Emmings’s head snapped sideways, whip-cracking his reedy neck. The shockwave travelled down his bony body and twisted it violently. Before his feet left the powder-white ground, his head began to deform, to wrench out of shape, to lose all semblance of Emmings. Then it burst, and Emmings folded like a snap-shut clasp knife. He fell sideways into the dust. Molotch glimpsed a lean figure with a bolt pistol duck back into cover behind one of the pillars. Just a glimpse, but Molotch recognised him.
That bastard interrogator, Thonius.
So, they’d found them. Thonius, his cronies – and their thrice-damned master.
Nung trampled clear of the undergrowth and peppered the nearest pillars with his cannon. Stone dust and quartz shrapnel blizzarded off them in a long, stippling line.
Molotch ran out beside him and pulled the blood-flecked pulse rifle out of Emmings’s still-clenched hands.
‘Where is he?’ Lynta was behind him suddenly, her snub-las raised. ‘It was that rant-freak Thonius, wasn’t it? I saw him.’
‘Over there…’ Molotch pointed.
‘Hose it!’ Lynta yelled to Nung, and started to run.
Nung loved Lynta as much as he could love anything. He obeyed without hesitation, raking the pillars again and showering the ground with spent cases. The chalky impart spume wafted up, clouds into a cloudless sky.
Lynta disappeared behind the nearest pillars. Molotch started to move again. Kyband and Hehteng emerged from the jungle.
‘The camp!’ Molotch screamed at them. ‘Nung’s with me!’
Kyband and the lupen started to ran up the track. Hehteng used his backward-jointed, powerful limbs to leap ahead of the human.
Molotch edged down into the pillars. It was hot and quiet again suddenly. The sun glared down, almost overhead, and he ignored his pouring sweat and the burning of his skin. He’d lost his straw hat somewhere. He moved from shadow to shadow, hugging the scant shade at the base of the pillars. Nung shuffled after him. The ogryn’s breathing was loud and ragged.
Abruptly, two figures whirled into view around the side of one of the columns: Lynta and Thonius. Somehow, they had disarmed one another. Their desperate combat was extraordinary, almost too fast for the eye to follow. Kick, jab, kick, evade, duck, slice, jab. Two perfectly trained killers unleashed. Molotch raised his rifle and tried to draw a bead on Thonius, but Nung knocked his aim aside. ‘Zygmunt hit her!’ he wheezed.
It was true. He might. The combatants were a blur of circling bodies and scything limbs. There was no way to separate them.
Molotch ran past them instead, tracing his way down the sunburnt track towards site C. He quickly left Nung behind.
Molotch paused beside the last of the pillars, panting, and gazed down at the cliff-face and the cleft. There was no sign of life; in fact, there was no sign of anything except the disengaged excavator modules cooking in the sun where the servitors had left them.
He took a step forward. Something hard and hot pressed against his temple.
‘Drop the rifle,’ said a woman’s voice.
Molotch hesitated.
‘Drop it, Molotch, or I drop you.’
Molotch tossed the tau weapon into the white dust. ‘Is that you, Kara Swole?’ he asked.
‘You better believe it, you frig-wipe ninker.’
She let him turn slightly, so the barrel of her laspistol was in his face. Of all the bastard’s band, she had always been his favourite. A dancer-acrobat, short, well muscled, womanly. Her body was tightly packed into a cream skinsleeve, and her red hair pressed down under a hood. She wore glare-goggles. Her small, expressive mouth and wide cheekbones were as attractive as he had remembered.
She was not smiling.
‘I always did think you picked the wrong side, Kara,’ he said. She spat, and banged the nose of the pistol into his throbbing, gap-toothed mouth so hard it made him whine.
‘So help me, I’ll kill you for what you did on Majeskus. So help me, I’ll—’
She halted and stiffened, as if hearing some invisible command. ‘All right, all right,’ she protested to someone not there at all. ‘Alive.’
‘He’s with you, isn’t he?’ Molotch said. ‘Tell him… tell him I’ll see him in hell.’
Nung had finally caught up with his master. He slithered down between the last of the pillars, howling Molotch’s name and firing the cannon.
