They had no way of knowing that, thanks to Betancore, their means of escape was now burning in a deep impact gouge in the permafrost about eight kilometres north.
What rose above the landing platform out of the blizzard night, its down thrusters wailing, was my gun-cutter. Four hundred and fifty tonnes of armoured alloy, eighty metres from barbed nose to raked stern, landing gear still lowered like spider-legs, it rose on the blue-hot downwash of angled jets. Banks of floodlights under its beak-nose cut on and bathed the deck and the cultists in fierce white light.
Panicking, some of them fired up at it.
That was all the cue Betancore needed. His temper was hot, his mind void of anything except the fact that Vibben was dead.
The gun-turrets in the ends of the stubby wings rotated and washed the platform with withering heavy fire. Stone splintered. Bodies were reduced to sprays of liquid.
Eyclone, more intelligent than his men, had sprinted off the platform to the hatch as the gun-cutter rose into view.
And that's where he ran into me.
He opened his mouth in shock and I pushed the muzzle of Vibben's gun into it. I'm sure he wanted to say something important. I didn't care what it was.
I punched the gun so hard into his mouth the trigger guard broke his lower teeth. He tried to reach for something on his belt.
I fired.
Having emptied his brain-case and shattered it into the bargain, the round still had so much force it crossed the deck and pinked off the
armoured nose of the hovering gun-cutter, just below the cockpit window.
'Sorry/ I said.
'Don't worry about it,' Betancore crackled back over the vox-link.
'Most perturbatory,' said Aemos. It was his most frequent expression. He was hunched over, peering down into the casket on the cryogenerator chamber platform. Occasionally, he reached in to tinker with something, or leaned down for a closer look. Gestures such as these made the heavy augmetic eye glasses clamped to his hooked nose make a soft dialling click as they auto-focused.
I stood at his shoulder, waiting, looking down at the back of his old, bald head. The skin was liver-spotted and thin, and a narrow crescent of white hair edged the back of his skull.
Uber Aemos was my savant, and my longest serving companion. He had come into my service in the first month of my career in the Inquisition, bequeathed to me by Inquisitor Hapshant, who was by then dying of cerebral worms. Aemos was two hundred and seventy-eight standard years old, and had provided his services as a savant to three inquisitors before me. He was alive only thanks to significant bionic augmentation to his digestive tract, liver, urinary system, hips and left leg.