“An attack? You’re sure?” said Zhen, pulling Lament to her feet. “It couldn’t be anything else?”
Lament shook her head. “They’re preparing to mobilize. They’re going to demolish the buildings and launch a surprise attack. We might only have days,” she said.
“Good thing I brought my bag of tricks, then,” said Lander Mist. “I can bring this bunker of theirs crashing down on top of them!” They patted the satchel gently. Lament looked at Zhen.
“Will that do it?” she asked. Zhen shrugged.
“Could do. The armour will survive though-” she froze. “You hear that?” she said. Lament nodded. The thunk-thunk of a patrol’s heavy boots on the pavement. “Round the corner!”
The three of them ducked around the corner of the building opposite the secret fascist base, into the doorway of an apartment block. The two repeater-armed soldiers tramped past in silence, menacing shadows in the dark alleyway.
Lament heard the door click and turned. Mist had pushed open the door and gone inside.
“Mist!” she hissed. No answer. Zhen was gone too. Lament rolled her eyes and darted into the dark.

The corridor was lit only by red emergency lamps, illuminating unreadable graffiti on the peeling walls. Some of the doors hung off their hinges.
“Our friends have been busy here,” said Zhen, examining a taped-up doorway. “They purged the whole building, I’d bet. Wouldn’t like to guess at what we’d find inside.”
“You mean… killed them?” said Mist, horrified. Zhen nodded simply. “Why would they do that?”
“Show of strength. Don’t mess with us, or we’ll… execute your entire family and all your neighbours,” Zhen sighed. “Horribly inefficient. But then, you don’t go into fascism for efficiency.” She allowed a mirthless, dead burst of laughter to escape her lips. “People defect because they see the theatre – the military police, the parades, the shiny new guns – and then they arrive here and find it all exists to protect itself, mainly.”
“Well,” said Lament. “It isn’t going to protect itself much longer. What are you in here looking for?”
“I’ll tell you when I find it,” Zhen answered.

It took them three more floors before Zhen found what she was looking for. A simple door, completely unremarkable in the dark corridor.
“Ah-ha!” she said.
“Ah-ha?” said Mist. Zhen repeated herself.
“What do you see?” she asked. Before anyone had a chance to answer, she spoke again. “A door. But not just any door. A new door. See where the graffiti misses that corner?”
“They put it in after they purged the building,” Lament observed. “Why?”
Zhen grinned. “Let’s find out!” she said, and heel-kicked the door right next to the lock, sending it splintering inwards.
“Intruders!” came a voice from within, but Zhen was quick on the draw with her force-pulser and two dull thumps emitted from the squat device, followed by two crumpled thuds from inside the room.
“Come on!” Zhen said, and ducked into the room.

There were a number of interesting qualities about the room, least of which was the two dead men sprawled in the corner. It seemed to have been decked out as an impromptu command centre, with banks of radios and monitoring equipment. Wooden planks laid out from a hole in the wall formed a bridge to the next building. A table dominated the centre of the room with models representing tanks and infantry units scattered across it.
“Somehow, I don’t think this was a friendly game,” Zhen remarked bitterly. “Look at these plans. They’re going to sweep across the whole Loyalist sector. End of play.”
Lament took up a position at the end of the bridge, covering it in case anyone had heard Zhen’s pulse-fire. “Radios?” she said. “I thought you didn’t use radios.”
“We don’t,” said Mist. “They do. They siezed the military equipment. That included all the encoded radio equipment. Anything we send by radio is like shouting directly into their ear, but we can’t pick up a single thing they say.”
“How long did you say you’ve been holding out for Imperial contact?” “Five years,” said Zhen.
“How? You shouldn’t have lasted five minutes!”
Zhen shrugged, the simple gesture speaking volumes. “We had the numerical advantage at the start. Things have been getting worse quicker lately.”
Nobody was coming down the black plastic tunnel. Very clever, Lament realised. Black tunnel, black sky. As good as invisible if you weren’t looking for it.
“Alright,” she said, turning and crossing to the planning table. “Time for a real plan.” She pointed to Mist. “Can you remotely detonate those bombs?”
Mist shook their head, then stopped, Their eyes tracked slowly across to the corner of the room that was full of radio equipment. “Give me ten minutes and I can.”
Lament shot them a thumbs up. “Get started. Zhen, you’re with me. We’ll need to cover Mist if things go south.”

