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What happens when an Inquisitorial thug ends up on the run from her employers? This...

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Eryn emerged retching into feeble sunlight.

Her filth-spattered storm coat snapped in a sudden wind. Standing in the gaping mouth of the hive outflow pipe, watery filth still swirling around her ankles, she scanned her surroundings. The bleached plains of the chemical flats, swathed in scraps of acrid vapour, rolled to the horizon like pallid flesh, the pale disc of the Roust system's wretched star hanging above in a polluted sky. Sounds of traffic and an occasional disembodied shout floated down from the hive like discarded refuse. But she cared not for the sights or sounds of this world – had never cared for them, in truth - or for the vertiginous drop beneath her as she stepped out on to the corroded service walkway that led away from her vantage point. She cared only for her quarry.

He was there, only a few score feet away, gripping the treacherous handrails as he climbed the pathway that wound around the rugged mesa the hive squatted on. His garish silk robe seemed ludicrously incongruous against the pale sky and dark stone, like the plumage of some up-hive noble’s expensive pet broken free.

She braced her autopistol, not wanting to fire but prepared to if necessary. His ragged breath became audible as she crept toward him, the gun held steady. But as she closed the distance, he threw a glance over his shoulder, his eyes hardening as he caught sight of her.

He turned slowly, holding his hands to his sides in surrender. His lean, bearded face showed a thin smile. “My dear,” he said, “it seems you just cannot help wanting to make my acquaintance. I knew I had a way with women, but still...”

“Shut your mouth, Van Craal,” she said. Her voice was low and harsh, trying not to cough in the blighted atmosphere. “It's only because my employer would prefer you alive that I haven't left you back there in the same heap as your coven. Now drop your weapons. If you try to pull anything on me, I'll kill you.”

“And disobey your master? I have a feeling I know who your master works for, and I doubt you'd anger him by shooting me.”

“He'd get used to it, I'm sure.”

“You stupid woman.” He took a step forward. “You have no idea what you're getting into,do you?”

She smiled mirthlessly. “I'm disappointed. Of all the lines, you pick that one. I've heard that so many times, usually before pulling a trigger.”

“Feel free.” And then he charged.

She fired twice, the bullets pinging off what looked like a layer of lacquered red armour beneath his robes. Then he lunged. Thin steel talons slid from his fingertips, and she swayed back from his frenzied slash, the talons squealing down her flak vest, leaving bright tracks in the black surface. His eyes were bulging, pupils dilated to tiny points, and weird growls emerged from between his clenched teeth. He must have taken some kind of combat stim that was only now kicking in, she realised.

However, Eryn had learned from bitter experience that rage was no substitute for technique. As another strike descended towards her head, she deflected his arm with her wrist before springing back from an upward swing that would have disembowelled her. As Van Craal tried to recover, she darted in and smashed her gun-butt into his face. He rocked back, but still his face was contorted with battle-rage, heedless of his broken nose. Eryn brought up her weapon. Feeling like it could turn out to be an extremely costly mistake, she thumbed it to automatic, lowered her aim and fired.

The spray of fire struck Van Craal's left leg, tearing it most of the way off below the knee. Momentum carried him forward, and he instinctively flung out his arms. Eryn aimed a kick at his midsection that sent him sprawling on to his back and he hit the walkway with a clang.

Eryn stood over her quarry. His eyes flicked from her face to his ruined leg, the look of fury becoming one of horror.

“Wearing off already, is it?” she hissed. “You ought to have a word with your dealer.”

“All right!” he squealed. “I'll-”

He was interrupted by a low, pained groan, a sound of tortured metal. Eryn's gaze flicked to the cliff face, where the walkway was anchored to the rock by bolts the size of her forearm. The two that supported Van Craal's section, already pitted and flaking from decades of exposure to the ruined atmosphere, were coming loose, leaning away from the rock like the sagging heads of battered prize-fighters.

Van Craal clung to the metal floor. Though the talons had retracted, Eryn hesitated, expecting a sudden swipe. “Hurry up!” he croaked. Slowly, she placed a foot on Van Craal's section. The metal creaked ominously. As she brought her other foot down, there was a sudden sharp sound like a pick striking rock.

Eryn leaped back as the section of walkway came free with a tremendous screech. She watched as Van Craal, an accusing look on his face, receded into the vapours amid a shower of stone and metal. The wispy fog parted just long enough to see him bounce from an outcropping.

“Damn it,” she said.

