The Inquisition II

[Lady_Canoness]

This is the sequel to The Inquisition: A story of Secrecy and Intrigue and continues the story of Inquisitor Godwyn. (*edit* the link to the Inquisition: A story of Secrecy and Intrigue is dead, though the story itself can be found in the back pages of the Short Story section of the Librarium.)

 

It is not necessary to read one before the other, but it might just help! As always, I will try to maintain a high standard of both story-telling and writing throughout the thread. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I do writing!

 

*Prologue*

 

He was getting too old for this.

“Lord?” the acolyte tapped lightly on the door before peeking into the Lord Magistrate’s office. “They are expecting you in ten minutes, Lord.”

The man behind the High Magistrate of the Inquisition’s desk grunted in acknowledgement, and the acolyte quietly closed the door behind him as he exited.

He was getting too old for this.

For sixty-three years, Simon Donovan had presided over the five-hundred-and-twenty-first Inquisitorial Conclave and had heard more arguments in this quarter of his life than he had when he was an active Inquisitor in the field. They were always the same too, like they were making the rounds because there was nothing better to do. Today it might be the heresy of hero-worship, and next week it could be daemon hosts and whether or not they were still just as blasphemous and unholy as they had been for the past ten-thousand years.

The Magistrate swallowed down what remained in the half-empty glass of water on his desk and belched softly in the privacy of his office.

No one ever learned, it seemed, and if they did they sure as hell didn’t pass that learning on as every new generation of Inquisitors brought with it the same problems that had plagued its predecessors.

He set down the empty glass on its usual coaster to the left of his desk and shuffled through the six files he’d committed to memory over the past fifty-seven days, picking one up at random and flipping open the cover with his thumb as he slipped his reading spectacles over his eyes with a shallow groan. The servo skull on the mantle behind him hummed to life and lifted itself to hover over his shoulder and shine its small beam of light onto the document in time with the movement of his eyes across the page.

Isaac Strassen.

Yes, he remembered him. Donovan tossed the file back down amongst the others and slouched deeper into his arm chair with a heavy sigh.

The Inquisitor Strassen had served for one-hundred and seventeen years, had been killed three years ago, and Donovan claimed to know him when all he’d even seen of the man was the picture on his file.

Four other files on his desk also bore the names of people he had never met in person: Lord Inquisitor Roth, Inquisitor Felix, Inquisitor Pierce, and Inquisitor Andovich. All dead – all no more to him that a picture, a name, and a record.

He picked up the sixth file on his desk and flipped open the cover. This person he had met, mainly because she was the one who had stood in the dock for the past fifty-seven days of the hearing. Not the best way to meet someone.

His eyes scanned the cover page of her file and over the picture of the severe-looking blond woman.

Kin-Slayer. That was what the Mono-dominants had taken to calling her, and truth be told they weren’t far off – she had admitted to killing three out of the five dead Inquisitors, which was more than enough for the Mono-dominant Inquisitors to bay for her blood, and Donovan had seriously considered giving it to them. Nothing was quite as despicable as Inquisitors turning on their own when there were so many enemies more deserving of the Inquisition’s wrath, but in her defence the killings were more than the mere murder the mono-dominants claimed them to be.

The Thorians had been quick to point out that the five dead Inquisitors had been involved in a conspiracy to commit treason against the Imperium, and that their deaths were both just and deserved. Debatable, but definitely not beyond consideration.

“Lord?” the acolyte tapped on the door before peeking into the Lord Magistrate’s office for the second time. “They are expecting you, Lord.”

Donovan grunted, and the acolyte quietly shut the door behind him as he exited.

For every day of the past two months this woman had sat under the scrutiny of the conclave and had weathered their merciless assaults and stinging accusations with a frigid veneer. She did not deny that she had killed three of the five, nor was she repentant of her deeds, and now – after two months of hearings, testimony, and argument in which all questions had been aired and answered – only one decision remained.

Was what she had done a crime?

If so, the mono-dominants would have their blood. If not, the woman whose picture he looked at on the file would walk free. Impartial, the decision fell upon the Lord Magistrate, as did the woman’s fate.

Donning his cloak of office, Donovan left his chambers with the files still open upon his desk.

“All rise before his Grace, the right honourable High Lord Magistrate of the Inquisition.”

Ninety-seven Inquisitors rose to their feet in the oval shaped conclave chamber as Simon Donovan entered with his acolytes in tow and mounted the steps to the high bench. There, before him in the lowest part of the conclave chamber with the bench and galleries rising above her on all sides, stood the accused: one Cassandra Godwyn – Imperial Inquisitor, confessed killer of kin, and (if the testimony he’d heard was of any indication) cold hearted b*tch to boot.

He looked over the rim of his spectacles at the accused as he took his appointed seat – the collective groan of the gallery benches filling the room as ninety-seven Inquisitors did likewise.

The room was silent.

From his left, one of his acolytes passed his written cues into his hand. The Lord Magistrate cleared his throat. He would make this quick.

“On charges of treason against the Emperor by way of willingly committing the egregious crime of murder against agents of His Holy Inquisition,” Donovan began, peering up from the proclamation in his hand at the young Inquisitor who waited silently before him, “I find the accused, Imperial Inquisitor Cassandra Pallas Godwyn…”

Every breath in the room was withheld as the Magistrate paused between words.

“… not guilty, and cleared of all charges.”

The Mono-dominants instantly rose from their seats and cried out in disbelief at the obvious miscarriage of justice.

The Thorians applauded the Magistrate’s wisdom and sensibility.

The Magistrate removed his spectacles and whispered to something to his acolytes before stepping down from the bench and returning to his chambers.

The accused said nothing, but with a simple nod of recognition rose to her feet and dismissed herself from the hearing.

[Lady_Canoness]

*Part 1*

 

TWENTY YEARS LATER.

 

 

“Inquisitor?”

Someone was rapping on her cabin door. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes.

“Inquisitor, are you there?”

Part of her wished she wasn’t, but now that she was awake there was no escaping it.

“Is it time?” she asked, swinging her feet off her bunk and onto the floor with a groan. She’d fallen asleep wearing in her clothes again, and as she sat on the edge of her bed she could feel the uncomfortable sweaty warmth under her shirt and down the backs of her legs. Not the way she wanted to present herself to Inquisitor Brand now that they had been a day planetside on Penumbra.

“Yes, it’s time,” her Interrogator answered her through the cabin door, and she heard his footsteps walk away from her cabin back to the main hold of her shuttle.

Running her hands through her hair, Cassandra Godwyn heaved one last sigh as she blinked herself awake and stood up – stretching out her arms and feeling her back crack as she did so.

Her cabin aboard Meridian was small, much like the rest of the shuttle, and only seemed to get smaller over the years. Not that she didn’t like it or appreciate just how many times it had saved her life, but after living with her ship for the better part of thirty years it was as familiar as familiar could get.

Bending over she touched her toes, just to make sure she still could, and felt the welcome tug of the muscles along the back of her legs. The woman she saw in her cabin’s mirror looked no older than her mid-thirties with long blond hair tied up behind her head in a tight bun and striking eyes of light blue set into a severe face with long cheeks and an angular chin. Not bad for being in her mid fifties.

Pulling the blouse she’d slept in over her head and tossing back onto the bunk, she leaned closer to the mirror under the dim yellow light to inspect her left ear. She’d lost it twenty-three years earlier to the same plasma pistol she now carried as her own when she had killed the treasonous Lord Inquisitor Roth on Panacea, and now in its place was an intricate metal housing for a bionic replacement that was bolted into her head amidst a tangle of scar tissue that loose strands of her hair could only partially cover. It ached from time to time and was often at odds with its organic counterpart, but the alternative of a gaping hole in her head had been no more appealing.

Buttoning on a fresh off-grey coloured blouse and throwing on the shoulder holster for an inconspicuous machine pistol, Godwyn donned her armour-weave greatcoat and black-polished jackboots and marched from her cabin into the main hold.

Her cabin was one of four on the port-side living module which was attached to the main-hold, the primary operations space for Godwyn and her crew and comprised the majority of the ship aside from a cramped engine room, small cockpit, and a communications center called the nest. Normally the hold buzzed with activity, though, as she’d given her team a two-day leave, only Alexander was waiting for her as she entered.

“Inquisitor,” he waited attentively for her word and stood up a little straighter as she entered.

Godwyn’s first apprentice, Interrogator James Alexander was a promising young man on the cusp of his twenties who had come into her service little more than half a year ago. A psyker, Alexander was uniquely skilled in sensing the psychic presence of others – non-psykers and psykers alike – though he displayed promise in the more mundane arts of the Inquisition as well, and was a quick study in just about everything Godwyn could teach him. Of equal importance to his abilities, however, he was also professional in nature and displayed a sense of duty uncommon in most adepts his age. This, coupled with his tall slim build, dark hair, and dark eyes, made him look the part of a young Inquisitor trainee – something Godwyn had long ago learned to be of more importance than was often credited.

“Any word?” Godwyn asked, but Alexander quickly shook his head.

“No word,” he replied with a frown.

So Brand was still expecting them, Godwyn mused as she exited her shuttle and stepped into the Penumbra’s dark night with Alexander following wordlessly in her shadow. The meet was on.

 

Penumbra was a cesspit of a night world with its only claim to fame being that it was located at the crossroads of numerous warp passages that spanned the Ghoul Stars and thus acted as a hub for the rabble that could be washed up for lightyears in every direction. Mercenaries, merchants, vagabonds, and every other manner of space scum called Penumbra home and worshiped it as the planet of red lights where vice was cheap and fortune and ruin walked hand in hand through the lantern-lit streets. Imperial law was almost non-existent and the night-world thrived in some sort of natural order where the strong of today oppressed the strong of yesterday while watching their backs for the strong of tomorrow. Its cities rife with crime and warred over by guilds of merchants, gangsters, and thieves, it was a place where anything could be found so long as one knew the right person to talk to and the right palm to grease. Here, the power of the Righteous Servants of the Emperor was a myth, which made the work of an Inquisitor much, much easier, though it could get harder on the mere flip of a coin.

“Why would Inquisitor Brand call us here?” Alexander wondered allowed as their black service car raced down the winding lamp-lit roads of Hogshead, the largest, and thereby ‘capital’ city of Penumbra.

Godwyn, behind the wheel of the racing vehicle, answered the question from her student with a question of her own:

“Why are Inquisitors summoned anywhere?” she asked, her eyes the road instead of the blur of passing lights that hung threaded overhead from decrepit old buildings.

“To root out the influence of the alien, the mutant, the heretic, and the daemon and destroy them,” Alexander replied, his head turning instinctually as they sped past a foursome of bawdily dressed women who prowled on the street corners and flashed glimpses of their full bosoms to tempt passers-by. “But that is just to the point,” he argued; “this planet is a wretched hole that stains the Domain of Man. I could kill a man at random and be rewarded for having killed a sinner!”

“True,” Godwyn conceded her student’s point with a considerate nod, “but think of how a planet such as this can have a farther reaching influence than what merely meets the eye. What happens here rarely stays here…”

Alexander caught on quickly to the theory. “What starts here will end somewhere else, so it is within our interests to find whatever it is and stop it before it gets off world.”

“Exactly,” Godwyn nodded. “Our task is to find out what evils are likely to slip off world, and what evils are likely to stay.”

The glossed black-painted vehicle sped on through the lamp-lit warrens of the dismal night city until Godwyn brought the vehicle to a stop not ten minutes later in a deserted back alley of a decaying warehouse district.

“Stay with the vehicle and keep it moving,” she instructed Alexander as she pulled the car out of gear and opened the driver-side door to step out of the vehicle.

“Keep an eye on where you’re going as well,” she said pulling her greatcoat tightly around her as she closed the door and her student slid into the driver’s seat, “this place is easy to get lost in. I’ll summon you when its time to pick me up.”

He acknowledged and slowly pulled away; leaving Godwyn standing alone and watching the tail-lights recede into the distance before disappearing around a bend in the road and dropping the abandoned alleyway back into the darkness. Somewhere in Hogshead, a trio of starshells were fired high into the air to burn brightly through the drifting smog and cast ethereal rays of white-light across the shifting shadows of the city below. Godwyn watched them for a moment like silent stars falling from the sky back down to earth, and the light cast a ghostly pall across her face before she turned her back and disappeared into the darkness.

Inquisitor Brand, one of the senior Inquisitors operating within the Ghoul Stars and the reason behind Godwyn being on Penumbra, had summoned her to a secret rendezvous in a derelict stock-house in Hogshead several weeks earlier when she was still half a sector away. He hadn’t told her why, though he had transferred the message via astropath as being priority-level fuchsia (not the highest urgency, but high enough to attract her attention) and Godwyn knew enough about him to know that it was unlikely that he would be wasting her time. Like her, he was Ordo Xenos, and, though she had never worked with him, he had a reputation for a taciturn yet brilliant Inquisitor whose methods were beyond the grasp of most others in the Ordos.

Opening a side-door into the stock-house from a culvert between crumbling buildings, Godwyn was greeted by blackness as she closed the door behind her on creaking hinges. She drew her compact machine pistol just in case. It took several moments for her eyes to adjust to the gloom, but as her surroundings became more visible it was apparent that the stock-house had been used by no-one other than squatters for several years, and that a fine layer of dust covered everything from ancient broken open crates, to garbage and human waste. The smell alone was enough to deter most interlopers.

Fishing a laced handkerchief from her coat’s inside pocket, Godwyn covered her face with one hand while keeping the pistol steady in the other. Why would Inquisitor Brand have called her here?

“Who goes?” a sharp female voice demanded from somewhere in the darkness.

Godwyn froze, and slowly lowered the kerchief from her face.

“Inquisition,” she answered softly. “Who asks?”

A pistol breach was cleared in response. “You are expected,” said the owner of the voice, and Godwyn heard footsteps leading away in the darkness.

“I am expected by a man,” the Inquisitor replied, following slowly in the direction she interpreted the voice as coming from, “not a woman.”

The sharp sounding female did not answer, but a rectangle of light suddenly appeared in the darkness, and through squinting eyes Godwyn could see the woman’s silhouette pass through the door and descend into what appeared to be a staircase. Shielding her eyes against the sudden brightness, Godwyn walked towards the light, but when she came to the staircase it was empty and the wooden door leading into the basement level was closed.

Holstering her pistol and stifling a quick cough into her handkerchief, Godwyn followed down the stairs and pushed open the wooden door.

Inquisitor Brand was waiting in the room beyond with his back to her and his hand resting on the mantle of a wide-mouthed fireplace as he watched the dim glow of the dying embers and the last plumes of smoke escaped up into a hidden chimney pipe. He said nothing as she entered and closed the door behind her, but he raised his free hand in a recognizing gesture that said he would be with her in a minute and to make herself comfortable.

What he had in mind in the way of comfort was anyone’s guess, however, as the basement room was lit only by a pare of bare lamps suspended from the ceiling, and the only furniture – not counting the litter of old wooden crates that was scatter haphazardly about the room on the dirt floor – was a worn looking table and a trio of wooden chairs. Godwyn elected to remain standing.

To Godwyn’s left beside the door, the woman she took to be the one who she had spoken to earlier appeared to have come to the same conclusion, and was standing with crossed arms watching Inquisitor Brand’s back. The Inquisitorial rosette hanging from a thin chain around her neck clearly marked her as an Inquisitor and not an underling of Brand’s, though Godwyn had never set eyes upon her before. At first glance, her pale face looked as if it were chiselled from ice and topped with black hair was fully braided into ropes pulled back along the length of her scalp. Around her shoulders was draped a high collared black Inverness that opened at the front to reveal a silver breastplate with a crest that Godwyn easily recognized as the tell-tale mark of the Ordo Hereticus: a witch hunter. The woman regarded Godwyn with a pinched and irritable expression that suggested that she too been summoned with little knowledge as to why.

“Inquisitor Godwyn,” Inquisitor Brand began in his characteristically soft and distant sounding voice without turning to face either woman, “be introduced to Inquisitor von Draken. Inquisitor von Draken – Inquisitor Godwyn.”

Standing practically side-by-side, the Inquisitors looked at each other though neither one was in any hurry to proffer a hand.

“Cassandra Godwyn?” von Draken raised an eyebrow with a lisping drawl. “The Kin-Slayer herself?”

A Mono-dominant: the last person Godwyn wanted to find herself introduced to.

Von Draken’s thin lips curved upwards in a slight smirk. “Should I consider this an honour or an insult?”

Godwyn didn’t give her the satisfaction of seeing her take offence.

“As I’ve never heard of you, I wouldn’t dwell on it for long,” Godwyn replied flatly, meeting the woman’s dark eyes and daring her to strike back.

“That is enough to satisfy introductions, I think” Brand interjected softly – effectively partitioning the warring Inquisitor and bringing their eyes back to where he stood still watching the embers of the fire. Brand did not continue, but neither woman spoke; instead leaving the basement chamber in an uncomfortable silence.

Brand was odd – Godwyn had known this since the first time she met him. Behind his surface eccentricities and social awkwardness, however, was the mind of a genius, and, from what she had heard second-hand and experienced first hand through her brief dealings with the senior Inquisitor, Brand likely knew more about the Ghoul Stars than any other man alive.

“This planet is one unlike others, of which little is seen or understood,” Brand resumed talking to the fireplace. “True night worlds beyond the reach of a sun are rare, and rarer still if supporting an abundance of life. But here you are, on one such world that ignores what reason tells us must exist and damns our attempts at understanding like no other. It is a mystery to boggle the mind, I think, and I hate mysteries that I cannot solve, but that is not why I called you here.”

He stopped as if waiting for them to ask the obvious question, but neither Inquisitor in attendance said a word. Brand cleared his throat and straightened up before finally turning to face the Inquisitors. He was a tall man – a head-and-a-half taller than Godwyn, at least – and a statuesque face of black skin pierced with pearly white eyes sat imposingly in the middle of a large bald head. This was the face that had once ordered an entire grand cathedral burned to the ground along with all its occupants for practicing false idolatry, and would do it again without hesitation.

“I will tell you know why I brought you here,” he announced to the door behind them and not once making eye-contact with either of the women. “Several murders have occurred, unexplained, that have taken my attention by means perturbing. These deaths fester with corruption unlike – ”

“What evidence do your ‘perturbing means’ have to back up such claims?” von Draken interrupted the large Inquisitor’s meandering canto with a forward question. Evidently the witch hunter knew little enough about Inquisitor Brand to underestimate his quiet resolve.

The snap in his neck was almost audible as Brand wheeled about with his full attention on von Draken and stared her full in the face with his ghost-like eyes.

“These means of mine are beyond the doubting of your likes,” he reprimanded the witch hunter with staggering speed in a storm of silence that made the Hereticus Inquisitor flinch beside her.

“See images if you will,” Brand whipped a dossier from the inside of his coat and tossed it to the table before him with a small *fwap*. “Crimes of passion, random killings, acts of madness – tell me now if these things they seem to you! If by chance they do and your means are clear, then I kneel and offer you my apprenticeship. If not, then my words will be heeded and you will understand them!”

The images were gruesome, and if Godwyn had ever harboured any doubt as to Brand’s certainty in interpreting the murders her reservations now vanished. He had uncovered thirteen bodies, though on a planet were murder was common practice there could easily be countless more killings that went undiscovered. The bodies had been found alone, or in small clusters, in empty buildings throughout Hogshead, and had all started to smell and decay before they were discovered. The killers had obviously dumped the bodies with little fear of discovery, meaning that they were too deranged to imagine retribution for their crimes, or they thought themselves immune to whatever response came their way.

Godwyn was impassive as she pawed through the remainder of the pictures on the table. She’d seen things like this before, and it had been some time since she’d last felt shock at the level of debasement possible in human beings.

The victims appeared to have been chosen at random regardless of age, gender, or physical traits – people who appeared to be entirely unrelated save for the cruel fashion in which they were put to death, and that now they brought upon themselves the scrutiny they had never been afforded in life.

“Their wrists were slit and their blood drained,” Brand explained airily as the Inquisitors stepped back from the table and away from the morbid photographs. “What you see before you are acts of savagery wrought upon a cooling corps. Mercy in small measures for something so foul.”

Mercy, small or otherwise, was the last thing that entered Godwyn’s mind.

The people in the pictures had not just been murdered, but defiled in the most inhuman of ways. They had been sliced open from collarbone to pelvis and had their life-giving organs pulled out from underneath their ribcage. Eyes, ears, and tongues were missing, and their shaven scalps bore wicked gashes and cuts where hair had been artlessly hacked away. Some of the first corpses to have been discovered had even been entirely flayed of their skin.

“It is as if they did not so much want them dead as not alive,” Inquisitor von Draken remarked malevolently, and Godwyn nodded in silent agreement. To kill was one thing, but to utterly destroy someone in such a targeted and deliberate fashion was another.

“Who did this?” Godwyn asked, drawing Brand’s attention from Inquisitor von Draken to herself. “What do we have to go on?”

“Less than would be useful,” Brand frowned – the indifference in his voice was starting to get unnerving – “you will know where and when they were found, and who found them. You will not find witnesses, or any willing party to parlay of the crime.”

“Finding anything on this planet will be like finding salt in sand,” the witch hunter commented mirthlessly. “I’d sooner reduce the city to ash than waste my time with this.”

“Your time is the Emperor’s to use,” Godwyn retorted. She’d only just met her, but already she felt as if she’d found a hindrance instead of a help in Inquisitor von Draken.

“As is my duty,” von Draken shot back. “Putting this whole planet to the sword would be a blessing.”

“Enough,” Brand stepped in quietly, though his voice carried the same effect as if he had shouted. “Enmity winds you down the road of failure. Hereticus and Xenos – two Ordos side by side – will see your success. Your means alone are what you must use in this. I must depart.”

“You’re *leaving* after what you just told us?” the dark-haired woman glared at him in disbelief as if demanding that he correct the error he had just let pass his lips.

The speed at which he’d shifted from supporting the investigation to announcing his imminent departure was startling, and Godwyn found herself thrown off-balance with the need for more information.

“Inquisitor Brand,” Godwyn joined her fellow Inquisitor in asking for clarification, “is this not your investigation? Why are you leaving it then?”

“My council is not kept with you,” he explained to the wall. “Your role is here.”

 

* *

“Did he have any answers?” Alexander asked as the black service car slowed to a stop in the dark alleyway and Godwyn got in the passenger-side door.

She was still shaking her head from her meeting with Inquisitor Brand. The man was odd – yes, she knew that – but this had undermined even the most basic of her assumptions of the Inquisitor by a significant margin. A heretical cult was definitely at work in Hogshead and possibly the whole of Penumbra – the photographs had been evidence enough of that – but Brand’s sudden insistence of his own departure was still unexplained and unexpected. She had a few suspicions as to why he would leave (though admittedly they hinged on him being mentally unstable), but to handoff his investigation to another without good reason was beyond the excuse of madness. Godwyn would report him on this, though she imagined that von Draken would beat her to it. Whatever she thought of the witch hunter, there was no denying that they had found common cause spurning the senior Inquisitor’s actions.

“No,” Godwyn answered, shutting the car door behind her as the Interrogator accelerated down the dark alley and away from their meeting place, “no answers.”

Alexander shook his head as if he’d expected as much. “Only more questions,” he finished her train of thought.

“Call the others,” Godwyn instructed him. “We have a lot to do.”

[Lady_Canoness]

*Part 2*

 

So far as anyone knew, Penumbra had no recorded history that was widely accepted as accurate, and, depending who was asked, the planet could have any number of ‘official’ accounts as how it came to be in its present state.

The most believable stories typically involved the evolution of a smugglers’ port over many centuries until it became covered with the blighted city-states as it is now. Other reasonable accounts involved pirate bases, merchant camps, or an ancient mining settlement to explain the centuries old cities that were constantly being built and rebuilt in the remains of cities from an even older age. More outlandish claims involved merchant fleets unwittingly becoming trapped in the planet’s gravity well, crashing to the earth below, and building the first cities out of the salvaged hulls of their ships, though these stories were thought of being just that – stories; used to entice and excite minds otherwise unoccupied. Stranger still were the theories of how Penumbra was the center of power of an ancient alien race long extinct, and that men had stumbled upon the planet like rats stumbling into an ancient trap.

