Guard fic 4.2
The aftermath of the discussions.
“So how for the love of His sacred name did it manage to get that message? It wasn’t even broadcast!”
Bill, well used to his commander’s style of interrogation, was unphased by King’s outburst.
“I’ve not figured it out yet Sir. I presume from my vox caster set which they took off me, but it doesn’t have that kind of range. You said the sound was clear?”
“Clear as I’m standing here!”
“Then it wasn’t my equip, she crackles like a ghost box on any sound more than about two yards away.”
“Again but without the heresy please, guardsman?” King sighed. He wasn’t sure if assigning a gender to a machine spirit was actually heresy, and from Rossaria’s lack of reaction he assumed it wasn’t, but it was certainly pretty weird.
“Sorry sir. It must have been picked up by a transmitter within range to be recorded in the first place, but it couldn’t have been my vox caster because of the clarity of the sound and the range I was at, so they must have access to another comms device. Do they have your comm bead do you think sir?”
“No, I gave it to Rhys before I surrendered, wasn’t going to risk that falling into enemy hands.”
“And it doesn’t keep a record of messages anyway.” Bill mused. “I’ll keep working on it Sir.”
“They may have mine.” Rossaria commented. “I haven’t yet sourced a replacement for the one I left on the grav ship, but they may have picked that up.”
Bill picked up on that immediately and wanted to know what had happened: King had forgotten that Bill of course wouldn’t know that Rossaria had dropped hers as a marker on the grav ship.
“Well that’s the answer then Sir.” Bill said, smiling at a mystery unravelled. “A comms bead is a lot clearer than a Vox. It will have been broadcasting to its maximum range and the Vox picked it up, and a Vox unlike a comms bead does have recording capacity, so the message will have been recorded there and picked up by the Tau when they analysed the Vox.”
“No, wouldn’t work. A Vox has an imperial machine spirit, how would they have been able to interrogate it? Or do you mean it’s been corrupted?”
“Neither, sir. The machine spirit has limited capacity for...”
“Let’s try this in plain Gothic now Bill, so we don’t have to go over it again in five minutes’ time when you stop gibbering like a techpriest.”
Bill grinned slightly, acknowledging the comment. He wasn’t an initiate of the mysteries of Mars by any stretch of the imagination, but he did have a way with a Vox and often forgot that not everyone shared his enthusiasm.
“Basically sir, a machine spirit is pretty thick, and a Vox’ machine spirit is dafter than many. It doesn’t have to be smart, all it does is follow instructions. We keep it protected and looked after, so it doesn’t need to know how to tell friend from foe. So someone asks it for information, the machine spirit will assume the person asking is allowed to ask. It knows to keep broadcasts secure but it doesn’t think not to replay its recordings when you ask for them, because it hasn’t noticed it’s been kidnapped. It assumes it’s me asking, because it usually is.”
“Doesn’t it have authorisation codes to follow?”
“Yes sir, but everyone knows that a vox caster’s codes are on his dog tags. Otherwise if I go down then it’d only be you and high command who would be able to use it because you’ve got the override everything clearance and that would just be stupid.” He put his hand to the space round his neck where the tags usually hung. “It won’t have taken them too long to figure that out.”
“Probably took them longer to figure out which way up to hold it.” King agreed ruefully. “So you don’t think they’ve found the Lord Commissar’s comm bead?”
“Not necessarily sir, no.”
So that was always something, at least. Not much, but something. The hope now was that they could spin out these ridiculous talks long enough so that by the time the Tau got utterly fed up and shot them, Commander Trevanus and the rest of them would have completed one of the tunnels, got the artefact and got out of there. Hopefully at some point this would involve this squad’s escape too, but he was still drawing a blank on that one.
“The only thing the machine spirit might have been confused about would be not getting the update download, but that’s not enough to trigger any alarms for her. It, I mean.” Bill was continuing, having got caught up in his favourite topic and with little else to do, it was pretty rare these days that they found anything to spark their interest. Hunter was listening intently, so King tried not to be too snappish about it.
“Up and down? That makes no sense.” Oh well. There goes that plan. Fortunately Bill took it as a genuine enquiry.
“The download is like a briefing sheet for a machine spirit sir, so I just mean that when the vox gives up her data she usually gets data in return telling her - it Sir, sorry - everything that has changed since it’s last update.”
“So why wouldn’t it get one this time?” Hunter asked, getting caught up in the technical talk. Throne spare him from cogboy wannabes.
