by Dan Abnett
‘That little shit. He made me feel this big, and–’
‘Because you weren’t introduced,’ said Carl quietly. He was sitting on a couch in the bay window of the chamber, admiring the new rings on his hand. The winter night ticked and rattled at the window panes behind him.
‘I’ve half a mind to go back there and shove a kineblade up his arse,’ Kys growled.
‘Half a mind is all you’ll need for that,’ said Ballack, overhearing her as he walked in from the adjoining room. ‘We have to be careful.’
Kys turned slowly and glared at the interrogator. In the two months he’d been with them, he’d shown an unfailing ability to wind her up.
She felt sorry for him, of course. Ballack had been through an ordeal, and he’d lost the hand, after all. He’d also shown creditable initiative bringing the whole matter to Ravenor. Still, he was, as Kara might say, a smug little ninker when all was said and done, and far too pretty for his own good, with that long white hair and those ion-drive blue eyes.
For once, he seemed to notice her displeasure. ‘Sorry, Kys,’ he said. ‘That was rude of me. It’s just... sometimes I’m very aware that I’m risking my entire career doing this. No offence, sir.’
‘None taken,’ Ravenor replied, his voice issuing as an electronic monotone from his chair. ‘We’re all risking our careers.’
No one spoke for a moment. The fire crackled in the grate and warmed the room, part of a rented suite in Berynth high-hive. The floor was a checkerboard of brown and cream wooden tiles, the walls panelled in dark umwood. The fireplace was an extraordinary frame porcelain inlaid with silver and nacrous shell. The logs spat and coughed. Kys, Ballack and Thonius reflected quietly on their situation, each in their own way. Patience wondered what depth of worry knotted in Ravenor’s mind.
+I realised why Stine’s reaction upset me so,+ she sent.
+Go on.+
+It wasn’t that he made me feel like a criminal. It was that I am a criminal and he forced me to realise what that means. Everything I’ve ever done in your service, Gideon, I’ve done in the knowledge that I’m serving the Emperor’s ultimate will, but there’s no legitimacy any more.’+
+There will be. I will make the ordos understand why I’ve had to take this course. We will have our sanction.+
+But there isn’t any right now.+
The chair swung around from the fireplace and faced the three of them. They all looked up respectfully. ‘I’ve said it before, but for the record, let me repeat... when we’re done, I will bring us to Myzard. To Rorken, if necessary. I will make account, and I will take the reprimand.’
‘I wonder who they’ll send after us?’ Carl mused, admiring his rings again. He looked up at Ravenor. ‘I mean, they’re bound to send someone, right?’
Ballack sat down on a tub chair. ‘Lilith. Myzard will send Lilith and a team. Lilith Abfequarn is good. She already has a black notation rating. We can only hope she doesn’t have the first clue where to start looking. That means, we can’t make a scene.’
He looked pointedly at Kys.
‘Fair point. It’s been made already. No one needs to tell me again,’ Patience replied. ‘So, Carl? Where do we find this agent?’
Thonius was about to reply when the apartment’s outer hatch slid open. Patience saw how quickly – how nervously – Ballack rose and placed his good hand on the grip of his pistol.
It was Maud Plyton. A version of Maud Plyton, at least. She looked strange, buttoned into a long gown of Parsiji lace and deep green silk. The material strained and bulged voluptuously. Her cropped hair and heavy make-up created the unfortunate suggestion of a man in drag. ‘Nice to see you too,’ she sneered at Ballack, seeing his hand on his gun.
‘Not had a good day, Maud?’ asked Kys.
Maud flopped down heavily on the nearest couch and yanked off her high, feminine shoes. She’d borrowed them from Kara and they didn’t fit well. Her feet were sore. ‘Bastard things!’ she declared as she tossed them over the back of the couch. ‘I’m sorry to say,’ she said, ‘I got nothing.’
‘It’s all right, Maud,’ Ravenor replied, ‘we have a lead now.’
‘Oh, good,’ Plyton replied, getting up. In one, ungainly upward drag, she wrenched her expensive dress off over her head. The dress was another lend from Kara, tight and too short for Maud Playton’s frame. She wriggled the dress off her arms, and headed out of the room in her support hose and whalebone corsetry. There was a considerable sense of pneumatic tension. ‘Thank Throne that’s off! It was throttling me. I don’t do posh.’
