by Dan Abnett
‘Yes. Come on.’
Macks was clearly considering taking one of the heavy auto-las weapons from the corpses, but that would mean touching them.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Lead on.’
‘Macks?’
‘Yes?’
‘Maybe I should borrow that handgun after all,’ Drusher said.
They hurried through the frozen woodland, following the steady returns of the auspex. The fog was burning off, and the heavy red sun was glowering down, casting a rosy tint across the iced wilderness.
When they paused for a moment to catch their breaths, Macks looked at the magos.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘I was just thinking...’
‘Thinking what?’
‘Skoh was looking for this thing for months. State of the art track-ware, qualified help. Not a sign. And then, today...’
‘He got unlucky. Damn, we all got unlucky.’
‘No,’ said Drusher. ‘If you were the beast... wouldn’t today be a good day to turn and take him out? It was his last serious try. He’s coming out with a magos biologis at his side, changing tactics. Using taggers.’
‘What are you saying, Drusher?’
Drusher shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s... convenient, I suppose. This thing is quick and sly enough to do its evil work and stay right out of harm’s way. By the time a killing is discovered, it’s long gone. Today, we had the best chance yet of catching it. And what does it do? It changes its habits entirely and turns on us.’
‘So?’ asked Lussin.
‘Almost like it knew. Almost like it was concerned that a magos biologis and an experienced tracker might have enough skill between them to pose a realistic threat.’
‘It’s just an animal. What did you call it? An apex predator.’
‘Maybe. But it’s what a man would do. A fugitive who’s evaded capture this long, but hears that the search for him has stepped up. He might decide the time was right to turn and fight.’
‘You talk like you know what this thing is, Drusher,’ said Macks.
‘I don’t. It doesn’t fit into any taxonomy I’ve studied. It doesn’t fit into any Imperial taxonomy either. Except maybe classified ones.’
‘What?’
‘Come on.’
Drusher stood up and hurried on through the copse.
The air-mill had been derelict for fifty years. Its weather boards had fallen away and the sails of its wind-rotor were flaking. The district had processed its flour here, before the cheaper mass-production plant had opened in Udar Town half a century ago.
Drusher, Macks and Lussin edged through the chokes of weed brush towards the rear of the ruin. The tracker tags had been stationary for half an hour.
Macks pushed the lap-frame door open with the snout of her riotgun. They slid inside. The interior space was a dingy cone of timber and beamed floors. The mill-gear ran down through the tower’s spine like the gears of a gigantic clock.
It smelled of mildew and rotting flour-dust. Drusher took out the pistol. He pointed upwards. Lussin, riotgun gripped tightly, edged up the open-framed steps to the second level.
Drusher heard something. A slither. A scurry.
He hung back against the wall. There was something up with the auspex. An interference pattern that was making the screen jump. As if an outside signal was chopping the scanner’s returns.
Macks circled wide, gun raised to aim at the roof. Lussin reached the head of the stairs and switched around, sweeping with his gun. Drusher tried to get the auspex to clear.
Lussin screamed, and his gun went off. There was a heavy, splintering sound as he fell backwards down the steps, his weapon discharging a second time.
He was dead. The front of his skull was peeled off, and blood squirted into the air.
Macks howled, and fired her riotgun into the ceiling, pumping the grip and blasting the rotten floorboards in a blizzard of wood splinters with each successive shot. Every muzzle-flash lit the mill room for a millisecond
Exploding wood away before it, the Beast smashed through the deck and came down at them.
It was a blur. Just a blur, moving faster than anything had a right to. Macks’ riotgun boomed again. The creature moved like smoke in a draught. Drusher had a fleeting glimpse of deep purple body plates, a snapping tail of gristly bone, forearm claws like harvest scythes. Macks screamed.
Drusher dropped the auspex, and fired his pistol.
The recoil almost broke his wrist. He yelped in pain and frustration, stung hard by the kick. Use both hands, she’d told him.
It turned from Macks, chittering, and bounded across the floor right at him.
