The Liberator's Day Off (Part 6)

My schola fencing master, Myamoto de Bergerac, had a collection of pithy sayings. The one that was foremost in my mind at the moment was, "The greatest swordsman in the galaxy doesn't fear the second greatest. He fears the complete amateur because Emperor alone knows what ignorant thing they'll try next."

Which was how a mechwright so low on the mechanicus table of organization that she didn't even rate the title of enginseer managed to get the jump on two combat veterans with decades of experience. Technically, as a mechwright attached to an imperial guard regiment, she *could* be considered a soldier. Still, the tech-priesthood has their metal heads so far up their metal fundaments that they're more likely to fall onto their appendages and worship a lasgun rather than pick it up and fire it at an enemy. In specific ways, techpriests are even more rediculous on a battlefield than civilians.

I supposed I ought to be embarrassed, but when the Emperor issued my soul, he forgot to include things like 'priding oneself on one's combat skills,' preferring instead to furnish me with an utterly shameless will to survive. Much to the probable dismay of my Schola, I never bought into the idea of a battlefield as a place to test my mettle or prove my faith. A theatre of operations has far more in common with the ignominious, bloody pratfall of drunken louts in a dive bar where everyone has forgotten to put away all the sharp things than the high, noble battle opera that propaganda would have you believe. What the glory of war and my reputation have in common is that both are legendary- in the sense of being widely believed and utterly untrue.

So when I swam to consciousness, I was able to save a considerable amount of the sort of time many a nobler warrior would have wasted being shocked at having been taken down by the lowest type of bolt-turner in the mechanicus hierarchy in favor of skipping directly to the part where my gibbering panic feverishly tried to plan how to survive being a prisoner in the hands of an amateur.

This wasn't helped by the fact that I was bound hand and foot, relieved not only of my weapons but, as near as I could tell, everything but my skivvies, and blindfolded. My ears worked as well as they ever did, though, and I mentally blessed my youth scuffling around in completely dark corridors in the underhive for the acuity with which I could still more or less map out what was going on around me through the sounds I heard.

My keen instinct for survival expertly filtered out all the ambient noise in favor of focusing on the ones most relevant to my continued good health and well-being: the worryingly ragged breathing of my aide and the off-key clangor of a member of the mechanicus clearly in a frothing panic, a noise which somewhat resembled a bucket of dropped metal bolts scattering across a hanger bay.

I tried to lay as still as possible, playing unconscious while still testing the limits of the restraint- and then the scraping, pinging noise of distressed metal and augmentation shifted as if every ocular, mechadendrite, and hovering piece of technotheocracy had suddenly stopped what it was doing and snaked around to focus on me.

"You're awake!" The voice didn't sound at all like a tech-priest. Mechanicus priests strive mightily to purge themselves of the weaknesses of flesh and things like emotional reactions to events, which means they talk in the most soporific monotone imaginable. Not this one, though. Instead, it sounded a lot like the voices I've heard what seems like hundreds of times before in my long and discreditable career: the voice of a grass-green Fracking New Girl (FUNG for short) on their first deployment, drunk on the panic of their very first taste of the burning rotgut liquor that is battle.

The closeness of her clanking convinced me that now was not the time to play dead, as air currents and other sensory inputs I've never bothered to examine too closely informed me that something desperate, scared, and smelling of oil and incense was now much further into my personal space than I would voluntarily let anyone that I didn't intend to have a rather pleasurable evening with later.

"Listen closely, meatbag." It was the voice of a young woman teetering on some edge, and I listened since edgy people two centimeters from my face while I am helpless in their hands is not something I want to give a final shove, lest they take me over the cliff with them.

Then she began speaking. Gibbering, really.

I won't bore you with the whole rambling pile of disjointed conversation, salted with terrified threats, seasoned with a few blats of binary and random morale-bosting quotes that seemed to imply that she had a very un-tech-priest-like habit of watching propaganda holos featuring commissars. It was my least favorite mix of experiences, being both tedious, ridiculous, and terrifying, three words which, come to think of it, sum up nearly the entirety of my opinion on war.

The only saving grace was that the mechanicus screwup with more than a few screws loose had A Plan. I will grant. It was pretty nearly the worst plan I'd ever heard, and with anybody other than me, it would have failed spectacularly three seconds after she had put it in motion. So I wonder if the Omnissiah liked or hated her, given that her leading theory for this whole situation was that the mechanicus clockwork version of the God-emperor had somehow blessed her efforts and gifted her with me.

Given that this was me we were talking about, I was going to go with 'hated.'

