[M] War in the Shadows - Patriots IC

[Azazeal849]

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CAMPAIGN 1

Spoiler: Sarna Astros - Baraspine 

Striken spire, hive Alda
Zero hour +8
Patriot objectives: Kill loyalist nobles

The iron grate scraped softly as it popped outwards, shedding months worth of uncleaned rust onto the pipes below. The grate was pulled inside, and in its place a man in urban fatigues appeared. Stealthily he dropped down onto the foam-lagged pipe, shrugged off a dusty backpack, and began to snap together a modular marksman’s las.

Three other men followed him, helping each other down and cursing quietly in Jotunhel gothic at the effluent smell of the hive. Lastly came a smaller, wirier figure in a hooded bodyglove. She needed no help to climb down, and landed sure as a cat among the zig-zagging pipework. Her kit-bag contained not guns but blades, along with uphiver clothing and one-way contact lenses imprinted with false retina scans.

The leading feral-worlder snapped his lasgun’s scope into place and pulled out a map, which he spread on top of the pipe between him and the silent woman.

“We’re here, between levels one-twelve and one-thirteen.” he murmured, raising his voice only as much as necessary to carry over the chugging refrigerator pumps. He leaned forward and pinned a gloved finger to the map. “A short climb should bring you up to the main thoroughfare, and then you’ll have easy access to the villa.”

The woman nodded silently; she had heard all of this before. One of the Patriots’ informers had flagged the Vel-Corosa family as harbouring residual sympathies for the old order; the crusaders would no doubt try to extract them for information or perhaps even a new puppet ruler; she was here to kill them first. An orbital drop into the hive as soon as Eudaimonia broke from warp, with the Imperial attack already ongoing, was cutting things extremely close. However, Sarna Astros had more experience than most in prowling hive spires, and in taking care of serpentine Imperial nobles.

“We’ll work our way up after you and cover the main entrances to make sure no-one interrupts you.”

“You’d better have that teleport homer ready.” one of the other snipers growled as he snapped together his weapon.

“Take care on your way up.” the first man added as he folded away the map. “We might be in the posh part of the hive, but if the interlevels are anything like the crawlspaces back on the ship then they’ll have rats a size you wouldn’t believe.”

He smirked, and offered Sarna a close-fisted salute. His fellow feral-worlders repeated the gesture, and the strike team silently parted ways.

Spoiler: Enki Volkner, Omikron Zahir - Perinetus 

Stilat Cosmodrome, eighty three kilometers north of Ragnarov Forge
Day 156 of Perinetus civil war
Patriot objectives: Neutralise loyalist airbase

The news from the frontlines was good. The Ankylon defence line had been broken southwest of Ragnarov, and archmagos Delzharian had moved his command post forward to begin coordinating the final assault. But tech-assassin Kiran Sova and his strike team would be nowhere near Ragnarov when the god-machines walked.

The mechanicus installation at Stilat doubled as an airbase and an orbital launchpad for vox satellites. Right now, its most pressing function was a base for loyalist air power. The Patriot-aligned mechanicus had almost total command of the air around Ragnarov forge, and Delzharian wanted to keep it so for his final assault on the city. With air defences too strong for conventional bombardment, and the nearest ground forces some ninety kilometres distant, the Patriots were resorting to subterfuge to keep the enemy airbase out of the fight.

As the servitor pilot chattered stolen passcodes across the vox, Sova and his chosen assassins held themselves mag-locked against the shuddering floor of the cargo hopper. Directly ahead of Sova was the hazard-striped cargo ramp, ready to slam down and reveal the heavy autocannon tripod-bolted to the floor, Sova’s own mechanical hands in the firing stirrups. In his peripheral vision the tech-assassin could see his team: cloaked in blood-red, either canting out binary prayers to their weapon spirits or reviewing hololith projections of their target. Their landing point on cargo pad four was highlighted in blinking orange, along with the optimal firing lines to the control tower, fuel tanks and AAA batteries that would be their first targets.

