Pounded by tonnes of plummeting liquid, the terrifying apparition emitted a high-pitched keening which somehow managed to cut through the rumble of the waterfall, and vanished, sucked back into the warp at last.
“Can we go now?” Drake asked. “He looks pretty dead to me.”
Horst nodded, and they began the long trek back to the Beyonder’s Hostelry.
“Was that the same one?” Drake wondered aloud, as the boom of the falling water diminished behind them. “Or the third of those things we’ve encountered?”
Horst shrugged. “Offhand,” he said, “I don’t know which of those possibilities worries me more.”
Twelve
The Misericord, Scintilla System
249.993.M41
“We’re lifting,” Barda informed them from the cockpit, and Horst felt a gentle pressure against his spine as the Righteous Indignation began to rise. The vista of the hangar bay dropped away as the young pilot fed power to the engines, and began nudging them towards the vast brass hatch set into the ceiling of the cavernous chamber. The noise outside would have been appalling, reinforced by the echoes rolling back from all sides, and Horst found himself suppressing a grin as he caught sight of Tweendecker covering her ears, her robes flapping as they were caught in the backwash from the shuttle’s engines. Her face was still invisible behind her mask, but Horst hadn’t needed to see it to know she was heartily glad to see the back of them. He still wasn’t entirely sure if the small honour guard which had assembled to see them off was a mark of respect, or just to reassure the ship’s company that the Inquisitorial party had unquestionably left.
A moment later the shuttle had risen too high to see anything other than the throat of the boarding shaft, the gate in the hangar ceiling swinging ponderously closed beneath them; Barda began to tilt the little craft back as it rose, shifting the point of balance towards the main engines, and Horst swallowed, feeling the first faint twinges of the void sickness which usually afflicted him when travelling in space. The shuttle had its own gravity generator, so he remained comfortably settled in his seat, but the shifting perspectives outside were playing havoc with his inner ear regardless. Light began to enter the shaft as another huge door began cranking open ahead, pure sunlight edged with the knife-sharp shadows only visible in vacuum, and Horst found himself squinting in the sudden brightness.
“Emperor be praised!” Drake said, with every sign of sincerity, as the shuttle passed through the portal, and gained the freedom of open space at last. He looked back at the misshapen lump of the Misericord with visible distaste, then glanced across the narrow aisle at Horst. “Still think her reputation’s just gossip?”
“She was bad luck enough for us,” Horst agreed. “But we’re out of there now.” He stood, cautiously, waiting for his inner ear to stop spinning, and took a step towards the flight deck.
“Is something wrong?” Keira asked, and he shook his head, trying to ignore the inevitable twinge of nausea which followed.
“No. But if Barda’s going to set us down at the Tricorn, he’s going to need the proper clearances. I can arrange that better from the cockpit.”
“That would be the most efficient course of action,” Vex agreed. “Their resources will be invaluable in furthering our investigation, and we should avail ourselves of them at the earliest opportunity.”
If anything, the view through the armourcrys shielding the pilot’s station was even more vertigo-inducing than travelling in the cabin had been, but Horst fought off the queasiness which afflicted him, and settled into the copilot’s seat next to Barda. Most of the controls facing him were completely unfamiliar, but he recognised the vox-unit he needed, and began to enter the necessary codes.
“Do you want to head for the orbital docks?” Barda asked, pulsing the manoeuvring jets to slip around the steady stream of heavy cargo shuttles already beginning to pillage the vast holds of the Misericord. The immense structure was visible ahead of them, a miniature galaxy of lights leaking from uncountable viewports and airlocks, tied together by a city-sized conglomeration of metal and other materials, hanging in the sky between the shuttle and the planet below. Several small asteroids, long since pillaged of any extractable minerals, were embedded somewhere among the accumulated flotsam, along with a couple of early void stations; rumour had it that even a few starships which had docked there had failed to break away again, becoming slowly digested as the stellar reef system had grown inexorably around them.
