The Inquisition

[Lady_Canoness]

Thanks D!

 

Your points on Aquinas are well made. I'll admit that he is probably the hardest character I've tried thus far since he has to be both human (so that he can be related to and understood) and superhuman (because, as you pointed out, he's a space marine AND a Librarian). He is also a central character with a very big role to play, so comments on him are very helpful. I am toying with the idea of infiltration-style operations in which he would hang and provide psyker support since I don't fancy a big guy with a large force staff is all that sneaky!

 

I'm glad that you're liking where the story is going! I've got a notepad full of ideas and story-lines, so hopefully you'll keep enjoying the ride!

 

-L_C

[Lady_Canoness]

Here we are with part 6 of the Inquisition.I apologize in advance for whatever typos I may have missed as familiarity makes glazing over errors easier :P

 

 

*part 6*

 

 

Leaving Tenantable felt as if it was long overdue, and as Patroclus cast off from her mooring in high orbit Godwyn felt no remorse while watching the brown planet as it shrank behind them. A miserable ball of dust and dirt, Godwyn had done her part to ensure that it would get a new lease on life and be given a chance to start with a clean slate. She had recommended a full investigation into the administration on Tenantable and a tightening of its trade-laws to choke out the corrupt industrialist. If that were achieved, then the rebellions and revolts would eventually cease as a new peace and stability was allowed to take root and grow. Perhaps, one day, the scars of the past would heal, and the memories of years of oppression and despair would cease. Only time would tell.

She had sent off her report via one of Columbo’s astropaths shortly after boarding Patroclus, and soon thereafter had received a confirmation of reception as well as a personal note of gratitude from the sector consul on Panacea. A job well done, it had said, and it felt like one too. She had also sent word to Lord Inquisitor Roth requesting information on Inquisitor Pierce. He was evasive in his reply, however, and requested that she return to Panacea as soon as possible so they might discuss the matter face to face. The next step after Tenantable was now clear, and she had even managed to recruit another asset to her staff.

So far as Godwyn was concerned, Grant was a sound choice for an Inquisitorial attaché – or ‘henchmen’ as they were sometimes called. He was obviously intelligent and cool under fire as was any commissar in the Emperor’s service, but Godwyn also thought him to possess an eager willingness to fulfill the Emperor’s Will which caused him to volunteer his service on Tenantable without question, and again to join the Inquisitor’s company when she invited him. He was also quite personable and did his best to merge with the Inquisitor’s cohorts without causing any friction. Best intentions aside, however, the reaction of Godwyn’s crew was understandably mixed.

Striker was very supportive of Godwyn’s choice to bring the Commissar along, and seemed to enjoy having another trained soldier on-board. They also had quite a bit common as both were about the same age (give or take a few years), had been raised by the Schola Progenium, were commissioned officers in Imperial service, and now working in the service of the Holy Inquisition.

Lee and Sudulus, on the other hand, were less than thrilled by the Commissar’s inclusion, though Godwyn was fairly certain that their sentiment did not extend so far as actual dislike. Officers – and especially commissars – had a reputation for being pompous and holier-than-thou, after all, though hopefully time would dispel whatever notions they harboured.

Aquinas was, unsurprisingly, indifferent to the Commissar, for while he did acknowledge Grant as a skilled individual, he had expressed reservations about the Commissar’s ability to adapt to Inquisitorial operations, and whether or not the rigid indoctrination of commissariat training could be so easily supplanted when duty demanded it.

Regardless, the Patroclus was two weeks travel from Panacea and Godwyn fully intended to make the most of the time she was given.

 

* *

 

The Patroclus moved from moved from real-space into swirling nightmare of the Warp during the night-cycle of the first day of transit, jarring Godwyn from her sleep in a sweat. Only psykers could perceive the warp as a tangible thing, but even non-psykers could feel it like a lurch in the pit of their stomachs when a ship passed from the void of space into the Sea of Souls that was the Warp.

Sitting upright in her bed and feeling the momentary nausea subside, Godwyn looked out the porthole opposite the foot of her bed and saw the stars gently listing by. Obviously they weren’t really stars as the Warp was a mass of roiling insanity that could drive a man mad by just looking upon it, but Columbo had seen fit to have projectors installed underneath all the automatic warp-screens for the comfort of his passengers and crew. Her breathing became a little easier as the cool air in her room brushed against the flash-sweat that clung to her exposed skin – clever Columbo; it was working.

Sliding free of the covers, Godwyn put both feet on the floor and stood up. She was wide awake now – as good a time as any for a nightcap. Wiggling her toes on the comfortably cool floor, she pulled on a night-robe before opening the door to the common room, which was dark save for the light coming from the artificial space-scape on the large view port, and crossing to the small liquor cabinet poised at the end of a large sofa to poor herself a generous glass of cognac on the rocks.

The clink of the cold ice against the glass, the sweet smell of the fine brandy, the –

“Can’t sleep, Inquisitor?”

She nearly dropped the glass and had to catch herself against the cabinet as she choked on the cognac.

She should have known better than to think the room was empty!

“Dear Holy Emperor, Aquinas!” she hissed, careful not to wake the others in the adjacent rooms. “If I didn’t know better, I would say you were doing that on purpose!”

The Librarian was sitting comfortably in a large armchair in the far corner of the common room near the door – the only chair in the room that would actually support his size and weight. How long he had been sitting there she had no idea, but he was still fully armoured and sitting with his fingers arched in a pensive repose. She made a mental note to always check that chair in future.

“I take no personal pleasure in it,” his serpentine voice replied from the shadows, “though I believe it preferable to announce myself than watching you in silence like some letch.”

Emperor forbid he ever become one of those. Godwyn sat herself neatly on one of the sofas facing the Librarian from across the room and crossed her legs while keeping her back perfectly straight. She looked into the darkness where she thought is face would be while under the prickling sensation that he was looking right back.

“Why aren’t you asleep?” she asked. The Space Marine seemed to make a habit of staying awake, and though it had never bothered her before, now Godwyn thought herself entitled to know.

“I am a space marine,” Aquinas answered her, “my physiology does not require rest like yours,” and, after a pause, he added; “and neither does it require stimulation of the flesh. Your concerns are unwarranted.”

Even the darkness she felt her cheeks redden: had her suspicions – as momentary and foolish as they were – been that obvious?

“We have also entered the Warp,” he continued, “and what ails you in this state ails me tenfold.”

“Is that why you were so silent at supper tonight?”

Earlier that night, Master Columbo had warmly invited all his guests as well as his senior staff to a banquet in the seigneurie. It had been a wonderful occasion of delectable food and drink which ended only when Sudulus had decided he’d climb onto the table and try to perform a dance he’d once seen in a questionable video.

“No,” Aquinas corrected her, “I simply do not take as much enjoyment from food and drink as others do.”

“Did you ever like it before you were a space marine?” She didn’t know where the question had come from or why she had asked it. His life before becoming one of the Astartes was really none of her business, and in retrospect she really hoped that she hadn’t offended him.

“I am two-hundred and sixty-eight years old,” he said, his tone flat. “For the first nineteen years of my life I was afraid of going to sleep lest I wake up screaming, or of touching those I loved lest I kill them with my hands. I enjoyed nothing before I became a space marine.”

“I… I’m sorry,” she managed, instantly regretting asking the personal question even more than she had before.

“Do not be sorry,” he replied coolly, “I am not.”

She hastily took long draw from her glass as if losing herself in the liquid would somehow smooth over her blunder. It was strange: the question was obviously a mistake – which she freely admitted – yet at the same time she couldn’t help but feel closer to the space marine as a person. He was human, after all – superhuman, yes, but human.

Maybe it was the drink, but she felt a pleasant warmth spreading through her all the same.

“I was afraid when I was a child too,” she murmured, finishing her drink and setting it on the small coffee table in front of the sofa. It was a funny feeling, sitting in the calm starlit darkness of the common room sharing childhood stories with a space marine. She found it hard to keep a smile off her face.

They sat in silence for a few moments. Aquinas asked nothing of Godwyn, and she said nothing in return as to not disturb the comfortable silence.

“You should get some sleep,” he said eventually. “There is much to do and to discuss come tomorrow.”

 

 

Aquinas wasted no time the following morning, and as soon as they had finished the breakfast served in the common room, the Space Marine suggested Godwyn walk with him in the upper galleries while the others split off either to the libraries, gun-ranges, or any other of the amenities provided aboard the Patroclus.

On the top-most level of the ship beneath the superstructure, the galleries ran the length of the ship on both starboard and port sides as a continuous promenade with majestic windows gazing out upon the void (or in this case, the projections of space on the inside of the protective screening) that reached fifty feet up to the ceiling. Traditionally noise was kept to a minimum on a ship’s galleries as they served as a place of leisure, much like a private park planet-side, where one could take hours strolling the carpeted length immersed in discussion while admiring the grand vista or stopping to rest at one of the numerous benches, sofas, or sitting areas that were placed around the five meter wide corridor. The Patroclus, of course, was no exception, and Hercule Columbo had spared no expense in making the upper galleries the most exquisite, luxurious, and of course comfortable, area of repose as could be.

Knowing Aquinas only ever said what was on his mind or nothing at all, Godwyn walked in silence side by side with the Librarian until they reached the upper promenade and began a leisurely stroll down the starboard side of the ship with not a soul, other than a solitary cleaning servitor, in sight.

“I believe now is the perfect time to discuss your role as an Inquisitor in the context of this and future missions,” Aquinas broke the silence with what was becoming his trademark candour.

Godwyn didn’t know how to respond to this. Was this an evaluation? She greatly respected the Librarian’s wisdom and insight, yet at the same time she often found herself bewildered by it.

“Go on,” she said after a pause.

“I mean no disrespect to your office or ability,” he apologized in advance, “but in all truth you are young and inexperienced, which I believe we should seek to remedy now that we have the time.”

She swallowed the lump in her throat and with it her pride. “How would we do that, given that I have only been an Inquisitor a relatively short time?” she asked, genuinely wishing to improve herself based upon the Librarian’s suggestions.

“As a student, you have learned your lessons well,” the Librarian began, his eye looking ahead and his hands held loosely behind his back, “but as an Inquisitor you need to break the mindset of a student. The student does things by the book; the Inquisitor realizes there is no book.”

Side by side with the Librarian, Godwyn reflected on this: if being by the book was how she was trained, and her training made her an Inquisitor, how then could she realize there was no book?

She asked him this.

“The Inquisitor is not like a guardsman, a governor, or even a space marine,” Aquinas explained. “From my experience, an Inquisitor is a unique and enlightened individual whose awareness of themselves and their surroundings, coupled with the authority of the Immortal Emperor, makes them who they are.”

He looked sideways at her as if to gauge her understanding of his words.

“An Inquisitor learns from what surrounds him. To be a true Inquisitor, and not a student, you have to pursue your own understanding. Being an Inquisitor is not part of who you are; it *is* who you are.”

“I *am* and Inquisitor,” she repeated.

Aquinas nodded; “You cannot act the Inquisitor; you are the Inquisitor, and an Inquisitor is what you are.”

“You are saying that this is a question of… mindset?”

He nodded again; “In essence, yes. You cannot think of what an Inquisitor would do, but what you would do. Yet it is not enough to simply think yourself an Inquisitor, but gradually know yourself as one.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Experience cannot be explained, but only experienced.”

 

Aquinas did not so much tell her the answer as show her where she could find it for herself.

“The Inquisitor’s allies are his or her greatest strength, and the reason why an Inquisitor may call upon any of the Emperor’s servants for aid. Use your allies not as weapons with which you defend yourself and attack your enemies, but instead use them as books from which you may learn and better yourself. Mind also that an Inquisitor who has learned from their allies knows best how to employ the knowledge of their allies in pursuit of their goals. Do not doubt that knowledge is power, and that mind will overcome what might cannot even begin to grasp.”

A strong mind with a willing – almost voracious – appetite for learning was what made an Inquisitor. A student learned from texts and tutors, yet an Inquisitor had to learn also from people and places. Places, Aquinas had confided in her, would come in time, but people were here now.

It wasn’t like any lesson she had ever been taught or any insight she had yet been given, but the more she spoke with Aquinas the more she understood it. Speaking with him, however, was just the beginning, and as wise as he was there were many things she would not be able to learn from him.

“Wise-men are the best teachers but the worst to learn from,” he told her, “for wisdom blinds those unprepared to wield it.”

With those words he took his leave and left her alone on the promenade gazing into the simulacra of the void, confident that she would seek him out if she had more questions. She didn’t keep track of how long she stayed there, walking up and down the seemingly endless galleries, but the more she turned his words over in her head the more certain she was that he was right, and when she returned to the common room for a late lunch she did so with a renewed sense of purpose.

 

For the rest of the second day, and most of the following two weeks, Godwyn turned her time and attention to her staff not as Inquisitorial servants, but as people. For hours at a time she would be with one or more of them doing everything from training and theory to playing regicide and musing about life.

Often times she’d be on the lower-deck gun-ranges with Victoria blasting off dozens of rounds while talking about weapons drills and combat tactics to the definition of a ‘good man’.

“Civilians can think whatever they want,” Victoria shrugged as she stripped down her hellgun to its bare components and examined their cleanliness, “some women like a man with big muscles or a big – ” the roar of Godwyn’s pistol drowned out the last word of the Captain’s sentence.

“To me,” Victoria continued as if uninterrupted as she closed one eye and sighted down the hellgun’s barrel, “a ‘good man’ has always going to watch your back no matter what kind of a mess you’re in. Dependable, reliable, and accurate.”

Other times she and Striker would go on mock commando raids through the cargo-holds and stage mock firing procedures as if of seek-and-destroy combat operations. It was serious for the storm trooper Captain, but her serious mentality also made it more valuable and fun.

“The one thing to remember,” Striker said, mopping her brow once they had finished a ‘search and rescue’ operation without being detected (the labour servitors and ratings had served as the ‘enemy’), “is that half the battle is always fought in the enemy’s head. For example, when most enemies see that they are fighting storm troopers, they expect us to come hard and fast, but we know that if they are expecting it they are also preparing for it. The trick is to do the opposite – to unbalance them,” she accepted Godwyn’s proffered canteen and passed it back to her after she had taken a long swig. “Anything you can do to mess with their minds will make them that much easier to take down.”

Sudulus would regularly give similar advice, and delighted in demonstrating his vast knowledge to the Inquisitor with the aid of whatever he could find around the ship.

“Most people consider locks and security devices to be very difficult to master and overcome,” the savant explained as he led Godwyn on an instructional tour of Patroclus’ lower decks. “Most people consider the primary purpose of security hacking or lock cracking to be gaining access to something they otherwise couldn’t gain access too, yet, in my experience, most people are wrong about just about everything.”

He stopped in front of a particularly worn-looking security door somewhere in Patroclus’ belly and beamed as if it were a work of art on display. “Truth be told, at least half of security work – if not more – revolves on making things so that other people cannot get through them. Take this door, for example,” he presented the door with a sweep of a bionic hand. “I cannot open this door as it requires a numeric code to be entered on this access panel,” he brought her attention to the panel with another sweep of his hand. “Suppose, therefore, that I do not have time to crack the numeric code, but, at the same time, I wish to make it so that the person who has the code can’t open the door either.

“Now then, I am aware that the default setting for eighty-percent of securable doors in the case of power failure is ‘lockdown’, which does not reset until the power source is restored. I am also aware that security doors – as an operational rule – rely on external power sources. Thus, if I wish to secure the door against someone who has the numeric code, I must remove the power source and force it into lockdown.”

He spun on his heel and proceeded to busy himself prying off several panels around the number pad with the implants in his fingers and snipping several wires. When he was done, he screwed the panels back in place, and once again turned to the Inquisitor. “As you can see, the door is now locked down permanently until the wiring is replaced. Very, very useful indeed!”

His mechanical and scholastic aptitudes were far more practical than mere ship-board vandalism, however, and it was with great enthusiasm that he explained – and later proved – how several Imperial construction standards could be craftily exploited.

“Everyone knows about air-ducts,” he explained one morning over breakfast in the common room while he scooped the pulp from a citrusy fruit with a tiny spoon, “but not many people know about drainage ducts. Common fact is that all interstellar ships are constructed with drainage ducts under the floors, as are – by convention – most orbital stations and groundside structures over a certain size. Now, these are by no means simple to access – as one typically has to go through a solid floor to do so – and are by no means safe – what with the chance of a flash flood in the ducts – yet if accessed, an infiltrator can,” he spun his spoon about idly in the air as he chewed and swallowed, “in theory, remain completely undetected.”

“S’ totally somthin’ you’d dream up, Sudulus,” Lee quipped from across the room where he had draped himself across one of the leather sofas. “ ‘alf the people ‘n this room couldn’ fi’ down ‘n there. Man needs t’ be a mouse!”

Lee Normandy, despite his typical nonchalant attitudes towards any kind of work-related activity that didn’t involve flying, driving, or either preparing to fly or drive, was surprisingly receptive to Godwyn spending time with him. She didn’t tell him, or any of her companions for that matter, about what Aquinas had suggested; there was no harm in them not knowing, and they wouldn’t feel as if she were putting them on the spot as a type of ‘appraisal’ of their skills.

For the most part, Lee liked playing cards with whoever was around. He, Godwyn, Sudulus, and any other person he could drag into the game, would sit around a table, in either the common room or somewhere else on the ship, and play Blind-man’s Bluff – a game for two or more where players tried to hoodwink the others into believing they were dropping pairs from their hand onto the deck without being called out as bluffing and having to pick up all the discarded cards, though if a player was falsely accused, then the accuser had to pick up all the cards in the deck, and the first player to have no cards in their hand was the winner.

“Th’ trick,” Lee explained, flushed with victory after winning yet another round, “is t’ be a good liar.”

He held up a hand to quiet Sudulus before the savant could start complaining again, and leaned back in his chair. He continued:

“Thing is tha’ mos’ people look t’ th’ face – ” he waved a hand in front of his grinning mug before locking his fingers and resting both hands behind his head, “ – t’ see if someone’s lyin’, bu’ tha’ ain’t th’ way t’ do it. Y’ gotta watch th’ body, ‘cause people act diff’rent’ly when they know they’s bein’ watched, eh? So when a bad liar ‘s lyin’ y’ll see ‘m act ‘ll funny-like, like ‘es tryin’ to act norm’l, righ’? Sudulus ‘ere tries t’ act ‘ll like a swindler – no Sudulus, ‘s true – so its real easy to spot ‘im.”

Once again the savant tried to protest, but Lee just frowned and shook his head in silence.

“What about me?” Godwyn asked, cutting over Sudulus’ arguments; “What gives me away?”

The pilot’s hazel eyes flickered over in here direction. “You boss,” he said, leaning forward with a weary grunt, “you’re too stiff. Y’ get ‘ll serious-like when y’re lyin’, see? Too tense – gives it righ’ away.”

The more she talked to the pilot, the more she felt an admiration for him growing on her. He wasn’t charming, in anyway regal, or physically attractive, but of all her companions Lee was the most worldly. He’d lived in the underbelly of Imperial society for most his life and was used to running with people who made their own rules – people with the skills of an Inquisitor but without the authority. He knew the talk, he knew the walk, and most importantly he knew the ins and outs of the system he had exploited and evaded for most of his years. She figured she would do well to learn from someone like Lee, as his type were often the type that could get things done regardless of conventional wisdom.

“Laws ‘re meant t’ keep idiots ‘n line,” Lee had once told her when she had asked him why he had so willingly broken Imperial laws when it was so easy to abide by most of them. “If y’re good, y’ don’t need laws, ‘cause y’re not abou’ t’ do anythin’ stupid. But now I’m wit’ you, I don’t need t’ break laws, ‘cause y’ break ‘em anyway n’ its called legal!”

Grant, the newest member of her squad, was, of course, the complete opposite of Lee and made for a very stark contrast of opinion.

An officer’s officer to the bone, Grant believed deeply in the values of duty and loyalty, and made it a personal mission to act as he believed others ought to act. Free from the dirt and dust of Tenantable, he dressed himself sharply and took the time to reintroduce himself to some of the finer things offered in civilised life. Sometimes Godwyn would find him reading Imperial history in his quarters while listening to some of the finer tunes of Columbo’s ship-board collection softly in the background, though at other times he would be training with Striker in the gymnasium where both officers could put their different skill-sets to the test.

“Most impressive, Captain Striker!” he boomed after the conclusion of their third consecutive duel.

Being Imperial officers, both Grant and Striker had been trained in swordsmanship while attending the Schola Progenium, though after three duels it had become apparent that Grant had kept up his skill with a sword while Striker had let it slide.

Winded, Striker let her practice blade fall to the floor with a clatter and sunk to a knee. It had been close, in Godwyn’s eyes, but, regardless of her speed and agility, Grant’s superior form had been the deciding factor in each bout.

“I think you’ve earned the right to call me Victoria,” Striker replied breathlessly, dabbing the sweat streaming off her face with her shirt.

The Commissar chuckled as he retreated to where he had deposited his towel and began mopping his own face and chest.

“How about you, Inquisitor?” he asked, glancing in her direction with a wide smile. “Would you be interested in a duel?”

Admittedly, Godwyn had never practiced swordsmanship in any form, and, after seeing the Commissar’s skill first-hand, realized there was a lot more to fighting with a sword than the hacking and slashing motions she had often witnessed.

“Lessons?” she compromised.

Grant looked considerate and jogged the suggestion back and forth across his mind, then flipping the sword mid-air and catching it by the blade, held it hilt forward for the Inquisitor to grasp.

“Lessons,” he agreed.

[Lady_Canoness]

Hot off the press is part 7of the Inquisition!

 

*Part 7*

 

The two weeks of passage went by quickly, and, in what felt like no time at all, Meridian was loosed from the Patroclus’ hold and descending into the soft clouds that shrouded Panacea. Steeped in natural beauty and as perfect as it had been when they saw it last, they flew low over rolling viridian hills and forests in full bloom under the rich pink of the morning sky as the approached Cornice from the east with her white towers growing ever taller over the horizon.

Entering the Cornice proper, they were welcomed into the embrace of a city just waking to meet the day. The skyways intertwining between her towers were bustling with activity even as droplets of dew still clung to the city’s white sheen, and in the soft shadows of the morning sun numerous cafes and restaurants seated their first customers of the day and looked out upon the morning commute from overlying terraces stretching up along the towers’ flanks.

The virginal city of Panacea, Cornice had never known unrest or violence on her streets, and her citizens lived on in a sheltered innocence of the reality beyond her skyline. Cornice was a city of hope, security, and prosperity where the spectre of the sword that loomed over Man’s domain went pleasantly unnoticed amidst the concerns of daily life. Indeed, as Meridian slowly navigated the sloping curves of Cornice’s towers and touched down in her appointed berth, the Inquisitor and her team were fondly greeted as if they were relics of an off-world age of darkness that had no bearing on Cornice’s moment of light.

It would almost be nice to live here – if one was content with a pleasurable blindness.

Seeing through the tapestry of elegant lies that the populace had spun for themselves, one could hardly miss the truth that Panacea – like the Imperium itself – balanced upon a knife’s edge, and that it was upon the fortunes of planets countless light-years away that Panacea would continue to rise or plunge into the abyss. In the Emperor’s realm of millions of worlds populated by billions of souls, thousands of men and women died daily protecting planets they had never heard of and faces they would never see of people who they would never know existed.

In an empire that would take generations of men to cross from one side to the other, could it come as any surprise that its people would lose their perspective? Was it any surprise that they would forget the names of the heroes upon whose backs the Imperium was forged? Was it any surprise that a people would think themselves invincible until the fires of war fell upon their homes?

To Godwyn, the only surprise came in witnessing it.

To be an Inquisitor was to see the Dominion of Man differently, and to know that but for the actions of a few exceptional men the Imperium would descend into darkness. To be an Inquisitor was to maintain a constant vigilance and fight a war without hope of victory to delay the inevitable.

There was no hope in the darkness that surrounded them – only an eternity of war in the constant struggle for survival in a hostile galaxy.

 

* *

 

Lord Inquisitor Roth was waiting on an open balcony outside his office when Godwyn was admitted to see him by an adjutant.

“You summoned me, Lord Inquisitor?” she asked, waiting respectfully back from the banister where the senior Inquisitor stood looking out over downtown Cornice. She had hurried to the Inquisitor’s office soon after landing, but, fast as she was, the pink morning sky had turned a menacing grey as a western front of storm clouds gathered in the distance with the threat of heavy rains.

Leaning against the rail, Roth peered over his shoulder before straightening up and walking casually towards her with a gentle smile.

“That I did, Inquisitor Godwyn,” he said he said quietly, coming to a stop in front of her prior to making a show of glancing over her person and genially extending a hand; “It is good to see you again. Brother Librarian Aquinas is not with you?”

Meeting his eyes, she took his hand and couldn’t help but feel a smile creeping into the corners of her mouth. Thought it had been little more than a month since she had seen him last, in the flesh Lord Inquisitor Vance Roth was more alluring than her recollection of him. Well dressed in a fitted brown leather over-coat with high cuffs and collar, the Inquisitor’s well-kempt and distinguished feature betrayed no hint of the man’s age, though at a glance he looked almost youthful in appearance.

“He said he had matters to attend to,” Godwyn replied, “though I could contact him if you wish.”

“No – no, that is quite alright,” Roth bobbed his head in an anxious nod, and, rubbing his hands together distractedly, walked back to the banister.

“To business then, Godwyn,” he said, once again leaning against the rail as he watched the storm approaching from afar; “I would have hoped to have good news after what you accomplished on Tenantable. No-one here knew about the extent of greed and mismanagement taking place on that world, but you uncovered it and delivered a solution that can be acted upon – with minimal resources, I might add. This should be a satisfying accomplishment, Strassen or no.”

He sighed; “But Pierce’s involvement makes things worse than I had expected.”

“Why?” Godwyn asked as the Lord Inquisitor turned his back on the city to face her. “What do you know about Pierce and his involvement with Strassen?”

“It’s what I don’t know what troubles me,” he said dryly, “but I’ll spare the inconsequential details and tell you that Inquisitor Pierce has a reputation of extremism that is well earned. He is cold, uncaring, and heartless and his morality is questionable at best, though, so far as I can tell, he is loyal and has many supporters within the Ordo Hereticus. If he’s in league with Strassen however…”

“Can we bring him in?” Godwyn asked, stepping up beside Roth at the banister. “Question him?”

“Not a chance,” Roth shook his head. “Unpleasant as it is, Pierce is well protected and trying to bring him in would only invite reprisal in more ways that one.”

“But if he’s working with Strassen we need to find out what he knows!” Godwyn argued.

“*If* he’s working with Strassen – so far we only have reason to be suspicious of him.”

“He’s my only lead! I have to know if he is involved. It – ”

“I said no, Godwyn!” Roth snapped, giving the young Inquisitor a hard look and warning her to let it be. “Besides, he’s not our only lead.”

 

“And what does he mean by that?” Sudulus quipped. “Does that mean we went to Tenantable for nothing?”

Grant shot him a look from the opposite side of where they were sitting in the back of the motor carriage. “It might be a set-back, Sudulus,” Grant said curtly, “but given the circumstances I would hazard to say the mission on Tenantable was a success.”

Sudulus gave him a sour look as if to say ‘of course you would think that’, but Victoria Striker interceded before either of the men could attempt to escalate.

“Need-to-know basis,” she guessed, but turning to Godwyn then added; “though what would an Inquisitor be kept out of?”

In truth there were many things an Inquisitor would not be privy to within the Inquisition. It was a common misconception for outsiders to think that all Inquisitors were peers, and that all would work together to defend mankind from the horrors of the galaxy. Many thought that Inquisitors were somehow superior forms of life to other ‘common’ human beings, and that their physical, mental, and spiritual prowess far exceeded those of normal people.

All of it was rumour, all of it was hearsay, and almost all of it was false.

Godwyn knew from experience that spent as much time watching each other as they did watching for heresy, and that greed was as common a motivator amongst the Inquisition as duty. Inquisitors were also human – and painfully so at times. The only reason they could be thought of as otherwise was because only the greatest or most terrible of Inquisitors received any shred of recognition, and for the few Eisenhorns, Czevaks, and Coteazs in the Imperium, thousands of lesser Inquisitors died alone and forgotten because they were not exceptional or lucky enough to survive to see greatness. Perhaps Inquisitors did have tremendous potential compared to common people, though few Inquisitors ever survived to see it realized.

Outside the motor carriage the storm had broken and rain poured down so ferociously that it obscured the windows and made a sound like ten-thousand fingers drumming against the top of the vehicle and one-hundred thousand palms slapping the pavement on the other side of the glass.

“It means that our search for Strassen has taken a turn for the worst,” Godwyn filled them in. Only minutes earlier she had received the news herself. It wasn’t all bad, but none of it was good. “It means that Strassen could be just one of several Inquisitors we don’t know about who have gone rogue.”

Dismayed, Sudulus groaned and Grant shook his head.

“The tip of the landmine,” Striker added her own metaphor as she looked out the window onto the washed-out skyway.

Of that all four were in agreement.

“What details do we have?” Sudulus asked at length.

 

“None of it is good,” Roth confessed as if in defence while Godwyn paced back and forth along the balcony, “in fact, I would not be mentioning it at all if I thought there was a chance that it didn’t have anything to do with our current predicament.”

“But instead it has everything to do with it, am I wrong?!” she replied testily.

“I would remind you of whom you are speaking to, Inquisitor!”

“Am I wrong?!” Godwyn repeated. “I thought finding Inquisitor Strassen at any cost was my purpose in this mission, but now you tell me that you have withheld the most telling piece of evidence? Evidence that would have more than likely revealed Strassen’s motivations instead of sending me on a ghost hunt?”

Godwyn referred to a text-book case of an ancient Inquisitor who spent all his resources and lost all his team in the process of chasing a figment of his imagination.

“Godwyn, this goes far beyond that and you know it! This is no childhood tale where everything is simple and straight-forward!” he snapped back testily. “If this information slips into the wrong hands it could mean a catastrophe and put our operations in this sector in jeopardy as the Inquisition tears into its own! Keeping control of the situation is *far* more important that searching for one Inquisitor!”

He paused for a moment in an effort to calm himself. Still fuming, Godwyn folded her arms and glared at him.

“I am not so egotistical as to keep you running about in the dark, however,” he continued, his voice once again steady and level. “I want you to succeed in this, Godwyn, though I want you to be well aware of how delicate this situation is. Can you do that?”

“Yes, I can do that,” she replied, still annoyed.

“Good,” he sounded relieved. “Now I should warn you that this will not be easy to hear nor easy to believe, but it is true, and if it became common knowledge, even within the Inquisition, the Warp could take us all because we would be finished.”

“Go on.”

“You have heard of Inquisitor Antivus Felix, have you not?” he asked somewhat warily.

 

 

“I have come across some of her published works, yes,” Sudulus replied with a nod to the Inquisitor’s question.

“Who is she?” Grant asked, looking back and forth between the savant and the Inquisitor as the motor carriage leaned into a long turn.

“I believe she is an expert on exodite eldar and their threat-level to the Imperium, yes? Or at least that is what I have read of her,” Sudulus explained with a small shrug as he tapped his chin with his index finger.

“Close enough,” Godwyn agreed. “She was an experienced Inquisitor known in the Ordo Xenos as a moderate with an interest in studying alien architecture.”

Sudulus raised his eyebrows with a look of interest which Godwyn understood as an indication that he wouldn’t mind meeting Inquisitor Felix and discussing the topic in detail with her. In this Godwyn had to disappoint him, however, which was a shame since Felix would likely have obliged him.

“But you said ‘was’,” Grant cut in. “Has something changed?”

“Officially Inquisitor Antivus Felix is missing,” she explained, “though in secret it is presumed that she is dead. Murdered.”

 

 

Godwyn approached this news carefully as Roth watched her from across the balcony for a reaction.

“How do we know this?” Godwyn asked slowly, “and how do we know that Strassen and Pierce were involved?”

“Again there is no official record,” Roth explained, “but I and two other Lord Inquisitors were given a report by one of the men who saw it done. Strassen and Pierce, as well as two other Inquisitors who I will not name, were implicated. I am certain that this report was genuine.”

“But you won’t reveal any of their identities?”

“As I said, this is a delicate matter.”

Roth was nervous, that much she could see, and if Vance Roth was nervous than there was a good chance that the information surrounding Inquisitor Felix’s demise was volatile indeed.

“Do we know why it happened?”

Inquisitor Roth let out a long sigh and his shoulders seemed to sag. “There were rumours that she was fraternizing with xenos. To what degree no-one knows, but there were some within the Ordo that suggested there was more to it than mere rumour. I don’t know what happened next, in fact I doubt anyone really does, but about four years ago Felix was somehow captured by the Inquisitors – two of which are confirmed to be Pierce and Strassen – and taken to a remote Inquisitorial oubliette where she was interrogated and eventually murdered.”

 

 

“The very thought of it leaves me cold,” Sudulus shuddered, squirming uncomfortably in his seat; “Inquisitors killing their own for Emperor knows what reasons… I can see why he’d want to keep it as a dirty little secret.”

Grant was perturbed. “Do we… know anything else?” he asked as he idly fiddled with his cap that was resting on his knees.

“We know the coordinates of the oubliette on feral world called Trajan’s Deep,” Godwyn replied, “and that our next objective is to search it to see what traces were left behind.”

“Did the Lord Inquisitor have any idea of what we might find?” Striker enquired.

“None. All he knows is that the oubliette has been decommissioned from use.”

“What about Pierce?”

 

 

“Inquisitor Pierce,” Roth repeated himself, “is only a *suspect*. We’ve got nothing on him, and even if we did I would not send you after him!”

“Lord Inquisitor,” Godwyn began again, beseeching Inquisitor Roth to acquiesce to her reasoning, “finding Inquisitor Pierce would prove much more valuable! He knows where we – ”

“Stop, Godwyn! Just stop!” he halted her mid-sentence with a warning gesture. “Without hard evidence to prove that Pierce is involved with Strassen we cannot make any moves against him! An accusation with no fitting evidence would see your career ruined, and possibly even see you killed – that is why I am asking you to *gather* evidence first!”

“But until I do you’ll let Pierce walk free?!”

“I will be watching Pierce,” Roth corrected her firmly. “Your suspicions and evidence of his activity on Tenantable is enough for me to do that.”

 

 

“And I suppose asking the Lord Inquisitor to run in Pierce for the murder of Inquisitor Felix is asking too much, isn’t it? Since that would invite the whole ceiling to cave in on him…”

Sudulus was thinking aloud long after the others had fallen silent, and was still going as the motor carriage pulled into the parking garage alongside the Imperial landing berths.

“…and we can’t have him assassinated as that would simply compound the problem. Oh dear – oh dear, what have we got?”

Godwyn opened the side door of the carriage and planted her feet firmly upon the pavement. “We have two hours until Aquinas said he would return,” she turned to address her savant as if answering his question, “so what do you say we get Lee and find somewhere to eat?”

“A most stunning induction!” Sudulus exclaimed with a wide smile – his mood flipping like a switch – “I do think that a most novel solution!”

Their load seemed just a little lighter once they started laughing again.

 

* *

 

More and more it felt as if they were passing life by as duty drove them from Panacea less than a day after they had arrived. In a few hours, the Patroclus was refuelled and resupplied. Shore-leave for the crew was cut-short, and all hands were ordered back to their stations to prepare to cast-off as Columbo’s vessel made good headway with Panacea to her stern into the open void.

“Trajan’s Deep, eh?” Columbo was muttering to himself with a sly grin as he studied the star-charts on the navigation deck on the Patroclus’ bridge. A mariner first and a merchant second, Hercule Columbo revelled in forging across space on improvised courses far off the beaten trade-routs.

His First Officer and Navigator were with him studying the star-charts, as were Godwyn and Brother Aquinas. Neither Godwyn nor Aquinas were experience space-farers in the same sense as Columbo’s bridge-crew, yet expressing an interest in how they would get to where she commanded was not only respectful to the experienced ship’s officers, but also a reminder that she was in charge – something crews could easily forget.

“I can’t say I’ve ever been out in that direction,” the Ship Master was tracing his finger across a section of the chart that lay to the galactic north of the sector.

“These two planetoids are airless rocks,” the Navigator, a thin reed-like man named Priestly, interrupted as he noted two marks on the chart. “Their gravity wells overlap as well,” he remarked, “and we can determine that their orbit is decaying. A likely cause of the asteroid debris located in this particular area of space.”

He rubbed his nose thoughtfully as all eyes rested upon him. “By my approximation there are two courses open to us,” he stated pointedly. “Either we drop warp here,” he stabbed his finger onto the chart before the pair of airless planetoids, “and navigate the debris fields for the duration of four or-so days, or,” he swept his finger in a long arc around the nearest star and looped it back to the marker that represented Trajan’s Deep, “we take the long rout and stay in continuous warp.”

“Estimated travel time?” Columbo asked, folding his arms and rocking back and forth on his feet.

“Three-and-a-half weeks through the asteroid field,” Priestly speculated with a casual shrug, “and maybe four-and-a-half to five weeks in continuous warp.”

Columbo considered the Navigator’s recommendations then said with a confident smile, “I would like to take on the asteroids myself. I think it would do the crew good to get back to some honest space-faring!”

The Navigator looked less than enthused by the Ship Master’s jibe, but didn’t make an issue out of it.

“Be advised that pirates and other scum often make their nests in such places,” First Officer Brent cautioned with a quick look to the Inquisitor as if seeking her agreement in the matter. Still dressed in his over-decorated military uniform, the First Officer continued to strike Godwyn as someone trying to distinguish himself amongst the background opulence of Columbo and his vessel. She didn’t think it did him any credit.

“One would be able to detect traces of activity in the area before walking into a trap, yes?” Aquinas asked as all eyes turned to look up at him. Even now, in their third voyage together, none of the crew seemed to be any more comfortable around the space marine than they had been on the first voyage, and ratings and officers alike would often do their utmost best to stay well clear of him. Even Columbo, a man who was warm and welcoming to the rest of Godwyn’s companions, appeared to lose the colour in his face when the Librarian spoke.

“In theory, yes,” the Navigator replied to the other psyker, though he found it difficult to look upon the Librarian’s face.

“It is possible,” Columbo spoke up. “Possible, but not always accurate.”

