Editing Days of Judgement (Warhammer High) (section)

===Saal Huulta===

At a distance, war makes a particular sound. The quake of the ground, the thrumming of engines, the rattle of weapons, the muffled thump of detonations, the holler of voices; it all blends together into a kind of ominous growl, the feral call of some prehistoric carnivore over the next hill. Closer however, and the murmur turns into a roar, the scream of a million throats, the thunderous crash of artillery fire and the howling of the dying as they lie side by side with the dead in the freezing mud.

 

This was the aural soundscape that engulfed the Captain as he spurred his men forward, daring them to seize the moment and finish the foe. In one hand he held his sabre, a treasured gift from those he considered his family. It was running red with blood.

This was the final push, the last bloody act in a war that had dragged on for half a decade. Do or die time. The Captain had been leading them for nearly five years, and his time was nearly up. This would be his last fight. Then he would head back home, to the woman he loved. He already wore a ring on his finger, a symbol of the commitment he had made to her a short time before, during his last period of leave.

Tanks rumbled alongside the troops, cannons blasting at the foe with vigour, covering the advance. Across the battlefield, massive war engines stomped along like iron gods, the foe fleeing with every ponderous step taken. Even at this distance the Captain could clearly hear the occasional metal creak or squeal of their vast, lumbering chassis as they pushed ever onwards into the heart of the foe.

On the edge of his vision, the captain saw something; rather, someone. A shadowy figure on the crest of the hill, urgently gesturing at him. A warning?

The low whine of a missile barrage cutting through the air at speed answered the captain as he looked at the figure. He saw the danger too late.

Fire lit up the ridgeline, ripping tanks and bodies apart, tearing into the soldiers like the claws of some great beast. His soldiers. The backwash boiled down the hill in a fiery bloom, thundering into the captain. Then the world faded, darkening in every sense and–

 

–Saal Huulta awoke with a start, his body drenched in sweat. For a few seconds he blinked and shook his head, trying to remove the image of the dream from his mind. Ever since the Fontaine Case, these dreams of faces, places and spaces he knew he had never seen dogged him ceaselessly. No amount of counsel or therapy could get rid of those dreams, try as he might. He blink-switched on his Chrono Implant and cursed as he saw the time of 04:37 hours flashing on his retina, vivid green in a pitch-black room. His shift didn’t begin for another hour and a half, and he knew he couldn’t get back to sleep now. He might as well head in now, start his shift early. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Huulta lived alone, his life given over to his job and career. He glanced over to his only companion, a Tenocitan blue parrot named Inwit, currently sleeping in its cage on the other side of his bedroom.

He had a quick shower, struggled into his work clothes and headed for the lift. His hab was spacious and comfortable enough for a one-man unit in the corner of a massive city block, but it was a fair distance from work and he had a long drive every morning.

The streets were almost deserted as he drove into work. There were just a few stragglers around from the night before shambling under the pools of lumen-light. Work shifts didn’t change for another few hours, and most decent sorts were asleep. The other sort was his business.

Like everything on this world, his workplace was fortified, though more heavily than most buildings, with an armoury, training ground, barracks, firing range, scriptories, archives, warehouses, kitchens, gymnasia and garage concealed within its armoured walls. A city within a city. He went inside, signed in, and decided to get a cup of caf to try and jump-start his brain. As he stood in the near-deserted cafeteria with only a few hardy souls snatching an early morning meal, sipped his caf and tried to bully his brain onto alert mode, a voice came up from behind him.

“Saal, good morning. You’re up early, again.”

“Couldn’t sleep. Figured I’d start my shift early, get a head start on that paperwork.” He nodded at the speaker, while wracking his brain to remember who it was. Kolbe, one of his colleagues. He wasn’t close with the man, but he had worked with him a few times and knew him as a good sort.

“Whatever the big event the higher ups are working on, it's got to be important, especially with all the paperwork we’ve been handed. Who do you think it'll be?”

“Some off-worlder big-shot I’d expect, come to check if the gate is closed or not.” Huulta gestured at the roof, or rather what lay beyond the roof.

“You’re one to talk; you’re no more of a native than whoever’s visiting.”

He was right on that count. Huulta didn’t have the violet eyes of the natives, a reflection of the evil orb dominating the sky; his eyes were a light, piercing blue. Eyes that were very good at uncovering the truth no matter how well it was hidden.

