Chapter 2 - Six misses
Kiri bit her tongue. Seraya had a point, but complaining wouldn't help them now.
The big man was already rooting through a crate, his augmetic fingers delicate despite their size. "Medical stims," he announced happily. "Quality work, too. Throne-grade pharmaceuticals." He pocketed several vials. "We should search the rest."
"Later," Kiri said. "We need to move. Gen, which way?"
The scholar consulted her auspex. "Two passages. Straight ahead or right."
"Straight," Kiri decided. Keep it simple. Get in, find the interrogator's data, get out.
They moved in formation — Glume and Seraya on point, Gen in the middle scanning with her auspex, Kiri bringing up the rear with her bolter ready.
The first junction was corroded, metal eaten away by acid drips from the ceiling. The second room was a medicae bay, surgery tables overturned, supply shelves ransacked.
Kiri checked her auspex. "Life sign. Closet. One contact."
Everyone froze. Seraya's hands crackled with power. Glume's conversion field hummed to life, a barely visible shimmer around him. Gen pulled out her laspistol — small, new, perfectly maintained.
Kiri holstered her bolter and drew the inferno pistol.
Short range. This is what it's for.
She nodded to Glume. The big man moved to the closet door, his augmetic hand on the handle. Seraya positioned herself for a clear shot. Gen stayed back, auspex scanning.
Three... two... one...
The cultist exploded out swinging, work-claws extended, purple robes flapping.
Kiri fired.
Miss.
The shot seared the door frame. The cultist stumbled but kept coming, swinging at Glume.
Kiri fired again.
Miss.
She saw Gen's lasbolt fly through the air, wide of the target.
The cultist leapt at Glume, its claws looking to disembowel the big man. But his conversion field flashed and he stumbled backward, shaken but whole.
Third shot.
Miss.
Fourth shot.
Miss.
Glume danced across the floor, his power sword humming. He drove it through the cultist's torso in one smooth motion. The blade punched through corrupted flesh and Slaaneshi robes like they were paper.
Kiri stared at her pistol. Four shots. Point-blank range. Four misses.
"You okay?" Gen asked quietly.
"Fine." Kiri’s hands weren't shaking. That was good. "Just adjusting to new equipment."
"Slaaneshi cultist," Gen observed, examining the body. "So we have Tzeentch graffiti and Slaanesh cultists. Multiple Chaos factions."
"Fighting each other, probably," Seraya added. "Which means things are about to get a lot more complicated."
Kiri holstered her pistol.
Seraya said nothing. But Kiri felt her eyes.
They burned the body and moved on.
The Chaos ritual chamber reeked of burned parchment and blood. Candles flickered. An altar made of books dominated the center.
"Don't," Seraya said sharply when Gen moved toward a scroll. "Don't touch it. Don't read it."
Gen paused.
Kiri cleared her throat. "Maybe we should bag it? Bring it back?"
"Trust me," Seraya interrupted. "Just burn it."
Pausing for just a moment, Kiri met Gen's eyes. They both nodded.
The room went up in flames. The books blackened and curled. The parchments turned to ash. And Kiri felt something — some pressure that had been building behind her eyes — release.
And they moved on.
Through an engineerium where Gen somehow managed to both stabilize catastrophically failing plasma reactors and rig them to blow remotely. Through crew quarters littered with signs of violence. Through a Genestealer nest — dozens of corpses, all torn apart by something with teeth the size of Kiri's hand.
Through a room where the stars outside were wrong.
The next room looked normal at first. Then reality started fracturing.
The floor tilted without moving. Items floated, phasing in and out of existence. Kiri tried to step forward and her ankle twisted wrong — a spike of pain shot up her leg. She stumbled, caught herself, felt something wrench in her shoulder.
"Everyone down!" Gen shouted. "Don't move!"
They pressed themselves flat. Kiri's head pounded. Blood trickled from her nose. Across from her, Seraya and Glume both had similar wounds — reality itself was hurting them.
Then, as suddenly as it started, the room stabilized.
"Out," Seraya gasped. "Now."
They scrambled through the far door. Once in the corridor, Seraya pressed her hand to Kiri's shoulder. Warmth flooded through it — psychic healing, uncomfortable but effective. The pain faded.
"Thanks," Kiri muttered.
Seraya just nodded, already moving to see if Glume needed help.
The next room seemed beautiful. An officer's dining hall, with a gallery view of the surrounding stars.
"Don't look," Gen warned, pulling Kiri away from the viewport. "It'll damage your mind."
