IV
VERITAS

1
Canopus, Josian Reach

The lady in red appeared again. She took him up in her arms, making him giggle as she rocked him back and forth, before she began to sing to him again. For a few moments he closed his eyes and enjoyed the cool, loving caress of her cold gray hands and the sweet tune of lullaby.
Then the door swung open. The lady in red howled, immediately shoving him back into the cradle before turning to some unseen foe and charging towards the door. The wet snap of broken bone rang against the walls as more shouts burst out; the lady in red grunted and snarled and screamed, and for a moment he could see her fighting with something, struggling, until she was pulled away, still screaming and crying and flailing.
Then the skull-face stared down at him, and a pair of black hands shrouded the world in shadows as the lady in red cried out-

"Heidrich!"
He awoke.
"Finally," came Isnic's throaty growl.
Heidrich's blurry eyes registered the figure looming over him; he groaned, and slapped at his eyes with a numbed hand, only to find a solid block of spray-cast where his palm ought to be. He dimly remembered then that his entire right hand was still healing after a month. Beating himself with a piece of concrete proved more effective for waking him up than a slap from his hand.
"Sorry, sorry…" Heidrich said, rubbing at his eyelids.
"Kid, you really like to sleep. You know that?" Isnic stepped back to let the Korpsman slip out from his bunk.
"Sorry, I-"
"Another dream. Right," Isnic grunted, folding his arms.
Heidrich turned his head to Hildegarn, who sat on her bunk to the left of him. "Good morning," she said to him plainly. "Or evening, as it is where we're going to be dropping at."
Isnic snorted, and tapped his chest with his thumb. "We," he echoed. "A damn shame about you, though, Heidrich. The Lady Inquisitor doesn't want you going and picking fights alongside us."
"What?" Heidrich blurted out, and then immediately felt stupid for asking, as the itch of his arm in its cast taunted him.
"She's apparently got some other work for you. Wants you to stand and look intimidating for her, I guess." Hildegarn slipped off her cot, and held her hand out for Heidrich. "Let's get you into some proper clothes."
"Alright." Heidrich took her hand in his, and slid out from his bed. Isnic stepped out, leaving Ingrid and Heidrich together, standing, staring at one-another.
"We probably should get going," Hildegarn said.
The Korpsman nodded. "Probably," he repeated - the two shared a chuckle, then Ingrid leaned forward on the tips of her feet and kissed his cheek.
"I'm sorry we don't get to fight together," she told him. Heidrich shrugged, and left the room hand-in-hand with her.

Canopus was a world chilled to its core, where the cold put down anything of excitement. The frigid air of Canopus was only marginally intolerant to human life, but nevertheless the nobility of the world resolved to shield themselves from the planet's air by building up their hives into all-encompassing superstructures, cities built from singular spires. All around the hives were the clustered shanties of the peasantry who, in want of some other labor, were put to work in the local manufactories. A thousand different cultures had sprouted up amongst the downtrodden– tribes waged war for scraps, communities pooled resources for sustenance, and "rubble-lords" attempted to influence manufactory labor with petty unions.
The bright snowfall covering the village stung at Heidrich's eyes. Deep footsteps peppered the streets, and though the paths were quiet and empty at the moment, the Korpsman could make out, all around him, the work of children at play: small trench networks ran from house-to-house, half-trampled by later traffic, while stocks of snowballs piled up on the edges of the no man's land between the miniature defense lines. Heidrich could not help but smile, though the thought of siege opened up unpleasant memories.
"Damn me," the Lady Inquisitor said under her breath, glancing from shack to shack. "It was so easy the last time…"
Heidrich tightened his scarf around his lower face and, not quite sure how to respond to the Lady's mumbling, shivered – she had forbid him wear his "gruesome" mask, as she referred to it.
"Ah!" The Lady suddenly stiffened, causing Heidrich to place his left hand on the holster out of caution - but the Lady simply strode forward into the deepest snow of the children's warzone, wading through it towards a particular hab, determined to keep her right arm hidden beneath her cloak. Heidrich followed.
As the Lady approached the scrap-metal shack, the door, plowed clear of restricting snowfall, slowly creaked open: a woman appeared in the doorway, heavily dressed to resist the cold. As the Lady Inquisitor approached, the woman stepped out into the snow, clutching at the cloth of her bosom.
The Lady stopped a few meters from the woman, slipped her right hand out from beneath the folds of her cloak, and revealed an object covered tight with grey cloth and bound with strings of nylon – the butt of a folding stock stuck out from one end of the cover.
The woman glanced at Heidrich, and her face contorted in a mix of confusion and fear. "Aren't you…"
Worried he was misidentified, Heidrich pulled down his scarf. Just then, a man, tired and dirty with machine oil, peered out at them from the edge of the hab's entrance.
The woman looked at the parcel the Lady carried, and her features twisted into an expression of pure horror; she heaved, and collapsed into the snow, sobbing, crying, all the while watched by the man in the doorway.
For what seemed minutes, the other three among them stood still, watching wordlessly as a mother cried for her son.

