The dark city, p.11
The Dark City, page 11
Revus forced his muscles to relax, one by one. It was getting harder to come down from that low-level tenseness he maintained during operations. Age was a part of it – he was less malleable than he had been, like a hard-worn piece of synth-leather that now cracked where it used to flex. ‘No sign of him. Not in Salvator, not beyond. I shouldn’t be surprised – he was always careful.’ Wrists, forearms, upper arms, shoulders. ‘I looked into off-world.’
Spinoza nodded. ‘He has to try that, at some stage. I mean, we know what Franck told him – the last elements of the conspiracy have already left. It has to be away from Terra. Whatever, wherever this thing is.’
‘But that would be difficult, even for him. Not getting into orbit, maybe, but further out. I made my own enquiries, and everything my contacts are saying checks out.’ Neck, jawline, brow. ‘There’s an iron vice clamped over the realspace barrier. They’re shooting before asking questions, just knocking tonnage clean out of the void.’
‘He could break that.’
‘Possibly.’ When he had been in optimal condition, probably. Even a year ago, maybe. Right now, starved of Erunion’s potions and with everything that had got at him since the xenos incursion, almost certainly not.
‘So we can’t find him down here,’ said Spinoza, smiling wryly. ‘And he can’t have got out. The last dregs of the Project are already in motion, a long way off, even while the world they seek to save burns to ash anyway.’
‘But you have something.’
‘A few scraps, here and there. Some material from Jarrod that we’re getting worked on. A book. Another broken mirror.’
‘Another one.’
‘Probably just smashed in all the upheaval – I took it, just in case. More promisingly, data-coils from a Mechanicus transport, stolen by our recalcitrant assassin. There’s so much material in those things that we’re struggling to know where to start. Erunion’s people are all over it.’
‘If they answer…’
‘Then we’ll have something, even if small, to work on.’
‘And if not…’
‘Then we’ll have hard decisions to make.’ She sighed, and flexed her bruised fingers. ‘I am still committed to this, captain. Finding him. Seeing it out.’
Revus nodded. ‘I know.’
‘But only as long as it can be justified. And for as long as I can stave off this damned interest from my own kind.’
‘There’s something else.’ Thighs, calves, ankles. His stomach remained painfully clenched. ‘I was tailed, too. Not sure for how long, but they got a good look at me. I managed to shake them off a while back, but I’m guessing they know where I’m based well enough.’
‘Just a shadow?’
Revus nodded. ‘To see who I was talking to, maybe. To gauge how serious we are. Maybe just get a sense of what we’ve got left. I got a pict of their craft – it’s Militarum, one of the Sanctum regiments.’
‘They didn’t make a move on you?’
‘No.’
‘They didn’t realise they’d been seen?’
‘Don’t think so.’
Spinoza let out a long breath. ‘Militarum. You’d think they had better things to do.’ She shook her head. ‘What’s your judgement?’
‘Could be connected to your inquisitor, but I doubt it – he clearly has plenty of toys of his own. Arx might have set two dogs running on us, but that feels wrong, too. Worst case? We have another High Lord taking an interest.’
‘Or a general. Or a sector governor. Or a hundred others.’
‘If someone’s authorised this, then we can assume they’ll move soon. They don’t have the luxury of assigning troops at the moment unless they’re serious about it.’
‘Quite. Still, it all helps to reinforce a decision Zijes had already pushed me towards.’ Spinoza sat up straighter, looking directly at him. ‘It’s me they want. Either to cover up what happened at the Fortress, or to get to Crowl, or to stop me getting to Crowl, or to kill our interest in the Project. But I won’t have this place attacked again. We need to leave. Make a show of it, draw them away and stay ahead. Start moving, keep moving.’
‘Then we’ll need somewhere to go.’
‘That’s what everything is aimed at. Hegain is already prepping the Spider-widow.’
‘Not alone, surely?’
