The dark city, p.7
The Dark City, page 7
It took a moment to orient himself as the auspex’s view swept across the towers, spires and Ecclesiarchy piles immediately outside. He fixed on the preordained coordinates, got his lock, and trained the viewfinder on a glut of interconnected transitways about eighty metres down. After a moment or two, an enforcer convoy trundled across the nearest of them, klaxons blaring from armoured personnel carriers. A little later came what looked like a collection of looted groundcars and wagons, driven fast and erratically. Then a long pause, a hiss of hot winds, before he sighted the vehicle he was after.
A single groundcar this time, driven far more slowly. It had exactly the same profile and armour style as the one he had taken to get out here.
Revus watched the groundcar draw up to the entrance-maw of the tower opposite, slow to a halt, then crack its gull-wing doors up. A figure got out, dressed in armour very much like his. The driver looked around carefully, then moved cautiously up towards the tower’s main access chamber. It looked like he was trying to enter the combinations on the first of many locked doorways.
Revus angled his viewfield upwards, sweeping past row after row of blackened windows, until he was staring straight up into the cloud cover. He reset the image filters, compensating for static interference, and began to probe for heat signatures.
Nothing emerged immediately. Revus modified the scan, shifting away from the tower’s edge and out into the centre of the narrow void between buildings. That was when he got it – just a fleeting glimpse, nothing solid.
They were being careful still – keeping high, using the smog as a screen. No doubt they had better sensor equipment than he did, something capable of piercing the shadows at range. Still, the one glimpse he’d obtained should have been enough. He ensured the pict-image was stored, then got back up, walked the way he had come and headed down the stairwells. As he did so, the figure down at ground level finished doing whatever he had been doing at the entrance-maw, got back into the car, and drove off.
The two of them rendezvoused an hour later.
By that point they were deep underground, in a barrel-roofed hall that echoed with every movement they made. It was almost completely dark, and Revus turned his helm-lumens on as he entered the eastern end of the hall. Each sweep of his head picked out rust-mottled metal surfaces, rivets coated with grime, pocked panels. The floor was ankle-deep in oily water.
His groundcar was waiting for him at the far end, parked carefully between a pair of criss-cross support struts. The driver had removed his helm, and stood casually next to the slowly cooling engine.
‘Got what you wanted?’ he asked, tossing Revus the groundcar’s lock-slug.
‘Enough,’ said Revus, catching it. He reached into a capsule at his breastplate and withdrew a credit-slice. ‘What we agreed, Salax. Plus a little something extra for your trouble. If you’ve damaged the vehicle, though–’
‘It’s just as you left it. Trust me.’ The man called Salax took the credit-slice, checked the amount of coin stored on it, and nodded. ‘Not as useful as it was, given, well, you know.’
‘You’ll survive.’ Revus looked the groundcar over. After the visual checks, he ran a discreet sweep for listening devices. Salax was about as trustworthy as the rest of his contacts in the run-down Salvator undercrofts, so you had to be sure.
‘You’re not going to tell me who’s after you?’ Salax asked.
‘I don’t know who’s after me.’ Revus completed his inspection, and unlocked the doors.
Salax grinned. ‘I could get used to this, though. Mimicking a captain of storm troopers. Next time you’re out here, be careful – I might have recruited a whole squad.’
Revus got in. ‘Wouldn’t recommend it.’ He started the engine, and the doors slid closed. ‘They’d eat you alive.’
Then he was revving through the brackish water, kicking up a spray as he rumbled up the exit ramp, leaving Salax to find his own way out of the maze. He headed up towards nominal ground level, sweeping along the curving nexus of viaducts and suspended transitways, past the smouldering ruins of a water-treatment facility before powering through a rubble-scattered parade ground, replete with ouslite effigies of obscure Imperial generals and heroes.
Revus waited until he was halfway back into home territory before pulling over again. He reached for the auspex unit, pulled up the stored picter image from the spire, adjusted the filter controls, and took a careful look.
