by Dan Abnett
clouds rippled in fast motion across skies I didn't know, strobing with electrical flashes. Dark trees, and darker, higher walls, ranged around the edges of the dream. I felt the instinct, the hunger from the casket, lurking in some blind spot my eyes refused to find.
Carrion birds, a flock of them, swooped down from the upper reaches of the sky and took all the colour with them, staining the dream-world grey. All except for a spot of red that glittered in the colourless soil ahead of me.
With each step I took towards it, it receded. I began to run. It continued to display dream logic and moved away.
Finally, gasping for breath, I stopped running. The red spot had gone. I felt the hunger again, but now it was inside me, clawing at my belly, filling my throat with craving. The roiling clouds overhead froze suddenly, motionless, even the lightning flares stilled and captured in jagged, phosphorescent lines.
A voice spoke my name. I thought it was Vibben, but when I turned, there was nothing to see except the suggestion of a presence drifting away like smoke.
I woke. From the clock, I had been asleep only a couple of hours. My throat was raw and my mouth dry. I drained two glasses of water from the side cabinet and then fell back on the bed.
My head ached but my mind would not stop spinning. After that, no sleep came at all.
The vox-link chimed about four hours later. It was Betancore. The Essene has just made orbit/ he told me. We can leave whenever you like.'
The Essene lay slantwise above the inverted bowl of Hubris, silhouetted against the stars.
We had left the radiance of the Sun-dome into a blizzard squall. The airframe of the cutter had vibrated wildly as Betancore lifted us out of the clutches of the ferocious, icy winds until we were riding clear over an ocean of frosty vapour.
The blizzard, a sculptural white continent, then dropped away below until we could see its tides and gusts and currents, the wide centrifugal patterns of its titanic force.
'There,' Betancore had said, with a nod to the raked front ports. Even at ninety kilometres, still rising through the thinning aeropause, he had made visual contact.
It had taken me a few more moments to find it. A bar of darkness distorting the pearly edge of the planesphere.
Another minute, and it had become a three-dimensional solid. A minute more, and I began to resolve the running lights glittering on its surface.
Yet another minute and it filled the ports. It resembled some colossal tower that had been ripped away from its earthly foundations and set adrift, tranquil, in the void.
'A beauty,' murmured Betancore, who appreciated such things. His inlaid hands flicked over the flight controls and we yawed to the correct approach vectors. The gun-cutter and the massive vessel exchanged automatic telemetry chatter. The flight deck pict-plates were alive with columns of rushing data.
'A bulk clipper, of the classic Isolde pattern, from the depot yards of Ur-Haven or Tancred. Majestic…' Aemos was muttering and annotating his idle observations into his wrist slate again.
The Essene was three kilometres long by my estimation, and fully seven hundred metres deep at its broadest part. Its nose was a long sleek cone like a cathedral spire made of overlapping gothic curves and barbed with bronze finials and spines. Behind that bladed front, the angular hull thickened into muscular buttresses of rusty-red plating, looped and riveted with ribs of dark steel. Crenellated tower stacks bulged from the dorsal hump. Hundred metre masts stabbed forward from the hull like tusks and other, shorter masts projected from the flanks and underside, winking with guide lights. The rear portion of the juggernaut splayed into four heat-blackened cones, each of which was large enough to swallow a dozen gun-cutters at once.
Betancore turned us in and ran us along the flank heading aft. To us, the great vessel seemed to wallow and roll as we joined its horizontal.
A lighted dot divorced itself from the Essene and ran out ahead of us, flashing ultra-bright patterns of red and green lamps: a pilot drone to lead us in.
Betancore gently chased the drone and swung to port as its lights instructed. We slid neatly between two mast arrays, crossed the ribbed belly, and finally braked to station-keeping under a rectangular belly-hatch edged with black and yellow chevrons. The hatch was one of a line of six down the hull's underside, but this was the only open one. A fiery orange glow washed down over us.
Exchanging a few terse comments with Uclid in the drive room, Betancore nudged the gun-cutter upwards through the yawning hatch. I watched the edges of the hatch-mouth, two metres thick and scratched in places to the bare metal, pass by alarmingly close.
