Predator, Prey

by Rob Sanders

  ‘Would you have me wait half the night on your tardiness, sir?’ Mesring berated, prompting the priest to pour the water from the pitcher and into the marble bowl. The Ecclesiarch offered the priest his hands, at which the savant bowed and reverently kissed the pudgy backs of both. ‘All right, all right,’ Mesring grumbled impatiently.

  The priest fell to removing the rings from Mesring’s fat fingers and depositing them on a pair of sculpted, marble hands. Upon completion of this exercise, Mesring placed his hands in the basin and washed his weary face. He snatched a towel from the attendant priest and dabbed his features dry. As the Ecclesiarch scrunched the hand towel up and prepared to toss it back at the savant, he found the priest admiring one of his many extravagant rings of office.

  ‘How dare you!’ Mesring rumbled, bringing the back of his hand up to correct the attendant priest. ‘Damned insolence,’ he marvelled as the priest proceeded to try the ring on for size.

  The savant-priest’s own arm came up with astonishing speed and violence. Within moments the priest had the hand Mesring was threatening to slap him with in a horrific lock. The Ecclesiarch’s features contorted beneath the fat of his face. The slightest twist of the priest’s grip shot agony through the High Lord’s trembling carcass.

  The priest admired the Ecclesiarch’s ring on the forefinger of his other hand. It was crafted in the likeness of the Adeptus Ministorum’s holy symbol, inset with a tiny skull. The skull’s eyes burned red, indicating that the ring was primed. Grabbing Mesring by one of his many chins, the priest forced him back to the cold marble of the wall. Mesring struggled but then, as the priest twisted his arm further, subsided with a pained groan.

  The priest tapped his ring-adorned forefinger against the Ecclesiarch’s throat. ‘Beautiful,’ he said simply, admiring the digital lasweapon. ‘Jokaero, no?’

  Mesring managed a terrified nod. ‘Careful now,’ the priest warned. ‘I wouldn’t want you to slit your own throat. Such craftsmanship should be employed in defence of your continued existence, not be the instrument of its ending. I’m sure you agree.’

  This time Mesring signalled such agreement with the slow closing and opening of his yellowing eyes.

  ‘Who are you?’ Mesring hissed through his agonies. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Who am I?’ the savant-priest repeated – the savant-priest who had been chief attendant to the Ecclesiarch for decades. Who had been privy to his appetites and secrets. Who had attended on Mesring on board the sacerdotal skiff on the journey from the Imperial Palace. Who had assisted the Ecclesiarch in the bestowing of blessings upon the High Lords themselves in the Anesidoran Chapel. ‘And what do I want?’

  The priest seemed to move something around in his mouth and then proceeded to bite down hard. Mesring watched in horror as the priest’s face began to tic and to tremble. Like a stone cast into a still pool, his features rippled. A ghastly transformation took place before the Ecclesiarch’s fearful eyes. Long, grey hair rained to the marble floor along with clumps of the priest’s tangled beard. False lenses ran down the imposter’s cheeks like tears and a plastek film that had covered the priest’s cracked and aged lips peeled away and fell to the floor like a strip of dry skin. With the localised polymorphine losing effect and the transformation complete, Mesring beheld his uninvited guest.

  ‘Vangorich…’

  ‘Yes.’

  Face-to-face with his foe, some of Mesring’s accustomed bluster returned.

  ‘This is an outrage,’ the Ecclesiarch seethed. ‘The High Lords will hear of this!’

  ‘No,’ Drakan Vangorich, Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum, told him with absolute certainty. ‘You asked me a moment ago what I wanted. What I want right now, your eminence, is for you to shut that interminable hole in your face. For if you do not, I shall save your shoulders the further responsibility of bearing the weight of your head. I shall then have one of the many operatives I have planted in your organisation, studying your behaviour and mannerisms, wear your flesh and assume your responsibilities. Am I understood?’

  Mesring considered the Grand Master’s words and once again confirmed his understanding with his eyes.

  ‘Here is what I need you to do,’ Vangorich told him. ‘You will contact Lord Commander Udo and have him convene another unscheduled meeting of the Twelve. Just the Twelve.’

