‘Almost there,’ the tall soldier assured her at last, after the latest of several enquiries about the matter. ‘We’re just reaching the treeline.’ A moment later, the entire party broke out into the open again, looking down on a scene of utter devastation.
‘Throne preserve us,’ the dark-haired man muttered. ‘What the hell happened here?’
As the pale light of dawn intensified to the thin grey murk that passed for sunshine across most of the surface of Sepheris Secundus, the full extent of the havoc wrought by the raiders became all too clear. From a distance, the great gash in the curtain wall of the fortress, and the charred craters where its air defence batteries had once been, were the most visible signs of damage, but the closer they got to it the more evidence they could see of the incredible amount of firepower their mysterious enemies had been able to unleash. As they trudged across the plain fronting the violated bastion, Drake felt his spirits sinking with every step, turning his head from side to side as he plodded through the snow in a futile attempt to find some trace of anyone or anything he recognised. Even Sergeant Claren would have been a welcome sight, but the reek of charred meat from what was left of the command Chimera was enough to confirm that nothing more tangible remained of him than ashes and grease.
The Imperial Guard encampment had quite simply been obliterated. Every vehicle, every hab unit, had been scoured from the permafrost as thoroughly as though they’d never existed. Even the blackened remains were disappearing from view, as the drifting snow began to shroud them, the only graves most of the casualties would ever know.
To Drake’s shocked surprise there were still a few survivors, a handful of hollow eyed men in uniforms like his own, huddled warily in twos or threes, mustering under the command of one of the red-uniformed garrison troopers. A few glanced up with idle curiosity as the Inquisitorial party approached, and Drake nodded to a couple of faces that he vaguely thought he might have recognised, but no one responded, too far gone with exhaustion or trauma.
‘What’s going to happen to us?’ Kyrlock asked, taking in the small clusters of Guardsmen with a single sweeping gesture of his arm.
The dark-haired man that Drake assumed was some kind of second in command glanced at the inquisitor for a moment, and then clearly deciding he was too exhausted to answer, shrugged. ‘Reassignment, I suppose. None of you will be going back to a line regiment after what you’ve seen tonight.’
‘Reassignment where?’ Drake asked, knowing trouble when he heard it.
The man shrugged again. ‘That’s for the inquisitor to decide.’
Great, Drake thought. The old man looked as if the only thing he could work out was which side of the bed to collapse onto. He was leaning heavily on the skinny kid in the flight suit, and the matronly woman who’d done that scary thing with the fire was clucking around him like a mother hen.
‘Halt.’ Drake looked up to find that, lost in his thoughts, he’d led the group almost as far as the hole in the outer wall. A red-uniformed trooper was pointing something, which looked like a bigger and heavier version of his own lasgun, right at him, while several others kept the rest of the little group covered with hair trigger intensity. ‘Who goes there?’
‘Inquisitor Finurbi.’ The old man was pulling himself upright, staring down the group of soldiers, his Inquisitorial sigil flashing red in the artificial light spilling from the vast gash in the wall. ‘These people are with me.’
‘Fine, sir. You’re expected.’ The NCO in charge of the detail stood aside, with a crisp salute.
The inquisitor nodded. ‘Good. Let’s get inside out of this infernal wind, and start trying to make some sense of this mess, shall we?’
Six
The Citadel of the Forsaken, Sepheris Secundus
089.993.M41
Horst squinted, narrowing his eyes against the wan noonday sun, which was seeping through the scudding grey murk and clinging to the tops of the distant mountain peaks before bouncing feebly from the surface of the table in front of him. This side of the fortress had escaped any significant damage in the attack, and the conference room they’d convened in might have been anywhere in the Imperium: the same polished wooden table, the same uncomfortable chairs, and the same gilded aquila looming over everything, which he’d seen a hundred times before on a dozen different worlds.
