The Grand Provost Marshal looked on. Vernor Zeck was a hulk of a man, although half of his bulk was made up by augmetic prosthetics. His skin grafting and bionics were evidence of a lifetime spent working city-hives of inequity on Macromunda and working up through the ranks of the Adeptus Arbites — enforcing, hunting and judging corruption in the hearts of lesser men. His square jaw betrayed disinterest, whatever he forced his eyes to suggest, and in doing so Zeck revealed the very nature of his calling. The Provost Marshal could track a consignment of narcotics up through the hive, down to its very last grain. He could beat confessions from mutants, spire nobles and even fellow arbitrators in precinct house dungeons. He could preside over courts for months, sometimes years at a time, passing judgement on sector-spanning criminal enterprises so involved and complex that they would burn out a calculus-logi’s cogitator. But among the ancients of the Senatorum, blinded by tedium of the most intense kind, Zeck found that his nose for criminality and corruption abandoned him. The occasional sniffs of malfeasance — suspected abuses, secrets of self-interest, profiteering — were ignored by the Grand Provost Marshal. Like a cyber-mastiff before a river or a sewer-channel of effluent, Zeck lost the scent, his suspicions carried off by a stream of banal bureaucracy.
‘Perhaps a donation of some kind would be in order.’
‘For the greater palatial families.’
‘For the palatials, yes.’
The Lord Commander and Ekharth, the Master of the Administratum, were guiltier than most of inaction. If the Imperium were a ship, buffeted in a sea of circumstance, at the mercy of galactic chance, then information was its anchor. With an Imperium of information at their augmented fingertips, or at the fingertips of a chancellor, archivist, clerk or scribe who occupied posts on the bottomless data chain below them, Ekharth and Lord Commander Udo had the knowledge required to solve all but the most dire of the Imperium’s problems, or those that were to come. The abyssal infotombs of the Estate Imperium. The tithes chamber notarium. The ordozarchy of the Departmento Munitorum. The findings of inquiries and inquiries about inquiries, gathered in vellum mountains at the Officio Officium. Decades of back-dated threat assessments from the Logis Strategos, and vermillion-class strategic directives: Solar, Obscurus, Pacificus, Tempestus, Ultima and Extra-Galaxia. These were but a few of the byzantine institutions and divisions that answered to Ekharth and Udo’s absolute authority. It wasn’t as though the pair were not aware of the Ardamantuan atrocity. Even before the catastrophe, the Inquisition had brought the situation to Udo as part of a Critical Situation Packet. Ekharth was already well aware of the xenos species known as the Chromes in the form of the damage their encroachment was doing: missed tithes and trade disruptions.
After Ardamantua — as one xenos threat was exchanged for another — little changed for Ekharth and the Lord Commander. The orks had always been a threat. The Lord High Admiral’s fleets were engaged in actions on the frontier space of the Imperium, defending worlds and trade routes from junkers, freebooting greenskins and upstart warlords declaring wars from warp-spewed space hulks. Indeed, beyond being dropped into such internecine border wars with the greenskins, Verreault — the new Lord Commander Militant of the Astra Militarum — had inherited the Emperor’s bastion amongst the stars only to find it already thoroughly committed to crusades and long-standing strategic engagements. Q’orl Swarmhood expansions. A Segmentum Solar-grazing hrud migration. Expeditionary fleets from the Nadirax Republic. Coreward appearances of the aggressive Biel-Tan craftworld. Carnivorous trans-plants mounting seed-invasions of Imperial systems surrounding the Nepenthis death world. Tarellian mercenary movements in the Phidas sector. The Kindred. The Xerontian Similisworn. The horrific resurgence of the Ubergast. Data continued to flood in from the various theatres and while Abel Verreault was eager that all threats received due attention, troops and materiel, response times were glacial. The Lord Commander Militant was often working with reports that were months out of date. Troop movements arrived to find xenos threats long eradicated. Some simply disappeared into the embrace of alien forces that had grown many times in magnitude since their deployment. Others found themselves sent astronomical distances to incorrect coordinates, finding nothing but dead space, wasted opportunity and relief in equal measure.
While some would later deem the Lord Commander Militant’s inexperience in both the galactic theatre and the daedal politics of the Imperial Palace a factor in a catastrophe both unfolding and unappreciated, others would lay responsibility at the doors of the lords Udo and Ekharth. Only they truly had the pieces of the puzzle in their hands. Their blindness came not of inexperience, but of veteran pedantry. Amongst the dire threats already presented to the Imperium, the myriad planetary tragedies and enemies innumerable — the evolving calamity heralded by the Ardamantuan Atrocity was but one atrocity among many.
‘A toast: to Beta-Novax…’
‘…Fleur-de-Fides.’
‘Beta-Novax was yesterday.’
‘To Fleur-de-Fides, then.’
Resplendent in Navy dress uniform, Admiral Lansung was bold and broad. His jacket was the blue of the deepest oceans and the golden waterfalls of his epaulettes tumbled from his thick shoulders. He parted the gathering like a capital ship on manoeuvres before joining Lord Commander Udo and Ekharth at the Ecclesiarch’s altar. Fraters moved through the group of significants, handing out fortified amasec and attending to the gathering’s petty conveniences. One by one, the Twelve approached the Anesidoran altar, where Ecclesiarch Mesring delivered a blessing. Dipping his chubby digits into the ash of incense, Mesring used his thumb and finger to smear an aquila on the foreheads of the presented worthies.
About them, the wolfish Wienand circled. She had respectfully left her bodyguard at the chapel archway and now she watched and drifted, her eyes narrowing sharply beneath her precisely cropped fringe. She absently took a glass of amasec from a passing frater and exchanged greetings with the Paternoval Envoy Helad Gibran without looking.
Wienand went through the motions. She drank in celebration of the feast day. She took her blessing. She bore her soot sigil. All the time the Inquisitor was watching. Thinking. Reaching determination. The Imperium was ailing and vulnerable to attack. The great men and women of the Imperium before her had grown like a cancer about their responsibilities. The Inquisition was the cure. They would surgically trim the tumorous lethargy and self-interest from the hallowed halls of the Imperial Palace in order to save the body politic. Strategies were in play. Pressure was being directed. Wheels turned within wheels, taking the Imperium in the right direction.
She looked up at the stained-glass representation of the God-Emperor behind Mesring and the attendant savant-priests that never left his side. It was her job — her sacrosanct duty — to further the Inquisition’s myriad interventions and keep the Imperium on the right track. She despised surprises. She prided herself on being the most informed personage in the chamber, and wished to remain that way.
Surprises had a horrible way of manifesting in such meetings, however. In meetings of the Senatorum and of course, the meetings of members’ agents in the darkness of hive basement sections and underlevels. Wienand was still breaking in Raznick, her new bodyguard. Her former escort-operative’s smashed body had been dicovered in the bowels of a Tashkent mag-lev terminal. He had underestimated his quarry. It had served as a useful reminder to Wienand not to underestimate hers.