Chapter 108: Shoot Anything Glowing Red
"Move! Move! Everyone off and moving now!"
At the edge of Klassya's Cold Quarter, Chimera APCs and light assault vehicles were pulling up in sequence along the broken-down street front, and the 112th was deploying from them with the controlled urgency of a regiment that has spent considerable time doing exactly this under considerably worse conditions.
Boot heels hit the street in a continuous overlapping rhythm that transmitted through the ground of the derelict district as a single sustained vibration.
These were veterans of Macragge. They had been expecting a week's rest. The expressions on their faces distributed fairly evenly between homicidal intent toward the enemy and a more personal grievance directed at the situation that had ended their leave before it had properly started.
The deployment had been Duvette's direct order.
The first soldiers on scene had been the several dozen lightly armed 112th troops Evan had brought at Stroud's emergency contact. When Evan arrived, Duvette handed him a second order immediately.
"Full regiment, first-level combat readiness, full kit, assemble here at maximum speed. And send notification to this planet's Adeptus Arbites in my name as Colonel-Commissar. Chaos cultists operating in the Cold Quarter."
The moment the attack had happened, Duvette had opened the Grand Strategic Display.
This was, in its way, one of the better outcomes of Stroud's expedition. The instant pursuit and weapons fire had established hostile contact, every individual involved in the attack had resolved as an enemy marker on the map. Red points had appeared across a significant portion of the Cold Quarter in real time, and as the robed figures scattered, the display tracked every one of them converging on several dense concentration points deeper in the district.
He watched them run toward their own positions and allowed himself a single cold assessment.
You think that helps.
He had commissarial authority and battlefield discretion at the highest grade. There was no Munitorum reporting procedure that needed satisfying before he acted. He activated the full-regiment order on his own authority, and the political complications that might follow from deploying three thousand-plus soldiers in a large-scale military action on a hub world without formal coordination could be addressed once everyone who had been moving military-grade weapons for Chaos traitors was in custody or dead. Anyone with cause for concern about that sequence of events was welcome to review the situation on their own time.
Every soldier in the 112th had crossed the Warp expecting to sleep, eat something that wasn't field rations, and spend several days not being in immediate contact with anything that wanted to kill them. They had managed less than half a day of this before the emergency assembly signal had cut through whatever they had been doing.
Kleist, for his part, had spent the entire transit in the back of a Chimera delivering a continuous and detailed assessment of Stroud specifically, and of the class of individuals who required a rear-echelon hub world in order to find trouble. He only blamed Stroud for the precise reason that in the whole of the 112th, Stroud was the only soldier who could reliably be expected to discover a Chaos weapons cache while looking for a bathroom.
"Commissar." Evan fell in beside him at a quick step and came to attention. "The Adeptus Arbites have responded. They are assembling Arbitrators and a suppression unit. They expect to be in position in approximately forty-five minutes. They are requesting we hold until they are ready to move."
"Leave them to it." Forty-five minutes. Adequate.
In practical terms, clearing a Cold Quarter Chaos cult and black-market operation of this scale would ordinarily call for local Planetary Defence Forces or an Arbites suppression squad. What was present instead was over three thousand fully armed veterans who had recently spent an extended period killing Tyranids in underground tunnels. The available force was somewhat in excess of what the situation required, in the way that a demolition charge is in excess of what is required to open a locked door.
But Duvette's purpose was not confined to clearing the positions.
Juno had placed this gift in front of him. He intended to take everything it contained.
For maximum operational effect, he activated three skills in sequence.
[Emperor's Gaze -- Active]
[Focused Volley -- Active]
[Limiter Break -- Active]
He opened the full-regiment command channel.
"All units, platoon-level formations, clearance sweeps on coordinates I am transmitting now. No delays, no hesitation. Shoot anything glowing red. Those are the cultist markers. Retain their profane markings as evidence."
He switched to a separate channel.
"Anderson. Stroud. Elias. Take two assault companies to the coordinate I am sending you now. Those robed figures from the casino alley. I want their legs broken. Not one of them runs. Find out who is in charge. Send me the warehouse location as soon as you have it."
Stroud's confirmation came back immediately. Duvette closed the channel and moved.
He took Evan and a guard company directly to the warehouse. They arrived to find no one had returned to it. The timeline had not given them the opportunity.
Two precisely placed high-energy las-shots from the guard company melted the warehouse door's electronic lock from its housing. Duvette put his boot to the door and walked in.
The supply cache was exactly as Stroud had described. Heavy utility sheeting across most of the floor space, the careful storage, the deliberate organisation of an operation that had been running for some time.
"Count it. Evan."
"Sir!" The adjutant moved immediately, taking several soldiers with him, pulling back the sheeting systematically and moving through the inventory with the focused attention of someone who has processed enough supply manifests to know exactly what he is looking at.
Several minutes later, Evan came back at a jog. His voice was controlled but the number in it was not entirely contained.
"Report, sir. Fifty crates of high-grade carapace armour, with matching hellguns. And substantial individual combat supply stocks. Plus the large precision components."
Duvette's eyes narrowed slightly. He ran a quiet calculation.
"Take all of it." He started to say something else, then revised it. "All personal combat supplies. Every crate. Leave the large precision components exactly where they are. The Arbites will be here in forty-five minutes. Move quickly."
"Sir!"
The soldiers moved with the focused enthusiasm of people who recognise quality military equipment and understand that possession of it is a meaningful improvement in their personal survival odds. Crates were moving toward the 112th's transports within sixty seconds.
Duvette's accounting was straightforward. When the Arbites arrived and found the warehouse, they would find the precision components: a significant haul, clearly significant enough to demonstrate a serious smuggling operation had been interrupted. The 112th, after a difficult action against the cultist network, had secured the facility and preserved the most critical items from removal.
The carapace armour. The hellguns. The individual combat supplies.
He had not seen any of that.
He was standing outside the warehouse, watching the transfer approach completion, when Stroud's voice came through the earpiece. Slightly ragged, some channel interference.
"Commissar. Done. We found the leader."
A brief pause, then Stroud again:
"This one was equipped. Carried a micro-shield generator and a short-range teleporter. Almost managed it with the teleporter. Almost."
The channel produced a sound that was not from Stroud. It came from someone else in the location, at a pitch and sustained duration that communicated a very specific kind of regret about the teleporter not having worked.
Duvette did not comment on the sound.
"I'm sending Evan with two Chimeras. The leader comes back with you. Everyone else, on-site disposal. No information leaves before we return to billets." He paused. "Keep it quiet."
"Understood, boss--" A muffled command directed at someone in the room, not toward the vox. "Shut up. I said shut up, stop making that noise." The channel closed.
Duvette put the earpiece away and turned back toward the warehouse entrance. The transfer work was in its final stages. Crates that would have occupied a significant line item on any Astra Militarum supply manifest were disappearing into the 112th's vehicles with a speed that spoke well of the regiment's logistical instincts.
The evidence was secure. The prisoner was en route.
Now for the Arbitrators.
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