Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘That must be how the raiders are getting into the system,’ Broklaw said. ‘Since they all seem to originate from the same point.’

Amberley nodded. ‘Along a passageway leading to their craftworld,’ she confirmed. ‘But now we’ve shown them a new path. One they’ll be sure to exploit.’

‘Why didn’t they know about it already?’ I asked. ‘If their primary target is this mine, on this moon, you’d think they’d have done their recon.’

Amberley sighed. ‘Because the webway’s fragmented,’ she said. ‘This branch only leads to one place, although when we entered the portal there we sensed other pathways leading off from it.’

‘Sensed?’ Proktor asked, clearly out of his depth by now. ‘Can’t you be more specific?’

‘No,’ Amberley answered, her voice a clear warning not to pursue the matter. ‘Perceptions get distorted in the webway. If we hadn’t had a psyker with us, we might never have found our way out again.’

‘I see,’ Proktor said, in the voice of a man who manifestly didn’t. ‘And you were able to breathe in this labyrinth through the warp?’

‘Obviously,’ Amberley said, an unmistakable edge of testiness which I had long learned to be wary of entering her voice now. ‘Otherwise we’d be dead.’

‘Air probably leaks in from some of the worlds it’s connected to,’ I said hastily, trying to keep the discussion on matters of relevance.

Proktor frowned in puzzlement. ‘Then why doesn’t it leak out again through the entrances leading to open space?’ he asked.

‘How should I know?’ Amberley snapped. ‘It just doesn’t, all right? Does anyone here actually care?’ Kasteen, Broklaw and I exchanged carefully neutral glances, and after a moment she went on, Proktor finally having had the sense to shut up. ‘No? Good. Then you need to get on to subsector command and call for reinforcements.’

‘Of course, if you consider it necessary,’ Kasteen said, with the air of a woman juggling hand grenades. ‘But if you show us the location of the portal we can just blockade it. Those tunnels are natural choke points, and the eldar can’t get anything larger than infantry through them anyway. Holding them off once we know their lines of advance will be a trakki76 shoot.’

Amberley manipulated the controls of the hololith, marking the end point of one of the new passageways with an eldary-looking rune. ‘It’s here. But that’s not the point. The point’s where the other end comes out.’

‘Which would be where?’ Broklaw asked.

Amberley twiddled a few knobs, then thumped the control lectern with her fist in a manner as assured as a properly sanctified tech-priest. The image vanished, to be replaced with a representation of the solar system we were currently in: the star at the centre, the inhabited planets, moons, asteroids and void stations all marked with runes showing their populations, economic output, state of readiness against attack (lamentably low in all but the outermost, nearest to the eldar fleet) and other such information, with us far out on the periphery, facing a constellation of enemy contact icons.

‘Ironfound,’ Amberley said, zooming the image in on the system’s capital world, hanging in space like a ripe ploin, teeming with people and gravid with wealth. ‘One of the biggest manufacturing centres in the entire subsector, if you don’t count the Mechanicus forge worlds. Thirty billion people, turning out everything from Baneblades to boot soles. Disrupt that, and you’re looking at economic collapse on half the worlds in the cluster. Famine, riots, rebellion, and the t’au poised just the other side of their border to swoop in and pick off the juiciest. We could lose a dozen systems to them in less than a year, and that’s just the best-case scenario.’

I shook my head. ‘The best-case scenario is that none of that happens. Why should it? Why now?’

Amberley looked grave. ‘Because the eldar have recently rediscovered a webway portal on Ironfound, down in the sump of the main hive. To cut a long story short, they claimed the planet long before the Imperium even knew it was there, and they’re not happy about how it’s been redecorated. They want it back. And, oh look, they’ve got a raiding fleet already in the outer system.’

‘God-Emperor,’ Kasteen said, and Amberley nodded.

‘My sentiments exactly.’

‘Right,’ Broklaw said, homing in on the tactical issues with his usual directness. ‘We need to send a message to Ironfound, get their planetary defence force on full alert, and whatever system defence assets they’ve got deployed in an outer defensive line.’

Kasteen nodded decisively. ‘And get there ourselves as quickly as possible.’ She glanced at Amberley for approval and, finding it, returned her attention to Broklaw. ‘Find an astropath, let the rear-echelon grox fondlers on Coronus know we need reinforcements for Ironfound, and to back up the defence forces here against the eldar and any here­tics that might still be running around loose.’ She turned to Proktor. ‘Find us a ship.’