Playing Patience

by Dan Abnett

  Cyrus closed his eyes as the words came out. We already knew his true identity. What else did we have?

  ‘Tell me about Victor Zahn.’

  Cyrus frowned. ‘I don’t know a Victor Zahn…’ I was watching his mind. It wasn’t the truth, but it wasn’t an outright lie either. Cyrus didn’t immediately recognise the name.

  +Tell me about Victor Zahn.+

  Cyrus blinked as the telepathy slapped him. My interrogative was accompanied by an image of Zahn’s corpse in the Hinterlight’s morgue which I dropped into his mind like a slide into a magic lantern.

  ‘Oh Throne!’ he murmured.

  ‘You know him, then?’

  ‘He was a pupil here, years ago.’

  +And Goodman Frell? And Noble Soto?+

  Two more graphic images.

  ‘Oh, Holy! They were pupils too. This was years ago. Five or more.’

  ‘And you groomed them,’ said Nayl. ‘You and your staff. Groomed them like you groom all the poor strays who wind up here. Sold them on.’

  ‘No, this is a respectable place and–’

  ‘So respectable,’ I said, ‘that you wipe all your records so we can’t see them.’

  Cyrus bit his lip.

  ‘Zahn. Frell. Soto. Who did you sell them too?’

  ‘T-to a merchant, as I remember.’

  Lie. Bald and heavy. And well formed, not just vocally, but mentally too. A layer of mendacity cloaked Cyrus’s thoughts, like a cake of dried mud. A mind-trick, one of the many taught by the Cognitae. I had been expecting as much. For all his fear, Cyrus was still a product of that heretical institution, and therefore had to be unlocked with precision. If I’d just burst into his mind telepathically from the outset, I might have damaged or destroyed many of his locked engrams. But now I had a solid lie out of him, and that lie revealed the way his mind-shields worked: their focus, their strengths, their inclination.

  ‘Who did you sell them too?’

  ‘I told you, a merchant. A free trader.’

  +Who?+

  He squealed as the psi-jab rattled his mind. He was utterly unprepared for the sharpness of it.

  ‘That was a demonstration of how things will be if you resist,’ I said. ‘Now I’m going to ask the question once more…’

  XI

  Patience heard the buzzing, not with her ears but with her mind, and slid into cover behind a crumbling rockcrete wall. Moments later, a varnished human skull hovered past through the gloom. Tech implants decorated the back of its cranium, and lights shone in its hollow orbits. A sensor drone, sweeping for her. She’d heard the bastards talking about them before her release. This was the first physical proof that men were actually after her.

  Men. Hunters. Killers.

  The skull hovered on the spot for a moment, circled once, and then sped away into the shadows. Patience stayed low. After another minute, a second drone – this one built around the skull of a dog or cat – skimmed past and made off in another direction.

  She slowed her breathing, and deliberately encouraged her mind to do the sort of tricks that usually happened unbidden. She reached out. She could feel the area around her in a radius of ten metres, forty, sixty. The shape of the geography: the sloping trench to her left, the broken columns ahead, the line of burned-out habs to her right. Behind her, the sewer outfall pouring sludge into a cracked storm drain. She sensed bright sparks of mental energy, but they were just rats scuttling in the ruins.

  Then she sensed one that wasn’t.

  This spark was bigger, human, very controlled and intense. Right ahead, beyond the columns, moving forward.

  Moving slowly so as not to dislodge any loose stones, she turned and began to creep away around the storm-drain chute towards a jumble of plasteel ruins. Her left toe kicked a rock and it rolled away off the drain’s edge and started to fall. Patience caught it neatly with her mind and lifted it up into the silence of her hand.

  The brief delay had been to her advantage. Now she sensed three or four human mind-traces in the ruins ahead of her. Not focused like the other one, feral. In the shadows.

  Don’t trust the black, that’s what DaRolle had said to her. Trouble was, could she trust DaRolle’s advice?

  She crouched low, and stayed there until she could see them. Ragged human shapes, barely visible, moving like animals through the ruins. Gangers, members of the notorious Dolor clan. She could see three, but was sure there were more. The hunter was closing from the right, now almost at the rockcrete wall.

