[39]

We were all toxin hazards at first. I held my breath while a medic put my helmet into a sealed box and another hooked a breathing mask over my face. We had to hold Verity and let them hose her down while she sobbed and twitched, and every heartbeat moved her closer to death. They put her in one of the uncontaminated Arvus transports with several of the civilians. It lifted off and away, scattering rainwater into mist.

Hana pulled her helmet off gingerly once she got permission. Her face was completely covered in blood. It spilled out and ran down her hands and neck. There was a long thin gash from her eyebrow almost to the back of her head. She dropped the helmet. A grim-faced older woman in a medic's uniform heard the clatter and turned. A few seconds later she was pulling my hands away from Hana's blood-matted hair. "Hold her steady," she said, and started punching skin-staples into her scalp.

They took Hana on the next ship. People were moving everywhere, shouting, coordinating. I could hear more chatter on the command vox. I felt numb and useless. A third ship left with the last of the badly wounded. A group of Enforcers was shouting at the Battle Sisters holding the perimeter, demanding to be let through. I sat there against the wall next to Tara, not talking, not knowing anything to say.

Castor and Adem came up to us. Castor suggested that we might want to get up and follow him, which is how enlisted men in the Guard give orders they aren't supposed to be allowed to give. I did what he said. He led us around the corner to a crude privacy screen and purification shower set up in the garden. There were civilians everywhere, standing or sitting close together in little clustered groups. A woman wearing muddy socks and no shoes was kneeling down, changing a baby's diaper on the ground.

Castor made us take our weapons and armor off and bag them for cleansing, then go through the purification shower. I found a gash in the back of my gorget, paper thin but cutting almost all the way through. It must have been the impact I felt when Hana was cut. My whole body hurt, especially my neck and hips. By the time we got out, Castor was gone, needed somewhere else.

I detailed Adem to find out where they had taken Verity and Hana and get us transport there. We ended up on the way to the nearby civilian hospital in the back of an Enforcer detention van, hauling our armor and weapons in thick black bags. It smelled of vomit and the floor was sticky under my bare feet, but it was warm, and the Enforcer had given us blankets to cover ourselves with. Adem had stayed behind, attending to some urgent business I have no knowledge of. The Enforcer got us to the Sisters guarding Verity's room, and they passed word until a hospital orderly brought us plain hospitaller habits not too different from our own, and soft cloth shoes.

Hana was sleeping. Stitched up, her black hair now half shaved. Her skull hadn't been opened. It was just a laceration. Just blood loss, stopped in time, repaired by transfusion. She would be fine.

Verity was unconscious. Tubes connected her body to a machine that whirred and sucked and thumped in a gentle rhythm. There were wires on her chest and head connected to another machine that ticked and purred and displayed arcane diagrams on a multitude of screens. Except for her left leg, she was white. Her leg was purple and blue where the tourniquet had crushed down around her thigh, then swirling pink and violet branching out from her knee. Her foot was gray.

There were three tiny slivers of dark green crystal and spatters of blood in a sealed glass box. A small bandage, not even a trauma dressing, was held against the inside of her knee with a single wrap of gauze.

Tara and I lit candles to the machines and prayed to the Emperor. I had a thought that terrified me, because I thought it might have come from Him. But when I asked if there were other people who were denied the machines for Verity's sake, the nurse said, "No." Verity had been hit in a limb, and she had had her armor's autotourniquet deployed in seconds. The other victims never had a chance.

I almost thanked the Emperor for that, and felt a rush of shame. Instead I thanked Him for sending the machines, and for the autotourniquet, and I prayed for Verity and Hana and the children that had been taken. I don't remember when my prayers turned into screams. I was just screaming, beating my thigh with my rosary clenched in my fist. "Please, God, please, please, God—" sobbing, incoherent, begging the Emperor I do not know for what.

Tara held me, trapped my arm, held me until I became still. She made me quiet before anyone could take too much alarm.

Grendel and Elin joined us after an hour. Grendel prayed aloud over Verity.

