‘I see where you’re going with this,’ Horst said, nodding in agreement. ‘If there’s a way off-planet for runaway serfs, then the missing psykers might be using it too.’
‘That brings me to the second thing,’ Carolus explained, plucking one of the tiny sugared cakes from the plate in front of him. ‘If I’m right about the scale of the conspiracy, and the resources available to it, then this planet is a prize they can’t possibly resist.’
Lower atmosphere, Sepheris Secundus
087.993.M41
The drop-ship banked sharply, threading the gorge between two mountain peaks wreathed in snow, the wind of its passage thrashing the trees in its wake as the smooth metal hull soared easily through the turbulent air. Thick, driving snow obscured the viewports, and vicious crosswinds buffeted the fuselage, but the pilot remained calm and unconcerned, feeling the aircraft responding to the slightest touch of the controls like something alive.
A hololith, the image within it so sharp and steady it might almost have been a solid sculpture of glowing light, relayed an image of the surrounding terrain, every feature meticulously rendered with such fidelity that he had no need to look at the blurred, obscured reality beyond his cockpit. Status displays, translated into readily understood Gothic, scrolled across thin, flat pict screens of xenos manufacture and unparalleled clarity.
‘We’re on our final approach,’ he voxed to the compartment behind him, seeing the red icon of the target edging into the fringe of the display.
‘Acknowledged,’ the strike leader said. Howling like a daemon, clawing the snow from the trees as its belly skimmed their uppermost branches, the drop-ship swooped like a shrike on its unsuspecting prey.
Icenholm, Sepheris Secundus
087.993.M41
‘You have got to be joking,’ Horst said without thinking, and then flushed, embarrassed. The inquisitor wouldn’t joke about something like that, especially not in the middle of a briefing. He clearly wasn’t the only one to feel that way, though. Vex was ashen, his normally dark brown face a pasty grey colour that contrasted oddly with the metallic sheen of his augments, and Elyra looked shocked and horrified. Perhaps she was arguing with their patron telepathically, or perhaps she was simply stunned beyond words.
Keira’s expression was unreadable, of course, but even if her feelings had been visible, it probably wouldn’t have helped much. The psychotic bitch was in a world of her own most of the time anyway. Reminded again of her presence, he tried to ignore the disquieting fashion in which the rippling colours playing across the girl’s synsuit emphasised the curves of her body.
‘Why would there be a secret holding pen for the Black Ships on Sepheris Secundus?’ Elyra asked, incredulity raising her voice half an octave. ‘I thought the Arbites took care of that at the Isolarium.’
‘Something on the scale you suggest does seem hard to believe,’ Horst agreed, seizing on the distraction gratefully.
‘Does it?’ the inquisitor asked dryly. ‘There are containment facilities for psykers on most Imperial worlds. Given the unusually high population of this one, and the unusually high incidence of mutation among it, I would have thought it obvious that the one here would be somewhat larger than usual.’
‘It does seem reasonable,’ Vex said, his voice steadying with an effort that only Horst’s years of experience, winnowing truth from lies, allowed him to detect. ‘In the years since the last Black Ship called here, over a thousand psykers have been apprehended. The Adeptus Arbites facilities at the Isolarium would have been overwhelmed long ago, if they were forced to contain them all.’
‘All right, I concede that,’ Horst said, ‘but I don’t see how you expect this holding pen to provide a lead to the conspiracy.’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Keira asked, smiling at him in a faintly superior manner, to which the afterimages of his involuntary erotic reverie lent disturbing overtones. ‘A thousand psykers, lined up and ready for grilling. If there is a group taking them off-world, then there’s a good chance they made contact with at least a few of them before they got picked up.’
‘Good point,’ Horst conceded, receiving another disconcerting grin in return. Before he could start worrying about it, though, the inquisitor broke in.
‘That is why we’re going there now. Just a short suborbital hop.’ He reached up to shake the thin glass bells above his head, signalling for a servant. ‘You’ve got ten minutes to collect any gear you might need.’