Sova heard the whine of landing struts extending, and the shuddering roar of the VTOL jets. It wouldn’t be long now. Sova’s pulse was racing, and acid was burning the pit of his stomach. He rather enjoyed the still-human feeling of anticipation. There was a time for sober, holy communion with the machine spirits, and there was a time to let the Omnissiah-granted spark of life loose. That was what mattered - beyond the theological debate between holy discovery and the sclerotic ideals that had ruled Perinetus for too long. Alongside, but apart from, the sterile necessity of their current mission objectives. The holy joy of proving your Intellect superior to an opponent; of bringing yourself one step closer to the Machine God by destroying the enemies who obstructed his path.

Explosive bolts sent the landing ramp crashing outwards, far faster than its smooth hydraulics were designed for. As the machine spirits howled in protest, Sova’s autocannon let out a throaty roar of its own, reducing the loading servitors who had come to attend the cargo hopper to a fine mist in one contemptuous sweep.

“Deploy!” Sova barked in machine code.

[Atrum Daemon]

Stilat Cosmodrome, eighty three kilometers north of Ragnarov Forge
Day 156 of Perinetus civil war

Enki was silent as he reviewed the hololiths of the mission parameters and location. Control tower, fuel tanks, and gun batteries were optimal choices to cripple the base. Nearby, Zahir was covered in a scarlet cloak intoning his chants to prepare himself for the coming mission. The Fulgerite would make for a fantastic distraction as he let loose his building electric power. Enki was preparing in his own way as he mapped out the route he would take in the glorious destruction to come.

To reduce their enemies to smoldering ruin was to prove one’s ideas superior. When the opponent would not budge, they had to be shown the right way. Blessed ruin would rain down upon those who opposed them and the fires cleanse the weakness from their bodies and their souls. Such rot and unclear thought often permeated both those within the Priesthood of Mars and those without. Enki’s career was built on the ruined buildings and charred bones of those upon whom he rained retribution on.

Enki was well-armed with his needed explosives and weapons. The arms on his back were ready as well with the grav-gun and rad-cleanser primed. He was ready to do battle with their enemies and bring down their walls around them. The bolts released as Zahir stood and threw the robe off to reveal his glittering form. Before the end of Sova’s order, Zahir was gone from the lander in a blur of electric energy. After all he had to expend all the motive energy he built up and the fuel tanks were a fine target for him as well as the control tower.

Enki stomped down the ramp, heading toward the gun batteries. There were security forces responding to the gunfire but they met a grisly end within the confines of their transport. From the dish-like weapon on his body, the Magos fired a blast intense, cross-spectrum radiation that cooked the people inside alive. Enki picked up speed, his massive frame deceptively fast in terms of momentum even if it lacked fine agility.

<Zahir will certainly get noticed,> Enki canted back to Sova through a heavily encrypted and protected channel. <He can handle it but I will do my utmost to accelerate the completion of our objective here. In the meantime, I request you explain the logic in your choosing the pair of us for this. It would follow that an assassin would want more discretion rather than quite the opposite.>

Enki was no fool and of course had his own suppositions as to why but he wanted to see if the tech-assassin would give any sort of answer. Experience had taught him that such a lot were often possessed, and arguably blessed, with a particular way of thinking. He never did get to ask VK why he wore such ghoulish masks…

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Enki Volkner, Omikron Zahir - Perinetus 

The unarmed tech-priests in the control tower ducked for cover as a claw of lightning from Zahir’s voltagheists dragged across the sloped windows and blew them into raining shards. A second boom announced the dome of one of the fuel tanks splitting open under pressure to release a great brown cloud of vaporised kerosine. It sparked on static a moment later, and a red fireball bloomed over the cosmodrome. Zahir’s voltagheists drank in the light, even as the heat blistered his skin down to the subdermal armour.

As black smoke closed a fist around the sky, Enki heard a crackle of heavily-distorted laughter across the vox link in answer to his question.

