[Ravenor 01] Ravenor - Dan Abnett

  +How much.+

  He stubbed the lho-stick out. "Three-quarters of a million."

  +That's a lot.+

  "Yeah, right. That's a lot."

  He was still telling the truth, as far as I could chart. But suddenly I saw the real, bald reason he wasn't a part of his distant cousin's flect trade. It wasn't principle. Siskind couldn't afford it. Three-quarters of a million was beyond his means, and he was resentful about it. The resentment filled his mind in a very readable blur of spiky red.

  +What's Firetide?+

  He blinked and laughed, about to lie badly. "I have no idea."

  +Yes, you do. Firetide drinks as usual... that's what Thekla said to you.+

  Siskind tilted his head back and opened his arms wide. "You're reading my frigging mind, you bastard! Tell me!"

  +Tell me.+

  The psychic jab snapped him upright and made tears well in his cruel eyes. "Okay. O-frigging-kay. Don't do that again."

  +I won't. If you don't provoke me. Tell me about Firetide.+

  "I want another smoke." His mind was muddying up again, hardening to my scrutiny. It was peculiar. I felt my interrogation was going well, but still there was a sense he was giving me answers from a free part of his mind while the rest was impenetrable.

  "Wystan?" I voxed.

  The door-hatch slid open and Frauka came in.

  "Lho-stick for Master Siskind," I said.

  Frauka pursed his lips, and plucked the carton out of his jacket pocket. He offered it to Siskind, who took one. Frauka flashed his igniter and lit Siskind's smoke, then lit another for himself.

  "Sometimes, I thank the God-Emperor of Mankind for sealed-unit respiratory niters," I said.

  The comment passed Frauka by. "I'll be outside," he said, exiting.

  The door-hatch slunked shut.

  "You've got your smoke," I said. +Now tell me about Firetide. +

  "It's a festival. On Bonner's Reach."

  +That's out in Lucky Space. +

  "Yeah, five days in. From here, two weeks. The last Free Trade station. We used to meet there at Firetide and have a drink or several."

  +Thekla was expecting to meet you there?+

  "Hoping is a better word. We've done Firetide every few years. It's a chance for rogues to catch up, away from Imperial scrutiny."

  +Why was he hoping to see you there?+

  "Just to catch up."

  I paused. +I contend, Siskind, that the message was clearly an instruction for you to meet him there.+

  "Think what you like."

  +He was telling you to come there, wasn't he?+

  "Yeah, all right, he was."

  +Why?+

  "I don't know. And that's the truth." It was.

  +Tell me why that might have been.+

  Siskind looked down at the floor. "I think he was hoping to recruit me. Hoping to try again. The cartel meets at Bonner's Reach. I've been doing well this season. Thekla believed I could buy in."

  Every word of it was the truth. I couldn't understand why I felt every word of it was also somehow rehearsed.

  +Do you think that Thekla, having passed on the Flint moots, might have gone directly to Bonner's Reach?+

  "That's likely," he said.

  +Master Siskind, I'm now going to withdraw my agents from your vessel and leave you alone. Thank you for cooperating with the Inquisition. Do not cross us again.+

  "I'll try my frigging best."

  +For your information, I have had my people disassemble your communications array and your mass-drive regulators. Nothing has been damaged. I estimate it will take you four working days to refit the systems. My apologies for the inconvenience. But I don't want you following me.+

  He smiled. "You're a total bastard," his mind said. "Thank you, inquisitor," his mouth covered.

  Drive engaged, the Hinterlight began to describe a hard, tight trajectory out and away from the distant sun of the Flint system. The Allure, temporarily crippled and adrift, became an increasingly faint hard return on its aft sensors.

  Ravenor glided down the midships companionway with Nayl, Kys and Zael trailing behind him. Apparently, Nayl had promised the boy a look at the bridge.

  Halstrom was waiting for them at the bridge hatchway. "Mr. Thonius and I have done some research, sir," he said. "It took some rooting out of the database, in conjunction with the Carto-Imperialis, but we dug up 'Firetide'. It's-"

  "A festival on Bonner's Reach. Due to begin about twenty days from now." Ravenor said.

  Halstrom wavered. "Oh," he said.

