The guy suddenly had a gun in his fist. A great big Navy model Hecuter 10, the muzzle smoking. Taper was gaping at him, absolutely stunned by the speed of what had just happened.
The guy was still smiling.
He put two more rounds into Taper’s chest, point blank.
Oblivious, Taper flew at him, twig arms outstretched.
‘You really don’t understand who you’re dealing with!’ Taper wailed, his bony fingers closing in a vice.
But the guy had somehow sidestepped him. Despite his bulk and size, the guy moved like lightning. He came up around Taper’s lunge and kicked him in the back, sending him sprawling into the corner of the room.
The guy threw something small and black at Taper. ‘Sire Taper, it’s the other way around. You don’t understand who you’re dealing with.’
Instinctively, Taper caught the small black thing. He looked at it for a split second. A split second was all he had.
The grenade’s blast vaporised him and brought down the wall behind him.
Before the dust had settled, the guy was up and running.
+Three heartbeats in the hallway outside!+
‘Three heartbeats in the hallway!’ Zael screamed out.
The guy was already firing through the doorway.
‘How did you know that?’ he yelled.
‘I heard it…’ Zael said.
‘How did he hear it?’ the guy asked no one at all.
‘Don’t leave me here!’ Zael cried.
+Don’t leave him.+
‘You’re kidding me!’ the guy snorted to the invisible voice.
+I never kid. You know that. Don’t leave him. I want to know how he’s picking me up.+
The guy glanced round at Zael.
‘Come on,’ he said. He wasn’t happy about it. Not at all.
His pistol hanging in his hand in an alarmingly casual way, the guy went out into the hallway with Zael behind him. The guy’s shots had made a mess of two more hammers who were sprawled on the tiled floor. One was still twitching. Just death-spasms. The last jerks of a ruined body.
A few metres on, at the end of a smeared trail of blood, the third hammer was trying to crawl to safety. The guy casually shot him once in the back of the head.
Zael swayed and turned to face the wall. His mind was a mess. The guy probably thought he was queasy because of the killing, but Zael had seen plenty. This was withdrawal. A look was long overdue. Throne, how he needed one! Just a little cheapo splinter even, to calm his nerves.
‘What are you doing?’ the guy snapped.
Zael had been stroking the cool wall with his palms and resting his sweaty forehead against it. He glanced round, aware that the muscles in his face were beginning to tick.
‘God-Emperor, look at you. Don’t skid out on me now, or I will leave you.’
Zael flinched, hoping to hear the invisible voice again, sticking up for him. But there was nothing now. The guy seemed to notice it too.
‘Ravenor?’ he asked. ‘Ravenor? You with me still?’
Zilch. ‘Ravenor?’
‘I thought you were Ravenor,’ Zael said. The guy sneered at him. He was about to say something, probably something impolite, when the invisible voice came through again. Just a hiss. Just a whisper, as if it was under great strain.
+Kara.+
‘Kara? What about her? Ravenor?’
+In trouble.+
‘What sort of trouble? Are you waring her?’
Nothing. The voice had gone away again.
‘Shit,’ breathed the guy. ‘I should get out of here. They might need me.’
‘Getting out of here,’ Zael shrugged. ‘Now that’s a good idea. I remember where the door is.’
‘No,’ said the guy. ‘We’re too committed. We stick to this.’
None of which was what Zael wanted to hear.
The hallway turned into a lounge area with big, red satin sofas and three fabulous hardlight sculptures. The blinking, neon-bright structures of the art utterly captured Zael’s attention so the guy had to drag him on by the hand. Ahead they could see yellow-robed household staff fleeing before them.
A moody hammer came running towards them down a corridor to their right. He was hugging a sack to his chest, and skidded up hard as he saw them. His eyes grew.
He dropped the sack and started to run off the way he’d come. The guy aimed his pistol at him, but thought better of it. Instead, he went over to the sack and emptied it onto the floor. Dozens of little parcels fell out, each wrapped in red tissue paper.
Flects.
‘Throne, let me have one! Let me have one, please!’ Zael blurted out, realising at once how frigging pathetic he sounded.
