But Lyko had run. Out of fear, or chasing some timetable, I didn't know. But he'd run and, in so doing, incriminated himself.
I'd gone to his residence, a rented hab high in the spires of Hive Ten, the moment Inshabel had alerted me to the deceit. But Lyko had cleared out, taking his people with him. His hab was empty and abandoned, with just afew scatterings of trash left behind in the stripped rooms.
I had set my staff to work tracing him, a tall order given the planet-wide data-access problems in the wake of the rioting. I had decided almost at once to pursue him alone, without informing the Inquisition. You may see this as odd, almost reckless. In a way, it was. But Lyko was an inquisitor of good repute, held in high regard, and with many friends. There was scant chance I could tell the ordos I was undertaking a hunt for him on the basis he was harbouring a notorious rogue psyker without the fact reaching him, or without his friends making trouble for me.
Those friends of his, of course, included Heldane and Commodus Voke: the stalwart trio that had captured the thirty-three rogues on Dolsene in the first place. How empty that 'heroic' action now seemed to me. I had been so impressed when Lord Rorken had shown me the report. Perhaps the 'capture' had been easy, or even staged, if Lyko was secretly in league with Esarhaddon. Perhaps it had all been part of an elaborate conspiracy to perpetrate the atrocity of Hive Primaris.
I was dogged by grim, unanswerable speculations. I had no way to prove Lyko was corrupt, not even now, though I certainly suspected it. He might have been an unwitting pawn on Dolsene, or at the Lange palace, or he might have been in it all along. It was possible too that his departure from Thracian was a coincidence that I had misinterpreted. It wouldn't have been the first time an inquisitor had moved undercover without announcement.
It was even possible that he too had discovered the deceit after the event, and was moving fast following some lead to make amends for his mistake. Or that he was fleeing the shame… or…
So many possibilities. I had to play the odds the safest way. I was sure Lyko was guilty to a greater or lesser extent, so I would follow him. Even if he was simply chasing Esarhaddon too, it would lead me in the right direction.
And I couldn't inform the Inquisition, or talk to Voke or Heldane. My uncertainty was such that I couldn't even trust them not to be part of it.
A complex trail of almost subliminal clues had put me on his tail. I'll spare you the bulk of the details, for they would merely document the painstaking tedium that is often the better part of an inquisitor's work. Suffice to say, we searched and processed vox logs, and the broadcast archives of the local and planetary astropathic guilds. We watched ship transfers, orbital traffic, departure lists, cargo movements. I had personnel in the streets, watching key locations, asking off-the-record questions in trader bars, calling in favours from friends of friends, acquaintances of acquaintances, even one or too old adversaries. I hired trackers and bloodhounders, and took every scent trace I could from Lyko's apartment. I had pheromone codes programmed into servitor skulls that I released into up-ports and orbital stations.
I had well over a hundred personnel on my staff, many of them trained hunters, researchers or surveillancers, but I swear the sheer load of data would have burned out our brains.
We would have failed without Aemos. My old savant simply rose to the challenge, never put off, never fatigued, his mind soaking in more and more information and making a thousand mental cross checks and comparisons every hour, tasks I couldn't have managed in a day with a codifier engine and a datascope.
He seemed, damn his old bones, to enjoy it.
The clues came in, one by one. A shipment of cargo put into long-term storage in a holding house in Hive Eight and paid for by a debit transfer from one of Lyko's known associates. A two-second pheromone trace in the departure halls of a commercial port down on the coast at Far Hive Beta. A fuzzy image captured from a Munitorium pict-watcher on the streets of Hive Primaris.
