On the plus side, I suppose, we’d managed to deprive the xenos of the easy victory they’d hoped for, and would undoubtedly have seized by now if the extra division of Catachans I’d arrived with hadn’t proved so tenacious, but from where I was sitting it looked uncomfortably as though all we’d managed to do was delay the inevitable. I was sure Zyvan was doing his best to get a proper relief force together, but the tyranid hive fleets had been striking ever deeper into the heart of the Imperium over the past few years, and all too many of our resources were being diverted to contain them; the promised reinforcements could take months to arrive, if they even got here at all.
‘Then we hang on,’ Braddick said, his shoulders slumping with weary resolution, at odds with the sharp creases of his typically ornate Mordian tunic, and I nodded soberly.
‘I don’t see that we’ve any other choice,’ I agreed, all too conscious of the irony.
The thing was, you see, that I needn’t even have been there in the first place. My current position, Commissarial Liaison Officer to the Lord General’s staff, had left me in a position to pick and choose my assignments to a far greater extent than I’d ever dreamed possible in the earlier stages of my long and inglorious career, where circumstance and the long arm of the Commissariat had kept shoving me into harm’s way despite my best efforts to let it gallop past unimpeded. Of course my entirely unmerited reputation for dauntless courage and flamboyant derring-do meant that I was hardly in a position to follow my natural inclination and remain indefinitely on Coronus[3], watching my aide, Jurgen, deal with most of the paperwork passing through my office while I wondered how soon I could slope off for lunch. Maintaining it meant showing my face at the front line from time to time, to encourage the troops and remind Zyvan how lucky he was to have me around, while keeping as far from the enemy as possible in the process.
With this in mind, a quick jaunt to Quadravidia had seemed just the ticket; as I said, we’d expected the relief flotilla I’d hitched a ride with to tip the balance of the war there decisively in our favour, so I should have been able to keep out of trouble without too much difficulty once we’d arrived. More to the point, it would keep me comfortably out of the way of the encroaching hive fleets. I had no desire to end up as a blob of goo in a reclamation pool somewhere, which seemed all too likely if someone decided they needed a Hero of the Imperium around to keep the troops steady in the face of so many scuttling horrors. So, making myself scarce while the high command drew up their plans for the latest attempt to contain the tyranid menace was only prudent.
To cut a long and dismal story short, we arrived in good order, and disembarked by drop-ship, the orbital side of the starport facilities having failed to survive the first tau onslaught[4]. We were harried a bit on the way down, of course, but the Navy had enough fighters still in the air to keep most of the fleas off our backs, and we took only a few losses, digging in around the planetary capital for the most part. Braddick and his Mordians were delighted to see us, especially once our first counter-attack had thrown back the enemy forces to the outer hab ring, and for the first week or so it really looked as if we had the xenos on the run; although I was seasoned enough a campaigner to realise that reclaiming the entire world would be a long and arduous process.
So much the better, I’d thought, envisaging a long spell comfortably behind the firing line, while Zyvan and the Navy got ready to tackle the ’nids. With any luck I could spin things out here long enough to get back to Coronus well after their departure.
So the appearance in orbit a fortnight later of a fleet of tau ‘merchantmen’ [5] came as a pretty unpleasant surprise. By luck or base cunning, probably the latter knowing them, they popped into the system a couple of days after the Imperial flotilla had left for Coronus, and had a clear run for the planet, the gunboats of the SDF[6] having been swept from the sky in the course