‘Ordinarily, but his voxsponder is broken. He sends to me.’
‘He’s a psyker?’
Nayl nodded.
Bashesvili exhaled and stood upright, putting her hands on her hips. ‘He’s dying. That much is clear. Critical impairment to the support system and the device’s integument.’
She gently steered the chair into the diagnosis bay, pushing aside the gurney where her more regular patients usually reclined. Nayl watched her. Bashesvili turned on a number of the devices, including an array of raised scanner pads held upright on a chrome frame. She bent a few of them over to better address the chair. Monitor screens lit up on the display consoles, and she studied them. Then she took out a paddle sensor and ran it over the casing.
‘This is thick armour.’ she said. ‘I dread to think what might have punched holes in plating this tough. Trouble is, it’s so thick, I’m not getting any kind of useful imaging through it.’
‘What can you do?’ asked Nayl.
‘I could attempt to link up an external life support system to stabilise him, but…’ She bent down to examine the recessed ports and ducts in the chair’s back.
‘But?’
‘But… looks like the connectors and feeds are non standard fitting. This chair is a custom build. So that’s no good. It’d be a stop-gap anyway. To attempt to save him, I’ll have to get in there.’
‘No,’ said Nayl firmly. ‘He doesn’t allow that.’ The armed guards either side of him tensed, ready to restrain him.
‘Does he allow himself to die?’ Bashesvili asked Nayl.
‘What?’
‘I simply can’t help him if I can’t get in there. Will he allow that, if his life is in the balance?’
Nayl shrugged. ‘He is an Imperial inquisitor. His name is Gideon Ravenor. As far as I know, he hasn’t been out of that chair since he was placed in it.’
‘How long ago?’
‘Decades. He is a private person.’
‘I’m a medicae,’ said Bashesvili. ‘We reach our own understandings.’
She ran her hands over the cowling of Ravenor’s chair again.
The hatch banged open. It was Lang and two more troopers.
‘Colonel!’ said Bashesvili, straightening up and saluting.
‘Doctor,’ Lang nodded. She looked at Nayl. ‘We have consulted with the local ordos. They’re searching their records. So far, they cannot find any trace of your credentials. Nice try. The badge had me fooled.’
‘Colonel—’ Nayl began.
‘They’re still checking,’ Lang said, ‘and signals have been sent astropathically to nearby sector conclaves. I have been promised an answer with all due haste, but realistically, this could take days, even weeks. In the meantime, sir, I have to presume the worst and deprive you of your liberty.’
‘Please,’ said Nayl.
‘This is wartime,’ said Lang, ‘and wartime rules apply. I cannot take post security anything less than seriously. The rebels have attacked this station before and may do it again, at any moment.’ She stared at Nayl. ‘They may already be here.’
‘Take him to the cell block,’ Lang told the guards. They marched Nayl out of the room.
‘This one needs attention, colonel,’ Bashesvili said. ‘He’s in a poor state.’
‘Do what you can to make him fit for interrogation,’ said Lang.
The colonel and her escort left. The hatch closed. Alone, Bashesvili looked down at the battered chair.
‘Where possible,’ she said, ‘I like to establish a dialogue with my patients.’
A tiny rasp of response came from the machine.
‘You know,’ said Bashesvili, ‘a does it hurt? Doesn’t it hurt? Say “ahhh” type of thing.’
There was another tiny gasp.
‘I shouldn’t do this,’ said Bashesvili, ‘but I’m wilful, and menopausal, and at the bad end of a long drudge tour out here on Rahjez.’ She reached up into her hairline and slowly unscrewed her blocker implant. She set it down on the polished table beside her.
‘Is that better? Hello in there?’
+It is better. Can you hear me?+
‘Extraordinary! Yes, I can. You’re strong. Like a song in my head. You have a nice voice. Mellow. You were a handsome devil, weren’t you?’
+I don’t know.+
‘Yes, you were, once. I can tell. Now, what’s your name?’
+Gideon.+
‘Hello, I’m Ludmilla. Don’t you dare think of messing with my head now, you understand? I have a responsibility here.’
