by Dan Abnett
The blue fireball hovered over the work line for several minutes, and then, frustrated, flew up and away out through the roof.
MUCH LATER
A vacant lot between hab-stacks in Formal M, a deep pit of jumbled rockcrete and collected pools of rainwater exuding the acrid stink of sulphur.
M was an especially decaying sub-borough, famished by a forty year long downward arc in trade. Many of the six century-old stacks had been cleared by optimistic landlords hoping to raise new cheap pre-habs and cash in on the worker influx to the petrofactory combine when new contracts came through. But the promised contracts had never been honoured. The combine had closed. The razed sites - some cleared to their sink levels - remained as gaping pits between crumbling stacks.
Kys walked out across the bottom of the open hole, gazing up at the mouldering rockcrete shells around her. The only light came from oil-drum fires in some of the neighbouring ruins that warmed dispossessed families. She could see them flicker at high, ragged holes that had once been windows until the glass and metal frames had been robbed and sold.
"In one piece, I see," said a voice. She didn't bother to turn. Carl Thonius appeared out of the shadows to her left, screwing up the lid of a silver hip-flask.
"In one piece," she replied.
Kara Swole appeared to her right, looking tired and haggard. "I understand you've caused as much hoo-ha as me," she said.
Kys shrugged.
"Now we're all here, I suggest we don't waste any more time." Harlon Nayl said from the shadows behind her. Kys sighed. She'd been able to sense Thonius and Swole waiting, but Nayl had fooled her, as usual. He looked grumpy. He was dragging a scruffy street kid along by the wrist.
"Who's that?" Kys asked.
"This is Zael. He's coming with us," Nayl said curtly. He looked over at Thonius. "Bring it in, would you?"
Thonius walked over into the centre of the derelict lot and produced a guide beacon from his coat. It was a chrome cylinder no larger than a spice grinder. He twisted the top of it and set it on the ground. A pattern of tiny green lights flashed in repeats around its sides. Kys could just feel the sub sonic pulse.
As they drew back to the edges of the lot, Kys said, "So what? A pick up? He wants us back at the ship, does he?"
"No," said Nayl.
She heard the gentle hum of cowling-suppressed landing thrusters from above them. A black shape appeared overhead against the dark froth of the clouds. The lander descended slowly, vertically, into the demolition cavity.
The vehicle was unlit. Even the running lights were off. The only illumination came from the faint green instrumentation behind the canopy and the hot-blue bursts of exhaust from the jets. As it came in, skeletal landing gear unfolded from the belly with a hydraulic moan. For the last few seconds before touchdown, they had to turn their faces away as the jets lifted grit and dust and created a vortex in the squalid confines of the pit.
The jets died away to nothing. Like a squid's beak, the nose hatch articulated open. An object rather than a figure emerged, gliding down the ramp on silent anti-grav suspensors.
"By the Throne," Kys said, "When was the last time he came in person?"
"We've not had a good day, have we?" Gideon Ravenor said. His tone was tired, but it was impossible to assess his actual demeanour. The voxponder system of the force chair that did his talking for him washed out inflection.
"Not bad, exactly," said Harlon Nayl.
"No, not bad," echoed Thonius.
"Though not entirely great, either," admitted Kara Swole. Her voice was husky, and there were dark rings around her eyes as if she hadn't slept in a month.
"Bad enough for you to come," Kys said pointedly. The sealed chair unit, matt-dull and intimidating, rotated slowly to face her.
"Indeed," replied the colourless voxponder voice. "Looks like I won't be able to protect you effectively from orbit. I feel a more intimate range is necessary. Let us get into concealment before we talk further."
There was a muted acoustic click from the chair as Ravenor sent a vox-signal they couldn't hear to the waiting lander. Two figures emerged at once from the hatch and strode over to them. Then the jets cycled up again and the unseen pilot steered the lander up and away into the dark.
