Chapter 118: Mission Concluded
Beyond the alloy door, the flashing red alarm lights had been entirely extinguished. In their place, the backup power had engaged a dim and colourless illumination that did very little for the atmosphere of the hall.
Duvette clambered back through the hole Anderson's melta gun had cut in the door, the hem of his black greatcoat trailing ash and machine oil. He moved quickly to the centre of the hall and began working his way through the unconscious bodies on the cold floor, shaking them awake one by one.
Anderson was the closest and the first to open his eyes.
The large man lay still for several seconds, looking around at the dim surroundings with clear disorientation, before the memories of what had happened before the darkness came back to him all at once.
He sat upright, gripped the heavy bolter beside him, then stared at Duvette standing before him in one piece.
"Boss." Stroud was already struggling unsteadily to his feet, pressing a hand hard against his head. The depth of the unconsciousness had apparently stripped several details from his short-term memory. He seemed to have no clear picture of what had actually knocked him out, only a general recollection of a catastrophic sound threatening to bring the entire structure down. "We survived that bloody self-destruct system?"
Beside them, Finn was frowning at his own arm with focused attention, making small adjustments to his mechanical eye and prosthetic with the tools he kept on his person.
"Commissar." He tapped his metal forearm twice. "My components have a minor fault. What exactly was that?"
The rest of the soldiers were waking around the hall in sequence, each checking weapons and running a quick inventory of their own condition. Finding nothing seriously wrong, they exchanged the low, restrained commentary that soldiers use when they have survived another situation that should not have been survivable.
In the Astra Militarum, as long as you were still breathing, the process by which you arrived at that state was largely beside the point.
Duvette walked to Anderson, who had just made it to his feet, and set a hand on his shoulder with the quiet weight of a direct order.
"Anderson. Take a few men into that room. Bring the Explorator's body out."
A brief pause carried the rest of it.
"Gently."
Anderson registered the instruction without comment and moved before anything else had time to happen.
Shortly afterward, he and several soldiers emerged from beyond the melted doorway, carrying the Explorator's remains in a groundsheet. What they laid on the floor at the centre of the hall was no longer recognisable by any measure except its general shape. They put it down with care.
Duvette turned to face the assembled soldiers of the 112th. When he spoke, the register was the one he used when something needed to be said properly and only once.
"The facility's self-destruct sequence was terminated by direct physical intervention. After we entered that room, it was this Explorator who used his own logic core to force a direct interface through the ancient cogitator array's firewall. He gave his life to open the only path out that existed for any of us."
The hall went quiet.
The veterans had no particular warmth for the Mechanicus as a rule. Incense and machine oil and the specific kind of self-important eccentricity that came with decades of augmentation were not qualities that endeared a man to soldiers who lived in mud and blood and extreme cold. But on a battlefield, anyone who spent their life to buy yours was owed the highest respect a soldier could give.
The soldiers lowered their heads. One by one, hands rose to chests in the sign of the Aquila and held there in silence for the Explorator who had never given them his name.
The sound of quick, purposeful steps reached them from the direction of the hall's entrance.
Venus Carpé had come back.
She entered the open space with her elite household guard at her shoulder, helmet off, her face showing every degree of the colour it had lost during the retreat. She crossed the floor quickly toward Duvette, clearly preparing to say something, and possibly to address the considerable awkwardness of having left the main force behind, when her eyes fell on the scorched shape laid out on the groundsheet at Anderson's and Finn's feet.
Duvette opened first. "We survived, as you can see. The Explorator severed this facility's base-level self-destruct logic at the cost of everything he had."
Venus opened her mouth, appeared to change her intended words, and settled for a quiet exhale. She looked at the body for a moment. Then, with the careful tone of someone approaching a topic they have already decided to approach carefully: "What was in that room?"
"Nothing." Duvette did not pause. "Nothing except a cogitator array that burned out from overload. The family's old navigator's log had the wrong information. What we thought was an ancient ruin was a heavy armament warehouse left behind by the Adeptus Mechanicus during the Great Crusade."
He gestured around at the hundreds of rusted forms filling the hall.
"Evidently."
Venus surveyed the wrecked servitors and dormant Kastellan Robots, then looked back at Duvette. "So our only gain from this is the wrecked Kastellan shells." The exhaustion was present in her voice, and behind it the particular quality of disappointment that follows a long expensive effort producing nothing.
"It appears so." He gave a slight shrug, entirely at peace with the outcome in a way his expression did not fully explain. The private accounting was his own. He was also quietly calculating when best to make contact with Cawl, who was almost certainly somewhere in the galaxy right now, either analysing whatever he had found in the Blackstone Fortresses or finishing the Armour of Fate.
Neither of them had anything useful to add. They got on with it.
For the next one standard Terran day, the thousand-strong force became the most efficient salvage operation either command had seen. Duvette and Venus directed the soldiers through the hall in systematic sweeps, clearing every Kastellan Robot remain that retained an identifiable shape and every recoverable component from the stasis field generator housings, loading all of it into cable nets for the ascent.
When Venus transmitted the operation's results to the Carpé flagship in orbit, Patriarch Olivier Carpé received them with the philosophical composure of someone who had been making these calculations for a long time.
For a Rogue Trader working the galaxy's margins, committing enormous resources to a derelict site and recovering nothing of the original expected value was a standard risk. It came with the work. You priced it in before you went.
And this was not entirely empty-handed. Olivier noted in the transmission that Great Crusade-era Kastellan armour commanded extraordinary prices from dissident tech-adepts operating outside Mechanicus authority. Even complete scrap, to the right buyer through the right channels, would recover a significant portion of the expedition's costs. If the family's attached tech-priests could coax anything further from the hardware before sale, the return could still be meaningful.
The cable drew taut on the final haul. The last Kastellan shell, enormous even in its wrecked state, rose from the dark of the underhive toward the shaft above.
When the last useful item had been secured, Duvette ordered a small team to partially bury the entrance. Venus glanced at him.
He answered before she asked. "To prevent the feral mutants in the deep underhive, or any passing salvagers who might follow our tracks, from finding this place."
She accepted that without further comment.
Several hours later, the last landers lifted from Omicron-Nine's surface and began the ascent toward the fleet in low orbit.
Duvette looked down through the viewport at the dead world below, growing small and silent beneath them. In the shadow of his filtration mask, the corner of his mouth had found a slight angle that was not easy to see from outside.
What he was bringing back from this world went far beyond the salvage.
When the time was right, Belisarius Cawl would have his own methods for retrieving what lay at the bottom of that shaft, intact and ready. That was the nature of the man, or whatever the Archmagos had become across ten thousand years of uninterrupted work.
Until then, this secret would continue to sleep quietly alongside a dead world, in the dark.
THE END....of v1