  ‘And why would I do that?’ Mesring said.

  ‘Ah, ah,’ Vangorich reminded him, tapping his finger and digital weapon against the Ecclesiarch’s throat. ‘I do not want to be invited, but you can wager your life that I will be in there. Just like I was today.’

  ‘I…’

  The Grand Master raised his dark eyebrows. ‘I’d need a good reason,’ Mesring said, ‘to justify that.’

  ‘You have one,’ Vangorich returned. ‘You will tell them that you slept uneasily tonight. That the loss of the Jeronimus Fyodora shrine worlds weighed heavily on your mind and that you have taken the destruction of the Fleur-de-Fides cardinal world as a punishment – as a sign. An indication of the God-Emperor’s dissatisfaction with the High Lords’ present course of action in the rimward sectors.’

  ‘I will not take the Emperor’s name in vain,’ Mesring hissed, ‘and cheapen my faith with such falsehoods.’

  ‘You will,’ Vangorich insisted. ‘You do already. Every day. Remember to whom you speak, Ecclesiarch. I have been your shadow for longer than you knew you had one. You will declare a War of Faith. You will raise frater militias and mobilise your Templar forces. Your priests across the segmentum will preach this from the pulpits. This will all be done under a banner of sacred vengeance. The priests and people of Fleur-de-Fides will be avenged. You will use your influence with the Lord High Admiral – in light of the Ardamantuan Atrocity, other devastations on the edge of the segmentum, and your War of Faith – to have him recall his fleets, armadas and flotillas from the diversion of border actions and campaign crusades. To ensure the new Lord Commander Militant and committed Astra Militarum forces have the full support of Navy warships and troop carriers. To redeploy our assets across the segmentum in anticipation of xenos invasion. These greenskin successes, their barbaric new technologies, this self-named Beast: these all add up to a credible threat, not to a single world or sector but to the very core. The Imperium is in clear and present danger.’

  ‘You are not qualified to make that determination,’ Mesring replied. ‘And neither am I.’

  ‘True,’ Vangorich admitted. ‘But there are those among us who are. Those who know and have always known more about this threat to our Imperial sovereignty amongst the stars. They are fearful. I look to their fear for guidance.’

  ‘Then take some comfort from their interest and expertise,’ the Ecclesiarch said. ‘If they act, then why need we?’

  ‘You, Udo, Lansung – your inaction is defined by political advantage. They act in spite of you, but to no lesser advantage. Terrible things are done in the name of necessity. Besides – I don’t have reason to trust any of you. You will do these things I ask not because I have asked you. Not because I have threatened. You will do them because it is your duty. It is your hallowed responsibility to look to the safety and sanctity of the Emperor and His dominion. That is your only reason for being, Ecclesiarch.’

  ‘Lansung is his own man,’ Mesring insisted. ‘He will not allow his ambitions to be thwarted. I won’t be able to convince him to abandon wars he is already fighting. He will not break up his armadas. I can’t–’

  ‘You can and you will,’ Vangorich warned. ‘Many claim you to be your own man also, with power and boundless ambition. Yet here I am, using what I have to apply pressure in the right places. You will do the same. Use what you have with Lansung and find a way.’

  ‘Why not remove Lansung?’ Mesring suggested. ‘If he’s the problem, assassinate and replace him instead. Leave me out of this.’

  ‘As always, I will
do what I must,’ the Grand Master admitted. ‘But if the segmentum is under threat from invasion, we are going to need Admiral Lansung and his strategic experience. It might surprise you to learn this, your eminence, but I don’t really want to kill anybody. But as I said: sometimes terrible things are done in the name of necessity.’

  ‘Say I agree to this,’ Mesring said with gravity. ‘Say, for the sake of argument that I even agree with a recall strategy. This degenerate xenos Beast, after all, is decimating my worlds too. What’s in it for me?’

  Vangorich gave the Ecclesiarch a look of smouldering scorn and disgust. His lips tightened.

  ‘Why, my lord Mesring… you get to live,’ Vangorich told him. The Assassin became calmer and more dangerous with the Ecclesiarch’s every incendiary suggestion. ‘A few minutes ago I placed a toxin of unrivalled and agonising lethality in contact with your skin.’ Mesring frowned. ‘The devotion of a reverent kiss.’

