by Dan Abnett
‘Here he is!’ Falken cried. ‘Magos Biologis Dresher!’
There was some clapping.
‘Drusher,’ Drusher said.
‘Whatever,’ Falken said, putting his arm around Drusher’s shoulders. ‘Couldn’t have done it without you, friend! Really, you were on the money! Eh? What do think? Is this a… a…’
‘Carnodon,’ Drusher said, painfully aware of how big Falken was beside him, squeezing him in the hug.
The felid had been laid across four gurneys, heavy and limp in death. Its tusked snout seemed to grimace, as if it, like Drusher, wished it was somewhere else. Small, dark punctures in its belly showed where Falken had shot it.
‘May I?’ Drusher asked, and Falken let him go over and examine the beast. The crowd turned back to toasting and laughing.
It had once been a wonderful thing, master of its world, afraid of nothing. An apex predator. Drusher smiled sadly as he thought of the phrase. A big specimen too, maybe five and a half metres body length, nine hundred kilos healthy body weight. But at the time of its miserable, hunted death, it had been less than six hundred kilos, emaciated, its ribs poking out like tent braces. It was old too, post-mature. The coat was raddled by sarcoptic mange and laden with lice, fungus and parasites. Drusher ran his hand along its flank anyway. So knotted, gristly, starved. He peeled back the black lips and examined the dentition.
‘Where did you get it?’ he called out to Falken.
‘In the cellars under the Lexicon,’ Falken said, coming over. ‘We got a heads-up. We’d circulated your picture, you see. Thanks for that. I went in, saw it, and boom-boom.’
Drusher nodded.
‘Truth be told,’ Falken said, dropping his voice, ‘it didn’t put up much of a fight. But I wasn’t taking any chances.’
‘I understand.’
Falken turned back to the crowd.
‘For Onnie Rimbaud, poor bastard!’ he cried. ‘This one’s for you, son!’
Falken offered the nearest bottle to Drusher. Drusher shook his head.
‘Thanks for your help, Dresher,’ Falken said.
‘Drusher.’
Macks came over.
‘I want to thank you on behalf of the division, Valentin,’ she said. ‘You got us our result. I’ll bill the Administratum for a whole week, fair enough? Go get your things together. Someone will drive you home this evening.’
Drusher nodded.
‘I have a transporter waiting,’ Macks said. Drusher’s bags were in a neat stack beside the office door. He was closing the last of the dossiers, and sliding them back onto her carts.
‘Right,’ he said.
‘Well, it’s been good to have you on board. Thanks. Like old times, right?’
‘Like Outer Udar, Macks? I get the distinct impression you remember that more fondly than I do.’
‘Things’ll work out, Valentin,’ she said.
‘Before I go,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to look at something.’
‘What?’
‘Let’s put it this way. I’d hate to have you come all the way up the coast to get me again.’
Macks frowned. ‘What are you on about now?’
‘The killer wasn’t – isn’t – that cat.’
Macks wiped her hand across her lips as if encouraging patience. ‘Go on.’
‘I said from the start it wasn’t an animal.’
‘You also told me to look for a carnodon.’
‘Let me show you something,’ Drusher said. He held up a data-slate. The compact screen showed a display of the city, overlaid with rune symbols. ‘I’ve done some collating. See here? I’ve mapped all the sites where the victims were found. Thirty-two bodies.’
‘I did that myself, on an ongoing basis. I saw nothing. No pattern, no discernible spread.’
‘I agree,’ said Drusher. ‘I mean, there’s a certain concentration of kill-sites here, in this crescent, but most of the others are too wayward, too random.’
‘So?’
‘That first body you showed me, in the morgue. So cleanly, so particularly cut. Minimal signs of feeding, if any at all. Just like the body today in the Commission of Works. And Rimbaud.’
‘Right. The face bitten off.’
Drusher nodded. ‘Yes, except I don’t think it was bitten. Remember how clean I said it was? I mean almost sterile. None of the bacterial traces one would expect from an animal bite. Especially not from an old, diseased predator with gums receding from vitamin deficiency. Macks, I could wiggle that poor cat’s teeth out with my fingers.’
Her face had gone hard.
‘Keep going, Valentin,’ she said.
