[44]

254.738.M41

02:07 Local (Merograd) Time

Even after weeks of practice with it, there was something eerie about the servo-skull when Mak'ti was in direct control. It didn't move like a machine, obeying one simple command at a time. It was too fluid, like a living creature inhabiting the human skull. Its optical limb became a tentacle, not a manipulator for the tiny picter. It moved like an appendage, as if it were reaching out as it neared corners and gripping to pull itself along. I had to remind myself that it was looking, not grabbing—and that it was still just a thing, a mechanism under human control.

The tactical advantage it provided was impossible to overstate. It was like cheating. Mak'ti's voice was in our ears, flat, terse, almost bored. "Closed door right. Open breach front. Glass wall right, no target." We moved as fast as stealth allowed, boots clicking quietly on the floor. We still worked every angle as if the skull didn't exist, but there was no hesitation, no stopping to decide and plan. We flowed like water. I had already decided that we wouldn't attempt to clear every room. We would accept the danger of having no cleared space at our backs. The mission had collapsed to getting wherever the screams were coming from, as fast as possible, undetected. We bypassed rooms when the servo-skull peeked under the door and detected no immediate threat. "Closet, no target." Or one time, "Center-fed, six targets, unaware." I thought about opening it and killing them. But it would only take one of them firing one unaimed shot and the mission would fail. We bypassed it and pressed on.

We found stairs down from the mezzanine. Even with the skull, they were a nightmare, open from all sides into the manufactory floor. The skull could see eight people, armed, seven men and a woman. Most of them were oriented outwards, watching the ground-floor doors. Two were sitting, talking and occasionally glancing at a picter screen. If we could get downstairs, the autolooms would hide us, but the descent itself was totally exposed.

We wasted two minutes of mounting risk looking for other ways down. I thought about cutting through the floor with melta-gel, but it would make a bright light and a noxious smell and a loud sound as the piece of floor fell down.

We took the stairs. We went one at a time with the others in position to open fire. Mak'ti had a pair of drones in position near the exterior door, ready to strobe the picters and make a distraction. When it was my turn descending, one of guards glanced right past me. I had him in my sights, finger tight on the trigger, the slack taken out. I was sure that he saw me, but then he looked away, yawned, stretched, and sat back down.

The stairwell down to the basement was where the blueprint said it would be. There was a man standing by it with a carbine. We were huddled behind the concealment of one of the dormant autolooms.

"Mak'ti," I said quietly. "Find out which of them can see the door-guard."

The skull maneuvered, drifting to the edges of concealment and threading its picter around barriers.

Mak'ti: "Zero at present. But three of them could if they turn around."

"When I order 'fire,' strobe the picters."

"Copy."

I aimed my bolter at the guard's head.

"Verity, after we kill him, you cover right," I murmured. "I'm left. Tara, door. Ready?"

Verity aimed her weapon. "Ready."

Tara and Hana were holding their angles.

I waited for a scream to come from the far side of the door. It came.

"Fire fire fire."

Pfhak-pfhak-pfhak.

"What in the Warp?" said the woman at the picter screen. Just as one of the men said, "Did you hear that?"

"There's something outside!" said the woman.

We were moving, me and Verity back to back in the open. I had a man in my sights, but he was facing away, rifle up and aimed at his door. My shoulder thumped against the wall and I hated myself for making the sound.

"Locked," said Tara. "Breach?"

Whisper bolts into a metal door would be quieter than a gunshot—but still as loud as hitting it with a sledgehammer. Melta-gel would light up the room.

"Look for keys," I said. I tried to breathe slowly. My heart was pounding. I felt a target on the back of my head. If any of them turned around…

"Are we burned?" said another man. "Vox Nikolai."

Tara said, "Found keys." I heard the door open a few seconds later. She said, "Clear."

"Go, go. Fast."

The servo-skull scudded past our shoulders, optical limb twisting ahead of it as we descended the stairs.

Wessex: "Killing the lights."

"Warp!" said someone behind us. "Davin! What the warp? Warp, warp, warp!"

Mak'ti: "Corner, close. Two targets, alert, submachine guns."

"Verity," I said. "Kill them."

She took the corner just as the lights went out with a muffled thump. Her bolter purred quiet automatic fire. There was an answering stutter of unsuppressed shots and the whine of ricochets.

"They're dead," Verity said. "Reloading."

"Tara, push, go."

I pressed forward with Tara. Hana started firing at the enemy behind us.

