The two men stood on a viewing platform with a semicircle of exhaust tubes half ringing like organ pipes, echoing the roar of the machinery deep beneath them and radiating dull heat. The air was close and smelled scorched; the valley’s permanent ceiling of black cloud and ash looked low enough to be scraped with the fingertips.
After a few more moments of surreptitiously watching the ensign, Mitrani tried again, with a carefully-judged change in tone.
“Are they even worth the trouble? Should you not treat the matter dismissively?” He weighed his words; they were well away from the arclight arrays of the central pyramids, and the perpetual twilight was making Petronas’ body language hard to read. “Perhaps the best punishment,” he went on, “would be to let them lose themselves in a substreet pit of Shexia?”
“They belong to the flotilla. They are its property, which is to say ours. I’ve been tasked to make sure they die as they were intended to, and to forfeit three square centimetres of skin from the back of each of my hands without numbing-drugs if I have not done so by the time we cast off for Hydraphur. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
Petronas untucked an infrascope from the oversized cuff of his elaborate uniform tunic and scanned the platform underneath them again. Mitrani thought he saw a slight tremor in the hand holding the scope that Petronas couldn’t quite control. Or maybe it was the heat-haze spoiling the infrared view of the platform that made him grunt with annoyance and stuff the scope crudely away again. Below them were bulky, prowling figures: troopers of the dock watch, loaned to Petronas by Second Dock-master Paich as a gesture of goodwill to his distinguished clients. When Mitrani had been placed in charge of keeping the flotilla officers happy, he had not seen this coming.
As they stood amid the rumble and the low red light, a pair of prop-carriers passed overhead and by their lights Mitrani saw Petronas scrub a hand over his eyes and face. His shoulders slumped for a moment, and then he gasped in a lungful of the smoky air and snapped himself back to attention when he remembered he was sharing the platform with someone else. In the better light the orbit-clerk got his best look at the ensign’s face since they had left the ornithopter: pale dun eyes, lantern jaw, a birthmark curling under one side of the mouth. It wasn’t hard to see where the tears from Petronas’ eyes had left marks down both his cheeks. Despite the ensign’s crude attempts, their tracks were still as clear to read as the cocktail of expressions he was trying to hide. Agonised frustration, grief, and poisonous rage.
During his career Mitrani had encountered behaviour that he understood in a cerebral way but knew he could never fully feel in his guts. He knew about the intensity of emotions within families, and there were times when he had visited client ships and seen families together that made his own feelings ring like a bell, but he himself had been taken from a foundry crèche at five to begin his conditioning and could not imagine what such a life might be like from the inside.
Master Paich liked to amuse himself by locking Mitrani away by himself every so often, where the lack of human company was torture as the clerk’s heightened social cognition starved for input. Each of the nights that he wept himself to sleep in an empty room, Mitrani knew it amused Paich to see how much isolation hurt him. But that was not the same thing as knowing what made such casual cruelty so appealing. Mitrani had tried to imagine inflicting cruelty on another person and the thought had revolted him.
So it was easy for him to know what the ensign was feeling, but Karmine Mitrani was still trying to understand how that meshed with his words when there was a shout below.
“Hear that?” cried Petronas. “The lift-platform, they’re trying to get down the shaft! Run, come on! I knew the little bitches couldn’t have gone far!”
The metal lattice under their feet rattled as Petronas bolted across the platform and down the narrow stairs. Mitrani, wishing not for the first time that he had not drawn this assignment, picked up the hem of his ash-coat and ran after him.
The Callyac’s Promise,
Docking orbit, Shexia
They never talked about the little vault in the depths of the Callyac’s Promise as a conference chamber. The conference chamber was where old Hoyyon had called them together to wait upon him, the place where all their advice had to be pitched to his ears, the place where they all were required to begin every meeting standing in stylised positions around Phrax’s throne so as to reproduce exactly the earliest known painting of a Phrax delivering orders to his underlings. As the whims of traders went that had not been the worst, and it had been bearable while Hoyyon had been younger and lucid and still full of steel, but as he had aged the conferences had changed, and not for the better.