‘The body in the stacks we went to look at. That was the work of the carnodon. It had mauled and eaten the corpse away. I checked the autopsy files. Nine of the cases were just like that. Gnawed. The victims were all either dead already or helpless. Old, infirm. The carnodon had escaped from the zoological gardens, but it was weak and long past its hunting prime. It roamed the city, not preying, but scavenging. That was all it could do any more.’
‘What are you telling me?’ Macks asked quietly.
‘Look at the map again. Here.’ Drusher flipped a switch. ‘Now I’ve taken away the bodies I can attribute to the cat. Cleans it up a bit, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she admitted.
‘The old carnodon was hungry and opportunistic. It had no pattern. It just roamed and fed where it could. What we’re left with is a much more precise zone. Almost territorial. The killings here were like poor Rimbaud – swift, savage, clean. No feeding.’
‘But it’s still an odd crescent-shaped spread. How can we triangulate from that?’
‘Look at the map, Macks. Territory is determined not just by hunter but also by prey. The crescent-shaped dispersal covers an area east of the Commission of Works. There are none to the west because that’s an area interdicted by the Martial Order Division. It doesn’t kill there, Macks, because there’s no one there to kill.’
‘Oh Throne…’ she murmured.
‘And this is the good bit,’ Drusher smiled. ‘Look what happens when I mirror the dispersal, projecting it as if there were quarry in all directions. The crescent becomes…?’
‘A circle.’
‘Right, a circle. There’s your focus. There’s your bloody pattern. That’s its territory. Right there.’
Macks was driving faster than ever. In the back seat sat Edvin and a trooper called Roderin. Both were checking their riotgun loads.
‘You’re sure about this?’ Macks hissed.
‘I’ve very little left to stake on it,’ Drusher replied, ‘my professional credentials being long since used up.’
‘Don’t get smart,’ she warned. ‘You two ready?’ she called over her shoulder.
Edvin and Roderin both replied in the affirmative. Edvin leaned forwards.
‘I thought we’d got this thing, sir,’ he said. ‘I mean, I thought Falken had plugged it.’
‘He got the cat,’ Drusher said. ‘But the cat wasn’t it.’
Macks began to slow down, and it was lucky she did. A second Magistratum transporter swung out in front of them from a side street, and ploughed ahead.
‘Falken,’ Macks whispered.
They pulled up outside the Commission of Works. Falken had two troopers with him, Levy and Mantagne.
‘What the hells is this about?’ Falken asked belligerently. He was still half-drunk from the party in the morgue.
‘We’re onto a lead,’ Macks said. ‘Behave.’
Falken looked at Drusher. ‘I got it, stone dead. Boom-boom. What is this crap now?’
‘Something else,’ Drusher said.
They spread out in a line, entering the weed-choked waste behind the Commission of Works.
‘Macks?’ Drusher called. She came over to him.
‘I’d like a weapon.’
‘In the old days, you–’
‘I’d really like a weapon,’ he repeated.
Macks nodded, a
nd lowered her riotgun in one hand as she pulled the handgun from her holster. She handed it to him.
‘The safety’s by–’
‘I know how they work,’ he snapped.
They pushed on.
‘So, this is all about territory, right?’ she said.
Drusher nodded. ‘You saw the map. We’re entering its territory now. Its hunting ground.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Like I said, you saw the map. The thing is, we’re not talking about animal instinct. Not territory as a predator would understand it. We’re talking about orders.’
‘What? Orders?’
‘What is this place, Macks?’
‘The Commission of Works.’
‘And what’s behind it?’
‘Just rubble, Valentin.’
‘Yeah, but what was it before it was rubble?’
‘It was the main building of the Administratum here in Tycho. Before the tank shells levelled it.’
‘Exactly. The Administratum centre. Dead centre of the spread pattern. During the civil war, something was ordered to guard that vital point, secure it, defend it.’
Macks glared at him. ‘A man?’
Drusher shrugged. ‘Something. Something that’s still doing it. Macks, I glimpsed the killer in the Commission of Works, right after it killed Rimbaud. It was humanoid.’
Spread wide, the line of officers entered the ruins of the Administratum. Some parts of the ruin were two or three storeys tall, held up, crippled and crooked, by the ferrosteel bars stripped through the rockcrete.
