by Dan Abnett
Any moment now...
Eleena and I dragged the other two into the shelter of a hollow a good distance from the downed aircraft.
'Stay here,' I whispered to her. 'Give me your weapon.'
Silently, she offered me her stubby laspistol.
'Stay down/ I advised and ran back to the wreck, retrieving my staff and my sword. I tossed the runestaff into the undergrowth to keep it out of sight and drew Barbarisater.
The speeder was coming down through the upper branches, trying to pick out the flier with its stablight. I tucked the sword and pistol into my belt and lunged up into the lower branches of the gros beech that overlooked our crash site.
The tree was huge and gnarled. Grunting, I swung myself up into the main boughs and then further up into the web of thinner branches.
The speeder hovered into view, crawling slowly towards the smoking wreck, its searchlight playing back and forth. I could see the masked side-gunner in the open door, one hand on the yoke of the pintle-mounted autocannon, the other on the bracket of the lamp.
The speeder descended. I climbed higher, up into the lofty reaches of the beech, until I could climb no further and the hovering speeder was directly below me.
The pilot said something. I distinctly heard the crackle of his intervox. The door gunner replied and let go of the lamp, setting both hands on the cannon's grips, turning it to aim down at the crumpled flier.
The glade below me filled with flashes and booms as he riddled the airplane with his cannon fire. The valiant little Urdeshi craft shredded like tinfoil.
The door gunner stopped shooting and called down to his pilot.
Now or never.
I let go of the branches and dropped straight onto the roof of the speeder. It rocked slightly beneath me. I steadied myself, crouched down, gripped the upper frame of the door hatch and swung in, boots first.
The gunner was bent over with his back to the hatch, getting a fresh ammunition box from the wall rack. My boots connected with his lower back and shunted him face-first against the cabin wall. I landed beside
him as he staggered backwards, his hands clutching at his broken face, grabbed him by the arm and propelled him backwards out of the hatch. We were ten metres up.
The pilot gave a muffled grunt as he looked round and saw me. A second later, the muzzle of the laspistol was pressed against the corner of his jaw.
'Set down. Now/1 said.
I prayed I was dealing wim a mercenary and not a cultist. A mere would know when to cut his losses, and bargain to live for another day and another paycheck. A cultist would fly us into the nearest tree, gun or no gun.
Making his motions very slow and clear so I could be sure to read them, the pilot cut the speeder's main thruster, and sank us to the forest floor.
'Shut us down,' I said.
He obeyed, and the lift units hummed to a halt. The dashboard went blank apart from a few orange standby lights.
'Unstrap. Get out.'
He unbuckled his harness and slowly pulled himself up out of the pilot's seat as I covered him with the pistol. He was a short but well-built man in ablative armour and a grey flight helmet with a breathing visor.
He jumped down from the speeder's side hatch and stood with his hands raised.
I got down next to him. Take off the helmet and toss it back into the speeder.'
The pilot did as he was told. His skin was pale and freckled, his thinning hair shaved close. He regarded me wim edgy blue eyes.
'Unzip the suit.'
He frowned.
To the waist.'
Keeping one hand raised, he drew the zipper of the ablat-suit down, revealing an undervest and shoulders marked with old, blurry tattoos. The psi-shield was a small, disc-shaped device hung round his neck on a plastic cord. I snapped it off and tossed it into the undergrowth. Then I used my will.
'Name?'
'Nhh...' he growled, grimacing.
'Name!'
'Eino Goran.'
I nudged my mind against his. It was like rubbing up against something sheathed in plastic.
'Right, we both know that's an emplated identity. A rash job from the feel of it. Real name?'
He shook his head, his teeth clenched. Emplate IDs were cheap enough to buy on the black market, especially a fairly poor quality one like this. They were fake personalities, usually sold with matching papers, psi-woven over the subject's persona like a fitted dust cover on a piece of
furniture. Nothing fancy. If you had the money, you could buy fingerprints and retinas to match. If you really had the money, a new face too.
