"Where are you… you bastard… Emperor protect us… Lord Commander, guide us…"
Duncan was growing desperate.
His breath came in harsh, ragged bursts inside his helmet. Every step sent a tremor through his armor's frame, servos whining as they fought to keep pace with his frantic movement. The underhive swallowed sound strangely here. His boots struck rusted decking, broken plasteel, loose cable, and old bone, each impact echoing down corridors that branched into darkness like the veins of a dead machine.
He had already begun muttering prayers to Qin Mo.
It was not doctrine. It was not something the Ecclesiarchy had taught him. But Qin Mo had forged the wargear on his body, raised fortresses from ruin, and dragged men out of battles that should have killed them. If the Emperor worked through instruments, then perhaps a desperate soldier could be forgiven for invoking the man who had armed him.
"Lord Commander… one more miracle," Duncan whispered, staring at the flickering auspex feed on his visor. "Just one."
Part of him hoped there was some hidden function buried inside the device, some unmarked subroutine Qin Mo had installed and forgotten to mention. A wider scan range. A predictive tracker. A way to pierce the layers of metal, sump-fog, and biological noise smothering the ruins around him.
But Duncan knew better.
The auspex had never been designed for tracking missing men through a hive. Its intended purpose was uglier and more practical: post-battle extermination. After the shooting stopped, it identified bodies that were not yet bodies. Wounded enemies. Pretending enemies. Mutants playing dead beneath corpses. Anything with a heartbeat, heat signature, or biological trace that still required a las-bolt, blade, or hammer to make the battlefield safe.
Now he was using it to find Albert.
Still, he pushed on.
His heads-up display jittered with overlapping data. Structural instability warnings flashed and vanished. His augmetic eye corrected for darkness, smoke, and the watery shimmer of chemical vapor leaking from cracked pipes overhead. Old habitation stacks loomed around him, collapsed into jagged canyons of ferrocrete and metal. Corroded catwalks hung above like broken ribs. Far below, sump-water moved sluggishly through drainage channels, carrying ash, oil, and things Duncan chose not to identify.
Then the auspex pulsed.
A return signal appeared.
[Life-form detected: 1]
Duncan froze so abruptly that his armor's stabilizers clicked in protest. The bio-scanner refined the signal, narrowing it through interference, filtering out rodents, fungal heat-blooms, and distant movement from the lower tunnels. A marker appeared on his visor, then locked into place.
Exact coordinates.
A clear route.
Duncan exhaled, slow and controlled, forcing the panic down before it could make him careless. His hands tightened around his weapon.
"Found you," he murmured.
Then he moved again, fast now, but no longer blindly.
....
Two minutes later, Duncan crouched behind a corroded bulkhead half-eaten by rust and old acid rain. The metal groaned softly beneath his gauntlet as he leaned close to the edge. Ahead, through the murk of dying lumen-strips and drifting chemical mist, his target came into view.
Albert.
The regimental commander walked alone through the ruined passage, but there was nothing natural in his movement. His stride was steady in the wrong way, too even, too empty of caution. He did not glance at side tunnels. He did not check corners. He did not react to the distant bark of gunfire or the groan of stressed metal overhead.
He moved like a man whose body had received an order his mind was no longer allowed to question.
His eyes glowed faintly. A dull purple sheen clung to them, visible even through the haze.
Duncan's stomach tightened.
His first instinct was to charge. Tackle Albert, pin him, drag him back to the fortress, and let Qin Mo or the anti-psyker dampeners rip whatever had seized him out by the roots. Duncan's armor carried systems designed to blunt psychic interference. They were imperfect, but imperfect was better than standing here and watching Albert walk deeper into enemy hands.
He shifted his weight, ready to lunge.
Then he heard engines.
The growl came from a side avenue, distant at first, then swelling into a hard mechanical snarl that bounced between the walls. Duncan flattened himself behind the bulkhead as a squad of heretics on combat bikes thundered into view. Their machines were low, brutal things, armored with scavenged plate and marked with devotional scratches that had been carved too deeply to be mere paint. Their exhaust trails stank of bad promethium, burned oil, and something sharper beneath it.
