Month: August 2017

I had been weightless before. We would run zero-g drills in the Schola on holy days. As a treat the masters would let us dictate our learnings for the day, as a benevolent reflection of the God-Emperor’s grace. We would choose the zero-g chamber every time.

This was not that. The unnatural feeling of helplessness was present, but twinned with a fusillade assault on the senses. Your inner ear spins like a compass at magnetic north. Your body is pummeled furiously by nimbus fists, from which you cannot defend yourself as your arms are whipped back by invisible reins. You hear nothing except the roaring wind. You see nothing through tear-filled eyes. You tumble through the heavens with nothing but your grav-chute and the elusive memories of your aerial insertion training – two minutes of lying on an ammo crate on a guardsman assault course with a drill sergeant barking instructions like we were some thick-skulled ground-pounders.

Perhaps it was my disdain for her petulant remarks that jogged my memory. Perhaps it was catching a glimpse between blinks of a drop zone that was once the size of a grapefruit had now filled my horizon. I would hate to give her crude methods such credence over my own survival instincts. Whatever the case, whichever direction I faced, I reached to the small of my back and ripped he grav-chute cord with all my strength.

Nothing happened. The ground seemed inches from my face, the gothic spires of the shrine we were to land in turned from stalwart monuments to treacherous deathtraps.

Then the grav-chute ignited with a blessed vengeance I have not seen since in man or machine. Its roar was a thunderous, mocking laugh, an affront to gods and gravity. I was plucked from the air by the hymns of saviour angels, played by the part of the whining grav engines strapped to my back. My neck jerked back, like a child being collared while stealing pastries. My limbs flailed in front of me. I was a cartwheeling puppet whose master had snatched up the marionette. Adrenaline burned through my veins and I could hear the blood pumping in my ears drowning out the tattoo of anti-aircraft and small arms fire in the complex below.

It was an impressive estate, designed in traditional high gothic, replete with sky-piercing spires and high arched windows. The grand courtyard in the centre was filled with the disciplined snaps of the guardsmens’ las rifles and the surreptitious crackling of return fire from the House Guard. They were our distraction while we dynamically inserted into the defensive heart of the estate: the shrine.

I scanned the skies near me for my newly minted comrades and by the Emperor’s grace they were present and largely on target. We were four angels of wrath descending on wings of fire.

There was no time to signal to them, although what I would have signalled I’m not sure. We were moments from insertion through the stained glass ceiling of the shrine. I braced for impact.

Time slowed. There was no impact. My feet traveled through the glass as though it wasn’t there. I was a stone dropped into a serene lake, and my ripples exploded the stained glass around me into a violent kaleidoscope of jagged shards. The descent was a blur as every sense was filled with the sight, sound and pain of broken glass and the floor of the shrine rushed up to meet me. The grav-chute issued one last triumphant wail as it spent the remainder of its fuel cushioning my landing.

It took longer than I care to admit to regain my bearings and offer silent thanks to the infallibility of my chute’s machine spirit and the wisdom of the Emperor that made it so. Blessed be my upbringing then, for my hands do not suffer such frailties, and my rifle had been unclipped from its harness and levelled at the nearest target. It struck me how quiet it was, the gunfire just outside the shrine was little more than a muffled rainstorm in the distance.

We had arrived, but we had yet to make our entrance. I was still struggling to focus, but all I needed was my voice. It was time to make our duty known, to fire our warning shot.

“Emperor’s Inquisition!”

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First – The Gelt Journal: Prelude

Next – Part 3: Not Innocent

A violent means to a better end; the more concentrated the application of violence, the longer and better the end result. That was the most resounding wisdom imparted to me from my upbringing. Tumbling through space at the speed of sound in an iron coffin was an outstandingly violent means to an end of the cold walls and stale air of our master’s void ship. As fire washed across the nose cone of our lander and the planet engorged in the front viewport, only a single thought occurred to me: was this a commendation or a condemnation?

