Rites of Passage - Mike Brooks Page 3

  She focused past and around them, looking for the warp echoes of Gallimo Prime’s fate, and saw it almost instantly. It was a flickering wound hanging in space – not active, not a portal through which a ship could pass, for example, but still something from which the energy of the warp could infinitesimally bleed. It was a ragged tear in–

  No. No it wasn’t. Chetta clenched her fingers on the head of her cane until her knuckles protested and looked closer, forcing herself to concentrate. She had to be absolutely certain about this.

  She was absolutely certain about it. It wasn’t a tear.

  It was a cut.

  ‘My lady?’

  Chetta realised she’d spoken aloud. She closed her warp eye and opened her physical ones, then turned around to see DeShelle regarding her with a look of concern. She debated whether to keep what she’d just learned to herself, then instantly decided against it. Such information was too important to risk on the continuing good health of one Navigator.

  ‘Captain,’ she called, motioning to Arqueba. ‘Would you care to join us, please?’

  Anja Arqueba’s command throne floated majestically over to them, borne aloft by a combination of anti-grav motors and suspensor cables that disappeared into the bridge’s vaulted ceiling. Arqueba was another Navy veteran, although she and Chetta had never seen combat together, and what could be seen of her hair amidst the neural interface cables dotting her scalp was an iron grey.

  ‘High lady?’

  Chetta cleared her throat and kept her voice low. ‘Keep this to yourselves for now. I don’t want word to spread among the crew, because the crew will talk when we get back to Vorlese. Which, incidentally, I want us back in the warp and heading for as soon as this conversation is over. I’ll handle the translation here, but then I’ll need whoever is next on the duty rota to take the rest of the journey.’

  DeShelle and Arqueba both nodded dutifully.

  ‘This was no accident, or random warp storm,’ Chetta said simply, nodding in the direction of the absent planet. ‘From what I can see, someone intended to drag Gallimo Prime into the warp.

  ‘And they found a way to do just that.’

  Children of the Serpent

  Even among the mighty windscrapers of Ascension City, the Navigator halls stood tall and proud. The mighty edifices, each stretched over multiple city blocks, were built of ferrocrete for structural strength, but clad in square miles of the finest marble and punctuated with windows of glassaic that would have taken up the entire sides of buildings on lesser worlds. Sentinel-sized gargoyles clung to cornices and leered over precipitous ledges. Gold leaf and filigree had settled on surfaces like great colonies of roosting insects. House sigils were picked out in platinum and precious stones, and subtly illuminated so that they blazed out into the night of Vorlese’s twenty-seven-hour rotation. As a planet on one of the main warp routes to Holy Terra, and a proud survivor of the Despoiler’s assault during the Thirteenth Black Crusade, Vorlese was the seat of power for several of the largest Navigator houses, and they advertised that power.

  Despite their appearance, however, the halls were not mere ostentatious frippery. They stood independent of the webwork of enclosed gantries and procession ways that linked the other buildings around them, and any flyer not broadcasting approved security codes would be shot down in short order if they approached too closely. At ground level, razor wire and other, less obvious deterrents prevented the curious or malicious from drawing near. Even the most desperate denizens of the Smog Deeps knew better than to approach a Navigator hall, even if they had no concept of what one actually was, or who dwelled within. Navigators were paranoid, and as mutants in an Imperium that widely reviled and hunted mutants, they were wise to be so.

  All these things would pose a severe obstacle to most people who intended to harm a Navigator, but Radimir Niklau was not most people. He could get inside every one of these heavily defended palaces should he choose to, but such a venture was not without risk, and Niklau had not gained the favour of his patrons – his true patrons – by being careless. There were easier measures that could be taken for now. Later, when the prey became more cautious, he could utilise his more esoteric skills.

  For now, he needed information.

