There'd been some trouble at the orbital docks. The outside of the shuttle's hull was patterned with stub rounds and a few burn marks of las. Instead of a carefully generic departure through a civilian transport, Janos had received an encoded vox and a rather visible Arbites Eagle shuttle on approach for 'routine inspection' that really hadn't fooled anyone.

"Simultaneous raids hit all twelve targets as we left. The snatch-teams had a field day." Arbtriator Provost Silas DeLance kept reading the data-slate and his lips curled into amusement. "Master Teedis's shuttle was down for mysterious maintenance. That took a deft touch Janos. They caught him trying to commandeer a plebe's tug."

"So we were able to salvage it then."

Silas nodded. The older Arbitratror's face was lined with age and creased with scars, but his carapace was a glossy black sheen and the honor-tags of his rank shimmered in the shuttle's interior lights.

"It'll take a month at least, and there could be more that we didn't uncover." Silas shrugged, "We still bagged over three hundred for the punishment details. We'll hold the executions for the end of the month."

Janos nodded. He'd only recently had the chance to change back into the Arbites carapace. His bodyglove was rumpled, gray rock dust still salted his hair, and until he reached a facility or vessel with a functioning shower unit he was going to smell like an industrial plant.

For six months he'd been Yedero Tythus, a blandly generic mid-level data-intendent in a merchant guild suspected of being involved in xeno-artifact smuggling. Now, Yedero was dead, just one more cover to be peeled off, one more fabricated life history to be deleted, one more ghost to bury.

It wouldn't be that hard. He'd been doing this for years. Janos looked at Silas and nodded his head, "What about the ones I requested to exempt?"

Silas took the data-slate and scanned it. Nathis Kerr, Celia Hulletsen and Jeela Hulletsen.

One might believe his friend was indulging in some softness. It was a possibility Silas immediately dismissed. He could just ask Janos why but he'd trained him for ten years. If he couldn't follow his subordinate's mental footsteps then Silas might need to consider retirement.

He knew from Janos's reports that Nathis had been someone Janos had made a habit of frequently interacting with as Yedero Tythus, but the woman and her child were tertiary, at best. A low level retainer – a glorified deck-scrubber really, and her daughter who'd just passed her twelfth name day and second year of indentured training for the honor of loading more fragile guild cargos into their fat-bellied holds.

Silas snorted. Nathis was also one of Master-of-Merchant's Patria's former data-archivists. The rest of the pieces clicked into place.

"Jeela's their illegitimate isn't she? With Teedis out of the way, you want Patria wondering just what information Nathis provided the Arbitrators to buy him and his paramour a stay of execution."

Janos blinked as if to say what an odd coincidence and Silas stifled another snort. "Patria is a matron of one of the most powerful merchant guilds in the system. I doubt she'll impale herself on such an obvious hook."

The younger detective shrugged. "She's going to be paranoid with Teedis snapped up. She'll send someone because she can't afford not to. We hook them, maybe they can link to her."

Silas grunted.

Inside of his Arbites armor, Janos was just another generic chin jutting out from a visored helm. Outside of it, Janos Grenn remained a rather bland man. Not particularly handsome no noteworthy deformities. Above average height, above-average build, a generic face with a blunt jaw and cropped dark hair and slightly darker eyes that seemed to defy more specific colors like black or brown.

Even his expressions were watered down. Faint tugs for smiles or frowns, slight narrowings of brows for focus or confusion. With some stubble and a long-coat he'd be lost in the background of any busy Imperium street. Completely unnoticed until he sprang the trap. Then you had an easier time convincing a cyber-mastiff to let you go.

It'd probably be more gentle too. Silas thought.

The vox-speaker rumbled to life over their heads. "Provost Silas. We're on final approach for Salmica Orbis."

Janos leaned close and his muddy brown eyes widened in honest astonishment.

Three days of travel had brought the central planet looming before the armorcrys panels wrapping the flight-deck. The vast fleets of Salmica, both commercial and military, threaded the void around it. Fat-bellied merchant-ships formered orderly queues that stretched for thousands of kilometers. Cargo haulers with their boxy holds jostled for space with the fat-bellied whales of Imperial troop transports fresh from the eastern arms of the galaxy.

