by Dan Abnett
She looked up through the hole, aiming her light.
"Oh, Holy Throne..." she said.
"Plyton?" her vox-link buzzed. "Plyton, what can you see?"
"Another ceiling, sir," she said. "Like the man said. A whole other dome above this one. It extends... Throne, I can't see how far. So old, so very old..."
Golden images, figures, faces, intagliated beams, lapis lazuli and pure selpic, ornate lettering in traced silver, lines and constellations, a hint of some vast organised chart that covered the ceiling.
"Plyton? Maud?"
"Sir, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
SEVEN
Two days after Carl's successful penetration of the Informium Depository, my team took up occupation of a rented townhouse in the ninth ward of Formal E.
The house was called Miserimus, and it was a dank, sulking manse of rain-eaten ouslite and formstone that stood in a quiet up-stack neighbourhood of private gardens and secluded mansions.
The lease was acquired in the name of Morten Narvon. The forename was that of a childhood friend of Nayl's, the family name that of the first boy Kara had kissed. Carl Thonius' devious concealed graft program had done the rest, including transferring down-payment from an obscured account to the rental guild. Hidden within the Informium's data-core, the graft program could now provide anything we needed, not falsified but genuinely created by the unimpeachable archive of all records. It was superb work, but I think none of us showed proper appreciation to Carl. It was the sort of thing we expected from him. He remained sullen and unhappy about the way things had gone.
The empty halls and chambers of the unfurnished townhouse were cold and unfamiliar, but it was a home of sorts, a safe house. We settled in. Carl and Patience went out and purchased some simple items of furniture to make it liveable. They used false names and false accounts provided by the graft. In those first few days, that became the game. My friends would sit around and dream up alter egos, and Carl would tap his codifier, send them through the Informium's data-wash, and make them real. It cheered him up somewhat to amuse the others with his skill.
There was a tension however. An apprehension about the task ahead. We had names, most of which Skoh had provided: Akunin, Vygold, Marebos, Foucault, Strykson, Braeden. Each one the shipmaster of a rogue trader. Each one a member of the Contract Thirteen cartel.
"Search them down." I told Carl. "Find out if any are logged as on planet. Find me backgrounds and trade histories. Find me connections. What links them?"
Carl nodded.
"You have the Informium at your disposal now, Carl. The central registry of data in this subsector. And you can use it to sift and search it invisibly. Do so."
Carl had set up in the east bedroom, his equipment resting on packing cases. His cogitators had a vapour link to the local wireless mast (registered, via the graft, to an invented rickshaw firm) and dry ground splices to the main civic data conduits in the street outside, courtesy of a midnight pavement excavation by Nayl and Zeph. He also had click-links to the municipal vox system and landlines.
"What else am I looking for?" he asked.
"Links to the Ministry of Subsector Trade." I replied. "Anything fuzzy, anything irregular. Jader Trice especially. We can't be sure, but there's a better than good chance he knew he was sending us downriver into a death trap when he teamed us with his agents last year. Who knows? Trice may be clean and the conspiracy might be operating at a level below him. But I met him and I doubt it. By the same token, look upwards."
"At the lord governor?"
"At the lord governor. If Barazan himself is involved, I need to know as soon as possible. It makes our action here so much harder if this rot has spread to the very top."
"I'll get to work," Carl said.
"One last thing," I said. "See what you can recover concerning the Divine Fratery."
Carl nodded again. I'd told him everything about the warning my once-mentor Eisenhorn had delivered on Malinter, six months earlier. Thorn had been quite specific. The Divine Fratery, a cult of seers based on Nova Durma, who delighted in farseeing the future and then manipulating it to their own dark ends, had seen something - a prospect - that concerned either me or one of my team. We would awaken something here on Eustis Majoris before the end of the year, which was just a few short months away now, and the Imperium would pay dearly for that mistake. The danger went by the name of Slyte or Sleight or Sleet or something of that form. I hated farseers. I'd done enough farseeing myself in my early days with the eldar to know that way led only to madness.
