by Dan Abnett
‘See?’
He started to cry again.
‘Oh, shut up! Umberto, picture the near future… the many possible near futures. On one extreme, I walk out of this room and leave you here to get on with your empty, privileged life. You never see me again, and the Inquisition never comes to your door. To reach that future, you have to answer every question I ask you to my satisfaction.’
‘All right…’
‘Here’s the other extreme. You answer badly. I kill you, here and now, and drop your fat corpse into the river.’
His lip began to tremble and his eyes filled with tears again. She could tell he was fighting hard to stay in control. As hard as she had done to pretend to like him.
‘In between those extremes, there is the future where I expose you, drag you to the marshals, get you charged and locked up and generally ruin the rest of your miserable frigging existence.’
‘I understand.’
‘And there’s one final extreme. An extreme extreme. Far worse than me just killing you and dumping your corpse. I call my superiors and they take you away. What happens to you after that is, I can assure you, far worse than a quick death.
‘So… which future do you like the look of best?’
‘The one where you walk away.’
‘Good. Who is your dealer?’
Sonsal rocked back on the couch. ‘He’ll kill me,’ he said.
‘Futures, Umberto, extremes…’
‘All right! His name is Drase Bazarof.’
‘And who is that?’
‘One of my line chiefs at Engine. He’s sink-scum. But he knows people.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘I don’t know! A sink-stack somewhere! I don’t socialise with scum like that!’
‘But his residence will be logged on your personnel manifest, right?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘We’ll look in a moment,’ she said. She walked over to the dining table and took a slug of her amasec. ‘Who does he supply? Besides you?’
‘He keeps his business out of the workplace except for me. The machine guild inspects our premises so often. But he’s said things to me about his stack. He sells there, I think.’
‘He has a supplier. I mean, he must get these things from somewhere. He doesn’t make them.’
‘I have no idea who. You’ll have to ask him.’
‘I will. Calm down, Umberto. You’re quaking like a leaf.’
‘I’m scared. I’m scared of you. I’m jumpy. Would it be all right if I just used this look to calm my nerves and–’
‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’
He hung his head and gazed at the tiled floor.
‘Where’s your manifest?’ she asked.
Sonsal accessed his work database using a codifier in the corner of the apartment. His hands were shaking. The codifier was a curved valve screen set over an intricate mechanism of brass tubes and wires. The enamel keys of the touchboard had long, stiff arms.
Sonsal pulled up the Engine Imperial info-strata, opened the various document files with his personal codes, and decompressed the manifest. Then he left her to read it and wandered back to the couch shakily.
Kys used an alphabetiser to locate Bazarof, punched up his address, and memorised it. For good measure, she skin-wrote it too, on her left forearm, gently mind-nudging pores open and closed to form a pattern visible only by microscope.
She checked her chronometer. It was late.
‘Ravenor?’
Nothing.
She sighed. She was about to get up when she heard a snuffling noise.
At first, she couldn’t work out what it was. An insect caught in the windowlights, maybe. A poor piece of plumbing. She looked around.
The noise was coming from Sonsal. He was getting to his feet, jerking and twitching, and shuffling backwards, sliding the chaise across the tiles.
She knew at once he’d used a flect while she wasn’t looking. Damn him! Damn her! She should have kept an eye on him. He’d been so scared, so dreadfully strung out that he’d looked for an escape, even a temporary one.
‘Sonsal? Sonsal!’
His head was bucking around, dystonically. His eyes had rolled back. Shit, was this normal? Was this what flect’s did? Sonsal kept backing away so violently that the chaise overturned with a crash.
‘Sonsal!’
He seemed to hear her voice. He staggered away, moving backwards as if in fear, and slammed through the panel door into the study.
‘Damn it!’ she cried.
The main doors pushed open and two of Sonsal’s bodyguards looked in.
‘Sire? Are you all right?’ one called
‘Get the hell out!’ Kys yelled, and with a nod of her head slid the entire dining table down the length of the room, crockery and glassware tumbling off it. It slammed into the doors and pushed them shut. Outside, the bodyguards began hammering and kicking at the blocked entrance.
