Editing Bleeding Out: A Custodian's Story (Warhammer High) (section)

=== Shield of the Daughters ===

The Treasury Security forces had their own office complex within the Administratum Wing of the Imperial Palace, hundreds of miles from where the Custodians had their stronghold. Quadriga commandeered a Gyrfalcon Jetbike and went speeding through the palace, down wide avenues chocked with the teeming masses, mag-lev lines buzzing with passenger and cargo trains and service tunnels deserted but for servitors mindlessly maintaining. Piloting was so automatic to him he could let his mind wander over his meeting with Skuratova.

Akilina Ilyinchova Skuratova, Director-General of the Treasury Security Forces and fellow bearer of the title of Secutarii-Filias. With a name like that, she could only hail from the lands of Ursh, and she had the iron-hard temperament and fiery anger common to the people of those hard lands. Anger that had been directed on Quadriga many times before. He fully expected it to be turned on him again before the day was out.

Half an hour’s flight took him into the vast expanses of the great bureaucratic stronghold from where the million and more worlds of the Imperium were managed. And within this vast warren lay the offices of the human security forces who guarded the Daughters of the Primarchs.

The headquarters of the Treasury Security forces was a plain, anonymous nine-story high block of plascrete and iron that was no different to the tens of thousands of others that the Administratum used. There was no external indication of what went on behind its walls. Only a pair of Tarantula Sentry Guns mounted on the third story could attest to anything beyond the mundane paper-pushing, their guns silently watching Quadriga as he coasted to a halt.

Skuratova was waiting for him outside the Treasury office, flanked by a pair of ‘Beehive’ Security guards. She always observed protocol, even when Quadriga thought it a waste of their time.

“Custodian Quadriga.” She snapped out a crisp salute. She had never been a beauty, but she looked as tough as groxhide boots. Even the bellicose and defiant Lady Furia had never seriously tried to test Skuratova’s limits.

Age had tempered Skuratova but not beaten her down. Her hair was the colour of weathered iron, her face sharp and young-looking but for the crow’s feet that alluded to her true age. The badge of the Tupelov Lancers Regiment of the Imperial Army, one of the famed Old One Hundred, was proudly displayed on her chest.

“You know why I am here.”

“Of course.” Without a word she turned and strode back to the officers, Quadriga shortening his pace to keep up with her.

“Subjects VIII and XIV are to be in an exposed public place later today. I hope that appropriate steps have been take.”

“You already know they have been,” She did not even slow down, the doors sliding open to admit them into the building. “And I wish you’d use their actual names for a change. Using numbers is very impersonal.”

All the treasury guards stopped dead and threw a salute to the hulking form of the Custodian as he passed them by. Quadriga gave them no regard.

“Using their names is a weakness. Personalizing the subjects clouds your judgement, makes you more likely to act under emotion as opposed to with the perfect clarity of logic. I cannot afford to know them beyond how I am to protect them.”

“And is that true of the Emperor Himself?”

“Of course. He is beyond my keen, as he is all other beings in this Galaxy. I know enough to do my duty for Him, but no more. Not even Valdor knows the Emperor’s mind. It would weaken us if we were to know more than is necessary for us to serve Him.”

“I sometimes wonder what the Emperor takes out of your kind when you are remade.” Skuratova remarked. “I know the Astartes know no fear, but what do the Custodes have cut out of them?”

Quadriga gave no reply. It was a question he had sometimes asked himself, but he had no frame of reference to answer it. And he had enough on his mind without questioning his own fundamental nature.

“We have to discuss future arrangements. Schooling at Imperator High is ending, and preparations for the next step must be made now. The subjects are about to disperse, and that will make our job considerably more difficult.”

“We have already been working on it.” Skuratova replied. “There are a number of documents with proposals for the Kourtney detail already laid out. And I’m sure you will have a thing or two to say about them.”

“Yes.” Quadriga stopped before a set of armoured double doors with a pair of treasury guards in front of it. They were visibly nervous as they confronted the golden giant. Most mortals were that way, which made Quadriga wonder how Skuratova was always unaffected by him.

She waved them aside, and the doors slid open to reveal the main briefing room.

“Shall we?” She gestured at him to enter.

He gave a short nod and stomped inside. Now he could finally do what he was tasked to do.