[Dark Heresy 02] - Innocence Proves Nothing

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  Keira glanced up, colouring slightly as she registered Horst’s presence, before relaxing into an elaborately casual pose, while Horst fixed his gaze about a centimetre above her left shoulder. So, they were both still trying to pretend they didn’t feel the way they obviously did about one another; Drake suppressed a wry smile, and did his best to keep his mind on the business at hand, instead of the unintended entertainment.

  Keira nodded in agreement. “Charter vessels take far fewer hops, so we’ll be there in half the time.”

  “Something of an exaggeration,” Vex put in, glancing up from the sheaf of handwritten papers he’d recovered from the heretic cell they’d raided the previous night. The recaf he’d requested was cooling untouched beside him, Drake noticed, which hardly came as a surprise. “But we should still arrive ahead of them, if the warp currents are favourable.”

  “You’ve booked us on a Chartist ship?” Drake asked, his apprehension growing by the minute. There was only one such vessel in orbit he knew about, its arrival heralded by rumour and gossip as always.

  Horst nodded. “The Misericord.” He glanced at Drake, visibly surprised by the Guardsman’s reaction. “Is something the matter?”

  “It’s a jinx ship,” Drake said. “Brings bad luck wherever she goes.”

  Horst and Keira glanced at one another, finally making eye contact, then turned back to Drake with almost identical expressions of tolerant amusement.

  “It’s just a ship,” Keira said.

  “It’s more than that,” Drake insisted. “The last time she put in here we had the serf riots, and the time before that there was the mirepox outbreak, and back in 989 two ore barges collided in low orbit just after she came out of warp; they both went down, and one of them took out a whole village when it hit. The Misericord’s a jinx all right.”

  “And bad stuff never happens when she’s not in-system, does it?” Keira asked, sceptically.

  Drake shook his head. “Of course it does. But it’s always worse when she’s here. Look what happened this time, daemons and everything.”

  “He might just have a point,” Keira said slowly, her assurance beginning to waver a little.

  Horst shrugged. “Even if he does, we’re still boarding her. It’s our duty.” He smiled, a little thinly. “Besides, we’re on a mission for the Emperor. I can’t see Him letting a bit of bad luck get in our way.”

  “No, of course not,” Keira agreed, looking a great deal happier.

  Drake took another slug of his recaf, which had begun to grow tepid, and wished he could share her confidence.

  The Ursus Innare, the Warp,

  Date and Time Meaningless

  Vos Kyrlock stirred, and woke in hell. Quite literally, he thought fleetingly; beyond the walls of the cargo hold lay the realm of daemons and worse, the Dark Gods themselves, with nothing but the psychic shields and the sigils of warding etched into the battered hull to protect the fragile bubble of reality which cocooned them all. Every now and again the metal groaned, responding to the subtle stresses of the engines and the megatonnes of ore contained within the storage bins; every time it did so he started involuntarily, picturing some malign horror scrabbling at the hull, intent on devouring the souls inside.

  “You’ll drive yourself mad, thinking like that,” Elyra said, her pale face and blonde hair tinted orange by the flickering fires which lit the vast, shadowed space of the hold they occupied, supplementing the wan and erratic glow of the handful of luminators suspended from the ceiling, between the mouths of the chutes down which the ore had been dumped from the hangar bays above. At least the group of fugitives they’d joined had been allowed to disembark before the hatches in the floors of the shuttles had been opened, pitching their contents down into the darkness below; knowing the kind of people behind the smuggling racket, Kyrlock wouldn’t have been all that surprised if their human cargoes had been dispatched the same way. Beneath each chute the surrounding rock rose in ragged hillocks, obscuring the metal horizon of the bulkhead walls, but he could still see around a dozen other fires from here, each one marking the location of a different group of ragged and desperate refugees, united by little more than a greater distrust of all the rest. It was like a miniature version of the Tumble, the lawless sprawl of slag heaps where the underworlds of Icenholm and the Gorgonid transacted their business, he thought, gangers and all, just scooped up and swallowed whole by the starship.

