'That seems most unlikely,' Yaffel assured me, scooting across to join us, and I found myself wondering how well he was going to fare if the Spawn of Damnation was as chewed up as wrecked ships usually seemed to be[104].
Drumon nodded. 'If they were disabled by enemy action, they would have transmitted some data back before we lost the link,' he pointed out, and, somewhat reassured, I echoed the gesture.
'One did,' Yaffel said, with perfect timing, and my burgeoning confidence wilted again like a Tallarn salad. 'But I can confidently rule out aggression by a genestealer as the cause.'
'I'm delighted to hear it,' I said. 'And the reason for your confidence would be...?'
Yaffel quivered a little, although whether it was from suppressed indignation at my manifest scepticism, or the vibrations set up in the deck by the synchronised plodding towards the Thunderhawk of our Terminator escort, I couldn't rightly have said. 'The CAT in question was equipped with motion sensors,' he said. 'Nothing could have approached it within twenty metres without registering, and nothing did. So, unless you're aware of a genestealer capable of travelling in excess of ninety metres a second, in order to overwhelm the response time of the auspex to movement within its vicinity, simple mechanical failure seems far more likely.' He seemed genuinely put out by the admission, which I suppose was only to be expected, having noted on previous occasions how loath tech-priests generally were to admit that anything might go wrong with their precious contraptions.
'Stealers are hellish fast,' I agreed, 'but not that quick.' Another thought struck me, and I seized on it eagerly, seeing a last, faint hope of avoiding this ridiculous enterprise. 'I don't suppose any of your mechanical moggies were able to tell if there's anything fit to breathe over there?' The Reclaimers wouldn't care one way or the other, of course, and for all I knew everyone in the tech-priest contingent had been fitted with augmetic lungs, but I most definitely required something with a dollop of oxygen in it to keep me going. I'd tried breathing vacuum once before, and that was novelty enough for one lifetime.
'They were,' Drumon assured me. 'Both composition and pressure are well within tolerable limits for an unmodified human.'
'Well, that's nice to know,' I said, as the air in my immediate vicinity became marginally less wholesome, announcing the arrival of my aide.
'Sorry to keep you waiting, sir,' Jurgen said, with a salute-like wave in the general direction of Drumon, a compromise he generally fell back on when unsure precisely where someone connected to the military stood in relation to his own somewhat nebulous position[105], and a businesslike nod to Yaffel. 'I was preparing a flask and a few sandwiches, in case you got a bit peckish later on.'
'Thank you, Jurgen,' I said, and although it would have taken a lot more than a quick slurp of tanna to perk me up at that point, I felt my spirits beginning to revive nevertheless. As I've remarked before, his phlegmatic demeanour and apparently boundless confidence in my leadership, however misplaced, was curiously heartening. His lasgun was slung from one shoulder, in an apparently casual fashion which belied the speed with which he could reverse and use it, and, as ever, he seemed perfectly willing to follow me on this absurd escapade with no more thought for the risks involved than he would have employed on a foray into the kitchen in search of a snack.
His flak armour was partially obscured by a tangle of pouches and webbing, containing Emperor alone knew what (apart from a flask of tanna and some sandwiches, of course, although their precise location was anybody's guess), but by now we'd served together for so long that something would have seemed seriously amiss if he was prepared to venture into the field without it. 'Your timing's impeccable, as always.' Which wasn't exactly true, but no one else seemed quite ready to leave either.
'We might as well board,' Drumon said, leading the way up the ramp and into the bowels of the Thunderhawk. Seeing no further reason to delay, I followed suit, Jurgen trotting at my heels. Yaffel stayed where he was, hovering anxiously, while a couple of loading servitors with the Adeptus Mechanicus sigil proudly displayed on their tabards plodded towards the Thunderhawk bearing brass-bound boxes, for all the galaxy like an apprehensive habwife watching the family porcelain being heaved into a pantechnicon by carters. What they contained I had no idea, and cared even less, beyond inferring that they had something to do with the tech-priests' scavenging expedition[106].
