‘But—’ Heth protested.
‘You have dragged us from the flames, sir, but we do not have long to live. Stay away. All I can do for you now is present my testament of events and convey all the information I have.’
‘I won’t accept that, shipmistress!’ cried Heth.
‘You must, my lord. A great disaster has overtaken the Imperial Fists here at Ardamantua.’
‘We can plainly see,’ said Kiran, ‘a cosmic event, a gravitational hazard that—’
‘It is not natural, admiral,’ said the shipmistress through the vox-link.
‘Say again?’
‘It is not a natural phenomenon. Ardamantua has not killed us all because of some whim of the universe. This effect is artificial. This location is under direct attack.’
‘Attack?’ echoed Maskar.
‘By what? By the Chromes? The xenoforms?’ asked Heth.
‘I do not believe so, sir,’ answered Aquilinia. ‘There are alien voices in the noise bursts. Listen to them. And watch the rising moon.’
‘Ardamantua has no moon,’ said Kiran.
‘It does now,’ said the shipmistress.
Twenty-One
‘That simply cannot be a moon,’ said the Azimuth’s First Navigator, studying the large printout that had been unfolded on the silver display tables of the charting room. ‘It is far, far too close to the planet itself. Look, it is within the very aura of the nearspace disruption. That close, its gravitational effects would split Ardamantua in two.’
‘Am I honestly hearing this?’ asked Heth. ‘We have what appears to be best described as a full-blown gravity storm besetting this planet and coring out the heart of the system, gravitational anomalies all around the nearspace region, and you say—’
‘My lord,’ said the First Navigator. ‘I am quite precise. The gravitational incidents, the disruptions that we are seeing, are considerable. But it is random and it seems to be manufactured by distortions in space. If a planetoid appeared in such close proximity to the world, it would be a much more focused and significant effect. Ardamantua would have shifted in its orbit, perhaps even been knocked headlong. The hazard we are encountering is like sustained damage from a shotgun. A moon… that would be a blow from a power hammer.’
‘But still,’ said Maskar, tapping his finger on the oddly shaded part of the printout. ‘This… What is this?’
‘An imaging artifact,’ said the First Navigator.
‘It’s of considerable size,’ said Maskar.
‘It’s a considerably sized imaging artifact, then, sir.’
‘The Amkulon was an imaging artifact too,’ Heth reminded them quietly. ‘Then it turned out to be a ship.’
‘The physical laws of the universe would simply not permit a moon or other satellite body to move so close to a planet, nor could such a body appear—’
‘I’ve seen daemons,’ Heth growled. ‘Up close. Don’t talk to me about the physical laws of the universe.’
They stood in silence and stared down at the huge printout. The chart room was cool and well-lit, arranged for the study of cosmological documents. The air circulator stirred the edges of the vast vellum sheet that hung over the edges of the silver table.
None of the ships in Kiran’s fleet had been able to detect or resolve anything resembling a moon in the gravitational and radioactive maelstrom surrounding Ardamantua. The printout image had come from the mission log data transmitted to them from the Amkulon. Aquilinia had recorded and stored the auspex scan as she dragged her ship out of its death-dive. This had been shortly before the tumult increased, swallowed her up, and blinded her.
‘We have examined the resolution,’ said one of the several tech-adepts assembled in the chamber. ‘The so-called “moon image” is indeed a ghost. Verifiable data is hard to find, of course, but that object seems to be only partly material, as if it is an echo of something not quite there.’
‘An imaging artifact!’ the First Navigator declared.
‘No, sir,’ said the tech-adept. ‘It is like something trying to emerge. To pass through. To translate. As if through a warp gate.’
‘Hellsteeth!’ cried Heth. ‘Then who or what are we dealing with?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Admiral Kiran, ‘but I place my full-throated support behind your efforts to pursue this, sir, rather than giving it up as a dismal and lost cause. We must find out what is happening here, and who has wrought it. Because if they can move a planetary body here, then they can pretty much move one anywhere, and do anything.’
Twenty-Two
The meeting done, Wienand dismissed the four interrogators. They rose from their seats, bowed to her, raised their hoods, and left the tower-top chamber.
The Inquisitorial Representative sat alone with her thoughts for a while. There were documents and advisories to review, and her rubricator had been urging her to annotate the latest watch list.
