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Chapter 25: Silence
Duvette drew one long breath.
Fox was gone. That was a fact and it would stay a fact. What had changed was that every command authority in the 101st now ran through him, which meant certain things were now possible that had not been possible thirty seconds ago.
"Recover your discipline," he said quietly to himself, and then he pressed the vox-bead and raised his voice to carry across every channel at once. "All units! Find cover! Return fire!"
This time the order found purchase.
The surviving NCOs and company commanders were the first to pull themselves back from the edge. Working through the metal storm, using whatever they could find as cover, they started physically hauling soldiers out of open ground and into any position that offered protection. The men who had gone furthest into the Chaos-influenced fury were harder to reach, but the Ash Watchers were veterans with deep training behind the instinct, and once the worst of Khorne's influence was pushed back and Duvette's presence came through the channel, their conditioning reasserted itself. One by one, then in groups, they stopped throwing themselves at the enemy and started fighting with their heads again.
The machine guns did not care. The four fixed weapons kept cycling, tearing craters into whatever cover the soldiers pressed themselves against, finding the gaps and the ones who moved a fraction too slowly and removing them from consideration. Brass shell casings continued to pour from the ejector ports and pile up around each position.
Duvette was behind a stone support column, watching through the gap between his cover and the floor.
Each gun had a crew of three. The positions had been selected carefully: overlapping fields of fire across every tunnel exit ramp, no dead ground, nothing approaching from any tunnel mouth that wasn't already being covered by at least one barrel. The ammunition boxes beside each position were still substantially full.
He needed a window.
The left gun stopped.
Then the others, in rapid sequence, each weapon going quiet within a second of the one before it. Reload. The crews were moving: protective covers up, empty belts clear, new ammunition boxes being hoisted into position. Five seconds. Perhaps slightly less.
Duvette came out of cover at a sprint.
His boots cracked against the broken stone in a rhythm that was too fast and too direct to track until it was already happening. The heretics suppressing the other tunnel exits had not oriented to his position and the gap in his direction was still open when he reached the first firing position.
He raised the bolt pistol in his left hand and fired.
The first round struck the ammunition box directly. The contents went in a chain of detonations, one cartridge igniting the next in a cascade that took less than a second to consume everything in the box. The explosion swallowed the gun and all three crew members with it, the barrel spinning end-over-end through the air before it came down into the heretic crowd beyond. Screaming followed.
The second and third rounds hit the gun mount's hydraulic stabilizer housing in rapid succession. The housing gave way on the second impact and the blast from the third finished what remained.
Duvette was already diving sideways before the echo of his own shots finished crossing the space. Las-fire came back from three directions simultaneously, burning lines past him that left scorched marks on the rock face behind where he had been standing. He rolled, found the base of another support column, pressed his back against it.
His right arm was sending him information he did not have the attention to process right now. He was aware of it in the way you are aware of something you have filed for later.
He allowed himself approximately half a second of private acknowledgment that he had no idea how that had worked and had no complaints about it.
Then, from somewhere above him in the dark of the support beams overhead, three sharp cracks of las-fire came in rapid succession.
Three full-power beams. Three precise points of aim. The barrel connection housings of the three remaining guns, each one struck with the kind of accuracy that required knowing exactly where to aim and having the stillness to put the shot there from elevation in a firefight. The guns went silent. Three shots. Three weapons.
Duvette looked up toward the beams. The angle was wrong for a direct view of the position, but the Soul of the Legion's identification markers were clear enough. Green, with a status tag.
Finn Valentine. He had found his way onto the support structures during the chaos and had been waiting there, and he had just disabled three fixed heavy weapons with three shots while seriously wounded.
The tag shifted the moment Duvette identified it.
A psychic lightning bolt came from the direction of the eight-pointed star, a white-blue arc that lit the entire space in a single violent instant, and it went directly to the beam where Finn was positioned.
The status tag went to Seriously Wounded and stopped changing.
"Finn." Duvette said it under his breath. He held it for one second. Then he let it go. There was nothing he could do from here and the window in front of him would not stay open.
All four guns were down.
"For the Emperor!" His voice went out on the command channel as he came out from behind the column and started moving. The Ash Watchers responded. From every tunnel exit, from every cover position around the square's perimeter, soldiers came out and began advancing, the las-fire and solid-shot weapons reorganizing into something that resembled a coherent firing line. The heretics' defensive positions at the base of the ramps had been taking pressure from every direction and they began giving ground.
Duvette moved through the square using the support columns as cover, one position to the next, pressing toward the center. The bolt pistol fired when a target presented itself. A heretic came at him from the side with a blade: he turned into the swing rather than away from it, let the blade go past him, and brought the bolt pistol's grip around in a reverse arc against the man's temple, then discharged the weapon into the man's chest as he was still falling. He did not break stride.
