'I'm not.' She grinned again, and with a definite sense of foreboding I belatedly registered the fact that the chauffeur was removing what looked like almost as much baggage as the tech-priests had accumulated from the car. 'I'm coming too. Isn't that a wonderful surprise?'
'Wonderful doesn't even begin to cover it,' I said truthfully.
NINE
PERHAPS FORTUNATELY, THE ear-splitting noise inside the Thunderhawk after it took off made further conversation impossible. There were the headsets Veren had drawn my attention to on the journey down, of course, but the last thing I needed was Mira vox-casting the details of our association across an open comm-net, so I made sure the one I gave her just prior to our departure was switched off before handing it over. Though grateful for the aural protection it offered, I declined to activate mine, either: I had no interest in anything the tech-priests might have to say, and I knew from long experience that Jurgen would simply lapse into sullen silence the second our skids left the ground, too preoccupied with holding on to his last meal until we reached the turbulence-free zone beyond the atmosphere to respond to anything short of a life-threatening emergency. Or possibly an acute lack of tanna. In any event, he was hardly a sparkling conversationalist at the best of times, so I wasn't exactly left feeling deprived.
All of which left me with far too much time to brood. I'd had a few moments before we lifted to ask Mira what the frak she was doing here, although of course I was rather more circumspect about the manner in which I phrased the question, and she'd smiled in a manner I found distinctly disturbing. Before she could answer, though, the tech-priests had started trooping aboard, and Jurgen returned to inform me that our kit was properly stowed, so I'd had little option but to follow the herd and hope everything had a rational explanation. Mira certainly wasn't behaving in the usual fashion of people bidding farewell to their home world, gazing at it through the viewports as long as they could, trying to burn the image of it into their memories in the near certainty of never seeing it again, preferring instead to smile at me in a manner uncomfortably reminiscent of a bored eldar reaver looking for someone to torture to death to pass the time. Perhaps she simply lacked the imagination to grasp what embarking on a voyage through the warp actually meant. Even if she did return home, the chances were that decades, or even a century or two, were likely to have passed, and that she'd be as much of a stranger to the altered Viridia as an offworlder setting eyes on it for the first time[48].
Predictably, I didn't get another chance to broach the subject until after the Thunderhawk had docked with the Revenant, after a journey Jurgen had probably found mercifully brief. The strike cruiser was still orbiting Viridia at a relatively low altitude, barely beyond the point where the first faint wisps of upper atmosphere would begin to drag at her hull, no doubt to facilitate the use of her teleportarium, or allow her weapon batteries to strike at targets on the surface in the unlikely event of her Space Marine complement requiring a little additional assistance. It still seemed long enough to me, though, and it was with a great sense of relief that I heard our engines throttling back, and the series of metallic clangs which preceded our arrival. What Yaffel and his tech-priests found to amuse them, I have no idea. Perhaps they conversed among themselves, in the peculiar manner of their kind, or just remained absorbed in communing with their data-slates.
I didn't have much opportunity to talk to Mira after we disembarked, either. To my pleased surprise Drumon was standing at the bottom of the ramp, and exchanged a few words of greeting with me, before striding on to confer with the tech-priests and begin examining the equipment they'd brought with them. By the time I'd completed the pleasantries and looked round for Milady DuPanya, she'd already snared a couple of faintly stunned- looking Chapter serfs, who'd evidently been incautious enough to wander within hectoring range, and was holding forth to them in great detail about the correct disposal of her luggage. I decided to leave her to it, and went to separate Jurgen and Gladden, the factotum who'd been assigned to look after me on the voyage here, who were already squabbling over the matter of who should be responsible for my kit with belligerent tenacity and icy politeness respectively. Apparently no one had expected me to bring my own aide, let alone one who looked more like a Nurgle cultist than a member of the Imperial Guard, so his arrival had caught them on the hop, rather.
