The Liberator's Day Off (Part 10)

Being a commissar is all about appearances. The trouble with being a commissar, as opposed to being the warlord and leader of a hundred-planet polity, is that instead of being seen to give orders and having subordinates obey them, you suddenly have superiors who can give you orders and you have to be seen to obey them.

I will grant that Governor Worden was not precisely my superior, but since I had turned down the opportunity to take his job and his people from him, that did leave him securely in the position of local authority. And since I had more or less volunteered to stay a simple deliveryman, Jonah decided to take advantage of that and send me hither and yon like I was his personal delivery boy.

I will grant that he did have a pretty good reason for running me off my legs. "Until you showed up all we were doing was staving off the inevitable."The governor growled at me in one of our small informal skull sessions. "we thought the Imperium had abandoned us to our fate."

"Hardly." I snorted theatrically. "The golden throne does not abandon the souls of its faithful subjects to the heretic." I frowned fiercely. "Not without one hell of a fight." As lies go, that's one of the biggest whoppers even I've ever told, but it's what the governor of this half-slaughtered planet needed to hear and so that's what I told him.

"Thank the golden throne for that." He made the sign of the Aquilla, then met my eyes soberly. "My people need to see you. They need to see that the imperium has come."

I could see where this was going, and I saw no way to head it off. "It is the duty of a commissar to see to morale," I said, as if in agreement. "What did you have in mind?"

And that is how, despite my desire to stay safely in the shadows nursing my aide, I got stuck on a publicity junket. I wasn't alone, which still warmed the cockles of my non-existent heart whenever I took the time to reflect on exactly how that had come about.

Parker and I had worked long and diligently on the propaganda film and had been invited to its first public showing with the Governor and a select crew of Newsies and Bugle readers. The film had drawn to its heroic conclusion, heavily focused on Magos AutoOctavius and his brilliant brewing of the panacea to both cure local citizens and purify the vast aquifer that was Viasalix's main water supply. The heroic music played, a few accolades and credits were proclaimed, and the applause in the little showroom exploded from the audience like a rolling artillery barrage. It continued for some minutes as the crowd of dozens did an adequate job of pretending to be a crowd of hundreds, applauding the movie, applauding themselves, applauding Magos AutoOctavious, and most of all, applauding their victory. I savored it, too, standing and applauding just as vigorously. The moment stretched for minutes that seemed like hours, the representatives of Viasalix unwilling to surrender the moment.

Then the governor himself appeared back on screen, entirely in character as J Jonah Jameson, Editor-in-Cheif of the Daily Bugle (helpfully labeled as such with a caption across the bottom of the screen), and the applause died abruptly as everyone realized there was still more. I was also surprised because this change had not been discussed with me. A frisson of fear twisted my guts as my instincts generated a hundred reasons why I might have been left out. The pictcast of the Governor sat at a very familiar newsdesk, staring soberly and professionally at the screen. "And here's the real blockbuster, folks. Parker. You're fired. The Daily Bugle needs a pictcaster a lot less than Lentonia needs its anointed son." The editor straightened his shoulders, and I abruptly realized that, by a subtle change of posture and shift in tone, Jona had gone from being J. Jonah Jameson, Broacaster and Editor of the Daily Bugle, to Jonah Worden, Governor of Lentonia. The shift was slight, but there, as if the man had just had another two hundred pounds of weight dropped onto his shoulders. As transformations went, it was a masterstroke, and the caption across the screen obligingly updated itself to "Jonas Worden, Imperial Governor of Lentonia." The man staring from the screen looked like he was entirely equal to the task. "I, Jonas Worden, Governor of Lentonia, am proud to proclaim and declare to you, my holy, hallowed citizens, beloved of the Emperor, that our future is assured. I declare my son, Peter Benjamin Parker-Wardon, my heir and your Governor-In-Waiting; my future, your future, and the future of Lentonia!"

My guts heaved a sigh of relief as I realized I was not the target of this little surprise this time, and I turned to stare at the Governor and at Parker.