The interior of the passenger compartment seemed rather less commodious than I remembered, around a dozen Terminators taking up quite a lot of room[107], but we found seats with little difficulty - and this time I made sure that I got hold of a headset before strapping in. The seat Drumon had steered me to, before settling into his own, between the looming bulk of the Terminators and the red-robed tech-priests twittering away to one another in Binary, had a clear line of sight to a nearby viewport, through which I watched Yaffel directing the stowage of the last of his baggage before scooting up the ramp to join us.
No sooner had he done so than the boom of the closing hatch, felt rather than heard over the rising racket of the engines, echoed through my bones, and the suffocating sense of apprehension I'd fought so hard to dispel swept over me once more. Like it or not, I was committed, about to set foot aboard a warp-spawned deathtrap, and however devoutly I might wish it, there could be no turning back.
I DON'T SUPPOSE the short hop from the strike cruiser to the Spawn of Damnation took more than a handful of minutes[108], but it seemed an eternity to me, my apprehension growing with every passing second. To distract myself, I flicked through the frequencies the headset could pick up, but none of the conversations I overheard made much sense: the Mechanicus contingent seemed content to continue warbling at one another in their own private language, the Terminators were absorbed in one of the pre-battle litanies peculiar to their Chapter and Drumon seemed to be meditating, no doubt praying to the Omnissiah to provide a sufficiently juicy stash of archeotech to make the absurd risk we were running worth taking. Since Jurgen was never exactly a sparkling conversationalist at the best of times, I was effectively thrown back on my own company, with nothing to occupy my mind apart from the ominous view through the panel of armourcrys facing me.
Until our Thunderhawk left the docking bay, I'd had no idea how close to the space hulk the Revenant had moved; but almost as soon as the sturdy gunship moved out of the shadow of the hangar doors, the vast derelict was filling the viewport, like a misshapen metal asteroid. As our pilot boosted us away, on a parabolic trajectory towards the shattered hull of the Redeemer-class vessel somewhere on the far side of the vast conglomeration of scrap, the strike cruiser shrank rapidly, diminished by distance, while the dimensions of the space hulk seemed largely unchanged. I found myself reminded of the tiny fish that accompany oceanic leviathans[109], then, rather less comfortably, of the lesser bioforms which swarm about the massive bulk of a tyranid hive ship.
Though I tried to pick out some of the more identifiable features I remembered from the hololithic image Drumon and Yaffel had shown me, the effort was futile. I'd seen spacecraft from the outside before, of course, but in every case their hulls had been limned by a myriad of light sources, from the huge luminators guiding shuttle pilots into the hangar bays to the sputtering sparks of the welding torches in the hands of the void-suited tech- adepts pottering about on the hull, not to mention the warm, welcoming glow seeping from uncountable viewports. The immense bulk of the Spawn of Damnation was utterly dark, however, as bleak and inhospitable as the void itself, so that despite its size and solidity it seemed an insubstantial phantom, appearing only as a hole of greater darkness against the glittering backdrop of the stars.
After a few moments the glowering shadow had expanded to encompass the entire viewport, and I felt an overpowering sense of vertigo, as though we were falling down an infinite abyss ripped into the fabric of the universe. I gripped the armrests tightly and listened to the hammering of my heart, which for a moment or two seemed to drown out the perpetual howl of the Thunderhawk's engine[110] .
It was only at this point, perhaps because we were so close by now, that I finally began to pick out patterns in the darkness, deeper shadows which spoke of fissures in the accretion of detritus below us, and the faint gleam of reflected starlight striking highlights from peaks and promontories in the horizon of twisted metal.
'Magnificent!' Yaffel breathed, apparently in all sincerity, and I found myself reflecting that there was never a heavy object around to throw when you really needed one.
'Let's hope you still think that when you've got a pack of genestealers snapping at your heels,' I said, momentarily forgetting that he didn't have any, and with a touch more asperity than politeness and protocol would normally have allowed.
'Our Terminators should be able to keep them at arm's length, at least,' Drumon commented wryly, rousing
