Crowl ignored the skull.
‘Give the captain cordial greetings and request boarding rights as per standard protocol.’ He swung around in his seat and looked at Spinoza. ‘Time for you to suit up, I think.’
Captain-General Thalek Arjanda watched the vid-relay picts of the Inquisition vessel entering reception hangar nine. He watched his first officer Fliox receive the guest and take him inside. He watched them walk through the passageways and up the spiral staircases. It didn’t take them long — just a few minutes — not enough to learn much. The guest was tall, cloaked, almost pallid. He carried himself like they all carried themselves — as if everything in their line of sight were guilty, ripe for the fires.
This one had extremely fine armour, though. Must be worth some coin, Arjanda thought. He could do something with that, and they’d pay for it in the outer reaches.
And then, all too soon, the approach lights blinked on, the bridge door chimes sounded, and he had to rise and do his duty. He pushed himself from his command throne, dusted down the last evidence of a hasty meal and risked a final glance in a handheld mirror, just to check no crumbs clung on to his protruding moustache and forked beard.
Arjanda was of the old-school mercantile captain type, dressed in fine cloth and wearing real-leather boots, over-the-knee and buckled with real steel. A long waistcoat had been stretched over his old-age girth, straining against a row of bronze-gold buttons. His gloves were catskin and smoothed by use, and his half-length cloak had a gold thread inlay bought after a lucrative run to Tentrion nine standard ago.
The effect normally helped him cultivate an aura of authority. Crews liked working for a captain whose success was obvious — they shared in it. Now, though, faced with this walking shade, one who didn’t have to scrimp and deal and connive to scramble in order to procure his finery, he felt suddenly
puffed up and vulnerable.
Perhaps no one ever felt differently, faced with one of them. No one with any sense, anyway.
Arjanda picked up his jewelled walking cane and strolled towards the rear of his expansive bridge, where the doors were now opening and Fliox was ushering the spectre inside. On either side of the incoming party, banks of cogitators locked in thick metal cages chattered away, attended by both free-crew and indentured menials. Above them was a high domed roof, marked with tarnished silver astrological patterns and old Navigator House sigils. Ten metres down was the narrow strip of real-viewers, manned by augur-servitors and showing the pale grey arc of Terra’s upper atmosphere.
‘My greetings to you, lord inquisitor,’ Arjanda said, bowing. ‘I trust the passage was trouble-free.’
The inquisitor inclined his pale head slightly. His movements were precise, weighted like a swordsman’s, refined. Up close, the artfulness of his armour could be clearly seen — it was like a skin of black plates, silver-lined, barely audible but clearly tight-packed with power. His hair was slicked back severely from a high forehead, his lips thin, his eyes hollow. When he spoke, the voice was unusual — dry, precise in diction, infused with more Low Gothic contractions than might have been expected.
‘Were you expecting trouble, captain-general?’ Crowl asked.
‘Not at all. Not here.’
‘Tell me about your ship.’
Arjanda swallowed. He could feel sweat beginning to prick at the base of his spine. He could sense Fliox hovering, the rest of the crew looking up at them when they dared.
‘This old thing?’ he asked, risking a half-laugh. ‘Four hundred years old, so she’s got some life in her yet. Never had any trouble. Never been impounded, nor held to combat-majoris. We’ve had some run-ins with pirates over the years, but they never did much more than scrape the paint. You can take a look around her, if you wish.’
‘What cargo do you carry?’ The inquisitor never moved his eyes away. There was something terrible lingering in those eyes, something that was hard to pin down but was most definitely resident and which made Arjanda feel faintly nauseous.
‘All sorts.’ Arjanda gestured towards one of the cogitator banks, where a plugged-in menial was busy clattering on a runeboard. ‘You can see the manifests if you wish. Mostly foodstuffs, taken from the Crag Belt. We can haul industrials, chem-vats, fuels. It’s all documented.’
‘Do you carry weapons?’
‘That would be prohibited, lord. We’re not a sanctioned Navy transport, and we don’t have the licences.’
Crowl smiled, a chilling expression. ‘Any lapses, captain? Any time you have made some mistake with the scholarship? Such things are possible, even for the diligent.’
Arjanda stiffened, hoping that sweat had not broken out across his balding pate. ‘Never,’ he said, hoping it looked reasonably convincing. ‘Never. Look at the logs.’
Crowl nodded, with an expression on his face that betrayed just what he thought of the veracity of the Rhadamanthys’ own logs. ‘When did you make orbit?’
‘Eighteen days ago, standard.’
‘Inbound from?’
‘Hesperus.’
‘Carrying?’
‘Ninety per cent grain derivatives, for processing on-world. Eight per cent sundry industrials — I can give you an inventory. Two per cent empty.’ ‘That’s a lot of empty.’
‘We were let down by a supplier. We had to move. You can’t keep the Schedulists waiting, or they-’
‘No delays en route?’
‘One small wait in-system, off Luna. There were hold-ups in the stack.’ Crowl nodded. ‘They were running Tier Four scrutiny. Were you boarded?’
‘We were.’
‘Who by?’
Arjanda began to get flustered. The questions were delivered politely, softly, but they were relentless, one after the other. ‘A scour-team from the Provost Marshal’s division. I forget the names. Fliox? He will retrieve them for you.’
‘Did they find anything?’
‘Of course not.’
For the first time since arriving on the bridge, Crowl finally took his eyes away from Arjanda’s and ran his cold gaze across the cramped and cluttered space. He looked at the battered bridge stations, the faded metalwork, the chipped bulkheads. Every glance seemed weighted, as if calculating how efficiently he could destroy it all.
Arjanda clutched the handle of his cane, and felt the ivory tip bore into his clenched palm. No one dared speak. The crew pretended to work, but their tension was palpable.
Eventually, Crowl drew in a deep breath. It looked like that pained him a little, for the ghost of a wince flickered over his austere features.
‘You offered to demonstrate your voyage data,’ he said. ‘So then, show me what you’ve got.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
A Threadneedle boarding capsule was a hateful thing, designed by a lunatic and outfitted by sadists. The concept had been derived from the posthumous writings of the heretic tech-priest Xho-Xho of Targaron V, who it was rumoured had taken his inspiration from an unsanctioned dissection of a failed boarding torpedo variant STC, radically reducing it in size and scope and adding novel aspects of his own devising. The Mechanicus looked dimly on such acts of initiative — hence the writings being abruptly posthumous — and quietly ensured that the design lay unlooked-at in the hidden archives of Mars for three thousand years. Only in the mid-41st millennium, as the long arc of the war began to turn and the imperative of desperation sparked interest in the previously forbidden, did radical members of the Priesthood uncover the blueprints again and begin to consider turning them into actuality. What became known as Project Chaldea was originally intended for use in individual ship-boarding actions by the Adeptus Astartes and certain factions of the mechanised skitarii, but Xho-Xho’s design parameters were never robust enough for that, and so it was repurposed for use by the specialist elements of the Adeptus Terra — the assassins, the spies, the Inquisition.