“No,” Horst said, beginning to transmit a coded vox pulse which identified the tiny shuttle as an Inquisition vessel. “Hive Sibelius. We’re heading straight for the Tricorn.” A luxury they wouldn’t have had, if they’d left Barda and the shuttle on Sepheris Secundus; instead they would have had to transfer to the dock, find passage to the surface and make their way to the headquarters of the Calixian Conclave from the nearest star port. Even if everything had gone according to plan, it would have taken the best part of a day before they could report to Inquisitor Finurbi, and in Horst’s experience, things seldom worked out as easily as that. Even with the advantage the shuttle gave them, he’d taken the precaution of sending a vox digest of the events aboard the Misericord to their patron’s office as soon as the Chartist vessel had emerged from the warp; time was of the essence, and the inquisitor needed all the information they could provide if he was to decide on their next course of action.
“Northern continent. Right.” Barda looked across at Horst, a faint trace of amusement on his face, and the arbitrator realised that the surprise he felt must have been visible. “I read up on Scintilla on the voyage here.” The young pilot glanced through the viewport, a faint trace of wonder on his face. “The picts don’t do it justice, though; all that water.” The grey-green mass of the polluted oceans was visible through the banding of cloud, the darker mottling of the continents standing out clearly by contrast, and Horst remembered that Barda’s home world, the only one he’d ever seen from space before, was perpetually shrouded in cloud.
“Very commendable,” Horst said. “Unfortunately, the rest of us didn’t have time to relax with a slate…”
Hive Sibelius, Scintilla
249.993.M41
Although Barda was fascinated by Horst’s account of events aboard the Misericord, he was too good a pilot to allow himself to become distracted by it; as he listened, the bulk of his attention remained on the instrumentation arrayed in front of him, and the panorama of the hive city towards which they were descending. His reading aboard the shuttle during the long voyage here had prepared him to some extent for the wonders unfolding below, the details gradually becoming visible as they descended through the main mass of cloud blanketing the ground, but the actuality of it was more than he’d been able to imagine. Hive Sibelius was vast, dominating the continent on which it stood, eight thousand kilometres at its widest point, and its central spire rose almost to the stratosphere. That led to some interesting wind patterns; not to mention the thermal currents rising from the manufactoria of the middle hive, and, for all Barda knew, the sheer conglomerate body heat of its billions of inhabitants.
“So what are you going to do with this bone thing?” he asked, once Horst had finished speaking.
The team leader seemed more comfortable now they were back inside the atmosphere, and he turned his head slightly, apparently looking for some landmark he recognised, as he replied.
“Turn it over to the inquisitor, of course. There are facilities in the Tricorn for storing that kind of thing.”
“I suppose there would be,” Barda agreed, never having had any occasion to think about matters like that before. It seemed reasonable to him, though; no doubt acolytes like Horst and the others would come across unhallowed artefacts all the time in the course of their duties, and they could hardly leave them lying around in the bottom of a drawer somewhere. He made a minute adjustment to the shuttle’s trim, bringing the nose up a barely perceptible amount, and relaxed a little, sensing that the airflow around the fu
selage was optimised again in a fashion he couldn’t have managed to put into words even if it had occurred to him to try.
“There’s the Lucid Palace,” Horst said, as Barda banked the shuttle in a wide, slow turn over the artificial landscape below. By this point they’d descended so low that the sprawl of the hive filled the horizon, although according to his altimeter they were still closer to the vacuum of space than to whatever passed for ground level here.
Barda turned his head in the indicated direction, and, after a moment, was able to make out the city-sized citadel in the froth-churned ocean which marked the residence of the Sector Governor. Reluctant to fly directly over the central spire of the hive, he widened the turn a little, drifting towards the towering artificial cliffs, where the fringes of Sibelius tumbled like setting lava flow into the sea which bordered it. “Impressive,” he said, as the minute course adjustment brought the palace more clearly into view. Though dwarfed by the main mass of the hive itself, it passed beneath them like an artificial mountain, surrounded entirely by turbulent water. Its surface, fashioned in the likeness of the petals of a vast flower, the original of which was long extinct anywhere on Scintilla, was festooned with gaudy banners, uncountable thousands of them, which made the whole structure appear to ripple as the winds roared around it.
