Scourge The Heretic

by Sandy Mitchell

  Deep in the genetorium, in the shadows of the primary power core, the untidy and ill-managed environment they’d struggled through to get here might as well have been on another planet for all the effect its presence had in this temple of order and serenity. Vex glanced up from the system schematic being projected in the air above his faithful data-slate, savouring the presence of the Machine, the purposeful, constructive world of metal and glass surrounding him. As he did so, his attention was attracted by a deferential greeting in binary, to which he courteously responded by rote.

  ‘May I be of assistance?’ one of the tech-priests on duty asked, approaching him with all the diffidence due to a colleague openly wearing the sigil of the Inquisition alongside the cogwheel emblem of his calling.

  ‘I think you might,’ Vex said, raising his voice a little over the hum of the generators. Having someone around who understood the intricacies of the system, and who could immediately answer any questions he might have, would speed up his investigation considerably. He gestured to the pieces of equipment surrounding them, many with open inspection panels, from which hastily spliced cables and a profusion of wax sealed prayer parchments spilled, mute testament to the heroic efforts made by Tonis and his repair teams over the preceding few hours. ‘The damage in this section seems relatively minor.’

  ‘Indeed it is, by the grace of the Omnissiah,’ the junior tech-priest confirmed, nodding eagerly. ‘The spirits of the circuit breakers confined the holy energies, preventing them from doing harm in their eagerness to be free.’ He tried unsuccessfully to keep a note of pride from his voice. ‘I have been made personally responsible for the appropriate rite of thanks for their timely intervention.’

  ‘Then I have indeed been guided to your input by the gears of the Great Machine,’ Vex said, seeing no harm in encouraging the young man’s vanity if it helped him gather the data he needed a little more efficiently. The quick burst of binary had identified him as Brother Polk, a low-ranking tech-adept seconded here by the Adeptus Mechanicus. Like everyone else he’d exchanged handshakes with since his arrival, a secondary layer of embedded coding contained a security clearance verified by the Inquisition liaison office of the Lathe Worlds. Vex took a degree of quiet satisfaction in that, still nettled by Keira’s implied slur on the probity of the order he served. ‘Am I right in assuming that the secondary generators are in a similar state?’

  ‘You are indeed,’ Polk said, responding to the flattery in precisely the manner Vex’s analysis had suggested was the most probable. ‘The safety systems performed their functions like true servants of the Machine.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Vex said. If Polk was right, he’d just been spared a further three hours of painstaking investigation. He glanced at the schematic again, pinpointing the next most likely point of vulnerability. ‘If I could impose upon you to accompany me to the primary heat exchangers, I’m sure I would find your advice equally valuable there.’

  ‘Technomancer Tonis did say my duties here were of paramount importance,’ Polk said reluctantly. ‘The machine-spirits of the genetorium were gravely affronted, and must be propitiated with all due dispatch.’

  ‘As is only right and proper,’ Vex said, resigning himself to a longer, more detailed analysis without the young man’s assistance. Polk nodded, his disappointment at being unable to participate further in the enquiry quite palpable, and another thought occurred to Vex. ‘Although, aiding me to apprehend the person responsible for their suffering as quickly as possible might perhaps restore their equilibrium even more effectively.’

  ‘Perhaps it might,’ Polk responded eagerly, ‘and you are, after all, acting in the name of the Inquisition. Perhaps I can best discharge my duty by assisting you.’

  ‘That does seem the most rational inference,’ Vex said, permitting himself a moment of amusement at the young man’s enthusiasm, perhaps seeing a little of himself as he’d once been, on the day Inquisitor Finurbi had walked into a quiet Mechanicus shrine with an interesting problem to solve. He stood aside, deactivating the data-slate, and returning it to the recesses of his robe. ‘Perhaps you would care to lead the way.’

  The inquisitor’s talent burned and pulsed like a psychic beacon, drawing the intruder irresistibly towards it, scorching it with its purity and power. The intruder hesitated for a moment, wondering if it had waited too long. The man’s strength was increasing by the moment, his defences sharp and diamond hard, the vulnerabilities it had hoped to find scabbing over even as it watched.

