Ben Counter - Bleeding Chalice

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++Priority Transmission: Coding/Delta/Rouge++
++Recipient: Loyal Imperial Commanders – as designated
by Commissariat, The Librarius Staff, Inquisitor Baptiste
& Canoness Arrea.++
++Subject: Traitors and Executions++
++Author: [Rus]Incubus – Scrivenor-in-attendance to
Inquisitor Nikolay Vinogradov++
++Thought for the Day: To cheat is both cowardly and
dishonourable++
Attention all loyal citizens of the Imperium!!!
Scanning of sacred books is a mortal sin!
*********
Whispered by Tzeentch, Lord of Hidden Knowledge.
Inspired by Slaanesh, Master of Forbidden Pleasures.
Resist foul machinations of the Dark Gods and buy
books from the Black Library.
***********
Thought of the Day: All traitors will be executed
without mercy and compassion!
Inquisition are watching YOU!
More Ben Counter from the Black Library
SOUL DRINKERS
SOUL DRINKER CRIMSON TEARS
MORE WARHAMMER 40,000
DAEMON WORLD GREY KNIGHTS
A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL
THE BLEEDING CHALICE
Ben Counter
To Helen
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
First published in Great Britain in 2003 by
BL Publishing,
Games Workshop Ltd.,
Willow Road, Nottingham,
NG7 2WS, UK.
10 98765432
Cover illustration by Adrian Smith.
e Games Workshop Limited 2003. All rights reserved.
Black Library, the Black Library logo, Black Flame, BL Publishing, Games Workshop, the Games Workshop logo and all associated
marks, names, characters, illustrations and images from the
Warhammer 40,000 universe are either «, TM and.’or ® Games
Workshop Ltd 2000-2005, variably registered in the UK and other
countries around the world. All rights reserved.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 13: 978 1 84416 054 9 ISBN 10: 1 84416 054 8
Distributed in the US by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020, US.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookmarque, Surrey, UK.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in
this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or
incidents is purely coincidental.
See the Black Library on the Internet at
www.blacklibrary.com
Find out more about Games Workshop and the world of Warhammer 40.000 at
www.games-workshop.com
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, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their
comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and
countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant
Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mcchanicus 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 talcs of those times.
Forget the power of technology and science, for so much
has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. 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.
ONE
The years lay so heavily on the corridors of the Librarium Terra that the very air was thick with age. The
endless tottering rows of bookcases and verdi-grised datastacks seemed chained down by the weight of the
thousands upon thousands of years of history. The librarium was deep within the planet's crust but even
som the indistinct hum of activity droned through the labyrinthine corridors, just as it did everywhere else on
the holy hive world of Terra. It was the sound of billions of souls grinding their way through the
bureaucracy that kept the Imperium of Man together.
Even the captain of the deletions unit felt the sheer importance of the information that filled the librarium.
He had lived on Terra all his life,
immersed in the endless repetition of the myriad tasks that made up the government of the Imperium. He
had done his job since birth, just as his forebears had done, and the shadows beneath Terra comprised his
whole world.
But even he, after the decades spent performing his thankless task, had some instinctive under-standing that
the Librarium Terra held a repository of particularly pure, dangerous history.
The captain glanced around the next corner. The gallery he saw was lined with shelves of books so old they
were little more than banks of rotting paper, lit by yellowed glow-globes that picked out the faint silver
spider's webs that had been there, undisturbed, for as long as some of the books.
No one knew the full layout of the Librarium Terra. Estimates of its size varied, as no one had been to its
furthest extents and returned - the dele-tions team had taken three days of forced marching to get this far.
But, by the best estimates of the adepts who gave the unit its orders, the objective was close by.
The captain waved his ten-strong unit forwards. They wore black bodysuits with hoods that left only the
eyes visible, rebreathers built in to keep aeons of dust out of their lungs. Their gloved hands held
narrow-nozzled flamers connected to fuel can-isters on their belts. But the captain carried a silenced
autogun with a flaring flash suppressor. They moved quickly and almost silently, each one
covering the other. They had always been members of the same unit, just as the captain had always
commanded them. The captain didn't need to actu-ally give them orders - they just did as they had always
done, as generations had done in the endless predator's game beneath Terra.
The captain hurried down the gallery until it opened onto a landing overlooking a tangled knot of bookcases
and datastacks. The cases held huge leather-bound volumes, tarnished infoslates, crum-bling scrolls and
reams of parchments, crammed onto shelves that had collapsed here and there into drifts of tattered paper.
The datastacks, blocks of smooth black crystalline material that could store remarkable amounts of
information, ranged from sinister glossy black obelisks to elaborate info-altars covered in filigree decoration
and crowned with clusters of statues. Several of them bore images of the Adeptus Astartes, the
armour-clad Space Marines who formed the elite of the Imperium's armed forces, battling aliens and
corruption across the distant stars.
