[M] Penitence - IC

[Azazeal849]

Winded and groaning but unhurt, Glabrio sighed and slowly began to bring himself back to his feet. They're going to pay for that.

An arbiter’s sixth sense tingled through the back of his neck, and he turned to see a figure loomed behind him. Somehow, one of the cultists had made his way up the stairs to the mezzanine level. He was wielding a wrecker servitor’s impact hammer in both hands, and what little Glabrio could see of his face beneath the rebreather and sand-goggles was twisted with hate. Glabrio had a bare split second to haul his shield around and brace before the heavy piston swung down and discharged its pneumatic force into the centre of the borrowed weapon. The shock generator crumpled in a blow-out of sparks, and the residual energy of the impact was sufficient to crush the shield back against Glabrio, and send the investigator himself reeling back against the balcony balustrade.

A lasbeam cracked off the marble, bursting a fist-sized chunk out of the stone mere inches from Glabrio’s elbow. The ex-arbiter wondered vaguely what Crenshaw would think of him damaging his borrowed suppression shield, as he shoved the weapon forward to clear space for his pistol, and received another bone-jarring blow from the impact hammer in response. A lasbeam hit the carapace plate covering his back, battering him back in the opposite direction. Lasguns and solid sluggers were banging off from seemingly every direction.

Cursing, Glabrio dropped to one knee, angling his shield over him and hooking his pistol hand out to fire. The cultist was already swinging for him, but at the last second Glabrio saw him flinch and screw his eyes shut, a muffled cry of pain filtering through his rebreather. His impact hammer fell wide and pulverised the balcony floor. A moment after that, a large-calibre bullet struck the back of the man’s head. The front of his skull burst outwards and went flying over Glabrio. The grisly missiles sent flecks of blood and grey matter showering over the investigator, and only the glass of the cultist’s goggles stopped his eyeballs from doing the same.

As the body sprawled over Glabrio and rolled limply aside, the investigator saw a second cultist lying dead further down the mezzanine, with two familiar figures behind. Marc was leaping over the body to get to him, Kadath’s oversized autopistol still in his hand, while Ella was dropping the arm she had thrust out towards the cultist. She was panting from the run through the hospital, and inquisitor Suffolk’s force gladius was raining sparks from her other hand. Both of them were without their enviro-suit helmets, and sweat had plastered their hair to their foreheads.

“We need to move.” Marc advised, as he dropped the empty magazine out of the big Tallarn auto and slid in a fresh one. The pistol banged furiously as he fired it over the balcony at the cultists below, and Glabrio added his own shots to the suppressing fire. Marc jerked his head towards the decapitated cultist. “Those two weren’t the only ones behind you. Bastards are crawling all over the ground floor.”

Glabrio looked around for Josiah, and saw that the arbiter had dragged himself away from the balcony, where he was now grunting in pain. He had one hand clasped to his leg and the other to the side of his neck, and both of his gloves were sticky with blood that had leaked out through punctures in his flakweave undersuit. The arbiter had evidently taken more damage from the cultists’ grenade than Glabrio himself.

“Can you get up?” Ella sked Josiah urgently. The astropath’s lips were drawn tight from the stinging psychic violence pulsing through the air around her.

Josiah nodded. “If the Emperor requires it.” he growled through clenched teeth, and allowed Ella to clasp his bloody hand and haul him to his feet.

+ + + + + +

Looking south through the clearing dust storm, Sapphira could see that the promised Nebula attack was beginning. Smoke was rising from the buildings at the far edge of the city, and CAS aircraft were buzzing around them like angry wasps, the distance softening their engine roar to a dull rumble. Some sort of gunship was throwing out smoking darts, missiles thumping from the launchers in its wings.

Submunitions sprayed through the air and erupted the line of buildings on the horizon, the thunderclap of the impact reaching the hospital a second later. The distant buildings went down one after the other, crumbling as if they had been made of spun sugar. The roof of a burning water reclamation plant caved in, and the flames within greedily sucked in oxygen, gusting a fireball thirty metres into the sky.

"Do not get too close to the windows." Crenshaw advised. "The heretic with the missile launcher and his friends are still down there."

No sooner had he said it, a las weapon raked the glass wall ahead of them, blowing out the panes one after the other. Whether Arcolin's cultists below had seen them or not, breaking through to assist their team-mates had just become somewhat more problematic.

+ + + + + +

Marc led the group, Kadath's pistol braced over his other wrist, which was turned with the screen of his vambrace auspex towards his face. His drone was still up and showing the west side of the hospital as clear, but his motion tracker was alive with contacts: moving dots that pulsed like a frightened heartbeat.

He pulled up short and signalled to the others, holding up a flat palm and then two fingers. He and Glabrio flattened themselves against opposite sides of the corridor, while the limping Josiah raised a pistol in the hand that wasn’t clamped against his neck. A few seconds later, a pair of storm-coated cultists came barging through the ward doors ahead, and half a second after that they both went down in a bracketing hail of fire.

Marc cursed as his pistol slide locked forward on his final, empty magazine. He holstered the hot weapon, before running over to the dead cultists and making do with a battered machine-pistol that one of them had been carrying. He removed the oversized magazine and found that it was still full, before pushing it back into the grip and chambering the first round. Beside him Ella was turning a circle, one of her crystal-fronted Tarot cards held out in front of her. Marc caught a brief impression of tiered seating and a pillar of light on the glowing face.

"They're on their way." Ella reported, breathing shallowly as she returned the card to her pocket.

"Who, the others?"

"No, Machairi. The Astronomican card, for hope. She's on her way."

Marc nodded. The long-range vox was still lousy with interference, thanks to the storm – and quite possibly to Nebula jamming as they began their attack on the city – but he trusted Ella’s readings. He turned to Glabrio.

"Get to the roof, switch on the homing beacon and throw up a couple of flares so Machairi knows what to aim for. I'll round up the others."

"What about Carson?" Josiah asked, as he slumped against the wall to take the weight off his bleeding leg. "Sapphira left him locked up downstairs. He's my prisoner."

"Frak Carson." Marc opined. Josiah was hardly a friend, but he was against letting anyone else risk their lives to retrieve that piece of underhive sump-shit. "If we can't drag him out then Prinzel can trigger his collar as soon as we're clear."

Josiah's broad features twitched. "I will admit, I can't see any violation of Imperial law in that course of action.”

Marc nodded agreement and turned on his heel. Leaving the others to fall back upstairs, he pounded on through the derelict ward, listening to the screech of lasfire and the heavy thump of explosions that now seemed to be coming from every direction.

"Kally," he snapped into his vox, "There's too many angles to cover - we're falling back upstairs. Machairi's on her way. Where are you?"

Kally was with Vizkop in the south fire-escape stairwell, and her current thought was shitting hell! as an honest-to-gods plasma gun blew the landing above her into superheated dust. Half the ceiling came down in a welter of plasterboard and light fittings, crashing into both Kally and Vizkop. Forced to one knee as a piece of rebar thumped painfully against her helmet and shoulder plate, Kally saw cultists coming up the stairs. The plasma gunner was not immediately in evidence, though three others were pushing up the stairs behind what looked like a battered arbites tower shield, although the ceramite Aquila on the front had been chipped away by gunfire, and struck through with a crude spray-painted X. The refractor field within the Aquila seemed to have shorted out long ago, possibly as a result of the cultists' own overly-eager desecration, but behind the shield Kally could hear the ugly roar of a chainsword, and she liked that a lot less.

Still kneeling, she groped for a grenade with her numb left hand. With her right she fired a one-handed burst into the edges of the cultist's shield, hoping to torque it hard enough to knock the carrier's arm to one side and open him up to a second volley. Her wrist quickly protested the decision as it took all of the bolter's considerable recoil, and bolt rockets blitzed into the shield and into the wall beside. The cultist staggered slightly, but the two behind him opened up with lasguns, firing at Vizkop as he strafed across the landing to get a clear shot with his Salusian revolver. Neat las-holes through Vizkop's mechanicus robe crisped away into larger marks as the armour beneath absorbed and reflected the energy, and his helmet visor briefly fizzed with static as a red beam screeched off the side of his helmet. Then Kally had no more time to worry about Vizkop and the two shooters as the first cultist drove up into her. The eroded Aquila at the centre of the shield punched towards her, and then a throaty roar filled the universe as the chainsword came hacking in from her left.

+ + + + + +

“We’re leaving.” Kelly said brusquely as she dropped her finger from the vox bead in her ear. She gathered up her dataslate and slotted it into the breast pocket of her enviro-suit. As if to punctuate the statement, the harsh white bulbs which lit up the operating theatre flickered.

Alicia, who was standing near the whirring promethium generator, looked uncertainly over at the prisoner whom the generator was keeping alive. “What about him?”

The lights flickered again, and gunfire echoed up from somewhere below them. Arcolin was slumped motionless in his chair, his head dropped forward against his chest and the generator’s steel-jacketed cables trailing from his sternum interface ports.

“We sedate him.” Kelly replied, nodding towards the needles of kalma that Sapphira had left on the operating table for their use. “Then I’ll put his battery back in.”

A heavy explosion, another missile impact perhaps, struck the hospital and vibrated the floor. The lights began to strobe. Kelly heard Arcolin mumble something.

“Say what?” she asked, pausing with her hand hovering above the row of hypodermic needles. Arcolin mumbled again, without raising his head. It was only then that Kelly realised that he was repeating some kind of chant. A cold jolt shot through her stomach, and she made to drop her hand to her hip and claw out her laspistol.

Her hand wouldn’t move, and neither would anything else.

The lights went out.

+ + + + + +

Tomas felt it as a prickle across his skin and down the back of his neck. Gavin must have felt something much worse, because the psyker threw back his head and screamed, before his bionic legs gave out under him with a crunch, and he collapsed to the floor.

“Gavin?” the team’s commander snapped urgently, dropping to a knee beside the stricken psyker. He had a horrible suspicion that he knew what had caused the disturbance. He had had the misfortune to feel a similar sensation once before in lady Machairi’s employ. His pulse began to pound as Gavin looked up at him with saucer-wide eyes and confirmed his worst fear.

“Warp-spawn, agent Tomas Prinzel!” Gavin gasped. One hand was stabbing at the null halo around his neck in a desperate attempt to shut out the psychic intrusion, while the nails of the other had raked bloody welts into his bald scalp. “Warp-spawn!”

Tomas hauled the scrawny psyker to his feet, and ignited his Casterian power sword with a snap-hiss of charging energy fields. Changing direction, he barged through the rusted double-doors on his left and sprinted down the corridor that led to Arcolin’s makeshift holding cell.

When he got there the heretic was gone. The unlocked cuffs hung limply from the bolted-down holding chair, and the generator power cables had scattered across the floor, recoiling like wounded snakes. The generator itself had been half overturned against the wall, and sported a smoking hole in its front. Promethium fuel was leaking out of the now-silent engine.

Alicia was pinned beneath the generator, cursing violently as she braced her arms and tried to push the crushing weight off her. Leaping over the overturned operating table and crunching through its scattered contents, Tomas put his back against the wall and his booted foot on the hard metal of the generator. Combining their strength, he and Alicia were able to send the engine tilting over and then crashing to the floor.

"He started chanting something,” Alicia explained at machine-gun pace as she staggered free. Her expression was one of shocked horror. “Before we could stop him, there was this flash..."

“In there!” someone shouted in gutter Baraspine, and then Tomas’ senses were assaulted by a cataclysmic bang and a flash of fire and smoke. A whole squad of cultists came bursting into the entrance corridor in the wake of the grenades.

+ + + + + +

Ella ran, groping her hand along the wall for support, trying to follow the bright imprints of Marc’s footsteps as the whole corridor throbbed red around her. Her lungs were burning, and her breath was raw in her throat. She was afraid – not of the violent aura that now saturated the hospital, but for her friend. Marc wasn’t going to round up the rest of the team, at least not as his first priority. The flash of murder red through his aura as he said it had betrayed that lie. He was going back for Arcolin before the cultists found him.

She shouldered through a door, following Marc’s psychic tracks into the ward-room beyond, and immediately lost sight of them amid the splintering black and purple that wriggled across her warp-sight like snakes through oil. It radiated through the walls and coiled through the rusted bed frames, pulsing like a heartbeat. She staggered to the side, and thumped her leg against a bedside cabinet that had disappeared from her warp sight. The little gasp of pain died in her throat as she realised that someone else was in the room with her.

It was Kelly Black, but it was not just Kelly Black. Something else was hovering behind her friend’s distinctive golden aura, piercing it with white thunderbolts of panic and distress. The Other was a swirl of indistinct auras; vaguely man-shaped, but made up of dozens of lesser souls that were at once both more and less than human. It dominoed through them, each one different, but all of them a beautiful, terrible blue. It was more horrifying even than staring directly into the black voids that made up Kally and Crenshaw.

The Other had one of its clawed, amorphous hands curled around Kelly’s throat, and the other was clamped around her wrist. Ella saw it wrestle the hand upward, and it was only then that she realised that Kelly was holding the bleeding red warp image of a gun. She was too horrified to even raise Suffolk’s force gladius in defence.

The laspistol cracked, and Ella felt a volley of impacts punch her in the chest and stomach. Her breath left her in a coughing gasp that brought a taste of copper with it. Her warp-sight exploded bloody red as she reeled back against the door, the force sword tumbling from fingers that she could no longer feel.

+ + + + + +

The ceiling of the southwest wing had collapsed under a weight of sand blown in through the smashed windows. Exposed to the dust and damp, the floor wasn’t doing much better. It was, however, the fastest way back to the others – and to the operating theatre where Arcolin was being held.

There was no question in Marc’s mind – unless inquisitor Machairi was coming down with overwhelming firepower, they would not have the luxury of time to drag an unconscious Arcolin, never mind his generator, up to the roof and evacuate. The number of cultists swarming the hospital made him wonder if Machairi would even be here in time at all. In either scenario, the safest option – the only option – was to terminate Arcolin DeRei here and now. A dead cultist hatched no new plots, and Marc would be dead himself before he allowed one as rabidly dangerous as Arcolin to be rescued by his mad Tzeentchian allies.

Marc was running flat out when the door to his left swung open and smashed him in the face, poleaxing him off his feet. He landed on his back with an impact that knocked the breath out of him. Choking and spitting out blood, he looked up and saw his sister stumble through the now-open door.

“Kel!” Marc coughed in shock.

Kelly looked down at him, and there was something wrong with her eyes.

The words Marc was going to say died in his throat, and instead the air was filled with a hissing whine, which grew louder and higher in pitch as something powered and lightning-fast streaked towards the building. The missile hit the floor below them, shattering a load-bearing outer wall. The pillars around it went down like dominoes, as did the floor beneath Marc and Kelly’s feet, and then the floor below that.

[dakkagor]

"We are going to need more." Crenshaw opined clinically. "Vizkop, Kally, I strongly recommend that you get over here right now."

"Go." Kelly urged. "I'll watch him. Alley..." She hesitated, turning to their returned comrade. "You stay here with me."

Alicia opened her mouth to protest. "I can..."

"It'd be best if you stay." Kelly repeated firmly.

Alicia twisted her mouth as she drew and cocked her oversized pistol, aiming it squarely at the impassive Arcolin. "Alright."

“Moving.” Kally said into the vox before she turned to Arcolin. “Don't go anywhere Arcolin. I'm not done talking to you yet.” She spared a look for Kelly and Alacia.

“I'm on band six. If you need me back here let me know.”

She stepped out the door and immediately ran into Vizkop, who passed her her boltgun and sword.

“Never rains but it pours, right?”

“Tell me about it.”

Kally fell in next to Vizkop, and the pair began to double time it towards the stairwell. Both of them slid to a halt together and hunkered down as they heard a group of people coming up the stairs towards them.

