Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘That’s quite all right,’ I said, although normally anyone making excuses like that would be getting pretty short shrift from me. One of the privileges of wearing the scarlet sash is that it lets you barge in anywhere, whenever you like, at least if you can claim some kind of military connection. Right now, though, I was perfectly happy to give the local militia a chance to hide any evidence of slack discipline, pilferage from the stores, or general incompetence of any kind; I had a different target in mind. If Defroy really was our heretic traitor, I wanted him where I could see him, preferably at the business end of my laspistol. ‘I take it I can leave the preparations in your capable hands?’

‘Indeed you can, commissar,’ the woman agreed, colouring slightly for some reason.172

‘Splendid,’ I said. ‘In the meantime, I’ll check in with the commander of the governor’s household guards. If you could point me in the direction of wherever they’ve docked?’

‘Of course.’ She gestured towards the portal through which Mott, Vekk­man and their reluctant guide had disappeared a few moments ago. ‘You’ll need the pneumatic at the end of the corridor. They’ll be in sector cerulean taupe, in the third tier docking bay.’

‘You seem very certain of that,’ I said, keeping my tone conversational despite a shiver of unease. ‘Given the number of vessels which have just docked.’ She might have the same kind of augmented cerebellum that Mott did, of course, but so far had shown none of the tendency to compulsive loghorrea that I associated with that kind of enhancement. Any normal person shouldn’t have known that without looking it up.

‘If it’s anything to do with the governor, that’s where it’ll be,’ the woman assured me. ‘The nearest docking bay to his Skyside estates.’

‘Of course.’ I nodded, a fragment of memory seeping into my skull. Herren had referred to it in passing, trying to track the eldar Vypers which had so unexpectedly saved my life. ‘And we are in…?’

‘Sector vermillion beige,’ she said. ‘Everywhere’s colour coded, so you should find your way without too much difficulty.’ She looked at me speculatively. ‘Unless you’re colour blind?’

‘I don’t believe so,’ I said, with a smile I thought an appropriate response to the laboured attempt at humour. ‘I should be fine, unless you’ve got a sector beige taupe. I’ve always had trouble telling those two apart.’

‘I think everybody does,’ the woman said.

I turned to my aide, who was looking as healthy as he ever did now we were no longer being bounced around like a pea in a can. ‘Jurgen?’

‘Is he with you?’ The tone of surprise in the bureaucrat’s voice was unmistakable. ‘I thought he was one of the inquisitor’s people.’

‘My personal aide,’ I said, ‘and a credit to his uniform.’ Which, admittedly, was stretching it a bit, especially since clothing didn’t so much fit him as hang around in his general vicinity.

‘Ready when you are, sir,’ Jurgen assured me. He had the melta slung across his shoulders for ease of carrying but, I was pleased to see, kept his lasgun where he could swing it round and open fire with it at a moment’s notice.

‘Then we’d best get on,’ I said, making a show of bowing formally to Amberley. ‘By your leave, inquisitor.’

‘By all means, commissar,’ she responded, the hint of amusement at the charade colouring her voice audible only to me (and possibly the members of her warband, who also knew her well).

Leaving the docking bay, Jurgen and I found ourselves in a wide, stark corridor, both sides of which were lined at intervals by heavy pressure doors leading to hangar bays like the one we’d arrived in. Well over half of them were empty, the parked ships in the occupied ones lonely and abandoned, save for the occasional enginseer performing routine maintenance on them, or bored-looking crew members keeping a desultory eye on their charges. Usually, no doubt, the wide passageway we walked along would have been crowded with shuttle crews leaving or returning to their ships, dock workers hustling cargoes in and out of the bays, along with the odd servitor to handle the heavy lifting, trollies and grav-sleds trundling down the marked lane in the middle of the floor and, almost certainly, the occasional low life keeping an eye out for something to pilfer. The relatively few people we did meet seemed intent on their own business, although a few turned to watch us go past, their eyes apparently caught by the unusual sight of my uniform, or the weapons Jurgen was carrying.