I was moving faster than they were expecting. Blowing the key parts of the factories away with enough of a delay to get me a minute or more of lead time before things went totally kablooey was enough for me to be a klik or more away from the impact zone. Unless this whole shelling thing was tasked to obliterate a massive area, there was no way I was going to be caught in the area of effect... and if that was a danger, it would be obvious enough by the shelling stopping, and I would just book for even more distance at top speed and see if they could predict me moving at a few hundred kph overland as they tried to catch me.
Then, of course, I’d piss them off by blowing up another branch of their bloody power circuit.
The incoming shells were eradicating the Runework that had been accumulating power, both freeing elements of it and sucking more of it away and up the rolling slopes towards whatever was going on up at the shielded spire top up there, the command-and-control center for this entire kiloplex of production.
The kids had gotten back to me in fairly short order. Strangely enough, certain members of the command staff had relayed that similar things were going on all over the planet. The foreboding coming over everyone at this coordinated behavior certainly wasn’t getting anyone’s hopes up that this was a coincidence, as it smacked of some really dangerous shit going on that they couldn’t possibly do anything about.
Then that ‘misdirected’ report of the evaluations and reality of Forgeworld Qim’bai was laid out for the command staff, who, despite their own rather disdainful attitudes for the lives of the men under their command, still had interesting expressions when they realized all the restrictions they were laboring under in terms of assault tools, and even this entire campaign to liberate the world itself, were completely and utterly pointless.
But something was going on. All the Fleet Assets that could be of use had been drawn off, now obvious as part of some coordinated plan. There was nothing they could do to stop what was going on, except start unleashing some firepower of their own that they hadn’t been using... and those assets were not in place, and had not been readied for use, since they weren’t allowed on this battlefield.
It would take time to get them ready and operational, and now, time was something they didn’t have...
--------
Someone was following me.
I turned around, skating backwards and looking downslope as I ran along a short bridge.
There was a skimmer there, a stupid vehicle to be using in a warzone, not enough armor or weapons to serve as a vehicle of war. It was just a fast and speedy transport, designed for use behind the lines.
It was a few kliks below and behind me, and I just caught the angle of it here as it moved up to wait for the shells flattening another section of the kiloplex, factories and buried habitats erupting under the shelling.
Full magnification leapt forwards, and I eyed the crew there.
A junior officer of the Tiger Legion... Crimson Tigers, by the paint, hulking up in the back. That was a guy in Mentat colors at the controls. A cybered-up Mekker was pretending to be useful in the co-pilot seat. In back was a guy with a long rifle and cyberspotter, scanning the surroundings as he held a long rifle ready. A dark-skinned fellow with a golden Coronal cloak was seated there, watching the shelling with a flat face, while a sour-faced man in Umbran black and grays sat opposite him. A short, trim man almost lost to the eye filled out the Inquiry team, and I found myself amused despite myself.
Well, they were never going to catch up if they just followed my trail...
I started shooting out impaled Mekkers and overseers who hadn’t wanted to become slaves to the Warp, and vivic flames ignited down the sides of the road... away from the spotters overhead.
Hmm, I had better change my destination...
------
“Sir!” Bemrin sat up and pointed. Everyone turned around, and looked in that direction.
A couple kliks away and upslope, faint lights were barely flashing, leaving a trail of burning white fireflies behind.
They’d seen those lines of white lights, burning along the roads, reducing impaled and tortured dead to dust, turning the filth and runes of their sacrifices to ash and less. A mercy, a taunt? Whatever, it had been an easy trail to follow, and it had naturally run into and through the areas being pounded to rubble by the shelling.
“Kip!” Sir Mugamu shouted, and the skimmer was already wheeling and hurtling in that direction. Landscape maps plotted out an optimal route, trying to stay out of line of sight of the spotters up on the Spire ahead, having no desire to draw that bombardment down upon themselves.
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“A stroke of luck? An unwary trail?” Inquistor Hrom asked in disbelief.
“No,” Sergeant Kampi stated firmly. “She started the trail where we could see it, not before, and it is all out of sight of the spotters, despite there being more targets she could shoot where they could be seen upspire.”
Techmeister Vahix couldn’t really frown, but somehow managed to. “She saw and is luring us in?” The towering Legionnaire nodded slightly. “For what purpose?”
“She wants us to follow her more closely.” Sir Mugamu narrowed his eyes. “So, she is leading us somewhere, and doesn’t think we will catch her before then.”
“Given how fast she is moving, she could be fairly confident of that,” Kiprugh murmured from where he was juking the skimmer down low through the remnants of the kiloplex, now looking very abandoned. The runes carved and painted on everything were filling the air with an unwholesome static that was threatening to do bad things to the drive and control systems, and he had to focus continually to keep the skimmer on course.
