'We'll catch it, magos,' the shipmaster assured him, 'Omnissiah willing.' Then, to my surprise, he made the sign of the cogwheel, which the tech-priests and Astartes present all echoed.
'Forgive my ignorance,' I said, approaching the hololith, 'but if we're merely going to be following the same current as the space hulk, how can we hope to catch up with it? Won't we be travelling at the same rate?'
'A very astute question,' Yaffel said, in the manner of a born didact pouncing on the opportunity to expound on his favourite subject. 'But the situation isn't as hopeless as you might suppose. Don't forget that the Spawn of Damnation is drifting, while the Revenant is moving under power. That means we can correct our attitude and orientation to the current, to optimise the flow around our Geller field.'
'And in simple language for the rest of us?' Mira muttered, then had the grace to blush as Drumon answered the comment she'd clearly believed to be inaudible.
'I gather the sport of waveboarding[55] is popular in some of the coastal regions of your world?' he asked, and Mira nodded, although Emperor alone knows how he discovered this. 'Then think of us as riding a waveboard, while the hulk just bobs about as the Emperor sees fit. Does that make things clearer?'
'I suppose so,' Mira said, as politely as she could. 'Thanks.'
'In addition,' Yaffel said, trying not to sound miffed at the interruption, 'the Spawn of Damnation will be returning to the materium at random intervals, for indeterminate periods of time, some of which will be in the order of years. We, on the other hand, can enter and leave the warp at will. As soon as we determine that it's not at a given exit point, we can re-enter the immaterium and continue our pursuit.'
'I see,' I said, vaguely surprised to find that I did. 'But how can we be sure we've found an exit point in the first place?'
The moment I'd finished speaking, I knew I was going to regret asking that particular question: Yaffel's gyrations increased markedly, as if he could barely contain his excitement, and he raised a hand to point at the hololith. Apparently divining what I'd just done, Mira kicked me sharply in the ankle, although I suspect my Guard- issue footwear made the gesture more uncomfortable for her than it did for me.
Fortunately, Drumon came to our rescue, intervening just before the magos could launch into the tirade of technotheological jargon I'd unwittingly come so close to unleashing. 'Essentially,' he said, 'the passage of so large an object between the two realms leaves a weak spot in the boundary between them, which our Librarian and Navigator believe they can detect.'
'How weak?' Mira asked, no doubt mindful that just such a spot now existed within her home system, and probably picturing a host of daemons flooding through it to lay waste to Viridia.
Yaffel nodded reassuringly at her, no doubt having had to assuage the fears of sufficient numbers of lay listeners by now to be aware of what she must be thinking, and grabbing the chance to display his expertise after all. 'Not enough to allow any of the warp's denizens access to the materium,' he said, his flat monotone sounding oddly sure of itself. 'The weakness is more akin to a deformation of the interface than a breach of it.'
'I see,' Mira said, managing to sound as if she meant it. 'But if you can predict where the weaknesses are, can't you just tell which systems are at risk and warn them by astropath before the hulk gets there?'
'Things are less simple than that,' Drumon said, drawing our attention to the hololith again. A moment's perusal was enough for me to recognise an astronomical display of the sector and a few of the systems surrounding it. 'Here is Viridia.' The system flared green. 'And these are the boundaries within which the Spawn of Damnation could have travelled.' A translucent tube began to extend itself from the green dot, the mouth of it widening the further it extended, so that by the time it reached its fullest extent, well over two dozen systems had been swallowed by the flickering funnel.
'It would take a lifetime to search all those systems,' I said, obscurely relieved at the realisation of just how impossible a task we were taking on. After a few months I'd find an excuse to leave them to it, and return to my desk, secure in the knowledge that whatever foolhardy undertaking General Lokris had been planning to drop me into the middle of would be safely over.
'Fortunately, we won't have to,' Yaffel told us, looking smugger by the second. 'Each emergence point we find will reduce the potential volume of space in which our quarry could be, and refine our predictions. After the first few have been plotted, we should be closing in on it nicely.'
