The Inquisition War (22 page)

‘Whose else do you think the hag’ll wear? Did she bring her own spacesuit in that little satchel, shrunken by magic?’

‘She has never worn such gear in her life.’

‘You want rid of her, yet you don’t want her to wear your suit.’

‘No, I do not! She might taint it psychically. Interfere with the protection runes.’

Grimm chortled. ‘Our inquisitor can exorcise and asperge and reconsecrate it afterwards.’

Obviously the squat didn’t place much faith in any such techno-theological procedures, the efficacy of which was perfectly evident to Jaq and to most right-minded people. Still, the little man seemed somehow to get by. Unconsecrated, he certainly wouldn’t survive in the warp!

‘I will bless all our armour beforehand,’ vowed Jaq. ‘Triply so, when we are about to undertake a short swim in the sea of souls! I will seal and sanctify. You, Moma Parsheen, world-slayer, will lead us to Carnelian. We will surprise him, net him, wring the juice of confession out of him.’

Jaq thought of the collapsible excruciator that any inquisitor carried, to extort information from the unwilling. It had rarely been his style to use that instrument. Even though the device was righteous, he felt a certain repugnance towards it.

Sometimes the whole galaxy seemed to reverberate with a sob of pain, a moan of anguish.

S
OON
J
AQ AND
Meh’Lindi were donning their stout suits of power armour and Grimm his smaller version of the same, while Googol disdainfully assisted Moma Parsheen into his own suit, his lips curled, as if he was packaging excrement.

Cuisses on to thighs... locking on to the hip girdle. Flared greaves on to shanks; magnetic boots locking into the greaves... ‘
Benedico omnes armaturas,
’ intoned Jaq. ‘
Benedico digitabula et brachiales, cataphractes atque pectorals.
’

Presently they were testing their sensor pick-ups, temperature regulators, air purificators...

TEN

L
IKE FOUR BLACK-CARAPACED
beetles decorated with protective runes, fluorescent red icons, and weapons pouches, Jaq and Meh’Lindi and little Grimm – who was tugging Moma Parsheen – jetted their way into a ruptured, cavernous hold. They hoped to maintain radio silence.

Junk of aeons hung aimlessly nearby: strange knobbly skulls of some humanoids reminiscent of irregular, cratered moonlets, an antique plasma gun half melted into slag, broken crates, and a buckled cage that was still confining a corpse dressed in a spotted leotard. A tumble of yellow silken hair suggested woman, though the long-exposed flesh was purple leather.

Their light beams played around the interior. Shadows jerked about. The corpse in the cage seemed to shift as if seeking release. In the deeps grim giant ghosts appeared to swell. This was all illusion.

Jaq carried on his suit a force rod, power axe and psycannon. The force rod, resembling some solid black flute embedded with enigmatic circuits, stored psychic energy so as to augment a psyker’s mental attack. Unknown aliens had crafted all such force rods which had fallen into the hands of the Imperium, most notably the cache found in the ice-caverns of Karsh XIII. Impervious to any probing, a rod never needed or offered the possibility of any overhaul, so it was perhaps the least adorned of all weapons. By contrast, the shaft of Jaq’s power axe was embossed with rococo icons, the pommel of that halberd was a brass ork skull, and complex purity seals embellished the power-pack to which a cable resembling a gem-serpent ran. The psycannon likewise was adorned with supernumerary ribs and moulded flanges painted with esoteric, exorcistic glyphs.

Jaq drew Meh’Lindi’s attention to the bio-scanner in its filigreed, jade-studded frame. A blotch of green light registered the psychic throb of life deep in the interior of the hulk. However, his scanner was fogged by emanations from the aspect of the hydra that was alive, almost masking the trace.

That pocket of life was plainly still some distance away, yet it was apparent to Jaq that the instrument was attempting to distinguish more than the single sharp blip that would represent Carnelian alone.

He held up his gauntlet questioningly, opening five fingers once... then twice.

Meh’Lindi signalled another ten possible presences far ahead, in her opinion. Maybe more.

