Gorgias had started butting into the wall-panel where it hovered, then moving upwards and trying again. Carefully, Spinoza began to move along the elevator platform, testing at the edges. The panel was just like the rest — twenty metres wide, ten tall, with grooves to take the edges of slotted container units. When the arbitrators had been here, it would have been pressed right up against the side of one of them, buried under the mountains of cargo.
Her auspex readings showed nothing. Everything reflected back, giving her nothing. Frustrated, she pushed hard against the panel. It didn’t move, but there was a faintly audible click from the far side. Spinoza looked at Gorgias, who looked back.
‘Move away,’ she warned, bringing out her crozius and activating the energy field. Argent snarled, throwing illumination up the gloomy walls. Bracing herself, Spinoza brought it up to the join running along the top of the panel, gripped the maul two-handed, and pressed it into the structure.
Energies flared up instantly, scattering against the steel. The panel-edge resisted for a few seconds before the extreme heat started to tell. It cracked, blistered, then blew. Spinoza almost stumbled as the entire fascia swung inwards, triggered by the destruction of its locking brace. Argent’s energy field flooded light into the space beyond the casing.
Spinoza remained static for a second, startled. They should have been staring into the solid innards of the brace-wall, but instead a whole new chamber had opened up before them. The walls, the floor, the ceiling — all were thick with blood. The stains were old, dried a dark red-brown but dyed deep into the metal as if fired in an oven. There were other marks on the walls: gouges, as if energy claws had ripped through the outer skin, and burn-marks, and the glimmer of what looked like spatters of acidic residue.
‘Foulness,’ hissed Gorgias, swirling around inside, its picter-lens clicking rapidly. ‘ Hereticus-majoris-extremis. ’
The space stank like nothing Spinoza had ever encountered. Some of it was the blood, locked in its sealed unit for a long time, but that was not all. There was something indescribably disgusting in the stagnant air, something that made her want to gag. Saliva pooled in her cheeks, and she swallowed it down.
‘What was in here?’ she asked, half speaking to Gorgias, half to herself. The chamber was empty, but her esoteric scanners were now running off the scale. They would require analysis — nothing in them made any kind of sense.
Then she saw the red light, blinking on, off, on, off, down in the corner of the chamber. She knelt down, bringing her head closer and switching off the auspex overlays.
A tripwire beacon, rigged to the blown door-lock, now transmitting.
Spinoza turned on her heel and jogged back to the elevator platform controls.
‘Aneela,’ she voxed, keeping Argent activated as the platform began to grind down to deck-level. ‘Prep for immediate dispatch, inform the Lord Crowl, and ready arms — we are discovered.’
Crowl took his time, peering into the convex pict-screen, watching the phosphor runes scroll past in blurry sequence. The lists of manifests, routing stations, warp stages were all routine, nothing that would arouse the suspicion of even the most exacting of assessors. No doubt the arbitrators had been all over this already, but you never knew. They might have boarded a hundred vessels before this one, and even psycho-conditioned scrutineers could feel fatigue.
He could sense Arjanda hovering at his shoulder, breathing heavily, padding back and forth, trying not to let his agitation become too obvious. The captain was very scared. His crew were very scared. That was to be expected. Once he might have put that down as a marker of some kind of guilt, but he’d long since learned the truth of what he had already told Spinoza — everyone was scared of an inquisitor, the criminal and the innocent alike, which made their job harder, not easier. Spinoza didn’t seem to have fully grasped that truth yet, but it was to be hoped that she would do, in time.
His thoughts strayed to his new acolyte, and for an instant the ranks of ship-data swam out of focus. He remembered first discussing her with Revus, months ago. The data on her had been hard to get hold of, but Huk had been creative in her enquiries. They had all worked hard for him, the bloodline, and that was some small comfort in a world of disappointments.
Should his conscience have been pricked a little more? Maybe, maybe not. He had been languishing in a moral void for so long that recollecting old decencies came harder than ever. Still, for all Tur’s influence lay heavy on her still, there were promising signs.
‘Can I be of any assistance, inquisitor?’ came Arjanda’s querulous voice.
Crowl turned the dial over to the next screen, never taking his eyes off the grease-streaked glass. More runes flickered, line after line of them.
‘How long was your delay off Luna?’ he asked, casually.
‘Two days,’ said Arjanda.
‘It took two days?’ asked Crowl, finally looking up at the captain.
Arjanda shrugged, a weak affectation of levity. ‘I did not tell them their business.’
Crowl returned the console. ‘Here, now. I’ve looked at your internal records of movement within the solar system. It’s just as you say, but now I find something unusual — perhaps you can help me. Your augur records show close tracking of another vessel at local time/date marker 456-56-13. This vessel’s location I can extrapolate from the augur logs as somewhere out in void sector 4569, a long way beyond Luna. And yet the location of the Rhadamanthys on that same time/date marker, according to your own location recorder, puts you within five thousand kilometres of the Luna holding shipyard Chraeses. So either your augur range is incredibly long, or one of these two records is mistaken. Which is it?’
Crowl looked up to see Arjanda visibly shaking. That was not terribly unusual. What was more unusual was that the captain-general was holding a pistol two-handed, pointing it at Crowl’s head. Sweat was now pouring freely down the man’s face, making his elaborate moustache slick where it met his puckered flesh.
The rest of the sentient crew had also drawn their firearms — mostly shotguns and obsolete-format lasguns, the kind of thing you’d expect a freighter crew to use.
‘Throne, I wish you had not come here,’ said Arjanda, looking as if he might burst into panicked tears. ‘Do you think I want to do this? Do you think I want to damn myself?’
Crowl pondered how to react. His fingers were inconveniently far from Sanguine, but it was not the weaponry that concerned him so much as the fact they were daring to deploy it at all.
‘You realise what you’re doing?’ Crowl asked, quietly.
‘Damn you, yes I do!’ shrieked Arjanda, trying to control his shaking arms. ‘Whoever you sent down into my hold has just tripped a proximity beam, and I can’t let you go now. Any of you. They’ll find me, you understand this? They’ll find me, and he will find me, and I can’t… I won’t…’ The muzzle was trembling now, rocking back and forth as the man’s muscles tightened. ‘I’ll die first! I’ll die first. Nothing you can do to me would be worse. Nothing. ’
Crowl looked past the gun’s barrel at the tortured face beyond. ‘You’re a good man, are you not, captain-general? You love the Imperium. I can sense it, but you’ve become part of something that scares you. You should give me some names now, for in your situation that is a kind of heroism.’
Arjanda started laughing. His shoulders rose and fell, rocking with the bitter peals. ‘I don’t care! If you’d seen what I’ve. Holy Throne, I am damned to purgation anyway, and we are all damned to purgation, and you are too, so what does it matter that-’