The memories were strained, and their recollection flittering at best. But when the bombardment came, I was far from the only one tossed around in the resulting shockwaves. Lucene, too, was thrown to one side of the trenches, but true to her resiliency and grit, she managed to retain consciousness for a time. Weakened, weary, and immobilized, but conscious. And through damaged red slits of her Sabbat-pattern helm, she got to witness the arrival of our attackers, even if she knew not how to describe them best.
Great hulks of dim grey, adorned with stripes of yellow and black, jumped into smoldering trenches before her eyes. Their armor was twisted and tainted, with imagery she would rather have not borne witness to, but she refused to take her eyes from me even as they surrounded my limp form. These hulks seemed to communicate with one another in silence, turning to each other as one would in conversation, but no sounds rang out from beyond the internals of their horrifying shells. Some wielded conventional weaponry, others autocannons larger than even Lucene herself, and still others had what appeared to be missile pods on the shoulders of their carapaces. These, unbeknownst to Lucene, were Cataphractii Terminators, and among them the Tyrants, who wielded said-missiles and were likely responsible for the bombardment we had just faced.
As one of these Cataphractii lifted me into their arms and made off with my body into the warzone from whence they had arrived, the others moved over to Lucene and her Sisters. It was then, despite her struggle and fight to survive, that Lucene succumbed to her trauma and blacked out at last.
The next thing Lucene knew, she forcibly ripped out from her power armor, an almost-overwhelmingly painful experience as the cybernetics embedded between herself and her armor were ripped apart. She was set upon bare feet in the nude, and found herself briefly amazed that she had any strength to stand amidst such pain, but paused in that regard for only a moment before racing forward in an attempt to rip her assailant’s head off. That was short lived, and the traitor-Astartes before her simply shoved her deeper into her cell, where she fell and landed hard enough to keep her down in sore, bloodied agony.
“Easy, brother, with the goods,” another Astartes chided the one that had handled her so. “Especially with that one, for her size. Brother Mortoc says she alone might be worth a geneseed to Honsou, on Medrengard.”
“As you say, Brother. Stay down, runt,” the first Astartes commanded of her.
“Throne burn you all,” Lucene muttered to herself, shivering in pain, tensing up against the cold, plascrete floor of her cell, which was marked with the remains of what must have been centuries of occupants, if not millennia.
“He hasn’t yet,” the Astartes laughed in reply, and then moved on to the next Sister. Lucene, still in agony, again lost consciousness, though this time to the sounds of her Sisters meeting similar fates as she herself as they were one-by-one ripped out of their armor.
Lucene was not tortured further, in the traditional sense, though her stay in the dim cells under Jaegetri’s surface was far from pleasant all the same. They let her suffer on the floor of her cell the first night after they had extracted her from her armor, but subsequently chained her appendages up and lifted her off the floor, to minimize her movement and prevent her from denying them whatever they wanted from her life. They also hooked up what was only barely passible for medicae equipment to keep her sustained with the bare minimum of life support, though she would have much rather gone without such minimums all the same.
For another day, Lucene hung still in that position. She remained in torturous agony, but her resolve as a servant of the Throne persisted despite it. She bided her strength and her time, and wondered only when she would next have an opportunity to use both. Cal had endured worse than this, she reminded herself, oft thinking of the near-corpse of mine she had rescued in Abseradon. She still had both her eyes and arms, and intended to wield them to their full potential when first the opportunity arose. And arise it did, though not in the manner she anticipated.
On the third day of her imprisonment, a Heretek came to visit, escorted by a handful of the baleful heretic Astartes. This Heretek differed in immediate appearance from those she had had the misfortune of knowing so far, in Holicar Espirov and Antonax Reth-07. Frankly, she thought, this emissary of the Dark Mechanicum was not too different in appearance from the loyal tech priests she had come to work with. However, the one telling icon of heresy was the multitude of bionics attached to the Heretek’s face, and the green, inhuman, oozing blood that dripped out from their haphazardly-adapted forms.
“This one will suffice for the daemonculaba process,” the Heretek confirmed for the Astartes upon inspecting Lucene. “Prepare her for exfiltration and transport. Leave the flesh intact; it is Medrengard’s role to tamper with it as required. Next.” Lucene hoped that the Astartes would open her cell and unbind her then and there, but it seemed that, instead, they would wait for the inspection of her Sisters to conclude before moving them out at once.
The Heretek never got the chance to inspect another of Lucene’s Sisters. Instead, the group was interrupted by a blur of black, moving against and within the many darkened shadows of the chamber. How long had they been there? Lucene did not know, and likely the Astartes didn’t either. The black blur revealed itself only in tossing out a small, grey dart, a skull emblazoned on its butt, which sailed across the room in a glimmer before silently embedding itself in the eye of an Astartes, piercing his helmet completely.
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As a unit, the Astartes spun on their heels and lit up the room in a cacophony of Bolter fire, including the heretic that was now down an eye. The flare and flash of light revealed the shadow to be a terror Lucene had only seen once before, though it had then rescued her from the depths of the Dawnshadow and now seemed poised to rescue her again from the depths of Jaegetri. With each Bolt fired, the shadow closed the distance to the Astartes at an alarmingly inhuman rate, but it was in darkness that an Iron Warrior lost an arm while another outright lost their head. Then, finally, the poison of the dagger in the first Astartes’s eye took hold of him, and he, too, fell to the ground, crashing down in a death satisfyingly thundering.