  He let his instincts take him past the teeming marketplaces; down the great thoroughfares where the faceless, grey-souled masses of the Imperium’s chattel dragged themselves to or from their place of employ at the sound of the shift-change klaxon; over a spindly looking crossway that swayed in the wind between blocks, and was clustered with lights in an effort to prevent flyers from colliding with it; around the gently humming sealed chambers where the power generators throbbed. After a while, he became consciously aware of what was guiding his steps.

  ‘I’ve seen you before,’ Radimir murmured, eyeing a sigil in the smear of graffiti and gang signs that crawled down one wall of a throughway. It was a crude depiction of a crowned serpent – not particularly large or ostentatious, and not created with any remarkable degree of artistic skill, but it had caught his eye. There had been another, one block back, in the same style and with its head pointing towards this one.

  A trail, perhaps. But leading where?

  This serpent had a kink in its neck, suggesting that he should turn right at the next junction. He did so, and found his next guide some way down the passage, nestling beside a flickering strip lumen in the ceiling. That one sent him on to its fellow, scratched into the wall above a garbage compactor. He nearly missed the next, half-concealed as it was by a wanted poster for an outlaw going by the name of Emerson Tobias, who from the look of the bad pict seemed to be some sort of foppish dandy with an over-fondness for knives. However, a quick easing aside of the text describing Tobias’ misdeeds gave Radimir the direction he needed to take at his next turning, up a long flight of stairs into a wide public atrium.

  Here he slowed, feeling uncertainty gnawing at him for the first time. There looked to be only one way in or out of this hall, so presumably here was where he would find what he sought. But there was always the possibility that the sigils were old or, worse, had already been deciphered by one of the Imperium’s watchdogs, yet been left as bait. The luminators on the walls and ceiling here were close-spaced and in good condition, and there were few places to hide. A very bad place for a fight, should it come to one.

  Radimir calmed his breathing, and ran through a quick mental focusing exercise. Discovery was always possible, but it was highly unlikely that a constant watch was being kept, even if someone had realised what the sigils meant. Besides, entrapment of that sort was incredibly unlikely: the Imperium would almost always destroy such things, if they realised their true nature. Destruction was one of the few things the Imperium excelled at, and the only thing about it that he admired.

  There. Another crowned serpent, but this one was coiled into a circle and eating its own tail rather than leading him anywhere further. Radimir headed for the door it sat next to, with the easy confidence of a man who had merely taken a moment to get his bearings, and ascended the wide steps of dark stone that led to the pillared entrance.

  It was a public library. Radimir snorted in quiet amusement. Perhaps there would actually be some true knowledge contained within.

  The desk clerk was a skinny woman with thick streaks of grey in her black hair, and whose sense of self-important duty was tangible. She held up a hand as Radimir made to walk past the counter at which she sat, and he paused, studying her.

  ‘Are you a member?’ she demanded, fixing him with a stare that would doubtless have rooted a lesser person to the spot.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Open browsing is five ducats,’ the clerk sniffed, jerking her head at a displayed list of prices behind her. ‘Borrowing is two ducats per item.’

  Radimir dug into his pocket and pulled out the appropriate coin. He’d already broken down some of the money he’d received from Ke
ll – Vorlesian ducats, apparently – precisely to avoid being remembered as the man who’d tried to pay for something as mundane as library admittance with a high-denomination piece. He slid it across the counter and the clerk took it, tucking it into a till that clicked as its inbuilt counter registered it. There were no opportunities for light-fingered employees here, clearly.

  The clerk returned to her filing, ignoring him now that he’d paid his way. There was nothing about her to indicate that she was who he sought; she was merely another unthinking wheel in the Imperium’s enormous, corroded machine. Radimir moved on.

  It was some ten minutes later when he found what he was looking for. Two rows away from where the data crystals sat on dusty shelves interspersed with cogitators, in among the genuine books that reeked of leather and paper, old glue and mouldering dust, a tall man with angular cheekbones and eyes of quiet hazel was replacing tomes on a shelf. As he did so, the light glittered for a moment off a ring on his left forefinger: a crowned serpent wrought in silver, eating its own tail.