Silas had seen it all slowly building up, but Janos had been on the asteroid complexes of Hexos for the past seven months worming his way into the heart of the xeno-artifact smuggling ring. This was his first time seeing the gathering of military might for Salmica's Tithing.

Naval cutters and scaled-down destroyers darted among their larger cousins, cruisers and cathedral-tower battleships bristling with lance batteries and macro-turrets. The baroque hulls of battlecruisers and Dauntless class frigates haloed Salmica's white poles, constantly overwatching the stream of freighter traffic.

It wasn't the Cadian Gate, but with the Founding underway it was hard to think of anything short of a full scale armada of Traitor Legions that might be able to make the system worry.

Janos's awed expression schooled back into bland propriety and he nodded his head. "This will be the 453rd Salmican Rifles?"

"457th. Through the 459th " Silas's grimace puckered a bit. "Lord Commander Presedor the Third, in his infinite wisdom, has decided to have a triple Founding. Apparently one of those blasphemous xeno-races are giving the Eastern Segmenta fleets some serious trouble."

"Tyranids," Janos admitted, "I've heard the stories." The shuttle was slipping through the orbital lanes of traffic and docked ships and he eyed one of the naval cruisers their shuttle was skimming past. The sunlight striking gold highlights off its rows of flying-buttress gun-batteries was also illuminating a large gash across its proud deck. Like something had taken a bite out of it.

Something large.

"I don't care if they're overgrown roaches or greenskins, if you can't find three million Emperor fearing citizens willing to do their part without calling in the Arbitrators every week to quell riots, you've got no business being the Planetary Governor."

Civil issues like that were what the PDF and the Enforcers were for. The Arbitrators enforced the Emperor's Law. Their manpower was built around ensuring the Emperor's will was carried out and his laws obeyed, not in being stretched thin across two dozen hives dealing with every minor murder or civil vandalism.

Janos frowned, "You didn't blow my cover in a sector-wide smuggling ring to deal with some disgruntled draftees holed up in a spire."

Silas's expression slowly closed up. Suddenly, he looked his age, and more, a leather-beaten hook-nosed face etched with scars and gristle. "No I didn't," he replied.

Janos waited, but Silas stared ahead as if the most fascinating pict-show was being played across the shuttle's blank screen. That was worrisome.

There was a sealed case secured to Silas's carapace. A message tube with the details of Janos's newest assignment. Silas hadn't opened it, and he wasn't giving Janos anything. It wasn't like Silas to let time go to waste – he preferred his subordinates have as much information as possible and there were always too many demands for the small division of Detectives assigned to Salmica.

That Silas refused to speak of it here meant that the veteran detective-chief was adhering to the rule of law on this one - the first time Janos had ever seen his maverick superior do so.

Well, almost the first.

Finally Silas sighed, like air hissing out of a tomb. "It's going to be hard,"

Janos felt a cold pit, a faint echo, pressing down his spine. "Worse than Sigoris?" Just saying the name stirred up old ghosts. Smoking incense and blood and worse.

"Almost certainly." Silas turned and gave Janos a chipped-ice stare. " I need you sharp. Mind open. Understand?"

Faced with that stare, all Janos could do was nod grimly and bury that pit deeper in his gut.

The shuttle began the familiar shuddering dance of breaching atmosphere. Rivets creaked and the armorcrys windows darkened with flames. Both Arbitrators subconsciously mouthed prayers of integrity to the machine-spirit governing the shuttle, but it had no desire for a sudden suicide of promethium flames and wreckage-rain.

The friction fires on the hull outside finished their brilliant burn and faded away. Sunlight warmed Janos's pale face through the armorcrys window and the sky outside the view port was the brilliant blue of a Koronis sapphire. It was the first time he'd seen a breathable sky in seven months. It was the first time he'd worn Arbitrator carapace in seven months. Under different circumstances, Janos almost could have smiled.

