Chapter 107: Rogue Traders? Smugglers?
In the unheated darkness of the Cold Quarter alley, Duvette heard the unhurried sound of boots behind him, recognized the instinct to walk faster, and suppressed it. He turned his head toward the woman.
"Do you have to follow me?"
Juno pulled her coat's collar closer against the cold, wearing the expression of someone who is finding the evening pleasant. "Relax, Commissar. Our paths happen to coincide."
He exhaled at length.
The decision had been made in the tavern, less than an hour ago. He had weighed everything available to him in a compressed span of time and accepted the deal.
The consideration that had settled it was a quiet pass through the skill tree.
Among the options requiring substantial Emperor's Wrath to unlock, there were entries that addressed Chaos corruption at its root. A genuine purification capability, not suppression. The STC template Heldane was searching for had been touched by Chaos in a way that transformed it from an extraordinary find into an extraordinary trap. But given sufficient time to unlock the right skills, that problem became manageable.
The time differential was the other factor. Heldane would not fully understand what he had found for another twenty years by Duvette's best estimate. In the entire Imperium, he was the only person who knew what was inside that ruin. Twenty years was an adequate preparation window for someone motivated to use it.
Juno's approach was also reasonable on its own terms. Use her recommendation to place him in the advance forces, earn the Warmaster's confidence through the early campaign, and determine the next step from a position of established credibility.
He was running through the broad outline of this when the alley to his left produced a sound that he had not anticipated.
"Commissar! Help!"
Duvette stopped. He knew that voice with absolute certainty.
He turned his head toward the sound.
Three figures were hurtling toward him through the overlapping shadows of the alley junction, moving with the urgent, unceremonious speed of people who have exhausted all other available options. Behind them, a series of red laser beams tracked through the dark air in tight bursts, scorching lines of black into the alley walls on both sides.
Duvette's eyes went wide.
He had been gone for a matter of hours. What in the Emperor's name had these three managed to do to the Cold Quarter?
Juno, standing beside him, observed the scene and produced a quiet sound that was unmistakably amusement.
Duvette turned to look at her with an expression that contained a specific question.
The Lord Inquisitor raised one eyebrow. "You assume everything is my doing?"
He did not answer that. He did not have time to answer that, because the lead pursuer was already clearing the last corner of the alley.
He drew the plasma pistol, raised it single-handed, found his target, and fired.
The discharge filled the alley with brief, searing light. The bolt took the lead pursuer in the torso and the result was definitive. The charred remnant fell and the pursuers directly behind him broke their momentum abruptly.
"Make yourself useful." Duvette addressed this to Juno without looking back.
She considered this for a moment with apparent unconcern, then stepped up beside him. She reached up and removed the black eye patch covering her right eye.
The golden eye beneath it opened.
She lifted her chin and directed her gaze toward a specific figure in the crowd of pursuers. The woman with the metal collar and the white-cloth blindfold.
The sound the woman produced was not something that comfortably classified as a scream. It traveled through the alley and continued for longer than seemed reasonable, with the particular quality of something emerging from a body in the process of complete systemic failure. Her hands went to her head. Blood began at the corners of every facial orifice simultaneously. Her body bent backward against itself at an angle that bone and muscle were not designed to achieve.
The metal collar around her neck fractured. A single clean crack, and then it was in pieces on the ground.
From within her, a column of gold fire rose and consumed what remained. It left a specific type of residue.
The robed figure standing nearest the woman stared at this for the space of one full second.
"That is a Saint's Relic! The Inquisition! Pull back!" His voice broke against the alley walls. "Run!"
The robed figures were already moving before the last word. No hesitation, no discussion, no attempt to reassess the tactical situation. They ran.
The remaining gang members found themselves standing in the middle of an alley, holding weapons, looking at the man in the black greatcoat who was now walking toward them with a specific look on his face. Whatever mathematics they were performing about the next few seconds of their lives produced a clear result. Weapons hit the ground. The alley cleared.
Duvette looked at Stroud, Elias, and Anderson, who were breathing hard and looking back at him with an assortment of expressions in which relief featured most prominently.
"What happened?"
Stroud opened his mouth. Then his eyes found Juno, standing slightly behind Duvette's shoulder, watching with what appeared to be mild entertainment. He closed his mouth. Something about the combination of information he was looking at seemed to prevent the formation of coherent sentences.
"Talk." Duvette's voice applied the relevant pressure.
Stroud talked.
The full account came out in the compressed, sequential delivery of a scout giving a contact report: the casino, the hunched figure, the underground warehouse, the carapace armour and hellguns and the unidentified precision components, the fragmented conversation with a Carpé family reference, the blindfolded psyker's detection of him despite the auspex reading clean, the chase.
Duvette's eyes narrowed as the account finished.
"Smugglers. The Carpé family."
A weapons cache of that scale, in a hub world in the middle of a major crusade assembly: the implications were not obscure.
"A Rogue Trader dynasty's heir." Juno's voice came from beside him. She was looking along the alley's length, her tone even and uninflected. "Specifically, someone positioning to inherit control of the family's operations."
Duvette looked at her. "You already knew about the smuggling."
She turned her head toward him with the expression of someone finding a question entirely reasonable.
"I did mention I had a welcome gift for you."
He was on the verge of pointing out several things about this gift, but she was already speaking.
"The Chaos traitors are not unintelligent. The Imperium has assembled a significant force on Pyrite for obvious reasons, and anyone paying attention can see it. To disrupt that assembly from inside a world that still functions under Imperial authority, you need people already present. People with access to resources and the operational flexibility that a large, well-established dynasty provides." She paused. "The Imperium has never been short of opportunists. An ambitious heir looking to establish themselves is a particularly reliable one."
She replaced the eye patch, covering the golden eye. She looked at Duvette.
"How you handle it is your decision. Consider it a token of good faith."
He was assembling a response to this when she raised one hand in a brief, dismissive wave and turned away.
"Until next time, Commissar. When the next step is ready, I will find you."
The black coat disappeared into the shadows of the alley and was gone.
Duvette stood in the cold for a moment.
He pressed two fingers firmly against the bridge of his nose where the headache had been building since the tavern.
Then he turned and looked at Stroud, Elias, and Anderson, standing in a row and watching him with expressions that ranged across a wide spectrum of uncomfortable.
He exhaled.
Damned smugglers.
****
50+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces