[53]

Everything took too long. Everything we did was too slow. Clearing our way to the east wall took two of our minutes. We saw another pair of the unnaturally dormant Orks watching from an upper window in the building across the overgrown street. We lost another minute repositioning inside to reach an exit where a bomb-crater in the street had turned into a tiny patch of young forest. From there, we crawled.

When the wind blew and stirred the leaves and tall grasses that grew along the north-south street, we moved. When it stopped, we stopped. The minutes slipped away. The tall building loomed up ahead of us on the far side of an intersection. The windows were narrow and pointed at the top like they might once have been stained-glass, but they were blackened and empty, now.

The intersection was split by rubble and the overturned hulk of a truck, red-brown with rust and green with sprouting grasses.

When I checked with thermals, I saw two Orks high above us, hidden in windows near the top of the tall building. I didn't think they had seen us.

The Eldar would attack from above, anyway, I thought, when they finally found us. A few Orks didn't change the plan. Move to a middle level, bunker in, and turn the stairwell into a death trap. Pray it wasn't needed, and the Eldar didn't find us. Wait for reinforcements to arrive.

We started working our way across the intersection. Two of us covering, two moving in a low scramble to the next concealment. Taking turns.

If we turned left, the sub-metro station would be about a hundred meters down the street on our right. It wasn't visible from the intersection.

The tall building had been an Administratum or Judicar administrative structure. The broken remnants of tall stone statues, the saints unidentifiable now, flanked an arched double-door. The door on our left had fallen outward, turning the steps into a ramp. The other door hung half-open. Its brasswork was still bright in the morning sun, showing half of an Aquila Ascendant.

Just left of the tall building there had been a small park, or perhaps badly maintained autocar parking. It was a waving field of grasses and wildflowers, now.

The nearest structure was just to the right of the tall building. Its original function was unidentifiable. A bomb or heavy artillery had partially collapsed it and gutted it with fire. I couldn't see Orks inside. I marked it as a possible secondary fallback point.

We had just made it to the cover of one of the broken statues and were moving up to the open door when the timer ran out. I glimpsed a flicker of movement and saw them. Seven tiny specks, my five scout decoys and two relay drones, rocketing up into the sky. Then there were flickers of shadow and wisps like greenish smoke—darklight and shard weapons reaching up for them from unseen shooters in the ruins. Most seemed to come from our south or west. I couldn't see which ones were hit, if any, but the wisps that were shard volleys tracked up to higher angles for a second before they ceased.

Inside through the gaping-open door, there was a small antechamber. It had a vaulted ceiling supported by heavy internal buttresses on the walls. Slit windows that might have been deadly murder holes if they weren't filled with an accumulation of cobwebs and dead leaves. We slipped inside, towards a thick iron double-door ahead of us. The door was open a few centimeters, but mostly closed. We tried to be silent. The leaves felt loud, rustling softly under our boots. We stacked up on the doors, two of us on each side. Tara and Verity with their guns pointed at it. Me with Verity, operating the servo-skull. Hana with Tara, covering the rear.

As quietly as I could, I gave the command-word to make the servo-skull check the door. It reached out its optic and slipped it through the opening. On the attached data-slate, the image slowly panned around the room.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

The antechamber was cut out of a large rectangular room that took up about a quarter of the footprint of the structure. The servo-skull couldn't get an image of all the space to our sides, but it could see the side wall of the room. It was stacked from the floor to the three-story-tall vaulted ceiling with scrolls, green-gray with mildew.

I described what I saw to the others, speaking quickly and in a hushed voice.

"Three story internal. Two catwalk balconies left wall. Ladders. Three closed doors, one each level, left wall…"

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With only one small break at each level for a side door—one on the floor, and one each on the two balconies—the stacks of scrolls continued halfway to the north wall, where an interior buttress shaped like a saint with his arms upstretched supported a vaulted mosaic ceiling and the weight of the structure above.

As the image continued to pan, the tactical problem got worse. The far side of the buttress was filled with dead cogitator stacks, also floor to ceiling. But between the buttresses and the ceiling-supporting pillars, there were huge administrative desks, built as tall as my chin, so that petitioners would have to crane their necks up to look at the minor functionaries deciding the fate of their permits and appeals. They would be hard to climb. Deadly to climb in a firefight. They extended all the way across the long axis of the room, jammed in between every set of pillars like a fighting platform. They blocked our way to the set of double-doors that would lead to the interior stair and two unpowered elevators.

There was no cover. There was some concealment. Piles of scrolls fallen from their places, clogging the catwalks and heaping the ground floor. But it would only help an enemy.

"Room east-west axis fully barricaded. Right side, same as left. Balconies. Three doors in a stack. Possible concealed positions. No visible targets—"

And then—something very close, moving, earthy-green, came into view just out of the dead space to my right. Something grabbed the optic.

The servo-skull was yanked violently forward. It caught on the edge of the door and the door was flung open with the force of the pull. Something metallic swept down and shattered the servo-skull into fragments of bone and arcing circuitry.

At the far side of the doorframe, Tara was already firing, her Whisper rounds making a rapid semi-auto pfhak-pfhak-pfhak! as she worked the trigger. Verity and I had a view of the center-left third of the room through the now-open door. We had the cover of the double-doorframe to fight from. Tara and Hana had more cover to work with thanks to the remaining closed door.

Orks rose silently up from behind the administrative desks, exposing just their eyes and weapons. I could see three. At least one of them had a shard rifle. I fired.

Have you been in a workshop filled with people at work with pneumatic wrenches and power tools? That was the sound, almost that exactly. Whisper bolts on automatic or rapid-firing semi. The thrum of a shard weapon. Clanks and bangs from huge crossbows.

The initial exchange of fire lasted about five seconds.

Regular bolts would have shattered the desks, first blasting clouds of deadly splinters out of the other side, then follow-up shots punching straight through. But the Whisper rounds spent most of their energy going through.

My Ork, the one with the shard gun, jerked with penetrating shots but didn't go down until I landed two in the center of his forehead. I saw something sparking in his head as my rounds blew his skull open, like broken electronics. Then he crumpled.

Something huge and heavy hit me in the shoulder plate and spun me down to the floor. It was a meter-long piece of rusted rebar, launched from one of the crossbows. I could see Hana had turned and was firing into the room, too. Tara was reloading.

There was an Ork in view on the balcony, crouched behind the doorframe on the third level. I shot him from where I lay on the floor, spending the rest of my magazine. Some missed, but something must have hit, because he toppled from the balcony as I ejected my spent magazine. He didn't fall like an Ork. His arms and legs kept moving like he was trying to walk and aim. He looked like a malfunctioning servo-drone. He kept doing it even after he crunched into the floor.

There was a brief moment where the only sound was the static-like clicking of shards glancing off of the closed door and the thrum of shards cutting the air between the two pairs of us. My shoulder and collarbone hurt but I didn't think they were broken. I couldn't see anything else to shoot. None of us had a target.

Then the only sound was me seating my magazine and working the action to chamber a round. It was like the whole world had stopped and was listening to me.

Silence.

Then, like a switch being flipped, like a choir answering the director's cue, the Orks bellowed. All at once, from fifteen, maybe twenty voices—not just in the room, some were behind us through the open door, some were far above us and muted by distance.

"WAAGH!"