The onlookers in the free trade salon crowded in closer, astonished by what they were witnessing. Some of them had seen the bounty hunter at work before. You didn’t mess with that, not hand-to-hand, unless you were crazy, or suicidal or—
Or something else entirely.
Something laced with grafts and glands and implants. Something so augmetically re-engineered it would take on a monster without hesitation. In any fight, there was an underdog. Despite all physical appearances to the contrary, that underdog was Lucius Worna.
This was something the crowd wanted a ringside seat to see.
Worna threw two heavy punches at the man in the lizard-skin coat. Each one would have demolished his skull if it had connected. But Armand Wessaen seemed to slide out around them, leaving empty air. He landed two strikes of his own: his graft blade slit through Worna’s left eyebrow, and his left fist actually dented the mother-of-pearl surface of Worna’s chest plate.
Worna stumbled away from the force of the blows.
Wessaen’s left hand produced a cisor from the pocket of the lizard-skin coat. The warmth of his hand woke the large, black beetle-thing up, and its exposed mandibles, razor-sharp, began to chitter and thrash.
‘You’ve picked on the wrong man tonight,’ he hissed as he came in again.
Worna swung around. Again, his punch hit nothing but space. Wessaen had danced nimbly to the left, and stabbed the graft blade up under Worna’s left shoulder guard. He tugged the blade out, escaping the blind retaliation. Now blood was spurting down the bounty hunter’s left bicep guard.
Worna pivoted at the hips and clawed at his adversary. Wessaen backed away with abnormal speed, executed a deft tumble, and came back on his feet behind his cumbersome opponent. The cisor ripped into Worna’s lumbar plating, the mandibles chewing through it like it was tissue paper.
Worna pulled away, but no matter how tightly he turned, he was just a thundering hulk in heavy armour, and Wessaen was always behind him, jittery-fast. Wessaen was glanding something potent, and hyperactivity pulsed through his hard-wired, reconstructed body.
Worna made another desperate grab. Wessaen kicked him in the face, and then followed the kick with another stab of the graft blade. The blade punched through the bounty hunter’s midriff armour.
Where it stuck fast.
Wessaen swallowed.
Worna grabbed the man in the lizard-skin coat by the right wrist and wrenched the graft blade out of his belly. As the cisor chattered in, Worna caught that wrist too.
Wessaen’s eyes went glassy-wide. Glanding, he was faster than the massive bounty hunter, and almost as strong. Almost.
Straggling, Worna raised the man’s right wrist until the graft blade was in front of his face. They were locked, quivering with matched fury. Worna slowly leaned his head forward.
And bit the graft blade in half.
Wessaen squealed. Lucius Worna laughed, a deep booming laugh, and spat the broken blade out of his mouth. He let go of Wessaen’s right hand and yanked on the other wrist, straightening Wessaen’s left arm as he brought his free fist up under it.
The left elbow of the man in the lizard-skin coat snapped the wrong way with a bone-crack that made the onlookers wince.
The cisor fell onto the floor, and began to eat the carpet. Wessaen started to squeal again, but the squeal ended abruptly as Worna’s right hand punched him in the face and sent him flying across the floor.
‘End of story,’ said Lucius Worna.
Oblivious to the blood streaming from his wounds, Worna clanked towards the fallen man. Wessaen lay in a twisted heap, his broken arm limp and dislocated like a snapped twig. He was moaning, blood pattering from his mashed lips.
‘I have a warrant,’ Worna boomed, his voice like tectonic plates scraping together.
Closing his bitten-off graft weapon so that his hand refolded, Wessaen fumbled into his lizard-skin coat and wrapped his fingers around the summoning whistle.
His last resort.
It had cost him a fortune, more than all his body enhancements in fact, and he’d not used it before. But he knew what it did. And if there ever was a moment for it, this was it.
It wasn’t actually a whistle. It was a smooth piece of rock that had been hollowed out by a technology unknown to the Imperium. But blowing through it was the only way a human could activate it.
Wessaen blew.
All the onlookers winced. Glasses shattered on the salon tables. The huge bio-lumin tank-lights suspended in clusters from the salon’s high roof flickered. Every freetrader in the chamber fell down, ears bleeding.
