[10]

154.738.M41

13:00 local time

The Aquila Shuttle brought us back from Denma to Velgrad. Not home, not the fortress-convent like I had hoped. The convent, home to about one hundred and thirty of us, was out in the far outskirts of the city. Instead we arrived at Saint Margaret's Chapel, where Superior Isela staged the ready response force.

The work room in the back was packed with our Sisters, both in and out of power-armor. With the four of us arriving, there were twenty-one of us. I felt sorry for the ones not wearing armor, having to endure hard armored elbows and shoulders and the stifling heat of too many bodies. Deacon Surs was there, also, and a woman who I didn't recognize at first as Nika.

Nika looked bad. She hadn't been in great shape when we pulled her out of the hab six weeks ago, either. But now she was too pale, her skin looking almost gray under her freckles, and I could tell instantly that she'd been injured recently, badly. As cramped as we were, everyone was giving her space.

Isela raised her fist and the murmur of greetings, questions, and benedictions that came of our arrival went silent.

"Some of you know this already. But Nika, give your report."

She rasped out her explanation of how she ended up needing us to come save her.

"After the interrogation, they released me. I went back. Back to my life. What was left of it. Back to the factory, and the hab. About six weeks later… three days ago… I got shot. Somebody just shot me. In the street. I didn't see it, didn't see them. Just impacts and pain and a loud noise… then falling."

I suppressed a twinge of sympathy. This wasn't the place.

Since leaving the hospital, Nika said she had been hiding here.

Isela's eyes found my team standing in the back and she gave us a small nod. "The day after I sent rotation C to punishment detail, the hospital room they had been in was bombed. The Enforcers never found out who did it, even when they rolled up the Sanctifying Truth membership."

Maybe she sensed the question in my eyes, since she added: "All of it. Multiple chapters scattered across the planet. It's not a tolerated sect any longer. But the Enforcers found no secret scriptures. No sabotage plans. And nothing—no witch, no toxin weapon, nothing to explain what C encountered. Speak, Tara."

Tara spoke up beside me. "What about interrogations? Somebody must have talked."

"No. Either the Enforcers were sloppy or the heretics were just better. They—the Enforcers—found some corpses and a lot of empty habs. There are thousands of members of the Sanctifying Truth that have just disappeared, gone all at once. The Enforcers made tens of thousands of arrests, but no one useful. People like Nika. Harmless. But sometimes even sin serves the Emperor's will. Trying to murder Nika was a mistake. The Enforcers traced the shooter to a location."

Isela smiled. It would have been fearsome even without the twisted scar tissue that was all that remained of much of her face. "We aren't waiting for the Enforcers. I have authorization for an assault."

❖ ❖ ❖

​

Assault planning. There were hours looking at maps. First the element leaders and Isela, then the elements themselves. Deacon Surs left and came back a dozen times carrying new maps and blueprints and surveillance picts. Groups split up, studied, argued, came back together, and planned some more.

In principle any of us could have done what Isela did, holding the whole thing together, making the plan simple without being easy to stop. Making sure that any failures would be easy to fix. Pulling together all of our fears and anticipated complications into something that seemed easy and obvious in retrospect.

In reality—I'm glad it was her.

My team's role would be minor if things went well. The target was a small former rail depot. A few hundred years ago it was decommissioned and retasked as a residence, then again retasked for light industry in the last century. Saints only knew what the interior configuration would be now, but the structure and grounds were the same. It was a squat, one-story, rockcrete building, with a perimeter wall with two wide gates at opposite ends where the rails used to be.

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We would be one of the first teams to take our final position. The tallest building with line of sight south of the target, which we had labeled Tall South, had a rooftop that provided good coverage of half of the target structure over the perimeter wall at a distance of about 200 meters. It also commanded a long axis view down one of the two streets where ground vehicles could attempt to reinforce or escape the target.

There wasn't a comparable structure on the other side, so the north side of the target would be screened by Isela's ready reserve at ground level. Twelve women would conduct the actual breach and clearance of the target compound. They would have the servo-skull, too: it had finally been fixed.

There were supposedly six hostiles in the structure. We even knew what a few of them looked like, from partial overhead surveillance. The wall screened them from street level.

I still didn't like it. Back when we did the hab raid, we were only supposed to fight a handful of enemies. But we fought a whole platoon instead. I would have wanted to wait and observe and make sure. Isela didn't want to wait that long.

The Enforcers had fought, administratively speaking, to keep us from taking over the assault. They said that there wasn't any sign that the target was alerted, and they wanted to spend weeks setting something up correctly. But Isela had gotten her way. We would accept the risks and rush the assault. We could be in position to hit at 04:30, three hours before local dawn.

Surveillance picts showed weapons, but if they had anything heavy, it stayed inside. There was a chance that they didn't have a guard posted at night.

We had access to the electromotive hub for the block, so we could turn off all their wired lights and picters. We all had low-light vision built into our helmets. For a mission on short notice, it looked pretty good. And we were a rapid-response unit. A day's notice was a day more notice than we usually got.

I drew two long-las rifles and a stormbolter from the armory. We could test out the rifles in the basement range, a few shots to be sure of the armorer's zero. The range wasn't rated for bolters. Gwen inspected the stormbolter piece by piece and ran the action until she was as happy with it as she could be. Another few hours obsessing over picts, going over every part of our completely simple role, and memorizing parts of the plan that had nothing to do with us, until everyone was on everyone else's nerves.

We went to our building, Tall South, an hour after sunset. It was a nice hab, clean, with little attempts at beauty even in its brute utilitarian design. None of the other buildings around looked like they made an effort. We got to the roof dressed as laborers, carrying our armor and weapons in crates. Then we locked it down and settled in for the night.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

You may object that bolters are accurate enough for precision overwatch at 200 meters and beyond. But we would have some lines of sight measured in kilometers, and I wanted to be able to engage them if our mission role changed. Also, long-las are slightly better than bolters at medium range if you don't have to defeat armor and cover. Faster projectile. Less recoil. Quicker follow-up shots.

The stormbolter is standard Sororitas doctrine for any support by fire role that can justify the weight. For what we expected to do, it was probably the wrong tool. Bolters excel at winning fights immediately, against anything up to and including lightly armored vehicles. Stormbolters are the same—just bigger, faster-firing, and with enough ammunition for four seconds with the trigger held down instead of one and a half.

Against unarmored infantry, with a static position, it was at once too much and not enough. Too much firepower. Too little ammunition per reload to deny an area for long enough for the assault force to really maneuver. Although there's much to be said for being able to turn a technical or a light assault flier into scrap metal in one half second burst.