Chapter 35: Commissar Duvette, Help Me
On the upper deck of the Hive, the whale-class heavy transport, the captain's private circular conference room had been thoroughly ignited.
The sealed door that normally represented absolute authority over the space failed to contain what was happening inside. The shouting carried through it regardless.
Captain Brandon Hawthorne stood at the head of the long holographic tactical table. His deep green naval coat, tailored for precise effect with its gold trim and honour lanyards, had come somewhat apart. The aristocratic face that normally projected a commander's composure was white as paper.
Around the conference table stood more than a dozen senior Astra Militarum officers who had narrowly escaped death in the last several hours. These were men and women who commanded thousands on campaign, and they were directing every ounce of their shock and fury at the naval captain without any restraint whatsoever.
"Twenty-odd officers!"
An Astra Militarum colonel brought both hands down on the table hard enough to shake the surface. Rage had put a ragged edge in his voice.
"Twenty-odd senior commanders from various regiments, killed in their private cabins with their throats cut and not a sound made! Captain Hawthorne, I would like to hear your explanation for how a group of alien assassins appeared on a heavily-defended Imperial transport!"
First Officer Elijah, standing to the captain's left and sweating through his uniform, was attempting to calm the officers before they crossed from shouting into something worse. "Gentlemen, the naval damage control teams and security forces are already conducting a full sweep--"
"A full sweep! We want to know whether these damned aliens have been dealt with!" Another officer cut him off without any ceremony, the dust of a hasty retreat still visible on his flak armour. "How did they appear on the midship deck as though they were taking a walk in a private garden? Where were your naval armed patrols? Asleep in the bilge?"
"And your alarm systems! Why did not a single alarm trigger until there were already bodies?"
Chief Tech-Priest Zeta, standing to the right, made no immediate reply. The red light in his mechanical eye pulsed in cold, even intervals.
He deployed his servo-arms and began explaining in his synthetic voice, working through the operational parameters of alien micro-stasis fields and monomolecular cutting technology and how such devices bypassed Machine-Spirit detection protocols.
In the noise and the anger of the room, the explanation landed nowhere. The rational precision of it was simply swallowed by the volume around it.
Eventually, the Tech-Priest gave up Low Gothic entirely. He shifted directly into Binary, a particularly grating and hostile stream of machine-cant that he directed at the assembled officers with all the polite consideration he felt they deserved.
The room was about to turn physical.
Then the guard outside the alloy door produced a sound that cut through everything, the particular tone of a man who has recognised a situation he cannot stop and is stating objections he knows will not be heard.
"Commissar! Commissar Duvette! You cannot simply walk in without--"
"Move."
The guard's sentence did not finish. The heavy alloy door, rated to stop light weapons fire, was kicked open with a force that treated its specifications as a suggestion. The lock tore free and hit the opposite wall with a sharp crack.
"Are you quite finished."
Not a question. A cold voice with absolute weight behind it stood in the doorway.
Every sound in the room stopped at once. Angry officers, Binary-shouting Tech-Priest, all of them looked toward the door in the same motion.
Colonel-Commissar Duvette Erdmann.
He still wore the black commissar's greatcoat. The clothing beneath it was soaked through entirely with sweat and blood, dark red staining across the fabric in broad patterns, and numerous cuts were still seeping through it. His left hand held the master-crafted power sword, blade not yet cleaned, black blood scorched into the edges where the disintegration field had done its work. His right hand gripped something the way a man might carry a bag of rags.
He walked into the room at a steady pace while the assembled officers watched in silence.
His eyes held no readable emotion. Whatever had just ended in the bilge had left something on him that was not invisible, some pressure radiating off him that had no technical name but that every person in the room was registering at a level below thought. The senior officers who had been so thoroughly in command of the room a minute ago found that none of them could hold his gaze when it passed across them.
"Go on." His voice was contemptuous. "Why the silence?"
He walked to the holographic tactical table and tossed what was in his right hand onto the smooth surface without ceremony.
It rolled several times and came to rest in the centre of the table.
An alien head. Slender pointed ears. Pale, lifeless features. At the neck, the scorched black flesh where the disintegration field had made contact.
An older colonel from an armoured regiment reflexively raised a hand and pointed at the head, beginning to form a question.
Duvette turned his head and looked at him. The look was unhurried and entirely without heat. Half-lidded, measuring. The particular quality of it told the colonel something without using words.
The colonel swallowed whatever he had been about to say and did not try again.
Duvette turned away. He drove the power sword into the deck at his feet, placed both hands on the table surface — dried blood on the edge near his palms — and leaned slightly forward to address the captain directly.
