[Dark Heresy 02] - Innocence Proves Nothing

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  Having given the franchiseman enough time to get used to the idea that he wasn’t going to get a percentage of the jewellery Elyra was carrying after all, Kyrlock carefully baited his hook. “She did say to let you know she’s still interested in that bit of business you discussed, though,” he said, as if he’d only just recalled the message. With a bit of luck, motivated by greed, Greel would contact the Sanctuary to arrange a meeting with her. That would allow him to keep track of Elyra after all, despite their enforced separation.

  “Very sensible of her,” Greel said. “Voyle’s contacts are mostly on the void station, and you need planetside pull to shift what she’s carrying.” He shrugged, a wintry smile elbowing its way onto his face. “I hope she’s getting paid in advance for whatever she’s doing. I’m afraid our friend’s operation took a bit of a dent last week, so he might not have the cash reserves he’s used to.”

  “Did you find out what happened yet?” Kyrlock asked, trying not to sound too interested. This might be information Horst, or even the inquisitor himself, could use.

  “Someone hit his warehouse on Scintil VIII,” Greel said, sipping at his drink. “There are all kinds of rumours flying around, but it sounds like the Arbites to me. They cleaned the place out, and left a lot of damage; I don’t know of anyone else who could have brought that amount of firepower to the party.”

  “Then it sounds like she’ll be needing that job sooner than she thought,” Kyrlock said. He paused for a moment. “Come to that, I want to know where I stand. If you’ve got some work for me like you said on the ship, I want it. If not, sorry about your people. I don’t think I broke them much.”

  “Not as much as I will, if they don’t start doing the job I pay them for,” Greel said, smiling faintly. “But getting past them was a pretty impressive audition. Without weapons, too.”

  “Chainaxes tend to get noticed in the street,” Kyrlock said. “Shotguns too.” There were people walking around out there with visible weapons, but they were a small minority, and most of them had stared at him in implicit challenge as he’d passed. Franchise operatives, probably, posted to keep the regular gangers from getting in the way of the serious business of making money. A couple had even accosted him, but Greel’s name had been enough of a passport to avoid any more serious confrontations.

  Not that he’d have been particularly concerned if it hadn’t been; he was certain he could take care of himself if he needed to. Even so, he preferred to avoid conflict if he could: Elyra was relying on him to contact the other Angelae, and he couldn’t risk getting hurt in a pointless brawl before doing that. The shotgun was still with him, in case things got ugly, comfortably cocooned in the grox-hide holdall he’d purchased from a street vendor outside his lodgings, and which he carried casually in one hand; he hadn’t had to draw it to get past Greel’s watchdogs, but it had made a handy club.

  “Sometimes that’s useful,” Greel said. “But not today.” He leaned back in his chair, his hand moving away from the drawer at last, and looked at Kyrlock appraisingly. “All right, you want to work. Fine by me. I’ve got a little job needs doing, and judging by the noise I heard a few minutes ago, the man I had in mind for it needs to see a medicae now.”

  “Big fellow with an ear missing?” Kyrlock asked, and Greel nodded.

  “That’s the one. Pyle. You’ll like him when you get to know him, everyone does. Great sense of humour. Doesn’t bear grudges either, you’ll be glad to hear.”

  Kyrlock nodded too. “I think I broke his arm. Hit it with a shock maul.”

  Greel’s eyes narrowed a little. “You’re not carrying a shock maul.”

  “No.” Kyrlock shook his head. “He was. I sort of borrowed it.”

  “I see.” Greel chuckled quietly to himself, although his eyes never left Kyrlock’s face. “What did you do with it afterwards?” His eyes flickered towards the holdall, although Kyrlock was sure he’d correctly divined its contents the moment he’d arrived.

  “I gave it back,” Kyrlock said. “I’d finished with it.” Pyle hadn’t been in any condition to use the weapon, and he’d no further use for it himself; he preferred the greater reach the chainaxe gave him when it came to close combat. Besides, it had intimidated the hell out of the franchisemen still standing in Greel’s outer office, which had been the whole idea; no one discarded a functional weapon in the middle of a brawl unless they had something better to hand, or were supremely self-confident. After that, no one had been keen to tackle him, and find out the hard way what he had in reserve.

