[IC] The Enemy Beyond: Warhammer 40,000 Inquisitor RP

[POOHEAD189]

Further in, the swamp lived up to its name. The forest and small isles of soft earth dotted the landscape, and small mammals with six limbs scurried along the branches and shimmied up gnarled trees as we trudged through what we hoped was the most shallow of pathways through the mire. Lucius had volunteered to go first, to keep the depth of the swamp in mind. However I countermanded that and sent him to the back. Even if his height was a good gauge of testing water levels, his bulk would create holes in and of themselves, and we wished to move as stealthily as we could in the murk.

Bugs plagued us incessantly and sweat clung to our skin, but I was surprised to hear only a modicum of complaining from Emmaline and a smidgen of griping from Selencia. Clara did grouse once, but she was only concerned our current trajectory might have us be caught in a compromising position. I led us as best I could across what passed for solid ground, however, and it took another two hours before we saw another living being that was not insect or critter. If I had to guess, we were a days walk to the river and two days away from reaching any real hard ground on the opposite shore.

At first, I thought the crude boat was a part of the landscape, but at the corner of my eye I saw it lazily detached from a small tree infested piece of land, and I signaled for the group to hide as best they could. With some sloshing accompanying us, we managed to kneel behind what logs and large fungal growths we could. Lucius had to lay almost flat in the water to even scratch the surface of what I might call 'hiding,' though like an astartes, he could hold his breath far longer than a normal man and so ceased to move, his armored bulk looking like a fallen craft more than any being.

The boat's arrival was announced by the sound of a juttering engine, and from my vantage point I could see three men atop a flat surface. Their fatigues were dirties beyond excuse, even in such a locale, and two of them held lasguns in their hands, watching the ruined landscape with a lazy interest. I was too far to tell if they were mutant or merely ugly, their faces mangled from some attack or cursed to them by inbred genetics. Two minutes slid by, and the boat disappeared beyond the last vestiges of sight. I breathed a sigh of relief, and picked myself up, helping Emmaline to her feet before my lover gasped.

I turned, and swiftly approaching us were three boats, motorless and made of twine, riding low in the water and easily passing as bundles, I still cursed myself for not paying my surroundings as much attention as I could. There had to be nine of them, three to each boat, each with lasguns slung over their backs and brutally simple bits of metal curtained around them for armor. They looked like normal men as far as I could ascertain, which was fortunate. Clara popped from behind a tree, carbine at the ready. Emmaline hastily armed herself and Lucius Raj rose from the depths like a sunken god, but I held my hands out, pointing at the captain and thunder warrior specifically. "Hold! Org Hake! Org Hake!"

During the brief exchange, the locals had raised their weapons to fire, but they kept their fingers off the trigger as I called in their native tongue.

"What?" Emmaline whispered nervously.

Lazarus rose beside us, his limbs whirring and sputtering water as they began to move again. "He is speaking savage-lingua. A curious dialect of it, and if my records are correct, he would need to use utilize a few local flourishes, but it is common language on feral worlds." He explained, helpfully.

"Ock mok en oteppa!" One of the men called back, gesturing with his gun. Once more did I thank Inquisitor Kronus for a lesson that I in my youth had called useless. I could not guess if this was Kator Talon and Son’s of the Fen, but whoever they were, they had not been mutated as of yet. I gathered the one speaking was asking us for an introduction, albeit in a very threatening fashion. I complied. As I did so, Lazarus was good enough to translate.

"We have come at the behest of the moon god. We are heralds in the wake of its sleep. Have we arrived too late?... No, you have not. If you are truly a messenger, what do you seek to give us?...We wish to cure the blight on this land."

"How come you never taught this to me?" Emmaline asked softly, downtrodden. Despite myself, disappointing her did pull at my emotions, though I was a bit too happy to be conversing at the moment to be truly effected.

"I did not know if we were going to need us," I told her simply, self satisfied. "If you would like, every new locale we visit, I will demand a crash course in linguistics and any other small aspect we might need. They will be graded reports."

Despite the joke, she took my meaning. "Point taken."

[Penny]

I strongly suspected that we were going to need to insitute some kind of communal classes before our next mission, though I could appreciate it wasn't time to bring it up. The boatmen jabbered in their cant. Though agitated, they weren't immediately going for weapons, which I took to be a good sign. The language was derived from a form of proto gothic that tugged at the edge of my conciousness.

"Arg ye stande vay thak provfae?" one of them called, fingering his weapon.

"Do we stand with the prophet," Hadrian translated. Judging by the way the locals shifted when they said it, alot hung on our answer. I ran the angles quickly in my mind. There have been many times in my inglorious career in His service my back ground as a con artist has come in handy. These people had no tradition of prophets, which meant the concept was off world. Stand with suggested the drawing of lines and picking of sides. That meant they balance of probabilities meant they weren't with the off worlder.

"No," I suggested, hoping that Hadrian had been translating literally.

"Onae!" Hadrian called. The phenoms began to coalecse in my mind as I got more of a sample size. The boatmen exchanged glances, clearly afraid, though of exactly what I wasn't sure.

"Climb... we take you safe," one of the boatmen called.

"There is no way we are getting Lucius on one of those boats," I sighed.

The village was located down one of the many murky streams. Great walls of almost impenetrable mangrove rose on both sides. At times the canopy reached completely across the water, blocking out the sun like a tunnel. After an hour or so the channel opened to reveal a small island, ramparted by carefully manicured mangroves. A handful of boats were pulled up against a muddy bank. Long strings of eel like fish hung from ropes above a smoking trench. Unwashed children threw handfuls of what looked like seaweed into the trench, feeding smouldering fires within. Beyond the shore stood a cluster of huts of woven seaweed, bedecked with shells and dried flowers. Grim faced men squatted in the dirt before the huts, some had las guns, others had spears of metal or bone. Thye all stood as the boats came into view, eyes widdening as Lucius stomped through the water behing the boat, up to his neck in the brackish water but unworried. By the time we reached the village all the children were out of sight and all the men were waiting for us, weapons brandished. A grisled looking man with ritual scars on his face led them, clearly the chief.

"I hope you are ready to negotiate," I whispered to Hadrian.

[POOHEAD189]

Within minutes, the warriors of this village surrounded my crew and I, spears and lasguns fitted with bayonets bristling. I had ordered everyone accompanying me to holster their weapons and try to appear as nonthreatening as possible. For the women it was easy. This hamlet was likely misogynistic and had antiquated ideas of sex, but for Lucius I had to tell him to lay his weapon down at his feet. He did so begrudgingly, even if he likely did not need it to kill everyone here.

"Uha fon eya," The chief said, roughly translating to greeting a foreigner. I responded with a local handsign of greeting, allowing him to continue. "Mahi mani tal mahi spekka soona an loona."

In fact, perhaps it would be prudent to merely translate what they were saying in their entirety in the essence of expedience. He asked me if I spoke for the gods. It was a tricky gamble on my part, as I felt almost borderline sacrilege to portray myself as such, even if it was a very crude portrayal of the divine emperor.

