The Inquisition War (44 page)

S
OME WHILE LATER
, spindly Googol lolled in his ornate Navigator’s chair contemplating the warpscreen which was, as yet, inert. He was hung with amulets and icons. The air in the obsidian control room was still chilly. Smoke lazed from the incense sticks which Jaq had lit. The air reeked of Vegan virtueherb, for piety. Also of musty myrrh, the exudate of wounded desert bushes. Myrrh, to preserve and strengthen.

Aye, to preserve Vitali Googol’s mind long enough for him to see his way through the warp to a sun and its worlds. Quietly the Navigator recited to himself:

‘Click of claws upon the hull,

Sweet tendrils crawling in my skull—’

Googol shook his bald head in rejection of these images. His teeth sought his injured lip, but he refrained. He eased his bandanna up by a millimetre or so. He was sweating feverishly.

Vitali was trying his best to master himself.

Was his best sufficient?

Meh’lindi watched him carefully, ready to kill him instantly with a nerve-blocking fingertip, if she must.
Tormentum Malorum
was shielded against the intrusion of daemons from the warp. But what if the Navigator, whose mind reached out into the warp, were to invite a daemon? Or daemonettes!

Better to kill Googol and wallow here in the empty void. And if
Tormentum Malorum
had already entered the warp... kill Googol even faster, praying that daemonic forces would lose their focus.

Be adrift in the warp, hoping never to converge upon any derelict hulk, to become part of it...

Did Vitali understand that Meh’lindi might be obliged to kill him?

S
HE WHISPERED IN
mumblespeech, ‘Inquisitor, our Navigator is half-way insane.’ Hers not to question, nor to object. Yet she made this observation.

‘Our hopes must ride on the other half of him,’ Jaq replied; and she nodded. If another day passed, Googol might be two-thirds demented, not merely half-way mad.

They must reach a world. They must find an astropath. An astropath would eavesdrop for them on the torrent of psychic communications emanating from Terra in their direction and onward. Military transmissions, commercial ones, theological ones. From this thin segment of psychic sendings – yes, thin, yet a flood nonetheless! – the astropath would try to winnow what was happening a century downstream from Jaq’s flight from Earth. A hundred years after his discovery of the hydra conspiracy, let there be some clue by now! Let his
Liber Secretorum
have reached the Masters of the Malleus. Let the ordo have acted in some way which Jaq might understand – even though none but a secret inquisitor might identify the signs.

Which world should they aim to reach?

While Meh’lindi kept much of her attention intently upon Googol, Jaq had taken his Tarot pack from its wrapping of flayed mutant skin. He prayed aloud that the Emperor’s spirit should guide the divination.

Then he fanned the seventy-eight wafers of liquid crystal, with their fluid interactive designs.

Four suits: Discordia, Adeptio, Creatio and Mandatio. And the major arcana trumps.

Discordia was the suit of strife, though it could also signify authority. Discordia cards comprised enemies of the Imperium, aliens whether hostile or nominally friendly, and warp entities. Here was the terrible figure of a Chaos renegade from the Eye of Terror. Here was an eerily beautiful eldar, an aspect warrior.

Adeptio was the suit of vigorous work. Here was a Space Marine. Here was an assassin – and Jaq noticed that this card by now depicted a figure very like Meh’lindi.

Creatio, suit of fertility, embraced such persons as Navigators and astropaths. Here was an engineer, a squat with bushy red beard and forage cap and quilted flak jacket – so very like Grimm whom they had lost.

Mandatio, suit of stability, included the Inquisition, though Jaq’s own significator card was the trump of the High Priest, enthroned, hammer in hand. That figure wore Jaq’s face: rutted and scarred. Slim grizzled moustaches. A circuit of beard cupping the base of his chin. A single thin line of beard ascending to his lower lip. On his right cheek – in the card – glowed the electrotattoo of an octopus clinging around a human skull, emblem of the hydra. Its spores would invade human minds. On some distant day, in some distant year, the conspiracy would knit all the minds of ensnared humankind into a terrible involuntary instrument of destruction, scouring away corrupted souls and aliens throughout the galaxy and even ravaging Chaos itself, harrowing the hell where daemons dwelled.