Ludicrous and baseless as most of these stories were, however, people would not be stopped in believing, disagreeing, and arguing over any old thing they might come across, though even with theories running rampant there were three things that just about everyone could agree on:

That Penumbra was many thousands of years old; that the populated cities were to the north, and that the uninhabitable sticks from which no man ever returned were to the south; and that Hogshead was the biggest city under the starless sky.

The ‘many thousands of years’ was anyone’s guess, but it stood to reason that it was true since people were often stumbling across things never seen before by exploring the vast deserted areas of crumbling city or simply taking a wrong turn in one’s basement and finding the remains of underground tunnels never known to exist.

All the cities being clustered around the planet’s northern pole, however, was fact. Ship sensors from orbit penetrated the atmospheric layers of smog and determined that the only sources of heat and power came from the northern hemisphere, and that the southern regions of the planet were utterly cold and lifeless. Whether or not anyone had ever been there and come back, on the other hand, was questionable, though those who did make such claims were often of poor repute and known spinners of tall tales.

Hogshead, as it were, stretched out for many miles in a carpet of urban sprawl that spread itself outwards in all directions from the mountain of twisted metal and crumbling masonry that called itself the ‘Capital Spire’ – though in truth it was the fortress-like palace of whatever crime-lord claimed it for his own. There was no formal authority or sanctified power in Hogshead, and the self-title ruler only remained so as long as he had the influence to keep his rivals from overthrowing him. The system of anarchy wove itself into and around the city almost like a living entity, and the city-life ebbed and flowed through it like an ocean tide over rocky shores. Swathes of buildings would be abandoned or repossessed for any number of reasons that would leave some sections of the city overcrowded and noisy while others would be nearly devoid of life for months on end as communities picked up and moved almost at random. With no regional governance or infrastructure, the abandoned places in the city were all but forgotten – havens for the lost, the desperate, and those people who preferred that their business remain unseen.

Being such people, the crew of the Meridian had brought the shuttle into Hogshead and rested it concealed in a crumbling courtyard between deserted hab buildings in an abandoned part of the city. Avoiding undue attention was a key factor in attaining success, Godwyn theorized, and she had took whatever means available to her to ‘deter’ prying eyes from getting too close to her base of operations.

 

Sudulus was waiting when they arrived in the service car, and no sooner had they stepped out of the vehicle into the brilliant glow of Meridian’s exterior floodlights then Godwyn’s trusted savant was hustling over to greet the Inquisitor with his usual idle-time briefing.

“Inquisitor, your team has assembled aboard and is awaiting further instruction,” the little man reported.

The savant was a long serving member of Godwyn’s entourage and had been with her since her earliest days as an Inquisitor. The years had not been kind to him, however, and his age was starting to show, but despite this Sudulus remained an asset to Inquisitor Godwyn’s staff as an expert on all things textual and was Godwyn’s primary point of reference in issues ranging from Imperial politics to micro-biology. Sudulus was a self-styled tinkerer and, thanks to his bionic forearms and hands, was adept at modifying and overcoming numerous security and lock-out devices – a skill that proved more than useful in an Inquisitor’s line of work.

“Where there any difficulties in recalling them?” Godwyn asked as they walked towards the shuttle hatches. Most of her team was still relatively inexperienced in working together and occasional misunderstandings were to be expected as they became more accustomed to each others company, but Sudulus shrugged off the question as being of little concern.

“Most hadn’t gone very far,” Sudulus replied, but added with a grumble; “though Lee made a point of taking his time…”

An ex-smuggler with an easy smile and a loose sense of humour, Lee Normandy had served with Inquisitor Godwyn for the better part of thirty years as Meridian’s pilot, and had proven himself time and again to be reliable and loyal despite his coloured past. More than just a pilot, Lee was also comfortable in the shady underbelly of Imperial society and possessed a keen sense of street-smarts that made him invaluable when it came to operating outside the sights of Imperial authorities. The price for his skills, however, came at dealing with his crude social demeanour, and – though friendly – he would often encroach on other people’s nerves.

“Sudulus,” Godwyn stopped him just before they boarded the shuttle.

“Inquisitor?” both the savant and her Interrogator turned towards her, but she ushered Alexander to go on ahead, leaving her alone with Sudulus underneath the empty windows of the hab blocks.

“There is something I need you to do for me,” she said after she was certain that they were alone and that Alexander was out of earshot.

“Anything that I can, I will,” Sudulus replied with a nod.

“Good.” It was not that Godwyn did not trust her apprentice, but there were some things that he should not hear.

“The Inquisitor I came here to meet is abandoning this planet and leaving me to take his place,” Godwyn explained in a hushed voice; “I want to know why he is leaving and where he is going.”

Sudulus’ eyes instantly lit up and a pensive frown crossed over his face as he started to play the tips of his bionic fingers over his chin and jaw.

“Interesting…” he said, pacing back and forth in front of the Inquisitor as if the gears grinding in his head were stirring the rest of his body into action. Sudulus relished a challenge, and often times would prepare reports on a whole host of information for the Inquisitor with or without her consent.

“Tracking an Inquisitor – Brand, was it? – will be very difficult, and doubly so given that we are not on an Imperial world in the strictest sense. Doable, I think, but by no means easy. Nonetheless, with any luck I should be able to pick up a trail.”

Godwyn nodded in approval. “Another thing – ” Sudulus inclined his head receptively, “ – there is an Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor von Draken who is also on Penumbra. Find out as much as you can about her.”

“Is she an ally?”

“That is what I am hoping you’ll tell me.”

 

Godwyn’s team was assembled in Meridian’s main hold when she entered with Sudulus, and as the savant took his seat there were seven pairs of eyes following her as she rounded the chamber and came to the head the large rectangular table at the center of the hold.

Immediately to her right was Alexander, sitting patiently at the table with one leg crossed over the other and a stylus and dataslate in his hands. The Interrogator would often take notes when she spoke, though he never asked for confirmation about what he had written, and never volunteered to show them to anyone – something Sudulus was quick to remark on in private.

Next to Alexander was Lee, who sat back with his arms crossed and his booted feet on the table. The pilot appeared to be in good spirits as the dark leathery skin of his face was stretched into a wide grin as he whispered a one-way conversation to the person beside him, though, by the looks of it, he wasn’t getting very far.

Brianna – or Sister Brianna as she introduced herself – was sitting next to the pilot with her arms folded tightly over her chest and her young face set like stone with her bright grey eyes looking purposefully away from the ex-smuggler. The newest and youngest member of Godwyn’s crew aside from Alexander, Brianna had approached Godwyn several weeks earlier on the shrine world of Salem Prima and offered her services. So far as she knew from speaking with her, the young Sister had taken the Oath of the Penitent Sinner, but instead of seeking absolution through battle with her Order Brianna had chosen the path of the Exile, and had been banished from her Order with nothing but an ornamental chainsword in her hands to seek forgiveness in the eyes of the Emperor and the hope of one day returning to the Sisterhood. The Inquisitor did not ask what crime she had committed to be banished forthright from her Order and Brianna did not speak of it to anyone. Her skills and training as a Sister of Battle were clear, however, and Godwyn considered her to be a welcome part of her crew.

The penitent Sister was not the only battle-tempered soldier on Godwyn’s team, and sitting next to Brianna at the foot of the table opposite from Godwyn was Nerf – an elite Catachan commando who had come into the Inquisitor’s service just over two years earlier on the recommendation of Inquisitor Brand. Like all Catachans, Nerf was a large and powerfully built soldier, though he also possessed a kind spirit and good nature that seemed somewhat out of place in a professional killer. Proficient in almost every type of combat imaginable, but neither boastful nor proud, Nerf got along with just about everyone and carryied himself with a calm confidence that most people found reassuring.

Nerf had not come into Godwyn’s service alone, however, and with him came the lithe assassin he called Mercy. A giant standing well over seven feet tall, Mercy was unlike any woman Godwyn had ever met in more ways than she could describe. She was almost feline in nature in how she would perch herself atop furniture or inside of confined spaces instead of doing so like an ordinary human being, and how her predatory violet eyes would watch and follow a person with an almost hungry glow. She never spoke either, and preferred to communicate through expression and poise instead of words or signs – something Godwyn had found irritating until Nerf explained that she was mute. When asked about how he and the assassin had come together Nerf was evasive, though he admitted that they had once found themselves on opposite sides of a conflict until chance brought them together, after which they became almost like siblings with the Catachan always looking out for her best interests while the willowy giant watched his back with a playful devotion.

Mercy never sat at the table, instead, when the team took their seats, she perched herself atop of the counter in the small galley at the back of the hold to watch the others attentively.

Illias, a tech-priestess of Mars, sat quietly next to the empty space at the table where Mercy would have been with her human arms folded neatly on her lap and her paired servo-arms folded neatly behind her back. Godwyn had encountered Illias about a year earlier working as part of a merchant fleet in the Ghoul Stars suspected of trafficking dangerous xeno artefacts, and during the length of the investigation proved her worth by disabling the fleet from within and allowing the Inquisition to take advantage of the chaos. As well as being gifted in the works of the Omnissiah, Illias was also highly proficient as a gunsmith and would regularly modify weapons for the Inquisitor and her team (except for the Catachan, Nerf, who was superstitiously protective of his guns and refused to let anyone service them). Skilled as she was, however, like most tech-priests Illias was more machine that woman, and disdained purely human practices, like socializing, as being pointless.

Lastly, sitting to Godwyn’s left, was Sudulus. For the most part, the savant was quiet during briefings and rarely voiced his questions before the rest of the team, though when called upon he would readily go on at lengths to share everything he knew about any given subject. Modest and never lecturing without invitation, he was well-liked by most of the crew, though Godwyn noticed that he harboured a resentment towards Illias that seemed to grow steadily over time.

“Right,” Godwyn overruled the silence as she took her seat at the head of the table, “I want to hear what you make of this;” she tossed the dossier she had been given by Brand and contained the images of the murdered victims into the middle of the table.

Contrary to many Inquisitors who dealt with their operatives on a strictly need-to-know basis, Godwyn liked to share as much as she could with her team and allow them to put their questions, thoughts, or concerns into the open. She believed it helped keep her team stay focused and in good spirit. She believed it was a strength.

Lee caught site of the first of the bodies and instantly recoiled with a groan of disgust. From where she sat cross-legged on the galley countertop, Mercy leaned closer to the table with a look of curiosity for a better view.

“Murdered. Butchered. Completely beyond what is necessary to terminate a human being,” Illias remarked as if she were looking at a disassembled machine.

Sudulus grimaced, and his eyes darted from the tech-priestess to the other faces around the room.

“Poor buggers…” Nerf voiced what the others were thinking as he slid several of the images closer and resigned himself to a rueful shake of his head before leaning back in his seat.

Godwyn was watching them closely. Behind the mingled pain and regret that surfaced on their faces was a spark of anger waiting to be nursed into righteous hatred – that driving energy that pushed men and women to carry out the work of the Emperor in an otherwise cold and unforgiving galaxy.

Nerf was rubbing the stubble on his square chin thoughtfully, and Godwyn nodded for him to speak:

“Is there something you would like to add, Nerf?”

The Catachan leaned his massive forearms onto the table and flipped through a few of the images with a furrowed brow and pursed lips.

“It looks to me like someone left these poor people where they thought they would be found,” he said with a shrug. “Where were they found?”

“Empty warehouses, mostly, where people rarely go,” Godwyn replied, though she was careful not to dismiss his idea.

“If I wanted to get rid of a body I’d burn it,” he continued. “So if these people were left lying around it would be for a reason. My bet is some way of marking territory.”

Godwyn nodded. Nerf could be right, and Emperor knows that the mutilated dead are often used as grim warnings to the living.

“Fear of death in an effective deterrence amongst most human beings,” Illias agreed with Nerf in her typical cold manner. “It is possible that the bodies were placed in areas in close proximity to a strategic location.”

Nerf nodded in agreement, but Interrogator Alexander was not so sure.

“Or it could be the opposite,” he spoke up against the growing consensus as multiple heads turned to hear what he had to say. “It is possible that these people were positioned as a distraction to draw attention away from their base of operations. People feel safer further from what they see is dangerous, so if you put danger far away, then they feel safer up close.”

“A diversion, you mean,” Nerf added.

“Yes,” Alexander nodded quickly, “more or less.”

The Catachan considered the Interrogator’s words. “That would mean the bodies would be concentrated in some way,” he glanced down the table at Godwyn; “Are they, boss?”

Reading a pattern into where the bodies were discovered was too much to hope for, but Godwyn had toyed with the possibility. The corpses were scattered, however, and if there was a pattern to their dispersal then it was not immediately recognizable.

Next to the Catachan, Sister Brianna reached into the center of the table and picked up one the photos – her eyes moving over the grisly image as if looking for a hidden meaning.

There were no markings on the bodies and nothing suggesting as to what purpose the bodies had served other than their harvested organs.

“It is a work of darkness,” Brianna snarled in righteous anger. “What meaning can we attribute to the deeds of heretics?”

“We’re not looking to understand why they do it,” Godwyn corrected the battle sister as she pitched the photograph back onto the table as if the image alone contained the same taint as the bodies; “We’re only here to find those responsible and put an end to it.”

The young sister did not appear appeased, but she remained silent as Sudulus spoke up from Godwyn’s left.

“Do we have access to the bodies, by chance?” he asked quietly, but Godwyn shook her head:

“I was told that the bodies were burned after these photos were taken,” she said.

For reasons unknown – and likely more complex than respect for the dead – Brand had disposed of the bodies before Godwyn had arrived on Penumbra. He had insisted, however, that all that could be discerned through closer investigation of the corpses had been transcribed for both herself and von Draken. She had briefly glanced over them on her way back to Meridian, but even though the dissection notes were thorough there was no accommodating for the absence of physical evidence. Senior Inquisitor or not, Brand was out of line.

“What we do have are locations and times,” Godwyn continued, “as well as the distinct possibility that there are bodies that have yet to be found…”

She looked over her team as they waited in silence for the Inquisitor to explain their course of action.

“Hogshead is a large city with more crime than I care to imagine, but somewhere out there are the answers we’re looking for, and I intend for us to find them before more people end up like this,” she waved towards the chilling photographs as if her team needed to be reminded of what they’d just seen.

“So where do we start, Inquisitor?” Alexander asked, looking up from the notes he’d scribbled onto his dataslate.

A fair question, and a question to which Inquisitor Godwyn only gave one answer.

“We start where the blood is freshest,” she said.

[Aqui]

Interesting start - a lot sooner than I thought too. I wasn't expecting to see a continuation for at least another week :D Interest choice of Retinue members too. Being the suspicious bugger I am, I think Brand is up to something :)

 

But I'll have to wait to find out if he is ;)

[Lady_Canoness]

Thanks Aquilanus, and I am hoping that the team members will only become more interesting as the story progresses!

 

I held onto part 3 for some time so that I could match it up with part 4, but now, I think, it is ready for your viewing!

 

*part 3*

 

Fresh blood is not always clear blood, and upon examination each crime scene revealed the same thing.

“Nothing,” Sudulus said with a grunt as he pushed himself back to his feet after inspecting the entirety of the loft. “If a victim was indeed found here, there is no trace of them or whoever moved them, I’m afraid.”

Godwyn had suspected as much.

They were standing alone in the musty old attic of an abandoned hab-block in the very spot where Brand had reportedly discovered the first of the victims, but – like the five other crime scenes they had visited – this one was also devoid of any clues that might point to the perpetrators. A broken-down water pumping station, the basement of an abandoned garage, two empty warehouses on different sides of the city, a disused storefront, and now the loft in an empty hab-block: how Inquisitor Brand, or anyone for that matter, had discovered the bodies was as much a mystery as how they had gotten there in the first place.

“We do have the identification of the individuals who discovered the bodies,” Sudulus suggested, sensing that the Inquisitor was growing increasingly perplexed as they stood in the flickering lamp-light amidst the shadows of the cobwebbed attic.

“True,” Godwyn nodded, “but we also have no method of contacting them.”

Sudulus conceded the point with a disheartened shrug.

For the past three days, Lee and Nerf had worked through nearby communities discretely searching for those who had supposedly discovered the bodies, but despite Nerf’s subtlety and Lee’s quick wit they returned every day without success. Crime was rife in Hogshead, and it appeared that a particularly messy murder caught no more attention than any other of the frequent deaths that occurred day-to-day. If anyone in Hogshead knew about the killings, then no-one cared enough to talk openly about it, and without any means of identifying the victims there was no way Godwyn could determine if there was any relation between them. Had these people shared something that made them targets? Was there some way of determining who else would likely be targeted and where to find them?

Godwyn shook her head. Thanks to Brand’s insufferable nature she would likely never know.

“Sudulus, would you send for my Interrogator, please?”

The savant acknowledged and quickly hopped down the rickety staircase leading to the lower floors. Alexander would be elsewhere in the hab-block looking for corroborating clues, though Godwyn hoped that his otherworldly talents might prove of more use than his investigative capabilities.

“You called for me, Inquisitor?” the young Interrogator arrived in the dank attic several moments later.

“I did,” Godwyn replied, still staring at the filth-covered floor-boards as if visualizing how a flayed corpse might have appeared resting on it. “Tell me what you see.”

The second sight, as it was often called, was the refined use of a psyker’s innate ability to sense the extra dimensional presence of the Warp and use it in such a way as to perceive the passage of the Warp in real space. An old friend of Godwyn’s had once likened it as to watching ripples on water, and being able to determine the passage of a ship by its wake. Souls burned brightly in the Warp, and as such a trained psyker could detect the passage of soul in real space much like seeing the wake of a vessel in water. Time eroded the Warp-wake left by souls, however, as did the rapid movement of many souls – akin to many ripples breaking the surface of the water all at once – but in a place where few living things passed, the Warp-wake of a soul could be sensed for days, weeks, and perhaps even months after its passing.

At the other five locations the passage of souls had proved too tumultuous for her Interrogator to sense anything distinctive, though it was Godwyn’s hope that their luck might change.

Closing his eyes before opening his mind to the Warp, Alexander braced himself and swallowed a deep breath of air as his face screwed up in concentration.

Godwyn felt the instant he opened his mind to the Warp as the temperature in the loft instantly plummeted and shivers ran up and down her spine like icy fingers along her back. Alexander’s features became relaxed and trance-like as he stumbled about lightly on his feet. She didn’t dare speak or touch him though, as any sudden lapse in concentration could prove devastating, but only watched in silence as her Interrogator slowly turned about like a marionette suspended in a fluid medium and tottered away across the attic in pursuit of something she could not begin to grasp. Gradually, he staggered towards the staircase and Godwyn followed him down – her breath steaming the air in front of her face.

He made it the bottom of the stairs and then stopped – seemingly looking about into something she could not see. Godwyn waited several feet behind him. When he still didn’t move for several more seconds, Godwyn drew closer, thinking that perhaps her movement could jog him out of whatever mire he had become entrapped in. She was not more than two feet away from him, however, when suddenly he broke from the trance like a whale breaching the surface of the water. Instantly off-balance, he swayed and fell, though Godwyn stepped in and quickly caught him underneath the arms before he could hit the floor. He was cold to the touch, and through his clothes Godwyn could feel his thin frame shivering even as she gently lowered him into a sitting position.

“What was it? What did you see?” she asked as soon as he was on the safely on the ground and had caught his breath within his heaving chest.

Wiping a hand across his sweat-streaked forehead, Alexander’s dark eyes darted up to his master. “Something was wrong,” he said, biting his lower lip and cracking knuckles before laying the palms of his hands flat against the floor. “I could feel someone’s presence faintly beyond our own, and I tried to follow it…” he pointed towards the stair with a finger that he has having trouble steadying.

Fatigue, Godwyn reasoned, not fear.

“…but when I got there,” he continued, swallowing more air, “something happened. Something like… like nothing. I got there and nothing.”

Godwyn’s eyes narrowed.

“I don’t know if it was a person or what… but it was hollow – like nothing I’ve ever felt. An untouchable, I think!”

“An untouchable…” Godwyn repeated thoughtfully. Untouchables were rare. Every living thing, she had been told, has a presence in the Warp – some stronger than others – but untouchables (be they human or otherwise) were the opposite, and actively repulsed the Warp with their mere presence. They were difficult to be around for non-psykers, but for those with psychic talents they were nigh intolerable and left them feeling sickened and drained as if their very souls were being driven from their bodies. The rarity of untouchables also made them highly sought after by the Inquisition as well as other more sinister organizations that sought better means to combat psychic influence, as not only could untouchables overcome psykers, but they were also entirely immune to psychic power. To date, there existed no better means of psychic defence.

“Could you get any sense of what it was?”

Alexander shook his head; “Not for the life of me, no.” He swallowed again, and struggled back to his feet. “I’m sorry, Inquisitor. I haven’t been very helpful.”

 

* *

 

“On the contrary, I’d say that is quite helpful, Interrogator,” Sudulus corrected him when the three of them had returned to Meridian and Godwyn informed her savant of what had transpired.

Sitting at the table in the main hold, Alexander was still rather shaken and seemed to shrink in his seat while the Inquisitor and her savant talked to him. ‘It was like having the air pulled from my lungs and the strength sapped from my limbs,’ he had confided to his master when the service car pulled away from the abandoned hab-block not more than an hour earlier, ‘like feeling myself die.’

“If that’s true, then I’m glad I could do it,” he said, “but I’ll be glad if I never have to feel that way again.”

Sudulus nodded sympathetically as he fetched the young man a steaming cup of caffeine from the galley and set it down on the table in front of him. “Very understandable, dear boy,” he said as he sat himself on the table beside him and patted Alexander on the shoulder; “Very understandable indeed.”

Lee had just recently returned and was busying himself in the cockpit while the tech priestess Illias had silently disappeared into Meridian’s engine room, though with Nerf, Mercy, and Brianna still in field, the shuttle was fairly quiet and a sense of calm ruled the main hold as Alexander sipped noiselessly at his beverage and Godwyn stood with her arms crossed and her eyes staring ponderously into the distance.

“Even in a place like this, an untouchable could not go without being noticed,” she said after several more moments of silence.

Pursing his lips, Sudulus cocked his head back and forth to either side. “Quite likely you are correct, though even if there are witnesses we have no means to contact them.”

Godwyn shook her head, though her arms remained tightly crossed. “Untouchables are rare,” she said insistently; “only people with influence and power could retain one for exclusive use.”

“Like the Inquisition,” Alexander spoke up, looking from Godwyn to Sudulus to see if they had caught on.

“Are you thinking that Inquisitor Brand has an untouchable in his service?” Sudulus asked with a raised eyebrow, and the Interrogator nodded.

“It has happened before,” he continued; “Inquisitor Eisenhorn was said to have had an entire staff of them under his control.”

Godwyn stepped in before he got any further, however:

“No,” she said, “it’s not Brand.”

“Can you be sure?” Sudulus asked quizzically. Godwyn nodded in reply:

“James, was there any trace of an untouchable at any of the other locations?” she asked her apprentice.

Alexander shook his head; there hadn’t been.

“Untouchables are specialists within the Inquisition,” Godwyn explained, “and I think it highly unlikely that Inquisitor Brand would bring an untouchable with him to one crime scene but not to any of the others. I think that the untouchable is likely connected to whoever perpetrated these crimes.”

Sudulus was nodding in time with her words. “Yes, yes, I see where you are going with this,” he said, his bionic fingers once again tapping against his chin, “and the fact that the oldest crime scene was the one attended to by the untouchable? An overseer? Ceremonial guest, perhaps? Some other part of the ritual? Very interesting indeed, I say… though you think this will aid us in locating an untouchable here on Penumbra?”

Inquisitor Godywn was confident that it would.

“Lee,” she called over her shoulder towards the hatchway that led to the nest and the cockpit. “Would you come here for a moment?”

The pilot popped his head through the hatch a few seconds later.

“Somethin’ up, boss?” he asked. He was chewing on something dark and leathery that smelled incredibly potent on his breath.

“Who runs the streets in Hogshead?” Godwyn asked, trying to ignore whatever the pilot was voraciously chomping on.

