Liar’s Due
James Swallow

	+++Broadcast Minus Zero Zero [Solar]+++
	The voice from the speaker horn above the square was metered and automatic, and it did not differ from the everyday tonality it gave to matters of the most mundane news. The flat, near-emotionless words rang out over the streets of Town Forty-Four, across the mainway and the alleys, over the rooftops of the general store and the rover stables. The people under the shadow of the Skyhook stood rooted to the spot in shocked silence, or else they wandered in circles, fear and confusion robbing them of reason. 
	The recording reached its conclusion and began again. 
	‘The Imperium speaks,’ said the humming, clicking voice, a chime of orchestral tones jangling beneath the opening phrase. ‘On this day, news from the core reaches the agricultural colony of Virger-Mos II.’ That part of the statement was always the same, promising the people of Forty-Four and the other settlements across this backwater world a measure of understanding about the galaxy at large around them. 
	Today, the prologue rang an ominous note, the familiar turning sinister. The main body of the message began; somewhere far over their heads, at the summit of the Skyhook, was the planet’s lone astropath. The psyker’s sole duty was to parse news into palatable forms and send it down the telegraph. ‘This is Terra calling, and with grave import. Make all citizens aware and know this grim certainty. The battle has broken the Eternity Gate. The Imperial Palace falls as Terra burns around it. It is our great sorrow to announce that the Emperor of Mankind lies dead at the hand of Horus Lupercal, Warmaster.’
	Some of the townsfolk began to weep, others cradled their heads and tried to deny the voice’s words. One man laughed, a humourless bark of utter disbelief. And then there were others, who looked on and said nothing, only nodding as if they had known all along that this day would come.
	Beneath the speaker horn, the marquetry boards ticked and clicked, the carved wooden slates turning about to form the shapes of the words. ‘The Emperor joins the roll of honour alongside his sons: Sanguinius, Dorn, Russ and the Khan. The remnants of his forces now sue for peace. Surrender is at hand here. The inter-Legionary conflict is no more. The battle for independence is concluded, and Horus has his victory. Even now, ships are being dispatched to all points of the etheric compass to cement his new rule as Imperator Rex.’ There was a moment of silence, as if the machine-speaker could not fully grasp the words it projected. ‘Know this. The war is over. Horus has the throne.’
	The speakers fell silent and the panic began to bed in. 
	In the cool of the icehouse’s porch, Leon Kyyter’s gaze dropped to the upturned palms of his hands and he saw the line of little white crescents where he had dug his fingernails into his own flesh. He felt dizzy and sick inside. The youth was afraid to stand up for fear he might stumble and collapse upon the cracked blacktop of the mainway. It was a nightmare; it felt like a dream, there was no other explanation. Nothing else made any kind of sense. 
	The Emperor, dead? It was impossible, unbelievable. The birds in the sky would speak High Gothic and the seasons would rewrite themselves before such a thing could happen! Leon refused to accept it. He would not!
	‘Horus has the throne…’ He heard the words repeated by one of the grainwives from the Forroth farmstead. She was trying the phrase out, speaking it aloud to be sure it wasn’t just a string of nonsense words.
	‘Will he come here?’ asked someone else, and the question was like a spark to kindling. Suddenly everyone in the town square was talking at once, voices rising in angry confusion. Leon was buffeted by fragments of conversation coming from all around. 
	‘...how long would that take?’
	‘...already on their way...‘
	‘...but there is nothing for them here!’
	‘...could he be killed?’
	‘...this world will fall under the Warmaster’s shadow...’
	The youth scowled and pulled himself to his feet, pushing away quickly, almost as if he could outrun the dark thoughts swirling in his mind’s eye. Terra on fire. The palace collapsing. A sky black with starships. A battle zone choked with silenced guns.
	He forced his way through the mass of people; there had to be hundreds of them, almost the entire populace of Town Forty-Four crowding into the open space to hear the voice of the weekly broadcast. Was the same scene being played out in every other township down the wires, from the capital, Oh-One, to the icewheat farms up in Eighty-Seven? 
	Leon looked up and traced the lines of the telegraph cables with his gaze, the web of black threads dangling from the slender impact-plastic poles. The line of the weathered, bone-coloured masts led away out of the town and vanished across the endless landscape of barley fields. Beyond the limits of the settlement, the land was flat and featureless from horizon to horizon, broken only by the occasional steel finger of a silo or the lines of a railhead. It was a static, unchanging landscape, symbolic of the planet itself. 
	Virger-Mos II was an agri-world, a breadbasket colony so far off the axis of the core Imperial worlds that it was almost invisible; still, it was one of hundreds of similar planets that fed a hungry empire, and in that manner, perhaps it might be thought, to have some minor strategic value. But it was an isolated place in the Dominion of Storms, ranged in the deeps of the Ultima Segmentum. A remote, unimportant world that turned unnoticed by the rest of the galaxy. There were less than a million people living on the second planet’s wind-burned surface, all of them working in service to farms in one way or another. 
	And none of them could forget their place, especially those who lived in Forty-Four. Turning to face the other way, Leon’s view was immediately dominated by a tower of black shadow that rose from behind the service complex beyond the square, vanishing into the sky. Tipping his head back, the space elevator seemed to thin away to a thread’s diameter as it went towards orbit. Inside, automated systems that few human beings had ever seen worked without pause, gathering the cargo pods full of grain that arrived via the railheads on drone-trains, and carrying them up into space. The Skyhook was Town Forty-Four’s sole reason to exist; while there were farmers who nominally called it home, they kept mostly to their ranches. The settlement was for those whose lives revolved around the elevator and its operation; but in truth, their function was almost cosmetic. 
	Leon recalled one night, when his father, Ames, had come home from the tavern in his cups and offered the boy a gloomy lesson; he told him that the town had no reason to exist. Every system inside the Skyhook, from the cargo handlers to the complex mesh of diamond ropes that hoisted the pods towards space, was run by automata. Every soul in Forty-Four could die in their beds at once and the elevator would run on, taking the grain and raising it high to where cargo lighters could meet it in orbit. The lesson, Ames Kyyter had said, was that even when people deluded themselves into thinking they were important, the reverse was usually the truth.
	The young man didn’t see it that way, though. He didn’t think of the shadow of the Skyhook as something to be detested, like his father did. The old man cast the tower like a monster, and he glared up at it each day, as if he was daring the orbital tether to snap and come down upon him. No, Leon saw it as a bridge to something greater, a monument to human endeavour. In the shadow he felt protected, as if somehow the aegis of the Emperor was captured in its shade.
	He had felt that way until today.
	Thoughts of his father drew Leon back down the shallow rise towards the dormitory house that had been owned by his family for seven generations. He was so intent on it that he wandered straight into a knot of people gripped in tense, emotive conversation.
	‘It doesn’t matter what you think!’ Dallon Prael worked as a senior solarman out in the vane orchard, where the light from Virger-Mos’s bright yellow sun was captured and turned into power for the township. He was a large man, but his size was all illusion; Prael was flabby and lacked any muscle or stamina, as Leon had observed over spirited games of pushpull at the tavern. His chubby hands wove in the air. ‘We all heard the telegraph!’ 
	Among the group, a handful of the assembled townsfolk gave Prael’s words nods of approval. But the man he was addressing grew a grimace across his face.
	‘So what do you propose, Dallon?’ Silas Cincade put the question with force. ‘We stand around and fret?’ In contrast to the solarman, Cincade was tall and wiry, but his real strength was underneath his aspect. Silas’s elderly father owned the rover stables and his son worked maintenance on the vehicles there. Leon couldn’t recall a time when the man didn’t have grease-smeared hands or the scent of battery fluid about him.
	Prael and Cincade were tavern-mates, but here and now that seemed irrelevant. This wasn’t an argument over politics at the bar-step, but something else, propelled by fear. The tension in the air was strong, like the crackle of pre-storm static. Leon began to wonder if the two men might come to blows; not a week’s end had passed in the last two years that someone had not caused an argument on the matter of the civil war, and this pair were often at the heart of it.
	‘You would rather we stumble blindly?’ Prael was demanding. ‘I spoke to Yacio. He’s telling me that every other telegraph channel has gone black. No connections coming in, nothing but silence.’ He folded his arms. ‘What do you make of that, eh? That’s military doctrine, isn’t it? Cut the lines of communication.’
	‘What do you know about soldiering?’ Cincade snapped back. ‘The only Imperial Army garrison is in Oh-One and you’ve never left this quad!’
	‘I trained!’ Prael retorted hotly. ‘When the Imperial Army came here and showed us how to drill, I trained for the town watch!’
	Cincade opened his hands. ‘That would be the watch we don’t have and never needed?’
	‘Maybe we need it now!’ said one of the others, a ginger-haired man from the medicae’s office.
	Prael nodded. ‘Aye! If I wasn’t here talking, I’d be dusting off my rifle!’