So now they met here instead, a little room where the truth was told between colleagues and equals. None of the masters brought in their retainers, none attempted formal greetings or rites. They all understood that the flotilla required traditions and ceremonies—but occasionally it also required this.
“Have we got the last of them yet?” Halpander asked. He was the flotilla’s Master of Logistics, the controller of provisions, loading, unloading, crewing, repairs. Things being out of place bothered him.
“We haven’t had the final report yet, but it won’t be long,” answered Kyorg. Kyorg controlled the Office of Envoys aboard the Arrow of Magritta, supervising diplomacy with whatever authorities the flotilla was required to deal with. Most of the others had a low opinion of him: as rogue trader, Hoyyon had been his own figurehead and first envoy and had left Kyorg with little more than formalities to take care of. With Hoyyon dead, Kyorg had shown little inclination to pick up the slack, and always had a delegate to blame for anything that went wrong. “I gave Rachen the job of getting authorisation to hunt them down and he said the dockmasters had waved us in and given us a clerk to help it all go smoothly. I think he sent an ensign down to finish it off. I’m sure they’ve got it in hand.” The others around the circle exchanged glances.
“We must have the full account of the escape documented for punishment and suppression, too. And quickly.” That was the papery voice of Mistress Zanti, skin as white as her tunic and eyes as black as her skirt and shawl. The grey silk scarf over her head showed the outlines of the ridges of data-sockets that covered it from ear to ear. Zanti had the unusual ability to genuinely unnerve most of the flotilla masters: she was as cool, ruthless and unerringly precise in her thoughts as one of the logic engines she presided over. Her craft, the Kortika, was the newest of the flotilla, added seventy-eight years before, all from the way she had built up her own agencies and her own turf. Nobody could remember the last time someone had become that powerful in the flotilla through nothing but their own efforts. “I have not ordered the eidetor-savants to begin the scribing processes yet,” she went on, “and I will not do so until I can know that they can record that the escapees were brought home and their accomplices punished.” Such a statement in such a tone should have been grossly out of line for someone in Zanti’s position, and it was a measure of the force of her personality that the rest of them simply stared at their fingernails or at the table.
“We have managed our affairs for centuries, I think we all know,” put in Gait smoothly after the silence had stretched out for several minutes. “This is an unfortunate untidiness that will soon be over, and which I am sure we do not need to spend any more time on. Perhaps the charged situation we have found ourselves in since the death of our old trader is persuading us that such setbacks are larger than they are?” Looking around the table, he saw that he had hit on it. They had spent so much time on the minutiae of the escape because no one wanted to come out and say what they knew they were all here for.
Gait had been Hoyyon Phrax’s majordomo, his master of chambers. Officially he was probably the least powerful man in the room, even with the fluid, personality-driven way that the flotilla masters measured rank, but in personal terms he had been closer to the old man than any of them. So, he supposed, it came down to him.
&nb
sp; “It’s time we admitted it,” he said. “Not all of you may know how strongly the feeling runs, but I have spoken now to every one of you and I know that all of us here feel the same way.”
He watched them look at each other. The masters of the Phrax flotilla were tough and seasoned. They had been in their jobs for decades at the least; many could remember a change of trader, some of them two. Between them they had seen the flotilla through warp-tempests, radiation and meteor storms, excursions into wild space and through Imperial interdicts, pirate ambushes and xenos raids, the attentions of rival rogue traders and rare internal intrigues.
