[Dark Heresy 02] - Innocence Proves Nothing

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  Combing their way across the chamber was a slow and frustrating task. An awful lot of detritus had accumulated at the bottom of the shaft over the centuries, and the Angelae had to pick their way through and around it, constantly alert for treacherous footing and jagged edges.

  “I’ve found something!” Jenie called, holding up the battered remains of a valise Keira recognised as having once contained most of Horst’s clothing, including a few items they’d recovered from Cuddy’s stall.

  “Well done,” she called encouragingly. “It shows we’re on the right track.”

  “It shows we’re out of our rutting minds,” Drake grumbled. “We’ll never find it among all this cack.”

  “Trust the Emperor, and He will guide your steps,” Keira quoted, refusing to be disheartened.

  The Guardsman shrugged. “Well, He might try guiding them a bit quicker, that’s all I’m saying.”

  Keira felt her hand flexing over her sword at the casual blasphemy, before pragmatism overrode the instinctive reaction. Drake was as pious as the next man, she knew, and not everyone was as pure in outlook as the Redemptionists. These days she wasn’t even sure if she was, uncomfortably aware of how many little compromises she’d had to make to get the job done. Then all her doubts were swept away, as the beam of her luminator picked out the unmistakable outline of the cogitator case they were looking for; if that wasn’t a clear sign of the Emperor’s favour, she didn’t know what was.

  “I’ve got it!” she yelled, keeping the precious box pinned in the circle of light, irrationally afraid that if she moved the luminator away from it the case would disappear.

  “Well spotted,” Horst said, hurrying as best he could through the hindering debris to join her, and Keira felt strangely cheered by the compliment. “Is it intact?”

  “Of course not,” Keira said. “But I’m not poking about in what’s left of it until Hybris has taken a look. You know how many wards and hexes he’s put in the thing.”

  “A wise precaution,” Vex said, stooping to examine the case. “Although I’m afraid none of the mechanisms remain functional.” He lifted a corner of the box carefully, and a cascade of small cogwheels and broken glass rattled against the floor. “It also appears that the machine-spirit has departed to the eternal files.” He made the sign of the cogwheel, and muttered a brief benediction in binary.

  “What about the manuscript?” Horst asked, and the techpriest lifted the lid, peering inside with an expression of hopeful expectation, which vanished as suddenly as a slamming door. “It’s gone,” he said flatly.

  Scintil VIII Void Station, Scintilla System

  247.993.M41

  The locator the Deathwatch Techmarine had given Quillem guided them to a small, unregarded access hatch in a rusting metal wall between an apothecary’s stall and a vendor of bushmeat, both shuttered for the slack period. Taking advantage of the cover the two ramshackle structures provided, Malven extended a mechadendrite from beneath his swaddling jacket and probed the latch, muttering a brief incantation in binary as he did so. As always, the twittering chant set Quillem’s teeth on edge, but it was over mercifully quickly, and seemed to have done the trick; a moment later the slab of metal swung outwards, squealing a little on hinges unoiled for decades.

  “Ladies first.” Carys stuck out a hand to check his movement, then grinned, eager as always to see what someone was taking such pains to keep her away from. “Don’t want to set off any alarms now, do we?”

  “No, we don’t,” Quillem agreed, stepping aside to let her go first. This was what he’d brought her along for, after all. The service conduit ought to be clear of any unpleasant surprises, but if it wasn’t, she’d be the one most likely to spot them. Carys scooted inside, then the interrogator ducked his head and followed her.

  The narrow duct was even more cramped and claustrophobic than he’d imagined, and he felt a sudden flare of panic, which he fought down after a moment. The others were looking to him for leadership, and he couldn’t show any sign of weakness in front of them. The passage was tight and airless, his shoulders brushing the walls on either side, and he couldn’t straighten up either, forced into a low crouch by the closeness of the ceiling. Conscious that the others would be hard on his heels, he shuffled awkwardly along, until he collided with something warm and yielding.