The captain peered into the gloom that flooded the labyrinth below. He spotted movement - a scholar
worked in an alcove formed by the cases. Surrounded by discarded books he was leafing rapidly through
another. His face was incredibly wizened and his arms had been replaced with jointed metal armatures that
flicked through the book's pages with incredible speed. The scholar
could have been a servitor, a mind-wiped automa-ton that was human only in the sense that it was formed
from a rebooted human brain. Or it could have been a sentient human, a loyal servant of Terra like the
captain himself, acting out some task that was probably redundant and meaningless but which represented
the loyalty of everyone on Terra to the immortal God-Emperor.
The captain raised his autogun close to his face and focused on the hairless, tight-skinned skull of the
scholar. The autogun coughed once and the scholar's skull crumpled suddenly as if paper-thin. The body
slumped and fell, sprawling against the shelf behind it and disappearing beneath a cascade of books.
There were to be no witnesses to a deletion. That was the way it had always been done. Had the scholar
been aware of it, he would have understood why he had to die.
The captain vaulted from the balcony down into the shadows below. The rest of the unit followed him, their
feet padding on the tarnished wood of the floor as they landed. Down here the air was so heavy with age
and knowledge that moving around was like walking through water. The faint, sickly glow from the
electro-lanterns dotted here and there served only to make the shadows harder. The captain spotted some
titles and dates on the vol-umes on the shelves. These books held details of the Imperium's armed forces,
regimental histories of
the Imperial Guard and accounts of long-forgotten battles. The deaths of billions of men were glossed over
in those pages, and the captain could almost hear them screaming from the same pages that praised their
sacrifice to the Emperor.
A simple hand signal, and the deletions team spread out, each taking a section of bookshelf and pulling out
volumes at random, glancing at the cov-ers and contents and then casting them to the floor. A servitor
appeared without warning, its deformed splay-fingered hands spinning along the floor in a fruitless attempt
to keep it clean. The nearest of the unit turned, sprayed a lance of flame through its vulnerable soft human
core, and turned back to his work as the servitor shuddered and died in a burst of sickly smoke.
Another unit member hurried up to the captain. He was holding a book of red leather, its pages edged in
gold. On the cover was a raised symbol of glittering black stone - a chalice surrounded by a spiked halo. It
was the symbol they had been ordered to look out for.
The captain tapped the nearest deletions trooper on the shoulder. The trooper then tapped the near-est to
him, and the signal passed through the whole team in a heartbeat. They dropped whatever they were
holding and drew their flamers.
They fired plumes of flame into the bookshelves, filling the power-charged air of the Librarium Terra with
the stink of flame and smoke. The protective
clothing of the team reflected the worst of the heat but the labyrinth was still a furnace, with walls of
superheated air billowing between the burning cases.
The captain removed the magazine of his autogun and replaced it with a single round picked from his belt.
He aimed at the closest datastack, which was shaped like a three-panelled altarpiece with its mem-crystal
worked into heroic images of battle. The gun fired again, with barely a sound, and the explosive round
shattered the crystal into a flood of broken black glass.
Wordlessly, with an efficiency born of generations of toil, the deletions unit moved through the whole
section of the library burning and shattering any-thing that might hold the information they had been ordered
to destroy. Already the energy sup-pression drones were hovering in from around every corner, projecting
dampener fields that held back the heat of the fires and kept them from spreading. When the team left, the
drones would move in and their overlapping fields would smother the flames - but not before the books and
datas-tacks were reduced to smoke and ash.
Centuries of history were lost. Whole planets and military campaigns vanished forever from the Imperial
memory. But more importantly by far, the deletion order had been carried out, and all official record of the
Soul Drinkers Chapter was erased from the history of Mankind.
* * *
Like most of the rest of the Imperium, no one really knew when Koris XXIII-3 had been settled. The
grey-green, mostly featureless world had sup-ported continent-spanning grox farms for longer than the
Administratum could accurately record. The agri-world supported barely ten thousand souls, but was a
subtly critical link in the macro economy of the systems that surrounded it, for grox formed a commodity as
vital as guns or tanks or clean water.
Grox were huge, lumbering, reptilian, unsanitary and foul-minded. Crucially, however, they were almost
entirely edible, each producing a mound of colourless, tasteless, stringy but nutritionally sound processed
meat. Without the grox that were lifted from Koris XXIII-3 in vast-bellied cargo ships every three months,
the billions of workers and gangers on the nearby hive worlds would starve, riot, and die. The shipyards of
half a segmentum would find their human fuel faltering.
The Administratum knew how important the grox were. They administered the agri-world directly,
cir-cumventing tax-dodging governors and grafting private enterprise by keeping their own adepts as the
sole power and, indeed, the whole population.