Molotch threw himself down as the fusillade of fat-cal shots went over him. He saw Swole leap the other way, turning an expert but desperate handspring in the dust. She cleared the fire zone as far as one of the excavators, and ducked down as rounds spanged off its bodywork. Then she ran, lithe and fast, into the jungle. Molotch wondered if Nung had hit her. He doubted she would still have been moving if he had.
Molotch snatched up the pulse rifle and fired a few blurts after her, splattering tubers and cups.
‘Nung! Stay guard here!’ he instructed, and ran towards the cleft.
In the crooked, sweltering dark, he met Boros Dias coming the other way.
‘Back!’
‘I heard shooting…’
‘Back, doctor!’
Boros Dias retreated into the excavated chamber. The organic parts of the mangled servitors were already beginning to rot.
‘What’s happening?’ Boros Dias demanded plaintively as Molotch pushed past him. ‘Molotch?’
‘The justice of the Imperium of Man, swaggering with its own self-importance, has come to interfere with us.’
‘The Imperium? You mean the Inquisition?’
Molotch took an expensive larisel-fur brush from Dias’s kit and began to brush dust away from the frieze.
‘You mean the Inquisition?’
‘Shut up, Dias.’
‘Oh great throne of Man…’ Dias whimpered and slid down the wall onto his backside.
‘Shut up, Dias.’
The brush was too fussy, too slow. Molotch upturned the xenoarcheologist’s field kit and began to pick through the items that had spilled out onto the gritty chamber floor. He found the hand-flamer Boros Dias used for frying off lichen and algae.
It ignited with a single pump of the trigger, and Molotch wound the nozzle up to full. The flame was blue-hot. He ran it along the lines of the carving, frying out dust, blasting away loose matrix. The narrow chamber filled with the acrid stink of cooking stone.
‘You’ll damage the relic!’ Boros Dias yelped, seeing what he was doing. ‘It’s priceless!’
‘I know,’ said Molotch, agreeing with both points. He burned away more dust and sand, heedless. ‘How long would it take you to reveal the rest of this frieze, doctor?’
‘A week… maybe two…’
‘We don’t have an hour.’
The flamer was no good against the thicker coverings of ancient rock that caked the base and upper left quadrant of the relief. Molotch snatched up a sample hammer and started chipping the layers of rock away with brutal strokes.
‘Stop it! Molotch, stop it!’ Boros Dias cried, getting to his feet. ‘You’re destroying—’
‘Shut up, Dias,’ Molotch said, cracking away more splinters with fierce, fluid blows.
‘Sir, you pay me to advise you. You pay me well for my expert opinion. We have an understanding, a compact. I only agreed to join you because you said the excavation work would be done with rigorous attention to formal practice.’
‘Shut up, Dias.’
‘Molotch, you are brutalising the treasure of the past! You are vandalising the most important—’
Molotch turned, sweating and short of breath. He lowered the sample hammer. ‘Doctor, you are completely correct. This is sacrilege, and I have contracted you at great expense to oversee this project in all formal particulars.’
‘You have, sir,’ Dias agreed. ‘If we preserve the find, perhaps the Inquisition will take that into account.’
Molotch smiled. ‘You really don’t understand what the Inquisition means, do you, doctor?’
‘I—’ Boros Dias began.
r />
‘Doctor, I think it only fair that we conclude our professional arrangement here and now. Consider yourself freed of the terms of our contract.’
Boros Dias began to smile. Then his face melted, just as it had started to scream. His bared skull cracked like pottery and he fell onto his back.
Molotch dropped the hand-flamer. ‘I never liked you,’ he said to the smouldering corpse. Then he turned back to the relief and resumed his frantic attack. The smell in the chamber was now much, much worse.
He only had time left for another few savage blows. There was so much more hidden. Perhaps if he’d had a power drill…
He tossed away the hammer and located the portable brass picter from amongst the late doctor’s overturned kit. Two or three wide angle shots of the whole, then a series of close-ups, one section at a time, with as much overlap as he could manage.
His thigh throbbed like hell.
Molotch tucked the picter into his bodyglove and squirmed his way out of the cleft.
NUNG WAS DEAD. Blood-loss from the ugly gunshot wound had finished him. He lay as he had fallen: propped up over one of the excavators. Nte-flies foamed around his face and the hole between his ribs.
Beyond the massive pillars, wretchedly thick black smoke boiled up from the direction of the camp, staining the bright, empty sky. Molotch could hear the distant chatter of exchanging gunfire.
