[Dark Heresy 02] - Innocence Proves Nothing Read online

  A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

  INNOCENCE

  PROVES NOTHING

  Dark Heresy - 02

  Sandy Mitchell

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  For Tony, for use of the office.

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bioengineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the techpriests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants — and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  Prologue

  The Gorgonid Mine, Sepheris Secundus, Calixis Sector

  107.993.M41

  Desperate men take risks, and there are few people in the galaxy more desperate than those fleeing the wrath of the Inquisition. Meres Tancred ran, not daring to look behind him, heedless of the unforgiving stones wreaking irreparable havoc on boots which had cost him as much as the annual upkeep of a dozen serfs. The breath rasped in his throat, and he suppressed the urge to cough as the wind shifted, bringing with it the stench of smoke from the burning mansion in the distance.

  “What happened?” one of his companions asked plaintively, and Tancred shook his head, almost grateful that his lack of fitness had rendered him virtually incapable of speech. The trouble with being a seer, apart from the constant fear of discovery, was that the handful of people privy to your secret expected you to have all the answers.

  “Inquisition,” he gasped out after a moment, slowing a little as the three of them began to approach the main workings of the mine. That much was obvious, even to someone without his gift; the shuttles which had swooped over their heads as they’d approached Adrin’s mansion, fortuitously late for the gathering he’d called, had been devoid of insignia, but could have come from nowhere else. The Adeptus Arbites garrison at the Isolarium relied on tracked, armoured behemoths to get around, on the rare occasions civil unrest provoked their direct intervention by becoming severe enough to threaten the smooth flow of tithes to the Imperium, and the Royal Scourges had neither the training nor the resources to mount an airborne assault. That left the survivors of the Inquisition facility in the Forest of Sorrows, which the allies of the group Tancred served had so recently raided, rescuing untold numbers of innocent victims from the terror of the Black Ships in the process.

  The psyker’s jaw clenched angrily as he considered that. He’d hoped the off-world mercenaries had wiped them out completely, but in his heart of hearts had always known that was unlikely. The agents of the Throne were formidable warriors, and even the exotic weaponry the Faxlignae had somehow been able to scavenge from alien sources wouldn’t even the odds to that extent.

  “What do we do now?” his interlocutor asked, a shrill edge of panic beginning to enter his voice, and Tancred forced himself to sound confident.

  “We escape,” he answered briefly, raising his voice to be heard over the scream of an ore shuttle dusting off from one of the pads scattered around the perimeter of the vast pit. They arrived and departed every few minutes, feeding the insatiable maws of the ore barges which hung in orbit above Sepheris Secundus like flies around carrion, and as his eyes turned to follow it, he felt the first faint stirrings of hope. “On one of those.”

  “Escape where?” the third man asked, speaking for the first time; Tancred didn’t know him well, but remembered his name was Vogen, and that he was a pyrokine, like the majority of psykers in the coven. “They’ll know who we are as soon as they begin interrogating the others. Nowhere on Sepheris Secundus will be safe.”

  “Then we’ll have to go off-world,” Tancred said, trying not to let the flicker of apprehension he felt at the idea show on his face. He glanced up involuntarily, as if the constellation of ore barges hanging above their heads would somehow become visible through the constant covering of wind-blown cloud.

  “Off-world?” Drusus, the first of the group to have spoken, clearly wasn’t happy at the prospect of being uprooted from everything he knew. “But we can’t! Who knows what’s out there?”

  “I know what’s back there,” Tancred said, with a brief glance at the crimson glow behind them. “And I’d rather leave on an ore barge than a Black Ship.”

  “Me too,” Vogen agreed. If Drusus still felt disposed to argue the point he kept his opinion to himself, and trotted in the wake of his companions without another word. “Which way now?”

  “Follow the road,” Tancred replied, raising his voice a little to carry over the clamour of the traffic. Even at this hour heavily laden lorries still rumbled along the hard-packed surface, the beams of their headlights wavering randomly with every jolt, the Waymakers perched precariously on their ramshackle platforms atop the cab roofs warning of their approach with trumpets and drums. The drivers seemed too intent on keeping their promethium-farting charges under control to pay any attention to the trio of fugitives hurrying along the fringe of the carriageway, but Tancred kept a wary eye out for any signs of interest among the scattering of serfs on foot. To his relief none of them seemed willing to meet his eye, their innate deference to anyone clearly of noble status enough to blunt their curiosity; and he would have bet a considerable sum of money that most were on clandestine business of their own in any case, this long after nightfall.

  His advice turned out to be sound, to his own vague surprise, and he breathed silent thanks to whichever of the Powers was guiding his footsteps. After less than a kilometre they came across a landing pad, little more than a patch of roughly levelled ground surrounded by heaps of ore, where teams of sweating serfs shovelled lumps of rock onto a rattling conveyor belt by the light of a portable luminator. The other end terminated in the hold of a grounded shuttle, which looked almost full by the faint gleam of citylight falling from the metropolis above, and the flickering drumfires which marked the perimeter of the cleared zone.