So much for AMT technology, the Mentat thought gloomily. He’d heard there was some new anti-Warp technology being developed spinwards, but there was no chance it had made it to this sector yet...
“Klisto, do you have any sense of her?” Inquisitor Hrom asked the silent last member of the team.
“Of her personally, no. She’s not leaving a psi-trail of note. What she is doing is disrupting the configurations that have been set up here, like sweeping a broom through a sand painting, or an eraser across a page of ink. And, of course, she is laying out the white fire, and it is eating the Warp energies...” the Assassin trailed off, his eyes flat and cold.
His presence was withdrawn; it was hard to tell that he was there, but none of the psi-users there had anything but the utmost wariness of him. The Assassins of the Empire could kill almost anyone or anything, but psi-users were all horrendously vulnerable to them, just like the Silent Sisters.
“Where is she leading us, then?”
“Where else? Given the battle reports, she is heading to the heart of this place,” Sergeant Kampi stated, his visor seeming to gleam for a second. “The enemy is planning something, and she is here to do something about it.”
The Techmeister’s head swiveled impossibly to glare at the Legionnaire. “You cannot be certain of her motivations, Sergeant!” he stated in a flat voice that nonetheless held sharp correction in it.
“That is true,” the armored hulk replied in his own filtered voice. “But of the forty-two battlefields she has been seen upon, she has, every single time, made her way to the heart of the command structure and slaughtered it, leaving a trail of white fire as she does so. If you would care to calculate the statistical likelihood of her not having the same motivation here, I invite you to do so.” His grim amusement did not place weight on the Mechanist’s words at all.
Vahix huffed artificially, and turned away. The math was not in his favor, after all...
---
Their skimmer ascended a breakwall in the shadow of a looming hab, coming directly over the safety rail that wasn’t functioning now, and onto the burning trail the Dark Angel had left behind.
Swathes of vivic fire were burning at the exhortations and sigils of the Warped inscribed everywhere, bodies were burning and falling to ash and dust, and they led without a doubt to the west and up.
Kip gunned the skimmer in that direction, murmuring, “That vivic stuff works. There’s less interference on the grav-drive and electronics right here...”
“There has not been enough experimenting done to truly verify the absence of any negative features to this vivus!” Vahix droned harshly. “It may be a massive attempt by the Warp to introduce a corrupting power into the Empire. Until proper testing is done, it should be used minimally, or not at all.”
Both Mugamu and Hrom glanced at one another. Both had been recipients of that massive astropathic sending that had gone out across the galaxy... under Twilight Seal. The message had included large amounts of corroborative testing data conducted by both of their Orders, and it had been enough to satisfy a Coronal and Umbral Duke. The Mechanist’s words were basically treating the opinions of the Twilight Orders as irrelevant.
Did the Guild truly think the Orders were not extremely sensitive to the fact that this vivic fire might actually be some grand scheme of the Great Enemy? But the sheer violent reaction of the Warped in so many places to the discovery of the vivic fire seemed to belie those words. Assets the Warped had spent centuries, perhaps even millennia, to get into place had been burned in attempts to restrain, restrict, or remove the knowledge of the vivus. The death tolls from those attempts reached into the tens of, if not hundreds, of billions!
If that message had not gone out across the whole galaxy, it likely would have died violently at its origin, and the vivic fire remained unknown.
But the Mekkers had not been responsible for its discovery, and so were emphatic in their demands that usage of the new discovery be set aside until it was properly vetted by their testing division. Their resistance was naturally making implementation of the energy much slower and more difficult than it could have been.
The inability to duplicate it with technology was probably a very sore point with them, too.
“The trail is ending!” Kip spoke into the silence, and everyone watched the trail of burning vivus peter out, while the skimmer came to a halt.
“She covered five kliks in under two minutes on foot. Where did she go?” Bemrin asked, looking around.
Klisto stood up and pointed. “There.” All eyes turned on the entry to the broad steps leading down to a subterranean maglev station. “Her passage down those stairs disrupted the runes like a bullet through a target. They are still recovering. Take us down there.”
Kip wasn’t going to say no to an Assassin. He immediately guided the skimmer down a hundred feet of stairs, and without batting an eye triggered the nose-mounted pulse laser to shoot out the main entry doors to the station, allowing the skimmer to glide smoothly inside.
The place was abandoned, although the floors, walls, columns, and even parts of the ceilings were carved and painted with all kinds of symbols, their meanings enough to raise hackles on the driver’s neck.
There was a hiss of something, not noise, more a whisper across the soul, as the Helices of the Assassin rose up, and extended out in a silent, writhing caress across the soul. The skimmer, which had started to rumble and shudder, returned to humming smoothness, and the sense of something horrible watching them from all around faded to nothing...