Inquisitor, page 2
The mosaic occupied much of his consciousness so that he was only dimly aware—out of the corner of his eye, and mind's eye—of Meh'Lindi, a flexible ebon statue of herself, yet still with an ivory face. Now she was inserting the throat and ear plugs with which she would hear and communicate and breathe.
Jaq summoned a facet into full prominence. It swelled. Around it, like a thronged ring of moonlets each with its own scenery, all the other facets squeezed.
A skirmish in a hovertank plant...
Arrows of light cross-hatched a grey cavern housing half-completed vehicles. Hybrids armed with lasguns were pressing hard against a picket line of planetary guardsmen. Those guards were a loyal, uninfiltrated unit, and they were losing. What brutish caricatures of human beings the hybrids were, with their jutting, swollen, bone-ridged heads, their glaring eyes, their jagged bared teeth. In place of a human hand several hybrids sported the terrible, strong claw of the purestrain Genestealer. When those hybrids overran the guards they might simply tear the last survivors apart.
Yet this wasn't the whole picture, oh no, not by any means. Jaq shrank that grim facet and expanded another...
Many hundreds of rebels swarmed across the roof of a rose-red plate-district, heading for a tree of administrative towers.
Mingling with hybrids, indeed outnumbering them, were rebels who looked truly human. Some of these would be the firstborn spawn of hybrids, human in looks yet able to procreate a purestrain Stealer. Others would be subsequent offspring, genuine human beings who still heeded the hypnotic brood-bond.
A series of explosions tore at the stem of the plate-district where it was attached to the rest of the city. The entire plate sagged and snapped free. Briefly, the whole huge structure sailed on the air, then it fell. Rebels slid and scrabbled for hand holds, claw holds, as the district plummeted towards the fringe of the jungle two kilometres below.
On impact—a tree-flattening impact—dust arose. The dust was rebel bodies. Even the plasteel of the plate cracked open. A well-aimed plasma beam from above ignited fuel storage tanks. Within and without, flame engulfed the fallen plate-district. The dust burned; as did any populace who lived in that plate, supposing they had survived the plunge of their factory-homes.
Many hundreds more rebels were dead now. Really the rebellion was entering its final, frantic, suicidal phase.
“Some people believe the Genestealers were designed—as a living weapon,” Googol was informing Grimm. “A fine joke, dreamed up by some vicious alien!”
“Huh.”
“Well, why not? Do you think they evolved that way? Genestealers can't breed on their own. How could they have come into existence in the first place without malicious midwives? They're compelled to infest other races and multiply like a cancer within.”
In his travels throughout the galaxy doubtless Googol would have heard many rumours, despite best official efforts to suppress scaremongering talk.
“Perhaps,” suggested Grimm, “a Chaos storm warped them from whatever they were before? Seems the purestrains can't pilot a ship, can't fire a gun, can't fix a fuse. Otherwise, they'd be all over the place under their own steam. What a clumsy weapon! Huh!”
“Yet what an excellent dark joke against life and family and love.”
The little man muttered some oath in his own Squattish dialect.
“Now, now, Grimbo,” reproved the Navigator, “we all speak Imperial Gothic here—”
Another, darker oath in the same patois. “-like civilized beings.”
“Well, kindly don't call me Grimbo, then. Me name's Grimm.”
“Grimm in name though not grim in nature necessarily. You're but a sprout of a Squat.”
“Huh. You're hardly antique yourself, despite appearances.”
Those wrinkles on the Navigator's face; and his mournful tunic...
Meh'Lindi's hair was slicked down tight. When she sprayed her face, her visage became more of a blank than ever, a black mask with the merest hint of features. The syn-skin would protect her against poison gas or flame or the flash of explosions; it would boost her already-honed nervous system and her already-notable vigour.
By the time she wound the scarlet sash around her waist once more, miniaturized digital weapons hooded her fingers like so many baroque thimbles. The needier, laser, and flamer were precious, rare Jokaero devices.
Jaq summoned another facet...
