III
TRACES

1
41 Pry, Golgenna Reach

He awoke to the hum of that soft, familiar voice.
The lady in red was a gentle blur to his sleep-sensitive eyes. Her youthful features were veiled by the faint lack of distinction, but her voice was deeply familiar - it filled him with joy and relief to hear it again.
She rocked him back and forth, pouring her adoration over him until he could properly make out her red eye and loving smile. She pulled back a stray lock of her silver hair with her gray-gold finger, and glanced off towards the doorway.
Content, she looked down at him again and began to sing her sweet song - the song she sang only for him. The dulcet tones quickly lulled him back to sleep...

Heidrich awoke again to the rattle of the overhead piping. Reality welcomed the Krieg-born back with cold arms, and he found himself momentarily too groggy to leave his pleasant rest.
He groaned as he sat up, supporting himself with a single hand against his mattress while he rubbed at his eyes with the other - the lights were on and making him wish he had never woken up. He leaned out of his bunk, almost forgetting there was a rail hanging in front of his forehead from the cot above him: The others were gone.
Dressing himself, the Korpsman took note of the metal jingling above him - counting the number of clinks made by the pipes had become a pass-time for him in the nights where sleep did not come, or in the days when he found himself waiting in the barrack.
Yawning, he unlatched the door.

Otokar Isnic did not need to glance over to know it was the Lady Inquisitor's meek little acolyte who had entered: Heidrich's step was made iconic by its orderliness and by its softness, the latter likely being a trait left over from experience with traveling through chem-soaked mud.
"Well, shit!" The gray-skinned bounty hunter slapped his razor down by the sink and glanced over at the Korpsman. "Thought you'd never wake up, boy!"
Heidrich coughed. "Sorry."
"Another of those dreams you keep mentioning?"
Jan Gerfrid was off on the other side of the locker room, Heidrich noted; as usual, he was not particularly interested in their conversation. The assassin was, however, too polite to ignore the Korpsman outright, and so held up a hand for a brief moment in greeting.
Heidrich looked back at Isnic. "Yeah, it... yeah, it was."
"Damn, kid. Talk about lucky. I bet a couple dreams every now and then would be a bit more interesting than the holovids they've got in the lounge."
Ingrid Hildegarn appeared from the showers then, wringing out her blonde hair with a towel, paying only a glance to the Korpsman's presence. Heidrich stared at her as she sat down by Gerfrid and began taking her clothes from her locker.
In fact, there was something about Hildegarn which had enraptured Heidrich ever since he first greeted her, when the Lady Inquisitor brought them all aboard the Wrath of Justice.
"Hey," Isnic grunted, snapping Heidrich's attention away from Hildegarn, "quit with the ogling, kiddo."
At this, the lithe and distractingly naked mercenary turned her head towards the two; Isnic cracked a smile at the predicament he had put the Korpsman in.
"I-I'm sorry, I wasn't-" Heidrich coughed again, as he realized he had a habit of doing at such embarrassing moments.
"Chill out, kid," Otokar Isnic said, picking up his razor as he turned again to his reflection. "Just go wash up already. Word is Inquisitor Freia wants us up on the bridge, ASAP." He made a popping noise with his lips on that last syllable, which reinforced the sarcastic pluck his voice carried.
Free from awkwardness, the Korpsman hurried on into the showers. As he passed, he dared glance over at Hildegarn - the mercenary was also looking at him, to his horror.
She winked at him with one of her blue eyes.
Heidrich blinked several times, and hurried along.

The Wrath of Justice was not the serene and orderly vessel the Lady Inquisitor was used to working with; quite the contrary - as was to be expected of Freia, the ship was about as disorderly as possible without breaking any real discipline code - it was not uncommon to find crew running through barracks as a routine shortcut to the opposite end of the deck, or for off-duty bridge-teams loitering even while the next shift worked around them. Freia had explained she preferred allowing the ship to run in whatever fashion was most efficient.