Lee Normandy leaned his shoulder into the side of the hatchway. “Tha’ wou’ be th’ blokes call’d th’ ‘Brigade’,” he said between chews before fishing more of the mysterious food out of his pocket and spinning it about between his fingers.

“What the devil are you eating!?” Sudulus exclaimed from across the hold with a look of revulsion on his face and a voice that was a little too loud for the close confines of the shuttle.

“ ‘s local thing,” Lee replied innocently, “salt’d mea’ o’ s’m sort. Spicy too.” He took another bite. “Wan’ s’m?”

“Dear Emperor, NO!” he squawked back as if horrified by the very thought of it.

Lee shrugged nonchalantly, but Godwyn intervened before they could get even sidetracked.

“Have you spoken to the Brigade? Do they know what is going on in the city?”

Lee nodded. “I’d say so, yea,” he replied, shoving the spiced meat back in the pocket of his old flight jacket, “tho’ gettin’ anythin’ ou’ of ‘em might be a li’l bit mo’ of a challenge. Their lackeys act ‘ll tough n’ stuff, bu’ I doubt they know anythin’ t’all. You’d nee’ a cap’ain or somethin’ like one to ge’ anythin’, I bet.”

Just by looking at him, Godwyn could tell that Sudulus was not convinced, but, regardless of what she might think of his tastes, Godwyn had to admit to herself that she trusted Lee’s instinct for this type of thing more than anyone else’s: if Lee thought that a Brigade captain would know what was happening on the streets of Hogshead, then he was probably right.

“And where would I find one of these ‘captains’?” she asked next.

“O’ tha’s easy!” Lee chuckled. “Th’ Brigade’s fav’rit place t’ go is a club call’d th’ Lion’s Den. Th’ lackeys talk ‘bout it non-stop when they’ve ‘ad a few, an it sounds li’e the place t’ be for the mi’le men who kno’ wha’ is wha’ aroun’ ‘ere.”

“A night club?” Alexander asked behind a raised eyebrow.

“S’always bloody nigh’ ‘ere,” Lee corrected him with a grin, “so ‘s just’a club.”

“Y’ can’t jus’ walk in there though,” Lee continued, looking back at Godwyn. “There’s loads o’ pr’cedure n’ how y’ even approach ‘em.”

“But you can get us in, right?”

The ex-smuggler chuckled and made a show of an elaborate bow. “I’m your man, through n’ through!”

 

* *

 

Their course set, Lee slipped out into the darkness of Hogshead to find away into the Lion’s Den with the guarantee that he could get the job done. Godwyn retired to her cabin once the pilot had departed, but was alone for no more than two minutes when Sudulus was knocking at her door.

“A moment, Inquisitor?” he said through the door.

“Certainly.” Godwyn swung her feet back onto the floor.

She’d been about to fall asleep fully clothed… again. She should really stop doing that, though some hard-learned habits were difficult to break… and some scars cut too deep.

Clutching a dataslate to his chest, the little savant slid open the cabin door and quickly shut it behind him once he had entered, turning to address the Inquisitor in the cramped interior of her cabin with a conspirator’s glint in his eyes.

“Inquisitor Tanya von Draken, Ordo Hereticus,” he announced in a hushed tone, handing the dataslate to Godwyn. “It took time, but I managed to find some information about her that should prove itself quite useful in the days ahead, yes?”

Taking the offered slate, Godwyn scrolled through the contents. Service records, accolades – the standard information withheld by the Inquisitorial Archives and not available without the consent of a senior Inquisitor – not that it could stop Sudulus. According to the record, von Draken was forty-six years old – not much younger than Godwyn – and had a suitably uninteresting career that mainly revolved around persecuting heretical cults with extreme prejudice.

“She doesn’t exactly look like the helpful sort, does she?” Sudulus comment – showing that he’d taken the time to browse the contents of the witch hunter’s records before presenting them to Godwyn.

“And I am?” she asked mildly as her eyes continued to peel away at the other Inquisitor.

Sudulus made some reconciliatory remark that Godwyn didn’t particularly pay attention to. None-the-less, his observation had been accurate: von Draken’s records did not portray her as someone interested in co-operation.

“As you can see,” Sudulus continued, unable to restrain himself, “she’s taken to acting unilaterally with an exceptionally heavy-handed approach in most all of her dealings. As such, I would expect her to continue with her *blunt*” – he grimaced at the word – “approach to her duties here on Penumbra.”

“So my trusted savant is of the opinion that Inquisitor von Draken will be more hindrance than help?” Godwyn asked, handing him back the dataslate with a slight nod of thanks. “I notice that it didn’t say who mentored her either.”

“Hmm yes,” Sudulus scowled, the lack of information in that regard was a source of frustration to him; “we can only guess that some thick-skulled brigand was responsible for teaching her his ways, as crude as they are. Though as for a hindrance,” he shrugged, “one can only hope that she doesn’t blunder into our path.”

“Agreed.” With that, Godwyn made to dismiss him, but the savant seemed hesitant and lingered by the door.

“One more thing,” he said discreetly; “Lee’s suggestion of going to the Lion’s Den – are you certain this is wise? I fear it is great risk and not entirely necessary…”

“I don’t have much in the way of options,” Godwyn replied honestly, “though if I did I would certainly consider them.”

“But this is reckless!” Sudulus urged her to reconsider. “Lee’s confidence could easily be misplaced and you and everyone else could be walking head-first into a disaster!”

“It’s a risk,” Godwyn admitted, pushing the savant to become even more insistent, “but you’ll be overseeing the operation,” she smiled warmly at the old man, “and I have to trust that you know what you’re doing.”

With a tired sigh, her savant hung his head.

“I don’t like it, Godwyn,” he said; “in fact, I don’t like a single thing about this damned world, but I know my place and I know my duty. If you must go through with this, then I will see it done.”

[Lady_Canoness]

*part 4*

 

 

She called it control.

The light of a half-dozen monitors and shifting read-out displays flickered across the cracks in his face in the dark room and reflected in his watery eyes as they traced the outlines on the screen.

It didn’t feel like control.

Folds of loose skin hanging from his neck bobbed in time with his shallow breathing and wiggled every time he turned his head, while strokes of his fingers passing over plastic keys rattled like rainfall in his ears over the background hum of electricity coursing through the unlit room.

It felt more like watching a spectacle where the script depended on one’s level of concentration, and the slightest lapse in attentiveness could turn a triumphant masterpiece into an unforgiving tragedy with disastrous consequences that dominated the life of spectator even after the play was finished… or at least it felt that way to Sudulus.

“Control to all elements, check in,” he spoke into the comm. as all six screens cut into different images as if seen through the eyes of six different individuals.

“Firs’ check n’in,” Lee Normandy’s drawling voice slid into the dark room as if the pilot was within the walls themselves.

“Second, checking in,” the battle sister’s sharp voice quickly followed the pilot’s like an axe sinking into wood.

“Third and fourth, standing by,” Nerf said between colourful blasts of loud music and shouting voices that momentarily brought life to the darkness.

“Fifth, checking in,” Alexander said in earnest, quickly cutting the feed before taking too long.

“Six, ready,” Illias’ flat, lifeless voice said with perfect clarity against an utterly silent background.

Sudulus nodded to himself. All the actors and actresses were in position in the wings, and only one thing remained before the spectacle could begin. He swivelled round in his chair to the back of the small room where a dark figure watched the six screens in silence.

“Everything is prepared, Inquisitor,” Sudulus reported to his superior, “shall I give the order to begin?”

Her arms crossed, Godwyn’s blue eyes shifted between the flickering screens, studying each in turn.

The first, second, and fifth screens were all looking into the lamp-lit streets of Hogshead and watching the tides of people drifting this way and that. The third and fourth screens were somewhere inside a building with strobe lights, pulsing streamers, and hectic mélange of provocatively dressed revellers indulging in unadulterated ecstasy. The sixth and last screen showed no movement and no life, and fixated solely and an array of blinking panels, crossed wires, and metal pipes.

She nodded. It was time.

 

* *

 

The Carolingian. The name was like a rash through the slums of Hogshead.

One of the Brigade’s most notorious crime lords, the Carolingian was known throughout the night city for his obsession with wealth and profit, as well as his insufferable disdain for those below him. The only value inherent in human-beings rested in their exploitation, or so said the crime lord, and, while profitable individuals would be maintained and cherished, he made no qualms with exhausting less profitable sources. Permanently.

Hogshead, and indeed the Imperium itself, were filled with men like him, and while some would eventually meet justice by some blood-soaked turn of fate, most escape the wrath that haunts them and live on as if rewarded for their crimes. This man, however, would not be so fortunate.

As well as wealth, the Carolingian prided himself on information, and when Lee went looking for who might know the whereabouts of a mysterious and dangerous individual all answers came back the same:

The Carolingian was their man, though getting him would not be easy.

 

* *

 

As Interrogator Alexander understood it, his mentor’s plan of action was quite straight-forward: Lee, sister Biranna, and he would watch the Lion’s Den nightclub from outside, while Nerf and Mercy would infiltrate the Carolingian’s hideout and wait for Illias to cut the club’s power from the underground generators. With the power cut, Mercy would then find and subdue the target and bring him out with Nerf’s aid while Lee, Brianna, and Alexander himself provided support. If Mercy happened to get into trouble, then they were to withdraw with her to a predetermined fallback position and await further instructions from Sudulus and Inquisitor Godwyn. Simple really, and, as his first real operation, it was also quite exciting, though admittedly Alexander wished he could be inside the Lion’s Den for a better view of the action.

The streets outside the Lion’s Den were teaming with activity, and a fantastic contrast to the other parts of Hogshead he’d seen.

Everywhere he looked there all manners of people engaging in all sorts of activities: peddlers displaying all sorts of wares both bizarre and mundane while street-vendors canvassed their services with great proclamations to passersby; merchants dressed in exotic fashions while brutish-looking bodyguards cleared the way before them and urchins darted about and frolicked in their wake; the down-trodden poor who moved almost unnoticed beneath the crowds while temptresses and courtesans cooed and beckoned to passersby in caged scaffolds that dangled amongst the lamps overhead...

It was life, pure humanity, like nothing he had ever heard or seen. Both wildly exciting and frighteningly unnerving at the same time, and like a child at the circus Alexander found himself biting his lip in anticipation of what would happen next.

“Why do they keep looking at me like that?” Brianna hissed from somewhere beside him and pulled his attention away from the crowd.

The battle sister was standing a few feet away from him with her back against a building and her eyes looking upwards at something Alexander did not see. He hadn’t noticed her approach, but he was thankful for her company all the same. Having someone he recognized close-by amidst a sea of strangers was oddly reassuring in a way he couldn’t easily describe.

“Who?” he asked without thinking – only afterward realizing how foolish the question was.

“Who else?” she replied with particularly scalding look; “Them!”

She was talking about the harlots, and when Alexander glanced up towards their dangling perches he could see that several of the tawdry attired women were leering down at the sister with eyes that could rend flesh. A sharp contrast, the sanctified sister preaching her creed and the self-gratifying seductresses who tempted with every move, and one he’d entertain to explore if given the time, which at the moment he wasn’t.

“Maybe because you’re looking at them,” he suggested, hoping to remove her attention from the caged prostitutes and avoid a scene.

The sister grumbled something most likely involving the sanctity of chastity, but Alexander more pressing matters on his mind than listening to the sister’s sermons.

He liked the sister and she wasn’t much older than he was, but despite this he hope that being in the company of an Inquisitor would soon break her of her engrained prejudices before they got her into trouble. She was hardly inconspicuous as it was, what with her short white-platinum hair and her pretty features, but her many intolerances and choice of attire made her all the more obvious.

Denied her power armour, the exiled sister had pieced together a suit of black plate armour which she had adorned with a variety of hand-crafted holy symbols and seals. Crudely made but lovingly maintained, she had draped a crimson sash around her neck and shoulders as well as wound rosary beads around her gauntlets and held the whole thing together with a mishmash of belted straps. Alexander could admire her for her creativity and conviction, though at the same time he could bemoan her for her impracticality. The ceremonial chainsword slung across her back was thankfully covered by a drab cloak (for the sake of subtlety, she said), though the holstered laspistol that swung at her side was clearly visible with every clanking footstep she took.

“Remember to watch the street,” he reminded her somewhat brusquely. “We need to be ready to assist the others inside.”

In response, the sister seemed disagreeable at best, and Alexander found himself wishing once again that he was inside the Lion’s Den with Mercy and Nerf.

 

 

Nerf would sooner have smashed his head repeatedly into an anvil than willingly come in here, but then again being in the Lion’s Den night club would probably have the same effect. The flashing lights and pulsing strobes were making his eyes sting something fierce, and the noise – he could swear that artillery barrages were quieter than the Den’s so called ‘music’. He could hardly hear himself think, let alone hear what other people were saying.

And what was with all the dancing?

Standing at a small table while leaning against the banister overlooking a vast circular dance-floor beneath him, all Nerf could see through the flashing lights was an ocean of bobbing heads and waving arms that spun around and around and around through the half-light like the remains of a bad hangover.

He didn’t understand it, though across the table from the Catachan, Mercy was relishing every moment in the club as she immersed herself in the atmosphere and drank deeply from the thrill in the air. She moved the curves of her long body like a snake charmed by the rhythm, longing to give in to passion, while her face remained supernaturally serene and her violet eyes flowed over the muscular man who fidgeted opposite to her.

“We’ve got a job to do,” Nerf reminded her aloud, though even he couldn’t hear the words that came out of his mouth.

Her lips curved into a smile beneath her freckled nose, and she fluttered her eyes longingly as she tilted her head back to reveal the white of her long neck before curving her back and seemingly flowing forward towards the Catachan – drawing his eyes inadvertently down to the perfectly formed breasts underneath the killer’s form-fitting shadow-suit.

Damn her – why did she have to be so sensual?

Her smile deepened as her long, pink tongue slipped from between her parting lips and caressed the air just inches from his nose.

She was such a tease.

She knew they had a job to do, and she knew she was the one to do it.

The assassin drew back and fixed Nerf with her deep, enthralling eyes. He scowled. The sooner they could leave this place the better. What was taking that tech-priestess so long?

 

 

Backup systems were always the first to go. In this case, a simple diesel combustion generator. Her human hands working side-by side with her mechanical appendages, Illias had the primary ignition and fail-safe trigger dismantled to their component parts in less than two minutes. To be sure, she also sabotaged the primary combustion chamber to overload, and kill whoever tried to start it up again. Effective: it would take a day’s work to deconstruct the generator and repair the damage that had been done.

Her first task complete, the tech-priestess pushed herself upright and continued on to find the primary power-source.

As per her estimations, the Lion’s Den, like most of Hogshead, was powered from subterranean generators located amidst the kilometres of crumbling tunnels, ancient basements and sewers. Hazardous and foolish and just asking for catastrophe, the stupidity of the locals was much like she assessed, though more than stupid they were also woefully negligent, and as the tech-priestess wove her way through what reason would dictate should be heavily guarded she was greeted with no resistance of any sort. Out of sight, out of mind: did the people on the surface really think that no-one would attack what they so obviously left vulnerable? Perhaps they were counting on the equal idiocy of an invader, or that any interloper would be confused by the misdirection of the labyrinth of tunnels under ground? Yet what kind of imbecile would be misled by a pipe that held no charge?

Following the ionized piping along the dimly lit underground, through passages that looked to be millennia old, Illias found her way to through the silent catacombs of Hogshead in a matter of minutes, and was met with mild surprise when she found a rusted old security door standing between her and her goal. Perhaps these people weren’t so inept after all, for, while it was old, the door was sturdy enough to withstand the tampering of the unskilled and the inept – practically every inhabitant of this world, so far as she had seen.

Prying the face-plate from the locking-mechanism with her servo arms, Illias calmly disengaged the power-locks without incident and swung the door open on grinding hinges. How crude.

What lay beyond the door succeeded in catching her attention, however, as the stone and dirt of the previous tunnels was quickly replaced by the metal passageways of what appeared to be a ship embedded in the rock.

Very interesting; how, she wondered, had it ended up there?

The passages were in poor repair and wore their age badly, but at least they were mostly intact, and, seeing that the intrusive piping led inwards into the derelict, the hooded tech-priestess didn’t have to guess as to where the Lion’s Den drew its power. Sure enough, not two minutes later, Illias entered the wreck’s ancient reactor chamber and fount it illuminated by the bright glow of a single 64-di plasma reactor bound behind powerful void shielding.

Impressive. She took a moment to admire the sight of one of the Omnissiah’s most beneficent blessings. An inextinguishable power source, plasma reactors burned with the power of a miniature sun and could generate energy for thousands of years without fluxuation. Once initiated and properly contained, plasma reactors required little in the way of maintenance and could produce immense amounts of energy – even a 64-di (a relatively small model) could generate more than enough energy to power several dozen hab-blocks or a small space-faring vessel.

The difficulty posed by plasma reactors, however, was that once the chain-reaction in the plasma core was initiated it was impossible to stop. Entirely self-sustaining, a plasma core would burn indefinitely, and as such could never be shut down unless it was forced into overload through containment failure, though the resulting explosion from a 64-di core would vaporise the derelict and everything else within a half-kilometre radius. Shutting the core down was therefore not an option.

To deny the Lion’s Den power, the energy output of the plasma reactor would have to be rerouted into something else.

Severing the connection between the reactor and the Lion’s Den would deprive the night club of power, but would also overload the reactor through the gradual energy build-up, and was thus not a solution. Cycling the energy back into the reactor’s void shielding was a typical stalling manoeuvre, but wouldn’t be able to contain itself for more than a few minutes before needing an outlet for the energy build up, and thus was no more of a solution than severing the connection. Severing the connection and then dissipating the energy build-up into the ground could work, in theory, on a smaller reactor, but even with a 64-bi plasma core the ground would be ionized past capacity and would be lethal to Illias and just about everyone within a five-hundred meter radius, and thus was not a solution.

The derelict vessel, however, if still sufficiently intact, would likely be able to sustain the reactor’s charge. The ship’s systems were probably decrepit and would burn out in short order once the energy-flow was redirected, but even so the ship would be able to contain the charge better than anything else available.

Intoning the blessings of the Omnissiah over the venerable machine-spirits of the vessel, the tech-priestess set about the task demanded of her, and in a matter of minutes the lights on the streets flickered and died.

 

The lights went out, and, for a fraction of a second, Nerf was allowed to savour the welcome change of total silence in the Lion’s Den: as if the Emperor Himself had decided to cut him a break.

And then the screaming started.

The swell of panic rose through the Den at a feverish pace, and in no time at all hundreds of voices were screaming and shouting as people ran blindly through the total darkness.

He couldn’t see them running, but he could feel their terror as revellers were trapped in the darkness and trampled over people they could not see in a vain attempt to find the light. Soon there were shots like cracks of lighting and screams of pain as fearful patrons drew concealed weapons in a bid to defend themselves from the mounting chaos, but the panic was contagious, and in moments the struggle for escape became one of survival as the terror struck occupants of the Den clawed and tore at each other like rats in a trap. The Brigade guards fought to restore order, and lamp-packs flashed on as bursts of automatic-fire cut through the screaming. If it worked, however, was anyone’s guess as the suffocating blackness only seemed to compound upon itself with every passing moment.

Not having moved since the lights went out, Nerf calmly lit one of the huge cigars he kept in his coat pocket and planted it firmly between his teeth with a puff of sweet smelling smoke. A body came stumbling through the darkness towards the flash of the match, but quickly fell away with a gurgling moan as it collided with twelve inches of folded Catachan steel. Wiping the blade on his pant-leg, Nerf took another long drag on his cigar. Poor, dead idiot.

“Mercy – ” Nerf plucked the cigar from his lips; it was time to act “ – you ready?”

He didn’t need to see the murderess’ eager face and striking smile to know the answer. Reaching into the inside pockets of his dock jacket, Nerf retrieved the assassin’s weapons and placed the paired neuro-gauntlets onto the table between them.

“Good luck,” he said from behind another waft of smoke, but the assassin was already gone.

 

“Activate the infra-red,” Godwyn murmured from over the shoulder of her savant. “I want to see what they’re doing in there.”

As directed, Sudulus flicked two switches on the tactical display, and the previously black screens of the third and fourth elements were quickly plunged into a deep red.

The third element, Nerf, was hardly moving as people ran blindly by him in the dark, but the fourth element was moving almost too quickly to follow.

Flowing like liquid through the crowd, Mercy swept past panicking people with amazing agility while dodging wildly firing patrons and bypassing guards who were trying to form some sort of perimeter.

“My word, but she is good!” Sudulus exclaimed with a grin as the image on the screen sped past an oblivious Brigadier who was attempting to secure a door.

“She can see perfectly in the dark?” Godwyn asked, now curious as to just how far the killer could push herself.

“It would certainly appear so, yes,” Sudulus replied, still grinning. He liked the assassin, and little things like this made him like her even more.

Momentarily alone in what looked like a backroom corridor, Mercy paused, and on the edge of the wide-angled screen the onlookers in the nest could see the needle-like talons of the neuro-gauntlets slide out into place. The target must be near.

Sudulus wetted his lips, and glanced back over his shoulder at the Inquisitor.

Mercy was on the move again, up a narrow flight of stairs and through a door into what looked like a guard-room where the outlines of two armed men standing near a far door. Startled, they turned, but she was on them in a blink of an eye and both fell silently before they had time to respond.

The savant was shaking his head in amazement. “Incredible,” he said, “I never thought I’d see such a display!”

Godwyn wasn’t watching, however. Her attention was drawn to the first element’s tactical display, where a column of six armoured vehicles were pushing through the streets towards the Lion’s Den: six vehicles that bore the distinctive icon of the capital ‘I’.

 

Half the lights in the streets had flickered and died not more than two minutes ago, yet the madness unfolding in the Lion’s Den made the panic on the streets seem pale in comparison. Assuming nothing worse than the typical gangland foul play and caring nothing for the screams coming from within the Lion’s Den, most people on the streets made to quickly leave the area, while merchants and brokers did what they could to prevent anyone from carrying away their more valuable goods under the cover of the mass exodus.

Further down the street and a good distance from the sister and Godwyn’s apprentice, Lee had been eyeing a particularly attractive nude sculpt that he though would fit perfectly on the cock-pit dash, though unfortunately the peddler was paying too much attention for him snatch it just yet. The boss didn’t mind his petty theft all that much (though Sudulus usually made a loud display denouncing his latest acquisitions whenever he got the chance) and all was forgiven so long as he didn’t cause any trouble by getting himself caught.

Shots rang out somewhere overhead and sent people ducking for cover. Now was his chance. Swooping by the peddler’s stall amidst the confusion, Lee swept the sculpture into the breast of his flight jacket and ducked down with the rest of the rapidly dispersing crowd leaving the proprietor none the wiser.

All too easy, he told himself with a smile, and escaped further down the poorly lit street. He had not gotten far, however, when suddenly the darkness lit up as bright as day and he had to shield his eyes from the glare, while his ears filled with the snarling roar of powerful diesel engines speeding down the street towards him. Following the crowd, he dashed to the roadside just in time to watch as six black, armoured vehicles powered past at terrific speed.

“I ‘ope y’re seein’ this…” he whispered into the comm.

 

Alexander was relieved to find that Brianna hadn’t gone very far by the time the lights went out. He wouldn’t admit it to her, or anyone else, but having the battle sister close-by boosted his confidence a great deal.

“Remember to stick to the plan,” he said to himself as much as to the sister as he waded towards her through the rapidly dispersing crowd. A scowl told him that she knew, and she waited in silence with her hand planted firmly on the handle of her pistol.

Shots erupted from somewhere in the night sky and sent nearby people ducking for cover. From beside him, he felt the sister tense draw her weapon.

“Stay your hand!” he cautioned her with a warning hand on her armoured forearm. “Our orders are clear.”

His instructions netted him a contemptuous look, but she kept her weapon lowered.

“If we are attacked, I will defend myself,” she made it clear that she wouldn’t take orders from him even as panic gripped the shadow-filled streets.

