Chapter 69: Bare Hands, Split Skull
Duvette followed the still-sweating logistics officer out of the warehouse area.
Behind him came Anderson, Finn, and Major Kleist at the head of several dozen fully armed Astra Militarum veterans. Their direction: the administrative building at the rear of the distribution center.
Everything they passed confirmed what Duvette had suspected.
The entire base was operating in a state of bizarre overload. Logistics and administrative personnel moved in every direction, carrying thick parchment scrolls or data-slates, hurrying between prefabricated buildings. These low-level bureaucrats all appeared overwhelmed by the vast Astra Militarum force that had suddenly assembled. Industrial servitors ground along on their tracks, blindly shifting ammunition crates. Dispatching officers screamed through comms channels until their voices gave out.
On the surface, it all looked like a wartime logistics system pushed past its limits. To Duvette, it was a net, deliberately woven to buy time.
He paid no attention to the surrounding noise and kept following the guide officer's steps. They crossed an open area piled with cargo containers and came at last to the administrative building.
Imperial-pattern construction: exterior walls of heavy plasteel and ferrocrete. But from the moment he stepped into the ground floor lobby, Duvette registered something wrong.
It was abnormally dark.
As the central building responsible for coordinating the entire distribution center's materiel allocation, this place should have been brilliantly lit, its cogitator array screens alive with uninterrupted data streams. Instead, most of the lighting tubes along the corridor ceiling were extinguished. The few that remained produced a weak, unstable yellow glow.
The air carried a strange compound smell, old leather and some kind of chemical agent mixed together. Nothing like any normally functioning Imperial administrative institution.
The guide officer stopped at a wide set of oak double doors. He extended a trembling finger toward them, indicating that the distribution center's highest-ranking official was inside. Then he retreated into the shadows of the corridor as if he were fleeing.
Duvette stopped. He turned and looked at the soldiers behind him, keeping his voice low.
"Anderson. Finn. Take people and hold this corridor. Lock down the doors and every approach. No one in or out without my order. There will be fighting. Be ready."
"Understood, Commissar." Anderson nodded and his massive frame moved to fill the center of the corridor. Finn said nothing. The mechanical eye emitted its cold red glow in the dim.
Duvette pushed the heavy oak doors open alone.
The metal hinges gave their grinding scrape. He walked through and pulled the doors shut behind him.
If the corridor outside had been dim, this spacious office was in absolute darkness. Every window was sealed behind heavy blackout curtains with no light coming through from outside. The room's only illumination came from a small desk lamp at the far end, placed on a long office table, its weak light reaching no further than one corner of the table and the upper half of the face of the man sitting behind it.
The distribution center's official sat at the boundary of shadow and light with his hands folded on the desktop. He appeared entirely unsurprised by Duvette's arrival.
Duvette stood in the doorway and looked at him with narrowed eyes. He found the details he was looking for almost immediately: the ones that violated the norms of human physiology. The man's skull was completely hairless, and in the desk lamp's glow the bare skin held a faint blue-purple cast. Abnormal muscle ridges ran along both sides of his neck. His breathing was far slower than any normal human's.
Duvette didn't reach for his weapon. Instead, he allowed himself a slight smile.
"It seems you've given up on maintaining appearances entirely."
He walked toward the desk with the ease of someone making conversation.
"I'll be honest with you. I've always been curious about one thing. How do you manage it? In Ultramar, with the Ultramarines watching over it â€" how do you slip people into positions at this level without anyone noticing?"
The man did not react with any fear of being identified. He raised his head slowly and looked at Duvette through the lamp's glow with eyes that were almost entirely without visible pupil, clouded over and deep.
His mouth corners spread to both sides and kept spreading, well past any limit a normal human face was built to reach, pulling into a grotesque smile.
"The rotting rules of this place are rigid," the official said, his voice hoarse and carrying wrong resonances. "Our bloodline evolves. The great Ascension Festival approaches. You are perceptive, Commissar. But you and your kind, trying to resist the descent of the angels with that scrap metal." A low, coarse sound that might have been laughter. "Laughably pathetic."
He rose from his chair. In the shadows behind the desk his body appeared to be undergoing some structural expansion, something altering in the shape of it.
"Since you walked in here yourself, you may as well die here. A sacrifice before the angels descend."
Duvette did not engage with the speech. His attention had already shifted to the semi-transparent strategic map in his vision.
On it, clearly visible: several bright red contacts moving rapidly through the ventilation shafts and ceiling voids surrounding this room. Their speed and movement patterns were entirely non-human. They were converging on the Astra Militarum squad in the corridor outside in an encircling formation.
Purebred Genestealer assassins. Deployed specifically to kill him.
Watching those contacts close on the map, the slight smile on Duvette's face became more pronounced. His eyes held nothing but killing intent.
"Sacrifice?" He stopped. He looked straight into those clouded eyes. "You have one thing wrong. You are the prey."
The word had barely left his mouth whenâ€"
BOOM.
From far outside the administrative building, an explosion detonated with enough force to tear across the sky. The shockwave came through the thick walls and set the blackout curtains shaking violently, rocking the desk lamp on its base. Through the gap where the curtains had shifted, the distant horizon blazed orange-red.
The 42nd Armoured Distribution Center's dedicated Promethium fuel and high-energy battery storage. All of it going up in a column of fire that climbed toward the upper atmosphere.
The official's expression locked.
The confidence left his face and did not return. As this facility's coordinating authority, he understood precisely what an explosion at that location meant. Every defensive element on Parmenio would turn toward it. There would be no containing the response.
