The Inquisition II

[Lady_Canoness]

*Part 9*

 

“So what I’ve been hearing is true? Anarchy rules the streets of Hogshead? A death toll likely climbing into the tens of thousands?”

Godwyn paused, the half-empty glass of single-malt whiskey part way between her lap and her lips; “Yes, something like that.” She tipped the glass to her lips and drained it in a single go.

Standing at the view port with his back the Inquisitor, Hercule Columbo shook his head to the void; “Emperor above…”

They were alone under the crystal dome of the Seigneurie, like they had been countless times before aboard Columbo’s famed merchant vessel: Godwyn reclining deeply in one of the antiquated armchairs Columbo kept in his rich collection – an empty glass in her hand and an unstoppered bottle on the table at her side – while the Ship Master himself paced nearby – hands behind his back, facing outwards and never towards the woman in the chair. It was a scene that played out with increasing regularity within the circular ballroom, like a kind of quirk that developed between friends in trying times.

When Inquisitor Godwyn and Hercule Columbo had first met nearly a quarter century earlier, the Inquisitor, still fresh from her days as an apprentice, had been tasked with tracking down and apprehending her old mentor, and had been put into contact with the rogue trader as a means of transportation between worlds. Needless to say, nothing about her first major assignment turned out the way she planned, and the impression it made on her career and her person was profound, yet, of all that came from it, her relationship with the rogue trader Columbo was one of the things she cherished most. Even if, at times, she had odd ways of showing it.

He was an old man, Columbo – old enough to be Cassandra’s great-great-grand father, as he’d often remind her – but the word did him no justice. True enough, he had seen many years and been master of the Patroclus since before Cassandra Godwyn had even been a seed in her mother’s womb, but if that made him old, then he wore his age well. He was stately, regal, even noble – as if he were the embodiment of an older, more civilized era when profiteers were gentlemen of an aristocratic ideal to whom plying the stars was as much an art as it was a science.

The vessel reflected the master’s ideal perfectly, and, even as the years wore on, the Patroclus wedded artistry with functionality to a point where each came together as a thing of beauty. Of all the long ships that travelled the void, the Patroclus stood apart. Every deck, every hall, every cabin bore the fruits of the master’s skill as well as that of his crew.

Aboard a ship so magnificent, the vast circular room of the Seigneurie was the crowning jewel, and Columbo’s most prized theatre in which to entertain guests and friends of all kinds. Filled but not overwhelmed with title pieces of all his various collections, the Seigneurie was a liveable display of elegance arranged with utmost care under a domed ceiling of glass that opened upon the stars and was lined with hanging chandeliers of the richest craftsmanship. It was here that the master of the Patroclus would entreat his cherished guests to drink, dance, and dine in parties of two to two-hundred, and it was here that the Inquisitor and the Ship Master saw most of each other, though as of recent the dance became rare, the dining uncommon, and the drink overwhelming.

“I do not judge you, Cassandra,” Hercule continued, his back still turned but his voice betraying a worry that suggested that he was doing just that, “but think of the cost! Surely your wish must be to prevent such things, not precipitate them!”

Godwyn’s hand was already crossing back to the whiskey bottle to refill her glass.

“And for grace’s sake, surely this is a time when your senses are needed elsewhere and not dulled by drink!”

She gave him a warning glance to not pursue the subject as she poured more whiskey, uncut, to the five-finger brim of the glass, and it was at her lips again before the bottle touched wood.

Columbo could only shake his silver haired head. In the years he’d known her, he’d seen Inquisitor Godwyn go from a good humoured young lady with the spark of nobility, to a severe Imperial Agent driven by duty whose only respite seemed to come from the bottom of a glass. It was not to say that the young woman he cherished almost like she were of his own blood-line was gone – she still laughed and smiled and would have that sparkle in her eyes – but it just seemed harder for her to do so. There was a weight on her shoulders, a weight she would not acknowledge or share, and likely one she did not even realize was there.

“I am compelled by duty, Hercule,” she said softly, the glass poised between the fingertips of both her hands, “you know that.”

Columbo sighed. “Yes, I know that,” he confessed with a weary nod, “but you’re not making it easy on yourself.”

She confided much in him, likely more so than with some of the members of her actual team, but there were always things she left unsaid, and it often these he felt should be talked about most.

“If my duty was easy,” she said, drinking slowly as her eyes traced unblinkingly across the far side of the room, “then I wouldn’t be needed to do it.”

“You know what I mean,” he retorted in a challenge of sorts. She was evading. She had boarded his ship and come to see him immediately, but either the drink or the burden pressing down on her back, or both, kept her from saying the real reason why. Now he was giving her a chance – opening a door and inviting her to walk through – and, if she did, then maybe, just maybe, he could talk to her.

Instead, however, she got up, drained the rest of her glass at an alarming rate, and placed it gently back on the side table.

“Thank you for the drink, Hercule,” she said, the haze of alcohol just barely descending upon her eyes, “however, I should see to my team. I can’t be idle for too long, but I promise we’ll have time to talk later.”

Columbo turned to face the young woman and he smiled; a small, warm, carrying smile. “Yes, I understand,” he said, and he was glad to see that his smile was returned in the same way. “I’ll be here waiting when you come back.”

She turned to go and left without another word, but the smile stayed on Columbo’s face. Things had changed about her over the years, but underneath it all she was still Godwyn as he’d known her all along.

 

 

Leaving the Seigneurie, the Inquisitor made her way to the cabins set aside for her use upon the Patroclus’ habitation deck, though unless her ‘team’ consisted of an aged bottle of gin among other things stocked in the common room’s liquor cabinet, then she wasn’t seeing to them.

Since their return to the orbiting Patroclus, Godwyn had made it very clear to her entourage that this was not a withdrawal, and that they were merely taking time to regroup, analyze the information recovered from the planet scribe, and formulate a plan of action based on the developments planetside. Illias had set to work immediately and had sequestered herself in the ship’s cogitator mainframe to use every resource available to aid her in the decryption and recovery of data, though notably she had not requested the assistance of Sudulus, and, to the best of Godwyn’s knowledge, her savant, stung with indignation, had remained on Meridian to make what he called ‘necessary adjustments’ to the shuttle. The rest of her team had dispersed upon arrival to pursue their own agendas, though as Godwyn entered the richly furnished common room through the sliding double doors she found Nerf casually smoking one of his favourite cigars as he stood at the opposite end of the room staring out the viewport at the winking running lights of a multitude of other vessels that hung alongside them in the orbit of Penumbra.

Turning slightly as he heard her enter and cross the room behind him, he plucked the glowing cigar from between his rough lips and extended a warm nod in her direction as a greeting.

“Things were getting pretty hot down there,” he said through a waft of smoke when glass chinked against glass behind him and Godwyn poured herself yet another stiff drink. “How’re you holdin’ up, boss?”

She wetted her lips on a sip of the dry liquid and savoured the flavour before answering. “Just like having one foot in the grave,” the Inquisitor replied dryly as she leaned up against the back of one of the leather-bound sofas and folded her arms. That drew a rumbling chuckle and another waft of grey smoke from the Catachan, and when he eventually turned to face her he did so with a wide grin on his face.

“But you know what that also means?” he asked.

She shook her head, eyeing the glass in her hand considerately before taking another long drag on the clear liquor.

The Catachan exhaled a long plume of smoke into the air. The cigar between his broad fingers was monstrous – at least nine inches long – but had a pleasant scent to it, like the burning of some rich wood.

“It means that you’ve got at least one foot out,” he said, and flashed his trademark tooth-filled grin before slowly turning back to the viewport and the dark vista beyond.

Godwyn let his words swirl about in her head for a time as she swirled the drink in her hand. With two solid drinks behind her, and a third on its way, the thoughts flowed more easily through her head as ideas seemed clearer without doubts or uncertainty lingering in the way.

“Nerf,” she interjected with a thought, “there is a picture I’d like you to take a look at.”

“Sure thing, boss,” the commando shrugged in response, “let’s have a look at it.”

Abandoning the viewport, Godwyn produced her data-slate after the Catachan had sunk comfortably into a spacious sofa and uploaded the image she’d received from the Witch Hunter to the display screen. Placing it on the coffee table between them and sliding it forward, Godwyn sat down opposite her henchman as Nerf leaned in for a better look.

“Nice picture,” he said with a slight frown after a moment’s glance. “Somethin’ special about it?”

“It was taken by another Inquisitor,” Godwyn replied, resting her elbows on her knees and placing the glass of gin on the table between them; “one who said it was taken after several of her operatives were killed by the person in that picture.”

Nerf took a long drag on his cigar and blew the smoke out his nose. Sinking comfortably back into the sofa, he fixed the Inquisitor with a passive look. “But you don’t believe her?”

“Do you?”

The Catachan gave a little tilt of his head to show that he was thinking about it. “Our girl Mercy kills a lot of people, and I don’t think she’d be choosey about it.” He shrugged again. “She probably did kill those people.”

The Inquisitor’s face hardened, but Nerf remained indifferent.

“It’s a messy business doing what we do, boss,” the Catachan continued. “I’m pretty sure we’ve all killed people who didn’t deserve it. But then again it’s a messy galaxy out there. We’re all gonna get our hands dirty one way or another.”

Godwyn didn’t disagree, but at the same time she wasn’t staying awake at night thinking about it – she had enough trouble sleeping as is.

“I didn’t ask her to kill these people,” she explained what she thought should already be clear. “If she’s doing this, then she’s doing it on her own.”

Nerf flicked his cigar and seemed to nod along with what she was saying. “So you’re worried about her going rogue?” he said.

Godwyn nodded, and after a pause added: “That, or she’s taking directives from someone else.” She had to be careful with how much she told him, but Nerf was already shaking his head.

“Mercy’s not like that,” he said, “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“She doesn’t talk,” Godwyn reminded him with perhaps a little too much emphasis laced into her words. “How do you know she isn’t?”

If Nerf took any offence he didn’t show it, but remained totally calm and nonplussed. “She’ll kill just about anyone you don’t order her *not* to kill,” he commented.

Godwyn was not reassured, but Nerf waved it down as being unimportant.

“There’s a lot of stuff she does that she doesn’t want anyone to know about – that’s just who she is – but she’s not without reason. She knows who’s boss. Also, she likes you, so I don’t think she’d do anything that she thinks would bring you to harm.”

“She likes me?” Godwyn asked sceptically, raising both eyebrows in surprise as she reached for her gin. “Did she *tell* you that?”

Nerf snorted, the grin returning to his face. Like Godwyn, the Catachan had not taken the time to clean himself up after the fighting planetside, and his face was still smeared with dark camouflage paint, though it didn’t hide the rugged charm in his smiling features.

“You’re good to her, boss,” he explained, clamping the cigar between his teeth as the Inquisitor occupied herself sipping from her drink, “and she likes the company.” He nodded his head reflectively; “She’s been through a lot of bad sh*t getting here…”

Godwyn met his eyes, but the Catachan was staring into memory. It didn’t take long for him to snap back out though;

“So I wouldn’t worry about her. She probably did kill those people, but I wouldn’t read too much into it.”

He leaned forward and pulled the data-slate towards him as Godwyn turned over his words in silence.

“One thing though, boss,” he said, puffing on his cigar and sliding the image back across the table to the Inquisitor, “I’d ask this other Inquisitor when that picture was taken.”

Arching an eyebrow, Godwyn leaned forward also to look at the picture. “Why?”

The Catachan plucked the cigar from between his teeth and flicked it. “She’s got a sword in this picture, see?” he pointed out with a battle-stained finger.

“Meaning?”

“Well, I haven’t seen her use a sword in years,” he added, “and, believe me, she is very picky about her weapons.”

Godwyn looked up at him. He was looking right back her.

“So she wouldn’t use a sword? At all?”

Nerf shook his head. “You’ve seen how good she is with those claws she has,” he said, “so no; I don’t think she’d use a sword.”

She took another look at the picture. It was grainy and the quality was poor, but the unmistakably tall woman was holding something long and angular in her hand which was much too long to be anything other than a sword.

“I want to ask her about it,” she announced, but Nerf only gave a low chuckle in response.

“I think we all want to ask her a lot of things,” he said with a wistful smile.

 

* *

 

The memories of the library aboard the Patroclus had always been good for Interrogator James Alexander. Between the sky-reaching shelves of perfectly arranged velum and parchment upon which innumerable classics were transcribed, he’d always felt a prevailing sense of calm in the quiet spaces devoted to the aggrandisement of thought, and of all the places he’d been in his life he could think of nowhere better to find peace.

Yet even so peace eluded him.

He’d put on some music he’d found in Columbo’s audio catalogue to try and fill the quiet in the air, but so far it hadn’t worked. Maybe it even made things worse. The music was gentle. Beautiful. But as the woman sang softly in a dialect he couldn’t understand, all Alexander heard was a slow melody of sorrow sliding into despair.

Would it always be like this, he wondered? Would this be what fighting meant to him? The adrenaline rush of life and death flashing around him had vanished, and in its place was a void that was taking too long to fill.

His left hand was shaking, and his stomach felt ill.

Nerf had given him a cigar as soon as they stepped off Meridian – one of his long, valued cigars that he’d once said came from his home world of Catachan. Maybe he’d known what the young man would go through.

Alexander wasn’t a smoker, and he doubted that he’d tell the difference between the rich, powerful aroma of the Catachan’s cigar and the cheap stench of a lho-stick, but he’d lit it all the same and sucked down the smoke as if it were the air itself. It had substance. It had something.

The others, though, they all seemed to be coping; one way or another.

Godwyn had gone to see the ship master, as she often did when coming in from afield, and Illias had went straight to work on deciphering the information they’d risked their lives for. Brianna was a trained warrior, and judging by her icy demeanour after their escape was hardened against the fighting, if such a thing was possible. Nerf and Mercy, on the other hand, seemed almost better off after the fighting, as if they somehow thrived on it. Was that what happened when a person had seen too much bloodshed?

Cigar smoke wafted up over his face.

He didn’t know. Nerf seemed immune to it, or maybe just so far gone that it felt more normal to him to be fighting than not. But Mercy?

He shook his head at the thought.

So much about her was already so far from being human that he wasn’t surprised that the killer was one with her craft. She was different, abnormal.

He puffed on the cigar.

Maybe even a mutant, or possibly a –

“Witch.”

The sound of someone behind him practically jumped the Interrogator out of his skin, and he stood bolt-upright from the armchair in which he had been sitting.

“What!?” he managed, turning on his heels and noticing the battle sister glaring at him not more than a half-dozen paces away.

“Don’t pretend,” the sister’s pale features were cold and her stance was both rigid and uncompromising. “You thought you’d hide what you are from us?” She wasn’t wearing her armour or carrying her weapons, but even so Alexander could tell just by looking at her that she meant to cow him, which was likely why she’d chosen to confront him like she did – when he was fatigued, strained, and not expecting an attack.

The Interrogator straightened up, facing down her accusatory stare as he marshalled his wits about him and briefly removed the cigar from between his teeth. Maybe he was looking too much into it, or simply imagining what he would have done in her place, but either way he was determined not to stand for it.

“I’d watch where you throw your accusations,” he warned her.

He was taller that she was by a fair margin, but the sister’s grey eyes never changed from their withering stare.

“I am an agent of the Holy Inquisition, and I won’t be criticized by you.”

The penitent sister didn’t heed his warning, however, and took as step closer as the Interrogator took a step back. Brianna wasn’t wearing armour or carrying her chainsword, but between the quilted leather jerkin she had on and the modest fitting cargo pants it was all too easy to imagine that she could have concealed a weapon.

“I won’t let a mutant deviant walk unpunished. Your very presence is a transgression upon what is sacred!” The sister was almost shouting now, and the Interrogator could feel the righteous anger rippling off her as she continued to close on him.

Unwilling to retreat any further, Alexander held his ground. She must have been looking for conflict when she found him, but he had no idea why. Then again, since when did a servant of the Ecclesiarchy ascribe to reason?

Forcing aside his personal feelings and refusing to be baited into losing his temper, Alexander addressed her in as level a tone as he could:

“My mentor chose me knowing of my talents,” he insisted, holding his head high, “and her crew accepts me in spite of them. Instead losing your temper at me, your time would be better served asking why you were never told.”

Brianna didn’t seem to hear him, though if she did the young sister made a good show of ignoring the Interrogator. Instead, warning him as way of response, she levelled a threatening finger at his chest. “I have a sacred duty to protect the Imperium from corruption within,” she said through gritted teeth, “and if you show even the slightest indicator that you can’t resist your taint, then don’t think for a moment that I won’t kill you!”

Her warning delivered, the sister threw him a last, disgusted look, and turned quickly to go.

“Why were you exiled?!” Alexander called after her as she strode from the library; “What made you leave your sisters?!”

The slamming of doors was all he got in response, followed by sudden silence as the flurry of anger rescinded from the vaulted room.

In the background, the voice of the singer changed tune to sing a song a little more lively.

 

* *

 

Unlike the rest of Godwyn’s entourage who spent the majority of their ship-board time on the habitation deck or making use of other amenities aboard the Patroclus, Mercy was liable to go anywhere for reasons only she was privy to. Sudulus had come up with an idle theory suggesting that she often spent the time learning all the hiding places aboard a ship and finding the areas where no-one ever went. Lee also had a theory, though his was much more lewd and likely inspired by one of the raunchy vids he kept hidden in his stash. In truth, however, no one really thought much about her disappearing since she always showed up at some point (often when she was least expected) and never missed anything too important. It did mean that Godwyn was unable to find her though, and after a brief and fruitless search the Inquisitor retired to her cabin for a couple painstaking hours of sleep before being woken by the appearance of her savant.

“I’m terribly sorry to disturb you, Inquisitor,” he roused her gently, noting that, once again, she had been sleeping fully clothed, “but I am told that the core of the machine you found down there has yielded some interesting results.”

Swinging her booted feet to the floor, the Inquisitor sat on the edge of her bed with a groan and massaged a hand around the base of her neck.

Compared to cabins aboard Meridian, the living quarters provided for Godwyn and her crew on board the Patroclus were both spacious, elegant, and comfortable with ornately hand-crafted canopy beds with little expense spared in their decoration in place of Meridian’s simple cots, but even so the Inquisitor was finding it to be less and less of a reprieve.

“Anything we can use?” she asked, resting her elbows on her knees and wiping the palms of her hands over her face as Sudulus casually backed off to give the Inquisitor her space.

“To be frankly honest, I cannot begin to tell,” he replied in an annoyed huff, allowing Godwyn to guess that the tech-priestess had been cryptic as usual when she told him about it. “All she told me was that the team ought to be recalled and that she would need to see you as soon as possible. Precisely why she is unable to tell you this herself, I do not know. Damnable cog-head treating me like an inferior errand boy! I cannot see too little of her!”

Godwyn nodded in silent agreement. She got the message.

Leaving her cabin, she called her squad to assemble in the common room between the cabins, and, when they had arrived, invited the tech-priestess to speak:

“Time is of the essence, Inquisitor,” Illias said in her usual flat tone once everyone had given her their attention. “I will proceed to my findings immediately if you will permit it.”

Godwyn, standing cross-armed at the head of the room with her back to the viewport, indicated for the tech-priestess to do what she felt she must, and around the common room eyebrows were arched as her companions looked from one to the other. Even Mercy (who had only just arrived moments before they were set to begin) gave an intrigued look from where she was propped in the doorway of her cabin.

“I have traced the high-frequency transfer of encrypted data-files to numerous recipients across the Penumbra,” Illias began without preamble. “The contents of these files are largely composed of geological and archaeological data with a particular interest in the past four-hundred years.”

“Soun’s jus’ li’e some batty cult a’ w’rk t’me,” Lee cut in from where he slouched on one of the leather bound sofas in the middle of the room. The comment earned him a scathing glance from the battle sister, but everyone else seemed to ignore him.

“There is an anomaly in the data transfer, however,” Illias continued as if uninterrupted, “and by my estimation it is worth investigation.”

“What kind of anomaly?” Godwyn asked. Nerf nodded in agreement; he wanted to hear this too.

Illias looked from the Catachan to across the room at the Inquisitor.

“The recipient is in the uninhabitable southern hemisphere of the planet,” she explained.

“Impossible!” Sudulus instantly retorted. “Your calculations must be off. There is nothing in the southern hemisphere of Penumbra – it is completely lifeless down there!”

“I did not say it was on the planet’s surface,” Illias corrected him. “The anomaly, it is a ship.”

[Lady_Canoness]

With so many things on the go (and working six days a week) it is getting harder and harder to find quality time to sit down with Godwyn and the Inquisition, though now that I've got part 10 ready to go I suddenly feel much better! Like the first Inquisition, there will be about 17 to 18 parts to this tale, so that halfway mark has been passed.

 

*Part 10*

 

 

No one had ever bothered to count the ships in orbit above Penumbra, though if they had the number would likely reach into the thousands. Mostly trader vessels, the skies above the night world were hectic, and often chaotic, as ship masters jockeyed against one another for position and shuttle pilots tried to reach the planet’s surface without a collision or some other mishap befalling them. To find a single ship over the northern hemisphere in such conditions without proper guidance would be madness as ships would come and go as they pleased without anyone being any the wiser. However, to find a ship orbiting above the southern hemisphere was another matter entirely.

So far as anyone knew, the southern part of Penumbra was a desolate, barren wasteland far from the northern city lights called the Sticks, and, according to local legend, no-one who went down into the darkness ever came back. Ships had scanned the area before and found nothing save ravines and craggy mountains devoid of life, and even the most enterprising of prospectors discounted it as worthless; ensuring that while the space above the teaming cities would be packed, the sky over the Sticks would remain as barren as the ground below.

Under Godwyn’s direction, the Patroclus lifted anchor in high orbit above Hogshead, and in three short hours was clear of the anchorage and on a set course south to the last known coordinates of Illias’ anomaly. Godwyn waited on the bridge with Columbo and the tech-priestess for the duration of the search, but in the end it would take another three and-a-half hours to pick up the trace of a ship in orbit above the Sticks.

 

“We’ve picked up contact at range five-thousand,” one of the deck officers announced after what had felt like an eternity of silence. “Confirmed that it is a ship.”

Breaking off from the hushed conversation he’d been having with his first officer, Columbo gently strolled from the aft end of the bridge up to the command platform and stood next to the Inquisitor as she leaned on the rail separating them from the operations deck below. “On display, please,” he said, the conversational tone of his voice more than enough to carry across the calm atmosphere on the bridge.

The bridge-crew acknowledged in silence, and moments later the holographic image of a ship appeared hovering in midair.

“I say…” Columbo murmured, his face darkening as his eyes criss-crossed the image of the ship that waited off their port-bow in the blackness, “it seems like you’ve found quite a remarkable vessel…”

Godwyn could only nod in agreement as both she and the tech-priestess leaned forward for a better look; the image hovering over the heads of the bridge-crew was of a vessel the likes of which she had never seen before. It was definitely of Imperial origin as it maintained the elongated hull with colossal superstructure mounted abaft, yet the ship’s baroque design was such a way it was broader across the beams than it was between the keel and dorsal spines which gave it the appearance of being flatter and more menacing so that even the vessel’s holographic simulacrum conveyed a sense of might by simply looking at it. From the onset it didn’t look heavily armed, but closer examination of the ornate hull revealed deep recessing between the ship’s angular ribbings that hinted at concealed armaments and suggested that the vessel could be far more durable than its abnormal hull structure would otherwise entail.

