clarification requests to the Main Spine command station. Line supervisors and labour-stewards in the plants and manufactories chivvied their personnel back into production, but they were uneasy too. It was a test, surely? Or a mistake. A few moments more and the alarms would shut down again.
But the klaxons did not desist.
After a minute or so, raid-sirens in the central district also began keening. The pattern was picked up by manufactory hooters and mill-whistles all through the lower hive, and in the docks and outer habs across the river too. Even the great ceremonial horns on the top of the Ecclesiarchy Basilica started to sound.
Vervunhive was screaming with every one of its voices.
Everywhere, hazard lamps began to spin and flash, and secondary storm shutters cycled down on automatic to block windows. All the public-address plates in the city went black, erasing the glowing lines of weather, temperature, exchange-rate data, the local news and the ongoing output figures. They fuzzed darkly for a few seconds and then the words “Please stand by” scrolled across all of them in steady repeats.
In the firelit halls of Vervun Smeltery One—part of the primary ore processing district just west of the Spoil—rattling conveyers laden with unprocessed rock shuddered to a halt as automatic safeties locked down. Above the main smelter silo, Plant Supervisor Agun Soric got up from behind a file-covered desk and crossed to the stained-glass window of his bureau. He looked down at the vast, halted plant in disbelief, then pulled on his work-jacket and went out onto the catwalk, staring at the thousands of milling workers below. Vor, his junior, hurried along the walk, his heavily booted feet ringing on the metal grill, the sound lost in the cacophony of hooters and sirens.
“What is this, chief?” he gasped, coming close to Soric and pulling the tubes of his dust-filter from his mouth-damp.
Soric shook his head. “It’s fifteen thousand cubits of lost production, that’s what the gak it is! And counting!”
“What d’you reckon? A malfunction?”
“In every alert system in the hive at once? Use your brain! A malfunction?”
“Then what?”
Soric paused, trying to think. The ideas that were forming in his mind were things he didn’t really want to entertain. “I pray to the Emperor himself that this isn’t…”
“What, chief?”
“Zoica… Zoica rising again.”
“What?”
Soric looked round at his junior with contempt. He wiped his fat, balding brow on the back of his gold-braided cuff. “Don’t you read the news-picts?”
Vor shrugged. “Just the weather and the stadium results.”
“You’re an idiot,” Soric told him. And too young to remember, he thought. Gak, he was too young himself, but his father’s father had told him about the Trade War. What was it, ninety years back, standard? Surely not again? But the picts had been full of it these last few months: Zoica silent, Zoica ceasing to trade, Zoica raising its bulwarks and setting armaments up along its northern walls.
Those raid-sirens hadn’t sounded since the Trade War. Soric knew that as a bare fact.
“Let’s hope you’re right, Vor,” he said. “Let’s hope it’s a gakking malfunction.”
* * * * *
In the Commercia, the general mercantile district north of the Main Spine, in the shadow of the Shield Pylon, Guilder Amchanduste Worlin tried to calm the buyers in his barter- house, but the sirens drowned him out. The retinues were leaving, gathering up servant trains and produce bearers, making frantic calls on their vox-links, leaving behind nothing: not a form-contract, not a promissory note, not a business slate and certainly none of their funds.
Worlin put his hands to his head and cursed. His embroidered, sleet-silk gown felt suddenly hot and heavy .
He yelled for his bodyguards and they appeared: Menx and Troor, bull-necked men in ivory-laced body-gloves with the crest of Guild Worlin branded on their cheeks. They had unshrouded their laspistols and the velvet shroud-cloths dangled limply from their cuffs.
“Consult the high guild data-vox and the Administratum links!” Worlin spat. “Come back and tell me what this is, or don’t come back at all!”
They nodded and went off, pushing through the packs of departing traders.
Worlin paced back into his private ante-room behind the auction hall, cursing at the sirens to shut up. The very last thing he needed now was an interruption to trade. He’d spent months and a great deal of Guild Worlin funds securing mercantile bonds with Noble House Yetch and four of the houses ordinary. All of that work would be for nothing if trade—and income—went slack. The whole deal could collapse. His kin would be aghast at such losses. They might even strip him of his badge and remove his trading rights.
Worlin was shaking. He crossed to the decanter on the wrought-brass stack table and was about to pour himself a hefty shot of ten-year-old joiliq to calm his brittle mood. But he paused. He went to his desk, unlocked a drawer with the geno-key that he kept around his wrist on a thin chain and took out the compact needle pistol.
He checked it was primed and armed, then fetched the drink. He sat back on his lifter throne, sipping his liquor and holding his badge of credit—the mark of his rank—gazing at the Worlin crest and its bright ornament. He waited, the weapon in his lap.
The klaxons continued to wail.
At carriage station C4/a, panic had begun. Workers and low-classers who had ventured into the mercantile slopes for a day’s resourcing began to mob every brass-framed transit that trundled in along the cogged, funicular trackway. Carriages were moving out towards the Outer Habs and the Main Spine alike, overloaded, some doors only half closed.
Crowds on the platforms, shivering at each yelp of the alarms, were getting fractious as more and more fully laden transits clattered through without stopping. A slate- seller’s stall was overturned in the press.
Livy Kolea, hab-wife, was beginning to panic herself. A body-surge of the crowd had pushed her past the pillars of the station atrium. She’d kept a firm grip on the handles of the child-cart and Yoncy was safe, but she’d lost sight of Dalin.
“My son! Have you seen my son?” she asked, imploring the frenzied crowd that washed around her. “He’s only ten! A good boy! Blond, like his father!”
She grabbed a passing guilder by the sleeve. A rich, lavish sleeve of painted silk.
“My son—” she began.
The guilder’s bodyguard, menacing in his rust-coloured mesh, pushed her aside. He jerked the satin shroud off the weapon in his left hand, just briefly, as a warning, escorting his master on. “Take the hand off, gak-swine,” his vox-enhanced larynx blurted gruffly, without emotion.
“My son—” Livy repeated, trying to push the child-cart out of the flow of bodies.
