by Dan Abnett
Time passed.
The driver’s door opened, and the transporter rocked on its springs as she clambered back in.
‘I think we’re looking for a carnodon,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’ she said, gunning the engine and throwing the vehicle forwards in rapid acceleration.
‘Yes. I mean, working from the details here. I could be wrong if the specimens were changed after this list was made up, but it’s a simple process of elimination.’
‘Is it?’ she asked, throwing them around a street corner so fast the tyres squealed.
‘There were only four predators listed in the bombed-out pens. Discount the Mirepoix treecreeper because it’s an injector, not a biter.’
‘A what?’
‘It injects its prey with a long proboscis, and dissolves the internal organs, sucking them out.’
‘Enough.’
‘I mean, it doesn’t have a mouth.’
‘All right, all right.’
‘So, no bite wounds.’
‘Right.’
‘Right, so the saurapt from Brontotaph is off the list as well.’
Macks changed down, and raced them along another empty boulevard. ‘Because?’
‘Because it’s the size of a hab block. Falken wouldn’t have had to be drunk to spot it already.’
She grinned.
‘And the pouncer here, from Lamsarotte, we can cross that off too. It’s a felid, but far too slight to cause the wounds you showed me. Besides, I doubt it would have lasted long in this climate outside a heated pen.’
‘So we’re left with the, what did you call it?’ she asked.
‘Carnodon. From Gudrun. Throne, there shouldn’t have been one in captivity here. They’re virtually extinct, and listed on the Administratum’s prohibition order. It’s a felid too, but big, and from temperate habitats.’
‘How big?’
‘Five or six metres, maybe eight hundred kilos. Quite capable of biting off a man’s face.’
‘So, magos biologis, how do we catch a carnodon?’ she asked, heaving on the wheel.
Drusher looked up.
‘We’re… we’re going rather fast, Macks,’ he said. ‘Another call?’
‘Yes,’ she replied.
‘Another breach of curfew?’ he asked.
Macks shook her head. ‘Question stands, Valentin. How do we catch a carnodon?’
The habs were clustered together at the northern extremity of the town, gathered in tight, conspiratorial knots. Acres of wasteland surrounded each stack, littered with the flotsam of war and poverty. Much of the intense fighting during the civil war had taken place in this shell-damaged suburb.
Macks slowed the transporter, and guided it between piles of shattered bricks. They were approaching one of the most ramshackle towers. Ahead, the lamps picked out a pair of Magistratum transporters, parked near the stack’s loading dock. A heavy morgue carrier was pulled up beside them, its rear hatch gaping.
‘Come on,’ Macks said.
Drusher got out into the cold, pre-dawn air. The rectangular habs stood stark against a sky slowly paling into a gold sheen. He smelled the sweet rot of garbage, and the unpleasant odour of wet rockcrete.
‘Bring your stablight,’ she said, making off across the rough ground to the group of Magistratum officers waiting by the stack entrance. She spoke to a couple of them, then signalled Drusher to follow her.
They entered the wide doorway, and began to climb the crude stairwell.
‘They’ve held off so you can get the first look at the scene,’ she said.
Drusher took a deep breath. They climbed to the fifth floor.
‘Hurry up,’ she called back to him.
‘Hang on,’ he said. Drusher stooped to examine the rough wall, touching a dark patch among the lichen with his fingertips, and then sniffing them.
‘You’ll catch something,’ Macks said, coming back down the stairs to join him.
‘I thought that’s why you hired me,’ he said. ‘Smell this. Ammonia, very strong. Other natural chemicals, pheromones. This is a territorial mark. The animal spranted here.’
‘What?’
‘It scent-marked the wall with urine.’
‘And you wanted me to sniff it?’
Drusher looked up at her. ‘It’s textbook felid behaviour. The stain suggests quantity, so we’re looking at something large.’
‘Carnodon?’
‘It fits.’
‘See if this fits too,’ she said.
The derelict hab stack had become home for vagrants, and it was rare for these dispossessed souls to have any contact with the Magistratum. But one of them had been scared enough to raise the alarm, having heard a commotion on the fifth floor.
