Let The Galaxy Burn

by Marc

  The tiny threads of light from the walls flicked at her pale, scarred skin as she pulled back the curtain that surrounded the synth-shower that occupied nearly a quarter of the room. It was a complicated device, used in some form by each of the temples under the auspices of the Officio Assassinorum, although each used a unique chemical mix of its own.

  Nyjia adjusted the valve-array that set the mixture for the spray, checking each dial carefully to ensure that there were no errors. It was a matter of life and death, since an incorrect setting could lead to asphyxiation as the synskin was applied or simply to death afterwards if the armoured properties of the membrane were inadequate.

  Selecting three exotic blades from the rack beside the shower, Nyjia pulled a series of levers and then flicked a switch as she stepped up onto the pedestal at the focus of the various nozzles and jets, tugging the curtain closed behind her. Closing her eyes, she could feel the delicate spray accumulating in layers over her body, clinging to her limbs like coats of rubberised paint. The pattern of the rain was specifically programmed for her body, focusing around the major muscle groups to augment their strength, and around her vital organs to provide maximum protection. Thin layers sealed the bladed weapons into place on her thighs and calf. The Vindicare synskin also contained reservoirs of oxygen and metabolic suppressor chemicals, in case the assassin had to stay in hiding for long periods of time.

  Sliding the shower curtain back with a snap, Nyjia stood glistening in the speckled light of her dark room, her body shimmering in the slick, membranous armour that hugged her figure like a second skin. She paused for a moment as the synskin dried, letting the fingers of light dance over her perfect form, before vaulting down from the pedestal and snatching her long-barrelled rifle from its fittings on the wall. She spun it once in her hands, checking its balance, and then flipped it over her shoulder into the harness moulded into her back. Without a moment’s hesitation, she stalked out of the chamber and slipped invisibly out of the temple precincts.

  ‘YOU’RE ELEVEN MINUTES late, cipher,’ hissed Kayle, looking Lexio up and down and trying to work out what was different about him this morning. All these ciphers look the same, he thought agitatedly.

  Lexio shuffled from one foot to the other, twisting his hands anxiously around the metallic tube that he had found in the Procession of History outside the hall. He was looking down at his feet, keeping his eyes fixed on the join between the two flagstones and concentrating on keeping his feet away from it. He knew better than to look up at the face of a prefectus, especially a secundus who was in the process of reprimanding him.

  ‘Stop fidgeting!’ snapped Kayle, unable to abide the pathological peregrinations any further. ‘Report to your station and wait to be summoned. The Historicus himself will be here shortly, and I am sure that he will have use for you.’

  ‘B… but sir…’ began Lexio, still staring at the ground.

  ‘What!’ clipped the prefectus, his impatience with this underling reaching breaking point.

  Lexio found himself simply unable to speak. He had often reflected that it was strange that he could never find any words of his own when confronted with a senior official, but that he could recite long, intricate messages for hours without fumbling even a single syllable. Today of all days, with such dramatic events to report, he had no words at all. Instead, he just stared at the ground and pushed his hands forward with the little black tube balanced in his up-turned palms.

  ‘What! What? What’s this?’ bleated Kayle, snatching the object from Lexio’s shaking hands. Without ceremony or appreciation for the significance of this item in Lexio’s traumatic day, Kayle tugged the roll of paper out of the tube and cast the metal aside. He casually cast his eyes over the spider ideographs etched into the paper and then nodded, as though it all suddenly made sense.

  ‘I see,’ he said, handing the paper back to Lexio without looking at him. ‘I presume that this is a document from the Archeotechium? A new find?’ he continued, without waiting for confirmation from the cipher.

  Lexio shuffled and spluttered slightly, unable to articulate himself, but Kayle pressed on, ignoring him. ‘You should take it down to vault 47589X3, curator 14.259. Wait there for the translation and then bring it back to me – your memory key will be my face. Do you understand?’

  Lexio nodded uncertainly, his mouth working soundlessly. ‘N… not… ar… arch… not from there…’ he managed, finally.

  Kayle’s eyes snapped round to inspect the gibbering cipher. ‘What? Not from where? What are you talking about? Just go and get it translated and bring the translation back to me.’ he said sharply, shaking his head at the very concept of an orally-challenged cipher.

  A commotion erupted outside the hall as a number of menials crashed about carrying a ladder. ‘What’s going on this morning – it’s a disaster,’ muttered Kayle as he realised that he was the ranking prefectus in the vicinity. He turned and strode towards the Procession of History, leaving Lexio wringing his hands in the middle of the great hall.

