[centre][img]https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/I_with_skull_3840.png[/img]
[@Searat][@Roland][@ReedeThe23rd][@Katthaj][@BCTheEntity][/centre]


Artificial light seared the half-open eyes of the hanging figure – human, male, stripped of all clothing and belongings – as a narrow beam hit his face once more, the remainder of the nondescript room left in utter darkness. The chains that suspended him from the ceiling jingled slightly, loud in his ears and in the mostly empty room, as he shifted his swollen features in the direction of the torches glare.

“Why must we continue this game, Interrogator?” Came a voice from somewhere and nowhere all at once, hot breath now coming from the cracked lips of the captive as he tried to focus on the sound with only his one remaining ear, “we have gone around in circles for several days now, and yet you refuse to tell me anything – I [b]am[/b] a patient man, but even I have my [i]limits[/i].”

There was much stress on the last word, something or someone moving in the shadows at the fringes of Salah Alikahn's distorted vision, the Inquisitorial apprentice having been doing his best to keep mental note of everything and anyone he could since his abrupt capture.

Only now did a door proper open off to the side, a shuffling sound causing Salah to crane his cramped neck to see again the broad shape of his torturer.

“Hum... well, let us begin once more, shall we?”



[hr]



Almost nothing moved in the gravitational well of Taskana IV, save for a few merchant vessels and orbital patrol craft of the Planetary Naval Defence Force – the latter consisting of generally out of commission frigates and one or two larger classes of ship, enough to fight of a raid but lacking if it came to a determined assault by well equipped adversaries – all orbiting the planet much as they did day after day, indeed only one thing seemed different, and this went very much unnoticed by those guarding the planet or trading either.

In size it was smaller even than the frigates of the PNDF, capable of holding a skeleton crew of trained professionals and any passengers required to be somewhere undetected and at speed, the colouring a solid black marked only with a crimson and stylised =][= of the Emperor's Inquisition adoring it's hull.

At this point it was nought more than a semi-visible object to the eye, light bending about it to conceal it from observers, sensor dampeners of the most sophisticated assortment meanwhile made certain that it went unheeded by pretty much any and all standard devices within the Imperium.

“Captain Galini, we are now in orbit of the planet.”

A stern-faced woman in a uniform so crisp it could have cut a finger gave the slightest of nods to her helmsman and pressed a button on her command throne.

“This is Captain Galini to the passengers, we shall be delivering you to the planet within the next two hours, please prepare yourselves for departure.”



[hr]



Thiago Duarte was sat in the cockpit of the guncutter [i]Pond Skipper[/i] when the Captains message came over the ships internal vox, a smile spreading across his face, one gloved hand running a hand over his thin moustache and twirling the end as he thought about their briefing 'with' Inquisitor Lycus.

It had been a week earlier, the holographic projection of the shadowy Inquisitor (if indeed it even was him at all, and Thiago had his sincere doubts) all deep hooded robes so voluminous that one could not even see a face in it's shadowy folds, his voice so chilling that it still made the Glavians skin crawl to remember it.

Several persons of interest did the group have on Taskana IV, so he said - a xenobiologist named Doctor Zahn, a known criminal boss called Augustus Neep and a noblewoman grown rich on the grox burger trade Avelina Gadise – all potentially involved in the abduction of Interrogator Alikhan, or at least with information pertaining to it.

Honestly he had paid little attention to it, being a simple pilot (and gunslinger if the situation called for it), his silver-veined hands already running over the flight instruments before him in planning to deliver his passengers to the surface of the agri-hive world below.

Taskana IV was the Helvin Expanses major exporter of grox meat, and under the Gadise Consortium had made famous their interplanetary fast-food chain 'Grox Shop', which the pilot had heard served some of the most succulent food around. Then there was the rest of it, that not taken up with grox herding and rearing, constituting of several hive cities that made up the population centres of the planet, it was to one of these that he would be taking the Inquisitors Acolytes.

When they arrived that is.