by Gav Thorpe
‘I… I am feeling... indisposed, Captain Kulik. I think it better if I retire to my cabin at this juncture. I do not feel well at all.’
‘That would be for the best,’ Kulik replied gently. ‘I will have the surgeon send an orderly with something relaxing for you. Mister Crassock, please assist the admiral to his quarters.’
Price nodded dumbly once more, looking every bit the old man he was becoming, frail and uncertain. Kulik could not understand what had happened to his mentor, his friend, and it cut him deep to see Ensign Crassock helping Price off the command deck. When the door closed behind them, Kulik drove the image from his thoughts.
‘Signal to fleet. All vessels to make all speed possible to the flagship for immediate attack on the objective.’
Kulik realised he was still holding the hilt of his sword, his knuckles white with strain. He released his grip and flexed his fingers, forcing himself to relax. Emperor protect me, he thought, from orks and admirals.
Eighteen
Terra – the Imperial Palace
On past occasions Wienand had lamented the sheep-like mentality of humanity, and in particular their desire to crowd onto Terra in their tens of thousands to pay homage to the God-Emperor of Mankind. Even amongst the Inquisition such thoughts were becoming heretical, but Wienand had read the ancient records and knew, or at least had a semi-educated inkling, just how ‘godly’ the Emperor was. There were some, like Veritus, who had embraced the teachings of the Ecclesiarchy and openly supported the organisation. Wienand remained unconvinced of the necessity for an Imperium-spanning church, but she could certainly see that it might have its uses.
At the moment its greatest use came in the form of a queue five miles long, winding back and forth up the Avenue of Martyrs towards the Cathedral of the Saviour Emperor. Having cut and double-backed through the crowds at the transit station several times to confuse any potential pursuer, eventually emerging out of the southern gate, Wienand had plunged straight into the milling tide of humanity.
Amongst the press of bodies, the inquisitor found herself inside a sort of mobile shanty. It took days, weeks usually, for anyone wishing to enter the Cathedral itself to achieve this, and such was the demand that it then took another three days to process from the massive doors to the entrance of the inner basilica where the altar could be seen. Each pilgrim had roughly three seconds in the presence of the relics kept in stasis there before being moved on by armed Frateris. It seemed an awful lot of effort to see a couple of metal shards – supposedly from the Emperor’s armour – and a pile of ash that was once, so the Ministorum claimed, a fragment of Roboute Guilliman’s cloak.
People had tents, handwagons and portable cooking stoves, gathered as families, groups and even entire communities that had made the long and arduous journey to the heart of the Imperium. Most of them, even those that had been considered wealthy when departing, would have expended their every resource to chart passage. Some would have worked their way from system to system, haphazardly crossing the stars, edging ever closer to their destination.
There were clothes and fashions from thousands of different worlds. Underhive punks with extravagant gang hairstyles and tattoos who had been touched by the light of the Emperor queued meekly alongside labourers in heavy coveralls and hand-woven smocks. Various individuals of planetary nobilities moved serenely through the mass atop sedan chairs carried by augmented servants, or cut themselves off inside servitor-pulled wains covered with brilliantly embroidered panels and sheets. No powered vehicles, save for the patrol transports of the Adeptus Arbites, were allowed on the Avenue of Martyrs, nor animals, so all transportation was either on foot or man-powered in some fashion.
A middle-aged couple had procured quadcycles and were gently pedalling in fits and starts as the queue edged forwards, their teenage offspring riding on top of the trailers hitched behind. Wienand suspected that both parents and children had been a lot younger when their pilgrimage had begun.
Quite a few were recognisable as ex-military: Guardsmen and Naval personnel who had earned the right to pilgrimage by conquest or bravery. That right might bring them to Terra but it didn’t extend so far as jumping the queue. Conversely, the western edge of the roadway was reserved solely for members of the Ecclesiarchy. Preachers and missionaries with letters of reference from cardinals of recognised dioceses were granted access, alongside a few fortunate individuals of the Frateris who had earned similar reward for services rendered. Amongst the cassocks, uniforms and robes were ornately dressed members of higher-class families, whose dedication to the Adeptus Ministorum had perhaps been more financial than physical or spiritual.
