He stepped through the doorway on the far side of the airlock, trying to hide his relief at finally being on a solid deck. Elyra was already in the room beyond, and was talking to a man he didn’t recognise; they both looked up as he entered the chamber with Zusen, which, judging by the piping and conduit running through it, was some sort of utility space. “Here they are,” she said. “As promised.”
“We were told three,” the man said. He was short, but muscular, and carried himself like a man used to trouble. He seemed to have found some recently, too, if Kyrlock was any judge, the mottling on one side of his face looking suspiciously like the residue left by the fragments from a nearby detonation. He was wearing a loose jacket and trousers in hive-pattern camo, though he clearly didn’t feel comfortable in them.
“The others are right behind us,” Zusen said, breaking away from Kyrlock, and staring at the newcomer with an expression of delighted surprise. A moment later Trosk and Ven appeared, stopping short as soon as they entered the chamber.
“He’s one of us,” Ven said, confirming Kyrlock’s suspicion. Psykers seemed able to recognise one another, and he couldn’t imagine any other reason why Zusen would suddenly lose interest in clinging to him.
“Mister Voyle here claims to be a representative of the Sanctuary,” Elyra said.
“So,” Trosk said. “Are you coming with us, or not?”
“That’s what we’ve been discussing,” Elyra said. She turned to Kyrlock. “The one we met in the Gorgonid was right. They were surprised to see me, but grateful to us for looking after the juves.”
“Grateful enough to offer us a job, like he said?” Kyrlock asked, trying to sound indifferent. It was hardly likely that the man in the mine had been able to send an astropathic message about their encounter, or would even want to, so implying that he’d been included in whatever arrangement Voyle thought they’d made wasn’t much of a risk.
Elyra shrugged. “Sort of,” she said. “He thinks they can use me, at any rate.”
“But not me.” Kyrlock nodded his understanding, having expected as much from the outset.
“Do you have a problem with that?” Voyle asked, addressing him directly.
Kyrlock shook his head. “I preferred Greel’s offer anyway,” he said. He glanced at Elyra. “It’s a good deal,” he reminded her, as if hoping to persuade her to reconsider.
“So’s not having to look over my shoulder for the Inquisition every hour of the day,” Elyra replied.
“Well, I can’t argue with that,” Kyrlock said. A sudden loud clanking sound from beyond the doorway drew everyone’s attention, and the catwalk beyond began to swing towards the wall of the ore chute. He started to take a step towards the hatchway, intending to close it before the discharge hatches opened, but before he could complete the motion the door swung closed of its own accord, thudding firmly into place. He turned towards Trosk, thinking the young wyrd must have been responsible, but the shaven-headed youth was staring at Voyle with undisguised envy.
“If you hurry, you can catch up with the others before the shuttle leaves,” Voyle said, gesturing towards the only other door to the chamber.
“Sounds like a plan,” Kyrlock agreed. He nodded to Elyra. “You ever get tired of babysitting, get in touch.”
“Take care of yourself, Vos,” she said, her tone perfunctory.
“Yeah, you too.” No point in delaying any further: it would only make Voyle suspicious, so he turned away, walking towards the exit.
“Goodbye, Vos,” Zusen said, and he turned back, trying to hide his surprise. The girl was looking at him with a peculiar expression on her face. “And thank you for pretending to like me.”
“I do like you,” Kyrlock protested automatically, completely taken aback, and a faint, sad smile ghosted across the girl’s face.
“I know exactly what people are feeling, remember? Every time I got close to you, it made your skin crawl. But you tried to hide it, and that was kind.” The smile flickered, like a wind-blown candle flame. “So, thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Kyrlock said, and, moved by an impulse he couldn’t explain, raised his hand in farewell. “Look after yourself, kid. “Cause I guarantee you, no one else will.” The same advice his brother had given him, when they parted for the last time.
“I’m not a kid,” she said, the smile spreading, and her voice devoid of petulance despite the words.
Kyrlock shook his head. “No, I don’t think you are anymore,” he said. Then he turned and walked through the hatchway Voyle had indicated, fighting the impulse to turn and check on Elyra for one final time. She was an experienced Inquisition agent, he knew; he’d just have to hope that would turn out to be enough.