  “Oi! You might at least buy me dinner first,” Carys said, clearly amused at his clumsiness. Shuffling and slithering sounds behind him told Quillem that the rest of the team was following, and a moment later a resonant boom of metal against metal confirmed that Malven had closed the hatch. Somehow that seemed to intensify the darkness, and the air grew thicker, permeated with the choking odours of dust, rust and rodent droppings.

  “Hang on a minute,” Carys said, scrabbling for something in her jacket judging by the sound, and a moment later Quillem found himself squinting as she kindled a small luminator. It wasn’t all that bright, but in contrast to the pitch darkness surrounding them it seemed more than adequate, and after a moment his eyes adjusted enough to take advantage of the glow it cast.

  Now he could see his surroundings, the conduit turned out to be every bit as unpleasant as his imagination had pictured it, patches of damp raising blisters of rust on floor, walls and ceiling, which broke off whenever anyone brushed against them; shattered, they sublimed into tiny flakes of brown dust, which scratched at his eyes and left his mouth coated with the bitter taste of old, dried blood. In places the traces of moisture were more pronounced, and Quillem’s knees and elbows were soon coated with thick ochre slime, where small puddles had coagulated into an offensive porridge of corrosion, mould and faeces.

  “That’s better,” Carys said, attaching the tiny light to an elasticated headband, which left her hands free, and setting off at a rapid crawl, apparently undeterred by the filth littering the floor.

  “I liked it better when we were navigating by smell,” Rufio said, from somewhere behind Quillem. “It’s like a hrud’s nest in here.”

  “Well, if you see one, feel free to poke it with your stick,” Quillem said, trying to sound relaxed, and sticking as close to the thief as he could. Rufio was perfectly trustworthy, of course, or Inquisitor Grynner would never have recruited him, but he always felt more comfortable where he could see the man.

  “Shamefully neglected,” Malven said from the rear of the column. “These power relays haven’t been sanctified in a generation.”

  “You mean those box things?” Rufio asked, ducking past something the size and shape of a rust-shrouded rucksack. His attention called to the periodic protrusions in the walls as something other than just an irritating obstacle, Quillem examined the next one as he passed it: an anonymous metal chest, to which a few flakes of paint still clung, connected to its fellows by a cable as thick as his forearm.

  “I do,” Malven confirmed, as incapable as most of his brethren of recognising when his leg was being pulled. “This must be part of the energy distribution grid for the old docking bays.”

  “So don’t mess about with anything,” Quillem added, unnecessarily, trying to keep as far from the cables as he could. If anything went wrong down here, they’d be lucky if the inquisitor even found their ashes.

  “Bit of quiet back there, if you think you could manage it,” Carys said, a hint of irritation entering her voice. “Sound carries a long way in these ducts, and I’d rather not let the heretics know we’re coming.” She waited a moment, apparently anticipating some kind of argument, then resumed her progress, muttering under her breath. “Mum was right. Never work with amateurs…”

  After that they moved on in relative silence for a while, punctuated only by their ragged breathing, and the scraping of cloth against metal. Just as Quillem was beginning to wonder if they’d ever reach their objective, Carys turned, holding up a hand.

  “Wait,” she whispered, so quietly Quillem barely heard her; he glanced back, and relayed the message, just in time to prevent Rufio from colliding with him. Judging by
the short burst of murmured profanity which followed a moment later, the assassin hadn’t been quite so quick to inform Arken of the unexpected stop.

  “What is it?” Quillem breathed, moving a little closer, and trying to peer over the woman’s shoulder.

  “Motion sensor. Set into the ceiling, where you’d be most likely to miss it crawling along like this.” She glanced up, the luminator attached to her headband illuminating a crudely welded metal box about the size of a data-slate.

  “Unsanctified work,” the techpriest said, a faint edge of distaste forcing itself into his voice, despite his best efforts to filter his utterances of emotional content. “Put together by some heretical dabbler.”

  “I don’t care who built it; what does it do?” Quillem asked.

  “It senses motion,” Carys told him, accurately but unhelpfully. “In this case ours. Don’t worry, I know how to deal with it.”

  “That would be a matter for a properly sanctified acolyte of the Omnissiah,” Malven objected.

  “Except you can’t get to it,” Carys pointed out in a whisper.