  ‘A fine place you have here,’ Radimir remarked, approaching him from the right. The man turned to him, a gentle smile on his face.

  ‘I like to think so. Sulaman Eichner, senior archivist.’ He proffered a hand, which Radimir took.

  ‘Radimir Niklau.’

  ‘And what brings you to our collection today, Goodsire Niklau?’ Eichner smiled.

  ‘Serpents.’

  Eichner, on the verge of withdrawing his hand, stiffened involuntarily. Radimir tightened his grip.

  ‘That’s a very poor tarot face you have there, senior archivist,’ he murmured. ‘Just imagine the trouble you could be in if I were a servant of the Inquisition, instead of the Eightfold Path.’

  The corner of Eichner’s mouth twitched, but his smile was transfixed, like an insect pinned to a display card by a magos biologis.

  ‘Our masters have been watching,’ Radimir continued, the lies slipping easily through his teeth. ‘Your efforts have been noted, and your rewards will follow.’ He looked into Eichner’s eyes, measured the man, considered their surroundings and took a leap of faith. Many things drew people away from the Emperor’s lies, but it was often relatively easy to work out what. For a senior archivist… ‘The knowledge you have been seeking will be made available to you.’

  Eichner’s stiffness dissolved into limp relief. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you…’

  ‘But first, I will require your assistance,’ Radimir said, holding up a finger to silence Eichner’s quiet joy. ‘Your assistance, and that of your… associates.’

  All things considered, Radimir thought that the Children of the Serpent were a fairly poor collection of worshippers. Sulaman Eichner had been seduced by the search for forbidden knowledge – Radimir hadn’t ascertained exactly what – but he hadn’t yet fully thrown himself into the work of overthrowing the Imperium and bringing about its downfall. He viewed it as overbearing and constraining, and felt that the dogma of the Ministorum limited humanity’s potential to learn and grow, and wanted to bask in the knowledge and glory of the Ruinous Powers. Radimir agreed wholeheartedly with all of that, but Eichner had yet to wholly understand or commit to the path he’d begun to tread. In time, with the right development, Sulaman Eichner might become the sort of man the Inquisition hunted mercilessly – the sort of man who unlocked the secrets of the warp and inducted multitudes into them. At the moment, however, he was merely a morbidly curious senior archivist with an anti-authoritarian streak and the ability to organise and coordinate a cult.

  Radimir might take him along when he left Vorlese to its fate. Or he might not.

  The rest of them, at least of those Eichner had been able to call together at short notice, were the usual mix of malcontents, deviants and self-important fools who had completely failed to understand what they were getting involved in. There were a handful of sociopaths who simply wanted to hurt and kill people, and weren’t particularly bothered about what framework it was that allowed them to do it; put them in carapace and give them an Ordo Hereticus sigil, and they’d probably be just as content to serve as Inquisition shock troops. There were a few mutants of the less obvious sort, the kind that could move about with relative security in hooded cloaks and with respirators over their faces. Then there were a couple of dozen of what Radimir thought of as the family types: folks for whom the worship of Chaos had been passed down by previous generations with the same sort of ditchwater-dull lack of imagination that most Imperial citizens worshipped the Emperor. Give them an autogun, point them at the governor’s guards and tell them their day had come, and they’d start a riot, a revolution or whatever you needed them to, but you couldn’t trust a one of them to think up anything that would actually bring glory to the Ruinous Powers.

  There were four who really stood out to Radimir, aside from Eichner. Svet was a huge mutant, and apparently the brother of three of the family types. He was as large as an ogryn, and had been blessed by the Changer with what looked to be razor-sharp spurs of bone dotted across his body, particularly from his knee and elbow joints. Unlike an ogryn, however, he appeared to have undiminished intellect compared to his fellows, although he struggled to get words out around his enlarged, tusk-like teeth. Radimir could see that Svet was accorded great respect by the others on account of his blessed appearance, and was offered seating appropriate to his mighty frame and the best of the available food, which would certainly be preferable to the death by burning promethium he’d suffer if anyone in authority laid eyes on him.