  Patience lifted the rock in her hand and threw it, sending it far further than her arm alone could have managed. It landed in the trench with a loud clatter.

  The hunter turned and made for it immediately. She got a glimpse of a man in an armoured jack and high boots scurrying towards the lip of the trench.

  Then the Dolors saw him too.

  A pivot-gun roared and the hunter was knocked off his feet. The gangers rushed forward at once, baying and yelling, crude blade weapons flashing in their dirty hands.

  The hunter’s jack had stopped the worst of the ball round. He leapt back up, and shot the closest Dolor through the neck with his handgun. The savage figure spasmed and went down thrashing. Then the others cannoned into the hunter and they all went over into the trench.

  Patience started to run. She heard another shot behind her. A scream.

  She scrambled over a rusted length of vent-ducting, and dropped into the cavity of a roofless hab…

  …where a man was waiting for her.

  Patience gasped. There had been no spark off him at all. Either he was shielded, or his mind just did not register to her gift like regular human minds.

  He was tall and thin, clothed head to foot in a matt-black, skin-tight body suit. Only his eyes were visible through a slit in the tight mask, but she saw the way the fabric beneath them stretched to betray the smile that had just crossed his face. He held a long, slender spike-knife in each hand.

  Patience stretched out with her mind, hoping to push him away, but the tendrils of her gift slipped off his black suit, unable to purchase. He lunged at her, the twin blades extended, and she was forced to dive sideways, grazing her palms and knees on the rough ground. She started to roll, but he was on her at once, the tip of one blade slicing through the flesh of her left shoulder.

  Patience cried out, but the pain gave her strength. She kicked out, and as the man jumped back, she flipped onto her feet. She backed as he circled again. She could hear him chuckle, feel the blood running down her arm.

  He lunged again, leading with his right-hand blade. She ducked it, and came out under his arm, but the other blade raked across the back of her right hand as she tried to fend him off. She punched at him. He struck her in the side of the head with the ball of his right hand and knocked her onto the ground.

  There was a rushing sound in her head. She thought of her sisters, and the mother she could no longer picture. In desperation, she lashed out with her gift, but the killer’s black skin-suit again rendered him proof against her power. It was too slippery. She couldn’t get hold of anything except–

  The man stumbled backwards in surprise as the knives flew out of his hands. He might have been armoured against a telekine, head to toe, but his blades were good, old-fashioned solid objects.

  Patience pulled them both in until they were slowly orbiting her body as she rose. It would the matter of a moment to toss them both away out of the hunter’s reach.

  But she had a much better idea.

  With a bark of effort, she drove them point-first towards his eye-slit and nailed his skull against the back wall of the hab.

  XII

  Carl Thonius knocked on the refectory door and waited for a response. From inside, the oddly modulated screams and yelps of Prefect Cyrus shivered the air. As he waited, Carl glanced round at the four magistratum troopers guarding the hallway. They were clearly unnerved by the strange sounds of human pain echoing from the refectory. Carl smiled breezily, but got no response. He kno
cked again.

  The screams ebbed for a moment, and the door flew open. Nayl peered out.

  ‘What?’ he spat.

  ‘I need a word, dear fellow. With the boss.’

  ‘Don’t “dear fellow” me, frig-face. Is this important? He’s busy!’

  ‘Well,’ Carl stammered. He was always edgy when he had to deal with the big ex-bounty hunter. ‘It is, sort of.’

  Nayl sneered. ‘Sort of doesn’t cut it.’ He slammed the door in Carl’s face.

  Carl cursed and knocked again. Nayl threw the door back open.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Carl snapped. ‘Don’t treat me like that–’

  ‘Oh, go away you frig-wipe…’

  Carl looked Nayl in the eyes. ‘Know your place, Nayl. You may not like me, but I am his interrogator. I want to see him now.’

  Nayl looked Thonius up and down. ‘Balls after all,’ he said, grudgingly. ‘Okay.’

  Carl walked into the room. Cyrus was slumped forward in his chains, wheezing, blood leaking from his tearducts. Kara sat on a chair just inside the door, her face grim.

  ‘Carl?’ I said softly. ‘This isn’t really time for an interruption.’

