'She's a fine sight/ he murmured to me as if I might not have noticed.
You forget Vibben so quickly?'
He snapped round at me, stung. 'That was low, Eisenhorn. I was just commenting/
You'll like her less when you get to know her. She's an untouchable/
'Seriously?'
'Seriously. A psychic blank. It's natural, and I haven't tested her limits. It's all I can do to be in the same room as her/
'Such a looker too/ Betancore sighed, gazing back in at her.
'Useful to us. If she passes certain requirements, I'm going to employ her/
He nodded. Untouchables were rare, and almost impossible to create artificially. They have a negative presence in the warp that renders them virtually immune to psychic powers, which in turn makes them potent anti-psyker weapons. The side-effect of their psychic blankness is the unpleasant disturbance that accompanies them, the waves of fear and revulsion they trigger in those they meet.
No wonder her life had been difficult and friendless.
'News?' I asked Betancore.
'Made contact with a sprint trader called the Essene. Master's one Tobius Maxilla. Deals in small units of luxury goods. Coming here in two days to deliver a consignment of vintage wines from Hesperus, then on to Gudrun. For a fee, he'll make room for the cutter in his hold/
'Good work. So we'll be on Gudrun when?'
Two weeks/
I spent the next hour or so interviewing Bequin, but as I suspected she knew precious little about any of the men. We gave her accommodation in a small bunk-cell next to Betancore's quarters. It was scarcely more than a box, and Nilquit had to remove piles of stowed equipment to clear it, but she seemed pleased enough. When I asked her if she had any possessions she wished to collect from the Sun-dome, she simply shook her head.
I was reviewing yet more piles of data with Aemos when Fischig arrived. He was dressed in his brown serge uniform suit and carried two bulky holdalls over his shoulder, which he dropped to the deck with a declamatory thump as he stepped aboard.
'To what do I owe this visit, chastener?' I asked.
He showed me a slate bearing Carpel's official seal. 'The high custodian grants you permission to leave to pursue your inquiry. Dependent on this...'
I reviewed the slate and sighed.
'I'm coming with you/ he said.
SIX
Divination by auto-seance.
A dream.
Joining the Essene.
I lodged A formal complaint with the high custodian's office, but it was simply for show. Carpel could manufacture serious problems for me if I tried to leave without his agent. I could do that, of course. I could do as I liked. But Carpel could delay me, and I didn't know how much co-operation from the elders and administrations of Hubris I'd need later if any part of this investigation led to trial.
Besides, Carpel knew I was going on to Gudrun, and he would plainly send Fischig there under an Arbites warrant to investigate anyway. On the whole, I decided I'd rather have Chastener Fischig where I could see him.
On the afternoon before our intended departure, I had Lowink prepare for an auto-seance. I doubted whether anything further could be learned now, but I wanted to cover every avenue.
As usual, we used my quarters, with the cabin-door locked, and Betan-core strictly instructed to prevent interruptions. I sat in a high-back armchair, and spent some quarter of an hour lowering my mind to a semi-trance state. This was an old technique, one of the first I had been taught when my abilities had originally been detected by the tutors of the Inquisition. On a cloth-covered table between us, Lowink laid out key evidence items: some of Eyclone's effects, some other pieces taken from Thaw-view
12011, and some from the processional. We also had the mysterious casket from the cryogenerator chamber.
Once he was satisfied I was ready, Lowink opened his mind to the warp, and filtered its raging influence through his highly trained mental architecture. This transitional moment was always a shock, and I shuddered. The temperature in the room dropped palpably, and a glass bowl on a side counter cracked spontaneously. Lowink was murmuring, his eyes rolled back, twitching and jerking slightly.
I closed my eyes, though I could still see my room. What I was seeing was a visualisation of our surroundings constructed by Lowink astropath-ically in the Empyrean itself. Everything shone with a pale blue light from within, and solids became translucent. The dimensions of the room shifted slightly, stretching and buckling as if they had difficulty retaining their coherence.
I took up the items on the table in turn, Lowink's projection enhancing their psychometric qualities, opening my mind's abilities to the signatures and resonances they carried in the warp.
