“Cardinal rise!” Silas shouted as he ducked behind the cover of soot-covered stone, red lasfire racing over his head and illuminating the darkness in the process. If not for the lasfire, nothing would have been visible to the naked eye, but as it was, the scene was marred by the dim glow of combat. Silas, of course, could see perfectly, ever wearing his skull-adorned Omnishield helm. All of my Agents could see perfectly with their equipment, while I could see just fine with my mind.
“On it,” Lucene replied over vox, and barely revealed herself from behind the blackened column she was taking cover behind. She was aiming for the risen platform before she even saw it, given the instruction from Silas. Her eyes, through her Sabbat helm, only just focused on the struts keeping the platform up by the time she pulled the trigger, after which her Boltrifle roared once. A single explosion followed as she ducked back behind her column, and a number of panicked screams and the clattering of collapsed structures followed in turn. Silas responded to the cacophony by peeking over his cover and opening fire more actively, cutting down our foes amidst the chaos.
+Left flank, upper balcony, twelve seconds. Bliss. Right flank, ground floor, access hatch, fourteen seconds. Silas and Lucene,+ I commanded, standing behind my own column, eyes closed and focusing through the myriad sounds of warfare to hone in on the psychic presence of oncoming assailants. My own Boltpistol was at the ready, though I had only used it to pick off individual stragglers that slipped through the barrage Lucene and Silas provided, or that eluded Bliss’s snare. It was the four of us against a small army. You did not need to be a Commissar to know who was winning.
Having once been a Commissar did tell me by how much, though, and I expected things would wrap up after this final flank from our foes. But still, we had not found him…
Twelve seconds’ pause. Things quieted for a moment. One could even hear the low drumming of vehicles overhead, driving along an intercity expressway. Many exceeded planetary velocity limits, but those were rarely enforced. We were a good distance below such criminal activity, with a great deal of ground and plascrete between us, not that I cared to be policing something so trivial either. Our current location was that of an underground temple, which we had accessed from an aboveground one. Both were to the same deity—Veralith—whom I had never heard of before. That was not uncommon; planets often had their own pagan gods, and so long as their mythology did not conflict with the Master of Mankind, and His Nine Reverential Children, any world was free to pay respects to any lesser deities they believed existed. Faith to the Imperial Creed was paramount, but it was not absolute; even Lucene showed no discomfort in discussions involving this ‘Veralith’ entity.
In any case, we had arrived here hot on the heels of another Phaenonite, us having been working with a young priestess of the Veralithean faith who suspected something amiss under her temple. And wouldn’t you know it—
With a bang, a group of shadowy foes emerged through a busted-down door on the upper balconies of the room, right on time. As immediately as they had entered, the first few of the group found themselves kicked off their balcony, falling several flights before landing with skeleton-crunching impacts on our floor. Bliss then wrestled with those that followed in close-quarters, bringing knives to a gunfight and emerging relatively unscathed. Two such knives, smaller than her palms, were drawn from her waist and thrown into the oncoming crowd, sinking into the hearts of foes unknown.
Moments after the upper balconies were flooded with enemies, a similar group burst through an access hatch behind our initial approach. As with Bliss’s response, Lucene and Silas opened fire upon them at once, reducing their initial forces to showers of blackened reds. I, meanwhile, casually stalked further into the room, Boltpistol held to my side, but ready to be raised at a moment’s notice. I was there for two reasons, and neither were for fighting—I was there to find a traitor, and to dismantle whatever it was they had been working on on Aerialon. The shooting and bloodshed paved the way for that journey, but it was not the destination.
I reached out with my mind, past the multitude of foes that sought to overwhelm my unit. I flooded the underground temple with my thoughts, over and through and around a dozen rooms and two dozen corridors, some intended to be secret but unable to be hidden from me. I was, within the temple, omnipresent, and yet I found the opposite of anything at all—nothing. There was an emptiness in the darkened room, something my mind could not touch. It was larger than the form of a man, but only just. And it did not fight against my mind, as the presence of a Pariah would have; rather, this emptiness was only that, an untouchable, unknowable void suspended in the abyssal night of our room.
