Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘Three people, moving away,’ Amberley confirmed, her face illuminated by the glow of the portable auspex she’d produced from a pocket while Pelton and I spoke. ‘No other life signs in the vicinity.’ Which wasn’t entirely true, as there were indeed rodents scurrying around not far from here if my ears and nose were any judge, but the little machine-spirit was only on the lookout for anything human sized or thereabouts.

‘Neat trick,’ Zemelda said, with a glance of approval in my direction, ‘but seeing would zenith.’

Mott nodded. ‘Visual acuity in this environment would speed our progress appreciably,’ he agreed.

‘Luminators, then,’ Amberley said, ‘we’ve got no time to waste. Although I was hoping to hold off using them for a while, to conserve the powercells.’

‘Don’t worry, miss,’ Jurgen said, patting one of his webbing pouches, ‘I brought a few spares.’

‘And we don’t all have to carry one,’ I said. ‘That would save some light for later, in case we need it.’ And possibly my neck, if I hung back towards the rear of the group, as whoever was out in front lighting the way would be the first target of an attack from ambush.

A fear which failed to materialise, however, as we continued on down into the gathering darkness, which began to wrap itself around us like a suffocating cloak, seeming all the denser the moment we kindled the luminators. Mott had been right, we did move a lot faster once we could see where we were putting our feet, but the down side to that was that everything outside the narrow cones of light134 was now blanketed in impenetrable gloom. Every now and again I skipped through the frequencies of my vox-bead, but as I’d expected I picked up nothing but static, or the occasional planetary defence force transmission, too faint and distorted by distance and intervening obstructions to make out anything beyond a word or two. Frustrating as this was, I found these fragments of contact with the wider world obscurely comforting, a reminder that we weren’t entirely alone down here, and when we eventually stopped for a rest I took my turn to sleep with the faint, indecipherable murmuring still susurrating in my ear.

Only to wake abruptly, with the familiar dream images of my encounter with the daemon Emeli aboard the Adumbrian mining barge fading from my conscious mind, though not nearly fast enough to suit me, and an urgent, clearer voice echoing across the vox-channel: ‘Contact! Contact! Contact! Xenos moving uphive, zone zero nine zero, plural red alpha. Engaging.’

The reply was too faint to make out, although I found myself ­hoping the defence force vox-operator was having better luck in that regard than I was;135 it would have been ironic, to say the least, if one of the scouting parties had finally found the enemy and no one further up the command chain was able to make use of the information.

A familiar odour washed over me, and I sat up, grabbing my weapons. Jurgen had stowed his lasgun in favour of the melta, which never presaged anything good.

‘Gunfire,’ he said, gesturing with a grubby thumb in the direction of a tunnel mouth leading off at an angle from the direction of our march so far, which Mott had assured us was the most direct and efficient route towards where we needed to be. Sure enough, the savant was shaking his head.

‘If we take that direction, we’ll add a minimum of twelve and a max­imum of thirty-seven hours to the time taken to reach our objective,’ he said, ‘depending on the number and nature of obstructions and other delays we encounter.’

‘Would that include an army of eldar?’ I asked, rhetorically, only to regret the flippant remark at once as Mott shook his head.

‘Not an army,’ he said, ‘as our chances of surviving such an encounter are too low to constitute a meaningful numerical value. A patrol or scouting party small enough to overcome or evade, however, would account for the higher end of the range of probable delays.’

‘Good enough for me,’ I said. I pointed to the tunnel mouth we’d originally been intending to take. ‘Let’s stick to the plan.’ Especially as blundering into the middle of a firefight wasn’t exactly my idea of fun.

‘Yes, we should.’ Amberley glanced thoughtfully at the side passage through which the faint echo of combat was still permeating, and my heart skipped a momentary beat, anticipating a sudden change of mind. ‘Might be useful to see how far they’ve got, but…’

‘The local troops can take care of that,’ Pelton said, and I nodded, as though I’d been considering going to take a look myself.

‘They’ve already called it in,’ I said, skipping over any lingering doubts I might have had about whether their message had actually been received. ‘They’ve probably got reinforcements on the way by now.’ Or they were retreating as fast as they could manage to disengage.