by Phil Kelly
For a time they were silent, brooding on private shadows.
Finally the traveller spoke: ‘I walk the vash’yatol, Iho’nen. I cannot linger on this failing world. When do we begin?’
‘I have activated the Catalyst,’ the giant answered. ‘He is already here.’
TWENTY-NINE DAYS BEFORE UNITY
THE IRON JUNGLE
The locals called the inner skin of Vyshodd’s dome the Iron Jungle. Climbing through the gloomy industrial labyrinth bolted to the perimeter wall of Sector Nineteen, Haniel Mordaine felt it was an eminently fitting name. His path spiralled upwards, shadowing the dome in a tangle of catwalks and girders that heaved and groaned like an iron man bloated with corrosion. It was an arduous ascent, but he’d resisted the lure of the intermittent pneumatic lifts, preferring the certainty of a long, hard climb to the possibility of a short, infinitely harder fall.
If this architectural heresy kills me I’ll never know the truth of things, he thought grimly. I’ll never know the truth of him. Angel’s Blood, is this Calavera even a man?
For almost two months Mordaine had been lying low in a decrepit traders’ hostel waiting for word from their contact while Kreeger salved his anxieties with cheap Oblazti lodka and narcotic glitterfish oils.
‘The Calavera is in deep,’ his lieutenant had explained. ‘It’s the way he operates. How he sniffs out the rot.’
‘You make him sound like a dog, Kreeger,’ Mordaine had taunted.
‘A bloodhound,’ Kreeger had corrected, ‘the best the grand master had – and the only player in the conclave who buys your story. He’s all you’ve got, duke.’
‘And I’m grateful for his friendship, of course–’
‘Friendship?’ Kreeger had shaken his head. ‘No, duke, you’re useful to him. I’ve told you before, he thinks you’re the key to the real enemy.’
‘But I don’t know a damn thing!’
A shrug. ‘Maybe you don’t need to.’
And then Mordaine had tried the Question, as he’d done countless times before: ‘What is he, Kreeger?’
And as always, Kreeger had offered the same hollow answer: ‘Never met him. Nobody ever did except the grand master. All the rest of us ever had was a name.’
A name I never knew, Mordaine thought bitterly. I was your protégé, Escher – your damned interrogator – but you never trusted me with the identity of your finest operative. And if you concealed that then what else did you hide from me?
‘How did you find him?’ Mordaine had tried.
‘I didn’t,’ Kreeger had answered. ‘He found us.’
‘Yet the entire Damocles Conclave failed?’
‘Maybe because he’s been covering our trail.’
Watching over me as I scurry from one dismal backwater world to another like a frightened rat! Tugging my strings…
Mordaine snatched at a guardrail as his boot punched through a rust-riddled plate and sent fragments clattering into the abyss below. Frozen rigid, he waited until the shuddering walkway had steadied before gingerly sliding his foot free. Once again he cursed the Calavera for sending him on this lethal errand.
Word had finally come two days ago.
‘He’s found them,’ Kreeger had relayed. ‘The tau are here.’
‘On Oblazt?’ Mordaine had slurred through a lodka-soaked daze.
‘In this hive,’ Kreeger had said. ‘Whatever’s coming, it starts here. It’s time to step up and take control, interrogator.’
‘Interrogator…’ Mordaine had been ashamed of the sudden, gut-wrenching terror that seized him. ‘I’ll be exposed… The conclave will come for me.’
‘And they’ll find a man who’s done his duty.’ Kreeger had actually grinned then, but it was all teeth and no eyes. ‘This is where you make things right.’
‘I need to meet the Calavera.’
‘What you need is muscle. An army. This is what he wants you to do…’
And once again I’m dancing to the Calavera’s tune, Mordaine thought miserably as he resumed his ascent. And the worst, most damnable thing about it is he’s right! An army is precisely what I need.
