‘And the threat is related to what you fought on Squire’s Rest,’ he said to Gared.
The Librarian nodded. ‘Intensified,’ he said.
‘Your belief is that the prognostication involved events on this vessel rather than the planet below.’
‘Yes.’
Gared sounded uneasy. He should, Styer thought. The prognosticators had sent them to specific coordinates, not a ship. The site of the incursion could so easily have been elsewhere. It was happenstance that the Scouring Light had still been present when the Tyndaris arrived. Styer wondered if the Scouring Light would have been destroyed if not for the Tyndaris. Or perhaps it was more likely that the kroozer would never have been drawn here without the promise of a good fight. More and more disturbing implications were opening up before him.
Vohnum said, ‘Clearly it was right that we were sent here.’
‘Brother,’ Styer said, ‘your exegesis is unnecessary. I believe it is also short-sighted. But I will not enter that debate now. We have a duty to perform.’
He and Furia led the way down the passageway. The acolyte warriors tensed. Styer watched their hands tighten on their guns. They were carrying more kroot long rifles. They still had the sense not to aim them at the Space Marines. Styer carried his daemon hammer in one hand, holding it near the head. Furia had not drawn her weapon. They were keeping their approach peaceful. There was no need to threaten. The guards knew what they were up against. But it was important for them to know also that nothing would prevent his entry to the chamber beyond.
Styer stopped two paces from the door. He turned his head to the first guard on the left. ‘Open this door,’ he said.
‘We cannot,’ the guard answered.
‘Your orders have no weight with me any longer.’
‘You misunderstand me, lord,’ she said. She had paled. So had her companions. ‘Only Inquisitor Orbiana and Sage Andoval can open it. It responds to no one else.’
‘Then you are fortunate,’ Styer told her. ‘We will open the door ourselves. Step aside.’
‘Please, lord, we–’
‘Step aside.’
She did. They all did.
‘Brother Vohnum,’ Styer said, ‘please get us inside.’
Vohnum stepped forward and fixed a melta bomb to either side of the door.
‘There is a risk,’ Gared said quietly.
‘To breaking the wards?’ Styer asked. ‘Of course there is. But you are convinced a great threat is forming on the other side.’
‘It is.’
‘Then it would seem these wards are of little use. Brother Vohnum?’
Vohnum moved back, detonator in hand. ‘At your command, brother-justicar.’
‘Move back,’ Styer told the acolyte warriors. They did so without protest.
The squad retreated a few metres, Furia a bit further than that. They readied their weapons. ‘Now,’ said Styer.
Light the intensity of pure heat and pain filled the corridor. The reaction ate through the metal of the door, evaporating it within seconds. The glare faded. Borsam, his surety of movement belying his injuries, advanced with Vohnum. They reached into the gaps, took hold of the damaged door, and pulled. With a hiss of escaping air, and subaural hum of profaned sigils, the door came away from the wall. The crash as it fell resounded along the length of the corridor like the toll of a huge bell.
‘Enough of secrets,’ Styer said. He climbed over the door and through the entrance.
The room on the other side was a large laboratorium. It was almost as big as a loading bay. Its central area was split between theoretical and practical research. To the left, bookshelves reaching almost to the height of the ceiling ten metres high. Before them was a desk, strewn with data-slates and open manuscripts. To the right, arrays of medicae equipment and several surgery tables. Around the periphery of the laboratorium were stasis tubes. They contained specimens: orks. Two more, dead, were strapped to tables. Orbiana and Andoval were standing by what appeared to be the most recently deceased ork. From their position, Styer guessed that they had been examining it when the bombs had been triggered. Andoval held something disc-shaped.
At his shoulder, Gared muttered, ‘I would very much like to see what the sage has there.’
‘You’re thinking of what was removed from the crown in the tomb.’
‘I am.’
Orbiana strode forward. ‘Justicar,’ she said, ‘you overstep your authority.’ Her voice was frozen rage.