  "Just because I got there first doesn't mean I don't appreciate your efforts, Mr. Halstrom. Well done."

  He beamed. "Thank you, inquisitor."

  "How's the mistress?" Nayl asked.

  "Pissed off, Mr. Nayl," Halstrom said.

  "But doing it anyway?" I wanted to know.

  "Yes," said Halstrom. "Course is set. Drive engaged. We're heading out into Lucky Space."

  Kys and Ravenor went in through the hatch, and moved across the bridge to join Cynia Preest.

  "Thank you, Cynia," Ravenor said.

  "For what, Gideon?" she snapped, gruffly.

  "For doing what you didn't want to do. For taking us out into Lucky Space."

  She looked up from her main station grimly. "I don't like it, Gideon. Not at all. But I am in your service, and while that lasts, I do what I'm told." She paused and then smiled. "I understand Mr. Halstrom is pretty keen on this whole venture."

  "I think he is." Ravenor agreed. "Cynia... you might describe yourself as a rogue trader..."

  She halted, mid-action, and looked hard at the armoured chair. "And? Where are you going with this?"

  "If I gave you three-quarters of a million in ready cash, just how rogue could you be?"

  In the bridge doorway, Zael looked up at Harlon Nayl.

  "Why's it called Lucky Space?" he asked.

  Nayl grinned a not-at-all-reassuring grin. "Because, once you're out in it, you're lucky if you last five minutes."

  FOUR

  No bugger goes to Lenk anymore.

  Lenk was the end of the line, the most rim-ward world in the Angelus sub. Once it had been an important trade gateway through to the neighbouring Vincies subsector, ideally placed on a stepping-stone line of systems that formed a convenient trade lane down through places like Flint all the way to the sub's capital world. For over six thousand years, it had been a prosperous place.

  Then the Vincies sub collapsed, almost overnight. There had been a gradual slump in trade, and a marked increase in lawlessness over a period of years, though nothing terminal. Slowly, the Vincies had become the Angelus' rougher neighbour. But the real collapse had been triggered by a warp storm that had swept, without warning, through a great rimward portion of the sub in 085.M41.

  It was a notable disaster. The lethal storm had engulfed eighteen systems, including that of the Vincies' capital world, Spica Maximal. All of the subsector's primary population centres and industrial worlds were lost at a stroke. The death toll alone was unimaginably vast. Shorn of its central government, main markets and vital heartland, the subsector fell apart. Fifty or so Imperial worlds in the core-ward territories of the sub escaped the storm, but they were all minor colonies or secondary worlds and none had the power or wealth to assume responsibility as a new subsector capital. Some attempts were made to align them instead with the Angelus sub - effectively turning the remains of the Vincies sub into a fiefdom of its wealthy neighbour - but it never quite worked. The region fell away into lawless decay, no longer Imperial territory in any meaningful sense. Even the name withered. It was just Lucky Space now.

  Lenk's fortunes withered too. The once-proud gateway market, the third wealthiest planet in the Angelus region after Caxton and Eustis Majoris, became a backwater. There was a long period of deprivation, popular unrest, and then a drawn-out, insidious civil war that resulted in a mass migration of its population back into the Angelus sub to begin new lives there.

  N
ow the only trade that went through Lenk was the rogue kind. It became a last watering hole for pioneers and speculators brave or crazy enough to try and make money from Lucky Space ventures.

  It had quite a reputation.

  As a footnote to this misfortune, the warp storm finally blew itself out in 385, after three hundred years. Left behind in the ravaged rim-ward part of the old sub was a clutch of dead systems known as the Mergent Worlds, the scorched corpses of Imperial planets like Spica Maximal resurfaced from the deluge. They were tainted, of course. Utterly tainted, and utterly prohibited. A fiercely prosecuted interdiction by the Battlefleet Scarus hemmed the Mergent Worlds away from Imperial and non-Imperial contact alike.

  "The shaved head of an old man, from behind, by candle light," Kara said.

  Nayl snorted.

  "Not you, old man with a shaved head." Kara laughed. "A really old, wizened man."

  "Not bad." Nayl conceded.

  "Tour turn."