+I won’t. I promise. Believe me, Ludmilla. All I want is for this pain to stop.+
‘Yeah, well, you’re screwed. I can tell just by the whiff of you. You’re rotting inside that box. I need to open you up. Your friend seemed to think that was a no-go. What do you say?’
+I say… I can’t hold on much longer, Ludmilla.+
‘That’s a start,’ she said. She reached over and swung in a hinged table of sterile tools. ‘What happens? Do you open your case, or do I have to crack it with a cutter?’
+Wait.+
‘What for?’ she asked. She wiped at her face suddenly, as if cobwebs had brushed against it. ‘What are you doing? I can feel that! What are you doing?’
+Forgive me. I was looking into your mind.+
‘Oh. Kindly don’t do it again.’ She paused, and then asked, ‘What did you see?’
+I saw enough to know I can trust you. I have to trust you. I will open the casing. Please don’t be distressed by what you see inside.+
‘Bloody hell, Gideon,’ she snorted. ‘You haven’t got anything I haven’t seen before. How does the casing open?’
Ravenor didn’t reply. There was a slow hiss of releasing catches, and the upper part of his chair slowly lifted away. Vapour oozed out. A dull, blue light shone from the open cavity.
‘Oh, Gideon,’ she said, peering inside. ‘Oh, you poor man.’
She turned, pulled on surgical gloves and looked back into the cavity. ‘I think I’m going to have to call for interns to help me so I can—’
+No interns. No one else. Just you.+
‘Ow!’ she said. ‘Not so fierce with the sending, please.’
+I’m sorry, but please—+
‘All right. If that’s what you want.’ She bent down and reached into the cup of warm, stagnant fluid. She circled her arms underneath Ravenor’s physical form.
‘Have I got you? Are you supported?’
+Yes.+
Bashesvili lifted him out of the chair. Tiny ducting relays and drip feeds, clustered in their thousands, like fronds of hair, pulled away.
+Nhhhg!+
‘It’s all right, Gideon,’ she soothed. ‘Shush, shush. It’s all right. I’ve got you. Gideon?’
The wet, blood-smeared, respiring sack of pale flesh she held in her arms had gone very quiet.
‘Gideon?’
‘THEY DON’T BELIEVE us?’ snarled Angharad.
‘No.’
‘They don’t believe us?’ she repeated.
‘No!’ said Nayl. ‘Now, hush. I’m thinking.’
‘We’re a thousand years out,’ said Iosob from the comer of the cell. ‘That’s an awful long way.’
‘I know it is,’ said Nayl. ‘That means a confirmation of our status is never going to come because we don’t exist yet. I was just hoping we could delay them. It’s ironic. The rosette is genuine, but to them it’s a fake. Now shut up both of you and let me think.’
‘Ow!’ he said, almost immediately. Spiky pain had jabbed into his head.
‘I feel that too,’ said Angharad, massaging her temples.
‘It’s Gideon,’ said Nayl, rising. ‘It’s Gideon. He’s hurting.’
‘Maybe,’ said Angharad, ‘but didn’t they warn us? Something about the thorns after dark?’
Night had fallen outside. Through the small, barred slit of a window, they could hear the thorn brush – the ku’kud – around the compound whispering and rustling.
&nbs
p; ‘Oh, great.’ Nayl growled. All right, our choices have just been reduced to one.’
‘Which is?’
‘We bust out of here.’
Angharad gazed at him with steady, hooded eyes. ‘Far be it for me to mention a few “ifs”, but—’
‘But?’
‘If we can open that cell hatch, if we can evade the guards without getting gunned down, if we can find a way out of the compound, and if Ravenor is fit enough to accompany us—’
‘Reach a point, please, woman.’ Nayl said.
‘If your good friend Gideon is hurt and can’t be moved, will you leave him here?’
‘No,’ said Nayl.
‘Then there’s no point breaking out. It would be signing our own death warrant. To escape, and then not flee?’
Nayl sighed and leaned his back against the cell wall. He slid down it until he was sitting on the floor. Angharad presumed he had given up.
‘Are all Carthaen women so pessimistic?’ he asked. ‘I thought you were a warrior?’
‘A good warrior knows when to fight,’ said Angharad.