Inquisitor Finurbi sat at the head of the table, only the frozen tundra beyond the large picture window behind him giving any clue as to their actual location. Fascinated by the continual motion, Horst gazed past their patron’s right shoulder at the windswept snowfields, drifting and spiralling in the near-constant gales like frozen cloud, breaking like surf against the encircling forest. Suppressing a yawn, he tried to look interested in what Vex was saying.
‘It was definitely sabotage,’ the tech-priest concluded, having spent the last ten minutes explaining in excruciating detail how improbable it was that both primary and secondary power sources had been lost simultaneously, let alone at the same time as the citadel had come under attack.
Horst nodded, as though he’d been paying attention. ‘That raises two obvious questions,’ he said. ‘Who and how.’
Keira snorted derisively. ‘Heretics, of course,’ she said, leaning back in her chair at what to anyone else would have seemed a dangerous angle. Her feet were on the table, almost opposite where Horst sat, and she looked at him sardonically down the length of her legs. Nettled by her apparent indifference, and the lack of respect it implied for their patron, Horst bit down on a sharp retort, but he was saved the bother of replying by the man at the opposite end of the table from the inquisitor.
‘You won’t find any of those among my command, I can assure you.’ Captain Malakai scowled, his face showing clear signs of recent medicae attention, and Inquisitor Finurbi coughed diplomatically.
‘I don’t doubt that for a moment.’ Despite food and rest, Horst suspected that their patron was still severely debilitated. An opinion Elyra clearly shared, judging by the brief expression of concern that passed across her face as the inquisitor spoke. ‘But the fact remains, your security was quite clearly compromised.’
‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ Malakai growled, manifestly in no mood for the niceties of protocol. ‘I lost almost a third of my command.’ His jaw tightened. ‘But that doesn’t mean we have a traitor in our midst.’
‘I’m afraid it does,’ Vex chimed in diffidently. ‘If we examine the evidence dispassionately, it’s the only logical conclusion. The genetorium is in the very heart of the facility, and only someone with access to it could have cut the power supply. Once we discover how it was done, of course, that should be a strong indication of who was responsible.’
‘How soon will you be able to tell?’ Malakai asked, with the same expression Horst had seen on the faces of arbitrators getting their first glimpse of a suspect they thought they could beat a confession out of.
The tech-priest shrugged. ‘It’s too early to say,’ he said levelly. ‘I’ve been consulting with Technomancer Tonis, the senior surviving acolyte of the Omnissiah, and he’s of the opinion that the systems are too badly compromised to be able to tell much without a thorough examination.’
‘Can you trust him?’ Keira asked ingenuously. Vex looked baffled, so she went on. ‘Whoever took out the power plant clearly knew what they were doing. I’d start by asking where all the cogboys were when everything went klybo.’
‘A tech-priest?’ Despite the studied neutrality of inflection practised by those of his calling, Horst could quite clearly detect an undertone of shock and outrage in Vex’s voice. ‘Absolutely unthinkable!’
‘She might actually have a point for once,’ Horst said, more to seize the opportunity of putting Keira back in her place by assuming a slightly patronising tone than because he actually agreed with her. To his chagrin, however, she seemed unabashed, possibly even taking the comment as a sign of his approval, and smiled at him again in that disconcerting manner. ‘Why couldn’t it be one of
the tech-priests?’
‘Because to deliberately cause a machine to malfunction would be a mockery of the perfection of the Omnissiah,’ Vex explained, somehow managing to sound both condescending and outraged at the same time. ‘It would be an act of blasphemy against the Machine-God. You might as well ask if an ecclesiarch was praying to the Dark Gods.’
‘Well, it wouldn’t be the first time one of them did,’ the inquisitor conceded, ‘but I don’t think we should be concentrating our attention on any particular group among the staff at the moment. The raiders quite clearly had detailed knowledge of the layout of the citadel, which implies in turn that someone passed them that information.’
‘A whole nest of heretics,’ Keira said gleefully, no doubt picturing a wholesale purge of the unrighteous, preferably with a lot of blood and burning involved. ‘Better and better.’