Very little of interest happened on Koris XXIII-3, a situation the adepts of the Administratum had worked
hard for. The roaming herds of grox and the small islands of adept habitats went centuries with scant
incident, the passing years marked only by the
arrival of the huge dark slabs of the cargo ships and the occasional desultory deaths, births and promo-tions
amongst the handful of humans.
So when a ship actually landed at the planet's only spaceport at Habitat Epsilon, carrying some-thing other
than another adept to replace a stampede death, it was a rare event. The ship was small and very, very
fast, mostly composed of a clus-ter of flaring engines that tapered to a sharp wedge of a cockpit. There
were no markings and no ship name, whereas an Administratum ship would bear the stylised alpha of the
organisation. Adept Median Vrintas, the highest-ranking adept in the habitat, guessed that the ship carried
someone or something important. She quickly donned her black formal Administratum robes and hurried
across the meagre, dusty streets of the habitat to greet the ship's occupant.
She didn't know how right she was.
Habitat Epsilon, like every other structure on the planet, was formed of gritty brown rockcrete, pre-moulded
and dropped from low orbit. The buildings were ugly and squat, the architecture fea-tureless and windowed
with dark reflective glass that kept the glare of the orange evening sun from the offices, workrooms and
tiny living quarters. The spaceport was the only feature that made Habitat Epsilon remarkable, a
prefabricated circle jutting from the edge of the habitat. There was a small unmanned landing control tower
and a few unused
maintenance sheds, indicative of how very few ships landed there.
A section of the ship's hull lowered with a faint hiss of hydraulics. Feet tramped down the ramp and three
squads of battle-sisters marched out. Sol-diers of the Ecclesiarchy, the church of the Emperor and the
spiritual backbone of the Imperium, they wore ornate black power armour that clad them from gorget to
foot and carried enough firepower in their boltguns and flamers to reduce the habitat to smoking rubble.
Their leader was more stern-faced than the rest of the Sisters, and old in a way that suggested she was a
damn good survivor. She bore a huge-bladed power axe. The armour of the Sisters was glossy black with
white sleeves and tabards - order and squad markings had been removed.
The sister superior said nothing to Adept Median Vrintas as the Sisters of Battle filed out onto the
spaceport's ferrocrete surface. They flanked the ship as an honour guard, weapons readied - as if any-thing
in Habitat Epsilon could threaten them. Adept Vrintas had heard of the Sisters of Battle, of their legendary
faith and skill at arms, but she had never seen one of them in the flesh. Was this some priestly delegation,
then? The Missionaria Galaxia, or a confessor come to see to the planet's spiritual health? Vrintas mentally
congratulated herself on having the habitat's small Ecclesiarchy temple swept out just three days before.
The next figure to emerge from the ship was a man. He was not particularly tall but his consider-able
presence was aided by the carapace armour that covered his torso and upper arms and the floor-length
blast-coat of brown leather lined with flakweave plates. His face was long and lined, his jaw pronounced
and his nose slightly lumpy as if it had been broken and set a few times. His eyes were a curious greyish
blue, larger and more expressive than eyes set in that face had a right to be. His black hair was starting to
thin. Subtle implants in one temple and behind the ear were for neuro-jacks, simple as far as augmetics
went, but far beyond the means of any planet-bound adept. His hands were gloved - one held a data-slate.
He strode past his honour guard of Sisters, glanc-ing at the sister superior with a barely perceptible nod.
The watery sunlight of Koris XXIII-3 glinted off the rings on his free hand, that he wore over the black
leather glove. The stiff breeze fluttered the hem of the blastcoat.
'Adept?' he asked as he walked up to Vrintas.
'I am Median Lachrymilla Vrintas, the chief adept of this habitat,' said Vrintas, tingling with the realisa-tion
that this visitor must be far, far more important than anyone she had ever met before. 'I oversee the planet's
second most productive continent. We have five hundred million head of grox in nine...'
'I am not interested in the grox.’ said the stranger. 'I ask only a few hours of your time and access to
one of your adepts. There need be minimum dis-ruption to your important work here.’
Vrintas was relieved to see a subtle smile on the man's face. 'Certainly.’ she said. 'I shall need to know
your name and office, for the records. We can't have just anyone wander around our facilities. And of
course you and your colleagues will need to walk through our disinfectant footbaths. There will be
quarantine protocols if you wish to leave the habitat as well, so once I know under whose author-ity you are
acting...'
The man reached into his blastcoat and took out a small metal box. He flipped open the lid of the box and
inside Vrintas saw a stylised T of gleaming ruby in a silver surround. 'Authority of the Emperor's
Inquisition.’ said the man with the same smile. 'You need not know my name. Now, you will kindly direct
me to Adept Diess.’