Time enough for all of that later. The morning’s news had been grim — pretty much exactly what she had been anticipating, but grim. Her masters in the three sub-divisions of the Inquisition expected much of her, and they had set her in place among the Twelve to accomplish a great deal, but it was a complicated dance, a matter of balance and timing. The Inquisition was an instrument of the Imperium. It did not set Imperial policy.
Unless it knew best, in which case it could not be seen to set Imperial policy.
Wienand’s quarters were an eight-level suite in the armoured crown of a tower overlooking Bastion Ledge and the Water Gardens. There was not much of a view because of the tower’s ample fortification. Agents of the Inquisition had added defences of a more specialised nature when the tower was acquired for the Representative’s use. The very walls and the armourglass of the windows were threaded with protective wards woven from molecular silver fibres, and potent runes had been discreetly worked into the patterns of decorative ornamentation on the carpets and ceilings. Automatic weapon arrays and intruder denial systems had been retrofitted into every staircase, doorway and floorspace, and most of the servitors were wired for weapon activation at a moment’s notice. The suite was cloaked, in addition, by multiple counter-surveillance fields, and several more exotic effects derived from the esoteric arts that the Inquisition both practised and guarded against. A cone of silence, psychically generated yet psychically opaque, covered the uppermost storeys, and there was even a Mars-built, engine-rated void shield in the tower core that could be activated by voice command.
Wienand rose to her feet. She was dressed in a simple, full-length gown of pale grey wool. Her rosette adorned her wrist, as a bracelet. She felt she should summon her rubricator and begin the day’s correspondence, but she was enjoying the solitude, the calm emptiness of the room.
She walked to the side table beside her desk and poured herself a glass of water from the fluted crystal jug, wishing her mind were as clear as the cool water. She raised the glass to her lips.
‘There really could be anything in that, you know.’
Wienand tried not to react. She maintained her composure with an extraordinary, invisible effort. Without sipping, she set the glass down again and returned to her seat at the desk without making any eye contact, or any outward show that there should be anything troubling in the fact that Drakan Vangorich was suddenly sitting in one of the seats vacated by the interrogators.
‘Such as?’ she asked, moving some papers.
‘Oh, toxins,’ said Vangorich. ‘I hear toxins are very popular. Untraceable, of course. Not necessarily lethal, but certainly mood-altering, or behaviour-modifying. Toxins that make you compliant and suggestible. Toxins that render you open to autohypnotic implanting. All sorts of things.’
‘I see.’
‘Don’t you have a taster? An official taster? I thought you would have. A person like you.’
‘I’ll recruit one if it makes you happy,’ she said.
‘I’m only concerned for you. For a friend.’
She looked at him, directly. He was smiling, and the smile did not sit well with his scar.
‘Why? Did you place a toxin in my water, Drakan?’
He shook his head.
‘Throne, no. No, no. Why would I? What an awful thought.’
He paused, and looked her in the eyes.
‘But I could have done. Anyone could have done, that’s my point.’
‘No one could have, Drakan.’
‘Why is that?’ he asked sweetly.
‘Because no one—’
She broke off.
‘Because no one can get in here?’ he asked. ‘Well, I seem to put the lie to that.’
He rose to his feet.
‘You really are the most composed person, Wienand. Applause for that. Not even the courtesy of mild surprise at finding me here.’
‘I should not be surprised,’ she said.
‘Even though your security advisor told you that this suite had a triple-aquila secure rating that nothing short of a primarch could get past?’
She didn’t blink.
‘I was quoting directly from his written report submitted for your approval nine months ago.’
‘I know.’
‘Page eighteen, line twenty-four.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Quite a colourful turn of phrase… “Nothing short of a primarch…” though not terribly technical.’
‘I agree.’
‘And not terribly accurate,’ he said.
‘I noticed.’
‘I’d sack him, if I were you.’
‘Drakan,’ she said, done with his games, ‘I’m impressed. All right? Does that satisfy you? I’m impressed that you got in here without setting off any alarm or countermeasure. It is almost inhumanly chilling that you were able to do so.’
‘Thank you,’ he replied. ‘For what it’s worth, when it comes to the private Palace apartments of the High Twelve, this is by far the hardest to get into.’
He looked at her and affected an expression of innocence.
‘So I’m told,’ he said.
‘I presume you came here for a purpose,’ she said.
