Hidden Depths Read online

  HIDDEN DEPTHS

  Sandy Mitchell

  Ciaphas had once suggested the best way to find the local heretics was to crawl down the nearest hole. Like many of his apparently flippant remarks, this had struck Amberley as having an element of truth. As a successful Inquisitor, which was to say one who was not only still breathing but was still sane and relatively unscarred in both body and soul, she had often observed the tendency of the unrighteous to meet secretly in the warren of long-forgotten tunnels, service ducts and built-over bones of earlier cities that riddled the foundations of most Imperial conurbations. Those treading the paths of the Dark Gods needed silence and solitude for their blasphemous rituals, while the kind she was most interested in required storage space for their contraband.

  On the other hand, dealers in indicted alien artefacts also liked to remain close to where the shuttles carrying low volume and high value cargoes grounded, which on Ironfound meant the small auxiliary spaceport at the pinnacle of the hive’s highest spire. Emperor forbid that the local aristocrats had to wait even a handful of hours for their off-world indulgences.

  ‘Just how reliable is this informant of yours?’ she asked casually, slipping a hand inside the slit of her tabard to draw her bolt pistol from the holster at her waist. The garment was dark blue, a fortuitously fashionable colour, which, like the smoky grey of the bodyglove beneath it, blended easily into the shadows of the dimly-lit utility corridor running through the warehousing levels just beneath the landing pads. The public thoroughfares would be thronged with travellers and their entourages, not to mention the plebeians who actually worked there and who arrived and departed by air so as not to trespass on the hallowed precincts of their high-living betters.

  ‘That depends on what you mean by reliable,’ Pelton replied. His own sidearm, a starkly functional laspistol devoid of the intricate engravings entwining the Inquisitor’s weapon, was holstered in plain sight. The bodyguards of a minor aristocrat like Amberley’s cover identity tended to carry their armament openly in an attempt to intimidate, since most of them were far from proficient in their actual use.

  ‘Seemed mainly rising, for a dock dreg,’ Zemelda put in helpfully, which Amberley mentally translated as ‘reasonably trustworthy’. Probably. The former street vendor looked like the most improbable lady’s maid imaginable, which, paradoxically, seemed to consolidate her cover with pretty much anyone she came into contact with – provided the bulge in her tabard went unremarked. It disappeared now, as the young woman drew her laspistol, a heartbeat faster than Pelton. He smiled, a proud mentor beaten to the punch by a promising student.

  ‘Usual drill,’ Amberley said, allowing the slight hardening of her voice to bring everyone’s attention back to the matter in hand. ‘Flicker, Zemmie, you’re with me. The rest of you cover our backs.’

  ‘An eminently satisfactory disposition of our forces,’ Mott said. Amberley inhaled, ready to tell him to be quiet, but the savant fell silent without prompting, the simple statement apparently having done nothing to trigger a cascade of tangentially related information through his augmented cerebellum.

  ‘Works for me,’ Yanbel agreed, in his distinctively Kaledonean burr, drawing a laspistol of his own. The tech-priest would be the most effective member of the rearguard if they did come under fire, but Amberley didn’t expect that to happen. At least she hoped it wouldn’t. Mott could handle a gun if he had to, but could easily freeze, too overwhelmed with the complexities of calculating the optimum trajectory to actually pull the trigger. As for the sixth member of the Inquisitorial warband...

  ‘Rakel,’ Amberley asked, ‘do you feel anything?’

  ‘Old,’ the psyker said in her rasping voice, her eyes focusing suddenly from infinity to the Inquisitor’s face. ‘Old, and undying.’

  ‘What is?’ Amberley asked, hoping, if not for a straight answer, at least for one with a couple of clues in it. Tau technosorcery could be strange beyond imagining, but none of their devices were alive. Or undying, which sounded disturbingly like not quite the same thing.

  Rakel shrugged eloquently. ‘It’s singing to the void,’ she said, which was no help at all. ‘But the people can’t hear.’

  ‘People. Right.’ Amberley seized on that. ‘Can you tell how many?’

  Rakel waggled the fingers on her right hand. ‘That many.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Amberley couldn’t tell if the psyker was trying to fold any digits down, but even so, five against three were pretty good odds, when two of them were her and Pelton – and Zemelda was perfectly capable of looking after herself too. Unless Rakel had been trying to indicate more than five? Amberley decided not to think about that.

