Ravenor Returned

by Dan Abnett

  Few people spoke. There was no clamour of voices. Just the tramp of feet, the hollow booming of tannoy announcements, the cries of gampers and food-vendors touting for business.

  Pale-faced, this was a multitude starved of sunlight and drained of expression. Dark eyes, tinted goggles, suits and robes of emerald, black or grey, the regulation colours of the clerical workforce. Ocular augmetics here and there, skin-plugs and neuro-link spinal ports, mechanical braces perched like brass spiders on hands deformed and crooked by carpal tunnel syndrome. Ear-jacks for transcribers and stenographers, vox-grafts in the mouths or throats of dictators and transcriptors. Wheezing quadrupedal walking frames, their stilt-legs folded, for the archivists and filing officers who worked amid the towering shelves of the index vaults. Almost four hundred thousand allergies to paper, dust, ink, or all three. Nearly two thousand undiagnosed malignancies to face, brain or throat from excessive exposure to screen radiation.

  All of them moving in the same direction, into the vast towers of the Administry.

  And I was watching just three of them.

  The carriages jolted to a halt and the automated doors rattled open, disgorging another cohort of Administry workers to swell the tramping tide. As soon as it was empty, the rail transit would close its doors and clatter off into the airless ducts of the sink levels to pick up workers of the Administry night shift, who were currently leaking out of the tower’s basement exits in equal numbers to the day workers flowing in on the surface. The various departments of the Administry never slept. The cogitators ran all day and all night, chattering and processing.

  There was Patience, in the midst of the crowd, moving with the flow. I saw her glance at her own reflection in the windows of the carriage, and felt her distaste. Her hair pinned up, no make-up except for some shadowing around the eyes to give her a hollow, sleep-deprived look, a unisex suit of cheap, black linen and an emerald jacket. Just another scribe, another clerk, another Administry drone.

  The swollen crowd pushed out along a dank rockcrete concourse, past black iron railings and down a wide flight of stone steps out of the transit station. The lips of the stone steps had been smoothed and worn down by decades of footsteps, so they looked soft and indented like unplumped pillows. Through the station arch, under the copper eagle suspended from the glass roof, into the street, into the main flowing bustle. Patience was nudged several times by the press. If I stop walking, she thought, the pressure of bodies will lift me off my feet and carry me along like driftwood.

  The street was covered by an ironwork rain-shield, but she could smell the raw acid wetness in the air outside. Overhead, tannoy horns were crackling out inspirational mottos. There was an unappetising odour of cooked onions and fatty meat coming from the barrow ovens of the curbside vendors. The massive ouslite tower of Administry Hall Three rose up ahead like a ziggurat, dim and hazy in the morning smog.

  Patience eventually reached the mouth of the entrance hall, a yawning maw ten metres high, like the door of an ancient tomb. The graven visage of the God-Emperor glared down at the workers from the overmantle. No one looked up, but every worker raised his or her hands to make the sign of the aquila as they passed beneath.

  Inside the stone hallway, the massed footsteps echoed like rain. The flow of workers began to subdivide into the warren of side corridors and passages, heading for their appointed stations and departments. More instructions rang from the ceiling speakers. Patience saw PDF guards watching over various junctions, weapons slung, but they were not checking papers. Wall-mounted optic scanners at each doorway or hall-mouth read every worker permit that passed through, marking each one with a flashbulb flicker and a tonal ping, logging them into the system.

  Patience saw the brief flash as her own permit was read. She began following the indicator signs for D:G/F1.

  The tide began to thin out. The hallways had once been carpeted, but the pile had been eroded back to frayed matting like the bed of a dry stream. The air smelled of dry dust and static, and the photovoltaic lamps cast everything in a tobacco-coloured stain. She passed by the doorways of large cogitation chambers, glimpsed the endless rows of clerks at stations, heard the seamless clattering sound of ten thousand fingers striking keys.

  In the hallway, quill servitors scuttled past, copy boys ran through carrying despatch boxes, gaggles of scribes hurried to meetings with transliterators and cipherists, gatherers pushed their heavily-laden basket trolleys, tech adepts shuffled along, hefting tool crates, heading for the latest repair. The walls were lined with the twisting, branching tubes of the pneumatic despatch system. Every few seconds, there was a burp of air as another message cylinder rushed past inside one of the tubes.