There were growls of annoyance and accusing shouts as Wienand pushed herself through the mass, suspected of trying to jump her place. A few brave souls made grabs and lunges but were soon dissuaded from further action by a flash of her bolt pistol; the Inquisition sigil of the ring on her trigger finger was even more of a deterrent for many. Anyone who had spent more than five minutes on Terra learned to keep an eye out for the stylised ‘I’ with cross-bars, and to affect an air of total disinterest in anybody that possessed such a thing.
She continued to worm her way through the throng. It was hard to chart any kind of course. Not only was the press of people like a thicket, allowing passage in some places and obstinately blocking it in others, great incense burners hung from the ceiling above the Avenue of Martyrs. The smoke from these spilled down like a fog, obscuring visibility even further. Wienand was dimly aware of the tenements rising up on either side of the vast thoroughfare, storey after storey of small cell windows, broken by the occasional spray of stained glass where the way-chapels were situated.
Peddlers of all descriptions moved up and down between the columns of the pilgrimage queue. Their wares ranged from the mundane to the extraordinary. Many were selling food and clothes, others had small trinkets and keepsakes purportedly from the Cathedral itself. Quite a few were soilmen, with synth-leather bottles and buckets and brightly painted portable screens to allow the pilgrims to relieve themselves without losing their place; those that were prepared made their own arrangements or organised themselves into queuing shifts to avoid such expense. There were several touting out their services as place-holders. They would, for the right fee, happily queue in place of a pilgrim so that they might spend a day or two resting in one of the dorm cells or perhaps visit one of the lesser attractions of the Imperial Palace.
More exotic were the modified queue-folk. Wienand spied a tele-bless. The woman’s eyes had been replaced with optical lenses and the bulky, cable-pierced box of a storage drive jutted from the side of her skull. She had been inside the holy sepulchre of the Cathedral and was willing to allow others to access her sights and memories for the right price, thus passing on the holiness of the sanctuary without the irksome waiting.
Messenger cherubs – vat-grown winged creatures with angelic faces and dead eyes – flitted back and forth through the haze of incense above the milling crowd, carrying missives to and from the Cathedral offices. She decided to follow their course to keep her bearing as the crowd surged and rippled around her, edging ever closer to unity with the Emperor.
Although the mass of pilgrims gave her plenty of cover in which to hide, it also prevented Wienand from seeing if she was still being pursued. She was sure that whoever had followed her down the tunnel would have been close enough to track her progress into the multitude, and if they were in communication with others sworn to Veritus and his allies she might well be at the centre of a converging net.
She needed to get into the hab-blocks, effect a change of clothes – and preferably dye her hair – before disappearing altogether. Over the heads of the throng around her the inquisitor could see the top of an arched entrance to the nearest hab-block, about three hundred feet away. She started to head towards it, stepping past an elderly couple who had sat down on the ferrocrete with a small stove to brew a pot o
f some hot beverage or other. They were dressed in mendicant robes – undyed smocks given out for those that needed to sell the last of their belongings, including their clothes, for food and water.
‘Tai, dear?’ asked the old lady, offering up a much-chipped ceramic cup and saucer. ‘You seem in an awful hurry. Why not relax a moment and have a nice cup of tai?’
Wienand couldn’t help but grin at the lady’s attitude. To keep a tai set whilst dressed in charity rags demonstrated an adherence to a certain level of standards that gave Wienand a momentary lift in spirits.
‘No, thank you, but I appreciate the offer,’ said Wienand. She delved into a secret pocket inside her jacket and produced a brassy coin. On one side was the Inquisitorial symbol and on the other her personal mark. She handed the token to the old man and pointed to an Adeptus Arbites watch-tower about half a mile ahead. ‘When you get to the way-station, show them this. Say that Inquisitor Wienand instructs that they escort you to the front of the queue.’
