Outside the window is a church, and as I prop my head up to look at its spire, a bit of sunlight slips through the clouds above, and the metal shingles and the effect is, well, quite beautiful.

I get up out of my bed, move across the cramped apartment. Even as the cups on my desk rattle, even as the floor shakes as I reach for the coffee maker, I try to keep the illusion. Outside it looks like a rustic little village, quaint, inviting. And I know that above the roof of this building, a gigantic spiked shuttlecraft is descending again onto the farmfields, incinerating everything in its path.

They're here for me, I think, that or for Linda. She's curled up on the bed, and I smile sheepishly at her. She sits up, pale-skinned, black hair, hand reaching out, ever-searching for a cigarette. She glanced out the window. The little figurines she bought off some natives jiggle along the windowsill, in a dance of their own. They topple into her lap.

"Coffee?" I say.

"Is that-" she says, still looking out the window. "Is that what I think it is?"

"That or we're under attack."

"Which would be worse, you think?"

Linda has the military background, not me. She swings out of the bed, stands up, naked, but with perfect military posture. She moves out of the room, and moments later, she's in the bathroom. I sip my coffee.

Outside the window, I can see schoolchildren running. I can't tell if they're excited or terrified, but the schoolmistress charges out of the church, grabs them and pulls them back into the church. Soon, I can see almost the entire town heading for the church. Hiding. This was a good sign, sort of. Is it were some hostile organisms landing down, they'd be heading for the rocks, burning the crops as they go. Hiding in the church meant the government was coming.

Should I hide? I wonder.

Linda comes back into the room, in full uniform -- honestly, she does have a great body, but it's hidden under the grey fatigues, swathed under the greatcoat. She picks up her helmet from beside the bed and turns towards me. "Should you hide?" she asks.

"I don't know," I say. "Depends on who it is, I guess."

My own uniform lies in a shallow grave on a planet light years away from here, crumpled up beside my old sword, which is buried in the throat of one of the inquisitors. I wonder, not for the first time, if there is anyone in this universe whose past isn't at least somewhat violent.

Let's be honest, though, some old habits die hard. My wardrobe is still predominantly white and black. Linda tried to make me wear green once, and it felt like wearing a forest. Nature is still suffocating sometimes, but I'm learning.

I get dressed. The white leather jacket is light. Linda's greatcoat might not look particularly stylish, but the thing has stop a bullet. This spring fare I'm wearing not so much.

Linda is reloading a gun over on the bed. I have no idea where she got it from. Under the bed? I've never seen that gun before in this apartment.

"Well," she says, having finished reloading. She looks up at me and I can't see if she's afraid; her eyes are covered by the black visor of her helmet, like particularly dark sunglasses. "Shall we go meet them?"

It's a short walk out of the village to the farmfields, and as we stride out of the town, I start to feel very exposed. We are the only two figures in town, everyone else locking themselves inside of the church, relying on the inquisition's respect for religion to save them (it wouldn't).

Golden wheat sways ahead of us, until the field terminates into black oblivion where the shuttlecraft burned everything as it touched down. I think the field belongs to Farmer Gerald, who is probably cowering either in his tiny farmhouse or is back in the church with the others.

There are three witch hunters standing outside the black shuttle, tiny figures against its towering spiked spire. I don't recognize any of them, which is a good thing.

Linda salutes and says, "Gentlemen, this is quite the gathering for such an obscure planet. What can we do for you?"

Three of them. Only three of them standing here. Where are the others? Where is their guard? Where are the weapons that should be bearing down on us?

The foremost witch hunter, the tall gaunt one, turns to his friend on the right, takes a sheet of paper from him and reads it, lifting reading glasses up in front of his eyes. "Commander Linda Barry, yes?"

Linda looks both uncomfortable and irked. The witch hunters never follow any sort of military protocol. The Imperial Guard would've handled introductions much more formally. "You are speaking to her, sir. And you gentlemen?"

