[50] and [51]

[50]

Inquisitor Amon Grendel, tech-adept Mak'ti, tech-adept Seg, tech-adept Ik'tar, Edric Esmond, Adem mag Dram, and Castor Makarion died on 290.738.M41, at approximately 09:00 Vogel local time.

Adem was thirty-one years old. Castor was forty years old. I do not know the other ages. Seg, Ik'tar, and Esmond were not well known to me.

Amon Grendel was Amon Grendel.

Castor, Adem, and Mak'ti were my friends.

[51]

I tried to focus on tactics. We had plenty of air. Even at our slow pace we could be out of the river in ten minutes when we decided to leave its concealment, and we had almost two hours of air.

Had the crash been detected by our side? I didn't think so. We had been flying low to avoid being seen. There had been no mayday. Esmond's messages by vox before the jamming had been on the short-range squad net.

We were expected to report in an hour. If nothing came, someone would come to search for us. They would come cautiously and in force, but they would still be flying into a trap.

One hour, then. One hour to get clear of whatever was jamming the vox and send word.

There was a tall building with an interior stairwell at the north end of the blocks we had studied. We hadn't been much higher than its top floor when we were in the Arvus and the vox had worked. We could go there, get out of sight, and clear our way upward.

If we were undetected, we could leave a vox-relay drone—no, two, for redundancy. Leave them on a timer, so that we could have displaced already when they broke concealment and were detected, rocketing up towards the sky. They could carry a message out of the jamming and transmit to our command.

Which led me back to Wessex.

Which led me to him pointing to the place on the map where my friends had just died. Saying, "My skills are not as useful." Letting someone else go instead.

The whole operation had been his idea.

One possibility was that he was right about the Eldar, and we had been terribly unlucky. Or they had greater forces than we thought, and were entrenched with a large, well-armed perimeter.

Another possibility was that he had betrayed us.

I couldn't think about tactics, but if I thought about Wessex being responsible, I could avoid thinking about how Castor and Adem and Mak'ti no longer had faces. How I would never hear any of their voices again. I could make Grendel's death a tactical fact, instead of the upending of the world.

Every plodding step made the idea of betrayal feel more horribly believable. I thought about how little I really knew Wessex. Animated, excitable, brilliant, but who was he, really? I didn't know his age, his history, his past, even his planet of origin or his original name. He could have been a heretic that Grendel had given a second chance. A useful convict saved from hanging by conscription.

Some part of me recognized that I had forgotten to pray. Now, when I needed it most of all.

I started to mouth, "Help me to honor the martyr," but it made my chest feel crushed, and I stopped. I prayed the Libera Nos instead. "Ab insidiis xeno, libera nos Domine" felt easier to say.

I stopped thinking about Wessex. Distances were hard to judge, but I thought we had gone far enough north. I pointed west. We turned. Our slow, half-crawling march through knee-deep muck turned towards shore.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

The servo-skull couldn't move underwater, and it couldn't transmit its picture by vox because of the Eldar jamming. But I connected my data-slate to its back port and held my helmet against it to give it audio commands.

We had reached the rockcrete retaining wall that bounded the city side of the river. We followed it to a collapsed section where rubble and debris had accumulated into a hill that sloped up out of the water.

When we neared the surface, I ordered it to extend its optical limb to the surface and do a visual scan. I held it up so that it could reach. The four of us gathered close and watched the pict through the data-slate screen. For several seconds there was nothing but static. Then perhaps the skull's machine-spirit fought through some obstacle to its duty, because the screen flickered to a grainy, low-resolution image.

We were three hundred meters farther south than I had thought. The ruined bridge that I thought was behind us was still north of us. It loomed up on our right about fifty meters away. I had assumed that we had started near where we were supposed to land, but there was no reason why that should be the case after Esmond's desperate attempt to save us. The high building I wanted was out of sight beyond the bridge.

I put the slate away and turned back to the others to point the way north. Something was wrong with the water behind them. I don't know what I saw, there was nothing to see—maybe it was sound, or a tremor of pressure, I don't know. I knew something was wrong. I grabbed my bolter and snapped it up. The others reacted to my motion. They rotated outward, covering other sectors. Fifteen meters away, I saw a little puff of muck rise up and cling to something for a fraction of a second. I aimed a meter above it and fired my weapon, aimed up another half meter and fired again. I felt the bone-rattling thump of underwater explosions. There was a little flash in the cavitation bubble. The water went dark and red around a too-tall shape.

For a moment it was still coming. I fired three times more. At least one bolt hit. The Wrack disintegrated into a cloud of gore. I glimpsed a huge, hook-edged gun before it settled into the mud. I couldn't tell what kind. For a second I tried to remember whether any Eldar weapons could fire more than a few meters underwater. Then I realized I was being a fool.

Sonar. Tremor-sensoria. Subaudio scanners. Stupid, stupid. How many times had I warned younger Sisters? Never assume that the Eldar can't see you just because you can't see them.

