by Dan Abnett
‘I don’t understand,’ Kys said. The nausea bubbled through her again. She felt as if she was going to pass out.
‘Let us be open with you,’ said the first man. ‘We are trying to help you. The data you are processing is in a ciphered form. Your processing is one stage of the decryption. It is possible you have stumbled upon some meaning accidentally.’
‘I… I don’t—’
‘It happens from time to time,’ the other man said. ‘At this stage in the process, scribes occasionally and inadvertently recover some small unit of true meaning. A morpheme, a phoneme, nothing more.’
‘On rarer instances,’ said the first man, ‘innocuous text, such as this’ – he gestured to the file – ‘may generate a morpheme subliminally in a scribe’s mind. This generally causes feelings of sickness. We wish to recover that subliminal. Once we have done so, we can take steps to improve your well-being.’
Kys blinked. She didn’t understand anything of what they were saying. It was just as much gibberish as the files she’d been staring at all day.
The men carried on talking. She thought about the files, the meaningless jumble of characters floating up the cogitator screen, the way they’d made her zone out.
She knew that Ravenor wouldn’t have abandoned her without a good reason, but she needed him now. With what concentration she could muster, she reached out with her mind, hoping to find the strength to call to him.
‘Are you listening, scribe?’ one of the men was saying. She touched his mind, felt his determination. He was convinced she had something in her head, something valuable that he would recover no matter how long it took.
‘Help us to help you,’ said the other man. ‘As soon as we have the subliminal, we can quickly ease your discomfort.’ She touched his mind now, saw a quick, brittle flash of what he meant by ‘ease your discomfort’. The man waiting just outside the room. The secretist in the sober suit, a gun in his pocket, waiting to be called in to put a round through the base of her skull.
Desperation seized her, but the nausea swept in more fiercely than before. Off balance, she half-rose, half-fell off the stool. She tried to get up, the ordinate trying to help her. But she was too dizzy. Then she threw up violently on the floor under the table and rolled onto her side, consciousness fading.
The last thing she heard, as if from the other end of an echo chamber, was the ordinate saying, ‘What is this?’
The last thing she saw, as if through the wrong end of a telescope, was the ordinate clutching her green jacket and holding up the analyser Carl had given her.
FIVE
THREE AND A half hours after Jader Trice authorised their use, the psykers unleashed by the secretists were called off. The five of them, exhausted from the huge strain of their search efforts, fled back to the flesh forms they had left floating in dank lead holding tanks in the basement levels of the governor’s palace, and rested there, moaning and whimpering.
It was late afternoon in Petropolis, the sky a dirty scumble of grey clouds and vapour. The moment the psykers ebbed away, a fierce thunderstorm broke out over the hive.
Revoke knew keeping the psykers active any longer would have been unwise. Quite apart from the fact that the psykers had come close to draining their energy reserves and he had no wish to burn out such a valuable resource, Revoke was aware of the civil issue. Though invisible and intangible to all but the most gifted or sensitive persons in Petropolis, such overt, proactive psy-activity would unsettle the general population. As it was, the data reports were busy with stories of panic attacks, freak weather effects, unprovoked domestic violence, numerous suicides and reputed sightings of the manifesting dead. Formal complaints had been made by the Astropathic Guild, the Navis Nobilite and several other august Imperial institutions that utilised psy-adepts by legal covenant.
Trice had the Ministry issue polite responses, suggesting that another grave incident like the one at the diplomatic palace had taken place, but was now under control. Months of careful political manipulation and other more devious machinations meant that virtually all agencies and organisations in Petropolis were directly or indirectly under the control of Jader Trice, including the Astrotelepathicus and the Officio Inquisitorus Planetia. But most of them didn’t realise that fact, so it paid to be circumspect.
There was another reason the psykers had been put back in their boxes.
‘We’ve found him,’ said Boneheart, one of the senior lieutenants of the Secretists as Revoke entered the Counsel Room.
‘Show me,’ Revoke replied. He had brought Monicker with him and, like a heat-haze shimmer, she hovered at Revoke’s elbow as he examined the print outs Boneheart was unfolding.