<Sometimes the Machine God’s design requires a dagger in the dark, magos.> Sova canted, honouring Enki with his formal title. <And sometimes it requires an atomic blast to light up the night
.>

As Enki advanced, past the mewling, choking remains of a tech-guard who was trying to crawl free of the irradiated transport, the fizzing tracers of Sova’s autocannon swept past him. They homed in on a missile rack, blasting it from its turntable in pieces, and then annihilated a gatling cannon that was traversing down to target the magos reductor.

<We are alike. You see the Machine God’s design in the discord of battle. Too many of our kind cling to the belief that there is an underlying order to the universe. There is not. In its natural state, everything in our reality tends towards entropy. Our brothers are tainted by confirmation bias, and the human proclivity for pattern recognition.>

Sova released the firing stirrups of the smoking autocannon and leapt from the back of the cargo hopper, red robe fanning around him like wings as he folded into a landing on the ground below the skypad.

<The only order - the only motive force - is the spark that the Machine God gives to us. I am one with the Machine God’s universe, and I further its holy entropy. Where that entropy falls is a matter for the prophets. Like me, you do not resist the entropy. You embrace it, and dedicate it to the Machine God. More importantly, you do not resist the spark.>

Sova rose, his hands lashing out to the sides and mag-luring the weapons at his hips into his waiting palms. A phosphor blast pistol clacked as it chambered, and an arc maul ran with electric light. The tech-assassin strode over the metre-thick concrete apron, joining Enki in the centre of the taxiway. In the background, the fire from the ruptured fuel tanks had begun to spread, throwing ash and burning gobbets of kerosine towards the Thunderbolt hangers. Another tank boiled and split with a shuddering boom, and the sky began to rain fire through the black smoke.

<Come.> Sova invited, his glowing blue optics rotating to face the doors to the main complex. The tech-priests in the control tower had managed to lower a blast door across the arched entrance, but it would not delay the kill-team for long. <Get these doors open and we can see to the generators below the tower.>

By the time Zahir had rejoined them, flames were crawling up the orbital launch gantry.
Either side of the airbase doors, two cog-embossed shrines lit up and began to unfold, like steel origami.

<Ah.> Sova halted, his ocular bionics whirring as they tagged ident codes over the shapes lurking within. <Scyllax Guardians.>

From within each shrine a killing shape unfolded; a hovering metallic scorpion with overlapped plates armouring its hunched back and segmented steel cables trailing below. They might have been wholly mechanical, were it not for the grinning skulls nestled below their humped carapaces. They drifted forward, silent but for the hum of anti-grav and the sheek-sheek of scissoring blade-limbs.

[dakkagor]

"Ofcourse I'll be careful. Watch yourselves, and good luck."

She returned the salute and darted away, surefooted, her route already committed to memory.

Servants entrance provides the best chance to get in undetected.

She reached the next grate and slowly levered it up. The street was surprisingly quiet. But then, she imagined most of the nobles cowering in safe rooms in their villas, to shield them from the incoming attack. She tapped the pair of meltabombs on her belt and smiled wickedly. A safe room door would not be a problem.

She levered and pushed the grate the rest of the way aside and belly-crawled out of the duct, and under a parked up cargo-8. She quickly pulled out a pair of modified magnoculars and scanned the building, noting the wrought iron fence was electrified, the servo skulls drifting on their slow laps, and the distinctive marks left in grass by the clawed feet of cybermastiffs. Sarna scoffed. She thought these people lived in fear of assassination.

She crossed the street quickly, and worked her way around the wall. She vaulted it from a nearby parked hovercar and landed in an ornamental tree. A luxury, but one that would get its owners killed.

She paused, and watched as a cybermastiff prowled below her. She snapped some kind of nut from the tree, and tossed it so it rang of an electrified fence nearby. The cybermastiff immediately moved off, which allowed her to jump to the villas wall and begin climbing around.

