[Dark Heresy 02] - Innocence Proves Nothing

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  Jared hadn’t been exaggerating about the smell, Keira thought. She’d found her way into the sealed section with little difficulty, following the directions the techpriest and the Malcontent had given her, moving with all the stealth her training had made her capable of. She’d only encountered a couple of the mutants so far, dispatching them swiftly and silently, and she was confident that her intrusion into their territory remained undetected. She tapped the comm-bead in her ear.

  “The passageway’s clear,” she voxed, keeping her voice as low as she could. That was something of an exaggeration; whatever catastrophe had led to this part of the ship being cut off for so long had more than left its mark, but at least up and down here corresponded to the direction of gravity again. She ducked under a fallen ceiling beam, which loomed up out of the gloom surrounding her as a patch of greater darkness, and straightened, listening for any telltale signs of movement. “Which way now?”

  “Straight on for about ten metres,” Vex said, his voice attenuated slightly by the intervening kilotonnes of metal. “You should come to a crossway, leading straight into the heart of the section.”

  “And the muties’ camp, probably,” Horst added. “There’s a large open space up ahead, probably a cargo hold or a hangar bay.” He hesitated a moment. “So be careful.”

  “Count on it,” Keira assured him, pleasantly surprised by his concern. She turned her head a little, almost relishing the darkness enshrouding her. She’d enhanced her natural night vision with eyedrops from her Assassinorum operative’s kit, which had dilated her pupils completely, and was able to pick out her route well enough to move with complete assurance, despite the lack of any source of light beyond the occasional splash of phosphorescent mould or the status displays of long-forgotten devices, which continued to signal wanly for the attention of crewmen long since crumbled into dust. The luminators her companions had relied on during their descent seemed crude by comparison, and would simply have betrayed her presence to her quarry in any case.

  A few more cautious steps took her to the passageway, and she paused, feeling a faint current of air on her face. The stench intensified, carried on the breeze, and she suppressed the gag reflex without conscious thought. There were sounds too, the curious admixture of guttural speech and more bestial noises she’d heard picking her way past mutant camps on her scouting expeditions into the Shatters beneath the Gorgonid mine on Sepheris Secundus. She was on the right track.

  The corridor here was broader and wider than the one she’d just left, and she was able to pick up her pace a little. She dropped her hand to the hilt of her sword, making sure it was loose in the scabbard, and that her throwing knives were ready for use. The sounds were getting louder, and she was beginning to see her surroundings a little more clearly, a diffuse glow up ahead growing steadily brighter with every step.

  “I’m getting close,” she reported, instinctively moving towards the nearest wall, where the shadows were thickest.

  “Acknowledged,” Horst said, sounding more tense than she was, and she melted into the patch of darkness around the jamb of an open doorway at the end of the corridor, her cameleoline bodyglove making her all but invisible as she scouted the space beyond.

  She’d expected to find herself at floor level, but this entrance opened directly onto a mezzanine gallery, floored with metal mesh, running the full width of the hold. A staircase descended just beyond the doorway, matched by another at the far end, and the wide platform of a cargo lift was visible halfway between them; it had obviously not moved in decades, and by now had rusted immovably into place, transmuting itself into a balcony which projected out over the huge space beyond.

  Keira ventured cautiously onto the metal walkway, placing her feet carefully to minimise the noise. She need hardly have bothered, though, the racket of the mutants below more than sufficient to drown out any sounds she might make. There were far more of them than the group which had attacked the Angelae; by her initial reckoning there must have been at least three score of the abhuman monstrosities shuffling around the vast space, tending to the flickering fires which fitfully lit it, hammering at pieces of metal to form crude tools or weapons, or rutting bestially wherever they happened to be. Horst’s guess that this was the site of their camp was clearly accurate, as a few sheets of fabric had been draped over makeshift supports to form tents, although, since the debased creatures clearly had no idea of decorum or privacy, she couldn’t see why any of them had bothered.