Kys ran into the study. The desk was askew, and several drawers had been pulled out. A door out into the hall stood open.
‘Sonsal!’
She ran out into the hall. The glow-globes were set to low burn. As soon as she appeared, the bodyguards ceased their hammering and ran at her. She deflected one with a rolling kick and punched the other off his feet into the wall.
Sonsal, still jerking and twitching, was backing up the grand staircase away from her. Blood was leaking out of his mouth and one eye had closed. Terrified household staff members appeared in doorways and peered out. They all vanished, shrieking, when Sonsal started shooting.
It was a small-calibre slide-away, a sleeve piece. He must have got it from his desk. Blindly, he fired it down the staircase as he went up backwards. Shots pinged off the marble treads and twanged away from the iron rails.
Kys had no gun to return fire with. She ducked into cover and crooked her left wrist backwards, drawing the long, handle-less kineblade out of her bodyglove sleeve with a jerk of her telekinesis. The twelve-centimetre blade hovered in the air.
‘Put the gun down, Umberto!’ she yelled.
He fired back at her, blowing out a dusty hole in the wall’s plasterwork beside her head. Another shot took a huge mirror off its wall-hooks. It splintered on the landing floor.
With a fierce burst of directed telekinesis, she leapt out into the open. The kineblade zoomed up the stairs and pinned Sonsal’s left sleeve to the banister rail. At the same moment, she plucked the slide-away clean out of his hand and whipped it through the air.
She caught the gun neatly, and aimed it back at him.
‘That’s enough!’
He was still shaking and vibrating, frantic. His pinned sleeve seemed to distress him more than anything, and Kys realised it was because he could no longer back away.
‘Right, Umberto! Right! I’m coming up there! Calm down and I’ll–’
Sonsal pulled at the pinned sleeve, tore it away, and staggered backward at the same moment. Suddenly freed, he slipped and went over the stair rail, shoulders first.
Two storeys to the marble floor of the atrium.
She looked away. Even the bone and mush sound of impact was bad enough.
‘Shit,’ she said. Alarms were ringing right through the house. People were screaming.
She retrieved her kineblade, went to the south exit, and let herself out.
Three
She melted away through shadows, through the city darkness. I kept watch over her as soon as she was clear of the house’s blinding landspar. From the mosaic of her raw, surface thoughts, I reconstructed the events up to Sonsal’s death. Her mind presented an indifference, but I could tell it was forced. She was troubled, alone, and a little scared. Patience Kys hid many things well – her true name, for example – and all who met her thought her hard and callous. But I knew better. Not because I could see her vulnerable side – she wouldn’t allow that – but because I knew it was there. I could hear its hollow echo when I tapped gently against her m
ind, as a man might knock to hear the leaden sound of a hidden alcove behind a wood panel.
Alarm protocols had drawn the marshals to the neighbourhood of Sonsal’s house, along with other, less identifiable officials. My mind lingered with her for some minutes as she hid in a temple porch while fast-dispatch cruisers and prowl-trucks scoured the streets. The Petropolitan authorities took the security of their richest and most privileged citizens very seriously. This was the second time in the space of a day my people had run foul of the Magistratum.
At the warning sirens from Sonsal’s house, the other residences in the street fortified themselves automatically, like herd animals reacting to the distress signals of one of their number. Gates and doors were mag-locked, window shutters furled into place, and roof armour, designed primarily to guard against rain, clattered out into full extension. I could feel the tense sensor-cones of alert-ready sentry servitors, taste the ozone stink of electrified wall-tops, and smell the stirring heat of suddenly armed anti-personnel mines.
Sonsal’s terrified householders had already furnished the marshals with a description of a single assailant. Thirty-five minutes after she had quit the south entry, Kys was still no more than a half kilometre from Sonsal’s house, and seven hundred and seventy-three armed officers were hunting for her.
