V2 Chapter 45: First Meeting with Cawl
Duvette transferred forward clearance command to Evan and Anderson, then took two personal guards to the designated coordinates. A light shuttle in military affairs markings was already sitting on the temporary landing pad, its vector engines idling at low power.
He boarded without a word and sat by the viewport, watching Ashek II's scarred surface fall away beneath him.
When the shuttle punched through the low-orbit dust layer, he finally saw it: the Ark Mechanicus floating in high orbit above.
The thing was enormous to the point of absurdity.
The expedition fleet's battleships, sitting in its vicinity, looked like escort craft. The outer hull was covered in layer after layer of Mechanicus runes and vast antenna arrays, the vessel's stacked structure resembling a forge world that had been transplanted into the void.
The Ark of Omen.
Belisarius Cawl's flagship.
Duvette looked at the vast shape and turned something over in his mind.
He had no way of knowing what Cawl's disposition toward him actually was at this moment. A ten-thousand-year-old Archmagos carried too many fragmented personalities, and too many secrets that no mortal was supposed to know.
And he happened to know the most dangerous ones.
The Primaris project. The Sangprimus Portum. Guilliman's awakening.
If Cawl was currently operating under one of his more aggressive personality configurations, he might genuinely decide to erase Duvette and everyone around him who could be considered a security risk, and do it without hesitation.
He was not entirely without leverage, of course.
He was still a Colonel-Commissar on the active order of battle for the Sabbat Crusade, and he had just led the 112th through the most critical operation of the Ashek II campaign. Supreme command would not stand by and watch Mars unilaterally remove one of their best assets.
He also held the Star of Terra.
But Duvette understood clearly enough that in this particular universe, being a hero was not immunity. Being a hero simply meant being someone worth investigating in secret with considerably more thoroughness.
And then there was the Inquisition to factor in.
Until he was actually in the room with Cawl, everything remained unknown.
What surprised him was the shuttle's heading. It did not fly toward the Ark of Omen. It turned toward the expedition fleet's flagship instead.
That counted as a positive sign.
At least the meeting would take place on expedition territory. Marshal Blackwood had evidently not permitted Cawl to simply take Duvette aboard the Ark directly.
Which meant that if Cawl did intend to act against him, doing so openly would be considerably more difficult.
The shuttle entered the flagship's lower hangar. When the hatch opened and Duvette stepped down the boarding ramp, he found an unusual figure waiting at the edge of the landing deck.
The figure appeared to be a Mechanicus priest of some kind, with a number of servo-skulls drifting in the air around him. But the moment Duvette looked at him, the face turned toward Duvette with precise, immediate accuracy. It was a fully human face, showing no obvious augmetic modification. It produced a smile that registered as carefully constructed rather than natural.
"Ah. Good day, honoured Imperial hero, Colonel-Commissar Duvette." The priest stepped forward and inclined his head in a composed, measured bow. His voice was mild. "I am the assistant, companion, and servant of the great Archmagos Belisarius Cawl. You may address me as Qvo-77."
Qvo-77.
Duvette turned the name over internally. Cawl's companion, the one who was continuously resurrected through cloning technology, technically not classified as abominable intelligence despite what any objective assessment of the situation would suggest.
In the instant Qvo-77 lowered his head in the bow, Duvette noticed what was beneath the pale human skull: no biological tissue of any kind. In its place, a dense arrangement of mechanical gears, hydraulic lines, and cold metal framing.
Duvette kept his expression unchanged and offered a composed smile, inclining his head to indicate he understood.
Only at that point did his peripheral vision catch two other figures standing nearby: a senior naval officer whose complexion was visibly pale and who looked profoundly uncomfortable with the entire situation, and an Inquisitor watching Duvette with a dark, fixed gaze.
Duvette turned his head toward the Inquisitor and smiled pleasantly.
"It has been some time, Inquisitor Maysondaire."
The Inquisitor who had clashed sharply with Duvette on Formal Prime stepped forward one pace, his face closed and cold.
Maysondaire's eyes carried undisguised hostility and scrutiny. His voice was flat. "It seems your luck has finally run out."
In his assessment, Duvette had not only operated in circumstances of probable Warp contamination during the preceding engagements, he was now apparently entangled with a senior Archmagos in ways that had no legitimate basis under Imperial military law. Taken together, this was a significant violation of the Codex Astartes provisions governing Astra Militarum personnel.
The Inquisitor lowered his voice to something that carried its threat without needing to raise it. "When the moment presents itself, I can put you on the gallows at any time. Nothing standing behind you will save you."
Duvette did not give him a second look.
He dismissed Maysondaire's grey-faced posturing entirely and turned with a pleasant expression toward the naval officer standing to the side, who had been enduring this exchange with the visible suffering of a man who wanted to be anywhere else.
"If you're ready, sir, I'd appreciate being taken to the designated location."
The naval officer, whose internal relief was not entirely contained, wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, gestured with a somewhat unsteady hand for Duvette to follow, and set off down the corridor.
The group moved in suppressed silence through the flagship's steel corridors toward the largest strategic conference chamber on the ship.
Duvette drew a steady breath and stepped through the heavy alloy doors as they slid open.
The figure at the centre of the conference room took his entire field of vision the moment he crossed the threshold.
It was enormous. A metal colossus that resembled a heavy gun emplacement given movement and will. Even in this exceptionally large conference room, its presence made the space feel cramped.
Marshal Blackwood, not a small man by any standard, stood before the figure at a height that barely reached the upper joints of the machine's lower limbs.
Heavy Martian red robes concealed the upper body of the thing. At this moment it was leaning forward slightly, bearing down on Marshal Blackwood with a posture that radiated pressure, apparently in the middle of some sharp disagreement.
"He remains on the active order of battle of the Sabbat Crusade." Marshal Blackwood's voice carried suppressed anger beneath the formality. "Archmagos, the 112th has just completed the decisive decapitation operation on Ashek II. I will not permit anyone to remove an expedition officer under the pretext of a technical review."
"Incorrect." Cawl's layered synthetic voice was level and cold. "This individual used a high-grade authorisation belonging to me and made contact with a severely contaminated piece of dark Mechanicus technology. Under Mechanicus technical contamination protocols, he is required to submit to isolation and review."
Blackwood was drawing breath to continue when he noticed Duvette had entered. He stopped.
He exhaled slowly, and nodded to Duvette in acknowledgment.
The red-robed colossus also ceased its exchange. With a grinding sound of servo-motors turning, it shifted its enormous mechanical frame and brought itself to face Duvette directly.
"ENOUGH."
The immense Omnissian axe in Cawl's grip was raised and brought down against the flagship's metal deck with a single blow. The impact rang through the conference room like a bell struck at close range. Every person in the room went completely still.
Then the layered mechanical voice began filling the space.
"As you can see, I have answered your call, Duvette Erdmann."
The optical sensors concealed beneath the hood's shadow locked onto the Commissar with absolute precision.
"Tell me. What is it you want?"