[Dark Heresy 02] - Innocence Proves Nothing

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  Quillem nodded, recalling the plans he’d studied on the screen of his data-slate. As he’d expected, that would put the other end of the clandestine corridor they’d infiltrated somewhere among the docking bays, but precisely where would have to be determined at a later date. Right now they had more pressing concerns to worry about.

  “Good work,” he told Rufio, then nodded at Malven. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  The bolt pistol was a comforting weight in his hand, and he flicked the safety off, glancing at the others as he did so. Arken said nothing, but followed his lead, drawing the laspistol he normally favoured, his face set. Rufio smiled, disdaining anything so crude as a firearm, but tapped the blowpipe tucked into his belt with a fingertip, reassuring himself that he knew precisely where it was, and could ready it for use in an instant. Carys, too, preferred to leave her hands free, but opened her jacket, revealing a bolstered autopistol among the tools of her trade arrayed around her belt.

  “Now would seem an appropriate moment,” the techpriest said, and opened the panel.

  The Misericord, the Warp,

  Date and Time Meaningless

  “Gone?” Horst echoed, unwilling to believe it. After travelling so far, and overcoming so many obstacles, he refused to believe that they could be cheated of their goal so close to its completion. “Gone where?”

  “I lack sufficient information to offer an opinion,” Vex said, sounding as disgruntled about the fact as a techpriest would ever admit to feeling.

  “Could it have been scattered by the impact?” Drake asked, and Vex shook his head.

  “No. The case retained sufficient structural integrity to have contained the papers. The only plausible inference is that someone removed them after it fell.”

  “Verren,” Keira said, and Horst nodded, reluctantly coming to the same conclusion. “We should have asked him a few more questions while we had the chance.”

  “Well, it’s too late for that now,” Horst said, wishing he’d been a little less precipitate in ordering her to tidy up that particular loose end.

  “It can’t have been him,” Jenie offered, a little hesitantly, and Horst turned to look at her, trying to conceal his eagerness for her answer.

  “Why not?” he asked, and Jenie shrugged.

  “He’s a sot, but he isn’t stupid. He knows who you are, and that you’re after that box. If he’d found it first, he would have tried to sell you whatever was inside.”

  “That makes sense,” Drake agreed.

  “Which raises the obvious question of who took it, and where they are now,” Vex concluded.

  “Another Receiver, probably,” Jenie said, and shrugged. “The only trouble with that is finding out which one. There are hundreds, looking for salvage all over the ship.”

  “Which means there aren’t that many working this particular section of the outhulls,” Horst said. “We’ll contact the guild officially when we get back, and find out who’s been down here since the ship left Sepheris Secundus.”

  “Should narrow it down,” Keira agreed. “What’s our fastest way back?”

  “The way we came, I suppose,” Jenie said, with a sidelong glance at Vex, who was consulting his data-slate.

  After a moment, the techpriest nodded. “Technically, that’s true, although if we make a small diversion to take advantage of the open passageway we passed, we can avoid having to climb the cable in the shaft we descended.”

  “That gets my vote,” Drake declared, and Keira nodded her agreement.

  “Mine too,” she said, with an amused glance at Jenie.

  “Then that’s the way we’ll go,” Horst declared, noticing the expression of relief on the face of their guide. He might have made some kind of remark about it, but before he could say anything a metallic clatter echoed through the gloom.

  “We’ve got company,” Keira said, swinging her luminator in the direction of the sound, and Drake followed suit. Shadows were moving among the debris, roughly human-sized, but scurrying like rodents, avoiding the light. “At least a dozen.”

  Horst drew his bolt pistol, and peered through the gloom, trying to get a good look at one of the creatures.

  “More over there,” Drake called, sweeping his own light to a different section of the hold, in response to a fresh outburst of scuffling.