  Patience arrived at the entrance to department G/F1. The optic scanner flash-pinged her again as she entered, and a hololithic sign lit up with the words WAIT HERE.

  She waited. Beyond the doorway, she could see the huge chamber, high-ceilinged, gloomy, lit by the enormous hololithic display screen at the far end, swirling with green data-forms, and by the rows of individual desk lights on the scribe stations. There were at least a dozen rows, an aisle between each, and Patience counted something in the order of a hundred stations in each.

  There was a cacophony of rattling keys. Copy boys and gatherers moved up and down the aisles, delivering and collecting files. Servo-skulls drifted down the aisles like bees hunting pollen.

  +Throne. I’ll go mad in a place like this.+

  +The beating heart of the Imperium.+ I sent back. +But for the ceaseless work of the Administratum, civilisation as we know it would grind to a halt.+

  +What, are you recruiting for them now?+

  She looked round, back out into the hallway. In the wall directly opposite the department entrance was a shrine alcove where the blessed seniors of the Administratum performed the hourly rites to bless and favour the work of the scribes.

  +That’s odd, don’t you think?+ she sent.

  The alcove was dusty, as if it hadn’t been used in a while. There was no water in the placatory dish, and the sheaves of herbs were limp and desiccated.

  +I agree.+

  ‘Junior Scribe Merit Yevins?’

  Patience turned. An elderly female, an ordinate, approached. She was robed and hunched, her claw hands blue with ink-stain that would never wash out.

  ‘Yes, ordinate,’

  The woman held out a blue hand and took Patience’s permit-slate.

  ‘You are transferring from division six rubrication?’

  ‘Yes, ordinate.’

  ‘You have manual skill in excess of eighty norm?’

  ‘Yes, ordinate.’

  Junior Scribe Merit Yevins had died in a road traffic accident three days before. Carl had scooped her records from the Informium and grafted them to provide Kys with a genuine Administry background.

  ‘Follow me.’

  The ordinate led Patience down one of the aisles. Pale-faced scribes hunched at their cogitators, gazing at their glowing yellow screens, their hands fluttering over the metal keyboards or turning the pages of the documents clamped in their articulated reading stands. Patience had to watch her step to avoid tripping on the cables and trunking that spilled out across the floor. The ordinate seemed to know where they all were without looking.

  The old woman gestured to an empty cogitator station.

  ‘Begin here,’ she said. She waved a gatherer over, rifled through the alphabetised files in his cart, and took out a bulging sheaf of crumbling documents.

  She handed them to Kys. ‘Transcription,’ she said. ‘Destination database is K8456 decimal. What is the destination database?’

  ‘K8456 decimal, ordinate,’ Patience replied.

  ‘Begin.’

  The ordinate limped away. Patience sat down at the station and woke the cogitator. It mumbled and shuddered as it warmed up, the valve screen slowly glowing into resolution. It scrolled data noise for a moment, then opened to display an entry gate and invited her to type in her serial cod
e and destination database.

  She did so. The screen trembled again, and the optical display closed like a flower then reopened to reveal a new file ready for transcription.

  By then, Patience had arranged the sheaf of papers on her reading stand, open at sheet one. She secured it around the corners with some of the old rubber bands dangling off the lip of the frame. Carl had briefed them well on basic clerical habits. She even slipped on the plastek thimble that aided page-turning.

  +Here we go.+ she sent.

  She started typing.

  It was copying by rote. The figures in the document had no meaning she could discern.

  After a few minutes, she reached her left hand into the pocket of her coat. The little analyser Carl had given her was there. With her fingers, she played out its tiny plug-wire and, with the analyser still out of sight in her pocket, brought the wire end up onto the station and plugged it into one of the spare data-ports on her cogitator.

  +Getting that?+

  +Carl’s getting a signal now, thank you. He says you’re operating a late model K-phyber cogitation engine with numerical reinforcement sub frames.+

  +The stuff he knows.+ Kys sent back, and carried on typing.

