Leaning forward, Wienand reached under the bench and used her ring-transmitter to open the auto-bolt on the reinforced locker beneath. She pulled open the front to reveal several guns and pistols. She selected a lightweight bolt pistol and loaded it, placing it in the pocket of her coat. As added protection she pulled out a snub-nosed laspistol and tucked that inside her boot. Moving to the locker to her right she repeated the action and retrieved several blind and concussion grenades. Another locker yielded up a shock maul that slipped nicely up her sleeve and a sheathed vibroknife that she tied to her waistband.
As the shuttle clattered along in the gloom of its own lamps, Wienand took stock once more. Rendenstein was still alive, she was sure of it, if only because her bodyguard and assistant was fitted with an internal pulse monitor that had not activated. She might be captured or hurt, but Rendenstein’s heart was still beating.
It was impossible to hear anything over the clattering of the rack-and-pinion engine of the carriage, but Wienand could not shake the feeling that someone was following along the track behind her. She twisted on the bench and glared back. There was nothing in the twin cones of yellow projected by the rear lamps. In the darkness beyond, who could say?
In the fourteen tortuous minutes it took for the shuttle to clank and wheeze its way to the Cathedral of the Saviour Emperor, Wienand formulated a plan.
It was a very simple plan. She would lose herself amongst the human crush of the Piety Dorms. That was as far as it went. Survival was her only goal in the foreseeable future. Once that was assured Wienand could expend thought and energy on something loftier, like finding out who was trying to kill her and how she was going to respond.
The implications of what Veritus had done horrified Wienand but she forced herself to think through the consequences. The Inquisition was meant to be a free-form, self-regulating organisation. In fact, the term organisation was misleading. The Inquisition was officially recognised by the Senatorum Imperialis and the rest of the Imperium, but other than that it had no formally mandated structure, duties or remit.
In essence there was no Inquisition as such, just inquisitors. Each inquisitor, a bearer of the Emperor’s Seal, was a power unto himself or herself. Nobody was quite sure who had appointed the first inquisitors — or even if anyone had appointed them and they had not simply assumed the role for themselves. Over a thousand years later, it was still true that an inquisitor was the only authority that could bestow the Emperor’s Seal to another. Not the High Lords, the entirety of the Adeptus Terra nor the Mechanicus could grant such power to one man or woman.
Necessity had required a certain amount of support and infrastructure, and ad-hoc solutions had, over the centuries, gathered gravitas and traction to become quasi-formal institutions. The Inquisition as an entity had grown, as had the role of Inquisitorial Representative. Wienand had read some of the earliest Senatorum reports and it seemed that in those early decades the Inquisitorial Representative had simply been whoever was on Terra and available at the time. That was when the Inquisition had been looking outward far more than inward; resurgent alien threats, the risk of the rise of forces allied to the Ruinous Powers.
It pained Wienand to consider the notion that perhaps Veritus had been right on some level. Maybe the Inquisition had been tainted by association. The free-thinking, dynamic band of trusted investigators and agitators, judges and executioners, proselytisers and protectors had become something far greater, yet also diminished. The Inquisition possessed resources far beyond what it could have claimed even a century earlier, in terms of manpower, wargear and materiel. It had ships and soldiers, fortresses and libraries, communications nets, security protocols, sleeper cells, kill teams, relay posts, research stations and an untold number of agents, operatives, spies, infiltrators, slaved-servitors, pilots…
‘Damn,’ Wienand said out loud. ‘That bastard Veritus is right.’
The whole point of the Emperor’s Seal, the authority it represented, was to set the entire resources of the Imperium at the disposal of an inquisitor. If he or she needed an army, the Imperial Guard was required to oblige. If an inquisitor needed a ship, the Navy would provide. If someone was meant to be killed, there was the Officio Assassinorum. With a galaxy-spanning empire to draw upon, albeit fractured and impossible to govern, why did the Inquisition need these things for itself?
The answer was simple. The Imperium was broken. The offices and organisations meant to rule and control the vast interstellar swathes of mankind were simply unfit for the purpose. In fact, no institution would ever fit; the size of the Imperium and its scattered worlds prevented anything like meaningful communication and governance.
