[62]

Week of 330.738.M41

Wessex and the Inquisition had been hard at work, and their diligence was successful—but I didn't learn of it until later. The first I knew of their successes came from an accomplishment that was as much of a surprise to them as it was to me.

The forces of the Inquisition captured their first intact Fear unit (or "Epistemic Engine") on 330.738.M41. This year in Gaervalt's northern hemisphere, that was deep winter. We are not strongly synchronized with the Terran year.

At the end of months of furious effort, vast resources expended, lives lost, and moral prices paid—it happened with almost no effort at all.

At 02:40 Velgrad time, deep in the night, Enforcers responded to gunfire in Velgrad's Northeast Industrial District, 4th Ward. They arrived three minutes after the last shots were fired. They found a small warehouse with seven dead men, three dead women, and a sinister piece of Eldar machinery the size of an ordinary hab oven. They secured the perimeter and notified the Interrogator's forces at once.

The men and women had been killed by standard small arms. Investigators assessed that several las-weapons, at least two shotguns, and at least two submachine guns or autopistols had been used. There was gunshot residue on three of the bodies' hands and sleeves, indicating that they had returned fire briefly before their deaths.

I have gotten ahead of my story, since I did not learn any of this until late that day, when Palatine Elin called me into her office to meet with her, the Sisters Superior, and Throne Agent Wessex. But to complete the prior scene: there was a note left on the floor, weighed down by an empty magazine.

death to the Eldar​death to their works​Sanctifying Truth of Velgrad​will surrender to Riven Veil

I found out at 07:15, when Palatine Elin told me and the Sisters Superior to leave the rest of our morning meal and follow her. Wessex was waiting for the five of us in Elin's office. He swept me a courtly bow and remembered just in time to redirect his respectful gesture primarily towards Elin.

"Dearest and most lovely of all Marisas, honored Sororitas officers—I bear good news, great news, and strange news indeed!"

The good news came from Novant Keep, where Wessex had unraveled an assassination plot against Acting Planetary Governor Zahn and, in the process, rolled up an estimated half of the Novant Keep insurgency. No Epistemic Engine was recovered, but he judged the insurgency shattered in that region, and efforts were ongoing by the Enforcers to exploit the success still further.

Planetwide, including Novant Keep, the heretics had been losing people captured or killed at a rate of fifty to one hundred every week. They could sustain those losses, Wessex said. Their recruitment was likely higher. But they might not be able to sustain the pressure that the losses brought.

The great news, and the strange, related to the Epistemic Engine captured in Velgrad. He told us about it as I have told you.

"We believe it was an ambush by the sect themselves—slaughtering the element that controlled the Engine. A major operation must have been planned, surely. Perhaps even a planetary operation, timed with the assassination, which my most laudable diligence has equally dashed! With an Engine captured, we may finally learn how to trace and detect them before they can attack again. But behold, the strangest of all!"

He produced the note. We read it.

"Will surrender—to you!"

"A trap?" said Elin.

"Perhaps, perhaps. But I think not. And we shall give them no chance. I should favor ordering them—we can use the city's government voxcasters—ordering them to march up and stop fifty meters outside your wall. They can give their surrender in the open, under your guns. Perhaps with a flight of gunships loitering a few kilometers up. If it still seems like a trap when you have seen them… shoot them!"

That night at 22:00, when our night-vision advantage would be total and the cold would be a bitter hardship for enemies attempting stealth, we assembled in full battle array. Tara was there beside me, in her own power-armor, one last time.

One quarter of our number, including the novices, waited in the hardened bunkers underground, ready to deploy as a reserve or continue the Order if some cataclysm killed the rest of us. The other three-fourths readied the guns and enfilade positions as if preparing to repel a concentrated assault. We didn't have gunships, but we had a flight of Lightning strike fighters somewhere unseen in the clouds far overhead, just seconds away at a dive.

We didn't need them. Ninety-one exhausted people assembled from the city. They trudged through the thin snow, with brittle brambles cracking and snagging at their pants and skirts, following a flare-marked path through our razor-wire under the watch of our guns. There were fifty women and girls and forty-one men and boys. The youngest was thirteen years old.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

They didn't bring weapons, except one of them, an old man, had an Army officer's sword, which he laid in the slush at the last flare.

I wasn't involved in taking their surrender. Palatine Elin granted such mercy as is ours to give, for people who had murdered so many with no mercy of their own. In exchange for their documents, their obedient cooperation with all interrogations and information about their former comrades, their chanted rejection of the differences between their sect and standard doctrine, and their oaths of penance and eternal obedience to the Church, she conscripted the strong into a penal regiment and the weak into a labor camp. Murderers and hangers-on together, they would live in service, until they died atoning for crimes for which there could be no atonement.

Some would not do it at first. They wanted to surrender, but they could not bear to reject their teachings. Elin said that she would not kill them, but neither would she accept their surrender on behalf of the Church unless they would meet her terms. They could attempt surrender to the Enforcers, or to the Inquisition itself.

In the end, all but two relented. Wessex took those two away.

For those who did not come to us in surrender that night, there was no mercy. Enforcer and Inquisition roadblocks captured more than forty fleeing the city. More were found over the following days. Tribunals and firing squads were kept busy for seven days.

Wessex was gleeful at first, flushed with victory following on victory. But by the last round of executions, there was a grim, determined weariness in his face that made him look very old.

I have not seen him again.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

Hana and I were all but fully healed. Still sore, still unable to risk full exertion, but able to move normally and do all the tasks of daily life and most kinds of training. Tara no longer had cramps in her hands and arms, and they were no longer green except for the fingernails. But her permanent symptoms remained permanent.

We talked for hours, every time we were free. Sometimes with Hana, sometimes with Isela or my former squad-leader Claire. Sometimes with others that were more Tara's friends than mine.

By the time she announced the decision, on 337.738.M41, we knew it was coming. She would ask the Bishop to release her from her vows. He would do it, of course. Tara was incapable of being the deadly infantryman that every Battle Sister must be. But he would release her even if she only no longer believed she had a vocation to the Sisterhood. At least on Gaervalt, the Order is not a trap. A Sister who does not want to be a Sister cannot do what we do. And simple motherhood is a vocation as badly needed as ours, in its own way. Someone must fight the Emperor's enemies today. But in twenty years, and forty years, and sixty years, someone will have to fight them again. Every generation will have its enemy, and every generation must have strong men to fight them and brave women to carry on living at home.

Tara's departure no longer felt terrible. No longer like the end of her world. It was the end of one beautiful life and the beginning of another. She had spent time with the beekeepers outside the wire, and she wanted that to be her. Perhaps even near the convent, if she was very blessed. There was room for another little house by our fields of blackberries and roses. A man might be persuaded to travel a few extra minutes to his factory job, so that his wife could keep the home with honey and extra income and the scent of beeswax.

She had a new form of entertainment, too. When she wasn't terrorizing us with delighted little facts about bees ("Did you know they murder all the males every winter? Chop chop chop, with their wonderful little mandibles!") she was making Hana and me blush by pretending to have the most sinful fantasies about what she might do with a future husband in bed. I'm not sure if she was really fantasizing, or if it was her way of defying fear. Maybe both. It really was hilarious, though. She was still a Sister for a few more weeks—so she had to temper her choice of words, but she had all of our training period to think of clever ways to make implications without actually committing sins.

Hana reminded me of myself two years ago, after Sariah died. She hadn't known Verity the way I knew Sariah, but the shape was the same. Hurting inside, but determined to carry on. To not just survive Verity, but in some way to be her. But she didn't know Verity, not really. She knew the woman she had been in the months before she died. I don't know what that means, but it must mean something.