The inquisitor had brought Zeph Mathuin and the blunter named Wystan Frauka with him. Ravenor clearly wasn't taking any chances. Mathuin - tall and dark-skinned, with long ropes of tightly braided hair hanging down the back of his leather storm coat - was muscle, plain and simple. He'd been part of the team for three years, and no one knew much about his past, except that - like Nayl - he'd once operated as a licensed bounty hunter in the outworlds. His eyes were little coals of red hard light framed in the slits of his lids. He had a handgun already drawn, stiff at his side in his right hand, and his left hand was pushed into his coat pocket to brace against the weight of a heavy kitbag slung over his shoulder. He nodded a brief acknowledgement at Nayl as he came up - out of professional respect, mainly - but ignored the others. Mathuin didn't mix well, so Ravenor usually held him in reserve, but he liked to bring him along when he had to art in person: there was no doubting the ex-hunter's skills.
Kys sighed when she saw Frauka. Considering he never played any physical part in their activities, Wystan Frauka was a hefty man - big-boned and broad, with a louche, diffident manner. His hair was dyed black and neatly trimmed, his clean-shaven face craggy, mocking and lazy. Technically, he was almost sexy in a weather-beaten, exotic way, but the basic essence of him repelled Kys. The blankness, the nothingness. As he approached, he took a pack of lho-sticks from the hip pocket of his well-tailored, sober suit. He slowly tapped one out and lit it. Then, with a fork of blue smoke exhaling carelessly from his nostrils, he nodded at Kys, a little appreciative nod, his eyes wickedly narrowed.
She turned away. For now, at least, Frauka was wearing his limiter, but there would be a time, probably quite soon, when that limiter would be deactivated, and she'd have to tolerate the numbing void of his being. The attribute made him indispensable as well as unpalatable.
Under Nayl's lead, the group left the pit and entered a sub-level of the rotting hab adjacent to it. The place had been gutted. Seeping rain-burn had eaten away the ply-board tiles of the suspended ceilings to reveal cavity spaces of corroded wiring, decomposing insulation and scabby stonework. The beams of their lamp-packs stabbed through the dripping gloom, revealing rust-streaked, mould-blotched wall boards with sticky folds of shed lining paper concertinaed at the skirting, piles of trash, nitrate-burned carpets, doorless holes.
Once they were deep inside the rain, Ravenor selected a usable room. It had been a communal lounge shared by all the habs on that landing, larger than the individual living spaces and - because it was at the centre of the block - more intact. Wet rot had got into it, blackening the ceiling, covering the now skeletal furniture frames with fungal growths, and curling the barely readable paste-boards and notices away from the wall. Washroom rosters, rent association announcements, hiring lists, uplifting motto cards and scriptural quotes distributed by the ministorum.
They entered, and assembled loosely around Ravenor as he illuminated the chamber with a wash of yellow light from his force chair's lamps.
"Wystan, if you wouldn't mind?" the voxponder said. Frauka nodded, switched his lho-stick to his other hand, and reached into his jacket. This was the moment Kys had prepared herself for.
Wystan Frauka was one of those rare beings known as a blunter or "untouchable". It wasn't just that he was a non-psyker - like the majority of humans - he was the antithesis of a psyker. His mind was psi-inert. It could not be read or probed by a psyker, nor could it even be detected. Moreover, it totally inhibited psychic activity in his immediate location. The moment the limiter was switched off, Kys felt her telekinetic powers ebb away, felt even the essential vibrancy of her mind stifled. It was almost intolerable, like being blindfolded and muzzled. She wondered how the inquisitor - a profoundly more powerful psyker than sh
e - could bear it.
Whatever the discomfort, it was useful. With Frauka's cold blankness loosed around them, and with the anti-snoop devices Mathuin had set up, they now enjoyed virtually seamless privacy.
They began to talk. Kys willed them to get it done quickly. She wanted to be rid of Frauka's company, even though she knew his presence was vital if a psyker like Ravenor was going to operate without detection on Eustis Majoris. Untouchables had first been utilised by Ravenor's mentor, the legendary Eisenhorn, who had built up a cadre of them known as the Distaff. Those times were as long gone as Eisenhorn himself, the Distaff disbanded, but Ravenor carried on some of his old master's traditions.