I was joined in the passenger compartment of our lander by four others; two gunmen, a tech adept and a woman clad in full plate armour. The first shooter was wiry and run-down, with a ganger fauxhawk that had greyed earlier than his age belied. He was clad in quilted overalls sat underneath a guard-issue flak vest we had been assigned before our departure. My briefing told me he was a gunslinger named Proteus, a man whose past was not his own, the bullet scar on his left temple and barcode tattoo behind his ear confirming he was a mind-cleansed agent. Useful enough in a previous life to have his skills preserved, but not his memories.

The second gunman stroked a long hunting rifle and was the only one in the compartment to meet my gaze. Not a challenging or scrutinising look, but a disinterested, vacant stare – as a child might before understanding the social implications of holding another’s gaze. He sported black dreadlocks on most of his grey skull, the left side of his face singed to baldness by some violent means. He was lean, wearing a black assassin’s body glove that exposed his arms branded with a letter ‘X’. The compartment rattled, and an earring bearing the same symbol caught the light. The briefing told me his name was Mur-X52, which explained the symbology, but I could not place the death cult or assassin temple he would have been from.

The Tech Adept was the closest to a civilian we had. He was silver-bearded portly man into his fifth or sixth decade and appeared surprisingly human for a member of the Cult Mechanicus. He wore their colours but where I expected robes, he wore short, practical garments festooned in pockets for tools, geegaws and miscellanea. The roughness of his fingers and pollution scars on his arms told me he worked with heavy machinery, probably agri, before his assignment to us.

The final person was only thing that gave me cause to believe this wasn’t a mission to rid the Imperium of troublesome agents; a holy Sister of the Adeptas Sororitas. Her plate mail was painted purple with white aquila adornments and the gold sashes of her Order draped over top. She had her nose pressed hard into an almanac of the planet we were just about to be forcibly dropped on, but she wasn’t taking it in, just moving her eyes and turning the pages. I knew what fake studying looked like from my classmates in the Schola. Perhaps the act of reading soothed her. It soothed me watching it.

The compartment was suddenly bathed in crimson light and the lander lurched downwards. A Latirian Guardsman escort in our compartment burbled something into his atmo-helmet vox in a regimental cant. I picked up something about anti-aircraft weaponry. Our ‘brief’ was becoming briefer by the second.

The faceless Guardsman addressed us brashly, saying more with his hands than with his amplified voice. “Straps off!  We are dirtbound in fifteen seconds! Hats on asses people, they’ve rolled out the fireworks to welcome us!”

As if to punctuate his charming turn of phrase, a cacophonous explosion rocked the plummeting lander and a sliver of shrapnel punched through both sides of our compartment. Alarms screeched and the light shifted to a more panicked shade of scarlet. The Guardsman knuckled some runes on the rear door’s command slate and the lander shuddered gratefully in response.

The rear of the craft split open, sunlight lancing into the crimson twilight of the cabin. Air and noise exploded into our compartment as the rear doors slowly unfolded, ready to disgorge its precarious cargo. I remember the air tasting like iron, but that could have been the blood from my tongue. Wind whipped around us, tugging at our harnesses and yearning for us to wrap ourselves in its embrace. I checked the straps on my weapons and that there was a round in the chamber. We would be deep striking into the centre of the conflict, so the impatient weapon spirits must be primed for split-second fury. The guardsman gazed out the rear of the lander at the violence that was unfolding on the ground below in the same way as one of my Schola mentors would browse a box of confectionery for the choicest morsels.

An explosion erupted in the sky behind him, casting us in his shadow. He turned to look at us. You could tell by the way he spoke that he was grinning under his atmo-helmet.

“Face first into battle!” He barked as the jump light in the compartment turned the colour of seasickness. “Give ’em hell!”.

And then we fell.

