by Various
He lunged again, leading with his right-hand blade. She ducked it, and came out under his arm, but the other blade raked across the back of her right hand as she tried to fend him off. She punched at him. He struck her in the side of the head with the ball of his right hand and knocked her onto the ground.
There was a rushing sound in her head. She thought of her sisters, and the mother she could no longer picture. In desperation, she lashed out with her gift, but the killer’s black skin-suit again rendered him proof against her power. It was too slippery. She couldn’t get hold of anything except–
The man stumbled backwards in surprise as the knives flew out of his hands. He might have been armoured against a telekine, head to toe, but his blades were good, old-fashioned solid objects.
Patience pulled them both in until they were slowly orbiting her body as she rose. It would the matter of a moment to toss them both away out of the hunter’s reach.
But she had a much better idea.
With a bark of effort, she drove them point-first towards his eye-slit and nailed his skull against the back wall of the hab.
XII
Carl Thonius knocked on the refectory door and waited for a response. From inside, the oddly modulated screams and yelps of Prefect Cyrus shivered the air. As he waited, Carl glanced round at the four magistratum troopers guarding the hallway. They were clearly unnerved by the strange sounds of human pain echoing from the refectory. Carl smiled breezily, but got no response. He knocked again.
The screams ebbed for a moment, and the door flew open. Nayl peered out.
‘What?’ he spat.
‘I need a word, dear fellow. With the boss.’
‘Don’t “dear fellow” me, frig-face. Is this important? He’s busy!’
‘Well,’ Carl stammered. He was always edgy when he had to deal with the big ex-bounty hunter. ‘It is, sort of.’
Nayl sneered. ‘Sort of doesn’t cut it.’ He slammed the door in Carl’s face.
Carl cursed and knocked again. Nayl threw the door back open.
‘Don’t do that,’ Carl snapped. ‘Don’t treat me like that–’
‘Oh, go away you frig-wipe…’
Carl looked Nayl in the eyes. ‘Know your place, Nayl. You may not like me, but I am his interrogator. I want to see him now.’
Nayl looked Thonius up and down. ‘Balls after all,’ he said, grudgingly. ‘Okay.’
Carl walked into the room. Cyrus was slumped forward in his chains, wheezing, blood leaking from his tearducts. Kara sat on a chair just inside the door, her face grim.
‘Carl?’ I said softly. ‘This isn’t really time for an interruption.’
‘Sir, I’ve been trying to recover the lost data. The erased data. There’s really not much to get back, I’m afraid. I doubt we’ll ever find out what happened to most of the poor children laundered through this place.’
‘Your incompetence could have waited,’ Nayl said.
‘Stop ragging on him, Nayl,’ Kara hissed.
Carl shot Nayl a dark look. I could tell there was something more.
‘I told you I might be able to recode the last few days worth of material. Uh, recently processed material still existing in the codification buffer.’
‘Yes, Carl.’
He cleared his throat. ‘There was one item there. A record of a transaction made two nights ago. An older female pupil named Patience. Groomed by these bastards partly because of her spirit, and mostly because she was a latent telekine.’
I swung round to face him. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘A telekine?’
He nodded. ‘The recoding is pretty clear. I think she was the psyker you were looking for.’
‘Did you say her name was Patience?’ Kara asked quietly.
‘Yes, why?’ Carl replied. She shrugged. She was holding something back.
‘Kara?’ I nudged.
‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Just, when you were looking around, for traces of her, you thought I was bored and I said–’
‘Patience is a virtue,’ I finished.
Kara nodded. ‘Yeah, Patience is a virtue. Spooky.’
‘Coincidence,’ Nayl muttered.
‘Believe me, Harlon,’ I said, ‘in the length and breadth of this great Imperium of Man, there is no such thing as coincidence. Not where psyk is involved.’
‘Duly noted,’ he replied, not caring or believing.
‘Where did this Patience go, Carl?’ I asked.
