weapons in a confined space rammed with delicate equipment essential to my survival wasn’t likely to end well, even leaving aside the vast amounts of nothing at all on the other side of the viewport.
‘There should be a data-entry port on the nape of the neck,’ the tech-priest instructed. ‘Remove the interface cable from the socket.’
‘Right.’ I half stood, leaning across the thing, and grasped the block into which a tangle of wires led. ‘You want me to pull the plug.’ I yanked it out in one swift movement, bracing in anticipation of friction or resistance, but it slid smoothly from the socket, leaving me feeling momentarily unbalanced. ‘Got it.’
‘That should have exposed the main power unit.’
I squinted at a large red switch, which had previously been concealed by the cabling. ‘It has.’ I flicked it to the opposite setting. ‘And it’s off.’
‘Wait!’ The voxcoder drone took on what in a human voice would have been a distinct tone of alarm. ‘You need to–’
The servitor rose smoothly from its seat, and turned in my direction. ‘Unauthorised system access,’ it said. ‘Maintain the integrity of the unit.’ Gilded metal hands reached for my throat.
‘–isolate the secondary powercells first,’ the tech-priest finished.
I ducked under the reaching hands, and drew my laspistol, all my earlier qualms at using it in so confined a space vanishing in an instant. I pulled the trigger, hoping to find a vulnerable system, although in my experience most servitors in military service were armoured against just such a contingency. As it happened, though, the Emperor seemed to be with me for once, as the thing staggered backwards, leaking ichor, smoke and lubricants in roughly equal measure. I followed up with a further double tap,[15] and it fell, half-slumped against the bulkhead.
‘Right, it’s deactivated. More or less.’ I ducked back into my seat. ‘Now what do I do?’
‘You’ll need to access the guidance system,’ the pilot said, taking over the conversation with almost indecent haste. Under the circumstances, however, I was hardly about to chide her for a lack of vox etiquette. ‘The same lectern you used to bring up the trajectory data.’
‘Got it,’ I said, after a few random pokes at the controls in front of me. ‘Now what?’ The projected course on the pict screen was still about to end somewhere amidships, probably among spreading clouds of debris. The starship would almost certainly survive the impact, albeit with several decks gutted, but the shuttle definitely wouldn’t, and neither would I.
‘There should be a bank of four switches to your right,’ the pilot said. ‘Can you see them?’
‘I can,’ I confirmed, on the point of reaching for the nearest, before remembering what had happened with the servitor and resolving not to mess about with anything I didn’t understand without getting clear instructions first. I glanced up at the viewport ahead of me, and immediately wished I hadn’t; the Ocean Orchestra was clearly visible in the distance, still too far away to resolve in much detail, but undeniably big and disconcertingly solid.
‘They control the attitude thrusters. You push them forward to make a burn, release the pressure to cut the thrust. The switch will return to neutral as soon as you let go. Clear?’
‘Pellucid,’ I assured her. The starship was filling nearly a quarter of the viewport by now, and I hoped she was going to get to the point before too much longer. ‘Which ones do I need?’
‘All of them, but that’s not the point right now. You need to slow your approach. The retros should be next to your left hand – a large lever, looks a bit like a heavy weapon trigger.’
‘Got it,’ I said, wondering why they couldn’t just label these things in plain Gothic.
‘Make a three-second burn.’
I squeezed the trigger, and felt an answering vibration hum through the fabric of the ship. After my best guess at the right amount of time, I let go and peered hopefully at the pict screen. The projected impact point had shifted a little, drifting slightly towards the stern, but there was no doubt about it, I was still going to hit. ‘Done,’ I reported, with as much confidence as I could inject into my voice. Then, a little more hopefully, I added, ‘I don’t suppose I could just slow to a stop and wait for the recovery team?’
‘Not a chance,’ the pilot assured me, with what sounded like genuine regret. ‘You’ve got too much momentum to k– dissipate.’ At least she’d been tactful enough to bite off the word ‘kill’, which I appreciated. ‘You’d just hit the fusion converters instead of the lord general’s stateroom.’ Which would likely vaporise the entire ship. No wonder they all sounded so nervous.
‘So what do I do now?’ I asked, conscious of every passing second. The view ahead of me was almost entirely composed of metal by this point, a jagged landscape of protruding turrets and auspex arrays, interspersed with the lights leaking from viewports and the utility pods accompanying the hulljacks carrying out their arcane rituals on the surface of the ship.
‘Bring up the docking procedure on the pict screen,’ the pilot instructed. ‘It should be the third item on the playbill.’
‘Got it,’ I said, doing as I was bid, and the image changed to one that looked almost familiar: a targeting crosshair, like the display of a vehicle-mounted heavy weapon. I wasn’t a trained gunner by any means, but I’d taken the controls of a Chimera’s primary turret often enough when there was no one else left to do so, and always appreciated a pintle mount on the Salamanders I habitually commandeered for my personal use whenever I could get away with it.[16] I felt the first faint stirrings of renewed confidence. ‘I take it I’m supposed to shift the reticule over the docking port?’
‘We’re redesignating your entry point,’ the traffic controller cut in, much to my surprise; I’d been so caught up in what I’d been doing I’d almost forgotten he was there. ‘The heavy shuttle bay will be easier to access.’ By which he clearly meant harder to miss; the average heavy cargo lifter would need hangar doors several hundred metres wide to negotiate safely, instead of the much smaller bays normally used by passenger vessels like the one I was on.