This one was like a false wall erected in a hurry to ward off casual minds. It lacked any sort of real history, not even vague biographical engrams. A mind mask as cheap and unrealistic as the carnival faces his comrades had worn.
But, though poor, it had been put in place with great force. I tried to shift it, but it wouldn't budge. That was frustrating. It was obviously false, but I couldn't get past it.
There was no time to worry at it now.
Out! I willed, and he collapsed unconscious.
'Eleena! Aemos! Come on!' I shouted, dragging the limp man back into the speeder. I checked him for weapons - there were none - and then lashed his hands behind his back wim a length of cable from the speeder's pulley spool. By the time Eleena and Aemos reached me, carefully bearing Medea, I had the pilot gagged and blind-folded, and tied to one of the speeder's internal cross-members.
We got everything aboard - the items we had rescued from my study, the runestaff, all of it - and secured Medea in a pull-down cot in the aft of the speeder's crew bay. Then I got into the pilot's seat and, once I'd made sense of the control layout, got us airborne.
I edged up just above the treetops, running unlit. The moon was up and the night was clear, apart from a brown smudge against the stars away to the north. The smoke from my burning estate, I had no doubt. There was no sign of anything else in the air. Hugging the tips of the trees, I turned us south.
Once we were underway, I checked out the cockpit. It was clearly an ex-military flier, bought for the purpose in my opinion. Insignia mouldings had been chiselled off, service numbers erased with acid swabs. Apart from the basic controls, the cabin was provided with several socket racks where optional instrument modules could be bolted in. Only a vox-set had been fitted. There were gaps where an auspex, a terrain-reader and night vision displays might have gone, and also slots for a navigation cod-ifier and a remote fire control system that would have slaved the door weapon to the pilot and done away with the necessity of a separate gunner. Whoever had supplied the mercenaries with their vehicles had provided only the most basic package. An armed troop-lifter with an old model vox-caster comm. No automated systems. No clue to origin or source.
But it had decent power and range - over a thousand kilometres left in it before it would need a recharge. Something to get them in, lay down cover and get them out again.
The forest flickered by beneath us. The vox burbled intermittently, but I had no idea of the codes or cant they were using, and little desire to let anyone know the flier was still operational.
After a while, it shut off. 1 unplugged it, pulled it out of its rack and told Eleena to toss it overboard.
'Why?' she asked.
'I don't want to risk it having a tracker or transponder built into it.'
She nodded.
I tried to get our bearings manually, using the basic instrumentation, working to reconstruct a map of the area in my head. It was pretty much guesswork. Dorsay, the nearest main city, was perhaps a hour west of us now, but given the scale of the operation mounted against me, I felt going there would be like flying into a carnodon's den.
There were small fishing communities and harbour towns on the east side of the Insume headland, the closest now more than two hours away. Madua, a chapel town in the south-east, was in range. So was Entreve, a market city on the fringe of the wild woodland. So were the Atenate Mountains.
> I thought about calling the arbites on the vox, but decided against it. The attack on Spaeton House must surely have been noted by sentries at Dor-say, especially once the main fires started, but no emergency support units had come. Had the arbites been paid to turn a blind eye? Had they been more complicit still in the raid?
Until I understood who and what my enemies were, I could trust no one, and that included the authorities and even the Inquisition itself.
Not for the first time in my life, I was effectively alone.
I headed for the mountains. For Ravello.
Ravello is a hill town in the flanks of the western Atenates, situated at the foot of the Insa Pass, on the shores of a long freshwater lake that forms the headwaters of the great Drunner. It has a small but distinguished univer-sitariate specialising in medicine and philology, a brewery that exports its lake-water ale all over Gudrun, and a fine chapel dedicated to Saint Cal-wun, which houses to my mind some of the best religious frescoes in the sub-sector.
It is a quiet place, steep and densely packed, its old buildings lining narrow hill streets so tightly their green copper roofs overlap like plate armour. From the air, it looked like a patch of dark moss clinging to the blue slopes of the Itervalle.