  Then, on the verge of turning away, it saw a minute flaw, a tiny opening that none of its kind would dare attempt under most circumstances, but it had no choice. Impelled by desperation, it lunged into the attack.

  Carolus stirred, his dreams disturbing ones, as they so often were these days. He’d seen and done too much to ever expect to sleep soundly again, but exhaustion held him in chains of smoke, weighing him down and suffocating his soul. He was with Elyra, as he so often was in the rare, pleasant reveries, both of them younger, in the bedroom of the villa they’d shared in the mountains above Fallion, back in the days when it had just been the two of them, before they’d been joined by Roykirk the bounty hunter and Verro the ratling. Now Roykirk and Verro were dead, and he mourned them, sobbing desperately, even though they’d died half a sector away and three years after Fallion.

  Carolus, what is it? Elyra asked, smiling in the way that had always made his heart sing, but that only made his grief grow stronger. Her hair was red, not yellow, and he could see beyond her, through the gap where the wall should have been, that the village in the valley below was ablaze from end to end, its inhabitants running and shrieking and dying, burning like candles or choking in their own smoke. He tried to answer, but nothing escaped him beyond racking sobs that shook his whole body, and left him howling like a child. It’s all right, I’m here. Her arms were round him, soothing and reassuring, and he clung to her, desperate for comfort. I’m with you now, and I’ll never, ever leave you.

  Her grip tightened, impossibly, moving sinuously around him, and he began to struggle, dimly aware through the weight of the nightmare that something was wrong.

  ‘Try him again,’ Horst said, tearing his eyes away from the hypnotically swirling snowscape in the darkness beyond the window of the guest quarters’ lounge. Elyra looked at him for a moment, as if attempting to find a way of verbalising just how fatuous she found his advice, and then gave up and returned her attention to the vox panel.

  ‘Carolus, the shuttle’s ready. Can you hear me?’

  ‘He must really be out of it,’ Keira said, glancing up from the throwing knife she’d been playing with, balancing it on one finger by the tip, flipping it up to catch the hilt, and then moving on to the next digit. Drake had been watching her since she started, fascinated, a mug of recaf growing cold in his hand, and Kyrlock had long since gone to bed.

  Horst nodded. ‘Hardly surprising,’ he agreed. ‘I can’t remember the last time I saw him that exhausted.’

  ‘I’d better go and wake him,’ Elyra said.

  Keira shrugged. ‘He’ll be cranky,’ she warned.

  ‘He’ll be a lot crankier if we let him sleep now that the shuttle’s prepped,’ Elyra said, making for the door.

  ‘Carolus. Carolus, it’s me, Elyra.’ The voice echoed through the guest room, accompanied by a loud, continuous knocking. ‘Carolus, are you all right?’

  Deep in the coils of nightmare, the voice penetrated, clear and true.

  This isn’t happening! Carolus thought, tearing the faux Elyra from him with a single psychokinetic blast. As she flew backwards he could see that her limbs were elongated and boneless, like tentacles, dangling from a body that hung in the air before him, losing any resemblance to a human being as he focused more clearly on it. His eyes snapped open to a nightmare.

  The thing that had attacked him was real, a grotesque apparition, floating a few feet above his bed, its questing tentacles already reaching down to ensnare him again. The worst th
ing about it, though, was that it was somehow insubstantial, flickering in and out of existence as he watched. Again, he reached out with his mind to swat the thing, but it resisted. Somehow, their moment of contact had sapped his strength again, and it rallied fast, rolling with the insubstantial blow and swooping down towards him.

  ‘Carolus! Can you hear me?’ Elyra’s voice again, shrill with concern.

  Hazy recollections of his nightmare began to surface, and with it a surge of anger that tore through his mind, sweeping everything else away. This warp spawned obscenity had defiled his most cherished memories, tried to turn them into a weapon against him, tried to turn his love for Elyra into the instrument of his destruction. Gathering every iota of that anger, he channelled it, forming a lance of pure hatred and loathing, which impaled the bloated body hovering over him, burning through it like a white hot blade.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ Horst asked, drawing his bolt pistol as an eldritch keening echoed around the corridor outside the inquisitor’s bedroom. Before he could use it, the door in front of them flew from its hinges, blasted aside by a ball of flame that had erupted into existence in front of Elyra.

