XVII
COUNTDOWN
"The end is nigh."
- Magos Errant Thoromir Teest
Tyreon Dryd awoke with a heavy yawn. He rolled over, slipped out of bed, and stretched out his stiff joints, not particularly interested in the largely-uncovered woman lying beside him.
His tired senses automatically guiding him out of bed, he unceremoniously left his sleeping partner slumbering. The Tactician rubbed his eyelids as he reached for the morning mug of recaf laid out alongside his fresh-pressed uniform atop the dresser, then promptly squinted again at Lady Carthine Laelian's naked backside. He quietly considered her curvature – slender, yet well-rounded in all the right places, if a bit firm – before slipping out of his bedchambers, not willing to bother with his uniform in his lethargic and apathetic state.
Colonel Spiridon was waiting for him as he entered into his study in a heavy gown. The TASO adjutant rose to attention, and Dryd only put him at-ease after he had sat down behind his work-desk. "What have you got for me?" He softly mumbled as he brought his drink to his mouth.
Spiridon sat down across from him, and put down a data card before the Tactician. Dryd eyed it for a moment, before glaring at the Colonel with his groggy expression; then the Tactician sighed, and took out his data-slate and inserted the card. He sat forward as he read the file with some vague appearance of indifference, smacking his lips occasionally.
When he finished, Dryd sat back and let the data slate clatter against the polished wood surface of his desk. "So," he rasped, "the Eldar are stinging us again."
"Yes Sir. I saw what had been done to the bodies. I think it rather safe to say this means they're helping Raege," Spiridon explained. "Perhaps we should send this along to the Inquisition-"
"That would not be a good idea, Pavew," Dryd deadpanned, wagging the index finger of the hand gripping the mug. "We already agreed to make no further persecution against Raege. Any further efforts will have to be in secret… and the Inquisition must not be allowed to know of this. It'll only cause us more trouble."
"Then, I trust you read the intel report?"
"Yes. And I want efforts doubled in the way of that particular operation. I'd like to know why the Commissar is that far out." Dryd started to bring up his mug again, but put it back down, slouched to the side, and began to rub his chin as he concentrated on the personnel file to his left. "If she's meeting up with her unit's ship, she could have chosen a planet closer to Scintilla, rather than waste so much time going towards the Expanse…"
The Tactician looked back up at Colonel Spiridon. "Keep me posted. Have Kotryna's Cell keep a close eye out for Raege," he ordered.
The Colonel nodded. "And, Sir, one last thing..." He glanced over at the half-open door to Dryd's bedroom, and then leaned towards the Tactician. "I can confirm your suspicions. She's an Inquisitor," he whispered.
Dryd looked at the door, then took a sip of recaf. "Very good. Please, arrange an accident for her, then."
As Colonel Spiridon left, Dryd took a book from his shelf, sat down again, and began reading. Raege was somewhere else in the Sector, and all he could do – all he was obliged to do – was sit and wait for her trail to reemerge.
While orbital reentry had never been much more than simply tolerable for Raege, she found that the atmosphere of Faldon Kise made the tremble of the craft around her hellish. Such was the reputation of the world, a place soon to rival Gunpoint and Klybo in the annals of Calixian tragedy.
A single cycle between day and night on Faldon Kise took a full Terran year. When settlers came to the planet in the early years of M.40, they had found a world where the weather consisted almost purely of gale-force winds, with blinding snow blowing across the entirety of the dark side; the side of the planet exposed to the agonizing light of the bloated star was constantly subjected to scorching temperatures. To worsen the condition for those who lived upon the bleak surface of Faldon Kise, twice every Kisian cycle was a near-catastrophic event, where the moon traveled close and caused traumatic events across the planet's surface.
Few would have surrendered the relative comforts of worlds like Scintilla or Reth for so brutal a life; yet the settlers had been as determined as had those before them, the brave humans who had settled such horrible balls of rock as Barsapine or Nocturne. For a time the colonies on Faldon Kise had stuck it out, defying the uncaring politics on nearby Malfi which denied them additional funding to uplift their state of misery, and the uncaring nature of physics. The struggle of the people of Faldon Kise was admirable, and to some it was inspirational: more than one penthrift novelist had written works of praise for the Kisian condition - here was a world where man was pushing onwards in spite of everything the galaxy threw at him.