Spinoza smiled. ‘I’m not as mad as Crowl. You’ll be coming. As will Khazad, you’ll be pleased to hear.’
Revus felt a twinge of pain at the base of his spine. ‘That will improve our defensive capability.’
Spinoza laughed. ‘It will. For now, take a rest period. That is an order. We’ll convene again soon.’ She turned the data-slate back on. ‘The work goes on. The first sniff of anything we can use, and we are out of here.’
CHAPTER NINE
Erunion tried to stand up straight, to pull away from the parchment-heaped desktop, and felt a ripple of pain in his hunched spine. He hadn’t had a proper rest period for – how long? Two weeks? More? That would kill him, in the end. He’d end up like the old man, riddled with agony and set on the long slide into oblivion.
Courvain had always been under-resourced. A citadel aiming to fulfil Crowl’s ambitions should have had its own separate apothecarion, its own autopsy laboratoria, its own tech-priests and its own extensive retinue of skilled operatives. Until Khazad had arrived – quite by accident – they hadn’t even employed a specialised assassin. ‘Working alone’ had been the old man’s mantra, as if there was anything particularly impressive about that. It had made him obscure, to be sure, and there was some value in that, but now that many eyes were on them, it felt like a policy of weakness, an indulgent and arrogant inability to trust, to delegate, to give up control.
But then Erunion was getting irritable from fatigue. He was getting fed up of patching storm troopers, or working with the lexmenials on equipment that really needed a true expert, of grabbing meagre ration-sticks when he could and never getting any sleep.
He looked around him. The citadel’s observatory was in pretty good shape, compared at least to the rest of the place. It had been spared the ravages of Franck’s invasion, and its shielded outer walls hadn’t taken much damage during the aerial dogfights. Almost all the main cogitators were functional, though they drew a worryingly large amount of power from the spluttering reactors far below. Menials were all hard at it – several dozen, shuffling between glowing lenses and scribbling results on scraps of parchment. A pair of auto-scribes chittered away, delivering hard copies of virtual analyses, allowing the more experienced scribes to get on with the real work of interpretation and deciphering.
They were good enough, Erunion thought. Not a patch on a proper savant, like Yulia, but efficient, and used to this kind of work. In the past, of course, Crowl would have been leading the decoding effort himself, along with that damned skull. Once again, the weakness of concentrating everything in one individual was exposed.
The doors to the observatory slid open, and his scrawny head jerked up. Spinoza walked through the doorway, her hair dishevelled and longer than it had been, her shoulders a little more hunched, her skin pallor just a shade greyer, and he rose to meet her.
You’re going down the same path, he thought. They all do the same, sooner or later.
‘Any progress?’ Spinoza asked, her voice clear but the weariness evident. She came alongside him. They stood in a shoulder-high trench running around the perimeter of the main cogitator-array, under the shadow of the greater mass of cable-linked equipment, which wheezed and clunked as the valves exhaled.
‘Some,’ said Erunion. ‘I was about to summon you.’ He turned to the reams of parchment that lay all around. ‘I can give you a summary now, if you–’
‘Please do. As concise as you can make it.’
Was that a criticism? Was he prolix? Crowl had never complained.
‘We have certain advantages,’ Erunion said defensively. ‘We already cracked several Mechanicus code-walls as part of earlier work, not least with reference to the transfer from the Rhadamanthys. Much of what the assassin recovered can therefore be read, with effort. The challenge, as I told you when this came in, is quantity. It took us several hours just to orient ourselves. The vast bulk of this is routine, as you’d expect – movements of supplies, requests for physical appointments with Imperial bodies, and so on. But then, I had an idea. You remember the ship, the Ohtar? That name was embedded in reverse sequence in the transmissions from the first vessel. We could enter its standard form, 00726174686F, into the binary screeds to narrow down the search. That worked. We began to get material of interest.’
Spinoza gave him a weary smile. ‘Very good. Anything on Raskian’s whereabouts?’