  This time he caught one of the skulkers in the open, and Horst stared at it in revulsion. It was vaguely human in size and shape, but its jaw was overlarge, and studded with sharp, pointed teeth. Its fingers ended in long, curved talons, but it carried a club fashioned from a length of pipe, to which vicious, rusting spikes had been fixed. It quailed back from the light, shrieking, and Drake shot it, taking it cleanly through the head.

  Instantly, more of the abominations appeared, swarming all over the still-spasming corpse, slashing and tearing at it with their own fangs and claws in an insensate feeding frenzy. None were exactly alike, Horst noted, some sporting fur or scales, but all shared their unfortunate fellow’s resemblance to humanity.

  “Mutants,” Keira said, revulsion curdling her voice, and began to draw her sword. Horst forestalled her.

  “Pull back,” he ordered, “and find some cover. If they swarm us, we’ll never be able to hold off that many.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Keira said, but she replaced the blade in its sheath, and readied her crossbow instead.

  “Works for me,” Drake agreed, and turned to Jenie. “Which way?”

  “I don’t know!” The girl’s voice was shrill with panic, and she glanced around frantically, like a small animal with its leg in a trap. “I’ve really no idea!”

  “Well you’d better get one fast,” Keira said, planting a crossbow bolt neatly in the eye of a mutant a little bolder than the rest, which had begun to lope towards them, “unless you’re planning to end up as indigestion.” Her victim pitched backwards, becoming a meal for its fellows as rapidly as the first had done.

  Horst took out a couple more from the main group with his bolt pistol, noting with rising apprehension that fewer of the bestial abhumans stopped to feast on the corpses of the fallen, and that they seemed to be losing their fear of the light. It was only a matter of time before the whole pack descended, and they could never hope to fight them all, out in the open like this. He rounded on the terrified joygirl. “Keira’s right,” he said. “You’re supposed to be a guide, so guide us. We need to go somewhere defensible.”

  “I really don’t know!” Jenie was almost hysterical by now. “I’m sorry, I lied, all right? I’ve never been deeper than the Fringes in my life!”

  “Rutting great,” Drake said, laying down a burst of suppressive fire, which forced a handful of mutants to duck back behind a pile of scrap. “Should have known better than to trust a whore in the first place.”

  “We’ll discuss this later,” Horst said, hoping they’d get the chance to. He turned to Vex, who had abandoned the data-slate for his autopistol. “Hybris? Any recommendations?”

  “None for the present,” the techpriest said, sending a couple of heavy-calibre slugs after Drake’s las-bolts. They ricocheted, whining off into the dark, and eliciting a howl of inhuman agony from behind a pile of detritus. “The original doorways are some twenty metres above our heads, which rather precludes their use as a refuge, and the mutants appear to be using all the service ducts which give access directly to this level.”

  “In other words, we’re swiven,” Drake said, firing again.

  “It would certainly appear so,” Vex agreed.

  “This way!” an unfamiliar voice yelled, and something shattered on the metal floor, spreading a pool of flame. The mutants howled, drawing back from it, and two more of the makeshift incendiary devices followed, filling the cavernous space with flickering orange light. Horst turned in the direction they’d come from, to see a rope descending from one of the open doorways high above their heads. “It’s your only chance!”

  It was hard to argue with that assessment, and he gestured towards
it. “Keira, you go first.” She glanced at him curiously, probably wondering if the unresolved issues between them were clouding his judgement, and he explained hastily. “We don’t know who’s up there, and I know I can count on you to make sure they play nice.”

  “They will,” she assured him, and swarmed upwards with a rapidity and grace which no one else he’d ever met could have matched. As she disappeared, the mutants howled again, in rage and disappointment, and a few of them began to edge around the puddles of burning liquid, beginning to lose their fear of the flames.

  “Hybris,” Horst said, discouraging them with a couple of well-placed pistol bolts. The explosive tips turned chunks of the scrap they were hiding behind into shards of shrapnel, which bit deep into abhuman flesh, and he was rewarded with more shrieks and howls. “You’re next.” The techpriest’s autopistol was adding the least to their firepower, and keeping him safe was their only chance of finding their way back to the Beyonder’s Hostelry.