The sun was rising as we approached from the north. The air was clear, a baking blue. We had left the wild woodland in the first touches of dawn, and climbed up into the foothills, following the line of the Atenate Minors up into the higher altitudes. The Itervalle was high enough to have cloud cover round its peak, but across the lake, the first of the great giants rose: Esembo, ragged like a tooth; Mons Fulco, a violet triangle stabbing the sky; snow-capped Corvachio, the sport and bane of recreational climbers.
We were nearly out of power and the speeder was getting sluggish. I dropped us to road level and came in through the western gate. There were no traffic and no pedestrians. It was still early in the morning.
The streets were paved with the same blue-grey ouslite that the buildings were constructed from, bright in the sunlight, dank in the shadows of the narrow streets. We passed through a square where a student lay sleeping off a night's drinking on the lip of a small fountain, along a wider avenue where ground cars and civilian fliers were parked in a herringbone, and then turned up a narrow street and climbed the hill out of the glare of the sun. I opened the speeder's windows and breathed in the fresh, clear air. The muted sounds of the flier's engines washed back at me, reflected oddly by the tall, shuttered faces of the dwellings on either side of the steep, paved lane.
It had been a long time, but I still knew my way around.
We parked in a cul-de-sac alley just off the lane, little more than a blunt courtyard where a mountain spurra struggled to grow against the face of a wall. The spurra, or at least its little yellow spring flowers, was the emblem of Saint Calwun, and votive bottles and coins littered the little stone basin the tree was growing from.
A first floor shutter twitched at the sound of our engines, and I was glad I had asked Aemos to stow the door gun during our flight. At least we resembled a private transport.
'Stay here,' I told Eleena and Aemos. 'Stay here and wait.'
I walked back down the street in the quiet morning. I was still wearing the boots, breeches, shirt and leather coat I had put on before the auto-seance the night before, but Aemos had lent me his drab-green cloak. I made sure I was displaying no insignia or badge of office, except my signet ring, which would pass notice. Medea's autopistol, reloaded with shells from a box magazine we found on the speeder, was tucked into the back of my belt.
A stray dog, coming up from the town centre towards me, paused to sniff my cloak hem and then trotted on its way, uninterested.
The house was as I remembered it, halfway down the lane. We had passed it on the way up, and now I made certain. Four storeys, with a terrace balcony at the top under the eaves of the copper-tiled roof. The windows were shuttered and the main entrance, a pair of heavy panelled wooden doors painted glossy red, were bolted shut.
There was no bell. I remembered that. I knocked once and waited.
I waited a long time.
Finally, I heard a thump behind the doors and an eyeslit opened.
"What is your business so early?' asked an old man's voice.
'I want to see Doctor Berschilde.'
'Who is calling?'
'Please let me in and I will discuss it with the doctor.'
'It is early!' the voice protested.
I raised my hand and held my signet ring out so its design was visible through the eyeslit.
'Please/1 repeated.
The slit shut, there was a rattle of keys and then one of the doors opened into the street. Inside was just shadow.
I stepped into the delicious cool of the hall, my eyes growing accustomed to the gloom. A hunched old man in black closed the door behind me.
'Wait here, sir/ he said and shuffled away.
The floor was polished marble mosaic that sparkled where scraps of exterior light caught it. The wall patterns had been hand-painted by craftsmen. Exquisite, antiquarian anatomical sketches lined the walls in simple gilt frames. The house smelled of warm stone, the cold afterscents of a fine evening meal, smoke.
'Hello?' a voice filtered down from the stairs above me.
I went up a flight, onto a landing where shutters had been opened to let the daylight stream in.
Tm sorry to intrude/ I said.
'Gregor? Gregor Eisenhorn?' Doctor Berschilde of Ravello took a step towards me, registering sleepy astonishment.
She was still a very fine figure of a woman.
I think she was about to hug me, or plant a kiss on my cheek, but she halted and her face darkened.
