situation on Viridia had stabilised, but Mira's little world had always revolved around her, and I was beginning to realise, somewhat belatedly, that she wasn't going to take kindly to my departure on anyone's terms but her own.
Oh well, too bad, I thought. Heiress to a planet she may have been[40] , but I couldn't see that having much weight with Gries if she tried to argue him into leaving me behind. For a moment the mental picture that conjured up, of the petulant young aristocrat haranguing the Space Marine captain, raised a fleeting smile, before I dismissed it and turned my attention to more pressing matters. 'See if they've got any of those little lizard things, and some of that smoked fish pate, in the kitchen,' I told Jurgen. The rations aboard the Revenant were adequate, of course, but fairly basic, the little comforts of life generally coming low on the list of priorities of a Space Marine, and I intended to make the most of the skills of the governor's chef while I still had the chance. 'Otherwise, use your initiative. And get something for yourself, too.'
'Very good, sir,' he said, and departed as quickly as he could without compromising the air of dignity he felt appropriate to someone in the exalted position of a commissar's personal aide, and which he endeavoured to maintain at all times, in blissful ignorance of the fact that it was completely invisible to everyone but him. He returned a short while later with a large covered tray, the contents of which he laid out for me, and a thermal bag leaking steam, which, to my unspoken relief, he bore off to his own quarters, there being few things in the galaxy more likely to curtail the appetite than watching (or listening to) Jurgen stuffing his face.
After concluding our meals there was nothing much else to do, since we had little enough kit between us, and Jurgen had already stowed it, so I found myself in the unwelcome and novel position of time hanging heavily on my hands. I busied myself with make-work, visiting the bunker for one final time to pass on what information I could about the state of affairs the Astartes were leaving behind (a lot of dead heretics, mainly), and pick up the latest news of the Guard campaign in case, in defiance of my expectations, Gries turned out to be interested. (I was right, as it happened; he wasn't. As soon as we'd left the Viridia System, his attention was focussed entirely on the pursuit of the space hulk, and I can't recall him ever mentioning the campaign there again.)
To my relief, I didn't run across DuPanya anywhere in the corridors of the palace, as I was by no means certain how much he knew of my association with his daughter, or of her recent displeasure. As it happened, I never set eyes on him again. I did find Orten hanging around in the command centre, marginalised by the Guard officers but gamely determined to do whatever he could to prevent them from making too much of a mess of his home world, and made sure I said my farewells to him as publicly as possible: I don't know if that made anyone take him a little more seriously, but I hope so[41].
Of Mira, I saw nothing before quitting the palace, which I must confess to being ambivalent about. On the one hand, I couldn't help feeling a certain sense of relief at having avoided a confrontation which would probably have ended in recrimination, but on the other, I've never liked leaving unfinished business behind. As Jurgen drove us out of the main courtyard and through the wreckage of the gardens along the main causeway, which stood out clearly as a straight strip of mud marginally less churned up than its surroundings, I found myself glancing back over the armour plate protecting the crew compartment of the Salamander he'd requisitioned from somewhere to scan the hundreds of windows in search of a flash of blonde hair; but in vain. At last, as we passed through the battered gate in the outer wall through which Trosque had launched his attack on the besiegers, the palace disappeared from sight, and I directed my attention to our immediate environment.
I hadn't seen much of Fidelis in the relatively short time which had elapsed since our arrival. On the few occasions I'd ventured out to compare notes with Guard commanders or Astartes in the field it had been aboard a Rhino which my hosts had thoughtfully dispatched, the arrival of which always seemed to excite a certain degree of interest among Guardsmen and PDF loyalists alike. It seemed the Reclaimers were still taking the matter of my personal safety as seriously as the Terminator sergeant had intimated, which was fine by me. The only downsides that I'd discovered so far were an inability to see anything beyond the interior of the APC, which was considerably roomier than the Chimeras I was familiar with, and the fact that the bench seats were to the same scale as the fittings aboard the Thunderhawk: fine for the superhuman stature of a Space Marine in powered armour, but distinctly uncomfortable for us ordinary mortals. The upshot of which was that I'd only seen snapshots of the city, as it were, generally a disputed part, where the amount of ambient noise and incoming fire made loitering to sightsee decidedly unwise.
