The Inquisition War (30 page)

‘I wasn’t, um, especially requesting to be challenged. Not in that sort of way, at any rate! Not that I don’t welcome opportunities... But Vitali Googol versus the whole of the solar system’s defence network, um, right, very well...’

‘This flight could become legendary,’ hinted Grimm. ‘You might compose a praise-song about your piloting.’ Meh’Lindi smiled bleakly. ‘Alternatively, a suicide ode.’

‘First,’ said Jaq, ‘we must jettison that trunk of hydra. Set it on a lazy course into a blazing sun. The blue one hereabouts should serve the purpose as well as any.’

‘That’s your only proof, boss. The hydra’s your evidence.’

‘Do you think I would dream of smuggling that into the heart of the Imperium? Imagine the hydra let loose in the bowels of our birthworld, in the headquarters of humanity. Impossible!’

Nevertheless, he reflected, some of the substance of the hydra would travel all the way to Earth notwithstanding. Some was subtly hidden within Meh’Lindi’s own body, incorporated, neutralised.

He imagined Meh’Lindi confined in a dungeon of his Ordo. He imagined her stretched out and opened like a toad in a daemonological laboratory of the Malleus, being investigated, probed to destruction, first of her mind, then of her flesh. His mind rejected this vision, though not before her troubled gaze had met his.

SIXTEEN

T
HE
E
YE OF
Terror lay far out near the fringe of the galaxy, to the galactic north-west, in a region as lonely as Jaq sometimes felt himself to be these days. His spirits were hardly raised when Grimm almost deserted ship mid-way to Terra...

The squat had insisted that the distance was simply too great to attempt in one warp-jump with the fuel remaining in the tanks of the
Tormentum
.

He was undoubtedly right. Vitali Googol should have been the one to point this out. Indeed the Navigator insisted that he would have done so just as soon as their ship had left the system of the blue sun, just as soon as
Tormentum
was running, storm-tossed, through the warp once more.

Did Googol in his heart wish to obstruct their flight to Earth by limiting their options as to a refuelling stop – so that they might be obliged to call at some major base where awkward questions could be asked, or agents of the cabal could strike at them more easily?

Worse still, was Googol’s attitude becoming cavalier? Did he not care whether they were marooned or not? The Navigator protested, in a hurt tone, at Jaq’s semi-accusation.

From tortured snatches of verse that Jaq overheard subsequently, it seemed that the memory of that beringed giantess was preying on their poet’s mind, eroding his romantic soul like acid, for reasons which Jaq only half comprehended and thought it wiser not to pry into. Had Queem Malagnia represented some sort of anti-ideal to Googol, some appalling pattern of sexuality which haunted him even as he tried to reject and purge it, failing to?

What romantic formula could he possibly fit Queem into? If he did not do so, how could he forget her? How could he come to terms with forsaking the dark lusts of that corporeal, living city – in the way that he had come to terms with never attaining Meh’Lindi?

This depressed Jaq.

They aimed for a lone red dwarf star named Bendercoot, a thousand light years inward towards Segmentum Solar. Records listed Bendercoot as parent to only four small rocky worlds, all uninhabited. The outermost hosted a minor orbital dockyard for Imperial Navy and trader vessels. The gravity well wasn’t deep: a mere two days to travel inward from the safe jump-zone, two days to travel outward again.

It was to be hoped that this dockyard hadn’t been destroyed by alien attack or abandoned; records could be centuries out of date. Failing Bendercoot, the travellers had at least three other obvious options – ports on minor routes they could call at. Jaq hoped that Googol was navigating faithfully, and cursed himself for his doubts.

However, the millennium-old dockyard was still circling Bendercoot IV. An Imperial cruiser was moored upon it: a cluster of fretted, fluted towers linked by flying buttresses studded with death’s heads. Also, a pocked, patched, bulbous old freighter. Grimm, who had spent further long hours fine-tuning, then polishing,
Tormentum
’s engines, went “ashore” inside the orbiting dock to convey a satchel of rare metals for payment and to “sniff the air”, so he said.

Came the hour for their departure, Grimm was still missing.

