'The orks aren't getting out of our way either,' my aide responded, phlegmatic as ever, sending a burst of automatic fire down the corridor as he spoke. Another burst of bolts responded, hissing over our heads, to impact against the wall. The 'stealers reeled from the multiple detonations, but rallied quickly, renewing their attack on the weakened barrier; at this rate they'd be through in a matter of seconds.
I backed away another couple of paces, swinging my chainsword in a defensive pattern, and waiting for a target of opportunity for my laspistol. I'd only have time for one or two shots, and I intended to make them count.
Then a flicker of motion caught my attention again, half-hidden by the shadows at roughly the height of my shins, and I whipped round to face it, bringing the pistol to bear. My finger began to tighten on the trigger.
'Commissar! Is that you?' The voice in my comm-bead was attenuated and hazed with static, and for a moment I was too taken aback to respond. 'The pict link is considerably degraded.'
'Drumon?' I slackened the pressure on the trigger, just in time to avoid blowing a hole in a CAT, almost identical to the one we'd found shortly before Blain had gone to report to the Emperor. It trundled out from behind a sagging console, which had concealed it from view when Jurgen and I first entered the room. 'Where are you?' I fired a couple of las-bolts at a genestealer which had ripped a hole in the wall while I was speaking, sufficient to poke its head and shoulders through, and which was reaching out to grab me. It dropped, most of its head now missing, to dangle grotesquely, halfway through the aperture, like a badly mounted trophy.
'Aboard the Revenant,' the Techmarine replied, sounding faintly surprised. 'We thought you were dead.'
'I soon will be,' I replied, with a degree of brusqueness, cutting at another 'stealer, which had burst through the wall as though emerging from some nightmare chrysalis. It retreated, leaking fluid from its thorax, and prepared to charge again. 'The hulk's crawling with 'stealers and greenskins.' As if to emphasise the point, Jurgen fired again, eliciting a bellow of orkish rage, and abandoned his post to join me. 'We're boxed in between them.'
'Sorry, sir,' Jurgen reported, yanking the luminator from the barrel of his lasgun and dropping it unceremoniously to the deck, where it rolled around, casting grotesque shadows across the monsters hemming us in. He drew his bayonet and snapped it into place where the light had been. 'I'm completely dry.'
'Hold your position,' Drumon advised, and cut the link.
'Like I've got any choice!' I snarled, ducking under a scything blow from the rallying 'stealer, and laying it open from thorax to head before it could recover its balance. It dropped, and I turned to face the next, snapping off a shot at the first ork to enter the chamber as I did so. He staggered, then recovered, and began to charge, his clumsy axe raised for a killing blow, while the genestealer I was facing lunged, too fast for me to counter...
Then something seized me, crushed me and tore me inside out. For a timeless, blinding instant I lost all sense of who, what and where I was, overwhelmed by more pain and terror than I knew it was possible to experience. Then I felt another wrench, like that of a starship's transition from the warp back to real-space, and fell, feeling cold metal beneath my face.
'Commissar. Are you well?' It was Drumon's voice again, but real this time, not issuing from the tiny transceiver in my ear. I blinked my blurry vision as clear as I could, and felt huge ceramite gauntlets lifting me to my feet.
'I'll let you know,' I said, wondering vaguely why gretchin were hammering spikes into my temples, and no one was doing anything about it. 'Where are the 'stealers?'
'And the orks,' Jurgen added, looking about as healthy as I felt, which is to say not noticeably different from his usual demeanour.
'Back on the Spawn of Damnation,' Drumon said, as though that should have been obvious.
'Then where the hell are we?' I asked, trying to focus on our surroundings. We were in an echoing metal chamber, lit by functioning luminators. Arcane mechanisms were everywhere, being tended by solemnly-chanting tech-adepts, and the air was thick with incense and ozone. Everything I looked at made my headache worse, so I gave up trying to make sense of it.
'Aboard the Revenant,' Drumon said, in the same tone of voice. He indicated the automaton we'd stumbled across, which for some reason was still with us, and pottering around the echoing chamber at random. 'Fortunately the CAT's teleport homer was still functioning, so we were able to bring you back along with it.'
'You mean you could just have teleported the one we went to fetch back aboard any time you felt like it?' I asked, feeling foolish and angry in roughly equal measure.
The Techmarine shook his head. 'It was deactivated,' he reminded me.
'So it was.' And if I'd known then what I knew now, I'd have cheerfully left it to rot. I glanced at the doorway, as another towering Figure strode through it with a nod of greeting. 'Apothecary Sholer. A pleasure to see you.'
'I imagine so,' Sholer said. 'An unprotected teleportation can have unpleasant effects on the system.'
'Indeed it can,' I agreed. 'But, all things considered, a decided improvement on the alternative.'
TWENTY-THREE
I SPENT THE best part of a week under Sholer's care, recuperating from the effects of being yanked through the fringes of the warp by the scruff of my neck[146], and feeling vaguely resentful that I was suffering the worst hangover of my life without having had the fun which should have preceded it. Jurgen, to my surprise, seemed none the worse for the experience, recovering in little more than a day[147], and busied himself as usual with fending off unwelcome visitors and sorting out the administrative trivia I felt too groggy to deal with. Some things I couldn't avoid, of course, Gries among them, and I filled my time between sleeping and gradually diminishing bouts of nausea with compiling as complete a report as I could of our wanderings aboard the Spawn of Damnation, and the unpleasant surprises I'd found there.
Feeling I ought to make a show of taking my position of Imperial Guard liaison officer seriously, I got Jurgen to forward copies of my evasions and excuses to Torven, who passed them to Duque and Kregeen in turn, and all three passed the information down the line of their respective commands; the inevitable upshot of which was that rumour and exaggeration soon began to outpace the factual summaries, so by the time I was up and about again practically everyone in the system was convinced I'd seen off a greenskin invasion, and a swarm of genestealers, pretty much single-handed.
'It's no wonder the governor wants to see you,' Drumon told me, on his last visit to my quarters aboard the Revenant. Now that the immediate crisis was over, and I was feeling a lot more like my old self, I'd lost no time in arranging my transfer to the Imperial Guard garrison on Serendipita. I'd had more than enough of spacecraft for the time being, and just wanted to be somewhere away from metal corridors and shadows that might turn out to harbour a genestealer or two. True, it would have to be a very foolish 'stealer indeed to try boarding an Astartes strike cruiser, but every time I glanced out of a viewport, the ominous mass of the space hulk could be seen looming over us, and the further I could get from it the better so far as I was concerned. 'You seem to be the only man in the system more honoured than he is.'
'So long as he doesn't want to challenge me to a duel,' I jested, surprised, and a little touched, that he'd bothered to come and see me off.
Drumon smiled faintly. 'Small fear of that,' he said. 'The way the locals are talking about you, I think he would rather take on the brother-captain if he had a grievance.'
146
The actual mechanisms of teleportation are a little more complex than that, involving the linkage of two discrete physical points through a precisely focussed Geller field, but Cain's typically forthright description is close enough for most purposes.
147
Possibly because his peculiar gift cushioned him from the worst effects of exposure to the warp, although Cain would have had no way of knowing that at the time.