by Dan Abnett
"Where possible," she said, "I like to establish a dialogue with my patients."
A tiny rasp of response came from the machine.
"You know," said Bashesvili, "a does it hurt? Doesn't it hurt? Say 'ahhh' type of thing."
There was another tiny gasp.
"I shouldn't do this," said Bashesvili, "but I'm wilful, and menopausal, and at the bad end of a long drudge tour out here on Rahjez." She reached up into her hairline and slowly unscrewed her blocker implant. She set it down on the polished table beside her.
"Is that better? Hello in there?"
+It is better. Can you hear me?+
"Extraordinary! Yes, I can. You're strong. Like a song in my head. You have a nice voice. Mellow. You were a handsome devil, weren't you?"
+I don't know.+
"Yes, you were, once. I can tell. Now, what's your name?"
+Gideon.+
"Hello, I'm Ludmilla. Don't you dare think of messing with my head now, you understand? I have a responsibility here."
+I won't. I promise. Believe me, Ludmilla. All I want is for this pain to stop.+
"Yeah, well, you're screwed. I can tell just by the whiff of you. You're rotting inside that box. I need to open you up. Your friend seemed to think that was a no-go. What do you say?"
+I say... I can't hold on much longer, Ludmilla.+
"That's a start," she said. She reached over and swung in a hinged table of sterile tools. "What happens? Do you open your case, or do I have to crack it with a cutter?"
+Wait.+
"What for?" she asked. She wiped at her face suddenly, as if cobwebs had brushed against it. "What are you doing? I can feel that! What are you doing?"
+Forgive me. I was looking into your mind.+
"Oh. Kindly don't do it again." She paused, and then asked, "What did you see?"
+I saw enough to know I can trust you. I have to trust you. I will open the casing. Please don't be distressed by what you see inside.+
"Bloody hell, Gideon," she snorted. "You haven't got anything I haven't seen before. How does the casing open?"
Ravenor didn't reply. There was a slow hiss of releasing catches, and the upper part of his chair slowly lifted away. Vapour oozed out. A dull, blue light shone from the open cavity.
"Oh, Gideon," she said, peering inside. "Oh, you poor man."
She turned, pulled on surgical gloves and looked back into the cavity. "I think I'm going to have to call for interns to help me so I can-"
+No interns. No one else. Just you.+
"Ow!" she said. "Not so fierce with the sending, please."
+I'm sorry, but please-+
"All right. If that's what you want." She bent down and reached into the cup of warm, stagnant fluid. She circled her arms underneath Ravenor's physical form.
"Have I got you? Are you supported?"
+Yes.+
Bashesvili lifted him out of the chair. Tiny ducting relays and drip feeds, clustered in their thousands, like fronds of hair, pulled away.
+Nhhhg!+
"It's all right, Gideon," she soothed. "Shush, shush. It's all right. I've got you. Gideon?"
The wet, blood-smeared, respiring sack of pale flesh she held in her arms had gone very quiet.
"Gideon?"
"They don't believe us?" snarled Angharad.
"No."
"They don't believe us?" she repeated.
"No!" said Nayl. "Now, hush. I'm thinking."
"We're a thousand years out," said Iosob from the corner of the cell. "That's an awful long way."
"I know it is," said Nayl. "That means a confirmation of our status is never going to come because we don't exist yet. I was just hoping we could delay them. It's ironic. The rosette is genuine, but to them it's a fake. Now shut up both of you and let me think."
"Ow!" he said, almost immediately. Spiky pain had jabbed into his head.
"I feel that too," said Angharad, massaging her temples.
"It's Gideon," said Nayl, rising. "It's Gideon. He's hurting."
"Maybe," said Angharad, "but didn't they warn us? Something about the thorns after dark?"
Night had fallen outside. Through the small, barred slit of a window, they could hear the thorn brush - the ku'kud - around the compound whispering and rustling.
"Oh, great." Nayl growled. "All right, our choices have just been reduced to one."
"Which is?"
"We bust out of here."