They skidded to a halt around Albert.
One rider dismounted. She was bald, broad-shouldered, and clad in patchwork carapace armor reinforced with mining plates. Her skin had the waxy pallor of someone who had spent her whole life away from honest sunlight, but her eyes were bright with ugly amusement. A bone charm swung from her neck as she strode toward Albert and spoke quickly.
Duncan was too far away to hear her over the idling engines.
His visor compensated. The HUD focused on her face, tracked her lips, compared movement patterns, and translated with the blunt confidence of a machine that did not care whether the words made Duncan sick.
Text scrolled across his display.
["We finally caught one alive. Take him back. I'll use him to track down that abhuman freak."]
Duncan's jaw clenched hard enough to hurt.
Albert did not resist. He did not flinch, protest, or even look confused. When one of the heretics gestured toward an empty bike, Albert mounted it with the obedient calm of a servitor receiving a work instruction.
Every instinct in Duncan screamed at him to attack. The heretics were close. He could kill several before they reacted. His armor could weather small-arms fire. His weapons could turn those bikes into burning scrap before they gained speed.
But Albert was in the middle of them.
And Albert was compromised.
If the enemy psyker still held him, a sudden assault might force them to kill him, detonate him, or retreat deeper into tunnels Duncan could not follow alone. Worse, if Duncan misjudged the strength of the psychic control, Albert himself might become the enemy's shield.
Duncan hated the conclusion before he reached it.
He could not save Albert here. Not alone. Not cleanly.
He watched the bikes turn and vanish into the mist, their engines fading into the underhive's endless mechanical groan. Only when the last echo died did Duncan rise from cover.
His fists opened and closed once.
Then he turned back toward the fortress.
This was no longer a rescue. It was intelligence. And intelligence had to reach Qin Mo alive.
....
47th Regiment Fortress
Far beneath the fortress, Qin Mo was working.
The chamber around him had once been part of the hive's buried infrastructure, a maintenance vault or service junction abandoned by whatever department had owned it generations earlier. Now it had been reshaped into something cleaner, harder, and far more dangerous. Reinforced walls hummed with power. Cable channels ran in neat black lines across the floor and ceiling. Suspended hololithic displays turned slowly in the air, showing layered maps of the underhive, probable tunnel routes, psychic-interference zones, and half-completed calculations.
At the center of the chamber stood a machine of Qin Mo's own design.
It was not elegant. Not yet. Its frame combined scavenged sensor housings, modified auspex cores, gravitic stabilizers, field emitters, and components no Mechanicus adept on Talon I would have recognized without first reaching for a weapon. Thin bands of cold light moved across its surface as Qin Mo adjusted its internal geometry with gestures too small for an ordinary craftsman to follow.
The device had one purpose.
Triangulate the location of the Genestealer Patriarch.
Klein entered without ceremony, though he still stopped at the threshold for half a second, as if confirming the room would not decide to rebuild itself around him. He carried a fresh data-slate under one arm. His face was drawn, his uniform rumpled from too many hours of command without proper rest, but his eyes were alert.
"My Lord," Klein said, "Duncan has returned with a report."
Qin Mo did not look up immediately.
The words were enough. His mind assembled the likely chain of events before Klein finished breathing. Albert had left his assigned position. A Genestealer Cult psyker had seized control of him. The enemy had exploited the mistake quickly, which meant they had been watching for an opening. Now they had a ranking officer alive, compromised, and potentially useful as bait, hostage, or psychic conduit.
Had this been an Astra Militarum regiment, such a failure would have been an unforgivable disgrace.
For a Planetary Defense Force unit, it was disappointing but not surprising.
Qin Mo had no illusions about the PDF's worth as an institution. Brave men existed within it. Competent men, too. He had seen enough of them bleed to know that. But courage did not make a system functional, and the PDF of Talon I had been built by the same decaying logic that produced underfed soldiers, outdated intelligence, brittle command chains, and officers trained to obey plans long after reality had murdered them.