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First – The Gelt Journal: Prelude

Next – Part 2: Nimbus Fists

“I was not prepared for what I had seen. I had expected a paltry gathering of dead men’s dusty things, or some backwater squatters with zipguns holding up the local merchantry. Not… this.

Bile rose in my throat. My vision narrowed to a distant pair of pin pricks. My body rejected the nature of gravity and my head took leave of my senses. My previous life was vomited into the turbulent stream of my consciousness, but not the part I had expected. I had piled men as sandbags on Caltrax-9 and dug riot trenches through the tank-compacted bodies of water rioters on Daphnia, but those were not what I had flashed back to at that moment.

I had a sudden moment of lucidity amidst the cotton wool clarity my senses were affording me. There I was, barely few decades old and squire to a famous Arbitrator and law-maker, tending to his equipment before evening prayers. He approached me, hand raised, and my gut sank.

I quickly rose to my feet and closed my eyes, anticipating another reprimand. What was it this time? Was it the third rivet on his maul again? I swore I had checked that. Inside breast pocket strap? I had the seamstress prepare another three for me, just in case it snapped again. Only this time, there was no reprimand. I slowly opened my eyes.

I was only a stripling at the time and have since mentally reconciled his immense size, but it did not prevent this particular memory from painting him as a giant. I stared up at him from my position as insect. He was a broad man who blocked the light from the hall when he stood in the doorway and his fist was balled, but this time it did not contain a reprimand, but a collection of images. He asked me what I saw.

I told him I saw the collected works of a serial killer. The pictures were of bodies, all cut in precisely the same way across the throat, sometimes so forcefully that the head was left dangling about the chest by a thread of sinew or a patch of skin. He told me my observation, although precise, must be false. These were done within minutes of each other, but on different planets scattered about the sector. There was nothing connecting these individuals, rich or poor, except the cuts in their neck. This had to be the work of a cult.

Something about that encounter made me overstep my position without hesitation. Even as the words left my lips, I foresaw a lifetime cursed to squiredom, cleaning the slop from the interrogation chambers for the rest of my miserable existence. I told the Arbitrator he was wrong.

So much effort had been made into making it appear the work of a cult, the locations and timings specifically, that the killer had plastered his fingerprints all over every crime scene. Not literal fingerprints, that’s Magistratum work, woe betide the day the Arbites are forced to rely on basic fingerprint evidence to convict. No, the fingerprints of murder.

The cast-off blood from each cut played out identically. Some had struggled, some were killed standing, some were killed sitting, some in their beds while they slept, and yet the cast-off tells the same story – one person, one thing, of the same height, build and strength, did this. As I spoke, I referenced scribes and verispex agents who had done work about this, and I had already begun flicking through my work scrolls for citation. He had already left the room.

I received my deployment orders the next day, a junior post at Caltrax-9. The other squires told me it was essentially a death warrant. Seventeen years later at my posting on Daphnia I receive a missive from the the Segmentum Headquarters. My mentor had been dead for six years at this point, but his signature was undeniably present on the scroll.

The case had been closed, an incredibly prominent member of the Adeptus Terra had been implicated and found guilty, and my name had been signed off as the contributor for the evidence that finally damned them. I was not sure what to make of the information at the time, but it filled my contemplative morning lho-stick time for many subsequent sunrises. There had been a pattern, and I saw it as instinctively as I draw breath. I took a long, purposeful draw on my lho-stick. Tigurian-brand I think it was. The rich, peaty taste turned into acrid death in my lungs.

I coughed and spluttered, falling to my knees. My head swam, the cotton wool on my senses turned to razor blades. The sweet smell of morning lho turned into the sickening smell of poisoned sea air and death. My vision collapsed around me, cascading like a tower of broken glass. The atrocity in that Emperor-damned cave triggered something deep within me. I knew what this meant. This was not the needless wholesale slaughter of Caltrax-9, nor the street butchery of Daphnia.

This was a pattern.”

Next – Part 1: Dirtbound