"Yes, I am their herald. I have come from beyond the sun to speak to the men of the swamps, but I had thought there would be more of you." I told him.

"That is why you bring such a champion," The chief remarked, stroking his chin, idly fingering one of the many piercings along his jaw. "But why did you bring the women? Are they gifts."

"I have not come to bring any gifts save the safeguarding of your home. My companions each play a part in the divine plan. But you did not answer my question." I reminded him.

The chief looked thoughtful, and I could tell he was weighing his options on if believing me would serve his purposes. Eventually he replied: "If you are who you say you are, then you are welcome. If not, we will eat you. But as for your question, a man from the sky, much like you, came many months ago and began speaking to the tribes of the forest and the swamp. Nagrip was his name, and he took my people from their sacred rituals and gave them weapons of controlled fire and boats that moved without paddles. I took what people listened to me to this small village, and here we have lay hidden."

"Nagrip," I said, pondering. No one looked at me any more thoughtfully save Emmaline, as the name sounded much like a colloquial word and her psychic abilities likely granting her some insight into my broad thoughts. "Where is this man? I would see if he is a messenger of darkness."

The chief nodded, eager to help. Like as not he was anxious to see us away, if not to solve his problems than at least to keep ourselves from becoming one. "Less than a day across the water, to the west, he makes his dwelling with our fallen kinsmen. I hear he also has foul beasts lurking near, but beware the plague. Only fire can cure it, and if you are infected, it would be best to die rather than infect your friends. We will provide you with two boats. Use them as you will."

Beasts and plague? I did not wish to believe it, but perhaps this was land had the mark of the Lord of Rot. Swamps were a breeding ground for disease regardless, and any vehicle might look like a beast to this man, so I believed I was letting my worries get to me. However, it paid to be prepared. "Thank you, we shall perform our divine duty and rid your waters of this foulness. But we do not have the power to cure the plague. It would be best if you were to move eastward as soon as possible."

"Pick up and leave?" He asked, aghast. I nodded.

"Yes, as you once did months ago. I can slay, but I cannot cure." I informed him, and got to my feet. If my hunch was correct, this swamp would remain tainted for centuries. I only hoped I was wrong, and I turned to my companions. "We're heading west."

[Penny]

Once it became clear that we weren't to be killed on the spot, the atmosphere warmed considerably. While the boats were being prepared the women and children returned from wherever it was they had vanished to. Some of them hid, other approached us, more than a few tried to touch my hair, the gold being an unusual shade among what were a darkskinned and dark haired people. One of the warriors even attempted to grab me, but Clara produced a knife in a heartbeat and persuaded him to mind his manners.

The chief's son, Garm by name, was sent with us to be our guide, though he didn't seem altogether pleased with the idea. These people had been fighting their kinfolk since Nagrip had established his domination. This is how the lasguns had come into their possession. They were horrified that their own people had abandoned their rituals to follow Nagrip's dark gospel. I was horrified also, thinking about how easy it would be to subvert simple folk all over the Imperium with nothing more sophisticated than a few crates of weapons and medicine.

"We could spend the night," I suggested to Hadrian, glancing at the sun. He shook his head firmly.

"This is the last night before the lunar tide, we cant afford to wait."

"Do we even have a plan?" I objected.

"Find Nagrip, send him to the Emperor's Judgement," he replied.

"That is more like a mission statement,' I suggested.

"Kavasa, Kavasa," he replied, alternating pronunciations. Then he grew more serious. "We cant plan till we get more information, and to do that we need to get closer."

"The Emperor Protects," I said, without much enthusiasm.

[POOHEAD189]

Like the Sicilian Expedition of ancient Terra, we sailed to almost certain catastrophe, to ground we only marginally knew into what could be a trap. Luckily the water was not too deep for Lucius, at least the majority of the time. He was given a pair of ropes to tug on if he was in need of speed or more likely, we were in need of stopping. Garm rode at the head of our skiff, with myself and Emmaline aboard behind him, in that order. He was a hale man, but rough living and the constant struggle against his now-distant kin had made him look far more aged than his thirty years might normally tell you.

We were given a bit of supplies. What fresh water they could grant us refilled our canteens and containers, and we were gifted small fruits wrapped in leaves with the vague shape of plantains, with coarse outer skin that coated a bitter but filling meal. Before departure, our small skiffs have been sprayed with a strange musk that felt almost viscous to one's senses, but we were told it kept the bugs away and it proved a relatively truthful claim.

"Describe the landing we seek." I told Garm, who looked at me with a muted fear.

"It's an island twice the size of the one I live upon, with an area for docking on the far side across from our approach. Ever since they have been given the boats without paddles they have cleared the waters around the island of reeds and the small trees, where the ganda lizards lay their eggs this season." Garm said, sounding reservedly forlorn at what was likely a terrible tragedy to his people.

"What manner of beasts does Nagrip have in his employ?" I implored, not wanting him to dwell on the lost traditions just yet.

"Beasts that hurt the eye to see. I could not describe them if I tried." Garm said, and he shuddered at the thought. I felt a cold chill run down my spine, and my eyes dropped to my blessed power sword, the hilt protruding from our packs beneath my legs.

[Penny]

I felt bile rising in my throat at Garm's words. The Ordos of the Holy Inquisition had nebulous but vast responsibilites, but at its core the Ordo Malleus, with which I had become associated, was concerned with the Daemon. I had almost died at the hands of Bahometus and his abominations, and the wrongness of what he had summoned lingered in my mind. All psykers lived with the knowledge of what lived just beyond the prosaic veil of reality. It was a private fear that lurked at the back of the mind. To see it made manifest, to see the doom of all life, was difficult to bear.

"The Emperor Protects," I intoned without any real conviction. Hadrian reached back and squeezed my hand and we slicked on across the dark water.

We began to pass villages, identical in every respect to Garm's home, save they were all abandoned. Some had red dye smeared on the walls of their rude huts, others were smouldering ruins, torched by their neighbours, or by their own hands in a vain attempt to stamp out the contagion. We saw only one living soul. An old man sitting against a clump of trees. His eyes were rolled back and his breathing laboured, great red sores covered his body, weeping clear sera which had attracted thousands of tiny black insects. If they bothered the old man he was too far gone to do anything about it.

"The Sickness," was all Garm would say, stroking harder to steer us further away from the dying man.

We continued on for another hour before, abruptly the mangrove ended. Just ended. Prefabricated ferrocrete blocks had been set up in a vast wall. It curved away to both sides too irregular for me to estimate the area beyond. My breath caught as the boat grounded against the concrete. The area beyond wasn't cleared. It was drained. Millions of gallons of water had been pumped, revealing a landscape of dried mud beyond. Patches of it were blackened where organic matter had been piled and burned. Great trenches had been dug and they still flowed with brackish sea water. The skeletons of marine life encursted the recovered earth like mould, imparting their iodine stink to the vista.

