Eight
The Misericord, the Warp,
Date and Time Meaningless
Despite the doubts he’d initially felt about leaving his home world to roam the void with the Angelae, Barda was quite enjoying the trip. It certainly didn’t hurt that he had the entire shuttle to himself, and was able to luxuriate in the unfamiliar experience of solitude. The guildhouse of the Cloudwalkers had always been crowded, and flying solo was the only time he’d ever had to be alone with his thoughts. Even then he’d had to stay alert, watching his instruments, apart from the rare occasions he’d taken a supply shuttle to one of the outlying void stations, and had been able to simply coast for hours at a time.
This was even better: parked in the deserted hangar bay, he didn’t need to make the periodic course corrections that a long journey in free flight would have required, although he conscientiously ran the periodic systems checks he would normally have been doing in any case. The habit was too ingrained to break, and, like any member of his guild, it was a matter of personal pride to ensure that his vessel would be ready for use the instant his clients required it.
He continued to monitor the Misericord’s internal communications too, as Horst had instructed, but so far had gleaned nothing else worth passing on. Vex had set up some complex filtering system to record anything which seemed significant, so all he had to do was skim through the summary it provided every hour or so to see if the tireless machine-spirit had spotted something it thought worth bringing to his attention, but every now and again he would pick one of the dozens of vox-channels at random and listen to it in person for a while. He was curious about the strange enclosed world of the ship he rode on, and enjoyed the small glimpses his eavesdropping gave him of the way it functioned.
He’d hardly expected to receive a message himself.
“Inquisition shuttle, this is Captain Raymer of the Merciful. Is anyone there?”
“Righteous Indignation responding,” Barda replied, allowing the strict vox protocols of his profession to mask his surprise.
“Good.” Raymer wasn’t happy about something, that much was clear from the tone of his voice. “I need to talk to Horst, but he’s not responding to his vox.”
That was hardly surprising, Barda thought. According to the last auspex echo he’d had, the Angelae were so deep in the bowels of the ship that their short-range comm-beads would be effectively shielded by the bulk of the metal surrounding them. Even the powerful transmitter aboard the shuttle would have difficulty getting through by now. “I’ll relay a message,” he said diplomatically, “as soon as he becomes available.”
“Becomes available?” Raymer snarled. “Who the hell does he think he is, the Lord Shipwright?”
“He thinks he’s a representative of the Inquisition,” Barda said, enjoying the novelty of being able to talk back to someone in a position of power and authority without fear of the consequences. “What do you want to tell him?”
“Fine, have it your way,” Raymer said, reining in his temper with an audible effort. “Tell him we’ve finished our check of the manifest, and the men who attacked your colleagues weren’t registered as passengers.”
“You mean they were members of the crew?” Barda asked.
“Of course they weren’t,” Raymer snapped back. “You think I wouldn’t know if we had wyrds aboard?”
“It’s not for me to speculate,” Barda replied, hoping he was managing to mask his amusement. “No doubt Acolyte Horst will discuss the matter with you at his convenience, if he needs more information. Was that all?”
“Yes, that’s all,” Raymer said, and cut the link abruptly.
Barda turned to the main vox transmitter, and relayed the information as crisply as he could, hoping the Angelae were still able to receive it; then, despite knowing a reply was impossible, he sat listening to the static on the channel they were using for several minutes.
“Did you get that?” Keira asked, glancing back at Horst. Barda’s voice in her comm-bead had been tenuous, and hazed with static, but she was sure she’d understood the substance of the message. The sense of unease which had begun to oppress her intensified as she considered the implications.
“I think so,” Horst replied, looking equally troubled. They seemed to have arrived somewhere close to where the shaft they were looking for was located, or, Keira corrected herself, at least they were somewhere aboard the same derelict hull. Starships were big, even when they weren’t fused together to form a spacegoing leviathan like the Misericord. Once again they seemed to be walking on walls, avoiding deep wells of blackness where old corridors plunged into lightless depths, and their progress had become slow as they clambered around them. “And I’m not sure I like the implications.”