‘That hardly seems likely here,’ Horst said mildly, refusing to rise to the bait. ‘This is one of the most secure facilities in the sector. Everyone connected with it has been thoroughly examined by the Inquisition.’
‘Evidently not thoroughly enough,’ Malakai said, looking as though he was eager to make a start on the job at once, and in person. Then, realising he had perhaps gone a little too far, he nodded to the inquisitor. ‘No disrespect to your colleagues intended, of course.’
‘None inferred,’ Inquisitor Finurbi told him. ‘Even the most faithful servant of the Emperor can be suborned or cozened into disloyalty if the right pressure is applied. Indeed, if our adversaries are as resourceful and well organised as they appear, whoever was responsible for informing them of the weaknesses in our defences may have done so entirely unwittingly.’
‘You mean psykers?’ Elyra asked.
The inquisitor nodded. ‘We know they employ them. A sufficiently powerful telepath might have been able to lift the knowledge from an unsuspecting mind without the victim even being aware of it.’
‘That wouldn’t account for the sabotage,’ Horst pointed out. ‘Whoever did that must have had access.’
‘They might have been influenced,’ Elyra suggested, without sounding terribly convinced of her own argument. ‘A powerful enough psyker might be able to control someone’s actions from a distance.’
‘Except that the psi dampers would have nullified any such power,’ Malakai pointed out, ‘along with those of the inmates.’
‘A very good point,’ Vex agreed. ‘The dampers were fully active right up until the time the power failed.’
‘They haven’t been restored yet, though,’ Elyra said.
Vex shook his head. ‘They were extensively damaged, and since you and the inquisitor are the only psykers left in the facility, Tonis felt it both expedient and more courteous to divert the repair teams to more urgent matters. Of course if any of the inmates are recaptured, bringing the dampers back on line will become a far higher priority.’
Malakai snorted. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about that. We’re still operating under Condition Extremis. The search teams will shoot to kill.’ He shrugged indifferently. ‘Not that we’ll find many alive in any case. Most of the fugitives will have frozen to death by now.’
‘Most, but not all,’ Inquisitor Finurbi pointed out. ‘A few will have abilities that enable them to resist the cold, and some will simply be too bloody minded to lie down and die now that they’ve been given a taste of freedom. The Arbites should be warned to expect a sudden upsurge in incidents involving psykers, particularly in isolated communities.’
‘Already in hand,’ Malakai assured him. ‘We informed the Isolarium as soon as we got communications back, in case whoever hit us tried to free the psykers they’re holding too.’
‘Good.’ The inquisitor looked appraisingly down the table. ‘Keira, you wish to say something?’
‘I’m not sure,’ the young assassin said, with a shrug that, from Horst’s perspective, sent uncomfortably interesting ripples along the length of her body. ‘It’s just something Malakai said a minute ago.’ She tilted her head, to regard the Guard commander quizzically. ‘You said the dampers would stop a psyker from possessing anyone, but what if they were possessed by a daemon?’
The hiss of indrawn breath from everyone around the table was quite clearly audible for a moment, before being drowned out by another hacking cough and the clang of Vex’s hand against his breather unit. The tech-priest shook his head doubtfully, his eyes watering a little. ‘I couldn’t say. The units here are powerful, most certainly, but they weren’t designed with the repulsion of warp entities in mind.’ He turned to the inquisitor. ‘Perhaps the Ordo Malleus might have some pertinent information?’
‘Perhaps.’ Inquisitor Finurbi nodded thoughtfully, looking more tired and drawn than Horst could ever remember. ‘I’ll make the appropriate enquiries, but I don’t think it’s likely.’ A faint air of tension, which had hung over the room ever since Keira had asked her question, seemed to dissipate as he spoke. ‘I hardly think a daemon would have bothered with anything quite so subtle as sabotage, or coordinating a military strike with such obvious precision.’
‘Neither do I,’ Horst said firmly, trying to hide his relief, and ignore Keira’s infuriating grin. ‘What do we know about the forces that attacked us?’
