Chapter 7 : Taking Stock
The water purifier was dead.
Nash stood in front of the machine — a squat industrial unit bolted to the sub-basement floor, its intake pipes running down to the aquifer beneath the commercial district — and watched the system paint its guts in diagnostic amber. Corrosion in the filtration membrane. Burned-out motivator coil. Contaminated input reservoir. Twelve separate failure points, each one feeding into the others like a cascade of bad decisions.
[INFRASTRUCTURE ASSESSMENT: AQUA-PURIFIER UNIT, TYPE IV (VALDORIA MUNICIPAL)]
[STATUS: NON-FUNCTIONAL — 12 CRITICAL FAULTS DETECTED]
[REPAIR ESTIMATE: 8-14 HOURS WITH QUALIFIED PERSONNEL]
[PRIORITY: MAXIMUM — WATERBORNE CONTAMINATION WILL REACH LETHAL LEVELS IN 48 HOURS WITHOUT CLEAN SUPPLY]
Corso stood beside him, arms folded, her face doing the same math his system was doing. Without the purifier, five hundred people drank aquifer water contaminated by runoff from the bombardment — industrial chemicals, biological waste, Emperor knew what else. Two days before the first dysentery cases. Four before people started dying.
"Korvak's been at it for two days," Corso said. "The motivator coil is fused. He says he needs a replacement from the manufactorum district, which is six kilometers inside Ork territory."
"He doesn't need a replacement. He needs a bypass."
Corso looked at him. The same look she'd given him in the warehouse — measuring, weighing, filing. "You know water purifier repair now too?"
"I know that in every strategy game I ever played, the water supply was the first infrastructure you secured. I know that motivator coils can be bypassed with a direct power feed if you sacrifice efficiency for function. I know this because the alien AI in my brain is showing me the schematic in real time."
"The coil is a regulator. It controls flow rate. If we bypass it and feed power directly to the filtration membrane, we get clean water — slower output, higher power drain, but functional."
"That's..." Corso paused. "That's not standard procedure."
"Standard procedure assumes we have spare parts and a supply chain. We have scrap metal and desperation."
She almost smiled. It didn't reach her eyes. "I'll get Korvak."
Nash had spent the morning walking the perimeter. Every meter of it.
The system had transformed his vision into a tactical overlay — wall integrity percentages hovering over scrap-metal barricades, fields of fire mapped in translucent blue cones, population density clusters marked in orange where too many civilians occupied too little defensible space. The data was overwhelming in volume and precise in its assessment: this place was a deathtrap held together by desperation and a lieutenant's refusal to die.
[SETTLEMENT NODE ASSESSMENT: SECTOR 12 COMMERCIAL DISTRICT]
[WALL INTEGRITY: 38% (CRITICAL)]
[DEFENSIVE POSITIONS: 12 (ADEQUATE FOR 40 DEFENDERS — CURRENT GARRISON: 83)]
[FOOD RESERVES: 72 HOURS AT CURRENT CONSUMPTION]
[AMMUNITION: 340 LASGUN POWER PACKS — ESTIMATED 4 HOURS SUSTAINED COMBAT]
[MORALE: 23/100 — COLLAPSE RISK: ELEVATED]
[RECOMMENDATION: IMMEDIATE INFRASTRUCTURE TRIAGE — PRIORITIZE WATER, WALLS, WEAPONS (IN ORDER)]
He carried a salvaged data-slate — Corso had given him one from the command stores — and took notes as he walked, the system feeding him information that he translated into handwritten observations. Mundane enough to avoid questions. The clerk, taking inventory. Doing what clerks do.
But he didn't just count supplies. He counted people.
At the eastern barricade, a woman named Tava repaired sandbag casings with a needle made from wire. Her daughter — eight, maybe nine — sat beside her, stacking spent power packs into a wall of miniature bricks. The girl looked up when Nash's shadow crossed her game.
"What's your name?" Nash asked.
"Lida."
He wrote it on the data-slate. Not because the system needed it — it had already tagged the child with an identifier — but because names mattered. Names were the difference between a population count and a community.
"Nice wall, Lida."
The girl looked at her stack of power packs. "It keeps falling."
"Try offsetting them. Each row half a brick to the side. Like this." He crouched and demonstrated, the same interlocking pattern the system had recommended for the actual barricades outside. "Stronger that way."