‘Plenty of hits, as you can see,’ Boneheart said. He was a tall man with a craggy face pitted by old acne scars, his hair an oily, hard-combed shelf of grey. ‘Hive like this is a target-rich environment. Over nine thousand potentials, but you can rule out all the ones I’ve put a cross through. Low-level sensitives or latents who don’t even know what they’ve got. That leaves about two hundred higher grade returns, true actives. Most of them will be hucksters, faith healers, backroom clairvoyants, spiritualists, maybe even the odd sub-cult member. Some of them are interesting, and we should pass the locations to the Magistratum.’
‘But none powerful enough?’ Revoke asked.
Boneheart shook his head. ‘You said our guy’s major grade, didn’t you?’
‘From the briefs I’ve read, dangerously powerful,’ Revoke replied.
‘Well then, no,’ said Boneheart. ‘If we’re looking for a gamma or a beta, an alpha even, there are only a few hits that match.’ He tapped his finger on the graph at a particularly large wobble in the signal. ‘Like that. Except that’s the Astropath Guild. And that, that’s the guild’s sub-station at Tenthe Arch. In fact, most of the big returns here can be identified as legit psy uses. Except these four.’
He pointed. ‘This one, up in Stairtown. Could be our man, but intelligence suggests it’s a known unsanctioned psyker called Efful Trevis. Same story here in Central E. Another black-market mind-pirate known to us. And here. In J. Same again. I’ve sent teams out to secret all three, but I’m pretty sure all we’ll be doing is closing down unsanctioned activities that the ordos should have picked up long since.’
‘Which behind leaves one,’ Monicker whispered.
Boneheart nodded. ‘That’s right. This one. It fits damn well. High grade activity, delta at the very least. The site is meant to be unoccupied, so that matches too. A hideaway, someone acting in seclusion.’
‘Show me the map,’ Revoke said. Another of the secretists passed him a hand slate. The chief provost was quite particular. We are to move in immediately and end this.’
Revoke looked up at the secretists around him. The low-lit room was quiet except for the chatter of codifiers and data-engines. ‘Ravenor is an Imperial inquisitor. We must not underestimate his abilities, nor the abilities of the men and women who accompany him. This will be a full force operation, maximum prejudice. I’ll be leading it. I want you, Boneheart and Monicker, Tolemi, Rove and Molay as team leaders. Combat ordnance. Where’s Drax?’
Secretist Molay looked awkwardly at Boneheart.
‘I thought you’d been told, Toros,’ Boneheart said. ‘Drax is dead.’
‘Since when?’ Revoke asked, his voice as heavy and cold as permafrost.
‘This morning,’ Molay replied. ‘He was part of the operation to secret the members of Special Crimes. Someone shot him at a residence in Formal E.’
‘Who was he secreting?’
Molay referred to his data-slate. ‘Uh, a junior marshal called Maud Plyton. She worked with Rickens. Lived with her uncle at the address. Two other bodies were recovered from the scene, one male, one female, so that probably accounts for the girl and her uncle. Both were reported as shredded by the sheen birds. Maybe this junior marshal popped Drax before the birds got her.’
Revoke pursed his lips. ‘What is the status
of the Unkindness now?’
‘They’re loose, naturally,’ Boneheart said. ‘But we’ve got Drax’s pupil Foelon working to bring them under control. He’s a good boy. I estimate we’ll have the Unkindness back in play before the morning.’
‘Very well,’ said Revoke. ‘I’ll review this matter again later. For now, we have our priority. And we’ll just have to do it without bird cover. Harness up. I want us airborne in twenty minutes.’
THUNDER PEELED ACROSS the murky city. In Formal E, rain lashed down out of the premature night, rippling the windows of Miserimus House.
Frauka was cooking. Zeph was still prowling the place, a gun in his hand. Carl had gone upstairs to shower. I sat, watching over Carl’s machines as they mumbled and whirred, watching data-fields pulse and flicker on the screens. Whatever had been stirred up was now dying down, but that didn’t mean we could relax. Only the insane or the recklessly powerful would unleash five psykers to scour an Imperial hive. No, let me correct myself. Only the insane, the recklessly powerful or the Holy Inquisition would unleash five psykers so.
