[Ciaphas Cain 05] - Duty Calls Read online

  Climate and temperature are more a matter of altitude than geography here, enabling the jaded traveller to experience a wide variety of environments with little more effort than that required to hire an aircar and chauffeur, although, as is so often the case with backwater planets, some caution is advised when attempting to find accommodation, as even the most prestigious local establishments can, on closer inspection, turn out to be somewhat basic in the facilities they offer.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the event, the arbitrator was suitably flattered by my request to discuss our business in person, not least, it seemed, because my reputation had preceded me as it so often does, and scarcely another hour had passed before I found the ground dropping away beneath me once again. Jurgen had managed to secure us seats on a courier shuttle with urgent business in Principia Mons[1], his manifest pride in being able to find us transport so quickly only partially mitigated by the realisation that having done so meant having to get airborne again for the second time in one day Nevertheless he bore this travail with the phlegmatic stoicism with which he accepted everything else, only the thickening of the air around him and the whitening of his knuckles mute testament to the discomfort he felt even before we’d left the pad. (Although, being Jurgen, I suppose it would be a little more accurate to say that his knuckles went a paler shade of grime.) It would probably have suited both of us better if I’d left him behind, but protocol demanded that my aide accompany me on an official visit to an Imperial official of such exalted rank, so we’d both have to make the best of it, Jurgen trying to ignore the discomfort of his rebellious stomach, and me trying not to picture the reaction of the arbitrator when I turned up with him in tow. [1. The planetary capital. Technically the somewhat unimaginative name referred to the plateau on which the city was built, but since the equally dully named Principia Urbi had sprawled out to encompass most of it, the two had become virtually synonymous. If Cain was ever aware of the distinction, he makes no mention of the fact.]

  Perhaps it was for that reason that I turned my attention to the landscape falling away beneath us, getting my first real glimpse of the planet that we’d come so far to protect. I knew intellectually that we were perched on the highest and most desolate plateau of this patchwork world, but seeing the reality from the air brought the strangeness of our position home to me in a manner that no amount of background briefing would ever have been able to do. Hoarfell was huge, so many kloms[1] across that disembarking from the dropship had felt like stepping out onto any other planet in the Imperium. Now, as our shuttle banked away to the south-east, I found myself able to appreciate the sheer scale of it for the first time. [1. Kilometres; a common Valhallan colloquialism that Cain had picked up, among others, from his prolonged association with the natives of that world.]

  The first thing to attract my attention was the field at which we’d landed, and which, like most of the other dirtside facilities scattered across the face of the planet, combined the functions of a starport with those of an aerodrome for the local traffic. This was, of course, considerable, given the peculiar topography of the place. With very few exceptions, where adjacent inhabited plateaux were both close enough and sufficiently similar in height to allow the construction of viaducts between them, taking to the skies was the only way to shift anything from one tiny island of life to another. As a result the amount of air traffic criss-crossing the globe was truly staggering, given its relatively modest population of a mere billion or so. Even on the short trip to Principia Mons, which took less than an hour, I caught sight of innumerable other aircraft, ranging from two-seater skycars to wallowing cargo dirigibles the size of warehouses, around which swarms of smaller planes buzzed like insects.

  As we rose above the city of Darien, the densest concentration of citizens on Hoarfell, I found myself being put in mind of the firewasp nest I’d stumbled across on Calcifrie (which had turned out to be remarkably useful in deterring the party of eldar reavers pursuing me at the time, but I digress), a never-ending swarm of bright metal insects swirling about the landing pads as they receded into the distance. Though the densest concentration of aircraft was hovering above the aerodrome there were plenty of others buzzing around the rest of the city, private skimmers and aircars for the most part. I made a mental note to suggest to Kasteen that we get our Hydras deployed as soon as possible; rather too many pilots were crossing the space above our garrison for my liking. In the event, of course, she was well ahead of me, and by the time I returned she’d already imposed an exclusion zone in a wide enough radius around us to seriously irritate the local traffic controllers.[1] [1. So much so that the prohibition was flouted several times by local civilians, until a “warning shot” downed an aircar full of city aldermen returning from a banquet at the halls of the Fabricator’s Guild, fortunately without doing serious injury to anyone of consequence. After that, it seems to have been followed to the letter.]