She tried it. It held. A grin — the first genuine smile Nash had seen in this entire perimeter — cracked across her face.
Something warm settled in Nash's chest. He stood, nodded to Tava, and kept walking.
"Small victories. That's what keeps the gears turning."
Father Marcus found Nash before Nash found him.
The priest was older than Nash expected — sixty at least, with a face carved from years of prayer and privation, white stubble on a jaw that had been strong once. He wore Ecclesiarchy robes, torn and filthy, over a body that moved with the careful economy of someone conserving energy he couldn't spare. A brass aquila hung from his neck on a chain, and his hands — large, steady, scarred — clasped it reflexively as he spoke.
"You're the clerk."
"Garrett."
"Father Marcus." He didn't extend a hand. Studied Nash with eyes that held the peculiar clarity of absolute faith — not the blind kind, the kind that had been tested and hammered and come out harder for it. "They're talking about you. The survivors. They say you walked through Ork territory with five people and lost only two."
"Four. I lost four."
"Luck," Nash said.
[FATHER MARCUS — ECCLESIARCHY PRIEST, VALDORIA PRIME DIOCESE]
[LOYALTY: 40 — NEUTRAL]
[KEY STATS: FELLOWSHIP 60, WILLPOWER 65]
[SKILLS: INSPIRE 55, LORE (IMPERIAL CREED) 70]
[POTENTIAL: C (AVERAGE)]
[NOTE: GENUINE FAITH. WILL SUPPORT LEADERSHIP THAT PROTECTS HIS FLOCK.]
"The Emperor doesn't deal in luck, my child." Marcus's voice carried — not loud, but resonant, the kind of voice trained to fill cathedrals and hold attention. "He deals in purpose."
"Then His purpose put me here. I'm trying to make use of it."
The priest considered this. Something shifted behind his eyes — not trust, not yet, but the recognition of a fellow pragmatist wearing different clothes.
"The people need more than walls," Marcus said. "They need to believe the walls will hold."
"That's why I'm glad you're here, Father. I need someone who can give them that."
"And what do you need?"
"A list. Everyone in your congregation with skills — construction, medical, mechanical, cooking, anything. I'm assigning work teams. Idle hands make for panicked minds."
Marcus's eyebrow lifted. "You sound like a general, not a clerk."
"I sound like someone who doesn't want to die. The list, Father?"
"You'll have it within the hour."
He left. Nash watched him go — the measured stride, the way survivors turned toward him as he passed, the calming gravity of a man who'd spent decades being a fixed point in other people's chaos. The system rated him a C for potential. Nash rated him essential.
Enginseer Korvak was a different problem.
Nash found the tech-priest in a maintenance alcove near the water purifier, hunched over a workbench covered in machine components. Half of Korvak's body was augmetic — the left arm a mechanical replacement, currently twitching and unresponsive, the left eye a dull red lens. Shrapnel scars cratered the organic side of his face. He looked up when Nash approached, and the red eye whirred into focus with a sound like an insect.
[ENGINSEER KORVAK — ADEPTUS MECHANICUS, VALDORIA PRIME FORGE ENCLAVE]
[LOYALTY: 35 — SUSPICIOUS]
[KEY STATS: INTELLIGENCE 55, TECHNICAL 65]
[SKILLS: REPAIR 60, TECH-USE 55]
[POTENTIAL: C (AVERAGE)]
[NOTE: ORTHODOX TECH-PRIEST. SUSPICIOUS OF NASH'S "INSIGHTS." WATCHING.]
"Enginseer. I understand the water purifier's motivator coil is fused."
Korvak's organic eye narrowed. "That information is accurate. The machine-spirit requires a replacement component. I have submitted a requisition to Lieutenant Corso—"
"A requisition we can't fill. I'd like to discuss a bypass."
The augmetic arm twitched. "A bypass."
"Direct power feed to the filtration membrane, bypassing the motivator coil entirely. Lower efficiency, higher draw, but functional output."
Silence. Korvak's red eye clicked — Nash's system identified it as a recording function. The tech-priest was cataloguing this conversation.
"That procedure requires understanding of the Aqua-Purifier's internal architecture." Korvak's voice carried the flat harmonic of someone who spoke through augmetic vocal cords. "Architecture that is not typically available to Administratum clerks."
