Her helmet was full of blood, the lenses before her eyes a wash of red-filtered static. She choked, tearing at the neck seal with her remaining fingers. The helmet came away in a spatter of crimson and slipped from her grasp, rolling away across the scorched earth.
Hold still!
As soon as she was no longer drowning she found herself burning; a gourd of molten metal pouring down her throat and washing out through her chest. She couldn’t even scream - the fire had burned her lungs to ash.
You’re dying, the Tâin sounded close to panic.
Hold still!
Her scrabbling, bloody fingers found the snapped-off end of a blade - Kally’s bolt rounds had torn away part of her chest plate, and the lathe sabre had parted the armourweave beneath like cloth. Pink smoke rose from between her fingers as she closed her hand around the blade-shard and pulled. She saw her fingers trembling before the pain whited out her vision.
She might have lost consciousness for a moment, it was difficult to tell. But when the world blurred back into view the blade-tip was lying half a metre from her outflung hand, the glowing runes along its flat guttering one last time before fading out.
She could feel worms burrowing through her chest as the Tâin fought to reknit her shredded flesh. They pushed the last of the blood out of her lungs and up her throat, retching it out over her cheeks and chin. She used her first breath to scream.
Alicia, for the love I bear you, hold still!
It was still using her mother’s voice, and it was that more than anything that pushed her to get up, forcing her trembling, kitten-weak limbs to move with nothing more than the dregs of willpower and satrophene still twinging through her body.
She made it to her knees and slumped there for a moment. She was still in awful, miserable pain, but at least now biting her tongue was enough to hold it back.
“I told you,” she croaked, “To stop talking like her.”
The land around her was a hellscape, unrecognisable. The manticore barrage had flattened half of the terrain features, and burned the rest. Small embers of alba phosphor still glowed among the wreckage, hissing ghostly curls of smoke. The air itself smelled scorched.
Her hands were trembling - her suit too damaged to flush her body with anti-stimms, let alone painkillers. Three of the fingers on her left hand were bloody stumps, counterpointing the two cybernetics on her right.
I should stop making a habit of losing these.
Yes, the Tâin agreed as new flesh began to creep over the severed ends, forming new joints, new tips, new fingernails.
Please do.
Alicia looked around, blinking away the nausea that threatened to tip her over as she moved her eyes left to right in their sockets. All she could see were bodies, half incinerated by the missile strike: scrapped skitarii hunters and dead Nebulas.
Dead family. Hand over bloody hand, she crawled her way to what was left of Aronright and yanked the corpse’s sidearm from its thighplate holster, re-arming herself.
“Where is she.” she growled.
She’s a blank. I couldn’t tell you even if I wanted you to try and fight again in your current state.
Alicia punched the ground with her newly restored fingers. As if in answer, the caster in her discarded helmet began to buzz with static-lacerated vox chatter. She heard the short, coded blurts of Nebulas in action, hard-pressed by the Imperial counterattack.
I can still help them.
“Captain?”
The voice snapped through the air like a high velocity bullet. Tyria’s voice.
“Holy Throne.” And that was Sharma. The medic and the sharpshooter must have locked their armour down in time to survive the flames and overpressure, but it was still a miracle that they hadn’t been pulped by flying debris. “Amarok company, this is Striker Six, I have eyes on Striker Actual, she’s alive!”
Tyria’s eyes dropped to the bloody rent in Alicia’s armour, right over her heart. The skin beneath was already sealed, without so much as a blemish. “Captain?” she breathed. “You’re...?”
“It’s...” Sharma whispered, and Alicia saw his hand go automatically to his neck, where that silver Aquila of his usually hung. “It’s a miracle. It has to be.”
Alicia opened her mouth to object - or rather, she didn’t. She felt a pressure against her jaw, subtle but iron-strong, clamping her mouth shut. For a brief moment, panic gripped her.
“
What are you doing!?” she shrieked silently.
I’m saving your life again.
+ + + + + +
Her mouth was full of blood, and the lenses that had replaced her eyes were sheened with red. There was earth pressing down on her, heavy as a giant’s fist, and the air smelled like burning metal.
+Kally?+
She managed to roll her head, loose clay peeling off her face and falling onto the hard ground below. She coughed into it, a spatter of blood that looked like water against the dark red earth. Above her was a jagged slash of light. Somehow she had been thrown into a shallow crevasse, which might also have been why flying shrapnel hadn’t punched a dozen holes through her.
Somehow, domina Veiss’ servo skull had ended up in the crevasse with her. It was lying with its jaw buried in the ground, half of its cranium blown away. Somehow, it was still emitting a tinny stream of music. Its attack code broadcasters had been blasted into confetti, leaving just the
maudlin jazz tune for the damaged vox to twist into something slowed and discordant.
+Kally?+ Evgeni pinged her implants again, insistently.
+Can you hear me?+
Kally groaned, wriggled until she had one arm free of the clinging, heavy clay, and used the leverage to drag herself out of the muck. The hard-baked earth split and rained away. +I’m here.+
There was a pause, which she took to mean that Evgeni was indulging in a human sigh of relief.
+I cannot see you, but a recovery team is approaching the area.+
+Imperial or Patriot?+ She waited a few seconds - an eternity, she had learned, by the standards of mechanicus communication. +Evgeni?+
Silence greeted her vox receiver, but her aural implants filtered out voices; above and to her north.
“Auspex is detecting bionics, over there.”
“Where’s that damn music coming from?”
They were speaking Calixian trade-Gothic, the official language of the crusade. That had to mean Imperials. She managed to get to her feet, despite her body’s organic and inorganic protests.
“Here.” a voice called.
A pale face appeared at the edge of the crevasse - a harsh-lined face that did not look like it had ever smiled. The face regarded her with piercing black eyes.
It took her a second to place him. He had been one grim face among many, unremarkable among the ranks of armoured killers. Even after her extended time among task force Carbon, Kally would probably have passed him over if she hadn’t seen Ella flinch when he passed by. When pressed, the astropath had told her his name and mentioned that he had been her handler for three excruciating months. Back then, Kally had felt sorry for her.
Damyn Kazic. First posted to the ill-fated inquisitor Suffolk, then to the even more ill-fated inquisitor lord Sidonis, and now, by the grace of the Emperor, he was here. His eyes showed no flicker of recognition as they regarded her. Mind-wiped, she guessed; the inquisition never treated those who had served under a heretic with leniency, but they hated to waste good material.
So who did he serve now?
A black suit of armour appeared beside Kazic, its blue cyclops eye glancing down at a vambrace auspex before target locking onto her. More appeared, lasguns with underslung neutron blasters angled down.
Sidonis’ Quasar troopers.
Machairi had not picked up the remnants of Sidonis’ personnel - the ordos weren’t about to let a single inquisitor wield that kind of power again, let alone one of Sidonis’ former proteges - and Lucullis disliked the militaristic approach that stormtroopers embodied. So who had deliberately snagged a key fragment of Sidonis’ retinue and deployed them to the very same warzone as the blank who had taken him down? It was too neat to be a coincidence.
“Are you Kally Sonder?” Kazic asked. The sun was beating down like a hammer, but his voice had all the warmth of a glacier, grinding its way inexorably down a frozen valley.
Kally nearly answered, but her underhiver’s sixth sense checked her. There was something about the way the Quasars were standing, something subtly wrong…
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