  ‘Sir, I’ve been trying to recover the lost data. The erased data. There’s really not much to get back, I’m afraid. I doubt we’ll ever find out what happened to most of the poor children laundered through this place.’

  ‘Your incompetence could have waited,’ Nayl said.

  ‘Stop ragging on him, Nayl,’ Kara hissed.

  Carl shot Nayl a dark look. I could tell there was something more.

  ‘I told you I might be able to recode the last few days worth of material. Uh, recently processed material still existing in the codification buffer.’

  ‘Yes, Carl.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘There was one item there. A record of a transaction made two nights ago. An older female pupil named Patience. Groomed by these bastards partly because of her spirit, and mostly because she was a latent telekine.’

  I swung round to face him. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘A telekine?’

  He nodded. ‘The recoding is pretty clear. I think she was the psyker you were looking for.’

  ‘Did you say her name was Patience?’ Kara asked quietly.

  ‘Yes, why?’ Carl replied. She shrugged. She was holding something back.

  ‘Kara?’ I nudged.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Just, when you were looking around, for traces of her, you thought I was bored and I said–’

  ‘Patience is a virtue,’ I finished.

  Kara nodded. ‘Yeah, Patience is a virtue. Spooky.’

  ‘Coincidence,’ Nayl muttered.

  ‘Believe me, Harlon,’ I said, ‘in the length and breadth of this great Imperium of Man, there is no such thing as coincidence. Not where psyk is involved.’

  ‘Duly noted,’ he replied, not caring or believing.

  ‘Where did this Patience go, Carl?’ I asked.

  ‘She was sold for ten thousand to a narcobaron cartel who purchased her for use in a game they like to play.’

  ‘A game?’ I asked.

  ‘The record implies this is not the first subject the scholam has sold to the cartel for this purpose. I say game, it’s more sport. They release the purchased child into the slum-tracts and then… then they gamble on how long he or she will survive. Once they send their hunters out.’

  ‘So what?’ asked Nayl. ‘They’ll clean up our little psyk-witch loose end without us having to break a sweat. ‘

  ‘If the records are true,’ I warned. ‘Consider this. There might be a game. There might be a narcobaron with a taste for barbaric gladiatorial sport. On the other hand, all those things might be a substitution code to conceal an act of purchase to a Cognitae procurer.’

  ‘I actually don’t know which would be worse,’ Kara said.

  I turned back to Cyrus. He whined as my mind re-entered his. He was still weak and reeling from our initial session, and by rights I should have left him a while to be sure of getting accurate responses. But there was no time. An unsanctioned menace was loose somewhere, or already leaving the planet under close watch.

  I tried a few key phrases – ‘the psyker’, ‘the telekine’, ‘Patience’ – pushing them at his mind in the way a child rams shaped blocks at a box, hoping to find the right hole to fit. He responded with various recurring words: Loketter, the game, trophy worth…

  I wasn’t sure how hard to push. I wasn’t sure if I was slamming him back against the limits of truth, where there is nowhere left for sanity to go, or simply meeting some form of substitution. Substitution was another standard Cognitae mind ploy. Anticipating psychic interrogation, the brotherhood mnemonically learned to replace the details of true memories with engrammatic euphemisms. Narcobaron, for example, could stand for procurer. Game might stand for purpose. It was a simple but almost unbreakable deceit. Well-schooled, a Cognitae brother could mask memories with metaphors. He could not be caught out in a lie, because he wasn’t lying. The truth had been erased and replaced with other facts. Using such techniques, a member of the brotherhood might withstand the most serious psyk-scrutiny, because the truth was no longer there to uncover.

  ‘He’s giving me nothing,’ I cursed, turning away. ‘Unless it is the truth. Do you have an active lead, Carl?’

  Thonius nodded.

  Kara got to her feet. ‘Let’s go and find her,’ she said. ‘If the story’s real, I mean if there is this frigging barbaric game actually going on, there’s a girl out there who really, really needs help right now.’

  ‘Throne! Let her die!’ Nayl barked. ‘Frigging psyker! What? What?’ Kara and Thonius were already heading for the door.