Five. Plasma in the back, chain sword in the front. Vizkops hands flashed through a series of combat signs. Kally nodded, quietly impressed.

Cover me, and I'll clear them out. Kally signed back.

They both listened for a second, and then Vizkop shook his head, eliciting a shove from Kally.

Cover me, and then follow up. Vizkop signed. Kally shook her head vigorously.

The two stared each other down, then Kally held up her fist. Vizkop mirrored the motion.

One.

Two.

Three.

Rock signed Kally, Paper signed Vizkop.

Frack you!

Before either agent acted, an blast of white fire cut through the air and carved through the ceiling above them. Both of the agents threw themselves to the ground out of reflex as hot plaster rained down on them, before they clambered back to their knees, the cultists below warned by some sixth sense that the agents had been waiting in ambush for them.


Still kneeling, she groped for a grenade with her numb left hand. With her right she fired a one-handed burst into the edges of the cultist's shield, hoping to torque it hard enough to knock the carrier's arm to one side and open him up to a second volley, while yelling for Vizkop to move. Her wrist quickly protested the decision as it took all of the bolter's considerable recoil, and bolt rockets blitzed into the shield and into the wall beside. The cultist staggered slightly, but the two behind him opened up with lasguns, firing at Vizkop as he strafed across the landing to get a clear shot with his Salusian revolver. Neat las-holes through Vizkop's mechanicus robe crisped away into larger marks as the armour beneath absorbed and reflected the energy, and his helmet visor briefly fizzed with static as a red beam screeched off the side of his helmet. Kally saw one of the cultists thrown back against the wall to slide down it with a red streak, and the two at the rear of the pack broke of to pursue the assassin as he dived into a set of operating theatres. Then Kally had no more time to worry about Vizkop and the two shooters as the first cultist drove up into her. The eroded Aquila at the centre of the shield punched towards her, and then a throaty roar filled the universe as the chainsword came hacking in from her left.

Kally backed up two steps, and felt the chainsword glance from her carapace chestplate anyway, nearly dragging her to the floor as the chain bit and tore through the ceramite weave. She drew her sabre and thumbed the activation rune before the second strike and met it with a parry, her boltgun discarded on the floor in her hurry to get something between her and the roaring melee weapon.

Watch your fingers

She caught the next blow, and the next, the chainsword bouncing away each time in a shower of sparks as its diamond hard teeth met the powerfield. Each time, Kally lashed out with her sword, but the riot shield was an impenetrable wall that the cultist was using with some skill. She knew she could eventually hack her way through and destroy it, and then the man behind, but that would take time she did not have. She needed to change the dynamics of the fight before she lost it.

She met the next blow and held the parry, stepping into it and twisting her sabre two handed. There was a shriek as the beyond razor sharp edge of her blade sheared into the whirring teeth of the chainsword, and defanged it, stripping the teeth in a hail of sparks and white hot shrapnel. The cultist pulled the blade away and slammed her with the riot shield, knocking Kally onto her arse. Over her suddenly lowered head a spray of lasbolts punched holes in the brickwork beside and behind her.

She scrambled to her feet and the chainsword, now a whirring, smoking red hot club, swung down for her. She cut the top of the blade off, and the sword finally catastrophically failed, a pair of battered chains exploding from their casing. Kally raised her left arm in reflexive defence as they lashed for her face, and felt the chains wrap into and bite through her armour. The cultist immediately changed tack, pulling her in with his improvised whip and lashing out with the shield simultaneously. Kally stumbled into the blow and felt her left shoulder wrench, causing her to cry out in pain. She shoved back, and the fight dissolved into a brawl. She could vaguely hear the other cultists yelling for their friend to get clear so they could take a shot, and somewhere below and two her left she could hear Vizkop firing his distinctive pistols. With a yell, she pushed the cultist back and over the rail.

She had a moment to realise how bad an idea that was before the chain wrapped around her arm dragged her off the landing and after the cultist as he fell.


+++++

Tomas spun and held up his shield, screwing his eyes shut as the flash bang went off in a searing flash of light. He was practically deaf as he lowered the shield and saw a half dozen cultists sweep into the room, all faceless behind balaclavas and sand goggles, and level their rifles. A firing squad. He gritted his teeth and hunkered down, covering Alicia out of instinct and preparing for death. Even with his shield, there was enough firepower to put him down for good. He tensed, preparing to charge into the fusillade and take at least one of the bastards down with him.

Before the cultists could fire, there was a pulse of overpressure and a flash of blinding white. Tomas thought for a second they had been hit by a lightning strike from the raging storm, but as he refocused on the cultists he watched living tendrils of energy crackle over their gear, lasguns malfunctioning as power bled away and magazines dropped from autorifles. Above him, the light bulbs flared to brilliant life one final time before detonating in a shower of glass.

Gavin. Thank the Throne for Gavin.

Tomas charged with a roar. Before the first cultist could recover, he swung his sword down in an overhead cut that tore through crude metal armour and into a shoulder. He kicked the cultist clean off his blade and slashed out again in a wide sideways cut, his broadsword meeting a stunned cultist's head and smashing it like a overripe ploin. The others had rallied, dropping their disabled rifles and pulling knives and axes. The first one came at Tomas with a wild overhead swing, and Tomas met his chest with his shield, the blast from the field discharging slamming the man back and through a wall, his ragged robes on fire. The next two circled and struck together, and Tomas turned his shoulder into one blow, letting the armour soak it while parrying the other with his shield. He stabbed out with his sword, and impaled the cultist coming for his front, and pulling the blade clear reversed it, swinging in a low cut that took out a leg and dropped the cultist screaming to the floor. The final one standing threw himself bodily at Tomas, slamming into the shield and nearly bowling him over. Tomas redirected the bull rush, flipping the man to the floor before driving his sword into the cultists side. As Tomas stood and brought his boot down on the last screaming cultist's neck, he saw Gavin standing in the doorway, and watched him wince slightly as the bastard's neck snapped.

“Good job, Gavin. Wouldn’t have survived that without. . . whatever you did.”

“Not bad yourself, Agent Prinzel.” muttered Alicia, still recovering from whatever had happened in here. He shrugged, and regretted the motion immediately. He could feel a wet warmness spreading from his shoulder. It wasn't a deep wound, the armour had seen to that, but a gash had been opened in his armour and his flesh.

“Where is Arcolin?” Tomas demanded, watching Gavin totter into the room on his mechanical legs. “And for that matter, where is Kelly Black?” He strode over to Alicia and pulled her to her feet, and gave her a once over. She looked fine to his eyes, but she still seemed slightly off balance mentally; possibly a mild concussion or shock, or perhaps...

“Arcolin...he summoned something.” Alicia shook her head. "The lights went out so I didn't see it...but it tore the room apart."

Warp Shock. Tomas had seen it before, seen it unbalance the hardest of soldiers. Watching reality melt and run like cheap wax could tear at the mind in a way no conventional horror could. He turned to Gavin as the frail psyker put himself in the half-destroyed chair, and remembered how he had responded to the feeling of gooseflesh and horrible disquiet in the corridor.

“Daemon.” Tomas hissed through gritted teeth.

Alicia shook her head again as she groped around the floor to retrieve her oversized handgun. "A daemonhost. He couldn't summon it down here without a body to put it in. There's no background warp energy, no foci laid out." She looked at Tomas earnestly. "If he's made himself into a vessel then he just became exponentially more dangerous. I lost track of Kelly in the dark, but..." She shook her head once more, lips pursed. "I wouldn't hold out hope."

“You and I need to have a long talk about what you do and don't know, Agent Alicia Tarran. And don't rule out Kelly just yet. She's tougher than she looks” He raised an eyebrow as he saw Gavin lower himself with a pneumatic wheeze into the chair left miraculously untouched in the maelstrom.

“Gavin, we don't have time for you to sit down. We need to get after the thing wearing Arcolin like a greatcoat and kill it.”

"That is exactly what I plan to do, agent Tomas Prinzel." Gavin rasped. His face was pinched tight, but determined. "There are old cables still running through most of the hospital. I will project through them and find the warp-spawn."

He nodded. “I'll keep these frackers off you. Do what you came here to do. Alicia, get after Arcolin, and terminate him! Go!"

The former Nebula acknowledged the order with an emphatic nod, racked the slide on Pretentious Bitch and drew a second pistol from the thigh holster under her skirts with her off hand.

Tomas now had an objective, and a plan. He hauled several destroyed bits of furniture to the door and piled them up, watching Alicia set of at a soldier's practised jog. Once his crude barricade was set, he policed a rifle from the floor, a heavy Armageddon pattern autogun, and reloaded it, checking the action and piling up a small stack of spare magazines. It seemed to be in mechanical order, and he knew that a man with a rifle, and an iron will, could turn a room into a fortress.

“Emperor watch over you, Gavin.” he muttered as he hugged the barricade, listening to a wave of booted feet making their way towards him from down the corridor. “Emperor watch over us all.”

+++++

Kally had managed to grab the railing by dropping her sabre. The cultist had grimly hung onto his smashed chainsword, and the sudden heavy weight had popped her left shoulder clean out of its socket with a hot spike of agony. She cursed Strelilov for the millionth time, and applied her boot to the cultists masked face. On the third kick he finally let go of the sword and fell, crashing into the railings as he plunged screaming down the stairwell to land in a bloody, broken heap below.

Above her, a pair of the bastards levelled guns at her head and fingers.

With a grunt, she swung onto the landing below, landing and rolling to send a fresh spike of raw pain through her shoulder, lasbolts cutting the air where she had been. She drew a las pistol into her right hand before slamming her left arm into a wall, brutally popping the limb back into place with a nausea inducing crunching sound.

"Sapphira's going to fracking kill me for that."

She drew her other pistol and fired them both at full auto. Three bolts exploded across the armour on her chest even as she fired and backed up into a corridor, but one of the cultists plunged over the rail, riddled with shots. She heard movement behind her, and spun to see another pair of cultists running down the corridor. She had completely lost track of Vizkop in the brawl, but she thought she could hear a firefight running a floor or two below her. She levelled both pistols and fired, catching one and dropping him, and forcing the other to duck into an office. Las rifle fire tore down from the landing and into the corridors entrance, and Kally ducked deeper in for more cover.

+++++

He would have killed for Gavin to pull the same trick as before, and disable the cultists guns, but he was stuck doing it the old fashioned way. He'd give his good eye for a few members of his old fire team, but he was alone. And he'd probably give up his original lung for one of the current team to cover him, but they all seemed to be engaged elsewhere.

The rifle kicked against his shoulder, hard, and he gritted his teeth as he kept firing down range, suppressing the cultists at the far end of the corridor and preventing them from advancing. His right shoulder was now numb, and he knew logically that he had lost a fair amount of blood. One of the attackers got overconfident, stepping clear of cover, fumbling with his webbing. Tomas plugged a neat set of rounds into his chest and ducked back as bullets whined over his crude defences.

He watched warily as the cultists backed off. Circling round? This room only had one way in or out, but he remembered the team reporting that the bastards had breaching hammers in their arsenal. If this fight was about to go mobile, he would need to sort his shoulder, and then see about moving Gavin. And something else. There was no way he could push deeper into the building now, and get to and retrieve Merle. And with so many attackers, the scum was a rogue variable, too dangerous to let live.

He reached into his webbing, and pulled out the . . . Tomas frowned, and looked down at his chest.

Nothing! His gloved fingers pushed through a slashed hole in the pouch. He frantically scanned the blood covered floor until he saw it, and dropped to his knees to grab it up.

The detonator for Merle's collar was gutted, cut open by a blow from some weapon and its vital circuits torn out. Tomas wasn't a techpriest, but he knew that the detonators machine spirit was a casualty. It had been designed to be fail-safe rather than fail-deadly, which meant that Merle, though he had no way of knowing, was off the leash.

Tomas couldn't help but bitterly laugh at the irony. The Detonator had certainly soaked a hit meant for him. Merle Carson had saved Tomas life, and in the process, stayed his own execution.

In the chair behind him Gavin let out a hissing breath, his features drawn taut and his hands clawed around the chair arms.

Tomas frowned. If Gavin had a chance to defeat this daemon, he had to let the psyker take the shot at it. He walked over to the gaunt, frail man and sheathed his sword, and drew a laspistol from a holster.

Tomas would give Gavin his chance. But he wouldn't hesitate to save him if he went wrong.

+++++

Gavin had not fought Malfallax on Saros Station. He had been in the Telepathica eyrie with Kelly, sending a desperate message to the secret chapter house on nearby Titan. Gavin still remembered the raw, awesome power of the Grey Knight prognosticar flooding back through him, tears running down his face at its painful purity even as his larynx nearly ruptured trying to emulate the Grey Knight's voice. He wondered if the dark mirror of daemonic possession approached the same kind of pain, and if so he hoped that Arcolin DeRei was feeling every iota of it.

The Grey Knight who had burned Gavin's mind had been a bastion of purpose - proud in his power, unafraid of it and unshunned; bolstered by faith and the psychic might of others like him, who saw him as a brother and not just a dangerously unreliable tool. He had been a defiant voice howling his challenge into the warp, instead of shrinking and hiding from what he knew lurked within it. The Grey Knights were everything that Gavin Jenkins would not and could not ever be. He remembered weeping as the connection was broken, falling into the arms of Kelly Black as his mechanical legs folded in response to the spasm from his misfiring nervous system. Kelly Black - she had caught him and tried to help him, and had done the same not an hour later when he had unleashed himself upon the Gnosis Guard and dared her to shoot him dead. Agent Prinzel thought that Kelly was still alive. Inasmuch as Gavin prayed for anything, he prayed that his team leader was right - even more than he prayed for the strength to strike Arcolin's daemon-infested body down. Gavin would never be a Grey Knight, but he would fight for one of the few people who had treated him kindly, and against the monster that had caused them so much grief. Even if that monster was now the living puppet of a power that no sane person could comprehend.

Gavin's mind bolted through dismantled detectors and long-abandoned cable runs, speeding past Alicia as he frizzoned through the arterial corridors. As the metallic aura of perfectly machined weapons in perfectly steady hands fell away behind him, he began to sense the faint, sickly spoor of the daemon growing stronger ahead of him. It wasn't immediate and savage, a rending of the materium like he had felt before - it was the foetid trail left by recent passage; dull and ominous. He was getting closer. The empty ward ahead of him was throbbing darkly.

Gavin arced into a lasgun lying next to a slain cultist, draining the weapon's battery in the process, and then on into the damaged enviro-suit slumped near the door. He realised a split-second later that the suit's occupant was still alive, their bio-electric thoughts firing in sporadic seizures as they fought not to sink into final oblivion. It was one of Gavin's team mates. It was Ella Seren.

Gavin's scrawny physical muscles clenched tight as his mind flitted across damaged cooling coils and las-scorched armourweave. There were no cultists left alive on this level of the hospital - Gavin would have sensed their murderous minds if there were. Only the daemon could have done this. It was close. Gavin zagged through the suit's still-intact comms system, setting the built-in distress beacon shrilling as he passed. Alicia was close behind him; she could help Ella where Gavin himself could not.

Where did you go? Gavin all but snarled. You murdering warp-tainted bastard, where did you go?

He frizzoned back, feeling another feeble pulse of bio-electricity from Ella's wounded mind. Gavin held back fearfully. His psychic affinity for machine spirits was part aptitude and part preference - electronic systems spoke to him in simple, cold binary, and even the semi-aware ghosts of the mechanicus' better creations didn't carry the hidden apathy, revulsion and suspicion of almost every human brainwave he'd ever scanned. But more tellingly, he knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of a more powerful psyker's mind probe. The idea of subjecting the unconscious and wounded Ella to such an intensely invasive experience made him almost sick with disgust.