He wasn’t about to argue, but Alexander sensed that his words would be heeded. He was a member of the Holy Inquisition after all, and that would likely ensure co-operation more-so than his inexperienced leadership.

He didn’t have time to dwell on it as a spear of blazing light accompanied by the roar of powerful engines yanked his attention to further down the street where the shape of numerous bulky-looking vehicles were growing ever larger behind the glare of burning headlights.

“Who – ?” Brianna began, raising a hand to shield her eyes from the intense brightness, but Alexander didn’t need to see the vehicles to know that something was wrong.

“Hang back!” he shouted, grabbing for the sister lest she make herself seen. “They’re not ours!”

He saw a question forming in her face, but the Interrogator pushed it away with an earnest shake of his head.

“They’re not ours!” he repeated, the sinking feeling growing in his gut as he beckoned the sister to follow him with the rest of the crowd that was rapidly scattering before the oncoming vehicles.

She followed somewhat reluctantly, but soon they were both running in time with the flood of people until they had safely turned into an alleyway and broken line of sight with the vehicles.

“Who are they!?” Brianna demanded once they had stopped and Alexander was gulping down deep breaths to calm the heart hammering in his chest. He couldn’t be certain but he had a pretty good idea, and with the tremor of dread building in his gut he could well guess that he didn’t want to be around when whoever was inside those vehicles did whatever they were intending to do.

“What about the others!?” the sister continued, her eyes digging into him as if searching for answers buried in his flesh.

James Alexander shook his head. Godwyn needed to know about this.

“Command,” he straightened up and called in with the comm. bud in his ear, “we’ve spotted – ”

++“I know,”++ Inquisitor Godwyn’s voice cut him off abruptly, ++“get to the rally point. Lee will already be there.”++

“Inquisitor?” he asked for confirmation, not sure whether he should believe what he was hearing. Were they aborting the operation?

++“We’ll salvage what we can,” she continued, “but right now I need you and sister Brianna to get to the rally point.”++

 

The armoured vehicles had pulled up at the entrance to the Lion’s Den and heavily armoured passengers were disembarking in rapid succession before massing at the doors. They had lost the initiative

“Inquisitor?” Sudulus asked again; “What are your orders?”

She shook her head: the operation had gone beyond her control.

“Call Nerf and Mercy back,” Godwyn instructed him. “Get them out of there before it is too late.”

 

“Understood,” Nerf replied into his comm. between the periodic screams and burst of gunfire that still tore through the inside of the Lion’s Den.

After a few minutes without power, the chaos was starting to die down, though only barely. There were still fights and mad scrambles to escape, but the Catachan imagined that most people were by now cowering in corners to try and wait it out – a particular luxury that was now gone to him. From what he had been told there was company outside, and armed troops and heavy vehicles could only mean one thing: the company was going to be coming inside, and, more than likely, they’d be shooting when they did. Nerf had to escape before that happened, but he wasn’t about to go anywhere without Mercy, and – if he knew her like he thought he did – Mercy wasn’t about to go anywhere without getting what she came for.

Groping his way through the dark, the Catachan fighting knife found the throat of someone carrying a lamp-pack and a stub gun. A good start.

Not knowing that their fellow guard was dead, Nerf shouldered his way through the packed night-club following behind the yellow lamp-pack beam with little trouble. He didn’t know where Mercy had gone, and since she couldn’t talk there was no easy way of reaching her.

It was time to do things the hard way.

No sooner had he slipped into a back-room corridor, however, then a tremendous explosion rocked the Lion’s Den as the front doors were blown open and tongues of glowing orange flame lashed out into darkness and lit up the shadows with a hellish glow. Behind him things were about to get hot.

 

She felt the explosion rumble through the walls, but deep inside the nightclub’s private lounges Mercy paid it little attention as she waited in dark.

Things were quieter here. The spaces were tight and the tone equally frantic. She could smell the fear amidst the sharper scent of desperation on every body that passed her hiding place. Already she could imagine the salty taste of their sweat on her tongue, the warm clammy feeling of their fearful skin on her fingers, and the rush of hot blood washing over her hands. The thought of so many being so close tugged at her mind and begged her to release control and give in to bloody sensations for which she yearned – to indulge herself in her gore-soaked fantasies.

Three men had already died at her hands, but they had not satisfied her. She did not feel them die. It had been artless, cold; a snapped neck – nothing more. Why she deprived herself so small a pleasure she did not know, but she was here to capture, not kill. Her prey was near, though as much as she desired feel his life slip away between her fingers she could not kill him. The Inquisitor had been very clear.

The sound of running feet drew her attention as a guard came dashing around a corner, following the beam of his bouncing lamp-pack, and tore past her – oblivious that he had passed within arm’s reach of the killer – before disappearing again through another door leading away from her.

By now they all knew that something was wrong, but had yet to clue into the fact that this was no mere gangland turf squabble, and that their leader was indeed threatened. Streams of chattering gunfire were starting to echo up through the walls and in the room beyond she could hear raised voices.

Melting back into the shadows, the assassin bided her time.

 

Events at the Lion’s Den had escalated rapidly to the point where they were now far beyond Godwyn’s ability to predict or control. The vehicles had deployed flamer teams, and as she watched the new arrivals launched an all-out assault on the Lion’s Den.

Appalled by what he was witnessing and his own inability to put a stop to it, Sudulus complained loudly while the Inquisitor, on the other hand, remained almost entirely silent as her eyes flickered across all six screens in rapid succession.

It had to be von Draken – only the witch hunter would attempt something so brazen – but how did she have the resources? What was she trying to accomplish?

A surge of anger fought its way upwards through her chest – What did it really matter? That thick-skulled bitch was in the process of burning down her best lead!

“Where is Mercy?” she snapped, her voice dropping dangerously low even though it nearly shook with anger.

Sudulus couldn’t say for sure. She wasn’t withdrawing, but she wasn’t advancing either; could it be that she was merely waiting for the opportunity?

“Impress upon her *exactly* how dire the situation has become, will you?”

The savant did not disobey. The attackers were pushing their way into the Lion’s Den and burning everything in their way. Waiting for the opportune moment was no longer a luxury they could afford.

 

Things were getting bad – real bad! Being turned around and around in the dark with a gun battle raging behind him, Nerf was starting to fear that he was looking in the wrong spot. Why couldn’t this building make more sense?

Pounding up a lopsided staircase, Nerf emerged into another decaying corridor with dust-caked windows overlooking an alley to one side, a rickety wooden wall to the other, and a closed door opposite to him. The further he went the more certain he became that Mercy wasn’t here. Losing the patience required for caution, he stormed the door and bashed it open with his boot – the lamp-pack underslung on his stubber sweeping room as he entered. A fire-escape; how ironic. He’d found a way out, at least.

The sound of boots racing up the staircase behind him jogged his attention as he instinctively spun with his back to the nearest wall and snapped off his lamp-pack just as an armed brigadier banged open the loose door and marched through without so much as passing his light over the rest of the room. He was breathing in gasps and muttering curses under his breath, but the Brigadier seemed to know where he was going, and that was good enough for Nerf.

Stalking after him like a ghost, Nerf followed him from a safe distance, though as it became clear that the man with the bellows-breath wasn’t about to lead him where he needed to go, Nerf decided to take drastic measures. He flicked on his lamp-pack.

“Hey!” he quickly shone the light up into the man’s face as he spun around. “What are you doing back here!? We have to get out! Now!”

The heavy breather sputtered something unintelligible in response as he quickly shielded his eyes from the light. “Get that sodding thing outta me face!” he shouted back, recoiling from the light like a slug from the flame.

“Sorry,” Nerf did his best to sound apologetic yet frantic at the same time, “This stuff’s getting real, y’know? W-why aren’t we leaving?”

In the pitch dark with their lights shining around each other’s feet, the Brigadier did not notice that he was speaking to a stranger.

“Run if you want, but without the boss and we’re as good as dead!” the other man growled reproachfully, turning his back on Nerf and continuing on in a direction away from the fire escape.

Keeping in his assumed character, Nerf copied the choice swear-words he’d heard his temporary comrade utter earlier and followed after him with plodding steps. With any luck this man would take him to the target, and hopefully right into Mercy.

 

“Lee, Interrogator Alexander, and Brianna have successfully reported without incident,” at last, Sudulus provided Inquisitor Godwyn with some reassuring news.

It wasn’t much, but it was something.

“Inquisitor…” the savant turned to face the Imperial agent who stood silently behind him. “What are we to do about…” his face contorted somewhat as he struggled to find the correct word, “… that *other* Inquisitor?”

The Kin-Slayer was silent. The demands of her role were clear and her course of action was set, though the consequences were still unforeseeable and would remain so until whatever was happened at the Lion’s Den was resolved.

“I want to meet with von Draken,” Godwyn replied, “alone and in private. Can you see that it happens?”

Sudulus nodded gravely. “That I can do,” he said, “though might I add that I dare to hope that this can yet be resolved without further conflict?”

“Conflict is upon us, whether we want it or not.”

 

In what seemed like no time at all the intruders had pushed through the Brigadiers guarding the Lion’s Den and were hurriedly setting the place aflame while rearguard units engaged disorganized Brigadier reinforcements in a bloody massacre in the streets where the fighting quickly spread as numerous armed factions to the opportunity to wage war for their own benefit. Inside, the Lion’s Den was in utter chaos as flames engulfed the ancient structure while the few surviving Brigadiers raced to escape the spreading conflagration through smoke-choked corridors, and with still no sign of Mercy or her target, Nerf was starting to get desperate.

“Where’s the Carolingian!?” he hollered as the heavy breathing Brigadier stopped a few paces ahead of the Catachan and was now coughing and sputtering as the smoke grew thicker around them.

“W-who!?” he managed to shout back, though he quickly doubled over into a coughing fit and braced himself against the wall.

“Right…” Nerf said mostly to himself – this was getting him nowhere. Sliding his knife free from underneath his coat, he slit the man’s throat in a single, decisive motion, and threw him to the floor. “You’re useless.”

He stepped over the gurgling guard and left him to die in the dark. He needed to find Mercy, and quick.

Keeping low with a handkerchief over his face to avoid the worst of the smoke, Nerf came across another suffocating guard not a moment later.

“Where is the Carolingian!?” he demanded again, but when the guard couldn’t answer him he finished him off in the same manner as he had the last and stalked off with blood on his hands.

His eyes were starting to sting. Nerf didn’t know how much more of this he could survive, nor did he know how much of it Mercy could take, but he knew that he had to get her out with or without their target. There was simply no way that he’d leave the assassin behind.

The rattling bark of gunfire shattered the smoke-filled air somewhere in front of him and Nerf threw himself flat against the wall as bullets scythed through the air and thudded into the corridor around him. Reversing the grip on his gun, Nerf flicked off the lamp-pack and returned fire with the stubber into the gloom only to be rewarded with… silence. Nothing.

Keeping low, the Catachan commando advanced in a crouch along the wall.

The smoke was getting thicker and his eyes stung to the point of watering, but even so he wasn’t about to give up now. He couldn’t.

Holding the handkerchief over his face with one hand and the stubber in the other, Nerf shimmied up to the corner, and after a brief pause gingerly poked his head around to look into the darkness. He couldn’t see much, though just at the edges of his blurred vision was the Brigadier’s corpse sprawled on its back.

Good enough.

He was just about to keep moving when a familiar shadow appeared in the corner of his eye.

 

Heaving a great sigh, Sudulus leaned back in his chair and passed his metal hands over his bald scalp.

“Nerf and Mercy are out,” he said, sounding relief at knowing that they hadn’t lost anyone. “A close thing, but they’re okay.”

Godwyn accepted the information with a nod.

“And the Carolingian?” she asked, but Sudulus shrugged.

“No sign,” he said; “it is as if he weren’t even there.”

 

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

[Aqui]

Looking forward to the next bit :ph34r:

[Lady_Canoness]

Good to hear Aquilanus :)

 

There will be more time between parts this-time around (life has a funny way of doing stuff like that) but I'll do my best to get it out in a reasonable time frame while maintain consistency with the rest of the story.

[Tutteman]

I just thought I'd say that I'm liking the story! At some point I will find the time to read part one. But Part Two is fabulous ;)

[Aqui]

Good to hear Aquilanus :whoops:

 

There will be more time between parts this-time around (life has a funny way of doing stuff like that) but I'll do my best to get it out in a reasonable time frame while maintain consistency with the rest of the story.

 

I hear you on that. It's been nearly a year since I've had any time/inclination to carry on And we all fall down, although I do have 3 days off coming up on Friday, so I might have a stab at it ;)

[Lady_Canoness]

Thanks Tutteman! I'm glad to hear that my work and my characters can be enjoyed the second time around without having to have known them from the first!

 

And I couldn't agree more, Aquilanus, though I have been fortunate enough to keep my interest in the Inquisition and the Inquisition II, and been able to keep the ball rolling! My previous work on the Saint Ascendant and the Fallen Saint became so hard a slog that I just couldn't get through it. Though on a side note, if anyone ever wanted to see the origins of Nerf and Mercy, then they can be found there... (burried in the cavernous hollows of the Ordos Inquisition forums)

 

Enough of the past! Part 5 is read to be released!

 

_____________________

 

*par 5*

 

The black skies over Hogshead had long since grown quiet in the aftermath of the attack on the Lion’s Den when Inquisitor Godwyn and her student departed from Meridian several hours later in the sleek black service car, and a sense of order returned to the crumbling night city as the Brigade rallied to regain control of the streets. Mistaking the lack of gunfire in the air for calm was a stretch, however, as anarchy and chaos still swirled like whirlwinds through parts of the city, and though the mysterious forces that razed one of the Brigade’s most notorious strongholds to he ground had vanished as soon as the deed was done, there were no shortages of pretenders looking to take advantage of others when the opportunity arose. None-the-less, the fighting had been fierce for a couple of hours, during which time Godwyn regrouped with her team and decided to keep their heads down until the violence had washed over and they could once again move freely throughout the city.

During that time, Sudulus had managed to make contact with the Witch Hunter, von Draken, and Godwyn had arranged to parlay face to face in a private location. She suspected the Witch Hunter’s involvement in the attack, and with good reason: the emblem of the Inquisition was as plain as day on the insurgents’ vehicles, and the records that Sudulus had acquired showed that von Draken preferred obtrusive antics over the more subtle and delicate approach.

Was it enough for Godwyn to condemn her? No, though it was enough for her to enact of the Inquisition’s most ancient rites, and confront her in person while in the field.

Beside her in the dimly lit cab of the service car Alexander’s hands tightly gripped the steering wheel as his eyes darted between the road glowing in the headlights and the Inquisitor’s face reflecting the red light of the instruments. She had told him little of von Draken other than her name and that she was of the Ordo Hereticus, though quickly gleaning what was under the surface, he became perturbed at though of the Witch Hunter becoming a potentially dangerous adversary. Like most young Inquisitors, he had seen little enough of the Imperium to believe in the clear distinction of good and evil, right and wrong, and allies and enemies. Godwyn once believed as he did, but an agent of the Ordos would learn otherwise over time – the hard lesson of moral ambiguity – or not learn, and perish as a result.

He had asked her about it, why she was determined to meet the other woman alone without backup, but Godwyn had little to tell him.

“Feign weakness when you are strong, and appear strong when you are vulnerable,” she had told him as she checked over her heavy pistol and holstered it under her shoulder, “and in doing so you can learn to predict your enemy whilst you remain hidden from them.”

Nodding slowly with his eyes on the road as his master fastened the Icon of the Just round her neck so that it hung just beneath the Inquisitor’s rosette, Alexander could not help furrowing his brow as a frown spread across his face.

“What if she plans to kill you?” he asked, glancing at the Inquisitor as she prepared to stand without her allies.

“She doesn’t,” Godwyn replied. “If she did, she would have done it already.” The Interrogator gave her a questioning look. “She’s not that subtle.”

 

The meet was to take place in a small tavern in a grubby part of Hogshead called the White Heart. Crammed amidst the crumbling hovels and crooked streets deep within the lower regions of the city, the White Heart was agreed upon as a meeting place because it was far beneath the eyes of the Brigade or any other major gangs, and was off the radar for enterprising off-worlders or anyone else looking to cash in on information. Lee had heard about it almost by mistake, though once he’d taken the time to better acquaint himself with the area (something easily done through buying drinks and playing cards) he assured the Inquisitor that despite the rough edges there was no safer place to talk in private. Even so, however, Godwyn had come prepared.

Stepping out into the quiet avenue just up the block from the White Heart, the black service car pulled away and left Godwyn standing alone in a forest of desiccated buildings. Both before her and behind her the streets were empty and lit only by the occasional lamp or orange glow of a smoking torch, giving the impression of walking through a great cavern instead of underneath an open sky.

“Can you hear me?” she whispered, apparently to herself, for anyone watching would not see another soul to who she could be speaking.

“I can hear you, Inquisitor,” Sudulus’ voice answered inside her head from where he was waiting in the nest.

After losing her left ear and having it replaced by a bionic enhancement many years ago, Godwyn had implanted a uniquely crafted micro-bead into her head that, once activated by a wireless control in the ship-board nest, could allow Sudulus to hear as if through the Inquisitor’s own ear and speak directly into her head without being overheard. This allowed communication between the two even when the savant was not present, and, if coupled with a servo-eye, meant that the savant could essentially see and hear everything the Inquisitor could while remaining completely undetected. Naturally, the system had limitations, though they had yet to test the true extent of its capabilities.

“Good,” Godwyn replied, not needing to speak any louder than if she was speaking to herself; “I’m going in.”

The armour-weave of her coat shifted and flexed as she walked, and the mass of three pistols holstered and bound tightly against her body seemed to add extra weight to each of her steps, but Godwyn kept her calm and her wits keenly about her as she approached the White Heart. She was hoping to avoid any unpleasantness, but she was prepared in the event that it could not be avoided.

A plasma pistol, heavy pistol, and machine pistol were all primed and ready, as were the more covert trappings of the Inquisitor, though whether or not these tools would be needed, or even useful, was known only to the Emperor as Godwyn opened the rough iron door under the crudely worded sign ‘The White Heart’ and stepped through.

The tavern inside was gloomy as if carved from the walls of a cave, and she had hardly closed the heavy door behind her when her nostrils were assailed by the pungent reek of wood smoke and body odour. Seemingly unbothered by the smell, a motley collection of dishevelled patrons skulked around a clutter of rickety tables gulping down mouthfuls of putrid-looking grog under the flickering light of smoke-belching braziers, while a scarred and heavily implanted barkeep leaned his pock-marked forearms on a shoddy wooden counter and carried on a hushed conversation with a hunched, hooded figure that sat with his back to the door. None of them looked up as the Inquisitor entered, and, quickly scanning the room, Godwyn could see no trace of the Witch Hunter. It was the agreed upon time, however, and Godwyn suspected that she was already here… somewhere.

Keeping her coat tight about her, she approached the bar without drawing the eyes of its keeper and placed two gloved hands upon its rough wooden surface.

His eyes glanced in her direction from beneath his folded brow. “Whatch’u wan’?” his voice was a whisper but he threw it like a challenge, cutting open the stuffy silence like a blade puncturing a blister.

“I’m here to meet someone,” Godwyn replied, her voice both calm and direct – as striking a contrast from the barkeep’s slur as its owner was from the rest of the mongrel clientele.

The disfigured barkeeper gave her a long look with his muddy eyes lingering on the rosette pinned beneath her throat – a pause that indicated familiarity – before grunting something of an assent and walking round from behind the bar; beckoning her to follow as he did so. He led her up a creaking old staircase to a roughly circular loft forming a ring under the ceiling and looked down over the tavern floor below. Almost completely in shadow, it came as no surprise to Godwyn that she had not seen it when she first entered, and even as the barkeep led her across the worn wooden floor it took her a few seconds to notice that there were a half-dozen deep alcoves carved into the stone walls that were occupied by sturdy looking tables and padded benches. All these alcoves were empty, however, save for the one sitting opposite the stairs that had a clear view of the bar on the lower level, where a single figure sat waiting in the flickering light of a nearby torch, but even from a distance Godwyn could recognize the angular, pale face of the sole occupant as belonging to Inquisitor Tanya von Draken.

Following her through the gloom with dark eyes, the Witch Hunter said nothing as Godwyn took the seat across from her and sent the barkeep on his way.

“You wanted to talk?” the dark-haired woman began in a put-upon tone as soon as the barkeep was back downstairs and had resumed his muttering conversation with the haggard hunch-back at the bar.

“I do,” Godwyn replied with a confirming nod as she delicately plucked the gloves from her fingers and set them on the bench beside her before reaching into her coat pocket and retrieving a small, silver-coloured pyramid no larger than a walnut and placed it purposefully between them on the table where it hummed and puttered before falling silent. Sitting upright with one hand rested on the table and the other hidden in her lap, von Draken spared the tiny object only the most fleeting of glances before turning her attention back to the other Inquisitor. Maybe she knew what the object was, or maybe she didn’t, but the Witch Hunter made it clear in her features that she would entertain no trickery and expected to waste no time on frivolous pleasantries.

The aural disruptor being in place between them and ensuring that no one (other than Sudulus) would be able to overhear their conversation, Godwyn mirrored the Witch Hunter’s severe disposition and got right down to the reasons for calling her here:

“You attacked the Lion’s Den. Why?” Godwyn levelled the question like a spear towards her adversary, but the other woman wasted no time in responding;

“I didn’t, and I had no reason to do otherwise,” she answered, dropping the words with the same stiffness as throwing a gauntlet.

“Bulls**t.”

The word belonged to Sudulus and was only for Godwyn to hear, though the bluntness of the savant rivalled that of the Witch Hunter. “She is obviously lying, Inquisitor. I would suggest that you call her on it.”

A sound proposition, but Sudulus was not sitting at the table with Godwyn or looking at the shadowy face of the woman who sat across from her in the torchlight. The words alone sounded like a lie, and of all the people in the Imperium a Witch Hunter was likely a more capable liar than most, but something in her gut tugged her into believing that von Draken – an adept liar though she may be – was at this moment being completely truthful.

“You know who did?” Godwyn continued, careful not to reveal whether or not she bought the other Inquisitor’s answer and keeping her judgement hidden.

“No. What is it to you?”

Even if she was telling the truth, von Draken wasn’t selling herself in either direction, and was purposefully denying her questioner the means for further deduction.

“My agents were engaged in an operation at the Lion’s Den when the attack occurred.” Godwyn was the first to volunteer ground in the hopes that a displayed willingness to cooperate would cue her counter-part into doing likewise.

It didn’t, however, and Godwyn’s revelation was met with icy silence from the Witch Hunter. Von Draken was forcing her to further reveal her hand, or to abandon the parlay with nothing gained.

Her face like a mask, the Witch Hunter let the silence hang in the air for several moments more before levelling a further question to elicit a response.

“And the operation is of what consequence that you would blame me for its interruption?”

“It is at the consequence of the duty to which both you and I are sworn!” Godwyn retorted testily. “The Holy Inquisition’s investigation into the cultist activities on this world has been jeopardized by this act, and that is why, if you are not responsible for this act yourself, you will want to know who is just as much as I do!”

Again, von Draken was silent, but it was a silence more telling than words.

“She knows something,” Sudulus commented into her ear. “I dare say that if she was blameless she would have denied you already.”

Her savant was still convinced of the Witch Hunter’s guilt, but Godwyn did not think it that simple. Tanya von Draken knew something – with that Godwyn agreed – but, looking at Witch Hunter, she could not be convinced that the woman across from her had perpetrated the attack herself.

“Whatever it is you think you know, Inquisitor, would be of greater benefit to us both if it were in the open,” Godwyn attempted to persuade her with a more tactful approach, though the unchanging veneer of the ice-like woman made it impossible to tell if her words were having any affect.

Still looking at the Ordo Xenos Inquisitor sitting opposite her, von Draken reached a hand into the breast pocket of her coat and produced a single data-slate which she placed delicately on the table in front of Godwyn with a light *clack*.

“Perhaps you could then explain this?” she said, activating the data-slate with a flick of her finger before retreating her gloved hand back across the surface of the table.

