by Dan Abnett
‘Not much. It’s stopped.’
But your nose was bleeding.
‘Yes. So what?’ He tucked the handkerchief away again, sniffing.
Why?
‘Why?’ Frauka drew on his lho stick. ‘Why? You ask why?’
I’m waiting for the answer.
‘Because it was. Shut up.’
Noses bleed for a reason.
‘I’m sure they do. In my case, sonny, it’s because I picked it.’
Both nostrils?
‘Do me a favour. Shut up. I was reading.’
I’m bored with the endless dirty stories.
‘Well, hey, I’m not,’ Frauka snapped. He raised the slate again. ‘“Her full breasts were as white and round as–”’
He lowered the slate and gazed at the boy.
‘You know what I have to do if you wake up?’
Yeah. I can feel the weight of the gun in your pocket and the weight of the promise you made to the Chair in your head.
‘Well, then.’
There was a long pause.
Then Wystan said. ‘I’m an untouchable. There shouldn’t be any way you can feel anything in my head.’
And yet?
‘Shut up. Where was I?’
Something about breasts?
‘Right. Yes.’
You can’t trust any of them any more. You know that? So many dirty stories. So many secrets. Kara, Thonius, Ballack, Nayl...
‘So I won’t tell anyone. Will you?’
The boy on the cot lay as still as death.
‘Right, where was I?’
* * *
She was making her way up the spinal corridor to the bridge when Belknap appeared.
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Still just walking around?’ he asked.
She nodded.
‘Sholto’s asleep. Too much numbskull. He’s got some great stories. You know, he believes his family is descended from–’
‘I’m scared,’ she said abruptly.
He looked at her. He didn’t need her to tell him why.
‘Come with me to the infirmary.’
‘I can’t. I have to get to the bridge. The grid’s going to wake in five minutes.’
‘All right. Be calm. Check the grid. I’ll go and set up, and then come and get you.’
She nodded again.
‘Everything will be fine,’ he said. He took hold of her hands and folded them into the sign of the aquila across her breasts. ‘Have faith.’
He kissed her. She wrapped her arms around his neck as if she was going to break it.
‘Ten minutes,’ he said, pulling away.
She walked in the opposite direction.
Fyflank was on the bridge, running some impenetrable system checks on the main helm. The manhound looked up and grunted when she appeared, and then carried on with its work.
Kara sat down at the vox station. She rubbed her eyes with both palms and drew a deep breath.
The board lit up. Systems woke on automatic. Runes glowed, and then scrolled across the main comm screen. She waited for the graphics to settle down, and then keyed in the carrier signal.
Nest wishes Talon, she typed. Above and starward, the voices of friends.
A pause. Then letters typed out across the screen.
Too tired for Glossia, Kara. Everything’s all right here. We have a lead, a possible in. How are things up there?
Everything’s fine, she typed.
Good. Talk to you again in three hours. Goodnight, Kara.
Goodnight, Gideon.
Four
Berynth is a dark, dirty, ugly hive clamped to the south-western tip of Utochre’s second main landmass, ringed by fifty smoke-belching mine stations. This mass of industry and habitation, over ten thousand kilometres in area, cannot be seen from orbit. It cannot be seen by the Arethusa. This is due to Utochre’s miasmal cloud cover. Most of the moon, land and oceans both, is ice-clad, and the atmosphere a dense, opaque cloud mass, thanks to an impact winter that has lasted thirty thousand years. Astronomers blame the foul climactic circumstances on a past collision with a lesser moon.
I sift and consider such facts, to keep my mind turning.
A moon itself, the eighth moon of twenty-eight, Utochre circles the well populated Imperial world of Cyto at a great distance. Notably a claw-shaped new moon in Cyto’s winter skies, Utochre has a reputation as a dark place. The early settlers on Cyto had invested Utochre with myths, suggesting it was a repository of evil, a place to which bad or twisted souls migrated after death.
