by Ian Watson
In that event, you (whoever you are, wherever, whenever) may be scanning these words as part of a briefing, poised on the brink of a deadly mission.
I hail you – fellow inquisitor, Space Marine commander, whomever.
Firstly I should briefly introduce Jaq Draco’s travelling companions, without whom he would surely have failed. They were three: Meh’Lindi the assassin, Vitali Googol the Navigator, and Grimm. (Little Grimm the squat; do not despise this plucky, ingenious abhuman. Do not mock his youthful foibles.) When Draco landed on the planet Stalinvast accompanied by these three, the inquisitor was in the guise of a rogue trader, an incognito that he often used. Googol was his pilot; Grimm, his engineer. Seemingly, Meh’Lindi was the trader’s mistress, though in truth... a secret inquisitor needs a secret assassin, does he not?
One of the nastier poison toads of the universe was about to launch itself out of its box, under the energetic prodding of a much more public inquisitor by the name of Harq Obispal. Draco would keep vigilant watch in case any toadspawn remained behind uncleansed. He was likewise keeping watch on Obispal, a surveillance of which Obispal should ideally have remained unaware, though doubtless he might have relished the scrutiny, since Obispal was a performer...
ONE
SOME HIVE WORLDS consist of shell upon shell of plasteel braced by great pillars, as if the planet has grown a metal skin and then another skin and yet another, each successive skin being home to billions of busy human maggots, fleas, lice.
Other hive worlds are poisoned wildernesses punctuated by rearing plasteel termite mounds, vertical cities that punch through the clouds.
The cities of Stalinvast were more like coral reefs looming above a sea of hostile jungle. Kefalov bulged like some fossil brain adorned with innumerable ridges. Dendrov branched every which way, a forest of tangled stags’ horns. Mysov was a mass of organ pipes, from which sprouted the fungi that were suburbs. Other cities were stacks of fans or dinner plates.
A thousand such cities, soaring, bulging, branching from the surface of Stalinvast and almost all involved in the manufacture of weapons for the Imperium. Stalinvast was a rich, important world. Its thronged reefs were proudly stained rose-red, scarlet, purple, pink. Between the cities the blue-green jungle was riven with great scars where plasma cannon and barrage bombs had been tested. Warrior robots, juggernauts, and great armoured vehicles used the jungles as a proving ground.
The capital, Vasilariov, partook of most of the styles of coral architecture. Fifty kilometres long by forty wide by five high, currently Vasilariov was being scarred by some of its own weapons as Harq Obispal raged through the hive like an angry bear. Doing good work, oh yes.
IN THE EMERALD Suite of the Empire Hotel, a plate jutting high above raw jungle at the southern edge of Vasilariov, Meh’Lindi said, ‘I think I shall go into town to practise.’
‘Against the rebel hybrids?’ asked Grimm. ‘Huh! Count me out.’
Which meant, as they all knew, that Grimm didn’t intend to miss any of the action.
‘Dressed like that, Meh’Lindi?’ Googol drawled archly.
The Navigator’s large eyes assessed her gown of iridescent Sirian silk tied at the waist with a casual scarlet sash, her silverfur stole, her curly-toed slippers.
True, even costumed thus as a trader’s mistress she would be armed – with a garrotte or two, some tiny digital weapons for slipping on to her fingers, phials of the chemicals she used.
Reclining on a couch, Googol appraised Meh’Lindi’s figure as she began to twitch subtly. The assassin was running through some muscle exercises, using her enhanced body sense to tense and untense. She was artful steel expanding and contracting, tempering itself. Googol’s own pose suggested languor. The spindly Navigator yawned.
Yet he was watching Meh’Lindi. As was Grimm; as was Jaq himself.
Meh’Lindi was taller than most men, long-limbed and sleek. Her height served to distract attention from the power in her calves and biceps. Her face, framed by curly, cropped raven hair, was curiously flat and anonymous – almost forgettable. Its smooth ivory planes suggested beauty without exactly expressing it, as if awaiting a stimulus to burst into life. Her eyes were golden. Meh’Lindi. She had been taken as a child from a wild jungle world of carnivores, flesh-sucking plants and hunter-warriors who had lost most of the arts of civilisation save for those of cunning, combat and survival. Borne away to commence a decade of training in the temple on Callidus, she had stubbornly insisted longer than most recruits on maintaining her identity. In her outlandish, simple dialect she had declared, ‘Me, Lindi! Me, Lindi!’ Soon enough the seven-year-old girl had killed an older pupil who mocked her. She became known as “Meh’Lindi” thereafter among her instructors. They let her keep that part of herself, though much else changed. Now she smiled down faintly at the jungle below the crystal windows of the suite as if remembering home – though this day the really deadly jungle was within the city, not without.