In any case, Mechwright Paverick had A Cunning Plan. She'd shot a commissar for signing an execution order against a trooper who happened to be her brother and had some half-baked idea of dressing me up in his uniform so that I could sneak into the man's quarters long enough for her to find and destroy all traces of the paperwork, thus saving her brother's life. Temporarily. Imperial Guardsman wasn't exactly a job with long-term prospects.

It was absurdly amateur in so many ways that it was difficult to count, but allow me to hit some of the more cogent points I quite carefully refrained from pointing out to the desperate mechwright.

Let's start with the minor fact that it was entirely unnecessary and betrayed a yawning gulf of knowledge on the part of the coggirl that revealed how most of her ideas about how the commissariat worked came from holovids. She explained- (half ranted, half sobbed with rage, to be more precise) that she'd found and destroyed the hard copy of the execution order and was now desperate to track down and destroy the other copies now that the commissar who had ordered it was safely dead in a regrettable friendly fire incident on this inglorious battlefield.

Executions in holos are solemn affairs featuring lots of official paperwork and are clearly penned by administrative adepts who must file at least one copy per finger on their (often digitally augmented) hands. The commissariat was NOT the administratum. In fact, the commissariat is violently jealous of its administrative privileges and, more accurately, its power. Keeping copies of things like execution orders that would then be managed and filed by administratum adepts would hand power to the administratum to an unacceptable degree. In addition, as a practical matter, commissars are on the sharp end of the endless war against the unholy, and we don't have *time* for frakking around with infinite paperwork. So the copy Mechwrite Paverik had already destroyed would be the only one- and the commissar would not have kept any other log of the affair until he reported it over and done with.

Second, Mechwright Paverik was mechanicus, a completely separate chain of command. Even if she had shot the commissar, the commissariat had no jurisdiction over her. Anyone who complained about it would need to petition the Mechanicus to discipline her for her behavior, and the odds of the Martians giving frack that one of their own had offed a meatbag...were slim, to say the least.

Third, she seemed to think I was also a regimental commissar instead of the arch-nemesis of the Damocles Gulf Ciaphas Cain, ruler of a hundred worlds and all-around traitor, scoundrel, and heretic-in-chief. I'll grant, at this point, that I'd managed to mislay my hat, sash, ornamental bolt pistol, and most of the prominent symbols of my office and allegiance. I will also grant that, stripped of those decorations, my clothing was very nearly the same uniform I'd had when I graduated from Schola, apart from a few seams let out to accommodate added muscle and a few buttons let out at the waist to accommodate enough of a reserve of energy that I'd be able to stretch my rations if I ever got caught up in another of Nurgle's famine campaigns.

Your standard regimental commissar would have agreed to do what she said right up to the point where she handed them the chainsword and lasgun looted from the dead and then sent her head bounding across the battlefield and riddling her body with lasbolts. What held for her being able to get away with shooting a commissar worked the same way in reverse, more or less: the commissariat was also an entirely separate chain of command, which meant that the Mechanicus would have to petition the commissariat to censure the commissar who had killed one of their own, especially when the Mechanicus in question was caught red-handed after killing another commissar.

Although, come to think, most commissars *wouldn't* be able to get away with it since there are generally far more enginseers attached to a regiment than there are commissars. The number of ways a tech-priest can make its displeasure known probably has to do with the number of mechadendrites they use to rewire your environmental gravity controls to crush you to death. But I digress.

Fourth, her plan to disguise my face involved me wearing a plague mask, the assertion that the commissar she'd shot never actually spoke aloud, and a few other refinements straight out of a variety show stooge drama. I wondered if she was one of the mechanicus that asserted that all meatbags looked alike.

All in all, it was an absolute tyro plan. To this day, I sometimes contemplate the idea of sitting across from Archmagos Paverick and commiserating in bewilderment with her as we meditated upon how ridiculously well and for how ridiculously long it worked.

I'd done the barest amount of bargaining- just enough to win the 'privilege' of being allowed to tend to Jurgen while the neophyte brainstormed her master plan in my direction and to take off the blindfold while I did. To my relief, Jurgen, the mechwright, and the headless corpse of the commissar were the only things in sight. We'd also been relocated, that much was obvious, into a room with a bit of cover- and the only lights available came from the tech-priest herself, which I used, as best I could, to look Jurgen over.

His condition worried me. His skull was cracked, and the mechwright had confiscated the majority of both of our clothing and refused to allow access to any of it, a plot twist that works far, far better as a contrivance in a holovid romance than it does during a desperate hostage negotiation on a battlefield. Her proffered substitutions involved the dead man's clothes for myself and a spare red cloak for Jurgen.

