The Home Front - IC [M]

[PaintSerf]

It had taken a lot longer than the Cartel had wanted. Schedules were starting to slip.

The first lead, a cyborg fighting circuit, had been using simple bulk mining augments, probably boosted from shipments to Hetrodyne Station on the edge of the Hazeroth Abyss. The steroid bulked fighters with drill arms and buzzsaw hands had been crude, bulk work, little better than servitors. Too crude and primitive for their needs. Bai and Amador had left the illicit, blood-soaked arena alone against Burakgazi's outspoken protests. It simply wasn't worth their time and it might be, linked in the tangle of deniable shell guildpacts, tontines and contracts, an asset for their backers in any case.

The second lead had been a grey market stimm still in the Velkahalian sinks, in the outer domes sprawling around Sibellus base. The adept running the still had barely been worth the name, undoubtedly addicted to his own product, and so brain addled a day later that he no-doubt wondered if he had imagined the visit from the hulking electro-priest and his handlers.

The third lead, an augmenticist working for nominal fees in the most deprived low hive sinks on the coast, had turned out to be a legitimate threat. Her organ harvesting operation had seen hundreds crippled and tortured to feed the uphive nobles’ need for cheaper rejuvenat treatments and replacement organic components for their servants’ bodies. Worse was the unlicensed experiments that had fused the crippled and the damned into monstrous flesh-golems etched with twisted electoos.

Konstantin remembered Amador turning as he heard the ominous click-click-click-click metronome of him touching his copper capped thumb to his fingertips. He saw the stony resolve in the luminen’s sculptural visage, and the implicit challenge as the electro-priest’s remaining silver bionic eye narrowed at him. Amador had sighed, and relented with a nod. That abominable work had been an affront to both their faiths. He had silently marked the Aquila points as Burakgazi was enveloped by a nimbus of light and Vardanyan unsheathed her knife.

The tech-witch’s lab had been burning when Burakgazi knocked it from its moorings on a black, lichen covered cliff. It had fallen into the storm howling against the hive’s walls, to be dashed against the cliffs by glassy black waves. The lab’s twisted mistress had followed, broken but still alive, a few moments later, to be swallowed by the ocean. Konstantin had watched until her tainted spark was extinguished.

“While I admire the initiative, I do expect the tribute of blood and skulls from my servants, Konstantin.” The daemon - one of the daemons - spoke within his mind with a genteel, aristocratic languor. Konstantin heard the implicit order of a monarch, a King, for his vassals to prove their fealty with the slaying of a contemptuous prelate.

I am not your servant.

“No?” The query was the whip-crack of a fencer’s saber, as it sliced open a rival’s cheek in a duel of honor. “Justice and blood are my will, Konstantin. You brought that justice in spades to the deviants in their spires.”

I will never be your servant.

“So you say.” It chuckled, as it so often did when it repeated his own words against him, and smiled with the pink stained teeth of a corpse renderer who tasted their first bite of forbidden flesh - and forbidden power - and desired more.

“Khek off.” Konstantin growled lowly at the daemon in his head, and the thought of Him. He spat into the black ocean beneath him, as he tasted the copper tang of blood in his throat.

“You good?”

The electro-priest turned to regard Ani with his functional eye. The lean, whipcord knife fighter watched him with restrained concern, and Konstantin answered with a restrained nod. They both knew he was not capable of being good, under present circumstances.

“Well, let’s get out of here then.” Ani responded, deliberately casually, as she raked her pointed nails through the soaked mass of her asymmetrically cut mane. She scowled harmlessly at him. “In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s pissing out - and unlike you I ain’t cut my luxurious locks.”

Konstantin smiled down at his companion. “That sounds an awful lot like a you problem.”

“No, my hair’s fine. Your man bun was the damn problem.” Ani snarkily countered, as she companionably took his hand and led the chuckling electro-priest away.

Three promising leads expended, and they only found what they wanted at all when a lower-order technomat from the ship’s staff handed Dashing a cheap, pulp-printed trancemissionary pamphlet, the tight black text nearly unreadable against the offwhite, lumpy paper.

“Look at it under blacklight.” he had explained. Sure enough, under UV a cleverly hidden part of a map appeared. Another day collecting more of the pamphlets had revealed the rest of the map, and Burakgazi, Dashing and Amador had made plans to make contact. Ani and Nara insisted that they come too, and eventually Amador relented, on the condition they follow his lead. Bai had declined. She had spent a day in Sibellus’ underhive, which was more than enough for a well-heeled Malfian’s lifetime.

“We have to be careful.” Amador had said. “Someone like this, they only ever want to be found on their own terms.”

The group had donned slickcoats and taken concealable weapons. Then they had wended through the lowhive pleasure district built in the shadow of broken statues of Imperial saints until they had found an old, abandoned rendering plant that housed a recaff house. Gelt changed hands, and the front of house man led the pair behind the tatty curtain that separated the softly furnished, threadbare area for customers, and through the kitchen with its bubbling pots of hot, black recaff and fryers loaded with sizzling cheap pastries. A freight elevator took them below, and into a maze of steam tunnels, with blacklight visible arrows guiding them, at last, to a sealed blastdoor, guarded by a muscled brute clad in butcher’s chain with a shockpole, and a pair of slaved stubber turrets.

“Weapons go in the slot.” the brute grunted, indicating an armoured hatch set into the wall. With practicised reluctance, the group had deposited concealed pistols and knives into the hatch. They all submitted to a patdown, with only a minimal amount of flirting from Dashing and Nara, and a sincere nod of reassurance from Burakgazi for Ani when it had been the knife fighter’s turn to be frisked.

“We'll be watching you, One Eye.” the brute grunted to Burakgazi as the door opened.

Stan impassively regarded the henchman as everyone except Ani went ahead. The luminen was confidently assured that he would easily tear out the thug’s spark of life in any hypothetical fight between them. He calmed his voltagheists, which reflexively twitched at the brute’s provocative words, with the Knowledge imparted by his extrasensory sight which indicated his baseline heart labored to sustain his extensive muscle grafts. The henchman was an insignificant, self-correcting irritant.

“Enjoy your time.” Stan quietly stated, with a clinically gentle double-pat on the brute’s shoulder. He disregarded the henchman’s quizzical, uncomprehending frown and politely gestured for the tensed Ani to lead on.

They had stepped into an airlock, and it cycled with a hiss of air. Amador suspected this was one final layer of security. Perhaps the chamber could be emptied of air, or filled with poison. Perhaps the walls and floor could be electrified. He didn't share any of this with his companions, and if the Luminen noticed he kept it to himself. It would only agitate the others, and it proved that who they were dealing with was serious and competent. That was promising.

Finally, the inner lock cycled and they took one step closer to their objective.

The room they stepped into was a riot of colour and noise, strobing light and boneshaking bass. Hologlyphs danced in the air. The whole place was shaped like a corkscrew, a drill, descending down into the meat of the hive. While the level they stepped out onto was relatively clear, as the floor dropped into a ramp that wrapped round the inside of the structure, it was more and more full, until at the bottom it was a seething mass of people moving in time with the pounding music. Each level was served by a bar, and drinks seemed to be in every hand.

“Ooh…” Nara trilled delightedly, eyes wide and smile flashing as she took in the atmosphere.

“Impressive.” Dashing muttered, sweeping a glass from a passing server’s tray with a practiced grace. Stan's face was twisted into a near permanent frown. His remaining eye flicked from patron to patron.

“They're all augmented.” he stated.

“Of course.” Amador looked upwards and raised a brow. “This is a temple of the Omnissiah, after all.”

Stan followed his gaze up, towards the ceiling. Etched in brass was the Opus Machina, the half skull half cyborg symbol of the Cult Mechanicus.

“Hereteks.” Stan snarled under his breath. His knuckles whitened as he clenched his fists, reminded of the augmenticist’s den of profane horror he had so recently cast down into the ocean. “We should. . .”

“Do nothing, handsome.” Dashing replied smoothly, with an opportunistic brush of the back of his fingertips against the tech-priest’s muscular forearm. The shipmaster unrepentantly shrugged at Burakgazi’s wordless glance at the imposition. “We need this person's help, remember.” He stepped back from the railing. “Anyway, it seems we've been spotted. Maybe they were expecting us?”

A servoskull buzzed up from the lower levels and passed a scanning beam over the small group, before making an affirmative beeping noise. It turned again, and they followed.

They were both led to a private room connected to one of the clubs mid layers. Behind heavy metal doors decorated with stylised cogs, they found a hexagonal room, each wall decorated with a complex pattern of spheres and lines connecting them, etched onto polished bronze. Against each wall was an overstuffed red velvet chaise longue, edged with gold braid, each served by small metal tables. In the centre of the room was a plinth, and at the centre of that was a pole. Stan doubted it was structural. The place conjured unpleasant memories of Vamassian's mansion, but this felt, somehow, classier. There was real money, real power, lurking here, unlike Vamassian and his seedy den of misery.

The servoskull bobbed across the room and into the outstretched arms of a figure reclining on one of the chaise longue. The figure, clad in red robes that seemed to merge with the seat, gently petted and cooed at the skull, stroking it with long metal fingers before giving it a playful push. With a seemingly contented buzz, it disappeared up towards the ceiling where a circular iris opened up, the drone disappearing inside.

“Well, my dears. Don't stand there gawking. Take a seat. And don't worry, they are strong enough to hold even you.”

Stan started forwards, and then stopped. Amador hadn't stepped forwards, and had made a small gesture for Ani and Nara to hold back at the doors threshold. He assessed the figure reclining in front of him. She (the voice had confirmed it) seemed slight, maybe half his size. But the robes didn't seem to want to settle on her figure. Apart from the woman (priestess?) were a pair of twins, supple men in clubber’s attire with opposite limbs and eyes removed, and replaced with artisan grade bionics. Small opus machinae made of gold were implanted into their bronzed foreheads. Both carried las carbines, slung at the small of their backs.

Oh my Deus… Stan internalized as he exerted his will to not externally react to the truly breathtaking sight of the twins. They were a highly intriguing blend of masculine aesthetics, bionic artisanship, and assuredly lethal prowess. Behind him, the electro-priest heard the thoughtful hmm of Ani, as if considering whether she could take the two of them...and the similar reaction from Dashing and Nara, for an entirely different physical consideration.

“You've taken a risk, meeting with us like this.” Amador offered. He stepped forwards at last.

“I have. Drink?”

Stan shook his head, resisting the temptation – yet another temptation – as he stepped into the room proper. His steps were hushed by thick, expensive carpet. The others helped themselves. From the appreciative noise Dashing made, the liquor was clearly of surprisingly good quality.

“The runes on the wall, what do they mean?” He gestured towards the etched panels, polished to a mirror sheen. Five Burakgazi's mirrored the gesture.

“You look smarter than the average muscle. I'm certain if you exercise that most vital organ, you can figure it out.”

Stan glanced back to Amador, who shrugged as he passed a glass to Ani and Nara. He knew that the seneschal would have surreptitiously passed a toxin wand over the glasses, and if he was handing them off to the girls the liquid was safe. Amador passed a tumbler filled with sticky, brown liquor to Stan, who took it in his hand, making the tumbler seem like a shot glass. He swilled the drink around the glass, watching how it clung to the inside of the glass like oil before draining back down, thinking the puzzle over, until the drink in his hand jolted recognition.

“Alcohol, Nicotine, Morphia, caff, and, I think, Tetra-hydro-cannabinol.” He stated, pointing to each in turn. “The five most common chemical stimulants in the Imperium. They are held up by the Magos Biologis as the most generous gift of the Omnissiah to mankind, and some subsects even hold them up as true wonders, on par with the las-rifle or the warp engine, underpinning the Imperium.” The luminen frowned slightly, as he set aside the tumbler. “At least, that’s what someone told me a long time ago.”

The figure in the robes laughed, clapping her hands together. “Well done! Not just a pretty face, I see. So. Let me see if I can figure out the rest. You are clearly someone’s magnum opus.” She pointed at Stan. “I even recognise the style. But Veiss isn't the kind of Domina to let her toys get away from her. So probably one of her students.”

She tapped a finger against her robed thigh.

“Odd. I thought she tended to favour womenfolk.”

“She does.” Stan agreed. Even within the mechanicus, rumours spread like trojan viruses - and even the self-isolated warriors of Stan’s brotherhood had been reached by stories of a spire-top heiress, driven to rage on her wedding day after a tawdry affair between her betrothed and her younger sister the very night before. Ironic, perhaps, that it had been very human spite which had driven the heiress to renounce her family and openly embrace the Deus of Mars instead, but no doubt that logical paradox had only fuelled the tale’s spread.

“You are on the correct track.” Stan said, inclining his head towards the priestess. “I was not her student, but I was one of her fulgurite brotherhood, the Circuit of the Second Sons.”

“Ah.” The metal finger tapped against the priestess’ leg once again. “On the correct track, but not quite correct? Hmm.”

The figure seemed to retreat deeper into her robes, falling silent for a moment.

“If Veiss has the wherewithal to craft her own set of electro-priests, then she has obviously done well for herself. The Second Sons, though…”

The metal finger patted against her crossed legs; tap-tap, tap-tap.

“You are Vostroyan, if your bearing and accent are any indication. Veiss has not inconsiderable holdings there. Could she be playing on their reverence for First sons? I think she could.”

Tap-tap, tap-tap.

“I would love to meet this son and heir she might be crafting. He must be exquisite.”

“That he is…” Stan murmured, and coughed as he fought down the urge to blush at the thought of brilliant, gorgeous...and completely oblivious Evgeni Veiss. Nara giggled under her breath.

“And you two. . .” the priestess continued, her cowl twitching slightly as the face hidden within turned to Dashing and Amador. “If my contacts at the port authority are worth the gelt I pay, are linked to that Meritech Raider they are keeping off the official books. So you are either very, very bad people, or linked to someone with some serious money. I'd guess the Malfian cartel.”

“Quite so,” Dashing confirmed, and smiled wryly as he amicably lifted his glass in a toast, “and it would seem we’re in good company, even in Sibellus.”

“We represent certain parties in the Malfian sub with concerns in the Adrantis warzone.” Amador confirmed. “We wish to make use of your services, before we depart.”

“The Captain, then.” Dashing inclined his head in completely false modesty. “Seneschal?” Amador sketched a small bow. “And the two girls. . . collateral? Goods in trade?”

Stan felt his anger rise to his skin, making him nearly crackle. He stepped forwards, fists balled, but Ani and Nara swept past him.

“Why you. . .”

“If you think. . .”

The threats died in their throats. The priest on the couch unfolded, carefully cut slits in the robe allowing dozens of mechandrites to uncoil like a nest of rad-vipers. There were enough snaking from her robes to carry her off the floor like a puppet on strings. Stan had an indelible impression of armoured legs dangling free, arms extended like a mad conductor, head lolling forwards like the neck was broken. The top of her robe brushed the ceiling of the room as metre after metre of mechandrites poured from her robes. Each one was tipped in shining metal blades, pincers and tools.

+++DON'T+++ The word stamped itself directly into Stan’s brain, causing him to blink and reel. Whatever the effect on him, it nearly floored Ani and Nara. Amador dropped his drink with a stuttered curse, and Dashing tried to scramble backwards, his back meeting the wall.

“Holy fucking throne.” Dashing breathed, his eyes wide in fear.

+++THIS IS MY HOME, MEAT. IF I CHOOSE TO, I COULD STRIP YOU BOTH FOR PARTS IN AN EYEBLINK. DO NOT TRY ME.+++

The voice hammered into Stan's head again. Some kind of infrasound, maybe even a true archeotech sonic weapon. He noticed that the twins, still impassive, were unfazed by this display. Directional, then, with some kind of halo where you can stand safely. He filed that tidbit away as the splitting headache suddenly receded and the Techpriest slowly folded back up, mechandrites snaking back under the robes. Finally she was sat again on the chaise lounge, one leg canted over the other, fingers laced. Stan still couldn't make out her face under the robes.

A pair of vents opened in the ceiling, and buzzing servoskulls emerged, cleaning up spilled drinks and handing out fresh glasses.

“Now we have established exactly how much of a risk I have taken in meeting you all, shall we start again?” She took a filled glass from one of the bobbing servoskulls, sipped it delicately, and placed it on the table.

“My name is Zerlinda Ghast, a pleasure, gentlemen and ladies. My apologies for that earlier outburst. Now, shall we get down to business?”

+++++

The negotiating took an interminable hour, during which Zerlinda plied them with drinks and offers of just about anything they could imagine. Dashing actually took up the offer and disappeared about halfway through; a bottle in each hand, a giggling girl on each arm. Zerlinda caught Stan’s look, and assured him that the workers were here of their own free will. She expounded at great length on the cleanness of her operation, and its 'moral superiority'. He politely kept his doubts to himself.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Amador got to the point.

“We need some work done on this one.” He patted Stan’s shoulder. “He got roughed up and lost an eye.”

“Careless.” Zerlinda quipped. “You should take better care of yourself.”

Stan bit his tongue for what felt like the Nth time. The electro-priest took no shame from the damage which had been inflicted by Erdene in their brief, unfortunate encounter on Vaxanide. He had doubted her ability and questioned her honor as a warrior...before the deployment, and in the aftermath of the broken summonings. He had promised Erdene he would keep the scar, as a reminder of her determination and a testament to her skill. Kimmie had ensured it remained.

Nara clumsily leaned over and whispered in his ear.

“I'll share the twins with you, if you like.”

Stan tensed at the unexpected whisper in his ear, and sharply turned into his blindspot. Nara was face to face with him, and by her widely dilated eyes and the sweet scent of alcohol on her breath, was now properly sauced. She trilled delightedly at having caught him by surprise, and darted forward to straddle his thigh and languorously curl her arms around his broad shoulders.

“Mmh...” Nara softly giggled, with her lower lip gently pinched by her teeth as she pressed her sweat sheened forehead against his. Stan could feel the slight, magnetic attraction forming between their lips as she stared into his eye and whispered at him. “...hmm. I. Gotcha.”

Stan could hear a soft crackle of static in his ear, and pixels of black were fulgurating in front of his functional eye. One of the daemons was drawing close again. Purple. he knew. Red curled around him during moments of violence, parasitising his anger like a dark mirror of the electoos threaded beneath his skin. Purple was more apt to appear during moments of temptation, stretching its warm fingers over him like a leech probing towards blood.

Stan froze, hesitated. He instinctively drew back a fraction, breaking the contact between Nara’s skin and his own.

“Shame on you.” the daemon purred in a voice of gently spinning ballroom silks. “Throwing darts in lover’s eyes.”

Stan could hear a soft tapping as one of his fingertips went into spasm, tremoring against his copper-capped thumb.

Be gone. I am not your servant, and neither is she.

The daemon’s laughter was the tinkling of bells, strung in celebration across razorwire still hanging with the ripped flesh-shreds of bullet riddled soldiers. Stan could see it now, standing in the darkness of Nara’s pupils: a handsome, ghost-pale figure in a perfectly tailored suit, black waistcoat against a pressed white shirt. The expensive cut could not hide the fact that it was thin to the point of starvation, and its fine-boned face held eyes that looked through him rather than at him. A thin line of blood trickled from its nose. Its hair was a blood too - a slicked-back wave of dyed red that stood out painfully on Stan’s monochrome vision.

Its haggard appearance did not stop it from smiling at him.

“It’s too late for her, you know.” Its voice was softened upper-hive cant, the soothing words of a mother running her fingers through a child’s hair, while her other hand closed around the dagger hilt behind her back. “She has waded too deep. She may spurn the water now, but it is in her skin. Can you smell it?”

Its smile widened, setting off a ripple effect of lines across its thin, pearlescent skin.

“She’s trying to hold onto you, but every moment in her presence pulls you deeper underwater. Don’t fight it. The Prince awaits you in the deep. Sigh out your breath and let him embrace his children.”

Be gone!

The daemon offered him a deep, mocking bow, sweeping one leg back as it stooped. Nara’s face flashed into stark photonegative, pale eyed and screaming. A moment later both the illusion and the daemon were gone, leaving only a pale dagger-smile hovering in the air between them before that too dissolved into grains of static.

Stan could feel the warmth radiating from Nara’s face. The sweat on his own brow had gone cold.

“Ouch!” Nara exclaimed, frowning as she no doubt interpreted his withdrawal as a rejection. Stan opened his mouth, not quite sure what to say, as she sighed dramatically and swooned. He reflexively caught her, which made Nara smirk mischievously as she lounged against him.

“You wound me, Stan...” Nara exhaled, and rested her tattooed hand over her heart while her other slid along his neck to idly run her fingers through his hair. “...but I suppose I can’t be too wounded. Such deliciously handsome men must be quite a sight for a sore eye…”

Stan groaned and tried not to blush again. She wasn’t wrong. They were deliciously handsome, and his eye had kept being drawn back to the twins, while Ghast and Amador had bantered. Obviously Nara had seen. Obviously.

“Dooo...on’t be a bitch to Staaan, Naraaa…” Ani slurred from where she lay half collapsed on a nearby chaise longue.

“Me, a bitch to Stan? Never...” Nara murmured as she reached up to kiss his scarred cheek. “Okay, honey. The twins are all yours…” She giggled, and poked his chest. “...if I can watch.”

“Deus…” Stan hissed through his silver capped teeth as Nara persisted.

“Steriously...seriously...cut the shit.” Ani almost whined as she struggled to sit upright, with a petulant frown as she came to the electro-priest’s defense like a very loyal, very inebriated younger sister. “His eye...without it, his eye, he’s got no...no...prescription… perciption…damn it, his eye’s frakked up!” The knife fighter swayed and sunk back down. “...I’m frakked up…”

“Ah, dearie me.” Ghast soothed. “I think someone should switch to recaff. I’ll have a pot brought in.” She looked at Stan again, unreadable behind the robe. “You inspire loyalty in these two, that’s to be commended. You’ll have to tell me the story of how you won that loyalty one day.”

“One day.” Stan responded, with all the conviction of shift colleagues agreeing to have a drink in the future. He had no intention to disclose the details of Vaxanide with Ghast, as there was no positive outcome to a conversation about daemons and the Inquisition with a heretek.

Nara inhaled sharply, eagerly and nestled into his arm and chest as she turned towards Ghast. “We can always -”

“Talk another time, as I believe we were about to discuss the business at hand.” Stan interrupted, correctly anticipating what the suggestion was if her disappointed sigh was any indicator. The electro-priest gently hoisted Nara from his lap, and held her steady as she swayed on her heels until she could dejectedly and unsteadily make her way over to Ani.

“Well, let me take a look at you.”

Stan nodded and stood, removing the leather eyepatch, and Ghast rose elegantly, with liquid smoothness. A coil of mechandrites boosted her off the floor, while a few more mechandrites unfolded from her wrists, shining lights into the cavity in his skull and making his teeth itch as their spirits inquisited through his modified flesh.

For a second Ghast was silent.

“So. How is Veiss?”

Stan swallowed. More returning ghosts.

