upwards through the narrowing aperture, but there still seemed to be a metre or so of clearance around its reduced profile.
The Terminator thought otherwise, however. The missile pods above his shoulders elevated to track the fleeing target, and a flurry of rockets streaked through the air, impacting on the main engine and the fuselage around it.
‘Take cover!’ I yelled, quite unnecessarily under the circumstances, and threw myself flat behind the comforting solidity of the wall. The rear half of the shuttle exploded, a sheet of vivid flame boiling like an incandescent thunderhead across the hangar, and the entire vast building seemed to shudder around me. Searing heat and a hurricane force wind blasted down the corridor, whirling loose equipment, wall panels, and a couple of stray servitors away with it, then the blazing fuselage crashed back to the hangar floor, shaking the walls once again with the impact.
Klaxons began to blare, and fire retardant foam began to issue from concealed nozzles, drizzling down on the inferno below like a thick, sticky snowfall. Specialised servitors activated, sallying forth from their niches to battle the flames, directing jets of the stuff into the hottest patches.
‘That’s put paid to ’em,’ Jurgen said, with mordant satisfaction. I began to nod my agreement then froze, the gesture half-completed. Unbelievably, something was moving in the heart of the blaze, half-concealed by the leaping tongues of fire, the dense clouds of smoke, and the blizzard of foam. Something moving towards us with evident purpose.
My hand fell to the laspistol I’d just shoved back in its holster – although what good it could do against something capable of surviving a crash like that was beyond me – but before I could draw it, and make an utter fool of myself in the process, the smoke cleared a little and I realised it was the Terminator, plodding clear of the catastrophe he’d caused, parting the flames like a curtain before him. I craned my neck upwards, fixing my eyes on his helmet, nestled below the raised, hunched shoulders of the bulky armour. A moment later the faceplate hinged open, revealing its occupant, who extended a huge armoured gauntlet, large enough to have crushed my ribs with a single squeeze.
‘Commissar Cain,’ he rumbled, in the deep, resonant tones of a typical Adeptus Astartes. ‘An honour to meet so staunch a friend of our Chapter.’
‘The honour is mine, to have served alongside it,’ I lied shamelessly. ‘Though I must confess to finding your presence here something of a surprise.’
Before he could reply to that, another voice broke in, which, in its own way, took me equally aback.
‘Brother-Sergeant Yail,’ Kildhar said, trotting down the corridor towards us, her red robe flapping with the agitation she was failing so dismally to conceal. ‘Have the specimens been successfully reacquired?’ She glanced at the furnace beyond the door, and her shoulders slumped. ‘I see not.’
‘Specimens?’ I looked at her, then back to the hulking Space Marine, who wasn’t exactly looking shifty, but rather gave the impression that he would have been if the ability to do so hadn’t been genetically engineered out of him. ‘I think you’ve got some explaining to do, magos.’
THIRTEEN
‘You’ve been breeding the damn things?’ Zyvan expostulated, with a glare across the conference chamber at the Adeptus Mechanicus side of the polished steel table fit to freeze helium. El’hassai, seated next to him, looked equally grim, if I was able to interpret his expression with any degree of accuracy. Kildhar, still chastened from a long and uncomfortable tête-à-tête with Dysen while we’d waited for the Lord General and his retinue to arrive, quailed visibly, and the Magos Senioris emitted a burst of static from his vox-unit which sounded uncannily like an irritable clearing of the throat he probably no longer had. ‘And why were we not informed of the presence of an Adeptus Astartes unit on Fecundia?’
Yail, who had divested himself of his Terminator suit in favour of the lighter and more comfortable tactical armour worn by the majority of his brethren[92], smiled sardonically. He alone remained standing, partly because none of the chairs in the typically spartan conference room Dysen had put at our disposal could have taken his weight without buckling, but mainly, I suspected, because that way he loomed over everyone else even more impressively than usual. Besides which, as I’d observed before, Adeptus Astartes seldom seemed to sit anyway. ‘We are not, properly speaking, a combat unit,’ he said.
‘I’m sure the genestealers you incinerated would be delighted to