  Mesring looked from Vangorich’s lips to the backs of his hands, then to the floor where the plastek strip bearing the toxin lay curled and abandoned after the Assassin’s transformation.

  ‘You poisoned me?’ Mesring wheezed, trying to catch his breath.

  ‘You have three days to meet my demands,’ Vangorich told him. ‘Three days to meet with the High Lords, to use your leverage with Lansung – to have him issue the recall. Three days until you die on your knees, bleeding from your ears, nose and eyeballs, praying for a mercifully swift and painless death you don’t deserve from the God-Emperor you have served so very poorly. Upon successful completion of my demands, one of my operatives will deliver to you the antidote. If you fail, there will be no such need to do so.’

  Vangorich released Mesring, before slipping the Ecclesiarch’s digital weapon from his finger.

  ‘I only have your word that I’ve been poisoned,’ Mesring said weakly.

  ‘Or that there’s an antidote if you have,’ Vangorich reminded him with chill certainty. ‘Think of it this way: you put the same trust in me as I put in you.’

  ‘You said that you didn’t trust any of us.’

  Vangorich dropped the Jokaero ring into the basin of holy water. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. He brought up the hood on his priestly robe and sank down into its darkness before walking away.

  Mesring’s fat face was a nest of fury and confusion. Scrabbling through the water in the bowl, the Ecclesiarch found his weapon-ring and slid it onto his little finger. Pointing the weapon at Vangorich’s presented back, the High Lord thought on the toxin working its way through the pores of his skin, through his blood and soaking slowly through his internal organs. He thought on the potential antidote in Drakan Vangorich’s possession. The Ecclesiarch lowered his hand in defeat, and his eyes with it.

  ‘Three days,’ Vangorich’s voice echoed about the Ecclesiarch’s cavernous private chambers. Mesring looked up, but the Grand Master of Assassins was gone.

  EIGHT

  Incus Maximal / Malleus Mundi – orbital

  Astropath Orm de Zut pulled himself through the module hatch and allowed his frail, green-robed frame to drift through the crowded weightlessness of the compartment. He wore a pair of tinted goggles to hide the empty sockets of his eyes, which, combined with his spindly frame, gave the astropath the appearance of an insect. He clutched a suckle-flask of low-grade amasec to his chest and allowed a lho-stick to drizzle smoke in his wake.

  He negotiated the module in silence, inhaling through the narrow slits of his nostrils before exhaling through the grim line of his mouth. With one hand, the blind savant groped and pulled himself past various datamat, holomat and automat servitors who were wired into their observation cradles. Finding a corner of the compartment not drowning in cables, surveillance equipment or Adeptus Mechanicus priest-personnel and servitors, de Zut settled in an alcove, bobbing about in the zero gravity.

  ‘Master de Zut,’ Notatio Logi Lutron Vydel addressed the astropath. ‘You are intoxicated, sir – again.’ There was no hint of accusation or displeasure in the adept’s static-laced voice, no wrinkle of vexation in the ebony flesh of his hood-framed face. As ranking priest on the Addendus~727 Broad Spectra Adeptus Mechanicus Signum-Station, the notatio logi was not given to such emotional indulgence. It was simply a statement of recorded fact. Like a humpshuttle pilot on a outpost, only required during the cycle changeover of arrival and exodus, de Zut was bored, underemployed and without distraction.

  De Zut said nothing.

  ‘My brother adept is reminding you of your responsibilities,’ Lexmechanic Autegra Ziegl said, turning away from the rune banks built into almost every surface of the compartment. She reached past the astropath. Nudging him to one side in the zero gravity, the lexmechanic adjected several plungers and dials. The outline of her cranial cogitator was like a research installation built into an asteroid, its unit-accretions dominating her shaven head.

  ‘This is the Omnissiah’s work,’ she said. ‘His loyal servants work hard to compile statistics and testimonia for the astro-telecommunication data package.’

  ‘To Mars,’ de Zut said, putting one hand across his chest in a mock salute while raising his suckle-flask.