  ‘There’s something in there,’ she said, the colour draining from her face. ‘I can sense it.’

  ‘What is it?’ Horst asked, pushing past the psyker, bringing his pistol up as he dived through the door, slipping easily into the room clearance drills he’d learned in the Arbites. The inquisitor was sitting up in bed, his face drained and white, staring at a point in the air about a metre in front of him.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Elyra followed him in, her eyes searching. ‘It’s gone now.’ She shuddered. ‘It felt so cold.’ Catching sight of the man on the bed she hurried over and embraced him. ‘Carolus, what happened?’

  ‘I killed it, I think.’ He returned the gesture, holding her tightly to him for a moment, breathing deeply to restore his habitual calm. ‘Drove it off, anyway.’ Then, to Horst’s embarrassed surprise, and Elyra’s evident delight, he kissed her. ‘It was your voice, the sound of it. If you hadn’t called out to me I’d never have woken in time to fight back.’

  ‘Do you know what it was?’ Horst asked, taking refuge in the practical. He’d never seen the inquisitor look frightened before, or emotional, and he found the experience profoundly disturbing. He’d known intellectually that their patron had shared some kind of bond with Elyra, going back long before he or any of the others had joined the Angelae, but they’d never been particularly demonstrative with one another, at least not while anyone else was around. The idea that Carolus Finurbi could be vulnerable, despite his power and status, was a new and unwelcome one.

  ‘Not exactly, no,’ the inquisitor said, sounding a great deal more like his old self, ‘but I think we owe Keira an apology.’

  ‘You think it was a daemon?’ Elyra asked, horror and incredulity contending for supremacy in her voice. Finurbi nodded slowly, leaning on her for support as he rose to his feet and reached for his robe.

  ‘I’ve never encountered anything like it before,’ he said slowly, ‘so I can’t be sure. But if it wasn’t warp spawn of some kind, it’ll certainly do until a real one comes along. When I get back to the Tricorn I’ll talk to the Malleus, as well as seeing what Jorge is after. Maybe they’ll be able to identify it for me.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ Elyra said, trying desperately to keep the conversational tone normal, ‘your shuttle’s ready. Barda managed to find one that didn’t get too badly dented in the attack, and he’s waiting to take you back to Icenholm.’

  ‘I won’t be returning to Icenholm now,’ the inquisitor said decisively, a measure of his old steel beginning to reassert itself, to Horst’s unspoken relief. ‘Things are moving too fast. I’ll need the full resources of the Tricorn if I’m going to unravel this mess.’

  ‘I’ll get Malakai on it at once,’ Horst promised, reholstering his sidearm and making for the door. ‘There must be a ship of some kind in orbit heading for Scintilla today, even if it’s just an ore barge.’

  ‘So long as it’s capable of warp travel, nothing else matters,’ Finurbi said. ‘There’s no time to lose.’

  ‘I doubt that you’ll find anything untoward with this system,’ Polk volunteered diffidently, as Vex reached out to remove an inspection panel from the wall. ‘Technomancer Tonis ministered to it himself.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Vex glanced at his faithful data-slate. ‘No repairs appear to have been scheduled on it, let alone completed.’

  ‘Before the incident, I mean,’ Polk amplified. ‘I met him in the corridor here just yesterday. He was correcting a minor imperfection he’d detected.’

  ‘Was he indeed?’ Vex was troubled. He knew that such routine tasks were often done without keeping a proper maintenance record, but seldom by someone of the technomancer’s rank. He would have expected more devotion to Order and Correct Procedure. Resolving to ask the man about it the next time they met, he lifted the panel clear.

  An acrid cloud of dark smoke billowed out, and dissipated slowly in the current from the air vents, bringing with it the unmistakable smell of charred insulation. ‘Oh my,’ Polk said, shocked, and Vex’s chest panel rattled with a fresh bout of coughing, ‘a manifestation!’