In a transit-tube station two different units of planetary troopers were fighting each other furiously at close quarters. Rainbow light sprayed and arced as the vibrating edges of power axes met the energy fields of power swords. One of these units must have been entirely Genestealer brood in human guise. But which was which? Those who wore the black basilisk insignia, or the blue deathbats?
Reinforcements were arriving on foot through the tunnel. Flamers sprayed at the fracas; and at last rebels could be distinguished from loyalists, just as it became obvious that the new arrivals on the scene—pink salamanders—were also loyalists. For the black basilisks screamed and writhed and quit fighting as soon as superheated chemicals clung burning to them. Deathbats—those of the brood—rushed frenziedly, even as they blazed, to attack the wielders of the flame guns. Precision laser fire sliced through the berserkers, killing human torch after human torch till the last had fallen.
Presently, perhaps tardily, foam engulfed the platforms to douse the clingfire—blinding this particular spy-fly, though by now Jaq had registered the loyalists' hard-won gain...
Another facet: a ribbed hall of towering, icon-stencilled machine tools, littered with corpses, many of them as grotesque in death as they had been in life...
Jaq's hundred roving spy-flies and the screen-eye were another Jokaero invention, perhaps unique, which the Ordo Malleus had captured. Those simian, orange-furred Jokaero were forever improvising ingenious equipment, not necessarily in the same way twice, though with an accent on miniaturization.
Debate still waxed hot as to whether the orange ape aliens were genuinely intelligent or merely made weapons instinctively as spiders make web. Grimm, a born technologist himself—as were all Squats—had pointed out that this eye-screen required psychic input from the operator. So some Jokaero must have psyches. At least.
Most planets seemed to harbour biological flies. Swamp-flies, dung-flies, offal-flies, sand-flies, flies that liked to sip from the eyeballs of crocodiles, corpse-flies, rotting-vegetation-flies, pseudo-flies that fed on magnetic fields. Who would notice a little fly buzzing, around nimbly? Who would mark that fly watching you, transmitting what it saw and heard back to the eye-screen from anywhere within a compass of twenty kilometres? Who would expect that the fly and its fellows were tiny vibrating crystalline machines?
“I go!” announced Meh'Lindi.
If she chose, she could speak as gracefully as a courtier, as deviously as a diplomat. In the face of imminent deadly action, she sometimes reverted to a more basic style of utterance, recalling her original primitive tribal society. Lithely and silently, swift as a razorwing, she departed the Emerald Suite.
With a piercing thought and a twist of will, Jaq detached one of several spy-flies hovering in the otherwise deserted corridor outside, detailed it to follow her.
He magnified that viewpoint, allowing it a quarter of the eye-screen. Meh'Lindi paused momentarily, glanced back in the direction of the spy-fly, and winked. Then she padded quickly away, pursued.
“Huh, so I'll be off too.” Grimm jammed his cap down
hard, patted his holstered laspistol, checked his “bunch of grapes”—his grenades—and scampered after her. Unlike when Meh'Lindi exited, this time the suite door banged shut.
“Noisy tyke,” commented Googol, uncoiling from the couch. “Surprised he doesn't favour a bolt gun. Clatter-clatter-clatter.”
“You know very well,” said Jaq, “that he slammed the door to signal he was following her.”
Googol laughed giddily. “He needs to run around to keep his legs short. And Meh'Lindi, to keep hers long.”
“She'll be back, Vitali, never fear. As will Grimm.”
“Grimm racing off to protect her... as soon set a mouse to escort a cat! It's really pathetic the way he dotes on her then pretends to bluff it all off with a huh. I suppose in the absence of any dumpy Squat females Meh'Lindi must seem like a goddess to the little chap.”
And, thought Jaq, likewise to you? And even—somewhat—to me? “A deadly goddess,” he said, “who always has other things on her mind. As I have. So hush.”
The Navigator prowled to and fro. He picked up a crystal decanter of amber liqueur, set it down. He pricked his thumb against the corkscrew horn of a baby teratosaur skull mounted on one wall, its brow inset with a green jewel. He stirred a courtesy bowl of dream-dust, untouched within its force-membrane by any of them hitherto, then went and cleaned his hands under the vibrostat. Nervous for Meh'Lindi's safety? What was Meh'Lindi's whole purpose, what was her very life, but to go into perilous places, always to emerge alive? What was her daily rationale but to keep herself tuned to a pitch, taut as a bowstring? Yet in those golden eyes of hers was a lively intelligence and even wit. Of course, her sense of wit could be alarming.