“Run her signatures,” Columbo instructed his crew as his eyes followed the Inquisitor’s over the slowly rotating holograph, “I would like to know what it is we are looking at before we get too close.”

The crew complied immediately, and Godwyn heard them whispering amongst themselves before the deck-officer approached the command platform to report. “Signatures are that of the ‘Lord Decimus’, sir,” the uniformed officer reported as he handed a data-slate up to the ship-master, “commissioned mid-M.34 as an explorator vessel by one Solomon Decimus.”

Colombo nodded his thanks and the officer retreated.

“Sir,” the signal-operator called up from below, “we’re not getting any energy readings from her, sir.”

“Nothing?” the ship master asked for confirmation.

“Nothing,” the man replied. “She’s completely dark.”

Dark: no lights, no power, and, most critically, no life support. A dark ship was a dead ship – completely invisible to conventional scanning save for the metal of her hull.

“Do we have her last port of call?” Columbo persisted, but again the response was negative:

“No sir, we’ve got nothing on her.”

The ship master accepted this, but when next he turned to Godwyn it was not with an air of accomplishment.

“She could have been out here for eons, and if she’s dark, then it’s likely that whatever you’re looking for isn’t here,” Columbo told her mirthlessly as if sharing in the disappointment of another lead turning up dead, but Illias interrupted them before either one could say anything further:

“That is incorrect,” she said matter-of-factly in a bold move. “Ship sensors are only capable of tracing radiation through the hull. If a power-source is localised deep within the ship, it will be untraceable by outside monitoring.”

Columbo conceded the point, though Godwyn’s trained eye picked up the ship master’s annoyance at being overruled on his own bridge.

“What about life signs?” Godwyn asked the tech-priestess.

“Lack of life support does not infer lack of life,” Illias replied, her expressionless face turning to the Inquisitor’s. “If a crew operated in full pressure suits, they would remain undetected by conventional means.”

“But by unconventional means?” Columbo cut in, seemingly interested in what else Illias might divulge on the topic.

“Xeno technologies perhaps,” she explained; “not Imperial.”

The ship master seemed intrigued, but Godwyn wasn’t about to entertain any further questions and dismissed the tech-priestess from the bridge. Columbo hid his disappointment well, but not well enough.

“How do you want to proceed then, my dear?” he asked once Illias had departed. “Shall we go in for a closer look?”

Godwyn nodded, but then pointed out several unusual discolourations along the holograph’s hull. “What are those?”

Columbo followed her finger. “Those? Those are what are called ‘void burn’. When a vessel goes too long without a refit, its hull will undergo minor ionization and warping that makes it read differently than the rest of her. It typically means that a ship has been a long time without making port.”

“So this Lord Decimus has been here a while?”

The older man shrugged as if to say that was one explanation. “It’s possible, yes, though whoever was her last master certainly did not make habit of docking, shall we say.”

An ancient ship sitting dark on the dead side of a world with the only thing pointing to its location being a tech-marvel hidden beneath the crust of the earth that was linked to mysterious and grisly murders? Even without her current investigation Godwyn wouldn’t have passed it by.

“I am going to board that ship,” she said. “Get me as close as you can.”

 

 

 

The rogue trader took them as close in as eight kilometres before they had to bridge the rest of the gap with Meridian, but, even so, boarding the Lord Decimus and gaining access to its dark interior was no easy feat. Encased head to foot in hard suits with a limited two hours of air, Godwyn, Alexander, Illias, and Sudulus had to get in, find what they were looking for, and get back the Patroclus before they suffocated.

Sitting in Meridian’s lower hold they were quiet. Nerves most likely, Godwyn thought, not fear; it would make them cautious, not compromise their judgement. They were right to be nervous too, for the galaxy was full of danger, and she had seen enough classified reports to know that it wasn’t just the unwary or the foolish who fell into such things. The world of Penumbra was already a mystery that defied explanation since it was far beyond the habitable distance from a star, and here she was about to board a ghost ship without armour and no more protection than her plasma pistol could provide. Fools never thought themselves foolish. She’d taken the necessary precautions, however, and Columbo knew that if she did not report back by the time her oxygen would expire that he was to reduce the Lord Decimus to a blazing wreck and quit the system even if it took him until Ascension day.

She cracked a grim smile inside her mirrored rebreather helmet as she remembered an old instructor of hers telling her that suffocating was a positively peaceful way to die compared to practically every other fate hanging over the head of an Inquisitor. She’d still been in the academy at the time and recalled being very intrigued by the man, so much so that they’d been scandalous lovers for a few nights, that was until he suffocated one day at a faculty gala and died right there on the floor. The dark irony of it all was that he certainly didn’t look peaceful when she saw him with that bit of half-chewed gateau hanging from his mouth.

Lee’s voice telling her that they were ready to board tugged her back to the present, and in a moment she was leading her team out of the hold on a ten-meter space walk through the blackness of the void to Lord Decimus’ outer hull. All around them was black, save for the lights shining from their helmet attachments, Meridian’s fuselage-mounted searchlights, and from the Patroclus that hung almost like a scaled model eight kilometres in the distance. It was biting cold too, even inside their insulated hard-suits, and it came to some satisfaction to the Inquisitor that walking up the ships hull in magnetic boots was as difficult as it was so that her body could keep itself warm.

“The airlock,” Illias pointed out from Godwyn’s side where she didn’t seem to be having as much difficulty moving as the rest of them. “That is our way in.”

Fusion cutter braced in her servo-arms, Illias started carving through the airlock’s outer doors while the rest waited nearby trying not to think about their time winding down.

Six minutes more and they were through, pulling their way pasr the smouldering airlock doors before walking vertically down the interior corridors into the darkness.

Inside her helmet, Godwyn’s world was unnervingly quiet in the vacuum with the only noise being the amplified sound of her own breathing and the sucking gurgle of the air-scrubbers working to purify the air inside her suit. She couldn’t see much aside from what was illuminated in her helmet’s light attachment, but as she led her team noiselessly through the empty corridors of the Lord Decimus she felt the tug of fascination pulling at her mind. Cold, dark, and empty, the gothic architecture of the ship’s interior corridors somehow seemed fitting and caught her attention with sharply angled buttresses and baroque wrought iron chandeliers that hung frozen in space as they stomped noiselessly by.

“A moment,” Godwyn stopped her team after several minutes and unfastened a locator beacon from one of her hard-suit’s carrying compartments. A rudimentary but reliable piece of technology, the locator beacon took very little time to fasten to an interior bulkhead and transmit its signal back to the Patroclus and Meridian, allowing it to be traced by both vessels in the event that they needed to find it again.

“How do we find the receiver?” Alexander asked once they started moving again along the curved surface of a vaulted ceiling.

“Presumably it would be on the bridge or otherwise in the superstructure,” Sudulus explained over the comm., and Godwyn had to turn sidewise to look over her shoulder to see that they were still behind her as she could hear nothing aside from her breathing and their voices.

“We located in the superstructure now,” Illias added. Godwyn had assumed as much – nowhere else on the ship would this kind of artistry be so commonly displayed.

“I see.” Even over the comm. something about her apprentice struck her as sounding distant, but Godwyn pushed it aside as being a result of where they were. They were all on edge, though he just had less experience in hiding it.

“Finding a turbo-lift elevator will likely be indicative of nearing the bridge,” Illias continued, oblivious to the Interrogator’s nuance towards ending the discussion about their surroundings, but she didn’t get any further as Alexander suddenly cut her off;

“Inquisitor, something is here!” he nearly shouted. The young man sounded panicked, but Godwyn kept calm – panicking with limited air was a good way to end up with no air.

“What is it? What do you mean?” she kept going; taking long, awkward steps in the magnetic boots and half-pivoting to make sure the others were still with her, though she noted that her apprentice was getting more agitated and was falling behind.

“It’s cold – very, very cold! The untouchable presence is strong here, Inquisitor – like its here now!”

Sudulus stopped, but Godwyn motioned for him and the tech-priestess to keep going as she went back for the young man. “Keep going,” she instructed them. “Find that turbo-lift and wait for us there.”

Alexander was starting to stagger backwards even with the cumbersome boots on his feet. He was whispering something nonsensical into his mic. but Godwyn blotted it out and grabbed him firmly by both arms and gave him a shake to grab his attention.

“Control yourself, Alexander!” she told him as her apprentice’s mirrored helmet tilted slightly back towards hers from where it had been staring over her shoulder. “If you lose it now, you’re done for!”

He seemed to regain some measure of coherency and jerked into focus before weakly trying to pull himself free from her grasp.

“It’s here, Godwyn!” he said in almost a whisper. “I can feel it like its inside me already!”

The young man was scared – petrified with abject terror – but he had to know that they couldn’t stop now.

“I’m right here with you,” Godwyn tried to cajole him forward, “I’ll get you through this, I swear.” She took a quick look over her shoulder; Sudulus and Illias were gone from view in the darkness. Hopefully they wouldn’t be listening.

Whatever fear plagued the Interrogator was beyond reasoning, however, and seemed to root him to the spot while rendering him helpless and, by extension, rendering her helpless: she couldn’t leave him here, and she wouldn’t forfeit everything by taking him back. Like the scenes of the murders and the planet scribe, the untouchable presence was here, though he said it was stronger – so much so that he could feel it without opening his mind to the Warp. There had to be a way forward, a way that she could use this to her advantage…

Checking one last time over her shoulders, Godwyn made sure that they were alone in the empty corridors deep inside the Lord Decimus.

“James,” she asked slowly, hoping that he could hear her, “where is it?”

“It’s… it’s somewhere here – I can feel it inside me!” he whispered back.

Taking a deep breath, she wavered with her next words waiting on the tip of her tongue. She knew what had to be done. “I want you to take me to it.”

It was an order, but it was as if she were asking him to push a blade through his own flesh, and no matter how daring he might be the Interrogator couldn’t bring himself to obey.

“You have to show me where it is,” she told him when she could elicit no response from her apprentice. Godwyn started to move forward again and pulled gently at his arms, and, to her surprise, he did not resist; letting himself be led further into the bowels of the ship in the opposite direction from the tech-priestess and savant. His cooperation didn’t make her feel better about what she was doing, however, and with every step she had to steel herself against the tides of doubt that told her that what she was doing was wrong. It had to be done – she had to know what this untouchable resonance was and how it linked the murders, the planet scribe, and the Lord Decimus together. She had to do it, even if it was Alexander, not her, who paid the price.

After several minutes, Godwyn sensed the ship getting steadily darker around them and the solitary beams of light produced by their helmet lamps seemed to reveal less and less the further they went. It also felt colder, and the corridors looked to be getting narrower. They had likely passed beyond the superstructure, Godwyn guessed, putting them further and further still from the others. She checked her air meter – just under sixty percent left, though Alexander’s was closer to fifty.

His condition was worsening. Irregular, gasping breaths interrupted her thoughts, making it harder and harder to focus with each new sound that was transmitted through the open comm.-link, and his feet were beginning to drag as he hobbled alongside her like some sick parody of a marionette. More than twice she had to stop and hook her fingers around the edges of his vacuum suit to keep him from floating out of her grasp as his feet carried him in no certain direction. The worse he became, however, the closer she felt she was to her objective.

“It’s not much further,” she told him once they had cleared a labyrinth of dark corridors and set foot onto what looked like an arterial passageway, though in truth she had no idea where they were or if he could even hear her at that point.

A violent-sounding mumble was all she got in reply. Godwyn looked at him, trying to discern whether or not he had uttered words or merely noise. He was getting limp in her arms. They must be getting close.

A cold sweat was forming along her brow, but Godwyn kept going – placing one heavy foot in front of the other while she half-dragged her semi-responsive student along with her. It was getting harder to move him and she considered disengaging the magnetic clamps on his boots.

He mumbled something again like words on the edge of comprehension – sounds to which she could almost ascribe meaning. In silence, she kept going.

The passageway turned out to be a gallery with tall windows that stretched up to either side of them, though when she tried to look through to whatever was beyond she saw only blackness. Were they moving along the spine of the ship, or was this an overseer’s gantry instead? It was hard to tell.

A chill ran down the back of her neck, and she shivered. Her suit was thermally insulated, but even so she could feel the bitter cold of the vacuum biting through to her skin. Had it always been this cold and she’d just failed to notice? The thought made her skin crawl, and she paused to check over her shoulder. Maybe it was the black windows, but something gave her the feeling of being watched by malevolent eyes. The seeds of fear were sprouting in her mind.

Keeping her head facing forward, she kept going.

She didn’t notice that they’d left the gallery behind them until all of a sudden the windows disappeared and the walls shot outward when they entered a vast spherical chamber that pushed their lights to their very limits until she could only just make out the other side of the chamber dimly illuminated in the distance. A circular walkway ran the circumference of the room, and, hauling Alexander up to the guardrail, the Inquisitor peered over the edge to the floor below where a black circle stood out from the dulled grey metal that surrounded it at the very bottom of the sphere. If the Lord Decimus really had been an exploratory vessel six thousand years earlier, then the spherical room would likely be a test chamber of sorts – perhaps one of many such test chambers – and underneath it would be some form of containment vault. Containment of what, she was not sure, but she had a hunch that the black circle at the bottom of the sphere would access it.

Beside her, Alexander started to twitch and mutter madly as if in the grips of a terrible nightmare, though Godwyn tried to ignore him as she reactivated the magnetic clamps on his boots.

“Wait here,” she told him, trying to make herself understood but to no avail. He was talking now, saying words that she could understand, but they were dark things. She tried not to listen as his whispering voice crept into her ears.

Godwyn turned her back on the Interrogator, leaving him to his waking nightmare, and with some difficulty scrambled over the guardrail and let the weightlessness of the void take her. Drifting through the emptiness, she felt her chest tighten and constrict within the cold of her hard-suit while her heart-rate quickened and sent blood coursing through her veins at a fever pace as she drew closer to the dark hole. The untouchable was in there, she was sure of it. It had to be.

Her feet touched down on the sphere and she walked with awkward, jarring steps along the curved surface with her eyes fixed on the looming darkness ahead. She checked her air: just over forty percent left. She’d lost track of time. How long had it been since she left the others?

She was getting closer now.

Her plasma pistol was glowing in her fist. Godwyn didn’t recall drawing it.

Her eyes were stinging and watering in her head. Madly blinking, she tried to clear them. Blood was ringing in her ears.

The dark indent in the sphere was right in front of her, and she walked up to its edge before peering down into it. The hole was not more than three meters wide, but it was at least six meters deep… and at the bottom…?

She leaned over, shining her helmet light as much into the blackness as she could.

Her ears were ringing, and she felt a cold, clammy wetness spreading down her chest and legs.

There was a heavily reinforced vault door at the bottom of the hole, and as she looked more carefully Godwyn saw the glint of light reflecting off the glass of a tiny viewing port embedded in the middle. Her legs felt stiff and numb as the suit chafed against the inside of her thighs and across her breasts like so many hands while her jaws ached as if struck, but in spite of her body’s resistance she stepped inside the black hole and walked one foot at a time down towards the vault door.

She had to know what was in there.

Reaching the vision slight, she peered inside. Nothing. Only darkness.

Impossible. She placed a gloved hand on the vault door and tried to angle the helmet light through the view port, but still she saw nothing in the chamber beyond. Looking around there was no way to open the door that she could find. Maybe… just maybe…

She pointed the plasma pistol at the glass of the window, but stopped herself short of pulling the trigger. No, she could not do that. Godwyn dropped the pistol back to her side.

The screaming in her head was making it hard to think. But it wasn’t in her head. It was in her ears. It was Alexander.

Suddenly aware, Inquisitor spun on the spot and tore her eyes from the vault. What had she been thinking?! Trying to run, she pounded her way back up out of the hole and into the spherical chamber.

James Alexander was still screaming in terror.

The beam of her helmet light cutting through the darkness, she looked all over for her apprentice but saw nothing – the giant chamber was empty.

What had she done? Where had he gone?!

Running up the walls of the chamber, she reached where she thought she left him, but found that he was gone.

“Alexander!?!” she yelled in fearful desperation. His screams were her only answer.

She looked back down the gallery hall – he wasn’t there. No – he couldn’t have gone far!

Panicking, she started to run the circumference of the room, but still saw nothing until by chance she spotted him thrashing helplessly in the nothingness of vacuum high up near the top of the sphere.

Shouting his name, she pushed forcefully against the deck and propelled herself weightlessly towards her student so that they collided with a silent crash and she wrapped her arms tightly around him. Immediately he stopped screaming and went limp in her arms.

“James!? No!” She pulled at him, but there was no response. Frantic, Godwyn looked around for the way out and spotted it not a long distance away. Bracing herself as her feet touched back against the metal skin of the sphere, she got ready to throw all the strength she could muster into propelling both she and her student towards the gallery opening, but as she looked for her target her eyes traced first over the black hole that now loomed overhead, and where she had first seen nothing but darkness the Inquisitor now saw two faint pinpricks of green staring back at her from the gloom. A chill ran through the entirety of her being, but when she blinked the lights were gone swiftly enough to be a trick of her imagination.

With a grunt of effort she pushed off, carrying the unresponsive Alexander with her as she made a break for the exit.

 

Godwyn’s oxygen levels were reaching critical levels when she made it back to the familiar looking corridors of the superstructure and finally heard a voice other than her own talking in her ear:

“Godwyn!? Godwyn? Is that you?” Sudulus exclaimed as she came drifting around a corner with Alexander clutched haphazardly in her arms.

“Yes!” she shouted back. “Sudulus, where are you!? I need help!”

The savant appeared moments later with Illias in tow and together they helped the Inquisitorial agents back to Meridian with only minutes of precious oxygen left to spare.

“Did you find anything?” Godwyn asked her savant as soon as Lee had turned the shuttle around and was carrying them back to the Patroclus.

Still in his hard suit, the little man nodded his mirrored helmet as sat looking across the hold to where Illias was monitoring Alexander’s condition.

“We did, Inquisitor,” he replied wearily. “Illias and I, we uncovered vast quantities of information regarding surface anomalies on Penumbra, though most focused on one area – a particular canyon range deep within the dead lands of the Sticks…”

Godwyn nodded; she’d need a full briefing later – they all would – but she had something to go on. Sudulus wasn’t finished, however, and he cleared his throat before asking his next question:

“The Lord Decimus,” he asked; “will you have Columbo destroy it?”

Godwyn paused; her eyes carried down to Alexander before looking back at the savant. She knew what she should say, and she knew what she wanted to do, but something held her back – something that she needed to know, to understand.

“No,” she replied after a lengthy delay, and then added as an afterthought; “that ship may still have answers to questions we haven’t yet asked.”

Her savant nodded, and they spoke no more until after Meridian was safely returned to her hangar aboard the Patroclus.

[Ice warrior]

"It is the 41st millennium, and there is only war.

Future, where technology is so complex that it takes more than a human to understand and master the most basic machinery.

Future, where a mortal men carriers weapons, which can create miniature star and to blast tanks to ashes.

Future, where cities are leveled to ashes from orbit, by a press of a button.

Future, where Inquisition (Left hand of the Emperor) has unlimited power at there hands, goes to ship with 2 hours air supply? WOOOooot!

I could believe it, if she has a small device in her mouth or in her throat, but comon full suite with 2 hours... ;)

 

Well, luckily i don't have anything else negative, since your short stories are awesome. Keep up the good work!

 

 

-ICE-

[Lady_Canoness]

Hahaha! 2 hours is all the time I'd want to spend in a vacuum suit anyway!

 

As it turns out, part 11 is ready to go!

 

________________

 

*Part 11*

 

Godwyn went to visit Alexander as soon as she heard that he had regained consciousness, but when she arrived Mercy was already there. Dressed and sitting on the edge of his bed in the medical bay, he was talking to the assassin in a low voice when the Inquisitor entered. Lounging on the opposite bed, Mercy wasn’t talking back, but her eyes flickered in Godwyn’s direction as she stepped through the medical bay doors and the assassin sprung lightly to her feet, and a richly passionate smile playing under her violet gaze as the giant slipped past the Inquisitor and out the door with nary a sound.

Alexander watcher her go with an unasked question resting on his tongue, and a momentary cloud of disappointment lowered over his eyes as his mentor replaced the long-limbed assassin as the only other soul in the sterile silence of the medical ward.

Godwyn crossed to the cot Mercy had recently abandoned and sat down facing the young man.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, hands resting on her knees as he only briefly met her eyes.

“I’m alright,” he said, bowing his head so his eyes fell between his knees as he ran the palms of both hands over his dark hair. “Better, I think.”

His mentor digested his words in silence. He wasn’t alright, and he wasn’t better after what he’d been through, but he was thankful to be free of it.

“I know it was necessary, though,” he said, talking to keep the words off his chest as he arched his fingers against his lips and briefly looked up into the older woman’s face. “We had to do it, and you had no real choice, but…”

“Do you know why I did what I did?” she asked.

He thought about it, then shook his head. “I like to think that I understand it, but no – I don’t really know why.”

“I did what I had to because I knew we’d be worse off if I didn’t.”

His eyes were lingering everywhere but on her face. He didn’t understand. Like all students taught in the academies of the Inquisition, he knew what it meant to sacrifice and to be sacrificed, but he didn’t know what it really meant to make a sacrifice. Sacrifices, Godwyn learned, were never done easily or willingly, and without the gift of hindsight they never made sense. In time he would realize why she did what she did, as would she, though for the meantime both of them would have to wait and see.

“Did we find anything on that ship?” Alexander asked, hoping to change the subject off his own shortcomings, and Godwyn nodded in response.

“More than I had anticipated, yes,” his teacher admitted.

“Good,” he stood up from his bed and walked with considerate steps over to the opposite wall where he lingered somewhat pensively before turning around. Godwyn rose from her feet and folded her arms, though she remained stationary as James Alexander started to pace across the ward.

“What can you tell me?” he asked.

She could tell him almost everything, though she thought it prudent to give him only pieces at a time and see how he managed it.

“The Lord Decimus, the planet scribe, and the murders are all connected,” she told him what he had likely already guessed.

“So we’re not dealing with a cult, then?”

She shook her head. “No. We are likely dealing with Inquisition, but a rogue element that knows full well who we are and the implications of attacking us.”

“That makes no sense.”

“On the contrary,” she disagreed, “it makes perfect sense if we’re being used.”

Alexander seemed sceptical. “We’re killing their people and damaging them. Why would they let us do that?”

“Just because they’re using us doesn’t mean they’re good at it. We didn’t find the planet scribe and Lord Decimus because they let us: we know about who we’re facing because they are making mistakes.”

This made sense, and Alexander nodded along with it. “So what is our next move?”

After returning to the Patroclus and putting as much distance between themselves and the Lord Decimus as they could, Godwyn had sat down with Sudulus and Illias to go over what they had found on the ship’s bridge. They’d been fortunate, and the information was barely encrypted, making it a simple matter of picking and choosing. All of it had pointed in one direction: downwards to the planet’s surface and deep into the uninhabitable Sticks.

“The Sticks?” Alexander asked her to be sure. “Why would they be focused there when everything else has been taking place in Hogshead?”