They had even bluffed, connived or deceived, or on one occasion outright assassinated, their way through clashes with Imperial governors, the Adeptus and the Inquisition. But the introverted little microculture of the flotilla could be oddly sensitive about certain things. Like…
“The matter of the succession.” It was no surprise that the voice was that of D’Leste, the man with whom Gait had spent the most time in secret talks. A squat man with the craggy red face of a brewhouse thug and the deft hands of a born surgeon, D’Leste commanded the flotilla’s Apothecarion and had been Hoyyon Phrax’s personal physician. “More specifically, the matter of the heir.” (There were uncomfortable stirrings around the table, but no one contradicted him. Gait would not have allowed the subject to come up had he not made sure that everyone at the meeting would hear the matter out. But they went one better.
“Phrax the Younger. Varro Phrax.” Behaya’s thin, mobile face and reedy voice always made her seem nervous, even when she was simply thinking aloud as now. Her title, according to the old and quaintly-worded flotilla documentation, was “Supervisor of Pertinent Bodies and Labours”, she was universally addressed by the shorthand title of “Crewmistress”.
“I suppose we’ve all had time by now to form an opinion of him.” Behaya had charge of the network of “friends and correspondents”, as the flotilla referred to its spies and informants through the major systems of a dozen sectors. The responsibility had technically been Kyorg’s, but he had been outwitted by Behaya and had lost the responsibility to her after he had not displayed the wit or ambition to retain it. By that stage Hoyyon had been entering his final illness and one of the first things Behaya had done with her new powers was to establish a dossier on Varro Phrax. Neither she nor any of the other flotilla masters had liked what they had heard.
“The man’s useless,” ventured Trazelli, the flotilla’s captain-at-arms, once again voicing the room’s opinion.
“I don’t remember him as a child the way I suppose some of you do, but let’s be honest, we’ve all read the reports from Behaya’s people. The little wastrel’s done nothing but drift and spend since he parted ways with his father. No stomach for the role. Oh, I don’t doubt he’s got a gut hanging to his knees, but no stomach for the role.” That was what passed for humour with Trazelli. The others ignored it.
“I do remember Varro as a child,” said Gait. “He left the flotilla at ten. His father thought it would do him good to grow up on Gunarvo. There was talk at the time of a major migration into the worlds beyond it in the Deunoff Subsector after the second Hadekuro Crusade cleared the orks out. Full Imperial colonisation and reconstruction edicts, very profitable for rogue traders providing we moved in time. Hoyyon wanted to make sure there was a way in for us if we needed it, so he left Varro and his mother there so the boy could grow up making some good contacts.”
“He’s wasted his life, then,” snapped Zanti. “Literally.” One of the things she also handled was the flotilla’s contracts and commercial bonds; if anything at all had come of the Deunoff Sub she would have known it.
“Admittedly it’s been forty years,” said Gait as though he had not been interrupted, “but I remember Varro as being a very… passive boy. He wasn’t short on brain, and he seemed to like pleasing his father, but I watched him carefully and I never saw him with that light in his eyes. Never saw him want to reach out and clutch something and change it.”
“A withdrawn little man, would you say?” asked Halpander.
“Not as a child, no. In fact, I remember him as not being shy in making use of the finer things we provided him with. No qualms about making sure his life was good.”
“Has that changed?” Zanti asked Behaya.
“Not at all,” the crewmistress answered. “He and his mother became quite the darlings of Gunarvo, by all accounts. That push into the Deunoff sub never came about, but Gunarvo grew prosperous anyhow. And Hoyyon made sure Varro and his mother were very well set up to begin with—he wanted them sought after so they could get established in the right kind of way. Pity we never got around to going back there, really. We might have made a difference.”
Zanti flicked her hand as though she could physically brush the irrelevant thoughts away.
“So it’s out in the open, then, isn’t it?” she said. “We don’t want him. We’re without a trader and in the shit, because our trader-in-waiting is an indolent little playboy who’s going to come on board with favourites he’s built up after forty years of being allowed to indulge himself.”
More thoughtful silence.