Most were dull and blunt, with no trace of resonance. Some had wispy tendrils of auras around them, relics of passing contact with human hands and human minds. Eyclone's vox- device buzzed with the distant, unintelligible whinings of ghosts but gave up nothing.
Eyclone's pistol stung my hand like a scorpion when I touched it - and both I and Lowink gasped. I had a brief aftertaste of death. I decided not to touch it again.
His data-slate, which Aemos had yet been unable to open, was dripping with a sticky, almost gelatinous aura. The thickness of the psychic residue betokened the complex thought processes and data that had adhered to it. It gave up nothing, and I became frustrated. Lowink amplified my scrutiny and at last, as a whisper, I landed the word, or name, 'daesumnor'.
The final item for inspection was the casket. It resonated brightly with flickering bands of warp-traces. Our contact with it was necessarily brief because of the exhausting strength of its halo.
We probed, opening what seemed to be three levels of psychometric activity. One was sharp and hard, and tasted of metal. Lowink averred that this was a relic of the intellect or intellects that had crafted the casket. An undeniably brilliant but malevolent presence.
Beneath that, colder, smaller, denser, like a lightless collapsed star, lay a heavy, throbbing trace that seemed to be locked in the heart of the casket's machine core.
Around both, fluttering and swooping like birds, were the vestigial psychic agonies of the dead from Processional Two-Twelve. Their plaintive psychic noise rippled through our thoughts and sapped the emotional strength from us both. The dead souls of the processional had left their psychic fingerprints on this device that had been instrumental in their murder.
We were about to step back and end the seance when the second trace, the cold, distant, dense one, began to well up to the surface. I was
intrigued at first, then stunned by its gathering force and speed. It filled my head with a nauseating, intolerable sense of hunger.
Hunger, thirst, appetite, craving...
It rose from the depths of the casket, wailing and yearning, a dark thing tearing up through the other trace energies. I glimpsed its malice and felt its consuming need.
Lowink broke the link. He slumped back in his seat, panting, his skin dotted with the stigmatic blood-spots of an astropathic augury taken far too far.
I felt it too. My mind seemed cold, colder even than the ministrations of Dormant. It seemed to take a very long time before my thoughts began to flow freely again, like water slowly thawing in an iced pipe.
I rose and poured myself a glass of amasec. I poured one for Lowink too as an afterthought. Neither of us ever came away from an auto-seance feeling good, but this was signally worse than usual.
There was danger,' Lowink husked at last. Vile danger. From the casket.'
'I felt it.'
'But the whole seance was unseemly, master. As if distracted and spoiled by some... some factor.
I sighed. I knew what he had felt. 'I can explain. The girl we have aboard is an untouchable.'
Lowink shuddered. 'Keep her away from me.'
I passed the word 'daesumnor' to Aemos in case it assisted his work on the data-slate and rested in my cabin to recover. Lowink had gone back to his tiny residence un
der the cockpit deck. I doubted he would be useful for much for a goodly while.
I gathered up the evidence items, re-bagged them and locked them in the cutter's strongbox, all except the casket, which was too big to fit. We kept it bagged and chained in a tarpaulin locker aft. As I hefted it up to return it to the locker, I felt the aftershock of its aura, as if we had woken something, some instinct. I considered this to be the imagination of my stung mind working overtime, but I completed the task only when I had buckled on a pair of work gloves.
Betancore joined me shortly afterwards. He had gone through Vibben's effects and found no will or instructions. Now we needed her cabin to house Fischig, so we placed her belongings and clothes in an underseat storebin in the crew-bay and together carried her wrapped body to the cot in the medical suite. I locked the door as we left.
"What will you do with her?' Betancore asked. 'There's no time to arrange a burial here now.'
'She once said she came with me to see what the stars were like. That's where we'll lay her to rest.'
Then I slept, turning fitfully despite my exhaustion. When sleep finally came, the dreams were cold and inhospitable. Murderously black, back-lit
clouds rippled in fast motion across skies I didn't know, strobing with electrical flashes. Dark trees, and darker, higher walls, ranged around the edges of the dream. I felt the instinct, the hunger from the casket, lurking in some blind spot my eyes refused to find.
