‘Run!’ Krane rasped at her, turning and cutting clumsily with The Wolf but hitting nothing except empty air. He raised his bolt pistol and fired wildly as he staggered in a circle, sending bolts into the ceiling and the walls. DeShelle dropped to her knees as he swung towards her, suddenly cut off from her escape route by the wavering muzzle of his gun.

The tip of the power knife burst through the front of Luc Krane’s throat in a sizzle of burned meat and flash-drying blood.

DeShelle sprang up from the floor, firing her laspistol one-handed at and around Krane in the hope that she might hit something, and fleeing back down the corridor along which she’d come, away from the murderous phantom with a glowing powerblade who could apparently appear and disappear at will. She’d not had time to call for help, but what should she say? If she called reinforcements here, would she not leave others unguarded? If the attacker could move so freely–

Another nauseous lurch, another instinctive scream of warning inside her skull. She dived forwards and rolled as she’d been trained to, just as a blue-white power knife flashed into life and slashed through where her head should have been. She didn’t stop to gape at the impossibility that someone who’d been behind her had got ahead of her, didn’t stop to shoot, just kept running as she heard a snarl of apparent frustration. Luc Krane had tried to fight this killer, and he’d died. She wouldn’t stand a chance, gut warnings or no.

The blue-white glow of the powerblade snapped out again behind her, just as she turned into the first corridor where the lights had gone out, with the still-lit staircase at the end. She accelerated, expecting at any moment to feel a searing pain in her spine, or see a knife-wielding silhouette lunge from the walls at her, with her intuition abruptly and fatally silent.

The Holy Ordo

The Holy Ordo

Chetta couldn’t say anything for a few seconds, while her brain desperately tried to recalibrate itself. Then she turned painfully on the spot, away from Vass’ – no, Ngiri’s – calm expression, which was underlit by the dancing hololith, until her gaze landed on Kennevario Xudine in his grav-chair. The cadaverous old Navigator looked utterly unsurprised.

‘You!’ Chetta spat, pointing at him angrily with the hand that wasn’t clutching her cane. ‘You knew!’

‘I knew,’ Xudine confirmed in that sonorous voice of his, with an acknowledging dip of his head. ‘Lady Ngiri identified herself to me, and requested that I aid her disguise as a rogue trader. I was, of course, only too happy to be of service to His Imperial Majesty’s Inquisition.’