It was time to even the odds a little. I directed her north, towards a high-rise section of Formal B known as the Staebes, where wealthy young professionals lived in their own, opulent version of the city’s lamented hab-stacks. The architect had had a keen sense of irony.
Kys plied the shadows, forced to keep to the surface streets because the crime-alert had locked out all the descender wells into the sub-levels. I wanted to speed her on her way with minimal fuss and attention. Distractions were needed.
I left her and drifted on to a transit control office on Staebes circle. There, with a little effort, I planted the image of a lone female, running scared, in the mind of the shift supervisor. He would later swear on the aquila that he’d seen the woman on a security pict transmitted from the outbound platform of the Gill Park mag-lev station. His urgent call swarmed the manhunt in that direction.
Continuing west, I located by chance three Munitorum contractors performing after-hours repairs on an electrical supply sub-station behind Lontwick Arch. I rested gently in the forebrain of one of them for a few minutes, figured him out, and guided his hands. By the time I departed, he had misconnected two street-quarter grids and caused a blackout across eight city blocks. It took the trio seventeen minutes to repair the fault and restore power. They spent a good ten minutes of that time in fierce argument as to which of them could have been damn fool enough to cross-wire in the first place. The blackout, suspicious to say the least, surged the manhunt round again, splitting it, confusing the searchers.
By then, Kys was crossing the pedestrian footbridge across the hydroelectric canyon that divided B from E.
There, she was nearly caught. A Magistratum flier, cruising overhead, caught her on pict. I got into the observer’s mind just in time to block his recognition. The flier moved on, stab-lights scissoring, blind to her.
Kys was now moving south, down through Formal E. Under the ironwork walkways and tintglas roofs the streets were busy. Surface E was a popular zone for bohemian dining houses and drinking parlours, frequented by the rich from the high rent neighbourhoods over the canyon. Here, the marshals had ditched their transports and were moving through the crowd. Many were covert officers. The patrons of surface E did not take well to armoured marshals tramping through their midst.
It was hard to watch them all at once. Hundreds of minds, hundreds of personalities, some of them intoxicated, some of them high. The minds of the non-uniformed marshals were disguised by their well-rehearsed cover idents.
+Get into that cafe. Buy a drink and sit in the far end booth.+
Kys obeyed. I had to get her off the street. I’d just sensed two detective chasteners closing through the crowds towards her.
The cafe-bar was small, and lit by glow-globes so tar-stained they shone orange. Kys bought a thimble of sweet black caffeine and sat where I had instructed her. There were nine other customers, all middle-aged, sallow men in black clothing. They chatted in low, tired voices. Each one had ordered a large mug of foamed milk-caff.
They seemed sinister. For a moment, I feared I’d directed Kys into a den frequented by some form of secret police.
It was not so. Three doors down from the cafe-bar was the Elandra crematorium. The custom on Eustis Majoris was for sombre, evening funerals. The men were all paid mourners and hearse drivers, taking a respite during the long service before returning to perform their duties on the way to the wake. They sipped cheap amasec and grain liquor covertly from cuff-flasks, and smoked short, fat obscura sticks with hardpaper filters. When they departed, the cooling milk-caffs were left untouched on their benches. The bar owner cleared them without a shrug. The mourners were regulars, the untouched caffeines their way of paying for a seat out of the evening chill.
‘Where now?’ she asked, stepping into the cold night again.
+Follow the street down to the mag-lev station, and take the second through train to the Leahwood end stop. I’ll join you again shortly.+
I was confident she was clear now. I wanted to backtrack and see what I could learn from those hunting for her.
The Magistratum manhunt was running out of steam. I touched mind after mind, and felt only the spectacularly ordinary sensations of everyday marshals. Wariness, weariness, gripes about too-tight boots or too-loose jacket armour, worries about pension prospects, longings for the end of the evening shift. Occasionally, I brushed by the thoughts of a more senior officer, and felt the agitation of failure, of crime-solution quotas not met.