  As we rose higher, away from the city itself, I was able to get a better view of the landscape surrounding it, a wilderness of snow and ice through which hills and escarpments in muted tones of black and grey rose to pierce the leaden clouds above them, so that it was hard to tell where rock ended and vapour began. Somewhere out there was the highest point on the planet, but which of the vague blobs in the distance it was I couldn’t tell even if I’d cared.

  Then, suddenly, with shocking abruptness, the landscape vanished. I just had time for the briefest of glimpses of a sheer cliff face of quite staggering proportions receding into the depths beneath us, which were swallowed by the all-enveloping murk, before we were cocooned in a bubble of mist that wrapped itself around our fragile little craft and blotted out the world.

  Happily, our first sight of Principia Mons was far more propitious. As we descended the clouds grew thinner, merely whitening at first, until finally they broke altogether, allowing shafts of bright sunlight to break through, and revealing a sky of quite remarkably vivid blue. (Or so it seemed to me, but then I’d been stuck onboard a succession of starships for most of the last few months.) Jurgen seemed no more uncomfortable than usual, so I left him to his own devices, and glanced out of the window again, eager to see what the absence of clouds would reveal.

  It’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve seen some remarkable sights in my time, from the spires of Holy Terra itself to the aurorae of Fabulon, but the landscape of Periremunda was in a class of its own. Beneath us the last vestiges of rain evanesced into vapour, rising again to form more clouds without ever reaching the sere and barren surface of the world below, where bare, baking rock alternated with oceans of drifting sand.

  Once we flew over a sandstorm, which would have stripped the flesh from the bones of an unprotected man within seconds, kilometres high, but still so far below us as to seem like a thin film of dust seeping across the planet’s surface. The eye-stabbing flicker of electrical discharges sparked and flashed deep within it, an uncanny echo of the rolling sonic boom that trailed in the wake of our hurtling aircraft. And in all directions, as far as the eye could see, rose columns of rock, each separated from its nearest neighbour by tens or hundreds of kilometres, to stand proud and alone, like the trunks of some immense petrified forest.

  From above they seemed refulgent, glowing with life, in stark contrast to the magnificent desolation surrounding them. As we passed close to a few I was able to discern forests and lakes, hills and valleys, and the unmistakable signs of human habitation, all preserved in miniature, like the vivaria sometimes maintained by curious children or noble dilettantes.

  We must have crossed or skirted some dozen or so of these remarkable spires on our journey, although most flashed past so quickly I barely had time to take in any details. Some were relatively open, appearing to support agricultural communities of some kind, while others seemed completely overgrown, choked by a profusion of tangled vegetation that only a Catachan could love. A few seemed to support communities the size of small towns, while others, barely a kilometre across, seemed com
pletely uninhabited.

  I dredged up from somewhere the statistic that roughly eighteen thousand of the plateaux scattered across the planet held a population of some sort or another,[1] and shuddered at the logistical problems that implied for the Imperial Guard forces waiting to be deployed in their defence. Even split down into individual squads, which would be absurd, a mere dozen regiments could never hope to cover a fraction of them. All we could do was wait, and hope our enemies showed their faces openly somewhere we could concentrate our forces against them. A pretty forlorn hope, of course, if they knew what they were doing, and what little indication we’d had so far seemed to confirm that they did. If ever a planet seemed ideally suited for guerrilla warfare, Periremunda was it. [1. Which implies that, despite his assertion to the contrary, he probably at least skimmed through the briefing materials on the voyage out from Coronus.]