  Evelyn Darke was a wyrd, an unsanctioned psyker missed by the sweeps and purges and therefore not taken by the Black Ships to be drained to a husk for the benefit of the Corpse-Emperor on his Carrion Throne. She was a hollowed-out young woman with dark circles around haunted eyes, and in many other places she’d have been the leader of the group, as the one with the most obvious power. However, it seemed she preferred to simply sit as far back into the shadows as she could, which was an approach Radimir could identify with. She’d stared at him distrustfully, but appeared to defer to Eichner’s judgement.

  ‘And what do you do?’ Radimir had asked, when Eichner introduced them. Darke had looked at Eichner and the archivist had gestured encouragingly, like a father keen for his child to demonstrate their latest trick.

  ‘I burn things,’ Darke had replied. Then she’d looked away from him, and that had been that.

  Then there was Aylen Marjuk, whom Radimir had pegged immediately as a stone-cold killer. Former Astra Militarum, he’d either seen something during his service that his commanding officers hadn’t realised he’d seen, or had come to enlightenment at some point after his discharge or, more likely, desertion. He watched everyone, always had one hand on the military-issue laspistol he kept holstered on his left hip, and radiated the sort of passionate belief that Radimir thoroughly approved of. Aylen Marjuk wanted the Imperium to die, even if he wasn’t forthcoming about exactly why. He also stuck close by the shoulder of Sulaman Eichner, and was possibly one reason why the apparently amiable senior archivist hadn’t endured a serious challenge to his position.

  Finally, to Radimir’s complete lack of surprise, there was Emerson Tobias.

  Tobias looked even worse than on his wanted poster. Hair that had once been artfully unkempt was now an unwashed mop; cheeks that had been smooth had become gaunt; eyes that had been shadowed had become sunken. He was a killer as well, Radimir could practically smell it on him, but Tobias was a self-aggrandising blowhard. Had Radimir been a gambling man, he’d have wagered good money that Tobias had fallen in with the Children of the Serpent simply because he had nowhere else to go. He didn’t have the spine for what was coming.

  ‘What do you need from us?’ Eichner asked respectfully, when Radimir had taken his measure of the room. They were gathered in the halls of a generator chamber. It was apparently where Svet lived, on the basis – according to Eichner – that the only people w
ho ever came in to clean or maintain it were his three brothers.

  ‘I need access to the logs at the space port,’ Radimir said. ‘Specifically, I need to know the movements of Navigators from House Brobantis. Which ships they are assigned to, when they are scheduled to arrive and depart. The space port will have that information because the security forces need it. I also need it.’

  ‘Why?’

  It was Emerson Tobias, predictably. He sneered as Radimir looked over at him, displaying a set of even white teeth that had remarkably escaped the decline visible on the rest of his face.

  ‘What sort of glory can come from that?’ Tobias demanded. ‘Sulaman said you were here to reward us for our loyalty. I think you’re here to use us to pursue a personal grudge.’

  ‘Do not confuse your lack of comprehension for my lack of purpose,’ Radimir told him coldly. ‘Your reward will come, if you prove true. If I were to try to explain the details of my purpose to you, your brain would ooze out of your ears.’

  Tobias stood, with a dramatic flourish of his coat sleeves. ‘I’ve killed seventeen men and women, stranger. Seventeen! All for the glory of the Great Powers! You?’

  Radimir sighed, and got to his own feet. He scratched his cheek, considering. ‘Somewhere upwards of fourteen.’

  ‘Hah!’

  ‘Billion.’

  Tobias blinked.

  ‘I’ve killed entire planets, little man,’ Radimir said softly, walking slowly towards Tobias with his hands in his pockets. The other cultists leaned away, none of them eager to get involved. Marjuk still had one hand on his service laspistol, but he didn’t draw. ‘I’ve consigned more souls to screaming torment than you could possibly meet in a thousand lifetimes. I have purpose. What I don’t have is patience with amateurs.’