The red carpet smouldered and burned, flames seeping out of holes punched by fiery lasbolts, shrapnel from bolt-shells and the charred remains of the Household Guard. They lay where they fell, their fine green uniforms now being picked over by a hungry psyber-eagle. Hope’s twin heads pecked at the straps of a polished silver breastplate, working it over like he was cracking the shell of a crab. The guards had been caught unawares by a sudden burst of psychic terror, funnelled through the eagle, and had been rendered insensible with fear, easy prey for the Inquisiton. Amelia navigated this bloody scene, stepping over bodies and around burning patches of carpet, at the head of a small force. She was followed by her ever-present bodyguard Corporal Al’Said, a fire-team of five sisters of battle rendered anonymous by their ornate armour, and by the hulking form of Magos Zeletrass. The Magos was still a horrific amalgam of flesh and steel, but she had seemingly switched out all of her parts since Amelia had seen her standing at the Inquisitor’s right hand, having recommended Amelia for promotion.

Once again, they found themselves wandering the halls of a labyrinthine complex but this time they were the aggressors, striking from all sides to overwhelm the beleaguered defenders. The orbital drop by the Stormtroopers had caught the Governor’s guards utterly unprepared, and the man himself was now being held by the Inquisition in his private quarters. The enemy still held many of the anti-air defences that dotted the spire, so the Inquisitor was unable to send the governor away, and the drop-trooper’s momentum would not last forever. In time, the enemy would rally and bring in fresh reinforcements. Outside the hive, in the streets of the city, the PDF was waging war on itself as Imperialist and Loyalist factions emerge amongst their ranks. Marshall Taimur hastily mobilised regiments from the neighbouring spires, but the PDF had been left in the dark over the planned coup and it would be some time before they could seize control over the approaches to the palace, and so secure the captive governor.

The fate of the battle was to be decided by acolytes far more senior than Amelia; she had been ordered to escort the Magos to the Governor’s private archives before anyone thought to erase them. Her team moved at a brisk walk through the halls of the palace encountering scattered groups of professional guardsmen alongside servants armed with decorative weapons taken from the walls. So far, they had yet to reach any real resistance, but there was no telling how long their luck would hold. The vox in Amelia’s ear came to life in a shower of static before receiving a message across the Inquisiton’s secure network.

‘Sigilite to all callsigns, report status.’

The Inquisitor was contacting his servants; he was loosely coordinating the attack from the throne room, giving his expert commanders a great deal of operational freedom whilst leaving himself free to throw his weight behind any offensives.

‘Overseer to Sigilite, Overseer-four delayed in mid-hive. All other units on schedule.’

Marshall Taimur’s regiments were moving through the hive in twelve-wheeled trucks, or on the public metro lines, but their Malcador tanks were unwieldy, and had been struggling with the esoteric jumble of roads that formed the bulk of Imperial hives.

‘Eagle to Sigilite, our advance has slowed and the enemy are counterattacking across our lines, Eagle-two-four is entirely cut off.’

Lieutenant-Colonel Coriolanus and his drop-trooper were charged with expanding the perimeter of the Inquisition, supported by the sisters of the Order of the Bloody Rose. They cut their way through the palace, fighting hand-to-hand in the servant’s passageways or trading shots across the indoor lake five hundred metres square. Whatever their skill, they were only a battalion and the further they pushed the thinner their ranks became.

Next to speak was a flurry of different callsigns, specific adepts tasked with securing important sites. Some had already achieved their objectives, whilst others were hopelessly bogged down and needed support. Amelia spoke with this group.

‘This is Rose-Four-Delta,’ the callsign for the fire-team Amelia now commanded, ‘proceeding to target, light resistance encountered and overcome.’

This minor duty done, Amelia turned her mind back to the task at hand. With a thought, she summoned Hope from his meal. The eagle was reluctant to leave his meal uneaten, having failed to pry apart the breastplate, but settled himself with a quick eyeball as he flew away. The fire-team moved along the halls, taking care to avoid the main thoroughfares and the pitched battles that had engulfed them. Occasionally they would encounter isolated servants, or small squads of Household Guards moving to outflank the enemy, but they were easy prey.

At the centre of one of these networks of rooms lay a chamber heavy with incense and laden with thick carpets and exotic silk curtains. It contained a menagerie of indecently-dressed women attended to by eunuchs in simple jerkins and baggy pantaloons. Amelia was taken aback by the strange sight and was caught flat footed as the harem rose with a single terrifying shriek and charged the Inquisition, brandishing exotic daggers, ornate pistols or simply sprinting with bare fists. The Sisters were too professional to hesitate over such a sight and let loose a devastating hail of bolter fire that detonated in and amongst the charging crowd, sending silk veils flying in clouds of viscera. Corporal Al’Said joined in with his hellgun as the Magos opened up with exotic weaponry, flinging bolts of blue-white electricity and incandescent globules of phosphorous forwards even while readying her titanic axe.