  ‘Bay seventeen,’ Pelton reminded her, sotto voce, although there was precious little chance of their voices carrying through the thick, metal access hatch he indicated. Like the rest of their surroundings it was encrusted with the detritus of millennia, and Amberley had to look hard to distinguish its outline through the dirt. At least there was little prospect of being ambushed, she thought; their footprints were the only ones visible in the thick carpet of dust, which rose in knee-high puffs with every step.

  ‘Yanbel?’ Amberley stood aside, holding her luminator to give the young tech-priest a good view of the locking mechanism.

  A smile spread over his face. ‘Haven’t seen one of those in a long time,’ he said, poking at the panel with a mechadendrite that suddenly snaked out from beneath his robe, ‘and that was in a museum. Piece of... Ach, you wee scunner.’ A brief shower of sparks illuminated the corridor for a moment. ‘Whoever consecrated that was a complete rustwit.’ He banged the panel irritably with the butt of his laspistol, and Amberley flinched, but, fortunately, it seemed the safety was still on.

  ‘Can you get...?’ Zemelda began, but before she could complete the question Yanbel stood back with a satisfied grin. With a loud clunk, the retaining bolts slammed back and the entire hatch fell clear of the wall, crashing to the deck in an explosion of sound which reverberated around the confined space, leaving Amberley’s ears ringing with the overlapping echoes.

  ‘So much for sneaking up on them,’ Pelton said, and dived through the gap, his laspistol blazing. He wasn’t likely to hit anything, moving so fast and with no target in view, but then he didn’t have to; the smugglers would probably be too busy ducking for cover and wondering what in the warp was happening to retaliate.

  Or maybe not. As Amberley followed her acolyte though the open hatch, a bellowing ogryn charged straight at Pelton’s oblivious back, shouldering out of the way a free-standing storage rack that looked solid enough to dent a Rhino as he came. One fist, larger than the gauntlets of a Space Marine’s power armour, was gripping a massive crowbar, already swinging down in a bid to pulp the former Arbitrator’s skull. Seeing the motion out of the corner of his eye, Pelton began twisting aside, far too slowly to evade it.

  But Amberley’s reflexes were even sharper. Before the lethal club could make contact, her bolt pistol barked and the ogryn’s skull fragmented in a shrapnel spray of armour-hard bone.

  ‘Brisk shot, ma’am,’ Zemelda said, popping through the hatch behind her, and opening up vindictively at a smuggler half-visible behind a crate in the corner. The man yelped and disappeared, but whether that was because he’d taken a hit or was just too sensible to remain in the sightline of a purple-haired Valkyrie blazing away in his general direction, Amberley couldn’t tell.

  ‘I was aiming for his arm,’ Amberley said with a twinge of regret, although killing the ogryn wouldn’t have lost them that much information – the abhumans were too robust to interrogate easily, and too stupid to notice or understand much of what went on around them in any case. The humans, on the other hand, would tell them plenty. Quickly, if they had
any sense, but eventually if they didn’t. She held up her hand, letting the electoo in her palm flash into visibility, and raised her voice. ‘Surrender now, in the name of the Inquisition!’

  The bump and clatter of weapons hitting the floor echoed briefly round the storage bay. These ones were sensible, at least in the short term. No doubt some of them would later regret not fighting to the death while they had the chance.

  ‘We wasn’t expecting the Holy Inquisition,’ a faintly accusing voice said, its owner sidling out from behind the crate Zemelda had been peppering with las burns. A handful of others followed his lead, emerging from whatever bolt holes they’d found for themselves, blinking like rodents emerging from hibernation to find the predators already in residence. Dockyard dregs to a man or woman – in a couple of cases it was hard to be sure.

  ‘No one ever does,’ Pelton said, eyeing the fellow who’d spoken with evident distaste. Cheap robe, cut in imitation of more expensive styles, too much jewellery and cologne. Trying a little too hard to look prosperous, and thereby clearly labelling himself as an unsuccessful hustler. ‘What’s in the crates?’