‘And a better one knows when to improvise,’ Nayl countered. He’d sat down to tug off one of his boots.
‘What is he doing?’ asked Iosob, sitting up to watch. Angharad shrugged.
Lang’s guards had searched them all, and scanned them scrupulously for metallics and concealed weapons. They’d found Nayl’s boot knife, the coil of multi-purpose wire he carried around his waist, and the small pebble charge he kept in a wrist pocket.
He levered open the heel of his boot, and carefully teased something out of the rubberised sole. It was a slim jemmy pick, made of inert plastek.
‘This answers your first if,’ he said, holding it up. ‘This opens the hatch. The points you raised were good, and I can’t argue with them, but we still have to do this.’
‘And when the hatch opens?’ she asked.
‘Like I said, we improvise,’ he grinned. ‘I’m good at that.’
Angharad nodded. ‘One of the few things I like about you.’
IF THIS IS how I am going to die, I am strangely happy about it. To be free, one last time. To be outside the chair. To feel the air on my skin.
I cannot say what fate I expected, but it was certainly some titanic doom, suffered in the service of the ordos.
I suppose this is exactly that in a way, but it’s also a calm end, and a free one. The plight we are in seems so very far away. The impossible divorce from our own place-time. It fades, and seems insubstantial.
I fade too.
Stay awake, stay awake. All that seems important any more is lying here, in the cool air. I’m feeling the useless, dying body I own twitch and tremble as Ludmilla Bashesvili works.
She is breathing hard. I can feel her tension. I can also feel her devotion. She has fixed various links to my circulatory systems and organs. I can hear machines beeping and chiming. I can feel a warm glow, which I presume is either anaesthetic or the in-feed of intravenous fluids and blood.
I can also feel a scratching around the edges of my mind. Ludmilla feels it too, and it bothers her. The ku’kud. Night has fallen, and the brush is active outside. It is not a sentience, just a dry, gristly hiss of residual psychic activity. It is not unpleasant, just irritating, like a chorus of insects. A vast body of psi-responsive matter, like a sponge.
‘Gideon?’ she asks, putting a bloody tool down in a steel dish with a clatter. ‘With me, still?’
+Yes.+
‘Good,’ she says.
She’s lying. I go free for a moment, and see the world through her eyes. I see the shrunken, twisted thing that is me lying on the surgery table. Bunches of squirting pipes and sucking tubes intrude into me through catheters. I have not seen myself in the flesh for a long time.
Poor, withered flesh. A wrinkled sack of organs and redundant bones, the vague, vestigial remains of a human face, sunk low like a tumour on the top of the sack. God-Emperor, how did I ever survive the Thracian Atrocity? God-Emperor, why did you let me survive?
I see the discoloured flesh, the atrophied ends of truncated joints. I see the pallor of my burn-tissue skin, the cicatrice scars of my original surgery. I notice also the patches of black bruising and necrotisation, creeping across my form like the shadows of leaves on the ground. I see the wounds the hooked things made, pussy and raw, like gaping mouths. I was hurt even more than I thought. Ludmilla has just removed a hank of hook bone ten centimetres long from what I once called my belly. She drops it into a bowl in disgust. The Great Devourer.
My mind swims. There is pain, but beyond the pain, there is a solace, which I think might be death. Ludmilla threads a needle.
I have to stay awake. I know this. I know this.
I look into her. I slide through reefs of sadness and concern that part easily because she is concentrating elsewhere. The life of a field medicae is no life, I quickly realise. Hers has been long and unrewarding. Thought engrams dazzle and open. I see her siblings in the family home. Laughing children, a cherished nugget of memory. A blue dress. Her father’s posting. Her father’s death. I see a bad marriage, and a few disastrous love affairs. I see a child she lost.
I am a voyeur. I should care, and be ashamed of myself, but I’m not. The front of her mind is locked in effort. The back drifts, like a warm sea, forgotten.
I see the war. Thirty years long already. Rebels on Veda have risen in the cause of emancipation. Imperial secessionists. The Guard has locked the systems down. Protracted fighting on three worlds. Rumours of Guard-sanctioned massacres.
