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The Vorbis Conspiracy – Extract

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I

Another corpse in the rain.

Probator Lycia Calix crouched low in the gutter and tilted the dead man’s head towards the light. The fatal shot had left a scorched circle between his eyebrows that was barely large enough to admit the tip of her little finger. The exit wound was a different matter altogether.

The back of the man’s head was gone. A las-bolt had seared through his skull like a high-energy mining laser, superheating brain, cerebrospinal fluid and blood into greyish-pink vapour. The partially cooked remains spattered the wall of the alley, rain washing them down to the ground in oily rivulets that glistened in the Rampart’s red-and-blue flashing lights. The body was still warm.

Just another day in Korsk.

‘What do we know, sergeant?’

‘Johannes Villek.’ The sergeant-of-sanctioners assigned to the crime scene glanced down at her data-slate and frowned. ‘Thirty-eight. Married. Two children.’

‘Designation?’

‘Patrol enforcer.’

‘Anything taken?’

‘Just his holo-seal.’

A mass-transit conveyer rumbled overhead, its slate-grey bulk concealed by the leaden cloud that hung over Korsk in a perpetual shroud.

The sanctioner cleared her throat. ‘It’s another one, isn’t it?’

Calix stifled a flicker of irritation. The seventh identical spree-killing in a month, and it seemed everyone still needed a probator to say the words out loud for them. She turned up the collar of her longcoat, which did nothing to ease the icy trickle of rain flowing down between her shoulder blades.

‘What’s your name, sanctioner?’

‘Silje Deynholt, probator.’

‘And what do you think, Sergeant Deynholt?’

Deynholt squared her shoulders. ‘Single shot, downward trajectory. No sign of the perpetrator, or anything to connect Villek to any of the other victims. Beyond the obvious, of course.’ There was a hint of defiance in her voice, stopping the necessary fraction short of insubordination. ‘So yes, probator, I think it’s the Butcher of Korsk. Again.’

Calix winced. Spree-killers weren’t exactly a rarity in Varangantua, but this one stood out in more ways than one. The kills were clean and professional, a far cry from the usual gang-war bloodbaths, and the known victims were exclusively officers of the Lex. When the third victim had been discovered – two weeks before the luckless Enforcer Villek breathed his last in a rainy downtown alley – a pict-cast reporter had compared the murderer’s expertly delivered kill-shot to slaughtering grox in the district’s abattoirs, and the wry sobriquet had stuck despite all the Bastion’s efforts to dislodge it. Nicknames like that were dangerous. They made murderers into celebrities, and the last thing Korsk needed was an unofficial folk hero with a long-las and a penchant for murdering enforcers.

She looked down at the corpse. Rain was falling on the open eyes, trickling down the empty face like tears. Had those eyes seen death coming in the form of a streak of glowing green energy, or had he been snuffed out in an instant, oblivious as an altar-candle?

‘Witnesses?’

‘Not this time.’ Deynholt sniffed. ‘Maybe the Butcher was feeling self-conscious.’

Calix had precious few clues to hang her investigation on. Nothing connected the victims beyond their profession, no common ground that would take her a single step closer to finding who had murdered them and why. She had her own theory as to the exact weapon used – at the sort of distances the Butcher favoured, only a high-powered lasrifle would suffice – but hardware built to that specification was virtually unheard of outside the Panthera. If she’d been the betting sort, she’d have put money on the Butcher’s weapon of choice being a high-end Mons-Pattern long-las, with the new Mauros Reaper in a close second place.

Still, speculating about the weapon wasn’t going to get her out of the rain. Calix rubbed at her eyes, irritated by the tiny red alert flashing in the bottom right of her iris’ augmentation display. She blinked it away. Whoever was calling could wait.

‘Anything else you need, probator?’

‘A solid lead, if you’ve got one.’

Another Rampart was drawing to a halt at the end of the alley, the twin beams of its lumens catching the falling raindrops and bleaching the crime scene to flickering monochrome. Before the vehicle reached a standstill the side door opened, and a slender figure in a high-collared white tunic hopped birdlike to the ground, followed by a servo-skull trailing a metallised spinal column.

Deynholt raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t often see the verispex senioris out in the rain.’

‘Wonder what’s brought her out of her sarcophagus,’ Calix muttered, barely avoiding the servo-skull as it shot past her face, its glowing red ocular snapping a quick succession of images. ‘Verispex Istivel. To what do we owe the pleasure?’

