per cent, and falling,' Yaffel said, after conferring with a couple of his junior tech-priests. 'Analysis of the auspex echoes can only go so far, however; the five per cent of anomalies requiring further investigation we found last time would appear to be something of an irreducible minimum.'
'Then we remain until the probability drops to five per cent,' Gries said, 'before proceeding to the next emergence point. If none exists, we will have to return in numbers sufficient to secure this system while we investigate the remaining anomalies.'
Well, good luck with that, I thought, resolving that if we got out of here in one piece I'd kiss a gretchin before allowing myself to be dragged along on so patently suicidal an endeavour. Which reminded me... I tapped the comm-bead in my ear. 'Jurgen,' I said, 'the ship's under attack by greenskins. Don't alarm Miss DuPanya unduly, but if you can persuade her to get dressed, and ready to move in a hurry, it might be wise.'
'Very good, sir,' my aide responded, in his habitual phlegmatic manner. 'Don't want to get caught on the hop again, like we did off Perlia, do we?'
'No, we don't,' I agreed, not envying the task I'd inflicted on him. Mira would probably have just got back to sleep, and wouldn't take at all kindly to being roused again. Better cranky than dead, though, in my view, and if the ork gunners' aim improved in the next few minutes we could all be breathing vacuum if we weren't light on our feet. (Not an experience I'd recommend, or wish to repeat.)
The deck shook under my feet again, and we were plunged into darkness, for nearly two seconds this time. When the luminators rekindled, they had a red tinge to them, which made the bridge look uncomfortably as though someone had sprayed it with blood.
'Starboard shields down,' the man at the enginseer's station reported dispassionately. 'DCT[61] reports reconsecration will take at least ten minutes.'
'That's too long-' I began, just as the auspex man glanced up from his pict screen.
'Mass torpedo barrage incoming,' he said, a blizzard of contact icons erupting into the space between us and the orks.
'Throne on Earth!' I breathed, horrified. There was no way in the galaxy that the Thunderhawks could intercept that many missiles, but they gave it their best shot, managing to whittle them down by about ten per cent before they struck. Which only left enough to tear the guts out of the cruiser instead of vaporising it.
I braced myself for the ripple of impacts, but instead of the explosions I'd expected, I felt no more than the faintest of tremors through the soles of my boots, as the fast-moving projectiles impacted without detonating against the adamantium hull plates. 'They didn't go off!' I said, buoyed up by a sudden surge of relief, which dissipated almost at once as the obvious explanation occurred to me. 'They must be-'
'Prepare to repel boarders,' Gries voxed through the ship's internal speakers, confirming my conclusion before I could voice it. He turned back to Yaffel. 'Magos?'
'The probability of a successful detection is down to eight point five per cent,' the tech-priest informed him, his voice as uninflected as ever. It might have been my imagination, of course, but I was sure he was oscillating more than usual, however.
'Then recall the Thunderhawks,' Gries said, 'and prepare to withdraw as soon as it falls to five per cent.'
The shipmaster nodded, and opened a vox channel of his own.
'Bridge to enginarium,' he said crisply. 'Prepare for entry into the warp.'
For the second time in as many minutes, my sigh of relief was choked off before completion. Instead of the acknowledgement we'd all been expecting from Drumon or one of the serf enginseers under his supervision, the speaker rang with the sounds of combat and the bellowing war cries of orks. The greenskins had breached the enginarium, and until they were evicted, we wouldn't be going anywhere.
I MUST SAY, we all took it remarkably calmly under the circumstances. Or, to be honest, everyone else did, responding to the unexpected reversal with a flurry of sharp, succinct orders, while I kept a panicky eye on the hololith for any further signs of a greenskin assault. They weren't slow in coming either, with several more waves of boarding torpedoes already inbound, although with the Thunderhawks out of the way, our gunners were reaping a rich harvest of them, having switched their aim from the larger warships. Fortunately, the apparent scramble to claim us as a prize meant that any more destructive incoming fire from the surrounding fleet was sporadic at best, and no more accurate than you might expect, so all in all we were still getting off far more lightly than I would have believed possible. It also probably didn't hurt that several of the greenskin vessels were now exchanging fire with one another, the instinctive aggression of their kind finding a more immediate form of expression now that the battle for the Revenant had reached something of a standstill from their point of view.
