[24]

215.738.M41

Near Velgrad

I told her that I wanted Tara and Verity to get a shower and a toothbrush, too. She left to talk to someone. When she returned, she refused the shower, but granted the toothbrush. Fine. We could keep bathing using the sink. I brushed my teeth at gunpoint, and they took the brush and cuffed my hands again.

She asked if I had questions.

"Where are we?" I said.

She wouldn't say. Nor how many of their people worked here, or what they had done with our armor. She told me not to ask tactical questions. I asked where Gwen was. She left and came back.

"I'll tell you, but you have to tell me something, first."

"What?"

"Tell me why you love the Emperor."

I wonder if she expected a story, or a theological argument. Or more silence. Or if she just wanted to get me used to answering questions. She was too smart to not know the answer any Sister would give.

"He is the salvation of Mankind." Verbatim from the catechism.

"Six hundred meters after marker 282 on the Velgrad-Ostport rail," she said. "400 meters north from the track. Under a round stone half a meter long."

"Is that close to us?"

"No tactical questions."

"Did you desecrate my armor? Are you using it for your murders and lies?"

"No tactical questions!"

"Then die."

She waited. I said nothing. She prompted me for more questions. I said nothing.

She sighed. She was frustrated. Maybe angry. She took a few deep breaths. She said, "Wait." She left the room. She came back.

"Your armor hasn't been used. Nor your Sisters'."

That was half an answer.

I felt the feeling of finding a target in my sights.

I said, "Half-truths are lies."

Her face went tight. She leaned back. She shook her head. "That's all I can say."

"You said, 'the pain of yielding up our lies.' Yesterday."

"I did."

"Does that mean murder?"

"Sometimes killing is necessary. Sometimes even killing from ambush."

"I'm not talking about Gwen."

"No? Then who?"

I didn't answer. Silence was easy. She took a long time to continue.

"Death is the Emperor's currency," she said. I felt a surge of anger as she continued. She talked about great causes and spending lives to achieve them. How it saddened and grieved her, but it was necessary for her beautiful future. She sounded like a priest trying to comfort a congregation that had sent their husbands and fathers to war, or a general mourning the cost of a terrible battle. Only it was her war, their war, and they were waging it against us.

She had sounded intelligent and wise before, to me. Wrong, perhaps, but wrong like an erring philosopher, in need of some wise man's correction, not mine. Now she sounded like an idiot. She said something about "a future where—" and I cut her off, anger boiling over in me.

"Where the Eldar torture our children and our cities burn and the Orks devour our dead," I said.

She looked at me and didn't try to talk. My hands were tight fists in the cuffs behind me.

"Idiot," I said. "Do you want a truth? Twice in twenty years we have almost been defeated. While you were learning that lying is bad, I was fighting them in space. The Eldar. You can't even imagine how bad they are. There is no truth true enough. Even lies can't approach it. Yes, our masters lied, they lied and lied and lied and told you that there was nothing to fear, and keep working, and keep raising children, because without children who will fight them again in twenty years? Now you make common cause, you use their weapons on us, fight their…"

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I stopped myself. I realized too late that I had given something away. I had given many things away. Maybe the idiot was me, for letting her lure me into talking. Thank the Emperor she had no recording device. Imagine my voice in a propaganda broadcast, saying those things: "Our masters lied and lied and lied," Marisa Ven, Sister of Battle. Foolish. Foolish. I made myself breathe. I resolved not to speak anymore.

Naomi looked conflicted, but what did I care about her inner conflict? Did I imagine I could convert her? Convince her to help us escape? Was it because she was a woman, and the rest of the guards were men? Foolish. She wasn't a random member of their sect, perhaps deluded and confused. She wasn't someone I could save. She was the weapon they had chosen to defeat me.

She started to explain some ridiculous lie. There were two kinds of Eldar, a bad kind and a good kind. And I had only fought the bad kind, so I couldn't know, but it was true. I suppose she must have believed it. Whatever else she was, I believe she wouldn't knowingly lie, not directly.

I tried to focus on a psalm and ignore her words, but I thought, And soon she will tell me of the good Orks, too! I had a mental image of a good Ork. He was dressed like a convert ready for baptism, and he would smell of chrism and not of blood and rot and horror, and smile shyly with sparkly little white teeth as a priest forgave the sin of his existence. It made it hard to keep my mind on the psalm.

She denied that her sect had ever collaborated with any xenos, even the good Eldar—but yes, the technology was taken from them, and used temporarily for the sect's righteous ends. They would destroy it all after the planet was taken and peace and prosperity had been restored. After their chosen leadership had been recognized by the Adeptus Terra as the new stewards of Gaervalt.

I wanted to know just how the Fear was supposed to help them accomplish that. But I didn't trust myself to ask. Even if I had asked, I think she would have told me it was a tactical question.

She asked other questions. She tried to engage me again. I found the cadence of my psalm, and heard her no more.

They took me back to the cell. As before, I told all. Verity and Tara agreed that I should keep silent. I wondered again at the strange mix of the sect's tactical effectiveness and their obvious error in not separating us. Perhaps it was a trap: Naomi knew that I would tell all—that I would have to tell all, to keep us three united and strong. Perhaps she thought she could convert us all, through me.

Still, her admission of xenos technology was good intelligence.

The good Eldar was too impossible to even imagine, but we all laughed when I told Verity and Tara about my good Ork.