Their heads were bare and shaved. More of the curiously-wrought skinplant tech encased their necks, so that their heads seemed to be resting on slender columns of intricately inscribed metal. The skin of their faces and scalps was entirely covered in swirling flame tattoos, echoing the design around the doorway. Their eyes were augmetic implants that glowed a dull green.
"Welcome," said one. Its voice was like silk.
"The immaterium has brought you to Bonner's Reach," said the other, its tone rasping and deep.
"Free trade is welcome here," uttered the first.
Perched on her hovering platform, Preest bowed. "Thank you for your greeting and welcome," she said. "I most humbly crave admittance. I have brought a tribute for the welfare of all."
"Let us examine it," said the rasping one.
At a signal from Nayl, the servitors brought forward the caskets and opened some of them. Foodstuffs, much of it stasis-fresh, wine and some flasks of amasec.
"This is acceptable tribute," said the rasping Vigilant.
"Welcome," repeated the silky one. "Do you wish us to advertise your presence and identity to the merchants here?"
"I am Shipmistress Zeedmund. Of the sprint trader Tarnish. I am here for Firetide, but I also seek interesting commerce."
"Zeedmund. Tarnish..." they echoed.
"I have serious collateral," she added. "Make that known. I am interested in genuine business."
"You appreciate the Code of the Reach?" asked the Vigilant with the silk voice.
"Peace and discourse," Preest replied. "And no weapon within the bounds of the Reach with a range longer than a human arm."
Nayl and Mathuin dutifully displayed the empty holsters at their hips, the ritual sign of unarmed intent.
"You are familiar with our rules," said the silky-voiced Vigilant.
"You have been here before," the rasping one said. It was more of a statement than a question. Nayl stiffened.
"I am a trader," said Preest. "I go where I please."
"Voice-pattern records show you to be Cynia Preest, shipmistress. Not Zeedmund."
"Traders change their identities. Is that a problem?"
"Not at all. We are ever discreet." The Vigilants stood aside and ushered them through the threshold. "Enter and make your trade."
Beyond the gate, they entered a capacious chamber hewn out of the planetary rock. The air was still muggy and over-used. The place was bathed in a yellow, fulminous light from bioluminescent tank-lamps mounted at regular intervals along the wall. Archways led off into other chambers, and at the far end, a well-lit tunnel disappeared away into the free trade areas. More Vigilants appeared, to conduct Preest's servitors to the communal larders where the tribute could be left.
One of them, his voice a whisper, approached the ship-mistress.
"Do you require a guide? A translator? Any other service?"
"I will ask if I need any such service," she said. The Vigilant bowed and backed away.
With her bodyguards either side of her, Preest began to glide sedately down the long tunnel.
On Bonner's Reach, visiting traders could avail themselves of drink and nourishment free of charge. Indeed, almost all services were free. A berthing fee was required, of course, but once that was paid, a trader could luxuriate in the bountiful hospitality of the station. The level of comfort was designed to relax visitors and encourage profitable, unhurried mercantile negotiation. The Vigilants merely expected a fee equivalent to one per cent of gross on any deal or transaction made within their precincts.
Of course, this apparent largesse was helped enormously by the recognised custom of tribute. Every captain, master or venturer, human or otherwise, was expected to offer something in the way of foodstuffs, liquor or other intoxicants upon arrival.
Preest's tribute was conducted down three kilometres of rock-cut corridors into a handling bay that adjoined one of the station's many food preparation areas. There the servitors set the caskets down as instructed and made their way back to the Hinterlight. A Vigilant labelled the caskets with storage instructions. Before long, kitchen labour would sort through the caskets and distribute the contents: perishables into cold stores and stasis vaults, wine to cellars, dry goods to the well-stocked pantries, specialist foods into appropriate containers, and narcotics to the tenders who walked the floors of the free trade salons.
The Vigilant was called away. Two pot-men were having an altercation in the nearby kitchen.
Preest's caskets were left unattended against the wet quartz wall of the handling bay.