‘She was sold for ten thousand to a narcobaron cartel who purchased her for use in a game they like to play.’
‘A game?’ I asked.
‘The record implies this is not the first subject the scholam has sold to the cartel for this purpose. I say game, it’s more sport. They release the purchased child into the slum-tracts and then… then they gamble on how long he or she will survive. Once they send their hunters out.’
‘So what?’ asked Nayl. ‘They’ll clean up our little psyk-witch loose end without us having to break a sweat. ‘
‘If the records are true,’ I warned. ‘Consider this. There might be a game. There might be a narcobaron with a taste for barbaric gladiatorial sport. On the other hand, all those things might be a substitution code to conceal an act of purchase to a Cognitae procurer.’
‘I actually don’t know which would be worse,’ Kara said.
I turned back to Cyrus. He whined as my mind re-entered his. He was still weak and reeling from our initial session, and by rights I should have left him a while to be sure of getting accurate responses. But there was no time. An unsanctioned menace was loose somewhere, or already leaving the planet under close watch.
I tried a few key phrases – ‘the psyker’, ‘the telekine’, ‘Patience’ – pushing them at his mind in the way a child rams shaped blocks at a box, hoping to find the right hole to fit. He responded with various recurring words: Loketter, the game, trophy worth…
I wasn’t sure how hard to push. I wasn’t sure if I was slamming him back against the limits of truth, where there is nowhere left for sanity to go, or simply meeting some form of substitution. Substitution was another standard Cognitae mind ploy. Anticipating psychic interrogation, the brotherhood mnemonically learned to replace the details of true memories with engrammatic euphemisms. Narcobaron, for example, could stand for procurer. Game might stand for purpose. It was a simple but almost unbreakable deceit. Well-schooled, a Cognitae brother could mask memories with metaphors. He could not be caught out in a lie, because he wasn’t lying. The truth had been erased and replaced with other facts. Using such techniques, a member of the brotherhood might withstand the most serious psyk-scrutiny, because the truth was no longer there to uncover.
‘He’s giving me nothing,’ I cursed, turning away. ‘Unless it is the truth. Do you have an active lead, Carl?’
Thonius nodded.
Kara got to her feet. ‘Let’s go and find her,’ she said. ‘If the story’s real, I mean if there is this frigging barbaric game actually going on, there’s a girl out there who really, really needs help right now.’
‘Throne! Let her die!’ Nayl barked. ‘Frigging psyker! What? What?’ Kara and Thonius were already heading for the door.
‘One life, Harlon,’ I said as I slid past him. ‘I learned many things from Eisenhorn, but ruthlessness was not one of them. Thousands may die, millions even, unless Molotch is found and brought to justice. But any count of a million starts with one, and to ignore one life when there is still a chance of saving it, well, one might as well give up on the other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine as well.’
‘Whatever,’ said Nayl.
‘Thank you for your vote of confidence,’ I said. ‘Kara, inform the magistratum that these interviews are suspended until we return.’
<
br /> XIII
The armoured manse did indeed belong to the man named Loketter, and nineteen counts of narco-traffic were outstanding on his name. The manse was a brass mushroom that dominated a long slope of rubble scree above the shadowland of the slum-tracts. Down here, with the monolithic bulk of Urbitane behind us, the immensity of the urban squalor and ruin was shocking to see.
The manse was ferro-armoured, and shielded, but our scanners lit with the buzz of electromag activity inside.
‘Signals!’ Kara reported. ‘They’re running drones out into the slum.’
‘Can you track them?’ I asked.
‘Working…’ She adjusted some dials. ‘I’ve got a lock on nine. Covering a hex-grid twelve by ten. Map comparison… Throne, these archives are so old! Here we go. An area known as Low Tenalt.’
‘Details?’
‘Serious slum-land,’ Carl said, speed-viewing the data on his codifier. ‘Basically wreckage. High probability of gang activity. Territorially, the gangs are the Dolors and, to the west, the ruin-burbs are run by the so-called Pennyrakers. Magistratum advice is to avoid this area.’
