“No,” replied Hark. “I’ve met him a couple of times at Section. He seems a decent sort. I’m glad we’ve got him on our side.”
Hark fell silent and stared at the clock on the wall.
“What?” asked Ludd.
“Nothing, Ludd.”
“You were going to say something.”
“I was just thinking that I hope Edur’s on the level. Whatever’s going on here, it’s messy and complicated, and everybody seems to want a piece of it. I hope Edur’s the friend Gaunt needs. I hope Edur doesn’t have an agenda of his own.”
“You think he might?” asked Ludd. “He seemed a decent sort, like you said.”
Hark sighed. “You develop a nose for these things, Ludd. Every commissar does, sooner or later. You get so you can detect what’s behind the mask. Edur’s keeping something back, though it may just be the nature of this high-value prisoner.”
“I’ll develop this knack too, will I?” asked Ludd.
“Of course. And it will aid your work immeasurably. It will tell you, for instance, that Trooper Criid is not here simply to deliver his company day sheet.”
Ludd turned. Dalin Criid was standing in the office doorway, a fresh day sheet in his hands. He looked awkward.
“Sorry to interrupt, sir,” he began. “I was told to bring this to you in Major Kolea’s absence.”
“On the desk please,” said Hark. “Then you can tell us what’s really on your mind.”
Dalin wavered slightly.
“Come on, boy,” said Hark. “It doesn’t take two of you to deliver a day sheet, and if Merrt thinks I can’t see him lurking out there in the corridor, his prosthetic face is not his biggest problem after all.”
Merrt loomed in the doorway. “I didn’t mean to cause any gn… gn… gn… trouble, sir,” he said, chewing the words out through his ugly augmetic jaw. “I was just giving Dalin some moral support. He thinks he’s found something.”
“Why do you need moral support, Criid?” asked Hark.
“Permission to speak openly, commissar?”
“Granted.”
“I knew I’d have to bring it to you, sir, and you scare the hell out of me.”
“Good answer,” said Ludd.
“I ought to scare the hell out of you too, Ludd,” growled Hark. “All right, Criid, what have you got? Waiting around here for news from the city is driving me batty, so distract me with something interesting.”
“I’m E Company adjutant, and with Meryn, I mean Captain Meryn, off-base, that means I have to run all the dailies and keep on top of—”
“Funnily enough, I’m surprisingly conversant with day to day military business,” said Hark.
“Yes, commissar. Of course you are, commissar.”
“Let’s have it, then.”
Dalin paused.
“I was running the daily tests on the company vox-sets, and I think I got a signal, sir,” he said.
Hark gestured towards the hall doorway behind Dalin. “There are three nice men from the Inquisition in the vox office across the hall, Criid,” he said. “I doubt you’ve picked up anything they haven’t. They’re monitoring all traffic.”
“Of course,” Dalin agreed. “Except this is a twin, sir.”
Ludd looked at Hark.
Hark sat forward and gestured to Merrt.
“Would you mind closing the door please, Trooper Merrt?” he asked.
Merrt closed the door, and leaned against it for good measure.
“I don’t get it,” said Ludd.
“Are you sure it’s a twin?” Hark asked Dalin.
“Sure as I can be, sir,” Dalin replied. “The sequence is buried, but it’s clear enough. It’s E Company signature, so that suggests to me it’s Captain Meryn.”
“Because Meryn would use his company code to contact his own company’s casters,” Hark ruminated.
“Exactly.”
“Excuse me,” said Ludd. “I don’t get it.”
“And there’s a locator tag tacked on to the signature?” Hark asked.
Dalin nodded and said, “I checked it back. It’s your call sign code, sir. Captain Meryn… or whoever sent the signal, wants to talk to you.”
“TJhm…” said Ludd, and raised his hand.
Hark glanced at him in aggravation.
“What is it, Ludd?” he asked.
“I don’t get it,” said Ludd.
