by Dan Abnett
‘You’ll have to come with me,’ Falken said. ‘To Tycho.’
‘To Tycho?’
‘The Marshal wants to speak with you.’
‘Oh Throne!’ Drusher gasped. ‘I thought perhaps a fine…’
‘Pack your things, magos. All of them. I’ll give you five minutes.’
Drusher had very few belongings. They fitted into two small bags. Falken didn’t offer to carry either of them down to the transporter.
It was dark now, fully night. When the transporter’s engine turned over, the glare of the headlights filled the depths of Amon Street.
Drusher sat up front, beside the Magistratum officer. They drove up through the town, onto the coast highway, and turned south.
The cities of the Southern Peninsula, Tycho amongst them, had been the arena of a savage civil war that had raged for over ten years. The popular separatist movement had finally been defeated by government forces two years earlier, but by then the war had critically weakened Gershom’s already-ailing economy. Strict, Imperial martial order had been imposed throughout the Peninsula and right up through the Bone Coast into the Eastern Provinces.
The civil war had stained the air with smoke, and poisoned the coastal waters, killing off the fishing industry. The cities of the Peninsula were urban ruins where the Martial Order Division worked to re-establish Imperium law and support the impoverished civilian population.
Falken drove for two hours without speaking. The vox-set under his dashboard, turned down, crackled with Magistratum traffic as if it were talking in its sleep. Drusher stared out of the window at the darkness and the occasional black ruin that loomed out of it. This was it, he felt. Gershom was his nemesis. It had lured him in, a bright young man with an equally bright future before him, and it had trapped him like a fettle fly in amber. It had drained him dry, throttled his spirit, made him destitute.
And now this, after all his efforts to earn a crust to live, let alone a ticket off-world, it was going to destroy him. Disgrace. Shame. Perhaps a custodial sentence.
‘I don’t deserve this,’ he murmured.
‘What’s that?’ asked Falken at the wheel.
‘Nothing.’
They began to pass through armoured roadblocks where Magistratum troopers wearing the orange ribbon of the Martial Order Division waved Falken through. They were entering the Peninsula proper, the real warzone. Ghost cities, tumbled and forlorn, drifted past, lit by searchlights and military beacons. The dark landscape outside the transporter became a phosphorescent waste of fragile walls and empty habs.
Tycho was the principal city of the Peninsula region, and when they drove in through its empty streets, four hours after leaving Kaloster, Drusher saw a miserable calamity of twisted girders, piled rubble and smoke-blackened buildings. His face, half-lit by the luminous dials of the dashboard, reflected back to him off the window, superimposed on the ruins. Pale, thin, bespectacled, the hair thin and grey. Drusher wasn’t sure if he resembled the wastes of Tycho, or if they resembled him.
They pulled up outside a mouldering ouslite monolith in the city centre.
‘Leave your bags,’ Falken said, getting out. ‘I’ll have them brought in.’
Drusher followed him in through the towering entrance. Magistratum officers hurried to and fro in the echoing atrium, and limp Imperial flags hung from the roof. There was a smell of counterseptic.
‘This way,’ Falken said.
He led Drusher to a room on the fifth floor. The elevators were out, and they had to use the stairs. Falken made him wait outside the heavy double doors.
The hallway was cold, and night air seeped in through the cracked windowpanes at the far end. Drusher paced up and down. He could hear the rattle and clack of cogitators in nearby rooms, and an occasional shout from down below. Then he heard laughter from behind the double doors.
Falken emerged. He was still chuckling.
‘You can go in now,’ he said.
Drusher walked in, the doors closing behind him. The office was large and grim, a single metal desk planted on a threadbare rug. Half a dozen wire-basket carts heavily laden with dog-eared dossiers and files. A cogitator, whirring to itself. Faded spaces on the walls where pictures had once hung.
‘Throne. I wouldn’t have recognised you, magos,’ said a voice.
She was standing by the deep windows, silhouetted against the night-time city outside. He knew the voice at once.