Aquinas seemed satisfied. “That will be enough,” he said.

“Yes,” Columbo said in summary; “quite,” he smiled. “However, the choice is yours, Inquisitor.”

They all looked at her expectantly.

“Asteroids are nothing you can’t handle?” she checked with the Ship Master.

“Nothing I am worried about, no,” he assured her.

“Then we’ll take the shorter rout.”

 

 

It had occurred to Godwyn partway through the first week of travel that antiques likely weren’t the only things Columbo collected, and apart from Captain Striker and Brother Aquinas, who were superbly equipped for combat, her squad was noticeably lacking in staying power.

“I must admit I am surprised you didn’t ask sooner!” Fisrt Officer Brent declared rather loudly as he led the Inquisitor and her team to Columbo’s private armoury. “We have a fairly sizable collection weapons and armour that I think you will find satisfactory.”

He punched in the code for the reinforced security door (with Sudulus discreetly watching him) and generously ushered them inside.

The First Officer had not been overstating himself.

Lee started to chuckle and clapped his hands together in anticipation, Grant’s eyes widened as he glutted himself on the collection just waiting to be appraised, and even Striker – who said she had come along only to offer advice – regarded the racks of assorted weapons with a gleam in her eyes and a smile on her lips.

Brent followed them in. “So you see,” he said with an introductory wave, “we have much to offer.” And indeed he did.

About the size of the common room, the armoury was filled with several rows of weapon racks and servicing tables. There were guns on display, unpacked crates of weapons and arms, stands covered with armour, and ammunition enough to last months. Rare weapons, antique weapons, illegal weapons – the Patroclus had them by the dozen. Some were big, some were small. Some had bi-pods, others tri-pods, and others still had belt feeds. Some had scopes, some only sights, and some with firing mechanisms so complicated it looked as if the firer might need special certification just to hold it.

Cassandra Godwyn was lost. She wanted a durable, combat-ready weapon supplement to her heavy pistol, as well as a light layer of body armour that she could wear under her coat without it being too obvious. Apparently, however, her vague ideas of picking and choosing something that fit her general requirements were completely lost under the arsenal laid out before her eyes, and she didn’t have the vaguest idea of where to start looking.

First Officer Brent was obviously an expert on firearms, and while Godwyn was staring at wonder down the rows of weapons, Michael Brent was already describing the specifications of different pistols to an over-enthusiastic Sudulus who was hanging on his every word. Currently the ship’s officer was introducing the savant to an exotic-looking needle pistol and describing its features with almost intimate detail.

“High capacity, high rate of fire, and a substantial projectile spread make this weapon extremely dangerous in close quarters,” Brent was saying as Sudulus hummed and hawed over the delicate looking weapon.

“As you can see, it is also very light-weight and highly concealable.”

“Oh yes… yes indeed…” Sudulus mumbled as if mesmerized as Brent held out the weapon for him to take.

“The barbed needles also make it extremely effective against unarmoured opponents, though at the trade off of significantly reduced accuracy at ranges of over forty feet and reductions in armour penetration that increase at range.”

“Well…” Godwyn’s savant murmured as he examined the pistol with a wide grin on his face, “you can’t have everything.”

“Actually,” First Officer Brent clapped him on the back, “in this line of work you usually can!”

Sudulus started giggling like a child with a toy.

A couple of rows over, Lee had found himself a powerfully built scoped revolver with a three-shot chamber. Big and chunky, the pistol looked as if it weighed ten pounds, but the pilot had clearly taken a liking to it as he smoothed his hand down the length of the barrel with a very affectionate touch.

“Ai Vicky!” he called over to where Striker was picking out weapons with Commissar Grant.

She looked over and he flashed the pistol with a boorish smile.

“‘ow d’ you like m’ cannon?”

Striker rolled her eyes.

“To be fair, Lee,” she said, cocking her head towards the Commissar, “I think Markus’ is bigger.”

Jaw hanging slightly open, Lee looked as if he’d just been slapped. The Commissar was watching him with a hard expression. Shutting his mouth, Lee twitched his eyebrows, snapped off a quick grin, and disappeared back into the gun racks as if preoccupied by something he had just remembered.

Victoria watched him disappear with a suppressed chuckle.

“Mine is bigger.”

“What?” she turned back to Grant – his face was the image of seriousness.

“My gun,” he added, lifting the rifle and spreading a wide smile across his face.

“Hellgun,” Striker noted approvingly, biting her lip as she examined the weapon in the Commissar’s hands. “duo-beam, cell-fed… not as powerful as mine, but a good choice. I like it.”

“I thought you might,” the Commissar agreed, quickly putting a hellgun back on the rack, “and that’s why I’m taking this one instead.”

She watched as he pulled a matt-black box-fed light machinegun off the rack and tested his balance in his hands.

“Very suitable,” she nodded favourably, taking the weapon as it was offered to her and testing the balance for herself before aiming down its sights and checking its action. Impressed, she gave a supportive grunt. “Retractable stock, balanced frame, good sights, smooth action; looks like you’ve found a winner.”

“I think that goes without saying…”

 

 

Several stacks over, Godwyn had been successful in finding several matching pieces of carapace ablative plate armour that covered from her chest down to her feet and had the added bonuses of being unrestrictive on her movement and partially concealable beneath her over-coat if she left it unbuttoned. Granted, the armour wasn’t exactly light and would take some getting used to – the front and back plates combining to weigh about twenty pounds – but added layers of protection would likely make a world of difference in a fire-fight.

To supplement the armour, she’d also selected a sturdy combat shotgun with the First Officer’s recommendation.

“The XG12 Castigator pattern shotgun,” Brent had announced as he carefully selected it from the rack and handed it to the Inquisitor as if it were a trophy; “a medium weight, pump-action combat shotgun with an effective range of fifty meters.”

The weapon in her hands was about eight pounds and three-and-a-half feet long with the stock folded out. Unfinished gunmetal grey with a rugged design and boasting both a fore-grip and pistol-grip, the XG12 certainly felt good to carry and highly manoeuvrable.

“You’ll notice the sights are very clearly defined,” he encouraged her to aim the weapon, “and you’ll see when firing that the dual grips act for great recoil compensation. I should also mention that the castigator is in essence a flechette shotgun as each shell fired carries upwards of two-dozen pronged projectiles that help to increase the weapon’s accuracy and armour piercing abilities at range. For close-quarter engagements, it really is top of the line.”

“That’s quite a pitch,” Godwyn thanked him, placing the weapon down on one of the servicing tables. “Did Columbo state what he wanted in return for his weapons?”

“Master Columbo he is pleased to help in whatever measure he can with your mission,” Brent assured her, though Godwyn was not convinced.

“He doesn’t seem like the kind of man who would part with his collectables for nothing.”

“That is not how we see it, Inquisitor,” Brent said with certainty; “Aboard the Patroclus, you are our friends, and we would like to keep it like that.”

[Lady_Canoness]

Part 8 of the Inquisition is now up. In this part I tried my hand at a BFG style space-battle between the Patroclus and an enemy vessel. Did I pull it off? You tell me!

 

 

 

*part 8*

 

 

Dropping out of the Warp and into the asteroid field brought a remarkable cheer to the Patroclus and its master as if the return to the void heralded the return of what Columbo thought his roots. Every hour he would spend on the bridge, personally guiding his vessel with a deft hand through the countless miles of loose rock, and all the while seemingly enjoying himself immensely. Navigation through asteroid fields was considered dangerous and thankless work by the majority of mariners, and to most it was a needless hazard as any carelessness on behalf of the helmsmen or turret crews could result in catastrophic damage to a ship’s delicate sensory equipment or hull. Such was the risk that many captains would gladly accept taking the extra time required to circumnavigate the field rather than passing through it. Hercule Columbo, however, took asteroids on to be a personal challenge – one of the few challenges left to him after decades of plying the stars on what he described as intrinsically dull trade routs.

“What I would like is to draw a line across virgin space,” he had confided in her one time over dinner and drinks, “to sail out into the uncharted breadth of the void, and marvel at its beauty as I make my own way and write my own charts.”

He had sat back in his comfortable chair and sipped his wine as his eyes stared off into a future only he could see. “Some day I’ll do that,” he said, “when my time comes to shuffle off this mortal coil, I’ll take Patroclus and any hands that deign to follow, and set out into space to forge my own destiny.”

She had thought it romantic at the time, and, with the wine in her, had almost volunteered to go with him on his journey, though remembering that her calling in life was the Inquisition quickly snapped her back around. She wanted to uncover the mysteries of the galaxy, not necessarily get lost somewhere out in space.

Regardless, it was something to dream of as the hours slowly passed like the asteroids that floated beyond the viewing ports; something altogether less foreboding than the task at hand.

Much as she had expected, Aquinas agreed with Roth’s orders to investigate the oubliette on Trajan’s Deep:

“Remember that information is our weapon against Strassen and Pierce,” he had reminded her as they discussed it on another stroll along the galleries, “and that you must overcome both with your mind before might. This mission is secret, and the more subtle we are in our approach, the more likely we will be successful.”

“You don’t think we could be wrong about Pierce, do you?”

Aquinas shook his head. “I have no doubt about his guilt, but this is not a question of killing the guilty as it is understanding the crime.”

Understanding the crime was proving difficult to do, and the more she thought about it the more convoluted it became. Strassen had gone rogue; turned his back on his duty, and set out to pursue his own agenda. Yet what were his motives? Originally she had thought that the accumulated horrors he had witnessed over the years had driven him to radicalism and madness, but after her last discussion with Roth she wasn’t so sure. What did Roth think? He had known of Strassen’s involvement in the murder of Inquisitor Felix – did he not think that the murder of a fellow Inquisitor was enough to drive Strassen away from the Inquisition? It wasn’t possible that he thought it irrelevant, as he had been quick to furnish her with every other piece of information that even mentioned her former mentor in passing. So why had he hidden it? Was it only to be used as a last resort after other avenues failed?

Godwyn did not know, and neither was she willing to guess. There was too much at stake to be forming conclusions based solely on assumptions.

Maybe Pierce wasn’t involved after all; maybe he was just a wretched man in his own right. There was no way to tell.

She tried not to dwell on it, and instead spent her time honing her skills of body and mind, enjoying the company of her companions, or on the bridge at Columbo’s invitation, though over the long night cycles she couldn’t help but lie awake in bed and stare at the ceiling as images of Strassen floated freely inside her head. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. She thought she knew him, but the truth that she knew next to nothing about the man haunted her thoughts every night until, eventually, sleep would take her.

 

 

The wail of warning claxons ripped into her dreams like a howling chainsword and tore Godwyn from her sleep in a start. Without hesitation she bounded from bed and pulled her overcoat over her naked body before storming barefoot into the common room.

Aquinas, fully armoured and carrying his force staff, was already there when she arrived, though her other companions had also been caught off guard and came dashing out of their rooms half-dressed but wide awake. The alarms were much louder out in the open and they had to shout to make themselves heard.

“Wha’s goin’ on!?” Lee shouted as everyone converged on the space marine.

“It’s an action-stations alarm,” Aquinas explained in a flat tone that was just loud enough to be heard over claxons. “Next comes battle-stations.”

They stepped aside as Aquinas walked to the window and peered into the asteroid field that listed gently by; at odds with the chaotic wailing inside.

“Somewhere out there an enemy has been spotted. We had best prepare ourselves, for our allies may have need of us.”

He was disarmingly calm in the unfolding chaos. Godwyn didn’t know if she should feel comforted or disturbed.

“Right!” Grant was shouting now, bringing their attention back from the space marine with his parade-ground bellow; “We arm and regroup here in two minutes! Go!”

In an instant, Godwyn was back in her room and throwing her coat onto her unmade bed as she forwent putting on any undergarments and scrambled to pull on the nearest shirt, pants, and shoes she could find before hastily donning her new armour. Her heart was hammering in her chest as her fingers fumbled with the tightening straps. A battle! Here on the Patroclus! She’d hardly been expecting it, but she found herself thrilled by the prospect. She threw on her holstered heavy pistol and dragged her new shotgun from its case under the bed. Adrenaline was already surging through her body and causing her mind to race as fast as the wailing alarms. The Commissar’s words were already at work within her, fanning the flames in her soul until she was itching for combat. She slung the shotgun over her shoulder and stood up – stuffing her Inquisitorial Rosette into her pocket as she did so. She was ready.

Back in the common room her team was starting to regroup.

Commissar Grant, standing tall with his commissar’s hat in pristine condition upon his head and his offices’ black storm coat hanging from his shoulders, was in the middle of the room with his new machine gun under one arm while his other rested against the pommel of his sabre. He stood as if on the field of battle leading the soldiers of the Imperium, and Godwyn couldn’t help but feel proud when she looked at him – proud to be fighting, proud to be serving the Emperor. Truly this man would walk into the maw of the Warp itself with sword drawn and gun blazing.

Dwarfed by the Commissar but standing proudly beside him nonetheless was Sudulus in his unassuming cloak and holding the needle pistol he had acquired tightly in both bionic hands. It was an inspiring sight, the little scribe standing bravely beside the hardened commissar, and, though out of his element, Sudulus’ determination was to be admired.

Banging the door to his room closed behind him, Lee quickly hustled up to join them. He was wringing his hands together in anticipation and had strapped the shoulder holster of his prized new revolver over his flight jacket. Like Sudulus, Lee didn’t have any armour, but he looked eager and willing all the same.

Victoria Striker was the last to join them – likely because she was the most armoured other than Aquinas – and was still adjusting the power-feed to her hellgun as she marched into the common room to stand between Godwyn and the Commissar. There was no doubting that she was ready: decked out from her neck down in black carapace armour and trained specifically in space-ship combat, Striker was likely the second most capable combatant on board after Brother Aquinas.

Godwyn hoped that whatever the alarms were wailing about didn’t come down to a fire-fight aboard the Patroclus, but even if it did she felt that her team was prepared. They were ready.

“Inquisitor!” Grant’s bellow could have carried itself through a hurricane and still be heard. “You’re team is prepared! What are your orders?”

Godwyn looked sideways at the Librarian. Still at the viewport, Aquinas turned, caught her eye, and nodded.

“We go to the bridge!” she shouted to make herself heard as all her team’s eyes were upon her. “From there, we see what can be done and where we are needed!”

They left the common room together, but had hardly made it off the habitation deck when the warning claxons suddenly changed from the fast high-pitched wail of ‘action stations’ to a deeper throbbing hum.

As if on cue, the First Officer’s voice boomed over the ship-board intercom:

+*bzzt* “Now hear this. Now hear this. All crew report to battle stations. I say again. All crew report to battle stations. This is not a drill. This is not a drill”+

One the decks below, rapid-action teams of the Patroclus’ staff would be moving out from designated rally points to carry out the First Officer’s orders. Aboard the Patroclus all crew from the cooks and chamberlains to the cargo ratings were trained in emergency procedures and warfare protocols should the merchant vessel come under threat. Every man and woman, of all trades and all ages, were prepared to fight. They were all on the same ship, and they all carried each other’s lives in their hands.

In the maintenance bays servitors were quickly repurposed for combat, the inhibitors emplaced upon their higher functions quickly rescinded, while in the medical wing the ship’s doctor and support staff hustled to and fro in preparation to take on casualties.

All hands were prepared. The Patroclus was in readiness. Now all they needed was an enemy.

On the bridge the action was ordered chaos as officers shouted every which way, all terminals were manned, and orders were doubly given and received. Standing before his command throne, his hands behind his back with an ornamental sword sheathed at his side, Hercule Columbo oversaw the defence of his ship.

“Inquisitor Godwyn,” he greeted her as she mounted the command platform beside him, “I apologize for this interruption, though it gladdens me to see that you are not caught unprepared.” The usual cheer was gone from his voice, and in its place was a stern man who took the threat to his vessel most seriously.

“What is the situation, Master?” she enquired, overlooking the bridge as the command crew carried out their duties in a swift and precise manner.

“Not twenty minutes ago we received and maintained an asdic contact on the long-range scanners that turned out to be a vessel. We tried hailing them, as is standard space-faring procedure, though we’ve got nothing in return. They have maintained course, however, and they know of our presence. It is likely that they are pirates and have been shadowing us for more than a day now, using the asteroids for cover.”

Godwyn nodded as she digested the information. She knew little about space-ship combat and deferred to Columbo’s higher knowledge.

“Range is one-hundred and fifty thousand,” Columbo continued, “at fifty thousand, we will be in range to fire.”

Being a merchant vessel, the batteries aboard the Patroclus were nowhere near the calibre of Imperial Navy vessels, though in a light skirmish her size and shielding could protect her from the worst of the damage.

“We’ve got a reading on the enemy vessel, sir,” the call came up from the operations deck, “she’s escort class bearing one-thirty aft on the starboard side. She’s increased speed to four-seventy though maintaining a steady parallel course.”

“Hold course and keep eyes on the asteroids,” Columbo commanded, “I don’t want to make their job any easier.”

The bridge crew hastened to comply. Fighting in an asteroid field could be lethal as paying too much attention to either the enemy or the environment could see a ship ruined.

“Starboard batteries are reporting armed and ready. Standing-by for further orders.”

“Sir, port-side batteries at seventy percent readiness.”

“Get them to pick up the pace!” Columbo barked in reply; “She could slip behind our wake at any moment. I need those guns operational!”

The officers sounded off at the affirmative and the orders were relayed down to the battery decks.

“Inquisitor,” Columbo dropped his voice back down to address her, “I have personally seen three pirate vessels crumble into the void, and today I intend to make it four. They are hated to me – more-so than any alien I can conceive.”

Godwyn did not question him. His livelihood as well as his life was at stake, and he would broker no threat to either without extreme prejudice.

“Do not ask me to concede the field or make good an escape,” he continued though he did not look at her. “In this I am knowingly disobeying my orders from the Inquisition to act as your transport, and I accept whatever consequences may come from that, though if she engages I will not let her escape.”

His fury was cold, and Godwyn knew better than to aggravate a man in such a state. “Do what you must, Columbo,” she replied, “you have my support.”

The Ship Master smiled in thanks.

“Enemy vessel is altering course!” the call came up from the First Officer. “Now on intercept course at five-seventy!”

“Alter course ten degrees to the starboard bow!” Columbo ordered; “Cut across her nose and force her to match us!”

By executing such a manoeuvre the Patroclus would be showing her broadside to the enemy bow and would force the other vessel to alter course to bring her own broadside guns into a firing arc.

“Port batteries are armed and ready. On stand-by.”

“Range to enemy contact one-ten and closing. She’ll be within range in four minutes if she maintains course.”

Columbo shook his head. “Pray that she doesn’t outrange our guns, dear Godwyn,” he whispered. The enemy vessel being astern of the Patroclus, it was possible that she could begin firing before Columbo’s guns were in position if the range increments of her guns vastly outstripped his own.

“Master Columbo,” Commissar Grant stepped up behind him from where he had been silently looking on with the rest of Godwyn’s team, “with your permission, I would speak to your crew. Prepare them for the eventuality of battle.”

The Ship Master turned considerately. “I would appreciate that, commissar,” he said with sincerity, “my crew are trained and willing, but they are not soldiers. Anything you could do to prepare them would be welcome.”

The Commissar saluted sharply, and dismounted from the command platform to the main vox hub.

“Vox is open, commissar,” the First Officer stepped aside for Grant, and the whole of the bridge seemed to fall silent in anticipation.

Unafraid, the Commissar stood at ease before the vox-caster, his unshakeable confidence in himself and his duty filling the bridge, and when he started to speak he did so as if the words came naturally from fire in his soul:

“What we do now is what defines us as people. Bravery and courage are not words reserved for soldiers and heroes on distant battlefields in the far-flung reaches. They are the words of humanity. They are the words that see us rise above and overcome. As Men, the sons and daughters of our forbearers who conquered the stars, we oftentimes forget the nobility of our birth and the justice of our cause, and that it is not to soldiers and heroes that bravery and courage belong, but to men and women like us, for it is the story of Men to triumph. Now is the hour to take up this courage! Now, in this hour, we will not fear and we will not falter, for in this hour we fight with the courage of Men!”

The bridge erupted with cheers and applause as Grant unceremoniously shut off the ship-wide vox and returned to where the Inquisitor and Ship Master stood.

“You speak well, commissar,” Columbo thanked him as he approached, “I am glad you are here. Your words will have made a difference for many of my crew.”

“It is my duty – no less,” Grant replied with a curt nod before withdrawing to the back of the bridge to wait with the Inquisitor’s team. There was a battle to be fought, and words alone would not be enough secure victory.

“Enemy contact altering course bearing two-seventy and speed of three-ten. Range to contact is one-thirty.”

“She’s dropping abaft of us,” Columbo hissed, watching the holographic display charts that monitored the relative movements of both ships, “her captain must know he can catch us if we try to run.”

“Come to new heading!” Columbo commanded, “Bring us hard to port and match her!”

Auxiliary thrusters flared into life as the Patroclus banked hard to her left amidst the asteroids to bring her parallel to the following ship, though at this distance within the asteroid field the ships had yet to catch sight of one another and were manoeuvring off sensor data alone. If they so desired, the captain of either ship could go dark by cutting all non-essential power and simply vanish into the asteroids, but neither Columbo nor his nemesis were prepared to let the other escape so easily.

“She’s increased speed to six-sixty and maintaining course. She’ll be in our range in three minutes at that speed.”

“Six-sixty?” Columbo murmured in disbelief, “she will be ground into dust by the asteroids if she keeps up that behaviour…”

“Drop speed to two-ten and bring us onto an intercept course!” he hollered, then murmured, “we’ll see how fast she drops speed once she sees she’s walking right into our broadside,” loud enough for only Godwyn to hear.

“Two minutes forty seconds until we are in range.”

“Good. Disable cargo-hold life support systems and re-rout power to aft void-shields.”

At his command the bottom deck went silent and dark as all power was cut in the lowest section of the ship. The action-stations command had drawn all crew to the middle and upper decks, and all hands were accounted for: only the vermin would suffer as life support went offline in the cavernous holds.

“Two minutes until we are in range. Enemy contact is holding steady both course and speed.”

The holographic image of a vessel suddenly popped into the air and rotated above the heads of the bridge-crew.

“Aaaah…” Columbo breathed a sigh of appreciation, “and here is our enemy.”

The readings were sketchy, but the icon depicted a craft a kilometre in length (about a third the size of the Patroclus) of unknown class or specification.

“Looks like a refitted merchantman,” Columbo mused, noticing the gun-batteries visible along the ship’s dorsal spine. “Decent firepower for her size too… looks like she even has a lance or two… this is will be a difficult fight.”

“Lances?” Godwyn asked for confirmation with a shocked expression. Even though naval history had never been her strong point she knew full well that lances were high-powered and precise energy weapons capable of cutting clean through an unprotected ship.

“Yes,” Columbo confirmed her suspicions with a grim nod. “She likely takes her prey with a swift and devastating attack, though she lacks the stomach for a fight. It will be a pleasure to remove this filth from the Emperor’s domain.”

“Minute-thirty until we’re in range. Sir, she’s reducing speed to five-sixty and we’re reading an energy spike!”

“Crude and predictable!” Columbo snorted contemptuously. “She’s preparing to attack at extreme range though didn’t wait to mask her energy signatures,” he rapidly explained to the Inquisitor. “Brace for impact!”

Red warning lights flashed throughout the Patroclus’ decks, and as Godwyn watched a beam of searing light tore across their vision and illuminated the whole of the Patroclus stretching out before the bridge in a burning white light.

“Incoming attack confirmed a miss! Four-eighty kilometres across our starboard bow!”

“Turn three-ten into her bow!” Columbo shouted as officers ducked this way and that across the length of the Patroclus’ bridge to carry out his orders.

The Patroclus rolled through the void into a left turn as she swung her massive body through the asteroid field – the auto-targeting turrets compensating with flawless grace as the gunnery servitors continued to blast apart the small pieces of rock with bursts of energy.

It took Godwyn several moments to notice that she was clenching the railing of the command platform so tightly that her knuckles on both hands were turning white. The lance attack had burned like a ray from a sun reaching out towards them from hundreds of thousands of kilometres away, only to miss by over four hundred kilometres… the beam had looked as if it was right in front of her face! The thought of it actually coming any closer was terrifying!

“Energy spike coming from the enemy vessel! Imminent attack!”

“How soon until we’re in range?” Columbo demanded.

“Minute-ten sir, but – ”

The bridge lit up like a sun as the second lance attack tore past them.

“Confirmed miss! Two-nine-five off the port bow!” someone shouted out as soon as the ferociously bright but eerily silent attack passed.

“ – she’s further reducing her speed. Time to being in range is gradually increasing!”

The enemy’s aim was improving, and she wouldn’t continue missing for much longer.

“Bring us about to one-ninety!” Columbo commanded the helmsman, “We’ll close the range ourselves.

“Enemy contact changing her heading, bearing three-ten off our port. Range… ninety thousand and closing.”

Columbo nodded approvingly; “Good, she’ll soon see what she’s dealing with.”

“Energy spike! Imminent attack!”

This time the lance scored a hit. Reaching out from the depths of space the beam of incandescent light erupted with a terrific storm of searing energy and dazzling ionic vapours as the Patroclus’ mid-ship void-shields absorbed the brunt of the blow that would otherwise have ripped the ship in half.

“We’ve been hit! We’ve been hit!”

“Damage report!”

His brow dripping with perspiration and his eyes wide, First Officer Brent spun on his heel and couldn’t keep the relief from his face as he replied breathlessly: “Mid-ship port shields holding at eighty-three percent. Crews report mild ionization in the hull, but no major damage.”

Everyone on the bridge seemed to let out a collective sigh of relief: Patroclus’ shields were holding strong and soon they would be ready to answer back with guns of their own.

“We’ll be in range with our port-side batteries one minute!” a deck officer announced.

“Find me a firing solution!” Columbo barked back.

It was going to be a long minute, but even longer if the gunnery crews didn’t have any orders on when and where to fire.

Given the limited firing arc on battery emplacements and that guns were launching colossal shells unimaginably vast distances at a moving target, ships engaged in battle had only small windows of opportunity in which to fire effectively. They could be in range in one minute only to be able to fire for a few seconds before having to wait several more minutes until the ship was positioned to allow another barrage.

The clock was ticking and every second counted with the ever looming threat of another attack coming out of the blackness.

Another lance strike pierced the darkness, though this time it missed by mere tens of kilometres. The timing of each attack was irregular, suggesting their adversary had sub-par targeting systems on her most potent weapon, though the scan readings also indicated a host of batteries bristling on her flanks and it was only a matter of time until she opened up with her main guns.

“Twenty seconds to range! We’ve got a ten second firing solution!”

Columbo’s cannons fired at a rate of one shell every two seconds, giving an initial opening salvo of five shots per cannon before their target passed.

“Have all port guns crews on immediate stand-by to attack! Divert energy from starboard shields to the port batteries!” the Ship-Master ordered, his face flustered and his eyes wild as he smelled the approaching kill.

Sensing the energy build up, the enemy vessel scaled down its power reserves on all systems and bolstered its shields in anticipation of the attack.

The seconds wound down.

“On my mark!” Columbo hollered as the entirety of the ship seemed to hold its breath.

The last few seconds dripped by. Their opportunity arose.

“FIRE!”

The order reverberated through the Patroclus, and in split seconds the twelve portside batteries erupted in fire and pounded shell-after-shell into the void. The ship shuddered and shook as vapour trails soared off into the darkness as automobile-sized shells were hurled towards the enemy.

Five shots each, and the firestorm ceased.

“A hit! A hit! A veritable hit!”

The sensory data warbled and shook as at least four shells impacted against the enemy’s shielding and threw up walls of explosive flames along her flanks.

A cheer went up throughout the bridge. Blood had yet to be drawn, but a blow had been struck upon the enemy!

“Enemy vessel altering course one-fifty, speed remaining constant!”

Slipping back out of range, the enemy contact was pulling hard to port in an effort to cut across the Patroclus’ stern.

“Bring us about to starboard and set an intercept course,” Columbo commanded, “she won’t be catching us blind. And bring the starboard shields back up to full force!”

“Shields will be back at full in ten seconds!”

Along the Patroclus’ pearlescent flanks her shields crackled and hummed as the protective cocoon of energy enveloping her powered back up to full.

“Sir, we’ll have a firing solution of twelve seconds in forty-eight seconds – sooner if she closes.”

Columbo nodded. “Have all starboard gun crews on immediate stand-by!”

“Energy spike! Attack imminent!”

“Hold her steady until we can fire!” the Ship-Master barked.

The enemy vessel lashed out with the fury of her port batteries and hurled a salvo of hyper-velocity shells across the void – white vapour trails drawing lines across the blackness the only marks of their passing. Plumes of fire bloomed across Patroclus’ flank as the massive slugs repeatedly dashed against her shields, illuminating the bridge with a fiery orange glow as the explosions unfolded into the void not more than a hundred meters from the ship’s hull.

“Hold her steady!”

Scores upon scores of white lines were flung across the blackness for every one that tested Columbo’s shielding as if a great arachnid were flinging strands of web into a cosmic wind. It was beautiful, but utterly deadly.

“Shields are faltering at half-power!”

“Hold her steady!”

Ten seconds remaining. The barrage of incoming fire abruptly ceased just as the starboard-shielding reached a critical point.

“Energy spike! Incoming attack!” the call went out mere seconds after the firestorm had ended.

“FIRE!”

The reverberating pounding of monstrous guns shook up through the deck and sent shell after shell into the void as the stung Patroclus visited her pain with vengeance upon the enemy. Three shots each – four shots each – five shots each –

The black horizon lit up like a sun as the enemy’s lance lashed out mid-salvo and rocked the Patroclus with a terrific wrenching explosion that staggered everyone off their feet as her starboard shields collapsed and the spear of energy stabbed between her ribs with murderous intent.

“We’ve been hit! We’ve been hit!”

“Fire retro-rockets!” Columbo hollered, his voice stifling the momentary panic as every got back to their feet. “Bring us around to hard to starboard! Present port batteries!”

The wounded ship was sluggish to reply, but, with the burning hole torn in her flank loosing flames into space, she defiantly swung her prow towards her enemy and bared her portside guns.

“Damage report!”

Brent was badly shaken, but he dutifully approached the Master’s throne and fought to keep his voice steady. “Compartments four-through-seven on decks five and six are lost, sir! Massive ion readings in the hull! Blast doors are holding and fires are contained, but gun-crews on deck four are reporting casualties!” He swallowed, knowing that the worst news was het to be delivered; “Sir, starboard shielding has failed. Repair teams are dispatched, but they don’t have an assessment on damage or repair times…”

Blood had been shed and the Patroclus was wounded, but Columbo would not give up his vessel until she fell out from under him.

“Find me another firing solution!” he barked.

Godwyn’s stomach was somewhere up near her throat, and she found it a chore to remind herself to breath, yet she could to naught but watch as the battle between the stars unfolded around her.

“Enemy contact altering course bearing one-ten at speed of four-forty. Range of forty-two thousand and closing!”

Sensing the Patroclus’ weakness, the enemy captain was attempting to outflank the injured vessel and fire again on her wounded side.

“Hard starboard! Hard starboard!” the Master ordered the helmsman. If Patroclus swung fast enough, she would once again be able to face down the enemy with her uninjured port batteries and maintain a parallel course without presenting too much of a target.

“Incoming attack!” The scanners leapt as power surged through the enemy vessel and she struck out again with her lance – the beam of searing energy rippling off the Patroclus’s bow shields as the devastating weapon missed by a mere handful of meters.

“How long until we’ve got that firing solution!?”

“Twenty seconds for five, sir!”

“To the Warp with that!” Columbo bellowed back. “Stand-by retro-rockets to burn! We ride her until the guns glow!”

The tactic was desperate, but Columbo was suggesting the Patroclus use her stabilizer thrusters to pivot the vessel in concert with the foe to extend to the length of time in which she could fire. Columbo’s ploy would increase their window of opportunity from five seconds to twenty, but would also make the Patroclus open to attack.

“Ten seconds! Range thirty thousand!”

On the edge of sight, Godwyn though she could just see a glint of a plasma wake twinkling between the dark asteroids – her first glimpse at the enemy.

“Reduce bow and stern shielding to sixty-percent power. I want everything we can spare on the port-side defences! Fire on my mark!”

The entirety of the Patroclus seemed to hold her breath in anticipation as the seconds trickled down. The glint in the distance moved slowly across the infinite scope of space. The window opened.

“FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!”

The deck thundered and shook as gun-crews worked like madmen and auto-loaders slammed shell after shell into the steaming breaches. Deck overseers shouted, sweat ran, the cannons roared and bucked like beasts untamed, while the white contrails of the Patroclus’ wrath tore across the darkness of space.

“Burn those retro-rockets! Burn them for all you’re worth!”

Shot after shot streamed from the Patroclus’ batteries as she followed through with her subjugation of the foe. Dozens of shells streamed harmlessly by, but many bit deeply into her shields and threw up gouts of flame into the ether. In retaliation the lance slashed at the Patroclus but was denied by her shields.

“Port shields at seventy-eight percent and holding!”

Unfazed, the fearless Columbo pressed on his attack as they rounded upon the eighteenth second of continuous fire. Every eye on the bridge was fixed on the readouts in hopes that thirty thousand kilometres away the unseen enemy was bleeding. The holographic image of the ship was shivering and waving as the explosions thrown up against its shields distorted their sensors, though just on the cusp of the twentieth second of continues fire – just as their window closed – angry red runes glared across the holograph’s surface.

A triumphant cheer arose from the bridge:

“We’ve got her! What a hit!”

Thirty thousand kilometres away the enemy’s port batteries were broken and aflame, and her company was dying.

“Keep on her!” Columbo drove the Patroclus onwards, “Get me another firing solution!”

The enemy was panicking now; she had not expected such a fight from a merchantman and now she was bleeding her hold into the void. What should her captain do?

“Enemy contact altering off intercept course! Master, it looks like she is trying to escape!”

Columbo’s face darkened. “Keep on her, I said! I do not intend to let her villainy go unpunished! I will see her burning and crumbling into the void before I give up pursuit!”

He glanced sideways to the Inquisitor, a vindictive smile playing across his face; “‘A moment of laxity spawns a lifetime of heresy’ does it not?” he quoted to her.

Godwyn nodded, though she did not point out that the quote referred to duty instead of revenge.

“Sir! We’ve pick up four contacts coming from the enemy vessel – they look like attack craft!”

“Attack craft?” Columbo repeated with a scowl, “do we know the class?”

The deck officer double-checked his read-out, then shook his head. “Not yet, sir.”

“Likely boarding craft,” he mused thoughtfully as he considered this new threat. “If she can’t beat us into submission, then she’ll try to take us over from within, will she? How long until they get here?!”

“Five minutes at the least, sir!”

Pirate attack craft – also dubbed assault boats and sometimes void sharks – were the plight of merchantmen galaxy wide. Unlike Imperial Navy vessels that boasted interceptor craft, superiority fighters and more turrets than were countable, the Patroclus – like most merchantmen – had almost no defence against long-range attack craft. Shields were of no use and batteries were far too clumsy while the hulking merchant vessels themselves were ponderous and heavy in comparison to the nimble single-pilot flyers. Only a vessel’s hull could protect against boarding parties, though any space-faring ship had weak-points which could be exploited, and once inside the well-armed attackers could often overpower a ship’s ill-equipped crew. Boarding was not without risk, however, as an unscathed ship often had numerous internal defences that could be activated, though if a ship was damaged and her hull compromised, then the attackers could benefit from the confusion of battle to further damage the ship.

Boarding was often-times the final nail in a ship’s coffin.

“Godwyn, I’m afraid I must trespass upon your good will once again,” Columbo said as he motioned for her and her companions to follow him to the back of the bridge as he left Brent in command with orders to pursue the fleeing enemy.

“I have gotten us into this mess,” Columbo confessed in a hushed voice not to be overheard, “but I need all of your help if I am to get us out again.”

He looked imploringly at each of them in turn as if asking them to trust him just a little more, and Godwyn could see in his eyes that he was afraid. He put on a brave face for his crew and his ship, but in the company of the Inquisition he told no lies. He did not fear death or the risk to his vessel; it was failure that he feared – he was afraid that he would fail her, and that his fool pride would have consequences that reached beyond him.

Godwyn did not blame him for it, however – in fact, she respected him more-so because of it. He was a rogue of a man, yet he had the courage to look beyond his own self interest and seek atonement for his misdeeds. In a way it made him noble.

“We’re with you in this, Hercule,” Godwyn reassured him on behalf of her team, “just tell me what you need us to do.”

“Taking over a ship of this size is not easy,” he explained with a strained but steady voice, “but when they board Patroclus, they will try to gain control of three areas that will allow them to seize the vessel by the throat: the batteries, the engine rooms, and the bridge,” he counted them off on three fingers. “If they have the strength to overpower or disable any or all of these three things, I have no doubt that they will signal the mother vessel and destroy us with their combined might.

“Now, I can put the ship under a security lockdown and provide you with the means to manually override any security door you come across – that should buy us some time – but I need you to take the fight to the enemy alongside my own troops.”

“What kind of troops do you have, Ship Master?” Grant asked.

“I have twenty servitors outfitted for combat as well as four mobilised teams of ten that are armed and trained, though, once again, my people are not soldiers and have never seen combat.”

Lee made an involuntary hissing noise and Striker shot him a dirty look, but the Commissar looked unfazed.

“My assessment is that your troops would do better if they were to fight with us instead of on their own,” Grant proposed and Columbo nodded in agreement, but Aquinas was not convinced:

“I mean no disrespect, Ship Master,” the space marine addressed him, “but your people will likely be slaughtered if they fight beside us, and prove more hindrance than help.”

Not knowing where to turn, Columbo turned to Godwyn. “What do you suggest, Inquisitor?” he asked, painfully aware that the longer they took talking the closer the enemy boarding parties came.

“We’ll split into teams,” Godwyn decided. “The batteries are likely the easiest to attack and hardest to hold, so we should deploy your men-at-arms there.

“Grant,” she looked meaningfully at the Commissar, “you and Lee will be with them.”

The Commissar nodded but Lee looked confused. Grant was a natural leader and thus the obvious choice to fight with Columbo’s troops, Lee, however, she picked because he was a resourceful fighter and would likely prove to be a valuable contrasting force to the Commissar’s rigidity in defence.