  Nayl leaned on the iron guard rail and gazed down through the observation bay's segmented glasteel port. "A citrus fruit," he said at length.

  "That's terrible. And you've used it before."

  "I have not."

  "Have so. Ganymedae. Remember? A waxed citrus fruit, you said, sharp and acid."

  "Can I finish? I hadn't finished."

  Kara grinned, and made a deferring gesture. "Please, dig yourself out."

  "I was going to say... a citrus fruit, one of the big, fat ones with the amber rind. And not only that, one that's been in the fruit bowl too long and is just beginning to turn. A dusting of grey mould on the skin, a dimpled puffiness."

  She frowned. "Your metaphor being that it's spoiled?"

  "Spoiled. Rotten."

  "It's all right, I suppose. A tad obvious."

  "But 'the shaved head of an old man from behind by candle light' isn't?"

  "You've got to give me points for allegory."

  "Allegory now?"

  "Allegory," she nodded. "The old man has seen better days and remembers them sadly. He's worn out. He's turned away, so we can't see his face anymore, or even tell if he's alive. He's poor, so he has to rely on candles. Which, of course, adds a poetic flourish about the colour."

  "Poetic flourish my arse. My metaphor was clean and contained."

  "Allegory beats metaphor. Every time. Hands down. I think I win."

  "I think not."

  "You're a poor loser, Harlon Nayl. I've got you cold on this one. Have the grace at least to lose with good manners."

  "What are you doing?"

  They both started up and looked round from the rail. Timid and wan, Zael stood in the hatchway behind them, watching them.

  "Hello, Zael," said Kara with a broad smile. "What are you up to?"

  "Just... you know..." He remained in the doorway, as if he felt safe there, and looked around at the gloomy observation bay. The only light, apart from lumin-strips along the edge of the grilled walkway, was coming in from outside.

  "What are you looking at?" Zael asked.

  Nayl waved him in and pointed out through the port. Nervously, Zael came through the hatch and crept out across the metal observation platform to the rail.

  "That's Lenk," Nayl said.

  Outside, cold blackness, pricked by hard star-points and the glimmering, lustrous skeins of distant clusters and more distant galaxies. Dominating the view was a mottled, bruised, orange sphere. It was a world - Zael knew that. A planet, sunlit and unshadowed, suspended by invisible physics in the darkness of space. They were looking down at it, as if from the roof of a hive stack. Zael wondered what his home looked like from this vantage point. Part of him yearned to be back on Eustis Majoris. Part of him never wanted to see it again.

  "Lenk," he said after a while. "Where's that?"

  "Right here," grinned Kara, as if it was a trick question.

  "Are we flying past it?"

  "This is a starship, Zael," said Harlon. "It doesn't fly. We're at high anchor above Lenk. A stop-over. The Chair wanted to say hello to the Navy Station commander here. He's gone down there with Mamzel Madsen."

  "Why?"

  "It's protocol," said Kara.

  "What's that?"

  Kara looked over Zael's tousled head at Nayl and shrugged a "help me out here".

  "It's the done thing," Nayl said to the boy. "You know how an important player... a dealer say, makes sure he introduces himself to the moody hammers protecting a down-stack club. It's polite. The dealer makes sure the moodies know who he is, and vice versa. To avoid trouble later."

  "I get you," said Zael.

  "Well, that's all he's doing. The Fleet has a base here on Lenk. It runs operations up into the region we're heading for. The Chair wants the commander to know who he is and where he's going. In case we get into trouble."

  "What sort of trouble?"

  It was Nayl's turn to glance at Kara.

  "The hypothetical type," Kara said.

  "What's hypothetical?"

  Kara crouched down so she was on a level with Zael. She rested her forearms on the rail and her chin on her forearms. "We're not going to get into trouble. Of any sort. Inquisitor Ravenor-"

  "The Chair." Nayl corrected her.

  Kara pursed her lips. "Right... The Chair won't allow us to get into any trouble. We're safe. You're safe."

  Zael looked round at her. "I like your hair that colour."

  Surprised, she reached up a hand and touched her short, shaggy fringe involuntarily.

  "Thanks," she said. "I've been meaning to go back to red."

  "It's nice."

  The boy leant out over the rail and started looking from side to side.