"What in the name of the Throne," Selenica breathed. It wasn't just mud and ash. In the center stood a city. It rose in a series of structures carved of some greenish basalt. Obelisks rose at oddly irregular intervals like quills on a porcupine. At the edge of the ruins I could see men with las guns, standing watch over other men, passing buckets of mud out and tossing them into the trenches. Slaves put to excavating the city, captured tribesmen or subjugated members of Nagrip's allies.

"What the fuck is this..." I breathed.

[POOHEAD189]

I felt a similar feeling if disgust at the sight, but I had seen many such atrocities in my short career. It never got easier to feel, but it became easier to handle and I did not skip a beat as I slid from the skiff with Garm, helping Emmaline out to mute any noise she might cause. She was brilliant but I did not think her repertoire included slinking through wetlands. We knelt beside the veritable wall that loomed between us and the blasted landscape, small rivulets in the ferrocrete between the blocks a convenient window to peer within. I waved for Clara and the others to approach, indicating with my hand signs it was safe but stealth was required. Clara acknowledged and lead the others closer a few blocks to my left.

"It did not look like this when I was last here," Garm said softly, horror in his voice.

"When were you last at this location?" I asked him, not looking away from the scene before us. I estimated there was perhaps a hundred slaves, and a quarter of that number in guards, though they were scattered over what looked to be half a kilometer. There was virtually no way beyond some psychic miracle that we could approach without being detected. Perhaps Clara could shimmy through and use her new scope to good effect, hiding in the trenches, but that would only give us a very small advantage in what would likely be a prolonged firefight.

"Three times of the sleeping moon," He whispered, squinting as he gazed up the almost eidetic spires that nearly pierced the sun. Even as he spoke, a group of five men approached from the south, across the landscape of interchanging wet and dryness. They carried lasguns and wore the same fatigues we saw of the men on the boat. It was hard to gauge from our position, but they seemed to have a much short range of open ground to traverse. If they were boat men, that meant the docks were closer. An idea began to form in my head, though it was foolhardy.

"Lazarus, I need you to remain here with Garm and Lucius. Do you have your rifle?"

Lazarus approached, unfortunately having a rough go of it like Emmaline, though it was for a reason far more similar to Lucius. The steel arms and mechanical bits on his form made him decidedly more heavy than the average man. Luckily, he had kept his transuranic arquebus in pristine condition despite the geography.

"Good, Emmaline, Selencia, and Clara are going around to the docks. You will slip in and hide in one of the trenches. I'll need your fire support if things get hairy, and I believe they will before it's all done. Lucius, protect Garm and Lazarus. If people assail your position or if you see anything beyond a man going at any of us, unleash hell. Understand?"

"Beyond a man? A xenos?" Lucius asked.

"Er, possibly." I temporized, not wanting to explain the entities of the warp to someone who had been sleeping before the Unification of Terra. "Garm, remain here. Keep your boat safe. We might be needing it soon."

"Sky one, they do not use skiffs like us. If you approach in one, they will think you are of my tribe."

"I will convince them that I have captured one." I said, looking at the women and gauging their reactions. They tried to look unworried, save for Emmaline who did not seem particularly excited. My visage softened for a brief moment, and I placed a hand on her shoulder. "I'll need your help to convince whatever guard is at the dock. We'll look dirty, but we merely need to be at the dock. When he step off, we kill the guard and take their fatigues." My eyes flicked to Clara, who nodded.

"I suppose I'm coming with you because...?" Selencia asked.

I grinned. "Why, you're our doctor. There is a plague about."

[Penny]

We circled east. There was enough gaps in the mangroves this close to the deeper water of the lake that, even without Garm, it wasn't a challenge. I pulled my hood up. My hunting clothes weren't a particularly close match to the fatigues the enemy were wearing, but they were sufficiently different from the furs and leather of the locals to make it clear I was an off worlder. My hair was in a severe braid, which I concealed beneath the foul weather hood. Clara and Selenica took similar precautions. It wasn't certain that the presence of so many women would arouse suspicion, but it was a risk we were all keen to avoid. I brought the Helix-2 though there was no chance I would be able to get the massive thing unlimbered in time to bring it into action, so I gripped my thousander under my weather cloak and hoped for the best.

The dock was a metal platform on pontoons bolted to the side of the ferocrete levy. The lake wasn't big enough to have appreciable tides but this was off the shelf tech meant for somewhere that did. A small crane had been attached to the central section to facilitate the transfer of heavy loads from the water side to the mud side, its yellow and black lifting arm surprisingly bright and cheerful amidst the drab natural colors. Two men in flak armor stood smoking low sticks, both in the small patch of shade provided by the crane. The moment they saw us they tossed the lho sticks they had been smoking into the water and unshipped las rifles. These weren't the gilded show pieces we had seen in the hands of the natives. They were dark compact weapons, with underslung lumens and other personalized upgrades. Professional mercenaries almost certainly. I wondered how Nagrip had accomplished this impressive, if crude, piece of engineering. Clearly he was more than the minor warp dabbler Hadrian had imagined when we set out. He had funding and support, maybe even Mechanicus support to get all this done. Hadrian clambered to his feet and cupped his hands around his mouth.

"Get us an enginseer, barge crapped out about two clicks out!" he bellowed, sounding extremely irritated. The guards were gripping their rifles but not pointing them. I wondered if I dared give them a nudge with my mind, but decided against it. Something was wrong with this place. I had no knowledge of the planets hydrography but it seemed impossible that a city could by laying under the mud like this without being many thousands of years old, probably pre-imperial and xenos to boot. They were a sour an unpleasant taste in the back of my mind and I wasn't eager to swim in such murky waters.

"Who the frak are you!?" one of the guards called, lifting his las gun to point at us. The skiff continued towards them no faster than a swift walk.

"Who the frak do you think I am?!" Hadrian thundered, "Now get us a damn enginseer before the locals decided to come back and sink our damn barge while we can't move it! Do you know what the boss will do to us if we lose that shipment?"

It was a masterful performance, edged with enough irritation and interest to hold their attention as we approached. We were perhaps ten feet away when Clara reached down and took out a length of locally made rope. As she drew her arm back one of the guards must have realised something was amiss, he began to swing his weapon down and open his mouth to shout. Clara threw the rope, casting it wide so both men ducked involuntarily to avoid it, her other hand came around and hurled something small and metallic. The frag grenade struck the closest thug in to top of the head with an audible crack, having ducked into its trajectory, he dropped his gun and staggered backwards, bright blood leaking from his crown. The grenade bounced back, striking the concrete and plopping into the filthy water, the pin having never been pulled. The second guard reared back but Hadrian whipped out his sword and threw it overhand with a spin like a trala spike. It hit the second mercenary in the throat punching through his neck and glancing off his spine, dropping him to the ground with blood gouting from his severed blood vessels. Clara leaped the remaining four feet and scrambled up onto the dock, but the man she had brained with the grenade was recovering, staggering drunkenly towards Clara and clawing for his pistol. Even stunned he was good, catching her wrist before she could jab the short knife into him. She twisted him around, towards the edge of the dock but it could only be a moment before he screamed or managed to engage his vox. I brought the paddle down on the back of his head as hard as I could. I felt vertebrae and skull crack under the force of the blow, and he dropped like a polaxed grox. Clara's grip was all that kept him from tumbling into the water, guiding him down so we didn't soak a uniform we would momentarily need.

