The Inquisition War

by Ian Watson

  ‘Sorry, boss. Really!’

  ‘You did come back, Grimm, that’s the main thing.’

  Squat, Navigator, assassin: which could Jaq be one hundred per cent sure of? He prayed not to fall victim to the paranoia of which Carnelian had accused him – or else his story, whenever he managed to tell it, might seem wholly unbelievable.

  Was not paranoia a touchstone of sanity in this universe of enemies and deceit? Trust no one, not even yourself, he thought, for you, too, may stray from the pure path without even realising it.

  Jaq fasted.

  TERRA.

  All comm-channels burbled with vox traffic hours, minutes or seconds old. Astral frequencies would be quite as crowded with telepathic messages of even greater urgency, though such messages wouldn’t be time-lapsed by the speed limit of electromagnetic radiation. Long-distance radar registered the blips of hundreds of vessels heading in-system or climbing the last shallow incline out of the deep gravity-well of the Sun.

  To scan even the approaches to the home system from beyond the outermost challenge-line would seem ample confirmation that the hub of the Imperium could never falter. Yet Jaq hardly needed to remind himself how warp storms had formerly isolated the home system from the stars for several thousand years. The first flowering of human civilisation throughout the galaxy had wilted, rotting into the cesspool of the Age of Strife. That earlier heroic age was eclipsed so utterly that it was now whelmed in obscurity. He hardly needed to remind himself that during the thirty-first millennium the possessed rebel warmaster Horus had laid waste to Luna and invaded Earth, breaking through to the very inner palace. The putsch was defeated, oh yes, but at what dire cost. Thereafter the wounded Emperor could only survive from grim millennium to grim millennium immobile in his prosthetic golden throne.

  What Horus had almost accomplished by main force and using fighting machines of the Adeptus Mechanicus, Jaq hoped to finesse by guile – assisted by a lugubrious Navigator, a squat whose reliability was now in question, and an assassin whose thought processes increasingly puzzled him.

  Jaq stabbed a finger at one particular blip on the radar screen. ‘Display that one, Vitali.’

  Googol fiddled with the magniscope and brought a flying, dark castle into sharp focus. He gasped. ‘A Black Ship, inward bound, Jaq.’

  ‘Match its course. We’ll board it. Inquisition inspection.’

  ‘Won’t that be among the most vigilant of vessels?’

  ‘It’ll have been on tour for a year or so. If I’m on a black list of criminals I doubt that any resident inquisitor will know.’

  Jaq spoke with a show of confidence. He was a Malleus man. Therefore let the Black Ship be carrying an ordinary inquisitor; this could work to Jaq’s advantage.

  Inquisitors frequently travelled on Black Ships while the vessels traversed the galaxy, harvesting fresh young psykers. An inquisitor was extremely useful to the officers of a Black Ship who needed to test their human cargo and root out any malignant weeds en route. As Jaq knew only too well; for he had been similarly rooted out, not as a weed but as a precious flower, transplanted, advanced to greater things. He remembered Olvia. Many such as Olvia would be crowding the dismal dormitories of the Black Ship, their prayers crescendoing as the ship dipped ever closer to Earth, their spirits focusing mournfully upon the impending sacrifice of themselves. The oppressive psychic miasma inside such a vessel would provide a useful protective fog for Jaq.

  ‘What about Tormentum?’

  ‘Program her to head away beyond the jump zone under ordinary drive towards the comet halo, then just to drift. We’ll know roughly where she is, if we can ever rendezvous with her again.’

  Googol nodded. Few ships strayed out beyond the jump zone. Ships were either in-system vessels, remaining within the confines of Sol space, or else they were interstellar – in which case they would dive into the warp as soon as they could. Tormentum could remain undetected, yet reachable aboard a conventional craft, offering an option for the unpredictable, dark future.

  How much Jaq’s companions knew by now! They knew of the Ordo Malleus, of the cabal, of the hydra, of the Eye and of creatures of Chaos. More, much more, than ordinary mortals ought to know. If Jaq’s mission succeeded, his accomplices in it ought really to be mindscrubbed... Ought to be, as Marines were mindscrubbed after participating in a daemonic exterminatus; reduced to the condition of babies so as to safeguard their innocence and sanity. Or else honourably executed.