The Captain, however, confided with the Lady that Roslindis Freia used only the sharpest punishments whenever she encountered actual infractions. Once again, Freia had demonstrated her inability to part with her upbringing in the Arbites.
The ship herself was a manifestation of her master's persona: She was a tough, well-armed warrior, narrowly avoiding a Navy definition of light cruiser due to her being more than a kilometer shorter than the Dauntless-class; nevertheless, the Lady Inquisitor imagined the Wrath of Justice could take the Valkyrie on equal footing.
Could have, the Lady Inquisitor reminded herself. The Valkyrie was being repaired with the utmost priority in drydock over Synford, but the damage done was so horrendous that, as the original survey had foreseen, the work would take just over a full year for it to even be in a voidworthy condition again.
The Lady Inquisitor glanced up from her book as the chamber door opened - in stepped Freia's retinue, with Heidrich carefully skulking in-tow.
Freia glanced over at them as she finished one last press-up, then promptly got to her feet. "Well," she wittedly said, stretching out her arms, "took you long enough."
The Lady Inquisitor stood up. "We managed to get docking and resupply permission for Station Forty-One by convincing them this is a Rogue Trader."
"Of course, we'd rather they didn't find out otherwise," Freia added. "So, the Lady and I will be sticking back for a bit."
"Surely that isn't necessary," Heidrich said. "You two can just disguise yourselves, can't you?"
"Oh, but we rather think it necessary, kiddo," the Lady Inquisitor said. "So, in our place, the four of you will be donning disguises to track down our target."
"And what would that target be?" Isnic asked, folding his arms.
Freia stepped up to the table in the midst of the room and thumbed over a few of the activation sigils upon its side; a hologram of a wanted poster flickered into sight over the tabletop. "You're going to track this piece of garbage down" the Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor told them.
"Uygur Franik," the Lady Inquisitor explained, stepping around the holo-display. " Wanted by the Scintillan office of the Magistratum for murder, unwarranted distribution of restricted substances, trafficking of proscribed beasts, and unsafe navigation of orbital trade lanes. The lowest of the low, really. When the Turas-Hie administration began to scatter from Scintilla, Franik was contacted by Chair Secretary Tynods Hael. Apparently, Hael was desperate for offworld transport, but wanted his trail to be masked. Getting a smuggler to move you around is the easiest way to avoid being picked up."
"That is, if your tracker is ordinary law enforcement," Freia added. "As little as a competent Arbites team of Investigators can pick you out of the hiding spaces aboard a smuggler with a full, proper sweep of the ship. A competent Inquisitor can find you before you take off."
The Lady nodded at the implication behind her associate's comment. "Hael was basically Chairman Ludorf's student. Tynods was going to assume the position of Chairman when Ludorf gave up the ghost, but he is presently unable to take that office, considering he's running as far from it as he can. Reign in Franik, and then we'll find out where Hael has gone. It's clear he's part of this, judging from his little flight. Plus, I think he's afraid."
"Of us?" Gerfrid mused.
"I don't know." The Lady Inquisitor's doubt spoke volumes, though Heidrich was hard-pressed to think of anything more immediately terrifying than the Inquisition.
"This Vok guy," Freia took a moment to stretch, "I can't help but notice he's really got his lackeys afraid of him. It would take a lot to make them want to scatter."
"That's pretty damn typical, though," Isnic grunted, pointing a finger as though to indicate his employer's words. "That fear-thy-master thing, I mean. I bet Vok's got them all running off to avoid us getting ahold of them."
"You're forgetting that assassin who beat us to Driaan," the Lady Inquisitor countered. "Given there aren't many excommunicated groups that can teleport a person out of the midst of a hive, then cover up their tracks, I'm willing to put money down that this was Vok's doing."
"Incidentally, we don't know a thing about this Yrtzen Vok," Hildegarn finally spoke up. "I think we ought to do something about that."
The Lady Inquisitor nodded. "We're already working on it. Now get moving. Franik hides out somewhere on the station – try posing as a potential buyer of some of his products to get an audience with him."