But I need to know where he is.

He looked down at the scattered, misfiring signals coming out of Ella's open, vulnerable mind, and felt his skin crawl with self-loathing. It crawled again, this time from the inside, as he caught hold of the mental impulses and eased himself down inside Ella's head like a burrowing parasite.

"I need you to be brave, okay?" said a woman with dirty-blonde hair and prematurely lined skin. "Can you do that for me?"

"Mum, I don't want to go!" the little girl still clinging to her skirts sobbed. "Please don't make me, please!"

She was frightened. She didn't want to follow the scary, blank-faced man to the cargo-8 parked in front of the doors. Outside, the landing party from the Black Ships were aggressively cordoning off the holding complex, pushing back the gangs of robed hivers who were hurling stones, bottles and abuse.

The woman knelt and pulled the little girl into a hug. There were tears in her eyes, which only frightened the little girl more.

"I'm sorry, Ella." the woman said, her voice cracking. "I'm so sorry. We don't have a choice. You have to-"

"-make it to the comms spire and send a distress call."

Commissar Schenke's words were calm and matter-of-fact, which was mirrored by the steady amber glow of the man-shape that formed his presence on Ella's warp vision. It was almost as if they hadn't just been through a furious, blitzing firefight with the pirates storming the Greed's Reward.

"Father Bicktus told us not to." sister Rose protested. "As soon as they detect an astro they'll blast the ship apart and make their escape."

"Not while their own men are still aboard." Schenke argued. "Like Janie said, those boarding torpedoes were one way. They'll need an extraction, and the only place they can land one is this hanger bay. We hold it and buy time."

"Um...Schenke?" ventured the small, spiky avatar standing behind the commissar. The quills that topped the young mutant's head rattled nervously, and she still didn't seem comfortable standing without Schenke at least partially between her and the two Sisters escorting Ella. "How are they going to find the comms spire?"

"Shireen knows the way, Janie."

Janie's avatar glanced back to somewhere beyond the range of Ella's warp-sight bubble and flickered doubtfully. Ella heard the mutant scoff.

"Good luck to you, Blondie."

"Would you rather we kept her here to fight the pirates?" Schenke countered. "Besides, you've already proved that you can fight for two."

Janie stood a little straighter, and her avatar momentarily flared purple.

"So," sister Rose put in sternly, "The only question is what-"

"-is that for?" Ella asked, as she looked at the burning twist of cloth that Simeon had scavenged from somewhere around the psyker hold. Apparently he could make fire with his hands, although with the heavy band of a psychic inhibitor clamped around his head, he had had to make do with an ordinary match.

Simeon blinked at her. He was a sandy-haired boy of nine or ten, and he seemed less concerned than the rest of them that they were hurtling through the void towards Emperor knew where, surrounded by the thump and crash of machinery, the barked orders of Telepathica overseers, and the ever-present wailing that filtered through the sweating steel walls.

"It's your birthday, isn't it?" he said simply, grinning as he pushed the burning twist of cloth into an empty candle holder.

"Oh." said the eight-year-old Ella.

Simeon didn't know where they were going, any more than he knew that in a few weeks an inquisitor was going to read his mind, shake his head sadly, and have a Telepathica armsman escort him through into a soundproofed euthanising chamber. But he had been kind to Ella. He picked up the rusted candle holder and held the dancing flame towards her.

"On Elnaur Delta," he explained, "You blow the candle out, and they say that if you make a wish at the same time, the Emperor grants it."

It was not a superstition that Ella had ever heard of. But if the Emperor really did grant birthday wishes, she knew what she wanted: she wanted to go home.

She screwed her eyes tight shut, and blew out the candle.

Simeon laughed. "Happy-"

"-birthday, Ella."

Ella smiled shyly, and adjusted the shoulder strap of her party dress as Kelly's golden-yellow avatar sat down next to her.

"You really didn't have to do this." she said as she looked around the Mooncalf's refectory, which her team-mates must have spent the last few hours decorating.

The caged flames that made up Kelly's face shifted into a smile. "So you keep saying. Don't mind Jansen. He's just a bit drunk, that's all."

"It's okay." Ella said, nodding her understanding. "He misses his little sister. I know he does."

"I'm sorry we couldn't have all met you under better circumstances." Kelly said as she cupped her drink and rested her elbows on her knees. "Kally said you'd have fitted right in."

Ella giggled nervously. A psyker and a blank...that would have been an odd fit. Then again, as Kelly had said, it was all a matter of circumstances. Where the Tarot led, what the Emperor willed. But of course, Ella thought, if things were really that simple they could just -

- do it. Just do it. What have you got to lose?

At the front of the arched chamber, a Psykana overseer who was leading the droning, meditative chant. The novice's halls were in the deepest underground caverns beneath the City of Sight - the overseer's soporific voice should have echoed, but dampening crystals threaded through the walls stole the sound. Feeling uncomfortably hot in her starched initiate's uniform, Ella looked away from the overseer and instead stole a glance to her left. The girl sitting next to her had rich brown skin, a pretty, short-bridged nose and tightly curled hair, and she looked just as bored as Ella. She also sensed Ella's scrutiny almost immediately, which was an occupational hazard with psykers. She shot Ella a questioning glance, though not an unfriendly one.

Ella's heartbeat reached a painful crescendo, until she worried that the meditating boys and girls around her wouldn't even need their eldritch senses to hear it.

"Do you want to go for tanna after?" she blurted in a whisper. She was sure that Raeni could sense her embarrassment even in the highly unlikely scenario that it wasn't showing on her face, but to her surprise the other girl smiled.

"Yeah, alright." she whispered back, tugging at a strand of her curly hair.

"Initiate Seren!" the overseer suddenly thundered, making both girls almost jump out of their skin. The boy next to Ella flinched at the spike of psychic alarm radiating out of her.

Another occupational hazard of psykers was that their overseer was one too. Ella cringed, turning bright red, and slowly shuffled round to face the equally red-faced overseer.

"Do you think this is a joke, initiate Seren?" the overseer barked. "What do you think-"

"-of the Solomon Rookery?" Theodosia said, and her jade-green psychic avatar tilted its head questioningly.

Ella took a sip of the drink she had been offered, and coughed, which made Theodosia laugh.

"It's good." Ella said, after she had finished spluttering. "I just don't drink that often."

"Are you being this cute on purpose, kitten? Or is it all natural?"

Ella's stomach fluttered at the compliment, and she blushed in spite of herself. Theodosia laughed again, making her green soul-projection ripple prettily.

"Never turn down a free drink, Ella. And don't let any other-"

Other. The Other. She could see it tightening its formless claws around Kelly's neck, making her friend's aura flare with helpless terror. It had a gun - it had a gun and oh God Emperor!

The memory splintered into incoherence, and Gavin's probing mind was assaulted instead by a raw tide of unfiltered feeling. Most of it was pain, but there was fear in there too.

Duty. Have to help them. Have to save. Please. Duty. Du...ty...oh please please please no. Please. I don't want to die.

Gavin shuddered and withdrew in horror; jerking like a knife twisted out of a wound, still bloody with Ella's desperate thoughts. He had not spoken much to the young astropath during their time together, and if she survived he wasn't sure if he could ever face her again. Make it worth it, he told himself through gritted teeth, still tasting bile on his tongue. He fled the ward, jolting through the between-floor cable flats and leaving a trail of filthy ectoplasmic ice in his wake.

He found what he was looking for thirty seconds later - and when he saw it, he wished to the God-Emperor who had forsaken him that he hadn't. Back in the barricaded operating theatre, Gavin's corporeal body wept tears of horrified rage.

+++++

Alicia ran, sweeping her guns left and right as she made progress, covering every door and alcove. Any prediction she could make as to what Arcolin DeRei might do was rendered invalid at this point. What in the warp would a daemon do? She barged through the door of an open-plan gallery, which might have been a recovery ward until all the useful equipment was stripped out, and rolled to evade an expected fusillade of gunfire or warp lightning. None came, and as she came back up onto one knee she registered the frantic beeping from her in-ear microbead. It was the mayday tone from one of her team-mates' hazard suits. Wary of a trap, she kept her guns up as she threaded through the rusted skeletons of bedframes. She instantly dropped them when she saw who was crumpled beside one of the beds, near the opposite doors.

"Ella." she gasped, running to the petite astropath's side. She pressed down hard on the microbead in her ear. "Team..."

She hesitated, before settling for the call sign she had used back on Saros and Teleostei. That was the Alley Tarran they knew. The Alley Tarran they expected, she thought, resignedly.

"Team, Winchester One. Man down, man down. Arcolin got Ella!"

She tore her hand away from her ear as she dropped to her knees next to the motionless astropath. Ella's hazard suit was burned through with half a dozen ragged holes, and her force gladius lay beside her on the silica-dusted floor. Droplets of red had splattered down her chin and lips, and more blood stood out bright across her cheeks and neck.

"Ella? Come on kitten, give me a sign." She pinched the pale astropath's ear, hard, and her anxiety rose when she didn't get a response.

Alicia cradled the astropath's head, dipping her own to check for breathing. She felt a weak brush of air against her cheek. Alright, that was good. She laid Ella's head down flat and to the side, against her knees, so that she wouldn't choke on any more blood. Then she pulled a knife from a wrist-sheath and set to sawing open the front of Ella's hazard suit. The flak vest she wore underneath was scorched, but didn't seem to have been penetrated. Okay, that was good too. She resisted the instinctive urge to remove the armour as well and check for bruising underneath. From painful experience, she knew that the mule-kick blast of a lasbolt vaporising the outer layer of your armour was still akin to a miniature grenade going off next to your chest. The tightly-fitted armour might be the only thing holding a broken rib in place.

Ella coughed. Alicia snapped back towards the astropath's face, chiding herself for forgetting to check her airway. When you were used to team-linked Nebula suits with their own MIU diagnostics and chem-dispensers, you got rusty at the basics.

"Ella? It's okay, I've got you. Can you hear me?"

Ella's hazel eyes snapped open. The way they darted around without focus told Alicia that the trauma had robbed her of her warp sight.

"Who's..." she rasped, her voice thin and reedy.

"It's me, it's Alley."

"Alley." Ella croaked, her hands grasping blindly before finding Alicia's arm and holding on tight.

"I've got you." Alley soothed, feeling a little vulnerable at the intimate, trusting grip on her arm. "Where does it hurt most?"

Ella sucked in a weak, rattling breath. "Chest." Her mouth opened to gasp like a landed fish, revealing bloody tooth-marks on her tongue. She coughed again, spattering blood across Alicia's skirts.

"It's okay." Alicia said, as a look of sudden panic crossed the astropath's chalk-white face. "It's not from your lungs; you just bit your tongue. Listen to me. Your flak vest stopped the shots. You've got a broken rib, maybe a collapsed lung, but you're going to be fine. Just breathe."

Ella coughed again, nodded, and held on tighter to Alicia's arm.

[Atrum Daemon]

Vizkop was growing tired of faffing about with these cultists. He wanted this done so he could deliver a severe beating to Arcolin. Instincts from his youth telling him that everyone responded to pain eventually. Besides, in his current state, who on the team could stop him from quite literally kicking the shit out of worthless meatbag?

He shoved those thoughts away and refocused himself as his vision cleared. His revolver barked and decimated a head. But was burning through his rounds too fast. It was time to do what he had a guilty enjoyment of. He was in a operating theatre with two of the cultists. Two dead men. He ducked behind a row of seats and holstered his revolver. His blades slid out and the fields crackled to life. He then thought about a better idea and the blades slid back. Accessing his detail functions, he removed the strength limiters from his arms. He was feeling a little more viscous with everything that had happened.

He surged to his feet and gave a sharp whistle to the cultists. They whirled and fired, surprised shots whizzing by him as he reached forward and ripped one of the chairs from where it was bolted. He tossed it at the two men. It only clipped one as they ducked away, but the sharp cry told Vizkop that his shoulder was shattered. He shot forward to where they were hiding and tackled the one he had not hit with the chair. Metal fingers were swiftly inserted to the man's mouth at the roof and floor. With a wrench and a sickening sound along with a rush of fresh blood, he separated the man's jaws.

“And you're in a sorry state,” Vizkop said, standing and walking to the injured man. He kicked him in the side, cracking ribs. “Oh but that shoulder is the worst. Severe damage. Yes, yes, that needs to be removed immediately.”

He reached down and tore the offending arm off, spilling blood across the dirty floor. The cultist died of shock on the spot. He tossed the arm down and reengaged the limiters for his arms. “I'd count this a healthy outlet for my aggression,” Vizkop commented. “Now to the rest...”

He drew his pistol again and exited the theatre. The firefight started in earnest as he reached a lower floor and he ducked behind cover. He peeked out and fired a few rounds, each finding their mark and sending the target spinning to the floor. He was lucky he had gone downstairs as there was a ragtag strike force storming the building. In terms of firearms, he was not well equipped for the showdown he was facing. But that's where his other gear came in handy. He holstered his pistol and slid his blades into activation. He accessed his overclock enhancement and intoned a quick prayer to the Omnissiah before activating it.

Everything slowed and he whirled from his cover, shooting forward like a bow from a taught string. He weaved effortlessly through their incoming fire as he moved, his perception and reactions heightening as the world slowed around him.

'I am a blade of the Omnissiah.'

His blades stabbed through the skulls of the two cultists up front.

'I dedicate myself to war in the Omnissiah's name.'

He ripped the blades free and moved to the next, viewing the cultists reactions at half-speed. Arms holding weapons were removed before cutting one cultist open from neck to waist.

'My body has been tempered in the holy forges.'

Vizkop's body spun and his blades glided through flesh and bone with terrible ease, the assassin dancing through the airborne blood while he moved.

'I am a sword of the Omnissiah. In his name I do destroy his enemies and safeguard realms claimed in his name.'

His arms arched upward and sliced off both arms on a cultist wielding a revving chainsword.

'I will wear many faces, but call none my own. For I am a blade. Faceless I will be.'

A final twirl brought him to the other end of the assaulting cultists, helmet smoking again as he cut off his overclock. The sound of the bodies hitting the floor was incredibly satisfying as his senses returned to real-time.

'Faceless I shall be. For a blade has no need for one.'

[PaintSerf]

Spot reserved for a future post.

[Azazeal849]

WHAM. WHAM. WHAM.

The echo of something striking against unyielding steel reached Marc as he lay in the darkness, blinded and choked by brick dust. His left ankle was on fire, and something was pressing down hard on his chest. He tried to push up with his arms, and felt a slab of ward-floor decking slide away and crunch into the debris beside him. He groped for his face, trying to rub the blinding dust out of his eyes.

WHAM. WHAM. WHAM.

When he could finally see again, he saw a gaping hole in the ceiling above him, going up for at least another floor. He was half buried in rubble and bent pieces of rebar, and his carapace armour was white with a cloying layer of dust. He groped around, and his right hand found the cultist machine-pistol that he had lost in the fall. The cracked auspex screen on his left forearm was blinking a single contact in his vicinity.

WHAM. WHAM. WHAM.

Marc rolled over onto his side, bringing a flare of pain from his left ankle as the chunks of plaster and brickwork tumbled off him. A faded sign on the wall told him that he was in the morgue level - one of the sealed-off basements where bodies were stored before being rolled down to the adjoining crematorium. The banks of freezers were gone now, and the only light in the windowless gallery came through the collapsed ceiling. In the wide shaft of light, eddies of brick dust swirled in dizzy, disoriented spirals.

