Inquisitor 1: Horst POV
Inquisitor Horst hid a sneer as he watched the obese and deranged planetary governor Alkazere the XXIII lambaste the head of his personal guard for once again failing to finding any useful information on the person who defaced his so called 'monument' and on the person behind the theft from the tech priest's temple in his city. The governor could do many things as long as his tithes and duties were upheld, but even he had to bend when the Martians were out for blood. Which they certainly were given the reports of numerous arrests and interrogations being performed around the hive city. Tens of thousands of tech priests along with tens of millions of skitarii across the planet were combing both the city and its data networks in search for any clues on the identity of the perpetrator that the magos had labeled Heretek Hexus Maximus Alpha. Normally the fact that a thief managed to steal from the Adeptus Mechanicus would have been hushed up and dealt with silently. However, the tech priests revealed to him that the thief didn't just steal from the temple, he or she had copied the entirety of their data archives. Every single scrap of data from dictionaries to all of their STC templates.
When he was informed about the true scope of the theft, as most just assumed the thief had stolen some expensive holy equipment or a few important files or at most a single STC, he was shocked to say the least. All of the STC's were copied from their archives. That meant there was a literal treasure trove of data in someone's hand that could be used to basically create their own empire with the right industry. Everything from lasguns to escort sized starships data were in the hands of the enemy with the possibility of all that data being copied and sold to uncountable numbers of people with ill intent towards Humanity. This was a very dire situation and explains just why the Ad Mech were so blatant with their attempts at tracking down the thief. This was by the far the greatest black mark against the Adeptus Mechanicus since the Horus Heresy. The only consolation was the fact that Golgotha was not a forge world so it did not contain even more powerful and advanced STC templates merely the more common patterns that most industrialized worlds had access to. Then again, if the thief could steal everything despite a forge world's formidable defenses without an army the Imperium would have an bigger problem to deal with.
While he was of the Ordo Malleus he immediately offered his services as this was a grave situation that warranted his assistance. Initially he came to this planet to speak to his Squat contacts for leads on a target he was pursuing in this region of space, but then he was attracted by the events surrounding...ugh 'The Glory of Alkazere' even thinking the name caused him discomfort. How in Terra's name the fat bastard managed to complete that monstrosity of resource wastage, yet still manage to pay this tithes boggled the mind. He was going to have to send some of his agents to investigate the local Adeptus Administratum to make sure they properly assigned the correct tithe levels to this world.
Where was he? Right, he was attracted by the ridiculously large bounty for something that normally a governor would just find out with their own intelligence networks. The fact that the governor himself could not find the one responsible indicated that the situation might have been more interesting than it first seemed and he decided to take a look. He landed on the planet with his current retinue: a sanctioned psyker by the name of Rosalia Themondo her appearance hidden under her robes and mask, an enginseer with a predilection for minor tech heresy called Zyphus Cin his twin mechadendrites waving lazily in the air in preprogrammed search patterns designed to look innocuous, a twin pair of Catachan jungle fighters Bellow and Lung Stutsman their heavily muscled bodies towering over the others and bare to the world to see much to the displeasure on several nobles and to their interest on others. His group was quickly granted and audience with the planetary governor once he had shown his identification codes.
He will cherish the moment the governor saw him as his face paled even under the heavy amount of makeup he had used. Alkazere had quickly explained the situation without hiding anything as he knew better than to try to lie to an inquisitor. He then proceeded to examine the area himself to try to acquire a trace with which to follow. When he saw the trail of destruction left among the waste of resources he immediately became suspicious. He could immediately tell that none of the damage was caused by any weapon he could identify except one. Fists. Except the imprints left behind showed that they were regular sized unarmored fists, imprints left behind by such fists in solid high quality rockcrete!
He had immediately thought of a mutant but the blood work showed no trace of any mutations, in fact it was purer than anything the enginseer had ever seen with absolutely no trace of corruption or mutations, and immediately demanded that the person be captured for study as soon as possible. So the target was a purely normal unaugmented human that could somehow damage rockcrete with his bare fists and judging from the total amount of blood found being enough to die from shock, be able to rapidly recover from blood loss.
Inquisitor Horst had then decided to resort to more esoteric means and proceeded to use his psyker powers. He opened his senses to the Immaterium and read the traces of the past along the currents of the Warp that drifted through the area. He had spent several hours traversing the length of the trail with psyker Rosalia using her own powers to help ward his mind against the occasional daemon that probed his defenses.
His mind had caressed every nook and cranny of that alleyway all the way to the end, stopping several times whenever he had detected a stronger than usual trace of...something. It was very strange, when he was investigating with his powers he could not find the usual traces left behind by people who lingered in places. Even servitors left more traces in the Warp then this person. Was it because of their genetic purity? Something to figure out when he finally caught the person.
Luckily he had gathered enough samples of the person's traces to begin tracking them, or at the very least, be able to recognize where they have been and if he was close enough he would be able to recognize them. It should have been simple thing yes? Just follow the trail, but the trail stopped at the edge of the sudden drop from the damn vanity project and subsequent searches revealed no other traces nearby, meaning the person somehow manage to get transport off the place. That transport happened to be the house guard transport where a trace was found, but that ended up as a dead end as no other trace leaving it was found.
So he was forced to manually comb the several levels of a hive city to try to locate additional traces much to his annoyance. Of course he did not forget to send a message to the his Squat contacts in their underground quarters within the nearby mountains asking them for the leads toward his original target and to keep an ear out for the target of Alkazere's bounty. In the end Inquisitor Horst spent over a month fruitlessly searching to no avail for any traces, it did at least cut down on the places the person could be.