Alarms started blaring the instant Freia took the face off the Skitarius with a high-setting swing of her power maul. The tech-adept standing by immediately turned and fled, yowling in fear while the Inquisitor began swinging the maul at the manufactory gate.
"You sure there's no other way in?" Freia shouted back at Gerfrid; the assassin simply shrugged. "Try to find one, then! You and Ingrid, you both go find some other entrance!"
A team of Skitarii, armed with hellguns, opened fire on them from an alcove to the left, forcing Freia's team to cover.
"Forget it!" The Inquisitor shouted. "Oto, get a grenade on them already! That's our way in!"
Isnic tugged on Ingrid's coat as he leapt to his feet. "Cover me!" he shouted to her and stormed forward. Hildegarn shouldered her autogun and began firing on the red-robed augmetic soldiers, catching one with a shot to the abdomen before the rest ducked into the buttresses along the building's wall. Isnic pushed on, ignoring the las-fire bearing down on him. He pulled a frag grenade from his belt and, popping the pin off with his thumb, tossed the explosive, hitting one of the Skitarii square in the face with it before it detonated.
All that remained of that first squad of reinforcements were scattered bodies wrapped in red rags. Inquisitor Freia immediately seized the chance, running across the snow to where the Skitarii had appeared from. "Let's go, let's go!" She shouted back at her team.
Hildegarn hesitated for a moment, half-expecting more resistance to emerge from the alcove, but complied, falling in between Isnic and Gerfrid as they pushed on into the fane of Magos Ordinatos Xiatin.

Heidrich felt more uncomfortable than he could remember ever being. The husband of the crying woman had calmed his wife down to a point where she agreed to at least relocate her weeping to the living space within the hab; as his wife had stumbled back in, hunched over and still breathing heavily, the man had asked the Lady and Heidrich to enter.
A fire burned in a makeshift hearth on one wall, connected by a hose to a fat promethium canister, but the flames did not seem to be able to heat the room, even with the warmth which had escaped while the door had been open – there was no real insulation to the building.
Now seated by the fire and covered with a heavy blanket, the woman, her face raw-red as she desperately rubbed away her tears before they could freeze, attempted to bring her breath under control. "I thought-" she spat out, before pausing to once again heave. "Santi was a good boy, he – no matter what people he was around, he-" she moaned, and buried her face in her blanket.
The husband came over and handed the Lady and Heidrich each a steaming steel mug. "Warmed amasec," he told them as he sat down by his wife. "Kept it stored for years. At any rate, I guess my wife and I want to know, your grace…"
He looked up at the Lady Inquisitor, and narrowed his eyes. "We… we want to know how it happened." Immediately, he remembered himself, and cleared his throat. "And - and you have our thanks for bringing back the lasgun. It's… all we have of him, now."
The Lady nodded. "I know."
The wife looked up at them, attempting to say something – and finally she did. "Santi found that gun… he found it out in the junkyards by the manufactory. Did he tell you that story? He brought it home and - and for months he worked and worked on it. He… he said he'd use it to help keep us safe, he always did."
The Lady nodded again. "I know."
Heidrich hid his confusion by lifting his scarf back over his mouth then staring down into his mug.

Hildegarn was beginning to lose her patience with crowds.
The suddenness of the group's attack had sent the manufactory's labor force into something akin to a riot: crowds pushed and pulled at one-another, limbs flailing madly, shadows flickering against the hot glow of munition presses and open furnaces. The poor lighting and confusion made the process of picking out a target's location nightmarish.
Powerful las-beams cut through the crowds, determined to chance upon Freia's group; Isnic opted to simply toss his grenades indiscriminately in the general direction of the gunfire's source. Metal screeched and more people screamed as an explosion sent body parts – both natural and artificial – spraying out about the manufactory floor.
More las-fire streaked through the air, from multiple directions. Freia resorted to shouting vague orders as she pulled her Fatebringer from its holster and fired into the gloom. Amidst it all, Hildegarn began to question the point of her own presence – she was an infiltrator, so she told herself, not a raider. Then her thoughts turned to Heidrich…
Hildegarn narrowly avoided a las-beam to the face, and cursed herself for being careless before opening fire in her assailant's direction.