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Suddenly every shift of light and twisting shadow from the surface looked like an invisible Eldar coming to kill us.

"Out, out, out of the water, get out!" I don't know if they could make out the meaning of my screams despite the water, but they moved with me. We struggled up the slope and into the light of day.

Shrubs and saplings came right up to the retaining-wall. We moved through them towards the half collapsed hab-stacks ahead. We dashed the last few meters to a large empty window-frame at street level. Verity and Tara worked the angles of the window frame while Hana and I held flank security.

We went inside, cleared the room, set security on the window and a half-open interior door, and paused for breath. I realized I was still on suit air and switched back. The helmet filters out spores and dust and bacteria. Odors get through.

The air smelled surreally like deep woods, not a city or even burned ruins. It smelled of water and pine and dirt, damp and mold and old decay. But there was also the faint smell of recent putrefaction. Of rotting flesh.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

There were a hundred things to say and a hundred more to ask, but staying alive came first. We were somewhere the enemy might have seen us go inside.

"Clear and move," I said quietly. "We displace a few doors down."

We did. We used the servo-skull and my plugged-in slate to peek into the corridor. The pict quality was still as badly degraded but I thought it would show an Eldar at indoor distances if we worked slowly. Two minutes later we were in a small hab with a cracked but solid window that faced a sunlit space so thick with bright spring green that the window showed nothing but leaves. We cleared the main room and toilet room and closed the hall door gently behind us. The latch still worked.

We fell back to a corner of the room where it was easy to guard the door and the window was in view at the same time. There was a mold-slick old dresser lying on the floor there. A mouse ran into it as we were moving around the room. Hana used it as a firing rest for her bolter.

I brought up my aerial pict of the operations area. Our building had an enclosed courtyard, so that was what the window faced. Not the outside. I let myself relax a fraction.

I said, "Injuries?"

There were none. I made the sign of the Aquila left-handed, so I could still cover my angle. I started the simplest rite for the dead. The others joined as they recognized the prayer. We were quiet. None of us got all the way through before grief got in the way of the words. Together, we got to the end.

The words are:

Blessed judge and guardian of souls, have mercy on your fallen servants. Turn not your face from the dead, nor from us who carry on.

After a moment, I said, "Plan. Get to high ground. Send relay drones with whatever we know by then. If the Eldar haven't found us by then, they will probably see the drones. Time limit… twenty-five minutes. Then we send from wherever we are. Afterwards, retreat if possible. Thoughts?"

Tara said, "If we are fighting, we won't have time to record a message."

I agreed and changed the plan: I would make a recording before we needed it. We could replace it later if we had the chance and our knowledge had changed.

Verity said, "We have five drones, right?"

"Yes," I said.

"Why not leave one here? Right out there through the window. Or two, even, so it's harder to shoot them down. Give them instructions to wait ten minutes and then go."

"Yes. Good. But just one. And twenty-five minutes. We might learn more and need the other drones. And right now we only know enough to warn rescuers away from danger. Yes?"

The others agreed, or at least didn't disagree enough to say so. There was a moment of terror when something rattled against the window, but it was only wind blowing the leaves.

Hana said, "Do you smell that?"

I did. "The rot smell is worse."

"Courtyard?" she said.

It made sense. Wind would have brought the smell.

Tara said, "We could set all of the drones on timers. Leave one every five to ten minutes. Have them all launch at the same time. Then instead of giving one position away we give away five. Four decoys. One real thing."

I liked that. I thought about it. I changed the plan. Multiple units separated by distance would make it impossible to shoot them all down. I would use the useless scout drones, too. Five more targets to overwhelm their surface-to-air capability. Ten simultaneous launches, coordinated by mindless timers.

What weapons could they actually have? They had shot us with a darklight gun. Extremely limited ammunition, single shot, imperfect accuracy. Their shard weapons would work badly against a mechanical target like a drone. Hits would just make dents or tiny holes, not fatal toxin wounds. They would only be effective for the first second of flight.

I felt sure the Eldar would be able to destroy one. Maybe several. Probably… hopefully… not enough.

The changed plan also gave us a new role. We were not escaping to high ground. We were scouting the area, and then falling back to a chosen fighting position or retreat path. If we couldn't retreat, we would fight until reinforcements arrived or we died.

We spent another four minutes of our dwindling supply of time in that decaying little hab, reviewing maps and picts. I picked two retreat corridors and two nearby fighting positions.

The sub-metro station had only one entrance, except if the enemy wanted to travel kilometers around and then attack down a long straight tunnel with nowhere to take cover from our fire.

The tall building that was my original plan would be the other fighting position. It had an interior stairwell. Hell to clear. Hell to assault. The easiest thing in the galaxy to defend. We could weld the doors shut with melta-gel and hold forever until we ran out of ammunition or they brought the building down.