Calix might have been invisible for all the attention the verispex paid her. The older woman waved a clawlike hand. ‘Sergeant, have the cadaver bagged for transfer to the mortuarium.’

Deynholt nodded, then cupped a hand over the vox-bead in her right ear. ‘Just a moment, please, verispex. I’m getting reports of some sort of disturbance in the shipping lanes.’

Istivel’s mouth twisted into a sneer. ‘Is that really relevant right now, sanctioner? Need I remind you that your duties here require your undivided attention?’

‘My apologies, verispex.’

‘I’m not finished,’ Calix said. The Rampart’s flashing lights were doing nothing to improve the ache behind her eyes.

‘And you are?’

‘Probator Lycia Calix. We’ve met, several times, in fact. More importantly, you’re at my crime scene. You can take the corpse when I’m done with it, assuming you ask politely.’ Calix folded her arms, and met Istivel’s glare with a truculent stare of her own. They could stand all night in the pissing rain for all she cared. It would be about as much use in finding the Butcher of Korsk as anything she had done so far.

The engine-rumble overhead was louder now. The Rampart’s vox-caster crackled into life. ‘All units, be advised to take shelter. Multiple reports of aerial debris incoming. Impact zone is expected to cover from Tyversk Sub-district to the Via Aquae Magna–’

‘That’s most of Korsk.’ Calix looked up. The sky had turned an unnatural shade of bronze. ‘Are we under attack?’

A vivid green glow illuminated the verispex’s face, then her skull exploded like a frag grenade. The corpse toppled to the ground, muscles still twitching, not yet aware that they had turned from part of a living organism to ninety-five pounds of future corpse-starch. Calix wiped at the sticky liquid spattering her face, opened her eyes and tried to make sense of what she was seeing.

A figure crouched on the roof of the manufactorum opposite, their silhouette indistinct, wavering like a grainy pict-cast. A gust of wind blew back the hood of a cameleoline cloak, and she caught sight of a faceless helmet, a suit of carapace armour, the distinctive silhouette of a sniper rifle. Calix drew her snub-nosed Mauros Astrapi from its holster, and fired. The roaring air swallowed the gun’s report as the ground shuddered beneath her feet, the sky a brilliant inferno of black and gold–

–and then death fell on Korsk like the fist of the God-Emperor Himself, and her problems were suddenly much bigger than a spree-killer and a handful of corpses.

II

The rain was the colour of ash.

Calix watched the falling droplets dance in the Graviteer’s lumen-beams, the shattered city laid out before her like a half-dissected corpse. A mismatched pair of cyber-mastiffs loped alongside the enginebike, the uneven ground no match for their dextrous paws and powerful piston-driven hindquarters. The air reeked of promethium, charred plascrete, ruptured sewers and rotting meat. If the reports were to be believed, close to a million people were decomposing in the rubble.

‘You’re not supposed to be in the impact zone.’ The voice came through her vox-bead, sharp and crisp in her ear.

‘And you’re not supposed to be on the secure channel.’

‘Touché.’ She could hear the smile in her fiancé’s gilded drawl. That particular vox-channel was reserved for Bastion use only, but Sevastyan Tzemerov had never had much respect for rules, at least as far as they applied to him. His position in the vladar’s inner circle made him more or less untouchable, but Calix knew his ambition was set far higher even than that. ‘I assume you don’t need to be reminded of our evening’s engagement?’

Shit. The memorial service at the Basilika of the Six Martyrs. How had she managed to forget? Sevastyan had been arranging the ceremony on the vladar’s behalf since hours after the disaster: a chance for Ecclesiarch Andreikov to extol the virtues of the city’s numberless dead, while the surviving dignitaries put on their best tragic expressions to be pict-cast planetwide.

‘I remembered,’ she lied.

‘Excellent. I didn’t want to have to explain your absence to the ecclesiarch. Poor chap’s got enough to deal with right now. The whole city’s been worked up into a frenzy waiting for the blessed Saint Antiope of Alecto to come home – only now she’s stuck in orbit while the Navy and the Regio Custos bicker over who dropped a servitor-shuttle on our heads.’

The Graviteer swept past what had once been a hab-block. Its lumen-beams glinted off red eyes and squat, grey-furred bodies picking through the ruins. Calix thought of what they were there to find, and shuddered. If there was a god of dredge-rats, its ears would be ringing with prayers of thanksgiving for the feast today.

Sevastyan sighed. ‘I’d bet you Thronegelt to slate what’s left of the Butcher of Korsk is lying under a hundred tons of rubble.’

