If you have never been shot, I commend you on your caution and good fortune. I myself have been shot on no fewer than seven occasions (at time of writing) and I have to say the experience doesn't improve with repetition. Fortunately for me the hunters jacket I had been wearing at the time had a layer of ballistic cloth woven into the leather and it managed to deflect the las bolt from my centerline. The filthy water had been more of a concern and I had endured a punishing regime of counterbiotics at Selenica's hands that made it impossible to eat or drink more than a few mouthfuls of water or nutrient broth. The fact that the water might have been tainted with more than bacteria occurred to me often and though he concealed the fact, I felt the brush of Hadrian's mind more than once as he inspected me for the taint of the enemy. I was his responsibility in that respect. Inquisitors are, to a degree, self policing, with various inqisitors keeping an eye on each other. They are expected to do the same for their own warbands, in much the same way as they are the rest of the Imperium. I don't like to think of what it might have meant to Hadrian to discover such a taint in me, but fortunately for both of us I remained pure. Or as pure as I ever was anyway.

By the time the Caledonia arrived I had recovered enough to move around. Selenica had done a remarkable job of healing the wound and within a month it would vanish completely not leaving so much as a scar. This was, I was to learn, one of the advantages of being hit by las fire rather than a hard round, though I admit to the vanity of having even that kind of scar tissue surgically corrected in my later career. 

We lifted to the Caledonia without incident, two days before Candlemass 990.M41. Urien and his crew were pleased to see us, excited to hear the story of our recent adventure. I was still recovering though by now I was able to eat enough that the hunger in my stomach was a dull pain rather than an all consuming one. Selenica insisted on inspecting me daily, but it seemed the danger of infection had passed. Urien laughed the whole thing off, joking that it was too bad that their wasn't a scar because a scar on my lower back might be worth investigating, punctuating the remark with a good natured elbow at Hadrian's expense.

That night we were treated to a celebration in the feasting hall. Hadrian regaled the company with tales of our adventures, though he tactfully left out the fact that our opponent appeared to be an Inquisitor. Orbital control was non-existant on Havenos so we couldn't identify the ship which had brought our power armored opponent. Disconcertingly there were spikes of astropathic traffic after our escape that indicated that at least one ship had left the system after the reflooding of the excavation. Hadrian raised this point with Urien, asking what ships routinely frequented this out of the way place, but the Rogue Trader knew of none which regularly made the run. I was also surprised by a new mural which had been artistically rendered on the feast hall wall.

"It isn't a bad likeness," Hadrian admitted as he sipped his amasec and looked up at the larger than life rendition of a mostly naked blond woman dancing on a stylized table. I snickered, probably the first laugh I had uttered since I had been shot. The exaggeration of my assets was considerable and the cock of my hips positively scandalous but I choose to look upon it as an honor.

"I suppose there are worse things to be remembered for," I agreed.

That night we retired to Hadrian's anteroom and began the first large scale dig into what we had recovered. I started by making psy-picts of what we had seen. Starting with our unseen adversary. Hadrian had shown me the technique during our convalescence at Agesula. We both conjured images of what we had seen, though the stella themselves were stubbornly resistant. We were able to create the images but within moments the plates blackened and curled until they were illegible.

Lazarus, upon beholding the picts began to swear fluently in binaric, his human eye widening in fury. 

"This is heretechal!" he snarled. I exchanged a cautious glance with Hadrian.

"You are just figuring that?" I asked, perplexed as to why this was only just occurring to him.

"Heretech," he corrected, glowering at me, "those servitors have been perverted, their cortexes have been wired to cogitators that would restore their ability to feel pain, to access their higher reasoning!"

"Why would they do that? How would it even be done?" I asked, but he was already lost in a reverie of buzzing clicks which I had learned to interpret as him accessing internal data storage to compressed to be readily brought to mind.

Hadrian was reading over the transcripts which we had escaped with, or trying to do so. There was some translation to Gothic, but large portions of it were nonsense symbols or multiple letters printed over the top of each other. I lifted one up and began reading. It appeared to be some kind of religious drama, though what the Gods were and what the characters were doing was opaque to me. It was clear that understanding them would take more than an evenings work.

"Gravemire," Lazarus declared sitting suddenly upright. We all turned to him.

"Analysis of crate serial numbers suggests that eleven different pieces of equipment were transshipped through the Hiveworld of Gravemire."