  “Then you’re either a suicidal idiot, or precisely the man I’ve been looking for,” Greel said. “No doubt time will tell which it is.” He reached inside the drawer again, and produced a thin sheaf of papers, to which a pict had been clipped. It showed a faintly worried-looking young man with dark hair and earnest brown eyes, which reminded Kyrlock incongruously of a hound hoping for a titbit. He was wearing a padded jacket, which meant he was from a long way further down the hive; either minor nobility, or a high-ranking servant in somebody’s household.

  “Who’s that?” he asked, feeling he ought to show a little interest.

  “Marven Dylar. He owes me some money, which he’s been rather slow to repay.” Greel shrugged. “True, I’ve been off-world for a while, but he knows where my office is.”

  “Do you want me to kill him?” Kyrlock asked, trying to sound casual about it. He’d taken lives before, in self-defence, or in the heat of combat, but he was by no means certain that he could commit cold-blooded murder. To his well-concealed relief, Greel was shaking his head.

  “Of course not. I want my money back. Or what he originally offered in exchange, which would be preferable.” The franchiseman shrugged. “If you can’t manage to extract either, then by all means, make an example of him if you like.” Another thought seemed to strike him. “You can read, I take it.”

  “Well enough,” Kyrlock said, taking the sheaf of papers, and stuffing them into the bag next to the shotgun. “Do you want me to get in touch when it’s done?”

  “If you see the need,” Greel said. “Otherwise, just come back here. You shouldn’t have any more trouble getting in.”

  Hive Sibelius, Scintilla

  256.993.M41

  As an initiate of the Cult Mechanicus, Vex was supposed to be above such petty human frailties as frustration, but right now that was pretty much what he was beginning to feel. Not that he would ever have admitted it in such plain and simple language. The manuscript, which they’d gone through so much to recover, had nothing to say about the origins of the bone fragment, and little about its arcane properties that they hadn’t already deduced for themselves. That had left him with no other option than to go looking for clues elsewhere, and the search had not been going well.

  “The data I need is proving particularly elusive,” he said, keeping his voice uninflected with rather more effort than usual. He was certain that the archives of the Tricorn would have the answers he sought, but Inquisitor Finurbi’s message had effectively curtailed that avenue of investigation, and he’d already wrung dry the few other repositories of information on archeotech available to him.

  “Is there anywhere else you could try?” Horst asked, with the air of a man knowing the question is both foolish and futile, but determined to ask anyway in case he turns out to be wrong.

  “Not from here,” Vex said, turning away from the cogitator keyboard for the first time in days. Communing with the data-net had been stimulating at first, but by now he was beginning to feel fatigued, too many of his superfluous fleshly components demanding rest and nutrition. Drake was making recaf in the kitchen unit, and his mouth suddenly flooded with saliva as he caught the scent of it.

  “Where then?” Keira asked, placing a steaming mug and a plate full of sandwiches on top of the main data loom, and Vex had to force himself not to snatch at them straight away. Ingesting nutrient was a distasteful necessity, the pangs of hunger and thirst a lingering human weakness, and it would be
unseemly for a member of his order to give in to their dictates without interposing a little reason to master them first. Nevertheless, he appreciated the gesture, even overlooking the egregious disrespect towards so fine an example of the Omnissiah’s bounty that using it as a table implied.

  “The Temple of the Omnissiah in the upper hive has an extensive archive,” he said, trying to ignore the excessive sensory input being provided by the nourishment. “Not all of it accessible remotely by technotheological means. Some of the older records only exist in hard copy, and there are rumoured to be artefacts there of great antiquity.” Feeling that he’d demonstrated the superiority of reason for long enough, he took one of the sandwiches and bit into it. If his companions were amused at how quickly the food disappeared, they concealed it well; Vex simply felt quietly pleased with himself for dealing with the matter as expeditiously as possible. “It may be that one of those will be sufficiently similar to the one we recovered to enable us to deduce its origin and purpose,” he concluded, a trifle indistinctly.

