Northeast Velgrad
Around 20:00
We reacquired the truck a minute later as we cleared the smoke from the Arsenal fire. They were a street over but still going east. They saw us at the same time. About 400 meters. Small arms fire clattered off the hull and a round tugged at my shoulder but didn't penetrate. They started aiming their heavy weapon as I aimed the stormbolter. They disappeared for a second behind a small building and emerged right into my sights. I fired a long burst. I couldn't see most of the effect but I saw a bright blue-white flash and a smudge of black smoke. The truck slewed hard to the right. I think I had hit their heavy weapon and damaged a wheel.
They slowed for a turn and I took the opportunity to give them another burst. No visible effect. Maybe I missed.
They tried to break contact. We kept chasing. It was only a single truck, not a formation. And they were still faster than us. Isela might have wanted us to abandon the chase and go look for something more substantial to fight. But Deacon Surs couldn't get her on the vox.
The chase led us out onto the eastern section of Saint Drusus Causeway, where it goes around the outer perimeter of the city.
The Fear went away entirely after about three minutes. I reviewed the facts and was relieved to decide that we were chasing a real enemy. That I had shot and killed the enemy, not some Army or Enforcer unit who had just panicked in the Fear. (And somehow loaded a heavy lascannon onto the back of a civilian truck, while in the midst of panicked flight. Foolish, in retrospect.)
We still couldn't contact Isela. Or anyone else in Velgrad, Sister or Army or Enforcer or even civilians. Surs raised a flight of Guard aircraft and started arguing with their commander.
I spent another thirty or forty rounds at extreme range. If I hit anything, it wasn't important enough to slow them down. They had given up on return fire.
We lost visual contact after about ten minutes. After fifteen, we gave up the chase and slowed to let the engine cool.
"Marisa," said Tara on the squad vox. "Come down here. We know where they are."
❖ ❖ ❖
Tara laid out her logic as I crouched at her shoulder watching her manipulate her small data-slate.
"Assume the Fear works in a line," she said. "Like a laser or a tight-beam stablight."
I thought about it. "Like in the hab. It hit us in the hallway. Movement got us out."
"Yes," she said. "Exactly. And it didn't affect Isela today, airborne in the Aquila Shuttle. So the maximum area can't be much more than a kilometer. So it sweeps back and forth across the city like a machine gunner suppressing a position. I guessed that there was just one unit and I think I was right. Look."
She zoomed out on her map and looked around. "I need a straight-edge."
Surs provided a pen. Tara positioned the pen on one of her marks, times and places where we had felt the Fear. She moved it from one to another in a way that made it sweep back and forth across the city like the beam of an auspex scanner.
"I don't have the mathematics to get an exact position," she said. "Surs?"
"I'm afraid not."
"It doesn't matter. It has to be around here."
She marked a circle on the map, maybe a kilometer wide, several kilometers outside of the city. She held the pen in the circle and swung it. Just like a machine gunner suppressing a large stretch of ground.
I got out my own slate and accessed that area. There weren't many structures. I thought, A machine gunner would be happier in the trees, somewhere with cover and concealment and nothing obvious to bomb. But I looked at the structures anyway, and I knew. The certainty was so instant I wondered if it was the Fear again. But I knew.
I said, "The Interrogator said there wasn't a psyocculum reading."
"Yes," said Surs.
"Then it's technology. Xenos or heretical tech, but some part of it is a machine. Machines that affect whole cities need power."
I turned my slate to face them. I felt the battle-joy. The feeling of seeing a xenos ship disintegrate under Imperial guns. Of seeing inhuman, predatory abominations shatter and burn and die.
I had zoomed the map in as far as it would go. There near the edge of where Tara had drawn her circle was a little white lightning bolt symbol and the words Electromotive Substation Z-2 (exclusion zone 100m).