  “How do we get aboard?” Vogen asked, as they slunk into the welcoming shadows between the ore heaps.

  Tancred considered the matter. They might be able to board the conveyor unseen outside the narrow cone of arclight, but that would be chancy at best, and he didn’t much care for the prospect of being tipped onto a heap of jagged rocks at the other end in any case. The lip of the loading hatch was too high to scramble up, and even if it wasn’t, attempting to do so was bound to attract attention. Cautiously, he reached out with his mind, feeling the f
aint echo of consciousness on the other side of the looming vessel, then narrowed his focus, skimming surface thoughts like a chef lifting fat from the top of a stockpot.

  Swiving cold. Miserable mudball. No place for a voider…

  Tancred smiled, and led the way round the vast bulk of the heavy lifter. It was bigger than he’d realised, the size of a small building, and he found it difficult to believe something that huge could ever fly, let alone bear them to a starship in safety. But the Powers provided, if you trusted their guidance.

  “What do you want?” a voice asked from the darkness. It was surly, devoid of the deference a lifetime of privilege had conditioned Tancred to expert, and he felt a surge of irrational resentment. The tip of a lho-stick glowed red in the gloom, and after a moment he began to discern a blacker silhouette behind it. The man’s mind became sharper, boredom and irritation giving way to sullen hostility.

  “We need transport,” Drusus blurted out. “Right away. We can pay…”

  “I’m sure you can,” the pilot said, his thoughts becoming clearer by the second. Arrogant little nosewipe. Typical mudball aristo, thinks the galaxy revolves around his arse. The lho-stick fell, and was ground underfoot. “Now swive off, I’m busy.”

  Tancred wasn’t sure where the surge of anger came from initially; the shock of a peasant refusing to do what was required of him, irritation with Drusus for provoking the man unnecessarily, or perhaps it was a gift from the Powers. Whatever its origin, it swept through his mind like a riptide, focusing his will into a white-hot dagger, which he drove into the diffuse consciousness ahead of him. The pilot staggered, with an inarticulate cry, then straightened slowly.

  “What did you do?” Vogen asked warily.

  “What I had to,” Tancred answered brusquely, his attention focused almost entirely on maintaining his connection with the pilot’s mind. Fly us out of here. Find us a starship.

  He wasn’t sure how long he could keep this up; the strain was incredible, and he could feel his victim’s consciousness roiling like a thundercloud, dissipating slowly with the effort of trying to disentangle itself from his own. If he didn’t break the connection soon, one of them would die, he could feel it. Maybe even both of them.

  But desperate men take risks, and there are few people in the galaxy more desperate than a man on the run from the Inquisition. He held on to the squirming mind in front of him, and began to climb the boarding ramp in the wake of his unwilling puppet, hoping he’d have enough time to complete what he’d so precipitately begun.

  One

  Icenholm, Sepheris Secundus

  108.993.M41

  “Any idea what it is yet?” Drake asked, pausing on his way to the breakfast table to converse briefly with Vex. The former Guardsman was ravenously hungry, a circumstance which had driven him from his bed shortly after dawn, and he’d been vaguely surprised to find any of the other Angelae up and about at this hour. Nevertheless, the techpriest was sitting in his usual corner of the villa’s living room, gazing thoughtfully at the sliver of strange, ivory-like material he and Horst had recovered from the depths of the Fathomsound mine. Perhaps, Drake thought, he hadn’t been to bed at all: acolytes of the Adeptus Mechanicus tended not to bother with mere human weaknesses like sleep, if they could wire themselves up to avoid them.

  “None at all,” Vex replied politely, his tone so even that Drake wasn’t sure if he appreciated the courtesy of being spoken to, or resented the interruption. “If it’s as ancient as it appears, however, it’s quite likely to predate any archives on Sepheris Secundus.”

  “Perhaps you’ll have better luck on Scintilla, then,” Drake said, hoping he’d managed to sound sufficiently matter-of-fact about the disturbing notion that he’d shortly be treading the soil of another world. Well, that was what he’d joined the Imperial Guard for, he reminded himself, to get off the planet of his birth and carve a new destiny among the stars, untrammelled by the petty snobberies and rigid social hierarchy of his home world. He was undoubtedly doing that, though hardly in the manner he’d expected when he’d thumbprinted the enlistment papers.

  “Perhaps.” Vex nodded thoughtfully. “The archives at the Tricorn are an unrivalled depository of arcane information, at least within the Calixis Sector. Not to mention the Adeptus Mechanicus shrines in the main hives, which also boast extensive technotheological libraries.”

