Chapter 15: The Decision
Duvette left Evan downstairs and pushed through the canvas into the command post.
The atmosphere on the ground floor was different from usual. Several staff officers stood around the communications equipment without speaking, without moving, wearing an expression that was not busy and not relaxed but something tightly held in between. Duvette did not stop to ask. He walked to the iron stairs and went up.
The partition on the second floor was open.
He paused at the entrance for one moment.
The room was full. Every officer in the 101st Ash Watchers Regiment was there, all nineteen company commanders, standing in a semicircle in their grey greatcoats with the snow still melting off some of them. Every face was turned toward the center of the room.
Colonel Fox stood before a data-slate mounted on a tripod, his face carrying the look of a man who had received news that had not improved with time. Beside him, a servo-skull drifted in place at eye level, its mechanical eye sockets flickering with a low dark-red light, its sensory tendrils moving in small slow arcs below the jaw.
In the corner of the room, a stretcher had been set on the floor.
On it lay a person bound entirely in blood-soaked bandages, only half of a pale face and two closed eyes visible above the wrappings. The bandaging had gone from red to dark brown at the edges. The chest moved with the shallow, exhausted cadence of someone for whom each breath was a significant effort.
The company commanders' responses to Duvette's arrival varied. Most continued to look at the data-slate and gave no indication they had noticed him. A few acknowledged him with a nod, but their eyes held distance rather than welcome. He did not dwell on it. He wanted to know what had happened.
He moved through the group to the front.
The data-slate showed a detailed structural schematic. Duvette scanned it and recognized the layout almost immediately: the Heras geothermal heating core. The main reactor chamber, the distribution pipework, the cooling systems, the maintenance tunnels branching through the whole structure, the exhaust vents, all of it annotated precisely. He noted that the core was protected by heavy alloy-steel walls throughout, including the maintenance passages, and that the vents carried substantial alloy mesh barriers at their openings.
"The Magos found it," Fox said. His voice had a slight roughness to it. "Official blueprints from when the agricultural distribution hub was built, several thousand years ago."
He touched the slate's edge.
The image changed.
An incomplete tunnel map filled the display, compiled from multiple survey efforts and clearly still fragmentary. The lines were irregular, some sections broken, some overlapping, the whole of it resembling a spider's web that had been torn apart and only partially reassembled.
"This is the combined survey from every reconnaissance team we have been able to send down," Fox said. He looked at Duvette. "Including the passage you identified."
Duvette studied the map. Several tunnel exits were marked with blue circles, each annotated with small text giving their surface destinations: Norton Township, Carsen Fort, Elvin Village. Settlements in the immediate region.
His gaze stopped on one marking rendered in red. That was the fork. The junction he had navigated by instinct and a rising headache.
The red circle had no destination text beside it.
Fox pressed his finger against it. The display shifted back to the structural schematic and the two maps were overlaid, the tunnel survey semi-transparent over the core's blueprints.
Duvette's pupils tightened slightly.
The unmarked red-circle tunnel ran almost directly adjacent to one of the core's major components. The proximity was alarming. Surrounding it, several smaller and medium tunnels also approached the core structure, none as close as the primary passage but all interconnected with each other. Between the tunnel network and that component of the core there was an area marked only with a question sign, which Duvette suspected was approximately where the reconnaissance team had been ambushed, and which suggested the enemy had already made progress through whatever alloy-steel wall still separated the tunnel from the component.
"These passages were dug by civilians." Fox's voice was level. "Over thousands of years. People who could not make the agricultural tithe, who were driven out in winter, who dug to survive the cold rather than freeze. One generation after another, until eventually it all connected."
He paused.
"The tunnels near the core specifically. That is where the people who had no other option went."
Duvette understood.
The cult was largely composed of dispossessed people from the bottom: agricultural workers, low-level PDF personnel, and at least one former PDF colonel who had become the uprising's senior leadership. They knew these illegal passages the way people know the ground they were raised on.
"The planetary governor and the nobility never knew these existed?" Duvette asked.
Fox nodded. "We have found no official record of them." He turned to the window, looking out at the snow-covered ground below. "Perhaps they knew and simply did not consider it worth their attention."
He was quiet for several seconds. His silhouette in the grey light seemed to carry more weight than usual.
"I transmitted your assessment to command," he continued. "The Lord General's response was that they have no forces available to support us. The traitors are currently conducting a major assault on the defensive lines in the northern continent."
Duvette said nothing audible. The thought he actually had was considerably less measured.
"And." Fox turned back from the window and looked directly at Duvette. "Of the two reconnaissance teams we sent into the tunnels, one person came back."
He indicated the stretcher in the corner.
"That soldier's report: the tunnels have a significant concentration of enemy fighters. Well-equipped. And there are signs of Chaos Astartes presence."
The room went completely silent.
"My assessment," Fox said into the stillness, "is that the assault on the northern continent is a feint. The traitors' actual objective is the geothermal core beneath this city. A ritual detonation combined with the blood rites already in progress. The veil between the Warp and realspace." He let that sit. "Possibly today. Possibly tomorrow."
He looked around the room at the assembled company commanders.
"I have sent another report upward. There is no time left to wait for a response. If we remain at our posts, we will almost certainly be destroyed by the explosion, and whatever survives the initial event will be overwhelmed by what comes through the breach afterward."
He stopped.
"I have brought you all here because I have one question to ask."
"Do we go underground and stop this, regardless of the orders we would be violating to do it?"
"Or do we stay here and die?"
No one spoke.
The servo-skull emitted its quiet mechanical hum. From the stretcher came the sound of labored breathing. At the window, snow had begun to fall again, a soft persistent sound against the glass. The horizon outside was as still as it had been all morning, but the stillness had changed in quality.
Duvette looked at the two nearly overlapping lines on the display.
There was very little time.
After a long silence, Fox glanced at Duvette. Duvette understood exactly why. In this room he represented Imperial discipline and the authority of the Officio Prefectus. Abandoning a defensive position without orders was a serious violation. A commissar had the legal authority to execute the officer who gave that order.
Fox had looked at him and then looked away and was about to put it to a vote regardless.
"All those in favor of going underground and stopping this," Fox said. "Raise your hand."
All nineteen company commanders looked at each other. Then, as one, they looked at the commissar standing with his hands behind his back in the center of the group.
Duvette held Fox's eyes for a long moment.
Then he smiled, which was not an expression anyone in the room had seen on him before, and he drew the bolt pistol from its holster and fired once.
The servo-skull came apart on the floor in a shower of mechanical fragments.
Every company commander in the room went very still.
"I agree with your proposal, Nathan," Duvette said.
"If strict adherence to orders means standing here and doing nothing while millions of people die and a daemonic horde tears its way into our reality, then the orders can make way for a moment."
He looked at the fragments of the servo-skull on the floor, and then at the assembled officers.
"Let's go."