“Well enough.” he lied.

“She doesn't know you are here, does she? She'd be quite cross if she found out I worked on her work without her permission, you know. Her crossness could be measured in megatons, I'd imagine.”

“You would be correct.” Stan confirmed. He could easily envision Triumphant Rationality coring out the whole district with its lance by the will of his former mistress’ pique. He shook his head. “No, I doubt she knows where I am. We are...not on speaking terms. Not anymore.”

“You poor thing.” Zerlinda cooed. “It's not been easy for you, has it?”

“I have endured.” he responded.

“I'm not talking to you!” Zerlinda gave him a playful tap with a mechandrite. “I'm talking to this poor thing that's left in your skull.” Zerlinda flowed away from Stan and turned to face Amador. “The work can be done. It won't be easy though, I can't just slap any bulk grade augmetic in there. He's custom work, by a master Domina of the arts. If I patch it, he'll burn it out the next time he goes into combat.”

“We need him to last a bit longer than that.” Stan noted that despite how much Amador had drunk, he remained mostly sober. He wondered if Amador had employed some legerdemain, or had dosed himself with some stimulant to keep him clear headed. “What can you do?”

“I can build him a custom job. I'll need him for a few days, unconscious so I can map his electrical impulses and manufacture something that will match up with his current augment regime.”

Amador glanced to Stan, who nodded slightly.

“Acceptable. Although,” The electro-priest reached into his pocket, and extracted the articulated silver eyepiece of his destroyed bionic. Erdene’s maestro strike had almost wholly bisected it. “I would ask that you attempt to salvage what you can.”

Ghast hmm’d and thoughtfully rubbed her hands together. “I would normally ascribe that request to vanity...but you obviously see your desirability as a curse. So, sentimentality it is.”

“You are not wrong.” Stan quietly answered.

Unlike his ill-omened hours on Vaxanide, he could easily remember Sasha. The blank expression on the face of the man he loved, as he calmly handed back his engagement band, as if it - and the love they had shared - meant nothing to him. Because it hadn’t, anymore… He could envision the knowing, indulgent smirk beneath Veiss’ mask as he reluctantly handed over the silver rings to be reforged into a more suitable purpose as his bionics’ lenses.

Ghast hmm’d again, as if displeased to emulate another priestess’ work. “Very well.”

“There was something else.” Stan interjected. Zerlinda swung round to face him. He got a glimpse of a face, some kind of stylised mask, made of gold. It made him shiver.

“I have a...problem with my dreams.” Zerlinda stayed silent. “I need to not sleep.”

“Then you have a bigger problem than you think.”

Konstantin did not dignify that incorrect conclusion with a response.

Zerlinda sighed. “Eyes, bones, muscles, glands. All easy. All biological machines that can be replaced or improved with chrome and plastek. But the brain, ah, that's a tricky one. Even the Emperor, foremost prophet of the Omnissiah, allowed his greatest creations the pleasure of rest. Even Astartes sleep. Did you know that? Not like you and I, but still, they rest their brains.”

“I have seen Magi with more metal than meat in their skulls.” Stan snarled. “I know it can be done!”

“Those Magi are closer to clattering cogitators than people!” Zerlinda snapped back. “I should know, I worked with enough of them, and all the ones that aren't insane are some special flavour of broken or stupid. Sometimes it's so subtle that you almost can't tell, but if you know them, well, you know that what you have left is a ghost in a machine, a mechanical echo, and not the person they once were.”

“So you can't do it.” Stan muttered.

“Oh no, I can do it. I just choose not to. We do have options beyond just wasting half your brain though. The easiest is a memorace shunt. It would act as a buffer between you and your dreams, recording the raw data generated by REM sleep and then overwriting it. Its something I've seen work for those who suffer with mental disorders, acting as an override when certain conditions trigger it. Or, we could cut down the amount of actual sleep you need. With glands, we could reduce the amount you sleep by about a quarter for a limited period, up to a week. After that, you'd crash hard and need to sleep for a day or so. We could also gland you in such a way that you only lucid dream, giving you significant control of your dreamscape and the ability to wake up at any time. Finally, there is another, risky option.”

Zerlinda retreated to her seat, and summoned another glass of amasec.

“There is a way we could . . .de-synch the left and right half of your brain. With appropriate meditative exercises, you could shut down one half of your brain at a time, allowing you to maintain a semi-conscious fugue state that will provide the equivalent of a full night's rest. To say that this is risky is an understatement, as we will be imitating with glands and bionics the abilities of the holy Astartes. It is theoretically possible, and has been done, so it is practically possible. But if I fail, the best result will be that you will be reduced to a drooling simpleton.”

Objectively speaking...that would be the best result.

Stan resisted the urge to smile grimly at the perversely logical solution to his predicament...but for all that he understood the improbable odds of success as a tech-priest, as hinted by Ghast’s careful couching of her proposition, he knew that the operation would be a success and he would not -much to his lament - be rendered into a drooling simpleton by the heretek’s work.

You extradimensional pieces of shit would not be quarreling over my soul if I would be.

Correct.

Konstantin exhaled slowly, and tuned out the mirthful cackling of daemons within his mind as he calmly turned towards Ghast’s masked visage. “I understand and accept the risks. Please, let us proceed.”

[dakkagor]

Tomas quietly entered the room, at 8th bell, as was his routine at this point. His back to the door, it hushed over the thick carpet as he pushed it open, balancing a tray of tanna and breakfast cakes in one hand, his other hovering over a holstered bolt pistol. As he turned into the room and the door swung closed behind him, he ran his eyes over the room.

The stuffed cudbear, trapped in a pose some taxidermist had thought was a fit of fearsome rage, was still at its allotted guardpost in the left corner. Some noble had long ago stitched a Mordian dress uniform cap to its head, and covered its chest in medals. The whole effect was topped off by its very wonky eyes, and a face that seemed more confused than ennraged. On the right, an ancient dresser piled up in the corner like a hive stack, its every surface covered in nick-nacks and gewgaws from across the sector. It spilled subsidiary drawers, makeup tables and shelves across the right wall in a confused jumble of different styles, wood colours and paints. An overstuffed, worn-down sofa sullenly waited for him this evening under the room's sole window, with his old guard coat and kit bag still there from where he had fallen asleep on it last night. A low table in front of that was a battlefield of reports competing for space and favour, with a magnetized travel regicide set stubbornly holding the centre ground. Old mugs full of cold recaff and tanna stood as unsteady towers, holding down sliding piles of plastek printouts from the Tricorn's cogitators.

Another door led to the bathroom, which some perverse mind had decorated with an endless variety of sea shells, harvested from beaches across the sector. Every time he washed, or washed his charge in the hefty, gargoyle-covered cast iron tub, he found another handful fallen and broken on the floor, but he could never identify from where they fell.

Finally, he circled round to the bed. It was the only new item in the whole room, freshly installed a few years ago. Rich dark wood from Ganf Magna had been diligently carved into the pillars of a four post bed, with heavy curtains drawn. He took a moment to listen to the soft susserations of the machines next to the bed, and offered them a silent prayer before he drew back the rich velvet curtains.

Machairi was still asleep, her head turned away from him, her breathing shallow. He deftly retrieved the bed tray with one hand from the foot of the bed, and set it up with the fresh pot of tanna, the tray of soft sweet cakes, and a slim folder of reports, eager and ready to join the battle on the table. Tomas took a final few moments to check the inside of the bed, and under it, in the process retrieving the footstool he had been using as a chair. Finally, he crossed to the window, and pulled back the blackout curtains to reveal the hard light of Scintilla's primary, banishing the shadows of the room.

Tomas squinted as he stared out into the cold light of the upper spires. It was a clear day, and he could make out the thin, black needle of the Bastion Porphyr in the distance. Closer, out on a column at sea, the vast stone flower of the Lucid Palace squatted. He had chosen this room because it didn't have a view of the Tricorn. The last thing he wanted was the Inquisitorial spy-servitors to have a direct view into the room Machairi was recuperating in.

There was a groan as the light hit Machairi, and Tomas smirked. He pulled out an auspex wand and, with a quick admonishment to its irksome spirit, began to sweep it across room. Machairi took a few seconds to wake up, and a few more to squint and adjust to the light.

"Morning inspection report, Tom?" she asked, as had become routine.

Tomas glanced at the mildly martial cudbear. "Dismally failed, as per usual. I'll have to write him up again. In fact, I think I'll have him transferred and replaced by someone less garish."

Machairi exhaled a soft breath of amusement. "He can stay. I grew up in a spire like this."

Tomas snorted. "I hope not exactly like this. Old grizzly here would be enough to give any little girl nightmares." He tapped the stuffed cudbear with his foot.

"The spire-top life gives people funny ideas, and decor is the least of them." The inquisitor's eyes flicked up thoughtfully to the hanging canopy of the four-poster. "I always thought the ordos could probably do with fewer blue-bloods in their ranks. The Progenium would have been fairer in some respects. Orphans of nobles and underhivers all rise and fall on their own merits. On the other hand, they don’t have a choice about where they end up."

Tomas heard the inquisitor exhale.

"I chose."

He paused, and changed the direction of his slow security sweep. Alia sounded more maudlin today than he had heard her in months. He silently crossed the room and pulled the footstool under him, and sat down on it. Machairi turned her head, dark eyes regarding him.

"The Machairis were all old money, spire nobility. I was their fifth child, their third girl. Far enough from the succession not to have too much responsibility, high enough in the pecking order not to worry about going destitute after both my fathers died." She made a face. "A good recipe for wasting your life on feasts and obscura. One of my brothers certainly did."

She swallowed, and Tomas leaned forwards with a handkerchief to wash her face. Alia stubbornly turned away. He wanted to say something about how no-one got to choose their families, but something made him hold his tongue.

"I wanted to show that I was more than that." Alia went on after a moment. "And I knew that I was smarter than other people. I could talk my way around my big brothers and sisters before I was ten. If I didn’t know something I always found out who to ask and how to charm them. I got a renovation project on the villa done in half the time by knowing the right people and where to put them. I knew how to embarrass the other Houses too, when they made power plays around the spire."

"When I was that age I was learning how to muck out a stable." Tomas filled two cups from the pot, and began to slice up the cakes into easy to bite chunks. "It wasn't even a useful skill in the guard, if you can believe that."

"You turned out alright." Alia said, softening a little as she turned back towards him. "And you were smart enough to know the value of reading."

Tomas acknowledged the compliment with a sway of his head. "Well, a small mind might be a tidy mind but I've also heard it said that knowledge is power."

"Exactly." Alia smiled. "Well, when you make it your business to know everything, you hear when an inquisitor lord has recruiters canvassing the hive. They give you the speech about the honour of serving the Emperor and protecting the Imperium and seeing the galaxy...I’m sure you’ve heard it."

"I've given it a few times myself." He smirked. "For all the galaxy I've seen, it seems to mostly be ship holds, hive sumps and scabby badlands."

"We'll need to find some heretics on a pleasure world one day." Alia swallowed painfully again. "Well, in any case, the pitch worked. I knew I’d be good at it. In the end it wasn’t so different from the shadow wars between the Houses. Do you remember when we cornered Haarlock on Hercynia?"

"I'd never seen you happier. When you said 'going somewhere, heretic' you sounded just like an inquisitor from one of those cheap holo-serials."

He put the cup to Machairi's lips, and she swallowed the sweetened black tanna. For a few minutes they sat quietly as Machairi drank. When the cup was empty, he placed it back on the tray and took up his own.

"I let the mask slip for a moment." Alia admitted. "Knowing you’re protecting the Imperium is all well and good, and for some people that’s enough, but for me there’s always that extra thrill when you know you’ve trapped someone. Outplayed them. Checkmate."

"Pity you're so objectively bad at regicide."

The inquisitor raised an eyebrow. "You cheat."

"Pffft."

Tomas took up a fork and skewered a few bits of cake, feeding them to Alia as he thought through this series of confessions. Months together, with Alia totally dependent on him and a few trusted others, had finally torn down the last few barriers between them. She had never talked about her childhood before.

It frightened him.

Frowning, he dabbed away a few crumbs from Alia's chin.

"Is that why you kept Crenshaw around? Not just as another lever on a team member, but as someone who could stand up to you, play the game at your level?"

Machairi chuckled herself, and Tomas allowed himself a small smile to see some of the old Alia poking through.

"Maybe." she allowed. "I have my...suspicions that he might enjoy the same feeling."

She settled back a little.

"Though mostly, I value having someone who can look at my plans with absolute objectivity. I know enough inquisitors who’ve taken my particular brand of hubris too far."

He nodded. "History is littered with them. But I don't think that's something you'd need to be worried about. You've always seemed very grounded to me."

Alia smiled thinly. "When I was making my inquisitor’s application to the conclave, I remember writing about making the call to sacrifice one man to save ten. The inquisitor’s call, I’ve heard some of the lords call it. How it’s different from the soldier’s call, where you all face some of the same danger, or the governor’s call where you never meet the people you’re dictating to."

Tomas nodded.

"Most people couldn’t make that kind of decision and it’s no shame on them that they can’t. It’s no kindness to make them face the habwife who knew nothing about her husband’s crimes, or make them look an agent in the eye before they send him on a mission they know he won’t come back from. We shouldn’t punish them just for having empathy."

Alia sighed; a long, slow breath that seemed to deflate her.

"So that’s the inquisitor’s call - to be at peace with sending a man to his death to save ten others. Even if he’s done nothing wrong, even if he’s your closest friend. You can rationalise it, say it had to be done to save all those other lives. Say it was right, say it was for the Emperor and the Imperium."

The inquisitor snagged a corner of her lip between her teeth for a moment, then let it go.

"I wonder if the Solomon team would have stuck around if they knew I wasn’t risking their lives just for the Emperor, but because I enjoyed proving I was smarter than some heretic."

Tomas nodded again, biting his cheek. He had read then-interrogator Machairi's application to conclave, thanks to some careful questions and a few well-placed bribes. It had been well-written, concise, devoid of flowery language. Brutal, in its conviction and simplicity. But now he was being made to wonder if that wasn't just a manipulative front for Alia to get what she wanted.

Tomas knew that if he pulled that thread, unravelled it, there would be no end. It would pull everything apart. Best to leave it unpulled.

"I don't think anyone risks their lives just out of duty. Each member of that team, in the end, has their own reason to stick with it that goes beyond just dry obligation to the Throne. Duty can go in other directions. It can be duty to your team mates. I always respected Vince for that. Despite his problems, he held his duty to his team in the highest regard."

"He did. He deserved better." Alia fell silent for a moment. The question hung in the air between them. How many more friends would die before this came to an end?

"I..." Alia began, with uncharacteristic reticence. "I know I’m rather good at selling the job, but I wonder - when I first asked you to join the team, after the affair with the genestealers - behind all that Casterian gallantry, was there a little voice asking what might happen to you if you said no to an alien hunter’s apprentice? Do you ever stop and think about what might have been?"

Tomas shook his head. "I can't stop now. And behind the gallantry...well, I suppose there was some fear. Justified, really, when you think about what we've done in the Inquisition's name. But I think the main thought was that this crazy woman clearly needed help if she was going to keep tripping over horrors like that."

Machairi laughed, and Tomas smiled.

"Whats the good news today, anyway?"

Tomas reached across the bed and picked up the reports.

"Well, the main news is from Perinitus. . ."

[Azazeal849]

Inquisition temporary headquarters, Baraspine
Six days after hive Alda surrender

“Ah, the noble inquisitor Lucullis I presume.”

The silky greeting drifted through the incense-heavy air of the sanctum, causing Feyd Lucullis to look up from his preparations. A glance at his wrist-chron told him that his interlocutor was precisely on time. He turned.

“Spare your flattery.” he advised, resting one hand on his bolt-pistol holster as he looked the newcomer up and down. The woman in front of him was short and soft-bodied, but her face was razor sharp. Behind the glossy black hair curling over one shoulder, her shadowed eyes were bright and intelligent, and her dark-painted lips held the confidence of someone who had already appraised every room and decided how to play each one. She could have been in her late thirties or double that, given the Kol family’s obsession with juvenats. Lucullis could guess why inquisitor Machairi would associate with such a woman. “You must be lady Kol.”

“I am.” Kol answered, and immediately she was all business. “Shall we begin then? Where is Alia?”

Lucullis glanced back at astropath D’lane, who was kneeling in the middle of the floor with a rosary chaplet dangling from his prayer-clasped hands.

“Lady Machairi is unable to join us personally. She will commune by auto-seance.”

Machairi was, in fact, already on Baraspine, though Lucullis understood that her injuries and Yannick’s ongoing scrutiny both made prudent cases for her to remain in hiding for the time being.

“Lovely.” lady Kol nodded, taking one of the smoking incense tapers from the wall and using it to mark the points of the Aquila.

Lucullis mirrored the process. “Astropath.” he stated as he finished tracing the divine symbol. “You may begin.”

D’lane exhaled a slow breath, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop with it. When the astropath opened his blind eyes they were glowing softly, backlit in white.

“I reach across the void.” the astropath whispered. “I give my eyes to the Emperor. My soul to His destiny. And my voice to those who would speak his words.”

On that last sentence the sound of his voice seemed to shift, dopplering away as an echo of another voice manifested behind it.

“Inquisitor Lucullis.” Alia Machairi’s voice sifted from the astropath’s quietly moving lips. “Lady Kol. Apologies for my absence. We’re speaking privately, I take it?”

Lucullis cast a terse look around the pentagram-warded room. “Obviously.”

“What news is there from hive Alda?” Machairi asked. As her voice echoed between the walls, some of the wards shimmered briefly at the contact, leaving small discs of ice like breath on a mirror.

“Still hunting for a suitable planetary governor.” Lucullis replied, folding his arms. “Since the Vel-Corosas had the bad manners to die.”

A feminine hmm escaped the astropath’s parted lips. Ice crystals drifted around the room like delicate snow. “There aren’t many other choices who would be tolerable to both Caiser and the Baraspini.”

“Vel-Scarna is the current favourite,” Kol chipped in, cradling an elbow. “Or at least that’s what I’ve heard. It might have something to do with the fact that he had his household praetorians kill six other house leaders at dinner and then loudly proclaimed his allegiance to the God-Emperor and His imperium.”

“That’s one way to burn bridges.” Machairi commented.

“It certainly makes for a convincing framing narrative.”

“Six murders will make the other nobles uneasy.” Lucullis noted. “Which might be what they need right now. But we’ll need to have the praetorians executed.”

“For overthrowing tyrants?” Kol cocked an elegant eyebrow.

“Yes, lest they make a habit of it. And hopefully Vel-Scarna will get the message too.”

“Especially if we leave him reliant on Imperial bodyguards.” Machairi’s voice sounded approving through the echoes. “Unfortunately I can’t directly suggest it to Caiser. Yannick might spin it as me trying to take too much control over events.”

Lucullis fixed the meditating astropath with an intense stare, as if Machairi could see him through the man’s blind eyes. “I am not your messenger, lady Machairi.”

“I’ll handle it.” Kol offered. “Caiser will be well-disposed to me.”

It was Lucullis’ turn to raise an eyebrow. “Will he now.”

“House Kol lost its holdings on the Tephaine system agri worlds when the Patriots rebelled.” Kol pointed out. “And my son worked for the press on Tephaine itself. He’s a prisoner there. Is that not enough reason?”

“Perhaps.” Lucullis allowed. “Or it may give Caiser the impression that the Patriots have leverage over you.”

“I had considered that. I thought it prudent to cut the Munitorum a better rate on rations for the duration of the crusade.”

“A magnanimous gesture in such uncertain times.” Machairi’s voice conveyed a knowing smile. “Does your brother Abhinav still handle planetary development contracts?”

“That he does.” Kol affirmed.

“I have a thought, lady Kol. If you can lend me your public relations expertise for the next, say, solar year, I might be able to convince some contacts in the administratum that a house of unquestioned Imperial allegiance should take over the agri-business in Adrantis at war’s end.”

Kol hmm’d, tapping her chin. “A very interesting thought, lady Machairi. I’ll send it back to Abi when Laki’s ship makes orbit.”

“You have a ship already in system?” Lucullis queried.

“I also thought it prudent to deliver the first shipment of supplies to liberated Baraspine. My daughter has been badgering me for months to let her do something meaningful in the family business, so I might as well ensure her a suitably public debut.”

“Not public enough.”

Kol blinked at him. “I beg your pardon, inquisitor?”

Lucullis frowned. “Some of my agents are aboard a Navy ship, in orbit around Baraspine. If there had been any arrivals since the pacification began, they would have reported it. What was your ship’s name?”

“The Ayanaant.” Kol replied, now also frowning. “It was due to arrive at the Apogee jump point either last week or this one.”

Lucullis let out a slow breath. “Ah.” He fished in his pocket for a handheld vox caster. “Marrick, find agent Black and ask him to data-mine the incident out at system’s edge during the invasion. Ship identification and survivor testimonies.”

“What incident?” Kol demanded, scattering ice crystals as she stepped forward to come face to face with the inquisitor. “What happened?”

Lucullis met her accusing gaze without flinching. “I may have some bad news, lady Kol.”

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Twenty nine days before Baraspine invasion 

Cathedral of Illumination, Scintilla

Hive Sibellus was the seat of power on Scintilla, but Hive Tarsus was its seat of faith. It was also the muster ground for the eight regiments that Scintilla was dispatching to aid the Adrantis reclamation. Even the Cathedral of Illumination could not seat so many, but vid-recorder skulls circled the glass dome so that none were denied the blessing of the Emperor’s word before they set out to do battle. Currently occupying the pulpit beneath the triple portrait of Drusus, Angevin and the Emperor was pontifex Albinius, though he was in the process of concluding his long-winded sermon and ceding the pulpit to his executor, lord cardinal Tarpeian.

“This should be good.” Mariyana Veiss commented. To the bemusement of those around her, she was hovering above the pews for a better view, though her grav-suspensors were not drawing half as many hostile looks as her ostentatious Baraspini mask. “I hear Tarpeian’s sermons are much more lively.”

“You should sit.” inquisitor Lucullis chided her. “A magos in an Imperial church draws enough eyes without flaunting the fact that you’re from the world they’re about to invade as well.”

The domina tutted behind her mask. “Darling, I was born to flaunt. Besides, don’t Terra and Mars stand united in purpose today?”

Lucullis continued to fix her with his stoic gaze. After a moment, Veiss shook her head and floated back down, smoothing her red and gold gown beneath her as she resumed her seat.

The respectful hush of the cathedral was broken by a roaring swell of cheers and shouted blessings as lord cardinal Tarpeian ascended the pulpit. He did not have the bearing of a traditional hero - unassumingly built, with narrow shoulders and grey hair that was brushed back from a widow’s peak to the nape of his neck, but his eyes were shrewd above his blade of a nose, and his short beard did nothing to hide the relentless cast of his lips.

The lord cardinal raised his arms, embroidered sleeves of heavy cloth trailing to the floor like wings. Lucullis did not fail to note how the cheers instantly fell silent, receding like the tide as the lord cardinal began to speak. His voice boomed across the cathedral, amplified by the vox-cherubs clinging to the vaulted ceiling.

