yet/
'Gregor!' she wailed.
'Listen! Think about this logic-'
'Logically? That bastard killed my father an-'
'Listen! I don't want the cutter giving us away too early. That means leaving it here. But I do want the cutter ready to respond at a moment's notice,
and that means you have to stay here on standby! Medea, you're the only one who can fly it!'
She shook off my grip and turned away, gazing at the rolling surge of the ocean.
'Medea?'
'Okay. But I want to be there when-'
'You will. I promise.'
'You swear it?'
'I swear it.'
Slowly, she turned look at me. Her eyes were still bright with hurt. 'Swear it on your secrets,' she said.
'What?'
'Do it the Glavian way. Swear it on your secrets/
I remembered this now. The Glavian custom. They considered an oath most binding if it was sworn against private, personal secrets. In the old days, I suppose, that meant one Glavian pilot swearing to exchange valuable technical or navigational secrets with another as an act of faith and honour. Midas had made me do it once, years before. He'd made me swear to a three-month sabbatical at a time when I was working too hard. It hadn't been possible, because of one case or another, and I'd ended up having to tell him that I adored Alizebeth and wished with every scrap of my being that we could be together.
That was the deepest, darkest secret I had been carrying at the time. How things change.
'I swear it on my secrets/ I told her.
'On your gravest secret/
'On my gravest secret/
She spat on the ground and then quickly licked her palm and held out her hand. I mirrored her gestures and clasped her hand.
We left her with Aemos, Dahault and Verveuk at the gun-cutter and made our way up the cliff stairs.
It was raining by the time we reached the top, and the last few flights were treacherously wet. Salty wind flapped in from the sea, gusting into our coats and clothes.
I was worried about Poul Rassi. Though he didn't look it, he was over a century older than me, and the climb left him pale and breathless. He was relying on his cane more than before.
'I'm all right/ he said. 'Don't fuss/
'Are you sure, Poul?'
He smiled. 'I've been in the courts and privy chambers for too many of the last few years, Gregor. This is almost an adventure. I'd forgotten how much I liked this/ Rassi raised his cane and flourished it ahead of us like a sabre. 'Shall we?'
* * *
We advanced into the hinterland of Miquol. Fischig had an auspex locked off on the old PDF base, so we headed for that as a place to start.
The sky was the luminous, hazy white of a blown valve-screen. Stripes of fog clung to the ground like walls of smoke. The rain was constant. The landscape was a mix of jagged upthrust outcrops and steep, shadowy valleys littered with scree. Boulders were scattered all around, some the size of skulls, some the size of battle tanks. The rock was dark, almost the colour of anthracite, and occasionally it was splintered out in cascades of volcanic glass. A forbidding, grey place. A monochrome world.
After two hours, we passed a rust-eaten tower of girders capped by sagging, corroded alloy petals that had once been a communications dish. One of the peripheral receivers of the listening station.
We're close/ said Fischig, consulting his auspex. The PDF base is over the next headland/
Durer PDF listening station 272 had been established shortly after the planet's liberation by the newly formed Planetary Defence Force as part of a global overwatch program. Through it, and around three hundred facilities like it, the Durer PDF had been able to maintain a round-the-clock watch of orbital traffic, local shipping lane activity and even general warp space movements, providing the planet with an early warning network and gathering vital tactical intelligence for this part of the sub-sector in general. Over a period of twenty years following the annexation of the territory, the network had gradually been ran down, eventually supplanted by a string of scanner beacons in high orbit and a slaved sub-net of sensor buoys seeded throughout the Durer system.
The PDF had finally vacated the obsolete station some three decades before, undoubtedly grateful that they would never have to tolerate a tour of duty on this harsh rock again.
The station lay on the shore of a long polar lake, framed by ragged infant mountains to the north. It was an exposed place, bitten by the sub-zero winds. The lake, smudged with mist, was a flat, gleaming mirror of oil-dark water, its glassy surface occasionally disturbed by a flurry of wind ripples.
On the grey shore there were eighteen longhouses arranged in a grid around a drum-like generator building, a hangar large enough to shelter several troop carriers or orbital interceptors, a cluster of store barns, a number of machine shops, a small Ecclesiarchy chapel, a central command post with adjoining modules arranged in a radial hub and the main dish array.
All of it had succumbed to the feral ministry of the environment. The modules and prefabs were aged and dilapidated, windows covered with boards. The roadways between the prefabs were littered with rusting trash: old fuel drums, the carcasses of trucks, piles of flaking storm shutters. The vast main dish, angled towards the west, was a skeleton of its former self, just a hemisphere described by bare girders and dangling struts. In the
black mirror of the lake, its reflection seemed like that of a giant, bleached ribcage. But it looked to me more like the ruins of an orrery, just the shattered remains of the central solar ball, permanently peering in the direction it had last been turned.
Hugging cover, we made our way onto the cold shore and crossed the short distance to the nearest longhouse. We all had weapons drawn by now, except Begundi. Fischig's auspex and motion tracker both indicated life-signs close by, but how close they weren't telling. Thanks to the damn magnetic interference we were forewarned but as good as blind.
We were non-verbal by now. I gestured and sent Haar ahead down the left side of the street, Fischig down the right. I'd have liked to deploy Kara too, but she was keeping to my orders and sticking close to Rassi, her assault weapon tight in her gloved hands. Rassi, his sombre, fur-trimmed robes flapping in the wind, had produced a multi-barrel pepperpot handgun of exotic manufacture.
Bequin hung back from me so that her psychic deadness wouldn't conflict with my mind. For the trek across Miquol she had changed her formal gown for a quilted body suit and stout boots, with a hooded cloak of dark green, embroidered velvet wrapped around her. I noticed she had also left her long walking cane aboard the cutter. She had drawn a slim, long-nosed micro-las that I had given her on her hundred and fiftieth birthday. It had pearl-inlaid grips and was a custom masterpiece, an antique made by Magos Nwel of Gehenna.
The pistol suited her. It was slender and elegant and devastatingly potent.
Up ahead, I saw Fischig signal to Haar. Haar knelt down and gave the big man some cover as he crossed to the back door of the next longhouse. I sent Begundi forward in support. Begundi still hadn't drawn his hand cannons from their shoulder rig, and ran with an easy, loping gait.
