Spinoza and Hegain moved within the precincts of the Hall proper, and presented credentials at three further security cordons before a pair of heavy iron doors swung open. After that, their surroundings sunk into that ambience so familiar in all courtrooms of the Imperium – the musty, mouldering air; the oppressive lighting; the muffled squeaks of boots on high-polished floors. Several squads of enforcers jogged past them, heading up to the gates to reinforce the perimeter. All saluted as they went by. Two servo-skulls with high-range oculi hummed overhead soon afterwards, heading the same way. One of them scanned Spinoza, presumably an automatic process, and picked up the subtle response systems embedded in her armour. Unperturbed, the skull bobbed onwards, its grav-unit whining.
‘This equipment is adequate, at least,’ Spinoza remarked as they kept walking.
‘Erunion works hard,’ Hegain agreed. ‘He will be pleased to hear of it, when we return.’
Without advance planning and access to restricted schematics, finding a path through the warrens beyond would have been nigh-impossible. The corridors soon branched, then branched again, splitting up into dozens of different subterranean avenues. Every surface was highly polished and smelled of chemical cleaners. Every door was iron-barred and unmarked, save for small, cryptic iron glyphs set into the lintels. Adepts scurried all over the place, hauling materials from the repositories to the court-chambers and back again, their gaunt faces hidden under the ubiquitous scholars’ cowls. It quickly became clammy, and the grind of atmospheric processors made the floors thrum. Once within the steel trap of outer security, few dared challenge a proctor and her escort, and the numerous armed guards made the aquila respectfully whenever they were encountered. Only the automatic scanning systems continued to challenge them, which happened at regular intervals as they progressed further inside.
They ignored the corridors leading to the courtrooms and gaols, as well as those descending to the interrogation suites and holding cells, but followed Revre’s directions towards the third great portion of the Hall’s interior – the investigation archives. Over the millennia of the Hall’s ceaseless activity, these repositories had become truly immense, filling chamber after chamber with tight-packed files and vellum-bundles. Some sections were devoted to the accounts of notable judgements, others to academic tomes of esoteric jurisprudence, yet more to the mundane business of recording the minute-by-minute conduct of active enforcement work. As ever, the volume of material soon outpaced the ability of any single administration to process, and so a secondary industry of intensive tome-mining had sprung up within the Hall’s cavernous vaults. Whole branches of its standing army of scholiasts were devoted to mounting extensive expeditions into the furthest and oldest reaches of the lower levels, set on uncovering lost jewels of wisdom or relocating the corpuses of the revered foundational Judges. Every senior official of the Adeptus Arbites, wherever they were stationed in the Imperium, had the ambition to make the pilgrimage to this place, just once, in order to assist this effort, perhaps to rediscover something truly significant in the deeps, maybe to learn some hidden truth of the Lex, or possibly just to breathe in the leathery air of the sealed chambers and gaze in rapture along the cases of ancient, flaking spines. It was even rumoured that, from time to time, some of the most fanatical of them took up permanent habitation in the furthest reaches of the archive-pits, eking out a famished existence in the dust and darkness before they finally expired among their beloved parchment-scraps, surrounded by burned-out candles and the scrawl of hasty, obsessive notes.
Of course, most of the archives were neither as important nor as well-hidden as those legendary screeds – records stretching back over the past few centuries were still reasonably accessible and frequently made use of. Hall XXVI of Level 458 was virtually at the repository’s surface-stratum, though even using Revre’s data it still required a long hike to find it. The bustle of the upper corridors slowly receded and the lumens dipped even lower, until the two of them were trudging through a twilight underworld of stacked vellum walls, each volume crammed on to iron shelves that seemed to stretch on forever.
‘Folio thirty-three…’ Hegain mumbled, scanning with a handheld augur to gain a fix on the correct location. ‘Folio fifty-nine… Hells below, are these not in any kind of order?’
