[Caiphas Cain 03] The Traitor's hand

by Sandy Mitchell

  'Thank you, Jurgen,' I said, clambering out, unexpectedly grateful for the amasec I'd drunk earlier after all. 'That was very resourceful.'

  'Couldn't have you missing your appointment, sir,' he said cheerfully.

  Further conversation seemed superfluous, so I left him to deal with the praetors who seemed to have plucked up the courage to approach by now, and went inside.

  'Commissar.' For a moment I failed to recognise the young praetor who stood inside the cool marble atrium beyond the heavy wooden doors, clearly waiting for me, then the nagging sense of familiarity clicked. Young Kolbe. With his helmet off the resemblance to his father was quite striking, although his build was taller and slimmer. 'It's good to see you again.'

  'I'm pleased to find you so well,' I said.

  Kolbe inclined his head in the same manner as his father. 'Your medic did an excellent job. I'm supposed to be on light duties, but under the circumstances…' his gesture took in the bustle surrounding us. Uniformed praetors were hurrying in all directions, many of them leading prisoners who were either cursing loudly or protesting their innocence according to temperament, and I even caught a glimpse of a couple of black-bodygloved members of the Arbites itself.

  'Things do seem a little hectic,' I said as he escorted me across the echoing space towards the bank of elevators under a vast and tasteless mural of the Emperor scourging the unrighteous.

  'We've been rounding up every low-life in Skitterfall who might have a connection to the heretics,' he told me cheerfully. 'And then there's the usual unrest you get in a civil emergency.' We side-stepped a redemptionist preacher and his congregation, still happily bawling his lungs out about the apocalypse about to descend on the unworthy in general and the riot squads who'd waded in to prevent them making an early start on the vice district in particular, despite their escort's frequent and enthusiastic application of shock batons. 'So arbitrator Hekwyn thought it might be a good idea to send me along to meet you.'

  'Good idea,' I said, as we gained the sanctuary of the elevators and the relative shelter of the large stone eagles flanking them. Young Kolbe punched a couple of runes on one, and the doors clanked open, the brass filigree forming a pattern of interlocking eagles mirroring their large stone cousins.

  'Sub-basement seventeen,' Kolbe said, looking up and drawing his own baton as the Redemptionist party collided noisily and violently with a group of joygirls on their way to an adjacent holding pen. 'If you'll excuse me?'

  'By all means,' I assured him, grateful that here at least was a mess I didn't have to worry about sorting out, and watching him wade into the fracas with every sign of enjoyment. The doors creaked closed as I pressed the icon he'd indicated, and I began my descent into the lowest level of the building.

  After about thirty seconds of tedium, made even worse by a scratchy recording of Death to the Deviant apparently performed by tone-deaf ratlings with nose flutes, the doors rattled open to reveal a plain anteroom with a scuffed carpet and an arbitrator in full body armour behind a desk pointing a riot gun in my direction.

  'Commissar Cain,' I told her as casually as I could while staring down a gun barrel I could have comfortably fitted my thumb inside. 'I'm expected.'

  'Commissar.' She put the clumsy weapon down and did something to a keypad on the desk. She must have had a comm-bead inside her helmet, because she nodded at something I couldn't hear, and waved me to a seat in the corner. 'The arbitrator senioris will be with you shortly.' I'd heard that one before and was beginning to think I should have brought something to read, but I'd barely had time to sit down before a thick steel door behind her swung open and Hekwyn emerged.

  'Glad you could make it,' he greeted me, holding out a data-slate in his new augmetic hand. He seemed to be getting used to it now, judging distances as easily as he did with his original one. I took the slate, skimming through Slablard's record as quickly as I could. It was similar enough to the military charge sheets I was intimately familiar with for the job to take little time. By the time I reached the end we were halfway along a plain corridor, finished in unpainted rockcrete, in which blank metal doors were set at intervals, identical save for the numbers stencilled on them. The air was close, smelling of old sweat, bodily fluids and the unmistakable tang of acute fear which no one familiar with an eldar reiver slave pit can ever forget. 'He's in here.'