"Emperor, cast your gaze upon this, my good servant, and Thine own." He touched her lightly on the forehead, nodded to the rest of us, and left, already reaching for his vox.

Elin made us get assessed. An exhausted medic poked and prodded, scanned us with a variety of auspex settings, and shone bright lights in our eyes. He prescribed us each an injection of brain-medicament, which went in through the base of the skull and burned like cold fire. Elin commanded us to submit to a week of enforced rest.

We stayed awake until a novice brought us our bolters, carefully cleansed of toxin residue. Then we slept. We didn't know it, but the work of the Inquisition swept on just tens of meters away, in the morgue below our beds.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

232.738.M41

Our armor was restored to us in the morning, cleansed and field-repaired as it would be at war.

My visor had been replaced with Aria's, the first of us to die last night, and Hana's had been replaced with Eloise's. Each suit of armor bore a gray prayer-cloth tied around its arm, asking the machine-spirit to accept and honor the mechanisms loaned from the slain. Our own old visors would go to sanctioned tech-priests for careful inspection and meticulous repair.

The other two helmets required only a small replacement part for the flash-blinded autosenses and the standard rites of integration, which any large force of Sisters can do on its own.

The patching of the armor itself, like my damaged neck guard and much of Hana's armor, creates a tiny weakness of structure. But unless compounded by many such repairs, there is no real difference in performance. A technician blesses the tools and armor, drills into the damaged area, and anchors a simple grid of plastisteel wire. The entire damaged area is then heated until it glows and re-layered with ceramite and steel according to the rites revealed by the diagram. It is quenched in blessed oil. If the gap is wide enough to matter, fiber layers are cut to fit and laid inside. The scar is then covered with spall-epoxy inside and out. The color-changing surface material remains damaged around the scar and cannot be repaired in the field.

The technique itself is simple and requires none of the sacred mysteries of the Mechanicus. I can do it, though my results look ugly and crude. An unblessed copy of the diagram is attached at the end of this section.

Many things happened quickly not long after the armor was returned.

First was the sound of an angry crowd outside of the hospital. I had been trading a massage with Tara; we were stiff and aching and clicking in places that shouldn't click. Hana was lying down with a cold cloth over her eyes. We grabbed our bolters and went to the window. A crowd roared and milled. Enforcers were shouting from a skirmish-line. Something happened that made the crowd gradually quieten. A uniformity and stillness rippled through them. Their roaring became a somber chanted litany—the familiar words of the Declaration of Faith. I set my bolter down.

In the stillness that followed the declaration, a small procession emerged from the hospital morgue. Something like a growl spread through the crowd. It tightened in on itself, everyone taking a half step forward. A formation of soldiers with parade uniforms and fixed bayonets marched ahead of six naked, impaled corpses on long spikes, each one carried by a team of four men. The corpses looked hideous and wrong, even under the gruesome, bloodless wounds that had clearly killed them long before impalement. After a moment I realized they were Eldar, stripped of weapons and armor. I let out a breath and made the sign of the Aquila. I left and went to find one of the Sisters still on guard.

"The Inquisitor is finished with those," she said. "They're taking the xenos to the bridges, one to each. To destroy with fire."

I was just returning to our room when medics bustled in and ordered us to clear our beds away. They had a new medicament for Verity, from the night's studies of the toxin. Verity woke frightened and in pain when they injected her, which took them all by surprise. The three of us pushed our way through them to hold her and speak soft words and find a prayer for her to speak with us.

After the injection, they applied a salve, sticky and pinkish-clear, which smelled somehow of both berries and bleach. A woman medic with gloves coated it thickly over her poisoned leg. I was shocked to see Verity's skin turning green under the gel. Not green like rot or extreme pallor—a true earthy green. But the medic seemed unsurprised, even pleased.

I said, "Is it supposed to be this—this?"

"Yes," she said. She turned her head so that she was speaking to Verity even though she was answering me. "The green color is expected and safe. A side-effect of the alchemies that deliver the healing. It will go away on its own, like spilled ink."