I suspected this was the object of whatever the Phaenonite may have been up to, but for all my mental searching, I could not find the Phaenonite themselves. To that, I sighed, and retracted the feelers of my mind, pulling back into my own being. In the process, I felt the need to act to assist my allies. Silas had been truly flanked, Bliss’s Laspistol had overheated, and Lucene’s Boltrifle needed a reload. I pivoted on my feet, training my Boltpistol upon Silas’s flanker, and fired, my eyes still closed. I aimed for the light of their mind. It darkened. In the same thought, I froze a man in place directly ahead of Lucene, just as his aim began to form upon her to capitalize on her reload. Meanwhile, Bliss found a handful of her opposition thrust over the parapets of the balcony on which she fought, pulled into the air by an unseen force.
Lucene finished her reload and removed the head from the torso of her frozen foe just as a few bodies hit the ground far behind her, screaming as they fell. Then, at last, true quietude, until Silas spoke up. “Thanks, sir.”
“Stop calling me sir, Silas,” I grumbled, and then turned to face the void and opened my eyes. Still too dark to see anything. “Come here, all of you. There is something here my mind cannot perceive.”
While Lucene and Silas approached, Bliss fastened a grappling hook to the parapets and gracefully slid down to our floor with a small flourish, almost as an acrobat. She made to join up with us shortly after landing. “Monitron?” Silas suggested.
“Please,” I nodded. Silas held his Monitron-fastened arm out to me while keeping his eyes on the suspended figure before us, his gaze being displayed on the pict-screen of his arm. The figure was large indeed, like an oversized humanoid skeleton, but made of metal. The surface of the metal seemed almost as though to be moving, but whatever it was before us, it was very definitely dead, if ever it had lived at all. “Xenos,” I muttered. “I have seen records of its breed. Varnus and the Mechanicum consider them an affront to their Omnissiah. Thank you, Silas, that will do.”
“Should we destroy it?” Lucene asked, Boltrifle already being raised to the thing’s head.
I paused for a moment. Destroying it and removing traces of its existence would have been the right thing to do. But I knew the damnable things to be quite durable. “Don’t waste your energy. Veralith will suffer a skeleton in its closet. We will tell the priestess to see to the sealing of this lower temple; I think she will be inclined to agree without needing details. However, while my mind cannot penetrate its presence, perhaps I can find something of its past.”
“Sir?” Silas asked, but I ignored his querying concern and stepped up to the foot of the beast. I reached out with my left arm, then thought better of putting an augmetic into contact with the ‘living metal’ of a Xenos runt. Flesh, then—I raised my other arm to its raised feet and closed my eyes.
***
I see through the lidless, eyeless sockets of a cold dead thing. Soulless. It had been soulless even in life, and colder even then. My vision is granted not by remaining mental energies of the creature, for no such things ever existed; instead, I see through the dust that had settled upon the Xenos over the aeons. I am the dust of worlds burnt to cinders, engulfed in plumes of green flame. I am the dust of fallen civilizations. I am the dust of star stuff, carried in the void between conquests. I am the dust on an Aeldari Diresword, blown through the already-empty chest cavity of this now-dead thing.
The dead thing settles in this dust. It is left behind and forgotten. I see through the dust of aeons. A billion suns rise and fall over the course of its inert history. Sediment buries the forgotten dead. But then, an eternity later, that sediment is removed, and the dust sees sky again. Excavators. Humans. Across the exchange of dozens of hands, much of my view of the Xenos skeleton is taken away, the dust being removed as studies and quarantines begin. They culminate in blood as his—no, her—forces close in to acquire the Xenos. I see her for the first time, slender, gaudy; but despite her thin and ostentatious appearance, she wields full command of her troops with ruthless efficiency, as I do mine.
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When they acquire the Xenos, they move it from one location to another. I see them all, save for one, but ironically it is only that one which I know the name of—Amnes Minoris. They brought it there, and any glimpse of the world is hidden from my view even from the psychic resonance of dust. I wish I could say I was surprised. But here, on Aerialon, is the final resting place of the Xenos, where they committed to their final studies. They dissected the remains of the creature, particularly interested in its sundered chest cavity and its yet-intact skull. But why? To what end? I do not discern that, for those that work on the Xenos do not know, and she keeps her distance and stays silent.