The lid of the fourth casket along popped open. Telescopic levers hissed taut, lifting the produce tray up, revealing it to be merely a shallow false top.
Breathing deeply and slowly, Kara Swole slid herself out of the hidden cavity. She had contorted her body into a tiny space. As she emerged, she paused, grimacing, to pop her shoulder joints back into place.
Kara looked around. There was no time to complete a full body recovery here. She reached her hands up and detached the fibre-optic patch from over her left eye. The adhesive took some lashes with it. She rubbed her eye and wound the patch up in its long string of wire, unplugging the far end of it from the inside of the casket. Thanks to the fibre-optic, she'd been able to see a cold-light view of the outside and judge the best time for emergence accordingly.
Keeping a watchful eye around her, Kara tucked the fibre-optic into a hip pouch. She was wearing a skin-tight light-reflective bodyglove with only her head exposed. He thick red hair was slicked into a tight latex net that made her look bald. She opened the next casket along, and removed its false top layer too. Her equipment was stowed beneath. First, a small, prepacked rucksack on a tight nylon harness. Then, a compact vox, and a multikey that slipped neatly into holder loops on her waistband.
Her limbs and back were sore. She stayed wary, expecting discovery at any moment. The thin combat knife slipped into place in her glove's calf sheath. Nearly done.
She could hear footsteps approaching. One last task. Two almost empty tribute caskets would be more than a little suspicious. She tore open the shrink-wrapped packs of dehydrated kelp and shook their dry contents out into the bottom of each casket. Then she tore the top off a water flask and emptied its glugging contents after them.
Footsteps came closer. She pushed the produce trays back into place, closed the casket lids, and dashed into the shadows at the far end of the handling bay. Then, like an arachnid, she went clear up the sheer quartz wall. The palms and soles of her bodyglove were angle-ribbed with razor-steel filament hooks that could find purchase on almost any surface. She reached the top of the wall, slid into a rocky cavity, and lay still.
A troupe of kitchen labourers wandered into the bay below her, flipping up the lids of Preest's caskets to examine the fare. As she watched, they opened the casket where she had been concealed and took out the top tray.
The rest of the casket was chock full of glistening kelp. She heard the labourers scoff and moan. It was typical cheapskate rogue trader behaviour. Come bearing plenty when in fact most of the makeweight was sea cabbage.
Kara grinned to herself.
As soon as the labourers began to heft the caskets out into the larders, Kara began to move again, scuttling across the rock wall and in under the great flinty arch to the kitchen. Her arms and legs were throbbing with pain. Sheer climbing put an enormous stress on musculature, and her body wasn't yet limber from the forced contortions of the casket.
She forced herself on. A cramp in her left calf lost her some grip, but she clenched her teeth and persisted.
The kitchen below her was a vast and dingy haze, steam surging up from a dozen canisters on a dozen stoves, smoke trailing off roast veal and orkunu and marinated sinqua on the fire pits, drums of broiling ketelfish, pans of frying lardons, tureens of potage, steamers of fubi dumplings and blanching wilt-leaf. The roof of the chamber was a thick smog, which suited her just right. Though stone-cut, the kitchen hall was bolstered with t
hick cross-members of steel that formed ceiling beams. She dropped down onto the nearest one, swathed in oily smoke and vapour. There, invisible to the staff twenty metres below her, she stood for a long while, tension-flexing and relaxing her tortured body. Arms, joints, digits, spine, ribs, pelvis. As if performing to some great invisible audience, she began to stretch and slide, backflip, rotate and split.
Then she lay on her back on the beam, the kitchen clattering and broiling below her. She was still sore - that was inevitable after two hours in the box. But she was at last spry and warmed up.
Kara Swole rolled over, rose and began to run across the beam towards the interior of the station.
It was the worst dream yet. Something liquid yet solid was pouring in under Zael's hab door. It was black and it was stinking. Like his granna's glue. Like her frigging mind-burning glue!
