“Tell me that one more time,” Katiya Petrovska demanded through gritted teeth. The newly appointed Regimental Commissar of the 112th Kandari rifles glared at the Administratium drone who stood in her commandeered office somehow contriving to look nervous despite being equipped with two augmetic eyes. The office had at one point been part of a scholam but the juvies had been given an unexpected holiday when a regiment of the Imperial Guard had arrived on Pavonis. Well, part of a regiment anyway.

“The astropathic message was very clear Commissar,” the administratium official reported, looking at the ground to avoid Katiya’s icy blue gaze.
 
“The Omniscience Light and the Lord Cardinal Catemek were both swept of course by the warp storm, they report their position as the Katarn system and they are making for Pavonis at best speed,” the adminstratium adept repeated in the sing song tone of someone repeating a memorized message.

“Katarn is six months from here at least,” Katiya snapped, though truthfully her being irritated about it wasn’t going to change the fact that two thirds of her regiment was stuck months of warp travel away. The storm had come up during the last few weeks of the voyage, just in time to separate their own transport, The Judgment of Atrino, from the rest of its fleet. Only three of the nine companies of the 112th had been on the Judgement, worse only one company was front line troopers, the other two companies were sappers and logistics, and they had no armor beyond their chimeras. That wasn’t going to be enough to calm the riots and unrest they had been sent to deal with, worse yet it might be just enough to provoke the very trouble they had been sent to quell. Katiya stalked over to the window and peered out onto the scrumball fields where the guardsmen were busily carrying supplies and munitions from a trio of massive armored shuttles. She made quite the picture, dressed in great coat and wearing the distinctively beaked cap of commissar perched on her dark braided hair and the crimson sash of office wrapped around her slender waist, partially covering the polished black belt from which depended a bolt pistol and a power sword in a black and silver scabbard.  She turned back to look at the Adept and was momentarily distracted by the children's drawings that were pinned to the far wall. They were obviously a class project, depictions of Pyro the Promethum Flame, some of the depictions of burning heretics were actually quite artistically rendered.
 
“Who else knows about this? She asked after a moment, her sudden decisive turn causing the adept to flinch and drop an ink bottle he apparently had been clutching beneath his dark gray robes. The bottle bounced on the cork floor but didn’t break.

“Well there is the sstropath, myself, the governor and the prelate of the governor’s guard, I suppose the two soldiers on duty?”

“Are they still on duty?” she asked. The adept blinked like a stunned fish.

“Yes… I mean I assume… I came straight here, but captain Raloc wasn’t in his office and...”

Katiya strode passed the flunky and threw open the door into the central hallway of the scholam. A corporal she didn’t know looked up in startelement as the door bounced off the wall with a sharp crack. To her approval he was in his full battle rattle, which was what Raloc had ordered and the regimental standard operating procedure after landfall in a possibly hostile planet. She really needed Raloc but the captain was a newly promoted officer and had yet to learn to delegate tasks to subordinates, he was out liaising with the local arbities, getting what insight they could provide on the insurgents. In fairness this wouldn’t have normally been a problem, but with the Colonel and Major stranded at least six months away, if, and that was a big if, the warp storm subsided.
 
“You,” she ordered the guardsmen, “take ten men to the palace, round up the prelate of the governors guard and the men on duty at the astropath sanctum this morning. The astropath is to be confined to the sanctum. Bring the rest of them here until I figure out what to do with them.  I’ll have a note for the governor with a commissariat seal in five minutes.”
 
It was important that the news that the Imperial Guard had arrived badly understrength not spread, or at least that word didn’t spread quickly. It wouldn’t be possible to keep that fact underwraps forever, but they needed to gain as much time as they could.

“What… what about me?” the Administratium Adept blurted, his augmetic eyes whirring wide in shock at the sudden and unexpected development. Katiya looked back at him as though startled he was still there.

[@POOHEAD189]