It was beautiful. Perfect. An organic engine designed for one sole task: murder. The muscular power of the body, the counterweight tail; the scythe limbs, like a pair of swords. The inhuman hatred.
It had no eyes, at least none that he could see.
Hold the gun with both hands and aim low. That’s what she’d said. Because of the kick.
Drusher fired. The recoil slammed up his arms. If he’d hit anything, it wasn’t obvious. He fired again.
The Beast opened its mouth. Fifty-three centimetres of bite radius, teeth like thorns. The blade-limbs jerking back to kill him.
He fired again. And again. He saw at least one round flick away, deflected by the Beast’s bio-armour.
It was right on him.
And then it was thrown sideways against the wall.
It dropped, writhed, and rose again.
Drusher shot it in the head.
It lunged at him. A riotgun roared and blew it back. Bleeding from the forehead, Macks stepped up and fired blast after blast. She fired until the gun was empty, then took the pistol out of Drusher’s hands and emptied that into it too.
Ichor covered the walls. Frothy goo dribbled out of the Beast’s fractured bone armour.
‘What is it?’ Macks asked.
‘I believe,’ Drusher replied, ‘it’s called a hormagaunt.’
But Macks had passed out.
It took the better part of an hour for the relief team of Arbites to reach them from Udar Town. Drusher had made Macks comfortable by then, and dressed her wounds.
Pistol in hand, he’d carefully examined the beast. The goad-control was easy to find, implanted in the back of the eyeless head.
When Macks came round again, he showed her.
‘You need to deal with this.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘It means this abomination was brought here deliberately. It means that someone was controlling it, directing it in a rudimentary fashion.’
‘Really? Like who?’
‘I’d start by asking the bishop some questions, and his pet heavy, Gundax. I could be wrong, of course, because it’s not my field, but I think the bishop has a lot to gain from something that puts the fear of the God-Emperor into his flock. It steels the faith of a congregation to have something real to rally against.’
‘He did this on purpose?’
‘It’s just a theory. Someone did.’
Macks was quiet for a while. He could guess what she was thinking. There would be an investigation and an inquest. The Inquisition may have to be involved. Every aspect of life in the province would be scrutinised and pulled apart. It could take months. Drusher knew it meant he wouldn’t be leaving Outer Udar any time soon. As a chief witness, he’d be required to stay.
Outside, it had begun to sleet again.
‘You must be happy at least,’ murmured Macks. ‘That work of yours, your great taxonomy. It’s all done. You’ve finished.’
‘It was done before I even got here,’ said Drusher dryly. He nodded at the body of the beast. He’d covered it with a piece of sacking so he didn’t have to look at it any more. ‘That wasn’t part of my job. Just a curiosity.’
‘Oh well,’ she replied with a sigh.
He went to the mill door, and gazed out into the sleeting wilds. Ice pricked at his face. Gershom would be k
eeping him in its chilly grip a while longer yet.
‘Could I keep this jacket a little longer?’ he asked Macks, indicating the fur coat she’d lent him. ‘It’s going to be a cold winter.’
PLAYING PATIENCE
I
West of Urbitane, the slum-tracts begin, and one descends into a ragged wilderness of dispiriting ruins where the only signs of life are the armoured manses of the narcobarons, projecting like metal blisters above the endless rubble. This is a destitute realm, a great and shameful urban waste, stalked by the Pennyrakers and the Dolors and a myriad other gangs, where Imperial authority has only the most tenuous grip.
A foetid wind blows through the slum-tracts, exhaled like bad breath from the sumps and stacks of the massive city. This miasmal air whines through the rotting habitats and moans in the shadows.
And those shadows are permanent, for the flanks of Urbitane rise behind the tracts, eclipsing all daylight. Flecked with a billion lamps, the rockcrete stacks of the sweating hive city ascend into the roiling clouds like the angular shoulders of some behemoth emerging from chthonic depths, and soar as a sheer cliff above the slums that litter the lightless ground at its foot.
Sub-orbitals cross the murky sky, their trace-lights blinking like cursors on a dark screen. Occasionally, the slums tremble as a bulk-lifter passes particularly low overhead on its final approach into the canyons of the hive, the bass rumble of its engines shivering the air.
