One of these orbital refineries, however, was not what it seemed.
It floated high above Blackflower's pocked landscape, which still bore the scars of a strategic encounter between the massed forces of the two Hives so long before. The transmissions that frequently passed between the refinery and Ironbloom utilized the same encryption employed by the highest echelons of Immortal Light's royal court. Further, the refinery was far larger than the rest of its ilk, and boasted a variety of defensive weaponry out of proportion to its apparent intrinsic value, along with a newer section that had been put under gravitational spin.
It was also occupied. Hugh Moss sent one of his newer bead-zombies to greet the Queen of Immortal Light's proxy, once the incoming cruiser had settled into the docking facilities. While he waited, he stood by a railing surrounding a deep, oval pit that had become known, to those who lived – and more frequently perished – within the Perfumed Garden, as the Killing Floor.
The air was damp and humid, the rust-streaked walls of the converted refinery now half-hidden behind dense greenery, while insects and small bio-engineered winged creatures constantly darted here and there. Water dripped from the uneven surface of the ceiling and the light was dim and grey-green, the combined effect giving the illusion to those few visitors to the Perfumed Garden that they were underwater.
Moss wore a long, thick coat deliberately left open over his emaciated, naked body so as to better feel the cool dampness of the air against his mottled and heavily scarred flesh. Relatively fresh welts wriggled across his narrow chest and torso, mementoes of an unpleasant encounter quite recently.
Two men circled each other warily at the bottom of the pit as Moss gazed down upon them. Each moved in a low crouch, keeping their distance as they circled, and waiting to see who might make the first move when the right time came.
Of the two, Da'ud Anwar had risen from the gutter, working as a hired thug for an extortion racket in Nairobi before being given the choice of immediate execution or joining a prison mining operation on a prospective colony world. From there he had lied and cheated his way onto a coreship before developing a taste for extortion and assassination. He had eventually learned of the Perfumed Garden, the place from which the most highly valued assassins within the Consortium originated, and found his way there, as some few very determined ones always did.
Victor Nimitz was already an assassin of some repute, but one who had been sent to kill Hugh Moss specifically. He was not the first to be sent on this quest and – Moss knew for sure – would not be the last. A variety of physical and psychological torture had been used to first destroy Nimitz's mind, and then carefully rebuild him into the efficient and vastly improved killing machine that now prowled the floor of the pit.
If he survived this contest, the remade Victor Nimitz would be repaying those who had sent him on his mission by killing them all.
Both men had benefited from Moss's extensive knowledge of extreme body modification. Da'ud Anwar had chosen to model himself on a Terran wolf; his internal musculo-skeletal structure had been altered so that his bones could unlock one from another, allowing him to morph his body into remarkable new configurations. He was, for instance, able to stretch and alter his limbs in such a way that he could run on all fours with surprising speed. His teeth had been removed and replaced with sharpened diamond flakes; a modification that allowed him to rip out another man's throat with startling efficiency. Da'ud had even extended the morphology to his tongue, so it was now long, black and eel-like, and the poison it secreted could kill any other human he encountered within seconds.
Da'ud's present opponent had taken a different approach. Victor's muscles could inflate in seconds, so that what at first appeared to be a human being of normal musculature could rapidly increase in size and – for a limited period only – physical strength. His sweat carried deadly neurotoxins. His jawbones had been replaced with titanium, and the flesh that covered them altered to enable him to stretch his jaws wide like a snake and crush an opponent's head in their grasp.
As Da'ud glanced upwards and caught Moss's eye, there was a certain admiration in their exchanged glance; something that might even be called love. Victor's expression remained bright but blank, for he was little more than a walking automaton now, really, and Moss already had a good idea which of the two engineered warriors would win this battle. And yet this knowledge was coloured by the awareness that Da'ud, assuming he survived this contest, had every intention of confronting Moss himself at the earliest opportunity.
And that would never do.
Moss spared Da'ud a brief smile; he had faced similar challenges quite a few times before and survived all of them – and more. If Moss's thinking was correct, Da'ud would win this fight, more by virtue of his intact intellect than anything else, and the relatively robotic Victor would most probably lose.
Or, if he was wrong, Victor would kill Da'ud and thereby solve a potential problem for Moss. Either way, Moss had carefully engineered and nurtured the two men's rivalry in the hope that precisely such a face-off as this one would occur.
Victor's body tensed in a way that signalled he was ready to attack. Moss then withdrew a dagger from the inside pocket of his long coat and tossed it down onto the floor of the pit. The blade struck the absorbent matting covering the floor fairly near Victor, its hilt wobbling slightly from the impact.
Two pairs of glittering eyes stared unwaveringly up at Moss with a mixture of respect, awe, terror and hatred.
'Wait,' Moss ordered quietly. A moment later, the Queen of Immortal Light's proxy, along with a select group of the Queen's own councillors and advisers, entered the chamber that contained the Killing Floor. The Queen's proxy was young, fed just enough of the gene-morph secretion produced by the Queen herself to keep her stand-in both enormously fat and effectively immortal, but without achieving the gargantuan scale of the real thing.
This proxy – if she was lucky and proved herself sufficiently loyal – might get the chance to found her own Hive in some distant future millennium. For the meantime, however, she served the same Queen that had mothered her and all the other citizens of her Hive; and although not as large as the Queen herself, the proxy was still of sufficient girth to warrant a field suspension platform all to herself. She appeared to float into the room on a platter of coloured light, the field-generator itself hidden under the vast folds of fat that composed most of her bulk. The Royal Councillors walked on either side of her.
Shortly after the Queen of Immortal Light had granted Hugh Moss shelter within the Night's End system, he had made a point of carrying out surgery on his body that would allow him to interpret the scent-speak on which the Bandati so regularly relied. He easily picked up the air of imperious aloofness his visitor evinced.
'The proxy of her imperial ruler, the Queen of Immortal Light, gives you greetings,' one of the Councillors spoke into a gently glowing interpreter hovering directly before his mouth parts. The Councillor then glanced towards the ringed pit, and continued: 'She also wishes to know the nature of the entertainment you intend providing for us.'
Moss bowed slightly, and gestured down towards Da'ud and Victor, who still waited patiently. 'This, my dear proxy, is the method by which I test the results of my continuing research,' he explained, listening carefully to the tick-tack sound of a simultaneous translation into the Bandati dialect. 'As you already know, my creations are much in demand.'
'These are your newest assassins, then?' the proxy asked him directly, clicking breathily into her own interpreter.