by Dan Abnett
'Going to find you, actually. Take us to Thaw-view.'
FOUR
The Sun-dome toured at speed.
Thaw-view 12011.
Questioning Saemon Crotes.
The wealthiest Hubrites kept winter palaces on the west perimeter of the Sun-dome. According to Chastener Fischig, they 'enjoyed both light and dark' as if that was something indulgent. They looked inwards to the lit dome and had shutters that could be opened to view the dark landscape of the winter desert. It was a spiritual thing, Aemos suggested.
Fischig shut down his terrain-following guidance as we sliced through the streets, and his heavy speeder rose up above the traffic and buildings. We hooked hard turns between glass spires and roared west.
I think he was showing off.
In the rear seating, under the roll-bars, Aemos clung on and closed his eyes with a soft groan. I rode up front with the armoured Fischig, seeing a predatory grin on his face under the visor of his Arbites helmet.
The speeder was a standard Imperial model, painted matt-brown and sporting the badges of the solar symbol and the chevrons and tail number of the local Arbites. Armoured, it turned heavily, the anti-grav straining to keep us aloft. There was a heavy bolter pintle-mounted forward of my seat. I glanced around and saw a locked rack of combat shotguns behind the rear seats.
Give me one of those!' I yelled above the slipstream and the choppy thrum of the turbo-fans.
"What?'
'I need a weapon!'
Fischig nodded and keyed a security code into a pad built into his bulky control stick. The cage on the gun-rack popped. 'Take one!' Aemos handed one over to me, and I began loading shells.
Thaw-view rose before us, a terrace of luxurious crystal-glass and ferrocrete dwellings built into the curve of the dome itself. We whipped low over stepped gardens, making ferns and palms shudder in our downwash.
Then Fischig keyed the fans to idle and we settled on a wide veranda deck, eight storeys up.
He leapt out, racking his shotgun.
I followed him.
'Stay here/ I told Aemos. He needed no further encouragement.
'Which one?' Fischig asked.
'12011.'
We edged along the wide, curving deck, clambering over dividing rails and trellises of climbing flowers.
12011 was glass-fronted, with wide sliding doors of mirrored window-plate.
Fischig swept up a warning hand, and took a coin from his pocket. He flipped it onto the terrace and it was atomised by nine separate las-beams.
He keyed his vox. 'Chastener Fischig to Arbites control, copy?'
'Copy, chastener.'
'Access dome central and shut down auto-defences on Thaw-view 12011. Immediate.'
A pause.
'Shut down authorised.'
He made to step forward. I halted him and tossed a coin of my own.
It bounced twice on the basalt terrace and rolled to a halt.
'I like to be sure/ I said.
We came up either side of the main picture window. Fischig tried the slider but it was locked.
He stepped back, apparently preparing to shoot the window in.
'It's arma-plex/ I told him, rapping my knuckles off the material. 'Don't be stupid/
I pulled the plastic bag containing Eyclone's effects from my jacket and searched for the compact las-knife. Before I found it, I found the plastic key.
Slim chances but what the crud, as Inquisitor Hapshant used to say.
I slid the key into the frame lock and the window slid aside on motorised rails.
We both waited. Perfumed air and light orchestral music wafted out past us.
Adeptus Arbites! Make yourselves known!' Fischig bellowed, his voice amplified by his helmet speaker.
They did.
Rapid gunfire, heavy calibre, blew away the terrace rail, decapitated potted shrubs and dwarf trees, cropped flower beds, and chopped down the deck's aerial mast.
'Have it your way!' bellowed Fischig and rolled in, pumping his shotgun. The blasts were deafening.
I clambered up a drain-spout onto the second level balcony, my shotgun dangling around my shoulders on its strap. Furious exchanges of fire rumbled below me.
I went in through a gauze-draped opening into the main bedrooms.
The room was over-warm and dark, dressed in red velvet with soothing, ambient music welling from hidden vox-speakers. The bed was in disarray. In one corner, on a gilt credenza, sat a portable vox-set. I padded forward and studied the responder log. Fischig's chaos down below rumbled through the floor like a distant storm.
