[Dark Heresy 02] - Innocence Proves Nothing

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  That left the techpriest, who had parted from the others, and begun to walk up the street towards him. Fine, he had his target.

  “Hound one to kennel.” He spoke quietly, a hand raised to conceal the fact that he seemed to be talking to himself, and feigned interest in a display of hand tools in the grimy shop window in front of him. “Three hares started, repeat three. Active trace on one, hounds tracking both the others. Acknowledge.”

  “Acknowledged, hound one. Trace confirmed.” To his surprise, the unmistakable voice of Ullen the Techmarine responded. Malven was proving difficult to replace, none of the other techpriests aboard the Emperor’s Justice having his specialised skills, which meant the Deathwatch Techmarine was still having to fill in for the fallen acolyte at moments like this. Quillem hoped he wasn’t finding the distraction from his regular duties too onerous.

  “Hound two. I heard that.” Carys cut in almost at once, confirming his assessment of her readiness. “Who and where?”

  “Drake, the funicular. Sythree’s with him, but disregard if they split up; the Justice is tracking her.” His target, the techpriest Vex, was getting closer now, but he just had time for one more transmission before closing the link. “Smart move with the tracer, Carys.”

  “Thanks.” The thief cut her connection, apparently cheered by his encouragement. Good, he needed her sharp.

  Quillem turned away from the hardware store, and glanced at his chronograph, as if wondering how long his connection would be. He’d timed the motion exactly, keeping his face averted from Vex without appearing to deliberately avoid him, but he needn’t have bothered with subtlety; the techpriest’s attention was entirely on the timetable attached to the pole supporting the illuminated sign which marked the embarkation point for services to the adjacent sector.

  The interrogator smiled, and joined the queue, waiting until a couple of smelters, an overseer and a habwife had taken their places behind Vex before moving into position. It seemed this was going to be easier than he thought.

  Tarsus High Orbital Docks, Scintilla System

  256.993.M41

  “Enjoying the view?” Voyle asked.

  Elyra nodded. “Impressive,” she said. Mindful of her assumed persona, she inflected it to sound as though she was anything but impressed, but in truth she had been. After Kyrlock had parted from the little group of psykers she’d wondered what sort of hellish bolt hole they’d be conducted to next, picturing something akin to the hold aboard the Ursus Innare, but their eventual destination, after an indeterminate time spent scuttling through the warren of service tunnels which riddled the vast structure, had been completely different.

  It was the smell she’d noticed first, a damp, heavy odour like wet loam after rain, seeping round the seals of a heavy door like dozens of others they’d passed; she’d expected to move on, but Voyle had paused, gazing intently at the locking plate. A moment later the hatch had swung open, and their guide vanished into the space beyond.

  Elyra followed, with a glance back at the trio of juvies; Zusen was hard on her heels, while Trosk was shepherding Ven in the right direction, his attention mostly taken up with the mumbling seer. Thanks to the momentary distraction, she’d already taken a couple of steps after Voyle before her surroundings truly registered.

  “This is amazing!” Zusen had said at her elbow, her voice tinged with awe.

  Elyra had nodded. “Beats the last place they stuck us,” she agreed, choosing her words carefully. She and Kyrlock had made their own contact with the Franchise smuggling ring, rather than relying on the Sanctuary as intermediaries, but the phrase made her sound a part of the group herself, rather than a chance-met stranger; and, if challenged about it, as she half-expected Trosk to do, she could plausibly claim to have meant Greel and his Franchise operatives.

  “Needs must,” Voyle said, glancing back at his quartet of charges with a faint air of amusement, which led Elyra to suspect that he’d anticipated an awed reaction. “We needed the ore scow to get you off-planet, but there’s no reason you can’t be a bit more comfortable now you’ve arrived.”

