The Inquisition IV

[Taranis]

Great "dungeon" mission. I thought to my self: this screams of Aliens. Very cool writing. Spider is going to be an interest interrogator. Please don't kill her. :wacko:

The presence of nurgle? Demons? adds a whole new aspect to this story and perhaps also to the personality of the one armed librarian?

[Lady_Canoness]

Spider is going to be an interest interrogator. Please don't kill her. :unsure:

 

Kill her? You must think I'm a terrible person if I'm secretly plotting to kill all my own characters ;)

 

... though it would be awefully dramatic...

[Aqui]

Spider is going to be an interest interrogator. Please don't kill her. :lol:

 

Kill her? You must think I'm a terrible person if I'm secretly plotting to kill all my own characters :P

 

... though it would be awefully dramatic...

 

There does see to be a trend forming ;)

 

I am looking forward to the day Godwyn learns a few things, although I can't shake the feeling that she already knows about Nerf's fate already, but it either letting it go, or is just bidding her time.....

[Lady_Canoness]

*Part 10*

 

Meridian landed amidst sheets of rain on the penthouse tarmac at dawn the following day. It had been a long flight, and at times rough, so, as Lee saw to the refuelling and maintenance of her shuttle, Inquisitor Godwyn dismissed her agents to do what they willed until mid-day. Likely they would rest, socialize, or seek out whatever pleasures might exist in the rain-drenched city, though, while they turned their attention towards other things, the Inquisitor remained focused and strode from the suite in the direction of the garages. A question disturbed her thoughts, and it was a question she had hoped to never need ask herself:

Had she been discovered?

The mark on her chest told her that her presence would go unnoticed psychically, but was that enough? She had assumed – perhaps foolishly – that it would be, but her adversary was resourceful, and Spider’s discovery could well be proof of just how far Orion Aquinas could reach. If such was the case then her contact on Acre had likely been compromised, and in so being so was her operation. In tracking a rogue space marine – and a librarian at that – surprise and subtlety were her greatest assets, and if she’d lost those… ?

Pounding the elevator controls with her fist, the doors closed, and Godwyn steadied herself as the lift began to descend. The numbers on dial slipped by with every floor, going from one-hundred lower and lower until reaching ‘G’.

But if she hadn’t been discovered?

Acre was a large world, and finding one man – especially one who did not want to be found – was a difficult undertaking. Likewise, how easy could it be for him to find her? She had been careful, and von Draken’s presence greatly eclipsed her own. This world had dozens of secrets, probably even hundreds; what was to say she had not happened across one of them?

An intriguing thought, she admitted gruffly, but that’s all it was – a thought, a suspicion. She wouldn’t have a leg to stand on until it was fact.

Aquinas had yet to show himself, however, so she would not hasten to reveal her presence either. There was only one thing for her to do.

“Tanner!” her voice echoed through underground garage as her coat billowed behind her. The cadet snapped to attention, saluted, and opened the side door of the arbites officiate car just in time for her to step right in. “Take me for a drive.”

 

+“Cassandra,”+ the holographic simulacrum of the Witch Hunter flickered and crackled mid-air as the car rumbled and bumped through the water-swollen streets, +“I thought you were done with me. Nice to see you’ve reconsidered.”+

Sitting in the back seat, Inquisitor Godwyn crossed one leg over the other and did not rise to her counterpart’s bait. “Hello, Tanya,” she responded with a slow nod as the transparent image folded her arms over her chest, “have you followed up on the lead I sent you regarding the refugees at the Lancaster building?”

+“I have, and it turned out to be good. Further interrogation of picked up refugees have corroborated your findings. These ‘clerics’, whoever they are, have been spotted in numerous cities across Acre. It’s not much yet, but it’s been enough for the Governor to restrict all passage to and from orbit, which is a start,”+ von Draken seemed reluctantly appreciative. +“Good find.”+

“And the bald men?”

+“Lack of hair isn’t a lot to go on. I hope you’ll instruct your agents to get closer next time.”+

“But you found something?”

+“Nothing worth reporting.”+

Godwyn narrowed her eyes irritably. The Witch Hunter was being purposefully antagonistic, and though they were allies – and possibly even friends – there was still a rivalry between them that would not be laid to rest.

+“Still,”+ von Draken resumed, +“a favour for a favour. I think we’re even.”+

That she even thought of it in the terms of ‘favours’ was off-putting, but Draken’s superior resources allowed her to be in a position where she called the shots concerning their alliance. If she wanted things a certain way, then she’d get them – as it was, Godwyn had larger matter to contend with:

“I have some more information for you,” she announced, resting her hands in her lap left-over-right.

The Witch Hunter seemed interested. +“What is it?”+

“The nobles have a gathering at my mother’s estate in three days time,” Godwyn revealed what she had held back since their first meeting, “You wanted ears on the noble houses, but with my help you can have eyes – on all of them.”

The image of Draken frowned, or as much as she could with her prosthetic jaw; +“And what would you want in return for this?”+

Godwyn sunk further back into her seat to get more comfortable. “There is another lead I would like you to investigate for me.”

The Witch Hunter said nothing – she was listening.

Godwyn continued. “There is a broadcasting tower at these coordinates,” she said, entering the correct series of digits into the number panel beside the communication relay, “the tower itself is online, yet the facility has been overtaken by something I cannot identify.”

+“What are its properties?”+ She had her attention now.

“Hard to say,” Godwyn admitted, “but there is a strong warp presence, and whatever it is comes across as being hostile.”

+“Interesting…”+ von Draken was looking at something out of Godwyn’s field of vision – likely plotting the coordinates on a planetary map – +“I will have a team look into this and keep you appraised of my findings.”+

The Inquisitor nodded her thanks. “I do appreciate that, Tanya.”

The Witch Hunter laughed; +“The things that can be accomplished through cooperation,”+ she said, +“If we continue like this, we might actually save the Imperium!”+

It was a dark joke they had to share and it didn’t lighten the load, but at least they were making progress thanks in large part to each other.

+“Is there anything else?”+

Godwyn shook her head; “No.”

+“Very well,”+ Draken’s image leaned forward to deactivate the communicator on her end, +“good hunting.”+

 

“Inquisitor?”

It was Tanner’s voice she heard next as the cadet chauffer spoke to her from up front.

“Yes, what is it?”

The boy’s eyes looked back at her through the rear-view mirror. “Some of the arbites over-watch reports made reference to a group of bald men. Shall I recover them for you, ma’am?”

“Yes,” she nodded, “do that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

 

*

 

Stone made it all the way into his quarters before he remembered about his boot. He had walked in from the landing pad, up the stairs to the master bedroom, dropped off his armour and shotgun in the armoury, back down the stairs from the master bedroom, through three other rooms, down the hall towards the guest bedrooms, opened his door, crossed his floor, and sat on his bed staring at the aquarium in the wall before remembering his boot and – more importantly – what was underneath it.

Sitting on his bed, Stone undid his laces and carefully lifted his foot free from the leather boot so that he wouldn’t knock it over. Warily, he picked it up and turned it over – his hard eyes studying whatever was on the other side.

What was it?

Inside the broadcast bunker he’d stepped in something dark and slimy, but hours later it had changed into something grey and necrotic-looking; like a dried-out corpse.

Holding it closer to his face, he risked smelling it: it even smelled dead.

Stone put the boot back on the floor, and for a short while the Mordian just stared at it. Eventually he got up and left the room, taking it with him as he walked with the uneven gait that comes from only wearing one shoe.

The soldier in him told him that it was just some bit of alien dirt and that he should clean it off his boot and get on with things; the Iron Guardsman in him told him that he should shine his boot while he was at it, yet the part of him that identified itself as an agent of the Inquisition told him that he should get it looked at. After all, the Inquisitor wouldn’t be thanking him if he ended up out of commission with a foot infection that he’d contracted from an uninspected boot.

After a minute’s uncomfortable walking, Stone reached the laundry room, attached to which was the servants’ kitchen and maintenance cupboard. In years past this part of the suite would likely have always been busy, but now that the Inquisition had moved in it was virtually empty. Stone had never bothered coming here before, and the only reason he changed that now was because this was where Meredith had set up her makeshift lab.

Over his life, Stone had known a fair few doctors – at one point he’d even had one for a wife – but none of them were quite like the bustling dynamo that was Meredith. He wouldn’t have picked her as his doctor, that was for sure. A man might come into her lab with a gunshot wound and she’d spend the entire time working over his foot fungus; that’s the way she was. Not to mention that she had a weird way of talking to people, and an even weirder way of looking at people.

Where had the Inquisitor found her anyway?

“Iliad,” Meredith looked up as the Mordian stepped through the doorway, “I wondered when you’d come here to find me.”

She been examining something on a sterilized slab and was wearing pair of magnifying glasses that gave her the appearance of some demented insect, though when Stone came in she stood up straight and pushed the glasses farther up her forehead out of her face.

“Can you look at something for me?” Iliad Stone walked right up to the slab where it looked like the doctor was operating on… he didn’t know what she was operating on. He took a step backwards just in case.

“Probably,” Meredith replied with a shrug, her round face not noticing the soldier’s hesitation at getting too close. “What is it? Rash? Gash? Irritation? Swelling? Do you need ointment? Perhaps a lotion? Prescription, though I don’t know where you’d get one around here, haha.” She started to laugh – an awkward girlish laugh.

Stone held up his boot before she could get any more carried away.

The laugh dropped off Meredith’s face and she suddenly looked very sheepish as she glanced between the man and his footwear.

“You want me to look at that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, hand it over.”

Stone passed the boot to the doctor and she slipped her magnifying glasses back down over her eyes. Holding it in outstretched hands she moved it back and forth in front of her face as if trying to adjust her eyes, then tapped it a few times with her knuckles.

“Hmm…” she glanced over at Stone, then stuck her nose inside the boot and took in a deep breath, coughing a few times before she withdrew. Shaking her head as if to clear it, she pushed the glasses back up her head and handed the boot back to its owner.

“Yep,” she said, “that there is most definitely a boot. Feels well worn… smells like it too.”

She plopped the boot back in his hand. He stared at it in disbelief.

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

“I know its damned boot!” he cursed, thumping it back down on the slab. “What in the hell kind of idiot are you?!”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Meredith confessed genially, a chuckle forming across her small mouth. “I was thinking ‘well gosh, what does he expect me to do with this? Better indulge him just in case’,” she screwed up her face into an odd servitor impression while duck-stepping around the slab in a comical waddle. She started to laugh, but Stone looked appalled.

“No, really,” she said, wiping the corner of her eyes with a pudgy thumb, “what do you want me to do with it? Determine its gender? See if you’ve got a male or a female boot and if we can somehow make a profit by breeding them? Seriously, Iliad – don’t be so cross – it’s a boot!”

Stone flipped the boot impatiently and thrust it forward. “That!” he pointed at the necrotic grey substance on its sole. “I want to know what that is!”

Meredith stopped joking and slipped her glasses back down over her eyes. “Let me see that…”

Stone watched with crossed arms as the doctor picked up the boot and studied the underside very closely. After a few seconds she turned on an operating lamp for more light, and a few seconds after that she retrieved a set of surgical tools from a counter-top across the room.

“Where did this come from?” she asked, not looking up as she prodded the foreign substance.

“It’s something I stepped in back at the bunker,” Stone explained. “It was sticky and dark when I first saw it.”

“I see, I see…”

She started slicing chunks away and carefully placing them in independent glass dishes that she sealed with a clear wrap.

“What is it?” the Mordian’s curiosity wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” Meredith replied factually. “Right now I am preparing to take a variety of tests, after which I will hopefully have determined some of its properties.”

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

“I’m not sure… wait for the tests to be finished.” One by one, she stacked the sealed dishes on top of one another and bustled away across the lab to retrieve more. Soon, she had carved the majority of the necrotic substance from the underside of Stone’s boot and had more than a dozen dishes stacked beside her.

“How long will these tests take?”

She stopped, turned, and smiled at him. “Not long,” she said, “but you can stick around if you like. Ask more… questions.”

Her grin seemed to say that he would be her next test subject if she had her way, but Stone had other ideas of what to do with his time. Turning, he walked from the lab. “Let me know what you find,” he said, and left the doctor alone with her tests.

 

*

 

Adeptus Arbites Overwatch was not a major operation. According to strategic plans laid down by the Administratum, Overwatch was mandated to ‘to observe and report upon the actions of the citizen body to ensure observance to Imperial law and creed.’ In short, Overwatch was curfew enforcement, and on many worlds it was considered to be so far down the roster of priority operations that it was rarely monitored. On Acre, the Overwatch operation was entrusted to the hands of Arbites cadets, and, though the aspiring enforcers pursued it religiously and reported every incident of curfew breach, the reports rarely made it past the desk of a patrol sergeant. Overwhelmed with the influx of refugees and critically short on manpower the Adeptus Arbites was stretched too thinly across Acre’s cities, and every day too many crimes went unpunished without accounting for every curfew misdemeanour.

