[52]

The window wouldn't open without force, and force might make a loud noise. There was a door just down the hall. We cleared our way to it, used the servo-skull on the door, and opened it.

The smell hit us first. Rotting flesh. Old feces and older blood. Death in all its vile indignity.

Then we saw them. They were almost hidden by the vegetation. Almost.

Where people would have hung flowers, banners, reliquaries, prayer-cloths—there were people. Desecrated. Dismembered. Between ten and fifteen, it was hard to tell. Some of them were children.

There was something like an inversion of art in it. If art is the reaching towards the divine, towards meaning and beauty, this was a reaching towards the opposite. I will not describe what was done to the people there. There were things that had been people stretching up the inside walls and balconies of the hab-stack courtyard. It was the claim that there is no meaning, manufactured out of human flesh.

I should not thank the Emperor for the death of His people, but I cannot do else. I thank Him they were dead and not still alive in their state.

We were only there for a few seconds. Just long enough for me to place the drone with my first message in the garden made lush by the corruption of their flesh.

The Lectio teaches us that the natural world is beautiful if seen completely. Even something awful can be turned to the perfection of the Emperor's design. Corruption gives way to clean soil. Chaos orders itself by the imposition of natural law.

I could not see it. None of us could see it. If it is true, I still cannot see it. I could beg the God-Emperor to send annihilation. To unmake that garden of unmaking, to turn all within it to clean bone to be remembered and clean ash to be scattered. I could not ask Him to make that place into something good. Not without first destroying it by fire.

I will submit to correction if I err, but I think I will not understand. I think I can never understand.

We fled that vile place.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

We did not have time to conduct a thorough search of the region. The route I wanted to take only covered about half a kilometer, but it would take our full remaining time: a sort of shallow zig-zag. From the intended landing site, we went west to get inland where there was rubble that would conceal movement without blocking our ability to see. That took us northeast, paralleling the river.

First we went north, until we had a concealed view of the place where we were supposed to land and sample the water. I tried sending the servo-skull to scout over a building with a collapsed roof, but when I looked at the recording, there was just static. We could look at the present moment while the data-slate was attached. That was all.

I couldn't see anything that indicated an enemy base. We got close enough to see the bottom of the ruined bridge, but there were no Eldar and none of their unholy works clinging to it.

With no new information, I timed a scout drone and left it as our first decoy.

We saw an Ork as we continued north and west. It was small for its kind, not much more bulky than a very large, very hunchbacked man. It wore a ragged red loincloth and carried a crude spear made of a sapling trunk and a metal spike. Verity and I aimed at it, but we held our fire. The Eldar must have lost us, either when we left the water or when we moved through the habs. Sound would let them find us again. He stared at us stupidly for a moment, coming out of his cover and standing still in the open. He was about ninety meters away. I think he was very young and did not grasp what our bolters were.

He turned and started north. I had an idea. It made me smile slightly in spite of everything.

"Armor color to green," I said. We had been using urban dark gray. There were trees and grass, ivy, spring growth everywhere. The gray was better for indoors. The forest brown-green might be slightly better outside, but that wasn't my reason.

"Follow the Ork while we can. If the Ork can move freely on a path, any movement on that path will look like just more Orks."

"Green," said Verity. "In case they glimpse us through the trees. We'll look like good Orks."

"Good Orks," I agreed.

We continued through the ruins.

We found more human remains. Between three and five people, I think, but they were just scattered bones. They were cracked and marked by Ork teeth. They were much too recent to be left from the war.

We lost sight of the Ork after about one hundred and fifty meters. I left another decoy scout drone. We started working northeast.

Once, we went through a building to avoid an intersection with sparse concealment. The smell was so bad we had to go back to suit air. It was like the whole floor inside was made of flies and beetles. We found more desecrated bodies when we checked an open doorway. They were recent. They had been posed in a room.

I wondered how many mutilated, dying people must have been brought here over weeks or even months.

It wasn't until after we had continued on that I realized what it meant. It was the same as Wessex's bacteria and the toxins. The toxins made the bacteria present. More bacteria meant closer to the source. More discarded victims meant we were closer to a place where Eldar had been living for a long time.

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I said in a hushed voice, "Wessex didn't betray us."

Verity glanced at me. "Of course he didn't."