“Aquinas and Sudulus,” she moved on to her most valuable asset, “you two can hold the engine rooms. If this is a standardized vessel in design,” she looked purposefully at Columbo; he nodded, “then there is only one accessible entrance to the engine room. Sudulus, you know where that is, am I right?” the little scribe nodded, “and you know your way around one too. Your abilities, Brother Aquinas, will mean that you can hold the engine room alone with little support while Sudulus watches any back entrances in case they try to get in another way.”

“A sound plan, Inquisitor,” the Librarian nodded in approval.

Godwyn continued; “Which leaves Striker and me to protect the approach to the bridge with a handful of servitors. Clear?”

Striker knew what she had to do and responded the affirmative, and the others were in agreement as well.

“Good,” Columbo rubbed his hands together in anticipation, “I’ll have one of my crew provide you with override wands and comm. units linked to the internal frequency. You should hurry, however – they will be here any minute now.”

[Papewaio]

*Strokes non-existent goatee* And the plot thickens. . .

 

That ship combat was beautifully done, perfectly representative of what single combat in space should be. Columbo certainly knows his stuff when it comes to the Patroclus, and the way he acts in combat, to me, adds further depth to his character. He seems the quintessential rogue - suave and charming, but keeps a cool head and knows what has to happen in a fight.

 

Interesting that you brought Grant into it, I didn't see that at all. And the rivalry between him and Lee over Striker is excellently written. Do you have ideas for further additions to Godwyn's team?

 

Murder within the Inquisition is fairly serious if I remember rightly. If word of that got out, Strassen and Pierce would have had to have some concrete proof of xenos fraternisation to withstand the backlash. Oh now look what you've done, you've started me thinking.

[Lady_Canoness]

I'm glad that the story is coming together! (its definately encouraging to hear that people are getting out of it what I am putting into it!)

 

Grant is the product of something I've always wanted to do which is field a commissar in a story. I think commissars in general are amazing characters and really stand out amongst other people as being duty driven. Writing one outside of combat was a challenge, but Grant is standing on his own as a character, I think, and scenes of high intensity are great ways of showing off his character and making up for entering the story several chapters later.

The relationships between Grant, Lee, Striker, and Sudulus is also a fun way of expanding them as people.

 

As for other characters, I had originally planned to add more to make it 4 men and 4 women, but plans change. The story arc for the Inquisition is at the rise of the midpoint and will soon begin to tie itself back together towards a climax.

I do have plans for an 'Inquisition II', however, so we'll see how it plays out...

[Lady_Canoness]

*part 9*

 

Forging through the asteroid field in pursuit of her fleeing quarry, the was little the Patroclus could do prevent the four boarding craft from swooping down against her port side and attaching themselves to her hull like blood-sucking leaches. With blasts of melta-fire the pirates cut through her outer hull and set foot on her decks. The battle for the Patroclus was officially joined.

 

“Columbo, how are we doing for time?”

Godwyn and Striker had just parted ways with her party on rout to their separate destinations. Defence of the bridge access meant holding a single corridor at the base of the superstructure which at one end was connected to the rest of the decks by a single turbo-lift elevator. The corridor was long with a high arched ceiling and acted as a junction to the rest of the super-structure as well as a bottle-neck against any attackers with sparse cover. Indeed, ship-board fighting was a bloody and unforgiving affair.

+“I’ve got reports of four hull breaches and invasive life-signs on my security readouts, Inquisitor. Two towards the bow between decks three and four, and two more closer to the stern between decks six and seven. I would expect those two to be coming your way.”+

“Understood,” Godwyn replied into her mic as she and Striker hauled what little furniture decorated the corridor away from the turbo-lift to form a makeshift barricade.

“Ask how long we’ll have to wait on those combat servitors,” Captain Striker grunted as she strained to tip one sofa on top of the other to act as a bullet sponge. The extra fire-power of the combat servitors would likely make a marked difference as well as take the pressure off the two of them.

“When can we expect those combat servitors?” Godwyn asked, kneeling behind their barricade which consisted of two sofas, a couple of wooden coffee tables, and an urn. Fortunately, the corridor was only about twelve feet wide and their barricade took up most of the space, but if it failed they’d have to resort to ducking into the elevator archways that ran along the corridor’s sides and led to the rest of the superstructure and the bridge.

+“Inquisitor, I’m sorry to say that the servitors are too far away to be useful to you. I’ve instructed that they be placed in patrol-mode to keep the hallways clear. Once again, I am sorry.”+

“No matter,” Striker said optimistically, “with the turbo-lifts locked down, we can expect them to take a while getting to us, and when they do this place will be a killing field.” She checked that the power-feed to her hellgun was fastened tightly, then glance over at the Inquisitor who was crouched quietly by the barricade.

“Nervous?” the Captain asked.

Godwyn nodded. The waiting and anticipating of the bloodshed to come was starting to make her stomach churn. She hoped Sudulus and Lee would come out alright and that she hadn’t made a mistake asking them to partake in the defence.

“You can’t be nervous, Cassandra,” the Captain addressed her by her first name and put a steadying hand on her shoulder. “You know this will work and that we can do this, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.”

Godwyn shook her head as if to clear it. The Captain was right – she was thinking too much and she’d have to stop before it got her killed. “Thanks Victoria,” and she meant it, “I needed that.”

 

First blood went to the pirates, though no-one was around to witness it. Two members of the repair crews had been trying to salvage power-rods from a backup circuit breaker and had thought they had enough time to make it there and back before they were found. They were wrong, and they paid with their lives – the pirate raiders taking the power-rods as a sweetener to what else they had waiting for them.

 

 

Override wand in hand, Grant walked through the security door to the portside mustering point. Lee, pistol drawn and covering the Commissar’s back, followed him in. There had been no word from either Godwyn or Columbo since they’d reached deck four so Grant assumed that there was still time before the boarding parties broke through, but regardless it never paid to be careless.

“Who are the unit commanders here?” he demanded with a shout that brokered no argument from the gathered ship’s armsmen as the doors closed automatically behind him. Columbo’s squads had been ordered to assemble and to expect the Commissar’s arrival, but even armed as they were Grant could tell that the armsmen were not soldiers. They were frightened down to the last, and in their eyes the Commissar could see the haunted look like they were raw guardsmen fresh out of training as they waited around the rally point in an uncomfortable silence.

The four armsmen troop leaders stepped forward, trying to rally their courage now that the experienced Guard officer was amongst them. Aside from the striped badges on their sleeves, they were indistinguishable from the troops they led. Dressed in crisp white fatigues with grey flak vests and wearing metal helmets, most of the armsmen carried autocarbines and pistols, though a few carried bulky boarding shotguns with grenade bandoliers slung over their shoulders. They were well equipped, but surplus equipment did not make up for fighting spirit.

“You four are the squad commanders?” he asked for confirmation.

They mumbled or nodded in reply. Grant was unimpressed.

“As of this moment, I am in command,” Grant said loud enough so that everyone in the room could hear him even over the sound of the ringing alarms. “As I speak this ship is being boarded,” he continued, looking the unit leaders in the eye but speaking to all of their troops as well, “and every soul on this ship will die unless you follow my orders. I want to hear you tell me that is clear and that you understand!”

They chorused back a mixed bunch of agreements and acknowledgements. In all likelihood they’d been kept in the dark as to what was actually happening and had been left to imagine the worst. It was not how he would have managed his troops, but he had to make do either way.

He got right up in face of one of the squad leaders – the biggest one he could find – and looked him square in the eye.

“Are you ready to die for the Emperor!?” Grant demanded.

The man was tall and fairly heavy, but didn’t have the hardness of a fighter to him. He looked gentle – like someone had volunteered for the job because he thought he was doing everyone else a favour.

“What is your name!?” the Commissar barked in his face when the big man couldn’t answer him.

“Hodgkin!” he replied in a startled yelp.

Grant backed off. “Well Hodgkin, I don’t have time to make you a soldier today, but you will have to fight as if you were one, otherwise you are going to die like one. And if you aren’t ready to die for the Emperor then you had better make sure you are ready to fight for Him!”

Grant unslung his light machine gun from his shoulder and handed it to Lee who was standing stalk still by the door as if he were trying to melt into it. Everyone in the room was looking desperately at the Commissar.

“The men who are boarding this ship will try to kill you, and they will succeed if you do not follow my orders and do exactly as I say. Do you understand? I want you to tell me that you understand!”

They replied back that they understood, and louder this time – their desperation feeding off the Commissar’s words and providing them with a growing glimmer of hope.

“Good. I need soldiers if I am going to win this fight, and that means you have to do what I tell you and do it to the best of your ability!”

He started to pace back and forth in front of them; exactly as he had seen numerous commanders do before.

“Our primary objective is to prevent the enemy from seizing control of the port batteries,” he pointed to the security door at the far end of the room as emphasis to where the batteries lay, “though our secondary objective is to kill the enemy and drive them from this ship. To accomplish that, your squad and your squad,” he thrust his finger at two of the unit leaders but not Hodgkin, “will follow my second in command – Mr. Normandy!”

Lee almost jumped at hearing his name and tried to stand a little taller. The Commissar hadn’t mentioned anything about having a plan on their way down from the bridge.

“His automatic weapon will provide the mainstay of the defensive squads, and will at all times cover the batteries from enemy attack. Hodgkin and the other squad will be with me and form the basis of the counterattack which will repel and destroy the enemy. To do that we will hold at the batteries until the enemy attacks us, after which we will counterattack. Is that clear? I want to hear you tell me that is clear!”

They almost shouted it back.

 

 

The engine rooms aboard the Patroclus were truly cavernous in size and demeanour. Vast halls of blackened iron holding gargantuan machines and mighty turbines that filled the air with an almost impenetrable din, the engine rooms were dark and dangerous, and serviced by an army of tech adepts who fluttered about their work on a labyrinth of dark catwalks and perilous gantries. Brother Aquinas and Sudulus were not invited into the engine rooms themselves, however, as the lead tech-engineer was waiting in the security check point just to the fore of the engine rooms to meet them.

“I do not know why the Master deems it necessary for you to be here, Lord Space Marine. We are well protected here,” the tech-engineer addressed the Librarian with a monotone, grating voice as he bowed deeply. He did not even acknowledge the presence of the savant. Like all tech adepts of Mars, the lead engineer was robed in a simple red garment with a heavy cowl that drooped around his shoulders even when drawn over his head, and around his waist was an unassuming belt of worn rope from which dangled numerous intricate tools. It was likely that he also sported numerous bionic enhancements, though none were visible beneath his hood.

Aquinas did not choose to dignify the tech-engineer with an answer.

“Is this the only way the engine room may be accessed?” he asked. The security checkpoint was surprisingly quiet considering the noise of the engines behind the aft door and the noise of the alarms to the fore-deck.

“It is the only way in or out. All other entry-points ventilate into the vacuum, Lord,” the tech-engineer nodded.

“Good,” Aquinas dismissed him, “return to your duties.”

The tech-mage retreaded rather brusquely without a backward glance, though Aquinas ignored his display and instead turned to his small companion.

“Sudulus,” he grabbed the savant’s attention as the little man craned his neck to catch a glimpse inside the engine rooms before the doors closed behind the tech-engineer’s back; “remember why you are hear.”

“Right right,” the little man burbled, “what can I do?”

Aquinas directed him to the consoles nestled behind the security checkpoint desk. “Follow your Inquisitor’s orders and see what you can do with those.”

Sudulus wasted no time and his mechanical hands flashed over the access terminals as he muttered to himself and became fully engrossed in his work.

“Anything in particular I should be looking for?” he asked as the Librarian reopened the doors leading into the rest of the ship. A long corridor faced him with doors branching out onto store rooms on either side of the wide hallway. He would wait for them here.

“See that the doorways out of this hallway are sealed,” Aquinas instructed him as he walked further along the corridor – the ceiling a mere hands-breadth from the top of his psychic hood – “they are to have no means of escape other than back the way they came.”

Sudulus set to work at once, his keen eyes eagerly flashing as his fingers raced to carry out the Librarian’s instructions, and in no time at all every door on the same deck as the engine room was sealed, allowing for one avenue of approach.

 

 

The pirates struck at the port batteries first, but Grant’s men were prepared.

“Righ’ wha’s the plan?” Lee had asked him four minutes earlier.

Grant had already positioned his squads on the station deck alongside the modular firing bays to prevent the enemy from engaging the gun crews directly. When in use, guns aboard the Patroclus were rolled forward on mechanical track mechanisms from the station deck into a separate firing bay sealed off from the rest of the ship by blast doors which prevented damage to the ship should the gun misfire. The firing bays were well armoured but small, and could not accessed by any means other than entering through the station deck entrances. The station deck, on the other hand, was a vast room with a high ceiling that stretched the entire length of the gun emplacements and was criss-crossed by a layer of catwalks and operations clusters beneath the arched ceiling. A total of five doors, large enough to fit a pair of leman russ battle tanks moving side by side, opened onto the station deck. Grant had ordered four of the doors sealed shut, but had left the bow facing door unsecured. The enemy would seek to exploit this weakness, and he would seek to exploit their exploitation in return by mounting his defence against that single portal.

The two squads he’d ordered to defend the batteries with Lee were spread out along the catwalks or hugging the ample cover of the large gun tracks on the deck, while he and the counter attack units were massed to either side of the unsecured door to press the attackers when they wavered.

“We’ve been over the plan,” Grant replied. “Is something unclear?”

The squads were ready, but Lee had pulled Grant aside to where they could converse in private just out of earshot in the noise-filled station deck.

The pilot looked uncomfortable, though whether or not it was the Commissar that bothered him, or the situation they were caught in, was unclear.

He gave the Commissar a prompting nudge on the shoulder; “Y’ know wha’ I mean,” he whined, his eyes darting all over Grant’s face and cap as he held the other man’s light machine gun heavily. “I’ve nev’r done anythin’ like th’s b’fore! ‘Ow do I lead these people?”

The only person Lee had ever been responsible for was the person he saw in the mirror, and it was obvious that looking out for others scared him.

“They will be looking to you to lead them by example,” Grant told him, “so do what you think they should do.” Given the opportunity, Grant would have gladly explained to the pilot everything he thought essential for being a leader of men, but with the threat of imminent attack he had to keep it short. “Just do what I have told you and do it well: start firing as soon as you see more than one enemy coming through the door, and stop firing when I wave you down. They will follow your example and shoot when you shoot.”

“‘Ow do y’ know tha’?”

“Because I told them to.”

Lee didn’t know what made the Commissar so sure of himself, and, Emperor forgive him, he didn’t care, but as soon as he had taken his position on the catwalks he did exactly what he was told – not because he liked Grant but because he didn’t know what else he should do.

The forward doors ground open. Hidden behind cover, the defenders collectively held their breath. Lee didn’t pay attention to who they were, what the looked like, or what they carried. Peering down the machine gun’s sights he waited until he could see one under the center prong and two more in his periphery before squeezing the trigger.

A hail of solid slugs blasted at everything standing in the doorway as Lee and the defenders opened up from cover with everything they had. The first man in and four entering behind him were brutally and hacked down by the sheer volume of chattering firearms arrayed against them before their comrades ducked back out the door and out of sight. The armsmen were yelling encouragement to themselves and their friends as they continued to suppress the entirety of the doorway and rake the corridor beyond with a ceaseless hail of bullets. To brave their gunfire would have been murder.

“I will lead the charge!” Grant bellowed over the cacophony of fire, priming a grenade in one hand while drawing his sword in the other and waving above his head. The cover fire stopped. Grant threw the grenade – tossing it low through the door. Someone screamed. The grenade exploded – rending fragments of metal tearing and ricocheting wildly off the deck and bulkheads.

“With me to victory!” he plunged through the door with sword held high and twenty roaring armsmen at his back.

The grenade had killed four and left the remaining three bloodied and dazed to meet the merciless charge of Grant’s men. The Commissar himself skewered a badly bleeding woman through the chest with his sabre as she tried to get back to her feet, while from beside him the big man Hodgkin kicked a dazed pirate off his feet with a point-blank blast from his shotgun. From the right of the door, the last pirate snapped off shots with an assault carbine and dropped one of the armsmen with two bullets to the thigh and groin before he too was gunned down and shredded by the return fire of two shotguns and an autocarbine.

“Press the advantage! Onwards to victory!” Grant cried out, rallying his men while the fury of battle and bloodshed still raced in their veins. He led them on as they surged to confront the enemy and drive them from the Patroclus’ halls.

 

 

Grant had hardly sounded the charge on the station deck when the storm broke at the base of the superstructure, and Godwyn and Striker found themselves assailed by a determined force fighting an uphill battle.

Enemy fire ripped over and around their barricade and tore chunks of foam and fabric from the stacked sofas as the Inquisitor and her bodyguard traded furious blows back and forth with the enemy as they tried to stagger free of the elevator. The bodies of four they’d already killed were strewn in the forty paces of no-man’s separating the lift doors and the piled barricade, but the attackers showed no sign of relenting as they ducked in and out meagre cover hugging the sides of the turbo lift to whip fire back at the defenders.

Striker, her head down and her breathing heavy as she pressed her shoulder into their cover, was counting seconds between bursts to keep her enemies guessing before spraying blindly over the barricade with lethal bursts of her howling hellgun. A little ways beside her, Godwyn was crouched down on all fours and periodically peeking around cover and blasting a fistful of flechettes down towards the lift before ducking back, pumping the shotgun, and loading another round into the second barrel to keep it at a full six. Their cover wouldn’t last forever and their backs were to a wall, but then again the Patroclus could be blasted apart or crushed into dust by the asteroids, so what did a little fire fight matter?

A shot ripped through the back of the sofa between them. They looked at each other with concerned expressions; the top sofa had been chewed away almost to the frame – their barricade was dissolving quickly. Striker returned fire in a long burst and sent their attackers ducking back out of sight.

Godwyn didn’t know how many were left, but from the returning fire she guessed at least three or four.

The storm trooper briefly ducked back down then resumed pummelling the elevator not more than a split second later – keeping the enemy in the elevator pinned. The return fire was sporadic and wild as Godwyn sent another blast down the corridor.

“Cover fire!” Godwyn shouted at the storm trooper, hoping she could be heard over the piercing wail of the hellgun.

“Covering fire!” Striker acknowledged, and stood up behind the barricade with her hellgun screaming.

Godwyn vaulted the barricade and sprinted to a small alcove hidden in the wall, barely managing to conceal herself as she braved a glance along the corridor to the lift doors. Striker was showering the lift with a suppressive stream of red energy beams that were warping and melting the metal wall panels but otherwise failing to blast through the enemy’s cover.

Whispering a small prayer to the Emperor and hoping she wasn’t about to get herself shot, Godwyn darted from cover slid her back along the wall with her shotgun levelled at the turbo-lift doors for any sign of the enemy. Adrenaline was pulsing through her limbs and her heart was thundering up around her throat. She sped past the mid-way point of the body-strewn no-man’s land in a fast moving crouch, all the while the back of her brain kept telling her that she was going to get shot. Her footsteps sounded like cannon-fire – there was no way they wouldn’t hear her coming.

About ten feet from the open lift doors a man stepped around cover into her sights. He was armed with a machine pistol and wearing scavenged looking flak armour. The look of anger on his face quickly dropped into one of shock when he noticed Godwyn on his flank. She squeezed the trigger and the shotgun roared as he dropped without a sound – a spray of blood decorating the interior of the lift behind him. Someone inside the lift was shouting. She briefly saw another man clatter to the floor inside the lift as she ran – cut down by the hellgun – and she slammed into the wall to the left of the open turbo-lift.

Blood racing, she pumped another round into the chamber and slowly straightened up into a standing position as she edged closer to the door. Striker abruptly ceased fire and ducked back behind the ruined furniture. The replying barrage was diminished in its fury, however, as what sounded like a single automatic weapon lashed out from beyond Godwyn’s sight to chastise the storm trooper. There was a break in the fire and she heard an empty magazine drop to the floor. Spinning on the balls of her feet Godwyn veered into the door way and fired – cutting the pirate in half with a point-blank shot to the midriff. The third man in the lift went down in blood, but from the corner of her eye she spied a fourth pirate immediately to her left, his own weapon raised against her.

She didn’t hear the shot until she was already knocked to her back and Striker was screaming her name.

 

Grant lost two in a hit-and-run fire fight, and lost another when they’d pinned the fleeing enemy down in a store room. They’d killed upwards of nine, however, and heedless of losses the Patroclus’ armsmen pressed on like heroes.

“Covering fire!” he bellowed as two armsmen hastened to open up from across the way and suppress the enemy sheltering down the hall and across the lobby as Hodgkin boldly leapt from cover to drag a wounded comrade from danger. The young man had been shot in the neck and would not survive long unless they managed to get him to the medical wing a deck up, but the other armsman – a bright young woman and the only female to have volunteered to join the Patroclus’ fighting force – had been killed outright as she tried to duck for cover but instead got two bullets to the gut and one to face.

“You and you – get him to the infirmary!” Grant ordered as Hodgkin delivered the wounded man with bloody hands. The two armsmen hurried off with the crewman between them, and Grant clapped Hodgkin on the shoulder:

“Press on to victory!” he encouraged him; “We will yet win the day!”

“We’re right with you!” Hodgkin spoke for all of the assembled armsmen as they huddled in cover and enemy fire spat down the adjoining hall towards them. “What is our next move?”

Sweeping off his cap, Grant cautiously peered around the bend at the bullet-mauled store room entrance about forty paces away. Between his squads and his enemies was a corridor about six paces wide followed by an open area with metal framed furniture bolted to the floor. Cover was minimal, and up ahead there were numerous blind-spots in the open area beyond the corridor; it could be an ambush, but even if it wasn’t their charge would be down a firing corridor and could turn into a rout for the armsmen if handled improperly.

“Grenades,” he said down the line of eagerly waiting faces and tightly gripped guns as the two armsmen opposite from him on the other side of the junction traded fire with the cornered enemy. “Cover fire and then four grenades into that open area,” he explained to his attentive teams, “after which Hodgkin and his squad will follow me as we advance into the sitting room as the second squad provides covering fire. Once there, and we have secured it against the enemy, grenades into the store room and the final charge!” He emphasised the final part of his plan with a fist clenched in victory and smiled inwardly as he saw the grim enthusiasm spread across their faces. They would likely take casualties, but with victory in grasp they were ready for any obstacle.

“Right,” he took the grenade that was handed to him and primed it. “Covering fire!”

Four armsmen leaned out into the hall and emptied their entire magazines in the direction of the enemy.

“Fire in hole!” Grant shouted, loosing the grenade handle and tossing it into the middle of the open area at the end of the corridor along with three others thrown by the men at his back.

The grenades went off – winging lethal shards of shrapnel across every surface and deafening them with their roar.

“Death before dishonour!” he shouted and stormed into the corridor in a running crouch with Hodgkin and his men at his back and the guns of the second squad overhead.

The room at the end of the corridor was clear, though the furniture was badly mangled by the grenade detonations. As more of Hodgkin’s armsmen spread out into the sitting room, however, bursts of fire erupted from within the store room and sent bullets ringing of walls and metal furniture frames. One armsman was hit clean in the chest and dropped backwards to the floor, though his flack vest had saved his life. Unbidden, Hodgkin’s men returned fire through the busted doors, but another armsman got hit in the face and was spun to the ground dead as his blood splattered onto his comrades.

“Grenades! Now!” Grant waved his sword overhead from where he was crouched behind a twisted metal chair.

The grenades sailed through the air and exploded with a satisfying crump deep inside the storage room.

“With me now! Charge for the glory of the Emperor!”

The Commissar was first over his cover and led them through the door into the smoke-filled storage room with his sword flashing. Determined to fight to the last, the enemy was ready, and no sooner had Grant set foot through the door when a large beast of a man in a torn, bloody uniform rushed him headlong with a roaring chainsword in his fist. Grant intercepted the weapon with his blade before it could strike and quickly backhanded his attacker in the face with the pommel of his sabre – feeling the man’s nose and teeth shatter beneath the burnished brass. The man staggered, but Grant wasted no time in kicking out at his knee and toppling the brute over before reversing the grip on his sword and running him through the chest with his steel. Hodgkin was second through the door behind the Commissar and got a shot off with his autogun at an enemy between the toppled stock shelves before a bullet from an unseen foe caught him high and brought him low, crashing to deck.

The fight proved earnest when two more armsmen were gunned down in the doorway before the rushing Grant’s men finally got the upper hand and furiously gunned down the remaining pirates with autogun and shotgun fire.

“Commissar, you’re bleeding!” one of the armsmen pointed out in astonishment as Grant regrouped the remainder of his forces. He looked down – his shirt had been torn and dark blood was running along his side where a bullet had grazed through an inch of flesh.

“So I am,” he confirmed, though the more he thought about it the more he felt the sting of pain reaching up from his wounded flank. Seven of his men had been killed, however, and another two wounded – what was his discomfort compared to that? A small price to pay for victory.

“Contact the bridge and tell them what we have done,” Grant commanded, “there may still be enemies left to fight.”

 

 

Godwyn was finding it hard to breath and her chest felt as if it were on fire. She’d been shot, but she didn’t know where. Her limbs felt sluggish and weak, and her head was pounding like a drum from being thrown against the deck so hard.

She blinked. A wash of colour and light seemed to swirl around the inside of her eyelids. She opened her eyes, and to her surprise saw someone who looked a lot like Striker looking down at her.

“Don’t move!” the Captain’s voice sounded faint and far away in her ringing ears. The storm trooper looked concerned, though Godwyn was having a hard time focusing so she couldn’t be certain. She didn’t think about it, however, as the she groaned with pain when Striker pressed the palm of her hand against her chest. The ship was starting to spin again. She closed her eyes.

“Can you hear me?” Striker asked.

Godwyn opened her eyes, and suddenly wished she hadn’t as she felt horribly nauseous.

“You’ve been shot,” the Captain informed her in a slow and steady tone, “but don’t worry,” she added when Godwyn’s face started to contort, “you’re armour took all the damage. You’re safe now, but you’re still hurt, so don’t move while I take a look, okay?”

She thought she nodded, but in truth she had no idea what she did.

Seemingly satisfied, Striker gently undid the straps to remove her armour and carefully lifted up her shirt. She grimaced.

“Does it hurt here?” she pressed lightly against the Inquisitor’s ribs – Godwyn’s eyes started to roll. The storm trooper bit her lip. “You’re in once piece,” she said, looking into the Inquisitor’s eyes to make sure she understood, “but you might have some broken ribs and bruised organs. You’re already turning purple down here.”

“My head hurts…” the words escape her lips.

Striker was chewing the inside of her cheek and did not look reassuring. “How many fingers?” she asked, holding up four fingers.

“Four.”

“What is your name?”

“Cassandra Pallas Godwyn.”

“The Emperor is our Father and Protector. Can you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Good. What did I ask you to remember?”

Godwyn sighed painfully; “The Emperor is our Father and Protector,” she recited.

Striker nodded and shifted her weight as to sit down by the Inquisitor’s head. “Well,” she said, “the good news is that you don’t seem concussed, and we’ve held them here. You remember who ‘they’ are, right?”

“The pirates,” Godwyn groaned, she wanted to sit up, but Striker held her back.

“I’m not a medicae, Cassandra, so for your own safety you should stay there until the lockdown ends and we can get someone up here to look at you.”

“What about Sudulus? He’s treated injuries before.”

Striker shrugged. “Even if he has, he and Aquinas likely have their own trouble to deal with…”

 

Broken and thrown back from the batteries and the superstructure, the pirate boarding parties fought to destroy the Patroclus piece by piece before they were overwhelmed. Destroying what they could, defiling what they could not, and killing whoever they found, eliminating the pirate stragglers was like extracting a barbed stinger from the flesh. Worse still, however, were the two teams of raiders still intact who were making for the engineering decks with all speed and blasting through whatever obstacles stood in their way.

Aquinas saw all this as he watched them approach, but he felt no fear or urgency. Everything was under control.

“Sudulus,” the Librarian said softly from where he waited by the open door of the security check-point with his back to the savant, “turn off the lights on this level, and then hide under the desk.”

Sudulus did as he was told, and when the pirates arrived they were greeted by total darkness. One-by-one the raiders flicked on lamp-packs or lanterns as they groped through the noise filled blackness. It never occurred to them that the opponent they faced needed neither light to see them with or sound to hear them by.

They fanned out in a wide spread through the long corridor and swept their lights before them as they found every side door secured but the way forward surprisingly bare. Some of them started to lose their nerve in the darkness and shone their lights at shadows cast across the ribs of the arched ceiling, though they were quickly rebuked by their fellows; there were over two-score of them, what could oppose them on a merchant ship that they wouldn’t see coming?

The first man to snap shot his comrade from the corner of his eye, and the fear quickly spread like a plague until they were nearly paralyzed in the darkness and had to will themselves forward with every step. Some were convinced that they were getting lost and had somehow gone the wrong way even though there was only one way open to them, though others were convinced that they were nearly there. Five minutes later and the rearguard was certain that they were being followed, but doubling back they found nothing, though upon their return five men had somehow vanished into the darkness without a trace.

Their will to fight had almost vanished without having so much as set eyes on their enemy. Some claimed it was witchery and that they should never have set foot on the lower decks, while others maintained it was a clever ruse and that they would make their enemies pay tenfold for it. It was at that point when a man gone mad with fear swore that he had seen blue eyes burning brightly in the darkness.

 

Sudulus had been hiding in the dark beneath the security desk for at least twenty minutes without so much as hearing a whisper from the space marine. What was he planning? Had he gone anywhere? Had he even moved from where he stood? Not being able to see the hand in front of his face, much less across the room, Sudulus hadn’t a clue where he had gone.

“Aquinas!” he hissed: “Aquinas! What is happening?”

He got no reply.

“Aquinas!?!”

He tried to squirm out from under the desk but quickly bonked his head. Cursing and rubbing his scalp, he managed to scramble free from the desk just as the lights turned back on.

The Librarian was standing not four feet away and was giving him an almost scolding look.

“What in bloody bother!?” Sudulus whined and quickly looked away to hide his embarrassment as his head still stung with pain.

“I told you to stay under the desk,” Aquinas said flatly as the savant dusted off his robes and muttered under his breath.

The savant scoffed. “What are you playing at not answering me?” he demanded. “I thought I was alone all that time!”

The Librarian regarded him impassively. “I do not play,” he said in his usual toneless voice. “The enemy is defeated, though we must hasten to secure the rest of the vessel.”

He strode off without a further word, and, begrudgingly, Sudulus trotted after him.

 

------------------------

 

At this point I'd like to know how the plot is coming across and whether or not the story is one that is easy to follow without being overly simplified. Also, how are the characters coming across this far along in the story? Are there any who are too subtle? Too obvious? Two dimensional?

Thanks for reading and enjoying!

[Papewaio]

The plot is good, not too hard to follow but with twists to surprise. That said, some of the leads Godwyn is following seem a bit weak. A stronger reason for going where they do might help a little.

 

As for the characters, Godwyn doesn't fit the standard template of an Inquisitor. She's seeming unsure, a little too indecisive. That's not necessarily a bad thing though. As for the rest of her team, well done! Different personalities that stand out readily from each other and the interactions within them are interesting.

 

Keep up the good work!

[Inquisitor =D=]

Loving the story so far. And I agree with the above, the team is wonderful! Unique and interesting, and they even stand out from other characters of the genre (Inquisition books that is).

 

And to be honest I love how Aquinas handled his area, seriously not what I expected. Bravo. Bravo.

 

=]D[=

[Lady_Canoness]

Very glad to hear that the characters are holding their own! And yes, plots can be tricky to get off the ground, though now that we're over the hump, things should be smooth riding from here on.

 

Thanks again, I do appreciate the feedback :)

 

And now, hot hot hottttt off the press (meaning that there may be mistakes that I glossed over) is part 10 of the Inquisition!

 

*part 10*

 

Of all the possible outcomes following the defence of the Patroclus, being confined to her bedchamber in a body-brace was the last thing Godwyn had expected. The shotgun blast she’d taken to the torso had proved much more substantial than Striker had originally guessed, and it was with a doting voice that Sudulus informed the young Inquisitor that four of her ribs were broken and that the bruising – which had turned her chest a frightful shade of black and purple – would be very painful for the next few days.

“Oh yes, dear Godwyn, I’m afraid you’ll be quite sorry if you try to move about, yes?” he said as he helped stack pillows behind her back so she could at least sit up, “though the injections I gave you earlier should expedite the healing process of your body, you see, so you won’t be out for a few weeks, making four or five days seem trivial by comparison! Don’t you agree?”

Sudulus was right, there was no denying it, and five days in a bed was nothing compared to what could have happened: Striker had shown her the armour and how the chest piece was barely holding itself together – it was a miracle that she hadn’t been killed at that range.

The worst part of being bed-ridden, however, wasn’t the pain or having to stay in the same position for hours on end, rather it was the feeling of helplessness and that she wasn’t being of any use to anyone as the Patroclus slowly recovered from the pirate attack. They had successfully repelled the boarding attempt with ‘acceptable’ casualties, though the enemy vessel had successfully slipped away in spite of Columbo’s best attempts to pursue it. To have his beloved Patroclus damaged, a fifth of his crew killed or wounded, and to be denied the satisfaction of destroying the perpetrator had greatly darkened his mood, and, compounded with the regrettable truth that she could not re-enter the Warp safely until her hull was repaired, made for a subdued tone on ship. The enemy vessel returning for another attack was also a possibility, and – though a slim chance – was an unwanted weight on the minds of an already burdened crew.

To Godwyn it also meant that her transit to Trajan’s Deep was delayed, though she was not as impatient as some of her colleagues within the Inquisition and did not feel as if she must press the matter with the already taxed Ship Master. Strassen had taught her that time wisely spent was time well spent, and, though the irony of using Strassen’s own teachings to find him did not escape her, she still respected him greatly.

 

“I don’t think Strassen murdered Inquisitor Felix,” she said to Brother Aquinas one evening when he came to visit her in her chamber.

“And why is that?” the Librarian enquired as he gently closed the door behind him and stood at the foot of the Inquisitor’s bed.

Being stuck in one place and threatened with boredom had been all Godwyn needed to once again focus her attention on the wealth of information she had been provided with about her mentor and redouble her efforts to make the connections between the man she had known as her teacher, the man whose reports she had read, and the man who had been implicated in the murder of Inquisitor Felix.

“Because it’s not like him,” she replied, and went on to explain herself: “Strassen as I know him, through both my years as his student and the documents we have, has always been a very calculating and controlled individual. Even when he was wrong he evaluated his wrong-doing and corrected himself. I have no reason to believe that he’d react to something with violence unless he was certain that he had no other options available to him. It’s just not like him to kill someone without reason!”

“You are assuming he had no reason to kill Inquisitor Felix,” Aquinas pointed out quietly. “If Inquisitor Felix had gone rogue, as was suspected, he would have killed her.”

“But if she had gone rogue he would have followed due process,” Godwyn countered. “The fact that what happened to her is not documented shows that she had not been branded a radical or a traitor. We would know if she had been.”

Aquinas did not answer, and instead walked over to Godwyn’s bed-side table and poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher that Sudulus had brought in sometime earlier. She looked at him expectantly, yet he did not answer as he calmly walked back to the foot of her bed and sipped quietly on the glass of water he held gently between the fingers of his armoured fist.

“You are making assumptions that you should not be making,” he said in a soft voice barely above a whisper.

She asked him what he meant.

“You will remember that I told you to the Inquisitor there is no book,” he began as he drained his glass and placed it carefully on the sill of porthole behind him, “which means that the Inquisitor makes his own rules.”

“What do you mean?” Godwyn interrupted as she tried to pull herself up straighter against her back rest. “The Inquisition is governed by a mandate handed down from the High Lords of Terra.”

“In writing, many things are like that,” Aquinas nodded, “though in reality the men and women of your order are as secretive as they are inquisitive.”

“Is that what you think of me?” she asked cautiously.

Aquinas narrowed his eyes. “You speak as if I do your order a disservice. I do not. The Imperium would not survive if Inquisitors did not keep their secrets, and it is necessary that they continue to do so. Do I think of you as secretive? I do not, though given time you will become like your colleagues out of necessity.”

Godwyn made to speak but Aquinas silenced her with a frown: “The Imperium is not capable of hearing the truth that you so adamantly seek. Not now and not ever. As such it is necessary that Inquisitors keep secrets even from each other, and while you believe Inquisitor Felix would have been turned over had she strayed from her duties, you must realize that perhaps her secrets were so damning that Strassen and the Inquisitors with him may have had no choice but to destroy her secrets as they destroyed her.”

“What – what are you saying?” Godwyn posed after some reflection, as the depth and severity of the Librarian’s words left her chilled and perplexed; “Are you saying that killing her could have been necessary?”

“I am saying that you are making assumptions based in your own inexperience, and I am advising you to guard against such actions.”

“But how will I know?”

Aquinas’ face was expressionless when he answered her. “Your duty is to uncover and destroy threats to the Imperium, not to know them.”

 

The following days proved lengthy as the Patroclus drifted free of the asteroid field at last and the repairs to her battle-scarred body were completed. Like the ship, Godwyn was on the mend as well, and by the time Master Columbo was prepared to make the transition back into the Warp Godwyn had regained her feet and was almost fully healed. The days in bed in forced repose had given her time to recoup with her squad (though know she thought of them more as friends than colleagues) and see that the battles sat well with them and that no nerves were frayed or spirits dislodged.

Sudulus and Lee, the two she had been most concerned about, seemed to be either nonplused by the fighting or invigorated by it, as Sudulus found the ship to ship combat on the bridge to be most fascinating while Lee was as boastful and confident as ever when describing his heroics in the defence of the batteries.

Aquinas, of course, had survived the battle unscathed and made no mention of it once it was behind him. Similarly, Grant left his participation in the fighting unspoken, though the word aboard ship more than made up for his modesty and most of the crew regarded him as something of a hero. He didn’t seem to mind his new-found reputation, but when Godwyn had light-heartedly asked him about it he had excused his actions as duty, and something that he would have expected from anyone in his place. Striker greatly admired him, however, and made no claims to the contrary. She and the Commissar could often be found in each others company either engaged in intense discussions of military strategy and tactics or simply making the best of the quiet that had descended upon the Patroclus once she had cleared the field battle.