The girl came out of a side room, a bathroom I imagine, and shrieked when she saw me. She was naked, and dived under the bedclothes for cover.
The muzzle of my shotgun tracked her.
'Who's here?'
She whimpered and shook her head.
'Inquisition/ I hissed. 'Who's here?'
She began to sob and shook her head again.
'Stay down. Get under the bed if you can/
In the adjoining room, I heard whistling. A voice called out a name.
'Don't answer/ I told the weeping girl.
I moved slowly round to the side room door. Light shone out. There was a hint of steam and a smell of bath-oils. The whistling had stopped.
He was wary, I'll give him that. He didn't bluster out, gun blasting.
I tipped open the door with the snout of my weapon and five high velocity rounds shredded holes in the wood panel.
I fell to my belly on the floor and fired three shots in through the door
gap-
'Inquisition! Throw down your weapon!'
Two more shots punched through the door.
I crawled backwards from the doorway and stood up, the gun resting in my hands.
'Come out/1 said, using my will.
A large, tattooed, naked male blundered out of the bathroom, half his face shaved and half covered with sudsy foam. A Tronsvasse Hi-Power autopistol was still in one hand.
'Put it down/1 commanded.
He hesitated, as if my will had no force. A conditioned mind, I supposed. Take no chances.
The autopistol was just pulling up to find me when I blew off his half-shaved face with the shotgun and sent his body splintering back through
the half-open door.
The girl was still crouched, naked, at the end of the bed, shivering. I was surprised she hadn't bolted out of cover at my command too.
I spun to face her.
'What's your name?'
'Lise B/
'Full name!' I snapped. I wasn't concentrating on her especially, but there was something about her. An air. A tone.
Alizebeth Bequin! Pleasure girl! I worked the Sun-dome these past four Dormants!'
'You're here why?'
'They paid up front! Wanted a party! Oh lords…'
Her voice trailed away and she collapsed on the bed.
'Get dressed. Stay here. I will want to talk to you.'
I moved to the door of the chamber and looked out into the unlit hall. Below, down the stairwell, gunflashes and shouts echoed up.
Seeing my shape in the doorway, a man ran towards me.
'Wylk! Wylk! They've found us! They've-'
A moment before he realised I was not Wylk, I decked him with the butt of my weapon. He fell hard.
Two solid shots raked the doorframe next to me.
I ducked back in, sliding back the grip of the shotgun.
Shots punched through the wall above the bed-head. Bequin screamed and rolled off the bed.
I blasted back, punching two more large holes in the door.
Two men slammed into the room, wild-eyed and desperate. Both were dressed in light interior clothes. One had a laspistol, the other an autorifle.
I dropped the lasgunner with one direct shot that hurled his body against the wall. The man with the autorifle opened fire, his shots chewing through one of the bed-posts.
I dived for cover as the autom
atic fire ripped up tufts of carpet, shattered mirrors and demolished furnishings.
Rolling, I frantically sought cover.
My would-be killer dropped face-down onto the bed. The girl pulled a long retractable knife out of the back of his neck.
'I saved your life/ she told me. 'That'll make it better for me, right?'
I told the girl to stay put in the bedroom, and from her nod I was pretty sure she would.
I stepped out into the gloomy hall. The level below had fallen silent.
'Fischig?' I voxed.
'Come down/ his reply crackled back.
A spiral stairway led down into a large, split-level lounge area. The air was thick with smoke, which coiled out of the terrace window-doors we had opened. The hard daylight of the Sun-dome streamed in, making ladder-bars of light in the drifting haze. The opposite wall of the room
was a wide segmented shutter. If opened, it would reveal a view over the freezing wastes beyond the dome.
A storm of gunfire had ruined the expensive furniture and decorative fittings. Five corpses lay twisted at various points on the floor. Fischig, his visor raised, was hauling a sixth man up into a high-backed chair. The man, wounded in the right shoulder, was wailing and crying. Fischig cuffed him into place.
