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Shaking his head to clear his thoughts of the lingering aftermath of the hallucinogenic grenades, Darien curses loudly at the sight of the empty chamber and starts reloading his shotgun automatically even as he scans the room for potential traps.

"I suppose it would have been too easy for them not to have a way out the back. Anyone bring a light with them?"

Eli heads down to the basement...

Ajax, scraped, bruised, and hoarse-voiced, staggers up to his feet after a few false starts, once the hallucinogen wears off. A look at the other disoriented members of the team awakens suspicion, and the noticeably unexploded grenade and accompanying unexploded comrade strengthens it. "Sonofawhore..." the psyker mutters under his breath, glaring angrily at the gaping hole in the wall. At Darien's question, he growls, "If things keep up like this, I'm going to have to work out how to turn this whole damned city into a 'light' for you."

Regulator Krine strode into the basement, for a moment puzzling over the amount of carnage done to the room despite the relative lack of enemy bodies and (Emperor be praised) friendly ones. “I thought you people would want to know, we’ve got all the fops upstairs secured. Praise the mechanics for plastics,” she said, thinking of a brand of plastic ties used by the local enforces in leiu of more extensive restraints in crowd control. She’d never expected to have to do crowd control, but one of the enforcers had come up with a box from somewhere in the trucks, and set to work. “We’ve got Kinge seperated upstairs, keeping him out of sight. With your permission, I’ll detail two men to knock him out, stuff a bag on his head and take him back to the station. It’s probably not wise to hold someone that rich in the middle of this town without a squad of arbitrators and a rhino. And maybe some battle sisters. There’s lots of people with few morals and a hankering for money.”

Meanwhile, Ajax, for whom, it appeared, there just wasn't any luck, could feel something, in his mind, a momentary sense of pressure that suggested something were trying to work its way in; a sensation most psykers were at least partly familiar with, but here, the sensation was different, and close at hand, an effort to control.

Ajax is...well, more or less ignoring the Regulator, trusting his compatriots to handle that for the moment while glaring angrily at the rent wall and the pit beyond. It takes a great deal to truly anger the normally-reserved psyker, but to have the force of his own mind redirected and tricked into flaying itself...that will do it. He stoops to pick up his discarded sword where it lay, starting to sheath it...and then freezing in place with the tip just barely slotted home.

The probing fingers. The insistent film of thought sliding through his mind, trying to separate his will from his body. The witchery. Rather than discard the anger already suffusing his thoughts, even if the relatively-untrained psyker could have done so, he embraces it, rage against the intrusion into his most private inner being storming through his mind and the currents of the warp nearby. In his mind, the currents of thought rouse from their normal, subtle ripples, ignited in a heartbeat until the emotional equivalent of magma pours through Ajax's brain, burning, searing at the unknown invader.

Meanwhile, to those outside, his body rocks to a halt mid-motion, every muscle just...waiting, not tense, but simply not something a novice psyker can pay attention to while fighting a war in his own mind.

"Regulator, please take the prisoner back to the station. Let NO ONE know he's been taken. Record anything he says, do not let him move in any way. At the very least he's involved with heretics, and he may be their leader. Crom and Eli will be accompanying your men," Scar answered.

"Someone hand me a shotgun, I've got some business to take care of in there," he said with a grin. Taking the weapon from the Regulator, he forced his way into the secret room, fired a blast down the hole, and began his descent.

"I brought keys" as he looks around at the destruction. well What's next?

"You and me are going to be following the Regulator take Kringe to the base. You see, this operation is far too important to have scum like us ruining everything"

"Hey Scar, you want we should come back if we finish the escort in decent time?"

Then I guess I'll hand these keys over to someone. Let me think, Ajax would probably just wear them, The Tech priest would probably be insulted by their crudeness, and some others I just don't trust with these things...

"Stay with him, assist in his... initial debriefing. Keep an eye out as well please, we know he's connected, and I don't want any of his cronies breaking him out. We'll be along shortly, I get the feeling he's the link we need, but I'm not letting this psyker get away." Scar replied over the comm, continuing his descent.

Finishing with the reloading and nodding in agreement at the disposition of their prisoners, Darien starts after Scar, walking close to the wall in the hopes of getting a clear shot past the other man if necessary.

"If a firefight starts, try to make room for me to shoot, Scar. I'd feel awfully embarassed at shooting you in the back accidentally."

Scar’ descent into the pit was quite comfortable; the hatch had been made to accommodate comparatively rotund personages. There was a ladder set into one side of the tube, and it took almost thirty seconds, cautiously descending it, to reach the bottom; the chamber at the bottom was empty, a hemisphere of dressed sandstone making up the walls. In a moment of sharp-eyed clarity, he could see the green dot of a laser beam reflecting against a mirror, and a moment’s analysis found a piece of some kind of solid explosive under the bottommost of the flat wide rungs. It was easily enough to turn an unwary descent of the chimney into an impromptu blast furnace. The only other way out of the chamber at the bottom of the chute was a solid metal door, clearly some kind of pressure hatch; wherever they’d got it, it wasn’t custom designed, as it had a wheel on the ‘out’ side. The laser shone off a reflector on the door- clearly if it were opened without de-activating the bomb, it would detonate.

