by Dan Abnett
The others made themselves comfortable in the passenger trunk. Plyton leaned by one of the small armoured port lights, craning her neck to see up and out. They were three hundred metres down, and the water was black and clear like glass, but above them, it graduated into a green twilight.
"Creepy," she murmured.
Angharad glanced at her.
"All this water on top of us. The pressure. The cold. Even if you could reach the surface, there is no surface. Just a roof of ice."
Angharad shrugged and looked away. Little seemed to impress her.
"The whole ocean's covered in pack ice, right?" Plyton asked.
"The whole thing." Ravenor replied, "apart from a few anomalous breaks. In most places, the pack is five or six hundred metres thick. Quite a roof."
Plyton grimaced. "A fine time to discover I'm claustrophobic," she said.
"You've travelled in the void," Angharad said. "Compared to that, this is nothing."
"It'll kill you just as fast," said Plyton. "Besides, we can all have our own private fears, can't we?"
"I do not have private fears," said Anagharad. That made Plyton laugh.
"Any life out there?" Plyton asked.
"Algae. Aggregated bacteria. Phytoplankton. There may be no sunlight, but the moon's excessively active. A lot of thermal venting."
"Anything bigger than that?"
"No. There are rumours, but no."
"Cold," said Plyton, glancing back out.
"It's deep, too," Ravenor said. "The ocean floor depth varies, but in some places it's technically immeasurable."
"Immeasurable?" asked Plyton.
"Abyssal."
"What do you mean, immeasurable?"
"I mean it's so deep, any instrument sent down to sound it is crushed by the extremity of pressure."
"What about auspex? Modar?"
"That deep, that cold, that pressurised, the water starts to behave in very strange ways. It doesn't give up its secrets. You were right, Maud. In some ways it is much, much more dangerous than the void. The deep ocean of Utochre may be one of the strangest places in the Imperium. Which is probably why the House is here."
"Are you telling me this to reassure me?" Plyton asked, slightly pale.
"One can face one's private fears better if one understands their limits, I always think. I was giving you the best information I could."
"That below us is a freaky abyss that we don't understand and could never escape from?" Plyton asked.
Ravenor was silent for a moment. "I probably shouldn't have opened my mouth," he said.
He moved across the cabin to where Kys was sitting.
+Just so you know, we're out of contact. The vox isn't making it through the water and the ice, not even via a relay at the hive. Something - the ice I think, but I don't know why - is bouncing psychic transmission. We can't talk to Kara.+
"You spoke to her before we left?"
+Just before. She knows what we're doing. I told her not to start fretting unless a week went by.+
Ravenor saw that Kys was still silently staring forward, keeping an eye on Lucic through the pilot house hatch.
+Can we trust him?+
"No," she said, "not at all. He's in it for the money, I think. Besides, it's too late now."
+And if he proves untrustworthy?+
"We're all armed. That kind of cancels everything out."
Lucic's estimate turns out to be conservative. It takes the best part of eleven hours just to reach the vicinity of the Berynth Eighty-Eight deep water rig. He blames contra-currents, and an undertow effect called the Neath Stream, which cannot be predicted. Strange, on a moon where prediction is the most exclusive commodity.
The journey becomes laborious. There's nothing but the sluggish purr of the cavitation system. The underboat's enviro-systems are not the best, and it grows colder and the air stales. I sense the discomfort of the others, the body stink of anxiety and confinement. Maud is the worst. Her unexpected claustrophobia becomes physically oppressive to her. I do not ware Maud, nor would I attempt to without her consent, except in the most critical of situations, but I extend psy-feelers gently into the periphery of her mindscape and work to reduce her clogging panic by influencing her respiratory rate and slowing her pulse. I adjust her metabolism into an instrument to fight her fears.
Her mind, as I nestle against it, is in retreat, like a sick animal. I swim in her surface thoughts, her petty tensions and spectral fears. That's when I see the footprint.
It's been carefully disguised, like a track in snow scuffed over to conceal it. It's been so carefully disguised, I cannot be sure it's what I think it is without a more invasive probe, and this isn't the time or the place for that.
