by Dan Abnett
‘Leave it alone.’
‘It itches really bad,’ he complained.
‘Wait a minute,’ Kys said, stopping suddenly. ‘Let me check… No, I don’t care. Get on and don’t mess this up.’
‘Stop ragging me. I’ll do this.’
‘You’d better,’ Kys warned. She fixed the boy with her hard green eyes. ‘One hair out of place and I’ll debone you faster than you can say, Oh, Mr Ravenor, bweh bweh bweh…’ Kys mock-sobbed, her knuckles up at her eyes and pulled a stricken face, her lower lip stuck out.
Zael laughed.
She slapped him round the chops.
‘What the hell was that for?’ Zael asked, his eyes reddening with tears.
‘Just getting you into character. Come on.’
She grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him at a run into the quiet of the west entrance. This was a minor public entrance, just a couple of interlocutor podiums staffed by clerks and a handful of guards.
Kys pulled Zael up to one of the desks and yanked him to attention. From his high silver podium, the clerk peered down. He adjusted his augmetic implants to focus properly.
‘What is your business?’ he asked.
‘I need this one gene-screened,’ Kys said, indicating Zael.
‘And you are?’
‘Subsist officer, Formal E department,’ Kys flashed a leather identity wallet open and shut perfunctorily, just too fast for it actually to be seen. She was wearing a sober, well-tailored grey suit, her hair in a tight coil, and no make-up. Her blunt demeanour and austere look was precisely that of a humourless social welfare agent. ‘Found this one sleeping rough. Thieving too. We need a screen to establish next of kin and get him assigned.’
The clerk looked at Zael. The boy’s clothes were worn and frayed, and his face was sullen.
‘Very well,’ The clerk selected some coloured forms from his desk and passed them to her through the grille. ‘Fill these out. There’s a booth over there. Then bring him back for scanning. The fee will be two crowns.’
‘Thank you,’ Kys replied. She tucked the forms under her arm and led Zael over to the writing booths.
‘We’re inside, Carl. Just say the word,’ she whispered.
BELOW THEM, THE city whipped by, dark and dotted with lights. The hindwind was fierce. Kara feared for a moment that it would lift their globes right up into the stratosphere.
The vast, illuminated shape of the Informium was coming up. A gigantic rotunda of basalt, its exterior dressed in ashlar and swathed with climbing ivy and tether-weed around its upper levels. It was one of the largest single buildings in the inner Formals, and the depository of all civic documents and records for Eustis Majoris.
‘Fourteen seconds!’ Kara voxed. ‘Fifteen. Sixteen. Release!’
Kara hit her harness lock. Let go, her globe shot up at once and was lost in the high altitudes of the storm. She dropped like a rock. There was no time to look around for Nayl. Blackness turned over and under her. The city lights whirled dizzily.
Then the upper parapets of the rotunda were rushing up at her. Kara coiled, and landed with a winding impact on a fringe of stone roofway thick with bushy tetherweed and ivy. The plant growth helped cushion her landing. She rolled hard to rob her body of momentum. Sheen birds, startled by her landing, flocked up into the sky.
Battered by the wind and streaming rain, she got to her feet.
‘Kara?’ the vox crackled.
‘Harlon?’
‘Teensy problem.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Somewhere I’d rather not be.’
She scrambled to the edge of the stone roof, struggling through the acid-bleached ivy and stiff weed. She peered down. The sheer drop was giddying. The street was a necklace of lights a kilometre below.
Ten metres beneath her, Nayl was hanging over the drop, clinging to the beard of ivy that cascaded down the outer wall.
‘You stupid ninker,’ she said.
‘Thanks for that. Uh, help?’
Kara quickly unwound the mono-filament line wrapped around her waist. From below, over the vox, she heard Nayl curse. The bushy vines were weak and sickly from years of acid rain, and they were beginning to tear and snap under his weight.
‘Kara?’ Carl voxed. ‘Is everything all right? Are you in position?’
‘We’re fine. Everything’s fine,’ she heard Nayl vox back. ‘We’ll call you back as soon as we’re in place.’
‘Okay, Thonius out.’