We had not been found, and Wystan’s limiter was still off, blotting me out from prying minds. But it was just a matter of time. My confidence was faltering. I had come back to this world, dragging my loyal friends along, to uncover some great conspiracy. I had even boasted that I thought it might go right to the top.
Now, the more I pushed, the higher it got. Arrogantly, I had come back to this world under the badge of Special Condition, cutting myself off so heroically from support or back-up, safe in the knowledge that I was an Imperial inquisitor and, armed with that authority, I could explode this heresy.
Hubris. That’s meant to be noble, isn’t it? As a human quality, it rates next to stupidity in my opinion. We were going against foes of demonstrably formidable power, the planetary authorities themselves. Just us, the eight of us if you included Zael. We would all pay for my arrogance. Every single one of my friends would—
‘What are you thinking about?’
Zael was with me, curled up in a drum chair.
‘Guess.’
He sat up. ‘You were thinking that we’re really fricked up,’ he said.
‘Where did you learn language like that, Zael Efferneti?’ I asked. ‘Have you been hanging out with Nayl too much?’
He smiled. ‘Streets of Petropolis, born and bred,’ he said. ‘I know all kinds of swears.’
‘I’m sure you do.’
‘Was I right?’ he asked.
I hesitated for a moment. ‘We could be in a difficult situation, Zael. I may have put you in a difficult situation. If I have, I’m sorry.’
‘Can’t you find the bad guys then?’
I turned my chair to face him. ‘Some of them. What really matters is what they’re trying to do. We don’t know that yet. Once we do, maybe we’ll—’
‘What?’ he asked.
Die horribly, I thought. ‘Do something about it,’ I transponded.
‘Sacristy,’ he said suddenly, getting to his feet and reaching for a glass of water from Carl’s desk.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Sacristy. I don’t know what the word means, but I had a dream where it was very important. Dreams are important, right? You told me that.’
‘For someone like you,’ I said and spurred my chair towards him. ‘Say it again. “Sacristy”?’
He nodded. ‘Sacristy. I had this dream, and when I woke up I thought I’d better remember that, so I did. But only just then.’
‘Tell me about it.’
He blushed.
‘Go on.’
‘All right. I… I was dreaming I was in this lovely golden place. Like a landscape. Green hills, woods, a glade, all these beautiful people walking around with haloes of light around them. There were some buildings too. I think they were golden. That’s probably where the golden thing comes from.’
‘Uh huh… move on.’
‘So one of the people is Kara. And she looks really good,’ He paused and blushed a darker shade. ‘She had this white gown on, it was really tight. Halter neck. And she said, she made me promise…’
‘What?’
‘If… if I remembered to tell you the word “sacristy”, she’d take her dress off and—’
I swung away. ‘That’s great, Zael. Keep up the good work.’
‘But I haven’t told you the end of the dream yet!’ he protested.
‘I can imagine.’
‘But—’
Carl wandered in. He’d showered and changed. He was wearing black velvet trousers with high boots and a tight black singlet. It showed the taut flesh of his torso and arms, but it also displayed the grim, puckered suture scars around his right upper arm where the limb had been reattached. I was surprised. Carl had been so fastidious about hiding his awful wound so far. He had been ashamed of it, and thought it spoiled his perfect looks.
No longer, apparently.
He smiled at me. ‘What are you two talking about?’
‘You don’t want to know,’ I said.
‘Oh, I do!’ he grinned, sitting down at his workstation.
‘Kara undressing,’ I said, trusting that would put him off.
‘I had a dream!’ Zael protested.
‘I’m sure you did, little man,’ Carl beamed. ‘You two boys and your smut when you get alone together.’
Now I felt embarrassed.
Carl’s fingers danced across the keyboard, pulling up the latest data-skeins. Carl had always worn jewellery – it was part of his measured elegance – but now I saw that every finger on his right hand was laced with rings. Four or five to each digit. The left hand was bare.
