ohmm

Chapter Ten
	Far from the battlefields of Foraldshold, the capital of the Cognomen Subsector was split in two.  As a Subsector of the Imperium of Man, it was ostensibly under the control of the Adeptus Terra and its myriad branches of administrators, bureaucrats, and officiators.  In practice, the whole Subsector consisted nigh-exclusively of satrap worlds of the Forge World Cognomen.  As a result, most practical administration for everything other than psyker collection and basic taxes was handled by the Adeptus Mechanicus itself.  Nearly all of the Adeptus Terra functions of the region were packed into a single huge space station, known simply as ‘The Platform,’ that hung over the planet in medium orbit.
	Within, chambers packed with archival equipment echoed faintly with the sound of scratching quills and clicking keys.  Scribes and laborers of the Adeptus Terra, from Administratum scriveners to tax assessors, labored in chambers filled to the ceilings with papers and data cores.
	Beneath tottering stacks of ancient paperwork and clouds of swooping servo skulls, scribes with finger quill implants scratched away their calculations and listings of income and expenditure, describing the fates of worlds and men with lines of ink and chalk.  Hierarchies defined by tenure, favoritism, and of course inertia bound careers that spanned centuries as Adepts cycled information out of one desk and onto another.
	Many humans, by the very nature of the breed, think themselves above their caste and lot.  In the Imperium of Man, few were.  One of the precious few exceptions labored on that station, The Platform, in a room that had never seen the raw light of stars and housed ninety-five other quill-scribbling functionaries of the Adeptus Administratum.
	Lewis Ohmm, Scrivener Second Class and spy for Lord Inquisitor Eric Stoldst, saw many things on his desk that would turn no heads among the ranks of the Adeptus Administratum, the Estate Imperium, the Officio Munitorum, or any of the other bureaucratic bodies of the Imperium of Man.  Facts and figures, some correct, were his tools and medium as he labored in the monotonous obscurity of the Administratum’s endless paper cycle.
	Some left his desk more discreetly than others.  Hunched over on a chair that conformed to his spine, Scrivener Ohmm would sometimes copy a document four times instead of three, and would send the spare to his frightening master.  Lord Stoldst was a man that Lewis Ohmm had never met, and – Emperor willing – never would.  Ohmm had been recruited by a strange man with glowing red eyes, who told him that his insights were appreciated very much by powerful men who served the Emperor.  The strange fellow had shown Lewis Ohmm a long list of charts and documents that Ohmm had written and copied in the course of his work, concerning this and that and other things, and told Ohmm that his work was all in order.  Perhaps, the man had mused from the door to Ohmm’s kitchen in the heart of the massive Platform, to a room with no door to the corridors outside, Ohmm could keep his eyes open for any documents that pertained to the movement of things that weren’t human through the places where humans dwelled.  Perhaps that analytical mind that Ohmm had and rarely got to use could be put to good work, helping to prevent affairs that could cost lives, and money, and worlds, growing unfairly the work that the Administratum had to do afterwards.  Perhaps.
	Then, when Ohmm had managed to unlock his muscles and open his mouth to protest his home invasion, the man had held a finger to his blue-painted lip and shushed Ohmm’s unspoken protests, and a glimmering symbol of the Inquisition had appeared before the strange man, hanging in the air like a flower petal on a warm breeze.  The man had whispered that there was much to gain and to be lost from the balance of Ohmm’s answer, and that the only shame was in asking too many questions.

	From that day forward, Ohmm had served in his usual role, afraid of everything, speaking little and working with his eyes fixed down on his desk.  Months had passed, and nothing that seemed unusual crossed his desk; superiors and inferiors had brought him papers and he copied them, sorted them, collated them, and tried not to think too much.
	Then, one day, seven months after his strange visitor had nodded when Ohmm said ‘yes’ and had walked out the door of the Scrivener’s apartment, Ohmm’s hand froze mid-scratch of the quill.  Something about the document he was reading – a manifest for the ship The Eagle’s Wings, a great freighter that crossed the Sector – didn’t feel quite right.  The ship always packed its cargo halls to the ceiling, to maximize profit, like most freighters.  This time, when the ship had flown from Thimble to Celeste, one cargo chamber had been completely empty.  Ohmm, his stomach seizing with certainty and feeling the need to avoid eye contact, had consulted with the matching repair log for the Chartered ship, and that cargo bay was listed as being in working order.
	Ohmm had made an extra copy of the manifest, shaking in fear all along, and slid it into a tiny crack in the wall of the work chamber that he had never thought about before the strange man had reminded him it existed.  Nothing had happened after that day, nor the next, nor the week following it, but the day after that, Ohmm had come home from work to find a basket of simple gifts on his kitchen counter, with a note, unsigned, that said ‘Loyalty is treasure.’
	The gifts had included candy from Combine’s endless farms, and a seashell from far Celeste’s glittering shores, and a block of wood embossed with the image of the Emperor Transcendent from Jodhclan’s Paradise’s monastic workshops, and a bolt shell with a paper tag that said ‘Second Battle of Septiim Primus.’  These were gifts that Ohmm had never seen before, had never even dreamed of owning, and as he examined them in wonder, he suddenly felt very loyal indeed.

	One day, a few years after the horrifying battle to reclaim the planet Dawn-Break from the forces of Tzeentch, Scrivener Ohmm, now promoted from Scrivener Fourth Class to Scrivener Second Class and well used to the routine of serving his terrifying master, was reading some papers.  That was common, it took up fourteen hours of his day.  What was not common was the list on the paper’s faded yellow surface.  It was an original document, taken from the guts of the spending reports of the Rogue Trader ship Vae Malleus, put in three months before at that planet Forender-b, a satrap of Cognomen.  Cognomen’s bureaucrats handled the vast majority of the work processing shipments between its own worlds, so why this paper had crossed his desk at all, Ohmm did not know.  As he read the paper, though, a stirring moment twitched his belly.  The ship, according to the spending reports, had bought molded wood pulp framing units for holding heavy metal cargo.  It had also bought spray-paint remover, turpentine, steel wool, chemical reaction nullifier fluid, and stencils for painting metal.
	Scrivener Ohmm was not a man who committed much crime.  However, he had spent enough decades reading Arbites reports about defaced Imperial property to know that those were the things one bought when erasing serial markings from something, and replacing them with new ones.
	Ohmm dutifully copied the records, once, twice, thrice, and then a fourth time with studious practice.  Off the original went, to the master archives of The Platform, the copies filed dutifully into their own logs that would never be opened.  Into the crack the final copy went, with a brief note in Ohmm’s own hand that said ‘counterfeiting serials? Dare not presume.’
	Ohmm settled back at his desk, and resumed his work, wondering with slightly ashamed eagerness if there would be more off-world treats on his kitchen table in a few days’ time.