‘You do it very well,’ said Ravenor.
Plyton grunted dismissively from the next room and called out, ‘I do undercover all right, but that was not a bit of me. I haven’t had that many unfamiliar hands in my chest area since I was last assigned to vice.’
‘Well, fancy,’ said Carl.
Plyton stuck her head back around the door, and then lifted one arm and sniffed her armpit. ‘And I stink. That’s not high-class, is it?’
‘I can’t begin to tell you,’ Carl said.
‘Is there a drink going?’ Maud asked.
‘I’ll get you one,’ said Ballack.
‘Help me unlace this bastard corsetry, someone. I beg you. Preferably you, Patience, seeing as it’s yours. ‘
Smiling, Kys walked across the room and followed Plyton into the adjoining chamber. Plyton leaned forward and Kys started to untie the laces. It was a struggle.
‘Emperor help me, I can’t breathe. How do you wear this stuff, Kys?’
‘Well,’ said Patience smoothly.
‘Here’s that drink,’ said Ballack, appearing in the doorway with a glass. He hovered.
‘Here. In my hand!’ Plyton said. ‘I can’t reach it when you’re standing over there.’
‘I was just... mindful of your...’
‘I’m sure I haven’t got anything you haven’t seen before,’ Plyton said.
‘No, just a little more of it.’
‘Oh, you wish!’ mocked Plyton, taking the drink and sipping. ‘Yum, lovely.’
‘If anyone gets to go back to Stine and Stine,’ Kys called out, tugging at the corset laces, ‘it’s going to be me. ‘
‘I was hoping to participate myself,’ said Ballack. He had returned to the fireside in the neighbouring room, and was trying to secure his long white hair into a pony tail. It was a hard feat to accomplish with just one hand. Evisorex had severed his left hand cleanly, and his wrist stump was sealed in a black leather nub packed with micro healing systems. It would be another month at least before it was ready for an augmetic graft. ‘I really would like to serve, sir,’ he said. ‘I want to be useful.’
‘The pair of you, then,’ said Ravenor. ‘If that’s all right with you, Carl?’
Thonius shrugged. ‘I’m happy.’ He rose to his feet. ‘Can I help you with that, Gall?’
‘Thank you,’ Ballack replied. Carl began to comb Ballack’s mane with his fingers to tie it up.
‘We’ll wait for the others to return,’ said Ravenor. ‘You can get started in the morning.’
‘So what’s keeping Nayl?’ grimaced Plyton as Kys slowly released her torso from its confinement.
Sleet whipped against the windowpanes of the ground level hangar. The work crews had gone for the day, and the underboats sat in their ice pool like grey sea beasts, sleeping. Only a few spotlights shone down from the iron gantries.
Angharad made a soft noise like a sigh and rolled off him. They lay together in the dark for a while listening to the patter of sleet.
‘I’m glad you lived,’ Nayl said.
‘That’s a funny thing to say,’ she replied, turning her shoulder against his chest.
‘Is it?’
‘Obvious then. You didn’t need to say it. I felt how glad you were. Right then.’
‘We should get back,’ said Nayl.
‘Is that thing really necessary?’ she asked, nodding to the little psyk-block unit beside them.
> ‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s hard to explain. Ravenor... I don’t want to hurt him.’
‘Hurt him?’
‘You’re so like Arianhrod.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Forget it. Trust me. I’ve come to know how hard it must be for Gideon to be the way he is. He’s human, after all.’
‘He has his mind.’
‘Yes, but he has his memories. It’s just a feeling I get.’
‘That he wouldn’t approve?’
‘Maybe. It’d be like rubbing his face in it. If he had a face.’
It was warm and dark under the vent panels. They’d made a bed of cold weather furs from a locker.
‘We should go,’ she said. She rose in one fluid motion, and began to look for her clothes. She was silhouetted against the bay’s lamplight for a moment.
He looked at her. ‘Maybe another five minutes won’t hurt,’ he said.
Three
Waiting made Kara Swole tense, and tension gave her a headache. At least, she hoped it was the tension. She didn’t want to think about the other possibility.