  The door looked no different from any of the others around us, but Hekwyn seemed positive enough, tapping a six digit code into the keypad too rapidly for me to follow. The door opened, releasing the smell of flatulence, and I motioned the arbitrator through ahead of me politely.

  I was pretty sure our smuggler wouldn't have the wit or the determination to be waiting in ambush, in the hope of overpowering whoever next came through the door and making a run for it, but there was no point in taking any chances.[56] As it turned out, there wasn't much chance of that anyway, as he was quite firmly shackled to a chair in the middle of the chamber, and didn't strike me as the kind to chew his own arm off to escape. (Which I suppose pretty much ruled him out as Chaos cult material.)

  I wasn't quite sure what I'd expected him to look like, but I knew I'd expected something a little more impressive. He was a small man with watery eyes which refused to make contact with whoever was talking to him and thinning brown hair; the net result was uncannily like a startled rodent.

  'I want to see a legal representative,' he blustered as soon as we appeared. 'You can't just keep me here indefinitely.'

  'What we want and what we get in life are seldom the same,' Hekwyn said regretfully.

  Slablard squirmed. 'I want to talk to someone in authority.'

  'That would be me,' Hekwyn said, stepping further into the room. Slablard's eyes widened at the sight of his uniform, then positively bulged when he saw mine. 'I have overall responsibility for the operation of the Arbites on Adumbria.' He paused a moment, giving this time to sink in, then indicated me. 'This is Commissar Cain, who you may also have heard of. I've invited him to sit in on our conversation as a matter of courtesy, since acts of treason also fall under military jurisdiction in a time of emergency.'

  'Treason?' Slablard's voice rose an octave, sweat stains appearing under the arms of his coarse blue shirt as though someone had turned on a tap. 'I just moved a few crates!'

  'Containing weapons subsequently used to attack His Majesty's Guardsmen,' I said as sternly as I could. 'And that's treason in my book.' Slablard looked desperately from one of us to the other, finally fixing on Hekwyn as the slightly less intimidating of the two.

  'I didn't know,' he whined. 'How could I?'

  'Perhaps if you'd asked?' Hekwyn suggested mildly.

  The little man wilted visibly. 'You don't know these people. They're dangerous. You don't want to cross them, you get what I'm saying?'

  'These people are heretics,' I said. 'Worshippers of the Ruinous Powers, sent here ahead of the invasion fleet to undermine our defences against them.' I leaned forward, fixing him with my best commissarial glare, which had made generals turn pale before now. 'Have you any idea how much harm you've done?'

  'They told me it was just black market ore!' Slablard was practically in tears.

  'You have to believe me, I'd never have dealt with them if I'd known they were heretics.'

  'It's not me you have to convince,' I told him. 'It's the Emperor himself. You'd better just pray that your soul hasn't been corrupted by your association with the agents of darkness, or you'll be damned for eternity.' All claptrap, of course, but I delivered it as fervently as Beije would have done and felt quite pleased with my acting ability.

  'That's hardly our judgement to make,' Hekwyn reminded me, as if he actually cared. I began to suspect that after years of data shuffling in the upper echelons he was relishing the chance to indulge in some hands-on arbitration. 'Once the threat of Chaos has been neutralised it will be for the Inquisition to determine who is or isn't tainted by the Dark Powers.'

  That did it, as I'd been pretty sure it wo
uld. At the mention of the Inquisition Slablard broke down in hysterics, which threatened to go on for so long I eventually sacrificed part of the contents of my hip flask just to get him to calm down enough to talk. It was a shocking waste of good amasec even if his palate was refined enough to tell the difference (which I doubted), but there was plenty more back in my suite, and I had no doubt that Jurgen could find another bottle once that was gone.

  I stepped gingerly round the puddle of urine spreading across the rockcrete floor, finally divining the purpose of the drain in the corner, and resumed my casual-but-dangerous pose leaning against the door.

  'These people,' I began. 'Who are they, and where do we find them?'

  TEN

  'Competence on the battlefield is a myth. The side which screws up next to last wins, it's as simple as that.'