The women charged forwards with reckless abandon, pressing on even with shattered limbs or gaping wounds. Their eyes were wide with manic fervour, and, even though they were being cut down in droves, their very bodies were shielding the rest of their number. Within moments they would meet the kill-team with their simple weapons and Amelia knew that she would be overwhelmed in a tide of flesh. She gathered her strength, funnelling the warp down through her staff and into her cowl, and her collar lit up with the tell-tale blue balefire of psychic energy while her eyes became mirrored spheres that seemed to reflect the black emptiness of the void. Power flowed into her, guided along arcane circuitry set down in sanctified wiring, and she sent it all into a single, titanic, shriek. The flames poured into her skull as her cry funnelled the essence of the warp into her foes. Psychically-imbued sound scythed its way through every mind in the charging crowd, tearing apart the delicate pathways of the brain and burning through their emotions and memories. They died quickly, bombarded by every emotion and memory they had ever felt reflected around their mind until it became little more than a meaningless sound of deafening scale. Like puppets with their strings cut, they collapsed.

Amelia stood before the dead, panting heavily and desperately leaning on her staff for support. Al’Said took her shoulder to keep her upright as the sisters strode over and through the bodies in their heavy power-armour, mowing down the eunuchs who had remained behind the charging crowd. Once Amelia had gathered herself together, she moved over the corpses far more carefully as the sisters, as she wore leather boots instead of a hermetically sealed suit. The eunuchs lay surrounded by dozens of empty needles; they had drugged the women to use as a rabid and expendable force. This manic charge was not the product of loyalty or fanaticism, but an artificial state induced by their masters. The sheer disregard for human life horrified Amelia, but she forced herself to move on. This slaughter was little more than a footnote in the larger battle, and Amelia’s duties lay elsewhere.

‘There is a false wall here, I can hear it calling out to me.’ Magos Zeletrass spoke in what may once have been a woman’s voice, heavily distorted by deliberate tampering and simple misuse.

With barely a glance, the Magos induced the wall to open. Amelia was amazed; the Magos had gained control of the door whilst standing on the other side of the room, and she would have sensed the use of Psychic power. The door was indistinguishable from the wall, and Amelia would have walked past it without a second thought. The corridor behind was narrow, but too lavishly decorated to be a servant’s passage.

‘I think this passage is for the Governor, or other high-ranking dignitaries.’ Amelia mused.

‘Why would the governor need a secret passage in his own palace?’ The Magos questioned.

‘No doubt he wanted a way to visit his girls without any gossipers, or his wife, spotting him in the halls.’ Corporal Al’Said supplied by way of explanation.

A strange clicking briefly emanated from the Magos, it almost sounded like she was working over some great mystery, before she turned once again to the passageway. After staring at what appeared to be a blank patch of wall for ten seconds, she turned her vast bulk around to Amelia. Her face, what little of it hadn’t been replaced by a random assortment of sensors and cameras, was unnaturally pale, almost bone white, and parts seemed to have rotted away.

‘I have downloaded the blueprints for this passage. We will be able to bypass enemy lines and proceed almost directly to the archives.’

‘Excellent news. We’ll take the tunnels then. Sister Cassandra, take point.’

Amelia had made the effort to commit the names of her command to memory, but she made sure she wasn’t looking at any particular sister when she spoke. Though there were differences in their armour, the cut of the cloth or the placement of devotional beads for example, she wasn’t confident in her ability to identify individual members. The sisters hadn’t spoken since Amelia had asked them to introduce themselves, acting with a cold professionalism that unnerved her.

As she followed Sister Cassandra through the labyrinthine tunnels, Amelia couldn’t help but wonder if their detached air had other causes than professionalism. Like her, the sisters had all been wards of the Imperial State brought up under the watchful eye of an Imperial organisation. Unlike her, the Sisters were all the daughters of servants of the throne who had fallen in the course of their duty, leaving their orphans to the Schola Progenia. Amelia could not help but wonder if their lifetime spent under the control of the Ecclesiarchy had soured their attitude towards Psykers. In truth, it had been an unusually long time since she had encountered overt hostility and suspicion over her powers. The majority of the Imperium would gladly see her burned at the stake, sanctioned or not, and the Inquisiton was very much the exception to the universal rule. Had she been rated lower she would have been shipped off to the Guard to throw bolts of energy until her mind collapsed and she met her end in the barrel of an ally’s pistol. Had she failed in some way on the black ships or in the Palace then she would be long dead ad remembered by no-one. Amelia did not remember what she had undergone in the Imperial Palace, she had forgotten it the moment she left, she only knew that she had survived because she had the good fortune to be born with strong psychic potential.