She was alone on the Arethusa’s main bridge, nominally on watch, although there was little to watch for. Most of the ship’s systems were shut down and de-powered: just enough juice running through the conduits to maintain basics. As soon as they had arrived at high anchor above Utochre, Unwerth had turned off the commercial transponder and deactivated the ship’s carrier number and beacon. They had no wish to advertise their location, let alone their identity. Every three hours, automated systems lit up the Arethusa’s vox-grid and allowed her to check in with the surface team. The silences in between were numbing. Naturally, if any problems developed, Ravenor could always summon them without waiting for the routine vox-check. Kara had made sure a lander was ready in the belly hold.
She checked her chron. Another forty-five minutes before the next check in. She was fidgety. She’d tried a workout to shake it off, a little blade practice, but it hadn’t done the trick. She’d felt rusty, slow, her heart not in it. It had been a long time since they’d seen any combat. She had no lust for combat, but the discipline kept her sharp.
The worst of it was, her mind was cloudy. She felt befuddled, and she wasn’t sure why. She remembered Ravenor remarking on it back on Tancred, just before they’d left, some comment about him sensing something on her mind. She could remember getting a little steamed about that, but couldn’t recall why. Guilt, probably. She’d never told Ravenor about her illness, nor of its miraculous remission. She hated keeping secrets, especially from him.
The cloudiness had been on her since then. Maybe that’s what he had detected. Maybe that’s why he’d asked her to lead the second team and stay aboard the ship as back-up. Perhaps he didn’t feel she could cut it as a principal agent any more. Perhaps he was right, but she hated the feeling that she was being sidelined.
She hated it almost as much as she hated the cloudiness. It was a nagging sensation, like the haunting awareness of a memory that temporarily refused to form. There was something on the tip of her tongue that just wouldn’t realise itself.
Of course, forgetfulness was one of the primary symptoms to watch for.
She realised she was rubbing her temple with her fingers. She pulled her hand away.
She got up quickly and walked off the bridge, down the echoing spinal corridor of the ship. Most of the Arethusa’s twenty-strong crew were sleeping, apart from a few running spot repairs in the enginarium. The old, wretched hulk creaked and groaned around her. The walls were scabby and decayed. Unwerth’s vessel was neither a beautiful nor a reliable machine.
She heard Belknap’s voice, picked up her pace, and then slowed again, realising he was in conversation. Through an open hatch, she spied him, sitting in the forward communal on the other side of a table from Sholto Unwerth. They were chatting and drinking glasses of dry Thracian muskell. Belknap got on with Unwerth better than most of them, with the exception of Kys, who had bonded with the little shipmaster during the perilous hours in Petropolis, and now deflected the worst of the teasing the likes of Carl and Nayl dished out at Unwerth’s expense.
Belknap got on with everybody, of course, because medics usually possessed that reassuring knack. But Belknap and Unwerth were both outsiders, part of Ravenor’s team only because of the support services of conveyance and healing they provided. Though both had faced serious danger on Eustis Majoris, neither was employed as a fighter or principal agent.
Unwerth had suffered badly. He had been tortured and mutilated at the whim of the infamous bounty hunter, Lucius Worna, before Kys had rescued him, but he had held out, loyal to them all. One look at his hands showed the pain he had endured for them, and yet the likes of Carl still delighted in teasing and mocking–
Carl. His name stung in her head as she thought of him. She frowned at the inexplicable strength of her own reaction. What had Carl ever done to her, except be an odious twit?
She backed away. Unwerth was telling Belknap some long and involved story about his own family history.
‘...it is much derailed, in places high and low,’ she heard the shipmaster saying, ‘that there ever was a race of beings of the name the squats, and many scholams and those of the high mindful claim it’s just a myth, a thing that never was, but my direst old grand avuncular sweared to me that the Unwerth lineament has some timbre of that blood in it, right back in all perspective, I mean...’
Kara had no wish to intrude. More properly, she wanted to speak to Belknap alone. She backed silently away.
‘Kara?’ Belknap called, looking around from the table. Eyes in the back of his head, that one. The old vigilance of an Imperial Guardsman on sentry duty.