“That reminds me, the Judge wants to see you as soon as you arrive. Something’s up.”

He downed his caf with a single gulp and ignoring the burning sensation in his throat headed for the Judge’s office.

The Judge, as fit for his station, had the biggest office at the very top of the courthouse. Unlike most Judges, his office was Spartan to the extreme. Behind his stone and steel desk was a massive armourglass window which offered stunning views of the city. the faint light of dawn was only now starting to touch the highest spires. A ceiling-to-floor bookshelf full of dusty old books set against one wall. The little library covered almost every topic in civilian and military law, many of them pre-Imperial. The other wall was bare metal with no ornamentation.

Above his desk was an ancient Boltgun, Umbra Ferrox pattern, which he used whenever he had to conduct a vital mission in person or during any major riots or rebellions in the dark bowels of the city. He hadn’t used it in many years. Flanking it hung a simple shock maul and a hefty power axe. All weapons of judgement.

The Judge sat at his desk examining a dataslate, and he set it down as he saw Huulta enter.

“Proctor Saal Huulta of the Arbites reporting sir,” he said crisply, snapping a salute. “What are my duties for today?”

“Huulta, you’re in early. Again.” The Judge sighed. “There is more to life than solving every case you can, you know?" Saal simply stood at attention, staring blankly at the Judge.

"Never mind. I have a task for you,” he continued. Judge Reinhold of the Arbites was a veteran of many thousands of cases - both in the courthouse and in the field - and an expert in almost every facet of Imperial Criminal Law. He was someone who would always get the job done as the head of the Tetra Arbites detachment. Saal had immense respect for him, and Reinhold mirrored that respect. There were very few he implicitly trusted more than Judge Reinhold.

“We received a report from the Orpo about five minutes ago.” The Orpo was the standard name for all the civilian police forces across the Cadian gate region, separate from the Arbites. Like the Arbites, their regional HQ was on Nemesis Tessera, though nowhere near as big as the massive city-sized fortress the Arbites had there. Saal had been there a few times, but he wasn’t particularly fond of the place. Too close to the Ordo.

The Judge turned to face the vast sprawl of the hive, his eyes sharply observing the spires as the light caught against their edges. A lone Ornithopter buzzed past in the distance.

“They found something down on level one hundred and seventy-three, sector G. They want someone from the Arbites to investigate, apparently there’s something about the nature of what they’ve found which demands our attention.”

Huulta acknowledged his orders, mentally preparing himself for the work to come, but the Judge wasn’t finished.

“Macharia will be hosting the most important of guests in a week’s time, and we need to ensure that law and order is upheld before, during and after their visit so I want this done by the book.”

“Can you spare any details about our mysterious guests sir? There had been plenty of rumours about the upcoming VIP visit to Macharia, some more outlandish than the others.”

Reinhold smiled slightly. It seemed hard to believe that his iron hard face could even crack a smile, but Huulta had known him longer than most. “I’m afraid not, but believe me, this is a once in a millennia occurrence. Now get to it, you have a job to do. You know our words.”

Huulta knew the words, knew them off by heart. They were the words he lived his life by. “It is our job to ensure the Lex Imperia is upheld here, as on all worlds. We discover the guilty. We deliver the punishment.” He saluted, and bowed out of the office. Immediately he headed straight for the armoury. Time to enter the deep end again.

Huulta attached the plates of his Carapace Armour to his body, one by one. The jackboots, the breastplate, the greaves, one by one they bonded to his body. It was a ritual to him, a way of mentally becoming one with the case, taking on the mantle of an Arbite. Finally and reverently, he placed the armoured black helmet crowned with an eagle onto his head, turning him from a man into a figure of terror. Once his helmet was on, it would not come off until his case was solved. That ritual had come from his greatest shame, the case that haunted still.

The moment his helmet came on, his trademark frown followed it. Huulta was almost as well known for his complete and total lack of other facial expressions as he was for his dedication or his superhuman shooting skills.

He checked Oathkeeper - he was far from the only Arbite to name his weapon – and waited for it to rectify his DNA profile, holstering his Power Maul while he did so. Oathkeeper’s DNA reader beeped on, and Huulta slung it over his shoulder. Gingerly he strapped on his Plasma Pistol, reciting an oath to calm its machine spirit, something other more rational types would laugh at. Though he was always in fear that it would overheat one day and melt his hand off, shooting the enemy with the power of a caged star was nothing to sniff at. He had delivered judgement with his Plasma Pistol before and it felt good, despite the risks.

