—and dug her fingernails so far into the flesh of her palms that blood oozed between her knuckles.
'Enough.'
Kaustus silenced the laughter, tossing aside the data-pad like some broken toy, its ability to entertain spent. An abrupt silence gripped the room and he watched the crowd with narrowed eyes, colossal shoulders squared.
'A mission.'
To Mita, bathed unwillingly in a tumult of psychic emissions, the phrase was like an icy wind. She tasted the hungry anticipation of the retinue, all forced amusements forgotten, minds focused and sharp. She gave them their dues: fools they might be, but they were obedient with it.
'Investigation and salvage.' Kaustus cocked his head towards his staff, barking commands. 'Three teams, three transports. Division pattern delta. Now.'
The entourage divided like a machine, three groups forming in short order. Without the benefit of individual familiarity, Mita could nonetheless detect the more obvious distributions of resource: in each group there hulked the cowled form of a combat servitor, in each a medic fussed with triage apparatus and checked chemical proboscis, in each a hooded priest stepped from figure to figure, administering blessings and prayers.
Kaustus had been collecting disciples his entire life, amassing a crew to shame even the most luminary of fellow inquisitors. With a single command the capabilities and specialisms of the whole had been spliced evenly and instantly, without comment or question or flaw. Even to Mita, still smarting from their scorn, it was a display of impressive efficiency.
She struck what she hoped was an authoritative pose — uncomfortably aware that she alone had failed to fall in. If Kaustus had expected her involvement he gave no sign of it, nodding briskly at each group.
'We rendezvous at gate Epsilon-Six in three hours,' he barked. 'Cold-weather gear, night-sight, fully armed. Dismissed!'
The retinue filed from the suite without a word, and Mita reflected that for all their variety, for all the many characters and histories contained within the group, they operated with parade-ground efficiency to match even the most elite of the Imperial guard's storm troopers.
She realised with a start that she was the last to leave, and that Kaustus was staring at her, gloved fingers toying elegantly with the cruciform ''I'' medallion around his neck. 'Interrogator,' he said, features unreadable. 'You appear to still be here...'
'My lord,' she swallowed, hunting for a diplomatic method of delivering her enquiries, settling eventually for a lame: 'What are we to investigate?'
The anticipated rebuke for her insolence never came. She imagined the man's lips curling behind the mask: the grin of a cat entertained by its struggling prey.
'That's just it, interrogator,' he cooed. 'You already know.'
She frowned. 'My lord?'
'How did you put it? "Something from the heavens... Something massive... Something dark"?'
'I... I'm sorry, my lord, I don't u—'
'You were right. Albeit somewhat late.'
'Late?'
'A vessel — a large vessel — crash-landed in the ice wastes two hours ago. Given that we were already here, it would seem remiss to not aid in the investigation.'
'But... but...'
'It's not coming, interrogator. It's already arrived. Dismissed.'
She marched out in an unthinking haze, and as she stamped towards her dingy cell to prepare, an ugly foreboding twisted in her guts. Her waking revelation returned to her and she winced against the pain.
Something has fallen from heaven.
Through night-vision binox — baroque coils of cabling and lenses enveloping her eyes like a hungry kiss — the hive was a flaming steeple.
Peering over her shoulder, shivering despite thick furs, Mita regarded the city-world as the convoy left it behind, swallowed by the horizon like a melting stalagmite. That there were larger hives on worlds less remote couldn't detract from its magnificence: the city's vastness snagged at her eyes, sucking on her attention. Two hundred million souls, crushed together like termites, eking out their blind lives in the belly of a spine-tipped beast.
Most would never see the sky.
It punctured the air like a gnarled knuckle. Cloud-clad and encased in frost, it was an inverted icicle, its uneven surfaces eroded by time and weather, pitted by industry and accented by turrets and spires. Where once the tempests of Equixus had raged undisturbed, now they found themselves incised, gashed apart by this upstart architecture. It drew a thick blood of lightning, auroras boiling into the night, and the splendour of its crackling crown strobe-lit the bleak wastes for kilometres around.