Carrion birds, a flock of them, swooped down from the upper reaches of the sky and took all the colour with them, staining the dream-world grey. All except for a spot of red that glittered in the colourless soil ahead of me.
With each step I took towards it, it receded. I began to run. It continued to display dream logic and moved away.
Finally, gasping for breath, I stopped running. The red spot had gone. I felt the hunger again, but now it was inside me, clawing at my belly, filling my throat with craving. The roiling clouds overhead froze suddenly, motionless, even the lightning flares stilled and captured in jagged, phosphorescent lines.
A voice spoke my name. I thought it was Vibben, but when I turned, there was nothing to see except the suggestion of a presence drifting away like smoke.
I woke. From the clock, I had been asleep only a couple of hours. My throat was raw and my mouth dry. I drained two glasses of water from the side cabinet and then fell back on the bed.
My head ached but my mind would not stop spinning. After that, no sleep came at all.
The vox-link chimed about four hours later. It was Betancore. The Essene has just made orbit/ he told me. We can leave whenever you like.'
The Essene lay slantwise above the inverted bowl of Hubris, silhouetted against the stars.
We had left the radiance of the Sun-dome into a blizzard squall. The airframe of the cutter had vibrated wildly as Betancore lifted us out of the clutches of the ferocious, icy winds until we were riding clear over an ocean of frosty vapour.
The blizzard, a sculptural white continent, then dropped away below until we could see its tides and gusts and currents, the wide centrifugal patterns of its titanic force.
'There,' Betancore had said, with a nod to the raked front ports. Even at ninety kilometres, still rising through the thinning aeropause, he had made visual contact.
It had taken me a few more moments to find it. A bar of darkness distorting the pearly edge of the planesphere.
Another minute, and it had become a three-dimensional solid. A minute more, and I began to resolve the running lights glittering on its surface.
Yet another minute and it filled the ports. It resembled some colossal tower that had been ripped away from its earthly foundations and set adrift, tranquil, in the void.
'A beauty,' murmured Betancore, who appreciated such things. His inlaid hands flicked over the flight controls and we yawed to the correct approach vectors. The gun-cutter and the massive vessel exchanged automatic telemetry chatter. The flight deck pict-plates were alive with columns of rushing data.
'A bulk clipper, of the classic Isolde pattern, from the depot yards of Ur-Haven or Tancred. Majestic...' Aemos was muttering and annotating his idle observations into his wrist slate again.
The Essene was three kilometres long by my estimation, and fully seven hundred metres deep at its broadest part. Its nose was a long sleek cone like a cathedral spire made of overlapping gothic curves and barbed with bronze finials and spines. Behind that bladed front, the angular hull thickened into muscular buttresses of rusty-red plating, looped and riveted with ribs of dark steel. Crenellated tower stacks bulged from the dorsal hump. Hundred metre masts stabbed forward from the hull like tusks and other, shorter masts projected from the flanks and underside, winking with guide lights. The rear portion of the juggernaut splayed into four heat-blackened cones, each of which was large enough to swallow a dozen gun-cutters at once.
Betancore turned us in and ran us along the flank heading aft. To us, the great vessel seemed to wallow and roll as we joined its horizontal.
A lighted dot divorced itself from the Essene and ran out ahead of us, flashing ultra-bright patterns of red and green lamps: a pilot drone to lead us in.
Betancore gently chased the drone and swung to port as its lights instructed. We slid neatly between two mast arrays, crossed the ribbed belly, and finally braked to station-keeping under a rectangular belly-hatch edged with black and yellow chevrons. The hatch was one of a line of six down the hull's underside, but this was the only open one. A fiery orange glow washed down over us.
Exchanging a few terse comments with Uclid in the drive room, Betancore nudged the gun-cutter upwards through the yawning hatch. I watched the edges of the hatch-mouth, two metres thick and scratched in places to the bare metal, pass by alarmingly close.