‘Really?’
Carl shrugged. ‘Magistratum advice is a blanket “avoid the slum-tracts”, so what the hey?’
‘How far?’ I asked.
At the helm of the cargo-gig, Nayl consulted the gyro-nav built into the stick. ‘Eight spans to the Low Tenalt area from here, on boost.’
‘Do it,’ I said.
‘You don’t want to level this manse first?’ Nayl asked.
‘They can wait. This girl can’t.’
Nayl nodded reluctantly, and hit the boosters. He wasn’t in this like the rest of us were. Running low, like a pond-fly skating the surface, we zipped through the ruined landscape, skipping rubble heaps, ducking under shattered transit bridges, running fast and low along the brick-waste gouges that had once been hab-streets.
Everything was a grey gloom, caught in the immense shadow of the city. Such ruin, such endless ruin…
‘Coming up, point three,’ reported Nayl, hauling on the stick. The engines whined shrill. ‘Two… one… setting down.’
The gig thumped and slithered as it settled on the loose brick.
Carl, Nayl and Kara were already up, arming weapons.
‘Sit down, Carl,’ I said. ‘I need you to run scope from here.’
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘I want full scanner input,’ I said as I hovered towards the opening hatch behind Kara and Harlon. ‘Wystan can watch your back.’
‘You’re going yourself?’ Wystan asked, surprised. It was one of the few times I’d ever heard emotion in his voice.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Kara and Harlon looked at me.
‘Yes, I’m coming with you,’ I said. ‘Have you got a problem with that?’
‘It’s just–’ Kara began.
‘You don’t usually…’ Nayl finished.
‘This isn’t usually,’ I said, and powered out past them into the chilly gloom.
Nayl leapt out after me, his Urdeshi-made assault gun cinched high around his broad frame. Kara paused and looked back at Wystan and Thonius. ‘Lock the door,’ she grinned. ‘And don’t open it unless you know it’s us. Even then, keep your powder dry.’
She jumped out, raised her Manumet 90 riot gun, and ran to join us.
Carl swallowed. Wystan Frauka got up, and locked the hatch shut. He looked at Carl, lit yet another lho-stick and patted the handgun tucked into his belt. ‘I got your back, Carly,’ he said.
‘Great,’ said Thonius. He turned to regard the sweeping screens of the scanner and adjusted his vox mic.
‘Getting this?’ he called.
‘Loud and obnoxiously clear,’ Nayl crackled back.
‘A ha ha. Funny. Not. Move west, two hundred metres, then head north along the axis of the old fuel store. The drones seem to be gathering there.’
‘Thank you, Carl,’ I responded.
We moved through the wasteland. It was one of the few times my state allowed me speedier and quieter access than my able-bodied friends. Nayl and Kara followed, clambering over the dunes of rubble.
‘See anything you like?’ Kara said.
‘I don’t frigging believe we’re doing this,’ Nayl grumbled.
‘Move left. Left!’ Carl’s voice rasped over the vox. ‘I’ve got drones moving now. Gunshots.’
‘I heard them,’ Nayl said, and started away to the left.
‘Flank him wide, Kara,’ I said, and she moved away in the opposite direction.
‘Throne,’ I heard Carl say. ‘I think we were right. I think this is some kind of frigging game.’
I propelled myself forward. Both Kara and Harlon were out of sight now, though I could sense them just fifty metres away, each side of me.
The twisted ruins of the tracts rose up on left and right. I tasted life-signs.
‘Hello?’ I transponded.
The Dolors appeared out of the gloom. Ragged, emaciated, filthy, feral. There were twenty of them.
Blackened teeth bared in wild grins. They raised their cudgels and spears and charged.
‘Your mistake,’ I said.
XIV
The barons were laughing. Most of them were drunk, or out of their heads on lhotas and obscura.
DaRolle looked up from the drone relay.
‘Have we got the bitch yet?’ Boroth demanded.
