I will admit that if I hadn’t been low key convinced I was going to die in the next few hours it might have been more intimidating to come face to face with a conclave worth of Inquisitors. As it was I was pleased to have taken Hadrian’s… advice is too soft a word, direction I suppose to dress more conservatively than was my wont. I had worn, at Lazurus’ suggestion, an armored body glove, one of the pair I had picked up in the few days between the affair at the manor and boarding the ship. It was the less ostentatious of the two, matte black with panels of navy blue ceramite attached at key points. I had worn a dress robe over the top of it, a conservative vaguely ecclesiastical cut that could be easily removed when the shooting started. My hair I had pulled into tight braids which were woven down my back to keep them out of the way and my head covered with a veil of lace which had been worked into scenes from the life of Saint Catherine. When you are a psyker it never hurts to appear like you might be a closet Emperor Botherer. Even so I got looks which ranged from loathing, to desire from the assembled company. Psykers are never well trusted, even in the Inquisition which houses more than any other imperial institution save the Astropathicus itself. The entire Imperium would collapse if it wasn’t for psykers, yet even here we are viewed with suspicion. 

 

 

The only weapons I carried were the force staff and a las pistol, though Lazarus had assured me that he would have an extra riot gun with him when we made it to the ground. I felt very underdressed in the firearms department. The Inquisitors quibbled for a few minutes about arcane details of deployment which might as well have been tech priest babble as far as I was concerned, and then we split up and headed to separate shuttle craft, the better to spread the risk of destruction as for the tactical advantage it would provide. Remember initiates, don’t put all your Inquisitors in one basket.

 

I expected the decent to be somewhat similar to shuttle flights I had taken before, despite the long dagger shaped hulls and bulky gun pods of the assault shuttles. I was disabused of this immediately as I was slammed into my seat by several G’s worth of acceleration. I squealed in fright but everyone politely ignored me. The next ten minutes were a combination of crushing G force and sickening maneuver as we powered through the atmosphere and then dropped to the nap of the earth. The fleet had not detected any anti-air craft emplacements, but the surface of the planet gave off so much in the way of strange and unexplained readings, that the tatorium had no confidence that a failure to detect them ment they were absent all together. Our enemy had, afterall had a considerable amount of time and considerable resources to fortify the place. Later, much later, I learned that the Fleet Commander was as much concerned about the mysterious Necron technology as anything the heretics might bring to bear, despite Mechanicum assurances that it was dormant.

 

The ride was so miserable that when we finally hit the ground it was something of an anti climax. More than anything I was relieved not to have lost my breakfast of akenberry waffles over my nice new dress, stained with lubricant grease and old gun oil as it had become during the decent. I wobbled to my feet a half second before the rear ramp dropped with a clang that was all but obscured by the wind rush that blasted in, carrying with it a scouring cloud of sand and flying particulate. I pulled my hood down over my eyes in time to avoid any serious problem, and I wondered if Saint Catherine had any particular relevance to vision and forethought.