  Then the import of Elyra’s words hit him, and he felt a shiver of pure dread rattle his bones. Elyra was a firestarter, not a telepath: if she could suddenly read his mind, the influence of the warp must be leaking in here somehow, changing her, changing them all…

  Elyra grinned, although in a manner Kyrlock found far from reassuring. “All I’m reading is your body language,” she said, a faint air of disdain suffusing the words. The persona she’d assumed in order to infiltrate the Shadow Franchise’s people-smuggling ring, and the rogue psyker underground which was using it for purposes of their own, was that of a self-centred sociopath; after years of service to the Inquisition, she wasn’t about to break that cover now with an inappropriate show of concern for someone else. This was the best she could do, given their chances of being overheard, and Kyrlock appreciated the subtle gesture. “I’ve seen it before in first-time warp hoppers, fretting about where they are and what’s out there.” She picked up a lump of shale, and threw it with sudden vigour, and surprising accuracy; its trajectory terminated with a rattle and a rodentine squeal, followed by panic-stricken scurrying in the surrounding darkness. “This is solid, and this is real, Vos. You’d do better worrying about the rockrats snacking on your toes while you’re asleep.”

  “Ew. Thanks for that cheerful thought.” Zusen, one of the trio of juvie wyrds travelling with them, sat up, and huddled her bedroll a little more tightly around herself. As usual she’d settled down to sleep close to Kyrlock, seeming to find his presence reassuring, and, as usual, the Guardsman tried to hide his unease at her proximity with a friendly smile. Elyra had made it perfectly clear that they needed to keep on the right side of the juvies to follow them through the next link in the chain, and find out who was offering rogue psykers a refuge; not just on Sepheris Secundus, but, potentially, across the entire sector.

  “You’re welcome,” Elyra said flatly.

  “It’s good advice,” Kyrlock said, grateful to have something else to focus on, even if it was just the skinny little wyrd who followed him around like a lost puppy. Not that he wouldn’t normally have enjoyed a young woman paying him so much attention, even if he did prefer them with a bit more meat on their bones; but he couldn’t shake the knowledge of what she was, even for a moment, and she flat out gave him the creeps. Elyra was a psyker too, of course, but she was sanctioned, her powers in the service of the Emperor, and he’d learned to trust her during the earlier stages of their mission together. “Better make sure you sleep with your boots on; although that won’t help against a pack of them. If you get swarmed, they can strip you to the bone in a matter of minutes.” He threw another chip of greasy shale on the fire, watching carefully until the heat sweated the pitch out, and it ignited, hissing gently. The fire was their lifeline. If it ever went out, the rockrats would move in, and he didn’t want to think about what that would mean.

  “I’m keeping my boots on anyway,” Zusen told him, appearing like a wan little ghost in the flickering half-light. “Put anything down around here and it’ll grow legs.” She turned her head, scanning the other fires suspiciously. A fight had just broken out near one of them, terminating abruptly as one of the participants grabbed a rock seconds before the other did, felling his opponent with a single blow. No one else in the group reacted at all as the victor resumed his place next to the flames, after a cursory rummage through his enemy’s pockets.

  “Very likely,” Elyra agreed, ostentatiously ignoring the spectacle. “Which is why Vos and I never sleep at the same time, and I keep my little friend here handy.” She lifted her backpack,
which was resting on her lap, just enough to reveal a glimpse of the laspistol inside, ready to be drawn in a heartbeat.

  “Me too,” Kyrlock agreed, with a nod towards the chainaxe and shotgun lying next to his own pack, which he’d been using as a pillow. He didn’t think any of the other refugees would dare attempt to rob them, after seeing how well armed and proficient at violence both he and Elyra were, but it would be foolish to take that for granted. Desperation could drive people to pretty much anything, in his experience.

  “Then I’ll turn in for a while,” Elyra said, unrolling her own blanket. Trosk and Ven, the other two members of their party, were still snoring faintly, to Kyrlock’s unspoken relief; it was bad enough having to look after one of the wyrds on his own, never mind all three of them. “Wake me if anything interesting happens.”

  “You can count on it,” Kyrlock assured her. After a while the psyker’s breathing became more regular.

