[Dark Heresy 02] - Innocence Proves Nothing

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  “I’m happy for you,” Drake said, even more determined not to try the stew. “Shame about the neighbours, though.”

  Simeon nodded. “They just appeared out of nowhere, a short while ago. Now they’re spreading. Time we pulled back to a higher level.”

  “How’s that possible?” Keira asked. “We’re aboard a star-ship. No one can just appear on it.”

  “There was an impact a while back,” Simeon said. “Near one of the sealed levels, left over from a debris strike about a century ago. Some of the old welds broke, and a couple of hatchways sprung.” He indicated one of the other men. “Jared was going to take a look after the Riggers had finished patching the new damage, but then the muties started showing up, so he lost the taste for exploration.”

  “Damn right,” Jared said. “The smell was bad enough down there, never mind the creatures.”

  “Smell?” Horst asked, and Jared nodded.

  “It stank. Hardly surprising, as the whole deck had been sealed off for over a hundred years, but I wasn’t keen to go down there, let me tell you. Probably just as well as it turned out. I wouldn’t want to run into a whole tribe of those things.”

  “Could you show me?” Vex asked, and produced his data-slate. Jared nodded, and went into a huddle with the techpriest, poring over the map together in muttered undertones.

  “What about the wyrd?” Keira asked, her hand falling to the hilt of her sword, as it always did at the thought of an enemy of the Imperium to be purged.

  Simeon shrugged. “Never seen him before.” He looked troubled. “But if he really can control those things, you’re going to find it hard to get to him.” There hadn’t been much point in hiding the fact that they were Inquisition agents, as Jenie was bound to blurt it out sooner or later, so Horst had explained who they were on the short walk back to the Malcontents’ camp.

  “We’ll find a way,” Horst said. He glanced up, surprised, as a drop of water fell on his face. “When you said there was water down here, I didn’t think you meant that it rains.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Simeon said. “There are spaces in the outhulls so high that water condenses near the ceiling, and falls back to the floor. But that’s just a leak from up there.” He pointed above his head, and Drake raised the luminator.

  As he’d expected, there was another open portal in the ceiling, where a pressure door had once sealed a corridor, and the beam hazed away into what seemed like infinity. Just before it petered out, though, he thought he could discern the shape of a heavy bulkhead door, like many others they’d passed, sealing the end of the shaft. As he peered upwards, trying to resolve more detail, another drop of water fell, landing on his cheek, and he flinched.

  Gradually a nascent suspicion began to grow in the back of his mind, and he called across to Vex. “Hybris. Is that the lake we crossed up there, or have I got turned around again?”

  “No, you’re quite correct,” the techpriest assured him, after a cursory glance at the data-slate display, and resumed his conversation with Jared.

  “Lovely,” Drake said, trying not to picture the thick slab of metal giving way under the pressure of the tonnes of water above it.

  “They said I can stay,” Jenie said, settling beside him with a metal bowl of whatever the cooking pot had contained. She blew on it, and began eating, with the curious expression of someone determined to like it whatever the taste.

  “Well, I guess that’s what you want,” Drake said, trying not to sound surly, and Keira drifted over to join them. “You certainly went to enough trouble to get here.”

  “Would you mind explaining why?” Keira added, sounding genuinely curious. “There aren’t many people who’d risk lying to Inquisition acolytes to get what they wanted.”

  “There aren’t many people as desperate as I was,” Jenie said. “I was a Gatherer of Diversity. Believe me, you’ve no idea what that’s like.”

  “No, I haven’t,” Keira agreed evenly.

  Drake snorted. “I might have known even the joygirls had a fancy name on this jinx barge. Everyone else seems to.”

  “Is that all you think I am?” Jenie asked, then shrugged. “Of course, that’s what beyonders are supposed to believe, so I suppose that makes me good at my job.” She chewed moodily for a moment. “The ship’s an enclosed community. We know all too well what a stagnant gene pool leads to. Which is why we have the Gatherers.”

  “You mean you’re supposed to…” Drake broke off, incredulous.