“It could be any number of reasons,” Godwyn admitted with a shrug, “but the data we recovered looked like a geological survey mapping an anomaly in the planet’s crust over time as well as energy fluxuation attached to the anomaly.”

Alexander was shaking his head again. “It makes no sense though,” he said; “they are completely undetected out here, so why waste resources and manpower on a city thousands of miles away when it is easier simply to stay quiet?”

It was a good question, and one that Godwyn did not have an answer to no matter how much she looked for it.

“No matter,” the young man dismissed the thought and continued to pace the length of the medical bay. “What about the untouchable? What happened with it?”

“It’s still on the Lord Decimus, so far as we know.”

“Did you find it?”

Alexander wasn’t facing the Inquisitor and didn’t see her discomfort as she walked silently over to stand at the med bay doors. “No, I didn’t,” she replied coolly. “You fell unconscious and I had to get you out.”

“It felt different though,” her apprentice was thinking aloud; “more potent, more focused. Like it had grown stronger than it was before…”

Godwyn was no psyker, nor had she any imaginings about being able to relate to a psyker’s sensitivities, but she knew what it had felt like to her. It felt like that day twenty-three years ago when Roth had betrayed her and left her at the hands of Inquisitor Pierce. It had felt so real – so certain – like the nightmare happening all over again. His fingers she felt at her throat, his breath on her back, and his hands on her flesh. Part of her had known beyond a doubt that his face was what she would see behind that door, and that she always would.

“The untouchable isn’t our primary concern,” she corrected him. “Right now we need to know what these people are doing in the Sticks, and why they are willing to throw an entire city into turmoil to hide it.”

Interrogator Alexander said that he understood, and, as much as he wanted to know more about the untouchable that he seemed destined to follow, he knew his duty. He would be ready to go within the hour.

 

* *

 

An hour had hardly passed when Meridian once again leapt from the Patroclus’ hold and plunged into the darkness below. With nothing to see, Lee was flying by instruments as he brought the Inquisitor and her team down on a set trajectory towards the coordinates denoting their target on the world below. Somewhere down there, at the bottom of a hollowed out chasm half a mile deep, was an object so ancient that the earth itself had grown up around it and buried it beneath the weight of ages. ‘Penumbra’s monolith’, Sudulus had called it for lack of a better moniker, though as far as descriptions went there was little else that could be said. It predated the planet scribe’s inception by what must have been a wide margin and provided no clues as to its origins. Who built it and how was a mystery, as was why an ancient subterranean structure would be found in a place otherwise devoid of life or any other sign of civilization.

What the monolith was, however, had to take second place to why this mysterious third party was interested in it. Could be that it was an ancient artefact or weapon of unholy power, or some other tool of great enough significance to justify such an extensive expenditure of manpower and resources? Whatever the truth, Godwyn had prepared her team for an unfriendly welcome. At six kilometres, however, Lee called Godwyn up to the cockpit to see something he couldn’t explain.

“We go’ lights,” he said as she entered the black-lit cockpit, “loo’s like six’y meter spread. Stand’rd landin’ zone markers.”

Squinting through the enhance view-finder, she saw what looked like a white light with four pinpricks peeking out brighter than all the rest. Had she less confidence in her team’s discretion she would have thought it a sign that they were expected, though it never hurt to be wary.

“Take us for wide pass and get Sudulus to give it a thorough scan,” she ordered. “Don’t put us in range of anything that might be down there until you know it’s clear.”

Scans came back negative, however, and with due caution Meridian started her approach on the landing zone and settled her struts onto the blackened earth of the Sticks just long enough for the side hatches to open and for the Inquisitor and her to disembark before taking to the night sky once again to assume a holding position.

“Comm. check,” Godwyn ordered once her team was all on the ground and her shuttle was airborne. One-by-one they checked in and flicked on the lamp-packs attached to their headsets: the battle sister Brianna, armoured in her salvaged suit of black plate and adorned with rosary beads and holy seals, was carrying the modified lasgun she’d taken to using in both hands while the chainsword from her Order was sheathed over her shoulder; Nerf, the Catachan commando, with his auto-carbine shouldered and wearing his usual dark fatigues under his tactical webbing of ammunition and explosives; Mercy, the lithe giant wearing a headset despite her silence, and practically disappearing into the surrounding blackness when eyes weren’t directly on her; the tech-priestess Illias, with her heavy stubber deployed in both servo-arms while her hands rested idly by her sides as if hoping not to fight; and lastly Alexander, newly armed and armoured from the Patroclus’ armoury with carapace plating and an autogun despite his face being drawn and pale in the lamp-pack’s light. All were ready and accounted for.

“Sudulus?” Godwyn asked next, “Are you reading us?”

+“Clearly, Inquisitor,”+ the savant replied from somewhere in the night sky above their heads. +“I’m not getting any contacts around you, and energy readings from the anomaly are stable. You are clear to proceed.”+

“Understood,” she copied, and drew her plasma pistol from its holster inside her armour-weave greatcoat. “Mercy,” she nodded to the assassin, “lead us out.”

 

The assassin was gone without a sound, though the bobbing light of the lamp-pack gave them a way of following her passing, and in no time she had led them from the lit landing zone over rocky outcroppings to the edge of a ravine so deep that their lights could not penetrate it. Loose rocks scattered around their feet and over the edge as they searched for a way down, but Mercy had already spotted it, and brought their attention to a row of lights that spiralled down into the earth not more than a quarter mile away. Whoever had been here prior to their arrival must have marked the way down for future use, and when they arrived at the top near the first light they saw a well worn path of sand amidst the jutting rock.

Wary of traps, Nerf and Mercy went ahead, but as they passed the fifth lamp and were more than halfway to the bottom it became apparent that whoever had strung together the lampposts had not expected visitors. The downwards path proved treacherous enough, however, and Nerf doubled back multiple times to guide the others around areas of unstable footing, sudden drops, and bends so tight that one could hardly turn around. Farther ahead there seemed to be a system of levers and pulleys likely to lower cargo to the ground, Illias announced, but past the halfway point there was no going back.

It took several more minutes until they were back on level ground, and Godwyn waited for her team to regroup and collectively catch their breath.

Looking around her, the Sticks were strange. The sky was black, much like the rest of Penumbra, but here the rocks were also blackened as if burnt, and the dust that filled the cracks in the earth was grey almost like ash. There was no wind either, and not a sound followed them down into the ravine.

Alert for any sign of danger, Godwyn led the way forward through the blackness.

 

It was another seven minutes until they found Penumbra’s monolith. Looming out of the darkness, it was bright at first glance and their lights reflected across its surface like millions of minute glass shards sparkling back at them.

“Now how’s that for a first sight?” Nerf said with a low whistle, and Godwyn found herself nodding in silent agreement and wonder.

As they drew closer the reflection of their lights seemed to fade and grow dim, but still it was like nothing she had ever seen. Rising up before them was a towering wall of what looked like rock though it was flat and darkly reflective like molten metal, and no signs of age or erosion marred its flawless sheen. Looking upon it was not like looking upon a thing of beauty, however, and Godwyn felt a cold uneasiness festering in the pit of her stomach as if in her subconscious she knew that she was looking at something that should not be.

“Interesting,” Illias said from somewhere beside her as they closed the gap of the last dozen meters that remained between them and the monolith’s surface, “it emanates sub-sonic sound-waves from its surface.”

“Why would it do that?” Godwyn stopped to consult the tech-priestess before going any further.

“I do not know,” she replied in a tone of fascinated curiosity, stepping closer to the perfectly flat wall and stretching out a hand as if to touch the surface with her palm. “I have never seen anything like this before. The material itself is unknown to me.”

“Don’t touch it, Illias,” Godwyn warned her. The tech-priestess stopped as she was told, though she did not back away and continued to stare at it as if completely mesmerized by its appearance.

It could not be denied that the sight monolith was astounding and that its presence in the Sticks was a mystery that demanded an explanation, yet while her comrades stared up at its perfectly smooth surface Godwyn could not shake the disturbing feeling that told her she had found something of which she should be deathly afraid.

Looking upwards she noticed shadows clinging to the monolith’s surface – something that should not be given that the wall of stone seemed to be flat and without flaws.

“Did you see that?” she asked, and walked back a ways from the glimmering rock as more lights shone upwards in search of what she had seen.

Runes. There were runes cut into the surface of the rock, and now that she knew how to look she found them easily. Three in total, they were truly massive in scale and had been etched one above the other in a vertical line that stretched up beyond the range of her lamp-pack to see, but even so she felt her throat tighten and heart her begin to beat rapidly in her chest for she had seen similar runes before in her studies. She couldn’t read them – she doubted there were any who could – but she knew well enough where they came from:

“Necrotyr…”

The name was not lost on Alexander, and his expression darkened with the plummeting realization of what they stood before sunk home.

“What’s a necrotyr?” Nerf asked. He’d been standing nearby, though by watching the Inquisitors he knew enough to guess that it wasn’t good.

A mythical race ancient beyond reckoning, the Necrotyr were said to have ruled an empire that spanned the breadth of the stars, though long ago they had vanished with no trace other than the mysterious black stone monoliths they had left behind. Other than that, everything was rumour and hearsay even within the archives of the Inquisition. There were numerous reports of vessels disappearing every year near worlds known to harbour Necrotyr artefacts, and it was not unheard of for mechanicum teams to vanish without leaving a trace when investigating Necrotyr ruins. Other reports claimed that military units had come under attack as far away as Cadia from forces believed to be Necrotyr, though other than pict recordings and unusual blast scorings there was never any evidence other than eyewitness accounts from traumatised survivors to suggest that such forces actually existed.

“What do we do?” the Interrogator asked his superior while he gripped the autogun harder in his hands, wondering if it would be of any use should something go wrong.

“We still have to do what we came for,” Godwyn replied firmly as to abolish any doubt that alien revelation might have been conjured up in her apprentice. She led both he and the Catachan back to where Brianna, Mercy, and Illias had remained by the face of the monolith. “We’ll proceed with caution,” she said as they rejoined the others, “but we have to find out why other people were here and what they were looking to accomplish.”

“If I may posit a theory,” Illias spoke up and Godwyn signalled for her to continue, “I believe it likely that whoever came here did so for Necrotyr technology. It is rumoured to be impossibly advanced, bordering on magical, and such rumours would likely hold great influence over any who would seek to exploit xeno artefacts.”

“We’re not dealing with looters,” Godwyn corrected her, “but we need to find what they found.”

Illias nodded her hooded head; “As you say, Inquisitor.”

Godwyn would remind her of that if need be, though at the moment she was more concerned in finding a way inside the monolith.

Unlike other alien civilizations she had studied which for the most part used conventional, biological, or Warp-based technologies as the basis of their empires, the Necrotyr were said to have used technologies so advanced that they defied physical realities to such an extent that it did indeed seem magical. There were reports of Necrotyr technologies that allowed the user to move through solid matter uninhibited, and others that quite literally made matter come into existence where there had been nothing. If these reports were even slightest bit accurate then it was no stretch of the imagination to reason that a geometrically flawless monolith could indeed be fitted into solid rock at the bottom of a chasm, and that accessing it would be no simple matter of finding a hidden lever or secret tunnel. Surely they couldn’t walk through it or be teleported inside, but how then had their unknown foe interacted with it? There was nothing in the chasm to suggest that anything had occurred outside the monolith. Was it possible that whoever had opened the monolith had done so with a xeno artefact already in their possession? A sort of key?

The question likely had an answer, but they never found out, for where there had been nothing Godwyn turned around and saw a gaping opening fitting seamlessly into wall, and peering inside was a passageway leading into the darkness. One by one they entered, and the darkness swallowed them whole.

 

 

To say the sepulchre-like stillness of the Necrotyr edifice was disquieting would not be enough, for inside the ageless monolith Godwyn and her team found it quietly maddening, and even the bravest of hearts felt their courage sapped as they clung to the weapons in their hands and scoured the shadows around them for the danger they felt certain was there. The further they went along the solitary passage, the more the claws of madness dug into their minds.

Everything around them was alien and wrong – so simple in its purpose, yet so inhuman in its function. It defied what they saw – what they needed to see to understand and relate. To humanize. None of it was familiar, none of it made any sense, yet all along they felt a horror greater than anything they had felt before, for this was a horror beyond the mind’s ability to perceive.

The manifestations of madness differed from person to person within the monolith Necrotyr, and it was the silent daemons of their own humanity which pursued them down the unchanging black passageway.

Keeping her focus solely on what lay ahead of her, Godwyn forged into the silent catacomb with Nerf following by her side. The big man was quiet and seemed unusually spooked as he swept his lamp-pack over the perfectly angle surfaces around them. Like all of them, he had been raised fighting humans and aliens in a world that was alive and made sense, where something could be beaten and could be killed, and where the skills he had learned fighting one enemy could be use on the next. This place was dead, there was nothing similar about it, and it left them as exposed as if they had never fought a day in their lives.

Nerf could feel it as he stayed close and tried to cover his back, Mercy could feel it as she walked silently with the others instead of darting ahead through the shadows, and Brianna battled not to feel it as she muttered litanies of purity and fortification over and over und her breath.

Not concerning herself with battle or tactics, however, Illias walked with them in wide-eyed fascination, and her heavy stubber hung idle in her arms as she marvelled at the walls beside them and the floor beneath their feet.

“It is remarkable…” she was saying to herself, her voice being the only sound that could be heard aside from the flat echo of their footsteps, “technology refined to a singular perfection of purpose… Amazing…”

“It is alien,” Sister Brianna retorted in a vehement whisper that all could hear; “it is a blight on Humanity and a stain on His realm!”

From the tone of her response Illias didn’t seem to care what the battle sister thought, though she fired a stinging retort none-the-less. “It is science perfected,” she corrected the younger woman, “something the ignorant and the blind are quick to label as heresy.”

“Enough! Both of you!” Godwyn hissed from up ahead, but beside her Nerf quickly put a hand on her arm to grab her attention.

“Boss,” he said with a low rumble as his eyes continued to stare ahead, “something is changing in here…”

She was about to ask him to clarify, but as the Inquisitor followed his eyes forward she could see what he meant. The long corridor they had been following, which led only straight with the occasional offer of a slight decline, suddenly opened farther up ahead into what could only be a vast chamber.

“Air particles are charged here,” Illias reported, sweeping her hand as if she were cupping air, “and the frequency of vibrations in the walls and floor has increased… I believe we are nearing a power source.”

Nerf looked back and forth between the tech-priestess and the Inquisitor, while Alexander backed away from the walls and almost bumped into Mercy.

“We continue forward,” Godwyn reminded them, her voice stern and deliberate to overrule any doubt, and after steeling her nerves she carried forward with a determined air. Like the rest of her team, she didn’t know what to expect, but to have any chance of succeeding she had to be ready to lead her team into whatever lay waiting for them. There could be no room for fear, no room for doubt, and no waiting for a second chance.

She learned from her mistakes.

 

 

Leaving the passageway behind them, they entered an immense circular chamber and immediately found their breath stolen away by the sheer scale of what surrounded them. The chamber was enormous – massive beyond belief – so large that a squadron of Imperial Titans could stride comfortably through its center with no fear of collision, or a shuttle like Meridian could take off from one end and fly comfortably to the other. High above them the ceiling was lined with concentric rings with each inside layer being narrower and stepped lower than the outside rings until they came almost to a point at the center of the ceiling and extended into three prongs angling downwards to the ground. The bottom of the chamber was similarly ringed, and each layer was a wide trench that cut deeply into the stone and was joined by what looked like a single causeway that reached the very center where three angled pylons pointed upwards towards the pronged center of the ceiling.

That they could see all this was amazing, and removing her lamp-pack Godwyn realized that for the first time since they had landed on Penumbra there seemed to be a natural light that emanated from the ringed recesses in the floor, though the light had a green tinge to it and made the air look like a sickly gas.

“Incredible…” Illias was the first to break the silence as she walked past the others to the edge of the first recess and looked over the colossal expanse before them. “Imagine what mysteries could be claimed here…”

Stepping up beside her, Godwyn took a cautious glance over the edge. The trench of the first ring was at least eighty feet deep and likely a hundred wide with a large, flat bottom running between the walls that seemed to be the source of the eerie green light. She squinted for a closer look as she heard the others draw nearer to the edge behind her. From her vantage point the walls of the trench did not look wholly real, and what looked like a phosphorescent green liquid suspended within the very fabric of the wall rippled off their surfaces as if caught in an ethereal wind.

“What new sorcery is this?!” Brianna spat at the sight of it when she saw the source of the light, but from further away to Godwyn’s right Alexander was shaking his head.

“James?”

He glanced up at his mentor, then nervously looked back at the strange green substance on the walls of the trench before wetting his lips and trying to offer an explanation:

“There’s no trace of the Warp here,” he said, looking back at Godwyn but avoiding the battle sister’s accusing stare while the others started to move out around them. “If anything, there is almost an absence of it.”

“What do you mean?” the Inquisitor asked; “Can you sense the untouchable here?”

Once again the Interrogator shook his head. “It’s not like that,” he shut his eyes tightly in concentration and kneaded his brow with his fingers. “The Warp… it’s just not here, like this place diminishes it to the point where it almost ceases to exist.” He opened his eyes; “as if this entire place were an untouchable…”

Illias, who had been carefully listening to every word while examining the patterning on the ceiling high overhead, quickly joined in. “Are you inferring that…?”

Godwyn nodded; she had come to the same conclusion. “Yes,” she said, “the untouchable came from here. It is Necrotyr.”

“But it was on the Lord Decimus!” Alexander exclaimed in a hushed voice, but to Godwyn it made no difference and her face darkened in reply:

“It was there because someone brought it there.”

 

 

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this place,” Nerf admitted with a frown, “like we’re walking into something we really shouldn’t be walking into…”

Mercy, following quietly a couple of paces behind the Catachan, said nothing, and her expression remained sunken. He was looking for a way down, some way into the trench so that the Inquisitor and the tech-priestess could take a closer look at this weird alien stuff, and she was following him probably because she preferred the comfort of his company… even though neither of them was anywhere near comfortable.

Nerf looked back over his shoulder – the lithe giant, who had been focusing intently on his heels, quickly brought her violet eyes up to meet his. She smiled; a nervous, uncertain smile the faded as soon as it appeared.

“I know,” he agreed, “I know.”

They walked in silence until they came across a long declination moments later that descended into the outer ring at the foot of the causeway leading to the centermost point of the massive chamber. Checking that Mercy was with him, Nerf hopped down onto the declination and started down into the outer trench. Reluctantly, Mercy followed him.

It wasn’t a long way to the bottom, but when Nerf reached the floor with both walls of shimmering green rising up around him in ghostly silence, he knew instantly that he had found something important.

“Get the boss,” he told Mercy after she came to a stop at his shoulder, “she needs to see this.”

The assassin apparently agreed, and was off in a flash as fast as her long legs could carry her.

 

 

Warriors – thousands, but likely tens of thousands, standing like metal statues in serried ranks. They were humanoid in shape, but upright and tall – far taller than an average man – and broader across the shoulder too, and at their sides they held long-bladed spears taller than two men standing one atop of the other.

“Iron men…” Illias breathed in disbelief when she saw them, but they weren’t men, nor were they made by man or anything like him.

They were Necrotyr. Beings so ancient that they denied reason. Aliens so abhorrent that they became death’s embodiment. A foe shrouded in equal parts mystery and myth. They were real.

“They must be in some kind of stasis field,” Alexander wondered aloud as the Inquisitor’s team spread out between the rows of silently staring warriors waiting behind the veil of pulsating green energy. “I can’t feel their presence… like looking at an image of what is a million miles away.”

Godwyn kept her pistol drawn all the same. The statuesque warriors might stay that way for thousands of years or more – she hoped that they would – but knowing that someone else had found them yet done nothing left her feeling as if that would not be the case, especially if they’d woken one from its sleep.

“The Imperium needs to be warned of what is down here,” Godwyn announced, “and where there is one, there could easily be dozens more. Seeing that this threat is neutralized is now our top priority.”

Her team acknowledged and made ready to move out.

“Inquisitor,” Illias approached her, stowing the servo-arms and heavy stubber behind her back as she did so, “securing the planet scribe would allow us to locate other xeno monoliths in the Sticks.”

Godwyn agreed; “Then that is what we’ll do,” she said, and marched to incline leading out of the trench without sparing another look at the frozen Necrotyr.

As soon as she’d learned about the monolith, Godwyn had suspected that it was something a radical and power-hungry Inquisitor was trying to tap into: an ancient power system or information bank, an extremely dangerous or sensitive relic, maybe, that required rituals and an untouchable to reveal, or maybe a cache of alien technology. But an army? No – that she had not anticipated – it was too much. If the rumours about Necrotyr were true, then a stasis tomb of this size could threaten an entire world, and was likely only one of several. And if Penumbra fell? Warp travel would become more dangerous as ship masters were forced to take uncharted leaps into the immaterium, transit in the region would decrease, and ultimately Imperial presence in the Ghoul Stars would suffer because of it.

The threat of the Necrotyr was real, and someone was risking billions of human lives for some unfathomable and unacceptable goal. She would –

“LOOK OUT!”

Instinctively Godwyn dropped into a roll and threw herself down to her left just as massive shadow seemed to whoosh overhead. Her team’s weapons were firing and striking against something metallic, and she heard a sound unlike any other before Nerf’s muscular arms were wrapped tightly around her as he threw himself over her and rolled to safety scant seconds before a loud explosion ripped into the air and something heavy crashed to the ground.

“Stand! There’re more of them!” Brianna shouted from somewhere behind her, and in an instant Nerf was off her and pulling the Inquisitor to her feet.

“Are you okay?!” The Catachan was looking at her intensely, but she was unharmed. Scooping up her plasma pistol from where it had fallen when Nerf had flattened her, Godwyn caught a fleeting glimpse of what had come crashing out of the air towards her. She felt her eyes go wide as her jaw dropped.

Not three meters away and lying in a tangled heap of smouldering metal was a colossal spider. It was huge – easily the size of an armoured vehicle – and had eight barbed legs long enough to impale an ogryn while two forward claws looked as if they were made for eviscerating flesh and armour alike. Nerf had hit it with an explosive charge at close range, incapacitating it and mangling it horribly, but the metal monster still twitch on the ground – its sheering mandibles scraping against the stone floor with a terrible screeching noise that could be heard even over her squad’s gunfire.

Godwyn vapourised its ugly head without hesitation, but as she turned she saw more of the humongous arachnids drifting silently towards them through the air while beyond the approaching beasts even more of the metal monsters were crawling from cracks in the ceiling.

“Fall back!” Godwyn waved them on as she started to retreat, “Go! Go! Go!”

The effect of small arms against the creatures was pitiful, and bullets bounced and ricocheted from their hides as they failed to stop the deathly silence of their advance.

“Move it! Now!”

Godwyn raised her plasma pistol and sighted at the nearest spider. The pistol’s laser-guided rangefinder marked it at twenty-two meters away, but with a squeeze of the trigger a bolt of plasma tore into the spider’s flank and left a burning hole through its carapace. Still it came on.

Alexander had fallen back to the top of the incline and had stopped to shoot at the spiders in rapid bursts with his autogun. Running behind him, Godwyn clapped him on the shoulder – they couldn’t kill them all, it was time to run.

