Prologue

+++ 5.478.988 +++
+++ REDACTED +++
+++ REDACTED +++

/CODE MAGENTA/

Partial transcript of Operation Prey communications (type Eta)

A: ...finally done it. Against all expectations.

B: -Silence-

A: -Silence- You think it went too easily master? (surprise)

B: -Silence-

A: I assure you master. Our sources are to be trusted. They have started recruitment. I have received two extensive files. Meetings, set-ups... framings. (signs of desperation)

B: Very well. You would bet your live on this?

A: Yes, yes. Of course. I would never... I would never dare to bring you unreliable information. Have I ever led you astray?

B: -Silence-

A: Master please. I have never (desperation)

B: (interrupting) You are right of course. Your information has always been correct. Expect your payment in the usual way. Lay low. This last job was quite risky. If ever our target would become aware of our activity, it would be now.

A: Thank you master. (relief)

B: I'll be in touch. (threat)

Connection severed with A.

C: So, you trust this source Ramses?

B: I trust him... on this. But trusting a snitch? Never Inquisitor.

C: -Sigh- I hope you are right. If this checks out... then we might... (doubt)

B: Unless we've been missing something, we're going to bring this case to a close Inquisitor.

C: -Silence- After all those years. You know how long this has gone on, Ramses? How long they have evaded righteousness?

B: Centuries.

C: Centuries. (resignation) Make sure this ends now.

B: Of course, my friend. Of course. I'll meet you on...

Transcript ends

Chapter 1: Induction

+++3.559.988.M41+++
+++Caeruleo Primaris, subsector Victis, Carceris Sector, Segmentus Obscurus+++
+++Hive Superbiae - Basement level D-8 of the Pelagus Administratum Majoris facility+++

They hadn't really known what to expect, but they thought themselves ready for the task nonetheless. None of them had chosen to be there, but they all understood they had no other options. They didn't know each other, but knew that they would soon need to work together. And that there was no room for failure. There was only victory... or death.

There were four of them. They all sat in rather uncomfortable chairs. The floor was wet and the room chilly. The only light came from a small, inadequate lumen globe, hanging from the ceiling on a stripped wire. The light couldn't push away the darkness at the corners of the room. It hid their eyes in the shadow of their brows. They were silent and looked around, although the room wasn't much to look at. Bare stone walls between buttressed rockcrete support pillars, a corroded steel door... A decaying rat's corpse lying against the wall. A vague stench of rot prickled their noses.

The smallest of the four, a positively scrawny man, wore a frayed red robe, the hood pulled over his head, partially concealing a dirty, silver visor. The six lenses whirred and purred as they scanned the room and zoomed in and out. The man held a book in his hands, resting his arms on his bionic legs. A quick look revealed that he was just paging through the book. Those who looked beyond that, saw that the man was reading it at an incredible speed. As if he needed to devour it, instead of just reading it. One of the red lenses focused on the other three in the room, keeping it locked on a face for exactly 2.4 seconds before switching to the next one. The man noticed a bored look on the man to his left.

This one wore a leather jacket and heavy cargo pants, numerous pockets stitched onto the trouser's legs. Some were stuffed, others completely empty. Holstered on his belt, hung a Macharius-pattern autopistol, easily recognizable by the long barrel that stuck out of the lower end of the holster. It was the weapon of choice of pistoleers who valued accuracy over rate of fire. In the gloom, the others could still see that the burly man was tense. His right hand was always hanging close to the gun, but after a few minutes the others had decided that it was more of a tic or habit than a threat. The eyes of the man were focused on the only exit of the room and apart from a quick inspection when the man had entered, he'd seemed to have lost interest in the other three.

Which was quite different from the third man's attitude. Seemingly the oldest of the group, his black hair turned silver at the temples, the man had been and still was observing his companions thoroughly. His blue eyes had been going up and down each one of them, time and again, perhaps trying to discern little details that would give away little pieces of information on his company. He was the only one in the room who openly wore armour. Full carapace body armour, all black. All badges and identitags had been removed. The man was armed too. A heavy bolt pistol was mag clamped to his thigh. It would look like he was some expert trooper, but an unkempt beard meant that he either was just returning from a long mission or that he no longer cared enough to clean up.