Jaq riffled through facets, summoning scene after scene into prominence in swift succession till he came to the spy-fly that was tracking... Harq Obispal.
Chapter Two
Brandishing a bolt gun in one hand and a power sword in the other, the burly Inquisitor strode along a broad boulevard, glaring to right and left.
Obispal's ginger beard forked three ways as if hairy tentacles sprouted from his chin. His eyebrows were bushes of rusty wire. His belted black robe was appliquéd with glaring white death's heads. His swamp-hunter boots could have been an elephant's feet lopped off and hollowed out. Weapons and other devices hung within his blood-red, high-collared cloak; and a communicator dangled from one ear lobe.
The Inquisitor was advancing in the vanguard of a squad of armoured imperial guardsmen. Guardsmen from the local garrison, rather than Marines from off-world. Obispal believed in the force of will, in his own ruthless aura; and indeed, except for the evidence of lurid, puckered scar tissue across one cheek, he might have seemed invulnerable.
Presumably he didn't rate the Stalinvast operation as requiring really major surgery—even though thirty hive cities had been devastated to date and several totally destroyed. Casualties? Twenty million civilians and combatants? Out of a thousand cities housing billions...
Wistfully, Jaq quoted to himself the words of an ancient leader of the middle kingdom on bygone Earth: “In the land of a thousand million people, what does the death of one million of these count in the cause of purity?”
Still, suppressing such a plague wasn't the same as purging it totally. Only one fertile Genestealer needed to remain alive in hiding to undo all the good work within a few decades. Highly trained Marines would have been utterly thorough, and would never yield to the malaise of combat, that battle-weary yearning to be done with a ghastly campaign, to rate it a probably total triumph, a practically unqualified success.
Wrecked cars and land raiders smouldered along the boulevard under a leaden ceiling so high that utility tubes and power cables seemed to be but a delicate tracery. Many glow-globes had been shot out or had failed, thus shadows lurked like intangible behemoths. Baleful fumes drifted from slumped ducts; corrosives dripped. Gloomy tunnels led aside into blitzed factories.
Jaq allowed sound to invade his awareness.
Obispal was howling execrations that echoed, multiplying as if his voice was that of many men.
“Death to the alien scum that steal our humanity! Death to polluters! Death to the polluted! With joy may we burn and cleanse!”
The Inquisitor's voice, as picked up by the spy-fly, almost drowned the crackle of gunfire. Obispal whirled his sword around so that his right arm resembled a circular saw. He threw the deadly, humming weapon into the air and caught it deftly by the shaft. He could have been leading a parade, twirling the baton.
Yes: a parade... of extermination.
Obispal had certainly taken his time over the cleansing, even protracting the process. Backed by his men and by the many planetary troopers who were unpolluted and loyal to the governor, he had commenced his activities around a ring of other cities than the capital, moving from one to the next, destroying. His actions had triggered full-scale rebellion by the hybrids and by the vaster Stealer brood of true-seeming humans. For decades these latter had been infiltrating the administration and even the troopers.
If Obispal had started by cleansing the capital the Genestealer broods might have dispersed, escaping through transit tunnels or even overland through the jungle to more distant cities. So his strategy made sense at the same time as it seemed wantonly ruinous.
It was as if game birds had been flushed by beaters and driven towards a central point, forced to attack the heart of power and authority in a desperate bid to secure this for themselves and seal the planet.
Bees flying into a bonfire...
Troopers fought troopers. Administrators murdered their superiors and released stock of weapons to the rebels. For the first time the ordinary workers and managers glimpsed the true faces of the hybrids who had lurked in their midst, cloaked and hooded, or masked.
Jaq scanned another swarm of these hybrids, on the rampage with guns and blades. Their stooping posture was of a person melting down, slumping into the stance of a vicious carnivore. Amidst the swarm, handsome if eerie human beings orchestrated the pandemonium.
