It was too late. Tutrone had undone the catch. The false nail sprang back and something flew out of the cavity in the finger tip. A silver worm, like a thread of necklace chain, flashed through the air.
Where did it go?'
'I don't know, I said, pushing Tutrone and Aemos behind me. 'Did you see it?' I asked Fischig.
'Over there/ he said, pulling a short-nosed gloss-black autopistol out from his robes.
I reached for my own gun, then remembered I'd given it back to Vibben.
I snatched up a bone knife from the trolley.
The worm slithered back into the light. It was a metre long and several centimetres thick now. What foul sorcery had caused that expansion, I did not want to know. It was made of segmented metal, and the head was an eyeless cone split by a hissing mouth full of razor teeth.
Tutrone cried out as it flew at lis. I pushed her down and the thing whipped across over us, hitting a corpse on a nearby plinth. There was a dreadful sucking, gnawing sound and the worm disappeared into the corpse's torso through a jagged hole.
The corpse vibrated and ruptured, filling the air with a foul mist of vapour. The worm swished up out of it and disappeared across the floor. By then, Fischig had opened fire and blasted the shattered corpse off its plinth. The worm was long since gone.
'Touch-activated mechanism/ Aemos was murmuring to himself, 'very discrete, probably of Xenos manufacture, a guard weapon, with some mass-altering system that expands it on contact with air and/or release, hunting by sound...'
'So shut up!' I told him. I bundled him and Tutrone against the far wall. Fischig and I moved in parallel courses down through the plinth rows, weapons ready.
It reappeared. By the time I saw it, it was almost on me, thrashing forward through the air on its metallic tail. In a split second, I reflected that this was how Eyclone had wanted me to die. This was what he had intended to unleash against me on the landing platform at Processional Two-Twelve.
Rage made me deny him. I stabbed out and my extended blade jabbed directly between the gaping teeth and down the gullet. The impact knocked me back. I found I had the whole, heavy, two-metre thing thrashing on the end of my knife like a lash.
Shots banged past me. Fischig was trying to hit it.
You'll kill me, you idiot!'
'Hold it still!'
With a metallic rasping, it was chewing down the blade and the handle towards my hand.
Tutrone came in from behind me and together we wrestled the powerful, coiling thing onto a plinth. She activated a bone-saw on her augmetic hand and sliced down through its neck with a shrill scream of spinning blades.
The body continued to thrash. She grabbed it and dropped it into an acid trough usually reserved for bio-waste. The hissing head and the knife it was still chewing away at quickly followed it.
The four of us gazed down at the thrashing remains as they disintegrated.
I looked round at Mortress Tutrone and Fischig.
'I know which one of you I'd rather have around in a fight/1 muttered.
Tutrone laughed. Fischig didn't.
'What was it?' Aemos asked me as we raced in Fischig's landspeeder through the streets to the Arbites' headquarters.
'You guessed more than I know/ I replied. A gift from his masters, certainly/
'What manner of masters make a thing like that?'
'Powerful ones, Aemos. The worst kind/
Our meeting at the Arbites' grim chambers was brief. At my request, Fischig had summoned Magus Palastemes, the head of the cryogenerator technomagi.
He took one look at the casket in the evidence room and said, 'I have no idea what it is/
Thank you. That will be all/ I told him. I turned to Fischig. 'Have this sent immediately to my vessel/
'It is state's evidence-' he began.
'Who do you work for, Fischig?'
The Emperor/
"Then pretend I'm him and you won't be far wrong. Do it/
* * *
Hadam Bonz was waiting for us in the interrogation room. He had been stripped naked, but Fischig assured me nothing of import had been found in his clothes.
Bonz was the gunman I had laid out in the cryogenerator chamber, the only one of Eyclone's men to have survived the night. His mouth was swollen from my blow. He had admitted nothing except his name.
Fischig, Aemos and I entered the room, a dull stone box. Bonz was shackled to a metal chair and looked terrified.
So should he, I thought.
Tell me about Murdin Eyclone/ I said.