In a few minutes she dropped down in front of the servants entrance. She tried her contact lenses, and smiled as once again, their contacts information proved good. The door slid open with a chime, and she slipped into the house proper, drawing her power sword and a long, poisoned stiletto.

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Sarna Astros - Baraspine 

The servant’s entrance was narrow and wood-panelled, and led into a large store room filled with thrumming refrigerators. Beyond that was a kitchen picked out in white tiles, with rows of knives neatly mag-tacked to the walls. Sarna could see no-one, but there was a great deal of human noise: urgent voices coming from upstairs, and a loud clattering from a room on her left.

The latter turned out to be a man in a glossy black tunic who was standing on the other side of an elegantly curved dining table, side-on to Sarna as he rummaged through an antique dresser against the wall. Catching her with the tail of his eye he turned, with his arms full of silver plates. A plain wooden facemask hid his expression, but Sarna heard the squeak of surprise as he froze in place. His head dipped a fraction to regard the blades in Sarna’s hands, and then he dropped the plates with a cacophonous noise and bolted away through the house. The slamming of an external door told Sarna that he wasn’t sticking around long enough to raise any alarms.

The hallway Sarna found herself in next was wide, paved with veined marble and warmed by a deep, wine-red carpet that pointed the way towards a double staircase. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, dispensing crystal-kissed light and a fog of sweet-smelling vapour from dangling censors. A great coat of arms hung on the wall between the stairs, supported by two strange-looking beasts and bearing a scroll in stylised High Gothic.

A distant artillery strike thumped, causing the chandelier above the stairs to vibrate. Another wooden mask appeared, this one peeking out from beneath the sweeping staircase. Sarna saw a man and a woman crouching there, dressed in the same glossy black as the first man, and with similar wooden masks.

“Who are you?” the man asked in a small voice. Sarna, who could make a game out of perfectly imitating accents, placed his as from somewhere further down the hive - the old Skaltine city district, perhaps.

[Atrum Daemon]

<Quite the intensive guards,> Enki mused as he regarded the Guardians. <Zahir, help us deal with these. And be mindful of their rad-vents.>

Sova had given the Magos plenty to think on as his aid squared his shoulders and readied his staff to drain the energy from the Scyllax. Or at least draw their attention enough to let Enki get the doors open before blasting them apart. The Magos understood Sova’s point of view because he, in large part, shared it. The inevitable entropy of all things was a masterful part of the Machine God’s will. Even at its greatest state of disorder, the light and motive spark of the Omnissiah could be seen within the threads of the universe. Their brothers in the priesthood were blinded by their own convictions and confirmation biases, as Sova said. And those who were not, such as his dear cousin sheltered away in her Ark, were few and far between.

But it mattered very little, Enki thought as his grav-gun thumped out a blast aimed to cripple one of the advancing Guardians as his power axe cracked to life. It mattered little because the truth would win out one way or another. Those who were foolish, misguided, and naïve would be shown the true light of the Omnissiah through glorious conflict. Through blessed destruction. Destruction like what raged around them as fires consumed more of the port and as powerful electric blasts arced from Zahir along with his ranting litanies.

It was a glorious symphony. One that, in Enki’s presence, was blessed. Their ideals and their desires would be vindicated in the eyes of the Machine God.

In the moments after his grav-gun let loose its blast of crushing force to one of the advancing Guardians, Enki surged toward it with the intent of finishing it off by driving his power axe into the Scyllax’s engine. With the shielding afforded by the design of his body, the potential radiation vent of the machine’s death throes would be harmless.

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Enki Volkner, Omikron Zahir - Perinetus 

There was only one problem: the construct did not immediately die. Even crushed to the ground by the grav-blast, it tried to lash out with its segmented blade limbs. They shredded through Enki’s sacred robe, scoring and scrabbling at his metal body. One snagged under an armour plate at the magos’ thigh and levered it half off, before a second sweep of Enki’s axe bit through the Scyllax’s back. Enki’s vision dissolved into static as a burst of ionised particles bombarded his ocular implants, and by the time they had recalibrated the Scyllax was dead under his feet, bleeding smoke and sparks.