  ‘Cargo,’ the man said. He waved an expansive hand at the boxes and bundles surrounding them. ‘All perfectly legitimate, swear on the aquila. Got some paperwork somewhere...’

  ‘Legitimate like Horus,’ Zemelda said, kicking the crate she’d already shot halfway to splinters. The wood shattered, spilling the pulverised remnants of a ceramic dinner service, and a couple of thin rectangles of slick, white plastic which had evidently been concealed inside a soup tureen. ‘That’s tau heretech.’

  ‘Strictly proscribed,’ a dry, reedy voice added, ‘by seven hundred and seventy-eight thousand, six hundred and two separate Imperial ordinances–’

  ‘Thank you, Mott,’ Amberley said hastily, before the savant could begin quoting them verbatim, and gestured to the rest of the party to join them. She turned to the squirming merchant. ‘I’ll need names. Where you got these, who your customers are.’ He said nothing, clearly trying to come up with some spurious excuse, and she raised her bolt pistol. ‘Now would be good. Unless you think you can manage without kneecaps.’

  ‘Happy to help.’ The man nodded earnestly, spraying gobbets of sweat as he did so, clearly in no mood to see if she was bluffing. ‘Got ’em off Bran Largo, shipmaster of the Eternal Faith.’ Zemelda stifled a snort. ‘Does the Gravalax run, brings back the odd curio. Never knew he was handling stuff like this, swear on the aq–’

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ Amberley said, weighting her voice with just the right amount of scepticism to leave the little ratbag thinking he might still be able to wriggle off the hook if he cooperated. ‘But we’ll need to see what else he’s left you holding.’

  ‘Help yourselves. I’ll need a re–’ He shook his head, scattering more droplets of sickly-scented sweat, having suddenly thought better of it. ‘Just do what you like.’

  ‘We always do,’ Pelton said. ‘Comes with the job.’

  Amberley watched her team disperse, carrying out a quick and meticulous search, while Zemelda held the thoroughly demoralised smugglers at gunpoint. None of them seemed inclined to make a break for it; the corpse of the ogryn was right in their sight line, and the young woman could hardly miss at that range. Pelton broke open crate after crate, discovering almost a dozen pieces of heretech concealed among more innocuous goods, while Yanbel and Mott conferred in undertones, cataloguing every fresh discovery. Only Rakel seemed distracted, although that was nothing new, wandering around the storage unit with her eyes unfocused, muttering continually under her breath. After a few moments Amberley realised the psyker was moving in a definite pattern, looping back and forth around one of the storage racks like a comet drawn in by gravitation only to be flung out again by the angle of its approach.

  ‘Flicker,’ she said quietly.

  Pelton glanced up, saw what she was looking at and nodded. A few strides took him across the room, to the bank of shelving. Lost in her own universe, perceiving Emperor knew what, Rakel never even noticed his approach, bumping into him and moving on without acknowledgement.

  ‘What’s over here?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ the sweating man assured him, a little too quickly. ‘Old stuff, on the way out. Nothing Largo brought in, swear on the–’

  ‘Aquila, right.’ Pelton glanced at the manifest stapled to the wood, then across to Amberley, raising an eyebrow in an exaggerated expression of surprise. ‘He’s telling the truth. Routed outsystem.’ He waited just long enough for the flicker of relief to appear in the smuggler’s eyes, and added the kicker. ‘On the Eternal Faith.’

  ‘Really.’ Amberley raised a quizzical eyebrow too. ‘More curios?’

  ‘That’s right.’ The merchant nodded, painfully eager to be seen to cooperate. ‘Local goods, don’t know what he does with ’em. Market for everything, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Pelton agreed, having a strong suspicion about the contents of the boxes. About a third of the manufactories on the planet below made armaments of one sort or another, feeding the insatiable maw of the Munitorum, and as surely as water flowed downhill, a small proportion of their output would be diverted to the local underworld. He pried one open, and tried to mask his surprise. ‘This is just junk!’

  ‘No part of the Omnissiah’s bounty is just junk,’ Yanbel reproved, strolling over to take a look. He glanced inside the crate, frowned, then looked at Amberley. ‘Although this is doing a pretty good imitation.’ He began to sort through the pieces of corroded metalwork. ‘Most of it’s ancient.’

