LITANY VI
"How by Faith did he escape the genestealers?" Sister Helen asked, a question that all the present wanted to know.
"That only he can tell us, if he lives. Call of a surgeon immediately and notify the Inquisitor. He will want to know. I think the more important question why is he here?" Gloria said, looking at Lady Morgana. There was that image…
The Lady, her gaggle of maids standing behind, afraid, did not batter an eyelid.
Sister Marie as already making the calls as Gloria had ordered.
"Sisters Marie and Helen, both of you wait here. Sister Helen, I want you to look after Lady Morgana and her staff. Sister Marie, as soon as either the Inquisitor or surgeon arrives inform me."
"Yes, Sister Superior." Sister Marie complied.
"Where are we going?" Rachael said, easily on par with Gloria's thinking.
"He left a trail of blood. We will follow it immediately; hopefully if there are any enemy survivors – I believe that the Captain was captured, the only way he could have survived that massacre – they will not have been able to escape further." Gloria said. "Get your weapons, we don't have time to don power armour."
Rachael nodded, another Sister exclaimed: "What?"
"That's an order, we have to move quickly."
A few minutes later Gloria and eight other Sisters, bolter armed, or a flamer in the case of Sister Rachael, had followed the Captain's blood trail to a wall panel that was slightly ajar. Cautiously the Sisters surrounded the door before swinging it open suddenly and bursting in, guns ready.
The inside was stone, dry and bare. Protected only by their faith the Sisters made their way down the corridor. Without their power armour they moved quietly and in a compact formation, stormbolter held at the hip in front, bolters over her shoulder.
The Captain's blood trail meant they could move fast. They saw the spot where the Captain could no longer carry himself on his feet. Bloody handprints starting where afterwards it was just red smears along the ground. They were amazed that he had been able to move at all in his condition. A true warrior.
They came to a staircase heading down into darkness. How had the Captain been able to climb it? They all wondered, silently, as they took the stairs slowly and their eyes gradually became use to the dim light.
The bottom of the staircase was reached without incident. Then Sister Marie's crackling voice came through Gloria's earpiece. Other than her weapons, power sword slung low on one hip, the communicator was the only gear she had brought.
"Sister Superior, the surgeon is tending to the Captain and the Inquisitor is here as well." Sister Marie said.
"Can I speak to him?" Gloria asked.
"Yes, Sister Superior. He is waiting."
There was a small delay before the Inquisitor spoke. "What is your situation, Sister Superior?"
"We are following the Captain's blood trail through a secret or emergency tunnel or some sort, Inquisitor. So far we have found no one." Gloria replied.
"Continue. It is safe to assume that the Governor and any survivors will be located in this area of the Palace. It is not on the schematics; I am having the warship's scanners turned to the area to make a new schematic and will sent it to you," Feordervich said.
"I cannot receive it, Inquisitor. We are not in our armour."
"Ex- you are in your… habits?" the Inquisitor was momentarily stunned.
Gloria replied in the affirmative, cringing, expecting a reprimand but there had been no time to suit up.
"Continue," the Inquisitor said after a short pause, recollected. "And be careful. You all saw what happened to A Company."
"Understood. I least of all want to suffer casualties."
The communication ended.
Inquisitor Feordervich, his crimson replaced with black and brown handed a Stormtrooper's vox back to the soldier.
"Take your squad down after the Sisters and join them as quickly as possible," he told the squad's commander and he saluted, then acted to follow out the command with haste. To the surgeon, his own: "Will the Comte survive?"
The surgeon, standing over the Comte's body now on a gurney, looked grim. "It is a miracle of the Emperor that he is still alive. He has lost a considerable amount of blood. I can keep him alive for some time; plasma is being sent from the ship as we speak. If it gets here fast enough then his chances are good."
Feordervich nodded. "Keep me informed. He has important information."
The Inquisitor turned his attention to the governor's wife next.
"Did you know of the tunnel?"
The Lady, seated and alone, her maids dismissed, shook her head. "I am just a simple woman, Inquisitor. My missing husband has full rule of the household."
"That I doubt, Lady. Nonetheless whilst your husband is missing and suspect of heresy, and worse, you will be confined to your quarters. You can have one maid as company."
"You are so generous, Inquisitor," Lady Morgana said icily and rose.
Feordervich hated nobles who did not risk their lives daily for the Emperor, like the Comte. Being female was no exemption. Many brave heroines served in the Imperial Guard or as spies, their high class allowing them access to places no man could penetrate.
After the Lady retired his psyker entered.
"How are you?" the Inquisitor asked. His psyker was an important asset.
"Better, Inquisitor. The enemy?"
"Defeated, mostly. The Governor and an unknown number of heretics are still unaccounted for. What of the presence you felt?"
The psyker closed his eyes and concentrated; the presence that the Inquisitor had spoken of had been the reason for his faint at the start of the battle.
"There is still something, shifting, changing, but malignant. It is here… I… I dare not delve further. It is too strong for me."
The shadow passed and the psyker opened his eyes. Neither he nor the Inquisitor saw Lady Morgana's shadowed face vanish from the doorway, slightly ajar. The Inquisitor's frown deepened. He informed the psyker of Gloria's discovery.
