attack with a speed and precision which left me breathless.
'Very good,' the Techmarine said, with more animation than I'd ever seen from him (or any of the others for that matter). 'First blood to you, commissar.'
'I hope I haven't damaged your armour,' I said, knowing how precious it would be to him, but Drumon shook his head.
'I will leave that mark as a reminder,' he said, 'never to underestimate an opponent.'
'I'm full of nasty, underhanded tricks,' I said, truthfully enough, but inflecting it like a joke.
Drumon nodded. 'In my experience, survival is honour enough for the battlefield. Would you care to continue?'
Well, I would, and we did, although I never got through his guard again; even though he still held back, he was always more than a match for me. By the time we'd finished we found ourselves agreeing to meet again the next time his duties permitted, and over the next few weeks we managed to train together several times. I've no idea what his fellow Space Marines made of our arrangement[58], but many of them seemed to be making more of an effort to be friendly around the time Drumon and I started training together.
All in all, the growing undercurrent of tension between Mira and I notwithstanding, I was beginning to slip into a fairly comfortable routine aboard the Revenant; so much so that I began to take it for granted that the voyage would continue uneventfully until we either caught up with our quarry, or abandoned the search. But, of course, I was about to receive a salutary reminder of just how dangerous our quest was, and that the galaxy contained far more perils than the one we pursued so diligently.
ELEVEN
OUR THIRD ATTEMPT to locate the hulk in the material universe was almost the death of us all; not that we had any premonition of the fact as we prepared to make our latest transition back into the realm of the real. If anything, I suppose, by now we were growing a little complacent, confident that Yaffel's calculations could be relied on, and that the Librarian's abnatural talents would be sufficient to drop us into the materium more or less on top of the space hulk we sought - or, more likely, where it had been at some time in the past.
Accordingly, when Gries invited me to the bridge to observe the transition, my immediate expectation was of a repeat of our previous attempts: merely a wilderness of the void, the details probably a little different from those we'd investigated before, but essentially no more than another dead end to be discounted before moving on. Mira had been invited too, of course, as protocol demanded. But, no doubt to everyone's relief, she'd declined to drag herself out of bed, the summons having arrived in what she and the ship's chronographs insisted was the middle of the night.
I, of course, was enough of a seasoned campaigner to have hauled myself upright, yanked my laspistol out from under the pillow (provoking a tirade of most unladylike language in the process) and clambered into my uniform within moments of the message being delivered by a bleary-eyed Jurgen. Fortified by the mug of tanna he'd waved in my general direction as I made my exit, I arrived on the bridge a mere couple of minutes after the surge of nausea which generally accompanied the transition from the warp to the realm of reality had swept over me.
'Any luck?' I asked, and the crewman manning the sensorium display nodded in my direction.
'The system's teeming with life. If the 'stealers are here, or have been, there's a lot for them to infect.'
'What kind of life?' I asked. It couldn't have been an Imperial system we'd arrived in, or our vox receivers would have been flooded with comms traffic, and challenges from the local SDF, by now. 'Where in the Throne's name are we?'
'Processing the starfield data now,' Yaffel assured me calmly, gazing into the hololith. 'After correcting for parallax errors, our most probable location would be here, give or take approximately eight light-seconds.' One of the stellar systems inside the green funnel, which had been reduced substantially since the first time I'd seen it, flared more brightly, and the translucent cone obligingly shrank a little more.
'Anything on auspex?' I asked, and the operator raised his head to glance at me.
'I've got thousands of contacts,' he reported. 'It'll take a while to narrow them down.'
'Thousands?' I asked, as he returned to work, my palms itching worse than ever.
'Void shields to maximum. All gunnery stations stand to,' the shipmaster said, pretty much confirming what I most feared, before looking across at me as well. 'Many of them appear to be under power and closing on our position.'
'Wonderful,' I said, before realising that sarcasm wasn't quite what was expected of the dauntless warrior everyone here fondly imagined me to be, and plastering a smile on my face which I hoped would seem sufficiently insouciant. 'Always something to be said for a target-rich environment. Any idea whose day we're about to spoil?'
'Still scanning frequencies,' the vox operator reported, his voice almost as calm as Yaffel's mechanical one. 'Getting something...'
'Put it on the speakers,' Gries ordered, and a moment later an overlapping babble of harsh, guttural voices burst into the room.
My stomach knotted, and I took a deep breath, stilling the instinctive surge of panic which swept over me. I recognised that sound all too well, was even able to pick out a word or two I knew. 'Orks,' I said.
'Undoubtedly,' Gries agreed, no doubt familiar with every enemy of the Imperium I'd ever heard of, and a double handful of ones that I hadn't. 'And eager to welcome us in the manner of their kind.' He looked across at the shipmaster. 'Engage them at your leisure.'
'By your command,' the shipmaster responded, with a grave inclination of his head. 'All batteries, fire at will.'
I moved across to the hololith, where Yaffel had thoughtfully brought up a tactical display which enabled me to see just how frakked we were. Innumerable greenskin vessels were swarming in on our position, evoking a curious half-memory of Drumon surrounded by the sparring drones, before the full seriousness of our position elbowed the whimsical image aside.
The Chapter serf gunners were disciplined, I have to give them that, holding their fire until they were sure of a target[59], before unleashing the full fury of their awesome destructive power in a single concentrated salvo which gutted the ramshackle greenskin vessels they'd targeted. For every one they brought down, though, ten surged forwards to fill the gap, and had they been able to concentrate their fire it would all have been over within moments. Fortunately, however, they were as disorganised as ork mobs always are, blazing away in our general direction without seeming to aim, and only a few of their shots struck home. I felt the faint tremor of their impacts through the fabric of the hull with an answering quiver of apprehension, before forcing away the memory of the greenskin attack on the Hand of Vengeance, which had come so close to taking my life.
'Thunderhawks away,' the auspex man reported a moment later, and a cluster of smaller echoes[60] took up station around the blip which marked our position, doing a very nice job of keeping the greenskin fighters and occasional torpedo volley off our backs. 'Still no sign of our primary target.'
'Then it's probably not here,' I said, mainly to Gries, but pitching my voice so that my calm, reasonable tones would carry across most of the bridge. 'And even if it is, it'll take more than one ship to get to it through this much resistance.'
'I concur,' the Space Marine captain rumbled after a moment, much to my well-concealed relief. The overhead luminators flickered, plunging us into momentary darkness, broken only by the eldritch glow of pict screens and lectern lights, before flaring up again.
'Void shields holding,' one of the bridge crew reported. 'Generators two and nine down. Damage control responding.'
Gries turned to Yaffel, ignoring the clear implications which seemed to me like an unwise degree of single- mindedness. 'Your assessment, magos?'
'The probability of finding the Spawn of Damnation still within this system is now approximately seventeen
