All of which left me without the proverbial paddle. I wasn’t dead yet, though, and I’d been in tighter spots than this before now, so I dispensed a few encouraging platitudes, bade everyone in the bunker a good night, and withdrew, ostensibly to go and make sure the troopers on our perimeter were keeping up to the mark. I was by no means certain the final assault would come tonight, but if it did the command bunker would be a singularly unhealthy place to be. I had no doubt that the technosorcery of the tau would have pinpointed it to the millimetre, and that it was top of the list for a visit from one of their strike teams.
‘Good meeting, sir?’ Jurgen asked, materialising from the shadows, his unique and earthy aroma greeting me a good three seconds before he had time to open his mouth.
‘I’ve had better,’ I admitted, with more candour than I’d normally employ. But Jurgen had served with me for nigh on seventy years by that point, saving my miserable hide more often than either of us could count, and I owed him as much honesty as I ever gave anyone.
Our brief exchange was punctuated by heavy weapon discharges flickering in the distance like a gathering storm, lacerating the grey overcast of early evening, stark against the red-tinged sky. Not all the red was due to the sunset either; hab blocks were ablaze in a dozen places throughout the beleaguered city. Unfortunately the firestorms hampered our movements as much as the tau, if not more so: the xenos were able to hop about in their anti-gravitic vehicles pretty much as they wished, instead of having to grind their way along laboriously cleared routes like our Chimeras and Leman Russ were forced to do, only to end up in the middle of an ambush as like as not.
‘Tanna, sir?’ Jurgen said, producing a flask from somewhere among the tangle of webbing he was habitually festooned with, and I took it gratefully. The evenings were chill here in the equatorial mountains, where the capital had been founded, although why they hadn’t put it somewhere a little more clement was beyond me[7].
‘Thank you,’ I said, sipping the fragrant beverage, and savouring the tendril of warmth which oozed its way down into my stomach. ‘Shall we go?’
‘Ready whenever you are, sir,’ my aide assured me, scrambling into the driving seat of the Salamander we’d requisitioned from the transport pool shortly after our arrival. The engine was grumbling quietly to itself already, Jurgen being far too seasoned a veteran to risk even the second or two’s delay that firing it up would take if we were caught flat-footed this close to a combat zone.
I clambered into the passenger compartment, returning the salutes of a squad of Guardsmen double-timing it past us in the direction of the main gate as I did so. With reflexes honed by decades of exposure to Jurgen’s robust driving style, I grabbed at the pintle mount for support an instant before we jerked into motion.
It was as well that I did, for in regaining my balance my eyes drifted skywards. Black shapes were moving above the buildings the fading light had now reduced to stark-edged silhouettes; etched against the crimson glow, the gracefully sinister curvature of their surfaces betraying their origin unmistakably.
‘Incoming!’ I voxed, opening fire with the storm bolter as I did so, quietly cursing my luck. The attack I’d anticipated, and come so close to avoiding, had arrived.
EDITORIAL NOTE:
It will hardly come as a surprise to most of my readers that, beyond a few desultory complaints about the air temperature, Cain says little about Quadravidia itself. The following extracts may go some way towards remedying this deficiency.
From Interesting Places and Tedious People: A Wanderer’s Waybook, by Jerval Sekara, 145.M39.
Quadravidia will be a familiar destination for most seasoned travellers in and around the Damocles Gulf, since it has the great good fortune to be situated at the confluence of no fewer than four warp currents of unusual swiftness and stability. Unsurprisingly, therefore, this is a world, or, to be more precise, an entire planetary system, which tends to be passed through rather than visited. Indeed, it is quite possible to transfer between vessels aboard one of the many orbital docks and void stations which ring it about without ever setting foot on the planet at all.
Nevertheless, it can be worth breaking a longer journey here for a prolonged sojourn, or even making it