Four thousand years as the center of Imperium might and glory in the Helicansubsector had left the upper reaches of Salmica breathtaking. Sky spires glittered like spears of silvered brass. Strong edifices of carved marble, the figures of Imperial saints and heros watched the tiny shuttle from their titanic perches and ecclisiarchical processions marked the morning masses. Green flows across the web of interconnecting bridges marked the sky-gardens and the open-air walkways shimmered with markets and the flow of brightly colored traffic.

The Hyperios Lances, marvels of tech-priest engineering studded the hive's upper walls, huge hyperlas batteries more than capable of smiting any intruder out of the sky with an actinic flare. Their presence highlighted the platinum-crusted ziggeraut of the Adeptus Mechanicus shrine and farther in the distance the gold plateau of the Governor's Palace marked the ultimate excess of space, a palace that thrust out horizontally instead of forced to take up a condensed vertical stack.

Janos didn't blink at any of this. Janos had been low too many times to be dazzled by the glitter this high up. Far enough down, the chrome and platinum turned to rust and corroded iron just like any other spire. But when he saw the stark black slab of adamantite lumber into view, the Arbitrator couldn't stop a small smile from tugging the corners of his lips.

To a passerby the Monulix might have seemed ugly, unseemly, a brooding hulk amongst the roses. To Janos it was the most beautiful thing he ever saw. It stood separate from the glitter, apart from the temptations. The thick walls had the solidness of impregnability, the uncluttered design spoke to a straightforward mindset and Emperor help you if you underestimated that as a simple-mindedness because the Arbitrators were always vigilant.

No speeder traffic hovered around the central precinct, the Monulix had a no-flight cordon a kilometer wide, the only air traffic that circled it were the black hulls of Valkyries or Eagle shuttles like their own and on rare occasion the chrome-crusted speeder of a governmental representative.

Even the planetary governor had to ask politely and schedule his visits ahead of time. Those who didn't risked being expunged quite suddenly from their descendents' gene-pools courtesy of a barrage of armor-piercing flak.

Gun-batteries recessed in the black slab battlements tracked their progress and a pair of fixed-wing Thunderbolts in the black and crimson of Arbites colors flanked their approach, one drifting close enough for a visual inspection of the cockpit and its crew. Janos knew behind the sealed cockpit, the pilot would be issued security challenges and if he didn't countersign correctly, the other Thunderbolt would be hovering high in the sky, read to dive and force the shuttle to the ground.

If the shuttle tried something so foolish as opening fire or trying to evade, the Arbitrator piloting the Thunderbolt could shred it with a quick burp from four nose-mounted autocannons or just paint a lock and let one of eight Skystrike missiles do the work for him.

There were less intimidating commutes to work, but Janos would've been more worried if the pilots had allowed a shuttle to pass through seven security-vigils unchallenged just because it had the correct color scheme on its wings.

The shuttle cleared scrutiny and a minnow sized hole appeared in the Monulix as a hangar bay hatch cranked open.

Landing in the hangar and popping the hatch smelled like a homecoming. Janos and Silas disembarked into a perfume of sharp fyceline mixed with chemical cleaners and the crisp air salting in from the distant sea.

A group of arbitrators trotted past in the cavernous space with the clatter of armored boots and suppressor shields, heading for a Valkyire dropship idling on promethium fumes. Shock troops, probably bound for one of the planet's draft-riots.

Fellow troopers and enforcers passed them in the stark rectangular halls as the two left the hangar behind. Some Janos knew by more than notarized names and he nodded. Some even returned his nod. Only a few whispered quietly as he passed, most were disciplined enough to restrict themselves to pointed stares at a slim band of red-painted ceramite lipped below his collar.

Detectives were something of the third-armed stepchild of the Adeptus Arbites family. An Arbitrator dealt in absolutes. Gray areas were anathema to them, but the gray areas were what Detectives had to live in. Sometimes that meant ignoring lesser crimes, sometimes that meant actively participating in heretical activity to secure some criminal or heretic's trust and gain access to the more important targets, the lynch-pins of the operations.