Forest of Sorrows, Sepheris Secundus
087.993.M41
‘Listen,’ Drake said, raising his head and straining to hear over the battering roar of the blizzard. As it had intensified, they’d scraped out a snow hole in the bottom of their makeshift fortification, which, together with the residue of the alcoholic glow, had kept them surprisingly warm despite the freezing temperature. ‘Do you hear that?’
‘It’s just the wind,’ Kyrlock said dismissively. ‘Holy Throne, you city boys, anyone’d think you’d never been outdoors before.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Drake said, unwilling to leave their refuge unless he had to. But then, given the amount he’d drunk relatively recently, it was beginning to feel as though he didn’t have much of a choice. He wobbled reluctantly to his feet, feeling the blizzard lash against his face as he drew level with the wind again. ‘Couldn’t hurt to check, though.’
‘Please yourself,’ Kyrlock said, showing no sign of being willing to follow, not that Drake had expected him to. Clearly divining the real purpose of his friend’s excursion into the howling storm, the former forester grinned, the edges of the facial tattoos of his home barony appearing from beneath the chinstrap of his helmet as the skin stretched. ‘Make sure you keep your back to the wind, or it’ll come off in your hand.’
‘Wouldn’t be the first time for you,’ Drake retorted reflexively, and clambered out into the teeth of the flensing gale, before Kyrlock could think of a suitably obscene riposte.
He hadn’t taken a couple of paces before the unutterable foolishness of leaving their refuge became all too clear, but the residue of alcoholic warmth within him, and the thought of Kyrlock’s derision if he returned ignominiously with an unemptied bladder, combined to keep his legs moving until he reached the comparative shelter of a tree a handful of metres away. In its lee, the wind and the never-ending barrage of sleet moderated to the merely almost unbearable, and mindful of his friend’s facetious advice, he quickly created a cloud of rank-smelling steam, which was whipped away almost at once. Trying to explain frostbite in that particular extremity to the medicae orderly was a conversation he’d rather not have.
As he turned away from the rough bark of his refuge, the wind seemed to moderate, almost imperceptibly, and the sound he thought he’d heard before shrilled momentarily into audibility. The high, teeth jarring shriek of a powerful engine, and the rumble of its passage through the atmosphere, rose for a moment through the rolling thunder of the wind, through the blizzard-lashed forest. Shielding his eyes as best he could, Drake looked upwards, straining for a glimpse of anything out of the ordinary through the wildly gyrating branches and the whirling kaleidoscope of snowflakes.
‘Vos!’ Kyrlock couldn’t hear him above the howl of the wind, of course, but that’s what the helmet voxes were for.
‘Warned you.’ His companion’s voice was still bantering. ‘But if you want me to come and help you look for it, you can stick that…’
‘Shut up and listen!’ Drake demanded. As he strained his ears over the bellowing storm, he thought he could detect the sound again, a rising note in the discordant symphony surrounding them.
‘What for?’ Kyrlock asked, responding to the unmistakable note of urgency in his friend’s voice, all trace of levity gone.
‘For that!’ Drake responded, raising his voice as the sound rushed out of the darkness, building so quickly that within seconds it was something he felt rather than heard, resonating deep within his body. Something huge and dark howled overhead, the b
last of its passage combining with the bellowing wind to create a vortex that slammed him off his feet. Deafened, half-blinded by whirling snow and a stinging barrage of thin green needles wrenched from the branches above him, he floundered, disorientated, in the middle of a drift. After a moment, he slithered to his feet, eyes stinging, and spat out fragments of bark.
‘What the hell was it?’ Kyrlock asked, his voice forcing its way past the ringing in Drake’s ears. A more alarming possibility seemed to strike him, and he hesitated. ‘Danuld? Can you hear me?’
‘Just about.’ Drake looked around, all sense of direction gone, and fought down a rising surge of panic. After a moment, a thicker swirl of snow in his peripheral vision resolved itself into the comforting solidity of Kyrlock, his outline blurred by his grey and white camo cape, and he sighed inwardly with relief.
‘What do we do now?’ Kyrlock asked, as Drake unslung his lasgun, checking the power pack with cold numbed fingers. A full charge: good.
