Free The Inquisition War by Ian Watson Page A

were precious, alien, jokaero devices.
    Jaq summoned another facet...
    In a transit-tube station two different units of planetary defence troopers were fighting each other furiously at close quarters. Rainbow light sprayed and arced as the vibrating edges of power axes met the energy fields of power swords. One of these units must have been entirely genestealer brood in human guise. But which was which? Those who wore the black basilisk insignia, or the blue deathbats?
    Reinforcements were arriving on foot through the tunnel. Flamers sprayed at the fracas, and at last rebels could be distinguished from loyalists, just as it became obvious that the new arrivals on the scene – pink salamanders – were also loyalists. For the black basilisks screamed and writhed and quit fighting as soon as superheated chemicals clung burning to them. Deathbats – those of the brood – rushed frenziedly, even as they blazed, to attack the wielders of the flame guns. Precision laser fire sliced through the berserkers, killing human torch after human torch until the last had fallen.
    Presently, perhaps tardily, foam engulfed the platforms to douse the clingfire – blinding this particular spy-fly, though by now Jaq had registered the loyalists’ hard-won gain...
    Another facet: a ribbed hall of towering, icon-stencilled machine tools, littered with corpses, many of them as grotesque in death as they had been in life...
    Jaq’s hundred roving spy-flies and the screen-eye were another jokaero invention, perhaps unique, which the Ordo Malleus had captured. Those simian, orange-furred jokaero were forever improvising ingenious equipment, not necessarily in the same way twice, though with an accent on miniaturisation.
    Debate still waxed hot as to whether the orange ape aliens were genuinely intelligent or merely made weapons as instinctively as spiders make web. Grimm, a born technologist himself – as were all of his kind, it seemed – had pointed out that this eye-screen required psychic input from the operator. So some Jokaero must have psyches. At least.
    Most planets seemed to harbour biological flies. Swamp-flies, dung-flies, offal-flies, sand-flies, flies that liked to sip from the eyeballs of crocodiles, corpse-flies, rotting-vegetation-flies, pseudo-flies that fed on magnetic fields. Who would notice a little fly buzzing around nimbly? Who would mark that fly watching you, transmitting what it saw and heard back to the eye-screen from anywhere within a compass of twenty kilometres? Who would expect that the fly and its fellows were tiny vibrating crystalline machines?
    ‘I go!’ announced Meh’Lindi.
    If she chose, she could speak as gracefully as a courtier, as deviously as a diplomat. In the face of imminent deadly action, she sometimes reverted to a more basic style of utterance, recalling her original primitive tribal society. Lithely and silently, swift as a razorwing, she departed the Emerald Suite.
    With a piercing thought and a twist of will, Jaq detached one of several spy-flies hovering in the otherwise deserted corridor outside, detailed it to follow her.
    He magnified that viewpoint, allowing it a quarter of the eye-screen. Meh’Lindi paused momentarily, glanced back in the direction of the spy-fly, and winked. Then she padded quickly away, pursued.
    ‘Huh, so I’ll be off too.’ Grimm jammed his cap down hard, patted his holstered laspistol, checked his “bunch of grapes” – his grenades – and scampered after her. Unlike when Meh’Lindi exited, this time the suite door banged shut.
    ‘Noisy tyke,’ commented Googol, uncoiling from the couch. ‘Surprised he doesn’t favour a boltgun. Clatter-clatter-clatter .’
    ‘You know very well,’ said Jaq, ‘that he slammed the door to signal he was following her.’
    Googol laughed giddily. ‘He needs to run around to keep his legs short. And Meh’Lindi, to keep hers long.’
    ‘She’ll be back, Vitali, never fear. As will Grimm.’
    ‘Grimm racing off to