Ten metres from Armand Wessaen, the nature of space-time buckled and popped apart. The surface of the air itself bubbled and began dripping, like the emulsion of an old tintype pict exposed to flame. A seething, iridescent vortex, whisked up from molten, pustular matter, yawned into being, and the hound stepped out of it.
Just a skeleton at first, dry-clicking into view. Then, as it came on, organs materialised inside its ribcage, blood systems wrote themselves into being, muscle grew, sinews, flesh. It solidified, clothing its reeking, yellow bones in meat.
It was hyenid in structure, its forelimbs long, its back sloping off to short hind legs. Its skull was massive, with a pincer jaw and long yellow fangs that could shred anything, even a man in ceramite armour. It stood two metres tall at the hunched shoulders.
Its eyes were white, the hair on its hunchback a bristly black.
The eager onlookers now recoiled. The traders and merchants in the salon began to flee in blind panic, along with the tenders. Not just from the sight of the monster, but also from the smell of it. The gross stink of the warp.
Worna turned to face it, drawing an execution sword from his harness. He knew it would be over fast, just as well as he knew the outcome wouldn’t favour him.
Wessaen began to laugh, despite his injuries. ‘You picked on the wrong man, you frigger! The wrong man!’
The vortex faded. Now fully manifest, the hound padded forward, about to spring, intent on the prey it had been summoned to destroy.
The Vigilants swarmed onto it from all sides, lashing into it with their hand-and-a-half-swords. Blades rained and sliced. The hound coiled and turned, but by then it was already too late. In less than twenty seconds, the Vigilants had hacked it into bloody slabs and shreds.
The Vigilants turned, as one, to face Worna. In unison, they rested their bloodstained swords on the floor, tip-down, their hands folded over the pommels.
‘Oh, Throne, no…’ gurgled the man in the lizard-skin coat.
‘Code,’ Worna said. ‘The Code of the Reach. No weapon is permitted that has a range longer than a human arm. And that came from more than an arm’s reach away.’
Worna picked up the cisor. It wriggled in his hand, cluttering. ‘The mule wants his face back,’ he said.
And that was when the man in the lizard-skin coat really learned to scream.
‘HOLY THRONE,’ REMARKED Ornales. ‘I honestly don’t think we need a piece of that.’
The free trade salon stank of blood, and other things less savoury. Under the watchful gaze of the Vigilants, tenders were hosing the floor down. A few traders had been lured back in with the promise of free drinks. Business was still business at Bonner’s Reach.
‘No, I think we do,’ Siskind told his first officer.
‘His type comes with trouble.’
‘Only for the ones he’s going after,’ said Siskind. ‘Come on.’
‘What do you want?’ asked Lucius Worna, barely looking up as they approached. He was just finishing packing the various tagged and numbered pieces of Armand Wessaen into the individual cryo-caskets his servitors held ready.
‘I want to retain your services,’ Siskind said.
Worna straightened up and looked at the ship captain directly. ‘You sure? Some people don’t like what they get. If this is a midnight wish, then forget it. You’re drunk. Go to your bed.’
‘A midnight wish?’ Sisk
ind echoed.
‘Look at your chron, master,’ Worna rumbled, returning to his labours. ‘The Imperial calendar is about to flick over one more meaningless digit. A new year. If you’re partied up, and fancy to settle some old score, sleep on it. I’ll still be here in the morning.’
‘No,’ said Siskind. ‘I know what I’m doing. I want the services of a bounty tracker. I’m prepared to pay.’
‘How much?’ asked Worna.
Siskind glanced at Ornales. ‘Twenty thou. Plus a ten per cent stake of whatever cut we make.’
Lucius Worna dropped a still-twitching hand into one of the icy caskets and closed the lid. He looked at Siskind. ‘You’ve got my attention,’ he growled. ‘What sort of cut are we looking at?’
‘You know, you’re still kind of bleeding there…’ Ornales said timidly, indicating his cheek.
‘Yeah,’ Worna replied. You gonna sew me back up, pussy-boy?’