	The mechanic rolled his eyes and caught sight of Leon, looking to him for support. The youth could only manage a tense shrug. ‘Look,’ said Cincade, trying to inject a note of calm into his voice. ‘You know how the air goes. Lines drop out all the time.’
	In that, he was correct. Some peculiarity of the mineral-laced soil of the colony played havoc with vox-transmitters, meaning that communications were solely sent and received by telegraphic cables strung across the landscape, and here, up the side of the Skyhook. Without a wire, the towns on Virger-Mos II were reduced to using message riders or heliographs. The rich soil made it a wonder for growing crops, but the abrasion of it scoured the rockcrete walls of every building and made blackcough the colony’s worst killer. Sometimes the windborne powder was enough to chew through the shielded lines stretching across the countryside.
	‘If the capital has gone quiet, there’s a rational explanation for it,’ Cincade went on.
	A woman, red-faced with near hysteria, glared at him. ‘You can’t know that!’ 
	‘We need to protect ourselves,’ said Prael. ‘That’s what we should be thinking about!’ 
	Cincade grimaced. ‘All right, all right! How about this, then? I’ve got my trike in the stables. How about I drive out to Oh-One and find out what’s going on? I could be there and back before nightfall.’
	‘It’s not safe.’ Leon said the words without thinking. 
	The mechanic shot him a look. ‘How do you know?’
	‘The boy is right!’ Prael went on. ‘Throne and Blood, did you not hear the broadcast, Silas? The war–’
	‘Is not our concern!’ Cincade replied. ‘We’re in the arse-end of the Imperium, where neither man nor primarch would bother to turn his gaze! So this sort of sorry panic is pointless. Better we find out what is happening from the colonial governor himself, yes?’ The man turned to Leon and gave him a light shove in the back. ‘Go on, son, get home. Look to your Da.’ He glanced up as he walked away. ‘And the same to the rest of you, too!’
	Prael muttered something under his breath as the red-faced woman glared after the mechanic. ‘He’s always swanned around this town like he smells sweet,’ she grated. ‘Now the grease-monkey is giving orders?’ 
	Leon became aware she was looking at him, waiting for the youth to agree with her. He said nothing and went on his way, heading back towards the dormitory.
	His father wasn’t there when he arrived. Leon took the stairs to the top floor two at a time, brushing his hand over the forever-closed door to his mother’s room as he passed it, as a matter of ingrained habit. At the landing, he went to the suite – it was a fancy name for the chambers, something that seemed too grand for just a nondescript bedroom-balcony-fresher combination. He rapped on the door with the back of his hand, calling loudly. 
	‘Esquire!’ Leon kept up the insistent pace of his knocks; there were no other residents at the dormitory house, and there hadn’t been for some time. These were the fallow months when the drivers from the far fields stayed at their ranches rather than venture in under the shadow of the Skyhook. ‘Esquire Mendacs, are you there?’
	He heard movement through the door and presently it slid open on oiled runners. ‘Young Leon,’ said the man, absently smoothing down the front of his tunic. ‘Such urgency.’
	‘The telegraph–’ Leon spoke so quickly he stumbled over his words and had to gulp in air and begin again. ‘The telegraph says the Emperor is dead and Horus has taken Terra! The war is over!’ He blinked. ‘I don’t think it can be true…’
	‘No?’ Mendacs wandered back into the apartment and Leon trailed after him. ‘Or do you mean you wish it not to be true?’
	The esquire was a slight man, his skin pale in comparison to the tanned natives of the agri-world, and he had long fingers that reminded the youth of a woman’s. Still, he carried himself with a kind of certainty that Leon kept trying to emulate. Mendacs had a quiet confidence that radiated from him; it was peculiar how someone who at first glance could appear unassuming, could also command attention if need be.
	He poured a measure of amasec from a flask on the table and glanced at where Leon stood. The young man’s hands kept finding one another of their own accord, knotting and wringing. 
	Leon repeated the telegraph message as best he could remember it, the words spilling out of him. Emotion coloured every syllable, and he felt his cheeks redden and go warm as he reached the conclusion. Mendacs just listened, and took small, purse-lipped sips from the liquor. 
	‘Horus’s warships are coming here,’ Leon went on. ‘They may already be close by!’
	‘One cannot tell,’ Mendacs offered. ‘The currents of warp space are strange and unpredictable. The passage of time there is somewhat elastic.’
	Frustration furrowed Leon’s brow. Of all the reactions he had expected from the esquire, this was not one of them. The man seemed almost… resigned. ‘Are… Are you not troubled by this turn of events? The war comes to us! The Imperium is in tatters! Are you not afraid of what will happen next?’
	Mendacs put down the glass of amasec and wandered to the window. His pict-slates and a quiver of stylus-rods lay there in an untidy pile. ‘It’s not that, Leon,’ he said. ‘Any sane man is concerned about the future. But I have learned that you can’t let yourself be ruled by questions of what may be about to happen. A life lived in the shadow of unfulfilled possibility is inward-looking and limited.’
	The youth didn’t understand the man’s meaning, and told him so.
	A moment of dismay crossed Mendacs’s face. ‘The dust storms that come during this season. Are you afraid of them?’
	‘Not really... I mean, they can be dangerous, but–‘
	‘But you understand them. You know you cannot change them. So you take shelter and let them pass, then pick up your life and progress as if they had never been.’ Mendacs made an inclusive gesture that encompassed them both. ‘We are little people, my friend. And the likes of us cannot change the course of wars that span the galaxy. We can only live our lives, and accept what fate presents to us.’
	‘But the Emperor is dead!’ Leon blurted out the words, his voice rising. ‘I can’t accept that!’
	Mendacs cocked his head. ‘You can’t change that fact. If it is so, you must accept it. What alternative is there?’
	Leon turned away, shaking his head, closing his eyes. ‘No. No…’ He felt dizzy all over again, and stumbled into a drape partitioning off part of the bedroom from the main space of the suite. For a moment, he found himself looking into Mendacs’s sleeping area. He saw the low, narrow bed, the rail of clothes hangers.
	On the bed there was a case – the small valise the esquire had carried on a shoulder strap when he first arrived, Leon remembered – and it lay open. Inside lay not clothes or more pict-slates, but a conformal array of equipment that resembled nothing familiar to the youth. It wasn’t metallic and greasy-looking like the innards of a rover engine; it gave the impression of being fragile, like fans of black glassaic and silver filigree.
	But then the train of thought forming in Leon’s mind was abruptly forestalled by the harsh bark of his father’s voice echoing up the stairs. ‘Boy! Get yourself out here!’ He could hear the tromp of boots on the staircase.
	‘You should go,’ Mendacs said, without weight.
	Ames Kyyter was at the landing as Leon left the room. He gave the other man a terse nod and then glared at his son. ‘I’ve told you before not to pester the esquire. Come on, down with you.’ He gave Leon a cuff around the ear and the youth ducked it, racing back to the lower floor.
	His father came at his back. ‘Where did you go?’ he demanded. ‘I told you to stay here, wait for me to come home. Instead I return and you’re gone.’
	‘The telegraph!’ Leon piped. ‘Did you hear it?’
	Ames’s face soured and he shook his head. ‘That’s got you worked up, has it? I should have known.’
	Leon could hardly believe his father’s cavalier dismissal of the import of the message. First Mendacs and now him? ‘Of course it has! The war, Da! The war is coming here!’
	‘Don’t raise your voice to me!’ Ames snapped back. ‘I heard the bloody spool. I know what it said! But I’m not going to wet my britches over it!’ He blew out a breath. ‘At a time like this, a man needs to be calm. Understand the import of the day, not run around like a damned fool.’
	Leon felt a wash of cold roll through him. ‘Da. What’s going to happen to us?’ He hated the way the question made him sound like a frightened little boy.
	‘Nothing. Nothing,’ insisted his father. ‘You think the Warmaster gives a wet shit about this colony? You think he even knows the name of this star system?’ He scowled. ‘You think that the Emperor did?’
	Despite himself, Leon let his hands contract into fists. It made him angry when the old man spoke about the Emperor in that tone of voice. Dismissive. Disrespectful.
	He opened his mouth to answer back, but the thin scream of a woman sounded. Both of them went to the front door, following the cry, and there, out on the street, they found people pointing into the south-western sky, a new shade of fresh fear on their faces. Leon stepped out and turned his head to see. 
	The low sun was at their backs, and the sky was a shade of deep blue, broken with a few long lines of grey-white clouds. High up, the moons were visible as ghosts, but what caught his eye were the lights. 
	For a moment, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. They were lines of fire, thread-thin, marching slowly across the heavens towards the far horizon. There were lots of them, a dozen or more at his count. It was hard to be certain. They were reflecting sunlight as they fell.
	‘Invasion,’ said someone, and the word was almost a sob. 
	‘The Warmaster!’ Leon turned and saw the red-faced woman again. She was stabbing her finger at the air. ‘He’s coming down from orbit!’