But I know what I think it is. I know what my years of experience scream to me it is.
Sometime in the last two or three days, another mind has been in her. Another presence has taken a much firmer hold of Maud Plyton than I am doing with my light psy-caresses. She has been, briefly, under considerable mental duress.
From who? And how? I haven't read another psyker, and she's hardly been out of my company. Kys couldn't do this, and why would she? Now I feel a creeping dread upon me. What have I missed? What's been in amongst my people without my permission, or even my knowledge? Lucic wears a blocker. Is there more to that casual insurance? Is he blocking the outside, or is he hiding something? Or is it...
I try to reassure myself. The footprint could be false, a side-effect of Maud's troubled state that I am misreading. Then again, her troubled state, her sudden claustrophobia, could have been triggered by aggressive manipulation.
I broaden my mind for a moment, and cast around. I feel the other heartbeats and minds around me, together with the hard negative of Lucic. Everyone's on edge, except Angharad, who is still and cold and silent like a pool. Nayl is restless, Ballack and Carl are both closed off and busy with thoughts of their own. Kys feels me stir and looks up, a question on her face.
+It's nothing, Patience. Relax.+
It's not nothing. What has done this?
I reach outside the underboat, but the sea is too cold and too blank for me to extend far.
"Eighty-Eight," Lucic announced. The sound of the underboat's drive systems altered slightly as the pilot brought the craft around and slowed it. The sea ahead was lighter, more radiant.
Nayl studied the console displays, and saw the vast hole, an artificial polynya, in the roof of ice above. Berynth Eighty-Eight was a filthy, gargantuan engine sticking up out of the hole like a dagger in a wound. The lower limbs of the mining rig, its huge drilling members, extended down into the lightless depths below, churning up cloud banks of heated silt.
"Vox links are live," Nayl said.
"The rig will have a fleet of boats down on operation, guiding the drilling." Lucic replied.
"Lots of backwash litter too." Nayl added, adjusting the listening scopes and the detectors to wash out the noise and minimise interference.
"The rig's drill engines, circulator pumps and hydraulics." Lucic replied, "not to mention signals chopped and bounced by rising silt, and the suck-rattle of the excavation tubes, and the low-level vibration of the icebreaker systems keeping the hole open. The sea's a funny place. 'Neath side, you have to get used to a lot of data clutter, and learn not to trust the sensors all the time."
He made a course adjustment with the pilot servitor's approval. The underboat nosed slowly around, and slugged away on a fresh track, skirting the industrial site and its cloud of noise.
They were running under the ice again in five minutes, heading south south-west into clearer, colder water. The rig noise gradually receded behind them.
"This water is colder," said Nayl, reading off the instruments. "Six or seven points and falling."
"That's because the sea bed just dropped away under us," said Lucic. He glanced at the pilot, who nodded confirmation. "We just went off over the Berynth Shelf. Eighty-Eight mines out about as far as there is ocean floo
r to reach. We just crossed from deep water to what we call Wholly Water."
"Holy water?"
"Wholly." Lucic repeated with a lean grin, "as in there's wholly nothing below us anymore. We're out over the abyssal zone."
Nayl woofed out a breath. "Don't tell Maud," he said.
"Which one is Maud?" asked Lucic, looking back into the passenger trunk.
Nayl didn't tell him.
Lucic grinned wider and shook his head. "Deep ocean, my friend. We're in deep ocean now."
"I'm not your friend," Nayl said sullenly.
Lucic shrugged. "You might want to reconsider that. Out here, all alone, a man needs all the friends he can get."
"Sholto?"
The little shipmaster didn't look up immediately. He was sitting at the master control of the Arethusa's bridge, with Fyflank and two of his most senior crewmen huddled around his shoulders.
