Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Lin stepped into the Sleepless Eye bar.

He had worried about how to conceal his frame, but once he reached the bar he realized his concern had been unnecessary.

People draped in great cloaks that hid their bodies, just like him, were everywhere here. Inside, he hardly stood out at all.

The Ultimate Wall's garrison sat near the platform where the underhive gave way to the midhive—truly the posting closest to the underhive. If Lin's guess was right, the Astra Militarum previously stationed there had also been responsible for controlling and inspecting the routes leading from the underhive up into the higher hive levels.

But when Hays's single transfer order pulled the Astra Militarum away from here, the planetary defence force that took over the post simply lacked the strength to maintain surveillance over the underhive's population. As a result, plenty of monsters and freaks from the underhive had slipped up into the midhive. Those strange figures who draped themselves in cloaks to hide their identities were, by and large, people from the underhive.

Yet the patrons of this bar seemed already accustomed to such things. Not a single person raised any objection to these cloaked oddities; everyone went about their own business with unchanged expressions.

Lin sat down at the counter. The bartender gave him a glance. "You want a fire-dog, or a firecracker?"

"You don't sell liquor here?" Lin asked, curious.

"Of course we sell that too, but there's certain business only we can do. Seeing as you're a figure from the underhive, I'll let you in on it—our boss has a very tight route with the pipe-works set up in the midhive. What everyone else pours out is thirty-four-year-old junk sent back to the factory, but we can get you oil-cloth-wrapped goods straight off the production line. With the greenskins about to arrive, even the biggest gang needs a few more pieces on hand, doesn't it?"

"So how about it?" The barkeep set a cup of cheap rotgut in front of Lin. "What are you thinking? Our boss doesn't care which gang you're with—as long as you've got the coin, we do the deal. The price is a bit steep, sure, but the merchandise is absolutely reliable."

Lin didn't reach for the drink. He already had a preliminary assessment of just how chaotic the hive city had become.

Those who could flee had fled long ago. Anyone with a shred of influence was now liquidating assets by every means possible, hoping to secure a ticket off Port Sanctus. As for those who truly couldn't get away, they had begun stockpiling weapons to protect themselves in what was to come.

Port Sanctus had indeed deteriorated to the brink of collapse.

The barkeep waited patiently for Lin's reply—but then a hand clapped onto Lin's shoulder from behind and hauled him up from before the bartender. A rough male voice cut off their exchange. "I've already settled the deal with him. Don't go stirring up trouble."

"Tch, so he's got a boss already."

The bartender curled his lip, pushed the liquor toward Lin, and gestured that Lin was to pay for the cup.

Lin thought for a moment, then fished a Throne coin out of his robe. The barkeep's eyes went wide at once. The person behind him smacked a palm across the back of Lin's head, then tossed the bartender a power cell.

The figure leaned close to Lin's ear and scolded him in a low voice. "If you want to get swarmed, don't drag me into it!"

"I was just testing something. I didn't expect that even the areas near Terra had regressed to bartering."

"Currency has zero credibility right now."

"But this is the midhive. I thought it'd be a bit better here." Lin walked into the bar's private booth alongside the figure. "Besides, I wouldn't have thought an Inquisitor would be afraid of getting swarmed."

"This is a covert operation. I have to avoid drawing attention."

The figure shed the disguise. Her voice shifted from rough to smooth, and her features returned to the appearance Lin had seen earlier at the Governor's palace.

Inquisitor Vladilena Milizé.

"Whose attention are you avoiding? That colleague of yours?"

"Pavonis? He's certainly among them."

"Anyone else?"

"It would be more accurate to say the vast majority."

"Looks like I'm not among the vast majority—after all, I have the honor of a personal audience with an Inquisitor."

"My retainers are all carrying out missions in the underhive. Besides, I have to meet you in person to prove the Inquisition's sincerity."

Vladilena sat down gracefully and looked at Lin's utterly indifferent face. "You don't actually think the Inquisition is unaware of what you did aboard Cath Maximus, do you?"

"And if I do? If you people were really hung up on that, I don't think we'd be sitting here chatting."

Even without her permission, Lin plopped himself down across from her without ceremony. "Besides, Mars hasn't even made its position clear. How can you come charging over and use this as leverage?"

Lena fell silent for a moment.

She was finding that this sage really did have a sharp tongue.

