by Dan Abnett
"To begin with." I replied, using the voxponder. I did this out of respect. For some reason, she had always objected to me mind-speaking. "It could be a long run. Right up the lane to Lenk, if needs be."
Cynia Preest pouted. "No bugger goes to Lenk anymore."
"Some buggers do. The sort I'm after. I hope to catch them before that. Certainly before they hit Lucky Space."
She tilted back her head and laughed. Then stopped. Then looked at me with narrowed eyes. "You're joking?"
"It's been known, but not at the moment."
"Shit!" she said, and turned away and then said it again, with equal vehemence. "Shit! I am not... categorically not... going to take my darling into Lucky Space."
"Cynia..."
"No. No way, Gideon. Flint's bad enough. It's only borderline Imperial these days. But Lucky Space? I am not taking the Hinterlight out of sub territory, especially not there. There are pirates out there, dark kin, brigands, death worlds, rip-worlds-"
"The people we're shadowing have a particular interest in rip-worlds." I said.
"Well, lucky them. They can enjoy them on their own."
She walked away from me, cussing my parentage, and leaned over the pilot console, resting her hands on the spoked brass wheel. I knew what this was about: Majeskus. I'd enjoyed a fine working relationship with Shipmistress Preest until Majeskus. God-Emperor, it still haunted me. I have never - will never - forget the desperate voices of Will Tallowhand, Eleena Koi and Norah Santjack as they crackled over the vox in the moments before their doom. Nor have I forgotten the damage done to the Hinterlight. How many was it? Fifty, sixty per cent of the crew? May the Throne of Terra keep the soul of Zygmunt Molotch burning in agony forever. Sometimes I wished that bastard was still alive so I could kill him all over again.
But he was dead, incinerated on Zenta Malhyde, and my friends and allies were dead and gone also. And that was then, and this was now.
Cynia had ramped the volume up to full again. The bridge space shook with symphonic pomp.
"Cynia!"
She pretended she hadn't heard.
+Cynia.+
She snapped round to glare at me. "Not to put too fine a point on it, I'm bloody unhappy about this."
+Cynia...+
"Don't mind-chat me! Talk like a regular human, or get off my deck!"
"As you wish," I said, switching back to voxponder.
"Better," said Cynia Preest, and dimmed the music. "Throne, Gideon, I'm afraid."
"Afraid?"
"It'll happen again, won't it? Sooner or later. We'll meet a bastard tougher than us and he'll hurt us bad."
"Zygmunt Molotch was a genius-psychotic. A Cognitae-schooled freak. An aberration. Yes, he hurt us. More than hurt us. But he's gone now. Get Harlon up here and he'll relish telling you how he flamed Molotch's arse on Malhyde. We're after safer game, Cynia. Crim-smugglers who've hooked up with game agents. They scour the rip-worlds and everything else out there for viable circus beasts. There's very little risk."
Mistress Preest scowled at me. "That's what you said last time."
She turned back to the helm position and studied it for a while. The Hinterlight's bridge was surprisingly small for such a large vessel, essentially because it had been rebuilt in drydock after the Majeskus incident. Six months' expensive reconstruction, courtesy of the Guild Mechanicus, who'd only agreed to touch a rogue trader because of the influence I'd brought to bear through the Ordos Helican. A compact strategium well contained the actuality sphere. Behind it, a double hatch let into the shipmistress' ready room. Fore of the strategium, a simple, sloping bay contained the helm stations and the Navigator's socket. Bridge crew and servitors scurried round. Oliphant Twu of the Navis Nobilite was already plugged in to that socket, his lids shut, reading ghost stars on all three retinas.
"I have a course, mistress," he reported in a slow, lazy voice. "Flint. To orbit, four days."
"Hold it ready, if you please, Navigator." Preest looked at me.
"Cynia..."
"Don't you bloody 'Cynia' me!" Cynia Preest exploded again. "Be at your beck and call, fine! Carry you and your band of killers around the known stars, fine! But this..."