I dropped the paddle as Clara tied up the skiff, climbing out awkwardly, nearly falling into the drink as my weight pushed the gunnel down towards the water. Selenica looked pale but followed behind, the pair of us keeping watch while Clara and Hadrian pulled on the uniforms of the dead enforcers. I crept to the edge and looked down towards the unsettling city. A broad moat had been dug for the purpose of drainage and I saw big promethum powered pumps off to the west, spraying water out over the levees in three giant muddy geysers. Beyond the moat the ground rose slightly to the city. The buildings on this side had been cleared. The undertaking seemed immense until I saw how it was being done, through my hunters magnocular I could see filthy looking men, off world laborers judging by their garb, spraying muddy water from a great hose, effectively sluicing the mud which encrusted the buildings down into the moat. Only after they had done all they could did the slaves move in with brooms and buckets. On the western side of the city I could see barracks made out of plastec sheeting. The space between the wall and the moat was grooved by what looked like a giant sledge, hooked to the wall at one end and pilings at the other by cables that allowed it to be drawn back and forth across the mud. Presumably equipment and supplies were craned down onto it and then it was slid across the intervening space to the mostly cleared streets. I could see slaves acting as stevedores, hauling crates of supplies out of sight and into the city. The more I saw, the less I liked.

[POOHEAD189]

The fatigues were rancid and wet with sweat, and I wasn't entirely certain they had not soiled themselves at one point out of sheer laziness. Gritting my teeth, I donned the garb without complaint as Clara did, leaving our folded clothing with Emmaline to place inside her pack. Clara kept her carbine, but I took a fallen lasgun and kept my power sword slung across my back, donning a small, stained tarp over it as a makeshift cloak.

I lead us out of the docks, moving with a laziness and looking around with disdain smeared across my face. I found the dregs of society had a way of walking. Men who would gut you as soon as greet you moved with a subtle loathing and a bowling gait, as if gravity itself annoyed them. Clara was not a field agent, used more for security detail on Pacitus and the Caledonian when I needed her presence there, but she did well in copying my movements. The two in the back were partially cloaked by our presence at the fore, and the upended ground and constant puddles of fetid water only deepened how tired they were of this whole expedition, which was good for our cover at the current moment.

"Ska, id got the hagk!" One of the guard called, asking what I had brought them today, curiously not posing it as a question in the traditional sense.

"Jama, jis fen wobs fo boz," I remarked derisively. Hopefully if he thought the two trailing Clara and I were meant to meet their leader, they wouldn't be stopped on the way to the city.

Three of the guards glanced over at the group, but only in passing. One of the guards was squatting like a particularly ugly ape, and he peered at them suspiciously, but a slave suddenly dropping a bucket of water drew his attention back to his work. I kept myself from breathing a sigh of relief as we sauntered past the guards and made our way into the mouth of the first towers wrought of eerie looking basalt. As we stepped under the first blanket of shade, the coolness was contrasted by the feeling of anxiety that shot up my back and prickled my psychic senses. I felt very much I had stepped out of the cook pot and into the fire.

[Penny]

My sense of disquiet increased with every step we took. I almost wished for the guards to notice us, las guns and stubbers at least being familiar and definable dangers. The city was oddly configured, towers reached up a few dozen feet or so, some beginning in rough naves, others naked. The streets were paved, though it looked as though the stones fitted together with an impossible smoothness, something that none the less did not render them slippery. I glanced into some of the towers, accessible through roughly circular doors. Inside they were largely unadorned, though occasional niches showed cracked plinths where small items had obviously been removed. Heavy duty power cabling ran along the streets, tacked to walls with cargo tape or stapled into the ground with iron spikes. The cords went to flood lumens that were positioned to light various walls, or to small portable cogitator units, of the type archeors used at remote dig sights.

"You are the closest thing we have to an archeor Emma, can you tell us anything?" Hadrian whispered as we moved down a narrow boulevard over which the towers seemed to slightly crowd.

"I'm not very close to an archeor," I countered, but I knew that evading the question served no one.

"It's old, at least ten thousand years, not human," I supplied.

"How do you know?" Clara asked, I suspected more nervous than curious. She might be even less used to this kind of thing than I was, for all she had vastly more experience of combat. I had afterall been a part of the suppression of a powerful cult. Also I had been abducted by that cult previous to that, which I think counts.

"No stairs. Not one single staircase in the whole place," I explained nodding towards one of the towers in which a ramp coiled around the inside. It was a very inefficient design, one that didn't make sense unless the inhabitants were physiologically unable to climb steps. We entered into a square where one of the stella we had seen from the levy reared skyward, surrounded by packed crates that seemed to contain statuary smashed from niches. The stella seemed to rear out of the ground, and was made of a darker different stone. I got the queasy feeling that the stella had existed long before whatever alien creatures had raised the city began using tools. Strange markings had been chiseled into them some kind of script which tugged at the edge of my awareness, like something I had seen in a forgotten dream.

"Enuncia," I breathed, the word swimming up into my mind from somewhere else. My head throbbed painfully. I was suddenly skipping along the street of Quentain on Bonaventure, my hair done up in pigtails. Then I was in a cold cell, staring at something I couldn't make out. Both images flashed crazily across my vision, accompanied by blasts of psychosomatic sound, like heavily amped static.

"Are you okay Emma?" Clara asked.

"Yes," I replied by rote, "Why?" Before she could answer I raised my hand to my nose and stared at my fingers as they came away bloody.

[POOHEAD189]

Beyond the sensation of intense wrongness upon my psychic senses, the structures connected to the spires were fashioned with an intense meaninglessness that gave it the appearance of the place being made in a mad child’s dream. The only right angles we saw were happenstance, and even the lithe towers that loomed above us swayed and curved like undulating dancers, initially simply just being too large for us to easily notice at first glance.

The deeper we moved, the fouler the feeling. A rank smell of putrid rot was in the air, and the ground began to grow more…organic as we walked. It was still hard and made of some weird stone-like substance, but it had the feel of striding upon a great carpet of some hairless, bestial skin. Odd mushrooms bloomed along orifices along the walls, and soon I stopped us from continuing further in, certain we were merely walking into a pocket dimension in the warp.

I knew that to be impossible, but humans were not safe to traverse further, even with our psychic powers, and whatever was happening here, the guards outside knew we were to meet with someone and survive the tale. We backtracked, moving past the almost living architecture and turning into one of the larger ‘archways’ if one was generous enough to call such a blasted hole that particular term.

