by Dan Abnett
Another amber rune. Another sigh and a tap.
‘See? The city datacores are divided into discrete sub-blocks, which means separate encryption protocols and user codes. I’ve already burned out one decrypter. I’ve had to rescribe the Geiman-rys paradigms from memory.’
‘The stuff you know, Look, we may roll soon, to back up Nayl. You staying here?’
‘Yes, there’s a lot to do.’
She nodded and walked away. Zael was now watching them both, she noticed.
Zael put down his bowl as she walked away. He’d heard most of their exchange and wondered why the foppish man had lied to the woman.
Until she’d walked over, he hadn’t been working on the cogitator at all.
They were high up at the top of west twenty. They could hear the wind moaning, and the actual fabric of the massive tower creak and give. The rotting hallways were deserted. It was creepy, like being on an abandoned ship at sea.
This was the upper realm of the Stairtown towers, a place called the deadlofts, six kilometres above sea level. Originally, these levels had been luxury habs and penthouse apartments, but then Stairtown – like so many other boroughs – had fallen into slump. Without maintenance, the summit levels had succumbed to decay. Wind, acid rain, regular fires generated by lightning strikes, vandalism. The rich and beautiful people had moved out years ago. Now the deadlofts – the top six or seven floors of every Stairtown stack – were lawless places where the homeless, the poor, the fugitive and the insane claimed their own spaces. And even they did not number many.
It was a sparse and inhospitable zone. There were no amenities. No power, no plumbing. Some areas were entirely exposed to the lethal ministry of the rain. Others had lost their tintglas and were traps for murderous radiation and ultra-violet light. Where the window ports were broken, the high-alt gales could get strong enough to rip people right out of the tower or rupture them with extremes of atmospheric pressure.
It had taken the three of them two hours to cross between the Stairtown towers on foot to west twenty, and another whole hour to climb to the loft level. No working lifts. Two double-backs because of blocked accessways, two more due to screwstairs that had collapsed from corrosion.
They saw only a smattering of life. Ragged vagrants huddled in corners; shadows that darted away as they approached: a naked man clad only in faithpaper, his body hideously blotched with acid burns, cooking moss over a candle; a semi-dismantled cleaning servitor, dead except for its left function limb that mindlessly circled a buffing mop in the air.
They had to sidestep acid drips from the roof, and check the flooring where it had been eaten into soft pulp. Draughts whined down abandoned halls. Nayl had drawn his pistol and the other two followed him closely. Kara was especially unnerved by the absence of Ravenor. She had to remind herself that back in the old days, with Eisenhorn, she’d happily functioned without a telepathic nursemaid. But she’d become so used to Ravenor’s presence since then.
They’d questioned a few of the inhabitants. Some refused to answer at all, and most that did claimed not to know any Odysse Bergossian. But one old woman, hunched on a mat in an empty hab, had mumbled a few directions. The windows behind her were cracked and broken, and hard light and cold air streamed in. The back of her head and neck were burned raw. She hadn’t moved for a long time. She was eating beetles when they found her.
Through those cracked windows, Kara saw the poisoned glare of the sky, the cloudbanks, the dropping view through the tower tops towards the vast expanse of the smog-covered city. This was the brightest, lightest place in the whole of Petropolis, pushed up out above the pollution cover. And it was also the most wretched.
They followed the instructions she’d lisped through bad teeth flecked with broken wing cases and leg segments. Two halls on, they heard music.
Kara drew her compact and checked the load. Mathuin put down his kitbag and unfastened it. He pulled the rotator cannon out and settled its bulk over his left shoulder, buckling the support frame around his torso. The weapon was about as long as a man’s arm, a counter-weighted cluster of ammunition hoppers from which a swathe of six aluminium barrels projected. The cannon actually depended from a gyro-balanced armature that extended from the harness frame under his left armpit. Mathuin took off his left glove and revealed the polished chrome augmetic connector that replaced his left hand. He clunked the connector into the receiving socket on the back of the cannon so that it became an extension of his arm, and brought it to life. The autoloading mechanism clacked and shifted the first of the ammo hoppers into place. The swathe of barrels test-rotated as one with a metallic whir.