"Behold," said Verity. Her voice was still pained. "Your prophecy comes to pass."

I thought she was delirious. She smiled up at me.

"The good Ork," she said. "The good Ork! Get me my baptismal gown! Where is my chrism?"

Hana and the medics thought we had gone insane. Tara and I clung to each other, laughing until we couldn't stand and tears covered our faces.

(Even later, when we explained to Hana about Naomi's "good Eldar" and my idea of a "good Ork," she said we were still insane, but she loved us anyway.)

That was how we were when the vox-call came from the Inquisitor that we were wanted downstairs in the morgue.

It seems strange now that the three of us put on our armor and checked our weapons without a word. It was a secured, guarded hospital morgue. The Eldar there were absolutely dead, their remains cleared of traps by the arts of the Inquisitor himself. Yet we went with our helmets under our arms and our hands resting on our bolters, with tears still on our faces and our hair still mussed from sleep.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

It was my first time in a large hospital's morgue. It was horrible. I don't know if all are like this, or just this one, but it was horrible. There should be a last gentleness after death, solemn gratitude for the organs and tissues taken so that others might live. Someone should be standing and praying, or singing quietly, or censing the surgeons, or lighting candles at a beautiful altar. If it has to be cold, the light should be warm. There was none of that.

There were stark white lights, low ceilings, hard floors that were both gleaming and filthy. There was a tiny iconostasis abandoned on a wall between large gas canisters. There was incense, but it only burned next to great machines with many limbs whose purpose was to disassemble human corpses into life-saving parts. The output wasn't wrong. The morgue would make clean bones to revere, clean ash to recycle. It would let the dead pass on the needed living parts as a last gift to those still alive. It was horrible anyway.

In one large room there were two rows of steel tables. Most were covered with thin sheets that couldn't hide that what lay beneath them had never been human. A few were uncovered, and left no doubt. Even in obvious death, the sight of the Wracks made my heart race and my hand tighten on my gun.

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Inquisitor Grendel and a masked and hooded woman stood near a tall steel table with the naked, bolter-ravaged corpse of a human woman on it. Even through the glimmering sanitation field around the corpse I could smell putrefaction and necrosis. There was something wrong with her, besides the obvious cause of violent death—half her torso gone, a leg gone, ugly shrapnel wounds from secondary fragmentation and the discoloration of decay. She had huge, recent-looking scars in long straight lines, like for massive invasive surgery. There were shapes under her skin too regular and smooth to be disease, like wires or cables. Something was wrong with her shoulders and hips—like the limbs weren't attached quite right.

The hooded woman bowed to us and suddenly I recognized her. She was the Interrogator from day 110, the one who had debriefed us after our first encounter with the Fear. Grendel didn't introduce us. Instead, he nodded acknowledgement of our presence, looked back down at the corpse, and spoke.

"This is the least-damaged specimen that we extracted from the autocar last night. You recall Support 1 observed their approach just before H-hour. The four women stopped their car a few hundred meters from the bait. Support 1 destroyed them and their vehicle as the fighting began. I want you to look at it and tell me what you see."

"Stay outside the green line," said the Interrogator. "Or wear your helmets or a mask."

I put my helmet on, grateful for the excuse. Tara did the same. Hana, her head wound still red and painful-looking under the shiny transparent mediskin, followed the Interrogator's gesture to a mask.

I mentioned the things that I had noticed already. "I don't understand," I said. "Are her feet and hands not decaying?"

"They are," Grendel said.

"How can that be?"

"Your world has few servitors. Do you know how they are made?"

I said that I did. I stepped back so that I could look at the Inquisitor.

"Explain it."

"On more advanced worlds, when people die with their bodies and brains mostly undamaged, they can give them to the future."

Previously I had imagined something like a funerary rite, when I thought of such things. Now I imagined a place like this, and felt revulsion. I continued as best I could.

I said, "The body is fused with machines. The tissues are changed so they will not decay. The soul is gone, so the base matter of the brain is fused to a machine-spirit. It is less than a man, but more than dead flesh and simple machine."