In the gloom that clung to the edges of the room, a wiry figure lunged furiously back and forth. Kelly's fists were wrapped around a length of broken copper pipe, which she was slamming over and over again into the chain-locked doors that barred her way out of the morgue. WHAM. WHAM. WHAM. The blood running down her temple was black in the dull light, standing out sharp against the pale brick dust that covered her face like a mask.

Marc could hear a single, high-pitched tone ringing in his ear, which he belatedly realised was coming from his microbead. He tapped runes on his cracked sleeve unit to try and find a clear channel. The team's backup frequency was awash with static. On the tertiary band, all he could hear was something like distant screaming. He cycled back and-

"...down, man down. Arcolin got Ella!"

"Alley!" he rasped into his pickup, recognising the voice. But instead of a response all he got was screeching static.

No, not Ella. She deserved so much better than to die out here at the hands of a deranged psychopath. She might still be alive, she might be okay. He wouldn't give up on her, and he wouldn't give up on Kelly, no matter what that wretched bastard had done to her.

"Alley!" he croaked once again into the fizzing vox, and this time the channel seemed to clear enough to carry his voice through.

"...chester One, s... again?" Alley's voice called back, hazy through the interference.

"Alley." Marc rasped a third time, "Marc. How's Ella, is she still alive?"

"She's stable...I've got her."

Marc's relief was short lived. WHAM. WHAM. WHAM.

"Alley." Marc coughed. His pulse was racing, setting off a painful hammer in his injured ankle, and acid was burning the pit of his stomach. "Arcolin's done something to Kelly. She attacked me and now she's trying to batter her way out of the morgue level."

There was a pause, accompanied by what sounded like a curse.

"Team, Win...er One. Be advised...host is Kelly Black, repeat, daemonhost is Kelly Bl..."

Marc's fear spiked. "Alley!" he rasped into the vox, as loudly as he dared, "Alley stop, wait!"

His only answer was a mocking cackle of static.

+ + + + + +

Kally levelled both pistols and fired, catching one and dropping him, and forcing the other to duck into an office. Las rifle fire tore down from the landing and into the corridors entrance, and Kally ducked deeper in for more cover.

She heard the hissing blast of a plasma impact, and looked up to see the office door violently ejected from its hinges on a bow-wave of green fire. Even as the fire wash sent pieces of wood and metal pinwheeling across the corridor, there was another electromagnetic whine and several more flare-bright bolts went chasing up the stairway beyond. A chain of explosions disintegrated the lower stairway, then the upper, and then the cultists shooting down from the landing. Kally saw one of the men catch fire and evaporate as he turned, in a puff of ash that ejected a burnt skull and shoulder blade down the stairs towards her. They bounced to a stop at her feet, smoking, as Merle Carson appeared at the bottom of the collapsed stairs.

He was horribly burned; his forearms seared red and the right side of his face a braised nightmare. One eye was boiled white, though Merle didn't seem to care as he casually craned his head to observe the carnage with his undamaged left eye. His mouth pinched down on a precariously dangling lho-stick as it scrunched into an appreciative frown. The plasma gun in his hands was screeching as it vented steam.

“Oh, baby!” Merle groaned with satisfaction. He let the dangerously overheated gun hang from his right fist as he took a drag. The convict reached out for his lho, oblivious to the blood and brain matter he smeared across his face. Merle’s posture sagged slightly as he exhaled a contented sigh, and suggestively raised an eyebrow at Kally through a plume of acrid smoke.

“Was it good for y’all, too?”

The convict chuckled darkly at her expression and absently knocked the ash from his lho.

“Don’ be lookin’ so surprised, sweetheart. Did y’all really think I’d be lettin’ some culto cocksucker go kill-stealin’ you from me?”

In spite of his threatening words, Merle kept his hissing plasma rifle pointed at the ground. He lazily gestured towards Kally’s bolter with his gently fuming smoke-stick.

“Now before y’all go doin’ somethin’ drastic, don’ be forgettin’ that I’m the friendliest face y’all are gonna see ‘tween here an’ the basement, or that Mr Tall Dark and Soulless is already headin’ there now.” The convict challengingly tilted his chin at Kally with a dubious expression on his brutalized face. “I mean, y’all already gott'a know your boyfriend won' be hesitatin’, even a slight li’l bit, ‘bout puttin’ down your gal-pal, right?"

Merle snorted and shot her a nasty, golden toothed grin as he brought the lho back to his lips.

"Tick tock, Kally girl. Tick tock. Missy Black’s on the death clock.”

+ + + + + +

Glabrio shouldered through the shrapnel-scarred door, and was immediately hit by a hissing blast of air and glass particles. Behind him, Josiah cursed and shielded his face.

"Come on." the investigator snapped, slinging his shotgun over his shoulder and freeing his hands to pull the homer beacon from the velcro pocket at his waist. "Get on the vox. Try and raise the Lady."

Josiah was already unpacking his long range vox set, leaving bloody handprints on the black plastic casing as he took shelter in a corner of the roof's curtain wall, in the lee of the fitful wind. Glabrio looked down at the black discus of the homing beacon.

"Machine God," he murmured to the device by way of a prayer, "I know people are seemingly lining up these days, but don't frak us." He depressed a rune to set a small green light blinking at its centre of the disc and tossed the homer to the ground, where it scraped a trail through the glass dust coating the roof.

Glabrio looked up, over the safety wall skirting the edges of the hospital roof. Without his helmet and visor, the toxin-laden air tasted foul. The gunfire downstairs had subsided to sporadic bursts, but explosions were still chaining off from the city centre, the blasts a dull thunder that came rolling over the roof wall alongside the rattling glass shards. The Nebulas' supporting aircraft were still buzzing above the flattened prefabs, now looking less like stooping hawks and more like circling carrion birds as they scanned for any remaining resistance. The buildings in the distance were roasted shells, gutted by the Nebula's savage assault.

"Let's hope this gets us the right kind of attention!" the investigator remarked as he struck a flare into life and threw the streaming pyrotechnic down next to the beacon. A red plume of smoke billowed into the sky.

"Inquisitor Machairi." Josiah was repeating into the vox, stopping every few seconds to adjust the tuning in an attempt to cut through the signal-bouncing glass clouds. "This is arbiter Wuziarch, do you read?"

+ + + + + +

The orbit to surface lander screamed as it cut down through the atmosphere, trailing white streamers of condensed air from its wingtips and tail fins. It cleared the air in front of it with a potent ident-code - an aggressive mix of inquisition cyphers and the personal sanction of subsector governor Thomas Tierce.

Inside the sleek hull, the thunder of the turbojets was reduced to a dull, shuddering roar, which allowed inquisitor Machairi to concentrate on the screen in front of her. Clad in black survival fatigues armoured with contoured carapace plates, the inquisitor's eyes were fixed on the dull green auger bars as they rolled back and forth across a greyscale map of the city below. The display lit up with white flares as the Nebula strike team made their swift and methodical firesweep through the Dead City.

"Inquisitor." her tech priest reported in a hollow monotone from the lander's cockpit. "Homing beacon detected, north west."

Machairi craned around in her seat, shifting from the auger screen to the armourglass porthole in the lander hull. The ground below them was a haze of settling glass dust, clinging to the abandoned buildings and smothering the smaller habs. The grey brick of a medicae complex jutted above the soup, with a fraying pall of red signal smoke pouring from its roof.

"Get us there." Machairi ordered coolly, "And arm the turrets."

"Compliance, inquisitor." the tech priest intoned, and there was a sizzle of building power as the lander's lascannons thrummed into life.

The lander juddered as it fell lower. The worst of the storm had passed, and they were still above the groundswell of eddies and vortices channelled by the Dead City buildings, but through the porthole Machairi could still see coarse streamers of glass scudding across the lander's wings and engines. She had ordered her tech priest to launch as soon as the weather planetside had fallen within the minimum acceptable tolerances. She had been certain that the Nebula air support descending from their frigate would wait no longer than that.

From above, it was easy to appreciate the brutal economy of the Nebula assault, as it played out like a neat simulation on the auger screen. Whatever cult cells that DeRei had been organising here on Baraspine would soon no longer be a problem. Whether these seemingly random attacks on Imperial authority figures were just distractions, was an answer that they would have to pry out of DeRei himself. This clearly wasn't over yet.

Beware the daemon at your back. Machairi reminded herself soberly.

Still, it was useful to get an impression of just how efficient the governor's life guards were in action. Machairi turned away from her sensor screen again, this time to regard the tall, regal young man who sat beside her. Trist Maxilium; the governor's hand-chosen liaison to work with her in hunting down DeRei.

Trist Maxillium was styled the Lord of Sabilis, though one would not ascribe much weight to the title just by looking at him. The man looked no older than twenty five Terran standard, with a casual mop of blonde hair and boyish blue-green eyes. His crisp white robe was pinned at the collar bone with a golden broach, and embellished by a black arrow-shaped arm guard that covered the man's left arm from shoulder to elbow. It lent the ensemble a vaguely martial look, the kind favoured by young hive nobles who tried to add gravitas to their standing by imitating the uniforms of real soldiers.

The instant impression was that of a young fop, and Machairi knew that it was entirely deliberate. The man's guileless blue-green eyes missed very little of what was going on around him, and almost imperceptible lines around his jaw gave away the fact that he had undergone significant juvenat surgery - possibly augmetic. From the hair-thin lines around his eye sockets, Machairi surmised that they were augmetics as well, and uncommonly good ones. Only someone who had spent a fair amount of time around mechanicus augmetics experts - experts like, say, Vizkop - might have seen them. The so-called Lord of Sabilis was much older and much better connected than he chose to appear. Machairi was still feeling out whether he was also wiser.

"Tell me, my lord." Machairi asked the governor's agent delicately, "Are the Nebula corps always this forthright?"

Her tone was intrigued as she glanced back towards the window, and then fixed her eyes back on the handsome young lord as she unspooled the vox caster from its cradle at her elbow.

+ + + + + +

"Faceless I shall be, for a blade has no need of one."

As Vizkop fell silent, so did the scene around him, save for the glass dust skittering across the floor. It stuck to the glazes of blood seeping over the tiles, forming silver pools in the white ceramic. The dust was blowing in through a large breach in the wall in front of Vizkop, but no more cultists were coming to die from the street beyond. Vizkop's internal pickup chimed as his sweeping vox receivers homed in on a new signal, automatically tuning, filtering and decoding.

"Repeat:" a familiar voice crackled in his ear, hissing through the interference. "This is inquisitor Machairi, please respond."

When Vizkop did, he thought he detected a smile behind the inquisitor's tone.

"Secutor." Machairi replied, "I had a feeling that if we got through to anyone it'd be you. What's your status?"

At that moment the motion detectors in Vizkop's helmet tagged a series of new contacts, boxing them in with blinking amber rhomboids. A knot of figures were on the move in the complex opposite the breached wall, spreading out to take up firing positions. No, the secutor realised as he further analysed the movements - not taking up firing positions, scattering for the doors at either end of the ruined building. They were falling back. A sand-cloaked, filter-masked figure appeared briefly behind a broken window before darting away again, paying no attention to Vizkop.

A possible explanation revealed itself a few moments later. Vizkop's threat detectors pulsed as a pair of bulky, angular shapes arced above the intervening buildings, propelled by the white knives of thruster jets. Another two followed, the armoured figures moving in fireteam pairs as they took long, low bounds towards the hospital. Vizkop's optics identified a familiar name, blinking on the chest hololith of one suit before it vanished beneath the roofs.

Gunnery sergeant Jensaa Kirabo.

+ + + + + +

"Kally? Saph? For Emperor's sake, pick up!"

Marc's ears were a painful cacophony. The vox channels were all garbled, or else dead, emitting a high-pitched tinnitus ring. Every few seconds he thought he caught a snatch of a voice he recognised, but it was gone too quickly for him to make anything out. He wondered if Arcolin's daemon was letting the snippets through specifically to torture him. The white noise was punctuated by the steady WHAM WHAM WHAM of Kelly's pipe against the door, thudding in time to Marc's own jagged heartbeat. The tears veiling Marc's eyes reduced his sister to a dark blur, ten metres away across the debris-strewn morgue.

The temperature in the morgue suddenly shifted, the air chilling by several degrees. Marc clenched his fist around the cultist's autosub and scrubbed the blurring tears from his eyes, just in time to see a film of ice chasing around the lower edge of the wall, zagging and branching like electrical discharge as it followed the lines of long-dead power cables. Kelly didn't cease in her efforts to batter through the steel door.

"Begone psyker." Kelly snarled, in a voice that wasn't hers. "This is not your fight. Walk away and you will live."

The temperature dropped another couple of degrees.

My name is Gavin Jenkins. Marc felt it rather than heard it, a sine-wave of white noise from his microbead that almost sounded like speech as it shuddered through his skull. And you are going to release my friend agent Kelly Black.

"Begone, Gavin Jenkins." Kelly said, her voice rasping as the daemon tore and twisted her vocal cords. "I do not have to hurt you, but I will."

Something invisible thrummed through the room, causing the auspex screen on Marc's arm to fracture into wavering lines before going dark. Marc's heart painfully skipped a beat, and a dish-sized slab of plaster dislodged itself from the ruined ceiling to smash across the floor. In response, Marc's earpiece roared with angry static, and a spider-web of ice splayed itself across the door. Kelly staggered half a pace back, still facing away from Marc.

"Stop it, Gavin!" she shrieked. "Stop it or I will break you! You think Crenshaw was bad? I will leave you nothing but a shell!"

I am no longer afraid of Martin Crenshaw. Marc's earpiece sizzled. A line of ice snaked across the floor towards Kelly and she staggered back again, dropping the pipe with a clatter. This time she screamed, high and desperate. The sobbing shriek came again as the ice darted and flickered across the metal floor around her.

"I said stop it, Gavin!" Kelly shouted, abruptly snapping upright. "That isn't me you are hurting, it's her! You'll kill her long before you kill me!"

The ice darted in again. Kelly shrieked in pain, clawing at her head.

Gavin, stop! Marc wanted to scream as the sound knifed through him. For frak's sake stop!

The line of ice flickered back like a wounded thing, snaking and spreading up the wall. Kelly staggered to her feet, leaving a few droplets of blood to dribble onto the floor from somewhere on her face.

"Leave." she rasped.

The ice spread across the chain-locked door as if to bar her path. I can't stop you. Marc's earpiece sputtered. But the others can. They're blanks, sisters, trained exorcists. They will drive you out.

Marc's vox bead went dead, returning to its previous flat-line ring.

Kelly let out a shriek of anger, and another painful thrum swept through the room, dislodging more pieces of the crumbling ceiling. Kelly slammed into the door, this time attacking it with nothing more than her bare hands. Streaks of blood began to smudge the metal. For a moment, Marc thought that the film of ice took on the shape of Gavin's pinched, gaunt face, its mouth screaming wide in pain. Marc had lost all feeling in his right hand, the fingers cramped and the knuckles white as he gripped the salvaged machine pistol. He pushed himself up onto one elbow, triggering a thunderbolt of pain from his damaged ankle. He raised the snub-nosed gun, leveling it at Kelly's back.

He wavered.

He dropped his arm back to the floor, shivering, and cuffed the cold sweat and tears out of his eyes.

They're coming, he told himself, They're coming to help. Gavin was right - Kally and Sapphira were still on the lower levels, close enough to act on Alley's warning. Aye, and Crenshaw too. Mother frakking son of a bitch Crenshaw. A surge of visceral rage wrapped itself around Marc's chest. This was only happening because Crenshaw had insisted on taking Arcolin alive. But the frakking major wouldn't see it that way - any more than he'd have any concern for Kelly's safety if he got down here. Marc trusted Crenshaw's instincts, to take no chances - but that spelled death for his sister.

His mouth was dry, and his heart was thudding in his throat. The microbead in his ear roared painfully, almost causing him to cry out, and then as if by the Emperor's own will the channel cleared, and he heard:

"Marc? Marc, are you still there?"

