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The motive force moved through Rina von Valancius. Her mind swam through dark waters of dense information, filtered bit from byte and irrelevance from importance.
She plunged into the deep sea of data then surfaced again, brain numb from informational overload. She knew it was here. The backdoor. It was hidden deep in the binharic object code and readable only by a machine.
Another dive and—there! A trapdoor, deep on the ocean floor, marked by a glowing amber rune. She pushed herself down, further into the system, further from human language and feeling, and affixed her rootkit. She was in.
BY ORDER OF HIS MOST HOLY MAJESTY
THE GOD-EMPEROR OF TERRA
SEQUESTERED INQUISITORIAL DOSSIERS
AUTHORISED PERSONS ONLY
Please enter your authority code > *************
Validating…
Thank you, Throne Agent.
You may proceed.
Rina pulled three golden connectors from the sockets behind her ear. They were coated in a thin film of pink: blood mixed with cerebral fluid. She’d have to be more careful in future.
*
Rina’s well-needed rest was interrupted by a knock on her office door. No servant arrived to announce the visitor. She’d had them all expelled while she communicated with the cogitator.
Groggily, she threw on the first piece of clothing she could find—an old dress of Theodora’s that was too small in the waist and too big in the bust—and padded across the soft carpet to the door.
She opened it to find Heinrix van Calox stood to attention. He smiled at her warmly.
‘Rina.’ His expression faltered as he looked her up and down. ‘Is now a bad time?’
Shit. If she had known the Interrogator was at her door she might have put a little more thought into her appearance.
‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Please, come in.’
‘Gladly.’
As she moved towards her desk, a shiver of psychic energy feathered across Rina’s input jacks. She started and turned to Heinrix.
His eyes widened in realisation. ‘Apologies, Lord Captain, I didn’t think. Possibly a sensitive area. I—you were injured.’
Lord Captain. He called her that every time their little flirtation went too far, drifted into awkward territory. Given how awkward they could both be, that was often.
Her cheeks were red. ‘Thank you.’
‘So,’ she dragged out her chair and sat behind her desk. ‘What can I do for you?’
Heinrix sat opposite. He didn’t ask, anymore.
‘Well…’ he trailed off, looked at the ceiling, looked at the floor, anywhere but at her, it seemed. ‘I noticed something strange in the ship’s cogitator banks.’
‘Oh?’
She hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary on her dive.
‘You don’t seem surprised,’ said Heinrix, with a note of confusion in his voice.
‘Pasqual was probably messing with the intercessory prayers again, the spirits are very restless, right now.’
‘No, Rina, I mean that I had access to your internal systems.’
She laughed. ‘Well, of course you’ve been in my cogitator banks. What respectable member of the Inquisition boards a Rogue Trader and doesn’t check the banks, bug the vox relay and place their own backdoor into the main system?’
‘Oh.’
‘And,’ she continued, ‘no offence, but you didn’t do a particularly good job of hiding it. A technomat signature beginning with a deck allocation code? We haven’t done that since the STL for personal usernames was discovered.’
She’d lost him. His eyes were glazed over, his face glum.
‘Honestly,’ she told him, ‘I thought it was a power move, at first. I figured the Ordo Xenos taught better tech-skills.’
He narrowed his eyes. Rina could have sworn that the temperature in the room dropped. Awkward, kind, Heinrix was gone. She was sitting opposite Interrogator von Calox, now. A slight frost patterned its way across one corner of her desk.
‘Where, if not my order’ he spat, ‘does one learn such things?’
She shrugged, kept her calm; she’d seen worse than this. ‘Here and there. What did you find in the cogitator records?’
He glowered at her. ‘Someone on this ship has accessed an internal Inquisition database.’
‘Oh, yeah. That was me.’
She smiled, tried to will him back to usual Heinrix with a slight telepathic nudge. He shielded his mind, violently.
‘How can you say that so brazenly, so casually?’ His hands hit the desk; he was shaking. ‘This is a crime against the Inquisition, tantamount to heresy!’
Throne on Terra, had he not worked it out by now? Did he really think her some kind of heretek?
She took a deep breath, lest her calm would falter. ‘Heinrix, what did your background check say about me?’
‘Very little. That you were an Administratum clerk from the Scarus Sector. I presume that is not the truth.’
