Chapter 3 - Worth Every Solar
The shrine had been beautiful once.
Kiri could see it in the architecture — the soaring archways, the carefully carved Aquilas, the pulpit designed to catch and amplify a speaker's voice. Someone had built this with reverence. With faith.
Someone else had desecrated it.
The Aquilas had been carved into obscene shapes, their wings twisted into suggestions of things Kiri's mind refused to fully process. The walls were covered with flayed skin — human skin, she realized with a lurch — arranged in intricate patterns that might have been beautiful if they weren't so horrifying.
And at the center, slumped against the pulpit, was a body.
Human. Female. Wearing the remnants of Inquisitorial insignia.
"Interrogator Vile," Gen whispered.
The dead woman's hand was locked in a death grip around a data slate. Her face was frozen in an expression of absolute terror.
That's what we came for. That data slate. Whatever intelligence she gathered. That's the whole mission.
Then the Chaos spawn turned its head toward them, and Kiri forgot how to breathe.
It was massive — easily twice Glume's size — and wrong in ways that made the corrupted cultist look almost natural by comparison. Too many limbs. Too many mouths. Flesh that rippled and reformed even as she watched, sprouting new appendages and reabsorbing old ones in a continuous, nauseating cycle.
It was crouched over the corpse of a Genestealer, tearing chunks of chitin-covered flesh free with teeth that looked like they'd been stolen from a dozen different predators and fused together at random.
It hadn't noticed them yet.
Kiri's hand went automatically to her inferno pistol. Then stopped.
Six shots. Six misses.
If she missed this — if the spawn noticed them before she could kill it — if it got to the data slate before they could retrieve it — the whole mission would be pointless. All the corruption they'd witnessed, all the horrors they'd endured, for nothing.
"I'll take it," Seraya whispered from beside her.
Kiri's jaw tightened. The psyker's tone was careful. Not condescending. Not mocking. Just... offering. Like she was trying to save Kiri from another humiliation.
And that somehow made it worse.
"No," Kiri said. The word came out harder than she intended. "I've got this."
Seraya's eyes narrowed. "Kiri, you've missed every—"
"I said I've got it." Kiri met the psyker's gaze directly. "I'm the quietest one. Let me sneak up and kill it before it notices us." Seraya looked like she was about to protest. "Just back me up if — or when — I need it."
They stared at each other for a long moment. Kiri could see the calculation in Seraya's eyes — the weighing of mission success against... what? Pride? Ego? The need to prove something?
Finally, Seraya nodded. "Don't miss."
"I won't."
I hope, she added silently.
Kiri moved forward. Silent. Careful. Every lesson from her childhood coming into play — how to move without being noticed, how to control her breathing, how to step so that not even trained guards would hear her.
Twenty meters. The spawn kept eating, oblivious.
Fifteen meters. She could smell it now — corruption and rot and something that burned her nose and throat even through the rebreather.
Ten meters. Close enough to see the details she wished she couldn't. The way its flesh moved independently of its muscles. The eyes — too many eyes — scattered across its body in random configurations. The mouths that opened and closed rhythmically, chewing on nothing.
She raised the inferno pistol.
Her heart was hammering. Her hands were steady.
This is it. This is what you left home for. What you bought this pistol for. What you've been training for. Prove you can do this. Prove you don't need your father's name or your brother's inheritance or anyone's approval but your own.
She sighted down the barrel. The spawn's center mass — or what passed for it — filled her vision.
She thought about her first day on the Navy ship, mopping floors and taking orders from people half as smart as her, choking down her pride because she'd chosen this. Because it was better than spending her life as someone's backup plan.
She thought about her first mission. About the Voidstalker spinning out of control, everyone screaming, certain they were going to die. About how she'd closed her eyes and felt the craft, trusted her instincts, and brought them home.
She thought about the plasma pistol — her father's pistol, the one thing he'd ever given her that meant anything — and how her brother had taken it from her like he'd taken everything else.
She thought: This one is mine.
She exhaled slowly.
Squeezed the trigger.
The inferno pistol roared.
The spawn exploded.
Not died. Not fell down. Exploded — like she'd hit it with a demolition charge instead of a pistol. Superheated melta energy tore through its twisted form, cauterizing as it went, and painted the wall behind it in chunks of flash-burned meat that sizzled as they hit stone.
Kiri stared at the smoking crater where the spawn had been.
Her ears were ringing. Her hands were shaking now — adrenaline catching up to her. The inferno pistol was hot enough that she could feel it through her gloves.
"Holy Throne," she heard from behind her. She could almost feel Gen making the sign of the acquilla.
Then the auspex screamed.
Four more spawns, emerging from alcoves around the shrine that Kiri hadn't even noticed. They'd been there the whole time, hiding, waiting, and now they were charging.
