Mincer sat at the prow, watching the low-water for new impediments. He gestured and Folik inched the ferry to starboard, swishing in between the trash hulks and the river-sound buoys.
Folik could see the crowds on the jetty. Big crowds. He grinned to himself.
“We’ll make a sweet bundle on this, Fol!” Mincer shouted, unlooping the tarred rope from the catheads.
“I think so,” Folik murmured. “I just hope we have a chance to spend it…”
* * * * *
Merity Chass had been trying on long-gowns in the dressing suites of the gown-maker when the klaxons first began to sound. She froze, catching sight of her own pale, startled face in the dressing mirror. The klaxons were distant, almost plaintive, from up here in mid-Spine, but local alarms shortly joined in. Her handmaids came rushing in from the cloth-maker’s vestibule and helped her lace up her own dress.
“They say Zoica goes to war!” said Maid Francer.
“Like in the old times, like in the Trade War!” Maid Wholt added, pulling on a bodice string.
“I have been educated by the best tutors in the hive. I know about the Trade War. It was the most bloody and production-costly event in hive history! Why do you giggle about it?”
The maids curtseyed and backed away from Merity.
“Soldiers!” Maid Wholt sniggered.
“Handsome and hungry, coming here!” squealed Maid Francer.
“Shut up, both of you!” Merity ordered. She pulled her muslin fichu around her shoulders and fastened the pin. Then she picked up her credit wand from the top of the rosewood credenza. Though the wand was a tool that gave her access to her personal expense account in the House Chass treasury, it was ornamental in design, a delicate lace fan which she flipped open and waved in front of her face as the built-in ioniser hummed.
The maids looked down, stifling enthusiastic giggles.
“Where is the gown maker?”
“Hiding in the next room, under his desk,” Francer said.
“I said you’d require transportation to be summoned, but he refuses to come out,” Wholt added.
“Then this establishment will no longer enjoy the custom of Noble House Chass. We will find our own transport,” Merity said. Head high, she led her giggling maids out of the thickly carpeted gown-hall, through drapes that drew back automatically at their approach and out into the perfumed elegance of the Promenade.
Gol Kolea put down his axe-rake and pulled off his head-lamp. His hands were bloody and sore. The air was black with rock-soot, like fog. Gol sucked a mouthful of electrolyte fluid from his drinking pipe and refastened it to his collar.
“What is that noise?” he asked Trug Vereas.
Trug shrugged. “Sounds like an alarm, up there somewhere.” The work face of Number Seventeen Deep Working was way below the conduits and mine-head wheels of the mighty ore district. Gol and Trug were sixteen hundred metres underground.
Another work gang passed them, also looking up and speaking in low voices.
“Some kind of exercise?”
“Must be,” Trug said. He and Gol stepped aside as a laden string of ore-carts loaded with loose conglomerate rattled by along the greasy mono-track. Somewhere nearby, a rock-drill began to chatter.
“Okay…” Gol raised his tool and paused.
“I worry about Livy.”
“She’ll be fine. Trust me. And we’ve got a quota to fill.”
Gol swung his axe-rake and dug in. He just wished the scrape and crack of his blade would drown out the distant sirens.
Captain Ban Daur paused to button his double-breasted uniform coat and pull the leather harness into place. He forced his mind to be calm. As an officer, he would have been informed of any drill and usually he got wind even of surprise practises. But this was real. He could feel it.
He picked up his gloves and his spiked helmet and left his quarters. The corridors of the Hass West wall-fort were bustling with troop details. All wore the blue cloth uniform and spiked helmets of the Vervun Primary, the city’s standing army. Five hundred thousand troops all told, plus another 70,000 auxiliaries and armour crews, a mighty force that manned the Curtain Wall and the wall forts of Vervunhive. The regiment had a noble heritage and had proved itself in the Trade War, from which time they had been maintained as a permanent institution. When foundings were ordered for the Imperial Guard, Vervunhive raised them from its forty billion-plus population. The men of Vervun Primary were never touched or transferred. It was a life-duty, a career. But though their predecessors had fought bravely, none of the men currently composing the ranks of Vervun Primary had ever seen combat.
Daur barked out a few commands to calm the commotion in the hallway. He was young, only twenty-three, but tall and cleanly handsome, from a good mid-Spine family and the men liked him. They seemed to relax a little, seeing him so calm. Not that he felt calm.
“Alert duty stations,” Daur told them. “You there! Where’s your weapon?”
The trooper shrugged. “Came running when I heard the—Forgot it… sir…”
“Go back and get it, you dumb gak! Three days’ discipline duty—after this is over.”
The soldier ran off.
“Now!” cried Daur. “Let’s pretend we’ve actually been trained, shall we? Every man of you knows where he should be and what he should be doing, so go! In the hallowed name of the Emperor and in the service of the beloved hive!”
Daur headed uptower, pulling out his autopistol and checking its clip.
Corporal Bendace met him on the steps. Bendace had a data-slate in one hand and a pathetic moustache on his upper lip.
“Told you to shave that off,” Daur said, taking the slate and looking at it.
“I think it’s… dashing,” Bendace said soulfully, stroking it.
Daur ignored him, reading the slate. They hurried up the tower as troopers double-timed down. On a landing, they passed a corporal tossing autoguns from a wall rack to a line of waiting men.
“So?” asked Bendace as they started up the final flight to the fort-top.
“You know those rumours you heard? About Zoica going for another Trade War?”
“That confirms it?”
Daur pushed the slate back into Bendace’s hands with a sour look. “No. It doesn’t say anything. It’s just a deployment order from House Command in the Spine. All units are to take position, protocol gamma sigma. Wall and fort weapons to be raised.”
“It says that?”
“No, I’m making it up. Yes, it says that. Weapons raised, but not armed, until further House Command notice.”
“This is bad, isn’t it?”
Daur shrugged. “Define ‘bad’?”