[35]

228.738.M41

Approximately 20:00

The globe must have been some nobleman's prized display piece—a meter wide, hand-painted in reserved greens and blues over a tan surface of fine leather. It rotated easily on its polished wood stand, looking altogether out of place in the deserted hab now serving as the offices of the Inquisition in Velgrad. It was marked over now with shading in red and white, making it appear like a scene viewed through a thermal scope.

Wessex showed me sixty-three places where the shading rose to white. This was the visual representation of a week's work by thousands of Administratum adepts—the places where patterns of data had pointed to a possible Eldar presence.

Grendel wanted to cut sixty-three to one. And not that only, but to a single district of a city or a single township of one of the rural regions. He wanted to do it all at once, in just a few days, without it seeming that he was doing anything of the kind.

His solution was to create a terror.

"Mobilizing an insurrection with thousands of heavy civilian trucks," said Wessex, "is a vulnerability. On this world, at least—a vulnerability, not a strength. You have three point one billion people, which might provide enough vehicles for anonymity—but not on Gaervalt. Most of your bulk shipping is by train or boat."

He referred to a data-slate for a moment. He continued. "Only three million heavy trucks on the planet, half the average for similarly populated worlds in this subsector. Eliminate military vehicles, government vehicles never reported missing, civilian haulers definitively accounted for during the events of day 198. The total drops to one million. Slightly less than one percent of that number was employed to move insurgents and munitions for the Sanctifying Truth."

He explained the significance of such a small number: it had to do with everything that surrounded their use, not the use itself. Purchase, rental, theft, storage, disposal, return to working fleets, a dozen other factors.

The Enforcers were at work upon it. It was a good and promising lead. But it was slow, vulnerable to corruption and bribery, and vulnerable to something like sleight of hand—one truck could look like ten, if moved and touched up with paint. Or ten trucks could be made to look like one, by keeping them dispersed.

"Still, slow and steady is the only way—the only way to find the trucks, and know that we have found them. Alas." He sighed and shook his head.

"Wessex? I don't understand. Why tell me this?"

"Aha!" he said. "That's the beauty, my beauty! We do not seek to find the trucks! We seek to find the Eldar!"

I think he was very pleased with himself, and pleased with me for letting him pounce.

"Inquisitor Grendel shall make the Enforcers strike, and strike, and strike again. An iron fist of ruthless arbitrary cruelty, a travesty of justice, a million innocents swept up, ten thousand fortunes ruined, ten thousand names dragged through dishonor! A grave affront to the dignity of man! The name 'Enforcer' the month's byword for callous misrule. And yet—in that net, we shall entrap the sect. Terror, terror is the word. Panicked calls to superiors. Frantic hiding of evidence. Finger-pointing, fleeing, abandoning posts. And amidst all that disorder, a single cadre of inhuman predatory minds, choosing who may be trusted to carry on living—and who must die, along with all the evidence they had. But all the while, we watch, and wait."

I could see the grim logic of it by the time Wessex was finishing his speech. I prayed Wessex's enthusiasm was not inherited from the plan's architect. I did not think it was. Grendel was a man who might do terrible things to achieve his ends, but I do not think he would smile at how clever he was for doing them.

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Eldar ships are stealthy, but not undetectable. Quiet, hard to see, but they are physical things. Grendel had autonomous sensoria positioned to monitor the close airspace around the sixty-three high-likelihood locations. Even partial data, even statistical hints, would greatly narrow the search. Perhaps even narrow it to one.

"People will die," I said. "Innocents. Enforcers."

"Unfortunate, but likely true. The Enforcers know the peril, but procedure has too much weight… and your friends the body-slicers seem to dislike witnesses of any sort. Prayers for protection would not be amiss."

I had been thinking of mistakes, panic, too much use of force, or too little. And the other cost, all the Enforcers who would not be doing their other duties. I hadn't thought through the other consequence, yet. Now I imagined some district lockup as the lights began to flicker, panicked screams as the blood began to flow.

It's murder, I thought. Grendel is murdering—

I stopped myself from completing the thought. It was wrong. Grendel did not will those deaths. Rulers must make choices, and when rulers choose, some men must always die. It is the nature of the world.

I tried to think of a reason why he shouldn't do it. I could beg him to choose a different way, if I could just think of some reason that seemed true.

It wasn't that I thought it was wrong. It seemed necessary, reasonable. A few deaths paid for a chance to end a terrible evil. A few thousand reputations and livelihoods ruined, their children learning to hate and fear the Enforcers. Did such things matter, weighed against the cares of an Inquisitor? Wouldn't I do the same, with the same information, with the same power, with the same awful responsibility?

All I could think was that Grendel was a good man, but that there was some truer good that could have been his. That maybe there was some outcome that was worse in all the ways men count results, but better in every way that mattered. There to be taken, but coldly put aside.

Though I cannot name even that outcome, so perhaps I was just being foolish.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

The second plan was aimed at the same target, but with a precision that I liked much better.

We would be bait twice removed.

Grendel wanted to lure a high-quality combat unit of the Sanctifying Truth to a place of his choosing. Not to destroy, but to defeat and capture. This, in turn, would lure in the Eldar, but by the time they arrived, we would have fallen back.

Then our work would be done, and Grendel's watchers would begin their own. Not pursuit, which might be detected: a sequence of observers, passing the ship from one to another as it moved along its course, until it led us to their base. Straight to the enemy's heart.

Wessex said that Tara, Verity, and I were to be the lure which baited the Sanctifying Truth. And yet somehow we would not be the bait itself. And in a further strange turn, even though we were the bait (or half bait) we would somehow also be part of the force which would capture the enemy.

"By what means the Inquisitor intends to work that miracle, I fear I must leave to the man himself," he said. "Though I have a sense that Mak'ti suspects already, and deigns not to tell."