Luck was with us, as no sooner had we entered that we heard voices. I don’t know if I was relieved or not that they sounded like locals, and around a ‘hall’ in the bend of the first warped chamber, two men appeared, speaking to one another in their bastard tongue. Immediately I recognized them. They were the men we saw on the first boat, before Garm’s village found us in the murk.
“Cha skota,” one of them said, indicating me with a wave of his hand. He waved it over to another opening in the melted stone, and I gave a few quick words to acknowledge him. I stepped forward, Clara following suit closely. I moved past the two degenerates, but the one who spoke eyed me. I knew he could not recognize me, as he had not spotted me within the reeds. However, he placed a hand on my shoulder and peered deeply into my face. “Ey, wah co fo bata?”

Lazarus had timed me before on my quick draw. My fasted on the gun range was firing three shots accurately at 1.37 seconds. I wish he were here now, because in my desperation I believed I beat my previous high score. In the same movement I drew my sidearm, I batted his hand away and fired three shots. The first two burst through the first dreg’s chest, and the last shot went clean through the head of the second man before his eyes could widen. The rapport of the shots was loud, but the stones seemed to absorb the noise rather than multiplying the echo as one might have feared from the spacious curves. I had observed the phenomena when we first entered, and I had counted on that here.

“Why did you do that?” Selencia asked breathily, too cautious to scream at me.

“He saw through me.” I remarked simply. “It wasn’t what he said. I saw it in his eyes.”

“Hadrian is right. I could feel it…I think.” Emmaline remarked without extreme confidence.

“So now where do we go? Not where he pointed us to enter, surely.” Clara said.

“I think we should. We’re here in the belly of the beast. If we aren’t here to cut the head off the snake, we might as well leave.” I said. I also had the sinking suspicion that it wasn’t necessarily a trap, but boatman would have exposed us when we entered. However, it was just a hunch. We would have to see if I was right in my assumption.

[Penny]

Clara was clearly working hard to keep a façade of calm. On the basis of her demonstrable skill I had forgotten the fact that she hadn't really been in the field before. Even my pitiful experience gave me an edge on her, and my psychic abilities gave me weapons and insights that she couldn't imagine. For a moment I felt both lonely and terrified, filled with an urge to squeeze Hadrian's hand, but he was already moving ahead. Selenica still seemed to be tracking, but her glassy eyes made me think that she was simply moving on autopilot. How much good would either of them be if things really went wrong? I had to bite back a laugh at the presumption that I would be much better.

We moved through another series of strange arches and once again I felt the taste of stale saltwater cloy at the back of my throat. We weren't in the Warp, we were still alive afterall, but we had entered into some kind of interstitial space. Had the ancient Xenos who built this place been chaos tainted? Was this a city of the dead that had slowly fallen into the shadow of the Warp? Was it a deliberate portal? I had too many questions and no data to work with. Not that I imagined that data would comfort me in any case.

"Watch yourselves," Hadrian murmured as we passed through another arch. This one seemed hung with long tendrils of something like seaweed, each ending in a small bilious yellow flower. They looked uncomfortably like mouths. There was evidence that similar vines had been removed, probably with flamers judging by the ash and the smell of prometheum. If this was new growth, it was hellish fast. Our pace slowed as we heard noises up ahead, a dull staccato chattering like the kind you hear from certain types of Administratum Cogitators. We entered the square through the ruins of what might have been a gate or blockhouse. In the center stood a massive stella, carved with a dizzying profusion of runes. It must have been a hundred feet tall, though such a thing was completely impossible owing to the fact we would have seen it from the levy wall. A half dozen servo skulls buzzed around it, scanning and recording. A semicircle of cogitators stood before it, each slaved to a servitor who wrote constantly with an auto quill. All of the servitors were covered with fungus. It grew from their eyes, from their mouths, from the pores of their skin, seeming to pulse with sickly energy as they transcribed the feed from the skulls. Guards in flak armor stood watching the servitors. As we watched we saw one begin to thrash against its connections, whipping cables free and keening like a lost soul. One of the guards stepped close and fired a stub pistol into its cranium, waited a moment, and then gave the twitching corpse a second shot. Two more guards used pincers to disconnect the corpse and drag it to a fire pit made of stacked cinder blocks. They levered it in, then drenched it in promethum and torched it, adding the smell of burning flesh and lubricant to the mycological miasma of the place. Another servitor was led forward. It was crude, probably one of the locals refitted by some low grade flesh butcher. He was plugged in and began to write. I wished Lazarus were here, though his afront at the tech heresy might outweigh his insights.

"They are transcribing it," I breathed, eyes flicking to crates in which parchments were being lain down. They crackled with void shields, the kind I had seen in Hadrian's library that shielded prohibited texts. I wondered what it might say and of what use it might be. Before I could speculate a man walked out of a tent in a suit of body armor that would have made a Stormtrooper jealous. He was handsome and earnest looking and he pointed and gesticulated at the pillar, making violent gestures to his guards. A tech adept in a crimson robe emerged behind him, buzzing away from a vox caster too low for us to register. The first man turned to snarl something at the tech priest and I gasped despite my best efforts. Pinned to the collar of the new comers armor was a familiar badge of red and silver. An Inquisitorial rosette.

[POOHEAD189]

Emmaline clutched my sleeve, but it was as if her touch was a transient sensation to my dulled senses. I was far away, shocked at what I was seeing before my very eyes. It simply did not make sense. I felt it must be some chaos induced dream, or some facsimile fraud having stripped the regalia of an Inquisitor to mock our most sacred traditions. But I knew that was impossible as soon as I thought it. I recognized the armor he wore. It was Malleus Power armor, one of the Ordos' most sacred armaments. Gilded ceramite, inscribed with pentagrammatic wards upon its forging deep within the Tricorn Palace on saturn. Every strike from the armor could banish a daemon, every attack upon its form would licit a conflagration upon an entity of the warp and perhaps expatriate it from this very plane. Only our most trusted Inquisitors could gain access to such a consecrated piece of equipment, much less wield it. It would take me two centuries of peerless effort for me to even be considered to hold such an armor, and only in dire need. No heretic could get its hands on one, and an Inquisitor wielding one would have to be rent asunder to be killed, destroying the armor with it.

The armor meant trust. I could put my faith in a man who wore it, beyond any shadow of a doubt. And yet here he was, in this obscenity of a courtyard at the crux of an unholy city half buried in the accursed warp. It made no sense to my young mind, and it was only Emmaline's grip tightening on my sleeve that brought me back from a state of numbness.

"That's a Medicae Servitor," Selencia said softly, gesturing with her head at the third one down. She hadn't deigned to look too closely at the man or the tech adept yet. Her eyes had always been sharp, but this place was having its effect on her. She wanted to speak on what she knew, clinging to the familiar. "Remidium Pattern, I think. But it's been tampered with. I saw many in my time at the Officio Medicae."

