Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘Fine,’ I said, rising a little more slowly, and adjusting my cap to a more heroic seeming angle for the benefit of the troopers sitting behind us. The prospect of travelling in an open-topped scout vehicle in the sub-zero temperatures prevailing outside was distinctly unappealing. Then I caught another glimpse of the Chimeras growling away outside, and inspiration struck. ‘But it’ll take a while to get it out of the hold. I’ll hitch a lift in the command vehicle of the squadron outside, and get up to speed with the deployment on the way in.’

‘Very good, sir.’ My aide nodded judiciously, as though his approval had been sought, and adjusted the lasgun slung across his shoulder. ‘Do you want to pick up your kit first?’

‘No, just take it straight to my quarters,’ I said. ‘I’ll be reviewing tactics in the command centre for some time.’ Where it would be warm, at least by Valhallan standards, they’d have a pot of tanna brewing, and I could easily contrive a reason for having got a lift in with the Chimeras.

‘Would you like me to join you there?’ Jurgen asked, and after a moment’s consideration I nodded.

‘Yes, I would,’ I said, adding ‘whenever it’s convenient,’ to his evident satisfaction. Jurgen’s dogged loyalty and adherence to whatever he considered his duty had smoothed my path in innumerable ways over the years, and it never hurt to show my appreciation of that; not to mention the fact that if he didn’t feel particularly hurried, my quarters would be a lot more comfortable by the time I found my way to them.

The cold outside was, if anything, even worse than I’d anticipated, the air burning into my lungs as uncomfortably as the foetid atmosphere of a forge world, although considerably less lethal in the long run, I supposed. Not that the long run would be much of a consideration if I hung about on the landing pad for long; I could already feel the chill leaching the life from my bone marrow, everything else already too frozen to be aware of. Not that the troopers disembarking around me seemed too bothered by the lethally low temperature; on the contrary, they seemed in a holiday mood, laughing and chattering as they clattered down the ramp, a few of them turning their faces to the drifting snow as though luxuriating in a shower.

Conscious that if I didn’t get a move on I’d probably end up frozen to the ramp, I began plodding towards the command Chimera I’d spotted from inside the drop-ship, easily distinguishable from its fellows by the cluster of auspex arrays and vox-antennae mounted on its hull. Which took me out of the lee of the grounded shuttle – the freezing wind promptly redoubled, hitting me with the force of an ogryn’s fist, stabbing me with a million shards of windborne ice and wailing in my ears like a berserker charge of eldar banshees.

Which I suppose was my subconscious giving my well-developed sense of self-preservation a heads up. I’d known the xenos were on Drechia, of course – for some reason the vast majority of their depredations had been on that benighted worldlet – so the comparison was a natural one, but making it recalled their presence to mind, and that probably saved my life.14 As the howling rose in pitch, I glanced upwards, catching a glimpse of three fast-moving dots partially obscured by the flurrying snow.

‘Incoming!’ I yelled, heedless of the eardrums of whoever was monitoring my comm-bead back in the command centre, hoping I could at least warn the troopers around me. Not that I needed to have bothered, as most of them were already unslinging their lasguns, no doubt far more used to distinguishing the sounds of an approaching threat through the whining of a blizzard than I was.

Finding that I could move fast after all despite the strength-sapping chill all around me, I sprinted for the command Chimera, desperate to get behind its protective armour plate before the incoming jetbikes could close to firing range. The thought of returning to the shuttle behind me flickered briefly across my mind, but the ramp was already beginning to rise, the pilot obviously too old a hand to risk being caught on the ground unprotected.

Then, with the roar of a powerful engine, the scout Salamander Jurgen had requisitioned burst out of the cargo hold, flying off the end of the steepening slope, almost getting caught in the narrowing gap as it cleared the ramp. A shower of sparks, eerily similar to the crimson-tinted snowflakes swirling around me, followed it as it grazed the lintel of the cargo hatch on its way through, and crashed to the ground with an impact which resonated through my boot soles, no doubt doing things to the sturdy little vehicle’s suspension that would have made an enginseer blaspheme had any seen it. Maybe some of them did, but I suspect that by then the attention of any in the immediate vicinity would have been thoroughly diverted by the eldar attack.