‘Why did you tell him that?’ Kara called down.
‘I don’t want to mess up his frigging plan, do I? I don’t want to let him down. He’s trying to prove something to the boss with this operation.’
‘Harlon, you don’t even like Carl. You’ve never liked him. You—’
‘Kara. Baby. Quit it with the mouth and help me, for Throne’s sake.’
‘Okay. Don’t move. Don’t even breathe.’
STANDING IN THE booth, Kys mimed writing with the pen. She’d finished filling out the forms minutes earlier. Now she was just playing for time. She sent a nudge.
+Carl? We’re waiting.+
‘Keep doing just that. Kara and Nayl are not quite in place.’
+Is there a problem, lady?+
Kys stiffened. The telepathic voice wasn’t Ravenor, it wasn’t any mind-voice she knew. It had come from right beside her.
+Zael? Was that you?+
+Yeah. It was me.+
+I didn’t know you could cast. Since when could you cast?+
+I dunno. I just thought out loud and there you were.+
Kys looked at him. After all these months, she still didn’t know what to make of the kid. There was something about Zael that worried her, scared her even.
And it took quite a lot to scare Patience Kys.
WYSTAN FRAUKA LOOKED up from his data-slate. It was yet another of the tediously bad erotic novels he wiled away his time reading, though he never seemed to derive any titillation from them at all. He took the lho-stick out of his mouth, exhaled, and said, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘What do you mean?’ I replied, using my chair’s voice transponder.
‘Something’s the matter. I can tell.’
‘Really? How?’ I asked.
‘It’s the way you always…’ his voice trailed off and he shook his head sadly. ‘You’re a floating box. I don’t have the first clue. I was trying to be personable. Remember how you said I should improve my people skills?’
‘I remember,’ I said. ‘Here’s a tip. Referring to me as a “floating box” is not all that personable.’
‘Right ho,’ he said.
‘However, there is a problem,’ I admitted. ‘Carl’s in place, so are Kys and Zael. But Kara and Nayl are experiencing difficulties.’
‘So intervene. Help them,’ Wystan said.
‘Carl’s so anxious to run this show and make it work. He wants to prove himself to me. If I intervene, it’ll dent his confidence. It’ll look like I don’t trust his abilities.’
‘So?’
‘So I’m supposed to be training him. Making an inquisitor out of him.’
‘If he screws up, he screws up this entire operation, right? I thought you told me it was important.’
+It is important?+
Wystan stubbed out his lho-stick and immediately lit another. ‘Hello?’
Sometimes I forgot that Frauka was deaf to my mind.
‘It is important. Very important. I’m impressed, Wystan, I didn’t think you were even listening at the briefing.’
‘You wound me, inquisitor. I listen. Quite often, actually. I just don’t care much.’
We were holed up together in an empty hab on the sixtieth floor of a stack two kilometres from the Informium. The place was a dank wreck, rain pelting hard against the smeary window. Wystan was sprawled on a sofa that looked as if it had been used as a practice target on an artillery range and then given to hungry rats. He was my untouchable, my psychic blank, the real outsider of
my team. Most of the time there was very little for him to do, and he sat around with his limiter activated, smoking and speed-reading his dreary pornography.
I cast my psi wide, and summoned a picture of Kara on the roof of the Informium, Nayl hanging from the slowly tearing vines below her.
‘You said they were experiencing difficulties,’ Frauka said.
‘Yes.’
‘What sort of difficulties?’ he asked. ‘The falling off a tall building to certain death hundreds of metres below kind,’ I said. ‘Bummer,’ he remarked casually.
‘ANY TIME YOU like,’ Nayl murmured. The vines were really starting to give way now.
Kara played out the filament line down to Nayl.
‘Grab it and hook it up!’
He got hold of the end, swaying out as he did so on the bending boughs. Frantically, he cinched the carabine to his belt.
She tightened the line and braced her body against the stonework.
‘I’m having a sodding ball, you know,’ Nayl mumbled.
‘Try and stay rigid. I’m going to lift you now.’
‘Rigid. Not a problem.’
‘Here we go.’
