‘I never want to see that piece of shit again,’ said Bedlo. ‘Get some fuel for the flamer, and I’ll show them how to burn.’
Perdu looked up at the five bowed heads before him. His faithful five stood hunched in an arc around him. All of the faces were familiar, even though their heads were bent and cast in deep shadows. He hadn’t thought to see Logier again, but there he was, looking right at him, his sixth man. He did not bow his head to the Emperor. Perdu held his gaze while he continued to recite the final prayer, and Logier slowly lowered his head, and finally closed his eyes.
‘You came back,’ Perdu said to Logier once the rest had dispersed.
‘A man must find comfort and strength where he can,’ said Logier, without blinking.
Perdu wanted to say something, but couldn’t think what.
‘You want to know that I delivered the chips?’ asked Perdu.
‘No,’ said Logier. ‘Good evening, ayatani.’
‘The Emperor protects,’ said Perdu, reflexively, as Logier ducked through the low doorway into the dark alley beyond. Perdu tucked his prayer book hurriedly under his cloak, ready to follow the stilt-man. He wanted to confront the agri-worker, but didn’t know why. It didn’t matter; he was too late. There was no one in the alley when Perdu entered it, not even the boy.
Men seldom moved around in groups anywhere on Reredos. Groups made the occupation guards suspicious and the glyfs twitchy. They tolerated twos, but only women and children could move around in groups of three or more, and then not always unmolested.
There was no way that Bedlo’s cell could travel together to the cache, so he split them up and sent them on different routes.
Bedlo would have liked to have the old ayatani on his side, but he didn’t know whether Revere would show up or not. Bedlo wasn’t his boss, and he knew that Revere answered to the Emperor, if he answered to anyone at all, so Bedlo could only give him the time and place of the raid, and wait and see. He was Shuey’s boss, though, and he paired him up with a new recruit called Ailly. Bedlo knew that Shuey was keen and sharp, and would’ve made it into the Guard, no problem, if the war hadn’t cut Reredos off from the Imperium; but he didn’t yet trust Ailly, who had only just joined them and could still prove a liability.
Bedlo had to trust Mallet, despite the tensions between them. He had no choice; the man was virtually a law unto himself. He wasn’t predictable, but he could always be relied upon to turn up for a fight. Bedlo sometimes wondered if he’d switch allegiance, if he ever found his position untenable. It would not surprise him.
Bedlo spotted Mallet halfway along the arterial road out to the galleries, walking south, almost at a right angle to his position, tacking towards their destination. Bedlo was travelling almost directly east–west, and he’d given the boys the long route, circling the lower west quarter of the hive and traveling north to their location.
The cell members would meet at the cache and travel together from there, albeit not in a group that could be picked out by the sentry guards that patrolled close to the skirts of the galleries.
Bedlo wished he had augmetics. He was beginning to feel conspicuous among the stilt-men that lived, ate and slept in this quarter. Still, his pack looked convincing enough, and he’d rigged up an old filter cap to look like it was fitted to his chest. He could be mistaken for an agri-worker at a glance, even if he wouldn’t pass a more thorough inspection. The pack, which was standard-issue for the agri-workers, neatly contained the flamer, which he’d taken from Mallet who had cleaned and prepped it ready for use. Bedlo only hoped that the fuel Mallet had managed to half-fill the reservoir with was actually flammable.
Boys were the same the planet over, and Shuey and Ailly were no exception. It had been so long since augmetics had been issued that the boys working the galleries were indistinguishable from the hivers, and from those that lived in the no-man’s-land between the galleries and the hive proper. The foe sometimes used them for sport, but even as easy pickings they were noisy irritating little putes, and were mostly left alone.
Mallet preferred to zigzag his way along the edge of the hive rather than spend too much time too close to the galleries. He didn’t trust the open land or the regular rows of tunnels extending into the distance. He didn’t like the way they regularised the perspective of the place. He was comfortable in the hive where he could see no further than the next corner or intersection, and no one could see him from any distance, especially the damned glyfs. He wove his way back and forth, along alleys and side-lanes, along the backs of windowless buildings and through endless covered ways. Above was never a good place.
The cache was hidden in an old hop-drying silo in no-man’s-land, one of half a dozen squeezed together onto a shred of land too small to contain them. The round buildings, only four storeys high, stood cheek by jowl with each other. They seemed to bulge outwards, casting heavy shadows against the surrounding manufactories, which had once operated as brew-houses and mash-vats but which now contained the fleshy purple pods and roots that the foe relied on for sustenance. The narrow, dark, round buildings with steep roofs and venting cowls in their chimneys were totally unusable by the Archenemy. They’d tried to store their produce in them with disastrous results. The hot dry air that was good for the papery hops putrefied the enemy crop almost before it had been stowed, and no new use could be found for the frothing black liquid that resulted. The mess had been left, and the buildings with it.
Logier entered the kiln at the south corner of the site. He was able to move around freely, his augmetics his passport to virtually all agri-areas. He would spot the hive-cell, but they would not recognise him, and enemy guards were thin on the ground. Most of the glyfs hovered over the galleries further out that were too distant for the excubitors to patrol effectively. The local population had no interest in the crops, and only those used to working with the foetid vegetation could stand to be anywhere near large quantities of it. There were enough guards to keep an eye on the workforce, but they had become fat and complacent over the three years of occupation, and unfettered access to the crop had made them bloated and slow.
The hop silo was warm and dry, and no longer smelt of anything. The putrid pods had quickly liquefied and then solidified to form a glassy black surface perhaps thirty centimetres deep on the floor. There was a tidemark a metre high on the walls where the original crop had been loaded to, but other than that, there was no sign that the silos had been used for anything other than their intended purpose.
Neither friend nor foe had been near the silos for the better part of three years, so they had become a useful exchange point for goods crossing no-man’s-land, and were a convenient link between hive- and agri-cells.
Logier had added rubberised slips to the spade-like feet of his augmetics, in order to gain some purchase on the glassy floor surface, and he walked across the silo to examine the cache, arranged on pallets and in makeshift containers on the far side of the room alongside a sizeable hand-barrow. Ozias had put together a fine hoard of weapons since the inception of the agri-resistance-cell, and they had plenty to spare for the right cause.
Logier stripped a las out of its canvas cover and held it to his shoulder. Then he pulled out the sight and offered it up to the rifle. He hefted the thing in his hand for a moment, and then separated the pieces and put them back in their cover. He did the same for an autopistol, and then checked a row of flamer-tanks sitting neatly side-by-side on the top of a stack of pallets. None of the weapons were complete, all were broken into their component parts, and fuel and ammunition were stored separately, as per Ozias’s instructions.