Chapter 47: The Front Collapses
Duvette was back with the 101st.
He stood at the edge of the encampment and looked up at a dark sky. Lead-grey cloud cover hung low, filtering the Shrine World's daylight down to a sickly amber that settled over everything with the quality of an illness. The air carried an unusual compound of incense and gunsmoke, the first from the cathedrals distributed throughout the city, the second from the front line. He made a quiet sound of mild distaste, adjusted the peaked cap on his head, and walked the camp perimeter at an easy pace.
The encampment was active. Soldiers checking equipment, counting ammunition.
Stroud was crouching on the ground in an idle conversation with three soldiers. Anderson leaned against an armored vehicle with his eyes closed. Finn sat on a crate of ammunition, the mechanical eyes producing their quiet hum while the targeting system ran its self-calibration cycle.
They were bivouacked in a prayer square on the city's western side. Through the camp perimeter, Duvette could see the stone paving outside — carved Imperial aquilas and sacred text running in dense columns across the slabs, some of them cracked now where heavy vehicle tracks had passed over them.
The city's name did not particularly matter. On a Shrine World of this type, every city bore the name of a saint or a martyr, and every city had been built around its cathedrals: soaring structures of pale stone, severe monasteries at their flanks, saint's tombs along the processional routes inlaid with gold and ivory in the style of an age that had taken the available resources and poured them all into the same channel. According to the records Duvette had reviewed, this world had three hundred and seventy major cities, each with a minimum of five cathedrals.
And now the Orks had come.
The Ecclesiarchy had put out the call when the invasion began, and millions of believers had responded with the tools immediately available: pitchforks, crude homemade firearms, and the Emperor's name on their lips as they went toward the enemy. They had died in quantities that produced piles of bodies high enough to constitute terrain features. The local Planetary Defence Force and the Adepta Sororitas garrison had been the only reason the world had not fallen before the 101st's arrival.
"Strange assignment, putting a light infantry regiment on civilian evacuation detail," Duvette muttered to himself. He shook his head. "Not the first time."
They were not, technically, among the front-line elements. The main force was still engaging the Ork advance and losing ground to it steadily, but that engagement was out there, not here. This particular duty had come down from above, and Duvette had his quiet suspicion about why a regiment with the 101st's recent history had been assigned protective work rather than shoved directly into the grinder with everyone else.
The image of a white-haired woman in a black Inquisitor's coat came to him without invitation. The empty right eye socket. The single red left eye.
He let the image go.
* * *
A few days prior, aboard the Shark assault boat returning from the Eternal Lament.
The cabin was dim, the red emergency lighting cycling in slow pulses that filled the interior with the color of the inside of a closed fist. Duvette sat in his seat with his eyes closed, waiting for the return to the troopship, the engine hum a constant background presence.
A cough broke his stillness.
He turned his head. Juno lay across the seats opposite him. She had woken, her face still the particular shade of pale that came from having lost a significant portion of one's blood supply, the bandaging across her right socket having soaked through since it was applied. She had turned her head and found him with the one functioning eye, and she gave a quiet sound of amusement.
"You didn't kill me," Juno said.
Duvette said nothing.
He looked at her for a few seconds. Then he looked at the hull wall instead.
"You owe me a great deal, Lord Inquisitor," he said.
Juno produced two more coughs, each bringing a small amount of blood. "I do," she said. "You helped me secure the core. I will honor what I promised. Every point of it."
Duvette let out a short, humorless sound.
"Then my only request is that I never have to see you again," he said.
Juno's amusement returned, smaller this time. "Maintaining working relationships is a basic professional requirement for an Imperial officer, Commissar Duvette."
He turned and fixed the single red eye with a look that did not have warmth in it.
"A working relationship," he said. "With someone who abandoned allied soldiers and sent us forward to die for her objective." His voice was entirely steady. The contempt was not hidden.
Juno received it without any apparent inconvenience. "Anyone would have done the same," she said quietly, the words fading at the end, going nearly inaudible.
Then she opened her eye again and looked at him.