Running as fast as he could in the heat, he followed the eastern path out of the cut of the cliff, away from the pillars, and into the emerald shade of the adult tubers. These were monsters: their trunks were five metres in diameter, their cups like basins, and their boughs and fleshy leaves arched up twenty metres. Poison-bees hummed around him as he ran. Viscous sap-pools splashed under his feet.
Only his most trusted – Kyband and Lynta – knew about the escape plan. Where they’d first made planetfall, over to the west of the sites they’d hidden a way out. They’d done this even before they’d established the habi-camp.
His heart was racing. He knew it would take months to recover from this ordeal. But he pushed himself on.
At first, he missed the spot. Burned out and panicking, he fell down on his hands and knees and began to cry. Then his Cognitae-schooled intellect took over; the mind that encompassed noetic techniques, polished and refined by the great and abominated academy. He sat up, and breathed deeply to slow his panic. Then he methodically consulted his wrist-mounted locator. Over to the north, a hundred metres.
Molotch got up again and ran in that direction. Sunlight invaded the clearing where the drop flier sat. It was a handsome little thing, a Nymph model recon flier, removed surreptitiously from a Guard munitions depot in the Helican sub. It crouched on six long hydraulic legs, its wings folded back. It looked like a giant metal mosquito.
Molotch had left it under canvas. The camo-tarp was now heaped up on the mucky ground.
He stepped forward. Lynta appeared from behind the tail boom.
‘Throne, you scared me,’ said Molotch.
‘I have that effect on most people,’ she smiled. ‘It’s all gone to hell, hasn’t it, Zygmunt?’
Molotch nodded. ‘It has. But all is not lost. We can escape, you and me. This bird can get us clear. We’ll fire up a beacon. Brice can send a shuttle down to meet us. We’ll be gone before the fighting’s over.’
She shrugged.
He popped the cockpit door and leaned in to fire up the engines. The vector fans began to whine into life.
‘Thonius. Did you kill him?’ he asked.
She replied, but he couldn’t hear her over the mounting fan-chop.
‘Thonius? I said, did you kill the bastard? Last I saw, you were deep in it.’
‘That was all for show,’ she said. She was pointing her snub-las at his face.
‘Lynta?’
‘Game’s over, Molotch.’
‘God-Emperor no!’ he mumbled in dismay. ‘I trusted you… you’ve been with me for nearly a year! Lynta! We even—’
‘Yeah, I know. Makes me sick just to think of it. Drop the pulser.’
‘Tell me this isn’t true, Lynta…’
‘My name isn’t Lynta. It’s not even Patience Kys, but that’s how I’m known these days.’
‘Patience Kys? But she’s one of that bastard’s—’
‘Exactly. Toss the tau gun.’
The murder-hardness had not left her green, green eyes. He threw the long, square-ended xeno-weapon into the mud at his feet.
She gestured with the snub. ‘Now kill the engines.’
With his gaze fixed on her, he reached over into the cockpit, keeping his hands visible, and took hold of the throttle.
And rammed it forward.
The engines screamed into max-thrust. They stripped wet, black flesh off the tubers around the clearing, blew a rippling crater in the ooze beneath the flier and threw Patience Kys onto her back.
The Nymph rose, wings unfolding, and wallowed sideways, crushing into the tuber stands and thrashing them into mush with its veetol jets. Molotch clung on, and scrambled up into the cockpit, screaming out with the terrible effort. Twice, he nearly fell off.
He seized the controls and calmed the yawing flier. Las-shots bounced off the nose. Kys was on her feet below, blasting up at him. Molotch veered away and started to climb hard, leaving the traitorous bitch behind.
He circled over the black jungles and white scarps, getting his bearings. He slammed the canopy shut. The pall of smoke from the camp rose to the east.
‘Brice! Brice! This is Molotch!’ he shouted into his vox-link. ‘I need evac now!’
The signal crackled. ‘Understood. Five-eleven-three nine-six-four rendezvous lock. Make it fast!’
Molotch punched in the coordinates and slammed the flier west over the gloss-black rot-forests. He could do this. He would do this…
‘Where you going, Zygmunt?’ a voice suddenly crackled over his link. Molotch knew the voice. It belonged to Harlon Nayl, the most dangerous agent in his bastard-adversary’s private cadre.
