Chapter 105: Let's Make a Deal
Every muscle in Duvette's body went tight in the same instant. Operating on the battle-honed instinct that had kept him alive through more situations than he cared to catalogue, he arrested the step he had just taken into the tavern, turned his boot heel, and moved to leave.
He had almost completed the turn when Juno's voice reached him again.
"There was a small complication at the end of our last arrangement. I wonder if you're aware of it."
Duvette stopped.
He turned back slowly. His right hand dropped to the edge of his coat in a motion that was entirely natural and positioned it near the plasma pistol inside, and he narrowed his eyes at her with a directness that made no effort to conceal where he stood.
"As far as I am concerned, everything that happened between us is finished and settled."
Juno looked at the posture of a man who had arrived ready for the worst, and laughed quietly.
She set the wooden cup of amber liquid down on the scarred table with a dull tap, and lifted her chin toward the empty seat across from her.
"Relax, Commissar. This visit has nothing to do with that."
Duvette stood where he was and held her gaze for a long moment, his mind running through the variables and what each of them implied. Then he released his grip on the pistol's edge, crossed the tavern floor with a steady step past tables that smelled of cheap alcohol and worse tobacco, dragged the protesting wooden chair back, and sat down across from her.
Juno had both elbows on the grimy table, her hands loosely crossed beneath her chin, and that single eye, red as a cut ruby and carrying exactly the warmth of one, regarded him without any pretense of looking elsewhere. The tavern's overhead lamp swayed slightly and threw its unsteady light across her pale face, tracing a shadow that suggested a pleasant expression.
It was not a pleasant expression. Duvette kept his face neutral and noted internally that it was genuinely unsettling.
With his arrival, the ambient noise of the tavern, which had compressed to nothing when he came through the door, began cautiously reassembling itself. The gang members and smugglers and various individuals with reasons to avoid official attention had registered that the immediate threat of arrest or execution was not materializing, and drinking and low conversation gradually refilled the underground space.
Juno lifted her cup and took a small measure of the sharp liquid.
"I must say, it is somewhat remarkable." Her tone carried a dry amusement that was not entirely without sincerity. "Less than half a year, and the probationary commissar fighting to survive in the mud of Farrak IV has become an Imperial hero whose name circulates at the highest levels."
She let her gaze travel briefly to the decorations at his chest.
"The Munitorum and the Administratum have been debating what grade of commendation is appropriate for your actions on Macragge. By the standard the engagement warrants, a Star of Terra would not be excessive."
"So the unusual orders dispatching the 112th to Pyrite in the Sabbat Worlds after the Macragge campaign," Duvette said, his expression unchanged, his tone carefully stripped of anything except the question, "that was your arrangement?"
Juno offered a slight smile and did not answer directly. Instead, she looked at the empty space on the table in front of him.
"Can I offer you something? The local brewing down here has a character that the better Amasec vintages lack entirely. Something raw about it. Frontier-world violence in the flavor."
"No." Duvette settled back against the chair, unhesitating. "I prefer to keep my head clear at all times. Particularly when I am sitting across from an Inquisitor."
Juno raised an eyebrow without visible offense, raised her right hand, and produced a clean snap of her fingers in the direction of the tavern keeper, who was observing the interaction from the far end of the room with the hunched posture of a man hoping not to be noticed. The keeper moved immediately.
"Your arrival in the Sabbat Worlds is connected to me," Juno said, accepting the refilled cup. "But it was not my initiative alone."
She set down the performance of amusement. Her voice leveled.
"You were born in the Segmentum Pacificus, and grew up as a commissar in Imperial service within it. A name that carries considerable weight across the whole of the Imperial military establishment will not be unfamiliar to you."
Duvette's brow drew slightly together. "Who?"
Juno accepted the fresh cup from the tavern keeper with a brief nod, and fixed her gaze back on Duvette.
"Marshal Slaydo."
The name landed, and Duvette's internal response was immediate recognition. Slaydo. The first Warmaster of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade. A commander whose reputation had been built across engagements that had become case studies: methodical, adaptable, with the particular quality of a general who understood that strategy and logistics were the same discipline. In the immensity of the galaxy's military history, that name stood for a particular chapter of iron and blood.
Juno rested her cup on the table and settled into the account with the manner of someone covering ground she had covered before.
"The Sabbat Worlds. This sector, once Imperial, has been eroded across several centuries by the shadow of Chaos and the Blood God's devoted. The deterioration reached its conclusion four years ago, when the High Lords of Terra issued the formal declaration that the Sabbat Worlds had fallen entirely."
"Only worlds like Pyrite, at the sector's outermost margin, remain under tentative Imperial control."
Her voice was audible across the tavern's noise without effort.