‘I’d like to be able to talk to him before you paint the walls with his body,’ Nayl said.
‘Just a precaution,’ Mathuin said.
‘In that case, you get to be backstop.’ Nayl made to walk on, then turned back. ‘You kill me or Kara with that bullet hose, Zeph, and we’ll come back to haunt you to the end of your frigging days.’
‘I know what I’m doing, Nayl,’ Mathuin said. He did. Kara knew that. He really did. In this trio, despite her years of experience, she was the amateur. She’d learned her trade since recruitment as an ordo auxiliary. These two had both been doing it since they could walk. Bounty men, hunter-killers, so hard-bitten teeth broke on them.
But when Nayl offered her point, she felt flattered, even now. Stealth was her thing. She moved like silk, and had a nose for surveillance. Those skills had been why Eisenhorn had chosen her for his retinue in the first place.
She led the way, Nayl a dozen metres behind her, Mathuin out of sight down the hall. Sunlight blazed down through the skylights, mobile and distorted by the fast motion of passing clouds. She could smell acid.
The music was louder now. Thumping, tinny. It sounded like bootleg pound, the music of the twists. Mutant club sounds were all the rage with younger types.
At the end of the hallway, a door was shrouded with opaque plastek sheeting stapled to the jamb. Hard daylight shone out around it. That was where the music was coming from. She thumbed off the safety and edged forward. Handwritten in paint by the doorway were the words GET OUT.
Ordinarily, she’d have had Ravenor tell her what was behind the sheeting. Now she had to sidle close and peer through a slit. A large penthouse chamber, part of a suite. Bare floorboards, bare flakboard walls, huge tintglas windows through which the sunlight blazed.
Kara waved Nayl flat against the wall, and took a breath. Then she pushed through a gap in the plastek sheeting, her weapon raised, and panned it left and right.
There was no one there. A stained mattress roll, some empty wine bottles, drifts of discarded, soiled clothing, a battered old four-speaker tile player covered in club stickers from which the music was raging. There were open doorways to the right and the left.
Beside the mattress roll was a polysty tray full of gladstones. The Bazarof woman had said Bergossian had a habit. The smooth stones, mined on a distant outworld and strictly prohibited, were slightly psyk-reactive. Held in the hand or put under the tongue, they produced a warm, blissful sensation. The sense of euphoria and well-being could last days apparently. They were popular in the twist clubs down in the undersink.
These, strangely, were dusty, as if unused and untouched for weeks.
The floor around the bedroll was covered in screwed up hanks of red tissue paper.
Nayl came in after her, his heavy pistol up and ready. She pointed to the player to suggest she might turn it off, and he shook his head. He kept watch on the right hand doorway as she checked the left. A galley kitchen, unlit. It stank. With the power and water cut, it had no function any more except as a dump for trash. Heaps of discard rubbish and crap rotted in there. Craproaches scurried in the gloom.
She re-emerged and moved towards the window to be out of line-of-sight from the other door. With Nayl covering her, she went through.
Another large room, also well lit thanks to the vast expanse of tintglas. This one was
also empty. There was a broken toilet stall to the left, and another doorway in the right-hand wall. Originally, this had been where the apartment finished. The doorway had been opened through the flakboard partition with a sledgehammer, allowing access to the neighbouring apartment. More plastek sheeting covered it.
Kara waved Nayl in. Immediately, he saw what she’d seen. Someone had used a charcoal or graphite stick to write on the bare walls, the ceiling and the floor. The markings seemed insane. Some were patterns and geometric designs, dividing up the sections of the room. These were annotated by odd, scrawling texts, some of which were written directly onto the walls, others on sheets of paper taped to them. There were drawings too: men, cherubs, monsters, all primitive but carefully rendered.
‘Ninth heaven of truth…’ Nayl whispered, tracing a finger along one annotated space.
‘The place of atonement. The zone of understanding. The fifteenth heaven, where men rest from their travails…’ Kara looked at him. ‘What the frig is this?’
He shook his head, and pushed his way – gun raised – through the plastek-covered doorway.
