by Dan Abnett
"Got a lead, then?" she asked, as he dried himself.
"His workmates said he has family up in Stairtown. They think he might have run home to hide. We're going to try some addresses there this morning. You up for it?"
"Sure," she said.
Nayl walked out of the shower bay past her, and reached for his bodyglove.
"Where's the boss?" Kara asked.
Nayl jerked a thumb.
She hadn't seen him, but there he was. A lightless armoured shell lurking between cloth-roll piles at the far end of the warehouse. He'd even killed his anti-grav. The force chair sat on its runners.
"What's he doing?" Kara asked.
+I'm thinking.+
"He's thinking," said Nayl.
"Yeah, got that, thanks."
They rocked up north in the cargo-8 once Mathuin had got it running. Nayl drove, with Kara beside him. Mathiun sat silently in the cabin behind them, his heavy kitbag at his side on the tatty rear seats.
On the broad, inter-formal routes the going was excellent. These were great raised roadways of crumbling rockcrete with siding baffles of chaincage and ballast-filled plastek hoppers. They slid through the grimy morning traffic, adding a billow-wake to the greasy exhaust pall. Kara watched the huge hive-city glide by the window. Stacks, manufactories, broken lots jailed in chain-link, a transit station with an elevated track-section that ran along the inter-route for six kilometres, retaining ouslite walls daubed with illegible slogans and peeling posters, smokestacks, the low, pale sun strobing through the posts of a long roadside fence like a zoetrope.
Occasionally, through the smog, the looming forms of the distant inner-formal towers emerged, like primeval leviathans rising briefly to the surface light. Sunlight struck hard, starry glints off faraway fliers. Dry lightning twinkled over the estuary.
Off the inter-routes, in the tight surface streets of the formal boroughs, progress was a slack crawl. Traffic was dense, and the constantly shifting daily street-marts impeded their way Kara saw the ratty frontages of shops and trade-dens roll past, dangling neon signs and wrought iron script placards, flocks of pedestrians, faidi-paper booths, hollow-eyed indents queuing at the labour halls, peddlers with their barrows, and spry kerb-dancers tumbling for coins.
She heard music from a dozen sources, the booming unintelligible sermons from the street corner speaker-horns, the rise-and-fall whoop of an Magistratum siren. She smelled spit-fat, sausage and skilleted bushmeat from the gutterside cook-stalls. She watched the gampers flood out of the sink-shops every time the burn-alarms sounded. As they unfurled their umbrellas, it looked like a time-lapse reel of forest mushrooms blooming.
"Eyes up," said Nayl. "We're nearly there."
Ahead of them, the city rose abruptly, as if it had been folded at right angles. The stratum of stack floors and landings climbed away into the murk.
Stairtown.
FOUR
Here, Petropolis met the hills and conquered them. Here, the city shelved up and became a vertical borough. Mist had gathered in the deep wells of the formal, and the rain-alarms were ringing. Vast spiral stairways of iron, lidded with tintglas so they looked like vast models of genetic double helixes, rose out of the vapour into the upper levels. Powerful pendant lamps hung down on rusting chains three kilometres long, like shackled stars.
They left the cargo-8 in a pay garage under the west nine stack and climbed spiral five into the habs. All the pedestrian screw-stairs were bustling with citizens, moving up, moving down. Their combined voices filled the huge misty well like the rustle of gigantic paper sheets. The spirals were stepped streets, broad enough for twenty people to a tread. Hawkers and cook-stands had set themselves up on parts of the wider outside curves. Some vendors hung their wares out over the guardrails on long frames so that ascending citizens could admire them from floors below. Gymnasts and acrobats, some of them enhanced with poor quality mechanical augmetics, twisted, rotated and swung from scaffold structures suspended off the sides of the staircase, defying the fathomless drop. Kara pulled on Nayl's sleeve so she could watch them for a moment. Mathuin waited, glowering with impatience, two steps up, the kitbag slung over his shoulder.
That had been her life before this, spinning and dancing between the thorny iron bars of the circus arena. She admired the techniques. Taut wire, trip trapeze, solid bar work. The augmetics were cheats though. Three-sixty differential wrists and auto-lock digits made some of the moves too easy, too safe. She could have done it all, aug-free. She peered over the rail into the ghastly void of the sink below.
Maybe not with that risk.