  “Your turn,” Drake said, discouraging another rush with a burst of automatic fire as Vex began to climb the rope. “I can keep them suppressed a lot better with this than you can with a pistol.”

  “True,” Horst said, “but I’m in command. I go last.”

  “I’m not arguing,” Drake said, failing to conceal his relief. “I’ll set up again as soon as I get to the top, and cover you as best I can from there.”

  “Then you’d better not hang about,” Horst said. The Guardsman sprinted for the rope, slinging his lasgun as he did so, and began to swarm his way up, adrenaline more than compensating for his lack of technique.

  “What about me?” Jenie asked anxiously, as a trio of mutants charged forwards, drool spraying from their distended jaws, flourishing makeshift weapons as they came. Horst felled them with a blizzard of pistol bolts, the misshapen bodies bursting apart in a shower of blood and viscera. The weapon’s clip was almost empty by now, and he knew with a stone-cold certainty that he’d never be able to reload it before the next charge brought him down. “For Throne’s sake, you can’t just leave me to them!”

  “I can,” Horst said, “but I’m not going to. We still have things to discuss.” He smiled, without humour. “I can always throw you back if I don’t like your answers.”

  “Grab hold!” Drake called, from the doorway above their heads. “We’ll pull you up!” He opened fire with the lasgun again, single shots this time, picking off the boldest of the mutants.

  “You heard him,” Horst said, emptying the rest of the clip as the main body of the pack began to surge forward, the prospect of losing the last of their prey apparently overcoming their fear of the Angelae’s weapons. Holstering the gun, he leapt for the rope, and began climbing.

  With a yelp of fear, Jenie grabbed the line beneath him, and Horst felt it sag a little as it took her weight; then they were both rising, hauled upwards by whoever had lowered it in the first place. It had been some time since Horst had had to make a climb like this, but he kicked off instinctively, using his legs to accelerate his progress, all but running up the wall.

  Seeing their prey eluding them, the whole pack ran forwards, screaming and howling like the damned, but it wasn’t that which sent a shudder of pure horror down Horst’s spine; interspersed with the bestial ululation, he could clearly discern phrases in some form of debased but recognisable Gothic. “Meat run, kill it quick!”

  “Get them off me!” Jenie screamed, and he glanced down to see one of the largest of the mutants leap high enough to grab hold of her leg. For a moment, it seemed, its weight would be enough to break her grip, and send the girl crashing to a hideous death, but she’d taken the precaution of wrapping a loop of rope around her upper arm. It constricted, making her scream again, and she kicked out frantically with her other foot, catching the debased creature in the muzzle. It howled with rage and pain, but didn’t let go, and, to his horror, Horst felt the rope slipping backwards under the added weight of the furious creature.

  Then he felt rather than heard a faint hiss of displaced air passing close to his face, and the mutant abruptly fell backwards, a crossbow bolt embedded in its throat. The rope began to rise again, and Horst glanced upwards to see Keira’s grinning face looking down at him.

  A moment later she reached out a hand, which he took gratefully, and helped him up to the metal floor of the passageway.

  “Thanks,” Horst said, suddenly wanting to say a great deal more, but realising this was hardly the time or the place to say it.

  “You’re welcome,” Keira said, maintaining the pressure for another fraction of a second, before turning to drag Jenie over the edge of the drop.

  Horst looked around, taking in the half-dozen people on the other end of the rope. They were a strange group, dressed, for the most part, in the patched and faded remnants of guild liveries, no two alike. Two were women and four were men, although whether that fact was significant, he had no idea, and all were carrying bundles or bags.

  The man at the front of the group stepped forwards, clearly the leader, judging by his air of calm authority. His hair was grey, but he carried himself with the ease of a man much younger than his apparent age, and unlike his male companions, his beard was neatly trimmed. He smiled at Horst. “I thought we’d lost you there for a moment,” he said, his voice the one which had shouted the warning.

