Lord of the Night

'...and onwards into the gulley known as Spit Run, where resistance was overcome with mighty deeds and...'

Propaganda. Damn Orodai for his wounded pride — he'd led the Preafects on a crusade and he'd taken the Hivecasters with him.

Damn, damn, damn.

The acolytes snapped to a guilty attention when they saw her, decorum returning where excitement had ruled. She ignored them and steered Cog towards the screen, his bulk pushing cowls and autoscholars aside like a ship's keel.

'...and just receiving word from the second wing — they're east of here in the Chalkmire territories — that a rebel stronghold at Brokepoint Town has fallen to the Emperor's warriors with a total loss of life...'

The presenter, who stood at a safe distance from the growing maelstrom of tracer fire and sooty explosions behind him, was clean and elaborately dressed, his unassuming features betraying not a single hint of mechanised augmentation. Mita was hardly surprised: she'd seen broadcasts on other Civilian Worship systems on other populous worlds — joyous reports of the Emperor's victories, lectures in religious dogma, uplifting sermons, vilification of captured criminals and heretics — and in every case the chosen representative of the state embodied pure, unthreatening humanity. Mita had little doubt that beyond the gaze of the servoskull trained upon him, the small man sported a plethora of control articulators, autofocus diaphragms and self-viewing vambrances to broadcast his own image into his retina, but such paraphernalia could hardly be considered photogenic.

'...seem to have routed insurrectionists with — praise his glory — no reported casualties! Truly an example to us all...' The little man waved an arm grandly at the scene behind him — some unnamed underhive township being bombed to dust by a circle of Preafect tanks. Through the unclear flickers of pixelated flames, if she concentrated hard, Mita could make out the small silhouettes of staggering figures, writhing and dying. Children and women, burned alive.

She wondered, distantly, how many millions of eyes were fixed upon communal hivecasters throughout Equixus. Most worlds practised compulsory viewing: at least an hour of every day spent by each citizen in passive absorption of CW doctrine, and from what Mita had seen of this hive its customs were no less rigorous than elsewhere. She prayed to the Emperor with what small part of her mind remained untarnished by doubt and exhaustion that Inquisitor Kaustus was not amongst this broadcast's audience.

Not that it would stop him from hearing about it, one way or another.

'...a surge of rebels, but in praise to Him-on-the-Throne-of-Earth — Ave Imperator! — heroes of the Preafectus Vindictaire have broken through the barricades to dispatch the filthy heretics...'

Mita clenched her teeth. Not heretics. Just people. The worthless and the dispossessed, the ones who fell through the cracks. The ones being slaughtered in the name of revenge.

She could imagine the scene all too clearly. The winding column of Preafect Salamanders, grinding across drifts of waste and rust. Perhaps their intentions were pure, at the start, perhaps they really did intend to seek out those responsible for the attack on the star-port, to hunt down the villain behind it all. But the underhive was a warren of suspicion and paranoia, and it would not have taken long for the first shots to ring out, for the first angry outlaws to panic at the sight of such a force and lash out.

The Preafects had no idea who was responsible for the massacre at the starport. They had no clue as to the motive or the goal. In the main theirs was a simple role, and at its crux was an elegant assertion: Resistance implies guilt.

Orodai had led his warriors into the shadows to hunt and kill a monster. Instead they found themselves conducting genocide — a glorious, wanton, bloody pogrom upon those who had slipped from the light.

Blood ran thick through the streets of the underhive, and though its inhabitants begged the Emperor for mercy, wept his name as they died, screamed in prayer as their families burned — still the slaughter continued, and it was conducted in the name of the same god to which its victims cried out for help.