what that'll have evolved into.' Or what it lived on, come to that. Foraging wouldn't exactly be easy in an environment composed mainly of metal, which was why the genestealers tended to hibernate between systems. (At least according to the archives Gries had authorised my access to, and remarkably thin they'd turned out to be, considering this particular space hulk had first been reliably identified almost two thousand years ago[115].)
Yaffel subsided, looking a bit less sure of himself, although I had little enough time to enjoy my minor victory. I voxed Drumon, sure that he'd been paying at least partial attention to the conversation. 'Any change in the readings from the CATs?' I enquired.
'Still no sign of movement in their immediate vicinity,' the Techmarine responded at once, confirming my guess. 'But another one just ceased transmission.'
'In the same way as the first?' I asked, feeling a sense of vague disquiet.
'Precisely,' Drumon confirmed. His helmet swivelled towards Yaffel.
'It should be recovered for examination. So high a failure rate may point to an unforeseen environmental factor.'
'That may be the case,' the tech-priest conceded, sounding more than a little unhappy at the possibility. 'But our highest priority has to be the recovery of the cogitator core.'
I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of the data-slate Yaffel had produced. A deck plan, familiar from the hololith aboard the Revenant, was displayed on the tiny screen, our position marked precisely where I'd expected us to be, and a speckling of icons around us picked out the cordon of Terminators. A wider scattering of coloured dots a little way beyond them, most of which were moving slowly and erratically, just had to be the CATs; the one nearest to us was both stationary and limned in red, indicating that it had just malfunctioned.
'That goes without saying,' I said, thinking rapidly. If Jurgen and I branched off at the next cross corridor, always assuming we could squeeze past the Terminator guarding it, we'd reach the downed mechanism in a handful of minutes. It wouldn't be hard to manhandle it back to the Thunderhawk, and we could spend the rest of the time before our departure with several centimetres of ceramite and a reassuring amount of firepower between us and the genestealers infesting this deathtrap, instead of roaming around a pitch-dark labyrinth waiting for something to pounce on us. 'But Drumon has a point too. If there is something about the hulk affecting our devices, there's no telling what could fail next.'
'That's highly unlikely,' Yaffel said, with an air of studied unconcern, no doubt reflecting that for someone as dependent on augmetics as he was I'd just raised a rather disturbing possibility. 'But I suppose it would be prudent to look into it. What do you suggest?'
'Maybe Jurgen and I could recover the CAT,' I said, as if the idea had only just occurred to me, 'while you push on to the objective. We won't be much help with the theological stuff anyway, and everyone else will be needed to salvage the cogitators.'
'That would seem to be the most efficient use of our resources,' Drumon agreed. He indicated the icon marking the Terminator guarding the next junction. 'Brother Blain can accompany you, as that shouldn't compromise our perimeter. He can resume his post once you've picked up the CAT.'
'Sounds good to me,' I agreed, passing through a doorway into a roughly square chamber, where the clawed Terminator who'd conversed with us briefly aboard the Thunderhawk was on sentry go. Like the other portals we'd passed through on the way here[116], it had been left open, presumably by the advance guard ahead of us; the door to the left as we entered was open too, the tracks on the floor of the exposed corridor confirming that it was indeed the route to our objective, while the pair directly ahead and to our right remained tightly closed.
Jurgen and I moved aside, into the far corner, clearing the way for the rest of our party to turn to the left and clatter off into the darkness, while Drumon and Blain exchanged a few words. If the Terminator was surprised or resentful of his sudden change of orders he gave no sign of it, merely beckoning to us to follow as he slapped the palm plate set into the wall next to the door opposite the one we'd entered the room by.
'This way,' he said, unnecessarily, as the thick steel plate moved smoothly aside, with none of the metallic groaning I'd become used to aboard the vessels I'd travelled on. Jurgen shone his luminator down the corridor thus revealed, picking out nothing more threatening than another identical portal closing off the end of it some ten or twelve metres away.
