The corridor was suddenly quiet, full of smoke and blood. Nietzin hauled Cerra to her feet. ‘Quickly,’ Vaughn said, and they picked their way between the bodies, towards the stairs. One of the Sisters, hit in the leg, was slowly crawling towards her gun. Vaughn kicked it out of reach.
The prioress lay on her back behind them, dead eyes staring upward. She had joined the long list of martyrs of the Imperium.
The lift was fast, but it was too much of a risk. They took the access stairs instead. It was hard, slow going. Vaughn’s knees soon ached from climbing. Their boots seemed to ring out an invitation to be ambushed on the metal stairs. Sister Cerra staggered beside Tash, a thin strand of drool hanging out of her mouth, until Fane, muttering about having to do the hard work, grabbed Cerra and hauled her along after him, half-carrying her up the stairs. Nietzin paused, puffing, met Fane’s eyes and started up again before the inevitable mockery began. They kept on, covering the way forward and the stairs behind, winding their way towards the surface. ‘Come on,’ Vaughn snapped, ‘Come on!’
He tried to remember how many Sisters the briefing had said there would be. By now, everyone capable of bearing arms would have been called in to fight. Surely there couldn’t be many more power-armoured Sisters. They’ll be waiting, he thought. It’s what I’d do: set a trap. Somewhere between here and the landing pad…
At last the stairs ended. They looked out onto a small hall, empty except for a door on the far side. Vaughn tore it open, Nietzin covering him, and they stepped out into fresh air and strong wind.
They crept down the side of the building. Vaughn glanced around the corner. The landing pad was empty. Vaughn peered towards the chapel through his monocular and saw small dark figures moving down the ridge; some robed, some armoured. He saw staves, censers, heavy bolters and meltaguns. The whole damned priory had turned out to fight.
The moment we step out, we’re dead.
The landing pad was wide open, and covered by a dozen big guns. For a moment he wondered if the flyer would turn up to rescue them at all.
Thrusters roared beneath him. The flyer rose up beside them, its engines setting the ropes on the handrail flapping wildly. A hatch dropped open in the flyer’s battered flank, and Lao’s voice came droning out of the speakers mounted under the wings.
‘Climb in – come on, hurry up! If you think I’m landing here you must be bloody joking.’
The flyer tore up through the sky. Vaughn watched the atmosphere thin out and darken as they reached its upper limit. Flames licked at the window as the ship left Rand XXI behind for good.
He looked over at Tash. As team medic, she was sitting beside the girl they had rescued, monitoring her status with a device somewhere between a narthecium and a psi-tracker. The novice herself sat with her mouth slightly open, gazing at a point behind Vaughn’s head. She looked like a doll, or a broken servitor.
Sister Cerra. Vaughn wondered if that was her original name: a lot of the Sisters of Battle changed their names when they joined the Adepta Sororitas. He felt too tired to care.
‘Watch her,’ he said. ‘Wake me up if anything changes.’ Then Vaughn rested his head on the wall, and the rumble of the engines coaxed him into sleep.
The others woke him up in the docking bay. The Solar Tradewind still looked like a merchantman inside. In truth, it was something between a Q-ship and a research vessel. Aching, Vaughn unbuckled himself and followed the others down into the bay.
Petarmus waited for him. His clothes were creased and his hair ruffled, as if it was he who had only just woken. He was Vaughn’s equal and opposite, the leader of Inquisitor Harsek’s other team of acolytes, the one the crewmen of the Tradewind called the left hand. The left hand watches the right, Vaughn thought, as a pair of medics wheeled a stretcher into the bay.
‘Welcome back,’ Petarmus said. ‘Good to see you’re alive.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You can tell your team they’ve got six hours. There’s a crate of amasec in the mess.’
‘I’ll let them know.’
‘Lord Harsek wants to see you in an hour. He says to make yourself presentable first.’
‘I will.’
Petarmus nodded. ‘He’s up in his garden, tending the spinethorns or whatever he does up there.’ Vaughn made to leave. ’Good work on getting out alive, by the way. There’s not many that cross the Sisters and walk away.’
Vaughn checked in his gear, washed, changed his clothes and slept for twenty minutes in his quarters. He sat on his bed and looked the room over. It didn’t seem like much for fifteen years of military service, of one sort or another. Travel the galaxy, serve the Throne. I could have missed the Guard tithe, worked out my time in a weapons factory instead of ending up here. Still, I did do something worthwhile; for once, I saved a life. If I’d have left her down there, she’d be dead by now; staked out and burned as a witch when the exorcism failed to take hold. For once, there had been no balancing out, no trading of a few lives to save many more. He had done the right thing, without doubt.
He walked down the corridor, to the mess room.
‘Hey, Vaughn,’ Fane said, working at the bottle top of an amasec flask with his knife, ‘Vaughn!’
‘What?’
‘Guess what I prayed for last night. Go on, guess.’
Vaughn shrugged. ‘The good grace to keep your mouth shut.’
‘I prayed for the saints to send me to a planet full of women. And you know what? I got what I asked for! The saints have a sense of humour, that’s for sure!’
Vaughn was surprised how much Fane’s blasphemy angered him. Nietzin shook his head and muttered something about people getting what they asked for.