The perpetrators of these crimes likely thought themselves free from Imperial justice, as brazen as they were, for so long as the Arbites were occupied elsewhere who would hold them to account? And they were right; no-one would catch the doers of lesser evils while refugees rioted and ransacked the miserable city streets in an effort to break free from the Arbite’s tightening noose, and diligence of the Arbites cadets was too often wasted. That an Imperial Inquisitor would even deign to look at an Overwatch report was unthinkable, or at least it would have been until Inquisitor Godwyn followed her chauffer into the cadet’s mess at the nearest Arbites precinct.

 

“Just this way, ma’am,” Tanner held open an old wooden door in the draughty basement of the precinct above which a sign declared ‘Cadet Mess: Members and Orderlies ONLY’.

The Inquisitor stepped through as she was ushered, and was greeted inside by a large room with a low ceiling that was warmed by a wood burning furnace. Six long bench-seated tables lined the floor, and opposite the door, at the far side of the room, a worn-looking bar with a quotidian stock was tended by a lazily uniformed boy no older than his mid-teens. Several other boys, who looked just barely older than the bartender, talked loudly amongst themselves from different groupings around the room, and by their shrill laughter Godwyn detected that some of the boys were actually girls.

All of them were cadets, and were either off-duty or disregarding their duty. Their uniforms, while likely neatly pressed and inspected at some point in the day, were now draped across their shoulders like elaborate costumes, and cadet caps were cast aside or upside down in the sort of the display that was reserved for carefree drinking.

The noise in the room didn’t abate as Godwyn entered, and it was only as she followed Tanner up to the bar that the young boy behind the counter was first person to look up and acknowledge their presence with a glossy-eyed nod:

“How goes the fight?” he asked Tanner, his eyes focusing on the uniform he recognized instead of rain-spackled great-coat that he didn’t. Obviously he’d never seen a day of real fighting in his life.

“Where’s Cadet Blackridge?” Tanner asked, his posture rigid and his manner businesslike as he addressed the boy.

Behind them, some of the off-duty cadets had turned around on their benches and were look towards the bar. Clearly, Tanner and the stranger with him stood out as being out-of-place. Business was never conducted in the mess, though that was about to change. Godwyn smiled internally to herself: the naivety of youth was always enjoyable to see. It reminded her that there was still innocence to be found in a galaxy otherwise stained with blood.

“He works the evening shift,” the boy behind the bar explained, not returning Tanner’s professional manner and instead slouching even more as he stared up at him, “I’m here for the morning. What’s up? You here to drink? Is she your guest? You know that higher ranks aren’t allowed unless it’s been approved by a senior member.”

“Do you know where Blackridge is?” the chauffer chose to ignore the cadet’s question.

“I think he shares room 145 with a few of the other senior members,” the boy shrugged. “You might find him there.”

“Good. Thank you.”

Tanner then turned to the Inquisitor – making a show of standing perfectly to attention as he did so. The other cadets in the mess looked at him with a mixture of puzzlement and annoyance on their faces: who was this stranger he was with that made him disregard the usual mess etiquette so entirely?

“Ma’am, may I suggest that we speak to Cadet Blackridge at once?”

Godwyn nodded; “Lead the way.”

She followed Tanner from the mess and into the draughty hallway without a backwards look. She didn’t need to see it to know that every cadet was watching them go.

 

Cadet Blackridge shared an office space big enough for one person with three other cadets, and as Tanner held open the door Godwyn knew that there was no way six people would fit comfortably at once.

“Ask the other three to step outside,” she instructed her chauffer, and waited in the hall as two teenage boys and a teenage girl filed out in silence and proceeded down the corridor in silence until they disappeared from view – likely to the mess.

When the Inquisitor entered Blackridge was sitting alone, his chair turned towards the door, and his mouth open in a question he had not yet asked as he tapped a stylus on his work surface. Tanner closed the door with a soft click, and the cadet named Blackridge finally spoke.

“Can I… help you?”

He looked to be in his early twenties, and even sitting Godwyn could tell that he had a long, lanky build. His eyes were sharp, likely matching his mind, and his hair was short-cropped and brown. The look on his face said he was expecting trouble.

“Cadet Blackridge?” Godwyn asked, folding her arms across her chest and leaning on one of the other desks.

“Yes,” the cadet answered, spotting her bionic hand but being careful not to look at it. “What’s this about?”

“The report you filed last night on Overwatch,” Tanner spoke up on Godwyn’s instruction, “do you have a copy of it?”

“Yes,” Blackridge replied, visibly confused about what was going on, though he retrieved the paper copy of his report all the same. “Is this some way of investigating me? Are you in Internal now, Tanner?”

“No, you are not being investigated,” Godwyn answered, holding out her metal hand to accept the cadet’s report. “My name is Inquisitor Godwyn, and from this point onward you are being seconded into the Imperial Inquisition until such a time that I release you.” She flipped through the pages, quick-reading the cadet’s slanted hand-writing as he described in pain-staking detail an otherwise mundane occurrence. His account was extensive, but had it not been for her it was unlikely anyone would have ever read it.

“Are you two for real?” Cadet Blackridge was looking from Tanner to Godwyn and back again with a look of bewilderment on his face from where he still sat in his chair, “That’s an Overwatch report. No-one even reads them!”

“It’s real, Black,” Tanner said softly, standing with his back to the closed door; “your report might help an Inquisitorial investigation.”

The uniformed cadet in the chair was flabbergasted – so much so that he didn’t move, didn’t stand up, and didn’t sport anything across his face other than the blankest of expressions. His brain was likely double-checking itself just to make sure he wasn’t mishearing everything. Godwyn decided to hurry him along:

“You are in my service so long as you prove useful,” looking up from the report to make sure that he was listing and, more importantly, understanding. “If you stop being useful in two seconds or two years is up to you, but one thing I do not accept in my service is wasted time.”

These last words in particular grabbed his attention, and Blackridge quickly stowed his surprise and remembered what he was supposed to be. “How may I be of service, ma’am?” he said, and smartly stood to attention – his eyes facing forward towards where Tanner stood at the door.

“The subjects you mention in your report,” she waved her human hand towards the paper, “how long did you have eyes on them?”

“For less than a minute, ma’am.”

“And they were…?”

“Five men, ma’am: all well built, pale complexions, bald, and around six feet tall,” Blackridge replied, echoing the very words he had written in his report the night before.

“And the location you saw them? You said entering a building at 2250 – 436 East Industrial? How long were they there for?”

“As long as I was present, ma’am. I did not see them leave.”

“Which was how long?”

“In excess of twenty minutes, ma’am.”

Everything he knew was in his report and Godwyn went over it in detail. After a dozen questions she had everything she needed.

“Are you armed?” she asked. The cadet retrieved a service laspistol from a desk drawer. “Good. Keep it with you, and let’s go.”

Blackridge didn’t ask where they were going, though as the three of them left the small office in room 145 Inquisitor Godwyn handed the cadet’s report to her chauffer;

“Can you take me here?” she asked.

Tanner nodded; “Yes, ma’am.”

 

Godwyn briefed them in the car, and though she sensed that Blackridge had a lot of questions he did not ask them and listened quietly as the Inquisitor explained to the cadets their role in assisting her; she would approach the target building alone and find a way inside while the cadets would stay with the vehicle and cover the main entrance with instructions to apprehend anyone who attempted to flee. Theirs would be a low-risk position, though Godwyn had already made arrangements with Constantine to contact Inquisitor von Draken for the complete destruction of the building and everyone inside should the worst come to pass and herself and the other two people inside the motorcar end up dead. She did not anticipate a bloodbath, however, and as Tanner neared the target building Godwyn received some last minute intelligence from her logistician as to what she could expect.

+“City records have the building as being a seasonal administration office for a rockcrete refinery,”+ Constantine’s disembodied voice crackled around the motorcar’s interior, +“it should be empty.”+

“Well its not,” she corrected him, drawing her heavy pistol from its holster at her shoulder and ejecting the magazine.

The weapon had originally belonged to her mentor, Inquisitor Isaac Strassen, and was one of two identical hand-crafted pistols – one belonging to master, and one to student. She’d lost her own pistol thirty years ago, however, on the day she’d been betrayed by an Inquisitor Lord, and now there was just the one – the last gift from master to student. Holding it in her left hand, it weighed nearly eight pounds and measured fourteen inches in length. The ejected magazine in her right hand, she counted six high calibre bullets before sliding the clip back into her weapon and priming the chamber with a satisfying *clack*. Six rounds in the gun and a further six in her coat – twelve shots: more than she’d need.

+“Building schematics suggest that the best point of entry would be a rear parlour door inside a walled courtyard,”+ Constantine continued. +“Not many windows overlooking it and lots of cover once inside.”+

“It sounds too obvious,” Godwyn countered, transferring her heavy pistol from her left hand to her right and extracting a thick flash suppressor from the inside of her coat and attaching it to the pistol’s muzzle.

+“Keep in mind that these men aren’t alerted to your presence.”+

“I don’t like it, Constantine. Find me another point of entry.”

+“Well…”+ she could hear the rustle of parchment on the other end of the line as he sorted through what was likely a stack of schematics he’d heaped onto his work surface, +“the main street access is far too exposed. There is a back door as well, but it opens right at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Lastly, it looks like there is a basement door, but you’ll have your back to the target building in order to get in.”+

“So you’re saying the parlour is my only real option?”

+“The others are too risky…”+

The Inquisitor didn’t like it, but she had to trust her agent. “Keep this channel open,” she told him. “I will contact you via comms if I need anything else.”

+“Understood, Inquisitor.”+

 

A block away from the target building, Tanner pulled over to the side of the road and let the car idle. Mid-day traffic was fairly light, though there were a lot of people on the sidewalks to cover the Inquisitor’s approach.

“Remember your roles,” she told the cadets sitting in the front of the car. Both had their laspistols drawn in their laps, and Godwyn could tell from their body-language that they were on-edge. “Keep a low profile. I will be back shortly.”

Opening the passenger door, she stepped out into rain and looked up and down the street before closing it with a snap and motioning for Tanner to pull away. He and Blackridge would cover the main entrance.

Pistol concealed inside her coat, Godwyn arched her shoulders against the rain and merged into the foot traffic that swelled along the roadside. No-one looked at her as she walked amongst them, and the falling water and cloud-filled sky gave everything a gloomy tinge. Her boots splashed through puddles and by halfway up the block her hair was plastered to her scalp and face.

In the glimpsed faces trudging by was mirrored the misery of an entire city.

A group of refugees huddled against overarching building walls, their scraggly bodies and desperate pleas going unnoticed by everyone who walked past them until a squad of white armoured Arbites enforcers turned up to move them along with kicks and jabs. The refugees screamed and cried and some attempted to fight back, but Godwyn didn’t spare them a second glance as the enforcers went about putting them down with ruthless efficiency.

Moving with the crowd, the target building grew closer until Godwyn had walked several times around it and ensured that there was no one watching from the windows. On her last pass she noticed the black Arbites motorcar slide gently to the roadside and stop a little ways down the block with a clear view of the front entrance – behind the tinted windows, Tanner and Blackridge would be ready and waiting.

An alley way ran behind the target building parallel to the courtyard and Godwyn turned down it – avoiding puddles and huddling refugees with equal disdain. The target building itself was three stories tall and made of worn brick. Numerous windows dotted its surface, but from Godwyn’s passes she had seen that every single one of them was shuttered and empty – concealing whatever was within and maintaining the building’s empty look. The courtyard behind it was long and walled in by an eight-foot high brick wall with only one gate allowing access from the alley. Naturally, this gate was locked, though when Godwyn tried it she found that the mechanism was not complex and that it could be forced. She rattled it a few times to test its give, then, discretely checking over her shoulders to avoid any unwanted attention, gave it a sharp twist and a wrenching tug with her bionic hand – the weathered lock coming apart with a snap of twisted metal.

The perimeter breached, she eased open the gate and slipped inside the courtyard. Inside there were puddles and piles of rusting scrap, but other than that it was deserted and gave no sign of anyone being alerted to her presence. Closing the gate gently behind her, the Inquisitor removed herself from the public eye and drew her pistol.

The parlour door Constantine had described was hidden away in an inconspicuous nook on the outside of the building about forty paces from the courtyard gate. Had she not been informed of its existence Godwyn doubted that she would have found it. The door was narrow and made of wood – the grey and blue paint blistering and peeling under the constant rain – and Godwyn forced the lock with a loud *crack* of splintering timber.

Pistol raised, she pushed her way inside.

The parlour was dark with curtains drawn across all the windows, and as her eyes adjusted to the gloom she saw undisturbed dust-sheets covering all the furniture and various decorations on the finished wooden walls.

Leaving the sound of falling rain behind her at the door, Godwyn stepped forward.

The hardwood floor squeaked unbearably under her weight.

She froze, straining her ears for the sound of movement, but when it appeared that she had not be heard she took another step.

Another torturous squeak.

