Chapter 6: Cold Front
The snow was getting heavier. The distant artillery that had been a hollow background presence since they left the hill was falling silent in fits and starts, rounds coming further apart now.
Duvette leaned against the cold wood of the granary wall and bit into the field ration.
The compressed rectangular block dissolved slowly in his mouth. It had no flavor. It had a texture that he was choosing not to think about too hard.
He chewed, considered what on this world or any other could possibly have been used to produce this substance, and turned his attention to the soldiers resting in huddles on the granary floor.
Forty-three had left the trench.
Thirty-seven remained.
The last ritual site had been a different scale from the others. The enemy there had not been armed with improvised weapons and scavenged firearms. They had encountered local PDF defectors in standard-issue armour, and the site had been anchored by a light vehicle mounting a heavy stubber.
He had spent the hundred Emperor's Wrath from the perfect ambush reward on the second passive ability in the Iron Discipline branch before the assault.
[Forced March (Beginner)]
[Slightly reduces the negative effects of harsh weather on troop morale and physical endurance. Slightly reduces supply consumption for legion members. Movement speed bonus in complex terrain.]
That had helped. The cold had bitten less deeply, and they had been able to maneuver through the snowdrifts more effectively than the enemy expected. The firefight had still been brutal.
Six of his soldiers were in the snow outside that last village. Three more were in the granary corner with serious wounds, the medic cutting away frozen bandages to replace them with what he had left. The coagulant gel was gone. He was using cloth strips bound as tight as they would go. Duvette knew what that meant for those three men's odds in this weather.
He had brought them anyway.
He remembered the names of the six who had not made it. The loss of each one settled somewhere that had started to accumulate weight.
It reminded him of losing a warband of veteran soldiers in a single engagement in a game he used to play, back when losing something meant reloading a save. The thought of that particular comparison made him feel worse, not better. He was not going to let this keep happening. He understood perfectly well that in this universe, that resolution might be wishful thinking. He held it anyway.
Across the granary, Stroud was sitting on a hay pile cursing quietly and continuously at the food, the weather, and the cultists in no particular order.
"Enough, Stroud."
The bald lieutenant shut his mouth immediately. He took a particularly aggressive bite of his ration block, apparently working out his frustrations on it. Then something caught his attention. He came off the hay pile in one movement and disappeared behind a pile of rubbish stacked against the far wall.
He reappeared holding two glass bottles of something unidentified, grinning at the room. "Would you look at that. Come on, brothers, let us have a drink and warm up. To our fallen, may they find their rest at the Golden Throne."
Duvette finally looked up. "Put them back, Stroud."
The grin went away. Stroud looked at the bottles with genuine grief, then disappeared behind the rubbish pile again.
Duvette pulled up the company status overlay.
[Current Command: Ash Watchers, 101st Regiment, 6th Company]
[Remaining Strength: 37 (including 3 seriously wounded)] [Company Experience: Veteran]
[Overall Supply: 25%] [Overall Loyalty: 90%] [Overall Morale: 65%] [Overall Stability: 80%] [Chaos Corruption: 33%]
[Active Passive Bonuses: Steel Ring (Beginner), Forced March (Beginner)]
Supply at twenty-five percent. Power cells, medical supplies, food; everything was in the red. The three hundred Emperor's Wrath from completing the ritual quest was sitting unspent. He had not yet decided where to put it.
They had taken the enemy's weapons and ammunition in the raid, which kept them from running completely dry. That included the heavy stubber from the vehicle. He also had the last remaining melta bomb from the company's original kit. They could still fight. They could fight one more engagement at reasonable effectiveness before the supply situation became critical.
He found himself thinking about how Anderson had removed that heavy stubber from the vehicle mount.
He had pulled it free. Off a pintle mount. With his hands.
Duvette had found a moment during the march afterward to speak with the big officer properly. Anderson's history turned out to be considerably more interesting than his rank suggested. As a young man he had been put through the aspirant selection for the Astartes. He had not made the final cut, some qualifying criteria he had not met, but his physical results had been noted as exceptional even by those standards. After that, he had spent time working personal security for someone senior on their homeworld, and during that period had undergone a limited amount of crude biochemical augmentation. Not the full sequence, nowhere close, but enough to produce what Duvette was looking at now.