Inquisitor Thaddeus was an extraordinarily patient man. It was this quality, above all others, that had kept
him doing the Inquisition's work when men more violent, or brilliant, or strong-armed had found themselves
lacking. The Ordo Hereticus, the branch of the Emperor's Inquisition that rooted out threats amongst the
very men and women it was sworn to protect, needed all those qualities. But it also needed the
understanding that the Imperium could not be healed of all its sick-nesses at once.
It needed men who could see the enormity of a task that stretched well beyond their own lifetimes, and not
give way to despair. Thaddeus knew that, as just one man, even with the magnitude of the resources he
could command he could do but little in the grand scheme of the Imperium and the divine Emperor's wishes
for mankind. At present he had a full company of Ordo Hereticus storm troop-ers and several squads of
battle-sisters under Sister Aescarion, but he knew that even with their guns he could not hope to end the
corruption and incom-petence that threatened the Imperium from within - just as aliens and daemons
threatened from with-out. The whole Inquisition had that responsibility. If the task was ever to be finished, it
would be fin-ished by men and women of the Ordo Hereticus, many generations distant.
Thaddeus understood all this, and yet was willing to give his life to the cause, because if he did not, who
would?
It was precisely because of his patience that Thad-deus had been given his current task. The first inquisitor
to have taken on this mission, a bloody-minded and morbidly stubborn soul named Tsouras, had been
selected because he happened to be the only one available at that time. He had failed because he had no
patience, only a burning deter-mination to win visible triumphs to terrify and amaze those around him.
Tsouras, and inquisitors like him, had their uses, but that mission had not
been one of them. When there was time, the lord inquisitors of the Ordo Hereticus had selected Thaddeus
to take over, because Thaddeus could suc-ceed by picking away at the layers of lies and confusion until the
truth was uncovered before its captors realised.
At that moment, Inquisitor Thaddeus wished he had not been given the mission at all. Though the higher
purposes of the Inquisition were burned into his remarkably resilient mind, he was still ulti-mately just a man,
and he knew a dead end when he saw it. The few available leads had dried up, and the man now sitting
across the untidy desk opposite him was, grim as it sounded, possibly his last hope.
'I do hope I am not inconveniencing you,' said Thaddeus, who never saw any reason to be impolite no
matter what his state of mind. 'I understand the importance of the work done here.'
The numbers aren't important.’ said Adept Diess. 'I just stamp forms all day' Diess had, until recently, been
a fit man, middle-aged but wearing well. Now he had given up on himself and was putting on weight, though
he still looked sharper than anyone on this planet had a right to be.
Thaddeus cocked an eyebrow. 'You sound as if the Emperor's grox farms do little to inspire you. Median
Vrintas would be discouraged to hear that.'
'If you had spent as much time as I have balanc-ing the books for this place, you would know that Median
Vrintas can hardly count. She can have her
opinions but I keep this planet making the Admin-istratum tithes.'
Thaddeus smiled. 'You speak freely. A rare thing, believe me. Refreshing, in a way.'
'If you have come here to kill me, inquisitor, you will do it no matter what I say. If you have not, you won't
waste the bullet.'
Thaddeus sat back in the uncomfortable chair. The other adepts had shown the sense to leave the office
before Thaddeus had to ask for them to be removed, so the only sound was the grinding of a cogitator
somewhere in the back of the low-ceilinged room. Dust motes floated in the thick light from the setting sun
outside.
The office was home to maybe thirty adepts, each at a partitioned workstation. Every wall and surface was
covered with paper - statistical printouts, graphs, charts, graphic depictions of the many dis-eases that
plagued the common grox, and grim notices reminding the adepts of the ceaseless sacri-fice they were
compelled to make for the Imperium. The Administratum tried to foster the same atmos-phere whether it
was running a palace or a workhouse - its members dedicated their lives to the work that kept the Imperium
running, the unending mundanity of jobs without which the macro economy of the Imperium would collapse.
'You are an intelligent man, adept. Not many men of your station would know an inquisitor when they saw
one. Median Vrintas certainly didn't. I have
heard men swear blind we don't exist, or that we're all fighting evil gods and don't bother with the likes of
mortals such as yourself. But you seem to know rather more than them. Am I right, consul?'
The adept smiled bitterly. 'I am glad to say I no longer hold that office.'
'I think we understand one another, Consul Senioris Iocanthus Gullyan Kraevik Chloure. You know what I
am here to talk about.'
'It's been a long time since anyone called me that.' Ghloure seemed almost nostalgic. 'I could have had
command of a whole sector, if I'd just toed the line for a few years more. But, I wanted too much too fast.
You've probably seen it before.'