  There was no sign of her quarry, though, and she moved further along the gallery, trying for a better vantage point. As she did so, a pattern came into view on one of the crude tents, which had evidently once been a banner of some kind. She activated her vox.

  “The DeVayne Incorporation’s symbol is a hand, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “It is,” Vex confirmed. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because it’s in the hold here.” Now she knew what to look for, she quickly made out the same logo in several other places around the cavernous space, stencilled onto cargo containers long ago broken into and stripped of whatever they’d held.

  “Interesting,” Vex replied, his voice thoughtful. “Their ancestors must have been thralls in transit, cut off by the earlier impact, and forgotten about when the section was sealed. After several generations exposed to the warp…”

  Before he could elaborate further, Keira caught sight of her quarry at last, walking away from one of the ramshackle pavilions.

  “Target in sight,” she said crisply.

  That could be a problem. If the wyrd was living down there, it would be almost impossible for her to reach the tent to search for the precious manuscript without being spotted by the creatures surrounding it.

  Keira held her position, and observed the man analytically, as she’d been trained to do. He was walking purposefully, towards the stairs at the far end of the gallery, but she was confident that her cameleoline body-glove and the shadows enfolding her would be enough to evade detection, and remained perfectly still. The human eye registered movement above all else, and, as she knew from experience, it was possible to escape notice even in the open if you simply remained immobile.

  After a moment or two of watching her quarry, she was able to discount the possibility of the manuscript being anywhere in the camp with a fair degree of certainty. The man moved easily among the mutants, but his body language was redolent of disdain and contempt; clearly he was willing to use them, but despised them as much as any other pureblooded human would. Keira smiled coldly, relishing the irony of one kind of abomination looking down on another. That being so, he was highly unlikely to be sleeping among them, and she doubted that he’d leave anything as precious as the manuscript where it could be casually despoiled by bestial hands while his back was turned.

  Which made the whole thing very simple. Follow him back to his own lair, find where the document was hidden, and take it. Preferably killing him in the process. She had no doubt that she could eliminate him easily, despite his apparent ability to predict attacks, but if she couldn’t, there was always Mordechai’s plan to fall back on.

  The psyker began to climb the stairs at the far end of the gallery, and Keira waited until he’d reached the top and disappeared through the open doorway at the far end before making her move. As the darkness swallowed him, the glow of a luminator flickered into life, and she breathed a silent prayer of thanks to the Emperor; he could hardly have made it easier for her if he’d tried.

  Eleven

  The Misericord, the Warp,

  Date and Time Meaningless

  “Are you sure you can do it?” Horst asked, and Vex nodded, trying not to seem irked at the interruption. He’d had a great deal of practice in dealing with unmodified humans in the years since he’d left the ordered existence of the Mechanicus shrine, for what he’d intended to be no more than a brief sabbatical, so he was able to reply without a trace of irritation inflecting his voice.

  “I believe so,” he said, wonderin
g why Horst seemed to think the answer might have changed at all in the five minutes and twenty-seven seconds since the last time he’d asked the same question. “It should be a simple matter to determine the correct codes.” He had absolutely no doubt of his ability to do so; the only problematic variables lay in the physical condition of the ship itself, which he was unable to predict with any degree of certainty, and whether Keira would be able to carry out her part of the plan. On balance, he was inclined to be optimistic about that, as the young assassin was commendably efficient, and seemed able to survive most things the galaxy threw at her. Given the data to hand, he would assess her chances of escaping death on this occasion at around sixty-seven per cent, and sustaining serious injury at no more than forty.

  Perhaps it would be tactful to keep these particular musings to himself for the time being, however. Horst seemed particularly concerned about the young assassin of late, for reasons he couldn’t quite fathom, and verbalising them would probably distract the team leader unnecessarily.

  “We’re going to be making rather a mess of your camping ground, I’m afraid,” Horst said, turning to Simeon, and the Malcontent shrugged.