 

On the last day before the Patroclus made the transition from real space into the warp, Master Columbo had arranged for a party in the seigneurie to which every member of his crew was invited in celebration, and remembrance, of past battles fought and those who had given their lives in defence of his ship. It was meant as a merry occasion to help elevate crew morale before the always strenuous Warp-travel, and Hercule Columbo did his utmost to make it so. Everyone had heard how the Ship Master had been utterly incensed when the enemy vessel had slipped beyond his reach and how for the following few days he had dwelt in the depths of melancholy as a man who had given up much and gained nothing in return. Godwyn personally thought that he felt impotent and ashamed as it was on his word and thirst for battle that over seventy of his people had been hurt or killed, and he had not delivered a satisfying victory in return. In a speech before two-hundred people, Columbo seemed in high spirits, however, and before entreating them to a hearty buffet of food and drink he thanked them all for their service and trust, and swore an oath that his vessel, his enterprise, and his crew would not be long-suffering. With that, he raised his glass in a toast, and not a one of those in attendance found their appetite wanting for lack of food or drink.

The Ship Master’s good mood was infectious and soon the domed room under the star-lit sky was heaving with joyful voices as his guest mingled amongst friends both old and new.

Though dressed professionally, Godwyn downplayed the fact that she was an Inquisitor and listened intently to the stories and gags of Columbo’s crew. To her it was all light-hearted and fun – and of course utterly irrelevant – which likely explained why she never once caught sight of Brother Aquinas when she moved through the mingling company. The space marine had likely found somewhere quiet to center himself or browse through more excerpts from Columbo’s personal library, though when she thought about it he wasn’t the only one missing. Lee was naturally to be found making himself the center of attention as he spread tall-tales from his smuggling days to any audience he could capture, and she had last seen Sudulus pouring himself yet another drink and giggling madly, though Markus Grant and Captain Striker were mysteriously absent.

“My dear Godwyn!” Columbo came striding through the crowd with a wide grin on his face. “My dear, dear Godwyn, I am so glad you accepted my invitation!”

She returned his warm greeting in kind, and he beamed at her with what were almost tears of joy in his old eyes.

“If you please, follow me?” he beseeched her, indicating that he wished to speak with her in private.

She followed him, and he led her from the party out of the seigneurie to a small study down hall on the same deck. The interior was modestly furnished by Columbo’s standards with several glass cases of art, an antique desk, a loveseat, and two armchairs close together side-by-side. He invited her to sit, which she did in one of the arm chairs, though before joining her he took the opportunity to top up his drink from a bottle he kept in one of his desk drawers.

“Godwyn, I would like to thank you,” he said, sitting down in the chair beside her with a warm smile on his face, “truly, thank you.”

She towards him over the arm of her chair: “Whatever are you thanking me for, Hercule?” she asked. Though old and grey, Columbo did not suffer from the withering effects of time, and the traces of the handsome man he must have been remained visible behind the weight of his years. He wore his age well, she thought.

The Ship Master chuckled. “Oh to be young again,” he mused amiably, “if only I had met you before I was old enough to be your great grandfather.”

She raised her glass to her lips and watched him over the rim as she took another sip, her eyes flashing into his.

“Well…” the Ship Master’s cheeks started to redden and he quickly looked away though the smile never wavered from his face, “I suppose I should say what I intended to say before things get carried away and I forget it all!”

“And just what is *that* supposed to mean?” she asked almost playfully.

“Weeell!” he replied with a satirical expression of flamboyancy, “I *waaas* going to lavish you with most generous praise and thanks for being the image of the Inquisitor exemplar,” he swayed in his seat as if washed over by the magnificence of her presence, though rebounded just as quickly; “but if you keep making scandalous suggestions to men the likes of which were already grey by the day you were born… then I might have to retract and such statement.”

It was Godwyn’s turn to redden and snort with laughter as she rocked back in her chair.

“Quite right,” she agreed with a gasping smile as she wiped at her eyes and steadied her hand lest she slop her drink onto her lap. “Please go on, Hercule. I’ll try not to be so openly *shameless* in the future!”

He chuckled in response, and they both waited until they had calmed down and their glasses were empty before continuing.

“I must say, though – and truthfully! – that you are a pleasure to have on board and to work with, Godwyn,” he said with humbling honesty.

“Please,” she said as a smile crept back to her face, “between you and me, it’s Cassandra.”

He nodded and clapped his hands onto his lap.

“Right – Cassandra.”

A comfortable silence descended between them, though after several moments it was lifted as the Ship Master continued to speak.

“I must admit that I did not trust you for the first few weeks of our acquaintance,” he said, “as the Inquisitors I have met or dealt with before – including your friend Lord Roth – have always been guarded and distant. Not that I am daring to infer that you are irresponsible, but you seem different to me.”

“From what everyone tells me, it is because I am young,” she replied, then added with a grin; “and if you’re unlucky I’ll grow out of it.”

“Emperor forbid that ever happen!” he retorted with a comedic fluster in his voice.

She laughed. “So how did you come to know Roth anyway?”

He sighed and rolled his eyes as if recalling a particularly bothersome memory, though he did not spare any details when she raised a questioning eyebrow.

“I was receiving an exotic shipment on Panacea – illegal stuff, but nothing too outrageous – when my supplier was busted in a spectacular fashion by the Arbites,” he explained. “Naturally, I wanted to distance myself from that disaster as much as possible, so I took up with who I thought was another supplier.” He glanced over at Godwyn, “though I am sure you can guess who he really was.”

She could – rotten luck on his behalf.

“Roth saw fit to cut me a deal, though: I keep my trading more-or-less legal and do whatever favours he asks of me, and in return he keeps the port authorities off my back.”

“Sounds like he sees you as quite the asset to have.”

He sighed heavily. “Yes I suppose he does,” he admitted, “though being at the beck and call of a Lord Inquisitor who has you by the balls is not thrilling work. However, I will miss having you on board when this is over, Cassandra. Truly I will.”

“Well,” Godwyn shrugged thoughtfully, “who says it has to end? I’m sure I could find a way to retain you in the employ of the Inquisition to ferry me around.”

He smiled broadly and quickly leapt up from his seat. “Could I tempt into accompanying me for a stroll around this ship? You know, to stretch our legs and curl our tongues?”

She grinned, and also standing replied, “I could be tempted. After you.”

 

Together they ambled through the Patroclus’ quiet corridors for what could have been hours. The party still going on in the seigneurie, there was little risk of being overheard and the Inquisitor and Ship Master talked freely as friends about times past, deeds done, and the odd thing they wouldn’t mind doing if the chance arose. Columbo even let slip that he was one-hundred and forty-two years old, had been Master of the Patroclus for sixty-six years, and that some of his people were the second generation of crewmen aboard his ship after having been born and raised on the Patroclus between the stars.

“It’s almost romantic, a life amongst the stars,” he said dreamily as he escorted Godwyn back to the guest quarters and they said their goodnights outside the double doors.

“I don’t think it can go wrong,” she added with an affirming smile. She’d never thought herself a fawning star-gazer before, but the way he spoke so wistfully about journeying in the void made her feel as if there really was nothing more that one could ask for.

He gazed at her warmly, his eyes positively glowing with fondness. “I don’t suppose I could offer you a night-cap…?”

She patted his arm. “Maybe some other time.”

After saying a lengthy adieu they parted ways, and Godwyn quietly slid open the doors to the common room and closed them with a *click* behind her. It was dark inside with the only light coming from the faintly glowing stars beyond, but even so she could see the dark outlines of the furniture and the furthest door being the one to her bed.

She took her fist step, but instantly froze as movement from one of the sofas caught in her eye. Laying together with clothing draped haphazardly on the surrounding furniture, Striker and Grant were completely oblivious to her presence. They were clutched in each others arms and the white of Victoria’s bare legs were wrapped around Markus’ strong hips moving with the motions of –

Godwyn quickly dropped her eyes to the ground, though all the will she could muster wasn’t enough to blot out the animal moans of ecstasy from the two soldiers. Warriors in one hand, lovers in the other.

Not willing to disturb them in their moments of passion and hardly daring to breathe, she quietly backed out the door just as the Captain’s hand slid the length of Grant’s back and clutched encouragingly at his hair.

Doors closed, Godwyn let out an exhale of breath – that was close – though taking a careful step back she couldn’t stop grinning like an idiot. The Commissar and the Captain? She could have seen it coming. He was a good man for her too.

She quickly backtracked down the hall at a swift pace. They couldn’t take that much longer to move to somewhere more private, could they?

“Hercule!” she caught up with him just as he stepped onto the lift.

Seeing her, he held the door and welcomed her to join him.

“Not too late for that nightcap, is it?” she asked, grinning as the lift doors slid shut.

 

* *

 

Boarding Meridian as the Patroclus approached high orbit above Trajan’s Deep, Sudulus plopped himself down in the nest’s swivel chair and spun about as his eyes scanned every readout and monitor.

“Fluxuations normal…”

His bionic fingers crawled over all three of the nest’s keyboards on their own accord as the savant compared four readouts at a glance as he muttered to himself.

“Syncs are engaged…”

He spun two-hundred and seventy degrees to his left and flipped three terminal switches one after the other as the cogitators hummed and crackled to life.

“Green on all boards…”

He entered a few choice command words on one of the keyboards and two screens flickered and rebooted in response.

“And today seems like a good day for Korvic’s March of the Angelic Host…”

Meridian’s speaker system grunted and crackled to life to the clearing of brass trumpets and delicate woodwinds.

“Bramp Brampapa-pa Bramp-Bramp Brampapa-paaaaa!” Lee goose-stepped through the nest on his way to the cockpit while trumpeting triumphantly at the top of his lungs.

“Stand-by hangar control for opening of hangar doors and docking clamp release,” Sudulus intoned into the short-range vox channel as he continued to ignore the pilot’s ignominious musical renditions of Korvic’s masterpiece from the cockpit.

+“Roger that, Meridian. We’re waiting on your word.”+

“Lee!” Sudulus leaned back and called through the hatchway into Meridian’s cockpit, “Would you stop that awful racket and get us moving!?”

“Brampapa-paaaaaaa!”

The ex-smuggler’s hands danced around the forest of switches, dials, and glowing lights as he waived an imaginary baton for the orchestra in his mouth.

“Lee!!”

He punched in a few important studs and flicked a few more dials and with stuttering whine the engines came to life. Leaping out his chair, he amble back the nest and clapped the savant on the shoulder, before goose-stepping back to his seat and drumming his fingers across the cockpit dash with wild exultations.

“Meridian to hanger control, we’re ready.”

+“Understood, clamps released and doors opening. Have a nice flight.”+

The shuttle lurched underneath them as the docking clamps receded with a thump.

Sudulus rolled his chair back to the hatch adjoining the main-hold. “We’re ready to take off when the doors open,” he called into the aft compartment.

Gathered around the table in the main hold and giving their weapons and armour a last check, Godwyn provided an impromptu briefing for her team.

“This world is mostly jungle and is purported to have a miniscule native population of tribal humans. No Imperial contact recorded, however, so we should expect to rough it on the surface until we find the oubliette.”

“Anything about native species? Predators?” Striker asked as she replaced the barrel of her hellgun and reassembled the weapon.

“It is safe to assume there will be many of each, yes,” Aquinas replied, arms crossed. Something about the planet made him uneasy, and when he read the initial scanner reports aboard the Patroclus he had mentioned that something was amiss. The planet had no history of Imperial contact for a reason.

Satisfied, the storm trooper captain snapped the last piece of her hellgun into place and thumped it against the table in readiness; “I’m good to go.”

“We have the objective’s coordinates fixed?” Grant asked, standing a small ways back from the table and wearing his usual black coat and hat as his light machinegun rested on the table an arms-length away.

Godwyn nodded. “We do,” she confirmed, “though atmospherics are making it hard to get an electronic fix. Apparently there is a lot of organic matter in the atmosphere, so we’re going to have to do this the old fashioned way with a plotted map and compass. We’ll also likely need rebreathers if the organic matter is as thick as the scans indicated.”

Aquinas looked grim.

“Organic?” Striker asked with a curious inclination of her head. “Like pollen?”

Godwyn shrugged; “It’s possible, but I don’t want to take any chances risking infection. Oubliettes are self-contained environments with decontamination protocols, so once we get there we should be okay.”

“Exposure should be limited,” Aquinas agreed, picking up the menacing astartes battle helm he had placed on the table and adjusting its fittings before setting it back down but leaving a hand resting atop it for emphasis. “The Alien comes in many guises,” he said, looking at each of them in turn with a warning gaze, “and each can be as deadly as the last. Preparedness, in any case, is your best defence.”

They nodded.

“Alright Lee!” Godwyn called forward to the cockpit; “Let’s get down there!”

[Lady_Canoness]

The story is heating up after the development of the middle stages, and we are now in the last leg of the journey where the likes of cliff-hangers, twists, and revelations doth dwell!

I hope the quality is remaining consistent with reader standards (being the writer, it gets bloody hard to tell after looking working it for hours) and that the characters remain true.

 

*part 11*

 

 

Getting down there was about all they could hope to do. From a distance the planet looked like a hazy, greenish-yellow ball – definitely not what they had expected even when consulting what little information they had – though as Meridian entered the atmosphere of Trajan’s deep Lee found himself flying through a blinding sea of yellowish fog that dusted the view-ports and stuck to the shuttle’s hull.

“Th’ ‘nstruments ‘pear t’ be accurate,” Lee said, “bu’ I can’ see s*** in this, an’ s’ possible tha’ this Emp’ror damn dust r’ fog r’ wha’ever th’ s*** it is could bugger our sensors.”

He looked over his shoulder at the Inquisitor and she could see that her pilot was scared; “I dunno ‘f I c’n get us down ‘n this…”

“You’ll find a way,” Godwyn reassured him and herself at the same time, and pressed steadying hands onto the shoulders of his flight-jacket. “I trust your instincts when it comes flying.”

Lee was unconvinced, and the mood in the main hold was none the better.

Aquinas appeared to be calm and was sitting at the far end of the table and loading individual shells into his bolt pistol. She wished she knew how he could be so certain when even the most confident of pilots was leaving their survival up to chance. Maybe it was a space marine thing, but it would help if he could somehow instil his confidence into the rest of them. Sudulus especially could use the help as the savant was anxiously pacing up and down the hold trying to reason through his fears:

“Pollen? No, pollen doesn’t come up this high – not its purpose. Spores? No, spores aren’t like this either. Has to be clouds then! Clouds dissipate closer to the ground! Heh – no reason to be nervous!”

She would try to offer him some assurances, but she had known Sudulus for far too long to think that telling him everything would be alright would make a difference.

Striker had disappeared into her cabin with her gear, but Grant remained sitting at the table polishing the already gleaming crest on his commissariat cap. Godwyn sat in the chair next to him.

“How are you holding up?” she asked quietly as the savant continued to mutter up and down to himself.

“I’m ready,” Grant replied, leaving ‘for whatever happens’ unspoken. His face was drawn and colourless, and, though his body blanched at the thought of hurtling headlong through blinding fog, she knew that his will was strong, and the he meant his words.

“How’s Captain Striker?” she asked.

He paused for a second in his polishing. Neither he nor the Captain had any idea that Godwyn knew of their involvement together and neither one had publically expressed any feelings for the other. This was Godwyn’s way of letting him know that she was supportive, however.

“She’s… a strong woman,” he said after a moment of gazing into the distance and turning to meet the Inquisitor’s eyes. He wasn’t about to pry as to how she knew – such an action would be beneath him.

“Watch her back, won’t you? She needs that,” Godwyn smiled lightly and rose to leave the Commissar to his bright-work.

 

The descent was rough and at times touch-and-go as Lee strained his every sense to bring Meridian down in one piece. Reducing his speed as much as he dared while still keeping Meridian airborne, he steered them deftly through invisible obstacles in the choking clouds, though was still surprised when a jungle canopy suddenly loomed up at him through the yellow.

“Pull up! Pull up!” Godwyn had yelled, but Lee Normandy was solid under pressure and managed to skim them along the tops of the trees before finding a landing site in an open clearing several minutes later.

After eighteen hairy minutes of flying blind through nerve-wrackingly thick clouds they were on solid ground once again.

“I knew you could do it,” she clapped him on the shoulder as he sunk back into his seat and breathed a grateful sight of relief. That was another one for his stories no doubt.

Getting planetside wasn’t the end of their troubles, however, as the organic clouds that had blinded their descent had also lodged themselves in the engine intake-filters and would make the build-up of force needed to get off the ground almost impossible unless they were properly cleaned out.

“ ‘S a few ‘ours work a’ th’ least,” Lee explained as he re-emerged from Meridian’s engine room on the lower deck as her team suited up to head onto the planet’s surface. Lee would be staying behind to work on the ship and make sure that Meridian was able to take off when they returned, though the rest of her squad would go with her to find the Inquisitorial oubliette.

Relaying with the Patroclus in orbit, they had established their current position being at least a two day march from the purported position of their objective, though on a hostile jungle world two days could easily turn into a week or longer if they were unlucky. To make matters worse, her team’s personal communicators would not be able to make contact with Meridian while she was on the ground, meaning that as soon as they set into the jungle they would lose contact from orbit and any hope of a quick rescue.

“The air appears to be breathable, in theory,” Sudulus confirmed as they dressed in heavy gear with full rebreather helmets, “though as we can see from the state of Meridian, it is thusly safe to assume that, in practice, inhalation of… whatever this organic matter is – ” they still hadn’t figured that out, “ – would be unhealthy to say the least. Limited exposure would be advisable, as would be maintenance of all equipment while in the field, I think.”

Brother Aquinas and Captain Striker were already properly equipped, as the space marine’s power armour acted a vacuum suit and the storm trooper’s armour was not far behind, but for Grant, Sudulus, and Godwyn it was another story. Wearing light armour acquired from the Patroclus’ armouries as well as their standard clothing, each also donned full rebreather helmets with heavy goggles and hood attachments that draped over their shoulders to prevent anything from catching around their necks. Water canisters could also be attached in a fashion that did not expose them to the atmosphere.

“How’re we going to eat our rations?” Striker asked as she stood in the lower hold waiting for Sudulus to finish attaching her water canister to her back.

“Until we reach the oubliette,” Sudulus replied, already breathing heavily under his hood, “it is unlikely that we will have any opportunity to do so...”

Grant, his expression hidden behind his mask, shrugged his shoulders. The collar of his black coat was turned up around his neck and he looked decidedly sinister as he stood at ease with his light machinegun in his hands.

“I do, however, have a supply of stimulant needles that I keep for just such an occasion,” Sudulus continued, “and when injected into the bloodstream, the stimulant serum, theoretically, should provide us with enough energy to continue onwards with minimal nutrition.”

“We are here on a mission,” Aquinas reminded them, the menacing visage of his space marine helmet looking over everyone gathered in the room, “and we will proceed towards our objective without hesitation.”

The mission was clear; all that remained to be seen was whether or not the jungle was likewise.

 

The first few hours of marching set a disheartening precedent. The air was notably warm and made them sweat under their heavy clothing and packs. The hoods were stiflingly hot as well, and every so often they had to degum their rebreather units to prevent them from clogging up. The terrain was also unforgivingly rough, and though Aquinas forged ever onwards without signs of slowing, the rest of them – especially Sudulus who was not in the best physical condition to begin with – found the jungle to be a cruel mistress. In their first hour of wrestling through the undergrowth, braving mucky swamps and streams, and enjoying cleared pathways that never seemed to last long enough, Sudulus had caught his foot twice in hidden roots and needed to be freed; Grant had gotten his coat tangled in something with vicious looking thorns, though with Striker’s help he had escaped unharmed; and Striker herself had tripped face first into a stagnant, foul-smelling pool, which she struggled out of with a stream of curses and profanities. Regardless, Aquinas continued on at an astoundingly fast pace, and it was all Godwyn could do to keep up with him.

“Something is amiss on this planet,” he confided in her as they took a quick break in a dusty clearing after four hours of steady marching. “I can feel it.”

“What do you think it is?” she quietly asked as Grant, Sudulus and Striker talked amongst themselves and joked half-heartedly at the expense of the jungle.

“It is a low rumble at the back of my mind,” he said, his helmeted features peering off into the surprisingly quiet trees. “This organic fog is not native to this planet, and that the humans who were are no longer.”

Feeling a tingling along her spine, she peered over he shoulders at the silent trees; “Like it killed them?”

“I do not know,” Aquinas replied, “though remember it is not our purpose to find out.”

How could she forget?

 

Somewhere up above the sun was setting in the putrid sky, turning the yellow air into a hazy brown. They had been walking in silence for almost about six hours since leaving the Meridian, and the novelty of walking through a jungle (if it ever existed) had long since worn off. Aquinas was still leading on tirelessly with absolute certainty in his direction, though Sudulus was fading quickly and had already given himself a boost with a stimulant needle to keep going.

“Wait! Hold up a moment!” Grant called out from behind her. Up ahead, Aquinas stopped on the crest of a ridge and turned around. Sudulus took this opportunity to catch up with Striker’s assistance.

“What is it, Commissar?” Godwyn asked as he stepped off to the side and drew his sword.

“Come take a look.”

Moving down the line to where he stood, she peered into the bushes. Holding the underbrush aside with his sabre, the Commissar nodded towards something half-hidden by the jungle. How he had spotted it was anyone’s guess. It was metal, and seemed to have been exposed to the elements for some time judging by the levels of corrosion.

“What is that?” Striker asked as she came closer to take a look and see what had captured their attention.

It was a gun. A large, crudely built and badly weathered gun. With a gloved hand, Godwyn dragged it free from the jungle and hefted it up as Grant withdrew his sword and sheathed it.

“No feral humans built anything like that,” he said grimly with a shake of his head.

The handle was huge, large enough for two human hands, and the gun was ridiculously heavy.

“These runes,” Godwyn pointed out to the Commissar and the Captain, “do you recognize them?” She did, though she’d only ever seen them when studying tomes on the various xeno species that plagued the galaxy.

“Orks!” Sudulus wheezed with eyes wide in fascination; “Those are ork glyphs!”

Godwyn nodded, and tossed the gun back into the jungle. From the ridge, Aquinas looked on as the light faded around them.

“We are not here to hunt xenos,” he reminded them, “leave it be and continue onwards.”

Sudulus wasn’t prepared to let the discovery drop, however. “What about Lee and the ship?” he chirped, and, distorted as his voice was, Godwyn could tell what was on her savant’s mind. “Shouldn’t he be warned?”

“It’s a large planet,” Striker assured him, wiping a hand across the yellow muck that was accumulating on her helmet visor as she did so, “I think he’ll be alright.”

“But we found this gun!” Sudulus argued; “a veritable needle in a haystack! There could be thousands of orks on this world! If they find the Meridian we will be trapped here!”

Aquinas did not bother retracing his steps as the others tried to assuage the savant’s fears, and instead spoke in a clear voice that overruled them all.

“For a man who prides himself on reason, you are showing none,” he said, his tone perfectly level even when his words were scathing. “Now come along before you make yourself a coward as well as a fool.”

Turning on his heel, Aquinas trudged from the ridge onwards into the darkening jungle.

Sudulus, stunned as if slapped, merely blinked through his mask and made no attempts to defend himself.

Looking at the others as if to gauge their spirit, Godwyn nodded once in conclusion, then followed after the Librarian; Grant came behind her, and, taking one last look towards the ork weapon, Sudulus bustled after them with Striker bringing up the rear.

Night was falling quickly, and the discovery of the ork presence on Trajan’s Deep ensured that it would not be an easy one.

 

They made camp on the dry ground between the snaking roots of a knotted tree so massive that the base of its roots alone covered more area than two score or more of lesser trees. In the darkness they could hardly see the tree’s colossal trunk, though as they walked through the cavernous hollows between its exposed roots they could just begin to grasp its size in the miniscule beams of light produced by their lamp packs. An untold number of people could have sheltered beneath this tree, and to the five them it felt like a palace of wood after hours spent in the claustrophobic confines of the dense jungle.

“It’s unbelievable…” Sudulus managed, flopping himself down in the dirt and running a gloved hand over the tree’s bark as his curiosity momentarily took over from his fatigue. “Never – never, have I seen anything so magnificent in nature! Fascinating – truly wonderful!”

Godwyn said nothing but sat down against nook in a root that seemed fit her weary back just right. She was tired – they all were, save Aquinas – and as she finally got off her aching feet and sucked down more water into her dry throat, she could think of nothing more than tearing her rebreather off and letting the night’s air cool hear sweat-soaked face and neck. Cruelty of cruelties that she should be denied even that on this world, and sleeping with a mask on would doubtlessly be a treat.

Striker squatted down nearby and brushed the mysterious pollen off her armour before dropping onto her backside with a satisfied grunt. Long marches were long even for trained soldiers, it seemed.

“Will we need to organize a watch?” she asked, flashing her light around to see that everyone was close enough to hear her.

“I can watch the camp,” Aquinas replied softly before anyone else could speak up. “All of you should rest. I have strength enough to carry me onwards without it.”

Striker seemed satisfied, and Godwyn felt more at ease; having one of the Emperor’s finest watching over of them was a weight off her shoulders… and in her tired state seemed almost poetic.

Grant said something about needing to relieve himself and went deeper into the roots and Striker going went with him to watch his back. Godwyn figured she’d wait up until they returned… though maybe closing her eyes for just a minute wouldn’t be a bad idea either…

 

She woke from a particularly vivid dream of Columbo boasting about how he’d smuggled orks onto Tranjan’s Deep with the glaring red eyes of an astartes battle helm on the other side of her visor.

“What are you doing!?” she asked in a startled yelp, suddenly very much awake.

“I’m removing the organic residue from everyone’s masks,” he said matter-of-factly as if it was something he did all the time when people were sleeping. “Get some rest knowing you won’t suffocate in the night.”

 

If such a thing were possible, she woke up feeling more tired than she had the night before. Sleeping fully dressed on the ground had left her back aching, her neck painfully stiff, and a maddeningly uncomfortable sweat all over her body. To make things worse, her head was pounding and her throat felt as though it were coated with sand.

With a groan, she sat up.

It must have been approaching dawn as her surroundings were a dull, dusty grey and gave everything a diffused glow as the pollen scattered whatever light was coming through the canopy.

Grant was already awake and speaking quietly with Aquinas just a few paces away. Godwyn got up on sore feet to join them.

“How much farther?” she asked after they’d exchanged pleasantries about a morning that had nothing good about it.

“We’ve made good time so far,” Grant responded with a nod of his covered head, as he unfolded their scratch-made map and passed it to her, “if we keep a good pace we should be there by sundown.”

“Good,” Godwyn said, “let’s get to it.”

After a hasty breakfast from a syringe, they headed out into the jungle once again with Aquinas in the lead.

 

 

The jungle was not compliant, however, and no more than half an hour after they headed out, Striker tumbled into a crevasse hidden in the jungle floor and would have fallen to her death in the caverns below had she not wrapped her arm around the tangle of vines that draped down into the depths. Rushing to the edge of the chasm they found her screaming in agony as she hung forty feet down with one arm hooked at an unnatural angle into a mess of climbers as she desperately tried to secure her purchase with her free hand.

Grant instinctively lunged forward, but Godwyn intercepted the Commissar and struggled to hold him back.

“No!” Godwyn she yelled at him. He started to argue and pull himself free, but the Inquisitor held her own and grappled him to a stand still. “That ground is unstable!” she explained against his protests; “if you go we’ll lose her!”

Striker was biting back her screams and was trying to take the pressure off her caught arm though she was trembling with the effort.

“We can’t leave her there!” the Commissar argued, though he let himself be restrained by the Inquisitor. “I will not leave a soldier like that!”

“We’re not going to leave her!” she shouted back at him as she shook the bigger man as if trying to wrestle him back into his senses. “But I need you to take charge. Think: how do we get her out?”

The vines were straining under the storm trooper’s armoured weight, and her struggles to steady herself were only loosening them further.

“Captain!” Sudulus called out from where he was crouching at the edge as Aquinas marched past him to get as close to Striker as possible; “Try not to struggle, Victoria! You need to remain calm. Please, can you do that?”

She tried, but as her hellgun dangled perilously from its power feed they could see the storm trooper shaking with the effort to hold on for her life.

“I – I can’t keep doing this!” she shouted through gasping sobs of pain. “My arm, I – It’s broken!”

“Victoria, listen to me!” Grant called out, the commanding bellow back in his voice as he stopped struggling with the Inquisitor and regained his composure; “If you let go you are giving into fear! You will hold on because you are not afraid! Do you hear me!?”

She didn’t answer but stifled her gasps of pain and redoubled her efforts to hold herself steady.

Aquinas, meanwhile, had taken up position directly across the chasm from where Striker was dangling, and was cautiously lowering his massive armoured frame into a crouch on the very edge. The chasm was not that wide – no more than a dozen feet – but the Captain was a great ways down.

“I am going down there,” Aquinas announced coolly, and not waiting for permission he lowered himself over the edge with his eyes ablaze with ethereal might behind his helmet. Godwyn didn’t know what he was planning, but he scaled the rock with what seemed like effortless ease, and – with Godwyn, Grant, and Sudulus looking on – drew level with the storm trooper Captain. He said something, though no-one above heard what, and Striker nodded and seemed to forcibly relax. Then he jumped – or maybe floated – the gap between them and grabbed hold of the vines beside her. The vines strained above him. With slow and careful motions, he untangled the storm trooper’s arm from the vines and lifted her over his shoulder, and, with no visible display of duress, he began to climb back up the vines.

Godwyn and Grant were waiting when Aquinas reached the top of the crevasse and pulled Striker up the rest of the way, while Sudulus rushed to see to her badly deformed arm.

Victoria was in a bad way. Her right arm was broken in at least two locations and was dislocated at the shoulder. The pain was almost enough to completely incapacitate her.

“This is going to be hurt,” Sudulus warned as he fashioned a splint from a piece of dead wood and pulled some bandages from his pack. Sitting on the ground with Godwyn and Grant to either side, the Captain nodded, presented her mangled limb as best she could held her breath. Gasping at the slightest touch, she screamed as he straightened out her arm and started methodically binding the splint into place. Between them, Grant and Godwyn braced her upper body and spoke encouragingly as she flinched and struggled against the necessary pain involved in Sudulus’ work.

Aquinas, after retrieving his force staff from where he had left it, waited patiently nearby.

“There,” Sudulus breathed a sigh of relief and withdrew his hands from his bandage-work, “I think that should just about do it!”

Striker groaned, but managed to express her thanks.

“The oubliette will have a medical facility we can use,” Godwyn announced, standing back up and helping Grant get Striker to her feet. In truth, the facility would be more suitable for torture instead of healing, but the instruments were largely the same.

“Give her a shot for the journey,” Grant instructed the savant who hastened to comply. “I’ll walk with her the rest of the way.”

 

With Striker wounded, they moved much slower on their second day of marching, and as the sky began to darken it became obvious that they wouldn’t reach the oubliette until the third day.

Weary after two days of marching with little rest or sustenance, and unable to proceed through the approaching blackness, they made camp atop a cliff near a muddy waterfall. The sound of crashing water was soothing on the ears and made it easy to feel at rest, and, as she found a spot to sit with her back against a pollen stained rock, Godwyn could not help but think that Trajan’s Deep would be a world of unparalleled beauty were it not for the suffocating air. She could only imagine how it would have felt to have lived here amongst native humans and feel the sun on her face, the wind in her hair, and the soft earth beneath her feet. It was strange that such a world as this would be cordoned off by the Inquisition and left untouched by the realm of the Immortal Emperor. Why would they do such a thing, she wondered, and would anyone alive yet know? Not that it mattered, she reminded herself, and it was not as if she needed to know.

The others settled around her in the open: Sudulus almost dumping himself onto a patch of grass, and Grant helping Striker find somewhere she could rest in comfort without further agony to her arm. Aquinas, of course, showed no such signs of fatigue.

“Inquisitor,” he motioned to her through the spectral half-light and she slowly regained her feet, “a word?”

They walked closer to the waterfall in an effort to disguise their words from the others, and gazing over a black canopy they spoke:

“I have felt a growing presence in my mind since we landed on this world,” Aquinas explained, “and as we move closer to our objective it has grown in definition into something I recognize.”

He paused, but Godwyn waited for him to continue without interrupting. Despite the gravity of his words, his voice never wavered;

“There are orks on this world, and have been for some time. I believe we are drawing closer to their main holdings.”

“How close?” Godwyn asked. In their current state, she and her team were not prepared to become engaged in a fire-fight, and especially not with any significant number of orks.

“Their energies are primal like those of the world itself, and thus it is difficult to say, just as it is difficult to know whether or not the atmospheric anomalies can be attributed to them. However, if I were to judge by the strengthening of the presence I have sensed on this world, I would hazard to say that they are no more than a day or two’s travel from here.”

“Do you think they will be able to detect us?”

Godwyn felt her shoulders shiver as if being watched, but Aquinas shook his head in the dark.

“Only by the most rudimentary methods. Orks are brutish and single-minded creatures, and if we are careful our presence will go unnoticed.”

It was with the Librarian’s reassurances that she settled herself down on the earth for another uneasy sleep filled with disquieting dreams of beasts and noises in the dark that she could escape from.

 

The next morning was the first time saw a live ork in the flesh, and even from a hundred paces away it was terrifying.

She remembered seeing an ork in a dissection lab of alien species when she was still a noviciate at the Academy, and recalled watching in morbid fascination as the tutor removed the creature’s rib-cage and began to point out its various organs with a voice as sterile as the lab itself. What she had been taught did not do the real things justice.

They had set out before dawn with Aquinas leading the way, Godwyn following a dozen or so paces after him, Sudulus behind her, and Grant bringing up the rear with Striker. They had been forging through the jungle’s thick trees for three or so hours without incident until, as he came to a part in the canopy, Aquinas quickly waved them down. Everyone stopped where they were and sunk to the jungle floor; Grant helping Striker to hear knees.

Up ahead, the Deathwatch Librarian crept quietly forward before sinking back onto his haunches and waving Godwyn forward. She crept up to where he sat overlooking a wide open valley dotted with low-lying plants. At first she didn’t see anything, but remaining silent, he pointed, and, following his finger with her eyes, she saw them.

Orks.

Not one, not two, not even a dozen, but at least thirty hulking, green-skinned brutes.

Unlike the ones she’d seen in the laboratory, these aliens were big, muscular, and very much alive. Each one was built like some sort of hairless primate and had bowed little legs that supported a much larger upper body and a huge ugly head.

Even as she watched them, she felt herself sinking lower and lower to the ground until she could barely see them over the edge of the valley.

All of them were armed and armoured with thick, sturdy-looking hunks of metal that rustled and rattled as they walked. By looking at them, she couldn’t tell what they were doing, but they were milling about idly in the valley, and occasionally head-butting one-another or otherwise unleashing their violent instincts on the jungle around them by hacking at whatever foliage was nearby. She could hear the low rumbling of their voices in what she assumed must be some kind of speech, though occasionally one would shout or holler some alien gibberish before throwing something crude and metal at a bush, a tree, or even another ork. Surprisingly, none of them seemed to be affected by the polluted air.

Catching her attention, Aquinas then pointed out what looked like a cave dug into the rocky side of the valley, and as she watched she could see a flickering orange glow reflecting off the metal cave walls.

“That’s…?” she began, wiping a hand over the dirt-streaked lenses of her goggles to get a better view.

“Yes,” Aquinas nodded his helmet grimly, “and the orks have reached it first.”

Down the line, Grant couldn’t hear what the Librarian and Inquisitor were saying, but by judging their body language he could tell it wasn’t good.

“Wait here,” he whispered to Captain Striker, and began to creep forward.

Godwyn couldn’t believe that fortune had stuck this in their way:

“What do we do?” she asked Aquinas in a whisper; “We can’t fight them all, and we can’t wait her until they leave!”

The Librarian shook his head. “No, we cannot,” he agreed, and raised himself up as if preparing to move out.

Godwyn’s hand shot out and grabbed him by the forearm.

“What are you doing!?” she hissed; “They’ll see you!”

“That is entirely the point.”

“What!?”

The space marine turned and fixed her between the furiously glowing eyes of his helm.

“I have fought orks before,” he said softly, “and if I draw them away, you will have a chance to slip into the oubliette without them noticing. You know this is how it must be.”

“That’s madness! You’ll be killed!”

He gently removed her hand from his arm as if lifting away the hand of a child, and crept around the tree line in the opposite direction from Godwyn and her team.

“Aquinas, please!” she hissed after him. “We need you! I need you!”

The Librarian stopped, and looked back over his shoulder – red eyes that she would never forget.

“The mission cannot fail,” he replied calmly, then turned his back on her and continued to walk away. “Do not wait for me, Inquisitor.”

In a matter of seconds he had disappeared from view.

“Where is he going?” Commissar grant got down beside her in the spot that Aquinas had vacated. He had not yet spotted the orks.

Godwyn didn’t know how to answer him. Was Aquinas coming back? What did he intend for them to do?

“The orks are in our way,” she explained in a low voice, peering into the valley and watching as the brutes carried on kicking stones and otherwise passing the time. “Brother Aquinas has volunteered to draw them away so that we may reach the oubliette unimpeded.”

Realization dawned on the Commissar as he looked grimly to the orks and back. He carefully removed his light machinegun from across his shoulders and clicked the bipod into place.

“If he thinks he can kill them all…” Grant’s voice was grainy though his mask.

But Godwyn didn’t think that was what he had in mind.

“No,” she said with a shake of her head as she continued to spy on the greenskins, “I don’t think that is his plan.”

Grant was readying his weapon, but Godwyn gave him a warning look. “If he can’t kill them all, neither can you.”

“I know,” Grant agreed, “but if this goes to hell I want to be ready.”

Striker, refusing to wait behind after she had seen Grant draw his weapon, crept up behind them with Sudulus.

“Oh dear… oh dear oh dear – damn it all!” Sudulus hissed, and lay himself belly down to Godwyn’s right with his needle pistol drawn.

“Where is Aquinas?”

Grant and Godwyn explained everything to them.