As she turned away, she thumbed the vox-bead in her ear. “Go ahead,” came Anto's Catachan growl.

“Van Craal's dead.”

“Of course he is.” He chuckled.

“It wasn't intentional.”

“No doubt. But that's what happens out in the field, and I think maybe the old man forgets that, sat in his stateroom all day. After all, we're just another one of the Emperor's blunt instruments, my friend.”

That, she knew, was true.

Eryn let her head knock against the cracked tiles of the shower block, the water drumming on her skull. She ran callused fingers through her roughly cut hair, the same faded yellow as the guttering star that hung outside her cabin viewport, and looked down. For a moment she watched, mindlessly transfixed, as water greyed by the accumulated filth of the hive flowed around her throbbing, swollen feet. Though the feeling of the grime sloughing off her skin was liberating after a week on the ground, she couldn't shift the insistent feelings of annoyance.

Oscar Van Craal, long suspected of having an unhealthy interest in deviant matters, had proven the rumours correct when the Inquisition had tracked him to the meeting place of a minor warp-cult of the kind that sprung up like twisted weeds in certain hive cities. Ordinarily, such a trivial gathering would have been cleared out in an afternoon by the local Arbites, but the presence of Van Craal, a member of some important banking clan or other, had led the Inquisition to monitor the group. After a few weeks, Eryn's employer, Inquisitor Randall Bracker, had sent her in with a band of mercenaries and ordered her to bring Van Craal in, preferably alive.

As it was, she couldn't even bring him a body.

The flat tone of the shipboard comm system filled the air. Even here, thought Eryn as she slapped the wall-mounted vox control, there was no escaping the Inquisitor's demands.
“Go ahead,” she said.

“Specialist Keale,” came a male voice, as dry and quiet as the rustling of ancient pages but with an undercurrent of cold authority. “Once you have finished making yourself presentable, I require your presence.”

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Specialist Keale. Eryn had never been certain whether old Bracker called her that as one of the little jokes that only he seemed to find amusing. She knew well enough that her “specialisation” came down to wreaking violence at his command, and certainly the Inquisitor had ensured that her training regimen and the parameters of her missions were usually in that vein.

Blunt instruments, Anto had said, and that was the old man's favourite way to describe her. He seemed to regard her transformation into a servant of the throne of as some sort of pet project, had done so since he had shown her mercy when her days as an eager gang-girl in Boss Guler's crime empire had ended with her hiding under a bed while the Inquisitor and his band of lunatics had systematically wiped out said empire and most of its members. Sometimes, she still dreamed about it, even more than a decade later.

She moved with clanking footfalls through the corridors of the Hunter's Art, the utilitarian décor of the refitted destroyer gradually gave way to cleaner, brightly lit environs as she drew nearer to the Inquisitor's quarters. At the end of a passageway illuminated by the soft of glow candles in gilded sconces, every step accompanied by the faint click and whirr of security systems concealed behind the panelled bulkheads that scrutinised her as she passed, she stopped before a door of oak decorated with golden aquilas and the stylised I of the Inquisition.

“Halt,” grated a flat, metallic monotone beside her.

This had happened often enough that Eryn no longer started as the massive shape of Hoplon, the Inquisitor's guard-servitor, emerged from an artfully concealed alcove to her left, its footfalls disturbingly soft for such a massive construct. The already massive frame of the Ogryn that had provided Hoplon's organic components was now clothed in ceramite and adamantium, hoses and cables of unguessable purpose disappearing into the few scraps of exposed grey flesh. The servitor's tiny head regarded her almost curiously with that ruby-like bionic eye, exactly as it had that night eleven years before when, still clutching Guler's head in one massive fist, it had dragged her out by her ankle and dangled her in front of Bracker's smiling face.

Smoothing the front of her nondescript civilian gear, she straightened up and stared into the glowing eye, even though the mere proximity of the cyborg with its slack, dead face made her tense up with unease. She'd seen the way it – she refused to think of it as “he” - moved, seen it pad into a room with uncanny smoothness and tear men apart like tissue paper. The servitor stared into her face for an uncomfortably long time, then straightened and shuffled aside. Then it spoke, in a voice like grinding stone.

“Proceed.”

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The space beyond the heavy door was completely at odds with the rest of the Hunter's Art. Eryn stood in a lavishly appointed stateroom, the lights almost uncomfortably bright, the walls panelled, the floor made of white marble. She moved over to a marbled mezzanine appointed with antique furniture, settling herself into an ancient armchair opposite the Inquisitor's massive and obsessively neat desk. that creaked as it took her weight. Dour-faced Inquisitorial luminaries scowled down at her from a selection of faded oils hung around the room, and from somewhere came the tinkling of chamber music.