She froze again – her pistol shifting between the opening at the end of the parlour and the closed side door in the wall some fifteen feet to her left.

Still no sound other than the falling rain outside.

Another step.

Another squeak.

She made it across the parlour to the opening with the sound of creaking hardwood following her every inch of the way.

Beyond the parlour was a dark and quiet hallway with curving stairs at one end and a trio of doors at the other. The air was still and thick with dust. The sound of falling rain had almost vanished.

She stepped forward carefully – the carpeted floor of the hallway now muting her movements – and moved in the direction of the stairs. Once she had reached them she paused to listen once again and thought she heard something coming from the next level up.

“Constantine,” she murmured, “what is on the second story?”

The logistician took a few moments to respond while Godwyn covered the top of the stairs with her pistol.

+“Schematics show several large rooms,”+ he replied at last, +“looks like meeting rooms or lobbies. That’s all I can determine from here, I’m afraid.”+

“Are there lavatories on the second level?”

The pause in the young man’s voice told her that the question confused him. +“uuum… yes, yes there are. Why?”+

The Inquisitor did not respond, but proceeded cautiously up the carpeted steps to the second floor. What she hadn’t told him was that interlopers often hid on higher levels, especially if there were lavatories close at hand; they were only human, after all.

The second floor landing was also carpeted, masking the Inquisitor’s movements. Just before her on the ground a thin spear of light traced across the floor from a crack in a doorway to her left, and, as she approached, Godwyn spied what looked like a kitchen through the sliver of space that separated the door from the frame.

Hardly breathing, she stepped forward and listened: her bionic ear picked up something that sounded like speech from further down the corridor, but no sound came from inside the kitchen. She reached her left hand to the door and was just about to push it open when someone coughed inside, then a snuffle, and what sounded like the turning of a page.

The tips of her fingers touching the door, she pushed it slowly open.

Standing at the counter with his head bowed, a tall, powerfully built man with a bald head was flipping through what looked like an instruction leaflet.

The door creaked on its hinges and the man looked up. Godwyn shot him before he knew what he was looking at.

The retort of the pistol sounded like dropping a book on the floor, and the weapon kicked back in the Inquisitor’s metal hand. The large bullet hit the man square in the chest and painted the white cabinets behind him red with blood before punching him off his feet and throwing him against the opposite counter with a crash. He hit the floor face-first with a final thump, and then everything was quiet. No sound at all. Rivulets of blood ran down the cabinet’s wood surface and trickled onto the countertop in red drops.

Lowering her pistol, Godwyn stepped back into the hall. The distant sound of voices had not been interrupted. She moved towards it.

As she got closer she could differentiate between the staged voices of a vid player and the casual jawing of two or three males coming from the same room. She got closer and closer to the source of the sounds until she was convinced that she was just outside the room. In the corner of the second floor, Godwyn had found more of the bald men.

Two doors waited open for her. The one to her right was the source of the noise, but she checked the one to her left just in case there were any surprises waiting for her. The bald men continued to talk along with the vid player, oblivious to the Inquisitor’s presence.

Pistol levelled at chest height, Inquisitor Godwyn stepped into the open door and confronted the source of noise she had followed so accurately.

The room she saw through the door was wide, but not very deep, and three sofas with dust sheets still draped over them sat in a semi circle around a vid screen with the dust sheet peeled back. Some low-grade action vid depicting muscle-bound gangers blazing away at each other with lasguns flashed on the screen, and watching it were three more big, bald men; two with their backs to Godwyn, while the third was on the sofa to the left – his head just starting to turn as he spotted Godwyn in the doorway, the words he was saying still spilling from his mouth in a sentence he would never finish.

His eyes grew wide, and the muscles in his face started to change. It was all he had time to do before Godwyn started shooting.

The pistol kicked back with a loud thud – the first bald man was shot in the nape of the neck, blood spraying from the exit wound as he tumbled forward off the sofa without ever seeing his killer. The man sitting beside him caught the next round in the head – the top of his skull blowing open in an eruption of red gore that showered the dust sheets and the floor with blood. The third man was getting to his feet – his eyes never having left the Inquisitor – as his hand stretched for the weapon he’d left beside him. Godwyn shot him in the chest, and his face contorted in anger and pain before being thrown back onto the couch – his last breath escaping his lungs in a deathly scream. He bounced once on the sofa, then flopped facedown onto the floor – the shell casing of the bullet that killed him coming to rest on the carpet at same time.

Three dead men. The vid screen was still flashing as more muscled-bound gangers stomped onto the scene with guns blazing – blobs of blood and brain were partially obscuring the picture, giving the impression that the actors were shooting at piles of gore.

Gun still raised, Godwyn surveyed the scene of the carnage from outside the door. Four men were now dead in the building, but Blackridge had reported seeing five men in total just the night before.

Mock gunfire rung out from the vid screen over the still bodies of the dead men and a ganger fell in a flash of light.

Two bullets left in the pistol – more than enough to hunt down one last man – though, now that it was just to two of them, she’d want him alive.

Pivoting, she stepped back from the doorway.

Underneath the carpeting, a floorboard creaked. It startled her.

The chattering roar of automatic gunfire shredded the silence and tore chunks of plaster and splintering wood from the walls as a hail of bullets sliced through the room and riddled the doorframe with holes.

Godwyn threw herself back and fell through the second door to her left as stray rounds thudded into walls and hummed through the air. Surprised by the sudden gunfire, she kept her cool and stayed low as splinters and plaster dust fell all around her.

More bullets thwacked through the walls separating her from the gunman, but they were random and unfocused – a sign of someone spraying a large magazine in vain hopes of hitting a target – though a random bullet could be just as deadly as one that was deliberately placed. Godwyn kept her head down and huddled near the floor.

In seconds the firing stopped – her adversary likely emptying his magazine or hoping to pin her down in her position. Either one could be bad, so the Inquisitor scrambled to her knees and waited for him at the second doorway with her pistol raised.

Heavy footfalls were coming from the opposite room and she heard something heavy hit the floor as magazines were exchanged.

+Time to fry, ass****,+ an emphatic drawl came from the vid screen as another ganger got greased by the star.

Sweat shone from the Inquisitor’s brow as she closed an eye and lined up the shot.

A bald head peeked through the doorway and looked right at her.

Godwyn squeezed the trigger and the pistol rocked back in her hands with a muffled *thump*. Aiming purposefully low, the bullet tore through the wall between them and doubled the man over as it caught him in the gut.

Stepping from cover with her gun outstretched, Godwyn fired again and caught him in the upper shoulder – spinning him to the floor with a grunt of agony as the high calibre round nearly tore his arm off.

Empty, Godwyn reloaded without thinking and stalked into the room. Four bodies littered the floor – their blood staining the carpet a dark colour. The one she’d shot twice was still alive, twitching and groaning in an expanding pool of blood as he writhed on the ground. Blood loss would kill him soon enough, but not before she’d had some time with him.

+Too many bodies!+ the star’s superior was complaining on the vid screen – his face half-hidden behind a smear of dark blood – +it’ll never look like an accident now!+

+Yeah?+ the star decided not to care, +Well next time I’ll try to kill them in a way more convenient to you!+

Godwyn wasn’t in the mood for irony. Stepping over a still-warm corpse on they way to the vid screen, she flicked it off and brought silence down upon the room once again.

By the door, the man she’d shot groaned and made a desperate reach for where his machine pistol had fallen from his grasp. Godwyn was beside him in two steps, kicked the weapon away from his hand, and crushed his fingers with her bionic appendage – he winced and streams of saliva escaped from his mouth, but the man was too far gone to do much more than that as the bones in his hand snapped and cracked.

Letting his crumpled digits drop back to the floor, Godwyn crouched down by the man’s head and tapped it twice with the suppressed barrel of her gun:

“Talk.”

“F*** you!” he spat.

The Inquisitor had expected as much. Her knees moaned as she shifted her weight on her haunches. “Answer my questions and I’ll ease your passing.”

Oddly enough, the man started to chuckle; “B****, you already have,” he sneered.

“Alright,” she passed her pistol from her right hand to her left and flexed her bionic fingers. “Ever wonder what it feels like to have your testicles crushed in a vice?”

He tried to spit at her, but ended up spitting on his own face instead. “B****, you can’t do anything to me!”

“We’ll see about that.”

She snapped his belt buckle with a flick of her wrist then scissored open his pants with her fingers. Looking him straight in the eye, she grabbed his genitals and squeezed – not hard enough to crush anything, but hard enough to make his back arch in pain:

“Have you changed your mind?”

The dying man started to gurgle and cough, but the sound eventually turned into a quietly laugh. “Okay,” he said, smiling, “why the f*** not? You’re already f***ing dead anyway… won’t change anything.”

She didn’t let go of his privates; “Go on.”

He was still laughing softly to himself. “You got nothing to threaten me with… whatever you do… heh… it’s not as bad as what they’d do.”

“Who are they?”

“F*** you.”

“You don’t know, do you?” she chided the dying man. “You’re about to join your friends as a corpse for people you don’t even know. You’re so insignificant to them that you don’t even know who they are. They wouldn’t tell you.”

“F*** you, b****,” he smiled, his eyes only half open but looking up at her. “Killing us is the best f***ing thing you could have done. F***, I actually… actually feel sorry for you now.”

“And how is that?”

“Ha!” he coughed, and a speck of blood jumped from his lips. His belly – the ragged hole torn through it oozing dark blood and bile – quivered and shook with every breath. At most, he had minutes left. “B – because, they’ll find you… and you’ll wish that I was there to kill you when they do!”

“Why?”

“B****, they don’t kill the women…” he was still smiling, “naw… they’ll break your body, but leave your mind alone. Just when you think they’ll kill you, hehe… that’s when they’ll use for what they really want you for.” His eyes opened wide, and he tried to lift his head from the ground: “Your womb, b****!” he nearly shouted.

The Inquisitor remained impassive.

“They’ll breed f***ing monsters in you!” the man continued. “F***ing plough you one after the other until their juice f***ing drips from your c***! I seen it, b****! They’ll do it to you!”

The dying man coughed and wheezed – blood now flying from his mouth – but despite this he seemed very pleased with himself. “You’ve saved me though!” he gurgled. “They do s*** to you when you’re no longer useful… I seen that s*** too… Y- you saved m-me from that…”

His last few breaths were ragged and hoarse. “Thanks.”

 

He’d been dead for five minutes by the time Godwyn finally stood up from beside his head. The building was deathly quiet once again, the only sound being the pattering of rain against the curtained windows.

Stepping away from the corpse, Godwyn holstered her pistol. “Constantine,” she said softly into thin air, “did you catch all that?”

There was a pause. +“Yes, Inquisitor.”+

“Good, send a copy of it to Inquisitor von Draken.”

+“Right away.”+

Turning, Godwyn regarded the four cooling corpse spread around her; “And Constantine, have Meredith meet me here as soon as she is able. Tell her there are some bodies here for her to examine.”

+“Yes, Inquisitor.”+

[Taranis]

Oh yearh, Blackridge, more meat for the grinder! No not really, just kidding. Again an impressive piece of work. I really like all the aspects you include in the main story. Many bits and pieces generates a great story.

 

Have you read this story? Too bad its incomplete. Arbites story.

 

http://m.fanfiction.net/s/6570267/1/Just_B...s_Arbites_Story

 

I really like your stories for the depth and detail. When we know why or how things happen it enhances the reading experience. This part was especially good in that aspect. :P

[Lady_Canoness]

Thanks Taranis. This one was a long-time coming, so I'm glad it all worked out :)

[Taranis]

Thanks Taranis. This one was a long-time coming, so I'm glad it all worked out :)

I can clearly se the planning that went into this part. It is well spent.

[Lady_Canoness]

Thanks Taranis. This one was a long-time coming, so I'm glad it all worked out :P

I can clearly se the planning that went into this part. It is well spent.

 

Haha I agree! Most of my writing now takes place over a large coffee at the local Coffee Boutique on my days off :)

[Taranis]

Haha I agree! Most of my writing now takes place over a large coffee at the local Coffee Boutique on my days off ;)

That's the pleasure of writing? That and positive critique? B)

[Aqui]

As usual, I enjoyed it B) A couple of things are kinda making sense in my head (although it might be possible that I have completely the wrong end of the stick and those things mean something else). I won't make a fool of my self by saying what I think, but I'll be watching as ever with interest ;)

[Lady_Canoness]

As usual, I enjoyed it ^_^ A couple of things are kinda making sense in my head (although it might be possible that I have completely the wrong end of the stick and those things mean something else). I won't make a fool of my self by saying what I think, but I'll be watching as ever with interest ;)

 

Aaaw man, now I wanna know! Tell me, pleeeeeease! haha

[Aqui]

As usual, I enjoyed it ;) A couple of things are kinda making sense in my head (although it might be possible that I have completely the wrong end of the stick and those things mean something else). I won't make a fool of my self by saying what I think, but I'll be watching as ever with interest ;)

 

Aaaw man, now I wanna know! Tell me, pleeeeeease! haha

 

^_^

 

All I'll say is:

 

Boot goo, Eugenics, Rogue Space Marine Psyker. Not good ;)

[Brother-Sergeant Bohemond]

Im thinking stealers here....but I could be wrong

 

regardless, another excellent update :) Blackridge = more cannon fodder?