It made me nostalgic for Slawkenberg, where all the terrifying kaleidoscope of subordinates I had inadvertently amassed had the courtesy for their gibbering lunacy to at least be thoroughly *professional.*

"We're taking my aide with us. And his meta." I said flatly, wrapping his head and patching him up as best I could without any of the limited medical supplies she was holding hostage with my clothing.

"Why should I risk discovery with unnecessary personnel?" She said, a bit of mechanicus unemotionality leaking into her voice.

"Because he's my battle-brother!" I snapped. "You, of all people, should understand ties of kinship. He'll keep his mouth shut if I tell him to." In my experience, a little emotional blackmail never hurts when you're trying to get the response you want out of a woman, and I was secretly pleased to see it worked just as well as it usually does.

"That is logical. Very well."

"Pass me my medkit," I said flatly to the mechwright as she fiddled with my actual coat. "Right pocket, red case with the medicae sigil."

She opened the medkit, and I tensed, wondering if she'd spot the evidence of heresy, but passed it over without comment and with a dismissive flick of the mechadendrite. It still held three ampules of Panacea, and I injected one into the side of Jurgen's neck, which seemed to improve his color considerably, though it was far, far more worrying when he didn't immediately wake up.

I tensed for another fight over the melta. I had all sorts of reasons for wanting and needing it along, reasons that were none of her geartoothed business. Still, she blatted something in the strange, secret language of the mechanicus and said, "Such a fierce machine spirit! And you like this guardsman, don't you, don't you, lovely? Don't worry, we shall give you all the proper propitiations..." and she proceeded to whir and coo over gun like a mother Grix over a kitten. In all honesty, the melta seemed to be better off in her hands than Jurgen was in mine.

Jurgen was in no condition to move under his own power. That much was obvious. I was wracking my brain, thinking of the best way to carry him along until I could win free of this madwoman. The best solution, of course, would be to persuade the mechanicus somehow to do the carrying, freeing me to guard our backs and be able to dive for cover at a moment's notice. Just as soon as I persuaded her to return my clothing.

Which...turned out to be a solid no.

"You will wear the commissar's uniform." She said fiercely. "And I will put your garb on him."

I opened my mouth to disagree but found myself staring down the barrel of Jurgen's melta and once again decided caution was the better part of valor.

Mechwright Paverick was a terrible criminal, but parts of her undeniable mechanicus aptitude shone through the neophyte nonsense as she ceased brandishing the melta and proceeded with her plan. Her head bristled with a ponytail of delicate mechadendrites that she'd used to, with astonishing speed and undeniable skill, strip the dead commissar's headless body and, after staring at my mostly-naked form for far longer than was polite, proceeded to use several delicate tools out of her ponytail to make a few alterations. I worried a bit about the brains and blood splattered across the front of the uniform, but she had apparently noted the splashed viscera, splinters of bone, and other obvious tells that the coat had until recently belonged to the victim of a headshot, and did *something* about it. That something involved hoses and suction and greasy slurping sounds, but the upshot was it cleaned coat to the point where it merely looked as if the man who'd worn it had shown up and shown willing in a battle rather than died messily in it.

With Jurgen out of commission and entirely short on allies, it was becoming rapidly apparent that I would have to do my usual due diligence and set about saving myself.

Which is when I heard a noise. My head snapped around to face the source, and I barely had time to register the tendrils of flesh twisting and stretching like taffy, looming over the mechwright before the naked, headless, stripped body of the commissar bulged horrifyingly with an incipient demonic manifestation.

My battered mind had scarcely registered its presence before my body sprang into motion with all the haste of horrified realization. I dove toward the mechwright, and she attempted a block before my hand found my target- the hilt of the chainsword hanging from the belt danging in one of her mechadendrites. My other hand dove for the lasgun on the belt and managed to unholster it and snap off my first shot with the unfamiliar weapon before the warp-spawned monstrosity had made its first strike. The demonhost, though headless, somehow still managed a shriek from a new mouth in its bellybutton as I shoved past the mechwright, but by then, I had horsed the chainsword out of its sheath, thumbed the activator and began belaboring the thing with a will.

Without any other option, the only way to get the better of a manifesting warp entity is to whale the tar out of the flesh it attempted to warp to its will until it lost its hold on the materium and fled back to the warp. Fortunately, the former commissar's head had been obliterated. Still, the man had otherwise been in perfect shape, and the entity fighting its way into the materium was making horrifically good use of its reflexes. Paverik was shrieking and belaboring the thing with an array of mechadendrites, a downright serviceable display of showing willingness, I must admit, but I was grimly confident that the both of us were dead if I didn't do something soon.