Of course, here was a dying world.
The people of Faldon Kise were simple, and given the planet's propensity for destroying extensive settlements, the number of large-scale planet-side communities had never been high, and so the world had never been deemed worthy of the presence of a Mechanicus authority on the art of astromancy.
When the world attracted the admiration of Magos Errant Thoromir Teest, however, the Tech-Priest's calculations discovered that Faldon Kise's moon had been in a decaying orbit since the colonization… and the next year would be the last before the moon finally clipped the world in its orbit.
Thus Faldon Kise was made aware of its terminal illness. Whoever could escape left; much of the colonial populace, however, was too poor to get away.
Raege – nor Levy, apparently – had been prepared for this development: the discovery of Kise's fate had come but a few months before the date Magos Teest had determined would be its final instance as a hospitable world; the glancing collision would incinerate the atmosphere, and would damage the Kisian moon's orbit such that the next pass would destroy both bodies. Worst of all, Raege had arrived amidst the final hours.
While the Commissar had wanted to evaluate the status of her crew before heading down to Faldon Kise, there was no time. Under any normal circumstances, she would have simply abandoned the prospect of searching for the Dread-Master here, but during the wait for Raege the Ave Maria's bridge astropath, Mirrielly Androkulth, had located a place in the largest settlement which she had first referred to as "festering with taint" and then elaborated to be a clear hideout of the ruinous powers.
Fearing – knowing – there would never be another opportunity quite like that, Raege had grabbed as many people as she could, and set off with instructions in-hand from Levy on landing procedures.
Shaking about in the undampened cargo bay's passenger seats, Raege looked over the faces: Major Lockwood, Jacobi, Freuden, Firch, and then Nada. Small, efficient – and with the Culexus, devastating to whatever warp-trickery Rymen Valendr might have at his disposal. Every member of the team had been sealed in their suits and equipped with some form of rebreather – the air on the surface of Faldon Kise had been rendered toxic by mass-volcanic activity.
The clock was ticking: by Teest's divinations, the collision would occur in less than seven hours.
And so Commissar Raege dived into what she knew was the dumbest stunt she had ever pulled.
The ground shuddered.
That in itself was nothing particularly new; for as long as Braedr had lived, there had been two constant routines to life on Faldon Kise: the weather, and the tremors.
The thing was, though, Braedr had never experienced anything quite like this earthquake in his seventeen nights of life on Faldon Kise. The plating throughout the dockyard screeched as the building's foundation shifted.
Beyond the safety of the dockyard walls, the sights were nothing like anything Braedr had ever experienced, either: the winds howled with a fury unmatched by even the strongest gust of the night months, and the sky was colored with shades of red that he had never seen before.
He supposed his grandfather was blaming this on the Commissar, half a sub-sector away. After all, his grandfather blamed everything on the Commissar. The Commissar was the reason they could not go home. The Commissar was the reason he'd gotten that nasty scar that ran down his neck to his chest. The Commissar was the reason the sun was even hotter than it was last day. Grandpapa Dom would cry himself to sleep whimpering, "It's all the Commissar's fault."
He had been that way, blaming everything on this mysterious Commissar, ever since Grandmamma Elyn had died - that was the Commissar's fault, too, incidentally.
Of course, now Braedr jokingly mused to himself that what was happening to the world might be the Commissar's fault as well. As soon as word had gotten to Helixa City that the world was going to end, there had been a mass-rush to get off-planet. Braedr's family had been too poor to buy tickets off-world – Grandpapa Dom had spent what little money given to him as compensation for his service to make it as far as Faldon Kise, and then he and his son had spent their entire lives just making the money needed to subsist below the mini-spires of Helixa City.
Then, a month previous, as the earthquakes began to intensify, a strange man in a beaked mask paid a visit to his family's hab. When Braedr returned home from his post at the PDF center, the man was sitting at the family table, and offered to get the rest of the family set up well-enough back on their ancestral home of Kuluth if Braedr would stay behind until some time during the final days and follow some simple instructions. Braedr had had no choice, but he had not been anticipating to stay behind until the very final hours of Faldon Kise.