Perhaps it is a repository of evil. Certainly, it has become a famous place. Nobility, and the wealthy, make pilgrimage to Utochre, usually on charter passage from the main planet. The ferries are regular. Fecund with minerals, metals and precious stones, thanks to its complex and active structure, Utochre has become, over the years, a place of intensive ore mining and, secondarily, a centre for lapidary craft. The rock seams under the moon’s ice regularly yield the best uncut gems in the sector. All the key Imperial jewellers, and many hundreds of lesser halls, have set up premises at Berynth, exploiting this resource. The sector’s nobility come here to indulge themselves, partly because of Utochre’s resources, and partly because it is exclusive. Only the very rich and the most nobly born can afford the prices, and the effort, of the ferry connection.
But there is another service that Cyto’s twenty-eighth moon offers, for those who are very wealthy, or very superstitious.
Or very desperate.
I have a bad feeling that I fall into the last category.
It is a risk. The Wych House was always going to be a risk. There have been so many attempts to find it and close it down over the years. It is elusive. It is well protected.
It is dangerous.
It is never wrong.
Going to the Wych House had been Carl’s idea. I had blocked the notion to begin with, until Ballack weighed in with his support for it. I like Ballack, I admire him. Perhaps that’s why I finally demurred and brought us to Utochre.
From the moment we left Tancred high anchor, we were rogue. Not Special Condition, rogue. The word has a specific definition in the Inquisition’s rubric. It denotes an agent or agents who are deemed negligent, insubordinate and criminal. I have broken direct orders from my superiors. I have turned my back on an assigned duty. I have taken a mission upon myself without leave or permission. I have hidden myself so that I cannot be rebuked or stopped.
Rogue.
I never thought, never imagined myself in commission of such a sin, but this was my deliberate choice.
On Tancred, on the very hour of our departure, Ballack and Angharad had come to find us in secret. This was in the immediate aftermath of Molotch’s bloody trap. Ballack had come forward and offered his intelligence to me. He had not dared to go to Myzard.
I had scanned the interrogator carefully, several times, with and without Ballack’s consent. The story was consistent every time: closing on Molotch with Fenx, being trapped and picked off, one by one. Molotch jeering as he left Ballack to his doom, cuffed to a turbine hub. Angharad arriving just in time to cut Ballack free with her steel and haul him to safety.
‘Molotch is alive,’ Ballack had told me plainly. ‘He staged it all so he could disappear behind a faked corpse. You were right, sir, Molotch was here on Tancred, and now he’s alive and free. The Inquisition believes he’s dead. We were betrayed. Someone in the ordos betrayed us. That’s the only way Molotch could have known.’
‘And you come to me because?’
‘Because, sir, you were right, and you’re the only one I trust.’
Molotch had escaped me too many times. Molotch had cost me too many times. Majeskus. Oh Throne, dear Will and Norah and Eleena.
The memory of their screams wakes me still.
Too many times, Zygmunt Molotch, but not any more. Even if it costs me my reputation and my career.
Someone inside the ordos betrayed Fenx to Molotch. Thus, the simple equ
ation: the ordos cannot be trusted. To finish Molotch, I have to operate without their support or knowledge. I have to move in secret, and find Molotch before I am found.
It was always going to come down to this. Molotch is my nemesis. He was always going to be the one to destroy me.
Kara has just signed off. The vox-grid is dead again. She says everything is all right aboard the Arethusa, and I trust her, although I am still bothered by the mysterious secret she keeps. I stay awake and I think. I listen to the constant ticking of my obsession. Am I breaking all the rules I swore I’d never break, in order to do mankind a great service, a great service that only I am in a position to accomplish? Or am I just breaking all the rules? Either way, I fear I have led my friends into hell. I have doomed them all.
The Inquisition is not forgiving.
Kys, Maud and Carl are asleep. They are tired. I let them rest. Nayl is somewhere, screwing the Carthaen. He thinks I don’t know. I’m happy for him and for her, and I want to kill them both. Throne, I haven’t felt this way for a long time.
Not since the day I ended up in this box. It’s quite enervating.
