The Inquisition War (48 page)

Plausible, plausible. The story was plausible.

On board
Tormentum Malorum
– on board the
Scourge of Evil –
was a certain drug named Veritas which could force a person to tell the truth...

‘Enough!’ snapped Jaq. ‘Enough about your Grizzle and your Johanna! We’ve lost our Navigator. Googol’s dead, or at least his body is—’

‘We need a new Navigator, boss.’

We need a new one. The three of us. Wasn’t this mockery of a little family now reunited?

‘I know where one’s hiding. I’d have told you sooner – but the news about Vitali ripped me up inside...’

And besides, Grimm had had his alibi to recount. ‘In fact me and my mates helped him hide. We gave him a trike-ride out of the teeth of a mob.’

Meh’lindi asked through her throat-plug: ‘Wasn’t his warp-eye exposed to protect him?’

‘He’s weird about his warp-eye, this one is.’

Weren’t most Navigators weird in one way or another? To stare into the warp thrust weirdness upon them, and wrinkled their faces even while young.

From the wrecked doorway of the polluted shrine the autoguns of Grimm’s cronies erupted. Caseless ceramic shot flew along the Lane of Loveliness at high velocity. From out of the veil of smoke a gang of cultists were rushing towards the shrine – scores of frenzied marauders. They were being egged on by a blonde woman who wore thigh-high boots and a scanty leotard of black rubber hung with obscene trophies. She was waving a laspistol. Her hands weren’t claws, but her eyes, lavishly framed by mascara, looked so slanted and oval that surely they were a mark of daemonry beginning to manifest itself. How else could she have been attracted towards this already vandalized shrine unless something evil had sensed the presence here of a psyker who had already exorcized a daemonette and who had discharged his force rod at the spectre in the sky?

Several cultists fell, ripped by shot. The woman shrieked: ‘Who killsh him, enjoysh me! Who enjoysh me, killsh!’

Jaq had dashed to the doorway by now, Grimm had scrambled back on to his trike alongside his kin. Grimm swung the handlebars to and fro as he opened fire from the forks. All three squats cut swaths through those crazed devotees of corruption. Trike-mounted autoguns weren’t an accurate or subtle weapon. Would anyone wish to confront a rabid mob with precision sniper rifles? Numerous onrushers survived – almost as if they were protected by auras of invulnerability. Bullets and scattershot were twanging off the ceramic portal, impacting in the dangling door, winging through into the interior of the shrine.

A squat shrieked and clawed at shrapnel in his eye. A bullet took him in the throat. Blood burbled. Gagging, he slumped from his saddle.

Jaq was firing over Grimm’s shoulder.
RAARK-pop-swoosh, RAARK-pop-swoosh.

The blonde in the boots and rubber leotard was way behind her wild enthusiasts. She wasn’t advancing but dancing from side to side. If anyone wore an aura of invulnerability, it was she. Over the crackle and crumple of fire, and the screaming and the bellowing, she could still be heard shrieking: ‘Killsh, enjoysh!’

Deranged faces loomed closer. The attackers’ guns were spitting. The other squat tumbled, his face a ruin. Several bullets smashed into Jaq, ripping his habit, stiffening his mesh armour. Grimm crouched lower as he fired. Flush with the tiled door-jamb, Meh’lindi took aim at the blonde again. Because of that woman’s unpredictable jinks Meh’lindi had missed twice already. What could be more galling for an assassin than to miss her target? Meh’lindi began to squeeze the trigger. Then she closed her eyes. She was willing upon herself a calming condition of firing-in-the-dark. It was as if millennia of tradition gathered around her in that moment. Her hand twitched. Her finger tightened. The gun launched its toxic needles.

And the blonde danced. Now her dance was one of muscles puffing every which way, of a body vibrating with lethal contradictions. The blonde’s eyes bulged. Her mouth frothed. She was quivering jelly, sustained for a moment more by her rubber corset and her boots. And then the bag of jelly, hung with its scrotal fetishes, slumped.

The onrush subsided. It was if puppet strings had snapped. Some attackers stumbled onward almost in slow motion. Grimm’s autoguns yakkered. Meh’lindi squeezed laser pulses one by one.
RAAARK-pop-SWOOSH-thud-CRUMP,
spake Jaq’s boltgun.