Not many Arbitrators could handle that kind of unlawful elasticity, the record-rolls in the Detective Hall were filled with lists of promising Arbitrators with distinguished service records who'd failed, died, or become the very scum they were pretending to be after working too long, too deep in some undercover role. As a result, the rest of the Arbites tended to regard Detectives with equal amounts respect and suspicion.

"Destination?" Janos asked out of the corner of his mouth.

"Sub-mortuaries.' Silas responded.

Janos nodded as they stepped into a lift at the end of the hall.

The lifts were wide, designed to accommodate two rows of four abreast in carapace plates. Unlike the lifts found in most hab-blocks or civilian spires, these doors were solid slabs that could withstand heavy weapons fire or close tighter than a sealed vault if an unauthorized person – or even more unlikely, armed intruders – attempted to use them to move about the thousand-story complex.

The lifts stopped a dozen time. Janos stepped back to make room for a brusque judge and his etched-leather tome. Another pair of street judges crammed in as well, their armor still chapped from stub-rounds and a cloud of cordite smelled like they'd been practicing shotgun drills in a live-fire exercise.

The Judge he'd moved to make room for was giving the two of them curious glances. He'd noticed the discrepancy between Silas's and Janos's collars. Where Silas's was unadorned red, Janos sported a small black gothic I, with a human eye sigil in its center and a smaller gothic OM above it.

The Judge's body-language changed to something like suppressed panic and he shuffled a little farther away. Janos just kept his gaze fixed straight ahead at the blank doors and didn't acknowledge the slight.

Janos was an Omnicron rank psyker and a sanctioned one. He'd undergone the rites and received the Emperor's Light, but it didn't change the fact that he was afflicted with a mutant gene that at best case scenario gave him access to powers beyond human understanding, and worst case, made him a potential backdoor for a daemonic possession or incursion into the material world.

The judge got off on the next level even though it wasn't the archives. The pair of oblivious street-enforcers trotted off to their barracks. Silas flashed Janos a bemused glance and punched in his override code.

The next fifty levels flashed by much more smoothly until the doors opened on a layer deep beneath the marble covered floors of the upper precinct.

Here there was fewer ornamentation. This was not the display-halls of the upper floors where visitors, whether supplicants or governors, needed to be awed with the grandeur of the Emperor and His servants who enforced His laws.

These were the mortuary levels, only the coroner-morticians and their dead puzzles belonged here. The corridors were gunmetal gray, lit by flickering lumens ensconced across the ceiling. The air was chilled as Salmica's polar poles, and Janos could feel whispers at the back of his mind as they stepped into a small room lined with vaults set into the rockcrete walls.

One of the vaults had been opened and its body pulled out on the metal slab. Silas pulled back the plastek-fiber shroud and gestured at the ruined figure.

Janos had seen plenty of gore. On the scale of disturbing this one ranked in the middle as unique.

The body was still sheathed in a gloss-black bodyglove, something with a strangely shimmering weave to its patterns and multiple zip-pockets that set it apart from the drab charcoal body-gloves favored by the Arbites. There was no Y-shaped scar of a mortician's scalpel saw and the clearly augmetic eye had been left in the skull instead of carefully removed and handed over to the Verispex teams to track down and locate its point of origin.

A gaping hole in the chest of the bodyglove had allowed some sort of acid in and it'd chewed up the flesh from the inside out. At the same time the bodyglove had been tightly fitted. The result looked like someone had stuck a straw in and sucked.

The body's hands and upper arms had been dissolved to yellow-stained bone. Only a few gray strands of ligaments kept the bones together. Several fingers had given up the fight completely and lay in a neat pile along the tray. The face had been flensed as well, patches of yellow bone scraped out from bloody red strands of the muscles that once would have animated the body's face.

Now the only expression left on the corpse was a familiar one. A rictus grin of calcium teeth, the single faded blue eye remaining in its socket. The other had been flushed out completely in the acid soak.

"Am I going to ask the obvious, or are you going to tell me why we haven't done an autopsy yet?"

"I'll let the pict say it all for me." Silas handed over a piece of paper, "Seeing as how the article in question is sealed up tight in an air-vault under triple security vigils."

