Prequel 2 - Advance Warning
Kiri was at the door before the alarm finished sounding. “Let’s go!” she yelled.
“Wait.”
Kiri turned.
It was Seraya. “We should keep someone here to protect this one.” She gestured her head towards Vaughn. Kiri blinked. “We’re not done questioning her,” Seraya said. Not a bad idea.
“I’ll stay,” Glume said, leaning back in his chair and resting his head against the wall.
Kiri started to chew her lip. Glume was a formidable presence. She trusted him with her life against an aggressive foe. But he might just let Vaughn walk away if she asked nicely enough.
"I'll stay with him," Gen said. She was already positioning herself between Vaughn and the door. She'll keep her here, Kiri thought. That's what she's saying.
The corridor outside was empty. They moved fast, Seraya ahead, her staff already in hand, the air around her carrying that particular quality it got when she was drawing on something. Kiri had her inferno pistol up.
Hidemitsu's new room was two corridors over. They heard him before they reached it — not words, just the specific pitch of a man who was frightened and past the point of thinking clearly.
A figure stood outside the door.
He was slight, pale, dressed in deck crew overalls that didn't quite fit him. His eyes were closed. His lips were moving.
"It's too late," he said, without opening his eyes. His voice was perfectly conversational, which was somehow worse than if he'd been shouting. "Hidemitsu will be collected. As my masters require."
Kiri raised her inferno pistol and fired.
The man ducked and a hole gaped in the corridor wall behind them.
In the half-second that followed, something happened to the air between them. Not a sound, not a light — more like a pressure, a sudden wrongness behind her eyes, a sensation like fingers reaching into the back of her skull and beginning, very deliberately, to close. She felt her vision narrow. Felt something that wasn't her own begin to move through her thoughts like it was looking for something.
Then Seraya stepped in front of her.
It stopped. Immediately and completely, like a door slamming shut. Whatever had been reaching simply wasn't there anymore.
"Under attack," Seraya said into her voxbead. Then her staff came around in a single arc. The psyker crumpled, his throat crushed. She caught him before he hit the deck and knelt beside him, her hand moving across the damage with focused efficiency.
She looked up at Kiri.
Kiri became aware that she was still in a firing stance. That her hands were completely steady. That she had missed a stationary target from approximately six feet away.
She lowered the pistol.
Seraya's expression said nothing. Which, with Seraya, was its own kind of statement.
Kiri keyed her voxbead. “Enemy down. We're secure. What's your situation?”
Genevieve Zarkov remembered everything.
Not as a boast — simply as a fact, the way the mass of a bulkhead was a fact. She had stopped mentioning it to people after noticing it made them uncomfortable, as if she were accusing them of forgetting things, which she supposed she often was.
What it meant, in practice, was that she was always processing all of the data, not just what was at hand. While Kiri had been asking questions and Seraya had been sharpening her knife, Gen had been watching Vaughn's face, cross-referencing her answers against the access logs she'd already memorized, building a picture that was almost complete when the alarm sounded and Kiri and Seraya were gone.
Gen reached into her holster and took out the hot-shot laspistol. She checked the charge the way she checked it every morning — it was full, as it always was — and held it at her side.
Glume glanced at her.
She'd been practicing. Three weeks, every shift she could manage, working through the same sequences at the range until they stopped requiring thought. She hadn't told anyone. It seemed, she had decided, more useful to demonstrate than to announce.
Her voxbead crackled. Seraya’s voice: under attack.
Then the door opened.
Three of them. Moving fast, already splitting — one toward Glume, one toward the terminal, one toward Gen with the specific intent of someone who had been told exactly where to look.
Gen raised the laspistol, found the angle, and fired.
The cultist was hit right between the eyes. He was dead before the body hit the ground.
She didn't pause to look at it. The second one was already past Glume's initial swing and she stepped back, bought herself the distance she needed, and fired again — this one catching the cultist in the shoulder, enough to spin it into Glume's follow-through.
Glume cut it down without breaking stride.
The third one, the one that had gone for the terminal, turned to look at what had just happened to the other two.
Glume was already there.
Her voxbead crackled. “Gen? Glume?What's your situation?”
Gen looked at the room. At Vaughn, pale and still on her knees exactly where they'd left her. At the three bodies. At the terminal, untouched.
She keyed the bead. “Clear. Three down.”
She turned back to Vaughn.
"You were saying," she said. "Your sister."
Vaughn confessed in full in the briefing room, on her knees in front of Harcane. Her sister, the debt, the two years of leverage, the assassin and his cultists smuggled aboard during transit. She had not wanted to do it.
She had done it anyway.
When she was done the room was quiet.
"How long has House Varindal known we were on this ship?" Kiri asked.
Vaughn's eyes dropped. "The whole time."
"And the Iron Archipelago." Kiri kept her voice flat. "Do they know we’re going there?"
A longer pause. "Yes."
Harcane stood suddenly. “I trusted you Vaughn,” she snarled. “When you had family issues, I gave you leave. I had no idea I was giving you the opportunity to betray us.” She pulled her bolt pistol out of its holster, levelled it at Vaughn. “The penalty for treason — is death.”
The pistol boomed and the explosive round took Vaughn in the head, and then there was considerably less of Vaughn than there had been a moment before.
Inquisitor Harcane stood there breathing heavily. Then she looked at the four of them. "Every time I send you out," she said, "no matter how small the mission, you reach the end of it." A pause. "I’m not happy with how this turned out, but very happy with how you’ve acquitted yourselves. Loyalty – and competence – are rewarded.”
Then: "Rest. We translate soon."
She left.
Kiri stood in the room's quiet and thought about Vaughn’s words. They know we’re coming. About what that meant for a house that had crystals in a warp bubble beneath a warehouse and assassins walking the corridors of an Inquisitor's ship. About what they were translating toward.
In the corridor, Seraya fell into step beside her.
She was quiet for a moment.
"So Kiri," she said.
Kiri waited.
"You gonna keep working on your shot?”
“Shut it Seraya.”
"You missed the psyker."
Kiri glanced over. Seraya had a half smile.
"I'm aware."
"From six feet."
"I know."
"Standing still."
The blood was boiling in her veins. Fury — at Seraya. At herself. She owed Seraya before this. Did this increase the debt?
Kiri spun and faced Seraya. "What do you want Seraya?" She asked through clenched teeth.
Seraya’s smile drained away. “Just stay sharp. It worked out okay, but I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need to be sharp for the archipelago.”
“A feeling?” Kiri asked, “or a premonition?”
Seraya shrugged. “I don’t know.” Then she turned and headed towards the mess hall.
Kiri watched her go. Then she thought about Vaughn’s corpse, and the Iron Archipelago, and a psyker standing six feet away with his eyes closed.
She turned and went to find the training bay.
To be continued...