Kiri didn't think. Just turned and fired.
The second spawn was halfway to her when her shot took it in the head. The entire skull vaporized in a flash of white heat, and the body kept running for two more steps before collapsing.
One down.
"Get the data slate!" she shouted at Gen.
The third spawn was closer, moving faster. It had too many legs — six? Eight? — and they propelled it forward with disturbing speed.
Glume met it with his power sword, the blade carving deep. The spawn screamed and lashed out.
Something struck at Kiri — she never saw what. Her refractor field activated automatically, that tiny ring on her finger worth more than most people earned in a lifetime, and brilliant light filled the shrine, blinding everyone in range.
Including her.
Kiri fired blind, trusting instinct, trusting the rough position she'd noted before the flash.
She felt the heat wash across her face. Heard the wet thump of something large and organic hitting the floor.
Two down.
Her vision cleared in time to see Seraya stumbling back into the shrine. The psyker's face was twisted in a raw grimace of... something.
When had she left? What happened out there?
No time to dwell on it. Glume was carving through the fourth spawn with economical precision despite the chemical flood from his stim glands.
The last spawn turned toward Seraya.
Kiri raised her pistol and fired.
The spawn collapsed, a smoking hole where its torso had been.
Silence.
Kiri lowered her pistol. The barrel glowed cherry-red in the dim light of the shrine, heat shimmer rising from it.
Five shots. Five kills. Hulks that should have taken a team to bring them down — a dozen or volleys from the lasgun she’d been issued in the Navy.
Worth every Solar. Every single one.
Gen was at the corpse, trying to pry the data slate free. "It's locked in her grip."
"I'll levitate the body," Seraya said flatly. Almost detached. "We'll just push the whole thing."
The flight back was quiet.
Gen sat in the navigator's seat, the data slate connected to her autoscribe, its contents scrolling across a small display screen. Kiri could see the reflection of text in Gen's glasses, but she didn't ask what it said. That was Gen's job — information, analysis, making sense of the intelligence they'd retrieved.
Kiri's job was flying. And apparently shooting. The shuttle responded smoothly to her controls, the machine spirit content and cooperative. No emergency maneuvers required. No improvised landings. Just a clean, professional flight back to the void ship.
When they docked, she killed the engines and ran through the post-flight checklist with mechanical precision. Everything green. No damage. No complications.
Behind her, she heard Seraya levitating the interrogator's corpse through the airlock — psyker work, but it meant they wouldn't have to carry it. Small mercies.
Inquisitor Harcane was waiting in the hangar bay.
She took the data slate from Gen without comment, glanced at the levitating corpse, and nodded once — a gesture that somehow conveyed both approval and dismissal.
"Well done," she said. Her voice was flat, emotionless. "Debrief in six hours. Get cleaned up. Medicae will want to check you for corruption exposure."
Kiri filed past her with the others, suddenly aware of how exhausted she was. How much everything hurt. How badly she needed a shower and food and about twelve hours of sleep.
But as they walked down the corridor — Glume humming something tuneless, Gen's autoscribe whirring, Seraya silent and brooding — the psyker fell into step beside her.
"Nice shooting," Seraya said quietly. "At the end."
Kiri didn't look at her. Kept her eyes forward. "Thanks."
"You going to drill more with it?"
"Yes." The answer came immediately. No hesitation. "Until I don't have to think about it."
Seraya nodded. "Good."
They walked in silence for a moment.
"You ran," Kiri said. "In the shrine." She'd pieced it together on the flight home.
Seraya's jaw tightened. "Not by choice."
"I know."
"The spawn's fear aura." The words came out reluctant. "By the time I broke through it, you'd already killed most of them."
"All of them," Kiri corrected. "Glume wounded one. I finished it."
Seraya's expression was complicated. "Very dramatic."
Kiri wanted to protest, but couldn't. It was dramatic. Five kills in a row after six misses felt like fiction. Like one of those pulp stories the navy grunts used to carry around.
It had felt like redemption.
"Get some rest," Seraya said. "Harcane's going to want details."
Kiri nodded. "See you."
Her quarters were small — smaller than her childhood bedroom — but it was hers.
She sat on the bunk and fieldstripped the inferno pistol. Not because it needed maintenance. Because she needed to understand it.
Six misses. Five kills.
Not good enough.
But better than giving up.
She'd drill tomorrow. And the day after. Until six misses became three. Until three became zero.
She reassembled the pistol and holstered it.
In six hours, there would be questions. About Chaos cults and corrupted cultists and the intelligence retrieved.
But for now, she could rest.
She'd earned that much.
The Amalgam Seven mission is complete. But the intelligence retrieved — House Vandal, Leonova, crystals diverted, the exiled one named Miajana — points to something larger.
To be continued...