He sat down again, leaned back and crossed his legs.
‘I presume,’ he echoed, ‘that you read the transcripts this morning?’
‘In particular?’ she asked.
He sighed.
‘You’re really going to make me work for it, aren’t you?’ he asked. ‘The first intercepts are back from Heth’s valiant rescue mission. Ardamantua is a mess. Worse than could be imagined. The sheer scale of the loss isn’t yet reckoned, nor is the true nature of the threat. But… it’s bad news.’
‘Yes, I saw that,’ Wienand replied.
‘You’re very calm about it,’ he observed.
‘There’s no point panicking,’ she answered. ‘There’s every point making a considered and rational response. It is a threat. A severe threat.’
‘Just as you originally suggested,’ he said. ‘That’s why I thought I’d come and have a little word with you. You used me slightly, Wienand. You used me to move against Lansung in the Senatorum. That’s fine. I quite enjoyed it. It’s nice to feel wanted. You were concerned about the threat, because no one seemed to be taking it particularly seriously, but you were far more concerned with Lansung and his power bloc of allies, and the way the threat — and others like it — might be mishandled by them. It was a political manoeuvre to realign the High Lords. That’s how you sold it to me.’
‘Agreed. So?’
‘The threat’s very, very real, Wienand. It’s not a valid excuse for brokering, it’s a palpable problem. And I think you knew it was when you co-opted me. What does the Inquisition know that the rest of us don’t?’
‘I was concerned with Lansung’s high-handed attitude towards—’
Vangorich raised a hand.
‘There is a threat to the Imperium that is of far greater magnitude than anyone imagines, but the Inquisition is reluctant to disclose it. Instead, the Inquisition attempts to use political subterfuge to alter Imperial doctrine and policy.’
‘Not so,’ she said.
‘One would hope not, or that might be regarded very badly. The Inquisition taking over effective control of Imperial policy? There’s a word for that.’
‘A word?’
‘The word is “coup”.’
‘Drakan,’ she said, ‘you’re beginning to frustrate me with your paranoia. The Inquisition is not attempting to mount a political coup from within the Senatorum.’
‘Well,’ he replied, ‘it would seem to be one thing or the other. Either the Inquisition is trying to take control because it knows something the rest of us don’t, or you really are very concerned at the fitness of Lansung and his kind to sit at the high table.’
She said nothing.
‘What is the threat, Wienand?’
‘It is what it is.’
‘What is the nature of the threat?’
‘You know as much as I do, Grand Master. It is a xenos threat that requires attention.’
He rose again.
‘So you’re sticking to your story. This is all about your concern about power balance and the fitness of Lansung, Udo and the others to rule?’
She nodded.
‘Well, that rather makes it my problem, then, doesn’t it? An issue for my Officio?’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, with a slight note of anxiety.
‘Well, if any High Lord is deemed by his peers to be unfit or unworthy, the ultimate sanction has always been the Officio Assassinorum. It’s why we exist. It is our purview. Political subterfuge is entirely a waste of time when you have the Officio to clean house.’
‘Vangorich, don’t be medieval.’
He leaned on her desk and stared into her face.
‘Then I suggest you start trusting me,’ he said. ‘Tell me the nature of this threat. Share it with all of us. Tell me what is so terrible. What scares the Inquisition so much it needs to take control of Imperial policy? What do you know?’
She stared back at him, and hesitated.
Then she said, ‘There’s nothing. Nothing to tell.’
He stood up straight.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘I see. If that’s all you’ll say, I see I must take you at your word. I suppose I had better get about my business.’
‘What does that mean?’ she asked. ‘Drakan, what are you suggesting?’
He walked to her side table, picked up the glass of water she had poured, and drank it down.
‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ he said. ‘I am going about my business and performing the duties entrusted to me.’
He walked towards the door.
‘Drakan,’ she called after him. ‘Don’t do anything. Don’t do anything foolish. Please. This situation is very sensitive. This moment… You mustn’t act rashly.’
‘I’ll try not to,’ he replied. ‘But if no one tells me where the sensitivities lie, I cannot help but step on them, can I?’
The door opened, and Wienand’s bodyguard Kalthro strode in, a pistol raised. He halted when he saw Vangorich.
‘Far too little,’ Vangorich told him as he strode past, ‘far too late.’