Chapter 31: Space Hulk
The dream was bad.
Duvette ran through chaos and black, his feet finding blood with every step, no light anywhere in the dark — only dark, pure and suffocating, the kind that has weight.
Something was behind him.
It had no shape, or its shape exceeded anything mortal comprehension could reach. What Duvette felt was a pure malice, rising like an icy tide from somewhere at his back, closing the distance with every step he took.
Then, ahead of him, the bodies appeared out of the dark.
As the distance closed, he was able to see them clearly.
They were his soldiers.
Evan. Finn. Stroud. Anderson. Alek. They lay together in a pool of blood, their eyes open and empty, staring upward at the dark dome above them, their faces fixed in the expressions death had found them wearing.
Duvette stopped.
Behind him, the thing was closer. He could feel the malice pressing against his spine, cold as exposed bone, almost touching.
An instant before it caught him, he jolted awake.
He sat upright in the bunk, his chest heaving, cold sweat soaked through the fabric at his back. He pulled in several ragged breaths and looked around the room.
The cabin was dark. From the ventilation shaft above the bunk came the low and constant murmur of recycled air. He reached out and found the light panel and pressed it.
Soft white light spread through the room, pushing the dark back to the corners.
Duvette leaned against the headboard and pressed his palm against his face. His hand came away damp. He drew a slow breath and let it out, working his heart rate back down to something manageable.
"Damn it," he said under his breath.
Two nights since that wretched Inquisitor had sat in his chair and read his diary and demonstrated what her right hand could accomplish at close range. He had not slept properly through either of them. He had not had a clean night since Juno left.
He checked the pocket watch on the desk.
By standard Terran reckoning, it was the early hours of the morning.
Duvette pulled his mouth sideways, pushed himself out of the bunk, and crossed to the wardrobe. Lying here was not improving anything. He might as well go down to the lower decks and find the 101st and some noise rather than spend the rest of the night inside his own head.
He had just finished buckling his belt when someone knocked on the door.
He went still. His heart clenched hard. He stood without answering, eyes fixed on the sealed airtight door.
Who came to his door at this hour?
"Who's there?" he called out.
Nothing from the other side.
He waited ten seconds and tried again. "Who's outside?"
Silence.
Duvette's attention sharpened. He pressed himself close to the door and tried to hear something through the metal. There was nothing to hear.
He stood there for three full minutes and listened. Still nothing. He drew one long breath, pressed his left hand against the control panel on the wall, and released the lock.
The airtight door slid aside.
Duvette stood behind the frame, pressed flat against the bulkhead, and put his head out to look.
The corridor was empty. The armed ship's crew who should have been on patrol were gone, absent in the same way they had been absent the night Inquisitor Juno arrived.
And on the floor outside his door, something had been left.
A silver case.
Duvette stepped into the corridor and looked both ways along it. No one. Not a shadow.
"Insufferable woman," he murmured. No one with any decency delivered things in the dead hours of the morning.
He picked up the case and carried it back inside.
The airtight door closed behind him and he locked it at once, watching the red light confirm. He brought the case to his desk, set it down, pulled the chair out, and sat looking at the silver metal surface for a full minute.
He made himself ready. He drew one breath and pressed the latches.
Two items inside. On the left, a data-crystal, roughly the size of a thumb. On the right, a ring: a silver band set with a dark gemstone.
Duvette picked up the ring and held it under the light. On the interior of the band, a small line of text had been engraved: J.C.
Juno Karol's initials.
He set the ring down and picked up the data-crystal. He examined it for several seconds, then picked up the ring again and pressed the crystal into a small recess set into the ring's mounting.
Click. Click.
Two small mechanical sounds. The crystal seated itself. The dark gemstone in the ring's face lit with a faint blue pulse.
A moment later, a hololithic display materialized in the air above the ring.
Duvette turned off the cabin light.