By now their steady descent was bringing them into the upper levels of the air traffic over the main mass of the hive, uncountable thousands of shuttles, aircars and heavy cargo dirigibles swarming over and around the towers like flies attracted to a choice piece of carrion. Out of long habit, honed on the approaches to Icenholm, which were frequently choked with heavy cargo lifters shuttling between the Gorgonid and the ore barges in orbit, he kept part of his attention on the auspex, and an ear alert for the collision alarm. To his vague surprise, though, none of the dense traffic came close enough to trigger it, moving aside instead to make way for the shuttle, which remained surrounded by a small bubble of unimpeded air; after a moment’s thought, he realised that the Inquisition ID Horst was broadcasting was probably the reason for that.
Horst nodded, when he asked about it. “Yes,” he said. “Everyone in Hive Sibelius knows the Inquisition has its headquarters here, so they tend to keep out of our way if they can.” He smiled ironically. “One of the main advantages of working for them. There are others, but precious few; apart from the satisfaction of knowing you’re doing the Emperor’s work, of course.”
“Isn’t that enough for anyone?” Barda asked, and Horst’s smile grew a little less strained.
“I thought so when I was your age,” he said. “Now…” His voice trailed away, and a pensive expression drifted across his face. “These days, things seem a lot less clear-cut than they used to.”
Barda didn’t really understand what he meant by that, but there was no time to ask, and he wasn’t sure Horst would elaborate even if he did. “I’m taking us over the eastern fabrication zone,” he said instead. “There may be a little turbulence from the thermals above the manufactoria, but it’ll shave a few minutes off our arrival time.”
“Then do it,” Horst agreed, and Barda turned the shuttle’s nose towards the thick plume of smoke drifting across the artificial foothills of the hive slope like a low-lying thundercloud. Navigating was becoming a little trickier now, as their steady descent had brought them closer to some of the lesser spires which surrounded the main one, dwarfed by it like weeds round a tree, although they still rose a kilometre or two from the fissures and canyons of the main upper hive, and the air currents were getting a little choppy. Though modest in comparison to the towering gnomon which turned the entire megalopolis into a continent-spanning sundial, they still seemed to compete with one another to outdo their neighbours in garish ornamentation; as Barda piloted the shuttle over two of them, linked by a vertiginous bridge, he noticed that their outer surfaces were encrusted with mosaics and statuary.
“They like their decoration here,” he remarked, and Horst nodded.
“It’s a status thing. All the really wealthy and powerful families have estates on the main spire, of course, but the parvenus and the merchant classes make do with these, and they want everyone to think they’ve got just as much good taste as the upper levels.” He smiled sardonically. “It’s probably true, too. Sibellans like to flaunt it if they’ve got it, and flaunt it even more if they haven’t.” His knuckles whitened briefly on the armrest of his seat as the shuttle abruptly dropped a couple of hundred metres, before Barda levelled off again with casual ease. “What was that?”
“Just a bit of clear-air turbulence,” Barda assured him. “Although I wouldn’t call this air exactly clear.” The armourcrys was becoming spotted with motes of ash as they descended through the pall of smoke, and he concentrated on the controls, feeling the faint shuddering in the fuselage his years of experience had led him to expect. The thermals he’d anticipated came roaring up from the forges and workshops below, and he balanced on them instinctively, varying the power to the engines and the repulsor fields without conscious thought, keeping their forward progress almost as smooth as if they were still coasting through the vacuum of space. Horst watched him narrowly, but Barda barely noticed, completely engrossed in the intricate dance of mingling forces.