“Can you hear him?” Veiss asked, less impressed than the inquisitor. “I’m having difficulty. That robe of his is too loud.”

Lucullis did not dignify the barb with a response, and Veiss lapsed into silence as the lord cardinal continued to extort the faithful, the hololiths behind him splashing images of Adrantean atrocities across the arched projector windows, switching to ranks of Basilisk artillery and Thunderbolt fighters scorching across a burned sky as he promised righteous retribution. However, it was when the hololiths threw up pictures of three clearly-modified penitent engines - destined, the lord cardinal thundered, for the first three prisoners of the rebellion captured on Concordia orbital - that Veiss actually leaned forward in her seat.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, as the crowd around them erupted into paroxysms of hate and justice. “Delicious! I see that I wasn’t misinformed after all.”

“I’ve never known a man more apt than Tarpeian to revel in vendetta.” Lucullis replied.

“My dear Feyd, vendetta is to be savoured. I think I will have to arrange a meeting with this vigorous cardinal.”

“To what end, might I ask?”

“He seems like a bad enemy. I want to see that Yannick hasn’t been trying to turn him against your friends.”

Lucullis turned back towards the lord cardinal, folding his arms across the front of his grey jacket. “A lie.”

Veiss hmm’d. “I admit that I would also like to examine those penitent engines up close.”

“Half true, but not the whole.”

Veiss regarded the inquisitor curiously, and shrugged. “He is a business opportunity. A machine can always be improved, and a man with a penchant for biomechanical torture devices is bound to have some interest in how best to...ahem, what was the word he used? Affix three extensively augmented Nebula soldiers into them.”

Lucullis looked back at her without expression. “As long as there are no conflicts in those interests.”

“Such a jealous boy.” Veiss admonished. “Fear not, my dear Feyd. Have you known any scion of my noble house to allow themselves to be frakked by lesser men?”

“No. Your niece Natalia was perfectly capable of doing that to herself, as I recall.”

The shot failed to penetrate Veiss’ armour. “Ah yes.” she mused, tapping the glass that she had emptied over the course of the sermon. “Dear sweet Natty. The only person I hated more than that bitch was her mother.”

And so it was that the following evening, one of the sector’s most powerful priests sat down to dinner with one of the sector’s most powerful tech-magi.

Spoiler: Eighteen days before Baraspine invasion 

Ascension Starport, Scintilla

Yannick and his allies were on the move. While lord cardinal Tarpeian and the others would travel openly with all the comforts and ceremony befitting their rank, their agents scuttled like rats to their own secret conveyances. Like rats they kept to the shadows, for Scintilla’s ozone-depleted atmosphere offered little protection against the harsh sun. Merle Carson had been to many planets in his disreputable life, but Hive Tarsus was the only city of its kind he knew of where to live at the bottom of the stacks was considered a privilege.

Tarsus consisted of vast vertical piles with a dizzying web of platforms, walkways and thoroughfares webbed between them, each helping to block just a little of the sun’s glare from the layers below, but a clear tunnel had been kept above the starport towards the open sky and the geostationary orbital docks beyond. On the vast hexagonal launch platform, transports and landers stood baking in the open sun, half cloaked by the heat-haze shimmer that was rising from the blistered concrete. One of those transports, Merle supposed, belonged to that poor bastard Vaegar who would be smuggling their hit squad to Reshia.

Merle glanced at his battered, flickering holo-map, and tugged at the collar of his sweat-stained shirt in the hope of tempting down some kind of breeze. The air between the criss-crossing skywalks remained stubbornly close and oppressive. The lord cardinal at his shoulder suffered no such discomfort, on account of being back in some airy, ammonia-chilled office downhive, projecting his eyes and voice only through the gilded servo skull that hovered half a pace behind Merle.

“I trust you can find your way from here.” the lord cardinal rasped from a vox caster nestled between the skull’s grinning teeth.

“Yeah, yeah.” Merle muttered, swatting half-heartedly at the skull. Whatever machine spirit was wedged inside its cranium automatically flitted it back to avoid him.

“Have a care, penitent Carson. This servo skull is of some sentimental value to me.”

Merle squinted, a stare that the golden skull’s picter lenses returned impassively. “That right?”

“Yes, it once belonged to a journalist who accompanied me on the Margin Crusade. He was there under the pay of a godless man by the name of Abhinav Kol, which is a sin the Emperor might forgive...but he stepped out of line, which was a sin He does not.”

Merle cackled, unimpressed. “Well first off, even the Queen Bitch was more subtle with her threats than that. And second ain’t y’all seen my fucked up head?” He tapped the dent that Vincent Nyl had given him, for emphasis. “I’d make for one ugly-ass skull drone.”

The skull’s vox caster emitted a low crackle that might have been a sigh, or a growl.

“Yannick told me to expect a degree of flippant defiance from you. But even a degenerate fears for his soul...and your soul is in my hands.”

“Well, I suppose he’s half right there.” said a familiar voice at Merle’s ear. The hive smells of oil and dust and baking metal faded away, replaced by the wet, earthy scent of grave worms. He turned his eyes away so he wouldn’t have to see it, but the daemon was waiting there for him, leaning back against a coolant pipe with a light Tarsian sun-cloak pulled up over its blue hair. Merle could hear the pipe insulation crackling under the hands that weren’t really touching it.

“Go on then.” The daemon cocked its head. “Show him some of that Merle Carson defiance that we all love so much.”

Merle swallowed, and did his best to pull his lips into a sneer as he turned back to the servo skull. “Best wipe your hands then, preacher man. There ain’t nothin’ in this whole fucked up galaxy that I value less than my ol’ degenerate soul.”

The daemon eyed him, silently.

“An’ another thing.” he ploughed on. “How about a li’l carrot with all this shitty stick, huh? How come y’all won’t quit hammerin’ my dick but lord Vaeger gets the sweet treat of a Mariochi governorship dangled in front’a his piggy li’l eyes? He’s twice the degenerate I am, to hear the lovely lady Borden tell it. Where’s my incentive, huh?”

The skull crackled. “Having me absolve you so that you will not burn for eternity in warpfire is your incentive, Carson.”

“Well shit.” Merle huffed, with an expansive shrug. “Well I hate to tell ya twice, old timer, but like I said my soul’s waaay down my list’a priorities.”

Tarpeian hmm’d through the skull’s teeth. “What about hers?”

A hololithic projection sputtered from the skull’s eye socket, forming an oblong pict in the air.

The Shard pushed up away from the pipe. “Oh now that’s interesting!”

Merle felt the blood draining from his face as he looked at the pict: a pair of young women standing together in conversation. The older of the two wore the medallion and robes of a Ministorum cleric, with her arm curled around her younger.

Merle recognized the face, and not only because the Shard had tortured him with it. His sister’s wispy hair and thin features; his piece of shit brother-in-law’s wavy hair and bronze complexion.

Merle pointed at the broad next to his niece. “Who the fuck is that -”

“Devoted servant of the Emperor, you ask?” Merle could have sworn that the servo skull’s golden grin stretched a little wider. “My daughter, Delilah.”

Merle clenched his bionic hand until the competing servos whined in protest.

“I ain’t claimin’ to be a good person.” he finally ground out. “But she ain’t ever done nothin’ to no-one.”

“Oh I know.” Tarpeian purred through the skull’s vox caster. “And I’ve taken pains to maintain that. The Emperor loves an innocent soul.”

Maintain. Merle gritted his prosthetic teeth until he tasted metal, but the sweat on the back of his neck had turned cold. That means y’all ain’t told her what shit your holy rollers are there to start fuckin’ up.

The Shard tapped its chin, looking up at the hololith. “I wonder if that will put her in less danger or more, ae?”

“But of course,” Tarpeian went on coldly, oblivious to the daemon’s attention. “The Emperor also charges us to guard and protect such innocent souls, and in this case the power to protect her lies with...you.”

Merle flexed Vincent Nyl’s bionic fingers open and closed.

“Let me tell you of a revelation, penitent Carson.” the ghastly skull murmured. “When magos Moreau told me that it was possible to flense and gild a servo skull, and even install some of the necessary machine parts, without necessarily detaching it from a living body first, I must confess that I did not believe him.”

The skull whirred, its projected image of Delilah and Lucia still flickering in the air in front of Merle.

“Alas, even a lord cardinal can commit the sin of ignorance. I never considered the Martians’ worship of the Emperor to be truly equal to ours - it was too cold, too sterile...but I have to admit that watching a servo skull finally rise and twist free under its own grav suspensors...yes, there was something almost angelic about it.”

The picture shrank to a line, then a dot, then vanished, leaving Merle face to face with the skull drone. He stared into its dead eye sockets. The skull grinned back, its teeth the same gaudy gold as Merle’s own had been, until that malfunctioning rust streak Vizkop had beaten most of them out. Again.

“May the Emperor guide your actions, penitent Carson. Your holy conveyance awaits.”

With a soft hum the skull bobbed around and began to drift back down the walkway.

“How did that shit-fuck get to be a fuckin’ lord cardinal?” Merle muttered aloud as it disappeared.

“Shit sometimes floats.” the Shard replied flippantly.

“Nah.” Merle grunted, turning to face the daemon. After a lifetime of purge gangs, fighting pits, rogue traders and Throne agents, he knew a loose screw when he saw one. “There’s something up with that prick.”

The Shard folded its arms and leaned back against the rotted wooden barrier that guarded the edge of the walkway. Merle saw tiny beetles wriggling their way out of the wood and skittering away, as if in panic.

“Up?” the Shard repeated innocently, blinking its flect-glass eyes.

“What’s the deal with him?” Merle asked, knowing that the daemon knew, and was waiting for him to ask.

The daemon looked at him for a second.

Then another second. Its mouth flickered.

And then it burst into shrill peals of laughter, pearly teeth flashing as it doubled up against the barrier. Its red eyes flickered briefly back up to Merle, but that only set it to laughing more, wrapping its slender arms around itself and falling to its knees as Merle turned away in disgust towards the starport entrance.

The laughter followed him into the dark mouth of the entrance tunnel, until the steel doors snapped shut behind him.

Spoiler: Twenty four hours after Patriot surrender of Hive Alda 

Hive Alda, Baraspine

As he stood amid the animal roars of the ecclesiarchy’s victory display, Crenshaw found his mind drifting back to his office, and the stack of dictaphone records and psyker scribblings that made up his interrogation records. A couple of torn Baraspini war posters were laid next to them, with the caricature of himself vowing to burn the Adrantean Republic sitting on top. As the cheering around him swelled, he debated briefly which distasteful and necessary duty he hated least - parsing the ramblings of heretics, or showing face at this primitive pageant.

“Major Crenshaw, sir?” a voice shouted over the cheering.

Crenshaw exhaled slowly down his nose, and turned on his heel to face the grey-clad adjutant who had pushed his way through the crowd.

“I hardly think that warrants being phrased as a question. I seemingly have the misfortune of being one of the most recognisable faces on this planet.”

The adjutant didn’t seem to know what to say to that, so Crenshaw decided to show him a demonstration of a question that was warranted.

“What do you want?”

“There’s someone who wants to see you sir. A tech-adept.”

Crenshaw turned away. “There are many people who want to see me on a daily basis, and for many of them the feeling is not mutual. Tell them to petition colonel Cummings and to wait their turn.”

“She said you would say that, sir, and she entrusted me with a secret mechanicus sign to vouch for her identity.”

Well, that was novel at least. Crenshaw turned once more, eyebrow imperiously arched.

“Which was?” he prompted.

Solemnly, the adjutant brought his hands together - fingers together and curled downward, thumbs pressed together below. It resembled a heart.

“Oh.” Crenshaw ground his teeth. “Wonderful.”

After winding his way down several streets that softened the roar of celebrations to a low rumble, he found adept Kuscelian outside an abandoned food market. She was standing beside a whining grav-car, with the sand-laced wind snagging at her gown. An unusually fashionable gown, Crenshaw did not fail to note - still in mechanicus red, but layered with white and gold, and inlaid with silver circuit routes that shimmered whenever she moved her arms. She was accompanied by another priest in equally well-cut robes, who looked as handsome as he did formidable. Crenshaw treated Kuscelian to another sternly raised eyebrow.

“Hello major.” the Dragon priestess greeted him. The wind’s teeth worried at her shorn copper hair. “I had a feeling you would want to see me.”

Crenshaw folded his arms. “I do not, but sometimes it would seem that I have to.”

“Oh well.” Kuscelian shrugged, not put out in the slightest. Crenshaw realised what she was up to when she gestured back towards the grav-car with a sparkling arm. “What about her?”

Clearly waiting for her cue, Kally Sonder stepped out of the car’s rear door, grinning.

Much to his annoyance, Crenshaw couldn’t stop himself from gaping. “Kally!?”

“You know,” Kally purred, “I love that look on your face when I actually manage to surprise you.”

She was wearing an evening gown as well, a sweeping, low cut dress of midnight black, with a stylised pattern of silver across the chest that might, from the right angle, be mistaken for an Aquilla. Combined with heels, earrings and more conventional makeup than Crenshaw had ever seen Sonder wear, even in archived pict captures, she looked like a high spire debutant. She pulled Crenshaw in for a kiss by the front of his uniform, then into a hug as she leaned her head on his chest.

“Throne, I’ve missed you. Fancy a drive?”

“The conveyance is compliments of domina Veiss.” Kuscelian chipped in, motioning once again towards the grav-car. “She has deployed her servitors to cordon off the whole top level of spire 6 for you, along with the gardens and the glider pad.”

Crenshaw frowned. “Has she now. I did not expect your new friend to be so sentimental.”

“Oh no.” Kuscelian replied, her round face a mask of seriousness. “She explained to me at great length why marriage was a stupid idea, only useful for cementing alliances and even then far from the most efficient way of doing so.” She shrugged. “If you want my speculative opinion, there is some kind of history there.”

“Evidently.”

“But, she did say that if Kally insisted on having something as ridiculously baseline as a honeymoon, then she wanted to be known as having provided her with the best Omnissiah-damn honeymoon ever.”

Crenshaw tilted his head fractionally. “Convey some suitable regards on my behalf.”

“Yeah yeah.” Kally broke in. “Come on Crenshaw, we don’t have all day.”

“We should. . .” Crenshaw began, before being hefted off the ground and tossed over Kally’s shoulder with a gasp of surprise.

“Wait, I. . .” he sputtered as Kally swung around and strode back towards the car.

“Absolutely not.” She responded as she tossed a casual wave at Kuscelian and Evgeni. “I’ve been crawling through a rad-soaked hell for a month, and throne knows what else besides, I’ve earned this, and you’ve earned this, so get your sexy, beautiful arse into the grav car and lets go.”

Raech had a fleeting glance of Crenshaw being kidnapped by Kally, a conflicted look of panic and arousal on his face, before Kally pulled the door shut the grav-car lifted away. She didn’t trust herself to glance sideways at Evgeni until the grav-car had shrunk to the size of an insect buzzing up towards the spires. When she did, the laugh left her as an ugly snort. She would have clapped a hand over her mouth if she thought it would do any good against Evgeni’s aural implants. Fortunately, Veiss’ son was chuckling too.

“You missed out the part where the Domina offered Kally her pick of the eugenic harem to knock that honeymoon nonsense out of her head.” he commented.

“Yes.” Raechel admitted. “I thought that I should deploy a modicum of tact.”

“It wasn’t so tactful to mention the domina’s history.”

Raechel felt her cheeks growing warm. Stupid! “You are right.” She cleared her throat reflexively. Her whole organic form seemed to be rebelling against her today. “I apologise.”

“You were right too, for what it’s worth.” Evgeni said, seeming not to notice her baseline tics. “The domina was never truly happy with her engagement, but it was her sister seducing her betrothed that pushed her over the edge into abandoning the Veiss family legacy and building a new one with the mechanicus.”

“Oh.” Raechel paused, hunting for a suitable response. “I noted some rumours among the Triumphant’s crew, but obviously there was no hard evidence to go on.”

“I heard them too.” Evgeni nodded as they started back. “And since I’m privy to Veiss family records, I was able to substantiate some of them. That the Domina stormed away from the marriage altar after a spectacularly venomous diatribe was apparently true.”

He broke off as they approached the lander that had ferried them to the surface - a bug-like Herakaeli pattern with six splayed legs and a bubble cockpit. Evgeni’s guardians stood waiting outside in their tech-guard livery.

“Did it go well, then?” Dominika immediately wanted to know.

Evgeni smirked. “Well enough that she threw him over her shoulder and carried him into the grav car.”

He twitched a muscle in his cheek, and the holo-projector nestled within his right eye projected a thread of light which irised out to show a short recording of Crenshaw’s face, his features comically flickering between anticipation and anxiety. Raechel felt the snort of laughter rising up her throat for a second time, but this time she was able to clamp down on the impulse before it reached her nose.

“Wonderful.” Kazimir chuckled, deepening the lines on his amiable face. “So what are your plans now?”

“I would suggest a restaurant.” Dominika opined sternly. “If any of them are still standing, anyway. You’re still both far too skinny, and you need to keep your strength up for those long work hours.”

“Come on Dom.” Kazimir headed her off, still chuckling. As he tugged his partner away, he caught Raechel’s eye and favoured her with a trusting smile. Raechel smiled back, but behind it her augmented mind was racing.

Was that really trust, or a warning? For all her blessings and implants, she still found herself profoundly fearful of getting on the wrong side of Dom and Kaz. They posed little to no threat to a Dragon oculus, but the good graces of Evgeni’s grandparents were not as easy to regain as the polarised screen of a refractor shield.

And they are his grandparents. He might not call them by that name, but they take their role seriously, as sure as the Omnissiah’s truth.

“Could you assist me with something in the cockpit, Kuscelian?”

The question snapped her attention back towards the lander, where Evgeni was standing with one hand on the rear ramp hatch. He had stripped down to his fireproof bodyglove.

“Uh…” Raechel said. Stop thinking like a baseline, woman. “Yes, of course.”

All the same, she was a little disappointed to step inside the lander, see the tools laid out and realise that he had, in fact, meant exactly what he had said.

“Don’t worry,” Evgeni reassured her as she self-consciously removed her own outer gown. “There’s none of the Domina’s prying devices in here.”

He is not stupid enough to think I have not been sweeping for them. Raechel noted as she laid Veiss’ gifted robe carefully to one side. “Very well.”

She joined Evgeni in the forward section, the two of them looking like a pair of apprentice enginseers in their dark red bodygloves with their zip pockets and Cog-stamped sleeves.

“What are your preferred hymnals for manual maintenance?” Evgeni asked as she stooped for the toolbox.

Not expecting the question, Raechel felt the warmth pricking at her cheeks again. “Perhaps not hymnals in the strict sense, but I usually listen to sample-song.”

“Sample-song?” Evgeni inquired, looking interested.

Raechel sat back on her heels and clasped her hands, threading her flesh fingers through her metal ones. “My parents were menials in a manufactory on Vost. Some of the workers liked to record sound samples from the industrial machinery they worked alongside, and splice them together into music.”

Evgeni processed the idea for a moment. “Well, they do say that the sound of industry is the machine spirits offering their praise to the Omnissiah. Stream it.”

“Really?” Raechel asked, taken aback.

“I insist.”

Raechel felt her artificial heart uptick in response to the adrenaline squirting into her bloodstream. She tried to ignore it as she accessed her electrograft and connected to the lander’s vox system with a mental nudge. A rhythmic clank of slamming piston heads filled the cabin, soon joined by a sequence of pitched hydraulic hisses, before dropping into a rapid staccato of cogitator beeps. Raechel squeezed her hands together, trying not to cringe. Now that it was Evgeni listening to it, the whole thing sounded discordant and gauchely baseline.

“Hmm.” Evgeni grunted, nodding along to the piston heads. “You know what? I like it. Let’s proceed.”

Raechel relaxed slightly as he streaked a thumbprint of incense along the panel beneath the command console, and began to work the fastenings free with a screwdriver. She lunged for a second omni-tool and got to work on the screws at the other side.

“I spend most of my time in the labs or the training centre,” Evgeni confessed as they lifted the panel clear to expose the wiring beneath. “But there’s still something very soothing about ritual work. It might be the purview of lowly enginseers, but…”

“That is the appeal?” Raechel finished for him, pleased to have found the common ground. Ritual honours the machine spirit, so went the Sixteenth Universal Law. Why not the human spirit too?

Evgeni smiled at her. “I knew you’d understand. I hear the Domina found you doing maintenance work on the pipes below the crew berths while we were in the Warp.”

Raechel took a split second to recall the incident. “The flow of hot water to my cabin had stopped. It turned out that one of the filters had broken, washed downstream and blocked the valve.”

“Expertly diagnosed.”

Raechel shrugged and smiled at the compliment. “A simple problem with a simple solution. Sometimes it is nice to revisit old skills instead of getting lost in the machine god’s mysteries.”

“A little simplicity and certainty is good in times like these.” Evgeni removed a frayed length of fibre-optic. “You said you were trained on Vost. Where were you stationed?”

Raechel thought back to before the Lords Dragon, before inquisitor Hypatia, before she had even been trusted with the archiving of xenotech.

“My first assignment was in a vehicle manufactory. I do not think you ever lose your admiration for big slabs of metal with diligent machine spirits.”

Evgeni paused to trace a Cog circle across the front of his bodyglove. “And the Omnissiah’s servants who watch over them.”

“Most of them.” Raechel gritted her teeth as she screwed the new fibre-optic cable into place. “I recall that the delivery drivers would always use the reclamator drains as toilets when the enginseers were not looking, which was not optimal for the oil reclamators.”

Evgeni snorted with unexpected mirth. “Ah, the charm of baselines. I wonder how many archmagi are ashamed that most of them still need to piss.” He worked on in silence for a moment. “For me it’s the escape. Working on the flyers is soothing, but actually piloting them...for a little while I don’t have to worry about being Evgeni Veiss.”

“You are a very good pilot.” Raechel reassured him, and then cursed herself for such a stupid and obvious observation. She turned away quickly, but as she reached for the spool of replacement wires so did Evgeni, and his knuckles bumped against her augmetic hand.

“Oh,” the other tech priest said in surprise. “My apologies Kuscelian.” He looked down at their touching hands for a moment. “This is a bit forward, but may I examine it?”

“Mhm.” Raechel nodded, her mouth clamped tight shut because her baseline vocal cords seemed to have frozen up again.

Evgeni reverently traced another sacred cogwheel across the back of her hand. As the simulated pressure signals flashed up her arm through spliced nerve endings, Raechel was struck by a fleeting, blasphemous wish that the hand had still been flesh instead of metal.

“When were you blessed with this, if you don’t mind me asking?”

The simple question snapped Raechel back to a more rational state of mind. Simple problems and simple solutions - useful in more ways than one. She recalled the ruin of her hand; the fingers missing or twisted at ugly angles, and the red soup inside her open palm. She remembered shock and horror at the time, but it was so long ago now that it seemed nothing more than a thing done, an image on a documentary vid-reel.

