Chapter 9: Safe
Duvette was not entirely certain how the fight had ended.
His best reconstruction was that the melta bomb's shockwave had knocked him down and he had struck the concrete hard enough to produce a concussion. His back had certainly been burned. At some point after that, someone had wrapped his upper body tightly in bandages and gotten him moving again, because he was currently being held upright by a soldier and walking through a dark underground passage, and neither of those things had been his own decision.
He pulled up the company status and looked at the numbers.
[Current Command: Ash Watchers, 101st Regiment, 6th Company]
[Remaining Strength: 11 (including 3 seriously wounded)] [Company Experience: Veteran]
[Overall Supply: 9%] [Overall Loyalty: 85%] [Overall Morale: 46%] [Overall Stability: 70%] [Chaos Corruption: 40%]
[Active Passive Bonuses: Steel Ring (Beginner), Forced March (Beginner), Indomitable]
Eleven soldiers. He stared at the number and felt the weight of the orders he had given in the past several days settle onto his chest. The guilt and grief were not useful. He made himself carry them anyway.
The one thing that kept it from being worse: Stroud and Anderson were both alive.
Stroud had taken the bolt pistol hit and the ten-meter fall at almost the same moment. The combined result was fractures across most of his body and immediate loss of consciousness. Anderson had been caught by the chainaxe across one side and then hit by the bolt round's explosion at close range, producing internal organ damage and massive hemorrhaging. He was also unconscious. The medic had used the last of the coagulant gel to stabilize both of them, but wounds at that level should have been fatal for any ordinary person. That they were still breathing at all was not something field medicine could explain.
Which brought Duvette to the new passive that had appeared in the status display alongside a three-hundred-point Emperor's Wrath reward, the completion prize for the Uncover the Truth quest.
[Indomitable]
[When members of your legion sustain serious wounds that are not immediately fatal, they endure for longer and recover more quickly.]
[May the Emperor's protection be upon you.]
He considered that for a moment. Then he thought of Stroud's body falling from ten meters, and Anderson sitting up with his chest destroyed, and said nothing. Only thought, with something between gratitude and dark humor: yes, well. Thank you.
The column stopped. A soldier came back to find him. "Sir. Another junction ahead. Which way?"
Duvette had himself walked forward to look.
Two passages. He stood in front of them and studied the dark at the end of each one. After a moment, he became aware of something that might have been instinct or might have been something the Emperor's Gaze had sensitized him to even after its active duration ended. The left passage made him feel sick. Not metaphorically. His stomach moved unpleasantly and the headache that had been sitting at the back of his skull since the concussion spiked when he looked down that corridor.
"Right," he said. His voice came out rougher than intended. He hoped he was reading it correctly.
They moved again, slow and careful, Evan carrying his sister on his back in the middle of the column. The remaining soldiers were showing the strain in their faces: uncertainty and a creeping exhaustion that had gone beyond mere tiredness. But when they looked forward toward the figure limping at the head of the line, some of that uncertainty receded slightly.
Their commissar was still moving.
The right passage had been the correct choice. After a while the floor beneath their boots changed from packed earth to stone flags, and the passage was noticeably wider than the one they had come in through.
Eventually stairs appeared, going up.
At the top of the stairs, a wooden panel blocked the way. Two soldiers got their shoulders under it and pushed. The panel moved a fraction before meeting resistance from above.
They turned back and shook their heads.
Duvette took the lasgun from the soldier supporting him and set the power to minimum. He put one shot into each corner of the panel, four quick cracks in the enclosed space, and with a sharp sound the panel gave way.
The contents of the grain storage above came down in a rush.
The entire column went over in a cascade of heavy sacks and loose grain that filled the air with dust and the smell of stored wheat. Several seconds of coughing followed. When the worst of it cleared, they looked at one another from the floor, covered in grain and dust, and someone managed a short, incredulous laugh.
Duvette took a soldier's outstretched arm and was hauled up through the pile of sacks, emerging from the grain storage at ground level covered in grain husks and feeling considerably worse than he had before the sacks hit him.
The shots had been heard.
Boots on stone, moving fast, converging on the granary from outside. The door came in with a kick and light hit Duvette in the face, soldier-grade illuminators carried at shoulder height by Astra Militarum troopers in grey and green with weapons raised.
Then the weapons came down.
Friendly forces.
They were safe.
That was Duvette's last coherent thought before the floor arrived.
* * *
He was lying in a palace. The air was soft and pink and smelled of something that had no exact name but was pleasant in a way that felt too deliberate. The bed beneath him was the most comfortable thing he had ever been horizontal on.
A woman sat beside him. Tawny skin and straight black hair and eyes that held warmth and something else, watching him with the kind of attention that a person only gets in dreams.
His gaze moved upward, following the line of her face.
The golden laurel crown sat at the top of the picture like a signature.
Duvette came out of the dream with a violent start, heart hammering, back soaked in cold sweat.
"Slaanesh," he muttered, voice barely working. "Using gold to try and tempt me." He decided not to think too carefully about what that particular manifestation had been trying to achieve. His throat felt as though someone had sanded it. A fit of coughing followed.
He tried to sit up from the hard cot beneath him and discovered he was in a medical bay. Low light. The smell of antiseptic over blood. From nearby came the suppressed sounds of other patients, quiet involuntary sounds of pain.
An elderly voice spoke from just beside him. "Hold still, boy. I am about to change your bandages. The burns on your back are significant. No infection yet, which is fortunate, and the medication has been applied."
Duvette turned his head. An old man in a worn white coat was bent over the cabinet beside him, searching through its contents. White and grey hair. Deep-set eyes.
"Doctor Wayne," Duvette said before he had consciously identified him.
The old man's hands paused. He turned, looking mildly surprised. The surprise settled into a faint smile. "Conscious enough to recognize faces. The impact did not scramble everything permanently."
He came to the bedside and indicated for Duvette to sit up carefully. When he did, Duvette registered for the first time that his head was also wrapped in bandaging, and the dull ache inside the wrapping intensified with the movement.
"The other casualties?" Duvette asked. His voice was barely audible.
Doctor Wayne did not answer immediately. He began unwrapping the old bandaging from Duvette's back with careful hands. The gauze had adhered to the burned skin, and each section that came free brought a fresh stripe of burning pain. Duvette set his teeth and let the sweat come.
"They are in the critical ward next door," the old doctor said as he worked. There was something in his tone that was not quite medical professionalism. "The honest assessment is that none of them should have survived long enough to get here."
He applied fresh medication. The cold of it over the raw burns was briefly a relief before the nerve endings registered the rest of the information. "The Emperor's protection appears to be operating at some level."
Duvette thought, with genuine feeling: it really does.
The bandaging was replaced. Doctor Wayne collected the bloodied old gauze and moved toward the other end of the tent, his voice carrying back over the distance.
"The intelligence you brought in has been passed up the chain. The notebook, the tunnel network details. All of it."
A pause.
"Hoffman asked to see you when you were awake. Do not keep him waiting too long."
Leonard Hoffman.
The face came up from the original body's memories immediately: severe, precise, a peaked cap worn at exactly the regulation angle, a commissar's uniform that had never been seen out of order, eyes that assessed everything in front of them with the particular sharpness of a man whose professional function was to judge whether other men were worth keeping alive.
The official commissar of the 101st Ash Watchers Regiment. Duvette's nominal direct superior.
"Where is he?" Duvette asked.
Doctor Wayne had already reached the far end of the bay and was bent over another patient's cot.
"Next ward," he said, not looking up. "He is still lucid. Go now, while that holds."