"There is something I forgot to tell you," she said. Her voice was still very faint.
Duvette waited.
"I don't actually know the ancient dead tongues as well as that might have implied," Juno said. "You need not trouble yourself over it."
Duvette looked at her for a few seconds.
"I had guessed as much," he said.
He closed his eyes again and leaned back in the seat.
The engine hum continued. The red lights went on pulsing.
* * *
Duvette drew his attention back to the present. Juno was presumably still in the troopship's medicae bay, which was precisely where she belonged and precisely where he preferred her to be.
He had continued walking to an observation position at the camp's outer edge. Two Chimera APCs sat outside the perimeter, their hulls painted in the local camouflage scheme, the Imperial aquila on each vehicle's flank faded from extended field service. A cluster of PDF soldiers had been standing near the vehicles in conversation; they saw Duvette coming, straightened, and saluted. He nodded as he passed without slowing.
The ground was slightly higher at the edge, and from it the city walls were visible in the middle distance. He raised his field glasses.
Beyond the walls: a vast open plain that was no longer functioning as a plain. The entire area had been consumed by a dense sprawl of green growth, the Ork infestation establishing itself in the environment with the predictability of a biological process that had been doing this for millions of years. Dark green fog lay over the growth in a low layer. From within it, the rumble of bombardment arrived at irregular intervals.
Orks were fungal organisms. Their biology seeded itself wherever they traveled, the spores they shed finding purchase in any dark, damp location within a short period of landing. Within weeks, those spores produced vast, rapid-growing masses of alien vegetation: enormous mushroom formations and dense alien undergrowth with a penetrating, unpleasant smell that spread outward from the initial landing zones and continued spreading. The ecosystem the Orks produced for themselves served multiple functions: it provided food, it bred more Orks as the biological cycle perpetuated itself, and it provided exactly the kind of dense ground-level cover that kept large concentrations of Ork forces invisible to Imperial aerial reconnaissance until they were ready to move.
Duvette lowered the field glasses and walked back into camp.
He ducked into his tent and settled at the small table inside, setting the peaked cap on the surface beside him. A city defense map was spread across the table, annotated with unit deployment positions: his regiment's position on the western side, a second element positioned in the east.
He did not particularly need the map. The Grand Strategic Display Module's overlay showed him everything: the armored regiment holding the eastern approach, all the PDF auxiliary forces distributed through the city's defensive perimeter, their numbers and positions updating as they moved.
Thirty Leman Russ battle tanks. Five Hydra anti-aircraft tanks. Two Atlas recovery tanks. Five Trojan ammunition carriers. Add the PDF auxiliaries and his own 101st and the total came to approximately seven thousand four hundred personnel.
He looked at the unit markers at the base of the display and allowed himself a moment of private amusement. "This is exactly the classic Total War overhead view," he muttered.
Evan came into the tent at a pace that said something had changed.
"Sir."
"What is it?" Duvette answered, unhurried.
"Something's happened." Evan's delivery was clipped.
Duvette glanced out through the tent opening. The camp was still operating normally, soldiers going about their tasks. In the distance he could hear an armored vehicle's engine turning over, PDF soldiers raising their voices over it.
"That serious?" Duvette said, his voice unchanged.
Evan was quiet for two seconds.
Then he said, "We've received word. The front line has collapsed."
Duvette raised his head and looked at his adjutant. "Confirmed?"
Evan nodded. "The front-line commander's final communication before signals were lost included a warning. He estimated the first Ork contact waves would reach us within a short time."
Duvette turned back to the map with his brow set in a hard line. "Those wretched pilgrims and priests — they're not ready yet? It's been two days."
Evan paused before answering. "They are still deliberating," he said carefully, "on how to transport all of the saint statues in the city."
"An irredeemable collection of idiots," Duvette said, and meant every word of it. He took the peaked cap from the table and settled it on his head. "Get Stroud, Anderson, and Finn. Bring a full platoon. Come with me. We're going to demonstrate how an evacuation actually functions."