Freia clicked her heels - her signal for her retainers to leave. Heidrich emulated the others and left.
Freia leaned back against the table, watching the group leave… more specifically, the thin Korpsman that kept to the back. "He's an odd one," she said as soon as the door shut. "I guess he's trustworthy enough, but he looks like he'd break under much pressure."
"I've been trying to pin his personality for a while now. He's ridiculously shy, but at the same time it seems to take a lot to scare him. I'm still shocked he didn't run at the sight of that daemon in Tarsus… hell, I think it would have been more sensible to run in that case." The Lady Inquisitor smiled, and looked over at Freia. "What do you think about him? Aside from him being odd."
"I think he's a bit too tense, too concerned about leaving a good impression. Didn't you say you picked him up as a compromise or something?"
"I was told to take him for the sake of his survival. It was kind of a debt to a man I caused a lot of stress." The Lady took a moment to ponder whether the label of 'stress' sufficed for the loss of one's legs.
"Yeah, exactly. I think he wants to prove his worthiness, but he keeps quiet because he thinks he'll embarrass himself," Freia concluded. "That must be it. Explains his shyness. So there's that, and the fact that he's from the Death Korps."
"What's so wrong with that? I think their conviction makes them wonderful agents."
"Maybe, but from what I hear, their lives are all about war. Navigating civilian life must be really awkward for Heidrich there."
"At the start, actually, it was," the Lady conceded. "If you haven't noticed, he doesn't like to part with his uniform."
Freia stopped talking for a few seconds, and then frowned. "Ingrid's right, we don't have the first bit of info on this Vok character."
The Lady Inquisitor shrugged. "I already said, I'm working on it."
"How, exactly," Inquisitor Freia grunted as she began to stretch out her arms again, "are you working on it?"
"Don't worry about that right now," the Lady Inquisitor said with a wave of her hand. "Right now, let's just focus on Hael. Start small, you know? When it comes to this sort of treachery, that's the only way we can work."
"Focus on Hael. Right," Freia returned to her exercises while the Lady Inquisitor picked up her latest book, The Wailer in the Night, and began to read.

Roslindis Freia's operational style generally tended to involve somewhat-open investigations and manhunts, all typically resulting in long chases down alleys and through dockyards; her Acolytes, however, grew weary of the Arbites method of approach, and when operating independently of their master they tended to lean towards acts of subterfuge.
Locating Uygur Franik's den was simple enough – as it turned out, he had made his base out of a ramshackle series of sheet-metal fortifications within the 'slum' district of the station, which was really a series of primary cargo compartments hanging quite precariously to the tail-end of the station; Franik lived as a proprietor of drink-houses and gambling-holes among the permanent residents, many of whom were descended from destitute pilgrims unable to pay their ill-reputed carriers for further travel. In finding Franik's location, Isnic discovered Heidrich's offsetting attire to have been sufficient to intimidate the superstitious lot, who feared the wrath of a higher power with the arrival of this skull-adorned figure – Franik was a known debauchee, a fact which won him little respect in a town of the Emperor-fearing downtrodden.
After regathering, Freia's agents decided on their favored two-pronged technique to get in: Isnic and Heidrich would go up to the front, claiming with a criminal's furtive vagueness to have interest in brokering a deal with Franik over shipments of ghostpollen, while Hildegarn and Gerfrid broke in through whatever might be considered a rear-entrance; after some scouting, Gerfrid found such an entrance, and the duos started their operation.
At this point, Isnic supposed that Heidrich's attire was sufficient to spook Franik's guards, who immediately opened fire the instant the two agents appeared from the gate approach.
Isnic took a glancing shot to his right shoulder, which lodged itself into the flak padding under his coat, and immediately thereafter he used the force behind the shot to help him slide into cover behind a delivery cart loaded with casks of rotgut on the left, unslinging his Armageddon-Pattern; Heidrich, slightly behind the bounty hunter, had gotten back behind the steel wall which the gateway was built into.