Two levels further up, his army found him. The sentries surged from the shadows overhead, leaping between the swaying gantries with the wild yet graceful assurance of natural acrobats. Watching them descend, Mordaine understood why they’d made the dome’s canopy their eyrie. Oblazt might not be their home world, but up in this vertiginous web they were its masters.
Save for the quirks of fate, these warriors might have been enemies of the Imperium, Mordaine thought. Savagery runs dangerously deep in the blood of the Iwujii Sharks. After all, they’ve been bred for it.
The military harvested its recruits young on Iwujii Secundus, Kreeger had explained, fast-tracking children into soldiers through a state-sanctioned programme of internecine wars that culled the weak and brutalised the strong. It was a barbarous tradition that predated the planet’s assimilation into the Imperium, but one the Departmento Munitorum had been rather taken with, for the practice offered a steady stream of hardened troops for the Imperial Guard.
‘The Iwujii Sharks aren’t what you’d call well-adjusted regiments,’ Kreeger had warned, ‘but they live, breathe and bleed the Imperial Creed. You’ve just got to handle them right.’
Offering neither threat nor submission, Mordaine studied the men who encircled him. They were all slight of build, with burnished copper skin and ebony hair that hung about their shoulders in elaborately braided dreadlocks. Their features were striking, with high cheekbones and sharply canted green eyes. Most didn’t look a year past twenty and all exuded an energy that seemed to rage against stillness. They wore tight-fitting fatigues of viridian striped with crimson slashes like open wounds and a haphazard array of leather armour. The majority sported vambraces and greaves, one a pair of shoulder pads wrought with splayed claws, another a breastplate carved into the likeness of a snarling tree. These warriors were evidently Iwujii first and Imperial Guard second. They weren’t the kind of troops Mordaine would have chosen, but they were the only regiment stationed on Oblazt.
Regiment? One company, Mordaine calculated soberly. Just three hundred men to seize the reins of a hive and expose a xenos conspiracy…
‘My lieutenant sent word to your commanding officers,’ Mordaine declared, hesitating only a moment before committing himself: ‘I am Inquisitor Aion Escher, Grand Master of the Damocles Conclave. By authority of the Holy Orders of the Inquisition I am hereby sequestering all Imperial forces stationed on this planet to assist me in the prosecution of the Emperor’s justice.’
Keeping his movements slow and steady, Mordaine drew a heavy seal from his coat and brandished it like a defensive ward. The grand master’s seal – the seal he’d stolen after watching his mentor die.
I didn’t know, Escher, Mordaine swore. I didn’t know that girl was an assassin…
He quashed the guilt, drawing strength from the awe in the troopers’ eyes as they recognised the stylised ‘I’ emblazoned on the seal. For a few brief weeks his every word would carry the sanction of the Imperium’s most feared authority.
I can do this, Escher, Mordaine promised, though he didn’t know if it was an apology or a curse.
TOWARDS UNITY
ABOVE THE DOME
Veiled by the emptiness at the roof of the world, the outsider called Iho’nen watched as the Catalyst moved his design towards its apogee. The remote outpost he’d claimed and upgraded with xenos tech was awash with a fluid cacophony of information – tapped vox-communications and vid-feeds… economic and social statistics rendered as filigree neon algorithms and charts… a constantly updating parade of psych profiles… Iho’nen drank it all in like a giant data-devouring spider, assimilating, correlating and assessing a thousand facts every minute.
Days passed, yet he stood motionless, waiting as rigorously calculated
probabilities crystallised into absolutes. Occasionally minor errors would manifest, prompting him to intervene through a reagent element, but this did not trouble him. It was the errors, or more precisely their correction, that kept him from becoming irrelevant.
His fellow outsider, the xenos, did not watch with him, for he was travelling.