[Lady_Canoness]

Im thinking stealers here....but I could be wrong

 

regardless, another excellent update :) Blackridge = more cannon fodder?

 

Putting the clues together to see the big picture. Who are the bald men? What was inside the bunker? What was the goo? Who and where is the one-armed giant? Does Inquisitor von Draken have an agenda and can she be trusted? Will the nobles and refugees make matters more complicated? Is Blarckridge *really* cannonfodder?

 

Who knows.... who knows...

 

I know :)

[Lady_Canoness]

*Part 11*

 

By mid-afternoon Godwyn’s team had scoured the building from top to bottom for clues as to the men’s identities, though for all their careful work the search turned up few results.

For starters, it became clear that the bald men had not been there long – likely first arriving when Cadet Blackridge reported them for breach of curfew – and they carried little in the way of provisions with them.

“They were all in good physical condition,” Meredith explained to the Inquisitor after examining the bodies and performing the required autopsies back at her lab in the penthouse. “Healthy, well fed, and not showing any signs of injury or illness… though there were some abnormalities with tissue samples…”

“What kind of abnormalities?” the Inquisitor had asked the doctor.

“I can’t say for sure without more accurate testing, though it looked to me as if they have undergone some form of bio-modification. Hack-job, for sure, not faultless work. Someone wanted these men altered quickly for short-term performance – clearly not thinking about long-term health.”

“I see. Tell me, these modifications, what purpose did they serve?”

Meredith scratched her brow where beads of sweat had formed from the exertion of her operations. “Hard to know. I’ve passed the information onto my contacts at the academies. They’ve said they’ll have results in a week’s time.”

“Is there any way we can reduced the delay?”

“Not without risking exposure, I’m afraid.”

The information Meredith provided was troubling, and after the Inquisitor had left the doctor to her work she spent some time alone putting it all together. The condition of the men she’d killed suggested that they were well supported and, that whatever their support was, it was well organized. The expendable nature with which they were disposed of also suggested that there were more of them, and if the expendable troops of her enemy were so well invested…? The thought was chilling.

These were no mere fanatics she was dealing with.

Furthermore, the five dead men had the semblance of being a single cell in an otherwise complex insurgency. Though well supported, the men had no intelligence on them relating to larger operations, and the only information recovered was a single dataslate containing instructions to wait in the building where Godwyn had found them.

“That’s all it says,” Spider said with a shake of her head, sitting on the only sofa that hadn’t seen someone die on it in the second floor room with the vid screen.

Pacing around the blood-stained floor now that the bodies had been removed, Inquisitor Godwyn nodded to show that she’d heard. The only dataslate they’d found with the corpses had been code locked, but Spider had cracked that in a matter of minutes. As she read the contents, however, the new information didn’t seem particularly important.

“It instructs them to come to this address and wait for further orders,” the Interrogator repeated with an irritated sigh before flopping the slate down onto the sofa beside her. “There isn’t even a transmission record,” she added, watching the Inquisitor as she moved around the room in silence, “whoever did this uploaded the message manually, then had it delivered to the recipient. We can’t trace them.”

“No,” Godwyn agreed with her student’s assessment, “we can’t…”

Spider likely thought this meant that communications between the bald men and their apparent handlers were severed and could not be exploited, but Godwyn had other ideas:

“Did you find any other communication equipment in the building?” the Inquisitor asked.

“No,” the young woman replied, her mood darkening, “nothing.”

“Well,” Godwyn turned to face her, “what if whoever gave the instructions doesn’t know their men are dead?”

The Interrogator had not thought of that. She stood up; “We can intercept the new orders when they come in.”

Her mentor nodded, “Indeed. My thoughts exactly.”

“I can do it,” Spider added insistently; “Let me do this.”

Frowning, the Inquisitor considered her acolyte’s request. “I’ll need your help preparing for the nobles,” she said.

“That’s three days from now! I can do this in the meantime.”

“You’ll have to stay here until they make contact.”

Spider nodded her head earnestly. “I know. I can do it.”

Godwyn had no reason not to grant the young woman’s request. “Very well,” she agreed, “Zero will stay with you.”

The woman with the spider tattoo did not argue – in fact, she seemed grateful. “I could use the help,” she admitted with a slight cock of her head.

Godwyn did not doubt it.

 

* *

 

Inquisitor Godwyn was back at the penthouse by nightfall, and, as the rain pounded the sheet-glass windows for the fifth straight day, she made her way up the steps to the master-bed room upon legs that felt like led. She hadn’t really slept since arriving planet side. Put it off much longer and she’d likely start hallucinating.

Entering the room, she stripped off her coat and tossed it into an armchair before stumbling out of her boots and sinking into a sitting position upon the edge of the bed. Her eyes drooped, and she loosed what felt like the hundredth sigh in under a minute.

“How do you feel?” she asked herself. “Just hanging in there…”

Serum pills kept her awake and alert, but those could only last so long. Her head started to swim. The master bedroom was a more spacious accommodation than she’d ever had with rich furnishings and monstrous four-poster bed, but right now everything seemed to blur together in a haze of weariness. Falling, she sank backwards into the full quilt and let her eyes roll in her head. Sleep would be a very, very welcome release…

She blinked. When she opened her eyes again it was light out. She blinked again. Morning. Already.

Lying awake in bed, she listened to the rain drum off the skylight overhead. In bed. She was in bed. Her head was on a pillow, and her skin rubbed against the deliciously soft coverlets. She was warm and cozy, and beside her on a night stand rested her bionic forearm that had been removed the night before. Funny that she didn’t remember doing it… or changing out of her clothes.

Pushing herself up on her left arm, she blinked the fatigue out of her eyes and looked around the bed-room which was now a soft colour of grey in the cloudy morning light. Everything was at it should be, but the usual suspect was curled up in an armchair beside where the Inquisitor’s coat had dropped to the floor.

For someone so large, Godwyn was always surprised by how Mercy could fold herself into the smallest of spaces. Climbing from bed, she tip-toed closer to the giant in the armchair.

The killer was only pretending to be asleep and smiled when Godwyn kissed her. It was her idea of a little trap, and she pulled the her lover closer and embraced her in her long arms so that she could not escape.

 

Godwyn wouldn’t leave the master bedroom for another hour that morning, not that she minded, and when she did even the rain couldn’t dampen her spirits.

 

*

 

“Doc.”

Stooped over her operating slab, Meredith looked up and smiled. “Iliad,” she said warmly, “you’ve come to see me!”

The Mordian did not return the gesture. “Have you tested whatever was on my boot yet?”

The smile dropped from the doctor’s face. She sighed, and leaned her hands heavily against the edges of the slab. On the surface in front of her she was scalpel-deep in… something. Dark smears of blood were smeared on her gloves, and there were a few finger marks on her apron showing where she’d been scratching herself.

“Stone,” she asked slowly, her brow folded down in reprimanding fashion, “do you think I’m going to bungle around with a boot when the boss has me digging inside five stiffs?”

The Mordian hadn’t thought of that. “No, I suppose not” he said, apologetically gruff. “I’m sorry for wasting your time.”

He turned to go, but Meredith stopped him with a hearty laugh. The smile was back on her face; “Oh get back here, you soft-headed soldier-boy – I was only yanking ya’!” The gloves came off her hands with an elastic snap, “C’mon, I’ll show you what I’ve found!”

Enthusiasm, or a sense of humour for that matter, did not come to Stone naturally, and he held his position at the threshold to the doctor’s lab with his usual ‘pissed off’ expression.

“Oh come on!” she tried to coax him in. “I won’t bite! Unless…” a wicked smile crossed her lips, “unless you want me to, in which case I will bite you very, *very* hard…”

She’d do it too.

The look on Stone’s face said he’d soonerr inspect whatever was on the underside of his boot with his tongue than toy with the insufferable doctor, but at her insistence he drew around to where the stout little woman was waiting to show him something.

“So,” she began once he was close enough, “I’ve run quite a number of tests and have come to a very peculiar conclusion…”

She paused for obvious dramatic effect – so obvious that Stone either ignored it or missed it entirely.

The smile started to fade; now she was getting serious. “Well… it’s nothing man made.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean its not, say, a mixture of oil and dirt, or any other number of recognizable things. The properties, the compounds, they’re… well, they’re not like anything we ever work with. In fact, some of the compounds are right off the chart: I’ve never seen anything like them anywhere, and neither have any of my sources.”

She turned towards him. “Whatever you stepped in, well, it’s unique, which isn’t good.”

“Why? What do you think it is?”

Meredith struggled with not having the words to properly describe it; “Well… uuh…” she wetted her lips, “you see, this is of alien origin – not natural, that is for sure.”

Stone narrowed his eyes. “I’ve been to a lot of worlds and fought a lot of things,” he told her. “Not every world is the same. How can you be sure that this doesn’t belong here?”

“Because it doesn’t share any of the properties of its surroundings.”

The Mordian didn’t seem to follow.

“Evolution, Iliad, evolution,” she told him. “When something, like you or me, or even dirt, comes into being, it necessarily shares properties with its environment. Of course there is more to it than that, but I won’t bore you with technical terms. Suffice to say, something that belongs somewhere will display that by having similarities to the place in which it belongs. Water, for example,” she stated, “both you and me have water in us, and same with oxygen.”

“So you’re saying this… stuff… has nothing similar with this world.”

“Not a damn thing, and that’s not it.”

“There’s more?”

She nodded several times. “Yes,” she confirmed, “there is more.”

“What kind of ‘more’?”

“Well,” she sighed, leaning against the counter and looking up at the broad shouldered Mordian, “the boss has turned in some other things that clearly don’t belong here… but this time in people.”

“So there’s more of this stuff…”

The doctor tilted her head between a shake and a nod. “Sort of,” she said. “There are similarities between the stuff on your boot and some irregularities appearing in the refugees on this world.”

“S***.”

She nodded. “You said it. But it’s not that easy; there are enough differences between what you have on your boot and what is inside these people and I can’t determine if they are related by anything more than mere coincidence. I have my suspicions, but I’m still waiting for confirmation.”

“And if you get that confirmation?”

Her face turned into a wild-eyed smile. “Then we’ve got us a whole pile of s*** to clear up!” she exclaimed. “F***ing love it!”

The Mordian chuckled; bad news was always best served with a hefty dose of ‘f*** it’. He slapped the counter twice with the flat of his hand. “Keep me posted,” he asked, and turned to leave.

“Wait up a second, Stone,” Meredith called, stopping him just before he made it out the door. She had an earnest look on her face, and had folded her arms to keep them from fidgeting. “You wanna catch a drink later?”

The Mordian’s answer was simple: “No.”

Meredith didn’t give up so easily, however; “Oh come on, Iliad! What’s a girl gotta do to get noticed around here? I just want a little bit of fun!”

Stone’s statuesquely grim face remained unmoved. “Talk to Lee,” he said, “he’ll give you what you want.”

The doctor reddened; “Well yeah, but that’s kinda the problem, ain’t it? He’ll screw anything so long as it has two legs that’ll spread!”

Meredith was just getting wound up with a lot more left, but the former Iron Guardsman was done playing:

“No offence, doctor, but I’m not interested.”

At that he turned and walked from the lab – his footsteps echoing further and further away until they disappeared completely.

Left alone, Meredith licked her lips and drummed her fingers across the countertop: Stone didn’t give in easily, but she didn’t give up easily either. He was a hard man, and hard men were never easy to catch.

Shrugging her shoulders, the doctor went back to work. She’d get him eventually.

 

*

 

Spider woke with her face pressed into the plastic covered arm rest on a sofa and a pool of drool gathering under her chin. She blinked a couple times just to make sure she was awake and tried to sit up. A cramp in her back screamed out in pain and she grimaced – groaning as she repeatedly jabbed the offending area of her body with her fingers.

Feeling like s*** – as good a sign as any that the realm of dreams was far behind.

The room smelled like stale death from the day before, and dried bloodstains picked out the spots where four men had been gunned down. With the lights off, the room was so grey there was no telling the time of day.

Lifting herself into a sitting position, Spider shook out her cloak that she’d used as a blanked and rubbed her hands over her eyes. It felt like an oven under her collar and she stood up to shake off the clammy sweat she felt around her legs. Now awake, the Interrogator threw her green cloak back over her shoulders and left her boots by the sofa as she went in search of somewhere to wash her neck and face.

She’d been dreaming again, about faces, places, and sounds and things, but she tried to forget it all. There were never any good dreams anymore, and the more she thought about them the more miserable she became. She tried – sweet Emperor, how she tried – but it was dreadfully hard to see a light at the end of the tunnel sometimes. Now that he was gone, she didn’t know what she had to look forward to.