The last of the four men in the room was a woman. She had long blond hair, woven in an intricate braid at the back of her head. She was quite nice to look at, but anyone who looked too long at her, felt a bit... ill at ease. Instead of a pistol, she had a sword at her side and her hand was caressing the pommel. Everyone had seen that the sword was something extraordinary. The steel of the rain-guard was laid in with small precious stones and it might have been a nobleman's weapon if not for the fact that the scabbard was worn out and missed several of the small ornamental double-headed eagles that had once been attached in a neat line to the leather. The woman sat cross-legged, teeter-tottering her upper leg impatiently. She was the only one of the foursome that clearly expressed her feelings and in the last fifteen minutes they had all been sitting together, the others had heard her draw breath a few times to commence a sentence. But apparently she still hesitated to actually speak up.

So the silence stretched on and the four were left alone with their thoughts. That changed quickly enough when the door opened and a woman stepped in. She had long, beautiful platinum hair on the right side of her head, which was in stark contrast with the left side of her face. She was burned hideously, leaving her with extensive, pinkish scars. The signs of the terrible wound were still fresh and the outlook of the woman wasn't helped by the brand new ocular implant, replacing her, no doubt destroyed, left eye. As she stepped in, the trained look of the armoured man revealed that she also had a bionic leg on her right side. And judging by her step, that one was pretty new as well. She pushed back the long midnight blue cape she wore to reveal an armoured bodyglove with a miniature Inquisition symbol stitched to the chest in fine vermilion thread. This also betrayed the fact that her left arm had been replaced by a bionic as well. The foursome could see an exquisite bolt pistol at her belt, the barrel stylized like a skeleton that craned its neck to spit out its deadly payload. For a second it seemed like the woman was going to say something, but then the moment passed. From behind her back another woman entered the room. This one barely measured five feet tall and was about a head and a half smaller than the first one. Nevertheless, she was equally intimidating. Everything about the woman breathed lethal danger, not in the least the three throwing daggers attached to the white silk sash slung over her left shoulder. From beneath an asymmetric black pony, a tiny but sharp nose protruded. Two dark brown eyes, peered into the half light and none of those seated questioned for a second that the petite woman could turn into in a fury in the blink of an eye.

Perhaps sensing the hesitation of her companion, the woman spoke up. "Get up and follow interrogator Silverback. It's about time you're getting sworn in." The woman named Silverback, turned on her heals and stormed out of the room, barely missing the smaller woman. Everyone in the room could sense the anger radiating from the half burned woman. The three men and the woman stood up, all four properly impressed by the two interrogators. The woman was the first out of the door, closely followed by the bearded armoured man. The techpriest was fumbling to put his book away while the last man seemed to wait until the scrawny, red robed figure would move out of the room. After a few seconds the techpriest noticed how he was being waited upon and he offered a mumbled and quite incomprehensible apology as he half jogged to the door under the eyes of the pistoleer. On his turn the man followed the techpriest and passed the interrogator by the door.

"So, she's Silverback. And who are you?" he asked the petite woman. Seemingly bored, she blew the pony out of her eyes, her thin lips pouted upwards. "You want to know my name, Hammer? You think you can ask me out on a date or something?" The other man stopped before her and stared at her, quite unfazed by her jousting. The woman chuckled. "You think you bring anything valuable to the table, ganger?" She looked at his pants meaningfully. "Or are you gonna pull your gun on me?" Self-confident, the ganger turned around and without so much as a shrug, followed his three companions through the damp corridor. From behind his back the woman addressed him again, a sharp edge in her voice. "You think it's a good idea to turn your back on Inez Lancetti?" The ganger continued walking, but spun around to face the woman. He gave her a short grateful nod, and then turned around again. He heard how she started to follow him, the metal heels of her boots ticking on the flat pave stones of the Administratum building. "Not much of a talker, are you?" Lancetti stated, even though she had phrased it as a question. "We don't even know your given name." she added, leaving the words hanging, perhaps trying to provoke a response from the ganger. "And that's quite something when you're about to get induced in the Inquisition."