“Me neither,” Drake put in. “If those wyrds weren’t passengers, who the hell were they? Raymer seems convinced they weren’t crew.”
“Well, he ought to know,” Keira said, without much confidence. In her experience, local law enforcers weren’t exactly quick to spot signs of heresy, even when they should have been blindingly obvious. “Could they have come aboard with the thralls?”
“I doubt it,” Drake said. “They were dressed like Secundans from one of the minor houses. If they tried to blend in with the serfs, they’d have stood out like an ecclesiarch in a bordello.” He glanced at Jenie, belatedly realising that the simile was probably rather tactless given their guide’s profession, but the girl didn’t seem to have noticed. She was sticking close to Vex, apparently paying more attention to the data-slate in his hand than to their immediate surroundings.
“Jenie.” Keira raised her voice a little to attract the harlot’s attention, and listened to the echoes it raised with detached interest. After a moment the girl’s head turned. “Do you ever get stowaways on a vessel like this?”
“Stowaways?” Jenie stared at her in blank incomprehension. “How could they possibly get aboard?”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Keira said, with a faint shrug.
Jenie shook her head emphatically. “They just couldn’t. They’d be discovered as soon as the shuttles were unloaded.”
Keira nodded, recalling the bustle which had surrounded the Righteous Indignation when it arrived aboard. No one could possibly have slipped away unobserved through that maelstrom of activity. “You’re right,” she said. “Stupid question.”
“There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” Jenie said. “If you don’t know something, how else are you going to find out?”
Keira nodded. She should despise the young harlot, she knew, but in spite of the fact that the girl was a professional sinner, she couldn’t help finding her likeable. After all, she’d been born into a rigidly enforced caste system, which had compelled her to hawk her body to the passengers; it wasn’t as though she’d ever had much of a choice. “Good point,” she said.
“Watch your step,” Vex cautioned, from somewhere up ahead. He was poised on the lip of another of the shafts spaced along the canted corridor, where cross passageways had once intersected it. “We need to climb down here.”
“Oh good,” Drake said, with heavy sarcasm. “That looks easy.” He aimed his lasgun down the pit, the bright beam of his luminator playing across the walls. Two sides of it were smooth metal, studded at intervals with rivets and cross bracing, while the side which had once been the floor was surfaced with metal mesh. The fourth side had the remains of luminators attached to it, long since burned out, and connected by some heavy-duty cable. “Do you think that’ll hold?”
“It should do,” Vex said, reaching across the void to grab it, taking a cautious step onto the lintel as he did so, and tugging experimentally on the hanging wires. They held his weight, even when he swung out and prepared to scramble down.
“Next time, wait until we’ve rigged a safety line before you try something like that,” Horst said, failing to mask an undercurrent of anger in his voice.
“The risk was negligible,” Vex assured him, his voice
as even as ever. “The breaking strain of electrical conduit of this diameter would be in the order of several tonnes, and the supporting brackets are clearly capable of bearing a good deal of weight.”
“If you say so,” Horst said, sounding dubious. “Do we follow this all the way to the bottom?”
“I hope not,” Vex said. “There’s a side passage about twenty metres down, which seems to offer a more reasonable route. If we attempt to descend directly, we might well grow tired enough to fall, which, from this height, would be inconvenient to say the least.”
“Which is?” Keira asked, more from idle curiosity than anything else. Being native to Ambulon she had no fear of heights, and she didn’t feel the faintest flicker of apprehension at the prospect of the vertiginous descent. You wouldn’t be any deader if you fell a thousand metres than if you only fell ten.
“Approximately three hundred and fifty metres,” Vex said, as if that was no more than stepping off the kerb beside a carriageway, and began to scramble down the wire.
“You next,” Horst said to Jenie, and the girl shook her head, backing away from the dizzying shaft.