One by one, they reported their activities. Nayl briefly spoke of the gang maven he'd hunted in the overfloat, and of her bizarre fate. Kara described the way serious clan muscle had cornered her when she probed too hard after the dealer Lumble. Then Kys recounted the unfortunate matter of Umberto Sonsal.
"I got a lead on his supplier," she said. "Drase Bazarof. A line chief at Engine Imperial. I have a residence address."
"What a mess," muttered Frauka, with amusement in his voice. He was lurking in the corner of the room, leaning against the wall and lighting a fresh lho-stick from the smouldering paper filter of the one before. Nayl and Kys both shot him dirty looks.
"Just my thoughts," he said, with a shrug.
"I see no reason to reproach my agents," Ravenor said. "The circumstances they each encountered could not have been predicted." Kys knew there was resentment behind the comment. Prediction was a mind-skill that Ravenor had long tried to master, without success. It was pursuit of that secret that had made him tolerate the eldar for so long. "I myself have faced the unexpected tonight. A psyker, level gamma, perhaps higher."
There was a murmur. Ravenor's own latent ability hovered somewhere between high delta and low gamma, an extremely potent capacity that he was able to boost to truly scary levels using the psi-amplifiers laced into his chair.
"I aim to discover who he is, and what his status is. He appeared to be operating as an agent of some kind of private Magistratum unit, but the psykana register shows no one licensed to operate anywhere on Eustis Majoris except at the Guild Astropathicus."
"Unlicensed... or secret," Thonius said.
"I have not discounted the possibility that he is the agent of a rival inquisitor in Petropolis, Carl. I'd like you to spend the next few days finding out what you can about him. His name is Kinsley. He was accompanied by a minder called Ahenobarb and a third man, unnamed. I'll burn likenesses of all three into your short-term memory later."
Thonius nodded.
"Immediately, we need decent transport and secure accommodation. Harlon, Kara, that's your job. We'll follow up on your avenues of investigation later. For now, I believe our most promising line lies with Patience's clue. This man Bazarof."
Once Nayl and Swole had gone, Ravenor turned his attention to Zael. The child was clearly terrified - of the people he had fallen in with, of the events he had been dragged through in the last several hours.
"In Genevieve X's house," Ravenor said, "you could hear me. Yet you weren't boosted like Harlon."
"I don't know what that means," Zael said. He was visibly shaking, and trying not to look at the strange, sealed machine that hovered before him.
Ravenor had Frauka re-engage his limiter for a short while, and switched his chair's voxponder off, speaking directly into the boy's mind. It seemed to calm the boy considerably but now, relaxing, he became washed out with exhaustion and near to collapse. Ravenor let him curl up on the ratty seat cushions of an old armchair and sleep.
Thonius went through his pockets. "What's this now?" he said, producing the red-tissue parcel.
Kara Swole woke, and found herself crooked up in a foetal position on a shabby settee. She yawned, tasted her own wretched morning breath, and then hesitated. In the dimly lit room, Wystan Frauka sat opposite her on another settee. He was smoking, and looking at her. All she could really see was the amber coal of his lho-stick.
She sat up fast, and pulled on her waistcoat. "You're a creepy little ninker, aren't you?" she murmured. "See anything you like?"
Frauka opened his eyes - or rather, Kara realised that until then his eyes had been closed.
"Sorry, what?" he said, taking a drag of his lho-stick.
"You were looking at me. While I slept."
"No," he said, with little conviction. "I came in here for a rest. I didn't mean to disturb you. I was asleep."
"Right. With a lit smoke in your hand."
He tilted his head to look at the lho-stick between his fingers.
"Ah. That's a bad habit, I know."
"Ninker," she said, and got up. She scooped her shoulder rig from its resting place on the top of a cloth bale and pushed her way out through the hanging drape that served as a door. Frauka made no move to follow her. His eyes were closed again.
Outside the store closet, it was noisy and bright. The large factory space had a rockcrete floor across which pale daylight shafted down through skylights. Heaps of cloth bales and material rollers twice as high as Kara almost filled the place. She could hear the rattle of the thread machines coming from the adjoining hall, and the whine of the burn-alarms out on the street. Up in the rafters, by the opaque skylights, a few wild sheen birds roosted.