Another day of duty. He had no idea of the hell he would be putting himself through over the next eight days, and how his world would be turned upside down by what was to come.

 

Hive Tetra was named after a similar hive on Terra, and like it shared the basic cone structure common to all hives. There the resemblance ended. Macharia’s Tetra was a fortress, its armoured outer skin studded with gun turrets and missile launchers, and the inside levels cunningly designed to ensure any attacker would find it too costly to take. A long held rumour said that the Primarch Peturabo had built the hive, as he had built all the fortifications around the warp storm that he had himself named near the end of the Crusade. Huulta could very well believe that.

The last time the forces of the Eye had reached Macharia was nearly three hundred years previously, and Tetra had been besieged for nearly a month before the Legions came to the rescue. Some parts of the outer walls still bore the scars of that previous effort by the Daemonic and Human forces of the Eye, an ever-present reminder of what they were facing. That was many years before Huulta had come to Tetra, and he wondered if at some point he too would have to face the might of a full scale Chaotic Incursion. Quietly he hoped that whatever he was investigating would have nothing to do with the Eye or anything about it. He didn’t need complications.

The lower storage hangers on level one hundred and seventy-three were where food, shells and other materials were stored in the event of a Siege. His destination, Storage Hanger 73-G-19 was empty, its cargo used up and the building sealed off to prevent lowerhive gangs from occupying it before it could be resupplied. The Hanger was within sight of the Hive edge, the sheer armoured outer skin and hatches to access the weapons turrets clearly visible from the road. Several hovercars in the black, white and blue of the Orpo sat outside, lighting up the pre-dawn gloom with the blue of their revolving lights. An Arbites patrol officer stood by the hovercars, waiting for his arrival.

“Trooper,” he said to the patrol officer with a nod as he dismounted from his ‘Lawmaster’ pattern patrol cycle. “What do you have for me?”

“Something down in that warehouse sir.” The officer gestured at the nearest building. “A body was found inside it. Normally the Orpo would deal with it, but the officer who found it called you down here. Apparently it’s…unusual.”

Huulta followed the officer to the empty warehouse, where he left him to carry on with his patrol. An Orpo officer with the bars of a senior sergeant on her sleeve was writing something down on a holopad flanked by several of her colleagues at the entrance, and she closed it as she saw Huulta approach.

“Orpo, it seems you have need of me. What have you found?”

A shadow passed over the woman’s face. The Orpo officer had come here expecting to find a crime of usual note, but her disquieted expression gave him pause; and for the first time that morning he wondered what he had walked into.

“It’s, uh…” The Orpo officer trailed off and swallowed hard; she lost focus for a moment as she thought about something else. “You should probably see for yourself, sir.”

“All right. Show me.”

The sound of his jackboots echoed in the empty warehouse as she led him in. For nearly a minute they walked, past empty container stacks until they reached an enclosure.

“The body’s around the corner sir. I would advise caution…”

Huulta was powering around the corner, but he stopped dead at what he saw. Saal Huulta had seen much during his long years of service, crimes and bodies most people would faint or retch at. But this was something else. Something so overpowering it was only an act of iron will that held him steady. Saal breathed deeply, and composed himself. Fresh eyes looked over the tableau, taking in details to avoid the terrible whole.

The victim was a man, although it was hard to tell from what was left. The man’s body had been clearly and clinically sliced open with great precision. Iron nails had been used to pin him to the wall. One through each ankle, another through the wrists, the limbs splayed out in the form of an X. Then, the skin of the torso had been cut into pointed pennants of skin that each came to a point; one to the right and to the left, another down across the groin and the last pulled up over the skull to rise over the dead man’s head. Four more nails secured the tips of these wet strips of flesh in place. The cavity of the man’s body was empty, the internal organs lying in a pile on the ground beneath the corpse, all laid out in a series of intricate symbols. A circle had been painted around the body in blood.

The man had been made into a star with eight points. The Octed, the symbol of the Primordial Annihilator, the mark of Chaos. Huulta sighed. This would not be his day.