The alert vox had said little about the fugitive, concentrating more on a wide-band message to all stations that the man was to be arrested on sight and detained for questioning. He did not seem dangerous – but the psyker had too much experience of the commonplace becoming the uncanny to relax his guard, even for an instant. Rubio had chosen to delay his imminent departure from the Palace in order to join the search, compelled to do so by an impulse that he could not directly identify.

His bolt pistol hung holstered at his belt, and his free hand rested on the gold Ultima forged at the hilt of his force sword, the weapon quiet for the moment in its scabbard. Rubio’s stance communicated a warning to any who looked upon him. He was a scion of the Legiones Astartes, and as such danger was inherent in everything he did.

Once, Rubio had served with pride in the XIII Legion, the Ultramarines. First as a psyker-warrior of the Librarius, and then after the Edict of Nikaea had forbidden the use of his powers, as a line Space Marine. But that felt like a lifetime ago. Here and now, his allegiance was turned towards a more clandestine end, as were his more ephemeral abilities.

Rubio was not just a legionary – although the genhanced warrior-kind of any Legion were never ‘just’ anything; he was a gifted fighter on the battlefield of the metaphysical as well as the material. A psychic hood, a complex device of crystalline matrices and psi-tuned alloys, rose up behind his head, glowing with a soft inner light. The hood had been at rest during his ascent to the Eagle’s Highway, but now he was close to this human, it awoke of its own accord and pushed new awareness into his mind.

Or rather, it showed him the lack of something. Rubio’s eyes narrowed as he reached out with a subtle telepathic probe, reading the ebb and flow of energy around the thin man in the robes.

Nothing.

Where the colours of a human psyche should have coiled and drifted like living smoke, there was a void without depth. Rubio’s psionic senses recoiled from him, repulsed by the literal anti-form to his own powers.

‘You are a pariah,’ he said.

Those of a more fanciful bent than the former Ultramarine would have said the man was without a soul, but Rubio did not believe in such ephemera. Rather, he saw clearly that the fugitive was of the rare, one-in-ten-million breed whose psionic trace was diametrically inverted. Where others left an imprint on the invisible tides of the empyrean, this unfortunate had only nothingness within him. In some cases, such a being could be disturbing to the equilibrium of a psyker, even metaphysically dangerous. Rubio did not sense that threat here, however.