Alley!

Marc fought down his anger at his former team-mate. She was just doing her duty telling them. And right now she's the only lifeline you've got. Just like Saros. Marc clenched his fist as if to physically crush the thought. Alicia tore through Arcolin's cat's paws on Marioch after they killed her parents, he reasoned feverishly. Arcolin had said so himself, and it was one of the few things Marc was sure the bastard hadn't lied about. She had fought Chaos before.

"Alley!" he croaked into the vox, unable to raise more than a whisper even if he had wanted to. "Kelly's still trapped down here with me, what do I do!?"

The vox swirled with static. "...noticed you?"

Thump. Kelly was still driving her fists into the frost-covered steel of the doors. Blood was running between the knuckles of her hands. As the next strike hit, Marc clearly heard the crunch of something breaking. Sympathetic pain lanced through his own hand.

"No." he whispered, crushing the vox bead into his ear with his free hand. "She's trying to get out."

"Listen, Marc." Alicia's voice was faint and swamped by fizzing interference, but her tone was deadly serious. "This isn't going to be easy for you, but you need to put her down, right now."

"Frak off!" Marc swore savagely.

"Trust me, if that thing gets out it could burn planets!"

"That thing is my frakking sister, Alley!" Marc cuffed at his face with his forearm, still holding the machine-pistol in a death grip. "Blanks can drive out daemons, right? We can still save her!"

"Unlikely. She'll be too far gone by the time Kally or Crenshaw get to her!"

Thump. Thump. Thump.

"Marc, I'm giving this as both a professional opinion and a personal one. If Kally barges in there first, she's going to hesitate, and that daemon could rip her apart before her aura drives it out. If it's Crenshaw, he'll blow the daemon away regardless of who its wearing. Any of the others, they won't stand a chance."

Fear and rage battled for supremacy in Marc's chest, ripping him apart. He could hear Merle's mocking voice, speaking before Vincent had arrived to drag him out of the galley. So in answer to your question, kid, no I don' think your l'il sister would've pulled the trigger, even if it meant chicken-boy was gonna rampage across the whole station an' kill every last one of your friends.

If Crenshaw gets here first, Kelly dies. If someone else does...she still dies, and so do they. Marc felt sick. He remembered, bitterly, his promise to himself. It has to be me. No-one else in the firing line.

His head pounded as he looked down at the battered machine pistol.

"Marc? Marc, are you still there?"

Better me than Crenshaw. Marc wasn't cold, but every part of his body was freezing. He raised the gun again, and this time he pulled the trigger.

There was a metallic snapping sound from the weapon, and the bolt jammed open. Marc caught a glimpse of cracked bronze through the open bolt - an old or recycled cartridge that had simply failed instead of firing. Above him, he heard a sigh.

Marc's head snapped back. Through the sagging hole in the ceiling, he saw Arcolin DeRei standing at the edge of the broken floor struts. The scarred cultist wasn't grinning. In fact, his gaunt face was hovering somewhere between horror and relief.

The thought that the heretic had been up there watching, possibly the entire time, was enough to tear a howl of rage from Marc's throat. He slammed the stolen machine pistol into the floor, and there was a metallic ping as the cracked cartridge came loose and went spinning away. Not even caring that the gun was more likely to explode in his hand than fire, Marc rolled onto his back and swung his arm up, his entire hand crushing the pistol grip as his finger convulsed on the trigger. The gun roared a devil's rattle, and smoking holes exploded across the walls and ceiling. Arcolin yelped and reeled back, vanishing from sight as the floor where he had been standing was erased in a ripple of bursting plaster. Debris rained down on Marc as the gun clicked empty.

Tears streaming down his face, breathing through his teeth in furious snorts, Marc barely even noticed Kelly turn away from the door and look right at him.

+ + + + + +

Alicia was still trying to raise Marc on the vox, but the line had gone dead, choked by roaring static.

"Choice." Ella rasped from her lap, her voice a reedy whisper.

"Huh?" Alicia asked, snapping away from her vox to look at the injured astropath.

"Choice." Ella repeated, coughing. "The Ace of Adeptio, I read it, back at the warehouse...it means a really difficult choice..."

"Shhh." Alicia soothed, looking down uneasily at Ella's hand still gripped tight around her arm. "You're alright. I've got you."

She broke off as she heard a whisper of noise behind her. A footstep, and then another - almost quiet enough to miss, trying not to be noticed. Alicia didn't give any outward reaction, only curled her hand around the pistol in her lap. Ella continued to breathe raggedly, oblivious. At the third footstep, Alicia lunged around, bringing her gun up.

And looked straight into the bottomless red pit of a flect shard.

Ella gave a small whimper of surprise as Alicia's supporting presence slumped away from her. With her warp sight, just beginning to return, she saw the older woman's jade aura fade into unconscious olive. A second aura loomed above her, casting something aside that shattered as it hit the floor tiles. It was a man, faded blue, but on one side of his blurred face a patch of bright and vital flames were dancing as if with new purpose. It was only when the man spoke that she realised who he was.

"Tell her I'm sorry for that." he said quietly. "And tell Marc as well. Tell him I had the best intentions."

Before Ella could reply, Arcolin DeRei had slipped beyond the hazing bubble of her warp sight, and was gone.

[Imperial1917]

The hull of the lander rocked sharply as an eddy revolved from the massive gutted corpse of the necropolis and jarred the craft with its force. Fortunately the advanced augers had predicted such a pattern early enough for the pilot to ride the greater part of the assault.

"Tell me, my lord." Machairi asked the governor's agent delicately, "Are the Nebula corps always this forthright?"

Her tone was intrigued as she glanced back towards the window, and then fixed her eyes back on the handsome young lord as she unspooled the vox caster from its cradle at her elbow.

Quite reasonably he paused at the question and considered his answer carefully, keeping his eyes locked to the flickering tactical display before the pair. A feeling somewhere between wonder and appalment at his current circumstance passed through him as quick as lightning, temporarily overriding the more novel impression that a dissatisfactory response would yield a strangled to death with vox caster cord on a tag tied around his toe in the near future.

He thought on the question posed to him and reflected sourly that his friend – if a subsector governor was permitted such things – had placed him in a position that he was likely sure would either cement his ties to Sabilis or else get Trist killed. It was quite a pair of extremes and Trist cursed the day that he mentioned being ‘bored’ to the man. More inquisitorial attention was not something that he needed at that moment, even if he strongly suspected that the inquisitor was not so much interested in his reply as trying to make small talk to ease the tension she was trying to hide so desperately. And like so many of her kind, the powerful whose position either did not require or required the opposite of amicable people skills, she was probably incredibly poor at making small talk. Not that silence was an appropriate response; she was likely looking to file the information for later and saying nothing could result in the aforementioned strangling.

So he inclined his head at the tactical display slightly where he sat, as if more closely studying its contents, and replied in soft, clipped tones, “No more so than the mighty ordos, inquisitor.”

A smile flickered at the corners of the inquisitor's mouth. "Lord Sidonis might have skewed our reputation somewhat. I usually try to be more circumspect."

She chuckled, perhaps considering that Trist's first impression of her would have been her requesting a sector-wide arrest warrant from sub governor Tierce.

"Usually."

"Perhaps," said Trist, lifting his eyes from the tactical display to regard the inquisitor, "But would that mean a rule or an exception for the Inquisition as a whole?" A smile curved his lips and he continued, "And wouldn't such methods inherently mean that the more visible of the two commands the norm in the public eye?"

Machairi cocked her head. "I know a number of inquisitors who think a visible symbol is the most powerful, and I know a number of inquisitors who think the successful agent is the one who completes the mission without anybody knowing he was there and gone."

She gave him a coy look.

"But you aren't dealing with any other inquisitors, my lord - you only have to deal with me." She broke off to raise the vox set to her lips and depress the transmit rune. "Ground team this is inquisitor Machairi, what's your status?"

Only a dull crackle of static buzzed from the caster grilles mounted on the side of the vox cradle. The interference from the glass storm was still fierce.

Machairi's brown eyes switched across to regard Trist before she tried again. "Besides, my lord - I wasn't asking your opinion on the ordos. I wanted to know what you thought of the governor's life guards. Firsthand accounts are always so much better than the propaganda vids."

Trice shook his head and gestured to the tactical display, his face serious. "I was once told that wise man of ancient Terra advised his followers to not try teaching desert dwellers with water metaphors. The line I draw is an analog, inquisitor, one better suited to your background."

"Flexibility in function is paramount to effectiveness in function. The problems faced require similar solutions and so require similar bodies. Thus when you ask me whether the Nebula are usually so forthright, my answer is: no more than the holy ordos. And, as you point out, if the latter modus operandi is functioning as intended to, you would never know any better."

He smiled, "As to what I think of what we can see, here, now, I would say that they are well suited to the task at hand, even if they are not the sharpest tool in the Imperium's box."

"The governor is lucky to have them as bodyguards." Machairi noted offhandedly, and picked up the vox caster again. "Ground team this is inquisitor Machairi, please respond."

"Sixty seconds, inquisitor." the tech priest pilot reported, while the vox remained stubbornly silent. Both Machairi and Trist were pushed forward in their seats as the lander decelerated, its brake jets flaring.

"Take a breath, my lord." Machairi advised as she returned her attention to Trist. "Things might be about to get a little hectic."

Trist smiled and gripped the haft of his axe, ever hidden in the folds of his cloak. "As you say, inquisitor."

Machairi nodded, adjusted the gain on the vox set and tried the caster again. "Repeat: this is inquisitor Machairi, please respond."

[Atrum Daemon]

"Repeat:" a familiar voice crackled in his ear, hissing through the interference. "This is inquisitor Machairi, please respond."

“This is Secutor Vizkop,” the assassin replied, keying into the channel. “Good to hear you, Inquisitor.”

"Secutor." Machairi replied, "I had a feeling that if we got through to anyone it'd be you. What's your status?"

“How do I put this delicately?” Vizkop began, “The situation down here is completely fecked. Guess the years did nothing for this team's luck. Joking aside, we are in trouble. Arcolin has slipped the noose. Turns out he had more backup than we bargained for and they got the drop on us with a missile-fronted hello before storming the building. I just finished cutting a squad of them apart on the ground floor of the complex we've holed up in. The team is spread out all over. And I just heard a crackling report of a...something in the building. Our vox has been a bit spotty.”

There was a pregnant pause.

At that moment the motion detectors in Vizkop's helmet tagged a series of new contacts, boxing them in with blinking amber rhomboids. A knot of figures were on the move in the complex opposite the breached wall, spreading out to take up firing positions. No, the secutor realised as he further analysed the movements - not taking up firing positions, scattering for the doors at either end of the ruined building. They were falling back. A sand-cloaked, filter-masked figure appeared briefly behind a broken window before darting away again, paying no attention to Vizkop.

A possible explanation revealed itself a few moments later. Vizkop's threat detectors pulsed as a pair of bulky, angular shapes arced above the intervening buildings, propelled by the white knives of thruster jets. Another two followed, the armoured figures moving in fireteam pairs as they took long, low bounds towards the hospital. Vizkop's optics identified a familiar name, blinking on the chest hololith of one suit before it vanished beneath the roofs.

Gunnery sergeant Jensaa Kirabo.

“Well that's some good news,” Vizkop said, breaking the radio silence with Alia. “The Nebulas are closing in. I will keep you appraised, Inquisitor. Secutor out.”

He keyed off the line to the ship above and moved closer to the opening, peeking out and taking further stock of the situation. The cultists were falling back, which meant they had finished their mission most likely. Arcolin was getting away. The Nebulas could help in stalling the escape and recapture the traitor. But that presented a whole other mess of problems. But with everything going on inside and the distance to cover, there was no chance of anyone else making it in time. The Secutor's augmented mind worked as fast as it could, making multiple predictions from the available data.

He had no other option, really. If anyone else did not like, well too damn bad.

“This is Secutor Vizkop to Gunnery Sergeant Jensaa Kirabo. Be advised, you have cultist activity in a building near your position. They are attempting to make an escape and I have every reason to believe Arcolin De Rei is among their number. My team is tied down thanks to his machinations. Can you assist?”

In those moments while he waited for a reply, Vizkop considered that once the mission was over he would like to take a long vacation to some paradise world. If he lived through it all, at least.

[Azazeal849]

"Kirabo copy." Vizkop heard a moment later. He detected a slight rasp in the Nebula's voice, probably from a dry mouth brought on by a full combat dose of satrophene coursing through her system. There seemed to be a momentary pause from the gunnery sergeant that matched his own.

"We have them, secutor. Moving to engage."

Kirabo and her wingman soared above the rooftop once again, this time twisting round in their jet-assisted leap to train their weapons on the fishbone rafters of the administratum. Their modular autocannons roared, the muzzles lighting up with split-second blooms of burning gas. Vizkop had to admire the geometric precision as Kirabo thumped down through the roof of the complex in a shower of masonry and began to pick off the cultists. One spun round in surprise and died, out-drawn and outgunned by the Nebula's monstrous weapon. One ducked for cover and died, a firing angle fed from the wingman's camera punching a burst through the crumbling brickwork. One tried to return fire and died, only two bullets from his wild spray cracking off Kirabo's armour before Vizkop saw his chest, neck and skull explode in neat sequence. It seemed to Vizkop that there was a slight discrepancy in the Nebula's satrophene-boosted speed - a momentary pause before each well-placed kill shot. She was pausing to confirm that each target was not DeRei.

The wingman hammered down into the next room in a howling wash of jump-jets, and a few more bursts of fire flickered white through the broken windows before the building fell silent.

"McLaughlan, sitrep?" Kirabo's voice queried calmly, clearly not directed at Vizkop. And then, a few moments later, a transmission that was. "Secutor Vizkop, eight tangos down and one in custody, negative ID on Arcolin DeRei." A momentary pause. "And you're welcome."

[Azazeal849]

The lander howled to a stop above the hospital, its jets swivelling downward and sweeping ripples of stone and glass fragments off the roof. Extended autocannons tracked back and forth in their blister turrets, and the drone of the lander's anti-grav plates set the concrete roof vibrating ominously. Doors popped away from the lander's sleek sides and pistoned back, spilling out a nest of ladders and hoists, and one braided rope. A black-armoured figure slithered down the rope and dropped to one knee to cushion their landing. A shoal of silver-inlaid servo skulls followed them, firing bursts of auspex light into the surrounding buildings as they spiralled down around the hospital and dispersed into the derelict streets.

"Get everyone aboard." inquisitor Machairi ordered through the grille of her rebreather, clapping Glabrio on the shoulder as she rose to her feet and stripped off her heavy fast-roping gloves. She pressed a finger against her ear-bead as she stalked off towards the shredded roof-access door. "Pilot, activate the medicae servitors. Prep to receive wounded agents and possible prisoners."

"Compliance, inquisitor."

+ + + + + +

The servo skulls were buzzing through the ruins like questing hornets by the time Machairi joined Vizkop on the ground floor.

"Quite a mess you left back there, Dragon Slayer." the inquisitor commented mildly as she stepped out into the shifting glass-dust that covered the street. She affected nonchalance, but Vizkop could detect the tension in the corners of her eyes. Crenshaw and Sapphira had no doubt appraised her of the full, cluster-frak situation on her way down through the building.

Machairi turned to the armoured figure of Jensaa Kirabo, who despite Machairi's statuesque height overtopped her by a good few inches. "And you must be gunnery sergeant Kirabo." she said, tilting her head slightly.

The hulking Nebula didn't move. "Inquisitor."

"Could you please appraise me of the situation across the city, gunnery sergeant?"