  Comfortable was hardly the word Elyra would have used, but it was certainly an improvement on the hold of the Ursus Innare. They were walking on grass, which yielded beneath her feet in the fashion which, being void-born, she always found faintly peculiar. The floor was covered in a thick layer of soil, which had leaked from corroding knee-high containers arrayed in what had once been a neat grid, but which was now looking distinctly irregular. The grass was everywhere, underfoot, and choking the raised beds, in which a variety of weeds and straggling vegetable crops competed for space.

  “I never get tired of looking at it,” Voyle said, bringing her back to the present.

  Elyra could certainly see why. The derelict agrideck he’d conducted them to was on the outer skin of the orbital dock, protected from the void by a geodesic dome of metre-thick armourcrys. The disc of Scintilla was visible above them, cloud wreathing its pastel face, through which patches of the surface could be glimpsed, like the visage of a dowager behind a veil of lace.

  Familiar with the world they were orbiting, Elyra was able to make out the brighter smudges of the three continents, and the pale, sickly oceans surrounding them, whose grey and polluted waters blended into the lowering clouds, imparting a pearl-like sheen to the whole globe. The sere equatorial continent was right below, and she tried to make out the position of Hive Tarsus, but there was no real clue; the sun was almost exactly behind the docks, which meant it would be close to noon on the surface below. If she was going to spot the megalopolis with the naked eye, she’d have to wait until the sun was rising or setting down there, casting a shadow tens of kilometres long.

  “I take it you spend a lot of time here, then,” Elyra said.

  “You’re fishing,” Voyle replied, with a trace of amusement.

  “Sorry,” Elyra said, making sure the apology sounded insincere. “Old habits. I’m not used to trusting people.”

  “Then I hope we can convince you to, given time,” Voyle said.

  “Maybe you can,” Elyra said, her eyes still on the disc of the planet. The northern continent was comparatively free of cloud, and she tried to pick out the location of Hive Sibelius, wondering if Carolus was down there, marshalling his forces from his chambers in the Tricorn, or had already begun to move against the network she’d infiltrated. The more information she could pass on to him when she finally found a way to get in touch the better: they’d hunted heretics together long enough to know just how true the old adage that knowledge is power really was. “So what exactly is this place?”

  “An old agridome,” Voyle said, producing a lho-stick from an engraved silver case which had floated out of his pocket, and was now hovering in mid-air in front of him. “Got hit by the blight a few years ago, and we pulled a few strings to make sure no one ever got round to rescinding the quarantine order.” The silver case rotated towards Elyra, and she shook her head.

  “No thanks, I don’t.” Voyle’s casual use of his powers for something so trivial shocked her profoundly, but it seemed to be part of the ethos of the Sanctuary that the psykers affiliated to it should simply take them for granted, rather than regarding them as a curse, or at the very least a potential danger. Concealing her own unease, Elyra focused her will on the end of the thin tube, and kindled it, while Voyle was still reaching for his lighter.

  “Thank you.” He smiled, and inhaled the smoke. “Feels good, doesn’t it? Being able to be who you really are, without some vacwitted prole screaming ‘Witch!’”

  “Is that why you joined the Sanctuary?” Elyra asked. “To be yourself?”

  “Something like that,” Voyle said, inhaling more of the fragrant smoke. “I’d spent most of my life hiding what I could do, and when they found me, the relief… Well, I don’t have to explain that to you. They offered me refuge, in the Sanctuary itself, but I thought I could do more good here.” He shrugged. “On Scintil VIII, I mean.”

 
“Do more good how?” Elyra asked.

  “Helping the rescued.” He glanced at Elyra, a trifle embarrassed. “That’s what we call you, the people we save. I had a small cargo brokerage on Scintil VIII, and like most businessmen there, I was evading the odd tariff and paying protection money to the Shadow Franchise. It didn’t take much to convince them that I wanted to diversify into smuggling, and they agreed to bankroll me. Which meant they could move their merchandise on and off the station more easily, and we could shift some of the rescued through their network.” He smiled. “Oddly enough, we both ended up making money out of it, which was a bit of a bonus. Although I suppose that’s all at an end now. They’ll be looking for a new partner on the void station.”

