Leon came up out of the shadow as the train pulled away, the gaps left by the hatch doors growing smaller every second. He knew where the pods would be going, where Mendacs had to be going. Up, to the station, and off-world.

If he did nothing, he would never know why, would never know what was happening to his town and his colony. But the risk… the risk was more than he had ever known in his life.

He took it anyway. At the last possible second, Leon sprinted to the rearmost pod of the train and ducked under the closing hatch. The pod rang as the door sealed shut with a hiss of air.

The boy felt an abrupt shock of acceleration as the train moved onto the ascent rails; and then it settled onto a vertical rise and Leon tumbled into a corner, banging his head on an inner wall. Spirals of light behind his eyes followed him into darkness.

THE MODIFIED COGITATOR program did exactly what Mendacs wanted, shunting the cargo pods into a siding once they entered the transfer station, instead of moving the containers straight to unloading. He disembarked and gathered his gear, pausing only to throw a wry smile in the direction of the rear of the train, and then moved off.

The gravity plates in the deck of the transfer station shifted the orientation of ‘up’ and ‘down’ so that the colony was actually at his back. The platform itself, at the three-quarter point of the Skyhook’s length, was a flat disc shaped like a three-lobed cog; each of the cog’s teeth was an automated loading airlock for freight tenders to nuzzle to, although all but one was vacant. The vessel at the occupied airlock was greatly undersized in comparison to the grain carriers that usually made port there. It was just a simple warp-cutter, little more than a courier ship. Mendacs had been careful to dock it at the upper tier, so that anyone with a telescope on the ground would not be able to see it.

He didn’t go straight to his ship. First, he dumped the baggage – he wouldn’t need it for the last stage of the operation – and headed spinwards around the disc to the sealed astropath’s chambers.

The laspistol he had carried on his arrival was still where he had left it, hanging by a lanyard from the hatch controls. Mendacs recovered it, checked the charge as a matter of course, and then opened the heavy steel door. He heard the crackle of the energy-dampening field as he stepped through.

Nothing had changed; the astropath’s residence globe was as he’d left it, the iris hatch wide open, showing a glimpse of the padded zero-gravity space inside, the litter of debris still where it had fallen when he had been forced to pistol-whip the psyker to show the seriousness of his intent.

And the astropath herself. Still there, lying in a heap, her sallow face and mane of coiled locks staring blankly up at the ceiling. Mendacs cocked his head, watching the play of a nimbus of green-orange light that enveloped the woman, the radiance issuing from an iron box the size of a man’s torso. The stasis generator had performed its function perfectly.

He bent down on one knee and examined the astropath. Behind the glitter of the stasis field, she resembled an image from a video feed frozen in mid-motion. Mendacs didn’t understand the technology by which the device worked, knowing only that it could cast an envelope over a limited area, and within that barrier the passage of time slowed to a crawl. He had been on Virger-Mos II for almost two solar months, yet for the woman, only seconds would have passed. From her viewpoint, he would never have left.

Mendacs reached down and touched the control to deactivate the field. It winked out, and the psyker jerked back into life.

‘Please, do not kill me!’ she wailed, resuming a conversation that was weeks past and forgotten.

‘I will let you live if you do something for me,’ he told her. ‘Send a message. Only that.’

The astropath shook her head, and he held up the laspistol, pointing it at her face. She looked away, and then sighed.

‘It is not something that can be done at a whim. There must be preparations. A certain readiness is needed–’

Mendacs held up his hands. ‘Don’t lie to me. You can transmit at a moment’s notice if need be. I’m not some Administratum tech that you wish to baffle with the mystery of your talent.’ He tapped the barrel of the pistol against his temple. ‘I know how you work.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Without correct foundation, I could be injured! The warp eats the unprepared mind. Please, do not force me!’

She was a psyker of only minor talent; that was undeniable. The fact she was posted here, to this backwater instead of to a starship or colony of real note, confirmed that. The astropath’s days would have been a lonely, tedious string of parsing news from the core and the occasional communion with a comrade aboard a passing ship. Mendacs’s unexpected arrival was practically a gift.

He pressed the laspistol muzzle into her cheek and regarded her impassively. ‘I have other means to send this on my ship,’ he said, ‘but I would prefer that you do it. If your answer remains no, this will end now.’

At last the woman gave a nod. ‘Very well. To where do you wish me to speak?’ Mendacs reeled off a set of spatial coordinates committed to his memory and watched in amusement as the psyker’s expression became one of shock. ‘ There?’ she asked. ‘But that is beyond the lines of… It is for hisears?’

Mendacs returned her nod. ‘The Warmaster, yes, after a fashion.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘Send exactly this, no different. Seven words.’

‘Tell me,’ she said, glowering.

‘ Mission complete. Proceeding to next target. Mendacs.’

LEON WASN’T CERTAIN what would happen next.

He had never been this close to a psyker before, never even seen one in the flesh; for blight’s sake, he had never even been off the surface of his home world before this day, and now he crouched, trying to merge with the shadows out in the corridor beyond the astropath’s quarters.

Awaking with a start as the cargo train came to a halt at the transfer station, the youth had been transfixed by fear, sickened almost to the point of vomiting. Everything felt strange, the pull of gravity on him unusually light, the illuminators in the ceiling too bright, the air cold and artificial-tasting.

He hid inside the pod, afraid that Mendacs would come to find him, waiting until the remembrancer’s footsteps died away. When he recovered a scrap of his bravery, Leon dared to step out and follow the man on as best he could. Through trial and error, he had found his way here – but not before happening on a viewing port that presented to him the curve of his planet and the infinite void that surrounded it.

Leon looked into the blackness and had never been so terrified in all his life. He saw the dark and the fragile mass of Virger-Mos II, and suddenly realised that his father had been right all along. The universe beyond the home they knew wasa vast and uncaring space; one glimpse of this awesome sight showed the truth of those words.

He dared to look up from his cover as Mendacs spoke his own name, holding the slim pistol in his hand on the telepath. The woman did something strange, and the air around him seemed to ripple and flex like a lens of oil. A sharp, greasy taint flowed through the chamber, prickling his skin. Leon felt a spider web touch all over his body and he almost cried out. It was the warp.The gossamer edges of it bleeding out from the astropath as she sent the signal.

The youth began to tremble, rocking back and forth, begging fate to make the sensation go away; and then, as quickly as it had come, it dissipated.

‘It is done,’ the woman was saying, her voice carrying to him. ‘Traitor swine.’

Mendacs stepped back and sniffed. ‘That’s a very simplistic view,’ he replied. ‘Loyalty is an elastic concept. You’d be surprised what it can encompass, given enough impetus.’