positive lock.' The seconds stretched unbearably, the image of the attacking vessel growing ever larger on my screen, until I expected to see ravening beams of energy lancing out from it with every heartbeat.
'Target acquired,' another of the bridge crew said, seeming equally relaxed, and I finally realised that it was Drumon's presence which was making them so dispassionately efficient. Nobody wanted to be the one to let the crew down in front of their masters, so they were all doing it by the book, instead of cutting corners and giving way to impulsive profanity like the Guard troopers I was used to herding so often did when the las-bolts started flying.
A moment later the attacking corvette broke apart, like a seed-head on the wind, as our starboard batteries tore the guts out of it, to leave a slowly dissipating cloud of debris drifting apart in the void.
'Who were they, though?' I asked, not really expecting an answer, but the auspex man answered me anyway.
'The IFF beacon tagged it as the Lady Helene, one of the local System Defence boats[8].'
'Then they ought to have been on our side,' I said, beginning to feel that matters weren't going to be quite so simple after all. If part of the SDF had mutinied, then the chances were that a substantial proportion of their counterparts in the PDF had followed suit (or, more likely, led by example).
'Acknowledged,' Drumon rumbled, and for a moment I thought he'd responded to my comment, before I realised that he'd probably been too busy listening to the voice in his comm-bead to have even heard it. 'I will inform the commissar.'
'Inform me of what?' I asked, already more than half-convinced that I didn't want to know. His first words were enough to tell me I was right about that.
'The situation has deteriorated significantly,' he said, with commendable restraint. 'According to our signal intercepts, a state of civil war now exists throughout the system.'
'Frakking great,' I said, seeing little need to restrain myself under the circumstances. 'Does Captain Gries have any suggestions for dealing with it?'
I'd got to know Drumon well enough by now to be fairly confident that the expression which ghosted across his face was one of faint surprise that I'd even bothered to ask. 'Intervene at once,' he said, then broke off to listen to a voice in his earpiece. 'He is embarking in the hangar deck as we speak, and extends an invitation for you to join him.'
Not, needless to say, an invitation I could even consider refusing. I was there to liaise with the Reclaimers' command staff, which basically meant Gries, so wherever he went, I had to go too. At least until the Imperial Guard forces turned up, and I could find some plausible excuse to go and bother them instead.
'I'd be delighted,' I said, hoping I sounded as though I meant it.
I'D ARRIVED ABOARD the Revenant by teleporter, and been unconscious at the time into the bargain, so this was my first sight of the warship's hangar bay. My immediate impression as I walked through the airtight hatch, which slid closed behind me with a squeal of metal against metal, was one of purposeful activity. The inevitable crowd of Chapter serfs was bustling about under the supervision of a handful whose bearing and demeanour betokened higher rank than their fellows, even though the iconography of their uniforms continued to be strange to me. A startling number of them had visible augmetics, which either indicated a fair degree of hazard in their occupations (even by the standards of serving aboard a warship), or the kind of willingness to voluntarily adopt whatever enhancements would assist their work I'd previously encountered only among the Adeptus Mechanicus. I suspected the latter, as I'd gathered from the skitarii aboard the Omnissiah's Bounty that some kind of pact existed between the Reclaimers and the acolytes of the Machine-God, but there was no time to think about that now. Gries and his entourage were clearly visible in the distance, towering over the surrounding crewmen, and I set off across the echoing metal plain between us as quickly as possible.
Like every hangar I'd ever been in, the chamber was vast, but the very scale of it felt curiously comforting; for the first time since coming aboard I felt a measure of relief from the nagging sense of strangeness I'd experienced everywhere else about the vessel, whose corridors and hatchways had been designed to accommodate the greater-than-human bulk of Space Marines, and left me feeling curiously shrunken. Unlike the docking bays I'd passed through while embarking and departing from troopships, however, the vast space felt clinically efficient. All the apparatus required to refuel and rearm the pair of Thunderhawks currently occupying it was neatly stowed, and there was a marked absence of cargo pallets and other detritus cluttering up the place.