Kiri forced her eyes down. Some lessons from her father's court translated well — know when ignorance was safer. She pulled out her auspex. "Next room. Multiple contacts. Humanoid."
Everyone tensed.
"Could be the interrogator," Seraya said.
"Could be cultists," Kiri countered. The reading was wrong — too many signals, too erratic.
She pulled out two frag grenades. "We soften them up first."
"What if it's innocents?" Gen asked.
"It won't be." Kiri's voice was flat. Practical.
"Are you sure?" Gen asked.
"As sure as I can be," she said, and made a cutting motion with her hand. "Sometimes that's the best you can do," she muttered under her breath, before she paused. Almost feels like I'm channelling my father.
Glume positioned himself at the door. Kiri primed both grenades. "Ready?" he asked. She nodded.
The door hissed open. Cultists, five or more, standing around something wrapped in chains.
Both grenades flew. Door slammed.
The explosions were muffled but satisfying.
When they opened the door again, the cultists were dead.
All except the thing they'd been worshipping.
It was wrapped in chains. Covered in symbols that seemed to burn in the dim light. And when it saw them, it screamed — a sound that was wrong on every possible level. Not human. Not animal. Something that existed in frequencies that made Kiri's head hurt.
Every instinct screamed at her to run. To get out. To let someone else handle this.
Seraya charged it instead.
Of course she did.
The psyker's staff blazed with warp energy as she closed the distance, and Kiri wanted to shout at her to wait, to plan, to not be so Emperor-damned reckless —
But the thing was looking at Seraya now, and reality bent.
Kiri saw it happen. Saw the air ripple like heat off rockcrete. Saw Seraya's expression shift from aggressive confidence to raw, primal terror. The psyker's advance faltered, her staff dipping, her whole body starting to turn away.
It's using her own fear against her.
Then Seraya snarled — actually snarled — and psychic energy exploded outward from her like a shockwave. The fear shattered like glass.
And Seraya lunged forward, staff crackling with renewed fury.
Kiri forced her breathing to steady. Forced her hands to stop shaking. It looked like a man — albeit one flying in the air, covered in chains and symbols that made her head hurt — and she aimed at the thing's chest. Hopefully it had vital organs that she could torch. If she could hit it.
She fired.
The shot went wide, scorching the wall three meters to the left.
Five misses. Five shots, five misses.
Glume's stim glands activated with an audible hiss — some new augmetic he'd acquired with his Persepolis bounty. His muscles tensed, his veins popped, and he transformed from a man into something closer to a weapon.
He charged past her, power sword humming, and slammed into the thing's flank.
The blade bit deep. The creature screamed — not a human scream, not even an animal scream. Something that existed in frequencies Kiri's ears weren't meant to process.
The thing lashed out with chain-wrapped arms. Glume's conversion field caught them with a flash of light.
Kiri fired again, adjusting for movement, leading the target.
Miss.
Six. Six misses.
Seraya was battering it with her staff now. Each strike sent psychic energy cascading across the creature's form, and Kiri could see it working. The chains were cracking. The flesh underneath was withering.
Kiri thought about holstering her inferno pistol. She should use the bolter. The bolter was reliable. Proven. She'd drilled with it for three months straight.
But Seraya and Glume were in close combat. Bolters used explosive rounds. She'd hit her own team.
And some stubborn part of her — the part that had left her father's palace, that had enlisted under a false name, that had spent a vast portion of her life savings on this damned pistol — refused to give up on it.
Not yet. Kiri raised her pistol, ready to end it.
Seraya's staff came down one final time, wreathed in so much psychic power that Kiri could feel it from across the room — a pressure behind her eyes, a taste like copper on her tongue.
The creature's body crumpled, chains clattering to the floor, flesh withering to a desiccated husk that looked like it had been dead for centuries.
Silence.
Then Gen's shaky voice: "Is everyone alright?"
Kiri turned. The scholar looked pale, her autoscribe clutched in white-knuckled fingers. She'd stayed back during the fight — smart, given she was the least combat-capable — but the fear in her eyes was real. Though Kiri noticed Gen's new hotshot laspistol was drawn and ready.
"Define alright," Glume said. He was bleeding from a dozen small cuts where the chains had gotten through his conversion field. His skin had taken on a faint yellowish tinge that hadn't been there before. But he was grinning like he'd just won a betting game. "That was exhilarating."
"You're insane," Kiri told him.
"Quite possibly."
Kiri approached the corpse and shot it from point blank range. It immolated.
Seraya approached. Her jaw was clenched tight, a muscle twitching in her cheek. "You finally hit something."
"Shut it baldy," she said before turning to the others. "Let's roll."