‘N-no, I just—’
‘Then I’ll get to it when I get to it,’ Worna said. ‘What sort of cut?’
‘Six, maybe seven million in the first year.’
‘At ten per cent? That’s a real lot. What’s the job?’
‘I need you to hunt for me.’
‘That’s what I do.’
‘I was meant to meet a body here, here at Bonner’s Reach. A good friend. Name of Thekla.’
‘So go look around.’
‘I have,’ Siskind replied. ‘He’s not here. He told me he would be, at Firetide, but he’s not. If he’d gone out on some trade run, he would’ve left a message here for me on the personal spindles. But he hasn’t.’
‘Why’s it so important?’
‘I know he has enemies.’
‘Yeah?’
Siskind shrugged. ‘I want to employ you, Worna. To find my friend, or find the bastard who killed him before he got here. There’s a lot riding on it.’
‘And who might this bastard be?’ Worna asked.
‘Gideon Ravenor. An Imperial inquisitor. Is that a problem?’
‘Not even slightly,’ said Lucius Worna.
NOW
Local winter time, Eustis Majoris, 403.M41
I HAVE TO admit, after ten months aboard the Arethusa, I am filled with an almost unquenchable desire to throttle shipmaster Sholto Unwerth. And I don’t have any hands.
I employed Unwerth through my team principals. It was, in fact, Harlon Nayl who arranged the contract and negotiated the terms of Unwerth’s service. The price had seemed agreeable at the time, but as it turns out, there were hidden costs, infuriation being chief amongst them. Unwerth is diligent enough, and ineffably eager to please me. It is clear he takes his secret compact to serve the ordos of the Imperial Inquisition very seriously. But he is everywhere, everywhere I turn, underfoot, tormenting me with questions, and butchering the language with such a disregard for—
Well, enough.
It has been a trying time. The trap at Bonner’s Reach tested us all, and cost us. I doubt Cynia Preest will ever forgive me for the damage done to her beloved ship and the losses suffered by her crew.
I glide along the third deck companionway of the Arethusa towards the small stateroom Unwerth obliged me with. Zael is there, playing some game of his own devising with the pieces of my regicide set. He’s just a boy: sallow, shaggy-haired, no more than fourteen. He often tells me he’s eighteen, and I know he’s lying. I also know he doesn’t know what the truth is.
Zael looks up as I whisper in. After all this time, he’s still not used to my presence and appearance. I sense his fear. I am… no longer made as other men are. Grievous injuries, received over sixty years ago on Thracian Primaris, have left me confined to an armoured, enclosing support chair. The chair is dark-matt, sleek, suspended and propelled by a humming field projected by the ever-turning anti-grav hoop. I am just a mind, wrapped in a shred of ruined flesh, locked in a mobile life-support unit. I have no face any more.
‘Ravenor,’ Zael says. For all his wariness, he has never been afraid to call me by my name. No rank, no deference. Behind my back, I know he calls me The Chair.
‘Want to play?’ he asks.
I’ve been attempting to teach him the rudiments of regicide. So has Nayl. It is diverting to sit with Zael and push the playing pieces around the board with my mind. But for a bright lad, he’s slow to pick up the knack.
I switch to ‘speech’ via my chair’s mechanical vox-ponder. My words issue flat and monotonous, a quality I despise, but Zael is unsettled by my psi-voice. ‘I have work to do, Zael. Can you find somewhere else to be?’
Zael nods. He gets up. From the flash of his surface thoughts, I understand he’s deciding whether to seek out Nayl and ask him impertinent questions about women, or go and torment Unwerth’s manhound, Fyflank.
Zael’s excited. I pick that up too. We’re going home. To what he thinks of as home, anyway. It’s just a few days away now. We’re going back to the place where all this started, before I went off chasing wild geese. To finish it.
Zael leaves. I shut the hatch with a flick of telekinesis, and slide the bolt. Alone, I turn the chair to face the transcriber unit. Another flick, and it turns on, ready. I start to write, moving the stylus armature with my mind.