Light-caliber rounds punctured the steel skin of one of the rotgut casks above Isnic, and he quickly found himself being showered with yellowish brown brew. "That's it!" he shouted; Heidrich glanced over at him, keeping his head in cover while he brought up his carbine. "Now I'm pissed!" the bounty hunter roared, and immediately stuck his autogun out of cover and fired blindly towards the guards.
"Move up!" Isnic shouted to Heidrich over the gunfire; the Korpsman complied, and ran through the doorway: The two guards had hidden behind a pair of solid-looking rockrete barricades, and were keeping in-cover while Isnic suppressed them. Heidrich stormed forward with a practiced efficiency, getting down behind a similar barrier further ahead of Isnic; as the bounty hunter stopped firing, one guard immediately popped up and tried to aim for Heidrich, but fell back as a las-beam cracked through his sternum, and Heidrich hid just as the other came out and fired a trio of rounds at him. Heidrich immediately fumbled about his front pockets for where he had hid a frag grenade, regretting the notion of 'subtlety' he had been considering when he stripped down his field-kit.
"Wait!" Isnic shouted just as the Korpsman moved to pull the triggering-pin. "Wait a tick! More of them!" Heidrich leaned out just long enough to see the front door of the building slam open and reveal four guards filing through. Heidrich waited a moment for them to get out in the open before he flicked the pin away and lobbed the grenade out at them. When the blast hit and quick screams slipped forth from Franik's guards, the Korpsman's training took over and he immediately charged out of cover, finding four of the guards dead and the fifth in cover, wounded; Heidrich turned his upper body and fired without even stopping, killing the man with a shot to his unprotected chest.
Isnic caught up with Heidrich as he stopped up against the doorway. While the Korpsman peered in, Isnic immediately clicked his micro-bead on. "Gerfrid!" he snapped; Heidrich reeled back before a las-round whizzed by where his nose had been.
The micro-bead's earpiece clicked. "We hear you," Gerfrid calmly said.
"Listen, we've got trouble! I think they were expecting us!" Isnic explained to his partner.
"No, we can hear your gunfire," Gerfrid replied. "I have little doubt they were expecting us."
A shrill cry came from through the doorway – Heidrich had managed to pick off one of the guards inside with a shot on the snap. "At least eight more in there," the Korpsman announced, his voice muffled to an almost insubstantial rumble by his mask.
Isnic turned his head to the other side. "You getting something like this too?" he asked Gerfrid.
"Yes. They had a man on duty on both sides of the door. I spotted one behind a shutter on the second story as well, and as far as I know he hasn't moved."
"You inside?" Isnic asked as he fired through the doorway.
"Yes. You can't be much more than twenty meters away, judging by the noise. Also, given this place's size and layout I think Franik's got an escape plan."
"Noted. We'll hurry up," Isnic said, and readied his gun again. "Think we can run in?" Heidrich nodded.
"Alright, watch my back!" Isnic grunted as he swung around the edge of the doorway, rushing through in a crouched position; lasfire whizzed by precariously close overhead as Heidrich opened fire on the room and followed Isnic; the bounty hunter found cover behind an overturned table and the Krieger dropped down to his left behind a decorative partition – clearly Franik's hideout doubled as a drinking den for the locals, and the severe lack of patronage suggested he really was planning on the agents' coming.
Isnic glanced up out of cover and counted a good four guards on his side; a set of rounds pattering into the table to the side suggested there were at least two to the left. The bounty hunter pulled a grenade out of his backpack, pulled the triggering-pin, and gently skipped it across the floor; a few moments later, it exploded, and a bloody autopistol landed with a clatter at Isnic's feet. The bounty hunter glanced over at the Korpsman, who had downed one of his two targets, and was keeping the second, a particularly well-armored mercenary with a rebreather, suppressed.
Then, the remaining guard tossed something out of cover, taking a las-round to the unarmored backside of his arm. Isnic stared with some expression of surprise when he saw the riot-grenade clink between him and the Korpsman.