The distance to the center was closing.
Eighty meters. Fifty. Thirty.
At thirty meters he could see the psykers clearly.
All four of them stood at the cardinal points of the eight-pointed star, arms raised, their mouths moving in the continuous recitation that had been driving the ritual since before the regiment arrived underground. Between them, surrounding the star and the alloy-steel wall behind it, a shimmer in the air indicated something that had no color and no texture but was very clearly present.
He raised the bolt pistol and fired at the leftmost psyker.
The round crossed twenty-seven of the thirty meters between them and hit something and detonated. The flash was small and the sound was wrong, too contained, too muffled. The shimmer pulsed outward in a brief ring and returned to its resting state. Not a scratch.
Duvette fired again. And again. He put every remaining round in the magazine through the same point in the air, at the same psyker, with the same result each time. The psychic barrier absorbed every bolt round and gave back nothing. The psyker behind it did not even look at him.
He pulled back behind a column and began reloading one-handed, working by feel, his mind running ahead of his hands.
Conventional weapons were useless against a psychic barrier of that grade. He had known this was possible from the moment he saw the shimmer in the air, and he had known what the answer was for several seconds longer than that.
He had the Soul of the Legion.
He had Silence.
He looked across the square. The Ash Watchers were advancing steadily. The heretic defensive line was breaking. But the four psykers had not stopped working, and every few seconds one of them broke their recitation long enough to direct a psychic lightning bolt at a cluster of advancing soldiers, the discharge killing two or three at a time. The casualties were mounting. The ritual was still running. The blood in the channels on the floor was still flowing toward the central star and still boiling.
His assessment was that the psykers were operating at diminished capacity because most of their power was committed to the ritual itself. If they had been free to fight, there would be no one left in the square to discuss the matter. But diminished was not harmless.
The plan was clear. Close to engagement distance. Activate Silence. Thirty seconds in which their psychic capacity was effectively neutralized. Use those thirty seconds.
He finished the reload.
"Cover me!" His voice went out across the command channel at full volume. "All units: suppress the area around the psykers! Lay fire on everything between me and the center! Clear me a path!"
The response was immediate. Every available weapon in the square turned toward the star's perimeter. Las-fire and solid shot tore through the open ground between the advancing soldiers and the psykers' positions, driving the heretics defending that ground into whatever cover they could find. It would not kill them through good cover but it would keep their heads down for the time Duvette needed.
He ran.
He had covered half the distance when Adrian Hock turned and saw him coming.
"Pathetic dog." The vox-amplifier carried his voice across the whole square. "Die."
The Silence field reached the four psykers at almost exactly the moment the psychic lightning discharged.
What came toward Duvette should have killed him where he stood. At full power, a psyker's directed lightning strike was sufficient to incinerate a baseline human entirely, armour and all, leaving nothing behind worth examining. What hit Duvette's left arm was something far less than that: the field had reached his position and the Silence effect had reduced the incoming strike to a fraction of its intended force in the same moment the attack arrived.
His left arm took it.
The bolt pistol in his left hand was destroyed by the impact, the frame warping and the firing mechanism going with it. The arm itself was a bloody ruin below the elbow, torn open and burned in a way that removed it from the list of functional limbs. He went down on one knee, the pain arriving all at once and with complete commitment.
"Deal with this insect." Adrian Hock's voice, still amplified, directed at the psykers.
Nothing happened.
Adrian turned to look at them.
All four psykers had their hands pressed to the sides of their heads, their mouths no longer moving in the ritual recitation, the sounds coming from them now entirely involuntary. The Silence field had not killed them. It had simply removed their access to what they were channeling, with the abruptness of a door slamming shut, and the recoil of that removal was apparently not comfortable.
Comprehension crossed Adrian's face. He reached for the autopistol at his hip.
A las-shot came from above, a thin blue line tracing from the support beams overhead toward Adrian Hock's head with the precision that had defined every shot that had come from that direction tonight.
It missed the head by a fraction.
Adrian's right arm came off at the shoulder.
The autopistol hit the floor. Adrian Hock made a sound that the amplifier picked up and broadcast across the square before he thought to stop making it, and he went to his knees.
Finn was alive.
Duvette understood it and was moving before the thought had fully formed. He came off one knee and covered the remaining distance at a run, driving his full weight into Adrian Hock and taking both of them to the floor, his left arm screaming and doing the work anyway, pinning the man beneath him.
"The psykers!" He roared it across every channel he had. "Shoot the psykers! All of you, now!"
[Silence: 20 seconds remaining.]
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