Chapter 41: Let Us Each Keep Our Secrets
She was absolutely insane, Duvette thought. And his own luck was absolutely rotten.
They continued moving through the section of wreckage that bore all the hallmarks of Dark Age of Technology construction. What struck him as strange was that this portion of the hulk's interior had not shifted or rearranged itself the way the rest of the structure did. The space held its geometry. Something was stabilizing it, keeping it fixed and consistent in a way that nothing else aboard the Eternal Lament had been.
After destroying the damaged Man of Iron, they had run straight into a series of automated defense platforms.
The majority had already been dealt with. Duvette could see their remains throughout the corridor: wreckage scattered at irregular intervals, every surface marked with the signatures of Imperial standard-issue weapons, bolt impacts and cutting marks on the plating, plasma scarring around the housing joints. Prior Imperial forces had pushed through here. They had taken these platforms apart at significant cost, and left them behind as evidence of their passage.
But what remained was still more than enough trouble.
Juno had spent too much in the earlier fighting. Whatever reserves she had been drawing from, they were not recovering quickly enough. She could not hold the unit's front any longer. The psychic output she had been sustaining since the cathedral was gone.
To get back to the assault boat alive, Duvette and his soldiers had to push through on their own.
"Left side! Three o'clock!" Stroud's voice cut through the channel.
Two hovering spheres came around the corner, their sensor arrays locking onto the human formation in the instant they acquired line of sight. Miniaturized laser emitters began their charge cycle, producing a high-pitched hum that rose quickly through the frequencies.
Finn raised his lasrifle. The mechanical eyes spun rapidly through their calibration cycle, acquiring both targets simultaneously. He pulled the trigger and two high-energy beams left the barrel in near-perfect sequence, passing cleanly through the central processing cores of both spheres. Electrical discharge erupted from the housings and the platforms dropped, hitting the floor without further movement.
"Keep moving," Duvette ordered.
The unit pushed forward through the narrow corridors. At every interval another cluster of platforms appeared, and the soldiers fell into a rhythm they had no choice but to perfect: alternating cover, controlled advances, the heavy weapons brought up for the armored housings that refused to go down under anything lighter. The meltaguns and plasma guns came forward for those. The cost of the rhythm was being paid in people.
Thirty-eight of them now.
The unit pressed on through the wreckage, corridor by corridor, chamber by chamber. Duvette watched the blue contact markers in his upper field of vision count down with each engagement and held the feeling that came with that count somewhere it could not interfere with his decisions. He knew what stopping meant. He did not stop.
After a time that had no clean measurement, they came through into an open area where the power was still running.
The lighting systems here were operational and steady, casting an even white illumination across the full space. The environmental control systems in the ceiling continued to function, cycling clean cold air through the circulation network. The floor was noticeably clearer of debris, and through the gaps in the dust cover the original surface showed through, silver-grey metal with a faint sheen.
Duvette disengaged his helmet's night-vision. The extended use had been producing a mild discomfort at the edges of his vision, and the return to normal sight came with a quiet relief.
He also noticed the absence here of what had marked every other passage they had come through. The walls and floor were clean. No bolt impacts. No cutting marks. No plasma craters. The surfaces were as they had been when the power was last running, carrying nothing to suggest combat had ever taken place inside them.
As Duvette was registering the space, a shape resolved in the shadows of a cluttered corner at the far end.
A figure, collapsed and still, against several damaged data terminals.
Power armour.
Juno had already seen it. She moved before Duvette did, crossing the space at a steady pace without waiting for him. Duvette followed. The soldiers spread into a loose watch perimeter, Stroud and Anderson pulling in close on Duvette's flanks.
By the time Duvette reached the corner, he could see clearly what had fallen there.
A Battle Sister.
She wore the standard power armour of the Adepta Sororitas, the silver-grey plates engraved with the Emperor's holy symbol and devotional text running in dense columns across every panel. The armour had been magnificent once. Now the abdominal section was destroyed, a penetrating burn wound through the center of it, the edges of the breach a ring of melted metal that had flowed and solidified into warped ridges around the point of impact. Black blood had seeped from the wound and dried in uneven patches across the armour's surface. Her helmet was in place but the faceplate had shattered across one half, revealing the face beneath: young, pale, drained of color almost completely. Her eyes were closed. Her lips carried nothing. Her chest moved in a shallow, barely perceptible rise and fall.
She was alive. Barely.
