Communication Lost

Damian worked his jaw hard, feeling the burning pain in his cheek. He had every reason to believe that Lin Fan's slap had carried a measure of personal revenge. But he could not be blamed for it. Who could have known that old Famu, whom he had known for so long, really had a problem? Great-grandfather Kam above, he had known old Famu since he was naked! Everyone who had worked at the Great Basin under Great-grandfather Kam knew that Famu was a diligent, hardworking, good man. How had such a good man become so terrifying?

As he thought this, he looked back at old Famu's corpse, its expression twisted, its jaw badly dislocated, blood spurting from its throat in waves. He wondered if talking back to an officer like that would get him shot by the commissar.

Lin Fan was in no mood for Damian's wild thoughts. He merely gripped his Lasgun and hid behind an iron plate, peering at the heavy door marked by obvious red traces. In a few seconds, that thick door would surely be cut down, and the Chaos mob outside would swarm in and tear them apart. Lin Fan was not afraid at that moment. He might not suffer any harm, after all. But Damian and the others were good people; they should not die at the hands of a Chaos mob. The people on this planet were good people too. They should not become the toys and sacrifices of the Chaos Gods without ever knowing why. Lin Fan had received a good moral education growing up. He had no grand ambitions, but he had a kind heart. He could not bear to watch so many people die so cruelly before his eyes. At the very least, he had to save a few more, didn't he?

"Like fish on a beach. Save this one, and you can save that one too," Lin Fan told himself, repeating the saying.

"What are you talking about?" Lin Fan turned to Delia, who had asked the question, and sighed. For some reason, ever since Lin Fan had patted Delia awake earlier, she had followed close behind him with that obedient look on her face.

Lin Fan had asked Delia to use her communicator to send a distress call and warning to headquarters. But according to Delia, the Warp shriek from earlier had thrown every instrument in the room into disorder—the Machine Spirits were displeased, as they called it. Hearing that explanation, Lin Fan impatiently snatched the communicator away, ignoring Delia's angry little glare. He smacked the useless device hard several times, and it returned to normal.

An Auspex and a communicator should probably work in roughly the same way.

Delia was dumbfounded by this way of appeasing a Machine Spirit. She had never seen such a crude method before—and one that actually worked. For a long time afterward, it influenced how Delia maintained equipment and soothed Machine Spirits, causing her colleagues to constantly criticize her for not cherishing those delicate Machine Spirits.

Lin Fan, meanwhile, found no joy in the garbled signals and static coming from the device. It seemed that communications across the planet had been jammed, or that headquarters had been attacked and plunged into chaos as well. Fortunately, Delia knew the harvester's structure very well. With her leading them, they could find the fastest route out of this giant metal madhouse. Then they could take an armored vehicle or something else and get away from this dangerous place. After all, there were only eleven of them in total.

With a thunderous crash, the heavy iron door fell. The mob carrying thermal cutters charged into the room, shouting. The beautiful sight they had expected—everyone lying on the ground awaiting slaughter—never appeared. Instead, several Lasgun shots from the waiting assault squad tore their bodies apart, turning them into scorched lumps of charcoal that collapsed onto the floor.

Lin Fan fired precise shot after precise shot from his Lasgun, blasting apart the heads of the constantly flooding mob. He had thought the splattering bodily fluids and flying limbs would disgust him so much that he could barely fight, but in reality, only headless corpses with vaporized skulls remained, along with the burnt smell of roasting flesh that kept assailing his nerves.

Once Lin Fan realized what that burnt smell was, nausea rose in his throat. Still, the Adeptus Custodes' training was indeed thorough. His body continued to aim and pull the trigger on instinct.

The mob seemed to realize that crowding around a single doorway gave them no hope of breaking through. Leaving corpses scattered across the ground, they fled in all directions.

Lin Fan led the assault squad and Delia after the fleeing mob, continuing to fire at their retreating backs. Only when there was no longer a single moving figure visible in the corridor did he turn and ask Delia which way they should go.

Delia led them through the complex passageways, turning left and right until they finally found a small door about waist-high.

"This is one of the entrances to the machine's heat-dissipation channels. This passage leads directly outside, and it comes out right beside the suspended loader," Delia said, pointing excitedly at the unremarkable little door before them.

"But what if the hot exhaust air cooks us?" Damian asked worriedly. He had no desire to be roasted alive.

"It won't. We'll be fine!" Delia looked firmly at Damian with her beautiful large eyes. "I've rewritten this machine's sacred code and shut down its energy core. Even if those people reactivate it, starting up the energy core will require a great deal of preparation time."

"Then let's go." Lin Fan opened the door and was the first to bend down and head deeper inside.

The others followed closely behind Lin Fan, feeling their way through the dark heat-dissipation channel.

After advancing bent over in the darkness for a long time, they finally saw mottled light coming from the distance. Their spirits lifted, and they hurried toward it, walking and crawling alike.

"Praise the Emperor." Lin Fan offered the heartfelt exclamation as he walked at the front. Through the grille-like vent, he could see the loader below. They only needed to open this door, jump onto it, and escape with their lives.

But Lin Fan wanted to observe a little longer. Quite a few people surrounded the massive harvester called Kam—at a glance, perhaps several thousand. Lin Fan only understood the scale because he had seen crowds of a similar size on the field at his high school, which had an enormous number of students.

Looking at the energy remaining in his ammunition pack, Lin Fan felt that the eleven of them were not even enough to fill the teeth of the people below.

He turned to Delia and asked, "Can you make the loader go faster?"

"Uh... this... this violates the rules," Delia said, at a loss. She had seen so many violations of regulations today that her first reaction was to fear punishment from her teacher.

"No, no. This isn't innovation, and it isn't modification, right? We're only making the loader's Machine Spirit more lively, aren't we?"

"I... I think you're right..."

Lin Fan looked at Delia, who had reluctantly agreed, and nodded approvingly. This girl was not as rigid and dogmatic as those people he had read about in books. Then he kicked the vent door open with all his strength and jumped onto the loader.