Nember scowled as he tried to get at the idea through the alcohol, but Kinosa grasped it straight away and toasted it with the last of her wine.
‘It’s a trip, then,’ she said. ‘I’ll invite Tosk and Haffith, too. Let’s add a military footing to this thing, make it harder for them to say no.’
‘Where are they tonight, anyway?’ Adalbrect asked.
‘Snap purge in the east quarter of the labourer barracks,’ said Kinosa, pouring more wine. ‘Two new hauler crews came in yesterday with more dead machines. Seems one of ‘em was trying to smuggle in a weapons cache on the side. That’s still a military offence. They took it pretty seriously.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Vosheni. ‘Or at least not at that. Who needs this rabble to decide they’ve inherited a job as the Archenemy’s army? Joke, joke!’ and he flapped an arm at Adalbrect, who’d half-risen with a slapped expression on his face. ‘I know you do your job well, preacher, I joked. But honestly, why is some cheap hivestamp stub-gun so important to have out in a place like this? What are they going to do, rob the cooks at the refectory tent for another helping of starch broth? Who needs weapons in an empty desert?’
‘That’s four full crews fully armed. They only got one stash in the haulers, the others are safe. We’ll get them to Orange Five crew at midmorning meal tomorrow. Then we’re ready.’ Psinter was trying to keep her voice quiet and level, but there was an unimistakable satisfaction in it. It had been a hard thing to organise in secret, and their sudden need for haste had made it harder.
Kovind Shek pursed his lips and stared at nothing in particular. His long fingers stretched out and plucked up a stylus from the clutter across his little desk, made the motions of writing the words Orange Five half a centimetre above his writing pad, and dropped it again. It was a habit he was training himself into, to help him remember things. Not a perfect substitute for his old stacks of bound waferbooks, but a much safer one. After the Guard had busted one of their weapon mules, there had been another random snap-search right the length of the southern avenue, and the Ministorum brute squad had torn down and burned three barrack shanties.
‘All our people, then?’ asked Jopell. ‘All of them?’ The other two resistance members gave no answer but a scowl, partly in response to Jopell’s question and partly in response to him saying anything at all. Neither of them wanted him there. Kovind was the trusty, the crew chief who was allowed to supervise the native Ashek labourers. Psinter was his lieutenant in the Traditions and the Practices, and his peer in the Customs, but they had only been able to manoeuvre her into a junior forewoman’s job on the haulers. Jopell’s descent was recent offworld, only four generations on Ashek, with only tenuous ties to the forge-manories and none to the Inevitable Conclave. But in the turmoil after the hives had burned, he had ended up in the work crew draft, had played the compliant and grateful freed civilian so well he had been installed in a foreman’s job straight away, and now if they were going to plausibly pass off these meetings as the quiet evening chats between a crew chief and his offsiders Kovind had to have him there. Jopell usually understood that well enough to keep his mouth shut.
‘All our people,’ said Psinter, glaring at him. ‘The accident fatalities,’ with a salutary nod to Kovind, ‘have given us regular pretexts to reorganise the crews we started with. We’re still under-armed compared to the cog-lickers, though. Our edge over the Mechanicus picket-guards is going to be numbers and surprise, not hardware. And probably not discipline, either. Our people are enthusiastic, but they’re not soldiers. A lot of them are going to die.’
The three of them looked at each other. None of them valued the lives of their followers any more than their own: the Traditions discounted such things and the Customs exalted a very different set of priorities. But it presented a challenge. Neither Kovind nor Psinter needed to describe that challenge out loud. Jopell did anyway.
‘If we rush the pickets and only a couple of people know what they need to do in there, odds are they’ll die and the crew won’t know the next move. Tell everyone on the crew and that’s a real dangerous secret we’ve just told a lot of people.’
Kovind couldn’t quite restrain himself: a fist came down on the little table hard enough to make the lantern blink. The three of them fell silent for a moment as the bootsteps of a camp patrol scuffed by outside.
‘Want to try blabbing again, Jopell?’ hissed Psinter. ‘Just because, you know, you didn’t do it properly the first time and those...’ She took a breath and lowered her voice. ‘They didn’t hear you loud enough?’
I didn’t say anything any more incriminating than you, Jopell thought, but what he said was:
‘Why don’t we just use the delegation convoy?’
‘And so, the graveyard, murmured Jers Adalbrect as they passed beneath the machine-icons swinging on their leaded chains, and the red-shrouded heads of the Mechanicus escorts turned to look at him. ‘A casual vocalisation,’ he said to them before they could question him. ‘Disregard, please.’ They stayed studying him a moment longer, and Adalbrect wondered if he were going to be questioned. The ‘casual vocalisation’ trick was something one of the Logisticae adepts had taught him, back on… damn, was the Augnassis mission really four deployments ago now? The Mechanicus don’t talk to themselves, Mamzel Rindon had told him, they don’t exclaim when they’re surprised or mutter under their breath when they’re pissed off. But the ones who work with the rest of us know we do this casual vocalisation thing. Easier to just get into the habit of reporting to them that that’s what you were doing. He’d noticed a couple of the other Missionaria staff had picked up the habit too.
It took the guards a few moments more to decide there was nothing to concern them, and their gaze swung away again. They hadn’t appeared to confer about him: taped to Adalbrect’s sternum was a small metal plaque that vibrated when it detected silent cant-casts, and there had been no telltale buzzing against his breastbone.
The graveyard, he said again to himself, and this time kept his lips together and the words in his throat. It seemed more appropriate that way. The whole delegation had fallen into silence as they made their salutations to the picket guards and reboarded their carriers.
These were not just ruins that studded the cracked ground in the thickening dusk. They all knew about ruins. After months on Ashek it could hardly be otherwise. They knew about tragedy and death and the horrifying, industrial scale on which an engine of war dealt those things out. They knew the cost at which the Archenemy’s forces had been broken here, and the legacy the diabolical engineer known as Asphodel had left behind. They were not even strangers to the graveyard. They had watched it growing, filling and creeping outward beneath the dust-haze, as the columns of haulers slogged across the hardpan and the cranes tirelessly lifted and dragged. But now, here, in amongst them in the day’s last gore-coloured light...
The glint in the carrier’s running lights was the spread claw of one of the fat four-legged Murdernaut assault machines, the fingers curved, tapered, sleeker than the Imperial engines’ weapon limbs. Even severed, the menace of the open claw was enough to make Adalbrect start back from the window as though the thing had actually tried to clutch at the carrier’s balloon-tyres. There was no hint of where the claw’s owner might be, and Adalbrect’s imagination painted it out there in the darkness, somehow awake again, prowling pilotless after them, looking for warm meat on which to exact vengeance for its lost limb.