I must admit, I will forever savor the absolutely stunned body language of the little twit, which mirrored the stunned silence of the audience as they were hit with that little stinger. Then they all turned as one to the Governor and to Parker, and burst into thunderous applause.

The Governor turned towards me, catching my eye, and I smiled in benign approval and added my thundering collapse to the cacophony in the theater.

I was fairly sure that Parker glared at me under that blue and red mask, but I do admit that he recovered from the ambush with remarkable speed and rose to the occasion. He waved an arm, then lowered it slowly, and I was impressed when the crowd obeyed the gesture and lowered their applause in tandem with the kid's arm.

"Lentonia has a future." His voice was clear, and carried well, and carried conviction. "It has a future thanks to the imperium. It has a future thanks to panacea. It has a future, thanks to my father. And most of all, it has a future thanks to each and every one of you."

He lifted his hand to the sky, and the applause burst forth again.

He lowered it fast, and the applause died instantly as all leaned forward to hear his next words.

"Lentonians! A Toast!" he raised a fist on high, and then another, and opened them both, and signed the Aquila. "To the Emperor and to the Future!"

Nearly all of that had been cribbed from a speech Jona and I had required him to write to mark the film's end. But not all of it. The best speeches were a collection of platitudes, yes, but the way you delivered them, the way you toyed with form and format to make it yours…that moved hearts and bodies. I noticed, in particular, how quickly he had inserted 'it has a future thanks to my father' and noted even more how suddenly still Governer Worden went as if he dared not move lest he burst with pride.

And I noticed how loudly the crowd roared its approval. My skill at reading the political currents had not deserted me, and this had been precisely the right move.

I especially noticed how vigorously a certain contingent of the crowd clapped. It was hard to tell, with everybody in masks and rebreathers, but specific mutations are hard to hide even in full protective gear. They knew, all right. They knew the Governor had just declared an open mutant his successor, and the open amazement and joy in their posture when Parker made his speech about Lentonia's future meant that they all believed, in that moment, that they would be included in it.

I really hoped that I hadn't set the lot of them to be exterminatused by some overzealous inquisitor. Still, even if they were, this moment had engineered for them a heady victory of the sort mutants in the imperium hardly ever got to experience, and if all my machinations had bought them was a few months of acceptance, well, sometimes in this galaxy you have grabbed with both hands and run off with whatever prizes you can get. I hoped those in the crowd knew the essential skill of grabbing what enjoyment and victories they could.

No good deed goes unpunished. Governor Worden still had a boatload of governing to do, the aftermath of a significant battle to mop up, the remains of the imperial forces to somehow find and make contact with, and an entire citizenry to cure. And so he was doing what I used to do with whatever insoluble problem was presented to me. He, like the excellent wartime governor he was learning to be, delegated.

Specifically, he delegated spreading Panacea to Parker, and detailed advising Parker to me.

Parker was all set to swing off the instant Governor Worden issued his directive. In fact, he had lept from the chair he had been sitting into the keystone above the arched doorway some twenty feet away and stuck there. He jerked up short then, as if remembering something, then called, "Let's go, Commissar!"

I raised an interrogative eyebrow at him from across the room and didn't move.

"What?" He said, confused, then leaped back.

I concealed my flinch with the ease of long practice. This was not the time to reflexively draw my lasgun and shoot, no matter how a mutant hurtling toward my general vicinity triggered my 'Gargoyle, shoot it now' desires.

Instead, I settled into a mentorship pose. "Are you ready for a publicity tour, Lord Parker?" I asked, courteously.

"Yes!" He was nearly vibrating with impatience.

"Is your entourage ready?" I asked. He paused, confused. He looked me up and down. "You look ready to me."

"It is a leader's job to appear ready at all times, regardless of reality." I said. "Did you check to see if I was?"

"No." He said. He started to say something, then visibly paused, took a deep breath, and, to my vaguely approving astonishment, came out with, "Commissar Fossick, might I invite you to a planning session for my upcoming mission of mercy?"