Odysse Bergossian had taken over nineteen apartments in the top of the deadlofts. All of them were stripped and almost scrubbed clean and all linked by holes he’d smashed in the dividing walls. Each one was an annotated diagram of insanity. The markings and writings became more and more complex as they edged their way on. Increasingly, the creator of the markings had used colour – wax crayons – to decorate the walls and ceilings and floors. They found discarded lump ends of crayons underfoot, and more scraps of red tissue.
By the tenth apartment, the designs had become manic, and extraordinary. Fully rendered views of the city in full colour, as good as any limner could have managed. Lifelike faces. Unearthly beings that made Kara’s skin goose to look at. Intricate captions rendered in gold leaf and paint, naming such things as the ‘Hall of Sublime Healing’, the ‘Domain of the Sane’, the ‘Fifty-First Heaven of Lesser Gods’ and ‘Somewhere New’. Some of the murals had blood and body fluids caked into them. Kara and Nayl were both on their nerve ends. The music, far behind them, was a distant pulse. They could hear the creaking of the high-alt wind.
In the nineteenth apartment, they found Odysse Bergossian.
He was naked and hunched up, drawing on a wall. A basket full of broken crayons, paint pots and mucky brushes lay beside him. He had half-covered the room with designs. The contrast between the decorated half and the bare walls was oddly distressing.
He didn’t look up as they came in. They only knew it was Bergossian because he jumped when Nayl said his name.
He looked at them. He was young, no more than twenty-five, and his face and neck had nasty burns on them. He covered his face with paint-smudged hands and rolled over in a heap.
‘Where’s Drase Bazarof?’ Nayl said.
Bergossian moaned and shook his head.
‘Harlon!’ Kara called. Nayl went over to her, keeping his eye on the trembling man.
She pointed at the wall, and Nayl looked. This was the drawing Bergossian had been halfway through when they interrupted him. In full colour, beautifully captured, was the likeness of Bergossian. Standing over him, half-finished but unmistakable, were the figures of Kara Swole and Harlon Nayl.
‘Emperor preserve me!’ Nayl whispered.
Zeph Mathuin decided he had waited long enough. He was about to move when he heard footsteps coming up the hall behind him. Silent, he backed into the shadow of a doorway.
A thickset young man in labourer’s clothes walked past him, carrying a pail of hot riceballs and meat sticks, and three polysty caffeines on a preformed tray. He disappeared in through the plastek drapes.
Mathuin keyed his voxer.
‘Nayl. I think Bazarof is coming your way. Want me to intercept?’
‘Follow but hold back. We’ll get him.’
‘Odysse? Odysse? I’ve got lunch,’ the young man called as he walked through the connected, decorated chambers. ‘Odysse? Where are you?’
‘Busy,’ said Nayl, stepping out of a doorway and aiming his weapon.
The young man gasped and yelped, and dropped the foodpail and the drinks.
Kara appeared behind Nayl, dragging the whimpering Bergossian by the wrist.
‘Drase Bazarof?’ Nayl asked, lowering his gun. The young man clearly saw this as a chance to flee, and turned. Mathuin stood behind him, rotator cannon aimed at his chest.
‘Uh uh uh…’ Mathuin hissed.
‘I’m not Bazarof!’ the young man implored, looking back at Nayl. ‘I’m not! My name is Gerg Lunt.’
‘And that makes you what?’ Nayl asked.
‘A friend! Odysse’s friend! Shit, I knew Bazarof would get us into trouble…’
‘He’s here?’ Nayl asked.
‘Three cups of caffeine,’ Mathuin noted.
Lunt looked twitchy.
‘Up,’ said Kara suddenly. She’d heard the creaking of the roof before any of them.
Mathuin swept his weapon up to aim at the ceiling.
‘No!’ Nayl cried. ‘I want him alive.’ He looked at the skylight. ‘Boost me, Kara,’ he said.
‘You’re kidding, right?’ she answered. ‘You boost me.’
Nayl was about to argue.
‘Wasting time!’ Mathuin growled and placed himself under the skylight with his free hand cupped. ‘Move it and do what you do,’ he said to Kara.
