[60]

291.738.M41

The fighting was done. Every building in the combat area had been meticulously cleared. Late in the morning, that day after the battle, Palatine Elin ordered a power-armored squad into the river to search for the dead. They found the Arvus. It had finally exhausted its energy reserves, and it was cold and dark. They retrieved the human remains. They marked the location so that boats with heavy equipment might one day recover the wreck.

It was hard to discern whether the Fear unit the Eldar had used was the only one they had. Destroyed, they looked like any other piece of shattered Eldar machinery, and the clearance of the tunnels had been conducted with explosives used at almost literally every turn. This was not the first time the Order had hunted Eldar through their nightmare lairs. A place that seemed perfectly empty could still kill you. A place that seemed empty except for some unknown xenos machine probably would kill you. A grenade or demolition charge sent in first made it much more likely that you would survive. Traps triggered. Sensors destroyed. Invisible Eldar shredded by shrapnel or ripped apart by blasts.

No identifiable unit was found near the entrance to the sub-metro station, but that site had been blasted from orbit and pounded by bombs.

I learned from Wessex that no human prisoners were found alive. That was unsurprising. I had assumed that the bombing, the gas, and the grenades would have killed a few survivors. But they hadn't. At least they killed none that might have lived. There were no bodies found without already-unsurvivable wounds.

I think the Eldar must have had a few prisoners left, and they died on the Eldar ship when it tried to escape. Or, when the bombs were falling, when the air was filling with choke gas, their escape was cut off, and the Eldar realized they were going to die, perhaps their last impulse had been to murder.

Of the heretics who had become dependent on their Fear, their Epistemic Engines—nothing new was learned.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

Tara got better, but not much. They took her off of the machine after three more days. I thought it had to be a mistake. Anyone could see she was still poisoned. She could sit up on her own, and her face had stopped twitching, but standing was too much for her. Not just because of pain and stiffness. Standing made her sag and gasp for breath. And her arms were still shaking. They shook constantly, whenever she tried to make them do anything.

Hana and I were still bad, too. We both still needed wheelchairs to go farther than across a room. We were in pain all the time, even with drugs for pain and accelerated healing. We had purple bruises all over, even in places we hadn't been hit.

But Tara couldn't hold a cup of water. She couldn't dress or clean herself.

"Your blood is pure," said the physician, addressing Tara, not me. "The machine can do no more."

"No," I insisted. "Check again."

"We will. We check twice a day. But it is pure. Tara, you… the time from your injury to when we received you was too great. The damage had already been done. Nerves, heart, brain."

They tried to fix her. Days passed. They injected her with medicaments. The techpriest blessed her body and prepared it to receive machines. He implanted tiny mechanisms along her spine, entering through incisions so small they didn't even need a bandage. It helped, a little. She could stand and walk. She could even use her arms after they provided her with a brace to wear over her arms and shoulders. It countered the tremors with little servo-motors. Her arms still shook, but she could do the tasks of daily life, if she was careful and didn't lift much weight.

"Can you cut them off?" she said. "Give me augmentics."

I had asked already about cutting them off, but my question had been different. It was: 'Should I have cut them off when she was shot?' He said no. She would have died of shock.

"It would not work," he said. "Your arms will heal in a few weeks. The cramping and seizing, the pain, the numbness, those will go away. The shaking comes from damage to your nervous system. To the nerves themselves. You were shot with a potent neurotoxin. The counteragent was imperfect. The damage cannot be repaired."

"But how will I fight?"

He shook his head. He made the sign of the Aquila. "I'm sorry, Sister. I believe you will not."

❖ ❖ ❖

​

The Order returned to Velgrad on 295.738.M41, around 19:00 local time. The weather had been sleet and cold rain for a day and a half, but the jet wash of Arvus after Arvus burned the convent landing pad dry and filled the air with billowing steam.

In less than a day, Tara and I would be the same age. For six weeks, at least, and then I would be twenty-three.

We all wore our armor for the flight. There wasn't space for our armor and ourselves separately.

While we had been flying, my mind kept slipping between realities. In one I was invincible. I was fierce and terrible, a conqueror in ceramite and steel. I was the woman who had outlasted the worst the Eldar could give, seen the path to victory, and clawed through every barrier in the way. More even than the commanding Colonel, I felt that I had spoken victory into being.

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In the other I was a broken thing. In that world my armor was a costume, and a solid shock would snap my bones through its protective shell. In that world I wasn't wearing Verity's patched up backpack. Somehow it was wearing me.