The Thunderhawks were impressive enough, too, and I slowed my pace a little as I neared the closer of them. They weren't as large as the platoon-sized drop-ships the Guard routinely used, let alone the company-sized behemoths I'd ridden in on occasion, but their blocky solidity looked immediately reassuring. Their heavy armour could doubtless soak up a lot of incoming fire, and they seemed more than capable of dishing it out as well as taking it, judging by the amount of ordnance I could see hanging off their airframes. They were painted yellow and white, like the armour of the Astartes marching up the boarding ramp of the one I was approaching, their simultaneous footfalls echoing off the metal mesh like drumbeats, and looked as fresh as if they'd just been rolled out for the first time. Having gathered a little of how much tradition meant to a Space Marine Chapter, I had no doubt that they were considerably more venerable than they appeared, perhaps even centuries old, but their immaculate condition was a tribute to Drumon and the serf enginseers he supervised. It heartened me, too, I have to admit, as I found it hard to conceive of an enemy capable of standing against such a formidable vessel.
I trotted up the ramp in the wake of the power-armoured giants ahead of me, and found myself in a passenger compartment constructed on the same cyclopean lines as everything else sized for Astartes. Only about half of the seats were occupied, and I scrambled into one of the empty ones, feeling oddly like a child in an adult's armchair as I fumbled with the crash webbing. My feet hung awkwardly above the deck plates, and I was unable to draw the webbing quite as tight as I would have wished, but at least I had room for my chainsword without having to remove it from my belt, as would have been the case aboard an Imperial Guard landing barge.
'Commissar.' Gries's helmet turned in my direction, easy to identify, as it was as richly ornamented as his armour and surmounted by a crest of green and black. 'Are you prepared?'
'By the Emperor's grace,' I replied, falling back on one of the stock responses which I generally used to avoid committing myself, and feeling it wouldn't hurt to look a bit more pious than usual surrounded by so many paragons. There were fifteen of them in all: Gries's command squad, which I was pleased to see included Sholer, his narthecium ready for use on his left vambrace, and ten tactical troopers, already broken down into two combat squads. Most carried bolters, which I was more used to seeing mounted on armoured vehicles, as easily as a Guardsman handled his lasgun, while two of their comrades were equipped with heavy weapons it would have taken a team of ordinary troopers to use effectively on the battlefield. One carried a missile launcher, several reloads pouched at his waist, while another casually hefted the first man-portable lascannon I'd ever seen without a groundmount. The faceplates of their helmets were all the same yellow as their gauntlets, although the captain's shone with the lustre of gilding rather than pigment.
'May He watch over us all,' Gries intoned in response, although, to my surprise, he made the cogwheel gesture I generally associated with members of the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than the sign of the aquila.
I didn't have much time to think about that, though, because the boarding ramp was retracting, and the engines fired up to a pitch which left my ears ringing. It might have been fine for the Astartes, whose heads were cocooned inside their helmets, but it was distinctly uncomfortable for me. There was no point complaining about it, however, even if anyone could have heard me, so I just pulled my cap down as far as it would go, and quietly resolved to get hold of some earplugs before I accepted another lift in a Thunderhawk.
'Look in the locker to your left,' the nearest Reclaimer said, his words just about audible over the howling of the engines, even amplified by the vox built into his helmet. With some difficulty I followed his suggestion, since everything was laid out for far longer arms than mine, and discovered a comms headset with padded earpieces and a vox mic on a stalk. I donned it gratefully, and found the noise almost instantly reduced to a level I considered bearable.
'Thank you,' I responded, feeling faintly foolish.
'This is our primary objective,' Gries said, activating a pict screen. It seemed someone on his staff had been busy in the relatively short time since our arrival in-system, and had managed to gather a remarkable amount of information. 'Fidelis, the planetary capital, currently being fought over by three of the major rebel factions. The loyalist forces are dug in around the Administratum cloister, the cathedral precincts, the Mechanicus shrine and the