I was also concerned about the Cognitae connection. The Cognitae was - is - a cult school for genius heretical minds ran nearly a century before by a witch named Lilean Chase. My nemesis, the now-dead Zygmunt Molotch, had been a pupil of that school. Though shut down, its hand was in everything, stirring, tainting, fiddling. So many of its brethren were out there, unrecognised. I had encountered a shipmaster on my way into Lucky Space, a man named Siskind. He had been of the Cognitae bloodline, and his cousin, Kizary Thekla, master of the Oktober Country, had been the primary architect of our fate at Bonner's Reach.
Although deceased, one member of the Contract Thirteen cartel had enjoyed strong Cognitae associations. It made me worry. Were we entering a war as bloody and deceitful as the campaign we had waged against the bastard Molotch?
I left Carl to his work, and glided along the empty halls of the townhouse. In one room, I saw Kara working out against a makeshift punch bag. Her compact, voluptuous body was clad only in tight shorts and a vest, and it moved wonderfully as she slammed blow after blow at the target. I so resented my enclosed state.
Nearby, Wystan Frauka was asleep on a window seat. I pinched my mind and extinguished his still-burning lho-stick as I slid past. In the next room, Kys and Zeph sat either side of an upturned box and played regicide. Kys was laughing coyly. I sensed how much she was attracted to Mathuin, and how little of that infatuation he realised.
In the next room down the hall, Harlon Nayl, stripped to the waist, was standing before a trestle table on which the tools of his trade were laid out. Autoguns, laspistols, bolters, sense-rifles, grenades, daggers and estocs, throwing darts, revolvers, pump-guns, sting-blunts, synapse disruptors, ammo drums, mags, individual loads, a matched pair of fighting poniards, a longlas, an Urdeshi-made assault weapon.
I watched him as he selected each weapon in turn, spun it, slammed home a clip, aimed, dry-fired, then unloaded swiftly and cleaned. It was like watching a conjurer at work, a cardsharp. So smooth, so deft. So certain. He reached down and grabbed a twinned set of nine mil Hostec 5 autos, burnished in gold, raised, them, one in each hand, spun them forward, spun them back-Click! Clack! Click! - smacked them into grip, forward spun them again and then set them down.
I wasn't the only one watching. In the corner of the room, I spied Zael. He was staring in awe at Nayl's activities.
"What do they do?" he asked.
"The 5's? They kill folk."
"How?"
"Your basic squeeze and forget. Self-aiming. One touch drains the clip. Here's the slide, see?"
"Where?"
Nayl beckoned him over and racked back the top of one of the golden pistols. "See, the ejector port here? The safety? Here's where the mag loads in..."
I left them to their study.
One final room to visit, and I did so only with my mind. The "guest bedroom". Locked, the room was bare except for a wooden chair in the middle of the room. Skoh sat on the chair, his wrists manacled, and the manacles secured by a long chain to an iron peg Mathuin had secured through a floor joist. The chain gave him enough slack to walk around the chair, or lie down beside it on a blanket. The window, the door and the walls were out of reach.
We checked on him regularly. He never seemed to do anything except sleep, or sit silently on the chair, staring at the wall. It was tempting to think he was broken and harmless. But Skoh was a huntsman, one of the very best, and that meant he excelled at stillness and patien
ce.
I knew he was only waiting for us to make a mistake.
My link bipped. It was Carl.
"Tchaikov," he said. "Keeps coming up. If not banker to the cartel, then money launderer at the very least."
"We thought as much. Can we get anything on her?"
"No, it's a dead connect. I can't hack her systems. We'll have to face-to-face with her."
"Understood."
"She fronts a fabric import place in Formal K."
"Then that's where we'll go. But we have to be careful."
"Careful. I couldn't agree more."
Carl and I had not been idle during our months spent in transit aboard Unwerth's vessel. We had been preparing the ground, investigating, searching data, developing evidence. All inquisitors do this. If they tell you they don't, they're either lying or incompetent. I know for a fact my old mentor Eisenhorn would spend months, years sometimes, locking together the intricate webs of data that supported his investigations. Any effort of the Inquisition founders immediately if the ground is not well prepared.
