There was silence. One of the hooded figures raised his hand.
‘What, mistress, of the rogue elements?’ he asked. ‘What of them? There are more pieces involved in this game than the main and obvious players.’
‘This is a crisis of unparalleled proportions,’ replied Wienand, ‘not a game. As for the minor pieces, they will be brought to terms, or contained. Or they will be silenced.’
‘What, mistress, of the rogue elements?’ asked the hooded interrogator sitting at the back of the chamber. ‘What of them? There are more pieces involved in this game than the main and obvious players.’
Wienand looked at her questioner carefully.
‘This is a crisis of unparalelled proportions,’ she replied, ‘not a game. As for the minor pieces, they will be brought to terms, or contained. Or they will be silenced.’
Vangorich pressed a key on his data-slate and the screen image of the Inquisitorial Representative’s private suite froze, paused.
Vangorich sat back in his chair, put the slate down, and steepled his fingers.
‘Beasts arise,’ he murmured to himself. ‘And as they arise, so must they fall.’
Thirty-Five
It was a snowy night. Out of the steel-cold blackness, blizzards drove in and coated the spires of the vast hive as if they were a range of mountain peaks. Lights twinkled in the vertical city, numerous as the stars.
The routines of Adeptus Arbitrator Sector Overseer Esad Wire had been carefully observed for some time. His work at Monitor Station KVF usually ended at around three in the pre-dawn shift, and he would return to his habitation on Spire 33456 via an eating house in the Uchtepa District, which served food after hours.
On this particular day, there were variations. Two hours into his shift, Wire received a personal transmission via encrypted vox, a call that lasted only eight seconds, and which Wire did not contribute to. He merely listened. The nature and content of what he listened to was not possible to ascertain.
Presumably as a result of this transmission, Wire reported to his superintendent that he was ill, the unfortunate flare-up of some chronic condition. He requested, and was granted, permission to leave work early and visit the district medicae before returning to his hab.
He left the station three hours before the scheduled end of his shift, as soon as the relief overseer arrived to cover him, but he did not travel to the district medicae’s office, nor did he travel home. Instead, dressed in his long, brown leather storm coat, and carrying a small but apparently heavy bag, he went west through the Commercia District towards the Mirobod Transit Terminal. The Mirobod Terminal served the Trans-Altai maglev lines.
Approaching the terminal, Wire did not seem to be aware he was under observation or being shadowed. The exterior rail shutters had been opened, and snow was blowing in under the canopy, dusting the concourse.
Wire went down two levels and then, oddly, walked into the seedy basement section of the terminal where derelicts and low-life individuals congregated. Wire vanished briefly into the dank, concrete underlevel of support pillars, garbage and oil drum fires.
Uneasy, Kalthro decided it was necessary to act before Wire began to suspect anything. He left his vantage point, dropped down the east wall of the terminal on a micro-filament cable, and waited for Wire to emerge from the north end colonnade of the underlevel.
When the man in the long brown storm coat reappeared, Kalthro pounced. He brought the man down cleanly, broke his back, and snapped his neck.
The corpse was face down on the filthy rockcrete floor. Kalthro got up and rolled the body over.
‘You don’t need to pay a poor man to wear a thick coat on a night like this,’ said Esad Wire from behind Wienand’s agent.
Kalthro turned. He was very fast indeed. The snub-las was already in his hand. He was, as Wienand had boasted, a superlative operative, the best in the Inquisition’s employ.
But, as he turned, he was no longer facing Esad Wire, Sector Overseer, Monitor Station KVF (Arbitrator).
Beast Krule met him with a smile. He touched Kalthro’s right forearm and shattered the bones there. The snub-las dropped out of a useless hand. Then Krule put his right fist in Kalthro’s face.
It went through. Clean through. The knuckle points fractured out through the back of Kalthro’s skull, jetting tissue and blood with them under considerable pressure. The operative’s body hung off the fist, twitching. Krule jerked his hand back, and it came out gore-slick and steaming.
Kalthro crumpled onto the floor beside the dead vagrant in the brown coat. More steam rose. Blood pooled, dark and glossy. Then it began to clot and then freeze in the desperate temperatures.
Krule looked down at the body.
‘Not bad,’ he allowed. He wiped his bloody hand clean on Kalthro’s jacket, recovered his coat, and picked up his bag.
Then he walked away into the frozen night towards the maglev terminal entrance, whistling an oddly cheerful refrain.
Rob Sanders
Predator, prey
Capturing…
Competition is a universal constant. Territoriality, a quantified given. Empire building — an expectation. The galaxy is quietly expanding, but there will never be enough room for all the species who aspire to its dominion. The appetites of sentient beings tend to the absolute — like our own. This is not base predation. I talk not of the hunter and hunted. This is not survival of the fittest. I have made it my life’s work — and that of the life thereafter — to study the grand design of such selection and speciation. It is both wondrous and dreadful.
The apex species of the galaxy compete not for resources or sustenance. They all take more than need demands. They compete because they can. This is intraguild predation, the predators that kill their competitors — the predators that prey on each other. They are the wolves that take down the lion.
We partake in a techno-evolutionary arms race: a galactic test of our suitability to rule, to prosper, to exist. Our success, however, is our failure. With every step we take along the path of enlightenment, dominance and superiority, we plant the seeds of our own destruction. In attempting to annihilate the other sentient species of the galaxy, we force them to adapt. To learn from their mistakes on a genetic level. We create competitors with the evolutionary gifts to wipe us from the face of the known universe.
I think of the terrible things we have achieved. Our countless numbers and culture of conquest. Our forges, our immaterial implementations and the mighty vessels that take our dread weapons to the stars. I think on galactic princes and their gene-sired Legions: our crusaders in the cosmos, our ambassadors of destruction, our lethal gift to enemy empires. I think on these cold considerations… and know that we are doomed.
ONE
How could it have come to this?
There was little in the way of historical precedent. Invaders announced their intentions with armies and armadas. Some drifted with cruel patience across the void, while others arrived on the edge of our systems with their vessels still frosted from the warp. All were outsiders. They were savage or unreasoning, insatiate or cold in their calculations. They observed humanity’s expansion through alien eyes and thought to check its advance. The Imperium became an empire encroached, with the xenos biting at the borders. Alien aggressors took virgin territory a piece at a time or relived histories long past by retaking the ground of their ancients. These were the trials of humanity in a vast and hostile galaxy.