That was also the Commissar's fault, apparently.
Klaxons went off all over the empty hangar bay; the intervox unit began listing off automated alerts, but its amplitude and the resulting echoes rendered the words completely incomprehensible.
"Brace for pressure change!" The masked man barked – himself a fellow wearing an ornate rebreather which hid his face, causing Braedr to suspect him to be the same fellow from the month before. Braedr obeyed him by clinging to a guard rail, and sure enough, when the bay door cracked open, the sulfur-laden air outside rushed in, creating a gust within the bay. The one grace of the fellow was that he had been kind enough to issue Braedr and the remnants of his PDF squad who stayed behind fancy hermetic armor of a quality none of the poor frontier-boys had never seen before, as the air was both toxic to the lungs and corrosive to exposed flesh or cloth.
Moments later, an Arvus light freighter flew in, and the doors shut behind it. The craft slowly came to a stop over a landing pad, and then put down with all the grace of a tumbling rock. A few bright sparks shot off a panel over one of the thrusters as the machinery slid open to cool down. Before the rear hatch opened, the masked man was already moving to the craft, barking orders over vox for a servitor to bring in a repair kit. Meanwhile, nobody seemed to care that the environmental alert was droning on about how the bay was inhospitable.
Something about the hangar became unpleasant and miserable as from the cargo compartment of the lighter stepped first a trio clad in jury rig-sealed Storm Trooper carapace; next was a shorter man dressed in hermetic armor similar to Braedr's but clearly heavier – it appeared to have been assembled from stripped-down parts of a void suit.
The next person off was a real show: dressed in only a tight synskin bodyglove and a freakish skull-mask, she left little to the imagination; metal wires looped from seemingly random points along her robust body, while a number of plugged cables ran from the base of her neck to her helmet. Simply looking at her made the skin crawl underneath Braedr's suit.
Last, it was another peculiarity that stepped off. Wearing a hermetic hardsuit with even less plating than her companions was a woman slightly smaller than the skull-masked one. Gauntleting one of her arms was a heavy-looking red power fist which did not compliment the fresh grey paint of the light plating across the vital parts of her body; holstered on her right hip was an autopistol with an almost boxlike build, and meshed to her belt was a number of magazine pouches.
The masked man who had brought the PDF to the hangar stepped up to her and saluted. "How long will repairs take?" She asked, her mouth visibly moving behind her helmet's visor.
"Probably an hour, judging from what I saw," the masked man told her.
The woman sighed. "Alright. Take it back up once it's done, and have another craft sent down as soon as you're up. Make sure that whatever you send has proper magnetic shielding, the Tech-Priests estimate that the current plating's quality will just fry the entire craft if conditions worsen as expected."
The masked man nodded, and shouted to the servitor that entered the hangar pushing a tool-cart – the cyborg's skin was visibly smoking, bubbling and spitting across his exposed flesh. The organic parts of the servitor's brain had gone into shock and shut down by the time it reached its destination.
From the rear hatch came another individual – the pilot, judging from the simplicity of her burnt-orange bodysuit. "Commissar," she said, attracting the attention of the whole group of arrivals, "need I remind you that you will have literally no way to communicate with us once we leave? You should set a meeting place."
Commissar. The word stung at the back of Braedr's head. He had never seen a Commissar before – was the Commissar one of the new arrivals, or the masked man?
The grey-clad woman spoke. "Send a craft down to this same bay then, Iya. We'll be back here in about two hours, hopefully."
The Commissar, Braedr realized.
The Commissar looked back at the PDF troopers. "Why are these people still on this planet?"
The masked man raised a finger. "They are here to provide additional manpower to your objective," he explained.
The Commissar shook her head. "There's too many, they'll just slow us down," she told him. "Send them up to the Ave Maria. We'll keep them there for a bit, and then decide what to do with them."
That last sentence made Braedr incredibly uncomfortable, for some reason.