“We were not always a flotilla,” said Gait, who had often heard Hoyyon talking about this. “We were a single, small ship. Then we were two, then three, and as the line of Phrax built itself it built us. But how many times have we talked about this? How many of us have not had the dream that our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren will not be masters of a flotilla but of an armada? Other rogue traders have commanded them. Is the Phrax Charter not the equal of any and the superior of most?”
“I know what our charter says,” said Kyorg, as if everyone else didn’t. “It might let us look down our nose at the Imperium, Gait, but it won’t let us spit in their eye. Remember those craters on the Bassaan? Our trips back to Hydraphur are the one time when we’re really under the Adeptus’ thumb. We don’t get to pick and choose which successions we like and which we don’t. The charter says that—”
“Thanks, Kyorg, we follow you.” D’Leste cut him off with little grace. “We know this is not a good succession. We have had bad successions before. There are sometimes ways around them, but not this time. Varro’s not old, so just dropping out of communication for however long it takes him to die and blaming it on a warp storm won’t work.”
“We did that?” asked Halpander.
“Succession of Saitiri Phrax from his brother Rukkman, 347.M37.” said Zanti. “The fleet wasn’t able to reach Hydraphur until after Saitiri had passed away. His daughter Mietta succeeded.”
“Letting Varro succeed and simply running him as we run… as we administer the fleet in the temporary absence of a trader is not an option either,” said D’Leste. “I won’t bother with details now, but it’s clear from Behaya’s reports if you want to read them. He’s not the man Hoyyon was, but he’s no pliant little custard-brained figurehead, either. He’d fight us if we tried anything. Even if we kept control, the flotilla might not last in any form we recognise.”
“You and Gait seem pretty confident you know your succession problem inside and out,” said Kyorg, giving D’Leste an appraising look. “If I said ‘I suppose you have an answer for us too’, would I regret it?”
D’Leste’s and Gait’s eyes met, and the same thought was in both of them. There was no point in dancing around it any longer. D’Leste fingered an amulet at his throat and the room lights dimmed; a holo-cage of tiny wires hissed down from the ceiling to hang in the air and wove a net of light-threads that grew into a picture. A holo-pict of a young man’s head, pale dun eyes, a lantern jaw, a birthmark curling under one side of the mouth, the collar of an ensign’s tunic just visible where the picture truncated.
“Well then,” said D’Leste, “I would like to move the discussion on. And so here, my colleagues, is our subject.”
Foundry level,
Shexia City, Shexia
The alley they had found themselves in wa
s a hewsink, which came from “HW-sink”, which came from “human-waste sink.” The human waste was humans themselves, outcasts whose age or injuries stopped them working in the foundries, and who had so far eluded the Urban Purity Patrols who chased unproductive citizens out into the sewage marshes to die. As the pursuit party stampeded down the narrow space the shadows around them were full of furtive shapes slipping between the pipes and pylons—in a hewsink, if you saw a weapon or a uniform you ran without another thought. As Mitrani gritted his teeth and followed the troopers through the slipper muck underfoot, he could hear scuffles breaking out behind him as the braver outcasts emerged again to fight over food scraps or heat-taps abandoned in the rush.
Underneath the ash and warm mud the alley floor was a bundle of broad pipes with not even a grid laid over them, and Petronas and Mitrani both found themselves slipping and stumbling. The troopers, who had the advantage of cleated boots and experience moving around the lower levels, were pulling ahead of them, and that meant that they were drawing closer to their quarry. Mitrani’s guts knotted at the sound of a woman’s voice, a young one, sobbing out prayers and pleas ahead of them.
The alley suddenly dipped down into a slope and zigged through a ninety-five degree turn. Their quarry was already through it and the troopers’ laughing and calling to one another as though they were on a treasure hunt, rounded it easily. Petronas, just behind them, skated on the ash-mud and clanged into the pipes in front of him, then went down on one knee, cursing, as he tried to pull away from the hot metal and unholster his pistol at the same time. Mitrani, almost piling into him, saw the pistol come out and before he could help himself blurted “oh no”.
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 5