Chapter 27: Necessary Inquiry
The moment the four psykers went down, the psychic barrier over the eight-pointed star came apart. It did not fade. It shattered, in the way glass shatters when the tension holding it together releases all at once, the pieces of it dispersing into nothing before they reached the floor. The oppressive weight that had been pressing on the air of the underground square began clearing rapidly. The blood-smell did not go with it.
Duvette had Adrian Hock pinned under his full weight.
The uprising's commander had lost his right arm to Finn's shot. His left arm was still functional, and the hand at the end of it had found Duvette's throat with complete commitment. The fingers were closing like a vice, the nails already through skin, the blood from the punctures running warm down inside his collar. The oxygen deprivation was a tide coming in at the edges of his vision, darkening the periphery, slowing everything that was not the immediate physical act of pressing down.
Duvette did not let go.
His broken right hand had Adrian's throat. He could feel the fractured bones working against each other with each increment of pressure, announcing their condition clearly and continuously, the pain running from his wrist up through his shoulder and into somewhere behind his eyes. He acknowledged it and kept pressing, his thumb driving down on the windpipe beneath, the weight of his full upper body adding itself to the grip.
Adrian's face had gone the dark purple of deep oxygen debt. His eyes were open and completely bloodshot, fixed on the commissar above him with a hatred that had not diminished with the rest of him. The sounds coming from his throat were not quite words. Half-cursing, half something else, too degraded to be contempt but trying for it anyway.
The battle in the square continued around both of them. Las-fire crossed the air overhead, las-beams tracing their paths against the rock ceiling. Explosions and gunfire and the voices of men dying and fighting reached Duvette from a distance that his narrowing attention was making larger with each second.
The edges of his vision were going.
He could feel Adrian's grip continuing to tighten. The nails had already done their work. He could feel the blood. His brain had begun to reduce its available functions to the minimum necessary, the thinking going slow and the hearing going strange, a low ringing establishing itself under everything else.
He kept his eyes on Adrian's.
The System. The regiment. The other companies, the tactical picture, the ritual, the square, the Warp breach, the mission — all of it left him. The thinking cleared away until there was nothing in it.
This person had to die.
Adrian's voice came out broken and rasping, each word a separate effort through a throat being compressed from the outside. "You... Imperial dog... you'll all die... I'll be waiting in hell... for all of you..."
He did not finish the sentence.
A solid round came from the side and hit his temple with precision, and Adrian Hock's last statement was terminated mid-syllable. The round went through the skull and the skull did not contain what followed, and what it could not contain went across Duvette's face in a spray that was warm and thick and carried bone fragments.
Adrian's fingers opened.
The arm dropped to the floor.
Duvette held his grip for several seconds without releasing it, the pressure still maximum, his body not yet caught up with the information that the enemy was dead. Then the information arrived. He lifted his right hand from Adrian's throat and his fingers did not want to straighten afterward but eventually did.
He rolled off the body and lay on his back on the stone floor.
His chest heaved. Air came back in and it hurt going down, and he lay there and breathed it anyway. The blood and bone matter was drying on his face. Above him, the rough dome of the cave ceiling, the iron cages still burning in their chains, casting light that moved with the slight motion of air in the space.
The gunfire was thinning.
Without their commander and without the Chaos influence that had been shaping their behavior since the ritual began, the heretics came apart. They stopped organizing. They moved toward the tunnel exits, individually or in small groups, not fighting, only trying to be somewhere else. The Ash Watchers did not pursue. They held their formation and dealt with those who stopped moving in the direction of the exits and tried to hold ground instead.
That was the last of it.
Duvette closed his eyes.
The exhaustion came in from everywhere at once, through every limb, settling onto muscle and bone with a weight that was the accumulated debt of everything his body had been asked to do since they went underground. The pain arrived properly for the first time: both hands, the wounds at his throat where Adrian's nails had gone through, the broken bones in his right arm, the shredded left arm, the various impacts that had been too busy to register until this moment.
He did not care about any of it. They had won.
The dark was coming for him when a notification appeared in the upper right of his vision, white text drifting in quietly like something that had been waiting for a suitable moment.
[You have successfully foiled the enemy's plot on Farrak IV. The Emperor appreciates your loyalty and valor. Emperor's Wrath +500.]
The corner of Duvette's mouth moved.
"Well," he said. "Damn."
Then the darkness took him.
* * *
Three days later.
Farrak IV. Two hundred kilometers north of Heras. Forward High Command.
Lord General Frederick Morrison stood on a balcony that looked down over the city below, a silver cup of black coffee in one hand, the steam from it rising and dispersing in the cold morning air. The building had been a local noble's manor before the campaign — a three-storey main structure with broad terracing that gave sight lines to the plain in every direction and to the ruined streets immediately beneath.
The war's marks were on everything. Buildings reduced to charred frames. Wrecked vehicles abandoned in the roads. Shell craters holding shallow pools of muddy water. But the guns had been silent for three days, and the air no longer tasted of propellant.