‘Fine. I’m still taking the mastiffs in.’ She hated the stubborn petulance in her voice, but the unfinished business nagged at her like an itch she couldn’t reach. ‘One last look, before they level the place.’

Silence stretched out between them. ‘Dusk,’ he said at last.

‘Dusk?’

‘That’s when the ceremony starts. I’ll have your dress uniform pressed and laid out ready for you at home. We can eat afterwards. Will that do?’

Calix smiled. ‘You’re good to me.’

‘Too good. Don’t be late.’

The smaller of the two cyber-mastiffs raised its metallic snout and barked. ‘I have to go, Sev. The tracking mastiff’s trying to tell me something.’

‘Stay safe. And I’ll see you tonight.’

She cut the vox and brought the mastiff’s sensory feed up onto her augmentation field. Something buried in the rubble was giving out an energy signal less than a hundred yards to the north. She checked her display: still seven hours till dusk. Plenty of time for a small diversion.

‘You want to take a look?’

The smaller mastiff tilted its head to one side, a curiously organic gesture from a creature that resembled nothing more than a chrome-plated skeleton. She wondered if the vat-grown canine brain inside its chassis knew the trick the Adeptus Mechanicus had played on it, or if a powerful metal body and mono-edged teeth was a fair trade for the pleasures of the flesh. The Bastion’s cyber-mastiffs never seemed distressed by what they were missing, but then they never showed much by way of contentment either. They existed for one purpose alone: to hunt and kill in service to the Lex.

The find didn’t look like much at first. One linear crater among hundreds, gouged downward into the earth to end in a charred adamantine dome. The larger mastiff – a Sirius Six, capable of exerting a bite pressure of four thousand pounds per square inch if Dymaxion’s lurid advertisements were to be believed – reached the wreckage first, probing the object’s surface with its olfactory sensor. Calix ran her gloved hand across the smooth, damp metal surface, then drew it back as it let out a startling hydraulic hiss.

The dome was opening.

She leant forward to squint through the widening gap, and found herself staring into a miniature voidship cockpit. The interior smelled rank, as if an animal had found its way inside, soiled itself repeatedly, then died. The servitor-pilot was slumped in the command-throne, lit by a flickering red lumen mounted on the wall. The smaller mastiff growled.

She activated her vox. ‘Control, this is Calix.’

‘Go ahead, probator.’ Control’s voice was as brisk and efficient as ever.

‘I’ve found something in…’ She looked for a landmark and found nothing, settling instead for the string of coordinates on her display. ‘Part of the crashed shuttle. The flight-servitor’s intact. There might still be data in its cogitators.’

There was a pause. ‘I don’t have you assigned to that investigation, probator.’

‘No.’ Calix tried to keep her voice light. ‘But maybe you could pass it along to whoever’s working the case. If you have the time, that is.’

‘Please hold.’

The smaller canid was pressing close to her legs, its teeth bared. It was quivering from its snout to the tip of its mechanical tail, all of its attention fixed on something inside the cockpit. The servitor was moving.

Calix leaned closer. The servitor was trying to stand, its movements stiff and halting. It turned its head, and its mouth opened. ‘God – Emperor – protect,’ it wheezed.

‘Control–’ Calix’s voice cracked. She cleared her throat and tried again. ‘Forget what I said before. It’s not a servitor. I’ve found a survivor.’

III

It took time to coax the survivor outside, not helped by the awkward angle at which the bright orange salvation pod had embedded itself in the ground, the narrowness of the opening and the relentless drizzle. She was a girl somewhere in her late teens, dressed in a filthy tunic and breeches, a fine stubble of black hair covering her scalp. She looked like she hadn’t slept since the salvation pod had hit dirt three days ago.

‘You got a name?’ Calix asked. The girl didn’t speak. ‘You cold? Hungry?’ Calix took off her dripping longcoat and wrapped it around the girl’s shoulders, but she might have been a servitor after all for all the appreciation she showed. ‘Control’s sending a team to collect you. They’ll be here soon. Why were you on the shuttle? Did you stow away?’

Still nothing.

Calix shrugged. ‘You don’t need to talk to me. But let me give you a piece of advice – spill your guts before they send for the chasteners, or they’ll spill them for you.’

That didn’t get a reaction either. Either the girl wasn’t afraid of torture, or she was simply ignorant of the threat the chasteners represented. The latter option seemed more likely. An off-worlder then, a stowaway on the shuttle, maybe even a deserter from a ship in orbit. That would explain her silence. The Imperial Navy were hardly renowned for their kindness to oathbreakers.

