Chapter 61: This Is Murder! This Is Mutiny!
Eighty kilometers behind the lines. The rear camp.
"You cannot do this! Friendly forces have not yet withdrawn from that plain! How dare you commence an indiscriminate barrage! This is naked betrayal! I demand to see Major General Anthony!"
The furious shout tore through the quiet of the barracks area.
Inside a heavily guarded room, Major Dylan, Deputy Commander of the 101st, paced the narrow space in barely contained agitation.
He had led his company successfully, escorting the pilgrim column clear to safety. But on arrival, word had reached him that the artillery had pushed forward and was already walking a creeping barrage across the plain not far behind him. His comrades had been on that plain. All of them.
Dylan's eyes were red. Every few minutes he crossed to the barracks door and screamed his protests at the armed guards posted there.
"Stay calm, Major." The Cadian trooper at the door kept his face flat, his voice carrying no inflection. "By Major General Anthony's order, you are not permitted to leave this location. Cooperate with us."
"This is unlawful detention! You have no grounds for this! Let me out!"
Dylan lost what remained of his self-control. He roared, charged the door, and put his full body weight into forcing past the guard.
The Cadian trooper's response was cold and mechanical. He reversed his lasrifle without hesitation, and the rifle stock swept an arc and connected with the left side of Dylan's face.
A sharp crack, then a shout of pain. Dylan went down, blood at the corner of his mouth.
"Apologies, Major." The Cadian trooper leveled the weapon again, muzzle pointed at the floor, voice unchanged. "Do not make this harder than it has to be. We are following orders."
Dylan lay on the ground with his hand pressed against his rapidly swelling cheek, his eyes locked on the trooper with a fury that had gone past the point of words. He tried to push himself up. His head swam.
Then a different set of sounds arrived from outside.
The heavy grinding of tank tracks over mud. Boots hitting the earth in a rhythm that had nothing casual in it. Other guards shouting, their voices climbing toward panic.
The thick canvas flap at the entrance was wrenched open by a gloved hand caked in engine oil and dried blood.
A familiar figure stepped into Dylan's line of sight.
Duvette.
His commissar's greatcoat had been blackened by gunsmoke until the original color was barely a memory, the hem ragged. But the red sash at his waist burned against all of it, the mark of commissarial authority as vivid as an open wound.
Duvette stopped. He looked down at Dylan on the floor, at the blood on his face. Then, slowly, he turned that gaze onto the Cadian trooper who had put him there.
He looked at the man the way someone looks at a thing already dead.
No words. No warning.
Duvette moved. His boot came up fast, driven with the full weight behind it, and the kick took the Cadian trooper squarely in the chest. Something in there gave a muffled report. The man went down with the rifle clattering off the floor beside him, curling around the pain.
The reaction was immediate. Every Cadian in the room brought a lasrifle level and trained it on Duvette. They had seen the coat. The muzzles were not entirely steady.
In the same breath, Anderson, Finn, Stroud, and a dozen 101st veterans poured through the entrance behind him, moving in silence.
They spread without a word, raised their weapons, and pressed las-muzzles against Cadian heads and chests at point-blank range. These men had spent the night crawling out of a greenskin tide. They wore it on their faces and in the way they stood. The smell of gunsmoke and something worse was still on them. The weight of everything they had done through the hours of darkness was not concealed. It radiated from them the way heat radiates from metal that has been in a fire, and every Cadian in that room understood it without being told.
The barracks had become a powder keg with every fuse already burning.
Duvette stood at the center of it. His face was flat and cold. He looked at the Cadian troopers and spoke.
"Lower your weapons. Soldiers. I said, lower your weapons."
He raised one hand and pointed at the ruined greatcoat.
"Look carefully at what I am wearing. Major General Anthony ordered artillery fire on friendly forces during active withdrawal. That is not only deliberate murder. It is betrayal of the Emperor's loyal armed forces. And now he has unlawfully imprisoned my subordinate."
His voice in that room was cold enough to change the temperature.
"Do you wish to share in his charges? Treason. Heresy. Lower your weapons."