“Do we have a signal to look for?” Striker asked, on her knees in the bushes beside the Commissar. With her trigger arm badly broken, she was hanging back from the edge.

“That would supposedly be when the orks leave,” Grant replied gruffly. He’d drawn his sword as well, and had laid it down next to him.

Godwyn readied her shotgun, but could do naught but watch. There were more orks in the valley than they could possibly hope to kill, and she would sooner have her team flee into the jungle than make a foolish last stand.

“Look!” Sudulus brought her attention back around, “something’s caught their interest!”

Sure enough, the orks in the valley were looking over towards the opposite tree line and talking loudly amongst themselves. Some were even pointing or swatting their fellows to get their attention. Several had even emerged from the cave to see what the others were staring at.

Grant sighted his weapon, though the others watched in rapt silence.

Suddenly, a loud *bang* shook the trees they had been watching, and with exclamations of what might have been excitement, the orks quickly started to jog off in the direction of the noise.

Orks, Godwyn remembered from her studies, were a curious and inquisitive species by nature, and though few could be considered intelligent, the ork species showed a keen interest in anomalies or other abnormalities. This, she had been taught, could be exploited.

“Wait for it,” she cautioned in anticipation of the last ork reaching the trees and disappearing from view. “Okay, let’s go!”

One by one they slipped from the cover and into the open as the last of the orks vanished from sight. Weapon raised, Godwyn took the lead at a running crouch with Sudulus close behind her and followed by the wounded Striker with Grant covering the rear.

The Librarian’s diversion had worked, and they slipped into the cave mouth unseen whilst putting the jungle behind them.

[Lady_Canoness]

This chapter proved re-donk-ulously hard to write as I had so many ideas just screaming to be put onto paper. Half of them didn't make it, but we'll see what you think of the ones that did.

 

*part 12*

 

You are never free from knowledge.

Her savant repeated the words he read in the torch-light.

The orks had been digging. Unable to resist the draw of metal on a jungle world, the aliens had cut away the wilderness reclaiming the cave and set to looting whatever scraps of sheet metal they could pry from the cave walls, though as the greenskins dug further through tangles of creepers sickly weeds they were met with these six words set into forged adamantine.

You are never free from knowledge.

So read the warning to all who sought to enter the vault of the Inquisition. To those who were prisoner; that they would be held accountable for the trespasses of their minds. To those who were wardens; that the burdens of the condemned were now theirs to bear.

No common bulwark guarded the secrets of the Inquisition, and, try as they might to force their way through the stalwart gates, the orks found no purchase against its face. It would only ever grant passage to those of the Inquisition, and suffer the attempts of all else without remittance for ages to come, for in the center of the door there was but a single opening, no larger than a human hand, which could not be forced by any instrument other than the mark of the Inquisition.

Unbuttoning the front of her over-coat, Inquisitor Godwyn removed the Inquisitorial rosette from her chest, and pushed it into the perfectly fitting socket.

The gates were silent, but after a second her identity was confirmed, and with a great rumbling groan that stirred up the dust inside the cavern, the doors parted like the opening of a giant maw, and she and her companions were granted passage as the warning was imparted upon them one last time.

You are never free from knowledge.

 

They were admitted into darkness.

The outer doors of the oubliette grinding shut behind them, the Inquisitor and her allies found themselves trapped in an impenetrable blackness. Hidden inside the walls on either side of the door, ancient logic engines rumbled into life, and dim glow globes embedded into the arched ceiling awoke at the arrival of visitors. First two, then four, six, and eight – until the small chamber beyond the outer door was bathed in an icy-blue light.

Amen Puritate.

Purity without end.

A white mist of vapour hissed into the chamber from vents concealed in the ceiling, walls, and floor beneath their feet, but Godwyn told her comrades not to panic – this was a standard decontamination protocol present in every oubliette. She had never been in one before, but she had learned of them in her studies.

After the vapour subsided, clouds of disinfectant powder wafted from the ceiling, after which jets of some sort of cleansing agent blasted at them from all angles, though it left their clothing unexpectedly dry.

“I think we can remove these helmets,” she said. The decontamination cycle was over, and they pulled off their stuffy masks to look at each other and their surroundings with sweat-streaked faces.

Sudulus’ tufts of thinning hair were standing up at all angles, Grant’s normally kempt appearance was instead bedraggled and dirty, Striker’s eyes were puffy and red while her hair was caked against her scalp, and Godwyn looked no better. All of them shared a sallow tinge in their cheeks and wore a lingering weariness in their eyes that spoke of the jungle behind them. Regardless, it was good to feel the air again.

A small chime sounded from somewhere overhead and the decontamination doors opened before them into yet another chamber barred at the end by a massive door adorned with testaments of the Inquisition and inlaid with numerous leering skulls.

“What is this place?” Grant asked apprehensively as he craned his neck to look up at the vaulted ceiling while turning on the spot to keep an eye on the uncomfortably dark recesses hidden between the ribbed walls.

Godwyn was practically holding her breath as her eyes flitted across the ornamented angular surfaces of the chamber. Behind them, the doors leading back into the blue-lit decontamination room closed with a swift snap.

“This is the inner door to the oubliette,” Godwyn replied, “and beyond here…” She took a step forward. A mighty golden =I= was emblazoned upon the vault door, and at its center was an Imperial skull motif with red, glowing eyes. As soon as Godwyn took a step, the eyes grew brighter, until the entirety of the chamber was bathed in red light so fierce it was blinding and they had to shield their eyes.

And then came the noise – a terrible, rumbling noise like the breathing of a massive furnace, or as if the earth was moving above them. It grew louder and louder to a near deafening pitch until – suddenly and inexplicably – it stopped. The glowing light in eyes of the skull faded and died, and with a quiet hiss the Imperial motif slid upwards on oiled tracks along the =I= to reveal a glowing green dataslate with an attached numerical keyboard. Small letters flickered across its interface:

 

+Greetings: Inquisitor.

+Life signs: confirmed.

+DNA samplings: confirmed.

+Number of subjects: 4.

+Identity: logged.

+. . . . . . . .

+Enter code.

 

“What code? Do we know of a code?” Sudulus wondered aloud, the green glow of the dataslate illuminating his face contorted in concentration under the dim light of the vault.

Godwyn reached for the number pad, but stopped short as her fingers hesitated inches from the keys.

The code to access the vault could be any sequence of numbers an Inquisitor pleased, as the inner door was not actually secured by a numeric lock. Once an Inquisitor opened the inner door and it closed behind them, however, the doors could not be reopened from the inside unless the same code was entered – a precaution against something being loosed into an un-expecting galaxy.

Godwyn input three numbers: 1 – 1 – 3.

Mechanisms within the door clicked and whirled, and the golden skull slid quietly back into place. With a squealing groan the doors parted before them to reveal the inside of one of the Inquisition’s best guarded secrets. With baited breath, knowing hardly what to expect, they waited as the doors receded, and, in the sole corridor that was visible beyond, they the dim flicker of a solitary glow-globe that pulsed with an audible hum and cast staggered shadows down the angular ribbed walls.

Cautious and wary lest she trip some automated response, Godwyn led them on with Sudulus following closely behind her while Grant entered last supporting the Captain. Without hesitation, the doors shut behind them as soon as they had passed – locking them inside.

“Well,” Sudulus unsettled the deathly silence of the oubliette after the inner door had sealed itself shut and they had stopped underneath the glow globe, “here we are.”

 

* *

 

If the Academies of the Inquisition are the shining lights of the Emperor’s most holy Ordos, then the Inquisitorial vaults are its shadows, and the oubliettes amongst the darkest of them. Forged in top-secret Inquisitorial foundries on Mars using dark technologies the likes of which can be found nowhere else in the Imperium save perhaps in the vaults of Terra, Inquisitorial oubliettes are shipped in complete secrecy to thousands of undisclosed worlds across the Imperium to serve as top-secret bunkers for the shadowy agents of the Inquisition to conduct their most dangerous tasks. It is standard practice for servitor construction crews to be liquidated upon completion even though they know not what they build, and to know the location of an active oubliette is punishable by death for anyone who has not been authorized for its use. These precautions are necessary, or so the noviciates are taught, as the function of an oubliette is nothing short of damning, and it is with good reason that records of what transpires behind an oubliette’s locked doors can only be officially disclosed if ordered to do so by unanimous consent of an Inquisitorial conclave. How many unofficial disclosures occur cannot be guessed at, though Godwyn had never heard of one… save for the one in which she now stood.

An empty silence greeted them once inside the oubliette, and branching out to the left and to the right hallways extended from the flickering light into blackness. It was like a tomb – dead and forgotten – and with a menacing air that seemed to extrude from the walls themselves, almost as if the oubliette hated their presence.

She shook the thoughts from her mind.

“Alright,” she said half to herself and half to the others as she drew her lamp-pack from her pocket and flicked it on, “let’s see if we can get some more lights on for starters…”

“Shouldn’t we wait for Aquinas?”

Sudulus hadn’t budged from where he was standing directly beneath the pulsing glow-globe, and his usual keen demeanour was rendered pale.

She would like to wait for Aquinas too, and having the space marine’s unshakeable confidence by her side would have done much for her own courage.

But he wasn’t here, and had told her specifically not to wait for him – something she had not shared with the others. Godwyn didn’t know if he was coming back.

“We can start without him,” she said in a half-truth, and swept her light back down the left-hand hall.

 

 

They quickly found that the rest of the oubliette was black and without power, and if she had hoped for familiarity to breed understanding she was to be sorely disappointed, for after two hours in the darkness with the only lights being those they held in their hands Godwyn found herself only growing more disturbed.

Being inside the oubliette was like standing in the body of a metal beast. Bare piping and metal trusses criss-crossed the ceiling overhead while the walls were curved at abnormal intervals and angled in such a way that they seemed to press down on her shoulders. When she walked, the sounds of her feet were distorted and seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once, and with every step the shadows cast by the cold lighting snared the mind into seeing movement hidden in the ribbed metal walls. It was designed as a prison – as torture – and merely standing in it was enough to make Godwyn’s skin crawl.

It was also disparagingly small in size with only a half-dozen featureless rooms arranged in a square pattern around a central control cluster, and a sub-level that provided sparse living quarters with individual cells and a small kitchen and common area as well as a latrine. They quickly made Striker as comfortable as possible in the dark sub-level and Grant opted to stay by her side, but they had found no medicinal supplies they could use to tend to her arm or to her pain, and it was with a heavy heart that Godwyn confided in Grant that there would be nothing they could do for Striker until they returned to the Patroclus. Her arm was poorly set and remained swollen, and with every passing hour it became more and more likely that it would have to be surgically corrected or bionically replaced.

To make matters worse still, the central power station was offline. Sudulus was busily at work in the control cluster trying to get it functional again, but until he did there was no chance of finding what had happened here, as well as no lights, no logic engines or data-bank terminals, and the power locks on the main-level chambers were inoperable.

“I don’t know what I can do with this…” Sitting on the floor, the savant had pried a cover panel off the power distribution terminal and was setting about with his bionic fingers to examine the tangle of wires while Godwyn squatted down beside him so that he could see what he was doing in her lamp’s beam. “I don’t think this power source was ever meant to go offline…”

He knew that she didn’t follow the technical talk, but Godwyn had the feeling that he wanted to distract himself with words and didn’t want to be left alone. The rest of the control cluster was silent and so dark that she couldn’t see the open door over her shoulder. She would hated to have been left alone too.

“Why not?” she asked casually, hoping that her savant would launch into some theoretical supposition about power sources and their applications that could distract them from the menacing darkness.

“I don’t know,” he replied in a small voice. He continued to work in earnest. “But who ever designed this designed it not to be easily serviceable. Likely because they thought it would not break down.”

“Do you know – ” Godwyn started, but Sudulus sat up quickly and cut her off.

“No I don’t,” he replied with a nervous snap, drawing his knees up to his chest and running his metal fingers distractedly over his scalp. “It shouldn’t be happening!” he protested anxiously; “This system is too well built! Too strong a design – it’s not meant to fail!” He was panicked – rattled.

“Sudulus…” Godwyn reached out and put a comforting hand on his knee, but he looked at her with troubled eyes.

“This shouldn’t be happening!” he protested again with a high-pitched whine; “You don’t understand: this is not meant to fail! Everything about it is genius – utter genius! It’s – It’s… not like anything I have ever seen! It’s – it’s a work of art! Mechanical genius down to the last detail!” His pupils were dilating and his breathing was rapidly increasing.

Godwyn scooted over the floor beside him and gently put an arm around his shoulder to try and calm him down. She told him that he was nervous because of the dark and of where they were.

“Why don’t you come back with me to the lower level, and we’ll try again when you’ve had some food and cleaned up a bit?”

He nodded furiously, and tried to take some deep breaths as they stood up and slowly walked from the control cluster.

“This – this is too much to take. Yes – yes that would be good, I think…”

 

It would take Sudulus three more days of working feverishly in the dark before he managed to restore main power to the oubliette, but even at three days the oubliette was exacting a fearsome toll on those trapped inside.

Being in constant pain, Striker was afflicted worst of all, and every day in the dark saw her move less, speak less, and eat less. Grant had done his best to keep her company and hadn’t once left her side if he could avoid it. He would tell her stories, read passages from the Guard issue Uplifting Primer that he kept in his storm coat’s breast pocket, and at one time Godwyn even overheard him reciting poetry from memory. It was the Commissar’s trusted duty to inspire and motivate the spirits of others, after all, and doubly so in a place such as this. There was no telling if his efforts were effective, however, as the Captain often lay motionless with her eyes closed as she struggled through the pain with hollow, gasping breaths. They had done the best they could for the strong woman, but that was of little comfort.

Grant was been hard hit by Striker’s suffering but did not let it dampen his indomitable spirit for but a moment. He was resolved to accept nothing but success: he would carry them all out one at a time on his shoulders if he had to, but he would not see them succumb to failure. His courage was admirable, and Godwyn did not know how he managed when everything around them was deliberate for despair.

Even with her years of study and training in preparation for such things, Godwyn could feel her nerve eroding. As a premise, she knew the functions of an oubliette and the necessity of its use – she understood its uses and how it could be properly employed – she grasped the subtleties of its design and how it was meant to be effective – yet for all her so-called knowledge she found herself ill-equipped to put it into practice. Doubts about her mission, her allies, and herself clawed into her mind regardless of where she was or what she was doing until she became a sceptic of her own thoughts.

And always her mind wandered, turning out fears and suspicions to fill the space left by her empty surroundings. What if there was nothing here? What if Meridian had been discovered? What if Aquinas was dead? Maybe she was grasping at hope when really there was none. Could she do it, she wondered, could she track her mentor down?

The darkness yielded no answers, though at last the lights came on.

 

“It’s not much, but it is the best I can do, I am afraid.”

“It’s good. More than we need.”

Squatting on the floor of the control cluster with his arms wrapped tightly around his knees, Sudulus blinked up at the glow-globes as if seeing the light of a sun for the first time. He was rocking back and forth, like some sort of youngling animal separated from the brood, and what little hair he had stuck out like tufts of grass clinging to a weathered stump.

“I think it was tampered with,” he muttered, his eyes now fixed on the pried away wall panel in which he had been working, “but I fixed it – even though I couldn’t understand it.” The savant had managed to squeeze himself up into the wiring that extended through the ceiling to the otherwise inaccessible generator, and had worked in those cramped confines for hours at a time before clawing himself back out.

“I don’t know how they did it,” he looked up at Godwyn, genuinely confused, “but I fixed it all the same.”

“You’ve done very well, Sudulus,” the Inquisitor congratulated him, causing him to grin half-heartedly and rock faster on his heels, “but you’ve also done enough. Take a shower, eat some rations, and get some rest. I know that the Captain will be happy to hear what you’ve done.”

That was a lie. Victoria hadn’t said a word for what seemed like an age, but maybe, just maybe, things would change now that the power was back on. Regardless, Sudulus was starting to crack under the weight of this place, and a chance to uncoil his tightly wound mind could prove beneficial.

“Where is Aquinas?” Sudulus stood up; “Why isn’t he here yet?”

“He’s coming,” she lied again. “I’m sure he’s just making certain that the orks are dealt with.”

Perplexed, the little man gave a small shrug but quickly walked off in the direction of the sub-level lift, leaving Godwyn alone in the now lit control cluster.

That was fine. She preferred it that way.

The control cluster, as well as housing the power distribution controls, also stored the oubliette’s records in heavily encrypted data-banks, and everything that occurred behind the inner doors was recorded into its machine mind. If there was an account of Inquisitor Felix’s murder to be found it would be stored in the records, though only if they could be successfully deciphered.

The first key was obviously her Inquisitorial rosette, and, leaning over the data-bank, she inserted her badge of office into the machine and watched intently as the back-lit readout hummed to life and began to display small lines of text across its surface:

 

+Identity Confirmed.

+Welcome Inquisitor.

+Clearance Level <Limited Access> granted.

+Decryption in process…

+Submit Query?

 

Godwyn chewed thoughtfully on her lip as her eyes rolled over the screen. With one hand on the embedded keypad she typed ‘full access’, and waited for the machine to respond. The logic-engine inside the data-bank whirred and chugged for several seconds as the machine processed her query, then more text appeared on its display:

 

+Clearance Level <Full Access> requested…

+Request denied.

+Clearance Level <Limited Access> granted.

+Submit Query?

 

The obstinate machine wasn’t about to tell her how to increase her clearance level, so Godwyn decided to pursue her interests directly and entered ‘Inquisitor Felix’ into the keypad. The logic engine replied almost instantly:

 

+Subject <Inquisitor Felix> archived.

+Compiling records… complete.

+58 records complied.

+43 records <restricted>.

+11 records corrupted.

+4 records <accessible>.

+View records?

+Submit Query?

 

The records were arranged in chronological order, though almost the entirety of the middle was listed as inaccessible, with the only records she could access being two near the beginning, one in the middle, and the very last entry. Each was an audio/video recording of the interrogation of who Godwyn guessed had to be Inquisitor Felix by Inquisitor Strassen and a short, stocky man with a bulldog face who was identified as the other man of interest, Inquisitor Pierce.

From the onset of the oubliette recordings, Godwyn could tell that Strassen and Pierce were desperate (though Strassen hid it very well) and that Inquisitor Felix was being firmly uncooperative with her interrogators. Pierce came across as irritable and easily flustered, though at the same time he was stubborn and aggressive and needed to be checked by her old mentor’s calm and methodical demeanour lest he be wrong-footed by the woman who was supposedly their captive. Antivus Felix, herself an experienced Inquisitor, came across as being unbroken and taking charge of her own interrogation, often dressing down her questioners in a matronly fashion that served to only further aggravate Pierce.

Godwyn had only just set eyes upon her, but already she admired the other woman’s severity and audacity, though in truth it had likely played a part in her undoing.

In the second and third recordings, however, Godwyn could tell that Felix’s boldness had been short-lived once the torture began, and, though the recordings never documented what had been done to her, the results were clear to see. She had lost the admonishing tone from her voice and the contempt from her eyes, and Godwyn could see that the Inquisitor knew her fate was sealed though she struggled on out of spite. Pierce was changing too, as if he could smell the blood of the kill to come and it drove him to be even more antagonistic in his accusations and judgements. Nonetheless, Strassen kept the other man at bay and remained composed during the drawn-out questionings, though whether or not this was a mercy or cruelty was hard to discern. Together, Strassen and Pierce were battering Inquisitor Felix with assertion that damned her in each of their own ways. If Antivus Felix was a traitor as they accused her of being, then their combined techniques verged on brilliance, though if she were blameless, then the two men were authors of the greatest of wrongs.

As she selected the fourth and final record made available to her, Godwyn could only hope that she would soon find out.

The screen flickered momentarily with an image of the Imperial Aquila and the document identification sequence before the picture faded into the by-now recognizable white walls of the interrogation chamber and the gaunt woman fastened to a solitary metal chair in the center of the room. Comparing the recorded dates, Godwyn knew that Felix had at this point been incarcerated for a standard month plus nine days, and every day was reflected in her person. Gone was her professional attire of the first few days, and gone were the prison rags of the middle weeks. Now she was naked; bearing the marks of her imprisonment and torture for the records to witness as she squirmed and writhed against the cold iron-framed chair between rattling breaths sucked through cracked lips.

Inquisitor Strassen, an elderly man with a grey head of hair and weary old eyes but upright in his posture and wearing a long black overcoat, walked into the picture from the direction of the off-screen cell door. The recording eye followed him as he moved. This time he was alone with his prisoner.

“So begins the fortieth day of questioning Inquisitor Antivus Emanuel Felix, suspected traitoris extremis for crimes against the Golden Throne and His Holy Inquisition,” Strassen began with the customary proclamation as he had done in all the previous recordings, standing before the prisoner and announcing her crimes to the room at large.

“Isaac… please…” Felix mumbled between laboured breaths, though Strassen ignored her and continued the proclamation.

“Isaac… have you no pity… remaining for me?”

Inquisitor Strassen turned on his heels, and Godwyn watched as her mentor slowly walked away from his prisoner to the edge of the screen with his hands held pensively behind his back. There he paused for a few moments, glanced up at the recording eye, then turned back to Felix and began to walk casually towards her.

“Tell me, Antivus, have you ever witnessed the pity of the eldar?”

“Isaac… I beg you… pity me…”

Strassen ignored her and continued to speak in a casual tone as if she had answered his question.

“I have,” he said. “They leave none alive, as I’m sure you know. They slaughter the men, the women, and the children where they stand. They have no mercy – no pity, as you might say.”

His gentle pace was taking him behind the prisoner as he continued to speak.

“You act for them, Antivus – not directly, no – but by failing to confront the aliens when they reveal themselves to you.”

“Isaac… please, with all that I am… I beg you…”

“Your actions have shown you pitiless, Antivus, as you have left many of His people to beg for the pity of the eldar, which I have just shown you rests upon the edge of a sword. I serve the Emperor, Antivus, I serve His people. By wronging His people, you have wronged me. You show me no pity…” He stepped back in front of her, and brought his face close to hers; “…so why should I pity you now?”

“You don’t understand… Isaac…”

Strassen turned away from his prisoner once again and continued to walk at a leisurely pace around the interrogation chamber.

“You are right,” he said, “I do not understand how you could turn your back on your people as you did. That is what makes me different from you.”

A scraping noise escaped from Felix’s lips and her withered body shook against the chair’s iron frame. Godwyn could not tell if she was coughing or laughing.

“I remember… when I too… enjoyed such affection… as you give to the… masses.”

Strassen shook his head, and rounded on her sternly. “That changed the day I stopped calling you ‘master’.”

Godwyn’s eyes widened as she looked at the figures on the screen intently: Inquisitor Felix had been Strassen’s teacher!? How did she not know this? Why was nothing of their relationship recorded? Glued to the screen with apt attention, Godwyn listened carefully as Felix continued to speak.

“Isaac…” she said again, her voice feeble and shaking, “I always… admired your devotion… your respect for human dignity… you are above this…”

“My duty compels me, Antivus,” he replied slowly, “you knew this to be true even before you met me. I will do whatever I must,” he paused, though the angle of the recording eye prevented Godwyn from reading his expression, “to protect my people.”

“…yet you won’t protect me… from the indignities I suffer…?”

“To earn my cooperation, you know what I must hear.”

Antivus Felix sank even lower in the prisoner’s chair. “You would use it… for good… Isaac? You don’t… know what good is…”

“The people of this sector deserve better, Antivus. We both know that is good enough.”

Felix shook her bruised head: “The men with you… are power-hungry… They will not… see things… as you do.”

“They can be controlled,” Strassen retorted coolly.

“Or…” Felix countered, “…are they controlling you?”

Both figures on the screen fell silent, though Godwyn willed them to continue.

“You can’t use them…” Felix said at last, “there are none who can…”

Strassen shook his head. “You know where they are,” he reminded her, “everything else is not your concern.”

“Men like Pierce… can never know!” she pleaded.

“It does not concern you.”

“Isaac… I am begging you… you know what he does to people… what he has done… to me…” Felix’s voice was growing moist, and though she could not see it through the grain of the picture, Godwyn imagined that she was crying. “Isaac… if you care… you will not let him know… You will not let him hurt me further!”

“He will do what he must, as will I.”

“…don’t you care about me… Isaac?” she implored him.

Strassen stood motionless and unaffected by his prisoner’s suffering. “I care insomuch as my duty requires me to care.”

His demeanour was chilling, but even now Godwyn recognized the man she admired as her mentor: he was not without compassion, but duty always dictates.

“One way or another, you will talk,” Strassen told her; “whether it is to me or to the others, however, is up to you.”

He waited for her to respond, but when she didn’t he turned to leave.

“Wait!” she called after him.

He stopped at the door.

“Promise me… promise me that you… won’t tell the others…”

“I make no promises.”

Felix had no choice, though eventually she nodded, and Strassen came closer. She said something at that point – something that Godwyn did not hear – but when Strassen heard it he gave a satisfied nod and took several paces back from the woman in the chair. He then drew his pistol – the mirror image of the heavy pistol he had bestowed upon his student – and loaded a single round into its chamber.

“I am not without pity,” he said, and shot her in the head – her brain-matter scattering to the tiled floor as the single spent shell-casing bounced with an ominous clink.

Lowering the pistol, Strassen stared at the body, and Godwyn felt her eyes growing wet. He’d killed her, yes, but in the end he had done it to save her from more pain.

‘A necessary evil is still evil,’ Strassen had once told her, ‘and regardless of what good comes from it, it cannot conceal the evil that is committed. Both the Inquisitor and his prisoner share the same fate.’

[Lady_Canoness]

This part was very enjoyable to write and flowed quite naturally when it got rolling. We'll see if it shows. It includes my second attempt at a chase scene (the first being in my other work 'The Saint Ascendant'). Also, in this chapter we discover the fate of Brother Aquinas.

The end is nearing with only 4 - 5 chapters left to go!

 

*part 13*

 

For a whole second day Godwyn poured over the oubliette’s records in a frantic search to turn up and sliver of evidence to confirm or deny her suspicions about Strassen, but after hours without rest she was forced to accept that her efforts were in vain. Everything that could possibly provide answers to her questions were either restricted, corrupted, or altogether missing; leaving her tantalizingly close to uncovering the truth behind Inquisitor Felix’s murder with an abundance of possibilities but very little proof with which to work.

Felix had known some secret involving the eldar, and this secret had been enough to drive Strassen, Pierce, and their unknown associates into capturing the Inquisitor under the guise of investigating her treachery. But what was the secret, why did Strassen and Pierce want it, and what did the ‘people’ Strassen mentioned have to do with it?

Godwyn had watched the four recordings over and over again, but each time served only to accent her own lack of information; something she could not remedy while she remained here. She needed to contact Lord Roth. Perhaps he could access the restricted files, or perhaps he could authorize the arrest of Inquisitor Pierce with what information she had recovered, though regardless of what he could or could not do there was only one way to proceed, and that required returning to the Patroclus.

 

Wherever Brother Aquinas had gone the orks must have followed him, and not a soul witnessed the four figures slip from the cave mouth under the cover of darkness and dash through the valley before disappearing into the tree line. Godwyn had her doubts about making a break for the jungle from the oubliette, but back amongst the trees under the pitch-black canopy she could breathe more easily. Her team was in poor condition and Victoria was in a very bad state, but, with no other options available, the young Inquisitor would take whatever graces she could get, and not sharing the jungle with a horde of orks was an excellent start.

Risking more light, Godwyn flicked on her lamp-pack and clipped it into place on the under-slung lug of Striker’s borrowed hellgun and tested the beam on nearby trees before gingerly stepping forwards after the streak of light. Sudulus, needle pistol drawn in one hand and a lamp-pack in the other, followed closely behind the Inquisitor while Commissar Grant, supporting the slow moving Captain Striker, brought up the rear.

Before they had departed from the oubliette, Godwyn had told them what Aquinas had said: the mission could not fail, and they were not to wait for him. It darkened all their spirits and broke her heart especially, but they were leaving the space marine behind. If they reached Meridian and Lee got her airborne there would be no coming back. If they reached Meridian – though there was no knowing if they would get that far.

Their route back to the shuttle would be the same they had followed going in the opposite direction, though if they deviated from the pathway they would almost certainly get lost in the jungle.

And then there were their rations. For fear of exposure to the mysterious airborne pollen they could not eat any solid food in the open air, and instead had to rely on Sudulus and his stimulant syringes – of which there were only seven left. They had lots of firepower and ammunition, but if they became lost in the jungle the orks would be the least of their concerns. Hunger was not an enemy they could fight.

Sudulus kept two syringes for himself as he was the least physically capable. Godwyn and Grant had each taken one, and Striker had been given three despite her willingness to go without in favour of her squad-mates. Even so, their time was short, and even the slightest delay could prove fatal.

 

It was almost dawn with the night-time darkness receding to a dull greyness around them when Captain Striker collapsed.

“On your feet, soldier!” Grant tugged on her shoulders, urging her back up as her legs gave way and she crumpled to the jungle floor. He tried dragging her back into stride, but when it became apparent that her feet weren’t moving the Commissar called for the others to stop.

They were still in the shadows of the deep jungle with at least another two hours ahead of them until they could make camp.

Her own legs aching, Godwyn trudged back towards the officers as Sudulus sat himself down on the roots of a nearby tree with a moan.

“You can’t rest here,” Grant crouched down beside the crumpled trooper and grabbed one of her gloved hands tightly in his own, “you *must* carry on until we make camp.”

Her helmeted head resting on the ground, Victoria Striker mumbled something between shallow breathes and feeble attempts to regain her feet.

Grant looked up as Godwyn approached and shook his head in silence. Captain Striker was beaten. Her badly broken arm had all but sapped her strength for the past six days, and to take one more step struggling through the dense jungle was a step too far.

“Victoria,” Godwyn got down on her sore hands and knees so that her head was next to the storm trooper’s, “as much as I’d like to let you rest, we can’t stop here. It’s too dangerous – we have to keep moving.”

“I’ll take responsibility for her,” Grant offered as Godwyn stood back up, but the Inquisitor shook her head.

“This is my team and we are in this together,” Godwyn stated, giving the Commissar a hand up with a groan; “we’ll all carry her back if we need to, but I’m not losing anyone else on this damned world.”

 

Determined to carry on, they toiled through the jungle until the pollen-filled skies turned golden and made camp at the cliff-top waterfall where they had rested almost a week before.

“We’ll stay here for a couple of hours,” Godwyn announced, feeling the sweat trickle along the ridge of her nose and gather on her upper lip, “and keep going when we’ve gathered our strength.”

Her own legs felt like jelly and quivered whenever she tried to hold them still, and through her boots she could feel the blisters on her feet throb painfully as they reopened. How could suffering get any worse? She sat herself down by a rotting log and tried to knead the knots of tension out of her hips while listening to the burbling of the water and gazing out over the stained horizon. What had it been like for Strassen when he was on this world? Had he faced the same hardships? She didn’t really want to think about him, but at the same time there was little else she could do to escape the moment.

A little ways away across the cliff-top, Sudulus was having little luck trying to re-bind Striker’s arm. They’d have to watch her, the savant had warned them discretely; her mental-state was eroding as quickly as her strength, and he worried that if left alone she could well attempt suicide.

Grant wasn’t about to let that happen, and stayed close to her at all times whether marching or at rest. He’d relieved her of her combat blade and her side arm before they’d left the oubliette, and fought off his own fatigue to watch over her as she slept. Godwyn would relieve him from time-to-time between her own fitful bouts of sleep, but the man was impossibly stubborn and would often stay awake anyway and would not touch his allotted nutrient injection.

No amount of rest, it seemed, would ever be enough.

 

* *

 

The air was darkening on their second day of marching when the snapping of tree-trunks alerted Godwyn to something big crashing through the undergrowth no more than a stone’s throw away through the trees.

Suddenly alert, Godwyn waved her team down and dropped to her knees, pulling the borrowed hellgun from her shoulders as she did so and activating it with a flick of her thumb. The gun hummed to full charge in a half-second and the refractive sight painted a red crosshair over the jungle as she took cover behind a tree-trunk and aimed the weapon through shadows in the direction of the noise.

Tree-trunks snapped and leafy branches crashed to the ground beneath heavy footfalls and a rumbling roar like thunder. Whatever it was, it was moving closer and quickly.

Up, move – she signalled behind her as a tree went down with a snap not more than twenty paces through the thick foliage. Not needing to be told twice, Sudulus was up and scampering through the jungle away from the falling trees, but Grant and Striker were much slower.

Darting from the cover of the tree trunk, Godwyn dashed back to where Grant was half-dragging the storm trooper away from the thrashing trees.

The Commissar snapped around when he heard Godwyn rush up beside them:

“We have to fight!” he yelled over the noise. “We won’t be able to escape with the Captain like this!”

“Bullsh**!” Godwyn barked back, and grabbed the soldier’s knife from Grant’s coat pocket.

“What are you doing!?” he shouted in alarm, but Godwyn had already slashed the blade along the storm trooper’s armour, cutting the straps from the carapace plating and roughly pulling it from her body – easily freeing up at least twenty pounds of weight.

“Get her over your shoulders and run!” she bellowed back; “That’s an order! This is no time for heroics!”

The Commissar didn’t argue, and together they heaved the semi-conscious Striker onto his shoulders just as the nearest trees splintered apart and the source of the noise came crashing into view.

Bi-pedal and standing at least twelve feet tall was a humongous orkish contraption that belched smoke and trampled the foliage beneath it. Four piston driven arms tipped with vicious looking shears and buzz-saws extended from a heavily armoured cylindrical body above a pair of wide-barrelled machineguns, at the center of which was a single vision-slit revealing a red-lit interior and a pair of savagely gleaming alien eyes looking directly at the Inquisitor.

The ork started to shout and jabber from inside its machine and after a split-second delay the alien’s amplified voice hollered out from crude-vox units attached to the machine’s hull – spewing vile-sounding gibberish at the three terror-struck humans.

“RUN!!” Godwyn screamed, and Grant was off like a shot – bolting through the trees with the storm trooper over his shoulders.

Without thinking, Godwyn levelled her weapon at the iron-clad beast and held down the trigger – the hellgun wailing and bucking in her hands as it scored the hull of the ork walker with dozens of energy bolts.

The ork walker lashed out with two of its arms, felling a couple of trees as Godwyn threw herself flat and out of the way. The ork continued to scream alien obscenities as the Inquisitor scrambled to her feet and dashed away after Grant without a backwards look, though as she launched herself through the jungle she heard the crack and snap of trees falling as the monstrous walker lurched after her in pursuit.

With fear for her life driving her forward, Godwyn tore through the jungle in a blind rush as branches and leaves lashed at her arms and mask. The ork was following her and she could hear the whine of its saws as it cleared the forest after her. With a rattling chatter the ork’s machineguns opened up and sent bullets whizzing through the air exploding into trees around her and showering her with sprays of sap and splintered wood.

Her heart pounded in her chest as she sprinted from cover to cover in great bounding strides, she was hoping upon hope that the alien inside the machine wouldn’t get a clear shot. The trees were growing thinner up ahead, however, and the ork contraption was gaining as it stamped through the undergrowth at a terrifying pace.

A bullet whizzed by her ear and thwacked into a tree – cutting it off at the middle and bringing crashing down in an explosion of wood just behind her back. Something stung across her scalp, but she ignored it, instead ducking and weaving through the bushes as she tried to find someway of slowing the metal beast down.

Vaulting a downed log, she was caught off-guard by a sudden four-foot drop and fell head-over-heels into the dirt – the rim of her mask biting painfully into her nose as she face-planted onto the jungle floor. Cursing, and her eyes watering with the pain, Godwyn stumbled back to her feet and continued to run – the ork screaming after her and blazing away with its guns as it had to look for an alternate way around the drop.

The mask was badly skewed over her face and she was having a hard time seeing, but Godwyn ran on regardless until she stumbled upon a rough outcrop of jagged rock and threw herself down behind it to catch her breath. She could still hear the ork screaming, though by the sounds of it the alien was a little ways behind her. She readjusted her mask and wiped the trickle of sweat from her brow, and as her breathing came back into control she noticed that her pants were warm and wet. No time for pride, she reminded herself, quickly checking that her hellgun was still functioning after her fall; worse things had happened to Inquisitors in the field than peeing themselves.

She gulped down a mouthful of air through her stuffy mask and blinked the sweat out of her stinging eyes. Her head hurt. There was still a lot of sweat gathering on her brow. She wiped it off. Her gloved hand came back red.

Her chest tightened involuntarily as panic gripped her mind at the sight of her own blood. She’d been shot – in the head. Quickly, she reached her hand to the top of her scalp and felt around with her fingers: a stab of stinging pain confirmed her fears.

Sh*t! SH*T! She was bleeding from the head and had no idea of how bad it was!

Panic was rising rapidly and waves of nausea started to wash over her mind. Where were the others? She was lost!

The ork’s screaming grew suddenly closer, and the panic inside her quickly died as she strained her senses to their limits and concentrated on the approaching enemy.

Run, hide, or shoot?

It wasn’t much of a choice.

Adrenaline pulsing back into her limbs, Godwyn ripped from cover in a headlong dash through the sparsely treed opening. She didn’t look back, but she heard the ork guns open up again as her legs pumped madly against the ground and carried her at blinding speed towards Emperor knows what.

The ork machine stomped after her on its piston driven legs with its arms snapping and flailing wildly in anticipation of the catch.

 

“Where’s Godwyn?!”

“What!?” Grant span around. The jungle was awkwardly quiet in every direction – no snapping, no crunching, no shouting.

“She’s… she’s not behind us!” Striker wheezed from over the Commissar’s shoulders.

He set her down gently on the jungle floor, and the Captain struggled to her knees to watch the trees. Grant swung his machinegun around into his hands and scanned every direction with his eyes: nothing – no movement even at the highest treetops.

“Oh dear Emperor no!” he managed.

“We can’t… leave… her!” Striker grunted through her pain.

The Commissar looked at her – his eyes wide through his visor.

“The whole mission depends on her… we can’t leave without her!” Striker said again, more forcefully this time.

Breathing heavily, the Commissar snapped his head every which way and took a few desperate steps in every direction. Impossible. Impossible! She had been right behind him! With a scream of frustration he pointed his gun skyward and blazed away at the treetops until the spent shell casings of an entire magazine were piled around his feet.

