Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘No.’ The strange inquisitor leaned forward a little, although there was no one else present who might have overheard. ‘I’ve been looking into rumours of heresy among the workers in the orbital anchorages here. They’re often the ones first affected by spiritual contagion, as it passes from system to system.’

‘Not just spiritual,’ Amberley said. ‘If there’s some xenos influence about, they’ll be the first ones exposed to it as well. I came here to break up a smuggling ring trading in t’au artefacts.’

‘Successfully, I hope,’ I said, more to preserve the illusion of small talk than because I actually cared.

Amberley smiled thinly. ‘I broke the network,’ she said. ‘But that led me to the webway portal in the sump, and the current eldar mess.’

‘Which is impeding my investigation,’ Vekkman said. ‘I had no idea that the cult had taken root on Drechia, and now that the eldar have been stirred up, getting there to take charge isn’t going to be easy.’

‘I have a ship,’ Amberley said, confirming my guess that the Externus Exterminatus was somewhere in orbit, probably pretending to be an ore scow or something, ‘but I’d rather not get any dents in it unless we have to.’

‘Too great a risk,’ Vekkman said, eyeing the plates of food Amberley and I had brought in with clear disapproval. ‘There’s no one else capable of dealing with a daemonic incursion in the entire system, and my death could damn it all. I’ll continue to liaise with the local authorities by vox until the eldar are no longer an impediment to navigation.’

‘That might take some time,’ I said, an understatement if ever I made one. ‘We have a Naval task force and Imperial Guard reinforcements on the way,’ thanks to Amberley’s Inquisitorial request cutting through the usual Administratum obstructiveness like a chainsword through gretchin, ‘but it’ll be a couple of months at least before they get here.’

‘And it would be a mistake to underestimate the eldar’s determination to retake this world,’ Amberley put in. ‘There’s an entire craftworld at the other end of the webway tunnel in the halo, and its resources are vast. Holding them off until reinforcements arrive isn’t going to be easy.’

‘None of which is my concern,’ Vekkman said. ‘I have leads to follow up on Ironfound, of course, but it’s on Drechia that the cult has broken cover.’

‘Not exactly broken,’ I said, thinking about that. ‘We stumbled across their meeting place by accident. In fact if it hadn’t been for Amb… Inquisitor Vail’s discovery of the webway portal on Drechia, and the eldar using it,’ which I thought sounded more tactful than the eldar she’d led there, ‘we’d have had no reason to enter that part of the tunnel complex at all.’

‘Granted,’ Vekkman said, nodding in a manner presumably intended to encourage me to continue, although I thought I’d pretty much made my point by then. ‘But they’d summoned a daemon. That sounds to me like they were getting ready to declare themselves in no uncertain terms.’

‘Quite so,’ I said, taking a mouthful of kedgeree by way of punctuation. This was his area of expertise, so I felt I should tread carefully in contradicting him. ‘But a minor one, as these things go. I’ve seen far more powerful.’ I thought I was going to have to go into details about the horrors I’d encountered aboard the mining barge Emeli had selected for her triumphant return to the materium, but Vekkman merely nodded.

‘Of course, the Adumbria incident. The Imperium owes you a great deal for that, commissar.’

‘I had quite a bit of help,’ I said, accurately enough – although, as usual, most of the credit had attached itself to me. ‘From the five hundred and ninety-seventh, mostly. But there were Tallarns there too.’ Probably best not to mention Beije, the Tallarns’ commissar, who’d come within a hair’s breadth of allowing his personal antipathy to me to hand the wretched place over to the Ruinous Powers, and definitely not a good idea to mention Jurgen, whose unique talents had weakened Emeli’s daemonic form enough at the crucial moment for our combined firepower to blast her back into the warp.

Amberley swallowed loudly, and chased the contents of her now empty plate with a slug of her drink. She looked in Vekkman’s direction with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm.

‘I take it no one’s been summoning daemons on Ironfound,’ she said. ‘Which means your primary focus should be Drechia.’

Vekkman shook his head. ‘Except that the reports I’m getting from the local arbitrator’s office are indicating few clear leads. Which, given how good they are at uncovering corruption among the upper echelons of society, points to a small, low-level conspiracy which has managed to escape detection not because they have powerful connections, but because they actually have none.’