[56]

Verity and I went through first. We held security while Tara and Hana got through the window and dashed across the street. Hana dashed. Tara tried, almost fell, and staggered the rest of the way.

I put the drone case down. I gave the launch order. We ran. Hana had secured an empty doorframe. We got inside. I turned to see the drones rush skyward. There was almost vertical shard-fire and a parallel flicker of darklight from our southwest. The Eldar were almost on top of us.

I realized another error a second later. Four sets of our boot prints were stamped across the rockcrete in thick red Ork blood, pointing at this building like an arrow.

"Keep going," I said. "Moving clear. Don't stop."

It was hard to tell what the building had been. Not a hab. There was mangled machinery, and the walls were thick. Maybe an industrial kitchen. I think some of the machines were ovens.

We couldn't move quickly. Tara kept stumbling. After the first room, I had to help her walk.

We stopped in a side room. We hid behind a piece of fallen masonry. Verity peeked out through a crack while Hana held security on the door. I set Tara down.

"Another injector?" I asked.

"No," she said. "Get it out. Get the shards out. I'm dying. They're killing me."

I did it. We aren't surgeons. I did it badly. I gave her morphine but I know I hurt her.

But the shards dissolve in flesh. The longer they are in, the more poison. I got the armor off of her arm up to the biceps. There were three holes in her inside elbow before I started cutting.

There was very little blood. The autotourniquet was still tight. I did it without cutting a vein or artery. I found two of the shards easily. I couldn't find the third. Tara didn't scream, but she made a gurgling noise high in her throat that was quiet, but worse.

Verity murmured, "Eldar. I think. Entering where we did. Just shadows that shouldn't be there."

There wasn't time to look for the third shard. I pressed a bandage into the wound I had made with my knife. I used another autoinjector just above the wound. One of my two. I didn't know if it would help or not. I helped her put her armor back on and lock it into place like a sling.

"Are any still outside?" I whispered.

Verity nodded. "I think so. I… there might be one thirty meters south, in the bushes. And on the second story of the tall building—maybe. Or—I can't tell. Maybe."

We couldn't defend this room. We had concealment, and shard weapons have terrible barrier penetration. But the Eldar had at least one darklight gun, and their stealth, and grenades.

"We have to go," I said. "Tara, you are three. Hana, you help Tara if she needs it. Verity is one, I am two."

I liked the more destroyed part of the building for a defensible position. Its low, half-collapsed ceiling would force the Eldar to crouch and stoop. Dust and rubble on the floors would show even their light steps. We worked towards it. Verity on point, clearing angles. Me supporting her, covering the axis she had to leave unprotected, or rushing with her when we had to take an intersection back to back.

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I don't remember any of us doing it, but we had all shifted our armor color from forest olive-green back to urban drab-gray.

We reached the bombed-out section. I glimpsed something through a sliver of view afforded by a crack in the wall. There had been a big machine near a load-bearing exterior wall. Now the machine was flattened under a collapsed slab of rockcrete. Folds in the metal left little slits of darkness that looked like they would go all the way to the space between the wall and the machine. It was like a little bunker inside the building.

I decided we would fight from it. The Eldar might breach through the exterior wall and kill us, if they had big enough explosives, or were willing to burn through whatever tiny supply of darklight ammunition they had left. Against a conventional assault we could hold for a long time. We only needed minutes. If any of my relays had escaped, help would be coming soon. Maybe preceded by orbital fire.

I indicated the room. We moved and found an empty doorframe that led into the room. I covered the hallway axis while Verity worked the angle.

There was a flicker of shadow and a heavy grinding sound. Verity flew back and crumpled against the far wall. I turned my weapon and started shooting through the wall. Beside me, Tara was firing, too. I grabbed Verity's limp arm and started to drag her. There was a blinding flash of green—a moment of absolute darkness that seemed to rip at me and shove me all at once—and then an explosion.

The wall blew apart, crashing into us. We hit the other wall of the corridor amidst a heap of masonry. I think the darklight weapon had exploded.

I think I lost consciousness for a few seconds, because the next thing I experienced was Hana dragging me and Verity out of the hallway while Tara fired her weapon down the corridor. The roof had fallen another meter. The building was like a cave, shot through with beams of sunlight illuminating thick clouds of dust. I couldn't see what Tara was shooting at but I added my fire to hers until my weapon was empty. I reloaded.

We were in the room I had wanted. My little bunker was still there. I realized that it was holding up the roof. That old machine, the thick wall, and a lucky arrangement of rubble were all that was stopping a huge weight of steel and rockcrete from crushing us flat.

I took over dragging Verity while Hana rolled a grenade at whatever Tara had been shooting at. The roof shivered with the explosion and settled another few centimeters. I shoved Verity into the bunker, held security while Tara and Hana crawled inside, and then crawled in after them. One grenade would kill us all in there, but nothing could get to a hole big enough to throw a grenade through without passing through our field of fire.

Tara got her weapon reloaded. Hana aimed her gun through the firing slit made by the shape of the rubble over the machine. I knelt to check on Verity.

There was a blackened, decimeter-wide hole where her heart should have been.