‘Report it,’ Drake said. ‘What the rut do you think?’ He activated his vox again. ‘Sergeant, this is Drake. Are there any shuttles due in?’ He waited, bracing himself for some sarcastic rejoinder, but the only sound in his ears was the faint hiss of static. ‘Oh great, comms are down. This is just getting better and better.’
‘Why’s that?’ Kyrlock asked, deferring to his friend’s greater military experience as instinctively as he would have done to a social superior.
At a loss, and unwilling to admit it, Drake shrugged. ‘Too much wind,’ he suggested. ‘All this stuff blowing about must be blocking the signal.’ He glanced around again, trying to get his bearings. ‘Which way do you think it went?’
‘That way,’ Kyrlock said decisively, pointing into the murk in what looked to Drake like a completely random direction. Nevertheless, he knew his way around in a forest, so his judgement ought to be sound.
‘Come on, then,’ Drake said resignedly, beginning to lead the way into the trees in the direction Kyrlock had indicated. ‘Let’s go and check it out. Whoever they were, they were way off course. If they’ve crashed they’re going to need help, and Emperor preserve the poor sods, we’re probably the best they’re going to get.’
The Citadel of the Forsaken, Sepheris Secundus
087.993.M41
Inside the fortress, the drop-ship’s arrival had gone unnoticed, just as the intruder had planned. Brother Polk was still deeply immersed in the bowels of the auspex array, chanting the litanies of fault diagnosis as he traced bundles of wiring from one junction box to another. The problem was most perplexing, every individual subsystem appearing to run perfectly, although the primary one they made up between them continued to fail every time he tested it. Polk found that irritating, the impediment to the smooth perfection of the machine as irksome as a hangnail would have been if he still possessed his original fingers.
‘Have you made any progress yet?’ a clipped voice asked him, and, suppressing the annoyance at the interruption, which, as a mere human weakness, an acolyte of the Machine-God was supposed to be above, Polk wormed his way out from under the primary power coils to answer.
‘I have successfully eliminated a number of possible causes,’ he replied, straightening, and thanking the Omnissiah that he’d had his vocal cords replaced by a toneless voxcoder that would purge his response of any lingering traces of resentment at the interruption.
His interlocutor stared at him for a moment in a fashion his subordinates found satisfactorily intimidating, but the white-robed tech-priest remained irritatingly impassive. Feeling vaguely disconcerted, a sensation he found neither familiar nor welcome, Captain Severus Malakai of the Inquisitorial storm troopers cleared his throat. ‘Any idea how much longer this is going to take?’ he asked.
‘The Omnissiah’s work is complex,’ Polk told him unhelpfully, ‘and no one can count the steps on the path to enlightenment.’
‘I’ll take that as a no,’ Malakai said, turning to go.
‘Is there any added urgency?’ the tech-priest asked, and Malakai glanced back over his shoulder.
‘We’ve got an inquisitor inbound, ETA about thirty minutes, assuming the mad bastard doesn’t plough into a mountain, trying to fly in a mess like this. It would be helpful if you could restore coverage before he arrives, in case we need to guide him in.’
‘I will pray to the Omnissiah to speed my hand,’ Polk assured him, returning to work.
‘Good. That’s a weight off my mind, then,’ Malakai said sarcastically, as the tech-priest disappeared under the tangle of cables behind the wall panel.
Deep inside another panel, near the genetorium, a timer ticked downwards, and, secure in its living quarters, the intruder glanced at a chronograph on the wall.
Guiding the body it wore to its feet, it prepared for action, although it didn’t really expect to have to intervene in person. Its preparations had been meticulous, and everything would undoubtedly run as smoothly as it anticipated.
Only moments to go. Were it as human as it appeared, it would undoubtedly have smiled.
