Chapter 4: The Warehouse
Level 1,203 was exactly as described—an abandoned industrial sector, empty save for rows of nondescript warehouses. The air smelled of old lubricant and crystal dust, and the lighting was intermittent at best.
They found the warehouse marked on the map easily enough. Two guards stood at the main entrance, wearing House Varindal colors. Professional. Alert. Not the kind you could talk your way past without good credentials.
Kiri pulled out the augmented auspex Harcane had provided and activated it.
Power signatures. Active machinery. Definitely not abandoned.
Life signs. Multiple. At least a dozen.
"Definitely occupied," Kiri whispered.
"Service entrance?" Gen asked.
Kiri checked the map. Eastern side, as promised. They could get in without alerting the front guards.
"Or," Glume said slowly, "we just walk up to the front door with our forged credentials and see how far we get."
Kiri looked at him. It was actually not a terrible idea. They had House Varindal documentation. They could pose as inspectors, get inside legitimately, gather evidence without immediately raising alarms.
"Front door," Seraya agreed. "Direct is better."
Kiri nodded. Of course Seraya would say that. But it didn't mean she wasn't right. "Front door it is. Gen, you take lead—your administratum background will help sell it."
Gen frowned. "What do you mean, my... background?"
Seraya hid a smirk. Glume didn't bother.
"Nothing," Kiri said quickly. "You just seem the most..." Punctilious. Officious. Bureaucratic. "...professional."
Gen's eyes narrowed slightly, but she shifted into her bureaucratic persona, straightening her jacket. "Fine. But if this goes wrong, I'm blaming you."
"Noted," Kiri said.
They approached the main entrance with confidence—not arrogance, but the kind of quiet assurance that came from legitimate authority. The guards stiffened as they approached.
"State your business," one said.
"Inspection," Gen replied crisply, producing their credentials. "House Varindal quality assurance. We're checking crystal processing standards and inventory accuracy."
The guard examined the credentials with professional thoroughness. Whatever forger Harcane used was exceptional—the guard found nothing wrong.
"Proceed," he said, stepping aside.
Easy. Too easy, perhaps. But they were in.
The loading bay was exactly what Kiri expected from an industrial facility—cargo haulers, loading equipment, rollup doors large enough to accommodate bulk shipments. Four more House Varindal guards stood at intervals, professional and bored.
They gave cursory nods as the team entered. No challenge. No suspicion.
Beyond the loading bay, the warehouse opened into a larger space. Crates everywhere, marked with various Imperial insignia—Munitorum, Administratum, House Varindal. A jumbled mess that spoke to either disorganization or deliberate obfuscation.
And workers. Four of them, clearly civilians. Terrified. Moving with the jerky, frantic energy of people working under threat.
Three figures watched them. Not professional guards—these had wild eyes and wrong smiles. One giggled softly to himself as he watched a worker pack crystals into specialized containers.
Gen had her pict-recorder out, concealed in her palm, taking images with practiced subtlety. Evidence. Documentation. Proof.
The watchers glanced at them but didn't interfere. Just went back to watching the terrified workers pack crystals.
Above the main floor, stairs led to a mezzanine level—offices, probably. Control room. Records.
Kiri caught Seraya's eye and gestured upward.
They climbed.
The office level was quieter. Corridors lined with small rooms, one larger office at the far end.
Kiri followed the others into the main offices. By the time she entered, Gen was already at a cogitator terminal, her fingers flying over the keypad. A few moments of concentrated effort, and the screen lit up with data.
"In," Gen murmured with satisfaction.
She started scanning through files. Shipping records. Manifests. And other documentation—ritualistic in nature, covered in symbols that made Kiri's eyes hurt.
"This references 'the Lady,'" Gen said quietly. "Probably not Lady Varindal." She pulled more data. "Overseer Kael's operation. Shipments to the Iron Archipelago."
Kiri felt a mix of satisfaction and unease. They'd found what they needed—concrete evidence of House Varindal's heresy. But the scope of it, the organization behind it... She shook her head as she left the office, leaving Gen to her work.
The last room had vidscreens and a central hub. The screens were all dark.
She touched the input device — a mounted skull perched at stomach height with wires snaking into the pedestal beneath it.
The screens flickered to life.
Video feeds. Multiple angles of the warehouse floor below. The front entrance. The eastern service entrance.
And a feed for another location. One they hadn't seen yet.
A basement entrance, hidden behind stacked crates on the main floor.
"There," Kiri whispered, pointing.
They descended back to the main floor, moving with purpose but not panic. Just inspectors doing their jobs. The manic watchers followed them with unsettling interest, whispering to each other and giggling.
Kiri led them toward the corner where the surveillance feed had shown the basement entrance. Behind the crates, just as the footage had indicated, was a reinforced door with a security lock.
One of the watchers noticed.
"Oi," he called out, voice high and wrong. "What're you doing over there?"
Kiri turned, keeping her expression neutral. "Inspection. Checking—"
"Nobody goes down there," the watcher interrupted. He was grinning now, showing too many teeth. "Nobody. Not without Overseer Kael's approval. And he's not here."