	‘They’re heading in the direction of the capital,’ said another bystander. ‘Isn’t that how they do things? Droppers or something, they call them. Packed full of soldiers and weapons!’
	‘Drop-pods,’ Leon corrected, half to himself.
	‘What was that, boy?’
	Leon turned to the woman. ‘No, I mean, I don’t think–’
	‘You’re the expert all of a sudden then, are you?’ she retorted, glaring at him.
	‘I’ve read books,’ he replied weakly, and pushed on before she could speak again. ‘I mean, we don’t know what that is. The lights in the sky… they c–could be meteorites. I’ve seen them many–’
	The woman’s pinched face stiffened. ‘Don’t talk rot!’ She glared at Leon’s father. ‘Ames, is your boy as big a fool as he sounds? See it right there!’ She kept pointing upwards. ‘The Legiones Astartes have come!’ 
	The youth looked to his father for support but Ames was shaking his head; and again the townsfolk were all talking at once, and whatever he said went ignored.
	+++Broadcast Minus Eight Weeks [Solar]+++
	The train of empty cargo capsules passed through the ultraviolet anti-bacteria field and out of the throat of the Skyhook, the complex handling claws and mag-rail points snapping back and forth. Occasional flashes of sparks and running lights cast weak, sporadic illumination inside the depot complex at the foot of the space elevator. An identical train of pods moved in the opposite direction, these ones laden with vac-sealed sheaves of freeze-dried crops. With a grind of gears, the line of six capsules mated to the ascent line and they rose up the steep ramp until the train was moving vertically. The drive-head engaged and the pods raced away, up towards the night. In two hours’ time, they would be in the microgravity zone of the loading station in low geostationary orbit. There, mechanical menials would unload the train and move the cargo to a staging area, ready to await the arrival of the next interstellar freighter. The operation went on without a human hand in the process.
	Across the yard, the other, empty pods ground to a sudden halt as they moved beneath the unblinking eye of a terahertz-wave scanner. An alert horn hooted twice and the train shunted sideways, all six pods opening automatically. Chem-nozzles on spidery manipulator arms unfolded from the ceiling and began to probe the interiors of the capsules, coughing spurts of caustic foam into the darkened corners. The sensor had detected something inside one of the pods, and initiated a pest-control subroutine. It wasn’t unknown for creatures from other biospheres to make their way through the loading–unloading process, and off-world vermin had the potential to wreck a colony’s entire ecosystem.
	Nothing alive was meant to find its way up or down the Skyhook, no passengers, only inert cargo. The single landing strip out in Oh-One that could be considered a space port was the sole point of contact between off-worlders and the colony, although it was very rarely used. The transports that came for the planet’s bounty occasionally off-loaded supplies, but mostly they came to gather up the harvest and take it away. The crews of those vessels didn’t bother to venture down to the surface; they let their cogitators handle the business of arrival and departure. No one wanted to stay near Virger-Mos II any longer than they had to.
	The nozzles found their target and bracketed it with bursts of hot liquid; but the life-form inside walked through the boiling rain and clambered out onto the floor of the depot. The automated system was not programmed to anticipate anything like intelligent behaviour from a xenos pest, and so did nothing as the man doffed the plastoid oversuit that had protected him from the chill, folding it away in a case on his back.
	He removed the backpack and separated it into two discrete sub-cases, and after a few minutes of preparation, he walked on. The new arrival casually made his way across the depot, taking care to skirt the autonomous loaders, until he reached one of the few human-accessible maintenance bays. It hadn’t been used in decades, and it was an effort to get the doors open; but once he was done, the man was able to make his way out of the facility and onto the mainway. 
	Because his masters had trained him exceptionally well, no one in Town Forty-Four saw him; at least, not until he wanted them to.
	He’d changed into a commonplace, but well appointed, traveller’s robe, and after crossing around the edge of the township, he doubled back and approached from the east. He would appear to be walking in from across the plainslands, out of the warm, dusty evening. 
	It wasn’t necessary for him to ask directions or even consult the detailed topographic map copied from the files of the Departmento Terra Colonia. Every town like this one was the same; not in a literal sense, not in the manner of the lay of roads and of houses, but in character. The dynamic of the settlement matched those on dozens of other human worlds; the personality of the place, for want of a better word, was alike. 
	Even as Mendacs let himself be drawn towards the lights and the noise coming from the tavern, he was opening up his senses to Town Forty-Four. He wanted to know it; and in many ways, he already did.
	He entered the hostelry and was immediately aware of every eye upon him. That came as no surprise; an unannounced visitor in a remote township such as this one was akin to a minor miracle. Even as he crossed the room to the auto-bar on the far side, conversations were starting up, loaded with speculation about who he was or where he might be from.
	He ordered a bottle of a coarse local beer from the mechanical tending the counter, and waited for the first of them to gather enough courage to approach. He took care pouring the ale into a glass, using the moment to discreetly survey the room. There were pushpull chairs and gaming tables here and there. Regicide seemed popular in this place, and that was good; it gave him a point of commonality with the locals that he could exploit.
	Perhaps a third of the beer was gone when, at last, a man spoke to him. ‘Pardon, esquire,’ he began, inclining his head. ‘Silas Cincade. Can I ask if you’re from the Tolliver ranches?’
	It was a poorly concealed gambit intended to draw him out, but it was exactly what he wanted. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he replied, with a smile. ‘My name is Mendacs. I’m, ah, passing through.’
	‘Oh, I see,’ said Cincade, although it was clear he didn’t. ‘Have you ridden in? I have stables for any rovers.’ Mendacs caught the aroma of engine oil on the man.
	He gave a shake of the head. ‘I walked. From the next settlement.’
	Cincade’s eyes widened. ‘From Two-Six? That’s quite a hike!’
	‘Two-Six,’ Mendacs repeated, with a nod. ‘It is. And dry with it.’ He gently modified his tone, dropping the softer, more educated manner of a core worlder to emulate something closer to the rough-edged vowels of the mechanic’s colonist accent. ‘I admit it gave me a thirst.’ He saluted with the beer, and Cincade nodded back with a knowing smirk, ordering the same for himself.
	‘Cuts the dust, that’s truth.’
	Mendacs saw that Cincade’s compatriots – a chubby man, a youth and a dour fellow in a tunic – were sat around a gaming table, trying not to appear interested in the newcomer. ‘I’d like to take the weight off me,’ he went on, gesturing at the bags he carried. ‘Get a little distraction into the bargain.’
	‘Games?’ Cincade raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you play castles, then?’ It was a common variant of Regicide that dated back to before the Great Crusade, and Mendacs did indeed know it, along with many ways to cheat himself into the winner’s circle. 
	He nodded. ‘I dabble.’ 
	Cincade was already walking away. ‘We got a spare seat over here. Come join, if you’d like.’
	‘Absolutely.’ Mendacs gathered up his drink and followed.
	Within a couple of hours, he had slowly allowed himself to lose a small amount of Imperial scrip, and the looks on the faces of Cincade and his associates when Mendacs offered to cover the loss with a single gold Throne told him what he wanted to know. He tossed the coin onto the board and watched the pattern of their thoughts on their faces. 
	The chubby one, Prael, fancied himself as something of an authority on everything, but in reality he was an abrasive personality, self-important and priggish. Mendacs doubted that the others seated around the table would have spent any time with him, had this not been a small town where they couldn’t avoid his company and the reactions any snub might create. The dour man, Kyyter, almost licked his lips to see the coin; but the youth, his son, showed a very different kind of greed. Mendacs could see the boy was withdrawn among the men, and starved for anything of interest. 
	They were chatting amiably now, like good friends known for years and years. It was a gift, to be able to read people as he could. As easy as breathing, Mendacs was deft at drawing others into what seemed like polite, casual conversation. The fact was, people liked to talk about themselves, and they would often do so if only one would give them opportunity and impetus. 
	Only the boy kept probing at him; and after a while, Mendacs knew it was time to give up a little of his own mystery.
	‘I’m travelling the outer colonies all across the Dominion of Storms,’ he explained. ‘I’m a remembrancer.’ He glanced at the youth. ‘Do you know that term, Leon?’
	He got a vigorous nod in return. ‘You’re creating artworks for the Administratum. Documenting the glory of the Imperium.’
	‘The glory?’ said Ames, with a half-smirk that didn’t mask the true acid beneath it. ‘There’s not much of that hereabouts, I’ll mark you.’
	‘Respectfully, I disagree,’ said Mendacs. ‘The golden oceans of grain, the perfect blue of your skies… Oh, sir, there is beauty here. And it would do well for those who walk the halls of Terra to know of it.’
	‘You… You have been to Terra?’ Leon asked, awed by the idea.
	Mendacs knew he had the youth then. ‘My young friend, I was born there.’
	‘Is that so?’ said Prael. ‘Is it like they say?’