‘You haven’t been able to access Inquisition records on the ship.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘Of course not, this vessel isn’t authorised.’
She drew in a deep breath. She wouldn’t treat this man, whom she admired very much, most of the time, like an idiot. Especially not when he seemed a hair’s width from arresting her for heresy.
‘That’s what the backdoor is for. I did spoof the ship codes and use a virtualized machine spirit—just in case—but I promise you, my access codes are valid.’
She pointed to the cogitator. Metal-encased wires spilled from its dimly lit screen. They were still crusted with blood.
‘Do you want to see?’
He nodded. She wondered what he was thinking, but she didn’t dare to peek.
Rina sat before the machine and handed the wires to Heinrix. ‘Want to plug me in?’
She’d meant it as a gesture of peace, of trust. When the doom on Heinrix’s face was replaced with scarlet, she realised it may not have been taken that way.
Regardless, he stood behind her, brushed her dark hair from the pale skin that ringed her sockets, and slid the connectors into her ports. His touch was gentle; she felt none of his previous ire as his hands drifted slowly from her head and came to rest on her shoulders.
The system booted up in cathode-ray green.
BY ORDER OF HIS MOST HOLY MAJESTY
THE GOD-EMPEROR OF TERRA
SEQUESTERED INQUISITORIAL DOSSIERS
AUTHORISED PERSONS ONLY
Please enter your authority code >
She entered her credentials, then brought up her own file. It looked exactly as Heinrix had described.
‘I need obsidian clearance. Give me your rosette.’ Rina held out her hand.
‘I can’t do that, Rina.’
She sighed in frustration. Did he still not understand that he was dealing with a colleague?
‘Those things are impossible to clone, but, fine. The chest by the bed. At the very bottom.’ She gestured to the wires—she wasn’t going anywhere.
Her seal was buried beneath lacy black pants and matching bras. She preferred if Heinrix was going to see her underwear that he’d see it on her, but the way things were going that looked less likely by the second.
Flashing the rosette generally fixed things. At this moment she wished she’d done it months ago, when a von Valancius dropship had very nearly blown her cover in an Administratum block on Tharican Primaris. She’d had a choice between ruining an operation years in the making, or being, essentially, kidnapped. Rina had chosen the latter, and now, she was a Rogue Trader in a foreign sector and cut off from everyone she’d ever known due to a mass warp-storm. Heinrix had represented a bit of normality, until now.
A small slab of red plasteel, fashioned into the Inquisitorial “I” symbol, was placed on the cogitator panel.
‘Where did you get this?’ Heinrix’s voice was a seething whisper.
‘Let me show you.’
She slid it into the data-engine’s identifier drive.
SEAL RECOGNISED
WELCOME Imperial Agent Zarina Valancius.
CLEARANCE: Obsidian
ENCRYPTION: Cryptox v 2.6
The screen refreshed, scanline by scanline, and the real Rina Von Valancius came into view.
NAME: Zarina Valancius
KNOWN ALIASES: Rina Thorne, Zari Klein
RANK: Throne Agent
ORDOS MAJORIS: Ordos Malleus
ORDOS MINORIS: Ordos Helican
REPORTS TO: Inquisitor Octavius Marcellus
STATUS: MIA
ASSIGNATION: Departmento Munitorum Tharican Primaris Case x702i
EDUCATION: Schola Progenium; additional training Adeptus Mechanicus
His hands were back on her shoulders, and they squeezed, warmly. ‘I apologise for my doubt. I should have known.’
The psychic tension drained from the room. No frost, no tendrils of distrust leaking from Heinrix’s mind. Rina relaxed into it, and leaned back in her chair. Her head brushed Herinx’s chest, and she felt his fingers twitch in response.
‘I thought you knew. I thought everyone did. But when Abelard started showing me hidden xenotech cashes, I realised that letting everyone believe I was some clerk was to my advantage.’
‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.’
She chuckled. ‘I’ll hand them over to you when this farce is finished. My real life is beyond that warp-storm. You know, I presumed you were my Inquisitorial rescue when we first met.’
‘I still could be.’ He slid the plugs gently from her head, and the monitor went blank.
There he was, her Imperial Knight in shining armour.
‘Amesec?’ she asked. ‘I believe we have a lot to discuss…’