Downstairs was just like the blueprint. The hallway ran perpendicular to the stairwell. The screams were coming from a single room at the far end of the hallway to the left. There were five closed doors on one side of the hallway, the side facing the stairs. There was a spatter of blood on the floor, just visible in my helmet's night-vision. Something nagged at my mind about the geometry of the space above us, but I put it out of my consciousness. More screams and men's shouts came from the door at the end of the hall.

Mak'ti said, "Hana, go. I have rear."

We sprinted. There was a gunshot from inside the far door. Tara reached it just ahead of me and yanked it open. Shots ripped out through it. I felt something jostle me as I fired into the muzzle flash. There was another man, another gun, but the top of his head came off as Tara fired from my left. I could see three warm bodies tied to chairs. At least two of them were still alive.

"Tara, with me."

I swung inside, clearing one of the corners. There was no one in it, and when I oriented back on the center of the room, Tara had cleared the other corner, and Verity and Hana were inside, aiming out. The strobing light of lasfire and muzzle-flash came from down the hall: Mak'ti's servo-skull using its compact las-weapon to exchange fire with our pursuers. I could hear muffled explosions. I stripped out my half-empty magazine and reloaded with standard bolts.

"Command, Assault. In hostage room. Two alive."

"Three alive," said Tara. "One critical. Working." I repeated it for Wessex.

"Assault, Command. Support has engaged hostiles outside structure. Believe enemy QRF. Platoon strength. Friendly reinforcements en route. 3 minutes."

He meant, "Quick Response Force."

"Servo-skull destroyed," said Mak'ti. "Expect enemy imminent." Somehow her voice still sounded bored.

Tara had her personal-aid kit open and her knife out, cutting through a woman's shirt to get at a gunshot wound. I recognized her as one of the defectors, Svetlana. The male defector, Axel, was there, alive, apparently unhurt, and yelling things that I didn't have time to hear. The Inquisitorial agent, Sandal, had been tortured badly and I wasn't sure if she would live or be able to walk. I cut her free first anyway.

At the door, Hana fired off the last of her magazine of Whisper bolts and reloaded. Stablight beams were flickering wildly from around the corner to the stairs. Verity started hammering the bottom of the stairwell with a slow, methodical pulse of real bolts, one every five or six seconds. She wouldn't be shooting at people, but at the little sliver of visible wall. We had seen light body armor, but nothing covering arms, legs, groins, and heads. Even a little shrapnel could maim or kill. The stablights seemed to retreat.

I tried to remember the blueprint and the basement rooms. "Wessex, what does the blueprint say is in these rooms? Any fuel storage, anything that will explode?"

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"Negative."

"Tara, status?"

"Ready to move. She might live."

I cut the man free. I tried to tell him to stop yelling, then I realized, of course, all three of them had no ear protection. They had gone mostly deaf the second Verity fired her first unsuppressed bolter shot. And they couldn't see, either. Just brief flashes of armored shapes in the pure dark.

I said, "Making light." I switched my stablight on for a second. I put a finger over where my lips would be if my visor wasn't down. I pointed to the wall of the torture room on the side opposite the other doors in the hallway. "Go there. Go."

They didn't. I put my visor up. "Go! There!"

Sandal and Axel moved. Axel took Svetlana. I turned my light off and snapped my visor back down.

"I'm going to—"

"Back, back, back!" Verity screamed over me. She shoved Hana back and reached out, yanked the door closed. A deafening bang shook the room and the door bowed inward in the middle. Someone had gotten smart enough to use grenades.

"I'm going to breach through that wall, there. Tara, make the hostages not die. Hana, cover the door. Verity, you—" I stopped myself from saying that she would go first through the breach. She was visibly limping. "I'm first, you're my two."

Another grenade went off in the hallway, and a few seconds later, bullet and las-shot holes started appearing in the steel door. I set my melta charge on the wall. Tara was pushing hostages into a corner and tipping over a table full of evil-looking tools to give them some protection. She put her hands over her helmet's ear pieces and scrunched herself smaller, miming for them, shouting the instructions anyway: "Cover your ears! Curl up in a ball!"

"Back, back. Verity, ready?"

"Ready."

"Burning."

The shock of the explosive in the small space was like getting hit with a sledgehammer everywhere at once, even though most of it had followed the shape of the charge and gone through the wall into the side-room beyond. When I went through, it was obvious that I didn't need Verity, or a bolter. The whole room was devastation. I couldn't even tell what had been in it. Something made of wood, and something made of metal, and paper, I think, because there were little pieces of something floating around and catching fire. The charge had overpenetrated. It or some piece of flying debris had punched a meter-wide hole through the far wall and into the room beyond. I moved to the hole, trusting Verity to cover the closed door.