To his left Zahir had engaged the second Guardian. The fulgurite ran with electric light, arcs of power dancing around him like the streams of a child’s plasma globe. The Scyllax spasmed as its tentacle-limbs misfired under Zahir’s intense EM field. Zahir put one palm behind the guard of his stave, and crunched the blade end forward into the skull beneath the machine’s hunched shell. The holy half-cog splintered through bone and lodged in the electrics behind; there was a violent flash that dissipated into the stave’s glowing capacitors, and the Scyllax crumpled in a tangle of dendrites.

<Ave Omnissiah.> Sova intoned, and lifted his arc maul to point towards their next objective. The blast doors groaned, and then twisted and crumpled as Enki’s grav-gun was brought to bear. The crushed lumps of metal fell inwards with a ringing crash.

“Beautiful.” Sova canted aloud as the doors fell. He raised his phosphor pistol and put a hissing crater through the chest of a dumbfounded junior priest, who had been blasphemously pulling the wires out of the inside door controls in an attempt to stop them from hacking their way inside.

<The control centre for the orbital launch and landing pads is through here.> Sova transmitted over the secure vox, returning to the silence of electromagnetic comms so he could accompany the message with an updated map-image of the cosmodrome. <Beyond the security checkpoint is the generatorium. If we cause enough damage then it will slow their repair time for the facility by several days.>

The image before Enki’s eyes collapsed into a glowing line, then a dot, then vanished as they stalked along the dull grey corridor. Enki could hear the machine spirits panicking, and see the scarlet alarm lights flashing from every pict-screen. The red light was replaced by rotating amber as they broke through into the control room. Hastily locked cogitators still glowed atop brushed steel work desks, surrounded by paper and prayer-nut bracelets and all the usual paraphernalia of low-level mechanicus drones. Between two great charts of deorbiting vectors, workers in red jumpsuits where trampling over each other to flee through a door marked with the pulsing green of an emergency exit.

Against the unsightly display of baseline fear, a dozen tech-guard in heavy carapace and mirrored visors stood firm at the cardinal points of the room. As one, they registered the new threat and began to swing their ornate las-locks down from their shoulders. Before the long-barrelled guns had even centred, Sova had dived and rolled beneath the metal benches, blast pistol outstretched. His first shot took the nearest skitarius’ feet out from under him. His second and third exploded a pair of fire suppression canisters mounted on the walls, filling the room with choking clouds of dioxide smoke.

<I suppose we should kill them.> Sova remarked over the vox, as threads of las began to flicker and dart through the blinding fog. <Were it not the Deus’ work, it would almost get tiresome. Tell me magos, how many unenlightened sparks have you and your luminen snuffed out since you joined the reductor?>

[Atrum Daemon]

<You must be getting old.> The cant came over Enki’s private channel and drew his impassive face toward the smirking visage of Zahir. If Enki could manage it, he would look affronted.

<Excuse me?>

<You just let an automata, of all things, almost peel a layer off one of your legs! How long has it been since you actually engaged in close combat, Magos? Ten years? Longer? You are slow, so sayeth my observations.>

<It was a calculated risk. One that paid off.>

<Paid off how? In dousing you in rads and reminding you your form is, and always has been, complete shit?>

Enki’s rebuttal was interrupted by Sova, thankfully. The tech-assassin had a sound plan and a fine route to the generatorium, but Enki would make a slight alteration. If they were to truly neutralize the base, then they had to remove any chance there could be of repairing the power supply.

But that could wait, he realized, as their new quarry made itself known. The sight of the menials fleeing set off residual feelings of disgust somewhere within Enki. Such weakness should be discarded and so he commended the tech-guard who remained to attempt to slow their advance. But it was an attempt in vain as Zahir reignited his electoos and took off to engage. His voltgeists shrieked in delight as they deflected incoming fire from the Luminen who sent off a blast of electricity from his outstretched hand that arched between two tech-guard standing too close together. A third fell from a crushing blow to his skull that sapped all the residual electric energy from his body and his implants.

