The First Heretic

The man thawed a touch at Kadeen’s interest. ‘Elizabeth. We call her Elizabeth.’

‘Sir,’ Ishaq grinned. ‘Permission to come aboard your fine lady.’

So it’d started well. Once they were down, things took a turn for the worse. The officer in nominal command of their expedition wasn’t an officer at all – he was a Euchar sergeant who’d drawn the short straw and had to babysit the gaggle of pretension and nervousness that made up ten highly-strung artists in a warzone.

Ishaq half-listened to the sergeant arguing with a handful of the other remembrancers about just where would be acceptable for them to enter the city. He was already bored, standing on the edge of a rise about three kilometres from the city limits. The place itself looked no different from any industrialised sprawl on Terra, and there weren’t even any obvious signs of battle.

The nature of Astartes assault presented a problem for the people attempting chronicle the event. A direct drop-pod attack against the palace meant the remembrancers had to cross an entire hostile city alone, or would remain outside the city limits and ultimately witness nothing at all. The former was never going to happen. The latter almost definitely was.

Ishaq Kadeen was a naturally suspicious soul, and he felt a bleak sense of humour behind all this. Someone, perhaps even the Crimson Lord himself, was making fun of them all. Inviting them down here, but keeping them tediously safe and out of the way.

He trudged over to his minders: two men in the neat ochre uniforms of the Euchar 81st. Each of the remembrancers was similarly guarded. Ishaq’s own sentinels looked both bored and annoyed all at once, which was quite a feat for human facial expressions.

‘What if we just flew over to the palace?’ he suggested.

‘And get shot down?’ The Euchar was practically spitting. ‘That piece of shit would catch fire and fall out of the sky as soon as it came into range of the anti-air guns.’

With effort, Ishaq kept his smile cordial. ‘Then fly really, really high, and come down sharp on top of the palace. Then find somewhere to land.’ He demonstrated this feat of aeronautics with his hands. They didn’t seem convinced.

‘Not happening,’ one of them said.

Ishaq turned without another word, heading back into the dark confines of the Greywing’s passenger pod. When he emerged again, he had a plastek personal grav-chute pack tucked under one arm, clearly taken from the overhead storage lockers.

‘Then how about this? We fly really damn high, and anyone who actually wants to do their job can jump out and do it.’

The two soldiers shared a glance, and called their sergeant over.

‘What is it?’ the sergeant asked. His face painted enough of a picture: he needed another whining artist like he needed a hole in his head.

‘This one,’ the soldier pointed at Ishaq. ‘He’s had an idea.’

It took twenty minutes for the idea to become reality, and Ishaq regretted it right about the same time he jumped out of the gunship and started falling.

Below him sprawled the white-stone palace, like something from Ancient Hellas in Terra’s decadent past. It was coming up to meet him with surprising speed, while the wind was doing its best to beat him unconscious.

This, he thought, may have been a mistake.

He tapped the switches on his chest buckle that would engage the grav-chute. First one, then the other. First one, then the other.

‘Wait twenty seconds before you switch it on,’ the sergeant had said to the few of them that were making the drop. ‘Twenty seconds. Understood?’

Wait twenty seconds.

The wind roared against him, and the ground swelled below. Was he going to be sick? He hoped not. The queasiness in his stomach flipped and bubbled. Ugh.

Wait twenty seconds.

No sign of anti-air fire, at least. He could make out a spot among one of the inner courtyards – a blackened stain where a red drop-pod had beached itself. That was a good place to start.

Wait twenty seconds.

How... How long had he been falling?

Oh, shit.

Ishaq looked up, through bleary goggles he could see his two minders above. Both were far, far higher than him, shrinking all the while. Even smaller, above them both, were the others who’d caught onto his plan and given it enough credence to come with him.

He flicked the switches, first the blue, then the red. For several moments, absolutely nothing happened. Ishaq continued his plummeting death-dive, too surprised to even swear. He started flicking the switches in random panic, little realising that by doing so he wasn’t giving it time to warm up and engage.