Where you can watch us, Amon thought. Elod Galt nodded graciously.
The suite lay on the sixtieth level. Once the escort had departed, Haedo swept the rooms for surveillance devices using scanners concealed in the torso of the food-tasting servitor.
‘I would ask you to respect our integrity measures and refrain from using your vox servitor,’ Ibn Norn had remarked cordially before leaving them. The servitor’s function displays showed that vox channels were being jammed anyway.
Haedo opened the back of the rubrication servitor and initialised the compact cogito-analyser hidden behind the ribs. Using invasive programs so acutely coded that no Hy Brasilean systems would even notice them, Haedo linked the unit to the Planalto’s data-sphere.
‘The probes have been discovered in the memory cores of the Planalto Administratum,’ he reported. ‘There is…’ He scanned the data rapidly. ‘There is a palpable sense of outrage. Security across the Planalto has been raised to level amber six. The canton parliament is calling an emergency session to discuss the incident. There is furious debate in the intelligence communities as to whether the data invasion is the work of a foreign power or industrial espionage.’
‘If Sichar is guilty as charged,’ said Amon, ‘he’ll know the probable cause and the probable origin. How long will it take them to analyse and trace the vermicular probes?’
‘They were sterile and trace-free until they were launched,’ said Haedo, ‘but they would collect specific particulates during transit. A decent forensic examiner should be able to trace them back to our craft in a few hours.’
‘We are already suspected,’ Amon said.
‘Already?’
‘That Lucifer Black knows we’re not what we seem to be. I believe they are just looking for evidential confirmation before they confront us.’
‘And we still have no authority,’ said Haedo.
Amon nodded, slowly.
‘But they don’t know that,’ he said.
Haedo didn’t respond. He was studying the cogito-analyser intently.
‘What is it?’ Amon asked.
‘Parliament has initiated a system-wide purge to flush out and destroy the probes,’ Haedo replied. ‘The order was countersigned by Pherom Sichar, presiding over the parliament. But that’s not it… I’m getting feedback from the probes. Seven of them have penetrated the Planalto’s communication archive, and one has sourced Lord Sichar’s archive log for the last seven months.’
‘Translations?’
Haedo shook his head. ‘No, the code is still a wall to us. But the sender and receiver header codes on each message form are not encrypted. They’re stored in binaric. I’m running the entire list against comparative data. Wait… wait…’
Tight lines of script began to flow up the small screen of the compact device.
‘Four confirmed matches,’ Haedo whispered. ‘Four, you see? Each one is quite clearly the operative reception code for the Vengeful Spirit.’
The Lupercal’s flagship. Amon nodded. ‘That’s just cause. That’s all we need. We move.’
Strike teams summoned from the Palace could be in the heart of the Planalto in less than twenty-five minutes, but Amon judged that course to be counterproductive. An open shooting war would just make matters worse. He and Haedo had to secure the person of Sichar immediately, and then let a systematic investigation pick Sichar’s network of conspirators apart.
He took a trigger unit from the pocket of his robes and pressed it.
‘Brace for apport,’ he said. There was a loud, double-bang of over-stressed air pressure as the site-to-site teleport delivered two heavy, metal caskets into the suite directly from the Hawkwing. They appeared, fuming with vapour, in the centre of the carpet. The overpressure cracked two of the suite’s windows. Alarms, set off by the violent apport and its energy signature, started to pulse.
Haedo and Amon threw open the metal caskets. Inside each one, carefully packed, lay their golden custodes armour and the disengaged segments of their Guardian spears.
Drill teams of the Draco elite, led by Ibn Norn, burst into the holding suite less than four minutes later. The chambers were empty. A fierce wind blew in through a section of reinforced window that had been entirely cut out.
Ibn Norn glanced at the open, empty apport caskets, and the discarded clothes on the floor beside them. He saw the cockerel mask, the decorative sabre, and the wires of a displacer field hastily torn off.
He crossed to the window, and looked down into the streaming wind. The towers and street scheme of the Planalto spread out below him, far away. In the middle distance, on the shore overlooking the wide and gleaming edges of the Winter Fields, he saw Parliament House.
Ibn Norn activated his grav arrestor and leapt through the window.
Parliament House was a splendid structure built from filaments of silvered steel and pylons of a pale stone that looked like buffed ivory. Bells were ringing, urgently advising the delegates, burgraves and grandees to shelter or seek the protection of their bodyguards. Thousands of Dracos were gathering around the building’s various entrances, especially the broad main steps that led in a magnificent sweep up from the state quays of the Winter Fields.
Haedo and Amon landed on the roof of the largest quay house, disturbing ice powder that had been driven in off the fields. They killed their jump packs and surveyed the scene ahead.
‘We’ve roused them like a colony of angry ants,’ Haedo murmured.
Amon touched his arm and nodded.
A black figure flew in out of the winter sky, rebounded with agile grace off the spire of the gatehouse and landed in the midst of the milling Draco troops on the main steps.
‘Scanners!’ they heard Ibn Norn order. ‘They’re right here! Secure this precinct and find them!’
Haedo and Amon leapt down off the quay house roof and walked towards the steps side by side. Dracos bustled around them, checking handheld monitors or breaking heavier scanning equipment out of carry boxes. Voices were chattering urgently. Gun crews were setting up tripod weapons along the shore to watch the ice fields. Packs of gunships purred low overhead.
The two custodes calmly walked up the steps through the anxious soldiers. They came within three metres of the Lucifer Black. Norn was barking commands, and trying to organise a perimeter.
They entered Parliament House unopposed. The echoey main chamber was emptying. The grandees of Hy Brasil were filing off the banked seating and flowing towards the exits, under the dutiful watch of armed Dracos.
Lord Sichar was still in his seat, a canopied throne of dark wood that presided over the upper and lower houses. He was a noble-looking man in red and green robes, a little younger than Amon had imagined. Sichar’s own Lucifer Black was waiting to hurry his lord to a place of safety, but Sichar was busy signing some last documents brought to him by delegates and scribes, and conferring urgently with the master of parliamentary protocol.
‘Try not to harm his person,’ Amon instructed Haedo. ‘We need him viable for interview.’
‘We’ll probably have to kill his Lucifer,’ Haedo replied.
‘Agreed, but only if he resists. One clean shot. I don’t want a fight in here.’
Thirty metres from the canopied throne, they threw aside their falsehoods.
‘Sichar of Hy Brasil,’ Amon announced. ‘You are sanctioned by the Adeptus Custodes as an enemy of Terra. Do not attempt to resist us.’