Googol and Grimm both fed on her smile. As did Jaq. As did Jaq himself.
The inquisitor knew that he should only think of Meh’Lindi as a wonderful, living weapon. He sincerely hoped that the Navigator would never be foolish enough to try to charm Meh’Lindi into his bed. Meh’Lindi could crush him to straw like a constrictor. She could crack his hairless head like an egg. Googol’s ever-hidden warp-eye would pop out from beneath the black bandana tied around his brow.
As for the red-bearded squat who only stood waist-high to Meh’Lindi... dapper in his quilted red flak jacket, green coveralls and forage cap, his was obviously a comically hopeless passion.
‘Meh’Lindi...’
‘Yes, inquisitor?’ She inclined her head. Was she conceivably teasing him?
‘Don’t use that title while we’re on a mission!’ He hoped that his tone sounded severe. ‘You must address me as Jaq.’ Ha, the power to order this remarkable and disturbing woman to address him intimately.
‘Well, Jaq?’
‘Yes is the answer. By all means go and practise within reason. Don’t pull any stunts that draw lurid attention to yourself.’
‘Vasilariov’s in chaos. No one will notice me. I’ll be helping the Imperium a little, won’t I?’
‘That isn’t my purpose at present.’
Googol flapped a hand languidly. ‘The whole of Stalinvast may be in chaos in the ordinary sense, but Chaos as such has nothing to do with it. Genestealers aren’t creatures of Chaos even if they do hang out in hulks in the warp until they can find a world to prey on.’
Jaq frowned at the Navigator. To be sure, his companions needed to know enough about him and his goals to perform effectively, but Malleus policy on the subject of Chaos and its minions was one of censorship. Chaos – the flipside of the universe, domain of the warp – spawned many vilenesses of the ilk of Thlyy’gzul’zhaell which sought to twist reality askew. Innumerable such specimens? The Ordo Malleus attempted to numerate them! Yet not to broadcast knowledge of those. Oh no, quite the contrary. Even the natural menace of genestealers was daunting enough to require utmost circumspection.
‘Huh,’ said Grimm, ‘nobody knows the stealers’ true origin, so far as I’m aware. Unless you do, Jaq.’
Before Jaq could respond, Meh’Lindi kicked off her slippers. She discarded her stole. She loosed her sash, sending it snaking with a flick of her wrist so that Grimm jumped back a pace. Without ceremony she dropped her silk gown, standing naked but for her briefs and her tattoos, which were all black. A hairy spider embraced her waist. A fanged serpent writhed up her right leg as if to attack the spider. Beetles walked across her breasts. Most of her tattoos concealed long-healed scars, embellishing those cicatrices eerily.
Her hand now cradled a tiny canister; what a conjuror she could be. That would have been clipped somewhere inside the scarlet sash.
Poising acrobatically upon one leg then the other, Meh’Lindi proceeded to spray her body from toe to neck with black synthetic skin. Contorting herself elegantly, yet always rem
aining perfectly balanced, she missed no cleft or crease or dimple. At what stage did her briefs tear loose? Jaq hardly saw. He sensed her excitement and his own excitement; knew that those were two different species of excitement.
Hastily he redirected his attention towards the circular screen that he had hung on the wall in place of an oil painting of some horned, scaly jungle monster.
His psychic sense of presence buzzed as he recontacted his spy-flies. The screen lit with a hundred crowded little images, a mosaic of miniature scenes. Now that screen was the faceted eye of a fly, though the view from each facet was unique.
The mosaic occupied much of his consciousness so that he was only dimly aware – out of the corner of his eye, and mind’s eye – of Meh’Lindi, a flexible ebon statue of herself, yet still with an ivory face. Now she was inserting the throat and ear plugs with which she would hear and communicate and breathe.
