by Dan Abnett
'You called him a "facilitator"/
'That was where his danger lay. He believed he could serve his obscene masters best by offering his considerable skills to cults and sects that needed them. He had no true allegiances. He worked to facilitate the grand schemes of others. What he was doing here on Hubris was to advance and develop someone else's plans. Now he is dead, and his scheme thwarted. We may be thankful. But my task is not done. I must work back from Eyclone, his men, from any clue he left and dig my way into whatever greater, secret darkness was employing him.'
'And for this you want the co-operation of the people of Hubris?' asked Carpel.
The people, the authorities, you… everyone. This is the Emperor's work. Will you shrink from it?'
'No sir, I will not!' snapped Carpel.
'Excellent/
Carpel tossed a gold solar-form badge to me. It was heavy and old, mounted on a pad of black leather.
This will give you authority. My authority. Conduct your work thoroughly and quickly. I ask two things in return/
'And they are?'
You report all findings to me. And you allow the chastener to accompany you/
'I work my own way-'
'Fischig can open doors and voiceboxes here in the Sun-dome that even that badge may not. Consider him a local guide/
And your ears and eyes, I thought. But I knew he was under immense pressure from the nobility to produce results, so I said: 'I will be grateful for his assistance/
'Where first?' Fischig asked, down to business at once, a hungry look on his face. They want blood, I realised. They want someone to punish for the deaths, someone they can say they caught, or at least helped to catch. They want to share in whatever successes I have so that they can look good when the rest of their population wakes up to this disaster in a few months' time.
I couldn't blame them.
'First/1 said, 'the mortuary/
Eyclone looked as if he was asleep. His head had been wrapped in an almost comical plastic bonnet to contain the wound I had dealt him. Framed in the plastic, his face was tranquil, with just a slight bruising around the lips.
He lay on a stone plinth in the chill of the morgue below Arbites Mortuary One. His brethren lay on numbered plinths around him, those that had been recovered more or less intact. There were labelled bins of mostly liquescent material against the back wall, the remains of those that Betan-core had slaughtered with the cutter's cannons.
The air in the underground vault was lit cold blue, and frost covered circulators pumped in sub-zero air direcdy from the ice-desert outside the Sun-dome. Fischig had provided us all with heat gowns for the visit.
I was impressed by what I saw: both the dutiful care and attention that had been used to sequester and store the bodies and by the fact that no one had touched them, according to my instructions. It seems a simple command to give, but I have lost count of the times that over-eager death-priests or surgeons have begun autopsies before I arrived.
The mortician superintendent was a haggard woman in her sixties called Tutrone. She attended us in red plastic scrubs worn over an old and threadbare heat-gown. Mortress Tutrone had a bionic implant in one eye socket, and blades and bonesaw manipulators of gleaming surgical steel built into her right hand.
'I have done as you instructed/ she told me as she led us down the spiral steps into the cold vault. 'But it is irregular. Rules state I must begin examinations, prelim examinations at least, as soon as possible/
'I thank you for your diligence, mortress. I will be done quickly. Then you can follow protocol/
Pulling on surgical gloves, I moved through the lines of dead – there were nearly twenty of them – dictating observations of Aemos. There was virtually noming to be learned from the men. Some I gauged from build and coloration to be off-worlders, but they had no documents, no surgical identifiers, no clue whatsoever about their origins or identities. Even their clothing was blank… manufacturing tags and labels had been torn or burned off. I could begin a forensic investigation to identify the source of the clothing, but that would be a massive waste of resources.
On two of mem, I found fresh scars that suggested subcutaneous idem markers had been surgically removed. Ident marking was not a local practice, so that at least suggested off-world. But where? Hundreds of Imperial planets routinely used such devices, and their placing and use was pretty standard. I had carried one myself for a few years, as a child, before the Black Ships selected me and it was dug out.
One of the corpses had a curious scarring on the forearms, not deep but thorough, searing the epidermis.