Meanwhile, Krine, after passing her shotgun on obligingly – though she expected it back – walked away with a determined air, hand on the butt of her pistol.

[New Initiative]

"Throne," Scar swore softly. "Hold up, we've got a problem here, explosives on some sort of laser tripwire, I'm going to see what I can do to get rid of it," he said over the comm. "This psyker is starting to piss me off, I think I'm going to enjoy... enlightening him to the word of the Emperor." Inspecting the explosive, he carefully looked for a way to disarm it without blowing himself up.

"Darien, make sure I didn't miss a secret door please."

Obligingly beginning to examine the walls and floor for a possible alternative route, Darien pauses to ask, "Wouldn't Mercurius be a better choice to examine that device, Scar? I wouldn't want you to accidentally offend whatever machine spirit that thing has, and Mercurius may be able to disarm it without doing so after the proper -- and hopefully short -- rituals."

Darien had surprising success in finding something; concealed behind the ladder, in a small depression on the back of the ladder, was a single pin switch, easily missed by sliding one's hand down the back of the ladder without searching. The bomb, meanwhile, seemed to be wired into the ladder in some way, two thin cables snaking from its side and into the hollow steel.

"Scar, there seems to be some sort of switch mounted on the back of this ladder. I'm guessing it's hooked to that bomb and will disarm it, but I suppose it's possible these heretics were clever enough to rig a switch that would cause the bomb to detonate if it's hit by someone who assumed that it would turn off the bomb instead. I sort of doubt it, though."

Pausing for a moment, then grinning, he says "So, care to take a gamble?"

Meanwhile, Ajax felt the attack on his mind ceasing, and, for a moment, he could feel the glimpsed effort to attack someone else, Darien; rather than questing desire to control, this time, it was the harsh stab of a mental attack, that caused frost to form on the ladder, yet didn't seem to quite hit the target, for a moment. It had the feeling of something calculated to make its victim - had it worked, fortunately, some tide in the warp was working in their favour - fall to the floor below, and thus detonate the bomb.

Darien stares at the frost-coated ladder under his hands, blinking in shock.

Glancing down at the bomb below him and realizing what could have resulted if he'd been stunned by some psyker attack, he grunts, "Silence means assent" and flips the hidden switch rather than risk a delay waiting for Scar's response inviting another -- more successfull -- attack.

Darien's gamble turned out to be a wise one; and the laser light disappeared, without an explosion.

By the time Mercurius reached the blasted-open trapdoor from behind the stairs, Darien, Scar and Ajax were all somewhere along the process of climbing down the shaft. Peering down the hole, he saw that the trio were displaying obvious signs of stress, but he attributed it to the hallucinogen grenade.

"Interesting..."

Instead of climbing down, he attemted to visually estimate the depth, on the suspicion that the tunnel was an entry point into the system of maintenance tunnels that doubtlessly ran underneath the town rather than a purpose-built escape tunnel.

The depth did indeed suggest that it might be part of a sub-surface layer of maintainance and utility tunnels, but this particular tunnel’s lack of any visible marks suggesting official construction and inspection suggested that it, at least, was not a sanctioned part of such a network.

Ajax finally rousts himself from the confines of his own thoughts as the invasive presence retreats, hissing over the commbead network to avoid letting the Regulators listen in, "Witchery. Emperor-forsaken whores went after my mind, and I doubt they're done...it felt like the attention was directed...elsewhere." He lowers the hand holding his rapier to his side, closing his outer eyes and opening the inner one, trying to trace the shadow of the attempt on his own mind back to a physical location, if such traces still linger...

The exact location of the enemy completely eluded Ajax's inner eye. The constant, howling distress of some psyker close nearby easily drowned out any trace of his attacker.

The psyker grimaces, the high-tearing mental scream ringing through his head quite effectively jamming his immature senses to anything else. He grits his teeth, refocusing his efforts and trying to lock down exactly where that damnable -- and possibly damned -- screeching is coming from. Someone, after all, needs either salvation or execution, and with the headache rapidly building, the two might be one and the same.

Finishing climbing down the ladder, Darien shoots a grin at Scar and says, "I'm glad that didn't blow up. Aren't you?" Stepping past the Guardsman to examine the door quickly but (hopefully) thoroughly for any less-obvious traps before kicking it down, he finds himself resisting the urge to simply kick the door down and rush through -- they won't catch up to the escaping heretic if they all get blown up, but if he gets away finding him again will be difficult at best.