You understand.’ said Thaddeus without chang-ing his tone, 'that Inquisitor Tsouras condemned you to
death in your absence.'
'I assumed so.’ said Chloure. 'How many of the others got out?'
'Not many. Captain Trentius was spared, although he will never pilot anything larger than an escort. A few
menials that Tsouras decided were sufficiently minor to be incapable of true incompetence. But most of the
rest were executed. I must say, though Tsouras is not the subtlest of my colleagues, you have showed great
resourcefulness in evading him for as long as you have.’
Chloure shrugged. 'I planet-hopped for a while. Faked up some references, I talk the talk so there weren't
too many questions. I got posted here
eventually, and I wasn't intending to go anywhere else. Not many people look on a place like this for a
wanted man. At least, I thought so until you turned up.'
'You should know, consul, that you don't do anything in the Administratum without someone writing it down.
Your paper trail was long and winding but I have associates who could follow it.'
'Well.’ said Chloure. He looked more exhausted than frightened, as if he had always known this day would
come and just wanted it over with. 'The Soul Drinkers.'
'Yes. The Soul Drinkers. In light of your coopera-tion, I shall let you begin.'
Chloure sat back and sighed. 'It was three years ago, you know the dates better than I do. Anyway, we had
been detailed to take over the Van Skorvold star fort. We knew Callisthenes Van Skorvold had some alien
trinket that was particularly valuable. We fed it into a couple of databases and found out it was the
Soulspear.’
'The Soul Drinkers artefact?'
'The very same. It was a legend the search turned up, some poem about how it could level cities and kill
daemons and such like, and how they'd lost it.' Chloure sat up sharply and leaned across the desk. 'I am a
greedy man, inquisitor. I am ambitious. I could have let the Imperial Guard do it but I wanted it finished
quicker and cleaner. I know I could have
left the Soul Drinkers out of it entirely. If I had just played it by the book I would have saved us all a lot of
grief. But like I said, I'm greedy. I mean, we all want something.'
There are far graver sins, consul.’ Thaddeus said, with a veneer of understanding that surprised many. 'You
let the word go out that you had found the Soulspear. The Soul Drinkers would arrive, elimi-nate all
resistance, and take the item, leaving you to march into the star fort unopposed. Is that the case?'
'If it had happened like that I wouldn't be shovel-ling grox dung for the rest of my life. But you know all of
this.’
'What can you tell me about Sarpedon?'
Chloure thought for a second. 'Not much. I only saw him on the bridge screen. We had an Adeptus
Mechanicus ship with us. They sent a teleport crew into the star fort and snatched the Soulspear right from
under Sarpedon's nose.’
Thaddeus could imagine what Sarpedon must have looked like to the gaggle of naval officers and
Administratum adepts - a Space Marine comman-der, a psyker, an angry man burning with betrayal.
Chloure was calm, having imagined his final reck-oning with the Inquisition for some time, but even so the
fear he must have felt when he first saw Sarpedon played briefly over his face. Were you able to judge his
state of mind?' asked Thaddeus. 'His intentions?'
Chloure shook his head. 'I wish I could help you more, inquisitor. He was angry. He was prepared to kill
anyone who got in his way, but you know that. You haven't found them, have you? That's why you're here.
Not for me.’
Thaddeus's face betrayed nothing. 'The Soul Drinkers will be found, consul.’
You must be desperate to have gone to the trou-ble of tracking me down. I was just along for the ride,
Inquisitor Tsouras was calling the shots and presumably he couldn't help you. What did you think I could tell
you?'
Chloure was a sharp man. In many ways he was the first decent adversary Thaddeus had encountered for
some time. It was difficult to threaten a man who was perfecdy resigned to his death sentence. He had
guessed what Thaddeus was loathe to admit - the Soul Drinkers' trail had turned cold. There were barely
any leads left from the debacle at the Cerber-ian Field when Tsouras and the battiefleet, nominally under
Chloure's command, had been outfoxed and eluded by the fleet of the renegade Space Marine Chapter.
Sarpedon and his Chapter numbered less than one thousand men, and such a force was barely a speck in
the vastness of the Imperium, almost invisible against the boundless galaxy.
Chloure was, in a very real sense, one of Thad-deus's last hopes.
'You are one of the few surviving individuals to have had any contact with the Soul Drinkers.’
continued Thaddeus. 'There is a chance you picked up something that Tsouras did not.’
Chloure smiled, almost in triumph. 'To think that a humble agri-world adept should cause the mighty
Inquisition such woes! I can only tell you what you already know. Sarpedon won't give up, not ever. He
cares for his honour more than his life or those of his men. He'll run if you make him and attack whatever
the risks if there's a principle at stake. That's all I know. From the sound of it, that's all anyone knows.’