"Choke gas!" Isnic shouted as the bomb detonated, spitting out a thick cloud of the most debilitating irritants the Corlon-Tair forges could legally obtain for their Arbites commission; in seconds the unprotected bounty hunter was doubled over, trying to suppress a horrendous cough, and the dark-grey rings around his eyes had taken on a rare hint of red.
At this point Isnic was now grateful to the Korpsman for being so attached to his uniform. Heidrich had already moved ahead after making sure Isnic was fine, and put a beam into the wounded grenadier's face. "Franik! Find Franik!" Isnic tried to breath, but each heave felt as though there were no air available, and his lungs stung with each inhalation. "Get Franik!"
Heidrich quickly nodded and rushed down the small hallway in the back of the den, finding an open door to a cramped staircase; further down the hall was another series of doors, which he immediately moved to investigate. The closest room was a storage unit, with a reinforced maintenance hatch sitting open in the center.
Heidrich's micro-bead clicked. "Second floor is clear," Gerfrid announced. "Target is not on the second floor, and is not outside the premises either. Found Hael... looks like he hanged himself."
Isnic's coughing immediately flooded the channel. "Heidrich! Franik must be getting away! Look for him!"
With little better to go by than a hunch, Heidrich slipped down through the maintenance hatch to find himself on one end of a very long corridor. Every few seconds the shape of a mid-sized man flickered against the yellow light cast from beneath a series of grated floor panels further ahead.
Uygur Franik, the Korpsman presumed.
Heidrich immediately gave chase, quickly finding his heavy layers of clothing to now once again be a curse amidst the exposed piping and electronics which lined the walls; it was not long before Franik took notice of him and began firing back with his laspistol, maintaining as poor accuracy as he could achieve.
As sparks flew from bad shots and compressed gas mixtures hissed out of ruptured piping Heidrich attempted to fire back, but was not willing to stop moving, and so suffered from equally bad aim. Realizing he would never catch up as it was, the Korpsman began to unbutton his greatcoat, and forced his way free of the sleeves and buckles, pulling away his helmet and mask and leaving it all in a trail of abandoned kit behind him.
Heidrich, now protected only by the cloth of his tunic, renewed his chase, blinking away the sweat that dripped into his eyes. Franik opened an automated airlock, cutting the distance between the two in half as the smuggler waited for the door to slide open. Heidrich passed through the airlock and it immediately resealed itself behind him; as soon as Heidrich was through, Franik stopped, turned, and fired off a burst. Three of the smuggler's lasrounds did catastrophic damage to a thick power cable, and the fourth hit Heidrich in the arm like a heavy punch. Heidrich fell backwards, suddenly aware that he felt weightless; intuition initially told the Korpsman he was going into shock, but then he realized he was floating backwards: Franik had managed to cut the power to the grav-plating here.
Both Heidrich and Franik struggled with the new loss of force, and an unprofessionally incautious step had sent the smuggler bouncing against the ceiling, caught twisting about until he could take hold of a gas line and stop his momentum; Heidrich grabbed onto a bundle of wires, and tried to stop himself. The landbound Krieger took a moment to test his feel for his weightlessness – he saw Franik attempting to swing his way forward, and concluded that he had to do something or lose his quarry.
Heidrich forced his feet against the front of the airlock, still considering whether his plan would work; he crouched down against the door, pushing back to keep from floating off again… then he pushed forward, letting go of his support, taking on a form quite like a diver making the plunge; Franik groped hopelessly at his gun as it rolled away from him, desperate to reach it before the Korpsman reached him.
Heidrich collided with the smuggler just as he got ahold of the laspistol, causing him to once again lose grip of it. The two tumbled forward down the hall, banging against walls; they punched and kicked at one-another, Franik desperately trying to break free while Heidrich attempted to subdue the smuggler. Ultimately the Korpsman claimed victory, for he was on top when they fell to the floor in an area where the grav-plates had not been affected by the gunfire. Heidrich tore his knuckle with a knock-out blow that likely broke Franik's cheekbone.