“It’s a sleight of hand thing,” Hark said. “An old Guard trick. If you need to get a message through, and you can’t guarantee that the receiving caster is secure, you send what’s known in vox-officer vernacular as a twin.”
“How does it work?” asked Ludd.
“The sender broadcasts a signal on one of the standard operational Guard frequencies,” said Dalin. “It sounds… I’m sorry, sir. I’m speaking out of turn.”
“Go on, Criid,” nodded Hark.
“Well,” said Dalin, “the signal sounds like junk noise to anyone listening in. The Inquisition, for example. But it’s not, in several ways. For starters, it’s ’caster specific, coded for specific reception, in this case E Company vox units. And though it sounds like a random noise burst or static drizzle, it’s got the company-signature vox-code buried in it. It took me a moment to recognise that.”
“So it’s a message that sounds like vox-clutter?” asked Ludd.
Dalin nodded.
“And here’s the clever bit,” he said. “The junk signal contains the signature, plus another code called the locator. In this instance, someone has used Commissar Hark’s call sign code. The locator tells you where you should really be looking.”
“For what?” asked Ludd.
“The actual message,” said Merrt from behind them.
“The locator is a code representing another frequency,” said Dalin. “A non-standard channel, something out in the trash bandwidth. That’s where the twin is hidden. It’s called a twin, because it’s a twin of the first message. It’s usually passive-looped or non receptive, meaning that the receiver has to reach out, in vox terms, and capture the message. It’s just floating out there in the aether, waiting, completely undetectable unless you know where to look for it.”
“And that’s what the locator tells you?” asked Ludd.
Dalin nodded.
“How long ago was this, Criid?” Hark asked.
“About twenty minutes, sir. I asked Merrt to check my findings on the quiet before I came to you.”
“I think it’s authentic, sir,” Merrt said, “but maybe you’d better gn… gn… gn… get Beltayn to look at it.”
“Did you look at the message itself?” Hark asked Dalin.
“No, sir.”
“All right then, that’s what we’ll do first. Ludd, go and find Beltayn. And Rerval. Let’s get some vox expertise on this. Criid, grab one of the E Company casters and bring it to the temple house. We’ll work in there, out of the way. Merrt can get a weapon and watch the doors. This is strictly between us until I say otherwise, gentlemen. Right, let’s move.”
They went out into the hallway. Ludd and Merrt sped off in one direction, and Hark and Dalin strode the other way. There was the usual mid-morning activity, and a braised bean-and-cabbage smell wafting in from the canteen.
Hark and Dalin passed Curth, coming the other way with her arms full of medical reports.
“Everything all right, Viktor?” she asked as they passed.
“Everything’s fine, Ana.”
“Are you sure? You look—”
“I look what, doctor?”
Curth turned and considered him.
“You look like something’s up,” she said. “Like something’s happened. Has something happened, Viktor?”
Hark shook his head, and said, “Nothing at all, Ana. Just a few discipline issues I have to take care of. You know how these things are. Perhaps I look flushed because I’m relishing the prospect of shooting someone who deserves to be shot.”
“As long as that’s all it is,” Curt
h replied, and went on her way towards the medicae.
“Something’s afoot,” she said to Dorden as she came into the medicae office.
“Anatomically?” he asked, glancing up from his work.
Curth smiled.
“Hark’s covering,” she said. “I saw him just now in the hall. Something’s going on.”
She dumped the stack of reports on Dorden’s desk and began to work through them.
“What’s this?” asked Dorden.
“Everything we sent to the pharmacon yesterday has come back.”
“You’re joking! It usually takes a week.”
Curth shook her head.
“Nope,” she said. “Everything. Every single test, every single sample, every single blood. Praise be the Emperor for lock-down.”
“What?”
“The pharmacon staff couldn’t leave base last night, so, for want of anything more interesting to do, they worked through the entire case-load. I think we should remind them how fast they can work next time we have a rush on and they tell us they’re pushed.”