  ‘I thought you’d done this before?’ said Gatherer Lerally with a sneer. Like all the gatherers, he was a big man with heavily muscled arms and shoulders well displayed by his black singlet.

  ‘I have,’ said Nayl. ‘But it was a different system in collect-distribute where I worked. We had to number the files on a docket before we put them in the cart.’

  ‘Well, that just wastes time,’ Lerally sighed. He pointed to the data-slate in Nayl’s hand. ‘Your numbers come up there, file and destination, and you wait for the matching serials to flick up on the boards. Then you gather from the bench, swipe each file past your cart scanner, and it’s all logged. See? Simple. I don’t know how they did things at your old place, Tulliver.’

  Nayl shrugged. He had no idea how they’d done things at Bernod Tulliver’s old place either. Bernod Tulliver had been stabbed to death in an undersink mugging the month before, and, courtesy of Carl, Nayl was just borrowing his credentials.

  Right now, he was standing in the bowels of Administry Hall Three. It was hot, furnace-hot, thanks to the steam from the hydraulic hoists. Queues of brawny gatherers, each one with a cart, were assembled in front of the benches, watching the overhead hololiths. As numbers flickered up, gatherers moved forward to the benches to collect their cargoes from the robed co-ordinators. Behind the benches, the enormous cage-lifts brought up file cartons from the basement archives in clouds of vapour.

  ‘I’ll walk you through one,’ Lerally said. He was a gatherer supervisor, and wore the medal proudly.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Nayl.

  More numbers flashed up on the overhead boards.

  ‘That’s you,’ Lerally said.

  Nayl pushed his cart forward. It had a twisted castor and it fought to go the other way. Nayl winced as the strain pulled at his damaged arm.

  ‘What’s the matter with your arm?’ Lerally asked.

  ‘Nothing. Fricking wonky wheel.’

  ‘Get used to it,’ Lerally said unhelpfully. ‘Once you’ve been here a while, you’ll get a better cart. Perks of seniority.’

  ‘How long is “a while”?’

  Lerally shrugged. ‘Ten, maybe twelve years. Hurry up. You never keep the co-ordinators waiting.’

  Nayl slewed his cart up to the bench and showed the co-ordinator his slate. The robed man turned and hefted a bulging carton of papers from the cage-lifts.

  ‘Now swipe them off,’ Lerally said.

  Nayl took each file out of the carton and waved them in turn past the optical reader built into his cart. The dial kept blinking up ‘unknown’.

  ‘Frick’s sake, Tulliver,’ Lerally exclaimed. He licked his thumb and rubbed the wet end vigorously across the glass lens of the reader. ‘Dust builds up. It’s the static. Try it again.’

  Nayl swiped the files again, and the dial snapped up code numbers. Once his cart was full, Nayl slid the empty carton back to the co-ordinator, who slung it back onto the cage-lift.

  ‘Okay,’ said Lerally. ‘Now you deliver. Check off the codes against your slate and use the department map. You’ll soon find your way around.’

  Nayl nodded and swung his heavy cart towards the elevator bank. He glanced at his slate: P/S4. That was on the fifty-seventh floor. The way his cart was bucking and pulling wide, he’d never even reach the lifts.

  ‘Holy Throne,’ he whispered.

  +Stick with it, Harlon.+

  ‘Easy for you to say, boss. I’d rather be doing something less demanding.’

  +Like what?+

  ‘I dunno. Killing someone you don’t like?’

  +Are you sure you’re up to this?+

  ‘Will you leave it alone? I’m fine. I want to do this. I want to be doing something. Belknap said I was fit, didn’t he?’

  +Yes. Though I got the distinct impression he wasn’t telling me something.+

  Kara Swole stiffened. ‘Like what?’

  +I don’t know. I didn’t probe his mind. I respect doctor-patient confidentiality. I just got the impression he’d given you a clean bill of health because you’d told him to.+

  ‘Gideon, I don’t intend to sit this one out, all right? This is a serious deal, and you need all the help you can get. So I’m helping. I’d rather be doing that than sitting in that lumpy bed in Miserimus.‘

  +Is it really that lumpy?+

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  +And your wound? It’s stable? It’s only been a few days since you tore it open chasing Skoh.+

  ‘It’s fine. Now go away. I’m trying to blend here.’