“Nicely done,” Horst said, as the industrial zone slipped behind them at last, and the shuttle’s flight became smoother again without the need for constant vigilance.
“It’s not that hard,” Barda said, acknowledging the compliment. To him, that was no more than the literal truth, although he supposed his skill must seem arcane to a man unfamiliar with the rituals of spaceflight. “You just have to listen to what the bird’s telling you.”
“Which bird would that be?” Horst asked, an expression Barda couldn’t easily interpret flickering across his face.
“The one you’re sitting in, of course,” Barda explained, bemused, then suddenly understood. “I meant the shuttle. It’s Cloudwalker slang. Means having a feel for how the ship’s responding.” He smiled, amused by the misunderstanding. “I haven’t started hearing the void voices, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Like most shuttle pilots he’d spent quite a lot of time around starship crews, and had heard plenty of tales about the insidious whispering in the mind people sometimes claimed to have been plagued by while transiting the warp, although the only voices he’d heard on the voyage here apart from his own and the Angelae had been the ones on the vox-channels he’d been monitoring.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Horst said, sounding as though he meant it.
The main spire was looming up ahead of them now, dominating the skyline, and Barda adjusted their course a little to bring them around the artificial mountain in a tightening curve. As they rounded it, close enough to make out individual people bustling about their business on innumerable terraces and balconies, Barda could see that it was, if anything even more encrusted with ornamentation than the subsidiary spires had been. Gardens had been planted on several of the terraces, which had been glassed in to preserve the foliage from the cold prevailing at these altitudes. It was the first vegetation he’d seen on Scintilla, and he wondered briefly how the builders had managed to get the necessary soil to where it was needed; by air, presumably.
“They must like their plants very much,” he remarked, and Horst shrugged.
“Maybe some of them do,” he said. “But they like impressing the neighbours more.” He indicated the nearest construction site, one of many clinging to the outer surface, where spirejacks in breather masks toiled despite the thin atmosphere, apparently heedless of the abyss beneath their feet. “Everyone’s trying to have the biggest and the best estate on their level, just so the rest of the spirers can pretend they don’t care.”
“I don’t see the point,” Barda admitted, and Horst shrugged.
“Neither do I. But then we’re not rich and bored.” His posture straightened subtly. “Over there. See it?”
“Yes.” Three linked towers had come into view
round the curve of the central spire, shrunk to the scale of a child’s building blocks by distance, but still unmistakable, standing out clearly from the northern boundary of the sprawling hive. Barda felt his heartbeat speed up. This was it, the fortress from which the will of the Emperor was enforced throughout the sector. The Tricorn. “Do I need to contact traffic control?”
Horst shook his head. “They know who we are,” he said, with a quick glance at the vox-unit, still sending the ID code he’d entered. “If they didn’t, they’d have shot us down by now.”
“Really?” Barda wasn’t sure if the senior acolyte was joking or not. The ruthlessness of the Inquisition was legendary, of course, and very little he’d seen of the Angelae and Inquisitor Finurbi had contradicted that impression, but a shuttle crashing into the sprawling hive below would claim countless innocent lives along with the crew it contained.
Horst nodded, apparently able to appreciate his doubts. “Really. The security of the entire sector rests on the Tricorn. No amount of collateral damage can outweigh the need to protect it.”
“Of course not,” Barda agreed. It was a larger-scale version of the same choice he’d made back on Sepheris Secundus, when he’d used the white-hot flare of the shuttle’s engines to breach the walls of the heretic’s mansion, knowing that the man’s misguided household retainers would be immolated along with the stonework. It had been regrettable, but necessary. If he hadn’t acted as he did, Horst and the others wouldn’t have been in time to kill the daemon the cultists had been raising, and the damage to his home world would have been incalculable. “You told me when I signed up for this that there’d be hard choices along the way; I just hope the Emperor guides my hand again when the time comes.”
[Dark Heresy 02] - Innocence Proves Nothing Page 22