Mercy was already ahead and leading them out, and Nerf was hanging back between the Inquisitor and the assassin, but Illias and sister Brianna were still heavily engaged and bitterly refusing to give ground more than one step at a time.

Her lasgun cranked to full power, the exiled battle sister lashed out with stabs of red light that scored deep hits along the hides of the approaching spiders, but the creatures didn’t seem to notice and continued to float down around them. The heavy stubber braced and roaring in all four hands, Illias was walking slowly backwards as she pummelled the alien monstrosities with heavy shells and rained brass shell casings down around her feet. The weapon was not very accurate and the recoil was extreme, but whenever a spider entered within thirty yards of the tech-priestess the stubber fire became more telling and tore chunks of metal from the beasts before eventually pitching their bullet riddled hides to the ground.

Running to make her escape, Godwyn reached the opening that led back to the surface passage with Alexander at her side, but she skidded to a halt on the threshold and turned back.

“Illias! Brianna!” she yelled, seeing the two women who had just made it to the top of the incline and were still one hundred meters or more from the exit. “Come on! Move!”

Spiders were now filling the air, and Godwyn fired on one as she saw it moving in on the women’s blind side. The first plasma bolt missed, but the second scored a hit – blowing off two of its legs – and the third one put it down as a plume of boiling plasma hit something important inside the beast’s shell. She picked another target and fired again, but there were too many. She had no choice. Godwyn fell back after Alexander, leaving the battle sister and tech-priestess to make good their own escape.

“Run!” Illias shouted at the sister, “I can hold them!” and Brianna turned and dashed across the open floor of the chamber towards the exit without a farewell. Alone, Illias continued to step backwards one foot at a time as the targeting algorithms built into her mind cycled her weapon back and forth between the nearest enemies. Another spider crashed down and shattered into pieces that skittered across the floor towards her feet, but so many more were taking its place. The ammunition drum in her heavy stubber clacked empty:

“Oh most beneficent Omnissiah, Lord of Flesh and Steel, deliver us,” she chanted, wrenching free the spend ammunition case and pulling a secondary drum from her lower back and slamming it into place. “From Tempest and Darkness render upon us your light…” Her weapon was firing again in less than three seconds.

The spiders seemed to be dividing their attention, but several sets of the baleful, empty arachnid eyes were still set upon the tech-priestess, and on the nearest she saw arcs of green energy crackling over its carapace.

Illias swung the smoking barrel of her stubber in its direction and hammered it with bullets – blasting chunks out of it and making it shudder midair. On the verge of death, however, the green bolts of lightning leapt from its claws and struck the tech-priestess in the chest just as the beast fell from the air. She didn’t know what it was or what it was doing to her, but she could feel the energy coursing through her implants and burning them out – destroying her piece by piece. Her weapon stopped firing and her servo arms fell limp. Suddenly all the strength from her limbs was gone, and she felt a burning sting course through her body parts – machine and organic alike. With a crash, she fell forward onto the ground.

She was dying, she knew that. Her flesh was too weak, and now she paid for its weakness. There was no pain though, no suffering, just… emptiness.

Lifting her head, Illias looked up across the floor strew with spider remains. It was amazing really, more than any understood: autonomous beasts of metal, no organic parts, the perfect creation. A piece of a broken spider had fallen close by, and as her life ebbed away she looked at it. Not steel, not iron, it was some other kind of metal, like a liquid held in a solid form.

Stretching out with her left hand – a human hand – Illias reached for the Necrotyr’s metal and felt her fingers close around it. It was cool to the touch.

A black armoured boot slammed down on her wrist, and a fork of pain speared up through her arm.

From behind the barrel of lasgun, Illias heard her speak:

“Let it go, priestess,” Brianna growled through gritted teeth.

“…it is a work of gods… perfection…” Illias wheezed, struggling to see what she held in her hand behind the sister’s foot.

“It is a work of darkness. Let it go!”

Illias blinked… the air was leaking from her lungs.

“…there is no heresy in knowledge… only in its use…”

The crack of lasgun echoed through the chamber, and Brianna took her foot of the motionless arm, kicking the xeno artefact from its finger before turning and dashing towards the exit.

 

 

“Sudulus!” Godwyn shouted as soon as she was clear of the monolith, “I need a pick up now!”

+“Understood, Inquisitor. Inbound on your position in one minute.”+

“This is going to be a long f***ing minute!” Nerf shouted as he helped Alexander and then Godwyn up the side of the ravine and back up to the surface.

“Just keep going,” Godwyn told him, accepting the proffered hand as he hauled her up over a ledge in the ravine and helped her to her feet. Mercy was already at the top, and they had yet to see any spiders following them, but on the surface they were plunged into darkness with no way of knowing what was hiding beyond the range of their lights.

“Where are the others!?” Alexander called out when they had reached the surface, and Godwyn looked back over the edge of the ravine: no lights – both the tech-priestess and the sister were still inside the monolith.

“We’ll wait as long as we can,” Godwyn said as Meridian’s running lights appeared approaching rapidly in the black sky.

“I’ll keep watch,” Nerf said, and Godwyn nodded in agreement as the sound of engines filled her ears.

Meridian came in low over the designated landing zone as Lee brought her down gently and Sudulus opened the side hatches as soon as she touched down.

“What happened down there?” her savant shouted over the engine roar. Godwyn told him everything, and stared at her with a horrified look on his face.

“Emperor above,” he shook his head in disbelief, “this just keeps getting worse.”

The Inquisitor asked him what he meant.

“There has been a communiqué from that Witch Hunter, von Draken,” he explained, careful not to skip any details. “It was very brief, but I think you’ll understand that it is also very grave…”

He handed her a dataslate with the transcribed message from von Draken just as Mercy and Alexander entered the lower hold of the shuttle. The message was brief, consisting of only two lines: one was a code sequence which Godwyn instantly recognized as a plea covert extraction, and the other was a simple sentence; the same place as last time.

Von Draken was in trouble.

“What do you make of it?” Sudulus asked, but Godwyn shook her head;

“Let’s get airborne first.”

Nerf then entered the shuttle with Brianna, but he sat down without a word while the battle sister remained standing.

“Illias?” the Inquisitor asked.

Brianna bowed her head. It was enough. The tech-priestess was gone.

“Get us airborne,” Godwyn commanded. “We’re done here.”

[Lady_Canoness]

Part 12 arrives, and the proverbial soup grows thicker (though unfortunately I haven't been able to include any soup-related scenes - so sad). Things are racing to an end, and answers to questions will start to be delivered, though in the meantime read and enjoy part 12 of the Inquisition II!

 

 

*Part 12*

 

“Godwyn, you must agree that this is too coincidental to be anything but a trap?”

“It’s possible, yes.”

“But surely that would be reason enough to revaluate the necessity of such an action? You could be killed or captured!”

“Sudulus, I know what I’m doing!”

Practically jogging to keep up with the Inquisitor as she marched through the Patroclus’ lower levels to the hangar where Lee waited with Meridian to take her to the surface, Sudulus was shaking his head and muttering in disbelief. He was doing his best to reason with her, but so far he was having no luck.

“Godwyn,” he tried again, “the threat of the Necrotyr ought to be a priority more so than the cloak and dagger antics of your fellow Inquisitors!”

“Sudulus, you’re not listening to me!” Godwyn replied testily; “I have to know who on my side I can trust before confronting the threat of the Necrotyr. I can’t do this alone! I need allies!”

Sudulus was, in fact, listening; he just didn’t like what he was hearing.

“Godwyn, please – ” but she turned on him.

“Sudulus, look,” she put a hand on the little man’s shoulder as she stopped him mid stride and looked him keenly in the eye, “I’m doing this. This could easily be a trap, but if its not I need to know about it. I know it’s a risk, and that is why I’m going alone, but don’t think that you can talk me out of it.”

Reluctantly, the savant nodded, and, seemingly satisfied, Godwyn removed her hand from his shoulder and continued on to Meridian’s hanger, albeit at a slower pace.

“So what have you got for me?” she asked, now that he was walking beside her instead of running behind her.

Regardless of whether or not Godwyn agreed with him in the end, Sudulus had wasted no time in doing whatever he could to keep his Inquisitor safe in the likely event that von Draken’s plea for help turned out to be a trap. For starters, he had devised a mildly ionized cream that could be applied to the skin and would correspond with the scanning instruments aboard Meridian so that the wearer could be picked out from a great distance in a crowd. An ingenious little creation that he’d invented himself by raiding the Patroclus’ apothecary, Sudulus was quite confident that it would allow the wearer to be traced even in the event that they were searched, or suffered the indignity of being stripped naked. His second creation was much less subtle, however, but to provide his Inquisitor with a covert and highly effective weapon for close quarters, Sudulus had rigged up a pair of rings to be worn on each hand that were both connected to a bracelet with an inbuilt power source. These rings could be worn either inside our outside of gloves, and were relatively harmless so long as both rings did not touch the same thing at once. If they did, however, such as through a punch or a grab, the entire power store of the bracelet would be discharged into the object with enough energy to incapacitate a large man for a long period of time.

Two of his own creations weren’t the only things he was sending with Godwyn, however, and as he and the Inquisitor mounted Meridian through the lower hold and closed the hatches behind them, Sudulus nodded to Nerf who was busily wiping down the barrel of his anti-materiel rifle. So far as Godwyn knew, Nerf was just coming along for the ride as Lee and Sudulus dropped her off in Hogshead to meet Inquisitor von Draken, but Sudulus knew otherwise.

“Nerf, might I speak with you?” Sudulus had asked him earlier as the Catachan sat on his bed assembling several tube charges in the quiet of his own quarters aboard the Patroclus.

The heavy set man looked up. “Sure,” he’d said, nodding to the untouched-looking chair in the corner of his cabin.

Sudulus sat, and was silent for several moments as he watched the battle-worn jungle-fighter prepare his explosives. He looked horribly out of place, Sudulus thought, this muscular giant of a man wearing rough combat fatigues and his face still smudged with camouflage paint sitting on a beautifully ornate four-poster bed in the middle of a richly decorated cabin. He didn’t look at home here at all, though the savant was surprised by the Catachan’s apparent finesse in that everything was as neat and tidy as it had been before he moved in.

“Nerf, can you keep a secret?” Sudulus asked, leaning forward in his seat and rubbing his bionic hands together nervously.

The Catachan glance in his direction, saw the look on the savants face, and stopped what he was doing to properly turn and face the little man.

“I can,” he said, and Sudulus found himself relieved to see that the former commando looked to be taking him seriously.

“It’s about Godwyn,” Sudulus began, suddenly finding it hard to hold the Catachan’s gaze; “I want you to keep her safe.”

Nerf nodded thoughtfully. “Then we want the same thing.”

“eer… What?” the empathy of the large man’s response caught him somewhat by surprise, but Nerf waved his concern away and indicated that he shouldn’t be sidetracked.

“Right…” Sudulus continued, sitting back up and placing his hands on his knees. “You know she’s going to go and see another Inquisitor?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I’d like it if you followed her.”

“Okay.”

Sudulus arched an eyebrow. Just like that? No questions?

“Yes,” the savant went on, “and she can’t know about it.”

“So you want her tailed?” he asked.

“Well, yes,” Sudulus replied, momentarily standing up but sitting back down again when he changed his mind, “but not to watch her so much as to protect her. I trust you can be discrete?”

“You trust correctly,” he replied – his voice so flat that Sudulus wasn’t sure if he was making fun of him or not.

“And you can’t endanger her in any way.”

“Okay.”

Sudulus rubbed his chin; “Just follow her. If she walks into a trap, try to help her, but if you can’t then make sure you see where they take her. If not, then we’ll collect you once she’s safe.”

“And if they try to kill her?” he asked the question Sudulus didn’t want to answer.

“She’s an Inquisitor, they won’t,” he replied as if to convince himself more than the Catachan.

Nerf hadn’t asked any more questions, but agreed to help Sudulus however he could. The savant had given him a special tracer-dart gun just in case, and said it was to be used if and only if they tried to take her away in a vehicle. Nerf seemed fine with that, but Sudulus was starting to wonder if he was sounding paranoid.

 

Meridian took off a few moments later and was en route to Hogshead when Nerf found the Inquisitor in her tiny port-side cabin.

“What are you doing, boss?” he asked, leaning against the hatch-frame with his arms folded as he stood in the narrow corridor connecting the living module to the rest of the shuttle.

Godwyn looked up at him as he spoke. She was sitting on her bunk and fitting Sudulus’ shock bracelets under the cuffs of her blouse: it should be fairly obvious what she was doing. That hadn’t been what he meant though.

“What do you want to hear, Nerf?” she asked him, going back to delicately feeding the thin wires over her palm and into the rings on her index and ring finger, deliberately not giving him the attention of her eyes.

“That you’re not going to go kill yourself over someone’s idea of duty.”

She stopped what she was doing – the Catachan had a gift for being aggravatingly blunt when he wanted to be, but Godwyn kept her cool. She valued his skill far too much to risk putting him off over a simple dispute.

“I have to do this,” she told him, hoping that he’d leave it at that.

He didn’t.

“No, you don’t,” he said in his calm, quiet, almost brotherly tone of voice. He wasn’t trying to tell her what to do, but telling her what she could do.

Godwyn went back to wiring the rings to the bracelet with Nerf watching over her in silence. She knew the risks and she knew what she was doing, though more importantly she knew why it had to be done. Von Draken was the only other Inquisitor Godwyn knew of on Penumbra, and knowing her as a friend or foe would redraw the lines in the battle that was surely to come.

“I knew a guy once that was sure he could ambush an ork war column before it reached the front, and win the battle for the Emperor,” Nerf was talking again, and Godwyn glanced up in his direction as she finished working on the rings and pulled on her overcoat to cover up the wires running from her sleeves.

“You know what happened to him?” he asked.

Godwyn didn’t, but she could feel where his story was going. “He died a hero, but couldn’t stop the orks?” she guessed, but Nerf shook his head.

“He got his coordinates wrong and wound up in the wrong place. A lot of our guys died because of it.”

He left it at that and excused himself as Godwyn stepped out of her cabin and into the main hold. The Catachan didn’t need to emphasise the message of the story though, because that much was obvious: noble intentions meant f*** all if your plan wasn’t good to begin with.

She went down to the lower hold where Sudulus was waiting for her as they neared the city. They didn’t speak much on the way down, but when they felt Meridian begin to slow in her descent the savant took one last chance to go over everything he could with the Inquisitor before it was too late.

“Remember that I will be able to hear everything you hear,” Sudulus reminded her in way of conclusion as she stepped out of the shuttle when Meridian briefly touched down in a cleared square deep within the capital city. Godwyn didn’t forget, and tapped her bionic ear twice to show him that she knew as she strode away through the engine wash.

“We’ll be watching!” he called after her as Meridian started to rise and the Inquisitor disappeared from sight.

“Well then…” Sudulus turned back from the hatch as the shuttle lifted off. Nerf was waiting nearby, his face freshly painted black, and a dark beret Sudulus had never seen before flopped over his sandy brown hair.

“Lee, get us to the second drop point,” Sudulus instructed over his comm. as he gave the Catachan an appreciative nod; “we don’t want her to have too much of a lead on us.”

+“Roger tha’,”+ the pilot drawled in response as the shuttle banked off to one side and changed direction. A rough ride, but time was of the essence.

 

 

It didn’t take long for Godwyn to locate the White Heart, but when she found the tavern in the lower end of Hogshead the door was hanging open and all was dark inside. Standing outside, she looked up and down the road: there was not a soul in sight.

“Sudulus,” she murmured as if to herself, “there is no-one here…” She pulled a small light from the pocket of her armour-weave coat and flicked it on, shining the beam of yellow in through the door: skewed tables and chairs – it looked abandoned.

+“Infra-red readings are being thrown off by the environment and I can’t read any definitive signatures through the interference,”+ Sudulus reported, likely referring to the numerous trash-fires and open torches that the Inquisitor had passed on her way here, +“The buildings around you are made of solid rockcrete, and I am afraind that I can’t read anything through them.”+

“Alright then, watch my back,” Godwyn drew the machine pistol from its holster and cocked the chamber; “I’m going in.”

+“Understood. Be careful.”+

Holding her pistol outstretched in front of her and bracing one arm against the other, Godwyn entered the tavern and swept it from left to right.

Empty.

Normally she would have thought it an indicator that whoever had left did so in a hurry, but in this city she didn’t expect that the proprietor would be all that attached to any of the junk she found abandoned within. More to the point was whether of not Inquisitor von Draken had known that the White Heart would be empty when she requested an extraction.

+“I’ve got movement coming down the road from the south-east,”+ Sudulus’ voice spoke into her head. +“It would appear to be your guest, Inquisitor. I expect she will be at you in under a minute.”+

Godwyn confirmed that she understood, and quickly stepped back outside into the street and hid the pistol within her coat as she crossed to a covered alcove where she could watch the Witch Hunter’s approach unobserved.

+“She’s moving erratically, possibly to lose a tail,”+ Sudulus kept her informed as she went.

“She’s alone?”

+“Utterly and completely,”+ he replied, +“and moving fast too. Somewhere between a walk and a jog.”+

Godwyn glanced down the road to the south-east, but it was still too dark to clearly see an outline of anyone approaching.

“How much longer?” she asked.

Sudulus took his time in responding: +“She should be coming up into visual raaaaange… now.”+

Inquisitor Godwyn peeked again, and this time clearly saw the shape of a person making a hasty pace towards the White Heart. She had not been seen, and Godwyn watched and waited as the figure approached the tavern and then stopped suddenly when she found the door open. Stepping into the glow of a nearby torch, Godwyn easily identified the angular white face and drawn black hair of the woman across from her as belonging to Inquisitor Tanya von Draken. The Witch Hunter had paused just as Godwyn had, and was now looking up and down the street. Would she speak? Von Draken lingered for a couple moments more, then moved to enter the tavern, which Godwyn took as her cue to emerge from hiding.

“Inquisitor,” she hailed the woman, who spun around when she heard the Kin-Slayer’s voice. Godwyn approached her calmly, but kept her hands concealed in the depths of her coat pockets – one empty, and the other still holding the compact machine pistol.

“You came alone?” von Draken asked, he figures pale though nothing about her betrayed fear or unease.

The two Inquisitors approached one another in the middle of the empty street so that they stood face to face.

“You asked for an extraction,” Godwyn ignored her question; “Why?”

The Witch Hunter looked as she did when Godwyn had first met her. A white face like chiselled ice with black hair tied in ropes behind her scalp, von Draken wore the same high-collared Inverness she had before, though this time there was the notable difference of a long scabbard poking out beneath the hem of her coat.

She looked at Godwyn with intense, accusatory eyes; “There is a traitor in our midst,” she said in a whisper like the hiss of wind passing through trees, “and I fear for my life.”

“Who is the traitor?” Godwyn asked, her hands still hidden, but the other woman shook her head ferociously and looked away.

“My investigation is compromised, and my subjects dead,” she continued. “Someone knows too much, and I need to disappear.”

“What did you find?” Godwyn demanded; “How did you get too close?!”

“Does it matter?” the Witch Hunter rounded on her. “I was betrayed, and the betrayer knows too much!”

Inquisitor von Draken was becoming agitated, but the other woman wasn’t about to cave so easily.

“Answer me and I’ll take you out of here,” Godwyn stated her terms before the Hereticus Inquisitor, “or say nothing and I’ll leave you here.”

The pale-faced Witch Hunter gave her a hard look, and Godwyn figured that she was battling it out inside her head whether or not she should level with her. In turn, the Ordo Xenos Inquisitor remained firm, and presented the other woman with an unchanging stare.

Von Draken was the first to speak: “My people were assassinated,” she said, “and all by the same killer.”

Godwyn narrowed her eyes, but the Witch Hunter continued.

“I’ll admit that she was good, and probably thought that she got away unnoticed, but there are no two killers like that…”

+“Godwyn… she’s talking about Mercy.”+ Sudulus cut in. +“You should withdraw. Immediately!”+ but instead of heeding him the Inquisitor stayed, and the Witch Hunter continued – a thin, revealing smile creeping to her lips:

“… I tried to follow her, but for a giant she was impossibly quick. I don’t know where anyone would acquire an assassin like that…”

“Tanya…”

+“Godwyn…!?”+

“You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?” Tanya von Draken asked her, though not looking for an answer; “She’s one of yours – a giant that can disappear into the shadows…”

“Tanya,” Godwyn continued, being sure to keep her voice level, “there is more to this than both of us know. Come with me and we’ll figure this out.”

Von Draken shook her head however. “No,” she said. “You come with me, and I’ll find the truth out for myself. You’re a traitor, Cassandra, and you always have been.”

Godwyn took two steps backwards, but von Draken shook her head once again. “Don’t try and run from me!” she warned. “I have you surrounded! You’re life is forfeit!”

+“That’s a lie! She’s bluffing!”+ Sudulus shouted into her ear as he checked and double check all his scanner readouts. +“There is nothing on the displays”+

Inquisitor Godwyn took a steadying breath – numerous red dots had suddenly appeared on her chest.

“You’re not bluffing,” she said. Von Draken’s features were glacial. Her eyes moved slowly from side to side.

+“Impossible!”+ Sudulus railed. +“Nothing is showing up on my sensors! They must be masked somehow!”+

Inquisitor Godwyn glanced upwards so much as she could without turning or making any sudden movements. “You’ve got your shooters hidden inside rockcrete buildings,” she stated. Sudulus couldn’t see them, and for that matter neither could she, but Godwyn had a feeling that she’d find them there in the ruins around them.

“You’re a quick study,” von Draken said without warmth.

Somewhere above her, Sudulus was going berserk as Meridian circled overhead, but Godwyn tuned him out and focused on the Inquisitor before her.

“Take your hands out of your pockets,” von Draken commanded. She had yet to draw a weapon of her own.

Godwyn glanced back up to where she thought the marksmen would be hidden. “Will they shoot?” she asked, slowly drawing her hands from her pockets and raising them to shoulder-height.

“They won’t shoot unless I tell them to.”

+“Inquisitor,”+ Sudulus regained some measure of his composure with a deep breath that was exhaled in her ear, +“there are four contacts approaching to either side of you. Now listen; I can get help on its way, but you need to give me time – whatever happens down there, you have to delay them. Do you understand!? They must be delayed as long as possible!”+

Easier said then done, but as she looked discretely to either side she could just make out the black-armoured forms of the enemy troopers she had long credited to some third party. So much for the Witch Hunter’s people all being dead.

“Whatever you want, we can work it out here,” Godwyn told her, keeping her hands raised.

Von Draken didn’t answer, but told two of the guards to make sure that all her weapons were secured.

“Did you hear me?!” Godwyn persisted as the black armoured troopers roughly pulled her coat from her shoulders and tore at the holster straps of her pistols. “I said that we can talk now!”

Von Draken didn’t seem to be listening, but the guards succeeded in over-powering the vainly struggling Inquisitor and loosing Godwyn’s plasma pistol, heavy pistol, and even the machine pistol in her pocket, and threw them to the street. The Witch Hunter quickly scooped up all three weapons and passed them to another of the black-clad guards that was standing nearby, before walking up to where the two other guards had wrestled Inquisitor Godwyn to a standstill and giving her captive a disgusted look.

