and contrapsychic drugs filling Vaun's cell. The Battle Sister was no tech-priest, but she had seen confinement frames of this design before. She knew how they worked, pumping neuropathic philtres into the lungs and pores of particularly virulent psykers to stifle their mutant powers. She adjusted the rods and fresh splashes of murky fluid entered the tank. This will quiet you.’

'Wait. Stop.’ Vaun's body jerked inside the capsule, a pallid hand pressing on the inside of the thick glass. 'You do not understand. I only wanted... to talk.’

Another dial turned and darts of electricity swam into the liquid. 'No one here wants to listen, deviant.’

The words became vague, laboured, fading. You... mistaken... will regret...'

Miriya rested the barrel of her plasma weapon on the glass. 'Heed me. If one breath more of speech comes from that cesspool you call a mind before I deliver you to Neva, I will boil you in there like a piece of rotten meat.’

There was no reply. Torris Vaun hung suspended in the foggy solution, slack and waxy.

With a shudder, Sister Miriya muttered the Prayer of Virtue and fingered the purity seals on her armour.

Mercutio fell from the grip of the warp and pushed into the Neva system at full burn, as if the ship itself were desperate to deposit the cargo it carried. As the capital planet orbiting fourth from its

yellow-white star swelled in the frigate's hololiths, a small and quiet insurrection began on Mercutio's lower decks.

Men from the labourer gang on the torpedo racks came to the brig where Midshipman Vorgo was confined, and in near silence they murdered the armsmen guarding him. When they freed Vorgo, he didn't thank them. In fact, he said hardly anything but a few clipped sentences, mostly to explain where the gun servitors were placed in the cargo bay, and how the Battle Sisters had behaved toward him.

Vorgo's liberators were not his friends. Some of them were men who had actively disliked him in the past, picking on him in dark corridors and shaking him down for scrip. There was a common denominator between them all, but not one of the men could have spoken of it. Instead, they went their separate ways, each moving with the same hushed purpose and blank expression.

In the generarium where the Mercutio's reactor-spirits coiled inside their cores and bled out their power to the vessel's systems, some of the quiet men walked up to the service gantries over the vast cogwheels of the coolant arrays. They waited for a count of ten decimals from the turning discs and then leapt in groups of three, directly into the teeth of the mechanism. Of course, they were crushed between the cogs, but the pulpy mess of their corpses made the workings slip and seize. In moments, vital flows of chilling fluid were denied to the reactors and alarms began to wail.