  Perhaps fortunately I had little time for any more such pessimistic musings, as Jurgen finally roused himself with an expression of hopeful inquiry.

  “Do you think that’s it, sir?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Must be,” I said. There could only be a few truly urban areas on a world like this, and I doubted that any of the others would be quite as dense as this one. A faint tremor passed through the airframe of our tiny craft as, once again, we became slower than the sound of our passage, and the pitch of the engines fell, allowing us the leisure to contemplate the city as we drifted in towards the landing field.

  Principia Mons was, in many ways, gratifyingly familiar, the surface of the plateau covered in the sprawling jumble of hab units, manufactoria, temples and other such structures that can generally be seen on the approaches to any reasonably populous city throughout the Imperium. A few open areas remained unbuilt on, chiefly bordering the precipitous drop edging this peculiar eyrie. There were a handful of parks scattered across the outer fringes of the city, and a further one almost in the centre, which seemed to have a fortified enclave of some kind in the middle of it[1], but for the most part the place seemed completely urbanised. [1. The gardens of the governor’s palace: unusually, these were divided into an inner garden, to which access was strictly limited to members of his household, and an outer park, open to the citizens of the city on festivals and holidays.]

  As we approached I could see that the top kilometre or so of the spire had been honeycombed with tunnels, leaving structures and industrial units clinging to the side of the rock. The effect was not entirely unreminiscent of a hive, and I felt a faint warm glow of nostalgia at the thought.[1] It didn’t last long, though, being swiftly replaced by the realisation that despite its elevated position the planetary capital possessed an undercity to rival that of a more conventional community. In my experience troublemakers tended to gravitate into them like sump rats down a waste pipe, where they were Horus’ own job to winkle out again. [1. Cain alludes in many places throughout the archive to having been native to a hiveworld, but precisely which one remains obscure.]

  Not my problem, though, I told myself firmly, having had more than enough of that sort of thing on Gravalax and Simia Orichalcae. In any case my place was with the 597th on Hoarfell, which, cold and uninviting as it was, at least had the advantage of being comfortably free of tunnels where heretics might go to ground. I had no more time for such musings, however, as a sudden surge of pressure against my spine told me that the landing thrusters had just cut in, and within moments, it seemed, we were back on terra firma, to Jurgen’s eloquently unspoken relief.

  We disembarked into a fresh breeze, lightly scented with the odours of burnt promethium and cooling metal, but welcome for all that, and I squinted reflexively. The sun was still some way above the horizon, and although the first blush of sunset was beginning to tint the clouds above us, it still seemed dazzling after the cheerless gloom of the snow clouds blanketing Darien. It felt pleasantly warm, too, and I unfastened my coat, stepping upwind of Jurgen as I did so. I’d served with him long enough to realise that the sudden increase in temperature would soon have a similar effect on his body odour. I glanced around, orientating myself.

  “We seem to have been expected,” I remarked. A groundcar was making its way across the expanse of rockrete between us and the terminal building, flanked by a pair of outriders perched over the wheels of their gently-humming monocycles, pennants on its front wings bearing the device of the Adeptus Arbites snapping in the wind. My aide nodded, sidestepping a servitor, which seemed so intent on recovering the packages from the courier plane’s hold that it didn’t even register our presence.

  “They’re doing the thing in style,” he agreed, a hint of approval entering his voice. If there was one thing Jurgen relished, apart from porno slates, it was a punctilious adherence to protocol, preferably with as much pomp and ceremony as possible. A Salamander or utility truck would have done just as well for me, to be honest, even more so if I’d known what that simple little piece of courtesy was going to lead to, but I have to admit to feeling rather gratified at the time. I didn’t travel by limousine all that often, and the effusiveness of the welcome being extended to me augured well for the meeting when we arrived.

  The groundcar hissed to a halt at the foot of the boarding ramp, and a young man in a neatly tailored uniform hopped out to meet us, with a crisp salute to me, and a sidelong look of barely-suppressed astonishment at Jurgen.