Even so, as he hurried down the narrow passageway towards a swelling babble of voices, he wasn’t quite able to shake the dreadful certainty that he’d never set eyes on her again.
The Emperor’s Justice, Scintilla System
255.993.M41
“Pieter, come in.” Inquisitor Grynner glanced up from his desk, noting the data-slate in his apprentice’s hand with a faint nod of his head. “You have some additional information?”
Quillem nodded, and held out the reports he’d just finished collating. “The Ursus Innare docked at Tarsus High less than an hour ago. Some of our assets are keeping an eye on it, but the only people who’ve disembarked so far are members of the crew.”
“I hardly think they’re likely to usher a herd of illegal passengers through the main concourse,” Grynner said, a tone of mild reproof creeping into his voice as he paged rapidly down the screen.
“Quite so,” Quillem said. “So I’ve been going over the schematics of the docking bays. You’ll notice there’s a potential route directly from the freighter’s hold to the service passages, which could be used to move a large group of people relatively quickly.”
“Well done, Pieter,” Grynner said, selecting the indicated file, and skimming the contents. “It would require careful timing, but I’m sure that’s how they get their people aboard.”
“There’s more,” Quillem said, trying not to look too pleased with himself, and certain that the inquisitor wouldn’t be fooled for a moment by his pose of dispassion. “The ship reported a minor systems failure, which delayed the discharge of her cargo for nearly seven minutes. And according to the port logs, which Mal… I mean Ullen, obtained access to, the same thing has happened on two out of her last three visits.” He was certain that the Deathwatch Techmarine had found the request to tap into the port’s datacore a distasteful one, a misuse of his abilities, but with Malven dead, there hadn’t been anyone else on the inquisitor’s staff able to do the job. Not quickly and cleanly enough, anyway.
“From which we can infer that she’s been smuggling people on a regular basis,” Grynner said.
“Quite.” Quillem nodded his agreement. “There are only a few likely exits from the service tunnels, and I’ve asked Ullen to monitor the systems for any signs of unauthorised access.”
“Then all we can do is await developments,” Grynner said, placing the data-slate carefully on the surface of his desk. He steepled his fingers, and looked thoughtfully at his apprentice. “And speaking of which, how are Carolus’ people getting on?”
“They’ve gone to ground, as you anticipated,” Quillem reported. “Carys tagged them at the Tricorn without any trouble, but they seem to have brought their own shuttle and pilot with them from Sepheris Secundus, so she wasn’t able to follow them when they left. Something of an unexpected development, needless to say. Nevertheless, we do have a lead to their whereabouts.”
“The shuttle, presumably,” the inquisitor remarked.
“Exactly,” Quillem confirmed. “She got word back to the Justice fast enough for us to be able to track it with our auspex suite when they took off again; they landed at a small commercial pad in the middle hive, close to the western industrial zone.”
“That hardly narrows it down much,” Grynner said. “There are
about seven million inhabitants of that district.”
“But their pilot appears to be very conscientious,” Quillem told him. “He’s either living aboard the vessel, or visiting it to run systems checks every few hours. Either way, he can lead us to the others.”
“No doubt.” Grynner looked up at his pupil, his expression grave. “But be discreet, Pieter. We’re dealing with experienced and resourceful acolytes, and we don’t want to alarm them unduly. The consequences of that could be unfortunate, to say the least.”
“Of course, inquisitor,” Quillem assured him. “Discreetly it is.” He handed Grynner a second data-slate. “We’ve also intercepted the vox report Horst made to the Tricorn after the Misericord emerged from the warp. They seem to have had an eventful trip.” He waited for the inquisitor to skim through the file.
“Eventful indeed,” Grynner said, setting the slate down at last, in an uncharacteristically abstracted manner. “This fresh encounter with a daemon is extremely disturbing, Pieter. It pains me to admit it, but we’re out of our depth. We need advice from the Ordo Malleus.”
“Something of a problem when the information we’re dealing with is subject to a Special Circumstances edict,” Quillem reminded him. “We still don’t know if we can trust anyone in the Calixian Conclave with it.”
“Karnaki’s discreet enough,” Grynner said thoughtfully after a while. “And he has little enough to do with his colleagues in any case. I’d already considered consulting him, but now, I think, we have no choice.”