	He gave a solemn nod, building the drama of the moment. ‘It is all that and more, Esquire Prael.’ 
	‘C–can you tell us about… it?’ Leon leaned forwards intently, hanging on his every word.
	‘About what?’
	‘About all of it!’ The youth’s excitement crackled. ‘I’ve always wanted to see the Sol system!’
	Mendacs gave the boy an indulgent smile, and a worldly, inclusive nod to the other men. ‘I plan to stay here a while. I’m sure I could tell you a few things.’
	Behind him, the tavern door opened, and the room fell silent again for a brief instant. Mendacs turned to see a severe-looking man in a mandarin cap and grey robes striding across the floor. People began to turn their chairs out to face him as he crossed to the bar. 
	‘Oren Yacio,’ explained Ames. ‘He’s the telegraphist here. Brings the regular weekly news broadcast from the wires.’
	‘It’s a good place to play it,’ Prael noted. ‘We don’t have wires to individual houses here, like they do in Two-Six or the capital. Anyhow, not like there’s anywhere else for folks to spend an evening hereabouts, neh?’
	‘Interesting.’ Mendacs watched as Yacio fed a fat data spool into a console near the bar.
	The telegraphist cleared his throat. ‘On this day, news from the core reaches the agricultural colony of Virger-Mos II. This is Terra calling.’ He pressed a control with a flourish, and from hidden speakers in the ceiling, a synthetic-sounding voice began to speak.
	Along with everyone else, Mendacs sat silently and listened to the steady stream of pro-Imperial propaganda. All is well. The turncoat Warmaster is being beaten back. There are victories at Calth and Mertiol and Signus Prime. You have nothing to fear. The Emperor will be victorious.
	He smiled as he watched them listen, and in a little way he was disappointed. He wouldn’t be challenged here. This would be as simple as all the others.
	After the spool was concluded, the conversation went on about the contents of the broadcast, and Mendacs saw the nothings and the disinformation taken in by everyone in the tavern as if it were the word of unquestioned truth. He feigned fatigue, and it was then Ames made mention that he had rooms to rent. A couple more gold Thrones sealed the deal, and the cheerless man ordered his son to escort the remembrancer back to the dormitory house. 
	Leon almost fell over himself in eagerness to carry Mendacs’s baggage, and together the pair of them walked back along the mainway. Night had drawn close in the meantime, and the air was crisp and cold. 
	‘Just you and your father here, then?’ he asked.
	The youth nodded. ‘The blackcough took my Ma a couple of seasons back.’
	‘I’m sorry.’ 
	‘Thanks.’ Leon’s head bobbed. He didn’t want to dwell on that. ‘Where in Terra where you born? Was it Merica, or Hy-Brasil? Bania?’
	‘Do you know the Atalantic ranges? I grew up in a town a bit like this one, although the landscape was quite different.’ It was an infrequent truth in his arsenal of lies, but then such details always served as the bedrock of a firm legend. 
	‘I do, I do!’ Leon talked about the great plains of the long-dead ocean and the mountains that bisected it, with the enthusiasm of a devotee. He repeated rote descriptions, and Mendacs imagined that the boy was recalling the pages of pict-books he had read a hundred times over. He began a steady bombardment of questions that carried them all the way down the street. Had Mendacs ever been to Luna? The Petitioner’s City? What was it like to look upon the Imperial Palace? Had he ever seen a Space Marine?
	‘I’ve been in the presence of the Legiones Astartes, more than once.’ A primarch, too, although that fact he kept to himself. ‘They’re like gods of war made of flesh and metal. Terrible and beautiful.’
	Leon let out an awed, hushed breath. ‘I should like to see them too.’
	‘Are you certain of that?’ Mendacs asked, as they entered the dormitory house. ‘Where they walk, only war follows. It is what they are made for.’ The boy would be his barometer, he decided. Through him, he would be able to take the measure of the mood of the community, and by extension, the entire colony. 
	The youth swallowed hard. ‘I’ve read much about them. I wonder…’ He caught himself and stopped, halting by the door to the guest room.
	‘Wonder what?’ Mendacs asked, as he took the key rod from Leon’s outstretched hand.
	Leon took a deep breath. ‘How can they fight each other? Brother against brother? It makes no sense!’
	‘It does to Horus Lupercal.’
	The name actually made the boy flinch. ‘How?’ he repeated. ‘What madness sunders the Legions and makes them attack one another? More than two solar years now, and the conflict rages on with no end in sight. Even out here, word of the war is never far away.’ He shook his head. ‘The holocaust of Isstvan and all that followed could only be the work of one turned insane!’
	Mendacs took his bags and entered the room. ‘I would not even try to guess,’ he said. ‘Don’t try to map the thoughts and ways of men to the Legiones Astartes, Leon. They are not like us.’ Unbidden, a note of rare, honest awe crept into his voice. ‘They are an order of magnitude beyond our crude humanity.’
	He closed the door to the room and stood in silence, listening until he was sure the boy was gone. Then he spent another hour moving around the suite by lamplight with an auspex in his hand, letting the device sniff the air for electromagnetic waves, thermal patterns or anything else that might indicate the presence of a listening device. Mendacs knew he would find nothing, but it was good tradecraft to make the sweep. The habits of espionage were what kept his kind alive, in the end.
	He placed his baggage and clothes, settling himself in the room. It was actually better accommodation than he was expecting, modest but comfortable. He recognised the old touches of a woman’s hand, now ill-cared for. A remnant of the dead mother’s influence.
	When he was ready, Mendacs opened up the smaller valise case and disengaged the thin hide-panels over the real contents. He worked a crystal control and set the systems inside to a waking mode. The autonomous cogitator programs inside the mechanisms would run a series of tests to ensure the unit was in full working order, but he expected no problems. The unit was highly resilient. 
	As the device chimed to itself, Mendacs opened his tunic and drew out the small witness rod secreted in an inner pocket, and disconnected it from the microphone head fitted into his cuff. He unfolded a disc-shaped panel from the rod to manipulate the recording, cutting it into a rough edit for transfer. He had all of Yacio’s broadcast copied on there, the voice and the template sampled in near-flawless detail. When the unit was done, he inserted the rod into a data port and let the recording migrate.
	The valise’s innards were a suite of advanced microelectronics and crystallographic matrices; it was capable of many functions: vox communications, variable range narrow/broadcast, frequency jamming, countermeasures, simulation, data parsing, and more. He doubted anyone on Virger-Mos II could even comprehend the true potential of the unit; even in the core worlds, technology of this kind was both rare and prohibited.
	The rod gave off a soft ping and he removed it, unfolding a screen from the inside of the valise to examine the waveforms of the artificially generated voice. Mendacs paused, examining the pattern in the way an artist might view a blank canvas before committing the first brushstroke. 
	He paused; it was dry and warm, and the task he was about to perform would take a while. He shrugged off his tunic and rolled up the sleeves of his undershirt, making himself comfortable before he picked up his edit-stylus.
	If anyone had been in the room with Mendacs, as he moved they might have briefly glimpsed an icon tattooed on the inside of his forearm; in green ink, the symbol of a mythic hydra, its tail raised and three heads rearing back in fanged defiance.
	+++Broadcast Plus Eleven Hours [Solar]+++
	A dust storm was brewing far out on the plains, and while it was too distant from Forty-Four to cause any damage, the trailing edges of it were brushing the outskirts of the town, darkening the sky and pushing ripples of grit down the streets.
	Some of the people who assembled outside the telegraph station had goggles and masks dangling about their necks in readiness; others already wearing them. Along with the masks, there was a ready profusion in the number of weapons that were being worn openly. Mostly, they were low-calibre stubber rifles and shot-rods used for keeping down the population of grain vermin. Some had farming implements, although what enemy they hoped to defend against was unclear. It was more a matter of the weapons being there to soothe the ones who carried them, rather than being of any actual use in a confrontation.
	Dallon Prael had the only thing that could be considered a ‘modern’ weapon, and even that definition stretched credibility. The laslock rifle he held tightly was over a hundred and forty years old, bequeathed to the Prael family by a great-great-grandmother who had served with honour in the Imperial Army. The relic gleamed in the lamplight, and the fat man carried it as if it were his badge of office. 
	Town Forty-Four had never had a constable; there had never been the need, what with a circuit lawman from Oh-One passing through once a lunar. But Prael fancied himself as some kind of just man, as if the owning of the rifle made him heir to that office.
	He glanced at Ames Kyyter, who stood with his perpetually grim expression glaring hard over his folded arms. The dormitory owner gave a sullen nod. ‘Is there a purpose to this gathering?’ 
	Prael cast around. No one had made any announcement, but still the majority of the township was represented here, faces from almost all the families that lived inside the dominions. Those that were not here were being debated on by the rest of them, their names taken in vain. After all, if you didn’t stand up and be counted, then you had to be hiding something, didn’t you? You had to be afraid to take a side.