‘Nice rings,’ I suggested.
‘Thanks,’ he replied, flexing his right hand towards me to show off nearly thirty rings, including those around his thumb. ‘If you’ve got them, flaunt them, I say.’
‘Status?’ I asked him.
Carl looked at his screen. ‘Lots of agitation still. Plenty of Ministry comm traffic, plenty of Magistratum flare. Gimme a sec to punch up some data for you.’
The vox chimed. It was Zeph. ‘Contact coming in. Hnh. Stand down, it’s Nayl.’
Harlon had ridden the commute rail back into E from the Ministry towers. He was tired and hacked off and bedraggled from the storm.
‘Don’t think I can handle another day like that, Gideon,’ he told me as he settled down next to me, swigging a big amasec Carl had poured for him. ‘I mean, I thought our lives were supposed to be hard. In the Ministry towers, like a drone, it’s a mind killer. Just relentless crap. You know, I actually saw a scribe die at his station. And you know what they rushed to the medics? His cogitator.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
Nayl shrugged, sipping his drink. Rain clattered against the windows like pebbles. He looked more exhausted than I’d ever seen him and that was saying something.
‘It’s all about the data, I think. The data,’ he shrugged again. ‘I don’t know what they’re processing in there, but it’s not straight information. It’s like code, a jumble, a cipher. It seems all wrong to me. Then again, I don’t know what it’s like in any Administratum centre.’
‘You sampled the sort of stuff you’re talking about?’ I asked.
Nayl nodded. ‘Yeah, I used my picter when I could. You make sense of it.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Carl. ‘I still haven’t made anything intelligible out of the stuff from Kys’s feed.’
‘Speaking of, where is Patience?’ Carl asked. Nayl frowned. Kara had told me she intended to visit Belknap before she came back so he could check her dressings, so I wasn’t expecting her for another couple of hours at least. But Patience, like Nayl, was supposed to come straight back to Miserimus after her shift.
She should have arrived by now.
‘Her analyser’s no longer transmitting,’ Carl reported. ‘Hasn’t been for quite a while now. I’d just assumed she’d turned it off.’
‘Wystan?’ I said.
Frauka paused. ‘You sure? It could still be a risk.’
‘Do it, please.’
He activated his limiter.
Immediately my mind rose free. I reached out carefully, masking myself, but the psykers had gone, leaving an aggravated weather pattern behind them.
+Patience?+
I couldn’t see her, couldn’t even sense her unique bio-signature.
+Patience?+
There was no reply.
THE ARMOURED FLIERS dipped down towards the target location, mobbing through the evening light and the thunderstorm.
Clad in black body-armour, his hellgun cinched across his belly, Toros Revoke climbed to his feet in the red-lit hold of the lead flier. He looked back at the secretists harnessed to the bare metal walls.
‘Make ready to deploy,’ he called above the purr of the jet wash.
AS IF THICKENED and darkened by the storm, night had closed in across the bay side of the hive. Squalling inshore winds crashed the high tide against the breakwaters, pounding the stone piers of the outer flood defences.
The occulting lighthouse, a black tower against a black sky, pulsed out its regular flashes, as if defiantly refusing to match the haphazard rhythms of the lightning.
Inside, the cold, gloomy chambers and galleries had been lit by thousands of tapers and old, stained glow-globes. The storm winds hissed in under ill-fitting doors and rotting shutters, gusting like unquiet spirits along the dark halls, guttering the taper flames. Five of the fraters, armed with tindersticks, were occupied in a patrol of the lighthouse, relighting all the tapers and candles the intruding wind extinguished.
Most of the other Fratery members were at devotion in the stockbrick basement, or working in huddled groups in various parts of the structure to record the latest refinements to the prospect and its focus and determiners as revealed by the menischus. The psyker who Orfeo Culzean had ordered them to procure, an evil-tempered renegade astrotelepath called Eumone Vilner, had arrived that afternoon, and he was hard at work relaying the whispered messages of the fraters on Nova Durma.