“No,” she said, licking her lips nervously. “No, I can’t.”
“Fine.” Horst nodded to Drake. “Danuld.”
“Here goes nothing,” Drake said, slinging his lasgun with the barrel pointed down, to light his progress. He inched his way out onto the lintel, and grabbed the cable, with a reassuring smile at Jenie. “See? Nothing to it.” He began to work his way down with every appearance of confidence, until only the bobbing halo of his luminator was visible above the lip of the pit.
“I just can’t. Sorry.” Jenie backed away another step. “We’ll all be killed.”
“Well, it’s your choice,” Horst said. “I’m sure you can find your way back.” He turned towards the shaft.
“You can’t just leave me here!” Jenie protested, her voice cracking a little. She looked from Horst to Keira and back again, as if hoping to find some indication that he was bluffing.
“Yes we can,” Horst said. “You’re here as a guide. If you won’t guide us, we’ve no further use for you.”
“Then swive you,” Jenie snarled, making a convulsive grab for the cable. She clutched at it with the jerky movements of someone fighting their own body, and began to let herself down hand over hand, her eyes tightly closed. “Oh Throne on Earth, swive the lot of you…”
Keira followed, finding the descent easy enough, particularly once Drake gained the cross-corridor they were aiming for and the light cast by his luminator steadied again. She tried to keep a hand free in case Jenie slipped, even though there was little chance of being able to grab her if the worst happened, but in the event she never had to try.
“Keep going,” Drake called encouragingly. “You’re almost there.”
“Swive off,” Jenie answered, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She let go of the cable with one hand and reached out desperately. “Don’t just stand there, grab me for Throne’s sake!”
“It’s all right, I’ve got you.” Drake anchored himself with a firm grasp on a convenient stanchion, and reached out towards her. After a moment of flailing, he took hold of her wrist. “All you’ve got to do is let go and jump.”
“Let go? Are you insane?” Jenie shouted.
“It’s either that, or stay there for the rest of your life,” Keira pointed out. “Which, considering you’re blocking me from getting any further, is liable to be short.”
“All right!” Jenie let go of the cable, pushing off awkwardly, and shrieking as she began to fall; but Drake had a firm hold on her wrist, and hauled her into the sanctuary of the cross-corridor with a single convulsive movement. “Oh, thank the Throne! Thank you!” She clung to him, trembling, which Drake didn’t seem to object to at all. “I thought I was going to die!”
“Everyone does eventually,” Keira pointed out, somersaulting neatly through the opening to land beside them. Drake began to detach the girl, to Keira’s unspoken relief; the sight of them reminded her of the brief, impromptu embrace she’d shared with Horst after he’d hauled her to safety when the bridge collapsed, and the memory disturbed her in ways she didn’t feel comfortable with. “What was all that about anyway?”
“I don’t like heights, all right?” Jenie snapped, then recovered her composure as best she could. “Never have done.”
“Then it was very brave of you to make the descent anyway,” Horst said, joining them at last.
Unable to meet his eye, for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate, Keira went to join Vex.
“Will we have to do that again?” she asked.
“Not for a while,” the techpriest said, consulting the screen of his data-slate. He indicated a point on the display. “We’re here.” His finger moved. “And we need to be here.”
“Looks right to me,” Jenie agreed, joining them, and glancing at it in a cursory fashion. The ordeal in the shaft seemed to have boosted her confidence, Keira thought, which was probably all to the good. She began to lead the way into the darkness. “Are you coming, or what?”
Scintil VIII Void Station, Scintilla System
247.993.M41
The lower arm was never particularly quiet, but there were rhythms to the pattern of any human activity, and the Ordo Xenos team had timed their incursion to take full advantage of one of the periodic lulls. The corridors were emptier than usual, and many of the businesses closed, which made the network of outer pickets around Voyle’s warehouse easier to spot; which, in turn, made them all the easier to neutralise. Out of the corner of his eye, Quillem saw a flicker of movement down one of the side passages, heard a faint sigh and the slither of a falling body, and a moment later Rufio trotted up to join him, the habitual easygoing grin on his face.
