by Dan Abnett
Ain't not gonna happen,' said Big-eye, his voice muffled by his clothing. God-Emperor knew where his mouth was.
'I s'think so, when we have us such a scalding black score, him to enjoy' Nayl didn't shrink back.
++Let them through++ Phant said, his voice conveyed by an augmetic carry-sound unit. A vox-implant. Few twists had the money for that. Phant was certainly a player.
The minders stepped aside and allowed us into the booth. We sat.
++Go on++
Twist, I s'tell ya, we be in the market for section-alpha brainjobs. We s'hear you got one for the begging.'
++Hear? Where?++
'Round and around/ said Nayl.
++Uh huh. And you are?++
'Just two twists s'gonna earn us a deal/1 said.
++That right?++
We sat in silence for a moment as Phant called for more drinks. The girl was now combing and fixing her hair and doing her make-up. One of her many hands was on my knee under the table.
She winked at me.
With an eye growing from the end of her tongue.
++What I got, ain't no section-alpha, twists. S'section-alpha-plus++
That is s'why we came to you, Phant! S'why! No upper limit for our buy!'
++How U gonna pay?++
Nayl dropped one of the ingots onto the table.
'Pure mellow-yellow. And we got the bars. Much as it takes. So…? S'when-where?'
++I gotta talk to some people++
'Kay'
++Where can I reach U?++
The Twist and Sleep.'
++You sleep tight. Maybe I call you++
The audience was over. We took a table of our own near the raised stage and stayed for a couple more rounds, making a show of appreciating the indecent writhings of the girl with the belly mouth.
After an hour or so, we saw Phant and his retinue leave by a side door. 'Let's go/ I said. We finished our drinks and rose. Nayl gave porcupine girl a handful of coins and patted her bottom. Her quills bristled, but she smiled.
The minder didn't spare us a look with either of his heads as we left. Out of sight, round the corner of the dreary barstoop, I handed Nayl one of a pair of brass stimm-injectors and we detoxed quickly to rid our bodies of the alcohol dulling our systems.
It was the dead of night, but there was little darkness. The great curve of Eechan's ring systems glowed with reflecting sunlight and shone like bands of diamond-crusted platinum.
The main street of the shanty was a rutted, water-logged morass, and flaking boardwalk pavements edged the rows of slumping, dingy buildings. Glowing signs and the few street lamps reflected in the street puddles.
Beyond the shanty, to the west, the alpine slopes of the mainhive rose against the stars, like a dark mountain of trash decorated with a million little lights. To the east were the stacked, grubby mushrooms of the mill-farms and the distilleries, venting brown steam and yellow pollutants into the wind.
To the south, in the verdant farm lands, plains of thick, rubbery growth, we could see the running lights of several vast harvesters. They were segmented juggernauts; beetle-like machines the size of small starships, chewing up die greenbelt with massive reaping mandibles and digesting it through vast interior vats and worklines. Flues lined their backs like spines and spewed moisture waste and atomised sap up high into the atmosphere, where it
drifted and fell again like rain. Everything in the twist shanty was sticky with sap-fall. The rain was tacky and thick like syrup. The street puddles were viscous. Downpipes glugged and throbbed rather than pouring. Everywhere, there was a stench of decomposing plantfibre and liquefied cellulose.
'Do you think he took the bait?' I asked.
Nayl nodded. You could see he was interested. Gold's rare on Eechan. His eyes lit when I showed him that ingot.'
'He'll want to check us, though.'
'Of course. He's a businessman/
We walked along the street, hoods raised against the sticky rain. There were a few mutants around, all of them dressed in rancid tatters. They shambled along, lurked in doorways around covered braziers, or shared obscura bottle-pipes out of the rain in dim breezeways.
A squirt of sirens warbled down the main street and Nayl pulled me into an alley-end. A black armoured land speeder with blazing grilled lamps crept past.
I saw the crest motif of the mainhive arbites on the side and an armoured officer sat in the top hatch manipulating a spotlight.
The beam played across us and passed along. Another flute of siren-noise sounded and we heard a vox-amplified voice demand, 'Idents and papers, you five. Now!'