  ‘It would be an unacceptable waste of time, resources and data,’ Notatio Logi Vydel added, ‘if the package were not to reach the Fabricator General’s choralis diagnostiad.’

  ‘It would,’ de Zut agreed, taking another slug of amasec.

  ‘Which is why I’ve opened a file on your fitness for such an important duty,’ Vydel told the astropath with cold indifference.

  ‘A file,’ de Zut repeated. ‘Honoured.’ Again, he raised the flask.

  ‘Auspexmechanic Kelso Tollec has been identified as best qualified to monitor your competence,’ Vydel said. Tollec turned his hooded face from the data-pulsing rune banks and refocused his ocular-quad of bionics on the astropath.

  De Zut picked tobacco from his thin lips.

  ‘I can make Adept Tollec’s service record and signum-specifications available for your perusal, if you wish,’ said Ehrlen Ohmnio.

  Ohmnio was an officious transmechanic with an annoyingly cheerful face-mask. De Zut took a long drag on his lho-stick before flooding the crowded surveillancia module with silky smoke and reaching for a plunger set in the compartment ceiling.

  ‘Please don’t touch that,’ Vydel said. The logi was very particular about the signum-station’s equipment.

  De Zut gave him the dark lenses of his goggles and yanked down hard on the handle. The compartment rumbled as a metal blast screen lowered to reveal the thick armourglass of the module’s observation port. The searing ice-white glare of the Incus Maximal and Malleus Mundi forge-worlds dominated the void beyond. The surfaces of the pair were blotched with the black clouds of planetary destruction. Between them sat the rusted, clinker-plate body of an armoured moon: a greenskin abomination that rained swarms of invasion craft down on the frozen planets. Hanging above the decimation of xenos conquest was a flotilla of Adeptus Mechanicus ark ships and supertransports receiving the last of the forge-world survivors.

  ‘This is what I am referring to, master astropath,’ Vydel told him, without the suggestion of annoyance or inconvenience de Zut’s actions might have provoked. ‘Such wilful behaviour necessitates monitoring. I expected more of your kind. That was my mistake – after all, you are flesh and flesh is weak.’ The logi turned to his auspexmechanic. ‘Tollec, I want scan coverage, augur arrays and vox-monitoring intensified by forty per cent in line of sight quadrants. Particularly those occupied by Mechanicus contingents. Without filters, we might have emitted some optical or energy signature of our position.’

  ‘Scanning,’ the auspexmechanic said.

  ‘I understand why our surveillance needs to remain hidden from the enemy,’ de Zut acknowledged. ‘But your own people and priesthood? You’ve let them just die up to now anyway. Soon there won’t be anyone left to det
ect your presence.’

  ‘Master de Zut,’ Vydel said. ‘Are you familiar with our Third Law of Universal Variance?’

  ‘He will not comprehend,’ Autegra Ziegl said with confidence.

  ‘It is called the Bystander Paradox,’ Vydel continued, ‘and it states that whatever the Machine God’s servant observes, he affects. The magos metallurgicus’ involvement in an experiment might threaten to change its chemical outcome. An alien life form might behave differently under the gaze of a magos biologis than it would in its natural environment. A patient might stifle pain or embarrassing symptoms in the presence of a magos physic. You see, this signum-station is under strict orders – from the Fabricator General himself. Covertly observe. Record. Document. Do not interact. That is our solemn responsibility. And it is your solemn responsibility to send the sum total of our data and observations back to Mars.’

  ‘Solemn responsibility?’ the astropath repeated back. ‘What about our responsibility to those people?’

  ‘Their loss has been weighed and measured against future gains,’ Vydel replied.

  ‘And what of the losses on other worlds?’ de Zut spat back morosely. ‘While you coldly catalogue the slaughter of the Machine God’s servants, what of the mortis-cries of the dozen Imperial worlds I have intercepted? Mortis-cries of dying billions that I am bound by ancient decrees of my own order to report on, but that your surveillance protocols forbid?’

  ‘I calculate that to be a burden, master astropath,’ Lutron Vydel said. ‘But a necessary one. We cannot allow enemies – xenos or domestic – to learn of our surveillance. I understand that the mortis-cries might have tested you…’