I took a desperate gamble, grabbed the thing by a tendril, and pitched myself backward. It rolled forward with me, not quite having the full manifestation of warp powers that would let it do things like levitate and otherwise disregard the laws of physics. We didn't roll far- but it was far enough. Close enough to my unconscious aide for that most desperate of practical tests. Jurgen's newly inverted aura had been sufficient to bloody a psyker like Liar-haz's nose. Would it be enough to discommode a demon?

The unliving flesh abruptly slackened, shrieking even more hideously as Jurgen's newly inverted aura assaulted it. I clenched my fist, pulled harder, and then trisected the blasted thing with my new chainsword.

The thing, not living quite right, didn't die quite right. So I kept beating it and silently cursing before my far-too-experienced eye noticed the turning point of a daemonhost body dismantled enough to no longer support the entity infesting it. It bolted back to the warp, and I was left dripping, my stripped body and skivvies now newly soaked with fetid demon juice.

"I..." Paverick sounded shaken. "I needed that corpse-"

Despite the horror pounding through my veins, I was abruptly thankful the corpse was in well over a dozen pieces before I'd had a chance to discover what an amateur who cribbed the plans for her criminal enterprises from old episodes of Arbitrator Forboeding had had in mind for her foe's dead body.

"We will have to make do," I said. But still, it was clearly the moment to seize the initiative. "This is a demon infestation, Mechwrite Paverick; in light of the clear and present emergency, I will overlook your actions and accommodate your mission-" I borrowed a particularly corny line from the wildly popular classic war video "In The Emperor's Name"- "because my duty is to see with the Emperor's eyes." I was pandering to my captor and was nervously hoping that I wasn't betting my life that she'd seen *that* particular vid. "The big picture, Mechwrite. For those with eyes to see- the battle for Lantonia isn't remotely over."

I posed, chainsword dripping unflesh and ichor, splattered in demonic blood, and wishing I was stretching the point, but mortally certain that it would be just my luck if I were telling nothing but the absolute truth. "The battle for Landonia has barely begun."

The mechwright nodded soberly, and, just like that, I had her.

"You will need clothing." She noted and turned back to the project of altering the dead commissar's clothing to fit, which had been so recently and rudely interrupted by the dead commissar himself.

She was still, it appeared, grimly determined to carry out her plan, and at that point, I was willing to let her get away with it. Say what you will about Paverick, and believe me, I've said a lot over the years, but she had an eye for tailoring. The battlefield adjustments to the man's uniform fit well enough that I was instantly less worried I'd suffer the potentially deadly abrasions and blisters one gets from ill-fitting gear during an extended campaign. It would still be subject to a certain amount of chafing until I'd broken the dead commissar's uniform into my body, but at least I wouldn't be scraped raw after striding a single block. She appeared to silently debate over boots before finally passing me my pair. Good. I would need a pair of fitting boots to run like frack- preferably away from her, preferably sometime soon.

After putting together the rest of the uniform, she handed me the greatcoat, and I shrugged it on. The commissar's greatcoat was distinct from mine in that it had a built-in half-mask respirator that, after Paverick had commenced fiddling with it, fit fairly well. That's when I discovered the little frackwit, with the mix of cunning and gleeful ignorance I associated far more with the orks than the mechanicus, announced that she'd made few slight modifications to the half-mask.

When I attempted to say, "Thank you," I heard nothing coming from my throat.

"The commissar was mute." She explained. "He communicated only in battle-sign."

I worked my mouth and tried to let loose a *frack* this, and nothing came out. My vocal chords were indeed vibrating, but my working throat made not a single sound.

I began to take off the mask before I discovered what she thought was a second brilliant addition to her plan. "I designed it so that it won't come off. And I can hear you," the cogtwit said as my soundless mouth let loose a strand of profanity. "The collar acts as a vox, and you may communicate any needs to me. Until our bargain is complete, this will remind you to play the appropriate role."

"There's nobody to play it to but you!" I snapped, horrified at hearing nothing of my voice, not even in the resonant cavities of my skull. "Take this thing off!"

"If I do, it appears unlikely I will get it on again." She said, again with that mechanicus dispassion that was suddenly far, far more irritating than her panic. It indicated she was feeling more in control, more back in her element. On a battlefield, the only thing worse than a civilian acting erratically in fairly predictable terror is a civilian acting erratically with entirely undeserved confidence.