“Bind her,” she instructed. “She’s coming back with us.”

Godwyn couldn’t resist as her captors thrust her arms behind her back and forcibly marched her after the Witch Hunter.

+“Godwyn, you need to stall for more time!”+

She was seized by the forearms and the shoulders, but as they marched her away she managed to pull the leather gloves from her hands and expose the wired rings attached to her fingers. Looking to make them shift their grips, Godwyn went dead on her feet and dragged her boots over the cracked pavement until, between a chorus of curses and shoves, both men tried to grab her under the arms – loosening their grip just long enough as they tried to drag her forward. Taking her chance she wriggled her arms free, and before they could so much as shout she grabbed both by their thighs.

An electric crack cut the air like a whip and Godwyn felt her guards go rigid and fall away, releasing her as she propelled herself forward in a sprint towards the Witch Hunter.

Sensing the commotion, Inquisitor von Draken turned just in time for Godwyn’s fist to connect with the side of her face, throwing her down to the ground as her minders turned in alarm.

“Don’t shoot her!” the reeling Inquisitor yelled as she scrambled back to her feet, stopping her troopers from gunning down her counterpart now that she had broken free. “She’s mine!”

Heart drumming in her chest, Godwyn stalled her momentum as her opponent regained her feet and raised her fists;

“I was hoping for this, b*tch,” she taunted, and lunged.

 

+“They’ve started fighting, Nerf! Get there as fast as you can!”+

Arms furiously pumping, Nerf tore through the darkness at top speed. He’d been on the ground for five – maybe six – minutes before Sudulus told him that things were getting serious, and now he was playing catch up to try and spring Godwyn from an ambush.

+“Wait!”+

He skidded to a stop at the edge of a crumbling block house and pressed his back against the wall. Around the corner the street was once again bare save for crumbled debris and the flickering embers of garbage fires. In his hand he held a suppressed stub-pistol and his knife was sheathed at his belt, but otherwise the Catachan was unarmed and unarmoured – better for the surveillance mission this was supposed to be.

“What’s going on?” he asked, quickly checking his corners. This part of the city seemed deserted, though it made him wonder where all the trash fires came from that he’d seen en route.

+“I’m afraid there are more enemy contacts than anticipated,”+ Sudulus explained breathlessly as he tried to fix an alternate route but meanwhile cautioning him to hold back. +“Rescuing the Inquisitor will be quite impossible.”+

The big man swore under his breath. “Level with me, Sudulus,” he said, keeping his voice low; “what in the hells am I doing down here if at one point you want me to step in and now you want me to back off?”

The savant didn’t answer him directly, but either way the news wasn’t good. +“Keep your distance, Nerf. We can’t do anything for her now…”+

 

In hindsight it would seem darkly ironic that Godwyn disdained fist-fighting as a barbaric and artless form of combat, but as she ducked under a flying right hook and drove her elbow into the Witch Hunter’s flank Inquisitor Godwyn found herself glad that she’d kept her form by practicing in rudimentary unarmed techniques.

A groan of pain escaped Tanya von Draken’s pursed lips as she stumbled back a couple of steps before being driven to her knees as Godwyn’s follow through spun her to the ground as her right fist contacted the other woman’s cheek. Godwyn tried again and kicked out with her left foot, but the Witch Hunter flung herself out of the way and madly scrambled back to her feet.

Godwyn was playing for time, but her rival Inquisitor seemed particularly tenacious and able to withstand a beating.

With a snarl the Inquisitors came together in a tangle of limbs as von Draken rushed her counterpart and Godwyn’s blow glanced against her forehead. A rough, desperate brawl carried both to the ground – pushing the wind from Godwyn’s lungs before Draken set into the pinned woman with her elbows and landing two solid blows to the ribs before she was pushed back.

Fighting to free herself, Godwyn got her arms loose, but the other woman’s fist cracked her nose and spilt blood across her face, though didn’t stop the pinned Inquisitor from grabbing a fist full of the Witch Hunter’s braided hair in one hand and pulling her head back while her other fist rammed again and again into her abdomen.

With difficulty they separated – von Draken heavily favouring the left side of her body while Godwyn tried to stymie the flow of blood from her face. Both were beaten and their breathing ragged, but with the Witch Hunter’s black armoured troopers lingering around the periphery the outcome was certain, though neither one looked to be giving up so soon.

Spitting the pooling blood from her gaping mouth, Godwyn closed her eyes from a brief second and felt her head start to spin. Trying to catch her unawares, von Draken lunged forward, but Godwyn stepped in early and caught the blow with her shoulder before driving her knee up into the other woman’s chest.

The Witch Hunter crumpled as if shot and Godwyn immediately followed through with a strike that laid her flat on the pavement. Blood searing in her eyes, the Inquisitor did not relent and tried to go even further, but just at the moment of triumph a stab of pain struck like a bolt of lightning between her shoulders. She felt her limbs freeze and go numb from the pain as her strength left them, and, mouth extended in a silent scream, Godwyn fell to unfeeling knees.

Before her eyes, Inquisitor von Draken was slowly gathering herself back up and struggling to stand.

The pain was immense – as if she’d been shot through the back but not been allowed to die.

She couldn’t breath.

One of the black-armoured guards stepped out from behind her, a crackling shock maul held in his hand. He passed it to the Witch Hunter, who took it without pause. Shuffling forward, she brought the weapon back and –

 

Nerf grimaced when he saw the shock maul connect with the Inquisitor’s head and snap it backwards. It looked bad, and she fell like limp fish, but hopefully it wouldn’t have killed her.

As if to answer the Catachan’s question, one of the other Inquisitor’s goons walked up to Godwyn’s collapsed form and checked her for a pulse. The trooper nodded, and, from where he was hidden behind the withered hulk of an ancient automobile, Nerf nodded as well: Inquisitor Godwyn was still alive.

The woman she had been fighting said something and doubled over onto her knees, while around her the minders pulled Cassandra Godwyn off the ground and unceremoniously dragged her in the opposite direction from where Nerf was hiding.

There were six of the black clad minders – the other Inquisitor making it seven in total – and though the woman took her time leaving, eventually they all left the area, and Nerf followed after them at a discrete distance.

They took their time and covered quite a distance, but Nerf never lost his patience and continued to follow them even as they went deeper into the abandoned areas of the city. Eventually they stopped, and after several moments an unmarked shuttle appeared out of the night sky and came to hover low over a vacant lot so that his quarry and their prisoner could enter inside.

“You getting this?” Nerf asked into his comm. bead.

+“I see it,”+ Sudulus replied. +“Plant the tracking device.”+

“Sure hope this works…” Nerf drew the smooth barrelled dart pistol from its pouch and took careful aim at the hovering shuttle. It was about sixty yards away, but with a squeeze of the trigger the small comm. unit zipped through the air and attached itself to the hull of the vessel.

+“It will,”+ Sudlus reassured him as he watch the shuttle lift back off and accelerate into the black sky. +“It has to…”+

[Papewaio]

VERY good! More (possibly artificial) evidence on Mercy going rogue, something that manages to creep Nerf out and Brianna being a little too zealous is all excellent in my book! It's a shame Ilias died though; I quite liked her.

 

Godwyn's started to make being kidnapped by other Inquisitors a habit, isn't she? ;)

[Lady_Canoness]

Thanks Papewaio! - and to be honest the whole 'abducted by the Inquisition' was a total fluke! I was looking back on the Inquisition and my notes for Inquisition II and found that the forumla for each was very similar!

 

I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying the characters thusfar :P they are fun to write, fun to envision, and even more fun to imagine them going forward!

[Lady_Canoness]

Things are really starting to heat up, so hopefully you will find the story starting to knit itself back together and make more sense as the lines become clearer. What happens to Godwyn? Is Mercy a traitor? Is von Draken the villain or the pawn? Will Brianna's Zeal put the whole mission in danger? Is Nerf's loyalty beyond question, or does he have some other motive hidden beneath his implacable calm? Why am I asking all these questions that I cleary have the answers to? ;)

 

Hopefully you enjoy the read and enjoy finding out!

 

 

 

* Part 13*

 

The comm. dart worked, and Sudulus watched with baited breath as the signal became stronger and stronger as the enemy shuttle gained speed and lifted clear of the background noise into the night sky. Keeping his distance, Lee shadowed the enemy contact and watched from afar as she lifted high into orbit amongst the ponderous ships and slowed before disappearing inside one.

 

* *

 

“There was no mistaking it,” Sudulus insisted when they boarded the Patroclus not more than an hour later and were granted an immediate audience with Master Columbo, “the ship was the Lord Decimus. It has somehow been reclaimed and is at this very moment holding Inquisitor Godwyn captive within.”

No one voiced any objections to the contrary, but the mood in the Ship Master’s study was tense, and nowhere more-so than with the Patroclus’ Master himself. Leaning forward with his elbows propped on the surface of his desk, the venerable Columbo sat with arched fingers pressed tightly against his lips while his eyes were held transfixed by the finished wood surface that parted him from Godwyn’s crew. He didn’t utter a word when Sudulus spoke, and he didn’t utter one now that the study had fallen silent; he merely sat there, with his First Officer standing at his side, and stared dumbly at his desk. The vibrant décor of the office could not have been more out of place.

“Master Columbo, might I remind you of the urgency of this matter?” Sudulus pressed the issue.

In a room of five people, the savant was the only one that was moving as he paced back and forth before the Ship Master’s desk with his eyes keenly on the man behind it. Nerf was in a back corner near a book-case and was leaning against the wall. He hadn’t said anything since Godwyn’s three-member delegation had arrived but he was listening carefully, and, unlike the others in the study, he hid his unease behind an unflappable veneer. Alexander was there also and was trying to put on a brave face as he occupied a chair just off the left of Columbo’s desk, though the rapid movements of his dark eyes between the others and his inability to speak underscored the forlorn helplessness he surely felt.

“She could be tortured, or killed,” Sudulus continued, “and the longer we delay the more she will suffer for it!”

“And what would you have me do?” Columbo replied, laying his hands flat on his desk and meeting the savant with contrite yet controlled words. “You tell me that you lost Inquisitor Godwyn to an act of treachery you anticipated, let her captors escape, and only come to me for aid when she is already held beyond your grasp in ghost ship likely guarded by agents of the Inquisition. What do you expect me to do?”

He did not shout or betray any hints of anger within his eyes, but as he spoke a pain of loss lingered over the old man’s features, like a sudden realization that it was too late for anything other than regret.

“I love Cassandra like family,” he said, watching the savant as he struggled to come up with something to say that would make it better, “but this is no warship. I am no admiral and I command no flotillas. I am a merchantman, and regardless of my courage or my spirit I cannot perform miracles. What do you expect of me? Tell me some way I can save her, and I will, but don’t ask me to do something I can’t for the life of me do.”

Pinching the bridge of his nose, the little man closed his eyes and said nothing, and the Ship Master looked past him to the Interrogator for an answer.

Alexander shrunk back under his eyes – he didn’t have any answers – and he looked away. “If they think she is a traitor, they won’t let her live…” he said gloomily, further lowering the atmosphere in the room.

Sudulus could not accept it, however, and shook his head violently. “There must be something we can do!” he said, though when he looked to Columbo for something he got nothing in return.

“There is something we can do,” Nerf spoke up from the back of the room, and everyone turned in his direction as he stepped slowly to the fore and looked at each of them in turn.

His face was still dark with camo-paint and the black beret with the unknown crest pinned to it was still angled over his short hair. Streaks of dried sweat were visible on his neck, and the skin of his squared jaw still glistened beneath the rough shadow of unshaven stubble. His eyes were hard, his lips were cracked, and the fabric of his fatigues was marked with dirt and dust, but even so the otherwise impeccable chamber aboard Columbo’s ship was silent as he came forward.

The look he gave them was hard, almost like a veteran about to chastise wet recruits, but when he spoke he did so calmly without a trace of anger in his voice.

“There is something we can do,” he said again, and looked at Columbo; “You’re a ship master,” he said with a point of his finger before turning next to Alexander; “you’re an Inquisitor,” and turning lastly to Sudulus; “you’re someone who knows something about almost everything,” then he motioned to himself with his thumb; “and I’m a commando.”

They waited in silence as he paused as if in emphasis. He then pointed behind him to the door: “Out there we have an assassin, a warrior that will fight to the death for whatever she believes, and a crack pilot…”

He paused again – still the room was silent.

“Now,” he looked at each one of them again, “are you going to try and tell me that between the seven of us we can’t find out how to get on board a ship that is not all that far away when we already have everything we’ll need?”

“Nerf, it is not as simple as…” Sudulus tried to cut in, but Nerf wasn’t finished.

“Because if you do,” he glanced at the savant, “I’m going to put my boot so far up your ass that you’ll swear that you had it for dinner last night.”

Sudulus stopped abruptly, briefly eyed the Catachan’s boot, and was silent.

“Good,” Nerf scowled to the room at large as if to challenge any more dissent, “because I’ve got a plan on how we can do this…”

 

 

As a rule, Hercule Columbo did not suffer fools, nor did he suffer hubris, but when he listened to the Catachan’s plan he found that the man possessed neither the mind of an imbecile nor the heart for pride, and instead of a muscle-bound brute who stood in his study the Ship Master was compelled to see a good, honest man. Columbo had never bothered to associate himself with Nerf before, though now he wished he had. For all the qualities the commando did not possess, the Catachan deserved to be admired for those he did. Courage, honour, selflessness, truth – it would have been hard not to believe in him when he spoke of his plan to free the Inquisitor.

“So,” First Officer Michael Brent put forward as soon as they were gone from the Ship Master’s study and safely inside the closed confines of an upwards moving turbo-lift, “do you think the guardsman’s plan will work, sir?”

Standing upright with his arms folded behind his back, Hercule Columbo looked straight ahead at the turbo-lift doors while he chewed thoughtfully on the inside of his cheek. He didn’t know to be sure. He’d seen bold moves before, and over his long years had executed his share of daring, do-or-die ploys, but never before had he heard anything so intrepid when the odds of success seemed so slim.

“Do you?” Columbo returned the question to his First Officer.

Brent half-shrugged, then nodded; “It’s so crazy that it might just have to.”

“Aye,” the Ship Master agreed without mirth, “it does seem that way doesn’t it? Though I can imagine that this will not be something from which we will easily walk away from.”

The First Officer hastened to concur lest he give the impression of misunderstanding the gravity of the situation. For Columbo, however, there was no misunderstanding the task that was asked of him.

“Will we fight today?” he wondered aloud as the turbo-lift ground to a halt and he stepped with Brent at his side onto the bridge of the Patroclus, “Will the Patroclus do battle?”

“Yes sir,” the First Officer stepped up beside him on the command pulpit overlooking the operations deck, “today will be a day for glory.”

 

The wailing of claxons had only begun directing the Patroclus’ crew to actions stations when Nerf saw the battle sister approaching him from across the hangar as he ran last minute checks across his gear before boarding Meridian.

“Nerf!”

He’d explained his plan right down the last detail as soon as he’d got back to the common room with Sudulus and the kid, but even so he’d expected that he’d have to go over it again before they left. Not that he could blame any of them for asking – with so many things that could go wrong, they could all be dead in the next ten minutes.

“Yeah?” he looked up as the battle sister came closer and stopped a couple feet from him. She was fully armed and armoured, but had also donned a concealing threaded grey habit like Nerf had suggested.

She looked him up and down before speaking, as if sizing him up, prior to her bright eyes coming to rest on the Catachan’s dour face.

“I applaud your conviction and faith,” Brianna said, a look of admiration on her youthful features. “A lesser man would have forsaken his duty for fear in your place.”

Nerf struggled not to raise a questioning eyebrow as he scratched lightly at the stubble on his chin.

What?

Seeming somewhat disappointed when he didn’t say anything, Brianna tried again: “You are a true servant of the God Emperor, and your actions prove you as such.”

Nerf nodded, he could accept that, but before she got the chance to go past him into the waiting shuttle, he held up a hand and asked her to wait.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Brianna,” he said in low, rumbling voice, “but you’re the only holy warrior here. I just shoot things.”

Maybe she understood it, maybe she didn’t, but Brianna accepted it either way.

“As long as you shoot the proper things then,” she said with a nodded, and let the Catachan clap her encouragingly on the shoulder as she mounted up into Meridian.

 

* *

 

She awoke when the ice-water hit her flesh. A great torrent of it spilling over her face and mouth, Godwyn was instantly choking and sputtering as she writhed under the frigid water fall. Filling her nostrils and sloshing into her throat faster than she could spit it out, her chest tightened for air and she was on the verge of suffocating when, abruptly, it stopped. Coughing, it took her several moments to realize that she was blind, and that a wet, black sac had been fastened over her head.

She tried to move. Nothing. They’d bound her hands – she could feel the wire cutting into the skin of her wrists.

Again, she coughed. It was hard to suck air through the sodden bag that clung to her face.

“Cassandra Pallas Godwyn, how long we’ve waited to have you here,” a mocking male voice she did not recognize said from somewhere around her. Over the constant dripping of water running off her face, Godwyn thought she could hear air-scrubbers. She was in a room somewhere with the owner of the voice. Maybe on a ship, maybe in a bunker. Her face stung: now she remembered how she ended up here.

“There are many questions we’d like to have answered, and providing us with those answers would give much satisfaction to many people…”

“Who – ?”

The water was back in force, drowning out her question as she once again thrashed and choked under the downpour. The water was everywhere. She could not escape it. This time she knew she would drown – she could feel the water creeping into her lungs…

And then it stopped.

“No, no, no,” the voice chided her while she gasped and gagged; “no questions… I ask the questions, not you.”

The water came back briefly as if to emphasize his point. She was screaming when it stopped.

“Good, you understand. Now, tell me why you killed them.”

“Killed who!?”

The water answered her, longer this time, and she thrashed and struggled helplessly until her torturer decided to stop.

“You killed five Inquisitors – including your own mentor – a quarter century ago. I want you to tell me why you did it.”

She didn’t answer, so the water came back – spilling over her face and neck and freezing her scalp.

“I only killed three of them!” Godwyn shouted as soon as she was able between gasping breaths. “I told the conclave that! Three – Pierce, Roth, Andovich! That is what I did!”

Silence answered her, then the water.

“You lie,” the voice sounded disappointed as she gagged and sputtered, “just like you lied to the conclave. Tell me, Cassandra, how many times did your mentor f*ck you?”

“I’m not – !” she started to protest, but the water silenced her words behind a strangled scream as Godwyn wrestled to keep the water from out lungs. The cold stung her face and smothered her breathing, but somehow she was still alive by the end of it.

“They say that you were quite promiscuous in your younger years, and that you liked it when you were alone with your tutors and convinced them to slip it to you. Shall I blame the stodgy old masters of the academies for not being able to resist a tight, young body when it is given so willingly? Or shall I blame you – a self indulgent youth who cannot control her emotions or her urges?”

The voice didn’t want her to answer this time but went right to the water instead – as if drowning would answer his questions instead.

“You killed them out of jealousy, didn’t you? Jealous that your own inadequacies put so many others before you, you saw murder as your only way to notoriety. And how it worked, didn’t it? You have your own title – the Kin-Slayer – a moniker that everyone knows! How proud you must be!”

The water was back before she had so much as managed two gasps of free air, but when the water stopped and she could hear herself over the gurgling of her own breathing, Godwyn noticed a second voice alongside the first.

“ – enough,” the newcomer was saying. “Leave me with her.”

It was a woman this time, and after several moments of silence the black bag over her head was removed and Godwyn found herself looking up into the pale face of Inquisitor von Draken beside a giant iron spigot that continued to drip ice-water onto her already frigid flesh.

The Witch Hunter didn’t say anything, but reached behind Godwyn and pulled on something that slowly ratcheted the Inquisitor into un upright position so that she was no longer under the dripping ice-water and able to see the entirety of the room she know occupied with the Hereticus Inquisitor. As an interrogation chamber, it was small and mostly bare with non-descript walls and a single, wire-framed chair facing the gurney to which she was fastened. Von Draken, finishing whatever she had done beyond Godwyn’s sight, now occupied this chair, and watched her counterpart with an unreadable expression.

For whatever it was worth, Godwyn managed to take some small satisfaction in seeing that the Witch Hunter had several purplish bruises already forming on her face, and that her lower lip was split and caked with a dark smear of dried blood, though at the same time Godwyn didn’t imagine that she looked any better.

“Am I supposed to thank you for putting a stop to that?” Godwyn asked with an icy sneer, though she surprised herself by how loud her voice sounded now that the room was totally silent.

“No,” von Draken replied rigidly, “your fate remains unchanged. Thank me for nothing.”

“So what do you intend to do with me then?” the prisoner enquired coolly, though she knew that she needn’t bother asking. Since her capture, her fate had never been in question.

“You will be executed for treason,” von Draken replied, “but unlike lesser *men*, I take no satisfaction in humiliating my prisoners.”

“So we can talk then?” Godwyn asked, and her captor nodded once in assent;

“Yes, we will talk.”

It was no comfort knowing that these were the last hours of her life or that Tanya von Draken would be the last person she would see before the beyond, yet in the back of her skull she felt a certain calm. Perhaps it was from the freezing water that sill dripped from her hair, or maybe it was knowing with some certainty that this is how it would all end, but of all the ways she’d envisioned dying a bullet to the brain without further discomfort would be almost a kindness in a morbid fashion.

“I don’t like you, Godwyn,” von Draken told her, “I never have, and I likely never will even after you are dead, yet I respect you. You have done some good deeds in your life, and though they don’t right your wrongs, I respect you for them. Once you are dead, your body will be cremated without debasement and your ashes will be scattered. Your name will remain on the records, as will the nature of your betrayal.”

The Witch Hunter paused. Neither of the women had so much as flinched while she spoke.

“In return, I hope that you will hold to some degree of honour and answer my questions without need for further unpleasantness.”

She left it at that and waited for Godwyn to reply, but, for her own sake, Cassandra Godwyn did what she could to delay her questioning and eventual execution;

“I have questions of my own that I want to ask you.”

“They can wait,” von Draken answered.

“Until I am dead?”

The Witch Hunter remained passive; “Until I am done.”

It was good enough so Godwyn agreed, and without further hesitation the interrogator began with her questions:

“Who is the assassin I saw, and how did she come to you?”

“Her name is Mercy,” Godwyn replied truthfully. “I don’t know what she is or where she came from, but I was directed to her by Inquisitor Brand two years ago. But there is something else you should know…”

Von Draken nodded: she was listening.

“The assassin in my service fights with paired neuro-gauntlets. The one who killed your men fights with a sword.”

The Witch Hunter hissed in irritation. “Is this a farce to you!? Do you really expect me to care what weapon you add to your killer!?”

“You don’t know her!” Godwyn replied hotly. “In my service she has only ever used one weapon!”

“You’re saying that your assassin has gone rogue!?”

“Yes!!”

They were shouting now, and colour flushed to the bruisings on von Draken’s otherwise white face.

“So you are blameless on the basis that your killer is beyond your ability to control!?”

“Yes!!”

The Witch Hunter stood up abruptly and went back behind Godwyn. “So much for holding yourself with honour,” she said, and threw the gurney back down so that Godwyn was once again under the spigot before she wrestled the damp, black sac back over her head and pulled a drawstring tightly around her neck in spite of the Inquisitor’s protestations of innocence.