The three of them crept across the bridge to the plastic sheeting door on the other side. Lament parted the semi-opaque curtain, her force pistol poised. A dull psychic throb was beginning to make her head ache. Probably the rush from the focus band wearing off, she thought. Should have waited longer to put it on. The sheeting lead onto a mezzanine that surrounded the armour on the ground floor. At the centre of the preparations were two gigantic APCs fitted with tank-style turrets. Far below, soldiers and engineers scurried like ants around their nest.
“Coast is clear,” Lament whispered. “Let’s go.” But Mist was looking up at the structure, the walls, the thick concrete pillars that ran the length and breadth of the building.
“I can’t do this,” they said quietly, trying to retreat, but Lament pulled them forwards.
“Then we’ll improvise. Do you think your bombs could blow the fuel tank on that?” she said, pointing to one of the APCs. Mist nodded. “You know where the fuel tank is?”
Zhen raised her hand. “I can help with that.”
The plan was hastily devised, but it was the best they had. Zhen and Mist crept towards the stairwell, splitting the jury-rigged explosives between them as they went. Lament followed, walking backwards, force pistol covering their escape route. There was no sign of a patrol on this level, even to her psychic sense, but she always believed in being careful.
On the floor below, the three waited with bated breath as a guard passed them by. Lament nodded to Zhen, and she slipped away, heading for the stairwell’s mirror on the opposite side of the building. Mist and Lament continued on this side, descending at a snail’s pace. Lament pressed herself against the guardrail, projecting her mind’s eye onto the next level. It was at that moment she felt the thumping psychic throbbing again. Suddenly, she recognised the signature. It was getting stronger. A Psychic Projector! It was getting stronger as they came closer to the ground level. She held out a hand to stop Mist from getting any closer, recognising the malevolent wavelengths of the projector-pulse, decoding their message…
VIOLENCE, screamed the psychic impulse. KILL KILL KILL KILL, it scrawled on the animal part of her brain. DESTROY THE AGENT. DESTROY THE AGENT.
Her psycho-bulwark was holdingDESTROY but the closer theyKILL came to the surfaceKILLKILL the strongerBLEED it would getSTAB. SheFIGHT hadTHE toURGE fightTO theRESIST urgeKILL notTHE toAGENT raise her force pistol to her own temple.
“Lament? Is everything okay?” Lander Mist asked. Lament lowered the slim weapon from the side of her head, breathing heavily. The projector-pulse had retreated, for now. She grunted.
“Things here are worse than I thought,” she said. “Come here. Put your head between my hands,” she said, extending them outwards with a good foot between them. Mist did so. “I’m going to project a psycho-bulwark into your mind. You might recognise some thoughts that are not your own as we travel deeper. Do not listen to them,” she said. Mist nodded.
“What about Zhen?” they said.
“Zhen… we’ll deal with when we get to her,” Lament muttered.

Torric Zhen ducked into a shadowed spot behind a stack of ammo crates and examined the vehicles. They were indeed the old-model Personnel Carriers she knew well, souped-up with heavy weaponry. Her bag of explosives could easily put paid to both of them. She turned the radio detonator she had lifted from Mist over in her fingers. The power of life and death, that was. Of course, Mist wouldn’t be so stupid as to arm a bomb in their own bag.
She turned the detonator over again, and flipped the cover off the trigger switch. She flipped it back on. No voice in her head was telling her to do this. Off. On. Off. No. Where would be the fun in that? She closed the detonator and peeked around the crates. Engineers were scrambling around one of the APCs, chattering something about a wiring fault. Zhen slipped the bag off her shoulder, then laid down her pulser. She cleared her throat loudly.
“Is someone there?” said a guard.
“I’m unarmed,” Zhen said in measured tones. “I’m surrendering. I thought you might be interested to know that there are two Imperial dogs creeping around here with explosives, intending to blow up your entire operation. They’re coming down that staircase now.”