	Nobody had done anything so foolish as to lay a blow on another or rattle their weapon, but it was getting close to that. Questions and disagreements were reaching a head, fierce discussions building into simmering rage. Prael listened, venturing an interruption when he thought he was in the right and likely to be agreed with. All the talk broke down into two opposing viewpoints and the schism was growing larger with each passing moment. Rather than building consensus, the impromptu town meeting was widening the cracks.
	If the Emperor was truly dead, so some were saying, then what did that mean to the people of the colony, of this township? What did it really mean?
	Prael had no doubt in his mind that the message on the telegraph was authentic. After all, there were mechanisms in place to make sure that the astropathic signals from the Sol system and the core worlds were immune to distortion. He had been told this by other broadcasts and he believed it. He didn’t need to know how that worked, only that it did. Although he disliked the religionist nature of the word, he had faith.
	The message said the Emperor was dead; so he was. And where did a man like Dallon Prael go from there? Horus would be on the throne of Earth now, and he would be gathering his new empire to him. They all knew the stories of the worlds razed to ash for daring to show defiance to the Warmaster – like the planets of the Taebian Stars and other nearby sub-sectors, burned and left as dead balls of stone. 
	Some voices called for submission, for the intelligent, logical course of action. They wanted to put up the flag of the Warmaster, fly the Eye of Horus on every pennant. What other way was there to save themselves, if not declaring their loyalty to the new Imperator Rex? If they chose otherwise, when the Legiones Astartes finally arrived, they would be put to the sword en masse. 
	Others showed disgust at such an idea. This was an Imperial world, after all. Founded by Terra and the Emperor, brought to life by Imperial will, from the sweat of the brow of Imperial citizens and in service to the Imperium of Man. A loyal world of loyal colonials who should rightly spit hate in the eye of a turncoat murderer like Horus Lupercal.
	Prael listened to the arguments fly to and fro, and held his own tongue. The Virger-Mos system was so very far from Terra, so isolated and remote that it was barely part of the Imperium, just in name and manner only. He dared to ask himself the question – would it matter?
	How would it matter to a world like this one who ruled from a distant Earth? Horus or the Emperor? What possible difference could it make? They would still grow their grain and ship it out, they would still be born and toil and die under the shadow of the Skyhook. The only change would be the colours on the flag and the voice on the broadcasts. 
	So, was his fealty that cheap? Was the loyalty of a single colony to its birthworld so fragile and meaningless, that it could be broken by some lights in the sky and the phantom threat of a reprisal?
	‘We can’t just roll over like dogs!’ Prael startled himself by letting the thought take voice in a sudden outburst. His eyes misted with the force of his emotion, suddenly given a release. ‘Are we that weak?’
	‘It’s not weakness, it’s pragmatism!’ Ames Kyyter shot back an angry retort, backed by a handful of nodding people. ‘It means nothing to us whose backside lies on the Throne of Terra! So we say a different oath, so what? At least we live! I’m not going to lose all I have in the name of someone I have never seen, someone who doesn’t even know this planet exists!’
	Prael took a threatening step towards the other man. ‘You don’t understand!’
	‘It might not even be Horus, did you think of that?’ Ames retorted. ‘Maybe it’s the remnants of the Emperor’s stalwarts, come here to make planetfall!’
	Behind them, the door to the telegraph office slammed open and Oren Yacio came out, moving woodenly, his face drained of colour. He still had the complex set of headphones in his hands, the ones he wore while he worked at the telegraphic console. A loose wire trailed after him, dangling from an implant in the back of his neck.
	No one spoke as Yacio took the steps down to the road, blank-faced and sweaty. The only sound was the rattle and twang of the cables over their heads as the touch of the distant storm-winds brushed over them.
	Finally, the telegraphist spoke, raising his voice to be heard. ‘On this day, news from… News reaches the colony...’ He was trying to keep a professional tone to his words, but he failed. Yacio swallowed and began again, eschewing his normal air of formality. ‘A fragmentary broadcast has come across the wires. It was piecemeal and it took me many hours to reassemble it. Sporadic reports from Oh-Nine, One-Five and the capital.’
	‘The drop-pods,’ asked a woman. ‘Is it the Sons of Horus?’
	A torrent of other questions erupted after her, and Yacio waved his hands and let out a screech. ‘Quiet! Quiet! Listen to me!’ He shivered despite the warmth of the night air. ‘It is my duty to tell you all that his honour Esquire Lian Toshack, Imperial Governor-Select of the Virger-Mos colony, took his own life this day in his chambers. There… There is confusion about how next to proceed.’
	A ripple of reaction crossed through the small crowd. Prael said nothing, his sweaty fingers kneading the frame of the laslock. Toshack had killed himself rather than face the invasion. How many others would do the same, too terrified of the Warmaster to even bear the thought of facing his Legions?
	‘There’s more,’ Yacio went on, shaken by the portent of his news. ‘Other townships are passing on unconfirmed reports of… of sightings.’ He licked his lips. ‘Massive figures in dark armour have been seen advancing from town to town. Those settlements that sent such reports have all gone off the wire shortly afterwards.’
	‘Space Marines,’ breathed Ames. ‘Throne and blood, they’re really here.’ He nodded to himself with the bleak solemnity of a man standing before the executioner’s block. ‘I knew it.’
	‘No!’ Prael snapped. ‘No, we don’t know!’ He grabbed Yacio’s arm. ‘You said “unconfirmed”. That means this could be some kind of mistake, or–’
	‘Open your eyes!’ screamed the woman. ‘We are invaded, you idiot!’ Her words were like a match to kindling, and everyone on the street was shouting and wailing. 
	Panic hit Prael like a wave, and he felt the mood of the townsfolk crumbling. He knew that if he didn’t act now, the whole settlement would fall apart. With a grunt of effort, he hauled himself up onto the hood of a parked trailer and waved the laslock in the air, filling his lungs to shout. 
	‘Listen to me!’ he bellowed, drawing their attention. ‘I have lived my life in this township, just like all of you! And the blight can take Horus Lupercal for all I care!’ He shook the rifle, finding a new reservoir of will inside himself. ‘I will die before I allow that traitor bastard and his turncoat whoresons to take my home from me! I’d rather burn than surrender!’ 
	His blunt, forceful oratory got him a ragged chorus of cheers from those in the crowd who felt the same, but there was still a sizeable number who looked on, sneering at his words.
	And just then, from his higher vantage point, Prael saw something coming. Lights, bobbing as they moved, and the sound of an engine behind them. Something dark and large caught in the nimbus of the storm, coming down the mainway from the edge of town.
	‘It’s them!’ screamed a voice. ‘They’re already here!’
	The crowd scattered, some of them stumbling over one another in wild haste, others fleeing to find anything that approximated cover.
	The motions of his hands were automatic; Prael found the laslock coming up to his shoulder, his eye peering down the iron sights. The training and the days of vermin-shooting with a slug-thrower snapped back to him. The old laser rifle warmed up and went live. His finger was on the knurled trigger-plate.
	The dark shapes were closing in, riding on a plume of windborne dust. Prael wondered what was out there, behind those lights. An armoured tank, a cross-terrain vehicle? Perhaps lines of Legiones Astartes walking single file? He’d heard they did that to hide their numbers.
	‘Prael!’ Ames was shouting at him, trying to pull him off the trailer. ‘Get down from there, you worthless idiot! You’ll be the death of us all! Put down the bloody gun before they see you!’
	In all his life, Dallon Prael had wanted to be something. To be more than just a solarman, to have his existence matter. No, more than that. He wanted to be a hero. 
	His finger tightened on the trigger-plate. He would be a hero. Even if he had to die to do it. He would teach these invaders a lesson.
	The laslock released a pulse of brilliant red light with a shriek of split air, and the shot hit the mark Prael had made for it. 
	He let out a breath and felt suddenly dizzy. He waited for the reprisal. And waited. 
	The wind and dust went on and brushed past him with a crackle of grit, and Prael stumbled down, advancing towards his aim point. Acrid smoke curled in the air and he smelled burned flesh. 
	He stopped, and found himself looking at Silas Cincade’s corpse, lying where the body had been blown out of the saddle of an idling rover trike. A good quarter of the mechanic’s face was a blackened ruin of meat, where the las-bolt had hit just above his right eye.
	Prael started shaking, the rifle falling from his nerveless fingers. 
	In the end, it fell to Yacio to approximate something approaching organisation. While Prael went to pieces, weeping like a child, the telegraphist called on the townsfolk to find whatever they could to barricade the roads in and out of Town Forty-Four. They obeyed, mostly out of the need to feel like they were doing something that mattered instead of just waiting to die.
	Cincade’s body was taken, and somebody got the laslock away from Prael. The mechanic had ridden to Oh-One in search of information, and now they would never know what he had to tell them; most of the town had already assumed Silas to be dead anyway, fearful that the wandering invaders out there in the fields would have killed him before he ever reached the capital beyond the horizon.