  ‘Meh’Lindi, I’d like to speak to you alone,’ said Jaq.

  He walked ahead of her through the ebon corridor past twinkling niches to his own sleep-cell, which he cloaked in privacy. Memories of that other occasion when they had been alone together teased him turbulently, even though he knew that there could be no repetition of that exultant night. Nevertheless he yearned to know her true feelings.

  ‘Yes, inquisitor?’

  ‘You do realise, Meh’Lindi, that you’re the only repository of hydra hereabouts?’

  ‘Just as I knew,’ she replied, ‘that you would need to travel to Earth and would feel obliged to jettison that adamantine trunk.’

  ‘Was that why you ate some of the hydra? Not to protect yourself from it – so much as to preserve some trace?’

  ‘An assassin is an instrument,’ she said expressionlessly. ‘A wise instrument; yet still an instrument in the service of greater goals.’

  ‘You would give yourself to be tormented? Dissected?’ There: he had said it. He had confessed his guilty fear to his one-time mistress.

  ‘Pain can be blocked,’ she reminded him, ‘as it is when I alter my body.’

  He knew that this was less than the whole truth. The pain of physical injuries could be blocked. Yet inside the brain was the centre of raw, absolute pain itself. It could be reached by cerebral probes. Did she know how to isolate that from her consciousness?

  Aye, and what of the terror of having one’s very identity taken apart entirely? Must that not be agonising in the deepest possible way?

  ‘If I could give you a gift, Meh’Lindi, what would it be?’

  She considered for a while. ‘Perhaps... oblivion.’

  Now he understood her even less.

  Unless... unless she realised – as Grimm and Googol undoubtedly did not suspect – that it was the sacred duty of the Ordo Malleus to erase the very knowledge of monstrous Chaos from human minds, lest this knowledge seduce the weak. Such knowledge must be obliterated.

  Was Meh’Lindi forgiving him in advance for the possible fate of his companions, supposing that he succeeded? That indeed was loyalty.

  Jaq staunched the flash of anguished pride he felt. Loyalty to anyone who was not the Emperor was a dangerous commodity, was it not? As the hosts of Horus had proved.

  Still, he promised himself then and there that he would do his utmost to save Meh’Lindi and Googol and Grimm. Even if this made him, in some small way, a traitor. Even if, in so doing, he denied Meh’Lindi the gift of utter amnesia she requested.

  On the point of departure, she paused.

  ‘I have much to forget,’ she told him. ‘Inside this body of mine lurks plastiflesh and flexicartilage in which is written the permanent memory of a certain evil shape.’

  ‘Do you mean you feel as though there’s a kind of rune of evil written inside you? Do you feel that you’re somehow cursed? Rather than blessed by your wondrous ability?’

  ‘An ability to become one thing and one thing only! When I use polymorphine now I can’t adopt the appearances of other human beings. I will trigger the genestealer pattern within me. Thus I deny my chameleon possibilities. I ask you: is that Callidus? Is that cunning?'

  ‘So do you suspect you’re false to the traditions of your shrine? Yet your shrine asked this of you.’

  She nodded. ‘It was done to me with my consent.’ Perhaps she felt that her shrine had cheated her.

  He hesitated before asking, ‘Were you pressured into consenting?’

  She laughed bitte
rly. ‘The universe always applies pressures, does it not? Crushing pressures.’ That was no real answer, nor had he really expected one. Would an assassin betray the secrets of her shrine?

  ‘Yet on Queem’s world,’ he reminded her, ‘you felt illuminated... about Chaos, and the possible nature of the Harlequin man.’ Meh’Lindi pursed her lips; those lips that had roved over his body once, those same lips that had stretched into a terrible snout. ‘Darkly illuminated,’ she corrected him. ‘Darkly.’

  And even so, he would not wish to extinguish her light.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘FRUITFUL TRAVELS, JOURNEYMAN?’ Jaq asked a young bearded inquisitor who could almost have been his earlier self.

  Rafe Zilanov wore some alien foetus pendants dangling from his ear lobes. The man seemed alert, though a little inexperienced. Whatever his special talents – however well honed those were to diagnose any daemonic contamination among the passengers – the moaning psychic static aboard the Black Ship provided just the level of astral interference that Jaq had hoped for.

