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‘How big?’ I asked Midas. ‘Is what?’ he asked. ‘This… place.’ He pointed to the instruments. ‘Can’t say. A hundred kilometres, two… three… a thousand.’ ‘You must have something!’ He looked round at me with a smile that had worry in it. ‘Systems say it’s endless. Which is, of course, impossible. So I think the instruments are out. I’m not trusting them, anyway.’ ‘Then what are you flying by?’ ‘My eye – or the seat of my pants. Whichever you find most reassuring.’
Aemos saved my life and sanity. He and he alone stared in wonder at the saruthi, a perplexed smile of intellectual delight on his ancient face. ‘Most perturbatory,’ I heard him murmur. That simple detail made me laugh. My confidence returned, and with it, my resolve.
‘What the hell are you doing, trooper?’ he managed to bark, his pronounced Adam’s apple bobbing furiously. ‘Performing the ministry of the sacred Inquisition,’ I told him and shot him through the head.
‘Have you been teaching that girl to play?’
This life has purpose. I would stay here in it.’
Only when he had beaten me in three straight games did he admit that Bequin, in her infinite wisdom, had been coaching him for the past few weeks.
‘Don’t stint,’ I warned Madorthene. ‘And those foundees you refer to – Sergeant Jeruss and his men. I want them with me when I go in.’ ‘Gregor! We can give you a crack squad of Mirepoix who–’ ‘I want the Gudrunite survivors.’
‘Why?’ asked Brytnoth. ‘Because whatever their combat inexperience, they’ve seen a tetrascape. Those are the men I want at my side.’
He smiled. A wonder, that. I consider myself one of the very few mortals to have made a Librarian of the Adeptus Astartes smile. To have seen a Librarian of the Adeptus Astartes smile even.
‘Brother-Captain Cynewolf will be fascinated,’ Brytnoth said. ‘I promised him I’d find out the details. He was dying to ask you about it, but he didn’t dare.’ Now that was funny.
The counter-invasion had begun.