‘Nothing. From what we can see, the priests in Skhallax don’t know either. It worries them. They’ve had representations from the rest of the Council, and they can’t act on them. But this tells us very little, since the clearance of these messages is low down the chain, so we can assume that someone in the tech-hierarchy knows where he is.’ He cleared his throat, which was already too dry. Throne, he could use a drink. Was anyone guarding the stash up in Crowl’s chambers? ‘We get a repeated phrase – the Interface. That’s a common enough term in binharic – we ourselves might use the term rendezvous, or meeting place.’
‘For the delegation Franck mentioned.’
‘You’d think so. But here’s the strange thing – they talk about it as if it’s something they’re moving around. Something that came down in the Ohtar, and which they’re transferring somewhere else.’
‘No, I was there,’ said Spinoza. ‘I saw the cargo crate. Room enough for the xenos they transported. Not much else.’
‘Yes, it’s strange, because the power requirements, which they talk about more than once, are absolutely huge. Which implies a certain sense of scale. So something very big, very cumbersome, appears to have landed in Skhallax with the xenos, and has since been moved.’
‘Where to?’
‘We can’t decipher. Not yet.’
Spinoza took a look at the reams of close-typed runes. ‘This feels wrong. The whole point was that they brought the xenos down, and it was small enough to keep secret.’
‘But that was always strange, to me at least. Bring it here to do what, exactly? We know it went mad, but even if it hadn’t, what was their intention with it? Maybe its presence here wasn’t even the main event. Maybe something else came with it. Something more important, something Raskian needed to get this thing set up.’
Spinoza frowned. ‘I’m assuming there’s scope for error in these translations.’
Erunion stiffened a little. ‘Of course. We’re doing what we can.’
‘And I’m grateful.’ She rubbed at her eyes for a moment, and Erunion got a glimpse of how bloodshot they were. ‘What’s the time-index on these messages?’
‘The most recent is twenty-four days ago. They extend back for a few weeks further.’
‘Raskian has been out of communication for that long. His presence requires plenty of power. Could “the Interface” simply be a code for him?’
‘It’s possible, but he has a range of code names that are used elsewhere. I’d say it’s something different.’
‘Some kind of xenos tech, then. We assumed, right from the start, that a weapon had been smuggled in – maybe we were part right.’
‘Also possible. But here’s the puzzle – they brought it to Skhallax, then moved it. Where to? And why not take it to that destination first, given all the risk in running the cordon here?’
Spinoza pressed her fingertips together, furrowed her brow. ‘Crowl told me the xenos wanted to see the Throne for itself. Almost out of morbid curiosity. But that could have been a lie – maybe it needed something there, even just a glimpse. But after that, once that was done, things moved off-world. The delegation left, Raskian goes missing – the same process, you’d guess.’
‘This may not help, but the chatter from the priests at Skhallax indicates Raskian went back to Mars. They assume their home is suffering from the same effects as Terra, which seems likely. So whatever this thing is–’
‘It may well have been taken there.’ Spinoza shot him a dry grimace. ‘Right from the start, the one place we never wanted to go to.’
‘You cannot be intending to follow it.’
‘If Crowl did, I will too.’
‘Then you’re both…’ Erunion stopped himself, biting his tongue. ‘It would be suicide to try.’
‘But maybe they’re suffering just as we are, like you said. That might open some doors – if their sensor-nets are compromised, the command centres damaged.’
Erunion considered listing the reasons why attempting to infiltrate the Red Planet, whatever condition it might be in, was not just foolhardy but positively moronic, and decided against it. Spinoza would know them all. The fact she was even considering it made him wonder if her mind, too, was starting to turn.
‘More scraps may turn up,’ he said. ‘We have many weeks’ worth of material to crack and analyse.’
‘I appreciate that, chirurgeon, but we do not have that long.’
‘How long?’
