Sandy Mitchell - The Emperor's Finest

In the event, however, no one challenged my right to be there, which came as a welcome surprise. In fact, the only thing which surprised me more was that until Drumon arrived, there were no Astartes on the bridge at all.

'Techmarine.' The vessel's captain, who for some reason rejoiced in the title of shipmaster [7] Presumably because ''captain'' is a Space Marine rank, and to confer it on a serf, even in a different context, might lead to confusion. , vacated his control throne and inclined his head respectfully. (Not something the Navy would appreciate, having the man in charge abandon his duty for the sake of protocol in the middle of a battle, but the Space Marine Chapters, as I was already beginning to grasp, have a different perspective on things. Quite how different I wouldn't fully understand for a few more decades, however.)

'Carry on, shipmaster.' Drumon acknowledged the greeting with a barely perceptible nod of his own, and the shipmaster resumed his seat, absorbed again at once in the flurry of information blizzarding across his pict screen. One of the control stations ranged about the hushed and dimly lit chamber, through which the muted chanting and clouds of incense from the tech-adepts servicing the targeting systems drifted, remained vacant, and as the towering figure of the Techmarine took his place before it, I realised that it was placed higher than the others, where a standing man more than two metres tall could work at it comfortably. The other lecterns were manned by Chapter serfs in uniforms similar to those of the Imperial Navy, although their insignia were different, no doubt reflecting their affiliation and status in some manner I couldn't be bothered to enquire about at the moment.

'What's happening?' I asked, and Drumon glanced briefly in my direction as though surprised to be reminded of my presence, his gauntleted fingers continuing to rattle the keys of the data lectern. A blizzard of images, changing too rapidly for me to assimilate, danced across his face, reflected from the display in front of him.

'We have sustained only minimal damage,' he assured me, which came as a tremendous relief. The last time I'd been aboard a vessel under fire I'd ended up breathing vacuum, fortunately for no more than a handful of seconds, although it had seemed a great deal longer to Jurgen and I. The Revenant was made of sterner stuff than the venerable troopship which had delivered me to Perlia, however, being designed to be capable of holding her own against a ship of the line, and the voices around me were reassuringly calm.

'Who from?' I persisted, and if Drumon was irritated at all, he was too polite to show it. By way of reply he activated a nearby pict-screen, and I found myself looking at a slightly blurred image of a System Defence corvette.

'Viridian vessel, this is the strike cruiser Revenant, of the Reclaimers Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes,' the shipmaster said, his voice clipped. 'Break off and surrender, or be destroyed in the name of the Emperor.'

'They're turning,' one of the vassals said, his voice equally matter-of-fact. 'Looks like another attack run.'

'Gunnery stations stand by,' the shipmaster said, then glanced at Drumon for approval.

The Techmarine nodded again. 'All weapon batteries charged and ready,' he assured the crew, his voice carrying easily to every corner of the bridge.

'Fire when ready,' the shipmaster said, his voice as calm as if he'd just ordered a mug of recaf. 'Wait for a positive lock.' The seconds stretched unbearably, the image of the attacking vessel growing ever larger on my screen, until I expected to see ravening beams of energy lancing out from it with every heartbeat.

'Target acquired,' another of the bridge crew said, seeming equally relaxed, and I finally realised that it was Drumon's presence which was making them so dispassionately efficient. Nobody wanted to be the one to let the crew down in front of their masters, so they were all doing it by the book, instead of cutting corners and giving way to impulsive profanity like the Guard troopers I was used to herding so often did when the las-bolts started flying.

A moment later the attacking corvette broke apart, like a seed-head on the wind, as our starboard batteries tore the guts out of it, to leave a slowly dissipating cloud of debris drifting apart in the void.

'Who were they, though?' I asked, not really expecting an answer, but the auspex man answered me anyway.

'The IFF beacon tagged it as the Lady Helene, one of the local System Defence boats [8] A generic term for all light warships incapable of warp travel. .'

'Then they ought to have been on our side,' I said, beginning to feel that matters weren't going to be quite so simple after all. If part of the SDF had mutinied, then the chances were that a substantial proportion of their counterparts in the PDF had followed suit (or, more likely, led by example).

'Acknowledged,' Drumon rumbled, and for a moment I thought he'd responded to my comment, before I realised that he'd probably been too busy listening to the voice in his comm-bead to have even heard it. 'I will inform the commissar.'

'Inform me of what?' I asked, already more than half-convinced that I didn't want to know. His first words were enough to tell me I was right about that.

'The situation has deteriorated significantly,' he said, with commendable restraint. 'According to our signal intercepts, a state of civil war now exists throughout the system.'

'Frakking great,' I said, seeing little need to restrain myself under the circumstances. 'Does Captain Gries have any suggestions for dealing with it?'

I'd got to know Drumon well enough by now to be fairly confident that the expression which ghosted across his face was one of faint surprise that I'd even bothered to ask. 'Intervene at once,' he said, then broke off to listen to a voice in his earpiece. 'He is embarking in the hangar deck as we speak, and extends an invitation for you to join him.'

Not, needless to say, an invitation I could even consider refusing. I was there to liaise with the Reclaimers' command staff, which basically meant Gries, so wherever he went, I had to go too. At least until the Imperial Guard forces turned up, and I could find some plausible excuse to go and bother them instead.

'I'd be delighted,' I said, hoping I sounded as though I meant it.

I'D ARRIVED ABOARD the Revenant by teleporter, and been unconscious at the time into the bargain, so this was my first sight of the warship's hangar bay. My immediate impression as I walked through the airtight hatch, which slid closed behind me with a squeal of metal against metal, was one of purposeful activity. The inevitable crowd of Chapter serfs was bustling about under the supervision of a handful whose bearing and demeanour betokened higher rank than their fellows, even though the iconography of their uniforms continued to be strange to me. A startling number of them had visible augmetics, which either indicated a fair degree of hazard in their occupations (even by the standards of serving aboard a warship), or the kind of willingness to voluntarily adopt whatever enhancements would assist their work I'd previously encountered only among the Adeptus Mechanicus. I suspected the latter, as I'd gathered from the skitarii aboard the Omnissiah's Bounty that some kind of pact existed between the Reclaimers and the acolytes of the Machine-God, but there was no time to think about that now. Gries and his entourage were clearly visible in the distance, towering over the surrounding crewmen, and I set off across the echoing metal plain between us as quickly as possible.

Like every hangar I'd ever been in, the chamber was vast, but the very scale of it felt curiously comforting; for the first time since coming aboard I felt a measure of relief from the nagging sense of strangeness I'd experienced everywhere else about the vessel, whose corridors and hatchways had been designed to accommodate the greater-than-human bulk of Space Marines, and left me feeling curiously shrunken. Unlike the docking bays I'd passed through while embarking and departing from troopships, however, the vast space felt clinically efficient. All the apparatus required to refuel and rearm the pair of Thunderhawks currently occupying it was neatly stowed, and there was a marked absence of cargo pallets and other detritus cluttering up the place.