Angharad gazed at him with steady, hooded eyes. "Far be it for me to mention a few 'ifs', but-"
"But?"
"If we can open that cell hatch, if we can evade the guards without getting gunned down, if we can find a way out of the compound, and if Ravenor is fit enough to accompany us-"
"Reach a point, please, woman," Nayl said.
"If your good friend Gideon is hurt and can't be moved, will you leave him here?"
"No," said Nayl.
"Then there's no point breaking out. It would be signing our own death warrant. To escape, and then not flee?"
Nayl sighed and leaned his back against the cell wall. He slid down it until he was sitting on the floor. Angharad presumed he had given up.
"Are all Carthaen women so pessimistic?" he asked. "I thought you were a warrior?"
"A good warrior knows when to fight," said Angharad.
"And a better one knows when to improvise." Nayl countered. He'd sat down to tug off one of his boots.
"What is he doing?" asked Iosob, sitting up to watch. Angharad shrugged.
Lang's guards had searched them all, and scanned them scrupulously for metallics and concealed weapons. They'd found Nayl's boot knife, the coil of multi-purpose wire he carried around his waist, and the small pebble charge he kept in a wrist pocket.
He levered open the heel of his boot, and carefully teased something out of the rubberised sole. It was a slim jemmy pick, made of inert plastek.
"This answers your first if he said, holding it up. This opens the hatch. The points you raised were good, and I can't argue with them, but we still have to do this."
"And when the hatch opens?" she asked.
"Like I said, we improvise," he grinned. "I'm good at that."
Angharad nodded. "One of the few things I like about you."
If this is how I am going to die, I am strangely happy about it. To be free, one last time. To be outside the chair. To feel the air on my skin.
I cannot say what fate I expected, but it was certainly some titanic doom, suffered in the service of the Ordos.
I suppose this is exactly that in a way, but it's also a calm end, and a free one. The plight we are in seems so very far away. The impossible divorce from our own place-time. It fades, and seems insubstantial.
I fade too.
Stay awake, stay awake. All that seems important anymore is lying here, in the cool air. I'm feeling the useless, dying body I own twitch and tremble as Ludmilla Bashesvili works.
She is breathing hard. I can feel her tension. I can also feel her devotion. She has fixed various links to my circulatory systems and organs. I can hear machines beeping and chiming. I can feel a warm glow, which I presume is either anaesthetic or the in-feed of intravenous fluids and blood.
I can also feel a scratching around the edges of my mind. Ludmilla feels it too, and it bothers her. The ku'kud. Night has fallen, and the brush is active outside. It is not a sentience, just a dry, gristly hiss of residual psychic activity. It is not unpleasant, just irritating, like a chorus of insects. A vast body of psi-responsive matter, like a sponge.
"Gideon?" she asks, putting a bloody tool down in a steel dish with a clatter. "With me, still?"
+Yes.+
"Good," she says.
She's lying. I go free for a moment, and see the world through her eyes. I see the shrunken, twisted thing that is me lying on the surgery table. Bunches of squirting pipes and sucking tubes intrude into me through catheters. I have not seen myself in the flesh for a long time.
Poor, withere
d flesh. A wrinkled sack of organs and redundant bones, the vague, vestigial remains of a human face, sunk low like a tumour on the top of the sack. God-Emperor, how did I ever survive the Thracian Atrocity? God-Emperor, why did you let me survive?
I see the discoloured flesh, the atrophied ends of truncated joints. I see the pallor of my burn-tissue skin, the cicatrice scars of my original surgery. I notice also the patches of black bruising and necrotisation, creeping across my form like the shadows of leaves on the ground. I see the wounds the hooked things made, pussy and raw, like gaping mouths. I was hurt even more than I thought. Ludmilla has just removed a hank of hook bone ten centimetres long from what I once called my belly. She drops it into a bowl in disgust. The Great Devourer.
My mind swims. There is pain, but beyond the pain, there is a solace, which I think might be death. Ludmilla threads a needle.
I have to stay awake. I know this. I know this.