When Jaq turned up the gain on his sensor, static flooded it. Too much interference from the hydra. To his annoyance the sensitive instrument failed like a night-flower wilting in too bright a light. He muttered an invocation but the machine’s soul had perished and did not revive.

Ever since entering the hulk, Jaq had been aware of daemonic shielding. While this relieved his mind in one regard – daemon spawn would be unable to home in and manifest themselves – the precaution piqued his curiosity afresh.

Jaq heartily disliked space hulks. It was well known how these sinister plasteel cadavers could house genestealer broods, adrift for centuries or millennia until a fluke of the warp vomited the derelict into truespace close to some vulnerable world.

Or they might shelter piratical degenerates who had become creatures of Chaos.

Loyal subjects of the Imperium always feared hulks. Imperial merchantmen traversing the warp would flee at the sighting of one. Space Marines were honour-bound to board a hulk, to cleanse any threat it posed, and to recover any valuable or enigmatic pieces of ancient technology from millennia earlier which might be encysted in the wreck like pearls held in a lethal clam.

Too often, the consequences of such boardings proved quite dire.

Where better, then, to hide the heart of some treacherous web of intrigue than in such a megavessel lost in the vastness of the warp, that all sane voyagers would shun?

The four intruders drifted through the hold. Half a dozen different black-mouthed corridors beckoned, angling away variously. Tentacles of the hydra protruded from two; stout soapy cables, undulating sluggishly.

Moma Parsheen pointed to a third, empty mouth. That direction corresponded with the earlier bearings for the green splotch of life signs.

H
AD IT NOT
been for the psychic tracer, they must surely have lost themselves in the labyrinthine entrails of what was not one vessel but many, some of these enormous in their own right.

They traversed sooty halls so crammed with long-dead machinery as to be mazes in themselves. They floated down dismal lift shafts; they mounted crazily angled corridors where friezes showed forgotten battles between impossible ships shaped like butterflies with wings of spectral energy. Other walls were gouged as if claws had ravaged them. Some walls glowed with runes. Their lights picked out the graffiti of long-dead people – prayers, curses, obscenities, threats – and what might have been messages in alien script or in the calligraphy of madness. In one zone a drift of loose bones, kippered limbs, and dehydrated heads suggested cannibalism.

At last, a functioning airlock admitted them into a section where a breathable atmosphere survived, and warmth. Survived? Ah no, thought Jaq. Where air and heat had been
restored
.

He raised his visor and breathed cautiously. Oxygen enough, a spike of ozone – and a hint of sensuous cloying patchouli, perhaps injected to mask the undertow of smouldering embers, as of charring insulation.

The others copied him, Grimm assisting Moma Parsheen.

‘He’s very close,’ the astropath commented dully.

Through a plascrystal port they gazed upon a vast hazy hangar lit by the occasional glowstrip.
Veils of Light
was berthed there, tethered magnetically. So were six other starcruisers. One, shaped like a terrestrial shark; another like a rippy-fish; a third like the sting of a scorpion. Jaq looked in vain through a lens for identification marks, badges, or names. All the usual safety runes, of course. Otherwise, so far as he could see, the vessels were anonymous, identities concealed. Servitors – half-human, half-machine – rolled to and fro, stepped like spiders across the hulls on sucker pads. The haze in the hangar was exhaust gas expelled during docking.

That shark ship reminded him—

A speaker crackled to life.

‘Welcome, Jaq Draco!’ That was Carnelian’s voice: part merry, part crazed. ‘Congratulations! You’re everything we hoped for.’

‘Who is we?’ Jaq shouted in response and promptly slammed his visor shut in case of gas attack. Meh’Lindi and Grimm followed his lead, and Meh’Lindi flipped the blind woman’s visor shut too.

Jaq drew his power axe. The assassin and the abhuman both favoured laspistols at this point. In the gravityless environment of the hulk any unexploded bolts or similar projectiles could ricochet unpredictably for a long time within a confined space.