A dirty war. The Imperium fighting itself. No wonder Asa Lang was driven. The Archenemy, the greenskin, the eldar, all terrible foes. But I know, ultimately, there is no more bitter and distressing enemy than our own kind, when humans turn on humans. Ludmilla loathes it. Ah, I see… her family was from Veda. She hates this posting more. Rahjez. Right on the front, a listening watch. Front-line defenders, alert and wired all the time. She hates this.
She hates it most of all because of the ku’kud. The whispering thorn. Isolated out here, humans would be paranoid anyway. The brush makes it worse.
I wish I could soothe her. I—
+Gnnhhh!+
‘Gideon? Are you still with me? I felt that?’
+I’m here.+
My voice is less than a whisper. She has just extracted another chip of broken hook bone. It clinks into a bowl.
‘I’m worried about your vitals, Gideon. Please, try to stay here with me.’
+I will.+
The ku’kud is scratching at my mind. I wish I could blank it, but I can’t. It’s like a chorus, an insensate chorus. I—
It resonates. As I push up into it, it rustles back. Sentient or not, it amplifies my thoughts as echoes. Throne, I could—
+Annghhhhh!+
‘Gideon? Gid—’
I THINK I blacked out for a moment. Yes, the table-mounted chron has skipped eight minutes.
Eight?
+Ludmilla?+
‘Gideon? Oh, for Throne’s sake! I thought I’d frigging lost you!’+Language.+
She laughs. Ludmilla has a good laugh. The men she courted would have loved her for that. Why did she never find one good enough to keep? I feel so distant now. I feel—
‘GIDEON! COME BACK to me, you bastard!’
+I’m still here.+
‘I’m going to have to go deeper in this wound. You’re going to have to be strong. Can you stand this?’
+Yes.+
‘Concentrate on something. Focus on it.’
+Yes.+
I focus on… I drift. I try to remember what I am supposed to be doing. Everything is so vapid and thin. I think of Nayl, of Kys, of Kara, I think of Will…
He’s dead. I know he’s dead. Molotch killed him.
I think of Molotch and some measure of focus returns. Zygmunt Molotch. But for him, I would not be here. But for him, my life would have been entirely different.
I feel a passionate hatred.
The energy lifts me up.
‘That’s better. Good vitals. Now, this is going to really hurt.’
Molotch. Molotch. I want him. I want to finish him. A thousand years and half a galaxy away, I remember him and want to finish him. He did this to me. He put me here.
‘Gideon, your pulse rate is all off. Gideon?’
The ku’kud. The door. I can see it now. Now I can see it and—
‘Gideon?’
I can see it. Throne, I’m fading fast, I can tell. Each instrument Ludmilla pushes into me tastes different. The salt tang of the scalpel, the iron hit of the tweezers, the bleach sip of the retractors.
Oh, Throne. Oh, Throne, I am really dying.
But I can see it now. Oh, how I can see it. The door. The key. The ku’kud. I send it into Ludmilla’s mind. If only I could… if only I could—
‘Ow!’ she cries, jolting up. ‘Stop it with that!’
If only I could. If only I could. If only I could—
IF ONLY I could.
IF—
BASHESVILI JERKED BACK from the operating table.
‘Gideon?’ she asked.
Every single monitor device around her stopped pinging and wailed out a flat line drone.
‘No!’ she cried.
TEN
THERE WAS A bumping scrape of metal on metal, and the service boat locked into the docking clamps of the Allure. Servitors and deck wranglers began to move around, shouting back and forth as they started loading the modular crates of perishables and victuals onto the through-deck cargo hoists. Hydraulics sighed, bulk hatches opened, vapour drifted.
The cargo area was dark, and lit only by frosty amber overheads. Kara swung down from a crawlspace above a large duct circulator where she had hung, concealed, during the ride from the orbital station. Keeping low, she ran along the edge of the hold’s raised loading pad, and then swung over onto one of the laden hoists as it started to rise.
The hoist rose into the bulk hold of the rogue trader Allure. The air smelled of spices and rotting fruit. Crewmen and servitors were busy unloading one of the crate stacks, moving some of the containers on trolleys through to adjacent secondary holds.