Spider poked open a few doors before finding the lavatory, but splashing cold water across her face made the momentary depression subside, and as she looked at the woman in the mirror above the sink with dripping wet brown hair and bright blue eyes she couldn’t help but smile at what she had turned into. Even the spider tattoo looked sharp and attractive.

Some of the students at the academy had asked her about it – where she’d got it and what it meant – she didn’t have an answer. They’d asked for her name – she didn’t have an answer for that either.

Spider.

It sounded ridiculous – childish even – but she wasn’t a kid anymore, and in a galaxy filled with horrors there wasn’t enough time to worry about sounding childish.

She splashed more water in her face and rubbed her hands around her stifling neck.

The academy was behind her now, as were the other students and any question about the person she was. What was important was that she move forward – always move forward. She owed it to herself. Owed it to him – it’s what he would have asked of her.

Looking down at the name on her knuckles, it seemed as if the name looked back up into her. Was she doing enough?

In a sudden fit of anger she slammed the name into the mirror so that it smashed and shards of glass clattered like razor edged rain into the wash basin. The fury pulsed inside her skull to the point that it easily blotted out the searing pain from her lacerated fist. For the thousandth time she relived what happened on that night more seven years ago.

Why had he died?

He died because she was weak – she killed him because she was too weak.

If only she’d been stronger!

If she’d been stronger he would still be alive, and if he were still alive her life would be different: she wouldn’t have nightmares, she wouldn’t be alone, she would have a future, and… and she’d be loved.

Grabbing the Catachan fighting knife from its sheath she held the blade to the bared flesh of her left wrist and, after a moment’s hesitation, drew the keening edge slowly across her scarred flesh – relishing in the wave of painful ecstasy that swept across her being as her red blood was released from her body. She shivered and convulsed – the pleasure almost orgasmic as her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell against the wall gulping gasps of cooling air. She closed her fist and the blood trickled through her fingers over the four letters she had tattooed on her left knuckles: love.

The moment passed and she sheathed the fighting knife. Calm now, she had to be careful – one slip of the blade and she’d take off her entire hand.

A smile crossed her face as she sat on the floor, and, closing the wound, she bandaged it up tightly with strips of cloth, and after a few moments pulled herself back to her feet.

Bootless, she tiptoed through the shards of glass on the floor and left the lavatory. She was halfway back to the bloodstained room when something caught her attention. Mid-stride, she stopped.

It was nothing she could see, hear, or smell, but something was happening – she could feel it.

Closing her eyes, the Interrogator sharpened her mind and stilled her heart – stretching out with her sixth sense until she could pinpoint the exact nature of the disturbance: someone was coming.

She fumbled in her cloak pocked for her comm. link and shoved the bead into her ear. “Zero, we’re about to have company at the front door. Be there.”

The assassin didn’t respond and she didn’t have to; she was always listening.

Running back to the room where she’d left her boots, Spider banged through the door and hastily crammed her feet inside her footwear. She could see the interloper quite clearly in her mind’s eye and watched from a distance as a man wearing a wrinkled storm coat and wide-brimmed hat pushed through the rain and pedestrian traffic to get to the Interrogator’s door. He was breathing heavily and walked with stiff knees while his stooped composure served to hide his identity from the people on the street as well as shelter him from the rain. He could not hide from Spider, however, and the young psyker saw through his disguise to what he really was. He was not well – ill, perhaps, but there was something definitely wrong with him. He walked with a purpose and she sensed that this was no mere lackey.

Picking up the well-worn bullpup carbine from where she’d left it on the sofa the night before, she double-checked that the chamber was loaded before going back into the hall and hastening to the stairs.

“We want him alive,” the Interrogator instructed Zero over the comm., “whatever you do, make it none-lethal.”

The assassin would be more than capable of subduing interloper once he set foot inside, but Spider would have him covered just in case. If all else failed, she’d gun for his legs.

She sensed him coming closer and hid in a room just off the main corridor while the giant form of Zero took position beside the front door. Her sword was sheathed at Spider’s instruction, but she’d discarded her storm coat in favour of the mobility provided by an unarmoured body suit.

Hidden, they waited in silence.

Spider stroked her finger along the gentle curve of her weapon’s trigger.

The man came up to the door, and she could feel it in her mind as his flesh pressed against the cold brass of the handle.

A pause – he was hesitating.

In the dark, Zero’s hand closed around the hilt of her sword.

On the other side of the door, the man still stood holding onto the handle.

Spider willed him to open it, but she could feel his indecision and already knew what the outcome would be:

“He’s going to leave. Get him!” she hissed down the hall.

Zero sprung into action and yanked the door open – jarring the interloper off balance and the door lurched inwards.

Grabbing him by the neck, the long limbed assassin pulled him inside and spun him past her as she rapidly kicked the door closed behind them. The man screamed but somehow was still on his feet, and as Zero turned on him there was bright flash of light split-seconds before her open palm connected with his forehead and knocked him spread-eagled to the floor with a loud *smack*.

Spider came dashing down the hall with her weapon raised but the man was out cold, and when she got to him she swung her weapon over her shoulders andd started to drag him further from the door. Zero, making sure the way was barred behind them, followed her with long strides.

Finding the parlour where Godwyn had forced entry the day before, the Interrogator dragged the man inside along the creaking floor and looked for something with which she could bind and gag him.

“Interrogator…”

She looked over her shoulder at Zero as the giant assassin spoke her name.

“I have been shot…” Hand pressed against her chest, the lithe killer moved it just enough to reveal a hole about an inch in diameter that had punched through her suit just underneath her left breast. There was no blood, and scorch marks indicated that it had been made by a las-weapon. “It has ruptured one of my lungs…”

Unconscious on the floor, the man in the wrinkled storm coat – his pock-marked face now clearly visible – had multiple ornate rings on his finger; one of which Spider immediately recognized as a deployed digital weapon.

“How bad is it?” Spider asked, looking back to where the killer was standing in the doorway to the parlour. On a normal human such a wound could prove to be fatal, but, knowing where Zero came from, Spider would not call her ‘normal’ and had no idea if she would be able to pull through.

“I will not be able to fight on effectively…” the assassin told her, clearly short of breath, “and the internal swelling may damage tissue or organs if I do not receive adequate medical attention…”

Starting to worry, Spider activated her comm. link and patched it through the Inquisitor’s frequency:

“Inquisitor, I need a pick up at the target building immediately.”

Silence.

“Inquisitor, I need a pick up!” She glanced over at Zero – the assassin appeared to be studying the unconscious man and the weapon he had used against her.

“Inquisitor, I – ”

+“Interrogator? What’s going on?”+ It was Constantine’s voice.

“I need a damn pick up, Constantine, now! Zero’s been hurt!”

+“Understood. Keep this channel open, I will advise when your pick-up is en-rout.”+

“Good,” Spider closed the feed and looked over at Zero: she had heard everything and seemed satisfied with the result.

“It’ll take some time,” the Interrogator told her, “but do you think you – ”

A loud *crack* from the front hall cut her off mid-sentence.

Zero stepped calmly in from the doorway and grabbed the unconscious man by the front of his jacket as Spider covered the door with her carbine. “I will take the prisoner into the courtyard,” Zero explained as casually as if she were talking her way through an exercise as she pulled the man one handed towards the busted door and the rain outside.

Spider dropped back with her – the floor squeaking unbearably under her every step.

The men were in the hall – big and bald much like those Godwyn had killed – and closing in on the parlour with weapons drawn. They could hear the floor squeak and would take cover on either side of the door – firing blindly inside before taking peak. They would shoot around chest height. If Spider were on the floor, she would avoid it.

Almost at the door, the Interrogator dropped quietly to her belly as the wounded Zero hauled the unconscious man outside into the rain.

A screaming roar of automatic gunfire chewed through the air as the bald men fired blindly into the parlour – bullets screeching and snapping as they embedded themselves into walls and whistled over the Interrogator’s head.

There was a third waiting in a car outside, and he would leave if the men were not back in five minutes. A thought told her where he was, and what window on the second floor she should look from to get a good shot at him.

The firing stopped – the last few shell casings clattered and bounced across the floor.

A bald head peered around the corner.

Spider reacted smoothly by squeezing the trigger and sending her own rounds through wall behind which the men were standing – the bullpup kicking and bucking as chunks of wood and stucco were blasted out of the barrier as bullets tore through it.

She eased up on the trigger after twenty shots, and, still prone on the floor, waited. No sound – not a one – the men on the other side were dead.

Nerf’s carbine had claimed two more kills, and Spider had gunned down her first human beings. It was a lot easier than she’d thought it would be, in fact it felt like nothing at all. She’d already taken the life that she held most dearly; what more could two enemies of the Emperor be to her?

Getting to her feat, she stalked across the creaking floor and inspected her grisly work: two bald men lay in swelling pools of blood – their weapons dropped from dead hands and the killing bullet holes torn in their bodies.

One was still twitching.

“… Wait…” he raised an empty hand towards her – four fingers and a thumb begging her to hold her fire.

She blew his brains across the floor with a single *bang* – the clatter of the shell casing dropping to the floor beating out a brief epilogue to his shortened life.

She felt nothing as she continued upstairs.

In the room with the bloodstains, she placed her carbine down on the sofa and retrieved the assembled Mk. IV from where it rested behind the couch on the floor. It too was loaded with a round in the chamber.

Lifting the fifty-plus pound weapon in her arms, she marched to the room across the hall and parted the curtains on the window second from her left: sure enough, there was a beat-up old four-cylinder parked outside not a block away with a side-angled shot on the cab. The driver’s side window was open, and man with black hair and a scraggly beard was smoking a lho-stick while discretely glancing towards her building in his mirrors.

There were a lot of people in roads below.

Shouldering the anti-material rifle with some difficulty, Spider set about finding a stand for her weapon to lean against and found it in a small table tucked to one side of the room. Moving the table into position, she propped the rifle’s bipod against its surface and peered down the sights.

For a second everything was a blur, but, adjusting the dials, she eventually drew the vehicle into focus, and panned the crosshairs over to where they rested on the driver’s upper body. She had practiced this countless times on her own and had drilled with the Mk. IV almost daily when she was staying at the academy dormitories, but for all her handling of the weapon, she had never yet fired it with a living target in her sights. She had been with Nerf the one time she’d seen him use it to kill a target miles away, and it was he who had first taught her the ins and outs of the weapon. In theory, a shot like this was practically guaranteed to kill and Nerf would have made it with ease, yet the Catachan had been bigger and stronger than she was, and every time she fired a live round in practice she’d felt the weapon pull upwards and to the left – sometimes right off target. She’d trained intensively to correct the problem but she still wasn’t that confident, and with a bolt action she was only ever guaranteed a first shot – anything after that was a blessing.

Breathing slowly yet calmly through her nose as Nerf had taught her, Spider focused on her target and relaxed her right hand lest her own overzealousness foil her aim. The untreated lacerations on her knuckles prickled like thorns and threatened to distract her.

She steadied her heart, cleared her mind, and watched the crosshairs grow steady over the target. The man in the driver’s seat – oblivious to the sniper overlooking him – continued to glance back at the door: he seemed to be growing desperate.

Planting the lho-stick between his lips, he started to wind up his window and started the engine.

Spider moved her finger to cover the trigger. Her aim was steady – she had a clear view of the window going up and the man behind it. She could almost feel the Catachan standing beside her.

Take the shot.

She squeezed.

The rifle kicked back hard like a furious beast as an ear-splitting eruption filled the room. The window in front of her shattered, and down range she saw the driver’s side window explode and fall to the ground as the man inside disappeared and red mush coated the inside of the cab.

In the streets, people started to panic and scream.

“Target killed…” she whispered to herself a satisfied smirk, and worked the bolt so that a smoking shell-casing plopped onto the floor.

+“Interrogator,”+ Constantine’s voice buzzed in her ear as she folded up the biopod and lugged the Mk. IV rifle back across the hall.

“I hear you, go ahead.”

+“Lee will be at your position in under a minute. Get yourself and Zero to the rooftop for pick up.”+

She nodded to no-one in particular as she collected her carbine. “Good. Let the Inquisitor know that we’ve intercepted the instructions as well.”

+“I shall,”+ Constantine replied, +“well done.”+

Something in his voice came across as patronizing, but Spider bit back a fiery response in case it was just a result of frequency distortion. In the event that it wasn’t she cut the feed, and made her way downstairs to find Zero without any further commentary.

 

______________

 

At this time I'd like to ask for your assistance in giving a little assessment of how the characters are doing so far in terms of development.

How is Godwyn coming across in IV compared to I, II, and III?

How is Spider doing? I'm attempting to heap on the survivor guilt. Is it working, do you think?

How about the support cast? Meredith, Stone, and Constantine? Do they feel distinct and unique?

 

Is there anything in particular that you think there could be more of in regards to character development?

 

If you could answer any or all of these questions, I would be much obliged.

 

Thanks! ;)

[Aqui]

How is Godwyn coming across in IV compared to I, II, and III?