"Sometimes," said Grendel, "The same process is done to living people. It is not always evil. It can restore life and function to the terribly wounded. It is what permits the pilots of titans to wield those war-machines in battle. It is used for punishment of the most obscene evil."

I looked back at the dead woman. She didn't look like a servitor. And yet, there were those shapes beneath her skin.

"Emperor have mercy," I whispered.

"He did. Its existence was ended by your Sisters' guns."

"Then—the rot was from when it became this. Its body was already decaying before last night."

"She," said Tara, quietly. Almost begging.

"Tara?"

Tara said, "She was already decaying before last night?"

There was a question in her intonation, but I don't think it was a question, exactly. Inquisitor Grendel frowned deeply. He looked at her for a long moment, then nodded.

"She was," he said.

"The circuitry is of Eldar manufacture," said the Interrogator. "I believe the surgeries were also their work. Their purpose is unknown. Some may have been conducted purely for torture. Sister, in your experience, would someone with these bolter wounds have suffered more than a few seconds before death?"

"No," I said. "Almost instant. A bolter hit to the torso doesn't 'inflict a mortal wound,' it kills."

"Interesting. The adept who examined the blood concluded that the… that she had been in extreme pain for a prolonged time."

I looked back at the corpse. "They weren't wearing armor?" I said. That was easy to see from the shrapnel wounds.

"No."

"Weapons? Clothing? Equipment?"

"Autopistols," she said. "Laborer's clothes. One of the circuits we can identify in the scans appears to have been something like a vox. There were significant bio-explosives, but we have neutralized them."

Grendel motioned us away. "Continue to ponder," he said. "All three of you. I want your thoughts on why they were there, but not immediately. I have other things of which to apprise you."

Hana asked, "Inquisitor, may I ask why? Why you want our thoughts?"

"Yours specifically? I want your thoughts only because you happen to be here and are likely not a fool." He smiled and shook his head. "But truly, I want Tara's, Marisa's, and—were she available—Verity's. Because of Velgrad, 198, when they solved the location of the Fear unit. They have noticed patterns others missed. They may continue to do so. Now—come."

The first thing that Grendel had to show us was that the woman was surgically unrecognizable. She had no fingerprints. There was evidence of surgical facial reconstruction. Her retinas had been corrupted so that whatever the machine-spirits look for in a retinal scan could not be read.

The next was a little glass slide with a smudge of something on it. In a pict taken through a microscope, there was a tiny green thing, sprouting tendrils from both ends. Grendel identified it as an Ork spore, five days into its generative phase. It had triggered an alarm when the corpses were scanned, and they had found it in necrotized tissue in the woman's foot.

I remembered my training in spore-containment. I remembered the pictures. Fungiform ecosystems slowly developing out of decaying material. Pulsing bio-sacks filled with what would one day be a new Ork.

"I'm going to vomit," said Hana.

Grendel pointed. "Toilet, that way, on the right."

Tara went with her. I wish I could have, too.

The spore clearly pleased him. It was possible that the spore was a trick, but the Eldar had done everything to erase the woman's identity, and nothing else to create a false one. Fake fingerprints, he said, were easily within their power.

"It is technically possible that it came from anywhere," he said, sealing the spore away in a biohazard tube. "But as a practical matter, it hints that their origin is in the fifth-fraction of Gaervalt where Ork-spore is common. If this little abomination is the sole reward of last night for my investigation, it is still a great one. Eighty percent reduction in search area. Gene-scan of the spore may allow even greater narrowing of the search."

There was more. I wondered if Grendel had slept at all, or if he was running on stimulants and the sense of prey finally within reach.

Attempting a trace of the Eldar ship had amounted to failure. This did not come as a surprise: the plan had depended on the Eldar being unaware that they were being tracked. But they had lifted off under intense sensor scrutiny. Grendel was pleased to have a scanner profile of their ship. He hoped that it would combine with the data gained from his terror-enforcement of truck operators. I had almost forgotten about it.