After several minutes, the husband spoke up again: "how did it happen?"
"I can't tell you," the Lady Inquisitor said, softly.
"What do you mean you can't?" the wife snapped.
"Alina, please don't," the husband said weakly.
"What do you mean, 'don't,' Mal?" the wife hissed. "This is our son we're talking about!"
Heidrich dared look up as the husband turned his head to the Lady again. "I understand your secrecy, and I am sorry for questioning it, but please… we wish to know," the husband said.
"I told you, I can't…" The Lady repeated, eliciting a sigh from the husband. "Your son died heroically," she tried to explain. "I would have his name carved into the base of the Golden Throne as tribute to his valorous-"
"What will that do for us?" the wife screamed, leaning forward, wincing at the Lady, who bowed her head. "I want my son back! I want my baby Santi back!"
The wife looked at Heidrich then. "And who is he? Is that supposed to be my son's replacement?" her words had taken on a hateful tone; Heidrich looked away, unable to bear the sight of her. "How could you do that? You come here and call our Santi a hero-"
"Alina," the husband called.
"- And at the same time you come here and you mock us with the next person lined up to do your filthy work!"
"Alina!" the husband shouted. "You're yelling at an Inq-"
"I know what I'm yelling at, Mal!" the wife cried. "I'm yelling at the person who killed our sweet, darling boy!"
"I beg you hear me, Inquisitor, grant us mercy." The husband looked over at the Lady, who lifted her head again – she had managed to keep a stony face through the bout. "My wife knows not what she says, she is riddled with grief, she means no disrespect-"
"I mean every word of what I say!" the wife howled. "I mean it! This woman is dirt!"
The Lady Inquisitor looked away. "I'm sorry," she gasped.
The wife was quiet for a few seconds, then. Heidrich looked from her, to her husband, to the Lady, before it started up again:
"Get out," the wife demanded.
The husband lifted a hand towards her. "Alina, you can't-"
"Get out!" the wife screamed; the Lady Inquisitor complied, and stood up, followed by Heidrich. "I never want to see you again! You murderer! You monster!"
The insult-throwing continued as the Korpsman and the Lady stepped out into the snow. The two could hear the woman's screaming even as they retreated away from the block.
After a few minutes of walking the Lady stopped, and took a deep breath. "I brought you along, kiddo, because I felt you needed to see that," she said.
"Why?"
"So you know how lucky you are," the Lady somberly told him. "You don't have anyone that will get that worked up over you when you die."
The Lady Inquisitor's pessimism was painful to the Korpsman. "Who was Santi?" he asked her.
"Santi…" She sighed and looked up at the grey sky. "Santi was one of my acolytes in the investigation leading up to the Trojus affair. While your regiment was besieging the city, I went into its heart and killed a daemonhost responsible for controlling the minds of the civilians."
The Lady looked around, as though to make sure nobody was watching them. "In the thick of the fighting, I got separated from my team. Santi saved Lamortes from his own demise by getting the daemonhost to chase him. By the time I arrived, he was..." She closed her eyes and shook her head.
"You didn't punish those people back there," Heidrich pointed out. "Don't you have the authority to do so?"
The Lady stopped, and turned to Heidrich, giving him a soft, fake smile. "Kiddo, when your friend was executed, did you not feel any anger?"
Heidrich thought on it for a moment, then shook his head.
"No animosity towards the Korps, for what they did?"
"Not that I can think of, no."
"You're a rarity then, if that's the case." The Lady Inquisitor started walking again. "When a mother finds out her child's been killed, she can react in many ways… I don't think it quite right to deny them their grief."
She looked over at Heidrich. "Just understand how fortunate you are that you have nothing… nobody to lose."