 

More cynical, which is what I more or less expected to be honest. One does not survive in the 41st Millennium without being cynical to some degree.

 

How is Spider doing? I'm attempting to heap on the survivor guilt. Is it working, do you think?

 

It's a bit hit and miss in places. Sometimes her regret is palpable, other times it seems like she really could give a rats ass. Having said that, sometimes a survivor would feel that way. In either case, it's a difficult thing to write about unless the writer is a survivor themselves....

 

How about the support cast? Meredith, Stone, and Constantine? Do they feel distinct and unique?

 

They are certainly unique ^_^ Meredith is one I feel most "familiar" with (myself being a bit.....unconventional, I can relate to her. With Stone, he's much like his geological namesake. I understand that he's a "model" soldier and more than a few soldiers feel that betraying any emotion or getting too familiar with others can cause problems and/or mistakes, but for the Love of Primus, he really needs to get the Broom handle out from where the sun doesn't shine :lol:

 

Constantine, is fairly well balanced - cynicism, optimism, and knows his job well, would be nice to see what goes on in his head more though ^_^

 

Is there anything in particular that you think there could be more of in regards to character development?

 

I think that a more in-depth look at why Lee and Godwyn now resent each other. Why haven't they parted ways? More development of Mercy and Zero, perhaps more dialogue between the two of them. After all, we do know that Mercy can speak, she merely chooses not to :)

 

Also a little insight into Von Draken's past would be good, as I find her interesting too ^_^

[Lady_Canoness]

Thank you Aquilanus - and very well put. I agree with just about everything in your assessment, and thanks to your feedback I have a good idea of how to work certain things into the story (to tell more would be, well, telling!)

 

Also, Stone was given his name on purpose - good to know he's living up to it!

[Azekai]

More development of Mercy and Zero, perhaps more dialogue between the two of them. After all, we do know that Mercy can speak, she merely chooses not to

This. The assassin twins are very interesting, but this is the third installment- we need to learn about them now or never . . . and never would be a shame.

 

Godwyn is fine; an older, wiser Inquisitor who is forced to return to her roots and confront her past.

 

Spider is a good character, and I think you got the feel right for a person who is no longer a child, but is still struggling to find their place while dealing with loss.

 

The supporting cast is a lot of fun (Meredith is a hoot) and Stone and Constantine have potential. It is good to see them work together and bounce off each other.

 

By the way, this may have been addressed and I missed it, but is Spider sanctioned? She doesn't seem old enough to have made a voyage to Terra and back. Is she just going off of the training she received in part III?

[Lady_Canoness]

The idea with Spider is that in the roughly seven year time-span between 3 and 4 she has been trained in the Inquisitorial Academies to better hone her abilities. She hasn't made the trip to Terra, however. So far as I know, the Soul binding isn't something every psyker goes through. She is definitely no longer a 'rogue psyker'.

 

Good to know about the twins. They, like everyone else, will undergo more development in time, though I'll be sure to take all that has been said into careful consideration.

 

Thanks :tu:

[Lady_Canoness]

*Part 12*

 

“Name?”

“His papers identify him as Harold Mordecai. Fifty-eight years of age, off-world trader, free-merchant, with no listed home world or patron. Kind of a nobody.”

Folding up the man’s papers and handing them to Godwyn, Constantine waved a hand towards an assortment of other items displayed on a side table. “His effects,” he stated; “I was just in the process of cataloguing them.”

“Don’t bother,” the Inquisitor walked over to the table and glanced over the contents of the captured man’s pockets, her eyes lingering overlong on the deployed digital weapon that had sprung from inside a brass ring. “Destroy all of these once I am done with him.”

“As you wish.”

They were standing once again in the garage sublevels where the air was cold and clammy and the only light came from naked bulbs strung to the mould-stained rockcrete ceiling with snaking, rubber cased wires. No-one from the tower above came here aside from the Inquisitor and her team, and the natural sound-proofing of being several stories underground made for perfect silence.

Godwyn was there with the young man – Constantine – wrapped tightly in their coats, but they were not alone, and the brooding form of Spider stood with her back to a wall and her head bowed as her tattooed fingers adjusted the tiny metal implants on a servo skull.

The man named Mordecai was not amongst them, and waited in an adjoining room on the other side of a rusted iron door.

“Is he awake?” Godwyn asked casually, picking up the digital weapon and turning it over in her fingers before plopping it back onto the table.

“He was when I collected his things,” the man with the blonde moustache replied, then added with a soft chuckled, “granted, he didn’t say anything.”

The Inquisitor nodded.

“Skull’s ready,” Spider said softly from the side of the room, pushing the servo-skull into the air where it hovered in place for several seconds before locating Godwyn with its beady red eyes and purring through the air on its anti-grav motor to wait near her shoulder.

The Inquisitor looked at it – her impassive expression appearing in the small display screen perched on top of a dilapidated file cabinet across the room.

“Works well enough,” her voice came from two places in the dark, underground room, “be sure to record multiple transcripts.”

 

The heavy door swung slowly inwards with a tortured groan like a trapped beast, and a ray of yellow light from the other room traced across the dirt-crusted floor before creeping onto the form of the man occupying the wooden chair in the centre of the room. His arms, legs, abdomen, and neck were all fastened to the frame with tight knots, and a black burlap bag had been pulled over his head to block his vision and make every breath a burden. He did not start as he heard the door open but instead sat perfectly still, straining every sense to listen as footsteps moved towards him across the floor.

The door groaned shut, and a brief electric hum preceded a naked bulb flickering to light above the captive’s head.

The man’s blindness disappeared as the hood was yanked off, and the owner of the footsteps placed a second wooden chair before him and sat down.

A large, purple welt marking the spot where he’d been struck unconscious, Harold Mordecai looked at his captor with bulging, watery eyes.

Inquisitor Godwyn looked back at him – her eyes a sharp blue.

She was somewhere between old age and youth, with skin that lay smoothly over an aristocratic visage and only broke into lines around the corner of her razor-sharp eyes, and hair that shone like gold with edges of silver cutting into the crop around the edges. The woman had a hardness about her, however, as was disfigured by dark metal blocks that replaced her left ear and part of her face, and a skeletal metal hand that crept out from her right sleeve.

He was beaten by the years and the elements, and under thinning dark hair and bushy black brows was a circular face turned gaunt with pock-marked cheeks and wisps of a beard. The man was not a killer – that much was obvious at first glance – but had fought in different ways not immediately apparent.

“Harold Mordecai,” Godwyn began, relaxing in her uncomfortable chair and crossing a leg over her lap as the servo-skull bobbed by her shoulder, “allow me to introduce myself: my name is Tanya von Draken, and I am Chief Chastener of Adeptus Arbites special branch on Acre. I hope you haven’t been treated too badly since you were brought here?”

She paused, but her question did not elicit a response. Mordecai had trouble meeting her eyes, which was good.

She continued; “I won’t waste your time and mine by going over the questions I already have the answers to. Instead, I’ll tell you precisely where you stand.”

The Inquisitor leaned forward in her chair to mere put inches between her and the captive; “You tell me who you serve, what it is you have been ordered to do and what instructions you were taking to the five men in the seasonal administration building, and in return I will see that your death is quick, clean, and painless.”

The man blinked and looked away; “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

As first words went, his were disappointing.

“Wrong,” she corrected him, “you do. Two bald men came in after you, and you and I both know they were nearly identical to the five men you were going to meet.”

He wouldn’t meet her eyes and they both knew he was lying – the only question became what she needed to do to convince him to tell the truth.

“I’ll make it easier,” she continued; “One of the men you were supposed to meet was interrogated prior to his death and revealed something about your masters. Not only are you a small part of a larger operation, but your masters are also ruthless enough that he considered a just execution from the Adeptus Arbites to be preferable to whatever your masters had in store for him.” Godwyn paused to let the words sink in. “In fact, he thanked the person that pulled the trigger.”

Mordecai swallowed. Sweat was beading on his brow.

“Now,” Godwyn leaned back in chair once again – the wood creaking under her weight – “I don’t suppose you can expect any more leniency than he could when confronting your masters with your failure. We both know you have information I want, and, even if you were to somehow be released from custody, we can deduce with some certainty that your masters would pick you up and torture you to find out exactly what it is you divulged to me – even if you didn’t divulge anything. Afterwards, they would likely dispose of you in an equally gruesome manner.”

His eyes were starting to move rapidly across the room – looking anywhere other than at the Inquisitor.

Godwyn continued: “Though you should know that I can have you tortured as well, and eventually – no matter how long it takes – I will get the information I want from you. So you face a nasty demise no matter who you turn to. However,” she inspected her metal fingers in her lap as she nonchalantly explained the manner of the man’s execution, “if you cooperate with me, I will make sure you don’t get tortured. In fact, I will see that you are shot – no suffering involved.”

She smiled at him. Mordecai was starting to shake.

“You’re not a cold-blooded killer, Harold,” she told him. “Don’t think I can’t break you very, very easily.”

The threat was enough to shake his will to resist:

“I want to make a deal,” he said so quickly it almost came out a single word.

“Do you?”

His eyes were focused somewhere on the floor. “If you can protect me, and promise me my safety, I will tell you everything I know. Deal?”

“Mr. Mordecai, that entirely depends on how much you know…”

“Promise me!” he met her eyes. “I’m not a bad man! I just want to live. I can tell you everything. I have no loyalties to them – none! – I am not a threat!”

She waited, taking her time in answering him as she played with her metal fingers: “I am listening.”

The man licked his lips – his eyes now burrowing into his left knee – and took a few deep breaths to try and steady the shaking in his legs.

Godwyn leaned forward, grabbing his forehead with her metal hand and holding it steady so he looked at her face. “Well?”

“I work for the House of Styme!” he blurted.

The Inquisitor let him go and, after a pause, settled back into her seat.

The first words out, Mordecai told all as his life depended on it: “I… I work for the House of Styme. I was approached by a House Steward about a month ago… and I’ve been gettin weekly instructions since! They pay me, and I do what they tell me to – no questions asked!”

“Have you met this steward face-to-face?” Godwyn cut in, her legs once again crossed as she considered his words.

He nodded; “Yes – but just the once! I met with him at a hotel in Lake City… in… in the Laerdacre of Malcoln. There were lots of us in attendance. A whole room full. Several House attendants as well, though the Steward I recall as being in charge…”

“These other people,” Godwyn enquired, “do they all work for Styme?”

Mordecai shook his head and wetted his lips again; “I don’t know,” he said. “When I met with him, we did so in private at his request.”

“What did he ask of you?”

“He asked… he gave me falsified documents. I’m not a trader – you see – but my papers are meant to keep… keep your people from asking questions if I were searched.”

“But what did he ask you to do?”

“He said I would be paid, as well as be well rewarded, if I agreed to be a courier for them, the House of Styme. I did not know what it entailed at the time!”

The Inquisitor pursed her lips. “What did you do for them?”

Mordecai tried to shrug. “Mostly transporting communications between people. Sometimes arranging lodgings and accommodations in advance. Recently I’ve been travelling with minders. Please, I never thought much of it! I thought I was just accommodating trade negotiations!”

“Negotiations that involve biologically modified mutants?”

The man’s mouth opened and closed several times without sound. “I don’t ask questions when I’m paid!” he blurted pleadingly.

The Inquisitor would not indulge him with sympathy: ignorance was not an excuse. “What were you tasked to do when you were captured?”

“My orders were to instruct the men at 2250 East Industrial to locate and eliminate a man named Orten at… at sixteenth precinct…”

Godwyn raised an eyebrow at these last words; “Sixteenth precinct? The man is at an Arbites precinct?”

Mordecai nodded, swallowing; “Yes, they were to go to sixteenth precinct… a man on the inside was going to let them in. And no, before you ask, I do not know who the insider is!”

“Who is Orten? Why does House Styme want him dead?”

The man shook his head vigorously; “I don’t know why they want him dead, but he is a refugee leader that is being detained there. My only guess is that they want your people to look responsible for killing him.”

“What will happen now that you failed to deliver your instructions?”

“Nothing – it won’t change a thing! I’m not the only person they’ve got. They have others – I don’t know who – but others passing along the same information I am to other groups throughout the city. They keep us separate and isolated to avoid compromising each other, but not separate enough to think we are the only one’s out there! It is as you said,” he tried to laugh at this, though failed, “that I’m just a small part of a larger organization! I’m telling you everything I can! Please, I want to help you! I do!”

“If you sincerely want to help me, then tell me every detail you were to tell them.”

The prisoner hung his head and tapped his feet on the floor. Bound tightly in his chair, it was about all he could so far as moving.

“They were to get to precinct sixteen before the day is out,” he confessed. “Once there, the inside man would be waiting for them outside the perimeter and take them inside.”

“How?”

“I don’t know how,” he shook his head regretfully, “I wasn’t told. Once they’d killed Orten, they were to return to 2250 and await my next contact.”

“Would all the cells be given the same instructions as you?”