  “Let the beyonders treat you like a piece of meat, get pregnant, and refresh the gene pool,” Jenie confirmed bitterly. “And as soon as you’ve given birth, do the same thing again. Boys get adopted by the other castes, and the girls are condemned to be Gatherers in turn.” She rubbed her stomach absently. “Well, not my daughter. She’s going to have some choice about her life.”

  “I see.” Running around in the dark eating rat stew didn’t seem like much of a choice to Drake, but he could see why Jenie might think so. To his astonishment, Keira was gazing at the girl with something like respect.

  “The Emperor truly walks with you,” Keira said. “To risk so much to cleanse your soul…” Then she stood abruptly, and was gone.

  “What did she mean by that?” Drake asked, and Horst shrugged, having listened to the end of the conversation.

  “Some kind of Redemptionist thing,” he said. “They’re very big on turning your back on sin, whatever the cost. And she’d think Jenie here was sin on legs.”

  “There’s only one sinner I’m interested in,” Drake said. “And he’s out there laughing at us. How do we bring down a wyrd we can’t shoot?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Horst said. “And I think there just might be a way.”

  Scintil VIII Void Station, Scintilla System

  247.993.M41

  Light flooded the hidden passageway, bright as the luminators normally found throughout the station, and Quillem blinked his eyes clear of the sudden glare. No alarms blared, and no one shouted; after a moment he emerged cautiously into the warehouse.

  His first reaction was one of surprise. The luminators in the ceiling blazed down on an area roughly the size of a scrumball pitch, but instead of the stacked crates full of merchandise or contraband he’d been expecting, the vast space was all but empty. A few shipping containers stood off to one side, next to a staircase leading up to an office area overlooking the main floor of the warehouse from a mezzanine gallery, but apart from that there was no sign at all that cargo ever came through here.

  “Someone’s been living here,” Rufio said, stating the obvious.

  Quillem nodded. “Rather a lot of someones,” he agreed. The floor was covered in bedrolls, arranged in neat rows, although their rumpled appearance indicated that they’d been abandoned in haste, and that their occupants hadn’t expected to return. He glanced around warily, aware that the lack of cover in the cavernous space was leaving them dangerously exposed. “We need to know who, and we need to know why.”

  “No personal effects,” Carys reported, rifling through a few of the nearest bedrolls with the speed of a lifetime’s practice.

  “One hundred and forty-seven,” Malven suddenly remarked at Quillem’s elbow, and the interrogator turned to look at him.

  “One hundred and forty-seven what?” he asked. Arken was the only member of the team not to have emerged from the hidden panel yet, and he glanced back at the rectangle of darkness with renewed unease.

  “Individuals quartered here,” the techpriest elucidated. “That’s only the most likely number, of course; there are always variables, but there are a hundred and fifty bedrolls, of which three appear to be undisturbed, which leads me to conclude…”

  “I see, thank you.” Quillem cut him off, and took a step towards the concealed entrance. It would have been all but invisible from this side too, he thought, which meant that Voyle and his friends had probably been exploiting the breach in the station’s security for a very long time. Certainly t
he precautions they’d observed on their way in spoke of meticulous planning, and a sophistication far beyond most Shadow Franchise operations, which were generally aimed at making as much money as possible before the authorities noticed and moved in to close them down.

  Before he could reach the rectangle of darkness, though, Arken appeared, stepping into the echoing chamber as though being forced to wade through a cesspool. He looked around, his face paler than ever. “Madness and death,” he mumbled, gripping Quillem’s arm so tightly that the interrogator wasn’t surprised to find a bruise there the next time he removed his shirt.

  “Arken.” Quillem spoke clearly and calmly. “I need you to focus. Can you feel anything like the wraithbone?”

  “No.” The psyker regained a measure of composure, with an effort Quillem could see etched on his face. “Too much residue. Like in the tunnel.”

  “You mean all these people were psykers?” Carys’ voice was incredulous. “How’s that possible?”

  “I don’t know.” Arken shook his head. “But that’s how it feels.”

