“Bad is your facial growth. I don’t know what this is.”
They stepped out onto the windy battlements. Gun crews were raising the trio of anti-air batteries into position, hydraulic pistons heaving the weapon mounts up from shuttered hardpoints in the tower top. Autoloader carriages were being wheeled out from the lift-heads. Other troops had taken up position in the netted stub-nests. Cries and commands flew back and forth.
Daur crossed to the ramparts and looked around. At his back, the vast, smoke-hazed shape of the Main Spine itself rose into the sombre sky like a granite peak, winking with a million lights. To his right lay the glitter of the River Hass and the grimy shapes of the docks and outer habs on the far bank. Below him, the sweeping curve of the vast adamantine Curtain Wall curved away east to the smoke pall of the ore smelteries and the dark mass of the Spoil hunkered twenty-five kilometres further round the circumference of the city skirts.
To the south, the slum-growths of the outer habs outside the wall, the dark wheel-heads and gantries of the vast mining district, and the marching viaducts of the main southern rail link extended far away. Beyond the extremities of the hive, the grasslands, a sullen, dingy green, reached to the horizon. Visibility was medium. Haze shimmered the distance. Daur cranked a tripod-mounted scope around, staring out. Nothing. A pale, green, unresolvable nothing.
He stood back and looked around the ramparts. One of the anti-air batteries on the wall-top below was only half raised and troopers were cursing and fighting to free the lift hydraulics. Other than that, everything and everyone was in place.
The captain took up the handset of the vox-unit carried by a waiting trooper.
“Daur to all Hass West area positions. Reel it off.”
The junior officers sang over the link with quick discipline. Daur felt genuine pride. Those in his command had executed gamma sigma in a little under twelve minutes. The fort and the western portion of the wall bristled with ready weapons and readier men.
He glanced down. The final, recalcitrant anti-aircraft battery rose into place. The crew gave a brief cheer that the wind stole away, then pushed the autoloader-cart in to mate with it.
Daur selected a new channel.
“Daur, Hass West, to House Command. We are deployed. We await your orders.”
In the vast Square of Marshals, just inside the Curtain Wall, adjacent to the Heironymo Sondar Gate, the air shook with the thunder of three hundred tank engines. Huge Leman Russ war-machines, painted in the blue livery of Vervun Primary, revved at idle in rows across the square. More vehicles clanked and ground their way in at the back of the square, from the marshalling sheds behind the South-Hive barracks.
General Vegolain of the First Primary Armoured, jumped down from his mount, buckling on his leather head-shield, and approached the commissar. Vegolain saluted, snapping his jack-booted heels together.
“Commissar Kowle!”
“General,” Kowle replied. He had just arrived in the square by staff limousine, a sinister black vehicle that was now pulling away behind its motorbike escorts. There were two other commissars with him: Langana and the cadet Fosker.
Kowle was a tall, lean man who looked as if he had been forced to wear the black cap and longcoat of an Imperial commissar. His skin was sallow and taut, and his eyes were a disturbing beige.
Unlike Langana and Fosker, Kowle was an off-worlder. The senior commissar was Imperial Guard, seconded to watch over the Vervunhive standing army as a concession to its continued maintenance. Kowle quietly despised his post. His promising career with the Fadayhin Fifth had foundered some years before and against his will he had been posted to wet-nurse this toy army. Now, at last, he tasted the possibility of acquiring some glory that might rejuvenate his lustreless career.
Langana and Fosker were hive-bred, both from aspiring houses. Their uniform showed their difference from Kowle. In place of his Imperial double-eagle pins, they wore the axe-rake symbol of the VPHC, the Vervun Primary Hive Commissariat, the disciplinary arm of the standing army. The Sondar nobility was keen on discipline. Some even said that the VPHC was almost a secret police force, acting beyond the reach of the Administratum, in the interests of the ruling house.
“We have orders, commissar?”
Kowle scratched his nose absently and nodded. He handed Vegolain a data-slate.
“We are to form up at company strength and head out into the grasslands. I have not been told why.”
“I presume it is Zoica, commissar. They wish to spar with us again and—”
“Are you privy to the inter-hive policies of Zoica?” Kowle snapped.
“No, comm—”
“Do you then believe that rumour and dissent is a tool of control?”
“No, I—”
“Until we are told it is Zoica, it is no one. Is that clear?”
“Commissar. Will… will you be accompanying us?”
Kowle didn’t reply. He marched across to Vegolain’s Leman Russ and clambered aboard.
Three minutes later, the Sondar Gate opened with a great shriek of hydraulic compressors and the armoured column poured out onto the main south highway in triple file.
“Who has ordered this alarm?” The question came from three mouths at once, dull, electronic, emotionless.
Marshal Gnide, strategic commander of Vervun Primary and chief military officer of Vervunhive, paused before replying. It was difficult to know which face to answer.
“Who?” the voices repeated.
Gnide stood in the softly lit, warm audience hall of the Imperial House Sondar, at the very summit of the Main Spine. He wished he’d taken off his blue, floor-length, braid-trimmed greatcoat before entering. His plumed cap was heavy and itched his brow.
“It is necessary, High One.”
The three servitors, limp and supported only by the wires and leads that descended from the ceiling trackways, circled him. One was a thin, androgynous boy with dye-stained skin. Another was a voluptuous girl, naked and branded with golden runes. The third was a chubby cherub, a toy harp in its pudgy hands, swan-wings sutured to its back. All of them lolled on their tubes and strings, blank-eyed.
Servos whined and the girl swung closer to Gnide, her limp feet trailing on the tiled floor.
“Are you my loyal marshal?” she asked, in that same flat monotone, that voice that wasn’t hers.
Gnide ignored her, looking past the meat puppet—as he called it—to the ornamental iron tank in the far corner of the room. The metal of the tank was dark and tarnished with startlingly green rust. A single round porthole looked out like a cataract-glazed eye.
“You know I am, High One.”
“Then why this disobedience?” the youth asked, atrophied limbs trembling as the strings and leads swung him round.
“This is not disobedience, High One. This is duty. And I will not speak to your puppets. I asked for audience with House Ruler Salvador Sondar himself.”
The cherub swung abruptly round into Gnide’s face. Sub-dermal tensors pulled its bloated mouth into a grin that was utterly unmatched by its dead eyes.
“They are me and I am them! You will address me through them!”
Gnide pushed the dangling cherub aside, flinching at the touch of its pallid flesh on his hand. He stalked up the low steps to the iron tank and stared into the lens port.
“Zoica mobilises against us, High One! A new Trade War is upon us! Orbital scans show this to be true!”
“It is not called Zoica,” the girl said from behind him. “Use its name.”
Gnide sighed. “Ferrozoica Hive Manufactory,” he said.
“At last, some respect,” rattled the cherub, bobbing around Gnide. “Our old foes, now our most worthy trading partners. They are our brethren, our fellow trade-hive. We do not raise arms against them.”