On this, the planet's unlit face — tumbling in perfect synchronicity with the orbital year — it was always dark, and always cold. Against the gloom, factories belched fiery waste and loading bays vented nebulae of ionic pollution. From the upper tiers, above the drudgery of plebeian life, windows bled galaxies of spilled light. In Mita's eyes, with her binox devouring every luminous pinprick, the hive stood against the darkness like a monolith-god, an effigy thick with fire.
More pronounced still was the brightness in the chambers of her mind: in those unseen tendrils of psychic thought that swarmed about her like the arms of an anemone, she could taste the life of the city. Two hundred million souls, each one a guttering candle of psychic light. Each one as fragile as it was bright.
She turned away, briefly dazzled, and focused instead upon the small convoy. There were four transports — converted Salamanders with widened tracks and pintle flashlights — racing across the ice at an alarming speed. Three contained the Inquisitorial retinue — assorted cloaks fluttering as their mass allowed — whilst in the lead vehicle a squad of the local lawmen, the Preafec-tus Vindictaire, set their helmeted heads against the wind and glared back towards the others, no doubt deriding the interference of outsiders. Officially the Preafectus was an independent body, administrated by the galaxy-spanning Adeptus Arbites, but a certain amount of diplomatic compromise to Imperial officials was customary. Mita suspected that the inquisitor's involvement had been far from sanctioned by the lawmen, though it would be a brave man indeed who denied an offer of assistance from Kaustus.
The man himself shared her portion of the rear vehicle, gazing out from a raised gantry with face and mind equally as shrouded. The Inquisition trained its operatives to shield their minds from psykers with enviable aplomb, and where the other members of the retinue blazed in her sixth sense like lanterns, his radiance was shuttered and barred. He stood with arms crossed, as unperturbed by the cold as if still within his suite, and only his fingers — kneading together — belied the impression that he was a statue: some decorous idol draped in fine cloth. She realised without surprise that she still knew all but nothing about him. In the short time she'd spent in his service the one obvious conclusion she'd drawn was this: The legends were wrong.
Inquisitor Kaustus came complete with a reputation as glowing as the nocturnal hive at his back, and exploited it shrewdly. That he had undertaken great deeds, that he had crushed alien heresies throughout the Ultima Segmentum, she did not doubt. But that he had done so with nobility and honour — with heroism, no less, as the myths claimed — was harder to digest. Ruthlessness and heroism did not, in her experience, sit well together.
Mita had begun her tenure as an Inquisitorial explicator direct from the Scholastia Psykana on Escastel Sanctus. Selected by her masters, deemed strong enough to resist corruption without recourse to the crippling Soul Binding ceremony required of lesser psykers, she remembered the shadowy recruitment rituals with uncomfortable clarity. Naked and hairless, the young chosen had shivered in subterranean caverns, servitors gliding amongst them, testing, prodding, twitching. She remembered the shame, mingled with secret relief, as one by one the other youths were borne away by the vapid machines, selected from afar by their new masters. They would be scattered amongst the Munitorum offices, she knew, or perhaps deployed by the Administratum, or even — so the whispers went — inducted into the Chapters
of the Adeptus Astartes.
No one had warned her there was a fourth possibility.
She was claimed by the Ordo Xenos of the Emperor's divine Inquisition: that most clandestine of societies. She found herself gobbled whole by an organisation with unlimited authority, tasked to stalk the shadows of the Imperium and keep it strong, pure, and holy. Drugged and hooded, she was initiated into a world of secrecy and paranoia at the age of twelve.
At the age of twenty-five she left the fortress-world of Safaur-Inquis to join the retinue of the Inquisitor Petrai Levoix — blessed be her name — and for six years she was... content.