‘Shall I go and seek him out?’ asked Meh’Lindi.

Jaq stared from the porthole across a scalloped plain of metal bristling with gantries and defensive weapons blisters. Bright-lit towers cast groove-like shadows. This was a minor dockyard, yet doubtless it housed many kilometres of internal corridors and halls. The fuel and oxygen tubes had already snaked away.

‘
Sapphire Eagle
, clear for departure,’ crackled a radio voice. ‘Human purity be yours.’

‘Be yours too,’ replied Jaq. ‘We’ll hold for half an hour.’ To Meh’Lindi he said, ‘If he’s in any trouble, that could snare us.’

‘He left the engines in good trim,’ said Googol. ‘I’ll miss the little tyke.’

‘Do you believe he has skipped ship, Vitali?’

‘Maybe he doesn’t feel much like diving down the throat of a tiger... I don’t know much about the protocols of you inquisitors but you’re probably posted as a renegade by now.’

The journey to the Eye and then the return to Terra, though measured in weeks of warp time, would have cost Jaq years of real time. Once it was certain that Jaq was heading towards the Eye with Carnelian in pursuit, an astropath could have signalled Earth instantly, using Malleus codes. Perhaps the Harlequin man even had his own tame astropath aboard
Veils of Light
. He had made sure that he murdered Jaq’s star-speaker, Moma Parsheen.

Bael Firenze was powerful. Obispal, on the other hand... he could be netted and forced to confirm Jaq’s story. Obispal might be anywhere in the galaxy.

They waited.

For fifteen minutes.

Twenty.

Twenty-five.

‘Prepare to leave, Vitali.’

Jaq had valued the squat. Jaq had spoken in defence of abhumans... Now the squat was betraying him. Although this was only a trivial betrayal compared with the cosmic treachery planned by the cabal, yet it still stung.

Jaq himself might need to betray Meh’Lindi by handing her over to the Malleus laboratories. If Meh’Lindi suspected this, would she still remain loyal, girded by her assassin’s oaths?

At the twenty-eighth minute Grimm bustled back aboard.

‘Sorry, boss,’ he said. ‘Thanks for waiting. I met some brothers. We got to drinking. Hey-ho, hey-ho.’

‘And off with them you thought you’d go?’ asked Jaq sadly.

Grimm didn’t exactly deny this, which at least was honest of him. ‘I feel the tug of kin, boss. I’m the roaming kind, but still...’

‘You thought you’d see whether our ship left without you, thus deciding the matter.’

‘Launching now,’ warned Googol.
Tormentum
began to pulse slowing away from the dock.

‘Huh, so you
were
going to abandon me!’ Grimm managed to inject a note of indignant reproach, at which Jaq couldn’t help but smile wanly.

‘Course, I also thought to myself:
Earth.
Likely never see Earth otherwise. See Earth and die, don’t they say?’

How true. How many shiploads of young psykers arrived on Earth, only to die. By some people the Master of Mankind was dubbed the Carrion Eater. Would he likewise consume Jaq?

‘Sorry, boss. Really!’

‘You did come back, Grimm, that’s the main thing.’

Squat, Navigator, assassin: which could Jaq be one hundred per cent sure of? He prayed not to fall victim to the paranoia of which Carnelian had accused him – or else his story, whenever he managed to tell it, might seem wholly unbelievable.

Was not paranoia a touchstone of sanity in this universe of enemies and deceit? Trust no one, not even yourself, he thought, for you, too, may stray from the pure path without even realising it.

Jaq fasted.

T
ERRA
.

All comm-channels burbled with vox traffic hours, minutes or seconds old. Astral frequencies would be quite as crowded with telepathic messages of even greater urgency, though such messages wouldn’t be time-lapsed by the speed limit of electromagnetic radiation. Long-distance radar registered the blips of hundreds of vessels heading in-system or climbing the last shallow incline out of the deep gravity-well of the Sun.