He tried to wake granna. She was asleep in her chair, snoring, When he shook her, his hands went into her flesh like it was rotten, flybown meat. Yelping out in revulsion, he backed away and grabbed his granna's little effigy of the God-Emperor from the top of the cupboard. Zael held it out at the viscous horror spurting in around the door cracks into the kitchen.
"Go away, Novel Go away! Leave me alone!"
Something he needs to know...
He stifled a scream and-
Woke up.
Zael moaned and turned over in his cot. The cabin was dark, but he had left a light on in the bathroom. Its frosty glow spilled out across the gloomy space.
He was breathing hard. He wanted to call for Nayl, or Kara or even Kys, but he remembered they were engaged on some sort of mission. He wondered if he should try to contact The Chair. Nayl had advised him too, back at that place... what was it? Lenk?
He hadn't. He hadn't dared. He still didn't really know what The Chair had brought him along for or why The Chair considered him special. But he didn't want to spoil things. He didn't want to give The Chair an excuse to ditch him.
And what was this? Wasn't this excuse enough? Zael was having nightmares. His head was on wrong. After weeks, he was still witchy with come-down symptoms.
Zael sat up in the dark. He pushed his pillow across his knees and then leaned his head into it.
He wished, really wished, he could be a person like Nayl. A sorted out, in-control person. Or like Kara. Hell, even like Kys or Thonius.
Zael heard a sound from the bathroom. Like a block of soap falling from the rack, or a rubber ball bouncing in the metal drain-tray.
How could a-
He rose to his feet, holding the pillow in front of him like the most frigging pathetic shield in the Imperium. Water was hissing in the bathroom now, the shower head. Hot water. Steam gusted out of the cubicle, filming the glass door.
There was someone in there, inside the shower cube. Someone fogged by steam and water.
Zael swallowed hard. "Hello?"
"Zael?" The voiced echoed out over the rush of the shower. Zael heard someone spit out water to say the name.
"Yeah. Who's in there?"
"It's me, Zael."
"Who's me?"
"Frig's sake, Zael! Don't you know your own sister?"
Zael began to back away. "My sister... she's dead. You're not my sister..."
"Course I am, little," said the misty figure behind the glass door. "Why do you think I've been trying so hard to find you?"
"I don't know..." Zael murmured.
"Everything's joined, little. Everything's linked. Space, time, souls, the God-Emperor... it's all one big, connected everything. You'll understand it when you're here with me."
"With you? What do you want, Nove?"
"I have to tell you something. Okay?"
"What?"
The shower shut off abruptly.
"Snatch me a towel, little. I'm coming out."
"N-no! No, don't-"
The stall door opened. His sister stood before him. Fully dressed, soaking wet from the shower, haloed by steam.
And as burst and broken as she had been when they'd found her at the foot of the hab stack.
Zael simply blacked out.
"Let's circulate." Cynia Preest suggested. Her voice had a sly tone to it. She was enjoying this, and that pleased me. Bonner's Reach seemed to have reawakened Preest's enthusiasm for my hazardous occupation. For the first time in years, she was positive and engaged, probably because at last she had a proactive part to play.
We were standing in the stone entrance arch of one of the principle free trade salons. The scale of the chamber impressed me. It was bigger than the Carnivora, bigger than the interiors of some Ecclesiarchy temples I'd seen. A monstrous chamber hollowed from the planet's rock, lit by huge biolumin tank-lights suspended in clusters from the faraway roof. The other end of the chamber was so far away I could barely see it.
Even through Zeph Mathuin's enhanced optics.
A flight of marble stairs led down from the archway into the floor of the salon. Below us, hundreds - thousands, perhaps - of figures were gathered informally, drinking, talking, discoursing, trading. On our level, side galleries swept away around the walls of the hall. Looking up, I saw further tiers of galleries, twenty or more, circling the chamber all the way up to the ceiling.
