by Dan Abnett
Akunin nodded. ‘Yes, chief provost.’
‘So you are now the senior representative of the cartel?’
‘I suppose I am.’
Trice paused. ‘The cartel which… entirely failed to serve me?’
‘Well, put like that—’
Trice nodded to Revoke. Revoke drew his laspistol and shot Akunin though the back of the head. Akunin’s corpse slammed face down onto the low table, cracking its glass surface. Revoke snapped his aim up and found himself facing Lucius Worna’s steady bolt pistol.
‘No need for any of that,’ Trice said. ‘Put it away, Revoke. You too, Worna. Master Siskind?’
‘S-sir?’
‘I wish to employ fresh blood as leader of my cartel of traders. The old ones were so unreliable. I rather fancy you’d do a better job. What do you say?’
Siskind smiled. ‘I’d say put the bolter away, Worna.’
Worna obeyed.
‘Return to your ship, and await instruction,’ Trice told Siskind. ‘I’ll have clerks sent up to you with copies of the contracts. This is grown-up stuff now, Siskind. Are you up to it?’
Siskind nodded. ‘What about Unwerth?’
‘Leave him here with me.’
Siskind and Worna departed. Revoke knelt down beside Unwerth.
‘What do you get?’ Trice asked.
‘He knows little. Ravenor was careful. But he definitely brought Ravenor here. And he was paid to do it secretly.’
‘If Ravenor’s here secretly, it means he knows he’s out on a limb and can’t trust anyone, not even the local ordos. Which, of course, is very wise of him. He’ll be operating on… what’s it called?’
‘Special Condition, sir.’
‘Just that. A virtual rogue. And therefore infernally dangerous,’ Trice took a deep breath. ‘No more covert play, Toros. Unslip the psykers, unleash every secretist. Find Ravenor and burn him for me.’
FOUR
ZAEL PAUSED WITH the glass of cordial halfway to his mouth, and looked upwards. The glass slid out of his fingers and smashed on the floor between his feet. He didn’t seem to notice it.
‘Zael?’ I asked.
‘Didn’t you feel that?’ he asked. ‘I mean, you must have, it was so bright.’
I was about to reply when it hit me. A flash-flood of psy-power. Distant but immensely powerful, swirling across the hive. I was getting it real-time. Zael, foreseeing, had sensed it about to happen.
Masked in careful deceits, I reached my mind out. The vast psy-scape of Petropolis, to me a blur of dull colours and mind-forms, was punctuated by five specks of light that rose up over the stacks and spires, bright as super-novae.
Five psykers of great potency had just gone bodiless and were projecting themselves out over the city-hive.
They were hunting, searching for something. I saw pearls of fire spit out from some, dripping across rooftops, from others, beams like searchlights, tracking back and forth.
There was no clue to their identities, but I was sure that none of them was the psyker I had seen with Trice outside the diplomatic palace four nights earlier. I estimated I could handle any two of them, but all five together? They exuded a brute confidence and skill that reminded me of a devil called Kinsky.
I could not allow them to sense me. At my instruction, Frauka made himself untouchable, obscuring me, Zael and Miserimus House from view.
I found Carl in the kitchen. He was raiding the larder, piling a plate with cuts of meat, cheese and slices of swoter-bread from the boxes of provisions we’d brought in. He already had a goose’s drumstick clamped in his mouth.
‘What’s going on?’ he mumbled through it.
‘Something big,’ I transponded. ‘I need you back at your station.’
He glanced for a moment at the pile of food on his plate. ‘Leave that,’ I said. ‘You can come back for it.’
Carl put the plate down, but kept chewing at the drumstick as he followed me down the hall. It wasn’t like Carl to eat with such gusto. He normally picked at his food, and exhibited dainty table manners. He was also forever going on about careful diet and the trimness of his figure.
By the time he’d got back in front of his cogitators, he’d stripped the meat off and tossed the bone into the wastebasket. Still munching, he wiped his greasy mouth across the back of one hand and started at the screen.
‘Something’s going on all right,’ he agreed, typing at the keyboard and pulling up different displays of data.