The auspex had picked out the flank of a military atmospheric, half-screened by smog, but with enough exposed to reveal an outline – something agile, not massive. Revus knew all the marques, and this was a Stiletta-class observation craft, unmarked and lightly weaponed. Many Militarum regiments used them, alongside the Arbites and some well-equipped enforcer precincts. He scanned up to the intersection of the right-side wing and the engine housing and got what he was after – a regimental ident printed onto the hull, together with a tiny insignia engraved in gold.
‘Palatine Sentinels,’ he murmured.
He sat back in his seat, thinking that through. That regiment was based at the Palace itself, one of a select band of Astra Militarum detachments entrusted with guarding the core estates of the Sanctum Imperialis. No regiments permanently based on Terra were slouches, but these were among the most capable regular troops in the entire Imperium. Given all else that was going on, given the huge demands placed on such precious resources, the fact they were tailing him was… interesting.
He could opt to go back to Courvain now, limiting the damage and alerting Spinoza to the interest from outside. That might be the prudent course. Then again, he had discovered little else so far, and nothing of substance that truly justified the risk in coming out here. Better to return with something to contribute, even if it only closed down certain avenues of enquiry. Gulagh had given him something to go on, even if it was only slender, and that couldn’t be left hanging.
Revus pushed the auspex equipment back into its casing, and restarted the groundcar’s engine.
One more call to make. He’d just have to be careful.
CHAPTER SIX
Once the shock had faded, you began to forget what the world had been like before the cataclysm. You forgot just how teeming every narrow space had been, how bursting with life, how cramped and noisy and garish and vivid. Where had all the people gone? Many had died, that was certain, but most had not. They were mostly there, somewhere, buried down deep and keeping their starving faces out of view. The effect was extraordinary, as if the entire planet had shrivelled up into a hidden shell, withdrawing its infinite tentacles into a tight and tiny curl, waiting for some change in the waters that would see it all emerge into the grey sunlight again. In the meantime, every visible horizon was moribund, sweltering under a pall of terror, consuming itself in a ground-out orgy of half-hidden violence that would erupt just as you began to think the fires had died out.
Spinoza had received a few more broken communications from the Representative’s adepts at the Sanctum. None of the comms-bursts had reached her fully intact, but the spirit of the orders was nonetheless clear: return to the core, reinforce the walls of the Palace until armies could be mustered to reimpose the vice of control on the urban sectors. By refusing to respond to that injunction, she was skirting with insurrection herself.
Except that, as an interrogator, no one had control over her save her master, and no one had control over him save the Emperor. The Representative could bring some moral force to bear, but not much more than that. The great and the powerful were all locked up behind their mighty parapets now, husbanding their strength for the long promised attempt at restoration, almost completely blind to what was taking place across the vast city-realm beyond.
So she plotted her own path. The Spiderwidow crawled through turgid skies, its engines still operating far below peak performance. Aneela piloted it, while storm trooper Sergeant Tallis and four of his squad sat in the hold. That was as much of an escort as Spinoza dared to bring with her – with both Revus and Khazad out on operations, Hegain and the remainder of the troops would have their work cut out keeping Courvain’s portals from being kicked in.
Still, you had to be mindful of certain formalities. Rogue traders, in her experience, were status-obsessed people. Perhaps because they operated so far from regular Imperial lines of command, whenever they were welcomed back into the fold they were sensitive to the point of paranoia about being given the respect they felt they deserved. Most of their breed, of course, never made it to retirement – their occupation was as dangerous as any in the Imperium. For those few who did survive into old age, and for whom the rejuvenat no longer answered and the attractions of eternal voyaging had begun to pall, the choices for their twilight years were near endless. Most end-of-life traders were fantastically wealthy. The prestige of having such an exotic character coming to reside on any given planet was enough to make the average governor salivate – Spinoza had even heard tell of bidding wars, with rival worlds striving to outdo one another in blandishments and incentives. After all, who knew what rare tech a trader might bring with them? Who knew what tales they could tell of the measureless void that so few humans ever truly explored? And who could ignore the prospect, once the sad end inevitably came, of getting hold of some of that immense stash of coin for the planetary coffers?