"We secured Zhang and one of the tech priests." Although Kirabo's tone was perfectly neutral, something about her words seemed to add no thanks to you people. The Nebula tapped the side of her head, activating her helmet hololith. A line of blue light fanned out into a horizontal strip, and then extended up and down to display a flat rectangle two feet in front of her face. Above a blinking rune annotated PFC Sharma, the vid feed bobbed and swung towards a Valkyrie painted with red medicae helices. A pair of men wearing oxygen masks were being stretchered aboard by armoured Nebula soldiers.

"Any sign of DeRei?" the inquisitor replied, not rising to the bait.

Kirabo shook her helmeted head fractionally, causing the holo-pict to wobble. "No. Did you do any better?"

"We'll see." Machairi replied, her eyes following one of the skull drones as it hovered to examine the wreck of the mechanicus transport before banking away down the highway. "VIzkop mentioned you had a prisoner in custody. May I see him?"

Kirabo's vox caster crackled as she huffed into her mic. "You mean can you take him off our hands."

Machairi shrugged. "Are you really going to make me take out the rosette?"

Kirabo huffed again, then crooked two fingers over her shoulder. "Callisto? Let 'em have the cultist."

A shorter Nebula soldier emerged from the ruined administratum block, nosing a trembling man forward with the muzzle of her oversized autogun. The man looked young but prematurely aged; stunted by a wasteland diet, and behind his sand goggles his eyes were shadowed and tainted yellow by the toxic atmosphere. He dug his chin into his chest as if to hide his face when Machairi and the others looked at him.

"Thank you." Machairi nodded to Vizkop to take hold of the shivering cultist. "Oh, and gunnery sergeant?"

Kirabo turned back round. "Inquisitor?"

"When adept Zhang wakes up, advise him that he will be hearing from my colleagues very soon. I have a lot of questions regarding how DeRei managed to infiltrate his team."

Kirabo turned her head to watch the distant medicae Valkyrie lift off towards Arda hive, its red and white hull distinct against the smoky sky. "So do we, inquisitor. So do we."

+ + + + + +

Two kilometres away, in the tower of a stripped and time-crumbled machine temple, two figures clutched the hoods of their armourweave cloaks against the pull of the dying wind. Beneath the hoods, sleek, close fitting enviro-suits protected them from the caustic air, shielding their faces behind matte black visors. They did not concern themselves with detection. They were too far away for standard senses to be relevant, and their noospheric overrides had little to fear from skull drones, even ones with inquisition-level command encryption.

The taller of the two figures shifted a little, trying to shake off the deja vu of another abandoned city, stalked by biomechanical nightmares. Most of her kind would consider such thoughts illogical, but to the chosen few there was a balance to be found between rational thought and human instinct. The figure rolled back her sleeve to double-tap a manipulator panel mounted on her wrist. The hand she used was ungloved, but immune to the dust and toxin-laden air. The hand was bionic; the long fingers elegant constructions of interlocking silver. The figure's visor whirred quietly as microscopic lenses in the glass zoomed and depixillated. For a long moment, she studied the three women being stretchered across the hospital roof, and the eclectically-equipped agents securing them to the lift lines of the hovering lander. A dishevelled man in dust-smothered carapace armour was bent over one of the stretchers, seemingly shouting at its occupant to wake up. A battered woman with straggling blonde hair was tugging at his shoulders, seemingly offering support.

The figure let her gaze slide off the tortured spectacle towards the other two stretchers. Her visor cocked slightly to one side as the figure compared what she was looking at to stored images within her own, bionic-webbed mind.

A silent communication pulsed across to her, as quick and precise as a spark arcing between two conductors.

<Confirmation?> the shorter figure at her side asked.

<Confirmation.> the first responded. <There, centre stretcher. Adjusting for cheekbone reconstruction, 93% facial match. That is Alicia Tarran.>

+ + + + + +

The Arthrashastra
Baraspine high orbit

The atmosphere in Arthashastra‘s borrowed ready-room was tense.

At one end of the table sat inquisitor Machairi, at a place laid with a brushed papyrus mat, a small Aquila idol with two incense sticks curling sweet smoke into the air, and a goblet of honey-blonde amasec. At the other end sat Merle Carson, chained to his chair by heavy iron links across his wrists and chest. The inquisitor was dressed in lavender silk, the convict in dull overalls of heavy grey canvas. The contrast was striking, and intentional. And yet, Machairi noted, the convict wasn’t scowling, despite the new explosive collar gleaming darkly around his neck. He seemed almost amused.

Machairi silently sipped from her cup, and placed it back down next to the smoking Aquila. She looked down the table at Merle, all imperious arrogance

“I am not impressed, Merle Ray Carson.” she said, glaring at him. When I made my generous offer to grant you an inquisitorial pardon, it was on the understanding that you would give us actionable intel on DeRei. Instead, you repay me by relentlessly antagonising my agents.”

“To be fair, queen bitch,” Merle shrugged as well as he was able, rattling his chains. “I did tell y’all that I was gonna. Ain’t my fault if y’all ‘ve gone too senile to remember.”

Machairi glared at him, and toyed with the stem of her goblet. “Be careful, Carson. I can still tear up that pardon I wrote for you.”

“Oh give it a rest, lady high an’ fuckin’ mighty.” Merle replied. “We both know that pardon was grox-shit from the motherfuckin’ start.”

Machairi’s goblet froze half way to her lips, and the convict gave a wry cackle, puckering his lips.

“But it’s a fuckin’ sweet image thinkin’ of your blood boilin’ while y’all had to sit there an’ write it. I gotta ask, did it remind y’all of bitin’ the pillow while ol’ man Sidonis was rammin’ his shrivelled ol’ cock inta your self-righteous ass? ‘Cus fuck me, I can’ think of any other possible way you landed this here inquisitor rank.”

Machairi slammed her goblet down onto the fine, varnished hardwood of the table with a rattling crash. “Let me tell you how this is going to work, Carson. You are going to tell me everything you know about DeRei right now.”

Merle threw back his head and roared with laughter. "All'a y'all inquisition pricks ain't ever been too bright, eh? Y'all get access to all the data in all the fuckin' imperium, and y'all can't see shit! I mean, y'all had to rely on Van Der Mir an’ his sorry buncha assholes to stop Sidonis for ya, and Emerald might'a had a daemon ridin' his ass but he still got rubber man offa Solomon while your so-called quarantine enforcers were standin' aroun’ holdin' their dicks!"

Machairi pursed her lips. "I assume by rubber man you're referring to the xenos Juno - but I didn‘t ask you about Saros or Solomon."

"Ha, I don' fuckin' believe this.” Merle shook his head, looking up at the vaulted ceiling of the ready room. “You're a fuckin' joke, queen bitch. That wasn' a xeno, that was Lucius fuckin' Pembroke after the C'tan shard'd finished fuckin' him up! Yeah, we cut it outta him an' put it in that psyker bitch with the sword fetish, but it still left him lookin' like a walkin' talkin' gimp suit. Now please don' be tellin' me I've just blown your mind with that there revelation, 'cause I think I might jus' bust a nut if y'all make me laugh again."

Machairi just glared at him, and then stabbed the comm-bead nestled into her silver wrist chronometer. “Josiah, Vizkop, I’m done with Carson. Take him back to solitary.”

The door slid quietly open, and Wuziarch marched in with Vizkop gliding at his heels. The arbitrator’s neck was still padded with a gauze dressing, though through juvenat healing or sheer force of will his limp had entirely disappeared.

“Enjoy your drink, queen bitch.” Merle said cheerfully, as the two men unshackled his hands and hauled him up by the armpits, after which Wuziarch diligently applied a new set of manacles. “Don’ go too heavy now, or the soulless major might come creepin’ in here lookin’ for an easy ride.”

Machairi remained silent, resting her laced fingers against her chin as Carson was dragged to the door and it snapped closed behind them. After the sound of footsteps and clinking chains had receded, she suddenly smiled, and reached under the table to click off the vox recorder that had been taped to its underside.

+ + + + + +

Inquisition void-runner Tiercel
One hour later

The elegant oval corridors of Machairi’s Tiercel provided a familiar and welcome change from the eclectic opulence of the Arthrashastra. As they crossed the docking umbilical and climbed down into the crew deck, Crenshaw wondered idly if Machairi simply preferred to talk to him in her own defined sphere of influence, or if she still did not trust his cabin on Tarran’s ship to be proof against snooping ears.

“I must admit,” Machairi confessed once they were standing with glasses in hand in the deserted conference cabin, looking at the camera-projected image of Baraspine spinning below. “It tastes better when I’m not drinking it in Carson’s company.”

“Even when your new drinking companion is a blacksoul, Alia?” Crenshaw queried, cocking an eyebrow. “Sadly I can confess a similar sentiment. Perhaps the fire-and-brimstone preachers with their talk of heretics souring wine and turning food to ash unwittingly stumbled across a grain of truth.”

He paused to contemplate the view, ignoring Machairi's suddenly scrutinising look. Past the lumpy band of the Glom, hive Arda was visible as a black smudge through the grimy, marbled swirls of cloud.

“I cannot see DeRei remaining in the Dead City with his cultist cat’s paws crushed and the sub governor’s forces combing the area. Though I am afraid I cannot predict whether he will try to lose himself in hive Arda or try to make it back up to the Glom.”

“If he can summon daemons," Machairi thought aloud, mulling DeRei's projected options. "Then he has no more need for cultists. The PDF can put these poorly-armed cells of his down in hours, as they have indeed done. But if he can create ’flects, and now summon a daemon…”

“And a bound one, too." Crenshaw clarified. "There is no other explanation - nothing in that hospital suggested serious preparation for a standard summoning ritual. If there was, we would have found it and dismantled it. DeRei’s affinity for the warp seems to have developed significantly since Saros.”

Machairi frowned, folding her arms with her drink still in hand. “We’re still missing something. He was too lucky to slip past the Nebula net. Someone else we didn’t see must have been helping him.”

“Perhaps one of Danilov’s men is still at large?”

“They’d find it hard to operate openly. The arbites sentenced Danilov this morning, and every member of his crew now has a warrant out for questioning.”

“At least we can trust the Adrantean authorities to make a passable job of cleaning up DeRei’s associates.”

Crenshaw sipped his drink, the alcohol burning slightly at the gums around his prosthetic teeth. In truth, he wondered about the speed of the Nebula response - even if the level of mobilisation of the various Adrantis PDFs was exemplary, considering they had not seen a serious war in decades. Had the Nebulas been tipped off somehow, like the PDF on Marioch? And if so…sacrificing his cults was one thing, but why would DeRei himself actively initiate their destruction?

“Were you and sister Kiana able to deduce anything, major?” Machairi asked, breaking Crenshaw’s train of thought.

Crenshaw chewed the inside of his cheek, inevitably reminded of his tense encounter with the spymaster canoness. “Nothing relevant to DeRei or the Nebulas, Alia. However, I think I have finally worked out why the Necrons were after Kally's map.”

“Back on Hercynia?” Machairi cocked her head, not seeing the connection to their current worries.

“As you will recall, the Necrons mounted an aggressive attack on Solomon not long after the destruction of hive Makita, but they failed to break through and secure Pembroke from the ruin. Once they found out that Kally was carrying a piece of him, they must have thought it was the key to finding and re-imprisoning their rogue shard.”

Alia sipped her drink and swallowed, thoughtfully. “I see. Have you told Kally?”

Crenshaw hmm‘d. “No, but I thought you might find it valuable to know even after the fact - considering De Shilo and Lucullis are likely still watching us.”

“And Yannick.” Machairi reminded him, with a meaningful look. She sighed. “I will be frank, major; I am not happy with how our operation so far is going to look to my colleagues.”

The inquisitor paused, contemplating the pict-screen view.

“That said, Carson just gave me some rather beautiful intelligence, and together with what you’ve just told me, I don't think the Necrons were planning to search the hive at all.”

The smile that she offered Crenshaw was almost mischievous, which prompted the major to raise an eyebrow.

“Very well, Alia, I will take your bait. Since beautiful is not a word I usually associate with Carson, what did he give you?”

Machairi smiled, her dark brown eyes glinting. “The final piece of the puzzle between Emerald, Pembroke and the Necrons. He told me that Emerald dug Pembroke out right under the quarantine’s noses - if De Shilo wants to play hardball, we have evidence of some pretty gross negligence on his part.”

“And Yannick?” Crenshaw asked.

Machairi met the major’s pointed gaze, and pursed her lips. “That one I’m still working on.”

Crenshaw grunted low in his throat. Yannick was, after all, a far greater threat to him than to Machairi. He had been like a dog with a bone since the Ampoliros incident, gnawing the case down to splinters in search of evidence. Crenshaw suspected that Machairi had already expended some amount of political capital to keep him safe within her team.

“I am curious though, Alia.” he spoke up after a moment, seeking to change the subject. “How did you manage to prise that information out of him?”

Machairi’s smile returned, albeit thinly. “I’m quite happy to play at being the arrogant fool he thinks I am, if scoring cheap victories loosens his tongue.”

“Be careful, Alia. He has done a great deal of damage to the penitents recently, and your own agents.”

“Not as much as DeRei.” Machairi countered grimly. “How are Kelly and Ella?”

“Stable."

"The precautions I asked for were enacted?"

Crenshaw's expression was stony. "Yes."

Crenshaw neglected to mention how borderline Sapphira had been when he had ordered her to assist him with that procedure - not a good thing, when he was fairly certain that sister Kiana had tasked her with watching him for any sniff of heresy. He had not confided those suspicions to Machairi either; now seemed a poor time to push Sapphira over the edge by cornering her. And, he admitted to himself, Kally needs her friends. The thought almost provoked him into a perverse laugh. Not so long ago, it was not a consideration that would have even registered in his mental calculations.

"Father Belannor has also run purity checks on the whole team, including captain Tarran." he went on instead. "He pronounced them safe. However, I cannot overstate the continuing risk of Carson’s presence, even if you may now wish to keep him for blackmail material against De Shilo.”

“No, I agree.” Machairi nodded. “I don't want him near any of my people unless absolutely necessary. But if he knows things that could help keep the Sol ordos off our backs, then for now I will send him to solitary instead of an immediate appointment with Tarran's plasma chamber.”

Crenshaw exhaled. “Ah yes, and so we return to captain Tarran. Whom by the way I still recommend you bring in an impartial astropath to scry."

Machairi pursed her lips at the reference to Ella and what she had kept from the team. "I don't suppose the sisters Famulous have finished processing the trade warrant that Black sent."

"Not yet. Or if they have, the results are still in transit."

Machairi exhaled contemplatively. "Solvan has pronounced her clear of taint. That will suffice...for now."

"For now." Crenshaw repeated, and cocked a questioning eyebrow. "What do you plan to do about her, Alia?”

Machairi finished her drink, and set the crystal tumbler down on the table at her side. “I plan to beware the daemon at my back.”

+ + + + + +

The Arthrashastra
Fourteen hours later

The apartment smelled of damp laundry. Shirts, blouses and scholem uniforms were hung from the clothes horse in the main room, and from every available radiator. Space was at a premium, especially now that Varrius and Cassandria Black had finally agreed to give Kelly her own room, and moved their own bed into the corner of the living area. By the standards of many midhivers this humble dwelling was spacious; with an ever-growing population, and the Ad Mech dragging their heels on releasing the decommissioned chem plants for new building space, government rents in spire 13 just kept going up and up.

Through in the kitchen, the smell of powdered detergent was replaced by cooking and aggressively applied counterseptic. While the plague still ran rampant through the midhive, no-one wanted to take chances. Even juvies like Kelly had it hammered into them twenty times a day - by their parents, by the scholem masters, by the servitor vox messages blaring through the mag-lev stations while they waited for their train to school.