'Squad Trosque is en route to the enginarium,' Gries informed the shipmaster, and a sudden sense of foreboding seized me in its talons. I was standing in the middle of the prime target for a boarding party, with Emperor alone knew how many orks charging towards it as fast as their malformed legs could carry them.
I tapped my comm-bead again. 'Jurgen,' I said, 'the greenskins have boarded the Revenant. Numbers unknown. Any sign of them where you are?'
'Not yet, commissar,' my aide responded, sounding a trifle disgruntled if I was any judge. Clearly, Mira had proven to be as acrimonious as I'd anticipated. At least he'd be able to take it out on the orks, though, which I'd no doubt he would, with as much relish as any Valhallan finding a greenskin in his sights[62]. 'Would you like me to go hunting?'
'No, better stay where you are,' I told him, 'and keep an eye on the Viridian envoy.' I'd never hear the last of it, I had no doubt, but the idea of Mira on the loose with a shipful of orks to run into hardly bore thinking about. The mood she was in, she'd probably challenge one to a head-butting contest.
'Oh,' Jurgen said, in the tone I knew all too well was the precursor to telling me something I really didn't want to know. 'I'm afraid the young lady isn't here at the moment, sir. She told me she was coming up to the bridge to see you.'
'Did she?' I said, my stomach plunging to somewhere in the region of my boots. There was no point asking him why he hadn't accompanied her. I'd ordered him to wake her up, and that he'd done, as punctiliously as he fulfilled every other order he was given. And, if I'm honest, in his place I'd have been as pleased to see the back of her as he'd undoubtedly been.
'Would you like me to go after her, sir?' Jurgen offered.
'No, stay in the guest quarters,' I told him, after a fractional pause for thought. They were about as far removed from anything strategically important as it was possible to get aboard the strike cruiser, and although orks weren't exactly renowned for sophisticated tactical analysis, their brutish instincts were often a reasonable substitute. It was still possible that a party of them might blunder in there anyway, of course, but on balance it was as close to a safe refuge as we were likely to find. 'Do whatever you can to make them defensible, and wait for me there. I'll go and retrieve Miss DuPanya.'
I could turn this to my advantage, I thought, as I filled Gries in on this development as succinctly as I could. 'I'm about as much use here as a heretic's oath at the moment,' I concluded, almost in the same breath as Yaffel reporting that if the blasted space hulk was anywhere in the system we weren't going to find it now, so we might as well move on as soon as the little ork problem in the enginarium had been dealt with[63], 'and we can hardly leave her wandering around on her own under the circumstances. If you've no objection, I'll go and escort her back to her quarters.' Which ought to leave me well out of the way if the greenskins attacked the bridge, as I still expected them to at any moment.
'Of course,' Gries said, apparently taking my evident eagerness to get out there for a thinly disguised desire to bag a few orks.
'May the Emperor walk with you.' He made the Mechanicus cogwheel gesture again and turned away to discuss the tactical situation with the shipmaster, no doubt relieved to know that Mira wouldn't be blundering in to distract everyone at some crucial point in the battle if I could get to her first.
I left the bridge as quickly as I could and trotted down the main corridor leading away from it, my weapons in my hands. I was pretty sure I knew which route Mira would take from the guest quarters, and was confident of being able to intercept her without too much difficulty. As I reached the first junction of the corridor, I found a contingent of the ship's crew setting up a lascannon on a tripod, while others settled behind a makeshift barricade with lasguns in their hands, and I began to wonder if my decision to leave the bridge had been a trifle hasty, but there was nothing to be done about that now; and at least I had another bolthole to run for if the greenskins turned out to be between me and the relative safety of the guest quarters after all. Feeling mildly reassured by that, I