	Yacio warned them that the Legiones Astartes would come here. It was inevitable. The Skyhook was here, and that made it a tactical location. They had to protect it – either from an invading army come to plant its flag or for a brigade of defenders come to protect them from a heartless dictator. The space elevator was all they had that might be able to keep them alive. 
	What troubled Oren Yacio the most was the question of what he would do when he finally learned who had arrived on Virger-Mos II. The forces of the Emperor, or the Legions of Horus? 
	Did it actually matter?
	+++Broadcast Minus Two Weeks [Solar]+++
	The title of the book was Insignum Astartes: The Uniforms and Regalia of the Space Marines, and it was a real tome in the traditional sense of the word. Not a pict-book to be read by a data-slate, but a physical object made of plaspaper, like the ones his mother had always favoured. 
	Leon took great care with it, as the binding was old and the pages uneven where the glue holding them in place had yellowed and gone to powder. 
	He looked over age-dulled images of armoured warriors, captured by picters or rendered in artwork as they strode battlefields like mythic storm-lords. He knew the representations intimately, every shade and line and colour. He knew every word in the book by heart. The careworn pages showed details of Legion sigils, banners and insignia, basic facts on the nature of the Legiones Astartes and their battle doctrines. The book smelled of age and solemnity. At his feet, hand-drawn sketches that were full of painstaking detail, rendered on scraps of butcher’s paper, lay in an untidy pile beneath his bed. 
	Leon’s scribblings were crude in comparison to the illustrations in the book, but still he poured his full measure of intent into them. The best of his work – such as it was – was pinned to the walls of his small, narrow bedroom, along with yellowing newsprint clippings and pages kept from leaflets provided by the colonial authorities. The rest of his books and spools of picts lay on plastic shelves above his bed. They jostled for space with a collection of figurines, some stamped from metal and brightly painted, others formed from off-cuts of wood that Leon had carved himself. The youth’s room was, in its own way, a dedication to the great dreams of the Emperor and his warriors, to their glory and the glory of humanity.
	Pride of place went to a single cylinder made of heavy-gauge brass, polished to a bright sheen: the spent casing of a bolt shell. He put down the book and reached for it, taking the case between thumb and forefinger, turning it so it caught the light. Not for the first time, Leon wondered where the shot it contained had been fired. He tried to picture the mass-reactive shell head and the damage it would have wrought on impact. Who died for the sake of this? He asked the question in silence. Leon tried to imagine himself there in that moment, looking on as the round took the life of an enemy of the Imperium.
	The door to his room opened and Leon jerked, startled from his reverie. He’d been so engrossed in his own thoughts he hadn’t heard his father’s approach; certainly the man would never give him the grace to knock before entering. 
	Immediately, he saw the shell casing in Leon’s hand and his expression soured. ‘I can see you’re busy.’
	Leon coloured, feeling foolish. ‘What’s wrong?’ He fumbled with the casing, unsure where to put it. The man who sold it to him had taken a high price for it, and Ames had beat him when he learned how much scrip he had ‘wasted’; but the casing had fallen from the ejection port of a Space Marine’s bolter, and owning it made Leon Kyyter feel somehow connected to the warrior kindred he saw in the books. 
	‘It’s worthless, you know that, don’t you?’ Leon’s father pointed at the brass cylinder. ‘It was probably picked from the mud beneath the boots of some idiot in the Imperial Army, if that. That shell’s never been within a light-year of a Space Marine.’ He glanced around the room disapprovingly, as he always did.
	Leon kept his silence. He didn’t care to believe what Ames said. In his eyes, the casing was real and true, and that was all that mattered. 
	‘I’ll never comprehend why you hold so much interest for…’ He sneered at the crude drawings on the walls and the metal figures. ‘For all this.’ Bitterness clouded his father’s tone. ‘The Space Marines, the Emperor, all of them… They don’t care about you as much as you care about them. Terra thinks nothing of Virger-Mos or the people who live here. I keep wondering
when you’re going to grow up and realise that.’ 
	Still, Leon said nothing. He didn’t want to repeat the same pointless argument they had fought a hundred times over. 
	Ames tapped a picture of the Imperial Palace cut from a pamphlet, the edges of it curling inwards. ‘I know you think that one day you’ll go see this for real. But sooner or later, you have to learn that won’t happen. It’s a fantasy, son. You were born here, and you’ll die here. And the Imperium will go on without you. It won’t care.’
	‘What do you want?’ Leon said, at last. 
	His father frowned and turned away. ‘Do something useful. Take the kitchen remains to the burner.’ 
	Leon waited until he was gone, and then replaced the shell. He put the copy of the Insignum Astartes back on the shelf, where it would be pressed flat and kept safe, and then dolefully took up the duty he had been given.
	He walked across the dusty patch of grass behind the dormitory house to where the maw of the burner protruded from its underground hollow, and kicked the grate open with his feet. Leon let his mind wander, pretending instead he was on Terra, walking the halls of the Emperor’s Palace; but then the stink of the burner reached him and the pleasant illusion was destroyed. Scowling, he poured the pail of slops into the drop tube and let the furnace start its work.
	Through habit, he looked up at the Skyhook. At this time of day, the sun was throwing the space elevator’s shadow directly over the building.
	In the shade, Leon found Esquire Mendacs sitting cross-legged on the grass with a water flask and a cloth bag at his side. The remembrancer was working at a pict-screen, moving a stylus across it. He saw the youth and threw him a wan smile, beckoning him over.
	He left the pail and wiped his hands on the thighs of his trousers. ‘Beg pardon, esquire,’ Leon said as he came closer. ‘If I smell a little. The kitchen remains, I was just disposing of them.’
	Mendacs nodded. ‘It doesn’t notice. Are you well, Leon?’
	‘Well enough.’ He nodded at the hand-held screen. ‘What is that you’re doing there?’
	‘See for yourself.’ Mendacs offered him the device, and Leon took it gingerly, cautious not to touch any of the tabs or buttons around the pict-screen’s frame. 
	A half-finished image was centred in the middle of the display, a line sketch of the township from the shallow rise where the dormitory house sat. The rise of the Skyhook dominated the drawing. 
	Leon felt a brief flash of jealousy. Mendacs’s skill with the pen was an order of magnitude beyond the youth’s crude attempts, and even the incomplete piece here made his scribblings look like the work of an infant. He nodded. ‘It’s impressive.’
	‘It will be the basis for a digi-painting, perhaps,’ Mendacs said airily. ‘We’ll see when I’m finished with it.’
	When Leon didn’t answer, the remembrancer’s expression shifted and he frowned. The other man’s cool, steady gaze seemed to bore straight into the youth, and he wanted to look away. 
	‘Your father…’ Mendacs paused, feeling for the right words. ‘He doesn’t seem to have an appreciation for art.’
	Leon gave a glum nod. ‘Aye.’
	‘Your mother did, though.’
	‘How did you know that?’ 
	Mendacs smiled. ‘Because you do, Leon. And because there are still traces of her lingering in your home.’ He stopped, suddenly concerned. ‘Forgive me. Am I speaking out of turn?’
	Leon shook his head. ‘No, no. You’re exactly right.’ He sighed. ‘I’d like to have the talent that you do, but I don’t.’
	‘I’m sure your skills are balanced in other ways,’ offered the remembrancer. 
	‘My Da doesn’t seem to think so.’
	Mendacs studied him. ‘Fathers and sons always have a fractious relationship. This is a truth that spans the galaxy. One pulls against the other… one rebels, defies… The other tries to hold on to the old order of things, against reason.’
	‘We don’t see eye to eye,’ Leon sighed. ‘He thinks the Imperium ignores us out here on the periphery. He tells me that it’s all far away and unreachable. Terra, and all those things.’
	‘That is as much true as it is false,’ said Mendacs, ‘but I imagine Esquire Kyyter would not hear that.’ He leaned in. ‘Do you think he is right?’
	‘No,’ Leon answered immediately. His temper began a slow burn. ‘He doesn’t see what I see. He’s blind, too set in his ways. And he wants me to follow in his footsteps. I’ve tried to get him to see things like I do, but he doesn’t want to hear it. He thinks…’ The young man paused. ‘I think he believes I’m turning on him.’
	‘A traitor to your kin.’ Mendacs said the words without weight. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it? How fathers and sons can be so close but at the same time be so far apart?’ He paused and looked away. ‘Do you imagine that Horus Lupercal shared a measure of what you feel now, Leon?’
	‘What?’ The question came from nowhere, and in its wake Leon felt unsettled. ‘No! I mean...’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘The Emperor and the primarchs are not like us.’ The idea seemed ludicrous.
	‘No?’ Mendacs went back to his sketching, the stylus moving over the screen in small flicks of motion. ‘Even those who transcend humanity must stem from it. The bonds of family, of brotherhood and fatherhood… They still exist in them. They cannot escape such truths.’ The remembrancer looked back at him. ‘Just like you, Leon. It is something that all men must face. The question: May I defy my father?’