When he actually paused to think, the boy was quick on the uptake. He'd clearly realized that 1. I was neither a friend, subordinate, or follower of his and was not obligated in any way to leap up after and follow him wherever he went, and 2. These things needed a little forethought.

"That depends entirely on if there is some sort of recaf or tea," I said. "Forward planning is thirsty work."

"Let's use the staff room," Parker said decisively. "I'll show you which pot brews the best re-re-recaff."

The staff room was a wonder, one of those common places that grows when there's a set of norms strict enough to keep things tidy but spacious enough for the people sharing it to improve it. It featured several heavily modified recaf pots of the incredibly customized sort that had ritual and history and lore attached.

Parker demonstrated that he had internalized the culture of the biggest recaff pot by lovingly introducing me to it.

It had clearly started life as a samovar, but someone had welded three separate…hoppers? Feeds? Recaf brewers? To the sides, and it boasted a ceremonial manner of operation worthy of a techpriest ritual, for all that it was a completely secular act. Coffee pots have to be, since it's a rare techpriest that understands the mystery of 'taste' and 'texture' enough to get it right.

Parker was obviously an expert, and I listened appreciatively as he showed one domain in which he was the old hand and I was the new initiate. Every one of the levers and mechanisms made complete sense when you kept in mind that the whole system was designed by people with a minimal amount of recaf beans, very few sources of entertainment, and nearly unlimited time and expertise to lavish on one of the few sources of continuous, untainted joy that these people had prised from the entrails of a nurgalite infestation.

I had my doubts about whether the 'recaff' that came out of that collection of sacred tubing had any actual bean content after being filtered who knew how many hundreds of times. Still, it was obvious to me that this was a shrine, even if it wasn't dedicated to any particular god, saint, or emperor. It was sanctified still by all who had worked, reworked, brewed, and drank from its libations.

It made me reflect on what Nurgle had told me in our last encounter, about how I had cast a spell to summon him- or rather, the aspects of him that aligned with the dream of rest and relaxation, of moderation and play. I shivered, eyeing the boy, the acolyte working this recaff altar and wondered at the sort of god a man dedicated to the idea 'with great power comes great responsibility' could summon.

Of the existing ones, he seemed most closely aligned with the Emperor, a being of great power, yes, but one who clung to his duty, his responsibility to humanity, so tightly that he lit a fire so bright could be seen the breadth of the galaxy.

I imagined the kid before me, blazing that brightly, trapped that comprehensively, a vision of the future so horrifying that I felt the brief urge to smash the machine before it claimed everything Parker was or could be in an embrace as ruthless as the Golden Throne.

I didn't, of course. It wasn't even a warp-vision- just a fear-driven fancy. In cold hard logical terms, the great beasts of the warp were far more likely to eat Parker and all his ideals and ambitions long before he could be party to a sacrifice anywhere near as Galaxy-shaking as the Emperor's. It was far more likely his life would be wasted in something far smaller and more pointless.

My fists clenched. That was the job the Emperor, or at least the great apparatus of the imperium, had trained me to do: to spend the lives of those in my care with all due care. The fact that I was a hoarding miser with all lives around me, starting first and foremost with my own precious irreplaceable skin, didn't mean that I didn't see the duty in front of me: to jigger the odds as best I could so that whatever end Parker came to, at least it would not be pointless. Maybe I could use it to argue to Emperor that he should forgive a few of my transgressions.

The fact that doing it well could give me some sort of ultra-powered super mutant to hide behind in a fight did not escape me, nor the fact that apart from being a heretical traitor it was a duty I could practically do in my sleep.

Parker poured three cups. One for me, one for him, and one to place beside a votive candle in front of a wall of clippings from the bugle- and, with a start, I realized that all of the bylines were different, all highlighted, and not anybody I had met yet. People I would never meet.

A memorial. This *was* a shrine.

All right, you miserable excuse for a Commissar, I thought as I accepted the cup of watery recaf, and raised it to my lips in respect for the honored Lantonian dead. Time to, for once, do the job the Emperor allotted you.

Parker ushered me to a table and invited me to sit down.

