Spinoza herself knew almost nothing of this chequered history, but as she felt the innards of the despicable machine rattle, kicking her against the strapped-tight bonds of the restraint cradle, she mouthed a series of profane curses against whoever or whatever had created it.
She could see nothing. All she could hear was the roar of the plasma burner, which filled the tiny space and made her ear protectors swell. Her limbs were swaddled hard about her, and the torpedo’s walls were less than a hand’s width from her face. Above her head were the tight-crammed electro-mechanics, chittering and hissing as they reacted to the stream of incoming data. The machine-spirits of these things were vicious souls, as crabbed and spiteful as the devices they had been interred within, and Spinoza felt sure they made the ride deliberately uncomfortable.
A genuine boarding torpedo was ten times the size of a Threadneedle, and did its work through brute force and melta charges. This thing went slower, like a knife in the dark, and operated in void-silence. The first Spinoza knew of the impact was a gentle crump, followed by the deployment of whining armour-scalpels. Augur-bluffs whirred into action, disabling any sensor arrays in the cut-zone. The machine shuddered, shivered, then crept forwards again, indicating that a breach had been secured. Spinoza listened to the tortured sounds of rending metal, then heard the damnable plasma burner finally wind down. There was a final spasm of activity, then the interior of the tube was flooded with red light and the outer casing cracked open.
With relief, Spinoza blink-commanded the restraint harness to unsheathe. The synthleather straps snapped back into their holders, and she was able to shove the hatch open. Struggling for a moment, wriggling against the hard interior and pushing with her heels, she eventually crawled out, going on hands and knees until she was free of the capsule and could look about her.
The Threadneedle had entered as instructed — in an abandoned compartment under the Rhadamanthys’ main bulk storage halls. The incision in the vessel’s outer hull was less than two metres in diameter, and the temporary gauze of a void-seal shimmered across the breach. The torpedo may have been hateful, but it had done its job — flying in under the watch of the conveyor’s sensor grid, worming inside and then making good the damage. As it lay in the dark, its smooth exterior coated in crystalline frost, Spinoza gave it a grudging kick of acknowledgement.
That brought Gorgias swaying out of the rear compartment, its eye a disorientated lime-green. The skull collided with a beam overhead and spun around, needle gun primed.
‘Silence!’ hissed Spinoza, gesturing for it to calm down. ‘Your sense-grid is scrambled. Focus now. Crowl said you would be useful.’ Gorgias pivoted back round, dipping down to face her, and she saw just how old the remnant-bone was among all that scaffolding of Mechanicus motive-units and augur-housings. The thing’s spinal trail clattered over her forearm, linked metal sliding on the ceramite.
‘Interio?’ the skull demanded.
‘So it seems. How do you feel?’
A brief pause. Then the eye bled back to its habitual blood-red. ‘Crowl ingressus, ergo hurry-hurry.’
Spinoza edged forwards, gathering data on their position. She was fully armoured and helmed, and for all its combat advantages the enclosed headwear did nothing to dispel the lingering sense of being buried alive.
The compartment was only a few metres long, one of thousands of buffers between the interior units and the main hull-skin. Ahead of her was the interior access portal, thick with rust and clearly not used in a long time. She pulled a tumbler-cracker from her gauntlet, clamped it on to the lock-bolts and waited for the seal to break. Once done, she had to haul the hatch open manually, its motors having long since corroded away. Then she was through.
The interior of an unloaded bulk carrier was cavernous, echoing, unlit, nearly as empty as the abyss outside. Spinoza crept across the deserted plasteel deck. Above her soared mighty section dividers — huge walls ribbed with adamantium and marked by elevator-tracks. The construction was modular, and twenty-metre-high classification runes marched into the darkness at regular intervals. It was hard to imagine the volume filled by the millions of containers that the Rhadamanthys would have carried when loaded — now it was tomb-like.
Spinoza started scanning, using her helm’s inbuilt auspex capability to flood the walls with variant soak-tests. Gorgias went ahead of her, its lumen-points like stars in the dark.
Every so often, she came across a seal printed in ultraviolet — a sign left by the arbitrators on their scheduled scrutiny sweep. They had been thorough, ticking off each bay in turn, then stamping it with an auspex-visible seal of purity. Back when the arbitrators had been present, of course, the hauler would have been laden.
‘Nihil,’ chattered Gorgias, powering on ahead, then swerving around a
bulwark and further into the gloom. ‘Dum-de-dum.’
‘We are just beginning,’ said Spinoza, but in truth she began to share the same misgivings. Crowl had brought them up here after investigations of his own, ones in which she had had no involvement. Perhaps his judgement was sound, but there had been too little time with him to truly tell. It was wholly unclear what they were looking for. If there had been something to hide, it was unclear to her why the arbitrators would not have discovered it — a Tier Four sweep was a serious undertaking, conducted by serious operators whose life depended on not making a mistake.
Despite her misgivings, they covered the ground fast. A hauler’s crew was small in number — just a few dozen in most cases — and there was no reason for them to be present when the ship was empty. The skull ran wide-angle scans as they headed back down the length of the ship, rack after rack, chamber after chamber.
Soon enough, the final units beckoned — shabbier than the rest, faintly stinking of their last cargo. The metal decks were strewn with a few lost grains of freeze-dried wheat, rotting in the shadows. Spinoza edged around the corner and spied a chamber much like all the others. Diligently, she ran her array of scans.
Once again, nothing. She tallied the scrutiny marks, one by one. Everything had been checked. Wearily, she turned, looking for Gorgias. The skull was hovering halfway up the far wall.
‘Enough,’ she voxed, beckoning for it to come down. ‘We do not have much time.’
Gorgias stayed where it was. ‘Iterum. ’
‘There is no point. I have already run scans.’
Gorgias whirled around to face her, its eye flaring an angry crimson. ‘Stupidus! No universa arma augur matrix, no, no.’
Spinoza halted. ‘Do you have something?’
The skull began to bob agitatedly. ‘Locus hic. ’
Gorgias was over twenty metres up. Spinoza reached for the controls of the nearest elevator, patched into them, and the wall-mounted tracker flickered into life. She stepped onto the platform and shuddered up the wall’s face on rack-and-pinion tracks. She reached Gorgias’ position and stared at another blank section of wall. It was exactly as the others had been, and marked with the UV seal to boot.
‘This is cleared,’ she said.
‘Blindness! Iterum.’
Spinoza fixed on the UV seal, and pushed it through the full spectrum of visual checks. It came out identically to all others — until the last one. Spectral analysis brought up a different profile. It looked the same, had the same credentials, but the ink was chemically different.