The cliffs were so tall they nearly reached the sun from the vantage point of standing amid the lapping surf. North and south lay endless beach under the towering drop of the rise. The aircar lay smoking, buried into the sand by a foot and sinking a fraction every surge of the tide. Any evidence the three had experienced a crash landing was long since gone save for the transport and the black plume that gradually rose higher into the sky. 

The mercs' omnivisors were shut off, the material over the visor giving a natural shade to the sun, much like old terran sunglasses. They moved with synchronized, silent steps as they descended the ancient stairway. Nessor and his men had been given strict orders from Vorn to locate the renegade Inquisitor Hadrian Drakos and extract him, and were given permission to end the life of Emmaline Grimelhausen Teobaldina von Morganstern and anyone else with them. The DF had informed them they had landed just down the cliff, and after confirming it with a visual from above, they crept down in squad formation alpha. Small green lights of confirmation blinked in their visors when they spotted the aircar once more, on a more even elevation. Agripinaa Pattern Type III raised, Nessor took point as his team waited, creeping to a rock still nestled under the bosom of the cliffs. He turned his monoscope sixty degrees, the visual on the aircar multiplying by a factor of six. 

He saw no signs of the occupants or any survivors. The doors were closed with glass shattered, and trailing his scope downwards, it was hard to gauge if the ubiquitous rolls of sand were made by footsteps or were merely a natural occurrence. He gingerly moved his rifle to the right, and then the left. It stopped on a small bag, torn open with local seagulls picking at its contents. Idly he pulled his eye back from the scope, glancing left and right and then returning to gaze down. A bird had a nutri-bar in its beak, desperately trying to gobble it up. A few seconds passed, and he turned on his vox unit. 

"Aircar is clear." 

What Nessor thought moments after, I do not know. My minuscule psychic powers provided me with only the briefest insight into his psyche and experiences. I could gather quite clearly he, along with his team, were not heretics. They were not necessarily law-abiding, being a paramilitary organization hailing from the planet Luxor of the Segmentum Obscurus. I saw brief visions of them fighting an underhive gang on some distant planet, and the assassination of a planetary governer that had heretical dealings with the accursed Xenos, the Tau. I even caught a glimpse of a small campaign on an Ork-infested jungle world, extracting the daughter of a magistrate from an overrun fort. However, they had been duped by Vorn into believing I was a dangerous rogue bent on the dismantling of the Imperium at large, and I had not the time nor means to convince them otherwise. Unfortunately for them, they were wrong. And unfortunately for their lives, Vorn had ordered them to kill Emmaline and they accepted that contract. 

Nessor and the first four members of his team to step into the sand were dead in an instant, ripped to shreds by a remote detonation of a rigged hopper mine, a mere flip of the switch activating its bio-sensors. Sand lifted and rock fragments riddled the landscape like bullets, the sound accompanying it following immediately after with a single loud [i]crack[/i]. The four survivors were stunned, shouting into their vox and desperately trying to reorient themselves. I sprang from behind a crag, sand falling off me like loose water. A frag grenade in my hand, I let it cook for the moment it took me to reach the opening to the stairs and I tossed it into their midst. A burst of gunfire hit the sand of where I had stood a moment before.

"Frag! Frag!" 

Two of them hit the sand as the grenade detonated, shrapnel scraping the cliff face and eviscerating two of the remaining four survivors. The aforementioned ones that escaped death rolled deftly, raising their weapons my way without delay and firing, shells popping as they clapped against more crags. Emmaline cried out to the Emperor on their flank, suitably tired from her psychic battle but able to provided a distraction as she rose from where she had knelt, her arms before her face so the inevitable bullets that struck her hit only her ornate armor, taking the worst and keeping her relatively unharmed. The driver beside her let off a few shots from an auto-pistol he held, but he kept well out of their vision or he would have been dead immediately. 

I leaped from cover once again, my powersword thrumming to life. The heat and sudden dull noise caused the closest trooper to roll again and rise to face me, but I was the quicker. As he raised his rifle my sword cut clean through the barrel, and even as they sprang back and grabbed for their combat knife, my sword removed his head from his shoulders. I completed the spin, bisecting the distracted one with an easy flourish of the blade. 

As soon as it had begun, the fight was over. Even as I killed them, I received no pleasure in it. 

Emmaline's head poked out from behind her bracers, three small areas on her polished armor still steaming from the shots aimed at her head. The driver, a man named Gydwyn, wiped some sweat from his brow as he cautiously stepped before the stairway that led to a winding path up the cliff to the Cardinal's manor. 

"Cettin' et a wee bit close, aren't'ye?" He asked, looking down at the dead men incredulously. He glanced sideways at the battle-armor clad Emmaline. "Why no' git the girl tae fight?" 

"The hefty bint couldn't move quick across the sand. Too slow and dangerous for her." I said, having picked up one of the Agrippa assault rifles. I placed the stock against my shoulder and aimed down the scope, then ejected the magazine and checked the ammunition. 

"The next time someone calls me hefty-" She started, but I interrupted her with a tossed belt of extra ammunition. Her armor whirred as she went to catch it, letting out an 'Oop! shit' as it hit the sand. She blew a fringe out of her face as she bent over to grab it.

"Strip the bodies and grab a gun." I told them. "Take whatever you can find that's useful. They'll know in half an hour, maybe less, that their team wasn't successful. We need to be in by then."