Through the hole I saw a man lying on the floor with a pistol next to him, clutching his head. I shot him. I tossed a stun grenade into the room and crawled through the hole after it detonated. I checked the corners. There had only been the one enemy. The walls were stacked with cleaning supplies. More supplies had been knocked all over the floor.

This was the second room down the hallway from the torture room. It had just one door, plus the hole my charge had made. The door would open on the enemy-dominated hallway, with the stairwell across the hall on the left and the torture room down the hall on the right.

Somebody, a man, was shouting in the hallway. "Push up, push up, get a charge on that door!" Bellowing. They were all three quarters deaf. They didn't have hearing-preserving helmets. They had forgotten that we did.

I voxed: "Tara, Hana, bring them. Come to me."

They acknowledged. A few seconds later, but unrelated, the vox grew scratchy with static and Wessex reported that Mak'ti had shut down the enemy's vox communications.

We consolidated into the new room with the dead man and re-established rear security. Wessex's voice crackled again. "Reinforcements arriving. Enforcers are engaging enemy QRF."

I had Verity cover for me as I gingerly opened the door an inch. I saw the reflected light of stablights in the hallway, and I could see more from the direction of the stairs. The room we were in didn't look straight at the stairwell, but it was close enough to try a grenade.

"Wessex," I said. I was quiet, although the enemy was probably almost as deaf as our civilians. "Confirm zero Enforcers in MI33?"

"Affirmative. No friendlies inside except you and hostages."

I had only brought one frag grenade. I made Verity give me one of hers. I explained the plan by saying, "Two frags and clear, then pull back. Verity is first after the frags. I'm two."

I put the first one towards the stairwell, ripped the pin out of the other one before the first went off, and tossed it into the hallway. The two explosions crashed through us, even behind the door. Verity went, entering the hallway. She had picked the direction facing the stairwell. I followed her out, covering the other direction. There were corpses and pieces of corpses strewn across one side of the hallway in what had probably been a disciplined stack. I saw a few bodies that could have been alive, so I shot them. Behind me, Verity fired one shot.

Verity asked for a third person and a frag grenade. A few seconds later Tara's grenade bounced up into the stairwell and exploded, rattling us all again. There were some dancing stablight reflections for a second, and then there was nothing moving except for us.

We still had three more uncleared doors in the hallway. The enemy could still flood the basement with gas and kill the hostages. Or they could breach through the floor and drop down on top of us. Or blow up the building and bury us if they had enough explosives. But I thought the risks of trying to continue clearance were worse than the risks of waiting for reinforcements. We had an angle that would let us shoot anyone trying to enter the hallway from any of those doors and from the stairs. Our reinforcements were killing the enemy's.

I asked everyone's status. None of us were bleeding, except for the hostages. We had ammunition. All three hostages were still breathing.

Axel tended wordlessly to Sandal's cuts and burns. He turned out to be decent enough at applying bandages, for a murderous heretic child-killer.

Nothing else happened in the basement until Wessex voxed us to make sure we didn't kill the Enforcers coming down to rescue us. The enemy didn't try anything. I don't know why. Superior Isela reminded me sometimes there isn't a reason, especially when command breaks down. Whole objectives get forgotten. People mistake the commander's last intent and throw all their resources at something unimportant. Or somebody screams, "Oh Emperor, they're all dead," and the commander hears victory when what was meant was despair. Or perhaps it was just shock. Speed and violence attack the mind, not just the body. People break, shut down, give up and wait for the end. People take a two minute break and find the whole battle has ended while they were catching their breath. It's in all of us. It's in me.

By the time everything was over, three Enforcers had been shot. One of them lost his leg later that morning, when surgeons couldn't save it, but all of them lived. Castor and Mak'ti were fine. Adem had been hit in the helmet by a ricochet and needed help to walk for the rest of the day. All four of us in the assault element ached in every joint for days, and Verity's leg seemed to have lost days of progress towards recovery. But that was all.

Svetlana died in the hospital.

Sandal lived. She insisted on leaving Merograd with Axel and us as soon as the mediskin was applied to her wounds and the surgeons finished patching their ruptured eardrums.

We returned to Velgrad late that morning and gave Axel and Sandal to Inquisitor Grendel. Svetlana's corpse, the abandoned grav-chutes, and eleven captured Sanctifying Truth heretics would come later in separate transports.

Military and Enforcer units stood ready around Merograd Industrial 3-3 on high alert for 24 hours, but the Eldar never came to sanitize the site.

I think the thing that jostled me when we entered the torture room was a burst of bullets hitting my chest and neck plates. There was cosmetic damage there that I couldn't remember getting some other way, and one of my magazines was bent and ruined.