Chapter 36: Force-Feedback Armour
Duvette walked out of the captain's private conference room on the upper deck. The heavy alloy hatch sealed behind him with a muffled thud, cutting off the captain's long exhale of relief entirely.
As anticipated. Captain Brandon Hawthorne had kept him back for one purpose: a guarantee that would save his life.
The Eldar cutting through the bilge hull in absolute silence, more than twenty senior Astra Militarum officers killed in their sleep, a security failure of that magnitude was sufficient to end Hawthorne's career and possibly take his head along with it.
Hawthorne needed a perfect explanation, and Duvette, wearing the Star of Terra on his chest, was the only thing standing between the captain and that fate.
Duvette signed the joint engagement report. He played along with Hawthorne's proposal without resistance: the attack was classified as a premeditated decapitation strike by Chaos warlord Heritor Asphodel of Ashek II. The Eldar were nothing but elite mercenary assassins hired at great expense by the Chaos warlord, dispatched to disrupt Imperial pre-battle preparations before the landing.
The narrative was clean and sufficient. It concealed the real reason entirely: that an Eldar Shadowseer had brought a raiding party specifically to find him, hoping to change their destined fate.
Of course, Duvette had not signed anything for free. His signature saved the captain's life, and in return it secured the 112th something considerably valuable.
Captain Hawthorne had agreed to approach Magos Zeta on Duvette's behalf and obtain several sets of force-feedback power armour. This was equipment that standard transport ships did not carry as a matter of course. It was classified as high-grade hardware normally issued only to Inquisitors and Sisters of Battle; an ordinary Guardsman did not have the standing to look at a set directly, let alone wear one.
It worked only because Magos Zeta happened to have a small number of sets in his inventory. The captain intended to conceal a portion of the alien equipment recovered from the bilge and use that as leverage to secure the Tech-Priest's cooperation.
A clean exchange of political interests, perfectly balanced.
Duvette allowed himself a brief smile. With that equipment, the blade he was preparing for the decapitation strike ahead would become significantly harder to stop.
One hour later, he returned to his cabin.
The tactical terminal on the desk pulsed with a red encrypted-priority signal. A direct directive from expedition command, Marshal Blackwood, had come through.
The Marshal expressed generous praise for Duvette and the 112th's decisive response, making no effort to be economical about it.
He had not examined the details of the alien assassins too closely. The simple fact that the 112th, operating in the worst possible conditions of a darkened bilge with no preparation time, had killed aliens that would give even Astartes cause for concern was sufficient proof of what this regiment was capable of.
Marshal Blackwood was a pure pragmatist. He understood clearly: if the 112th was the expedition's sharpest blade, it had to be placed at the most lethal point of contact, not spent on secondary tasks.
Given the 112th's reported casualties from the bilge engagement, the Marshal revised the previous deployment plan immediately.
Command was giving the 112th one standard Terran week of final recovery time.
During that period, the frontal primary assault would be handled entirely by the other main Astra Militarum regiments, the Titan Legion, and the Knightly Houses. They would use their heavy guns and steel tracks to wear down Asphodel's Bane Engines and pay whatever the attrition cost.
Before the 112th deployed, command would send the most elite Imperial Storm Troopers in high-altitude infiltration to destroy the enemy hive city's rear-area anti-aircraft arrays, at whatever cost that required.
Once the anti-air network had a gap torn in it, that was the signal for the 112th's large-scale grav-chute drop, directly into the enemy's heart.
Duvette closed the terminal screen. One week. Enough time for the individuals currently occupying the medical bay to get themselves functional again.
He put on the black commissar's greatcoat — the hem still marked with dark dried bloodstains — and walked out of the cabin toward the medical section in the lower-mid decks.
The sealed door of the medical bay slid open on both sides. The sharp smell of antiseptic and the thick smell of blood hit him together.
In the intensive care section at the far end, five heavily-bandaged figures were laid out in a row on their respective beds: Stroud, Anderson, Elias, Evan, and Finn.
Doctor Wayne was mixing a batch of healing gel at the side station. Lena stood nearby, neatly holding a tray loaded with haemostatic clamps, passing gauze as needed.