Who?' The darkness had gone from his eyes now, Eyclone's spell broken. He was bewildered and confused.
Then tell me the last thing you remember.'
'I was on Thracian Primaris. That was my home. I was a stevedore in the docks. I remember going to a bar with a friend. That is all/
The friend?'
'A dock master called Wyn Eddon. We got drunk, I think/
'Did Eddon mention an Eyclone?'
'No. Look, where am I? These bastards won't say. What I am supposed to have done?'
I smiled. 'You tried to kill me for a start/
'You?'
'I'm an Imperial inquisitor/
At that, terror made him lose control of his body functions. He began pleading, begging, telling us all sorts of misdemeanours, none of which mattered.
I knew from the first moments that he was useless. Just a mesmerised slave, chosen for his muscle, knowing nothing. But we spent two hours with him anyway. Fischig slowly turned a wall dial near the door that vented in increasing measures of the sub-zero air outside the Sun-dome. In our heat gowns, we asked questions over and again.
When Bonz's flesh began to adhere to the metal chair, we knew there was nothing more.
'Warm him up and feed him well/ Fischig told his men as we left the cell. We execute him at dawn/
I didn't ask if that meant some arbitrary time in the next cycle or real dawn, six months away, at the start of Thaw.
I didn't much care.
Fischig left us to our own devices for a while, and I ate lunch with Aemos at a public bistro almost directly under the Sun-dome. The food was sour, rehashed from freeze-dried consumables, but at least it was hot. Fountain banks projected walls of water around the edges of the bistro so that the sun-globe light made rainbows that criss-crossed the tables and aisles. On this sombre day of mourning, there were no other diners present.
Aemos was in good spirits. He chatted away, making connections I hadn't begun to see. For all his faults, he possessed a superb mind. Every hour I spent with him, I learned more techniques.
He was forking up fish and rice and reviewing his data slate.
'Let's look at the transmission lag that Lowink detected in the messages Eyclone sent and received while on the planet/
They're all in cipher. Lowink hasn't unlocked them yet/
'Yes, yes, but look at the lag. This one... eight seconds... that's from a ship in orbit... and the timeframe matches that period in which we know Eyclone's mysterious starship was here. But this... during your struggle with him last night. A lag of twelve and a half minutes. That's from another system/
I stopped trying to macerate a lump of meat that resembled a slug and peered over. I'd never much considered the blurry side-bar that edged all astropathic message forms before.
Twelve and a half? You're sure?'
'I had Lowink check/
'So that gives us a reference frame?'
He smiled, pleased I was pleased. Three worlds in the picture. All between eleven and fifteen minutes' lag of here. Thracian Primaris, Kobalt II and Gudran/
Thracian Primaris was no surprise. That had been our last port of call, our last sighting of Eyclone. And, as far as we knew from the wretched Bonz, the place where he had recruited some or all of his servants.
'Kobalt's a nothing. I checked. Just an Imperial watch station. But Gudran-'
'A primary trade world. Old culture, old families-'
'Old poisons/
he finished with a laugh, completing the proverb.
I dabbed my mouth with a napkin. 'Can we be more certain?'
'Lowink's researching for me. Once we break the cipher... I don't mean the message cipher itself, I mean the coded headers to the actual text, we'll know/
'Gudran...' I pondered.
My vox-link chimed in my ear. It was Betancore.
'Ever hear of a thing called the Pontius?'
'No. Why?'
'I haven't either, but Lowink's cracking some of the old transcripts. In the weeks before Eyclone arrived, someone was sending messages off the approved links to a location in the Sun-dome. They talk about the delivery of The Pontius'. It's all rather vague and indirect/
'Do you have a location?'
'Why else do you employ us? Thaw-view 12011, on the west side of the dome, the high-rent quarter. Aristo turf/
'Any names?'
No, they're very exclusive and coy about such things/
'We're on it/
Aemos and I rose from the table. We turned to find Fischig standing there. He was wearing the full flak armour, carapace and visored helm of an Arbites now. I have to admit the effect was impressive.
