I don't know what to say, really. Linda had never told she had a sister before, and it makes me realize just how much some things aren't said between us.

For instance, I've never told her what my earliest memory is. This came up in conversation once, and she told me her earliest memory was of her father chopping down trees. I told her it was in the Mordoch Chapel chamber, clad in white robes, learning my prayers. Every day, there were humans sacrificing their lives and the prayers helped, they said.

That is not my earliest memory, however. My earliest memory doesn't make sense. It's me sitting in the vat where we were grown -- my batch of the inquisitors, I mean -- floating in the embryonic goo, looking about, the feeding tubes in my arms and legs. I remember to the right of me was the thing that was going to become Philip Vaazon, twisting around and looking at me with the too-large eyes all of us had. The vats were lit from the bottom, and each tank was its own glowing egg.

To my right, the creature in the tank was broken. I couldn't understand how exactly, but I saw the way the arms were bent, the milkiness of its eyes, the way its teeth were poking through its cheeks. It looked at me. I think I smiled at it, then. Making friends.

Then a man in a labcoat approached it, looked through it, and did something with the machine beneath the tank. Brown liquid exploded upwards, sending the fetus into oblivion, and then suctioned downwards, until it was gone. I think I screamed, or may have tried to.

I told Linda that the reason I turned on the Inquisition was some high moral stand, a disgust with the Hereticus's candid way with living beings, but I don't think that was it. I think it was just my fear. I'm afraid of the way they could transform a human being, change it from being a living thing into just a lot of bits and chemicals.

And, sitting in that shuttlecraft with the inquisitors, breaking orbit and heading towards the vast hideous thing hanging there in space, that starship, I could feel hat same fear coming upon me again. As soon as we entered that place, we would lose our status as human beings.

We are sitting in a dark room, the ceiling high and arched, ornately, almost exquisitely designed. A stained glass window depicting the emperor beams at us from behind the silhouettes of the three witch hunters. Richard, the gaunt one, the leader, leans forward and says, "When was the last time you were on an imperial ship, Commander?"

Linda doesn't say anything at first. She turns her head, regards him for a second, and says, "A while ago."

"I hope you found it hospitable."

"It was certainly interesting."

After living through so many wars, it's strange to see the void so empty. There are no Orkin ships outside, puttering and falling, blasted to bits by the Imperial weaponry, no Eldar city-states, no whipping meteorites or moons. Just our little planet below and that ugly spiky hunk of metal above.

"I find it sickening that they still call it Maze," the witch hunter Grimdire says. "Our destination, I mean. It used to be a holy land. Those tunnels were catacombs, I believe. Now they're infested with smugglers."

"Not to mention it's soon to be a tyranid breeding ground," Richard says.

I can't take my eyes off the ship above us. It's becoming closer and closer, becoming a horrible inevitability. I feel almost sick.

Linda once told me she used to crew on a ship like that, back early in her career, transporting her from one system to the next. Her captain used to joke about it, calling it practically a leave, these few days his soldiers got to drill about on a ship, rather than enter combat.

She used to sleep beneath coiling wires nestled in a bank of metal, and all night little things would creep along the floor next to the bedding, with circuitry and sensors where their eyes should be, their modified bodies locating dirt and waste and devouring it. She'd toss and turn, the only sounds the roaring of the engine, the gobbling noises from the monsters shuffling around beside her and the chanting of the priests above.

I never saw the lower levels of the ships when I was on one; I stuck mainly to the cathedral, kneeling in the glow of the stained glass.

There is a lurch, and in the glow from the planet outside I see Richard smile. A docking bay door on the side of the ship opens.

"Look at it," Richard says, leaning forwards. "The Immaculatus. A breathtaking work of architecture, don't you think?"

An odd thing for a witch hunter to say. His compatriots shift uneasily. To praise the artistry of a ship insinuated that there was an artist human enough for a human to praise. The ships are sacred; the people who built them, whoever they were, are closer to gods in the minds of the religious.