  ‘Weena Carvort, what are you doing?’

  Kara looked up at her supervisor, a dainty little man with augmetic eyes. His name was Beedron Halicut. Ordinate Ordinary Beedron Halicut.

  ‘I’m loading the tubes,’ she replied. In truth, her answer should have been. ‘I’m perched on an uncomfortable metal stool, nursing an aching belly-wound and the grim intimations of my own mortality, jamming numbered message cylinders into the spout ends of pneumatic tubes in the sweaty basements of Administry Hall Three, all the while pretending to be someone who perished from tubercolic fever in an Ecclesiarchy hospice ten days ago.’

  But that, naturally, would lose her the job.

  ‘You might think you’re loading the tubes,’ said Ordinate Ordinary Halicut, ‘but I believe you are inserting the cylinders upside down.’

  ‘Oh!’ Kara said. She looked at the plastek cylinder in her hand and slowly upturned it. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I thought you were skilled?’ Halicut said sharply.

  ‘Just confused, sir,’ Kara replied. ‘By the new system. On Caxton we loaded them plug-end first.’

  ‘Well, Carvort, you’re not on Caxton now.’ Halicut moved away to berate another tube-loader.

  The pneumatic tube despatch hall was a massive room in the sink-levels of the tower. Like stalactites, festoons of tube pipes fed down into the room, curving slightly to deliver the cylinders into rows of wire racks. They looked like inverted church organs. Schools of operators sat at the ends of the racks, sorting the cylinders that arrived with a burp of air, loading new ones into the ascender pipes. Newly-arrived cylinders were opened and their contents filed into cartons for the gatherers to wheel away. Fresh files came in to be wound into scrolls, cylindered, and sent on their upward journeys.

  The air pressure in the chamber kept popping and changing as the tubes barked and spat their loads.

  Kara glanced at the stack of papers she had just been given by a gatherer. It was just meaningless data, reams of figures. She wound it up tight, slid it into a tube, and pressure-fired it on its way.

  In Miserimus House, I relaxed for a moment. Nearby, Frauka was playing regicide with Zael. He’d finally got the boy to understand the rudiments of the game. Zeph was prowling the grounds, checking the sensors. C
arl was at his station, watching the first links show up from Kara, Kys and Nayl. ‘I’m getting a decent feed from Patience now,’ he reported. ‘I just…’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  Carl frowned. ‘I can’t figure out what they’ve got her doing. The data she’s processing makes no sense. Just random series of characters and numerals without context. Maybe it’s a cipher. Give me a while, and I’ll see if I can crack it.’

  ‘I have complete faith in you, Carl,’ I said.

  We were in now, really inside the heart of the mystery. I remember thinking that, feeling the satisfaction of it.

  How wrong I was.

  Shipmaster Akunin had taken a late luncheon at a private club in the high-stacks of Formal C, then travelled back to the Petropolitan in a hired limousine. He was edgy, and his mood did not improve when he reached his suite.

  ‘Anything?’ he asked his aide.

  ‘Still no response, sir,’ the man replied.

  Akunin cursed quietly. ‘If there’s nothing by this evening, I’ll send another message.’

  The aide nodded. ‘Master Siskind is here to see you.’

  Pulling off his blue satin coat, Akunin went into the lounge. Siskind was sitting in one of the low armchairs.

  ‘Siskind,’ Akunin said by way of hello. He crossed directly to the sideboard and poured himself an amasec. ‘Still nothing from Trice. Can you believe that? My messages are as emphatic as possible, and he deigns to ignore me. Drink?’

  Siskind shook his head.

  Akunin sipped his drink, pacing. The neotropical songbugs, sensing his demeanour, had fallen silent. ‘The arrogance of the man!’ Akunin spat. ‘Without the cartel’s work, he’d be nothing!’

  Siskind nodded gently.

  ‘Another hour or two, and I’ll send to him again,’ Akunin growled. ‘I’ve half a mind to go to him in person, see how he likes that–’

  Akunin’s personal hand-vox chimed and he took it out of his pocket.

  ‘One moment,’ he said to Siskind, and raised the device to his ear. ‘Akunin?’