himself from his trance in time to forestall whatever riposte the tech-priest might have been about to make.
'Bolter range would be better,' I said, inflecting it like a pleasantry, and nodding to convey my gratitude to him for helping to smooth over a potentially awkward moment.
'Better for some,' the nearest Terminator put in, raising a hand to display the fearsome claws I'd last seen ripping apart an artillery piece. His helmet swivelled in my direction, the voice issuing from it imbued with the calmness which comes from unshakable confidence. 'Arm's length suits me.'
'I'm pleased to hear it,' I replied politely. 'In my experience, the one thing you can say for genestealers is that there are always enough to go around.'
'Well said,' the sergeant I'd last seen in the ruins of Fidelis put in. 'If they turn up, we'll be ready.'
'They're not going to turn up,' Yaffel said, with an edge to his voice which might have been irritation if tech- priests hadn't been supposed to be above such things. 'The corridors around the beachhead are completely free of the creatures. None of the CATs has registered any movement.'
'Then where the frak are they?' I asked, not unreasonably.
'In hibernation, probably,' Yaffel said. 'If there are any left alive at all.' Though he wasn't exactly built for shrugging, he made a creditable effort, which his shoulder harness effectively neutralised. 'We're only inferring their presence, after all, from the infiltration of Viridia. It's possible the infestation came from another source entirely.'
'Possible,' Drumon conceded, 'but hardly probable.'
'Be that as it may,' Yaffel said, effectively conceding the argument, probably because if he did bother to work out the odds as he usually did it would have demolished his own position[111] , 'there's no reason to suppose that there was ever more than a handful of the creatures on board.'
'Can I have that in writing?' I asked, once again allowing something of the agitation I felt to imbue the words with rather more testiness than I'd intended. 'If there really are 'stealers aboard the hulk it's because the tyranids put them there, and they never bother with just a handful of anything when a few hundred will do.' As it turned out, even that was a woeful underestimate, but as I was still in blissful ignorance of that particular fact, my initial guess worried me more than enough to be going on with.
Any further debate was cut short by a few uncomfortable moments as the engines fired again, and the Thunderhawk pitched abruptly, its nose coming up as the pilot aligned it with whatever was left of the old Redeemer's docking bay. Then the gunship's external floodlights came on, throwing the wilderness of metal outside into clear visibility, and an audible gasp rose from the little coterie of tech-priests, despite most of them no doubt feeling such blatant displays of emotion were a trifle infra dig in the normal course of events.
Not that I could blame them for that. In its own way, the metallic landscape was quite awe-inspiring, though undeniably bleak. It spread out below us, filling the viewport to the jagged horizon, a wasteland of bent and buckled hull plates, sheared structural members and what looked to me uncomfortably like the wreck of a utility craft of a similar size to our Thunderhawk. Whatever it was had impacted too quickly for much to remain identifiable, but there was a wrongness about the proportions of the pieces of tangled wreckage which made me suspect it had been of xenos manufacture. Before I could draw Drumon's attention to it and ask his opinion, however, it had passed out of sight, and our descent had become even more precipitous.
Having been through more docking runs than I could count, even in those days, I gripped the armrests of my chair just as the pilot rolled us vertiginously around, the on-board gravity field fluctuating uncomfortably for a second or two as it synchronised with the local one and established a subtly different direction for down. Now, instead of descending, we appeared to be approaching a solid wall of fissured metal, and, despite knowing intellectually that our pilot was more than competent, I tensed involuntarily for an impact my hindbrain insisted was about to come.
It didn't, of course. No sooner had Jurgen's muttered imprecation about the flight crew's parentage faded into the echoes around us than the exterior of the derelict disappeared, to be replaced by the walls of a docking bay.
'This appears to still be functional,' Yaffel said, his tone adding an unspoken ''I told you so''.
'It does indeed,' Drumon agreed, 'but appearances are often deceptive.'
'Quite so,' Yaffel agreed. 'But we should be able to get the doors closed and the chamber pressurised without too much difficulty.' The hull-mounted luminators were reflecting brightly back from walls of age-dulled metal, their buttresses more slender and finely wrought than those I was used to seeing aboard Imperial vessels, and the arcane mechanisms scattered about the periphery of the docking bay seemed somehow simpler and more compact. What this meant I had no idea, beyond a vague notion that our intrepid hunters of archeotech had been pipped to the post, and that anything useful had probably been salvaged by others generations before; but Yaffel and the others didn't seem in the least bit downhearted, chirruping away to one another nineteen to the dozen, and pointing things out with fingers and mechadendrites like juvies in a confectionery store.
A final impact jarred against my spine, and the shrieking of the engines died back to a pitch which enabled me to remove the headset. Jurgen shook his head, scattering dandruff, as he followed suit.
'Well, that didn't take long,' he commented, checking his lasgun as he hopped down to the floor from the Astartes-sized chair he'd been sitting in. 'Better bring a footstool next time.'
'Good idea,' I said, flexing the pins and needles out of my legs, and wondering why I hadn't thought of that myself. A faint tremor was transmitting itself through the deck beneath my feet, which seemed a little odd, and I found myself looking around for the cause.
'Amazing,' Yaffel said, staring out of the viewport for a moment, before turning to Drumon with a self- congratulatory air. 'The autonomic relays appear still to be functioning.'
I didn't have a clue what he was talking about, of course, but the gist of it was clear enough: the ship's machine-spirit must still have been watching over the hangar bay, even after all these millennia, because the massive doors were sliding closed, with a smoothness and precision quite eerie to behold. Back on the Revenant it had taken a dozen void-suited crewmen to supervise the equivalent mechanism, and the same number again to begin pumping the atmosphere into the chamber once it was sealed. Here, it seemed, the ship was capable of doing the job for itself.
'Who's closing the hangar doors?' Jurgen asked, hefting his lasgun as he peered out of the viewport, evidently expecting hordes of ambushers to rush the Thunderhawk at any moment.
'The vessel's machine-spirit,' the tech-priest told him, no doubt relishing the chance to expound on the miracles of the Machine-God, despite my aide's manifest inability to grasp the finer points of technotheology. (Not that mine's all that great either, I must confess.
Either something works or it doesn't so far as I'm concerned, and if it doesn't it's an enginseer's problem. That's why we have tech-priests in the first place.) 'It's clearly aware of our presence.'
'Then let's hope it's the only one,' I said, scanning the shadows for signs of movement. I had no idea if genestealers could survive without air[112], but I learned a long time ago that it never pays to underestimate an enemy.
Drumon glanced in my direction, a data-slate in his hand, and nodded reassuringly. 'None of the CATs are registering movement,' he said, 'so it seems a reasonable inference.'
'So far,' I said.
'So far,' Drumon agreed, and donned his helmet. When he spoke again, his voice was flattened a little by the external vox speaker. 'I'll let you know the moment anything registers.' He began to make his way to the nearest airlock, no doubt intent on doing whatever was necessary to provide us with something outside we could breathe, but before he could enter it, I became aware of a faint tendril of mist wafting past the viewport.
'I think you've just been saved another job,' I said, beginning to understand why he and Yaffel were so keen to recover the ancient technologies which made marvels like this possible. Once they were understood, they could undoubtedly be used for the benefit of the Imperium in ways I couldn't even imagine. However great the hypothetical gains may have been, however, the threat of the genestealers was both real and immediate, and I resolved not to let my guard down for a second.
'So it appears,' the Techmarine agreed. He gestured towards the boarding ramp, including us all in the general invitation. 'Shall we take advantage of the fact?'
'By all means,' I agreed, determined to at least look as though I felt confident of surviving the next few hours, and fell into step beside him.
