"Corporal Inessa Laen."
The voice made her shiver as much as the cold.
"Well Corporal, I need answers to my questions, and if you cannot provide them then what use are you to me?"
Its words were punctuated with a low-pitched hum. It took her a moment to recognize it through the pain that fogged her mind, turned her thoughts into an incoherent mess. It was a sound she had heard countless times in her short lifetime.
It was one of the most exciting sounds she had ever heard in her youth, the soft hum that announced the beginning of a live-fire excersize in the bowels of a voidship. It was one she had heard over and over in the quiet of her barracks as she spent hours loading and unloading her weapon, ingraining the simple motions into her muscles. It was the quiet, innocent sound that signalled the imminent destruction of a flakboard target at the end of a range.
On Thesh, it meant she was about to see combat for the first time. It was a sound that started the pounding in her chest, the rush of adrenaline, the anxious shaking of excitement and terror. And again, when the smoke cleared at the end of each brutal assault and a heavy silence fell over the killing fields, when the dead were counted and the dreadful reality of what had occurred began to set in, it was a sound of comfort, a sound that meant when the enemy came again, she would be ready.
On Stiri II, it was the sound that began every foot patrol. It was the sound of a dozen troopers reading their weapons in the cramped interior of a Chimera. It was the quiet sound of warning mere moments before an ambush. It was a sound she longed for more than anything when the ammunition went dry and the enemy was upon them.
But now, in this dark, cold room, it meant only one dreadful thing. She was going to die.
Death was what she had been raised for, death in the service of the Imperium. She had accepted that long ago and expected it to come much sooner than now. Only under the Emperor's protection had she made it off of those hellish worlds alive and if now he deemed her service complete, so be it, she was ready.
Inessa had always expected, hoped for, a sudden death. Perhaps for a heavy autogun slug to decapitate her in a firefight, or a lascannon to reduce her vehicle to molten slag. This was not what she had hoped for. The minutes seemed to drag on for an eternity as she hung her head, shaking uncontrollably from the cold, and desperately tried to remember the words to a prayer that wouldn't come.
The voice broke the silence again, drowning out her thoughts once more.
"What regiment were you with, Corporal? Where were you deployed? Why are you on this ship? Who brought you here? I want answers, soldier."
It could talk all it liked. She had no answers for it, none that would stay its hand without damning her soul. Things were better this way, better for it just to end.
