Chloure was, in a very real sense, one of Thaddeus's last hopes.
'You are one of the few surviving individuals to have had any contact with the Soul Drinkers.’
continued Thaddeus. 'There is a chance you picked up something that Tsouras did not.’
Chloure smiled, almost in triumph. 'To think that a humble agri-world adept should cause the mighty Inquisition such woes! I can only tell you what you already know. Sarpedon won't give up, not ever. He cares for his honour more than his life or those of his men. He'll run if you make him and attack whatever the risks if there's a principle at stake. That's all I know. From the sound of it, that's all anyone knows.’
Thaddeus stood up grandly, letting his blastcoat sweep around him. 'The Inquisition knows where you are, consul. You do the Emperor's work much better here than if you had attained a higher rank, I feel, and for this reason you can consider your execution indefinitely stayed. But should your standards fall, I can ensure the sentence is carried out. We will be watching the tithes with great care.
'So, until then, consider my presence here nonexistent. Continue the work of the Administratum, Adept Diess.’
The man who had been Consul Senioris Chloure, gave a sardonic salute and returned to the thankless task of sifting through the mountain of forms on his desk.
Thaddeus swept out of the office, down the darkened stairway, and out into the grim exterior of Habitat Epsilon where the evening sun was now setting and the endless rolling fields beyond the habitat were dark with the herds of sleeping grox.
The Sisters were still waiting by the ship.
'Prepare for takeoff, sister.’ said Thaddeus to Sister Aescarion.
'There is nothing here?' she asked. Sister Aescarion talked to Thaddeus as if she was his equal, for which Thaddeus was grateful.
'Nothing. Tsouras left us precious little when he put half the Lakonia Persecution to death.'
'Have faith, inquisitor. The Soul Drinkers have committed blasphemy in the sight of the Emperor. He will guide our hand if need be.'
'I am sure you are right, sister. But I imagine the Emperor does little to help those who cannot prove their worth and we have proven very little so far.’
Thaddeus and Aescarion walked up the ramp and into the body of the ship. The Sisters trooped in behind, filing into the personnel compartment. The ship was clean and new, requisitioned by the Ordo Hereticus from the shipyards of Hydraphur and a rare example of craft both small and fast, with the manoeuvrability and firepower to look after itself. The inside was simple: glossy, black and bare metal, decorated with devotional texts to the Emperor that the Sisters had pinned up on bulkheads, walls and small shrines. Thaddeus had kept the trappings of faith from the cockpit, but gradually the Sisters had taken over everywhere they were stationed and had turned it into a mobile chapel to the Emperor.
Aescarion joined her battle-sisters in the grav-couches inside, and the Sisters murmured a prayer of respect as she took her seat beside them.
Thaddeus headed for the cockpit, which he had upholstered with dark maroon tharrhide. His copilot's seat nestled next to the installed pilot-servitor - once human, its facial features had been replaced with an array of scanning devices. One of its hands was now a set of gold-plated compasses that scritched out trajectories and geometric shapes on the data-slate jutting from its ribcage. The other hand was hard-wired into the instrument panel of the cockpit, and sent messages from its once-human brain into the ship's cogitators and engine controls.
'Launch.’ said Thaddeus to the servitor. The remnants of its brain recognised the command and the ship lurched as the thrusters on its underside kicked in. The featureless landscape of Koris XXIII-3 yawed and was replaced by the clear bright sky. Suddenly, the ship's primary engines roared, and Thaddeus was thrust into the deep upholstery as the ship tore through the planet's atmosphere.
Thaddeus didn't know if anyone else would go to the trouble of hunting down Consul Senioris Chloure. He hoped they didn't - Adept Diess was doing far more for the Emperor's flock than Chloure ever would have done.
Finding him, and letting him live, passed for a small victory, and Thaddeus anticipated few enough of those. The Soul Drinkers were tough and resourceful, and their intentions were unknowable. Though a Space Marine Chapter could conquer just about anything, it still consisted of just a thousand men, and the Soul Drinkers probably numbered significantly less. Thaddeus's own staff numbered more and he did not wield the massive household armies of some inquisitor lords.
The Soul Drinkers could disappear, if they wanted to.
But they would not. That was Thaddeus's best hope. Sarpedon was still, in many ways, a Space Marine, and he would not just sit tight in some far corner of the galaxy waiting to be forgotten. He still believed in something, no matter how twisted, and he would keep on fighting. The Soul Drinkers would do something to make themselves visible again. Thaddeus would be there, and he would find them. He would trap them and kill Sarpedon, if he could. Then he would coordinate whatever resources he needed to shatter the remnants of the Soul Drinkers Chapter for good.
He had faith, like Sister Aescarion. And even if that was all he had, for an inquisitor, it was enough.
THE SOUL DRINKERS Chapter had disappeared in its entirely at the climax of the Lakonia Persecution, when the Chapter's fleet had fled through a long-forgotten warp route leaving Inquisitor Tsouras's battlefleet grasping arnothing. The events leading up to the Persecution had been enough to mark the Chapter as rebels of the most dedicated and dangerous sort - an attack on the Adeptus Mechanicus, the destruction of the Lakonia Star Fort, the refusal to submit to Inquisitorial examination, and the killing of the interrogator sent by Tsouras to deliver his ultimatum.
When the smoke cleared, the Soul Drinkers had vanished from the face of the Imperium.
Well over a year later, salvage crews in the far galactic east reported a huge find: a massive graveyard of ships, some battleship-sized, that had all been destroyed by scuttling. The investigating Imperial authorities soon ascertained that this was the Soul Drinkers' fleet, including the mighty battle barge Glory and a shoal of strike cruisers and support craft. Of the Soul Drinkers themselves there was no sign. No one knew where they were or how they were travelling, but the fact that they had destroyed their own fleet - one of the most powerful independent forces for some sectors around -indicated that they were determined to make life difficult for anyone trying to follow them.
The fleet could have been tracked. But these mere thousand men could not be tracked - not when they had the immeasurable vastness of the Imperium to hide in.
And so it came to Inquisitor Thaddeus of the Ordo Hereticus. There was no question of letting Tsouras carry on with the task of hunting down the Soul Drinkers - he had let them slip by once and that was once too often. Thaddeus had few leads left to follow from the wreckage of the Persecution and the burned-out remnants of the fleet. Chloure was the last to be exhausted and like the others -Archmagos Khobotov of the Adeptus Mechanicus, killed in a generatorium explosion on the Forge World Koden Tertius, Captain Trentius of the Cardinal Byzantine and a few others who had survived Tsouras's enthusiasm - he had yielded nothing to indicate where the Soul Drinkers were or what they were planning. But Thaddeus did not despair at the magnitude of his task. He was reliable and thorough. He would get the job done eventually.
He knew hardly anything about the Soul Drinkers. He had studied their history in great detail, of course, and it indicated a zealously loyal Chapter, independent of will but ready to throw its valuable Marines against insane odds in the Emperor's name. There was barely a taint on them. But that was not the Chapter he faced now - the Soul Drinkers had broken so violently with their faith in the Imperium that their heresy left nothing of the Chapter's previous personality. Thaddeus knew that Sarpedon, who had taken command of the rebellious Soul Drinkers, would be the primary force behind the Chapter's new, blasphemous existence. Sarpedon was a psyker, one of the Chapter's Librarians and highly decorated throughout his seventy-year service. He would be tough to crack. Probably impossible.