hearing with which the Emperor had seen fit to endow him. 'You can rest assured we'll be prepared for any acts of treachery.'
'I'm glad to hear it,' I replied, though I felt a lot less easy than I tried to sound. We'd been ambushed almost as soon as we'd arrived in the Viridia System, and although the Revenant had shrugged off the attack easily enough, Drumon had made it abundantly clear that she was in no fit state to go into battle again. And Viridia had probably been infected by no more than a handful of implanted hosts; if the entire brood aboard the Spawn of Damnation had been roused, and able to rampage through the population virtually unchecked, the Serendipita System could already be lost to humanity. If that were the case, as my increasingly pessimistic imaginings were halfway to convincing me, then it would be like our arrival in the orkhold all over again.
So, as you'll readily appreciate, as we all turned to the pict screen which relayed an image of the universe outside the hull, the lingering nausea of our transition to the materium was the least of my worries.
In the event, I must confess, I found it something of an anticlimax. Instead of the marauding warships I'd steeled myself to expect, there was nothing to be seen in any direction but the reassuring glow of the stars. None of the pinpricks of light appeared to be moving, which came as a further relief; if they had, they could only be vessels of some kind. Of course the auspex operator had far more sophisticated senses to rely on than my eyes, and a moment later he confirmed my immediate impression.
'All clear,' he reported, in the same clipped monotone the whole ship's crew appeared to affect while on duty. 'Commencing detailed scan.'
'How far out are we?' I asked. My paranoia was as acute as ever, leaving me convinced that the system was going to turn out to be another firewasp nest sooner or later, and I wanted to be sure we'd have plenty of warning if trouble came looking for us. None of the speckled lights seemed any brighter than the others, but I was a seasoned enough traveller not to find that strange: at the kind of distances starships usually entered and left the warp, the local sun would be so far away as to appear no larger than any other star in the firmament.
'A little beyond the main bulk of the halo,' Drumon said, a thoughtful expression crossing his face, as he no doubt reached the same conclusion I just had. Innumerable pieces of cosmic flotsam would be clogging our auspex receptors, which meant an attacking flotilla would be all but undetectable at a distance - at least if they had the sense to power down and coast, igniting their engines only for the final attack run.
'That seems a bit far,' I said, determined to seem at ease despite the apprehension gnawing away at me. Starships would usually shoulder their way back into the real galaxy as close to a system's primary as they dared, to minimise the amount of time required to coast in to their destination; something I'd come to appreciate on the long, slow journey Jurgen and I had made from the halo to Perlia aboard a saviour pod.
Yaffel didn't actually shrug, but he contrived to give a passable impression of having done so as he leaned across the hololith table, oscillating slightly in his usual fashion. 'The hulk is drifting randomly, and we simply followed it through to the materium at the point from which it emerged,' he pointed out, in the manner of one of my old schola tutors wearily explaining the blindingly obvious to an indifferent cadre of progeni for about the thousandth time in his career. (A sensation I'm beginning to sympathise with, now I'm the one trying to get the young pups to pay attention.)
'Which might mean it hasn't been in-system long enough for the genestealers to infect anyone,' I said, feeling the first faint stirrings of hope since our arrival. Yaffel looked at me blankly, so I went on to explain. 'All those ork ships were clustered around the last emergence point, weren't they?'
The tech-priest nodded. 'I suppose so. What of it?'
'It must mean the Spawn was there just before we were,' I pointed out, conscious of the irony of the sudden reversal of our positions. 'A flotilla that size couldn't have been mobilised to intercept us that quickly. Those ships must have been going after the hulk, and arrived too late - just in time to target us as we emerged from the warp in its wake.'
'A sound inference,' Gries agreed, and Drumon nodded.
'Which means we should be concentrating our search efforts in this area.' He manipulated the controls of the hololith, muttering incantations under his breath, then hit the display three times with the heel of his hand to stabilise the image. The long-familiar starfield disappeared, to be replaced by a simulation of the stellar system we'd arrived in. A scattering of crimson dots picked out the Imperial population centres, confined for the most part to the moons of the largest gas giant, while a single gold rune marked the position of the Revenant. A three- dimensional grid fanned out in front of it, reaching almost halfway to the sun in the middle of the display.