“Young Specialist Keale,” came the dry voice. Eryn turned as the Inquisitor entered from a side room.

Randall Bracker was a straight-backed, cadaverous man with swept-back hair of pure white, clad in robes of shimmering black and deep gold. His face seemed to settle naturally into an expression of distaste, though he wore a reptilian smile now. His most noticeable features, however, were the network of pale scars that divided up his face and hands, evidence of countless past duels. Never trust a thin chef or an unscathed Inquisitor, he had once smirked to Eryn in the early days. He had been fond of making such remarks as she had sat there in the part his library he allowed her access to, reading through her latest selection. She remembered how she had just nodded, the closest she had been to a chef at that point being the ragged sub-hive vendors who had hawked stuff of unknown provenance on a stick to her and her crew.

Bracker lowered himself into the chair behind his desk and peered at Eryn over steepled fingers.

“Specialist Keale,” he repeated.

Eryn kept her mouth shut, even as the silence dragged out to an uncomfortable length. She had fallen for that before.

“Van Craal,” Bracker finally said. “He is dead, am I correct?”

“Yes.” There was no point saying it was an accident. Bracker would have known all the facts already.

He sighed in theatrical disappointment. “My dear, that is not what I wanted. I was hoping to ask Mr Van Craal a lot of questions, and now...well, I needn't complete that sentence, need I?”

“No, Inquisitor,” she muttered.

“Ah, well. Maybe you're not entirely to blame. I wanted you to be a blunt instrument, and once again you have certainly delivered there. But there must be a consequence.

“Sir?”

“Specialist Keale,” he said, his tone switching to that of a condescending educator repeating a favourite lesson for the hundredth time. “When I took you into my care, I wished to do some good. To educate you, make you a servant of the Throne. But it is true that when a man makes a pet of a wild beast, sometimes its original nature comes through. That happened today. I wanted Van Craal and I got nothing. So it seems to me that the means of your redress must also be the means of your chastisement. You will go back to the surface, you will search through the refuse, and you will find the piece of refuse you made today, that which was once our friend Van Craal. And needless to say, you will not fail me again.”

I liked this, it has that dark and gritty feel to it, that any story involving Inqusitors should have

Hm. Seems changing the tile was good for this story...

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Eryn's breath rasped within the confines of her modified voidsuit helmet as she trod the chemical-bleached surface of Roust IV, following the outline of the colossal mesa that Van Craal had made his final trip down. She held out a hand-held auspex unit as she waded through the centuries of refuse that had collected at the foot of the hive's rocky seat, piles of foetid rubbish that in places towered above her. She used the walls of the mesa to orientate herself, for the Aquila shuttle Anto had brought her down in had already vanished into the curtains of toxic fog.

Her footsteps, crunching through the gritty sand, were echoed by dull thumps as her companion followed. Hoplon had been sent down with her, its organic components shielded from the polluted atmosphere by a layer of enhanced armour that Bracker's contingent of seldom-glimpsed tech-adepts had fastened in place that morning. Its dead face gazed out placidly from a bubble of armourglass.

“Not far now, Specialist Keale,” Bracker's voice murmured through the suit's internal vox. “The auspex is already picking up faint returns.”

She kept moving. “All in all, Specialist Keale, you have been a capable servant to me,” Bracker droned on. “Your methods are perfectly efficient. However, I feel a more subtle agent would have been more suitable for this task. Van Craal was an indolent and pampered sort, and I feel the man's greed would have been the key. Perhaps if I had simply approached him in a more relaxed setting he would have been more cooperative, do you not agree?”

“He didn't seem so 'indolent' when he was trying to claw my guts out,” Eryn said.

“Ah, but you startled him, did you not? I take the blame, of course. We had him and I chose the most expedient method. You entered the chamber and gunned down his confederates before bellowing at him to surrender or die. Why, he probably thought that one of their rituals had gone awry and deposited some Warp-fiend in their midst!”

Eryn offered a non-committal grunt. Even after all these years she had rarely encountered the Immaterium in its most tangible forms, Bracker's style relying more upon striking before things could get that far, and discussion of it made her uncomfortable. The sight of those silk-robed cultists groaning and gyrating in their meeting chamber had appalled her on some indefinable level, and it had, she realised, come as a relief when Van Craal had bolted and they had gone for their weapons.