Panting, the Korpsman got up off the unconscious form of Uygur Franik, and looked down the degravitized corridor – the last thing he wanted to try was carrying his target down that way.
Heidrich put a hand to his micro-bead, appreciating for the first time the adrenaline-induced twitch in his fingers. "This is Heidrich," he paused to take a deep breath, and looked down the hall: There was a ladder leading up to a trapdoor a few meters ahead. "I've got Franik. I'm little ways off, so I'll try to meet up with you again."
"Alright! Good work, kiddo!" Isnic said, the rasp in his voice intensified by the choke gas. "Try to bring him back here. You need Gerfrid to find you on auspex?"
Heidrich rolled his arms in their sockets to try to subdue his combat-high. "I'll try to see where I'm at, first…"
The Korpsman remembered suddenly that he was no longer equipped with most of his gear - he felt an embarrassed warmth flush over his face. "Can someone pick up my stuff? I left my gear down along the corridor."

Among the things which the agents found in Franik's den, chiefly of interest was Chair Secretary Tynod Hael's corpse hanging from a piece of torn wire; second in the way of attention-getting was a voice-wafer that proclaimed, in a disturbingly deep voice, "they are coming for you – there is no escape."
A while after sneaking Franik back aboard the Wrath of Justice, dodging any possible associates of the smuggler in-port, the prisoner awoke to find himself bound to a harshly-angled metal seat – it took little more than a few low-power whacks from Freia's power maul before Franik finally broke his vow of silence – which he assured the Inquisitors was on pain of agonizing death – and explained how Hael had contacted him for passage to Canopus; when the message on the voice-wafer arrived, the Secretary had gone hysterical, and the moment he was alone had killed himself.
After loud praise from the Lady and Freia, the Inquisitorial agents went about their own business again. Heidrich returned to his bunk to get some rest.
He sat back against the wall behind his cot, holding out Ersabet's holo in front of him; the thought occurred to him that he ought to stop carrying it on his person, lest something damage it during a gunfight.
The door unlatched, and Ingrid Hildegarn entered.
"That was a pretty impressive story you told in debrief," she said, catching the Korpsman's attention as she sat down on the cot across the aisle from him, "what with the zero-G tackle and all. I have to wonder if it was true or not."
Heidrich sat forward, and saw her smiling at him – she was teasing him.
The surface of the holo glinted in the light; Ingrid looked down at it. "Who is that?"
Heidrich coughed nervously, and tilted the picture back towards himself. "Ah, just an old image."
"Of who?" Hildegarn leaned forward. "A service-buddy?"
Heidrich paused and glanced about the room. "Yes."
"Can I see?" Hildegarn asked, holding out her hand. Heidrich stood still for a moment, before stiffly handing her the portrait. Ingrid stared at Ersabet's image for a short while, and Heidrich in-turn stared at Ingrid.
Hildegarn looked up at Heidrich again. "Who is she?" she asked.
"She was a friend."
"Is that it?"
"I guess."
Hildegarn breathed, then leaned forward off the cot. "What was her name?" she asked, giving the holo back.
"Ersabet," Heidrich admitted.
"I see," Ingrid smiled again. "So that's all it was. I just reminded you of her."
Heidrich sat up straight, hitting the back of his head against the rail: Blue eyes and blonde hair, and the two had very similar faces. "I-I'm sorry if I offended you, I-"
"Don't worry about it," Hildegarn warmly said, brushing a hand through her hair. "I think it's kind of cute, really."
She stood up. "You should come with me. You ought to hang out with us in the lounge… don't be a stranger."
Slowly, Heidrich nodded, rubbing the back of his head. "Okay."
Ingrid clasped her hands around the Korpsman's own. "Great. Come on, Heidrich. You need to live a little."
Letting himself be led on, Heidrich decided he agreed with the Lady Inquisitor and Hildegarn on that point.