I had a back-file of data on Contract Thirteen that filled twenty-six slates. Carl and I charted the threads together on a tri-D strategium that Fyflank rigged up in the belly hold of the Arethusa. Such an obedient, capable creature, that man-hound. I am sure Unwerth underestimates him.
Two light-days out from Eustis Majoris, Carl and I finally settled on our preferred strategy. The names, the places, the links. Where we would look first. As an analogy, imagine a verthin nest. You know the thing - that great hummock of chewed material, populated by a billion billion stinging insects. Stick a probe in, dig it in, and you'll be stung badly by a swarm of soldier verthin, most of which you have no business with. Petropolis is like that. You need to be delicate, careful, extend your probes without hostility into the bowels to get results.
There has to be a careful process of enquiry and inspection, divulging secrets without the keepers of those secrets knowing you've exposed them. Delicacy is the key.
That's why we had the strategy. None of us wanted to get stung.
We would put it together, carefully, piece by piece.
Now Tchaikov seemed to be the first.
The hard-nose round struck a steel cabinet, glanced off, and started to tumble. It passed through a stack of files on the nearby desk and hit Harlon Nayl in the upper left arm, deformed and flat-on.
There was a puff of blood and a spatter of meat and Nayl started to fall, growling in pain.
So much for bloody careful.
"You snotwipe," spat Patience Kys and pinned the moody hammer's neck to the doorpost with two kineblades.
Dying, twitching, he dropped the autopistol, blue smoke still spilling from its muzzle.
Nayl came up behind the desk, his left arm streaming with blood, and fired his Tronsvasse Heavy twice. A second hammer folded and fell hard as he came in through the door.
"We've started something." Nayl grimaced.
"No, d'you think?" Kys replied.
Las-rounds started to whip down the hallway outside. They broke in blossoms of orange flame as they impacted.
+Where's Tchaikov?+
"No, honestly, I'm fine thanks." Nayl growled, returning fire on auto. His weapon made a dull, dead sound in the enclosed chamber.
"I've got her." Kara reported.
She was in the corridor outside, overlooking the vast loading bay of the fabric importer warehouse, high in stack 567 of Formal K. There was the tiny, round-shouldered figure of Tchaikov, scurrying away under escort to a waiting flier. Already, the massive exit hatch of the bay was winching open on thick, caternary chains.
Kara leapt off the balcony into the bay, somersaulting, an Urdeshi machine pistol in each hand.
She was firing before she even landed. Her caseless rounds stripped through the hammers around Tchaikov, bursting blood steam into the cold air of the dock, dropping them like stones.
Tchaikov turned.
She was tall, her black hair pinned in a bun, her face sheathed behind a molidiscu mask of silver velvet. She wore a long gown of embroidered ordskin that swirled around her like gleaming smoke as she faced Kara. Gold and red and pamaganter. Her long legs were bound in white linen, her feet arched high on brass clogs.
"Face to face," Kara said, tossing the empty machine pistols away to either side so they slithered across the deck. "And research says...?"
+Carl is sure her favoured weapon is the litoge whip.+
"Let's hope Carl's right." Kara replied, drawing the shivered sword sheathed over her back.
The sword had been mine - when I'd been a wielder of such hand weapons - long ago. Forged so hard by the hammers of master smiths, the blade had been knocked slightly sideways in time, so it resonated and shivered against the mundane now.
A beautiful weapon, and Kara Swole was beautiful enough to wield it.
Tchaikov produced her weapon. A litoge whip, just as Carl had predicted. Eight metres of thin, coiling, sentient iron, manufactured by an abominable race who dwelt deep in the outworlds.
The winding length of the whip curled in the air and flew at Kara, hungry.
She swept up with the sword, and took a metre off the whip. The cut length fell to the deck, its fused end fizzling.
Tchaikov cried out and lashed again. Another two metres of living metal flew away, smouldering at the cut.
Tchaikov ripped out yet again with her truncated weapon, and this time the shorn tip glanced away from Kara's block.
"Got anything else, bitch?" Kara said, her hand braced on the raised shivered sword.
Tchaikov dropped the litoge whip. It fell dead on the deck.
She turned and reached a hand out towards the open hatchway of her flier.