Yaffel studied it for a moment, then nodded. 'I concur. If the commissar's deduction is correct, which seems extremely likely, the probability of finding the Spawn of Damnation within the demarcated volume is approximately ninety-nine point two seven per cent.'
'I'm pleased to hear it,' I said, moving aside to make room for Gries, who, like all Astartes, required a considerable amount of space to stand in. I liked the sound of that a great deal more than the tech-priest's last set of sums. Even more cheering, from my point of view, was the fact that the gas giant and its attendant cluster of icons was on the far side of the sun, way beyond the area of space Drumon had picked out, and even the closest outpost of civilisation[79] was well outside its boundaries. It was still possible that a scavenger vessel of some kind had stumbled across the hulk, of course, as had appeared to be the case on Viridia, but even that worst-case contingency could be contained if we were quick enough. Despite a lifetime's experience that such feelings were merely the prelude to the discovery of a hitherto unsuspected greater threat, I found myself smiling confidently. 'It seems things are going our way at last.'
DESPITE THE PERSISTENT little voice at the back of my head which continued to insist that things could only be going this well to lull us into a false sense of security, I must confess I found myself beginning to relax over the next few days. The search for our quarry was as painstaking and time-consuming as on every previous occasion, with the obvious exception of the time we were being distracted by orks - the sheer amount of debris in Serendipita's halo was hampering our auspexes just as much as I'd expected it to do. This time, however, I had something productive to get on with, and threw myself into the work with an enthusiasm which surprised me a little.
We had, of course, transmitted the news of our arrival to Serendipita[80] , and the presence of a Space Marine vessel within their borders had created about as much excitement as you might expect, especially once the coin dropped, and the upper echelons of the System Defence Fleet realised that our mission meant a clear and present danger to their home world. Accordingly, a delegation of local worthies had been dispatched to meet us; and since diplomacy was hardly Gries's strong point, I'd found myself called upon to liaise with them in his stead.
To my faint surprise, however, Mira didn't seem to share my enthusiasm for this development, seeming, if anything, positively put out by it. 'I don't see why you have to do all their work for them,' she said, echoes of the pettishness I remembered all too vividly colouring her voice for the first time in weeks.
I shrugged, and sipped my tanna, while she tore a chunk out of a freshly buttered florn cake with her teeth and masticated it savagely. We were enjoying what I sincerely hoped was about to become a rare quiet interlude, before the heavy shuttle bearing the Reclaimers' latest guests arrived, and I felt it best to keep the peace if I could. 'I don't really have a choice,' I pointed out reasonably, transferring one from the salver to my plate while I still had the chance, and topping it with a spoonful of ackenberry preserve. I'd had ample opportunity to observe that Mira's consumption of foodstuffs gained momentum in direct proportion to how affronted she felt, and experience inclined me to safeguard my own provender. 'My orders were to liaise between the Reclaimers and the Imperial Guard, and since there's a Guard garrison on Serendipita, I'd be derelict in my duty if I hadn't contacted them at the earliest opportunity.' And thereby laid the groundwork for my passage back to Coronus, as soon as I could detach myself from this increasingly pointless assignment, although no one needed to know that just yet.
'I can see that,' Mira conceded, with a conciliatory tilt of the head and a faint spray of crumbs. 'I just don't see why you have to waste your time with the rest of them.'
'I'd rather not,' I told her truthfully. 'But they're all arriving together. Splitting them up isn't really an option.'
'No.' She shook her head, and I began to realise she probably understood the situation better than I did: after all, she'd grown up surrounded by competing factions jockeying for position, all needing to be kept working together for the common good. 'It'd create too much division, and if we're going to keep the genestealers from overrunning Serendipita, we all need to be singing from the same psalter.'