‘Our mission,’ Furia said, advancing to meet her, ‘is to combat a direct threat to the Imperium caused by a daemonic incursion. Our prognosticators declared it would occur at these coordinates. Epistolary Gared detected the taint of the Ruinous Powers in this space. That is all the authority we need. It is you who treads on perilous ground, not us.’
The two inquisitors stood face to face, power armour against bionic reconstruction. Orbiana wore metal and ceramite. Half of Furia was metal and ceramite. They were both beings of absolute determination. Neither would concede to the other. If one of them could, she would be a poor inquisitor.
Styer watched closely. He would not be the instigator of internecine violence. But he would act with all necessary force if circumstances dictated. If Orbiana moved her hands the wrong way towards the weapons at her armour’s belt, she would bring those circumstances into being.
Orbiana kept her hands still by her side. She said, ‘There will be no fighting here.’
‘That is wise of you.’
Styer wondered if Furia was goading Orbiana. He didn’t think so. That was unlike her. The venom he heard was for the danger the other inquisitor was bringing to the Imperium. The sight of so many orks, alive though in stasis, was an affront. Orbiana had run serious risks on Squire’s Rest, risks that, at least indirectly, had nearly cost the Grey Knights a strike cruiser. And the object she had taken from the mausoleum had had its own part to play, he was sure, in those costs.
Orbiana said, ‘You can see there is nothing daemonic at work here. Will you do as I ask and leave me to my work?’
‘Your work?’ Furia was disbelieving. ‘You bring our foes onto the ship. You call that work?’
‘Everything I do is for the greater good of the Imperium.’
Gared said, ‘What is your work?’
Orbiana’s answer was long in coming. Styer thought her hesitation pointless. The materials of her project were exposed. How difficult would it be now to divine its goal? Perhaps it was pride that made her resist, a refusal to be forced into this position. Certainly, there was pride when she did speak. And pleasure. The work was her obsession. The entire ship was testament to that fact. ‘We are,’ she said, ‘on the threshold of the final destruction of the orks.’ There was a slight tremor in her voice. There was an emotion there that Styer had not heard from his brothers, or Furia, or known himself for as long as he could remember. It was joy.
‘Lunacy,’ said Furia.
Gared was moving towards Andoval. The sage was frozen and shaking. He looked back and between Orbiana and Gared, as if seeking some guidance from the inquisitor. But she had forgotten him as she sought to turn the moment of revelation into victory.
‘You do me wrong, inquisitor,’ she said. ‘I don’t expect you to understand. You Amalathians are incapable of thinking beyond simple preservation. That isn’t enough. You cannot conceive of the fact that the salvation of the Imperium lies in the courage to take the great risk.’
‘So does its damnation.’
Orbiana shook her head. ‘Extraordinary risks demand extraordinary precautions and extraordinary care. These have been taken.’
‘In order to do what, exactly?’ Styer was growing impatient with the drama of Orbiana’s preamble. ‘By what miracle will you exterminate the greenskins?’
‘By means of a plague.’
Silence. Dead sil
ence. Orbiana’s pronouncement was a stone that plunged into consciousness and kept going down, down, down into depth upon depth of implications. The idea was mad. If Orbiana believed in its reality, she was mad. Its implementation would surely unleash madness beyond measure. Styer and Gared exchanged looks. Both daemonic forces the Librarian had encountered had defined themselves with disease. The puzzle pieces the Grey Knights had found since arriving in the Sanctus Reach began to come together. The image they were forming was dangerous.
Furia pointed to the medicae equipment and its profusion of beakers and solutions. ‘Your plan,’ she said, her tone flat with disbelief, ‘is to unleash a plague upon the galaxy?’
Until this moment, Styer had not thought Orbiana insane, at least not beyond the derangement that he believed to be inherent to all Xanthites. Her conduct in battle had been skilled and intelligent. He reproached her use of xenos weaponry, but not the manner in which she laid waste to the foe. But given what she was proposing to do, he now had to consider the possibility that she had fallen to corruption.
