He took four men with him, four thugs from the stacks that he’d paid very well to mind him. Valdyke did not intend to leave himself vulnerable to some off-worlder he’d never met.
The employer turned up at Ennisker’s Perishables late, riding in a car leased from the city landing grounds. A few minutes behind the car came two hired tractors, towing cargo trailers that barely fitted down the narrow, riverside streets.
Two of Valdyke’s thugs obediently trundled open the loading doors at the first hint of approaching lights. Valdyke already had the power running in the plant, and had brought in, as instructed, two bulk servitors for lifting work, and a medicae, a man called Arbus, who asked no questions and took what work he could get, due to the small matter of him having been struck off the community registry for malpractice.
The three vehicles drove into the plant’s vast loading dock, a musty cavern lit by sputtering naphtha flares. The bay’s floor had been stained brick-red by decades of blood-letting. At a sign from Valdyke, the thugs rumbled the doors shut.
‘I’m Valdyke,’ said Valdyke, walking up to the man getting out of the leased car. ‘Are you Master Eyl?’
The man brushed off his beige leather coat, and looked Valdyke up and down.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Pleasure to meet you at last,’ said Valdyke. He thought about proffering his hand, but the man didn’t seem like the sort. Not the sort at all.
‘So, you want these shipments unloaded,’ Valdyke began, ‘and th–’
‘Did you receive my instructions?’ Eyl asked him, in an accented voice.
‘Yes, I got them.’
‘Were they clear in all particulars?’
‘Oh, absolutely,’ said Valdyke
‘And the remuneration that I wired across, that was received correctly?’
‘It’s the down payment we agreed,’ Valdyke noted with a nod.
‘Then I’m not entirely sure why any further conversation is required,’ said Baltasar Eyl.
Valdyke hesitated for a second. The man had come in with his attitude set to ‘arsehole’, and Valdyke had diced men for less, for a lot less. Valdyke decided, however, to respond with an agreeable smile and a courteous nod. The smile-and-nod combo was inspired by two things. For one, the balance payment promised for the job was considerable, and Valdyke knew the only way to guarantee getting it was to finish the job properly.
For afters, the man, this off-worlder, had an air about him, something that said he was more than just dangerous. Dangerous was too small a word. He was still and contained, and his gestures were small and restrained, but Valdyke felt that was because an effort of sheer willpower was going on. Eyl’s flesh and behaviour were tightly controlled so that they could hold something in check, the way a straitjacket pinned a man’s arms. They were keeping a tight grip on something that smoked with feral cruelty, something that none of them, not even Eyl, wanted to see get out.
So Valdyke did his smile-and-nod, and clapped his hands. The thugs dragged open the dock’s inner shutters, exposing a second cavern-space, wreathed in steam, and filled with oily black machinery. Arbus the medicae readied his kit, and the servitors plodded forwards, bright orange and pincered like tusker crabs, to unload the containers.
As the work got underway (and Valdyke congratulated himself on his choice of venue, because it was a noisy business of clanks and thumps and piston-whines and vapour-hisses and, anywhere except the half-derelict piles of the riverside, it would have woken the neighbourhood and attracted the attention of the Magistratum), Valdyke assessed his employer a little further. There were three others in Eyl’s party, two men and a woman. The men were whip-cord, dog-eyed men like their master, and Valdyke presumed they were purchased muscle, though they were close with Eyl, their conversations tight and intimate. They were wearing leather bodygloves, boots, gloves and patched, Guard surplus jackets, but then so was every other thug in the sub. The two men had driven the tractors. Eyl had driven the leased car. Given the respect he apparently commanded, it seemed odd that he didn’t have a driver.
The fourth member of his party was a woman, a widow, weeded in a veil and black silks. She’d been riding in the back of Eyl’s motor, as if he was her chauffeur. There was something off about her too. When Valdyke looked at her – and widow or no widow, she was a handsome woman who deserved being looked at – it was as if she kept popping in and out of focus, like a film image distorting slightly as it was exposed to heat. It made Valdyke feel pretty sick to watch, so after a while he stopped.
The servitors detached the containers from the tractor flatbeds, and rolled them back up the dock into the adjoining chamber. Valdyke personally connected them up to the plant’s power source, just as if they were crates of meat, cold-stored, switching their refrigeration supply from mobile to static. Ducting systems inside the containers began to chatter and hum. Display lights lit up on the control panels.
Valdyke checked the lights. It was looking good.
‘Ambient’s coming up, and I’ve got clean green on the vital boost.’
He looked over at Eyl.
‘They look just like shipping pods,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ replied Eyl.
‘But they’re hibernaculums.’
Eyl stared back at him.
‘What?’ asked Valdyke. ‘Come on, I’ve been around. Even if I was so stupid that I couldn’t add together the resources you needed and the medical expertise you wanted on hand, you’re not the first person to smuggle live bodies onto Balhaut inside mortuary boxes.’
‘Am I not?’ asked Eyl lightly. His face, half-lit by the fluttering naphtha flares, was unreadable.
Valdyke shrugged. ‘Deserters, illegal immigrants, people who’d prefer to avoid the light of the Throne, it happens a lot.’ He grinned. ‘Sometimes the poor stiffs inside actually survive the process.’
Valdyke picked up a locking bar and wandered around to the hatch of the first container.
‘Shall we?’ he asked.
Eyl nodded. Valdyke beckoned the medicae over, and then unscrewed the lid of a little pot of commiphora and wiped a smear of the gum resin across his philtrum. The astringent scent filled his nose. Eyl certainly wasn’t the first person to smuggle living contraband onto Balhaut as part of the mortuary trade, and Valdyke had assisted several of his predecessors. The low-berth survival rate was worse than Valdyke had joked. Most of the time, you really didn’t want to smell what was thawing out in the box.
He broke the shipping seal, slid the locking bar into the slot, and rotated it. It took a push and a grunt of exertion, but the teeth of the lock popped, and the main drum of the lock swung away on its hinges. Valdyke pulled it wide, uncoupled the bar, inserted it into the inner socket, and heaved on it again.
The hatch seals released. There was a deep and nasty groan of bad air, an exhalation like the long, lingering and last breath a man ever took, one final lung-emptying exhalation for the ages, after which no more breaths would ever be drawn. Valdyke pulled the hatch open.
‘Oh, Throne,’ the medicae said, coughing, and fanning the air in front of his face.
‘Yeah, that’s ripe,’ said Valdyke, who could smell it despite the commiphora. It was a warm, gorge-raising stink of off-meat, of dirty blood, of gangrene. Stained meltwater ran out over the lip of the hatch and spattered on the dock. It was viscous, and filled, like broth, with lumps of organic matter.
‘Mind your shoes, doc,’ Valdyke said. Arbus muttered a caustic reply, and took a snifter of something medicinal from a hip-flask. Valdyke dropped the locking bar, and pulled out a hooked packing knife, a bent spar of blade forty centimetres long with the edge on the inside of the curve. He chokked the tip in through the polymer sheeting wrapping the pod’s contents, and cut down in a half-sawing, half-slicing motion. The smell got worse. Valdyke could see the first of the packets inside. Glad of his gloves, he reached in and slid it out on its telescoping rail. It came out like a side of meat, wrapped in a polymer shroud, clamped to the suspension rail by heavy-weight metal runners.