Where, in the west, the hive stacks come tumbling down to meet the slums, shelving like giant staircases in bad repair, there is a patched stonework tower that houses the Kindred Youth Scholam. It is a meagre place, supported by charitable works, teetering on the brink between city and slum. Humble, crumbling, it faces west, its many window-slits barred, for the safety of the pupils.
At the start of of the year 396 Imperial, there were, among the scholam’s many inhabitants, three sisters called Prudence, Providence and Patience.
The night I arrived on Sameter, the rigorists had locked Patience in the scholam’s oubliette.
II
Sameter is a dismal place, and its morose air matched our mood. A slovenly, declining agrochemical world in the heartlands of the Helican subsector, it had seen better days.
So had we. My companions and I were weary and dejected. Pain clung to us like a shroud, so tightly none of us could express our grief. It had been that way for six months, since Majeskus. The only thing that kept us together and moved us along was a basic desire for revenge.
We had been forced to make the voyage to Sameter aboard a privately hired transport. The Hinterlight was dry-docked for repairs half a subsector away, and its mistress, Cynia Preest, had pledged to rejoin us as soon as the work was done. But I knew she was rueing the day she had ever agreed to assist my mission. When I had last spoken with her, she had confided, bitterly, that another incident like Majeskus would surely make her break her compact with me and return to the life of a merchant rogue in the Grand Banks.
She blamed me. They all blamed me, and they were damn well right. I had underestimated Molotch. I had given him the opening. My blind confidence had led to the disaster. Throne, what a fool I had been! Molotch was the sort of enemy one should never underestimate. He was Cognitae, perhaps the brightest and best to emerge from that infernal institution, which took genius as a basic prerequisite.
Our lander skimmed down through the filthy air above the Urbitane isthmus, bumping in the crosswind chop, and cycled in towards one of the hive’s private landing gantries on the north side of the city. As the breaking jets fired, sudden, intense gravity hung upon us. Even inside my suspensor field, I felt its weight. I had linked one of my chair’s data cables to the lander’s systems, and so saw everything that the shuttered cabin denied my friends. The looming piles of the hive, the shelf-like stacks, each one kilometres wide, the bristling lights, the smog. Hive towers rose up, as vast and impassive as tombstones, etched with lit windows. Chimneys exhaled skeins of black smoke. The lower airways buzzed with small fliers and ornithopters, like gnats swarming up on a summer evening. There, the spires of the Ecclesiarch Basilica, gilded like a crown; beyond, the huge glass roofs of the Northern Commercia, so high that the clouds of a microclimate weather system had formed beneath their vault. There, the Inner Consul, the radiating rings of the transit system, the wrought-iron pavilions of the Agriculture Guild.
We touched down at sunset. Great, shimmering doughnuts of gas-flame were issuing from the promethium refineries along the isthmus, bellying up like small, fireball suns against the curdled brown undercast. The private landing gantry was high up in the twisted mass of the inner hive-towers. Leased by the local ordos to provide convenient access to the city, it was a creaking metal platform trembled by the wind shear. Even so, exhaust vapour from our dented, scabby lander pooled in an acrid haze inside the rusting safety basket of the pad. The lander, a gross-utility vehicle three hundred years old, reclined on its pneumatic landing claws like a tailless lizard. It had been painted red, a long time ago, but the colour was only a memory now. Steam hissed from the rapidly cooling hydraulics, and a disturbing quantity of lubricant and system fluid gushed out of its underside from joints and cracks and fissures.
Without asking, Kara Swole took hold of my chair’s handle, and pushed me out down the open ramp. I could have done it myself, but I sensed that Kara, like all of them, wanted something to do, just to keep busy. Harlon Nayl followed us out, and walked to the edge of the safety cage to stare out into the foggy depths of the hive.