“Now,” von Draken said forcefully, “I am going to ask you again, but this time when you lie to me I will turn on the water until you drown in it!”

“You don’t understand!”

“On the contrary, Inquisitor Godwyn!” von Draken reminded her vehemently, “I understand perfectly that you’re an honourless b*tch with a penchant for only ever being able to learn things the hard way!”

Godwyn continued to protest, but the Witch Hunter wouldn’t have any more of it and raised her voice to be heard over the other woman’s shouting.

“Tell me why you attacked and killed my men!” she demanded.

It took a supreme force of will to stop herself from shouting the first of many obscenities at that woman, but – taking as deep a breath she could through the soaking black bag – Godwyn dropped her voice and swallowed her rage. She had to think rationally; now more than ever if she was going to survive this. She had done nothing wrong, after all, even if one of her agents had.

“The only men I ever killed, or ordered killed, were unidentifiable soldiers in black armour,” she explained as slowly and steadily as she could lest she tempt more of the ice-water, “and only because they initiated hostilities.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s the truth,” she insisted, but no water came. She allowed another deep breath.

“And what reason would Inquisitorial shock-troops have to engage in hostilities against you?” The Witch Hunter had yet to relax her stance, but she was giving Godwyn time to explain herself, which was all she could really count on for now.

“I was investigating the Lion’s Den in search of information about an untouchable I thought connected to the murders when Inquisitorial forces launched an all out assault on the building and I was forced to disengage…” Godwyn paused for several moments, but the Witch Hunter said nothing. “I asked you about it, and you denied any involvement, though just now you had the same soldiers as reinforcements… and to think that I thought you were telling the truth.”

Still von Draken did not answer.

Godwyn swallowed. Blind, bound, and utterly helpless she could only hope that the Witch Hunter would see the truth for what it was, or, if she intended to drown her, that she would get on with it already.

“Then what?” her captor asked.

Godwyn didn’t know what she meant, and told her as much.

“When next did you encounter Inquisitorial troops?” von Draken asked her question again, and Godwyn heard what sounded like footsteps as the Witch Hunter walked around behind her head.

“They started a war in the streets, but I saw them next when I found the planet scribe. Your Inquisitorial troops were deployed in force to prevent me from leaving.”

The information about the planet scribe seemed to catch the Witch Hunter by surprise, and her tone momentarily changed to one of thinly veiled disbelief.

“Planet scribes are ancient and revered pieces of technology. How is it that you think you found one on Penumbra?”

She didn’t believe that Godwyn had found one, but if she didn’t believe it then she couldn’t know about it, and she couldn’t send troops to what she didn’t know about. Godwyn’s mind raced, and for the moment she was glad that von Draken could not see her face. It could be that the Witch Hunter was making a grave mistake, and that if she was made to realize it Godwyn’s life would not yet be forfeit. It was also possible that the Inquisitorial shock-troopers she had encountered in Hogshead were one and the same as the troopers backing up Inquisitor von Draken, yet if the troops were deployed without the Witch Hunter’s knowledge then there was likely someone else commanding both parties – the ever-elusive third party.

“I had a mechanicum-priestess confirm it,” Godwyn told her, hoping upon hope that she’d believe it. “The Inquisitorial troops knew how to get inside and knew how to cover the possible escape routes.”

The other Inquisitor was silent, but as if in answer she fixed the gurney to which Godwyn was bound back into an upright position and pulled the still-damp bag from her head.

Tanya von Draken once again took a seat opposite her prisoner in the wire-framed chair and pulled her dark Inverness tightly around her as she folded one leg over the other. Her bruised face was still unreadable, but in her ice-like eyes Godwyn felt as if she saw a glimmer of understanding. It would be difficult, but she couldn’t give up yet.

“Why should I believe you?” the Witch Hunter asked.

Godwyn took her time in answering: she had von Draken as a captive audience, but a single word would be as likely to save her as it would doom her. She met the Witch Hunter’s eyes and held them:

“Because someone is trying very hard to play us both for fools.”

The other woman’s eyes grew hard and her jaw tightened – bending the long cut that distended from her lip.

“To what end?”

If she were being completely honest with herself, Godwyn would have said that it didn’t matter – she knew what it felt like to be used by another Inquisitor as a means to their ends – the only thing that did matter was fighting back. Von Draken was still her enemy, however, and she could take nothing for granted until she had secured the other Inquisitor’s understanding.

“I have reason to believe that someone is trying to awaken the Necrotyr slumbering on the planet below.”

Any lasting suspicions Godwyn harboured about Inquisitor von Draken perhaps feigning ignorance in order for Godwyn to reveal what she knew vanished when a look of genuine shock sunk unbidden into the Witch Hunter’s visage. She banished it in almost a second, but it had been long enough for Godwyn to determine her counterpart had not known what she was dealing with.

“The Necrotyr?” Draken asked for confirmation, trying very hard to keep her voice level and in charge. “You claim that an ancient alien species – whose return is widely regarded as myth – inhabits the planet below, and that an Inquisitor is trying to bring them back!?”

Godwyn slowly nodded. To most it would sound too farfetched to believe, but, as an Inquisitor, von Draken would know that it was all too possible to be dismissed.

“You have proof of this?” the Witch Hunter asked.

“No one has proof of the Necrotyr other than what they saw,” Godwyn replied, “but I entered a tomb of xeno origin, saw glyphs I recognized as Necrotyr, witness their warriors in some kind of stasis, and was attacked by monstrous, metallic spiders the likes of which have been noted in unconfirmed reports around the Imperium. One of my agents was killed trying to escape, and I barely managed to flee with my life.”

“If what you say is true, then how do you know that the Inquisition is involved?” Tanya von Draken was doing her best to find fault in Godwyn’s words – as if looking for some excuse not to believe it was true – but Godwyn could tell her captor was starting to turn. The Witch Hunter’s certainty was unravelling, and even if Mercy was responsible for killing her agents, Godwyn doubted that she would be so quick to kill her for treason now that she was starting to hear the truth.

“The planet scribe pointed me to a derelict Explorator in orbit over the Sticks,” Godwyn told her, “and that derelict had the location of the Necrotyr tomb clearly plotted and under surveillance.”

“A derelict?” her captor repeated, and Godwyn nodded.

“I also have reason to believe that someone removed one of the Necrotyr from stasis and imprisoned it onboard.”

“Why?”

“I wish knew.”

Inquisitor von Draken rose from her seat and paced painstakingly about the room with her features creased in deep concentration. Watching her, Godwyn noticed that the Witch Hunter had all three of her pistols about her person in addition to a sword and pistol by her side.

“There is more,” Godwyn continued after some delay, and von Draken motioned for the prisoner to speak though she herself continued to pace. “My Interrogator confirmed that the Necrotyr are void in the Warp, much like untouchables, and he felt their presence in the planet scribe and even at one of the murder-scenes we had been tasked to investigate.”

Von Draken did not answer, and on her face Godwyn could see a look of troubled indecision that clearly did not frequent the woman’s visage. The Witch Hunter did not look at her captive when next she spoke:

“And what if I still don’t believe you?” she asked, eyes staring sightlessly into the corner where the wall and floor of the chamber met.

“Then shoot me already, and face the consequences on your own.”

The Witch Hunter drew her pistol – a massive, long barrelled silver revolver with richly ornate decorations and Imperial motifs running along its sides – but did not raise it.

“And if I believe you?”

Godwyn swallowed. “Then you’ll let me go, and we’ll uncover what truth remains together.”

Inquisitor von Draken looked in her direction and Godwyn could sense the strength returning to her features. She shook her head.

“I can’t do that.”

“Why?” Godwyn quickly posed.

Von Draken seemed to waiver in her response. “Because I’m not in charge,” she admitted eventually, once again looking away from her prisoner though her pistol remained drawn.

“Who is?” Godwyn asked, though she had a sinking feeling that she wouldn’t like the answer.

“Inquisitor Brand,” von Draken seemed to make up her mind, and strode over to the door of the chamber where she pushed a small button to summon the guards.

“He’s here!?!”

The Witch Hunter nodded stiffly as more black armoured troopers entered the interrogation chamber. “He is, and you are aboard the Lord Decimus – his ship. I think it time I brought you to see him.”

[Ice warrior]

This is getting really interesting and I truly hope that you manage to end it properly.

I would complain again that it is ending, but since I know that =][= 3 is coming (?), all I can do is applaud... Amazing!

[Lady_Canoness]

Thank you kindly Ice Warrior, though I would like to know what ending it properly is from your point of view (and they aaaall live happily ever after... :P)

 

And you are correct - Inquisition III will be on its way. I've been working on concepts for about the past month (if not more) for it, and once again I'll be trying to repeat the good stuff and then make it even better! Thanks for reading, and I'm very pleased that you've stuck with Godwyn all the way through <_<

[Ice warrior]

I think, I will be pleased with the ending, if it ends with a dot... <_< Well perhaps it is good, if the last part even remotely ties some loose ends and tries to make conclusion for the mission that =][= is performing.

As a side note, don't end it middle of a sentence.

 

-Ice-

[Aqui]

There's going to be a third?

 

:D

[Lady_Canoness]

That is correct Aquilanus!

 

The Inquisition III is already well into the conceptual stages. I won't shed too many details, but a certain Space Marine from the first Inquisition will be making a return in another big role :(

[Lady_Canoness]

Part 14 arrives, and hopefully you will agree that it sets the stage for something good in part 15! It also means that there are no more than 4 parts left in the Inquisition II (which may be happy or sad depending on your point of view.) How are you liking where this is going/ has gone? Is everything coming together okay so far? What characters are favourites, and what ones would you hate to see killed off? (okay, not fair question, but believe me when I say that I have that all under control by now.)

 

Nothing is left to chance, and the story from here is all mapped out. Just hang on and see if you like the ride!

 

*Part 14*

 

Lee Normandy had done a whole lot of dangerous things in his heyday as a smuggler, and every time where he nearly lost his skin he’d find himself a week later with a whore in one hand and stiff drink in the other promising himself that he’d never do that again.

Then he’d signed on with the Inquisitors. Official business his ass: they’d almost got him killed many times over! Not to mention how loose women seemed to be getting rarer and rarer these days. Maybe he was just getting older, and the leathery skin and sharp whit weren’t working the way they used to. Though that didn’t seem to stop the danger.

“How are we doing, Lee?” It was Nerf, the big Catachan. This was his idea.

“S’ fine, s’ fine,” he muttered softly as he deftly guided Meridian through the anchorage in the direction indicated by the blinking signal of a locator beacon that had been previously concealed upon their target.

The tension inside the shuttle was thick enough that one’d have to hack at it with a chainsword, though it was Lee’s job to make sure that from the outside everything looked like business as usual. No caginess, no evasive manoeuvres, no attempts at being stealthy. They were trying to bamboozle their way over to a capital ship, board it, and not get blasted into space-dust in the process. It was like pretending to be a thoroughly sloshed officer so the sentries didn’t ask anything when you traipsed through the front gate. It was crazy, but it might just work.

Lee didn’t think of the consequences – as a rule, he never did when he was in the act – but that didn’t stop everyone else, and from Nerf grinding his teeth in the cockpit to Sudulus sweating it in the nest, the price of failure couldn’t be higher. You get used to death – Emperor, in this type of life you have to – but you never get used to gambling your life and six others while betting against the odds. Well, maybe Nerf did, but then again he was probably used to a whole bunch of things that he really shouldn’t be.

And this was all his idea.

“We’re being hailed!” Sudulus nearly squeaked from his seat in the nest, and Nerf’s muscular form left Lee’s shoulder and marched from the cockpit to oversee the next step of his plan. “It’s the Lord Decimus…”

Nerf turned to look into the main hold; “James?”

Alexander was as white as a ghost as he stepped quickly into the nest and cleared his throat. “Dominus Extremis 113.566 Alpha Zeta,” he said in a clear voice into the comm.

Silence.

He glanced at Nerf; the Catachan was looking back at him.

“It’s an Inquisitorial code ordering immediate exclusive access,” the Interrogator explained. “Unless an Inquisitor is overseeing the communications deck, they should have no choice but to let us board.”

“It’s a gamble,” Sudulus agreed in a minute voice, and Nerf swallowed, looking from one to the other.

A crackle of crisp static announced the opening of a channel from the Lord Decimus, and after a brief pause there was a voice on the other end of the feed:

+“Permission granted Inquisitor. Proceed on trajectory to hangar 4. The Emperor protects.”+

The transmission ended and Sudulus quickly cut the feed, allowing a collective sigh of relief to pass through the shuttle as Lee gently adjusted his course.

“I don’t believe it,” Alexander said after several moments when no-one spoke. “I don’t believe it. That ship was a derelict hanging in space with an untouchable onboard. Now its here, with people inside.”

Nerf gave him a hard look. “Believe it,” he said; “we’re going there.”

Through the hatchway to the main hold, Brianna was sitting at the table muttering words of prayer as she worked a string of rosary beads through her fingers. Eyes closed, she looked to no-one but her Emperor and didn’t notice the long form of Mercy eyeing her uncomfortably from across hold.

Nerf ducked into the room. “You okay?” he said approaching the giant assassin after sparing only a half-glance towards the sister.

She looked down in his direction. She was not okay.

Nerf nodded. He thought he understood. The violet-eyed assassin never balked at combat, but she could feel everyone’s unease, and it made her nervous. The sister’s fanatical praying probably didn’t help either. Nerf didn’t know if the tall woman believed in the Immortal God Emperor or not, and he’d never seen her make an devotions, though seeing as he’d only ever known her as an Inquisitorial agent it was hard to think of her as not worshiping the Emperor in some fashion even if it was only a name she killed for. It made no difference to him – he’d been told all his life that he fought and killed for the Emperor, so that was reason enough. Gods, heroes, sinners, and saints – none of that mattered down a rifle’s sights.

“It’ll be alright, Mers,” he reached up and gave her shoulder a warm squeeze, “we’ll get the boss out okay.”

She didn’t look comforted.

 

The angled hull of the Lord Decimus grew ever larger in Meridian’s view port until it was all they could see and the larger ship swallowed them whole into its port-side hangar. The colossal doors of the hangar slowly ground shut behind them and it was done: they had boarded the Lord Decimus.

Locking the landing struts to the deck, Lee quickly shuttered the cockpit glass and rejoined the others in the lower hold as they waited for the hangar systems to equalize the exterior pressure.

“Remember,” Nerf was saying as he got there, “we need to clear the hangar without them catching on. Once we’re through there, we’re good to go.”

Everyone assembled seemed to nod in agreement. The hangars were a deathtrap as they could be sealed in and vented out with the flip of a switch, meaning that an intruder would perish before even establishing a foothold on the ship.

In an operation full of risks this was probably the biggest one, as no amount of fire power or skill could stop the hangar controller from blowing them all into the void, so where strength would fail they would have to rely on something else: subterfuge. Alexander was tall and lanky, though wearing a menacing-looking rebreather mask they’d pilfered from Columbo’s stores, and with a little acting, Nerf thought the Interrogator could pass for an actual Inquisitor. Everyone else would take the part of being his handlers and present themselves as unarmed and non-threatening, though once clear of the hangars they would have to be ready to overpower any guards and deploy fully armed to the teeth. Mercy was carrying most of their weapons, and, wearing a thick royal blue hooded robe with inlaid gold lining over her shadow suit, could pass at a glance for some kind of dignitary and smuggle in weapons that would otherwise be too large to hide. The weight would slow her down, but Nerf had promised that she wouldn’t need to do any fighting until she was unburdened of it all. Likewise, Brianna was covering her armour with a cloak, Nerf was dressed in pompous-looking military garb, Lee had his usual attire, and Sudulus wore one of his simple red-dyed habits to conceal tactical webbing laden with explosive charges.

A green light flashed on, indicating the equalization of interior pressure with the hangar atmosphere, and Lee opened the lower hatches.

“One more thing,” Nerf said as one-by-one they followed Alexander out of the shuttle, “remember that we need enough ammo to get in and out.”

There were some quiet acknowledgements, and then they were out on the deck with the cold metal bulk of the Lord Decimus rising around them. They moved stiffly and with purpose with Alexander in the lead towards a pair of sturdy-looking blast doors that awaited them across the cavernous hangar. They were hardly halfway there, however, when the doors parted and a delegation of black-armoured troops casually entered the hangar to meet them. The officer at their head held out hand as if to stop them:

“Excuse me, sir,” he said as they drew closer, “I must…”

But, moving at a steady clip, Alexander cut him off and produced his rosette: “Stand aside,” the Interrogator commanded in an irritated rasp of a voice very dissimilar to how he usual spoke, “I have no time for your excuses!”

He kept walking with the others of his pretend entourage keeping pace and his storm coat flapping around his polished knee boots as if meaning to march through the assembled guards, but after some hesitation the Lord Decimus’ troopers formed a more defensive stance and forced Alexander to stop mere meters from the door.

“Sir, you will have to stop here until I have confirmed with my commanders that you are granted clearance to leave the hangar bay,” the officer reiterated, but Alexander was already making a show of bristling with anger:

“I will remind you, soldier, that you are addressing an agent of the Emperor’s own Holy Inquisition, and that my authority exceeds that of you and your petulant commanders!” he rasped, taking a step forward into face of the officer with such a display of contempt that the uniformed man quickly took a step back and his troopers looked to one another with startled expressions. “My authority, vested in me by the Emperor Himself, is absolute, and it is a crime against the Emperor to bar the way of His Inquisitors with word or deed. If you attempt to interrupt the execution of my duty one more time, then I will see that you and your men suffer the consequences of it! Do I make myself clear!?”

The officer blanched and quickly stepped aside – motioning for his men to do likewise – and apologized profusely for any offense he may have caused.

Alexander waited for the troopers to clear his path, then proceeded through the blast doors with the officer following smartly beside him. “No-one,” Alexander warned him, “is to enter that hangar without my expressed permission. Do you understand?”

The officer said that he did, and with a clunk the blast doors closed behind them. They were in.

 

* *

 

She didn’t want to believe that she was on the Lord Decimus, but as she was escorted from the interrogation chamber there was no mistaking the ship around her for the ship she’d found earlier sitting dark in space. It had somehow come alive, and now von Draken said it belonged to Inquisitor Brand. A trick? Doubtful, but if it was true, then the implications were not good for the revered Inquisitor. No one simply lost track of a vessel this size: he knew what was happening on Penumbra even if von Draken did not, and more likely than not he had planned it that way.

Together with the Witch Hunter and a handful of armed guards, Godwyn entered a trubo-lift that began to ascend rapidly towards what she guessed had to be the bridge.

“Tanya…”

“Not now,” the Witch Hunter silenced her. Indeed the time of reckoning would be soon enough.

Free of the interrogation room, the chill of the ice water was starting to wear off, and as her face grew gradually warmer Godwyn could feel the sting of open cuts and throbbing bruises marking her fight with von Draken. She probably looked as bad as she felt too, for while the Witch Hunter had received medical attention, Godwyn had likely been moved immediately to torture.

She reached up to her face with manacled hands and gently traced the lines of her wounds – counting the bumps that should not be there. With all the adrenaline of the fight, she hadn’t noticed how much of a beating she’d sustained, though no doubt the Witch Hunter had suffered worse.

With a shuddering grind, the turbo-lift slowed to a halt and the doors parted, issuing forth the occupants onto the cavernous platform of the bridge.

Like much else she’d seen on the ship, the Lord Decimus’ bridge was dark and foreboding with deep shadows lining the corners of the chamber and a high vaulted ceiling combining with tall windows to make an occupant feel open to the blackness of the void. Exiting the turbo-lift at the lowest point in the deck, the command platform rose around them like an amphitheatre, and as von Draken led her forward Godwyn could see a skeleton crew operating from a plethora of cogitators and control banks. At the top-most level was the man himself, however, and the two Inquisitors had yet to leave the lowest level of the bridge when Inquisitor Brand turned to meet them.

Dressed in a long, richly decorated gown fastened around his waist by a sewn leather belt, Inquisitor Brand turned his back on the vista behind him and set his attention downwards to the women beneath him with his piercing white eyes. He looked at them both, one and then the other, and Godwyn found it hard to meet the immovable gaze of the man’s shaven, black head as his glare bored into her.

Several feet to her left, von Draken folded her arms behind her back and solidified her stance.

The expanse of the bridge seemed to empty around her in the absence of words until all that remained were the three Inquisitors.

Slowly and considerately, Brand started to move one step at a time down towards the women until he came to stop on the level just up from them. Still he waited, watching them both with an expression that could hide the want of a lifetime deep within its features.

Godwyn shifted uncomfortably as she tried to fix her eyes as far up his body as she could. He was a traitor – it shouldn’t be so difficult – and yet it was. Inquisitor Brand, master of the Lord Decimus, had played her from the beginning, sent his own troops against her, and was responsible for consorting with xenos, yet here he was cowing both a Witch Hunter of the Ordo Hereticus and an Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos with his mere presence.

As if sensing her derision the man started to laugh – a low rumbling noise like the building of a storm.

“Inquisitor Godwyn of the Ordo Xenos,” he said, and, as if breaking a spell, Godwyn found the resolve to meet his eyes buried in his words; “not that I could expect seeing you again would come to pass.”

“You are a traitor and a heretic!” the words sprang from her mouth to assail the black-skinned man without thought, but Brand simply laughed them off.

“Accusations without grounds or basis,” he explained. “You are the captive, held by the Witch Hunter, and standing accused of treason. Not I. Which brings me to a question,” he looked to von Draken, “why is she here? Did you not come to me saying you wished her killed?

Von Draken cleared her throat and looked sideways at Godwyn as both Inquisitors turned their attention in her direction. “I did and I do,” she agreed, “but she is more cunning than I had given her credit, and raises questions I would like to hear answered.”

Brand looked from one to the other questioningly, his demeanour severe; “Is that so?” he said. “You say she has lied to you with enough efficacies to pique your interests? She advances on your credulity, Witch Hunter, no more.”

“You’re quick to deny something you know nothing about, Inquisitor,” Godwyn cut in rapidly. “Feeling defensive?”

Had he been close enough, Godwyn had the feeling that he would have struck her, but instead Brand glared at the Inquisitor vehemently and stabbed at her with a warning motion.

“Hold your liar’s tongue, Inquisitor, lest I cut it out,” he threatened, but sensing an advantage Godwyn did not relent.

“She wants to know about the Necrotyr, Inquisitor – the ones you failed to mention that you were investigating on this planet. Did you tell her about how you were using this ship to monitor them, and how you ordered all your men to sow enough chaos amongst the people below to cover the evidence of your deeds?”

“The lies and perjuries of the Kin-Slayer are well known,” Brand countered, though he kept his temper in check and would not rise to her accusations. “I wonder what other falsities her delusional psyche has drawn from thin air?”

“Did you ever leave Penumbra?” Godwyn continued, letting her temper vent against the older man. “After you instructed us to search for some non-existent cult, did you even pause before going back into the Sticks and searching for a way to commit treason against the Immortal Emperor?”

Brand shook his head; “Speak when spoken to, Cassandra Godwyn. You’re time is at an end.”

It was a war over words, of that there could be no mistake, and Inquisitor von Draken was the prize. Godwyn would need her support if she was to make it off the bridge alive, and Brand would need the Witch Hunter to kill her.