Which made coming back to Terra, of all places, an odd choice for a trader to make. It was not known for its paradise zones or pleasure sectors. Its poor inhabitants were too filthy and stunted to be of any interest to an explorer, while its rich ones were unlikely to have their heads turned by even the most prestigious rogue trader.
So this Ferve Clodia, this old contact of Crowl’s that Aneela had unearthed, must have been a strange one. Further digging in what remained of Courvain’s archives revealed that she was a scion of one of the greater trader lines, bearing a Warrant of Trade dating back so far that its return to the Throneworld had caused waves even amid the serially unimpressible elite at the Palace. How Crowl had ever come across her, and why she had chosen to make her final home in the otherwise nondescript urban zone of Ayavasta-
Majoris, very far from the centres of power and prestige, was a total mystery.
For all that, Spinoza had to admit that the woman had created a formidable place for herself. As the Spiderwidow pushed its way through the rolling banks of smog, Ferve’s private mansion emerged in stages, its sloping walls jostling for prominence with the close-packed spires and towers around it. Its topmost sections had been plated in what looked like beaten gold, with the ramparts carved into ranks of statues and mythic imagery, some of it traditional Imperial, some of it very strange indeed. Giant effigies of starships surmounted some of the towers, floodlit from below, making the whole place resemble some strangely shrunken and frozen space port. Spinoza’s practised eye could detect the faint visual interference of active void shields over the steep rooflines, which was absurdly impressive for a single citizen’s residence, however successful they might have been in their active career.
‘Place looks intact,’ Spinoza said, as the gaudy pile of eclectic styles swam closer.
‘From memory, she brought plenty of her crew back with her,’ said Aneela, guiding the vessel towards a slowly opening hangar door. ‘Capable of looking after themselves, I’d say.’
The gunship was shepherded in, and Aneela set it down within a gloomy receiving hangar. Tallis’ squad disembarked with Spinoza. They were greeted on the apron by a suitably eclectic mix of figures: three servitors with flare-barrelled guns in place of right arms; a diminutive abhuman with long white hair; a slender man in the pale dress uniform of a fleet purser; five armsmen in a variety of armour types; some kind of skinny, bald adept in purple robes and a visor over his eyes; a canid with an augmetic rear leg, and a pair of pearl-studded servo-skulls hovering warily overhead.
The abhuman made the sign of the aquila. ‘Be welcome,’ he said to Spinoza. ‘Master-at-Arms Eckart Silisa, in your service. I trust by His name that your passage was in good order?’
Spinoza returned the gesture. ‘As much as is possible in these times. And you are preserved here, I hope?’
‘By her powers,’ Silisa said, turning to usher them further inside. ‘As you’ll see for yourself.’
A long walk followed. The mansion was large, and the entire party tramped up a series of steadily more ornate staircases. It was consistently gloomy wherever they went, with shrouded lumens floating high overhead, half-lost in clouds of dust motes. The floors, the sills, all the surfaces, were dusty and flyblown, despite their evident age and worth. Fine marble floors were cracked, real-fabric rugs and throws were mouldering and insect-attacked. Where the illusion gave out entirely, glimpses of a rougher substructure became visible – ribbed mouldings, beams, struts and supports. The whole edifice creaked softly as they passed through it, ticking over like cooling metal, underpinned with a constant thrum of generatoria in action.
‘Like a voidship,’ whispered Tallis, as they walked.
‘Very,’ agreed Spinoza.
Silisa eventually showed them into a large chamber high up on the mansion’s western face. Groups of orderlies shuffled about the murk, some armoured and heavily augmented, some looking little more refined than the gangers who were terrorising the hab-spires outside. The large windows all had their blinds pulled down, and suspensors threw a weak light over piles of furniture and other ephemera – wooden chests, brass instruments, heavy-cast deck weaponry, Navigator House honours, cartographic arrays, command bridge pulpits – all stacked and arranged chaotically around more prosaic collections of tables heaped with dusty decanters and glasses, occasional chairs of various Imperial vintages and armaglass-fronted cabinets stuffed with items Spinoza had no terms for. The place, for all its surface disorder, carried a quiet hum of regular activity, with dozens of bodies moving between the towering piles of parchment bundles and picter lenses and lasgun racks, all travelling as if following long-engrained habits.