  “If it’s unhallowed, I don’t see that it matters who deactivates it,” Quillem said.

  “Its sanctity isn’t the issue,” Malven said. “The correct incantations…” He broke off as Carys extracted a small aerosol from her jacket, and sprayed the box, paying particular attention to a tiny aperture in the underside. A moment later, choking fumes began to fill the narrow tunnel. The techpriest suppressed a surprisingly delicate cough. “But I suppose that might work too.”

  “What in the Emperor’s name is that stuff?” Quillem asked, his eyes streaming.

  Carys shrugged, and returned the spray to her pocket. “Molecular acid. Dissolves pretty much anything. Don’t get it mixed up with your breath freshener.”

  “And don’t get dripped on,” Quillem counselled, as they resumed their progress past the slowly melting booby trap.

  “At least we know they’ve definitely got something to hide now,” Carys said, sounding positively cheerful at the prospect. “No point putting alarms down a hole like this otherwise…” She broke off, the light she carried picking out a ladder ahead of them in the darkness. “I think this is it.” Before Quillem could stop her she’d swarmed up it, vanishing into the shadows above them.

  Quillem followed, relieved to be able to stand at last, and found himself climbing a narrow shaft a little more than twice his own height. At the top of the ladder was a corridor large enough to stand upright in, and he stretched his back gratefully, glancing round at their surroundings while he waited for the rest of the team to join them.

  “Look at this,” Carys whispered, the light from her luminator flickering around the passageway. At first Quillem wasn’t sure what she meant, seeing little apart from the greater headroom that was any different from the conduit they’d crawled along so laboriously, then it suddenly hit him. The floor was almost clear of detritus, the coating of filth hard-packed by the passage of innumerable feet.

  “Rufio.” Quillem gestured to the assassin as he stepped from the ladder. “Scout down that way, see where it goes.” He had no need to explain any further; the feral worlder’s tracking skills would already have told him everything he’d just deduced with a single glance. Rufio nodded, and loped off into the darkness, his jungle-honed senses evidently not needing anything so crude as a luminator to assist them.

  Arken clambered up the ladder a moment later, glancing around with an air of distraction, which Quillem found vaguely disquieting, as he first set foot in the corridor.

  “Are you all right?” he asked the psyker in an undertone. So far as he knew Arken didn’t suffer from claustrophobia, but it was surprising what hidden weaknesses would sometimes emerge under stress.

  “I’m not sure,” Arken replied. “I’m sensing some kind of residue here. It’s… disturbing.”

  “What sort of residue?” Quillem asked, fighting the urge to draw his bolt pistol. If the seer was uncomfortable, that meant there was probably warpcraft going on somewhere in the vicinity, or there had been recently enough for the fabric of reality to still be feeling the bruises. “Something xenos?”

  Arken shook his head. “Human, I think. Elation and madness and hatred, all tainted with the stench of the warp.” He looked directly at Quillem. “Something very bad was here, not too long ago. Hellishly powerful in the aggregate, but fragmented, divided.” He shrugged. “Sorry, that’s probably not making a whole lot of sense.”

  “We’ll find out what it is before we leave,” Quillem assured him, with more confidence than he felt.

  Arken shrugged again. “I’m not sure I want to,” he admitted.

  Before Quillem could reply, the techpriest joined them, glancing around the corridor with his habitual neutral expression. “Are we orientated?” he enquired dryly.

  “We are,” Carys assured him, leading the way along the passage, in the opposite direction to the one taken by Rufio a few moments before. “Just a few score metres down here.”

  Her voice had dropped to a barely audible murmur, and Quillem had to strain his ears to make out the words, but he wasn’t about to chide her for that; they were almost on top of their objective now, and caution was paramount. “Spread out,” he instructed the others, almost as quietly. “Let Carys go first.”

  The call was a good one; almost as soon as he’d finished speaking, the woman held up a hand, motioning her companions to stay back. Once again she plied her bottle of acid, grimacing as the fumes tainted the air around her, then gestured the rest of the party forwards.

  “Another alarm?” Quillem asked, when he got close enough to speak to her in an undertone.

