by Dan Abnett
They followed him back into the show galleries. His performance had begun.
Kys had heard it all before. To Stine’s credit, it wasn’t the same. She had to admit the factor was good at what he did.
He stopped in front of a glass display of exquisite peridot and moonstone settings, in full flow, fluently describing every facet and cut.
Stine stopped suddenly, and turned to them with a smile. ‘Forgive me for babbling. I get quite carried away. I ought to be telling you about the history of Stine and Stine. Sometimes, I forget myself. I am so enamoured of my hall’s work, I get quite incoherent.’
‘Does that interest you at all?’ he asked.
‘I think I speak for both of us,’ said Ballack, ‘when I say that coherence interests us a great deal.’
+Patience?+
+Hello. We’ve got it. We’re just leaving.+
Lucic led them out onto the promenade. With a final bow, the factor bade them adieu. ‘An excellent choice,’ he said, kissing Kys’s hand.
‘I hope so,’ said Kys.
‘It’s been a genuine pleasure spending this time with you,’ Stine said, his performance drawing towards its curtain call.
‘You’ve been most obliging, sir,’ Ballack said to the factor with a bow.
‘If I can be of any further service,’ Stine gushed.
‘My thanks again, as ever,’ said Lucic. Stine bowed for the thousandth time, and backed away into the hall.
Kys looked at Ballack. ‘We’re clear?’
‘We’re clear.’
‘Thank Throne that’s over,’ Kys muttered.
‘Let’s keep walking,’ Lucic advised. ‘Come on now, briskly. I’m uncomfortable with you carrying that around in a public place. Even on the Promenade St Jakob, there are unscrupulous elements.’
That was the three hundred and ten thousand crown horolog piece that now occupied Ballack’s case. Kys and Ballack trailed Lucic down the promenade.
‘What happens now?’ Kys asked.
‘Depends. How quickly do you want it to happen?’ Lucic asked.
‘Quickly, the next few hours.’
Lucic nodded. ‘Good. It’s better that way. The cue Stine sold me for the House has an expiry date. The House moves.’
‘We understand that.’
‘Fine. So long as you do. Two hours then, in underboat pen seventy-two. We can make the exchange there. How many people will be in your party?’
‘No,’ said Kys. ‘We have our own transport arranged. You meet us.’
‘That’s not how it works,’ said Lucic.
‘It is now,’ said Ballack.
‘No, no,’ said Lucic. ‘You’ll screw this up!’
‘It’s how we want it,’ said Ballack. ‘Adjust. I’m sure you’re capable. Boat pen sixty-one, two hours from now.’
‘Then I’m coming with you,’ said Lucic.
‘No, you’re not,’ Ballack smiled.
‘You want to use your own damn transport, fine!’ Lucic snapped. ‘But I’m coming with you. You’ll need me. Cue or no cue, the House will blank you if you arrive in an unauthorised transport. You need me still.’
‘You can get us in?’
‘All part of the price. You have to take me along.’
Ballack nodded. ‘Pen sixty-one. Two hours.’
‘I’ll be there,’ said Lucic, and strode away into the crowds.
‘What do you think?’ Kys asked.
‘I think he’s rotten to the core,’ Ballack replied, ‘but he’s all we’ve got. We have to run with this.’
Patience Kys sighed. ‘Like we had to run with Stine of Stine and Stine. I know. I still wish I could have killed the obsequious bastard, though.’
Stine of Stine and Stine walked slowly back into the hall’s main chamber of display and sat down heavily in the chair behind the simple wooden desk.
‘You did good,’ said the red-haired man, emerging from the shadows.
‘That’s all very well,’ Stine grumbled.
‘Here’s your reward,’ the red-haired man said.
A man much larger than the red-haired man plodded out of the shadows. He was wearing heavy power armour, but he made very little sound. He handed a weapon to the red-haired man. The red-haired man activated the blade. It made a shrill, grating whine.
‘Chainsword,’ said the red-haired man lightly.
