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Chapter 30: A Mission to Die For
Juno settled back in the chair and spoke.
"That girl. Her name is Lena, isn't it? Your adjutant's sister. Evan's sister."
Duvette said nothing. He stayed where he was, back against the door.
Juno rose from the chair in an unhurried movement, the well-made black coat settling around her as she stood. She turned her back to him and began collecting the tarot cards from the desk, one by one, the card faces turning between her fingers with practiced efficiency, the stack growing with each addition.
"You know, Commissar." She spoke to the desk rather than to him. "In Imperial law, harboring an illegal psyker is a grave offense."
She brought the stack to its edges against the desk surface to align it, then drew a black leather card case from inside her coat and placed the deck inside with the same careful attention one gives to things that matter.
"An unsanctioned psyker who has not been reported to any authority." The clasp on the card case clicked shut. "Do you know what Imperial law dictates will happen to her, Commissar? She will be placed in the Black Ships' holds — the ones where the sounds of weeping carry through the hull — and transported to Terra. There she will become a tool in the most complete sense of the word. Or she will become fuel."
She turned.
"And you, and the 101st, will be put to death for sheltering a heretic."
The smile had left her face entirely. She walked toward him, her boots making a precise sound against the metal floor. Duvette did not move. Her gaze had the quality he had registered at the banquet, not seeing through him so much as around him, taking inventory of what was inside before he had finished deciding what to show.
He did not speak. He knew she was telling the truth.
"You're not denying it." She stopped three steps away. "So you understand the weight of it."
"What does the Lord Inquisitor want to say?" Duvette finally asked.
Juno tilted her head fractionally. She did not answer directly. Her single visible eye moved past him to the wall behind his shoulder.
He became aware, a moment too late, that she was looking at his rucksack.
She stepped around him as naturally as if she were moving through her own quarters, reached up and lifted the rucksack from its hook. She unzipped it and reached inside. He watched her fingers move through the contents: a spare uniform, starch ration bars, the Imperial Military Regulations manual, his personal data-slate, and the notebook with the black cover.
Her hand found the notebook and drew it out.
Duvette kept his face still and concentrated on not allowing any of the things his body wanted to do to become visible.
She opened it. Her left eye moved along the first page — the red of it in the cabin's light was very clear, like something lit from the inside. She turned the page. Then the next. Then the next after that. She moved through the pages at a pace that was both careful and fast, and the only sound in the room was the paper turning. Once or twice her eye paused on a line before continuing downward.
She read several pages' worth. Then she closed the notebook.
She said nothing. Her expression suggested the text was no more legible to her than a water stain. She turned and dropped the notebook onto the bunk in a casual arc, walked around the bed, smoothed a crease from the sheet with two fingers, and sat down.
The springs made a sound.
"The illegal psyker is not an insurmountable problem," Juno said. Her hands settled folded in her lap. "Provided you help me with one task."
Duvette studied her. "A task."
"Yes." She nodded once. "If you execute it competently, not only will Lena's situation be resolved, your conduct on Farrak IV as well. All of it. A clean slate." A pause. "And there are additional rewards."
He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that means thinking rather than hesitation. Juno did not interrupt it.
"What task?" he finally asked.
She did not answer immediately. She leaned back until her shoulders rested against the cold metal of the bulkhead, her gaze drifting upward to the ceiling. The overhead light cast shadows across her pale face, making the geometry of it sharper and the red of her left eye deeper.
"An almost certain death mission," she said to the ceiling, without particular urgency. "I need you to bring people and come with me to a very dangerous place. To find something of considerable importance."
"Why me?"
Juno's mouth moved. Something in the movement might have been a smile.
She came off the bunk and walked toward him again, closing the distance until she stopped less than a half-meter away. Close enough that he registered the faint scent she carried — the ceremonial unguent used in Ministorum observances, something that had soaked into the fabric of her coat over a long period of use.
From inside the coat she produced one of the tarot cards. She held it between two fingers, raised her hand without haste, and pressed the card firmly into Duvette's clenched right fist.
He looked down.
The Fool. The last card. The grinning masked figure.
"A variable," Juno said quietly. "An unpredictable turn of fate." A brief pause. "His guidance."
She reached up and placed both hands on his shoulders.
The cold hit him through the uniform fabric immediately, not the ambient cold of the ship's metal but something specific and penetrating, a cold that started at the surface and arrived at something deeper without stopping at the skin. His body went rigid before he decided to let it.
The force that followed was not something he could have predicted.
It turned him. One step, two steps, toward the bunk, the pressure at his shoulders absolute and utterly unhurried and completely beyond his ability to resist. An Inquisitor's black-robed figure should not have been able to move a healthy adult man in full uniform with this quality of ease. He had faced transhuman Astartes and understood that the gap between their strength and a baseline human's was simply a gap. What was happening now belonged to a different category and he was still processing that when the push came and he lost his footing and sat down hard on the bunk and then was pressed the rest of the way down.
He lay on his back.
Juno leaned over him. The pale face was close, the features in the bunk's light fine and still. He could see the individual texture of her skin, the specific quality of light in the red eye.
She continued leaning forward until her lips were nearly at his ear.
Her breath was warm against his skin, carrying the incense scent. Her left hand was braced against the bunk, keeping her weight from settling fully. Her right hand came to rest lightly on his throat.
The position was not uncomplicated in its implications.
What Duvette was aware of, with complete clarity, was the cold of those fingers through the fabric and the inhuman strength that had just demonstrated itself without effort, and the precise arithmetic of what the right hand resting on his throat could accomplish before he could do anything about it. The rest of the implications could wait.
Then she spoke.
"Don't underestimate a Lord Inquisitor's scholarship, Mr. Duvette."
She paused. Her breath remained at his ear.
Then she spoke again, not in High Gothic and not in Low Gothic. The pronunciation was careful and slightly stilted, the tones imprecise in a way that was almost comical, but only almost.
Duvette recognized it.
It was the language he had spoken for more than twenty years in a life that had ended somewhere he no longer had access to.
"Let none say that warning was not given."
She said nothing further.
Juno straightened slowly. As she did, something crossed her face — very briefly, barely visible, an expression that was not quite confusion and not quite curiosity and was gone before he could examine it. She turned away from him and walked to the automatic door.
The door had been locked from inside.
It slid open at her approach with a brief tone.
She stopped in the doorway without looking back. Her voice had returned to its earlier, level quality.
"The mission details will reach you shortly." A pause. "Rest well, Commissar."
She stepped through the door.
"Good night."
Her footsteps moved away down the corridor and became inaudible.
Duvette lay on his back on the bunk and looked at The Fool card held in his right hand. The masked figure looked back from the card's surface with its permanent expression of knowing amusement.
He had the distinct impression that his future was, broadly speaking, finished.
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