‘And so some things are now clear to me,’ said Crowl.
Revus and Spinoza faced him across a hexagonal flecked-granite table in his private chambers. Crowl thought the interrogator looked tired, perhaps unsurprisingly after the events of the previous night. Perhaps he was driving her too hard, though there would be little chance of respite in the days ahead. She would have to endure it, just as they all did.
His captain looked as stone-faced as ever, his brief sojourn in the arbitrators’ domain seemingly having inflicted no fresh scars.
Despite the coming of fragile dawn, the chamber still burned with thick candles, dozens of them in elaborate iron frames. A polished skull sat in the centre of the table, black with age but reverently cared for. Legend said that it had once belonged to Inquisitor Axio, first of the bloodline, though that was of course impossible to prove.
‘Before the Rhadamanthys was destroyed,’ Crowl said, ‘I was able to study some of the ship’s sensor logs. The hauler had, as the captain told me, been detained for the Provost Marshal’s scrutiny, and nothing was found. At that stage, it was still fully laden, and so there was more chance of missing something, though the crew weren’t going to take that chance.’
Crowl reached for a decanter of opalwine, and offered it around.
‘No, thank you,’ said Spinoza.
Revus shook his head.
‘There was a discrepancy in the logs,’ Crowl said, pouring himself a goblet. ‘The internal location records showed just what the captain told me — it had entered the solar system, was detained off Luna for inspection, and then gained orbit two days afterwards. But the ranged augur logs told a different story. They recorded an encounter with a sub-warp vessel on the first of the two days the Rhadamanthys was supposed to be undergoing scrutiny, one that then locked on a trajectory for Terran orbital space. One of the records was thus incorrect. I will assume that the location sequence was the one at fault.’
‘Altered,’ said Spinoza.
‘You have a suspicious mind, Spinoza. So here’s the thing — whatever was carried on the Rhadamanthys was transferred to this second ship prior to the scrutiny teams arriving. The crew did what they could to clean up the mess, but didn’t have time to complete the task. They sealed the chamber and slapped on a counterfeit sigil, trusting that the overworked arbitrator units wouldn’t notice. There was, after all, nothing much to see, so any cursory scans wouldn’t have revealed a signal, as you and Gorgias discovered.’ ‘They didn’t make much of a job of it,’ said Revus.
‘They didn’t have the time. The Custodian Navradaran told me that the request for Tier Four clearance was made two days before the Rhadamanthys was due to achieve orbit — just before it had the chance for this rendezvous in sector four five six nine. That order originally came from Inquisitor Phaelias, who’s still missing. So here’s what I believe took place. Whoever wished to use the Rhadamanthys to bring this — we’ll say — illicit cargo to Terra was uncovered, at least partly, by Phaelias, who launched an investigation and imposed the scrutiny cordon. The importers could not risk the cargo being discovered and so made arrangements to have it transferred to a vessel with a better chance of evading the blockade. In the meantime, Phaelias pressed on with enquiries, and has either been neutralised or is still active in pursuit. Despite his diligence, the cargo, we can assume, made it as far as Terra. The Rhadamanthys was allowed to continue to hold orbit, since the diversion of so much genuine loading would have drawn attention, and in any case they had no reason to suppose anyone would take an interest in it after the arbitrators had cleared it for entry.’
‘Unless someone were to notice the discrepancy between the two logs,’ said Spinoza.
‘Such as, for instance, a quintus-level Schedulist scribe with a penchant for correcting errors,’ said Crowl. ‘Perhaps he made too much of a fuss, highlighting the Rhadamanthys’ contradictory submitted timestamps on arrival at Luna, and wouldn’t let it drop — so someone with an interest in making all of it go away decided to quieten him.’
Crowl took a sip of opalwine, and its warming liquor ran thickly down his throat. He hadn’t eaten yet, and felt the need of sustenance.
‘Should we report this?’ asked Spinoza.
‘Report what?’ asked Crowl, smiling dryly. ‘Valco’s records are gone, the Rhadamanthys is gone, Phaelias is gone. They — and we — are doing a decent job of covering their tracks.’
‘And we don’t know what happened to the cargo,’ said Revus.
‘Not quite,’ said Crowl. ‘My apologies, Spinoza — you were right to be frustrated on the bridge, but I was not lingering in order to vex you. A ranged augur record may contain data on ship types, displacements, even names. That was our last chance to gain intelligence on the transfer, and I was working to extract what I could.’ He took another sip. ‘At first, I believed that nothing would be retrievable. There was a short data-burst stored in the augur record, buried in the block-header, part of the standard exchange when a tracker beam finds its mark, but it was nonsense. Just alphanumeric runes in a sequence I didn’t recognise — 00726174686F — just where the vessel ident should have been, if any had been picked up.’
‘You still recall the sequence?’ asked Spinoza, taken aback.
‘Detail,’ said Crowl. ‘A specialism. But then I had another thought — difficult, with the place falling apart, but stress can induce a certain mental clarity. I’d assumed that this ship was an Imperial vessel, responding with an Imperial signal that would be understood and transliterated by the Rhadamanthys’ receiver systems. But there are non-Imperial ships in Terran orbital, many thousands of them. What if it were Martian? And if so, then the answer was obvious. The Rhadamanthys would have left the ident in its native raw format, an encoding that predates the Imperium by many thousands of years — sigil pairs in hexadecimal notation. On return to Courvain, I was able to locate the key and unfold the sequence. My first attempt was unpromising: Oratho. Then it became clear that the initial zero was a terminator, and that the sigil-pairs had arrived in reverse order. That gave me the true name — Ohtar. So it’s a Mechanicus ship.’
Revus nodded. Spinoza looked more sceptical. ‘Then we have a name,’ she said, ‘but how can we use it? They won’t have put the landing data into records we can access.’
‘No, of course not,’ said Crowl. ‘But we know the destination was Terra, and on Terra there are limits to where a Mechanicus vessel can find safe harbour and still remain secret — in theory, they are vessels of a distinct sovereign empire, and are treated as such. The main Martian embassy temples are within the Palace and would not have the facilities to receive an incoming voidship, not to mention the levels of security over that airspace. But outside the walls there is Skhallax. It’s big enough, it’s ugly enough, and you could hide a flotilla in there if you really had to.’
‘Skhallax?’ asked Spinoza.
‘Mechanicus enclave, south of the Outer Palace wall,’ said Revus.
‘A city within a city,’ said Crowl. ‘Built to enable the Priests of Mars to oversee the rebuilding of Terra following the Great Heresy, but they never left. Nominally under the control of the Administratum, but in practice the Fabricator General runs it as his private fiefdom.’
‘I did not think such things were tolerated,’ Spinoza said.
‘You’d be surprised what the High Lords will tolerate. The situation hardly aids us — an Inquisition rosette doesn’t carry much weight in there, whatever the treaties dictate — but we have to get inside. My suspicion is that Phaelias made the same decision, which would explain why nothing has been heard of him since.’