Fane was in the first stage of drunkenness. Later on, he’d be wildly pious, ready to fight anyone he suspected of doubting the sanctity of the Blessed Quivvar Nog. Then he’d pass out. He might be trash, Vaughn thought, but at least he was predictable.
Vaughn caught the lift up to the main garden. The servitors knew all of Harsek’s acolytes by sight, but they still scanned his iris. The lift carried Vaughn away from his men, into Harsek’s private domain. Gears ground under him, until the lift stopped smoothly and the doors rattled apart.
He stood at the edge of a huge, domed room. The ceiling glowed with turquoise light. Vaughn walked into warm air alive with the chirruping of alien insects. Xenos plants covered the ceiling, crawled up the walls towards the dome. A floater-seed as big as Vaughn’s head bobbed past.
He walked in carefully. The garden was beautiful, at a distance. Close up, he saw poisonous plants, strangling vines and worse: Catachan brainleaves, spikers, even a massive creeper-tree tethered to the side of the dome. As it felt Vaughn’s footsteps it flexed its roots like a thug cracking his knuckles.
In the centre of the garden stood a bespectacled old man . He came towards Vaughn with a smile on his face, wearing a plain brown robe. Inquisitor Harsek, whose word had burned entire worlds, had no great aura of power. There was nothing obviously sinister about him, but as ever, Vaughn fought down the need to retreat, the need to hide from Harsek’s calm, knowing eyes. ‘You’ve done an excellent job,’ Harsek said.
Vaughn did not relax. He bowed, quickly and formally. ‘Thank you, my lord. My men did well.’
‘No need for formality,’ Harsek replied. ‘Or false modesty. This girl is ours now. Thank you.’
‘Will they cure her?’ Vaughn asked. No doubt, he thought, Harsek would have his men probe around in Cerra’s mind, digging out whatever they required in furtherance of their master’s plans. Then, once they acquired what they needed and made the rest of her safe, they would dump her on one of the more stable-minded civilised worlds, to eke out a safe, boring existence with a trillion other nobodies. That was much the way Vaughn himself hoped to end up, once his service for the Inquisition was done: comfortably anonymous, a billion kilometres from
here. After all, he reflected, if they had wanted Cerra dead they could simply have left her with the Sisters of Battle.
‘Cure her? Goodness, no.’ Harsek whipped a pair of pruning shears from his belt and flipped them open like a butterfly knife. He stooped over a bush, snipping at the fronds. ‘One doesn’t cure a psyker. But they can be contained, put to good use. Only the Emperor can perform soul-binding, but there are other ways. The risk of a psyker drawing the attention of the Ruinous Powers never goes, of course, not entirely, but the danger can lessen a little, depending on how she’s used.’
At the mention of the Ruinous Powers, Vaughn made a quick, instinctive aquila across his chest.
‘But you managed to get her at her prime,’ Harsek added. ‘Just how we need her.’
For a moment, Vaughn thought he might just nod, salute Inquisitor Harsek and walk away. How did the saying go? A servant’s greatest contentment is the knowledge that his master’s task is done. But he had never quite followed that mantra. ‘How do you mean? If you don’t mind me asking, my lord.’
‘Of course. You’re always free to ask. And I’m always free not to answer.’ Harsek dropped the shears into a pocket in his robe. ‘She is an emergent psyker, undoubtedly. The presence of such a person draws warp entities the way blood in the water draws sharks. But there are some sharks worth studying, yes?’
Vaughn strained his memory to remember what a shark was. Ah, yes. ‘So, she–’
‘Would draw the attention of more interesting prey.’
‘Isn’t that dangerous?’
‘For her, yes. Fatal, probably. But for us… vital.’
Vaughn felt his face harden. ‘But she’s innocent, surely.’
‘Innocent?’ Harsek looked rather surprised, as if he had not expected to encounter the word in these surroundings. ‘Hmm. That’s not really a term I tend to use. I find it rather unhelpful. I prefer to think in terms of… purity of motive. Yes, that’s the best way of putting it.’
Vaughn made no attempt to hide his expression. There was no point in doing so. Harsek wouldn’t need to read his face to know what he was thinking.
‘Don’t be like that,’ the inquisitor said, his voice still gentle. ‘You didn’t waste your time – quite the opposite, in fact. She’s innocent, you’re innocent – so am I. We may do awful things sometimes, but our motives remain pure. The galaxy has yet to find a way to sully them.’ He smiled and took off his spectacles.
Vaughn knew that he would not tell his men any of this, especially Nietzin. For all they would know, Sister Cerra had been healed and set free.
‘I’ll remember that, my lord,’ Vaughn replied, and he turned and walked away.
About The Author
Toby Frost is the author of the novel Straken, about the eponymous Astra Militarum colonel. His other published work for Black Library includes the short stories 'Lesser Evils' and 'The Apex', the latter of which also featured Colonel 'Iron Hand' Straken. He has more tales of Straken on the way.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
First published in Hammer and Bolter: Issue Thirteen in 2011 by Black Library. © Games Workshop Limited, 2011.
Published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK
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Lesser Evils - Toby Frost Page 3