Bastard. That you’re screwing her I don’t mind. That you’re hiding it from me, that I most certainly do. Did you think you were sparing my feelings? Did you? Did you?
Five
The spoil wells lay deep under the hive, deep in the subterranean foundations below the permafrost. They were dank, badly lit rockcrete vaults dozens of kilometres long where the slurry from the mining operations was dumped on a regular basis. The air smelled of stone dust and moisture and raw minerals. A bitingly cold wind seeped in from the surface, invading through loading slips and drop shafts, and gusted around the numbered silos raising a grey dust.
‘Hiram Lucic?’ Ballack called out.
The man halfway up the spoil slope rose and looked down at them. He was skinny, but bulked up by furs and thermal body lagging, topped off by parts of an old hostile environment suit. He was holding a hand scanner unit. Five rusty old prospector-servitors sorted and scrabbled around him on the heap, tossing lumps of black rock into their battered panniers with corroded skeletal forelimbs.
‘Who wants to know?’
‘We do.’
A male and a female stood at the base of the heap. They stared up at him.
‘Yes, I’m Lucic. But I’m also busy. I’ve paid through the nose for two hours’ free sweep of this mass, and I won’t waste a minute of that. “We” can go away and come back later. Or just go away.’
‘I think you’ll want to speak with us,’ the woman said. ‘We were told to ask for you. We need an introduction.’
Lucic paused, and glanced at the scanner in his hands. Pretty much nothing was showing. The spoil coming out of Deep Nineteen was poor these days. That probably explained why he’d got the free sweep at a knock down.
He sighed and slithered down the loose rock waste towards them. He moved with the expert tread of someone used to moving about on broken spill.
‘Go on, then,’ he said. Close up, they didn’t give much away, except that they were clean and well dressed, which suggested money.
‘An introduction at Stine and Stine,’ Kys said. Lucic was an odd fish, thin and lean, just sinew and bone under his cold gear. His face was all cheekbones and jaw corners and a long blade nose. He had large eyes, which seemed to bulge from meagre sockets.
‘An introduction? That’s an expensive undertaking.’
‘We understand that,’ Ballack said.
‘I know Stine and Stine,’ Lucic said, ‘in my capacity as a prospector. They buy my stuff sometimes. Let’s see, an introduction.’ He did a little maths in his head, gauging them by their manner and their clothes. Too little and he diddled himself. Too much, and he’d lose the job. He assayed the circumstances. He was good at assaying things.
‘Gonna be two or three, minimum,’ he said.
‘Hundred?’ asked Kys.
‘Hundred thousand,’ Ballack corrected. ‘I am right?’ Ballack asked.
Lucic nodded. ‘What you want is costly.’
‘What we want is an introduction,’ said Kys.
‘Let me get cleaned up,’ he said.
He rejoined them in a dirty public canteen where the spoil well workers and prospectors met and rested. He had changed into a grey bodyglove and a fur-lined coat. There was still dirt on his hands. Ballack bought three hot drinks and some wizened pastries from the stall. There was steam in the air, and the rank scent of over-worked heating units.
Lucic sat down with them at a battered metal table, lit a lho-stick in his nimble fingers, and put an old data-slate on the table top. Miners in bulky work suits shuffled past.
‘I’ll need names, details,’ Lucic said. ‘This isn’t something you can just walk into.’
‘So we’ve found,’ said Kys.
‘You don’t look like the normal sort,’ Lucic said.
‘And what’s that?’
‘Nobility. The kind with nothing better to do.’
‘What do we look like?’
Lucic stuck his tongue in his lean cheek so it bulged. He thought about it. ‘Trouble?’ he suggested. ‘Look, the halls don’t like to be mucked about. They have real pull here. Magistratum, Arbites... hell, even the Inquisition. That’s a no-no. Especially the Inquisition.’
‘I understand,’ said Ballack.
‘What would happen if that was the case?’ Kys asked.
‘You’d get dead, and me along with you.’