There followed a series of gentle shudders, and mechanical thumps against the cutter's outer hull. Amber light bathed the cockpit. I looked up into the glow outside, but saw little except a suggestion of dark gantries and cargo-lifting derricks.
Another shudder. Betancore threw a row of switches and there was a whine as power-feeds and autosystems wound down. He pushed back from the control deck, and began pulling on his hide gloves.
He smiled at me. 'You needn't look so worried/ he mocked.
In truth, I am most disquieted by things I have no control over. Though I have rudimentary skills, and can manage an atmospheric craft, I am no pilot, certainly not one with Midas's Glavian pedigree. That's why I employ him and that's why he makes it look so easy. But sometimes my face betrays the alarm I feel in situations where I have no ability.
Besides, I was tired. But I knew sleep wouldn't come even if I tried, and there was business to attend to anyway.
Aemos, Bequin and Lowink would stay on the cutter for now. As soon as the hull door was closed and atmosphere recirculated into the Essene's hold, I opened the hatch and stepped out with Fischig and Betancore.
The hold where we were docked was vaulted and immense. I reminded myself it was just one of six accommodated by this vessel. The surfaces of the walls and decking were oily black, and sodium lighting arrays bolted to the ceiling filled the place with orange tinted luminescence. The spaces above us were busy with the skeletal shapes of cranes and monotask lifters, all shut down and lifeless. Packing materials littered the open floor. The gun-cutter was held over the sealed floor hatch in a greased crib of docking pistons and hydraulic clamps.
We crossed the hold, boots ringing on the metal deck-plates. It was cold, the chill of open space still lingering.
Betancore wore his usual Glavian pilot suit and garish jacket. He was cheerful and whistled tunelessly. Fischig was impassive, oozing command in his brown Arbites uniform. He had fixed his golden sun-disk of office to the breast of his jacket.
I wore a dark sober suit of grey wool, black boots and gloves and a long navy-blue leather coat with a high collar. I had taken a stub-pistol from the weapons locker and had it in a holster rig under my left arm. My inquisitorial rosette was buttoned away inside a pocket. Unlike Fischig, I felt no need to make a statement of authority.
A hatch clanked open on servos, and light shone out from an internal companionway. A figure stepped out to meet us.
"Welcome to the Essene, inquisitor,' said Tobius Maxilla.
SEVEN
With the master of the Essene.
A farewell.
Scrutiny.
Maxilla was a veteran trader who had run the Essene down the lanes from Thracian Primaris to the Grand Banks for fifty years. He told me he'd dealt in bulk consumables at the start of his career, then begun to specialise in exotic goods when the big bonded guilds began to dominate the wholesale market.
The Essene's got speed, a sprint trader. Pays me better to carry luxury cargoes and deliver them express, even if I don't run at capacity.'
'You run this route regularly?'
'For the past few decades. It's seasonal. Sameter, Hesperus, Thracian, Hubris, Gudrun, sometimes to Messina too. When Dormant finishes on Hubris, there'll be a lot more work there/
We sat in the luxurious surroundings of his audience suite, sipping vintage amasec from large crystal glasses. Maxilla
was showing off, but that was acceptable. He had a ship and a reputation to be proud of.
'So you know these routes well?' Fischig put in.
Maxilla smiled. He was a sinewy man of indeterminate age, dressed in a full-skirted coat of red velvet with wide button-back cuffs and an extravagant black lace cravat. His smile showed teeth that were inlaid with mother of pearl. Ostentation was common among ship's masters, it was part of showing off. Forget family lineage and noble blood, one had told me once, the lineage and pedigree of starships is where the new Imperial nobility is to be found. Ship's masters were the real Imperial aristocracy.
So Maxilla seemed to think, anyway. His face was powdered with white skin-dye, and he wore a sapphire as a beauty spot on his cheek. His imposing two-horned wig was spun from silver-thread. Heavy signet rings clinked against his balloon glass as he lifted it.
Yes, chastener, I know them well'
'I don't think we need to start interrogating Master Maxilla yet, Fischig/ I said plainly. Betancore snorted and Maxilla chuckled. Fischig glowered into his amasec.