He is here. It is a thought one day shared among the workers. They overheard a vox communication sent to their boss while she looked on at the Xenos. She gestures for one of her guard, and begins to speak to him. I hear her voice, light but shrill, in the minds of her workers. “Let him come,” she tells her guard. “When he nears, I will depart for the Amnes system. Until then, I’ll remain here to oversee the unit’s stability.”
“And them?” the guard asks, referring to the workers.
“Discharge them when I leave. I’m sure Veralith won’t mind.”
***
“Sir?”
“Not you too, Bliss,” I grumbled, hand shaking as I removed it from the foot of the Xenos. Silas grunted a chuckle. “We need to leave. Our target is not here.”
“You saw him?” Lucene asked, already clearing the way for me to lead the group out of the underground temple, which seemed counterproductive to have the sightless Inquisitor take point. Regardless, I took it, finding my way out with my mind, as I had found my way in.
“Her. Yes. She intends to leave this world, if she has not already. What is the nearest spaceport?”
“IS-41, sir,” Bliss reported at once, my trio following behind me. “Managed by Launch Control Overseer Richter Feng.” I nodded in understanding, though for a moment thought it an odd bit of trivia for her to know. I soon realized, though, that knowing and investigating her escape routes probably came natural to my Stealth operative.
“We will need to have them suspend all pending launches while we investigate,” I began.
“That will tip her off, though, won’t it?” Silas suggested, as ever evidencing his forward-thinking.
“Yes, it will. But it will buy us time nevertheless. That’s our most crucial resource for now,” I explained.
Our conversation carried us for a time, but by our exit from the catacombs beneath the surface-level temple, we had arrived at knowing and agreeable silence. That was good, as I had intended to bid farewell to the Veralithean priestess and urge her to have the underground passageways sealed, but she, instead, had her own things to say. “Inquisitor! Inquisitor!” she called the moment my ceramite-covered head poked out from shadows of a long-forgotten passageway.
“I am quite alright, priestess, and we have routed those that we suspected were defiling your temple. They will trouble you no more. But you should—”
“No, Inquisitor, it is not that, but thank you,” she shook her head, flustered and clearly upset by something else. She seemed drained of focus, but full of energy. “No, my Patron insists I speak with you. She reached out directly.”
That raised some alarms at once, as Pagan worship was one thing, but deific intervention was another, and much more closely watched by the Inquisition. Still, for the time being, I played along, though I could already sense Lucene’s sudden change in mood. “Did she, now? And what did she have to say?”
“She insists that you look skyward soon as you can, and that you make haste. She says you are pressed for time,” the priestess replied.
“More than she knows,” I grumbled. Divine intervention or faithfulness mixed with an empathic reading of my mood? Hard to say, but I was not inclined to level a world for a palm reader. “Thank you, priestess. We will take our leave shortly. But please, do see to the sealing of that passage, and ensure no one explores its corridors. It is dangerous down there, and soiled by its former tenants.”
“I shall, Inquisitor. Bless you for your service,” she replied, bowing to me, which seemed an accomplishment for the out-of-breath woman. I waved my trio on, and the four of us departed from the temple. As soon as we were beyond its heavy, plascrete walls and onto familiar paved plascrete streets, our vox chatter exploded in incoherent scrambling.
“Augh, what the Throne?” Silas winced, his vox being more intimately ingrained from his headset than our own, and even I managed a wince as well.
In doing so, I looked skyward, as the priestess had asked me to, and at first did not know what I was looking at. Well, I knew it to be my vessel, the Coldbreed, but I also knew something was off about it. What, exactly, caught my eye was beyond me in the moment, and gave me pause. An explosion from its starboard decks clued me in that something was more amiss, and indeed, the focus of my attention revealed my vessel to be closer to Aerialon than it should have been, and at an awkward tilt.
“Silas, boost our vox, now!” I shouted to him, but he was already on it. We did not then have the range to vox to the ship from the surface, but we did have the range to get in contact with our transport. “Mirena,” I voxxed to her. “Something’s wrong. Eyes on Coldbreed?”