'This isn't social, is it?' she said.
I went back to the speeder and flew it round to the private walled courtyard behind her residence where it was screened from view. The doctor's old manservant, Phabes, had opened the ground floor sundoors, and stood ready with a gurney for Medea. Eleena, Aemos and I followed them inside. I left the pilot, still in his will-induced fugue state, tied up in the flier.
Crezia Berschilde had put on a surgical apron by then, and met us in the ground floor hall. She said little as she examined Medea and checked her vitals.
'Take her through/ she told her man, then looked at me. 'Anybody else injured?'
'No/ I said. 'How is Medea?'
'Dying/ she said. All humour had gone from her voice. She was angry and I didn't blame her. 'I'll do what I can/
Tm grateful, Crezia. I'm sorry I've troubled you with this/
'She ought to go to the town infirmary!' she snapped.
'Can we avoid that?'
'Can we make this unofficial, you mean? Damn you, Eisenhorn. I don't need this!'
'I know you don't/
She pursed her lips. 'I'll do what I can/ she repeated. 'Go through into the drawing room. I'll have Phabes bring some refreshment/
She turned on her heel and disappeared into the house after Medea.
'So/ said Aemos quietly, 'who is this again?'
* * *
Doctor Crezia Berschilde was one of the finest anatomists on the planet. Her treatises and monographs were widely published throughout the Helican sub-sector. After years of practice in Dorsay and, for a period, off-world on Messina, she had taken up the post of Professor of Anatomy here at Ravello.
And, a long time ago, I had nearly married her.
One hundred and forty-five years earlier, in 241 to be exact, I had lost my left hand during a firefight on Sameter. The details of the case are unimportant, and besides, they are recorded elsewhere. I was fitted with a prosthetic, but I hated it and never used it. After two years, during a stay on Messina, I had surgeons equip me with a fully functioning graft.
Crezia had been the chief surgeon during that procedure. Becoming involved with a woman who has just sewn a vat-grown clone hand onto your wrist is hardly a way to meet a wife, I realise.
But she was quick-witted, le
arned, vivacious and not put off by my calling. For years we were involved, on and off, first on Messina, then at a distance, and then on Gudrun once she had moved back to Ravello to take up her doctorate and I had based myself at Spaeton House.
I had been very fond of her. I still was. It is difficult to know if I should use a word stronger than 'fond'. We never did to each other, but there are times I would have done.
I had not seen her for the best part of twenty-five years. That had been my doing.
We sat in the drawing room for over an hour. Phabes had opened the windows and the day's brilliance blasted in, turning the tulle window nets into hanging oblongs of radiant white. I could smell the clean, fresh chill of mountains.
The drawing room was furnished with fine old pieces of furniture, and filled with rare books, surgical curios and display cases full of immaculately restored antique medical apparatus. Aemos was quickly lost in close study of the items on display, murmuring to himself. Eleena sat quietly on a tub chair and composed herself. I was fairly sure she was inwardly reciting the mind-soothing exercises of the Distaff. Every few minutes she would absently brush a few strands of brown hair off her slender face.
The doctor's man returned with a silver serving cart. Yeast bread, fruit, oily butter and piping hot black caffeine.
'Do you need anything stronger?' he asked.
'No, thank you/
He pointed to a weighted silk rope by the door. 'Ring if there's anything you need/
I poured caffeine for us all, and Aemos helped himself to a hunk of bread and a ripe ploin.
Eleena tonged half a dozen lumps of amber sugar crystal into her little cup. 'Who did it?' she asked at length.
'Eleena?'
"Who... who raided us, sir?'
'The simple answer? I have no idea. I'm working on possibilities. It may take us a while to find out, and first we have to be secure.'
'Are we safe here?'
'Yes, for the time being.'
They were mercenaries/ said Aemos, dabbing crumbs from his wrinkled lips. That is beyond question/
'I thought as much/
The pilot you captured. You saw the tattoos on his torso/
'I did. But I couldn't read them/