‘Wouldn’t that cause a problem? I mean,’ said Ballack, ‘if we were Inquisition, let’s say?’
‘Here? No, not really. Easy to hide a corpse or three here. The spoil smelters. The pack ice. The undersea. Easy to get lost.’
‘Well, we’re not Inquisition,’ said Ballack, ‘or Magistratum or anything like that. But you’ve spotted we’re not your regular type of clients, so we’d better come clean.’
‘Go on.’
‘We’re operatives working for a certain important individual. He has business interests in this sub, and he wants an inside track to guide his investments. There’s a lot at stake.’
‘And he trusts the House to provide that guidance?’
‘Shouldn’t he?’
‘Oh, the House is good. Investments, eh?’
Ballack handed Lucic a data crystal. The prospector loaded it into his slate.
‘My name is Gaul,’ said Ballack. ‘My associate here is called Kine.’
There was a pause while the slate hummed. ‘Linking to the hive substrate,’ said Lucic. ‘Just be a second. Gaul, Kine. There we go. From Eustis. Your biowork checks out.’
It ought to, thought Kys, the work Carl put in.
‘I think we can do business,’ said the prospector.
‘Well?’ Kara asked slowly.
‘Everything’s good. There’s no sign of any regrowth.’ Belknap began to pack the medical kit away, carefully folding up the more delicate parts of the scanner.
He looked at her. She smiled. They embraced.
‘I was so scared!’ she sighed.
‘So was I. When you came to me like that. Kara, my love, I don’t want to scare you or jinx this, but you know you should–’
‘What? Be dead?’
‘You should be dead. The woman I met and fell in love with on Eustis Majoris had barely six months. Then, overnight, just like that, the cancer went. I kept thinking I’d made a mistake, that I’d missed something or it would come back. And when you came to me tonight... But, unless I’m very bad at my job, it hasn’t. It isn’t there. No sign. You’re clear.’
She got up. They were alone in the ship’s infirmary, apart from Frauka and the comatose boy in the ward nearby. Unwerth and Fyflank were up on the bridge
‘Are you?’ Kara asked.
‘Am I what?’
‘Very bad at your job?’
He laughed. ‘No.’
She kissed his neck. Then she sat back.
‘What’s that look?’ he aske
d, reclasping his kit and carrying it to a wall locker.
‘I never told Ravenor. I kept it a secret. Now it’s gone, but that secret inside me still remains.’
‘What do you mean?’
Kara shrugged. ‘I hated keeping it from him. I trained myself to cover the truth. Now there’s no truth to cover, it still feels like I’m covering for something.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ he said.
She steepled her hands in front of her mouth thoughtfully and breathed out. ‘It’s hard to explain. I feel like I’m keeping a terrible secret, but there’s no secret left to keep.’
‘The mind becomes conditioned,’ Belknap said. ‘It gets used to what it gets used to. It’ll pass.’
‘I hope so. I wake up sometimes and feel I can almost catch what it is.’
‘The secret?’
‘Yes, the secret. It has something to do with Carl.’
‘Carl?’
Kara sniggered. ‘I know. It’s stupid, but why do I feel like I’m lying on Carl’s behalf all the time?’
‘Guilt,’ he said. ‘Just your sense of guilt towards Ravenor. Throne knows why that has attached itself to Carl. Do you know something about him that I don’t?’
‘He’s a pompous arse, he wears too many rings, and he’s very good at his job.’
‘So, no then?’
She shrugged. ‘So why am I so muzzy? So clouded? Why have I got, doctor, this pressing sense of unease. This forgetfulness?’
‘Lack of exercise,’ he replied.
‘Right.’
He paused, and looked around at her. She knew that look. ‘We’re alone, you know?’
‘Frauka’s in the next room.’
‘Oh, what does porn-boy care?’
He kissed her, dragged off her vest, and cupped her breasts with his hands. She pulled him down onto the infirmary couch.
‘Exercise, you reckon?’ she murmured.
‘Have you ever wondered just how much you can get away with before someone notices?’ Thonius asked.