Spinoza took in the surroundings carefully. Grav-loaders had been stationed at the intersection of every major tome-casing. Boxy cogitator stations dotted the floor level. On the edge of hearing, she could detect other scholars at work in the far distance, their taps and scrapes echoing along the long avenues. Her helm’s tactical display picked up the intermittent flicker of servo-skull movement. Even here, even in these barren reaches, there were still eyes to see and ears to hear.
‘This is what we want,’ she said, using Revre’s information to home in on a sealed set of records.
They came to a halt in front of a barred metal section, behind which steel crates had been stacked. Spinoza scanned the catalogue panels with her own augur unit. After confirming the codes against Revre’s figures, she applied a lock-cycler to the bars. With a rusty clunk they slid open, revealing the crates within. Hegain pulled one out, then tried Revre’s seal-codes, one by one, until he found a match. The lid of the crate eased open, revealing an empty interior.
‘Anything at all?’ asked Spinoza, peering inside.
Hegain rummaged for a moment, using his helm-visor to scan for trace elements. ‘There was material placed in this, yes,’ he said, running his fingers along the bottom. ‘Standard archive-vellum. Very much gone now.’
They pulled out another crate, and then another. All were empty. They worked their way down, looking for records filed in the adjacent cases, and found nothing.
‘These were communications made at the highest level,’ Spinoza said, reaching for another crate. ‘Few would dare to destroy them, I think, without similarly high-level authorisation.’
‘The physical copies, yes,’ said Hegain, leaning against the casing. ‘But Revre, if I recall it, gave us scan-codes, did he not?’
‘The same, in all likelihood,’ said Spinoza. ‘But we have come this far – we must be thorough.’
They replaced the crates and re-sealed the casings. Then they trudged down the long avenue towards the nearest cogitator station. It was a huge, old contraption, with corrosion-spotted heat-sinks and a smeared, angle-poise viewer-lens. Heavy cabling snaked from its rear down into the floor, where it joined clustered wiring from the other linked units within the hall.
Spinoza took a seat before the terminal and activated the interrogation-unit. The machine-spirit coughed, spat, then blurted into life. She pulled out a typeslate, then adjusted the lens so the glyph-projector lined up with her eyes.
‘Record access,’ she said, speaking into the vox-grille, and holding her badge of status up against a sight-verifier.
The cogitator thought about that for a while, clattering internally, before a glowing line of runes chuntered across the lens.
Welcome, proctor. Security code, please.
Spinoza entered the first of Revre’s figures, causing the cogitator to clatter some more.
No records held under that file-heading. Do you have another request?
Spinoza halted the recall and entered a realtext-query.
Have prior records on this topic been removed?
The cogitator ran the logic, and the transistors along its back flashed as power was drawn to the calculus-engine.
Yes, proctor.
By whom?
Undetermined, proctor. Do you have another request?
Spinoza entered more of Revre’s codes, using each one to interrogate a different archive-silo. The answer was always the same.
No records held under that file-heading. Do you have another request?
In every case, the cogitator was prepared to divulge that the cases had once been populated, but had no data on the
reason for them being emptied. It was a clean removal with no omissions. This was a dead end. If any link had once existed between the Provost Marshal and the Speaker’s office, it had been terminated some time ago, and all traces of it expunged.
Hegain began to grow restive. He had been pacing up around, keeping an eye on the avenues ahead and behind. They were all deserted, but that could change at any time.
‘Details of any further catalogue items in this silo referring to representatives of the Speaker of the Chartist Captains,’ Spinoza finally voxed at the grille, for completeness.
Another round of clicking and whirring. None held, proctor. Do you have another request?
‘If I may, lord,’ Hegain ventured, peering out into the darkness, ‘I believe we have all we are going to get.’
Spinoza ignored him. She had one access code left, the last one Revre had given her before his mind had begun to fade. It had not been a pleasant task, nor an honourable one, leveraging that wretch. It would be better to get something out of it, making the deed a little less sordid than the pointless murder of a weak man.
