Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

I shrugged, in my best self-deprecating manner. ‘Sentinels are one man vehicles,’ I said, as though that were a matter of thinly veiled disappointment rather than a relief. ‘I could hardly crowd into the cockpit with the pilot.’

‘But the other group are going in Chimeras,’ a sharp-featured middle- aged woman put in, the resemblance between her and the lord marshal sufficiently close to make the likelihood of her not being a close relative, daughter or niece perhaps, vanishingly small. ‘I’m sure they could squeeze you in.’

‘I’m sure they could,’ I said diplomatically, ‘but they have a job to do, and I’m sure they’ll get on with it a lot better without me in the way. Sometimes you need to show you have confidence in people to bring out their best.’

‘Indeed you do,’ the lord marshal agreed, to my faint surprise. ‘If you hover over their shoulder all the time you just put them off.’

The woman gave him a hard stare, in which much past history was encoded for those with the key to decipher it, but as that didn’t include me and I didn’t care anyway I pretended not to notice.

‘Quite so,’ I said, noncommittally, and activated the hololith. This time it was tended by an enginseer who seemed so bored she might just as well have been part of the equipment, although no doubt she was keeping herself occupied in whatever arcane manner acolytes of the Omnissiah generally do, meditating on left-handed stem bolts or something. In the interests of clarity – since these people were, after all, the cream of the local defence force, which meant they’d achieved their high rank through family connection rather than quick wits or military acumen – I’d elected to dispense with the vector analysis, simply highlighting the spots we were interested in. ‘These are the locations we feel may be of interest to the eldar.’

‘Why?’ the woman cut in again. ‘They’re all in the middle of nowhere.’

I hesitated. I didn’t want to spook anybody by invoking the spectre of the warp, but there didn’t seem much of an alternative. ‘We think it’s possible they may have established a beachhead somewhere on Drechia itself,’ I said, choosing my words carefully. ‘Our analysis of the data you provided,’ and the rather more useful information we’d collected ourselves, but they didn’t need to know that, ‘leads us to believe that these are the most likely locations.’

‘You think they have up to seven beachheads?’ The lord marshal laughed, sipped at his tanna, then hastily put his bowl down. ‘I’m pretty sure we would have noticed at least one of them by now.’

‘As am I,’ I lied smoothly, although I doubted some of these people would have noticed if a squad of Banshees had wandered into the command centre and helped themselves to the tanna while we were talking. ‘But we would have been derelict in our duty to the Emperor if we hadn’t taken steps to discount the possibility.’

‘That may be so,’ the woman cut in again, ‘but you still haven’t told us exactly what you’re looking for.’ Throne help me, I was either beginning to admire her persistence or wish she’d drop dead. Perhaps a little of both.

‘We’re not entirely sure,’ I admitted, ‘but we’ll certainly know it if we see it.’

She nodded. ‘They’re just looking for anything that seems a bit eldary.’

‘Couldn’t have put it better myself,’ I said. The images on the vid screen blurred for a moment, although whether from static or a sudden flurry of snow I couldn’t have said, and if the enginseer knew, she wasn’t letting on. It cleared to show the last of the Chimeras setting off, farting promethium fumes which obscured the image even more, then the screen went blank. ‘Well, that seems to be that. Shall we get down to business?’

‘By all means,’ the lord marshal agreed, leading the way over to the conference table in the corner, and sitting down in what should have been Kasteen’s seat at the head of the table. Since she wasn’t planning to attend, having expressed a preference when asked for going ork hunting with a pointy stick,37 the matter was moot, and I decided to let it go. As the senior Astra Militarum representative I stationed myself at the other end of the table, warding off any rival claims by holding out my tanna bowl for a refill; I was still a little on the chilly side, and the approach of Jurgen with the teapot would be guaranteed to keep the chairs on either side of me comfortably clear of interlopers.

‘Thank you, Jurgen,’ I said, taking a sip of the warm and fragrant ­liquid, partly for the warmth it afforded and partly to displace his own, more earthy aroma from my nostrils. ‘Most welcome.’

‘Very good, sir.’ At which point he lumbered off to wait as unobtrusively as possible beside the refreshment table – which in his case was about as effective as an ogryn trying to blend in at a cotillion – while those who’d snaffled seats by the samovar for the extra warmth it afforded began to fidget uneasily as they found themselves within nasal range of him again.