resent it, or show the fact if he did. Despite betraying her aristocratic lineage by sporting a dress uniform even Mira might have regarded as a little over-ornamented, she paid close attention to our deliberations, and such interjections as she made were always cogent. Now she rested her elbows on the table, supporting her chin on her hands, and looked at the general as though she'd requested nothing more significant than a fresh mug of recaf.
'That would be prudent,' Torven agreed, and two sets of aides peeled away from the table, to go into a huddle in one corner of the conference room which had been set aside for our use. Given that the long table and the padded benches were a comfortable size, instead of being scaled for the more massive frame of the Astartes, I assumed that some of the crew were even now cursing us quietly for the disruption to their regular messing arrangements - an impression strengthened by a stain in the grain of the tabletop not far from where I was sitting, which looked uncannily like gravy.
Kregeen nodded, meeting the general's light brown eyes with her own, which were the same flinty grey as her hair. Although she presumably had the same access to juvenat treatments as anyone else of her status, she'd evidently chosen to fix her biological age at around the mid-forties, as a visible reminder of the significance of her office.
'I'll open some channels with the Arbites as well,' she said. 'I'm sure they'll have some useful advice about what to look for.'
'That sounds like a good idea,' I agreed. Like most civilised worlds, Serendipita had a small staff of resident arbitrators to oversee the local law enforcers, and I'd been vaguely surprised not to find one of them included in the delegation[86]. 'They've had more practice at rooting out clandestine activity than anyone else, so if a 'stealer cult does get established, they're almost certain to be the first to know.'
'If they know what they're looking for in the first place,' Torven added.
I nodded. 'Good point. Perhaps you could use the marshal's contacts to make sure they get the benefit of your Keffian veterans' experience.' Not a desperately subtle way of making sure the Guard and the PDF were working together, rather than following their natural inclinations to ignore one another as much as possible, but it seemed to do the job: Torven and Kregeen both nodded, a pair of aides next to them made eye contact and brief entries on their data-slates, and we were onto the next item for discussion.
'It's all well and prudent,' Duque said, having listened to the exchange without commenting, 'to be prepared to fight the genestealers if we have to, but surely it would be far more sensible to eliminate the threat entirely before things get to that point.' He had the pale complexion and ectomorphic build of a void-born, and no doubt felt more comfortable aboard a vessel in space than on the surface of a world, which was quite ironic given the unusual degree of choice his home system offered in that regard.
'It would,' I agreed, 'if that were possible. Do you have any suggestions as to how we go about achieving it?'
The admiral nodded, his pale face bobbing above a midnight-blue uniform which seemed even darker than it actually was by contrast. 'I do,' he assured me, with quiet confidence. He gestured to one of his staff, a junior lieutenant who bore a faint resemblance to him, a niece or a cousin perhaps, and took the data-slate she proffered. 'Given the progress of the search so far, we can assume that the Spawn of Damnation will be located within the week, and most probably a great deal sooner.' He consulted the display, then glanced around the table.
'I've already given orders for the majority of our System Defence Fleet to rendezvous with the Revenant, in the expectation that by the time they arrive, the hulk will have been found.'
'Well done.' Kregeen was nodding in approval. 'If we can keep it blockaded, nothing will be able to get on or off. All we'll have to do is wait for it to fall back into the warp, and blast anything which gets too close or tries to leave in the meantime.'
'Blockaded?' Duque looked surprised for a moment, then smiled, in what looked to me like honest amusement. 'You misunderstand me, madam marshal. I intend to destroy it.'
'With respect, admiral,' I said, 'I think you may be underestimating the sheer size of the thing. I'm given to understand that previous encounters recorded its mass as being on the order of a small planetoid, rather than a spacecraft as we'd normally understand the term.'
'Quite so.' The pale man didn't seem too put out at the interruption.
'But we'll have plenty of time to shoot at it. If the estimates the Astartes have given us are accurate, it will be at least a month before the Spawn passes close enough to any human habitation to pose a threat. We can reduce it a piece at a time if we have to, but reduce it we will.'
'Won't that create an even greater danger?' Torven asked, looking troubled. 'That amount of debris will pose a significant hazard to navigation throughout the system.'
'Not for long,' Duque assured him. 'The Spawn of Damnation is currently heading almost directly for the centre, and will end up falling into a cometary orbit about the sun within the next two to three years. It won't take much to time the attacks to nudge it a little, so that the bulk of the debris will pass close enough to be vaporised. Some of it will escape, of course, but that won't be passing close to Serendipita, or any of the other habs, on this orbit, and by the time it comes round again it'll be the middle of M43; time enough, I would have thought, to take any reasonable precautions against it hitting something.'
'It sounds a bit chancy,' I said, 'but I'd rather have a cloud of junk to deal with than a space hulk full of 'stealers.' After all, there was no telling how long it might take for the Spawn to drop back into the warp again; according to Yaffel they sometimes stayed in the real galaxy for decades, and the thought of thousands of genestealers drifting around a densely inhabited system, just waiting for some idiot whose greed was stronger than their sense of self-preservation to come dropping in looking for loot, made my blood run cold. After all, that's what appeared to have happened on Viridia, and the blasted hulk had only been in-system for less than a day. Duque's SDF could mount a blockade, of course, but the longer it went on, the higher the chances of a 'stealer or two somehow managing to infect a host and sneaking off to wreak havoc.
I nodded judiciously. 'In the absence of a more effective plan to preserve the security of the Serendipita system, I'll recommend we carry it out.'
'OUT OF THE question,' Gries said flatly. By now I'd got to know him well enough to realise a statement like that was effectively the end of the matter, but I have to admit I was taken aback by the speed and vehemence of his reaction.
Accordingly, I merely nodded in response, masking my dismay with the instinctive ease of a man who'd bet heavily on an inordinate number of promising-looking tarot hands in his time, only to realise shortly afterwards that everyone else's were better. (A reflex which had enabled me to scoop rather more pots than I'd otherwise have been entitled to, nevertheless.) 'Might I ask why?' I enquired, as though the answer were merely of academic interest.
I couldn't deny that Duque's scheme was chancy, to say the least, but it still seemed to me that the balance of risk was marginally in its favour.
'Because the Spawn's value is incalculable,' Drumon put in, glancing across the bridge towards the hololith, where Yaffel and a cadre of his red-robed acolytes were twittering away to one another in Binary, as they studied a three-dimensional image of what looked to me like the circulatory system of a diseased heart. 'A space hulk that venerable is a repository of archeotech almost beyond imagining.'
With a sudden sinking feeling, I realised that the diagram the tech-priests were studying so intently must be a schematic of the hulk's interior, no doubt reconstructed from generations of sensor scans culled from the archives, and therefore so out of date as to be worse than useless[87]. 'Don't tell me you're planning to board it?' I protested, too startled to give a frak for protocol.
'We are,' Gries said, in a voice which brooked no argument. It's probably a measure of how startled I was that I tried arguing anyway.
'The potential rewards may well be worth the risk,' I conceded, secure in the knowledge that someone else would be taking it, and determined to at least be diplomatic about my reservations, 'but surely our highest priority has to be the security of Serendipita?'
Clearly, Gries wasn't used to having his decisions called into question, at least by anyone outside his own Chapter[88], but fortunately he seemed willing to make an exception in my case. If anything he seemed surprised, rather than irked, which was fine by me; my sparring sessions with Drumon had left me well aware of the speed and precision with which an angry Astartes could strike down anyone provoking