"Recently, the High Lords have arrived at the ambition of reclaiming the Sabbat Worlds. The full breadth of it."
She paused.
"And in Marshal Slaydo, who submitted a detailed strategic proposal for exactly this reclamation over a decade ago, they found their instrument. The High Lords have agreed that he will serve as the first Warmaster of this unprecedented crusade."
"What does any of this have to do with me?" Duvette held her gaze with an edge in it. He had no particular investment in the grand designs of important men. He had investment in the 112th and in keeping everyone in it alive.
Juno did not answer the question directly. She continued.
"Slaydo did not want the appointment. After the Khulan Wars, his intention was to retire and implement a sweeping military reform program. His proposal claimed, with a confidence that the High Lords found exasperating, that restructuring the Astra Militarum's command architecture could improve its operational effectiveness by sixty percent."
"The High Lords, who had grown thoroughly tired of the proposal, made him a proposition: take back the Sabbat Worlds, and the reforms proceed unobstructed. He accepted the wager."
Juno looked at Duvette with an expression that was assessing something.
"To that end, he has been drawing together the best-performing Astra Militarum formations from across the Imperium. I recommended you and the 112th to his staff."
She lifted one shoulder slightly. "Though in fairness, you had already attracted attention from the Munitorum on Terra. I was pushing an open door."
"So you came to this particular establishment in the Cold Quarter to find me," Duvette said flatly, "simply to tell me something that has apparently already been arranged."
"No." Juno's quiet laugh surfaced again. "I recommended you to the Warmaster because I have a commission of my own to offer you."
"And if I decline?" Duvette asked immediately. He did not dress the question up. His body had already made a slight shift in the chair, weight distributed toward standing.
He had already settled it in his mind. If Juno would not accept a refusal, he would stand up and leave. If she moved to stop him by force or authority, he would draw the plasma pistol. Whatever the consequences, going down fighting was preferable to being managed again.
"Of course you can decline."
Duvette paused. The movement that had been building in his body encountered an unexpected obstacle.
Juno leaned back against the chair with the ease of a woman who is not concerned about any of the available outcomes. "This is a transaction based on mutual advantage, not the arrangement we had before. And you have Ultramar at your back now. I cannot operate the way I once did with you."
"A transaction." Duvette's eyes hadn't moved from her face. "What do I get from it? An extra two days alive in a crusade's meatgrinder?"
"A world." She said it without theater. "Your own. Entirely yours." She let that sit for a breath. "Or, if that is not your preference, an advancement that has no precedent in Imperial history. A Marshal-Commissar. A rank completely outside the Munitorum's standard authority structure, with the power to command multiple armies directly, and to mobilize forces across an entire sector at your own discretion."
"There is no such rank." Duvette looked at her the way he would look at someone who had said something he considered beneath serious consideration. "There has never been."
"Not yet." Juno nodded without any defensiveness. "But Slaydo is about to overturn a great many things."
She leaned forward slightly, bringing her voice down to a register the surrounding tables could not reach.
"And he and I have a relationship that goes back further than this crusade. If you complete what I am asking, both of us have the authority and the inclination to make you the exception."
Duvette was quiet for a moment.
"What do you want done?"
Juno settled back. Something moved through that single red eye, cold and calculating and not entirely readable.
"A colleague of mine. Inquisitor Heldane. He has been conducting reconnaissance along the crusade's forward approach routes, and he appears to have found something in the ruins there. Something old. Something significant." She paused. "I want you to involve yourself in it. Under the entirely legitimate cover of being an element of Slaydo's advance forces."
Heldane.
The moment the name reached him, something pulled at the edge of his memory with an insistence that was not casual. His mind went to work immediately, running through everything the previous life had given him about the 40K universe, pulling at the threads that connected to that name.
Heldane. That particular Inquisitor. The extreme end of the spectrum. And a discovery. Something that rewrote the balance of forces in the galaxy.
The realization hit him in the space between one thought and the next, hard and specific.
He remembered.
In the timeline ahead of him, this was the Inquisitor who found it. An ancient STC template. Not a weapons design, not a structural schematic: a template capable of producing standard Men of Iron. Functional artificial intelligences from the Dark Age of Technology. A find that could reshape the power structure of an entire civilization, in the hands of a radical Inquisitor who operated at the extremes of what his authority permitted.
Juno swirled the last amber measure in her wooden cup and finished it.
Whether it was the proof content of a Cold Quarter tavern's cheapest spirits or simply the quantity she had consumed this evening, something had reached the surface of her face that was not normally there. A faint warmth in the pale of her cheeks. The one functioning eye slightly narrowed, carrying a certain unhurried quality that her usual register did not include. She tilted her head and looked at Duvette with the particular attention of someone who has decided to wait for an answer.
"Well, Commissar?"