In that time she witnessed the scouring of the necron'tyr megaliths on Parson's Moon. She took a hand in the shattering of the Waaagh-Shalkaz when she overcame the warlord's puppet-wyrds. She bested the primacii magi of a genestealer insurrection in the Marquand Straits, and broke the mind of the Hruddite Demagogue of the Pleanar campaign. She earned the rank of interrogator at the age of thirty and, in the crucible of the Ylir uprisings, earned a citation from the Congresium Xenos for capturing the song-sword of a slain eldar warlock.
She was making a difference. She was the inquisitor's right hand. She sought — and earned — glory, and the accounts of her deeds ran in fluttering text-ribbons that she twined through her hair. She was somebody.
And then a week before her thirty-first birthday her mistress died — stupidly, pointlessly — in a messy crossfire on Erasula IX. And everything changed.
Abruptly she was no one. Abruptly she was less than nothing, and when all the enquiries and refutations were done she found herself reassigned, re-deployed—
—and re-subordinated.
Staring ahead into the driving snow, daring to study her new master's statuesque form in stolen glances, she wondered how long — if ever — it would take her to regain those heady heights of respect. Tasting the ebb and eddy of the retinue's thoughts around her, each one swarming with the desire to impress, to rise to the top, to be noticed, she realised with gloomy certainty that it was not going to be easy.
The crash site was as chaotic and as desolate as Mita could have imagined. To see a thing so mighty as a spacecraft so utterly ruined was a humbling sight. Already the snow settled across its fractured flukes, only the jutting paraphernalia of its lance arrays and command turrets breaking through the white sheet like the half-submerged bones of a drowned corpse.
For all that it was a mighty thing, its ancient plates and spars were nonetheless imbued with a great sadness — and a great bitterness. If the other members of the retinue shared the empathic shudder she felt as she ran a questing finger across a frosted bulkhead they gave no sign of it, but their search was conducted nonetheless with unusual restraint, like looters invading a mausoleum.
The vindictors barely exchanged a word with their uninvited assistants, clumsily picking their way towards a wound on the vessel's side, powerful torches spilling light as they entered. By contrast the retinue deployed quickly and efficiently, entering jagged orifices on three flanks. As they quested deep inside, like maggots squirming through rotten flesh, they directed terse reports via the shortwave voxcasters each wore. Kaustus received these bursts without comment, wandering across the vessel's surface, content to allow his minions to explore on his behalf.
She fidgeted in his wake, wondering whether she should have taken it upon herself to join the search. Her mind fluttered through awkward quandaries: should she await his command or assert her own authority? Should she seek to impress him with loyalty and obedience, or would a firebrand self-initiative gain his approval? Without any inkling of his temperament or tastes, such actions could easily dictate her success or failure as his highest ranking servant.
Unable to skim his thoughts, denied the view of his facial expressions, she nonetheless had a fair idea that she'd singularly failed in her attempts to impress him thus far.
'Are there survivors?' he asked, fingers kneading together.
'My lord?'
He sighed, hot vapour curling from the dimpled breathing slats of his mask. 'Interrogator, I dislike being answered with questions.'
'But, my lord, I—'
'I was assured by the ordo that your skills would prove invaluable. Are you now suggesting they were incorrect?' He spoke slowly and loudly, voice thick with condescension, and Mita struggled to control her rising hackles.
'N-no my lord, but—'
'Excellent. Then the time has come for you to show me you're here for a reason, don't you think?'
She tried to form an intelligent response, but as ever the options each seemed as lame as each other. She sighed, nodding in defeat. 'Yes.'
'So? Are there any survivors?'
Forcing herself to calm, she closed her eyes to the glowing traceries of the binox view and unfolded her mind, allowing it to seep into the metal of the craft like acid through stone. Immersed in the Empyrean, she tasted the ship's secrets, she learned its ancient name, she swarmed in its chambers, and she drank its flavours.
She finally stopped screaming when the inquisitor slapped her, hard, across the cheek.
Zso Sahaal
Zso Sahaal leaned out from his sheltered alcove and drew hungry eyes across the structural anarchy around him.
He'd warmed to his new environment quickly — a predator entering fertile hunting grounds — and couldn't resist a secret smile, relishing the darkness. This chequerboard of shadows, this ferrous jungle, this cavity-filled mountain: here he was indomitable.