'Someone has used a melta-torch to remove gang tattoos/ Aemos said.
He was right. Again, it was tantalisingly incomplete.
I looked to Eyclone, where I thought my best bet lay. With the Mortress's help, I cut away his clothes, all of which were as anonymous as his followers' garb. We turned his naked corpse, looking for… well, anything.
There!' Fischig said, leaning in. A brand mark above the left buttock.
The Seraph of Laoacus. An old Chaos mark. Eyclone had it done to honour his then-masters twenty years ago. A previous cult, a previous employer. Nothing to do with this/
Fischig looked at me curiously. "Vou know the details of his naked flesh?'
'I have sources/ I replied. I didn't want to have to tell the tale. Eemanda, one of my first companions, brilliant, beautiful and bold. She
had found that detail out for me. She had been in an asylum now for five years. The last report I had received said she had eaten away her own fingers.
'But he marks himself?' Fischig added. 'With each new cult he involves himself in, he carries their mark to show his allegiance?'
The man had a point, damn him. We looked. At least six laser scars on his body seemed likely to have been previous cult marks, burned off after he left those associations.
Behind his left ear, a skin inlay of silver was worked in the form of the Buboe Chaotica.
This?' asked Tutrone, shaving the hair aside with her finger blades to reveal it.
'Old, as before/
I stepped back from the body and thought hard. When I'd killed him, he had been reaching for something on his belt, or so it had seemed to me.
'His effects?'
They were laid out on a metal tray nearby. His laspistol, a compact vox-device, a pearl-inlaid box containing six obscura tubes and an igniter, a credit tile, spare cells for the gun, a plastic key. And the belt; with four buttoned pouches.
I opened them one by one: some local coins; a miniature las-knife; three bars of high-calorie rations; a steel tooth-pick; more obscura, this time in an injector vial; a small data slate.
At the moment of death, which of these things had he been reaching for? The knife? Too slow and small to counter a man who has a naval pistol wedged into your mouth. Then again, he was desperate.
And then again, he hadn't reached for his bolstered lasgun.
The data-slate, perhaps? I picked it up and activated it, but it needed a cipher to gain access. All manner of secrets might be locked inside… but why would a man reach for a data-slate in the face of certain death?
Track marks, along the forearm/ Tutrone stated, continuing her exam.
Hardly surprising, given the narco-ware we'd recovered from him.
'No rings? No bracelets? Earrings? Piercing studs?'
'None/
I pulled a plastic pouch from a dispenser on the surgical cart and put all his effects into it.
"Vou will sign for those, won't you?' Tutrone asked, looking up.
'Of course/
'You hated him, didn't you?' Fischig said suddenly.
'What?'
He leaned back against a plinth, crossing his arms. 'You had him at your mercy, and you knew his head was full of secrets, but you emptied it with your gun. I have no compunction when it comes to killing, but I know when I'm wasting a lead. Was it rage?'
'I'm an inquisitor. I do not get angry/
&n
bsp; Then what?'
I had just about enough of his snide tone. 'You don't know how dangerous this man is. I wasn't taking chances/
'He looks safe enough to me/ Fischig smirked, looking down at the body.
'Here's something!' Tutrone called out. We all moved in.
She was working on his left hand, delicately, with her finest gauge scalpels and probes, her augmented fingers darting like a seamstress.
The index finger of the left hand. There's unusual lividity and swelling/ She played a small scanner across it.
'The nail's ceramite. Artificial. An implant/
'What's inside?'
'Unknown. A ghost reading. There's maybe… ah, there it is… a catch under the quick. You'd need something small to trigger it/
She adjusted her bionic finger settings and slid out a very thin metal probe, thin like…
… a tooth pick.
'Back! Back now!' I yelled.
It was too late. Tutrone had undone the catch. The false nail sprang back and something flew out of the cavity in the finger tip. A silver worm, like a thread of necklace chain, flashed through the air.
Where did it go?'
