[43]

The following transcript comes from the audio-log of a tracker-pin carried by the Inquisitorial agent "Sandal," concealed in the wrist-seam of her blouse. It was recovered at 04:14 Velgrad time (00:14 Merograd) by the Enforcer unit pursuing Sandal's abductors.

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RECORD: Sound of three bells, which in Merograd signals night prayer, 23:00, and the beginning of Third Work Cycle. Sound of multiple quiet voices reciting: Love the Emperor, for He is the salvation of mankind. Obey His words, for He will lead you into the light of the future. Heed His wisdom, for He will protect you from evil. Whisper His prayers with devotion, for they will salve your soul.

Sandal: I don't like this. Give them two more minutes and then we abort. [pause] Negative. [pause] Copy. [pause] Copy. I see them.

Sandal: Axel and Svetlana Bokal. Come with me, now.

Axel: What? That's not the name—

Sandal: Shut up. The Holy Ordos know exactly who you are. In his infinite mercy, and in recognition for your grief at the loss of Marta, Irina, Jovan, and Damir, Lord Grendel has permitted you a chance to be useful—to oppose the Xenos you claim to have inadvertently served. Follow me.

Svetlana: No. We need a guarantee.

Sandal: I guarantee that my snipers will shoot you the second I'm five meters away from you. I guarantee that they are good enough to hit you in the knees. I guarantee that you will talk just as well with bullet holes in your bodies as without. There. Three guarantees. Now follow me. Or don't. I really don't care. It isn't safe here.

Svetlana: Snipers? Wait, no, stop—

Axel: Sveta, come.

RECORD: Sound of aircar doors opening and closing. An aircar engine starts.

Sandal: Where is the psychosomatic projection unit?

Axel: The what? Oh—yes. Yes. But no. We don't know. That information is compartmentalized.

Sandal: Who is your higher point of contact?

Axel: We don't have—it's not—

Svetlana: It's just a vox code. Frequency 660, signal AX-A-919. Where are you taking us?

Sandal: Out of the city. We think that your friends—DAMN! HORUS! WARP!

RECORD: Loud metallic sound. Sustained loud rushing sound. Screams. Loud metallic sound. Groans. Gunshots.

Svetlana: No, no, no.

Unknown 1: Well well, both still alive. And who's this?

Axel: Don't do this. It's the truth, the xenos, the Eldar, it's the truth. [Grunts.]

Unknown 1: I said, who's this?

Svetlana: She's with the Inquisition. You're dead, you're dead already, you're dead, you're dead.

Unknown 1: Inquisition. Interesting.

RECORD: Sound of struggling and dragging. Heavy chassis doors slam shut. Autocar engine ignites; acoustics become enclosed.

Unknown 1: You know, they were probably going to torture and execute you.

Svetlana: That's not true.

Unknown 1: Of course it's true. From their perspective we're all murderers. Especially you. Don't you think they have a recording of what you said that day?

Svetlana: They don't, that's not true.

Sandal: The Inquisition knows everything, Jovan.

Unknown 1: [Laughter.] Nice guess, liar. Most common name in the city, but not mine.

Axel: What are you going to do with us? Tell me the truth.

Unknown 1: Torture and execute you. Sorry, Axel. You were a good leader, but the work comes first.

Axel: Let Svetlana go. I… she didn't want to defect. I made her. Forced her. It's not her fault.

Unknown 1: Liar.

Axel: Let her go. Let her go, in the name of the Emperor.

Unknown 1: All three of you will be with the Emperor by sunrise. We'll pray that He forgives you for your sins, because we can't.

RECORD: Autocar doors open and close. Rustling sound. Impact sound. Other sounds become muted.

Unknown 1: What was that?

Unknown 2: Stupid clumsy slag tripped.

Unknown 1: Watch your mouth, that's a Throne Agent.

Unknown 2: She'll be a dead Throne Agent tomorrow.

Unknown 1: Yes. Watch your mouth.​

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Our flight would take about 90 minutes. The Arvus boosted hard to get to suborbital cruise and would come down again just slowly enough to not make a line of fire across the sky as it aerobraked to insertion altitude.

