The survivors had reported that the craft seemed devoid of the dangerous organisms that normally inhabited space hulks, but was instead rigged with well-hidden booby traps. Bundles of frag grenades were wired to bulkhead hatches. Gun-servitors guarded intersections. Airlocks opened into hard vacuum.

But there had been glimpses of what was beyond. There were areas partitioned into monastic cells, and a library crammed with leather-bound books.

One man reported a deck of fighter craft and vehicles. That had been before the news of the hulk's recovery had been passed on to Thaddeus, and the exploration of the hulk had been halted at his request until he arrived to oversee it personally.

Space hulks, ships which were lost in the warp and drifted after centuries back into realspace, were frequently home to savage aliens, insane cultists, and worse. But this hulk, enormous as it was, did not seem to contain any such monstrosities. Rather, it appeared to have been inhabited until recently.

Thaddeus's fingers ran across the controls of the navigation pulpit and several inset images appeared on the viewscreen. They were jerky, low-res transmissions from cameras mounted on the shoulders of salvage team officers, who were now waiting with their men in Navy landing boats attached to entry points on the near side of the hulk. There was no hope that they could explore anything like the whole mass of the hulk - such a task would take years given its size - so Thaddeus had ordered them into some of the more stable-looking, recognisable areas, like an early-pattern Imperial hospital ship and an escort destroyer from the time of the Gothic War.

Imperial Navy salvage teams were hard-bitten veterans of some of the most dangerous environments deep space could offer. They knew men had died on the hulk, but they were prepared to go that bit further in than anyone else to make sure their crew got credited with a find that could be spent in the dives of the next port they put into. Armed with shotguns and sheer guts, most of them would be pirates or black marketeers if the Navy hadn't press-ganged them from the hives and frontier worlds. It would be a shame to have to mindwipe them if they found anything they shouldn't know about, but they understood that risk, too.

'Captain?' said Thaddeus.

'Lord inquisitor?' replied the clipped voice of the captain of the Obedience.

Thaddeus couldn't claim the status of a lord inquisitor, but he didn't correct the man. 'You may begin.'

The transmissions from the Obedience filtered through a film of static that came from the bridge speakers. The images on the viewscreen juddered as the salvage crews, each a dozen strong, moved from their landing boats into the outer body of the hulk.

One team moved past the devotional plaques and shrines of the hospital ship, now dark and empty where once Sisters of the Orders Hospitaller had tended to the wounded from some unknown Imperial battlezone. Another was in the cavernous entrails of a starship's engine room, keeping their weapon-mounted torches probing into the shadows beneath the plasma generators. The corridors were dark and deserted; the only sounds the footsteps and orders of the salvage crews and the creaking of the hull. Transmissions from the crews informed Thaddeus that the hulk seemed to be empty and, sinisterly, far too clean. The gravity was working and the atmosphere, most remarkably, scanned as safe on the teams' crude auspexes. The youngest member of each team was ordered to remove his respirator and the fact that he didn't drop dead meant that there were no airborne toxins.

Moving further into the hulk, one team found a brig that looked like it had been used recently, with new locks and cells with devotional High Gothic texts on the walls. A ship's bridge had been opened up and the complex electronics of the cogitators and comm-links spilled out across the deck, with monitoring devices hooked into the workings. The plasma generators encountered by the team in the engine decks had been restored to working order. Someone had lived in the hulk, cleaned up the useable parts and even, it seemed, tried to make the hulk spaceworthy If they had succeeded, the hulk would have been a formidable weapon indeed, a fortress capable of carrying a massive number of personnel, along with the firepower of several of its constituent ships.

Thaddeus was now seriously entertaining the possibility that the Pilgrim was right.

'Coming up on Leros's crew.’ came the voice of one of the team leaders. 'What's left of them.' The corresponding image showed the bloody remains of several men, blown apart as if by explosives or large-calibre gunfire, spattered around the corridor.

'Keep your wits about you, team seven.’ ordered the Obedience's captain. Team seven, Thaddeus thought, probably didn't need reminding.

Thaddeus pressed an icon and the image from team seven was magnified on the viewscreen. They were in one of the warships, one with Low Gothic mottos scratched into the walls by a devoted crew. Leros's crew was scattered: an arm here, a head there, a weapon broken and thrown aside.

Something moved up ahead, a glint of metal.

'Halt!' barked the team's leader. 'Fall back! Lorko, you cover...'

A sheet of stuttering gunfire ripped down the corridor. The image swung wildly and a gauze of static shivered over the scene. Thaddeus could make out a man thrown back against a wall, the chest of his dark grey coveralls shredded and sodden with blood. Another man fell backwards, the upper part of his body blown apart.

Shotgun fire ripped back. Bright trails of an automatic gun spattered across the corridor. The team leader was yelling orders to fall back to the next junction.

Thaddeus caught sight of what was shooting at them.

'Team seven.’ he said calmly, knowing his voice would be relayed directly to the team leader. 'It's a gun-servitor. What explosives do you have?'

The leader was running back with his squad. 'Just signal flares.’ he said breathlessly.

'Use them. It will be blinded.' Thaddeus heard the team leader gathering a handful of flares from his men. The screen burned scarlet as they were lit and thrown back down the corridor behind them.

The shooting stopped. The image filled with thick red smoke from the flare as the team ran towards the blinded servitor. A volley of thudding shotgun blasts came a second later.

'It's dead.’ said the team leader. He had doubtless lost many men from his team on previous missions and his voice did not sound shaken in the least. 'It was never alive.’ replied Thaddeus. 'Show me.’ The leader kicked the closest flares down the corridor and waved some of the smoke away. Thaddeus could make out, on the floor, the remains of the servitor - its lower half was a hover unit. Its arms had both been replaced with twin-linked autoguns connected to large cylinder box magazines. Its face was just a jutting mass of sensors. Presumably it would have been difficult to make and would have been set to guard something important - a task it had succeeded in with the first team to come across it. 'Proceed.’ said Thaddeus.

The squad moved past the junction the servitor had been guarding. The leader glanced about, but Thaddeus saw that one of the corridors led to an arched doorway. 'That one.’ he said.

The team assembled at the threshold. The room beyond was large and unlit, and nothing could be seen past the doorway.

'Auspex?' asked the leader.

'Nothing.’ came the voice of one of his surviving crewmembers.

The leader shone his weapon torch through the doorway. The light played across a floor laid with smooth black marble veined in white, and across the foot of a bookcase. As the squad moved in they could see more in the light of their torches - cases of books that reached right up to the high ceiling. The shelves were full of books, most of them small volumes that could fit into the palm of a large man's hand, but there were a number of larger books, scrolls, and even stone tablets alongside them. A pulpit of stone stood before several rows of hardwood benches.