Cynia Preest was mistress of the Hinterlight, and my pilot. She was two hundred and eighty-four years old, although she always gave her age as "twenty-seven and a bit". Clad in a gold-suede bodyglove and red velvet robes, she was an imposing figure, womanly but robust, and just now becoming stocky and matronly. She had cropped, bleached hair, heavy make-up shadow over her eyes, and favoured excessive dangling earrings. I always thought she could have passed as a tavern hostess or a smile-girl madam, but for the tracery of fibre-wire inlay that ran down the left side of her face.
"Lucky Space..." She spat out the words.
Elman Halstrom, Cynia's deputy and first officer, had wandered over to join us while we had been talking. Modestly built, with a genial, heart-shaped face and slightly down-turned, put-upon eyes, he was a Navy veteran, and always immaculate. His thinning black hair was oiled back fleet-fashion, and he wore the formal uniform of Battlefleet Scams, though every insignia, pip and crest had been removed from it. Even the embossed buttons had been replaced by plain bone disks. I understood he'd been a captain once, though I knew nothing about the circumstances surrounding his exit from service. Cynia had engaged him- like so many of the crew - after Majeskus.
"We are fit and coming free," he reported. Halstrom was precise and clipped when it came to duties, a legacy of his years in the Fleet, but he was not beyond informality. I liked him. He could yarn a good tale and deliver a fine jest. "Eustis Majoris control has cleared us for system exit. Course is ready and held. Enginarium reports jump speed at your discretion."
Preest nodded.
"I couldn't help but overhear," he added. "She's mentioned brigands, I take it?"
"She has," I said.
There was a twitch of a smile on his small, rounded mouth. "Dark kin? Death-worlds?"
"All noted, Mr. Halstrom." The shipmistress has made all her objections abundantly clear. "I will endeavour to make sure our voyage has to go no further than Flint."
"Well then, that's excellent." Halstrom glanced at Cynia. "Mistress?"
Preest glared at me again, and then walked away to the main throne in the centre of the bridge. There she sat down and oversaw final preparation for warp translation.
"A word, if I may?" Halstrom said to me. He leaned over as he spoke, as if my three-sixty degree audio receptors wouldn't catch his confidence somehow, as if craning for an ear to whisper into. The gesture touched me.
"Of course."
We left the bridge and proceeded down the midships companionway. Halstrom walked slowly by my side.
"I understand we have guests?"
As first officer, it fell to Halstrom to supervise matters of shipboard security.
"We have. I've told them to make themselves available for induction interviews at your convenience. For now, they're restricted at my instruction to the quarters I've provided in my deck."
"Do you want them to remain restricted?"
"Not unduly. Not so that we appear rude. Standard prohibitions, I think... no access to the enginarium, the arsenal or any private cabins. I feel it is up to you and the mistress to decide what rules you set for them."
"I see. And, though I will interview-them, what can you tell me about them?"
"Not a great deal at this stage. They are agents of an official department known as the Ministry of Subsector Trade, and answer directly to the lord governor subsector himself. They have influence and power. A mis-handled situation could cause a rift between the ordos and subsector government."
"We wouldn't want that," smiled Halstrom. "And might a situation arise that could result in mis-handling?"
"It might." I replied. "One of them is a potent psyker. I suggest you have Frauka present when you interview him."
Halstrom was silent for a moment. We had almost reached the end of the long companion
way. Ahead, it split into the through-deck corridors and the main dorsal elevator bank.
"Obviously," Halstrom said, then, gently, "I know only what you and the shipmistress care to tell me about your work, on Eustis Majoris. But I know enough to understand that you deliberately conducted your operation on the planet clandestinely. As it was explained to me, you felt you could trust no one. Not even the authorities."
"That's still the case, Mr. Halstrom. I'm attempting to locate the source of a material that is undoubtedly warp-tainted. It is used as... as a drug, essentially. Recreational. But it is no narcotic. It is heretical. To obtain it, and smuggle it onto the subsector capital world and elsewhere... that requires friends in high places, I believe. So I tried to keep my business quiet. Unfortunately, fate decided otherwise."
"So these guests are here under sufferance?"
"Quite so. They're here because it is diplomatic to cooperate with them, not because I trust them."