‘You wish,’ DaRolle said. He walked across the lounge and crouched down beside Loketter.
‘What?’ asked the man in red.
‘New players just entered the game,’ DaRolle said.
Loketter sat up. ‘Show me.’
DaRolle held out his data-slate. ‘Three on the ground. A gig too, grounded there.’
‘What the hell is this?’
‘Problem, Loketter?’ asked Vevian.
Loketter rose and smiled. ‘Not a problem, but a bonus element to our game today. Look at your scans. See? Newcomers.’
‘Who the frig are they?’ Gandinsky blurted.
‘Interlopers,’ Loketter said. ‘House will pay two thousand for each one killed. Firearms permitted.’
The intoxicated crowd applauded this energetically.
Loketter looked at DaRolle. ‘The ones on the ground I can get these fools to mess with,’ he whispered. ‘You go and fry up this gig.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. Find out who these fools are. Then burn it and every one on it.’
DaRolle nodded. ‘Pleasure,’ he said.
XV
Patience was still running. The Dolors, invisible in the shadows but everywhere now, were jeering and caterwauling, their strangled cries echoing around the ragged walls and shattered windows.
They were calling out to her, taunting her, abusing her with obscene words and suggestions, many of which, thankfully, were so choked by the gang-argot they made no sense.
Occasionally, stones or pieces of trash came flying out of the darkness at her, and she deflected all those she could. Some found her, especially the stinging stone bullets launched from catapults and slings.
Her instinct was to head back towards the colossal city, but no matter how much ground she managed to cover, it seemed not to get any closer. Its sheer scale made the distance hard to judge. It was probably kilometres away still.
She reached the ruins of a manufactory, its ply-steel roof collapsed. Seas of garbage and rubble spread out from its eastern side, and she began to pick her way across the weed-choked waste. Behind her, she could hear the gangers scurrying through the manufactory ruins. A few missiles flew out after her.
A figure suddenly appeared ahead of her, across the sea of trash. A small male, or perhaps a female, who’d been down in cover behind the remains of a yard wall, hidden by a chamele
on cloak. Glancing up, Patience cursed as she saw a hunter drone that had obviously been shadowing her for several minutes.
Patience changed course, and began to run away from the figure. She ran wide across the overgrown trash. The figure started to follow, trying to cut her off, running hard, but neither made particularly good going. The trash and rubble was so uneven, so treacherous. Patience kept tripping, stumbling, turning her ankles.
As soon as the hunter appeared, the jeering from the invisible Dolors grew more ferocious. Catapult missiles and even the occasional arrow whipped out from the manufactory at the hunter.
The hunter – and it was clearly a female – stopped in her tracks, and produced an autopistol. She slammed in a clip and fired three times at the manufactory.
The shells must have been high-ex, because each impact went up like a grenade. Sections of the manufactory ruin blew in, and the Dolors went very quiet suddenly.
Patience was still running. The hunter put the gun away and resumed the chase.
A second drone zoomed into view suddenly, circled Patience once and then headed for the hunter. The woman stopped again, looking round frantically as she reached for her sidearm. Patience half-heard her shout a question into her vox-set.
There was a loud crack, a peripheral flash of light, and the female hunter jolted suddenly as a las-round went clean through her torso. She crumpled without a sound.
Her killer appeared, directly ahead of Patience. She skidded to a halt. He was big, and wore segmented plating over a coat of green hide. A glowing augmetic implant covered one eye. He had a las-carbine in his hands.
He stared at Patience for a moment, then put the carbine away in the leather boot over his shoulders. Then he drew a large dagger with a twisted black blade and took a step towards her.
‘Make it easy now, and I promise you won’t feel nothing,’ he said.
Patience was breathing hard from the running. It made it easier somehow to summon up her gift. The man thought the first couple of stones that came flying at him were from the gangers, but then more came, and more, larger rocks, pieces of trash, chunks of garbage. Debris started showering off the ground all around her, whipping at him.