Behind him, his adjutant stood with hands clasped at the small of his back, waiting.
"Has the report been compiled?" Morrison asked, without turning.
"Yes, General." The adjutant stepped forward and extended a data-slate. "Battlefield clearance is substantially complete. The other fronts continue to progress. We have recovered approximately seventy percent of the lost ground."
Morrison set down the silver cup and accepted the slate. He worked through it with practiced efficiency: battle reports, casualty figures, materiel losses, prisoner tallies, lines of advance. His finger moved through the rows.
His gaze stopped on one line. It was not the first time it had stopped there.
"Ash Watchers 101st Regiment," he said quietly. "Casualty list includes regimental commander Colonel Nathan Fox, Commissar Leonard Hoffman, seven company commanders, seventeen senior NCOs, and more than a thousand soldiers."
He read on. The underground engagement at Heras in detail: the enemy's disposition, the Chaos Astartes count, the psykers, the ritual that had come within minutes of completion and would have made the rest of this campaign entirely academic. And the acting commissar who had been present for all of it.
Duvette Erdmann.
"An inconceivable result," Morrison murmured. He returned the slate to his adjutant and turned toward the horizon. "A three-thousand-man regiment. Eight Chaos Astartes, four psykers, several thousand elite heretics. And they won."
Three days ago, that horizon had been fire. The cult's army had been advancing on Imperial lines with the mindless commitment of something that had forgotten the concept of stopping, taking losses that should have broken any human force and pressing forward through them. Then everything had changed simultaneously.
The assault stopped.
The heretics turned on each other.
Inside their own lines, across the entire front simultaneously, the cult's forces descended into internecine fighting with the same violence they had been directing at the Imperial positions. They killed each other with lasguns and blades and their bare hands. Within hours, every organized cult formation on the planet had either destroyed itself or collapsed into isolated groups without coordination or purpose.
Morrison had ordered the counterattack the moment his tacticians confirmed what they were seeing. The Cadian 371st, 374th, and 376th Armoured, the Valhallan 736th and 768th, and more than a dozen additional regiments had advanced simultaneously across a hundred kilometers of front. The ground came back faster than any of his projections had allowed for.
Victory had arrived too quickly for him to understand it while it was happening.
This morning's report from Heras had explained it.
"That commissar is interesting." A voice from the terrace entrance, behind him.
Morrison turned.
A woman stood in the doorway with a slight smile and her hands at her sides. Her robes were black — substantial fabric, well-made, silver embroidery worked along every edge with enough intricacy that it read as decoration at a distance and as something more deliberate up close. The hood was pushed back from her face. Long white hair, braided, draped over her left shoulder. Her left eye was a deep, clear red, the color of a gemstone seen through good light. Her right eye was covered by a black patch.
At her waist: a bolt pistol and the hilt of a power sword.
"Lady Juno." Morrison offered a brief nod. "I did not expect you to come personally."
Juno returned the nod and walked to the railing, setting both hands on the cold metal and looking down at the city. The wind caught the lower edge of her robes. Her face was young-looking, probably not genuinely so — the rejuvenat treatments available at that level of the Imperium's hierarchy made age difficult to read — pale and regular in a way that was technically flawless and somehow conveyed nothing warm.
He had thought before that she looked like a saint stepping out of a devotional painting. An accurate observation that did not quite explain why no one in her presence ever felt comfortable looking at her for long.
Standing near her always produced a particular sensation: the feeling of wearing no clothing, not physically, but in the sense that everything from the surface inward seemed available to her attention without any effort on her part.
"I've read the report," she said, looking down at the street below. "The acting commissar — Duvette. He endorsed Colonel Fox's decision to take the regiment underground without authorization from this command. An unsanctioned operation in a Chaos-influenced theatre."
Morrison retrieved his silver cup. "Yes," he said. "A clear violation of Departmento Munitorum doctrine. The fact that he won does not remove the offense, and given the Chaos presence throughout that underground engagement and the nature of the result, an inquiry is the appropriate procedure."
"His soul is mine to examine, General."
"Oh?" A trace of genuine surprise crossed Morrison's face. He studied the Inquisitor's profile. The expression she was wearing had all the external features of a smile. "The Lord Inquisitor is coming personally?"
Juno's smile acquired a degree of additional meaning that Morrison did not pursue. "Yes," she said. "I'll go myself."
Morrison lifted one shoulder. "As you wish. The procedures require Inquisition involvement regardless. I'll have my people prepare the documentation."
Juno nodded, acknowledging this without warmth. She said nothing more, turned, and walked to the terrace exit. The black robes moved behind her. Her footsteps produced no sound. She was gone into the shadow behind the doorway before he had finished watching her go.
Morrison looked at the space where she had been standing.
"Terrifying woman," he said to no one, and took another sip of his coffee. "That poor commissar."
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