‘Tisely,’ Yosef lowered his voice and stepped closer, becoming conspiratorial. ‘If we could keep the identity of this victim under wraps, just for a few days, it would help–’
But she was already shaking her head. ‘We tried to keep the information secure, but…’ The clinician paused. ‘Well. People talk. Latigue’s staff saw it all.’
Yosef’s heart sank. ‘So the Consortium know.’
‘It’s worse than that, actually,’ she told him. ‘They’ve reclaimed the aeronef directly from evidentiary after using some pull with the Landgrave.’
‘They can’t do that…’ said Daig, with a grimace.
‘It’s already done,’ Tisely went on. ‘And there are Consortium clinicians on the way to take custody of the luckless Cirsun here.’ She tapped the mist-wreathed tube. ‘They’re probably caught in that cursed traffic, otherwise they’d have been here already and removed him.’
Yosef’s eyes narrowed. ‘This is a Sentine matter. It’s an Iestan matter.’ His annoyance burned cold and slow as he remembered Telemach’s words in the precinct; and yet a day later her superior was sweeping all that aside in favour of doing everything possible to appease the Consortium; because Iesta Veracrux supplied wines to the entire Ultima Segmentum, and without Eurotas, the planet’s economy would die on the vine.
Daig finally swore under his breath, earning him a censorious glare from Tisely. ‘It doesn’t stop there,’ she went on, as if to chastise him. ‘Latigue’s seniors sent an astropathic communiqué to the Void Baron himself. He’s apparently taking a personal interest in the incident.’
Yosef felt the colour drain from his face. ‘Eurotas… He’s coming here?’
‘Oh, I don’t doubt it,’ Tisely told him. ‘In fact, I hear a whisper that some of his personal agents are already in the warp, on their way.’
In spite of himself, that queasy feeling returned to Yosef’s gut and he took a breath of the chilled, antiseptic air. With a sudden jolt of anger, he snatched the data-slate from Daig’s hand and glared at it. ‘This isn’t an investigation any more, it’s a bloody poison chalice.’
Valdor snapped back to awareness with a jerk, and he stifled a reflexive cough. He felt a heavy weight across his torso and thick drifts of sandy matter all around him. There was heat, too, close and intense, searing his skin. He tasted the stink of burning fuel on his lips.
Checking himself, the Custodian found nothing more serious than a minor dislocation among the contusions he had suffered in the crash. With care, he rotated his forearm back into its socket and tested it, the flash of pain ebbing. Valdor placed both hands against the weight holding him down – a section of hull plate, he noted – and forced it up and away.
He came to his feet surrounded by flames and grey smoke. Valdor remembered the moment of the impact only in fleeting impressions; sparks of pain and the spinning of the cargo bay all around him as the wounded flyer slammed into the sand. He had heard Tariel cry out; there was no sign of the infocyte nearby. Valdor moved forward, picking his way over steaming mounds of wreckage, heated by the blazing slick of liquid promethium that had spilled out across the landscape. Sections of the transport lay in a line that vanished off across the ruddy plains, surrounding a black trail carved in the dirt by the craft as it had skidded to a halt, losing pieces of itself along the way.
He saw something that looked familiar; the cockpit pod, the egg-shape of it stove in and crumpled. Blood painted the canopy from the inside, and Valdor knew that the pilot would not have survived the landing. He turned this way and that. The encroaching flames were high and swift, and he had little room to manoeuvre. Sweeping around, he found what seemed to be the thinnest part in the wall of fire and ran at it, his legs pumping. At the last possible second, Valdor leapt into the flames and punched through, the sandcloak around him catching alight.
He landed hard on the other side of the wreckage and came up in a crouch. Snatching at the cloak, he tore it from himself as the fire took hold and threw it as hard as he could. Panting, Valdor looked up; and it was then he realised he was not alone.
‘Well,’ said a rough voice, ‘what have we got here?’
He counted eight of them. They wore the patchwork gear of a junkhunter gang, armour cobbled together from a dozen disparate sources, faces hidden behind breath filters and hoods. All of them were armed with large-gauge weapons – different varieties of stubber guns mostly, but he also spied a couple with twin-barrelled laser carbines, and one with the distinctive shape of a plasma gun held at the ready. Their collection of vehicles was as motley as everything else, a pair of four-legged walker platforms along with fast duneriders on fat knobbled tires, and a single ground-effect truck.
Valdor considered them with the cold tactical precision of a trained warrior. Only eight, eight humans, some of them likely to have reflex enhancements, perhaps even dermal plating, but still only eight. He knew with complete certainty that he would be able to kill them all in less than sixty seconds, and that was if he took his time about it.
There were only two things that gave him a moment’s pause. The first was the figure standing up through a hatch in the GEV’s cab, behind the pintle mount of a quin-barrel multilaser. The gunner had an unobstructed arc of fire that was directly centred on Valdor, and as resilient as he was, without his usual wargear to protect him the heavy weapon would put the Custodian down before he took ten paces.
The second thing was Fon Tariel, his face a mess of blood and bruises, on his knees in front of one of the walkers, with the muzzle of a junkhunter’s rifle pressed to his back.
‘Hah,’ he heard the infocyte say, labouring the words up past his injuries. ‘You’re all going to be sorry now.’
Valdor frowned, and continued to glance around, ignoring the gang and looking off in all directions, squinting towards the near horizon. It was difficult through the low sheen of rust-sand in the air, but his eyes were gene-altered for acuity.
‘Put up your hands,’ buzzed the junkhunter with the plasma gun. Valdor had guessed possession of the powerful weapon made that one the leader, and this confirmed it. He ignored the command, still looking away. ‘Are you deaf, freak?’
In the distance, perhaps a kilometre away, maybe more, the Custodian thought he saw something brief and bright. A glint off a metallic object atop a low butte. He resisted the urge to smile and turned back to the junkhunters, casually positioning himself in such a way that he could see both the flat-topped hill and the bandit crew. ‘I hear you,’ he told the gang leader.
‘He’s a big one,’ ventured one of the riflemen. ‘Some kinda aberrant?’
‘Could be,’ said the leader. ‘That what you are, freak?’
Tariel shouted at him, his voice high with fright. ‘What are you waiting for, man? Help me!’
‘Yeah, help him,’ mocked the GEV gunner. ‘I dare you.’
‘You’ve made a very serious error,’ Valdor began, speaking slowly and carefully. ‘I had hoped we could make a landing in the erg, scout you out for ourselves. But you took the initiative, and I must admire that. You saw prey and you attacked.’ Looking again, the Custodian could see a second, unmanned weapon mount on the rear of the hover-truck. Untended, it pointed the mouth of a surface-to-air missile tube skyward. ‘Lucky shot.’