“They have to be in range of the bunker. We were way too far out for that, and we’ve only got further. I normally give her an update every day when I get back to base, but she’s not had anything for weeks now. But as I said machine spirits are too stupid to notice. She’ll probably be starting to be aware that the right rituals aren’t being done though. I don’t even know if the Tau techpriests know them, probably no one’s done anything for her since we were captured.”
King could hear in Bill’s voice that he was starting to get despondent and that kind of mood spread quickly, so he ordered another round of the wrestling league to get things going again. He stripped off his shirt and stepped forward into the ring, waiting for someone to join him and glad that his rank (or supposed rank) still allowed him to join in such stress relief. Even if Rossaria had been fit, it wasn’t an option for her. She couldn’t risk losing face by losing, and no one would even dare fight her anyway because of her rank. There were a lot of perks to life in the Commissariat but he couldn’t deny it had its drawbacks too.
Still, he thought as Hunter stepped forward to take up his challenge, they neither of them had sympathy to spare for the other.
-----
The second day of talks broke down too, though at least not as spectacularly as last time. This time it was over whether the colonist traitors had the right to just declare themselves free of the Empire and go join the enemy. The Xenos of course felt that this was only right and just in a civilised society - naturally, since they were the winners in this situation - while Rossaria in particular was extremely vocal about her belief that treachery should never be forgiven. King was a bit quieter on the subject, a fact that Rossaria quizzed him about later than night when the troopers were sleeping and they were lying on their stomachs under King’s bed, drawing the next part of the map together on Bellis’ coat.
“I don’t know.” King answered honestly. “It just - I..." He had no idea what made him blurt out the next part, especially not to a Lord Commissar and definitely especially not to a lunatic like Rossaria, but perhaps the close captivity had made him crazy. Or perhaps the knowledge that he was a dead man and declared traitor already just gave him that bit less to care about.
“I appreciate I’m only telling you this because you’re going to kill me anyway so I don’t really care so much, but it just didn’t feel right. And no, before you ask I don’t know why. I’m not used to all this diplomacy nonsense, but since it doesn’t look like anyone’s about to put a lasgun in my hand and let me do it my way I’m just going to have to figure it out, so when it didn’t feel right I didn’t do it. That’s why.”
“It didn’t feel right?” Rossaria echoed incredulously. “You are aware that these are heretics, I take it?”
“Oh no, that bit felt right.” He assured her “I’m not about to skip off and join the greater good - I’m lying here right now here doing all I can to get us all back safely so you can torture me to death for frakk’s sake, if that doesn’t prove my devotion then I really don’t know what will! I’d very happily put a bullet through all their heads, Xenos and traitors alike, and if I have to sit through one more of those damned polite arguments about the greater bloody good one more time then I swear by the Emperor’s golden heart I’d almost rather be turning the gun on myself.”
“Almost?”
“You’ve made it pretty clear that that would be bad for the Imperium at the moment, and not only do I obey you on that, under the circumstances I also have to agree with you. But seriously, could we compromise and let me cut off my ears?”
She smiled. There may have been a hint of sadness in it, it was difficult to tell by the red glow of the torch. Maybe that was just wistful thinking.
“I think our so-called hosts would object to that. They do seem fairly set on keeping us alive and able to listen to them.”
“Damn.”
“So are you going to tell me willingly what didn’t feel right?” Rossaria asked, pointedly bringing the conversation back to business.
King turned off the pen and took a long moment, trying to organise his thoughts. “The truth is I don’t know exactly. This whole discussion thing, it feels like a battle slowed down if that makes any sense.”
“It doesn’t.”
“I mean everything goes the way it should be in battle - they send out their scouts, we fire an opening salvo, people charge and go to ground, manoeuvre and circle round and throw out attacks and ambushes and counter ambushes, but it feels slowed down, like we get time to think instead of act, and that’s not a way I’m used to working. I fight battles and wars, not campaigns.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone or anything tortured like you’re doing to that simile.” was Rossaria’s cryptic reply. Antonius didn’t know what a simile was and her sentence didn’t really give him any clues, so he ignored it and continued.
“We’re both soldiers, we’ve both had that moment when you know you could throw off a shot, but if you do you’ll foul up the larger plan. It was that, except that I don’t currently know what the larger plan is. I just knew that would be the las blast that betrayed our position. You know?”
“Well at least now we’ve moved on to metaphors.”
Had he? Antonius remained none the wiser.
“Yes, I know what you mean. I just don’t see how it applies here.” She continued. “You’re negotiating on instinct?”
“Mostly what I'm doing is trying not to punch one of them, but yes. I had a hunch, so I followed it.”
“Wherever it may lead?”
