Bequin pulled a particularly angry face. 'You pair and your old intimacies. Why don't you ever give a straight answer?'
'Because the less you know, the less the Inquisition can harm you if we're caught/1 said.
The new lean you/ syruped Maxilla as I walked onto the Essene's bridge.
I had shaved away my beard, had my ragged hair clipped back, and dressed in a suit of black linen after my shower. I was still terribly weak on my feet and in no mind for Maxilla's foolery.
'Course is set for Cinchare/ Maxilla said stiffly, apparently recognising my mood. His gold-masked servitors chimed in agreement. His hooded navigator, all senses fixed on some different, quite other place, said nothing.
'I have a question/ said Inshabel. He was seated at secondary navigation position, reviewing the star-maps. Why Cinchare? A mining world out in the edges of the Segmentum, almost a Halo Star. I thought we'd be trying to find Quixos.'
There's no point.'
'What?' Maxilla and Inshabel asked, almost in unison.
I sat down on a padded leather seat. 'Why make the endeavour to find Quixos when he would surely kill us at a stroke? We've barely survived individual encounters with two of his daemonhosts. We haven't the strength to fight him.'
'So?' asked Inshabel.
'So the first thing we do is find the strength. Prepare. Arm ourselves. Make ourselves ready to take down one of the most powerful evils in the Imperium.'
And for that we need to go to Cinchare?' Inshabel whispered.
'Cinchare's the start, Nathun/ I said. Trust me.'
SEVENTEEN
Rogue star.
Doctor Savine, Cora and Mr Horn.
In the annex.
Even at full warp, it took the Essene thirty weeks to reach Cinchare.
True, we took a circuitous route, avoiding all possible encounters with the forces of the Imperium. I hated that. For once, I hated the subterfuge.
We learned, indirectly, a few weeks into the voyage, that my escape from Cadia had been discovered. The Inquisition - and other agencies - were hunting me. I had been formally declared Heretic and Extremis Diabolus. Lord Rorken had finally counter-signed Osma's carta.
I was now something I had never been before.
A fugitive. A renegade. And in aiding me, my band of comrades had made themselves fugitives too.
We had a few scrapes. Refuelling at Mallid, we were discovered and pursued by an unidentified warship which we lost in the empyrean. At Avignor, a squadron of Ecclesiarchy battle-boats, standing picket watch along the border of the diocese, tried to run us to ground. We only escaped that one thanks to a combination of Maxilla's shipcraft and Medea's fighting nous.
On Trexia Beta, Nayl and Fischig ran across a band of arbites hunters while they were trying to hire an astropath. They never told me how many they had been forced to kill, but it sat badly with them for weeks.
On Anemae Gulfward, Bequin succeeded in obtaining the services of an astropath, a sickly female called Tasaera Ungish. When Ungish found out who I was, she begged to be returned to her backwater world. It took a
long time to convince her that she was in no danger from me. I had to open my mind to her in the end.
At Oet's Star, we were discovered by an Inquisitor Frontalle during a resupply layover. As it was with Riggre and the Cadian pilots, I will always be haunted by those necessary deaths. I tried to reason with Frontalle. I tried very hard. A young man, he believed that taking me down was the key to a famous career. Eisenhorn the Heretic, he kept calling me. They were the last words on his lips when I pitched him into the geothermal heating exchanger.
From Trexia Beta onwards, there was an almost permanent rumour that a kill-team of the Ordo Malleus's Grey Knights was hunting us. And the Ordo Xenos's Deathwatch Chapter too.
I prayed to my God-Emperor that 1 could complete this task before the forces of righteousness overtook me. And I prayed to him that my friends might be spared.
Between those escapades, there were only the long, slow weeks of transit in the deep warp. I filled my time with study, and with weapons practice with Nayl, Fischig or Medea. I battled to get myself healthy again. The Carnificina had wasted me, both in body and spirit. The weight I had lost would simply not go back on, despite Maxilla's generous banquets.
And I felt slow. Slow with a blade, slow on my feet. Slow and clumsy with a gun.
Even my mind was slow. I began to fear that Osma had broken me.