That explained the physical capability. It did not explain the absence of a Potential Elite marker.
On the far side of the granary, the two children were working through their ration blocks in small, careful bites. The boy was perhaps thirteen or fourteen. The girl was younger, closer to ten. After the last several engagements, the initial paralysis of fear had faded. Duvette made a point of leaving them in a sheltered position during each assault, and the soldiers had taken it upon themselves to form a loose protective presence around them without being asked.
The boy stood up. He stepped over the legs of resting soldiers and came to stand in front of Duvette.
Duvette looked up at him.
"Sir." The boy's voice was quiet, with the particular roughness that comes with that age. "Are you... going to kill all of them?"
Two seconds of silence. Duvette nodded. "Yes."
Something moved across the boy's face, grief and hatred occupying the same space at once.
"Our parents," he said quietly. "They were killed by them."
He looked at the floor. "We used to help our neighbor Hak. Our family would give his family extra grain from our stores so they could make their tax payment. But that day... Hak came with a group of them and dragged our parents out of the house, and we had to..."
The ration block in Duvette's mouth had stopped tasting like nothing and started tasting like something considerably worse. He swallowed. The dryness in his throat was difficult.
This universe.
He reached out and put a hand on the boy's shoulder. He was not good at this. He was aware of that.
The boy took a breath, squared himself, and looked like someone who had just made a decision. "Where are you going? I might be able to show you a way."
Duvette frowned. "The snow is too heavy to move through right now. We are waiting it out."
The boy shook his head. "The freeze is going to last a long time. The snow came early this year, much earlier and heavier than usual. It will not clear on its own soon." He paused. "I think I know another way."
Duvette pulled the folded map from inside his coat and spread it across the hay between them. "Can you read this?"
The boy looked it over and shook his head.
Duvette put his finger on the villages they had already cleared. The boy's eyes lit up. "I know those places."
Duvette moved his finger to the city marker at the centre of the contested area. "We need to get here."
The boy stared at the marker for a long time. Then he looked up. "That is Heras. The largest city near us."
He dropped his voice. "Under this village there should be a large storage cellar, for food reserves. Our village had one too. During the freeze, people shelter in them. My father told me once that all the cellars in the area are connected by old passages, and those passages run all the way to the cellars under Heras."
Duvette went still.
Underground tunnels.
He was already thinking forward when the next thought arrived.
"Wait." His voice had changed. "Who else knows about these passages?"
The boy looked at him, confused by the sudden seriousness, and scratched his head. "Maybe... maybe others know? The cellars are very large, and a lot of the passages have collapsed. There are parts even my father never went through."
The weight of what that meant settled into Duvette's thinking. If the enemy knew about the tunnels. If they had already sent infiltrators through the passages under Heras while the regiment's main force was occupied fighting a frontal assault on the walls above.
If the enemy appeared from inside the city at the same time as the assault outside.
"Stroud. Anderson."
His voice cut through the granary like a shot. Both officers were on their feet before the echo faded.
"Wake everyone. Check weapons and remaining power cells. Get the wounded onto field stretchers." He was already on his feet. "We are not waiting for the snow. We move now. Into the cellars."
He looked at the boy. "What is your name?"
The boy met his eyes steadily. "Evan Reed."
Duvette nodded. "Good name." He looked at Evan for a moment longer. "You know where the cellar entrance is in this village?"
"I think I can find it."
"Then take us there."
Evan turned and moved toward the deeper end of the granary. Duvette followed, pulling up the skill tree in his field of vision as he walked.
The passages would be unlit. He had been thinking about this since the boy first mentioned the tunnels. His choices were clear.
He spent two hundred Emperor's Wrath and unlocked Stroud's second Shadow Branch skill.
[Silent Harvest]
[Surprise attacks have a greatly increased probability of a lethal strike. All movement produces significantly reduced noise.]
Then he activated a Legion skill from the Sacred Rites branch.
[Emperor's Gaze (Beginner)]
[For the duration of this skill's activation, you and your legion can perceive the faint luminescence of Chaos Corruption under any conditions.]
[Mortals fear the dark. Heretics fear His light.]
He walked after Evan into the shadows at the back of the granary.
"Move out, soldiers. From here on, we are the harbingers of death in the dark."