- Prologue -

Planet Archanon

Northern Latitudes

Continent known indigineously as 'Icerok'

Hive City Despora - East Quadrant

Mega-Hab East-6

89th Floor

Urdin Fraust was dying a slow and painful death. He had pleaded with his captor repeatedly to be put out of his misery but she would not grant him that mercy. He was a scumbag, a murderer and a great deal many more things but most of all he was someone undeserving of a quick exit. Besides, she thought to herself, she was having too much fun. In an earlier outburst she had severed an artery in his leg when he had not been forthcoming. Crimson streaked the grimey walls and ceiling where his vitae had been pumped out of the fresh wound. He would have bled out in minutes if she had let him but she kept the artery clamped with her telekinesis.

She had encouraged him in other ways, too. With a slice here, a fractured bone there, and a crushed testicle for good measure, she had slowly eeked some answers out of him: names of informants, cache locations, brevity codewords and the like. It was nothing that they hadn't already gathered from intercepted transmissions and previous interrogations, but confirmation from another source was valuable none-the-less.

She looked down uncaringly at her subject and smiled cruelly to herself. There was nothing better than laying the hurt on someone who prayed on the weak and needy for a living. Perks of the job, she had decided a while ago. His broken body lay in a heap on the dusty floor. The ragged overalls he wore were stained with oil, blood and piss. His shaved scalp was inked with clan markings, expletives and depictions of depravity.

She looked around at her handiwork. The cooling bodies of Urdin's former clan-members littered the floor around him. Smoke still rose from messy exit wounds which she had inflicted with her hand-cannon. The other thugs had been used as pin-cushions for her kines-blades: lightweight steel knives she propelled with her telekinesis or dual-wielded like daggers when she wanted to get up close. There were a dozen bodies in total, soon to be thirteen she reminded herself.

'They got it easy, you know?' She taunted him. She had only needed to incapacitate one of the clanners for questioning and as an agent of justice it had been her duty, and pleasure, to despatch the others. 'What do you think they'll do to you?' She continued, 'when they find out that you broke under interrogation and gave up the goods?' She had his attention now. He said nothing, but she didn't need to be a psyker to know that he was overcome with dread. 'But if you tell me who your boss is I'll spare you having to be skinned alive by your friends when they show up.' She tapped the hand-cannon holstered to her leg mockingly, offering an alternative.

'Who are you, witch?' He shouted between coughs of foamy blood. His hands and feet were bound behind his back with razor-wire. He writhed and thrashed in protest like a caged animal. 'Who the frak are you?' He bleated again. She thought about telling him her name, what did it matter? He was going to die soon anyway and It was just a name. It wasn't even her real name, but it was the one that she had taken upon leaving her old life and being recruited. It was the only one that her team knew her by. Sometimes she had nearly forgotten her true name herself.

Urdin Fraust had been surprisingly resilient to her methods of interrogation and even though he had given her what she wanted in the end, and they always did, she felt that she owed him something for the defense he had put up. She couldn't bring herself to acknowledge it as respect, but she was intrigued to say the least. He was still a scumbag though and she would make him suffer.

'It's not me you should be worried about,' she replied ominously. 'It's who I represent, it's what I am a part of that should concern you more.' She let that sink in and tapped in a key-sequence to her wrist cogitator and raised her arm at Urdin. He winced and closed his eyes, expecting to be immolated by a flame-thrower hidden in her wrist guard but instead it projected a stream of light towards him. A small icon appeared within the light and began rotating slowly in the air between them. The holograph illuminated the room in soft green light. It was no bigger than a side-arm but had the stopping power of an Emperor-Class Titan. It was her Seal of Office. The Symbol of a shadowy organisation whose entire inception was out of the necessity to root out and destroy evil in it's most heinous forms. It had spelled the doom of millions before Urdin and it would do so for many more after him.

The Rosette of the Imperial Inquisition.

She needn't have said more after that. It's symbology had the desired effect as she saw his bladder give way for the second time in an hour. She smiled wickedly to herself. Perks of the job indeed, she thought.

She left Urdin to contemplate his mortality as she decided to search the room. It was the largest room on this floor, she had concluded that it was probably an old common area for the inhabitants before the clan had taken over. There was a doorway in each of the four walls, but three of them had been sealed up allowing the clanners to bottle-neck any interlopers through the one entrance. They had fashioned a barricade at the choke-point out of old furniture and sandbags and placed a heavy-stubber on top. It had been a smart move, she supposed, but a breach-charge and a pair of stun-grenades had allowed her to shift the odds in her favor.

Stained leather sofas formed a semi-circle at the room's center around a ruined pict-caster that had all but been picked clean of parts and wires. Sluggers, stubbers and auto-rifles were piled in crates against the walls. The worktop where the kitchen area was had been used to stash narcotics and the associated paraphernalia. Broken glass and shell-casings crunched under her feet as she explored. The stench of damp, cordite and human waste lingered in the air.