‘All will be explained!’ came the voice, now over their audio pickups. ‘First, you must shed your armour and weapons. Especially, your assassin must divest herself of every tiny hidden trick. Except herself, of course! She’s the funniest trick of all.’ Carnelian giggled. ‘Do it now. You’re being scanned.’

Jaq switched on the magnetics in his boots to give him purchase for possible combat. Grimm and Meh’Lindi didn’t need to be told to do likewise.

‘Ah, you’re rooted to the spot!’ mocked the voice.

Moma Parsheen still floated blindly near the plascrystal port. Jaq gestured urgently ahead, and swung a boot forward.

At that very moment, from the air-gargoyles furthest away, fingers then arms of grey jelly erupted to interlace across the corridor. Behind the little party similar tentacles of hydra burst forth, blocking any retreat.

Jaq activated his power axe and strode forward. Meh’Lindi and Grimm flanked him, firing their lasers, slicing through the impeding arms.

Severed segments writhed and melted. Globules filled the air. Still more tentacles poured into the corridor – from every gargoyle now. The hydra’s substance reformed and repaired itself, recoagulating and stiffening even as Jaq hewed with his power axe and as his companions lasered.

A force greater than magnetism gripped Jaq’s feet. The floor was ankle-deep, knee-deep soon in viscid, melted and disjoined hydra which sought to set like glue, Jaq powered a boot free, then the boot was trapped once more.

Quite quickly the whole corridor filled to the brim with the substance of the hydra. Pressure mounted against Jaq’s armour, and though the armour could withstand far greater stress before crumpling he could hardly move even under full power. Red tell-tales blinked as he exerted himself.

Rather than overload the suit’s resources, he relaxed. The power axe, clenched in his mailed fist, still hewed away at the same small area in front of him, but for the life of him he couldn’t push himself into the space it liquefied, nor could he shift the weapon to left or to right, so firmly was his arm held by the hydra.

All he could see was tough grey jelly plastered across his visor. He felt such a writhing impotence. He was outguessed. Paralysed. Though nothing as yet had touched his flesh, he was a titbit trapped in stiffest aspic.

So were they all.

‘Cease fire, if you can,’ he radioed to his invisible companions. ‘We may only hurt ourselves.’

As he strove to release his grip on the control of the power axe, so the jelly appeared to co-operate. It slackened, then tightened once again as soon as the axe was inactive.

Presently, Jaq felt the fingers of his gauntlet being forced apart; and his axe was lifted away. Soon after, he realised with a chill in his groin that something was opening the clasps of his suit.

Those cold touches of steel! He realised that a servitor was stripping him of his armour and removing all detectable weapons. The robotic thing was working within the substance of the hydra and with its apparent complicity.

Recalling how Meh’Lindi had been violated on that other occasion, Jaq feared for her sanity once her psychic hood was removed. Yet he also hoped that she might retain some weapon, hidden in a hollow tooth perhaps.

When Jaq’s helmet lifted clear, the hydra did not flow up against his face to suffocate him. ‘Can you hear me?’ he cried. Only centimetres from his eyes and mouth, the hydra blurred and soaked up his voice so that he seemed to be shouting underwater.

Yet soon the glutinous entity was withdrawing far from his head, allowing him to see it squeezing portion by portion back into the ventilation system. He still couldn’t move. Burly, fearsome servitors held all four of the intruders inflexibly.

The machines were hideous parodies of the human form, their metal casings and flanges moulded so that the robots seemed to be sculptures made of bones welded together, interspersed with flattened, grimacing skulls. Each sported two flails of sinuous steel tentacles and a crab-like claw. The sensors of their faces were indented into a snarling, tusked daemon mask.

Finally, save for inchoate puddles adhering to the floor and the walls, the hydra was all gone.

‘What a deal of nuisance we could all have saved ourselves,’ remarked Carnelian’s voice. ‘And now, dear guests, it’s party time.’ These disconcerting servitors slid on magnetised feet along the corridor, carrying their prisoners suspended weightlessly. Suits and weapons remained adrift. At least Jaq and the others hadn’t been stripped naked. Only Grimm bothered to wriggle and kick.