Carl Thonius lingered in the hatchway, paying the pilot his fee and tip, and making arrangements for future services. Harlon and Kara were both dressed in bodygloves and heavy jackets, but Carl Thonius was, as ever, clad in exquisite, fashionable garments: buckled wedge shoes, black velvet pantaloons, a tailored jacket of grey damask tight around his thin ribs, a high collar tied with a silk bow and set with a golden pin. He was twenty-four years old, blond-haired, rather plain of face, but striking in his poise and manners.
I had thought him too much of a dandy when the ordos first submitted him as a possible interrogator, but had quickly realised that behind the foppish, mannered exterior lay a quite brilliant analytical mind. His rank marked him out amongst my retainers. The others – Nayl and Kara, for example – were individuals I hired because of their skills and talents. But Carl was an inquisitor in training. One day, he would aspire to the office and signet of the sublime ordos. His service to me, as interrogator, was his apprenticeship, and every inquisitor took on at least one interrogator, training them for the duty ahead. I had been Gregor Eisenhorn’s interrogator, and had learned an immeasurable amount from that great man. I had no doubt that, in a few years, Carl Thonius would be well on his way to that distinguished rank.
Of course, for reasons I could not have ever imagined, that would not be the case. Hindsight is a worthless toy.
Wystan Frauka emerged from the lander, lighting his latest lho-stick from the stub of the last. He had his limiter turned on, of course, and it would remain on until I told him otherwise. He looked bored, as usual, detached. He wandered over to where a servitor was unloading our luggage from the lander’s aft belly-hatch and looked for his belongings.
Harlon remained at the edge of the safety cage, deep in thought. A heavyset man, thick with corded muscle, his head shaved, he had a dominating presence. Born on Loki, he’d been a bounty hunter for many years before gaining employment with my mentor Eisenhorn because of his skills. I had inherited him, so to speak. There was no man I would rather have at my side in a fight. But I wondered if Harlon Nayl was at my side any more. Not since… the event. I’d heard him talk about ‘going back to the old game’, his defeated tone the same as Cynia Preest’s. If it came down to it, I would let him go.
But I would miss him.
Kara Swole trundled me over to the gantry edge until we were facing the safety basket too. We stared out across the city.
‘See anything you like?’ she asked. She
was trying to be light and funny, but I could taste the pain in her voice.
‘We’ll find something here, I promise,’ I said, my voice synthesised, expressionless, through the mechanical vox-ponder built into my support chair. I hadn’t mind-talked to any of them for a long time, not since Majeskus, probably. I despised the voxponder’s menacing flatness, but telepathy seemed too intimate, too intrusive at a time when thoughts were raw and private.
‘We’ll find something here,’ I repeated. ‘Something worth finding.’
Kara managed a smile. It was the first I had seen her shape for months,and it warmed me briefly. She was trying. Kara Swole was a short, voluptuous redhead whose rounded build quite belied her acrobatic abilities. Like Harlon, I had inherited her from Eisenhorn. She was a true servant of the ordos, as hard as stone when she needed to be, but she possessed a gentleness as appealing and soft as her curves. For all her dexterity, her stealth, her confidence with weapons, I think it was that gentleness that I most valued her for.
Molotch had faded into the void after his crimes above Majeskus, leaving no trace. Sameter, benighted planet, offered us the vestige of a clue. Three of Molotch’s hired guns, three of the men we had slain in the battle on the Hinterlight, had proved, under forensic examination, to have come from Sameter. From this very place, Urbitane, the planet’s second city.
We would find their origins and their connections, and follow them through every tenuous twitch and turn, until we had Molotch’s scent again.
And then…
Carl had finished his transactions with the lander pilot. As I turned, I saw the pilot looking at me, staring at me the same way he and the other crew members had stared since they had first seen me come aboard. I didn’t have to reach out with my mind to understand his curiosity.
The wounds of Chaos had left me a mangled wreck, a disembodied soul locked forever within a grav-suspended, armoured support chair. I had no physical identity anymore. I was just a lump of floating metal, a mechanical container, inside which a fragment of organic material remained, kept vital and pulsing by complex bio-systems. I knew the very sight of me scared people, people like the pilot and the rest of his crew. I had no face to read, and people do so like a face.