He raised the whirring weapon, and swung it at Stine. Stine was too astonished to attempt any evasion. The chainsword struck him on the left arm just below the shoulder, and carried on through, slicing him laterally across the upper chest. Stine’s head and shoulders, like a statuary bust, flopped backwards over the chair back, and his arms, severed at the top of the biceps, dropped leadenly onto the ground. The top half of the chair’s back rest, severed along with the upper part of Factor Stine, hit the floor too. Upholstery padding fluffed into the air like thistledown. Pressurised arterial blood squirted from the factor’s anatomically cross-sectioned body in shuddering jets and spattered noisily across the top of the wooden desk.
The red-haired man stepped back sharply in order to avoid getting splashed. He deactivated the chainsword and handed it back to the larger, armoured man beside him.
‘No one leaves Stine and Stine alive,’ he said. ‘Make sure of it.’
‘No one?’
‘End of story.’
‘No problem,’ said the armoured man. He reactivated the chainsword so it was buzzing in his fist and clicked his link as he walked away across the chamber. ‘All teams, attention. Deploy, and execute everyone in the building.’
Seven
The underboat Nayl had leased left pen sixty-one three hours later. It was a chisel-nosed grey tube of steel and ceramite twenty-four metres long, with a quiet cavitation drive along the centreline and two heavy-bladed propulsion fans fixed ventrally in cage nacelles.
It descended into the oily murk of the pen, lit up stablights on its prow frame, and purred out through the pen mouth.
The pen’s sea doors opened into a long, square-cut channel of blue ice and then out into the open water beyond the subframe of the giant hive. They passed gigantic foundation struts and derricks, brown with tar and mineral deposits that jutted down through the ice pack and disappeared far below into the black deeps. A few bulk capacity underboats went by along the same channel, inbound to the hive, laden with ore. Their stablight rigs were lit up like the lures of abyssal fish.
There were nine people on board the craft: Ravenor, Thonius, Ballack, Kys, Plyton, Nayl and the Carthaen, along with Lucic and the pilot servitor Nayl had leased along with the boat.
‘Quite a crowd you travel with,’ Lucic commented to Kys when he joined them at the pen quay.
‘Names don’t matter,’ Kys replied.
‘I wasn’t asking for any,’ Lucic told her, though his gaze lingered on Ravenor’s support chair. Lucic had come dressed in dirty work clothes: a faded, patched bodyglove, furs and a quilted coat. He also carried a grubby shoulder pack.
‘Weapons?’ Ballack asked him.
‘Just tools of the trade,’ Lucic replied, offering up the pack so Ballack could wand it.
Lucic chose to ride up front with Nayl and the pilot. From the main passenger trunk, a Spartan space with drop down seats, they could see forward into the pilot house through the open hatch. Instrumentation glowed below the gloomy forward ports. Lucic was sensible enough not to attempt conversation with Nayl. Once they had reached open water, Nayl handed him the grey case containing the very expensive timepiece. Lucic looked inside briefly, put the case with his pack, and accessed the navigation punch-box on the instrument panel. He entered a nineteen digit code. The cue. Screens blinked and rolled as graphics redrew and remapped. Then a spidery red chart came up, with route and way-marker graphics overlaid in white.
‘That’s some distance,’ Nayl said.
‘Eight hours minimum,’ said Lucic, ‘provided we don’t encounter any holdups.’
‘Holdups?’ Nayl asked.
‘Ice-falls. Sub-currents. That’s probably the worst we might get, this season of the year.’
‘There’s worse?’
‘There’s maelstroms. Believe me, if there was any chance we’d run into one of those, we wouldn’t have left the pen.’
Nayl pointed to the nav display. ‘Is that the House?’
Lucic shook his head. ‘The House is currently sitting ’neath side about forty kilometres south south-west of that. The chart resolution’s too large to show it. That’s Berynth Eighty-Eight, one of the deep water mining rigs, sitting in a two-kilometre hole it’s made for itself in the pack ice. That’s our excuse for heading out that way. We’ll divert when we reach Eighty-Eight.’
The others made themselves comfortable in the passenger trunk. Plyton leaned by one of the small armoured port lights, craning her neck to see up and out. They were three hundred metres down, and the water was black and clear like glass, but above them, it graduated into a green twilight.
‘Creepy,’ she murmured.
Angharad glanced at her.
‘All this water on top of us. The pressure. The cold. Even if you could reach the surface, there is no surface. Just a roof of ice.’
Angharad shrugged and looked away. Little seemed to impress her.