Jaq summoned a facet into full prominence. It swelled. Around it, like a thronged ring of moonlets each with its own scenery, all the other facets squeezed.
A skirmish in a hovertank plant...
Arrows of light cross-hatched a grey cavern housing half-completed vehicles. Hybrids armed with lasguns were pressing hard against a picket line of planetary guardsmen. Those guards were a loyal, uninfiltrated unit and they were losing. What brutish caricatures of human beings the hybrids were, with their jutting, swollen, bone-ridged heads, their glaring eyes, their jagged bared teeth. In place of a human hand, several hybrids sported the terrible, strong claw of the purestrain genestealer. When those hybrids overran the guards they might simply tear the last survivors apart.
Yet this wasn’t the whole picture, oh no, not by any means. Jaq shrank that grim facet and expanded another...
Many hundreds of rebels swarmed across the roof of a rose-red plate-district, heading for a tree of administrative towers. Mingling with hybrids, indeed outnumbering them, were rebels who looked truly human. Some of these would be the firstborn spawn of hybrids, human in looks yet able to procreate a purestrain genestealer. Others would be subsequent offspring, genuine human beings who still heeded the hypnotic brood-bond.
A series of explosions tore at the stem of the plate district where it was attached to the rest of the city. The entire plate sagged and snapped free. Briefly, the whole huge structure sailed on the air, then fell. Rebels slid and scrabbled for hand holds, claw holds, as the district plummeted towards the fringe of the jungle two kilometres below.
On impact – a tree-flattening impact – dust arose. The dust was rebel bodies. Even the plasteel of the plate cracked open. A well-aimed plasma beam from above ignited fuel storage tanks. Within and without, flame engulfed the fallen plate-district. The dust burned; as did any populace who lived in that plate, supposing they had survived the plunge of their factory-homes.
Many hundreds more rebels were dead now. Really the rebellion was entering its final, frantic, suicidal phase.
‘Some people believe the genestealers were designed – as a living weapon,’ Googol was informing Grimm. ‘A fine joke, dreamed up by some vicious alien!’
‘Huh.’
‘Well, why not? Do you think they evolved that way? Genestealers can’t breed on their own. How could they have come into existence in the first place without malicious midwives? They’re compelled to infest other races and multiply like a cancer within.’ In his travels throughout the galaxy, doubtless Googol would have heard many rumours, despite best official efforts to suppress scaremongering talk.
‘Perhaps,’ suggested Grimm, ‘a Chaos storm warped them from whatever they were before? Seems the purestrains can’t pilot a ship, can’t fire a gun, can’t fix a fuse. Otherwise, they’d be all over the place under their own steam. What a clumsy weapon! Huh!’
‘Yet what an excellent dark joke against life and family and love.’
The stout abhuman muttered some oath in his own outlandish dialect.
‘Now, now, Grimbo,’ reproved the Navigator, ‘we all speak Imperial Gothic here—’ Another, darker oath in the same patois, ‘— like civilised beings.’
‘Well, kindly don’t call me Grimbo, then. Me name’s Grimm.’
‘Grimm in name though not grim in nature necessarily. You’re but a sprout of a squat.’
‘Huh. You’re hardly antique yourself, despite appearances.’
Those wrinkles on the Navigator’s face; and his mournful tunic...
Meh’Lindi’s hair was slicked down tight. When she sprayed her face, her visage became more of a blank than ever, a black mask with the merest hint of features. The syn-skin would protect her against poison gas or flame or the flash of explosions; it would boost her already-honed nervous system and her already-notable vigour.
By the time she wound the scarlet sash around her waist once more, miniaturised digital weapons hooded her fingers like so many baroque thimbles. The needler, laser and flamer were precious, alien, jokaero devices.
Jaq summoned another facet...
In a transit-tube station two different units of planetary defence troopers were fighting each other furiously at close quarters. Rainbow light sprayed and arced as the vibrating edges of power axes met the energy fields of power swords. One of these units must have been entirely genestealer brood in human guise. But which was which? Those who wore the black basilisk insignia, or the blue deathbats?