Thonius had told her all about the sheen birds. Machine birds. Centuries before, the original architects of Petropolis had commissioned them from the Guild Mechanicus - simulacra of bird life, programmed to flock and sweep around the city spires as an adjunct of the architecture. Time and pollution had dwindled their numbers just as they had eroded the face of the towers. Now few remained: feral, uncared for, unloved.
Like so many things in this city, Kara thought.
Patience Kys was leaning against a wall nearby, eating some kind of meat off a spit-stick. She didn't look like she'd slept at all.
"What's up, Kar?" she asked.
"Frauka." Kara replied.
"That frigging slime."
"He was watching me sleep."
"Frigging slime."
Kara walked past her into the main factory hall. It had been the best she and Nayl had been able to manage the night before. A clothing manufactory in the busy garment district of Formal D. Decent vehicle access, basic amenities, an owner who was as afraid of crossing the Inquisition as he was glad to get some extra income for letting out the back store.
The boy Zael was fast asleep on a pile of insulation padding. He kicked gently in his slumber, like a dog. Nearby, Mathuin was working under the propped hood of the eight-wheeled cargo they'd bought for next to nothing from a drunken stevedore. Mathuin emerged, wiping his greasy hands.
"Piece of shit," he said, but not to her. Mathuin seldom directed any comment at anybody. Kara liked him, even with his stand-offishness. Studly build, achingly gorgeous dark skin. She particularly liked the way his hair was bead-plaited right across his scalp away from a left side parting. She liked asymmetry.
"Can I help?" she asked.
He looked at her as if he'd never seen her before. "Know anything about carbide engines?" he asked.
"No, I believe I don't."
"Then no."
Kara grinned, helped herself to his polysty cup of caffeine and wandered on. Sex on a stick, that Zeph Mathuin. A way with the ladies.
"What are you doing?" she asked Thonius as she strolled up behind him. He was sitting on an off-cut roll of lining cloth, poring over something, and jumped when he heard her.
"Nothing."
"Doesn't look like nothing."
"I'm making notes. Detailing the case," he said huffily, showing her his chapbook.
"What's that you're hiding in it?" she teased.
"My pen," he replied, revealing it.
"Right," she said. He was really bristling. What had he done to get all guilty about? "I was just asking."
"Well," said Thonius, "well, just don't."
Wha
t the hell was up with everyone this morning?
Kara finished Mathuin's caffeine and tossed the cup aside. To her left was a bay area screened off by a half-height wall of chalky rockcrete. A rattling frame of pipes and shower roses hung over it, spitting out water. It was a wash area, built for fabric workers to shower in after long shifts in the dye-house. Kara leaned her arms on the half-wall and looked over. She smiled to herself, Nayl was standing naked under one of the shower-heads, water streaming off his hard, scarred body. He looked as if he was in a trance.
"Looking good, bounty," she called, mockingly.
He looked up to see her, but made no attempt to cover himself. They'd been soldiers together in this war for a long time. Gender distinctions and sexuality had long since reduced to a dense layer of loyalty and unspoken devotion. They had been together for a while, since the early days, when they answered to Eisenhorn. It had been fun. Now, they were like brother and sister.
"Missed a bit," she said.
He looked round.
"That looks like blood," she added.
"Yeah," he said. "Mine. Me and Zeph went knocking for that Bazarof chump this morning, early. We'd have taken you too, but you were out for the count and the boss said you needed sleep."
"Boss wasn't wrong. How'd it go?"
"Shitty." Nayl replied, scrubbing the last of the dried blood off his calf with a shred of wet cloth. "He'd got wind of Sonsal and done a runner. Left a homemade pin bomb in his lodgings for those who came knocking. I was too slow."
"You intact?"
"Just about. Tap."
She reached in over the half-wall and knocked the rusty faucet shut. The water pipes shuddered and stopped their output. Nayl splashed through the draining water to the wall and grabbed a dank towel.