Displayed on the screen of the data-slate was a single still image. Grainy and poorly focused, it appeared to be a motion capture frame taken from a surveillance camera, but regardless of its quality the picture captured the image of a poorly lit alleyway and a fleeting glimpse of an unmistakably tall woman almost invisible in the shadows.

“She’s one of yours, is she not?”

Godwyn looked questioningly at the Witch Hunter; “Where was this taken?” she asked, knowing that von Draken was not about to answer her question directly.

“My agents were involved in a reconnaissance operation on behalf of the Holy Inquisition,” the Witch Hunter replied coolly, “when they encountered this ‘unusual’ individual. Two of my men were killed, and I was left with no indication of their killer aside from this picture.”

Von Draken paused for a moment to allow the other Inquisitor to think over her words before continuing in a tone devoid of any hint of anger.

“You want to know if I am purposefully acting against you? I want to know if it is not you who are acting against me…”

Godwyn pushed the data-slate back across the wooden surface of the table and met the Witch Hunter’s eyes with a hard look.

“You expect me to believe that this image is genuine?”

“You expect me to believe that a slayer of kin would hesitate to strike against a rival when she has not done so before?”

Godwyn did not rise to the bait with anger, but kept her temperament in check. “So the short-sighted Inquisitor uses a den full of criminals as an excuse to act upon some deluded sense of vengeance?” she replied mockingly, and taking a glimmer of satisfaction when she saw that her words had punctured the Witch Hunter’s unflappable shell and caused her to bristle with anger.

“I know my duty before the Throne,” von Draken hissed with a threatening jab of her finger, “and if you think that I won’t be watching you, then you are gravely mistaken! If I see even the slightest hint – the faintest inkling – that the High Magistrate erred in his judgement of you, then I swear upon the mantle of the saints that you will see justice at my hand!”

“This is why you are here then?” Godwyn retorted scornfully; “To try and make a name for yourself amongst the Mono-dominants by killing an infamous villain? By seeing if you can’t gain some sort of recognition for an otherwise unimpressive career?” She folded her arms and shook her head contemptuously. “Find your reason, I dare you, and I’ll put you down for treason just like the others.”

The Witch Hunter had had enough. Rising from her seat, she shot the Kin-Slayer with a glare of utter loathing and stormed from the White Heart, leaving Godwyn alone with thoughts more distressing than she cared to admit.

“Sudulus,” she whispered into the dark, “where is Mercy?”

 

* *

 

“Tha’ is mos’ defina’ly cheetin’!”

Grinning wildly while her shoulders shook with silent laughter, Mercy plucked the queen from Lee’s side of the board and plopped it down in the every-growing pile of regicide pieces beside her. Shaking his head in amused disbelief but unable to keep his own face free from a wide grin as he filled his eyes with the striking assassin, Lee scratched his stubbly chin as a prelude to his next bone-headed move. He was letting Mercy win, and she probably knew it, but then again winning didn’t seem to be a high priority for either of them when Alexander stepped into the hold and draped his coat over the counter next to where the Catachan was idly swabbing the action of his sniper-rifle with an oil-stained rag. Lee and Mercy were sitting at the opposite end of the hold near the closed hatchway leading to the nest and had their game board sitting at the head of the table (though both players were actually sitting *on* the table when the Interrogator entered) and were giggling back and forth while Nerf only half paid attention.

Though he’d known her for half a year, the willowy assassin was still a mystery to him, and, try as he might to figure her out, Alexander never ceased to be amazed by how different she was. She was strange in the truest sense of the word, though at the same time that was probably what made her so fascinating to him – more-so than the obvious reasons that kept him awake at night. It wasn’t so much her body, he figured – though he couldn’t stop himself from imagining what it would be like to feel her warm skin against his – but more in the way she acted. She wasn’t human. Alright, maybe that was taking it a little far – she was obviously human… but part of her seemed more than that. The way she moved so freely and gracefully with even the simplest of motions, or how she reacted so emphatically to things that were otherwise normal or mundane… or how she was startlingly unpredictable and had a habit of showing up where she wasn’t expected.

He only noticed that he’d been staring at her when a large, callused handed was waved up and down in front of his face.

“Stare any longer and you’re gonna start dribbling down your front,” Nerf said with a sly chuckle as Alexander blinked himself back into the moment. Mercy and the pilot were still playing regicide without a care.

“Sorry…” he corrected himself while trying to regain a little of his composure.

The Catachan smirked nonchalantly and continued to rub away at the components of his rifle.

“I wonder,” Alexander began, turning to look at the muscular commando who regarded him with a slightly arched eyebrow, “how long have you known her for?”

Nerf shrugged. He’d known her longer than anyone, Alexander supposed, and probably knew just about everything there was to know about her considering how close they seemed.

“About four r’ five years, I guess,” Nerf replied with a non-committal sigh as he placed the housing of the rifle back down on the counter and picked up the anti-material rifle’s long barrel and started to run the rag up and down along it.

The young man nodded, running his tongue idly over his lower lip as he tapped his chin.

“Was she always…?”

Nerf gave him slightly curious look. No rush.

“Well… quiet?”

“You mean mute?” the Catachan tossed the term about like it was as subtle as a brick.

Alexander nodded again; yes, he supposed that was what he wanted to know.

Nerf shook his head. “No…” he said at length; “no, there was a time when she talked. Granted, I never knew her when she did.”

“Then how do you know…?” the obvious question burbled up inside him, but the Catachan didn’t really answer. He knew, and that was it: no reason, he just knew.

“I see…”

At this, Nerf raised an eyebrow, and his heavy jaw curved into a crafty smirk:

“Do you?” he said, placing the barrel of his rifle down on the counter, and leaning his hand against it before turning to face the young Interrogator in an engaged but non-threatening way. “Is talking that important, you think?”

His gut reaction told him to appease the Catachan and seek out a way to pick his brains later on the subject, but with a flash of what could have been intellectual intrigue the young man chose to take him up on it instead.

“I would say that it is,” Alexander replied confidently. He wanted to see where this went.

Nerf gave him an appraising look – something Alexander had not expected to see on the Catachan’s rough face – and gave a thoughtful glance in the assassin’s direction.

“I’ve met a lot of people doing what I do,” he said, looking back the Interrogator with long-seeing eyes that seemed to underscore the truth in his words, “but she’s more real to me than anyone else out there.”

“What do you mean?”

Nerf shrugged his heavy shoulders and frowned. “She doesn’t complicate things,” he said. “She never lies, or makes s**t up to tell you what you want to hear. She’s just there. Maybe happy, maybe sad, but she keeps you honest. Keeps you real…” he folded his arms across his chest and looked back across the room at her. “It’s a lot easier doing things like she does. Not over-complicated or filled with all the other things we like to fill our heads with. She takes it as it is. I like it that way. It feels simpler… better.”

Taken aback, Alexander raised his eyebrows. He’d been taught a lot of things in the academies of the Inquisition, and he had imagined that the wisdom taught in those halls would encompass the entirety of Man, yet here he was in the hold of shuttle with a man who’d probably never read a textbook in his life listening to something so simple yet so profound.

“If you ask me,” Nerf continued, watching the assassin with a look of genuine understanding across his face, “she can still talk, but she just chooses not to.”

What happened next could only be described as a moment of clarity, and Alexander found himself nodding along with the Catachan’s words as if they were something he’d known all along. Maybe it really was like that. Maybe it could be that simple.

“Why?” he asked the question without really thinking about it; “Why would she do that?”

Nerf sighed, and his face dropped in what may have been sadness.

“I didn’t meet her under the best of circumstances,” he said, “and I know that a lot of bad things happened to her before anything got better. Enough things to break a person – to change them.”

“What kind of things?” Alexander asked, knowing that he was prying but feeling as if he had to know all the same.

Nerf shook his head. He wouldn’t tell.

“Do you love her?” It was Alexander’s final question – a nagging in his chest that needed to hear the words from his own lips.

The commando surprised him with a laugh, however, and fixed him with a jovial look.

“There’s more to it than love,” he said with the type of grin that could draw a smile out of any audience, “and if your lucky enough to ever meet a person who means that much to you, then you’ll know that one word isn’t enough of a description.”

Nerf left it at that and went back to working on his rifle, while Alexander returned to his small cabin on the starboard side of the shuttle with more thoughts swimming around in his head than he’d ever expected to have after a conversation with the Catachan.

[Aqui]

Well, consider me hooked -_-

 

And I like the irony of an Assassin named "Mercy"

[Lady_Canoness]

A pleasure as always Aquilanus :D

 

Mercy will have a large roll to play in the story going forward, so we'll see how she turns out!

[Papewaio]

Who knew a Catachan could be so introspective and philosophical?

 

Jokes aside, I really liked the extra depth you're starting to give your characters. I'd like to see a bit more of Ilias; I've never seen anyone try to write about someone so calculating (but then again I've not read that much). She seems like a character who could have much more to her than what she has at the moment.

 

It's still fantastic, so keep up the good work!

[Lady_Canoness]

Thanks Papewaio, I'm glad you're liking this new approach :)

To me, Nerf possesses a sort of 'low-man's wisdom' in that he's seen enough stuff (and learned from it) to know a thing or two about how life works and understand it.

 

Funny you should mention Illias, as she is next one to be 'under the microscope' as it were.

Every character will have one or more chances throughout the story to further develope themselves in such ways... and possibly shoot bad guys :P

[Lady_Canoness]

*Part 6*

 

 

The next few days in the sprawling city of Hogshead saw the continuation of strife unfolding under the sunless sky as the Brigade once again lost its iron grip upon the capital of Penumbra and running gun battles continued to erupt throughout the inner city streets. Emboldened by the razing of the Lion’s Den, rival gangs crawled from hidden warrens throughout the city and attacked like termites on a rotten stump before retreating away into the underground in the face of retribution. Yet for all their ferocity and ruthlessness, there were no signs indicative of any cult or shadowy hand orchestrating the anarchy, and no matter how many feelers Inquisitor Godwyn spread into the city the answer always turned up the same: this was Hogshead, rife with violence and crime; any corruption that existed here was of human nature, and not the insidious influence of the Warp. Not that it mattered to some within the Inquisition.

While Godwyn instructed her team to avoid direct involvement in the eruptions of civil conflict, her counterpart took every opportunity of using the chaos as cover for viciously stamping out Brigade fortifications and eradicating those positions held by the ruling gangsters beyond the reach of the rebel gangs. More troubling than what her counterpart within the Inquisition was doing, however, was who this counterpart actually was.

Von Draken had said that it was not she who attacked the Lion’s Den, and though Sudulus was rigid in his disbelief, Godwyn could not convince herself that the Witch Hunter was lying. It would make sense if she was lying, and in some regards it would even be beneficial to think so, yet Inquisitor Godwyn trusted her instincts on the matter, and her instincts told her that there was more at play than what she first suspected. Since meeting the Witch Hunter face to face several days earlier, neither Godwyn nor her team had picked up the slightest trace of the other woman, and had no concrete evidence that her signature was behind the handiwork of the mysterious Inquisition forces inciting the unrest in Hogshead – a conundrum that forced Cassandra Godwyn into reaching one of two conclusions:

Either von Draken was far more cunning than she had first suspected – something Godwyn was willing to admit she could have been wrong about – or there really was a third Inquisitor acting in Hogshead on a different agenda than the one set out by Inquisitor Brand, and was playing both women for fools.

James Alexander thought it possible that Brand was somehow actively involved with the events in Hogshead if not directly then through an intermediary, though Sudulus discounted the idea as being nonsensical. Inquisitor Brand, though renowned for the unorthodox yet brilliant nature of his schemes, would have no reason to enlist the aid of two fellow Inquisitors in a task if he planned to see it into fruition himself. More likely was that Brand had purposefully neglected to inform Godwyn of the existence of a third party, though whether or not von Draken found herself in the same position was still a mystery.

Godwyn had not told her apprentice what the Witch had said, nor had she shown anyone aside from Sudulus the image of Mercy on the Witch Hunter’s data-slate. The young man was taken with the assassin – of that she was well aware – and, as skilled and loyal as he may be, she did not trust him to be able to keep a secret away from the rest of the crew.

Sudulus had conducted every test he could think of on the image and had investigated it to near microscopic levels, but his findings had not been comforting. The image was genuine, and though Mercy’s face was hidden in shadow, her body had been unmistakable in von Draken’s picture. The only conclusion that could thusly be made was painfully clear: the silent assassin did not take her orders solely from Godwyn.

“That’s not all,” Sudulus had told her at the time. “If it so happens that Mercy is a double agent, then it would be safe to assume that Nerf is also compromised. They did arrive together, after all, on the recommendation of Inquisitor Brand.”

To an extent, Godwyn agreed with the savant’s assessment; Nerf and Mercy were extremely close, and had demonstrated in the past that they took their commitment to each other as preceding their commitment to any orders they were given, yet Nerf was also much more agreeable than the assassin and displayed a genuine good-nature that was absent in the lithe giant. To Godwyn, he did not fit the profile of a double agent, unless, of course, he was also far more cunning than Godwyn gave him credit for. How to act upon the savant’s assessments, however, was another matter entirely.

Double agents or not, Nerf and Mercy had proven extremely useful, and were willing to follow Godwyn’s directions without question. Removing both of them (because she sincerely doubted she’d be able to remove just one and still command the loyalty of the other) would be disastrous for morale and greatly hamper the effectiveness of her team, not to mention that they were without a doubt her most capable and deadly operatives. To that end, she had determined to take a less direct approach by keeping them close at hand in order to deny any third party their use, and in that regard Nerf was fairly easy. Catachan or no, Nerf was a military man and respected the chain of command, and reacted favourably even when Godwyn expressed a keener interest in how he carried out his job. Mercy, on the other than, was a challenge, and while the assassin appeared willing there was no real way of constraining her movements. For a person of her size, Mercy was alarmingly difficult to keep track of, and could literally disappear as soon as a person’s back was turned.

“She’s always done that,” Nerf had explained when Godwyn casually brought it up. “I don’t know how she does it or where she goes, but she always comes back, so I don’t think about it.”

The assassin looked curiously innocent whenever she was asked about it, and would answer whoever was asking with a slightly confused look.

 

Several days after her meeting with von Draken, however, Godwyn’s team found its first break in the ongoing investigation into the unrest in Hogshead, and her speculations surrounding the loyalty of her agents and the identity of the mysterious third party was put to rest in favour of pursing her primary objective. While Godwyn had her operatives covertly scouring Hogshead for further clues surrounding the murders and the untouchable presence that Interrogator Alexander had uncovered, Illias (much to Sudulus’ irritation) had spent much of her time in the nest fine tuning Meridian’s sensors, and (just as the savant was reaching the limits of his patience regarding her intrusion into his specialty) had discovered something she thought abnormal.

“Usual radio traffic over Penumbra as a whole ranges between high and low frequencies,” the tech-priestess explained in her usual uninterested monotone, pointing out numerous graphs and statistical charts displayed on the nest’s monitors while the Inquisitor watched over her shoulder, “but I have detected a patterned series of ultra-high sub-sonic frequencies unusual of civilian or military use emanating in rapid succession from a single broadcasting relay to several subsidiaries.”

Behind Godwyn, standing at the back of the nest, Sudulus scoffed contemptuously.

“This world is a haven for the unusual, in case you haven’t noticed,” he commented – the annoyance in his voice thinly veiled at best. “I would hesitate to call this conclusive.”

The Inquisitor, however, disagreed. Unlike her savant who felt as if his place was being usurped by a person with the unfair advantage of being more machine than human, Godwyn thought that Illias was right to think her discovery both unusual and suspicious. In her experience, only a few organizations ever bothered to use ultra-high frequency communicators, and those that did often had a very good reason for wanting their broadcasts to be all but undetectable.

“Do you have a fix on the broadcasting location?” Godwyn asked.

The tech-priestess nodded.

“Any idea of what they’re transmitting?”

“No,” Illias replied with a slow shake of her head; “The equipment available is sub-standard for the task – ” Sudulus rolled his eyes “ – and interception would not guarantee decryption. Likewise, the fixed locations of the subsidiaries are impossible to determine once a transmission is concluded. The only fix we have is on the point of origin.”

“Then that is where we go,” Godwyn replied.

 

* *

 

A fix on the point of origin meant that Godwyn’s team had the broadcasting location relative to other signals, and that a general direction and area could be pinpointed amidst the mess of frequencies over Hogshead. A fix did not guarantee them a geographical location, however, as pinpointing a single building in the middle of a sprawling city with boots on the ground was not infallible, and required careful plotting before any moves were made – something for which Illias lacked the intuition, though fortunately Sudulus did not.

Back in the operator’s seat, the little savant swivelled back and forth across the nest while his bionic hands danced between multiple key-panels with his attention split between four separate readout displays. Cross-referencing energy readouts with topographical charts and infra-red imaging, Sudulus matched the images manually with simplified versions and street-side recordings. It was an arduous, yet necessary task: seeing Hogshead from thirty-seven thousand feet through multiple filters was, after all, very different from seeing things on the ground.

The displays crackled and split up in momentary eruptions of static, breaking Sudulus’ concentration as he spun in his seat and leaned through to the hatchway that led up the cockpit.

“Lee, you’ve run into something!” he called through the opening, catching a momentary glimpse of an erotically posed nude sculpt carefully nestled in the pilot’s cluttered enclave.

“Righ’ righ’,” Lee Normandy’s voice answered back, likely between mouthfuls of the repulsive local snack-foods that he’d squirreled away up on his flight deck.

Meridian rolled gently to her right as Lee eased the shuttle into a sloping circle high above the target designation. Far beyond the reach of the city lights and unable to see anything through the blackness outside the cockpit windows, the pilot was flying by instruments alone – a difficult feat in its own right, but a suicidal gambit in the unmarked skies over Hogshead even for one so skilled as Lee Normandy. Fortunately, however, Lee was not without aid.

Floating higher still above the surface of Hogshead, her majestic silver hull concealed in a darkness broken only by the thousands upon thousands of running lights that spackled her length, rested the merchantman Patroclus; the ship of master Hercule Columbo, and Inquisitor Godwyn’s greatest asset.

One of hundreds of kilometre-long ships that loomed unseen in Penumbra’s skies, the Patroclus waited indefinitely at the Inquisitor’s call, and, being well equipped for years of interstellar travel without making port, was Godwyn’s bridge between worlds, though at the moment the broad-beamed rogue trader served as Lee’s eyes and ears: doing for him what he did for the team on the ground.

“Good – good!” Sudulus called out as the monitors in the nest came back online. “We should have an image… now.”

 

The screen embedded into the dash of the service car lit up as a torrent of information flashed across its surface and illuminated the dark interior of the cab with a dull, green glow. Sitting behind the Inquisitors in the back seat with a length of twine-like cable connecting the car’s relay-engine to a socket in her temple, Illias shivered and the tech-priestess’ eyes fluttered momentarily until the screen froze upon a single image.

“This is our fixed destination,” she said softly, removing the cable from her head and hiding it up one of the distended sleeves of her adept’s robe.

The image was of a building, low to the ground and with many twisted and convoluted passageways.

“This diagram,” leaning forward in the forward passenger seat, Alexander pointed out the discolouration around the image’s edges, “that means that…?”

“Yes,” Illias intercepted his train of thought with a slow nod; “It is underground.”

 

The scans were both clear and accurate, yet Sudulus could not bring himself to be convinced that he was looking at the right thing.

The fixed broadcast location was deep inside the merchant quarters, one of the more populated areas in Hogshead firmly under Brigade control, and was practically inundated by foot-traffic. A logistical nightmare to be sure, it made tracking hostile movements in the vicinity practically impossible, and meant that, should the ground team find itself in under assault, Sudulus would be as likely to direct them into cover amongst harmless civilians as an ambush.

Worsening things, however, was the intelligence collected on target location bordering on negligible. Even at thirty-seven-thousand feet he couldn’t read any thermal signatures inside the building, and had no way of advising Godwyn as to what she could expect to find.

The savant chewed on his lower lip as his head moved from screen to screen with unblinking eyes. He did not like this one bit.

 

The matching, black service cars pulled gently into a dark alleyway just blocks away from the target building and Godwyn’s ground team piled out. Fully armed and armoured, Godwyn, her student, and the tech-priestess stepped out of the lead vehicle while the Catachan, the assassin, and the exiled sister emerged from the second.

“We’ve just had confirmation that the target is mostly below street-level,” Godwyn updated her team as they assembled in the shadows between the overhanging buildings of the merchants’ quarter.

If the news surprised any of her assembled squad, they didn’t show it.

“That means that the plan changes a little,” Godwyn continued.

“Brianna,” the Inquisitor addressed the young woman, “you and Interrogator Alexander are coming with me and the tech-priestess inside.”

The sister, wearing a large and ill-fitting cloak draped around her shoulders to conceal her weapons and plate armour, nodded in acknowledgment.

“Nerf,” Godwyn then turned to the former Guard-commando, “I want you and Mercy to take up a covering position outside the target building and cover our backs. Understood?”

At first she’d hesitated to even bring the Catachan and the assassin along on the operation for fear that they’d compromise any sensitive data recovered, though eventually she had concluded that it was better to keep them close at hand than provide them with the opportunity to betray her from afar. Here, at least, Sudulus could keep an eye on them.

Nerf, dressed in dark fatigues with camouflage paint already smeared across his face and hands, gave a simple nod and shifted the weight of the two large satchels he had over his broad shoulders.

“Good,” Godwyn straightened her armour-weave great coat to better sit over the carapace armour she wore underneath, “let’s go.”

 

Moving out into the busy streets of the merchants’ quarter under the watchful eye of the capital spire that loomed large and fearsome on the black skyline, Godwyn’s team fanned out in pairs through the shifting crowds. The Inquisitor stayed with Illias while Alexander and Brianna followed several paces back and Nerf split off to find a covering position with Mercy. No one spoke, and they walked in silence through the noisy streets until they reached an inconspicuous cul-de-sac at the onset of a wide-open plaza. Leading them away from the bustle of the plaza, the dead-end was clustered with weathered dumpster bins, though at the very end – well beyond the sight of the street – was a short flight of stairs that led downwards to a featureless security door.

“Sudulus, are we in the right place?” the Inquisitor called up to her savant the moment that Alexander and Brianna had joined them at the top of the stairs.

+“You are on target, Inquisitor,”+ the little man’s voice spoke into her ear (Alexander looked skyward into the blackness to where Meridian would be circling unseen overhead,) +“Do recall that there are several other entrances in the vicinity,”+ he reminded her, +“and do be careful. I have no way of knowing what you will find down there for certain.”+

The savant was nervous – likely because this operation hadn’t been his plan to begin with – but Godwyn knew that he meant well. She’d be careful.

“Nerf,” she called on the Catachan next, “are you in position?”

+“Just about,”+ his reply came in; +“I’ve got a good view of the plaza from the rooftops. If anyone tries to follow you, I’ll know about it.”+

Inquisitor Godwyn nodded to herself in silence. They were ready.

It was time.

Brianna pulled off her cloak and tossed it aside, slinging the two rifles she’d been carrying off her armoured shoulders and handing one to Alexander, while Illias swiftly descended the stairs and got to work on the security door with both her hands and servo arms.

“Remember,” Godwyn instructed the youngest members of her squad as the tech-priestess set about overcoming the lockout mechanisms of the door, “don’t do anything unless I specifically tell you otherwise,” the look in the Inquisitor’s eyes brokered no arguments from her subordinates; “this is not a battlefield, and the resistance we face here will likely be the kind you can’t shoot at.”

She could see that the Interrogator understood, though the look on the face of the armoured sister was less compelling. Infiltration was new to her, but Godwyn had faith that the younger woman would quickly understand that.

Behind them, the door clicked and whirred before being shunted open to allow them passage.

“We have breached,” Illias announced in an uninterested tone, and stepped inside with the others following closely behind her.

The air inside the door smelled stale as they entered into a dimly lit corridor, as if the underground building had been without ventilation for months, which, coupled with the distinct lack grime that seemed to be ever-present everywhere else on Penumbra, led Godwyn to believe that it had been secured for a very long time, despite her having spent less than a minute inside.

With a well-oiled hiss the security slid shut behind them, and suddenly their world fell into an almost total silence with the sound of their feet ringing on the metal floor being the only exception.