‘Just walking around,’ she shrugged.
‘Join us,’ Belknap said.
‘Have a sniff of this here numbskull,’ Unwerth smiled, jiggling the bottle. ‘We are just of mindless confabuling.’
‘In a while, maybe. I’ve got to be on hand when the grid wakes up.’
She walked away, following a side corridor down to the ship’s infirmary. She turned on the lamps and began to search the scrubbed steel cupboards for a pain killer. Her head was really thumping.
It couldn’t be back. It couldn’t be back, could it? Please, Throne–
She stopped searching, aware that she was starting to hyperventilate. Panic, that wasn’t like her. She leaned on the side counter, breathing deep and slow. Nearby, packed into its carrying modules, was the expensive medical equipment Ravenor had purchased on Eustis Majoris. Belknap had used it to diagnose her condition and monitor it. He still checked her once every fortnight or so. She remembered the last occasion, en route from Tancred. She remembered his delight at the improbability of her health. The same every time. His joy.
How could she tell him? How could she ask?
‘Are you all right?’
Kara switched around Wystan Frauka stood in the doorway.
‘Sorry. You startled me,’ she said.
Frauka shrugged. ‘I saw the light on in here. Are you all right?’
‘Bit of a headache,’ she admitted.
Frauka dropped his half-smoked lho-stick onto the corridor deck, ground it out with his heel, and entered the infirmary. He opened a glass fronted cabinet and fished out a vial of capsules. ‘I find these work pretty nicely,’ he said.
‘They’re painkillers?’
He frowned, as if the question had never occurred to him. ‘I suppose. The blue ones there are a lot stronger, but they give you funny dreams and a dry thirst. These are what you might call headache strength.’
‘I didn’t know you suffered from headaches,’ she said, taking the vial from his hand.
‘Well,’ he began.
‘Suffering from headaches is something I would be sympathetic to,’ she said. ‘As opposed to, say, random, secret experimentation with the infirmary’s pharm supply.’
Frauka nodded sagely. ‘Then we�
�ll call it headaches,’ he said, ‘and say no more about it. I was just trying to help.’ He stepped towards the door.
‘Sorry,’ she called. ‘Sorry. Forgive me. I’ve got a real tension headache. Your life is quite boring, isn’t it, Wystan?’
The blunter shrugged. ‘It has its moments. They’re usually brief and quite violent. The rest of the time... well, thanks for noticing.’
Kara poured a glass of water from the scrub sink and rolled some of the capsules into her palm. ‘Two?’
‘I usually take three or four,’ he said. He patted his thick chest sadly. ‘But then again, I’ve got more body mass than you, and usually very little to get up for in the morning.’
She laughed, and knocked down two of the pills.
‘How’s the boy?’ she asked.
‘Why don’t you come and see?’
He led her down the short linking companionway to the small wardroom adjoining the infirmary and surgical chambers. Only one of the six cots was occupied. Zael lay, pale and thin, in his endless sleep, attached to a feeder and bio-monitor. Beside his cot, there was a single chair, and a cabinet on which sat a lamp, a data-slate, and a bowl full of lho-stick butts.
‘Any change?’ she whispered.
‘Yeah. He woke up and started dancing. I forgot to tell you.’
‘Shut up,’ she scolded with a grin.
‘I won’t half miss him when he wakes up,’ Frauka said with a sadness that surprised her. ‘Who’s going to listen to my stories then?’
‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked. Frauka shook his head.
‘Well, good night, and thanks.’
She left. Frauka wandered over to the chair and sat down. He lit a lho-stick and picked up the data-slate, thumbing it live.
The glow of the screen reflected on his face.
‘Where was I?’ he said. ‘Ah, yes... “Her nipples were hard and pink with excitement. She squealed in delight as his loincloth dropped to the deck. Very slowly, he–”’
Your nose is bleeding.
‘What?’
Your nose is bleeding.
‘Dammit!’ Frauka said, moustaching his left index finger across his upper lip to staunch the flow. He put down the data-slate, slid the burning lho-stick into the dish, and pulled out a handkerchief. He swabbed his nose, and peered at the smeared linen. It wasn’t the first time it had been spotted with blood. The old spots looked like rust.