‘There are at least five psykers active right now,’ I said.
Swallowing the last mouthful, he code-typed his way through further digitised information. Realising both his hands were oily and slick from the drumstick, he casually wiped them on the front of his soft, cream litten-silk shirt.
‘Lots of Ministry activity. Magistratum too. Some kind of alert,’ he said. He reached up and picked a fleck of goose-meat from between his teeth with his fingernail. ‘Sir, this is far, far more than the creeping backwash scans they’ve been running since the attack on Trice. This is all-out open season. They’re looking for something, looking hard.’
‘Any ideas what, Carl?’
He shrugged. ‘The Ministry traffic is coded. Encrypted, actually. I can’t break it. Throne, it’s the strangest code I’ve ever seen. Like they’re not even using words.’
‘All right, back down. Have they found our graft in the Informium?’
‘Not yet, sir.’
‘Nor should they, but keep watching in case they do.’
I swung my chair round to face Zeph Mathuin.
‘Pack us up, Zeph,’ I said. ‘We might need to exit in a hurry.’
He nodded.
‘Zael can help you.’
‘If we do exit in a hurry,’ Zeph asked, ‘any idea where we might go?’
‘Contact Doctor Belknap. He might be able to help.’
Zeph paused, as if reluctant to leave the room.
‘What is it?’
‘What about the others? Kys, Nayl and Kara? With Frauka on, they’re cut loose and on their own.’
‘That’s just how it’s going to have to be,’ I said.
NOW IN HER fifth hour as a dispatcher, Kara was going numb. Her back ached thanks to the spartan stool she was obliged to perch on, and her fingers were slowly going dead from processing the cylinders, sorting them, emptying them, loading them, sending them on their way. Worse than that, her mind was weary: the constant din of the pneumatic tube despatch hall, the poor lighting, the remorseless pace of work, the rattle-rattle-rattle of the multigraphing pool next door. Documents arrived coded or labelled with numerals she had to struggle to read before she could assign them. She felt almost overwhelmed, moving back and forth between repetitive physical action and lines of meaningless digits.
And they really were meaningless. In the first hour or so of the shift, Kara had assumed the sheaves of data she was being given to route were incomprehensible because she was new, and didn’t understand the complex workings of Administry filing and language. But that wasn’t true, she was sure of that now. Every file coming in or going out was just nonsense.
A gatherer arrived at her station with the latest load. He didn’t speak, didn’t even look at her as he dropped the bundle of brown-sleeved files into her processing basket. She picked up the top one, read the department code off the cover, then sneaked a quick peek inside.
Just like before. The files and documents had a sort code for identification purposes, usually a marker that meant they had to be sent from an anagramist department to a cipherist hall or vice versa. But the actual document was gibberish. No text that could be read, no headings or paragraphs or tables of contents, no graphs or results or minutes of discussion, no punctuation or syntax. Just oddly spaced columns of letters or numerals, sometimes one or the other, sometimes a mix of both. It wasn’t even as if they were written in a language she didn’t know. She was processing raw data in discrete chunks.
Just looking at it made her giddy.
A clatter beside her made her jump and she closed the file quickly. A servitor had just dropped a load of empty cylinders into the cage that sat at her feet like an ammunition hopper full of heavy stub-shells. She hooked one out, packed the file inside, and fired it on its way up the appropriate tube.
Kara knew she’d be feeling better about things if Ravenor had been looking through her eyes and scrutinising things too. But he’d suddenly gone quiet almost an hour earlier, and she hadn’t heard a thing since.
‘BOSS?’ NAYL WHISPERED into his sleeve, pretending to cough. Still nothing. That was the worst thing about having a little voice in your head: you missed it when it was gone.
He was pushing his laden cart down one of the main hallways, just another gatherer in the dense bustle of two-way traffic, following the signs to his next delivery point. No one spoke, but there was a constant noise: footsteps, squeaking wheels, rattling servitors, popping tubes, the occasional buzzer or call-chime. It felt like being buried deep in the workings of a giant clock, the springs and screws and gears moving all around.