‘That is my intent,’ Orbiana confirmed. ‘A specialised plague. One that will affect only the orks. Humanity suffers from many afflictions to which the orks are immune. There is not a single recorded instance of the Plague of Unbelief falling upon any race other than ours. I see no reason why the reverse could not also be true.’
Furia was shaking her head. ‘My colleagues in your ordo have never mentioned such a thing as being even remotely possible. We understand so little about the most basic nature of the orks.’
‘You know only intellectual cowards. The knowledge exists. It is simply a question of recovery.’
‘You were looking for this knowledge in the Mehnert tomb,’ Styer said.
‘Precisely.’
Gared loomed over Andoval. The sage looked up at him. The little man was so hunched that Gared was almost twice his size. ‘I will examine that,’ he said, holding out his hand. The sage handed him the disc.
Styer approached them, keeping an eye on Orbiana’s movements. She made no attempt to stop them. She actually seemed to welcome their scrutiny of her materials now, as if it was inevitable that she should convince them.
Gared showed him the object. It was black iron, densely engraved with runes. They were arranged in two interlocking spirals, one moving out from the centre of the disc, the other moving in. Styer couldn’t read the runes, but their effect was disorienting. He regarded the relic with deep suspicion. ‘What is this?’ he asked.
‘When the Octarius System fell to the orks, Major-General Mehnert led a counterattack that briefly reclaimed one of the outer planets. Though the victory was short-lived, he killed the warboss who led the ork forces on that world. He took some trophies. One of them was a crown on which the ork had mounted its own trophies of conquest. That disc was among them. The ork could not possibly have known its significance. Nor could Mehnert.’
Gared said, ‘I have never seen runes like these before.’
‘Their precise origin is unknown. The references to the relic are very rare and fragmentary. It has taken me thirty years to track it down.’
‘Your research must not have been confined to human sources,’ Furia remarked.
Orbiana ignored her. ‘It is my understanding that weaknesses specific to the greenskins are revealed in those runes. I believe they tell the tale of a plague that befell the orks in the distant past.’
‘You can read these?’ Styer asked.
‘No,’ Orbiana admitted. ‘Not enough to unpack the knowledge encoded there. Not yet.’
Furia joined Styer and Gared in examining the disc.
‘This is not merely xenos work,’ Styer said. The spirals captivated the eye even as they damaged vision. They invited study. They pulled at the mind. They were a dark fascination. Styer was convinced of one thing Orbiana had said: he was looking at a chronicle of disease. Not merely a chronicle, though. The vortex of the lines was unhealthy. Disease itself lay in the relic.
‘I agree with the justicar,’ said Furia. ‘The runes are dangerous.’
‘Of course they are,’ Orbiana said. ‘Everything about this project is dangerous. War is dangerous. Handled correctly, this danger will bring about the end of another. The orks will trouble the Imperium no more.’
‘They are too dangerous,’ Styer said. He turned to the squad. ‘This laboratorium is under quarantine, forbidden to all but the Ordo Malleus. Destroy the unused specimens. Seal the rest. Burn the texts.’ He looked at the equipment. He saw now several small stasis tubes containing fluids of foul, dark colours. ‘All of this will be purged in due course,’ he continued.
‘You have no right!’ Orbiana protested.
‘We have every right,’ Furia told her. She took the disc from Gared. ‘You have been using the tools of Chaos. The radicals of our ordos are adept at rationalising such acts. Your duty is to combat xenos threats. You may think you have been doing so. I will do you the honour of believing that you have convinced yourself you are doing the Emperor’s work. But you are deluded. Our duty is to combat the daemonic. Epistolary Gared detected an imminent threat in this chamber.’ She raised the disc. ‘We have found the origin of that threat.’
‘You will regret this,’ Orbiana warned. The earlier cold of her anger was transmuting into something molten. Her eyes were wide. Her stance was battle-ready. It would have taken very little, Styer thought, to push her into a suicidal attack.
‘If you try to stop us, you will make me regret not having you put to death,’ said Furia.
Gared relieved Andoval of his data-slates. The sage hobbled away from the Grey Knights to stand beside Orbiana.