"Coming?" said Nayl.
They went up past two more level stages and, with Mathuin leading, they turned left onto a landing, passing under a corroded sign that read "hab west nine eighteen".
A makeshift trader grotto had clustered itself around the landing stage exit off the stairwell, the way worm-feeders gather around an ocean-floor black smoker. The grotto thrived on passing trade. It offered contraband, tariff-free lho-sticks by the carton, reheated pasties of mechanically recovered meat product, low-quality erotica slates, dubious mech-ware, knock-off copies of small calibre urdeshi weapons, cheap clothing, promise-bonds.
"No thanks," Kara said to a grubby trader who offered her a new ident and a facial re-sculpt for the price of three courses with wine at a Formal B trattoria.
They entered the stack warrens. Rows of hallways, rows of identical doors, rows lined with failing strip-lighting that looked like luminous vertebrae. Trash littered the hallways. There was a strong smell of stale urine.
Mathuin walked ahead, pausing to read off a plak-board notice listing the addresses of the residents.
"Bazarof, eleven ninety," he said.
"A sister, we think," Nayl said.
The hallway carpet had been worn back to the matting by the constant foot traffic. Many of the wall panels had crumbled or been damaged, and most repairs had made use of cheap blue insulation tape, which gave off a sickening smell of rotten citrus. The doors to some habs stood open and inside they glimpsed squalor. Hunched hab-wives talking in doorways or just standing, arms folded, looking out blankly into the corridor; dirty children running from hab to hab: the sound of poorly-tuned vox broadcasts, the smells of rancid food, decomposition, grain liquor, toilets.
Eyes followed the trio indirectly but no one approached them. They didn't want the trouble... they were too tired to deal with trouble. But by now someone would have tipped off whichever clan operated this hab.
Eleven ninety. The door was open. An ugly, unwashed reek emanated from the hab. The walls just inside the door were shelved, and those shelves laden with bric-a-brac that was so dirty and broken it was impossible to identify individual items. Nayl led the way.
The interior was semi-derelict. Exposed bunches of electrical trunking bulged like a goiter into the room where the plasterboards of the west wall had collapsed. Garbage covered the floor and the crippled furniture. Two heavy tanks of lead glass with iron frames stood over by the eastern wall, full of filthy brown fluid that bubbled occasionally. The smell came from them. The only real illumination came from an old pict-viewer set in the corner, distorted black and white images dancing and flickering on its cracked valve screen. A woman sat watching it.
Nayl cleared his throat.
The woman glanced round, and looked them up and down. Then she went back to her viewing. She was old, Kara thought. Not a sister, a mother. A grandmother, even.
"Looking for your brother," Nayl said.
"Take your pick," she said, and gestured to the tanks. Kara looked again and saw that inside the glass tanks were pallid, deformed lumps of flesh. Limbless, formless, supported by the filterpipes and the chem-pumps. She saw a single, pitiful eye.
"Shit!" she recoiled.
"Your other brother," Nayl said.
The woman got up and faced them. If she was the sister, life had ridden her hard and worn her out.
"Drase," Nayl said. "It's probably not
to your advantage to protect him."
"I won't protect him," she said, somewhat surprisingly. "Knuck-head. He come here earlier, but I sent him away. Way he was acting told me whatever was after him was going to kill him, and anyone what helped him. And I didn't want part of that. Not for me, or my brothers."
Mathuin suddenly tensed and turned round. A heavy set, acid-marked clanster stood in the doorway, looking in at them. Four or five more loomed outside in the hall.
Mathuin reached for his weapon, but Nayl stopped him with a look.
"You all right, Nenny Bazarof?" asked the clanster.
"Yes," she said.
"You don't want them escorting out?"
"No," she said. "Drase was always bad news. I won't be sucked down with him. I got my brothers to look after."
"What happened to them?" Nayl asked.
"Metal poisoning. Industrial accident. They got workers comp, but it's not much. Ten years I cared for them. Can't even afford to flush their tanks as often as I'd like. Drase never gave me nothing."
She looked at the hammer in the doorway and shook her head. He backed out and left them alone. Then she looked at Nayl, and thought for a moment as if summoning up a great measure of courage.
"Hundred crowns," she said.
"What?"
"For a hundred, I'll tell you where he is."