It took thirty seconds. Thirty seconds of effort that almost broke Kara’s back. Nayl dragged himself up over the lip of the roof.
‘Ahem? Are you there yet?’ Thonius voxed.
‘Two minutes more, Carl. That’s a promise,’ Kara replied.
Kara got Harlon to his feet and together they hurried up the slope of the donjon’s domed metal roof towards the branching radiator vanes that rose like a metal forest from the summit of the dome.
Most of the data storage in the Petropolis Informium was beneath the ground in colossal vaults, or housed in crypts in the building’s massive outer walls. The sheer quantity of cogitator activity in the donjon was so great that it generated a staggering amount of bleed heat. Superconductor nets, laced throughout the Informium’s superstructure, channelled the heat waste away to prevent the files from corrupting or combusting, and it was vented into the central flues of the building and out through the roof vanes.
Harlon and Kara hurried in amongst the acid-gnawed trees of the radiator array. Despite the screaming winds and heavy rain, they were both sweating profusely in their sealed suits thanks to the exertion.
They began powerdriving open the inspection plates of the radiator vane, one by one, and packed each thermostat with insulation felt. In short order, six of the vanes were packed and resealed.
‘Carl… We’re in place and the vanes are lagged,’ Kara voxed. ‘You’re good to go.’
‘THEY TELL ME the internal vaulting is really worth a look,’ Thonius said. ‘They say, Lingstrom, they say, for that is my name… did I mention that?’
‘Yes, sir,’ replied the docent. His mind was still a little punchy from the essay the visitor had delivered on ouslite dressing and the miracles of ornamentation the Informium’s original architect had managed, despite a lifelong battle with scrofula and ‘a testicular asymmetry’.
‘Well, I should so love to see the internal vaulting.’
‘The building’s about to close to the public,’ the docent said. ‘In just a few minutes, in fact.’
‘That’s all I’d need,’ Thonius said. ‘Just a peek, you understand.’
‘Very well,’ the docent replied. He led Thonius across the marble floor to the silver podiums of the public interlocutors.
‘What is your business?’ asked the nearest.
‘A visitor expressing interest in the architecture,’ the docent explained. ‘A very knowledgeable man. He’d like to see the internal vaulting. He understands that public access will finish in a short while.’
‘Very well,’ said the clerk.
‘Thank you, dear sir!’ said Thonius, bowing.
The silver podium chattered quietly and issued a yellow pass ribbon from a slot in its side. The docent took it and pinned it to Thonius’s lapel. ‘Visitors’ permit,’ he explained. ‘Public areas only.’
Carl smiled. The docent wore a pass ribbon of his own, but his was scarlet instead of pale yellow.
They passed between the podiums, pausing to let the optic scanners read their permits. Then the docent led Carl through the broad archways onto the wide marble terrace that ringed the ground floor of the inner rotunda. The cavernous vaulted roof rose above them, a kilometre high.
‘Oh, now that is quite magical!’ Thonius cried.
‘I’d like my diversion now, please,’ he whispered into his vox.
KYS GRABBED ZAEL by the wrist.
+We’re on.+
She led him back to the interlocuter’s podium and handed over the forms, along with the payment.
The clerk painstakingly read and stamped each form in turn. ‘All in order,’ he said. He wound on a brass handle.
Part of the silver podium’s front slid open to lever out an articulated glass palm reader.
‘Place his hand on the plate, mamzel.’
‘Do it,’ Kys instructed the boy. Zael did as he was told.
There was a pause. A light on the podium flashed diffidently. ‘Now that can’t be right…’ the clerk began.
Klaxons started to howl on full alert. Screamer alarms started to shrill. There was a hollow series of clangs as security hatches slammed closed around the Informium, sealing every exit shut with portcullis cages of electrified bars. The guards looked at each other, raised their weapons, and hurried forward. ‘One diversion, as ordered,’ whispered Patience Kys.
‘WHAT IN THE name of Terra is that awful ruckus?’ Thonius cried.
The docent turned, unnerved at the screaming alarms. Guards and other staff members were hurrying back to the podiums behind them. The outer doors of the building had auto-caged.