	‘The Warmaster’s defiance has cost the lives of millions,’ Leon blurted.
	Mendacs looked away again. ‘All choices have their price.’
	+++Broadcast Plus Twenty-Two Hours [Solar]+++
	Leon crouched by the windowsill, the lights in his room doused, straining to listen. From the township proper, the sounds of breaking glass and the crack of gunfire echoed up towards him. He felt hollow inside, watching the plumes of black smoke rising into the night sky. The faint glow of fires was visible through the lines of the alleyways; he guessed that the general store was burning, but he couldn’t understand why anyone would have wanted to put it to the torch. 
	It was hours since his father had left, ordering him on no account to leave the dormitory house. Ames didn’t know that his son had seen him pick up the revolver he hid in the cellar, and tuck it into his waistband before he went. Leon tried to understand what that might mean. Why would his Da need a weapon, unless he knew that danger was coming to Forty-Four? Or was there another reason? Another kind of threat?
	Leon’s hands knitted and he looked around the room, the faint light throwing shadows over his pictures. He wanted to do something, but he didn’t know what it might be. None of his books or his drawings could give him any kind of answer.
	Then he heard the door close downstairs. Leon blinked and peered back out of the window; that seemed wrong. Had his father returned?
	Instead, he saw a shape in motion through the places where the light from the township didn’t fall, slipping away from the house. The figure was careful to stay in the shadows at all times, never once passing into the light. 
	It could only have been Mendacs; but the man moved in a way Leon had never seen before, almost as if his entire body language had gone through a subtle shift. On an impulse he couldn’t quite grasp, the youth scrambled to his feet and went after him.
	The remembrancer’s course skirted the edges of the township, and having lived his entire life within its confines, Leon soon knew where Mendacs was heading. The alleyways and cut-backs the man took were part of the map of the youth’s world, places where he had run as a child and played at games of Great Crusade with his friends.
	Mendacs was heading for the base of the Skyhook, and his path avoided all the places where the citizens of Forty-Four were gathered. Keeping his distance, Leon tried not to let the sights around him distract him from the follow; but it was not easy to put aside the sounds of the fires and the screaming.
	At the corner of the Adjunct, some men had been hung from the lamp posts, and they swayed in the wind, the fibre cord about their necks creaking. Leon recognised faces from the tavern up there, now bloated and pale. Along the top of the mainway, it looked as if people had built barricades, although he was too far away to be sure. Once or twice he spied small groups of people armed with anything that could be turned into a weapon, some stalking the streets, others hiding in wait as if looking for something to ambush. Windows were stove in on some houses; he saw one with the name of the Warmaster daubed across the front door. He couldn’t tell if it was as a warning or as a mark of hate. And at the westerly point, a telegraph pole had been cut down with chainsaws, lying where it fell with a mess of torn wires about the head of it.
	Leon lost sight of Mendacs as the remembrancer approached the service block at the foot of the space elevator. He was distracted by a moment of angry shouting between two men that ended abruptly in the blast of a shot-rod. One of the voices was familiar to him: Kal Muudus, a neighbour from a few doors down the lane. He was yelling something about the Emperor, but his words were barely coherent.
	A moment of real fear washed over Leon and it took all his will to stay where he was in the shadows, and not run pell-mell back to the dormitory house. 
	He stiffened, digging deep to find what small measure of courage he had. Leon’s world was collapsing around him as the day drew on, and in this instant of understanding, he questioned if Esquire Mendacs might have something to do with it. The tensions and unspoken discord between the settlers of Town Forty-Four had been there before Mendacs had arrived; but it was only after he came that they bubbled to the surface. Only after the remembrancer had taken residence had the darkness of the Great War out there seemed to reach its inky fingers towards the colony. 
	Leon drew himself up and sprinted the distance to the service blockhouse. The door was locked shut, but there was a narrow vent shaft up above it that the youth was skinny enough to enter. 
	He expected to be bombarded by the screams of alarms, but Leon dropped to the floor with only the clatter of his boots on the deck. He shrank into cover behind a cargo rig, but the sound of his arrival was lost in the steady background noise of the Skyhook’s inner workings.
	Even with the troubles in Town Forty-Four, the mechanised elevator went on regardless, ignoring the human drama beyond as it continually ferried trains of cargo capsules up to the orbital transfer station. A part of Leon was dazzled by his own daring at penetrating the blockhouse, and doing it with so little effort – but then he recalled that everyone in the settlement had been drilled with the warning never to enter the chambers within. Not only would the machines in there likely kill them by accident, but to do so was a violation of the colonial charter. Those found guilty of that were reclassified as indentured helots and sent to the frozen polar zones, to work off a decade or two on a punishment detail. Fear of that reprisal had kept the place sacrosanct.
	Now he was inside, Leon was fascinated by what he saw, the motion of the mech-arms, the rail points and the pod-trains. If an ant could have crawled inside a working rover engine, it might have experienced the same sights and sounds. 
	Movement drew his eye to a line of six empty capsules, their gull-wing hatches all open. At the front of the line, Mendacs was leaning over a control console, working at buttons and switches with deft, singular focus. At once, a siren gave a low hoot, and the train began to move forwards, the hatches slowly dropping to seal shut. Mendacs grabbed his bags and threw them into the closest pod, before stepping in after. 
	Leon came up out of the shadow as the train pulled away, the gaps left by the hatch doors growing smaller every second. He knew where the pods would be going, where Mendacs had to be going. Up, to the station, and off-world.
	If he did nothing, he would never know why, would never know what was happening to his town and his colony. But the risk… the risk was more than he had ever known in his life.
	He took it anyway. At the last possible second, Leon sprinted to the rearmost pod of the train and ducked under the closing hatch. The pod rang as the door sealed shut with a hiss of air. 
	The boy felt an abrupt shock of acceleration as the train moved onto the ascent rails; and then it settled onto a vertical rise and Leon tumbled into a corner, banging his head on an inner wall. Spirals of light behind his eyes followed him into darkness.
	The modified cogitator program did exactly what Mendacs wanted, shunting the cargo pods into a siding once they entered the transfer station, instead of moving the containers straight to unloading. He disembarked and gathered his gear, pausing only to throw a wry smile in the direction of the rear of the train, and then moved off.
	The gravity plates in the deck of the transfer station shifted the orientation of ‘up’ and ‘down’ so that the colony was actually at his back. The platform itself, at the three-quarter point of the Skyhook’s length, was a flat disc shaped like a three-lobed cog; each of the cog’s teeth was an automated loading airlock for freight tenders to nuzzle to, although all but one was vacant. The vessel at the occupied airlock was greatly undersized in comparison to the grain carriers that usually made port there. It was just a simple warp-cutter, little more than a courier ship. Mendacs had been careful to dock it at the upper tier, so that anyone with a telescope on the ground would not be able to see it. 
	He didn’t go straight to his ship. First, he dumped the baggage – he wouldn’t need it for the last stage of the operation – and headed spinwards around the disc to the sealed astropath’s chambers. 
	The laspistol he had carried on his arrival was still where he had left it, hanging by a lanyard from the hatch controls. Mendacs recovered it, checked the charge as a matter of course, and then opened the heavy steel door. He heard the crackle of the energy-dampening field as he stepped through. 
	Nothing had changed; the astropath’s residence globe was as he’d left it, the iris hatch wide open, showing a glimpse of the padded zero-gravity space inside, the litter of debris still where it had fallen when he had been forced to pistol-whip the psyker to show the seriousness of his intent. 
	And the astropath herself. Still there, lying in a heap, her sallow face and mane of coiled locks staring blankly up at the ceiling. Mendacs cocked his head, watching the play of a nimbus of green-orange light that enveloped the woman, the radiance issuing from an iron box the size of a man’s torso. The stasis generator had performed its function perfectly.
	He bent down on one knee and examined the astropath. Behind the glitter of the stasis field, she resembled an image from a video feed frozen in mid-motion. Mendacs didn’t understand the technology by which the device worked, knowing only that it could cast an envelope over a limited area, and within that barrier the passage of time slowed to a crawl. He had been on Virger-Mos II for almost two solar months, yet for the woman, only seconds would have passed. From her viewpoint, he would never have left. 
	Mendacs reached down and touched the control to deactivate the field. It winked out, and the psyker jerked back into life.
	‘Please, do not kill me!’ she wailed, resuming a conversation that was weeks past and forgotten.
	‘I will let you live if you do something for me,’ he told her. ‘Send a message. Only that.’
	The astropath shook her head, and he held up the laspistol, pointing it at her face. She looked away, and then sighed.