The side galleries, enjoying a view over the salon's main floor, were for private negotiations. There were booths spaced regularly around their circuits, softly lit, where traders dined together, gamed, and indulged. A quick muster of my mind, boosted as it was by the amplifiers on the Hinterlight's bridge, told me some various booths were vox-screened, some pict-opaque, and most of them were psi-shielded. A trader entering a booth could activate discretionary barriers to keep his commerce private.
We went down the steps into the throng. Preest hovered her way down like some monarch on her archaic floater carriage. It was a business to keep the canopy decorously unfurled above her.
I switched my mind from side to side, like a broom, sweeping up scraps of detail from the scene. Preest was in her element, confident, happy in a way that surprised even her.
Nayl was tense. A passing taste of his mind told me he didn't like it. I could hear a repeating mantra circling in his thoughts... way too exposed... too many angles... no cover... way too exposed.
+It'll be fine.+
He glanced at me. His expression was hidden by the visor of his blast helm. I glimpsed his eyes.
"Very well," he said, reluctantly.
+What's the trouble?+
"Nothing, boss. Nothing."
We proceeded onto the floor of the salon. I took a selfish moment to enjoy this brief stint of physicality. I relished the body I was waring: its power, its strength, its mobility. Zeph was almost too easy to ware, one of the key reasons I had employed him. Waring others was often traumatic to both me and them, but Zeph Mathuin gave up his corporeal form without any negative resistance. I borrowed his flesh like a man might borrow another's coat. When the time came for us to change back, neither of us ever suffered any consequences more serious than fatigue.
On we moved, through the jostling, chattering floor space of the salon. On every side, rogue traders chatted and bartered with others of their kind. Bodyguard cadres sat around low tables, getting drunk while they waited for their masters and mistresses to finish socialising. Races mixed. I saw eldar, of a craftworld unknown to me, resplendent in polished white armour, engaged with a fat human ox in furs riding on a lifter throne. Nekulli hunched and chattered around a trio of methane breathers who were tanked inside bizarre viro-armours that glistened like silver and exuded noxious odours. A bounty hunter in full body plate strode past us, trailed by his servitor drones. To my left, a kroot cackled and barked. To my right, a trader whose body was entirely augmetic chortled a mechanical chortle as the shapeless ff'eng he was dealing with cracked a joke. The trader was exquisite: his body parts and face were machined from gold, his dental ivory set perfectly in gilded gums, his eyes real and organic.
Some abominable form of opal-shelled mollus
c hovered on a lifter dais and fluttered its eye stalks and elongated mandibles at a rogue trader in a red blastcoat. As we went by, I saw that the rogue trader was human except for his transplanted feline eyes. Something humanoid but not human, an elongated figure in a white vac-suit, its skin blue, its neck serpentine, blinked its large mirror eyes at a monthropod and its larvae. The monthropod and its kin curved their tube forms backwards and clattered their mouthparts to pay homage.
Forparsi drifters in gowns embroidered with stellar charts examined the product examples of jokaero technology. A human trader with mauve skin-dye studied an outworld prospector's gem samples through a jeweller's lens. I saw guildsmen amongst the rabble. The Imperial merchant guilds were supposed to limit their activities to inter-Imperium commerce, but it was well known they had no desire to see the potentially vast profits of the outworld markets go only to the free venturers and rogues.
Everywhere, tenders went to and fro. Some were girls, some boys, many were xeno-forms. They scurried to serve drinks and provide other diversions.
Preest held out a hand and stopped one, a handsome, hairless youth.
"What is it your pleasure, mistress?" he asked. "I have some of glad and some of grin and also fine sniff-musk."
"Three amasecs," Preest said. "Make them all doubles."
The tender scooted off.
Several merchants made formal approaches to Preest, but she politely expressed disinterest to each after a few words had been exchanged. One, however, was especially persistent. He was a mutant or a hybrid, unnaturally short and wide, a dwarf by human standards. His hair flew back behind him in a great crest. His thick chin sported a shaved-back goatee. He was dressed in a dark red body-glove armoured with suspended metal plates. His bodyguard - a single, unimpressive elquon manhound with dejected eyes and heavy, drooping jowls - accompanied him.