I tried to choose the first way of being. I leaned forward in my flight restraints and forced a smile onto my lips the way that Gwen had showed me when we were nine. It didn't really look like a smile. There wasn't a mirror, of course, but I knew exactly what I looked like. Tara had almost my same face, and all the same expressions. Across the narrow aisle of the Arvus, she was doing the same thing. Then I saw Hana try it, too, and I watched the grief and fear in her face—not go away, but change, becoming something that smoldered. Hot, and beautiful, and fierce. I loved them so much it felt like my chest should glow with it.

The other Sisters with us didn't do it, but I felt something change in them, too. Can ugly little unfelt smiles be a psalm? Can an Arvus full of engine noise and silent women ring with the absent sound of it? It was like that.

When we had landed and all the hardware was where it had to go, and all the necessary rites of maintenance were done, we took what remained of Verity. We spread her ashes around the perimeter wall, where they turned the rainwater gray for a second and then disappeared. We put her skull with all the others from our past. Our armor was all put away by then. I was the broken thing, then.

Gwen's skull still wasn't with the others. Even when I write this it still is not there in the Chamber of Skulls. The natural process is not yet complete. It will come out of the ground when it is ready, but until then, we make do with her grave.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

Wessex came in the morning of day 296. The Inquisitorial forces were back in Velgrad, too, in their hab-block near the Arsenal. He brought presents for Tara, but the reason was to say goodbye.

It was 08:15. Ordinarily we would have just donned our armor and we would be going with our Superior for tactical training, but Tara, Hana, and I were assigned to enforced rest. Hana and I had been in the dormitory massaging Tara's hands. But no man could come in there, so we hobbled out to the cafeteria to meet him. We were wrapped in blankets, stiff, and slow. We walked bent over, with little shuffling steps, like we were old.

Wessex said that the woman they only called The Interrogator was taking control of Grendel's assets, human and material, until another Inquisitor was sent to Gaervalt from another star. (I never was permitted to learn her name, or even the reason why it was hidden.)

She asked no more service of us. The Order was to return to its ordinary preparations for future service to the Emperor. Tara, Hana, and I were released back to the Order.

Hana asked, "Who will fight, then? Someone has to fight."

"Yes," said Wessex. "The Interrogator has men of her own to fill the role. Doughty warriors of renown, who are ready to serve this instant—not after weeks of healing and retraining into a new squad. Their first deployment was on 294, two days ago. A moderate success."

I said, "Not Battle Sisters?"

"No."

"Can they fight in the Fear? Do we need to train them?"

He sighed. "I hope we need not discover the answer."

We gave Tara her presents. We all promised to be happy and enjoy ourselves twice as much for the absent dead, and not be grim or sad. Wessex had one from himself, an auto-stabilizing quill to let Tara write despite the tremors, though he said it might take time to learn. And he brought gifts from Adem, Mak'ti, and Castor, which they had bought before they died. A big box of chocolates shaped like flowers that I think was suggested by Adem's sweetheart. A sweet-smelling flask of bolter-cleansing unguents from Mak'ti that had found its way all the way from Mars. Castor's gift was a neat envelope of 36 thousand-vik notes and the words "two months' pay."

We all gawked and laughed and marveled, and counted the notes ourselves, and laughed again and picked them up when Tara dropped them because of her tremor, which would usually have just been sad.

It was so absurd and so absurdly like Castor. I would not guess he had ever put as much as a half-vik in the poor-box. And he must have known a Sister would never keep it. I imagined his little wry smile as he emptied out his bank account on this particular little point of principle. Somehow it didn't hurt then that he had died.

I said that we would give it to Palatine Elin, but I confess I only said that after thinking that I knew she would save it all for Tara's future. Otherwise I think I would have schemed.

Then came Hana's gift of makeup and butterfly jewelry, the wasp bracelet I had bought, and Verity's icon-locket and sweets. We tried eating the sweets, and the one I had was delicious, but we all started getting sad faces and stinging eyes when we sucked on them. We left the rest of the sweets and the chocolates where they could be shared out with the midday meal.

Wessex couldn't stay. He had a new investigation to launch into the Sanctifying Truth sect, chasing a lead in the arid steppe near Novant Keep. I tried to get him to tell us about it.

"Alas, my beauties, alas," he said. "I have divulged overmuch already. Now, I must go. Blessed nameday, Tara Mull."