Parcivale Redford didn't bite. He had only given away his gang name to the Inquisition. An old habit from his days in Kraskow, the hive he hailed from. He had never wanted to share his given name with the rest of his gang. Respect and reputation were highly valued with the Jesters. And Parcivale just didn't have the same ring as 'Hammer' to it. Especially since it was the name of an offworlder, even if Parcivale could only remember living in hive Kraskow. Those didn't get a lot of respect in the underhive. The uppies might revel in their presence, but in the shady and dank underhive Parcivale called home, you didn't want to get associated with them. But here and now, all ties to his old gang members gone, and on an entirely different world, the sector capital no less, he didn't really know why he hadn't given them his name. Still, he didn't feel like giving it up so easily.

"Hammer will do." Parcivale finally said. Lancetti laughed, a silver tinkle, although there was still a dangerous ring to it. "Fine," she said. "Looks like you won't be buying me dinner." Parcivale pretended not to be destabilized by the provocative behavior of the little interrogator. He wondered whether he still needed to respond. He knew that he might have slighted the authoritarian woman and that it might come back to bite him in the ass later. His doubts were answered when she laid a hand on his shoulder, turning him towards her and slightly pulled him down. "You seem to have caught on to the best way to survive here, Hammer. Keep your cards close to the chest. Only play them out when needed, and, finally, make sure you know what cards the others are holding." She let go of his shoulder and minced passed him on her short legs, the conversation come to an end. Parcivale watched her go, evaluating her advice and decided that he hadn't heard anything new. Apparently, the Inquisition and the gang life in hive Kraskow were very similar in some ways.

A bit further down the hall, Hephaestos MP5568-05, also came to the conclusion that the Inquisition and the Adeptus Mechanicus required the same protocols to thrive. The scrawny techpriest had done his very best to eavesdrop on the conversation, without actually looking like he was blatantly listening in on the conversation between the interrogator and the soon to be Inquisitorial acolyte. He hadn't really understood the whole dinner conversation - he hadn't expected to be allowed to go out to eat to begin with, seeing as they were hiding in one of the major Administratum facilities of the sector - but then again, he already knew that he wasn't the expert on inter human communication. In fact, he was about as knowledgeable on social interactions as an Ork nob was on multi-phase thermo-nuclear reactors. Still, he stored the conversation to his internal datalooms for later analysis. Although he would settle for high protein nutrient paste, he wasn't one of those techpriest that abhorred food with actual taste and texture.

He cleared his primary logicalculus drive of all food related queries and reloaded the puzzle he had been trying to solve: why were they in a derelict basement of the Pelagus Administratum Majoris facility. He had of course produced the most obvious answer in under 12.3 microseconds: they were there to get induced into the ranks of the Holy Inquisition. And the second most obvious answer to the question had followed 23.5 microseconds later: they were doing it here to do it secretly. However, the question he hadn't been able to answer - yet, he corrected himself - was why they were doing it secretly. Granted, Hephaestos didn't have a lot of material to compare the situation with - actually none - but he still thought it strange. He had heard of no other Imperial agency that did this. His own induction in the ranks of the Adeptus Mechanicus, while insignificant and unnoticed by the largest part of his peers, hadn't been a secret. From the datalooms that made up his memory, he had pulled up files that described the induction process of the Astra Militarum, the Adeptus Arbites and even a sketchy summary of the process the Adepta Sororitas used, but none had this level of secrecy. Quite the contrary. Some of these agencies even made a big deal out of induction, praising the individual that joined their ranks. This was something Hephaestos hadn't experienced himself and he stored the resulting secundary queries about his own desire for such praise for later analysis. The only other organization he had identified that kept the induction process secret, were some of the chapters of the Adeptus Astartes, although some of those were notorious for their secrecy in general. Hephaestos remembered how he had once, during his scholarship, had gotten the assignment to investigate the ways of the Dark Angels. Of course based on a literature review. Not actual fieldwork. It had been a complete bust and he assumed that even with a trip to their fortress, aptly named 'The Rock', wouldn't have improved the results of his study.