  "Careful," Kara said. "What are you doing?"

  "The planet's not very interesting. What I really want to see is the ship."

  "What?" asked Nayl.

  "The ship. I've never seen the ship. I've never seen any ship." Zael pulled back. "So what were you doing just then?" he asked them.

  "We were playing a game," Kara said.

  "A game? How do you play it?"

  "That's a good question," said Nayl, staring at Kara. "Some people make up the rules as they go along..."

  "Oh, get over it," she scoffed. She looked at Zael. "Harlon and I have been playing the game since we first met. Whenever we reach a new planet, a new world, a new place, we get together in an obs bay like this, or get a pict of it on a repeater screen, and we play the game. The idea is to describe the world... but not just what it looks like. Something that also describes what the place is like. It's character. That's how you win the game. Do you know what a metaphor is?"

  Zael thought about it. "When you say something is like something else?"

  "That's a simile," said Nayl.

  "Shut up, pedant." Kara scolded him. "Zael's on the right track. Why don't you play?" she asked the boy. "Look down at Lenk. What does it look like to you?"

  Zael stared down and screwed up his face in thought. "An orange rubber ball I once owned."

  Nayl shrugged. Kara cocked her head. "That's... that's good," she said.

  "Yeah, pretty good." Nayl agreed kindly. "Next time you might want to add some... you know... hidden meaning."

  "Like a baldy bloke with candles?"

  "Exactly like a baldy bloke with candles," Kara said.

  "Or a citrus fruit..." Nayl began.

  "Over, done, beaten." Kara hissed. "Get used to it."

  Zael was oblivious to their sparring. He leaned out again, craning his neck to see the flanks of the Hinterlight's hull.

  "You really want to see the ship, don't you?" said Nayl.

  "Yes."

  Nayl straightened up and looked at Kara. "What's Rav - The Chair. What's The Chair's ETA?"

  "Not due back for another six hours. Halstrom told me Preest was planning to quit orbit at midnight."

  "All right. Can you amuse yourself for a while?"

  "Absolutely," Kara said. "I've been doing that for years. I'm getting good."

/>   "Don't start," Nayl said.

  "I'll go see Carl. He could do with cheering up," she said.

  "Fine." Nayl looked at the boy. "You're coming with me," he said.

  It was good, but not perfect. Better than that benighted selpic blue jacket at any rate. But still, the lifelessness of his arm creased the shoulder-line of the linen tunic in the most horrid way. He turned three-quarters, then back the other way, studying his look in the full length mirror.

  Not good.

  Carl Thonius, alone in his cabin, sighed deeply, and began to unbutton the tunic. He had to use his left hand, and when it came to taking the garment off, he had to scoop the shoulders over his head and slide it off his rigid limb.

  Thonius had keyed the lights to low and locked the door. He'd put on a slate of his favourite music, but tonight even the light operetta The Brothers of Ultramar wasn't doing it for him.

  His cabin suite, refined in its decor and usually immaculate, was a mess. Vox-slates were screed across the carpet. He'd lost patience trying to find something he wanted to listen to. His bed, and the dressing chairs and occasional table beside it, were enveloped in a mass of discarded clothes. He'd been through his wardrobe a dozen times, trying everything.

  Maybe a full jacket of Gudrunite velvet? Perhaps a blouson of Rustedre shot-silk? What about, damn the season, a long kirtle of the most gorgeous green Sameter clorrie, with ivory toggles and a simply darling gilt brocade hem?

  Nothing worked. Nothing hid or excused his damaged form.

  At this rate, he'd be wearing a bodyglove. And, from there, it was a short step to shaving one's head and calling everybody ninker.

  Thonius turned and looked for something else to try on. In doing so, he caught sight of himself in the long mirror, pale and naked from the waist up.

  He paused, frozen. He'd always been proud of his thin, hairless, well-exercised form. Lean, he'd call it. Lean and gamine, perhaps.

  All he could see was the arm. The dullness of it. The leaden hang. Medicae Zarjaran - may the Emperor bless his craft - had begun a programme of post-op rehabilitation. Thonius counted himself grateful that he could now feel pins when they were stuck into his fingerpads. His digits still refused to move under their own power.