There were weeds everywhere, flourishing. Tinsel-barb and frondwort, cabbage speculus and the limp foliage of climbing tracedy. The air was pungent with root-rot, stagnant water, mould.
Drusher slowly circled around. Macks was nearby, riotgun raised. He glanced left and saw Falken bending in under a broken doorway. To his right, Edvin was aiming his weapon at the overhung, plant-swathed walls.
Levy raised his clucking auspex box. ‘Getting something, very weak. It’s coming from the west.’
Falken nodded and disappeared. Macks hurried onwards. Mantagne covered her, glancing nervously up at the blooming foliage. Weapon clenched high, Roderin shuffled through a ruined archway.
‘Getting hot now, getting really hot,’ Levy called, lifting up his auspex, which was burring like a cicada.
‘Throne, it must be right on us!’
Falken’s gun went off. Once. Twice. Then another one echoed it. Macks started forward, running, and Drusher followed. Levy was right behind them. Mantagne rushed around to the other side of the wall.
There was a scream. Two more shots. Three.
Mantagne was dead. He had been sliced open from the scalp to the sternum. Blood was still spitting from his opened body, high into the air.
‘Throne!’ Macks cried, turning around. She heard Falken fire again, then Edvin. ‘Where is it? Where is it?’
Levy almost crashed into her from behind, following his auspex blindly.
‘Right there! There!’
Macks aimed and fired, once, twice, grinding back the slide each time. She put a huge hole in the facing wall.
Shots again, distant, from Falken and Edvin. Macks and Levy followed the sound. Pistol raised, Drusher turned the other way.
This predator was smart. Very smart and very able. It knew all about misdirection. It could out-think any regular human, and then split him open. It understood military tactics because that is what it dealt in. It had been programmed. It had been given orders.
Breathing hard, Drusher edged around another shattered arch, his weapon braced. His pulse was racing, but this felt entirely odd. This wasn’t about his trained skills any more. This wasn’t about an animal, whose habits and behaviours he had been schooled to understand. This was the opposite.
So he did the opposite. Facing any hungry predator, the last thing a magos biologis would want to do is step into the open. But he did so, turning a full circle, his pistol aimed in both hands.
On the rubbled floor before him, he saw Roderin. Roderin was dead, just like the others.
Drusher circled again, weapon tight.
The killer flew at him.
Drusher pulled the trigger and kept it pulled. Eight, nine, ten rounds, the full clip boomed out of Macks’ borrowed sidearm, and hit the killer head-on.
It fell, burst open, broken, puffed pink intestines spilling from its punctured torso. A man, but not a man. A product of the civil war. Augmetically strengthened, augmetically wired, its eyes a black visor, wires stapled into its flesh, its palsied hands curled over to expose the whirring chainblades sewn into its wrists.
The chainblades whined as they came together. Despite the rounds he had put into it, it got back up. And leapt at Drusher’s face.
His gun clicked, dry.
‘Down, Valentin!’
From behind him, Macks fired her riotgun, and the killer’s head burst like a tomato. The impact knocked it sideways. When it landed, its chainblades were still whirring involuntarily.
‘All right?’ she asked Drusher.
He nodded.
‘You were right. As ever.’
‘Glad to be of service.’
‘Seriously,’ she said, leading him out of the ruins as Falken and Edvin fired shot after shot into the killer to make sure it was dead. ‘Seriously, Drusher, I owe you.’
‘A week’s pay, you said. I do what I do.’
He began to walk away, picking his path through the rubble.
‘Valentin, I could put it down as two weeks, no one would know.’
He shrugged. He looked back at her.
‘What about a ticket off this rock?’ he said, with a thin, sad smile.
‘Can’t afford that,’ she said. ‘Sorry. Budgets and all.’
‘I had to ask,’ said Drusher. He sat down on a chunk of bricks.
‘Look,’ said Macks. ‘You’ve seen how stretched things are down here. The Martial Order Division can barely keep up. We can use all the help we can get, particularly sharp, educated minds with a thing for details. What do you think?’
‘How would that work?’ Drusher asked.
Macks shrugged. ‘Not sure. I could probably second your services on a temporary basis using the emergency powers. It’s not much, I know, but…’
Drusher frowned. ‘My teaching post isn’t much, but at least it’s safe.’ He handed her back the pistol.