Freia had been planning on finding the Magos locked away up in his sanctum, cowering feebly as they broke in to take him captive - that had been her mistake, for the man-machine which burst through the brass gates into the hallway, stomping on metal hooves, shoulder-mounted heavy stubber firing, was no weak old man.
Freia went to ground as the stubber opened upon her squad, but Gerfrid had not been so lucky: a spray of large-caliber bullets tore apart his leg at the midthigh, forcing him to the floor. Isnic was grazed along his forearm, his flesh saved by the carapace plates sewn into his hide-coat's sleeves.
Freia slinked from the weapons crate she had initially gotten behind and into place behind one of the support ribs along the wall. Almost immediately, however, she was forced out to the open again as a grenade, launched from an arm-mount on Xiatin's exosuit, came flying at her – the Inquisitor tucked and rolled as the explosive detonated and sprayed shrapnel where she had been hiding, and immediately her carapace absorbed another string of hits from the stubber before she could get back to her feet and dodge.
Xiatin's aim turned away from Freia as she sprinted to cover behind another support rib even closer to him; she glanced back over her shoulder in time to see the gunfire rip into Hildegarn, before a bright streak from yet another weapon on the Magos's exosuit took the flesh off the mercenary's face while she was twisted to the side by the stubber-fire; the end result of the beam's path was a wall, which promptly disintegrated into nothing.
"Conversion beamer!" Freia shouted, now thoroughly desperate as the conversion beam projector's recharging reactors whirred – how a forge world Magos had managed to get his hands on such a weapon only panicked her more.
Gerfrid, having dragged himself to one of the crates, propped his sniper rifle up atop the container and took a shot which put a hole in the projector's upper rail and tore open one of the coolant hoses running along the body of the weapon. The beamer's connections to Xiatin's exoskeleton popped out almost immediately thereafter and the weapon was ejected from its mount, spilling coolant across the floor before finally dying without energy to feed its building reactions.
The Magos apparently had not calculated for the shift in weight-distribution, and nearly fell over once the damaged projector was free from its carriage on the underside of his arm; Freia took the opportunity to charge before his stubber's targeting could track her, and first took off the suit's arm and the Magos's hand with a swing of her maul, then destroyed the right leg's joint motors and Xiatin's foot. The exosuit toppled over, but Freia continued to disarm it, breaking off guns she had not even anticipated to find on it: a needle rifle, a shotcannon, a meltagun, and a flamer which she paused to damage just before she made the mistake of fracturing its fuel canister.
The Magos finally lifted the mess of wires which had once been his right hand through his body-cage, and wheezed.
"I surrender," he rasped, "please, I surrender."
Freia stopped, and staggered back. Satisfied that Xiatin seemed to be rendered completely defenseless, she looked back at the mess which had once been her team: Gerfrid was attempting to stop the flow of blood at the stump of his leg while Isnic attempted to apply a spray of synth-skin to stop the bleeding.
Only then did Freia focus on the pool of blood where Hildegarn lay, and her heart sank.

Santi had been one of the Lady Inquisitor's favorite retainers, so she told Heidrich. Although he had never been quite comfortable beyond the dead cold of Canopus, he had consistently proven himself to be one of the most devoted members of her team.
Santi had done much of the wetwork which led to the daemonhost Iraktalh; Santi had caught the corrupt planetary governor of Tanthos before he could escape his palace; Santi had saved the Lady Inquisitor from an ambush in the low alleys of Scintilla's Gunmetal City; Santi had gone back in a burning Sororitas Convent to pull out his trapped comrades…
"Santi was…" The Lady sighed. "I guess you could call him the everything-man. He was loyal and understanding, stoic and strong… I picked him up out of necessity – when I took the Iraktalh case I realized Moerchen, Maddox and I wouldn't cut it, so I dropped down to the first planet I could find, and… well, Santi happened to be the first one I picked up here. Not the most promising, but the first."
The Lady and Heidrich neared their Chimera, which had been parked on the edge of the shanty town, on the very outskirts of Hive Canin's trafficking lanes.
"To tell you the truth, Heidrich, I still don't feel right about what became of him," said the Lady. "He didn't have much in the way of aspiration. He viewed his work with the Inquisition as a public duty, and much as I wanted to see him be my Interrogator, he decided he wanted to instead go home after everything was done with."
The Lady Inquisitor hesitated to continue speaking, and motioned to the Chimera. The two approached the vehicle, and got aboard – the driver, one of Freia's staff members, awaited them.
"Port, please, and close the divider," the Lady ordered. Once the driver complied, she looked over at Heidrich across the aisle.
Feeling obliged to say something, Heidrich spoke next. "So what happened?"
"When I came to finish the siege of Trojus and kill Iraktalh, Santi and the rest of my team came with me," the Lady told him. "We wound up getting separated when we tracked the daemon down to a manufactory block, and Santi and his group got to it first, and made it chase them down rather than Lamortes."
The Lady grimaced, and her eyes took on something of a hooded look. "When I reached them, I…" She looked around the compartment, shifted uncomfortably, then took a hard breath. "I found Santi covered in blood. It looked like he'd been chewing on the jugulars of his fellows. He had been driven genuinely mad by the daemon in that short window of time."
Heidrich sadly frowned, for he knew what the Lady was trying to justify.
"I had no choice but to put him down. He tried to kill me…"
For the duration of the trip back to the port, the Korpsman said nothing in response to the Lady's confession.