‘The whole ocean’s covered in pack ice, right?’ Plyton asked.
‘The whole thing,’ Ravenor replied, ‘apart from a few anomalous breaks. In most places, the pack is five or six hundred metres thick. Quite a roof.’
Plyton grimaced. ‘A fine time to discover I’m claustrophobic,’ she said.
‘You’ve travelled in the void,’ Angharad said. ‘Compared to that, this is nothing.’
‘It’ll kill you just as fast,’ said Plyton. ‘Besides, we can all have our own private fears, can’t we?’
‘I do not have private fears,’ said Anagharad. That made Plyton laugh.
‘Any life out there?’ Plyton asked.
‘Algae. Aggregated bacteria. Phytoplankton. There may be no sunlight, but the moon’s excessively active. A lot of thermal venting.’
‘Anything bigger than that?’
‘No. There are rumours, but no.’
‘Cold,’ said Plyton, glancing back out.
‘It’s deep, too,’ Ravenor said. ‘The ocean floor depth varies, but in some places it’s technically immeasurable.’
‘Immeasurable?’ asked Plyton.
‘Abyssal.’
‘What do you mean, immeasurable?’
‘I mean it’s so deep, any instrument sent down to sound it is crushed by the extremity of pressure.’
‘What about auspex? Modar?’
‘That deep, that cold, that pressurised, the water starts to behave in very strange ways. It doesn’t give up its secrets. You were right, Maud. In some ways it is much, much more dangerous than the void. The deep ocean of Utochre may be one of the strangest places in the Imperium. Which is probably why the House is here.’
‘Are you telling me this to reassure me?’ Plyton asked, slightly pale.
‘One can face one’s private fears better if one understands their limits, I always think. I was giving you the best information I could.’
‘That below us is a freaky abyss that we don’t understand and could never escape from?’ Plyton asked.
Ravenor was silent for a moment. ‘I probably shouldn’t have opened my mouth,’ he said.
He moved across the cabin to where Kys was sitting.
+Just so you know, we’re out of contact. The vox isn’t making it through the water and the ice, not even via a relay at the hive. Something – the ice I think, but I don’t know why – is bouncing psychic transmission. We can’t talk to Kara.+
‘You spoke to her before we left?’
+Just before. She knows what we’re doing. I told her not to start fretting unless a week went by.+
Ravenor saw that Kys was still silently staring forward, keeping an eye on Lucic through the pilot house hatch.
+Can we trust him?+
‘No,’ she said, ‘not at all. He’s in it for the money, I think. Besides, it’s too late now.’
+And if he proves untrustworthy?+
‘We’re all armed. That kind of cancels everything out.’
Lucic’s estimate turns out to be conservative. It takes the best part of eleven hours just to reach the vicinity of the Berynth Eighty-Eight deep water rig. He blames contra-currents, and an undertow effect called the Neath Stream, which cannot be predicted. Strange, on a moon where prediction is the most exclusive commodity.
The journey becomes laborious. There’s nothing but the sluggish purr of the cavitation system. The underboat’s enviro-systems are not the best, and it grows colder and the air stales. I sense the discomfort of the others, the body stink of anxiety and confinement. Maud is the worst. Her unexpected claustrophobia becomes physically oppressive to her. I do not ’ware Maud, nor would I attempt to without her consent, except in the most critical of situations, but I extend psy-feelers gently into the periphery of her mindscape and work to reduce her clogging panic by influencing her respiratory rate and slowing her pulse. I adjust her metabolism into an instrument to fight her fears.
Her mind, as I nestle against it, is in retreat, like a sick animal. I swim in her surface thoughts, her petty tensions and spectral fears. That’s when I see the footprint.
It’s been carefully disguised, like a track in snow scuffed over to conceal it. It’s been so carefully disguised, I cannot be sure it’s what I think it is without a more invasive probe, and this isn’t the time or the place for that.
But I know what I think it is. I know what my years of experience scream to me it is.
Sometime in the last two or three days, another mind has been in her. Another presence has taken a much firmer hold of Maud Plyton than I am doing with my light psy-caresses. She has been, briefly, under considerable mental duress.