'I don't know, I said, pushing Tutrone and Aemos behind me. 'Did you see it?' I asked Fischig.
'Over there/ he said, pulling a short-nosed gloss-black autopistol out from his robes.
I reached for my own gun, then remembered I'd given it back to Vibben.
I snatched up a bone knife from the trolley.
The worm slithered back into the light. It was a metre long and several centimetres thick now. What foul sorcery had caused that expansion, I did not want to know. It was made of segmented metal, and the head was an eyeless cone split by a hissing mouth full of razor teeth.
Tutrone cried out as it flew at lis. I pushed her down and the thing whipped across over us, hitting a corpse on a nearby plinth. There was a dreadful sucking, gnawing sound and the worm disappeared into the corpse's torso through a jagged hole.
The corpse vibrated and ruptured, filling the air with a foul mist of vapour. The worm swished up out of it and disappeared across the floor. By then, Fischig had opened fire and blasted the shattered corpse off its plinth. The worm was long since gone.
'Touch-activated mechanism/ Aemos was murmuring to himself, 'very discrete, probably of Xenos manufacture, a guard weapon, with some mass-altering system that expands it on contact with air and/or release, hunting by sound…'
'So shut up!' I told him. I bundled him and Tutrone against the far wall. Fischig and I moved in parallel courses down through the plinth rows, weapons ready.
It reappeared. By the time I saw it, it was almost on me, thrashing forward through the air on its metallic tail. In a split second, I reflected that this was how Eyclone had wanted me to die. This was what he had intended to unleash against me on the landing platform at Processional Two-Twelve.
Rage made me deny him. I stabbed out and my extended blade jabbed directly between the gaping teeth and down the gullet. The impact knocked me back. I found I had the whole, heavy, two-metre thing thrashing on the end of my knife like a lash.
Shots banged past me. Fischig was trying to hit it.
You'll kill me, you idiot!'
'Hold it still!'
With a metallic rasping, it was chewing down the blade and the handle towards my hand.
Tutrone came in from behind me and together we wrestled the powerful, coiling thing onto a plinth. She activated a bone-saw on her augmetic hand and sliced down through its neck with a shrill scream of spinning blades.
The body continued to thrash. She grabbed it and dropped it into an acid trough usually reserved for bio-waste. The hissing head and the knife it was still chewing away at quickly followed it.
The four of us gazed down at the thrashing remains as they disintegrated.
I looked round at Mortress Tutrone and Fischig.
'I know which one of you I'd rather have around in a fight/1 muttered.
Tutrone laughed. Fischig didn't.
'What was it?' Aemos asked me as we raced in Fischig's landspeeder through the streets to the Arbites' headquarters.
'You guessed more than I know/ I replied. A gift from his masters, certainly/
'What manner of masters make a thing like that?'
'Powerful ones, Aemos. The worst kind/
Our meeting at the Arbites' grim chambers was brief. At my request, Fischig had summoned Magus Palastemes, the head of the cryogenerator technomagi.
He took one look at the casket in the evidence room and said, 'I have no idea what it is/
Thank you. That will be all/ I told him. I turned to Fischig. 'Have this sent immediately to my vessel/
'It is state's evidence-' he began.
'Who do you work for, Fischig?'
The Emperor/
"Then pretend I'm him and you won't be far wrong. Do it/
* * *
Hadam Bonz was waiting for us in the interrogation room. He had been stripped naked, but Fischig assured me nothing of import had been found in his clothes.
Bonz was the gunman I had laid out in the cryogenerator chamber, the only one of Eyclone's men to have survived the night. His mouth was swollen from my blow. He had admitted nothing except his name.
Fischig, Aemos and I entered the room, a dull stone box. Bonz was shackled to a metal chair and looked terrified.
So should he, I thought.
Tell me about Murdin Eyclone/ I said.
Who?' The darkness had gone from his eyes now, Eyclone's spell broken. He was bewildered and confused.
Then tell me the last thing you remember.'
