The Tothiat and a handful of his followers were aboard the Vulture now, and the Castigar snaked aboard after, turning to spray the bay with a salvo of accelerator shots. They drilled through walls and stanchions without significantly slowing. Solace felt the familiar shudder of an atmosphere bubble contending with unplanned apertures.
Then the Vulture’s hatch closed and the ship was on the move. It slid sideways out of the bay with a roar of thrusters, pulling its terrible cargo, forcing Rollo and the rest back. Solace instinctively tracked it with her purloined gun, but it wasn’t designed to puncture a ship’s hull.
A moment later and they were left in the ravaged bay, staring at Barney’s corpse and Medvig’s burnt-out shell.
9.
Havaer
Havaer Mundy, of Hugh’s much-feared Intervention Board, wore clothes badly. It was as though they weren’t quite right for his size or shape. It was a common Colonial problem born of too many generations of malnourishment and unreliable manufacturing. Make do and mend. Even with an orbital office over Berlenhof, Havaer’s tunics still seemed as ill-fitting as an itinerant spacer’s.
That he had a face designed by evolution for suspicious and mistrustful expressions had perhaps exercised some form of determinism, because he had ended up in a suspicious and mistrustful job. His features were gaunt and hollow, hung off big slanting cheekbones. Above them, his narrow eyes seemed to question everything. In his career at the Intervention Board – familiarly known as ‘Mordant House’ because of the planet-side district their office had once inhabited, and because it sounded just sinister enough – he had driven three subordinates to confess misdeeds he hadn’t even guessed at, just by sharing a room with them.
Today, Havaer wasn’t feeling too sinister. He was looking forward to getting to grips with some unchallenging intel reports on a smuggling operation. A cartel had been bringing the Hegemonic drug Esh into a handful of colony worlds, and he suspected preventing it was a lost cause. Still, his job was to do, not to set policy, and current policy was to draw a hard border and try to control access to the stuff.
Midway through his morning, though, he was called in by Chief Laery. She was hunched like a spider in an a-grav chair behind her desk. Her brittle-boned limbs were like narrow pipes, slightly thicker at the elbows and knees. Her neural link threw images and holograms across her desk as she addressed him.
‘Might have a problem. At Huei-Cavor.’
Havaer gave his chief a look. ‘The Hegemony takeover isn’t news, surely. And we can’t do anything about it. Unless we really do want to butt heads with the Essiel?’ Some of the more Nativist in the department had been pushing for just that: Hugh should take a stand against these damn aliens poaching their colonies.
‘It’s not the Hegemony, believe it or not.’ Laery’s head shifted on her fragile neck and more information began to appear over the desk. ‘A ship just brought in a packet from a Huei-Cavor informer. Supposedly something special docked at an orbital there. Under cover, but someone reckoned they could make a little Largesse by selling us the news.’
Havaer was scanning through the report. ‘More Architect gossip. This is nonsense.’
‘Almost certainly. And not the first time someone’s tried to spread this particular rumour,’ Laery agreed, then paused expectantly.
‘I thought they were going to repeal Standing Order Four,’ Havaer complained eventually, when he saw which way this was going.
‘Still in committee,’ Laery agreed with a thin smile. ‘Likely it’ll be done by the time you return from Huei-Cavor. Then they’ll use it as a reason not to pay you overtime.’
Standing Order Four came out of the period when any rumour of the Architects’ return had caused immediate panic. Whole teams of Mordant House agents had been dispatched by the swiftest routes at vast expense. But those days were past, and Hugh was seeking to cut back on costs. Crack squads of veterans, led by hard-faced people like Havaer, cost money. Especially when they kicked in doors, kidnapped and interrogated witnesses, boarded ships and almost set off whole chains of subsidiary wars in their fervour.
Apparently someone had seen a salvage crew drag in a wreck that looked like it had been Architected. Havaer shrugged inwardly. A ship could explode in a variety of ways. You could get some pretty spectacular effects if a gravitic drive went wrong in the instant of transit. And these days, who’d even seen an Architect’s handiwork first-hand? He already had his final report half composed in his head before he stood up. On Laery’s desk, the details of his berth to Huei-Cavor flashed up. He frowned.