Spinoza straightened, pushed her shoulders back. ‘I cannot tell you yet. Anything you get that might change this picture, signal me the moment you get it. Otherwise…’ And she gave him a knowing, resigned look.
‘You’ll give it a try,’ Erunion said, unable to think of anything worse. ‘Very well, I’ll keep at it.’
Revus did not take the rest period. At least, he took the minimal amount he could – a soporific to knock him out, then a chime to wake him after two hours, then a stimm to bring him back into full capacity. The combination, as ever, made him feel terrible, as if his brain had been steeped in sewage then wrenched out, but the training helped. You learned that quickly in the service – the rituals, the routines. Under-armour on, uniform snapped in place, weapon checked, helm checked, machine-spirits activated. Once the matt-black plates were tight against his flesh, enclosing him in the shell of Inquisitorial authority, you could begin to forget about any inner human weakness, maybe forget that you were human at all – just a weapon, a tool, a means to an end. That helped.
He emerged from his private chamber, blinking hard to clear the last grogginess from his eyes, then he was marching through the darkness, routes so familiar he could have traced them blind. Hegain was just where he expected him to be – in the garrison’s augur-room, sat before banks of strobing lenses. Other figures shuffled around in the cramped darkness, sliding data-slates and slugs into transmission nodes. The machinery crackled and hummed with the constant chatter of input signals.
Hegain started to rise when Revus came in, but Revus waved him back down and took the empty seat next to him. Together they looked up at the angled lenses, their faces bathed in swimming green phosphor glow.
‘You ran into an inquisitor,’ Revus said.
‘Yes, indeed we did so,’ said Hegain. ‘And that is the main activity I am performing at this moment – adapting the citadel’s longer-range detectors for the profile of the vehicles this one was using. Nighthawks, I believe for the most part, though I am informed that others may also be present, and must be accounted for.’
‘You were briefed by the assassin?’
‘Most thoroughly, in all aspects. She made a careful study while she was with him. Very complete, I have to admit.’
Revus’ gaze switched back to the main schematics. A network of delicate lines spidered out from Courvain at the centre, overlaid with all the complexity of the tangled urban landscape beyond. In normal times, the display would have been stuffed to the edges with moving aircraft, though now the blips of phosphor indicating an active target were sparse and slow-moving. A second cogitator bank processed all the signals, comparing them to filters supplied by the unit operator. No Nighthawk-class gunships had been detected, nor anything else habitually used by Terra’s many Inquisitorial retinues, but Zijes was of course capable of commandeering anything he took a fancy to. The trick was to search for patterns of movement, the kind of thing that would give away a planned assault. As it happened, the attack launched by Franck had actually been detected from a fair distance out using such measures, but the sheer numbers sent against them, together with their speed, had quickly overwhelmed their countermeasures. They had to hope that this new threat was not quite of the same magnitude.
‘You will need to expand the filter range,’ said Revus. ‘All attack craft on the records for Astra Militarum regiment the Palatine Sentinels, Terran depots.’
Hegain nodded smartly, already getting to work on the algorithms. ‘Aye, captain. It shall be just so.’
‘The moment you get a fix, alert me.’
‘It shall be just so.’
‘They may well remain at observation range – calibrate the scans for high altitude.’
‘It shall be–’
‘Yes, yes. What is that?’
Hegain adjusted the focus to home in on a cluster of signals to the extreme north-east of the scan range. They were not moving fast, but did appear to be coordinated. He zoomed in a little closer, right up to the edge of the scanners’ range.
‘Mm. I do not know, in all truth. Commercia traffic, I might say, maybe in convoy, if the times were of a different kind. What do you think of it?’
Revus studied the blips for a little longer. Hard to tell, at such range. Almost probably nothing to do with them. Still, if you wanted to conceal an approach…
‘Dispatch a remote skull. Two of them. Get an auspex feed, then get it analysed.’ He pushed back away from the console. ‘You see anything similar on the augurs, even at range, do the same.’