That was ten minutes putting on armor and shaking off the stupor of sleep, another ten minutes preparing and checking equipment, an hour of hasty planning and mental rehearsal, and a few minutes spared for obsessively re-checking everything and reviewing the evolving situation on the ground.

The agent's pin had been found in the runoff drain behind Merograd Industrial 3-3, a partially decommissioned light manufactory. It was sized for a labor-force of as many as a hundred, but now it produced canvas on self-loading autolooms with a staff of two menial laborers and one low-ranking tech-adept. Wessex thought the enemy, and the three people we were to rescue, were inside.

From the outside, M-I-3-3 was a rockcrete brick. It was made solemn rather than bleak by buttresses and cast-bronze statuary that could provide cover and concealment for someone hugging the exterior wall.

The west face extended into a loading-and-unloading dock against a connecting railroad. The north face had no doors. South had two ground-level exits, and East had two small personnel doors at ground-level and one that was ten meters above ground opening onto a wrought-iron escape stair. None of the walls had windows, but the roof did.

The roof was two right-angle triangular bevels with windows on the south-facing vertical parts, separated by a flat section about thirty meters wide. There was a metal door on the vertical face of the first bevel, opening onto that central flat area.

Initial surveillance showed no sign of exterior guards, and no human-invisible lights to suggest motion sensors. There were standard security picters positioned over the ground-level doors.

After looking at the map of the area, talking to the team, and deciding that we all hated every other possible approach, I said,

"Grav-chute insertion. The flat part here is big enough. Support element drops first and lands on that building Castor liked, this one here, with the gargoyles. Assault element lands here on the manufactory roof. We can cut the window or this door with melta-gel and drop down to the mezzanine."

"What if the mezzanine is gone?" said Tara. The blueprints showed a broad mezzanine level of glassed-in office space facing out onto catwalks over the working floor. But they also showed a date from four hundred years ago and loading mechanisms for the manufacture of heavy artillery shells, not autolooms, so it made sense to doubt.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"It's not." Adem spun his data-slate to face us. It was zoomed in on a low-angle pict from tonight. The reflection of lights on office glass was visible inside on what had to be the mezzanine level.

The plan was that we would clear methodically from above. We would use Whisper bolts and try to go unnoticed. (I also wanted the Whisper bolts in case they had human shields, so we could shoot past them with something that wouldn't explode.)

We would be arriving at about 02:00 Local, and the voice in the recording had implied torture through the night and execution near dawn. That might help us. If we could hear screams, we might be able to bypass large sections of the enemy-controlled space. But if they raised the alarm before we found the prisoners, we had to assume that they would be executed at once.

If we were detected, we would switch to regular shells, have the power cut, use breaching explosives to make our own paths to wherever we needed to go, and call in the Enforcer assault teams already mustering out of sight. They were too blunt an instrument for the rescue itself. But once the alarm was raised, we would likely need their firepower desperately.

There was a partial basement in the blueprint. Castor was sure that the prisoners would be there. I wasn't sure. I thought he was probably right, but I hoped that they would be in the mezzanine level, near the source of those lights Adem had seen.

We weren't grav-chute assault troops. We were trained on the 'chutes, but our training treated them as survival equipment. There wasn't any concept of timing deployment to the last possible second, or using the maneuvering jets to build up high lateral speeds, or landing in a sprint on uneven terrain with our weapons up and ready to fire. We were just supposed to strap them on, bail out, count to five, and activate the anti-grav. Then we were supposed to point ourselves towards the place we wanted to land and press the direction control gently forward, keep our legs together and our bolters held tight, and roll to the side on impact.

But it would cut out minutes of infiltrating on foot and let us attack from an unexpected angle. The roof of the target structure was flat and big enough to land on. Overhead servo-drone picts didn't show sentries or servo-drones on the roof.

If there were, we would have to learn grav-chute assault doctrine all at once on the first try. We could finish the mission with broken bones and torn muscles. We couldn't if we were all shot to death gently coasting down through half a kilometer of open air.