The Emperor protects those who protect themselves. Through constant vigilance, Makita Hive endures. Face masks must be worn in all public areas. Counterseptic wash stations must be used on entry and exit of all Imperial facilities. It is every citizen's holy duty to report signs of plague to the nearest medicae clinic. Ave Imperator.

Kelly unhooked her paper mask, threw it into the bin, and closed the kitchen door behind her to keep the smell of grain broth from infecting all of their clothes in the next room. Marc, meanwhile, slouched over to the table and shrugged his schoolpack onto the floor.

"Hiya kids." Cassandria Black said brightly, jumping back and forth between the electric cooker and her Aquila-marked administratum work slate. She paused to cough into her fist, as if clearing her throat. "How was school? Did the PS results arrive the day?"

The Preliminary Streaming exam was specifically designed to scare the shit out of Makita hive juvies around their twelfth Terran-standard year. It determined whether you would be allowed to continue into secondary schola - and potentially into well-paid work with the administratum or mechanicus - or whether you would be locked out of all such opportunities and earmarked for life in the labour corps, where the only way out was to join the PDF, or possibly the church. Kelly had duly spent the last two weeks running the tests over and over in her head, dissecting every written and spoken answer that she could remember giving, and losing sleep over every one that she wasn't convinced she had answered perfectly. Today felt like a weight had been lifted.

"Aye, they arrived." Marc replied before Kelly could open her mouth, keeping his face absolutely serious. Marc, who had passed his own PS the previous year, had actually kept the terrorising of his sister to a tasteful minimum over the past months. He had even helped her out with the algebraic maths that he knew she had difficulty with, but Kelly was still in no mood to be upstaged on her big day. She elbowed Marc hard in the ribs for his trouble and stepped past him; unlike her brother, she was unable to contain an ear-to-ear grin.

"Aye." she said, "I passed, mum! Beta grade, upper class!"

Cassandria's face lit up. She was a graceful, handsome woman, despite her hiver-pale skin and the shallow lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She had silky black hair and a dainty nose, which Kelly sometimes wished she had inherited instead of her father's blade-like proboscis. She remained convinced that she was never going to grow into it.

"That's fantastic Kel, well done!" Cassandria gushed. "Two geniuses in the family - we must be doing something right."

The vox-cast messages from the speakers outside grew suddenly louder as the flat door opened. They were immediately eclipsed by a bump and a curse as the same door jarred against the school shoes that Marc and Kelly had kicked off and left on the mat.

"Emperor's teeth!" Varrius Black shouted. "Marcus! Kelly! How many times have I told ye tae put your shoes on the rack!?"

Varrius Black did intimidation well, but neither Kelly nor Marc flinched. They knew that their father was relatively harmless while he was shouting and ranting. It was when he went dangerously quiet that they had to worry. Sure enough, when Varrius stomped through into the kitchen he just took off his stencilled enforcer's jacket, rubbed his angular face with both hands, and stooped to kiss Cassandria on the crown of her head.

"How was work?" he asked, giving his wife's shoulders a squeeze.

"Shan." Cassandria groaned, "The ad mech still willnae budge. And the baron in upper 12 is playing politics about our spire getting built up afore his."

"Urgh." Varrius agreed sympathetically. "Sometimes I wonder who the real criminals are. Go sit down, ae? I'll finish serving up."

He squeezed past her and took up stirring the grain broth. Cassandria gratefully moved over to the sink to pour a glass of water. It came out chalky-white, as it often did when the reclaimer plant across the level was struggling with the summer dry season. One statistic that Kelly could have lived without knowing was that every drop of water you drank in Makita midhive had, on average, been through thirty other people before being recycled once again into your tap. Then again, at least they had a reliable water supply, unlike many sections of the underhive.

Cassandria grimaced slightly at the silty water, and placed it down on the table to settle out while she looked over her work slate again.

"You kids wear your masks all day the day?" Varrius asked, looking over his shoulder as he banged the wooden stirrer clean on the edge of the saucepan.

"Aye, dad." Kelly and Marc answered.

"You pray tae the Emperor for protection before you sat down tae lunch?"

"Aye dad."

"Kelly's got some news for you." Cassandria said, shooting her daughter a sly smile, before coughing into her hand again.

Varrius paused and turned fully round. "You got your PS results?"

Kelly grinned. "Aced it, dad."

As Varrius was about to reply, Cassandria coughed hard into her water, and sprayed half of it across the dining table before she could cover her mouth with her hand.

"Mum?" Marc asked, looking alarmed.

"Cassie?" Varrius crossed the room in two quick strides. "You okay?"

"Fine, I'm fine..." Cassandria wheezed, wiping her mouth and groping for a flannel cloth to clean up the table. "Just tried to inhale it instead ae swallow it...I'm fine."

No you're not. Kelly thought, with horrifying certainty. She felt as if something was tugging down on her insides. Tomorrow you won't be able to get up, and in two weeks you'll be dead and us and dad'll be on our own.

She blinked. That thought didn't belong. The room seemed to darken. Kelly looked around in sudden apprehension, but Cassandria just smiled sadly at her.

"I love you, Kelly." she said, "And I would be so, so proud of you. But you need tae open your eyes."

Kelly looked around again, at a loss. "I'm..."

The music was a white wall of noise, full of harsh growls and thundering double-kick drums. Marc threaded his way through the low-ceilinged club towards the more packed crowd in front of the stage, which was surging back and forth as the hivers threw themselves at each other. Kelly saw that Marc kept looking back over his shoulder to make sure she hadn't gotten lost in the crush. He had been growing out a short but carefully-edged beard for the last week, which didn't really suit him but made the muscle-grafted heavies at the door less likely to ask him for proof of age. Kelly had her friend's older sister's ident card tucked away in the pocket of her jacket, but neither of them need have bothered. Plenus Luna was notoriously lax in its door policy, and Kelly was sure that half the crowd here were juvies like themselves. The rest were scruffy underhivers who lived and breathed the Hate Metal scene, and inevitably a few creeps sniffing around for younger girls.

"Hey beautiful." one such man asked as he came sauntering up to her, while Marc was busy yelling across the bar counter to make his order heard. The man was perhaps in his mid twenties and not unattractive, but his smile was almost a leer. "What's your name?"

Kelly shook her head. "You don't need tae ken my name."

The man leaned close to Kelly's ear to make his answer heard over the pounding amplifiers. The smell of his aftershave was cloying, covering up the sweat of the overly-warm club. "But I want tae get ta ken you."

"No," Kelly said with a sardonic grin, "You want tae frak me, and you don't need my name for that."

The man frowned as she gave him a gentle shove away from her. "What's up? You got a boyfriend, like?"

"No." Kelly admitted, "I'm just not interested in you."

The man finally shook his head and wandered off in search of an easier target, muttering something from which Kelly discerned the words 'frigid bitch'.

"Who the frak was that?" Marc asked with a frown as he belatedly turned away from the bar.

"Just a chancer." Kelly said offhandedly. "Not my type though."

Marc seemed to accept the explanation, and huffed. "See," he complained ironically, "Why do the fit girls no come up tae me when I'm waiting at the bar?"

"Well it's either your face or your personality." Kelly countered, taking advantage of the fact that her brother had his hands full of drinks and so avoiding the punch in the arm she would otherwise have recieved.

Quietly, she exhaled in relief. Marc had always been protective of her, but for better or worse he had doubled down after their mum's death. Kelly didn't like the sour, withdrawn young man her brother had become since - throwing himself doggedly into his schoolwork with his earbud-casters tuned into that underhive Hate Metal that he said helped him concentrate. Kelly was never quite sure if he wasn't just shutting the world out. It had been her idea for them to come along to this gig down on the very lower edge of 13 midhive, and she was happy to see her brother looking animated again.

"It was sweet ae you." Marc said, still holding the drinks. "You're always trying tae look out for other people first."

Kelly looked up at her brother in confusion. She was sure he hadn't said that on the night. Over Marc's shoulder, something shadowy and vaguely man-shaped had appeared among the surging crowd, and was gliding steadily towards them.

"But I need ye tae do yourself a favour first this time." Marc said. He wasn't raising his voice, but somehow Kelly could still hear him over the cacophonous music.

The shadow drifted closer, flickering blue.

"I need you," Marc said earnestly, "Tae open your eyes."

The hab-stack apartment smelled of blood and shit, and Kelly's surgical mask did little to protect her from it. A young man with narco-gang connections being shot to death in his own flat was sadly normal in the midhive. Personal firearms were outlawed in hive Makita, but too many weapons still filtered up from the lawless underhive through an intricate ladder of couriers and fronts. What was not normal was that the assailant had then proceeded to slash his victim's body open with a knife, and daub ugly red symbols across the walls with his blood.

Kelly liked the forensic jigsaw-puzzle of lab work. Marc over in Criminal Investigations could often solve the puzzle with half the pieces missing, but she built the watertight proof that ensured justice was done. Despite the satisfaction of assembling a dossier that would see a murderer or rapist punished and a family given closure, Kelly still preferred being sent out to directly appraise a scene with the other Scene of Crime Officers. The things she had to record were often harrowing, but she also got to see the faces of the victims, and sometimes those of the loved ones she owed an explanation to. It reminded her that the end goal of her job was human.

"I told you this wasn't just standard scum-on-scum." Sandra Farrel said. The room flashed white as she photographed one of the symbols with her boxy pict-stealer.

"The report said signs left on the walls." Kelly countered, her plastek oversuit crackling as she knelt down to photograph the body from a different angle. "That could have meant some kind of gang graffiti or calling card. They didn't say blood, and they didn't say this."

She gestured in the direction of one of the ugly blood-streaks. It looked like a squiggle, or perhaps a stylised flame, with a slit-pupiled eye in the centre. It wasn't like any of the common ganger logos, and something about it made her not want to look at it for long. That in itself was odd, for someone jaded by several years in verispex. It made her chest tighten forebodingly.

"No," Sandra told her dryly. "You just hate being wrong. Suck it up."

Kelly realised that she didn't have a comeback because her friend's observation wasn't untrue. She laughed instead, and the tension in her chest diffused a little.

"You coming to kickboxing later?"

"Aye. Maybe drinks too if these photos don't end up killing my appetite."

The door of the apartment crashed open, and a young MHE officer in standard patrol uniform came reeling into the living space.

"What the frak, get out of here!" Kelly yelled at him. "You'll contaminate the crime scene!"

"Shit's kicking off downhive." the MHE officer explained, shouting over her. "Verispex are pulling all SOCOs back to base while the riot squads arm up. We've got multiple officers down, possible cult signifiers on the gangers responsible."

Kelly and Sandra's eyes both widened. "Cults?" Sandra repeated.

The MHE officer looked uncomfortable.

"Agent Black..." he began, turning to Sandra.

Sandra shook her head. "I'm agent Farrel. That's agent Black."

The officer flinched. "Sorry, sorry, you almost look the same in those masks...agent Black...Kelly..."

Kelly's heart was punching hard against her ribs as the man hesitated. "What?"

"An IED went off near Buford mag-lev station - your father was hit."

Kelly's stomach dropped. "Is he...?"

"He's in a medevac rhino now, headed for St Kaori's. That's all I know. I'm sorry but we need to go now."

Kelly and Sandra looked at each other, both lost for words.

"Kelly..." Sandra began. "You always want to help everyone, even though you know you can't. You couldn't have stopped what happened to your father, any more than what happened to me."

No, Sandra never said that. Kelly edged back a little as the walls of the apartment seemed to swim.

"I don't blame myself for what happened, Sandy." she challenged her colleague quietly. "But that doesn't mean I'm not sorry."

"I know." Sandra soothed. "I just want you to remember - nothing that happened on Baraspine was your fault either."

Baraspine.

A rattling groan dragged Kelly's eyes from Sandra to the body on the floor. The dead man was gone, replaced by a silhouette of blue shadows that twitched and clawed weakly up at her. Kelly scrambled away from it with a cry of horror.

"Kelly," Sandra urged. "You need to open your eyes."

"They are open!" Kelly screamed at her dead friend.

Blackness.

No, not black - blue.

The shadow of the daemon loomed in front of her, reaching out with talons that dripped indigo liquid, and she didn't have anywhere to run. She opened her mouth to scream, but the sound only froze to death in her throat.

"Agent Kelly Black." a familiar voice said, and all of a sudden the daemon dissolved, sloughing and draining away like ink to reveal a shrunken, bald figure that stood on two ungainly bionic legs. Behind his gawky wireframe spectacles, his eyes glowed with a soft golden light.

"The daemon is gone, agent Kelly Black." the figure told her. "You do not need to fear its influence, nor its memory."

Kelly swallowed until she could force her vocal cords to work once more. "Gavin?"

"Agent Kelly Black." Gavin said, "I thank you, and I am sorry for everything. Including, and perhaps especially, this. But now, in this present moment, I need you to open your eyes and wake up."

At last Kelly understood.

And so she did.

She awoke to a dull, throbbing pain in her forehead, and the realisation that she couldn't see.

+ + + + + +

Gavin did not feel comfortable in chapels. The Imperial faith rejected him as a psyker; used and tolerated, but never welcome. And the cog-emblazoned temples of the mechanicus held nothing but terror for him. It seemed to Gavin that chapels were places of prayer and comfort for others, but not for him. Not for him.

Gavin was no longer afraid of dying. That emotion had been burned out of him on Saros Station. It had allowed him to attack the daemon on Baraspine without a second thought. But he did fear for one of the few people who had ever shown him true kindness. And for all his astral self had done, in the ruined hospital and after, he lacked the courage to meet her face to face now. But, Gavin knew, he was not the only one who cared. Others deserved to know, and so for their sake he steeled himself to enter the shrine of a distant and hostile god.

The wooden, gold-leafed doors behind the isolation bulkhead pushed open with a creak, and he found himself in a vaulted gallery that could easily have accommodated a hundred crewmen. But the painted saints on the walls frowned down upon empty pews, and only two figures knelt at prayer before the golden idol of the Emperor that stood at the far end of the chapel. Solvan wore a simple brown robe that made him look shrunken and frail within its voluminous folds. At his side Vincent Nyl thumbed a set of rosary beads, a cushioned plastek brace enveloping his neck.

Gavin limped forward, still feeling the effects of his psycho-stigmatic wounds, and cleared his throat, awkwardly. Solvan unclasped his hands and turned. When he laid eyes on Gavin, a smile crossed his prematurely-aged face.

“Gavin. Can I be of any help to you?”

“Er…no, father Solvan Bellanor sir.” Gavin replied, twisting his fingers. “I hope that I am not interrupting.”

Solvan’s smile became thin. "I am praying for forgiveness, Gavin. Something I’ve done many times before and will no doubt do many times again."

Gavin frowned. "But...father Solvan Bellanor sir, you were not there. Down on Baraspine. When Arcolin DeRei escaped."

The old priest nodded sombrely. "Precisely, Gavin. But it's not my job to burden you with my penance. Did you come here to see Vincent?"

"Er, yes, Mr Vincent Nyl." Gavin said, uncertainly, and shifted his gaze to Vince. "Erm...you might like to know that agent Kelly Black has recovered. That is to say, she has regained consciousness, and is awake."

Vince was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at Solvan, who nodded silently. Vince rose to his feet and limped past Gavin towards the door.

"Thanks, Gav." the old soldier rumbled, and clapped his meaty paw down on Gavin's thin shoulder as he passed. The slap was unintentionally hard, and made the psyker flinch as it landed square on a stigmatic bruise, though the squeeze that followed was oddly gentle.

"I'll leave you guys to talk." Vince said as he exited the chapel.

+ + + + + +

“He said we were to distract the PDF when the time came.” the man said, as he cupped his hands around the beaker of tanna. “He didn’t say we were to distract them by frakking dying.”