"I reviewed the maintenance manual on the transit terminal's cached data." The lie came smooth. Nash had practiced this one during the walk. "Davos — our tech-assistant — pulled it before we lost him in Sector 7."
"Davos is dead and can't contradict me. I hate that this is useful."
Korvak stared at him for four heartbeats. The red eye whirred again.
"I will... review your proposal."
"Review it fast, Enginseer. We have forty-eight hours before the water kills more of us than the Orks."
Nash left the alcove and didn't look back. The space between his shoulder blades prickled — the tech-priest's gaze, recording, analyzing, filing.
[ASSESSMENT: KORVAK SUSPICION ELEVATED — COVER STORY ACCEPTED PROVISIONALLY]
[RECOMMENDATION: DEMONSTRATE RESULTS TO MITIGATE INVESTIGATION TENDENCY]
By dusk, the water purifier had a crew.
Nash assigned them based on the system's skill assessments — three hive workers with mechanical aptitude, Venn for decontamination protocols, Korvak for technical oversight. The tech-priest worked in stiff, deliberate motions, his damaged augmetic arm compensated for by his remaining organic hand and two of the workers holding components in place. The bypass wasn't elegant. It involved cannibalizing power couplings from a dead generator and jury-rigging them into the purifier's main feed.
The first attempt failed — a power surge blew the coupling and sent Korvak stumbling backward with a curse in binaric that made the glow-lumens flicker. The second attempt held for eleven minutes before the filtration membrane clogged. The third attempt, guided by adjustments Nash suggested through careful questions rather than direct instruction, held.
Water flowed. Brown at first, then clearing, the purifier groaning like a wounded beast but producing output. Korvak ran a purity check with his auspex.
"Acceptable," the tech-priest said. The word sounded like it physically hurt him. "Barely."
But clean enough. Nash watched the first canteen get filled and passed around, the survivors drinking with a desperation that had nothing to do with thirst and everything to do with hope. Clean water. One problem down.
"In the bunker — was that five days ago? Six? — I woke up in a dead man's body and vomited on the floor. Now I'm running a water purification project for five hundred people. The universe has a sense of humor."
Priscilla appeared beside him with a ration bar — the compressed protein blocks that tasted like cardboard and chalk, standard Imperial survival issue. Nash took it and chewed. Terrible. He chewed anyway, his stomach cramping around the first solid food since the pipeline.
"You haven't slept," she said.
"Later."
"You said that eight hours ago."
"Then I was right. It's later now and I still haven't slept."
Her mouth thinned. The maternal concern was back — she didn't bother hiding it in private.
"Priscilla. I need a population breakdown by morning. Skills, family units, medical needs, work capacity. Can you do that?"
She straightened. The administrator woke up behind her eyes, sharp and certain. "I'll have it on your desk by 0500."
"I don't have a desk."
"Then I'll have it wherever you happen to be standing."
She left. Nash ate the rest of the ration bar in the dark, listening to the water purifier's labored rhythm, and allowed himself thirty seconds of something close to satisfaction.
The satisfaction died when the scout stumbled through the eastern gate at midnight.
The man was bleeding from a gash on his forehead, his uniform torn, his breath coming in the ragged gasps of someone who'd been running for an hour.
"Orks," he managed. "Warband. Northern approach. Two hundred, maybe more. Vehicles."
Corso materialized from the command post like she'd been summoned. "How far?"
"Twelve hours. Maybe less."
The system processed the scout's data, cross-referencing with Ork movement patterns from Nash's meta-knowledge — the Dawn of War campaigns, the codex supplements, a thousand hours of lore absorbed across two lifetimes. The numbers reformed themselves in his vision:
[THREAT REASSESSMENT BASED ON OBSERVED MOVEMENT PATTERNS]
[ESTIMATED HOSTILE COUNT: 350-450 (SCOUT REPORT LIKELY LOW)]
[ESTIMATED TIME TO CONTACT: 10-14 HOURS]
[VEHICLE ELEMENT SUGGESTS NOB-LED WARBAND — ORGANIZED, NOT FERAL]
Four hundred. Not two hundred. And organized, which meant someone with enough cunning to coordinate an assault rather than just charging at the walls.
Corso's face didn't change. She'd been expecting this. "Garrett?"
Nash looked at the wall maps. The barricades. The ammunition count. The five hundred faces depending on decisions made in the next ten hours.
"War council," he said. "Every squad leader, now."
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