  “What happened, exactly?” Elyra asked, seeing a flicker of hesitation in the man’s eyes before he answered. “If we’re supposed to start trusting each other, we could start with that.”

  “We got hit,” Voyle said. “We’d just moved a lot of people on to the Sanctuary, more than we’d ever tried rescuing before. Luckily they’d gone by then, but their escort was still around, and they decided to make a fight of it. Things got messy.”

  “Well, at least you finally made it to the sanctuary yourself,” Elyra said. To her surprise, Voyle laughed.

  “This isn’t Sanctuary,” he said. “Nowhere in the Imperium is safe for our kind. This is just another waystation, like the hole in the Gorgonid where you met the others.”

  “So where is it?” Elyra asked, and Voyle shrugged.

  “I’ve no idea. Out there, somewhere.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the stars above their heads. “The Inquisition have ways of getting information out of you. Better not to know in the first place.”

  “Better for everyone else,” Elyra said. “Not so good for you if you get picked up.”

  “Yes,” Voyle said, his good mood of a few moments before thoroughly deflated. He ground out the stub of his lho-stick on the corroded edge of a weed-choked vegetable bed, leaving a faint grey mark. “We’d better make sure that doesn’t happen then, hadn’t we?”

  Fifteen

  Hive Sibelius, Scintilla

  257.993.M41

  “She should be getting close by now,” Barda said, replacing his tankard on the table between them, and pitching his voice low enough not to be overheard by anyone else in the bar.

  Drake nodded. They’d returned to their usual berth after flying Keira to a shuttle pad on the northern fringes of the hive, generally used for short suborbital hops to Tarsus or the docking ports above it, where she’d be close enough to the Tricorn to make her way to her final destination without difficulty. It was heavily used, particularly by passenger vessels, and Barda had hoped they’d avoid attracting any undue attention by blending in among the constant stream of arrivals and departures.

  Keira had disappeared into the mass of passengers thronging the terminal like a raindrop into the sea as soon as they’d landed, and Drake tried not to wonder if he’d ever see her again. He would have preferred to remain where they were, in case she needed backup, but the risk of detection would have been too great, so they’d returned to the mid-hive almost as soon as she’d left the boarding ramp.

  Grounded, with nothing to do except wait for further orders, the shuttle had begun to feel claustrophobic, and it hadn’t taken long for Drake to start chafing under the enforced inactivity. Mindful of his promise to Horst to begin introducing Barda to the world beyond his cockpit, and quietly desperate for some displacement activity, he’d suggested finding a tavern somewhere in which to kill a little time.

  Much to his surprise, the young pilot had agreed, and now sat opposite him in a quiet booth towards the rear of an establishment Drake’s greater experience of such things had led him to consider a suitable one for his first attempt to acclimatise his charge to the ways of the galaxy. The furniture was solid, iron-grey plastek worn smooth by generations of buttocks, with few signs of damage, and the carpet on the floor still clung grimly to the majority of its nap. Somewhere for the clerks and overseers to stop for a bit of light refreshment, and maybe a plateful of food that actually tasted more or less like it was supposed to, on their way to and from their shifts. The bars frequented by the factory hands would be a great deal livelier, and a great deal more to his own taste, but they’d be a minefield for someone as socially inept as Barda, and a shuttle pilot wouldn’t normally set foot in a place like that anyway.

  “How’s the ale?” Drake asked, trying to deflect the conversation onto a safer, more neutral topic. He was as certain as he could be that they weren’t being overheard, but the more experienced Angelae had made it abundantly clear that the Special Circumstances under which they were now operating meant that very little could be taken for granted. Better safe than sorry was a maxim he’d learned the truth of very quickly in his first firefight, and he’d been applying the lesson religiously ever since.