I look at Richard, and I see the way he shifts his gaunt frame so he can get a better look at the ship. He's not just praising it, he's appraising it, letting his gaze run down the contours of its hull, up the elaborate decorations on the spires, along the fluted trellises. I realize I'm in the presence of an artist, an architect; someone who has no business in the Inquisition.

And then, as the glow of our beloved planet is gone from my skin, the mouth of the Immaculatus gorges itself on our shuttle.

XXXX

Linda has a fascination with bright colours that comes, I think, from the lack of them in her life. The world of the Imperial Regiment is a world of browns and gunmetal, the brown of the torn earth, the brown of their greatcoats, the brown of their tents, of their torn bodies, of the sky when it's filled with the smoke of the war.

The only colours that came into her life were the colours of the planets she fell onto; the fetid green of their jungles, the yellow heat of their deserts -- only the colours of the places hard enough and monstrous enough to withstand the war. Take green fields and blue skies, add a war, and all you've got is brown, brown, brown.

On our wedding night, she sat in our hotel room in a gown of reds and blues and greens and yellows, and just stared and stared into the aquarium set into the wall, watching the flickering scales on the fish as they turned rainbows in the water.

I had colours aplenty as a child. No sunlight, but bright primary colours glowing out of the black of the cathedral, the red, the blue, the yellow of the stained glass, the green on the armour, the orange of the fire. Shrouded in our prayer robes, we children had lots of colour.

Chunk. The sound of the air lock rockets me back to the present, the door opening inwards. Standing there, cigar clenched between his unearthly white teeth, is a Space Marine.

Oh good god, I'd forgotten what they were like.

He's massive. I wonder if the female Space Marines are this big. I wonder if there are female Space Marines. Maybe they're sexless. Maybe they all come out this way, this enlarged caricature of a human being. His neck is gigantic, veins sticking out. I bet his neck could turn a bullet. He grins and his eyes resemble bird's eyes, predatory as hell. Short cropped military grey hair. And, of course, gigantic armour. I'm in the presence of a war machine.

"Howdy," the war machine says. "C'mon in."

"Everything ready then, Captain?" Richard says, stepping past him. "Room all set up?"

"Haven't checked. This place is pretty efficient, though. I'm sure everything's good. Ah, these the newcomers?"

Meaning us. Linda steps out of the air lock and I follow her.

"I'm Captain Clive Baker," the Marine says, shaking Linda's hand and then mine. "Shitty flight up? I hate those shuttles."

We have to clamber over wires and steam-vents to get to the briefing room.

XXXX

"Right," Captain Clive Baker says, resting on the edge of the metal table, looking at the projector ahead of him like its a foreign creature. "Right."

We can screams outside the room, from the torture chambers above us. Richard gets up and closes the door, and silence drains in.

"Okay," Clive says. "We can begin. We are going to Maze."

"Hideous place," Grimdire says, looking at his hands. "Sickening twisted place full of nothing but criminals and drug dealers and homosexuals and-"

"Maze," Richard says. "A team of four operatives, Captain Clive Baker included, myself, Grimdire, and you two."

Meaning us.

"Where are these four operatives?" Linda says, looking uncomfortable.

"Waiting for us on Maze, actually," Richard says, approaching the projector, almost reaching for it, letting his fingers trail along the table.

"Eight of us, then," I say, the first thing I've said since we got off the shuttle. "Maze has been overrun by tyranids -- why are there only eight of us going?"

Grimdire glares at me like no one's glared at me before (and I've been glared at from pros before) and Richard smirks. "We haven't told the populace yet," Richard says.

"We'd like to keep this a secret," Clive says. "Bit of subtlety on our part. The tyranids can have Maze."

"We just want your sister," Richard says.

"I never knew she was so important," Linda says, leaning forwards.

"Well, that's the thing." Richard looks back at the projector, looks at it like it's his lover. "You sister, Commander, was the one who let the tyranids in."

I look at Linda, and she looks at me, and I wish that we were instead not here but rather in a supermarket, trailing down the bright aisles, rattling along together with a metal cart, moving like the elderly.

Linda starts to laugh.