Choose Your Enemies, page 12
‘Sure you’ve got enough?’ Amberley asked, with a faint smile, although she seemed to have selected at least as much as I had.[92] She turned away, still speaking, and began to weave her way through the crowd of guests as lithely as a dancer. ‘This way.’
Lacking her grace and mobility I settled for walking determinedly forwards, letting my reputation and the sight of my sidearms clear the way for me, which it did almost as effectively as Jurgen would have done had he been there. Protocol would have permitted me to be accompanied by my aide, of course, but I’d left him to get my quarters sorted out, confident that he would have picked me a prime billet and have everything squared away by the time I needed it. He would hardly have blended in here, that was for certain, not to mention the fact that I hadn’t been entirely sure whether Amberley intended bringing her pet psyker along or not;[93] if she had, the last thing we needed would have been Jurgen’s gift being revealed by Rakel having a seizure in front of the governor and half the aristocrats on the planet.
Amberley led the way through a pair of curtains hanging heavily across one corner of the room. Sidling through behind her – not without some peril to the contents of my impromptu pile of provender – I found myself facing a doorway plastered, moulded and painted to blend in with the rest of the wall, which it did most effectively. Indeed, had it not been for the crack of light showing around the jamb where it had been left wedged open, it would have remained invisible to all but the most diligent of searchers. Shouldering it aside, I found myself in a narrow hallway, off which a number of doors led, each one as plain and unornamented as the whitewashed walls. Turning back to see if the one I’d entered through was the same (it was), I inadvertently nudged the small wooden wedge propping it open with the toe of my boot. With the inevitable result; with my hands full, I was unable to stop it clicking to.
‘Nads,’ I said, with feeling.
Amberley, who had paused a few paces further along, presumably to make sure I set off in the right direction, shrugged, juggling her own provisions as she did so. ‘No problem. It’ll open easily enough from this side.’
‘Which is where?’ I asked, already certain of the answer.
‘Servants’ corridor. Which none of them will be using tonight.’ She started moving again. ‘We want the third room on the left.’
‘Why?’ I asked, and Amberley glanced back at me with a slightly quizzical expression on her face.
‘Because it’s reasonably comfortable, no one uses it much, and I’ve got Flicker guarding the door on the public side.’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘I meant why are the servants staying out of the way?’
‘Flicker had a word with them,’ Amberley said. ‘Money may have changed hands, or threats been made. Possibly both.’
‘I see,’ I said, and followed her into the room.
The room beyond was quiet, tastefully furnished with armchairs and occasional tables loaded with bric-a-brac, both apparently randomly distributed. What looked like wood panelling, but which a surreptitious poke revealed to be casting in some kind of resin,[94] covered the walls, which were largely concealed in their turn by tapestries depicting local heroes of whom I’d never heard slaughtering their enemies with unseemly gusto and gouts of crimson-threaded gore.
‘Commissar. All rising in yours?’ Zemelda greeted me in her own idiosyncratic version of Gothic, the street patois of her home world – or at least that small section of one city on it which had looked like being the only part of the galaxy she’d ever see until a pack of genestealer cultists, backed up by a handful of purestrains, had tried to kill Amberley and me on her snack-vending pitch. She was dressed as a lady’s maid, in keeping with Amberley’s cover, and almost looked the part if you ignored the bright purple hair and the bulge in the small of her back where she kept a laspistol holstered beneath the tabard covering her bodyglove.
‘Perfectly,’ I said, parsing the phrase as probably being an enquiry about my health, or general disposition at least, and returned the courtesy. ‘I trust you’re well?’
‘The summit,’ she assured me, which I took to be an affirmation, then slipped through the door we’d just entered by, drawing her laspistol as she went. The concealed panel clicked to behind her, leaving no trace of her passing.
‘Commissar.’ The man in the brown robe I’d seen Amberley speaking to before rose from one of the armchairs, with sufficient good manners to wait until I’d put my food and drink down on a nearby table top (displacing some hideous crystal cherubs to make room for them) before proffering a hand to shake. His voice was dry, and about as emotional as a tech-priest’s voxcoder. ‘Inquisitor Vail speaks very highly of you.’
‘You know she’s an inquisitor?’ I asked, assimilating this somewhat startling piece of information. In my experience Amberley only revealed her true vocation to a very select few: those whose aid she needed (who, like Jurgen and myself, generally moved into the second category if they survived the experience), members of her informal network of operatives and allies, and whichever heretics she was currently rounding up – who, by definition, were hardly going to be in a position to reveal her secret to anyone else.
‘As am I.’ He raised his hand, and an Inquisitorial sigil flashed into visibility in the palm of it: an electoo like the one Amberley had, confirming his identity without a doubt. ‘Rasmus Vekkman, of the Ordo Malleus.’
‘I said I was calling one of my colleagues in to deal with the cult we found on Drechia,’ Amberley reminded me. ‘Fortunately Inquisitor Vekkman was already on Ironfound.’