Then, this theft occured. The first indication it happened was when he saw an entire group of skitarii breaking into a house across from him and dragging out the occupants kicking and screaming. That was how he got into contact with the local ruling techpriests and got informed about the current situation.
The tech priests tracked the flow of information the instant it had started leaving the temple and had found the remains of dozens to hundreds of destroyed husks of advanced cogitators of an unknown design. The trace eventually led onto the edge of the Underhive inside an abandoned room where a large destroyed cogitator sat. According to enginseer Zyphus the data did arrive there and stopped there, meaning the data was stored and taken away. However, forensics showed no one leaving the area within the last month that would have access to the resources or tech to create such a machine. However, Inquisitor Horst discovered something even more important and shocking. A trace from the unknown person who was in The Glory of Alkazere. The person behind the theft was same person he was looking for this past month.
Other than the entire system of relays and destroyed cogitators, the tech priests hunted down and captured hundreds of criminals and minor hereteks and interrogated all of them with extreme prejudice. All of them easily divulging what they know to avoid suffering at the hands of the maddened mechanical worshipers and the fact that they were told to simply give it up should they be asked for reasons apparent soon after.
All of them revealed the same story, willing or unwilling.
All of them were approached by a masked man with a voice changer, with only a single commonality between them, a black outfit, a smiling mask, and an alias, Tri2.
Inquisitor Horst looked down once more at the dataslate containing an artist's depiction of the man described from multiple confessions before they were executed or turned into a servitor.
At every relay, every cogitator, every location that he attended the arrest of the heretek or criminal, his traces were there. His paths were clear. He did all of that recently.
A little over 2 months, to set up an operation of this scale and complexity. To hire so many unsavory individuals, strangely enough not a single was found with the taint of Chaos, and to coordinate them all together for an assault on the main Adeptus Mechanicus temple, for almost nothing.
Yes, the man had copied all of the temple's data, but that was the thing. Copied. Not destroyed or deleted. All the industrial sabotage, attacks on the tech priests, and alarms? Superficial in nature with everything easily fixed within the hour with no major critical damage and none of the tech priests were even slightly wounded. They were merely lured out from the temple and delayed.
This was the action of an enemy, but the way they went about it to avoid destruction and death made it very strange. Just what was this man's goal? Why did he cause such damage before this?
He had immediately began tracking the trails left behind, but quickly ran into another problem. He was not sure how tri2 had done it, but in the time that he had searched the other adjacent levels of the hive city, before he discovered the skitarii search teams, the man has somehow traveled across its entirety several times with various paths crossing each other causing the trails to tangle and mix like a ball of string.
He spent months getting rid of all the trails that led to either just dead ends, transport cars, and hidden rooms where the criminals and hereteks were found. He eventually tracked down the main trail to the off world merchant district on the initial level where he first started! The hacker was hiding under his nose all along! The trail led to a bustling restaurant into the back of the kitchen with none of the staff being the one he was searching for. A quick interrogation of the owner had him revealing that one of his staff went missing a few days before he arrived. A few of the regulars had informed him that the arbites had recently passed with a transport wagon, rounding up people for recruitment for a war and a few think they had seen the janitor getting caught.
Needless to say he was quite...incensed. All his effort only for the idiotic obese wasteful corrupt planetary governor to literally steal his objective right from his grasp.
Now here he was in the governor's palace waiting for the planetary governor to get rid of his guards in his idiocy in pursuing for the criminal that he already recruited into his own damn armies.
And as if on cue the governor yells at the head guard to take most of his men and to go back out to search for the culprits. As soon as the door slammed shut, leaving only the governor and what's left of his personal house guard, he stepped forward, his retinue behind him and behind them were a group of tech priests along with two dozen skitarii guards.
Alkazere the XXIII put on a obviously fake smile as he waddled over to the Inquisitor Horst in what he probably assumed was a noble and graceful manner.
"Inquisitor. How could I help the Inquisition today? Did you make any progress in your own search?" Planetary governor Alkazere the XXIII asked completely ignorant of the hell that awaited him.
With a barked binary command the two dozen skitarii immediately disabled and neutralized the nearby guards shocking the soon-to-be-ex planetary governor.
"W-what is the meaning of this Inquisitor?" Alkazere backed away in fear looking around at his defeated guards before remembering the rest were just sent away from his palace.
"You are hereby under arrest for the numerous crimes of embezzlement, tax evasion, fraud, kidnapping, murder, theft, assault, battery, corruption, and most recently the abetting of the criminal that stole from the Adeptus Mechanicus."
"There must be some mistake Inquisitor, I am innocent of all those crimes, especially that last one! I do not even know who is the one responsible!"
"You still actually did help him escape my pursuit, and that is a grave crime indeed EX-governor Alkazere. Take him away, and get whatever useful information you can out of him."
Inquisitor Horst ignored the screams and cries of the condemned with a trace of satisfaction and catharsis in his heart as he faced the tech priests who had began interfacing with the ex-governor's data systems to retrieve the information they required.
"Well? Where was the recent regiments that were raised being trained?" Inquisitor Horst asked a tech priest holding a data slate.
"Inquisitor, it appears that all recent regiments raised recently, which includes all new conscripts within the past few days, have been penal legions and have been already sent as part of the Armageddon Reinforcement Fleet yesterday. They were allowed past the planetary lock-down on account of a priority order from Segmentum Command for reinforcements. Target designated Heretek Hexus Maximus Alpha will be at Armageddon."
Inquisitor Horst felt the stress and annoyance from the past six months come to a boil as his vision went red, his eyebrow twitched, and his self control broke a just a bit.