Chapter 13: Be My Adjutant
Duvette came back through the canvas door, his boots hitting the floor fast.
In the briefing room upstairs, the maps were still spread on the table. Fox was bent over them and looked up when he heard footsteps. A brief expression of surprise.
"Duvette? Did you forget something?"
"No." Duvette walked to the table and put both hands on the edge. The wound across his back pulled sharply at the movement. He let it. "Colonel. I have a theory about what the enemy is planning."
Fox straightened up. "Tell me."
Duvette drew one breath and laid it out: the underground rituals, the geothermal heating core, the mass frontal assaults using low-quality cultist infantry as expendable material, and the connections between all three. He spoke quickly but clearly.
"The enemy knew about the tunnel network and did not use it primarily for tactical movement. Instead they have been sending wave after wave of their own followers into direct assaults on our lines. I believe they are using those followers' blood as ritual fuel while directing our attention to the surface. Meanwhile, underground, they are conducting a large-scale Warp ritual coordinated with a planned detonation of the geothermal heating core. The energy released, combined with the ritual, could be sufficient to tear the veil between reality and the Warp."
He paused.
"If they succeed, the Blood God's forces enter realspace. At that point, one hundred and sixty thousand soldiers is not enough to hold this planet. No one survives. Including me."
Silence in the briefing room.
Fox's face showed nothing readable, but his deep-set eyes were moving through the implications steadily. He was quiet for several seconds. Then he walked to the map and pressed a finger against the position marked as Heras.
"The geothermal core sits three hundred meters underground, north quarter of the city." He kept his voice low. "There is a significant defensive garrison around the access points, but the entire defensive posture assumes a surface approach."
He looked at Duvette. "The tunnel fork you described. Can you confirm it leads to the core?"
"No," Duvette said. "I cannot confirm it. But it concerns me enough that I came back."
Fox went to the window. He stood with his back to the room, looking at the snow coming down outside. The cold pushed through the hole in the roof and moved his grey hair.
"I will transmit everything you have told me to the command element immediately," he said finally. "I will also dispatch a team to investigate the passage you identified. But everything beyond that requires time. Command decisions, reallocation of forces. None of that happens tonight."
He turned.
"Go and rest. Your wounds are not healed. If this plays out the way you think it will, we may need you to guide the response operation. Be ready."
Duvette opened his mouth. Then he closed it and nodded. Fox was right. The things he could actually influence at this moment were limited, and exhausting himself further was not one of them.
He saluted, turned, and left the briefing room.
Going down the iron stairs, the pain in his back made itself felt more distinctly with each step. He went carefully, one hand on the rail. At the bottom, he was reaching for the canvas when he heard voices from outside.
Evan's voice.
"...I just wanted to ask if the Commissar was available. I have something to report..."
"The Commissar is in a meeting. If you have something to say, you can say it to me." A sentry's voice, and not a patient one.
Duvette pushed out through the canvas.
Evan was standing in the snow, his face bright red from the cold, both hands shoved up into the oversized sleeves of his greatcoat and working against each other for warmth. When Duvette came through the door the boy's eyes opened.
"Sir! You came down!"
"Come with me," Duvette said.
Evan blinked and followed. They walked back along the snow-covered road toward the camp, their boots leaving a trail of prints in both sizes behind them.
Duvette did not speak. He was thinking.
Sixth Company was nearly gone. Stroud and Anderson were unconscious in the critical ward. He was now the 101st Regiment's official commissar. By standard protocol that meant stepping into the position Hoffman had held, taking responsibility for the entire regiment.
But he barely knew the regiment.
He knew the 101st was light infantry: reconnaissance and irregular warfare specialists. He knew Sixth Company had fielded over a hundred soldiers before all of this started and had eleven now. He did not know the specific personalities of the other nineteen company commanders, which for a commissar was a significant gap. Knowing who you were working with mattered.
He was also missing something more immediate.
He looked sideways at the boy walking beside him.