‘Does it matter where I’m going, bounty hunter?’ Molotch said, cueing the vox to ‘send’. ‘I don’t see you being able to stop me now.’
‘Oh, you know me, Zygmunt,’ the voxed voice replied. ‘You bring a blade, I bring a cannon… you bring a flier…’
Noiseless, arch-winged, ominous, a Valkyrie assault carrier rose from the forest before him, washing the canopy growth back in a wide, concentric ripple. It was dressed in black camo paint, its Imperial Guard insignia removed. Its chin-turret began to flash.
Molotch’s Nymph lost a wing in a shower of splintering metal. It began to descend hard, auto-rotating. Multi-laser shots burst its belly and exploded its leg assemblies. The ‘crash’ alarm was blaring. Fire swirled up into the cockpit and roasted his legs.
Molotch screamed.
Then the first rocket struck home and blew off the flier’s tail boom. More followed from the Valkyrie’s under-wing pods, snaking out on curling spits of smoke. The Nymph came apart, burning, and dropped like a stone towards the inky forest cover, scattering casing fragments, engine parts and glass specks as it fell.
Zygmunt Molotch, ablaze from head to foot, was still alive when the hull finally met the ground.
A firestorm rushed out from the impact point, sucked back in again with the shockwave overpressure, and left a scorched circle ten hectares across in the undergrowth.
NOW
Local spring time, Petropolis, Eustis Majoris, 401.M41
TIRED, I MAKE myself comfortable. Not in any physical way. The sustain-field of my chair accommodates my rudimentary body-needs. I settle and adjust mentally, according to the psykana rituals.
A soft-edged trance allows me to open up. I can hear hectic noise from the ship around me, but I muffle it out. I am weary from the long voyage.
I concentrate. I resolve. I see nothing. I feel everything. Everything that makes up Eustis Majoris. Bloat-world, obese with cities. Filthy with a crust of dirt I can taste. It
is like examining a putrefying corpse.
My fingertips feel contaminated already, though I have no fingers.
Eustis Majoris. It makes me gag. Old world. Rain-eaten world. Sub-sector capital. The smell of tar and slime and ouslite on its consumptive breath. The dry odour of trade, the stale stink of vice.
It is hard for me to bear. My gorge rises, my stomach turns.
I resolve. There is too much data, too many signals from too many lives. I have to focus. They are down there. My people, hard at work. I must not lose them.
Specifics. I look for specifics. I hunt for the glints of the wraithbone markers. I whisper through lives, from one to another, as if walking through the rooms of an endless mansion.
I am a courtesan called Matrie, beautiful but spurned by my lover-protector, dreaming of a rich, new patron. My skirts are heavy with lace.
I am a drunk called Tre Brogger, counting out change on a bar top to see if I can afford one more snifter of amasec.
I am a footpad without a name. I am running, out of breath. My estoc is slippery with blood. I think I belong to a clan, and I think the clan will be pleased with the pocket-chron and credit wafers I have just acquired.
I am a washerwoman, crying over the son I once gave away.
I am a hab super, dry heaving as I force entry to a stack apartment where flies fill the air. Three weeks since the old man was last seen. I will have to call the marshals. I might lose my job for this.
I am a bird. Free.
I am an administry clerk called Olyvier, tapping at the keys of my codifier, the screen reflecting green phantoms at my augmetic eyes. I have awful halitosis because of an abscess in my gum. I cannot afford the medicae fees unless I put in extra shifts all month. I have a scheduled break in one hundred and nineteen minutes.
I am a servitor, stacking boxes in a stock-house. I had a name once, but I have forgotten how to say it. It takes an effort just to remember to stack the boxes the right way up. The boxes have arrows on their sides.
I am a pardoner called Josev Gangs. I am waiting nervously for the court doors to open.
I am a rat, and I am gnawing. I am a rat.
I am a gamper called Benel Manoy, crouching under the shutters of a sink-shop, waiting for the rain to come and bring me business. I am nine. My gamp, furled, is taller than I am. It was my father’s, when he carried the service. It needs new skinning, because it is sorely worn. The name on the gamp is still my father’s. When I get it reskinned, I will have ‘Benel Manoy’ writ upon it.