Thaddeus stood up grandly, letting his blastcoat sweep around him. 'The Inquisition knows where you are,
consul. You do the Emperor's work much better here than if you had attained a higher rank, I feel, and for
this reason you can consider your exe-cution indefinitely stayed. But should your standards fall, I can
ensure the sentence is carried out. We will be watching the tithes with great care.
'So, until then, consider my presence here nonex-istent. Continue the work of the Administratum, Adept
Diess.’
The man who had been Consul Senioris Chloure, gave a sardonic salute and returned to the thankless task
of sifting through the mountain of forms on his desk.
Thaddeus swept out of the office, down the darkened stairway, and out into the grim exterior of Habitat
Epsilon where the evening sun was now setting and the endless rolling fields beyond
the habitat were dark with the herds of sleeping grox.
The Sisters were still waiting by the ship.
'Prepare for takeoff, sister.’ said Thaddeus to Sister Aescarion.
'There is nothing here?' she asked. Sister Aescarion talked to Thaddeus as if she was his equal, for which
Thaddeus was grateful.
'Nothing. Tsouras left us precious little when he put half the Lakonia Persecution to death.'
'Have faith, inquisitor. The Soul Drinkers have committed blasphemy in the sight of the Emperor. He will
guide our hand if need be.'
'I am sure you are right, sister. But I imagine the Emperor does little to help those who cannot prove their
worth and we have proven very little so far.’
Thaddeus and Aescarion walked up the ramp and into the body of the ship. The Sisters trooped in behind,
filing into the personnel compartment. The ship was clean and new, requisitioned by the Ordo Hereticus
from the shipyards of Hydraphur and a rare example of craft both small and fast, with the manoeuvrability
and firepower to look after itself. The inside was simple: glossy, black and bare metal, decorated with
devotional texts to the Emperor that the Sisters had pinned up on bulkheads, walls and small shrines.
Thaddeus had kept the trappings of faith from the cockpit, but gradually the Sisters had taken over
everywhere they were stationed and had turned it into a mobile chapel to the Emperor.
Aescarion joined her battle-sisters in the grav-couches inside, and the Sisters murmured a prayer of respect
as she took her seat beside them.
Thaddeus headed for the cockpit, which he had upholstered with dark maroon tharrhide. His co-pilot's seat
nestled next to the installed pilot-servitor - once human, its facial features had been replaced with an array
of scanning devices. One of its hands was now a set of gold-plated com-passes that scritched out
trajectories and geometric shapes on the data-slate jutting from its ribcage. The other hand was hard-wired
into the instrument panel of the cockpit, and sent messages from its once-human brain into the ship's
cogitators and engine controls.
'Launch.’ said Thaddeus to the servitor. The rem-nants of its brain recognised the command and the ship
lurched as the thrusters on its underside kicked in. The featureless landscape of Koris XXIII-3 yawed and
was replaced by the clear bright sky. Suddenly, the ship's primary engines roared, and Thaddeus was thrust
into the deep upholstery as the ship tore through the planet's atmosphere.
Thaddeus didn't know if anyone else would go to the trouble of hunting down Consul Senioris Chloure. He
hoped they didn't - Adept Diess was doing far more for the Emperor's flock than Chloure ever would have
done.
Finding him, and letting him live, passed for a small victory, and Thaddeus anticipated few enough
of those. The Soul Drinkers were tough and resourceful, and their intentions were unknowable. Though a
Space Marine Chapter could conquer just about anything, it still consisted of just a thousand men, and the
Soul Drinkers probably numbered significantly less. Thaddeus's own staff numbered more and he did not
wield the massive household armies of some inquisitor lords.
The Soul Drinkers could disappear, if they wanted to.
But they would not. That was Thaddeus's best hope. Sarpedon was still, in many ways, a Space Marine,
and he would not just sit tight in some far corner of the galaxy waiting to be forgotten. He still believed in
something, no matter how twisted, and he would keep on fighting. The Soul Drinkers would do something to
make themselves visible again. Thaddeus would be there, and he would find them. He would trap them and
kill Sarpedon, if he could. Then he would coordinate whatever resources he needed to shatter the remnants
of the Soul Drinkers Chapter for good.
He had faith, like Sister Aescarion. And even if that was all he had, for an inquisitor, it was enough.
The Soul Drinkers Chapter had disappeared in its entirely at the climax of the Lakonia Persecution, when
the Chapter's fleet had fled through a long-forgotten warp route leaving Inquisitor Tsouras's battlefleet
grasping arnothing. The events leading
up to the Persecution had been enough to mark the Chapter as rebels of the most dedicated and dan-gerous
sort - an attack on the Adeptus Mechanicus, the destruction of the Lakonia Star Fort, the refusal to submit
to Inquisitorial examination, and the killing of the interrogator sent by Tsouras to deliver his ultimatum.