They were militia with uniforms, holding a hive-sized catastrophe together with lasguns, prayers, and stubbornness. That made their survival admirable. It did not make their failures mysterious.
Klein sighed, reading enough from Qin Mo's silence to know where his thoughts had gone.
"With respect, my Lord, I warned you not to expect too much from the PDF."
Then, out of habit as much as necessity, he asked, "What is our next move?"
Qin Mo finally lifted his gaze.
"Psykers…" he muttered.
Klein waited. He had learned not to interrupt when Qin Mo spoke in that tone. It usually meant a plan was forming somewhere unpleasant.
Qin Mo's eyes narrowed. "I need a cult psyker. Alive, if possible."
Klein's eyebrow twitched upward, but he did not ask why. Qin Mo rarely wanted anything without reason, and the reasons tended to become obvious only after the shooting started.
"Send Grey and Grot to clear out the extraction shaft," Qin Mo ordered. "Duncan's report suggests the enemy still has psychic assets operating nearby. I want one taken intact."
"And if intact is impossible?" Klein asked.
Qin Mo returned his attention to the machine. "Then bring me the head. Brain undamaged. I can work with that."
Klein absorbed that with the expression of a man filing away one more sentence he would never repeat in front of a priest.
"Understood."
He turned to relay the order.
Qin Mo adjusted a field emitter, and the machine before him answered with a low, satisfied hum. For the first time since Klein entered, a faint glint of anticipation crossed Qin Mo's face.
The enemy wanted to use psychic control as a weapon.
Good.
Then he would learn how the weapon functioned, take it apart, and make sure it failed when it mattered most.
....
Ten minutes later
A transport drone hovered silently above an extraction shaft.
The shaft yawned beneath it like a wound cut into the underhive floor, its rim reinforced with old industrial plating and warning sigils so faded that only the skull shapes remained clear. Cold vapor drifted up from below, carrying the smells of damp stone, rust, fungal growth, and old machinery that had not stopped moving simply because no one remembered its purpose.
Two armored figures dropped from the drone.
Grey and Grot.
They fell fast, but not carelessly. Their jump systems corrected their descent in short bursts, slowing them just enough to land without shattering the shaft's already weakened platforms. They maintained a two-meter separation all the way down, enough to prevent their gravity shields from interfering with one another. Qin Mo had warned them once. Neither man intended to learn the consequences by turning a battlefield into a physics lesson.
Grey touched down first, boots striking metal with a heavy clang. Grot landed behind him half a heartbeat later, his graviton hammer already in hand.
"I'll take point," Grey said.
"I've got your six, brother," Grot replied. His helmet tilted slightly as his HUD activated rear-view feeds and motion-tracking overlays. "Try not to sprint too far ahead. Some of us enjoy seeing what we're killing."
Grey ignored the joke, though the corner of his mouth shifted inside his helmet. He switched to thermal imaging and engaged his bio-scanners.
A single pulse rolled through the mineshaft.
For a moment, nothing answered except heat from old pipes, trickles of coolant, and the faint glow of fungal mats clinging to the walls. Then the scanner found movement.
Rustling.
Chittering.
Too many limbs against metal.
Grey raised his weapon.
The first abomination emerged from the darkness ahead, then another, then a dozen more. They slithered and scuttled across walls, ceiling, and floor with a speed no human body should possess. Their forms were grotesque hybrids of man and xenos: swollen muscle, pale skin stretched over alien bone, chitin ridges jutting through flesh, oversized claws flexing with twitching anticipation. Some still wore scraps of work clothes or PDF webbing, pathetic remnants of whatever human lives had been stolen to create them.
Aberrants.
Not purestrains, but close enough to make ordinary infantry die screaming.
They came in a rush.
Grey did not hesitate.
His twin-linked shotgun-las roared. The weapon discharged a spreading storm of searing light down the tunnel, each burst splitting into tight scatter-patterns that punched through flesh, chitin, and bone. The first wave came apart before it reached him. Limbs spun away. Bodies slammed into walls. One aberrant lost both legs and still clawed forward until Grey burned through its skull.