  ‘Fruitful? A net of eleven hundred psykers for the Emperor. I think that’s fruitful. We were only obliged to eliminate half of one per cent. Five per cent seem worthy of advancement.’

  And ninety-five per cent worthy of feeding to the cadaverous Master of Mankind to power his Astronomican. How long, how long, could the noble agony of the human galaxy continue? Maybe the cabal had the right idea, to replace this cannibalistic system – with the ultimate totalitarian control.

  Oh no, they did not. And oh no, they were almost certainly not what they seemed.

  Jaq grunted.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ asked the skew-eyed, brawny captain.

  The lines on Captain Holofernest’s ruddy face told of many years exposed to the psychic migraine of those he must transport. Here, thought Jaq, was an unsung hero of the Imperium. Not a Marine, not a Terminator Knight, but a hero even so. An ignorant hero, blessedly ignorant, his uniform hung with amulets. A hero to be browbeaten.

  Tapestries of space battles cloaked the walls of the captain’s cabin – permanent reminders of a more active destiny that might have been his?

  Jaq noted faint ring-marks from liquor glasses on the captain’s desk. Private drunkenness, while his Navigator steered through the warp, was Holofernest’s solace, his consolation, anaesthesia – and his weak spot.

  Jaq had activated his tattoos for Zilanov’s benefit, so that the journeyman understood that Jaq was his superior in ways that the young man did not wholly comprehend, yet knew enough not to query.

  Still, Zilanov reserved his opinion; as Jaq too would have done. The journeyman scrutinised Jaq’s motley companions curiously. He appeared to have identified Meh’Lindi as an assassin.

  ‘Wrong, captain?’ drawled Jaq, as nonchalantly as he could. ‘Oh, something is wrong. I’m investigating a certain matter. It relates to ships such as yours. Specifically, what happens when they deliver their cargo to Earth orbit.’

  ‘Our passengers get sorted out a second time,’ growled Holofernest. ‘To double-check our own good work; and very wise too. Then shuttles convey the majority to the Forbidden Fortress for long Astronomican training followed by brief duty. What of it?’

  ‘Whereabouts is that Forbidden Fortress, captain?’

  ‘Hah! That information is forbidden to such as me. Very wise too.’

  ‘Where do you suppose it is?’

  ‘I shouldn’t dream of speculating, inquisitor.’

  ‘Very wise.’

  The stronghold of the Adeptus Astronomica was inside the mountain range known as the Himalayas. One whole mountain was sculpted into the upper half of a sphere of rock that housed the Astronomican.

  ‘You speak of long training and brief duty. Why do you add those details? Do I detect grievances? A streak of softness in your soul?’

  Holofernest glanced at Rafe Zilanov for reassurance.

  ‘Loose tongues!’ snarled Jaq. ‘Those are best torn out. I’m sure you’ll be more discreet in future in your implied criticisms of the Imperium – unless of course liquor loosens your lips. But no matter. What concerns me is illicit slavery – namely the creaming off of a tiny percentage of comely psykers.’

  Zilanov knit his brow, and the captain gaped. ‘Who by?’ And visibly wished he had not asked. ‘Not that I’m inquisitive. Not that I—’

  Jaq favoured Holofernest with the thinnest of smiles. ‘I almost hesitate to say it. By perverted officials relatively high in the Imperial court.’

  Illicit slavery, thought Jaq, as opposed to legitimate dedication to the Emperor... Would those illicit slaves of whom he spoke live longer in private hands? He rather doubted it. Their brief existence might be positively vile in the hands of connoisseurs of degradation. Admittedly no such connoisseurs existed, to the best of his knowledge, except in his own imagination. It was a good idea to believe one’s own lies, then others might believe them too.

  ‘I need hardly emphasise the peril of harbouring untrained psykers even in the outer palace,’ he went on. ‘Even if such persons are kept prisoner behind psychic screens, any one of these might still become a conduit for a daemon; especially since they will call out in their pain and misery for any form of assistance. If a daemon possesses just one slave, and that slave escapes inside the palace – consider the possible consequences!’

  ‘Our passenger manifests are always accurate,’ protested Holofernest.