I look into her. I slide through reefs of sadness and concern that part easily because she is concentrating elsewhere. The life of a field medicae is no life, I quickly realise. Hers has been long and unrewarding. Thought engrams dazzle and open. I see her siblings in the family home. Laughing children, a cherished nugget of memory. A blue dress. Her father's posting. Her father's death. I see a bad marriage, and a few disastrous love affairs. I see a child she lost.
I am a voyeur. I should care, and be ashamed of myself, but I'm not. The front of her mind is locked in effort. The back drifts, like a warm sea, forgotten.
I see the war. Thirty years long already. Rebels on Veda have risen in the cause of emancipation. Imperial secessionists. The Guard has locked the systems down. Protracted fighting on three worlds. Rumours of Guard-sanctioned massacres.
A dirty war. The Imperium fighting itself. No wonder Asa Lang was driven. The Archenemy, the greenskin, the eldar, all terrible foes. But I know, ultimately, there is no more bitter and distressing enemy than our own kind, when humans turn on humans. Ludmilla loathes it. Ah, I see... her family was from Veda. She hates this posting more. Rahjez. Right on the front, a listening watch. Front-line defenders, alert and wired all the time. She hates this.
She hates it most of all because of the ku'kud. The whispering thorn. Isolated out here, humans would be paranoid anyway. The brush makes it worse.
I wish I could soothe her. I-
+Gnnhhh!+
"Gideon? Are you still with me? I felt that?"
+I'm here.+
My voice is less than a whisper. She has just extracted another chip of broken hook bone. It clinks into a bowl.
"I'm worried about your vitals, Gideon. Please, try to stay here with me."
+I will.+
The ku'kud is scratching at my mind. I wish I could blank it, but I can't. It's like a chorus, an insensate chorus. I-
It resonates. As I push up into it, it rustles back. Sentient or not, it amplifies my thoughts as echoes. Throne, I could-
+Annghhhhh!+
"Gideon? Gid-"
I think I blacked out for a moment. Yes, the table-mounted chron has skipped eight minutes.
Eight?
+Ludmilla?+
"Gideon? Oh, for Throne's sake! I thought I'd frigging lost you!"
+Language.+
She laughs. Ludmilla has a good laugh. The men she courted would have loved her for that. Why did she never find one good enough to keep? I feel so distant now. I feel-
"Gideon! Come back to me, you bastard!"
+I'm still here.+
"I'm going to have to go deeper in this wound. You're going to have to be strong. Can you stand this?"
+Yes.+
"Concentrate on something. Focus on it."
+Yes.+
I focus on... I drift. I try to remember what I am supposed to be doing. Everything is so vapid and thin. I think of Nayl, of Kys, of Kara, I think of Will...
He's dead. I know he's dead. Molotch killed him.
I think of Molotch and some measure of focus returns. Zygmunt Molotch. But for him, I would not be here. But for him, my life would have been entirely different.
I feel a passionate hatred. The energy lifts me up.
"That's better. Good vitals. Now, this is going to really hurt."
Molotch. Molotch. I want him. I want to finish him. A thousand years and half a galaxy away, I remember him and want to finish him. He did this to me. He put me here.
"Gideon, your pulse rate is all off. Gideon?"
The ku'kud. The door. I can see it now. Now I can see it and-
"Gideon?"
I can see it. Throne, I'm fading fast, I can tell. Each instrument Ludmilla pushes into me tastes different. The salt tang of the scalpel, the iron hit of the tweezers, the bleach sip of the retractors.
Oh, Throne. Oh, Throne, I am really dying.
But I can see it now. Oh, how I can see it. The door. The key. The ku'kud. I send it into Ludmilla's mind. If only I could... if only I could-
"Ow!" she cries, jolting up. "Stop it with that!"
If only I could. If only I could. If only I could-
If only I could.
If-
Bashesvili jerked back from the operating table.
"Gideon?" she asked.
Every single monitor device around her stopped pinging and wailed out a flat line drone.
"No!" she cried.