“After an accident.” she told him. “I tried to shut down a burning transformer before it exploded, and at the time I did not have the augmentations to be fast enough.”

“That machine spirit wronged you.” Evgeni’s frown dissolved as he gently turned Raechel’s hand over to examine the sensor-studded palm. “But this one is a worthy replacement. Full sensory covering...with pressure and temperature detection...mag lures...variable fingerprinting…”

He brushed his fingers down to her palm, marking off the hidden data probes with his fingertips.

“Surface data scanning...haptic uplink...noospheric data readers and transmitters.” He looked up, smiling sardonically. “No doubt you could override this flyer’s spirit in a heartbeat and send me crashing into a hive spire.”

“I doubt I would escape the flyer in time to watch you crash.” Raechel said, the corners of her own mouth flickering. “I have seen you in the Faraday module, beating the motive force out of those poor electro-priests.”

Evgeni sat back. “You have me at a disadvantage, Kuscelian. A few days in my company has taught you plenty about my life, but most of yours is still a cypher to me. Assembly lines, reclamator drains, burning transformers…and somewhere along the way, an oculus of the Lords Dragon?”

Raechel considered. It was a pleasing opportunity, to have someone who was interested and yet had not already pored through every scrap of data on the noosphere. Most tech-priests were methodical about their own preparatory research, but it didn’t render them immune to confirmation bias.

And you are? she chided herself. This is not an opportunity to tell the truth, merely to frame the story your own way. How would she frame it? Distilled, her life was a fine example of chaos theory in action.

She took a few moments to parse which sections she could tell him, and which she could and should not. Talking about Nikolai was undoubtedly going to be the hardest.

“Well…” she began.

By the time she had finished so had their work, and her Vostian sample song had reached the end of its audio bank. Evgeni flicked a switch and looped it back to the start, smiling when he saw Raechel’s surprise at the fact he had recorded it.

“So Kuscelian, I have yet to fully isolate all of the machine spirits sampled within your menial hymns. In the interests of efficient working, would you like to pilot the flyer back up to the Triumphant?”

Frak yes! Raechel cleared her throat. “Sure.”

+ + + + + +

HDMS Impiger, Baraspine orbit

Sapphira’s tempura roots were sizzling away happily in the en-suite galley, wafting a sweet, earthy smell through to the main table. As an executive officer, Ban Thurlow’s quarters were more spacious and better appointed than most - enough to fit himself, the Sister and interrogator Hybrida comfortably. Ban had long ago decided that he preferred such intimate dinners to the stiff and starched formality of Navy banquets. Here they could talk shop in casual clothes, with drinks of choice in hand, and sister Sapphira was proving as adept in the kitchen as any of Impiger’s professional chefs. He had already demolished her first course - a flaky, fresh-tasting silverfin in a crust of nuts and citrus - and was washing it down with a fruit-infused grain liquor.

Ban held the syrupy liquid on his tongue for a moment, and swallowed appreciatively. Victory was, as the saying went, sweet. The Emperor must have been smiling on him to have guided him to the very ship where governess Vel-Cyvasse was hiding. Seeing Sapphira on Impiger’s landing deck as he and his armsmen returned had been the icing on the cake, even if she had only had time to offer him a brief but meaningful nod as she dashed forward with the other medicae to help the wounded.

And so we came full circle. Ban thought, recalling their other, less auspicious landing on that same deck after the fight on Concordia. May the sweet memories of victory erase the bitter ones of defeat. He toasted the thought with another sip of alcohol.

Interrogator Hybrida was another welcome guest, having what Ban considered to be the invaluable trait of not allowing his rank to get in the way of his appetite for life. He might have welcomed some of the other agents as well, though he found himself a little glad that the sour, scrawny technopath was absent. He could still remember the tortured screech from lord Maxillium’s vocabulator as Jenkins used it to signal his ship.

Well that was unpleasant. he had said, trying to make light of it, but the memory made his skin crawl even now. He washed the thought away with another swallow, and reached for the bottle to refill his and Hybrida’s glasses.

Where was Jenkins now, Ban wondered. Hybrida’s team had withdrawn back to Impiger to await pick-up from their master, taking advantage of a base that was secure from the Patriots (and - hopefully - any other inquisitors), and had a choir of astropaths on hand. Even the sardonic old canoness Kiana was on hand to feed them the latest whispers from her network of Sister spies, though to Ban’s knowledge Hybrida had avoided the old crone thus far.

Perhaps my company is just too irresistible.

He didn’t mind that. As he had learned before leaving Axanite, the agents, attendants and bodyguards were invariably far more interesting to hang around with than the aristocrats they escorted.

“So here we are then.” Ban smiled, offering a full glass to Sapphira as she returned to the main room. “An interrogator of the mighty inquisition, a sister errant, and a humble Navy officer.”

“Not just any humble officer.” Sapphira corrected him. She folded her arms across the front of her borrowed warrant officer’s jacket. “The man of the hour who captured a traitor governess.”

It was framed as a compliment, but Ban couldn’t fail to note the knowing smile that accompanied it. You can’t groxshit a groxshitter, commander Thurlow. There’s not much you’re humble about.

Ban laughed at the observation. “That’s true.” he admitted, to both the compliment and the call-out. No doubt the good Sister had plenty of experience of the same from her partner Hybrida. However, when he looked up at the interrogator, he seemed strangely subdued. Perhaps he noticed, because he raised his glass towards Ban.

“Can you not be happy when I’m miserable?” he joked, but with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “It really makes me hate you.”

Ban pursed his lips. So their mission on the surface didn’t go well, whatever it was.

It was an unfortunate juxtaposition, if so - Ban and the interrogator had a surprising amount in common, by his own measure, except that one of them had captured a traitor governess, and under the other’s command some no-doubt equally important objective had gone awry. If that were me, I wouldn’t take the humiliation of putting us together too well either.

He decided to row back on his earlier comment.

“You’re a lucky man, interrogator.” he said, allowing his tone to become wistful as he handed Sapphira his plate. “Your dear lady can cook.”

As he had calculated, that brought a genuine smile back to the interrogator’s face. As Sapphira disappeared back into the kitchen, Hybrida even went so far as to loosen his collar and reveal an obvious (and obviously recent) bite mark on his neck that only Sapphira could have left. Ban played his part by raising his eyebrows.

Yes, mister Hybrida, I see that she can do much more than cook. And yes, I’m sure that the sex isn’t just as good as I think it is, it’s better than I could possibly imagine.

The interrogator straightened his collar just before Sapphira reappeared with a sizzling wok, wreathing her in clouds of fragrant smoke.

“Wait until you taste the tempura roots.” the sister said cheerfully as she set them down.

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance of arranging a transfer to the Navy?” Ban joked, offering the interrogator’s ego another open goal against him.

Sapphira laughed lightly. “Unfortunately sir, I couldn’t begin to imagine the exceptionally unlikely circumstance in which I would.”

Ban chuckled self-deprecatingly as they watched Sapphira go, determinedly keeping his eyes on the back of her head and not on the gentle sway of her hips as she walked. He was more right than he had intended - Glabrio was indeed a lucky man. And he absolutely would have chased the lovely Sister if she had been free.

I suppose the borrowed warrant officer uniform wasn’t an accident either.

Though that, Ban suspected, was the fault of a certain aide more familiar with his own choice of pursuits than either of the two Throne agents.

Ensign Lorca, you sly motherfrakker. How you do vex me. He pulled his eyes from Sapphira with an effort - it would surely tip Glabrio’s ego back the wrong way if he showed too much interest. From the begetting of daemons, our Emperor deliver us.

The Emperor answered, by way of a chime from the door.

Ban frowned. “Apologies, mister Hybrida, I wasn’t expecting any interruptions.” He scraped his chair back and rose to tap the pict-stealer rune beside the door. An image of a woman flickered up, a woman wearing an elaborate spun-gold mask and a scarlet robe that fell around her body in spirals. Not recognising the woman, Ban tapped the vox.

“Can I help you, m’lady?”

“Oh, I do hope so.” came the reply, in - as Ban was surprised to note - a rich Baraspini accent. “May I come in, commander Thurlow?”

The boldness of it made a smile tug at the corner of Ban’s mouth. “You have me at a disadvantage, madame…?”

“It’s domina, dear.”

Ban looked again, and noted the Martian scrollwork flowing across the woman’s mask and down the spirals of her gown. Well that complicated things a little. This ship belonged as much to the machine god as to the Emperor, and the machine god’s priests could go where they willed - although it was rare for them to swan right into the executive officer’s suite.

“Come right in.” he said, shooting an apologetic glance at Glabrio before depressing the door’s activation rune. The wood-fronted panel slid smoothly aside into the wall, revealing the tech-priestess in the flesh. With a stately nod of thanks towards Ban she glided in, her floor-brushing gown hiding her feet so that she almost seemed to float. When he heard the soft hum of some kind of mechanical motor, Ban guessed that that was exactly what she was doing.

“Well, the man of the hour!” she said, putting long-fingered hands together as she regarded Ban through her mask’s jewelled eye-lenses. They were like deep onyx pools, the tech-language prayers spiralling in towards them like the event horizons of two black holes. He must have lingered on them a moment too long, because he sensed a very un-Martian smile behind the mask as she added: “Oh, don’t mind the Baraspini trappings, darling - old habits die hard, but I have always known to pick the winning side.”

Ban returned the smile. All well and good, unless we start to lose. “I’m afraid faith masks are still a bit of a novelty to me.”

“Oh you’re too modest, mister Thurlow.” the domina replied, her dagged sleeve trailing as she gave a magnanimous wave of her hand. “I’m quite aware of the exquisite insult you gave to that traitor governor, by offering her a mere servant’s mask. I’m sure none of the Baraspini missed the message, or the demonstration of Imperial dominance. A magnificent coup de theatre.”

Ban’s smile froze on his face. He had intended - and indeed known - nothing of the sort.

“I do apologise for the interruption.” the domina continued, glossing over Ban’s silence. “But...dear me, where are my manners? I’ve gotten too used to observing the niceties through the noosphere. I am domina Mariyana Veiss, at your service.”

“Executive officer Ban Thurlow, at yours.” Ban returned. “Though I see you already knew that.”

“There is one new piece of Knowledge there for me.” the domina responded archly. “Executive officer, you said...not flag lieutenant?”

Ban smiled in surprise at the tech-priestess’ knowledge of Navy hierarchy. “Yes, until this crusade there weren’t many operations in Ixaniad that warranted deploying more than two or three capital ships. Flag lieutenant started to sound a bit grandiose under those circumstances.”

“Ah.” the domina said, nodding. “Thank you for that spark of illumination, mister Thurlow. Anyway, I should return the favour and explain why I’m barging into your quarters in the middle of dinner. I had hoped to speak with the good interrogator Hybrida, who I was informed could be found here. Would you mind terribly if I borrowed him for a moment?”

Ban looked to Glabrio, whose face had become strangely impassive as he pushed back his own chair. “Only in death does duty end, I’m afraid. Will you entertain Saph for me?”

“No, no.” Ban said, rallying. “I couldn’t abide you having to settle for cold tempura roots. I’ll take a stroll down to the stores and liberate us some more drinks.”

He sketched a polite bow, and kept a matching smile on his face until the door had closed and he could unveil the quizzical expression beneath. A senior officer cajoled into turfing himself out of his own quarters was probably an insult to rival whatever he had done to that damned governor Vel-Cyvasse, but he had certainly met another interesting player in the inquisition’s orbit.

+ + + + + +

The silence extended for a few more seconds after Ban’s footsteps had faded from earshot.

“Well?” Glabrio eventually demanded, straightening the collar of his dress shirt. “I don’t expect tech-priests to waste time toying with people.”

That seemed to amuse the hovering priestess. A smile tugged at the corner of her ruby lips as she drifted closer. “You’ll have to forgive me darling, toying with people is my vice.” The smile widened. “One of them, anyway.”

Glabrio put down his glass. “I see. Are we to assume then that your intentions are malevolent?”

“Not at all, I toy with people when my intentions are benevolent too. Especially when my intentions are benevolent.” The suspensor units hummed as they carried her within reach of the gin bottle, which she used to recharge the two agents’ drinks and then Ban’s orphaned glass. “Something I’m sure an inquisition interrogator can understand.”

Glabrio took the glass stiffly, and watched as the very un-Martian priestess sipped at her own. “Perhaps. But I’d like to understand more.”

“Can a lady not show her personal appreciation to the man whose efforts removed an extremely tiresome niece from my personal equations?”

Sister? It took Glabrio a moment to recall, and then it clicked. Chartered trader Natalia Veiss.

“It’s a generous offer.” Saph chimed in as she emerged from the kitchen. “But if I was going to invite someone else into our relationship it would probably be commander Thurlow.”

It was a suitably biting comeback, although Glabrio did turn his head to offer Sapphira a really? as domina Veiss laughed off the words. The rebuke died on his lips when he saw the carefully hidden spark of fight-or-flight darting behind Sapphira’s eyes.

“As my good lady says.” Glabrio affirmed, snapping back towards Veiss. “Also, while I appreciate the sentiment, the Hercynia case is five years closed - I’m sure you didn’t come just to talk about that.”

The domina’s onyx-black mask eyes regarded him. “Very well interrogator, I do suppose that’s enough ego stroking for one night. To business.”

Glabrio steepled his fingers and forced a smile. “Of course.”

+ + + + + +

The music slowed and faded to a blank-disc crackle, and their stilted swaying died along with it. Kelly squeezed Gavin’s hand, and hugged it to her chest for a moment before letting go.

No sooner had their hands parted, Kelly heard hushed voices turn into the crew berths corridor and come creeping towards them. She and Gavin drew apart just in time for Sapphira and Glabrio to appear in the doorway, clinging to each other almost as if for reassurance. Glabrio wore a dress shirt with his interrogator’s rosette proudly displayed, Sapphira a borrowed set of Navy fatigues. Both looked serious, though at the sight of their friends they immediately brightened.

“Oh.” Glabrio said, the serious look fading from his face. “We seem to have been infiltrated!”

Sapphira beamed with genuine joy. “Kelly! Gavin!”

And in that moment, Kelly’s resolve to confide in Sapphira about interrogator Borden withered.

Sapphira turned to Glabrio, wearing a hopeful expression. “Do you mind, Ri? We haven’t had a chance to girl-talk since we left Scintilla.”

Glabrio raised a playful eyebrow and tilted his head towards Gavin. “Is Gavin an honorary girl now?”

Gavin smiled thinly. “I will take that as a compliment, but there is some other work I need to attend to.”

Kelly shot a questioning look at Gavin, but he just closed his eyes and gave her the slightest of reassuring nods, before sliding past Glabrio and excusing himself.

“My condolences on interfering with your plans, interrogator.” he added as he took his leave.

“Merely deferred.” Glabrio replied. His arch smile hinted at plenty of recreational downtime already enjoyed in the preceding weeks. “I ain’t even mad.”

Sapphira planted a kiss on him, then gave him a playful shove out of the door. “Your cabin, one hour.”

“One hour.” Glabrio repeated, saluting solemnly and turning on his heel.

Sapphira giggled quietly as she pulled the door shut, but there was something a little too hearty in the laugh, a little too desperate. What doesn’t she want me to worry about?

“Raech is here too, right?” the sister said. “We should do this properly. Do you have her vox link?”

“Uh...yeah.” Kelly scrambled around in her pockets for a moment before pulling out her handheld caster. Sapphira swept it up and mashed the transmit rune, eliciting a short frazzle of static that sounded very much like a rebuke from the small machine spirit.

“Tech adept Kuscelian, this is Sapphira. Report to my quarters right now for an important debrief!”

“Sapphira?” Raechel had no need to fumble with a handheld and so the response was swift, though not without evident surprise in her tone. “I thought Shift 3 was your work cycle?”

“We rearranged so we could have dinner with commander Thurlow. Come on up!”

“Oh.” said Raechel, and there was an audible strike of footsteps against grated decking before she signed off.

“How have you been?” Sapphira asked warmly, turning her full attention onto Kelly as she handed back the portable vox.

Awful. “Not too bad.” Kelly smiled. Trapped. “Things are stressful but when are they not.”

Now they were both lying, but the hug Sapphira swept her into was very genuine. They stood there for a moment, rocking gently from side to side.

“Are you okay?” Sapphira asked as they retreated to arm’s length. Kelly saw the sudden concern in her face, and belatedly realised that she was tugging at a fingernail with her teeth. She shrugged to give herself a moment to think.

“Marc’s still...it’s still awkward.” she deflected, telling a half truth. “And I can’t help worrying about Kally - I know why she couldn’t stay around, but it’s still hard.”

“I know what you mean.” Sapphira nodded, slumping onto the bed and patting the mattress beside her in invitation. “We didn’t get a chance to see her either. It feels wrong to think she was here on the same planet and then gone again just as quickly.”

“She knew we’d try to make her stay.” Kelly said as she sat down, recalling her earlier conversation with Gavin.

“She’s right. She shouldn’t be out there trying to win the war all by herself.”

Lone wolves get killed, agent Sonder. Kelly remembered, stern advice from a long-dead superior.

“If it helps,” Raechel said, sliding smoothly into the conversation as she stepped through the door. “She told me to apologise to you all. And all of my entirely unbiased simulations give her very good odds of surviving for you to slap her for it later.”

She must have come straight from one of the shipboard workshops, because her red robe smelled of oil and mechanicus balm, mixing with the softer incense still drifting from the room’s lit taper. Sapphira immediately sprang up, creaking the bedsprings.

“Raaaaeeeeech!” she sang as she rushed over and enveloped the tech-priestess in another hug. “Come on now, spill. You’ve been sticking close to her since before you both left for Perinetus.” She drew back. “Wait a second. What happened to your hair?”

Kelly thought that Raechel looked momentarily uncomfortable at the mention of Kally’s mission and new augments, and the priestess was quick to smile and seize on Sapphira’s second question instead. Three liars, all trying to make each other happy.

“Yeah.” she said, running her hand through the inch-long regrowth at the back of her head sheepishly. “I had a fight with a blade servitor and I lost.” She paused for a moment and then very obviously added: “Guess who I met on Veiss’ ship?”

“Who?” Sapphira grinned, crossing the cabin to hunt for drinks.

Raechel made a gesture with her bionic hand, and the pict screen on the wall winked to life showing an image capture of a shirtless man in combat with two electro-priests.

“Veiss’ son.” Raechel answered, and a more genuine smile tugged at her small mouth.

“Offft.” Kelly supplied.

Sapphira hmm’d her own approval. “Now if we can just find a commissar Holt lookalike for Kelly, then when Kally gets back we’re set for the most ridiculous quadruple date in Imperial history.”

Kelly put on another smiling mask. The closest match to Holt’s long features she had seen recently had been Hadrak, the prisoner in the recording Borden had urged her to watch.

He knew what it was like to encounter a daemon. He was honourable, and he did the right thing. And Lucullis still killed him.

+ + + + + +

The alcohol was slowly receding from Sapphira’s system as she made her way back from a happy reunion with Kelly and Raechel, leaving behind it a numb feeling in her face and an increasingly urgent pressure on her bladder. She glanced at her wrist chron, and was pleased to see that it had been exactly fifty nine minutes between shooing her man away and turning up at the door to his cabin. She was less pleased to open the door and find Glabrio hunched over his desk, collar open and sleeves rolled up.

“Hey.” she admonished him. “I didn’t send you back to our cabin so you could sneakily start working again.”

Her interrogator looked up and smiled warmly at her, but there was a tightness at the corners of his eyes. He swept an arm over the scrolls and dataslates on his desk.

“The tides of the warp wait for no man...especially when they’re bringing the Furia with them.”

Sapphira gnawed her lip, and felt her artificial heart ticking up in response to her sinking stomach.

Look after him. Prinzel had tasked her as they departed Scintilla.

Oh, I’ll watch his back, sir. she had returned jokingly. And I’ll keep him real sweet. Empty balls and a fully belly, the proper hab-wife treatment. Even Machairi had cracked a smile at that.

It was more than that though, she knew. Glabrio both craved and feared the responsibility of his new rank.

She stepped up behind Glabrio and began to gently knead his shoulders with her fingertips. “Oooh, you’re tense.” she teased, repeating Glabrio’s favourite line back to him. “Why don’t you let me do something about it? Lucullis can wait that long, at least.”

Glabrio leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and made a wistful sound. “Thank you, but I’ve already got one mark from when you first stepped off the transport.”

“I hope you’ll forgive a moment of un-Sisterly weakness.”

Glabrio sighed and opened his eyes. “By the way, Saph...sorry about parading you around in front of Thurlow. That was a cheap shot.”

“I absolve you.” Sapphira said, solemnly marking the Aquila over his tilted forehead. She dropped her hand to the bruise on his neck, smiling as she brushed a thumb over it. “I didn’t think there was much point hiding it any more, given that even the Patriots seem to know.”

Glabrio chuckled faintly, remembering.

Sapphira had to hand it to the Patriots: they had truly left no stone unturned in trying to smear and slander their former overlords, with the inquisition team who had initiated hostilities on Concordia bearing the brunt of their propaganda. She had known that the common areas of Alicia’s Arthrashastra were pict-monitored, but she had never dreamed that their former friend would have taken recordings of her and Glabrio dancing in the great hall - and spread the images across half the subsector.

Look at us! the pictures proclaimed as they gleefully focused in on their less-than-platonic embrace. An interrogator and a holy sister - what degenerates, what hypocrites we are behind closed doors.

Sapphira remembered feeling sick when she first saw them; her head feeling faint, her bionic heart sending blood thudding through her ears, her cheeks burning in horror. She also remembered how Glabrio had made her break into ragged laughter when he observed that they hadn’t released a full video, since they clearly couldn’t find a way to edit it into looking like anything other than an exceptionally well-executed Axinite tango.

He wasn’t ashamed of her, and any reason they might have had to hide their relationship was long gone. The heretics were welcome to their slander; it was a fair trade for the weight off Sapphira’s mind.

“Remind me again.” Glabrio grinned weakly, tilting his head back to look at her. “Does my ass really look like that from the back?”

Sapphira ran a hand down under the back of his belt, and gave it an affectionate, reassuring squeeze. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s the Imperium’s ass.”

“Fair point.” Glabrio said, his smile flickering. He slumped forward, looking again at his scattered notes. “However, I suppose I shouldn’t wear two stupid high collars when the boss is dressing me down for Shriken spire.”

It’s still bothering him. Sapphira bit her lip again, but attempted another smile as she slid her arms around his shoulders and hugged him. “Alright, I’ll be gentle.”

She stooped to kiss him on the mouth, gently pushing his lips apart with her tongue. Glabrio returned the kiss, but she could tell that his heart was not truly in it. She drew back with a pensive sigh.

“It wasn’t your fault, ’Ri.” she said gently, stroking his hair.