"Well, Commissar Fossick," he said, preliminaries over. "You mentioned planning and not being ready."

"Yes, my lord." I said, "I-"

"I'm not 'my lord.'!" He said, half confused, half offended, and I concealed an irritated sigh in favor of taking his confusion seriously.

"I apologize." I said. "Does the Lentonian aristocracy have another honorific for the Governor-in-waiting?"

"I'm just Parker." He said. "Or 'Peter.'"

I looked at him with all due seriousness. "You are no longer a simply a man." I said. I still wasn't sure how old he was, but anyone willing to pick themselves up and fight Nurgle's minions deserved the title 'man' in my estimation, so I did not deign to diminish the part he had played. And that man deserved the following lesson. "You are now a symbol. You are the anointed successor of Lentionia. The hope of the future. A key leader- perhaps THE key leader- in this war. I am also not simply a man. I am a symbol. A symbol of the Imperium, delivering aid, comfort, and hope to the imperial Citizens of Lentonia."

"It would demean your accomplishments, your suffering, your perseverance, and, most importantly, that of every Lentonian who fought for and beside you, everyone who looked to you for aid and comfort in this chaos-tainted hour, for me to belittle you and yours by calling you 'Parker' like you're one of my privates I've assigned to dig latrines on punishment detail. You're not my aide. You're not a guardsman of mine. Except in the direst of circumstances, I do not command you. So. Governor-in-waiting Parker: if you are not a 'my lord,' how do I honor you and yours with a proper honorific?"

He looked…thoughtful. His face, of course, was unreadable through his gas mask, but his posture was an open book. I waited patiently for him to think through the implications himself.

"I must consult with the Governor." He said at last. "For this conversation, you may use my lord, but the situation here…" he waved his hand inarticulately. "'My Lord' won't…it won't hit the right propaganda target."

I nodded. "That's is part of your preparations as well." I said.

He nodded, and leaned forward. "What of your preparations, Commissar?" He asked. "You mentioned needing some."

"Yes." I nodded. "This tour will take me away from my people, and I need to leave Jurgen adequately cared-for. I also need Mechwright Paverick to fabricate me a proper respirator and a proper hat." I waved a vague hand at my currently bare face and head. "No Commissar worthy of the name would show up on a battlefield without a hat and a sash, much less on a publicity tour."

"How long will you need?" Lord Parker asked. "A day." I said, with certainty. In all honesty, I could have been ready in an hour, but I had no intention of being a fool who rushed in where Astartes feared to tread. "And please brief me on what you anticipate we will encounter on this tour, my lord."

He did.

"Most interesting." I said. "I will be ready in a day."

I spent the rest of the day settling my affairs as best I could.

I did spend quite a bit of time polishing up my command relationship with Paverick and Rolan. Rolan was simple enough. He had a longlas, he took orders well, and as long as you didn't mess with his sister he was the spitting image of a trooper with more bone than brains in his head. He loomed quite nicely, too, a quality useful in a bodyguard.

He was proving to be a dab hand with tending to Jurgen, being as gentle with Jurgen as he was with his subtly customized longlas. That quality alone was enough to settle my grudge for the stabbing. It wasn't as if I hadn't been stabbed before, and for much sillier reasons that his attempt to rescue his sister.

I also chatted him up and familiarized myself with the Kastrean 73rd as seen through the eyes of one of the Kastrean's low-level ongoing discipline problems, seeing as he apparently could not pass a uniform from another regiment without endeavoring to thump it. I collected the names, ranks, physical descriptions and anecdotes about who commanded the Kastrean 73rd, and settled the details into my brain as best I could. I honestly didn't see how I was going to bluff my way past an entire imperial regiment as Fossick, but sillier things had happened, many of them to me in the last week, and I still didn't have a better idea.

A bigger problem, and a bigger opportunity, was Paverick.