  “Best of luck, then,” Drake said, moving on to the side table. Despite the hour, the servants had done their job with their usual unobtrusive efficiency, and an array of chafing dishes was already laid out, leaking appetising aromas. He lifted a couple of lids, his mouth flooding with saliva, and considered their contents. “Would you care for some breakfast?”

  “Just a little recaf,” Vex said, “if you’d be so kind.”

  Drake suspected the techpriest had simply accepted the offer out of politeness, but poured the bitter drink anyway, then a second one for himself. The sun wasn’t visible yet, glowing wanly through the perpetually overcast skies, but the reflectors in the surrounding mountain range were already concentrating what little radiance they could collect onto the glittering city of glass suspended between the peaks. The effect was breathtaking, like a spider’s web encrusted with frost, enlarged and folded over on itself as intricately as the steel of a master-crafted swordblade, and Drake moved towards the terrace, determined to enjoy the sights of his home world while he still had the chance. For a moment, moved by idle curiosity, he glanced down towards the squalor of the Gorgonid mine, kilometres below, hoping to catch a glimpse of the orange glow which marked the site of the mansion he and the others had raided a few hours before, but could see no sign of it; either the conflagration had burned itself out by now, which hardly seemed likely, or the bulk of the city’s superstructure hid the smouldering ruins from view.

  “Couldn’t sleep either?” A fresh voice broke into his reverie, feminine, and uncharacteristically cheerful. Keira joined him on the terrace, her yellow silk robe clinging tightly to her well-muscled body as the wind pressed the fabric against her, as oblivious to the early morning chill as the native Secundan. Her purple hair was untidy, still swept back from her forehead with the scarlet bandana she’d worn the previous night.

  For a moment Drake considered reminding her that the servants would be scandalised to see her wearing red, the colour reserved for royalty on Sepheris Secundus, then decided against it. She’d undoubtedly take offence, and annoying her wasn’t a particularly safe thing to do. Besides, the sight of a cheerful Keira was an unexpected novelty, and one he fell like enjoying for a while longer. So he shook his head instead.

  “Still a bit keyed up after last night, I suppose.”

  “That’s the grace of the Emperor,” Keira said, her face preternaturally flushed, and a faraway look in her eye. “We’re still suffused with it, after sending so many heretics to His judgement.”

  Drake nodded slowly, and sipped at his recaf. It sounded more like the residual adrenaline sloshing around their systems to him, but he’d gathered that Keira’s Redemptionist faith was important to her, and that slaughtering the Emperor’s enemies played a large part in her devotions. Another reason not to give the young assassin a reason to dislike him: if she took it into her head that he was just another sinner to be purged, even his status as a provisional member of the Angelae Carolus might not be enough to deflect her wrath. “That must be why I’m so hungry,” he said, regretting the remark as soon as he’d said it.

  Keira seemed to think the point a reasonable one, though, as she simply nodded, joining Drake at a small table in a corner of the terrace, out of the prevailing wind, its surface inlaid with a mosaic of coloured glass forming the crest of the minor noble house from which the villa had been rented. She nodded at the former Guardsman’s heaped plate. “If you’ve got any favourite local dishes, you’d better enjoy them while you can.”

  “We’re leaving soon, then,” Drake said, trying to ignore the shiver of apprehension which accompanied the thoug
ht.

  The young assassin nodded. “This evening. No point in letting the trail grow cold.”

  “Quite,” Drake agreed, trying to hide his unease at the sudden realisation that he’d be transiting the warp before nightfall, and he might never see the city of his birth again. “If Vos and Elyra need backup when they get to Scintilla…”

  “They’ll have it,” Keira told him, with quiet assurance. “The inquisitor will be there well before their ship arrives, and he’ll make all the necessary arrangements. They’ll be as safe as if the Emperor Himself was walking beside them.”

  “That’s reassuring,” Drake said. Keira knew their patron far better than he did, and her confidence in him was heartening, but his best friend and the sanctioned psyker he was guarding had a long way to go before they arrived in the Scintilla System, and a lot could still go wrong before they made it somewhere Inquisitor Finurbi could provide some discreet assistance if they ran into trouble. “When do we leave?”

  “You’ll have time to pack, if that’s what’s worrying you,” Keira said. “Our ship won’t be leaving orbit for hours yet.”

  “That seems a long time to wait,” Drake said, warming his hands round the recaf mug. “If we’re going to beat the Ursus Innare to Scintilla, shouldn’t we leave as soon as possible?”

  “Don’t worry, we will,” a new voice chimed in. Drake turned in his seat to see Mordechai Horst, the leader of the Angelae cell, leaning against the doorframe. As ever, it seemed, only Drake, who had grown up in Icenholm, and Keira, born and raised on the belly of Ambulon, the fabled walking city on Scintilla, were completely comfortable out here on the terrace, so close to the vertiginous drop on the other side of the balustrade. “It’s just an ore scow, so they’ll need to drop back into real space more often than we will to correct their course. And every time they do that, they’ll lose a little more of their lead.”