But I have similar skills. And I have honed them well.
There is a time to use mind or voice tricks gendy to draw out your target. And there are times to use them like a stub-gun at point blank range.
It was time for the latter.
I pitched my voice, balanced my mind and yelled: 'Show yourself first!'
Eyclone didn't succumb. I didn't expect him to. Like me, he had years of resilience training. But his two gunmen were easy meat.
The first strode directly out into the middle of the gallery hallway, dropping his lasgun with a clatter. The Scipio made a hole in the middle of his forehead and blew his brains out behind him in a grotesque pink mist. The other stumbled out on his heels, realised his mistake, and began firing.
One of his las-bolts scorched the sleeve of my jacket. I squeezed the pistol's trigger and the Scipio bucked and snarled in my tight grip.
The round penetrated his head under his nose, splintered on his upper teeth and blew the sides of his skull out. He staggered and fell, dead fingers firing his lasrifle again and again, blowing the fascias out of the hibernation stalls around him. Putrid water, bio-fluid and plastic fragments poured out, and some screams became louder.
I could hear footsteps above the screams. Eyclone was running.
I ran too, across the vaults, passing gallery after gallery.
The screaming, the pounding… God-Emperor help me I will never forget that. Thousands of frantic souls waking up to face an agonising death.
Damn Eyclone. Damn him to hell and back.
Crossing the third gallery, I saw him, running parallel to me. He saw me too. He wheeled, and fired.
I ducked back as the blasts of his laspistol shrieked past.
A glimpse was all I'd had: a short, wiry man, dressed in brown heat-robes, his goatee neatly trimmed, his eyes twinkling with malice.
I fired back, but he was running again.
I ran on, glimpsed him down the next gallery and fired again.
At the next gallery, nothing. I waited, and pulled off my outer robe. It was getting hot and damp in Processional Two-Twelve.
When another minute passed and there was still no sign, I began to edge down the gallery towards his last position, gun raised. I'd got ten paces when he swung out of hiding and blazed away at me.
I would have died right there, had not the joker-gods of fate and chance played their hand.
At the moment Eyclone fired, several cryo-tubes finally gave way and yowling, naked, blistered humans staggered out into the corridor, clawing with ice-webbed hands, mewling, vomiting, blind and ice-burned. Eyclone's shots tore three of them apart and hideously wounded a fourth. Had it not been for them, those las-shots would have finished me.
Footsteps, hurried. He was running again.
I pushed on down the gallery, stepping over the blasted ruins of the sleepers who had inadvertently spared me. The wounded one, a middle-aged female, compromised and naked as she lay in the melt-water, clutched at my leg, begging for salvation. Eyclone's gunfire had all but disembowelled her.
I hesitated. A merciful headshot now would spare her everything. But I could not. Once uhey were awake, the hierarchy of Hubris would not understand a mercy killing. I would be trapped here for years, fighting my case through every court in their legislature.
I shook off her desperate grip and moved on.
Do you think me weak, flawed? Do you hate me for setting my inquisitorial role above the needs of one agonised being?
If you do, I commend you. I think of that woman still, and hate the fact I left her to die slowly. But if you hate me, I know this about you… you are no inquisitor. You don't have the moral strength.
I could have finished her, and my soul might have been relieved. But that would have been an end to my work. And I always think of me thousands… millions perhaps… who would die worse deaths but for my actions.
Is that arrogance?
Perhaps… and perhaps arrogance is therefore a virtue of the Inquisition. I would gladly ignore one life in agony if I could save a hundred, a thousand, more…
Mankind must suffer so that mankind can survive. It's that simple. Ask Aemos. He knows.