“I don’t know, but I think so, yes.”

Inquisitor Godwyn looked over her shoulder at the servo-skull. “Get word to precinct sixteen and have it locked down,” she spoke to it – the beady eyes and vox-grilled ears catching her every syllable. “When that’s done, order screening for all personnel.”

The skull continued to bob mid-air.

“You’re going to try and stop it?” Mordecai asked as the Inquisitor turned back around.

“That’s not your concern,” she replied bluntly: so far as he knew, ‘Chief Chastener von Draken’ had unlimited authority. He wasn’t wrong.

“How are you contacted by House Styme?” she asked, changing the angle of her interrogation.

“There is a dataslate at my hab-pod,” he told her plainly. “They… they contact me wirelessly through it with instructions and tell me to commit it to memory. When it’s done, I erase the message.”

“Do you confirm receipt?”

“No.”

“How do they know when you’ve carried out your instructions?”

“They don’t, but they send people to check on me every day.”

“When?”

“I…” he stammered, struggling with words, “I don’t… different times. They come at different times! I never know when they’ll be there. They never tell me anything either, they just…” he paused – his face wrinkling in discomfort; “They just *look*! They look at me. They don’t even speak!”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“The bald men,” he said, biting his lower lip. “They all look the same to me.”

“Are you saying they are the same people?”

“No,” Mordecai shook his head, “but… they could be. I mean, it’s hard to tell.”

The Inquisitor nodded along with his words, and she doubted he knew anything more about the bald men. To him they were just people he was ordered to work with. Anything more was beyond his need to know. Ultimately he was an unimportant piece in a much larger puzzle, and his unimportance meant that he could direct the Inquisitor only towards more means but not any ends.

“Where is your hab-pod,” Godwyn asked her last question, “and how do I access it?”

 

“Inquisitor…” Maxwell Constantine spoke up the moment Godwyn emerged from the room and closed the door behind her.

He and Spider had been watching the interrogation in its entirety form where it was displayed on the small greyscale pict-screen sitting atop the empty file cabinet, and from the stylus in the young man’s hand it looked as if he had been taking notes. Spider, on the contrary, had her hands shoved in her pockets, and continued to watch the grainy image of the bound prisoner with a disgusted look on her face.

“Inquisitor…” Constaine said again, standing before her with a pallid expression on his face though his eyes remained on hers.

“What is it?”

He preceded his words with a steady intake of breath. “Precinct sixteen,” he told her, “it’s locked down. It was before we made contact. We were told that several prisoners had been murdered.”

Spider was listening from across the room, but didn’t quit from looking at the image of Mordecai sweating and squirming in his chair.

“So we were too late,” Godwyn summarized. “So be it.”

“Orders, Inquisitor?” Constantine asked, his eyes only on her as he fidgeted with the stylus behind his back.

Intuition told the Inquisitor that there had been a disagreement between the youngest members of her team while she had been preoccupied, but Godwyn discarded the thought as unimportant in light of developments:

“Forget the precinct,” she told her logistician. “Take Tanner and Blackridge and search Mordecai’s hab-pod. I want that data-slate he mentioned.”

Constantine bowed his head stiffly – “Yes ma’am,” – an automatic response thanks to years of military service.

“Also,” she instructed him before he could carry out her orders, “liaise with Inquisitor von Draken about what has just happened, and see that Mr. Mordecai is handed over to her. We need her resources working with us in this.”

“Right away,” he turned on his heel and marched from the dimly lit basement chamber at top speed – Spider glaring at his back as he went.

“Interrogator – ”

The brown-haired woman with the spider tattoo on her face checked her temper at the sound of her mentor’s voice.

“ – your thoughts?”

Frowning, the younger woman dug her hands out of her pockets and folded her arms across her chest.

“If a noble house is involved in whatever is going on, then this runs a lot deeper than we thought,” she stated flatly, turning slowly to face her master and awaiting her approval.

“Indeed. What would you do if you were in my position?”

“I’m not in your position.”

“But if you were?”

Surrounded by rockrete walls, Spider did not meet the other woman’s eyes as they stood unmoving in the dank underground room. “I would investigate the prisoner’s claims against House Styme,” she replied. “Look for evidence.”

It was reasonable.

“Good,” the Inquisitor nodded slightly.

But reasonable was never enough: it needed to be absolute.

“Noble houses make powerful enemies,” Godwyn told her student, “but more than that, they are large and bloated institutions in their own right – ”

The younger woman’s face darkened in distaste.

“A steward doesn’t command that much loyalty either…”

“So it obviously goes higher!” Spider jumped to her conclusion a little too vehemently.

“But…” Godwyn continued, “just because our point of reference was a steward doesn’t mean it goes all the way to the top.”

The Interrogator appeared puzzled. “Even if they’re not traitors, their house is their responsibility. They’ll burn with the rest of it.”

“They will,” the Inquisitor agreed, motioning to her student that they were leaving, “but remember our reason for being here, and that an all-out purge is what we’re trying to avoid. Antagonizing a noble house would be counter productive.”

Following Godwyn out, the Interrogator appeared frustrated.

“We’ll see what comes of the banquet and the gathering of the nobles,” the Inquisitor told her as way of closure, “and in the meantime we’ll prepare to act.”

The student conformed to the wishes of the master and there was silence between them for a time until Godwyn changed the subject:

“What was it you argued with Constantine about?” she asked as she led the way up a narrow flight of stairs.

“He’s an idiot!” her student replied hotly but honestly. “He’s got it in his head that the whole Imperium is just like the Navy, and that you can’t so much as s*** without someone giving you permission!”

Godwyn had to chuckle. “A lot of military people are like that, especially the good ones.”

“Nerf wasn’t like that.”

The thought made her pause – so much so that she almost stopped when she reached the top of the stairs. Did she really want to talk of this?

Spider was silent.

“Nerf was different,” Godwyn put it mildly.

“Yeah,” the young woman agreed; “He was better.”

 

* *

 

Early in her career Meredith had often fantasized of being a triage doctor serving on the front lines of Mankind’s never-ending conquest of the stars. She’d pictured herself there in the heat of the action, swimming in the commotion, as wounded were brought in by the truck-load and medicaes swirled through the cramped confines of field hospitals like men possessed. Where life and death hung in the balance, where the crux of victory weighed upon the shoulders of every man and woman, where the blood on your hands matched the sweat on your brow, and where a day only ended when you slumped with exhaustion against a cracked wall and hung your head to sleep as the man-killing machine of war marched ever on. It was in places like that – in the hell-holes of the universe – that differences were forgotten, procedures and processes fell apart, and where real medicine came into its own. When you were there you had meaning and purpose, and in the bloody aftermath were forged the tightest bonds of friendship and trust.

Naturally, Meredith never made it there. She’d spent too much time dreaming about it, and not enough time working towards it, that when the time came to pursue her fantasies she instead found herself struggling with surgical qualifications and alcoholism on a central planet sectors away from the nearest conflict zone.

That fantasy came and went, but twenty years later she was still doing medicine and was finally starting to make a name for herself at the medicae academies while struggling from one complicated relationship to the next. She specialised in triage wards and became a well-known diagnostician across the world. It was around that time she was asked to teach, though she refused for personal reasons and continued to work in the bustling environment of the wards. Some months later Godwyn found her, and, though their initial contact had been fairly brief, the doctor made enough of an impression that the next time the Inquisitor came to see her it was with an offer she could not refuse.

The fantasy, it seemed, had not gone far after all.

For the most part, Meredith had thought she’d seen just about everything there was to see as a doctor, and that service under an Inquisitor wouldn’t be all that different than a day in the ward – other than the more elaborate locales and limitless resources, of course. She had, after-all, seen numerous gunshots, stab-wounds, incinerations, explosions, and all sorts of other nasty mutilations in her time – every doctor on an Imperial world had – but she had not anticipated that the real difference would be in the patients.

Zero, for one, was nothing like she’d ever seen in a triage ward.

 

“Up and about already?” the doctor asked, a cup of caffeine in one hand and a pastry in the other but both temporarily forgotten as she strolled back into her lab to see the seven-foot-something woman on her feet and examining the contents of the medicine cabinets Meredith had so lovingly stocked.

Meredith had been out of the room for less than two minutes to fetch herself a snack, and, when she’d left, Zero had been waiting calmly on the operating table for the synth-flesh to set.

The assassin passed an indifferent glance in her direction; “I find your skills adequate,” she replied airily, closing one cabinet door and opening another – ducking slightly to see what was inside, “I am well.”

“I can see that…” Meredith said with a nod, putting her cup down on a countertop and balancing the sugary pastry on the rim, “though you can feel free to cover up… you never know when Lee might barge in sans pants.”

Puzzled, the assassin looked down at her chest.

The body glove was peeled back like the skin off a fruit, and the upper portion hung around her waste so the empty sleeves almost touched the floor. Underneath her clothes, Zero was… substantial, to put it lightly, and Meredith could help but feel awkwardly inadequate while the other woman’s ‘assets’ were just out there for everyone to see.

Sensing the doctor’s meaning, or perhaps realizing her own mistake, Zero covered up – moving gingerly as the synthetic skin covering her wound was still tender.

“Good job,” Meredith commented with an appeasing smirk, “I’ll tell Lee that he needn’t get excited.”

The killer said nothing in return, and Meredith picked up her caffeine and pastry with the righteous intent to enjoy both to the fullest. Zero, however, decided to watch her, and sat on the operating table so that her toes brushed the laboratory floor – her eyes lingering on the doctor as she slurped and munched in the now oppressive silence.

The assassins were different, that much was obvious by even looking at them, but underneath the skin was where the real divergence began – so much so that Meredith began to wonder if they could even be considered human to begin with.

The lasblast from close range had punctured Zero’s left lung and, like most las-wounds she had seen, caused instant cauterization of soft tissue. This led to inflammation and swelling, which in turn was responsible for crippling pain within the victim as the swollen tissues put pressure on other organs and expanded into cavities.

All of this had happened within Zero, though the swelling appeared minimal and the lung managed to function normally.

To a normal human this would have been excruciating – every breath causing the damaged tissue to grate against the ribs and surrounding organs – but to the assassin the discomfort appeared minimal: she walked into the doctor’s lab and onto the operation table under her own power, and, even during surgery, required little in the way of pain suppressants. It was surprising, to say the least, and Meredith had originally chalked it up to the woman’s grit and fortitude, but upon operation she found the reason to be a result of modified physiology. Tissue surrounding the wounded area had been completely unaffected despite the localised swelling, and, while Zero still displayed sensory reception within other parts of her body, the wounded area seemed totally inured to any type of feeling. During the surgery, the giant woman felt nothing at all – Meredith had even run a few redundant tests just to be sure.

For all intents and purposes, the giant’s physiology appeared able to generate its own local anaesthetic, though whether it was a conscious or automatic response was unknown – as was whether or not the opposite was also possible through increased sensory reception.

“You are looking at me, doctor.”

It was a pointed observation in response to Meredith’s staring at Zero for over a minute and chewing on the same piece of pastry like some kind of bovine.

“What?” she swallowed, blinking, and hastily averting her gaze as she took a hearty swig from her steaming caffeine – scalding her throat in the process and coughing so that trickles of the dark liquid ran down her chin.

“You don’t like me, doctor,” she continued with the subtlety of throwing a brick through a window. “You think me repulsive.”

Meredith wiped the caffeine from her chin on the back of her sleeve and took another monstrous mouthful from the rapidly disappearing pastry. The assassin was staring at her with those large, honey coloured eyes. Meredith tried to laugh – the resulting snort making her sound like some kind of hog with its snout full of dough.

“Nog true!...” she said through her food, storing her mouthful in her cheeks like a rodent so she could get words through while levelling a finger fearlessly at the assassin’s chest; “With a rack like that,” she said, pausing for breath, “repulsive doffn’t even enter my mind. Wiff that kind of endowment, I could get any man in the Imperium, but you, you jush waste it!”

Zero narrowed her eyes – silently calling Meredith’s bulls*** – and her lips curled into a frown even though she remained unthreateningly seated.

“F***,” the doctor complained, taking another drink from her mug, though this time being careful not to overdo it. “The best tits have the worft attitudes. And I’ve seen a lotta tits!”

The killer wasn’t buying it, but something drew her attention away and allowed the smaller woman a momentary respite. “We have a visitor,” she announced flatyly.

Swallowing her last chunk of pastry, Meredith craned her neck around to look over her shoulder and beheld the welcome sight of Stone standing in her doorway.

“Iliad!” she may have sounded too relieved, and the Mordian cast a disgruntled glance in her direction; “Good of you to stop by! What’s up!?”

At the door, the Mordian looked more pissed off than usual.

“Word’s just come down from on-high,” he said, not moving into the room from where he stood. “I assume you’ve heard?”

Meredith rose from her seat, pivoting on the spot to face the ex-Iron Guardsman. Zero stayed where she was on the operating table, but looked at the powerfully built man with a curious air.

“No. What’s going on?”