“Then I’ll make the arrangements,” Quillem said. He smiled, wryly, anticipating his patron’s next remark. “Discreetly, of course.”
Hive Sibelius, Scintilla
255.993.M41
“Everything quiet outside?” Horst asked, as Drake entered the living room of the apartment.
“As the grave,” Drake replied, inaccurately. This close to one of the industrial zones which generated the wealth and power for which Hive Sibelius was famous throughout the sector, silence was a luxury denied the labourers who toiled around the clock in its furnaces and manufactoria. Day and night had little meaning to any of the locals, as sunlight never penetrated this deep into the middle hive: the street outside had once been open to the sky, but millennia of subsequent construction had buried it beneath almost a kilometre of masonry. Now luminator poles burned unceasingly, and ducted fans in the ragged ceiling did their best to suck the promethium fumes farted by the lorries which rumbled along the carriageway every few minutes, laden with raw materials for the manufactoria, away to the outside air: or, more likely, Horst thought, to some other part of the hive, where it would simply inconvenience someone else. “Preferably not mine.”
“Can’t blame a girl for being careful,” Keira said, lowering the pistol crossbow she’d been aiming at the door ever since she’d heard the first faint scuff of Drake’s key in the latchplate.
“Or a man,” Drake agreed, shrugging off the shapeless, dull green hooded coat he’d bought from a local street trader to help him blend in more easily with the local population. As he discarded it, he revealed the Scalptaker in its shoulder rig, angled for a fast draw. He and Keira both glanced in Horst’s direction as he spoke.
Nodding an acknowledgement, Horst let his hand fall away from the butt of his bolt pistol. Keira’s weapon would have been far more discreet if Drake had turned out to be an enemy after all, but around here, he suspected, no one would have heard the bolter being fired over the general background noise in any case.
The strange thing was, no one else seemed particularly bothered by it. Keira and Drake both slept soundly enough, and Vex seemed able to ignore the noise completely, tapping away on the keyboard of the cogitator in the corner of the room with unbroken concentration. Or perhaps he actually enjoyed it, discerning some hymn to the Machine-God in the never-ending racket. Only Horst found the constant thrumming in the background, the periodic growling of the trucks, and the sporadic thuds and crashes from the manufactoria a perpetual irritation.
Perhaps he should just give up trying to ignore it, he thought, and take to sleeping in the shuttle, like Barda did. Despite the fatigue which had afflicted him ever since their arrival here, he smiled at the absurdity of the idea; that would be an abrogation of his duty to the Angelae, and to the Inquisition itself. Inquisitor Finurbi would expect to find them here, of that he was certain, and when their patron required their help, he was determined to be ready.
The apartment was one of several nondescript properties the Angelae network maintained in Hive Sibelius, but he’d chosen to take refuge in this one for several reasons. The fact that it was in the most densely populated of the districts in which Inquisitor Finurbi maintained a safe house was a major one, of course. Here, the Angelae could come and go completely unremarked; even Vex’s distinctive robe was only one among the thousands worn by the small army of tech-adepts who laboured ceaselessly to keep the fabrication units turning out their quota of whatever it was they made.
The fact that many of the smaller, more valuable products left by air, and some of the essential equipment the Mechanicus acolytes required came in the same way, was also an advantage; the shuttle his team had arrived aboard would excite little comment, and they’d been able to rent a berth at a minor, and apparently struggling, commercial pad at a slightly less extortionate rate than he’d anticipated. They’d paid for a month up front, access to the inquisitor’s coffers apparently still being available to those of his acolytes who required it despite his disappearance; mindful of the need for secrecy, he’d had Vex reroute the funds several times before claiming the money. He wasn’t naive enough to believe that a sufficiently determined researcher couldn’t follow the trail back to them eventually, but he was sure they’d have moved on long before anyone managed to complete so complex a task.
His eyes moved momentarily to the firmly closed door at the far end of the room, where the main reason he’d chosen to go to ground in this particular bolthole was currently doing whatever it was he did all day. Marrak Vorn was the oldest surviving member of the Angelae Carolus, and one of the inquisitor’s closest associates; only Elyra, who had undoubtedly shared his bed at one time, had an equal claim to their patron’s confidence.