A sword flew into her grasp. It was a power-weapon, the blade wide and long, the grip double-handed, keyed to her response. Even from a distance, I could smell and taste its thirst. Blood. It was vampire steel, hungry and insolent.
"I have this, bitch." Tchaikov replied, and executed a flourish with the blade.
Holding her shivered sword up in her right hand, Kara beckoned with the fingers of her left.
"Then let's go," she said.
"Well, this is unexpectedly annoying." Carl Thonius said.
"What is?" I asked.
"This," he said, indicating the engraved glass cube sitting on the top of an otherwise plain burrwood desk in Tchaikov's private quarters.
"Oh, good." I replied. "For a moment I thought you were still banging on about the slight tear in your furnzi mantle."
He looked wounded, and glanced sadly at the pulled threads on the hem of his expensive, fur-lined cape. He'd caught it on a doorpost coming in.
"Well, that is a dreadful crime. I love this mantle so. But I had put it out of my mind and moved on to other doings. How shallow do you think I am?"
"Want me to answer that?" I replied. "We're raiding a premises, and you come dressed up for a gaudy night."
Carl adored fine clothes, and prided himself on his turn-out. For this endeavour, where the rest of the team were wearing bodygloves and wire armour, he'd chosen the mantle, a silk blouse embroidered with silver thread, perskin pantaloons and little slippers of gold crepe.
"You can talk," he said. "You got dressed up too."
It was true. I had. I was waring Zeph Mathuin. My physical form was a considerable distance away, in Miserimus House, watched over by Wystan and Zael. My mind had possessed Mathuin's body for the duration of the mission.
Waring is a skilful, strange activity. I am able to ware almost anyone, though the level of trauma for both me and the subject increases dramatically if they are unwilling. I hardly ever used Nayl, Kys or Carl this way, except in emergencies: it was too much like hard work. Kara was more pliant, though waring left her weary and strung out. For some reason, Zeph was the most usable candidate in my team. I could slip in and out of his mind with a minimum of pain. He never objected. It was one of the reasons he remained in my employ.
&
nbsp; Waring gave me a physical presence I otherwise lacked, and the opportunity to empty the skills and talents of the subject directly. Zeph Mathuin was a tall and powerful man, an ex-bounty hunter like Nayl. His skin was dark, and his black hair tightly braided out down his back. His eyes were little unreadable coals of red-hard light. His left hand was a polished chrome augmetic tool. He was a mystery, his past a secret, a blank. Even from inside his mind, I knew little about him expect that which he was prepared to tell me. I never probed. Mathuin worked for me because he liked the work and he was good at it. He could keep his secrets: that was all that mattered.
Clothed in his flesh, I felt strong and vital. I felt the weight of his leather stormcoat hanging from his shoulders, I felt the solidity of the matt-black Bakkhaus laspistol in his right hand, I felt the beat of his heart as if it were my own.
"What is it?" I asked, gesturing with Mathuin's hand at the cube.
"Unless I'm mistaken - which I'm not - it's a gullivat riddle box. Rare. Priceless, actually. It explains a lot."
"I'm glad. Now you explain a lot."
Thonius shrugged. "It explains why we're here. We were forced to mount this raid because I couldn't hook in to Tchaikov's data systems covertly from outside. Couldn't get a line, not even the whiff of data heat. This is why. She doesn't use a data system."
"Not at all?"
"You see any cogitators? Any codifiers? Any data engines at all?"
He was right. The room was devoid of any computation devices. There wasn't even any electrical wiring, no ports, no vox links, nothing. Tchaikov ran her entire operation on paper, the old-fashioned way. There was nothing that could be hacked or broken into.
"She's from Punzel. They pride themselves on mental rigour there, the old ways. Didn't you see the abacus frames the warehouse stackers were using as we came in?"
I had.
"Plus, of course, the records suggest Tchaikov was Cognitae-trained. The Cognitae use machines as little as possible, preferring to trust their own minds."
"Indeed."
"We could take her paper files - if we had a bulk lifter - and check through them, but I can tell you now, they'd only be legit accounts and manifests. Her secrets are in here. Stored in a non-electronic format."