Valdor recalled the incident with Braganza; he had been implicated in the brutal murder of a young noblewoman, and after ironclad evidence had come to light damning him despite all his protestations to the contrary, the Triton electorate that had voted him into office had savagely turned against him. Braganza had apparently died in an accident during his transport to a penal asteroid. ‘You leaked the details of his prison transfer.’
Tariel nodded. ‘The cleanest kill is one that another performs in your stead with no knowledge of your incitement.’
The Custodian allowed him a nod. ‘I can’t fault your logic.’ He stepped back and let the infocyte have room to relax. ‘If you have so much data to hand, perhaps you can tell me something about the man we have been sent to find?’
‘Eristede Kell,’ Tariel answered instantly. ‘Clade Vindicare. Currently on an extended duration deployment targeted at the eventual eradication of exocitizen criminal groups in the Atalantic Delimited Zone. Among the top percentile of field-deployed special operatives. Fifty-two confirmed kills, including the Tyrant of Daas, Queen Mortog Haeven, the Eldar general Sellians nil Kaheen, Brother-Captain–’
Valdor held up his hand. ‘I don’t need to know his record. I need to know him.’
The Vanus considered his words for a long moment; but before Tariel could answer, a flash of fire caught Valdor’s eye through one of the viewports, and the Custodian turned towards it, his every warning sense rushing to the fore.
Outside, he glimpsed a spear made of white vapour, tipped with an angry crimson projectile; it described a corkscrew motion as it homed in on the aircraft. Alert sirens belatedly screamed a warning. He had barely registered the light and flame before the transport suddenly resonated with a colossal impact, and veered sharply to starboard. Smoke poured into the cargo bay, and Valdor heard the shriek of torn metal.
Unsecured, the two of them tumbled across the deck as the aircraft spun into the grip of the rusty haze.
A visit to the valetudinarium always made Yosef feel slightly queasy, as if the proximity to a place of healing was somehow enough to make him become spontaneously unwell. He was aware that other people – people who didn’t work in law enforcement, that was – had a similar reaction being around peace officers; they felt spontaneously guilty, even if they had committed no crime. The sensation was strong, though, enough that if ever Yosef felt an ache or a pain that might best have been looked at by a medicae, a marrow-deep revulsion grew strong in him, enough to make him bury it and wait for the issue to subside.
Unfortunate then that a sizeable portion of his duties forced him to visit the capital’s largest clinic on a regular basis; and those visits were always to the most forbidding of its halls, the mortuarium. Winter-cold, the pale wooden floors and panelled walls were shiny with layers of heavy fluid-resistant varnishes, and harsh white light thrown from overhead lume-strips filled every corner of the chamber with stark illumination.
Across the room, the dead stood upright in liquid-filled suspensor tubes that could be raised from compartments in the floor or lowered from silos in the ceiling. Frost-encrusted data-slates showed a series of colour-coded tags, designating which were new arrivals, which had been kept aside for in-depth autopsy and which were free to be released so that their families could perform final rites of enrichment.
Daig took off his hat as they crossed the chamber, weaving in between the medicae servitors and subordinate clinicians, and Yosef followed suit, tucking his brown woollen toque under an epaulette.
They were here to see Tisely, a rail-thin woman with hair the colour of straw, who served as the senior liaison between the mortuarium and the Sentine. She threw them a glance as they approached and gave a glum nod. An accomplished doctor and a superlative pathlogia investigator, Tisely was nevertheless one of the most joyless people Yosef Sabrat had ever met. He struggled to remember a single moment where she had expressed any mood to him but negativity.
‘Reeves,’ she said, by way of greeting, and immediately kept to form. ‘I’m surprised you made it in today. The traffic was very dense this morning.’
‘It’s the weather,’ offered Daig, equally downbeat. ‘Cold as space.’
Tisely nodded solemnly. ‘Oh yes.’ She tapped one of the suspensor tubes. ‘We’ll be filling more of these with those who can’t buy fuel for the winter.’
‘Governor ought to lower the tithe,’ Daig went on, matching her tone. ‘It’s not fair to the elderly.’
The clinician was going to follow on, but before the two of them could enter into a mutually-supporting spiral of circular complaining about the weather, the government, the harvest or whatever subject would come next, Yosef interrupted. ‘You have another body for us?’
Tisely nodded again and changed conversational gears seamlessly. ‘Cirsun Latigue, male, fifty years Terran reckoning. Gutted like a cliffgull.’
‘He died of that?’ Yosef asked, examining the face behind the glass. ‘The cutting?’
‘Eventually.’ Tisely sniffed. ‘It was done slowly, by a single blade, like the others.’
‘And he was laid out like the Norte case? In the star-shape?’
‘Across a very expensive chaise longue, in an aeronef gondola. Not nailed down this time, though.’ She reported the horrific murder in exactly the same tone she had used to complain about the traffic. ‘Quite a troubling one, this.’
Yosef chewed his lip. He’d gone over the abstract of the crime scene report on the way to the valetudinarium. The victim’s wife, who was now somewhere several floors above them in a drugged sleep after suffering a hysterical breakdown, had returned home the previous evening to find the flyer parked on the lawn of their home, the machine-brain pilot diligently waiting for a return-to-hangar command that had never come. Inside the aeronef’s cabin, every square metre of the walls, floor and ceiling was daubed with Latigue’s blood. The eight-point star was repeated everywhere, over and over, drawn in the dead man’s vitae.
Daig was looking at the data-slate, fingering his wrist chain. ‘Latigue had rank, for a civilian. Important, but not too much so. He worked for Eurotas.’
‘Which complicates matters somewhat,’ said Tisely.
She made it sound like a minor impediment, but in fact the matter of Cirsun Latigue’s employer had the potential to send Yosef’s serial murder investigation spiralling out of control. He had hoped that the sketchy report made by the jager on the scene might have been in error, even as some part of him knew that it was not. My luck is never that good, he told himself. Bad enough that the High-Reeve had put her measure into the bottle for all this, but with this latest victim now revealed as a ranking member of the Eurotas Consortium, a whole new layer of problems was opening up for the investigators.
Latigue and all those like him were on the planetside staff of an interstellar nobleman, who was quite possibly the richest man for several light years in any direction. His Honour the Void Baron Merriksun Eurotas was the master of a rogue trader flotilla that plied the spaceways across the systems surrounding Iesta Veracrux. Holding considerable capital and trading concerns on many planets, his consortium essentially controlled all local system-to-system commerce and most interplanetary transportation into the bargain. Eurotas counted high admirals, scions of the Navis Nobilite and even one of the Lords of Terra among his circle of friends; his business clan could trace its roots back to the time of Old Night, and it was said that the hereditary Warrant of Trade held by his family had been personally ratified by the Emperor himself. Such was his high regard that the man served the Adeptus Terra as an Agentia Nuntius, the Imperial Court’s attaché for every human colony in the Taebian Sector.