Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘I’ve just dropped the pilot,’ I said, grabbing the control column and pulling it back. The flyer’s nose came up, just in time for me to see the vast slab of a cargo shuttle’s hull slipping past far too close for comfort, its engines burning brightly through the all-encompassing fog. I missed the wall of metal by what seemed like millimetres, although it was probably a bit more than that, and glanced round frantically for the next thing I was about to hit. ‘He tried to shoot me.’

‘Are you all right?’ Broklaw asked.

‘For the moment,’ I assured him. ‘But I’m still crashing a bit.’

I scanned the controls, trying to get the measure of them. It was scant consolation, but the vehicle’s machine-spirit seemed to be panicking almost as much as I was, lights flickering all across the dashboard, accompanied by a cacophony of squeaks and chirruping. A pict display seemed to be urging me to feed more power to a couple of the fans and throttle back the other two, so I complied as best I could, reasoning that the array of four levers next to the control column was probably linked to them in some way.

To my immense relief this proved to be the case, and after a bit of poking and prodding I managed to level out and stop spinning, which did my stomach and inner ear no end of good; I’d have hated to have to present myself at the Golden Throne with the last couple of meals staining my greatcoat. The cascade of rapidly diminishing numbers in the altimeter slowed, steadied and began to inch upwards again as I pulled back cautiously on the control column; it seemed I’d regained control with only a couple of hundred metres left to spare before making a dent in whatever was immediately below. I tried to work out how much time that would have been, then gave up, because it was far too low to be comforting.

‘I’m all right,’ I voxed, still feeling faintly surprised by my own words. I had no idea where I was, but a course to the governor’s palace seemed to have been given to the machine-spirit, which was dutifully displaying it on the pict screen in front of me. Since I didn’t have a clue how to find the command centre from here, and Fulcher was certain to have a better class of amasec than the bottle currently waiting for me in my quarters, I decided I might as well follow the directions I was being given. ‘If someone could apologise to the governor for the delay, I ought not to be too late arriving.’

‘Are you sure?’ Kasteen sounded both relieved and surprised. ‘We still don’t know what those eldar contacts are up to.’

‘All the more reason to attend the meeting,’ I said. ‘Maybe someone there will have an idea.’ I brought the flyer’s nose up a little more. Now it had stopped panicking, it seemed the machine-spirit was taking care of varying the pitch of the fans all by itself, so all I had to do was point the nose in the direction I wanted to go and let the Omnissiah take care of the rest. Which was fine by me.

‘The planetary defence force have scrambled a flight of Lightnings to intercept them,’ Broklaw said, sounding faintly surprised by their efficiency. ‘No contact reported yet.’

‘Good,’ I replied, starting to feel a little better about the turn events had taken. There was no guarantee that the sortie would come to anything, of course, but the notion of having a trio of heavily armed fighter planes between me and whatever the eldar vessel had deployed was distinctly reassuring. ‘Keep me updated.’

‘Of course,’ Kasteen said, and cut the link.

Twelve

Now I was beginning to get the hang of the air car’s controls, I found I was quite enjoying the sensation of piloting it. Feeling the agile little craft responding to every nudge of the control column was a pleasant novelty, and one I might have savoured to the full in less-crowded skies. As it was, I proceeded cautiously, peering through the murk surrounding me, wary of colliding with something big enough to swat me from the air. Fortunately the course suggested by the machine-spirit took me in a wide, gradually rising spiral around the main spire, which meant that there was little in the way of ancillary infrastructure to collide with, and the onboard ident beacon was transmitting a code reserved for the governor and his household, so everything but the largest and least manoeuvrable cargo haulers lost no time in getting out of my way.