Striker bowed her head.

Releasing the trigger, Grant let his weapon fall back to his side. “Only the Emperor can help her now,” he said grimly.

 

Smashing through the gripping thorns of a creeper plant, Godwyn skidded to a halt on the sandy banks of a wide-flowing river – astonished by what fate had put in her way. The ork walker was still behind her, and after fleeing through the jungle she’d found herself here with nowhere else to run?

The river bank extended in either direction to her right and left with no cover, and if she tried crossing she’d be gunned down in no time. Should she double back? Maybe try to outflank the machine? At least there was a long tree-line on the opposite bank, and the river was wide – maybe, if she could cross it, the ork would not be able to follow?

With a crash, the alien walker started to push its way through the undergrowth behind her. Time to choose.

Not wasting a second, Godwyn dashed into the brown flowing water and splashed as quickly as she could in the direction of the opposite bank.

The alien machine tore through the trees, and, trailing vines and creepers from its limbs, stomped across the bank – its weapons spitting death as it came; ripping apart the smooth surface of the water with its bullets.

Already up to her waist in the water, Godwyn dove head first into the water and felt it sting along her scalp and rush past her limbs as the underwater currents fought against her strength to carry her down river. Bullets whistled by through the water, but she couldn’t see them as her mask filled with the dirty liquid. Her armour and clothing were heavy and she could feel them dragging her down as she fought to swim with aching arms and legs. Up above she could see the surface and she struggled to get there as her chest tightened and her lungs screamed for air, but always there was too much water and it crushed the air from her lungs like a rock.

Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea.

She wondered if Strassen had ever drowned.

As her eyes stung with dirt-filled water, she felt something solid beneath her foot, and, pushing upwards with all her might, launched her head and neck clear of the river – gasping down as much air as she could above the breaking surface – then she was under again.

Suddenly she felt more alive – she could do this – she wasn’t dead, and she fought on all the harder against the dragging weight of her clothes and the pain in her head. Again she launched clear of water and clawed her way forward, though again she was sucked back under before she could do so much as open her eyes. She had to make it, she could not fail. Eventually it took less and less to force herself to the surface, and her soaking clothes grew heavier and heavier as the water became shallow beneath her and gravity pulled the liquid back from around her body. Soon she even glimpsed sand through the water that filled her visor.

Crawling on all fours and feeling very much like a drowned rat, she pulled herself up onto the opposite bank and let herself collapse into the sand. Gasping for air, she tore of her mask and swallowed down as much of the warm air as she could into her screaming lungs. Let the pollen kill her, or the ork on the opposite bank – she was done with this world.

Feeling faint, she wiped the water from her eyes and rolled from her stomach onto her side. Her clothes clung to her and chafed against her skin, and she had to wipe her sand-filled hair from her face, but at least she was in one piece.

Glancing back across the water, she saw the smouldering remains of the ork walker standing knee deep in the river, and managed a dry smirk in amazement as she swept her blond hair back out of her face: how in the Emperor’s name had that happened? She didn’t even notice when it stopped shooting.

She flopped her head back into the sand and gazed up at the darkening crimson of the sky as the sun set behind the pollen clouds. Her heart was still thumping against her rib-cage, but it was starting to slow… giving her the time to reflect on how hopelessly lost and tired she really was. Amazingly, she still had her heavy pistol and Striker’s hellgun, though she’d managed to lose both her map and her half-empty nutrient syringe. She felt a hand around the neck of her soaked overcoat – at least she still had her rosette.

“Inquisitor, I thought I told you not to wait for me?”

She sat bolt upright in the sand at the sound of the familiar serpentine voice. Walking towards her across the river-bank in a dirt-stained and battle-scarred suit of black power armour with his force staff in hand, the sight of Brother Librarian Orion Aquinas was enough to make her weep with joy – though instead Godwyn simply stammered, “You’re back,” in a tiny voice.

Nodding his helmeted head, he came to a stop beside her, and held out a hand to help the Inquisitor back to her feet.

“I thought I’d never see you again,” she said, peering up into the helmet’s glaring red eyes with a relieved smile on her face.

“Indeed,” he murmured, and set off down the bank without delay, forcing Godwyn to run after him to catch up.

“I had been hunting the ork dreadnought for several days in the jungle,” he continued when she had drawn level to him, “and I would have been content to allow it to lose itself in the wilds, but when it happened upon you I had to intervene.”

“Were there a lot of orks on this world?” Godwyn asked, tearing off a piece her undershirt and tying it over her nose and mouth to protect her from the worst of the pollen before once again sweeping her damp hair out of her eyes.

“Several hundred,” Aquinas confirmed in an uninterested tone. “I believe that one of their space-faring vessels was wrecked upon this world and the orks were left stranded.” He glanced down at Godwyn to see her looking back up at him; “It is also likely that the crash of the ork vessel resulted in the otherwise unexplained atmospheric conditions after several years. Regardless, this world will warrant further investigation by the Ordo Xenos and the Deathwatch. I would request that you add that to your report.”

“Of course,” Godwyn agreed without hesitation, “though I have one more question.”

Aquinas nodded. He was listening.

“How did you kill the orks?”

“I only had to do battle with two orks,” Aquinas corrected her, but continued when it became obvious that she wanted to do more. “I killed their leader – what they call a ‘nob’ – and then manipulated the orks into doing what comes naturally to them. The second ork was the one you saw burning on the riverbank.”

Humbled and amazed that a single space marine had managed to overcome hundreds of orks, Godwyn walked in silence beside the space marine for a long while until he spoke again.

“You have another question,” he informed her.

She didn’t even bother to be surprised.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Back to your ship, Inquisitor. Was there somewhere else you wanted to go?”

[Lady_Canoness]

The last calm before the wrap-up begins, this is a time for further adding to characters in their later states, and foreshadowing of things soon to come.

 

*part 14*

 

She’d never really taken the time to properly admire the stars. Millions and millions of them, the tiny dots of light, the canvas of the universe, and surrounded by planets and gases and entire systems of their own… and the thought that each and every one of them could have some alien creature looking skyward towards her thinking the very same thing. It was easy to forget sometimes, lost in their own little existences as they were, how big space really is. Men would ply the stars, fighting their puny wars, and never realize how insignificant their lives were. She’d once been told as a student that Man could set foot on an undiscovered world every day of her life and there would still be countless more left to find.

It was relaxing just to think about it, though of course the pleasantly hearty shiraz couldn’t hurt either after the second glass.

Draining the last drops of the red wine from her glass, Godwyn set it back down on the midnight tablecloth and sank lower into her chair with an exhausted groan.

“You’re too young to be making sounds like that,” Columbo chuckled from across the table as he speared the last cut of his veal on his fork and offered the half-empty wine bottle to the Inquisitor. She cocked her eyebrows nonchalantly and pushed the glass forward. He poured, and she raised the glass in thanks before tilting more of the burgundy vintage between her pursed lips.

“I’m starting to feel old,” she commented mirthlessly, setting the glass back down and casting her eyes around the comforts of the seigneurie that were absent from her person.

Sitting his fork at the side of his cleaned plate, Columbo folded his hands across his stomach. “If you feel like that now,” the Ship Master remarked with a sly grin, “then image how you’ll feel when you’re my age.”

“By then, hopefully I’ll be dead.”

He sighed, and made a motion as if removing invisible spectacles from the ridge of his nose.

“I’ve seen a lot of things that weren’t honeydew and roses in my time, Cassandra,” he said, watching her with pensive eyes, “but if there is one thing my age has taught me, it is that talking about troubles does tend to make them less troubling…”

Godwyn met his eyes with a sideways glance. “You know I can’t go into details, Hercule,” she said.

“To the warp with the details!” he retorted, tossing the idea over his shoulder; “March them out the nearest airlock! I daresay that if a beautiful young woman should find herself in distress aboard my ship, I will do her the service of hearing about it!”

She took another sip from her wineglass, and exhaled loudly before beginning:

“I’m in the dark,” she admitted, “and I haven’t any idea about how I’m going to get myself out. All I do seems to send me around a series of blind corners, and I can’t see what is coming next.”

Columbo nodded understandingly.

“…and there’s more,” she said.

“In that case,” Columbo refilled his wineglass and snapped his fingers for another bottle, “we’d better brace our spirits for the worst of it, yes?”

 

When Godwyn had sent her report to Panacea with requests for full disclosure on the incident surrounding Inquisitor Felix, she had hoped that Inquisitor Roth’s reply would somehow clear the air around Trajan’s Deep – metaphorically speaking – and that she’d finally get something concrete with which she could work instead of chasing the coattails of rumours and suspicions. As she feared, however, the Lord Inquisitor’s response was cryptic and brief:

++Events have precipitated on Panacea. I need to speak with you at once, in person, and in private, concerning Pierce.++

Roth was becoming more and more cagey – enough to convince her that the search for Inquisitor Strassen was definitely intensifying both on her end and on Panacea. Though still he left her in the dark. It was infuriating and disheartening to say the least, and the more she fought, struggled, and risked her life and the lives of her crew, the more distant Roth seemed to become. Maybe Strassen was putting pressure on Roth while she was roaming far off the mark looking for him, but then wouldn’t it make more sense to include her in whatever Roth had determined?

She wouldn’t know the answer until she talked to him again, but so far the message she was receiving was clear: the Inquisition still thought of her as a student.

What was it that he could not tell her via astropathic correspondence? Why must he always summon her back to Panacea when the transit time alone was giving Strassen months to prepare?

 

“Typically when a business contact wishes to see me in person, it is for one of two reasons,” Columbo suggested thoughtfully, relaying his own experiences in the hope that they might clarify things for his young friend. “If a contact trusts me implicitly, he will never ask to see me in person, so it is safe to assume that if someone asks to meet in person that, for some reason or other, they do not trust me.”

“You’re saying that Lord Roth does not trust me?” Godwyn asked incredulously. “Even after he hand-picked me for this assignment?”

The Ship Master presented the palms of his hands in defence.

“I did not mean to infer that he would not trust you in a malicious way,” Columbo backtracked, “but as I mentioned before there are likely two reasons why he might not trust you: either he does not believe you can follow his instructions without further clarification; or he does not know how you will react to certain developments, and he wishes to be present to clear up any misunderstandings between you.

“It’s not a sign of disrespect,” he continued with a defusing gesture; “people just don’t know you well enough to gauge how you react.”

“You would expect a Lord Inquisitor would be quite good at that by now,” she commented, raising her wine back to her lips.

Columbo shrugged; “Could be that your assignment, whatever it is, demands extra precautions.”

Godwyn matched his shrug and would have been content to leave it at that, but Columbo persisted:

“Come now, before I make myself the fool and leave you stuck in the dark, tell me how you plan to get yourself out of this. Inquisitors are highly resourceful people, and what might seem like common knowledge to you are myths and legends to the rest of us. Surely there is someway you plan to set things right?”

Godwyn shifted herself into an upright position and folded her hands across her lap. “Are you prying, Hercule?” she asked pointedly.

He snorted contemptuously at the thought of it.

“My dear Godwyn,” he said, “do I look like an information broker to you? I assure you that my interest is merely amicable, and my intentions are those of an older man addressing a younger woman – not of a swindling rogue addressing an Inquisitor.”

She cracked a smile, though quickly hid it behind a more serious tone.

“Very well,” she nodded, “you’ve earned your questions.”

 

Aquinas studied the oubliette recordings with a frown on his face, but otherwise witnessed the interrogation of Inquisitor Felix without expression.

Godwyn watched in silence; her eyes flickering from the space marine to the holo-recordings and back. As soon as Meridian had berthed upon the Patroclus, and after cleaning herself up following the standard decontamination procedures, Godwyn had wasted no time sitting down the space marine Librarian to share with him everything she knew.

“Interesting,” Aquinas muttered his first constructive word since they began as the final recording concluded with Strassen executing the hapless Felix. He did not seem at all surprised by what he had witnessed, though, as Godwyn reminded herself, he was adept at concealing such things.

“So what do you make of it?” Godwyn posed, leaning forward where she sat on one of the common room’s leather sofas and looking across at the seated Librarian.

Aquinas did not answer immediately as he collected the data-slates and neatly stacked them on the small coffee table that sat between them, his eyes narrowed and his lips pursed. She waited patiently for him to begin.

“Before we analyze what we have seen,” he said softly, meeting the Inquisitor’s eyes and leaning forward so that their gazes were level, “we must analyze why we have seen it.”

She nodded for him to continue.

“Out of fifty-eight records, we are granted four. This is no coincidence; someone intended it to be that way.”

The Inquisitor arched an eyebrow; “So Strassen knew I would go to Trajan’s Deep. How?”

Aquinas spread the data-slates back across the table with a wave of his hand, his eyes piercing into each as he did so. “Inquisitor Roth believed the events of Trajan’s Deep to be significant in determining the disappearance of Inquisitor Strassen. The apparent actions of Inquisitor Strassen, or actions taken on his behalf, confirm the Lord Inquisitor’s suspicions to be correct: Strassen anticipated that we would go there as he too believes it to be significant in the investigation of his disappearance.”

Godwyn chewed thoughtfully on her lip; she hadn’t thought of it from that angle, but when Aquinas pointed it out it seemed ingenious.

“I imagine these four recordings were selected because they allow us to see the course of the interrogations without revealing anything substantive. Incriminating material was likely given a higher level of secrecy by whoever tampered with the records, and anything that could reveal Strassen’s goals were probably destroyed to prevent you from seeing them even in the unlikely event of obtaining higher clearance.”

“But if someone decided what I would see,” Godwyn cut in, tapping her fingers across her lips as she leaned her chin against the palm of her hand, “then they would have anticipated how I would react.”

Aquinas inclined his head, but made it clear that he did not fully agree. “Possible, but not to the degree which you suspect,” he replied coolly. “Uncovering this information could be expected to elicit the same response form anyone.”

“A return to the source…” Godwyn finished his train of thought and drew a nod of approval from the Librarian: what she had learned on Trajan’s Deep was only enough to send her back to Panacea with more questions.

“What would Strassen have to gain from this?” she made her thoughts known, but for the first time Aquinas had no answers for her.

“To predict his motives now would be as foolhardy as examining them all through a process of elimination, though I believe what he has revealed may play some part in why he revealed it.”

“What are your thoughts?” Godwyn pressed; “You’ve known him longer than I have.”

Again the Librarian nodded, and his piercing eyes were drawn to the data-slates arranged before him as he lightly touched each in turn with his armoured fingers.

“I believe that the content of the data granted to us relays three things that Strassen wished to impart upon you and not to anyone else: first, that, though allies, he and Pierce are not in cohesion; second, that parties other than himself and Pierce know of something hidden within the sector which only Inquisitor Felix was privy to the location of; and third, that he is still the man you remember him being.”

A shiver of what could have been dread passed down Inquisitor Godwyn’s spine.

Brother Aquinas was watching her most intently with his blue eyes.

How could her old mentor know? How could he have taken into account her every move and every thought?

“I don’t understand,” she responded to the Librarian’s questioning eyes with a startled shake of her head. “How do you know this? How does he?”

He blinked, and the look was gone.

Exhaling deeply through his nose, the space marine rose to his feet and slowly walked towards the view port at the far end of the common room.

“I have studied mysteries in the dark places of the galaxy for a long time,” Aquinas began, looking out at the stars, “but I can assure you that the minds of men hold secrets darker than any forgotten crypt or tainted place. Your mentor was a brilliant man, adept at maximizing the resources at his disposal, and more capable at reading probability and character than any human I have yet met. While I doubt that his foresight was so great as to conduct the interrogation of Inquisitor Felix knowing you would see it, it comes as no surprise that he is capable of manipulating what occurred to serve his advantage.”

Lost for words, Godwyn merely stared at the dull data-slates in amazement, before once again turning towards the Librarian as he continued to speak:

“As we first suspected, it is possible that Strassen wants you and only you to find him,” he paused, “… though more likely as an ally than as an adversary.”

“Impossible!” Godwyn jumped to her feet defiantly; “I would never turn my back on my duty for him! He can’t possibly think that I would!”

The Librarian slowly turned to face her, though he kept his features unreadable and his hands loosely behind his back. “It is good that you say that, though be mindful not to rely strictly on such resolve, as that too can be exploited.”

 

“The problem with covering every angle too tightly is that you can never adequately cover any of them.”

Godwyn narrowed her eyes at him, but Columbo was markedly looking away as he topped up his fourth glass of wine.

“What?”

His eyes flashed back up, as if just noticing that he’d said something contentious.

“Oh, its just a little something I’ve learned over my years as a tradesman,” he said apologetically, though his performance was too seasoned for Godwyn to able to determine whether it was genuine or not.

“Care to explain it then?”

He smiled. “Oh certainly,” he replied, and shifted his weight as if to make himself more comfortable. “You see, I’ve learned that trying to prepare myself for every possibility leaves me painfully unprepared to deal with the most probable possibilities.”

“Are you meaning to say that I am being negligent?”

“Oh no!” Columbo quickly altered his position; “No-no-no, not at all!”

He sat up in his chair, tapping the fingers of his left hand against his thumb in concentration as he did so. “What I mean to say is,” he crossed one leg over the other before fixing both hands on the arms of his chair, “that you mustn’t become flummoxed by every possible outcome.”

“If it is possible, then one must be prepared for it,” Godwyn replied coolly.

The Ship Master rolled his eyes. “Well yes,” he agreed, “but then again it is *possible* that I could strip off my clothes and begin accosting my furniture – ” that drew a smile, “ – but its not necessary that you have a contingency in store for that!”

“Oh I think I might…” she looked at him innocently, which prompted Columbo to throw his hands in the air in mock exasperation, though he had succeeded in lightening the mood.

“Regardless! You see my point?”

She agreed, though hid the smile in her wineglass.

A comfortable period of silence followed in which both the Ship Master and the Inquisitor admired the company of the other under the dome of stars as the ship’s stewards entered with the dessert course of crème gateau au chocolat. Entreating his guest to the delicate dessert, Columbo himself waited patiently with a soft smile as the servants departed.

“Savour the small pleasures,” he announced, lifting his own fork, “as the large ones are often too much to wrap your lips around.”

“Hear, hear!” she applauded between mouthfuls, and Columbo promptly stood up for a bow to the imaginary audience that occupied the empty furniture of the seigneurie.

“In all sincerity though, my dear,” he said as he sat himself back down, “you have shared with me quite a bit of misery. How about then a change of pacing? Tell me something good – something that lightens the otherwise dark duties of an Imperial agent.”

She set her fork down on the edge of her plate and wiped the chocolate from her lips with a laced serviette. “What’s this? My turn to be a motivational speaker?”

He chuckled in reply. “Indulge me.”

 

Two days out from Trajan’s Deep, and Captain Striker was well on the road to a full recovery. As they had feared, her arm had been badly mangled from her fall and the subsequent week of improper care, though the Emperor smiled upon her when the chief medical officer announced with some certainty that all the damage could be corrected through surgical procedures and likely be healed when they reached Panacea in two weeks time.

“Inquisitor… Cassandra… I want to thank you.” Victoria Striker, free from her surgery with her right arm and shoulder encased in a plaster cast, was sitting upright in bed in the quiet recovery ward of the Patroclus’ medical wing. Like the rest of Godwyn’s crew who had braved the jungles of Trajan’s Deep, her features were still slightly sunken with dark rings beneath her eyes, but it was good to see the soldier smiling and free from pain.

“You don’t need to thank me,” Godwyn returned the smile as she sat at the Captain’s bedside. “It’s what we do. We’re together in this.”

Striker nodded in silent agreement and her smile diminished somewhat as she looked at her hands in her lap. “I’d given up, though,” Striker continued, studying the movements of her fingers. “I didn’t see a way out, and I thought we were done for… I was done for.” Lips sealed and eyes heavy, she looked back up at the Inquisitor, who sat quiet and understanding at her side; “and if it wasn’t for you and Grant, I would be.”

“Grant is an exceptional individual,” Godwyn gave credit where she thought it due; “he never gave up on either of us. You’re lucky.”

The Captain was slightly taken aback by the suggestive remark and followed up curiously as to what the Inquisitor was referring.

“He’s a good man,” Godwyn alluded to conversations they’d shared earlier, “even if he doesn’t have huge muscles…”

Colour started to seep into the storm troopers cheeks to match her hair. “Did he tell you?” she asked with an unmasked grin.

“I figured it out for myself.” She left it at that, and Striker didn’t feel the need to press any further.

“Either way,” Striker said with a determined look, “we’re all in this together until the end.”

“Whenever and whatever that is, yes,” Godwyn agreed.

At that moment Grant appeared through the ward doorway, though he stopped when he saw the Inquisitor.

“Am I intruding?” he asked, voluntarily taking a step backwards and indicating that he could return at a later time.

Godwyn was quickly on her feet, however; “I was just about to take my leave, actually,” she announced, and bade the Commissar stay as she hastily retreated to leave the couple in each other’s company.

She was happy for them, though also envious for their fortune in finding each other. Love was a scarce commodity within the ranks of the Imperial service, and while she could always find partners to satisfy her lust, she knew that her chances at meaningful affection were few and fleeting. The closest she had ever felt to a man had been during her four years studying under Inquisitor Strassen, but then her apprenticeship had ended, and she now found herself alone; hunting the one man she thought she cared for.

There is the Emperor, and there is the Imperium, she recalled from the sermons of Sebastian Thor; All else is transitory, as ash in the wind.

 

The after-dinner rum had been flowing freely for several rounds when the Ship Master finally rose to his unsteady feet and wished the Inquisitor goodnight. It was late, likely into the small ours of the night cycle, and the servants had not appeared for what felt like hours.

Her head feeling heavy as her eyes half-heartedly dragged themselves across the room, Godwyn could almost see her melancholy fermenting in the bottom of her glass. Closing her eyes and wishing it would stop, she downed the last of the searing liquid in a single gulp and smacked her glass back down on the tablecloth as her head rolled back along her shoulders.

“Hercule,” she called, her voice rolling along the floor to stop him just as he was about to reach the doors from the seigneurie, “are you going to ask me to your chambers?”

Besotted though he was, the Ship Master froze in his tracks and slowly turned to see the young Inquisitor gazing at him, still slouched at the table.

“I hadn’t planned on it,” he replied airily. “Did you want me to?”

Godwyn’s head looped itself around her shoulders as her fingers idly pushed at the now empty glass. Eyes glazing over, she ran her tongue over her front teeth before convincingly shaking her head and leaning forward with her elbows on the table. “No.”

Columbo nodded quietly, and was about to let himself out of the seigneurie when, once again, he paused with his arm outstretched. With a change of heart, he walked back over to the dining table rested his hands on the back of his chair.

“It gets easier, you know,” he said, looking down as the Inquisitor’s face slowly tilted up to meet him.

“What does?” she asked in a tired voice with reddened, bleary eyes.

“All of it.”

When she didn’t respond, the Ship Master gave his tongue a resolved click, tapped his hands against the wooden frame of the antique chair, and strode again to the doors – pausing only when he crossed the threshold:

“Goodnight, Inquisitor Godwyn,” he said with a last look, and closed the doors behind him.

[Lady_Canoness]

*part 15*

 

Within moments of arrival at the Inquisitorial headquarters in the capital city of Cornice, Godwyn was admitted to see Lord Inquisitor Roth in the same humble office in which she had first met him, and upon entering saw that not much about it had changed. The threadbare couch and bookshelf were still to the right of the Lord Inquisitor’s modest wooden desk in the small room, and the stucco walls were bare save for a framed copy of the Inquisitorial Mandate that hung facing the Lord Inquisitor’s desk. The desk itself was piled high with stacks of loose parchment and data-slates, and behind it, his face gaunt with dark rings beneath his eyes, Lord Inquisitor Roth looked up as she opened the door.

“Inquisitor Godwyn,” he rose momentarily and quickly ushered the young Inquisitor to the same chair she had previously occupied on their first meeting.

“Lord Inquisitor,” she bowed her head in his direction and took the seat as offered. He smiled, but only briefly and with visible strain, before sitting back down and working some sense of order onto his desk as he shuffled through papers and moved the bulkier data-slates onto floor. Godwyn waited patiently without speaking. Whatever he was occupied with must have been affecting him greatly in order for it to show so clearly on his face. He looked tired, and an old-age she had previously not noticed was seeping through to the surface of his face.

“My apologies,” he said, moving the last of the data-slates to the floor and turning to address the Inquisitor, “as you can see, I had the audacity to think I could accomplish more than I did in the time it took for you to come from the spaceport to here.”

Godwyn assured him that it was perfectly understandable, but that did little to elevate his mood and he continued to speak like under duress.

“Your report of the orks on Trajan’s Deep is definitely appreciated by myself and others, and you may rest assured that the aliens will be dealt with swiftly and discretely,” he said, trying to smile weakly. “You know how much we like to keep things stable in this sector.”

Godwyn smiled in agreement. She understood perfectly well that the sector, and Panacea in particular, were very concerned in maintaining stability in the region, and that threats of any measure were often dealt with as swiftly as possible. Recent news from Tenantable suggested just this, as the new planetary governor had ended the rebellions in the industrial cities and promised a wide range of reforms with full Administratum support. Swift, and by all means subtle.

Roth continued – his pallid skin crinkling like dry paper beneath his brown hair as he spoke.

“The recordings of Inquisitor Felix’s interrogation are also quite troubling, though I understand that you were hampered by a lack of security clearance, is that so?”

“Yes, that was the case,” Godwyn replied, though she did not go into detail about Brother Aquinas’ suspicions. Just by looking at him she could tell that his reviewing of her report with her was mostly courtesy, and that she had half of his attention at best until he got on to what he wanted to talk about.

Bobbing his head in acknowledgement, he sighed deeply from behind sealed lips and leaned forward with his elbows on his desk.

“This information Inquisitor Strassen extracted from Inquisitor Felix before he killed her is of great concern to me, as is our decisive lack of insight into what that information might be.”

“Brother Aquinas is looking into the matter,” Godwyn said flatly, drawing a look of approval from her superior. Perhaps she had judged to quickly – tired though he appeared, she could tell that his interest was roused.

“Has his investigation yielded any results thus far?”

Before departing for the surface of Panacea, the Librarian had informed her that he was going to contact his brethren in the Deathwatch once they were planetside for reports of eldar activity in neighbouring sectors. Because of the late Inquisitor Felix’s expertise on the elusive alien race, Aquinas thought it possible that any secrets she withheld from the Inquisition could be in someway related to the xenos. He was not particularly confident in his chances of discovering such a secret through official channels, however, but he knew several of his brethren had worked with Felix in the past, and that through them he may be able to produce a lead that would otherwise go unnoticed.

“No,” Godwyn lied, remembering everything Lee Normandy had told her about not giving herself away when she told a lie, and hoping that her deception went unnoticed.

The Lord Inquisitor shrugged, and leaned back in his chair. “Regardless, see that he keeps on it. I will be very interested to see what he discovers.”

Godwyn said that she would, but quickly turned onto other matters. “You said you needed to see me, Lord Inquisitor, in private? Concerning Pierce?”

“Yes that is correct,” Roth crossed his arms over his chest and his mood darkened, though also she noted that his look of fatigue seemed to vanish almost instantaneously. “As I said when last we spoke, I have been watching him closely, and, as it turns out, he is here: on Panacea, in Cornice.”

“He’s here?!” Godwyn repeated in surprise. “Why is he here? What is he doing!?”

Roth waived her down with a tentative hand.

“One question at a time, Inquisitor,” he cautioned her, “but yes it is hardly what we expected.”

More than that, Godwyn thought; why would Strassen send Pierce here if he knew that she would be here also?

“I do not know why he is here, but he arrived little more than a month ago and recorded his presence with our headquarters – could be he did this to avoid suspicion, but I do not know for sure.”

Godwyn had an idea: if Pierce announced his arrival, then he didn’t know that she was onto him, and if he didn’t know it was because Strassen hadn’t told him.

“I have had him tailed since he landed, however, and I know that he spends most of his time in the Imperial Sectoral Archive researching what my agents believe to be mundane history, though needless to say I now think his research is far less routine than it would otherwise appear.”

“You think he is looking into whatever secret Felix held?” Godwyn asked.

Roth nodded insistently. “It would seem plausible,” he said, “given that Felix is recorded as saying ‘you can’t use them, there are none who can,’ that he is looking for any scrap of information that might tell him about ‘them’.”

“Then we move on Pierce!” Godwyn demanded forcefully. “Once we get to him, we can get right onto what they have planned!”

She was confident that this is what Strassen had anticipated. He would hand her Pierce, the man he did not trust, in hopes that Pierce would lead her to him, and perhaps in so doing get her to join him in whatever plan he carried out. Mentor and student reunited again. A mind he had trained and moulded – a mind he could trust. He wanted her, and she felt the tug of longing to be back with him, but it wouldn’t work out as he had planned. She would go to him once she had Pierce, and she would bring him back… one way or another.

And, as if it were a sign, Roth was supportive of her idea.

“Before you arrived, my contacts placed him in the Archive at this very moment, and I have not been alerted to him leaving. If you are quick, I think we could get him while he is still there.”

Godwyn keenly agreed.

“Speed and subtlety will be important as I don’t know if he has any eyes watching his back,” Roth continued, rising from his seat as Godwyn did the same, “so it would be best if we kept this as low-key as possible.”

“I have Striker with me outside,” Godwyn replied. “I think the two of us should be able to take him without being noticed.”

Roth frowned.

“Bold,” he said, though he still looked supportive. “I think that could work. It will take me at least half an hour to prepare, but I can have gunship support and a fire-team ready to deploy should you need it, though, as I said, quieter is better.”

“Quieter is better,” she agreed, knowing that a lot of boots on the ground could turn a simple snatch and grab into a logistical nightmare. “Striker and I will get there as soon as possible, and if we’re lucky we can get him without a struggle.”

 

* *

 

The motor carriage accelerated through the mid-day traffic on the capital city’s streets as they wound between the glowing white spires on a downwards quest towards the Archives and Inquisitor Pierce.

The Imperial Sectoral Archives were housed in a centuries-old stone building deep at the feet of Cornice’s towers in what used to be the original seat of planetary government before Panacea’s rise to glory. Now no longer in use by the government, the massive grey building, obscured in shadow behind her rising towers, had been repurposed to store the sector’s history well out of sight of the ever-progressing populace, and shared its locale with warehouses, sweat factories, and the other necessities of society that one preferred not to see. Employment was high and crime rates were low, but even so the people of the white towers avoided the seedier elements of the shadow city when they could, and it was said that no-one went down there unless on business, even if that business was trouble, and descending through the upper-level skyways, Godwyn knew that was exactly what they were looking for.

“You don’t think we’ll need the others?” Striker asked, referring to Grant and Lee who were waiting back at Meridian with no inkling of the Inquisitor’s plan.

Fair question – they were dealing with an Inquisitor after all – but Godwyn shook her head.

“Quick and quiet,” Godwyn answered, laying her heavy pistol across her lap and placing the three six-round magazines on the seat beside her before loading one of the mags and priming the chamber. “They won’t ask questions of an Inquisitor, but the more people we have the more chances of Pierce getting the drop on us.”

The motor carriage-slowed as it descended another off-ramp, and Striker glanced out the window before looking back at Godwyn and absentmindedly feeling the pistol strapped to her thigh. Neither of them were heavily armed or armoured with only their casual attire and pistols, and Striker was likely longing for her hellgun, but regardless they both understood the necessity for subtlety: there was no-knowing who could be watching.

“Right,” Godwyn holstered her pistol and the extra ammunition before tugging at her overcoat and smoothing out her clothes, “how do I look?”

Striker, dressed in plain black fatigues with a grey jacket and snug fitting cap, gave the Inquisitor a quick eyes-over and shrugged; “Like anyone else going about their business.”

Just what she had been hoping for. Her coat was unbuttoned with its collar up, and the dark clothing beneath gave no indication that she was anyone other than just an ordinary citizen. Most importantly, the Inquisitorial rosette was safely out of sight in her pocket.

Several minutes more and the motor carriage pulled up to the curb outside the Archives.

“Quick and quiet,” Godwyn said one last time, and, together with Striker, opened the door and stepped out of the vehicle.

 

The Imperial Sectoral Archive was built like a fortress. Dark, squat, and imposing, it was a stark contrast to the smooth white towers above and spoke of a time long ago when the atmosphere around Cornice, and likely the planet in general, was much bleaker and far less optimistic. Little wonder then that they hid it in the shadows of their more recent successes.

Outside of the motor carriage, the streets were bare with not a soul in sight and no signs of life other than the occasional vehicle parked in the shadows.

Godwyn snapped the door of the motor-carriage shut and heard its echo rebound around the quiet streets. Sounds seemed muted down here, under the bustling city above, but it didn’t take much to imagine how this place had once been teaming with activity.

The comm. unit buzzed in her ear, bringing her back round from her surroundings. “Godwyn here, go ahead.”

It was the voice of Lord Roth who answered with surprisingly little interference:

++Status report?++ he asked.

“I’m at the Archive now,” Godwyn replied, mounting the steps to the old building with Striker at her side.

++Good,++ Roth sounded relieved, and Godwyn signalled for Striker to stop short of the main doors as she waited for further instructions. The doors were large and windowless, and made of a dull brass that looked as if it could weather quite a barrage before buckling. Fortress indeed.

++You need to be careful in there, Godwyn,++ he tried to impress a sense of prudence upon her as he continued, ++I don’t have a fix on Pierce’s location within the Archives, and, if you should come across him without being prepared, he will likely try to escape. If he does, just give the word and I’ll have my team move to intercept.++

“Understood Lord Inquisitor.”

She could almost feel him nodding in relief on the other end of comm. upon hearing that they were of an understanding.

++One more thing, Inquisitor,++ he added, ++don’t forget that we need him alive.++

“Yes, I remember. Godwyn out.”

Shutting off the comm. link, she nodded to the storm trooper: they were going in.

 

Behind the double doors, the Archive was an impressive old building lovingly maintained in its historic splendour by a dedicated staff of archivists and clericals who tended to the over five-million files shelved in the six stories of the old government building. Ancient chandeliers hung from vaulted ceilings in their hundreds throughout the Archive and cast a soft yellow glow down along the wood-panelled walls and creaking hardwood floors, while perfectly preserved wooden columns intermingled between rows upon rows of towering shelves. Dedicated reading rooms and sitting areas dotted the floor plan of every level in spaces that would have once been the offices of planetary officials and bureaucrats, and ancient pieces of art or monuments from the old city were on display in open areas, turning what would have been a bone-yard of musty records on any other planet into a museum of local history on Panacea. Visitors – if there ever were any – could literally lose themselves in the past, and spend hours browsing through materials the likes of which they would find nowhere else.

Godwyn and her bodyguard did not have hours, though the man they were looking for they would not find anywhere else.

Pushing through the front doors, the clerical behind the front desk opened his mouth to address her, but upon seeing the badge of office Godwyn held in her hand, quickly shut it again and looked at his feet. Moving out behind her, Captain Striker quickly secured the empty lobby and waited by one of the swinging doors that sat to the left behind the front desk.

“I’m looking for someone,” Godwyn announced as she pocketed her rosette and advanced on the reception desk where the old clerical was still focusing on his feet.

“I don’t know anything,” he immediately replied. Scared stiff, Godwyn thought it likely that he hadn’t even listened to her question, but merely answered by impulse. She was wasting her time.

“Lock the doors and get under the desk,” she ordered, and he nodded hastily at his feet. “No one leaves this building, understood?”

He nodded again and quickly darted to the doors as soon as Godwyn turned away from him. From the corner of her eyes, Striker watched the clerical do as he was told.

Wordlessly dismissing the frightened man, Godwyn approached the storm trooper as she waited by the door.

“Ready?” she asked.

Of course she was.

“Quick and quiet,” Godwyn reminded her bodyguard as much as herself. “We don’t pull our guns unless we need to. Let’s find this man.”

 

As they entered the Archive through the lobby doors, they found it close to being deserted, and not so much as a breath disturbed the silence between the shelves and left their steady footfalls over the creaking floor to sound like the marching of armies. Occasionally, while searching each room in turn, they would catch a glimpse of robed clericals drifting like ghosts down aisles of paper work, but vanishing without a sound whenever one of the women tried to tail them.

At length, they secured the first floor and then the second with no sign of Pierce or anyone else other than the oddly quiet archivists.

Godwyn found it maddening, and when she and Striker entered the number III staircase en route to the third floor, it took all she could muster to stop herself from shouting.

“What do you think?” Godwyn asked in a voice that sounded uncomfortably loud as they walked up the creaking wooden stairs under the watchful eyes untitled portraits.

“It’s too quiet,” Striker replied in almost a whisper; “I don’t like it.”

Inquisitor Godwyn could not have agreed more. This place was too calm for how anxious she felt inside – like it was somehow trying to smother her spirit with its deafening silence. Worse still, Godwyn was certain that Pierce would hear them from several rooms away whereas he could remain completely undetectable so long as he didn’t move. She had half a mind to call in Roth’s fire-team already and damn quick and quiet to the Warp.

They were somewhere near the center of the third floor when Striker suddenly stopped outside a closed door hissed to catch Godwyn’s attention.

Through there – she motioned with her head as Godwyn, hardly daring to breathe, crept closer. Was she certain?

The sound of a faint, clearing cough came through the thin wooden door. They looked at each other – this had to be it.

‘Follow me’, Godwyn mouthed, and, with her hand slowly turning the knob, eased the door open with a faint creak.

The room beyond the door was large and lined two rows of tables arranged horizontally away from them towards the gaping mouth of a large, black fireplace that sat in the middle of a wall lined with glass display cabinets that extended around the circumference of the room, and as Godwyn stepped inside she quickly counted three other exits leading from the room in different directions. More important than all these, however, and stealing her attention away from the decorations in the reading room, was the single figure sitting with his back to them at the table farthest from their door. From behind, she could tell that he was past his prime with a round head of thinning grey hair, a thick neck, and curved but broad shoulders underneath a plain black coat. Without even seeing his face, Godwyn recognized him as the man she’d seen before on a grainy screen while she witnessed the interrogation of Inquisitor Felix. He did not turn around when he heard them enter, however, and merely continued to look between the various papers and texts he had arranged before him on the table.

