[55]

It wasn't like the lesser Fear of the battle of 198. It was almost exactly as it had been on day 110. Supernatural, heart-crushing, thought-obliterating horror, shattering into vile certainties of things untrue.

I recognized it for what it was. But I also knew that my recognition was wrong. For that, too, was a comforting certainty, and all comfort had always been a lie.

In the quiet center of my mind, I had been praying Mina's rite. Falling in and out of it on "tend the fallen," sometimes falling out of words themselves, mixing it with wordless hope for Tara to survive and the words of the plan that might make it possible. But praying it. The prayer under the words. Perhaps as Mina herself had prayed it, in a different language, a different age, fighting and dying in a different war, five thousand years ago.

It was what Gwen had been praying on day 110. She said she heard her voice—Saint Mina's voice. 'Be not afraid. Raise your gun and fight.'

I heard no saintly words. Only Verity screaming, Tara sobbing, Hana begging, "No, no, no," and my own almost silent keening.

I knew that I had killed us, that the drones had failed. There was no rescue coming now or ever. No reason to fight, not here—not anywhere. No reason to believe in a fraudulent Emperor or the lying promises of a fraudulent Church. No hope, no faith, no God, no future for mankind.

Mina's rite was a cruel and empty lie. There had never been a martyr, only endless victims. Mercy only lengthened pain. There was no innocence, no choice between the darkness and the light.

I heard bare feet marching in utterly un-Ork-like cadence, coming from all around.

I knew that Castor had still been alive after the crash, and I had left him trapped in the wreck to die.

I wanted them to kill us. I wanted to die. I wanted all of us to die, and more than that, before annihilation, I wanted the twisting horror of an Eldar blade. Everything I believed was tangled with its opposite. There was no truth that wasn't also false. There was nothing I could just believe. But pain was sensation. Sensation was data, not belief. Uninterrupted, unfiltered, the one thing reason couldn't cut and cut and cut and cut away.

Something laughed. It wasn't a man or an Ork. It didn't feel like a daemon. It didn't sound like an Eldar to me.

I drew breath. I don't know if it was to scream, or to beg forgiveness for killing us all, or tell my Sisters to give up. I don't know why I said what I said instead. Today I could argue the philosophy, or give a reason that sounds so much like me that I can believe it over my own memory. I could say I found the courage to say what had felt true yesterday, and still felt beautiful and sacred and bright, even if all those things were illusions. Perhaps that might be true. But I don't think so. I don't know.

I said: "Be not afraid. Raise your gun and fight!"

Slap, slap, slap, went marching unshod feet.

The first Ork lurched through the door to the south like a marionette. I saw an expression on his monstrous face uncannily like human despair. I shot his head off.

Two more came. They were twitching, grief-wracked puppets. Marched into the Fear by a will not their own. They came as if to collect a victory already won. As if we were breaking some unwritten rule by fighting, by not lying down and waiting for capture or death.

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We killed them, though we could not have articulated why.

We moved through the north door, and for a moment, the Fear was almost gone. Then there was another Ork north of us. He fired a crossbow, missed, and died to return fire—but the Fear resumed.

We went north over his corpse and the Fear faded again.

Tara said, "Line, the line! Axel, the line."

We advanced through a corridor and I saw sunlight around a corner to our right. The east wall of the building. For a few seconds, while we were following a corridor west to east, I felt the Fear again, and we turned north and it was gone.

The line. The linear effect. Axel's interrogation.

The Fear projector emitted a beam. Like a narrow cone or trumpet shape, a few meters at the emitter, broadening with distance.

At close range, a few hundred meters away, it would work without much power, but the effect would be just a few meters wide. It could fill the length of a hallway, or the width of a room.

I ordered us through a side door. Verity was covering the long axis of the corridor, so I worked the angle of the open door. It was an office. Just the one door, and a broken window facing the half-bombed building across a gray width of rockcrete street. There was an Ork facing out the window. I shot him three times in the back and he came apart into a mess that covered the floor and wall under the frame.

"Inside, close it," I said.

I expected the Fear again, the Eldar responding to the death of their sentry, but it didn't come. Hana shut the door behind us and we moved to the side of the room, where we could watch the door without the window to our backs.

I reached for my data-slate, but of course it was gone. Smashed with the servo-skull just minutes ago.

"Tara, data-slate."

I took hers and found the corridor on the blueprint. I switched to the aerial pict and found the place on the building where it was. I drew the line east, but there was just the bombed building, a burned-out waterfront, and then the river for hundreds of meters.

I drew the line west. A hundred meters west, it went straight over the entrance to the sub-metro station.

"Hold on," I said.

"Marisa, there's no time," said Verity.

She was right. The Eldar must have deployed by now. The Orks and the Fear hadn't killed us, but they had fixed us in place. The purpose of a fixing force is to allow the destroying force to maneuver.

But avoiding being destroyed wasn't the most important thing any more. I was close to certain that I knew the exact coordinates of the enemy base.

I double-checked on my map and then I opened the drone case to prepare the last three relay drones. I clicked them all to record, prayed silently that they would escape, and leaned my head close to their round aluminum bodies to speak.

"Command, Marisa. Recorded relay 3. Believe Eldar base in sub-metro. Station at grid 45.5 mark 307.0. Need immediate orbital fire mission. Heavy jamming. Arvus destroyed. Four effectives. Wounded. Message repeats."

I made the sign of the Aquila. Let one get through, I prayed silently. Just one.

I held my bolter one-handed and clutched the open case in the other.

"Tara, can you get through the window if Hana helps you?"

"Yes."

"We are crossing to the other building. Verity is one, I am two, Tara three, Hana four. Set? Go."