"Are you sure?" said Hana. We were all equally quiet, holding our heads close together. We were crouching in bushes at the base of a low thick wall.

"He didn't betray us," I said. "We didn't take fire from a remote picket. Or from a prepared ambush."

Verity said, "Hmm? But…"

Tara whispered, "God have mercy."

"It was just terrible luck. Wessex was right. About almost everything. Down to a few kilometers. But it isn't the water purificatoria. The Eldar are here. Right here. One of these buildings is their base."

Tara said, "He accidentally landed us directly on the target."

"A few blocks away," I said. "Close enough."

My next drone was a real one, one of the relay drones. I had updated the message. I thought about reducing the time because the message was so important, but we had used most of our time already. Only fifteen minutes to my deadline.

The message was: "Command, Marisa. Recorded relay two. Arvus 1 down. Destroyed by Eldar surface-to-air darklight. Grendel dead. Four effectives. Heavy vox-suppression. Sign of long-term Eldar presence north of landing. Believe enemy base. Believe enemy base one hundred to three hundred meters north of landing. Message repeats."

I deployed the last three decoy drones and the third of our five relay drones as we moved to investigate my chosen fallback points, the sub-metro and the tall building.

They could be fallback fighting positions for us, as I had planned before. Or they could be useless, compromised, or occupied by the enemy. Either could be another desecrated corpse-site. Or they could part or all of the enemy base.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

We were half a block from both the sub-metro entrance and the tall building when we saw the Orks.

We were about fifty or sixty meters from each objective. Just seconds, if we broke cover and ran. Several minutes if we wanted to stay undetected and alive. About seven minutes were left until the drones would launch. We were running behind.

We were inside of a building that had once been a shop of some kind. Shelves, a counter, a few blackened metal wire things shaped like women that might have once shown garments for display. There were no bodies, no corpse-smell. I couldn't decide if the lack meant we were farther from the Eldar, like Wessex's bacteria counts, or if it was random chance, or if even Eldar don't want to smell rotting flesh where they sleep, and were hidden in the basement, right beneath our feet.

The Orks were across the street in a church, positioned in the direction of the tall building. I saw two immediately in the grainy image of the servo-skull's display, standing in the shadows back from an empty arched window that once had held stained glass. The sunlight outside reflected like colored sparks off of little shards in the dust outside the window. All that remained of whatever image it had held.

We gradually picked out four more Orks. There was one standing motionless in a copse of young trees sprouting out of what had been a fountain and statuary. Three of them were on the half-bombed roof of the church, hidden in a clump of grasses growing there.

All of the Orks were small for their kind, only a little more bulky than the one I had seen before. These were better-armed. They had the oversized axes common to their kind, and each had something like a huge crossbow. There was a strange uniformity to their weapons, though individually they looked like what an Ork would use.

Still, the sight of them cheered me. I thought it meant that we were moving away from the Eldar. I thought their base was somewhere between where we had come ashore and where we were now.

"We will go around them to the tall building. Internal to the east wall." I pointed through the building we were in, indicating we were to stay inside it. "Cross the street fast and then north to the building through the bushes. If we take fire, we break into the building on our right and fight from there."

Tara shook her head. "Marisa, wait. Look at them. Look at the Orks. Why aren't they talking? Why aren't they fighting each other? And look at the scars."

I looked. Every Ork I had ever seen had scars. But these were unusual. Long and straight and uniform. Like surgical scars.

And they were standing motionless. Breathing, looking around, but quiet, gripping their weapons and peering out like disciplined human sentries.

Or like Eldar sentries.

Not at all like Orks.

Could the Eldar make servitors of Orks?

If they did, could we kill them quietly? We each had a magazine of Whisper bolts, so maybe. Could we be certain that six was all they had?

Grendel had said that the women the Eldar had corrupted with their machines had been turned into half-living explosives. If we fought the Orks, even silently—would some of them live long enough to make themselves explode? Would they transmit back to their masters? There was no reason to believe that the Eldar comms-net was down just because they had disabled ours.

Were they transmitting right now, like a security picter?

"From now on, assume any Orks may be Eldar servitors," I said. "Plan is unchanged. If we can get past them it is better. Load Whisper bolts in case we need to fight. Then move."