For a second Hephaestos considered asking interrogator Lancetti for an answer after she had finished her conversation with the so-called 'Hammer', but he decided against it in an effort not to increase the number of failed social interactions. He already had a terrible track record. His datalooms involuntarily provided him with the exact odds of 1 success against 450 failures. Without new data, Hephaestos decided to let the question rest and gather more data in other ways. His optical visor provided him with excellent visibility despite the inadequate lighting. He noticed how the stonework of the walls was excellent, but that because of, judging by the coloration and the density of the moss growing in the seams, decades of neglect it was starting to decay. Here and there, he saw the results: loose stones or even bits and pieces that had fallen down from the ceiling. Hephaestos checked every door tag they passed, but unless the designations were some very complex code, he could only decide that after D8-3.774, D8-3.775 and D8-3.776, D8-3.777 would come and that it only meant that the Adminstratum had at least picked a fairly logical system to number their archives. All this made him decide that the nature of the building wasn't the reason why they were actually there. Hephaestos wanted to develop another hypothesis, but before he could, he bumped into the back of the armoured man. His first instinct was to curse the man, but the social protocols he had ingrained in his core systems, shut him up. Hephaestos had learned time and again that cursing at other men had proven to be an inefficient modus operandi. Most of the time, he only got cursed back at and in some distinct cases these curses had been accompanied by a slap or a formal warning of his superior. Honed by experience, he muttered an apology, half low gothic, half technolingua and took a few steps back. Then he saw that Silverback had stopped at a freight elevator which explained the sudden stop of the armoured man. As he waited until the little group would move on, he went back to his reasoning.

Lars Akira looked back annoyed when he felt someone bump into his back. He was just in time to see the scrawny tech priest scurry backwards, mumbling something which he couldn't quite make out. Once more he looked the man over. 'This is the hardest nut to crack,' he thought. The woman had been military. You could tell by any number of details: the way she sat on her chair, straight, ready to get a mission briefing; the way her hair had been pulled together, businesslike, making sure it wouldn't get in the way in times of combat; how she had walked out of the room, almost marching; how she had wanted to beam to attention when interrogator Silverback had entered the room. These were all tell-tales that gave her away. And he was pretty sure that she was an officer. She had wanted to start a conversation, she had been the first to be up and about, ... 'Unless she's just eager, Akira.' the man had thought. 'Or perhaps she's both.' He had almost missed the most important detail, but his trained eyes had picked up on it when she had been walking before him: a small metal plaque, shaped like the Imperial Aquila, studded into her neck. The sign of a sanctioned psyker. Lars hadn't been around many psykers before, but he was happy that at least this one didn't make him feel uncomfortable. It was a commonly known fact that psykers were a bit... off. Like they didn't really fit in with the rest. But the rule - if it even was a rule, Lars thought - didn't seem to apply here.

The other man also hadn't been too hard to figure out. His squatty posture, his hand constantly lingering near his gun, the pockmarked face, the gauntness of his skin. It all pointed at a life in the underhive. The man had an aptitude for violence. And he sure didn't look like the enforcer type. And if by any chance he was an enforcer, he was either very good at it, or, he had been very lucky. As an arbite Lars knew the statistics for underhive enforcers. He wasn't too optimistic about the number of service years and, in general, the life expectancy of the lot. No. Lars had pegged him down as a ganger. For most arbites, that would be enough to make any cooperation in the future difficult. But it seemed the Inquisition knew who to put together. Lars differed from other arbites quite a bit. Not just because his judge had been charged with the safety of the Imperial fleets instead of a single planet, but because Lars had a lot of experience with working undercover. And it had given him a unique insight in the hearts and minds of the common citizenry. Those that got trampled on on a daily basis. If it had taught him one thing, it was that loyalty to the Emperor could be found in the most unexpected places. So the ganger could prove to be a valued ally. Although Lars wasn't naive: the opposite was still far more likely.