Bringing up the rear, Brianna eyed their surroundings apprehensively, and kept the heavily modified lasgun she carried close in her hands.

“A moment, please,” taking the lead and signalling a stop after they had spent several minutes travelling through identical corridors in complete silence, Illias shuffled across the floor with her long robe trailing behind her towards a shallow indentation in an otherwise featureless wall.

So far they had come across nothing: no doors, no panels, no ventilation units; nothing that would suggest there was anything aside from featureless corridors once they were inside the outer door… which of course made it all the more likely that something was here. The rest of Hogshead was dirty, cluttered, and uniformly crude, yet here they found the opposite – something so alien to the city that it could not be mere chance.

Godwyn tapped the comm. unit in her bionic ear; “Sudulus, can you get…” she stopped short of actually asking him anything: the feed was dead. Whatever was behind the featureless metal walls was blocking communications.

“It comes as no surprise,” Illias was talking to herself in her usual, slow tone as she examined what looked like a hollow indent in the wall, “but the workings of the Glorious Machine God are of great exception here. The Omnissiah’s blessing has fallen far to have landed on this kind of world.”

Already wary of her surroundings, Brianna spared the tech-priestess a suspicious glance, and even Godwyn felt the skin at the back of her neck start to crawl.

“What do mean? Do you know where we are?” Godwyn asked the tech-priestess’ turned back.

“Oh yes, Inquisitor…” Illias replied airily; “we are in the presence of a magnificent work of the beneficent Machine God – a blessing of great worth that glories in his magnificence…”

“But what is it?” Godwyn persisted, holding fast to her patience as she felt it begin to slip away.

Illias righted herself, and turned to look the Inquisitor in the eye. “I don’t know,” she said flatly, “but we are inside the machine.”

Silent up until that moment, it was James Alexander who spoke next: “You’re saying that we’re inside of a giant transmitter?” he asked.

In response, Illias gave somewhat of a reluctant nod. “A crude, yet accurate assessment in principle,” she agreed, “though your words give no credit to the irregularity of such an occurrence.”

“We don’t have time to discuss this here,” Godwyn cut them off, and she could see from the expression on her face that Brianna agreed – she at least could appreciate how blind they were without communications. “Illias, find a way to get us out of these damn corridors and into where we can get what we came for?”

“Yes,” was all the tech-priestess said in response, and quickly turned back to poke at the indent in the wall with her hands and various instruments on her servo arms. Godwyn didn’t know what she was doing, but in a couple of moments a section of wall had parted before her to reveal an elaborate control console which she assaulted furiously with each of her limbs working independently as she manipulated numerous input sequences all at once. Several moments more, and further sections of the featureless corridors parted to reveal additional panels, displays, and even doorways that had until then been perfectly concealed.

“Primary security measures have been overcome,” Illias announced after the sudden revelation of what lay behind the walls. “Secondary and tertiary measures are still in place. The secondary measures can be overridden from this terminal, but tertiary measures can only be countermanded from inside the core.”

“Are there guards?” sister Brianna asked from where she stood covering the newly revealed doorways that had sprung up around them.

“No,” Illias replied without breaking concentration with her four active limbs. “A hard-line alarm will be tripped as soon as we enter the core. It cannot be deactivated.”

The Interrogator’s eyebrows shot skyward, but Godwyn had anticipated that the operation would not go undetected. That was why her entire team was deployed.

“How do we get our communications back?” asked the Inquisitor; hopefully tapping her comm. unit as she did so, though of course it was still dead.

“Wireless communications will not be available until the tertiary measures are countermanded and control of the structure is turned over to me,” the tech-priestess explained their opposition in the same manner as if she were summarizing an instruction manual, “at which point we will also be able to upload relevant data to Meridian if the failsafes are overcome.”

“You mean this might not work?” Alexander posed. He was trying to stay calm and composed, but Godwyn could see the angst starting to build up in his stance.

“This machine spirit is both old and powerful,” the tech-priestess sounded almost bored by their continuous questioning, “many of its functions will be unlike those of the Omnissiah’s other creations.”

It was obvious that Alexander had more questions, but he withheld them in favour of testing out the balance and sights of the modified auto-rifle Brianna had given him – he’d likely be needing it soon enough.

“Secondary security measures have been overcome,” Illias interrupted the silence that had fallen over the Inquisitor’s team. “The alarm has been tripped and the alert signal sent. We will not have much time to work undisturbed. We must get to the core.”

They set off immediately with the tech-priestess in the lead. She seemed to know where she was going and which doors to go through as they passed down the silent halls. It came as somewhat of a surprise to Godwyn that there were no internal alarms or security protocols to bar their way; perhaps Illias had disabled them, but it was with some trepidation that she confessed to herself that she had no idea what Illias had done, and trusted on faith alone that the tech-priestess was capable of what she said she was.

Driving the doubt from her mind, Inquisitor Godwyn focused on duty as the tech-priestess led them out of the winding labyrinth of corridors and into an oddly spherical chamber dotted with a multitude of blinking lights and snaking wires.

“The core,” Illias announced with reverence, and quickly murmured a prayer that Godwyn did not recognize or understand.

“Can you access the core now?” she pressed the tech-priestess, and the cowled woman quickly obeyed as the Inquisitor took a quick glance over her surroundings.

The core was small – not much larger than Meridian’s nest by comparison – and was ringed with what she assumed to be a multitude of logic engines and cogitator banks that rose in a dome over the central control node where the tech-priestess was now laboriously working over a dozen monitors and display screens. If Illias was correct, then this one room controlled the entirety of the structure Sudulus had plotted on the infra-red, and could store an untold wealth of planetary data including information that would likely aid her investigation in ways otherwise unimaginable.

Regardless of its potency, however, it was still just a machine, and there were limits to what it could tell her.

“Alexander,” she called her student to attention from where he was gazing upwards with curious fascination, “what can you see?”

Brianna had elected to not enter the confines of the core chamber, but even so space was tight, and Alexander seemed uncomfortable with the thought of exercising his talents.

“Do you think the untouchable was here, also?” he asked as he passed his autogun to his mentor and loosened the buttons of his coat. Godwyn nodded; that was what she wanted to find out.

Closing his eyes, the young man took several steadying breaths before easing his mind into the Immaterium, and Godwyn felt her skin shiver as the temperature of the air began its steady decline.

“No!” the outburst seemed to shock him as much as it shocked her, but the words had come from the Interrogator’s own lips.

“No!” he said again, though this time softer then when he had almost shouted it before; “It’s too close, I can feel it already – like the very air around me is… hollow, void, unnatural!”

He doubled over and rested his hands on his knees. From out in the corridor, Brianna was watching him with a condemning look.

“The untouchable was definitely here,” he continued apologetically; “so close I could taste it.”

“What is he talking about?” the armoured sister asked with a look between the Inquisitor and the troubled youth.

Godwyn shook her head. “Be glad that you’ll never know.”

[Lady_Canoness]

No preamble, just onto the good stuff. This one was a long time coming!

 

*Part 7*

 

In the dark, Nerf was waiting.

The four foot long anti-materiel sniper rifle, assembled from one of the satchels he’d carried with him onto the rooftops, was deployed and resting against the small parapet that separated his hiding spot from a four-story drop off the darkened off the building and into the well-lit street below.

To Nerf it wasn’t waiting, however; it was being ready, and in his experience there was indeed a difference. He was good at what he did – very good – and that meant that he was just as comfortable hiding out in the dark with his scope covering the outstretched market plaza as he would be engaging a target. No jitters, no angst, no nervous tick that begged to feel the first bullet fly and the adrenaline surge. He was calm, perfectly calm; the kind of calm that came from a lifetime of practice, fighting, and being ready. As a Catachan he was born into this, as a commando he was trained into this, but as an Inquisitorial operative, well, he was this.

The sky could be on fire and he would still be sitting here calm and ready to take the shot.

But Mercy was different.

Perched nearby and staring into the darkness, the lithe assassin was ready, but also restless. She didn’t complain or stir from where she lingered, but the man who sat beside her could almost feel the thirst for action rippling off her.

She wanted it, she wanted it now, and this was taking too long.

Nerf didn’t doubt that the giant was patient and that she could wait, but she wanted the action – needed it – as if her whole being lived for moments like these.

“Easy Mercy…” he breathed, slowly running his hand down the cold steel stock of his heavy weapon; “easy girl…”

Panning the rifle’s scope slowly across the crowds milling in and about the vendor stands, the Catachan kept his eyes peeled, but everything seemed to be business as usual down in the market. Not exactly calm or quiet, but nothing that screamed ‘shoot me! I’m dangerous!’ either.

The comm. bead buzzed in his ear.

He tapped it once, not taking his eyes off the market. “Three n’ four.”

+“We’ve got a problem.”+ It was Sudulus.

Behind him in the dark, Mercy looked skyward.

“What kind of problem?”

On the other end of the feed, the savant’s voice sounded strained. +“I’ve lost communications with the forward elements, and I’ve got no readings from their location whatsoever. Whatever is down there is running a lot of interference, and we’re as good as blind.”+

Nerf thought on it for a moment. “You’re expecting trouble?” he asked.

+“I told you that we’re as good as blind,”+ Sudulus said again, +“but I have a bad feeling about this, and yes; I expect a lot of trouble.”+

“There’re a lot of people down here. I need to know about this trouble before it starts shooting at me. Got it?”

+“Yes,”+ Sudulus agreed, and then after a pause added, +“hold your positions, and I’ll see what I can do.”+

“Understood. Out.” Nerf cut the feed and nestled the stock of his rifle back up against his shoulder, but when he looked back over his shoulder the assassin was no longer there.

 

* *

 

Lights were blinking in cycles and an electric hum permeated the space underneath the dome, but throughout all the distractions Illias remained unilaterally focused on the control node in front of her. Four limbs moving at once, her concentration and single-mindedness was commendable, and also something Godwyn did not share. The contents of the core, the implications of an untouchable, the loyalty of her team, and the breakdown in her communications cluttered her mind and all vied for the Inquisitor’s attention as being one more important than the others. The thought of this one room hiding the key to her questions, however, was one she pushed from her mind. Getting ahead of herself and leaping to conclusions could be a fatal mistake, as she learned before, and she would not risk a potential oversight in favour of a convenient truth.

“What progress are you making?” she dragged her thoughts back on track with Illias. Her team had been silent for the past several minutes since Interrogator Alexander had made his unpleasant discovery, and Godwyn had ordered her student and the sister back out into the hallway if for no other reason than keeping their focus elsewhere then on the core. This room, with its blinking lights and humming cogitator engines, was for the tech-priestess alone.

“The venerable machine-spirit is unlike any other with which I have communed,” Illias confessed as a sort of explanation. “You will have to be patient, Inquisitor. This process will take time.”

“Time is the one thing we do not have.” Godwyn was starting to feel agitated – if anyone had received the hard-line alarm, then their time would be dwindling at an exponential rate. “Can’t you do anything to make it quicker?”

“It is a mk. I planet scribe,” Illias announced in her emotionlessly flat tone without waiting for the Inquisitor to ask; “a machine of ancient majesty, the likes of which have not been seen for an age. Likely implanted into the planet’s crust thousands of years ago by the Old Mechanicus of the Dark Age. Few have been found, and fewer still functioning. It is a marvel that this one is in such good condition.”

“And what does it do?” Godwyn asked, waiting to see if the tech-priestess was addressing her work objectively or merely being absorbed by her own fascinations.

“In layman’s terms, it collects, records, and distributes planetary data,” answered the tech-adept without so much as pausing to think.

“Does it have any other functions?”

Illias shook her head. “No.”

Chewing on the inside of her lower lip, Godwyn folded her arms across her chest. If this place – this planet scribe – only acted as a storage and distribution center for planetary date, then whoever commanded the untouchable and was connected to the murders was also interested in a wealth of planetary data, and, judging by the amount of broadcasting that Illias had determined as emanating from the planet scribe, was also keen on sharing that data with numerous other parties.

Interesting.

Cults had been known to be both well funded and very large, which could explain why murders and planet scans could be connected, but could such a large entity exist both undetected and autonomously in a city like Hogshead where the balance of power was so clearly in the favour of the Brigade? Possible, and stranger things had happened before.

From the corner of her eye, Godwyn caught sight of an irregularly blinking red-light off to the side that she had not seen before. Judging by the tech-priestess’ attentiveness to what lay directly before her it was unlikely that she had seen it either.

“What is that?” Godwyn pointed it out. Illias stopped what she was doing and looked at the light for a long few seconds without moving.

“Tertiary security measures have been rescinded, and as part of its programming the machine spirit has restarted all secondary operating systems,” Illias slowly began to explain, and each of her words carried with it a sinking feeling in Godwyn’s stomach which made her certain that whatever the light represented wasn’t good; “that is a perimeter alert. Someone has entered the planet-scribe after us.”

Her lips tightened; “Is there any way to find them? To trace their movements?”

“Yes,” Illias’ four arms were moving in a blur again as she raced to find a way with an urgency that Godwyn had not known she possessed.

“Alexander – Brianna,” the Inquisitor summoned the youngest members of her team back to the core, but Illias raised a warning hand.

“Inquisitor,” the tech-priestess signalled her to belay that order, “I will direct them from here. Internal communications are functional. That will work to our advantage.”

“Alright, do it,” Godwyn agreed, but Illias wasn’t finished.

“Be warned that this course of action will slow the transmission of data,” she said; “time elapsed over engagement is directly correlated to an increase in time elapsed in data-mining procedures.”

“We risk it,” Godwyn decided, unfastening the clasps on all three pistols that she had holstered about her person. “In the meanwhile, external communications take precedent over data-recovery. If this goes to hell, I want an exit strategy more than I want planetary records.”

Illias nodded. “Understood Inquisitor.”

 

* *

 

+“Go through the first door on your left and down the hallway forty feet. To your right you will see a closed hatchway labelled ‘Maintenance M1’. Do you see the closed hatchway?”+

His heart pounding almost as loud as the footsteps of Brianna running behind him, Interrogator Alexander gulped down a breath and swung the lamp pack fastened to his autorifle back and forth across the dimly lit left-hand corridor.

+“Do you see the closed hatchway?”+

The beam of light cut across a tightly shuttered opening at about waist height. The words ‘Maintenance M1’ had been stencilled above it in crusty yellow paint.

“Yes, I see it,” said Alexander perhaps a little too loudly.

+“Good”+ the tech-priestess’ voice spoke into his ear. The shuttered hatchway suddenly opened with a silent hiss. +“Go through the hatchway and climb all the way to the bottom, thirty-five feet below you.”+

Stowing the autogun over his shoulder, Alexander ducked through the opening and lowered himself down the steel-runged ladder he found within. Behind him, he could hear the exiled battle sister doing likewise as her makeshift plate armour scraped against the close confines of the maintenance shaft.

+“You will now be in an area called the engineering sub-level,”+ Illias explained. +“Once you reach this area, turn to your immediate right after exiting the shaft and proceed straight until you reach a door.”+

Feeling his feet back on solid ground, Alexander clambered out of the maintenance shaft and straightened up. It was much darker down on the engineering sub-level, and the imposing silhouettes of still machinery cast deep shadows through the faint lighting.

“Where are you leading us?” he heard Brianna ask the tech-priestess as she followed him out of the hatchway.

+“Keep moving,”+ Illias ignored the battle sister. +“Do you see the door?”+

He didn’t see the door. Setting off in a jog, Alexander kept going until he did. Stopping in front of it, he heard the mechanisms within the door whirring and clicking before the door quickly parted.

+“Through this door is a receiving bay attached to a tunnel with surface access,”+ the toneless voice on the other end of the comm. told him what his eyes were seeing as he stepped through the open door into another shadow-filled room with a high ceiling. +“The enemy contacts will be entering through the receiving doors directly in front of you.”+ His eyes swung across the open floor to a large oval-shaped double door at the opposite end of the room not more than a dozen strides from where he stood. +“The upper-level gantries directly above you will provide adequate cover.”+ He shone his light upwards – casting shadows onto the ceiling as he spied several thin walkways with sheet-metal railings. +“There are six enemy contacts heading your way. I have delayed the intruders’ progress as best I can, but they will be on you in just over a minute. Good luck.”+

Alexander swallowed the lump in his throat as he tried to stymie the fluttering feeling that was slowly wiggling its way up through his guts. This was going to be close. He remembered how vulnerable his flesh felt underneath his clothing.

“What are you waiting for?! We don’t have time to waste!” Brianna clapped him hard on his shoulder as she dashed past to mount the gantries. “Let’s ready a fitting welcome for whoever is out there!”

Overcoming the momentary lapse in judgement, Alexander was racing after her with the autorifle gripped so firmly in his hands that he couldn’t have let it go even if he’d wanted to. He was familiar with the weapon and had fired it several times before on a practice range but had yet to test it in combat. In fact, he had never tested any weapon in live combat, and though he had been on live operations before the thought that he could actually die here in this room was frighteningly new.

Following the battle sister, he crouched low onto his knees behind the cover of the rail and waited, his breaths coming in shallow gasps.

“Turn off your light!” Brianna hissed from his several paces to his left, and they were plunged into shadow – her black armour making her almost disappear but for her pale face and hair.

“Are you sure about this?” he whispered back. Vision of the floor below them was poor, though he guessed that he’d be able to see movement well enough.

Brianna didn’t answer him. Drawing her chainsword from where she stowed it across her back, she placed the ornamental weapon gently on the gantry floor and waited.

With a flick of his thumb, Alexander activated the autorifle’s reflex sights, and noted the tiny numerals glowing in the bottom corner indicating that the extended magazine was loaded to a full fifty rounds. He made a mental note to thank Brianna for preparing his weapon for him if they both survived.

From across the room on the bottom level of the receiving bay came the sound of clicking gears and disengaging locks.

“Don’t shoot until I shoot,” Brianna was cradling her lasgun and peering discretely over the rail. Alexander didn’t need to be told twice.

With a low groan the doors beneath them opened, and Alexander strained his ears to hear the measured foot-falls of the intruders clunking against the metal decking. Holding her breath, Brianna watched as a single, black figure crept cautiously from the door – a beam of light streaking out from a fastened lamp pack as the intruder panned over the shadowy bay with its gun. Instinctively, Brianna ducked back silently just before the light shot upwards past their hiding spot and hit the ceiling, before disappearing again as its bearer moved on.

Alexander risked a glance.

Down below him, the black figure raised an arm silently into the air, and a second figure moved with minimal noise into the bay.

Brianna readied her lasgun and took careful aim – her metal armour rustling every so slightly as she did so.

The light instantly shot back upwards.

Shouting a curse as it blinded her, the sister reeled back into cover and Alexander heard voices from below as the first few whistling shots rang out through the gloom. Wasting not a moment more, the young Interrogator pivoted up into a standing position and drew a bead on the black figure with the light – not knowing that he had pulled the trigger until he saw the flash of the muzzle in his eyes and the spark of bullets hammering off metal below.

The one with the light staggered and went down awkwardly onto its front while Alexander watched it fall through his sights as the ammunition counter continued to decrease.

Brianna was back up and firing as well, but the return fire was negligible as the second figure made good its escape back into the cover of the doorway.

The battle sister dropped back down to a knee behind cover.

“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” she shouted, swatting the air with a gauntleted hand as Alexander eased up on the trigger and dropped down beside her. He hadn’t noticed the roar of gunfire until he found himself startled by its sudden absence. The counter in the reflex sight showed a one followed by an eight.

“Control yourself!” the woman hissed angrily before peering back up and over their cover to the floor below. A solitary figure in black was lying sprawled next to its fallen weapon. The other, as well as the ones they had not seen, must still be waiting in the tunnel.

What now? It was the question burning inside his head, but his voice lost the cue to speak between the blood rushing through his veins and his heart beating so fast that it might leap out of his mouth if he talked. Everything seemed starkly clear in the rush adrenaline as if the darkness had receded completely and that he could perceive the movements of the enemy like a sixth sense in the back of skull. More than anything, it felt like control.

Sliding the chainsword slowly beside her, Brianna edged along their cover and put more distance between herself and the Interrogator while keeping as low as she could. Eventually she stopped, and after doubling the distance between them slowly pivoted on one foot and peered over the edge at opening of the tunnel below.

There was nothing to see and no noise came from the enemy’s position, and though Brianna might have guessed that they had withdrawn, Alexander knew that it wasn’t true – they were still there, biding their time, waiting for the opportune moment. Feeling confident in his own abilities, the Interrogator eased his mind open to Warp and for a brief moment had the clarity and focus to see the enemy as if they were standing before his very eyes:

Humans – four males and one female – waiting in the dark completely oblivious to his presence. Waiting – not afraid or hesitant – but purposefully waiting with a rigid calm that felt to him both awkward and bizarre; almost as if a fanatical discipline had overwritten any trace of human emotion that might have lingered like a spark of light within their souls. It was… repulsive.

The moment passed and his eyes opened watching Brianna across from him. She hadn’t moved from when he’d seen her not a second before.

He blinked. Something had changed.

Gripping his autorifle, he leaned it against the rail and peered down the sights. Something was about to happen.

 

 

* *

 

“Tertiary defence measures are overridden,” Illias announced softly as her fingers blurred between keypads, “as soon as I enter the count, I will re-establish communications with the surface and begin data uploads from the core to Meridian.”

Godwyn nodded. “Time estimate?”

The tech-priestess was inexpressive in her response: “The count is a numeric code of thirteen digits randomly generated as a fail-safe against advance hacking techniques,” she explained. “It must be entered manually. I have already begun the process, but I estimate it to take upwards of ten minutes.”

Ten more minutes without comms. Godwyn shifted on her feet and folded her arms tightly across her chest: this was going to be a long ten minutes.

At the far corner of one of the node’s display monitors, the red light started to flicker and flash once again, and this time with the accompaniment of a small wailing chime. Both the Inquisitor and the tech-priestess turned to it immediately.

“Where are they this time?” Godwyn asked, unfolding her arms and leaning over Illias’ shoulder for a better view of the display.

“Levels one and five,” the adept replied unblinkingly, though her four limbs continued to work on overriding the count. “I can redirect – ”

“Don’t,” the Inquisitor cut in. “I’ll deal with these ones personally. Can you delay the further of the two long enough for me to go between them?”

“Yes,” the tech-priestess looked back and momentarily met the Inquisitor’s eye, “and I can direct you for the duration.”

“Excellent,” Godwyn straightened up and briefly adjusted the comms implanted within her bionic ear. “Keep me informed of your progress.”

 

* *

Amongst the Catachan jungle fighters there had always been men who had claimed to be able to smell a battle coming; whether it be something small like a brawl, subtle like a raid at midnight, or even a gunfight that lit up the canopy for miles around. Some said it was like tasting blood in the air or smelling the sweat of a man’s brow… or simply knowing the reek of ork sh*t compared to other things. Either way, it had always been pretty mysterious and unfounded, and Nerf never put much faith in it.

Smelling a battle coming was one thing, but seeing it coming was something else, and, if anything, he saw one coming now.

“Three four to control, you read?” he murmured into his comm. without moving his eye from where he had a clean bead on a dark outfitted figure through his rifle’s scope.

+“I hear you Nerf,”+ Sudulus’ replied from high above where the shuttle circled in the dark. +“What is happening down there?”+

Regardless of his trying to hide it, the angst was clear in the savant’s voice, and Nerf couldn’t keep a grim smirk off his face as he imagined just how tied up in knots he’d be if he was flying around in circles several miles up in the air. Some things just couldn’t be helped.

“I’ve got a count of seven bad guys down here in the market plaza,” Nerf informed him as he carefully traced the one out front with his crosshairs.

+“Have they spotted you?”+

“Nope,” – they hadn’t, and given his position Nerf doubted that they would even after he fired – “but they’re not being very cautious and they’re definitely armed.”

They weren’t moving in formation and on street level they might have blended into the crowd, but from Nerf’s vantage point higher up he could clearly see them weaving towards the general direction of where the Inquisitor had gone underground. It was certainly enough to catch his eye, and, working with the Inquisition, catching an eye was reason enough.