‘Macks?’
Germaine Macks stepped forwards to meet him, a smile on her lips. Her hair was still short, her face still lean, the old, tiny zigzag scar above the left-hand side of her mouth still visible. The other, newer scar on her forehead was half-hidden under her fringe.
‘Hello, Valentin,’ she said. ‘What’s it been now? Five years? More?’
He nodded. ‘Deputy Macks…’
She shook her head. ‘It’s Magistratum Marshal Macks now. Chief of Martial Order, Tycho city.’
He stiffened. ‘Mamzel, I can explain everything. I hope the fact that you know me of old might mitigate the–’
‘Falken was playing with you, magos.’
‘Excuse me, what?’
Macks sat down behind her desk. ‘I sent Falken up the coast to get you. Throne knows why you started confessing things to him. Guilty conscience, Valentin?’
‘I…’ Drusher stammered.
‘Falken was beside himself. He told me he didn’t think he could keep a straight face on the journey down here. Did you think you were in trouble?’
‘He… that is… I…’
‘Teaching the daughter of some small-time racketeer the art of watercolour painting? To supplement the pittance Admin pays you? Come on, Valentin! I’d hardly spare a chief investigator to go all that way to bring you in. You criminal mastermind, you.’
Drusher felt a little giddy.
‘May I sit down?’ he asked.
She nodded, still chuckling, and reached into a desk drawer for a bottle of amasec and two shot glasses.
‘Get this inside you, you filthy recidivist,’ she grinned, handing one glass to him.
‘I really don’t understand what’s going on…’ Drusher said.
‘Neither do I,’ she said. ‘That’s why I want some help. Some expert help. I said you weren’t in trouble, and I was lying. You’re not in personal trouble, but there is trouble here. And I’m about to drop you right in it.’
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘Drink up,’ Macks said. ‘You’ll need it where we’re going.’
‘In your expert opinion,’ she said, ‘what did that?’
Drusher took a long, slow look, then excused himself. Coming up, the amasec was a lot hotter and more acid than it had felt going down.
‘All right?’ she said.
He wiped his mouth, and nodded reluctantly. Macks took a little pot out of her uniform pocket, and smeared what looked like grease under her nose. She reached out and did the same to Drusher. The fierce camphor smell of osscil filled his sinuses.
‘Should have done that before I took you in,’ Macks apologised. ‘Old medicae mortus trick. It masks the stench of decay.’
She led him back into the morgue. The place was chilly, and tiled with mauve enamel squares. There were brass plugholes every few metres across the floor, and in the distance, Drusher could hear water pattering from a leaky scrub-hose. High-gain glow-strips, sharp and white, filled the chamber with a light like frost.
The cadaver lay on a steel gurney beside an autopsy unit. Other shapes, tagged and covered in red sheets, lurked nearby on other trolleys.
‘All right to take another look?’ Macks asked.
Drusher nodded.
She folded the red shroud back.
The man was naked, his body as white and swollen as cooked seafood. His hands, feet and genitals seemed shrivelled with cold, and the fingernails stood proud and dark. The hairs on his chest and pubis were black and looked like insect legs.
He must have been about one-eighty
in life, Drusher figured, fighting back another wave of nausea. Heavyset. Bruises of lividity marked his lumbar region, and there were other darker blue bruises around his ribs.
The front of his face, and most of his throat, had been bitten away. Parts of the skull structure had gone, along with the soft tissue. Cleanly severed, like industrial shears had…
Drusher gagged, and looked aside.
‘Animal, right?’ Macks said.
Drusher mumbled something.
‘Was that a yes?’
‘It would appear to be a bite,’ Drusher said, his voice very tiny. ‘Very deep and strong. And then… the suggestion of some feeding. Around the face and neck.’
‘Animal, right?’ she repeated.
‘I suppose. Nothing human could have… bitten like that.’
‘I measured the bite radius. Just like you taught me. Remember, in Outer Udar? I measured it.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Twenty centimetres. And I checked too. No tooth fragments. This was clean. I mean, it just bit his face right off.’
