The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,10

been like that on a hundred worlds, sometimes with official blessing, sometimes under active persecution, but always there, gathering in the dark, doing what we had been made to do.

Who made us like this? I don’t know. I don’t think He did. I think we were always waiting, playing different parts, waiting for our time to come again.

We’ll all have our versions of when it started. For me, it was out in the void, running silent, closing in on the benighted staging post of Hellion Quintus, where I had reason to believe there was a woman who had sold her soul to damnation for a brief escape from the hell of living.

I was right about that. I was just wrong about everything else.

I entered the Hellion orbital zone on a single-person Cull-class interceptor. In those days we rarely used fully crewed sub-warp vessels. Even highly trained cadres of human-normals found it hard to work with us, so in many cases we opted for servitor-equipped ships. Those thought-dead drones were still capable of twitching when I walked past them. Somewhere deep in what remained of their limbic function a vestigial horror of me still squatted, which was annoying. You could slice half their brains open, tie their nerves into loops, and still they could barely remain in the same chamber as us.

It would be worse in the staging post, but I might be able to get in and out without attracting much attention. Hellion was one of those throwback stations, built sometime in the very distant past when traders would still attempt to make warp jumps without properly sanctioned Navigators, then find themselves stuck in scream-space and having to abort rapidly. The vagaries of warp conduits being what they were, the station grew up around what old-time captains used to call a bail-shaft – a safe well in real space squatting at the base of a whole cluster of capillary exits. For a time, so our intelligence told us, the place had done well, even attracting some military spending from the sub-prefect’s resilience commander to beef up its guns. The usual hangers-on turned up – permanent traders, thieves, missionaries, pleasure-bringers. They said it was quite the place back then, if rough around the edges.

Not now. No one flew a warp-hull now without a whole team of Navigators to guide it. Even contemplating making a jump without many days’ preparation and the Geller fields at full integrity was madness – the ether was like boiling oil, and rumour said more ships were being lost now than were being built.

That was bad news for Hellion, and all the other half-cocked ­stations spinning within the old bail-shafts. Hardly anything dared to make the passage. The bulkers stopped coming, as did the Navy tenders. The only ships that plied such routes now were the ones that had a reason to stay hidden, and that diminished the quality of Hellion’s occupants further. Respectable people drifted away, leaving whole sections of its spiral structure echoing and empty.

So there we had it – a half-deserted void station full of contraband runners and slavers operating off the major warp routes as the empyrean fizzed madly all around it. You didn’t need to be a seer to guess that it was a weak link, a place where mortal fallibility would find plenty of hooks to get entangled with.

That wasn’t all, of course. We had our methods, our informers, our hunches. We’d seen a pattern of events develop over the past few decades – cells of shedim-worshippers had grown more numerous, and we couldn’t burn them fast enough, especially considering the need to remain out of sight of the jumpier units of the ­Adeptus Arbites. Hestia herself had immolated a secret society called the Circlet locked deep down under the shipyards orbiting Eyrinan V. Before they had all died, we got some garbled information that led us to other associated beds of heresy, among them Hellion Quintus.

So here I was, clad in my old armour, my charred flamer in my hand, watching the dark twist of metal turning slowly in the abyss. I let the servitors handle the comm traffic for docking, which involved them shunting binaric response codes to similarly lobotomised creatures at the other end. We came in low, under a heavy supporting beam for one of the station’s big spokes.

I finalised suiting up, and opened the airlock doors into a place that stank of human urine. There was no one waiting for me, not even automated guard-units. The