'Could it just be a vessel?' Gries asked, leaning forwards a little, as though he could force the pict screen to greater magnification purely by willpower. 'The SDF flotilla should be nearing the rendezvous point by now.'
'Unlikely,' Drumon told him. 'None of the System Defence boats would be that far out of position.' He loomed over the auspex operator and made some minute adjustments to the dials set into the surface of the control lectern, pinching them delicately between the fingers of his gauntlets, like an ogryn trying to pick up a porcelain tea bowl.
'Displacement reads in the gigatonnes.'
'Then it's the Spawn,' Yaffel said, sounding rather more excited than was strictly commensurate with his position. He wasn't exactly hopping up and down, which would have been difficult given his lack of legs, but he was definitely oscillating more violently than usual. 'It's the only reasonable inference.'
'And right where you predicted it would be,' I reminded him, which wasn't exactly true, as he'd only been able to narrow it down to a pretty wide volume of space, but he didn't seem inclined to quibble about it, merely nodding sagely in agreement.
'The Omnissiah leads us down the path of logic to a sure destination[96] ,' he said, with the comfortable certainty of a man for whom the universe not only ran like clockwork, but chimed the first few bars of ''Throne Eternal'' on the hour.
'Boosting the gain on the long-range imagifers,' Drumon said, doing something I couldn't see to the back of a nearby lectern with his servo-arm, and Yaffel trundled over to the hololith, where he began to poke around in turn.
'Then if the interociters hold together,' the tech-priest added, 'we should be able to... Omnissiah be praised.' The three-dimensional display flickered into life, and the image of what looked like a jagged piece of scrap metal began to tumble gently within it, growing larger with every passing minute, until it filled the space almost entirely. It wavered a bit, as such representations generally do, but Yaffel seemed to know what he was about, and with a few muttered benedictions, some fiddling with the controls, and a well-placed thump of his fist, he steadied the image.
'The Spawn of Damnation,' Drumon said, his voice remarkably hushed for a Space Marine. Gries nodded, apparently too overcome to speak at all, and his battered half-face relaxed into an expression I found hard to interpret, but had certainly never seen there before.
I studied the image, seeing nothing that made much sense at first. I was aware of the scale of the thing intellectually, of course, but it wasn't until I suddenly recognised a small blemish on the surface as a Galaxy-class troopship that something of the awe clearly felt by everyone else present transmitted itself to me. 'Throne on Earth,' I found myself saying. 'It's vast!'
Even that involuntary exclamation barely began to cover the sheer size of the hulk. It was big the way a small moon is, beyond any sense of scale a human can grasp or relate to[97]. Despite knowing the effort was pointless, I began to try to pick out more details, but any attempt to impose order or understanding on the tangled lump of wreckage was doomed to failure. Even trying to estimate the number of vessels which had fallen victim to this reef of space, only to become part of it in their turn, was impossible; at least for me, although I was sure Yaffel would have been able to take a shot at it. Drawn together by eddies in the warp currents, their physical structures had become combined and mingled, twisted around and within one another as they collided, rather than shattering and fragmenting as they would have done in the materium. It was as if a vast hand had scooped up a random selection of starships, and kneaded them together like a pastrycook with a fistful of dough. And it wasn't just ships: I was sure that here and there I could make out the harsher lines of pieces of natural debris, rocks and asteroids, drawn in by the gravitational field of the hulk during its periodic transitions through realspace, to become inextricable parts of it in the crucible of the warp.
The worst thing about it, however, was the sense of menace it radiated, an almost palpable threat, like the snarling of an ork just before it charges.
'Where are you planning to board it?' I asked Yaffel, and he indicated a semi-intact hull about three-quarters of the way round the lump from the wreck of the Galaxy I'd previously recognised.
'The docking bay here,' he told me, and I was orientated at last, my underhiver's synapses instinctively overlaying the internal structure I'd seen before on the exterior view. 'The sensor records we recovered from the archives are some centuries old, of course, but they seem to indicate that it could be made functional again with little effort.'
'So long as a 'stealer brood hasn't set up home there in the interim,' I said, not entirely sure how serious I was being.
'We'll take precautions,' Yaffel assured me, sounding blithely unconcerned; but I'd seen purestrains up close too often, and too recently, to dismiss the threat they represented so casually.
'Then you'd better hope to the Throne they're sufficient,' I counselled, perhaps a little more sharply than I'd intended. It may have been this which drew Drumon to join us, or perhaps he just wanted a better view of the space hulk. At any event he was suddenly at my side, looming over me like a well-disposed promontory.
'They will be,' he promised. 'By the time we get over there, we will know where the bulk of the brood is.' His demeanour was calm, and despite the improbability of his claim, I found myself reassured. After all, he was one of the Emperor's chosen, and he'd probably been facing 'stealers or worse since my great-grandfather was tracking bounties in the sump (or trying to outrun the would-be collectors of his own, most likely)[98], so he ought to know what he was doing.
'How soon will that be?' I asked, conscious of my responsibilities to Torven and the others. If I was going to make a good case for transferring my liaison post to the Imperial Guard headquarters on Serendipita, I'd better have some juicy titbits to throw to them.
Drumon considered the question a moment. 'Around twelve hours,' he said. 'The cats should have dispersed enough to locate any active genestealers by that point.'
'Cats?' I echoed, baffled. Plenty of Guard regiments use animals for one purpose or another on the battlefield, generally as cavalry mounts or attack beasts, but I'd never heard of Astartes doing so; and even if they did, felines would hardly seem the most likely creatures to give a genestealer a run for its money.
'See ay tee,' Yaffel elucidated, no doubt divining my confusion.
'Cyber-Altered Task units. Like very simple servitors, without the biological components.'
'Then how do they work?' I asked, even more puzzled than before. I might not have been a tech-priest, but even I knew it was the living brain which allowed a servitor to remember and process simple instructions.
'Quite satisfactorily,' Drumon said, with a momentary smile at his own wit, before continuing. 'They require no cognitive functions; just a simple vox circuit to relay picts and other environmental data. Once released, they just keep moving in a straight line until they reach an obstacle.'
'Of which,' I said, equally dryly, 'I suspect the Spawn of Damnation has more than its share.'
'Undoubtedly,' Yaffel agreed, apparently as constitutionally incapable of recognising sarcasm as the majority of those in his vocation.
'But the CATs have a simple mechanism attached to their tracks. When they reach an obstruction they can't negotiate, they simply rotate ten degrees on the spot, before moving forwards again. If they're still impeded, they repeat the process, and so on. Eventually they find a direction they can progress in.'
'They sound ingenious,' I said, wondering which of them had come up with the idea, and suspecting it was probably Drumon; the devices Yaffel was describing seemed to fit his practical turn of mind rather better than the tech-priest's analytical one[99].
'They should serve their purpose,' Drumon agreed. 'We plan to teleport thirty of them across to the hulk, around the area we intend operating in. If there are enough genestealers around to pose a threat, we'll know about it long before the Thunderhawk arrives.'
'That sounds like a wise precaution,' I agreed, nodding judiciously. If I'd been going off to loot a derelict, knowing there was a 'stealer brood lurking somewhere aboard, I'd feel a lot happier knowing where they were too - or, at least, that they weren't in the immediate vicinity of where I planned to be. 'Can you stick a bolter on them as well?'
Yaffel shook his head, failing to recognise the joke. 'That wouldn't be a practical option,' he began. 'The power-to-weight ratio-'
'Pity,' I said, little realising how prescient I was being. 'That might save everyone a lot of trouble.'