  Quillem felt a momentary flare of primordial terror, then reason reasserted itself. Even if that many wyrds had somehow been able to congregate here, they were long gone. The priority now was to find out where, and there was an obvious place to start looking. “Carys, with me,” he said. “Let’s check out the office.”

  “I’ll take a look at the cargo containers,” Rufio said, beginning to move away.

  Malven took out a data-slate. “I’ll try communing with the genecode reader,” he said. “With the right incantations, it might divulge the identities of the people it’s set to recognise.”

  “Sounds good,” Quillem agreed, with another glance at Arken. “Will you be all right?”

  “Of course,” the seer said, although Quillem was far from convinced of that. Since there was nothing he could do about it anyway, he turned, and began to follow Carys up the echoing metal stairs towards the office.

  “It’s locked,” she informed him cheerfully as he joined her outside the door. She took a couple of picks from a pouch on her belt, and began to work on the mechanism with every sign of enjoyment. Leaving her to it, Quillem leaned on the railing, looking down at the floor of the warehouse below.

  Rufio glanced up from the nearest cargo container, and waved. “Empty,” he said, using his comm-bead rather than raising his voice. “But it used to hold food.” He moved on to the next, then recoiled hastily. “The other end of the process. Portable sanitary units. Definitely not empty.”

  “Almost there,” Carys murmured at his elbow, then straightened up with a satisfied smile. “Done.” She pulled the door open, but stayed outside, examining the frame carefully. “Ooh, thought so. Haven’t seen one of those in a while.” She extracted a small pair of pliers from her tool-belt, and began to work on something Quillem couldn’t see. “Your Mister Voyle has a nasty mind.”

  “What is it?” Quillem asked.

  “Microwire, stretched across the door. So thin you can hardly see it. But if you walk straight in, it’ll cut you in half.” She closed the jaws of the pliers carefully, and something parted with a barely audible twang. An expression of consternation crossed her face. “Sorry, boss. That was dumb.”

  “What was?” Quillem asked, feeling his stomach knot. She only ever called him that when something was badly wrong.

  “We should just have ducked under; I felt a mild shock when I cut it.”

  No need to ask what that meant: if the wire had been carrying a current, it was a trap within a trap, and in disposing of the obvious threat, Carys had just tripped an alarm. Quillem tapped his comm-bead. “Everyone up here now!” No one argued, knowing him well enough to recognise the urgency in his voice, and he hurried to the railing of the balcony to see what was going on.

  Within seconds, it seemed, the main door of the warehouse was cranking open, a slab of metal about three metres high and four wide, and he cracked off a couple of bolts at the widening gap, hoping to dissuade whoever was coming to investigate long enough to allow the others to reach safety. The only real refuge would be the office, he thought, trying not to wonder if there were any other booby traps up here they didn’t have time to locate. Arken and Malven began to run, while Rufio settled himself behind the cargo containers, and drew his blowpipe.

  To Quillem’s surprise, instead of quailing behind the door as he’d expected, the guards began to return fire with expert precision, and he was forced to duck back behind the railing of the mezzanine, grateful for the metal mesh between the upright bars. A las-bolt scorched the air, close enough for him to smell the ozone, and something clattered against the protective palisade like a handful of coins falling on a resonant surface, accompanied by a sinister hissing sound.

  Recognising it, Quillem’s blood turned cold. “They’ve got…” he started to vox, but before he could complete the warning, Arken suddenly jerked, as though he’d run into a wall, and then fell sideways, his torso reduced to a rain of shredded meat fragments.

  “An eldar weapon,” Malven confirmed, sounding more intrigued than frightened. A faint nimbus of blue lightning started to play around him, as his augmetic enhancements switched to battle mode; in a moment, Quillem knew, he’d unleash an energy bolt of devastating power at their attackers. “Fortunately, I can repel the discs with an internal magnetic…”

  Before he could finish the sentence a pair of plasma bolts struck him almost simultaneously, the energy discharge fusing every augmetic component in his body, while reducing the flesh parts to charred and smoking rain. He was dead before he hit the decking, where his mechadendrites clattered like so much scrap, barely audible over the echoes of the gunfire.

