Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

I nodded. ‘You must have heard the rumours,’ I said, ‘and they’re true. She’s here, on the orbital, and making her way to the mansion as we speak.’ No point complicating things by mentioning Vekkman, who probably wouldn’t thank me for blowing his cover if he didn’t want to break it himself.

‘He’s lying!’ Evander screeched. ‘He’s here to assassinate the governor!’

‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘the inquisitor herself sent me here to ensure his safety.’ Which wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough, and the squaddies didn’t need to know any of the details.

The squad leader’s eyebrows furrowed as she tried to work this out. ‘Why you?’ she said. ‘You’re a commissar. Why aren’t you with your regiment, fighting the eldar?’

‘Because when an inquisitor asks you for a favour,’ I said, ‘the only possible answer is “yes”.’ For a moment I found myself wondering how Kasteen and the others were getting on in my absence, but as it was pointless to speculate, and I knew them well enough to be sure that they’d be acquitting themselves well, I dismissed the thought at once. ‘Besides, if anything happens to the governor, the defenders’ morale will plummet. Keeping him safe is a vital military objective.’ Actually, I rather doubted that, given that there was undoubtedly an heir or two poised to step in as soon as the throne became vacant, but this woman and the troopers with her were sworn to defend the man: hearing their mission validated by a Hero of the Imperium was the fastest and surest way to get them on side. And so it proved. Slowly, she lowered the hellgun, her subordinates following suit.

Evander seemed on the point of spontaneous combustion. ‘They’ve killed the governor’s servants! They tried to kill me! Shoot them, for Throne’s sake!’

The squad leader glanced from one of us to the other, clearly weighing our relative trustworthiness, and deciding to err on the side of caution. Her hellgun, though lowered, I noticed, was still being held ready for immediate use on either of us. Which was good; that showed her instincts were sound, and she wasn’t about to take anything for granted. She turned back to me. ‘Why were you chasing him?’

‘Because he’s a traitor, and a heretic,’ I said calmly, ‘who panicked when he thought we were on to him.’ Actually, now I came to think about it, I couldn’t see any logical reason for him to have attacked Jurgen when he did; all my suspicions had been focused on Defroy, and if he’d just kept his head, and continued to fade into the background, he could have expected to evade detection indefinitely. After all, he had no way of knowing that Vekkman had picked up enough information down at the docks for me to have identified him. But, as I’d observed on many occasions, anyone turning to Chaos was an Emperor short of a tarot pack to begin with; perhaps he’d jumped to the conclusion that he’d been rumbled, and just acted accordingly.

‘That’s ridiculous!’ Evander expostulated, sounding about as convincing as an ecclesiarch in a bordello claiming he’d just dropped in to collect a donation for the temple roof repair fund.

‘Is it?’ I narrowed my eyes, in the manner I’d long perfected while dealing with the defaulters in the regiment who’d come up on charges, and been foolish enough to offer an excuse with a hole in it big enough to have waltzed a Titan through. ‘Then why were you collecting interdicted eldar artefacts?’

The blood drained from his face. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said.

‘I’m talking about the spirit stones you collected from the transhipment docks,’ I said. ‘Probably for your cult to use in some blasphemous ritual.’ I paused theatrically, waiting for a reply, but the wretched fellow was beyond coherent speech by this time; his mouth moved, but nothing came out beyond variations of buh and duh, interspersed with the occasional squeak. I moved in for the coup de grace. ‘Not that I care. But the inquisitor will want all the details. And she’ll get them in the end. They always do.’

Looking back, I only had myself to blame for what happened next. The household troops were hanging on every word by this point and, savouring the sensation of being the centre of attention, I just couldn’t resist glancing at them for an instant to gauge how my performance was going down.

And that momentary break in eye contact was all it took. Up until that point Evander had been petrified, paralysed by indecision, nailed to the spot by my apparently detailed knowledge of what he’d been up to. Now he sprang with the alacrity of one of the face-eaters we’d encountered in the depths of the underhive, snatching at the hellgun of the trooper nearest to him. Taken by surprise, the trooper’s finger tightened reflexively on the trigger, unleashing a full burst185 into Evander’s torso.