Kneeling, the guy sneered at him, and tossed a single parcel towards his hands. Zael almost dropped it.
‘This stuff is filth. Filth you can’t imagine. You know about the Ruinous Powers?’
Zael shook his head.
The guy sighed. ‘Just use it. If you’re coming with me, I’d rather have you sussed and sorted than witchy-edged.’
‘I’ll be fine. Fine. Really. Fine,’ Zael replied. He wanted to prove to this guy that he wasn’t just some scrap-head, some burn-out, some waster. But he put the flect in his pocket all the same.
Then it got really nasty. It went down so fast, Zael wished he’d taken the look while he’d had the chance. Genny X’s hammers – those that hadn’t run – put up a last effort to defend their boss. They were all East K stackers, a clan notorious for not knowing when to quit. Shades and Jack-Ls had a rep for being meaner, but the stackers were famously brute-stupid and stubborn.
Zael and the guy came up some stairs into another room: a gloomy gallery with paintings and hololiths on the walls. It seemed empty, but the hammers were hiding behind furniture and wall panels. They came out like devils, howling, baying. Most of them were knucked out of their minds on baby blues and redliners. They were crazy-mad. Kill-hyped.
Everything became a blur to Zael. Overload. He froze, stock still, and screamed aloud as the frenzy exploded around him. It was too much. It was much too much.
He distinctly saw a hammer with rake-hook spin over onto his back, blood puffing from an exit wound the size of a dinner plate. He half-saw another drop to his knees, his entire face crushed by a curt little slam-punch of astonishing force delivered by the guy’s left fist. Another hammer flew past him at head height. Zael wasn’t sure if the hammer was travelling under his own momentum, or if he’d been thrown.
He heard four distinct shots, three of them the throaty roar of the Hecuter 10, one a small-cal sting-blunt. He saw a hammer down on his hands and knees, choking on his own blood, and another stagger spastically across the room to crash into a framed hololith, which he brought down on his head as he fell.
For a brief moment, Zael saw the guy, spinning on the spot, on one foot, his body bent over. His other leg was cocked out at right angles. The heavy boot snapped a hammer’s jaw as it rotated. Broken teeth ejected from the hammer’s mouth.
A hammer came right at Zael. A stacker with acid-tats like smile lines and a sow’s rib through his septum. He was shrieking so loud Zael couldn’t hear him. The hammer’s mouth was wide open and his uvula was wobbling. A grind mace cased his right fist and he was swinging it at Zael’s face.
The guy thundered into the hammer from the side, deflecting his weapon. There was a brief mist of blood, and something small and soft bounced off Zael’s stomach. The guy floored the hammer, broke his arm, yanked the disarticulated limb backwards, and slammed the still-spinning grind mace into the back of the hammer’s skull. Zael closed his eyes just before the hot, spattery mess drenched his face.
It was all still and quiet suddenly. He opened his eyes. Eight moody hammers lay dead around the trashed gallery. The guy was sitting on his backside in front of Zael, nursing his left hand. Little jets of blood were zipping where the guy’s left middle finger had previously been.
‘Well, shit this,’ the guy said, genuinel
y upset.
The finger had bounced off Zael’s stomach, and was now lying on the floor at Zael’s feet.
‘Damn,’ the guy added, pulling a little surgical clamp out of his thigh pocket and jamming it down over the digit stump.
‘You’re a first,’ he told Zael as he got up. ‘Never lost a body part until today.’
The guy seemed completely oblivious to the fact he had just taken out a room full of moody hammers, single-handed, in under ten seconds. Zael knew he’d cost the guy that finger. The guy had been saving him.
The guy pushed open the heavy tethwood doors and yelled out ‘Genevieve? Genevieve X? My name is Harlon Nayl! I am a certified agent of the Inquisition!’
The X did not respond, nor did Zael expect her to, somehow. He could feel cold, exterior air blowing at him, and that was odd. Had she opened a window and run?
They went into Genny’s sanctum. The guy led the way, pistol raised, blood still dripping from his clamped left hand.
Huge, floor-to-ceiling windows of stained glass threw coloured light down onto the expensive tappanacre rug.