Lower Atmosphere, Sepheris Secundus
087.993.M41
‘Get ready to deploy,’ the pilot instructed, watching an identical countdown on one of the screens surrounding his control station. The smooth, rounded surfaces of the flight deck still seemed strange, despite the comforting familiarity of the blocky Imperial technology grafted into several of the systems, and the flesh and metal hybrids of the servitors manning all but one of the other consoles. The exception was the gunnery station, where a hard-eyed woman in body armour sat; one of the other specialists their patrons had engaged for this mission. The pilot had no idea who she was, and preferred it that way. No names had been exchanged at the briefing, and although some of the men and women riding in the astonishingly large cargo bay behind him had clearly known one another, they’d kept their own counsel.
The money was good, and that was all that mattered. The path that had brought him here had been a long and winding one, mostly downhill, but this was it, the big score, the one that would set him up for life. Hell, if he’d known in advance what he’d be flying, he’d have done it for free. Emperor alone knew who, or more likely what, had built this ship, let alone how his employers had managed to get their hands on it, but he’d never had so sweet a ride in his life.
‘Standing by,’ the strike leader voxed in response, and went silent.
The pilot turned to face the gunner for a moment. ‘Time to warm up your toys, sweetheart.’
‘Everything’s ready,’ the woman assured him calmly, her eyes never leaving a panel of what looked like targeting displays. ‘And if you ever call me sweetheart again, I’ll have a new pair of earrings and you’ll be singing soprano.’
Frigid bitch, the pilot thought. Well, who cared. After tonight, he’d be able to afford all the women he wanted. Spotting a suitable clearing, he fed power to the gravitic compensators, and the great curved hull settled gently into the snow.
Forest of Sorrows, Sepheris Secundus
087 993 M41
‘Drake, Kyrlock, respond.’ Sergeant Claren leaned over the vox-unit in the platoon command Chimera, gripping the microphone as if it were one of the throats of his delinquent troopers. ‘Emperor help me, if the pair of you are drunk again I’ll have you flogged to within a micron of your miserable lives, is that clear?’ He waited for a moment, although he wasn’t sure quite what for; an indignant denial, perhaps, or more of Drake’s mocking pretence of respect for his authority. All he could hear, however, was the hiss of static.
‘It’s no good, sir,’ the vox operator ventured after a moment, clearly apprehensive about drawing down the wrath of the angry sergeant by speaking up. ‘All the comms are down. I’ve recalibrated, and recited the litany like the manual says, but I’m still not getting anything.’
Claren nodded thoughtfully, taking the measure of the situation. This was beyond his power to rectify, and if anyone could be said to be at fault here, it clearly wasn�
��t him. Good enough. It never occurred to him to send for a tech-adept to sort the problem out. Born and raised in a society where every decision was made by someone further up the hierarchy, the notion of acting on his own initiative was as foreign to his nature as disobedience or heresy. The way forward was clear. He would report the matter to the lieutenant when he woke in the morning. In the meantime…
Relieved, he settled back into his seat and picked up his mug of recaf. ‘Looks like we’re in for a quiet night, then,’ he said.
‘Emperor on Earth!’ Drake said, crouching as low as he could behind a tree on the edge of a large clearing in the forest. The drop-ship was massive, its smooth, metal hull utterly out of place surrounded by growing things, its rounded surfaces striking the Guardsman as both utterly alien and infinitely threatening. ‘They’re xenos!’ None of the ore shuttles he’d seen on their constant scavenging runs to the Gorgonid had looked anything like this.
‘I don’t think so,’ Kyrlock contradicted, handing him an amplivisor. Drake took it, focusing on the small knot of figures, dwarfed by the gargantuan scale of the vessel they’d come in, disembarking from the access ramp at the rear. Close to, they were unmistakably human, at least the ones whose features weren’t obscured by visored helmets. A few of them cursed as they first felt the force of the biting wind, familiar Gothic swear words hurtling towards the hidden Guardsmen along with the stinging snowflakes. ‘Mercenaries, you reckon?’
‘Must be,’ Drake agreed. ‘Two squads at least.’ It was hard to be sure of their numbers, the swirling snow blending the strange troopers with their shadows and blurring their outlines, but he was sure he could see over a dozen of them, maybe twenty or more. If only they weren’t huddled so closely together, it might be easier to do a headcount.
Scourge The Heretic Page 4