  ‘One life, Harlon,’ I said as I slid past him. ‘I learned many things from Eisenhorn, but ruthlessness was not one of them. Thousands may die, millions even, unless Molotch is found and brought to justice. But any count of a million starts with one, and to ignore one life when there is still a chance of saving it, well, one might as well give up on the other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine as well.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Nayl.

  ‘Thank you for your vote of confidence,’ I said. ‘Kara, inform the magistratum that these interviews are suspended until we return.’

  XIII

  The armoured manse did indeed belong to the man named Loketter, and nineteen counts of narco-traffic were outstanding on his name. The manse was a brass mushroom that dominated a long slope of rubble scree above the shadowland of the slum-tracts. Down here, with the monolithic bulk of Urbitane behind us, the immensity of the urban squalor and ruin was shocking to see.

  The manse was ferro-armoured, and shielded, but our scanners lit with the buzz of electromag activity inside.

  ‘Signals!’ Kara reported. ‘They’re running drones out into the slum.’

  ‘Can you track them?’ I asked.

  ‘Working…’ She adjusted some dials. ‘I’ve got a lock on nine. Covering a hex-grid twelve by ten. Map comparison… Throne, these archives are so old! Here we go. An area known as Low Tenalt.’

  ‘Details?’

  ‘Serious slum-land,’ Carl said, speed-viewing the data on his codifier. ‘Basically wreckage. High probability of gang activity. Territorially, the gangs are the Dolors and, to the west, the ruin-burbs are run by the so-called Pennyrakers. Magistratum advice is to avoid this area.’

  ‘Really?’

  Carl shrugged. ‘Magistratum advice is a blanket “avoid the slum-tracts”, so what the hey?’

  ‘How far?’ I asked.

  At the helm of the cargo-gig, Nayl consulted the gyro-nav built into the stick. ‘Eight spans to the Low Tenalt area from here, on boost.’

  ‘Do it,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t want to level this manse first?’ Nayl asked.

  ‘They can wait. This girl can’t.’

  Nayl nodded reluctantly, and hit
the boosters. He wasn’t in this like the rest of us were. Running low, like a pond-fly skating the surface, we zipped through the ruined landscape, skipping rubble heaps, ducking under shattered transit bridges, running fast and low along the brick-waste gouges that had once been hab-streets.

  Everything was a grey gloom, caught in the immense shadow of the city. Such ruin, such endless ruin…

  ‘Coming up, point three,’ reported Nayl, hauling on the stick. The engines whined shrill. ‘Two… one… setting down.’

  The gig thumped and slithered as it settled on the loose brick.

  Carl, Nayl and Kara were already up, arming weapons.

  ‘Sit down, Carl,’ I said. ‘I need you to run scope from here.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘I want full scanner input,’ I said as I hovered towards the opening hatch behind Kara and Harlon. ‘Wystan can watch your back.’

  ‘You’re going yourself?’ Wystan asked, surprised. It was one of the few times I’d ever heard emotion in his voice.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Kara and Harlon looked at me.

  ‘Yes, I’m coming with you,’ I said. ‘Have you got a problem with that?’

  ‘It’s just–’ Kara began.

  ‘You don’t usually…’ Nayl finished.

  ‘This isn’t usually,’ I said, and powered out past them into the chilly gloom.

  Nayl leapt out after me, his Urdeshi-made assault gun cinched high around his broad frame. Kara paused and looked back at Wystan and Thonius. ‘Lock the door,’ she grinned. ‘And don’t open it unless you know it’s us. Even then, keep your powder dry.’

  She jumped out, raised her Manumet 90 riot gun, and ran to join us.

  Carl swallowed. Wystan Frauka got up, and locked the hatch shut. He looked at Carl, lit yet another lho-stick and patted the handgun tucked into his belt. ‘I got your back, Carly,’ he said.

  ‘Great,’ said Thonius. He turned to regard the sweeping screens of the scanner and adjusted his vox mic.

  ‘Getting this?’ he called.

  ‘Loud and obnoxiously clear,’ Nayl crackled back.

  ‘A ha ha. Funny. Not. Move west, two hundred metres, then head north along the axis of the old fuel store. The drones seem to be gathering there.’