Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight Read online

  ‘Then, as you know, he would not fall under our auspices.’

  ‘Interesting. He thought differently.’ Crowl leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. The movement made his joints ache, but it was an affectation of Calavine’s. ‘He was in communication with your department regularly. Why was that, do you think?’

  Bajan’s right eyelid flickered, just by a fraction. ‘You have the records of this?’

  ‘Answer the question.’

  ‘I do not understand, inspector. How does this relate to our scheduled business?’

  ‘It does not.’

  Bajan looked properly confused now. ‘I had anticipated–’

  Crowl curled his fingers. ‘Tell me, then, about deposit account three-eight-seven-six-five, registered at Borlatte Vois accumulators.’

  Now Bajan looked scared. ‘None of this relates to our work here.’

  ‘I know, adept. That is the point. It is a very well-stocked account, for all that – far in excess of what might be expected for a private citizen in the service of the Throne. Its owner is Gerhardus Aolph. Of course, and as you know, no such person exists.’

  Bajan’s mouth tightened. ‘I have prepared reports. On shipping patterns.’

  Crowl ignored him. ‘You hid your tracks fairly well. The path back to you is convoluted – nine registered holding vehicles, of which the last – Aletto Urban – is entirely legal. If I did not have good forensic scholars in my departmento, you might have got away with it entirely.’

  Bajan leaned forward a fraction, his hand creeping towards a drawer. Gorgias noticed, and rose up threateningly, needle-gun extending.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ Crowl recommended, staying perfectly immobile. ‘My skull has an erratic temperament but a good aim.’

  Bajan’s hand froze. His expression remained blank enough, but Crowl was experienced enough to perceive the frantic calculations going on behind his eyes. ‘Really, I do not–’

  ‘This should be the end for you, Harker Bajan,’ Crowl said. ‘Filtering that much coin from your oversight contracts is just greedy, and I doubt even the most jaded overseer would be able to ignore it, once my report hit their desk. But you are in luck. Let us start again, shall we? With the things I am truly interested in. Why was Naaman Vinal in communication with your office?’

  Bajan’s eyes flickered, as he tried to keep up with what was going on. After a moment of thought, he seemed to understand, and slumped back in his chair. ‘Is this testimony protected under Inspectorate confidentiality?’

  ‘Yes. Not that you’re in a position to demand much protection.’

  ‘And my name will be kept out of it?’

  ‘Start talking – I do not have infinite patience.’

  ‘I do not know,’ Bajan said. ‘Honestly, I do not. The canisters were prepared from astropathic accounts and kept sealed. They were sent higher up – I only supervised the transmission.’

  ‘On whose orders?’

  ‘It had Ultra-Six classification. That is not questioned. I assume all the way to the top.’

  ‘I was given the name Cassandara Glucher,’ Crowl said.

  ‘She used to work here. I don’t know if she’s even still alive. The incoming register-address might have been hers, but that means little. We oversaw onward movement, kept the canisters safe and off-book, then cleaned up the acceptance records.’

  ‘It this normal procedure?’

  ‘It’s not as uncommon as you might think.’

  ‘Then I’ll need access to those files.’

  Bajan laughed, more nervously than with any kind of humour. ‘You are operating well above your clearance now, inspector.’

  ‘That is hardly your judgement to make. Where can I find them?’

  ‘For all the good it will do you, they were signed off by the Ninth Magister Calculo Horarium.’

  ‘You had project codes when processing this work,’ said Crowl, reaching for a data-slug and handing it to Bajan. ‘I’ll need those too.’

  Bajan took up the slug, looked at it for a moment, then grudgingly entered a series of digits. ‘I don’t want my name associated with this,’ he said again.

  Crowl smiled. ‘You’re consistent, I’ll give you that.’ He took the slug back. ‘Under the regulations of your office, as you well know, your position is now forfeit. The regulators at Borlatte are not sympathetic people. If I were you, I’d find some reason to get off-world. Then I’d stay there. You might even be able to access some of your funds if you move quickly enough, as I’ll be busy with this Magister – assuming, that is, you’ve given me the right names. If not, then we’ll be talking again soon.’