The stack apartment was a four-room affair, a kitchen-diner, a bed vault, a lounge and a washroom cubicle. The place stank of mildew.
And another smell Drusher hadn’t encountered since Outer Udar.
Blood.
The Magistratum crew had set up pole lamps to mark the scene, and it had been picted and recorded.
‘Watch your step,’ Macks said.
As they went in, the smell became more intense. The corpse was in the lounge area. Even Macks, hardened to the uglier aspects of life, had to turn aside for a moment.
The body was that of an older female. The legs, swathed in filthy hose and support stockings, were intact. The torso had been stripped down to the bones, and these had been broken open so that something feeding could get at the soft organs. There was no head, no arms.
‘They tell me the head’s in there,’ Macks said, indicating the kitchen area.
Drusher peered in through the doorway, glimpsing a brown, cracked object that looked like a broken earthenware pot. Except that it still had a residue of grey hair.
‘What’s this?’ Macks called. In the bedroom, her torch beam was illuminating a brown, fractured stick.
‘Arm bone,’ said Drusher. ‘Broken open to get at the marrow.’ He was remarkably composed. This was perhaps the most horrific sight that had ever greeted his eyes, but a professional detachment was masking his revulsion. The magos biologis in him was fascinated by the killing.
‘I think she was already dead,’ he said. ‘This is scavenging. A decent post-mortem will be able to confirm it. The feeder was big, but it took its time. Leisurely feeding, reducing the cadaver piece by piece, going for the most nutritional areas first. There was no struggle, no kill, although the carnodon probably made quite a bit of noise as it rendered down the carcass.’
‘Carnodon?’ she said. ‘You’re sure?’
‘I’d stake my professional credentials on it,’ he replied. ‘For what that’s worth.’
‘All right.’ Macks breathed heavily. ‘Can we get them in to clear this?’
‘Yes,’ Drusher said.
‘And can you work up something? I don’t know – a library pict, maybe one of your dandy watercolour sketches, so we know what we’re looking for?’
‘Glad to,’ he replied.
‘Good,’ Macks said. ‘ You look like you need sleep.’
He shrugged. ‘Where is the Magistratum putting me up?’ he asked.
Macks replied, ‘We’ll find somewhere.’
Somewhere turned out to be a torn couch in the empty room next door to Macks’ office. It appeared from the stale bedclothes that someone else had been sleeping there on a regular basis. Drusher was too tired to complain. Besides, as far as his relationship with the planet Gershom went, this was pretty much par for the course.
He fell asleep within minutes of lying down.
He woke with a start, and found he’d only been sleeping for a couple of hours. It was barely dawn. As was often the case, rest had freed up his mind, and there was now an idea buzzing around in it so busily it had woken him. He felt strangely energised. After years of tedious dead-end employment, he was finally calling on his primary area of expertise again, using old skills that he had begun to believe had long since atrophied.
He almost felt like a magos biologis.
Drusher got up, tucked in his shirt, and put on his shoes. The building was quiet and dead. He went into the hallway, and tapped on the door of Macks’ office. When he got no reply, he let himself in, and started to rummage among the dossiers piled on the wire carts.
He heard a metallic click behind him, and turned. Macks, her hair tousled, stood behind the desk. The sidearm she had aimed at him was slowly lowering.
‘It’s you,’ she grunted, her eyes puffy with sleep.
‘Throne!’ he said. ‘Where were you?’
Rubbing her face, she gestured at the floor behind the desk, where Drusher could now see a few seat cushions and a crumpled blanket.
‘You were sleeping on the floor under your desk?’ he said.
She cleared her throat, and holstered the sidearm in her belt pouch. She looked pissed off and weary.
‘Well, you got my bed, didn’t you?’ she snapped.
‘Oh,’ he said.
Macks picked up her boots and shuffled across to the office door. She leaned out and yelled, ‘Watch officer! Two caffeines before I shoot someone!’ Then she sat down on the rug, and started to pull on her footwear.
