The Beast Arises

Vangorich conceded that with a slight tip of his glass.

‘Just how formidable is the Fabricator General, assuming that an example needed to be made?’

‘Assuming?’ Krule sat back, crossing his muscular arms behind his head along the back of the low couch, as comfortable in someone else’s private space as only a man his size could be. ‘I could take him.’

‘Have you ever killed one of the Mechanicus?’

‘You’d know if I had, sir.’

Vangorich smiled.

‘Have you, sir?’ Krule asked.

Vangorich considered a moment. No one else would have dared ask their Grand Master such a question. It mooted the possibility that ‘no’ could be an answer. Another person might have raised it privately out of concern for Vangorich’s professional competence, but not Beast. He knew better.

‘No,’ he admitted.

‘Do you want me to set things in motion?’

Vangorich took a deep breath and shook his head, staring at the slush pile of slates, info-logs, and reports. Selecting a member of the Senatorum Imperialis who had acted with sufficiently witless culpability to warrant death was not difficult. It was, to borrow his favourite Navy aphorism, like launching a torpedo and hitting space. No, the challenge, the surgical art, was to identify that member whose untimely removal would most effect improvement in the rest.

He released the breath. Slowly. Deliberately. He massaged the stiffness from his neck.

‘Udo,’ he said after a few seconds. ‘Tell me about the Lord Commander.’

Krule rummaged for the relevant slate just as a minor earth tremor rattled the pile on the table. Only Vangorich’s cat-like reflexes spared the Inquisition’s carpet a wine stain. The hivequake lingered for a few seconds, and then passed. Vangorich transferred his glass to the other hand and lapped wine from his wrist, then stood and moved to the window. An orange glare lit his face. A hab-block was falling away from the Palace skyline, gutted by the ignited gases that were spraying from its exposed, ancient piping. Even through the reinforced armourglass, Vangorich could hear screaming. The long, hapless whine of tocsins spread slowly across the Imperial Palace.

Something had to be done.

He turned to find Krule checking a security alert on his wrist chrono. Krule silenced the audio sounder, then drew a bulky plasma pistol from the concealed holster inside his jacket. He rose quickly and quietly from his chair, gestured to Vangorich to take cover behind the table, and moved out of line from the door, pistol raised and trained.

Doing as he was bidden, Vangorich dropped onto one knee.

He hooked one arm over the table, partially to shelter his face behind it if need be, and pulled the silenced, slender-barrelled hellpistol he carried from his boot. He took aim at the door and glanced at the access panel on the wall beside it. An amber light was pulsing across the display, left to right and occasionally spiking in the middle, like a heart rate monitor. An intruder should have triggered a red alarm. Amber meant that someone with Inquisitorial clearance had entered the suite, effectively placing the automatic weapon turrets and intruder denial systems built into every staircase and corner space into a temporary ‘standby’ posture. Vangorich’s office had all the specifications. The intruder had ninety seconds to provide the correct form of physical identification and the required codes to one of those access panels before things started to get anxious.

The panel display turned to green and flatlined.

Vangorich cleared his mind, stilled his heart. His field of view became the doorframe.

There were, as his own interest in the matter proved, plenty of individuals on Terra with the motive and means to rid themselves of the Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum. Vangorich doubted there was a security system built that the adepts of the Mechanicus could not break. Lansung and Verreault undoubtedly commanded personnel with the skill set required to break a triple-aquila-rated secure facility, but neither struck Vangorich as desperate enough to try. The Ecclesiarchy, too, maintained a cadre of highly trained and conditioned operatives, and against the warp-touched abilities of the Navis Nobilite and the Imperium’s sanctioned psykers, even the Inquisition’s defences would come out second best as often as not.

Were any of them the match of Beast Krule?

Vangorich doubted it.

The door handle dropped with a click, and the door swung open.

Vangorich eased himself a little lower against the table and relaxed into the trigger. He angled his body for a headshot. Unless they were really, really good, he would get at least one shot.

As it turned out, he didn’t.