"Do you recognize him?" Emmaline asked in a hoarse whisper, feeling my distraughtness in her close proximity.

Had I, I would have likely been far too gone to be duly reasoned with. His features were fine and well formed, with a strong nose and a look of purpose in his striking green eyes. His chocolate hair was combed back to keep out of his hawkish eyes. He looked only a little older than I, but with rejuvenat technology he could be over eighty, perhaps a hundred years old. Even as I studied his features, he unholstered a bolt pistol and began to prowl the basterdized thing one might call a tower, eyeing the servitors as the servo-skulls buzzed around him in their dutiful work.

"Orders, boss?" Clara asked, nervously fingering her carbine. She seemed ready to spring, but I was hesitant to attack the man. Not out of any sense of camraderie, though the wrongness of firing upon a fellow inquisitor was painfully evident. His armor was the problem, and the distance it would take to close the gap on him. No bullet or lasbolt would be able to penetrate its hull. Only my power sword could, and even then it would be a near thing. Perhaps Emmaline could hold him steady, but that left the handful of guards and the servo-skulls, which might be armed themselves. We could also fire from here and if we were lucky, take the man, the traitor, in the head. But I couldn't.

I needed to know who he was.

[Penny]

The sense of wrongness was jarring. We had come here hunting a heretic only to find one of our own. Hadrian had told me of the divisions within the Ordos, but this was the first practical experience of it. I expected an inquisitor who had crossed the line to look... I don't know, tainted? daemonic? but he looked everybit as upright as Hadrian.

"We need to get closer," Hadrian whispered. I watched the tableau before us for a moment.

"I have an idea," I said, and reached out with my powers. It felt like I was skating in a thunderstorm, the sense of impending doom almost overwhelming. Nearby fungus and vines began to strain towards me, flowers opening like hungry mouths. All three of my companions tensed. I reached out and touched one of the transcription servitors. I didn't do anything specific, merely charged it with my mind. There was a flash of billious yellow in my mind and I slammed my shields in place in the nick of time. Fungus exploded from the servitor closest to the blashpemous column. Not the slowly creeping growth we had observed before, but foot long protuberances emerging in a flash. The servitor juddered and sparked then tore free of its data jacks in a spray of lubricant. The nearest guard tried to swing his weapon to bear but the fungus infested servitor drove a fist into his breastplate. Tendrils stabbed into his chest, and he screamed, his face blackening as greenish bile errupted from his lips. The remaining guards turned their weapons on the thing, las bolts blasting into it. The fungus was almost animate now, seeming to wear the remains of the servitor that still feebly reached out with its data jacks. The air filled with stink of burning fungus as the thing staggered towards the power armored inquisitor.

"Did you do that?" Clara asked me in an awed voice.

"We had better move," I whispered though Hadrian was already moving off towards the barracks structure.

[POOHEAD189]

The distraction worked like a charm, and I along with my retinue made across the small open space in haste. Emmaline tripped on the way across, but she managed to scramble on her knees and hands into the small building before anyone saw her. Inside, it looked like a small armory refitted into an office. Racks for guns had been replaced with plasteel shelves covered in old books, inquisitorial equipment, and a few stacks of ammo. There was a door front facing the servitors, and a door to the back where we had slunk in. I saw a few works on the shelf I recognized, one even being a text I had Emmaline read in her induction training. It disgusted me this man was so familiar in his tastes as I.

"This doesn't appear like the den of a heretic," Selencia commented as I sifted through a stack of papers on his desk. My heartbeat thudded rapidly in my head as I pushed aside planetary transportation logs and old land grants, before finding a small folder which held, I believe, a sampling of the transcripts that was being written even now outside of the small structure. A shout went up, and we all stopped to listen to a cultured voice berating someone. He sounded like he was used to giving orders. Clara knelt beside the window and peered out the small window. A few, deafening gunshots sounded. It was the telltale crack of a bolt-pistol.

"Well, that's the end of our distraction. But I have some bad news, Hadrian," She said, and I whipped my head to regard her. "They have a few more guys rolling in from our origin point, and they're shouting something."

"Damn," I said, correctly reasoning they were being warned of the two bodies out front. I didn't know if we could leave alive, but I placed the folder under my arm and reached to my lower back, retrieving a small item from my belt. "Clara, grenades. We can't leave without stopping this fiends plans."

"Frag?" She asked as I joined her opposite the door.

"Krak," I said, the oval device already in my hands. It was one of the most basic pieces of equipment to a man in the astra militarum, but it could ruin a fortified position with its intense concussive force. I counted on my hand from 3, and then I made it to one, Clara punched the button and the door to the front slid open, we pulled our pins, and tossed them the dozen meters to the tower. Even as they rolled, a servo-skull floated over to them and began to scan one, and the 'inquisitor' had the chance to curse and dive to the side as the two grenades detonated. The force blew apart six of the servitors and half the servo-skulls, pulsating a concussive wave across the small open space. I pulled my autogun, and my team followed behind me as we open fired on the dazed thugs.

[Penny]

I pulled my thousander from my belt and squeezed a pair of shots. One struck the power armored man and ricochet away. If anyone had time to pay attention they might have been shocked that I managed it. Las bolts were streaking in all directions vaporizing chunks of the prefab structure. The surviving servitors were still scribing, though without the servo skulls they simply output a continuous line. I was tempted to reach out with my powers again but the peril of the Warp felt all together too close. Hadrian shoved me down a moment before a bolt shell detonated above my head. Clara wedged herself into the doorway, her las carbine stuttering a burst that shattered a servo-skull before driving one of the enemy gunmen into cover behind one of the fallen blocks of masonary.

The power armored figure was screaming commands, redploying his men to form a base of fire. They were good, possibly ex-millitarum, wherever their current loyalties lay. Hadrian managed to flush one from cover and I snapped off a shot. Clara cut him down with two shots to center mass. He went up in a dirty orange flash as one of his frag grenades touched off under the lash of the las fire.

"We have to go before they flank us!" Hadrian shouted. I glanced back to see Selenica. Her knuckles were white and her gun was unfired, her eyes wide and staring.

"Selenica!" I yelled, then ducked back to grab her arm. Her eyes locked on me.

"We are going, grab the case!" I shouted, guesturing with my pistol to the nearest void shielded container. Her eyes blinked into focus.

"Right, casket," she breathed and grabbed up the nearest case.

"Emm get moving!" Hadrian shouted, as he and Clara started to lay down covering fire. It was not effective. The power armored inquisitor let out a bellowing warcry and charged forward, wading through las fire as though it was summer rain. He dropped his bolt pistol and drew a two handed chain sword, its blades whining to life as he rushed at Hadrian, aiming a savage cross cut at him. I shoved Selenica out towards the arch that led out the other side of the plaza. Where it lead I had no idea but we couldn't stay here. Clara was moving backward, darting from cover to cover. SHe flattened herself against a stone and produced two grenades from her belt. She tossed them both into the plaza where they burst spewing copious amounts of yellowish smoke that obscured the gunmen.