  ‘I don’t doubt it. Yet what of the tiny percentage of passengers that every Black Ship needs to eliminate? Do you store their corpses to be counted and tallied too?’

  ‘You must know that we scuttle such corpses into the warp.’

  ‘What if that tiny percentage did not in actuality become corpses, but are held alive in stasis in some nook or cranny of a ship as cavernous as this?’

  ‘Not on board mine, I assure you!’ The captain glanced towards his desk where his liquor glass habitually would rest. He was yearning for it now.

  ‘I make no personal accusations,’ said Jaq. ‘You have now received privileged information; that is all.’

  ‘What do you want us to do?’ asked Zilanov. The young inquisitor almost believed. Why should he not? The story was plausible enough to send a shiver down the spine of any Emperor’s man. Why should a senior inquisitor be lying?

  Jaq said, ‘I need to be smuggled into the number three south-eastern port of the Imperial palace in exactly the way we suspect these illicit slaves are being smuggled, namely in stasis food chests. Myself, and my companions.’

  ‘You’ll be utterly vulnerable,’ Zilanov pointed out.

  ‘Until the stasis deactivates at a pre-set time, that’s true. Do you suggest we should evade danger, when by risking ourselves we can lay a hand on the perpetrators of this crime?’

  Zilanov believed completely now. No traitor would make themselves so utterly helpless or risk delivering themselves paralysed into the possible hands of enemies.

  ‘This is an undercover operation of alpha-prime importance,’ said Jaq. ‘You are sworn to total secrecy. Now I’ll explain the routing codes you must use for the caskets...’

  AND STASIS CEASED.

  Jaq cracked open the lid of the container in which he had lain cramped in an enforcedly foetal position.

  He had felt no sensation whatever. He had expected to know nothing, either.

  Instead, his consciousness had been suspended in a single quantum of thought; and that thought had been anxiety. Maybe the workings of his consciousness had progressed ever so slightly during the timeless interval of his encapsulation, as his psychic sense of protection attempted to lift the siege of anxiety. Yet essentially he had been suspended frozen at that point of dread – his whole being composed of apprehension and nothing else. No memories, no active thoughts, no sluggish dreams; only an impersonal distillation of anxiety occurring within the same endless ever-instant.

  Now that he was Jaq again, he shook with accumulated fear. What if he had entered stasis al
ready in a state of terror or of pain? Ultimately, he hoped that his psychic talent might have soothed and opiated him, altering the nature of that ever-instant.

  What if not? What if he had possessed no enchantments? He suspected that he had discovered a new and terrible torture or punishment. For at the height of torment a prisoner might be dropped into a stasis casket to experience that climactic moment for a year, for a century.

  Jaq squinted up at massive rusty pipes beaded with condensation. Ah, those mottlings were not rust. Generations of pious runes had faded and been overpainted and had faded again. The mottlings were moving past a couple of metres overhead. He heard clanking, creaking, distant tintinnabulations of metal ringing on metal. His casket was obviously on a conveyor belt.

  Just as it should be. Mastering the fear which had washed over him in the release from stasis, he stood up. The four caskets were indeed travelling slowly along a segmented steel belt through a dismal, seemingly endless downhill tunnel. Dull orange light ached from glow-globes. The air was frigid. No one, nor any servitor, was in sight.

  Clambering to the nearest neighbouring casket, Jaq lifted the lid. Meh’Lindi sat up, a snake rearing to strike. She did not sting. She kissed Jaq fleetingly.

  ‘Thank you for that taste of oblivion, master.’

  ‘Master?’ he echoed.

  ‘We’re pretending to be slaves, aren’t we?’

  ‘We can forget about that now. Any ill effects?’

  ‘We assassins know how to blank our minds if need be, to induce hibernation. I became a blank, aware only of beloved nullity, the state before universe and Chaos came to be, when God existed, God the Nothing.’

  She was, he suspected, harking back to some strange half-remembered cult of her long-lost home world. The true God, the ever-dying Emperor, eater of souls, beacon of suffering striving humanity, was almost within reach now, perhaps only four hundred kilometres distant through the palace.

  Meh’Lindi in turn raised the lid of Grimm’s casket, and the abhuman exclaimed, ‘Huh. Huh.’ As if uttering his own restored heartbeat. Jaq opened the final stasis-box.