Tasaera Ungish was a semi-paralysed woman in her fifties. The arduous rituals of the warp had left her broken and all but burned out, consigned to a life as a junior telepath in the class-chambers of Ane-mae Gulfward. Her raddled body was supported by an augmetic exo-skeleton. I believe she might have been beautiful once, but her face was now hollow and her hair thin where the implant plugs of her calling had been sited.
'That time again, heretic?' she asked as I walked into her quarters. This was about the twentieth week of the voyage.
'I wish you wouldn't call me that/ I said.
'Coping strategy,' she purred. 'Your woman Bequin connived me out of a safe life on Anemae Gulfward, and made me party to a heretic's private crusade.'
A safe life, Ungish? A bad end. You'd have been dead in another six months, the strain of the traffic they were making you process.'
She tutted, her augmetic chassis whirring as she poured us two glasses of amasec. Hers was laced with fitobarrier enhancers, and her room stank of lho-leaf. I knew the rigours of her life had left her in constant pain, and she fought that pain off with everything she could lay her hands on.
'Dead and buried on Anemae Gulfward in six... or dead in agony in your service.'
'It's not like that/ I said, nodding as I took the glass she proffered.
'Is it not?'
'No. I've let you see my mind. You know the purity of my cause/
She frowned. 'Maybe/ She was having difficulty manipulating her own glass. The mechadendrites that governed her right hand were old and slow.
She waved me off when I tried to help.
'Maybe?' I asked.
She took a big swig of her drink and then poked a lho-stick between her crinkled lips.
'I've seen your mind, heretic. You're not as clean as you like to think you are/
I sat down on the chaise. 'Am I not?'
She lit the lho-stick and exhaled a deep lungful of its narcotic smoke with a sigh.
'Ah, don't mind me. A ruined worn-out psyker who talks too much/
'I'm interested. What do you see?'
Her exo-skeleton made soft whines as it walked her over to the other couch and the hydraulics hissed as they settled her into the seat. She took another deep puff.
'I'm sorry/ she said. 'Would you like one?'
I shook my head.
'I have served the Astropathicus all my life, such as it is, on guild tenure and as a freelance, as now. When your woman came to me with a job offer and real money, I took it. But, oh me, oh my...'
'Astropaths are supposed to be neutral/ I countered.
Astropaths are supposed to serve the Emperor, heretic/ she said.
'What have you seen in my mind?' I asked, bluntiy.
Too, too much/ she responded, blowing a magnificent smoke-ring.
'Tell me/
She shook her head, or that's what I supposed the hissing action of her head-cage was supposed to convey.
'I suppose I should be grateful. You took me from a dead life to this... an adventure/
'I don't need you to be grateful/1 said.
'Dead and buried on Anemae Gulfward in six... or dead in agony in your service/ she repeated.
'It won't be like that/
She blew another smoke ring. 'Oh, it will. I've seen it. Clear as day/
have?'
'Many times. I'm going to die because of you, heretic/
Ungish was stubborn and defeatist. I knew she had seen things she wouldn't talk about. Eventually, I stopped asking. We met every few days, and she psy-cho
metrically captured images from my mind. The Cadian pylons. Cherubael. Prophaniti, and the ornaments he wore.
By the time we reached Cinchare, I had a sheaf of psychometric pictures and, thanks to the crippled astropath, a grim sense of the future.
Cinchare. A mineral rock orbiting a rogue star.
Plagued by gravitic storms, the Cinchare system wanders sloppily through the fringes of the Halo Stars at the edge of Imperial space. Ten thousand years ago it had been a neighbour of 3458 Dornal, and had nine planets and an asteroid belt. When we finally found it, it was lurching through the Pymbyle systems, major and minor, and had suffered two serious cosmological collisions. Now it had six planets and radiating sheets of asteroid belts. Cinchare's rogue star was locked in a drunken dance with Pymbyle Minor, a flirtatious encounter of gravities that would take another million years to resolve.
Cinchare itself, or more properly Cinchare rogue system/planet four X181B, was a blue nugget of rock swaggering along an almost figure-eight far orbit around the clashing stars, following the vagaries of their impacting gravity wells.