“One has always heard whispers,” remarked Googol, “yet to behold with one's own eyes is quite an experience.”
It was on the tip of Jaq's tongue to point out that the Navigator was only beholding courtesy of the eye-screen. He refrained, not wishing to goad Googol into some display of bravado which might rob Jaq of such an excellent warp pilot.
“Whispers?” Jaq enquired instead. “Loud whispers? You were giving Grimm the benefit of your theories about Genestealers. Do Navigators gossip much? Might you gossip?”
“Navigators travel to many places, hear many things. Some true, some half true, some concoctions. Stories alter in the telling, Jaq.” A half pleading, half impertinent tone had entered Googol's voice.
The Navigator was remembering that Jaq might be attired right now as one kind of person, whereas actually he was someone else entirely... and Googol needed to be reminded of this.
Masquerading as a Rogue Trader of reasonable success, Jaq wore a pleated frock coat with silver epaulettes and baggy crimson breeches tucked into short white calf boots. The coat was capacious, a home to guns, and the boots were home to knives. Quite in line with any ordinary Trader.
Googol licked his upper lip nervously. “A true story that crosses the galaxy becomes a lie, Jaq.”
“So, can a lie similarly become the truth?”
“That's too sophisticated for me, Jaq.”
It wasn't, of course. No one who had stared into the chaos of the warp, no one whose living was to do so, could be unsophisticated and survive. In a sense the warp was the ultimate lie, since it continually strove to betray those who traversed it. Yet at the same time the warp was the ultimate background to existence.
Vitali Googol actively cultivated an air of sophistication, aided in this by the premature age lines wrought in his visage due to long immersion in deep space and in the warp. These lent a world-weary cast to a face that might otherwise have been babyish.
Within, the Navigator was still young and vulnerable—liable to foolish enthusiasms such as his attraction to Meh'Lindi. Knowing this, Googol tried to be wry about his own feelings and eschewed any dandified garb such as Jaq now sported. Vitali wore a black tunic stitched with purple runes which were hardly visible. Black was the void. Black was sophisticated. (Black was the colour of Meh'Lindi in her war paint.)
Jaq tried to imagine how Googol viewed him. The Trader costume suggested a certain piratical business acumen, though not without honour, and in the service of a deeper sensuality. Which was all a pretence. Jaq's sensual lips were definitely at odds with his sceptical ice-blue eyes. On the one hand, Jaq must seem capable of irony and flexible tolerance—perhaps only so as to spring a trap. On the other hand, he had to be as hard as granite inside, harder even than a brutally flamboyant exhibitionist such as Obispal—since Jaq was a guardian of those who guarded humanity, an investigator of the investigators.
Am I really hard enough? Jaq wondered. Or am I vulnerable too?
“Let Navigators gossip among themselves like fishwives,” he said sharply. “The Stealers must remain a secret from our multitude of worlds, save for leaders who need to know, lest confusion spreads.”
“If people in general knew—”
“That, Vitali, is what Inquisitors are for. To find out, and to root out. Confusion is the cousin to Chaos. Knowledge causes confusion. Ignorance can be the strongest shield of the innocent.” The ghost of a smile twitched Jaq's lips. Did Jaq Draco really believe these maxims?
Quarter-facet... Meh'Lindi had quit a transit capsule, had ridden an elevator down and was sprinting effortlessly along empty north-bound mobile pavements.
The south-bound pavements were crowded with refugees fleeing from the fighting. A river of people surged, fighting to gain the central express strip where that panic-stricken river raced fastest. Some refugees were injured, bleeding; others bore bundles of possessions. Often a would-be escapee, whose one foot was on the express path and whose other was still on the slower acceleration strip, was whirled aside in an eddy and sucked underfoot. Drizzle fell from malfunctioning fire-control nozzles. Lightning crackled overhead as cables shorted.
Quarter-facet... Mounted on a stolen power-trike, Grimm roared up the north-bound speedstrip. Meh'Lindi glanced once over her shoulder then ran on, taking huge strides. The little man stood up on the foot rests, throttling back.
