Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

A gunship banked overhead, engines screaming. Its black hull blocked out the light.

The column of lightning flared. The glass tabernacle exploded. Shards flew out. Bodies fell, torn apart, limbs and flesh split open. Ninkurra dived to the ground. A razor-edged sheet of glass skimmed her left shoulder. Numbness spread down her left side as the nerve shunts in her spine blocked the pain signal. She rolled back to her feet and jinked aside from another fragment.

The explosion froze. Pieces of glass, drops of blood and scraps of skin halted in mid-air, and then began to float upwards as the cries became a deafening pulse of terror.

‘Oh no…’ hissed Ninkurra.

The gunship above her opened up. Hard rounds whipped through the crowd.

The crop stubble was burning. Black smoke smudged the air.

A high, keening cry came from the mouths of the pilgrims.

‘So far…’ moaned the chorus of pain. ‘Can see… so far…’

She ran forwards. A man swung across her path. He was missing half his head; skull and brain sliced clean away, but he was still moving, mouth still shouting.

‘I don’t want…’

She kicked him aside. The gunship curved around in the air above her. Figures in crimson and black armour were dropping from its open hatches. More fire cut into the crowd as the door gunner of the second craft fired. Hot brass casings rattled as they hit the lip of the open door.

A wall of bodies in front of her. She raised her pistol and fired three times. The executioner rounds barely had time to sniff their kill markers before they hit. Wet explosions tore a hole in the pilgrims, and then Ninkurra was through it. She was seeing with three sets of eyes: her own and those of the hawks spinning through the air above. She could see the prospect. He was standing in a circle of burning crop stubble. His hands were spread, palms open, head tilted back. Furnace light poured from his mouth and eyes. A golden nimbus pulsed about his shoulders.

Ninkurra raised her pistol and fired. The round punched into the air and shrank, tumbling in slow motion as it became molten slag. A pilgrim grabbed at her. She took the grasping hands off at the wrist with a flick of the shard-blade, and tried to push forward. It was like trying to run into a gale.

The sounds of gunfire and gunships faded…

The feeling of her muscles dimmed…

She was not moving…

A trio of hard rounds whipped through the crowd behind her. She could see them move through the air, buzzing like heavy insects.

+Daughter…+ said a voice in her skull that spoke and shook like the sound of thunder. +Daughter of man… why is this happening?+

She tried to shut it out, tried to bury her thoughts behind the engrams imbedded in her psyche. But the pressure forcing its way inside her mind was immense, like a tidal wave pouring over a sea wall. She could feel it growing, too, raw power flowing out into being, unstoppable, wild, and filled with pain. There was just a scrap of her own will left, and she held on to it as the firetide of thoughts broke through her. She had faced moments close to this, but they had killed the prospect before its power fully manifested. She was about to see what would have happened if they had failed all those times before.

+I can see so far…+ roared the thunder voice in her skull, +but… I…don’t want to… I don’t understand what…+

Now, she willed.

The psyber-hawks dived from the sky above. Their feathers burned as they fell. Her last instruction held them true, wings tucked, ash spilling from them. They struck the man as they died, claws cutting into flesh for an instant before they became flashes of light.

It was only an instant, a stutter in unfolding time. But it was enough. Ninkurra raised her gun and fired once. The world shrieked, and then there was just the noise of burning corn and the chatter of distant gunfire.

‘The Horusians were the worst of what are called radicals,’ said Hesh. ‘Inquisitors who take the authority of the divine Emperor, and use it to follow their calling down paths that others would consider perversions of the ideals of the Imperium. Heretics, and betrayers of their office.’

‘But they are not called either heretics or betrayers,’ said Viola calmly, ‘they are called radicals.’

‘A kindness of language,’ growled Hesh.

‘A truth,’ said Viola. ‘They are inquisitors. None save the Emperor may gainsay them. If they believe something is right, who is to say that they are wrong? The Emperor cannot commit heresy or betray Himself, so how can those that walk in His name?’

Hesh turned his pale eyes on her. Thin lips peeled back over yellow teeth.

‘To defend heresy is to become worse than those you defend.’