'Upstairs?' Fischig asked me without looking round.
'Clear/1 reported.
I walked round the room, eyeing the dead and examining items left scattered on tabletops and bureaux.
'I know some of these men/ the chastener added, unsolicited. 'Those two by the window. Locals, low-grade labourers. Long list of petty convictions on both/
'Hired muscle/
'Seems to be your man's way. The others are off-worlders/
'You've found papers?'
'No, it's just a hunch. None of them have got any ID or markers, and I haven't found a cache anywhere/
What about this one?' I walked over to join him by the prisoner he had cuffed to the chair. The man coughed and whined, rolling his eyes. Unless he possessed unnaturally boosted strength thanks to drugs or hidden aug-metics, this man wasn't muscle. He was older, spare of frame, with grizzled salt and pepper growth on his chin.
'You didn't kill this one deliberately, did you?' I asked Fischig. He smiled slightly, as if pleased that I had noticed.
'I– I have rights!' The man spat suddenly.
'You are in the custody of the Imperial Inquisition/ I told him frankly. 'You have no rights whatsoever/
He fell silent.
'Off-worlder/ Fischig said. I raised an eyebrow. Accent/ Fischig explained.
I'd never have detected it myself. This was one of the reasons I used local help whenever I got the chance, even a potential troublemaker like the chastener. My work takes me from world to world, culture to culture. Slight differences in dialect or incongruities of slang regularly pass me by. But Fischig had heard it at once. And it made sense. If this was a leader rather than muscle, one of Eyclone's chosen lieutenants, then the odds were he was from off-world.
'Your name?' I asked.
'I will not answer/
'Then I will not have that wound treated for a while/
He shook his head. The wound was bad and he was obviously in considerable pain, but he resisted. I was even more certain he was a ringleader. He was no longer shaking or whining. He had switched in some mental conditioning, no doubt taught by Eyclone.
'Mind tricks won't help you/ I said. 'I'm much better at them than you are.'
'Go screw yourself.'
I glanced at Fischig out of courtesy. 'Brace yourself.' He stepped back.
Tell me your name/1 said, using my will.
The man in the chair spasmed. 'Saemon Crotes!' he gasped.
'Godwyn Fischig/ spat the chastener involuntarily. He blushed and moved away busying himself with a search.
Very well, Saemon Crotes, where are you from?' I didn't employ any will now. In my experience, it took only one blow to loosen mental defences.
'Thracian Primaris/
'What was your job there?'
'I was trade envoy for the Bonded Merchant Guild of Sinesias/
I knew the name. Guild Sinesias was one of the largest mercantile companies in the sector. It had holdings on a hundred-plus planets and links to the Imperial nobility. It also, as Betancore had informed me just that morning, had a trade launch berthed at the Sun-dome landing stage.
'And what work brought you to Hubris?'
'That same work… as a trade-envoy/
'In Dormant?'
'There is always trade to be had. Long-term contracts with the authorities on this world that require the personal touch.'
'And if I contact your guild, will it confirm this?'
'Of course/
I walked around behind him. 'So what brought you here? To these private apartments?'
'I was a guest/
'Of who?'
'Namber Wylk, a local trader. He invited me for a mid-Dormant feast/
'This dwelling is registered to Namber Wylk/ Fischig put in. 'A trader, as he says, no priors. I don't know him/
What about Eyclone?' I asked Crotes, leaning down to stare into his eyes. There was a ripple of fear in them.
mo?'
'Your real employer. Murdin Eyclone. Don't make me ask you again/
'I don't know any Eyclone!' There was a ring of truth to his voice. He may well not have known Eyclone by that name.
I dragged up a chair and sat down facing him. 'There is an awful lot of your, story that doesn't add up. You're found here consorting with recidivists who we can connect to a planetary conspiracy. There are charges of murder to be considered – a lot of them. We can continue this in far more intimate and comprehensive circumstances, or you can make me like you more by filling in some details now/
'I… don't know what to tell you
Whatever you know. About the Pontius, perhaps?'