Godwyn cleared her throat, and slid her hand underneath her coat to grab the heavy pistol she had holstered at her breast. Striker, she noticed, had her weapon already drawn and held it stiffly at her side.

“Inquisitor Pierce, I presume?” She knew who the man was – a monster – but asked anyway to hear him try and deny it.

The man sat up straighter in his chair and placed both his hands palm down on the table, his papers forgotten.

“I am he,” the puffed-up, superior voice she remembered from the recording answered her.

He did not turn around to see who addressed him.

“And that makes you Inquisitor Godwyn, does it not? I wondered when you would get here.”

What did he say?

Striker’s arm was up in a heartbeat, but Pierce was faster. Knocking his chair aside, the senior Inquisitor dove sideways between the tables with a machine pistol spewing in his hand even as the storm trooper traced him with a rain of bullets. Glass shattering overhead as Pierce’s fire tore into the display cabinets, Godwyn threw herself flat behind the nearest table with her heavy pistol in her hand as Striker leapt bodily over it and rolled clear of the razor edged shower while blasting shot after shot into the walls behind Pierce as the rogue Inquisitor made a mad dash for the nearest door. Godwyn got one shot off from the ground that splintered a table leg mere moments behind her fleeing quarry as he ducked through the door with his hands shielding his head.

“Are you alright? Are you hit?” Striker jumped back over the table as Godwyn got to her feet – shards of glass clattering off her overcoat and falling from her hair as she stood up.

“I’m fine,” she answered – only a few stinging lacerations – “get after him!”

Crunching the glass shards beneath their feet, they pounded over to the door where Pierce had made good his escape – knocking chairs and tables askew in their haste.

Striker reached the open door first, approached it carefully from the side, and ducked out to take a quick peek before dodging back in anticipation of any return fire.

“Staircase,” she announced quickly to the Inquisitor beside her, “looks clear. I’m going in.”

Hearing footsteps thundering into the stairs above them, Striker dashed into the staircase with her pistol pointing upwards and Godwyn following close behind to cover her.

Up above, a door slammed.

“Two stories up! Move, move, move!” Striker bolted up the stairs two at a time with her arms pumping wildly as Godwyn stormed after her to the fifth floor landing.

Holding her breath in her throat, Godwyn slammed into the wall opposite Striker to either side of the fifth-floor door – both with guns braced as the storm trooper reached for the door handle and held up three fingers on her rock-steady pistol hand. One by one she dropped them back down: three – two – one –

With a tug she opened the door and Godwyn aimed through with her pistol extended.

Fire from the machine pistol screamed at her from across the fifth floor reading room as Pierce held the opposite door. Bullets punched into the walls and through the open doorframe into the staircase as Godwyn leapt back out of sight and Striker returned fire blindly with her pistol until it clicked empty.

Leaning out a second time, Godwyn’s hand-cannon roared and blew a chunk out of the opposite door just as Pierce abandoned his position.

Dropping the spent mag onto the floor, Striker was still reloading as Godwyn dashed through the empty reading room with her heavy pistol held at the ready in both hands and hugged the wall to the side of the inner door. Striker caught up with her quickly – her eyes ablaze with adrenaline.

Not waiting for the word, Godwyn peered around the corner into the adjoining room: shelves, lots of them – they were back into the archives proper. Blinded on one side by the open door, Godwyn made to push it full open, but was thrown back immediately as the snapping retort of the machine pistol heralded a storm of small-calibre bullets punching holes through the door from Pierce’s covering position.

Waiting for a break in the fire, Striker rolled head over heels through the doorway and skidded behind the nearest stack of shelves, leaning out and snapping off sideways shots in the direction of their assailant.

Still in the reading room, Godwyn was checking her body for blood when the comm. link buzzed in her ear between bursts of pistol fire from outside the mangled door.

++Godwyn, I’ve got reports of weapons fire from inside the Archive. What is going on in there?++ Roth demanded.

“Pierce knew we were coming,” Godwyn explained, trying to keep her voice steady enough to talk to her superior. “He’s armed, on the run, and I could really use some fire support!”

Roth took a few moments to confer with the gunship crew.

++Understood, Inquisitor,++ he answered back, ++stay on him. We’re inbound in four minutes.++

Outside of the reading room, Pierce was on the move through the stacks with Striker following cautiously behind. Firing corridors between the stacked shelves were likely to prove narrow and deadly.

Following her bodyguard, the shooting had stopped, and between ragged breaths all Godwyn could hear were the rhythmic clumping sounds of boots on wood. Ahead of her, Striker would reach the end of stack, stop short with her back against it, peek every-which-way, and then duck in between another row of parchment-crammed shelves. Somewhere up ahead she could hear Pierce’s boots doing the exact same thing.

“Out there,” Striker hissed, cocking her head around the corner as she came up upon the end of another stack. Carefully, Godwyn peered around the corner for just long enough see what it was Striker had spotted. She ducked back. The storm trooper said nothing.

Down past the ends of several stacks was a large double door.

Godwyn peered around the corner again – she could hear the footsteps moving.

Striker skidded over to the stack across the way with Godwyn covering her just as Pierce’s head popped into view several stacks down.

Godwyn’s powerful heavy pistol roared twice – the first shot shredding through a stack of shelved parchment and forcing Pierce back out of sight while the second punched a fist-sized hole through the door.

Striker’s side arm opened up in small snapping bursts as the storm trooper sent bullets hurtling through the stacks.

Pinned down, Pierce had completely disappeared from view as Godwyn and Striker continued to hurl bullets at his hiding place. It was then, through the fusillade, that Godwyn heard the footsteps.

She looked over at Striker – he’s moving.

But Pierce wasn’t.

Hearing a pause in their fire, bullets screamed down towards them as the rogue Inquisitor broke cover and held down the trigger of his madly bucking machine pistol. Godwyn dropped back away from the screaming bullets as snow-drifts of torn paper filled the air following the machine pistol’s fury and Striker quickly flattened herself along the floor with her hands clasped over her head.

His gun running dry, Pierce dumped the empty mag onto the floor and kicked open the double doors – disappearing around a corner and out of sight just as Godwyn’s gun cannoned another high-calibre bullet through the door closing behind him.

Striker was up and after him in a flash, and Godwyn followed just seconds behind her – the young Inquisitor ejecting and pocketing the empty magazine and loading a fresh six-round clip into the stock of her pistol.

++Godwyn, are you still there? I need a status update.++ Roth’s voice buzzed in her ear – the sound of gunship engines loud in the background.

Gulping down a breath of air to steady her nerves, Godwyn slowed down to a fast walk and hit the comm. stud in her ear: “We’re still with him on the fifth floor,” she replied, her voice sounding much calmer than she felt.

++Understood. Be there in two minutes.++

“Two minutes,” she repeated to Striker – two minutes until reinforcements came over the hill. Her hands were starting to ache from gripping her pistol so tightly, and she could feel strands of her hair sticking to the sweat on her forehead. Two minutes was going to be a long time.

They braved the double door together – clear left – clear right – and Striker took point snaking down the right-hand corridor after Pierce as Godwyn covered her advance from behind. Reaching the end of the hallway and checking to both sides, the storm trooper held up her left hand and moved it back and forth in knifing motion – move up.

Whether he knew it or not, Pierce had just led his pursuers into a dead end.

Behind the main foyer on the fifth floor, which had been converted into stacks once the Imperial Sectoral Archive took over the building, had been the offices of Planetary Commerce and had been retained as office space by the archivists. Now as then, the offices were a labyrinth of near identical doors and long corridors, though, more importantly still, there was only one way in or out.

Pierce was waiting for them, however.

Wood splintered and broke as bullets ripped into the side-panelling and scattered wide as Striker pulled away from the edge to avoid getting hit. Caught in a right-angled corner, Striker waved the Inquisitor back as she recoiled as yet more fire shredded into the antique wooden walls.

Pierce had them at a momentary disadvantage and he knew it. With superior position and a high rate fire, the rogue Inquisitor could keep them suppressed at the far end of the hall without them being able to get a shot off without him shooting first. Firing in irregular bursts, bullets periodically chewed into the corridor as the storm trooper and Inquisitor Godwyn held their positions down the hall.

“Don’t look,” Striker warned as two more bullets thudded into the wall opposite them.

Godwyn didn’t need to be told twice and waited safely away from the corner. Lord Roth could be no more than a minute away, and if Pierce wanted to spend that minute holding them off at the far end of a corridor, then Godwyn was prepared to wait him out. He would run out of bullets or the fire-team would arrive: either way she’d get him today.

“Remember,” Striker whispered, glancing her green eyes towards the Inquisitor as a grin crept onto her sweat-lined face, “mess with their minds.”

Without a sound, they waited as the bursts of fire grew less frequent and then stopped altogether. Still they didn’t budge, until, counting down on five fingers, Striker and Godwyn stepped out into the hall as one with guns raised and ready.

But no gunfire rose to meet them and no footsteps either.

“How the…?” Godwyn heard Striker mutter from beside her as she looked down the sights of her gun to the end of the hall. Godwyn didn’t believe it either.

Pierce was nowhere to be seen, but instead there were two hooded clericals standing frozen in shock in the middle of the hall with gunshot wounds riddling their robes.

“Down!” Godwyn ordered the clericals out of her way; “Now!”

She walked towards them; gun outstretched, but her eyes on the open door at the end of the hall. Obviously terrified, the robed men did not respond, but staggered slightly on their feet. With all the holes in their robes it was amazing that they were standing at all.

Striker advanced behind her along the torn-up wall – her aim shifting between the clericals and the open door.

With only a handful of steps separating them, the nearest of the clericals seemed to take notice of the Inquisitor and hobbled about awkwardly on his bare feet as Godwyn reached out, grabbed the clerical by the hood, and tugged it away from his face.

The reprimand on her tongue died in her mouth as her jaw hung open and her eyes grew wide.

The thing behind the pacifier helm looked back.

At the far end of the hall and out the open door, a single word was spoken.

The arco-flagellants started to shriek and wail in pain as the trigger word pumped their bodies full of lethal combat enhancers and turned what Godwyn had thought to be wounded clericals into frenzied killing machines.

Arco-flagellation, a terrible punishment reserved for the most heinous of crimes against the Imperial Ecclesiarchy, turned a condemned prisoner into a nigh-unstoppable killing machine that felt no fear and no pain, and was implanted with a vicious array of close-combat weaponry. Typically, arco-flagellants were kept in a semi-comatose state by an arcane piece of technology called a pacifier helm that inhibited all but their most basic of motor skills. Every arco-flagellant was psycho-conditioned to respond to a trigger word, however, that, once spoken, would deactivate the pacifier helm and prompt the injection of numerous combat stimulants directly into the flagellant’s nervous system that served to not only drive the condemned into a berserk rage and attack anything nearby, but also doom it to an excruciating death that would last several minutes. Godwyn had never before seen an arco-flagellant activated, but even so she had heard enough to know that it was not something one wanted to be around.

Striker shot the nearest arco-flagellant in the head, but when the thing continued to wail and thrash as its combat arms tore themselves free from the clerical’s robe, she shot it repeatedly until its brain painted the wall and it lay in a twitching heap on the ground.

The second one was gaining momentum and with a single bounding step had almost closed the distance with Captain Striker when Godwyn caught it in the upper chest with a single shot and sent it off balance into the wall. Far from dead, the flagellant was still wailing and was getting back to its feet when Striker emptied the rest of her magazine into its skull and Godwyn shot it two more times just to make sure that the convulsing heap of bloodied flesh stayed dead.

Giving it not a moment’s thought, the storm trooper captain stepped over the quasi-human heaps and took cover by the door as she loaded her last pistol magazine and primed the chamber.

“He had to be close by to issue that trigger word,” Godwyn followed her bodyguard up to the door. Her legs were starting to feel weak, and her hands jittery – that had been too close.

Striker peered through the open door and signalled the all clear. The door opened to a large important-looking office with a notably high ceiling and heavy curtains drawn over windows at the far end behind the desk. The walls were bare, however, and judging by the look of it the room was well maintained but not in use.

Godwyn was at a loss – there was no way in or out of the office other then the door they had just entered. She walked across the room behind the desk and opened the curtains to look out the window; only a few meters down, sections of the Archive roof were close enough to be accessible.

She cursed violently and threw the curtains closed in a cloud of dust – all Pierce had to do was break a window and he was as good as gone!

Several paces behind her in the middle of the office, Striker was carefully scanning the room with her eyes, and Godwyn was about to join her when she heard Roth’s voice crackle in her ear:

++We’re on the ground floor now, Godwyn. What is your status?++

What should she tell him? That she’d lost him? That he’d likely escaped onto the roof? She didn’t know if any answer was good enough to give him, but just as she was about to open her mouth, Striker noticed something in the middle of the wall to their left and quickly crept over to it with the Inquisitor’s eyes following her.

++Godwyn?++

Striker gave her a reassuring look: a door, disguised and hidden in the wall, but a door none the less.

“I’m in a large fifth floor office off the stacks with Captain Striker,” Godwyn replied, knowing that if Pierce was through that door he could likely hear her. “It looks like Pierce might have given us the slip, though. I’m going to need some help finding him, I think.”

++Understood. We’ll be up promptly. Out.++

Godwyn closed the comm. link – by the door, Striker nodded; he had to be in there.

“Okay,” Godwyn said aloud, moving slowly foot-over-foot, with her gun braced as she approached the door, “I think we should meet up with Inquisitor Roth downstairs…”

Striker’s hand moved to the door’s handle and carefully took hold of it one finger at a time.

“…could be he knows where Pierce would *go*.”

Striker forced the door and they burst into what looked like an antiquated private chapel complete with a small number wooden pews and a sacramental altar, yet there was no sign of Pierce save for glass fragments littering the floor under a shattered window pane. He’d escaped.

Godwyn swore loudly. She’d lost it – she’d screwed it up! Her biggest chance yet to find out what Strassen was up to, and she’d lost it. Slamming the stock of her gun against the window sill, she cursed again. Pierce could be anywhere in a city like this, and even with only a few minutes head-start he would already be beyond her reach.

Behind her, Striker removed her cap and wiped it against her brow with one hand while she weighed the pistol in the other.

“I think,” she began, but stopped short as a spray of her scarlet blood painted the wall behind her.

Leaping up from behind the altar, Pierce’s machine pistol was spitting madly across the chapel as Godwyn dove for cover behind the pews.

Victoria Striker, however, was still standing.

With a dull thud her side-arm dropped to the floor, and, from where she lay, Godwyn watched in horror as the storm trooper captain slowly collapsed to her knees and doubled over. Her eyes bulging as her hand gripped her throat to cover the spurting blood, Striker then crumpled sideways to the floor where she lay – her eyes wide and pleading – as her life blood bubbled up through her mouth and streamed from in between her fingers.

The machine pistol’s bullets still screamed overhead, but Godwyn couldn’t hear them – all she could hear was a voice scream Victoria’s name. A woman’s voice. Her voice.

She didn’t know if the storm trooper could hear her – she didn’t know if she could hear anything anymore – but as her red-haired head touched the ground, Godwyn could hear everything.

A bullet bit off a chunk of the pew right next to her ear, and Godwyn flung herself back down onto the chapel floor before firing blindly back over at the altar with her pistol. One shot – then two more – she scrambled across the room as low as she could to get closer to Striker: Victoria wasn’t moving.

Pierce was up again and shooting – blasting more holes through the pew she was hiding behind – but Godwyn had to reload; her last magazine of six shots. She heard a break in the fire and aimed over the pew – blasting an ornamental candlestick in half as Pierce quickly dropped himself flat behind the altar.

F*ck him. Shifting her aim, she squeezed the trigger twice more and started putting wholes through the altar – aiming for where she thought he’d be.

The machine pistol popped back up to fire blindly from behind cover, but another shot sent it scrambling back.

Two shots left.

The gunfire was deafening in the small confines of the chapel.

She blew another fist-sized hole through the front of the altar.

One shot left.

“Godwyn! Godwyn!”

At the head of ten armoured shock troopers and carrying a heavy shotgun, Lord Inquisitor Roth charged into the office outside of the chapel and directed his men to cover as the gunfight roared in the adjacent room.

“In here!” Godwyn called, expending her last bullet to keep Pierce’s head down. “Striker’s been hit!”

Directing two of his men forward into the chapel to recover the Captain, Lord Roth charged in after them and threw himself down beside Godwyn.

Pierce, knowing he was cornered, stopped firing.

“Well done, Godwyn! Well done!” the Lord Inquisitor congratulated her, hardly able to keep the excitement from his face as he squeezed her shoulder tightly.

She thought she would have felt more elated, knowing that Pierce was in their hands, but instead Godwyn just felt cold. She glanced back at Striker as the Lord Inquisitor continued to clap her on the back; his men were starting to bring her out, but she wasn’t moving, and her eyes were empty.

“Inquisitor Roth? Is that you?” Pierce’s called over the altar, and Godwyn took some satisfaction in noting the absence of a swagger in his voice.

“Inquisitor Pierce, it is over now,” Roth called back, “you can come with me.”

“He can what?!” Godwyn spun around, but when she met the Lord Inquisitor’s eyes she saw that the excitement was gone, and that a new look had taken its place when he looked at her: regret.

“I’m sorry, Godwyn,” he said, but before she could form the words for a reply she felt a sharp pinch on her neck, and looking down she saw the needle.

Her stomach tightened and her spine tingled, and as the needle came out she felt her fingers open and her prized pistol fall with a thump to the floor.

Why? The words formed on her lips but no breath escaped them as her legs turned to jelly beneath her, and her back was no longer strong enough to support her own weight.

Why? Roth gently caught her head behind the neck and lowered her slowly down to the floor as her strength vanished and her mind swam.

Why? She looked up into his eyes as the world grew darker with hers, but she couldn’t find an answer in them.

“I am sorry it has to be like this,” he said, then stood up and addressed someone she could no longer see.

“Take this one to my personal transport and take the other to Angel of Mercy… see if you can keep her alive...”

Other voices said other things she could no longer understand until everything faded from her mind, and she knew only darkness.

 

 

-----------------

 

Plot twist anyone? I'd definately like to hear some responses to this.

Is it heating up like I said it would? Are things starting to come together now that Roth has shown his hand? Is the story maintaining the quality you expected? I would be much obliged if you would let me know!

 

-L_C

[Lady_Canoness]

Hot off the press comes part 16 of the Inquisition.

 

*BE WARNED* Some sections of this part may be uncomfortable to readers as it depicts what torments befall Godwyn at the hands of her captors in some detail. No gore or vulgarity, but some readers may find it uncomfortable/disturbing.

 

*THAT BEING SAID* This part also advances the plot in a significant way, and answers questions readers may have found themselves asking.

 

So here it is!

 

*part 16*

 

At first there was light. No meaning, no reason – no shape or substance – just light. She could see Something.

Then came sound. A plain, white noise that encompassed all and was so total that it was either deafening or just on the edge of hearing.

After came thought – consciousness – enough to put it all together.

A long strand of drool hung from her open mouth and was pooling itself into her lap. She blinked. Her eyes stung as if on fire. She closed her mouth and her tongue cut her drooling saliva off at the source.

Memories. Where was she?

She remembered Pierce, and Striker falling. She remembered Strassen… even though he hadn’t been there. And she remembered Roth – yes, Roth; the man who had betrayed her.

She blinked again, and heard her own breath escaping from her lungs in the form of a long, undulating groan. A rough pain extended from her lower back up her spine and into her neck. Straightening up, she felt unparalleled relief as her tight muscles finally relaxed and she rested against something welcomingly cold and straight.

Her eyes slowly adjusting to her mind, and she started to see things more clearly. Her body was sitting beneath her in a large metal chair wearing the white frocked blouse she wore next to her skin, as well as her familiar dark trousers. She could even see her fingers start to move against the flat metal armrests.

She suddenly felt the urge to rub her eyes, but found that she could not: her arms – as well as her legs – were bound fast to the chair with tight steel braces that ran the length of her forearms and shins.

She swallowed. Her mind fumbled behind her eyes as everything started to make sense.

He’d stabbed her with a needle, she remembered, and she’d fallen unconscious.

She tried to move her limbs, but to no avail – the steel held fast.

Panic rising in her throat, Godwyn quickly turned her head from side to side atop her sore neck – frantically looking for something familiar. White walls, white ceiling, tile floor, and a large welded steel door – not the familiarity she was looking for. She was a prisoner, and this was an interrogation cell.

In what could have been seconds or hours, the latch on the door was engaged with a resounding clunk, and the door swung inwards on greased hinges. Two men – one short and broad, and the other of a more average build – stepped into the room, followed by a hovering servo-skull that trailed loose cabling behind it like the remnants of its spinal cord. Both men were dressed in long storm coats, and each had an Inquisitorial rosette attached to their person.

Lord Inquisitor Roth and Inquisitor Pierce had come to see her.

“Godwyn, I believe you deserve an explanation,” Lord Roth said as if consoling a subordinate as he approached her with measured steps while the servo-skull hung at his back and Inquisitor Pierce took a position further back to the right of the door. “Doubtlessly you think I have betrayed you, and I would like an opportunity to explain my actions – not because I have to, but because I think you deserve to hear them.”

Godwyn had nothing to say to him, but if her visage could speak it would be disparaging his ancestry.

“You’re wasting your breath, Vance,” Pierce quipped from behind him in a voice that suggested he was jostling a long-time friend. “She doesn’t want to hear you.”

Roth held up a hand to ask for patience, but Godwyn cut in abruptly:

“Vance? So you’re on a first name basis with the ‘rogue Inquisitor’?” Godwyn spat at him vehemently. “You’re nothing but gutter-scum, ‘Lord’. A common traitor just like him! I can’t believe I trusted you!”

Pierce was chuckling at her outburst, but Roth looked genuinely dismayed.

“This is no betrayal,” Roth said slowly.

“Really? Maybe you should sit in the chair and see if you still think that!”

Pierce clapped his hands, though Roth shook his head;

“Fiery and beautiful to boot!” Pierce said with a jovial grin as if watching a spectacle. “I can see why old Isaac was so taken by her.”

Roth ignored him; his attention still directed at Godwyn.

“Cassandra…”

“Don’t talk like you know me!”

“Shut up and listen!” Roth reared furiously, suddenly pulling himself up and becoming more foreboding a presence so that even Pierce dropped the smile from his face and was silent.

“Everything I have done is in the name of duty!” he snapped, though his wrath was quickly brought back into check. “I did not betray you, Godwyn: I used you – I used you because I needed to get to Strassen.”

“You had me looking for my mentor already. You expect me to believe that this has anything to do with that?” she challenged him, though by the very tone of his voice she could tell that it was unlikely that the Lord Inquisitor was lying to her now.

“There is more to this than you know – much more,” Roth corrected her, but Pierce was shaking his head again:

“I still protest your notion that she needs to know this,” he said as if repeating an argument he and Roth had endured numerous times.

“My reasoning stands,” Roth turned to end the discussion with the other Inquisitor; “she needs to know because Strassen needs to know that she knows.”

Pierce conceded in favour of the Lord Inquisitor and allowed Roth to continue uninterrupted.

With a heavy sigh, Lord Roth looked Godwyn in the eye and began:

“You were never meant to find Inquisitor Strassen,” Roth told her; “he is far too brilliant a man for anyone – even one who knew him like you did – to find unless he wishes it, and we are fairly certain that he does not.”

“Then why did you send me after him?” Godwyn demanded through gritted teeth.

“Be silent and I will tell you,” he said – the servo-skull hovering closely over his shoulder with its eyes fixed on Godwyn.

“As you learned when first looking into the disappearance of your mentor, Isaac Strassen was dismayed with the state of the Imperium and the sector in particular. The corrupting power of greed, indifference, and apathy was everywhere, and he believed that it weakens the Imperium of Man as a whole and makes it vulnerable to the predations of enemies that would see us destroyed. He sought a way to make it right, and in that, he, Pierce and I, and several other Inquisitors shared a common goal.”

At the back of the room, Pierce’s eyes were focused on the floor at Roth’s feet, and his face looked lost in memory.

“We knew, however, that Imperial law was against us – that Inquisitors, governors, clerics, and countless others stood in our way – and would fight us tooth and nail to prevent we few of like mind from changing the Imperium for the good of all.

“We would not be stopped, however, and chose Panacea and this sector – a sector which prides itself as being an example of stability for others to follow – to be the center of our efforts: if we could be successful here, then the rest of the Imperium would turn much easier. None-the-less, with only a handful of Inquisitors, there was little we could hope to achieve, and we would need the equivalent of a miracle to help us strike key points from which change could be made. Tenantable, as you saw, was one of those points. The governor you threw from power was the culmination of the change we sought to bring on that world. That one world is hardly enough, however, and long before we began there, we were looking for a way to better achieve our ends.”

He paused, rubbing his fingers along his chin as he paced momentarily back and forth before Godwyn to gather his thoughts.

“That is where Inquisitor Felix came into the picture,” he continued; “her study into the eldar had revealed ancient ruins of the eldar webway in this sector, and would have provided us with a flawless means to carry out change across the sector with no danger of exposing ourselves or our intentions. To that end we captured Inquisitor Felix, and Pierce, Strassen, myself and one other Inquisitor took her to Trajan’s Deep to find out everything she knew.”

Godwyn looked at him in wide-eyed disbelief of what she was hearing, but Roth assured her that everything was true.

“Yes, Godwyn,” he added; “I was at Trajan’s deep, and it was on my word that the records there were altered.

“It was on Trajan’s Deep, however, that Strassen had a change of heart. Perhaps he thought we were too hard on Felix, but on that last day of interrogation – the day you saw on the records – he took the information we needed from Felix, killed her, and kept it for himself. And, by the time we discovered what he had really done, he had already made good his escape and went into hiding where no-one could find him.”

Pierce said something Godwyn did not catch, but Roth agreed with a sombre nod of his head.

“That, Inquisitor Godwyn, is how we came to you. Raiding Strassen’s holdings that he had abandoned in his flight, we found what looked like a last testament that he meant for you to hear one day. Taking it, we altered the testament to better suit our needs, and sent for you to come and claim it, with the idea of sending you on a mission to find your mentor. Fortunately for us, you accepted without question.

“What you have done since then, is expose yourself to what we are fighting for. You have seen the corruption, and you have seen what ends we will go to. You are now one of us, and an important piece of the bargain in our efforts to make Strassen return to us what he stole.”

Grinning malevolently, Pierce came forward until he stood next to Roth, and Godwyn had a sinking feeling about what would come next.

“And Striker? And my team? Were they just part of the deal too?” she demanded, looking furiously from one to the other even as her stomach started to churn inside her.

It was Roth who answered, though he was slowly retreating to the back of the chamber and leaving Godwyn to face Pierce and the hovering servo-skull.

“As far as your team are concerned, you have been killed in action trying to apprehend a dangerous felon in the same battle that critically wounded Captain Striker. She has been moved to intensive care at Angel of Mercy, and your team has been disbanded.”

“Bullsh*t!” Godwyn screamed after him, her eyes avoiding Pierce who was getting uncomfortably close to where she was trapped against the steel chair. “Aquinas won’t leave me! My team won’t let this happen!”

“I’m afraid they will,” Roth answered, now standing beside the cell door. “Brother Aquinas has been reassigned, and knows nothing of your true fate.”

Breathing heavily through her teeth and with no more words to hurl at the traitor Lord Inquisitor, Godwyn looked up at Pierce, who wore an unnerving smile on his face as he looked down at her body with hungry eyes.

“Touch me,” she threatened, her voice quaking with rage, “and I swear to the Emperor above that I will murder you slowly!”

Pierce looked at her sweetly, and started to casually unbutton his coat.

“See this servo-skull?” he said, gently folding his coat and setting it down on the floor. Godwyn’s eyes glanced up at the floating skull – its red eyes blinked back.

“It has been recording everything since we entered this room, and will continued to do so.” He leaned forward so that their faces were level. “Everything I do to you will be duplicated and sent to your dear mentor as added incentive for him to cooperate with us.”

Godwyn was quaking in both fear and anger – something which seemed to only further excite Pierce. “He’ll never see it!” she spat, her voice fracturing. “Whatever you do to me, it won’t work!”

Pierce considered her words with a look of nostalgia on his face. “Even if he doesn’t,” he said, running his fingers along the side of her cringing face, “someone as pretty as you will make a very nice addition to my collection.”

She spat in his glib face, but Pierce didn’t even wipe it off – he just continued to smile innocently like a cherub.

“Vance! PLEASE!” Godwyn started to beg. “Don’t let him do it!” But Roth did not listen to her pleas; merely shaking his head into his hand.

“Quite the fiery one indeed,” Pierce chuckled. “I would imagine that Isaac had quite a bit of fun tussling with you.” His hand cupped the swelling of her left breast and squeezed it hard. Godwyn lunged at him with her head, but Pierce dodged back, letting her go and laughing softly to himself.

“My, my – you and I will have great fun together…”

At the back of the room, Roth finally caved: “Dear Throne, Pierce! Do I *have* to hear this?”

“Very well…” Pierce agreed disappointedly, and straightened himself back up. Godwyn’s chest was heaving like a bellows, and her eyes darted furiously between her captors.

She was still looking at Roth, however, when Pierce spun on the spot and smashed her across the face with the back of his hand.

Reeling as her head banged against the back of the chair, lights seemed to flash before her eyes as Godwyn slipped back into unconsciousness and the world became black.

 

* *

 

Part of him knew that this day would come, but that didn’t make him any more prepared for it.

Standing in the cramped quarters of Godwyn’s cabin aboard Meridian, Sudulus dabbed at his puffy, watering eyes with a neckerchief and blew his nose. No, he wasn’t ready for this – he turned and left her cabin alone, and walked with small steps back through the empty shuttle to the main hold.

Grant and Lee had gone to Angel of Mercy to see Striker and to try and find out about the Inquisitor’s death and the whereabouts of her body, but Sudulus hadn’t heard anything from them yet, and Aquinas… well he didn’t know where the space marine was either, but he doubted that he could be of any help now.

Dead.

The little man sat at table and held his head in his hands. He remembered Godwyn sitting here with the rest of her crew; he remembered her voice; he remembered her face.

Dead.

He started to cry all over again, and stuck the neckerchief back under his eyes.

They had been so surprised when they heard. Lee had been goading the Commissar into a game of Blind-Man’s Bluff while the officer was busy shining the pommel of his sword, and Sudulus had just returned from the port-side quarter-master while wondering what was taking Godwyn and Striker so long.

And that had been when it happened. When the missive came through from one of the Lord Inquisitor’s acolytes: that something had gone horribly wrong and that Victoria was in critical condition and that Godwyn was… dead.

Grant and Lee had left almost immediately, but Sudulus couldn’t go with them – he wasn’t ready to believe that she was already gone. Thirty-two and dead already.

What would happen, he wondered, now that she was gone? Where would her crew end up? Where would he end up?

She had never spoken about a final will and testament – if Inquisitors were allowed to have such things – or how she wanted to be remembered, if at all.

Maybe he would seek transit back to the Patroclus and see if Columbo had any place for him on his ship, or maybe that would leave his wounds open so that they would never close. Maybe he could return to Tenantable – to see if he could work for the good of the people there. Whatever he would do, he could not stay on this world or on this ship. They were tainted to him now.

He was still wallowing in his grief when Aquinas strode through the main hold like he was on a mission without so much as saying a word.

“Aquinas? Aquinas!” Sudulus called after him as he ducked into the starboard cabins without so much as turning to look at the savant who was getting up from the table to follow him.

The Librarian ducked into his cabin and retrieved something Sudulus could not see, but when he turned around in the cramped quarters, he gave the savant a hard look of disapproval.

“I take it you have heard about the Inquisitor?” he asked in a tone that bordered on reprimanding.

“I – I can hardly believe it…” Sudulus managed to reply with tears still rolling down his face and his jaw bobbing up and down several times too many.

“Good,” Aquinas nodded, and motioned for the little man to step aside as he marched back into the main hold, “you should never believe everything you are told.”

“Do – do – do you mean she’s… it’s not true?” Sudulus babbled after him as the Librarian was already on his way out of the main hold to the lower deck of the vessel.

“I do not believe she is dead, no,” Aquinas replied, looking back over his shoulder at the bewildered savant, “and I will need your help in finding her.”

The space marine disappeared from sight as he made to exit the shuttle, but Sudulus was stuck standing in a stunned silence.

“Standing there is not how you will be assisting me,” Aquinas called up from the lower deck, and Sudulus, giving his head a shake before drying his eyes, quickly scurried after the Librarian.

 

* *

 

 

Godwyn awoke staring at the ceiling of a cell with a throbbing pain in her head and the tangy taste of blood in her mouth. For several moments she did nothing aside from listen to the sound of her own breathing – slow, deep breaths that confirmed she was still alive… even if that was all she could hope for.

Stripping her naked, they had dumped her onto the cold floor of a tiny cell with no comfort and no dignity, and Godwyn was left alone to try and piece herself back together. Her lips were cracked and caked with dried blood, and sore bruises marred her body and stabbed her with pain as she gradually dragged her unresponsive form off the floor and curled into the corner farthest from the door. She’d been beat, though she didn’t know by who or how many times, and hot tears rolled down her cheeks and onto her reddened chest as she tentatively placed her hand between her own legs and felt herself recoil at the sudden pain she found there. She hurt all over her being, both bodily and spiritually, and felt as if her own skin was growing too tight for her to bear.

It wasn’t right, how this was happening to her, yet it was happening to her anyway, at the hands of what were supposed to be good upstanding men – men to whom lives were entrusted, how easily now they took that all away.

She shivered, and withdrew her hand from herself – instead wrapping her arms tightly around her legs and waiting for it to come to an end. It could not be that her misery would last forever.

Eyes were watching her from a slit in the door – cold and merciless, feeding off her suffering – but she did not look at them, and hid her feelings away in the corner so all they could see was a battered woman sitting cold and alone with her knees to her chest. The eyes did not move, but stayed peering into whatever privacy she tried to keep for herself.

After what seemed like hours (though in reality it may have been no more than a handful of minutes) with the eyes still watching her, Godwyn, using the wall for support, struggled to stand and walked barefoot with her body uncovered in full view of the eyes up to the door. When she stopped, she was face to face with her silent tormentor, and her eyes of pale blue looked back out through the door.

“Who is the animal now?” she derided them frigidly.

The servo-skull couldn’t answer, but its baleful red eyes continued to watch her.

 

Pierce returned two more times to molest her, and each time she struggled to fight him off, though ultimately she failed. He brought with him a shock-maul, and though he only menaced her with it at first, he showed no restraint and landed savage blows against her chest, back, and limbs. He was not kind, he was not gentle, and not a single human word would pass his lips from the moment he entered to the time he left after ravaging her senseless body.

Broken on the floor, Godwyn found her only thoughts being those of death as she slipped in an out of consciousness while the servo-skull looked on.

It had to end. It would end.

 

At some point the door of her cell clunked open again and she heard the rush of booted feet sweep over the floor towards her. In anticipation of Pierce’s savage attack, she tried to rise up in defiance, but a suffocating blackness quickly overwhelmed her as a bag was pulled over her head and a she was grabbed by more than two hands and lifted from the floor. She struggled and kicked, but the grips of her attackers were vice-like and firm, and she heard their boots scraping over the ground in quick succession as they bore her away to some new torment. Muffled words she heard also, quick and angular like bursts of static, as she was dumped unceremoniously to the ground and strong hands bound her wrists and ankles before lifting her up once again and carrying her off.

A harsh fabric was pushed against her skin, more voices, and a door was slammed. The feet were moving faster now, and her body was pulled and tugged as the owners of the hands sped up to carry her away.

More voices – louder now – but she still couldn’t catch what they were saying. She heard another door open, and Godwyn felt herself tossed onto a cushioned seat before an engine fired up and vibrations shook up her body as a the vehicle she was in started to move.

The blackness suddenly disappeared as the bag was pulled off of her head, and she started to sputter involuntarily as her eyes darted around madly trying to adjust to the partial twilight of her new surroundings.

“Be calm, you are safe now,” she heard a familiar voice say from above her as the vehicle sped through the night streets of Cornice.

[Papewaio]

That was a very different scene to the other parts of the story, and brings the rest of what Godwyn has done over the course of trying to find Strassen into context with what the rest of the Imperium is like. You didn't blow what happened off, or trivialise it, and that's good. Ignoring the bad things just lets them continue, rather than trying to fix them.

 

On a less somber note, I loved the scene inside the Archive, very good indeed! Got the ticker going a bit, and I felt like I was the one ducking behind bookcases!

 

Keep it up. I can't wait to see how it's going to end.

[Lone Scout]

I haven't fully read your story yet...I want to but the kids are being ...kids. One question I want to ask. The Inquisitor is being accompanied by a Death Watch Libarian, easily one of the most deadly warriors in the imperium...why did you feel the need to give her a body guard?

So far I'm loving your story, and I can't wait to get the kids off to school so I can finish it tomorrow.

[Lady_Canoness]

Thanks gents, as always I will do my utmost to give a story that everyone can enjoy!

 

Papewaio: Thank you sire - you read it just as I intended it to be :cuss

 

Lone Scout: Good question. From an author/writing mechanic perspective, bringing in a body-guard character not only gives me another character to work with, but also frees up the Librarian to do Librarian-like things instead of always making sure the 'only human' Inquisitor isn't getting shot. I also want the Librarian to occupy more of an equal footing the Inquisitor (kinda like he is working with her, but cannot be bossed around like any other team-member) as well as take up the vaunted position of 'advisor'. I mean, I could have the Librarian do everything, but that would be less fun :D

You can think of Brother Aquinas being more of a partner on the mission, instead of an underling, but you'll see more as things unfold.

 

Enjoy!

 

-L_C

[Valek]

Hey man, great story, been reading the whole thing in one go.

 

Wel and easy written, nice descriptive but not to much either. If you keep on writing like this you might have a look to become writer i should say, at black library they always need talent.

 

Thrilled to see the unfolding of the story...

[Lady_Canoness]

Thanks Valek, and I am glad you are liking it. With some minor tweaking here and there, I might just try and get it to the Black Library. The words of encouragement in this thread and others are definately pushing me in that direction... :blink:

 

But with no further delay:

 

Part 17 arrives, meaning that part 18, followed by an epiologue, will be the conclusion of the Inquisition. You will see the end coming, and hopefully it will sign off the story of young Inquisitor Godwyn on a fitting note.

