Necropolis (2 page)

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Don’t try to stop me, outhab! I have a blade in my purse!”

The girl backed off, smiling. “I’m sure you have. I was just asking. The transits are packed and the exit stairs are no place for a woman with a kid and a cart.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe I could help you get the cart clear of this press?”

And take my baby… take Yoncy for those things scum like you do down in the outer habs over the river!

“No! Thank you, but… No!” Livy barked and pushed the gang-girl aside with the cart. She dragged the boy after her, pushing into the thicket of panic.

“Only trying to help,” Tona Criid shrugged.

The river tides were ebbing and thick, ore-rich spumes were coursing down the waters of the Hass. Longshoreman Folik edged his dirty, juddering flatbed ferry, the
Magnificat,
out from the north shore and began the eight-minute crossing to the main wharves. The diesel motor coughed and spluttered. Folik eased the revs and coasted between garbage scows and derelicts, following the dredged channel. Grey estuary birds, with hooked pink beaks, rose from the scows in a raucous swirl. To the
Magnificat
’s port side, the stone stilts of the Hass Viaduct, two hundred metres tall, cast long, cold shadows across the water.

Those damn sirens! What was that about?

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’?”

Bendace paused. “I—”

“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.