+“I see, I see…”+ Sudulus was muttering to himself, likely as he checked his readout-monitors to try and get a visual of what the Catachan was witnessing. +“Will you and Mercy be capable of handling this, do you think?”+

“Yup.”

Nerf wasn’t about to tell him that the silent assassin had gone missing on him – that would cause more problems than it solved – but he took some comfort in know that he wasn’t completely lying to the little man either: he and Mercy *would* be able to handle it… with the exception being that Mercy wasn’t around to pitch in this time.

+“Okay,”+ Sudulus sounded satisfied, +“I’ll do what I can from up here. Good luck to both of you.”+

Nerf switched off the comm. and pulled the bud out of his ear. The savant meant well, but Nerf didn’t want the distraction.

Adjusting the bipod resting on the parapet, he relaxed his shoulders and nestled the rifle up against his body as he shifted his aim ever-so slightly so that the cross-hairs lay in advance of his target; letting the unsuspecting bad guy walk right into his shot. Gently adjusting the dials on his scope, the Catachan waited.

Unlike the standard issue long-las sniper variant issued to most guard sniper outfits, Catachan commandoes favoured the penetration and stopping power of solid-slug rifles for a better take-down of large, tough targets, and among such weapons the mk. IV predator anti-materiel rifle was a well-liked, if rare, favourite. At four-feet in length and weighing just shy of fifty pounds when loaded, the mk. IV was unwieldy in a running battle, but, with a range of over two clicks and enough power to drop an ork boss with a single bullet, the rifle was a dream come true for a static sniper.

Against a vehicle it was dangerous, against a big alien it was deadly, and against a man it was overkill.

Eye staring unblinking down the rifle’s scope, Nerf watched and waited.

Fire.

The target walked into view. The Catachan slowed his breathing down to a crawl and the world seemed to go silent around him.

Fire.

A hair’s breadth from the crosshair. Soon he would be in it.

Fire.

Resting against the cool metal trigger, his finger gently squeezed.

With an ear-splitting roar the rifle cannoned backwards into the meat of his shoulder as a split-second explosion flared from the hammer-head muzzle of the mk. IV.

In his scope, the man crumpled like plaster smashed aside by a hammer-blow as the bullet tore sideways through his upper chest, pulping his vitals, and cutting him in two before carrying on its deadly flight the tiniest fraction of a second.

The target would never have known that he was dead, but with the mk. IV collateral was often unavoidable, and as he worked the bolt to chamber another high-calibre round, the first screams of pain and anguish floated back to the Catachan’s ears as bystanders lost blood and body parts to the sniper’s bullet. A lesser man might have balked at the damage he’d done, but Nerf had seen enough blood in his time to not give it a moment’s thought. The Imperium was filled with tragedies; why should he have time for this one? He still had six more people to kill.

 

 

* *

 

+“There is a hallway to your left. Go down this hallway until you see a door marked ‘E2’ on your right.”+

“I see it.” Moving at a swift pace, Godwyn dashed to the left and continued down the hall in a run until she found the marked door.

+“I will open the door. Be ready”+

The door parted with a quiet hiss and the Inquisitor stepped through. “Where now?” she asked, pausing as the way before her parted to both her left and right.

+“Left again,”+ Illias instructed her. +“Thirty feet down you’ll find a door on your left. Wait there. Do not go through.”+

Godwyn did as she was told and dropped to a knee outside the door as she drew a pistol in each hand and made sure both were loaded.

+“Enemy contacts are coming your way and will move past this door. I will advise and open the door. At that time you will be behind their position.”+

“Understood.” She waited, counting down the seconds in silence and straining to hear a sound through the shuttered door.

+“Be ready…”+

Godwyn stood up.

+“Go.”+

The door opened with nary a sound, and the Inquisitor slipped through with her weapons raised.

+“Five enemy contacts to your left and down the corridor. Move a quietly as you can.”+

Heavy pistol in her right hand and machine pistol in her left, Godwyn snaked down the hall in stealthily placed, flowing strides. She got to the end of the corridor and pressed her back tightly against the left-most wall.

+“Their backs are turned and they are moving away in a covering formation,”+ Illias whispered in her ear. +“Engage when ready.”+

The Inquisitor took a last, steadying breath. She was ready now.

Stepping one foot around the corner her heavy pistol was up and roaring – pitching one of the dark armoured intruders forward onto his face – while the in her other hand the machine pistol ripped a long burst of twenty rounds low to cut another down at his legs and staggering two more before the last member of the squad returned fire – frantically spraying a hail of bullets back up the corridor as the Inquisitor disappeared back around the corner and out of sight.

She was certain that she’d taken one out with the heavy pistol, and was fairly sure that she’d wounded three others with the spray at their legs, but that still meant that there could be up to four of them shooting back. Keeping her calm, Godwyn ejected the blank magazine from her machine pistol and slid another into place before pulling a small metal disc from her utility webbing as she ducked back from the corridor and waited for a break in the hail of suppressive fire that stormed her way. Sooner or later her adversaries would have to retreat or reload, or perhaps try something more risky, but either way she would be ready for them.

It was only a matter of moments until the suppressive fire stopped, and with a flick of her wrist Godwyn tossed the disc into the corridor – the stun grenade detonating a mere second later with a small pop of disorienting dust. The effect lasted only a few seconds, but the last man standing was still dazed and stuck midway through reloading when Godwyn dropped him with a shot to the upper chest from her heavy pistol before spraying the hallway with her compact rapid-fire weapon to finish off the rest.

The smoke clearing, she picked her way forward down the hall towards the corpses – covering them with her heavy pistol in case they started to move again. Black uniforms and black armour, but a pattern she wasn’t familiar with. She crouched closer to the last one she’d dropped: well equipped and decently trained by mercenary standards, but who were they and why were they here? A quick check of the corpse revealed little more than standardized kit and a few meaningless personal trinkets, none of which could tell her anything she didn’t already know.

Having little time left to waste, Godwyn stood back up and retrieved one of her attackers’ weapons before quickly leaving the scene. If she was lucky, Illias would be able to make something of it, though in the meantime she still had another enemy squad to deal with.

“Illias, I want an update,” she demanded of the tech-priestess as she took one last look down the body-filled corridor prior to turning her back and walking away at a quick pace.

+“Communications will be online momentarily,”+ the tech-adept replied somewhat distractedly, +“and the second enemy contact has been successfully contained on level five.”+

“Good,” Godwyn said with a frown; “take me there.”

 

* *

 

Minutes had passed, he’d counted them go by, and still there was no movement on the floor below. This was taking too long.

Peering over the edge of his cover, the crumpled shape of the one he’d gunned down was all Alexander saw. No signs of movement, no signs that the enemy was planning an attack, nothing at all to suggest that there was anyone even there.

The Interrogator’s grip tightened around his autogun as he cast a skittish glance to where the battle sister waited further along to his left. The thrill of battle had trickled away with the time, and now he felt a knot of tension building up in his gut once again. Something wasn’t right here; he didn’t need psychic powers to tell him that.

Keeping low, he scrambled over towards the battle sister. She threw an annoyed look his way as he approached.

“Something’s not right here,” he tried to warn her as he got close, but she wasn’t about to listen to him.

“Keep watching the opening!” she hissed back, scolding him like a child, but Alexander wasn’t about to back down. He grabbed her arm for emphasis, but she shook him off as if he were accosting her.

“There is no one there!” the young man insisted in an urgent whisper; “They’re going to out-manoeuvre us!” Finally, she was looking at him as if he were indeed making sense.

Brianna didn’t answer, however, but picked up her chainsword in one hand while holding her lasgun alof in the other and started to move carefully towards the stairwell down the bottom level.

Astonished that she could be so stubborn, it was several moments before Alexander got his act together enough to stop watching the pale-haired sister and get his autogun into a position to cover Brianna just in case he was wrong. She got to the floor without incident, however, and sure enough soon waved him down with an open hand. Quietly as they had arrived, the enemy had vanished. There was no-one there.

 

* *

 

The tech-priestess’ directives were impeccable, and within minutes she had steered the Inquisitor through the twisting innards of the planet scribe and delivered her to a powered down monitoring chamber somewhere on the fifth level.

+“One moment, Inquisitor,”+ Illias stopped her in her tracks just outside of another sealed door, +“something is malfunctioning within the planet scribe’s internal systems.”+

Taking a cautionary step behind a control pulpit, Godwyn dropped to a crouch and set her machine pistol on the ground as she reached up and tapped a finger against her bionic ear.

“What do you mean?” she asked in whisper lest she be overheard.

+“I am no longer getting any contact readings from the enemies on your level,”+ Illias explained, though from the tone of the tech-priestess’ voice she could well have been explaining a glitch in system to a neophyte instead of relaying life-threatening information to an Inquisitor.

Godwyn cast an instinctive glance over her surroundings, and was half expecting to see an obvious clue staring her in the face that she’d missed in her haste.

“They’re just gone?”

+“I had them contained. They have disappeared, however. Do not be alarmed.+

Godwyn swore under her breath and peered around the control pulpit towards the shuttered door the enemy should be behind; there were no signs of it being damaged or having moved in any way. Pretty d*mned good reason to be alarmed.

“Just open the door for me,” Godwyn replied at length. “I’ll find out what happened.”

+“As you wish, Inquisitor.”+

The doors parted with a silent hiss and Godwyn went through, pistols first. The enemy waited for her on the other side, but Illias had not been wrong: five corpses were cooling where they’d fallen with no obvious sign as to their slayer.

Holstering the machine pistol put keeping the heavy pistol drawn just in case, the Inquisitor crossed the room towards the bodies with her back to the wall. A few spent shell casings lingered on the floor, but otherwise there were few signs of battle.

Feeling around the neck of the nearest corpse, however, shattered her doubts when her hand came back slick with arterial blood. Five puncture marks had pierced the neck almost the entire way through, and had severed the spine, windpipe, throat, and jugular: only one killer Godwyn knew of was that efficient.

Her heavy pistol up in a flash, she panned it slowly across the shadows spread throughout the recesses the poorly lit room.

“Mercy,” she said, her voice loud and intrusive against the background silence, “are you in here?”

Appearing as if summoned, the lithe giant emerged from a corner of the dark room that Godwyn was certain she’d checked and stepped into the light. Blood coating the needle fingers of her neuro-gauntlets was still dripping onto the floor in tiny droplets. The assassin smiled, pleased to see that the Inquisitor was unharmed.

Dwarfed by the killer, Godwyn got to her feet and, after some hesitation, lowered her gun – the assassin watching it with violet eyes as she dropped it to her side.

“What are you doing here, Mercy?”

Of course, the giant didn’t speak, though the answer was clear in her face: she was here to help.

Cassandra Godwyn swallowed, and with one hand freed a handkerchief from her coat pocket to clean the blood from her fingers. Without moving, Mercy watched her do so – the same smile continuously splayed across her face.

“You didn’t need to help me,” Godwyn continued, staring up into the face of the mute killer. “I wanted you to stay on the surface with Nerf.”

In response Mercy gave a most unusual expression halfway between a jubilant laugh and a knowing smirk that ended as she winked her right eye in a very familiar manner, leaving the Inquisitor perplexed as to whether it was a show of cynicism on her part, well-intentioned banter, or even affection. Not helping the Inquisitor make up her mind, Mercy turned gracefully on her heel and sauntered away – her form fitting bodysuit seemingly shifting and displacing itself to partially blend her into the darkness even as she moved.

+“Inquisitor?”+ Illias’ voice pulled her attention off the assassin.

“Talk to me,” Godwyn replied, keeping an eye on Mercy and making sure she didn’t disappear; “what is going on?”

“I’ve regained comms with the outside,” Illias explained; Mercy stopped and turned to face the Inquisitor half-expectantly – Godwyn did her best to motion for the assassin to wait. “There is a great deal of comm.-chatter out there, and I am having difficulty maintaining a signal that will connect to individual units. You’ll have to come back here if you are to communicate with Meridian.”

Godwyn nodded in silent agreement; she would do that, but there were more immediate concerns as well. “Are we clear down here?” she asked.

Illias replied the affirmative; +“Yes.”+

“Good, then I’m coming back.” She made a quick pace back to the core with Mercy following intently on her heels.

 

When she returned, Sudulus was verging hysterical on the other end of the comm.

+“Thank the Emperor you’re alright, Inquisitor!”+ he half shouted so that his voice filled the confines of the core; +“I don’t know what you did down there, but it is as if – forgive me – the Warp itself has opened up here! Madness! Complete and utter chaos!”+

The feed was of poor quality and much static was mixed in with his words, but Illias was confident that she could maintain the uplink with Meridian, if not improve upon it.

“Calm down, Sudulus,” Godwyn replied in low, clear tone; “tell me what is going on.”

There was no response. Looking at Illias, the tech-priestess seemed flummoxed – it should be going through.

+“…war zone,”+ Sudulus’ voice suddenly cut back in, +“…utter chaos! Had I known that things could get this hot this quickly…!”+

“Sudulus, listen to me,” Godwyn commanded, making sure that her words could not be misunderstood. “I *need* details.”

This time Sudulus replied without delay.

+“Widespread fighting between numerous ground forces. Dare I say that everyone packing even so much as a pistol is getting involved! The Brigade is present in force, but they are meeting heavy resistance. I’m suggesting an immediate emergency extraction, Inquisitor. With the amount of fire-power on display, and with an increasing amount of air-traffic in the vicinity, I’m afraid we won’t get another chance if we don’t act now!”+

“Inquisitor,” Illias spoke up, looking back over her shoulder at Godwyn, “I have data ready to upload. If the Meridian is unreliable, I can upload it to a hard-case on my person, but I will need more time to make the transfer.”

At the back of the small room, her head ducked under the low ceiling, Mercy folded her arms and waited – her eyes lingering on the Inquisitor. One way or the other, Godwyn knew that she was going to be cutting things close:

“Sudulus, how much longer do you think we have until a pick-up becomes impossible?”

+“Minutes,”+ he replied, the frank honesty of his voice underscoring the desperation at hand. +“Inquisitor, the tech-priestess’ plan is foolish and reckless to the extreme. You can’t honestly consider it an option!”+

Godwyn had made up her mind, however. She was not about to return from the planet scribe empty handed.

“Sudulus, tell Lee to make the Meridian’s safety his top priority, and stand-by for a pick up on my word. We’re staying here as long as we can, at which point we will exit from underground and try to clear the fighting that way. You can get Nerf to rendezvous with us along the way.”

Sudulus was silent for several moments, and she could almost see him shaking his head in disbelief.

+“Understood, Inquisitor,”+ he said at last; +“I will standby for your directives. Emperor be with you.”+

The line went silent, and Illias cut the feed.

Godwyn, feeling a slight shiver run up her neck, straightened up and checked that her weapons were ready. Behind her, Mercy looked mildly amused as she waited to see what would occur, but the Inquisitor wasn’t about to engage her on the point.

“Work quickly;” she instructed the tech-priestess, “otherwise this whole city could cave in on top of us.”

[Aqui]

After the week I've had, reading this was an unexpected but pleasant surprise ;)

[Lady_Canoness]

It is always a pleasure, Aquilanus!

 

And I sure hope your next week heads upwards again!

[Aqui]

It is always a pleasure, Aquilanus!

 

And I sure hope your next week heads upwards again!

 

After today, I doubt it :) However, I have a day off Wednesday and then a long weekend from Friday.

 

I may actually do some writing myself.... ;)

[Lady_Canoness]

*Part 8*

 

 

Illias wasted no time establishing a connection to the core control node and reported that she would have the most recent communication files transferred to her person in a matter of minutes. Time and space being limited, copying the entirety of the planet scribe’s core would be impossible. They would have to make do knowing who was communicating and what was being said without the wealth of planetary data for context, but even that would be a blessing if the fighting topside continued to grow steadily worse.

Overlooking the work of the tech-priestess, Inquisitor Godwyn’s eyes raced in time with her mind as she scanned the read-out monitors while simultaneously working over possible outcomes of the operation in her head. Almost anything could happen between now and their escape, but of one thing she could be certain: it would be close – very close.

Godwyn did not doubt that the enemy she’d fought and killed had been little more than a rapid response unit tasked with determining the nature of the threat she represented, and now that two out of the three teams were eliminated the bulk of the armed reprisal forces would soon be on their way. It would be part of the enemy plan, she deduced, to use the street-fighting as cover and prevent anyone, including Godwyn and her team, from knowing the full reach of the enemy they were facing. She’d seen it after the assault on the Lion’s Den – just how far this mysterious third party would go to protect itself – and now she was going to see it again.

If this really was the hand of the Inquisition at work, then it had stretched itself wider than Godwyn could have thought imaginable, and whatever was at work on Penumbra would have to be of such importance that near limitless resources were being funnelled into it.

The thought made her shiver: she had a team, but whoever was out there had an army.

“Done,” Illias disconnected from the node and stood up with an air of finality, her servo-arms folding themselves up over her shoulders as she did so. “We can leave.”

Godwyn had expected the data-transfer to take more time, but was ready to move regardless. “Good,” she said; “sabotage the control node.”

Illias froze. Her eyes widened. “Inquisitor?” the question came slowly from her mouth as if her mind was still struggling to understand what it was she had just been asked to do.

From the back wall of the chamber, Mercy looked on intently like a wolf watching a lamb being put to pasture.

“No one sees what we’ve done here,” Godwyn made sure her instructions were perfectly clear as she looked the tech-priestess directly in the eye. “Destroy it. That is an order from an Imperial Inquisitor.”

Her pale flesh seemed to sink on her face, but, with an enabling nod from the Inquisitor, Illias turned with heavy feet towards the control node. In the eyes of a tech-adept her orders were little less than sacrilege, but unfolding her servo arms the tech-priestess executed a few swift motions – leaving the readout displays dark and the logic engines sparking when she was done.

“A necessary action,” the tech-priestess consoled herself as she gave the ancient core a last look before turning her back on the smouldering machine and once again facing the Inquisitor, “but it is no menial task you ask of me.”

Of that Godwyn was well aware, and she knew that for all her focus and resilience Illias would still require time to come to terms with that she’d done. Though if their attempted escape went poorly then emotional healing would take a far distant second to physically recuperating and picking up the pieces of a ruined investigation.

“Come,” Godwyn motioned for the other women to follow her from the core, “we have to go.”

 

Their planned escape route led them through the receiving bay where Alexander and Brianna had encountered the first of the enemy and into the winding network of passages that made up the cavern-like underground of Hogshead. It would take longer then a more direct route to the surface, but was also harder to get pinned down in, and would eventually bring them back to the surface further away from the fighting. It was far from a perfect plan. Godwyn had hastily worked it over with Illias while she’d been uploading the core, but with her Interrogator and the battle sister already waiting for them at the receiving bay it was the course of action the Inquisitor thought least likely to result in failure. Only time would tell if her assessment was accurate.

“There’s been no sign of enemy contact down this way,” Alexander reported, standing up as Godwyn, Mercy, and Illias entered the receiving bay from an unshuttered side-door. He’d been examining the black armoured body he’d killed during the brief fire-fight but had turned up nothing out of the ordinary: male, well built, well equipped, no identifying documents or items, no serial numbers on the equipment – he could be anybody. He’d even attempted several psychic probes as well, but his inexperience in sensing the minds of others meant that he was unable to determine what he felt – if in fact he felt anything at all.

Brianna was keeping her distance by the tunnel opening, and purposefully ignoring whatever the Interrogator was doing as she covered the way forward. When Godwyn entered, however, she turned, weapon held ready, and stood aside to let the Inquisitor lead them onwards through the opened receiving doors and out of the planet scribe. Mercy and Alexander followed close behind the Inquisitor, but when Illias passed, the sister held up a hand and waved her aside.

“Here,” she said, drawing her laspistol from its holster and holding it out stock-first for Illias to take, “you’ll probably need this.”

The tech-priestess looked at the weapon, then back at the sister. “No,” she said, her voice indifferent, “I will not need it.”

Brianna raise a quizzical eyebrow, but the tech-adept had already activated one of her servo-arms and was seemingly pulling pieces of her implants from beneath her robes and fitting them into place along her mechanical arm. As the sister watched, Illias dismantled parts of her torso and was assembling its components along the servo-arm as the frame, action, and barrel of a heavy weapon started to take shape. Lastly, she produced a compact drum of ammunition from her lower back and locked it into place just back of the servo-arm’s elbow-joint – the finishing touch on a cut-down heavy-stubber that she’d assembled from parts of her own body and now held perfectly braced between both servo-arms.

Speechless, the battle sister returned the laspitol to its holster with a baffled look, and without so much as a nod Illias hustled after the others with her heavy weapon held in a stowed position in front of her, leaving Brianna to momentarily wonder what else the tech-priestess managed to hide under her crimson robes.

 

“Wait here a moment.”

They’d been on the move for all of seven minutes, and had long since deviated off the main access tunnel leading from the planet scribe and into the tangle of under-city passageways when Godwyn called for a stop.

Staying close to the Inquisitor, Brianna and Alexander immediately sought out nearby cover while Illias dropped back a little into a better firing position. Mercy, only half-visible in the darkness of what looked to be a long out-of-service sewer junction, squatted back on her haunches and studied her surroundings with her glittering, violet eyes.

Godwyn – the only one standing out in the open as the lamp-pack beams of her team flashed over the decaying walls – holstered her heavy pistol and drew a small auspex that she kept on her tactical belt. With a flick of her thumb she activated it, and the green glow of its interface was cast across her features as she studied the palm-sized display.

“Sudulus,” she spoke softly, wondering if her savant could hear her either through her ear implant or the usual comm. channels, “can you read me?”

++“I can hear you, Inquisitor, yes,”++ it didn’t take long for him to answer, ++“but I’m having difficulty pinpointing your exact location. Too much interference from the surface, I’m afraid.”++

“That’s okay,” the murmur of her voice echoed in the silence. “I need you to patch me through to Nerf.”

++“Understood,”++ he complied. ++“Establishing secure connection.”++

There were several moments of silence as Godwyn continued to look down at the blank auspex screen, until:

++“I hear you, boss,”++ the Catachan’s rough, dry voice spoke into her ear. Mercy, still crouching in the darkness, looked back over her shoulder to where the Inquisitor was standing.

“Nerf, I’m forwarding coordinates to Sudulus,” Godwyn informed him as she relayed the auspex data through her personal comms in hopes that the Meridian would receive it. “I want you to rendez-vous there. Can you make it?”

The Catachan commando was silent for a couple seconds as the coordinates were relayed to him.

Godwyn hoped that he wasn’t cornered by the fighting.

++“Yea, I can get there,”++ Nerf replied, his tone business-like, ++“but there’s a problem…”++

“Mercy is here with me.” She wasn’t sure if he knew, but Godwyn had a feeling that he’d like the confirmation all the same.

As if part of his response, Nerf was silent for a couple more seconds. ++“Problem solved,”++ he sounded a little surprised. ++“I’ll be there.”++

The feed was terminated from his end, but Godwyn waited a few seconds in the darkness before cutting her own. Why did Mercy come to find her, she wondered? Nerf had sounded more confused by it then she was.

Across the way and still hidden in darkness, and unbeknownst to Godwyn, Mercy continued to watch her.

“Alright,” Godwyn slotted the auspex back onto her belt, “let’s keep going.”

 

* *

 

The city was ablaze. There could be no other way of describing it.

The sniper’s bullet had been the spark that lit the fuse to explode the bulging powder-keg that was the city, and now that the city had gone up there was fighting everywhere, and bodies beyond count lay scattered face-down in the streets. Rival gangs, feuding mercs, merchants looking to kill the competition, homicidal maniacs, and even the occasional poor bugger caught in between – everyone was shooting everyone with every weapon imaginable in a frenzied fight for survival.

Nerf wondered if the whole of Hogshead was like this. He hadn’t even killed his seven marks. After the third had gone down, someone started shooting in a mad panic, and then everything had gone to the Warp in a washbasin.

The marks had been as good as dead amidst the chaos, and not wanting to waste any bullets firing into a crowd, Nerf had held back to watch the crowd in case any real threats did emerge. Nothing had appeared so far, and now that he was ordered to move he was glad to be leaving. Too bad Mercy wasn’t there to watch, though. He reckoned the whole thing would have turned her on.