  ‘A grave one, too,’ Vex agreed, leaning forward to inspect the damage.

  ‘I’ll inform the technomancer at once,’ Polk said, reaching for a vox-panel set into the wall nearby. A moment later he glanced across at Vex. ‘That’s odd. He doesn’t seem to be answering.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Vex replied, as evenly as he could, peering into the depths of the ducting that his removal of the panel had revealed. He’d taken a small hand luminator from a pocket in his robe, and was sweeping the beam methodically among the systems, attempting to isolate the source of the disruption. ‘I suspect he already knows.’ Despite the instinctive revulsion he still felt at the idea, the deduction of Tonis’s guilt was all but inescapable. Tempering his horror and disgust with a strong sense of satisfaction at his own strength of mind, he began to search for any signs of evidence that would corroborate or, preferably, disprove the hypothesis.

  He found it almost at once. The site of the damage was obvious: scorch marks and scattered debris the unmistakable stigmata of an explosion, a small one, but enough to disrupt the power supply, and cause the safety overrides to shut down both sets of generators. The sabotage had been carefully planned, to wreak as much havoc as possible from the smallest amount of disruption, and Vex felt a reluctant stirring of respect for its efficiency. As he moved the beam of his luminator to get a better view, it reflected off something small and metallic. Reaching into the narrow gap, and suppressing an outburst of language quite unbecoming to a man of his position as his robe snagged briefly on an obstruction of some kind, he fished it out, and regarded it closely in the light of the corridor.

  ‘What have you found?’ Polk asked eagerly, craning his neck to see.

  ‘Evidence of treason,’ Vex said heavily, still not wanting to believe that a fellow tech-priest was capable of such wanton destruction. It was a small brass cogwheel, bent and distorted, but still quite recognisable, and a thin coil of wire, once tightly wound, now a loose, yielding spiral.

  ‘They don’t belong in there,’ Polk confirmed, regarding the fragments of metal curiously. ‘That thing looks like a clock spring, but I don’t see why anyone would leave a chronograph somewhere they couldn’t look at it.’

  ‘These are parts of a timer,’ Vex explained heavily, reaching for the comm-bead in his ear. ‘I need to speak to the inquisitor at once.’

  ‘The inquisitor’s shuttle just left the pad,’ Horst’s voice informed him crisply. ‘We’re working independently again. What have you got?’

  ‘A suspect,’ Vex said. ‘Tonis appears to have planted a small but effective bomb in the primary heat exchangers. I’m afraid Keira’s wild imaginings may not have been quite so wide of the mark after all.’

  ‘Hey, two for two.’ The young
assassin’s voice cut in, sounding inappropriately gleeful to Vex. ‘Maybe you should start taking me a bit more seriously.’

  ‘A couple of lucky guesses doesn’t make you Chastener Domus,’ Horst admonished, referring to a popular fictional detective.

  ‘This digression, though no doubt fascinating to anyone who knows or cares what you’re talking about, is hardly germane to our current situation,’ Vex said, dragging everyone back to the point. He turned to Polk. ‘Where’s Tonis now?’

  ‘In his quarters,’ the young tech-priest said, no doubt trying and failing to infer the fragments of the voxed conversation he’d missed, ‘meditating on the state of the systems. He left orders not to be disturbed.’

  ‘Then he’s in for a rude awakening,’ Vex said.

  In this, it turned out, the tech-priest was wrong. By the time the hastily reconvened group of operatives had forced entry to his quarters, Tonis was unequivocally and very messily dead.

  ‘What in the warp could have done this to him?’ Drake asked, looking at the scattered shreds of meat, intermixed with the fused remains of the late technomancer’s augmetic enhancements, in horror. He still had his Guard issue lasgun, and clutched it with whitened knuckles, scanning the room for something to shoot, but it seemed devoid of any threat. Apart from the crimson smears marring the smooth metal surfaces, and the shreds of something that might once have been organs hanging from the teeth of the cogwheel in the small devotional alcove, everything seemed pristine, placed carefully for maximum efficiency in its use, just as one might expect in the personal quarters of a tech-priest.