'Going somewhere without me, inquisitor?'
'Going to find you, actually. Take us to Thaw-view.'
FOUR
The Sun-dome toured at speed.
Thaw-view 12011.
Questioning Saemon Crotes.
The wealthiest Hubrites kept winter palaces on the west perimeter of the Sun-dome. According to Chastener Fischig, they 'enjoyed both light and dark' as if that was something indulgent. They looked inwards to the lit dome and had shutters that could be opened to view the dark landscape of the winter desert. It was a spiritual thing, Aemos suggested.
Fischig shut down his terrain-following guidance as we sliced through the streets, and his heavy speeder rose up above the traffic and buildings. We hooked hard turns between glass spires and roared west.
I think he was showing off.
In the rear seating, under the roll-bars, Aemos clung on and closed his eyes with a soft groan. I rode up front with the armoured Fischig, seeing a predatory grin on his face under the visor of his Arbites helmet.
The speeder was a standard Imperial model, painted matt-brown and sporting the badges of the solar symbol and the chevrons and tail number of the local Arbites. Armoured, it turned heavily, the anti-grav straining to keep us aloft. There was a heavy bolter pintle-mounted forward of my seat. I glanced around and saw a locked rack of combat shotguns behind the rear seats.
Give me one of those!' I yelled above the slipstream and the choppy thrum of the turbo-fans.
"What?'
'I need a weapon!'
Fischig nodded and keyed a security code into a pad built into his bulky control stick. The cage on the gun-rack popped. 'Take one!' Aemos handed one over to me, and I began loading shells.
Thaw-view rose before us, a terrace of luxurious crystal-glass and ferrocrete dwellings built into the curve of the dome itself. We whipped low over stepped gardens, making ferns and palms shudder in our downwash.
Then Fischig keyed the fans to idle and we settled on a wide veranda deck, eight storeys up.
He leapt out, racking his shotgun.
I followed him.
'Stay here/ I told Aemos. He needed no further encouragement.
'Which one?' Fischig asked.
'12011.'
We edged along the wide, curving deck, clambering over dividing rails and trellises of climbing flowers.
12011 was glass-fronted, with wide sliding doors of mirrored window-plate.
Fischig swept up a warning hand, and took a coin from his pocket. He flipped it onto the terrace and it was atomised by nine separate las-beams.
He keyed his vox. 'Chastener Fischig to Arbites control, copy?'
'Copy, chastener.'
'Access dome central and shut down auto-defences on Thaw-view 12011. Immediate.'
A pause.
'Shut down authorised.'
He made to step forward. I halted him and tossed a coin of my own.
It bounced twice on the basalt terrace and rolled to a halt.
'I like to be sure/ I said.
We came up either side of the main picture window. Fischig tried the slider but it was locked.
He stepped back, apparently preparing to shoot the window in.
'It's arma-plex/ I told him, rapping my knuckles off the material. 'Don't be stupid/
I pulled the plastic bag containing Eyclone's effects from my jacket and searched for the compact las-knife. Before I found it, I found the plastic key.
Slim chances but what the crud, as Inquisitor Hapshant used to say.
I slid the key into the frame lock and the window slid aside on motorised rails.
We both waited. Perfumed air and light orchestral music wafted out past us.
Adeptus Arbites! Make yourselves known!' Fischig bellowed, his voice amplified by his helmet speaker.
They did.
Rapid gunfire, heavy calibre, blew away the terrace rail, decapitated potted shrubs and dwarf trees, cropped flower beds, and chopped down the deck's aerial mast.
'Have it your way!' bellowed Fischig and rolled in, pumping his shotgun. The blasts were deafening.
I clambered up a drain-spout onto the second level balcony, my shotgun dangling around my shoulders on its strap. Furious exchanges of fire rumbled below me.
I went in through a gauze-draped opening into the main bedrooms.
The room was over-warm and dark, dressed in red velvet with soothing, ambient music welling from hidden vox-speakers. The bed was in disarray. In one corner, on a gilt credenza, sat a portable vox-set. I padded forward and studied the responder log. Fischig's chaos down below rumbled through the floor like a distant storm.