"Go!" Clara yelled and then staggered backwards as a lasbolt struck her in the hip, pitching her to the ground. She was up in a moment, limping away and spraying fire into the increasingly thick curtain of smoke. Hadrian had his powersword lit now, fending off blows from our mysterious assailant. I shaoved Selenica head of me, forcing her out towards the arch. I tracked the melee with my pistol but there was no hope of shooting accurately into the swirling sword duel. Clara limped past me, blood staining her fatigue pants below her cracked armor.

"Emm! Move!" she screamed but I wasn't listening.

"Take care of Selenica!" I shouted then ran back towards Hadrian. The power armored figure saw me coming and twisted sideways, opening some space between himself and Hadrian, clearly reluctant to engage two foes at once. If he knew how inept I was, he might have been less worried. I clicked my thousander to its underslung, planted my feet and fired the breeching round. It hit him in the chest from less than twenty feet, the kick nearly breaking my wrist. The blast knocked him from his feet, sending him scrambling back into the smoke. Hadrian stared after him, clearly of a mind to pursue, at least until he saw armored figures coming through the smoke.

"Go!" He yelled, turning and grabbing my arm, dragging me out towards the arch.

[POOHEAD189]

"Who are you!?" I demanded, unmoved as the enemy rushed to their master's aid, reloading their lasguns. A few knelt and readied their weapons in unison, but a burst of bullets rattled across them like acid rain. I didn't have to turn behind me to know it was Clara. Blood spurted from their shoulders and abdomens, one managed to scream and fired wildly, but his shots hit naught but air. Emmaline reached me and pleaded for me to move.

"You should know, brother." The other inquisitor said as Emmaline grabbed at my arm. He smiled, and the image was burned into my eyes and memory, and it would stay for years to come. "It's never that easy."

"Hadrian!" She screeched, and like a dam breaking I felt my limbs loosen and I moved, turning and hurrying out of the courtyard as lasbolts scythed through the smoke, scorching the eldritch rock of the walls. Emmaline and I reached the others, but we didn't slow. It seemed the emperor was with us, because we managed to follow the main thoroughfare and follow its winding path back out of the impossible landscape with only the dizziness of the warp to contend with. I felt dried mud crunch under my boots as I stepped back onto the blasted land of the old settlement.

For a moment, we almost made it out without being noticed, but the guards overseeing the slave labor turned and saw our desperation. Selencia stumbled and I caught her, and it was clear we weren't the locals guiding the heretics we had masqueraded as. There would be no reason the same group would run out with more or lesser numbers. As the dregs approached with their weapons, barking their bastardized gothic, I raised my hand, presenting three fingers, then four, then crooking one finger to slide down the front of my face.

"What was that?" Emmaline asked, hoping it was something good no doubt.

"After six months you should know by now, Em." Selencia said. "It's for the contingency."

Even as she spoke the last word, the closest mutant to their left lost the upper half of his body. It took a second for the sonic-boom to hit them, spraying mud and fetid water and bloody shrapnel half a kilometer in every direction. It gave everyone pause, all save me. "Come on! We need to get to the dock!" I cried, pulling out my handgun and dispatching two men to our right with well placed shots. Another man lost his legs, again, courtesy of Lazarus's transuranic arqebus.

As we moved, I spoke to Emmaline. "Can you get to Lucius from here? Speak to him?"

"Maybe..."

"Tell him to break the wall," I said. "Flood it!"

[Penny]

Las bolts sizzled and spattered on the mud behind us, blasting fist sized globes of the silty muck into shards of glass and burning organic debris. A claxon was sounding somewhere, oddly reminiscent of flood warning alarms I had heard on Bonaventure. I didn’t see how we were possibly going to survive. There was no way we could climb the levy without presenting ourselves to the full fury of the now aroused defenders of this hellish place. Said defenders were spilling from the barracks and other arches which lead deeper into the sunken city. Luckily for us a good number of them appeared to be local recruits, whose lack of accuracy had not quite been made up for by their numbers.

“Flood it?” I asked, already reaching out with my mind before I fully took Hadrian’s meaning. Lucius was easy to find, his mind a hard ball of barely restrained fury. I tried to convey the idea of flooding the city, but it was too abstract a concept for him to grasp at this distance. I altered my thought simply to ‘break’ and felt my connection snap. A roar of fury erupted from the distant wall as Lucius Raj stood, then drove a fist into the joint between two levy panel, his post human musculature and his ancient armor delivering enough force to send spidering cracks through the panel on which he stood. His arm flashed back and struck again, shattering ferrocrete and fiberglass supports both. With a roar he dropped into the hole he had made and vanished from my sight. I watched in fascinated horror as the levy wall groaned, and jets of water burst from the straining joint. By inches they grew until, with a groan, a ten foot panel twisted inwards and came away, carried into the enclosure on a crashing tide of muddy water. I saw Lazarus running along the top of the levy as a dozen panels bowed inwards. He fired on the move at something I couldn’t see, lifting a fireball ten meters tall from the interior of the compound. A black tidal wave of water and mud poured in from the breached wall, crashing downwards as the swamp rushed in. It swept over the slave barracks, picking up men and material in its wake, churning into a frothy tide as the dissolved cellulose in the swamp water tumbled and rebounded.

“Frack,” I muttered, then stumbled as something slapped me in the back.

“Emma!” Selenica was calling. I tried to straighten but there was something wrong with my legs. Hadrian caught me around the waist and hauled me along. He seemed to be whispering even though his lips moved like he was shouting. I had a confused impression of being hauled up onto the loading barge. Laying on the metal deck as Clara and Hadrian fired over the edge down into the maelstrom below. Dark water surged up around us but the barge broke free of its rails. I had a sudden and terrible impression that we were about to be swept into the fungal city and whatever warp borne horrors lurked within. I tried to cry out but my voice wouldn’t come. Selenica was suddenly standing over me, her shadow blocking out the anemic sun. Her hands were slicked with blood as she fussed with my belly, the medicae pack on her belt torn open. There was an unpleasant coppery taste in my mouth as I was shoved up unto my side, Selenica’s hands tearing at the back of my hunting jacket. In this new position I got a good view of the former excavation, now a shallow whirlpool of sucking and gurgling mud water filled with flotsam, some of it human. I watched the body of a fur clad tribesman circle around, dipping into the maelstrom. At the center of it all I could see the stella of the sunken city, curiously visible despite the opacity of the water rushing in to cover it. I could just make out the slight phosphorescence of giant fungal flowers, glimmering beneath the black water.

“Frack,” I tried to repeat, though the only sound I made was a glug as blood spurted from my lips. Selenica shoved something hard against my back and then the world went dark.