He raised the steaming cup to his lips and sipped through the mouth slit of the simple wooden mask he wore.

“You no longer owe DeRei anything.” inquisitor Machairi agreed gently.

She had offered the mask in deference to Baraspini cultural sensitivities, which dictated that all true believers should humbly hide their faces, save from close family members and the Emperor himself. DeRei had evidently not bothered to re-indoctrinate his followers too deeply into service to the blasphemous powers - exactly as had been the case on Marioch.

Machairi leaned forward and cocked her head slightly. Her own face was covered by an elegant, whorl-patterned mask of white silver, with blue gemstones inlaid over the eye lenses. The mask had once belonged to an overreaching Baraspini trader by the name of Natalia Veiss.

“Tell me what DeRei was planning,” she said, “And we can make some sort of deal. What were you supposed to be the distraction for?”

“I don’t know for sure.” The prisoner hesitated. “Some kind of power play on Perinetus.”

“The forge world?”

“I guess, though I don’t know how he planned to get there. I always assumed he worked out of hive Arda when he wasn’t meeting us out in the Dead City. He kept talking about this archmagos and a big speech he was going to give. He promised that we’d get ad mech help to build up our settlements into something liveable, but I don’t see how he manages that by voxing us to gun down and capture that team that came snooping around the Dead City…”

“I see.” Machairi replied quietly. She pressed her palms into her knees and rose, leaving the prisoner facing her empty chair across from his own in the otherwise barren holding cell. “Thank you for telling me. One of my people will be along shortly with food.”

As the mag-locks thanked closed behind her, Machairi pulled off the silver mask and eyed Tomas and Vizkop, who were waiting outside.

“Did you get all of that?” she asked them.

[dakkagor]

"Tick tock, Kally girl. Tick tock. Missy Black’s on the death clock.”

Her fists tightened around her pistols until her knuckles whitened. She resisted the urge to shoot Merle right then and there, and the only justification she could come up with was that he was basically right. Between here and Kelly, was a frak-off pile of cultist bastards, and she knew from prior experience, that for as much as she liked Crenshaw, his mercy was not one of his redeeming characteristics.

“Emperor frakking damn you Merle Carson, and the frakking horse you rode in on.”

“Now that’s the fuckin’ spirit, my li’l ganger gal.” Merle growled with patronizing affection.

He hummed with amusement and took another deep drag off the lho, its bright ember flare only highlighting his old bruises and recent burns. The convict exhaled a dual torrent of smoke out his nose with a bull-grox’s snort as he plucked the slightly bent leaf stick from his bruised lips and flicked it towards the charred skull at Kally’s feet. He grunted as it missed and sparked out on the ruined stairs.

“It’s lookin’ like you’re gonn’a have to be leadin’ the way, sweetheart. Damn.” The convict drawled, swinging his free arm and snapping his fingers. Merle kept his head turned toward Kally and vaguely gestured towards his damaged eye. His patently false disappointment was underlined by an ugly little smirk. “Y’all wouldn’ want to be riskin’ me accidentally not seein’ somethin’, now would’ya?”

“You’re such a frakking arsehole.” Kally seethed as she slammed her pistols into their holsters and retrieved her boltgun and powersword. She hadn’t needed Merle’s low wolf whistle to know that even now, being that sort of frakking arsehole, he wouldn’t waste the opportunity to be an unsavory letch.

“Love ya too, babe.” Merle snickered, as his good eye flicked back from a thorough once over of her backside to finish the one on his stolen plasma gun. He grunted in approval and cracked his neck, before he exhaled slowly and flashed a dangerous, glinting grin at the blank. “Now what’a’ya say we go savin’ the mother fuckin’ day, huh girlie?”

She ignored him and the various aches and pains already spreading across her body, especially across her chest, and took a bearing, before setting off at a dead run, Merle gleefully falling in behind her.

They tore out of the stairwell and through the deserted main hallway of an administrative section. Kally was vaguely surprised when Merle pulled even with her, and properly covered the cross corridors on his side as they darted past. Both former scummers kept weapons levelled and ready as the noise of several overlapping firefights echoed through the derelict hospital. She halted after bypassing three such intersections to gauge the air currents, before she hand signed to turn south. Kally almost snapped at Merle when he didn’t move – until she remembered his newly acquired blind spot, and sighed with frustration.

“Hey, dickless.” She tersely whispered, earning a wordless irritated grunt from the convict as she caught his attention. “We’re going south and down a level.”

“So we’re takin’ the direct route. Hmm.” Merle deduced, as able as Kally to feel the spatial disruption caused by two partially collapsed floors and an exposed basement. He hmm’d thoughtfully, doubtfully, even as he complied with her decision. “Interestin’ play to be callin’, sweetheart.”

“I didn’t ask for an opinion, shitbag.” Kally growled. She followed after Merle, and almost immediately regretted being downwind from the convict. “Seriously, Merle? You frakking shit yourself?

+++++

Tomas flinched as the temperature in the room plummeted, a thin rime of ice spreading across the pools of blood and cracked glass. The old soldier turned to check on Gavin, who had slumped forward. He managed to get an arm under him before the frail psyker collapsed out of the chair.

“Frak.” He muttered.

He didn't know if Gavin had succeeded or failed, but it was obvious the psyker had found the daemon and been in one hell of a fight. And taken one hell of a beating. Tomas grimly realized as he noted the psychostigmatic trauma. Bruises mottled the younger man’s face. His left eye was swollen shut, and a broken nose evidenced by the frozen blood caked around his nostrils. More almost black blood against Gavin’s almost sheet-white skin marked where the daemon had mauled him with psychic talons. The most severe gouges were torn across the left side of Gavin’s face, from his ear tapering down to his chin, which made him suspect that the psyker had taken a vicious backhand.

Gavin’s wounds were bad enough, but they weren’t what harrowed Tomas most. It was the shiny lines of iced over tears, and the expression of soul-wrenching anguish locked onto the otherwise limp psyker’s face. The old soldier’s bitter experience had him recognize that haunted look of profound loss, and he could easily guess what that meant. Kelly. Something bad has happened to Kelly. He bit down on a curse with gritted teeth, resisting the reflexive urge to once again damn the Terran torturers for the damage they’d inflicted on the penitents. Nyl being wounded had been destabilizing enough, but if one of the tight knit group of survivors was a fatality…

The old soldier dismissively shook his head. Whatever had happened down in the basement, and what was maybe still happening, it wasn’t good and he needed some damn answers. He was going to get some damn answers, but they would have to wait. Tomas knew Gavin was in no position to move under his own power.

“Sorry Gavin.” He muttered as he reached behind the psyker, and unclipped him from his bionic legs. “When this is over, we are going to get you some better bloody legs.”

He had studied Gavin’s mobility frame quite thoroughly as prep for mission, in case he needed to move the frail psyker in an emergency. With the psyker freed, he hoisted him onto his uninjured shoulder and started to make for the stairwell, a boltpistol in one hand and his sword and shield slung over his back.

“Tomas to team. Anyone out there?”

There was the familiar pop and hiss of static, but no response.

“Say again, this is Tomas, does anyone hear me?”

“I've got you chief. Me and Josiah are on the roof and have a beacon set up for extraction.”

“Thank the Throne.” Tomas allowed himself a wry smile. He could always rely on Glabrio to keep his head and his objectives in mind, even when the whole op went to the warp in a handcart. “I'm incoming with Gavin. Any sign of the others?”

“None yet. But I've been hearing some radio chatter.”

“Not good news?” Tomas huffed as he took stairs two at a time, and Gavin groaned on his shoulder at every jarring impact.

“Only snatches, but I think we've lost Ella and Kelly.”

Tomas swore, violently and with some variety and skill, before he responded over the vox.

“Once I've dropped Gavin off, I'll be going back in.”

“The Lady. . .”

“She'll understand.”

+++++

Kally realised this was as far as her little partnership with Merle could go. He could hear something hammering at something heavy and metallic a floor below. They had come to a stop and could hear, nearby, the distinctive sound of a Boltgun firing in sharp counterpoint to autoguns and lasguns.

Crenshaw

“What now, sweetheart?" Merle chuckled darkly. "Going to go help your blacksoul bastard of a fucktoy?"

Kally could feel the building move underneath her, and could sense not just the firefight nearby, but coming up the stairwell they had just crossed, a handful of reinforcements. They would be drawn to Crenshaw by the sound of gunfire and pin him from his flank. It wasn't even a decision.

"We push on. Crenshaw can look after himself."

"Now thats fuckin' cold, sweetheart." Merle cuffed at the wound over his eye and smiled widely. "Maybe your thinkin' about giving me another chance and leaving that uptight prick to get his soulless arse shot?"

She looked around the room, frowning, and ignoring his barb. Crenshaw was big enough and ugly enough to look after himself, and frankly, the . “Watch the door.” she responded flatly, before moving off to examine a section of piping exposed by collapsing wall. It was solid, unrusted, still firmly rooted to the floor and ceiling.

“Hey Merle, how frakked up is your eye right now?” She turned and pointed at her left eye, watching Merles face as he turned to respond

“Still working fine enough to enjoy your fine arse.”

“Hmpph.”

She turned back to the pipe. Mulled it over. She set her shoulders and walked over to Merle, padding quietly across the room, her sabre gripped in one hand.

“Hey.”

Merle turned, stepped back, guessing what was coming next as he hauled his rifle around. But Kally had approached from the side with his blinded eye, and the guard of her sabre crashed into Merles head, discharging a pulse of lightning. He flopped to the floor as Kally stepped back. Wordlessly, she removed her collar and reattached it to Merles neck, snuggling above the explosive device that had completely failed to keep him in check.

“Can't have the fracker downstairs jumping ship.” She dragged her fellow scummer over to the pipe and cuffed him to it. She didn't bother to check him for anything that might help him get free, this was only a temporary measure until Tomas finally got his thumb out of his arse and popped Merles head like a zit.

Kally looked up. Gunfire. Someone had screamed, The banging had stopped. She had run out of time.

+++++

Tears streaming down his face, breathing through his teeth in furious snorts, Marc barely even noticed Kelly turn away from the door and look right at him. She was smiling with her teeth, in a way that his sister hadn't done since the Terra cells had half-ruined her gums.

"You will not understand." she told him, in a voice that managed to echo and chorus all by itself. "Because you are just the ink on the page, drying and flaking away. We are the Story."

A line of explosions stitched between Kelly and Marc, drawing both Blacks' eyes up as Kally dropped into the room. She threw her empty boltgun aside as she landed, and charged with a wordless yell. Kelly stepped back, which turned into a reeling stagger as Kally's blank aura hit her full force, and then both women rebounded from the wall as Kally slammed into her and full-body tackled her to the floor.

Somewhere behind her Kally could hear Marc rasping her name, while beneath her Kelly was thrashing like a landed fish. Her friend's face and hair were mortis-white with dust, save for the shockingly red lines snaking from her nose and forehead. Her eyes were screwed shut; her mouth screaming open.

Kelly's fist flailed up to thump hard into Kally's ear, with the loose crunch of finger bones that were already broken. The blow was hard enough to stagger her sideways. Kelly rolled up and away from her and tried to crawl away, scrabbling blindly at the floor.

“Get back here.” she snarled, and scrambled after Kelly. She caught her friend, hauling her up by her collar and getting an elbow to her face for her trouble.

“In His name I abjure thee, in His name I castigate thee, in His name I cast thee out.” Kally chanted as she shoved Kelly to the floor again. She dropped on top of her friend and finally, finally, got her left arm around her friend's throat, putting her in a choke hold. “In His name I name thee, Daemon, thrice cursed, spawn of Chaos, and I cast ye the frak out!”

"You have no true faith in the Emperor!" Kelly shrieked, and jerked her head back with violent force. Blood exploded from Kally's mouth but she refused to let go.

"Alright then." Kally snarled. “In the name of Marcus frakking Black I abjure thee! In the name of Vincent Nyl and Sapphira Wilder I name thee daemon! In Kelly Black's name I cast you out of my friend!”

Kally scrambled to keep Kelly pinned, but it was like riding a rampaging grox. Even with her pariah aura smothering its sight and power, the daemon would use every reserve of its host, with none of the normal human limitations. Even so, Kally was counting her lucky stars. Compared to what had become of Sidonis, this was nothing. She tightened her grip and gritted her teeth as Kelly let out another keening shriek, beating her bloodied hands against the rubble.

“Come on Kelly, fight this frakker!” She felt teeth sink into her arm, chewing through the bodyglove under her battered armour to draw blood. “I know you're still in there!”

The pressure on her arm vanished and she braced herself for a second bite, but instead Kelly let out a retching noise and convulsed against her chest. Kelly dry-heaved a second time, and this time an enormous quantity of something thick and oily black poured out over Kally's arm and went spreading across the floor, roiling like something caught between gas and liquid. It shrank away in a ring around Kally's blank bubble, like oil dispersed by an immiscible water, before finally gusting upwards, shredding and vanishing through the ruined ceiling.

As Kelly slumped back against her arm, Kally saw her eyes glaze over, roll back into her head, and close.

Kally let go immediately, stepping up and away from Kelly. She tapped her vox bead and broadcast on a general band, ignoring the crawling goosebump sensation that had spread from her wounded arm to her whole body and was only now receding. She could feel a fresh nosebleed tracking down her face that had nothing to do with physical trauma.

“Kally to team, Kelly is safe. Repeat, Kelly is safe.”

She didn't dare broadcast more over the squad link, and knelt down to check on Kelly, hovering her cheek over her friends mouth

“She's not breathing.” She shifted and found Kellys wrist. “No pulse.” Marc was behind her, any previous relief vanished. Kally pointed to Kellys chest even as she flashed her combat knife, sawing Kellys suit open and peeling her sweaty flak vest off, before positioning Kelly so her airway was open. “Compressions, give me thirty.” As Marc got into position, gloved fingers laced and the heel of his hands over his sisters breastbone, Kally shrugged out of her own restrictive carapace. She bent down to Kellys face and counted the compressions.
10,
20,
30,
Kally ducked in and clamped her mouth over Kellys, pinching her nose, and pushed two breaths into her, Kellys chest rising and falling, before pulling up for air.
“Again!”
10,
20,
30,
Marc was flagging, Kally could see the strain on his face, but she couldn't admit that she was faring worse after the long firefight to get here. Kally ducked in and delivered two breaths.
“Again!”
10,
20,
30,
Come on Kelly, come back to us.
Kally ducked in again. One breath, out. Kelly coughed, spittle flying into Kally's face as she ducked in for the second breath. Both Kally and Marc slumped back, watching Kelly breathe on her own , before Kally rolled Kelly onto her side, propping her up. She also drew a laspistol, and kept it at her side. Marc shifted slightly, taking his sisters hand in his, before turning to look at Kally, an unreadable mix of emotions on his face.

“Looks like that grox fucking cultist got away while we being kinky, Kally girl!”

Kally's shoulders slumped as Marc hissed a curse. Kally pulled herself to her feet, and decided that trying to trade barbs with Merle was not worth her remaining fraks.

“Doors jammed, rusted most likely. Get your arse down here and cut us out.”

Merle grinned and scrambled down the rubble, plasma gun bouncing from its strap.

“I see the cute little verispex is out for the count, I always preferred my girls unconscious, stops 'em whining too much.”

Kally flicked the safety off her laspistol and favoured Merle with a death glare that could bore through concrete. He shrugged and turned his stolen weapon on the morgue door, and with almost admirable precision, cut the door from its hinges. A final blast sent it tumbling backwards with a dull roar that seemed to shake the whole building.

“Lets get out of here.” Kally muttered, keeping Merle covered as they started to head to the roof.