A few survivors were scuttling away. Otherwise: corpses. Some fallen bodies shuddered with fatal injury, moaning, whimpering. Meh’lindi stepped past the trikes and terminated the injured with stabs of her finger into the neck.

‘Buggers are blocking our wheels,’ grumbled Grimm.

Meh’lindi was already hauling bodies to right and left to clear a path. She seized collars or hair. She yanked. All the time, she glanced about her in case a threat remained.

Grimm knelt briefly by his fallen kin.

‘Huh,’ he addressed one, as if the puff of his breath was sacramental. ‘Go with our ancestors, and goodbye.’ He didn’t bother to close the squat’s remaining, gaping, bloodshot eye.

‘Huh,’ he said to the other. Then he turned to Jaq. ‘I guess this solves the question of transport to find your Navigator. Always supposing that you and herself can cramp your long legs up sufficiently to ride a squattish trike!’ He eyed Meh’lindi. ‘Course, she can dislocate her bones if she feels like it.’

This was perfectly true. Meh’lindi could distort herself to crawl through a narrow twisty tube. However, legs out of joint would hardly be very effective for riding a power-trike.

Jaq stepped astride a trike. He settled himself. He drew up his knees.

‘I think we can manage,’ he said. ‘You’re only a dwarf, after all, not a midget.’

Grimm puffed himself up. He cast around for his forage cap. Failing to find that much-twisted hat, he acquired a replacement from one of his fallen friends.

Jaq’s ornamented black habit had by now definitely seen better days. Yet really, was this particular day better or worse than any other? Was any day anywhere, anywhen, better or worse? Throughout the Imperium millions of people were dying every second, so many were the worlds. Millions more people were being born, to die – in agony or anguish, in delirium or despair.

‘Father of All,’ prayed Jaq, ‘how can you endure?’

‘Huh,’ was Grimm’s response. He revved his trike, then he discarded his axe as too cumbersome. ‘Let’s find a fourth member for our godforsaken family.’

‘No,’ breathed Jaq, ‘not forsaken. Not by Him. Never.’

Not until the paralysed anguished immortal Emperor failed at last, unsustainable even by the perpetual sacrifice of so many thousands of young psychic souls. Or until His multifold mind could no longer maintain its precarious equilibrium. Not until then! Yet perhaps the demise of divine protection was inevitable – unless a hydra in the head of everyone made mind-puppets of the whole of humanity, save for a cabal of controllers!

Jaq could almost sympathize with the supposed purpose of the conspiracy. If indeed that was its true purpose! Which he doubted...

Ach, their plan was treason in the extreme. It would transform the whole human race into raging puppets. How easily that plan might unleash a new and murderous Chaos god more terrible than any other, so that the warp would overwhelm all the worlds rather than contrariwise.

Where was there any sure salvation? Why, here in this boltgun named
Emperor’s Mercy
. And in the black force rod. And in Meh’lindi’s needle gun, and in her assassin’s sash. And in Jaq’s psychic vigilance.

FIVE

Warp-Eye

S
EVERAL BLOODY INCIDENTS
punctuated the zig-zag trike-ride across Caput City to the street where Grimm boasted, in a few sidelong grufflis, that he had “cached” the Navigator.

Cached, indeed. As if this was an act of prudent forethought on Grimm’s part! As if Grimm had anticipated that Vitali’s verses might have predisposed the Navigator to destruction by a daemonette.

Undoubtedly the squats’ assistance to that other Navigator hadn’t been merely an act of charity. If the insurrectionists won – who could say that they wouldn’t? – then more massacres would occur. Neighbouring cities must already be in a state of convulsion. Three abhumans could hardly have taken off into the desert on their trikes with any sure hope of survival pending an invasion by Imperial Guardsmen from some other solar system – in ten years’ time, or twenty, or never.