  “Can you get in there without any risk?” Horst asked.

  For a moment Vex wondered what he meant; shrines to the Machine-God were havens of order and efficiency in a complex and muddled galaxy, and although they contained their fair share of perils for the unwary, one of the Omnissiah’s anointed would have little to fear from random electrical discharges or the like. Then he realised what the team leader was driving at.

  “The risk of being observed is acceptably low,” he said, reflexively trying to calculate the odds of an unseen watcher identifying him as he entered the shrine. “Hundreds of members of my order enter and leave the premises every day, and I would simply blend into the aggregate.”

  “It’s who you might meet inside that worries me,” Drake said, looking up from preparing more sandwiches. “We know at least one senior techpriest’s involved in the conspiracy.”

  “Magos Avia,” Vex confirmed. “I hadn’t forgotten.” Nor was he likely to. Corruption among the Adeptus Mechanicus was almost unthinkable, the very notion an affront to all the principles he’d espoused on first donning the white robe of his calling. Nevertheless, Technomancer Tonis had built the mysterious psychic amplifier on Sepheris Secundus, apparently with the connivance of the mentor who’d brought him into the order in the first place.

  “What have you been able to find out about him?” Horst asked, accepting a plate of food and a steaming mug from Keira with a nod of acknowledgement. Keira smiled back, rather more than the simple exchange would seem to warrant so far as Vex could see, and settled on the dusty sofa.

  “Very little,” Vex said. “He has visited Scintilla in the past, but not for at least eighty years, and has spent the vast majority of the last two centuries on the Lathe Worlds. No doubt the records there would be considerably more helpful, but unfortunately they’re unavailable to us without a voyage of significant duration.”

  “I’ll ask Vorn to contact any Angelae there,” Horst said. “They might be able to dig something up.”

  Vex rather doubted that, but nodded anyway. “There may be some traces of his last visit in the physical archives of the shrine,” he said. “Nothing so dramatic as the ones he left in the Fathomsound, of course, but if he was researching the artefact at the time, I should be able to follow the trail he left. Even if he wasn’t, we should gain a clue as to his wider agenda.”

  “Tonis was a psyker before he joined the Mechanicus,” Drake said, emerging from the kitchen with a pair of plates and a couple of mugs wobbling precariously as he tried to balance them in his overfull hands. He handed one of each to Keira without mishap, and sat, beginning to tackle his own food with evident relish. “Could Avia have been one as well?”

  “Highly unlikely,” Vex said, trying not to show how uncomfortable he felt at the notion. The idea that even one of his brethren had been tainted by the warp was bad enough, let alone that he hadn’t been the first.

  “Maybe he’s possessed by a daemon,” Keira said, a trifle indistinctly. “Tonis was, so maybe his mentor is too.”

  “Tonis’ case was completely unprecedented,” Vex said, keeping his voice level with an effort, despite the manifest absurdity of such an idea. “It’s inconceivable that Avia could be equally afflicted.”

  “Unless the bone thing had something to do with it,” Drake put in morbidly, staring at the pocket in Vex’s robe where the mysterious artefact currently resided. “We still don’t know what it is, or where it came from. Maybe it does attract daemons.” He looked around as he spoke, apparently unhappy with the disquieting thought which had just struck him.

  “When I find the appropriate records, perhaps I’ll be able to answer that question,” Vex said, a trifle more sharply than he’d intended. As so often, the conversation was getting bogged down in pointless speculation and ludicrous flights of fancy.

  “Maybe they’re not the records we should be looking at,” Keira said, with a thoughtful expression. “Perhaps we should be trying to find out more about the daemon.” She looked directly at Horst. “If Hybris is right, then this is the first time ever a techpriest has been possessed. If we find out how and why, maybe we can start to see what’s going on here.”

  “Good point,” Horst said. “The only problem is, we don’t know anything about daemons, or where to go to find out.”

  “Don’t be so dense, Mordechai.” Keira shook her head, looking faintly amused. “We know exactly where to go. The south tower.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Drake said. “You want us to break into the Tricorn, sneak past hundreds of acolytes, dozens of inquisitors and an honour guard of Space Marines, then raid the archives of the Ordo Malleus?”