But it was also the truth. The Inquisition had obtained intelligence on Lin from their agents planted on Mars. The tangled complexity within the Adeptus Mechanicus meant they'd learned of it far later than Mars had—yet Mars had remained oddly silent on the matter.

On top of that, when the Inquisition had dispatched her to Port Sanctus, Mars had insisted on wedging itself into the affair.

Everyone suspected Mars had some grand plan, but no one knew what that grand plan was.

Lena collected her thoughts. Her counterpart's fierce contrarian streak made her reluctant to resolve the matter through ordinary threats, so she tried a gentler, persuasive approach. "Mars not holding this against you now doesn't mean they won't hold it against you later. You're a sage of the Adeptus Mechanicus yourself—you should understand the Mechanicus's nature of nursing every last grievance."

"And so?" Lin had already guessed roughly what Lena meant to say.

"My mission requires your assistance, Sage Lin. As long as you do the job well enough, the Inquisition will guarantee your safety going forward."

"What gives a single Inquisitor the standing to say that?"

"I'm merely a mouthpiece. This will comes from my superior standing behind me."

Lin's interest was piqued. "And your superior is?"

"The Inquisition's representative on the Senatorum Imperialis—Veritus."

This was the second time Lin had brushed against a High Lord, but unlike Hays, the Inquisition's representative—a holder of a permanent seat—was the true power-wielding faction among the High Lords. When they said they could guarantee his safety, those words were no empty pretext.

But what was the price?

Becoming an oil-drinker under the Inquisition's control?

These were all matters for later, though. Before any of that—what kind of mission did the Inquisition need him to assist with?

"I don't need the Inquisition's protection—but..."

Lin leaned forward, staring at the Inquisitor across from him. "If the Inquisition were willing to trade its protection of me for its support of me instead, I'd consider the proposal."

Lena knitted her brow. She could taste the difference in initiative that came from this swapping of terms. More critically, this demand happened to be exactly the bottom line Veritus had set for him.

Had her mentor foreseen this all along?

She probably ought to haggle with Lin a bit more, but given the mission ahead, Lin's power was something she had to have.

So she simply conceded outright. "Let's talk about the mission ahead."

Lin suddenly felt a twinge of regret.

This had been a lion's-mouth demand he'd thrown out precisely because he didn't want to agree—he hadn't expected her to accept so readily. But things had come to this, and he had no intention of going back on his word. He made a gesture, signaling for her to continue.

"My mission in coming to Port Sanctus is to apprehend an Inquisitor," Lena explained. "He has set up a... rather blasphemous ritual in Port Sanctus's underhive. We must bring him to justice—or at the very least, disrupt the ritual."

Lin frowned.

Anything involving rituals was always entangled with those uncanny, unnatural forces—especially when an Inquisitor would actually be hunted by other Inquisitors for it. That meant the probability the ritual involved a presence from the Warp was a flat one hundred percent.

He just didn't know how far along that ritual had already progressed.

He suddenly understood a little better why his counterpart was being so accommodating.

"The planetary Governor said you'd come to announce that reinforcements were about to arrive. That news of imminent reinforcements isn't just a front for your mission, is it?"

"Of course not. Half of the Solar Fleet is en route to Port Sanctus under the command of Admiral Lansong. The High Lords do indeed plan to fight a decisive main engagement at Port Sanctus. But before that, we must first pave the way for this battle."

The words seemed like standard officialese, but Lin keenly grasped the crux within them.

"You mean that if this ritual isn't disrupted, what happens next will endanger the entire campaign?"

Lena said nothing, but her expression was clearly a tacit yes. Lin clicked his tongue, feeling rather displeased.

The Inquisition made its own mess and had to call in someone to wipe their backsides?

And that earlier protection proposal had been so haughty, like a hand-out. Lin had been wondering just what the Inquisition's grounds for such arrogance were—only to find in the end it was a blank check that required him to go risk his own life first. It was hard to say whether this pack of Inquisitors regarded anyone outside their own circle as human at all.

Still, considering that this group of Inquisitors likely held a fair amount of intelligence, Lin reined in his temper and kept communicating with her.

"All you know is that he's in the underhive? No more intelligence than that?"

"My retainers are gathering it now."

"What I need is something more concrete."

Lena hesitated, but in the end she produced a data-slate. After Lin checked and confirmed the slate held no viruses, he plugged it directly into his own body.

The data stored within flashed before Lin's eyes like a waterfall, and he swiftly picked out the key information useful to him.