  “Hound one to kennel,” Quillem said, tapping his comm-bead again, and trying to come to terms with the barely conceivable. “We’re under attack with xenos weaponry.” Armoured figures were fanning out across the floor of the warehouse now, eight, ten, a dozen, laying down covering fire as they advanced with the precision of Imperial Guardsmen. None were armoured or equipped precisely the same, but they all moved with professional skill. As well as the eldar and tau weapons which had felled his companions, Quillem noted, the majority were equipped with Imperial-pattern lasguns, and one seemed to be carrying a kroot rifle, its long barrel surmounted by the blade of a primitive polearm unmistakable among the rest. “Extraction paramount, repeat, paramount.” Nothing else he could do now except wait for rescue, and hope they could survive long enough for it to arrive.

  “Emperor’s Justice responding,” the resonant voice of Ullen, the Deathwatch Techmarine, replied a moment later, and Quillem risked popping up to crack off a few more bolts at the advancing mercenaries. He hit one, the man’s flak armour no protection against the explosive projectiles, and watched him fall with grim satisfaction. It wouldn’t bring Arken or Malven back, but the act of vengeance made him feel better anyway.

  “Rufio’s still down there!” Carys shouted, grabbing him by the shoulder as he ducked back, just ahead of a blizzard of return fire. “We’ve got to help him!”

  “Don’t even think about it,” the assassin advised. Glancing down, Quillem saw him fitting a janus thorn into the end of his blowpipe. “I’m going to take out their leader. That might knock them back a bit.”

  “Good luck,” Quillem said. “The Emperor protects.”

  “He’ll have to,” Rufio said, sounding as amused as he always did. “You think it’s the one in the funny hat?” One of the mercenaries was wearing an eldar helmet and torso armour, although he was clearly human, moving without a trace of the lithe grace of the xenos breed.

  “That’d be my guess,” Quillem said, unable to imagine how a human had been able to get hold of such things in the first place, let alone turn them to his purposes. He turned to Carys. “Cover him. Give him the best chance we can.”

  “Right.” The woman nodded grimly, drawing her autopistol, and sending a blizzard of unaimed fire down into the floor of the warehouse. She didn’t
manage to hit anything, so far as Quillem could tell, but the bullets whined and ricocheted from the metal floor with a satisfying amount of noise, which distracted the mercenaries nicely, especially after a couple of his pistol bolts detonated as well.

  Rufio’s aim was as true as it always was; Quillem saw the deadly splinter flick through the air, striking the eldar-costumed leader precisely at the vulnerable point where helmet and torso armour met, slipping easily through the minuscule gap. Then, to his astonishment, the dart stopped moving, hanging in the air for a second before withdrawing, turning and retracing its path as quickly as it had come.

  “Psyker!” Carys gasped, but the warning came too late: even before she’d finished speaking, the janus thorn had returned precisely to its point of origin, speeding back down the blowpipe still held between Rufio’s lips. Despite the astonished assassin’s phenomenal reflexes, he had no time to react; he toppled backwards, dead before he hit the metal floor.

  Quillem felt a spasm of dread as the helmeted figure turned to look up at him, its posture one of disdainful amusement. The blizzard of incoming fire intensified, and Quillem crawled into the relative safety of the office, nudging Carys ahead of him. Las and plasma bolts scorched and dented the metal walls, shattering the observation windows, showering them with shards of glass which lodged painfully in hair and skin.

  “I’m sorry,” Carys said, as the firestorm abated, and running feet began to clatter against the metal stairs. “This is all my fault.”

  “No,” Quillem said, taking aim at the door, “it’s theirs. And they’re going to pay. The inquisitor will see to that, even if we don’t.”

  A shadow moved in the frame of the doorway, and his finger tightened on the trigger; but before he could pull it, the air thickened around him. The familiar wrenching sensation of a teleport field swept across his senses, as reality blurred and twisted around them, and the enemy disappeared in a welcome haze of nausea.

  The Misericord, the Warp,

  Date and Time Meaningless