‘A security breach!’ the docent said. ‘You’ll have to come with me. Back into the atrium. We’ll need to do a head count and permit check.’
Thonius grabbed him, fearfully. ‘Are we in danger, my friend? I can’t abide danger!’
The docent gently undid Thonius’s grip and ushered him on. ‘You’re perfectly safe, sir. Just head for the exit over there and join the other visitors assembling in the atrium. The guards will tick you off the list. I can assure you, you’re perfectly safe. The guards are very professional, and this kind of thing hardly ever happens.’
Thonius blinked at the young man. ‘You’re not going to leave me, are you?’ he said.
‘You’ll be perfectly safe, sir,’ the docent assured him. ‘Just go to the exit over there and wait. I have to check in at the staff muster point and await instructions.’
‘But—’
‘Really, sir, there’s nothing to worry about. That exit there.’
‘Bless you,’ said Thonius, and began to walk in the direction the docent had pointed. Ahead, a guard was waving visitors out through a barrier gate into the atrium.
The docent hurried off in the opposite direction.
As soon as the docent was out of sight, Thonius changed course and turned back into the main body of the building. He passed a security point, and let the optic scanners read his permit ribbon. A permit that was now scarlet.
‘NOW LET’S BE nice and calm about this,’ the lead guard said, though he kept his weapon raised. Zael was doing a fine job of cowering in terror between Kys’s legs. Kys was staring at the guards in disbelief.
‘What is this?’ she stammered. ‘What the Throne is this?’
The guard looked up at the clerk as his comrades closed in on the woman and child. ‘What’s going on?’ the guard asked.
‘The reader’s posted an extreme crime link,’ the clerk said, as if he didn’t believe it himself. ‘It’s sealed the building, and sent an automatic response to the Magistratum headquarters. Units are en route. We have to secure the premises and… and detain the malefactor.’
‘The what?’ asked the guard. ‘Him?’
He looked at the teenager crouched beside Kys. The other guards had all aimed their weapons at Z
ael.
‘Him? That’s ridiculous!’
Up on his podium, the clerk shrugged. ‘I just do what the system tells me. He’s a malefactor. Wanted on seven worlds. High profile, max security case.’
‘You’re bullshitting me!’ the guard cried.
‘This is outrageous!’ Kys cried indignantly. ‘He’s just a subsist child—’
‘Calm down, ma’am,’ the guard said. ‘There has to be some mistake here. You men! Shoulder your weapons, you look like idiots.’
Reluctantly, the other guards raised their aim and hit the safeties on their firearms.
‘This has to be a glitch. Just a glitch,’ the guard was saying. ‘What does the system say?’
The clerk peered at his screen. ‘Palm scan identified as Rinkel, Francis Kelman. Eight counts of rape-murder, five counts of wounding, three counts of public affray.’
‘Him? That kid?’
‘It’s what it says. The system is never wrong,’ the clerk said.
‘He’s just a kid!’
The clerk shrugged.
‘How old does the system say this Rinkel is meant to be?’ asked the guard.
The clerk consulted his display. ‘Sixty-eight.’
‘Sixty-eight?’
‘He’s had work done—’
‘My ass he has!’
‘Juvenat drugs?’ suggested one of the other guards.
‘He’s just a kid!’ the lead guard repeated.
There was a long pause. The clerk shrugged again. ‘You’re right. It’s a mistake.’
The lead guard nodded. ‘Thank you.’
‘Let’s scan him again and sort this out,’ the clerk added.
‘Right,’ the guard said. He turned to Kys and the boy. ‘Come on, son. We have to read your hand again to sort this out.’
‘No! I won’t! I saw what happened last time!’ Zael’s voice came out from behind Kys’s legs.
‘Be a good boy now,’ Kys said. ‘This nice man is trying to help you.’
Zael had already peeled the moulded plastek glove off his hand, removing the fake hand print. He had tucked the peel into Kys’s trouser pocket.
‘Come on, kid. Up you come. We can sort this out nice and simple,’ said the guard, holding out an armoured hand.
‘VANES ARE COOKING off nicely now,’ Kara voxed. ‘Overheat in two minutes,’ ‘Excellent,’ Carl responded.