  ‘No, no, it’s all correct.’ Bajan looked miserable. ‘But my family–’

  ‘Take them too. Consider this a lesson in morality. Learn from it, cleave to a better understanding of His example, and you may yet make something of your avaricious life.’

  Bajan made to rise, then hesitated, eyeing Gorgias warily. ‘So what are you going to do now, inspector? You can’t possibly make use of this information. Just one for the files, is it?’

  Crowl rose, ignoring the spasm up his spine. He had a long journey ahead of him now, and his mind was already turning to what must come next. ‘That’s right, adept,’ he said. ‘Just one for the files.’

  Chapter Eight

  The two corpses lay under Erunion’s harsh lumens, every blemish and wound unforgivingly exposed. Both were naked, one man and one woman, side by side on polished metal slabs. Medicae drones the size of clenched fists mobbed them, taking measurements, recording picts.

  Revus watched it all dispassionately. Erunion had been busy for a while, his gloves damp with blood, the instruments in their steel bowls spotted with it.

  Eventually, the chirurgeon unfurled, stretching his shoulders back. He unclipped his visor from its shackles, leaving a pink ring around each eye.

  ‘Simple enough,’ he said, scratching his nose. ‘The Callax revolver fired once. The Hammerglaive twice. Your killer entered the hab unit, perhaps expecting to find her asleep. She wasn’t. He fired first, but either she was able to evade it or his aim was bad. She had her own weapon somewhere close to hand – sensible girl – and returned fire. She hit him, but did not kill him outright. He fired again, this time more effectively. After completing his assignment, he managed to make it to the hygiene chamber, but succumbed there to his injury. If you had sent someone to do such work, captain, you would not have been happy.’

  Revus snorted. ‘I’d have done it myself.’ He leaned over the woman’s face. There was nothing remarkable there – her ash-blonde hair was thinning, her cheeks were a little sunken, but otherwise she looked in reasonable health. Operating as an informer for one of the various security agencies was a decent way of supplementing food rations and getting hold of medical credits. That alone made it worth the considerable risks, at least most of the time.

  ‘Was she a good contact?’ Erunion asked idly, stooping to clean a long scalpel.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Revus. ‘She fed her material to a priest in Salvator. I doubt he gave her the credit for his information, but I asked Huk to check. Small stuff, I suspect. How much are you really going to get in a parchment-works?’

  Erunion chuckled. ‘Keep your ear to the ground, anywhere much. You’ll hear a thing, sooner or later.’

  Revus remembered the picts in the woman’s hygiene station. Since returning to Courvain he’d tracked the parents down. They, and her employers, had been told that Elija Roodeker had succumbed to a sudden outbreak of bileclot, something that had to be cleaned up immediately, the body incinerated. The apartment had already been scoured by a biotoxin team and would soon be assigned to another occupant. Revus had made sure that the legal expenses of recording the death and registering it with the local scriveners were covered and a no-further-investigation note placed on the file.
The family had already been the victim of one crime; they didn’t need to be preyed on further.

  ‘So what do you make of him?’ Revus asked.

  ‘Matches no one on our files,’ said Erunion, bleakly. ‘Huk’s running further searches, but I doubt she’ll turn anything up. Underhive trash, just as you suspected – virtually impossible to trace. I doubt he’d even fired a proper gun before they got him to do this.’

  Revus looked at him. He was scrawny, his skin drawn tight across prominent bones. He had the sallow, bruised look of a man who’d lived his short life in the absence of natural light. Many of his teeth were missing from a rattish mouth, and his eyeballs protruded bulbously. Erunion’s scans had already shown up a cocktail of diseases bubbling through his system. No wonder that single shot had been enough to kill him – a stiff breeze might have done the same, on another day.

  ‘Sloppy work,’ he murmured disapprovingly.

  ‘So, what’s your supposition?’ Erunion asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Revus admitted, unable to take his eyes off the wretch before him. ‘There’s little enough reason for Gloch to knock out one of his own informants, unless he’s erasing his tracks down there for some reason. Maybe someone else was looking for him.’

  ‘Not much sign of a conversation taking place.’