Now, as Jurgen cannonballed us through the streets at his usual breakneck pace, swerving around those few obstacles too solid to bounce our tracks across, I found myself pleasantly surprised. The tide of war had evidently receded from the capital at last, only a few rockpools of unrest remaining to be dealt with, and the first signs of something approaching normality were beginning to appear, like shoots of green among the ashes of a forest fire. The road to the starport was clear of debris, the worst of the cratering marring its surface patched with raw rockcrete dressings, which I suppose was only to be expected given the amount of military traffic rumbling along it in both directions. What I hadn't anticipated was the number of civilian vehicles threaded in among them, overloaded cargo haulers for the most part, jammed with furnishings, possessions and grim-faced people clinging on for dear life among the detritus of their lives. They were, I suppose, returning to their homes, or the sites where once they stood, hoping to pick up where they'd left off, in defiance of all reason. Most of the ramshackle transports were graced with icons of the Emperor, and a few meagre offerings had been left at the shrines beside the road, where, no doubt, they'd be purloined as soon as dusk fell, in defiance of the curfew[42].
The side streets, which Jurgen eventually took to, impatient with the restrictions the density of traffic on the main thoroughfare placed on his natural inclination to open the throttle to its maximum and leave it there, were more cluttered, of course, but even here there were signs of returning life, which I found cheering. People were moving among the rubble of the sundered buildings, salvaging what they could, although if the emporium I'd encountered the sentries of the brood mind in was anything to go by, I doubted that the looters would have left them much[43]. In a few places the smoke of cooking fires rose from within the ruins, where enough of the original structures remained to keep the rain off, occasionally supplemented with tarpaulins or other makeshift materials.
Few of the people we passed spared us a glance, with the inevitable exception of the children, who were playing amid the ruins with the total absorption in the concerns of the moment peculiar to the very young. They tended to glance up as we hurtled by, stones and chunks of pulverised rockcrete scattering from our treads, shouting or waving, before returning to their games.
As yet, there seemed little in the way of organised rebuilding, although we caught occasional glimpses of what might have been the beginning of a coordinated effort at returning Fidelis to habitability. A handful of tech- priests seemed to be abroad, roaming the city in ones and twos, making earnest notes in their data-slates or poking about in conduits, while a party of sappers from one of the Vostroyan regiments was erecting flakboard huts in a park Jurgen couldn't be bothered to circumvent, presumably intended to house the hopeful occupants of the lorries we'd seen earlier. The only building under active repair that we passed was a local temple, where ragged refugees were laying bricks under the supervision of an elderly ecclesiarch, no doubt in exchange for the promise of food and a bed for the night[44].
A few moments later our progress began to slow again, and I poked my head over the armour plate surrounding the passenger compartment, reaching for my laspistol by reflex as I did so. Normally I liked to have the Salamanders I requisitioned fitted with a pintel mount, so I'd have something a bit more lethal to hand if things went ploin-shaped, but Jurgen had just had to take what he could find in the vehicle pool, leaving me to make do with my sidearm if push came to shove. A Caledonian sergeant, in a mottled camo-patterned uniform similar to the one Orten favoured, was flagging us down, the squad of troopers with him regarding us with the wary eyes of combat veterans. They were keeping their lasguns trained on us, just as they should have done with so much PDF kit still in the hands of insurrectionists and troublemakers, and I was pleased to see that they kept them on aim even after my uniform had become visible.
'Commissar.' The sergeant nodded a greeting, no doubt wondering if he or any of his men were in trouble, but determined not to show it. Very few Guardsmen are pleased to see a red sash, which no doubt accounts for the inordinate number of my colleagues felled by friendly-fire accidents. 'We weren't toid to expect you.'
'Probably because I had no idea any of our people were down here,' I said, noting the faint stirring of relief among the soldiers. 'My aide and I are on our way to the aerodrome.' I smiled at the troopers, who were still keeping us covered. 'You can stand down. We're not hybrids or 'stealer puppets.'
'Of course not,' the sergeant agreed, stepping forwards, a trifle nervously, with a portable auspex. 'But if you