‘You sure?’ she asked.
‘Whenever I spend any time with you, Macks, it ends up getting exciting,’ he said. ‘Rather too exciting for a man of my disposition.’
‘Hey,’ she replied, as if hurt, ‘I haven’t got you killed so far.’
Drusher smiled. ‘So far.’
Macks nodded.
‘All right,’ she said. She kissed him briefly on the cheek, and turned to walk back to the transporters.
Every wrong turn destiny had ever offered him…
And which was this? Drusher sighed.
‘Macks?’ he called out.
‘Yes?’
‘Would I get my own desk?’
Turning back, she smirked. ‘Valentin, you’ll even get your own couch.’
Drusher got to his feet, and wandered down the path after her.
THE KEELER IMAGE
Medonae the Eater, so called because of his appetites, had declared an auction, and word of this sale brought dealers and speculators from across the subsector, despite the isolation of his home.
An item in the catalogue drew my attention. I sent an agent in advance to confirm the provenance, and when word came back to me that it seemed authentic, I made arrangements to attend the sale in person.
Medonae the Eater dwelt on a war-burned rock called Pallik. Its orbit and revolutions blessed Pallik with a complex and irregular pattern of days and nights, some long, some short, some bright, some dim, which had led to the publication of various thick zodiacs and ephemeris tracts. I was not much bothered with learning the names
and durations of the day-night cycle. All I knew was that I should avoid the long and formidable ‘burnday’, a periodic event when all three suns rose together.
Many of those attending the auction arrived by cutter and orbital boat, setting down in the bleak flats of the desert outside the sloping walls of Medonae’s palace. Others came into the local city, Baryt Prime, and then hired caravans to trek out to the palace, six hundred kilometres beyond the city gates. Caravans made the trip almost daily, laden with goods from the city’s produce markets, such was Medonae’s appetite.
I set down on a mesa five kilometres from the palace, and made the way on foot. It was a lowday, when only the second sun made an appearance in the heavens, and then only for a brief interval of six and a half standard hours.
It was cold and dry. Through my glare shields, the sky was a deep, rich blue and the sun a white ball that cast lens flare when I turned my head. Light glinted on the hulls of shuttles and cutters parked on their landing frames on the desert floor. I saw the thin dust plume of a caravan procession fifteen kilometres out.
The palace was of fair size. It was all that remained of a city that had been levelled by war. Portions of it sloped away into the desert sands in litters of rubble, suggesting that a great deal more of the ancient habitation lay below ground or was, at least, buried in the bosom of history.
Sentinels at the gatehouse watched me approach.
‘You come to Medonae?’ asked one, his voice a vox-hiss through his rebreather mask. Both of them were dressed in plate and bodygear that had once been Astra Militarum issue, now repainted in the bright colours of a circus.
‘I do,’ I replied.
‘Your name?’
‘Gregor Eisenhorn,’ I replied. I saw no reason to lie.
‘And your standing?’
I showed them my Inquisitorial rosette.
Neither blanched.
‘Have you come to purge us, sir?’ one of them laughed.
‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘Has anyone here denied the sanctity of the Throne?’
‘Not us,’ chuckled the other. ‘We are all obedient to Holy Terra here, all of us.’
‘Then my business is purely to bid and buy,’ I said.
I was admitted.
The entry halls of the palace were busy with visitors. Each one, it seemed, had brought an ample entourage. Medonae’s servitors were conveying trays of food and drink from the kitchens, each new dish announced by a liveried chamberlain who declared the name of the delicacy as though it were another guest at the proceedings. I was offered a flask of water – a ritual gift for any traveller arriving out of the desert – which I took, and a beaker of wine that I did not. Various lots from the forthcoming sale had been set on display throughout the halls so that they could be viewed. I saw prayer-wheels from the Long Graves of Thracian, diadems from the Slave Worlds, a fine bust of Saint Kiodrus still in its satin-lined box, and a good oil of Guilliman, done by Manxis of Eustis Majoris, or so the ticket stated. The composition was well enough, but the brushwork lacked the finesse of Manxis himself. I thought that, most likely, it was a copy or the work of his school.