‘Where is the cathedral?’ The girl spoke quietly, but her Gothic was schola-room perfect, with no trace of any Varangantuan accent that Calix recognised. If anything, the girl’s crisp diction reminded her of the officers in the old-fashioned recruiting broadcasts, the sort designed to tempt vainglorious young idiots to sell their lives in service in the void.

‘What?’

‘A chapel will do. Or a convent.’

Calix waved a hand across the landscape of rockcrete rubble. ‘Take your pick.’

‘I need to speak with a priest.’

‘The hells you do. If it’s sanctuary you’re after, don’t bother. The ecclesiarch has enough on his plate without standing between you and the Lex.’

The girl’s gaze had drifted over Calix’s shoulder, and a frown creased her forehead. ‘You should secure your vehicle.’

Calix followed the pointing finger back up the gouged-out trench. Two ragged figures were circling her Graviteer like hungry carrion-beasts. The ignition was locked to her holo-seal, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t do it some serious damage, and the thought of the walk home wasn’t a welcome one.

‘Wait here.’ Calix headed off at a run, but the mastiffs outpaced her within seconds. She drew her Astrapi. ‘Officio Lex! Get your hands off that enginebike!’

One of the scavengers turned just in time to see the cyber-mastiffs bearing down on him, and ran. The second, braver or more stupid, decided to stand her ground, drawing a battered looking stub gun then yelping in terror as the Sirius model leapt into the air and slammed her to the ground.

Calix slowed to an amble. ‘Can I help you with something, citizen?’

The scavenger looked up. She was dressed in a worn set of forge-fatigues, her face pockmarked with tiny, well-healed burn scars. A foundry-worker, then, before she had decided there was a better life to be had outside the law. Everyone made mistakes.

‘Only you seemed to be taking an interest in my bike.’

The cyber-mastiff yawned, revealing rows of serrated teeth. Pinned under its bulk, the scavenger shuddered. ‘Please – no – I didn’t mean–’

‘You didn’t mean?’

‘Any harm. I swear. By the Throne.’

Sacred machine oil drooled from the mastiff’s mouth onto the woman’s face. Calix toyed with the idea of reducing Varangantua’s population of vermin by one, but there seemed little point. Thieves were like fungi. You could stamp out the fruiting bodies, but the rot still spread its tendrils citywide below the surface. She subvoxed a command, and the mastiff stepped back. The woman scrambled to her feet, stumbling in her frenetic haste to lose herself in the rubble and the gloom.

‘You’d better keep watch on the bike.’ The larger cyber-mastiff’s eyes flared green as it registered the instruction, and settled into a vigilant crouch. Calix retraced her steps to the wreckage, the smaller canid trotting obediently at her heel.

‘Just looters,’ she began, and realised she was talking to empty air. The girl was gone. ‘Well, shit.’

Calix scanned the area. The survivor couldn’t have got far, though the longer she stayed alone in the ruins, the more likely it was she’d attract attention from hungry scavengers, animal or human. Calix brought up the cyber-mastiff’s data-feed, her iris converting the stream of olfactory input into blurry neon streaks of hot pink and acid green. The trail was heading northwards, up the side of the trench onto open ground. It was already fading in the rain.

‘Fetch.’

The hunting mastiff’s powerful haunches contracted then extended, unleashing a burst of plyometric force that sent it up and over the salvation pod onto the waste ground beyond. Calix scrambled up behind it, mud soaking through her gloves and the synthweave of her trousers.

The trail led to the remains of an Adminstratum building, the shattered bas-relief of an aquila lying broken by a corner wall. The girl’s scent was a burning neon line, vivid green against a pixelated grey world. A round targeting matrix appeared in Calix’s vision as the mastiff gathered its haunches and sprang.

It struck the girl just behind the knee. She fell forward, but instead of hitting the ground in an ungainly tangle of limbs, she tucked her arms in tight, took the impact on her shoulder and rolled expertly to the side. As the mastiff turned, she was already up in a crouch, one hand drawing an oversized gunmetal shape from behind her back.

A bolt pistol.

The cyber-mastiff’s display flashed a warning. It lowered itself into a crouch, ready to spring again, its targeting matrix centred on the girl’s throat.