I circled back as far as Sonsal’s house. The psychic contour map of the city was still lit up, livid with recent trauma. There were flavours of pain and shock, worry and hysteria in the air here. I filtered out the sobbing housemaids, the damaged pain-throb of the bodyguards, the job worries of the butler, the seen-it-all dismissal of the medicae mortus scooping Sonsal’s ruptured cadaver into a linen sack.
I found the officer in charge, a marshal called Frayn Totle. He was afraid, and that surprised me. He was standing in the atrium, gazing down at the awful splash of blood on the marble. The dominating strands of his thought processes were as obvious as the layers of a sliced cake. An unsolved crime against one of the formal’s most respected was foremost of his worries. His wife, eight and a half months pregnant, was a distracting layer just under the icing. But he was afraid too.
What of? Why?
I waited to see. Three men walked over to join him, and his fear level rose. I tried to see them through his eyes, but he was resolutely avoiding them. I skipped away, and entered the mind of a mortuary attendant, who was waiting nearby to ship the gurney.
Three men. All dressed in tailored grey suits of the finest murray. One was tall and imposing, very wide, bigger even than Nayl, but he held back. Stepping forward was a well-made, more slender man with a combed chin-beard and tied-back black hair. His face was lean, hard-set, dangerous. The third man was a little, thin wretch with a balding blond scalp and fierce blue eyes.
‘D’you know who I am?’ the slender man with the tied-back hair asked. His voice was slick, like flowing honey.
‘Yes, sir,’ replied Totle. ‘I recognise you from the news-picts and–’
‘Well, that’s great,’ the slender man said. ‘You can, I’m sure, understand why we have an interest here?’
‘The flects, sir.’
‘Yes, the flects. The death of an august citizen like Sonsal is grievous enough, but the dissolute manner of his life that has consequently been revealed…’
‘I’ll keep the press out, sir,’ Totle said.
‘Yes, you damn well will!’ said the slender man. He paused, staring at the marshal. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘I’m… I’m surprised to see
you here, sir. Dealing with this matter personally.’
‘I take my duties seriously, marshal,’ the slender man said.
Who the hell was this? I wanted to know. I slid out of the mortuary attendant, who sighed gently as if waking from a dream, and moved closer to Totle and the trio. I reached out.
I got a brief taste of cold metal and power, a caustic spittle of danger and ambition. I got close enough to read the surface thoughts of the big man and know his name was Ahenobarb and he was hired muscle of the most dangerous kind. Then I reached out towards the slender man’s mind.
The little blond wretch turned and looked at me. I wasn’t there, but he saw me anyway. Saw my face, into my mind, my body and my soul, my birth and the lives of the generations before me. He was a psyker of appalling power. With just one look, he ripped into me and almost exposed me altogether.
‘Kinsky? What is it?’ the slender man said suddenly, seeing his companion stiffen.
‘Thought pirate,’ Kinsky replied. He was still staring at me, his blue eyes burning into my head.
I started to retreat. I threw up three mind-walls to cover my escape, but he punched through them as if they were paper. He left his body and came rushing after me.
As I soared up into the roof of the atrium, I saw his body go limp and fold. The big minder – Ahenobarb – caught him expertly before he fell, as if well practised.
Kinsky came up after me. Non-corporeal, he took the form of a ball of fire, fizzling the same blue-white as his eyes. I could feel the steel-hard lattices of his thought-traps closing on me and blocking my escape.
‘What is your name?’ he demanded, without words.
‘Screw you is my name,’ I replied, and thrust out at him with a charged mind dagger that formed, sharp and scarlet, in the air before me.
The ball of blue fire knocked it aside and chuckled. ‘Is that the best you’ve got, screw you is my name?’
I had been inhabiting a small, fragile sylph of white light, but in the face of the oncoming blue fireball, I resolved my non-corporeal self and became an eldar kon-miht, furious, winged and golden. I had been tempted to become an aquila, but I didn’t want this mind-warrior to gather any clues.