Antonius shivered. “Now there’s a question I can’t answer safely. Wherever it leads for the good of the Empire, yes. We need a way out of this and my instinct is the best lead I’ve got.”
“And yet your instinct got us into this.” She commented dryly.
“And got us out of losing the artefact, potentially forever. Got us into a ceasefire so we could regroup and rebuild. A good strong instinct is the best weapon a commander has.”
“You’re not a commander.” Rossaria reminded him. He flinched, reminding himself that this was one point he could never lose his temper on.
“Then say I’m acting the part.” He replied through gritted teeth. “It comes down to this Rossaria: do you trust me?”
“What a stupid question.” She replied in a voice full of scorn. “Do I really need my hat on before you remember who I am? I don’t trust anyone Antonius, that’s my training, my job and my duty. I don’t trust you, I don’t trust me: I don’t trust anyone in this galaxy except Him.”
Ok, yes, when you look at it like that it was a stupid question. Frakking commissars.
“So what will you say for me?” he asked, both to make her say it and because he was genuinely interested. He didn’t so much care about her good opinion, as know that he’d never make it through without it. Now it was Rossaria’s turn to hesitate, choosing her words carefully.
“I don’t believe that you would, in your current frame of mind, be likely to turn to heresy or treachery. I consider that you have faith in the Emperor but far more so in the Imperium, and are very dedicated to your duty and to the Astra Millitarum as a whole. I would say that you were a good commander throughout your career though blighted by a misunderstanding of psychology, which continues to be a weakness. I consider it to be unfortunate that your career has ended thus as from my observation I believe that you had potential to become a great military commander. Finally I can say that you would have made a terrible commissar, which you may take as a compliment or insult as you see fit.”
“Too bad at psychology?”
Rossaria answered at apparent cross purposes at first. “There is a rumour you hear when you start at the Schola Projenium: that the reason only half the class make it to Commissar is because the final trial is to kill your best friend. It’s untrue of course: far fewer than half succeed, there’s no such thing as a final trial, and not everyone gets the same tests. It’s just a rumour they spread to help us remember not to get too close to people. Some people always do still end up doing it however, and the few of them who could potentially make good Commissars despite that failing get the opportunity to redeem themselves through that test. I don’t think you could pass it.”
“I think I’m quite proud of that actually. And I’d certainly make sure my pal passed.”
“Yes.” She mused. “That’s my point.”
“So how for the love of His sacred name did it manage to get that message? It wasn’t even broadcast!”
Bill, well used to his commander’s style of interrogation, was unphased by King’s outburst.
“I’ve not figured it out yet Sir. I presume from my vox caster set which they took off me, but it doesn’t have that kind of range. You said the sound was clear?”
“Clear as I’m standing here!”
“Then it wasn’t my equip, she crackles like a ghost box on any sound more than about two yards away.”
“Again but without the heresy please, guardsman?” King sighed. He wasn’t sure if assigning a gender to a machine spirit was actually heresy, and from Rossaria’s lack of reaction he assumed it wasn’t, but it was certainly pretty weird.
“Sorry sir. It must have been picked up by a transmitter within range to be recorded in the first place, but it couldn’t have been my vox caster because of the clarity of the sound and the range I was at, so they must have access to another comms device. Do they have your comm bead do you think sir?”
“No, I gave it to Rhys before I surrendered, wasn’t going to risk that falling into enemy hands.”
“And it doesn’t keep a record of messages anyway.” Bill mused. “I’ll keep working on it Sir.”
“They may have mine.” Rossaria commented. “I haven’t yet sourced a replacement for the one I left on the grav ship, but they may have picked that up.”
Bill picked up on that immediately and wanted to know what had happened: King had forgotten that Bill of course wouldn’t know that Rossaria had dropped hers as a marker on the grav ship.
“Well that’s the answer then Sir.” Bill said, smiling at a mystery unravelled. “A comms bead is a lot clearer than a Vox. It will have been broadcasting to its maximum range and the Vox picked it up, and a Vox unlike a comms bead does have recording capacity, so the message will have been recorded there and picked up by the Tau when they analysed the Vox.”
“No, wouldn’t work. A Vox has an imperial machine spirit, how would they have been able to interrogate it? Or do you mean it’s been corrupted?”
“Neither, sir. The machine spirit has limited capacity for...”
“Let’s try this in plain Gothic now Bill, so we don’t have to go over it again in five minutes’ time when you stop gibbering like a techpriest.”
Bill grinned slightly, acknowledging the comment. He wasn’t an initiate of the mysteries of Mars by any stretch of the imagination, but he did have a way with a Vox and often forgot that not everyone shared his enthusiasm.