Janos looked at the pict. One eyebrow raised halfway up his brow, practically a scream of astonishment. "Is this…"

"It's not made out of papermache and glitterbeads if that's what you're asking."

"And he's-"

"As near as we can verify, yes, a dead agent of the Holy Ordos of the Imperial's Inquisition."

Silas unclasped the message tube, and activated the seal it with his gloveless palm. The gene-print clicked the lock open and he extracted a thin ream of parchment, crisp, white, and stained with writing and a holo-matrix seal holding the flickering light engrams of Sector Marshall Castellos Uriah.

"Your orders."

In beautiful gothic script, Sector Marshall Uriah, commander of the Adeptus Arbites of the Helican Sector, had authorized Janos Grenn, Arbitrator Detective third Echelon, a delegation four priority in the investigation and psychic reading of a dead body fished from an underhive pipe.

Somehow, the fact that the body in question was an Inquisitor failed to make the footnote. Janos lowered it carefully and looked at Silas. "This could ruffle some feathers."

"Most likely."

"And the Sector Marshall really thinks-"

"One doesn't risk the ire of the Inquisition on a whim, Janos." Silas grimaced and rubbed at his brow. "Obviously the legal precedent for this is shaky and it wouldn't slow the Inquisition at all if they care to take offense. If you refuse this, I'd say you've got a strong case for doing so. The Sector Marshall wants this kept under wraps, he won't bring this matter into a Judge's hall to be internally reviewed. Under the law, you can walk away from this one with all limbs reasonably intact."

"One question." Janos said quietly. "I'm just an Omnicron. Why not Equila, or Thurxin?"

"Uriah believes you were the only choice."

"And you agree with that decision?" There was a hint of a challenge in his voice.

Silas gave a thin-lipped smile. "I was the one who talked him into it."

Janos stared at the corpse for several moments. He blew out his cheeks and rubbed his chin, thumbing the scar under it. Then he shrugged "Alright then."

Silas exhaled slowly and nodded, "Thank you." He drew his bolt pistol and leveled it at Janos's skull. "Good luck in there." Janos nodded. The mind was the doorway to the soul. Stepping out always ran the risk of having something else step in. And if it did, it'd find a bolt-shot eviction notice.

Cold air rushed across his fingers as Janos removed his glove. Psyker talents were a mutation with dozens of different curses. One of the ways Janos's taint manifested was as an ability to glean impressions off of objects or subjects, memories, sounds associated with strong emotions or something the owner had thought frequently or powerfully about.

He rested his bare palm on the ravaged skull like he was about to give a benediction. Flesh-to-flesh made a better conduit and an Omnicron like Janos needed all the help he could get. He focused his will, fanned the ember of his taint, and blew.

Out.

Janos's breath suddenly plumed white in a way that had nothing to do with the room's chilly air. A sensation of frost crept down his brain and through his arm as psychic phenomena bled through his fleshed fingers to the bared bone of the corpse's skull.

Whispers prickled the air behind his ears. A moan with too many vocal chords drifted out of a sealed crypt-vault. The sealed hatch banged and shuddered and pinprick needles tapped his mind. Frost spread like rot across the walls and Silas's face turned strangely shadowed.

Distractions. Feints. Janos's lips moved, the upper rasping against the lower, murmuring out a warding catechism.

Love the Emperor, for He is the salvation of mankind. Whisper His prayers with devotion, for they will save your soul. Love the Emperor, for He is the salvation of mankind. Whisper His prayers with devotion, for they will save your soul…

The whispers shriveled back. The corpse-memory bloomed forward and suffocated his meager light and-

It was cold. It was dark. He was choking on liquid fire.

Acid splashed his face and sizzled his hands. The pain was exquisite and Janos ignored it, just as he ignored the arms flailing desperately in the liquid feces, and the pulsing agony of his heart punching blood out a hole in his chest. Those aren't my arms, that's not my flesh melting away into nothingness. It's. Not.

Janos pushed against the memory, straining his will against the ghost-story impregnated in the dead flesh. trying to take in the imagery. It was disjointed, confused, a shattered timelapse of the Inquisitor's last seconds of life, his final sights, his most intense fears.