"I do, however, have need of a guide." The Commissar looked over the PDF remnants; one of her Storm Trooper companions crossed their arms. "Who here would be best with directing me around the immediate area?"
Braedr sighed with relief, as there was no chance he would be chosen: Big Regar was the most efficient when it came to navigating the urban jungle of Helixa; failing him, there was Makir, or Kirl to show the group around. Braedr was simply not good with directions.
"Braedr knows the place best," Big Regar said, causing Braedr's eyes to snap wide open in his skull; he stared at Big Regar through his visor-plate with disbelief.
"Yeah, Braedr's definitely the best," Makir agreed.
"Oh yeah, definitely," Kirl added.
"He's got it down like the back of his hand," Little Namen said.
The whole of them pointed at Braedr and mumbled in agreement like a herd. Braedr's gaze dropped to the floor. "Yeah, fick you, Regar," he hissed under his breath.
"Ah." The masked man stood straight. "Trooper Braedr Hyll. Local PDF. Braedr, this is Commissar Raege."
Remembering himself, Braedr saluted. Curiously, the Commissar stared at him for a few seconds. "At ease," she eventually said.
"Very well, we shall get to work on repairing this craft. Best of luck to you, Commissar," the masked man said, and moved to take the dead servitor's tool cart.
Raege stepped forward, motioning for Braedr to follow. "The place is somewhere in the D-Sub-Block, in Kintros Block. I want you to be careful Hyll, because we're going after some men who are well-armed and very dangerous."
Braedr's head was now swirling, and a terrible nausea came over him - this was most definitely the Commissar's fault.
Outside the port, the shape of Helixa was quite unlike anything Braedr had ever seen before that day.
The sky was a deep red stained with yellow; volcanic ash blotted out much of the rising sun, but still the air was lit by the radiance of lava flows which had pressed their way up to the surface. In the far distance, lightning flashed almost constantly. A fierce, sporadic wind was blowing across the city, blasting every surface with sulfurous ash. Plumes of gas rose from the streets below the group.
"Lead the way," Raege said to Braedr. Lacking any choice, the boy did so, and took them across the wide crosswalk to a platform connecting with the final stories of a hab building.
"Where exactly is this Kintros Block?" Lockwood asked, scanning over the area with her hellgun aimed out in front of her.
"It's… ah, it's about a klick from here. D-Block is on one of the lower sections," Braedr explained. Realizing the mistake, he shook his head. "Wait, no, D-Block is the northeastern corner of it."
"So it's the farthest away from us?" Jacobi groaned.
"It'll take about an hour to get there if we use these walkways," Freuden noted. "At least another hour to search around, and then just under another hour to get back here. You sure there's no faster way?"
"As far as I know - no," Braedr told them. He had never really passed through the area often, and so only knew a few obvious routes around the region.
"We need to hurry. Travel between the surface and orbit is supposed to become impossible some time in the final five hours."
The Commissar's words struck Braedr – he finally began to appreciate the likelihood that he was going to die.
Somehow, the Commissar must have noticed his rising apprehension, as she placed a gauntlet on his shoulder plate.
"Calm down. We aren't dying here," she said, and then moved on ahead. "Jacobi, you take point. Lockwood, keep an eye on those corners. I don't doubt Valendr's going to have something jump us."
As the Guardsmen moved in proper discipline, Braedr noticed something peculiar about the Commissar's hardsuit:
On the face of Raege's right shoulder plate was a crudely-stenciled white nail-driven skull.
The Dread-Master slept.
He had been sleeping ever since he had arrived at the sanctum. They had him hooked to a life sustainer unit and tended him at all hours, for in body he slumbered.
Yet his mind – deep within his roiling subconscious, his mind was ablaze with activity.
The Great Conspirator came to him in his dreams; all He did was laugh and laugh and laugh at Valendr, as though the Dread-Master had humiliated himself. Perhaps, in some way, he had.
Yet everything went as He planned.
The Changer of Ways still laughed even as the Dread-Master awoke. His vision was hazy, sensitive with disuse, but he could make out the black and red-mottled armor of the Gore-Demagogue towering over him.