  ‘We don’t know that.’ Revus resisted the urge to massage his temples. It had been a long time since he’d taken a rest period. ‘Seems we don’t know anything much. Before I file this, do you have anything else?’

  Erunion wiped his gloves on his apron, and turned to an electro-scanner station. He activated the power-lever and routed the current to a polished picter-lens. Humming absently, he cycled through feeds garnered by the drone-augurs. Blotchy images flickered in sequence across the plexiglass – bones, muscle bundles, the twisting terrain of half-clogged arteries.

  ‘Now, then,’ he murmured, halting the procession. Revus moved closer to the lens. Erunion scanned in tighter, turning a brass dial up several notches. ‘What is this?’

  The subdermal scan was of the lower neck, close to where it joined the shoulder. There was a lump there, harder and more defined that the various clots and lesions that polluted the viewfield. It gave off no electromagnetic signature and had evidently been small enough and sufficiently benign to escape detection by the routine sensor-sweep.

  ‘What’s this trash doing with an augmetic bead?’ Erunion mused, panning and swivelling some more. ‘Close to the spine. A neural-clamp?’

  ‘Too small,’ said Revus, peering closely. ‘A pain-spike, possibly. To keep him in line.’

  ‘Hardly necessary. This rat would have worked for food.’

  ‘An ident-emitter, then. Something to give him access to where he needed to be.’

  Erunion nodded. ‘Maybe so. Want me to extract it?’

  Revus hesitated. He had already spent a great deal of time on this subject, and there were other things he ought to be attending to. He was half-minded to let it go, to order both corpses to the incinerators and mark the trail as ended, but then Crowl had always been one for the details. It might be something.

  ‘Let’s take a look,’ he said.

  Erunion smiled, and reached for the scalpel again. ‘No stone left unturned,’ he said.

  The blade went in, propelled by expert fingers. Soon the flesh was peeled back, revealing a tiny black knot, lodged in the neck-muscle. A tiny thread led from it, looking as if it wormed its way all the way in towards the spinal cord. ‘Hm,’ Erunion murmured. ‘I’ll have to make an incision to get it out. Happy for me to cut?’

  Revus nodded.

  The blade nicked in further. Just as it did so, a burst of white noise, high-pitched and ear-splitting, rang out from the bead.

  Erunion recoiled, clamping his hand over the wound even as Revus reached for his hellpistol. Almost as soon as it had broken out, the noise ended, leaving the picters scrambled with static and lumens flickering wildly.

  ‘What was that?’ Erunion asked, confounded.

  Revus pushed him aside and grabbed the bead, yanking it from its bloody cradle and holding it up to the lumen. ‘Is this place comm-shielded?’ he demanded.

  ‘Of course.’

  Revus squinted for a closer look. It was so innocuous, lying there in his palm. Amid the spots of red, though, were tight curls of microelectronics, wound together in ways that gave away its extremely sophisticated manufacture.

  ‘Damn,’ Revus said, closing his fist over the device. A little gentle pressure, and it was crushed. ‘Not an ident-bead.’

  Erunion looked up at him, confused. ‘What, then?’

  By then, Revus was already moving. ‘A tripwire,’ he snarled, feeling the hot flush of failure wash through his system. ‘One we just crashed straight through.’

  Erunion swallowed, all his assurance gone. ‘What now?’

  Revus halted at the doorway, fixing him with a bleak stare. ‘Burn them both,’ he said. ‘Lock everything down, get the Lord Crowl back here.’ He flung the remnants of the bead into the trash-unit. ‘If that thing was powerful enough to push through our shields, then whoever planted it now knows just where to find it again.’

  ‘Who, though?’ Erunion asked, querulously.

  ‘No idea,’ growled Revus, turning back to the course that would take him straight to the armoury. ‘Get it done.’

  Spinoza ran hard. She and Hegain scaled the first set of stairs without incident, but the alarms got louder with every stride, as did the clang and echo of boots hitting the floors above.

  It was too damned dark, and her proctor’s helm, despite Erunion’s modifications, did not compensate for it as well as her own. She heard her breathing in her earpiece, close and rapid. The route out spun in front of her, a false-colour web of retina-projected overlay, but it was difficult to decipher at speed and with so few reference points.