Genevieve X sat behind her desk, staring at them. There was pretty much nothing left of her except her bloody skeleton and little torn ribbons of tissue and flesh. It looked as if her clothes, skin, body fat and muscle, her lips, her eyes… had all been ripped away. Denuded, her skeleton seemed pitifully small. The bare bones, shockingly white, were patched with blackening clots of gore and sinew.
‘Damn,’ breathed Harlon Nayl.
It was hard to tell beyond that black wall of smog whether the actual daylight had gone or not. Still, another day was over. Billions of lights sparkled into life across the great, black city: from the highest points of the inner spires to the skirts of the suburbs. Out of the city’s heart, the Administratum clerks flowed in a monotonous grey tide. Along walkways and pavements, across pedestrian bridges and stack-level galleries, ten hundred thousand pale men and women in sombre rain-coats of emerald and black made their routine way homeward in slow procession. Many had shaven heads, or the scalp or neck punctures of neuro-link sockets. Most wore tinted goggles. None wore any kind of expression at all.
Eustis Majoris was capital-world of the Angelus sub-sector. Its heavy manufacturing industries may have begun to slump, and its fabricatory districts fall into decay, but it had one ancient craft that still thrived. It was the bureaucratic hub of two-dozen Imperial worlds. Here, in the massive ouslite towers of Formal A and Formal C, the minutiae of Imperial life was recorded, processed, evaluated, stored, examined, compared, scrutinised for levy and, ultimately, filed. There were more clerks and scribes, and more processing codifiers, in this ten kilometre square slab of city than in all the other sub-sector worlds combined. In gilt letters above the hallway doors of the administry towers were the proud rubrics of their function: ‘Knowledge is power’, ‘Data equals assessment, assessment equals insight, insight equals control’, ‘Know your codes’, ‘Information is truth’. All workers were encouraged to repeat such adages as mantras during work shifts.
Locally, there were other phrases that had come into coin, phrases the administry did not encourage at all. ‘If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing in triplicate’, ‘Those who shred history are doomed to repeat it’ and ‘I file everything, therefore I know nothing’ were three of the most popular.
Anonymous in a hooded rain-cloak, Harlon Nayl still stood out. This was because he was moving against the flow. Tugging the boy along by the sleeve, he was heading into the central districts against the night’s outpouring of scribes and administry functionaries. In places, he had to move aside where the rows of marching workers refused to break to let them pass. Sometimes he simply had to push his way through. But not once did such an affront provoke anything more than a slight scowl from the pale, shave-headed workers.
This was a new world to Zael. He gawped at it in a state of mounting unease. It was less than seven kilometres from the formal where he’d grown up and spent all of his however-many-it-was years. The streets and people here were cleaner than the dirty sink-stacks he thought of as homeground, but they seemed darker and totally drained of any spark. Formal J was a dump, full of no-hopers and filth, and condemned stack housing with yellow repossession notices pasted to the doors, but at least it had some sense of life and colour. The flicking neon of the bar signs, the fire tubs, the street musicians in their gypsy finery and the smile-girls in their scabby silks.
This was different. Soulless, bitter, grimly routine, depressingly quiet. How could so many people make so little sound, Zael wondered? Just the tramp of feet, the tinny tannoy announcements from the transit stops.
‘I’d like to go home now,’ he said to Nayl.
‘Home? To that hole?’ Nayl replied, about to laugh. Then he looked around and sighed, as if to say he knew what Zael meant. To both of them, there suddenly seemed to be a huge and distinct difference between a life where hope had been crushed and a life where there had never been any hope to begin with.
The silent crowds were thinning. They entered a very grand but depressing plaza of cold stone flags and wrought iron lamp standards. Statues lined each side of the space, acid-eaten worthies of the Imperium of Man that Zael had never heard of. Ahead was a mighty building faced in streaked black slate, its lit windows tall and very slender. It seemed big, but it was dwarfed by the gargantuan towers of the administry behind it.
There was a golden aquila on the building’s solid front, its wing tips forty metres apart. Superimposed across it was a set of scales, like the zodiac rune.