'I was on Thracian Primaris. That was my home. I was a stevedore in the docks. I remember going to a bar with a friend. That is all/
The friend?'
'A dock master called Wyn Eddon. We got drunk, I think/
'Did Eddon mention an Eyclone?'
'No. Look, where am I? These bastards won't say. What I am supposed to have done?'
I smiled. 'You tried to kill me for a start/
'You?'
'I'm an Imperial inquisitor/
At that, terror made him lose control of his body functions. He began pleading, begging, telling us all sorts of misdemeanours, none of which mattered.
I knew from the first moments that he was useless. Just a mesmerised slave, chosen for his muscle, knowing nothing. But we spent two hours with him anyway. Fischig slowly turned a wall dial near the door that vented in increasing measures of the sub-zero air outside the Sun-dome. In our heat gowns, we asked questions over and again.
When Bonz's flesh began to adhere to the metal chair, we knew there was nothing more.
'Warm him up and feed him well/ Fischig told his men as we left the cell. We execute him at dawn/
I didn't ask if that meant some arbitrary time in the next cycle or real dawn, six months away, at the start of Thaw.
I didn't much care.
Fischig left us to our own devices for a while, and I ate lunch with Aemos at a public bistro almost directly under the Sun-dome. The food was sour, rehashed from freeze-dried consumables, but at least it was hot. Fountain banks projected walls of water around the edges of the bistro so that the sun-globe light made rainbows that criss-crossed the tables and aisles. On this sombre day of mourning, there were no other diners present.
Aemos was in good spirits. He chatted away, making connections I hadn't begun to see. For all his faults, he possessed a superb mind. Every hour I spent with him, I learned more techniques.
He was forking up fish and rice and reviewing his data slate.
'Let's look at the transmission lag that Lowink detected in the messages Eyclone sent and received while on the planet/
They're all in cipher. Lowink hasn't unlocked them yet/
'Yes, yes, but look at the lag. This one… eight seconds… that's from a ship in orbit… and the timeframe matches that period in which we know Eyclone's mysterious starship was here. But this… during your s
truggle with him last night. A lag of twelve and a half minutes. That's from another system/
I stopped trying to macerate a lump of meat that resembled a slug and peered over. I'd never much considered the blurry side-bar that edged all astropathic message forms before.
Twelve and a half? You're sure?'
'I had Lowink check/
'So that gives us a reference frame?'
He smiled, pleased I was pleased. Three worlds in the picture. All between eleven and fifteen minutes' lag of here. Thracian Primaris, Kobalt II and Gudran/
Thracian Primaris was no surprise. That had been our last port of call, our last sighting of Eyclone. And, as far as we knew from the wretched Bonz, the place where he had recruited some or all of his servants.
'Kobalt's a nothing. I checked. Just an Imperial watch station. But Gudran-'
'A primary trade world. Old culture, old families-'
'Old poisons/ he finished with a laugh, completing the proverb.
I dabbed my mouth with a napkin. 'Can we be more certain?'
'Lowink's researching for me. Once we break the cipher… I don't mean the message cipher itself, I mean the coded headers to the actual text, we'll know/
'Gudran…' I pondered.
My vox-link chimed in my ear. It was Betancore.
'Ever hear of a thing called the Pontius?'
'No. Why?'
'I haven't either, but Lowink's cracking some of the old transcripts. In the weeks before Eyclone arrived, someone was sending messages off the approved links to a location in the Sun-dome. They talk about the delivery of The Pontius'. It's all rather vague and indirect/
'Do you have a location?'
'Why else do you employ us? Thaw-view 12011, on the west side of the dome, the high-rent quarter. Aristo turf/
'Any names?'
No, they're very exclusive and coy about such things/
'We're on it/
Aemos and I rose from the table. We turned to find Fischig standing there. He was wearing the full flak armour, carapace and visored helm of an Arbites now. I have to admit the effect was impressive.
'Going somewhere without me, inquisitor?'