  “I thought you had too,” Horst said. He glanced again at the motley group behind the man. “I take it you’re the Malcontents?”

  “Some of them,” the man said. “My name’s Simeon, formerly of the Suturer’s Parliament, so, as you can imagine, I see most of the rest from time to time.”

  “You’re really Malcontents?” Jenie was staring at them in something like awe. “Emperor be praised, I came down here to find you.”

  “And the rest of you?” Simeon asked, taking in the weapons the Angelae carried in a single pointed glance.

  “Something else entirely,” Horst said, with a glare at the joygirl. “But this is hardly the time to discuss it.”

  “Of course not,” Simeon agreed, relaxing a little, and Horst moved away to join Drake, who was sweeping the floor of the upended hold below with the luminator attached to his lasgun. The mutants were still congregated beneath them, glaring up with angry eyes, and Horst wasn’t quite able to suppress a reflexive shudder as he looked down at the seething mass of malformed flesh.

  “There’s something else down there,” Drake said, swinging the beam in a methodical search pattern. “Hanging back from the pack.”

  “Are you sure?” Horst asked. That didn’t make much sense that he could see, but by now he trusted Drake’s instincts almost as much as he did Keira’s or his own. “It could just have been a rat or something moving around.”

  “Don’t think so,” Drake said. “It was too large for that.” Then he tensed, as a human figure, in the garishly patterned clothing Horst had grown so used to seeing on Sepheris Secundus, walked calmly into the circle of light, and bowed mockingly. The Guardsman pulled the trigger, but the las-bolt hit a stanchion millimetres from the fop’s head as he turned, almost imperceptibly, and the following two rounds missed by an equally improbable margin as the man moved again. “Holy Throne, it’s him!”

  “The psyker who escaped in the Gallery?” Horst asked, and Drake nodded.

  “I’d recognise the warp-touched bastard anywhere.”

  “It’s unquestionably him,” Vex confirmed. As he joined Horst and Drake at the mouth of the tunnel, the distant figure waved to the techpriest as though to an old friend.

  “I’m glad you’ve still got it with you!” he called. “My pets won’t have so far to come to collect it!” Then he turned away, apparently oblivious to the las-bolts striking sparks all around him.

  As the man disappeared, the mutants at the foot of the wall fell silent, and began to drift away after him. A moment or two later the hold was as quiet as it had been when the Angelae first arrived.

  “Well,” Keira said, folding her crossbow a
nd replacing it on her thigh, “at least we know what happened to the manuscript. The wyrd must have found it.”

  “Which would explain how he knew the artefact was on board,” Vex agreed. His voice grew speculative. “Perhaps he can tell us what it is, and where it came from, when the interrogators at the Tricorn put him to the question.”

  “We’ll have to catch him first,” Drake said. He looked from one of his colleagues to the other. “Any ideas about that?”

  Ten

  The Misericord, the Warp,

  Date and Time Meaningless

  “It’s not much,” Simeon said, as he conducted the Angelae into another echoing chamber roughly the size of the one they’d just left, “but it’s home.” He shrugged, and smiled ruefully. “At least for now.”

  “You move around a lot, then?” Drake asked, taking in the temporary nature of the outlaws’ camp. Sheets of fabric had been erected to create small areas of privacy, and a small stove, burning the same volatile liquid which the Malcontents used in their incendiary bombs, had been set up between them to provide warmth, light and heat. A pan was bubbling away on it, and he regarded it suspiciously, wondering whether the mutants were the only ones down here who’d reverted to cannibalism.

  “All the groups do,” one of the women said, glancing up from the pot, after stirring it with a spoon which looked as if it had been crudely fashioned from something else. “Resources are limited down here. Stay too long in one place and they run out.”

  “That’s true,” Simeon said. He indicated their surroundings with an expansive gesture. “This is better than most; there’s water and algae here, and the rats are abundant.”