The dark settled. Only the hololithic display remained, hovering at eye level, casting a pale blue glow across his face, the text on it sharpening as the projector reached full resolution.
[Authorization confirmed.]
[Data security classification: Crimson.]
[Authorizing party: Juno Karol.]
[Recipient: Duvette Erdmann.]
[Warning: unauthorized persons reading this order will be classified as committing treason of the highest nature. Transcription and memorization in any form are absolutely prohibited. Violators will be subject to immediate Excommunicate Traitoris.]
Crimson classification. The highest security tier. Duvette's frown deepened and he kept reading.
[Target area: the space hulk Eternal Lament. Note: this vessel has recently emerged from a Warp storm at the edge of the [REDACTED] sector and is currently within an extremely brief realspace anchor window.]
[Mission objective: assist Lord Inquisitor Juno Karol and accompany with no more than fifty soldiers into the vessel's core zone to retrieve [REDACTED — insufficient authorization].]
[Threat assessment: extreme xenos infestation, Warp entity incursion, structural reality collapse.]
Duvette's expression froze where it was.
To confirm he had not misread it, he went back to the beginning and read the whole thing again.
A space hulk.
[Personal addendum from the Inquisitor: don't try to run, Commissar. All escape pod exits on this ship have been gene-locked to bar your biometrics. You may now proceed to the armory in my name and begin your preparations. We will speak again shortly. Good night.]
[Reading complete. This data-crystal will initiate its self-destruction protocol in ten seconds. Praise the Emperor.]
The hololithic display began to flicker. A countdown appeared in the lower right corner.
Ten. Nine. Eight.
Duvette had arrived at a particular state of profound and absolute emptiness: the specific stillness of a man whose mind has received something it cannot immediately process and has simply stopped.
Five. Four. Three.
The countdown reached zero.
The hololithic display flickered once and went out entirely. Inside the ring, the data-crystal produced a small, precise crack.
Duvette stood up sharply and drove his fist into the desk.
The metal surface produced a dull impact sound and everything on it jumped.
"You cannot be serious."
A space hulk. Him. The only meaningful distinction between this assignment and straightforward suicide was that suicide was faster and required considerably less preparation.
He paced the dark cabin back and forth and turned the situation over without making any progress on it. Her judgment had clearly failed. Sending Astra Militarum into a space hulk. A space hulk, of all possible things she could have chosen.
He had assumed the worst she might ask of him was something along the lines of accompanying her into an underhive to deal with a heretic cult. That was the reasonable end of the spectrum he had been mentally preparing for. A space hulk was not on any spectrum he had imagined.
In the Secaris Tragedy of 996.M40, an entire Blood Angels Chapter had been brought to ruin on a single space hulk. Against the endless waves of Genestealers pouring through the vessel's corridors, fewer than fifty of the Emperor's Angels had survived long enough to withdraw.
Those had been Astartes. Transhuman warriors. The Emperor's own genetically engineered sons.
And this Inquisitor, this woman with clearly broken judgment, had gone past the Astartes Chapters entirely and settled on a fifty-man Astra Militarum escort.
Because of some so-called divine guidance. If she wanted to die, she was capable of managing that without bringing anyone else into the arrangement.
Duvette completed a dozen circuits of the cabin and committed several dozen unflattering observations about Juno Karol and her ancestry to his internal record before exhausting the exercise.
Then he sat back down.
He stared at the ring on the desk.
Run?
Juno had been perfectly clear. Every escape pod and exit on this ship had been gene-locked against him.
Refuse?
An Inquisitor held summary authority to execute anyone who refused a direct order, and that authority was considerably amplified in the context of a Crimson-level mission. He had no doubt at all that she would use it.
That left one option.
Duvette looked at The Fool card lying on the desk where Juno had left it, the masked figure with its fixed expression of complete and permanent amusement looking back at him from the card's surface.
He laughed once. A short sound with no humor in it whatsoever.
"Well," he said. "That's properly it, then. Done for."