Jogging and coughing it didn't take long for them to reach the rally point. Estevez and another trooper secured the door to a small side chamber which was lit by some temporary lumens. Two other troopers inside checked their weapons, one of them had taken off her helmet and was tending to her plasma gun. Her dark eyes seemed to swim in the hazy air in coming off the weapon's coils. Jhon walked in with Mesarine and saw the disappointment on their faces that neither Alain nor Cuthbert were with them. This was all that was left, five squads in two Valkyries had been reduced to six troopers. Six troopers against what still must be hundreds of cultists and genestealer Xenos beasts. Jhon took off his vox unit and set it down, always carefully laying out the floor covering for it first. Then he had Mesarine both collapsed against the wall exhausted.
The troopers asked about Cuthbert and Alain, Mesarine said nothing and Jhon just slowly shook his head. They had given their lives to hold the line and that, as Jhon had always grown up knowing, was all any of us needed to have done our duty to the Imperium. Ever dispassionate, Mesarine spoke with the remaining survivors without looking up from her dataslate "We have new mission parameters. Brigadier Carruthers and I were briefed on secondary objectives which were to be actioned in the event that Objective Alpha could not be achieved. Jhon, step away from that wall". As he did so an innocuous wall of arcane machinery slipped aside and the hooded form of Adept 87Quark emerged out of the darkness.
"The Adept has had other business to attend to", Mesarine continued as if the Adept's presence should have been entirely expected "we are going to escort him into the local Mechanicum enclave and then return to the exfiltration point. This is now our primary objective. Does anyone have any questions?" There had been no vox from high command, so Mesarine must have already had these orders. It made sense now, the Adept hadn't been assigned to the mission to supply technical support. The force of Scions had always been his escort, and for some reason it had been kept a secret. It wasn't the first time that he had been lied to by his superiors, but this mission was already fucked and hidden agendas weren't going to make it any easier.
When the Tech Adept spoke his voice was entirely synthesized and came from an augmitter somewhere in his overly elongated abdomen. "There is a Biologis facility in this building. The resident Magos Genetor must either be recovered or his data-core and neo-cortex destroyed. The Forgeworld lost contact with the local Skitarii Alpha 3 cycles ago, therefore your unit is considered to be the next most viable resource. Your survival estimate is 3.76%. This is acceptable." Jhon didn't understand the reason that the priest had felt it necessary to impart the last piece of information. It hadn't seemed to have any effect on Mesarine, instead she simply signed for them to move out, heedless of the fatigue they all still felt, after only the briefest of rest periods.
They moved out at double time away from the blocked passageway and further down into the Alcazar. At Estevez's instruction Mesarine ordered them to kill their lumens, which plunged them into almost total darkness. Their lenses lit up in a dirty yellow glow and allowed them to still see a grainy image. Jhon hoped that the darkness would hamper the legions of cultists who must be swarming around the Alcazar, but he knew that it would do nothing to hamper the purebred killing machine that was a Genestealer.
They were lucky that none of those spidery killers emerged from the dark walls. However they were harassed the whole way along their route. Periodically parties of the deranged cultists emerged from side tunnels, most with grimy mining lamps sweeping from side to side, hunting down the intruders. These hunting parties did not cause the Scions too much of a problem. Instead they were put down quickly with only a few rounds of Hellgun fire. Occasionally the targets did manage to fire off a few autogun rounds but these harmlessly ricocheted. One of their mutated kind even managed to loose a glut of promethium from an industrial flamer before Jhon put a Lance beam through its forehead. They tried not to make use of their plasma gun; the weapon was running hot and was potentially unstable. Jhon knew that the machine spirits of plasma weapons were always temperamental, his Mechanicum training made him want to sooth it.