Kara approached. She'd slept, but not well. That surprised her, given that she was buoyant with relief. She'd had another dream in which Carl had come to her in some wild, desert place, and done nothing but laugh. She'd asked him questions, asked him why he was acting so strangely, and he'd just laughed at her. She'd woken in a cold sweat, sharply and suddenly, the headache pounding her temples. Belknap had been deep asleep in the bed beside her, his limbs twisted in the curious, boneless attitude of intense exhaustion slumber. She'd lain awake beside him for five minutes and then jumped when the vox intercom beeped. Leaping up gingerly, naked, she'd hit the stud before the second beep, hoping it wouldn't rouse Belknap.
"Kara," she had whispered.
"Might it be permeanable for you to come to the bridge, with all effluviancy?"
"Problem?"
"A very curiousnessity."
"I'll be there in five."
She had dressed in silence. Belknap hadn't stirred.
"Master Sholto?" she said again.
Fyflank and the crew mates looked around at her, and backed away to make space for her. She stepped in closer and crouched down beside the shipmaster's raised seat.
"Mistress Kara," Sholto said, glancing around with a thin smile. He looked awful: pale, jowly, drawn.
"Sholto, are you all right?"
He shook his head. "Forgive my unsanguine bearing. I fancy I took a little too much numbskull last night with your gentleman, the good doctor. He is a drinker of thirst, and I was thirsty, but not, in point all goodly made, a drinker."
"You have a hangover?" she smiled, relaxing slightly.
"A terrible head, as you ask, all of throbbing and whimsy. Never again, as I have told myself before. And such dreams, as I had. Quite a colostomy of nightmares."
"Why did you send for me, Sholto? Is it Ravenor? Has he signalled?"
Unwerth shook his head. "The grid has lit twice, with no reponderance from our friends below. They remonstrate themselves beyond our call. I sent for you because I was sent for in turn, so as it-"
"Sholto?" Kara said firmly.
He nodded. "I will cut to the cheese. Master Boguin was sitting night watch-"
One of the crewmen behind her, a portly fellow from Ur-Haven with less than adequate hygiene or dental maintenance, nodded expressively. "Master Boguin was on night watch." Unwerth continued, "here at this veritable station, and he detected a noise."
"A noise?"
"A noise, in all certainty." Kara frowned. "A noise?" she repeated.
Unwerth fiddled with the vox dials. "I'm trying to locale it again."
"What sort of noise?" Kara asked. Unwerth shrugged. "Well, internal or external source?" To her dismay, Unwerth shrugged again.
Kara breathed carefully. Her head was killing her. "Sholto, I'm trying to be patient. What are you talking about?"
"There's something here." Master Boguin said. Fyflank growled in support.
"Get up," said Kara. She was in no mood for this. Unwerth hopped down from the master's seat and let her take his place. He stood on the deck beside her.
Kara settled down. She started to adjust the console controls. "You're getting a vox signal? Another ship? Or just back-chatter traffic from Utochre's vox-space?" Sholto Unwerth simply shrugged again.
Kara gently turned the dials. A ghost frequency fluttered across the scope. "There!" Unwerth said. "I saw it. Hang on."
She made some alterations. The signal wave became cleaner. Kara peered at it. "That could be another vessel, pinging us with its primary auspex."
"In all assurity, there is no other vessel in range."
"I think you're right," said Kara. "It's not external. This print is a signal coming from inside the ship. Let me just-"
She halted suddenly, froze.
"What is it?" Unwerth asked.
She didn't dare tell him. She was looking at her hands as they worked the instruments. Her right hand. There was a ring on the middle finger of her right hand, a ring that didn't belong to her, and that she had no memory of putting on.
In one awful, sweeping moment, she was sure it was one of Carl's.
"Shit!" she cried, pulling her hands back from the station as if stung. She tried to pull the ring off. It wouldn't budge.
Unwerth was still staring at the flickering signal, a yellow zigzag pulse that rippled like a cardiogram across the vox-screen.
He leant in and made a final, tiny adjustment, locking the signal down. The noise came over the speakers.
It made all of them shiver.
It was the sound of a grown man, sobbing. It went on and on, shuddering tinnily from the console speakers, sob after sob, a wracking pain.
"What in hell's name is that?" Kara whispered. She tried to sound defiant, but her words wilted as they came out. Her guts were like ice. "Where's that coming from?"