Styer said, ‘Will you leave of your own accord, inquisitor? I would spare you the indignity of an escort, if I could.’
Orbiana didn’t answer. She stalked out of the laboratorium, ceramite boots ringing an angry toll against the decking. Andoval followed in her shadow. At the exit, she paused before climbing over the fallen door. ‘You have destroyed the network of wards that protected this laboratorium and my ship. I hope you know what you are doing.’
‘I only wish you did,’ Styer said. He walked over to the first of the orks in stasis. He leaned over the control surface next to the vertical tube and began the process of shutting the containment field down.
Orbiana left without another word. The Grey Knights began the process of destroying what had become her life’s work.
Almost an hour passed before they were interrupted by the ship’s tocsins.
CHAPTER SEVEN
GATEKEEPER
Styer reached the bridge with Furia. A glance at the auspex told him what he needed to know. The auspex readings confirmed the worst. A swarm of ork ships was approaching. Shipmaster Montgelas, his face pale, his right cheek twitching, turned from them to look up at the empty overhead command throne.
‘Where is Inquisitor Orbiana?’ Styer asked him.
‘I assumed she was with you,’ Montgelas said.
‘She was.’ Her absence was a troubling one. He did not like the way elements were suddenly coming together. Neutralising Orbiana’s project should have felt like a victory. It did not. It had come too easily. And now there was an acceleration of events that he did not trust. ‘Is there another kroozer?’ he asked Montgelas.
‘No, lord. They are all small ships. A great many of them.’
More carrion birds, lured away from the main fleets by the battle over Squire’s Rest. The destruction of the kroozer must have been a beacon to the horde. There were too many for the Scouring Light to take on. Evasion was not an option. It would mean abandoning the Tyndaris, and the sloop’s chances of escaping notice were slight. If the vessel remained where it was, it had the cover of the strike cruiser’s firepower. ‘Close in with the Tyndaris,’ he said.
‘How long can we fight them off?’ Montgelas asked.
�
��I’ll find Orbiana,’ said Furia. Raising her voice so the entire bridge crew could hear, she said, ‘If the inquisitor returns, you will accept no orders from her. This vessel is under the command of the Ordo Malleus. Is that understood?’
A full second passed before Montgelas said, ‘Yes, inquisitor.’
‘Order a search, ship-wide, for Inquisitor Orbiana, and full cooperation with me.’
‘At once.’
Furia held his gaze for twice as long as he had hesitated before she left.
Styer voxed Gared. ‘What is the status of the laboratorium?’
‘Sealed, brother-justicar. No further work is possible. We have denied the Ruinous Powers any purchase there.’
‘Would you consider our mission complete, Brother-Epistolary?’
‘Not for a moment.’
‘Neither do I.’ A minor incursion on the planet. A blocked one on the ship. His doubts swirled, and he doubted his doubts. The results of the prognostication so far had been gigantic cost at the hands of a xenos enemy, and suggestive but inconclusive encounters with the daemonic.
He had been making decisions based on current conditions. They were the correct ones, but the results had been closer to catastrophe than victory. He asked himself what he would do if the circumstances were very different from what they appeared. If they were fatally different. Then he opened the squad channel on the vox. ‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘make preparations for the worst of battles on the Scouring Light. Bring over everything from the Tyndaris. We have little time before the orks arrive.’
‘You expect boarding actions?’ Borsam asked.
‘That is a certainty. Prepare for more than that. Prepare as if we had arrived too late at the laboratorium.’
Furia heard Montgelas’s voice speak from vox-casters that dotted the corridors. He was doing as she had told him, and ordering the apprehension of Orbiana. The acolyte warriors she passed looked stunned.
The Scouring Light was not a large ship. It was large enough, though, for one person to vanish. Furia could find no trace of Orbiana. She gave the first level below the bridge only a cursory search. If Orbiana sought concealment, it wouldn’t be in a high traffic area. The Grey Knights had ordered all doors unsealed. Secondary laboratoria had also been purged, though only the main one had contained ork specimens.
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