I looked away from Hadrian embarrassed by the clumsy contact. I wondered if Emmaline-who-studies or Emmaline-who-practices would have done a better job. There was a slight trembling around us and I brought my emotions under control. Of course not, I was the best Emmaline even if I was far too humble to show it. I suspected that Hadrian would have words with us once he exited the nested mindscape but that was for later and frankly, only partially my problem.


The landscape shifted again and I found myself running across an assault course, probably in the belly of a starship. A psyker with an Imperial Sanctioning mark was lashing at Demick and a half dozen other mercenaries with similar features and coloration. I guessed they had all been recruited from whatever hell world he had come from, somewhere near the Damocles Gulf if the kroot was typical. Burning awls of mental energy lashed out only to vanish a few feet from each man as they encountered the warding necklaces we had been issued to protect us.


“They are training to fight psykers,” I told Hadrian as he caught hold of a rope and swung across a ventilation shaft. “Not that I am really that much of a threat.


“Move damn it! Demick shouted and the scene shifted again.

I found myself looking at a beautiful blonde woman through a high powered skype. She was stunning, but that couldn’t be me could it. Demick knelt behind a high powered las rifle. Despite his apparent concentration he turned to speak to us.


“The key is to control your breathing,” he explained, then pulled the trigger.


Warm autumn air and soft music played across me. I was at a Harvest Ball. Demick was dressed as a servant carrying a tray of drinks. He was wearing a mask that contained a compact pict recorder and was measuring distances and scouting hard points. The style of the richly dressed guests seemed to say Pacitus to me though I suppose the Imperium is vast and I could have been wrong. Demick moved through the ball, busing drinks from various guests before following another waiter back into the food preparation area. Demick closed the door and slid the vertical bolts to close it.

“Hey what are you doing?” a portly man in a spotless chefs tunic demanded. Demick drew a suppressed hand gun and shot the man twice, once in the heart and once in the head. The second waiter also revealed himself as a merc by pulling a gun. Both of the sous chefs fell within a heartbeat and the kitchen maid was just opening her mouth to scream when a bullet splashed a red ribbon of blood and brain across the wall. The whole operation took less than two seconds. Demick and his accomplice crossed the kitchen and opened the walk-in freezer, icy crystals blasting out into the air. The second merc pulled up his black and white tunic and began unwinding something from around his stomach. Of course I recognized it as tubular fiscolene but Hadrian knew such things better than me so I didn’t say anything. They marked out a rectangle on the floor of the freezer, then took cover behind several haunches of beef. There was a flash and crash of explosive detonation and as the smoke was whisked away into the recycler vent we saw a section of floor had been blasted clear and had fallen into the floor below. Demick and his companion leaped down into what appeared to be a data storage annex of some kind and began to pull data cores from racked cogitators and thrust them into a pair of expandable canvas sacks. I was no geographer but I recognized the skyline of Exkultis out of a narrow window at the end of the room.


“Any questions?” a severe looking man in mottled alpine camo demanded. I was squatting beside Demick and Hadrian as we examined a sand table that showed the progress of the Zephyr, with arrows and lines which a party girl like me could not possibly have interpreted as a plan of attack. Black armored landspeeders stood in ranks nearby beside temporary flakboard barracks. A transorbital shuttle with the crest of Van Hagen sat on ice crusted struts. I turned my head to see we were on a small island surrounded by a large icy lake, clearly a staging point of some kind.


“No sir!” The mercenaries chorused and then were up and moving heading to their speeders and checking their weapons. I could faintly hear the whistle of the Zephyr in the distance as it shouldered its way up toward the pass.


“I’m no judge but I think we should think about g…” a trio of kroot leaped from the woods, yelling weird ululating cries. Demick screamed and lifted his las carbine, hosing one of the aliens with las fire. A six legged cat like thing vaulted from behind the speeders and began ripping the commanding officer appart, pulling out ropes of entrails with its teeth, the horrible mouthfuls steaming in the frosty air.


“What in Terra’s name?” Hadrian, now dressed in mercenary armor and carrying an autogun demanded. A blast of heavy bolter fire ripped the cat thing to pieces but six kitchen hands wielding long knives sprang from the resulting offal, they were pale and corpse like their heads disfigured by the bullets that had killed them. One of them ran at me and slashed with his knife, drawing blood as raked up my arm. Hadrian put three rounds into him sending him staggering to the ground.


“His mind…. It is starting to collapse,” I gasped. Either Emmaline-who-knew-occult-lore was starting to lose control, or else Demick’s own mind was starting to react violently to our presence as we left the fog of his memory and reached the clearer recollections that led to his violent and temporarily suspended death. His own memories were starting to rally to try to destroy us, and everything else in this mindscape. One of the airspeeders was rising on its lift fans when a great pterodactyl like creature smashed into it, long claws reaching into the cabin to rip the driver free like the meat of a nut. Gunfire and smoke and the smell of death was everywhere. Demick was on his knees, fingers digging into the bloody sockets of his eyes as he wailed in agony. The very waters of the lake were blackening and growing choppy with omni directional waves, trying to crash in on the island from all directions.


“How do we get out of here?!” Hadrian demanded.

“You want Emmaline-who-explains, she is soooo much better at this sort of thing than I am,” I began. Hadrian slapped me across the face.

“We cannot stay here, tell me how to get us back to…. Wherever we were!”


“Wherever we were… Hadrian you are so smart!” I yelled. One of the kitchen hand corpses rushed me with a cleaver and I extended my hand. Clara Strong, equipped with the ceremonial sword she had used to help me raise the dead, stepped from my palm and in a fraction of a second grew to full size. She decapitated our attacker and charged into the panicked melee sword raised.

“Run for the speeders!” I called, lending what little help I could to Hadrian as he strode towards the speeder. His mercenary gear had gone and now he stood in full inquisitorial regalia, sword drawn. Dark unclean things were stirring beneath the crashing lake and dark tentacles began to slither up onto the shore. Hadrian pulled open the cab door of the nearest speeder, shot the mercenary trying to start it through the head and yanked his body clear.

“How does this help us?” he demanded.

“You should have asked for Emmaline-who-explains-things she is so much better…”

“Emmaline! You know how to get out of this place, tell me thrones sake!” he roared as I bundled into the back of the speaker. The whistle on the Zephyr screamed again, far closer this time.

“In Demick’s memory, Emmaline-who-is-all-of-us is on the train!” I yelled, swinging the heavy bolter mounted in the door and firing a long burst that, by pure luck, ripped one of the flying lizards from the sky.

“If you can get us to her, we can get out, but we have to do it before Demick dies, I don’t know what will happen if his mind collapses before we can get free!”