The Beast Arises

The Grand Provost Marshal looked on. Vernor Zeck was a hulk of a man, although half of his bulk was made up by augmetic prosthetics. His skin grafting and bionics were evidence of a lifetime spent working city-hives of inequity on Macromunda and working up through the ranks of the Adeptus Arbites — enforcing, hunting and judging corruption in the hearts of lesser men. His square jaw betrayed disinterest, whatever he forced his eyes to suggest, and in doing so Zeck revealed the very nature of his calling. The Provost Marshal could track a consignment of narcotics up through the hive, down to its very last grain. He could beat confessions from mutants, spire nobles and even fellow arbitrators in precinct house dungeons. He could preside over courts for months, sometimes years at a time, passing judgement on sector-spanning criminal enterprises so involved and complex that they would burn out a calculus-logi’s cogitator. But among the ancients of the Senatorum, blinded by tedium of the most intense kind, Zeck found that his nose for criminality and corruption abandoned him. The occasional sniffs of malfeasance — suspected abuses, secrets of self-interest, profiteering — were ignored by the Grand Provost Marshal. Like a cyber-mastiff before a river or a sewer-channel of effluent, Zeck lost the scent, his suspicions carried off by a stream of banal bureaucracy.

‘Perhaps a donation of some kind would be in order.’

‘For the greater palatial families.’

‘For the palatials, yes.’

The Lord Commander and Ekharth, the Master of the Administratum, were guiltier than most of inaction. If the Imperium were a ship, buffeted in a sea of circumstance, at the mercy of galactic chance, then information was its anchor. With an Imperium of information at their augmented fingertips, or at the fingertips of a chancellor, archivist, clerk or scribe who occupied posts on the bottomless data chain below them, Ekharth and Lord Commander Udo had the knowledge required to solve all but the most dire of the Imperium’s problems, or those that were to come. The abyssal infotombs of the Estate Imperium. The tithes chamber notarium. The ordozarchy of the Departmento Munitorum. The findings of inquiries and inquiries about inquiries, gathered in vellum mountains at the Officio Officium. Decades of back-dated threat assessments from the Logis Strategos, and vermillion-class strategic directives: Solar, Obscurus, Pacificus, Tempestus, Ultima and Extra-Galaxia. These were but a few of the byzantine institutions and divisions that answered to Ekharth and Udo’s absolute authority. It wasn’t as though the pair were not aware of the Ardamantuan atrocity. Even before the catastrophe, the Inquisition had brought the situation to Udo as part of a Critical Situation Packet. Ekharth was already well aware of the xenos species known as the Chromes in the form of the damage their encroachment was doing: missed tithes and trade disruptions.

After Ardamantua — as one xenos threat was exchanged for another — little changed for Ekharth and the Lord Commander. The orks had always been a threat. The Lord High Admiral’s fleets were engaged in actions on the frontier space of the Imperium, defending worlds and trade routes from junkers, freebooting greenskins and upstart warlords declaring wars from warp-spewed space hulks. Indeed, beyond being dropped into such internecine border wars with the greenskins, Verreault — the new Lord Commander Militant of the Astra Militarum — had inherited the Emperor’s bastion amongst the stars only to find it already thoroughly committed to crusades and long-standing strategic engagements. Q’orl Swarmhood expansions. A Segmentum Solar-grazing hrud migration. Expeditionary fleets from the Nadirax Republic. Coreward appearances of the aggressive Biel-Tan craftworld. Carnivorous trans-plants mounting seed-invasions of Imperial systems surrounding the Nepenthis death world. Tarellian mercenary movements in the Phidas sector. The Kindred. The Xerontian Similisworn. The horrific resurgence of the Ubergast. Data continued to flood in from the various theatres and while Abel Verreault was eager that all threats received due attention, troops and materiel, response times were glacial. The Lord Commander Militant was often working with reports that were months out of date. Troop movements arrived to find xenos threats long eradicated. Some simply disappeared into the embrace of alien forces that had grown many times in magnitude since their deployment. Others found themselves sent astronomical distances to incorrect coordinates, finding nothing but dead space, wasted opportunity and relief in equal measure.