[POOHEAD189]

As the dark waves crashing into the confused masses of the heretics and slaves, I felt a twinge of regret for the laborers. One man had just climbed out of a hole, fear and confusion in his eyes before he even saw the oncoming waters. The swell washed over him before he could even cry out and sent him back into the hole he had dug, evidently being the digger of his own grave. I know the reputation on Inquisitors. That we would signal the end of entire worlds in order to stamp out the smallest infection of chaos. Perhaps some of us have that strength of will, and lack of regard for their fellow man. I do not, and to see even a hundred men and women under the thrall of chaos being engulfed by the returning landscape was not what I wished for.

But even so, my mind fled their deaths quickly when I saw Emmaline fall. I admit I was selfish. She was the woman I cared for...

---

"She'll be fine," Selencia told me, placing a comforting hand on my shoulder. I looked at her, and we shared a lingering gaze for a moment before I was convinced.

The walls around us were stone and mortar, built in the style of stone fortresses of ancient terra. Crossing Town was a small port by imperial standards, but a castle dominated the center of the settlement and kept a hanger behind it's large walls, hidden just the same as the modern servitors and specialized equipment held within. I had revealed myself and my station to the Portmaster, and he had been all too accomodating granting my team a small wing in the citadel. I had spent most of my time by Emmaline's side, almost as much as Selencia. Her dark hair tied back and her jacket removed, she had worked nonstop to diagnose Emmaline and purge purge her of impurities. Psychic overload was very hard to treat, but if anyone could keep her stable, it was Selencia.

She didn't disappoint.

I gave her a smile, a rarity for me. She commented on it. "My, my, does the Inquisitor finally show a bit of his old self?" She teased.

"Old self meaning?"

She sat down on the cushioned chair across from me. The drapes hid the sunlight, but there was still a soft glow that surrounded the attractive woman. It brought back memories of a time before I was an Inquisitor, when I had first realized just how delightful she was. Perhaps if I hadn't been gone those five years to find Bahometus, I might have told her so. But I waved the thought away, knowing as lovely as she was, Emmaline was taken my interest more swiftly and completely than any woman. Selencia broke my thoughts. "Meaning back when you followed Kronus around like a puppy. You used to smile a lot then."

"That's because I was stupid," I told her, and turned my gaze to Emmaline. Her left arm exposed, there was an IV feeding nutrients into her system.

"You're still a fool, just a glum one," she replied, but I didn't hear her. Emmaline's eyes opened up, and immediately I was on my feet. Her lips moved as if she wanted to say something more elaborate than what came out, but the only words that escaped her lips were a soft 'frack,' again. I smiled again. My strong hand reached over and brushed her cheek gently.

"How are you?" I asked, care in my voice.

"Feeling like Lucius threw me down a mineshaft. W-where are we?"

"At Crossing Town. Don't worry, the Caledonia will be here in a few days."

[Penny]

If you have never been shot, I commend you on your caution and good fortune. I myself have been shot on no fewer than seven occasions (at time of writing) and I have to say the experience doesn't improve with repetition. Fortunately for me the hunters jacket I had been wearing at the time had a layer of ballistic cloth woven into the leather and it managed to deflect the las bolt from my centerline. The filthy water had been more of a concern and I had endured a punishing regime of counterbiotics at Selenica's hands that made it impossible to eat or drink more than a few mouthfuls of water or nutrient broth. The fact that the water might have been tainted with more than bacteria occurred to me often and though he concealed the fact, I felt the brush of Hadrian's mind more than once as he inspected me for the taint of the enemy. I was his responsibility in that respect. Inquisitors are, to a degree, self policing, with various inqisitors keeping an eye on each other. They are expected to do the same for their own warbands, in much the same way as they are the rest of the Imperium. I don't like to think of what it might have meant to Hadrian to discover such a taint in me, but fortunately for both of us I remained pure. Or as pure as I ever was anyway.

By the time the Caledonia arrived I had recovered enough to move around. Selenica had done a remarkable job of healing the wound and within a month it would vanish completely not leaving so much as a scar. This was, I was to learn, one of the advantages of being hit by las fire rather than a hard round, though I admit to the vanity of having even that kind of scar tissue surgically corrected in my later career.

We lifted to the Caledonia without incident, two days before Candlemass 990.M41. Urien and his crew were pleased to see us, excited to hear the story of our recent adventure. I was still recovering though by now I was able to eat enough that the hunger in my stomach was a dull pain rather than an all consuming one. Selenica insisted on inspecting me daily, but it seemed the danger of infection had passed. Urien laughed the whole thing off, joking that it was too bad that their wasn't a scar because a scar on my lower back might be worth investigating, punctuating the remark with a good natured elbow at Hadrian's expense.

That night we were treated to a celebration in the feasting hall. Hadrian regaled the company with tales of our adventures, though he tactfully left out the fact that our opponent appeared to be an Inquisitor. Orbital control was non-existant on Havenos so we couldn't identify the ship which had brought our power armored opponent. Disconcertingly there were spikes of astropathic traffic after our escape that indicated that at least one ship had left the system after the reflooding of the excavation. Hadrian raised this point with Urien, asking what ships routinely frequented this out of the way place, but the Rogue Trader knew of none which regularly made the run. I was also surprised by a new mural which had been artistically rendered on the feast hall wall.

"It isn't a bad likeness," Hadrian admitted as he sipped his amasec and looked up at the larger than life rendition of a mostly naked blond woman dancing on a stylized table. I snickered, probably the first laugh I had uttered since I had been shot. The exaggeration of my assets was considerable and the cock of my hips positively scandalous but I choose to look upon it as an honor.

"I suppose there are worse things to be remembered for," I agreed.

That night we retired to Hadrian's anteroom and began the first large scale dig into what we had recovered. I started by making psy-picts of what we had seen. Starting with our unseen adversary. Hadrian had shown me the technique during our convalescence at Agesula. We both conjured images of what we had seen, though the stella themselves were stubbornly resistant. We were able to create the images but within moments the plates blackened and curled until they were illegible.

Lazarus, upon beholding the picts began to swear fluently in binaric, his human eye widening in fury.

"This is heretechal!" he snarled. I exchanged a cautious glance with Hadrian.

"You are just figuring that?" I asked, perplexed as to why this was only just occurring to him.

"Heretech," he corrected, glowering at me, "those servitors have been perverted, their cortexes have been wired to cogitators that would restore their ability to feel pain, to access their higher reasoning!"

"Why would they do that? How would it even be done?" I asked, but he was already lost in a reverie of buzzing clicks which I had learned to interpret as him accessing internal data storage to compressed to be readily brought to mind.

Hadrian was reading over the transcripts which we had escaped with, or trying to do so. There was some translation to Gothic, but large portions of it were nonsense symbols or multiple letters printed over the top of each other. I lifted one up and began reading. It appeared to be some kind of religious drama, though what the Gods were and what the characters were doing was opaque to me. It was clear that understanding them would take more than an evenings work.

"Gravemire," Lazarus declared sitting suddenly upright. We all turned to him.

"Analysis of crate serial numbers suggests that eleven different pieces of equipment were transshipped through the Hiveworld of Gravemire."