  - Lord General Zyvan

  THE ONLY REAL problem we had with Slablard in the end was shutting him up. I downloaded the list of names, dates and locations he'd given us to the hololith in the conference suite with the air of a conjurer at a children's party producing an egg from an ear.

  'If anything, we've got a little too much to go on now,' I said. Zyvan and the senior Kolbe nodded, taking it all in as it scrolled up the display. Vinzand, I noticed, was absent, presumably because this was an operational matter and nothing he needed to be concerned with. Well, that suited me; the less debate there was before we took action the better, so far as I was concerned.

  'My people should be able to pick up any of these individuals who slip though the net,' Hekwyn said. 'But under the circumstances we're a little stretched to be mounting simultaneous raids on half a dozen different addresses.'

  'I see your point,' Zyvan replied, having evidently been keeping abreast of the situation in the city.[57]He turned to Kolbe. 'Perhaps the PDF could oblige us with the necessary manpower.'

  He would rather have used Guardsmen I was sure, but we were so widely scattered it would have taken hours to bring sufficient troopers back to the city, and if the heretics noticed Slablard had disappeared in the meantime they'd be long gone by the time we were ready to deploy. The Valhallan tanks were already in place, of course, but I tried to picture a troop of Leman Russes moving stealthily through the crowded streets and had to suppress a smile; we might just as well vox ahead and let the cultists know we were coming.

  'Of course.' Kolbe nodded, all calm efficiency, clearly confident in his troops' ability to deal with whatever awaited them. I hoped he was right. 'I can have a couple of companies at your disposal within minutes.'

  'I'm sure that will be sufficient,' Zyvan said, straight-faced. That would give us practically two full platoons for each objective, which was as sure-fire a recipe for utter confusion as I could imagine; that number of troopers would be getting in each other's way more often than engaging the enemy. 'But perhaps we should assign personnel to the operations once we've determined conditions on the ground.'

  That took a while, as you'd imagine, but at last we'd worked out the optimum troop deployment for each of the objectives and Kolbe had issued the orders. I stretched, glanced at my chronograph, and found to my surprise that it was still a few moments short of noon.

  'Well, that appears to be that,' I said, as Hekwyn departed for the Arbites building and the two generals stood, preparing to walk down to Zyvan's command post.

  The lord general nodded. 'I suppose you must be eager to return to your regiment,' he said.

  I thought of the bone-chilling cold of Glacier Peak and the endless tedium of the train journey before I reached it, and nodded with every appearance of enthusiasm I could muster.

  'My place is with them,' I agreed, unable to find a plausible reason to delay my departure. One crumb of consolation was that I should be able to hang around here long enough to grab a decent lunch before I went, though.

  Zyvan smiled, sure he could read my real thoughts. 'But you'd rather hang on here and see what the raids turn up, eh? After all, if it wasn't for you we wouldn't even have these leads.'

  'I'm sure Arbitrator Hekwyn's people would have found them just as quickly,' I said, trying not to look too eager. If he meant what I thought he did, it looked as though I could hang around here in the warm, enjoying every comfort the place had to offer, for at least another day after all; maybe even longer if I drew out the process of appearing to evaluate the intelligence we gathered.

  'I'm sure they would,' Zyvan said, sounding about as convinced of that as I had.

  'If you don't mind delaying your departure for a while, it occurs to me things might go a little smoother this afternoon if we have a representative of the Commissariat along on the operation.' He shot a sidelong glance at Kolbe. 'No reflection on your people of course. It would just save us the necessity of forwarding a formal report to them afterwards.'

  'By all means,' Kolbe said, no doubt happier at the prospect of his troopers' performance being scrutinised by me, rather than some rear-echelon data-pusher with the benefit of hindsight.

  'It would be an honour to serve with your command,' I told him. 'Albeit briefly.'

  If I'd known what I was about to get into, of course, my answer would have been very different, and I'd practically have run for the blasted train, but all I could see at the time was the prospect of another couple of days of good food and comfortable bedding.