“Just what I see in the sky, and it doesn’t look great. Have tried to get word to them but have had no response,” Mirena reported back.
“Start heading our way, full burn,” I ordered, just in time for Silas to give me a thumb’s up. He had configured his equipment to provide us with greater amplification while near to him. “Command-1 to Coldbreed bridge, come in, Helmsman, what’s your status?”
“It’s all fun and games up here, loyalist boy,” Prareus, the Phaenonite from Canicus, replied over my Helmsman’s vox. “Where’d you go, Blackgar?”
“Kill all vox communication,” I ordered to my immediate retinue and to Mirena. I had to think. I just needed a moment, but I could not afford myself that time in a world upside down. My mind raced past a million what-if’s a second, unable to reason through any logical course of action. Perhaps seeing or sensing my discomfort and my being overwhelmed, Lucene put a hand on my right shoulder, and that offered the clarity to solve all my problems. “Lucene, Silas, you two are going skyward with Mirena. Kill any traitor on sight with maximum prejudice, I don’t care about their intel. Bliss, you’re with me. The Phaenonites want me up there so their ally down here can get away; we won’t give them that courtesy. Take this,” I began, and reached into the cloak over my power armor.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” Bliss objected, having been given my Inquisitorial Rosette.
“Open a line of credit in my name. As much as you can get with as much persuasion as you can manage. Vox me the info when you have it, then go underground. Keep that, and yourself, safe. I’m going under, too; you two will need to load my armor onto the Bird,” I told Silas and Lucene, disengaging my power suit’s protections and stepping out from its shell while detaching the MIU controlling the suit from the base of my head. I then reached for the vox on my clothes, having previously relied on that of my power suit. “Silas, while I have you, patch me into IS-41’s operational vox pattern.”
“Right away, sir,” he nodded, and began re-tuning his equipment. How I missed my previous Interrogator, Hans Okustin; he had been gifted with great skills for vox manipulation. Thankfully, Silas was capable enough, and managed to establish a line of communication with IS-41 relatively quickly.
I spoke at once, time of the essence. “Launch Control Overseer Richter Feng, please respond,” I commanded, speaking on their lines without prior notice.
“Feng speaking, who is this?” growled a faceless, aged voice. Someone who had likely seen too much voidshit in their life to be much bothered by anything. I had to bet that would not have included an Inquisitor.
“I am Inquisitor Callant Blackgar, Ordo Hereticus. I have reason to believe a suspect of mine is going to attempt to escape from this world via a launch at IS-41. Suspend all pending launches until I arrive, Feng, and put in a call for the local Arbites to keep the area secure. Do not let anyone leave until they have been cleared by the Arbites or myself. Do you understand, Feng?”
“I…uhh, I do, I-Inquisitor. But I can’t just suspend launch operations on a whim without—” he started, but I interrupted him at once with my Rosette’s identification code, which I had already committed to memory long ago. I will not pen it to this report. “I-it says here that Callant Blackgar is deceased, sir.”
“There had been a point for that at one time, though it has proven problematic as of late. Do as I say, Feng; I’ll be there soon as I can.” I then cut the vox and turned to my friends. First to Silas and Lucene. “Maximum prejudice,” I repeated to them.
“With pleasure, Cal,” Lucene nodded, as did Silas.
I turned to Bliss. “Do what you must to get me that credit line. You’ll have four hours. Rob a bank if you need to.”
“You’ll have your funds, sir, for whatever you need,” Bliss assured me.
“Thank you, all of you. Worry not for me, but for those unlucky enough to have made an enemy of the Inquisition. The Emperor protects,” I said, bidding them farewell. They repeated the prayer likewise, Bliss heading off on her own path while Silas and Lucene awaited the landing of the Thunderhawk whose engines rumbled in the distance.
***
“My brothers three, it is with enthusiasm that I can confirm that contact has been made with both targets. Under the guise of naïve innocence, I have set Cronos and the Scarlet Blade upon their respective, irreversible paths. Together, as per the Plan, they will cleanse this Sector of Ouranos for us, and make way for our return from the Eye. Our great work continues ever onward, or my name is not Veralith, your fated sister.”