When the smoke cleared, the Soul Drinkers had vanished from the face of the Imperium.
Well over a year later, salvage crews in the far galactic east reported a huge find: a massive grave-yard of
ships, some battleship-sized, that had all been destroyed by scuttling. The investigating Impe-rial authorities
soon ascertained that this was the Soul Drinkers' fleet, including the mighty battle barge Glory and a shoal
of strike cruisers and sup-port craft. Of the Soul Drinkers themselves there was no sign. No one knew
where they were or how they were travelling, but the fact that they had destroyed their own fleet - one of
the most power-ful independent forces for some sectors around -indicated that they were determined to
make life difficult for anyone trying to follow them.
The fleet could have been tracked. But these mere thousand men could not be tracked - not when they had
the immeasurable vastness of the Imperium to hide in.
And so it came to Inquisitor Thaddeus of the Ordo Hereticus. There was no question of letting Tsouras
carry on with the task of hunting down the
Soul Drinkers - he had let them slip by once and that was once too often. Thaddeus had few leads left to
follow from the wreckage of the Persecution and the burned-out remnants of the fleet. Chloure was the last
to be exhausted and like the others -Archmagos Khobotov of the Adeptus Mechanicus, killed in a
generatorium explosion on the Forge World Koden Tertius, Captain Trentius of the Car-dinal Byzantine and
a few others who had survived Tsouras's enthusiasm - he had yielded nothing to indicate where the Soul
Drinkers were or what they were planning. But Thaddeus did not despair at the magnitude of his task. He
was reli-able and thorough. He would get the job done eventually.
He knew hardly anything about the Soul Drinkers. He had studied their history in great detail, of course, and
it indicated a zealously loyal Chapter, independent of will but ready to throw its valuable Marines against
insane odds in the Emperor's name. There was barely a taint on them. But that was not the Chapter he
faced now - the Soul Drinkers had broken so violently with their faith in the Imperium that their heresy left
nothing of the Chapter's previous personality. Thaddeus knew that Sarpedon, who had taken command of
the rebellious Soul Drinkers, would be the primary force behind the Chapter's new, blasphemous exis-tence.
Sarpedon was a psyker, one of the Chapter's Librarians and highly decorated throughout his
seventy-year service. He would be tough to crack. Probably impossible.
Thaddeus knew he would have to kill him. Sarpe-don would have to die before the Chapter could be
broken. Thaddeus might be unable to do it himself and might have to call in other inquisitors with their own
resources, perhaps agents of the Officio Assassinorum or even the planet-scouring Extermi-natus, once he
had located the Soul Drinkers and driven them into a corner.
Messy and costly. But every drop of spilt Imperial blood would be worth it. A rebel Space Marine Chapter
was a danger too great and unpredictable to forgive.
All these thoughts, as they often did, occupied Thaddeus as he sat in the darkened navigational chamber on
the Crescent Moon. The circular cham-ber formed an auditorium of upholstered reclining couches that
could have held a couple of hundred, but Thaddeus was usually the only one there, silent in thought as he
sunk into the deep padding. The seating was reclined because the navigational dis-play was projected onto
the vast glowing disk of the ceiling, shining down on the chamber like a full moon.
The Crescent Moon was Thaddeus's own ship, a ribbed gunmetal-grey cylinder with vast particle scoops
like the fronds of an anemone sprouting from the bow. These fuelled the four enormous engines just behind
them, leaving the rest of the
ship to house the bridge, living quarters, cargo holds, machine-spirit chamber, and all the rest of the many
places that a spaceship needed to func-tion. Thaddeus' own quarters, and those of his Interrogator, Shen,
were armoured sections in the heart of the ship. The inside of the ship was fur-nished to Thaddeus's taste -
simply and darkly. The ship was a rare creature, the sort of craft the ship-yards of the Imperial Navy
couldn't make any more, assembled centuries before from parts millennia old by one of Thaddeus's
mentors. It was fast and comfortable, and it only needed a crew of a few dozen, which gave Thaddeus
some valued privacy. However, with the storm troopers and Sisters occu-pying the refitted cargo sections,
the ship was feeling rather more crowded of late.
'Sector map.’ Thaddeus said, and the vox-sensor switched the star map from the shining star field to a map
of the sector, with the many star systems and planets flagged with names and coordinates. The Crescent
Moon was still orbiting around Koris XXIII-3, and Thaddeus had to give some thought to where he would
head next - probably towards the nearest Inquisition fortress or subsector headquar-ters to relate the paltry
scraps of information he had found to the Ordo Hereticus. The cluster of agri-worlds was surrounded by a
ring of populous hive worlds and manufactoria planets, many of which had their own permanent Inquisitorial
presence. Thaddeus was trying to decide which one would be
the least grim place to explain his lack of progress when the vox-casters chimed in alarm.