The couple looked at her wide-eyed, caught between shock and fear. Wienand winked and turned away.
At that moment she saw a commotion in the crowd about a dozen feet ahead of her. Someone was bulldozing their way through the pilgrims straight towards Wienand, smashing aside people in their haste.
With surprised shouts and angry yells the crowd parted, revealing a well-muscled man bulging out of the seams of a mendicant robe. The hood was thrown back as he sprinted towards her; he had an ageing, broad face with a squashed nose, and his bald scalp was crossed with three faint scars.
Wienand dragged free her bolt pistol but her attacker was shockingly fast and she did not have time to aim before he had reached her – she could not risk a wild shot with so many others around. The man’s hands were empty of weapons, she realised, and an out-thrust palm struck Wienand in the chest, hurling her back several yards, crashing through the brew set of the old couple, skidding and rolling across the rough ferrocrete.
The old man gave a shout, of pain rather than surprise, and lurched to his feet clutching his shoulder. Blood spurted between his fingers as he staggered a few steps and fell down to his knees.
Only here, as she lay on her back, did Wienand realise what was happening. The man’s face flashed from a memory of Rendenstein’s reports: Esad Wire, known as Beast Krule. It seemed that Vangorich was making his own play.
However, in the next instant she happened to look up and saw what it was that the Beast had also seen. In one of the hab windows on the far side of the avenue, about five hundred feet away, light glinted from a lens of some kind. Probably a telescopic gunsight.
Wienand rolled to her right out of pure instinct a moment before the sniper fired again, the high-velocity bullet cracking from the roadway where she had been moments before. Still dazed, Wienand did not resist when Beast Krule snatched the bolt pistol from her hand and turned towards the firer. There was something about his pose, the set of his shoulders and legs, the raw sturdiness of the man, which suggested some kind of endoskeletal bracing.
Beast Krule fired back at the sniper, a salvo of three bolts. From this range Wienand would have thought the shot impossible, but the trio of bolts arced over the crowd and dropped into the window. Krule had some kind of optical imaging and had even allowed for the decay rate of the bolts’ internal propellant. The flash of detonations illuminated a gaunt, shocked face within the dorm cell.
Wienand rolled to her feet, pulling free her laspistol. Other figures were converging on them from the crowd. Some of the pilgrims were rooted in horror, others were screaming, while many were trying to push their way back into the packed throng, trying to get away. The old woman had crawled over to her husband and was cradling him in her arms, a patch of wet red spreading through the crude grey weave of her smock.
‘Watch out!’ Wienand’s warning came just in time as a woman in a dark red Imperial Guard uniform lunged from the crowd at Krule, her hand clutching a gleaming power sword. The Assassin turned just in time, the shimmering blade slicing through the folds of the robe around his neck but missing flesh. Krule snapped out his right hand, fingers extended. The woman’s throat disappeared in a welter of foaming blood.
Another assailant dressed in the same manner, tall and lean, erupted from the panicked people to Wienand’s right. The inquisitor fired and there was a flash of light as a conversion field absorbed the energy of the las-shot. She didn’t have time for another, but Krule was there again, a kick snapping the legs from under the man, shattering shin bones. The Beast was on top of him in moments, driving reinforced fists through his chest and ribs.
Someone barrelled into Wienand from behind. She squirmed and twisted as she fell, firing the laspistol point-blank into the person’s gut. Hot breath warmed the inquisitor’s neck as the two of them hit the ground hard, forcing the air out of Wienand’s lungs. She stared into the red lenses of a pair of bionic eyes inches from her face, and was distantly aware of a sharp pain just above her right hip.
Suddenly the weight on Wienand was lifted away. The man seemed to rise into the air, blood drops falling from the blade of the long knife in his left hand, a scorch mark on the flak armour covering his torso beneath the layers of a preacher’s vestments. At first Wienand thought it was Krule who threw her assailant a dozen feet, but the robed, hooded figure was too slender. Her saviour stooped down, extending a hand with well-manicured fingernails and a small tattoo of a skull between thumb and index finger that Wienand recognised immediately.