Drusher turned slowly. ‘Macks? What am I doing here?’
‘Helping my investigation,’ she said. ‘I thought we’d covered that. I’m in charge in this neck of the woods, with plenty enough problems to contend with, I can tell you… and then this crap happens. I look for an expert, and lo and behold I find Magos Biologis Valentin Drusher, my old pal, working as a teacher in Kaloster. So I thought, Macks, that’s perfect. We worked together so well before, and this clearly needs a biologis expert.’
‘That’s great…’
‘Valentin, cheer up. There’s money in this. I’ll bill your hours out to the Magistratum, and you’ll get three times what the Administratum was paying you. Expert witness and all.’
‘You’re running the Martial Order programme here in Tycho, and you pull strings like that to get me to consider one case?’
‘No,’ said Macks. ‘I should have explained that too, I guess. This isn’t the only victim.’
‘How many others?’ he asked.
Macks made a vague gesture that encompassed all the other gurneys in the chamber. Twenty-five, thirty, maybe more.
‘You’re joking?’
‘I wish I was. Something is chomping its way through the population.’
Drusher steeled himself, and turned back to the exposed corpse, switching his standard glasses for his reading pair. ‘A fluorescing lamp, please. And a close glass.’
She handed him the glass from the autopsy cart, and held the lamp up, bathing the dead man’s devastated skull with blue light.
Drusher picked up a steel probe, and gently excised the lip of one of the revealed bone edges. He fought to keep his gorge down.
‘No tooth fragments.’
‘I told you.’
‘I mean nothing,’ he said. ‘Not even the bacillus residue one would expect from the wound mark of a predator. This wasn’t an animal. It’s not a bite.’
‘What?’
‘It’s too clean. I’d say you were looking for a man with a chainsword.’
Macks shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Why no?’
‘Because if there was a maniac with a chainsword running around downtown Tycho, I’d know about it. This is animal, Valentin.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ he asked.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you.’
The headlamps of her transporter picked out the sign over the wrought-iron gateway.
The Gardens of Tycho.
‘Well-stocked before the civil war,’ she said, pulling on the wheel. ‘The biggest xenozoological exhibit on the planet. The local governor had a thing about exotic animals.’
‘And?’
‘And, Valentin, it was bombed during the war. Some animals were killed, but many more escaped. I think something from here is roaming the ruins of Tycho, hungry, neglected, killing people.’
‘And that’s why…’ he began.
‘That’s why I need a magos biologis,’ she finished.
They pulled up and got out. The gardens were dark and quiet. It was still two hours before dawn. There was an awful damp reek in the air, emanating from the empty cages and the dank rockcrete pens.
Macks had given Drusher a stablight, and carried one of her own. They walked together, their footsteps gritty and crisp on the ground, playing the beams around.
The Gardens of Tycho had not been a sophisticated collection. Drusher remembered the spectacular xeno-fauna halls of Thracian Primaris that he had visited as a young man. There, the pens and enclosures had been encoded to create perfect habitats for the precious specimens, often with their own atmospheres, their own gravities even.
Such expertise – and the money to realise it – had not been available on Tycho. These were simple cages and, in places, armoured holding tanks, where exotic creatures from the far-flung corners of the Imperium had lived out their days on Gershom in miserable confinement.
Drusher knew exactly how they felt.
‘If it’s been caged like this, Macks, it will perhaps have become psychotic,’ he said.
‘The animal?’
‘The animal. It’s common in poor conditions such as these. Animals held in crude cages often develop behavioural problems. They become unpredictable. Violent.’
‘But if it’s a predator anyway…’ she began.
‘Even predators have patterns. The need to hunt, to breed, to territorialise. Limit those things, and you break the pattern.’
‘That’s important why?’ she asked.
‘If this animal is a carnivore, and I would suspect as much, it isn’t feeding on its kills. Well, only minimally. It is killing simply to kill.’
