[42]

My memory of those days runs together, and without a deployment, our helmet picter footage was overwritten continuously, so there is nothing to review. We kept to our schedule.

I won a grudging acknowledgment from Castor that I might survive a week as a sniper in the Guard. I told him he was wrong, but only because the rations would kill me before the enemy did.

There was an unpleasant, humid morning when we finished a rehearsal assault through The Maze, the training warehouse we shared with Velgrad's Enforcers. We went outside arguing about what had gone wrong and all stopped talking because the whole sky was split by a rainbow and the clouds were lit from inside by the sun.

With Verity recovering enough to endure the training tempo, we had returned to urban work, using the separate assault and support elements our little unit had been built around. We ran hundreds of scenarios. Single-structure fighting is fast.

We could run ten or more every hour, even with pauses to debrief mistakes. Sometimes we repeated the same scenario ten or fifteen times in a row until the movement of bodies, guns, and fake grenades through the space felt like rushing water.

We had gone back to The Maze because Velgrad had restored the burned and toxin-damaged part of the city where we had trained after the battle of 198. The Maze was a long warehouse near the railroad tracks filled with short scaffold towers and plasti-board wall sections mounted on rollers. It was less fun than fighting Grendel's men through actual ruins and blowing actual holes through actual walls. But the warehouse was large enough to lay out partial exterior walls, not just interior structure. That gave the support element chances to work too. Mak'ti accompanied us remotely, controlling her servo-skull, and Castor and Adem could search for firing angles through windows where they could help us inside.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

253.738.M41

It's impossible that Grendel's return was tied to the change in luck, but they came on the same day, twelve hours apart.

Wessex called us to the Inquisitor's headquarters at 06:00, pulling us—the Sisters at least—out of the conditioning period at the convent. All of Grendel's servants that were close enough to respond to the summons were there, over seventy in total. Wessex assembled us in three ranks, and we knelt for Grendel and his chosen few as they disembarked their Aquila transport. There were bandages, crutches, recently-stitched wounds. Their armor was clean, but it had been slagged in places, cut deeply in others. Grendel had one arm in a sling. He had departed with six followers. He had five when he returned. They had no body with them, and no bones.

The Inquisitor moved his hand like he was lifting something in his palm, signaling us to look up, but not to rise. He had no speech to give. He said, "Success." That was all. He and the others walked past our kneeling ranks to the lift platform and descended out of sight.

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We returned to our scheduled day, equal parts curious and chilled.

I never learned any of their names, those six men who had gone with him. I hadn't met them before the departure, and I never saw them again after their return. Several days later, I had the chance to ask the Inquisitor if I might know of them, and he said, "Not yet."

That evening, Wessex was helping us with Arvus maintenance when his vox chirped and he stepped away to answer it. He returned beaming, turning, almost dancing. He flung his arms wide and proclaimed,

"Propaganda! Propaganda, I love it! 'Real truth would fight the Eldar!' 'It wants you to doubt!' 'Work, obey, help her fight!'"

I shared a surprised, confused grin with Hana. Tara guessed the meaning.

"Good news?" she said.

"Yes, yes, most beautiful of all Taras! The enemy defects! He has seen our beautiful propaganda, and now he wishes to work, obey, and help poor bloody-faced Hana to slaughter and slay!"

He jabbed the air with a parry-lunge-withdraw to demonstrate how Hana would surely bayonet all the Eldar, if she ever had both cause and opportunity to fix her oversized blade to her bolter. It was crisp enough, amidst his enthusiasm, that I am certain he had been an infantryman or a student at a Schola Progenium in the life he had before Grendel.

"Defectors?" Tara said. "How many?"

"Only two, but what defectors! The leaders of all the Merograd cells. We believe they are a married couple—children all killed by Eldar last year, what joy! First they blamed the lying state, but now, thanks to you, and the God-damned xenos, and blessed propaganda, they blame the sect itself. Help her fight! Help her fight, by the Emperor!"

He very nearly embraced Hana, realized the impropriety, and patted the air over her shoulders instead.

An Inquisitorial agent would meet the defectors late tonight, Merograd time—which would be early next morning in Velgrad, evaluate the truth of their claims, and take them into custody. The possible intelligence gains were huge, Wessex said. He hoped for information that would let us sweep up all the remaining sect members of any importance in Merograd. First-hand information about the Fear units, possibly even information leading to the capture of an intact unit. Names of other highly-placed sect members, shared resources, safehouse locations, secret information protocols.

"A whole movement could be rolled up with less of a break than this," he said. "I could kiss you all, even Castor, by the Golden Throne of Earth!"

We shared the news to the convent at evening meal. Many prayers of gratitude were made, and many more for the Emperor's protection upon the agent's task.

If the Emperor granted His protection, it was His will that night to send it through human hands. We woke at 04:22 to alarm tones on our vox.

Wessex had learned from us and from Surs how the vox-briefing should begin. "Arvus," he said as soon as the alarm stopped. "Rescue operation in Merograd. Armor will be donned en route."