The Fork in the Corridor

The first door gave way on the second charge, and after that it stopped being a plan.

Mathias came through the breach with the smoke still rolling off the frame and put a bolter round into the first cultist he saw. The man had a welding torch and a coverall with a faded safety placard stitched to the chest. He went over backward into a conveyor line and the whole mess of him kept riding it into the dark.

There were more behind him. Dozens, shrieking, some armed with proper weaponry and some with whatever had been lying around the shop floor. Mathias stopped counting after the fourth and just moved. A pipe wrench glanced off his pauldron. He took the wielder’s arm off at the elbow with the power sword and shoved the rest of him aside, and then there was a gap and he went through it. The noise in the hall was enormous, bolters and chain-teeth and that awful ragged chanting, and under it all he could hear his own breathing, loud and even, which surprised him.

Hadrian was off to his left, doing something methodical and brutal to a knot of cultists by a lathe. He hadn’t looked over once. Mathias found that steadying.

It lasted several minutes. Then the hall went quiet in the way a hall does when everything in it that can move has stopped, and the strike force pulled in around a wide junction at the far end, where the floor split into three corridors. Somebody had painted a sigil on the wall in what Mathias decided not to think about. Lamps flickered. Far down the left passage, a door slammed.

“There.” The Chaplain’s voice came down the line before the Chaplain did. He walked into the junction with his crozius lit and his skull-helm turning slowly, the way a hawk’s head does. “The heretics ran that way. I saw their robes.”

Brother Aldric, the squad’s sword brother, nodded. “Down the left passage, then. All of us.”

“The hab-blocks are to the right,” Mathias said.

It was out before he’d decided to say it. A few helms turned. He felt the heat of it in his face, inside the helmet, where nobody could see.

The Chaplain took a moment. “Speak it plainly, brother.”

“The survivors are in the hab-blocks. The vox-logs came from that section. If even one squad were sent…”

“A heresy is a serpent, Brother Reinhart.” The Chaplain waved a gauntlet, almost kindly. “The coils thrash and the fangs find flesh, but all of it answers to the skull. Break that, and what remains is only meat, and meat may be gathered up at leisure.”

“And if the survivors cannot wait for leisure?”

“Then they die with the Emperor’s name in their mouths, and He knows His own.” No cruelty in it. That was what chilled him. The Chaplain said it the way a man tells you the hour. “We are not given the sparing of every soul, brother. We are given the striking of the right one.”

Mathias looked down the right-hand corridor. It was dark, and quiet, and he could see a handful of gutted lamps and one overturned cart. Somewhere in there a woman had read out a block number and asked if anyone was coming.

He looked left. The squad was already forming up. Aldric had stepped away, bolt pistol raised. The door at the end of the passage, the one that had slammed, was still swinging slightly on its hinge.

Hadrian had stopped beside him and was thumbing a smear of cultist off the edge of his sword, frowning at it, as if the blade were the only thing in the junction that concerned him. He said nothing. The blood wouldn’t come clean, and he gave up on it and sheathed the weapon anyway.

“Brother Reinhart,” the Chaplain said. “With us.”

Mathias said nothing. His hand was tight on the hilt again. He noticed it, and didn’t loosen it.