'I'm glad to hear it,' I said.
'If they can find any weak spots in the first place,' Mira muttered beside me.
'How can we know until we try?' Drumon said, leaving everyone else looking faintly baffled.
After that, the briefing was clearly over to all intents and purposes, although I made sure I asked a few supplementary questions to show a proper concern for what we might be getting into. By this point Mira had given up even pretending to be interested, simply standing as close to me as she could in a grim silence I began to find increasingly oppressive.
As we eventually left, to let the shipmaster and his crew get on with whatever it is that starship bridge officers do, I felt it politic to pause for a moment in passing and pay our respects to Gries. To my surprise, he acknowledged my salute and nodded to me. 'I trust you have everything you require, commissar?'
Ignoring Mira's smug expression, I nodded. 'Your hospitality is as generous as I remembered,' I told him truthfully. 'But I was wondering, if it's no imposition, whether you had a little free space somewhere I could run through my combat drills every day. I rather neglected them while I was convalescing, and I almost paid the price for that in the 'stealer nest.' Shaken a little by the narrowness of our escape, I'd resumed my regular practice sessions with the chainblade forthwith, and I had no desire to forego them again if I could avoid it, although my quarters were rather too cramped for much in the way of physical exercise which didn't involve Mira.
'Of course.' Gries looked at me approvingly and nodded. 'I would expect nothing less from a warrior of your renown. I'll see to it that you're given access to one of our training chapels.'
'Thank you,' I said, only too aware of the magnitude of the accolade he'd so unexpectedly bestowed on me. All I'd been expecting was a corner of a cargo bay somewhere; this was tantamount to a senior ecclesiarch throwing open the door to the sepulchre of a saint and asking how many bones I'd like to take home[56]. 'I'll try to prove worthy of the honour.'
THE RECLAIMERS' CAPTAIN was as good as his word. We'd barely made the transition to the warp when Jurgen knocked on my door with the news that the tertiary training chapel had been put at my disposal for an hour a day. I've no idea what the other two were like, but this one turned out to be an airy chamber about the size of a scrumball pitch, floored with metal mesh, and with luminators in the ceiling which could be adjusted to replicate any light level, from the glimmering of stars on a moonless world to a dazzling glare. Much of the equipment ranged about the walls was either unfamiliar to me, or intended for users a great deal larger and stronger than I was, so I left it alone, preferring to run through the complex patterns of attack and defence with the chainsword which years of familiarity had made instinctive beyond conscious thought.
It's probably no exaggeration to say that those hours of solitary sword drills aboard the Revenant were among the happiest of my life. Throne alone knows I'm no Emperor-botherer, but centuries of use by His finest warriors had imbued the very walls of the place with a sense of dedication and reverence for tradition which made me feel as if everything I did there was part of something greater than myself. Not a sensation I'm used to, or particularly comfortable with in the normal course of events, but I couldn't deny it at the time.
If I'm honest, I also found the periods of solitude I spent there becoming an increasingly welcome respite from Mira's company. Which isn't to say that her companionship had become wearisome, exactly, but with very little to do herself, she seemed to want to spend every minute I wasn't attending to my duties attached to me like a Catachan faceeater. For a man as used to his own society as I was, that was a very mixed blessing indeed: so much so that, from time to time, I found myself inventing errands in order to delay my return to my quarters. On one occasion I even went so far as to ask Magos Yaffel for some further details of the techniques he was using to track the space hulk through the immaterium, which I dutifully transcribed into the report I knew full well General Lokris wasn't going to bother to read anyway when I eventually completed it, despite not having understood more than one word in twenty.
We all experienced a brief flurry of excitement about ten days into our voyage, when Gries announced that the Reclaimers' Librarian had sensed the deformation of the membrane between the warp and the material universe which Yaffel had predicted, but when the Revenant popped back into the real galaxy for a quick look round we turned out to be drifting through the silent void between the stars, with nothing on the auspex for light years in any