“Get me out of here!” the Heretek screeched. “I’m too valuable to Warsmith Honsou to die on a world like—” but that was, Throne be praised, all the vile thing managed before an open palm met its bionic face. As its skull was flattened to half its prior thickness, many of those bionics protruded out from the rear of the Heretek’s head, and he, too, fell to the ground. The Bolter fire continued, but it was for naught but to give the Sisters a fine display of the utter eradication of their captors. Bolts were bested by hand, by thrown dagger, and by esoteric blade itself; in that, not unlike the preferred means of Callant Blackgar.
Only when the squad of Astartes and their miserable Heretek had fallen did the shadows return to silent peace at last. The humanoid shadow, barely perceptible to any of the Sisters—Lucene included—and entirely unheard from for a time, collected its thrown, skull-adorned knives from the many, many Astartes they had felled. Then, and only then, did the shadow turn to Lucene’s cell and kick the door open with apparent ease. “He’s not here,” Bliss muttered as she undid Lucene’s bindings.
“No, they appear to have taken Cal elsewhere,” Lucene acknowledged in a nod.
“What?” Bliss asked. Lucene blinked twice, not expecting that response, and then realized that the ‘he’ that Bliss referred to was not their beloved Inquisitor.
“Who are you talking about?” Lucene asked in reply.
Bliss stared at Lucene for a moment, and then her head shot a hair to the left. A fraction of a second later, two poison blades whipped through the air, coming to a rest after embedding themselves through the palms of a still-surviving Astartes, pinning his hands to the ground. For all his might, it appeared he could not overcome such bindings. And try he did, at least until a foot, black as night itself, punctured his chestplate and embedded itself in his sternum. “Where is Valeran Mortoc?” Bliss asked, leaning over the Astartes as the traitor-Angel screamed in pain. Between the poison in his veins and the foot literally inside of his chest, it pleased Lucene that one such as he could suffer as much as he was.
“Frig you, loyalist shitstain!” the Astartes cursed back. “Do you know what you’ve done? What Honsou will do to—”
“I don’t know or care who Honsou is. I’ll kill him all the same if he swings by. Where. Is. Mortoc!” Bliss insisted, pushing her foot deeper inside the Astartes’s chest and garnering greater screams for it.
“Oh what fun he’ll be having with that Inquisitor of yours,” the Astartes jeered. “You think it’s dark down here? One can only imagine what—”
“Where is he!” Bliss roared, ripping the helmet off her victim as bloodily and painfully as Lucene had been torn from her armor. Pleasant as the traitor’s suffering may have been to sit and enjoy, Lucene had already begun tending to her Sisters while Bliss’s interrogation continued.
“You think any of this matters?” the Astartes seethed out in bated breaths. “Where you’re going to send me, we’ll all wind up eventually, and when we do, the horror that will befall every last one of you will be—oh merciful gods, aaaaAAAAAAAA!” He succumbed to screeching in sheer anguish, as Bliss jammed one of her poisoned blades into the notches of the cybernetics at the back of the Astartes’s head, perhaps even piercing his Black Carapace. He cried out in what must have been an agony more excruciating than anything and everything Lucene or Cal had ever endured combined, Lucene thought, but seemed perhaps to be just another day on the job for Bliss.
“It’s one frigging question, and it’ll earn you the freedom from your pathetic life when you answer it,” Bliss hissed, digging in deeper and deeper with her blade. “Mortoc. Now!”
The Astartes held out for some time, amazingly, despite such agony. But when one of his eyes outright burst from the stress of his own screaming and the once-Angel subsequently fell into whimpering pleadings for mercy, he began to tease out an answer to Bliss at last. “Ci—Ci—Citadel—of Rust! They’re in the Citadel of Rust! Please, end this, end me, please! It’s-it’s-it’s not more than ten clicks east of here! Please!” But Bliss did not stop her torture, not then. It continued for moments still, until she was certain she had received an honest answer, during which time the Astartes’s mind melted into incoherent babbling. By the time Bliss finally did kill him, by outright cleaving his head off with her bare hands, there may not have been much left to the traitor’s brain at all.
A moment later, Bliss removed herself from the traitor’s body and collected her two blades embedded in his hands. She glanced once to Lucene, who was holding a Sister under the Sister’s right shoulder. “This prison is empty. I have killed its owners to get here. Your armaments are in an armory, which I’ve opened, 200 feet down the hall, to the right. I do not know about your vox equipment. Good luck.”
“That’s it?” Lucene asked, panting from her own exhaustion as well as from the weight of her Sister. “You’re just going to leave?”
“I got what I came for. And I freed you in the process. You’re welcome. Try to survive another day. Callant loves you. If he’s still alive, I will save him. But killing Mortoc is my top priority,” Bliss answered, callous, cold, and no longer the blackened shadow she had entered as, but instead covered in the gore of her victims. She did not seem to mind the filth of their remains, or if she did, she did not evidence such discomfort. “May the Emperor protect you all,” she finished, and did not wait for a response likewise. The maelstrom of murder that was Bliss Carmichael left as swiftly and abruptly as she had arrived, leaving Lucene and her Sisters to their own salvation.