An incoming transmission. The astropathic choir, the half-dozen telepaths who received and trans-mitted
messages between Thaddeus and the rest of the Imperium, spoke in unison over the vox, their voices
whispering and raspy. 'From subsector com-mand Therion, sector Boras Minor, Ultima Segmentum. Ordo
Hereticus naval liaison staff report rogue space hulk, possible Adeptus Astartes activity. Report to follow.
Have faith lest your unbe-lief consume you.'
Thaddeus pulled himself upright and walked through the darkened auditorium towards the door that led
towards the bridge. To tell the truth, he had held little hope that the requests he had made of the Hereticus
command - that he be informed via astropath of any unusual discoveries that matched certain criteria,
including the possi-ble presence of Space Marines - would bring in much information of value. Now a space
hulk had been found by the Imperial Navy, and the find had become known to the section of the Ordo
Hereti-cus that kept watch on the fleets of the Ultima Segmentum. For whatever reason they had
sus-pected the superhuman warriors of the Adeptus Astartes were involved. It was a thousand to one shot
that the Soul Drinkers were the Marines in question (literally, for they said there were a thou-sand
Chapters of Marines, though Thaddeus
suspected the true number could be anything), but it was a better lead than anything else he had.
The bulkhead slid open and instead of the corri-dor beyond, Thaddeus was confronted with the sight of the
Pilgrim.
Tall and shrouded and surrounded by a cloud of thick, sickly incense, the Pilgrim's face was hidden by the
tattered dark grey hood of his robes. His hands were wrapped in heavy bandages. Thick cables ran from
within the hood down to the qui-etly humming respirator clipped to the leather belt at his waist, to assist
whatever was under those robes to breathe. The bulky power pack on his back, which ran the Pilgrim's
portable life sup-port systems, gave him a crippled and hunchbacked look. The ever-present incense was
billowing from the twin censers that topped the pack, and a faint glow burned through the rents and frays in
the shroud as if the Pilgrim was fuelled by a furnace.
Thaddeus permitted the creature to be referred to as the Pilgrim because he professed to be an utterly
devoted follower of the Emperor, and he served Thaddeus as an expression of this fervour.
Although Thaddeus valued him greatly, the Pil-grim had a habit of acting in the most sinister manner,
occasionally seeming to anticipate Thad-deus's movements.
'Inquisitor.’ it said with a heavy, monotone, half-mechanical voice. 'The hulk. Will we go?' The
pilgrim turned and followed Thaddeus as he headed past it towards the bridge.
The Pilgrim must have been monitoring the infor-mation Thaddeus was receiving. Thaddeus knew the
upper echelons of the Hereticus must be spying on him must of the time, but he was not happy that the
Pilgrim was doing it too. Still, Thaddeus knew bet-ter than to risk a rift with the creature. 'Perhaps.’ said
Thaddeus. 'We are duty-bound to follow up any clues. But the chances of the find being relevant are...'
'It is them.'
'Unless you have some intelligence I have not received, Pilgrim, it would not do to get our hopes up. We
have received more promising leads than this before.’
Think on it, inquisitor.’ In the Pilgrim's voice, the rank sounded like an insult. 'One craft is more dif-ficult to
track than a fleet. A hulk is large enough to house a whole Chapter. And what loyal Chapter would sink to
taking up residence on a space hulk? The perversion of such an idea would suit Sarpedon perfectly.’
The Pilgrim knew the histories of the Soul Drinkers in depth, and had read of the many great victories they
had won in the Emperor's name, from the dawn of the Second Founding to the eve of their heresy. It had
instilled in him a hatred of what the Chapter had become; it was a hatred that rivalled Sister Aescarion's
religious faith. The Pilgrim was a
profiler, and expert in the means and beliefs of the Soul Drinkers, and he could be the most valuable
individual in Thaddeus's entourage if it all came down to guessing which way Sarpedon would jump.
yje can't be sure,' said Thaddeus. The Ordo Xenos was tracking more than seven hundred hulks and
suspected hulks at the last count, and they were only the ones they were willing to mention.'
'You are right of course, inquisitor.’ replied the Pil-gim. 'One ship amongst hundreds gives us long odds.
Perhaps you are pursuing a better lead at the moment? One strong enough to negate the value of optimism
摘要：

++PriorityTransmission:Coding/Delta/Rouge++++Recipient:LoyalImperialCommanders–asdesignatedbyCommissariat,TheLibrariusStaff,InquisitorBaptiste&CanonessArrea.++++Subject:TraitorsandExecutions++++Author:[Rus]Incubus–Scrivenor-in-attendancetoInquisitorNikolayVinogradov++++ThoughtfortheDay:Tocheatisboth...

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