Duvette found this remarkable in a way that had nothing to do with sentiment. In this place, with that wound, she had held on. There was something in that which the Imperium had spent ten thousand years trying to breed into its servants, and whatever it was, she had it.
Juno crouched beside her. The Inquisitor stripped the glove from her right hand and placed her bare fingers against the Battle Sister's face with a gentleness that sat strangely against the woman he had been watching all mission. The two of them exchanged words too quiet for Duvette to reach, barely audible even from a step away, the Battle Sister's lips moving in the faintest responses.
It continued for roughly a minute.
Then the Battle Sister's body released something it had been holding by will. She exhaled once. Her chest did not rise again.
Juno withdrew her hand slowly and stood.
Duvette removed his helmet. He held it under his arm, his face carrying the sweat and dust of the mission, his eyes sharp.
"You never told me," he said. His voice was level and without heat. "That you had sent others here before us."
Juno turned to face him.
"And," Duvette continued, his gaze moving once to the dead Battle Sister and back, "that what you are looking for is something from the Dark Age of Technology."
Juno smiled.
"Regrettably," she said, "you have no right to know. You had no right on Farrak IV. You had no right aboard the troopship. And here, in this place, nothing has changed."
Duvette held her eyes.
"I believe I do, Lady Juno."
The Inquisitor tilted her head. The red eye regarded him with what might have been genuine interest. "Are you threatening me, Commissar?"
"Tell me everything."
They looked at each other for several seconds. The atmosphere in the corridor changed in a way that was not subtle. Stroud and Anderson had both, without being instructed to, tightened their grips on their weapons.
Juno's gaze moved from Duvette's face to the Battle Sister on the floor. She was quiet for a moment. Then she let out a quiet breath.
"Very well," she said. "I will tell you."
She looked back at him.
"What I came here to find is indeed something from the Dark Age of Technology. A true Abominable Intelligence. What I require is its core processor."
An Abominable Intelligence's core processor.
"And you're not concerned the Mechanicus will find out?" Duvette asked.
"I have my methods, Commissar. That is not your concern." She continued without pausing. "I did send people ahead of me to retrieve it. Their presence here is sufficient evidence that they failed. However, there should be survivors. A few, at least."
Duvette looked at the Battle Sister, then back at Juno.
"I'm curious about something, Lady Juno," he said. "How did you know? About the Abominable Intelligence being here. About its location. About any of it."
"That is my capability, Commissar." Juno cut across him. Something had entered her voice that had not been there before, a quality that did not name itself cleanly. The red eye held him directly, steady and unflinching in a way that suggested it was measuring considerably more than the distance between them. "I am able to learn any secret."
Duvette narrowed his eyes and held her gaze. The white light of the chamber cast long shadows between them.
Then he spoke.
"I would think there is at least one secret you don't know."
Juno went still for a few seconds. Then she gave a quiet, brief laugh, the kind that was not a performance. "It appears you've guessed correctly," she said. "And that is precisely why I sought you out, Commissar Duvette."
She took a step forward. The distance between them closed to less than a meter. At that range he caught the smell of her: blood and sweat and something beneath both of them, a faint trace of something that was neither chemical nor mechanical and that he had no referent for.
"A person whose birth is documented," Juno said, her voice dropped to a register that carried only to him. "Whose history is documented. Who has become, without any discernible cause, completely opaque."
She paused. The red eye narrowed fractionally.
"You should count yourself fortunate," she said, "that it was I who found you."
Duvette said nothing. He watched her and waited for what would come next.
What came next was distance. Juno stepped back, restoring the space between them, and her expression returned to the measured neutrality he had come to recognize as her default.
"I don't object to the two of us maintaining certain confidences from each other," she said. She turned and looked down the corridor ahead. "At minimum, neither of our loyalties to the Emperor is in question."
A pause.
"It is time to move, Commissar." Her voice had returned to its current register, rough and depleted, a long distance from what it had been at the start of the mission. "We have limited time. The space hulk will not remain in realspace much longer. If we do not complete this before it slips back into the Warp, there is a very real probability that none of us find a way out."
Duvette drew a long breath and settled his helmet back over his head. The faceplate dropped into place and the tactical display filled his vision.
He looked at Juno's back for a moment. He looked at the Battle Sister on the floor.
Then he raised his left hand and made a brief signal to the soldiers behind him.
"Form up," he said. "Move out."
Metal boots met the floor and the sound of it rose and carried through the empty corridor ahead of them.