  “Pretty good,” Barda said, taking another swallow from his mug. “But I’d better not have too much. If we need to fly again today…”

  “You’ll need a clear head,” Drake agreed, hoping the call to pick Keira up would come soon, and drained his own tankard. It wasn’t that strong, compared to the stuff he’d been used to drinking in the Imperial Guard, but it had a pleasant, light flavour, with a lingering hint of caba nuts.

  “Can I get you another?” A woman was hovering beside the booth, a couple of empty tankards in her hand, and she reached down to add Drake’s to her collection.

  “Yes, thanks,” Drake said. He glanced across at Barda.

  “You too?”

  “Why not?” The young pilot swallowed a couple of times, and handed his own mug to the barmaid. “Just the one.”

  “I’ll be right back.” The woman smiled, and departed towards the bar, the angle of the booth taking her out of sight in a moment. Her hair was red, unlike most of the people Drake had seen here, and for a moment he felt a formless flash of deja vu; then he shrugged and dismissed it, trying instead to find some safely neutral topic to discuss.

  There were more ways into the Tricorn than most people realised, but Keira had dismissed all the obvious ones before she started. Simply landing the shuttle there, as they had when they first arrived, would have been easiest, but the risks were too great; if the shadowy enemies Inquisitor Finurbi had gone blue to evade really had infiltrated the Calixis Conclave, they would undoubtedly have identified the sturdy little craft on its previous visit, and be on the alert for its return. Besides, that would have left Danuld and Barda dangerously exposed while they waited for her, and if it all went klybo, as she was only too well aware that it might, they’d be caught in the crossfire. No point in them getting killed as well.

  The main gate was a little more plausible, but she wasn’t keen on that idea either. Though hundreds of people passed through it every day, they were scanned, checked, monitored and observed by dozens of Inquisitorial functionaries, any one of whom could be a dupe of the conspirators their patron was hunting, or an active member of the cabal in their own right.

  That left the postern gates, through which inquisitors and their acolytes arrived and departed on clandestine errands of their own, and which were monitored, if anything, even more closely than the main one. Clearly none of those would do either. Not normally, at any rate; but if she was bold, and the Emperor was with her, there just might be a way.

  Keira shrank into the shadows cast by the setting sun, which was glowing a rich, blood-red, like the coals of a furnace, and smiled, still enough of a Redemptionist to take the sight as a good omen. Above her, the triune towers loomed, thrown into stark silhouette by the crimson orb.

  Working quickly, she shed the skirt and blouse which had allowed her to blend in with the mid-hive drones, fading even more into the background as the cameleoline synsuit she’d worn beneath them began to imitate her immediate environment. From habit, she checked the feel and fit of her weapons, although she was so precisely attuned to them that she would hav
e known at once if anything was amiss: knives strapped to each forearm, her left thigh, and in the small of her back, the pistol crossbow and its clip of quarrels at the top of her right leg. She’d carried her sword bundled up in a carryall, which she abandoned too, slipping the scabbard into its accustomed place with a sense of lightness, the subtle weight, missed for so long, making her feel properly balanced again.

  This was going to work, she could sense it, as surely as if the Emperor Himself was standing at her shoulder.

  Smiling at the thought, she held herself still, waiting for the right moment to strike, like the predator she was.

  Hive Tarsus, Scintilla

  257.993.M41

  Kyrlock had waited until nightfall before setting out on the commission Greel had given him. The air was cooler after dark, more bearable for a man who’d spent most of his life either trudging through snow or watching more of it fall. The delay had given him time to catch up on a little sleep, grab some food, and become better orientated in the strange latticework hive he supposed he’d better start to call home.

  At night, the vast construction took on a strange and majestic beauty, the complex warp and woof of the interwoven streets and thoroughfares lit from all directions, so that it felt almost as if he was walking though a multifaceted jewel of incredible proportions. Looking up, he could see the complex tangle above him glowing with diffused light, layer upon layer of it, open and airy, but dense enough to block out any hint of the darkling desert beyond. Shortly after dawn, the light of the sun would begin to seep through again, bringing its suffocating heat with it, but for now Kyrlock breathed the cool air gratefully.