  So it was that, an hour or so later, I found myself rattling down a city boulevard in the back of the Salamander, half a dozen Chimeras behind me and my comm-bead full of excited chatter from PDF troopers all keyed up about their first taste of action.

  'Vox discipline,' I reminded them, trying to make allowances, and the extraneous traffic died with gratifying speed. 'We're passing the outer marker.'

  After some consideration, I'd attached myself to the group going after a house in the suburbs owned by one of the people Slablard had implicated, a woman called Kyria Sejwek, who Hekwyn claimed had tenuous links to a number of organised crime figures and probably ran a stable of high-rent joygirls. She also had a very good lawyer and connections to several members of the Council of Claimants, which meant that so far the Arbites had been unable to accumulate sufficient evidence for an arrest.

  Taking on a handful of bodyguards and a house full of women seemed a lot safer than going in against the warehouse where the weapons had ended up, which was no doubt heavily guarded and stuffed with explosives to boot, although I hadn't shared those reasons for selecting this particular objective with the generals, of course.

  'This is the obvious target,' I'd said, highlighting the warehouse on the holomap, and giving every appearance of being eager to storm the place single-handed. A few other icons glowed, picking out the secondary targets, and I pointed at the Sejwek house with just the right degree of a puzzled frown. 'But something about this place doesn't feel right.'

  'How do you mean?' Kolbe asked obligingly, and I shrugged.

  'I can't quite put my finger on it. But this woman's record - highly placed, intimations of vice - I'm probably reading too much into it, but…'

  'It could be the centre of the Slaaneshi cult in the city,' Zyvan said, taking the bait.

  I continued to look dubious. 'It's possible of course. But the warehouse is definitely our most promising lead.'

  'Nevertheless,' the lord general said, the idea I'd planted clearly taking root in his mind, 'it's a possibility we can't afford to ignore. Perhaps you'd better accompany that platoon instead.'

  'It might be wise,' Kolbe agreed. 'If there's evidence of sorcery there, the men would find your presence extremely reassuring.'

  'Well,' I said, with every sign of reluctance. 'If you're both convinced of the need…'

  By the time I'd finished protesting, of course, they were practically insisting I raided what I had no doubt was nothing more sinister than a high-class bordello, and I gave in with as much good grace as I could simulate.

  'That must be it,' Jurgen said, indicating a high brick wall running along the edge of the pavement. It cer
tainly seemed to be; the other houses, large rambling structures, their windows glowing warmly, were set back from the road behind lawns and shrubberies designed to emphasise the scale and ostentation of the buildings they contained. Only this one was sealed away behind what was beginning to look like a fortification, and my palms began to tingle with the intimation that perhaps this wasn't going to be the pushover I'd expected. Then again, given what we knew of her character and probable activities, Sejwek no doubt had a lot to hide in any case.

  'It is,' I confirmed, after a surreptitious glance at the mapslate just to make sure.

  I activated the comm-bead. 'This is it,' I broadcast over the platoon tacnet, so everyone could hear me.[58]'I don't have to tell you how important this is, for Adumbria and for the Imperium. I hope I also don't need to tell you that General Kolbe and I have complete confidence in you all, and know you won't let us or the Emperor down. Onward to victory!' It was one of the pre-battle speeches I'd been reciting by rote since the day I left the schola, but the PDF troopers had never heard it before and it did the job. Far better than I expected, as things turned out.

  'You heard the commissar.' That was the platoon commander, an excitable young man called Nallion who looked barely old enough to shave, and who wore his officer's cap at what he no doubt thought was a rakish angle. 'Deploy to your positions!'

  After a chorus of acknowledgements from the various squad leaders, the Chimeras split up, Nallion's command vehicle and first squad halting in front of the main gates (tasteless wroughtiron scrollwork with a hint of drooping lilies and far too much gilt) while the rest broke left and right, tearing up the lawns and flattening the shrubberies of the no-doubt outraged neighbours. Jurgen and I kept up with the left flank, which dropped a Chimera by the side wall before crashing through a boundary hedge to link up with another troop transport which had approached from the other side.