“Are there Necrons on the planet below?” Draken asked at large, but Brand shook his head.

“Liar!” Godwyn shouted. “There is one on this ship! I’ve seen it!”

Brand turned to face her, his brow furrowed. “Consider this,” he said, “how is it that I could have taken prisoner an alien species that in all accounts is reported to vanish without trace when disable or destroyed? Answer me that before I am slandered again.”

The urge to denounce him further as a liar surged in her chest, but at the same time she held back. He had her this time and he knew it, for it was a question that no-one had been able to answer regardless of their expertise. How could he have captured a Necrotyr when hundreds of other had tried and failed as the aliens mysteriously vanished without trace? Somehow he had managed it – she had seen and felt it last time she was on board – but how could she make von Draken believe it?

Inquisitor Brand was already smiling triumphantly, but Godwyn hadn’t given up yet:

“You’ve spent most of your career in the Ghoul Stars,” the prisoner countered, “and for all we know you’ve been studying the aliens for decades. What is to say you haven’t found a way? You’ve kept the tomb on Penumbra a secret, so what else have you been hiding?”

The look of victory never sagged from his face, and when she was done he bowed his bald head in mock thanks. “No credit is gained by your words of praise, Godwyn, and while you think me guilty of corruption by the alien, I know you are guilty for once again killing those loyal to the Emperor…” His white eyes passed over to the Witch Hunter, and he addressed her softly; “Have your doubts been waylaid, Inquisitor? Do you feel justified to carry out your duty?”

Von Draken looked from Brand to Godwyn. Saying nothing, she drew the silver revolver from its holster.

 

* *

 

Alexander had no idea where they were going, but they were away from the hangars and the corridors were mostly deserted.

So far everything had gone as planned and they had succeeded in infiltrating the Lord Decimus without incident. Better yet, their disguises were holding and Alexander’s first impression had been enough to keep the officer from asking any questions. If they were lucky, Inquisitor Godwyn’s captor would still be unaware of their presence, though time was against them and sooner or later they would have to act and draw attention to themselves regardless of luck.

Looking discretely around without alerting the officer or the two guards accompanying them, the Interrogator caught Nerf’s eye. The muscular jungle-fighter responded with a slight incline of his head to let the young man know that he was thinking the same thing: it was time to do what they came for.

“Wait!” the Interrogator shouted, startling the officer as he grabbed his arm and twisted him around while his other hand drew a pistol from inside his coat, stuck it up under the man’s chin, and blew his brains into the air so they spattered down like rain. Brianna was onto one of the guards, and Nerf quickly dispatched the other and threw the corpse to the ground.

“Okay, lets go!” he said, spurring the rest of the team into action and taking charge now that their subterfuge was done. “Mercy, let’s have the goods!”

The assassin, still lurking at the back of their formation, pulled the adept’s robe over her head in a fluid motion and tossed it aside – revealing her long body strapped to the gills with all the team’s weaponry. Nerf’s autocarbine – she tossed it to him along with two bandoliers loaded with extra mags – Brianna’s modified lasgun that had been bound against one of her thighs along with a spare laspitol, and Alexander’s autogun – fully loaded and ready for combat. For herself she had her paired neuro-gauntlets, and pulled off the remainder of the loose webbing and harnessing as she slipped the intricate weapons over her fingers.

Safeties clicked off, disguises were cast aside, and brief glances were passed between one another. This was it. They were doing this.

Lee scooped up the fallen troopers’ carbines and passed one to Sudulus – the savant looked as if it were about to bite him.

“Okay,” Nerf rallied the team around him, “we stick to plan: Lee, Su – ” he pointed at Godwyn’s longest serving companions, “ – you are with me. James, Brianna – ” he nodded to the other two, “ – you’re going with Mercy.”

Alexander took a deep breath and nodded, while the battle sister made a quiet aquila over her chest before casting a sideways glance at the Interrogator.

“Mercy?”

The assassin had stepped up towards the Catachan, and with a longing look in her eyes placed a hand around the back of his neck and rubbed it affectionately down to his shoulder.

Good luck.

He patted her arm. “Don’t worry about me,” he said as she released him. “Go do what you do, and I’ll do the same.”

She nodded and smiled, then started off down the corridor towards the superstructure with Alexander and Brianna dashing after her.

Nerf, Lee, and Sudulus watched them go.

“Emperor be with you,” the little man murmured, and then turned to follow the Catachan as he led them off in the other direction.

 

* *

 

“It’s been ten minutes since last contact with Meridian, sir. Still no sign of a signal.”

“Keep a sharp watch, then. I wish to know of anything out of the ordinary.”

“Aye, sir,” the signals officer saluted sharply and returned to his post on the Patroclus’ bridge while Hercule Columbo resumed his slow pacing of the command deck. It was as the officer had said: ten minutes with no signal, not that the Ship Master knew what to look for. ‘You’ll know it when you see it,’ the Catachan had said, and, for Godwyn’s sake, Columbo truly hoped that he did, though what a jungle-fighting commando would dream up as a signal was anyone’s guess. He just hoped the man didn’t think he’d get away with smoke signals.

“Sir,” First Officer Michael Brent appeared at his side from where he had been speaking intently upon the Patroclus’ internal comm., “the crew have been on action stations for the past twenty minutes, sir. I’m starting to receive requests for confirmation of orders.”

Columbo nodded thoughtfully. His crew were well drilled and disciplined, and would not suffer from hesitation or second-guessing. They also knew the Inquisitor and understood their role in her service, not to mention that she and her team had saved their skins at least once before.

“Move all teams to battle stations and load the guns,” Columbo commanded to his First Officer, “but leave all emergency systems unengaged, and do not bolster the shields to extra power. Wouldn’t want to jump the gun and give ourselves away, would we?”

“Understood sir,” Brent acknowledged and quickly exited the command deck to carry out his orders, leaving Columbo alone to admire his ship as she girded for battle.

 

* *

 

Von Draken was just about to take the prisoner from the bridge of the Lord Decimus when the warning alarms started and everyone froze.

Nostrils flaring, Inquisitor Brand glared around the room for an answer before quickly retreating back to the upper levels of the bridge while the other Inquisitors looked on.

“Captain!” he demanded as a black-uniformed officer dashed across the top of the bridge to join him. “What is going on!?”

Godwyn watched as the man struggled to explain himself to the Inquisitor, and, though she could not hear his words over the alarms, a look of growing anger quickly became apparent on his dark features.

“Then find them, damn you!” he hollered at the man. “And activate all ship board defences! Do not speak to me again until they are dead!”

The man scampered off like a chastened dog and shouted orders to the skeleton crew around him as he went.

Godwyn could not help but feel her own hopes soar as Brand’s crumbled beneath the howling alarms: Sudulus had been right, and help was on the way. All she needed now was to stay alive and keep her sights set on Brand. Whatever his plan was with the Necrotyr she had to make sure that it failed.

Still furious, Brand looked once at Godwyn with his madly white eyes, before turning to face the shadow-streaked wall.

“Faith!” he shouted the word like a curse that neither she nor the Witch Hunter understood, but as they watched a long-limbed body seemed to coalesce and become whole from out of the shadows. Long legs and long arms, Godwyn’s breath caught in her throat as an unmistakably tall woman stepped out of the darkness towards Inquisitor Brand.

Tanya von Draken stiffened as she saw the killer of her men, and Cassandra Godwyn’s heart fluttered as she looked upon the form of a traitor.

Lithe and graceful beyond compare with a body honed for nought but death, Inquisitor Godwyn looked up along the woman’s form-fitting shadow suit and nearly swallowed her tongue.

It wasn’t Mercy.

Where her assassin’s features was heart-shaped and fair, her mirror image had a long, olive-skinned face inset with eyes of glittering silver that hovered hauntingly above crimson lips while a whipcord of jet-black hair hung from an otherwise shaven scalp. The assassin spared a single glance at the Inquisitors beneath her, then knelt before her master – her giant size making it so that her head barely dipped past his chest.

“Your wish of me?” she asked in an ethereal voice like oil over water.

“Find these intruders,” Brand commanded. “Kill them all, and bring proof of your deeds.”

“As my master wishes,” she replied, rose to her feet, spared one more look for the two women watching her, and vanished almost instantly back into the darkness. Before she disappeared, however, Godwyn caught a parting glance over her curving back and managed a glimpse of the giant’s favoured weapons: a pair of long-bladed swords.

His killer dispatched, Inquisitor Brand caught the recognition in Godwyn’s eyes and drew a wicked smile:

“You recognize her, do you not?” he said, and Godwyn nodded in response.

“Though I’m not the only one,” she added. Standing beside her, Inquisitor von Draken was still watching the spot where she had last seen Faith.

Brand’s expression sank, but then quickly soured. “Kill them!” he quickly commanded the remaining guards on the bridge. “Kill them now!”

[Aqui]

I'm wondering if Mercy will meet her opposite number

 

Would be quite a fight! ^_^

[Lady_Canoness]

It is safe to guess that Mercy and Faith will meet, though what such a meeting would entail is hard to guess :P

 

...maybe they know each other :)

[Wysten]

Or that the meeting between two assissins will never happen, since it's what they do, over in a matter of moments, never mind seconds.

[Lady_Canoness]

The story of Mercy will be told, and eventually the question of who (or what) she is will be answered. Still, you can bet that I'll have some fun pitting her up against a near-identical killer ;)

[Lady_Canoness]

After almost 2 weeks with no continuation, Part 15 arrives hot off the presses! (just before I go to work too!)

From here on on the story is in 'conclusion mode' during which questions are answered, threads wind themselves back together, and the story prepares to (hopefully) tie itself off on a good note.

 

And now, with great pleasure, here it is!

 

_____________________

 

*Part 15*

 

Godwyn threw herself belly first for cover as the guards went for their guns, but the Witch Hunter was faster and spun on the spot to gun down the nearest two behind her with blasts from her silver revolver before scrambling for shelter as the remaining black-armoured guards ripped bursts of gunfire off the deck in her direction. Leaning back out, she returned fire with another blast from the silver hand cannon. Return fire was fierce, but in a flash of light Godwyn saw a transparent cocoon of energy from some kind of shielding envelope the Witch Hunter and redirect the white-hot projectiles to ping harmlessly off the floor.

“Weapons! Give me my weapons!” Godwyn screamed across the deck as von Draken ducked back behind the scant cover of a systems terminal and her shielding started to fade. The Witch Hunter didn’t answer however, and Godwyn flinched and threw herself flat once again as the lethal whiz of bullets sped overhead and ricocheted off the decking as the room was filled with the hammering report of automatic gunfire. She was pinned down and couldn’t move, but when she uncovered her head she just managed a glimpse of Inquisitor Brand fleeing across the upper level of the bridge. Her eyes followed him almost to their limit, but, just as he was about to escape her field of vision, a solid beam of golden light shone up from the decking at his feet and seemed to soundlessly float him upwards towards the ceiling.

“Draken! He’s escaping!” she warned, and the Witch Hunter glanced up overhead, but too late – an opening in the ceiling had parted before him and the traitor Inquisitor had passed through; the light dying the moment he was out of sight. Suppressive fire eliminated any chance of pursuing, however, and hemmed them in behind scant cover as bullets pinged and whistled around them.

“My weapons!” Godwyn urged her; “Give me my weapons!”

Flinching as a bullet snapped past her face, Draken had other ideas as she rose from cover and fired off the three remaining rounds in her revolver – the cannon’s roar being the last syllable in the canto of battle before a relative silence descended upon the bridge once again with the warning wail of claxons as the only source of sound.

Scrambling to her knees, Godwyn righted herself as the Witch Hunter walked over to her. “Show me your hands,” she said, quickly flashing the keys to Godwyn’s restraints as she reloaded her revolver, “hurry up!”

Godwyn did as she was told and von Draken released her.

“Don’t make me regret this,” she warned as Godwyn rubbed her wrists after the heavy manacles were removed and the Witch Hunter marched towards the trubo-lift leading from the bridge.

“My weapons,” Godwyn reminded her, following the other woman to the aft end of the bridge; “you’re going to need my help.”

Stepping into the waiting lift, von Draken handed Godwyn her weapons and the Inquisitor’s rosette. Each weapon was holstered with two extra magazines but her other possessions were as good as lost, leaving her with nothing in the way of armour to survive a prolonged fire-fight.

“One more thing,” Draken reached into her coat pocket and retrieved something just as the doors closed behind them and sealed them in the elevator, “this.”

In the open palm of her hand was a small medallion attached to a silver chain in the shape of a crux upon which rested an ascendant eagle with a downwards pointed sword clutched in its talons: the Icon of the Just.

“I don’t want to hear where you got this,” the Witch Hunter was saying as Godwyn plucked it from her grasp and quickly hung it around her neck and tucked it beneath her shirt, “but I hope my returning it to you is not a mistake.”

Godwyn said nothing in reply and waited in silence as the lift started to move. Her heart was already pounding in her chest, and she could feel hot blood singing through her veins. Standing still was becoming a burden.

“Where did Brand go?” she asked, occupying her eager hands by drawing a pistol in each and making sure that both were locked and loaded.

“I don’t know!” the Witch Hunter replied sharply. “And, frankly, I need to know what in the Warp is going on here!”

“I wish I knew…”

“Then tell me what you do know!”

Godwyn gave the woman a hard look: “Brand is trying to bring back the Necrotyr, and now wants us both dead. That is what you need to know! Everything else can wait!”

The Witch Hunter growled something under her breath. “You’re sure he is a traitor to the Emperor!?”

“Yes.”

“Dammit Godwyn!” she shouted, “I need more than that!”

“That’s all there is!” Godwyn shouted back. “He’s turned form his duty and now wants to kill us to conceal his crime!”

Von Draken shook her head, she was still having a hard time believing what she saw, but drew a fiendishly sharp-looking barbed sword from her side all the same.

“I hope you’re right…” she said.

“I know I am,” Godwyn replied.

The turbo-lift ground to a shuddering halt moments later and the doors parted onto an empty corridor.

“Is this the deck we were on last time?” Godwyn asked, cautiously taking a step out of the turbo-lift but then falling into a jog as von Draken dashed past her in a low run. Everything looked the same yet different now that she was seeing the ship for the second time, though the first time under power, and she found it difficult to establish a sense of direction.

“No,” her fellow Inquisitor replied once they had arrived at a junction further up the corridor and made sure that it was secure, “but this should allow us to circumvent most defences on the main decks, and if we’re lucky there won’t be many combat teams deployed up here.”

Draken seemed to know where she was going as she darted between corridors, and Godwyn had to admit that without her she’d be hopelessly lost. Everything looked the same and there were no directions pasted to the walls. Obviously this was a section of the ship that did not expect to see regular traffic.

Hugging the cover of the bulkhead as she peered down another side-corridor, Godwyn didn’t think she could count on luck aboard an Inquisitor’s vessel, but if the Witch Hunter knew how to get out she’d follow her lead. She could only hope that her team – if they really were onboard the Lord Decimus – could come up with something similar.

 

* *

 

“They know we’re here.”

Alexander had known it the moment the alarms started, but he hadn’t articulated it until now. Knowing they were there wasn’t the problem, though; it was what the enemy were planning to do about it. The alarms had been ringing for six minutes now – he’d timed it – and so far they’d met no resistance as they stole through the ship.

And where were they going? Mercy didn’t wait or stop to think about it; she just went. Did she know how to get to Godwyn? Did whatever it was about her that made her ‘different’ from ordinary human beings also make her able to sense where a person was?

Ahead of him, the armoured form of the battle sister dashed from one corridor to the shelter of another before turning around and covering the Interrogator as he did likewise.

She didn’t seem to be bothered by the assassin’s certainty, though she had to wonder.

“Something is not right here!” he hissed as he crouched down beside her.

The battle sister looked at him – the same look she’d given him since accusing him of witchcraft; the look that said she tolerated him but wasn’t about to even pretend to trust him – and moved on without a word, following after shadowy assassin that ranged farther and farther ahead.

It wasn’t reassuring and part of him resented them for it, but without any other options Alexander followed the sister further into the ship.

 

* *

 

“Hold up.” Nerf waved Lee and Sudulus down into cover behind a stanchion as another security team dashed by their hiding spot with two more combat servitors in tow. There was a lot of enemy activity down on this level, but for the most part they seemed to be more concerned with moving up deck instead of hanging around. Their loss.

The squad passed by without spotting them, but Nerf stayed hidden until he was confident they weren’t about to double back. After a few moments of hearing nothing put the alarms, he signalled for the others to emerge and keep moving.

“How much further?” the Catachan asked as Lee darted past and Sudulus moved up beside him.

The savant produced what looked like a miniature auspex from one of the pockets in his robe and checked the display.

“Hmm…” Sudulus frowned down at the small screen as the commando looked over his shoulder. “Looks like another forty or so meters, by my count,” he said, and looked ahead to where Lee was and then conferred with the instrument one more time. “And the one after that… about ninety, I think.”

Nerf nodded. He didn’t know what these things were – auxiliary struts is what Sudulus had called them – but he knew what would happen if he blew them up.

“By my estimation a timed demolition of three adjacent struts should be able to compromise the integrity of the shield generators,” Sudulus explained, tucking the auspex back into his robes and gripping the auto-carbine tightly in both hands, “and with any luck promote a cascading shield failure on the port-side of the ship.”

Nerf nodded again. Three – he had three things he had to blow up at the same time. Easy enough, and three was a number he could work with.

“And our guys with Columbo will be able to see it?” he asked, stepping up his own pace now that Lee had gotten far enough ahead and was waiting for them to catch up.

“Oh yes,” Sudulus replied in a small voice, blanching slightly as he thought about what the Catachan had in mind; “they’ll definitely be able to see it.”

“Good,” he gave the savant a congratulatory cuff on the arm as they moved up behind the pilot as he crouched next to a sealed packing crate in the wide corridor.

“Loo’s pre’y clear t’ me,” he whispered as they crouched down beside him, “‘ow much farther we gotta go?”

“Not much further now,” Nerf got them up to keep moving.

The corridor they were in probably ran the length of the ship in a more-or-less straight line broken up by a few blast doors. The doors weren’t locked down, however, and on Sudulus’ recommendation they let them be as they passed through. Containing the explosion, he said, would make for a stronger signal on the Patroclus, though also result in lesser damage to the Lord Decimus.

They reached the first auxiliary strut quickly, though, if it weren’t for Sudulus, Nerf would have run right past it. It didn’t look like much – really just a larger stanchion – but, if the savant was right, looks were very deceiving.

“Alright, cover me.” Sudulus dropped to his knees and placed his auto-carbine on the deck as the others covered either approach down the corridor with wide angles of fire.

“Why are you pulling up the floor boards?” Nerf asked when he caught on to what the savant was doing with his bionic hands.

“Because – ” Sudulus grunted as the first sheet of metal came loose. “Nerf can you give me a hand with this?”

Putting his carbine to the side, the Catachan reached down and picked up the metal sheet without issue.

“Because you’ll notice the strut has extra layers of protection to prevent damage on the deck,” he continued after nodding his thanks to the muscular commando. “That is why – ” he jumped down into the space they’d uncovered at the base of the strut below deck, “ – I think we should set our charges down here. Also, they are less likely to be detected or disarmed.”

Nerf wouldn’t disagree with that. To set three timed explosions off and have time to get clear of the blast, they’d need to set a long fuse, which could be all too easily subverted if someone got to it.

“Alright,” Sudulus hauled himself back out of the hole and picked up his carbine, “Nerf, I think we will require your expertise at this point.”

Damn straight. Placing his bullpup carbine on the deck beside him, the Catachan lowered himself into the gap beneath the deck and instructed the savant to hand him four satchel charges from his webbing. It was tight below the deck, and he had to wedge his wide shoulders down between the floor supports, but, taking an easy breath, he set about wiring up the explosives. It was hard to describe how much he enjoyed doing things like this.

With the explosives in place, he carefully fished the detonator pins out of his tactical vest and touched each to a charge before linking them all together.

“How much time do you think we need?” he called up as he wired the timer up against the strut and made sure everything was where it should be.

“Give us eighteen minutes to get it done and get clear,” Sudulus called back.

Nerf checked his wrist chronometer and adjusted the time. “Right…” he mumbled to himself, clicking the numbers into the timer and setting it so that the red digits started to count down before squeezing himself back out of the sublevel.

Only two more to go.

 

* *

 

Seventeen levels above the Catachan commando, Inquisitor Godwyn was having a likewise dilemma.

“Damnation!” von Draken cursed, staring down the interface terminal of a freight-lift; “He’s locked this one out!”

Godwyn glanced sideways at the Witch Hunter as she laboured over the control interface, gave one last look down the approach she was covering, then sidestepped over to the other Inquisitor.

“What do you mean?” she posed, eyes quickly flashing between the obstinate panel and the frustrated features of the woman who jabbed at it.

“This lift,” Draken hissed in irritation, swatting the terminal with an upward swipe of her hand as she walked away, “it’s been manually locked down.”

“Meaning?”

The Witch Hunter rounded on her: “Meaning we’re trapped on this deck. That’s what!” She shook her head and pressed the thumb and index finger of her right hand against her temple. “If he’s issued a ship-wide lockdown we’re as good as dead!”

“Are there any other ways to get off this deck?” Godwyn pressed, looking back and forth down the corridor and keeping her hope alive so long as there weren’t enemies storming down on them.

“Yes,” Draken replied, “there are two more freight-lifts that may not have been manually locked out, but I don’t know where exactly from here.”

If what she’d seen was any indicator, the deck they were on was large and easy to get lost in, but you didn’t find what you didn’t look for, and Godwyn knew well enough that she wanted to get off this ship more than she dreaded scouring a deck for freight-lifts.

She waived the Witch Hunter on with a tilt of her head. “Come on then,” she said, starting back down the way they’d come, “let’s get a move on to find those other two.”

Her vicious-looking barbed sword in hand, von Draken drew her revolver and took the lead as they progressed further down the corridor. Reaching a bend she pressed her back flat against the bare-metal bulkhead and peered around the corner as Godwyn drew up beside her. Instantly her hand came up in warning, and the fingers wrapped around the hilt of her sword flashed up two times. Contact.

Taking a step back, Godwyn readied her pistols in both hands as von Draken leaned away from the corner and gave her a silencing look. The constant droning of the alarms should deaden the sound of their footfalls, though if they stayed put they should go undetected.

How many? Godwyn signed.

The Witch Hunter flashed five fingers twice, and then two. Ten and two – or too many to get an accurate count.

Crouching low on the balls of her feet, Godwyn carefully edged up to the corner and peered around just far enough to catch a glimpse of the lead trooper. He was heavily armoured in what looked like black carapace and wore full helmet.

Godwyn slowly ducked back. She shook her head – no go. It looked like the troopers were heading their way, and moving cautiously with weapons raised – they were aware of their presence.

The Witch Hunter gave her a questioning look, and Godwyn waved her hand back-and-forth in front of her neck in a flat, slashing motion. The other Inquisitor nodded.

The troopers were still at a distance but would shortly cut them off, though if they acted quickly they could get across the way without being pinned down. It would have to be fast, however, and even so they wouldn’t be able to put up a long fire fight.