Moaning and grumbling, a pack of twists moved out into the street, lit by the spot-beam, as the officers dismounted to shake them down and run their gene-prints through the system.
Something we couldn't afford to let happen. Not if we wanted to maintain our position as anonymous mutants. One flash of my credentials would speed us past any arbites red-tape. But it might also alert Lyko.
I'd insisted on full concealment for the mission. No one knew we were here, officially. Aemos had done some surreptitious checking, and there was no official trace of Lyko either. But that was to be expected, and there was no telling how many mainhive officials he might have back-handed to alert him of any Inquisitorial presence.
Nayl and I turned west at the next junction, and followed the maze of alleys and breezeways between the rents and mill-habs to reach the Twist and Sleep by a circuitous route that would keep us off the main thoroughfares and away from arbites patrols.
And, as it turned out, bring us right into trouble.
It didn't look like trouble at first. A short, flat-browed runt in rags stepped
into our path, grinning like a salesman. He held his hands open, as if he
was going to curtsy. Twists, my twists, my friends… spare a few 'perials for a poor badgene
down on his luck/ I heard Nayl begin to say, 'Not tonight, twist. S'get you to one side/ But I had already tensed. How had this scabscum known to ask for
Imperial coins if he hadn't seen us at the bar and followed us on purpose?
His accomplices came out of the gloom and sap-rain behind us.
I rammed the word Evade! hard into Nayl's mind with a 'pathic surge and dropped.
A massive, spiked weapon sailed through the space our heads had just been occupying and connected with nothing but air.
The rant who had waylaid us uttered quite the most obscene series of curses I have ever, ever heard and dived on me. He had a double-headed dagger with a nurled hand-guard.
I caught his upflung wrist as he made to gouge at me, broke his elbow and kicked him through a nearby fence while he was still screaming in pain.
'Boss! Move!' I heard Nayl sing out and I rolled hard aside in the mud as the spiked weapon slammed down into the mire.
It was a thick length of timber with dozens of nails and knife blades hammered through it.
The friendly end of it was held by two amazingly large paws. The paws belonged to a hulk, a two hundred kilo monster covered wim blistered fish-scales and bony scutes. It wore only a pair of ragged blue trousers held in place around its midriff, almost comically, by a pair of red braces.
It swung the spike-post at me again, and I had to dive and shoulder-roll to escape it.
Nayl was going toe-to-toe with two others: a snouted female in black leather whose mouth and nose were hideously combined into one drooling, snarling organ, and a tall, thin male with a face peculiarly distorted by bone and gristle.
The female had a reaping sickle in each hand, and the tall male was armed with a mace made out of a reinforced strut toothed with the rusting blades of two wood saws.
Nayl had drawn his serrated shortsword and duelling knife and was fending off thrusts and strikes from both of them.
A power sword, a boltgun, a lascarbine… they would all have finished this unnecessary encounter fast enough. But we had agreed to carry nothing that would mark us out from the twist populat
ion. Tech-levels were low in the shanty. A plasma gun might have ended this quickly, but stories would have got round.
The scaly giant was on me again, and I fell through the rotting flakboard of a fence in my efforts to evade his swing. I found myself lying amid the debris in the back yard of one of the loathsome hab-rents. A light went on in an upper window and abuse, stones and the contents of a chamber pot were hurled at me.
The giant came on, swinging his club from side to side. The nails and blades were darkly caked with dried blood.
He backed me towards the rear of the rent dwelling and made to swing again.
No I commanded, using the will. He stopped dead. The rain of abuse and excrement from above stopped too.
It would take him a moment to reconfigure his mind and find his anger again. I moved right at him, punching a knuckle-curved fist at the place where his nose should have been. There was a crack of bone and a spray of blood.
The giant went down hard on his back, his nasal bone slammed back into his brain.
Nayl seemed to be enjoying his uneven duel. He was jeering at his attackers, deflecting the sickles with his sword and blocking the strenuous attacks of the mace with his knife. I saw him spin and belly-kick the male away, then turn to give the ghastly, snorting female his full attention.
But more figures were emerging from the night.
Ugly, abhuman scum dressed in rags. Three, four of them.