It left the techpriest. Being born on a forge world and having worked as a laborer for the Mechanicus in a distant past, Lars had known quite a few techpriests. Just like regular humans they had all kinds of quirks and habits. They had different kind of motivations and - even if they wouldn't admit to it - experienced various emotions. It seemed this one was no exception. Lars guessed that his withdrawn attitude had everything to do with his nervousness or perhaps even fear. Although it still remained hard to guess whatever was going on behind the six lenses of his visual sensor array. And it wasn't just because of the high level of augmentation techpriests techpriest usually enjoyed. In Lars' experience, about half of them was also batshit crazy.

Lars broke eye contact with the techpriest and looked before him. Interrogator Silverback had just opened the door of the freight elevator and with a curt nod, she invited the rest of them to join her. Lars took position immediately left of the sliding door, his tactical intuition guiding him. He looked over at Silverback, but the woman was staring out in front of her, her finger on the top button of the elevator control panel. "Straight to the hatt?" Lars asked, breaking the awkward silence that had accompanied the interrogator since they had left the room. The woman looked up disturbed. Lars realized that she might have misunderstood. He hailed from the Yamata sector, Drake subsector. Not exactly the place renowned for its perfect Terran low-gothic diction. And Lars hadn't been blessed with a schola education or a noble upbringing. He just wanted to repeat his question, leaving out any slang, when her expression changed to annoyance. 'Alright, Akira.' Lars thought, 'looks like she ain't interested in small talk.'

Lars' mind ventured on the reason behind this. The simplest explanation would be that the woman was just a sourpuss. Or that the Inquisition was a breeding ground for peevishness and choler. But having noticed the new bionics, Lars wondered whether the woman was still suffering. Although he hadn't had any work done on him by the Mechanicus, he had talked with enough men who had. An implantation of bionics never was a pain free process. And you needed to get used to them. Some men never really got the hang of it and claimed they always felt off balance or even suffered from phantom pain. It was one of the reasons why Lars had never accepted the offer of bionics. In his case, the surgery would be extensive and he feared that the benefits would be outweighed by the downside. One more reason not to do it, was that you stood out. Especially if you got a decent mark of bionics. The Imperium hardly handed those out to anyone. In the gutters of the hives or beneath the manufactoria on forge worlds, tens of thousands lived with missing limbs, ruined lungs or blind eyes. And as an arbite that had a habit of going undercover, standing out was about the last thing you wanted. So he had declined the offer of his judge back in the day when he had returned from a mission on Phlegethon, a backwater planet covered in acidic oceans. He had contracted a local disease which had sapped the strength from his muscles. Even with a physical treatment afterwards, he had never regained all his strength. He had had to give up his shock maul and tower shield. The ex-arbite felt at the ivory hilt of his bolt pistol. Luckily there were different ways to kill heretics and traitors to serve the Adeptus Arbites, and now it seemed, the Inquisition.

When Silverback was staring in front of her again, Lars let his eyes go over her once more. And then over his companions who were now all standing in the elevator, all keeping their distance in the large freight elevator. Suddenly the pieces fit. Lars didn't know a lot about the Inquisition - in all his years in the service, he'd only met their agents twice - but he did know that in the field they operated in small teams, cadres. And here you had four people about to be initiated. And one interrogator that would lead them. 'Could it be that she has lost all her acolytes?' Lars thought. Such a thing wouldn't have happened without a fight. Perhaps Silverback's new bionics were still a testimony of that fight. 'And it would explain her attitude towards us.' Lars thought. The arbite had lost men of his own and knew what it felt like. 'Actually, yours is worse, Akira.' Lars corrected himself and he still felt a sting of pain when he thought back of his own situation. He looked back at the woman. From the side he was looking at her, the right side, she was quite beautiful to look at. He sighed and dismissed the thought. Whatever they had brought him here for, it sure wasn't to enjoy the scenery.