  “Don’t be silly, Danuld.” Keira glanced up at him, smiling in the way she always did when someone told her that what she wanted to do was impossible; and, to her credit, they hadn’t been right all that often. “You’d be killed before you took a dozen paces.”

  “Quite,” Horst agreed, nodding quietly. “It would be suicide to try.”

  “Exactly,” Keira said soberly. “Which is why I’ll be going in alone.”

  Quillem was getting bored, and didn’t mind admitting it; but he’d been an acolyte for long enough to know that the periods of tedium on an investigation tended to outweigh the running and shooting by a considerable margin. Just as well, too, he thought sourly: after the fiasco aboard the void station, a bit of tedium was positively welcome.

  He was loitering as close as he dared to the Angelae’s safe house, on the corner of the street, where he could remain half-concealed if any of the missing inquisitor’s agents happened to emerge. A mass-transit station stood close at hand, and he blended easily into the inchoate mass of passengers waiting to board; if any of the passers-by streaming past had noticed that the service he wanted never seemed to come, they kept the thought to themselves.

  The noise and the stench surrounding him had long since faded into the background of his consciousness; he’d grown up somewhere not dissimilar to this, although, unlike most of his friends, he hadn’t been content to remain there, trudging to the manufactoria every day until he died. Instead, he’d volunteered for the hivesteading programme, lured by the prospect of carving out a new life for himself in some newly reclaimed tranche of the underhive, only to find that it hadn’t been reclaimed nearly as much as the authorities in the far-distant spire seemed to think; mutant raids were still frequent, and justice turned out to be the personal property of anyone with enough gelt to hire a bounty hunter.

  Much to his surprise, Quillem had thrived in this unpromising environment, swiftly acquiring both a gun and a reputation for being able and willing to use it; talking his way into a job as a caravan guard had been easy, and after a year or two he’d started collecting bounties as a sideline. It hadn’t been a bad life, all told, and he’d probably still have been enjoying it if Inquisitor Grynner hadn’t turned up one day looking for a guide into the lower deeps. The young Quillem had acquitted himself well again
st the genestealer cult which turned out to be lurking down there, and when the inquisitor moved on, he’d taken a new protégé with him, eager to learn all he could from his new mentor.

  Well, he’d certainly done that, Quillem thought wryly. Grynner had shown him how to use his intellect as well as his weapons, eventually placing him on the path to inquisitorial status himself, although he was well aware that many interrogators never proved themselves worthy to take that final step. Even so, he’d come a long way from a place like this; all in all, he had a lot to be thankful for.

  A flurry of movement near the house he was watching caught his eye, a mere eddy current in the endless stream of pedestrians, but it was enough: someone had left the building, moving with evident purpose. He allowed himself to drift with the flow of bodies surrounding him, angling towards the street corner, where he’d be able to see more clearly, but without creating any answering ripples in the crowd which an astute observer would be able to notice in turn.

  “Holy blood!” The exclamation slipped unbidden from his lips. Instead of a single subject to keep under observation, there were three of them, all leaving at the same time. He began to regret ordering Carys to take some rest, although Throne alone knew, she could clearly do with it. Then the habit of dispassionate analysis his mentor had taken such pains to inculcate in him began to take over.

  Sythree was wearing a jacket and skirt indistinguishable from those of the other women in the crowd, although her purple hair and Redemptionist bandana were still visible from this distance. If she hadn’t changed her clothes, she was probably still carrying the tracer Carys had planted on her when they’d brushed past one another in the street outside the temple; good enough, he’d just have to vox the Emperor’s Justice and ask them to monitor the signal. Drake was with her, moving towards the funicular leading to the upper levels; that meant he was probably on his way back to the shuttle, to check in with their pilot again. Plenty of time for Carys to pick him up en route, if she hadn’t turned her comm-bead off, but he doubted that; she prided herself on her professionalism at all times, and would have left it activated while she slept. In fact, she’d probably kept it in her ear, for just such a contingency.