“Another one down,” he said cheerfully, his blond pony-tail brushing against his back as he tilted his head a little to talk to the taller man. Rufio was a feral worlder, who’d grown up hunting creatures more dangerous than he was amid vegetation scarcely less lethal, and relished the chance to use his stalking skills whatever the environment. Quillem had worked with him a few times, but never warmed to the man; he’d killed in the service of his patron too, of course, but purely because it was necessary, or in self-defence. Rufio enjoyed that sort of thing too much for his liking: not because he was a sadist, or even particularly callous, but simply because he was good at what he did, and took a craftsman’s pride in doing it well. “He had this on him.”
Quillem took the short-range comm-bead from the assassin’s outstretched hand, and nodded in approval. “I take it he never got the chance to use it?”
“Course not,” Rufio said, with complete confidence. “I got him with a janus thorn.” He slipped the thin spike of wood, harvested from one of the most toxic trees of his home world, into a protective sheath, his dexterity unhampered by the thick leather gloves he wore. “He was dead as soon as it broke the skin.”
“Good,” Quillem said. “Then they still don’t know we’re coming.” He pulled a data-slate from his jacket pocket, and glanced at it, noting the positions of the sentries they’d already taken out, and adding Rufio’s latest victim to the tally. With a sense of relief, but little surprise, he realised that they’d all been stationed precisely where they’d been predicted to be: one of the many advantages of having a Deathwatch kill team attached to Inquisitor Grynner’s entourage was the matchless tactical expertise the veteran Astartes were able to bring to this kind of enterprise. No doubt they’d have preferred to take a more direct hand in the affair, but for the moment the inquisitor preferred a more subtle approach, which meant that Quillem and his companions had been given the job.
All five of them were dressed the same, in dark jackets and trousers, conventional enough in style to escape all but the most casual notice, while still being cut generously enough to conceal the weapons and other essential equipment they carried. Even so, they each managed to imbue the nondescript clothing with some trace of their
own personality.
Rufio, for instance, had his jacket unfastened, revealing a singlet of the same charcoal-grey, along with a necklace of teeth from some predator he’d faced and bested as part of a tribal rite on whichever backwater planet he’d come from. Malven, by contrast, kept his jacket firmly closed, partly to conceal his array of augmetics from casual passers-by, but mainly, Quillem suspected, because he simply didn’t feel comfortable in anything other than the vestments of a techpriest. The white robe of his calling would have attracted too much attention on a covert operation like this, though, so, despite his manifest reluctance, the mechwright had agreed to don something less noticeable.
Carys, the only woman in the group, simply fitted the clothes as though they’d been tailored for her, a happy knack she seemed to have whatever she wore. A striking redhead in her middle thirties, Carys was a thief, and quite an exceptional one; a talent she’d been happy to turn to the services of the Inquisition after her arrest, particularly once the alternatives had been pointed out to her. If anything was hidden in Voyle’s premises, Quillem was certain she’d be able to find it.
The fifth member of their party was the most enigmatic, and the one who, though he did his best to conceal it, Quillem felt the least comfortable around. Arken was a cadaverous young man, with a nervous manner and a faint, rasping voice, which grated on the interrogator’s nerves. He seemed to be huddled inside his cocoon of garments, which hung loosely on his spare frame, as though the ambient temperature was colder than he liked, although Quillem knew that the winds he felt were those of the immaterium rather than the void station’s recirculators. Arken was a sanctioned psyker, sensitive enough to feel the presence of any more blasphemous artefacts like the wraithbone which had slipped through their fingers in the Halo Stars; if Voyle was indeed working for the Faxlignae, and had somehow managed to obtain more of the stuff, they’d know almost as soon as they arrived on the premises.
[Dark Heresy 02] - Innocence Proves Nothing Page 14