The Inquisitor's forces had had one "success" from that operation—one raid on a small Enforcer holding facility, that was likely perpetrated by the Eldar. Twelve people had died. They hadn't gotten the data they needed, but Grendel said last night's observations might help.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

Tara and Hana came back. Hana was pale and Tara had Hana's helmet. Inquisitor Grendel acknowledged their presence with a glance and hurried on to another table covered in gleaming glassware and a small whirring machine, and Eldar weapons bagged in thick clear plastic. He warned us to touch nothing.

I recognized one of their light antivehicle weapons. Light for an Eldar, but it was almost as long as I am tall. Its power core was missing.

"They didn't use that one," I said. "It would have killed us if they hit."

Grendel shook his head. "I suspect it would have killed the user instead. This one has a hairline crack here, where the power core connects. And here, on the darklight projector rail."

"The cracks look minor."

"To us. Our weapons are built for war. Drag a meltagun through the mud, beat an Ork to death with it, and press the trigger, it will fire. Theirs are built for murder. Their weapons kill better than ours. They are worse at fighting wars."

"Was it their only one?"

"The only one we found. I am more interested in the shards. The hospital was able to provide a master-chemist to assess them. Medicines may be a possibility—but also, he has revealed something we may be able to use in the hunt."

The tox-shards were too unstable to have come with the Eldar to Gaervalt—the chemical would lose its potency over just a few days. And it wasn't anything for which humanity had an industrial process—so the Eldar had to be making it locally. Grendel believed they must be operating a major chemical facility, obtaining input precursors, producing waste.

Last, there were the Eldar themselves. Grendel had little use for the warrior corpses, but the Wracks fascinated him. He spoke of the recency of mutilation and augmentation surgeries.

"There is an Eldar form we call a Haemonculus," he said.

"Blood-worm?" My thoughts drifted to the shapes under the dead woman's skin and I looked that way in renewed horror, but Grendel shook his head.

"Likely an ancient mistake. A speculation about blood-worms causing Wracks, which led to Haemonculus as the taxon of their creators. Haemonculi are Eldar, or things that were Eldar once. Will you forgive a blasphemous comparison, knowing that I mean not likeness, but an evil twisting of something good?"

"Yes," I said.

"Then consider this: Warriors are like unto you, or perhaps unto guardsmen. Wracks are like unto the skitarii infantry of the Mechanicus: modified for combat and towards their masters' aesthetic ideal. Haemonculi are like unto tech-priests, especially the magi-biologis, who study the intersection of flesh and chemistry, surgery and machine."

"I understand."

"I believe at least one is active on this planet. The Wracks may be his creations, and at least bear his alterations. The desecration and defilement of the woman on the table are his doing. As was the murder of her and the other three. You may tell your Sisters this, if it may be a comfort to them."

I felt a stirring of memory. Desecration, defilement, murder, lies. Four women.

I asked, "Do you know their heights? Are there… is there enough left of them to guess?"

"Interrogator?" he said.

"I'll find out," she said. The Interrogator began scanning the corpse.

I said, "Tara, Verity, Hana, and I are all between 170 and 178 centimeters tall. Our armor can adapt a centimeter or two, but the tolerance is slight. Short or very tall women cannot be Sisters of Battle. At least not on Gaervalt."

"Obtain whatever measurements you can," Grendel called after his interrogator.

He compelled us to describe what range of shapes and sizes can fit into our armor and to try to remember our own metrics. The Interrogator found more than matching measurements when she consulted her auspex-picts. She found recent surgical alterations in thigh and shin bones for lengths precisely matching Tara, Verity, and me.

I did not know if it would help Grendel's investigation, but it answered some questions. What the women were there for, why the Eldar valued our deaths so highly they would send a team of their own killers, and why the women were rigged to explode. They were there to take the armor and bolters from our corpses, let 33rd Division drive them into division headquarters, and there, disguised as Battle Sisters, kill until they were destroyed.