'Back! Back now!' I yelled.
It was too late. Tutrone had undone the catch. The false nail sprang back and something flew out of the cavity in the finger tip. A silver worm, like a thread of necklace chain, flashed through the air.
Where did it go?'
'I don't know, I said, pushing Tutrone and Aemos behind me. 'Did you see it?' I asked Fischig.
'Over there/ he said, pulling a short-nosed gloss-black autopistol out from his robes.
I reached for my own gun, then remembered I'd given it back to Vibben.
I snatched up a bone knife from the trolley.
The worm slithered back into the light. It was a metre long and several centimetres thick now. What foul sorcery had caused that expansion, I did not want to know. It was made of segmented metal, and the head was an eyeless cone split by a hissing mouth full of razor teeth.
Tutrone cried out as it flew at lis. I pushed her down and the thing whipped across over us, hitting a corpse on a nearby plinth. There was a dreadful sucking, gnawing sound and the worm disappeared into the corpse's torso through a jagged hole.
The corpse vibrated and ruptured, filling the air with a foul mist of vapour. The worm swished up out of it and disappeared across the floor. By then, Fischig had opened fire and blasted the shattered corpse off its plinth. The worm was long since gone.
'Touch-activated mechanism/ Aemos was murmuring to himself, 'very discrete, probably of Xenos manufacture, a guard weapon, with some mass-altering system that expands it on contact with air and/or release, hunting by sound…'
'So shut up!' I told him. I bundled him and Tutrone against the far wall. Fischig and I moved in parallel courses down through the plinth rows, weapons ready.
It reappeared. By the time I saw it, it was almost on me, thrashing forward through the air on its metallic tail. In a split second, I reflected that this was how Eyclone had wanted me to die. This was what he had intended to unleash against me on the landing platform at Processional Two-Twelve.
Rage made me deny him. I stabbed out and my extended blade jabbed directly between the gaping teeth and down the gullet. The impact knocked me back. I found I had the whole, heavy, two-metre thing thrashing on the end of my knife like a lash.
Shots banged past me. Fischig was trying to hit it.
You'll kill me, you idiot!'
'Hold it still!'
With a metallic rasping, it was chewing down the blade and the handle towards my hand.
Tutrone came in from behind me and together we wrestled the powerful, coiling thing onto a plinth. She activated a bone-saw on her augmetic hand and sliced down through its neck with a shrill scream of spinning blades.
The body continued to thrash. She grabbed it and dropped it into an acid trough usually reserved for bio-waste. The hissing head and the knife it was still chewing away at quickly followed it.
The four of us gazed down at the thrashing remains as they disintegrated.
I looked round at Mortress Tutrone and Fischig.
'I know which one of you I'd rather have around in a fight/1 muttered.
Tutrone laughed. Fischig didn't.
'What was it?' Aemos asked me as we raced in Fischig's landspeeder through the streets to the Arbites' headquarters.
'You guessed more than I know/ I replied. A gift from his masters, certainly/
'What manner of masters make a thing like that?'
'Powerful ones, Aemos. The worst kind/
Our meeting at the Arbites' grim chambers was brief. At my request, Fischig had summoned Magus Palastemes, the head of the cryogenerator technomagi.
He took one look at the casket in the evidence room and said, 'I have no idea what it is/
Thank you. That will be all/ I told him. I turned to Fischig. 'Have this sent immediately to my vessel/
'It is state's evidence-' he began.
'Who do you work for, Fischig?'
The Emperor/
'Then pretend I'm him and you won't be far wrong. Do it/
* * *
Hadam Bonz was waiting for us in the interrogation room. He had been stripped naked, but Fischig assured me nothing of import had been found in his clothes.
Bonz was the gunman I had laid out in the cryogenerator chamber, the only one of Eyclone's men to have survived the night. His mouth was swollen from my blow. He had admitted nothing except his name.
Fischig, Aemos and I entered the room, a dull stone box. Bonz was shackled to a metal chair and looked terrified.
So should he, I thought.
Tell me about Murdin Eyclone/ I said.
Who?' The darkness had gone from his eyes now, Eyclone's spell broken. He was bewildered and confused.
Then tell me the last thing you remember.'
'I was on Thracian Primaris. That was my home. I was a stevedore in the docks. I remember going to a bar with a friend. That is all/
The friend?'
'A dock master called Wyn Eddon. We got drunk, I think/
'Did Eddon mention an Eyclone?'
'No. Look, where am I? These bastards won't say. What I am supposed to have done?'
I smiled. 'You tried to kill me for a start/
'You?'
'I'm an Imperial inquisitor/
At that, terror made him lose control of his body functions. He began pleading, begging, telling us all sorts of misdemeanours, none of which mattered.
I knew from the first moments that he was useless. Just a mesmerised slave, chosen for his muscle, knowing nothing. But we spent two hours with him anyway. Fischig slowly turned a wall dial near the door that vented in increasing measures of the sub-zero air outside the Sun-dome. In our heat gowns, we asked questions over and again.
When Bonz's flesh began to adhere to the metal chair, we knew there was nothing more.
'Warm him up and feed him well/ Fischig told his men as we left the cell. We execute him at dawn/
I didn't ask if that meant some arbitrary time in the next cycle or real dawn, six months away, at the start of Thaw.
I didn't much care.
Fischig left us to our own devices for a while, and I ate lunch with Aemos at a public bistro almost directly under the Sun-dome. The food was sour, rehashed from freeze-dried consumables,