Glabrio exhaled, his shoulders slumping as the air went out of him. “I’m an interrogator now, Saph. I’m in charge for as long as Prinzel decides to stay on Scintilla playing nursemaid. Which means I catch the shit when we frak up.” He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes and gritted his teeth. “Throne, it was bad enough having to tell Kiana, never mind the new boss.”

I’d have taken that first bullet for you if I could, Sapphira thought. By tacit agreement, however, she was no longer the team’s point of contact with Kiana and the Silent Vigil.

“In fairness,” she reasoned. “I don’t think we could have predicted a Patriot kill team.”

“We should have predicted something.” Glabrio complained. “The Vel-Corosa’s were high profile targets.”

There was a sullen pause. Glabrio exhaled.

“Sorry, Saph. I really wanted this, and I thought I’d earned it. And Lucullis gave us a high profile first mission...and then this happens. It’s not a good feeling knowing you’ve got to meet the boss after a failure.”

You have no idea Sapphira thought, but she didn’t say anything.

Spoiler: Four days after Patriot surrender of Hive Alda 

HDMS Impiger, Baraspine orbit

The shuttle’s engines rumbled, slowly fading to a silent vibration through the deck as air was siphoned out of the docking bay. Veiss’ shuttles were returning to the Triumphant Rationality, and soon enough Raechel and her inquisition counterparts would be transferring over to the frigate Volturius for their infiltration run on Tranch.

“And so we come to it.” Mariyana Veiss announced solemnly as she watched the clawed hands of the deck clamps snap back and the shuttle begin to drift free, guided by electromagnetic tethers. “The parting of the ways.”

“For now.” Raechel allowed. Kally and Evgeni had been dispatched to Marioch, and she fully intended to see both of them again - albeit for somewhat different reasons. Domina Veiss was bound for Skorgulian with Lucullis’ interrogator, via Perinetus to collect archmagos Ankari and a host of Vostroyan bodyguards. Raechel had gifted the envoys with some special support of her own, but she herself was bound for Tranch with the rest of Lucullis’ agents.

“I admire your optimism.” Veiss observed archly.

“I have been told it is my most endearing trait.”

“I wish you had shown a little more of it with my son.”

Raechel blinked. “Pardon?”

“Your service with the Lords Dragon speaks of ambition and daring, which are traits that I also value.”

Raechel took the playfully baseline flicker of the older woman’s eyebrows to be qualifying that statement with the words within reason.

“A part of me had rather hoped,” the domina went on, “That you would ignore my warning and solicit dear Evgeni anyway.”

Raechel said nothing, taking a moment to process whether Veiss was simply messing with her once again. Veiss met her silence with an enigmatic smile.

“I will point out that while I created that beautiful boy, there’s only such an extent to which I can control him. As much as I would like to arrange a beneficial union for him…” The domina did not bother to suppress the emotional twist of her mouth. “I have lived enough to know that that can be unwise. And although I plan to live much longer again, one day I will be gone and he will have to continue my legacy, make it his own....”

The hum of Veiss’ grav-suspensors changed pitch as they down-regulated, drifting her a little closer to the floor so that she was almost at Raechel’s eye level.

“I wanted to make sure that he learned to think like a good, logical tech-priest before anything else. But one day he will realise he is more than that.”

She held Raechel’s gaze meaningfully for a second, before the grav-suspensors whined once more and she rose gracefully back into the air, like a scarlet-plumed bird of prey.

“Oh well. The Machine God decreed that time must flow forward, and so we his acolytes must look forward too instead of back. May the machine spirits watch over you on your way to Tranch, oculus Kuscelian. I suspect you will need all of the Deus’ blessings there.”

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: False Flags 

Reshia, the Josian Reach
Imperial shrine world

Fire was everywhere on Reshia. It roared from volcanoes and hissed from the fissures where tectonics had pulled the mountains apart. It spilled across the sky every evening, when the strange chemicals in the atmosphere turned every sunset into a blaze of red that set light to the horizon and turned every cloud into dancing embers. It crackled through the night, as the static-laden air cloaked every tower and vox mast in a veil of purple corposant. The Reshians had even carved most of their statuary with pointed crowns, so that by night the saints and primarchs glowed with fiery haloes.

Reshia was blessed with fire and so its people honoured the Emperor with it, raising twisted cathedrals with great, curling spires that emulated flames reaching for heaven. Fire roared day and night from snarling gargoyles and burned in the eyes of marble angels who had been crafted with braziers inside their hollow heads. Years of soot had blackened the eyes and cheeks of the angels, making them look more like daemons.

The glowering statues did not faze Merle Carson. He knew what real daemons looked like. As he and Vaegar’s collection of armed goons made their way down the torchlit concourse, he began to wonder what Bitchy Borden and her cocksucker boss Yannick had been smoking when they sent him to meet up with some supposed allies here. Surely everyone round these parts is too pious for the disreputable shit that those two like to jerk off to at night.

And then he knew exactly why Bitchy Borden and her cocksucker boss had sent him here, when he saw who was waiting for them at the crossroads.

“Ho-ly shit!” Merle barked, his partially fused lips splitting into a genuine grin of garish gold and dull ceramite. “Clayton Gray? Is that you, ya mutie-burnin’ motherfucker?”

Gray stood grinning at the brazier-crowned crossroads. He was a tall, broad man with skin the colour of burnished teak, and a short growth of black hair clinging close to his head and to his lantern jaw. At his side were a dozen men from the old purge gangs, and even that toaster-fucking old apostate tech-priest Amadeus, with his oil-dripping vox grille and his wheezy cough.

“Merle Carson.” Gray drawled, in a thick Gunpoint argot that matched Merle’s own. The former purge ganger squinted in the murky Reshian haze. “That really you, you fuckin’ motherfucker?”

“In the fuckin’ flesh.” Merle drawled back, and turned towards the nearest brazier to reveal his mangled mug. He flourished his bionic underneath, as if he were the tits and ass from some mid-hiver game show, fawning vacantly over the proles’ crappy prize. “What’s fuckin’ left of it, at any fuckin’ rate.”

Gray whistled lowly at his disfigurement, his grimace quirking the old bar fight scar which roughly bisected his face. “Daaaa-aayumn, boyo. You fuckin’ uglier than I was fondly rememberin’.”

“You sayin’ I ain’t fuckable no more?” Merle challenged as he strode forward. He playfully turned towards the huddle of the old purge crowd, brow furrowed and arms raised to the side in mock outrage.

“You never was, asshole!” one of the masked ganger broads shouted, as several of the other fems harpy shrieked in confirmation. One of the guys quickly rallied to his defense, with a ready quip as he grasped the empty air ahead of him and roughly jerked his hips. “But ain’t like it never held you back, fucker!”

I know…I know, damn it! Merle screamed internally, his stomach roiling queasily as he tried not to remember. He used his resting smarmy, sneering bastard face as a burn scarred mask from his fellow Gunpointers as he acknowledged them with the metal edition of Vincent Nyl’s favorite finger.

“How the fuck’d that bitched mug happen to ya?” a third member of the shithead gallery shouted, as the rest of the others laughed merrily and returned the traditional Gunpoint middle finger salute.

“Oh…I fell in with the wrong crowd’a genuine fuckin’ article degenerates." He answered, figuring it was best to gloss over the fact said genuine fuckin’ article degenerates called themselves the Holy Ordos. “Not shiny, classy, an’ upstandin’ folks like y’all.”

“Whatt’a ‘bout the robo-pudpuller?” another queried, as he demonstratively hunched over and rocked a clenched fist back and forth by his beltline. While he mockingly scrunched his face with lewd exertion, one of the chicks gave him a saccharine, unlovely smile. “Who’d we owe for those purdy chompers, eh?”

“Same fucker, an’ I settled that fuckin’ debt with fuckin’ interest.” Merle growlingly lied; teeth gritted as he massively simplified the circumstances of his unwelcome prosthetics for the simpletons. Their obliging roar of approval intermixed with his muscle memory of rearing back with Vinnie’s torn off arm, and shouting his throat hoarse as he swung it down towards the mercenary bastard’s ugly head.

“Hey, fuck faces! We’re here do some fuckin’ work, so all’a y’all quit cluckin’ like a bunch’a broads!” Gray snarled at the mirthful mob, before his mouth quirked into a wry smirk. “If y’all ask really nice like, I’m sure this raggedy assed son of a bitch’ll give y’all a cold, hard reach around afterwards!”

“What the ever-lovin’ fuck y’all doin’ here?” Merle asked as they clasped hands, relieved that the sudden, overly friendly and unfiltered interrogation was over with. For the meanwhile, at least…

Gray shrugged at the question, and signed the Aquila with a surprisingly sincere piety to match the Emperor’s sigil looped around his neck. “That? I’m sorry but y’all have to take it up wi’ my boss.”

“...Cos y’all about to meet ’im!” Merle cackled, the old, old joke coming back to him. For the briefest moment, he was back in the underhive. It was the first time in weeks that he had felt genuinely happy about something. It’s been fuckin’ decades since I’ve been tickled to see a familiar face…

Until he felt a cold, hard-nailed hand on her shoulder.

“Good times weren’t they?” the Shard purred. “I especially like the time with the mutant girl and her father you made watch. Should we do it from her perspective, or from his?”

Merle’s blood instantly chilled, even in the stuffy heat. Gray remained exuberant, turning to whoop at one of the temples as they belched flame from their towers to mark the hour.

“Whoo! Check out all this flame, eh Merle? Jus’ like old times.”

Merle remained frozen, too scared to speak lest the Shard make good on its threat.

“Oh lighten up,” the daemon pouted, squatting down on a statue pedestal behind Gray and peering down with glinting eyes. “I’m just messing with you.” It pulled a knee up to its chest and let its other leg dangle, thick-soled hiver’s boot drumming lightly against the stone. “Why don’t you ask him if he’s met any mutants here?”

Merle forced himself to smile. “Jus’ remember, now, Reverend.” he admonished Gray, playfully invoking his faux-title from back in the good old days. “It’s a sin unless y’all marry ’em first.”

To his surprise, Gray winced, and scratched the back of his head. “Urgh, don’ remind me. We ain’t doin’ that shit no more, not with fuckin’ twists.” Merle’s eye widened as Gray even produced a Ministorum amulet from inside his flak vest. “Yours truly is a proper fuckin’ preacher man now, too.”

The Shard leaned forward. “Oh what’s this? A purge ganger changed his ways?” It cocked its head at Merle, innocently. “How come you didn’t, hmm?”

“No sir,” Gray went on, oblivious, as he tucked away his priestly qualifications. “Now we jus’ burn ’em, as the good Emperor intended.”

Merle swallowed. “Who we all burnin’?”

Gray motioned to one of the gangers, who produced a sheaf of parchment sheets from inside her greasy longcoat. Gray slapped them down on the statue pedestal right by the Shard’s feet, and motioned Merle over to join him. Merle swallowed again, throat tight as he surreptitiously noticed how the gangers all wore Aquilas, and other icons and faith marks on their kit. Oh what the motherfuckin’ shit…

“All’a these heretical fucks.” he said gravely, sweeping a hand over the half-dozen faces that had been etched by ecclesiarchy quill-skulls.

The familiar crinkled eyes and neat beard of the Queen Bitch’s pet priest, Solvan Belannor, stood out to Merle among the pictures. The cocksucker who started all this. I begged him. I fuckin’ begged him! Merle clenched Vincent Nyl’s fist with a grinding whine. That thought was dangerous. It would hear him.

“I recognize that pontificatin’ ol’ bastard.” Merle said, jabbing his middle finger into the picture as if he could crush the real man’s skull along with the parchment. “These other shrivelled sacks, though…?”

“Come on now.” the Shard urged him playfully. It pushed a curtain of blue hair out of its eyes, its blood-red gaze staring through him. “Work it out.”

Merle thought of Machairi, and of Yannick, her known enemy, and then of Tarpeian, who had yet to fully reveal his hand. Collateral damage. To make the real target less obvious.

“Exactly.” The daemon looked pleased.

“Enemies of the good lord Tarpeian.” Gray intoned, and solemnly signed the Aquila once again. “So let it be writ’, so let it be done.”

“He’s probably not wrong.” the daemon shrugged, drumming its foot on the pedestal. “You know lord cardinal Tarpeian. I’m sure these other priests have all angered him at some point as well.”

“At the fuckin’ convocation?” Merle asked.

“Yessir.” Gray nodded, slamming a fist into his palm.

Merle scratched his jaw. Now that he knew their objective, the enormity of it was starting to dawn on him, along with a plethora of risks. He looked over at the nearest temple as its towers breathed fire once again. Then he looked at the grim sentinels standing guard at every door, hooded in red leather, pilot lights flickering on their handheld flamer units. An’ that’s just a li’l shrine, with one ol’ priest who whiles away his time fiddlin’ the local kids. The cathedral has it’s own fuckin’ army, an’ the big holy hitters’ll be bringin’ their own security on top’a that.

“Y’all know the number o’ flamer-totin’ guards they got on that place?” he cautioned.

Amadeus lurched forward with a smell of grease and rust, and spattered Merle with a fine mist of oil as he coughed through his vox grille. “Oh yes.” the haggard enginseer growled wryly. “And flamer turrets, and purely decorative flamers...all with promethium tanks.”

Gray gave a smile even oilier than the tech-priest’s as he slapped his hands together and then threw them outward. “Whooosh, motherfucker.”

Merle had to hand it to him for irony points. If the ol’ crew are still sharp… He cast an eye over Gray’s eager-looking gangers turned, much to his fuckin’ surprise, genuine frateris rabble rousers. Hell, we might even pull this off, an’ leave the security holdin’ their cocks.

Then he looked back at Vaegar’s men. Yannick’s bitch-boy had sent his own enforcers - Adranteans all, heavily armed and armoured as well; the kind of kit one might expect from voidsmen who were used to suiting up for a close and deadly fight aboard a trade ship. No doubt they were also useful among the halls and pillars of the cathedral, but Merle had his doubts about their ability to wriggle through the wormways of a city in the way that was second nature to underhivers.

“Do we need them?” he murmured, pulling Gray in close to keep the conversation private as he jerked a thumb at the spacer muscle, who had disdainfully kept their distance from the Gunpointers.

Gray nodded slowly. “Verification.” he whispered, meaningfully.

As in verification of Adrantean involvement, by way of smokin’ corpses. Merle nodded his understanding. Sorry, you poor fucks. Lord Tarpeian’s well an’ truly hung y’all out to dry, even if y’all an’ your limp-dick boss don’ know it yet.

Better them than him.

+ + + + + +

Ecclesiarchy convocation, Reshia

Reshia was a holy place, and somehow it had turned into hell. Pockets of angry orange light were flickering all over the processional; fires set by burst gas lines and ruptured tanks, their flames leaping and cackling like daemons. Gunfire seared back and forth, and the air was full of choking, blinding smoke.

And everywhere the screaming, like the souls of the damned. There had been hundreds of pilgrims cramming the barriers when the first explosion had rocked the processional - most of them had tried to flee, crushing and trampling dozens at the archways and alleys, and still there was screaming. The Hearth Wardens tasked with defending the cathedral were impotent - Solvan had never met a man brave enough to stand his ground in the face of a flamethrower, but now most of the Wardens didn’t dare use their ritual weapons, for fear of burning the innocents around them. One Warden was hit as he tried to dash for a better shot, the lasbolt puncturing his tank with a dragon’s hiss. A moment later he was engulfed in flames, enveloping several cowering pilgrims in the blaze as he thrashed around, trying to release the tank. The screams gained another shrill chorus.

“The retribution of Adrantis!”

“Noble is our cause! Just is our reward!”

The heretic’s technological desecration included the cathedral’s auto-choral, which in obscene contrast to the slaughter within its shadow continued to broadcast the serene praise of the Emperor’s faithful. They had disfigured it with the defiant slogans of sedition, shouted with throaty vigor in Calixian, with the myriad tongues of the self-proclaimed Adrantean Republic were evidenced by their thick accents.

Solvan recognized the phrases from intercepts of Patriot propaganda, sent from Vigil agents diligently serving behind the traitor’s lines. The former had been taken up by the Adrantean mockery of the frateris, when they had breached the precinct house on Tephaine and set it - and the last, loyal defenders – to the torch. The latter was a rhetorical construct of the Republic’s chancellor, Souvage.

Overpressure had shattered all the windows, carpeting the ground in splinters of stained glass. They bit into Solvan’s palms as he dragged himself. The pain from the bullet that had caught him was worse, a persistent burning line cut through his abdomen. The pain in his side leapt as far as his mouth before he bit it back, trapping the scream in his throat. To make noise now would be to die.

“Here father, here!” deacon Posca was shouting, from behind a scorched and toppled statue. “Help him, you fool!”

One of the cardinal guard who had survived the initial blitz started forward at a crouching run. He only made it a few steps before a thread of las clipped the back of his head, painting his helmet lenses with an explosion of red. Posca shrank back behind the statue.

Solvan dragged himself onward with faith alone. Oh Emperor… he mouthed silently, his throat raw from the smoke. Lend me your strength, so that I might endure. Lend me your will, so that I may survive to take your vengeance.

“The retribution of Adrantis!”

“Noble is our cause! Just is our reward!”

A dragon’s roar lashed across the processional as a Hearth Warden finally gained a clear shot, and panicked shouts answered it. A burning man stumbled into Solvan’s view, fire squirting from the joints of his carapace armour.

Stand with us, Emperor. Lend us your fist to strike them down!

People were running, shouting, dying. Solvan saw a woman pressed flat against the back of a flying buttress, eyes wide, chest heaving. When one of the armoured heretics came stalking by he feared he was about to witness another cold-blooded murder. Instead the woman darted out as he passed, slipped the pistol from his hip holster and emptied it into his visor as he turned.

Silent Vigil, Solvan guessed, with a surge of hope. The heretic’s shotcannon was in the undercover Sister’s hands a moment later, but it only barked twice before a bullet hit her in the temple, blood misting the air around her head like a martyr’s halo.

“The retribution of Adrantis!”

“Noble is our cause! Just is our reward!”

The heretics were upon them a second later, men in masks with eye lenses the colour of hot night. These men were different - their armour patchwork, the clothes beneath civilian. They were covered in blood and oil, as if their true nature was oozing out. One of them hauled Posca from his hiding place.

“Wait!” the young cleric protested. “Wait! I’m the lord cardinal’s man!”

“Well ain’t that good for you.” The heretic answered, as he shoved the deacon onto his hands and knees and pressed the muzzle of his gun to the back of his neck. “For the Emperor and Adrantis!”

His autogun thundered once, and Posca’s blood splashed across the man’s eye lenses. Solvan tensed with rage at the execution, and shivered with disgust as he placed the fiend’s loathsome accent.

Not Adrantean. Gunpoint.

“Well shit.” he remarked, and tugged the mask off. Their eyes met.

He had a strong, dark face, split by an old scar and framed by a shadow of black beard, and he was smiling. It was the kindly, peaceful smile of a local prelate, but Solvan knew that this was no true son of the Emperor in spite of the Aquila, which hung from around his neck. He looked like someone merely dressing up as human, the mask slipping. He smiled down at Solvan, and offered him a brotherly hand.

“No need to be havin’ the last word, father, I'll assume it was somethin’ pious. Now come with us.”

+ + + + + +

Emergency meeting - Crusade ecclesiarchy HQ
Twelve hours later

“This atrocity cannot stand!”

Cardinal Tarpeian’s murderous denunciation echoed around the cathedral. The nervously chittering cyber-cherubs, their mechanical minds already mirroring the distress of the priests below, took flight with electronic shrieks as Tarpeian’s words bounced between the walls. Atrocity, the stone walls whispered back. Atrocity, atrocity, atrocity.

Wailing, shouting supplicants crammed the pews before him. Priests and prelates, monks and bonded servants, pilgrims and sisters errant, flagellants and the tattered remnants of the Hearth Wardens - all were crying out in wounded, vengeful anguish. In the shadowed pulpit behind Tarpeian the crusade pontifex was clutching a processional aquila in pale, trembling hands, but all eyes were on the lord cardinal.

“We came into this war with the spirit of mercy.” Tarpeian thundered. For a moment he bowed his head, as though the grief and guilt were too much for him to bear, but when he raised it again the fire had returned to his eyes. “We came to show compassion to the misled faithful. And they repay us with this…outrage.”

He threw a hand outward, towards the scorched and blackened wing of the cathedral.

“Father Gao-Fan. Father Dellacruth. Father Belannor. Three of our brightest and most beneficent, all taken. A dozen other men of faith, butchered and burned like animals! But for the grace of the Emperor, our lord pontifex might have been among them!”

Tarpeian signed the aquila, vehemently.

“If these Patriots were ever the misled faithful, they have since fallen into the abyss. What men with any shred of grace left in them, with any love left for the Emperor’s church, would ever stoop to something like this?”

The pews scraped back as the congregation spontaneously rose to their feet, shouting and cursing. Tarpeian held out his arms, and such was the gravity of his bearing that within a few heartbeats the cathedral fell silent once more.

“It is my worst fear,” the lord cardinal said gravely, “To see the blasphemies of Aurelius repeated on another shrine world. But I swear. before the Emperor and this congregation, that Reshia shall rise above this despicable act. We shall mourn the fallen with the honour they deserve, and then-”

“We need to do more than mourn!” a woman shouted from among the front rows. Gasps and hisses rippled out across the benches at the interruption, but the woman was already on her feet, and when she tore open her pilgrim’s robe to reveal the fleur-de-lys etched in red over black armour, the congregation were instantly quelled.

“This shall be answered for, lord cardinal.” the sister promised. “Fiercely.”

Her round, sandy-brown face looked made for smiles, but right now it showed only taut determination.

“I was blessed to know father Belannor briefly, during his work on Marioch. It would be my honour to pledge my sisters and I to his rescue.”

Tarpeian closed his eyes, and for a moment a thin smile broke the wrathful cast of his features. He opened his eyes once again, and looked towards the newly-revealed battle sister.

“Such is the true fervour that will see Mankind elevated to its manifest destiny.” he said softly, the vox stalk in his lectern only just catching the words. “I would expect no less of the ecclesiarchy’s finest at such a time. Nevertheless sister I must decline your offer - it is only by the Emperor’s beneficence that his holiness the pontifex survived this abomination, and I could not sanction any pursuit until I knew that he was protected, by guardians of faith and prowess, until he can be moved safely to orbit.”

The sister looked past Tarpeian, towards the pontifex himself. A handful of priests in flame-patterned robes stood close about Albinius, but only one of them bore a Hearth Warden’s flamer. Other Wardens around the hall began to mutter behind their masks at the perceived rebuke, but a furious glance from Tarpeian silenced them. Albinius leaned forward in his pulpit.

“Your...prudence is appreciated, lord Tarpeian.” he said, in a thin, dry voice that betrayed the shock and trauma that the shadows had been intended to hide. “But the sister is right. Scores of the faithful lie dead, and three of our own carried off by heretics. They must be hunted down.”