 

Until then, however, here is part 17, where we finally meet that man this story has revolved around.

 

*part 17*

 

“Isaac?” The question popped from her hoarse throat like a bubble breaking from the surface of water, but no answer was forthcoming from the back of the motor carriage as it moved swiftly through the dark city streets.

“Lie still and rest,” the voice assuaged her from beyond her sight, and what felt like a quilted blanket was laid over her so that it gently covered her eyes with its soft fabric. “There will be time to talk later, I promise you.”

Godwyn struggled helplessly against the blanket, but with her hands bound behind her back and her ankles similarly tied, her struggles were like those of an infant wrestling in the folds of its crib, and ultimately she was unsuccessful. The quilt was warm, however, and soft against her sore flesh, and, though her heart still raced within her chest, Godwyn slowly let her beaten body rest. The closeness and warmth of the quilt comforted her from the cold openness of the cell, and the movements of the vehicle underneath the young Inquisitor calmed her into a sense of safety where Pierce could no longer find her.

For the moment, she felt safe – as if the worst was over – and was rocked into a dreamless half-slumber as hours quietly drifted by outside the carriage windows.

 

The wilderness of Panacea was unbowed in its splendour as countless thousands of hectares of untamed viridian forests and emerald grasslands stretched as far north as the eye could see beyond the city limits of Cornice. The wilds were uniform in majesty save for the select smattering of skyscraping mining towers and astronomic arrays, and handful of other intrusions made by man. Few roads cut across this pristine landscape, though hidden away far from the white city towers were the luxurious lodges and retreats of the privileged, as well as numerous hideaways that catered to the urban appetite for pampered adventure. Yet despite the adventurous spirits of those who dwelt in the capital city’s ivory spires, there was much of the wilderness that was unexplored by the pampered adventurers, where no roads went other than those one made for oneself, and it was often said that an entire civilization could be living unseen under that alluring viridian canopy. There was no substance to these tales, however, and few ever took them for more than they actually were – stories of idle fancy – though there was no denying that one could vanish into the forests of green and live without leaving a trace… or at least not a trace anyone could find.

In short, they said, it was the perfect escape – the perfect way to get away from it all – and how one could hide under the city’s very nose.

 

Godwyn must have drifted off into a deep sleep under the quilted blanket, for when she next opened her eyes, she was no longer in the back of a moving motor carriage, but tucked under the white sheets of a warm bed with her limbs unbound and wearing a night-gown that was not her own.

“I took the liberty of making you more comfortable. I hope I was not overstepping my bounds.”

Godwyn sat up quickly in bed and propped herself on aching elbows upon hearing the same familiar voice she had heard earlier in the dark vehicle, though now it spoke to her in what looked like the modest interior of a one-room log cabin. The walls were of bare wood and undecorated save for the most Spartan of accessories, and several glass paned windows admitted light onto a worn wooden floor garnished by a single patterned rug. Her bed was nestled against the wall with a wardrobe standing next to the head, and a large trunk resting at the foot. There were cobwebs in the corners of the arched ceiling. Across the room, opposite from where Godwyn lay, was a small kitchen illuminated by a solitary glow-globe, though next to the kitchen was a large iron-work stove that warmed the air to a most pleasant temperature.

Sitting on a three-legged stool facing the stove, though looking over his shoulder towards the Inquisitor, was the owner of the voice she had heard. It was the man as she remembered him; wavy pepper-grey hair sitting atop an aristocratic old face with gaunt cheeks and deep, penetrating eyes.

Inquisitor Isaac Strassen sat before her in the flesh.

“Isaac…?” the name escaped as a breath on the air.

The venerable Inquisitor nodded slowly.

“Yes, Inquisitor Godwyn, it is I.”

A light of warmth, longing, and relief grew in her eyes upon seeing the man she admired most, though quickly her sense caught up with her, and the light grew dark with suspicion and distrust.

She retreated back from him, drawing herself up defensively against the wall.

“What have you done? Why am I here!?” she demanded, her eyes raking his old face with accusations.

Her old mentor made no move to defend himself against her doubts, but slowly turned his body to face her with his weathered old hands resting on his knees. “I have done what I should have done before. You are safe here, Godwyn.”

She shook her head fiercely and swallowed hard – her gaze darting around the cabin interior as the old man sat patiently on the three legged stool in the center of the room. “Why should I trust you? How can I know you aren’t lying to me like the others? Like Roth? You’re like all the rest!”

“Godwyn, I…”

“DON’T LIE TO ME!” she screamed at him, her chest rising and falling in a rage at the man who sat calmly before her. “I don’t know who you are! Don’t talk to me like you know me! I.. I…” hot tears of frustration, pain, and anger started to flood from her eyes, “I.. can’t trust you… I can’t let you!”

She wept into her hands as she pulled her knees tight up to her chest with her hair falling around her shoulder. Isaac Strassen waited patiently by, his eyes never wavering from looking upon his former student in concern, but his lips never parting to speak words that could not comfort her.

“Just… just leave me alone! I want to be alone!” she wailed through her hands as her body shook beneath her.

“You were alone in that cell,” Strassen said calmly. “You don’t want to be alone now.”

Godwyn did not answer, nor did she make any indication of having heard him as she buried her face beneath her arms, though when Strassen rose to his feet and ladled soup he had prepared on the stovetop into a wooden bowl she looked up, and accepted it without a word when he offered.

“You don’t know what they did to me,” she managed after several moments of silence in which Strassen sat back down facing his former student, and Godwyn began to relax as the warm broth entered her famished stomach.

In silence, Strassen made no comment to the contrary, though in the depths of his eyes she could see a mirror of her pain.

“What they did to you will not recur with me,” he stated softly, though there was no warmth or tenderness in his words – nothing that might get too close too soon.

Her red eyes watering, Godwyn studied his old face; she wanted nothing more than to believe him, but who he was – who she was – was irrevocably tarnished.

“How can I trust you anymore?” she asked him in little more than a desperate whisper.

His face held no answer, and she knew that none of his words could ever mend what had been broken in her.

“In three days time I will return to Cornice to right the wrong I allowed to happen,” he told her; “if, on that day, you wish to accompany me, I will not stop you.”

 

* *

 

At the time, Godwyn did not ask why he wished to wait three days to go back. She was finding it hard to think how she would feel three hours later, let alone three days, and everything she had come to expect as certain was starting to prove otherwise as her life seemed to unravelled around her.

Roth’s betrayal and Pierce’s savagery plagued her thoughts, as did her own helplessness before their perversion of duty. She needed to clean her mind as well as her body, to make herself whole again, to restore the balance of right and wrong in her mind, though the more she thought about it and reasoned around it the more she found herself lost in the morass of it all. She wanted to scream – to tear at herself with her hands and nails – to force it all back into place – to have everything make sense, but in frustration and anger she found nothing but a continuation of her torment.

The feeling of Pierce’s sweaty hands clutching her body still shivered over her skin whenever her clothing brushed against her, his hot breath was on every gust of wind that she felt against her neck of face, and the force of his body pressing against her shook up through her legs whenever she walked.

Many times she would trudge through the woods that surrounded Strassen’s retreat in hopes that walking beneath the living trees could help her forget what had happened between those unfeeling metal walls, or make her way through the meadows to the nearby lakeshore and submerge herself beneath the cool clear waters until she started too feel as if her body could forget the pain Pierce had inflicted and that her skin could once again be her own. It felt as if it helped – helped her feel like herself again.

Isaac, while she did this, would remain at a comfortable distance. Never getting too close, but not leaving her to guess where he was, and never trying to guide her on a path she could only set for herself.

He’d made himself a life here, in the wilds of Panacea, and though she never asked when or why he had made his forest home, when she looked at him she could tell that he had found a measure of peace that could not otherwise be found by people like them. By Inquisitors.

His cabin was as small on the outside as it was on the inside, and afforded no luxuries in technology greater than the single glow-globe he had installed over his kitchen. He grew his own vegetables in a lovingly cared for garden, crafted his own furniture that he arranged outside atop of a small cobbled patio, and even split the wood for his stove with a straight-edge axe.

He lived here anonymously, and when she looked upon him she did not see the mentor she had admired, nor the man she felt closest to, but instead she saw him for what he was: an old man who had found a small measure of peace in an otherwise unforgiving galaxy.

“Make no mistake,” he told her on the second night of her stay as they sat outside around a crackling fire-pit after the sun had retreated from the sky and the stars twinkled above them in their millions, “I am no Inquisitor. I have forfeited that privileged.”

Cassandra Godwyn, wrapped in a blanket with her blond hair tumbling around her shoulders, watched the reflections of the firelight dance across the wrinkles of his face. She said nothing to her old mentor, but could see even now that his mind was heavy, and that he had something he wished for her to hear.

“I believed that my actions would bring good to the Imperium, and that as an Inquisitor I would safeguard Men against the horrors of the galaxy. That my sacrifices would save the lives of billions.” He looked across at her and smiled faintly as she sat huddled by the fire. “The curse of age, however, is hindsight, and it took too long to see that I had wrought more ill than good.”

“Is it true, what they told me? About Inquisitor Felix?” she asked, and Strassen nodded, closing his weary old eyes and facing back to the flames.

“Why did you do it?” Godwyn needed to know.

Strassen breathed deeply, and answered her with his eyes still closed. “I know regret,” he said, “and the devils I saw in others blinded me from the devil looking out of the mirror. I have become so accustomed to seeing men as heretics and heretics as men, that I had forgotten that I too am a man.”

“You are no heretic.”

“No,” he shook his head reflectively, “perhaps not. My actions are much more damning because I saw the justice of my deeds. I set the trap for Inquisitor Felix to be captured. I loosed the likes of Pierce and Roth upon her. I killed her when the pain became too much to bear. All of this I did willingly and without coercion, and it was too late when I realized the horror which I had sown. If ever their plan was to succeed – a plan I helped create – I fear that the sector would rot from its heart outwards regardless of their seemingly noble goals.”

“And yet you sit here and do nothing?” the scathing words erupted from between her lips before she could withhold them. Strassen did not seek to deny her, however, and answered her question as if it were just and deserving of an answer.

“I deny them their greatest asset,” he replied with no ounce of hubris in his voice, “I deny them me and the information they hold. Fool that I am, I thought it would be enough to deal the deathblow to their schemes before they had truly begun to put them into motion… though when I saw that they had brought you into their fold, I knew that I had not done enough.”

For a time they left it at that, and both master and student sat in quiet contemplation underneath the stars watching the crackling fire while the sounds of the night-time forest surrounded them.

“How did you find me?” she asked eventually, though she did not meet her mentor’s eyes when she spoke.

Strassen let the question stand between them in the firelight and frowned. It was only when he felt her eyes upon him that he answered.

“I have more eyes and ears across the sector than Roth or his minions could ever know,” he said, “and though it took time to find you, I knew that I could not let what happened to Felix happen to you.”

“But why didn’t you try to contact me? To warn me about what was happening?” she longed to know as spectres of her earlier confusion and misunderstandings crept back into her mind with questions she had left unanswered.

“I thought it too dangerous,” he said apologetically.

“Too dangerous?” Godwyn repeated quietly, before her face contorted into a scream: “I was beat!”

The wave of her fury washed over him, but the venerable Inquisitor would not be stirred; “And had I warned you, do you think either of our fates would have been any better?”

He shook his head slowly from side to side as her momentary flame of anger subsided: “No, we would have been ruined. As soon as you were brought into this, there could be only one course of action. It was not a perfect plan, and it has not left you unscarred, but believe me Godwyn, for it is salvageable, and I can right the wrongs that I allowed to occur.”

It wasn’t enough, she shook her head at the ground as she leaned her face into her hands – it never would be – but he was right: she would have only lost more if he had told her sooner. It had to be this way, even if she suffered because of it.

“I want to go with you tomorrow when you confront them,” she said at last. “I want my vengeance.”

Isaac Strassen’s withered old head nodded in the orange glow of the flames. “And you shall have it,” he said. “On my soul, you shall have it.”

 

---------

 

Questions and comments are always welcome, and constructive ideas will likely find themselves worked into a sequel.

 

-L_C

[Archangel 1]

I really enjoyed reading this excellent story, its a shame it has to end. But I suppose all good things must.

[Lady_Canoness]

Thanks Archangel 1, I really do appreciate hearing about how people enjoy my work! It keeps me going! Though it must end... because if it didn't, then how would I start again? :mellow:

 

*part 18*

 

A cold mist had descended in the early morning of the third day and blanketed the ground in sparkling dew when a black tinted motor carriage slowly drove up the winding dirt road through the trees and stopped in the small clearing of around Strassen’s cabin.

From where she stood waiting with a single booted foot resting on one of the hand crafted chairs, Godwyn watched from the other side of the vegetable garden as two men disembarked from the vehicle, and, with the dull echo of slamming doors reverberating around the silent trees, approached Strassen as he waited at the edge of the small clearing facing away from her with his hands held expectantly behind his back. The men were unassumingly dressed in drab, insulated coats, and had hard weather-beaten looking faces that shifted and strained as they spoke with quick tongues to her mentor. Strassen would occasionally nod or say a few words back, but most of the conversation was one-sided and escaped into the still forest despite Godwyn’s best attempt to catch on to what they were saying. She didn’t need to hear their words to tell that the men were uneasy, however – one even seemed outright nervous – and eventually the more animated of the two broke off the conversation and entered the cabin.

She would not see him come back out.

The other man said a few more words to Strassen, appeared to come to an agreement, and walked back to the motor carriage – leaning heavily on the vehicle’s engine covering when he got there.

Isaac turned and waved her over. It was time to go.

 

The motor carriage bounced and shuddered as it slowly trundled down the winding dirt road away from Strassen’s retreat, and the silence inside the vehicle matched the hush of the surrounding forest as the first spears of morning sunlight slid silently through the gloom. They had been driving for just under an hour, Godwyn reckoned, but a word had yet to be spoken.

The driver, sitting alone in the front seat after his comrade had disappeared into the cabin and not remerged, watched the road in a muted silence over his whitened knuckles. Occasionally, Godwyn would see his eyes dart into the surrounding trees as she watched him discreetly in the rear-view mirror, but so far as she knew he never saw anything in the wild underbrush.

Looking, but not seeing.

The forest outside the window looked cold and damp as her eyes passed over it. The driver was nervous; perhaps even scared. What was he expecting to see?

Beside her on the cushioned back seat, Isaac’s attention was focused ahead through the forward window on the road, and she could just see the slight movements in his eyes as he looked everywhere other than out the side windows.

Reaching across the gap in the seat that separated them, Godwyn placed a gloved hand gently on his forearm and he smiled, resting his other hand on top of hers without looking.

The night before, Isaac had provided her with new clothing to replace what she had lost in captivity. A fitted armour-weave greatcoat as well as appropriate boots, gloves, and clothing, Strassen had also bequeathed upon her items of a more personal nature.

“There is only one Inquisitor in this room,” he had said as he pinned his Inquisitor’s rosette to her collar, “and I am not she.”

He had also given her his heavy pistol – the twin to the gun she had carried by her side for the past ten years, but was now lost along with the rest of her possessions that had been stripped from her – and the reassuring weight of the firearm now rested in a shoulder holster underneath the coal-black surface of her new coat.

Tears of happiness had seeped from his eyes as he gave her these things, and at the time he said it because he could finally look her in the eye knowing that there were no secrets that held him back. Godwyn accepted his heartfelt words gladly, though as she looked upon the wizened man she could not help but feel that there was another reason – a reason she could not bring herself to utter.

If Strassen had sensed anything with his otherworldly talents, however, he said nothing, and they continued on in silence until the black motor-carriage emerged from the thick forest trees and the capital spires of Cornice loomed above them.

 

A new day had dawned on Cornice.

Radiant sunlight sparkling off its white towers and illuminating its many skyways and streets, a population of millions rose in service of their planet and Emperor, and set the wheels of progress into motion to bring prosperity to their homes and glory to their planet.

From the window of the motor carriage, Godwyn watched as they passed by people along the roadsides: thousands of them, walking every which way alone or in pairs as they went about their daily lives. Entrepreneurs, clerks, shop-keepers, labourers, guardsmen – men who worked, men who thought, men who served, men who did none of those – some who walked fast, some more slowly, and others still who sat and stared at the sky as the city moved around them.

Theses were the People, she reminded herself as she watched them from her window, the ordinary people – the common man – the life blood of the Imperium. These people who didn’t know her, didn’t see her, and would never know if she lived or died: these were the people she and countless others fought to protect every day – the many for whom the few were be sacrificed.

“Do not wonder if you serve them or if they serve you,” Strassen said softly as his mind skimmed the surface of her thoughts even as he continued to look straight ahead. “For in truth it is neither,” he smiled somewhat airily; “The Emperor’s Will binds us to our fellow Men. Serve Him first, and in doing so you will serve them, and they you.”

The motor carriage drove on in silence through the bustling city streets until Strassen asked the driver to pull over to the curb not ten minutes later and promptly dismissed him.

Godwyn glanced questioningly across at her former mentor as the driver got out of the carriage and snapped the door shut behind him – the brief hubbub of noise that flowed into the cab as the door was opened vanishing as he closed it behind him and dissolved into the crowd.

“Why did we stop?” she asked. They were nowhere near the Imperial offices; in fact, she had no idea where they were when she looked at the buildings that rose around them outside.

Her old mentor exhaled deeply and looked distractedly out the window where a street performer had set up further down the curb and was beginning to juggle all sorts of sharp metal objects over his head. Godwyn ignored him even as Strassen continued to watch with a look of anticipation crossing onto his face.

“Everything will soon be in place,” he said with a tone of certainty that was not reflected by his features. He nodded to himself and quickly dropped his eyes from the juggler before glancing back up at the quietly waiting young woman.

The juggler was starting to attract a small crowd of onlookers, though they could still see him clearly from the carriage.

“Before we go, Godwyn, there are some things I would like to tell you,” he said at length. She shifted anxiously on the back seat of the carriage. There were too many people close-by, and the nervous tightening in her chest only served to make her feel even more like a target. Didn’t he know that they were horribly exposed on the street?

The juggler glanced over in their direction, though Strassen was preoccupied with words.

“I want you to know that of all my students, I think you are the most promising,” Strassen continued slowly, “not because of unique skills or affinities, but because I think you are a genuinely good person; something which the Inquisition is sorely lacking. I honour you for this.”

At any other time, Godwyn would have been moved beyond words, but the more she looked at the people passing by, the more she became certain that they were in danger.

“Isaac, is this the right time?” she asked testily as she glanced back over at the juggler who was now parading his routine up and down the sidewalk so that he was closer than he had been before.

“Yes. It is,” he replied bluntly. “Do you think I would place you danger like this?”

Godwyn tried to answer, but her mind was torn between watching the shifty street and her unmoving mentor.

Strassen seemed to understand her angst, but continued to assure her that there was no danger. “You have to trust me,” he said.

Godwyn steadied her nerves and eliminated all distractions from her mind as she had been trained to do, making Strassen her sole focus… and then the juggler walked right past the window behind him – dragging her eyes away with his brightly coloured clothes as he tossed the numerous bladed instruments high above his head.

“Godwyn…”

Her eyes darted back to the old man’s face.

“Lastly, I wanted to give you this,” he tucked his hand into the breast pocket of his coat and produced a small bundle of wrapped cloth, which he held for her to take. It was small, no bigger than the palm of his open hand, but when she picked it up she found it heavier than she expected and unwrapped the cloth around it with tentative figures as her old mentor looked on with an expectant smile on his face. Inside was a medallion made of burnished gold that depicted an ascendant eagle superimposed upon an embossed templar cross, and in whose talons was clenched a downwards pointing sword.

Eyes growing in wonder, she held in her hand the –

“Icon of the Just,” Strassen finished her thought with a warm smile.

Opening her mouth, she looked up at the old man in disbelief though it was a few seconds before any words came out:

“Y-you can’t give me this!” she protested in a whisper as she looked back and forth between her mentor and the Icon, but Strassen only chuckled softly in response.

“I can and I am,” he said, closing her fingers around the medallion and gently pushing towards her. “Emperor as my witness, I believe that you will prove worthy of it.”

Speechless, she bowed her head and reverently wrapped the medallion back into its cloth covering before tucking it safely into the inside breast pocket of her armour-weave coat.

When she looked back up, Isaac was no longer facing her and was once again looking out the window distractedly.

“Well now…” he mused aloud, “let’s see what this juggler can do…” He was chuckling to himself as he watched the street performer as if he had completely forgotten why they were there and that Godwyn was beside him, and she was about to say something when, suddenly, he pointed.

Her gaze followed his finger.

The street performer had finished his act and was bowing to the small gathering of applauding onlookers. Smiling and nodding, he placed his dangerous looking items onto the ground one at a time until all that remained in his hand was a single copper spearhead, and, after waving it around, thrust it skyward with an outstretched arm.

“And there is our signal,” Strassen nodded towards the juggler. “Now we can go.”

 

Boots on the pavement, the two Inquisitors stepped from the carriage and merged seamlessly into the passing foot-traffic without a head being turned in their direction. Buttoning his coat as he walked briskly along in time with the crowd, Strassen said nothing of where they were going and had Godwyn following him in an effort to keep herself from getting lost.

Unknown to Godwyn, they had stopped in Cornice’s financial district – the beating heart of Panacea’s planetary trade – and one of the most populated areas during the day. The sheer amount of people on the streets was suffocating as the press of bodies made maintaining one’s personal space nigh impossible, but, keeping her eyes locked on her mentor’s back, Godwyn navigated the crowd as best she could and followed him as he crossed the street at the base of a white skyscraper.

“This is the place,” he said, leading her off the skyway and through the glass doors into the tower.

“You’re certain of this?”

“Absolutely.”

Side by side they stepped out of the commotion on the street and into the tower’s mid-level foyer. Already twenty stories off the ground, the expansive entrance chamber was cool and quiet as the Inquisitors passed between rows of colossal columns that soared sixty feet high to touch the vaulted ceiling above as they made their way to the elevators.

“Where are they?” Godwyn asked as Isaac summoned the lift.

Strassen turned idly towards her – his calm to her disquiet – and looked back and forth across the foyer’s sparsely populated marble floors.

“On the top floor of this tower there is a restaurant,” he explained quietly to Godwyn’s questioning features; “that is where they are.”

“They are sure to be guarded,” Godwyn muttered in reply and her face darkening, but Strassen only smiled innocently.

“My people have made sure we have an opening,” he reassured her as the lift arrived with an automated chime and the doors parted.

“After you,” he waved her inside.

 

They waited in silence in the back of the elevator as the lift carried them and a host of talkative Panaceans sixty-four floors to the topmost level of the tower onto the elaborate terrace of the rooftop bistro.

Her stomach already somersaulting somewhere right beneath her throat, Godwyn looked to her mentor for a guarantee that they were in the right place as the others in the elevator filed out of the lift without breaking the stride of their conversation.

“Don’t be afraid,” he whispered to her with a warm face, as he followed the oblivious patrons from the lift, “everything will go as planned.”

Swallowing a deep breath, she went with him as he discretely slipped past the small queue of patrons waiting to be seated and stepped into the brilliant sunshine of the restaurant’s rooftop patio. There were at least one hundred tables, most of which were occupied, and several ornamental fountains and gardens. The gentle burbling of dozens of conversations sounded like water running down a creek, and it was with mounting angst that Godwyn realized that they were wasting precious seconds in the open without having any eyes on their targets. The gun under her coat felt heavy and her hands started to ache: this was taking too long.

“Over there,” Strassen murmured, directing Godwyn’s attention to a table farther across the patio and close to the banister with a view overlooking the city. Her eyes followed, and sure enough she saw them sitting unassumingly amidst the other diners like vipers hidden between reeds. Roth and Pierce – traitors, villains, fiends – the sight of them made her face grow tight with anger and set her blood boil.

Her right hand darted to the gun hidden by her chest, but Strassen shot her a warning look.

“You know what they did to me!” she snarled through gritted teeth as if challenging him to contradict her. “They die today!”

Her eyes filled with both anger and pain, Strassen did not deny her but urged caution:

“Wait for the opportune moment,” he calmed the flames in her eyes as she drew the gun slowly from its holster and held it low by her side. “Let the guilty know who comes for them.”

She looked at him with quizzical impatience, but he nodded slowly: they would do this his way.

“Imperial Inquisition!” she bellowed, pulling the rosette from her coat and thrusting it into the air as she trampled the murmuring conversations of the diners with a voice that brokered no dissent. “Everyone out! Leave – now!”

Like a flock of sheep hounded by wolves, the patrons fell away their tables with bleats of surprise and confusion as they fled for the exits, leaving behind them two men who remained seated amidst the abandoned tables.

Their meal interrupted, Roth was the first to stand, and wiping his mouth with a serviette, looked at the figures across the patio with an unreadable expression on his face.

Pierce remained seated, though his glowering features were far more readable as he leered resentfully at the newcomers.

“Isaac,” Roth spoke up, placing his napkin back down on the table beside his unfinished lunch, “I should have guessed that you were the one who plucked Godwyn out from under our noses. Regardless, it’s good to see that our efforts weren’t completely wasted and that we managed to draw you out after all.”

Godwyn’s gun was up in a flash, but Roth raised the palms of his hands to show he was unarmed and did not move from where he stood.

From beside her, Isaac Strassen cleared his throat. “I had hoped that my leaving would have served as indication that our plans ought not continue,” the venerable Inquisitor answered as he took several ambling steps forward with his hands held lightly behind his back, though he was careful not to obstruct the younger Inquisitor’s shot. “You must have realized that we went too far.”

“What I realized, Inquisitor Strassen,” Roth replied, slowly lowering his hands as his eyes lingered momentarily on Godwyn, “is that great sacrifices must be made for great good to be achieved. Leave your feelings out of it, Isaac. You’re getting hung up on the means instead of the end.”

“It is that type of reasoning that has caused such evils to occur before,” Strassen shook his head wearily, “and it is because of that flawed reasoning that I cannot abide your continued efforts towards this misguided goal. If I cannot stop you with my withdrawal, then you leave me little else in the way of choice.”

Roth laughed dryly, though Pierce continued to glare angrily at Strassen from where he sat.

“So this is it?” Roth mocked; “This is where you turn traitor and get your runt to shoot me? I had hoped you’d come to talk, Isaac, instead of coming to die.”

Anger flaring, Godwyn didn’t wait for another word and pulled the trigger on Inquisitor Roth only to be denied as a blinding flash of light disintegrated the bullet mere inches from his flesh. Overturning the table with a crash that sent food flying, Pierce pulled his machine pistol and ripped a long burst at the Inquisitors as he dove for cover.

Turning faster than thought, Strassen flung his former student backwards off her feet with a blast of psychic might and sent her bowling through abandoned furniture and skidding to a stop behind the cover of a concrete fountain as bullets sliced murderously through the air. Dazed but unhurt, she scrambled up off her back into better cover close behind the fountain just in time to hear Roth shouting orders to Pierce as the other man swore loudly:

“Finish her off, damn you! Don’t let her get away!”

The shooting had stopped, but Strassen was still out in the open. She yelled at him to get down, but he didn’t seem to hear her as he slowly turned in her direction on unstable feet. Their eyes met, and a loving smile spread across his creased old face, though it quickly vanished – drained along with the blood that gushed from the seven bullet holes torn in his chest.

Crying out in anguish as he crumpled to the ground, Godwyn hugged the low cover as Pierce sprayed more fire over her head.

“Kill her! Kill her!” Roth was shouting, but Godwyn found it hard to hear him – there was a roaring in her ears that seemed only to amplify the magnitude Strassen’s death, but as it grew louder she looked up just in time to see the bulky frame of Meridian rearing up over the side of the building with Lee Normandy grinning madly in the cockpit and Brother Aquinas crouching with Commissar Grant in the open hatchway of the lower deck.

Having spotted them, Roth was already sprinting across the patio to the far railing, though Pierce was turning to raise his weapon against Meridian’s crew.

Seeing her chance, Godwyn broke cover with her pistol raised in her outstretched arm and squeezed the trigger. With a roar the gun cannoned backwards in her hand as a single high-calibre bullet blasted across the open rooftop on a trail of fire and struck the hated Inquisitor Pierce just above the ear – disappearing inside his head for a fraction an instant before blowing through his brain and erupting from the other side of his head in a shower of gore that split his skull into shattered fragments and scattered them across the ground in a mess of pink and red. The headless body, as if surprised at its own death, flailed as it fell to the ground with a final thud – the machine pistol clattering from its dead fingers across the ground.

The gun smoking in her hand and the sound of Meridian’s engines screaming in her ears, Godwyn got up from behind the fountain and walked over to the body where she looked upon it with a grim satisfaction.

He was dead. The man who had beat her was dead – killed by her hand – though not before he’d killed Strassen. Screaming a curse, she shot him twice through the chest to sate her anger.

“Godwyn!” she heard Grant calling her name and looked up to see him in the Meridian’s side hatch and pointing to something behind her.

Roth.

She spun on her heels, but the Inquisitor Lord was nowhere to be seen. He’d made good his escape.

Grant was calling her name again, and as she turned he waved her madly towards the shuttle. Roth had gone over the side of the building, but he wasn’t out of her reach yet. Holstering her gun, she broke into a run; sprinting towards the tower’s edge as fast as she could as Grant and Aquinas urged her on and Lee brought the shuttle to hover as close in as he dared.

You can make it – you can make it!

Arms pumping, she leapt, planted one foot on the banister and propelled herself into the air – stretching out towards the arms of her teammates that were so close… but so far. Air rushed up against her face as she started to fall, but just on the very edge of hope she felt armoured fingers close around her wrist as Aquinas leaned out to catch her mid air and pulled her up into Grant’s waiting arms and onto her shuttle.

“We’ve got her!” Grant shouted up into the main hold from the lower deck as they hauled her to safety, and she saw the hem of Sudulus’ robes disappear from sight as he dashed into the cockpit to tell Lee.

Godwyn had never felt so relieved as to see their faces now and know that she was back with her squad, but with the pounding of her heart she also knew that Roth could not be allowed to escape.

“How did you find me?” she shouted to Grant over the roar of engines as Lee banked the Meridian to bring her around to the other side of the tower.

His eyes squinted against the rushing air and his storm-coat flapping wildly around him, the Commissar pointed to the space marine, but as Godwyn turned to him Aquinas merely nodded in response.

The city streets turning far below them, Lee pulled the shuttle round just in time to see Roth flying for the rooftop of a nearby tower using some anti-gravitational device on his person.

“Faster! We’ve got to get him!” she shouted, and from his braced position in the hatchway Grant readied his machinegun – hammering out a slew rounds as the Lord Inquisitor’s feet touched down on the tower and started to run.

“It is no use,” Aquinas said, somehow managing to make himself heard over the sound of the engines. “You will have to get closer to overcome whatever force-shielding he has.”

Grant ceased fire and cleared the hatchway as they passed overtop of the tower roof. “We can keep him from escaping,” Grant shouted as Lee brought Meridian low enough for a safe jump down.

Godwyn nodded and drew the heavy pistol Strassen had given her.

“The Emperor protects, Inquisitor,” Grant said, clapping her on the back. It was the last thing she heard before her boots hit solid ground and she rolled to her feet on the roof of the tower as Meridian lifted off to assume a covering position.

Unlike the rooftop restaurant, the tower Roth had fled to was topped by a narrow spire with no safety rails, and the numerous venting stacks and antenna arrays that shot skyward made for treacherous footing and a long drop to one’s death should a single step be misplaced.

Braving the perils, Godwyn rushed forward towards the nearest stack in a low run with her pistol braced in both hands. As dangerous as the footing was, the top of the tower provided Roth with ample cover to use in his escape, and, if he found a service-hatch before Godwyn found him, she was certain that he’d be beyond her reach in no time. She would have to make haste.

With a death-drop to one side with barely a meter of space to between her and the edge, Godwyn slid with her back to the wall around the outside of the tower as she looked every-which-way for a sign of the Lord Inquisitor. Thankfully she had never been afraid of heights, and as she reached the corner of the wall she jumped a small gap and found purchase between two stacks. If Roth was looking for a way to escape, then he likely would be trying to get to the base of the main spire, which meant climbing up through the numerous arrays and over into a narrow service passage hidden at the foot of the spire.

Keeping her pistol drawn, she wound her way through nests of delicate arrays and past corroded metal stacks until at last she found a small service ladder that led up and over a blind edge to the service passage. Placing a hand on the first rung of the ladder, Godwyn paused – Roth would have gone this way, most likely, but if he had decided to wait for an ambush this would be the ideal spot.

She looked around over her shoulders: there was no other way forward. It was a chance she would have to take.

Holstering her pistol, Godwyn hauled herself to the top of the ladder and peered over the lip.

Nothing.

There was the service hatch, but it looked as if it was firmly closed. It could be that she’d found a shorter way to the center spire, or Roth had otherwise been delayed, but she doubted it.

Hopping over the lip, she jumped the few feet down into the passage and landed on all fours with a slight thump, but just as she was about to get up she saw a pair of boots step out from behind a corner directly in front of her.

“Godwyn.”

Still crouched, she looked up into the glowing barrel of a plasma pistol aimed directly at her face with the eyes of Lord Inquisitor Roth staring at her down the weapon’s sights.

Her hand darted instinctively for the holstered pistol, but the time it took her arm to reach into her coat was more than enough for the Lord Inquisitor’s finger to pull a trigger.

The plasma pistol fired with an ear-splitting screech and the light of a sun blinded her eyes as she felt the left side of her head burn as if branded by molten metal, and…

And nothing.

She was still alive.

The pistol charged up for a second shot, but this time Godwyn was faster. Her gun was up in second, and with a roar like a cannon Roth was blasted backwards off his feet as the high-calibre slug thudded into his chest at point-blank range with the force of a shot-cannon.

Stunned, nearly deaf, and with a screaming pain consuming the left-side of her head, Godwyn got numbly to her feet and dragged her boots over the metal flooring of the service passage until she stood over the Lord Inquisitor.

Flat on his back but still alive, Roth was coughing up blood when he saw Godwyn’s shadow fall over him and the gaping black barrel of the heavy pistol level itself at his face.

“How…?” he croaked as Godwyn kicked at the plasma pistol from his grasping fingers with a sweep of her foot.

Her head felt like it was about to split in two, but even over the pain she could feel the Icon of the Just burning inside her breast pocket.

Blood gurgling up through his mouth with each struggle for breath, Roth bared his teeth and spat a gob of blood at his executioner:

“You don’t know what you’re doing!” he snarled vehemently.

Looking away from his face, Godwyn turned her gaze skyward. Up above her the sky was clear and brilliantly blue in the mid-day sun, and beyond wisps of violet cloud she could imagine closing her eyes and seeing the depths of space as if she were back aboard the Patroclus looking out into the beauty of the void. Somewhere out there were millions of worlds inhabited by billions of souls who lived out their lives in countless different ways. She’d never know the tiniest fraction of these people or see the planets on which they lived, but even in a galaxy so vast she knew that the light of the Immortal Emperor never faded, and that she could live for a thousand years and still know her duty before the Golden Throne.

They were bound by the Emperor’s Will, and through serving Him did they serve each other.

“Yes,” she answered to the sky above, “I do.”

And pulled the trigger.

[Lady_Canoness]

*Epilogue*

 

“It is the failing of many Inquisitors to study the enemy but not themselves.”

-Inquisitor Cassandra Godwyn

 

Though this story ends when Inquisitor Godwyn pulled the trigger to kill Lord Inquisitor Roth, the story of the Inquisition is never truly finished, for it is only through vigilance, sacrifice, and the boundless determination of the righteous that His realm is kept safe from the enemy within, without, and beyond.

 

* *

Hercule Columbo, though no longer under the orders of the late Lord Inquisitor Roth, remained close friends with Inquisitor Godwyn and was more than happy to provide her with a home-base aboard the Patroclus as her duties carried her between the stars. As always their relationship was amiable, and would remain so throughout the years they spent together regardless of where they were going or how long it took to get there. In a life that always changes, the Patroclus and her Master would stay the same and provide the solid backbone that every successful Inquisitor needs.

 

Captain Victoria Striker would never fully recover from the wound she suffered in the Archive at the hands of Inquisitor Pierce, and though her spirit remained unabashed she would never again see active combat. Retiring from Godwyn’s service, she was granted a position as a combat instructor at the Schola Progenium. She and Godwyn would remain friends, however, and though years would often pass without seeing or hearing from one another, neither of them would ever forget the times in which they served together.

 

Commissar Markus Grant also retired from Godwyn’s service, and with her aid was granted a commission with the Panacean PDF so that he could remain close to Captain Striker for the remainder of his career. The love between Striker and Grant only ever grew stronger, and eventually they married and he fathered her first and only child, a girl, who they named Cassandra in memory of their friend who brought them together.

 

Lee Normandy, forever tied to Meridian, would remain with Inquisitor Godwyn for years to come, and through thick and thin would conduct himself with the same boundless enthusiasm he always had from flaunting rules and enjoying the little things of life. He would still tell everyone he met that his career was over, though in time he realized that in fact it had just begun.

 

Sudulus would also remain faithfully by Inquisitor Godwyn’s side and carry on the vital task of learning as much as he could and relaying it in as much detail as was possible. Life in the service of the Inquisition is hard, however, and he like many others will have his share of burdens over the years to come. Regardless, the little man was forever faithful and was as much a part of Godwyn’s retinue as the Inquisitor herself.

 

Brother Librarian Orion Aquinas, after learning the fate of his long-time friend and seeing that the treasons of Roth and Pierce would never be fulfilled, held his duty to Inquisitor Godwyn to be complete, and withdrew from her service to return to the Deathwatch and eventually his original chapter – the Raven Guard. They would meet again on several occasions throughout her career, however, and each time they worked together would be a learning experience for the Inquisitor as the Librarian’s wisdom proved time and time again to be beyond question. The space marine had many years ahead of him yet, and time would see him become powerful indeed.

 

As for Inquisitor Cassandra Godwyn, well, her story is not yet over, even though this particular tale has come to an end.

 

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And so it ends! Please let me know your thoughts on the whole story, and if there is anything in particular you would want to see in a sequel ...no promises though! :mellow:

[Valek]

Great writing mate and a nice open ending