'We know all we need to, Sarkia. Just tell us, and when this is over, you will go free.’

Sarkia choked back a sob. 'You're renegades. You'll kill me.'

You don't know what we are. At the moment the only thing you have is my word as a soldier of the Emperor. Tell us what we need to know and you will eventually go free.'

Sarkia shrugged. 'I am going to die. Stratix Lumi-nae will kill you, too.' She paused, staring at the table. 'The grids are keyed to phrases from the revelations of the Omnissiah. There's a copy in every workshop and laboratory. There's an algorithm that'll pick out the code words, I can write it down. That'll open up the first level. The hot zone you'll have to get through yourselves.'

'You have been very helpful, Sarkia.'

She smiled bitterly. 'Are you trying to be comforting? You're a monster. You all are. You can't make this any easier. You're going to kill me, Marine.’

You can call me Iktinos.’

'I won't call you anything. I've only told you what I have so you won't have to break me for it, now I'm worth nothing to you. I'll be lucky if you just throw me out of an airlock.’

Iktinos stood up and picked up his rictus-faced helmet from the table. 'I say again, Sarkia, you have my word that when our work is done you will be freed. We have no interest in harming you. If we were still at the beck and call of the Imperium we would probably be required to hand you over for mindwiping. But we do not play that game any more.’

Iktinos strode out of the room, leaving Sarkia at the table. In a while the serfs would bring her something to eat and drink, and show her to the bunk that had been squeezed into one of the corridors they were using as a dormitory.

To anyone else, the successful questioning would have been a triumph. But Sarpedon was all too aware of the further risks the Chapter would have to take to survive, let alone succeed. In many ways it would have been a relief if Sarkia had known nothing. At least he would be able to banish any hope, and direct the Chapter's efforts elsewhere. Instead, Sarkia had just opened the gate for the Chapter to head into the heart of corruption and face both the horrors of Teturact's empire and the wrath of the Imperium. It would almost have been better if Sarkia had never been found, but Sarpe-don had to lead his Chapter to do the Emperor's work, no matter what the risks.

Sarpedon watched her for a moment. She wasn't crying or trembling. She just looked very tired, and he imagined that facing up to an alien environment and the very real possibility of interrogation and death had been draining for her.

Sometimes, Sarpedon thought, watching unaug-mented humans was like observing members of a different species. The Soul Drinkers were so isolated from the Imperium that the only normal humans Sarpedon saw regularly were the Chapter serfs: men and women so conditioned and loyal that they were more like intelligent servitors than people. Sarkia was Sarpedon's only contact with an Imperial citizen for a very long time apart from the short-lived Phrantis Jenassis, and no matter how curious he was about her he could not speak to her himself because she would probably go insane at the sight of him.

Sarpedon walked away from the shadows back towards the bridge, leaving Sarkia to the Chapter serfs. If she heard the talons of his arachnoid legs clattering on the metallic floor, she didn't look up.

ONE OF THE things that Thaddeus had begun to notice was that the Soul Drinkers were becoming officially nonexistent. His Tequests for astropathic traffic monitoring had been more and more difficult to implement, even when he brandished the small Inquisitorial symbol that carried the weight of immense authority. The warzone had been divided into military administration zones so the Departmento Munitorum could have a hope of wrestling with the logistics of such an immense operation, and Thaddeus had ordered alerts if astropathic transmissions were made with certain keywords - Astartes, renegade Marines, purple, spider, psychic and dozens of others. But there were several sectors that had not cooperated as Thaddeus had expected.

Imperial monitoring was impossible in areas completely controlled by Teturact, such as the space around Stratix that had been designated target sector primary, so Thaddeus could not expect much reply from the scattered recon ships and Inquisitorial operatives skulking between the plague worlds. But the Septiam-Calliargan sector had replied to Thaddeus's requests with red tape and misdirection. Aggarendon Nebula sector hadn't replied at all, yet there was little military activity around the nebula's scattered mining worlds. Subsector Caitaran, a tiny tract of space but one that included the Inquisition fortress and several Imperial Guard command flotillas, was worst of all: the communications Thaddeus received from the astropathic monitoring stations seemed stilted and contrived, and he had little doubt they were doctored.

That was only one symptom. Thaddeus's previous attempts to access historical records from worlds the Soul Drinkers had once fought on had yielded no information at all about the Chapter. The cathedral of heroes on Mortenken's World, for instance, no longer held the carved stone mural depicting Daenyathos, the Soul Drinkers' legendary philosopher-soldier who drove the alien hrud from the planet's holy city. Almost all the Soul Drinkers' marks since the Cerberian Field had been erased. Only Inquisitorial sources retained any cohesive history of the Soul Drinkers and their glorious history - glorious, at least, until the betrayal at Lakonia and the Chapter's excommunication. If there were aspects of their history not held in the Inquisition archives on the fortress-worlds in sectors where the Soul Drinkers had fought, then as far as the Imperium was concerned that history never occurred.

Thaddeus had never seen a deletion order in action before. He had heard of them of course, and been a part of some operations where they had been enforced. But he had never been aware of such a stain of ignorance across the Imperium, that burned books and wiped data-slates. Perhaps mind-wipings were being carried out on people who had encountered the Soul Drinkers. Thaddeus, as an inquisitor must, understood the importance of information, and how knowledge could rot the souls of those unable to cope with it.

Renegade Chapters were not unknown - how many children had been told the grim stories of the Horus Heresy, when half the Space Marine Legions were corrupted by the great enemy? But that it could happen now, and without any great Chaos presence to blame for it, could cause disillusion and panic; a situation the Imperium could ill afford. And the Soul Drinkers' disappearance from the memory of the Imperium made Thaddeus's job a damn sight harder.

He didn't know which sub-ordo of the Inquisition enforced the order. Neither did he know which operatives in astropathic nexus outposts and planetary archives were fuddling communications about proscribed topics. But they were effective, and without the authority of an inquisitor lord Thaddeus felt he could do little to get round them. He was feeding on scraps, and it was getting worse. He only hoped that his last remaining lead - an investigation of Eumenix outpost and the reason they had attacked it - would lead to some breakthrough. Otherwise his investigation would be starved of information until it died.

The Inquisition could be obsessed with blinding one part of itself to the activities of another, and Thaddeus sometimes wondered if it could one day push back the darkness and learn to trust itself. But there were enough dark rumours of Inquisitors who had become dangerous radicals or gone mad in their pursuit of corruption, so perhaps keeping members ignorant was the only way to stop it from rotting inside.

'Inquisitor?'

Thaddeus looked up from the data-slate. He had been reviewing the potential hits on the astro-pathic traffic, but there had been nothing promising, yet again. He saw - inevitably - the Pilgrim waiting at the door to the cold stone chamber. It was night on Caitaran and the filmy pale blue light from the cloudless night sky coloured blue and grey. Thaddeus had been so intent on sifting through the paltry astropathic data that he had failed to notice Caitaran's twin suns going down.