<Such work is never tiresome, assassin,> Enki intoned as he swung his meltagun to bear in his left hand and fired. The fusion blast all but cut one skitarii in half and a second pull of the trigger took off another’s head. <My personal account, not counting today, stands at one point two million sparks. The glorious days when I led my brothers in leveling cities that had fallen from the light of the Deus. Zahir keeps no such count.>

<What use is counting the husks of the dead?> Zahir’s cant cut in suddenly as he fried another foe into a charred mess. <They are already lost to the darkness and thus not worthy of any sort of memory or sparing thought! Those who fall before the true servants of the Deus are only useful as fuel for the righteous!>

In the height of his mania, Zahir was certainly less than the reasonable observer of Enki’s state that he was meant to be. Yet in doing their glorious work, Zahir could give no less than everything he had. He worried for his Magos, that was true, worried that his own pride would consume him to turn even against his new allies. But there was the spark of hope in that Sova was a kindred spirit in the glorious destruction they wrought upon those deprived of the guiding light of the Machine God.

<I’ll destroy the generatorium if I have the ordinance,> Enki canted as his grav-gun sent a pair of attempted marksmen flying back into a nearby pillar with enough force to pulp their organs on impact.

<Why delay the repairs by a few days when the potential outcome can be indefinite?>

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Enki Volkner, Omikron Zahir - Perinetus 

Sova would have smiled if he still had the muscles to do so. <I like your ambition, magos.>

The tech-assassin rose to his feet now that there were no more loyalist hereteks left to kill, and spread his arms wide as if seeking adulation from the corpses scattered across the room. Returning his arc maul to its sling against his leg, he waded through the thick smoke to straighten a cogitator screen that had been knocked off-balance during the fight.

“Ave Omnissiah.” he canted in machine code, sweeping aside the machine’s guardian program with a high-level command spike. Enki saw data streaming as a golden thread through the air, snagged by his multi-spectral optics as Sova began to take the Imperial machine’s knowledge for their own.

<I doubt we will find any records of landings that Delzharian does not already know about,> Sova confided, <But all information has value. Let us not delay.>

The stream followed them like a ribbon of light, flashing vox logs, supply rosters and auspex sweeps of Patriot aircraft movements as they left the smoke-shrouded control hub and struck out towards the generatorium. They met no more resistance - only screaming sirens and murder-red alert lights, and locked security doors that proved no barrier at all.

The generatorium seemed small for something that powered such a huge complex. Boxy air handling units rumbled, and refrigerator units cast whirling shadows across the walls from banks of fans bleeding away the heat from overworked cogitator cores. Foam-lagged pipes of hot or chilled water routed neatly round each other across the ceiling, and long square flues exhaled their exhaust gases out through vents in the walls.

A row of vast engines dominated the room, feeding heat and power out into what was left of the airbase. Several of the switchgear boards ranked up against the wall were blinking amber warning lights in response to the carnage the three infiltrators had already wrought. Not nearly enough warning lights.

A binary cackle escaped Sova’s vox grille as he spread his arms wide once more. “Do the Machine God’s work, my brothers!”

And in that moment, as if the motive force of the universe had heard and answered, something lit up like a beacon among the data that Sova was still downloading.

“Oh my.” the tech-assassin remarked. “Take a look at this.”

He locked a communion maser onto Enki and squirted across a data-packet containing a handful of the vox logs he was parsing. Enki’s implants sliced open the digital message and the high-level encryption within, and revealed a series of communications between the Perinetus loyalists and the crusade fleet moving in on Baraspine. The Imperials were requesting the support of the Machine God’s legions...for a strike against the hive world of Tranch.

Tranch - the Adrantis subsector’s third industrial hub, from which much of the Patriots’ war materiel was produced. And, more importantly, the meeting point of the fastest stable Warp-routes out of Baraspine and Tephaine. Take Tranch, and the crusaders would have a direct path to the Patriot capital.

