‘If they had a final asset to protect?’ Laurentis ventured. ‘A queen, or the equivalent? A dominant reproductive female? The egg source? I am just hypothesising, but if the nest was lost, they might destroy it as cover for an evacuation of the queen.’
There was another blast. This one came from much closer at hand. The force of it knocked all five of them over and slapped out a wall of mud and steam. Debris pattered down, and the rain ran brown. The Imperial Fists struggled to their feet. Laurentis coughed and shivered, trying to clear his head.
‘My gravitics are shot,’ reported Stab, checking his visor display.
‘Mine too,’ said Cutthroat. ‘No, correction. Gravitic register is working. It’s just showing very irregular patterning.’
‘Agreed,’ said Stab, ‘rechecking. Local gravity just looped for ten milliseconds, and that blast focus was gravitically strong.’
‘These weapons… these new weapons…’ Slaughter asked. ‘They’re what? Gravity weapons? Gravity bombs?’
Laurentis struggled to reply. He tried to formulate a reasonable-sounding explanation for why the Chromes should have mastery over gravity, one of the universe’s most notoriously uncooperative forces. Maybe their inter-system travel relied on some gravitic drive?
‘Watch your heels!’ Cutthroat yelled.
Chromes were rushing them from the nest pods behind them. They were standard forms, their silvery shells glinting in the stained light, spattered with mud and liquid, but there were a lot of them. Cutthroat and Stab met the first of them, side-by-side, driving strokes and slices with their hefty blade weapons that sent the xenos tumbling and bouncing backwards, slamming into the ranks behind, slit and spraying. The stink of ichor filled the rain.
Slaughter and Woundmaker got Laurentis back, and began to struggle down the reed-choked slope towards the waterline. The ground, wet as a marsh, was littered with dead xenos from the first phase. Moving backwards, Stab and Cutthroat came after them. Laurentis, gasping with anxiety, marvelled at their bladework. The speed of it. The relentless fury. The precision. Severed pieces of Chromes flew up into the air, spinning. Ichor jetted. The pushing ranks of assaulting xenos stumbled and clambered over the bodies of their dead.
Laurentis had seen ants do that. Forest ants, at the edge of a stream, the first ones drowning and dying so that those behind could use their corpses as a bridge, as a growing bridge.
The ants always got across the stream.
Ants never mourned their dead. They used them.
Another wave of Chromes scurried towards them along the bank to their right, clacking and sounding out the tek-tek-tek noise they made with their mouthparts.
Slaughter, positioned on the right, turned to meet them, his broadsword coming out. None of the Space Marines had resorted to bolters. Conservation of munition supplies.
Slaughter’s blade met the first Chrome, half-impaled it, then hurled it bodily across the river. It arced and hit the water with a dirty splash. His sword swung back and decapitated the next, and then cleaved the third down the middle through the head.
‘Protect the principal!’ Slaughter roared.
Laurentis cowered on the mud flats. The four Fists closed in around him, at compass points, each one meeting the assault as it swirled around them from the two lines of attack. There was so much ichor spray in the air that the rain tasted of it. They were all dappled with it. The Chromes threw themselves against the four-point defence, finding only death and dismemberment as a reward for their efforts. There is nothing, Laurentis remembered the old saying, as deadly as an Imperial Fist standing his ground.
Laurentis wondered how much scrutiny the Masters of the Chapters and other senior minds of the Imperial military, and even the beloved and exalted Emperor Himself when He had set to devising the Legiones Astartes, formulating their minds and bodies… How much scrutiny had they given to natural history, to the behaviour of cooperative animals and insects, to their selfless and almost mechanical efforts? The individual was never important, only the group effect. One quick glance at a magos biologis’ notebook or cyclopedia would reveal a thousand examples in nature of selfless cooperation, postlogical stratagems, and ensured survival.
A huge, armoured beetle could easily kill a tiny, lone ant.
But the ants always got across the stream.
Thirteen
‘You look unhappy,’ remarked Esad Wire.
‘Do I?’ replied Vangorich. ‘Do I really? You can tell that?’
Wire shook his head.
‘No, you can’t read that in a face. Not for certain,’ he admitted. ‘You can’t read anything in a face for certain.’
He stared at Vangorich for a moment, Vangorich just standing there in the doorway of the monitor station control room like a shadow brought in by the dusk, and considered him carefully.
‘Been a very long time, besides,’ Wire added. ‘A long time not seeing your face. I’m no longer familiar with its nuances. I wouldn’t know what sadness looked like anyway, even if I could read it for sure.’
Wire rose from his worn leather seat, brushing imaginary lint from his double-breasted arbiter jacket.
‘A long time,’ he said, an echo, spoken only to himself.
Vangorich was still in the doorway. Wire beckoned him.
‘You can come in, sir,’ he said. ‘Come right in. Or do you have to be invited over the threshold like a night ghoul?’
Vangorich stepped inside the control room. It was brightly lit, too brightly lit, the hard shine of the lamp-globes and spots revealing every fatigued edge and scuffed fascia of the control suite: the dials and levers worn by centuries of hands, the milky read-outs, the chattering banks of antiquated switches, the electric noticeboards with their mechanical letters and series lights that stated the day’s crimes and actions and, every few minutes, reshuffled and revised, like the journey monitors at transit stations.
Monitor Station KVF (Division 134) Sub 12 (Arbitrator). It had taken Vangorich four hours to get there. An hour’s flight east from the Palace by suborbital, then a three-hour descent into the underhives of Tashkent Spire, a journey of rattling lift cages, suspension platforms and dank hallways.
It had taken Esad Wire a great deal longer to reach Monitor Station KVF. After his past life was laundered and washed clean, three years at Adeptus Arbitrator incept training, two more at the Procedural Division in the Asiatic Domes, and then eight years with Tashkent Major Case and another six as a jurisdiction subcommander. Then he got the Sector Overseer star to pin on his jacket, and a monitor control room full of antiquated switches.
Everything was processed, everything formalised. Every crime had to be catalogued and filed, described and posted, and redirected to the appropriate division. It was a ritualised system that had never really coped with the actuality of real life and real crime in the vast hive, but it was considered the optimal solution and thus persevered with. Running the data-switching station was also considered a task of great responsibility, and thus always awarded to a man of significance or ability, as a mark of promotion. Esad Wire was not a law enforcer. He did not fight crime. He simply filed it.
The room was essentially automated. Wire made a gesture, and two junior arbiters, the only other living people present, went off to find duties in adjacent chambers.
‘“You look unhappy”,’ said Vangorich. ‘After all this time, that’s the beginning of your conversation?’
Wire shrugged.
‘It struck me as so,’ he said.
‘How has life treated you since you left the Officio?’ Vangorich asked. He did not look at Wire. He studied the chattering, updating lines of tile-type that were rattling up and down the displays.