“Basically sir, a machine spirit is pretty thick, and a Vox’ machine spirit is dafter than many. It doesn’t have to be smart, all it does is follow instructions. We keep it protected and looked after, so it doesn’t need to know how to tell friend from foe. So someone asks it for information, the machine spirit will assume the person asking is allowed to ask. It knows to keep broadcasts secure but it doesn’t think not to replay its recordings when you ask for them, because it hasn’t noticed it’s been kidnapped. It assumes it’s me asking, because it usually is.”
“Doesn’t it have authorisation codes to follow?”
“Yes sir, but everyone knows that a vox caster’s codes are on his dog tags. Otherwise if I go down then it’d only be you and high command who would be able to use it because you’ve got the override everything clearance and that would just be stupid.” He put his hand to the space round his neck where the tags usually hung. “It won’t have taken them too long to figure that out.”
“Probably took them longer to figure out which way up to hold it.” King agreed ruefully. “So you don’t think they’ve found the Lord Commissar’s comm bead?”
“Not necessarily sir, no.”
So that was always something, at least. Not much, but something. The hope now was that they could spin out these ridiculous talks long enough so that by the time the Tau got utterly fed up and shot them, Commander Trevanus and the rest of them would have completed one of the tunnels, got the artefact and got out of there. Hopefully at some point this would involve this squad’s escape too, but he was still drawing a blank on that one.
“The only thing the machine spirit might have been confused about would be not getting the update download, but that’s not enough to trigger any alarms for her. It, I mean.” Bill was continuing, having got caught up in his favourite topic and with little else to do, it was pretty rare these days that they found anything to spark their interest. Hunter was listening intently, so King tried not to be too snappish about it.
“Up and down? That makes no sense.” Oh well. There goes that plan. Fortunately Bill took it as a genuine enquiry.
“The download is like a briefing sheet for a machine spirit sir, so I just mean that when the vox gives up her data she usually gets data in return telling her - it Sir, sorry - everything that has changed since it’s last update.”
“So why wouldn’t it get one this time?” Hunter asked, getting caught up in the technical talk. Throne spare him from cogboy wannabes.
“They have to be in range of the bunker. We were way too far out for that, and we’ve only got further. I normally give her an update every day when I get back to base, but she’s not had anything for weeks now. But as I said machine spirits are too stupid to notice. She’ll probably be starting to be aware that the right rituals aren’t being done though. I don’t even know if the Tau techpriests know them, probably no one’s done anything for her since we were captured.”
King could hear in Bill’s voice that he was starting to get despondent and that kind of mood spread quickly, so he ordered another round of the wrestling league to get things going again. He stripped off his shirt and stepped forward into the ring, waiting for someone to join him and glad that his rank (or supposed rank) still allowed him to join in such stress relief. Even if Rossaria had been fit, it wasn’t an option for her. She couldn’t risk losing face by losing, and no one would even dare fight her anyway because of her rank. There were a lot of perks to life in the Commissariat but he couldn’t deny it had its drawbacks too.
Still, he thought as Hunter stepped forward to take up his challenge, they neither of them had sympathy to spare for the other.
-----
The second day of talks broke down too, though at least not as spectacularly as last time. This time it was over whether the colonist traitors had the right to just declare themselves free of the Empire and go join the enemy. The Xenos of course felt that this was only right and just in a civilised society - naturally, since they were the winners in this situation - while Rossaria in particular was extremely vocal about her belief that treachery should never be forgiven. King was a bit quieter on the subject, a fact that Rossaria quizzed him about later than night when the troopers were sleeping and they were lying on their stomachs under King’s bed, drawing the next part of the map together on Bellis’ coat.
“I don’t know.” King answered honestly. “It just - I..." He had no idea what made him blurt out the next part, especially not to a Lord Commissar and definitely especially not to a lunatic like Rossaria, but perhaps the close captivity had made him crazy. Or perhaps the knowledge that he was a dead man and declared traitor already just gave him that bit less to care about.
“I appreciate I’m only telling you this because you’re going to kill me anyway so I don’t really care so much, but it just didn’t feel right. And no, before you ask I don’t know why. I’m not used to all this diplomacy nonsense, but since it doesn’t look like anyone’s about to put a lasgun in my hand and let me do it my way I’m just going to have to figure it out, so when it didn’t feel right I didn’t do it. That’s why.”
“It didn’t feel right?” Rossaria echoed incredulously. “You are aware that these are heretics, I take it?”