  “Commissar Cain?” he asked, as though there could be any possible doubt of the fact, and I nodded, returning the salute in my best parade-ground manner.

  “That’s right.” I indicated my malodorous companion. “This is my personal aide, Gunner[1] Feric Jurgen.” [1. Jurgen had been serving with the 12th Field Artillery when Cain first acquired his services, so his military rank was that of gunner rather than the private or trooper more common among the line regiments of the Imperial Guard.]

  “Justicar[2] Billem Nyte.” The young man nodded at Jurgen with as much courtesy as he could muster, no doubt noting the contrast between his own immaculate uniform and the rather haphazard manner in which my aide’s seemed to be not so much clothing his body as just hanging about in its general vicinity. “Arbitrator Keesh sent me to pick you up.” [2. The local name for law enforcers. As has been noted elsewhere the accepted nomenclature for such officials varies widely from world to world, and like many seasoned travellers Cain often refers to them simply as Arbites, despite the fact that they’re merely subordinate to the Adeptus rather than true members of it. In this case, however, as he usually does when he has contact with actual Adeptus Arbites functionaries, he is precise about the distinction.]

  “That was very thoughtful,” I said, nodding a greeting to the outriders as I settled into a seat so over-upholstered that for a moment I thought I’d need my chainsword to cut my way out of it again. Neither of our escorts seemed to notice me, although the blank reflective visors of their helmets made it difficult to be sure. I fought down a fleeting memory of the necron warriors we’d faced so recently, and opened the window as Jurgen squeezed in beside me, unslinging his lasgun in order to fit it through the door. (Like most troopers in the Guard, he would rather have cut his own arm off than go anywhere without it, an attitude I’d been more than grateful for on innumerable occasions.) “I must say this is a great deal more comfortable than I was expecting.”

  A small naalwood cabinet, which alone was probably worth more than the aircraft we’d arrived on, proved to contain six crystal goblets and a couple of decanters. Finding that one of them contained amasec of a quite exceptional age and piquancy I poured myself a generous measure and settled back to enjoy the ride.

  “It’s the arbitrator’s personal vehicle,” Nyte told us with a hint of pride, no doubt revelling in his status as one of the few justicars allowed to play with it. “I’m his amanuensis.”

  “Then I’ll be sure to thank him when I see him,” I said, noticing Jurgen’s expression out of the corner of my eye, and moving quickly to forestall the inevitable jockeying for precedence that was bound to
ensue between the two aides now that he’d realised Nyte was more than just a chauffeur. Nyte took the hint and returned to the driving seat, no doubt grateful for the sheet of armourcrys between him and the passenger compartment.

  At first sight, Principia Mons seemed little different from any other Imperial city I’d visited in the last few years, apart from the visible lack of artillery damage. We hummed along a broad avenue between pleasingly proportioned buildings, the lack of space at the top of the plateau we were perched on not apparently having had an appreciable effect on the local architecture. I’d been expecting a rather more jammed-together feel, but in general it all felt surprisingly open and uncluttered. After a while it occurred to me that this apparent contradiction explained the extensive undercity I’d noticed as we flew in: the Periremundans had simply built downwards instead of up. (Not something I’d have felt too happy about in their position, weakening the top of the pole I was perched on, but I supposed they knew what they were doing.)

  All in all, then, it was a remarkably pleasant ride; at least until we got to the point where someone tried to kill us.

  CHAPTER THREE

  As ambushes go, I have to admit it was neatly and professionally executed. I suppose I should have expected something of the sort, having been warned before we left Coronus that the insurgents we faced appeared to be well organised and effective out of all proportion to their numbers, but the taste of unaccustomed luxury and the sheer normality of the street scene gliding past the window had lulled me into a false sense of security completely at odds with my normally reliable streak of paranoia.