Rich in ultra-rare metals including ancylitum and phorydnum, it had been a miner's plunder-haven for as long as it had been identified.
'No watch ships. Precious little in the way of guidance buoys/ Maxilla said as he steered the Essene in-system. 'I've got a habitation hot-spot. The mining colony, I'll bet.'
'Park us in orbit/ I told him. 'Medea, fire up the cutter for landfall. Aemos, you're with me/
'Whoo!' whispered Medea, tightening the grip of her circuit-inlaid hands around the bio-sensors of the cutter's steering yoke. Another hard buffet had shaken the craft.
The gravity-tides are all over the place. I keep hitting eddies and anti-trojan points/
'Small wonder/ Aemos muttered, easing himself into a deck-seat and connecting the restraint harness across his lap. The rogue star and its planet-herd have made a disaster area of this system/
'Hmmm...' said Medea, showing no concern as she rolled the cutter up and over on its back to avoid a jagged black asteroid that tumbled across our path. The close approach to Cinchare was a debris field, full of rock matter and collision slag, all swirling around in complex and exotic orbits. Parts of this field had formed into thin ring systems around Cinchare, but even the rings were buckled and warped by gravity-clashes. The space around us was a bright misty gold where starlight was catching the banks of dust and micro-litter. The cutter's shields could handle most of the larger rocks that swirled through it, but some were giants and required evasive manoeuvres.
Through the gold dust-light, we began to see Cinchare more clearly: an irregular, glittered blue object, spinning fast along a stricken axis. It was half in shadow, and the peaks of its mineral mountains made
pre-dawn flashes as they caught the early light coming up over the daylight terminator.
The closer we get to the body, the worse the gravitic disturbances will become, of course/ Aemos mused aloud. Medea didn't need the advice. Even I knew that an irregular body - and especially an irregular body composed of varying densities - would have a near-space lousy with abnormal gravity effects. I think Aemos was just chatting to keep his mind off things.
Medea banked us around the searing trails of three bolides, and into what felt like a chute of high gravity. Cinchare's surface, a revolving, pitted cold expanse, rushed up to meet us and filled the main ports. The descent and proximity alarms started to sound, and Medea killed them both with an impatient sideways stab of her hand. We levelled out a little.
The mining facility beacons just woke up/ Medea cleared her throat. 'I've got a pre-lock telemetry handshake. They're requesting ident/
'Give it/
Medea activated the cutter's transponder and broadcast our craft's identifying pulse. It was one of the disguise templates we stored in the codifier for covert work, a delicate piece of fakery designed by Medea and Maxilla. According to its signature, we were a research team from the Royal Scholam Geologicus on Mendalin.
They've cleared us to touch/ Medea reported, easing us past another buffet of gravity turbulence. They've activated the guide pathway/
'Any vox contact?'
She shook her head. 'It could all be mechanical/
Take us in/
Cinchare Minehead was a cluster of old industrial structures plugging the cone of an upthrust impact event. Flight approach was down a rille in the crater edge. The buildings seemed at first sight to be rude and unfinished, rough-hewn from the blue rock, but I quickly realised they were standard Imperial modular structures caked with accretions of blue dust and gypnate. As far as records showed, Cinchare Minehead had been here for nine hundred years.
We set down on a cleared hardpan surrounded by serially winking marker lamps. The braking jets kicked up a swirling halo of eluviam into the air-less sky. After a short wait, two monotask servitors, heavy-grade units on caterpillar tracks, emerged into the hard starlight from the shadows of a docking barn, attached clamps to our front end and silently towed us back into the barn.
It was a grim place of dirty bare metal and lifting gear. Two battered prospector pods sat in berthing bays, and in the gloom at the far end was a cargo shuttle that had seen better days.
The barn doors closed behind us, and flashing hazard lamps in the berthing dock moved from amber to green as the atmosphere was cycled back in. Apart from the servitors, there was no sign of life.
'Cutter's systems show green on outside conditions/ said Medea, swinging out of her seat.
Are we ready?' I asked.