‘On Ironfound,’ I said, seating myself as comfortably as I could in a chair facing the one Vekkman had previously occupied, and to which, as I’d expected, he returned. In all honesty I’d have preferred to face Amberley, who I found far more congenial to the eye, but I trusted her, and the man in the brown robe was an unknown quantity. ‘Not Drechia.’
‘No.’ The strange inquisitor leaned forward a little, although there was no one else present who might have overheard. ‘I’ve been looking into rumours of heresy among the workers in the orbital anchorages here. They’re often the ones first affected by spiritual contagion, as it passes from system to system.’
‘Not just spiritual,’ Amberley said. ‘If there’s some xenos influence about, they’ll be the first ones exposed to it as well. I came here to break up a smuggling ring trading in t’au artefacts.’
‘Successfully, I hope,’ I said, more to preserve the illusion of small talk than because I actually cared.
Amberley smiled thinly. ‘I broke the network,’ she said. ‘But that led me to the webway portal in the sump, and the current eldar mess.’
‘Which is impeding my investigation,’ Vekkman said. ‘I had no idea that the cult had taken root on Drechia, and now that the eldar have been stirred up, getting there to take charge isn’t going to be easy.’
‘I have a ship,’ Amberley said, confirming my guess that the Externus Exterminatus was somewhere in orbit, probably pretending to be an ore scow or something, ‘but I’d rather not get any dents in it unless we have to.’
‘Too great a risk,’ Vekkman said, eyeing the plates of food Amberley and I had brought in with clear disapproval. ‘There’s no one else capable of dealing with a daemonic incursion in the entire system, and my death could damn it all. I’ll continue to liaise with the local authorities by vox until the eldar are no longer an impediment to navigation.’
‘That might take some time,’ I said, an understatement if ever I made one. ‘We have a Naval task force and Imperial Guard reinforcements on the way,’ thanks to Amberley’s Inquisitorial request cutting through the usual Administratum obstructiveness like a chainsword through gretchin, ‘but it’ll be a couple of months at least before they get here.’
‘And it would be a mistake to underestimate the eldar’s determination to retake this world,’ Amberley put in. ‘There’s an entire craftworld at the other end of the webway tunnel in the halo, and its resources are vast. Holding them off until reinforcements arrive isn’t going to be easy.’
‘None of which is my concern,’ Vekkman said. ‘I have leads to follow up on Ironfound, of course, but it’s on Drechia that the cult has broken cover.’
‘Not exactly broken,’ I said, thinking about that. ‘We stumbled across their meeting place by accident. In fact if it hadn’t been for Amb… Inquisitor Vail’s discovery of the webway portal on Drechia, and the eldar using it,’ which I thought sounded more tactful than the eldar she’d led there, ‘we’d have had no reason to enter that part of the tunnel complex at all.’
‘Granted,’ Vekkman said, nodding in a manner presumably intended to encourage me to continue, although I thought I’d pretty much made my point by then. ‘But they’d summoned a daemon. That sounds to me like they were getting ready to declare themselves in no uncertain terms.’
‘Quite so,’ I said, taking a mouthful of kedgeree by way of punctuation. This was his area of expertise, so I felt I should tread carefully in contradicting him. ‘But a minor one, as these things go. I’ve seen far more powerful.’ I thought I was going to have to go into details about the horrors I’d encountered aboard the mining barge Emeli had selected for her triumphant return to the materium, but Vekkman merely nodded.
‘Of course, the Adumbria incident. The Imperium owes you a great deal for that, commissar.’
‘I had quite a bit of help,’ I said, accurately enough – although, as usual, most of the credit had attached itself to me. ‘From the five hundred and ninety-seventh, mostly. But there were Tallarns there too.’ Probably best not to mention Beije, the Tallarns’ commissar, who’d come within a hair’s breadth of allowing his personal antipathy to me to hand the wretched place over to the Ruinous Powers, and definitely not a good idea to mention Jurgen, whose unique talents had weakened Emeli’s daemonic form enough at the crucial moment for our combined firepower to blast her back into the warp.
Amberley swallowed loudly, and chased the contents of her now empty plate with a slug of her drink. She looked in Vekkman’s direction with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm.
‘I take it no one’s been summoning daemons on Ironfound,’ she said. ‘Which means your primary focus should be Drechia.’
Vekkman shook his head. ‘Except that the reports I’m getting from the local arbitrator’s office are indicating few clear leads. Which, given how good they are at uncovering corruption among the upper echelons of society, points to a small, low-level conspiracy which has managed to escape detection not because they have powerful connections, but because they actually have none.’
‘I’d start with your dock workers,’ Amberley said. ‘See if any of your suspects are particularly close to specific ship crews. Then cross-reference those vessels with regular runs to Drechia. That’s how we track genestealer cults in the Ordo Xenos, although Chaos-worshippers might do things a little differently.’
‘The same thought had occurred to me,’ Vekkman agreed. ‘On balance, the cult on Drechia is most likely to be a recent offshoot of a longer-established one on Ironfound.’
‘So,’ I said, perhaps a little too firmly in an attempt to hide just how much I didn’t like the idea, ‘we’re agreed that we’re facing two potential threats instead of one.’