"I know not," said Unwerth, "except that I don't like it."
He reached one of his mutilated hands over towards the vox-system's main switch and threw it, shutting the system down. The screen went blank and the chasing zigzag signal wave vanished.
But the sound of the sobbing man kept coming from the speakers.
NINE
"You had better see this," Nayl said.
They were thirteen hours into the trip. The pilot servitor was suddenly slowing the cavitation system and back-thrusting with the ventral fans. Kys came forward into the pilot house and let Ravenor use her eyes.
"There's your Wych House," Nayl said.
The underboat's rigged stablights were illuminating something in the murk ahead, a structure suspended below the glowing roof of ice.
"Oh God-Emperor," Kys muttered, craning forward between Nayl and Lucic.
"Quite a thing, isn't it?" the prospector said.
The Wych House was an armoured metallic orb three hundred metres in diameter. 'Neath side, everything was upside down. The orb was supported on five articulated mechanical legs, which gripped the canopy of ice above them. As they approached, the House scuttled back a few paces, its bladed claws scuffing the Neath side of the ice cover. It was walking on the underside of the pack ice as if the pack ice was land.
"There's a legend on Loki." Nayl began. "The hut of a witch that runs through the forest on the legs of a game bird."
"Baba Yagga's hut." Kys murmured.
+Baba Yagga's hut.+
"Baba Yagga." Nayl nodded. "You've heard of it?"
+It's not an old Loki legend. It's an Old Earth legend.+
"That so?" asked Nayl.
+That is so. Bring us in.+
Nayl glanced at the pilot. "Bring us in."
Lucic shook his head. "Wait. I need to broadcast the proper greetings. If we just close in, it'll run."
"Run?"
"I've seen it run, if it's scared, or feels threatened. It can out run this boat."
+Send the greetings.+
"My boss says send the greetings, Lucic." Kys relayed.
"He's a psyker, then?" Lucic asked. "I thought as much."
Kys and Nayl exchanged looks. "At this stage," Nayl said, "we really don't care what you thin
k, Lucic. Send the greeting. Do what we paid you to do or you'll be leaving this underboat through the wet-lock with no breathing apparatus and a bullet up your arse."
"I don't answer for him," said Kys quietly, "but he's more than capable of that, so don't piss him off."
Lucic pursed his lips and entered a contact code into the underboat's transponder. He checked it for fidelity once, and then pressed "broadcast".
They heard and felt the pulse of the system through the hull.
They waited.
"Does it usually take this long?" asked Kys.
Lucic tapped a long, scrawny finger against his bony chin. "No. The House is worried. Nervous. Probably because we're bringing a psyker aboard."
"It can sense that?" Nayl wondered. He saw the look on Lucie's face and shrugged. "Of course it can."
Kys leaned forward suddenly. "It's sending something. Throne, missiles?"
Nayl leaned on the controls. Two darting shapes had burst from the Wych House and were racing towards them, leaving bubble tracks in the semi-glazed water behind them.
"Relax," said Lucic, "pilot fish."
The missiles slowed as they neared the underboat, and turned, flashing and pulsing. The pilot servitor underwent some form of seizure, and began to act mechanically. His mind and systems were locked to the navigation systems of the Wych House. He steered them in, following the blinking pilot fish skimming just ahead of them.
The bulk of the Wych House loomed over the little underboat. They were being drawn up into a lighted cavity on the underside of the armoured orb.
The pilot fish zipped in ahead of them and vanished.
"We're going in," said Nayl.
"Lock and load," Ravenor ordered from the passenger trunk. Angharad rose and clutched her sheathed steel. Maud Plyton got up and racked her combat shotgun. Ballack drew his laspistol and checked its heat. Carl rose to his feet and double-clicked the slide on his autopistol.
Nayl flipped his handgun out of its rig, banged back the slide, and put it away again. He glanced at Kys.
"You ready?"
Kys had slid out two kineblades, one in each hand. She nodded.
"We're ready," Nayl announced.
The underboat slowly entered the House's docking pool.