From the back of the elevator, the psyker woman noticed how the armoured man slumped against the elevator wall, as if he had given up on something. She wondered what had happened to him. Even though he had a grizzled outlook, when their eyes had crossed, she had thought to see kindness in his eyes. She withstood the suggestion to reach out with her mind and probe him. She didn't know the rules around this place, but using her powers on her future companions, even if they didn't know they would become part of the same team yet, seemed like a bad way to start their fellowship. She knew of course. She'd predicted it. And it would be the first time one of her predictions would prove wrong. Not that she had done many. She still felt awfully unfamiliar with the powers the Emperor had entrusted her with. And she knew that each time she opened herself to the Warp, there might be something trying to claw its way in. She was thankful for the protection the Emperor provided her with. Although the process of sanctioning had been far from pleasant, she was still extremely happy with the end result. Still, she felt that she shouldn't use her powers lightly. Which was a bit at odds with her normal look on life.

Although she had lost the uniform of the Aeronautica Imperialis, she still felt like she was part of the Imperial Navy. And as captain of her own Mastiff troop transport, she had enjoyed quite a bit of autonomy. Both the officers as the grunts from her squadron knew who you needed to find if you wanted a mission done. Especially when it was hairy. Captain Bianca Saliaminsky had always been a bit of a daredevil, or who else in her flight had done a corkscrew with the far heavier variant of the standard Valkyrie transport. She checked the others again. Contrary to them, it seemed, she was quite eager to find out how she would serve the Inquisition. She knew that it wouldn't be a bed of roses, but she also felt honored that she would serve her Ordo in some of the most difficult missions she had yet to receive. A small smile played at the corner of her mouth and she almost impatiently tapped her foot on the elevator floor. For the psyker, things couldn't start quickly enough.

The elevator came to a halt, but Silverback pressed the bronze button to keep the doors closed. With a flick of her right hand, she opened the metal control panel. From behind her, techpriest Hephaestos uttered a few syllables in techno-lingua - the start of some sort of protest - before a soft and well-meant prod in the ribs from interrogator Lancetti made him shut up. Hephaestos was surprised that he hadn't been able to suppress the impulse to speak up himself and stored a personal memo in his datalooms to re-evaluate his social protocols. In the meanwhile, Silverback had found the naked ends of two electric wires and held them together. A small blue spark lit up the interior of the control panel, before the elevator started moving again, going higher than the brass numbers over the door could indicate. This time Hephaestos did manage to keep his mouth shut and not comment that this procedure was highly irregular and definitely not in compliance with standard Mechanicus protocol. The techpriest checked whether his companions shared his concern, but by the lack of shocked expressions on their faces, he judged that this wasn't the case. Immediately, he stored another personal memo about the obvious lack of respect for machine spirits with his companions. And as a suggestion to himself, not to press the case if they would encounter similar situations in the future.

Half a minute later, the elevator stopped again. The doors opened to reveal a small entry hall dominated by a solid plasteel door, flanked by two combat servitors with autocannons. The servitors had been relieved of their automotive parts and were stuck in reinforced cages with a wide horizontal slid to allow their autocannons to cover the entire room. Hephaestos recognized the preysense sensors that had replaced their left eyes and Lars softly whistled through his teeth when he saw the advanced motion-predictors on the barrels of the autocannons. "Stand clear." Silverback ordered, indicating her companions with a wave of her hand to stay put. Apart from Bianca, no one had shown the intention of leaving the elevator. The interrogator stepped out of the elevator and pulled up the sleeve of her right arm. The servitors, whose guns had been whirring in anticipation of combat, blurted out a seemingly downhearted bleep before standing down. "That's a nice trick." Parcivale muttered under his breath as they all stepped out of the elevator. In the meanwhile Silverback was thumbing in a ten digit code on a discretely hidden keypad in door frame. The door split in two and both halves slid to the sides. "Enter." Silverback said as she stepped aside.

The four soon-to-be acolytes walked in a simple but high-end room. The floor was made out of polished hardwood, here and there covered with sober beige short-haired carpets. The walls were lined with fine, white display cases, all lit up with discretely hidden lumen strips. In the middle of the room stood a long but low wooden table, surrounded by firm pillows. Parcivale noticed that, apart from the plasteel door they had come through and a single, strange looking sliding door on the opposite end of the room, there were no exits and no windows. Hephaestos' sensors didn't find any listening devices or pictcapters. Lars concluded that this was the ideal place to have a discrete and secret conversation. Silverback took a seat at the table and bumped rather clumsily into it with her knee. If anyone hadn't noticed that she was still getting used to her prosthetics, they had now. Hephaestos' datalooms were already bringing up an extensive manual for 'those blessed by the Omnissiah to have received the blessing of the Machine', but decided not to load it unto the dataslate hanging at his belt as he realized that he didn't want to address the interrogator. Instead he wandered around the room, inspecting the contents of the displays. Both Lars and Bianca were doing the same.