  “Vos,” Zusen said quietly, moving a little closer, “it’s all right to be scared. Everyone is. Even her.” The young wyrd stared at Elyra, her expression unreadable. “She just hides it well, like you do.”

  “I’ll just have to take your word for that,” Kyrlock said. Zusen was an empath, able to sense people’s emotions. He forced himself to smile, fighting the impulse to move as far away from her as possible. “But I don’t think you need your gift to know how I feel about being here.”

  “You’d be surprised.” A faint, fleeting smile appeared on the girl’s face, then vanished like clearing mist. “You hide how you’re feeling very well.” Then, to Kyrlock’s heartfelt relief, she turned away, and began rummaging in her rucksack for a compressed protein bar. “We’re getting short of these.”

  “Then we’ll have to eat less.” Kyrlock took a length of twine from his pocket, and began to knot it deftly. “Unless I get lucky with this.”

  “What is it?” Zusen asked, tilting her head for a better view.

  “A snare.” Kyrlock turned his head a little, pinpointing the nearest source of scrabbling in the rocks surrounding them. It was growing louder even as they spoke. “Rockrats’ll be out in droves soon.”

  “You can’t eat rats,” Zusen said, smiling shyly, then her face twisted with revulsion as she realised he was perfectly serious. “That’s disgusting!”

  “So’s starving,” Kyrlock said. “I’ve tried both, and believe me, rat stew’s preferable.” He stood, before honesty compelled him to add, “Just about.”

  “What do you mean they’ll be out soon?” Zusen asked after a moment, and Kyrlock shrugged, glancing at the motionless body in the distance.

  “They’ll be after the bait,” he said, not waiting to hear her reaction to that.

  Two

  High Orbit, Sepheris Secundus

  109.993.M41

  Despite his amusement at Drake’s obvious disquiet on the short hop to the Misericord’s parking orbit, Horst found himself staring out of the shuttle’s viewport at the approaching leviathan with a faint sense of foreboding, which he tried hard to convince himself was merely the onset of the void sickness which plagued him almost every time he was forced to travel outside an atmosphere. It was easy to see why the vessel had acquired so sinister a reputation; at first sight it looked more like a collection of scrap than a functioning starship, a misshapen assemblage of smaller hulls, jammed and fused together to no discernible pattern. It looked diseased, Horst thought, the bulges of airlocks and auspex arrays speckling the surface like pustules, or fungal growths. There even seemed to be a small asteroid or two embedded somewhere among the mess. The sheer size of it had been a shock too; even the bulk ore carriers keeping apprehensive station with it in the crowded skies above Sepheris Secundus were dwarfed in comparison, vessels the size of battleships seeming no larger than the shuttle they rode in.

  He was no stranger to warp travel, but in all his years of errantry on behalf of the Inquisition, and the Adeptus Arbites before that, he’d never seen a spacecraft so huge, or so ramshackle in appearance.

  “Fascinating,” Vex said, craning his head a little to gain a better view of the looming monstrosity over his colleague’s intervening shoulder. That section looks like part of a Swallow-class courier boat, although the drive assemblies are clearly from a much larger vessel. “The originals appear to be mounted on that pylon over there, although I’d have expected them to shear off by now; Omnissiah alone knows how they compensate for the lateral stresses.”

  “They probably don’t,” Drake said gloomily. “Bits fall off it all the time. Ask Barda if you don’t believe me.”

  As if on cue, the young pilot’s voice was suddenly audible over the comm-bead in Horst’s ear. “Sorry to be taking the long way round, but I’m trying to avoid the debris cloud,” he said. Once again, Horst noted, he dispensed with the elaborate honorific most Secundan hirelings would have found as natural as breathing; clearly his active involvement in last night’s heretic hunt had left him feeling more like a full member of the team than a mere employee.