When the Chimera rolled up the dock ramp where the shuttle from the Wrath of Justice had landed, the driver slid open the passenger divider, catching Heidrich and the Lady's attention.
"The shuttle's not here, my Lady," the driver announced.
The Lady Inquisitor got up from her seat and stepped up against the compartment door. "What?"
Sure enough, a quick peer through the Chimera's forward viewport revealed that the lander was not present on the pad.
"Why the blazes did they not tell us when we were coming in?" the Lady frustratedly asked.
The driver shrugged. "Odds are they were too damn lazy to do so."
A knock came at the rear hatch, then. Heidrich got up from his seat, stub revolver out, and released the rear-locks; when the door opened, the skull mask of a Space Marine Chaplain peered in at them.
"My Lady," the Chaplain said.
"Moerchen!" the Lady Inquisitor shouted across the compartment. "Cut the engine," she said aside to the driver, then stepped down the aisle nearer the Marine. "Where's the lander at?"
"Inquisitor Freia called for extraction at the Xiatin manufactory," Moerchen explained.
"How long ago was this?"
"About twenty minutes past."
"The manufactory's clear out in the far-edge of the hive outskirts, so its total flight-time would probably be within that range…" The Lady Inquisitor pondered this for a moment, then looked up at the Chaplain again. "That means we should have seen them coming in, unless they stopped somewhere in-between."
"What shall we do, then?" Heidrich finally spoke.
The Lady sat back down. "Not much we can do, aside from wait," she said. "If something happened to the lander in-transit, we'll find out."
Moerchen grunted in approval, then stepped away from the Chimera door.

After a half-hour, the lander dropped down onto the platform, loading bay open, with Isnic beckoning the Chimera aboard from along the side, shouting to them indiscriminately beneath the wail of the craft's thrusters. The driver simply complied, started up the Chimera's engine again, and rolled up into the lander's hold; Moerchen followed it on, and the hold's mouth shut behind him.
The Lady Inquisitor and Heidrich stepped out of the Chimera then while the driver hopped out of his top-hatch and set to work chaining the vehicle to the floor of the craft. Immediately, Heidrich looked over the seats for Hildegarn - instead, he found only Freia buckled in, sitting as though terribly uncomfortable and bearing an unusual expression of sullen anger.
"I botched this one," Freia called to her peer.
"What do you mean, Roslind?" the Lady asked, stepping up to a seat beside Freia; the ex-Arbitrator only shook her head.
Heidrich became restless when he caught sight of Gerfrid sitting grimly across the hold, missing his leg below the knee. "What happened?" the Korpsman asked.
"Magos Xiatin's in the prisoner compartment," Freia said, tilting her head in the direction of a door marked with the word "ward" above it. "Gerfrid lost his leg to heavy stubber-fire. We had to book it before any more Mechanicus personnel came on the scene to save the Magos…"
"What about Ingrid?" Heidrich asked.
Freia lowered her head and looked away from him.
Isnic grunted as he took a seat besides Heidrich, tugging at the Korpsman's coattail to do the same. "You better buckle in, kid, before we take off again."
Heidrich complied, but persisted. "What happened to Ingrid?"
Isnic exhaled deeply. "She's dead, most likely."
Both the Lady and Heidrich immediately looked over at him. Moerchen, braced against a guide rail in the back of the hold, slowly turned his head at the statement.
Heidrich, trying to mouth a phrase, looked in disbelief to Freia; the Inquisitor finally looked at him – her eyes had reddened at their edges. "She was breathing, so we ran her and Gerfrid to a hospice in the hive, but…"
The lander's thrusters screamed outside the hull as the craft took off again.
"Gerfrid was fine enough to be released after getting some emergency antisept and bandaging," Isnic said in a rare tone of somberness. "Hildegarn was in critical condition, and we needed to leave before Xiatin's force hunted us down. So we left her." The frown on the grey-skinned man's face deepened. "Her heart had stopped by the time we left. She's dead, Heidrich."
The Korpsman slowly turned his head to stare down at the floor, and let his back hit against his seat. Quickly, all other noise dissolved from his ears besides the howl of the thrusters.