More followed.
Grey lifted his left hand. The augmetic was Qin Mo's work, black-plated and precise, its internal gravitic systems waking beneath his intent. He clenched his cybernetic fingers.
The aberrants in front of him exploded.
Not from flame. Not from ammunition. Their bodies simply failed under sudden, focused pressure. Chests collapsed inward. Skulls burst. Mutated organs pulped inside cages of bone that lasted less than a second longer than the flesh around them. Wet fragments slapped across the shaft walls and steamed where lasfire had heated the metal.
Grot gave a low whistle. "Still hate that thing."
"You say that every time."
"And every time, it remains true."
The bio-scanner completed its deeper sweep. Grey glanced at the results. His visor filled with red.
Too much red.
Targets crawled through side passages, maintenance ducts, ventilation gaps, ore conveyors, flooded lower tunnels, and shafts that should have been sealed decades ago. There were so many markers that the HUD automatically faded distant contacts to prevent the display from becoming useless.
Grey's voice hardened. "We've stirred up a Genestealer nest."
Grot looked past him into the dark. Red icons multiplied across his own visor until the tunnel seemed packed with ghosts.
"I can't even see the exit marker anymore."
Behind them, the swarm hit.
The first hybrid lunged from a side alcove, claws extended toward Grot's back. It struck his active gravity shield and stopped as if it had slammed into a wall moving the opposite direction. Its limbs crumpled. Its ribs folded. A heartbeat later the thing dropped in a boneless heap at his feet.
Grot moved forward.
His graviton hammer came around in a short, brutal arc. The weapon did not need flourish. The head struck the nearest aberrant, and the localized gravity field around it turned impact into collapse. The creature flattened into the floor with a wet crack, armor fragments, bone, and meat compressed into a smear no medicae could have named.
The shockwave followed.
Nearby hybrids were hurled into the walls hard enough to split plating. One bounced from the ceiling and landed twitching. Another vanished under Grot's second swing.
"Rear clear," Grot said. "For the next five seconds, anyway."
Grey crouched beside one of the corpses. Even through the mess, the differences were obvious. These aberrants were not identical to the ones they had fought before. The mutations were more severe, the musculature denser, the bone growth stranger. Yet beneath the xenos corruption, traces of human anatomy remained: a worker's shoulder width, a jawline, the shape of fingers twisted into talons.
Something had changed in the cult's breeding stock or biomantic process.
Grey activated his bio-sample extractor. The compact device unfolded from his armor with a clinical hiss, its design resembling Mechanicus field tools only because Qin Mo had understood that soldiers trusted familiar shapes more readily than unfamiliar miracles. A needle punched into the corpse. Internal mechanisms began harvesting genetic material, separating usable samples from cooked tissue, toxins, and battlefield contamination.
"Taking samples?" Grot asked while crushing another movement marker behind them with a hammer swing.
"Qin Mo will want them."
"Qin Mo wants everything. Heads, brains, corpses, scrap metal, enemy weapons, mutant spit—"
"Move out, brother," Grey cut in.
His shoulder-mounted plasma cannon rose into position over his armor, locking onto the tunnel ahead. The weapon's coils brightened, bathing the shaft in blue-white glare.
"We don't have time to clear this place room by room. We finish the mission quickly."
The cannon fired.
A scorching plasma beam punched through the tunnel wall ahead, not following the old passage but ignoring it. Metal softened, ran, and boiled. Ferrocrete cracked apart. Support ribs glowed, sagged, then fused into new shapes as the blast carved a direct line through the shaft's structure. Superheated vapor rushed back over Grey's armor and broke around his shield in a hissing wave.
Originally, the tunnel led deeper down through switchbacks, crawlspaces, and ambush points the Genestealers knew far better than any Imperial soldier could.
Now there was another route.
Thanks to Grey's intervention, a brand-new passageway existed.