It was running. Spinoza’s shadow-figure, the one he knew would come, taking the darker road to remain hidden yet unable to resist the chance to get closer.
‘Follow it,’ ordered Crowl, running back the way he had come, firing down all the time, angling bullets between the narrow cracks and into the cavern beneath.
They pursued it all the way out, hearing the panting of human breath and the thud of boots on earth. As Crowl burst back out into the tank-chamber, he saw it break from cover, leaping from wall to wall, its body marred with the shimmer of cameleo coating. He fired again, his arm tracking the shadow-flicker, and the bullet grazed the curve of a chem-holder in a furrow of sparks.
Hegain’s squad was close on his heels, and they laid down a soak-pattern of lasfire. The shadow-form kept running, dancing between the glowing fire lanes and bounding off towards the way back out — a web of metal clamberways that twisted up towards a well of diffuse artificial light. By the Holy Throne, it was fast.
Crowl held up his gauntlet then, halting the volley, and the last of the lasfire aura faded away. ‘Subject is entering the prepared zone,’ he voxed as Hegain came to join him.
As the last word left his lips, the clamberways dissolved into cascades of nerve gas explosions, green-edged and puffy. He caught a final glimpse of the shadow-figure racing ahead of the explosions before its outline was lost in the daisy-chaining bursts. Hegain had laid the charges carefully, funnelling anything caught in their matrix into a narrow kill-zone.
‘Now then, Spinoza,’ Crowl voxed, observing the sequential charges go off with some satisfaction. He wasn’t surprised that they hadn’t downed it, but that hadn’t been the objective. ‘Subject is running and heading for your position. You wanted a chance to take it down — here it comes.’
Valco had lived in the same spire as Holbech. Everyone who worked at the Triad communication towers lived in the same spire as Holbech. For all that vast crowds of people forever made their way across the causeways and transit lanes, the majority on Terra never once left the enclosure of their own giant spires over the course of an entire lifetime. They would be born in the industrial natal units, ripped from their mothers at the earliest opportunity to be sprayed with disinfectant and branded with time-and-location stamps. They would be educated in the spire’s indoctrination units in classes five hundred-strong, where priests and scholars bearing electro-prods would bellow out the lists of the fallen for memorisation and impress the sacred trinity of fears: the alien, the heretic, the mutant.
At the age of ten standard, most would be assigned work-details, taking into account any particular aptitude: a position in low-level manufactoria, food tank processors, engineering squadrons or refuse collection. The more gifted would be given assignments in the spire’s myriad security and control organisations, or service the tower’s colossal internal life-support systems. The most gifted of all would end up in Hieron Valco’s position — tiny cogs in the Adeptus Terra’s unimaginably vast web of administrators. Many more again would fall between the cracks entirely, living a precarious life in the grimy shadows, feeding on the unwary, hunted by the overburdened arbitrators, an existence little better than that of the beasts which had once shared Terra’s poisoned biosphere.
No matter their station, when death claimed them their bodies would be taken down into the furnaces, the organs extracted and the hair stuffed into sacking, and the rest fed to greedy flames that never went out. Their eyes, now floating in preservation vials and dispatched via servitor to recycler apothecarions, would never have seen a sunrise unfiltered by dirty plexiglass. Their skin would never have felt the brush of the world’s wind, their ears would never have been free of the endless hum of the spire’s engines and its forges.
So it was not far to travel from Holbech’s relatively well-appointed hab-unit to his inferior’s more mundane cell. Revus took the priority turbo-lifts down from the supervisor-grade tiers and into the bulk-living combines below. The elevator chamber ground its way down a centuries-old shaft, shuddering as it came to a halt at the requested stop. When the doors jerkily slid open, they revealed a standard artery corridor, ten metres across, its walls blotched with grease and lit by faltering orange lumen-strips. A few wary souls looked up to see who had arrived, and immediately looked away when they caught sight of Revus’ dun-grey armour. The only ones who didn’t shuffle off into the dark were the lame, draped across the floor with hands cupped for food donations, their milky blind eyes staring up at the ceiling. Old Missionaria posters curled from the walls over their heads, spotted with mould, blaring out He Watches All and Hears All and Suspicion is Your Greatest Virtue — Feed It!
Revus made his way along the arterial, turning down a smaller feeder corridor, then another, with every turn moving deeper into the gloom and the grime. Eventually he halted before a nondescript door bearing the marker SD-Erati-Mov-B 3458. A long brown stain ran the length of the plasteel, terminating in a pool at the door’s base. Revus ran a brief scan for body heat on the far side, detected nothing, and deactivated the standard lock. The door’s motor wheezed and puttered out, so he grabbed the edge and hauled the slide-unit across on its rail, closing it after him.
The space was empty. It was a single cell, windowless, a few metres square, a standard single-person living module. A cot ran along the far wall, over which hung the main storage units. Food-preparation stacks leaned against the right-hand side, and a small comms-unit took up most of the left. A low table was stacked with documents — bundles of Administratum-standard vellum sheets bound with snapwire and thick with official seals.
Revus squatted down and rummaged through them. All the bundles were schedules for lifter-touchdowns, meticulously written out longhand, with marginal notes and a few corrections in what he presumed was Valco’s own script. Here and there, the reams of numerals were punctuated with snippets of text — I find fulfilment in service, The greatest of His servants would not function without the diligent labour of the least, the usual stuff.
He rose, blink-activated a trace moisture filter for his right eye, and scanned the chamber interior. He saw the faint impressions of boots on the metal floor. They would not have been Valco’s — probably arbitrators. Even the clumsiest of them would have taken anything of interest away, whether working for this Phaelias, or working for someone else, or perhaps — you never knew — just doing their job.
Revus switched to an infrared filter and moved towards the cot. A dirty blanket, chewed by lice, lay disturbed on the thin mattress. A few pict-books — The Authorised History of Astra Militarum Auxiliary Regiments in the Geres Subsector Vol. XXXIIa, a disease symptom primer from the spire’s Departmento Contagio, and a romance set on the reputed paradise world of Krieg with the convoluted title My Wish to Generate Children with You is Only Exceeded by My Devotion to Him.
Idly, Revus snapped open the cover of the latter, looking down at age-bleached images of starry-eyed lovers exchanging words of devotion as they sailed across a crystal-blue lake. He was about to close it again, when he noticed the narrow strip of parchment wedged between the cartridge and the plasboard cover. Working carefully, he teased the slip out from where it had been jammed. The leathery surface was creased and broken, no bigger than his thumb, but a single line of text could just be made out.
Rhadamanthys.
Revus pondered that for a moment. It was written in the same script as the margins of the lifter schedules, but hastily, as if to serve as an aide-memoire.