Except, Nayl thought, there would be some regulated order to a clock, no matter how complex its design. The systems and motions and processes of this place felt more like the inner guts of some baffling engine, designed by insanity or genius or both, labouring away towards some final, unguessable, esoteric product.
You’re getting jumpy, Harlon, he told himself.
His current destination was a processing hall on level nineteen. When he got there, he had to join the end of a queue of gatherers waiting to enter. He took a rest, leaning on the handle of his cart as the line slowly edged forward.
‘Long day, huh?’ he said to the gatherer waiting in front of him. The man stared at him blankly then looked away.
Nayl shrugged and turned to regard the flow of workers passing by down the corridor. Other gatherers rolled up to join the queue behind him. He turned to face his cart, and idly reached down and opened the crinkled, rubber-stamped cover of the uppermost document. Inside, another stack of printout pages, covered in columns of characters and numerals that made no sense. Every document he’d managed to sneak a look at that day had been the same.
Maybe they do mean nothing, he thought. Maybe there is no more data in the Imperium to be processed, so the Administratum is just circulating random material through its systems in order to justify its continued existence. In a place as soulless and unending as this, he could well believe it.
A hand reached in and firmly pressed the file cover shut. Nayl looked up and found himself eye-to-eye with a frowning ordinate.
‘This is not reading material, gatherer,’ the ordinate said in a reedy voice. Instead of replying, Nayl took a cue from the gatherer in front of him and simply stared back blankly.
‘Deliver. Collect. Never tamper,’ the ordinate said, and moved on down the line.
Nayl’s part of the queue finally moved into the processing hall. It was the largest one he’d seen yet, the size of a mass conveyance’s main hold. It was impossible to guess how many scribes and processors manned the long rows of chattering data engines and arithmometers. The dry air was filled with the constant tympani of their fingers. There was the usual activity in the aisles: gatherers distributing or collecting, supervising ordinates, despatch runners, the occasional drifting servo-skull.
One dipped down and hovered towards him. Lights in its sockets glowed dull green, and small manipulator limbs equipped with quills dangled either side of its vox grille like the mandibles of a beetle. The drone extended a quick, bright bar of hard light and read Nayl’s slate.
‘Aisle forty-two,’ it told him in a buzzing voice that was entirely synthesised. Nayl rolled his cart towards the forty-second aisle and then proceeded down it between the lines of typing scribes at their stations until he found the first cogitator that matched his transfer codes. He put the file into the scribe’s basket. The scribe didn’t look up. Bathed in the screen glow, the man’s bloodshot, unblinking eyes reflected back the steadily scrolling digitised display.
Nayl continued down the line, distributing the folders into pending trays. Overhead, a tannoy announcement blared out, extolling the virtues of a fast, fluid work rate.
Nayl’s cart was almost empty. As soon as he’d finished, a drone or an ordinate would direct him to another aisle for collection.
He heard a sharp, sudden cry and looked up. Three aisles away, thirty metres or so from where he stood, the scribe at one particular cogitator had rocked back from his screen and was beginning to convulse. A fierce seizure gripped the man’s body, shaking him so hard several of his spinal data-plugs tore out.
Instinct told Nayl to go and help the man, but he stayed where he was. Not a single scribe in the room had even looked up, and most of the gatherers were simply carrying on with their rounds. A few, like Nayl, had paused to look up with vague, canine curiosity.
Two ordinates shuffled down the aisle and reached the stricken scribe just before he gave a final, violent spasm and slumped head first against his screen. There was an audible crack. The man’s pale forehead had butted the screen with enough force to craze the glass. The ordinates rolled him back. Even from where he was standing, Nayl could tell the man was dead. Blood dribbled from the dent on his brow.
One of the ordinates turned to the nearest gatherers, Nayl included. ‘You. Assistance here.’
Nayl and two other men pushed forward obediently, and helped lift the dead scribe out of his seat. Nayl could smell sour sweat, blood and a corrupted odour that suggested the man had developed sores from too many hours in his seat. Such gross physical ailments were common amongst the Administry workers.