[dakkagor]

“Who are you?” the man asked in a small voice. Sarna, who could make a game out of perfectly imitating accents, placed his as from somewhere further down the hive - the old Skaltine city district, perhaps.

Who are you? Killer or saint? another voice buzzed, insistent behind her ear.

"I'm here to clean house." She cocked her head, listening to the thump of artillery. The fighting was getting awfully close. Her window of opportunity was beginning to close. She fixed the man who had spoken with a glare, and smiled as he recoiled. She knew part of that was that she was unmasked, which was alien to him. She leant into it, looming over the pair.

"Tell me where I can find the safe room, and your masters, and I'll let you go. Otherwise. . ." she gently prodded the man with her sword, rocking him back on his heels as he crouched. "Your masters will need to hire new help."

The man swallowed, and looked like he had been about to have an outbreak of bravery/stupidity, but the woman grabbed his arm.

"Downstairs. They're downstairs. A wine cellar. One of the casks, it has a fake front. It leads to a safe room."

She nodded. It might also lead to an escape tunnel, or a trap. Certainly she wouldn't put it past an especially devious noble to tell his servants that the safe room was in one place, and then put it in another.

"If you want my advice, and you do, hide, and stay away from the windows. If you call for help, I'll gut you like a fish. Are we clear?"

They both nodded.

"Understand I am being very generous and if you screw me over, you will regret it for a brief and painful span of time."

They both nodded again.

Sarna turned and left them alone, heading back to the kitchens. Silver plates still festooned the floor, scattered by the would-be looter, and the door he had fled through led to a small landing with a wooden staircase leading downward. The servants had been right about the wine cellar at least, as she soon found herself in a chilly stone room, lit by dingy lumoglobes. Dusty bottles lay on racks by the door, and further in the room was full of stacked wooden barrels and an alcoholic smell. The bigger casks could have easily fitted a grown man inside.

“Hey Sarnie.” a voice in Sarna’s ear warned, this one channeling more benignly through her comm-bead. The vox transmission was fuzzy from her descent back into the interlevel below the thick hive floor-plates. “We’re in position, but don’t be too long. There’s something going on near the cargo elevators down the thoroughfare - I just saw an enforcer Rhino rolling that way.”

The back wall was decorated with mounted cask-ends, stamped with the names of what Sarna presumed to be very expensive offworld imports. Pulling experimentally on them caused one to pop off the wall, revealing a smooth circular crawlspace behind. Her small frame fitted into it without difficulty. A few metres ahead was a circular steel door with a wheel-lock, and opening it revealed a narrow stone vestibule and a truly ancient arch, the carvings on it worn down to an unrecognisable blur. The doors installed within the arch however looked new and formidable, and the dark wood was many centimetres thick judging by the muffled voices coming from within.

“Sir! Ma’am! The extraction team is here!” one voice came faintly, speaking in clipped High Gothic.

“Only one of them?” replied another, more apprehensive.

An unavoidable pict recorder glowered down at Sarna from above the arch. Next to the door was the grille of a vox-projector, which clicked into life and rattled a question at her.

“Can you please authenticate?”

"The rest are outside, covering the retreat route to the transport." She lied smoothly. Lies came very easily to her.

"We aren't going anywhere. . . "

Crimson Lacuna Crow Decimus. it chuckled in her ear.

"Without the authorisation code, I know. I wasn't given it. Let me contact my team leader."

She made a show of placing a finger to her ear and stepping back from arch, just out of sight, as she looked the door over. No way she could get that open without them knowing she was hostile, and she couldn't dodge bullets. She hated that the. . . thing had given her an easy out, a simple solution. But she didn't see another right now. She stepped back into view of the pict recorder, and looked up into it.

"Crimson Lacuna Crow Decimus. Now hurry, things are going to shit out there."

There was a pause, and the door began to hiss open. She tapped her foot impatiently. She hadn't been lying about time being of the essence.