I called a warning out to Nayl and pulled out my blackpowder pistol. It was a clumsy antique I'd acquired from the black market on Front's Planet, but even so I'd dumbed it down to Eechan tech levels by replacing the engraved furniture with a shaped piece of packet-wood.
The flintlock mechanism was in good order, though. It cracked loudly with a fizz and a flash, the recoil punishing my wrist, and the ball went point-blank through the forehead of the nearest twist, exploding the rear of his cranium in a surprisingly messy fountain.
But it was a one-shot piece and there was no time for reloading.
Two of the remaining outlaws came right at me, the other turning to come in on Nayl's flank.
I broke the teeth of the first one to reach me with the rounded butt of the pistol, and ducked the second's poorly judged slice with a rapier.
Backing away, I drew my own blade. Also a rapier. Shorter by a good ten centimetres than my opponent's but balanced and guarded with a hand-net of articulated metal struts.
Our blades clashed. He was good, trained to his skill by a life of slaughter in the underhive. But I… I had me on my side.
I dazzled him with the ulsar and the uin ulsar, and then drove him back with a four-stroke combination of pel ighan and uin pel ihnarr before ripping the blade out of his dazed fingers with a swift tahn asaf wyla.
Then the ewl caer. My blade transfixed his torso. He looked confused for a second and then fell down, sliding dead off my blade.
His broken-faced accomplice, blood spilling from my pistol whipping, flew at me and I span, decapitating him with the edge of my blade. The Carthaens believe side-blade work is lazy, and stress the use of the point.
But what the hell.
Nayl had killed the third attacker with a bodypunch, and as I turned, he locked both of the female's sickles around his twisting knife and ran her through with his main blade.
He turned to me and raised his bloody shortsword to his nose in a salute. I returned it with my rapier.
The siren of an arbites groundcar was wailing along the alley. Time to be gone/ I said to Nayl.
'I thought you were dead!' Bequin cursed as Nayl and I burst in to the room in the Twist and Sleep.
We had some fun on the way home/ Nayl said. 'Don't worry, Lizzie, I brought the boss back safe/
I smiled and fixed myself a small amasec from the bureau. Bequin hated to be called 'Lizzie'. Only Nayl had the balls to do it.
Aemos was hovering by the window. Somehow, the rags of his twist disguise suited him.
'Most perturbatory… the arbites are coming this way/
'What?'
Nayl moved to the window.
'Aemos is right. Three land cruisers pulled up outside. Officers coming in/
'Hide yourselves, now!' I ordered.
Aemos hurried through the communicating door into the other bedchamber and threw himself down on the cot. Nayl blundered into the adjoining bathroom and used a tooth mug and loud groans to suggest he was busy throwing up.
Alizebeth looked at me frantically.
'Into bed! Hurry!' I ordered.
The arbites kicked open the door and played their flashlights over the bed. 'Hive arbites! Who's in here?'
What is this?' I asked, dragging the sheets back.
'Streetfight killers… witnesses said they came in here/ said the arbites sergeant, advancing towards the bed.
'Me, I been here all night. Me and my friends/
They gonna vouch for you, twist?' asked the sergeant, raising his weapon.
Wass goin' on? Too much light!' said Bequin, emerging from the dirty linen on the bed. Somehow she had removed her dress beneath the sheets. Clad in brief underwear, she slithered on top of me.
'Wass you doin'? Stoppin' a girl makin' her way? Shame on you!'
The sergeant ran his flashlight beam up and down the length of her body as it clung to me. I smiled the inane smile of the lucky or well-oiled.
He snapped the light off. 'Sorry to interrupt you, miss/ The door closed and the arbites thumped away.
I looked down at Bequin with a wink. 'Good improvisation/1 said.
She leapt off me and grabbed her clothes. 'Don't get any funny ideas, Gregor!'
I'd had funny ideas about her for years, truth be told. She was beautiful and sublimely sexy. But she was also an untouchable. It hurt me to be close to her, physically hurt.
I hate that fact. I feel a lot for Bequin and I long to be with her, but it was never going to happen. Never, ever.
That's one of the truly great sadnesses of my life.
