‘Of course.’ She inclined her head. ‘I will make the appropriate arrangements.’
‘The real problem’s the number of other ships in the sky,’ Zyvan said. ‘Every auspex in the fleet is being clogged up with thousands of returns[66]. We need to close the system to civilian traffic for the duration of the emergency.’
‘Out of the question,’ Dysen said, quite predictably. ‘We’re completely reliant on imported foodstuffs. Our protein synthesis plants can only provide enough nutrients for forty-seven per cent of the population.’
‘Then ration it,’ Zyvan snapped.
‘Not an option, I’m afraid,’ Kildhar said, with a passable attempt at a regretful expression. ‘Nutritional intake for the general populace is precisely calculated to maintain the maximum level of health with the minimum expenditure of resources. Even a five per cent reduction will have noticeably deleterious effects, and reducing daily allowances to a level commensurate with equal distribution would starve everyone to death within a month.’
‘That couldn’t happen,’ I said, to her evident surprise. I smiled, without humour. ‘The riots would have levelled the hives long before that.’
‘A good point,’ she agreed. ‘The tithe workers would undoubtedly respond in an emotional manner.’
‘So we can’t reduce the level of shipping,’ Zyvan said, reluctantly, although that was fine by me; the more ships in orbit, the better my chances of making a run for it if the ’nids really did overwhelm our defences.
‘It would appear not,’ I agreed. ‘So we’ll just have to make the best of it.’ I glanced around the room. The undercurrent of unease and suppressed hostility still crackled in the air like distant lightning. ‘And good luck with that,’ I added quietly to myself, thumbing my palm for good measure.
NINE
With relations as strained as they were between the expeditionary force and the Adeptus Mechanicus, it was hardly surprising that the bulk of the liaison work fell on me[67]. Zyvan wanted as little to do with the tech-priests as possible, while Dysen made it abundantly clear that the feeling was entirely mutual. I, on the other hand, was supposed by all parties to be a paragon of the Imperial virtues, so both were inclined to listen to me. More inclined than they were to listen to one another, anyway. Accordingly, I spent the next couple of weeks in a complex gavotte of half-truth and misdirection, intended to give the Lord General and Magos Senioris alike the impression that I considered their view of things the more reasonable, and that with a little more flexibility we’d be able to talk the other one round. No doubt Donali would have made a better fist of it, but he was parsecs away and at least I’d had plenty of practice at that sort of thing, after a lifetime of successfully deflecting blame and taking credit I didn’t deserve.
The biggest disadvantage of all this, so far as I was concerned, was that I was forced to relocate from the comfort of the flagship to the relatively spartan conditions of the forge world, in order to discharge my responsibilities most effectively. Apart from the full-time job of trying to talk some sense into Dysen, there was the small matter of an Imperial Guard army to deploy and get settled in, with all the friction between them and the local civilians which that normally entailed. Even more so in this case, as there were innumerable areas closed to us on the grounds of doctrine, safety, or sheer bloody-mindedness. At least the Death Korps seemed happy enough to rough it out in the wilderness, which would have killed more of the other regiments than the enemy, so they were out from underfoot, but the rest, a motley collection from over a dozen worlds[68], presented me with a constant stream of headaches. More than once I was tempted to pack the whole thing in and recommend our withdrawal, on the grounds that the ’nids were still bearing down on Dr’th’nyr like Jurgen catching sight of an all you can eat smorgasbord, and only the reflection that, if I did, Zyvan would undoubtedly take us off to confront them directly stayed my hand. Besides, we still couldn’t be entirely sure that the world was out of danger yet, and going down in history as the man who lost the Gulf would hardly have been the finest of ends to my undeservedly glittering career.
Fortunately the Mechanicus maintained a number of comfortably furnished suites near their inner sanctum for the convenience of visiting Imperial dignitaries, which they seemed to consider me as,