She used Mathiun’s cupped hand as a stirrup for one foot, and his shoulder as a shelf for the other. He was rock steady. Nayl glared at him.
There was no clasp or catch – the light had not been designed to open – but the seals were rotten and Kara pushed it out of the frame with the heel of her hand. Then she hoisted herself up and through from Mathiun’s shoulder.
Nayl looked at Mathuin a moment longer. ‘Guard them,’ he said, pointing at the two men, then hurried from the room.
Outside, it was bitingly cold and painfully bright. The air was thin. Kara edged her way along the roof, testing every step. Years of acid rain had turned the fabric of the roof into a damp, flaking landscape.
She put on her glare-shades and pulled up her hood. The gables and wings of the roof section projected before her. Behind her was a tower of old comm-masts and cable-stays, a vertical nest of rusting metal and faded plastics. She looked around. There was no sign of anyone. Maybe it had just been the wind.
The world was huge. She could see for many kilometres in every direction: an immense raft of curdled black cloud cover out of which the massive towerheads of Stairtown poked like islands. The sky above the cloud layer was a bright, watery smear. She didn’t want to be out here for long, especially if the rain or wind picked up. She could already feel the skin of her face tingling. She fastened the neck of her hood up to her nose.
She walked along further, getting nearer to the edge. It was treacherous underfoot. Kara held onto a stay-cable for support and saw smoke waft out where her glove clasped the dripping steel. Fumes from acid reaction was also puffing out from under her feet.
Over the steady buffeting of the wind, she heard a noise, turned, and almost slipped. Then she realised it was her vox-link.
‘What?’
Nayl’s voice sounded like it was coming up from a deep drain. ‘–are you?’
‘On the frigging roof!’ she answered.
‘No… where on the roof?’
She looked around, trying to translate the stark roofscape into something he would understand from beneath. It wasn’t easy.
‘Just turn on your locator!’ he snapped.
Stupid. Obvious. The precariousness of her state had made her forget basics. She was light-headed. The thin air was making her pant. Kara pulled back the cuff of her jacket and activated the little tracer sewn into the lining.
‘Got me?’
In the deadlofts below, Nayl came out of Bergossian’s rooms into the hall. There was a rune flashing on the fold-out screen of his compact auspex. ‘Yeah,’ he call
ed back. ‘I’m almost under you.’
She moved on. The wind was gusting stronger and it smelled wet and corrosive. There was a flapping, rattling sound, but it turned out to be a series of tatty old mills along the edge of the roof, their vanes spinning as the air moved.
Thirty metres away to the west, a gaggle of sheen birds burst up into the air, wings beating, and curled away over the lip of the eaves. They’d been disturbed. Kara saw a figure scrambling along the lower slope of the next roof section, clinging on to a tension cable.
Arms out for balance, she paced down the pitch of the roof like it was a high wire, and then leapt down onto the flat top of a ducting box. The bare metal of the box’s top dented like a tin drum under her weight and splashed up moisture from the pool gathered there. She saw a smatter of burn-holes appear in the strengthened cloth of her leggings.
He’d heard her land. She saw him look her way, and then continue on with more animation.
Ninker was going to slip, if he wasn’t careful…
‘Bazarof!’ she yelled. It was hard to project her voice over the thump of the wind.
He vanished out of sight behind a flue stack. She dropped down off the ducting box and scurried over the coping of the lower wing. Almost at once, she slipped over and began to slither down the hip of the roof. She caught a projecting truss-cable and arrested her slide.
‘Kara?’
‘West of me! About forty metres!’
In the corridor below, Nayl broke into a run, calculating her guess on the auspex screen. He had to kick open a door that had been locked for decades and pick his way through a dark, stinking apartment withered by the encroachment of the rain. Through another door, ajar and decayed to the consistency of wet paper, and he was out into a service corridor. It was littered with rusting junk and as dark as the room before it. A derelict servitor, decomposed down to bone and bare metal, decorated the next junction. It was lying on the bonded floor as if prostrate in prayer. Nayl turned left, groping now; it was so dark. Slimy tendrils of filth dangled from the ceiling and got in his face. He spat and wiped them away. There was another door. It gave beneath his shoulder.