A buzzer sounded and amber lamps began to flash along the length of the corridor. Halstrom stepped back and took careful, experienced hold of the nearest handrail, and I cut my chair's lift and maglocked it down to the deck. There was a slight tremor, then twenty seconds of vibration combined with a flickering, time-lapse impairment to my vision. The rumble of the main drives grew louder.
Then the buzzer stopped and the lights ceased. We had passed the translation point. Now the Hinterlight was travelling at something close to maximum velocity, outside realspace, traversing the treacherous oceans of the warp.
"I should return to my duties," said Halstrom, releasing the handrail. "Thank you, inquisitor, for your time and candour."
"Mr. Halstrom?" He paused and returned to me.
"How long will I keep Preest?" I asked.
He closed his eyes and shook his head. "I can't answer that, sir. Only the shipmistress decides. It would not be out of turn for me to mention that she has complained to me many times about the risks involved in continuing to act as your contracted conveyor. She is scared. That business six years ago. It's fair to say it destroyed her faith in you."
"I know," I said. The toneless voxponder did nothing to convey the sadness in my words. "Cynia and the Hinterlight have been part of my operation for... well, it will be thirty years next spring. I can't bear the idea of sundering that arrangement, or the idea of having to find another shipmaster to trust. But the last few years have been difficult. She's spoken of breaking our contract?"
He shook his head. "Mistress Preest would never be so unprofessional. But her agreement with you and the ordos is up for renewal on the anniversary. She has mentioned that it might be time for a change. Time to return to free trading, perhaps in the Ophidian sub, where merchant business is said to be booming. Of course, she will miss the security of the ordos stipend and retainer fees."
"But not the danger?"
"Not the danger, no, sir."
"I understand how you feel," I said, turning my chair towards the nearest elevator.
"Me, sir? No, sir," he said. "The mistress has been hurt once, and perhaps has lost her nerve. I can sympathise. But a little ran up into Lucky Space, hunting for heretics? That sounds rather exciting to me."
The cabin, badly lit and untidy, was pretty much the only place in the Imperium Harlon Nayl thought of as home. In a long, bruising life extended by juvenat treatments - Nayl was just over a hundred, standard, but looked a robust late-thirties - he had known a number of homes. Loki - cold, hard, unforgiving Loki - was his birthworld, but he'd outstayed his welcome there pretty much the same day he decided to follow his brothers into the bounty-hunting business. Loki hadn't been home for a long time now. He'd wandered for some years, not so much in pursuit of work but because pursuit was his work. Then he'd crossed paths with an inquisitor called Eisenhorn.
As part of Eisenhorn's band, he'd had residence in a number of places, and remembered most fondly the Ocean House of Thracian Primaris and Eisenhorn's estate, Spaeton House, on Gudrun. Both of those were memories now, just as Eisenhorn himself was. No one had seen the inquisitor since the affair on Ghul back in the eighties. Nayl often wondered if Eisenhorn was dead. So many of them were from that time... Fischig, Aemos, Tobias Maxilla, Eleena Koi. That's what this life did: it killed you, sooner or later. Serve the ordos of the Holy Inquisition, and eventually that duty got you dead.
Nayl pressed the hatch-stud and closed the door behind him. He moved through the gloom, and snapped on a few glow-globes. A status monitor by the door showed a pulsing red light. They were warp-bound now. He'd felt the shudder.
His cabin was quite small and situated on the end of a corridor. The shipmistress had bequeathed an entire deck to Ravenor and his entourage as their own private, sovereign state. The Hinterlight's crew never came here, except by invitation. It was even off-limits to the cleaning servitors, which probably explained why his room smelled of socks.
To his left, in an alcove, an unmade bunk, surrounded by scattered clothes, data-slates and books. Various pict-shots decorated the wall over the cot like a shrine. Most of them were faded, the emulsion peeling. In the main part of the room stood a small table and three chairs, a codifier terminal linked to the vessel's data system, and a row of recessed cupboards built in between the bulkheads. To his right was the sliding door into the head and the upright washroom.