“No,” Bracker continued, “I should have waited until a quieter moment. It's surprising how amenable men like Van Craal become with some good food and wine inside them. I could have simply bought what I needed from him. Yes, in hindsight I should have sent Esterman down.”

Eryn snorted. “I'm not sure, sir. I think Van Craal was pretty eager to use his expensive new bionics, and that wouldn't have gone too well for poor Danil, especially after a few drinks.”

A ringing voice abruptly cut in on the conversation. “No, Keale. You are better equipped for some missions - those that emphasise brawn. In my hands the situation would never degenerate into the kind of violence you perpetrate so ably,” This was Danil Esterman, Bracker's interrogator. Eryn grinned at the irritation evident in his voice. She had always enjoyed winding him up, and he had never concealed his distaste for her. Eryn had much preferred Alyse, Esterman's predecessor, but she'd been lost three years ago in what had turned out to be a pointless raid on some smuggling den. Alyse had been an inspiration to Eryn - far more so than their master himself.

“All right, Danil,” she said. “I admit defeat. Your finely-honed skills in pouring wine and extremely small sandwiches down your throat are no match for mine. They'd have come into their own when faced with an amped-up lunatic with six inches of sharpened steel growing out his fingertips. I'd probably just end up sticking him with the nearest bit of cutlery, and even then you'd say I'd used the wrong knife.” The most she'd spoken in two days, and Eryn admitted to herself that it was hardly likely to endear her further to Bracker. But the Inquisitor just gave an indulgent chuckle.

There was suddenly a loud ping, muffled in the voidsuit, as a proximity alert flashed up on the auspex screen. Eryn saw a large piece of metal a few metres ahead that appeared to be a section of maintenance walkway fallen from above, perhaps even the part that had come down with Van Craal.

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She spent nearly an hour combing the area, hindered by the way the auspex display intermittently crazed and juddered in ways that mystified, and, though she could not say why, perturbed her. She sifted through mounds of urban waste, glad of the thick gauntlets that insulated her from its stench and feel. She appreciated the irony as she, who had seen violence in many forms, fought the urge to retch as she picked through the hive's outpourings. Food containers encrusted with congealed blobs, lethally sharp pieces of glass and scrap metal, even some kind of large and unidentifiable animal that had somehow been deposited over the outer walls – it seemed every type of garbage imaginable was here, and Eryn was just glad she couldn't smell it.

All this time, Hoplon stood a short distance away, staring at her. She occasionally glanced at it in irritation – in fact, she wouldn't even have been able to tell it was powered up if not for the dull glow of its eye. Why, she wondered, had they bothered sending it down with her if it wasn't even going to help?

At last, Eryn happened upon a piece of discoloured purple silk protruding from a large heap. She carefully lifted away the refuse, uncovering the body of Van Craal. It looked as though he had landed at the bottom of a steep slope of junk that had piled up at the base of a stubby rock pillar and it had tipped on to him. Despite being covered thus, the pollutants of Roust IV had wrought horrible changes on Van Craal's body, the caustic environment eating his exposed flesh away almost to the bone and leaving his robes tattered and pale.

“Found Van Craal,” she voxed.

“Finally,” came Esterman's voice in reply. “The Inquisitor is occupied at present. He instructs you to retrieve anything on Van Craal's person at once.”

“Of course,” she said. “Mind telling me what it was that the Inquisitor calibrated this auspex to detect?”

“Privileged information,” he said. “You should know by now that if he required you to know, you would.”

Van Craal's effects were more meagre than Eryn had expected. There was a fat billfold, a small packet of pills – she presumed these were whatever he'd taken to fight her – a dog-eared notebook and a plain black wooden box about the size of a laspistol magazine. She fiddled with the latter, but it was locked.

“I have his stuff. Heading back now,” she said.

There was no reply but a faint crackle of static. Hearing a sudden loud thump behind her, she turned to see Hoplon stomping towards her. With the feeling that something had gone horribly wrong, she tensed, and, as the cybernetic giant quickened its pace, scurried aside as it threw a mighty punch. She lost her footing in a tangle of rubbish and slid awkwardly, throwing up dust and filth as she scrambled for balance. She regained her footing, fighting the weight and awkward fit of the clumsy suit.

But she had forgotten how fast the servitor could move. She turned to face her opponent, and just had time to register Hoplon's inert corpse-face gazing indifferently at her before a backhand blow cracked her faceplate and sent her to the ground.