There followed a series of gentle shudders, and mechanical thumps against the cutter's outer hull. Amber light bathed the cockpit. I looked up into the glow outside, but saw little except a suggestion of dark gantries and cargo-lifting derricks.
Another shudder. Betancore threw a row of switches and there was a whine as power-feeds and autosystems wound down. He pushed back from the control deck, and began pulling on his hide gloves.
He smiled at me. 'You needn't look so worried/ he mocked.
In truth, I am most disquieted by things I have no control over. Though I have rudimentary skills, and can manage an atmospheric craft, I am no pilot, certainly not one with Midas's Glavian pedigree. That's why I employ him and that's why he makes it look so easy. But sometimes my face betrays the alarm I feel in situations where I have no ability.
Besides, I was tired. But I knew sleep wouldn't come even if I tried, and there was business to attend to anyway.
Aemos, Bequin and Lowink would stay on the cutter for now. As soon as the hull door was closed and atmosphere recirculated into the Essene's hold, I opened the hatch and stepped out with Fischig and Betancore.
The hold where we were docked was vaulted and immense. I reminded myself it was just one of six accommodated by this vessel. The surfaces of the walls and decking were oily black, and sodium lighting arrays bolted to the ceiling filled the place with orange tinted luminescence. The spaces above us were busy with the skeletal shapes of cranes and monotask lifters, all shut down and lifeless. Packing materials littered the open floor. The gun-cutter was held over the sealed floor hatch in a greased crib of docking pistons and hydraulic clamps.
We crossed the hold, boots ringing on the metal deck-plates. It was cold, the chill of open space still lingering.
Betancore wore his usual Glavian pilot suit and garish jacket. He was cheerful and whistled tunelessly. Fischig was impassive, oozing command in his brown Arbites uniform. He had fixed his golden sun-disk of office to the breast of his jacket.
I wore a dark sober suit of grey wool, black boots and gloves and a long navy-blue leather coat with a high collar. I had taken a stub-pistol from the weapons locker and had it in a holster rig under my left arm. My inquisitorial
rosette was buttoned away inside a pocket. Unlike Fischig, I felt no need to make a statement of authority.
A hatch clanked open on servos, and light shone out from an internal companionway. A figure stepped out to meet us.
"Welcome to the Essene, inquisitor,' said Tobius Maxilla.
SEVEN
With the master of the Essene.
A farewell.
Scrutiny.
Maxilla was a veteran trader who had run the Essene down the lanes from Thracian Primaris to the Grand Banks for fifty years. He told me he'd dealt in bulk consumables at the start of his career, then begun to specialise in exotic goods when the big bonded guilds began to dominate the wholesale market.
The Essene's got speed, a sprint trader. Pays me better to carry luxury cargoes and deliver them express, even if I don't run at capacity.'
'You run this route regularly?'
'For the past few decades. It's seasonal. Sameter, Hesperus, Thracian, Hubris, Gudrun, sometimes to Messina too. When Dormant finishes on Hubris, there'll be a lot more work there/
We sat in the luxurious surroundings of his audience suite, sipping vintage amasec from large crystal glasses. Maxilla was showing off, but that was acceptable. He had a ship and a reputation to be proud of.
'So you know these routes well?' Fischig put in.
Maxilla smiled. He was a sinewy man of indeterminate age, dressed in a full-skirted coat of red velvet with wide button-back cuffs and an extravagant black lace cravat. His smile showed teeth that were inlaid with mother of pearl. Ostentation was common among ship's masters, it was part of showing off. Forget family lineage and noble blood, one had told me once, the lineage and pedigree of starships is where the new Imperial nobility is to be found. Ship's masters were the real Imperial aristocracy.
So Maxilla seemed to think, anyway. His face was powdered with white skin-dye, and he wore a sapphire as a beauty spot on his cheek. His imposing two-horned wig was spun from silver-thread. Heavy signet rings clinked against his balloon glass as he lifted it.
Yes, chastener, I know them well'
'I don't think we need to start interrogating Master Maxilla yet, Fischig/ I said plainly. Betancore snorted and Maxilla chuckled. Fischig glowered into his amasec.