‘Not necessarily.’ Vekkman looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘There could be some connection between the cultists and the eldar. I gather Slaanesh is of particular significance to their race.’
‘They’re hardly friends,’ I said, ‘judging by what I saw in the temple we stumbled into. Their psykers carved up the daemon like kroot with a corpse.’
‘Kroot?’ Vekkman looked faintly confused for a moment. ‘Never mind. The eldar drove off the daemon, you say?’
‘They have a particular antipathy towards Slaanesh and its worshippers,’ Amberley said. ‘They believe it lies in wait to devour their souls at the point of death. There can be no question of the two factions collaborating under any circumstances.’
‘Maybe we can use that,’ I suggested. ‘Get them pitted against one another, and mop up what’s left. It’s worked before.’
‘Not under circumstances like these,’ Amberley said. ‘The cult’s hidden, gone to ground. The survivors aren’t about to pop up raring to take on the eldar, and they wouldn’t last five minutes if they did.’
‘I agree,’ Vekkman said. ‘It would be more in their interest to stay hidden, and build up their power base during the reconstruction phase after the xenos have been driven off.’ He nodded judiciously in Amberley’s direction. ‘If your notion of the Drechia cult being an offshoot is correct, then that would imply a longer-hidden, deeper-rooted one here on Ironfound. I’ll be moving the focus of my enquiries here to Holdvast, as this would be the most likely centre of it.’
‘Good luck,’ I said, feeling that if he was about to tackle a job like that he was certainly going to need it.
Come to that, with an eldar fleet due in orbit within a matter of hours, so would the rest of us.
Editorial Note:
Once again, Cain provides frustratingly little detail about his surroundings, beyond whatever aspects of his immediate environment affect him personally. This seems as good a place as any, therefore, to redress this deficiency by interpolating a little more background information.
From Interesting Places and Tedious People: A Wanderer’s Waybook by Jerval Sekara, 145 M39
The Ironfound System is, in general, unremarkable, with the exception of an unusually large radiating gas giant on its very fringes, the moons of which form a veritable miniature solar system of their own, with the planet in place of its primary.
Since most starfaring vessels enter and leave the warp far closer in to the centre of the system, making either for the world of Ironfound itself or the peculiar subsystem on its outskirts, the two might just as well be orbiting different stars for most purposes; the one real difference being the steady stream of ore barges shuttling between the two centres, conveying raw materials to the forges of Ironfound in one direction, and essential supplies to the mines of the Avernus subsystem in the other.
Of the two potential destinations, Ironfound is by far the more welcoming, although the world itself is given over entirely to the processing of the raw materials so abundant elsewhere in the system (though not on the planet itself for several millennia, due to the thoroughness with which they were extracted) and the manufacture of innumerable items of minimal interest.
The discerning wayfarer will probably seek lodging in Holdvast, since this is the oldest, largest and most populous hive on the planet. Travellers are advised to be aware of the destination of the surface shuttle on which they embark, since there are several landing pads at different levels of the hive, and a moment’s inattention can result in boarding a ship bound for one on the industrial levels, which are insalubrious in the extreme. Far better to opt for a shuttle landing on the upper pads at the very top of the spire, where a spectacular view of the purple skies of the upper atmosphere, speckled with the lights of the orbiting ships and structures which catch the sunlight, can be enjoyed through the armourcrys roof of the passenger terminal.
From here, one can pass through the very highest stratum – both of infrastructure and society, since the mansion of the planetary governor occupies much of the highest habitation level, the rest being given over to gardens and statuary open to all for the payment of a modest fee.
From this point, the discerning wayfarer may descend to a level commensurate with their means and status, although these may not entirely coincide.
The highest kilometre or so of the spire is given over to the wealthiest and best connected of the local aristocracy, then the minor noble houses, most prosperous entrepreneurs and the like. Here accommodation may be rented for quite reasonable rates, should a traveller wish to retain an establishment of their own for the duration of their sojourn.
Descending further brings the wayfarer to the lowest stratum where a comfortable stay is assured, where the villas of the well-to-do trading classes nestle comfortably among wide boulevards, copiously endowed with emporia of all kinds, a wide variety of restaurants and other such amenities, and many forms of entertainment, such as theatres, music halls and public holo displays.
Those in search of less wholesome pastimes will be constrained to seek them in the lower levels, where the artisan classes gather, and where the ambience is commensurately less pleasant and reassuring.
Below these are the manufactoria, which are of no interest whatsoever, reportedly issuing vast quantities of effluvia, noise and noxious vapours, which the discerning wayfarer will avoid having to experience.
In common with most such Imperial habitations, below these the underhive begins, a wretched sink of villainous and debased humanity in which it is most unwise to even contemplate venturing. Though intrepid travellers from the upper levels do occasionally find themselves compelled to enter this dark nether world, driven by necessity or the desire for profit, they do so only in armed bands, escorted by professional guards of the roughest and most uncouth sort, returning with occasional items of value and stories scarce to be believed.
In short, this is a system in which the weary traveller may find the time to rest and recuperate in reasonable comfort, but which offers little in the way of inducements to remain for very long.