A dark, stricken look crossed his face. His jaw worked for a moment, trying to form words. He quivered. Then there was a liquid pop and his head fell forward.
Throne of Light!' Fischig cried.
'Damn it/ I growled, and bent down to lift Crotes's limp skull. He was dead. Eyclone had left failsafes in die conditioning that would trigger at certain subjects. The Pontius evidently was one of those.
'A stroke. Artificially induced/
'So we know nothing?'
We know a great deal? Weren't you listening? For a start we know the Pontius is the most precious secret they protect/
'So tell me about it?'
I was about to, at least evasively, when the shutter barring the far wall to the climate extremes of the world outside the dome blew out. Hidden charges fired simultaneously. The metal sheet splayed outwards into the freezing dark. The blast-force threw both Fischig and myself to the ground.
A millisecond later, the shattered crystal in the portal blew back in at us, carried by the hurricane power of the Dormant winds outside – a blizzard of billions of razor-sharp slivers.
FIVE
Covered traces.
The Glaws of Gudrun.
Unwelcome companions.
Deafened by the blast, I had wit enough left to grab Fischig and roll with him out through the terrace doors as the emergency shutter clanked down from its slit in the hardwood ceiling. We lay panting and half-blind on the terrace, the hard light and warmth of the Sun-dome thawing our cold-shocked bodies.
Alarms and warning bells sounded all along the Thaw-view residences. Arbites units were already on their way.
We got up. Our clothes and simple good fortune had protected us from the worst of the glass-storm, though I had a gash straight down my left cheek that would need closing, and Fischig had a long splinter of glass embedded in his thigh between armour joints. Apart from that, we had just superficial scratches.
'Bad timing?' he asked, though he knew it wasn't.
'The charges were set off by the same spasm that killed Crotes.'
He glanced away and reb
uckled one of his gauntlets, giving himself time to think. His face was a dingy grey colour, mainly through shock. But I think he was now beginning to understand the resources and capabilities of the people we worked against. Their abominable crime at Processional Two-Twelve had demonstrated the scale of their malice, but he hadn't seen that first hand. Now he was witnessing the fanatical servants of a dark cause, men who would fight without hesitation to the death. And he had
seen how brutally they would cover their traces, using mental-weapons and brain-wired booby traps that spoke of vast resources and frightening sophistication.
Arbites squads moved into the dwelling and secured it while local med-icae servitors patched our wounds. The clearance squads brought out the shivering girl, Bequin. She was wrapped in blankets and her face was pinched blue with cold. Under my seal and instruction, they placed her in custody. She was too cold to voice a complaint.
Fischig and I re-entered wearing heat-gowns. It would be another two or three hours before engineer teams could replace the outer shutter. From the harsh light of the terrace, we passed through three hastily hung insulation curtains into the dim, blue twilight of the apartment. The far wall was gone and we looked directly into the clear, glassy night of Hubris, a glossy grey landscape of stark shadows and backscattered light stretching away from the edge of the Sun-dome. Once more I was exposed to the piercing cold of Dormant and my blood ached.
The main room where we had questioned Crotes was a gutted cavity, blackened by soot and jewelled with glass. Hard lacquers of frost caked furniture surfaces and twisted the faces of the dead. Blood spilt by the shredding storm of glass was crusted like rubies in the dark.
We played the smoky white beams of our lamps around. I doubted we would find much now. There was a good chance any valuable documents had been set to burn or delete on the same trigger signal that had blown the shutter and killed Crotes. And it also seemed likely these people carried all truly important information internally, as memory engrams, or meme-codes, the sort of techniques usually reserved for the higher echelons of diplomatic corps, the Administratum and elite trade delegations.
That turned my mind back to Crotes's employer, the Guild Sinesias.
'It's a common enough name in this sub-sector/ Aemos told me back in the comfortable half-light of the gun-cutter in its landing platform berth. He had been researching the name 'Pontius'. 'I've turned up over half a million citizens with that forename, another two hundred thousand with it as a middle name, plus another forty or fifty thousand spelling variants.'