‘Rendenstein? I knew you were alive!’
Wienand’s aide nodded inside the hood and stepped past, delivering a skull-smashing punch to a man swinging a maul at Beast Krule’s exposed back. The Assassin reared up, bloodied hands flinging gore. He spun around but stopped himself as he pulled back his right fist.
‘That’s the last of them,’ growled Vangorich’s agent. He looked at Rendenstein and his eyes widened. ‘That I know of. There’ll be more soon, ma’am. We should go.’
‘Arbitrators!’ snapped Wienand, spying a knot of blue-armoured enforcers with shock shields and power mauls shouldering their way through the crowd a few dozen feet away. ‘This is no time for answering awkward questions!’
Krule led the way and Rendenstein took the rear, Wienand wedged protectively between the two enhanced warriors. They headed away from the incoming Arbitrators and found the shelter of an arched entranceway to one of the transit tenements.
Krule hit the steps inside at a run, going up two floors before turning along one of the landings and sprinting along its length to another stairwell, where he ascended again. Wienand wasn’t sure if he was heading somewhere specific or simply navigating at random, but after five minutes of hard running that had the inquisitor’s heart thrashing in her chest and her lungs burning, the Assassin finally came to a stop beside the open door of a pilgrim cell. He stepped inside and reappeared a moment later.
Wienand was almost doubled up, choking down huge gulps of air. She hadn’t realised the price her body had paid for the past few years being dormant on Terra. Rendenstein stepped past to guard the other side of the doorway, her skin as porcelain-like as usual. Krule glanced at the inquisitor’s aide with a look of appreciation before concentrating on Wienand.
‘All clear, ma’am,’ said Beast, taking Wienand by the arm and leading her into the room. It was a bare chamber about ten feet square, with a low pallet bed in one corner, a washstand with rusted taps in another and a bedside table in which had been left a tattered copy of the Lectitio Divinatus. ‘Sit down, let’s take a look at that cut.’
Wienand complied, wincing as her clothes pulled at the dried blood forming a scab over her hip. Rendenstein eased Krule aside, concerned for her mistress. The Assassin stepped away and glanced out of the narrow window before he pulled the thin rag of a curtain across.
‘I think I’m missing a few pieces of this puzzle,’ said Wienand, looking between Krule and
Rendenstein.
Both Assassin and assistant started to talk at the same time and then stopped. They looked at each other with embarrassed smiles. Krule waved for Rendenstein to begin again.
‘Your unscheduled and unpublicised meeting with Grand Master Vangorich meant that you were not in your chambers as expected when Veritus’ men came for you,’ said the bodyguard-aide.
‘You’re sure they’re from Veritus?’ asked Wienand.
‘Positive. I was compiling records on known agents on Terra of those inquisitors taking part in the conclave. I recognised one of them. They must have realised I had guessed why they were there. I killed one and managed to get away.’
‘I was following you from when you were finished with the Grand Master, ma’am,’ continued Krule. ‘I did a quick sweep of your offices after you left–’
‘I thought I locked down the whole area?’ said Wienand.
Krule shrugged apologetically and continued.
‘I saw what you had come across, but by the time I reached the shuttle platform you had already departed. I had to follow you along the track. I was trying to catch up, but you were moving too quickly. Once you hit the public spaces I didn’t want to draw attention to myself in case I drew attention to you as well. When I spotted the sniper, I had to act.’
‘And I ended up following Krule, though he didn’t realise it,’ said Rendenstein. ‘I started on the eastbound shuttle to the transport hub, but jumped off a few hundred yards into the tunnel to lose my pursuers. I didn’t know you would be returning – sorry it wasn’t there for you when you came to the monorail. After that I went to check your personal quarters and found another one of our attackers there. I was too late to save Aemelie, but I killed him before he could get away. The bodies are stashed in the maintenance ducts. I was returning to the offices when I heard footsteps. I hid for a few minutes and that’s when I heard the other carriage being started. I hurried back, expecting it to be you, just in time to see Krule chasing you into the tunnels.’