Nayl dropped his kitbag on the floor, where it became one of many. The main area was littered with equipment packs, rolled-up body gloves, boots, pieces of armour, tools, and various weapons that he really should have returned to the arsenal. One of these days he was going to get up in the night for a piss and tread on a loaded hand-cannon. Then he'd have to do some frigging explaining. And, most likely, go hunting for some missing toes.
Nayl wandered across to the bulkhead cupboards. He was limping. He ached. The free-for-all in the Carnivora had been less than fun. Reaching out to the cupboard latch, he noticed how skinned and raw his knuckles were. Grime-black, caked in dried blood, the calloused skin torn. He needed a shower. The effort didn't appeal to him.
He raised his left hand and held it out alongside his right. The missing finger seemed like a smack-in-the-mouth slur, an offensive lack. Ironic... that finger had once been his favourite insult. Now its very absence seemed obscene. All these frigging years, he been shot and stabbed and left for dead but he'd never lost a part of himself. It was like an omen. He'd never needed augmetics. He thought of Gregor Eisenhorn, replacing and supporting his battle-torn body bit by bit. Then - shit - he thought of Ravenor.
Was this where it started? Was this the beginning of the end? First a finger, then what? An arm? A leg? A major organ...
He'd liked that frigging finger. It had been on his top ten list of favourite fingers.
He poured himself a drink, amasec, from a bottle in the cupboard. It took him a while to find a glass, and longer to decide that the glass didn't actually have to be clean. Sipping it, he reached out to press the activator stud of the player unit in the cupboard. Nothing happened. So that's what that finger had been for. He used an existing finger this time, and low volume melodies flowed out into the cabin.
He'd have to go and see Antribus, get himself a new finger, augmetic, whatever and-
Nayl paused. Antribus? Ravenor's medicae was six years dead. One of Molotch's victims at Majeskus. The Hinterlight had a new medicae now. Nayl couldn't remember the fellow's name.
He sat down at the table, looking for a space to put his drink down. A carapace armour unit occupied most of the table top. He'd been repairing it on the way to Eustis Majoris, and the job was unfinished. He pushed aside powered drivers and stinky pots of lube.
The music was good. It was an old tile, one of his favourites. He hummed along, taking off his shoulder rig and disarming his pistol.
He took off his boots. He was hungry. He was sleepy. He was pissed off.
He was old.
He was thinking about the guests as he walked over to the bulkhead cupboards for a refill. He didn't li
ke it, not at all. Didn't like them. Something about them, probably no more than the fact they were intruding into his work, into the inquisitor's work. Kinsky was dangerous. The other two... who knew? Nayl reckoned he could take Ahenobarb out, if it came to it. Madsen, though. She was a blank page. And only the inquisitor could handle Kinsky.
He heard a little noise outside his cabin door. Just a little noise. A glance reminded him he'd left the hatch unlocked.
Nayl put down his drink and picked up a sleek Tronsvasse 38 from under a pile of soiled domes. Its tiny red tell-tale light showed it was loaded and armed.
He walked towards the door, gun raised, and popped the stud.
Zael as good as fell into the room.
"What the hell are you doing here?" Nayl asked.
"I got scared," the boy said.
A little amasec calmed him down. The drink made him flushed and smiley. He lolled on the edge of Nayl's bunk, holding the glass in both hands.
"What's this frigging music?" he asked.
"It's frigging bouzoukis playing frigging reels from my frigging homeworld," said Nayl from his seat at the table.
Zael thought about this. "It's a bit plinky-plunky, isn't it?"
"Not to me."
"Just saying."
"Don't."
"Okay."
The boy swung his legs and looked around.
"When do we set off?" he asked.
Nayl looked at him. "We've been in transit for about thirty minutes already."
"Oh."
"Didn't you feel the translation?"
"No. What was that, then?"
Nayl sighed. "The moment we went warp. A vibration? A shaking?"
"Oh, that's what it was. I thought-"
"Thought what?"
"Nothing."
"Thought what?"
Zael smiled a weak grin. "I thought it was withdrawal. I've been getting witchy-twitchy now and then." Nayl snorted and knocked back some drink.
"Where are we going?" Zael asked.
"Never you mind."
Zael pursed his lips and rocked back and forward. He looked around. "You've got a lot of guns in here."