"I will follow her. You are to conduct a séance and discover the nature of the disturbance. The Tyranids are known to have a strong psychic presence."
The psyker shook his head. "This does not feel alien. And I cannot help but feel that Sister Gloria is in grave danger and a terrible fate will befall her. Yes also, the Emperor's Light is strong with her."
"She is a brave one," the Inquisitor agreed. "An asset to the Imperium. Your insistence to save her against the Orks was a boon."
The corridor branched into three paths. Blood only went down one but the other two could not be ignored. The objective was not to find where the Captain had been kept, but to find and exterminate the last of the heretics and genestealers. Dividing her small force was risky, time against them.
Rachael, Verona and took two Sisters each. The other two were to guard the diversion point and wait for the Inquisitor.
Gloria continued down the corridor that contained the Comte's blood alone. It was still fresh, sparkling in the dimness. Only weak lights in the ceiling provided illumination to the shadowed corridor. Between each light there was a dark, impenetrable spot and the Sisters always approached cautiously but crossed quickly, as if staying for too long would bring some doom down upon them.
There was a doorway, open. The first door they had come to. Possibly they were now in the heart of the secret base. Gloria unsheathed her sword, it glowing with a faint blue light, and entered the room first.
Inside was a stone slab. On it, spilling over, was blood. An impossible amount of fresh blood. Something sparkled on the floor and she bent down warily, and picked it up. It was a badge, the Eagle. A nametag with E. Yegenov stencilled on it. The room was where he had been taken. Otherwise the room was empty.
Gloria walked around the slab and slipping suddenly, almost cracked her head against the stone.
"Ah, what is this?"
Gloria was going to say blood but when she looked down she saw that it wasn't just. It was more. Much more.
"By the Emperor," she gasped.
Rachael led her group with a purpose. Firstly that she wanted to find the heretics, even though they were aliens, and incinerate them with her flamer. They had wounded her. They had killed many Imperial soldiers. They weren't human. And they had made Gloria mad at her.
It was all their fault, and she wanted revenge. Bloody revenge.
The two Sisters flanking her, Nicole and Emily, shifted their bolters around from back to front. They were good fighters and always in her sub-squad. They rarely talked, using a combination of hand, body and eye signals to communicate. They were her protégés.
The corridor ended with an ornate doorway. Upon it were all kinds of runes that made the Sisters feel sick. They continued, the foulness strongest as they passed through. The room they entered was large and not empty.
There was one tall well dressed man in the middle of a kneeling crowd of blue and purple mutants. He held on a leash a genestealer. It saw them and hissed hatefully.
Verona and her pair checked room after room. Most of them were empty cubicles, cells with dry stains and nail scratches in the stone. Others were storerooms. One an office with rolled up scrolls. The Sister opened one: it contained a table of names and the length of time held, cell number, and how long they had taken to die when tortured. It was grim reading. She wished she had a flamer and could have cleansed the room.
"Sister, I think I hear something coming," the Sister guarding the door whispered.
"Back in the room," Verona said quietly, picking back up her bolter. The three of them pressed their bodies up against the wall next to the door and left it open a fraction.
They waited for what felt like an eternity, straining their ears to hear before a sound did register. A shuffling kind of noise completely different to the clatter and scramble of a genestealer. Probably a mutant then. They would wait for it to pass so they could see and judge it before attacking.
The noise grew louder. It was inconsistent. There would be noise, then nothing. It moved without pattern however, it stopped at any moment, waited for a minute or seconds before continuing. This approach worked at the Sister's nerves, fraying them.
Silently they recanted litanies to calm their minds and stay their patience. Recklessness would get them all killed.
Then there was gunfire, bolters, brought down the hallway by the cold stone.
Gunfire!
Gloria's head snapped from the grisly remains she had slipped on. Thankfully tearing her attention away from dissected heart, lungs and sliced bowels. The heart, she had noted with bile rising quickly up her throat, was still beating if slowly, and the lungs pumping as if alive.
Bolters.
Rachael's group, or Verona's. Or the rearguard.
"Hurry!"
The sickening find was left behind, gratefully, and she dashed back down the way she had come. There she met the two Sisters on guard and they pointed the way the firing was coming from.
"Rachael," Gloria said. "Get Verona immediately," she told them one and with other Sister in tow, ran down the corridor Rachael had taken.
"Judge them!" Rachael shouted. Her flamer was in range and she wanted to use it.
The mutants scrambled for cover as quickly as they could. Rachael's consecrated promethium flame purified the mass in the centre, incinerating the flesh leaving only charcoal or black bone when the flames died away. Nicle and Emily fired on either side of the blazing fire sending more heretical mutants to the Emperor for eternal punishment. The genestealer and its master managed to find sanctuary behind an obsidian throne. Bolter shells ricocheted off it.
The three Sisters, looking even more holy dressed simply in their habits entered the smouldering room.
"Come out and surrender," Rachael said. "Your time has come."
"Fool!" the man behind the throne yelled back. "Look around you. Your doom will come now. The Hivemind will consume the Imperium slowly."