A servitor, its torso and head casing wrought to resemble an antique ship's figurehead, a full-breasted damsel with gilt snakes in her hair, hummed across the expensive Selgioni rug and offered us trays of delicacies. I took one out of politeness. It was a sliver of perfect ketelfish, exquisitely sauteed and wrapped in a nearly transparent leaf of pastry. Betancore helped himself to several.
"You're a Glavian?' Maxilla asked Betancore. The two promptly fell to discussing the merits of the famous Glavian longprow. I lost interest and looked around the suite. Amid the finery were a series of priceless portraits from the Sameter School, marble busts of planetary rulers, a Jokaero light-sculpture, antique weapons and mounted suits of ceremonial mirror armour from Vitria. Aemos would appreciate this, I thought. It was to be a journey of more than a week. I'd make sure he got a chance to see it.
'Do you know Gudrun?' Maxilla was asking me.
I shook my head. 'This will be my first visit. I have only been in this sub-sector a year or so.'
A fine place, though you'll find it busy. There's a montb-long festival under way to celebrate the founding of a new guard regiment. If you have the time, I recommend the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, and the guild museums in Dorsay.'
'I may be a little occupied.'
He shrugged. 'I always make the time to do more than simply work, inquisitor. But I know your calling is rather more strenuous than mine.'
I tried to get the measure of him, but I was failing so far. He had agreed to give us passage, and for a modest fee considering what he might have demanded. I had already paid him with an Imperial bond. Most ship masters don't like to turn down a request from an inquisitor, even if they are charging. Was it just that Maxilla wanted to keep sweet with the Ordos? Or was he simply a generous man?
Or did he have something to hide?
I wondered. Truthfully, I didn't care. The other possibility was he might think this entitled him to some future favour.
If he did, he would be wrong.
The Essene left Hubris later that day, executed the translation to the Empyrean effortlessly, and made best speed for Gudrun. Maxilla provided quarters for us all in his state apartments, but we spent most of our time on the cutter, working. Betancore and the servitors ran an overhaul of the
ship. Lowink slept. Fischig, Aemos and I worked through the paperwork on the evidence, and threw conjectures back and forth. I still held back what little I knew of the Pontius from Fischig, but it wouldn't be long before he started to make the connection himself.
Bequin kept herself to herself. She'd borrowed a set of fatigues from a work locker and I saw her about the ship, reading books she'd taken from my personal library. Poetry, mostly, and some historical and philosophical works. 1 didn't mind. It kept her out of my way.
On the third day of the voyage, I met Maxilla again, and we walked the upper promenade deck together. He seemed to enjoy telling me the histories and provenances of the ormolu-framed paintings displayed there. We saw the occasional servitor at work, but so far there had not been the slightest glimpse of any other living crewperson.
'Your friend, Fischig… he is an unsubtle man/ he remarked at length.
'He's no friend. And yes, he is unsubtle. Has he been asking you questions again?'
'I saw him briefly on the foredecks yesterday. He asked me if I knew a man called Eyclone. Even showed me a picture.'
And what did you say?'
He flashed his pearly teeth at me. 'Now who's interrogating?'
'Forgive my imprudence.'
He waved a lace-cuffed hand. 'Oh, forget it! Ask anyway! Get your questions out into the open so we can clear the air!'
Very well. What did you tell him?'
'That I did not.'
I nodded. 'Thank you for your candour.'
'But I was lying.'
I turned and looked at Maxilla sharply. He was still smiling. I had the sudden horrible notion that we had all walked into a trap and dearly wished I was carrying a weapon.
'Don't worry. I lied to him because he's an arrogant runt. But I'll give you the truth of it. I would never want to put myself in the path of an Imperial Inquisition.'
'A wise philosophy'
Maxilla flopped down on a satin couch and smoothed the front of his coat. 'I was last on Thracian Primaris two months ago. There was talk of some cargo and I held some meetings. The usual. And that's when this Eyclone enters the frame. Didn't call himself that, of course. Bless me, I forget the name he used. But it was him. Had others with him, a sour, tight lot. One called Crotes, a trade envoy. He tried to have me believe your man was authorised by the Guild Sinesias, but that was rubbish, even though Crotes had the paperwork.'