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It was a clear night in Merograd. We had glimpsed the target in the Arvus's picter as we approached, viewing it through one of our data-slates, but we had them stowed for the final approach. We wouldn't see it with our eyes until we were in open air, since all we had was the open back hatch. Every 'chute was double and triple checked.

"Help me to honor the martyr," I said aloud. Everyone joined, even Mak'ti. "Tend the fallen. Defend the innocent. And walk in the light. Amen."

A minute later, we got drop confirmation. "No movement on the roof," said Esmond, our pilot. "Nothing on thermals." The Arvus's engines were silent, only the bass thrum of its antigrav as it coasted, just half a kilometer above the city. "Ten seconds to drop. Stand by. Four. Three."

Castor would go first. He had his building picked out, and would be the point guide for the support team. Hana was last out, so she was at the edge, hanging on to the side netting, ready to pass us through. Wessex wasn't with us, except over the vox.

"Two. One. Drop, drop, drop."

Castor stepped out into the night. Then Adem, crouching and shuffling forward, gripping the top rail until he reached the ramp. Mak'ti. Me. Hana did one last visual check and thumped me on the shoulder. I stepped out. The air snatched me away. I felt the sudden thrill, fear and joy together. I counted. One, two, three—I rotated in the air and saw Tara stepping out—four, five–

Weight found me again as I struck the engage switch on the grav-chute. I picked my target point and pushed the direction controls forward. Glancing up, I saw Verity step out, drilling-ground smooth. No trace of limp yet, even without a morning massage and then ninety minutes in the Arvus. Hana followed. The Arvus drifted up and away, fading to a speck. I could still see my assault team above me, little dark-gray human shapes against the black of the sky. When I tried looking back, I could just glimpse Mak'ti. Castor and Adem were lost to sight.

Esmond voxed, "Command, Arvus. Team is away. Arvus on overwatch. No movement on roof." I stared down at the growing shape of Merograd Industrial, too afraid of sentries to even remember that I was hanging by the will of a temperamental machine-spirit hundreds of meters above the earth. I could see lights on inside, dim but obvious through the rooftop windows.

One hundred meters. Fifty. I was a little too far forward. I switched from forward to reverse and had to grab my bolter as momentum made it swing away from me on its sling. I made sure my legs were together and my knees were bent. Twenty meters. The flat part of the roof rushed up and slammed into my feet. I hugged my weapon and rolled, skidded, stopped. I was dizzy, but I pushed up to my knees and raised my weapon, looking left and right.

I couldn't see a threat. I kept my right hand on the bolter and used my left to disengage the grav-chute straps, letting the expensive machine drop to the rockcrete surface of the roof. Tara thumped down ten meters away, and a split second later Verity was landing near her. Hana almost missed the roof, but the raised edge caught her as she hit and rolled. The servo-skull drifted down next to us a few seconds later.

I hit my vox. "Assault on roof," I said quietly.

Castor: "Support in position. I see you."

Esmond: "Arvus sees you. No enemy movement."

I fought against a rush of relief. I made myself smile and lean forward, like a predator contemplating prey.

Mak'ti: "Skull ready. Door?"

"Affirmative," I said.

We stacked up. I would rather use the door than the window if we could. Melta-gel is quiet, but it produces a brief bright light. Verity used her knife to pry the weather-barrier up from the bottom of the door while Tara held her gun on it. The servo-skull threaded its fiber-thin optical attachment through the gap and displayed the resulting image on our data-slates. Stairs. A guard at the landing, leaning against a wall with a lasgun held loosely.

Tara adjusted her position so that she was aiming through the closed door in the approximate direction of the guard. Verity checked the latch. Locked.

"Breach?" Verity asked. The helmet-vox carried her murmur to me like she was speaking into my ear.

"Melta-gel," I said.

She opened her little tube of the deadly stuff and pressed a decimeter out over the place where the latch met the frame. "Ready."

"Burn."

Brief blue-white light. Verity flung the door open for Tara. Tara's bolter made a quiet pfhak, pfhak, sound as she pressed the trigger twice.

We let the servo-skull take point and followed it over the corpse and into Merograd Industrial 3-3. As soon as I was inside, I heard the muted sound of distant screams. It wasn't coming from the mezzanine. Castor had been right.