"Wudier, former Ordo Malleus Inquisitor. Wanted internally by the Inquisition for conducting a daemon-summoning ritual and slaughtering civilians en masse. Slipped into Port Sanctus amid the chaos as the Imperial forces hastily withdrew..."

"Pavonis, Ordo Malleus Inquisitor. Formerly a sage of the Mars Adeptus Mechanicus's Void Technology school. Even after joining the Inquisition, he maintained considerable ties with Mars. He maneuvered by various means to join the force heading to Port Sanctus—suspected to be acting on Mars's instructions..."

"Governor Egrim Horst. Seventh-generation heir of the Horst family. His family followed the Emperor's Children Legion in liberating Port Sanctus, and he was personally granted the title of Governor of Port Sanctus by the Primarch himself..."

Now that was a piece of key information.

Lin pulled out the data-slate and tossed it back to the Inquisitor. "What's your read on the planetary Governor here?"

"An ambitious good-for-nothing. He has his own scheme, but the scheme itself hinges entirely on the whims of others." Lena's assessment aligned largely with Lin's own earlier view. "His ambition will be destroyed along with Port Sanctus, or shattered when the Imperial forces return to Port Sanctus."

"Then do you know his objective is also the underhive?"

Lena was taken aback. "But the planetary defence forces under his command are all concentrated in the upper hive levels."

"Which is why he wants us to clear out the underhive. That's the whole reason he approached us."

The Governor's objective and the Inquisitor's actually overlapped. No matter how righteous the pretext the Governor had used earlier, it was clearly enough now to put both Lin and the Inquisitor on their guard.

Lena rose to her feet. Having cross-verified this new intelligence with Lin, she looked ready to move immediately. "Perhaps this Governor could be a point of entry."

"You think he's connected to that Inquisitor in the underhive?"

"At the very least it won't be as simple as retaking control of the underhive. For the next while I'll be monitoring this Governor's movements. You must stir up some commotion in the underhive so I can catch him in a lapse. If he makes any suspicious move while you're operating down there, I'll notify you at once."

Lin pinched his chin and did not nod straightaway.

An Inquisitor's strength depended on how many reinforcements they could rally, but Port Sanctus's official powers had already withered after the great withdrawal to the point where they could no longer establish effective rule over the place. Under such circumstances, one shouldn't expect too much from an Inquisitor who'd brought no outside reinforcements.

Still, she was at least a professional at discerning Chaos. If the traitor Inquisitor in the underhive truly was connected to the planetary Governor, then sending her to keep watch was indeed a fairly suitable choice.

But this also meant the underhive could only be handled by him and these three hundred Astartes.

By all rights, the underhive should have great difficulty posing any threat to Astartes clad in power armour. But with an Inquisitor capable of summoning daemons down there, who knew what monsters and horrors lurked in the underhive?

Yet to get a clear picture of the situation in Port Sanctus, one had to start with the underhive.

Lin and the Ultimate Wall were now bound together—sharing the same losses and the same glory. The Ultimate Wall would never shrink back from Chaos's tricks, so naturally Lin couldn't avoid the problem either.

In other words, his goals and this Inquisitor's overlapped in at least some part.

In which case, cooperation wasn't out of the question.

"We'll search the underhive step by step, in our own way," Lin agreed. "I won't act entirely according to your ideas, and that allied force of Astartes isn't your puppet. But on the parts where our goals align, I think we can maintain a limited cooperation."

"Very well." No disappointment showed on Lena's face. She didn't even take issue with the term "allied force"—clearly she too knew that, as things stood, she had no standing to demand much.

The two ended their talk and stepped out of the booth. The crowd, who had earlier been itching with anticipation at the sight of Lin's Throne coin, all fell silent once he deliberately displayed the plasma pistol at his waist. He left the bar without incident, once more melting into the crowd, and returned to the Astartes' garrison.

The Astartes' war preparations were not confined to within the camp. When Lin returned to the garrison and entered the command room, he saw everyone gravely studying the intelligence the Felynes had brought back.

Noticing Lin's return, Kurande gave him a slight nod, then pushed that intelligence over in front of him.

"Not good news, is it?"

"Worse than that."

Having just finished speaking with the Inquisitor, Lin already had some mental preparation. But when he saw the images the Felynes had captured, he still couldn't help but knit his brow.

It was a ground strewn with corpses—their human skin flayed away.

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