“Agreed,” said Dorden. He began to help her sort the file packets, breaking the seals on confidential examination reports.
“Costin’s hep is confirmed,” she read. “I’ll get him in to discuss remedial care.”
“Have you got Twenzet’s bloods there?”
“Yes, and they look all right. Which is more than can be said for Neskon’s augmetics. It looks like he’s rejecting again.”
“If Neskon can’t keep that leg, it could see him out of the Guard on a 4-F.”
“I know,” said Curth. “I’m exploring other options.”
“What were you saying about Hark?”
“He’s hiding something,” Curth said. “Something’s going on.”
“How could you tell, Ana?” Dorden asked.
“You develop a nose for these things,” she replied. “Something is afoot.”
She opened another packet.
“Oh, this one’s yours,” she said, handing it to him.
Dorden read the tag strip.
“Aha, Zweil,” he said. “Thank you.” He pulled the envelope open and slid out the contents.
“Viktor just had this look on his face, you know?” Curth said, sorting through the remainder of the reports for priority. “You know that look he gets? Dorden?”
She turned and looked across the desk at the Ghosts’ elderly doctor.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Oh, Throne,” Dorden whispered, turning the pages of the pharmacon report and reading quickly.
“Dorden? What’s the matter?”
“Oh, feth,” said Dorden. He closed his eyes, shut the report, and handed it to her. Curth took it from him and started to read.
“Shit,” she murmured.
“The old dog must’ve known,” Dorden said, taking off his spectacles and massaging the bridge of his nose. “That’s why he was dodging the medicals.”
“Oh, this is just awful,” said Curth. She sniffed hard and rubbed her eyes. “It’s unfair, that’s what it is.” Dorden nodded. “So who gets to tell him?” Curth asked.
TWENTY
Old Ghosts
Gaunt found Criid watching the refurb’s road access entrance.
“You need to rest,” he told her.
She shook her head.
“You’re no good to me tired,” he said.
“I’ve been resting for months,” she told him quietly. “Standing still. This is what I need.”
“The prospect of a bloody death at the hands of the Archenemy?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
She snorted.
“A purpose,” she said.
Gaunt looked out onto the snow-heavy street. His wrist chron appeared to have stopped at some point during the night, and he could not shake or wind life back into it. His best guess was that it was approaching mid-morning. They’d been holed up in the refurb for about six hours.
It didn’t look like mid-morning. The Old Side street was silent and empty. Snow was still fleecing down out of the cloud cover, and icing every surface. It had drifted deeply across the pavements and around parked vehicles. There was no sign of life: no traffic, no civilians, no pedestrians, no municipal street workmen or ploughs, no gritting trucks. The sky was as grey as slate, and visibility was severely restricted. The Old Side skyline was a faint black phantom in the flurrying snow. The more he looked at the snow against the sky, the more it looked like static flooding a jammed pict-feed.
The city’s haunted emptiness could be explained by the bad weather, and it could also be put down to a security lock-down following the attack. Either of those explanations suited Gaunt fine.
The third one, at the back of his mind, the idea that it was entirely unnatural, did not. He set it aside, even though there was a yellowish quality to the snow-light, and an odd sensation of brooding in the air, and his wrist chron had stopped dead and refused to work.
“A purpose is good,” he said, belatedly.
“A plan would be better,” said Criid.
He nodded.
“Doctor Kolding says the etogaur’s too sick to be moved. He’s running a serious fever. Kolding didn’t want us to move him from his practice in the first place, although our hand was forced. As this place seems a little more secure, I’m loathe to ignore his professional advice.”
Criid shrugged and pouted.
“What?” he asked.
“This man is really that important? Do we really care if he dies?”
“You’ve seen what the Archenemy has put into motion to silence him,” Gaunt replied. “There’s your answer.”
“I suppose,” she replied. “It just feels wrong. I mean, we’ve spent most of our careers trying to kill men like him.”