To scan even the approaches to the home system from beyond the outermost challenge-line would seem ample confirmation that the hub of the Imperium could never falter. Yet Jaq hardly needed to remind himself how warp storms had formerly isolated the home system from the stars for several thousand years. The first flowering of human civilisation throughout the galaxy had wilted, rotting into the cesspool of the Age of Strife. That earlier heroic age was eclipsed so utterly that it was now whelmed in obscurity. He hardly needed to remind himself that during the thirty-first millennium the possessed rebel warmaster Horus had laid waste to Luna and invaded Earth, breaking through to the very inner palace. The putsch was defeated, oh yes, but at what dire cost. Thereafter the wounded Emperor could only survive from grim millennium to grim millennium immobile in his prosthetic golden throne.

What Horus had almost accomplished by main force and using fighting machines of the Adeptus Mechanicus, Jaq hoped to finesse by guile – assisted by a lugubrious Navigator, a squat whose reliability was now in question, and an assassin whose thought processes increasingly puzzled him.

Jaq stabbed a finger at one particular blip on the radar screen. ‘Display that one, Vitali.’

Googol fiddled with the magniscope and brought a flying, dark castle into sharp focus. He gasped. ‘A Black Ship, inward bound, Jaq.’

‘Match its course. We’ll board it. Inquisition inspection.’

‘Won’t that be among the most vigilant of vessels?’

‘It’ll have been on tour for a year or so. If I’m on a black list of criminals I doubt that any resident inquisitor will know.’

Jaq spoke with a show of confidence. He was a Malleus man. Therefore let the Black Ship be carrying an ordinary inquisitor; this could work to Jaq’s advantage.

Inquisitors frequently travelled on Black Ships while the vessels traversed the galaxy, harvesting fresh young psykers. An inquisitor was extremely useful to the officers of a Black Ship who needed to test their human cargo and root out any malignant weeds en route. As Jaq knew only too well; for he had been similarly rooted out, not as a weed but as a precious flower, transplanted, advanced to greater things. He remembered Olvia. Many such as Olvia would be crowding the dismal dormitories of the Black Ship, their prayers crescendoing as the ship dipped ever closer to Earth, their spirits focusing mournfully upon the impending sacrifice of themselves. The oppressive psychic miasma inside such a vessel would provide a useful protective fog for Jaq.

‘What about
Tormentum
?’

‘Program her to head away beyond the jump zone under ordinary drive towards the comet halo, then just to drift. We’ll know roughly where she is, if we can ever rendezvous with her again.’

Googol nodded. Few ships strayed out beyond the jump zone. Ships were either in-system vessels, remaining within the confines of Sol space, or else they were interstellar – in which case they would dive into the warp as soon as they could.
Tormentum
could remain undetected, yet reachable aboard a conventional craft, offering an option for the unpredictable, dark future.

How
much
Jaq’s companions knew by now! They knew of the Ordo Malleus, of the cabal, of the hydra, of the Eye and of creatures of Chaos. More, much more, than ordinary mortals ought to know. If Jaq’s mission succeeded, his accomplices in it ought really to be mindscrubbed... Ought to be, as Marines were mindscrubbed after participating in a daemonic
exterminatus
; reduced to the condition of babies so as to safeguard their innocence and sanity. Or else honourably executed.

‘Meh’Lindi, I’d like to speak to you alone,’ said Jaq.

He walked ahead of her through the ebon corridor past twinkling niches to his own sleep-cell, which he cloaked in privacy. Memories of that other occasion when they had been alone together teased him turbulently, even though he knew that there could be no repetition of that exultant night. Nevertheless he yearned to know her true feelings.

‘Yes, inquisitor?’

‘You do realise, Meh’Lindi, that you’re the only repository of hydra hereabouts?’

‘Just as I knew,’ she replied, ‘that you would need to travel to Earth and would feel obliged to jettison that adamantine trunk.’

‘Was
that
why you ate some of the hydra? Not to protect yourself from it – so much as to preserve some trace?’

‘An assassin is an instrument,’ she said expressionlessly. ‘A wise instrument; yet still an instrument in the service of greater goals.’

‘You would give yourself to be tormented? Dissected?’ There: he had said it. He had confessed his guilty fear to his one-time mistress.