If exports from Luxus Prime resumed, maybe the new regime could blame Lord Lagnost himself for the slaughter of representatives of the Imperial priesthood, and judges and arbitrators – irrespective of those psychic cries of crisis sent by his astropath. Maybe it was really Lagnost who had been in rebellion? Aye, rebellion against the Imperium. Maybe the cries for assistance had been a pretence. Maybe Lagnost had been attempting to set himself up as an independent ruler of his rich world. Truth could be turned inside-out. Who other than Jaq was conscious of that brooding presence in the sky?

The rotten new regime – if capable of governing – would extend its tentacles and its daemonic claws to the mining world and its factory moon. If the three squats tried to return to the mines, why, they were witnesses of what had actually transpired on Luxus Prime. They would be snuffed out.

Their only escape route was to the stars. With most of the interstellar Navigators butchered, to have saved the life of a Navigator could serve the squats in good stead.

Cached
, ah yes. Grimm had used the right word after all.

A
RBITES IN DARK
uniforms and reflective visors were advancing against a radio station. The building was faced in lustrous majolica mosaic. A frieze above the entrance spelled out piously in golden letters: VOX IMPERATORIS. This would be a religious radio station. However, the “Emperor’s Voice” must now be broadcasting falsehoods. Twisting towers soared overhead, corkscrews of orange and green enamelled tiling – the transmitter-aerials of the building. Sheets of plasteel barricaded the entrance.

Overturned vehicles littered the boulevard. The arbitrators availed themselves of these wrecks as cover. Those warriors of justice wouldn’t be greatly concerned with their own safety – especially if those glossy ceramic corkscrews overhead were transmitting blasphemies. Yet there were only a score of the mirror-helmeted men. To squander one’s life in such circumstances would be treason.

A shower of bullets and laser-pulses flew from the building. Several Arbites replied with krak grenades, fired from tubes clamped to the long barrels of lasguns. Pretty mosaic flew apart into tinier shards and sharp dust. Three arbitrators were wrestling a thermal cannon into position, bracing it in the wreckage of a limousine. That cannon was now close enough to the barricade to be effective.

Soon would come the sweet soft hiss of the cannon’s beam superheating the air in its path. Sheets of plasteel would begin to melt and slump. If any rebels exposed themselves, what a roar would arise as their bodily fluids suddenly vaporized.

Jaq and Grimm and Meh’lindi had skidded to a halt.

‘Damn,’ grumbled Grimm. ‘The way’s blocked.’

Mirrored visors turned in their direction. Lasguns with launcher tubes swung round.

‘In the Emperor’s name!’ bellowed Jaq. ‘
Ego inquisitor sum!
’

Just then, a squad of men in mustard-yellow tunics came rushing from an alley. They were brandishing shotguns. Tattoos on their cheeks were scarlet, as if each had been bitten and lost a gobbet of flesh. The tattoo was of some bloody-hued bird of prey.
Lagnost’s Hawks
, these ones! And covert cultists! They began to blast solid shells at the Arbites, and in the direction of the trikes. As the trio ducked, shells flew past.

Another mustard-squad with bloody cheeks arrived by a different route. Arbitrators fired las-pulses at those newcomers, killing a couple, before their true loyalties became apparent. This second squad weren’t rebels at all.

From around the side of the radio station, there clanked a tracked vehicle mounted with twin autocannons. Faded runes and rust mottled its antique armour. Smoke belched from its exhausts. Its engine coughed. The autocannons were much more pristine. Their long barrels sported rows of vanes to radiate away the heat of rapid firing, vanes like the backplates of some saurian predator. Muzzles protruded from fanged mouths wrought of plasteel. The vehicle’s cleats crushed tessellated paving. It swung to bear upon that thermal cannon in the limousine. Gunners upon the autocannon carriage let fly a high-velocity hail of shells. Shells ricocheted like stones skipping across a frozen river.

Evidently the rebels in the radio station had broadcast for assistance against the arbitrators.

The limousine erupted as fuel in its tank exploded. One arbitrator soared many metres through the air. The thermal cannon twisted upwards. Heedless of the blaze, another threw himself into the burning wreckage – so as to discharge the thermal cannon at least once, if the weapon was still capable of functioning. Even though the arbitrator’s uniform caught fire, his visor and gauntlets offered brief protection to face and hands. His lungs must be roasting.

That sweet hiss...