He had no time to think through the implications.
In the fraction of a second the explosion pulled his attention away, Duvette gave the command from somewhere below conscious thought.
[Limiter Break] â€" activate.
The self-protective restrictions the human brain imposed on the body tore away. His heart drove oxygen-rich blood through every limb at something approaching the limit of what the human circulatory system could sustain. Bone density and muscle output surged in the same instant.
The plasteel floor under Duvette's boot took a clear indentation as he launched. He came across the room like a bolt shell leaving a barrel, closing several meters in an instant, and hit the office table going through it, splinters in every direction, appearing directly in front of the official.
The official's head snapped back. His jaw dislocated with a sound that carried wrong harmonics, and a barbed purple tongue shot from his opening mouth.
Not fast enough.
Duvette didn't reach for his weapon. He raised his right hand, all five fingers closing like iron clamps, and seized the official's mutating skull with a grip that did not allow for any outcome other than the one that followed.
The explosive output of those muscle groups reached the theoretical limit of mortal human physiology.
Crack.
A sound of snapping cervical vertebra filled the office.
Using nothing but raw physical force, Duvette tore the entire skull from the neck, pulling it free along with a section of spine still trailing purple fluid.
The headless body convulsed twice and fell forward across the desk. Purple ichor erupted outward across the falsified materiel distribution documents.
At the same moment, from the far side of the heavy oak doors, the sounds of close combat arrived: weapons, flesh on flesh, and the shrill alien screeching of Genestealers. It lasted less than ten seconds before silence reclaimed the corridor.
Duvette dropped the misshapen skull onto the carpet, shook the viscous fluid from his glove, and crossed to the doors. He pulled them open.
The fight was over.
The corridor walls and floor were saturated in purple blood. Anderson stood in the center of the passage like something that could not be moved. He was covered in shredded flesh and his breathing was heavy and controlled. In both hands he held the remains of two purebred Genestealers, dead in his grip. These were creatures legendary for their ability to tear through armored plate with four razor-edged claws. They had been smashed apart, limbs broken, and now hung half-lifted in Anderson's fists like burst sacks.
The pressure radiating off this mortal veteran, in that moment, was the pressure of an Astartes.
Around him, several more Genestealer corpses lay scattered across the corridor floor in every direction.
Finn's mechanical arm and the combat knife in his hand were dark with Genestealer blood. He regarded the twisted corpses on the ground without expression, his mechanical eye producing its steady hum.
These battle-hardened veterans, with the absolute combat foresight provided by [Threat Sense] and the physical output unleashed by [Limiter Break], had met a force capable of massacring an ordinary infantry company and produced a completely one-sided outcome.
Not a single soldier wounded.
Duvette looked at these men and gave a brief, satisfied nod. "Turns out they actually can tear a greenskin apart with their bare hands."
Every soldier turned at his voice. The bewilderment was still visible in their eyes â€" the sudden impossible strength, the awareness that had moved faster than thought â€" but the combat instinct in their bodies had already handled everything the conscious mind had not caught up with yet.
"Is this..." Kleist looked at Duvette and hesitated before the question.
"The Emperor's grace." Duvette cut him off without pause. "Your loyalty was met with the strength it deserved."
He said nothing more. "Bring the bodies. Follow."
He turned, led them along the corridor, and walked out of the administrative building and its reek of heresy.
Outside, the square had erupted.
The explosion had triggered alert sirens across the entire facility. Local defense forces and auxiliary troops had been scrambled and were rushing in every direction without coherent purpose.
When they saw the group coming out of the administrative building, everyone in sight stopped moving.
Duvette walked at the front. His coat hem was blood-stained. In his left hand he held the coordinating official's skull. In his right, his bolt pistol. Behind him, Anderson and dozens of veterans dragged the remains of four-armed, grotesquely deformed creatures that none of the assembled troops had ever seen before and had no language for.
The auxiliary troops stared. Shock and fear were past hiding.
They had no idea where the monsters had come from. They had no idea what this Colonel-Commissar had done inside.
Duvette ignored all of it. He stood on the building's front steps and waited.
Before long, a figure came out of the shadows at the far edge of the square at a jog. Stroud arrived at a run, a light coating of dust on him.
"Commissar." He grinned â€" wide enough that nothing was left to the imagination. He leaned close to Duvette's ear and kept his voice low. "Mission complete. The fireworks were loud enough. About half the distribution center's fuel storage is in orbit."
Duvette gave a slight nod. "No one saw you."
"Boss, you wound me." Stroud raised an eyebrow. "Doubting my abilities at this point?"
Duvette said nothing to that.
This had been one part of the solution from the start. Working through normal procedure inside a camp this thoroughly infiltrated â€" climbing layer by layer up the chain of command, locating the garrisoning Ultramarines, getting a message through â€" would have taken far too long. Time was the one thing they did not have.
So he had sent Stroud with a small team to destroy the largest materiel warehouse instead.
A strategic weapons cache going up in flames inside the Realm of Ultramar was not a situation that could be managed quietly or ignored. The Astartes garrisoning this territory would not need to be found. They would come.
A portion of materiel traded for time. Worth every gram of it.
"Well done," Duvette said quietly.
He turned his head and looked at the distant sea of fire that had converted night into false day. The surging flames moved in his pupils.
"Now." He stepped down from the building's front steps and led the way toward the fire. "Bring the Genestealer bodies. We walk toward the burning warehouse area. We go and meet the true masters of this territory."