"You wake, my Liege," the Demagogue announced. "All goes as planned."
"All goes as planned," Valendr said, sitting up. "What troubles you?"
"Our sentries report a group of soldiers is approaching the sanctum."
"Impossible. Is this the day of days?"
"It is indeed."
Valendr glanced around - the heretek-priests were scurrying about, preparing his sustainer unit for storage. Valendr reached out with his mind, but could find nothing in the city which might be perceived as a threat, save the roaming abandoned animals and a cluster of humans at a nearby port.
"I know what you are thinking, and I must warn you they are using some manner of arcana to prevent us from detecting them."
"A null field," Valendr mused.
"She is among them."
Valendr's expression froze, and he slowly looked up at the Demagogue.
"The foulest lapdog Conrad Raege is amongst them, the sentries say."
"Why do we remain here? Did I not give orders to abandon this place if we were discovered?"
The Demagogue lowered his head. "I attempted to open the Webway portal just moments ago, but it did not respond."
Rymen Valendr looked around the room, and then let his eyes rest upon the doorway. Once the Gore-Demagogue had stopped speaking, the only sounds in his head were the distant echoes of the Great Conspirator's laughter.
"Send forth the Maleficir," the Dread-Master said. "If it fails to kill her, we are all damned."
"As you will it," the Gore-Demagogue said. "All goes as planned."
Valendr watched the Traitor Marine leave, the pointed tips of his Crozius bobbing with his step.
The laughter persisted in the Dread-Master's ears. "All goes as planned…"
The screens in the bay control tower lit up. Across each display scrolled the words "REMOTE ACCESS" as the cogitators booted up; the bright-lamps throughout the hangar snapped on, then the activation rituals began to awaken the spirits guiding the maintenance suites – such was the delicacy of awakening the Maleficir, for any participation by living beings would be disastrous.
The servos of the fuel injectors twisted, releasing their grip on the hull of the Maleficir, retracting into their dormancy cradles just as the gun-cutter's thrusters came alive. Entombed within the belly of the fuselage, the Maleficir's heart beat with renewed life.
The hangar shutters slipped open, allowing in the harsh air from outside – the foul taste on the gun-cutter's sensorium snapped the Maleficir into full consciousness; it flexed the axial motors on its wing-mounts, gazing out through the eyes of the nose-gun's pict recorder at the edges of its oubliette. The instructor cables relayed command impulses to the Maleficir's mind, whispers edging it forth from its prison to test its mettle, taunting it, agitating it.
The gun-cutter's rear-engines tilted backward into a sharp incline to send it upwards, but failed to get enough airflow to produce lift; in frustration, the Maleficir turned all of its thrusters forward, and rocketed off the platform, tearing away from the numerous still-attached diagnostor cables. The cutter's sheer weight and lack of speed combined to cause it to plummet, until the Maleficir attempted once again to fire the engines in take-off mode, this time succeeding just as it clipped the flagpole on a low-lying building. Each of the craft's six engines shrieked with a renewed life as the Maleficir rose up, above the tight confines of the hive below, and flew on to its target with an animal haste, for within its tomb the Maleficir hungered for carnage.
A tremor struck, and the wind picked up a new ferocity. Raege found herself having difficulty keeping on her feet as the force against her doubled. Dirt and soot blasted her visor, blinding her; she growled, and wiped at it with her hand, leaving streaks of grime trailing the edge of where she touched.
"This isn't going to be good if we're attacked," she said, looking back to Braedr as she shielded her face with her arm. "Is there any interior route nearby that we can take?"
Hyll's mind began to race for any string of information he might know about the area – usually, a block had numerous interior crosswalks for the months of atmospheric turmoil the moon's proximity brought, each block's maintenance system was planned uniformly, which meant that the passages in Kintros Block were identical in layout to the ones in his home…
He looked out, searching for any analogous structures in the buildings… and sure enough, he caught one. "There," he said, pointing off in the distance.
Raege looked, cupping the side of her helmet with her hand: sticking out from a roof some fifty meters off, connected by thin walkways was a shape recognizable as a bunker, strapped under the ribs of an Imperial chapel's buttresses.