It was obvious all of the brains had gone to Rolan's sister, and the trouble with having an imagination and having been on a battlefield is that if you dwell on it, it can drive you quite mad in short order. Her recent stint with mind-control had left her fairly shattered, so I was in the position of duct-taping her psyche well enough together to stay functional. She responded well enough to my usual cure for traumatized BORG: work their metal tails off until their mind scars over whatever broke them. I'd dropped enough tasks to occupy eight BORG into her lap with the sinisterly cheerful phrase 'I have every confidence you will prove equal to the task' and frack me if she didn't rise to the occasion. Everything from religiously running rituals of maintenance on Jurgen's melta to repairing her battered augmetics to sewing me clothes.

One of which, producing a custom respirator fit to me that resembled Commissar Fossick's respirator, she interpreted as a gesture of confidence and trust that I valued and relied on her as a subordinate despite her recent attempt to mind-slave me. I refrained from telling her I had no other options and wasn't enthusiastic about throwing myself entirely into Lentonian hands.

In any case, I needed the respirator so that I could look less like Ciaphas Cain, the Black Commissar, and more like Ciaphas Fossick, humble regimental commissar of the Kastrean 73rd, and she was still the best fitted to engineer that sort of getup. I still didn't have a better plan than the one she'd made up, and she still knew what the man had looked like far, far better than I did. More to the point, she claimed he'd always worn a respirator and communicated in battle-sign. While I could claim that the Panacea had miraculously healed me, I had no idea how far the imperium had let picts of the Liberator spread, and staying masked and conveniently quiet most of the time seemed like it might be a useful thing.

The reason I hadn't detailed her to do it anytime in the past week was that the idea of another mask on my face transforming into a frakking face eater was giving me nightmares, and it was taking me longer than usual to soothe my body down from that trauma, especially since my normal soother, Jurgen, was still stubbornly unconscious.

For want of anyone else who had the necessary expertise, I had also detailed Mechwright to liaise with Doctor AutoOctavius. This decision brought me a flood of intelligence on the local mechanicus and a raft of new worries that I set aside as 'not my problem' in favor of delegating them to Governor Worden. The only component that was my problem was the fact that they were very nearly engaging in tech-heresy and the disconnect between orthodoxy and effectiveness was distressing the Mechwright.

The BORG had given me some platitudes to cope with that as well. "Tell me, Mechwright," I said confidently, "When you were initiated into the mysteries of the Mechanicus, did they tell you everything you needed to know at once? Or did they start with simpler mysteries, and slowly replace them with more complex ones?"

"More complex ones," she said, with a rather juicy sniff for someone without an organic nose.

"Were the simpler versions you learned initially lies?"

She thought so hard on that that I could nearly hear the gears turning inside her head. "No." She said , finally. "They were simplifications necessary to my development at the time." She shook her head. "I did not have the mechanisms to comprehend the complexity I do now."

"Do you comprehend the level of complexity Magos AutoOctavius is working at?"

"No." She said this with certainty. "He has decades of experience and knows mysteries I can scarcely dream of."

"Don't promote your problems above your rank, Mechwright." I said. "Observe, learn what you can, do the mission assigned to you, and leave command to those with the rank for it."

That was incredibly good advice, I reflected. If only I had ever been able to follow it myself.

But that all circled back to Jurgen. If I was going to go glad-handing with Parker, I really needed Jurgen given the best care I could contrive. And on that I had to rely on Paverick.

"What is your assessment of Jurgen's Melta?" I asked.

"Apart from the slow power drain, which you explicitly ordered me not to repair," she reported, "he is in fireable condition, although the machine spirit within is extremely partial, and extremely definitive of his gender and proper address." She said. "I can propitiate him, and that seems to calm him, but I've never administered rites to one as fiery as this one. I think he would only fire for your aide, or, perhaps, you."

"He?" I raised an eyebrow.

"During the rituals it was communicated to me that the melta has a gender and proper address." She rubbed a spot on the back of her hand absently, and I noticed evidence of a fresh electrical burn. "I must be cautious, because it dislikes me a great deal since I attacked him when we met."

I nodded soberly. That was Jurgen all over. Then something about her phrasing nagged at me.

Firable condition. She'd said.

"What is his overall condition?" I asked.