‘Enough.’ Calix drew her Astrapi, hoping her hand wasn’t shaking too visibly. One shell from the bolt pistol would blast the cyber-mastiff into expensive shrapnel, and she didn’t want to think about what it would do to her torso. This situation was getting rapidly out of hand. ‘Drop your weapon.’

The girl kept her gaze – and the bolt pistol – firmly on the mastiff. A tinny growl came from between its razor-sharp teeth, but it didn’t move. At least one of them was still doing as it was told.

‘There are people out here who’ll kill you, skin you and eat you, understand?’ Calix said. She switched off the mastiff’s feed and picked her way carefully across earth churned by the rain into a stinking, cloying swamp, trying not to think about what lay beneath the surface. Sinkholes. Wreckage. Human remains. One misstep and she could so easily join them. ‘No matter what you’ve done, you’re safer with me than you are on your own.’

‘All the more reason I should be armed.’ The girl’s voice was cold. ‘Are you going to call off your hound?’

She was brave, Calix had to grant her that. ‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On whether or not you’re going to run again.’

The girl’s eyes flicked briefly to the wasteland around them, no doubt assessing her chances of making a successful break for it and coming to the obvious conclusion. ‘I give you my word I will not run,’ she said, with a curiously ceremonial air. ‘But I will not surrender my weapon.’

Calix sighed. It wasn’t much of a truce, but it would have to do. She subvoxed a command to the mastiff, which slunk back to her side with a tinny, resentful growl, its glowing eyes still fixed on the stowaway.

‘All right. You don’t run, I won’t set the mastiff on you.’ Calix inclined her head towards the bolt pistol. ‘Are you going to tell me where that came from?’

‘It was entrusted to me by–’

The mastiff interrupted her with a sharp bark. It shook itself, sending a spray of water arcing into the air, then lowered its metal ears to its skull. Calix followed its red-eyed gaze into the sky, where the cause of its unease was slowly appearing through the clouds. The dull whirr of an approaching Zurov broke the silence, the descending gunship’s four whirring rotors holding it stationary above the wreckage, lumen-beams playing over the salvation pod. Two elongated human silhouettes – the scavengers again, too greedy or too desperate to quit while they were ahead – danced in the searchlight like a child’s shadow-play.

A smile broke across Calix’s face. ‘Looks like our ride’s here.’ Soon they’d be out of the rain, heading back to the Bastion, and the ragged stowaway and her oversized hand-cannon would be someone else’s problem.

The gunship tilted forward, adjusted its bearing and opened fire.

The salvation pod erupted like a volcano. Black smoke and vivid orange fire plumed upwards. It fired again, and a second rocket obliterated the Graviteer and the cyber-mastiff keeping vigil beside it. A burning human figure lurched from the wreckage, arms pinwheeling desperately, only to be cut down in a burst of gunfire. Of the other scavenger, there was no sign at all.

‘Throne-on-Terra!’

Calix hit the dirt, the girl slamming down beside her a split second later. What had just happened? One minute she had been ready for home, the next the world had exploded in flame. The Zurov wasn’t here to collect them. It was here to… to what? To kill them? To destroy the salvation pod? She took a deep breath, swallowing down her panic. It might feel like they were alone out here, but the full force of the Lex was only a vox-call away.

‘Stay down,’ she hissed, and opened the secure channel. ‘Control, this is Calix, we have a situation!’

The vox was silent. She tried again. Nothing. Calix cycled through the frequencies, her breath caught high in her throat, but there was no answer, not even a crackle of static. Her iris was dead, too, its connection to the dataveil severed.

‘Shit.’ She glanced at the girl, and saw her own shock mirrored on the stowaway’s wide-eyed face. The surviving cyber-mastiff whined as though grieving for its partner, or, more likely, unsettled by the loss of its noospheric connections.

Calix looked up. The Zurov’s two search-lumens were sweeping the area, glittering droplets of rain dancing weightless in the rotors’ downdraught. A giddying dizziness swept across her as she watched, as if the dataveil had been the tether holding her to solid ground; as if Alecto’s gravity might fail at any moment and send her spiralling off into nothingness. The Zurov turned again, taking aim with a pair of underslung autoguns. She shot a desperate look around, searching for an overhang, a ruined set of foundations, anywhere to escape the merciless sweep of the lumen-beams. A trench, sixty yards away, maybe less. She grabbed the girl’s wrist.

‘Run!’

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WARHAMMER CRIME

A BLACK LIBRARY IMPRINT

First published in Great Britain in 2022.
This eBook edition published in 2022 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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