  THE BRIGHT LIGHT streamed through the stained glass windows, casting long shadows and sending hazy colours kaleidoscoping across the white marble floor. Nyjia lay back against the ceiling with her legs and arms spread out by her side, the fabric of her suit finding purchase in the intricately worked stone. She watched the commotion in the Procession of History below her die down, as an important-looking official strode out of the huge doorway at the end of the hall and barked some commands at the scurrying menials. Three of them ran off with a ladder, and one shuffled over to the official, muttering something that Nyjia could not make out – she couldn’t even read his lips because his face was turned towards the ground. He was gesticulating nervously and pointing up towards the little statues around the top of one of the great windows. The official’s face was contorted and twisted in disgust as he listened to the menial speak, as though repulsed by his very presence. Then he nodded abrupdy and dismissed the lowly adept, a look of relief washing over his face as the scruffy man shuffled away down die hallway.

  Nyjia didn’t even breathe as she held her motionless position against the ceiling, watching the people passing backwards and forwards along the Procession. She was obscured in the deep shadow of one of the wide vaulted domes that ran the length of the hallway, and she knew that nobody would be able to see her from the ground even if they looked up from their own feet, which they never seemed to do.

  After a few hours, she could see a pattern emerging in the traffic below her, as menials, ciphers and ordinates bustled through the Procession in the course of executing their duties. She watched the ebb and flow of the life blood of the Tower of Idols and realised how perfectly predictable everything was, as the officials pulsed through the corridors of the Administratum, utterly oblivious to her unexpected presence.

  She waited for the lull in traffic that occurred every twenty-three minutes, and then she dropped down from her vantage point on the ceiling, catching hold of one of the elaborate chandeliers that hung in the Procession, swinging underneath it and turning a neat somersault before landing lightly on the ledge above one of the stained glass windows. She edged silently along the thin protrusion of rock until she reached the gargoyle’s head – the traditional drop point of the Vindicare agents inside the tower. Reaching her hand down behind the sculpture, Nyjia realised that the Vindicare Master had been right – somebody in the tower had discovered too much. The small, metallic message tube was gone.

  Climbing back up into the shadows on the ceiling, Nyjia crept, crawled and leapt her way over towards the great doors at the end of the hallway. The second part of her mission now initiated.

  THUCYDIA LOOKED UP irritably from her desk and squinted through the lamplight. A grey-robed cipher stood uneasily next to her table, looking up and down tire aisle as though worried that somebody might see him. He had a small roll of paper in his clasped hands, and he was rocking agitatedly from one foot to the other.

  ‘Yes?’ said Thucydia simply. />
  ‘Please translate this. I’ll wait.’ said Lexio, clearly chanting the words he had said to innumerable curators on numberless occasions in the past.

  The curator snatched the little scroll from Lexio’s grasp and flipped it back and forth, quickly scanning both sides of the paper before pressing it flat against the surface of her desk. There were only a couple of lines of text scribbled onto it, but the dialect was quite unusual, and Thucydia scrunched up her face as her brain raced to recall the correct words. The Archeotechium was always uncovering new documents, but most of them were useless – worthy merely of being filed.

  When the content of the message finally seeped through into her consciousness, Thucydia could hardly contain her excitement. She leapt up from her chair and paced backwards and forwards, muttering under her breath as she tried to work out its precise significance for her inquiries into the machinations of the Vindicare Masters. It seemed to fit exactly into the historical hole – it was a ready-made explanation for how the Vindicare temple had kept itself out of the official histories.

  She rushed off down one of the aisles of bookshelves, searching for the most closely associated documents in the collection, leaving Lexio standing alone by her desk. He had no idea why the curator was so excited, and he didn’t really care. His own excitement about the events of the morning had already been squashed by the prefectus secondus’s matter-of-fact, routine response to his discovery, so he would simply wait for the curator to dictate the translation, just as he did every day.

  Suddenly Thucydia yelped and tugged down a giant box of documents. Straggling under its weight, she hurried back to her desk and thumped it down on the table, already starting to rifle through the thousands of pieces of paper within. As though remembering something incidental, she abruptly stopped and looked up at Lexio. For a moment, she wondered why anyone else would be interested in the translation of this document – as far as she knew, Vindracum was a dead language, and the note could be of only historical interest. But it was not her place to ask such questions, and a cipher would certainly not know the answers – he was a virtual automaton. She gave a level three memory key, so that the cipher would not have access to the content of the message, and then dictated the translation.

  Lexio blinked a couple of times, always slightly disorientated by the process of initialising his verbatimem. His consciousness literally switched off for the duration of the dictation, and the message went straight into the lower, subconscious reaches of his mind. When he came back to normal consciousness, it took him a while to realise how much time had passed. In this case, just a few seconds, it seemed. Already, however, the curator had her head stuck in the box of papers and she was quite clearly finished with him.

  Lowering his eyes back to the flagstones on the ground, Lexio walked slowly down the main aisle of vault 47589X3, heading for the huge, spiralling stone staircase that would take him back up into the Great Hall, after forty-seven floors of historical vaults. For a moment he wondered about the content of the message lurking in his mind, but then he resigned himself to the long, routine trudge up the stairs. Perhaps today wasn’t so exciting after all.

  PANTING AND DRIPPING with sweat, Lexio carefully lifted his foot over the last stair and placed it deliberately into the very centre of the first level flagstone. Drawing himself up after his advanced foot, he straightened his smock, smoothing out the creases and breathing heavily.