THREE DAYS BEFORE UNITY
HÖSOK PLAZA, VYSHODD ANCHOR HIVE
The first steps had gone smoothly enough, Mordaine reflected. Both the Iwujii Sharks and the hive’s ruling oligarchy had acceded to his authority, albeit sullenly in the case of the Koroleva nobles. With his force swelled by the hive’s Ironspine Hussars, he’d launched himself into the hunt with the fervour of a man racing death, which of course he was. If he didn’t uncover something tangible before the conclave caught up with him, he would be finished. His life was almost certainly forfeit regardless, but there was still honour to fight for, and, somewhat to his surprise, he’d accepted that might be enough.
But everything hinged on finding the tau.
The spoor of the xenos permeated Vyshodd like a spreading disease. He’d discovered fragments of strange machinery in the manufactories – sleek, geodesic blasphemies that shrugged off dirt and sang with unholy life. Then there’d been the rogue tech-priest who peddled enhanced trinkets guaranteed to run for a lifetime without power-ups or prayer. Most unsettling of all had been the abominable xenos sculptures adorning a Koroleva pleasure mansion. The brash minimalism of those abstracts had been an affront to decent Imperial aesthetics! Individually they were petty heresies, but together they pointed to a systemic infiltration that had been eroding Vyshodd for years, possibly decades. And then there was Unity.
Unity – a simple, beautiful and perfectly ruinous lie.
Rumour had it that a common fishery worker had formulated the creed in her rest periods, scrawling her ideas on scraps of packaging then spreading them by word of mouth. The doctrine espoused such deviant notions as the right to free speech and the wholesale redistribution of wealth, wrapping them up in a muddled entreaty to embrace some kind of galactic fraternity. It was puerile nonsense, yet it had spread among the ignorant and the oppressed like wildfire, as insidious as any Chaos cult. Mordaine didn’t doubt its true origins so he’d focused on rooting out the leaders, but all he’d found were followers – hundreds of them – who insisted that Unity had no leaders. How could it, when it was ‘the Many of One’!
And throughout this dismal farrago there had been no word from the Calavera.
‘Silence is good,’ Kreeger would assure him. ‘Silence means you’re on track.’
‘Then where are the warp-damned xenos?’ Mordaine had railed. ‘I’ve got nothing the conclave won’t find themselves!’
With the hive’s detention facilities overflowing and the population growing restive, Mordaine had tightened the screws, first with punitive rationing and curfews, then finally a string of executions, but nobody had come forward with anything he could use. Instead… this…
How can so many be so blind? Mordaine despaired as he weighed up the crowd gathering in the square below. He was crouched on a rooftop overlooking Hösok Plaza, a sprawling, statue-studded court dedicated to Oblazt’s Imperial liberators. The symbolism of the venue was not lost on him, but it was the sheer numbers that appalled him. There were thousands of them, mostly scruffy manufactory bondsmen and icebreakers, but also a smattering of municipal clerks and free traders. All had daubed their foreheads with the concentric blue circles of Unity. Despite its simplicity, there was something inherently alien about the symbol that repelled him.
‘I speak for the Many who walk as One!’ someone called from the square – a tall woman with the gaunt, febrile features of a tormented artist. The crowd fell silent at her voice, as if at a prearranged signal. ‘We offer you the open hand of friendship. Stand with us against the bloated tyranny that has betrayed this world!’
Mordaine could almost taste the seductive xenos heresy lacing her rhetoric. Yet despite her words the woman in the plaza appeared neither ignorant nor oppressed. Oblazt’s ruling class was a race apart from the commoners and she had the look. Mordaine was unsurprised, for the most zealous prophets of change often rose from the ruling strata. Sometimes it was guilt that drove their heresy, sometimes merely ennui, but the Inquisition had long understood the perils of privilege.
‘Cast off the shackles of your dead god and bear witness to a living unity that embraces all as One!’ the demagogue implored.