"Captain Hawthorne." His voice was completely clear in the silence. "The alien assassins in the transport's lowest deck have been cleaned out by my soldiers and myself. They sustained heavy losses. The survivors have withdrawn. What you need to do right now is immediately send people to check every other section of this ship for any remaining alien presence."
He did not wait for the captain to respond. He turned to face the Chief Tech-Priest.
"Magos Zeta." He placed the information with the precision of someone who knows exactly what they are offering. "Those aliens used their xenos technology to cut silently through the hull in the belly of the lowest deck. The physical structure there needs repair. Additionally, they withdrew in significant haste and left a considerable amount of alien materials behind in the bilge, artefacts, and the remnants of a miniature webway portal generator. I believe you and your colleagues will want to recover them."
"101010011..."
Magos Zeta's mechanical eye flared red. He nodded, indicating complete understanding and full acceptance of this arrangement.
With the Mechanicus handled, Duvette straightened and turned his gaze across the rest of the room.
He surveyed the assembled senior officers without hurry. Regardless of whatever rank insignia they wore, regardless of how much authority they held within their respective regiments, all of them were quiet. Faced with the combined weight of Duvette's physical presence — the blood still wet on his coat, the sword still driven into the deck — and his unquestionable command of the room, none of them had anything to offer.
He raised his right hand, blood dried across the knuckles, and knocked twice on the table surface.
"Gentlemen." His voice carried the particular cold composure of someone who has already calculated the outcome. "The brutal campaign of Ashek II is immediately ahead of us. We have, unfortunately, encountered an alien covert attack. This was no accident. These aliens very likely reached some form of arrangement with the traitors on Ashek II, with the specific intent of disrupting our forces before the battle begins."
He looked at them with cold eyes and set the political narrative for the incident in a single sentence, in a tone that made revision seem inadvisable.
"What we cannot afford to do right now is fall into disorder. The Astra Militarum forces in the bilge and midship decks are already in panic and confusion following the assassination of their officers. We need to address every negative consequence of this attack quickly and completely."
He let his gaze move across them and then pressed the point home.
"If we fail to align accounts and stabilise morale without delay, then regardless of whatever reasonable arguments you might produce to distribute the blame, Marshal Blackwood's command staff will not go easy on any officer at this table. You understand the expedition's military law better than I do. I leave you to consider what that means."
This landed precisely where it was aimed. There was not a person in the room who wanted to face a court martial on charges of maintaining a disordered defensive zone before a single shot of the main engagement had been fired.
A rapid political calculation ran behind every pair of eyes. They took the exit he had provided.
If this incident was classified as deliberate sabotage by Chaos forces working in concert with alien agents, they were survivors of a concerted enemy attack rather than officers who had failed in their duties.
"Colonel-Commissar Duvette is right. We cannot afford to lose our composure here." One colonel followed the current immediately.
"Indeed. Thanks to the Commissar's personal intervention, far greater casualties were avoided."
"Absolutely. It is fortunate to have an officer of this standing with us. Without him this would have ended very differently."
The senior officers expressed their gratitude and endorsement in a general chorus and accepted Duvette's arrangement without further difficulty.
Duvette made no response to any of it. He stood at the table's edge, face unchanged, watching them with cold eyes.
At the head of the table, Captain Brandon Hawthorne finally released a long and careful breath. He looked at Duvette with an expression of profound gratitude. Without the Commissar having forcibly defined the terms of this incident, his own head would not have been secure.
Hawthorne cleared his dry throat and picked up the thread Duvette had laid down. "Colleagues, Colonel-Commissar Duvette is correct. Please return to your respective units and see to the settling and preparation of your troops. Regarding this attack, the naval command will deliver a detailed response satisfactory to all parties."
With a usable way forward established, the officers did not press further. They offered their acknowledgment to Duvette and filed out of the conference room at a rapid pace. Magos Zeta led his servitors out at something approaching urgency in the direction of the bilge and its abandoned alien technology.
The wide conference room emptied quickly.
Only the captain and his First Officer remained.
Captain Hawthorne looked at the last figure still in the room, the Commissar, standing at the table's edge. He stood where he was, both hands working nervously at the hem of his green uniform, not quite moving and not quite speaking.
Duvette picked up the alien head from the table and turned to walk out.
Just as the Commissar was stepping toward the door, Captain Hawthorne finally found his nerve. He called after him, and there was a note in his voice that had not been there during the entire preceding argument: something much closer to a request.
"Colonel-Commissar Duvette. Could you help me?"