  The Hall of Historical Correction opened out before him, riddled with reading desks and kilometres of document stacks. The huge domed ceiling was nearly three hundred metres away – it was actually the roof of the great tower itself – and the frescoes painted onto it over the centuries were barely visible – just vague blurs of colour in amongst the dancing shadows. For a moment, Lexio paused and cast his gaze up into the heavens, watching the distant forms swim in reflection of the bustling commotion on the ground. He wondered whether it was quiet up there. Sometimes, in moments of heretical weakness, he even wondered what lay beyond that huge dome.

  The vast hall was circular in shape, since it stretched all the way to the external walls of the great spire in each direction. The single, circular wall was covered in tapestries, banners, and icons dedicated to the great scholars of the Imperium. Their harsh, disapproving eyes stared down at the officials of the Historical Correction Unit, suffering no indolence.

  On the far side of the hall, opposite the magnificent winding staircase that provided access to the research vaults below, were the twin doors that led out into the Procession of History. And in the very centre of the hall was the glorious throne of the Historicus himself, sparkling with gold and hoisted fifty metres into the air. It was supported on a complex matrix of platforms, each fashioned into the shape of one of the great classic tomes of the Imperium. The elaborate pedestal had been designed so that envoys and messengers from the other parts of the tower would all have designated platforms on which to await the attentions of the Historicus. For Lexio, this meant twenty-seven paces short of the bottom platform on the left-hand side. After all, he was not awaiting the Historicus himself, but his prefectus secondus.

  As he shuffled across the flagstones towards the throne, lifting his feet carefully over the cracks and skipping occasionally to avoid stepping onto a pile of papers, Lexio realised that the Historicus had already arrived for the day. He was enthroned and dispensing directions to the most senior prefects. Looking up, Lexio saw that the prefectus secondus was standing at the left shoulder of the Historicus, looking very pleased with himself. He seemed to see Lexio approaching the designated interview point, but his face snarled in displeasure at the thought of having to descend from his pedestal to interact with the snivelling cipher. Quite used to this response, Lexio came to a halt exactly twenty-seven paces short of the base of the pedestal, and resigned himself to wait patiently for the prefectus to acknowledge him. After his long journey and his troublesome morning, he was glad of the rest.

  NYJIA SPRANG FROM the head of one gargoyle, just catching hold of another with one hand, letting the momentum swing her into a vertical arc. She flipped soundlessly through the air, landing softly and precisely on one foot, balanced perfectly on the tiny rock protrusion of an engraving in the wall. After a quick glance around and down, she dove headlong from the wall, plummeting ten metres before catching hold of a banner-pole and spinning herself across to the other side of the huge dome. She landed neatly at the base of a near-vertical flagpole, and wrapped herself around it, tugging her long rifle free of its harness on her back as she did so.

  This was the perfect angle, she thought, as she brought the reticule into focus on the head of the fat official, sitting in the gaudy, golden throne far below her. He was surrounded by petty administrators, and only a near-vertical shot like this would make a clean kill.

  Holding her breath, Nyjia brought her metabolism almost to a standstill, letting the chemicals in her synskin bleed into her system to keep her alive while all of her muscles locked into position, giving her perfect stability. The fat man in her sights rocked and laughed, stuffing his face with food and spitting it at his assistants as he bellowed and cackled orders at them.

  Nyjia thought about the trigger and visualised the man’s head exploding in the reticule. And then it happened.

  THIS IS IT, thought Thucydia, pulling out a bunch of yellowing, old documents from the bottom of the pile. It all suddenly made sense, as she read the accounts of how various Historicuses had met untimely deaths throughout the history of the Tower of Idols. They had all been engaged in research into the Vindicare temple, which just happened to be located on the same planet, but they had all died without leaving any significant documentation on the affairs of the mysterious assassins.

  She turned the little scroll in her hands, reading the message over again, as though unable to believe that the text was so simple and straightforward. It explained everything.

  Shaking her head and chuckling slightly at the wonderful simplicity of historical conundrum
s, she clipped the message scroll to the front of the pile of documents and stuffed them all back into their box. Then she picked the box up and walked off down the long aisle in front of her desk in vault 47589X3. Finding the correct shelf amongst the kilometres of stacks, she pushed the box back into place and shuffled off back to her desk.

  Looking along the endless line of curators at their desks in the 589th reading room of level 47, she smiled to herself with the knowledge of a job well done. Her father would be proud of her, as the history of the Imperium took one small step closer to completion. Case closed.

  PANDEMONIUM WAS LOOSED in the great hall, as the Historicus’s head exploded into a rain of bony shards and splattered mush. Lexio looked hesitantly up from his position twenty-seven paces shy of the throne, fearful that one of the senior officials would see him stealing a glimpse at the Historicus. Instead, he saw the face of the prefectus secondus stretched into a scream and covered in ichor as he scrambled down off the matrix of platforms towards the ground.