The secret passage was long and largely featureless, giving Amelia plenty of room to think, but eventually the Magos directed them off into a side passage. They emerged from a doorway artfully concealed with a portrait of the Governor looking regal in a military uniform with the spire silhouetted in the background. This was the inner sanctum of the palace, where the Governor and his personal staff of three hundred civil servants worked on the business of running a system-wide government. It was an artificially airy space of white marble and golden statues depicting local heroes or important noblemen. The battle below had not touched this place and the acolytes tracked dirty footsteps across the marble surface, marring the brilliant white with a mixture of ash and gore. The halls below had been quiet as only a warzone can be, a desperate silence interspersed with distant firefights, but up here was the hushed atmosphere unique to holy sites, libraries and the halls of power.

The kill-team moved with determined silence, save for the faint sound of hot air from the exhausts on the Sister’s backpacks and the occasional clicking of their boots on marble. Even Hope was silent, having perched himself on one of the Sister’s pauldrons. As they rounded a corner, they spotted a figure moving down the hall away from them. He wore the uniform of a servant and age had given him a stoop. He carried a paper folder in a determined shuffle away from them, utterly unaware of their presence. Amelia signalled the others to stop, and drew a long knife from her jacket. The blade was incredibly thin, made of psychically reactive metals, and bore no crossguard or handle. Though Amelia was not a telekinetic, the blade was designed to react with her powers, and she was able to bring it to a hover before her face. With a single flick of her hand, the blade was sent speeding forwards before embedding itself in the back of the old man’s neck. Wordlessly, he dropped to his knees. With a second motion, the knife flew back out of his neck and into Amelia’s waiting hand. She wiped the blood off on her jacket before sheathing the knife and moving forward again, having the sisters stow the body in a nearby alcove.

Their luck could not hold forever, and soon they ran into a section of eight guardsmen who had been running through the corridors in two perfect files, moving to reinforce the front. Their Corporal offered a shout of surprise before his men spread to gather what cover they could behind some ornamental pillars. Amelia and Al’Said did the same while the sisters simply stood their ground and began firing. Instantly, the respectful quite of the palace descended into the orchestra of battle, the staccato crack of lasguns in symphony with the meaty thuds of bolters. Amelia drew her own laspistol and let off a few shots when she dared to poke her head out from behind cover. She couldn’t see the enemy from behind her pillar, cut she saw the sisters standing in defiance of the enemy even as pearly red lasbeams impacted against their power armour and burned through their black robes. Magos Zeletrass loomed behind them, having raised two of her four arms over their heads to fire again with her weapons. The polished marble of the hallway was lit up in a kaleidoscope of multicoloured energy as the two groups traded shots. The outcome was inevitable, but the noise of their fight would have echoed throughout the halls. Their presence had been noted.

They abandoned any pretence of subtlety, sprinting down the hallways and tearing down any doors that obstructed their path with the Magos’ titanic axe. They ran pursued at every turn by enemies, platoons of men mere metres behind them. Amelia sent waves of fear and confusion behind her, sending men staggering drunkenly against walls or weakening their resolve with a sense of creeping dread. Occasionally, the enemy would gain ground and Cororal Al’Said would discourage their advance with an expertly aimed burst of lasfire delivered backwards while at a dead sprint. Zeletrass ran with an unnatural stride on an unknown number of limbs, her weapons kept facing backwards and guided by rear facing sensors.

At long last, the doors to the archive came into sight. The Magos had driven them on the most direct route, and so the guards outside the archive were struck dumb when the wall they had been staring at dissolved in a shower of bricks and marble plates. They barely had time to react before twin bolt rounds detonated in their chests, pushing their breastplates outwards on both sides and leaving a spray of blood on the wall. Magos Zeletrass immediately set upon the door to the archives, using a thin mechadendrite to access the lock rather than the axe, so as not to destroy the precious information within. The door was built by the finest security company on the civilian market, but it paled in comparison to the Magos’ centuries of accumulated knowledge and code. It opened with barely a protest, and the acolytes rushed in before it sealed itself again.

Inside was a towering room filled to the brim with cogitator stacks and adorned with braziers that poured out icy fog. Two bonded tech-adepts stood before a single terminal, looking at their guest with growing horror. They were killed by twin lasbolts from Amelia and Al’Said, explosive bolt rounds being too risky for use in this place, and Magos Zeletrass practically threw them aside in her rush to get to the terminal. A whole host of wires shot out of the folds of her robe until ever possible connection had been filled. Whilst she worked on the arcane rituals of the Mechanicus, one of the sisters took a melta-pistol to the door, sealing them in and securing them from the efforts of the household staff who even hammered against the door before the heat of the melta radiated through and their skin fused to the metal surface. Amelia gathered her powers, and sent such a wave of fear into the minds of their pursuers that they immediately fled the room in terror. Their position secure, she raised her hand to the combead in her ear.

‘Rose-Four-Delta to Sigilite, mission successful. We are holding position.’