Side-stepping the corpses that she had made she found the remains of an antique mirror slumped against one of the grotty walls. In their take-over the clanners had stripped the once beautiful room of its character and personality but for some reason had left the heirloom more-or-less intact. Perhaps even they could appreciate a work of art, or maybe they enjoyed the vanity.

It was a full-length mirror framed by carved nalwood. The glass was specked with dried blood from the earlier melee and slightly cracked at the edges. She looked into the mirror. A tall and slender woman wrapped in a black body-glove stared back at her intently. Angular features and emerald green eyes were framed by short, jet-black hair. She felt exhausted, the tempo of the on-going investigation had taken it out of her, out of all of them, but she gave no sign of weakness on her hardened exterior.

She knelt down beside Urdin, making sure to avoid the pool of blood around him, and grabbed him by his grubby collar. She pulled his face closer to hers so that she could look him in the eye. His round face was a mess of scar tissue. 'Well?' She asked. He smiled a mouth of blackened and broken teeth. 'Go frak yourself, Witch!' He spat at her. Blood and saliva oozed out of his wretched mouth. She was going to reward him with a sternum punch when she felt a warm sensation in her chest.

She threw him back down and rose to her feet. The wraithbone necklace at her breast came to life with a soft blue glow.

+ Patience, you need to move with haste. The clan are returning in large numbers, even more than you can handle. + It was her leader and employer, Inquisitor Gideon Ravenor. Like Patience, he was a proficient psyker, though of a much higher caliber. Even from their ship in orbit over Archanon he could still project his psykic abilities more effectively than she could in person. The wraithbone necklaces that her and the others wore amplified her psykic abilities and allowed her to communicate telepathically with them. This method of silent communication was essential for clandestine operations such as this.

+ I've got everything that I'm going to get out of this fether, + she replied.

+ Very well, tie up all loose ends and leave no trace of your presence. +

+ I was going to leave him to the rats, it's what he deserves... +

+ Did you show him your Rosette? +

+ Yes, but he's bleeding out... +

+ We can't take the risk of him surviving and alerting the rest of his clan. Our presence on Archanon must remain a closely guarded secret. +

+ What about the corpses? It will be a bit of a give-away. +

+ They will reason that it was a raid from a rival gang. Nayl is on the 84th floor and is on his way up to you, he has a guest with him. I want you to both extract with her in one piece via the service elevator on your floor. +

+ Okay, meet up with Nayl, kill the bad guys, save the girl and extract via the service elevator. +

+ Do what needs to be done. No loose ends, Patience. + He severed the link. It was an order that she would have to obey, putting her personal feelings aside, she knew that they couldn't risk to have their operation jeopardized. 'You're the boss,' she said to herself out loud. After all, secrecy was the Inquisition's greatest weapon.

Kys opened up her mind to Nayl. She found his wraithbone necklace amongst the miasma of souls occupying Mega-Hab East-6 and expressed a playfully mocking thought to him to get his attention. He sent back the equivalent of a psychic grunt, still uneasy about using telepathy as a non-psyker.

+You know it's rude to keep a girl waiting, Harlon? +

+ It will be worth the wait, trust me. I hope that you're ready for this. I'm bringing the party with me. +

Kys could sense Nayl ascending the stairway to her floor along with the girl. Kys couldn't be specific about the number of clanners chasing them down the halls, but it was a sizable horde. The sense of blood-lust and borderline insanity was palpable amongst the mass of bodies. She decided that whatever she was going to do she would have to do fast.

She turned to face Urdin. He was pale and sweating profusely, his breathing was shallow and laboured. Patience gauged that he only had a few minutes left in him. 'Who... who are you talking to?' Urdin asked.

'The boss, well I was talking to him, but not anymore,' she replied vaguely. Urdin looked puzzled and cursed. 'But you had your mouth closed... and you aren't wearing a comms-bead... how were you...?' He trailed off. She smiled and tapped the side of her head. 'Witch-craft,' she said with a grimmace and winked. He cursed again.

It was time to leave. Patience reached out with her mind and retrieved her two-dozen kines-blades from their victims. They hovered towards her and then orbitted her body slowly, one by one finding a home in various sheathes on her body-glove. It was quite a spectacle for any non-psyker, but to a telekine like Patience Kys it was childs play. The many brass casings that covered the floor from her hand-cannon were standard issue and nondescript, they could not be linked to any clandestine organisation so she left them where they were. There was only one more matter to take care of.

'So... what did he say?' Urdin managed after much effort. 'Your boss... what did he...'. She ignored him and drew her hand-cannon from her leg holster. The LED display above the hammer read 'empty' in flashing red digits. She ejected the spent magazine onto the floor and slammed a fresh one home. The LED display now projected the number '12' in neon-blue digits.

'What did he say?' Urdin screeched in desperation. Heavy foot-steps echoed up the stairway adjacent to the common area. Urdin's reinforcements were on their way and would be upon them any second. She chambered a round in her hand-cannon, thumbed off the safety and aimed it at his head. The cruel smile returned to her beautiful face.

'He said it's your lucky day.'