Stowing the mk. IV tightly over his shoulders, Nerf carefully removed his bullpup pattern auto-carbine from the second of the protective satchels and snapped its night vision filter into place. He’d had this weapon for years and it had never let him down other than one time: when he let someone else clean it – a mistake he’d quickly learned from, and a lesson he never forgot thanks to the elaborate pattern of criss-crossing scars that decorated his right flank. It’d hurt like a bitch when he got ‘em, but he never did find out what he’d been shot with. All he knew was that his gun jammed and then he was in lots of pain. Lesson learned.

His weapon checking out, Nerf started to move fast and low over the pitch-dark rooftops. He had to watch his footing more than he did the fighting that lit up the streets, but he was sure not to take any chances. Just like back home, a wrong foot here could see him just as dead as a wrong foot in the jungle.

Nerf hadn’t covered more than a few buildings, however, when he heard a buzz in his ear and Godwyn’s savant talking to him over the comm. Finding a covered spot, the Catachan took a knee and covered one ear to hear the little man’s voice over the chattering gunfire and rolling explosions that shattered the darkness around him.

“Say that again?” Nerf practically shouted into the mic: even trying to hear his own voice was starting to get difficult.

++“There is an aerial contact heading your way bearing ten-six to the North East,”++ Sudulus repeated himself in earnest so that the operative on the ground could hear him, and that time Nerf understood.

Air traffic was increasing exponentially as the fighting dragged on – mostly people trying to get the hell out before they got themselves shot – but as Nerf scanned the night-sky for signs of running lights or after burn, he just barely spotted an flyer that was moving low and slow with minimal lighting. Possibly a gunship, but the likelihood of this being some privateer looking to take things to the next level was about as likely as a space marine falling out of the sky right on top of their heads. Stranger things happened, but he had a feeling that that was not happening now. Nope, this guy meant business in a bad way for him and the boss.

“I’ll take care of it,” he told Sudulus. Placing his auto-carbine somewhere he knew he could find it again, Nerf unslung the anti-materiel rifle from his shoulders and crossed to the edge of the rooftop at a running crouch.

Sure enough, the flyer was dropping speed even further until it came to a hovering stop over the market plaza – the afterwash of its engines blasting billowing clouds of dust into the air and scattering about loose debris in a wide radius. To Nerf, it looked like some type of valkyrie variant. Matt black and heavily armoured, the pilot probably counted on being immune to whatever Hogshead could throw at him, though he probably hadn’t considered the possibility of a Catachan hiding in the dark with a nasty boomstick pointed his way.

As Nerf watched, the people left alive on the ground quickly scattered, and to either side of the fuselage large troops doors were slid open and repelling ropes thrown clear. He could start plugging the troops as they piled out, but as he set the mk. IV’s bipod against the parapet Nerf had bigger target it mind: he had a hard angled shot on the cockpit, but it was still a shot.

Leaning up against the rifle’s scope, Nerf peered down the gun’s sights just as the first of the black-armoured figures touched the ground.

He took a steadying breath – feeling the warm air run in through his nose and out his rough lips.

Range… couldn’t be over ‘hundred meters. Wind and bullet drop wouldn’t matter at this distance.

The second set of troopers landed on the ground – quickly making for cover as the first waved them on.

His heart was beating steadily in his chest as he nuzzled closer to the rifle, his finger sliding from the guard to just covering the trigger.

Gunner front seat, pilot back. Gunner front seat, pilot back…

The third pair of boots hit the ground – still more where they came from.

The reinforced cockpit glass would probably redirect or block a regular sniper’s bullet, but this wasn’t a regular sniper. Nerf bet the glass would be as protective as an eggshell to a sledgehammer…

Number four was on his way down.

Fire… fire… fire.

With an ear-splitting roar the mk. IV cannoned backwards into his shoulder, and through the scope Nerf saw the cockpit glass explode inwards as the bullet passed clean through both sides and made the pilot all but disappear into an unrecognizable mess of red. For a fraction of a second the valkyrie seemed perfectly okay, but then realized the pilot’s death peeled hard to its right – its engine’s wailing like the damned as the troopers inside desperately tried to hold on – and plunged sideways into the ground with a sickening crunch of twisted metal that threw the few men who’d made it to the ground flat off their feet. Dust was everywhere. Then fire. And then an explosion that ripped the back part of the fuselage clean in two as the fuel tanks went up – instantly immolating whoever was left alive in the passenger compartment.

A sly smile spreading across his face, Nerf worked back the bolt and ejected the spent shell-casing onto the rooftop. In the Guard he’d have been given a medal for that kind of shot. Here…? Well, he’d be keeping that shell-casing; that was for sure.

Not spending too long admiring his handiwork, Nerf slung the anti-materiel rifle back over his shoulders, and went to pick up his carbine. He still had a rendez-vous to make.

 

* *

 

They followed the ancient sewer pipe for another two-hundred meters until a caved in section of the arterial piping forced Godwyn’s team to squeeze single-file through a more-recent side-passage that tunnelled off in another direction through a fissure in the sewer wall. The way forward was tight and their shoulders often rubbed against rough dirt walls, but as Godwyn led her team onward with her heavy pistol in one hand and bright-yellow lamp-pack in the other she had a good feeling that they were headed in the right direction. The tunnel, after all, was climbing gently upwards.

Behind her, Alexander sneezed loudly in the dust stirred up by their footsteps, though he quickly stifled the second and third outburst into his hand. Their voices could carry in a place like this, and, optimistic though she was about their chances, Godwyn did not think that they were so lucky as to be crawling around all alone in the dark places of the undercity. At best, they could expect that the people of Hogshead would retreat underground to avoid the open fighting in the streets, but at worst they could be confronted by crossfires and ambushes set up by a dug-in and well prepared foe.

The tunnel gradually grew larger around them – eventually allowing even Mercy to stand to her at full height – until it opened into a large, cavernous underground chamber littered with ancient-looking machinery and large piles of rubble strewn around collapsing retention walls of splintered wood. Automatically, the team fanned out and hugged the plentiful cover as the beams of their lamp-packs shone across their surroundings in an effort to grasp the layout of the room they were in.

It was big – that much was obvious – likely a long abandoned mining or excavation room from Hogshead’s unknown past. They had emerged near the back of the chamber and above them was moderately high ceiling of roughly hewn rock while the two chamber walls were visible to either side. Ahead of them, though, was only blackness, and however far the chamber extended forwards their lights were not powerful enough to see through to the end. Cover in the chamber was in abundance, but the footing also seemed rough and rife with obstacles that would have to be carefully navigated.

It looked like they would have to go forward, and it looked like doing so would be time consuming.

As a precaution, Godwyn checked her auspex before giving the order to move out; its readings were off, however – likely because of a low-level electrical interference generated by something in the rocks – odd, she thought, but nothing to be concerned about. Slightly more distressing was that her long range comms were also out, and that while she could communicate with her immediate teammates Meridian was beyond her reach. Regardless, the coordinates for the rendez-vous point with Nerf were just about three-hundred meters to her south-east, and if she could get out of the mining tunnel and back to the surface Godwyn had no doubt that she could make it there at about the same time he did.

Moving ahead, Godwyn signalled for the others to form up on her lead. Alexander responded immediately, and, having practiced similar manoeuvres with the Inquisitor while in transit aboard the Patroclus, took a parallel position several yards to her right where he crept forward in time with his autogun ready. Brianna was a little slower on the uptake, but being a well-trained warrior she picked up their formation quickly and scrambled around a pile of loosened rocks to take position on the left. Illias, on the other hand lacking any tactical training, took up a covering position as best she could with her heavy stubber. Mercy had already disappeared.

Fully alert now that they were in the open, Godwyn became especially aware of how noisy they were as their feet scraped over the bare rock beneath their feet, and consciously tried to place her feet more carefully one-over-the-other as the beams of their lamp-packs ghosted across the still darkness. The chamber was undoubtedly vast and must have once been of great importance to Hogshead, though now it looked as if the earth had not been disturbed in decades, if not longer, and had not felt the presence of human life for generations.

The clattering sound of scattering rocks drew her attention sharply to her left as Brianna struggled to maintain her footing as one of her armoured greaves skidded out from under her as she crossed a withered retention wall and come down from atop a pile of gravel. Luckily, she didn’t fall, and more importantly she held her tongue: only giving a look of wide-eyed surprise as she steadied herself at the last moment. She wasn’t looking at the Inquisitor though, and as the battle sister shone her light forward across the chamber she caught Mercy in its light as the lithe assassin skipped back towards them with long yet eerily silent bounds.

She came up to Godwyn and stopped with one of her trademark grins splayed across her sparkling face: she’d found something. Not waiting for them to ask, the giant woman beckoned them to follow her and led them off into the dark without hesitation.

She’d likely found a way out, Godwyn guessed, and waved for her companions to follow quickly in her footsteps while keeping as low as they could. They were noisy running after the assassin. Lamp-packs bobbing up and down as they ran and throwing up momentary shadows that made their footing hard, Godwyn had gone no more than a half-dozen paces when she felt her left boot kiss air instead of dirt as she stumbled and slid backwards off balance.

It was only until the second and third round slammed into her carapace plating that Godwyn realized she’d been shot.

Watching both her feet kick up in front of her, the Inquisitor hung in midair for what felt like a lifetime without feeling pain or hearing a sound until she landed flat on her back with a titanic crunch.

Then everything came back at once. The weight of an anvil suddenly pressed down on her chest and the air was squeezed from her lungs as if she were caught between a vice until it was too much even to breath and she founder herself suffocating in a world full of air.

“Down! Get down!” Brianna was shouting, taking the very words from Cassandra Godwyn’s breathless lungs even though she sounded a mile away.

“The Inquisitor’s been hit!”

She heard treaded boots digging in to loose rock even as her head smacked against the ground. It might have all been on another planet from them. Dying slowly in a world without air…

Two long-fingered hands suddenly seized her beneath both arms and scooped her up off the ground as Mercy dove head-first behind the protective cover of a rocky outcropping with the Inquisitor clutched tightly in her arms. They landed together with force, but no sooner was Godwyn regaining her wind and pushing herself off the ground than Mercy sprang clear and vanished into the darkness.

Back from her position, Alexander and Brianna were returning fire from positions of cover: the sister’s lasgun flashing in short, focused bursts while the Interrogator replied with wide-angled sprays of bullets aimed at suppressing a foe they had yet to set eyes on as bullets sliced the air around them and sent chunks of shattered rock flying.

Staying down behind the reassuringly solid cover of an overturned trolley cart, Godwyn waited to catch her breath before drawing her machine pistol with her left hand and plasma pistol with her right. Solid rounds were singing off the metal of the trolley cart at a torrential rate, pinning her down and separating the Inquisitor from the rest of her squad by a killing field no more than seven paces wide.

Creeping to the edge of her cover on her hands and knees, Godwyn risked a peek down-range but saw nothing in the darkness. Their unseen enemies had equipped flash-suppressors to conceal their positions and were likely engaging from long range with optically enhanced night-vision filters.

“Turn off your lights and stay low!” Godwyn shouted into her comm. “Cease fire! Cease fire!”

One at a time, her team eased up on their weapons before dropping down and snapping off their lamp-packs. If they were lucky it would make them less of a target and give them a fighting chance at engaging the enemy on equal footing.

A flurry of shots splintered the wood panelling of the barricade Brianna was sheltering behind and knocked her backwards off her feet with a loud clang as the bullets impacted against her plate armour.

The sister dropped like a stone and didn’t get up.

Instantly, Alexander was up and pumping fire back into the darkness. More bullets came his way and he was forced back down, but not before a thumping roar filled the confines of the chamber as Illias’ heavy weapon made its presence felt. Heedless of danger, the tech-priestess dashed forward with the heavy stubber snarling and kicking against all four of her arms as it spewed round after round into darkness and showered the ground at her feet with a rain of heavy brass shell casings that skipped and bounced along the cavern floor as she ran into the open. A slew of bullets screamed around her as she moved sideways across the enemy sights, and Godwyn saw several punch through the folds of her robes around her torso and arms, but the red-garbed tech-adept kept going as behind her Alexander made a mad scramble through the dirt to get to the downed battle sister’s side.

Seizing the opportunity, Godwyn swung out of cover with both pistols blazing in her fists. She couldn’t see anything, but she got off three blasts with her plasma pistol and felt the machine pistol run dry before she ducked back down.

Skidding to her knees, Illias threw herself into cover beside the Inquisitor and quickly scrambled in close against the overturned cart as another hail of bullets ricocheted wildly wide off their position.

“You’ve been shot!” Godwyn shouted at her, wincing as a solid slug clunked off a hard surface dangerously close to her head. The tech-priestess guided herself forward next to Godwyn with one of her human hands, though she kept her three remaining arms fastened to her weapon.

“My enhancements make me more resilient than a body of flesh,” Illias explained breathlessly as she rested her smoking weapon on her knees. Amazingly, she appeared unhurt even though there were more than a half-dozen bullet holes ripped in her robe.

Back from their position, Alexander was helping to pull sister Brianna back to her knees.

“Are you hurt? Are you injured?” he kept asking, ducking every time a bullet smacked into the rock nearby. The sister didn’t speak, but he could almost feel a hot anger boiling inside of her as she snatched up her fallen weapon and dragged herself back into a position from which she could continue to pummel the hated darkness with lasfire.

“Tactical assessment, Inquisitor?” Illias enquired in a monotone not suitable for life or death situations.

Godwyn didn’t have an answer – there was none she could give.

They were pinned down and marked by an enemy of unknown number and unknown position on an unmapped battlefield, and unless they managed to turn one of those elements in their favour the only tactical assessment that could be made was that they were all as good as dead. She needed something and she needed something quickly, because neither she, nor the tech-priestess, nor sister Brianna would be so fortunate as to survive getting shot a second time.

“We have to get some light down range!” she explained to the tech-priestess in way of an answer. Godwyn pulled the two phosphorescent flares she had been carrying free from her tactical belt and placed them side by side on the ground. She had intended to use them to mark a landing zone for Meridian, but in the near-total darkness of the mine the flares could prove invaluable.

A bullet sang off the rim of the overturned trolley cart and whizzed wide like an enraged hornet.

“Provide cover fire, and I’ll get these as far down as I can!” Godwyn continued, gathering up the flares in her right hand while keeping her plasma pistol drawn in her left. Illias acknowledged with a word, and Godwyn shouted the same command to the rest of her team on the comm:

“Covering fire on me, on my mark! Acknowledge!”

Alexander and Brianna answered that they understood, and, rising to her feet in a low crouch, Godwyn rested a steady hand on the edge of the overturned trolley in anticipation of making a mad run forward. Mad was right, she shook her head; this was suicide.

Loosening the det-tape on both flares, she took a deep breath and held it in before counting down the seconds in her head.

“Stand ready,” she told her team as more bullets whistled by. This was insane, but she had to do something otherwise they would all be dead, and she doubted that even Mercy would be able to pull her out this time… if Mercy hadn’t planned to lead them into this mess all along.

She bit her lip. Her knees tensed beneath her.

“Covering fire!”

Illias was up with her heavy stubber blazing away into the shadows in a reckless expenditure of ammunition. Alexander was bent low over the reflex sight of his auto gun and was watching the ammunition counter drop steadily down to zero. Brianna sang a hymn of wrath at the top of her lungs as the lasgun in her hands belted out angry red energy beams in testament to her words.

Pounding the rock beneath her feet, Godwyn tore forward in a blind rush to gain some measure of ground against the enemy. Heart drumming in her chest and blood singing in her ears, she lost reckoning of how far her feet had carried her when she dove into the cover of a large slab of crumbling rock and threw herself flat on her stomach against it. Immediately she regained her feet, and, as her team’s covering fire continued to tear into the darkness overhead, she hurled both flares one after the other end-over-end into the darkness. She didn’t see where the flares landed, but the pale white light lit up the darkness almost like day and outlined the entirety of the chamber before her eyes. Everything down-range was visible between the sharp contrast of darkness and light, and before, where she had seen nothing, she now saw the enemy.

Godwyn didn’t get a complete count, but there were at least ten or more at a range of thirty to fifty meters.

“Engage! Engage!” Godwyn commanded as she was forced down by fire raking the outline of the stone obstacle she sheltered behind.

Brianna unleashed a salvo of well places shots and saw a couple hit, though before the battle sister had time to confirm a kill she was already dodging and weaving forward across the chamber floor as she tried to advance under fire. Snapping off shots when she could, she drew even with the overturned trolley cart ducked down into cover beside the tech-priestess to eject a blanked power-cell before reloading and spraying more fire blindly over top of the badly mauled metal.

Illias was up in support of the sister laying down sweeping, near-deafening bursts of fire that showered more heavy-calibre brass shells down around her feet. A round took her in the shoulder, but she didn’t seem to notice as she calmly crouched back down in the face of intense return fire.

Only half a minute after the flares had ignited, Inquisitor Godwyn was noticing that they were starting to slowly fade. With an added sense of urgency she leaned out of cover and found an enemy down the sights of her plasma pistol: a squeeze of the trigger vapourised the upper half of his body in the blink of an eye while a powerful round from her drawn heavy pistol skipped off a pile of debris near the face of another and sent him ducking back down. A third enemy contact drew a bead on the Inquisitor and fire a long, noiseless burst with his suppressed rifle – the first few shots glancing harmlessly off the obscuring rock mere feet in front of her while a latter two whipped harmlessly along the folds of her armour-weave coat. The return from the plasma pistol blasted through the meagre cover he was sheltering behind and hit home with the force of a miniature star going nova – what was left of him fell to the ground in scorched chunks. In response to the death, several more of the enemy contacts set their sights on the Inquisitor and drove her back out of sight with a hail of lead.

Godwyn’s team shot back, but the enemy was too well dug in. The light was fading faster now, and now that the way forward was as good as lost they would have to find another way out.

“Alexander, do you read me?” Godwyn called to her apprentice as she dug herself lower into the ground as bullets snapped and whizzed around her.

++“I hear you, Inquisitor!”++ came her apprentice’s reply. He sounded panicked, frightened, but his sense of duty held him steady when lesser men would have wept in fear. Forget fear; Godwyn was glad that he was still alive.

“James, listen to me,” she began what she knew would not be easy to hear as another bullet ricocheted wildly through the air just above where she sprawled in cover. “James, listen to me! I need you to fall back. Backtrack out of here, and find another way to the surface! Do you understand!?”

++“I understand.”++

Good. That was very good.

“I’m ordering you to get Illias to the rendez-vous. I’ll follow you if I can.”

As if in response, the tech-priestess’ heavy stubber opened up again – heavy slugs slewing through the air towards the enemy positions.

Godwyn knew she was doing the right thing: Illias had to get to the surface with whatever data she had recovered from the planet scribe, and Alexander would have to take her there. Everyone else – sister Brianna, Mercy, Nerf – was expendable at this point; the investigation would still be intact… even if Godwyn herself was no longer around to conduct it.

She fired blindly over cover towards the enemy with her plasma pistol. That was the way it had to be.

Back a ways, Interrogator James Alexander scrambled on his hands and knees over the rubble-strewn mine floor in the half-light to find his way back to the tunnel they’d arrived through. Stray rounds were still whipping through the air above him, but the further back he got the more he could tell that the battle was behind him. He’d find the way back first, he figured, then collect the tech-priestess. She was an asset in a fire-fight, and his mentor would need all the help she could get. Nearing the back of the mining chamber, he knew the tunnel had to be close-by and he could sense their passage from before, though somehow the Warp-wake had been disturbed by something he couldn’t put his finger on. Still moving forward, he closed his eyes and tried to push his mind further onto his surroundings. Something was there…

He sensed Mercy approaching a moment before her hand touched his shoulder.

Startled, he spun around; almost losing his balance as the long form of the assassin loomed over him.

“Mercy!” the word jumped from his lips as he stared up at her, though his mind could not help but register her beguiling shape.

The assassin’s hands were already slicked with the blood of her victims, and flecks of it dotted her chest and face. Her eyes were cold. She did not smile.

There would be no going back.

Feeling an icy cold running through his veins, Alexander slowly crept back to the fighting, and when he looked over his shoulder the assassin had gone.

++“Inquisitor,”++ Alexander’s voice sounded distant and subdued in her ear ++“we can’t get out this way.”++

Godwyn swore loudly and managed another quick shot with her plasma pistol as enemy fire continued to pin her in place.

++“There is another way, Inquisitor,”++ it was Illias speaking now; ++“Mercy is directing me to the East. She’s found something.”++

A bullet obliterated a chunk of rock overtop of where she was sheltering – raining bits of shattered stone down atop of her head and shoulders. Godwyn grimaced.

“Go with her. Get out of here! I’ll try to draw their fire!” she didn’t wait for a response before ordering Brianna to lay down cover fire as she sprinted further to the left – drawing the enemy’s sights with her away from the tech-priestess as she tried to make good her escape.

She’d likely just committed suicide, Godwyn confessed to herself, as she was now a good distance away from her only escape and she doubted that the enemy would take her alive after going to such great lengths to kill her. She wasn’t dead yet though, and she had several ideas on how to make the black-clad bastards pay before they got her. Leaning out of cover she blazed away with both pistols until enemy fire forced he back into cover yet again.

It wouldn’t be long now.

Suddenly, through a break in the fire, Godwyn noticed movement to her right and turned just in time to see the broad shouldered form of the Catachan commando throw himself down into cover beside her, though he was up again in no time and pumping fire back over at the enemy. Stunned, she didn’t know where he’d come from or how he’d found her, but as far as she was concerned Nerf had never looked so good, and seeing him here now wading into the thick of the fighting filled her with a renewed sense of vigour that she could pull through yet.

Adding her firepower to his, they blazed away at the enemy with all their guns until they glowed, and between them they made a killing field which forced the enemy to back down into the deeper recesses of the mines, but for all their fury the battle was still hopelessly up hill.

His carbine clicking empty, Nerf dropped to a knee to reload and waited for the Inquisitor to do likewise.

“Time to get you out, boss!” he said when she dropped to his level; “We’re leaving!”

Godwyn didn’t argue semantics and scooted over to better see what he had in mind.

“We’ve got a clear run to the right,” Nerf explained – the thwack of bullets shattering the rock around them indicating that their opponents had reemerged from hiding to challenge their escape. “There is a shaft that way through a tunnel dug in the wall that can get us back to the surface. Mercy and the others are going through now. Bit of a climb, but we’ve got more of a chance going that way.”

“What about them?” Godwyn swung her pistol in the direction of the enemy as she covered her head from the tiny showers of loose rocks that pelted down on top of them.

“I’ll have you covered,” Nerf replied, locking a fresh magazine into his auto-carbine with added emphasis. “All you need to do is make a break for it. Go it?”

She got it.

“Alright,” he hoisted the auto-carbine in arms and rested the stock up against his shoulder; “Covering fire!”

The carbine opened up with a grinding rattle, and Godwyn ran flat out for the tunnel. She ran fast and she ran hard. She kept running until she was up the shaft and out into the war-torn streets. She kept running until she was aboard the Meridian and Lee was leaving the blinking lights of Hogshead behind.

“Put some distance between us and that city,” she told Lee as she stood in the hatchway to Meridian’s cockpit. The pilot gave her a reassuring okay, and she turned to go. The Patroclus had better be expecting them.

[Papewaio]

Glad to see that it's starting to heat up! Ilias' weaponry is downright awesome; I love that idea of her stowing as part of her body! And subtly altering phrases to suit the 41st millennium adds a great touch. Beautiful stuff.

 

As always, though, there is one flaw in your writing: it ends too quickly!

[Lady_Canoness]

Thanks bud :lol:

 

To be honest, I didn't know how that last part would be received (that's the problem with writing it in snippets over time). Things ARE picking up the pace, however, and will all start coming together. One way I know that I've got the rest of the story planned out is that I'm already dreaming up Inquisition III! :pinch:

[Aqui]

Inquisition III! :lol:

 

Yay! ^_^

[Lady_Canoness]

Yessir there will most definitely be a third story down the line, though I won't rush two just to get to it ;)