‘What time is it?’ she asked Drusher grumpily.
‘Early yet. I’m sorry.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘I wanted to check the autopsy files. From the victims. There was something I wanted to look at.’
‘That pile there,’ Macks said. ‘No, the other end.’
Drusher started to look through the files, wincing at some of the more grisly picts he encountered. Macks left the room, presumably to kill whoever it was that was being slow with the caffeine.
When she returned, he’d spread a dozen of the dossiers out on the rug, and was making notes with a slate and stylus he’d borrowed from her desk.
‘Macks,’ he began. ‘There’s something here that–’
‘Get your jacket,’ she said.
In daylight (though daylight was a loose term), Tycho didn’t look any better. From the side window of the speeding transporter, Drusher could now starkly see what had been merely spectral ruins the night before. There had been a melancholy air to the place in the darkness. Now everything was blunt and crass: the scars of fire, the pitting of assault weapons, the water-filled cavities of craters, the shock-fractures on slabs of rockcrete. Weeds fumed the city ruins, thick and unlovely, reclaiming the wasteground between tenements and stacks. The Gardens of Tycho were everywhere now, Drusher thought. The wild was reclaiming the city.
They drove in convoy with two other Magistratum vehicles, rattling down the empty thoroughfares.
‘Fresh kill,’ was all Macks would say. ‘In the Commission of Works.’
Falken was already on site, with four armed troopers in tow. Drusher wouldn’t have been able to tell that the building before him was the Commission of Works. Penetrator shells had caved in the facade, and chewed curiously geometric shapes out of the roof. The rear of the building was a dark cave-system of intact rooms.
‘In here,’ said Falken, shouldering his riotgun, and leading them into the mangled ruins. ‘Routine sweep picked it up about thirty minutes ago.’
They clambered over fallen beams, disturbing the thick white dust. The body lay in a nest of broken floorboards.
‘Civilian volunteer,’ Falken said. ‘He was on a registered night watch here. He had a weapon, but it doesn’t seem like he got the chance to use it.’
The man lay on his side, facing them as they approached with a face that was no longer there. Something had severed his skull laterally in a line from the point of the chin to the apex of the skull. It looked to Drusher like an anatomical crosscut pict from a surgery text manual.
Drusher knelt down beside the body. The linear precision of the bite was baffling.
‘Did you sweep?’ Macks was asking Falken.
‘A brief look. Rimbaud thinks he heard something.’
Macks looked at the trooper. ‘Really?’
‘Up at back, ma’am,’ Rimbaud said. ‘There was definitely something moving around. I think it’s still here.’
‘Is that likely?’ Macks asked Drusher.
He shrugged. ‘If it was disturbed before it could feed… I suppose so.’
‘Let’s go,’ she ordered. She and Falken moved ahead, weapons lowered. ‘Valentin, you’re up,’ she called back. ‘Stick with Edvin. The rest of you cover the front. Rimbaud, show us where.’
They moved into the dark, crumbling hulk of the ruin, every footstep kicking up dust. Falken, Rimbaud and Macks made their way up a staircase that was hanging off the remains of a supporting wall. Edging forwards with the trooper named Edvin, Drusher could hear the others walking around on the floor above, creaking the distressed floor, sifting dust down at them in hourglass trickles. Drusher could also hear Edvin’s vox, turned low.
‘To your left now.’ That was Falken.
‘Don’t get too far ahead,’ Macks replied.
‘Something! No, false alarm.’
Edvin glanced nervously at Drusher.
‘All right there, sir?’ he asked.
Drusher nodded.
‘Some kind of cat?’ the trooper asked.
‘Some kind,’ Drusher replied. He was becoming very aware of the beat of his own heart.
When it happened, it happened with such ferocity and speed, Drusher barely had time to react. There was a fantastic, booming detonation – in hindsight, presumably Falken’s riotgun discharging – swiftly followed by a series of pistol shots on auto. At the same time, the vox went mad with strangulated calls. The floor above Drusher shook with a violent frenzy. There was an impact, a crash. A scream. Two more blasts from a riotgun.