  ‘Archeotech?’ Amberley asked, and Yanbel shook his head.

  ‘Old enough to be, but it’s all common enough. Nothing rare or out of the ordinary.’

  Which made sense, Amberley thought. The tau were intensely curious about Imperial technology, or what they regarded as its lack, and would quite readily trade for unusual or antiquated pieces. ‘Where does it come from?’ she asked the sweating merchant.

  ‘Downhive, somewhere,’ he told her. ‘Arlen, that’s Arlen Sprigg, does a lot of trade with the lower levels.’

  ‘And the spire?’ Amberley asked, already knowing the answer. Tau technosorcery was expensive, far too much so for the ordinary citizen, and held a dangerous fascination for the young aristocracy of Ironfound.

  ‘Believe so, yes,’ the smuggler confirmed, sprinkling his immediate surroundings again with the vigour of his nod. ‘Very well connected is Arlen.’

  ‘Then I think we’re done,’ Amberley said, feeling the faint tremor though the soles of her shoes which indicated the arrival at the pad overhead of the plain, unremarkable shuttle she’d ordered. All that was left to be done was herd the survivors of the gang aboard, and they’d disappear forever, along with every trace of the contraband. The dead ogryn would have to be moved, of course, probably with the aid of a cargo servitor, unless she just left the cadaver there to sow a bit of paranoia among the local law enforcers...

  ‘Omnissiah’s circuits!’ Yanbel said, hauling something from the depths of the box he’d been rummaging in. He held it gingerly, at the farthest extent of his mechadendrite, fascinated and repulsed. The object glowed softly, in gentle rippling patterns, which struck highlights from the metallic parts of his face.

  ‘Tears of Isha,’ Amberley said, the eldar phrase falling unbidden from her lips.

  ‘It’s calling,’ Rakel said, staring at the refulgent stone as if hypnotised. ‘But they can’t hear it.’

  ‘Who can’t?’ Zemelda asked.

  ‘The eldar.’ It took a lot to surprise an Inquisitor, but, for some reason, Amberley found her voice sounded huskier than usual. ‘It’s one of their spirit stones.’

  ‘Eldar, you say?’ Arlen Sprigg shrugged, and pushed the spirit stone back across his polished wooden desk: an item which, on a world that had seen its last tree millennia ago, spoke volumes about his wealth and influence. A faint, phantom stone followed it, reflected in the gleaming wood. ‘I had no idea.’
r />   ‘Clearly,’ Amberley said, suppressing the urge to extend the hand she put out to pick it up a little further and jab him somewhere non-fatal but agonising. Instead, she nodded politely, as though the conversation was really as civilised as they were both pretending it to be. ‘Or you’d never have traded it so cheaply.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Sprigg agreed, leaning back in his overstuffed leather chair, another thumbed nose to Ironfound’s ravaged ecosystem. His office and adjoining apartments were high on the prime spire, almost level with the tops of the lesser ones surrounding it; only the governor’s court and a handful of favoured noble families held estates further up. Beyond the wide windows, pressurised against air too thin to breathe at this altitude, the horizon curved, forever shrouded in the diarrhoea-coloured clouds which hid most of the surface of Ironfound from view. Close at hand, the vast outcrops of the main hive could be glimpsed through the wind-stirred murk, and an occasional luminator gleamed, but for the most part they could have been marooned on a dead world.

  ‘Treason clearly pays well,’ Amberley said, not wanting the man to get too comfortable. At the moment he was wary, but still arrogant enough to believe he could deal his way out of this, that his court and social connections could somehow protect him from the displeasure of the Inquisition. A mistake far more powerful people than him had made before now, only to be equally disappointed.

  ‘Hardly treason,’ Sprigg said, smiling in a manner he no doubt thought was disarming. He looked about forty, with just enough grey around the temples to suggest maturity of judgement, although Amberley was familiar enough with the frequently juvenated to estimate his true age as at least three times that. Good. Anyone that determined to cling to life would be mortally afraid to lose it.

  ‘Rank treason,’ Amberley said, allowing the steel to enter her voice. ‘Consorting with xenos for profit. Polluting the Imperium with their unhallowed devices. Many of my colleagues would have executed you out of hand the minute they walked through the door.’