‘Like the hill beast?’ she murmured, thinking back to that haunted winter in Outer Udar.
‘No,’ he said. ‘That beast was different. Killing was its behaviour. Here we have an aberration.’
As they walked further, Drusher began to see the awful damage done in the course of the war. Bomb-shattered pens, mounds of rubble, plasteel cages shorn from their mounting blocks.
And bones.
There were corpses in the intact pens too. Limp sacks of dried flesh, scattered vertebrae, the lingering stench of dung and decay. A row of wire domes that had once held rare birds was littered with bright feathers. Tufts of down caked the wire mesh, evidence of frantic, starving attempts to be free. They reminded Drusher of Baron Karne’s poultry coops.
‘We thought everything had died,’ Macks said. ‘The stink when we first came down here. I mean, nothing had been fed or cleaned out in months. Everything in a sealed cage was dead, except some kind of emaciated dromedary horse, which had been living off its own fat deposits, and even that died a few days after we freed it. And everything in the bombed cages we figured was wiped out, although there are some finch-monkeys loose in the Lower Bowery, freaking little things, and Falken swears he saw a grazer on Lemand Street one night, though I say he was drunk.’
‘So if something’s loose, it came from the bomb-damaged cages?’ Drusher said.
She shrugged. ‘Unless some well-intentioned citizen came along during the war, and let something out and then locked the cage again. Some of them seem to be empty, though the collection’s manifest doesn’t say if they were just unstocked pens. It’s years out of date.’
‘You have a manifest?’
Macks nodded and produced a data-slate from her coat. ‘I’ve highlighted any item that was caged in the bombed area, and also anything connected to an empty cage. Throne, Valentin, I haven’t the first clue what half of them are. So glad to have an expert on board.’
He started to look at the list. ‘So it could be anything highlighted, or anything at all, given the fact that the stock might have been changed or rotated after this list was made?’
She was about to reply when her vox-link chimed. The sharp little note made Drusher jump. Macks took the call.
‘We have to go,’ she said, turning to h
ead back to the exit. ‘I’ve been called in. Some drunken idiots brawling in a tavern after curfew.’
‘Do I have to come?’ he said.
She turned back and shone her stablight in his face. ‘No. Why, would you like to stay here?’
Drusher glanced around.
‘Not really,’ he said.
They drove through streets that were deserted but for burned-out vehicles and the occasional Magistratum transport rushing off on a response. He sat in the passenger seat, studying the slate, rocked by the jolts of the uneven roadway. Relief was beginning to seep into him, relief that he wasn’t bound for disgrace and a custodial sentence after all. A little part of him hated Falken for his trick, but a greater part despised himself for being so foolish. Gershom wasn’t his nemesis. Valentin Drusher was his own worst enemy, and his ruined life was testament to the way he had studiously taken every wrong turn destiny had ever offered him.
‘Your hair’s gone grey,’ Macks said, her eyes on the road.
He looked up. ‘I stopped dying it.’
‘You dyed your hair?’ she asked.
He didn’t reply.
‘So you’ve matured out of that vanity, then, Valentin?’ she smirked.
‘No. I just couldn’t afford the treatment any more.’
She laughed, but he was sure he detected some sympathy in her tone.
‘I like it,’ she said after a while. ‘It’s distinguished.’
‘You haven’t changed at all,’ he said.
She pulled the vehicle to a halt outside a battered townhouse where Magistratum officers were attempting to restrain nine or ten brawling men. There was blood on the pavement, and the air was lit by the blinking lamps of the armoured patrol vehicles.
Macks got out.
‘Stay here,’ she said. She peered back at him through the open door. ‘So, is that a good thing?’
‘What?’ he asked.
‘The fact that I haven’t changed?’
‘I never thought you needed much improvement,’ he replied, immediately appalled that he’d made such a bold remark out loud.
Macks laughed, then slammed the door.
In the sealed quiet of the transporter, Drusher watched for a while as she waded in with her riot baton, and brought order to the scene. Then he turned his attention back to the data-slate.