At the very centre of the chamber was a raised circular platform constructed of some kind of dark polished wood, perhaps twenty metres across, on which a collection of similarly ramshackle furniture had been arranged. The summit of it all was a plush high-backed armchair decked out, rather ambitiously, in the manner of a ship’s command throne, with faded damask covers over the arms and clawed feet. A woman sat in it.
‘Captain,’ said Spinoza, climbing up the steps and bowing as she approached. ‘I thank you for receiving me.’
Rogue trader Ferve Clodia was tiny. Not an abhuman like her master-at-arms, but withered nonetheless by extreme age. She wore a long velvet dress that sat loosely around a stick-like frame, and had a gold-rimmed augmetic over one eye. Her head was bare and shining, though the baldness was partly concealed by a turban of fine fabric with lace edging. Her features were sunken and wrinkled, but her one natural eye still shone with a fierce, dark intensity.
‘For as long as any of us can receive anyone,’ Clodia croaked, waving to the collection of chairs. Members of her crew sank into the most comfortable looking of them, leaving Spinoza to select the one directly facing the rogue trader. Tallis and his troop remained standing at the dais’ edge, looking incongruous in their sheer black armour amid such decayed finery. ‘What a bloody farce, eh? When I woke up this morning, I told the boy in my bed that it’s been amusing for a while but it was about bloody time someone got off their starched arse now and sorted this out. You agree, eh? Long past time a grip was taken, but they’re all perverts and degenerates up at the Sanctum so we’ll just have to weather this foulness while they soil themselves in private and try to decide whether to slip some acherosa into their fine wine or actually grasp this by the generative organs and make some damned decisions.’ She laughed throatily. ‘I send my boys out into the hives from time to time and teach the scum to fear the Holy Aquila, and it’s all tremendous fun, but it can’t go on forever. Makes me half wish I’d never made planetfall and just ran myself into dust up in the big black, but you can’t escape this world forever, not if you’ve got any piss left in your bladder, because it’s the best one of the lot. That’s why you’re here, eh? With that old husk Crowl? Why we’re all here, Throne preserve us – all the sad pilgrims and the hustlers and merchant-princes – you have to be here.’
Spinoza swallowed. ‘Very… much so.’
‘So then, how’s Erasmus? Still as dry as a commissar’s tear duct? He’s a good boy, your master – knows his stuff, knows his way around a ship like a proper low-deck-rat, I like him – but Throne has someone left something rigid up his arse and forgotten to come back to get it.’ The man in the purser’s uniform chuckled quietly. ‘I thought when I first met him that he actually didn’t like it down here, that he’d be off and up into the black himself, running after that woman he had stowed up at the Palace – never knew her name – but it gets to people after a while, this place, and we said, didn’t we, Albujar, that he’d be here longer than we would, and then he’d be burying us alongside the old Warrant and having the last laugh, despite that he looks like he’s about to cough up his final spit at any moment.’ Then her face suddenly looked alarmed. ‘But that’s not it, is it? He’s not taken the Emperor’s Last Coin, has he? Tell me not. Because – don’t listen to a word of this bloody nonsense – I like him more than most men and dislike him less than most inquisitors, and he never tried to ruin me, sleep with me or kill me, which is more than can be said for most people on this planet.’
‘He is missing.’
‘Ah. Well, that is a damned pity, because I have a little casket of something with his name on it, if it hasn’t rotted away in the cellar already, and I’d like to see him drink it here with me before my third heart bursts in my sleep and I go off to the bosom of the Emperor to plead for my sins and my virtues. So that’s why you’re here, then? I’d bet Silisa you’d come to commandeer our guns for the effort, and we’d have to send you back with a few slaps to remember us by, so now I owe him a fine meal and the boys don’t have to get unpleasant with you, which is all to the good.’ Clodia sat forward in the chair. ‘What’s this all about, then, girl? Where’s he gone?’