  Carys shook her head. “Booby trap this time. Directional mines in the walls. Anyone they don’t know who gets this close, they want dead.”

  “Life’s full of little disappointments,” Quillem told her, and the thief suppressed a chuckle.

  “Isn’t it just?” she said, her attention on the floor. “Thought so. Look.”

  Quillem followed the beam of her luminator. A few metres further on, the trampled floor gave way to the familiar scattering of loose-packed detritus they’d struggled through in the conduit. He nodded.

  “We’ve arrived,” he said quietly.

  “And not before time,” Carys agreed. She began to examine the walls on either side of the corridor, looking at them so closely Quillem began to wonder if she was about to get a smear of rust on her nose, to supplement her natural freckling. “Oh, this is class work. Very nice. You’d never realise it was there if you didn’t know where to look.” She shrugged. “Of course the footprints kind of give it away, but you can’t have everything.”

  Stooping to join her, Quillem was just able to discern a faint line in the patina of rust coating the walls. “Hidden panel, do you think?” he asked.

  “Does the Emperor sit on the Throne?” Carys asked rhetorically. She gestured to Malven. “Can you do anything with this? Preferably quietly?”

  “To the Omnissiah, all things are possible,” the techpriest said, moving up to join them; as he began to probe the slab of metal delicately with his mechadendrites, Quillem and Carys stepped back a pace to give him room to work. “Most elegant. Unsanctified, of course, but well crafted nevertheless.”

  “Which means?” Carys asked, with a hint of impatience.

  Malven turned his head to answer, although his metallic tentacles continued to work on the concealed panel as if under their own volition. “The locking mechanism is tied to a genecode scanner. Only six people are authorised to trip it. If anyone else makes the attempt, the alarm will be raised.”

  “Can you do anything about it?” Quillem asked, and Carys shook her head.

  “Nothing subtle. Sorry. Genecoders are a bitch to get past, unless you’ve got a sample from an authorised user. We’ll just have to blow the hatch, and go in shooting.” She shrugged. “Never a Deathwatch team around when you need one.”

  Quillem raised a hand to the
comm-bead in his ear, then let it fall. The Astartes squad were on standby, he knew, but there was no way he could call them in for backup. He pictured the sable-armoured giants double-timing it through the startled crowds in the thoroughfares of the lower arm, and shook his head. The news of their presence would be all over the station in moments, the system in days, and any hope of keeping the operation secret would be gone. The heretics they were hunting would go to ground, the Faxlignae would slip through their fingers, and the mysterious agenda their prey was pursuing might well come to fruition before they could pick up the trail again.

  “We’ll just have to do the best we can without them,” he said, beginning to reach for his bolt pistol.

  “Or we could trust our intellect,” Malven added dryly. A moment later the panel moved, with a barely perceptible click, and a faint current of cleaner air began to waft past their faces.

  “What did you do?” Quillem asked, trying not to smile at Carys’ expression of astonishment.

  “Interfaced directly with the control circuitry,” Malven said, withdrawing his mechadendrites. “I simply added my own genetic code to the file of authorised users.”

  “Smart,” Carys admitted, with a nod of the head. “If you ever feel like a change of career, I know a couple of vaults I could introduce you to.”

  “The Adeptus Mechanicus provides for all of my physical requirements,” Malven replied evenly, “which would render thievery a singularly pointless endeavour.”

  Not for the first time, Quillem found himself wondering if the techpriest was entirely devoid of a sense of humour, or possessed a dry and ready wit which few gave him credit for. There was no time to think about that now, though, as the unmistakable sound of footsteps could be heard hurrying along the tunnel behind them. Drawing his bolt pistol, he turned, then relaxed: it was Rufio, as he’d already surmised, but right now would be a bad time to take anything for granted.

  “Only me.” The assassin grinned at him, as if amused at the idea that Quillem would actually be able to harm him if he ever really wanted to, then tilted his head back down the tunnel. “The travelled area peters out about half a kilometre that way. I couldn’t get right to the end, because there was another of those box things Carys took out, but it looks as though there’s an exit of some kind about where the footprints end.”