And hers too, I hope, in my more self-aggrandising moments.
I lay in bed and watched her drag on her dress again, and I felt the pang of desire.
But there was no way. No way in the galaxy.
She was untouchable. I was a psyker.
That way pain and madness lay.
TEN
Ruminations on Lyko.
The Chew-after.
The highest bidder.
Tumultuous sap-storms hammered the twist-town in the pre-dawn, blanketing the sky with swirling vapours and shaking the tiles and shutters with the gross weight of their heavy pelting goop. Thunder rolled. In the aftermath, veils of mist swathed the countryside, and the stillness was alive with gurgling and dripping and the swarming scurry of sap-lice and storm-bugs.
Nayl went out early with Aemos and bought paper pails of warm food from the twist-town commissary just down the street, which was already serving the work lines forming for the shift change in the mills. By the time they returned, we had been joined by Inshabel and Husmaan, who had slept through the night's altercation with the arbites in a shared room down the hall.
I'd yet to formally notify the ordo that Inshabel had joined my band, but he was now very much part of it. I felt he had the right to be here on this mission, for Roban's sake, and for his own. He had brought the news of Esarhaddon to me, directly and selflessly. Few of my team yet referred to him by his rank – it would be a long while until anyone eclipsed the memory of Interrogator Ravenor – but he had meshed well, with his bright mind and healthy, caustic wit. He was already providing me with more solid service than Alain von Baigg had ever managed.
Duj Husmaan had been a skin-hunter on his homeworld of Windhover when Harlon Nayl had first met him. That was back in Nayl's
bounty-chasing days, before he'd joined my cause. I'd recruited Husmaan eight years before on Nayl's recommendation, and he'd proved to be a resourceful, if superstitious, warrior with a great sense for pathfinding. Nayl had personally selected him from the
individuals in my retinue as muscle for this venture, and I had no quibble with the choice.
Husmaan was a slender man of medium height with coppery skin and white, sun-scorched hair and goatee. Here on Eechan, like all of us, he'd drabbed down his clothing to ragged black twist robes. He ignored the bundle of disposable wooden forks that Aemos had brought back from the commissary and started to eat the hot food from his paper pail with his fingers.
I picked at my own food idly, wondering how close we were to Lyko.
Lyko had been a fool and had damned himself. The damaging revelation that it hadn't been Esarhaddon who had been torched on the lawns of the Lange palace could have been circumvented if Lyko had kept his head. He could have claimed it a mistake, another example of the heretic psyker's treachery.
But Lyko had run. Out of fear, or chasing some timetable, I didn't know. But he'd run and, in so doing, incriminated himself.
I'd gone to his residence, a rented hab high in the spires of Hive Ten, the moment Inshabel had alerted me to the deceit. But Lyko had cleared out, taking his people with him. His hab was empty and abandoned, with just afew scatterings of trash left behind in the stripped rooms.
I had set my staff to work tracing him, a tall order given the planet-wide data-access problems in the wake of the rioting. I had decided almost at once to pursue him alone, without informing the Inquisition. You may see this as odd, almost reckless. In a way, it was. But Lyko was an inquisitor of good repute, held in high regard, and with many friends. There was scant chance I could tell the ordos I was undertaking a hunt for him on the basis he was harbouring a notorious rogue psyker without the fact reaching him, or without his friends making trouble for me.
Those friends of his, of course, included Heldane and Commodus Voke: the stalwart trio that had captured the thirty-three rogues on Dolsene in the first place. How empty that 'heroic' action now seemed to me. I had been so impressed when Lord Rorken had shown me the report. Perhaps the 'capture' had been easy, or even staged, if Lyko was secretly in league with Esarhaddon. Perhaps it had all been part of an elaborate conspiracy to perpetrate the atrocity of Hive Primaris.
I was dogged by grim, unanswerable speculations. I had no way to prove Lyko was corrupt, not even now, though I certainly suspected it. He might have been an unwitting pawn on Dolsene, or at the Lange palace, or he might have been in it all along. It was possible too that his departure from Thracian was a coincidence that I had misinterpreted. It wouldn't have been the first time an inquisitor had moved undercover without announcement.