I had learned the basics of battle-sign in the schola and favored her with a particularly cogent subset of that vocabulary.

"Rudeness is unbecoming of a commissar." She said, glowing eye lenses narrowing. "The speech impediment device is also rigged to explode if you tamper with it too extensively. Please do not attempt to attack me, or I will set it off."

I abruptly shut up and glared. Frakking amatuers!

I then stepped back as she came at me with the hat. I skipped backward and brought the chainsword up in a blocking position, lasgun pointed straight at her as I fell back.

Now, I could *say* that I had a cunning plan, and certainly Paverik, to this day, will swear upon the Ommnisiah that my reflexes were instantaneous and my judgment impeccable.

I will swear upon my soul that I fell back towards Jurgen because that's what I always do whenever there's the least opportunity that I'll get away with hiding behind him, and frack me if it didn't work this time, too.

I had absolutely no chance to appreciate the absurdity of the spectacle of a rather short, obviously female, and utterly untrained mechwright brandishing a commissar's cap at a man fully two heads taller than her and armed with a lasgun and chainsword and succeeding in driving him back, given that I was the man in question. I wasn't feeling very well on my game.

Still, the reasons for that became quite, quite apparent when two- or rather, three things abruptly happened: both triggered by crossing some invisible line into the 'too far' direction towards Jurgen's aura. Too far, at least, for the nurgalite curses on the dead commissar's enspelled clothing to vanish like snow thrown into a plasma reactor.

And for those articles of 'clothing' to transform back into what they'd been before, some twisted genius of a chaos sorcerer had decided to get creative.

I saw what happened to the hat. Its crisp, imperial lines suddenly went as floppy as an unstarched towel, its bold red, black, and gold devolving into a greasy grey—the sort of greasy grey I recognized immediately from my underhive days.

I *felt* what happened to the 'respirator' on my face, and let me tell you, suddenly having a catachan face-eater hooked into my skin ranks up there in the top fifty or so 'most unpleasant experiences of my life.' It might even rank up in the thirties, right next to the experience of dropping my new chainsword and ripping it off.

It's pretty much the only way to deal with face-eaters, and it took a bit more than the top layer of skin around my mouth and jawline along with it. It also explained why my voice had disappeared- the predators have a sound-dampening mechanism that erases the noises their victims make while they feed. In any case, a blessedly noisy shriek of agony came out of my newly-freed mouth, and I shot the cursed thing with a laspistol and flicked over to full auto.

The thing about terror is that you can use it to override agony, at least for a few precious seconds that you can use to do something *useful.*

After blowing the 'face mask' into twitching rags of muscle, I shot the 'hat' out of Paverik's mechadendrites before it could even think about leaping for a face.

But- and I really, really should have noticed this before- mechwright Paverick hadn't been wearing the hooded red robe of the mechanicus. Or rather, she was, but that wasn't all. The hood was pulled down, drooping over her back. What I'd disregarded as just another red hood had been a sash. The dead commissar's bloody sash, tied around her head like a winter scarf on Valhalla.

And that had *also* been an ensorcelled catachan face-eater.

It was a good thing for the mechwright that most of her head and face were metal because, when the face eater tore itself free, surprisingly few parts came away bloody. But that's when I knew we were dealing with some absurd nurgalite hybrid monstrosity rather than true face-eaters because the bedamned thing did something face-eaters never do: unwind from one victim and leap at another.

The only reason I didn't blow the bloody mechwright's head off then and there was because I was too busy shooting at the enspelled commissar's sash, making another leap for my face- and by the time I'd gotten *that* one, too, the tech-priest had dropped like a stone.

Adrenaline is a beautiful thing, but I could feel the end of it coming up fast and the agony lurking behind it coming up even faster. I rode the wave while it lasted, crouching to snatch up the panacea and pumping an ampule into my own flayed neck. I felt the warm, surging heat of healing spread like fire through me.

Why I did what I did next, I'll never know. Habit, perhaps? Or perhaps the merciless training of far, far too many campaigns against this particular foe, where, with an unlimited supply of panacea, we injected everybody, including the dead, because sometimes they weren't quite there yet. I'd run countless vaccination campaigns, some at chainswordpoint, and I was as familiar with wielding an injector as I was with a chainsword, so my trained reflexes must have kicked in here. In any case, my instincts betrayed me, that's for sure, because I moved faster than my self-interest and reason and injected the last dose of the panacea on Lantonia into an enemy tech-priest who, for all I knew, was already dead.

Then I collapsed on top of her and passed the frack out.