A lone figure waited for them in the centre of the plaza, made tiny by the emptiness. He stood self-consciously, as if aware he was being watched. He was adjusting his hair with the aid of a hand mirror.
‘There you are,’ he said as they came up. Then he paused and looked Zael up and down. ‘And there you are,’ he added in an uncertain tone. ‘And you are?’
‘This is Zael.’
‘My dear Harlon, you haven’t gone and found yourself a little friend have you? How absolutely darling! There’s hope for you yet.’
‘Shut the frig up, Thonius,’ Nayl snapped. ‘He’s only here because the boss wants to examine him.’
Carl Thonius pursed his lips and shrugged. ‘I see. I didn’t think he really was your type. Not enough breasts by a factor of two.’
‘Can we get on?’ Nayl snapped. ‘I take it she’s in there?’
‘That’s what we think. The local info-systems are damned hard to wire into. Actual decent Arbites cryptography for a change, wouldn’t you just know it? But we’re pretty sure she’s still here. And we know who to talk to.’
‘We do?’
‘A deputy magistratum called Rickens. He’s got the case.’
‘We could just go to the top–’
Thonius shook his head. ‘Only if we have to. Remember why we stealthed ourselves onto planet in the first place? This place is administry central. We go on record, the data’s in the system and we’re compromised. No matter how careful we are. Potentially, there’s too much at stake for that.’
Nayl nodded. ‘Let’s go then. Where’s Kys?’
‘Busy,’ said Thonius, with a shrug. ‘Maybe onto something. You?’
‘Something and nothing all at once. A zilch, probably, but an interesting one.’
‘What happened to your finger?’
‘The zilch I was talking about. Come on.’
With Zael in tow, they walked towards the main steps of the gloomy building.
‘How do you want to play this?’ Nayl asked.
‘Like we did on Satre?’
‘Okay, but don’t namby about this time…’
Tap… tap… tap…
The base of a steel-shod walking cane struck the polished wooden floor. It announced the man wherever he went. People straightened up respectfully when they heard the tap approach.
Deputy Magistratum First Class Dersk Rickens came down the gloomy, panelled hallway on level n
ine. The two officers on duty went straight-backed smartly and opened the tall double doors for him. He acknowledged their salutes with a brief nod. They could tell he was tired. He was leaning heavily on his walking cane.
His secretary, Limbwall, hurried behind him, laden with a pile of report slates and ribboned case-folders forwarded during the course of the day from duty processing. Limbwall was a young man, prematurely bald, his underwhelming looks ruined altogether by the heavy augmetic optics implanted into his eye sockets. He’d been an administry scribe for seven years until his request for transfer/promotion had happily coincided with the deputy magistratum’s written application for a scribe who could file.
Limbwall said a cheery hello to the guards as he passed by, but they ignored him. Limbwall wore the uniform – badly – but he wasn’t a real marshal in their opinion. Just an ink-monkey.
Beyond the great doors of panelled oak lay Ricken’s domain. A looming wooden mezzanine lit by cream-shaded electrolamps that hung on long chains. Files and slates were heaped up on the floor under the tall windows, and piled high along the tops of the battered filing chests. Mam Lotilla was dutifully processing case files at her old-model codifier, and Plyton, the savvy young junior marshal narco had sent his way, was pinning crime scene pict-stats of disembowelled bodies onto the wall boards. Beyond the mezzanine, wide wooden stairs led down into the main vault of the department, where hundreds of his officers worked at console stations or long rows of desks. A penetrating background murmur rose from the great room below.
Rickens had a headache. He’d been in budget meetings all afternoon, and they’d run over like they always did. Sankels, the bull mastiff from interior cases, had been up to his tricks again, and had managed to get all the finance additionals from narco, homicide, xen-ops, special and prohib-pub thrown out in favour of booster funds for his own office. There was cleaning to be done, he had told the chief magistratum, and the chief magistratum had agreed.
Which was all nonsense. The chief magistratum had only agreed because he knew Sankels was nose-deep with Jader Trice, the first provost of the newly formed Ministry of Sub-sector Trade, a man Rickens knew well from his numerous pict-channel interviews but had never met in person.