The Cadian troopers looked at one another. They saw the hesitation in each other's eyes. Under the leveled weapons of the veterans, under that gaze from the man in the commissar's coat, they set their weapons down. One at a time.
Duvette did not spare them another look. He turned to Dylan, still on the floor looking up at him, and extended his hand.
"Get up, Major." He pulled him to his feet and brushed the grime from his coat in two quick passes. "We are going to pay Major General Anthony a visit."
Dylan wiped the blood from his mouth and fell in behind Duvette without a word. Along the route through the camp, every Cadian who saw the smoke-darkened column coming instinctively moved out of the way.
The command tent sat at the camp's center. Eisenmark vehicles were positioned around its perimeter, blocking the approach for anyone without business there.
When Duvette lifted the canvas flap, Kleist and Volkov had already arrived. They stood at the tactical sand table, facing Anthony Rush and a cluster of his staff officers and bodyguards. The standoff between them had the quality of something already past the point of conversation.
Duvette's arrival ignited what remained of the atmosphere.
The veterans behind him spread out without instruction. Anderson's voice came out flat. "Move and you die."
Muzzles came to bear on every adjutant, staff officer, and guard in the tent.
"Commissar Duvette." Anthony worked to hold his composure. The anger in his voice was real, and so was the effort underneath it. "Is this a mutiny? I am the supreme commander of this battle-group. How dare you storm a command post."
Duvette walked straight to him.
"You ordered a creeping barrage across the plain," he said. The voice had the flat register of a formal charge. "You killed loyal Imperial soldiers during active withdrawal. You slaughtered the Emperor's own people. Major General, you have more than enough on your account for a heresy tribunal."
"That was to contain the greenskin advance! War demands sacrifice!" Anthony's jaw was set. The dark red of his mechanical eye glowed steady.
Duvette had finished talking.
He drew the bolt pistol in a single motion and pressed the barrel to Anthony Rush's forehead. The promise he had made in the middle of the artillery fire had found its literal form.
The tent went silent. The staff officers and bodyguards stood frozen in horror, unable to move under the veterans' guns. Anthony's face had changed. Cold sweat tracked from his hairline.
Duvette's finger rested on the trigger. He did not pull it.
A rough, calloused hand closed over his gun hand from the side.
Duvette turned his head. Kleist was beside him. The colonel's face had something tight and controlled in it, the muscles pulled slightly out of their usual alignment by what was running underneath. His voice came out quiet and rough.
"Let me."
Duvette held his grip.
Kleist held his gaze. "This is between him and me. It was my feud with him that put you in the path of those guns. If the Astartes had not arrived when they did, none of us would be standing here. So, Commissar Duvette." The grey-blue eyes did not move. "Let me."
Anthony found his voice. It came out at full volume and cracking. "Kleist! This is murdering a superior officer! This is open mutiny! I am a Major General of the Imperium, you do not have the authority to executeâ€""
The shot was very loud.
Kleist had drawn his sidearm and fired before Anthony had finished his sentence. The round took the Major General in the head. What had been Anthony Rush's head ceased to be a single object.
The body swayed once, then went down and forward across the tactical sand table. Blood began to move in slow, methodical tracks down the contour lines of the terrain model.
The tent was completely still. Gunsmoke drifted.
Kleist drew a long breath. He released Duvette's wrist, let the still-warm pistol drop from his hand to the floor, then raised both hands and pushed his disordered golden hair back into order. He said nothing. He turned and walked out of the command tent.
Duvette stood where he was, eyes half-lidded, looking at the headless body draped across the sand table. He found himself thinking, with a dry and distant quality, that he really should have been the one to do it. After all, that woman still owed him a great deal.
Volkov shook his head. The exhale he let out was long and carried something heavy. He crossed to Duvette's side and set a hand on his shoulder.
"This is no longer your burden, Commissar Duvette. When the Departmento Munitorum comes looking for someone to answer for this, they will come to us."
Duvette looked at the resolve written plainly across the older man's face and was about to say that was entirely unnecessary.
Volkov straightened his collar and walked out of the tent without looking back.
He left Duvette standing at the sand table, looking at the wreckage of what had just happened, facing the staff officers pressed against the tent walls and trembling.
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