Gaunt sat down on a pile of fibreboard.
“If we can’t move him, we need to bring help here,” he said. “One of us… you, me, Maggs… could go out and try to raise some help. But just one of us, in case trouble comes calling.”
“I’ll go,” said Criid. “I’ve been running a lot recently. I can cover some ground. Question is, who do I go to? Who do you trust?”
“I trust the regiment. But we don’t know how deep the infiltration runs, so I don’t trust any of the standard lines of communication. We need an unimpeachable point of contact. If I could speak directly to Hark or Gol.”
“We could find a vox.”
Gaunt shrugged.
“We also need food if we’re going to stay here any length of time,” she said. “Let me scout the area, and see what I can scrounge up. I’ll see if there’s anything moving around out there, while I’m at it.”
Gaunt nodded.
“Let’s start with that. But be careful.”
Criid slipped out through one of the refurb’s side windows, and ran down to the eerily empty main street. Snowflakes caught in her hair.
She was already spiking again, but it felt good this time, it felt right.
She turned left, and ran along the centre of the road, ignoring the pavements where the snow had drifted into deep banks. She followed the half-buried glitter of the tram rails, and splashed across stretches of melt-water where the snow cover had been heated by pipe-work or power sources under the street’s surface.
She went two junctions east, and then turned south around the church of Saint Sark, where the green iron railings looked as if they’d been dipped in icing sugar. There was a baker’s shop she knew on Londolph Square where she’d be able to get some bread and perhaps some cold meat or cheese. Gaunt had given her all the money he had on him.
That was presuming the baker’s shop was open. If it wasn’t, she’d impose Martial Provisioning Rules and help herself.
Something made her stop running. Afterwards, Tona couldn’t account for it. Something had just clicked in her head. It was intuitive. It was as if Caff had been at her side, and had just reached out and touched her arm.
She stopped running, and fou
nd cover behind the snow-caked tombs that filled Saint Sark’s little graveyard. She kept low. Her pulse was beating like a drum.
Three figures appeared a hundred metres away. That was a shock in itself, because the streets were so devoid of life.
They were soldiers. They were carrying weapons. They were hunting.
Fighting to control her breathing, Criid kept down, her hand on the grip of her laspistol. The three soldiers spread out, moving down the broad thoroughfare towards the church in a classic covering pattern. She could see the steam of their breath. She could see the glint as the snow-light caught their iron battle-masks.
The Blood Pact was this close. They were just streets away from Gaunt’s bolthole, and they were closing in, as if they had some scent! How could they know? How could they have the city at their mercy like this?
How many of them could she take, she wondered? Two, probably, then the third would drop her. If she was lucky and accurate, all three, but a hand-braced laspistol, rapid fire, at that range? And what if there was another team, beyond the street corner?
She heard a noise, over in the east. It was the rattling drone of turbo-fan engines. She adjusted her position, and looked up in time to see two Valkyrie gunships track past, heading west in a paired formation. They went behind the double spires of Saint Sabbat the Martyr, so that put them at least a kilometre away. They vanished into the blowing snow.
The Blood Pact soldiers heard the Valkyries too. They looked up, then scattered off the street, running fast. Criid wasn’t sure where they went, but they broke quickly.
Hunters, and hunters hunting hunters.
Rival forces were closing on Balopolis, and when they finally met, the result wasn’t going to be pretty at all.
Worse still, it reduced her and Gaunt to one thing: prey.
Bread and cold meat and cheese be damned. Criid knew she had to get back to the refurb fast.
“Maggs?”
A voice had called his name, but Maggs wasn’t sure where from. He’d wandered into part of the refurb that he hadn’t been in before, and discovered, to his bafflement, that it somehow linked to Hinzerhaus. He stepped through an archway, pushing a work curtain aside, and went from the cold grey shadows of the refurb on Balhaut to the warm brown shadows of the house at the end of the world on fago. On the Jago side, the wind blew the eternal dust like drifting snow.