NINE
There was a bumping scrape of metal on metal, and the service boat locked into the docking clamps of the Allure. Servitors and deck wranglers began to move around, shouting back and forth as they started loading the modular crates of perishables and victuals onto the through-deck cargo hoists. Hydraulics sighed, bulk hatches opened, vapour drifted.
The cargo area was dark, and lit only by frosty amber overheads. Kara swung down from a crawlspace above a large duct circulator where she had hung, concealed, during the ride from the orbital station. Keeping low, she ran along the edge of the hold's raised loading pad, and then swung over onto one of the laden hoists as it started to rise.
The hoist rose into the bulk hold of the rogue trader Allure. The air smelled of spices and rotting fruit. Crewmen and servitors were busy onloading one of the crate stacks, moving some of the containers on trolleys through to adjacent secondary holds.
Kara slipped off the hoist into the shadows. She was wearing a black bodyglove, with a tight hood to conceal her red hair. Crewmen strolled past her, chatting. She could smell their sweat, the stale lho-scent clinging to their work clothes. She shifted to a second hiding place, and tucked in. From her position, she could see the main floor of the hold. There was Siskind himself, in his glass jacket, a cruelly handsome, red-haired man. He was talking to the master of the service boat and signing off a manifest.
Kara had been aboard the Allure once before, when the Hinterlight had seized her and inspected her en route to Lenk. That seemed like a lifetime ago, but she still had a pretty good memory of the layout. She waited for a suitable lull in the activity nearby, and then made another dash along the side access to a companionway hatch.
The hall beyond the hatch was quiet and empty. She darted through, and headed forwards.
It took her ten minutes to make her way up three decks. Five times, she had to find cover as crewmembers came by. By her estimation, the bridge was not far off.
She hurried forwards, then heard footsteps and voices approaching. She looked around.
There was nowhere to hide.
Lucius Worna clanged down the companionway at Siskind's side. He towered over the shipmaster. The ugly wounds he had taken at the Wych House had been left untreated, and had begun to scab in black, scaly patches.
"How long now?" he asked.
"Thirty minutes, and we'll be shot of the last supplier." Siskind replied. "Then another hour as we light the engines, disengage anchors and calculate the last of the mass-velocity transactions. I thought I'd take supper now. Will you join me?"
Worna grunted. They reached the far end of the companionway, and Siskin
d swung open the hatch. Worna stopped and looked back.
"What?" asked Siskind.
Worna stared back down the empty walkway. He shrugged. "I thought I... smelt something."
"Like what?" Siskind asked.
Worna shook his head. "Doesn't matter," he said. They passed through the hatch and out of sight.
Kara breathed out. She dropped down out of the ceiling space and landed on her feet. Too close.
Thirty minutes, she'd heard Siskind say. If she wanted to be on that service boat when it left, that's how long she had.
The bridge, wide and low-ceilinged, was almost empty. Systems were cycling on automatic standby. Kara waited in the shadows as the Allure's first officer - Ornales, she seemed to recall him being called - checked over some console displays with two of his men. Then all three disappeared towards the navigation chamber.
The data was there, on the main console that extended down from the ceiling over the master's seat, blocks of information glowing on the repeater screen. She scrolled down carefully, reading off, until she was sure she was sure.
Voices. She ducked down behind the master's seat. She heard Ornales return, and walk through the bridge with his two companions. They left through the hatch she had entered by.
Kara rose again, and crept across to the comm station. The high gain vox was of an unfamiliar design, but she made sense of it. She set the band, altered the directional array slightly, and selected signal/non-voice. Very carefully, she typed her message on the worn, yellowing keys.
Dancer wishes Nest. Gudrun.
She pressed transmit. The machine warbled to itself quietly, and the words she'd entered on the display disappeared, to be replaced by signal sent.
She turned, and headed for the exit. She had, by her own math, less than ten minutes remaining. It had taken her longer than that to reach the bridge.
She ran down the bridge-link companionway, across a four-way junction, and turned left down an access walk. She heard voices a long way behind her, but nothing close. A ladder well took her down through the deck and onto a lateral access. The mess was nearby. She could smell boiled vegetables and grease.