The other watchers were moving now. Spreading out. Hands moving toward weapons.
The professional guards were starting to notice the commotion, hands drifting toward their laspistols.
"We have authorization," Gen said, her voice bureaucratically firm. "Munitorum compliance requires—"
"Fuck your compliance," the watcher spat. Then louder, to everyone: "They're not supposed to be here! Sound the alarm!"
Kiri's hand moved to her refractor field ring, twisting it to activate.
Everything happened at once.
The alarm shrieked through the warehouse—a klaxon that made Kiri's teeth ache. The professional guards started moving, reaching for weapons. The watchers drew laspistols with jerky movements, and Kiri caught it—something wrong with how they moved. Too fluid in some places, too jerky in others, like their joints didn't quite work the way human joints should.
"Throne," Kiri swore, pulling her bolter.
She fired before they could.
The watcher who'd challenged them exploded. Her bolt round caught him center mass and detonated, and his body came apart wrong—the flesh beneath his robes wasn't quite right, mottled purple and pink in patterns that hurt to look at directly.
The second watcher took shrapnel and went down screaming. His scream had too many harmonics, like multiple voices layered over each other.
The third one was still moving, laspistol coming up.
Las-bolts seared through the air from the professional guards. One grazed close to Kiri. Her refractor field activated.
The air around her erupted in blinding light.
Everyone cursed and clutched their eyes—including the third watcher, who stumbled backward, firing blind.
"Blind us all, why don't you," Glume laughed, charging forward despite the flash. Could he even see? Was he just hoping for the Emperor's luck?
His power sword found the cultist anyway. The blade caught him at the collarbone and cleaved down and through, bisecting the man from shoulder to hip.
The two halves fell away, and Kiri saw it—the inside of the body was wrong. Muscle and bone restructured into geometric patterns, flesh marked with symbols that writhed even in death.
All three watchers down. Now just the professional guards—real soldiers, unaugmented humans in carapace armor.
Seraya had already launched herself at them. Her staff came down on the nearest one's helmet with psychic-amplified force. Metal crumpled. Bone shattered. The guard dropped like his strings had been cut.
Another guard swung a vibro-knife at her. The blade sparked against Seraya’s refractor field—and brilliant light flashed again, catching the guards all around her. They had a viper in their midst and they could barely see.
Kiri blinked away afterimages and fired her bolter twice in quick succession. Spread pattern, targeting the cluster of guards trying to flank Seraya.
The first round caught one in the chest. Not a kill—his carapace armor held—but the impact threw him backward, blood spraying from the gaps in his armor. The second round clipped another guard's shoulder, spinning him around.
Gen fired from cover, but her shot went wide—clearly still half-blind from the refractor discharge.
Glume appeared out of the chaos, his power sword humming. He found the wounded guard Kiri had hit, the one barely staying on his feet, and brought the blade across in a horizontal slash.
The guard's head separated from his shoulders with surgical precision.
Seraya was methodically destroying the remaining guards. Her staff was everywhere—blocking, striking, crushing. One guard tried to rush her with a vibro-knife. She caught him in the throat with the staff's end. The wet crunch echoed even over the klaxon.
He dropped, choking on his own crushed windpipe.
Another guard fired at her. His las-bolt hit her conversion shield, which absorbed it without even a flicker of light—apparently it had recharged between discharges.
Kiri spotted movement in her peripheral vision—a guard trying to flank. She dropped and rolled as las-fire burned the air where she'd been standing.
Came up with her inferno pistol in hand.
The guard's eyes went wide.
Kiri pulled the trigger.
The beam of superheated energy punched through his chest and kept going. For a moment, he stood there, a perfect circle of cauterized flesh where his sternum had been, . Then he collapsed.
Mine. Worth every solar.
The last guard tried to retreat, realized he had nowhere to go, and raised his laspistol at Seraya.
She was faster. Her staff came around and caught him in the temple. His head transformed into a red mist.
Then silence. Just the klaxon and the ragged breathing of four people standing among bodies.
"Clear," Gen called, her hot-shot laspistol still trained on the doorways.
Kiri counted bodies. Three watchers down—and whatever corruption had reshaped them was dead too. Six professional guards, at least they'd died human.
The enslaved workers had fled during the chaos. Smart.
"We need to move," Gen said. "That alarm will bring reinforcements."
Glume wiped his power sword clean on a dead guard's uniform. "Basement first?"
Seraya nodded, her staff still crackling faintly with residual energy. "We came for evidence. Let's get it."
The basement door was still locked. But Kiri’s inferno pistol made short work of the lock. The door swung open, revealing stairs descending into darkness.
Cold air wafted up. And with it, a smell.
Sweet and cloying and fundamentally wrong. Perfume mixed with rot.
"Definitely something down there," Seraya said. She made the sign of the acquilla in front of her.
Could she sense something? Kiri grimaced.
"Of course there is," Glume muttered. His hand went unconsciously to his back, where the scourge marks were still raw.
They stood at the threshold, staring down into the dark.
To be continued...