"And this is your husband," the witch hunter says, glancing up at me. "We don't have his name on file."

"He's a civilian," Linda says, as if that's supposed to end the discussion. "Now, gentlemen, your arrival is interrupting my leave, so if you could--"

"Your leave." The witch hunter smirks. "Your finagled permanent leave, yes, I read the documentation on that. You won a bet, it seems, with the commissar Maxwell Find; yes, we remember. Maxwell Find is dead, Commander."

"Doesn't mean his debts die with him."

"Actually, it does. But -- ah, don't worry, Commander, we're not here to drag you back into the glorious service of the Emperor. Not entirely."

An uncomfortable silence descends on us all. I'm starting to feel the horrible sensation of being in my element again, which is horrific, since the sensation is coming from being in close proximity with this obsidian death machine and these three zealots.

The witch hunter says, "Commander, I'm not going to force you onto this craft because we require your cooperation in full, and since there are hundreds dead already, I'm not going to jeopardize that if I don't have to. Grimdire, if you please."

The witch hunter on the left steps forward and hands Linda an envelope. "Read that. We'll be here tomorrow."

And just like that, they let us go, and they go back into their ugly ship, while we get to go back to our apartment. Linda says nothing all the way into the village, all the way up the stairs, all the way to our bed.

I sit at the desk and she sits at the bed. Then slowly, she opens the envelope, and takes out a briefing report and a number of photographs.

"Oh god," she says.

The photographs fall out of her hand, hit the floor and scatter. Two of them flitter towards my boot. One of them depicts a tyranid, the photograph thankfully blurry enough so that the twisting mass of insectile flesh isn't entirely clear. The second photograph depicts a woman who looks enough like Linda to be her sister.

I pick them up and look up at Linda, who takes off her helmet, and looks like she wants to throw up into it. "Linda," I say. "Why them? Why the witch hunters?"

"My sister's, uh, a heretic," she says. "Been that way for years. Hiding from them."

"What do you have to do with it?"

Linda shakes her head. "I don't know. I want to go ask them but--"

I know what she means. Somewhere over this planet, in orbit, is one of the flying cathedrals the Empire uses, a wreck of black metal and religious fervor, cluttered with wires and steam. Linda was raised on a planet with trees and water and sky. I think her idea of hell is one of those ships up there.

She looks at the briefing report. "Tyranids," she says.

"Tyranids," I says.

"They've invaded Maze."

"A planet?"

"Trading spot, yeah, in the Ceres system. It's got, uh, it's got a network of tunnels beneath the surface, almost impossible to get around."

"I think we're missing the part about what you have to do with this, unless the inquisition have taken up the duty to telling people their family is in trouble."

"Well, no, that's easy." She sets the report aside and leans back, resting her head against the wall, eyes closed. I want to go take her into my arms, comfort her, but Linda never wants anything like that. She opens her eyes and looks at me. "I know how to get around the tunnels."

"What does the Inquisition care?"

"They want to rescue my sister so they can try her."

"So, essentially--"

"Yeah." She drops her gaze to the floor. "Either she gets torn apart by the bugs, or she's gets tortured by the empire."

"So what do we do?"

"Do you know what tyranids do to people?"

"I do."

"I don't want to get on one of those ships again."

"I know."

She buries her face in her hands, breathes in, breathes out. Then she gets up, and I see she's in military mode, face hardened. "All right," she says. "It's time to resume my command, I think."

"I'm coming with you, you know."

"Right, so you can get recognized, right? And then, oh yeah, and then you'll be taken from me and tortured by the empire."

"Well, that's the thing right? I'm not going to let you just leave and then go get torn apart by tyranids. Not without me."

"You want to fight about this?"

"Yeah. Yeah, this'll be one of those big marriage clashes you read about."

Without a word, she tears the curtain rod down from the window, whips it back, knocking the curtain rings from it and swinging it towards me. I'm already up from my chair, bouncing off the desk. I catch the curtain rod, twist into her momentum.

The two of us go flying through the door.