Lament and Mist had no idea of Zhen’s betrayal. They came down the stairs on the level above ground silently, step by agonising step.
“Where is she?” said Mist. They were beginning to feel the effects of the psycho-bulwark. It felt dull, stuffy, like a head cold. They felt slow. Lament edged closer to the railing and peered over, just in time to see Zhen turned around and pushed to her knees by soldiers.
“They’ve got her!” she hissed. Another movement caught her eye and she shifted her mental gaze to a soldier, running. She spun round on her heel and fired, snapping the soldier’s head back with a noise like someone stepping on an apple as he came around the corner of the staircase.
Lament cursed and pulled the staring Mist to their feet. “Listen, I need you in the fight,” she said. “Stay with me, watch the right-hand side. I’ll watch the left.”
With that, she started down the stairs, the muted thunk of her force pistol merging with the denser sound of the repeaters as she covered them.
Mist followed Lament, with shaking hands clasped around the handle of their pulser. On their left, force-repeater reports and the snapping, grinding bone sounds where the force-pistol’s waves had found their mark. The right hand side coming down the stairs was mercifully empty, only a few stacks of equipment to contend with. Could I pull the trigger? Mist thought.
Lament was in almost a trance state. Compared to her training this was child’s play. She ducked a wild shot and twisted her hips, training her sights on the soldier and loosing a force-bolt that struck him square in the stomach. Did she imagine the distant sound of a pop? She didn’t have time to consider as she threw herself to the floor to avoid a shot from behind, rolling on her shoulder and squeezing off another blast at the source of the offence. Her back to the first APC, she looked back at Mist.
“Mist! Bomb,” she said, matter-of-factly. Mist looked at her, confused for a second, then realisation dawned and they pulled one from their bag. It looked for all the world like a soda bottle. Lament read along the side “Cherry Blend Flavour”. Mist raised their arm to throw it, and the thump of a force-blast rippled through the air towards them. The bomb went spinning out of Mist’s hand as the pulse slammed into their arm, wrenching it backwards. Mist turned around in midair and hit the concrete wall, lying still where they fell. Lament cursed and fired off a handful of shots, diving to the ground next to Mist.
Alive. Barely. Lament grabbed the bomb, breathing a sigh of relief, and went to snatch the detonator.
“No, no, where is it?” she growled. Then she stopped. She knew where it was. She cursed Torric Zhen, and took cover behind a heavy metal crate. What was it the High Inspector of the chapter had said when she was under his tutelage? Learn to improvise, and you’ll never want for a plan? She twisted the cap of the bomb and pulled it off. Inside, the radio detonator held a plastic bag full of the arming powder. She ripped the bag open, and in a series of quick movements poured the powder in, slammed the cap back on and tossed the bomb underarm towards the enemy.
“Huh?” she heard from the guards.
Then all hell broke loose. One of the ammunition crates caught in the explosion heated enough to start going off – the guns on the APCs were the old kind, with percussion-cap shells and primitive explosive propellant – and suddenly shards of metal were flying everywhere. From her place behind the crate Lament was safe, but Mist was at risk of being torn apart. With a pained sigh, Lament steeled herself, and then crawled on her elbows towards her fallen ally.
“Come on,” she muttered. “Help me out.”
A hissing sound alerted her to the impact of a bullet in Mist’s bag, and she cursed. One of the bombs had been hit. She pulled the bag off Mist’s shoulder and threw it feebly, lacking any leverage from her low position. The bag thumped to the floor a few feet away with several new holes punched in it. There was one chance. She pulled her pistol, sighted it carefully, and fired. The pulse wave struck the bag, sending it skidding away as it exploded and the expanding cone of force blew the plume of fire away from the two of them. A guard who was standing in the way of the plume disappeared into smoke before their eyes.
“Zhen!” shouted Lament hoarsely when the smoke cleared. “You alive, you treacherous animal?”

Torric Zhen was alive, and at that moment was running through an underground message-runner’s tunnel to uncertain fate. She felt the sting of the Agent’s mind probing into her own, and quickly expelled it.

Lament reeled from the expert deflection of her mind probe. Standing in the devastated remains of the impromptu garage, among the dead and dying, she suddenly felt very ill.
She quickly suppressed it as she had been trained to, and walked around the room until she found a guard who seemed relatively lively, trying to crawl towards a steel shutter door. She put a foot on his extended hand and projected her mind into his.
-Where do your orders come from?- she projected.
-From belowNOWHERE,- came the reply. -From the catacombsGOD.-
That was interesting. Two sets of thoughts.