Kara looked away. A hundred was paltry, pocket change. Not to the Bazarof sister, though. More than she'd see in a year. She had to pluck up the bravery just to suggest such an extortionate sum.
Nayl reached into his jacket and counted out a hundred from a fold of local currency. The woman's eyes fixed on the fingers and the money. There was a flash - pain or anger - as she realised she could have asked for much more.
"Drase has a friend," she said as she took the money. "Lives up Stair, in the deadlofts, last I heard. West twenty, I think."
"I'd like you to be sure," said Nayl.
"West twenty," she confirmed. "Right up there. His name's Odysse Bergossian. They've known each other since growing up. Neither one good for the other."
"What's this Bergossian do?" asked Kara.
The Bazarof woman looked at her, as if only now aware of her. "Little as possible. He's a waster. Got a serious glad-stone habit, last I saw him. Sometimes does a spot gamping, other times odd labour jobs. I heard Drase talk about Odysse working at a meat packers in a freight zone up in K, and sometimes in the circus silos."
"Which circus?"
"The big one. The Carnivora, in Formal G."
"Thanks." Nayl told her. "We won't be back." Nayl nodded, and Kara and Mathuin followed him out of the hab and left the woman to her flickering picter and atrophied kin.
The vox-set bleeped. Frauka was reaching for it, but Kys pushed past him to get it first. Even just brushing against him made her flesh crawl. Frauka stood back with a false, laconic "after you" gesture.
"Kys."
She heard Nayl's voice through the tinny burble of the encryption circuits. The channel was as safe as they could make it.
He told her their progress. Ravenor, who had heard the vox-chime, slid his chair over. She knew he was tense. With the unidentified psyker out there, they couldn't risk switching Frauka off so the inquisitor could shadow the team mentally. Circumstances like this were a cruel reminder to Ravenor how helpless he really was.
"They're going up Stair," she relayed. "They think they've got a trace on my guy."
"Tell them to be wary, and to check in regularly." Ravenor's chair-speakers whispered tonelessly.
Kys talked to Nayl some more, and wrote down the details of their destination. Then she hung up the vox-horn.
"Got a feeling in my bones," she said. "They're going to need help."
"Wystan, could you prep some weapons for us?" Ravenor asked. The chair rotated slightly to face Kys. "Patience, I think the factory owner has some vehicles. Go and see if we can borrow or rent one from him."
As Frauka knelt down and unclasped one of their equipment cases, Kys strode away across the factory hall.
She was tense too, and edgy. A sound from above made her start, but it was just the mangy birds up in the skylight, knocking their rotting wings against the glass.
She saw the boy, Zael. He was awake, crouching against a rusted loom-block, sipping dehyd soup from a plastek bowl. They'd offered him proper rations, even foods from one of the street stands, but it seemed he liked dehyd. He was a sickly little thing. His undergrown body was so strung out by self-inflicted abuse, he probably couldn't take anything more than dilute, freeze-dry broth.
He was watching Thonius. The interrogator had set up his portable cogitator set, and spliced the data-leads into one of the municipal communication conduits. A branch of them ran down the alley beside the hall, and Thonius had used a sniffer to find their voltage and a uni-plug on the end of an extension lead to hack in. The risk of detection was minimal. The whole of the hive was wired up, and given the city's state of decay there were breaks in the system all over the place. Finding his splice would be like identifying one hole in a fishing net.
And Thonius was a fine operator. He had a slew of whisper programmes and encryption tools, some of them ordo issue, some of them self-written. Through his spliced link, he was rifling the data-blocks of Petropolis for information.
The portable cogitator, leather-bound, was the size and shape of a passenger trunk and so heavy only Nayl could carry it any distance without help. Thonius had got it up onto a pair of packing crates and it now formed a makeshift knee-hole desk. Skeins of wires ran out the back to the junction point with the extension feed. Three more wires ran up into the sockets behind his right ear. The lid of the trunk, which formed the screen, was propped open with a little brass elbow joint. Thonius was typing slowly using the oiled mechanical keyboard.
"How's it going?" she asked as she came up.
He shrugged. An amber rune appeared amongst the screen's rolling data columns, and he tutted, pressing a key.
"Slow. As might be expected of an administry world, the info-systems are vast and well governed. I have to watch every step for fear of detection as an unauthorised user."
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 Geimanrys 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 peopl
e 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 that 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.