‘Well, they were human,’ Malakai said, clearly relieved to have the discussion returning to a topic on which he felt at home. ‘We recovered a couple of bodies, mercenaries by the look of them. Most of their kit was Imperial.’
‘Most of it?’ the inquisitor asked.
Malakai nodded, and produced a handful of thin metallic discs, about the size of coins, which shone brightly as the watery sun struck them through the window. He dropped them on the table with a clatter, like someone overturning a set of cutlery. One fell edge down, and embedded itself in the thick wood of the tabletop. ‘We recovered these, too,’ he said.
‘What are they?’ Keira asked eagerly, leaning forward for a better look. Her elbows met the table simultaneously with the thud of her chair legs returning to the vertical. ‘They look like blades, but I don’t see how you could possibly throw them without slicing your fingers open.’
‘They’re ammunition,’ Malakai explained, ‘from an eldar weapon. At least one of the raiders had some of their armour too, I saw the helmet.’
‘Did you indeed.’ The inquisitor cupped his chin thoughtfully in his hand, resting his elbow on the table to take the weight of his head, and Elyra glanced at him again, concern on her face. He must have reassured her telepathically, Horst thought, as she settled back in her seat almost at once, looking faintly relieved. ‘I take it you’re absolutely certain of this?’
‘Absolutely,’ Malakai confirmed. ‘Before we were assigned here, my unit spent some time in the service of the Ordo Xenos. We encountered eldar face to face on two occasions, and observed them from a distance several times on reconnaissance.’
‘Their spacecraft was of xenos manufacture too,’ Vex put in, producing his data-slate and placing it reverently on the table in front of him. After muttering a catechism or two, he activated its projector unit, and a faintly wobbling hololithic image of the drop-ship that had downed their Aquila shimmered into existence above it. ‘Does this look like an eldar vessel to you?’
Malakai shook his head. ‘It’s tau. Couldn’t tell you its class, but the lines are unmistakable. We had a run-in with the little grey bastards a few years back, when they first started showing up on this side of the galaxy.’
‘Why would the tau attack a place like this?’ Elyra asked, puzzled. ‘It’s no threat to them.’
‘I don’t think they did,’ the inquisitor said thoughtfully. ‘It’s more likely that the vessel was captured or stolen, like the eldar equipment Captain Malakai found.’
‘Then how did the mercenaries manage to fly it?’ Vex asked reasonably. ‘Xenos tech is unhallowed, and no true servant of the Omnissiah would risk his soul meddling with it.’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Finurbi said, ‘but they evidentl
y did.’ His face grew troubled for a moment, as he strove unsuccessfully to recall something. ‘I’ve worked on occasion with a colleague from the Ordo Xenos. He mentioned something once about a heretical group that hoarded alien artefacts for reasons of their own, but the details escape me.’
‘The Faxlignae,’ Malakai said thoughtfully. ‘It would explain the eldar stuff, and the drop-ship. They’ve never shown any interest in psykers before, though, as far as I’m aware.’
‘Whoever they were, they were well organised,’ Horst said, staring at the hololith, ‘and well resourced. Wherever that thing came from, let’s hope it’s the only one they’ve got.’
Malakai nodded his agreement. ‘Its firepower was phenomenal, I can tell you that. It cut through our curtain wall in a matter of moments.’
‘Right where their ground troops would have the shortest route to the containment area,’ Horst commented. ‘Bit too much of a coincidence for me.’
‘And for me,’ the inquisitor agreed dryly, ‘which brings us back to our hypothetical interloper.’ He nodded at Vex. ‘I agree with your assessment. Find out how the systems were sabotaged, and we’ll be in a better position to identify the culprit. That’s your job, obviously, since no one else here has the necessary expertise, but feel free to ask for whatever assistance you may require from the rest of us.’
‘Of course.’ Vex nodded, quoting something that had evidently struck him as apt from the Credo Machina. ‘The purity of logic is a beacon for the truth.’ He made to switch off the projection, but Horst forestalled him with a gesture.
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