The Beast Arises

‘I don’t know,’ said Admiral Kiran, ‘but I place my full-throated support behind your efforts to pursue this, sir, rather than giving it up as a dismal and lost cause. We must find out what is happening here, and who has wrought it. Because if they can move a planetary body here, then they can pretty much move one anywhere, and do anything.’

Twenty-Two

Terra — the Imperial Palace

The meeting done, Wienand dismissed the four interrogators. They rose from their seats, bowed to her, raised their hoods, and left the tower-top chamber.

The Inquisitorial Representative sat alone with her thoughts for a while. There were documents and advisories to review, and her rubricator had been urging her to annotate the latest watch list.

Time enough for all of that later. The morning’s news had been grim — pretty much exactly what she had been anticipating, but grim. Her masters in the three sub-divisions of the Inquisition expected much of her, and they had set her in place among the Twelve to accomplish a great deal, but it was a complicated dance, a matter of balance and timing. The Inquisition was an instrument of the Imperium. It did not set Imperial policy.

Unless it knew best, in which case it could not be seen to set Imperial policy.

Wienand’s quarters were an eight-level suite in the armoured crown of a tower overlooking Bastion Ledge and the Water Gardens. There was not much of a view because of the tower’s ample fortification. Agents of the Inquisition had added defences of a more specialised nature when the tower was acquired for the Representative’s use. The very walls and the armourglass of the windows were threaded with protective wards woven from molecular silver fibres, and potent runes had been discreetly worked into the patterns of decorative ornamentation on the carpets and ceilings. Automatic weapon arrays and intruder denial systems had been retrofitted into every staircase, doorway and floorspace, and most of the servitors were wired for weapon activation at a moment’s notice. The suite was cloaked, in addition, by multiple counter-surveillance fields, and several more exotic effects derived from the esoteric arts that the Inquisition both practised and guarded against. A cone of silence, psychically generated yet psychically opaque, covered the uppermost storeys, and there was even a Mars-built, engine-rated void shield in the tower core that could be activated by voice command.

Wienand rose to her feet. She was dressed in a simple, full-length gown of pale grey wool. Her rosette adorned her wrist, as a bracelet. She felt she should summon her rubricator and begin the day’s correspondence, but she was enjoying the solitude, the calm emptiness of the room.

She walked to the side table beside her desk and poured herself a glass of water from the fluted crystal jug, wishing her mind were as clear as the cool water. She raised the glass to her lips.

‘There really could be anything in that, you know.’

Wienand tried not to react. She maintained her composure with an extraordinary, invisible effort. Without sipping, she set the glass down again and returned to her seat at the desk without making any eye contact, or any outward show that there should be anything troubling in the fact that Drakan Vangorich was suddenly sitting in one of the seats vacated by the interrogators.

‘Such as?’ she asked, moving some papers.

‘Oh, toxins,’ said Vangorich. ‘I hear toxins are very popular. Untraceable, of course. Not necessarily lethal, but certainly mood-altering, or behaviour-modifying. Toxins that make you compliant and suggestible. Toxins that render you open to autohypnotic implanting. All sorts of things.’

‘I see.’

‘Don’t you have a taster? An official taster? I thought you would have. A person like you.’

‘I’ll recruit one if it makes you happy,’ she said.

‘I’m only concerned for you. For a friend.’

She looked at him, directly. He was smiling, and the smile did not sit well with his scar.

‘Why? Did you place a toxin in my water, Drakan?’

He shook his head.

‘Throne, no. No, no. Why would I? What an awful thought.’

He paused, and looked her in the eyes.

‘But I could have done. Anyone could have done, that’s my point.’

‘No one could have, Drakan.’

‘Why is that?’ he asked sweetly.

‘Because no one—’

She broke off.

‘Because no one can get in here?’ he asked. ‘Well, I seem to put the lie to that.’

He rose to his feet.

‘You really are the most composed person, Wienand. Applause for that. Not even the courtesy of mild surprise at finding me here.’

‘I should not be surprised,’ she said.

‘Even though your security advisor told you that this suite had a triple-aquila secure rating that nothing short of a primarch could get past?’

She didn’t blink.

‘I was quoting directly from his written report submitted for your approval nine months ago.’

‘I know.’

‘Page eighteen, line twenty-four.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Quite a colourful turn of phrase… “Nothing short of a primarch…” though not terribly technical.’

‘I agree.’