'What did he want?'
'He was hiring to make a ran, empty, to Gudrun, collect a cargo there, and bring it to Hubris.'
The nature of the cargo?'
We never got that far. I turned him down. It was preposterous. He was offering a decent fee, but I knew I'd make ten times that with my regular work.'
'You didn't get a contact name on Gudrun either?'
'My dear inquisitor, I'm just a shipman, not a detective.'
'Do you know who finally took his work?'
'I know who didn't.' He sat forward. 'I happen to keep up dialogues with other masters. Seems several of us turned it down, and most for the same reason/
'Which was?'
'It felt like trouble/
By the fifth day, my sleep patterns had begun to return to normal. Too normal, in fact, as Eyclone began to stalk my dreams again. In sleep, he came to me, taunting and threatening. I don't remember much detail, except the afterimage of his grinning face each time I woke.
In hindsight, though Eyclone was certainly in my dreams, I don't think it was his smiling face I was remembering.
The Essene translated back into real-space and entered the Gudrun system on the morning of the eighth day, ahead of schedule. Maxilla had boasted his ship was fast under optimum conditions and the boast hadn't been empty.
I had made arrangements with him to leave the Empyrean in the outreach of the system, considerably short of the busy local trade lanes that most arrivals to Gudrun followed. He agreed without question. It would only be a short delay.
'Who was she?' Bequin asked me as we stood at an observation bay watching the pale shape of Vibben's shrouded body slowly turn end over end as it drifted away from the Essene.
A friend. A comrade/1 replied.
'Is this how she wanted to go?' she asked.
'I don't think she wanted to go at all/ I said. Nearby, Aemos and Betan-core gazed gravely out of the thick port. Aemos's expression was unreadable. Betancore's dark face was drawn and anguished.
Lowink hadn't joined us, and neither had Fischig. But as I turned, I saw Maxilla standing respectfully at the rear of the observation bay, wearing a long mourning coat of black silk and a short periwig with black ribbons. He moved forward as he
saw me look.
'I hope I'm not intruding. My respects to your lost comrade/
I nodded my thanks. He hadn't needed to make this effort, but it seemed appropriate for the ship's master to be present during a void burial.
'I'm not sure how these things are formally conducted, Maxilla/ I said, 'though I think this is what she would have asked for. I have spoken the Imperial Creed, and the Oration of the Dead/
Then you have done her fine service. If it is appropriate…?'
He waved forward one of his gold-plated figurehead servitors, which carried a salver of glasses and a decanter. 'It is tradition to drink a toast to the departed/ We all took a glass. 'Lores Vibben/ I said.
A minute or so's silence followed, then we slowly dispersed. I told Maxilla we could begin our approach run to Gudrun now, and he estimated it would take two hours to reach the inner system.
Returning to the cutter, I found myself walking with Bequin. She still wore the old work-suit she had liberated, though somehow it seemed to enhance her beauty rather than stifle it.
'We're almost there/ she said.
'Indeed/
'What will my duties be?'
I had yet to explain to her what she was or why I had recruited her. There had been ample time en route, but I had been putting it off, I suppose. I'd found time to show Aemos the finery of Maxilla's state rooms, and play regicide with Betancore. I wished I could throw off my distaste at just simply being around her.
I walked with her to the promenade deck and began to explain.
I don't know how I expected her to take it. When she took it badly and became upset, my response was barely controlled irritation. I knew it was her nature that was making me react this way and fought to find the sympathy she deserved.
She sat weeping on a shot-silk chair beneath one of the massive paintings; a hunting scene of nobles riding thoroughbred ursadons in the chase. Every now and then, she would blurt out a curse or whine a regret.
It was clear she wasn't upset that I wanted to employ her. It was simply the fundamental knowledge that she was… abnormal. A friendless, loveless life of woes and hard knocks suddenly had an explanation and that explanation was her own nature. I believe that she had always, stoically, blamed the galaxy as a whole for her troubles. Now I'd as good as kicked that emotional crutch away.
