What the Vox Kept

The left corridor was longer than it looked.

Mathias ran it with the squad at his back and the Chaplain’s litany rolling down the line, and he did not slow, because slowing would have meant thinking about it. The door at the end had been barred from the inside. Aldric took it off its hinges with a single kick. Behind it was a pump room and eleven robed figures, and Mathias killed three of them before the Chaplain’s crozius caught the fourth in the throat and the rest simply stopped fighting and started screaming. It was over quickly. It was always going to be.

The Chaplain stood among the bodies with his helm tilted toward the ceiling, listening to whatever he listened to. “The head is off,” he said. “Well struck, brothers.”

Mathias lowered his sword. There was a robe on the floor in front of him, still warm, with a name stitched into the collar in careful thread: the kind of thing someone’s mother does. He looked at it a moment longer than he meant to.

“Brother Reinhart.”

“Chaplain.”

“You have carried a question the length of that corridor. Set it down.”

Mathias had been composing it the whole way, and every version fell apart as soon as he opened his mouth. “I would return to the hab-blocks,” he said. “If the squad can spare me.”

The Chaplain regarded him for a long moment. Then he made the sign of the aquila with two fingers, quick and casual, like a man brushing off a sleeve. “A small errand,” he said. “Go. The Emperor will walk it with you.”

He went.

Hadrian caught up with him at the junction, a little out of breath, and said nothing, and Mathias was grateful. They took the right-hand corridor together at a jog. The lamps down here had all been shot out, and the cart he’d seen earlier turned out to have a body underneath it, a young man in a coverall, not a cultist, with his hands still raised.

Then the first of the cultists, face down at the foot of a stairwell. Then two more. Then a cluster of them on the landing, ten or twelve, and Mathias slowed because the wounds were wrong. No blades, no clubs. Bolt-rounds, tight groupings, the kind of shooting that comes from a squad that never has to speak to coordinate.

“Another strike force came through here,” Hadrian said, crouching to turn one over. The corpse’s robe was still smoking at the edges. “Not long ago. They were running from something and ran into us instead.”

“Into them.”

“Yes. That is what I said.”

Mathias stepped over the bodies and kept going.

Hab-block Nine-Four-Seven was the one. He knew it before he saw the number, because the corridor narrowed into the same flat grey he’d heard in the vox-log’s background hiss, the same buzzing strip-light overhead. A bunk frame had been dragged across one of the doorways and jammed against the wall, the kind of barricade made by people with no weapons and a great deal of fear. Behind it, faint, he could hear people breathing.

The door beside it was open.

She was sitting against the wall just inside, legs out in front of her like a child who’d been told to wait. Older than he’d pictured. Grey in her hair, a work-smock buttoned wrong. The vox-link was in her right hand, held loosely, the little indicator still lit, and from it came a soft continuous hiss, the sound of a channel nobody was speaking on.

There was a lot of blood, and it had been there for a while but not a long while.

Mathias stood in the doorway. He found that he wasn’t doing anything with his hands. After a time he knelt, and his armor let out a long, grinding sigh, ceramite settling on ceramite like a penitent going down on bad knees. He looked at the number stenciled above her head, the same number she’d read out so evenly. He had listened to her say it several times.

Behind him, Hadrian had stopped at the threshold and stayed there.

Mathias reached out and closed her fingers over the vox-link, and then, because that seemed wrong, opened them again and took it from her. He thumbed the channel off. The hiss went out of the room.

Then he stood and went to the bunk frame in the next doorway. He did not pull it. He took hold of one end and lifted it clear of the wall, an inch at a time, so that it made no sound at all, the way you might move something off a sleeping person.

“It is all right,” he said, into the dark. His voice came out lower than he’d intended, filtered and enormous through the vox-grille. He took off his helm. “Come out. We have come to take you out.”

Nothing moved for a moment. Then a hand, very small, appeared around the edge of the frame.