  “We’ll manage,” he said. The small group of nomads were packed up and ready to leave, which Vex could hardly fault them for under the circumstances, carrying their possessions on their backs, or slung on poles which two of the men carried between them. Jenie seemed as laden as the others, though considerably more awkward under her burden, and Vex found himself wondering if she was finding her new life quite as congenial as she’d imagined. “Everything changes eventually, except for the Emperor.”

  “Right,” Jared agreed. He glanced around the echoing chamber, as if fixing the image of it in his mind for the last time. “By the time we come back, you might even have improved it.”

  “There’ll definitely be fewer mutants down here to worry about,” Drake promised him, cradling his lasgun, and Vex nodded his agreement.

  “None at all, if everything goes as well as we hope,” he said.

  Keira followed the glow of the luminator through the warren of passageways, keeping well back from her quarry; the light he carried was visible for quite a distance, reflecting eerily from the grime-encrusted metal walls, so she tried to stay at least two turns behind him. Nevertheless, on a couple of occasions, when the corridors down which he walked were particularly long, she caught a fleeting glimpse of the man, striding out confidently ahead of her. His arrogance, no doubt born of the conviction that he was beyond the reach of the Emperor’s vengeance, infuriated her; it was an affront to everything she believed in as a Redemptionist, and she silently promised the Golden Throne that she’d deliver his soul to judgement before the hour was out.

  So thinking, she began to turn another corner, then froze: the reflection of the luminator was steady, which meant that her target had stopped moving. Fearing that he had somehow become aware of her presence, she began to draw the sword at her belt, and peered cautiously round the angle of the walls.

  Her quarry had stopped at the end of the corridor, where a heavy bulkhead had once sealed the passageway off from whatever lay beyond. Now, however, the thick metal had been bent, the door sprung from its guide channels, creating a narrow gap. As Keira watched, the man wriggled through it, the corridor descending at once into almost impenetrable darkness, apart from the thin crack of light where he’d disappeared. After a moment, this too began to grow dim as he moved away.

  Keira waited for her eyes to adjust again, and padded forwards, reaching the buckled door. The gap was easily enough to pass through, and she stepped across the threshold, noting with some relief that the air was fresher on the other side; struck by a sudden thought, she turned and looked at the jamb. It had indeed been welded shut, a long time ago, the seam split by whatever had caused the door and the wall surrounding it to buckle.

  “Mordechai,” she whispered, activating her comm-bead, “I’ve passed right through the old sealed section. By the look of things, I’m approaching the new impact site.”

  “Acknowledged,” Horst said. “We’re almost set here.” He didn’t repeat the words of caution he’d spoken before, but Keira hadn’t really expected him to, and told herself she wasn’t disappointed.

  “Can you estimate how severe the impact was?” Vex asked.

  “Very,” Keira told him. “The bulkhead door’s been sprung from its runners, just like Jared said, and the walls are severely buckled.” She took a few paces forward, compensating for the sudden unevenness of the deck plates without conscious thought. “The floor too.”

  “Interesting,” the techpriest said thoughtfully. “Given the nature of the material, for deformation of that magnitude to have occurred, the impacting object must have been of considerable mass.”

  “I’ll let you know,” Keira said. The damage was getting noticeably more pronounced as she advanced down the corridor. “What’s down here?”

  “A thermal vent, leading to the heat exchangers,” Vex said. “It should appear to you as an open shaft, about five metres across. I’d advise caution before attempting to access it, as the hull plating above is particularly thin, to enable the fusion core of one of the tertiary powerplants to be vented that way in the event of a plasma breach; an impact as severe as the one you indicate might well have ruptured it.”

  “Well, I’m not breathing vacuum, so I guess it’s all right,” Keira said, picking her pace up. Light was visible through the access hatch ahead, a steady gleam this time instead of the randomly fluctuating hand luminator, and she trotted forwards to gain a better view. “Sinning hell!”