“And so they shall be.” Tarpeian boomed, turning back to the congregation and striking a fist against the pulpit. “So they shall be! Holiness, I ask your permission to gather my own frateris veterans and leave at once - to bring these animals to justice, and to bring back our taken brothers.”

“Justice!” someone cried, and another voice added “Vengeance!”

The crowd swelled, feeding on the cardinal’s passion. The sister’s expression had hardened, but Albinius was nodding. With halting steps, he climbed down from his pulpit and stepped forward. His meagre bodyguard hurried after him.

“Cardinal Tarpeian.” Albinius intoned. His voice was stronger now, and the pontifex stood straighter in his soot-smeared robes. “You and your men proved their worth on Aurelius Prime. Call upon them again, and march forth with the Emperor’s blessing! In nomine Imperator!”

As he raised the aquila-topped staff towards Tarpeian, the congregation erupted - cheering, shouting, cursing the heretics, but above all chanting one name. Tarpeian! Tarpeian! Tarpeian!

Cardinal Tarpeian slowly crossed his arms, and linked his thumbs in a solemn aquila.

“Ave Imperator.” he growled. “His Will be done.”

+ + + + + +

Hive Alda, Baraspine

Marc turned the hidden locket over in the palm of his cupped hand, and felt himself shiver. Not from the cold - although they were high up in the spires, the storms seemed to have blown themselves out for the moment, leaving a still calm that was muggy, close and static-laden. Sunlight struggled to break through the thick cloud cover as they stood together on the spar that jutted out over the midhive. Behind them were the lancet doors of the fortified tower that the ordos had chosen for their new headquarters on Baraspine, with black-visored stormtroopers flanking the entrance. Ahead was the skyshield landing pad with blast panels raised, and the Aquila transport descending on a cushion of fire. The downwash blew pulses of hot air and grit into Marc’s face as the shuttle settled.

Marc thumbed Solvan’s locket again, still unsure what he was going to say to the old man. Sapphira would no doubt run up and hug him, age and injuries from his captivity be damned. Glabrio would joke, Gavin would be reserved, and Raechel would smile happily for them from the sidelines. Even Crenshaw would be happy, in his own way; with Kally gone once more, Solvan was probably the only one of them that the cold-hearted bastard spoke his unfiltered thoughts to.

And what would Solvan see? Me and Kelly still standing at opposite ends of the line from each other. Marc stole a glance to his left, and saw that Kelly was a mirror of his own tension, the sheet of parchment still crumpled in her fist. Marc knew what it said - he had read it himself a dozen times before rushing to deliver the news. He pictured it again as the whine of the Aquila’s atmospheric engines fell silent, seeing the neat strokes of decoded gothic beneath the scrawled symbols that astropath D’Lane had translated from his mind onto paper.

Adrantean heretics cornered in their lair. Vicious firefight, many casualties. Father Belannor recovered.

Recovered. Surely nothing else mattered right now. Solvan was home, and in as safe a bastion as any of them could be outside their quarters on Impiger. If it had been up to Marc they would have remained there, safe from Yannick’s spies, but Lucullis wanted the full assets of the ordos close on hand for their use, and Glabrio had agreed that it did them more harm than good to be seen to hide in orbit.

But if assassins could strike at the convocation on Reshia…

Marc tried to push away the thought. His PDA was already full of typed notes and stream-of-consciousness vox recordings. If he watched too many shadows at once, he was liable to miss the one that mattered. At the very least, he needed more than the two or three paltry astros D’Lane had received regarding the attack and lord cardinal Tarpeian’s subsequent rescue operation. No doubt Solvan himself could tell them much, though that could wait. For the Emperor’s sake, that could wait.

The old man’s been through enough. Marc just hated to sour his homecoming with the realisation that Marc himself had been too much of a coward to follow his parting advice.

The landing pad’s blast panels began to fold down like the petals of a flower, and Marc could see his friends’ shoulders slumping in relief along with them. He pictured the battered old priest limping and grumbling his way towards the stairs with that knowing smile in his eyes, but the first figures off the shuttle turned out to be two ecclesiarchy sisters in ash-grey robes. Low cowls shadowed their faces, and they held censers with fleur-de-lys openings that sent thin wisps of smoke coiling into the muggy air.

Beside Marc, Sapphira let out a sharp gasp. “The dark sisters.” she whispered.

Marc looked round, and saw that the hospitaller’s hands had shot up to cover her mouth. “Saph?” he asked, uncertainly.

Sapphira glanced round at him, and the look in her eyes set cold needles spreading through his abdomen. “The order Vespila.” Sapphira stammered, the gasp of a strangled ghost. “No…”

“Who…?” Glabrio asked, but that was as far as he got before Sapphira’s knees gave out under her. It seemed to take her an age to fall, and Glabrio himself appeared to be lunging in slow motion as he darted forward to keep her from crashing to the basalt walkway.

“They…” Marc heard Sapphira choke. “They tend...tend the dead…”

Slowly, Marc turned his head to follow her staring eyes, and that was when he saw the bier being lifted down the ramp of the shuttle. Six robed priests bore it on their shoulders, and crusaders in pontifex livery walked solemnly to either side. A simple flag bearing the haloed skull of the ministorum was draped across the coffin like a shroud.

Marc felt like he was floating, the stones of the walkway rolling gently under his feet as some deep, dark ocean closed over his head.

“They…” he heard Kelly saying, her plaintive voice muffled by the water. “They said recovered…”

There was a thick black ooze settling in his stomach, spreading out to run down his arms and pull his hands into clenched fists. Solvan’s locket was still there in his right hand, hard and cold and inanimate.

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Severed 

Hive Alda, Baraspine

Most people who had met Martin Crenshaw assumed that he was not a man who ever shed tears. That was broadly true. Many also assumed that he was compassionless. That was less accurate. Jaded might have been a slightly more fitting description. But some things could pierce even a jaded psyche, and shock it into a true numbness that matched the cold, empty exterior. Today Martin Crenshaw was cold, inside and out.

The scene was tranquil. The monastery crypt held all the trappings that befitted such a passing - candles, incense, garlands of flowers, a cyber-cherub that clung to the vault above the bier, projecting soft hymnals from its vox caster. A golden idol of the Saviour Emperor watched over the casket, hands spread in solemn blessing. But there was a hole in the serenity, an ugly black emptiness where something should have been, and its size and shape was a match for Solvan Belannor.

Crenshaw looked at the bishop’s face, rendered in commendable detail on the stone of the coffin lid. The sculptors had wanted a stern, indomitable expression for his repose, but Sapphira had all but threatened them into reconsidering. Now the stone relief lay with hands calmly folded, its sleeping face graced by the understanding smile that the team had known so well. It was the smile he had often given Alia’s agents when they were together at prayer; or when he found one of them alone, wrestling with their personal daemons.

Or when you officiated mine and Kally’s wedding.

Solvan had earned Crenshaw’s trust and respect long before then, but that...yes, damn it, that had earned his friendship. As far as Martin Crenshaw could truly consider someone a friend, Solvan Belannor had been that.

Crenshaw raised his eyes from the gentle features lit from all sides by their halo of candles, towards the hard, golden face of the Emperor. Only gold now, he noted with dark cynicism - the ministorum had of course thoroughly rejected the greed of Goge Vandire and the opulence of his Temple Tendency.

“We call you the saviour Emperor.” he said bluntly, speaking in the long-obsolete High Gothic of the Tendency. “But anyone with a grain of intelligence knows that you are a vengeful god. I will not begrudge you that. But what kind of god takes vengeance on his most faithful servant?”

The statue glowered back at him; silent, stoic.

“This man lost his youth to xenos magic to protect your people. He threw himself on a grenade on Perinetus to protect your people. He went to that convocation to protect your people.”

Crenshaw’s flesh and blood hand thumped against the stone pedestal beneath the coffin.

“I could be on that bier, and that would be good and just. I have no soul to save. Alia’s team have borne the brunt of the retribution for my actions on the Ampoliros and elsewhere, and I deserve my own share of judgement. But you punish me by letting him die?”

His head dipped a fraction.

“He did more for Kally than I possibly ever will. She is going to hear about his death the hard way, and you will not even grant me the mercy of being able to be there for her when she does. Frak you. You are no god of mine.”

“Pre-reformation Gothic.” said Alia Machairi.

Crenshaw brought his prosthetic teeth together with a clack. “A cursed language is good for cursing in.”

He turned towards the arched entrance way, and saw that Alia and Tomas had entered the crypt. He had hardly expected Machairi to announce her arrival in the Baraspine system, but he had also not expected her to be here so soon, even in secret. The fact that he hadn’t heard the two of them enter spoke to the extent of his compromised state.

The inquisitor and her bodyguard looked little better. Machairi was still confined to her wheelchair, though he noted new spinal implants in the back of her neck; the precursors to reconstructive surgery. It was not the wheelchair that made her look frail and brittle. Tomas, meanwhile, moved like a man unable to wake from a dream - his eyes a window into a soul that had been broken in half and put back together crooked.

“If you were me, you’d be telling yourself to be more careful.” Machairi said. “Some people aren’t too pious to eavesdrop, even in a church.”

Crenshaw turned away, both hands leaning heavily on the marble pedestal as he faced the coffin. “Are you going to tell me, then?”

“No.” Machairi’s voice was strained, a puff of white air that was almost immediately stolen by the circulation within the chapel. “I’m going to tell you that I loved him too. He was more a mentor to me than Sidonis ever was.”

“He managed to be a mentor to every single one of us.” Tomas nodded. His hand rested absently on his sword scabbard.

Machairi swallowed with an obvious effort. “Someone like Solvan...you’re lucky if you meet them even once. Someone like him can’t be replaced. You can’t make it right.”

Crenshaw exhaled. “If you were me, Alia, you would say you can live by his ideals. Keep the people he swore to protect safe.” His cheek twitched as he bit down. “You might also say the best way to do that is kill the ones responsible for this.”

“Maybe.” the inquisitor answered, closing her eyes. “But for now, all I want to do is grieve. I want to imagine him at the Emperor’s side before I think about sending anyone else to join him.” She looked up at Crenshaw, mirroring his own earlier response. “Are you going to tell me better?”

Crenshaw clasped his hands, looking up at the idol. “No.”

Prove that you are worthy of your name, saviour Emperor. Welcome him.

+ + + + + +

The sky had dawned bright and clear-blue, which seemed so wrong that Kelly Black had to polarise the windows and shut it out. The laboratory’s old air circulators wheezed and rumbled as they fought to keep the temperature of the room somewhere below suffocating.

Surrounded by evidence bags and immaculate stacks of verispex equipment, Kelly peeled off her plastek gloves and dropped her head into her hands. Every now and then it would randomly hit her and squeeze the air from her lungs, turning her next inhale into a sniffle, the exhale into a shudder. She had been tugging back and forth between the two states for hours - the stomach-churning grief that forced her to pull up short, and the masochistic need to carry on, to see all of it.

He’s really gone.

Solvan had been a rock for all of them, and for Kelly herself more than once. While everything else around them fell apart he was always there, and always seemed to know just what to say. And after the time-void on Hercynia and falling on a grenade for them all on Perinetus, she had naively believed that the Emperor simply wouldn’t allow such a good man to die.

Sifting through the old priest’s last hours, rendering it down in forensic detail, was only making the pain worse - and she already knew that it was essentially pointless. Tarpeian’s men killed most of the attackers, and those who aren’t dead soon will be. Neither outcome brings him back. And yet she felt the compulsion to keep digging at the wound.

Was she just trying to bury herself in work - any kind of work? If so she was getting as bad as Marc. Kelly cuffed at her nose and looked down at the notes again. They were paperclipped to a pict, of cold grey skin striped with ugly black bruises.

Bruising suggests a single hand (left) wrapped around the victim's throat. Damage to trachea and vocal cords too extensive for typical human grip strength, even in the scenario of assailant pushing down on prone victim with full body weight. Angular abrasion pattern on victim’s skin also atypical. It is concluded that the victim was strangled with a bionic left hand.

Kelly turned the paper over, hiding the cold, clinical words and the painful photo-pict that accompanied them.

Bionic hands still collect DNA. The frateris’ debrief had noted several of the Adrantean assailants to have bionics, and the compulsion to find out which one of them had done the deed was still burning hollowly in her stomach.

“And then what?” she murmured, scolding herself aloud. If the killer was one of the men who had escaped the cardinal’s enforcers, then telling Marc and the others would just goad them into swearing futile, bloody vengeance. If the killer was already dead, then her trail of distractions was cold - and Solvan would still be gone.

She got up, wearily, and made her way over to the sterile white block of the genetic analyser.

The sample centrifuge was whirring, and the machine’s printer hummed as it juddered out sheets stamped with long bars of black and grey.

And then the screen uplinked to the team’s partitioned data library began to blink: MATCH.

+ + + + + +

“That’s not possible.” Gavin’s voice was glacial, but his fists were trembling, and the muscles in his neck were standing out taut. “I blew his shuttle out of the void. I killed him.”

Marc stared down at his own PDA in silence. He wanted to think that Gavin was right and dismiss the DNA evidence as some kind of fault or rogue reading, but it made too much twisted sense. We never found Vince’s arm. But how the Horus had Carson gotten off the orbital if he hadn’t been in that shuttle?

Impiger or Tiercel would never have been an option. Arthrashastra was hardly more likely - the one thing that they and Alley had agreed on was that Merle Carson needed to die. If he had gotten past the Nebulas then he might have been able to lose himself in the sprint trader’s mothballed decks, but Vince - Marc swallowed - Vince had still been alive and fighting him when the Nebulas made their hostage trade with Glabrio and closed the airlocks. The times didn’t match up.

But the only option left after that was for Merle to crawl away into Concordia’s under-decks to die of his wounds.

Concordia had a medicae suite.

It also had non-perishable stores for visiting diplomats, more than enough to keep one man alive between the mechanicus’ annual tributes. He never left. And then - what, he bluffed his way onto some visiting trader vessel?

Marc clenched his fingers tighter around the compact data slate, as he realised that he was asking the wrong question. Carson doesn’t have the means to orchestrate something like the attack on Reshia. And the Adranteans still professed the imperial faith - precious few of them would have agreed to stain their nascent republic’s image further, with a blatant attack on the Emperor’s church. Unless their target wasn’t the church, but the inquisition. Then, Carson became the perfect asset to target Solvan. So who is Carson working with now?

The only thing that seemed certain for the moment was that Solvan had not been a random victim amid the attack.

Marc’s head was pounding. Was it him the Emperor was punishing? It was a self-indulgent thought, but it was also the second time Merle Carson had been employed to murder one of his friends, right after Marc himself had shied away from their well-meant concern. Right after they had parted on bad terms.

Just like Vince. he thought as his vision blurred.

He felt acid burning the back of his throat, and turned to quit the room.

“Kelly’s already on her way.” Gavin barked sharply at him. “The least you could do is stay and be here for her!”

Marc halted, the technomancer a pace behind his right shoulder.

“Aye right.” he growled. I’d just make her worse. The useful thing he could do right now was dig into all the shipping logs on and off Reshia: so that they could find out where the bastard might have gone, and kill him.

“Do we all have to die before you’ll talk to us?” Gavin asked him scathingly.

Marc whirled round, fist clenched to turn the spin into a punch aimed at Gavin’s face. The glass face of his wrist-chron broke with a sound like cracking ice, and the metal-link strap twisted and crushed tight around his wrist. Marc let out an involuntary bark of pain as the crushing force sprang his fingers open and caused them to rake harmlessly past Gavin’s jaw.

He hunched, cradling his wrist as ice crystals steamed off his arm. Looking into Gavin’s eyes, he saw that the psyker was as furious as he was: jaw clenched, muscles ticking in his scar-ravaged temples, sheens of ice glinting across his eyes.

It was Gavin who blinked first.

“I won’t claim to know your sister as well as you do.” the psyker said, more quietly. “But I do know that this rift between you is hurting her too.”

It was her decision, was Marc’s first thought. You’re as stubborn as each other, was his second, coming to him in Solvan’s voice. “I know.” he said.

“She’s a forgiving soul.” Gavin said as the ice around his eyes melted and formed a wet sheen on his cheeks. “If you can un-frak yourself, she’ll come around.”

Marc held the smaller man’s gaze for a moment, cradling his crushed wrist. “I hope so.” he murmured, and turned away.

“You’re not running again.” Gavin warned him.

“No,” Marc agreed, “I’m not. I just...need to get my thoughts in order first.”

Marc retreated from the room, and this time Gavin let him walk. The hallways of the new ordo headquarters were full of armoured agents and shuffling, robed adepts, and they paid Marc no mind as he forged slowly through them, wincing as he peeled the crushed remnants of his wrist-chron off his arm and examined the welts where the links had dug into his skin. He flexed his injured hand open and closed, thinking.

Gavin’s right. How many times am I going to keep on making the same mistake.

He found an empty office, closed the door, and clicked on his PDA’s dictaphone recorder.

+ + + + + +

Inquisition void runner Crimson Eye
In orbit above Reshia

“You’re risking a lot just by making this vox call.” inquisitor Yannick growled. His bionic eye glowed like a dull ember, the rest of his face lit by the holo-projector that was casting its grainy, greyed-out image across the observation lounge. The ashen globe of Reshia spun lazily beyond the windows, with the void-runner’s extended vox mast jutting like a needle across the view.

“No-one will be spying on us.” Tarpeian’s bastard dismissed lazily. Gideon Tarpeian had his father’s long face but his mask was not as carefully constructed, the malice slipping out past his soft-spoken manners to hang like a permanent threat behind his blue eyes. “Even if I were stupid enough to be sending this signal unencrypted, you have every reason to be here investigating the attack, and I have every reason to be telling you the tragic story.”

“I would have preferred a less conspicuous go-between than the cardinal’s own spawn.”

“How so? The lord cardinal has a rock solid alibi. He was at the convocation when it was attacked, after all.”

At the seat beside Yannick, inquisitor DeShilo’s black dreadlocks cascaded over his shoulders as he leaned forward to rest his chin on his hands. “He wouldn’t have needed an alibi if he had gone for something less blunt than a full terror raid.”

“It was inelegant.” Mariyana Veiss agreed as she hovered down to bring herself closer to the holo-tank. “Effective, I’ll grant you, but atrociously inelegant.”

“You wanted Machairi’s old preacher dead, yes?” Gideon countered.

“The domina is right.” DeShilo agreed. “Your lord father could have accomplished that without so much collateral death.”

“It is not in his nature to be restrained in the persecution of heretics.”

DeShilo closed his eyes for a moment, shaking his head. “Which is an issue in itself. This whole affair is far too close to lord Tarpeian’s signature methods for my liking, alibi or no. The church is a bad enemy, and even Vaegar’s lackeys aren’t totally expendable.”

“My lord father is the church.” The hologram’s pict component had frozen, flickering jerkily between frames, but the two inquisitors could hear the smile in Gideon’s voice. “And most of those collateral deaths were his enemies. His goals were well served.”

“And our goals?” legus Telek challenged. His hood shadowed all but his mouth and jaw from the hololith’s light. “Your machinations have driven Machairi’s team into a defensive posture.”

“Crenshaw,” the hatchet-faced man at Telek’s elbow added, his lips curling at the name. “Is working alongside them again, and Sonder is still active in the field.”

“You should study your quarry more closely.” Gideon replied.

“We are perfectly aware of their team dynamic.” DeShilo answered coolly. He had personally intercepted the late Josiah Wuziarch’s effects on their way back to the arbites, and had subsequently recovered and decoded the lawman’s private notes to add to Sidonis’ more outdated psych profiles.

“Then you’ll know that Belannor was a stabilising influence in their group. If they don’t do something reckless and walk straight into your hands on a heresy charge, then my father’s next blow will surely have them doing so.”

The video had begun to stutter again, freeze-framing between images. The moments they captured turned Gideon’s smile into something quietly feral.

“Make your preparations.” Yannick said curtly, and ended the transmission as the receiving station on the planet below drifted beyond the orbital horizon. He exhaled, slowly. “I suppose that means you’ll be needed once more, penitent Carson.”

He cast his eyes towards the door, where a familiar, ravaged figure leaned indifferently against the wheel lock. At the sound of his name Merle straightened, snapping to attention with an enthusiastic grin on his face.

"Fuckin’ A, I'm ready to go again." he drawled at Yannick.

The inquisitor regarded him. "I've read your file, Carson. And the first thing I resolved was not to trust anything you say."

Merle shrugged. "I...ain't ready to go again?"

“Regardless of the…” Telek shot Merle a sidelong glance. “Asset used, our friend is right about one thing. The time is ripe to move onto our next target.”

“Crenshaw.” DeShilo guessed. The legus and his ill-tempered lackey were seldom fixated on anything else. “You got the evidence you needed, then?”

“Colonel Cummings sent Urquhart to engage him.” said Telek, and a smile ghosted across the face of his associate.

“A honey trap?” Veiss asked, tapping a finger against her jaw. “How delightfully traditional. Did she know?”

Cummings’ grin soured into a sneer. “Do you take me for a fool? I raised it through the blank breeding programme. A standard, scheduled coupling.”

“He went so far as to threaten to kill her.” Telek deadpanned. “He is most definitely...compromised.”

DeShilo steepled his fingers. “A good thing he didn’t, or we wouldn’t have gotten her report.”

“It would not have mattered if he had. In fact it might have been preferable, as we could then have arrested him immediately.”

Across from DeShilo, Yannick smiled, but there was frost on it. “Are all the AAT as detached as you, Telek?”

Yannick was looking at Telek’s half-shrouded face, but DeShilo knew that, thanks to certain facial motor surgeries, the legus seldom emoted anything. He looked instead at the legus’ robes, his dark eyes flickering to the wireframe eye stitched onto them. For ten thousand years, that eye symbol had given men like Telek the legal mandate to oversee the largest and longest running slave fleet in human history, with the most dangerous cargo imaginable. They were the iron shepherds of all the blessed, cursed souls who held the Imperium together by their telepathic whispers and by their sacrifice to the golden throne of Terra. It was not a task suited to men averse to spending lives, or to ending them.

Telek confirmed his assessment by answering Yannick’s question with a blank un-smile. “Yes.” the legus said simply.

“The intelligent response would have been to submit to your good lady’s charms.” Veiss mused. “But no, major Crenshaw wouldn’t do that. If he wouldn’t so much as cast a wandering eye in my direction, he must be truly smitten with Kally. They’re married now, didn’t you know.”

“Married?” Yannick scoffed. “A pair of soulless?”

Veiss batted her eyes innocently. “I know, I thought that such a rare occasion deserved marking. I made sure to treat them to a proper honeymoon after I reunited them.”

“You…” Cummings gaped, after which there was a long pause. DeShilo could see his jaw working, the tendons in his neck tensing as if poison were rising up inside his throat. “What!?”

“And I’m pleased to say that it was surely the best honeymoon that that dreary little hive world has ever seen.” Veiss continued cheerfully.