'After you,' I said, mindful of my earlier fears, and unwilling to find myself trapped between a jammed doorway and a lumbering ceramite giant if it all went ploin-shaped, something my well-developed paranoid streak kept insisting could only be a matter of time. Whatever the tech-priest might prefer to believe, there were definitely genestealers somewhere around, and that meant they were bound to show up sooner or later. 'Anything on the auspex?' It was also a pretty safe bet that, like the Terminator we'd passed on our way here, Blain had enough sensory gear built into his helmet to give us a useful head start if the 'stealers started moving in on our position.
'Nothing significant,' Blain said. 'I'm picking up faint signs of movement on the deck above us, but nothing on this level at all.' He led the way into the narrow passage, filling it almost completely, like a mobile wall, while Jurgen and I trotted in his wake, our weapons aimed back behind us in case of unexpected ambush. A moment later he stopped abruptly, almost provoking an undignified collision. 'It should be through here.'
Another pneumatic hiss, as air pressures equalised on either side of the opening door, and he stepped through into a wider pool of darkness. Jurgen followed, sweeping the laminator around the walls, and, reassured that there was nothing lurking in the gloom waiting to pounce, I took up the rear.
We were in another square chamber, I realised at once, the ambient echoes enough to tell me that even if the beam of my aide's luminator hadn't been bouncing off the walls, picking out another three doors, all closed. Blain was plodding towards the middle of the enclosed space, casually pushing aside a few scattered cargo containers which would have taxed a heavy-lift servitor, when he stopped and looked down. (Or, to be more accurate, his helmet tilted a few degrees from the vertical, which seemed to be about as much head movement as anyone wearing a Terminator suit was capable of.)
'It's over here,' he said, gesturing towards a tangle of twisted metal by his foot.
Jurgen and I hurried over to join him, the shattered mechanism pinned in the beam of the luminator. I activated my comm-bead, staring at the wrecked CAT in perplexity. Things had indeed taken a turn for the worse, but not quite in the manner I'd anticipated.
'Drumon,' I voxed, 'we've found it. And you were right about an environmental factor being to blame.'
'With respect, commissar,' Yaffel cut in, before the Techmarine was able to reply, 'that's hardly a determination you're qualified to make.'
'In this case I am,' I said, not too perturbed to enjoy the moment.
'Somebody's shot it. With a medium-calibre bolter, if the damage is anything to go by.'
There was a moment of stunned silence, broken only by the faint hissing of static, before Drumon replied. 'Genestealers do not use guns.'
'Hybrids do,' I said, with the unshakable authority of personal experience. 'I recommend you proceed with extreme caution.' Which was hardly necessary advice under the circumstances, but it wouldn't hurt to look as though I was taking the mission seriously.
'Noted,' Drumon replied, in the tones of a man intending to follow that advice to the letter.
I turned to Blain. 'Anything on the auspex within firing range?' I asked, suddenly conscious that what might have seemed a reasonably safe distance from a purestrain would be anything but from a hybrid with a bolter.
'Still nothing on this level,' he assured me, sounding faintly disappointed - but then he was walking around behind enough ceramite to shrug off a direct hit from anything short of a tank shell[117].
Not being similarly blessed, I was a great deal less sanguine, you may be sure.
I walked around the chewed-up mechanism, wondering how best to shift it. Up close, it seemed a lot larger, and considerably more unwieldy, than I'd anticipated. Jurgen and I should still be able to manage it between us, though, but it would mean having to stow our weapons, and for a moment I hesitated; but our journey back to the hangar bay would be protected by the cordon of Terminators, so the risk of doing that should be minimal, and the only alternative I could see was to admit defeat and catch up with the others. I'd promised Drumon I'd recover his toy, and scuttling back to the Thunderhawk without it would undermine my credibility with his Chapter, so it was either that or show willing by taking my turn as 'stealer bait. Something about the shattered CAT's position seemed