"A local chapel. There's one on every Block. It's connected to the rest of the area." Braedr looked back to the Commissar. "That'll work, yeah?"
"There's nothing that doesn't require us go so far off?"
Braedr paused for a moment, and contemplated the ethics of telling a lie over revealing he had no idea where he was going – an expectant look back from the Commissar hastened his decision. "No, none here."
"Then let's get a move on," Raege said, and stepped forward. "I'll take point. Braedr, you move up with me, keep a couple meters back."
Somehow, the informality encouraged the PDF trooper; inversely, it concerned Freuden, who glanced at Lockwood in confusion, who then looked back at Jacobi. Hyll followed close to the Commissar while the others concluded they would be unable to determine the cause of the slip in the Commissar's verbiage, and simply moved in close and remained mindful of their surroundings.
Crossing to the roof acting as junction to the chapel and three other buildings yielded no harm, but as Raege stepped out onto the crosswalk she heard the damning scream of jet engines.
The Commissar's reaction was instantaneous: she glanced up at the sky, before realizing this useless given the lack of visibility; she then dropped to the ground. "Gunship, get down!" She shouted over vox. Lockwood and Firch had hardly needed the instruction, and were already on the ground by the time the Maleficir made its first pass; overhead the behemoth of a gun-cutter fired a long streak of heavy stubber rounds across the rooftop plating, grazing Jacobi's ankle as he tried to duck down – the Kasrkin immediately howled over the vox as the air began to eat away at his leg.
The Maleficir banked right, then angled its engines for an immediate spin-around. Raege rolled over onto her back to look up at the gun-cutter as it opened up with its nose-mounted autocannon in a strafing hover, ripping holes through the rooftop. The baleful chorus of the six jets lowered in pitch as it slowed down and dropped altitude, beginning to circle around to get a better shot at the Commissar and Hyll, the two of whom were just on the edge of the crosswalk to the chapel.
Freuden and Lockwood opened fire on the Maleficir with their hellguns, keeping low behind solid guard rails while Firch looked for a chance to slip into the open to grab Jacobi; as Freuden leapt up to fire another burst, one of the gunship's heavy stubbers, attached to a stabilizer hardpoint, swung backwards on its axis and fired at him – one round put a dent in his breastplate, while another tore into his shoulder plate and ripped the seal, causing him to hiss and swear as the flesh bubbled.
"Lockwood!" Raege shouted, ignoring Leebhr's yowling. "Run! You and Firch, grab Jacobi and get into one of those buildings! Freuden, Nada, you go too!"
"What about you, Commissar?" Lockwood said.
"We're going for the chapel," Raege told her. "We've got no choice!"
"We'll try to regroup!" Lockwood cried, slipping down to get ahold of Jacobi, who was curled up and clutching his leg in a desperate attempt to cover the decaying wound.
"Shit, Major!" The downed Kasrkin painfully snapped. "Can't… reach my… medikit!"
"Just hold on!" Lockwood shouted, pulling him away by the collar-locks on his armor; Nada had already slipped by through a hatch behind them.
"Get ready to run!" Raege shouted to Hyll, who was on his belly covering his head. Raege got up and sprinted, checking back to make sure Braedr was following…
The trooper was still prone.
"Braedr!" The Commissar screamed, and immediately ran back to him as the Maleficir repositioned to avoid hitting a construction lattice. Raege knelt by him, shaking his shoulder, glancing constantly to watch as the Maleficir's guns traced a path towards the two.
Raege clamped down on Hyll's arm with her de-energized power fist, and dragged him up to his feet as she ran back towards the chapel. "I'm not leaving you to die, trooper, so get a move on!" She shouted, and pulled Braedr along until he finally decided to start moving. The Maleficir opened fire on them again, its autocannon ripping apart the crosswalk as it traveled up towards the two. Raege, having released her grip on Braedr, activated the disruptor field on her power fist, and punched her way through the reinforced door on the front of the bunker, then let Hyll in before her. An autocannon round impacted at Raege's feet, knocking her back through the doorway, forcing her to scamper the rest of the way to safety on her hands and knees.