Supposedly purifying the cosmos.

Or else bringing about its devastation and the final doom of enslaved humanity.

The hydra tattoo on Jaq’s own rutted cheek was invisible. He certainly wasn’t willing it to show. As for all his other tattoos, of lurid daemons he had overcome, why, those were all hidden by his black garb.

Around the High Priest who was himself, he began to deal a star of cards.

And he shuddered.

For one was the Star trump indeed, with a pattern of stars around one star which was more prominent. Yet alongside it was the trump of Slaanesh –
in the form of a daemonette!
Something very like Slishy simpered and leered from the card. Next, was the Navigator card. It was reversed in a fashion which Jaq had never seen before. The Navigator hung upside-down by one foot from a scaffold. The solid black warp-eye in his brow, the eye which could kill, was exposed.

Jaq turned those two cards face-down swiftly.

‘Protect us,’ he prayed.

Finally he picked up the Star trump and thrust it toward the mumbling Navigator. ‘Use
this
to seek our destination.’

T
HEIR VOYAGE HAD
begun.
Tormentum Malorum
was in the sea of lost souls, racing through warp space. Eerie patterns swirled in the warp-scope, as of entities attempting to form and breaking apart.

Googol had chosen to wear jewelled gloves to manipulate the controls. The engines, which Grimm had tuned a century ago, wailed and throbbed just as excellent consecrated engines should.

‘The Astronomican’s so bright, so clear,’ chanted Googol, an anguished rhapsody in his tone. ‘So clear, so bright...’

Oh, clear enough to him who could behold the Emperor’s beacon with his warp-eye. Not clear at all to Jaq. Nor to Meh’lindi who was poised to kill, at a word from Jaq. They only saw the swirling frogspawn of the warp.

And they heard a clicking on the hull...

A clicking of claws, a caressing scrape...

‘Wait,’ Jaq whispered to Meh’lindi. ‘Wait.’

Sweat slicked Googol’s face. Were it not for the gloves, his hands might have lost their clutch on the baroque rune-infested wheel and damascened levers and tumorous knobs.

Blessedly the scratch of Chaos against the hull-screens and protective hexes grew no louder.

S
TARS IN TRUE
space on a screen! Vitali Googol had fainted. Had his heart failed? No...

Jaq undogged one of the daemon-shields from a porthole.

Stars! Stars of varied hues! The yellow of pus and of jaundice; the angry red of blood; the cyanotic blue of suffocation.

‘Kill him now?’ enquired Meh’lindi. ‘It might be a mercy.’

Jaq’s voice was harsh. ‘Does my assassin mention mercy?’

‘I’m sorry, it was a figure of speech. I apologize.’

‘All of one’s words should constantly be scrutinized for heresy. Language is a tissue of lies. Metaphors, rhetoric... Pah! We might still need Vitali till we can find ourselves a reliable new Navigator.’

‘Of course, of course. We are all only instruments.’

T
HE SUN THEY
were heading towards was known as Luxus, and its habitable world was Luxus Prime. This, they presently determined from radio traffic while they were still several days away from the planet itself.

It also became evident that a war was raging on Luxus Prime. But war was perennial. War was a deadly bloom which flourished from one year to the next under another ten thousand suns.

For renegades such as themselves, war meant commotion and opportunities.

THREE

Rebellion

J
AQ RAN ALONG
the so-called Lane of Loveliness of Caput City, boltgun in one hand and force rod in the other.

This particular boltgun was plated with iridescent blue titanium inlaid with silver runes. The force rod was virtually unadorned, a solid black flute embedded with a few enigmatic circuits. The force rod was for use against whatever spawn of Chaos he encountered, to augment his psychic attack. The rowdy boltgun was for use right now – against a trio of cultists who darted from cover amongst giant broken potsherds which were the remains of one of the glazed ceramic buildings.