  “Debris field?” Keira asked, a faint note of concern in her voice, and Horst felt a brief flare of irritation. It was hardly Drake’s fault that the young assassin had seemed unusually distracted of late, but his comments about the so-called jinx ship this morning hadn’t exactly been helpful in getting her focused again. She was dressed in her cameleoline bodyglove, which she tended to favour whenever she was expecting trouble, and had slipped a kirtle over the skintight garment to conceal her sword and collection of throwing knives. She’d chosen a muted green, which echoed the colour of her eyes, and the bodyglove was mimicking it precisely, imparting an air of sober respectability to her ensemble, which was undercut somewhat by the crimson bandana she insisted on sporting as a visible sign of her faith. Horst knew she’d found the Secundan prohibition on red clothing particularly irksome, and had resumed wearing the colour of the Redemption openly at the earliest opportunity.

  “It’s no problem,” Barda assured her, his voice suffused with confidence. “Just bits of garbage and other detritus drifting in the wake of the ship. Most of the really large ones have a collection like this following them around. Some of it’s been here for centuries, probably.”

  “Will it prevent us from docking?” Drake asked, trying a little too hard not to sound hopeful.

  “Of course not,” Barda replied, an edge of amusement creeping into his voice. “I just need to angle the vectors right.”

  “Thanks for telling us,” Horst said, as the shuttle banked a few degrees to avoid a lump of frozen organic matter the size of a groundcar, presumably flushed from the sanitary tanks decades before. A few score metres away he caught a glimpse of something metallic, then what looked uncomfortably like a desiccated corpse, and returned his attention to the interior of the tiny utility craft, seeking some distraction from his rising nausea. He turned to Vex. “If this stuff really is that old, it must have followed the vessel through the warp,” he said thoughtfully.

  “Well, of course,” the techpriest replied, as evenly as ever. “The theology of interstellar travel isn’t exactly my area of expertise, but the Geller field of a vessel this size must extend for quite some considerable distance. Anything in the immediate vicinity would be carried into the warp along with it, and regurgitated back into existence at the other end.”

  “Bits falling off,” Drake said gloomily. “Just like I said.”

  * * *

  “Let me get this straight,” Barda said, glancing up briefly from the controls to meet the reflection of Horst’s eyes in the armourcrys in front of him. He hadn’t been too surprised to see the leader of the Angelae team enter the narrow flight deck a few moments before: like any member of the Cloudwalkers’ Guild, the young pilot was used to clients butting in, wanting to see what was going on, or to be reassured that their lives and property were in safe hands. What had astonished the young pilot was the nature of Horst’s errand. “When you say you want to extend my contract, you mean you want me to come to Scintilla
with you?”

  “I realise it’s a lot to ask,” Horst said. “If you come with us, you’ll be cutting yourself off from everyone and everything you’ve ever known. Even if you do return here one day, nothing will ever be the same again.” His eyes regarded the pilot seriously from beneath his fringe of dark hair, his sober mien at odds with the brightly coloured clothing he’d put on in order to better look the part of a Scintillan merchant returning home after concluding whatever business had brought him to Sepheris Secundus. His turquoise cravat contrasted vividly with his orange silk shirt, and the magenta brocade jacket covering it, which, Barda suspected, concealed his bolt pistol.

  “Why would I want to?” Barda asked, with honest astonishment. He was well aware that his restricted upbringing among the guild had left him ill-equipped for any kind of life outside the limited confines of his birth caste, something which, like most Secundans, he’d never thought to question; until fate, or the hand of the Emperor, had led Inquisitor Finurbi to requisition his services. Now, the safe, settled tenor of his existence had been disturbed, beyond any hope of righting, and he found himself eager to seize the new possibilities his association with the Angelae were opening up. “The guild will still want a formal enquiry into the loss of my Aquila, and if I’m found culpable, that’s a bond debt I’ll never be able to repay.”

  “It’s hardly your fault we got shot down by heretics,” Horst said. “You were in the service of the Inquisition at the time, and our people on Sepheris Secundus can testify to that. Captain Malakai will make sure you’ve got nothing to worry about from that quarter, I can assure you.” He shrugged. “If you’d rather stay here, I can vox your guildmaster before we break orbit, and tell him to consider your services retained by the Inquisition indefinitely. Other teams will be active on Sepheris Secundus from time to time, and they’ll be as grateful as we are for the services of such an exceptional pilot.”