Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘As little as possible,’ Amberley said. ‘No telling how far the taint has spread.’ Then she relented a little. ‘It’s unlikely she’s involved, though,’ she conceded, to Proktor’s evident relief. ‘If she was she’d have made some kind of move to gain the initiative by now, instead of bleating for the Inquisition to come in and sort it all out for her.’

‘Unless it’s a clever double bluff,’ I said, unable to resist the impulse to tease the man a little, but if anything the remark seemed to have reassured him.

‘She’s not that bright,’ he said. ‘But keeping her side-lined is a good idea. She’s not all that discreet either.’

‘What about the temple you found?’ Delvinge asked, looking even more sickly than Proktor had. Clearly the news that heretics had been running rampant in the depths of a mine he was responsible for had been far from welcome, and he sat as far from Amberley as he could, glancing at her from time to time as though he thought it could only be a matter of time before she leapt out of her seat and shot him.

Kasteen turned to Amberley before she answered the question. ‘Grifen’s platoon’s still guarding the place, but I’m not sure if it’s from the here­tics or the eldar. Either way, we can’t just leave it there.’

‘Cleanse it,’ Broklaw put in. ‘Bring the roof down with demo charges.’

Delvinge nodded eagerly, seizing on the chance to demonstrate his loyalty. ‘My lads can do that. No problem. They can place the charges right where they’ll do the most damage.’

I nodded, and he smiled queasily, grateful for the tacit support. Our own sappers knew their explosives, of course – rather too intimately for my peace of mind in the case of their commander, Captain Federer, whose enthusiasm for detonating things was all too evident every time he got the chance – but the miners would be far better versed in the local geology.

‘Under military supervision,’ Kasteen agreed, after a moment’s consideration. ‘If that’s all right with you, inquisitor?’

‘Fine,’ Amberley agreed. ‘The sooner the better.’

‘Shouldn’t we wait for the other inquisitor to get here?’ Broklaw asked. ‘They might want to examine the site themselves.’ When we’d found similar pockets of corruption on Adumbria the Lord General had sent his own sanctioned psykers in to poke around before cleansing them, although the Inquisition hadn’t been involved on that occasion.68

Amberley shook her head. ‘I’ve already had Rakel give it the once over. According to her there’s psychic residue all over the place, but no actual warp breach. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather keep it that way.’

‘Gets my vote,’ I said, conscious that if that course of action had been signed off on by both the Inquisition and the Commissariat, Kasteen and the 597th would be comfortably insulated from blame if it all somehow went horribly wrong, or the quill jugglers back on Coronus decided to throw a jurisdictional hissy fit.

‘Then we’d better get on with it.’ Broklaw tapped his comm-bead. ‘Captain Federer. Got a little demo job for you. The mine manager’s liaising, make sure his pick jockeys know which end of the det cord goes bang.’ He listened for a moment, and turned to Delvinge. ‘He’ll meet you at the head of shaft three in twenty minutes. Better get your team together.’

The mine manager’s jowls wobbled, a hivequake of consternation rippling across his face.

‘Twenty minutes? That’s barely enough time to get there, let alone–’

‘Then you’d better get moving, hadn’t you?’ Broklaw said evenly. I’d expected Delvinge to make more of a fight of it, but he simply made a few spluttering sounds, like an enginseer getting their first look at a vehicle Jurgen had returned to the transport pool, before rising, bowing elaborately to Amberley, pointedly ignoring the rest of us and bustling out.

‘Well, that takes care of one problem,’ I said, although I didn’t believe it for a moment. Chaos cults didn’t just go away, although the fact that this one had apparently been lurking down in the dark for years without sparking any of the civil unrest which generally presaged an open declaration of allegiance did point to the fact that they were relatively small and weak as these things go. ‘We’ll have to get all the other mines checked, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Amberley agreed. She turned to Proktor. ‘I take it you can talk to the right people, get that organised? Once you’ve worked out who you can trust.’

‘I think so,’ Proktor said, before catching himself, no doubt reflecting that even though making firm commitments was anathema to a career bureaucrat this was hardly the time to sound unenthusiastic about purging heretics. ‘That is, I can. It’ll take a while, though.’

‘Good,’ Amberley said. ‘And we’ll need to talk to the arbitrator about searching the hab zones too, particularly the underhive. Where there’s one nest of heretics there could easily be others.’