Vorn was one of the inquisitor’s most crucial assets. He collated the reports of all the active cells, whether delivered in person, or by astropath to the Tricorn, and condensed them into digests suitable for retransmission to wherever Finurbi happened to be. If anyone knew the whereabouts of their missing patron, it would be Vorn.
Unfortunately, he’d turned out to have no more idea about that than Horst did, but had agreed with his assessment that when the inquisitor did break cover, this would be the first contact he made.
“So you might as well stay here for a while,” he’d said, shrugging, before returning to the array of vox receivers and data looms cluttering the back room, and at which Vex had stared with undisguised envy on their arrival.
“Speaking of being careful,” Horst said, “I take it you made sure you weren’t being followed?”
“I took all the usual precautions,” Drake assured him. Although the streetcraft required to spot and evade a hidden watcher had been strange to him at first, radically different from the battlefield skills he’d been trained in as a soldier, he’d been a willing pupil, and learned fast.
“How’s Barda?” Keira asked, and Drake shrugged, dropping onto a sofa barely any cleaner than the one in their old suite in the Beyonders Hostelry. Checking in on the young pilot was a regular and necessary chore, as Horst didn’t trust the vox not to be monitored by whichever shadowy enemies had forced their employer underground, and had been the main reason he’d gone out that day.
“Fine, so far as I can tell.” It had been a risk leaving the Cloudwalker alone with the shuttle, but bringing him here with them would have been equally problematic; on balance, Horst felt, if they needed the little spacecraft they were likely to need it in a hurry, and the time saved by having B
arda already aboard, ready to power up the engines before their arrival at the pad, might be crucial. “But if you ask me, that boy needs to get out more.”
“Maybe he does,” Horst agreed. Barda’s competence as a pilot was beyond question, but in most other respects he was dangerously naive about life in the wider galaxy. He glanced at Drake. “Do you think you can do something about that?”
“Not a problem,” Drake said, a peculiar mixture of eagerness and reluctance entering his voice. No doubt he’d relish the chance to get out of the claustrophobic apartment again, but Barda was hardly the companion he would have chosen for an evening’s entertainment. “I’ll take him for a drink or something. Try and ease him gently into real life.”
“Somewhere quiet,” Horst counselled, and Drake nodded judiciously.
“Good idea. I’ll leave the brawling and the joygirls for next time.” He smiled, clearly joking, and Horst felt a flare of irritation, which he quickly suppressed. This was no time for levity.
“Maybe I ought to make a recon sweep,” Keira said. “Just to check that the street’s clear.” She glanced at Drake, and brushed her purple fringe back out of her eyes. “Danuld’s getting good at spotting possible tails, but you never know.”
“Good idea,” Horst said. He doubted that anyone would have been able to find them as quickly as this, only two days having passed since they received Inquisitor Finurbi’s disquieting message at the Tricorn, but sending her out to make sure couldn’t hurt, and would prevent her from becoming too restive. She was wearing a loose blouse and knee-length skirt, in muted shades of brown and grey, typical of the attire worn by the women of this quarter, so she should blend almost invisibly into the crowds in the street outside. “Take care.”
“Always,” she replied, folding the crossbow with a neat economy of motion.
“Getting anywhere?” Drake asked, wandering past Vex to reach the small kitchen area, which an open counter separated from the rest of the room. Traces of an intricate mosaic were still visible on the wall there, between the larger patches of crumbling plaster and exposed brick where seeping damp from the levels above had broken most of the design away over the centuries, and Horst tried again to work out what it had once depicted. Rural scenes of some sort, he thought, of a kind which had ceased to exist on Scintilla millennia ago, if they ever had at all. Between the deserts and the jungles, and the sprawling hives, most of the planet was far too barren to even consider growing crops. All the food here, with the possible exception of the vermin hunted in the under-hives, had to be imported from nearby agri-worlds, thousands of shiploads a day arriving at the orbital docks for trans-shipment to the surface. If a warp storm ever hit the sector, Scintilla would die a protracted, agonising death, along with the billions of souls which thronged its hives.
[Dark Heresy 02] - Innocence Proves Nothing Page 25