'We can split a bottle of amasec while you give me a play by play later, Nayl. Stick to the meat/
'My family motto, chief/ Harlon grinned. 'Well, as it turned out, me and Kara had probably bitten off a sight more than we could chew, and we ended up cornered in a freight yard next to the lift-port. Backs to the wall time. Last stand. A change of underwear moment. And then, just like that/ he clicked his fingers, 'salvation arrived/ He looked over at Inquisitor Ravenor.
'lust glad I was able to help/ Ravenor demurred.
'Help? Him and his kill team kicked arse! Far as I could tell, only eight of the meres got out alive. Jumped their ship and ran off-world/
I set my empty bottle down on the duralloy floor and sat forward with my elbows on my knees. 'So, Gideon/ I said, 'how in the name of Terra did you come to be there on Messina at the right time?'
'1 wasn't/ he said. 'I was there at the wrong time. If I'd reached Messina a day earlier, I'd have been there at the right time. But my ship was delayed by a warp storm that also shut down my communications/
That's the second time since I arrived you've been enigmatic/ I said. 'Is that any way to treat your old master?'
Gideon Ravenor had been my interrogator and pupil back in the late 330s, the most promising Inquisitorial candidate I have ever met. A level delta latent psyker with a RQ. of 171, he had also possessed a genius intellect rounded out with a fine education, and an athlete's physique. During the Holy Novena on Thracian Primaris, he had been caught up in the infamous Atrocity and his body had been woefully crippled. Since that time,
he had lived within the cocoon of his force chair, a brilliant mind sustained within a paralysed, useless frame.
But that had not stopped him from becoming one of the Inquisition's finest agents. I myself had sponsored his promotion to full inquisitor status in 346. Since then he had successfully prosecuted hundreds of cases, the most notable being the Gomek Violation and, of course, the Cervan-Holman Affair on Sarum. He had also penned several works of considerable insight: the celebrated essays Towards an Imperial Utopia, Reflections on the Hive State and Terra Redux: A History of the early Inquisition, a study of warp craft that was fast becoming a standard primer, and a work called The Mirror of Smoke that dealt with man's interaction with the warp-state with such conspicuous perception and poetry that I believed it would survive as much as art as it was instruction.
Ravenor was all but invisible within the dim globe of his chair's field, just a shapeless shadow suspended in the fizzling gloom. His body was utterly redundant and everything he did was performed by psi-force alone. His mind had grown stronger in his infirmity, compensating for the things denied him. I was sure he was now much more than a level delta psionic.