By the time I'd sorted that one out, Drumon and the tech-priests had disappeared about whatever business they had together, and the pile of luggage Mira had brought with her had diminished to something approaching portable. I lingered while the last of it was thrown onto a trolley which looked as though it was more usually employed to rearm the Thunderhawks, and fell into step beside her. 'I give up,' I said lightly, contriving to look as though I was joking. 'What did you say you were doing here?'
'I'm the official representative of the Governor of Viridia,' she said, grinning impishly at me from under her fringe. 'My father's sent me to assess whether the space hulk remains any kind of threat to our system.'
'How can it?' I asked, no doubt looking and sounding as baffled as I felt. 'It's been gone for a century and a half, and it's hardly likely to come back.'
'But it could have left other threats behind, as well as the genestealers,' Mira said, in tones which made it abundantly clear that she didn't believe that any more than I did. 'We'd be failing in our duty to the Viridian populace if we didn't make every effort to ensure their safety, particularly now.'
'So your father asked you to come along on the hunt for the Spawn?' I enquired, trying to keep my scepticism from becoming audible in my voice.
Mira grinned again. 'I sort of volunteered,' she said cheerfully, taking hold of my arm.
I nodded, being able to reconstruct that conversation all too easily. This had all been her idea, clearly, although I still found it hard to credit that she'd become sufficiently infatuated during our brief affair to be willing to wave goodbye to everything she'd known just to follow me through the warp[49] . 'How very dutiful of you,' I responded. 'No doubt the populace will be suitably grateful.'
'No doubt,' Mira agreed, clearly not giving a flying one what the hoi polloi thought, and attaching herself to me with a tight grip. 'So it looks as though we'll be liaising together for the foreseeable future.'
DESPITE THE FAINT sense of unease about the situation which continued to oppress me, particularly in the quieter moments when I had time to reflect on the potential ramifications, I had to admit that Mira's words in the hangar bay had cheered me at least as much as they gave me cause for disquiet. As I've said before, she was pleasant enough company, and I'd felt rather starved of companionship during the voyage to Viridia once I'd recovered enough to start taking notice of my surroundings. This time round, although the circumstances were somewhat bizarre, I had someone I felt I could converse with, as well as engaging in a variety of recreational pursuits, all of which promised to make my second sojourn aboard the Revenant a great deal more congenial than the first had been.
Then, too, I had Jurgen with me again, which fact alone eased my mind considerably. We'd been through a lot together since our first chance meeting on Desolatia (and were to go through even more in the years to come, although, perhaps mercifully, I had little inkling of quite how much terror and bloodshed awaited me before I could sink into a relatively peaceful retirement[50]), and the prospect of facing whatever horrors awaited us aboard the Spawn of Damnation seemed far less daunting than they would have done without the knowledge that he would be watching my back as steadfastly as always. Not that I had any intention of getting within a thousand kilometres of the cursed piece of warp flotsam, of course, so anything lurking within the tangled mess of conjoined starships was of little interest to me; once we'd caught up with it, if we ever did, the shipmaster and his gunnery teams could carve it up at their leisure, and in the unlikely event of anything getting off before they did, it would have to be foolish in the extreme to try boarding a Space Marine vessel.
All in all, I suppose, I felt as happy about the fool's errand we were on as it was possible to under the circumstances, and resolved to make the best of things - an endeavour which Mira seemed determined to help with.
'I'm still not sure how you managed to persuade Gries to let you aboard in the first place,' I said, over a surprisingly palatable meal in my quarters, a few hours after we'd boarded. A fair proportion of her mountain of luggage turned out to have been delicacies of one sort or another, no doubt with my comments about the Spartan fare I'd subsisted on during our voyage to Viridia fresh in her mind. It felt odd to be eating a second breakfast when my body clock insisted it was late evening, but I'd hopped between enough worlds by now to be confident that I'd have readjusted to the Revenant's idea of chronology before too much longer. Gladden had got used to bringing my