Reinforcements were arriving on foot through the tunnel. Flamers sprayed at the fracas, and at last rebels could be distinguished from loyalists, just as it became obvious that the new arrivals on the scene – pink salamanders – were also loyalists. For the black basilisks screamed and writhed and quit fighting as soon as superheated chemicals clung burning to them. Deathbats – those of the brood – rushed frenziedly, even as they blazed, to attack the wielders of the flame guns. Precision laser fire sliced through the berserkers, killing human torch after human torch until the last had fallen.
Presently, perhaps tardily, foam engulfed the platforms to douse the clingfire – blinding this particular spy-fly, though by now Jaq had registered the loyalists’ hard-won gain...
Another facet: a ribbed hall of towering, icon-stencilled machine tools, littered with corpses, many of them as grotesque in death as they had been in life...
Jaq’s hundred roving spy-flies and the screen-eye were another jokaero invention, perhaps unique, which the Ordo Malleus had captured. Those simian, orange-furred jokaero were forever improvising ingenious equipment, not necessarily in the same way twice, though with an accent on miniaturisation.
Debate still waxed hot as to whether the orange ape aliens were genuinely intelligent or merely made weapons as instinctively as spiders make web. Grimm, a born technologist himself – as were all of his kind, it seemed – had pointed out that this eye-screen required psychic input from the operator. So some Jokaero must have psyches. At least.
Most planets seemed to harbour biological flies. Swamp-flies, dung-flies, offal-flies, sand-flies, flies that liked to sip from the eyeballs of crocodiles, corpse-flies, rotting-vegetation-flies, pseudo-flies that fed on magnetic fields. Who would notice a little fly buzzing around nimbly? Who would mark that fly watching you, transmitting what it saw and heard back to the eye-screen from anywhere within a compass of twenty kilometres? Who would expect that the fly and its fellows were tiny vibrating crystalline machines?
‘I go!’ announced Meh’Lindi.
If she chose, she could speak as gracefully as a courtier, as deviously as a diplomat. In the face of imminent deadly action, she sometimes reverted to a more basic style of utterance, recalling her original primitive tribal society. Lithely and silently, swift as a razorwing, she departed the Emerald Suite.
With a piercing thought and a twist of will, Jaq detached one of several spy-flies hovering in the otherwise deserted corridor outside, detailed it to follow her.
He magnified that viewpoint, allowing it a quarter of the eye-screen. Meh’Lindi paused momentarily, glanced back in the direction of the s
py-fly, and winked. Then she padded quickly away, pursued.
‘Huh, so I’ll be off too.’ Grimm jammed his cap down hard, patted his holstered laspistol, checked his “bunch of grapes” – his grenades – and scampered after her. Unlike when Meh’Lindi exited, this time the suite door banged shut.
‘Noisy tyke,’ commented Googol, uncoiling from the couch. ‘Surprised he doesn’t favour a boltgun. Clatter-clatter-clatter.’
‘You know very well,’ said Jaq, ‘that he slammed the door to signal he was following her.’
Googol laughed giddily. ‘He needs to run around to keep his legs short. And Meh’Lindi, to keep hers long.’
‘She’ll be back, Vitali, never fear. As will Grimm.’
‘Grimm racing off to protect her... as soon set a mouse to escort a cat! It’s really pathetic the way he dotes on her then pretends to bluff it all off with a huh. I suppose in the absence of any dumpy squat females Meh’Lindi must seem like a goddess to the little chap.’
And, thought Jaq, likewise to you? And even – somewhat – to me? ‘A deadly goddess,’ he said, ‘who always has other things on her mind. As I have. So hush.’
The Navigator prowled to and fro. He picked up a crystal decanter of amber liqueur, set it down. He pricked his thumb against the corkscrew horn of a baby teratosaur skull mounted on one wall, its brow inset with a green jewel. He stirred a courtesy bowl of dream-dust, untouched within its force-membrane by any of them hitherto, then went and cleaned his hands under the vibrostat. Nervous for Meh’Lindi’s safety? What was Meh’Lindi’s whole purpose, what was her very life, but to go into perilous places, always to emerge alive? What was her daily rationale but to keep herself tuned to a pitch, taut as a bowstring? Yet in those golden eyes of hers was a lively intelligence and even wit. Of course, her sense of wit could be alarming.
Jaq riffled through facets, summoning scene after scene into prominence in swift succession until he came to the spy-fly that was tracking...
Harq Obispal.