He needed an adjutant.
Evan had noticed the look and seemed unsettled by it. He tugged at one oversized sleeve. "Sir. Is there something on my face?"
Duvette did not answer. He continued his assessment.
Fourteen years old, possibly fifteen. Not tall, on the lean side but not without substance. Bright eyes. Quick-thinking. Had thrown a melta bomb at the critical moment rather than freezing. Followed orders and did not require explanations for each one.
Worth something.
"Evan," Duvette said.
"Yes, sir."
"I am now a substantive Commissar." He kept his voice even. "By custom, I am entitled to an adjutant. Someone who handles written communications, relays orders, learns the regiment's structure and personnel. Someone who is present whenever I need them."
Evan blinked. He seemed to be parsing the implication.
"Will you do it?" Duvette asked directly.
The boy stopped walking.
Snow came down onto his blond hair and sat there. He opened his mouth, closed it, and after several seconds asked very quietly: "What does an adjutant... actually do?"
"Follow me," Duvette said. "Wherever I go, you go. Whatever I tell you to do, you do. You remember names, unit organization, supply status. When necessary, you are my voice."
Evan looked at the ground in front of his boots. His footprints in the snow were a full size smaller than Duvette's.
He was quiet for a long time.
"Sir." When he looked up, his voice was steady. "If I agree... does that mean I never come back to Farrak IV?"
Duvette was quiet for a moment.
Then he nodded.
"Once a soldier leaves their homeworld with the Astra Militarum, they do not return unless they retire or they die in the field." He said it without softening it. "If you become my adjutant, you leave with the 101st when this campaign ends. Other worlds. Other wars. You may never see home again."
Evan looked down again. This silence was longer.
When he raised his head a second time, his voice was quiet but it was not uncertain.
"Can I bring my sister?"
Duvette had not expected that. He paused.
"I could arrange for the local civil administration to take responsibility for her. There are people here who could provide for her..."
He was already trailing off. He heard the problem in it as he said it. The local civil administration of a world that had just been through a Chaos uprising and a continent-spanning blood cult. He started reconsidering.
"My sister," Evan said. "She is useful."
Duvette looked at him. "How so?"
"She has been sensitive to certain things since she was very young." Evan's words came faster, as if he was getting ahead of any interruption. "She can feel weather changes before they happen. She knows when something bad is coming. The cold snap this year, she felt it first. Our family believed her and we stored extra grain early, which is how we had enough to share with others..."
He stopped. His voice came down.
"In the grain hub. She screamed before the attack started, didn't she. She felt the danger."
Duvette went very still.
Precognition. Psychic sensitivity.
He thought of the girl in the corner of the cellar. He thought of her screaming before the World Eater's ambush opened and how he had been holding the notebook and had not understood what her reaction meant until the heavy bolter fired.
"Does anyone else know about this?" he asked.
Evan shook his head. "My parents were afraid that if anyone found out they would call her a witch and burn her. They made us swear never to tell anyone." He looked at Duvette steadily. "I trust you, sir. A man who risks his life to go back for his people is not a bad man."
Duvette looked at him for a moment.
Then he said: "You are being naive. Being willing to risk my life for my soldiers and being willing to conceal a potentially dangerous unsanctioned psyker are two entirely different things."
The color left Evan's face.
"But I will agree to your request," Duvette continued. "I will keep this secret. Your sister stays with you. The official story is that she is a war orphan from the fighting on Farrak IV with no surviving family and no other options, taken in by the regiment. That is the only story anyone hears. Is that understood?"
The color came back into Evan's face all at once. Something in his eyes went bright.
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
"Do not thank me yet." Duvette turned and kept walking. "Being my adjutant is not easy work. You will have a great deal to learn and considerably more danger to face than you currently understand. You still have time to change your mind."
Behind him, boots on snow, moving quickly to catch up.
"I am not changing my mind."
Duvette did not look back.
"Report to my barracks tomorrow morning."
"Yes, sir!"