  The exclamation of astonishment escaped her unbidden, as she stared into the shaft, hardly able to believe the evidence of her own eyes. It had indeed been breached, only to be plugged again as neatly as a cork in a bottle by the vast bulk of an ore shuttle, like the ones she’d seen arriving and departing from the Gorgonid on Sepheris Secundus. If this was what had collided with the Misericord just before her entry into the warp, no wonder the crew had simply decided to seal the section, and deal with the problem once they reached Scintilla; sorting this mess out would be a massive undertaking.

  “Say again,” Horst replied, an edge of anxiety entering his voice.

  Recovering her composure, Keira drew her sword, certain that she’d found the heretic’s lair. “Sorry,” she said. “Bad vox discipline.” She took another look at the huge cargo lifter apparently suspended just above her head. “But this is incredible. There’s an ore shuttle jammed in here. It must be how the heretics got aboard.”

  “That’s right, it is.” The voice spoke right behind her, and Keira spun, aiming a strike at where she knew the man’s heart must be, but the sword met only empty air. She turned again, finding the garishly dressed fellow from the mutants’ camp in front of her, and advanced, unleashing a flurry of blade strokes, but somehow none of them managed to connect. The man laughed, an ugly sound, in which the taint of madness scratched like a broken nail. “Unfortunately our pilot expired on the way in, so our landing was rather harder than we’d expected. But we survived.”

  “For a short while,” Keira said, advancing onto the narrow catwalk which spanned the shaft. It didn’t occur to her to glance down, and see how deep it was; all that mattered was the smug popinjay in front of her, and the urgent desire to spill his blood.

  “Vogen and Drusus got careless,” the man said. “Overconfident in their gifts. Your friends, Drake and Vex is it? They were good. A credit to the Inquisition.”

  Incredibly, the fellow was still managing to evade every strike she made, and every time he did so, her anger grew. She fanned it, honed it, the way the Collegium had taught her, refining it into a weapon as sharp as the blade she wielded. Behind it all, her rational mind wondered how he’d known her colleagues’ names, and the man smiled patronisingly.

  “I can see them in your mind, you half-witted trollop. Along with your precious faith, with all those cracks in it you try to pretend aren’t ther
e, and those guilty little dreams about Mordechai you wake from sweating, and the document you came here to steal, and everything else there is to know about you.”

  “If you think you know me,” Keira said, shaping the anger, feeling it become a pure weapon of the Emperor’s wrath, “then you know I’m going to kill you.” She let the white heat of it flow like molten gold across the surface of her mind, and saw the psyker flinch, burned by it in a foretaste of his eternal damnation. For the first time he began to look uncertain, and started to back away in earnest. “My name is Keira Sythree, and I am death, and the hand of the Emperor Himself. You are nothing, and you are dust, and you are dead!”

  She struck on the final word, hard and true, and the psyker yelped in pain and surprise as her blade spiked flesh. Only his arcane ability saved him from a mortal wound, but his confidence was gone now, and he leapt back, through the access hatch on the other side of the narrow bridge. Snarling, Keira tensed her muscles to follow, but before she could make the jump a trio of abhuman monstrosities crowded past the terrified heretic, charging onto the narrow catwalk towards her, brandishing the crude weapons they favoured.

  Keira barely checked her pace, dispatching all three in a flurry of blade strokes, which sent them plummeting into the depths below in a rain of bloody chunks, but the brief delay had been all the respite the wyrd had needed. By the time she’d run forwards across the blood-slick floorplates he’d vanished into the darkened labyrinth beyond, only the overlapping echoes of his footsteps giving her a clue as to his whereabouts.

  “He’s running,” she reported briefly. “But he can’t hide forever.” He’d had the sense not to kindle his luminator this time, but a graduate of the Collegium Assassinorum didn’t need anything so crude as sight to track her prey. She turned her head, listening to the diminishing scurry of his flight, trying to pinpoint the direction it was coming from.