It was even possible that he too had discovered the deceit after the event, and was moving fast following some lead to make amends for his mistake. Or that he was fleeing the shame… or…
So many possibilities. I had to play the odds the safest way. I was sure Lyko was guilty to a greater or lesser extent, so I would follow him. Even if he was simply chasing Esarhaddon too, it would lead me in the right direction.
And I couldn't inform the Inquisition, or talk to Voke or Heldane. My uncertainty was such that I couldn't even trust them not to be part of it.
A complex trail of almost subliminal clues had put me on his tail. I'll spare you the bulk of the details, for they would merely document the painstaking tedium that is often the better part of an inquisitor's work. Suffice to say, we searched and processed vox logs, and the broadcast archives of the local and planetary astropathic guilds. We watched ship transfers, orbital traffic, departure lists, cargo movements. I had personnel in the streets, watching key locations, asking off-the-record questions in trader bars, calling in favours from friends of friends, acquaintances of acquaintances, even one or too old adversaries. I hired trackers and bloodhounders, and took every scent trace I could from Lyko's apartment. I had pheromone codes programmed into servitor skulls that I released into up-ports and orbital stations.
I had well over a hundred personnel on my staff, many of them trained hunters, researchers or surveillancers, but I swear the sheer load of data would have burned out our brains.
We would have failed without Aemos. My old savant simply rose to the challenge, never put off, never fatigued, his mind soaking in more and more information and making a thousand mental cross checks and comparisons every hour, tasks I couldn't have managed in a day with a codifier engine and a datascope.
He seemed, damn his old bones, to enjoy it.
The clues came in, one by one. A shipment of cargo put into long-term storage in a holding house in Hive Eight and paid for by a debit transfer from one of Lyko's known associates. A two- second pheromone trace in the departure halls of a commercial port down on the coast at Far Hive Beta. A fuzzy image captured from a Munitorium pict-watcher on the streets of Hive Primaris.
A passenger on a manifest listing making an unnecessary number of interconnecting flights between up-ports before moving off planet, as if trying to lose pursuit.
Then the key ones: a cursory excise exam of freight that registered the presence of psi-baffling equipment in an off-wo rid shipment. A series of clumsily disguised and presumably hasty bribes to key longshoremen at the Primaris starport. A rogue trader vessel – the
Instead of a long run to the Ursoridae Reef, it was heading spinwards, via Front's World, to the twist farms of Eechan.
There was a knock at the room door just after dawn, and I sent everyone except Nayl into the adjoining room. Bequin and Inshabel had the presence of mind to scoop up all the food pails except two. I went over to the window, and Nayl sat down in a chair, with his arm casually over the back so anyone coming in couldn't see the autopistol in his hand.
I focussed my mind for a moment to make sure our twist disguises were live, and then said, 'Enter.'
The door opened and the porcupine girl from the twist bar came in. She was dressed in a glistening sap-cloak, and she looked at us curiously as she pushed back her hood.
'You take your time, twists,' she said.
'You got something, sweetgene, or you simply s'got to check the good stuff you passed on last night?' Nayl asked with a lascivious smile.
She scowled, and a head crest of spines rose in a threat posture.
'I s'got a message. You know who from.'
The Phant?' 'I ain't saying, genesmudge. I just bring it.'
Then s'bring it.'
She reached into her cloak and produced an old, low-tech tracker set, battered and worn. Holding it up briefly, she thumbed it on long enough for us to see the green telltale winking, and then switched it off again and dropped it with a clatter onto the peeling tabletop.
'S'gonna be an auction. Bidder's market, so bring lotsa yellow, he says. Lotsa.'
Where? When?'
Today at shift two, in the chew-after. That s'tell you where.'
That it?' I asked.
'S'all I have. I just bring it.' She hesitated at the door. You s'might wanna make my worth while.'
I put my hand into my coat pocket and pulled out a single, large denomination Imperial coin.
Tou take these?'
Her eyes lit up. 'I take anything/
I tossed it over to her and she caught it with one hand.
Thanks/ she said. She went out through the door and then looked back at us, as if my generous contribution to her immediate happiness had shifted her opinion of us.
Which, sadly, given this miserable place, it probably had.
'S'don't trust him/ she advised, then closed the door and left.
The chew-after was the local name given to the tracts of farmland laid waste after the harvesters had been through. Wrecklands of shredded vegetation that began to regrow within days of a harvest, such was the speed and fecundity of
Eechan's floral growth. At any one time, there were several thousand square kilometres of chew-after in the farmlands round the mainhive.
We headed south, into the most recent areas of thresh-wake, following the signal of the tracker.
Noon. That was what she had meant by shift two. The second shift change of the day. We gave ourselves two hours to get there.
On top of all my speculations about Lyko, things still didn't add up. It had been easy enough for Nayl to identify Phant Mastik as the local slaver, with a specialisation in mindjobs, but why was Lyko using him? Why was Lyko selling Esarhaddon at all?
Aemos had suggested it was part of a final trade now that Esarhaddon had completed his part of their pact. That supposed Lyko was in control, which I doubted. And if he was simply cutting the heretic loose now the work was done, why sell him? Why, indeed, come all this way to do that? Inshabel supposed that maybe Lyko was now anxious to get rid of the rogue-psyker because he was afraid of him.
I had my own theory. Lyko had brought Esarhaddon to Eechan for some other purpose, and arranging a mock sale through the Phant was simply bait to draw anyone who might have followed him out into the open.
As it turned out, I was right. I wasn't surprised. It's what I would have done.
The chew-after was a miasmal waste. As far as the eye could see, which wasn't far at all given the clinging sap-mists from the night before, the land was a gouged, punished rain of ripped shoots, shredded plant-fibre, wrenched-up root balls and pressure-flattened soil. The massive track-marks of the harvesters had left wide ruts the depth of a man's waist, at the bottom of which plant material and soil was layered into a glassy flatness like they had been set in aspic.
The misty air was wet with sap and everything was crawling with lice motes and storm-bugs. They swarmed in the air, settled all over us, and we could feel them in our clothes.
By then, although we maintained our twist disguises, we were all armed and