'Sure/ said Medea. She had switched her regular Glavian pilot's gear, with its distinctive cerise jacket, for a much more anonymous set of grubby flight overalls. Heavy, tan and baggy, they were actually the quilted liner of an armoured void-suit. The surface was covered in eyelets, laces and stud-connectors where the armour segments would lock on and there were umbilical sockets in the chest. Medea had removed the helmet ring and allowed the heavy collar to hang open. She wore workgloves and steel-capped military boots, and tucked her hair up under a billed cap with the Imperial eagle on the front.
Aemos had adjusted the hydraulic settings of his augmetic exo-skeleton to hold him in the stiffest, most upright stance possible. Witb a long tunic-cloak of black bagheera, a white skull cap and an engraved data-cane, he looked every centimetre a distinguished scholam academic.
I lacked any trace of my usual inquisitorial garb. I wore learner breeches and high, buckled boots, an old flak-armour jerkin with dirty ceramite over-plates, and a full-face filter mask with tinted eyeslits that resembled nothing so much as a snarling skull. Nayl had lent me a motion tracker unit from his personal kit, which I had strapped over my right shoulder, and a heavy, snub-nosed laspistol that hung in an armpit rig under my jerkin. A combat shotgun rested in a scabbard between my shoulder blades, and I had a belt of shells for it around my waist. I looked and felt like hired thug-muscle... which was precisely the point.
Medea popped the hatch and we descended into the barn.
It was cold, and the air was parched from too many automatic scrub-bings. Odd mechanical noises sounded sporadically in the distance. Squat, short-base servitors were busy tinkering with the old shuttle's exposed engine-guts.
We clanged up the grille stairs to the interior hatch. It was marked with a bas-relief symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and an enamelled sign below it announced that the tech-priesthood was the supreme authority at Cinchare Minehead.
The heavy hatch whirred back into its wall-slot revealing a gloomy prep-tunnel lined with empty void-suits that swung on their hooks in the breeze. Beyond that, there was a dank scrub-room, a darkened office with a padlock on the door, and an empty survey suite with a deactivated chart table.
'Where is everybody?' Medea asked.
We followed the echoing hallways through the complex. Grubby mining equipment was scattered or piled in corners. A small first-aid station had been stripped of surgical equipment and stacked with crates of pickled fish.
A side room was empty except for hundreds of broken wine bottles. A disused walk-in freezer store exuded the stink of spoiled meat mrough its open door. Water spattered from the dark, lofty ceilings of some vaults. Chains swung from overhead hoists. Cold, dry breezes gusted down the halls.
When the wall-speakers boomed, we all started.
Allied Imperial Minerals! Duty rotation in fifteen minutes!'
The voice was an automatic recording. Nothing stirred in response.
This is most perturbatory/ murmured Aemos. According to Imperial records, Cinchare Minehead is an active concern. Allied Imperial has a workforce of nineteen hundred running their deep-cast mines, and Ortog Promethium another seven hundred at their gypnate quarries. Not to mention independent prospectors, ancilliary service workers, security and the personnel of the Adeptus. Minehead is meant to have a population of nearly three thousand.'
We had reached a main concourse, a wide thoroughfare lit by overhead lamps, many of which were smashed. Abandoned merchant shops and bars lined either side.
'Let's look around/ I said. We fanned out. I walked to the north end of the trash-littered concourse and found steps leading down into a wide plaza full of more empty shops and businesses.
I heard the whine of an electric motor from down to the left, and followed it. Round the corner of a boarded-up canteen, a fat-tyred open buggy was pulled up outside the unkempt entrance of a claims registry. I went inside. The floor was covered in spilled, yellowing papers and dented data-slates. A snowdrift of used and mouldering ration cartons filled a side door into a filing room.
Nayl's motion detector clicked and whirred. It projected its display on the inside of my mask's right lens. Motion, the rear office, eight metres.
I edged to the door and peered in, my hand on the grip of the holstered las.
A long-limbed man in filthy overalls was crouching with his back to me, rummaging through a foot locker.
'Hello?' I said.
He jumped out of his skin, turning and rising in the same frantic motion, then crashed backwards against a row of metal cabinets. His long, gawky face was pale with fear. His hands were raised.
'Oh crap! Oh dear God-Emperor! Oh, please... please...'