Yannick’s fist hit the table like a thunderclap. “Is this a game to you, domina?” the one-eyed inquisitor spat, the last word carrying all of his well-known antipathy towards the mechanicus.

“You are telling me.” Cummings finally ground out, “That you had the opportunity to eliminate both Sonder and Crenshaw, and you...did nothing?”

“Oh don’t be so boring, darling.” Veiss rebuked, with a dismissive flick of her metal fan. “Next you’ll tell me you staked everything on those saboteurs blowing him to bits at that ghastly auto-da-fe.” Her eyes switched towards the rest of the group. “You boys didn’t facilitate that little terror raid too, did you? Some might accuse you of actively sabotaging the Imperial war effort at this point.”

DeShilo shook his head. “One might argue that these repeated attacks on the ministorum serve to destroy the Adranteans’ credibility as wayward faithful, but no. The Legion’s treachery was abhorrent, and it had nothing to do with us. Although…” He turned a narrowed eye on the two AAT representatives. “When colonel Cummings assigned Crenshaw to attend, I’m sure he expected the frateris’ excesses to draw some kind of violent reaction from the Baraspini.”

Veiss tutted. “Even worse than Tarpeian. At least he can claim to be inelegant but effective. I have a better hypothetical for you. What if I were to smuggle Kally Sonder to Marioch alongside the expeditionary forces, supported on the ground by my own huntsmen, and supported operationally by my own son and heir - none could doubt my commitment if I were to involve dear Evgeni - with the intention of ambushing and killing the lamentable Alicia Tarran. Wouldn’t it be just tragic if she were to die in the process of eliminating the Heroine of the Republic?”

“Hypothetically?” Yannick prompted, cautiously.

Veiss fanned herself as she cocked her head in the direction of colonel Cummings. “Colonel, your hatred suggests a certain familiarity. How would Martin Crenshaw react to the death of the woman he loves, especially given that I took pains to make their last meeting the best night of their soulless lives?”

The venom drained from Cummings’ face as he considered, the flicker of an oily smile returning. “We know that he disagreed with Machairi about Sonder’s field deployment. He holds her responsible for Sonder’s safety. Of the many people he would seek to kill, Machairi may well be the first.”

“And anyone between her and him, I shouldn’t wonder.” Veiss said. “The remainder of her team’s presence is a given, and I’m sure it could be arranged for that grey little man Lucullis to be there too.” She smiled sweetly. “All hypothetical, of course.”

Yannick frowned, no doubt wondering what other hypotheticals the domina was considering. The psyk-warding pendant that Veiss wore brazenly woven into her mask whenever she graced them with her presence could not have done much to quell his fears.

“A neatly self-contained outcome.” DeShilo admitted. “Although one with quite a few possible points of failure.”

“You would go down in my estimation if you didn’t recognise that, darling.” Veiss purred. “As I said, hypothetical...so let us focus on the first act: Marioch.”

Yannick’s bionic eye whirred, the lens narrowing. “You are committing some of your best assets to this plan.”

“I daresay the best.” Veiss replied. “My own son, as I said. Though I hope you will respect my wish to keep his hands clean in the final operation.”

Yannick twitched two fingers, the slightest gesture of assent. “Very well. Then I will match your contribution. Some of my own tier one assets. But they will not act until Sonder’s kill on Tarran has been confirmed. The heretic is the greater threat.”

“If you are talking about the assets I think you are talking about…” Veiss elegantly closed the metal fan against the palm of her hand. “Are you sure you don’t have a flair for theatrics, inquisitor? I gave DeRei’s rifle to Kally to use against Tarran for a reason - and I do expect that marvellous specimen back, darling - but setting them against her afterward is almost as fitting.”

“I can assure you I have no taste for theatrics.” Yannick stated bluntly. “I merely know of Sonder’s augments, and I wish to see her countered and destroyed in the most certain way possible.”

Veiss hovered a little higher into the air. “You have to admit, it is delicious.” She fixed Yannick with a coy look. “I don’t suppose you’d permit me to make that destruction a little more certain with some modifications of my own? I would love to compare them alongside my ongoing project with lord cardinal Tarpeian.”

Yannick regarded her steadily, and DeShilo had to agree that his reservation at letting Veiss tamper with his soldiers was prudent. “I think not.”

Veiss made an elaborate charade of sighing and shrugging her shoulders. “Oh very well. Speaking of the lord cardinal, what is his next move on Baraspine?”

As the tension in the room subsided, the hostility turned outward once more towards Machairi and her team, DeShilo found himself reassessing the domina. Not fickle exactly, but she definitely plans to outwit and destroy everyone she meets. He had thought that the marriage and the priesthood had turned her feelings to ash, but now he wondered if that soul hadn’t always been infertile. Nothing grows in that woman but greed.

+ + + + + +

Merle leaned his scarred head back against the wall, zoning out now that the inquisitors and their friends were seemingly done with him.

“I’m going to miss Belannor.” the Shard said wistfully, squatting with its chin in its hands beside him. “Isn’t it a lovely twist of fate that the old priest started all of...well, us?”

Merle flinched and turned away. I fuckin’ begged him. He could still see the confessor’s face cursing him, telling him that he was irrevocably damned - only this time his face was turning black, with blood vessels bursting in his eyes.

“Don’t say I’m never good to you.” the Shard admonished. “I did give you the honour of killing him.” It pushed its hands into its knees and rose, blue hair flicking behind its shoulders. “Now pay attention, this next bit concerns you.”

Merle looked up, in time to see Yannick speaking while a spidery tech-servitor powered down the holo-tank.

“Tarpeian will be bringing her to his sanctuary, once her purpose in the War of Faith has been served. We will need you to guard her.”

“Huh?” Merle said hurriedly, standing up straighter. “Who?”

Yannick looked at him with contempt. “The Sister, of course.”

Merle nodded and swallowed, but inside he felt cold. The clawing desire to pay the hospitaller bitch back, for everything she had done while he was in her captivity, warred against the knowledge that the daemon would reflect each and every sensation back on him.

“Think about it.” the Shard said, seemingly unconcerned. “If the old fool’s assassination is a knife to your former team’s heart, then taking the Sister too is twisting it...and because our friend Tarpeian is that much of a grandiose megalomaniac, I assume he wants to be the one to do it directly to their faces.”

She wrapped her arms around Merle almost tenderly, and the convict felt the warm brush of phantom skin against his own cold and clammy neck. The daemon’s face was against his, whispering in his ear.

“Their lady inquisitor is broken - in body and, worse, politically. She has nothing more than her team and a few marginal allies. The family Kol? Well, I’m sure you’ll remember the servo skulls from the last time they crossed the lord cardinal. The Silent Vigil? They have more direct concerns, and every casualty diminishes their influence in the crusade’s decision making. Lucullis made the mistake of trying to be a lone wolf in a world of packs - and he’s about to find that his one true ally, lady Veiss, is not such a loyal ally after all. I expect our dear lord cardinal is smelling blood.”

The daemon chuckled to itself as it pulled black, red eyes glinting with mischief, the tip of a pearly tooth protruding as it dragged one corner of its bottom lip into its mouth.

“Oh, just you wait.” it assured Merle. “This is going to be good.”

+ + + + + +

St Alric’s Cathedral, Baraspine

Located in the heights of spire secundus, the cathedral had weathered the invasion unscathed. Pontifex Albinius had called it the will of the Emperor protecting the place - though Glabrio suspected it had more to do with his commanders on the ground fearing the wrath of his bulldog Tarpeian, and ordering their air support to stay well clear of the holy landmark.

The cathedral stood at the end of a long, narrow spur jutting from the side of the hive spire, its three bell-towers facing defiantly out onto the basin of the Allocthon crater. Even under the shelter of the crater wall, the glass storms had done their work: softening and blurring the granite features of the saints who stood atop its towers. Instead of the delicate crystal glass that adorned the windows of other churches, the cathedral’s arched windows were thick translucent armourglass - grainily coloured and letting in only a fraction of the sunlight. To compensate, the stairway leading up to the main nave was flanked by dozens of tall candles, the gold-coloured wax running into thin grooves that captured the run-off in silver bowls at the foot of the ascent.

Glabrio felt weighted down as he climbed the stairs. The rosette pinned to the silk-fronted lapel of his frock coat was burning a hole through his chest, the metal pin he could feel through the material putting him in mind of a bullet aimed at his heart. Imperial generals with thousands at their command had shied away from this place, and he was here to aim an accusation straight at the leaders of the Emperor’s church.

He felt a light squeeze of his hand, and glanced aside. Sapphira must have sensed his disquiet, and she was giving him an encouraging look. It was enough to steel him for the task ahead, and to remind him why they were here. Solvan. Glabrio had loved the priest like an older, slightly quarrelsome brother, and he wanted to see justice done as much as the rest of them. Lady Alia was demanding answers - about how the massacre had been allowed to happen, and how Solvan was seemingly able to be so directly targeted.

The thought of the Lady soothed his humours a little. Most of the others don’t even know she’s on the planet. She trusts me to get this done for her. She still trusts me.

He squeezed Sapphira’s hand back, and offered her a smile before dropping his hand to his belt. To his right Marc and Gavin walked with grim purpose, and he saw the silver glint of Marc’s spy drone flitting close to the agent’s shoulder. On Sapphira’s left, Kelly looked tensely vigilant. Crenshaw was silent; detached, focused. The short, rotund Kol woman beside him was blandly impassive. She has her own agenda, but the Lady trusts her too.

A row of sonorous vox-servitors waited at the top of the stairs, and they slid aside like metal beads to admit Glabrio and his team into the main nave of the cathedral. A trio of recorder-skulls circled lazily overhead. Before them, a double-vision flicker between the vast columns betrayed a refractor field, active across the entrance to the preacher’s apse. Standing in front of the screen were a dozen professional-looking frateris; at ease with feet apart and hands behind their backs, but with lasguns slung openly across their chests. Behind the flicker field were four crusaders in overlapping plate, shields grounded with the embossed aquilas facing the approaching agents. Behind them were a knot of red-robed acolytes.

And lord cardinal Tarpeian.

Glabrio’s jaw tensed as he focused on the man. For a moment he fancied he saw the hatchet-faced cardinal smile, but then the refractor field rippled and swam like a veil of water, and by the time the image had reformed Tarpeian was the picture of quiet dignity.

Glabrio halted ten paces short of the cold-eyed frateris veterans, and for a moment there was silence.

“Lord cardinal.” Glabrio said at last. “Imperator benedicat. I must say, it’s a surprise to see you answering our summons.”

“Quite.” he heard Marc murmur under his breath. The investigator shared all of Glabrio’s own doubts about how the lord cardinal had managed to come out of the convocation bloodbath as a hero. Glabrio felt little threat from the Aurelian veterans and their show of force - the lord cardinal wouldn’t dare spill inquisition blood in such a public and sacred place - but still he had the uneasy feeling of standing in the jaws of a trap.

Cardinal Tarpeian slowly signed the aquila. “Your benedictions are welcome, agents, but I am not here upon your summons. I am here for sister Sapphira.”

The name was like the gunshot Glabrio had been half expecting. He glanced left at the sister and saw her looking back, a frown knitting her eyebrows. He looked back at the cardinal behind his shimmering force wall.

“Excuse me?” he stated politely.

“As a former guardian of Saint Nicolas of Delphi,” Tarpeian piously signed the aquila once again. “She is necessary for his presentation to the Delphic Triarii, ahead of the War of Faith on Coseflame.”

“Nicolas Lehner was never canonised.” Sapphira challenged him.

“Really?” Behind the field, Tarpeian carefully unfolded a document. “This record was obtained by the labour of my faithful servant Posca, may he rest in the Emperor’s eternal grace.”

The parchment he was holding meant nothing to Glabrio, but Sapphira turned as white as ash.

“What?” he whispered urgently, half turning his head. “What is it?”

Sapphira bit her lip. “Vince told me it was a stupid idea.” she murmured, almost too low for him to hear.

None the wiser, Glabrio could only watch with increasing unease. The cardinal had wrested control of the conversation from him, and it was not a position with which he was familiar - or fond of.

“Ink on a page is always subject to interpretation.” Tarpeian noted sagely. “Much like your previous statement, Sister...some might see that as the guilt-wracked confession of someone responsible for the destruction of a holy relic.”

Hercynia. Glabrio suddenly remembered, and felt his stomach sink. She kept the pieces after that replicant blew her servo skull to bits, and Vince helped her with the funerary rites.

“A xenos construct on Venatora destroyed it.” he challenged Tarpeian. “We’ve got all the written and vid-reel evidence you like. The skull interposed itself to save Sapphira. If you see guilt in that rather than a miracle from the Emperor Himself, then I really don’t know what to tell you.”

He had hoped that the appeal to faith would throw the cardinal and his lackeys off their stride, but alas he was mistaken.

“What I see.” Tarpeian stated, calmly but with heavy intent, “Is a sororita who is very publicly known to have brought shame to her Order, and disgrace to the Sisterhood, by her service alongside...” The cardinal gritted his teeth and signed the aquila once again, as if he were trying to choke up some hideous blasphemy. “Saint Alia Machairi.”

“Blessings be upon her name.” Glabrio stated defiantly.

“You overstep.” Tarpeian warned, the first hint of a growl entering his voice. “We talk of confirming saints, but your inquisitor is someone who most certainly has not been officially canonised.”

Sapphira’s fists were clenched tight, as were Kelly’s, Gavin’s and Marc’s. Glabrio began to reassess the probability of bloodshed as the Aurelian veterans unclasped their hands and rested them instead across the grips of their hanging lasguns. Their commander, a lank haired, blue eyed man whose long face bore a striking resemblance to Tarpeian’s, met Glabrio’s eyes and smiled, offering him an almost polite nod of acknowledgement.

The servo skulls. Glabrio thought, glancing up. Marc’s drone. He must know this is all being watched and recorded.

“Think carefully, cardinal.” he cautioned. “Saph’s an agent of the Inquisition. Consider where your authority ends, and the consequences of overstepping it.”

“I overstep nothing.” the lord cardinal countered. “Sapphira is a Sister Errant.” His eyes narrowed through the rippling forcefield. “Very, very errant…and as a subject of the ministorum, her collaboration with your team is strictly by the Holy Church’s goodwill. By my right as lord cardinal, I am now revoking that goodwill.”

The frateris’ hands were around their lasgun grips now, fingers resting alongside the trigger guards. Glabrio’s mind raced for a way out, but he could see none. The same recorder-skulls playing witness to the exchange were binding his hands just as he had hoped they would bind Tarpeian’s. He looked at Sapphira again, but the sister’s shoulders had already slumped.

“I would suggest that you make use of this time to say your final goodbyes.” Tarpeian rumbled softly.

Glabrio looked Sapphira in the eye. She looked overwhelmed, hollow, lost. He saw her beautiful lips move, forming three silent words.

I love you.

The rosette pin was cold against his heart. There it was. There was the bullet.

By the time he had regained enough wits to reply, a wiry Aurelian had already put her hand on Sapphira’s wrist, and was pulling her away from him across the endless gulf of the cathedral floor. Behind the oily refractor field, Tarpeian was smiling - openly now; a tight, wolfish smile of victory.

I love you too. Glabrio realised. And with that clarity, he went for his gun.

A cold metal hand clamped down hard on top of his, pinning it to the holster.

“I know.” Crenshaw hissed in his ear, and the proximity of his blank aura made Glabrio want to retch. “We will retaliate, but not now.”

“When!?” Glabrio snapped, not caring if the Aurelians heard.

“When we have the opportunity.”

And when will that be!?

For a moment, he thought he saw a spark of kindred resentment in the major’s eyes. Kally. He knows what it’s like. And then he realised, with an unsettling twinge that had nothing to do with the major’s blank aura, that the major’s anger wasn’t directed entirely at Tarpeian. Yes, he knows what it’s like to have Kally sent away...and he knows that it was the Lady and me who enabled it. He would find no alliance there.

“Marc?” Glabrio snapped, rounding on the other agent. He understands rage. He knows what has to be done.

He bored his intent into Marc’s eyes, seeing his anger reflected back in one green eye and one milk-white bionic. But Marc just twitched his head; the subtlest of negative shakes.

“Remember what Machairi used to say, Ri.” he said, with an obvious effort. “Smarter, not harder.”

Glabrio saw a flicker of movement on his left as Kelly looked up, but before either of them could fully process Marc’s words, Tarpeian tapped his golden staff against the ground, tilting it to point towards Kelly.

“You. Go and collect the sister’s formal robes. She actually needs to look like a sister, for once.”

+ + + + + +

Kelly’s heart was thumping in her ears, her mind lashing around like a rat in a cage as she tried to think of a way out - threatening, running, fighting; they all circled back to the centre of the maze and the same inescapable outcome: Sapphira being ripped away from them. The only variable was whether the rest of them came out of the encounter alive or dead.

If I can get away from this one… She glanced aside at the Aurelian escorting her, weighed her own wiry build and limited MMA training against the muscular, sharp-eyed woman next to her, and didn’t like the odds of that course either. The ministorum might forbid its priests from keeping a standing force under their command, but Tarpeian’s bodyguards were clearly pushing the very limits of the decree - the woman looked like she had been through several warzones and collected part of her equipment from each. Her flak vest bore the golden sun of Aurelias Prime. Her marksman’s autogun was Margin pattern, her ammunition worn crossbelt-style in the manner of a Mordian fusilier. She wore a revolver on her hip, slung on a star-buckled belt like some Gunpoint outlander, and the knife strapped to her thigh…

...was Casterian. Kelly had seen the distinctive pattern-welding on Tomas Prinzel’s sword, and had heard him speak proudly on the Casterian tradition of welding their sword cores from bundles of twisted and untwisted steel. She would have recognised the striations and the starlike knots running down the centre of the knife anywhere.

For the first time, she looked at the frateris woman’s face. Her tan features were a professional mask, but there was tension in them. Her lips were pressed together just a little too tightly. Maybe she doesn’t like what’s happening either? Kelly decided to take the gamble - it was all she had left.

She moistened her dry lips. “Soldier…”

The woman glanced sideways at her, wary. “I ain’t no soldier.” she refuted. “I’m with the frateris militia.”

Her accent was painfully familiar to Kelly; a guttural Gunpoint drawl. But there was a hint of something else mixed in with it - something even more familiar.

Kelly glossed over the semantics of titles. The militiawoman’s attention was all she had really been wanting.

“I want you to promise that you’ll look after Sapphira for us.” she said, quietly.

The other woman’s mouth twisted. “Well see, that’s a little outta my hands, agent.”

Kelly clocked her discomfort, and went all in.

“Swear it.” she urged. “On your Casterian honour.”

As she had hoped, the woman’s stride notably slowed, her eyes widening in surprise before she controlled her expression. “The fuck did you...?” she asked guardedly.

“Swear it.” Kelly pressed. Sometimes the shadowy mystique of an all-knowing inquisition had its uses, and she played it to the hilt now.

The frateris shifted from foot to foot, uncomfortably. “No promises,” she warned, “I mean, I’m not really a...but I’ll do what I can, a’ight?”

That was the best that Kelly could have hoped for.

+ + + + + +

Glabrio’s ears were ringing as he stared down the arched corridor where Sapphira had disappeared: down into the catacombs of the cathedral, and the twisting tunnels that would no doubt lead her to a waiting transport and then offworld beyond his reach - perhaps forever. He clenched his fists, trembling as his nails dug bloody grooves into his palms. He felt weightless, like his mind had escaped and was swimming free of his body.

A rhythmic sound off to his left started him out of his horrified trance. He turned his head, and saw the sari-clad figure of Avani Kol bringing her hands together in a slow, sarcastic clap. Her eyes were fixed through the shimmering refractor field towards Tarpeian.

“Well played, cardinal.” she said, her high gothic clipped and toneless. “I’m actually glad that you decided to come here personally. I’ve been meaning to ask you about my daughter.”

Tarpeian squinted down at the small woman, suspiciously. “And who are you?”

The hands that lady Kol had been clasping in front of her lowered slowly to her sides. “Avani Kol.” she answered. Glabrio saw Tarpeian’s posture shift, clenching his fists at the familiar surname.

“And my daughter is Lakshmi Kol.” the lady continued. “Her ship was attacked en route to Baraspine.”

Tarpeian composed himself. “My condolences on your loss, but I fail to see what that has to do with me.”

“Really?” Avani scoffed coldly. “You’ve hated my family ever since my brother outsmarted you on Sarus.”

Glabrio glanced around, and saw Marc already watching Avani as he caught on to what she was doing.

“You are mistaken.” Tarpeian growled thickly. “That preening little snake never outsmarted me.”

The acolyte standing to Tarpeian’s right, a woman with elegant ropes of black hair and a dusting of freckles across her broad nose, had stopped smiling. Avani’s own smile was poisonous. “Nevertheless, your rivalry was hardly a secret. One might wonder how a Patriot cruiser was in the perfect place to intercept her ship, way out at the Apogee jump point, when the rest of the crusade fleet warped in right over Baraspine.”

“It sounds tragic, my lady.” the frateris commander broke in, his smirk matching Avani’s for venom. “If you wish, I can see to it personally that your children are recovered safely? It would allow you to focus on your own security.”

“You’re welcome to review my security any time you wish, sir.” Avani responded sweetly. “I trust you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

The frateris commander sketched a slow bow. “Personal safety is never a permanent state of affairs, my lady.”

“Quiet, Gideon.” the woman beside Tarpeian warned.

“Don’t worry confessor, I understand your friend’s meaning.” Avani replied archly. “He means recovered in the same way the lord cardinal means it when he launches a rescue mission.”

Tarpeian huffed and waved a hand, turning aside. “I have no idea what you are talking about, lady Kol.”

“I think you do.” Marc broke in. “Just like you know exactly what happened at the convocation.”

“The Emperor will forgive you in your grief,” Tarpeian snarled, biting down at the end of each word. “But I would have evidence before making such spurious accusations, agent.”

“I have plenty. So many of your personal enemies at one convocation must have been a tempting target. You’re not as careful as you think, heretic.”

“You with your penitent’s brand dare call me a heretic?” Tarpeian spat. “You will address me with respect!”

“I’m addressing you with the respect you’re due, lord cardinal. I’m calling you a liar, and a traitor to the Imperium.”

“I am the Ministorum in Adrantis!” Tarpeian thundered.

The woman beside him snatched at the lord cardinal’s sleeve. “Dad!” Glabrio heard her hiss.

She knew as well as Glabrio did that Tarpeian had blundered. The interrogator saw his chance and took it.

“Really?” he smirked, and raised his gaze towards the circling recorder-skulls. He brought his eyes back down onto Tarpeian, crushing all of his grief and guilt down into a diamond-hard point. “I thought that office belonged to pontifex Albinius.”

Another one of the robed acolytes behind the field tugged at Tarpeian’s elbow. “Your radiance, we should go.”

“I’m sure you were hoping that he would die at the convocation too.” Glabrio shouted after them as they began to hurry back into the apse. “Was that bad luck, or did your cat’s paw Carson screw up?”