Rachael ignored the remarks. She moved to the side wanting to be able to flame the throne and the enemies behind it, but stay a good distance from the genestealer.
Two mutants rushed from their cover; Nicole shot them both down in an orderly manner. The others stayed hiding.
"Are you the Governor?" Rachael asked.
"That I am, woman!" he replied. "And so you cannot harm me. I demand arrest and trail, and protection from my wife."
"What is he saying?" Emily said.
"I don't know," replied Rachael. "He is crazy." Then louder: "You are in league with aliens and a traitor to the Emperor. I have all the authority I need to send your miserable soul to hell."
Just then the genestealer broke free of its restraint, wanting only to kill as it had been designed to do and leapt at the Sisters. It did not make it, burnt to a cinder.
"They were the only ones that could have stopped her!" the Governor screamed and came out from behind the throne, brandishing a long discoloured talon in both hands. Rachael flamed him but the fire washed around a sparkling shell.
"Nuts!"
The remaining mutants came out as well and engaged Sister's Nicole and Emily. Without their power armour the struggle was better matched. Rachael had to use the bulk of her flamer to fend off the Governor's assault but she was knocked down and he pushed one foot onto her chest, keeping her there. She snarled at him. He snarled back and got ready to thrust the talon down through her body.
But the talon did not fall.
A sword sliced through the air and smote him, shearing the talon in twain. The Governor's expression changed from one of hate to that of shock. How had he been killed? Should not have his field protected him from harm? His hands grabbed onto the blue glowing blade, gaining some answer to the fatal mystery. He looked away from Rachael, coughing blood.
Gloria stood there, arms out stretched from the throw, guided by fate and more to strike true. She waited without moving until the light expired from the Governor's eyes and he collapsed to the ground, dead.
The melee had not finished.
Devoid of a leader the mutants fought with increased ferocity. For them there was only death; to inflict before they would be killed themselves. With Gloria's arrival the numbers were near equal and slowly the tide turned against them as Verona arrived and after her ten Stormtroopers who barrelled into the fray, eager to impress, and armoured, better suited to withstanding the hands, claws and fangs of the mutants.
It was over.
All the Sister's were bloodied and tore at their habits to bandage each other's wounds. A Stormtrooper medic injected antitoxins and agents into their arms to counter any infection that might have been introduced into their bloodstream by the foul mutants.
The Inquisitor took that moment to arrive and look around with displeasure.
Verona, about to say something to Gloria, was overruled by the Inquisitor.
"No survivors?" he asked.
"No, Inquisitor. I had to kill the Governor, he was going to murder one of my squad." Gloria replied. She didn't like the look the Inquisitor gave, that such a loss would have been acceptable if the Governor had been captured alive.
"Unfortunate. However, the infestation has been dealt with and the planet now free of taint."
"I am not sure about that, uh, Inquisitor," Verona said, realising that she had just back-answered a very superior, superior.
"Sister!" Gloria exclaimed.
Verona felt it was best to continue before she was punished. "While we were searching the cell block we heard a noise and took refuge, waiting for it to pass us by so we could see it. It came close, a shuffling noise like a wounded person, but I don't think whatever it was, was wounded. I think it was patrolling. It must have heard Sister Veronica coming and returned from whence it came. We didn't see it."
"Could you tell if it was human or alien?" Inquisitor Feordervich said, stepping forward.
Verona's tale jogged Gloria's own memory and she cut in as well. "We found where the Captain was held, and what I think are his internal organs. But they were still beating and none of the blood had dried. It was fresh as if only just spilled."
"What? That is impossible, a man cannot survive without organs."
"I know…" Gloria said, suddenly feeling breathless. "I don't think that it was the Captain anymore – not the one we knew." Faintness was beginning to claim her, sweat beginning to bead on her forehead. Something… she felt, was happening. Something bad. Evil.
"Who was it then?" Feordervich pressed loudly.
"Didn't you feel something when you entered the room?" Sister Rachael thrust in.
Feordervich growled, he was not in charge. All these women were chattering excitedly amongst themselves like hens. Women! "Sisters!" he exclaimed.
"I did not feel anything, until now," Gloria said, pressing a hand against her stomach; it felt like it was churning and that she was about to vomit. It was a nauseous sensation that all in the room were afflicted by. An odour assailed their nostrils.
"Gas!" the Stormtrooper commander said and his squad snapped their visors closed. The Sisters had no such recourse and gagged. The Inquisitor covered his mouth with a gloved hand and that was enough for him it seemed.
"Look at that!" it was Sister Nicole who spoke, pointing at the black throne.
Which now glowed with a green, leprous, light.
"Inquisitor?" the Stormtrooper commander said urgently. "Orders, Sir?"
Inquisitor Feordervich reached into his tunic and pulled forth an elegant, viscous, pistol and took a silver stake in the other hand.
"Take your positions." He said simply. "For whatever happens."
A/N: What, no reviews? Are you all waiting for the finale, or is it just a load of rubbish? Or soooo good you're all stunned? Hoho. In this Litany things have changed, gotten better I think, than what I had planned. I like the unexpected, mind still working as I type. The next Litany(ies) will be gooood.