‘Almost there,’ she said, inputting the final sequence.
The cogitator rattled. It clunked. Then it stopped. For a moment, there was nothing – just the creak of the shelves around them.
Then, without warning, it shut down entirely. The meagre lumens hung far above went out, turning the gloom into perfect darkness.
From somewhere far away, right on the edge of detection, an alarm clanged into life.
Spinoza smiled dryly. ‘I did not think he had it in him,’ she said to herself.
Then she got up, pulling her hand-cannon from its holster. Hegain was already moving, stowing his shock baton and pulling out an autopistol. Both activated their night-sights.
‘Forgive me, sergeant,’ said Spinoza, breaking into a stride and heading swiftly back the way they had come. ‘I fear that was one code too many.’
‘Nothing to forgive, lord,’ replied Hegain, chortling. ‘I don’t like to hide if I can help it. Best to fight harder on two feet, you think, yes?’
Spinoza remembered Crowl’s orders.
We have no defence, once we are exposed.
‘Just maintain your cover,’ said Spinoza, picking up the pace as the alarms grew louder. ‘We get out alive, then we worry about what comes next.’
From the terminus berths, Crowl and Bajan took a mag-train further inside the Nexus. Gorgias hung low over Crowl’s shoulder, silent and subservient. As they went, the opulence of the interior gradually unfurled around them. The elevated track wound through a series of halls, each one larger than the one before, all well-lit and shining from expensive equipment and glassy fittings. The floors were white marble, the staff dressed in crisp blue tabards. The mounted Imperial aquila was present, blindly overseeing the activity on the floors below, but not as often as the symbol of the Chartists, which adorned almost every surface.
There should have been little surprise about this. All knew that the Chartists were phenomenally wealthy. Unlike the military orders of the Imperium, which were forever run ragged trying to police its long frontiers, the merchants had it good, here at its centre where all coin eventually found its home. Crowl found himself wondering what the average Militarum trooper, stranded out in the freezing, mud-clogged trenches of the main combat zones, would have felt if they knew what their sacrifice was buying. Not that any of them would ever get this far to see it – there was a reason why the Nexus guarded its perimeter so tightly.
‘What is that?’ Crowl asked, as the mag-train glided through another large hall.
The track was over ten metres up, sending them far over the heads of the adepts labouring below. In this chamber, enormous crystalflex screens had been erected, on which cartographic symbols glowed softly. A complex web of trade-routes overlaid one another, marked by status runes and trigonometric equations. Every so often, the lattice would update, ticking over to register the arrival of another big convoy or the completion of a major contract. Most of the datascreens depicted local systems, just a few warp-stages across, and here the level of information was impressive – a gently scrolling list of manifolds and fulfilments, placed orders and newly launched hulls. On the largest, though, the one that dominated the centre of the hall, things were more schematic. It was impossible not to recognise the straggling swirl of the western galactic arm, marked with Terra at its centre. That map was familiar to any child of a good schola, as were the many system names that were learned by rote.
It was a figurative diagram, of course – there was no way, in a universe dominated by astropathic communication and the vagaries of warp-travel, to generate real-time snapshots of every fleet movement and every landing. The schematic of the Imperium was by necessity half-allegorical, with the usual astrological symbols mixed in with the astronomical ones, tied together with benedictions to the Emperor-as-Navigator and old injunctions against the caprice of the void’s tides. And yet, there was a broad picture to be read there, something that could be interpreted meaningfully, something that was clearly evolving. A long swath of that map was marked in red, tearing across the northern galactic sectors like a cut made by a jagged blade. Within that zone, whole systems throbbed with alert runes, their trade-routes and warp-conduits darkened, faded or erased.
Bajan followed Crowl’s gaze. ‘The anomalous regions?’ he asked coolly. ‘There is some uncertainty. As with all such things, the schema is only a rough indication. We compile distress signals, regular fleet bulletins, the usual sources.’