“Oh no, that bit felt right.” He assured her “I’m not about to skip off and join the greater good - I’m lying here right now here doing all I can to get us all back safely so you can torture me to death for frakk’s sake, if that doesn’t prove my devotion then I really don’t know what will! I’d very happily put a bullet through all their heads, Xenos and traitors alike, and if I have to sit through one more of those damned polite arguments about the greater bloody good one more time then I swear by the Emperor’s golden heart I’d almost rather be turning the gun on myself.”
“Almost?”
“You’ve made it pretty clear that that would be bad for the Imperium at the moment, and not only do I obey you on that, under the circumstances I also have to agree with you. But seriously, could we compromise and let me cut off my ears?”
She smiled. There may have been a hint of sadness in it, it was difficult to tell by the red glow of the torch. Maybe that was just wistful thinking.
“I think our so-called hosts would object to that. They do seem fairly set on keeping us alive and able to listen to them.”
“Damn.”
“So are you going to tell me willingly what didn’t feel right?” Rossaria asked, pointedly bringing the conversation back to business.
King turned off the pen and took a long moment, trying to organise his thoughts. “The truth is I don’t know exactly. This whole discussion thing, it feels like a battle slowed down if that makes any sense.”
“It doesn’t.”
“I mean everything goes the way it should be in battle - they send out their scouts, we fire an opening salvo, people charge and go to ground, manoeuvre and circle round and throw out attacks and ambushes and counter ambushes, but it feels slowed down, like we get time to think instead of act, and that’s not a way I’m used to working. I fight battles and wars, not campaigns.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone or anything tortured like you’re doing to that simile.” was Rossaria’s cryptic reply. Antonius didn’t know what a simile was and her sentence didn’t really give him any clues, so he ignored it and continued.
“We’re both soldiers, we’ve both had that moment when you know you could throw off a shot, but if you do you’ll foul up the larger plan. It was that, except that I don’t currently know what the larger plan is. I just knew that would be the las blast that betrayed our position. You know?”
“Well at least now we’ve moved on to metaphors.”
Had he? Antonius remained none the wiser.
“Yes, I know what you mean. I just don’t see how it applies here.” She continued. “You’re negotiating on instinct?”
“Mostly what I'm doing is trying not to punch one of them, but yes. I had a hunch, so I followed it.”
“Wherever it may lead?”
Antonius shivered. “Now there’s a question I can’t answer safely. Wherever it leads for the good of the Empire, yes. We need a way out of this and my instinct is the best lead I’ve got.”
“And yet your instinct got us into this.” She commented dryly.
“And got us out of losing the artefact, potentially forever. Got us into a ceasefire so we could regroup and rebuild. A good strong instinct is the best weapon a commander has.”
“You’re not a commander.” Rossaria reminded him. He flinched, reminding himself that this was one point he could never lose his temper on.
“Then say I’m acting the part.” He replied through gritted teeth. “It comes down to this Rossaria: do you trust me?”
“What a stupid question.” She replied in a voice full of scorn. “Do I really need my hat on before you remember who I am? I don’t trust anyone Antonius, that’s my training, my job and my duty. I don’t trust you, I don’t trust me: I don’t trust anyone in this galaxy except Him.”
Ok, yes, when you look at it like that it was a stupid question. Frakking commissars.
“So what will you say for me?” he asked, both to make her say it and because he was genuinely interested. He didn’t so much care about her good opinion, as know that he’d never make it through without it. Now it was Rossaria’s turn to hesitate, choosing her words carefully.
“I don’t believe that you would, in your current frame of mind, be likely to turn to heresy or treachery. I consider that you have faith in the Emperor but far more so in the Imperium, and are very dedicated to your duty and to the Astra Millitarum as a whole. I would say that you were a good commander throughout your career though blighted by a misunderstanding of psychology, which continues to be a weakness. I consider it to be unfortunate that your career has ended thus as from my observation I believe that you had potential to become a great military commander. Finally I can say that you would have made a terrible commissar, which you may take as a compliment or insult as you see fit.”
“Too bad at psychology?”
Rossaria answered at apparent cross purposes at first. “There is a rumour you hear when you start at the Schola Projenium: that the reason only half the class make it to Commissar is because the final trial is to kill your best friend. It’s untrue of course: far fewer than half succeed, there’s no such thing as a final trial, and not everyone gets the same tests. It’s just a rumour they spread to help us remember not to get too close to people. Some people always do still end up doing it however, and the few of them who could potentially make good Commissars despite that failing get the opportunity to redeem themselves through that test. I don’t think you could pass it.”
“I think I’m quite proud of that actually. And I’d certainly make sure my pal passed.”
“Yes.” She mused. “That’s my point.”