  Ahead of her, twenty metres off, a door slid open, exposing a rectangle of blinding yellow light and the silhouette of an armoured guard. Hegain got his shot off first – beautifully aimed, a shoulder-impact that sent the silhouetted figure spinning backwards. Another guard leapt through the gap, and this time it was her shot that felled him – low, smashing his shins.

  It would be non-lethal, if possible. These were loyal servants of the Throne, doing their duty.

  She reached the foot of a second stairway. More alarms were going off now, overlapping and filling the air with competing brays. The schematic whirled around across her viewfield, shaking with lines of white noise.

  ‘This way, if you please it,’ Hegain offered, scanning down the corridor ahead with his gunsight.

  Spinoza paused. The sergeant was right – that was the quickest route out.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said, gesturing up the stairwell. ‘Up here.’

  She ran up the metal steps ponderously, clunking as her armour weighed her down. As she reached the summit, an enforcer in full suppression-garb skidded through the doorway. She punched him, jabbing at the neck with gauntlet-fingers locked and extended, and he crunched into the wall, clutching at his dented gorget-seal. She dropped him with the heel of her hand cannon, then stamped hard through his armour’s knee-joint.

  Hegain caught up, dropping to one knee to sweep the corridor ahead. A combat lumen was flashing up above, sending blood-red light blinking from the polished walls.

  ‘This is very strange,’ he observed, drawing no targets.

  ‘So it is,’ Spinoza agreed, running again.

  They made faster progress after that, shooting down a lone scanner-skull that swerved into their path, and knocking out another two enforcers. Only one of those managed to get a vox-challenge out before Hegain, who might have been the best shot in Revus’ entire detachment, sent him cartwheeling from an impeccable helm-strike.

  ‘If I have the right of things–’ Hegain muttered, pan
ting as he clattered along in his heavy blast-plate.

  ‘–there should be more of them,’ Spinoza said, reaching the corridor’s end and skidding a fraction on the reflective floors. ‘Many more. So I do not believe that all those alarms can be for us.’

  They rounded a corner, jogged across an intersection and headed upwards, ascending rapidly now. There was a knack to gaining speed in Arbites armour, Spinoza found. It was all about momentum – once you had enough of it, the weight became easier to handle. No wonder the enforcers had a reputation for doggedness.

  As they reached a circular chamber studded with numerous slide-doors, a six-strong detachment of black-clad troopers trundled in from the opposite direction. Hegain made to open fire, but Spinoza shut him down, instead gesturing sharply to their leader.

  ‘You,’ she barked. ‘Your orders. Now.’

  ‘Perimeter, proctor,’ the woman replied, making the aquila hastily. ‘Sector D-4, overlook bastion.’

  ‘Then you are with me,’ Spinoza ordered, moving off again, using her schematic to pinpoint D-4. ‘Stay close. This is weak. Damned weak.’

  Hegain, to his credit, didn’t miss a beat. Whatever alerts had gone out concerning a data-breach in the archives, clearly something else had taken priority now.

  The eight of them travelled as a unit, heading ever higher, out from the inner courts and up towards the Hall’s perimeter. Once back in the upper chambers, the corridors filled with slamming bootfalls – adepts hurrying away from the exposed regions, enforcers and troopers racing in the opposite direction. The few senior officers were clearly occupied with their own missions, and were doing much as they were – getting to a position where they could be useful. The closer they all got to the outer walls, the more they all heard it – a roar, vast and sullen, like a sea coming in.

  The final doorway slid open, ushering in the smog and hot-air tang of the Terran night. Spinoza was first out, breaking through a blast-portal and onto a wide landing stage. The platform was over thirty metres across, perched atop an octagonal bastion tower. Two gunships were being prepped for take-off, ready to join the dozens that were already airborne. Additional troopers were stationed around its rim, a low rampart protected by a flak-screen, and all were busy. Smoke, much more than was usual, rolled up from the plazas below, acrid and eye-watering. The landing stage was perhaps twenty metres up from the nominal ground level, but the wall of sound was still impressive, blotting out the ever-present traffic grind with a rolling surge of human anger.