Tarpeian threw off his acolytes and whirled, unwilling to let the challenge go unanswered. “And just who is Carson?” he spat.

“You don’t know that name? What about Yannick?”

The blur of the refractor field turned Tarpeian’s teeth-clenched snarl into something inhuman. “Enough!” he roared. “All this amounts to is slanderous speculation! Speculation thrown by the failures who allowed this rebellion to occur in the first place! No-one of worth...no faithful servant of the Emperor will give the slightest thought to your blasphemy!”

The cardinal turned and stormed away in a swirl of red, disappearing through the golden door at the north side of the apse.

Glabrio stared after him for a moment before snapping a hand at his team. “We’ve got work to do.”

I’m coming, Saph. I don’t know how yet, but I’ll get you back from that bastard.

[dakkagor]

"I was lucky. I was just lucky."

Moderati Tamerlan Thorell sat staring into the middle distance, a hot cup of ration drink in his hands, reflective saviour shroud over his shoulders. A ragged beard had grown over his tattooed face, obscuring the spider and hourglass symbology of the Legio Arachnus, the famed Iron Spiders.

He looked up to Hange, pale, drawn, wearing a black armband of mourning over her uniforms left arm, and shuddered.

"Just lucky. When it all happened, they must have planned almost everything. Data chaos. I was. . . late. My plugs had developed a rash, they were worried about a bacterial infection. The medicae held me up to do a final wash and dose me with antihistamine, see if it was an allergy to a lubricant compound."

"Its common." Hange muttered. To Thorell, she seemed a million light years away. The hulking cybernetic warrior women at her shoulder seemed much more present. Much more threatening.

"My Princeps, seeing the data chaos on the surface, the fighting, moved Culmus Mortem and the Knights to full alert. Octavius, Eugene and Tomas all went ahead. I saw them from the door to the main bay, as I was getting my suit on. They just. . .they just gunned them down. Right in the middle of the bay. I ran. Holy Cog of mars, I just ran."

"You aren't built for close war, Moderati Tamerlan. It was the logical action." One of the warrior women said. It was probably meant to be comforting, a forgiveness. It didn't feel like it. He gripped the mug a little tighter.

"Me and a few other loyalists hid, tried to save other key crew." He swallowed. "We failed. They executed the Scions, broadcast it over the stations noosphere and vox links. Them, and their families. Down to the children."

"Do you want vengeance?"

He looked up sharply. Hange was staring somewhere past him. The words had barely been a whisper.

"Yes. But more than that. . .I want to make my survival mean something."

"It will." Hange said, focusing on him for the first time. "It will."

++++++

The cat was staring at her. From her memory, its pleading, wet eyes met hers and warned her.

Blood cannot wash out blood. Death cannot cure death. This war will consume you all.

She was standing on the stations skin, in her own, real body, clad in a voidsuit. Sodium lamps burned on gantries as tech priests scuttled over the radioactive wreckage of Furvus Maria.

No survivors. Hinzer was also dead, his knight completely destroyed. The twins had both survived, though Anna was currently undergoing cybernetic surgery to replace her shattered arm and leg. Skitarii losses ran into the hundreds.

She had been ignoring increasingly needy pleas for her attention, from the surface, from her subordinates. But she needed to look at this body, in state, to decide what to do next.

Finally, she felt the moment come to her. Her grief passed, leaving behind only fury. Indignation. A full sense of the monstrous betrayal that had been inflicted here. The path was clear.

She dismissed a few messages, then found the one she wanted.

"Hector."

+Yes Princeps.+

"Permission is given for maximum extraction of resources. No quarter, no mercy."

+By your command.+

Next, she addressed the tech priest sorority that stood with her, mourning Furvus Maria, awaiting her orders.

"Salvage her weapons, re-equip Culmus Mortem and Lupus Vengea with a plasma plastgun each. The rest . . .inter the rest right here. Let her final rest be under the Omnissiahs stars."

She turned away as the Tech priests started forwards. She ignored the tears that streaked down her face as an all too human weakness.

++++++

There are a lot of people on even a moderately sized Imperial station. On something as sizable as the Perinetus shipyard, there are millions of bodies, even after the carnage of a full scale revolt, and the following bloody suppression.

Exactly ten thousand of those men, women and children were herded into cargo bay kappa-11. Lines of Sirenia Skitarii stood at one end as the portals behind them shut, and for a moment there was a hush as the crowd, mostly menials, but more than a few of the surviving freedom fighters, waited to see what would happen.

Hector Rho looked down on the crowd from a stack of armoured containers, surrounded by bodyguards and snipers. The line of vanguard skitarii in front of him was three soldiers deep, and the helots and serfs did not approach too closely, creating a ragged gap between the stations population and the purple and cream robed skitarii.

"Menials of Perinetus." His voice was carried by the vox pickups, and echoed and boomed around the bay. "You have been found guilty of sedition, treason, or by inaction, allowing sedition and treason to bloom amongst your fellows. Princeps Hange Zoerrin, in her mercy, has given you the chance to redeem and save your souls in the sight of the Omnissiah and the Emperor. The strongest amongst you will serve as Skitarii, replacing our casualties. Those unfit to serve in battle will labour on our wargear, weapons and engines of war as technomats or servitor classes. And those not yet young enough to serve will be taken for testing to see what role they can be moulded for in the future. Choose to serve, or we will carry out the Omnissiahs judgement upon you."

There was a long, deadly pause. There was some muttering, some cries for mercy. The silence was broken by a cry of anger, and a hurled chunk of metal that clattered from a skitariis helmet and caused the warrior to stumble.

"We are not slaves! We are not parts!" Someone yelled. The cry was taken up, and more debris was hurled at the line of skitarii.

He sent out the order. He had calculated that a show of force would allow for an acceptable rate of raw material loss.

The first line of skitarii snapped up their radium carbines with mechanical precision as the mob surged towards them, and opened fire. Firing at full rate, they swept the weapons back and forth, hard rounds cutting fans of devastation into the crowd, which stumbled and recoiled like a single, wounded organism.

Magazines empty, the front line knelt. The second line opened fire over their heads. The baselines now knew what was happening, their slow biology catching up with the bloody reality of the cull. The anger turned to panic as more were gunned down, and others crushed in the press or trampled by their fellows.

The third line unfolded stun batons, and waded forwards. With machine precision, they smashed the resistors down and hauled them away for processing as the first line stood, with weapons reloaded, and advanced to cover them. Anyone who fought back was shot, riot rounds breaking limbs or snapping ribs, but leaving their victims alive.

Finally, the fighting died down, those who had given up and those who had surrendered dragged away in chains by servitors and tech-provosts, the injured loaded onto flatbed haulers and taken away to the skitarii's field refit centers.

Finally, the dead where shunted to one side by repurposed servo-lifters. They would be processed for field rations.

"Bring in the next ten thousand." Ordered Hector Rho.

++++++

Ignis Four Kappa was hunting. Her head was filled with divine chatter, the words of the Prophets, and of the Primes. Her limbs were remade in shining chrome and polished plasteel, her organs bulwarked with plastek and ceramo-carbon. She was reborn, as close to the machine as one of low birth could hope for. She could see in all directions, stride tirelessly for days, and augmit deadly pulses of murderous code that stunned and crippled the unbeliever.

All she had had to pay was most of her organic body. A fine trade.

+Squad Ignis, redeploy to quadrant aleph-two-five. Attempt by menial resistors to break into armoury in process. Addendum: live capture priority+

+By your command!+

She laughed cruelly as her squad hurtled down an access vent, plunging through deadly vacuum to reach their target. She dialed her taser goad down to stun, rather than fatal, and felt a delightful shiver of combat drugs through the remains of her organics. Oh yes, this would be good. But shamefully quick.


++++++

On the surface of Perinetus, it became known as the Month of Falling Stars. Debris, and thousands of bodies, continued to fall from the orbiting yards as the Legio Sirenia turned its hungry wrath on the orbital, despite the protests of the ground based Magi. Fully one in ten of the habitats vast population was repurposed or purged with brutal, machine like efficiency. Any who resisted were slain with unrelenting savagery, and many who would survive the month would linger only as empty shells, worked to near death to make good the losses of the Legio, traumatized by the slaughter unleashed upon them.

[dakkagor]

Crusade headquarters, Allocthon Crater
Hive Alda pacification operations ongoing

Crusade command was a busy place, filled to the brim with adjutants, runt officers, tech priests and a seemingly endless grey stream of administratum clerks. The more eoseteric arms of the Imperial war machine were also represented, with the occasional oddity representing an Inquisitor, merchant familia involved in the reconstruction or Rogue Traders operating as privateers. The flash of gold and a waft of incense would betray the presence of an Ecclesiarchy representative, while a black shadow and a bow wave of bodies clearing space would herald a member of the commisariat.

Savik was unsure which category to place himself in, where his influence and power would sit in the shifitng crusade heirarchy. He was an agent of the Mechanicus, true, but the Legio Sirenia maniple was, as far as he was aware, a unique asset in the crusades order of battle. That, he hoped, would give him some weight. In many ways the Legio force represented a very small fraction of the crusades strength, a Venator Maniple, 6 questoris in an ad-hoc banner, and maybe 3000 men and women under arms, with supporting elements. But Titans had a unique power, a unique scale of threat, that made them valuable beyond measure. And he was the liason for three of them.

Two now, he corrected himself. He let the sense of loss wash over and through him, processed it, then moved on with a silent prayer for the soul of Furvus Maria and her crew. He would miss Krista Lenz, her hard worn cynicism and her practical demeanour.

He threaded through the throng, two skitarii at his back, Prolik 3-Alpha and Prolik 99-Zeta. Macarro skitarii were named by the origin of their forge, with a long serial number and a batch rune, with the Alpha's being built for squad command. The genic line of Prolik Forge skitarii were bulked for strength and intimidation, and their uniforms were more ornate as befitted their role as an honour guard. Trailing behind the skitarii was his servitor assistant, Curis-78.

+Is it true that our brothers and sisters have taken heavy losses on the front, Executor?+ Prolik-3 augmitted, causing a few guard staffers to glance in their direction and shuffle away. The code burst was laced with frustration. While guarding an Executor was an honour, it also kept them away from combat, what they were built and trained for.

+It is true.+ he augmitted in response. +we are currently engaged in replenishment tactics to make good some of our numbers.+

+They will be inferior to a true Macarro born skitarii, Executor+ Prolik 99 rumbled. +Weak links in the chain.+

+No matter the technology or training, Skitarii, a man in a trench with a rifle is a man in a trench with a rifle. They'll give us back some of our strength in numbers and ability to absorb losses+

+As you say, Executor.+

The two lapsed into silence as they entered the main strategium. It was hot and close, such that condensation formed on coolant units that kept cogitator banks operational. Staffers were stripped to their shirts, uniform coats hanging from chairs and the corners of hololithic projectors, and stacks of plastek cups filled with the sludgy remains of recaff, tanna, or the dried residue of recyced water dominated flat surfaces throughout the strategium. Savik mused that the set up would be much more efficent if they used the noosphere for this, even as the tech priests in the room pinged him with messages of mourning and loss over the destruction of Furvus Maria.

He ascended the steps to the main command dias with his servitor assistant at his back. It was an elegant, female presenting model of brass, gilt and silver, only a thin sliver of augmented brain and spinal cord at its heart. The two skitarii stopped at the bottom of the command dias steps, and stood to attention as he reached the woman he was here to see, a woman with millions of lives in her hands, and her own dreadful calculus and politics to see them expended usefully.

"Executor Danton Savik. Thank you for your attendance." She dismissed the gaggle of officers around her with a wave of her cane.

"Ofcourse, Warmaster Andrea Caiser." He performed a bow which neatly hid his frown as the Warmaster activated a privacy screen, isolating them both from the outside with a wall of projected white noise, and cut him off from the electronic background noise of the noosphere. When he stood straight again, he subconciously ran his hands down his uniform, straightening out the creases as the Warmaster looked him up and down.

"What the fuck do your titans think they are playing at? I have a dozen furious reports from the Perinetus Magi about a literal rain of bodies from the orbital. I need those yards intact for the Navy if we are going to continue our prosecution of this war."

"We need resources, Warmaster. We have lost 50% of our Skitarii and one of our Warhound Titans. We can recover from those losses, and maintain our commitment to the prosecution of the crusade, if we accept some short term brutality of the civilian population of the orbital. Its infrastructure is intact and can be easily restaffed."

"So Ankari is right, you did capture another Titan. She wants it, you know."

"She can't have it. Perhaps she should be spending more time worrying where its packmate went. A Warhound titan is a big thing to lose, even for a Forge Mistress as incompetent and venal as Ankari."

"Any other officer would be at least somewhat apologetic, maybe even a little diplomatic, if their unit was currently raping and pillaging a vital war asset, Savik." The cane was in two hands now, like a discipline instrument, and Savik wondered what machine spirits of death lurked behind its very ordinary facade.

"Would it help?" He countered.

"No. It would just piss me off."

"Well, there you go then." He shrugged his shoulders. "We know what we are doing is potentially damaging to the crusade. Feel free to pin as much blame on us as you like, we are an outside force. You have a propaganda arm. Spin it as you please. No transmissions from the recedivists will be leaving the orbital any time soon to tell the sub sector otherwise."

"Good. What do you have for me?" She pointed the cane at the folder tucked under one arm of his servitor.

He smiled, and haptically ordered Curis forward, taking the folder and passing it to Caiser.

"A full report on the abominations of tech heresy Delzharian has inflicted on not just the hallowed engines of the Collegia Titanicus, but also the questoris war suits of House Kamil. We have detailed reports of augmented and forbidden cybernetica constructs as well, as well as debasements of sacred STC templates."

"Delzharian is dead." Caiser bluntly stated. "Some Inqusitorial agent saw to that where the Mechanicus failed."

"Yes, but his foul legacy survives. I doubt Perinetus has seen the last of his work, or the wider sub for that matter. After all, a significant maniple of Legio Fulminata escaped the orbital, and will likely link back up with traitor forces in the sub."

"You should have stopped them yourself, then." Caiser circled round the hololith, bringing up a representation of the sub-sectors warp lanes. "They can get practically anywhere in the region from Perinetus."

"If Ankari had not sent our warship support away, we would have caught and killed every last one of them on the orbital."

"And what do you have planned to counter them now?"

He nodded to the folder. "Send that, along with a recommendation for immediate action to Opus Macharia. It was a Legio Venator titan that we recovered from Perinetus, and it had been tampered with, its crew slain in open treachery. At the same time, send another copy to the Magi of the Lathes. Recommend a full investigation and data-stack audit of Perinetus, root and branch, to pull out all the last weeds of heresy. Give it the official seal of the Warmaster, so that it reaches the highest echelons as quickly as possible. I will add missives from my Princeps Senioris to the same affect."

"Legio Venator are unlikely to deploy to this theatre." Caiser pursed her lips. "They are already over-committed to the Margin Worlds Crusade." She held up the docket. "Is this likely to get them involved?"

"If it does not, nothing will." He shrugged. "Delzharian and his followers inflicted abomination on their titan, and his allies probably still have one held captive. Such an insult and provocation would move the Legio Sirenia to a war footing, and call in our supporting Knight households, to undo the dishonour and shame. The only reason they wouldn't commit. . ."

"Was if they couldn't." The Warmaster sighed, and pinched the bridge of her nose, before fixing Savik with her gaze. "And your titans? What will they do next?"

"Seek justice, Warmaster." He allowed himself a feral smile. "Those Fulminata bastards are going to wish they were never born."

[Jarms48]

[*Priority;*]
[*Top Secret;*]
[*Cadian 1010th Field Army;*]
[*Command Meeting*]

+++One Week Prior to Reclaimation+++

The room was quiet, one of professionalism rather than anxiety or anxiousness. Gathered today were all the members of the field armies command staff. From the General and his staffers, to each of the regiments Colonels. Together they sat, after having turned one of the transport vessels mustering halls into a functioning headquarters. Through the duration of their travels they had studied all the intelligence the administratum and munitorum had provided them. They knew their mission, their role in it. The importance of their field army and the contribution they had to the reclaimation.

"The Emperor smiles upon us," declared General Velius.
"For we are not alone in this endeavour. We find ourselves fighting alongside our peers in the Imperial war machine, whilst the warmaster has confirmed their fighting numbers do not match ours I have been assured their prowess does."

A hand rose in the distance, and then Colonel of the Cadian 356th independent super-heavy company stood from his chair.

"Against an entire sector, General? Does this not seem inadequate? Telfus after all was but one planet. Whilst I can say for a certainty that my tanks are ready to serve Emperor and Imperium, I'd rather us not die uselessly in a war of attrition." The Colonel nodded his respects after speaking his piece and sat down again.

It was unless to complain now, they both knew that. The man simply wanted to voice his displeasure at putting his prized Macharius tanks on the firing line. Whilst they were no true Baneblades they made up for it with numbers. Their independent super heavy companies outnumbered the traditional Baneblade company 2-1.

"Need I remind you, Colonel. This is shock and awe. A reclaimation effort. We are to rapidly take key areas of importance. Keep damage to civilian infrastructure to a minimum and aid those innocents in need. We are not invaders. We are here to bring the peace." General Velius returned.

General Velius leaned over the table and took in each of his officers faces. None of them appeared to be afraid, of course, many of them would be they just kept it hidden within. He’d be lying to say he wasn’t as well, this was war, the fates of everyone in this room and the entire field army rested on his shoulders. To an extent the expectations of a warmaster he knew nearly nothing about and the lives of the Adranteans as well. This campaign would be better than Telfus, they were all veterans now.

"We are surgical instruments in this conflict. Think of us as a medicae officer cutting away a cancer. The planet is merely the body and soul. We're here to cure it." General Velius stated, his voice full of prestige.
“I urge you to keep your men and women training for the next week. Increase their rations and see if this hulk of a vessel has some booze. Let them have some fun before we make landfall.”

General Velius stood from his chair and began a slow walk out of the mustering hall. Around him surprised, his bodyguards hurriedly stirred and fell in beside him. The General paused and turned back to face his officers.

“Oh, and don’t forget to practice your Adrantean common tongues. We’re winning hearts and minds down their ladies and gentlemen. The locals have an appreciation when you make an effort. Dismissed.” Velius finished.

The accompanying officers stood in unison and gave salute. “Forever onwards. Ave.”

[Jarms48]

[*Cadian 1010th Field Army;*]
[*2433rd, 1st Infantry Company*]
[*Captain, Jacktious*]

+++Five Days Prior to Reclaimation+++

The day was theirs, a brief reprieve before the fighting started and the training resumed. Many of them had gotten drunk the night before, a celebration after the brass gave them their final orders and removed the limits from their alcohol rations. Captain Jacktious left his men of the 2433rd 1st infantry company at ease, they didn't need him. Many of the troops were old friends or even family. That's how the recruiters along the grain-belt met their quotas with promises of pal battalions, he could remember the posters.

Who better to watch your backs? Keep your eyes on those closest to you. The PDF keeping family strong, together. It all sounded rather nice, serving the Cadian PDF and staying close to those you cared about. Even being garrisoned at local bases. That all changed once they released the truth, and entire local communities of enlistees were then pulled out of the PDF and put into the Guard. With a single strike of a pen, the townships and rural farms of the belt had lost a generation.

He put those thoughts at the back of his mind. Instead Captain Mathew Jacktious focused on the sound of his footfalls. He wanted to see an old friend. His travels took him from the barracks of the field army's infantry regiments to the lower levels of the field army's armoured regiments motor pools. It was loud, many of the tankies preferred to stay with their vehicles even during downtime. Around him he could see well used sleeping bags gathered onto the top decks of leman russ tanks, tools scatter around tool boxes, welding sparks coming from under the hulls of machines as the tankers attached addition applique to the under hulls from whatever scraps of metal they could get their hands on.

Some of the tankies he walked past gave him dirty looks, there was often resentment between the infantry and armoured units. They took to calling the infantrymen as poor bloody guardsmen or PBG's for short. Jacktious took no notice of the extra attention. In the end everyone understood they'd be working closely together, each of them was an individual spoke of the wheel and without the other the wheel would grind to a halt.

Mathew slowed, seeing the tell-tale name of My Fair Lady painted onto the off-side of the battle tanks turret. He could hear tinkering and talking. Some of her crew sat beside the hull laughing and sipping tin cups of re-caf. On the other side of hull was Jannet, his counterpart. The woman who accompanied his company throughout Telfus. Hands and face covered with grease, wearing olive coveralls instead of their standard uniforms.

"Out of the frying pan and into the fire, aye Jannet?"

"If it isn't Matthew, do you need my tanks to pull you out of proverbial fire again?" Her return was sarcastic, filled with a humour that developed between long standing colleagues.

"I think that credit still goes to the space marines." Matthew returned.

"A single squad and librarian against a planet? I would doubt their contribution changed much over the course of the war. They only assisted in taking the capital, then they fokked off like they always do." Her voice sounded slightly upset.

"Aye, I can't give them all the credit. However, you can't deny it was good for morale, and you also can't deny the fact that we've actually seen the angels of death up-close and in person."

"They're shorter than I expected, the statues always make them seem gigantic." Jannet quipped, her bubbly self already returning.

"And yet, taller than I expected. Let me remind you that your point of view is coming down from an armoured cupola."

"Oh, I'm aware. Your view coming from a PBG." She smirked, and gave his shoulder a light punch. "I can't think of a PBG I respect more than you."

She paused, thinking.

"So, what was life for you back home. You know, before all this?" Antheia said, outstretching her arms and pointing to the room for enthesis.

"Farmers and weekend reservists. Lived out near Kasr Eaghton. Drove land crawlers, helped the folks pick crops, sprayed pesticides, sometimes we'd help the dispatch officers deliver produce to the warehouses. Then on the weekends we'd go to the local PDF mustering grounds. Do drills until dark. For some reason I enjoyed that more than the remedial farm hand work, so I joined up. What's your story?" Matthew asked.

"Mechanic, born and bred. Lived out near Kasr Easkerton, went to church school. Parents use to joke they'd make a Sororita out of me. You know that old saying? Cadians learn to field strip a las-rifle before the age of 10? Well, I was field stripping, polishing and las-blasting tin cans by 7. I stayed for awhile fixing cars and tractors, but this starry eyed little girl wanted to see the universe.

So I joined the PDF, my fondness for all things mechanical put me into the armoured corps. Started as a loader, got pulled into the Guard and moved my way up." She said.

"Kasr Easkerton, only a few hours drive away. Makes sense why we're all here."

"That's right, grain-belt boys and girls the lot of us. Shame." Antheia returned.

"What's a shame?"

"That it took this long for us to have this conversation."

"We're in the Guard, Telfus had us occupied, orders kept us focused. Then we got assigned to this reclaimation, training and re-training. Never a dull moment." Matthew stated.

"Good luck out there, Matt. Ave." Antheia gave the sign of the aquila.

"Aye, good luck to yourself, Ant. Forever onwards." Matthew returned the gesture.