The cultists’ eyes were glazed with frenzy. One fired a stub gun inaccurately. Bullets from the slugger pinged off a nearby wall of glazed terracotta. The second cultist was swinging a chainsword two-handed. Obviously he was unfamiliar with the weapon. The sword buzzed furiously as its razor-edged teeth spun round, cutting empty air. The third of the cultists was a burly muscular brute. From a hand flamer gushed a narrow cone of burning fuel. Heat scorched Jaq’s face, but none of the fiery droplets had touched him.

Such a flamer was too compact a weapon to be worth firing from a distance, nor could its reservoir hold much pressurized fuel. Each blazing aerosol jet was spectacular but it extinguished quickly. You had to be close to your target.

Jaq’s bolter yakkered. Several bolts erupted in the body of the flamer wielder. It was as though the man had been booby-trapped internally with packets of explosive. These now detonated. For a moment the cultist quivered like jelly. The muscle-bound envelope of his body actually seemed to contain the shock waves. Abruptly he burst apart, gutted thoroughly and bloodily.

A bolt from Jaq’s gun caroomed off a great glazed potsherd, winging skyward into the haze of smoke which drifted across the city front fires. Subsequent bolts tore the gunman apart, then the swordsman too.

Jaq sniffed the sharp nitric aftermath of propellant which had ignited after each bolt flew from the muzzle.

‘Noisy,’ said Meh’lindi.

Yes, noisy. Yet with hardly any recoil.
RAAARK
, the gun would utter with each squeeze of the trigger. It hardly bucked at all in one’s hand. With a plosive pop it would ejaculate a bolt. With a flaring swish, that bolt would ignite and accelerate away. Then there would come the thud of impact, followed by the blast of detonation.

RAARK-pop-SWOOSH-thud-CRUMP
: this was the lingo of a boltgun. When it uttered several such statements, what a cacophony! The name of this particular boltgun, inscribed on the trigger guard, was
Emperor’s Mercy
.

Meh’lindi held a laspistol in one hand and a toxic needle pistol in the other. Both weapons were delicately damascened. She had sprayed herself with black synthetic skin and wore her red assassin’s sash twisted around her loins, various secrets concealed therein. The sash and her golden eyes were the only colours visible. Otherwise, she was a deadly black effigy of herself – supple and lithe. Even her eyelids were black as night. She had eschewed the digital weaponry which sometimes adorned her fingers like baroque thimbles.

Jaq wore lightweight mesh armour under his black habit, but Meh’lindi needed none. Her syn-skin would resist flame and flash and poison gas as well as honing her vitality. She breathed and spoke through a throat plug. She heard – acutely – through ear plugs.

She favoured the needle pistol. The bursts of energy from the laspistol tended to disperse over distance, especially if the air was hazy, as now. It appealed to her assassin’s instincts to speed tiny toxic dartlets by laser pulse into some distant target.

Abruptly Meh’lindi pivoted. Without seeming to take aim she fired at a rooftop, twice. Two cultists convulsed as neurotoxins ravaged their nervous systems.

For Jaq, with his psychic sense, a vast shape seemed to brood in the smoke over the city. The shadow-figure wore a carnivorous, bullish head. How balefully its eyes gloated at all the killing which was in progress. Two mighty arms ended in serrated crab claws. A single female breast bulged obscenely. The presence came and went, a phenomenon of the smoke.

Could many other people than Jaq perceive that manifestation? ‘Do you see it, Meh’lindi?’ Jaq demanded, gesturing. ‘It’s up there again!’

She shook her head. Yet she believed him. She hissed assassin’s curses – as if those curses might injure an aerial apparition which gallingly did not even register upon her senses.

Somewhere in the city a corrupted Cult Magus must be invoking and conjuring and sacrificing victims while praying to the cards of a Chaos Tarot.

Jaq pointed his force rod at the sky.

‘Don’t listen to me,’ he ordered Meh’lindi. Yet how should an assassin fail to register every diagnostic sound in her vicinity? ‘At least try not to understand me. Try to hear just noise.’

She began to chant some primitive outlandish barbarisms from her erstwhile jungle-world home which she would never see again, nor wished to.

‘Avaunt, daemon,’ yelled Jaq. ‘Apage, O’tlahsi’isso’akshami! Begone, Slave of Lust! In nomine Imperatoris ego te exorcizo!’