From who? And how? I haven’t read another psyker, and she’s hardly been out of my company. Kys couldn’t do this, and why would she? Now I feel a creeping dread upon me. What have I missed? What’s been in amongst my people without my permission, or even my knowledge? Lucic wears a blocker. Is there more to that casual insurance? Is he blocking the outside, or is he hiding something? Or is it...
I try to reassure myself. The footprint could be false, a side-effect of Maud’s troubled state that I am mis-reading. Then again, her troubled state, her sudden claustrophobia, could have been triggered by aggressive manipulation.
I broaden my mind for a moment, and cast around. I feel the other heartbeats and minds around me, together with the hard negative of Lucic. Everyone’s on edge, except Angharad, who is still and cold and silent like a pool. Nayl is restless, Ballack and Carl are both closed off and busy with thoughts of their own. Kys feels me stir and looks up, a question on her face.
+It’s nothing, Patience. Relax.+
It’s not nothing. What has done this?
I reach outside the underboat, but the sea is too cold and too blank for me to extend far.
‘Eighty-Eight,’ Lucic announced. The sound of the underboat’s drive systems altered slightly as the pilot brought the craft around and slowed it. The sea ahead was lighter, more radiant.
Nayl studied the console displays, and saw the vast hole, an artificial polynya, in the roof of ice above. Berynth Eighty-Eight was a filthy, gargantuan engine sticking up out of the hole like a dagger in a wound. The lower limbs of the mining rig, its huge drilling members, extended down into the lightless depths below, churning up cloud banks of heated silt.
‘Vox-links are live,’ Nayl said.
‘The rig will have a fleet of boats down on operation, guiding the drilling,’ Lucic replied.
‘Lots of backwash litter too,’ Nayl added, adjusting the listening scopes and the detectors to wash out the noise and minimise interference.
‘The rig’s drill engines, circulator pumps and hydraulics,’ Lucic replied, ‘not to mention si
gnals chopped and bounced by rising silt, and the suck-rattle of the excavation tubes, and the low-level vibration of the icebreaker systems keeping the hole open. The sea’s a funny place. ’Neath side, you have to get used to a lot of data clutter, and learn not to trust the sensors all the time.’
He made a course adjustment with the pilot servitor’s approval. The underboat nosed slowly around, and slugged away on a fresh track, skirting the industrial site and its cloud of noise.
They were running under the ice again in five minutes, heading south south-west into clearer, colder water. The rig noise gradually receded behind them.
‘This water is colder,’ said Nayl, reading off the instruments. ‘Six or seven points and falling.’
‘That’s because the sea bed just dropped away under us,’ said Lucic. He glanced at the pilot, who nodded confirmation. ‘We just went off over the Berynth Shelf. Eighty-Eight mines out about as far as there is ocean floor to reach. We just crossed from deep water to what we call Wholly Water.’
‘Holy water?’
‘Wholly,’ Lucic repeated with a lean grin, ‘as in there’s wholly nothing below us any more. We’re out over the abyssal zone.’
Nayl woofed out a breath. ‘Don’t tell Maud,’ he said.
‘Which one is Maud?’ asked Lucic, looking back into the passenger trunk.
Nayl didn’t tell him.
Lucic grinned wider and shook his head. ‘Deep ocean, my friend. We’re in deep ocean now.’
‘I’m not your friend,’ Nayl said sullenly.
Lucic shrugged. ‘You might want to reconsider that. Out here, all alone, a man needs all the friends he can get.’
‘Sholto?’
The little shipmaster didn’t look up immediately. He was sitting at the master control of the Arethusa’s bridge, with Fyflank and two of his most senior crewmen huddled around his shoulders.
Kara approached. She’d slept, but not well. That surprised her, given that she was buoyant with relief. She’d had another dream in which Carl had come to her in some wild, desert place, and done nothing but laugh. She’d asked him questions, asked him why he was acting so strangely, and he’d just laughed at her. She’d woken in a cold sweat, sharply and suddenly, the headache pounding her temples. Belknap had been deep asleep in the bed beside her, his limbs twisted in the curious, boneless attitude of intense exhaustion slumber. She’d lain awake beside him for five minutes and then jumped when the vox intercom beeped. Leaping up gingerly, naked, she’d hit the stud before the second beep, hoping it wouldn’t rouse Belknap.