Behind glass, and in some cases behind a force field, lay all kinds of artifacts, both recognizable as alien. Hephaestos recognized different kind of exquisite and extremely rare weapons. A Mars-II pattern inferno pistol, the chamber decorated with the Cog Mechanicus, lay next to something which resembled a grav pistol. Quite a few tomes, their leather spines showing the signs of old age, were put in neat ordered lines and the titles almost made Hephaestos drool. 'A brief history of the Carceris sector and its Inquisitorial conclave', 'On daemons' & 'Encyclopedia Psykana' were only a few titles Hephaestos would give his right arm for if he could read them. Especially since he would love to have his right arm replaced with a far more valuable bionic. Bianca had stopped at another display. Her sixth sense told her that there was something pretty powerful in the case before her, although what she saw didn't ring any bells: three copper, five-inch long nails with round, solid spheres at the end. One of the nails seemed to have been stuck in some sort of bone, seeing the broken off fragment right under the sphere. "Those are from an Ork weirdboy." Bianca looked up startled and looked right in the face of interrogator Lancetti. "I saw you wondering," the woman said, faintly smiling. Bianca nodded, wanted to say something, but then changed her mind. "Speak up," Lancetti said, "You won't get so many chances to learn." Bianca looked back at the copper nails. "You think I might... touch them?" Lancetti seemed to shiver. "There are all kinds of way to learn, but touching those, seems like a bad idea... They say that Ork weirdboys possess about the most bizarre and fickle minds in the galaxy. I wouldn't recommend playing with those... unless you would like to get locked up in an asylum. Excuse me." Without further comment, Lancetti turned around and headed for the sliding door, which now that she opened it, was nothing more than a stretched piece of paper on a wooden frame. "Of course," Bianca said, and she felt stupid for voicing her request. With a curt nod she left the company of the interrogator and took a seat on one of the pillows, next to the ganger. A few minutes later she was joined by the techpriest who started paging through his book again.

With Lancetti left, the last one investigating the displays, was the arbite. Lars studied a number of picts in silver frames, all neatly lined up as if they were Guardsman on parade. Without exception, the picts showed people, mostly laughing. In some of the frames, names and dates were engraved. The oldest one, was, according to the frame, taken about a hundred and ten years ago: 'First cadre under inquistor Ulysses Magnus'. As soon as Lars studied the next frame, he knew what he was looking at. The frame said '3.144.893.M40 - Promotion to interrogator by Inquisitor Ulysses Magnus after Trinity-campaign'. These were memorabilia from their Inquisitor: Harald Hirosani. It looked like the man had a sentimental streak. Which was something Lars could appreciate in a man. Loyalty to his comrades. Or fallen friends, it seemed. Another frame had a black ribbon on the edge. The label read '4.456.895.M40 - first cadre at Ordenna-campaign". It showed four men and two women in Guard uniforms, Hirosani standing proudly in the middle, with his arms around the shoulders of the two men at each side of him. The picts spoke of a history of almost a century of duty to the Emperor. The most recent pict was one taken in this very room: 3.673.979.M40 - Elle Silverback joins the ranks of the interrogators Primundo and Lancetti.' Lars could easily identify the two female interrogators and the Inquisitor, leaving the long, blond man to be interrogator Primundo. Although the picture was taken almost ten years ago, Lancetti hadn't changed much. Silverback however...

Lars just wanted to move to the next display case, when the sliding door opened and Lancetti returned. Ladies, gentlemen. Inquisitor Hirosani."

I hope this story is to your liking. Reviews, both positive as constructive are of course welcome. Indecent proposals from Russian ladies... Not so much.