A corpse worm crawling through the gap in an augmetic skull before leering jaws clamp down. Now it's thrashing, pale head peeling back to show lamprey teeth, screeching as its struggles only crush its own body. A wet shlick and half the worm falls with a plop into rushing water, the other half leaks black ichor down yellowed platinum teeth like a chewed off cigar.

He sank deeper into the corpse-memory, finding:

A curving tunnel. Liquid condensation with the acrid tang of factory-byproducts. Echoes in the dark. Lumen glowing on a blood red skull with a corpse-worm clenched in its smile, stained on permacrete walls. The worm seemed to writhe in the frizting light. The death-smile seemed to widen. This was the place to - Meet? Hunt? Find?

Die.

A click, the lightning flash of fiery cordite backlighting him. Janos screamed as his heart ejected into a visceral smear across a wall and he fell into A long, slow tumble into a rushing channel of cold water that burned like fire.

Far below, the distant glow of a scraptown tangle. Immediately ahead, the thundering roar of a wastefall. One word before the edge. Blacknife. A name? A killer? A place? Then blind eternity, clawing at him, at Janos, dragging him down to share the memory with it, share the corpse, share the fate and-

Janos's eyes snapped open with a sudden gasp. Something cold and hard was pressed against the back of his skull.

"Janos?"

Janos leaned over the corpse. Something bright and red was staining its skull. Janos touched his nose. "Cloth." His voice was a gaunt whisper. Silas didn't move. Neither did the bolt pistol. Janos squeezed his eyes shut against the pounding agony. "I could recite the Lex Imperialis while holding an aquila if you'd like."

Silas handed him a cloth. Janos staunched the blood dripping out of his nose and wiped a palm across his sweaty brow. He cycled his breath, inhaling and exhaling and when the splitting headache had dulled to a tender knot in his skull he opened his eyes again. "Paper."

Silas handed him a parchment scrap. Janos bent over it and sketched out a symbol. He paused and wrote down a word. After another pause, he added a question mark.

Silas took it from him and studied the symbol. A leering skull with a corpse-worm clenched between its teeth and underneath the word Blacknife

"What does it mean?"

Janos shook his head, "I don't know." He admitted.

"What else?"

"He was down in the tunnels...I think to meet someone, maybe that's not the best word. Encounter someone. Something. He was shot from behind. Large caliber. He fell into the water. That symbol and that word had him fixated. Even as the acid was eating into his flesh all he could think about was how he'd failed." Janos shook his head and shuddered. "He wasn't angry he'd failed. He was horrified he'd failed."

Janos took another breath, calming his thoughts, getting them back into order. "Whatever he was pursuing or trying to prevent...it was bad. It was very bad."

The provost sighed, "Did you see any trace of his killer? Anything at all?"

"Nothing. He never saw them."

Silas's "Janos. Think carefully. Was there anything?"

Janos shook his head slowly. "No...Silas, what's going on?"

Silas's face crumpled into a scowl. He glared at the corpse and shook his head. "We didn't perform an autopsy but Verispex techs pulled fragments of a shell from the fiber around the entry hole. We were able to match it. Quickly match it. He was killed by an Executioner shell."

Janos paused. He opened his mouth. He said, "Oh."

Janos was familiar with Executioner shells, and intimately aware of their lethality. Once a target's bio-spoor had been locked in, they were dead the moment the trigger got pulled. The seconds in between were just a formality.

An Executioner round would roll around obstacles and walls, zip between the press of bodies in a crowded street. Guided unerringly by the machine-spirit inside, nothing would it stop it from hitting its target and nothing short of solid carapace would even blunt its armor-piercing tip.

It was rare and expensive, only the Tech-Priests knew how to mate machine-spirit to ammunition like that and they supplied sealed crates of it to only one organization on Salmica Orbis. The Adeptus Arbites.

Silas gave Janos a grim little smile. It was almost sympathetic. "You asked why you? Now you know. For the past seven months you've been on an asteroid halfway across the system. You're the only one who's not a suspect."