If possible, the expression on Stone’s face turned from ‘pissed off’ to ‘even more pissed off’, and he leaned his shoulder heavily into the door-frame.

“You’re gonna love this,” he said to the doctor, “according to the Inquisitor, we’re to be married.”

[Aqui]

:D A good long story to finish my Birthday with (I'm starting to know how Iacton Qurze "The half heard" felt like <_< )

 

I'm loving Illiad's reaction at the end ^_^

[Brother-Sergeant Bohemond]

another great update, as per usual :blink:

 

Poor Illiad :o

[Azekai]

Great stuff as always, Lady Canoness! Can't wait for the next installment . . .

[Lady_Canoness]

Thanks gents, and happy birthday Aquilanus!

 

We're nearing the tipping point of Inquisition IV, after which things start coming together and getting a whole lot faster as we roll towards the conclusion! What will happen? I dunno... What do you want to happen? I dunno either... kinda wish I did :P

[Lady_Canoness]

A touch shorter, but you see where I am leading this...

 

 

_______________________

 

*Part 13*

 

With the banquet in one day’s time, marriage was an idea cooked up by Inquisitor Godwyn in order to give her eyes and ears amongst the nobles. The Noble House of Godwyn was large with many distant cousins and relations stretched across Acre, and, while the Inquisitor herself oversaw the banquet in a more official capacity, Meredith and Stone would take up the role of a third cousin and his wife and mingle on the floor without drawing unwarranted attention. The marriage was a clever cover and would last only for a day, but one day being married to Stone was better than no days, and Meredith was taking her wifely duties very seriously.

“Oh, Iliad, it’s just marvellous!” she squealed, holding the ballroom dress against her body and modelling it in front of a full-sized mirror. “Don’t you think it brings out my eyes?”

Standing somewhere near the back of the suite with Constantine as he waited for his turn for the tailor to fit him with a dining suit, the Mordian looked grim.

“Fantastic,” he said, dropping the words onto the floor like a rotten fish.

Glancing anxiously at Stone, the tailor – a small man with thinning blonde hair and a pot for a belly – bustled over and bade Meredith model yet another dress, to which she was only to happy to comply – tossing the dress on top of the slowly growing pile of discarded clothes.

“How about this one?” she held up a puce dress with a lattice bodice of fine golden threads and a slender collar that closed underneath her chin while leaving her arms bare.

They’d been at it for the past hour with Stone and Meredith posing as husband and wife in a suite just several stories below the penthouse while Maxwell Constantine played as the head butler attending them away from their estate. Acting was something new to all of them, but for the time being it seemed to be passable with the tailor truly believing that he was serving the lower-ends of nobility.

Meredith flashed the dress a few more times from different angles – doing her best to please her ‘husband’ – but Stone merely grunted something along the lines of ‘alright’.

Seemingly upset, Meredith discarded her dress, and beseeched the tailor to bring her another – the little man’s face growing redder and redder with embarrassment as his best garments were steadily turned aside.

“M’lord, may I have moment of your time?” Constantine asked from his place beside the Mordian, and upon a grunt of approval led the other man from the room to where they were out of earshot in another part of the suite. “Can you try a little harder?” he demanded, turning on him once they had stepped into a small side room furnished with two armchairs and a glass coffee table. “This will never work if you keep acting like that!”

Unmoved, Stone regarded the logistician with a flat expression. “You ever been married, son?” he asked.

Folding his arms, Constantine shrugged. “No, I haven’t,” he replied, and why should it matter? his face added what words did not.

The Mordian grunted, nodding once or twice. “Well I have,” he replied, then got right up in the young man’s face with a steady hiss; “so don’t lecture me on how to act. This is exactly how a married couple would look.”

There was silence as they studied each other’s resolve.

“Now,” Stone continued, taking a step back and indicating that they should return to Meredith and the pot-bellied tailor, “let’s go back in there before the girly-man decides that my butler is not really my butler and that something shady is going on. Got it?”

 

* *

 

By day’s end the team was prepared, and at Godwyn’s request they assembled in the penthouse kitchen for a last minute briefing before turning in for the night. Decaffeinated drinks were provided as well as a few light snacks, and, after everyone had had their fill and taken their places on stools and chairs around the room, the Inquisitor began her briefing by leaning over a blueprint of the Godwyn Estate.

“By now, I have spoken to all of you about your roles come tomorrow,” she said, looking around the room at each of them in turn, “and you all know why it is this is of the utmost importance.”

Silence: all eyes were on her.

“Tomorrow afternoon we have an opportunity to eavesdrop on Acre’s nobility. The refugee crisis is on their minds, and it’s up to each of us to see how it is they are involved and what it is that motivates their involvement.”

A few of her agents around the room exchanged glances, but most remained fixed on the Inquisitor.

“House Styme is of particular interest to us, but I want absolute certainty of their involvement prior to any moves being made against them. Understood?”

“Understood,” the word echoed back to her from around the kitchen.

“Good,” the Inquisitor gave a satisfied nod, “so let’s go over once again what we’re doing: Spider and Constantine – ” she looked to her Interrogator and logistician who were standing at opposite sides of the room, “ – you are tasked with running communications throughout the operation.”

Spider passed a sullen glance in the young man’s direction that went unnoticed by him.

“You’ll be in Meridian, and all communications will be routed through the nest. Out of everyone, you’ll be the ones to have the complete picture, so it is your responsibility to make sure everyone is appraised. Clear?”

“Quite clear,” Constantine replied with a nod.

“Good,” Godwyn continued, “Lee – ” the pilot was ready and waiting, “ – your role in this should be obvious. I want Meridian airborne and on hand in case we need a rapid extraction. I don’t think it will come to that, but I want you there just in case.”

“Go’ it, boss,” Lee agreed.

Next were Meredith and Stone; “You’re responsible for being eyes and ears on the floor with the nobles,” she told them. “You are to mingle and observe. Your outfits are modified with surveillance and tracking device that Constantine and Spider will be able to see and hear everything you do. You’ll also be given deployable surveillance bugs to plant once you’re inside. Security sweeps will pick up a few, but nobles are notorious for spying on each other so you shouldn’t worry about it blowing your cover. Any questions?”

Meredith raised her hand, and Godwyn indicated that she should speak her mind.

“Won’t they have things in place to avoid being spied on?” she asked.

“They will,” the Inquisitor agreed, “though by tomorrow I’ll have a way for you to get around that.”

Stone had the next question: “What happens if we need backup?”

“Mercy, Zero, and I will be in the House Security Command Centre,” Godwyn explained, pointing a finger to one of the places on the blueprints. “We’ll have eyes on you at all times and can deploy House Security Forces if the need arises. Also, Inquisitor von Draken of the Ordo Hereticus has placed two storm trooper squads on stand-by if we need anything more.”

It was a lot of firepower for a simple espionage operation, and Stone seemed satisfied.

“Any more questions?” Godwyn asked, but none were forthcoming. This was the second time she had explained everyone’s duty, and by now it was starting to stick. “Good,” she continued when the kitchen was silent. “As I mentioned, I will be on site in direct control of the operation. Anything and everything that we have not already discussed goes through me. Do you understand?”

They did.

“Good,” she concluded, and dismissed them to get a good night’s rest.

 

* *

 

Godwyn stayed awake as her team retired to their respective quarters, and when the penthouse was dark and quiet she seated herself in the comfy chair in front of Constantine’s communications terminal and entered the primer for an old friend. The display monitors flickered and clicked as her command was carried-out, and stream of numbers flashed across the screen for a split second before once again fading to black.

+“Patroclus,”+ a voice she did not recognize announced in a strong tone accented with static.

“Shipmaster, please,” Godwyn replied, sinking deeper into Constantine’s padded leather seat and kneading the bridge of her nose between the human fingers of her left hand. Suddenly she felt weary, like a heavy weight was pushing down upon her shoulders. She felt old.

+“Will you identify, please?”+ the voice asked. She entered the command into the console to decode the terminal’s broadcast encryption with a wave of her metal fingers. +“Thank you,”+ the voice said after a moment’s pause. +“I’ll see if the ship’s master can accept your call.”+

“Thank you,” Godwyn closed her eyes and sighed. Everything was quiet now besides the clicking of the comms. terminal, and through the darkness she fancied she could hear the rain pattering against the windows.

+“Cassandra!”+ the voice of Hercule Columbo, master of the Patroclus, emerged from the communicator’s vox-grill. +“What a pleasant surprise!”+

“It’s good to hear your voice as well,” she replied with a soft smile even though they could not see one-another. “How are you this evening?”

+“Oh, I am well, quite well,”+ he said, but there was just enough hesitation in his words for the Inquisitor to guess that he wasn’t being entirely truthful. +“Just having a few drinks over a game of regicide, in fact… though I’m very glad you called. What is it I can do for you?”+

The Patroclus was sitting idle in Acre’s orbit, and, though Columbo was accustomed to staying on hand when the Inquisitor was planetside, the governor’s decree halting all non-essential passage to-and-from orbit meant that the trader and many other men like him were being slowly bled dry. After all, the heresy on the planet below was known only to the Inquisition and the highest ranking officials in the governor’s house; to everyone else the edict was seen as an abrupt and excessive attempt at stemming the tide of refugees. Numerous ship captains had already lifted anchor and departed – taking their business with them – while many others tried to trade amongst themselves, or with the dozens of refugee ships that arrived daily in a feeble attempt to turn a profit. Still others had turned to smuggling and risked arrest or being shot down while attempting to land at unregistered landing sites across the planet’s surface.

It was widely acknowledged that the situation in orbit was becoming desperate, and many hypothesised that it would only be a matter of days until the crisis in the skies overcame the crisis on the ground.

“Something is bothering you, Hercule,” Godwyn interjected upon her old friend’s question, reflecting upon the growing plight in orbit with arched fingers; “Pray tell, what is it?”

+“Ha!”+ the old man forced a laugh; +“Indeed, indeed, fair Cassandra – I do suppose I am a fool for trying to hide something from you?”+

With that Godwyn agreed, and at her bidding the Shipmaster continued;

+“I must confess that I wish we were able to have this conversation face-to-face,”+ he said, his voice holding a hint of sadness, +“for you have been like a daughter to me, and, well, I think I owe you such a courtesy.”+

The Inquisitor listened in silence.

+“Cassandra, do you recall when, shortly after we first met, I told you of my dream to set out across the uncharted stars?”+

“Yes,” she said softly, “I remember.”

The old man sighed; a slow, deep breath. +“Well, my dear, I think it has come to that time. Cassandra, I wish to retire.”+

Alone in the dark of the penthouse, Godwyn felt a chill run down her spine, and around her the sound of falling rain grew louder.

+“Cassandra, are you still there?”+

“I am here,” she replied quietly, “and Hercule… I respect your wishes. You may retire from my service. Please, find what it is you are looking for amongst the stars.”

+“Well…”+ the trader tried to inject some spirit back into their conversation with a subtle laugh now that it had taken a solemn twist, +“no need for such finality! I shan’t dream of leaving you until your business here is concluded… I am not so poor a friend that I would abandon you mid-assignment!”+

The Inquisitor smiled; “No, I suppose you’re not,” she said genuinely, “though I do expect you to throw a party prior to your departure.”

+“Indeed – and it shall be the finest one to ever grace my halls!”+

“Good. I’m glad to hear that I won’t be rid of you without one last trespass upon the hospitality of your liquor cabinets.”

+“Oh no, my dear,”+ Columbo sounded genuinely joyful, +“though I must confess that I considered asking you to join me on my little adventure.”+

“It so happens that you asked me thirty years ago.”

+“So I did, though I take the liberty of assuming your respectful refusal, and will not force you to decline my invitation publicly.”+

“Very thoughtful of you.”

+“I tend to think so, yes.”+

Godwyn grinned. Small-time chit-chat with her old friend had a way of bringing her down from her pedestal and helped her feel human again, for it happened within the Inquisition that men and women tended to become entangled with duty and lose sight of themselves and others. This path ultimately led to destruction, and time and again Inquisitors throughout history demonstrated that the path to damnation was paved with devotion to duty. Losing sight of oneself meant losing perspective, and when one lost perspective one found it more difficult to discern right from wrong; friend from foe. The great Inquisitor Eisenhorn was said to have met his downfall in such a way, and Godwyn had witnessed the corruption of Inquisitor Roth and Inquisitor Brand first-hand, not to mention the tragedy that had befallen her own mentor more than thirty years ago. It was a common failing – to question the enemy but not question oneself – and it was one that she fought ceaselessly to resist.

+“But you wished to speak with me,”+ Hercule Columbo brought her back on track after diverting her attention elsewhere, +“how may I be of service?”+

“It’s almost ironic,” the Godwyn replied, leaning forward in her seat as if concealing a conspiracy, “but I wish to invite you to a banquette…”

+“Is that so?”+ the wizened trader was intrigued. +“You know how I am at parties.”+

“I do,” the Inquisitor admitted, “in fact, I’m counting on it.”

How could he refuse?