‘The heretics spit in the face of Father Terra,’ someone hissed beside Mordaine. Armande Uzochi. Since Mordaine’s journey into the canopy, the young Iwujii captain had become his second shadow, devoting himself to ‘the great inquisitor’ with an awe that bordered on reverence. Unfortunately there was a rancid, tightly coiled violence about the man that made Mordaine’s skin crawl. He suspected Uzochi was quite probably insane.
The right man to have by my side today…
‘Give the order,’ Mordaine said, feeling disconnected – disconnecting himself – as Uzochi voxed the platoon leaders. Ranks of Iwujii Sharks rose along the rooftops like vengeful spirits, silent and watchful. There was a clatter of booted feet below, and white-uniformed Ironspine Hussars appeared at every egress from the square, lining up in neat formations. The crowd backed away, congealing at the centre of the square as if density might offer some safety, but the rebel speaker held her ground.
‘Truth cannot be silenced!’ she proclaimed, spreading her arms wide, palms open. ‘Every martyr you burn will forge two stronger heroes!’ Her eyes glittered a radiant azure, ignited by the passion of her belief.
Why did you choose me for this filthy work, Escher? Mordaine asked, as he’d done so many times before, but never of the grand master himself. You knew I didn’t have the conviction to stomach it.
Impossibly, the rebel seemed to be looking directly at him now.
‘An inquisitor must armour his soul in ice,’ Escher answered from the crumbling mortuary of Mordaine’s faith. ‘The ordinary mass of mankind is irrelevant, as are even the most exceptional individuals. It is the divine thread of our species that the Inquisition safeguards. All else is either expendable or inimical.’
No. Mordaine strangled the dry, dead voice in his head. You’re wrong, Escher. Otherwise what’s the point to any of it?
‘Captain…’ he began.
‘Purge the heretics!’ Uzochi bellowed, misinterpreting him. ‘For Father Terra!’
No! Mordaine tried to scream, but he had no voice and a heartbeat later there was a surfeit of screams as his army opened fire.
Kreeger was waiting for him in the stairwell, smoking a lho-stick.
‘Tell the Calavera I’m done,’ Mordaine said, stepping past him.
‘He’s going to come in,’ Kreeger called after him. ‘He has a few loose ends to tie up first, but–’
‘Too late,’ Mordaine said flatly.
‘Only a couple more days, duke.’
‘It was too late from the start, Kreeger.’ Mordaine turned, letting the rage well up in his chest like purifying fire. ‘We’ve been played – you, me and most especially your precious Calavera! Vyshodd was a trap. This slaughter… We’ve given the xenos exactly what they needed. We’ve proven the Imperium is a monster.’
‘Always was.’ Kreeger shrugged. ‘Just like all the rest.’
Mordaine faltered, his fury leeched away by the other’s indifference. Perplexed, he studied his lieutenant’s deeply seamed yet oddly bland face, trying to make sense of the man who’d been saving his skin for more years than he cared to count. Everything about Franz Kreeger was grey, from his gaunt complexion and the dusting of stubble on his scalp through to the barren alchemy of his soul.
His story was fairly typical of his breed: twenty years a storm trooper in the Guard, including a stint at the Cadian Gate, then secondment to an Inquisition taskforce to P
haedra, a world somewhere on the fringes of the Damocles Gulf, where he’d impressed the presiding inquisitor enough to win a place on his retinue. Later that inquisitor had become the grand master of the Damocles Conclave and later still he’d assigned Kreeger to support a promising new interrogator.
‘Keep him by your side, Mordaine,’ Escher had advised, ‘and he will keep you alive.’
This was certainly true. Without Kreeger, Mordaine would have stopped running long ago. Angel’s Blood, he wouldn’t have run at all.
‘This hive… This entire planet…’ Mordaine whispered. ‘It’s going to welcome the tau with open arms.’
‘We’re still in the game, duke,’ Kreeger said. ‘The Calavera has taken a prisoner.’ Then he offered a name.
Mordaine stared at him. And then he dared to hope.
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