The girl came out of a side room, a bathroom I imagine, and shrieked when she saw me. She was naked, and dived under the bedclothes for cover.
The muzzle of my shotgun tracked her.
'Who's here?'
She whimpered and shook her head.
'Inquisition/ I hissed. 'Who's here?'
She began to sob and shook her head again.
'Stay down. Get under the bed if you can/
In the adjoining room, I heard whistling. A voice called out a name.
'Don't answer/ I told the weeping girl.
I moved slowly round to the side room door. Light shone out. There was a hint of steam and a smell of bath-oils. The whistling had stopped.
He was wary, I'll give him that. He didn't bluster out, gun blasting.
I tipped open the door with the snout of my weapon and five high velocity rounds shredded holes in the wood panel.
I fell to my belly on the floor and fired three shots in through the door
gap-
'Inquisition! Throw down your weapon!'
Two more shots punched through the door.
I crawled backwards from the doorway and stood up, the gun resting in my hands.
'Come out/1 said, using my will.
A large, tattooed, naked male blundered out of the bathroom, half his face shaved and half covered with sudsy foam. A Tronsvasse Hi-Power autopistol was still in one hand.
'Put it down/1 commanded.
He hesitated, as if my will had no force. A conditioned mind, I supposed. Take no chances.
The autopistol was just pulling up to find me when I blew off his half-shaved face with the shotgun and sent his body splintering back through
the half-open door.
The girl was still crouched, naked, at the end of the bed, shivering. I was surprised she hadn't bolted out of cover at my command too.
I spun to face her.
'What's your name?'
'Lise B/
'Full name!' I snapped. I wasn't concentrating on her especially, but there was something about her. An air. A tone.
Alizebeth Bequin! Pleasure girl! I worked the Sun-dome these past four Dormants!' r />
'You're here why?'
'They paid up front! Wanted a party! Oh lords...'
Her voice trailed away and she collapsed on the bed.
'Get dressed. Stay here. I will want to talk to you.'
I moved to the door of the chamber and looked out into the unlit hall. Below, down the stairwell, gunflashes and shouts echoed up.
Seeing my shape in the doorway, a man ran towards me.
'Wylk! Wylk! They've found us! They've-'
A moment before he realised I was not Wylk, I decked him with the butt of my weapon. He fell hard.
Two solid shots raked the doorframe next to me.
I ducked back in, sliding back the grip of the shotgun.
Shots punched through the wall above the bed-head. Bequin screamed and rolled off the bed.
I blasted back, punching two more large holes in the door.
Two men slammed into the room, wild-eyed and desperate. Both were dressed in light interior clothes. One had a laspistol, the other an autorifle.
I dropped the lasgunner with one direct shot that hurled his body against the wall. The man with the autorifle opened fire, his shots chewing through one of the bed-posts.
I dived for cover as the automatic fire ripped up tufts of carpet, shattered mirrors and demolished furnishings.
Rolling, I frantically sought cover.
My would-be killer dropped face-down onto the bed. The girl pulled a long retractable knife out of the back of his neck.
'I saved your life/ she told me. 'That'll make it better for me, right?'
I told the girl to stay put in the bedroom, and from her nod I was pretty sure she would.
I stepped out into the gloomy hall. The level below had fallen silent.
'Fischig?' I voxed.
'Come down/ his reply crackled back.
A spiral stairway led down into a large, split-level lounge area. The air was thick with smoke, which coiled out of the terrace window-doors we had opened. The hard daylight of the Sun-dome streamed in, making ladder-bars of light in the drifting haze. The opposite wall of the room
was a wide segmented shutter. If opened, it would reveal a view over the freezing wastes beyond the dome.
A storm of gunfire had ruined the expensive furniture and decorative fittings. Five corpses lay twisted at various points on the floor. Fischig, his visor raised, was hauling a sixth man up into a high-backed chair. The man, wounded in the right shoulder, was wailing and crying. Fischig cuffed him into place.