‘What the Throne–’ Edvin began, raising his weapon, and looking up.
The floor above them caved in. Drusher and Edvin were knocked flat, and almost buried in a cascade of broken joists, planks and falling bricks. Mortar dust filled the atmosphere like a fog, choking and stifling. Another gunshot.
Drusher struggled to his feet, pushing the broken floorboards off his legs. He could barely breathe. Edvin was on his face, unconscious. Something heavy had come straight down through the floor, and landed on him, half-crushing him.
Drusher blinked.
‘No!’ he cried.
The something heavy was the body of a Magistratum trooper, faceless, blood jetting forcibly from severed arteries. The blood sprayed up the walls, gleaming like rubies in the dust.
‘Macks!’ he cried. ‘Macks!’
He tried to reach her, though he knew it was far too late. Then something else came down through the hole in the floor. Something fast and dark and feral. It was the animal, the killer, trying to find an escape route.
It slammed Drusher over hard with one flailing limb, and he crashed into a plasterboard wall that shattered like old marzipan icing.
For a moment, just a fleeting second before he passed out, he glimpsed it. The shape.
The shape.
He came round staring up at Falken’s face.
‘He’s all right.’ Falken spat and turned away, wiping dust off his face.
Drusher sat up fast, his head pounding. ‘Macks? Macks?’
‘What?’ she asked.
Drusher saw her, crouching in the rubble in front of him. Falken was getting the dazed Edvin back on his feet.
‘Macks?’
She was leaning over the body. Drusher got up, and could see now the mutilated corpse was Rimbaud.
‘It got away,’ Macks murmured. ‘It got Rimbaud, and then it got away.’ Falken was shouting for the other troopers to sweep the rear of the building.
‘What happened?’ Drusher asked.
‘I didn’t see it,’ Macks said. ‘Falken saw something move, and fired. Then it all went to hell.’
‘It came down this way. After it had…’ Drusher paused. ‘It followed Rimbaud’s body down.’
‘You see it?’
; ‘I didn’t get a proper look,’ Drusher said.
Macks cursed, and walked away. Drusher crouched down beside the trooper’s body, and turned it slightly so he could look at the wound. The same clean, ghastly cut right across the face. But this time, a second one, abortive, made behind the line of the excising blow, as if the predator had been in a frenzy – alarmed, perhaps – and had made a first hasty strike before following it up. Even so the first strike, deep and into the side of the neck and head, would have killed Rimbaud outright.
But even in haste, so clean. So straight.
‘A cat? A cat did that?’ Drusher looked around. Edvin, blood dribbling from a cut above his left eye, was staring at his friend’s body.
‘That’s what the experts say,’ Drusher replied.
They drove back to the Magistratum HQ in silence. The sweep had picked up nothing. The killer had melted into the ruins beyond the Commission of Works as fast as frost in summertime.
‘You thought it was me, didn’t you?’ Macks asked finally.
‘What?’
‘The body. I heard you cry out. You thought it had got me.’
Drusher nodded. He felt they might be about to have a moment, something honest that approximated intimacy. He was prepared to admit how much he would care if anything happened to her.
‘If you can’t tell the difference between me and a hairy-arsed male trooper,’ she said, ‘I’m not holding out much hope for your observational expertise.’
He looked over at her. ‘Screw you too, Macks.’
She left him alone in her office, and let him get on with sorting the dossiers. A staffer brought him a cup of something over-brewed and over-sweetened late in the afternoon. By then, he was pinning things to the walls, and had switched to paper to make his notes. He accessed Macks’ cogitator, and called up some city-plan maps.
Macks came back just as it was getting dark outside.
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he said. ‘There’s something I need to show you.’
She seemed cheerful, upbeat.
‘Something I have to show you first,’ she said.
Macks led him down to the morgue. A crowd of officers and uniformed staffers had gathered, and there was almost a party atmosphere. Falken was passing round bottles of contraband amasec, so everyone could take a slug.