A junior clerk arrived, pushing a metal trolley. Nayl expected to move the scribe’s body onto it, but the gatherers put the corpse on the floor. The trolley was for the cogitator.
The ordinates uncoupled the machine’s data trunks and cables, unscrewed the floor brace and then had the gatherers lift the unit onto the trolley. It was quickly wheeled away.
‘Resume your tasks,’ one of the ordinates told the gatherers.
Five minutes later, as Nayl was reaching the end of his aisle, he saw a small team of tech adepts arriving to connect up a new cogitator.
Twenty minutes after that, as he made his way out of the hall with a reloaded cart, Nayl saw that the cogitator was now in operation, a replacement scribe at its seat.
The body of the dead scribe still lay in the aisle, ignored, awaiting collection.
PATIENCE KYS BLINKED. She thought for a moment that she had actually been asleep, but her fingers were still striking the keys and the bright screen display was still scrolling.
She swallowed, recovering her wits, horrified to realise that she had zoned out for a moment. The repetitive function, the noise, the screen flicker had combined to swallow her into a sort of trance. She glanced around at the operators around her, saw their glazed eyes and slack expressions, and knew that, for a moment at least, she had been just like them.
According to her chron, almost an hour had passed since she’d last looked at it.
In that time, Ravenor had gone. She could no longer feel him. Something must have happened to make him—
She suddenly realised she felt sick. Her head was throbbing and the glow of the screen was making her nauseous.
She started to type again, but just glanced between her screen and the file she was meant to be transcribing made her gorge rise again. She put both hands to her mouth and closed her eyes.
‘Scribe Yevins, why has your process rate dropped to below twenty norm?’
Kys looked up. A male ordinate, so old that the augmetic implants in his withered face were starting to rust, gazed down at her.
‘I feel… unwell,’ she murmured.
The ordinate bent down at once, not to assist her but to inspect the information displayed on her screen. As he looked away from her, Kys desperately detached the plug-wire from the analyser Carl had given her and coiled it away i
nto her jacket pocket before he noticed it.
‘Get up,’ the ordinate instructed her. He picked up the file she was working from, noted the page she was on, and tucked it under his arm. ‘Follow me.’
She walked after him down the aisle, unsteady on legs tingling with cramp, nausea swilling through her again.
Ahead of her, she heard the ordinate speak into a hand-vox. ‘G/F1. Suspected subliminal. Please attend.’
The ordinate led her out of the department hall, along the busy corridor and through a heavy side door into what Kys thought looked like a holding cell. Bare metal walls, tiled floor, a ceiling covered with acoustic baffles. There was a simple wooden table with two chairs on one side and a stool on the other. The ordinate pointed to the stool and Kys sat down. It was hot. She took off her coat and folded it across her knees, fighting down the bilious feeling inside her.
Two men entered the room. They wore robes similar to the ordinates, but Kys had no idea what rank or department they represented. She tried to focus.
‘Junior Scribe Merit Yevins, G/F1, station eighty-six. Work rate dropped, and she complained of feeling unwell.’
The men sat down across the table from Kys. One had a data-slate, the other a fresh copy pad and a stylus. ‘This is the file she was working from,’ said the ordinate, passing it to the man with the pad and stylus. ‘I’ve marked the page.’
The man studied the page. His companion activated the data-slate. ‘Transcript of her work,’ he said, and slid it to the man with the file. He went back and forth, checking the file off against the slate copy carefully.
‘No obvious component,’ he said at last. He looked up at Kys. ‘Can you remember any particular character, character group or file sequence that you were working on when you began to feel unwell?’
‘No,’ she said softly.
‘Then did a word, or a word-part or any phonetic structure or group of characters come into your mind at that time?’
‘No,’ she said again.
‘Think about it,’ the other man said. ‘Try to recall carefully.’
‘Is there a sound you can associate with your discomfort?’ asked the first. He slid the pad and stylus across the table towards her. ‘Perhaps you can write it down? Or say it aloud?’