‘Those systems are marked as lost.’
‘Not lost, inspector. Uncertain. There is some doubt as to their current status and reporting reliability.’
The mag-train brushed along, heading steadily towards the exit portal at the far end of the hall. Below, activity continued much as it must always have done – a steady, professional bustle of scholiasts and analysers bent low over tabulators and scrivenodes. Chronometers ticked away on the walls, each fashioned to look like the centrepiece of a ship’s command bridge, marking the estimated local time-date benchmark at major muster-centres. No one seemed concerned.
‘But the pattern is immense,’ said Crowl, unable to take his eyes from the map. ‘And it begins in the Ocularis Terribus. Has this information been passed on to the Council?’
‘Of course,’ said Bajan. ‘Everything is communicated in the usual way – I can show you the records, if you are interested.’
Crowl looked hard at the signals adept. There was a faint tightness around his mouth, a slight tension around his eyes. Nothing unusual, when faced with a member of the Inspectorate of Shipping. Was he really that relaxed about it? Had he been ordered to be? ‘What response did you get?’
‘I would not know, inspector,’ Bajan said. The mag-train passed into another tunnel, and the brightness of the hall faded into the flashing lumen-pattern of the Nexus’ interior. ‘That is something the Speaker’s office may be able to determine, were you able to ask them. But you will understand from your time in the scheduling stations that anomalies come and go. Sometimes they are very large, sometimes less so. We plan for them, we accommodate them, just as always.’
Crowl settled back into his clamshell seat. There was something surreal about the complacency. Still, these people knew their business. He himself had not been on a truly long void-passage for a very long time, and could hardly be held up as an expert on such things.
‘The galaxy must be compassed,’ he said, echoing the Chartists’ motto.
‘Quite.’
They moved on, travelling through more cartographic halls, then narrower chambers that appeared entirely devoted to enormous ledgers of goods and tithes. The scale of operations became somewhat numbing, a constant buzz of computation and calculation, never-ending in scope, remorseless in intensity. Most of it was utterly impenetrable to outsiders, an arcane business of profit-predic
tion and goods-distribution conducted over truly awe-inspiring distances and timeframes.
These were powerful people. In some respects, these were the most powerful people in the Imperium.
‘Here we are,’ Bajan said, getting up.
The mag-train glided to a halt. They disembarked and entered a glass-roofed atrium. Water – uncontaminated, by the look of it – ran from fountains into long ornamental pools. The adepts shuffling across the slate floors here were senior, clad in fine multihued robes and wearing elaborate headdresses. Bajan took Crowl into a palatial office, one that overlooked the cityscape beyond. That meant they were very high up, in the cluster of towers at the Nexus’ summit, and the hab-spires stretched off in a cool haze of grey, bleached by the diffuse light of the cloud-barred sun. Black specks of air-traffic flitted past in silent mobs, like billows of dust in the wind.
‘Drink, inspector?’ Bajan asked, heading to a heavy-set ahlwood desk with mournful caryatids for legs.
Crowl could have killed for one, but Calavine, unfortunately, was teetotal. Or rather had been teetotal, prior to his accident on the landing stages coming in from the Eleucine orbital transfer platform. Such a tragedy, that.
‘No,’ he said, taking the seat set opposite the desk. ‘We’ll get started.’
‘Very well,’ said Bajan. ‘I have prepared a selection of recent–’
‘I did not come all this way to scrutinise material you have already sanitised.’ Calavine had been an irritable man. Mimicking him proved rather enjoyable. ‘I have questions of my own.’
Bajan smiled tartly. ‘I see.’
‘You keep accurate records.’
‘We pride ourselves on that.’
‘And your responsibilities include the Laurentis subsector.’
‘They do. Among many others.’
‘Are you familiar with the name Naaman Vinal?’
Bajan frowned. ‘I do not believe so.’
‘He was a rogue trader.’
Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight Page 9