Godwyn went first – diving into a low roll across the deck and scrambling back to her feet on the other side of the corridor safely behind cover. Streaks of fire pounded against the opposite wall in response, and she could just hear the tail ends of shouts of alarm over the wailing claxons.

Draken leaned out and fired blindly around the corner with her revolver. Return fire tore her way and raked the bulkhead with wildly ricocheting bullets.

The enemy was likely falling back to a more covered position under suppressive fire, giving them a little more time – a little, but not much.

Godwyn reached around the corner and fired blindly with her machine-pistol – feeling the familiar buck and kick of the weapon in her hand – as von Draken flew across the opening in a defiant leap from cover to cover.

“Come on! Let’s keep going!” she urged her, and Godwyn sent a parting burst down the enemy-held corridor before racing after the rapidly retreating Witch Hunter.

They might have hit one or two of them if they were lucky, but Godwyn didn’t count on it. Retreat was their only real option, as a decision to stand and fight would quickly see them overwhelmed and killed.

Draken took a hard left and Godwyn heard the whistling snap of bullet’s whizzing past her head as the enemy emerged from a blind-spot down an intersecting corridor to the right.

Banging her knees hard against the deck, Godwyn skidded into the cover of a nearby door and slammed her shoulder into the hatch as more bullets sang murderously close by. Returning fire with the heavy pistol in her right hand, Godwyn fired two shots towards the enemy – the first sparking off the deck and ricocheting wildly upwards until it spanked off the ceiling, while the second blew through a man’s hip and dropped him with a howl of pain.

A ways back, Tanya von Draken had dug herself into the cover of a narrow metal stanchion and was breathing deeply with her eyes closed. She might have been shot, Godwyn thought for a panicked second before the other woman opened her eyes without a trace of pain and gave her an oddly calm look.

Suddenly and without warning an incomprehensible agony shot through her body, and Godwyn crumpled to the deck. She tried to scream, but no sound came, and while her ears fell deaf, her eyes bulged in their sockets as what felt like a nameless spear of fire plunged into her brain and sent forks of pain scorching down her spine.

“Psyker!” von Draken hollered as the other woman twitched and contorted on the deck thankfully beyond the line of fire. Her own psychic wards ablaze in the effort to keep her safe, the Witch Hunter retrieved a small discus from within her coat, tapped the runes on its surface several times with her thumb, and sent it whirling down the corridor with a flick of her wrist.

The psyk-out grenade detonated with a small *fump* into a cloud of sparking dust. Instantly the pain stopped.

Panting, with sweat running down her face, Godwyn gathered herself together and pressed herself further into cover as the chattering tell-tale of automatic fire ripped through the wail of the warning alarms and punctuated the humming lethality of the bullets that tore at the air.

Her back against the wall, von Draken calmly opened her revolver and plucked two rounds from the cylinder before replacing them with two silver bullets from her pocket. Swinging the cylinder back into place, she rotated the bullets into position, braced her arms and angled the barrel in the general direction of their attackers before squeezing the trigger twice in rapid succession.

With a barely visible flash, the soul-seeker ammunition streaked through the air and hit their target with a loud *bang* before throwing a wafting smell of burning flesh back down the corridor.

“Target killed!”

Taking a chance, Godwyn leaned back into the open and fired low at the silhouetted enemy just barely visible through the swirling smoke of battle – emptying the entirety of the machine-pistol’s magazine and seeing at least two enemies crumple with yelps of pain before the Inquisitor ducked back into cover.

“The door!” Draken shouted over the enemy screams and continuous crackle of small arms. “Get it open! We need an escape!”

Godwyn had almost forgotten what she was sheltering beside and turning around she saw a large, heavily reinforced door with magnetic seals. It would take a high-intensity meltabomb to get through, she reckoned, as the door was likely inches thick, though it did have an operating panel, and even as the bullets whizzed by she focused her attention on that. Naturally it was encrypted, encoded, and otherwise impossible to get through, but with little time to lose her hand automatically dove for her Inquisitor’s rosette.

The rosette, being more than just a badge of office, also housed a highly sophisticated override module that could bypass almost any security measure built in the Imperium in the past several millennia. Whether in the bowels of an underhive or aboard a Governor’s luxury yatch, an Inquisitor’s rosette was the key that could open any lock. That way nothing, or so she had been led to believe when she was just starting out as an Inquisitorial agent, could stand between the Holy Inquisition and the Enemies of the Emperor. Now more than ever, Godwyn needed that to be the case.

Her fingers working quickly and efficiently despite the battle that raged around her, Godwyn plucked the rosette from her pant pocket and quickly twisted the two prongs attached to the backside of the badge and initiated a set of low hisses and whirs that changed the eye sockets of the miniature skull motif adorning the Iquisitorial I into highly reflective surfaces capable of interpreting and overriding the most convoluted of codes. It wouldn’t work on a manual lock and wasn’t infallible, though in many cases the Inquisitor would have other means to make up for its minimal limitations.

The rosette worked in silence for several nerve-wracking moments as Godwyn kept her back to the gunfight raging just over her shoulder, but eventually there was a loud *click* and the door slid open.

Godwyn ducked in immediately. “Move, move, move!” she yelled to the other Inquisitor and quickly spun on the spot to secure the door as the Witch Hunter came diving through amidst a storm of fire. The weapons fire intensified, the alarms shrieked, and the door slammed shut – silencing everything behind it until Godwyn’s sigh of relief was the strongest thing that could be heard.

“Is that door secure!?” von Draken gasped, stumbling past the Inquisitor into the deathly silence of the chamber beyond.

Godwyn gulped down a breath of air and tried to still her hammering heart. It was, and she’d obliterated the code so that the only thing that would open it again was an Inquisitor’s badge. They’d escaped, for the moment at least, and they were safe, even though it hit her that she hadn’t bothered to see where they were. Turning around, Draken was already moving into the room, which, she saw, wasn’t any ordinary room.

Godwyn didn’t notice, but her jaw may have dropped somewhat.

In front of her was an armoury filled with what could only be Inquisitor Brand’s private cache, and, much like Columbo’s private armoury aboard the Patroclus, the treasonous Inquisitor had also amassed the collection of a lifetime – the only difference being that the reach of an Inquisitor far exceeded that of a rogue trader in terms of what could be acquired. The periphery of the chamber was lined with neatly organized weapons, and whereas Columbo emphasised the quantity of his collection, Brand had an obvious eye for quality. Underneath the low, ribbed ceiling and surrounding the edges of the sterile white tiles that made up the floor were weapons of exceeding rarity – so much so that the bulky form of an angelus-pattern boltgun was the most recognizable piece of equipment – and walking around a quartet of servicing tables arranged perfectly in the middle of the room, Godwyn could see that an open hatchway on the other side of the room promised a similar chamber just beyond.

Slumping against one of the servicing tables behind her, a staggered groan escaped von Draken’s lips. It was only then that Godwyn noticed the blood.

“You’ve been shot,” she quickly approached with Witch Hunter from across the room, but von Draken gave her a dirty look:

“It’s nothing,” she said behind bleary, pain-filled eyes. She’d clamped her hand over her right shoulder, but even so Godwyn could see the blood oozing between her fingers and running down the sleeve of her coat.

“Let me see,” she said. It was obvious that the other woman didn’t want to show any weakness, but reluctantly she let her hand be pried off the wound.

It wasn’t bad – as in it wouldn’t kill her – but a bullet had ripped through the upper part of her shoulder and likely hit bone, though it was hard to tell through the blood. Without being surgically corrected, it was possible that she’d lose some of the functionality in her arm for good. It also looked painful as hell.

Saying nothing, Godwyn let the Witch Hunter cover her wound again with her hand. When she stepped back, von Draken was looking into her face. Her features were wracked with pain, and her teeth were gritted. It was almost remarkable that she wasn’t screaming.

“I’ll have you looked at when we get off this ship,” Godwyn said after several moments of silence.

The Witch Hunter’s face grew bitter. “You’re not my friend, Godwyn,” she spat, though the other woman wasn’t going to argue. Tanya von Draken could keep her delusions if she so wished.

Leaving the Witch Hunter to her pain, Godwyn entered the second room of the armoury, but instead of weapons she found a magnificent collection of armour instead. Carapace, plate… she turned on the spot to admire all the different suits, then came to an abrupt stop beside an empty spot on the wall… power. Power armour.

Smaller than the Astartes patterns of power armour, the suit on the wall was definitely designed for an ordinary human. Coal black, the armour was not overly ornate, and looked like a cross between the power armour worn by the Sororitas and a more antiquate pattern of crusader plate. The greaves were thick and angular, with power cables inlaid into the flanks from the perfectly rounded plating that covered the thighs. The torso looked to be in several sections that allowed for a freedom of movement around the midriff, though covering the chest was a broad, flat plate adorned with the mark of the Inquisition. The paudrons were angular as well, looking closer to the Sororitas armour than that of the Astartes, but the plating covering the arms was bulky and thick. Checking around behind it, Godwyn also noticed that it lacked a detachable power-source, and that the power plant was built into a carefully vented housing in the back.

A smile crept onto the Inquisitor’s face. It looked perfect.

“Tanya…” she called into the room behind her, “could you help me with something?”

 

* *

 

Blood had already been shed.

Dropping a spent magazine from his autogun, Interrogator James Alexander slammed a fresh clip home as he ran while Brianna dashed after him between periodic turns to cover their back.

So far they had run into staunch, well coordinated resistance on the mid-levels of the Lord Decimus, though – largely thanks to Mercy – they’d managed to consistently slip out of the tightening noose of enemy forces closing around them. The fighting had been such a blur that Alexander had forgotten how many he’d killed – six? maybe seven? – but what did it matter? They kept running, shooting the enemy when they saw them, then running some more.

From further up ahead, Mercy came ripping back around the corner. The look on her face said it all: can’t go that way.

Cursing, Brianna spun on her heels and started to head back, but Mercy stopped her too: wait here – and she skipped behind them and once again dropped out of sight.

Now it was the Interrogator’s turn to curse as he ducked into the shadow of a stanchion and braced his gun against it to aim down the hall. The constant following after the giant assassin with no idea where he was going was nerve-wracking, and a film of sweat covered his crawling skin. Mercy knew what she was doing, true enough, but not knowing what she was thinking was enough to make him claw at the walls.

“Where in damnation are they coming from?!” Brianna growled from across the corridor as she positioned herself to be covered from both approaches.

Alexander didn’t answer – he didn’t want to think about if he was wrong – but he kept his gun braced all the same. Taking a deep breath, he tied his focus outwards, and briefly closed his eyes – seeing reality fall away around him as he let a slip of the Immaterium into his mind. It was all he needed.

“In front of us,” he said with certainty, “they’ll be on us soon.”

Brianna mumbled something under her breath but shifted her position to follow his aim.

Any moment now.

Four troopers came quickly around the corner with weapons spewing bullets down the hall before the Interrogator or the Sister could shoot back – one rebounding wide of Alexander’s ear while another pinged off Brianna’s shoulder plate and high. Forcing Godwyn’s agents back, the black-armoured troopers were trying to consolidate their position when an enormous form leapt from the shadows behind them – killing two from behind with clawed hands, before spinning one off his feet with a long-legged kick to the side of the head while a following knee went into the gut of the other and doubled him over while all ten fingers gouged upwards through his neck into his skull just as his comrade hit the ground. The sprawling soldier tried to scream, but Mercy was on him in flash – spurting blood painting her hands as the claws pulled out his throat.

As soon as it was done, Mercy quickly signalled to her two comrades down the hall, her face earnest: come with me.

They didn’t hesitate and followed her past her fresh victims through a side-room leading in another direction. It could have been a barracks or it could have been a training room – it didn’t matter – all that did matter was that they kept moving, and that the silent assassin seemed to have some notion of where to go. She wasn’t easy to follow, however, and after entering into a cramped and poorly-lit maintenance tunnel, Alexander found that he’d lost her again.

“She went right!” Brianna exclaimed as she came up behind him, but, eyes closed, Alexander shook his head. She was difficult to follow even with witch-sight, but he could briefly sense her passing against the otherwise tumultuous backdrop of the ship.

“No,” he corrected her, opening his eyes; “she went left.”

As if to affirm his psychic talents, Mercy suddenly reappeared to their left and beckoned them on. The assassin had found a turbo-lift not that far from them, and though the lift had been locked down she had somehow found a way to pry the doors.

Up, she signalled once both the Interrogator and the sister had caught up with her. Stepping up the edge, Brianna looked down into the receding darkness of the open shaft that waited below for them to take one more step.

“The lift is all the way down there,” Brianna replied, shaking her head as her eyes followed the taut cable running down the center of the shaft where it attached to the lift far below. “We’re not getting up this way.”

“Wait,” Alexander had come up beside her so that all three were looking into the dark expanse of the shaft, “there is a ladder built into the far side over there.”

Brianna caught what he was looking at, but even so she continued to shake her head and gave the giant assassin a hard look. “That’s at least four meters across. There is no way we’re doing that!”

Mercy looked disappointed. And then she jumped.

Not to the ladder – it might have been a stretch even for her – but to the cable; latching onto it with her arms and legs before snaking her way upwards with remarkable speed. She didn’t go very far, however, and, after what could have been no more than a ten foot climb, she reworked her long legs around the rigid cable and then let go with her arms so that her up body dangled upside down at the level of the open lift doors.

“What the…?” Brianna squinted at her.

Mercy looked calm, peaceful even as the blood started to rush to her face, and held out a long fingered hand towards her two charges – well within jumping distance – who waited by the door.

“No!” Brianna instantly dismissed the idea; “This is insane!” but Alexander wasn’t about to give up on the assassin: she had led them well so far, and this might just work. The killer’s violet eyes shifted in his direction, and her lips drew a smile on her upside down face. Her open hand wasn’t close, but it was close enough.

“This is madness! Don’t do it!” the battle sister warned him as she saw the Interrogator shoulder his weapon and tighten it across his chest, but James Alexander had made up his mind; he would put his trust in the shadowy killer.

“Step aside,” he said. She looked at him as if he was crazy, but stepped aside all the same.

Mercy continued to smile at him encouragingly as he backed up several meters, and took a running leap to what could have been certain death. He was airborne for a fraction of a second with his hands grasping at thin air, then he felt the assassin’s hand close tightly with a handful of his clothing as his face brushed briefly against hers before she redirected his momentum and he found himself clinging for dear life to the cold metal rungs of the ladder four meters from the lift doors. Swallowing a deep breath, he started to climb.

Maintaining her perfect poise, Mercy swung back around to face the sister and held out her welcoming hand. Your turn.

The clang of metal on metal and a yelping praise of thanks to the Emperor signalled that the sister had landed below him on the ladder, but Alexander didn’t look down. Mercy followed them onto the ladder as the kept climbing, though after minutes of seeing nothing other than the chipped red-paint of the ladder rungs between his hands, Alexander started to wonder where they were going.

“Alexander, stop,” Brianna said from behind, and he stopped without asking why. A large hand appeared beside his own, and he felt Mercy’s long form brush against him as she climbed over him with apparent ease.

With assassin back in the lead, they continued to climb until she stopped, sprung from the ladder back onto the cable, and then gathered her momentum before launching herself at closed pair of lift doors. It was a death-defying move as there was precious little purchase on the interior of the turbo-lift shaft, but somehow she caught herself, and with a terrific show of strength and balance managed to slowly pry the doors apart with a long groan of effort.

“Incredible,” Brianna murmured in wonder once the assassin had opened the doors enough to pass through and paused for a moment to catch her breath.

Exiting the lift was another challenge and took some time, luck, and a lot of effort, though feeling the solid metal of the deck between his feet felt like something of a blessing.

“Right,” Alexander began once Mercy stepped through the lift doors behind them, “where do we go from here?”

The killer grinned, and as if in response to his query started off again at a dash.

 

* *

 

The third and final set of charges were in place without a hitch, and Nerf pulled himself back up above deck as Lee and Sudulus covered him from above.

“That’s it,” he said with a grunt, getting to his feet and retrieving the bullpup carbine as he slid the metal sheeting back into place to cover their sabotage, “now, we’ve got just under five minutes to get clear.”

“Righ’,” Lee shouldered his carbine and gave the other two an expectant look, “so wha’ we waitin’ for?”

Sudulus fished the auspex from under his robes and flicked the screen a couple of times with a metal finger. He frowned; “Past enemy movements would suggest that there is an active turbo-lift somewhere around here,” he said, looking down the empty corridor to his right.

“So le’s bloody find it!” Lee exclaimed, then looked between the savant and the Catachan; “we gonna go?”

Nerf gave the metal decking one last kick into place, then quickly nodded. “Let’s move,” he agreed.

The alarms were still wailing non-stop and effectively drowned out the sound of their movements as they ran in a staggered formation with Nerf in the lead.

“Wha’ we got?” Lee asked after Nerf quickly stopped up at a large intersection and signalled them to hold as what looked like an arterial corridor crossed their path. The commando peered around the corner and then slowly turned back to the two men who were waiting on his words breathless expressions.

“We got company,” he said quietly; “Bad company.”

Sure enough, they’d found the lift used for enemy movements up deck, but it was also at a heavily guarded T-shaped junction with a hastily built CP and an enemy unit deployed at fire-team strength with two strange-looking gun-pods on the perimeter which Nerf guessed had to be automated sentry guns. Not good. These guys might not be expecting trouble, but the commando could tell that the armed and armoured soldiers wouldn’t be shooting the breeze either.

“Sh*t!” Lee cursed. “Sh*t! sh*t! sh*t!”

“Get a hold of yourself!” Nerf snapped at him with a low hiss. “Keep your cool or we’re all done for!”

Caught in the middle, Sudulus checked his chronometer. “Three minutes, forty-four seconds,” he said. The bigger men both gave him an unappreciative glare, and he held up his hands apologetically.

“Okay, this is how it’s going to be:” Nerf took charge, “you guys stay here while I try to get on their flank. It looks like there is side access, so I should be okay. At the two minute mark, you put up suppressive fire. Got it?”

They nodded and mumbled something in response, and he gave them each an appreciative cuff on the shoulder before sprinting off in the other direction and leaving the savant and the pilot standing rooted to the spot like statues. Sudulus was watching the seconds count down on his chronometer while Lee was nervously fingering his carbine like it was his first time all over again.

“This ‘s crazy,” he said, “caugh’ ‘tween dyin’ an – oh look – mo’ dyin’!”

“Nerf knows what he is doing,” Sudulus said in a small voice, suddenly feeling very vulnerable without the grizzled veteran leading them at the fore. Less than thirty seconds to go.

“If I liv’ through this, I’m gonna fin’ Mercy an’ f*ck ‘er brains out,” the pilot announced out of the blue, drawing a revolted look from the pale-faced savant.

“We could be dead in less than a minute, and you’re thinking about sex?!” he said in horrified disbelief, as if suddenly more afraid of what Lee might do than the enemy.

“Wha’?” the pilot shot back in defence. “Gotta ‘ave sumthi’ worth comin’ back to!”

The savant gave a weak laugh. “I’d be happy with a fresh cup of caffeine!” he squeaked, then checked his chronometer again. “Two minutes!”

“Bloody ‘ell!” Lee swore, and slapped his carbine before reaching blindly around the corner. “’Ere we gooooo!”

Shouting wordlessly in unison, Sudulus followed his example as both Inquisitorial agents blazed away blindly down the corridor towards the enemy.

There was no telling whether or not they hit anything, but as he approached from the flank Nerf was glad for the diversion and gunned down two of the troopers before the others had noticed his presence and fire started to whip back his way.

Caught in a cross-fire, two more of the troopers went down before the remnants started to give way and fall back, under heavy suppressive fire, away from the lift.

“We’ve broken them!” Sudulus stammered his voice somewhere in the void between astonishment and triumph. “We’ve done it! They’re falling back!”

Lee whistled in relief as he reloaded his gun. Sudulus was almost hopping on the balls of his feet in an eagerness to advance. The pilot gave him a wide grin – the fear sloughing off into an almost drunk sense of ecstasy – “’Ere we go!” he nearly shouted, stamping his foot for emphasis; “’Ere we go! Ere we go! Ere we go! We got this!”

Sudulus shouldered his carbine – the little man looking like a natural soldier – and backed around the corner, still looking at Lee as if to further congratulate him.

Lee, still grinning, was about to follow him when a sound like metal rain ripped down the corridor and series of ragged, bloody holes were torn through the little man’s chest. He staggered for a split second, like a bulging eyed marionette suddenly cut loose, and fell backwards without a sound.

Lee could feel his mouth open, but no sound came out.

“STAY THE F*CK DOWN!” Nerf hollered from down the hall near the abandoned enemy position.

“Su!?!” Lee’s mind cracked like a whip as his wits caught up with his eyes.

“STAY DOWN EMPEROR DAMMIT!”

“SU!!!”

Up ahead, Nerf hurried to dismantle the enemy sentry guns that were still trained on his companions’ position further down the hall. Why the hell hadn’t they waited!? What in the Warp were they thinking walking out into the open like that!?!

Cutting the last sentry’s power system, Nerf vaulted the CP’s hastily constructed barricade and dashed the remainder of the distance to where the savant’s little form lay sprawled on the deck.

“He’s – he’s fackin’ dead!!” Lee crept reluctantly from the safety of his cover towards the blood-soaked body of his long-time friend. “Nerf,” he turned to the commando, his normally tanned face white with shock; “he’s dead!!”

“Soldiers die,” the Catachan nodded grimly.

“He wa’n’t no bloody soldier!” Lee shouted at him furiously, but Nerf gave him a hard look:

“Do you know how much time is left on those charges?!” he demanded. “Do you want to die too!?”

The truth hit Lee Normandy like a slap in the face, and he winced as he heard it.

“You can’t mourn someone if you’re dead!” Nerf reminded him roughly. “So hurry the hell up! We need to get in that lift, and get the hell out of here!”

The Catachan turned and started to jog in the direction of the turbo-lift, and, after a last stricken look towards his fallen friend, Lee quickly gathered up the savant’s extra ammunition and auspex, and ran after him.

[Azekai]

Good stuff! R.I.P. Sudulus.

 

Also, when are the lolcrons going to attack? :P

[Papewaio]

At this rate, are there going to be any of Godwyn's team left?

 

That said, exceptionally well handled with von Draken. Hasn't dropped anywhere near out of the haughty Witch Hunter. I like.

[Lady_Canoness]

Thanks gents!

 

The lolcrons will attack, but not until Godwyn and her team are through on the Lord Decimus (spoiler in case you didn't know that they'd escape :rolleyes:)

 

As for how many in Godwyn's team will survive... well, you'll have to find out. And who knows if von Draken will make it out ^_^

[Taranis]

Excellent story, mate. Beenp following it for weeks.

I have tried to find part l but the link appears broken? ^_^

Looking forward to see how good prevails over bad, but probably at high cost? :)

[Lady_Canoness]

Link broken!?! Oh no!

 

Fortunately, the Inquisition is just on the second 'Short Stories' page. Maybe this will work: http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/index.p...howtopic=218649

[Taranis]

Worked like a charm. Also an excellent story. You should consider contacting black library about publishing a collection of godwyn stories some day. I'm looking forward to the rest of this story and hoping Blood Angels and perhaps eldar could be part of the good guys in part III ? :)