	‘It is not something that can be done at a whim. There must be preparations. A certain readiness is needed–’
	Mendacs held up his hands. ‘Don’t lie to me. You can transmit at a moment’s notice if need be. I’m not some Administratum tech that you wish to baffle with the mystery of your talent.’ He tapped the barrel of the pistol against his temple. ‘I know how you work.’
	Her eyes widened. ‘Without correct foundation, I could be injured! The warp eats the unprepared mind. Please, do not force me!’ 
	She was a psyker of only minor talent; that was undeniable. The fact she was posted here, to this backwater instead of to a starship or colony of real note, confirmed that. The astropath’s days would have been a lonely, tedious string of parsing news from the core and the occasional communion with a comrade aboard a passing ship. Mendacs’s unexpected arrival was practically a gift. 
	He pressed the laspistol muzzle into her cheek and regarded her impassively. ‘I have other means to send this on my ship,’ he said, ‘but I would prefer that you do it. If your answer remains no, this will end now.’
	At last the woman gave a nod. ‘Very well. To where do you wish me to speak?’ Mendacs reeled off a set of spatial coordinates committed to his memory and watched in amusement as the psyker’s expression became one of shock. ‘There?’ she asked. ‘But that is beyond the lines of… It is for his ears?’
	Mendacs returned her nod. ‘The Warmaster, yes, after a fashion.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘Send exactly this, no different. Seven words.’
	‘Tell me,’ she said, glowering.
	‘Mission complete. Proceeding to next target. Mendacs.’
	Leon wasn’t certain what would happen next. 
	He had never been this close to a psyker before, never even seen one in the flesh; for blight’s sake, he had never even been off the surface of his home world before this day, and now he crouched, trying to merge with the shadows out in the corridor beyond the astropath’s quarters. 
	Awaking with a start as the cargo train came to a halt at the transfer station, the youth had been transfixed by fear, sickened almost to the point of vomiting. Everything felt strange, the pull of gravity on him unusually light, the illuminators in the ceiling too bright, the air cold and artificial-tasting. 
	He hid inside the pod, afraid that Mendacs would come to find him, waiting until the remembrancer’s footsteps died away. When he recovered a scrap of his bravery, Leon dared to step out and follow the man on as best he could. Through trial and error, he had found his way here – but not before happening on a viewing port that presented to him the curve of his planet and the infinite void that surrounded it. 
	Leon looked into the blackness and had never been so terrified in all his life. He saw the dark and the fragile mass of Virger-Mos II, and suddenly realised that his father had been right all along. The universe beyond the home they knew was a vast and uncaring space; one glimpse of this awesome sight showed the truth of those words.
	He dared to look up from his cover as Mendacs spoke his own name, holding the slim pistol in his hand on the telepath. The woman did something strange, and the air around him seemed to ripple and flex like a lens of oil. A sharp, greasy taint flowed through the chamber, prickling his skin. Leon felt a spider web touch all over his body and he almost cried out. It was the warp. The gossamer edges of it bleeding out from the astropath as she sent the signal. 
	The youth began to tremble, rocking back and forth, begging fate to make the sensation go away; and then, as quickly as it had come, it dissipated. 
	‘It is done,’ the woman was saying, her voice carrying to him. ‘Traitor swine.’
	Mendacs stepped back and sniffed. ‘That’s a very simplistic view,’ he replied. ‘Loyalty is an elastic concept. You’d be surprised what it can encompass, given enough impetus.’
	‘You will not succeed,’ spat the psyker. ‘I know what you are. I see the brand. Alpha Legion.’ She pointed at his arm, where a tattoo protruded from his sleeve. ‘You’re the tool of monsters and turncoats. A liar, a walking falsehood!’
	‘I will succeed,’ Mendacs countered. ‘I have succeeded. Here, on Virger-Mos II and dozens of other worlds, all of them of similar stripe. This is not the first planet I have brought to the edge, nor the last.’
	‘If… If your masters come to invade, they will be made to pay for whatever they take. The Emperor’s Legiones Astartes will come here and take it back!’
	He shook his head, smiling slightly. ‘You don’t understand. Let me make it clear to you, mind-speaker. I alone am the invasion. And my work is done. There will be no massed attack from the stars, no bombardments and battle fleets.’
	‘But Horus–’
	Mendacs chuckled. ‘The Warmaster has more important things to do than send his men to this dreary corner of the galaxy. Are you so arrogant as to think it would be worth a primarch’s effort? Do you really believe he would commit ships to the capture of a farm?’ He spat the last words with a harsh sneer. Mendacs was warming to his subject; Leon recognised the same manner in his speech that the man had shown to the youth when speaking of his travels. ‘Horus’s fleet, as large as it is, cannot be everywhere at once. But to sow fear into the hearts of the loyalists, it must appear as if it can. Do you see? I am only one of dozens of operatives sent by Alpharius to create dissent and dissolution all across the galaxy.’ He nodded. ‘You are quite correct. I am indeed a liar, and one of the most potent strength. I sampled the signals you sent down to the populace, copied them, emulated them. Then it was only a matter of inserting them into the telegraph network, and letting the paranoia and petty fears of these parochial fools do the work for me. A handful of small asteroids captured from the Oort cloud and kicked into the atmosphere by automata-drones, and the fires were lit.’ He flashed a grin. ‘I made their sky fall.’
	With each word the man said, Leon’s fury had grown and grown. His terror gave way to anger, hard resentment at his betrayal. Finally, he could hold it in no more, and he burst from his cover and threw himself at Mendacs, cursing his name.
	The remembrancer – no, the spy – let him come running, at the last moment swinging up the laspistol and using it to crack the boy across the face. Leon cried out in agony as the butt of the gun broke his nose and he tripped, stumbling to the floor.
	Without pause, Mendacs turned back to the astropath and executed her, the howl of a single las-bolt resonating in the chamber as it blew through the psyker’s heart and killed her instantly.
	Leon scrambled backwards, bringing up his hands in a fruitless gesture of self-protection, gagging on the stink of burnt meat. Mendacs ignored him, instead stooping to pick up the box-shaped device lying on the floor. He holstered the gun and walked away.
	He was almost out of the room before Leon gathered the wits to call after him. ‘She was right, you are a traitor bastard! You’re a mass-murderer!’
	Mendacs halted on the threshold. ‘That’s not true, Leon. I’ve taken only one life since I came to this planet.’ He nodded at the dead psyker. ‘It’s the people who are killers. People down there, in Town Forty-Four and every other place just like it. People like your father and Prael and all the rest. They let themselves be manipulated, because deep within them, they want to be right. They want to have their darkest fears come true, to validate their loathing of the lives they lead.’
	‘You did it all!’ Leon shouted. ‘You faked the drop-pods in the sky; you used those things in your case to corrupt the broadcasts… You turned neighbours against each other with your lies and propaganda!’
	‘I did. And I will again, and again…’
	Leon’s shoulders fell. ‘Are… you going to kill me now?’
	Mendacs shook his head. ‘No. I knew you were following me. I wanted to see how far you would come.’
	‘Why?’
	He shrugged. ‘It amused me. I so rarely have a witness to the full scope of my work.’ The man nodded in the direction of the transfer station core. ‘You’re clever enough to find a set of cargo pods on the downbound rails. They’ll take you home.’
	Leon climbed unsteadily to his feet. ‘When I get back,’ he husked, ‘I will tell everyone what you have done. I’ll stop you. I’ll make sure all the other worlds are warned!’
	‘No, you won’t.’ Mendacs turned away. ‘You have a choice, Leon. You must swear your loyalty to Horus Lupercal and deny the Emperor’s dominion. Because by the time the Skyhook carries you down to the surface, the colony of Virger-Mos II will belong to the Warmaster. Not through force of arms, but because of the weakness of the people who live there. Because they have exchanged their fear of one thing they have never seen for the fear of another.’ He spared the youth one last look. ‘And if you do not join them, they will be the ones who kill you.’
	The warp-cutter detached and turned about its axis, the slower-than-light fusion engines coming online to propel the vessel up and away from the colony world. 
	In the cockpit module, Mendacs finished the last of the entries in his mission log, pausing to study the details of the mining outpost six light years distant where he would begin his work anew. 
	Content that he was prepared, he settled back into the acceleration couch and reached for the stasis field generator. He keyed the deactivation timer to trigger a week out from orbital insertion, so that he would have time to intercept the outpost’s vox-transmissions and begin work on a new plan of subterfuge. 
	Mendacs closed his eyes and flipped the switch; to him, he would awaken a second later and begin again. 
	It was what he was best at.
	Leon Kyyter leaned forwards and let his forehead touch the cold glassaic of the armoured viewport, his hands splayed palm open either side of his face. 
	He looked down, not daring to glance towards the threatening dark, watching the agri-world beneath him. Night covered the landscape, but there was light, here and there in scattered bands and broken commas of colour.
	Light from the fires of burning towns, yellow-orange and hellish in shade, falling everywhere he turned his gaze. 
	In the cold and the silence, Leon watched the distant flames spread.