Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘So let’s go and happen to some pointy-ears,’ Zemelda said, with what seemed to me to be an unhealthy amount of enthusiasm.

‘So long as it’s not the other way round,’ Pelton replied dryly, which pretty much summed up my own feelings on the matter.

The sounds of distant combat had long faded away, along with the voices of the planetary defence force in my comm-bead, when Zemelda held up a cautioning hand, slowing and sweeping the beam of her luminator across the floor of the tunnel ahead. Something dark and indeterminate was lying there.

‘Step easy,’ she said. ‘Something’s not rising over there.’

‘Looks like a body,’ Jurgen supplemented, before adding ‘a dead one,’ in case we hadn’t got the point.

‘Dead of what?’ Amberley asked, while we closed in on one another in sudden mutual apprehension, drawing our weapons as we did so.136

‘Hard to tell,’ Zemelda said, circling the corpse cautiously, keeping it centred in the beam of her luminator as though offering it for sale, or expecting it to get up and perform a comic monologue. She wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s been here a while. No shuriken or las-bolt wounds that I can see.’

‘Looks like a scavvy,’ I said, feeling I ought to contribute and remind everyone that I was the expert on underhives around here. ‘And a long way up hive from where you’d expect him to be.’

‘Her,’ Zemelda said, moving around to the front of the corpse, then shying in instinctive revulsion which, coming from an Inquisition operative, was hardly comforting. ‘Eeew. Gorge raising.’ She kicked the body, rolling it over, and I must confess to flinching momentarily myself. A bloodied skull was leering at me, tattered shreds of flesh still clinging to parts of the bone, one eye socket clogged with congealed blood. I took a firmer grip on my weapons, flicking the laspistol’s safety off, and resting my thumb on the activation stud of my chainsword.

‘Interesting.’ Amberley bent down for a closer look. ‘The scalp’s still intact. And most of the neck.’

I felt the familiar tingling in the palms of my hands, which usually means my subconscious is trying to remind me of something I didn’t know I knew, or some threat my conscious mind hasn’t recognised yet is lurking in ambush.

‘Whatever killed her, it moved fast,’ Pelton said, picking up something just outside the cone of light Zemelda was splashing about, and Mott obligingly swung his own luminator towards the former arbitrator, peering with interest at the object in his hand. ‘She didn’t even have time to get off a shot.’ He held out a crude autopistol, apparently pieced together from the remaining working parts of several others.

‘Lacerations on the hands, too,’ Amberley said. ‘Mainly on the palms. Defensive wounds?’

‘Highly unlikely,’ Mott said. ‘Typically, those would be on the backs of the hands, or the forearms, if she’d been attempting to ward off a blow.’

‘Grasping something, then,’ Amberley said. ‘Trying to pull off whatever was attached to her face, perhaps.’

‘Looks like ’nids if you ask me,’ Jurgen said.

I nodded slowly, fighting the impulse to dart nervous glances into the darker recesses surrounding us in search of a lurking lictor. The wounds did indeed look like the kind of damage inflicted by a glancing hit from a tyranid fleshborer, but if it had been one of those, our boots would have been crunching on the carapaces of the now deceased ammunition137 from the moment we first approached the corpse. ‘Great,’ I said, trying to hide my apprehension behind a flimsy screen of laboured sarcasm, ‘rampaging eldar and a Chaos cult aren’t nearly enough to be going on with. A side order of tyranids is just what we need to round things off.’

To my relief, however, Amberley was shaking her head in manifest scepticsm. ‘Can’t see it,’ she said. ‘If a hive ship was anywhere in-system the shadow in the warp ahead of it would have given every astropath on Ironfound a nose-bleed by now.’

‘That doesn’t rule out a genestealer cult,’ Pelton said, just as I was starting to feel a bit better.

Amberley shook her head again. ‘If there’s one of those anywhere on Ironfound it’ll be concentrating on seeing off the eldar. After generations of getting ready to feed this world to the tyranids they wouldn’t want to start all over again with an entirely new species.’

‘There’s another one over here,’ Jurgen called, having wandered a little way further down the passage, away from the lights, to let his eyes adjust. With his back to the luminators his night vision would work a little more efficiently, hopefully allowing him to see any threats approaching from deeper in the underhive in time to react to it. ‘Man this time.’

‘Killed the same way?’ I asked, moving to join him; like my aide, I preferred to give my senses as much time as possible to detect trouble coming.

‘Think so,’ Jurgen said. ‘Most of his face is missing too.’