"76% operational." She reported. "The las-sight, ranger, and vox array are still completely disabled, meaning his longrange projection capabilities are inoperative, but his baseline function as a gun still works."

"Are any of those parts repairable?" I asked, squelching the slight frisson of hope that shot through me.

"Yes, with a few simple parts." She looked at me a bit oddly. "I disabled them with a focused polarity reversal the day we met. It's a simple enough repair, but it takes a few hours to remagnitize the bearing, and you told me not to."

I closed my eyes, and carefully counted to ten. Finally, I asked, "Are you able to determine the parts of the melta that are broken because you attacked him, and which parts were broken before you met?"

"Yes." She said with the certainty of an expert. "For example, the power drain you noted was a preexisting error. But the polarity reversal was a blasphemy against this machine that I committed. Maintaining small arms is my regimental specialty, and I owe much penance for my sabotage of this one." She gazed at the weapon. "He's very focused on this conversation."

"The spirit can hear us?"

"Yes." She blatted in binary. "The incoming voxlink is untouched. It's only the outgoing broadcast array that is demagnitized."

"Jurgen." I said, calmly. "Do you wish us to attempt this repair?"

The Mechwright's oculars widened in surprise as every light and indicator on the weapon suddenly blinked twice.

"He says no." She hummed uncertainly. "Why did you call the spirit the same name you call your aide? Machines don't usually designate themselves after those who serve them."

"They are very attatched." I said. I rephrased. "Jurgen." I said. "Do you wish me to attempt this repair?"

Every light on the melta blinked once.

The Mechwright stared at me.

"You…you're not a techpriest." She said. "Repairing this…you would be committing heresy."

I leaned back, suddenly very tired. "Mechwrite Paverick, I do not put up with subordinates that make my shoulderblades itch." I said. "you have a choice to make. The sort of choice that comes on all battlefields. The sort of choice when you run out of instructions, and superiors, and have to choose, without knowledge, without guidance, without rite or assurance or guarantee, that the road you take will be the righteous one. A choice of faith. You made such a choice before, when you chose your brother over the commissar."

I took the melta gently from her mechadendrites, and passed her my lasgun. "If you truly think I'm committing heresy, you know what the penalty is. This lasgun needs some routine maintenance. I'm going to take a nap in that chair right there. Wake me up in half an hour. When you do, you will have chosen which path of faith to follow. You will have chosen to follow my orders. You will have chosen to teach me how to repair this melta. Or you will have chosen to shoot me in my sleep for heresy. A conscious choice is your human birthright. Make your choice and frakking well live with it."

She stared at me. "Would I succeed if I tried to shoot you?" She said.

"Maybe, maybe not. Tests of faith are rarely fair." I yawned, then settled back in the chair, clutching the melta to me.

I didn't sleep, of course, but I can sham it very well when I need to. I listened meditatively for any sign the Mechwright would fire the lasgun. The fact that she did a complete ritual of maintenance reassured me, as did the sound of her setting it down with a gentle 'thunk.' Growing up in an underhive means I have a very clear idea of what's around me based on the sounds I hear.

As I did, I meditated upon the nature of choice myself. I made choices all the time- usually horrifically self-interested ones, since mine was a coward's conscience, the conscience of a sumprat scuttling through a gutter pipe. I was my own rat. My choices were mine, damn it. I had never been interested in bargaining them away to any power for any amount of power. Not even to the Emperor. I expected to be called to account for my choices one day, but the one thing I could say before the Golden Throne was that my choices were mine." I hugged the melta to my cheek and waited to see the consequences of this choice play out.

Paverick woke me up precisely half an hour later. I went to the staff room, and secured two cups of re-re-recaff. I returned, and sipped one in hope. I set the other aside, a promise of even greater hope. Then I very, very carefully listened as Mechwright Paverick very very carefully instructed me how to remagnatize the incoming vox array. I followed her instructions to the letter.

When I made the final inversion and slotted the array back into place, Jurgen woke up.

I smiled, and handed him a recaf, and said, "Welcome back, Jurgen."