Unable to pause, fighting urgency and excitement, he quit his nook and bounded across a plungeshaft, dodging chains and cables: a shadow moving through shadows. Rising across vertical gantries, claw-over-claw, he pushed off with his hooked feet to hop between silent elevators, hanging like gibbeted bodies. Voices filtered from passages to either side and he paused, mimicking the ragged fabric of the wall. In a world of such haphazard architecture one more uneven shape, midnight-coloured and indistinct, was unlikely to draw attention. He unsheathed a claw, shivering at its silky emergence, and waited, every muscle tensed.
Thus poised, with every sense racing and alert, his mind found itself free to wander. It seeped into his memory like oil into a sponge, musing upon how he had found himself here: stalking this ancient labyrinth like a panther in the night.
The previous day, leaving the Umbrea Insidior countless kilometres behind him, he had watched the city appear by degrees on the horizon. For all its enormity he hadn't paused to admire it, or even to catch his breath — bounding ever onwards, tracing what faint evidence of the thief s passing remained.
At one point a phalanx of vehicles streaked nearby, engines broadcasting their approach long before the snow-haze gave them up. Cautious of confrontation, Sahaal merely pushed himself into the snow and watched them pass, ebony eyes tracking them through scarlet eyeslits. He assumed they must be heading for the crash site, and wondered vaguely what manner of personnel had been dispatched, and by whom. He decided eventually that he didn't care: there were a host of such minor questions to be answered, but nothing must divert him from the Corona.
He'd hastened towards the city, finally losing what vestiges of the thief s tracks remained. Staving off anxiety, he told himself the tracks no longer mattered: the scum's destination could hardly be doubted.
The city was, simply, vast.
At its uncertain base, where scarred ridges of stone and snow segued with serried ranks of ferrocrete and steel, he'd come to a deep fissure in the earth. Into the cavity iron foundations coiled down into the dark like the rusted roots of a titanic tree, colonised on every expanse by the grinding structures of industry. The rent billowed its fumes like the breath of a devil, a toothless mouth into the scarred ground.
Above it, where the frosted rock sprouted the lowest towers and tiers like mould, a multitude of heavy-doored gates had greeted his eyes: loading bays and vehicle access points, a hundred and one ways to cross from the arctic waste to the cloying darkness within. And every last one was close
d, sealed against the cold.
Sahaal had considered his options. That he must enter the hive was without question, but where to begin? Where to hunt the thief? On the cusp of this vast edifice, hunkering amongst the pipes and cogs of its dermis, he found himself assailed by hopelessness. To find one man within all this... He might as well search a desert for a single grain of sand, or a galaxy for a single star.
But, no. No, he could not allow himself the luxury of doubt. He must be focused. He must be driven.
He must be ruthless.
He'd slipped into the foundation-crevice like a knife between ribs, swallowed by the dark.
And now, a day later — a day of exploring, of haunting the wastes below the city itself, of stalking this endless parade of corridors and tunnels and pits — was he any closer to his prize?
No.
There was no logic to this underhive realm. Where above tiers crested tiers, joined by tapestry-strewn stairwells and columns of elevators, flanked by devotional statues and preachers' pulpits, here there was madness.
Ancient stairways led to nowhere. Tunnels twisted through knotted girders and plastic waste, collecting chemical sludge. Visceral cables spewed from haphazard partitions, coiling away ever upwards into the city. Collapsed tunnels were rebored or circumvented, uphive-sluices opened to vomit acid upon duct-strewn channels, and elevator shafts full of snowmelt rippled and splashed where slime-scaled things coiled in the deep. The weight of the hive settled across pillars and posts like an ever-present promise, like a clock counting out the hours until the fall of the sky.
And the people... Cowering in ghettos around scarce resources, these were the hopeless, the useless, the dispossessed. Divided amongst the petty empires of criminal gangs, scavenging in the dark to feast on fungus and beetle-meat — these were not people. They were animals. Rats.
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