Duvette clasped his hands behind his back and walked to the beds at a measured pace.
He looked at the five of them wrapped like mummies and let out an inward sigh, giving a slight shake of his head.
At the sound of boots on the deck, all five turned their heads in unison.
When they recognised who had come, these particular veterans, who had not blinked facing a Bloodthirster or Eldar assassins, found themselves wearing various degrees of extreme embarrassment.
They understood clearly. The bilge engagement should have been a solid defensive hold. The decision to push the pursuit was their own, and it was that decision which had led to them being reverse-surrounded by the Eldar pirates' elite. If Duvette had not brought the main force in and smashed the door open at the critical moment, all five of them would have died in that compartment.
Being the reason their commanding officer had to come down personally and pull them out: in the 112th's veteran culture, this was a profound disgrace.
"Boss..." Stroud's face was swollen on one side. He attempted what was supposed to be an ingratiating smile.
"Shut up."
Duvette cut him off with a cold sound. He stepped forward and looked down at them from above.
His eyes held no warmth of shared experience. They held only the absolute coldness and killing intent that represented an Imperial Commissar doing his job.
He lowered his voice to a level only they could hear, putting deliberate space between each word.
"Listen carefully to everything I'm about to say."
"Your unauthorised departure from your position and unsanctioned advance violated Astra Militarum battlefield discipline in a way that does not admit of argument." He delivered it as fact. "By military law, I should be sending you all before a court martial. Or assigning you directly to a penal company."
At the words "penal company," Stroud's body went slightly rigid.
"But Ashek II is ahead of us, and I have no use for dead men." Duvette continued in the same tone. "As punishment for your undisciplined conduct, for the Ashek II orbital drop in seven days, you five will be the 112th's first batch. You will be going in at the front."
The medical bay went to a complete silence.
The veterans who had been quietly relieved about avoiding the penal company went grey-faced in the same moment.
These veterans had traded lives with daemons and fought Eldar assassins at arm's length. They faced those things without flinching. The one thing that produced in each of them a deep and entirely genuine physiological dread was precisely the tactic being described: leaving solid ground, exiting a hatch from tens of thousands of metres above a combat zone, with nothing between them and the ground but a lightweight anti-gravity field generator.
The thought of entering enemy anti-aircraft fire in that configuration, with no vehicle armour for cover and no fortifications to aim for, made their stomachs contract violently.
"Commissar... this... you might as well just shoot me outright..." Stroud swallowed. His voice had actually developed a slight tremor.
Lena, standing nearby with the tray, put it down the instant she heard the punishment.
She crossed quickly to Evan's bed, took her brother's uninjured hand in both of hers, then turned and looked at Duvette with wide, clear eyes full of completely undisguised pleading.
Duvette made a cold sound and gave no response to the five expressions of profound despair or to Lena's wordless appeal. He left one final remark in a flat, entirely indifferent tone and nothing more.
"Stop lying there pretending to be dead. I've just extracted a batch of new equipment from the naval side — force-feedback power armour, enough to keep your worthless hides together when you hit the ground. When you can get out of bed and move freely, drag yourselves over to me and collect it."
He turned and left the medical bay without pausing.
The sealed door closed behind him. The moment his presence disappeared from the doorway, the atmosphere that had been suppressing the room collapsed entirely.
"It's all your fault, you stupid bald wretch! You just had to give chase! Now look at us — first batch, out the hatch, straight down from the sky!" Elias covered his face and produced a sound that was somewhere between a wail and a howl.
"That's complete rubbish! You came on your own! You Cadian coward! Without you dead weight dragging behind me I wouldn't have been spotted!" Stroud roared back at the top of his voice.
"Both of you shut it! I would rather take a Volcano Cannon shell directly to the face than be a flying target with a broken anti-grav pack and no cover!" Anderson's enormous frame twisted on the metal bed, making the frame protest loudly with every movement.
Behind the closed door, the sounds of mutual recrimination and various registers of despair and howling carried clearly into the corridor.
At the corner of Duvette's mouth, almost imperceptibly, something formed that was not quite a smile.
He straightened his collar and walked at a measured pace toward the command cabin. The war for Ashek II had only just begun.
***
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