To my Lord, Rorken, Grand Master of the Ordos Helicon, salutations. Sir, this missive is a testament—
Too slow and fussy. Too painstaking. I am seized by an urgency to get it all down at last, almost as if time is running out. I extend a mechadendrite cable from the base of my chair and link it to the transcriber’s terminal. Now all I have to do is think the words.
Sir, this missive is a testament, and I am recording it in the event that I will not survive to communicate it to you in person. I have sent this statement in encrypted form via astropath to the ordo office on Gudrun, with explicit instructions that it be delivered to you by a senior ranking interrogator. It has opened and decrypted only because it has registered your bio-template. You are the only one I can trust any more. The heresy I am endeavouring to expose may reach into the upper society of the Angelus subsector itself. To the very top, I fear.
My lord, here are the facts. Corroborating evidence may be found in the encrypted data-curls attached to this report.
In the early part of 401, I took my team to Eustis Majoris, capital world of the Angelus subsector, to investigate the illicit trade in so-called ‘flects’. These corrosively addictive objects are flooding the black market throughout the subsector group, smuggled in from the Mergent Worlds rimwards of Angelus. Flects are dangerous things, abominably dangerous. They are splinters of glass from the billion broken windows of the decaying hive ruins out in the Mergent Worlds, swollen with abhuman energies due to their long exposure to the warp. They have soaked up the light of Chaos, marinating for centuries in its glare.
In these little splinters of corrupted glass, a user might glimpse a reflection of something wondrous and be uplifted for a brief time to some transcendent high. When they come down, they immediately crave another glimpse of the wonder, another ‘look’, as the slang goes. But a great number of flects contain nothing except a fleeting vision of ultimate cosmic horror, a true vision of the warp. Such a sight destroys minds. And, of course, no user ever knows what he or she is about to see until they look into their next flect.
Flects are a curse. A disease. A plague. They are more addictive and destructive than any of the prohibited chemical drugs that blight Imperial culture. Not only do they kill, they corrupt. Every single flect that passes into the community carries with it the potential to open a gateway to the Ruinous Powers and destroy the Imperium, piecemeal, from within.
Reading this, it may surprise you, my lord, to hear that flects are no longer my primary target. The trade must be stamped out, and the distribution of flects stopped as soon as possible, and if I and my band can assist in that great work, so much the better. But because of the flect trade, I have uncovered something far more insidious.
The flect trade is just the
by-product of a greater heresy.
A cartel of rogue traders, operating under the terms of an off-book, black-budget arrangement known as Contract Thirteen, is providing the senior ministries of Eustis Majoris with tech salvage procured in secret from the polluted Mergent Worlds. This trade is in the form of codifiers, cogitators and other calculating engines recovered from the warp-drowned Imperial hives in that doomed territory. Someone, someone very high up in the hierarchy of Eustis Majoris, is paying well for such tainted artefacts. At the time of writing, their motive is not clear to me.
The cartel, risking everything to slip past the battlefleet blockade sanctioning the Mergent Worlds and anxious to maximise their profits, has been smuggling in flects as a supplement to their lucrative trade in logic engines.
Ironic, then. I come to Eustis Majoris to choke the flect trade and the traces of it bring me to greater threat. In their greed, the rogue traders have betrayed their true agenda. Contract Thirteen.
I pursued the matter of the flects to the hilt, until it brought me face to face with agents of the Administratum itself, in the form of one Jader Trice, First Provost of the Ministry of Subsector Trade. He seemed to share my concern about flects, and arranged for several of his agents to accompany my team on a trip to the black market source, up the line into what is known as Lucky Space.
But this was a trap, a trap sprung by Trice’s agents and by the rogue traders I was chasing. I commend them for their ingenuity. At Bonner’s Reach, they took control of my ship, the Hinterlight, murdered several members of the crew, and sought to dispose of us into the local star. Taking me down on Eustis would have caused a fuss. If I and my team failed to return from Lucky Space, it might have been years before anyone thought to examine why.
My team and I prevailed. Against the odds. We overcame Trice’s agents, and also the rogue trader, the Oktober Country, which was their instrument for our deaths. I will convey a more complete report concerning these actions later, if I have the chance.