The air in the underground passage had beco almost unbreathable. Propellant residue and the iron-thick reek of blood had accumulated in the enclosed space past any reasonable tolerance for either.
The 112th had torn through the encirclent and linked up with what remained of the defensive line. Under the cover of Anderson's power maul and Finn's precise fire, the last of the organisms attempting a countercharge were eliminated one by one, and the underground space settled into a silence that felt provisional but was, for now, real.
"112th, establish a defensive line imdiately. Watch every ventilation shaft and blind spot in this space. Maintain order among the civilians." Duvette put away the chainsword and drove the order out through a raw throat that still reached every corner of the chamber. The veterans spread without needing to be told twice, establishing interlocking fields of fire across the available cover.
Once he was satisfied the line would hold, Duvette moved to the rear of the position through the wreckage.
He found the officer commanding the remnant force leaning against a wall, breathing hard. The man looked up at the sound of approaching footsteps.
Duvette stopped in front of him and studied the face that looked back at him, the pale lavender eyes, unmistakable in any Cadian officer's face, and the particular expression of a man who has held sothing together through conditions that should have finished it. Duvette pressed a fist to his mouth, suppressed a cough, and extended his right hand.
"It's been a while, Elias." His voice was low and ant it. "Thank you."
The Cadian officer who had fought through everything the swarm had thrown at this position, and who had just watched the man responsible for most of it appear from a dark tunnel like sothing that had no business being as alive as it was, managed a smile. It did not have a great deal of success. He reached out and took the hand with one that was covered in dried blood and held it for a mont.
He opened his mouth, and his throat worked like he was assembling words. Perhaps he was going to ask why the swarm had been targeting his position so specifically. Perhaps he was going to say what he thought about all of it.
What ca out, in the end, was nothing. He shook his head. His gaze had moved past Duvette's shoulder to the civilian area at the rear, and to the young girl lying still on the waterproof groundcloth.
Duvette reached out and put a hand on his shoulder, once, with weight.
He knew what he had done to this officer's unit. Placing Evan and Lena with them had brought down a level of Tyranid attention on this position that no defensive assignnt was designed to absorb. He owed Elias Hawthorne considerably more than a handshake, and in whatever fighting remained ahead of them, he intended to pay it.
He left the Cadian officer to his breathing and moved toward the civilian area.
Evan was kneeling on the ground beside Lena, checking her condition with the focused attention of soone who had been watching for any sign of deterioration. His expression eased slightly when his examination confird no visible injuries, but the worry did not leave his face.
When he heard the asured footsteps approaching, Evan turned his head. The mont he recognized Duvette, he was on his feet in the sa motion, heels together, salute given.
"Commissar."
Duvette gave a brief nod and motioned for him to stand easy. Then he eased himself down despite what his leg wound communicated about that decision, and looked at Lena.
The girl was lying on the cold rockcrete floor, her face pale. What was strange about it, strange enough that it registered against everything else competing for Duvette's attention in a space full of the sounds of despair, screaming, and alien noise, was that there was no fear in her expression. No pain. In the middle of an underground fortress that had been at the center of a sustained Tyranid assault, Lena's face was entirely at rest, as if she had found her way into a deep and genuinely peaceful sleep rather than a dicated unconsciousness.
Evan settled back down beside him. He looked at his sister, and the worry in his eyes went down rather than up. He kept his voice low.
"Commissar, I only gave her one dose. The sedative should have worn off a long ti ago. She hasn't woken up. Is sothing wrong?"
Duvette's eyes narrowed.
One dose. Still unconscious. That was not the pharmacology working as intended.
He pulled off the tactical glove on his right hand and tucked it into his coat pocket, and laid two fingers against Lena's neck to check her pulse directly.
The mont his fingertips made contact with her skin, a notification appeared in his field of vision.
[Awakening psyker detected. Soul-bind with "Lena"?]
[Potential Elite: Prophet]
[Cost: 300 Emperor's Wrath]
Duvette went still.
Evan had been watching his expression without blinking, expecting to see confirmation of sothing catastrophic. He leaned forward.
"What is it? What's wrong? What happened to Lena?"
The alarm in Evan's voice pulled Duvette back. He cleared his expression, withdrew his hand from Lena's neck, and settled the tactical glove back onto his right hand. He turned to look at Evan's face, which was doing nothing to conceal how frightened he was, and shook his head.
"Easy. Lena is not in danger. Her vital signs are steady."
That much was true and verifiable. He said nothing else on the subject.
His attention was elsewhere.
An awakening psyker. The Legion's Blade had produced a soul-bind prompt. The question of whether this was specific to Lena, so interaction between the System and her particular state of ergence, or whether it would occur with any psyker approaching the threshold, was one he could not answer from the information in front of him. What the System had flagged before, it had not flagged until now, which suggested she had been approaching this point for so ti without crossing it.
The cost was three hundred Emperor's Wrath. He had spent the sa amount in total across his three previous soul-binds. This single contract would cost him everything that remained in his reserves.
He did not take long to decide.
He activated the soul-bind.
As the last of his Emperor's Wrath was spent, a connection ford between his awareness and Lena's, faint, present, and with the particular quality of sothing that had rooted itself and was not interested in being uprooted.
The next mont, Lena's personal panel opened before him.
[Prophet]
[Initial Skill: Echo of Fate]
[The bearer perceives vague tendencies in the flow of fate. All things and living beings connected to the bearer carry a certain probability that their fate will incline toward what she desires. The probability varies by target. Excessive alteration will result in backlash.]
Duvette read it twice.
His internal response to the skill description was not the calm tactical assessnt he would have preferred. It was approximately: this is either sothing stolen directly from Tzeentch's domain, or it was pried out of His hands specifically so He couldn't have it, and either way this is an extrely significant problem that is also, potentially, the most useful thing he has encountered in the 41st Millennium.
He gathered himself.
Useful as the skill was, it ca with a variable attached that he had not fully accounted for: the person it lived in. Lena's loyalty was locked at one hundred percent by the soul-bind. But she was thirteen or fourteen years old. Her understanding of what she was, of what was at stake, of what a universe that included Tzeentch and the Warp had been known to do with psykers who manipulated fate; none of that had been developed. If her instincts ran toward the pessimistic, the sa probability-shifting that could protect people could just as easily incline toward the outcos she feared rather than the ones she wanted.
That was a problem he needed to address. Along with keeping her alive and keeping her concealed from the wrong eyes, he apparently needed to add her overall ntal and spiritual state to the list of things requiring active attention.
He beca aware, through the soul-bind's completed link, that he could now read Lena's condition with complete clarity. The Warp disturbance that had been generating around her, the disturbance that had been drawing the swarm's attention to this position like a beacon, was gone. Fully cald. Whatever had been radiating from her before the bind was no longer there to be found.
She would wake up soon.
Duvette stood, absorbing the weight of everything that had just happened, and put his hand on Evan's shoulder.
His voice, when he spoke, carried sothing that was not a common note in it.
"Take care of your sister, Evan."
He left the adjutant to it.
He straightened his coat as well as it would straighten, set aside what he was still processing, and let his face reassemble itself into sothing a command structure could work with. Then he started back toward Elias Hawthorne.
They needed to establish what ca next. And for that, he needed to know exactly what this Cadian officer knew about the ground ahead of them.
****
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