when he's annoyed/
You're not tempted to attend?'
I laughed. In truth, I had thought to return to the Helican sub-sector capital before long. Thracian Primaris, the most massive, industrialised and populated world in the sub-sector, had wrested capital planet status from ancient Gudrun after the disgrace and foment of the Schism, finally achieving the preeminence it felt its size and power had long deserved. It was now the chief Imperial planet of this region.
There was work to be done, reports to be filed and presented, and those things could best be achieved by returning to my property on Thracian, my base of operations, near to the Palace of the Inquisition. But I had little love for Thracian Primaris. It was an ugly place, and I only made my headquarters there out of convenience. The thought of pomp and ceremony and festivals filled me with quiet dread.
Perhaps I would go to Messina instead, or to the quiet of Gudrun, where I maintained a small, comfortable estate.
The Inquisition is to attend in great strength. Lord Rorken himself…'
I waved a hand in Aemos's direction. 'Does it appeal to you?'
'No/
Are there not better uses for our time? Pressing matters? Things that would be more easily achieved away from such overblown distractions?'
'Most certainly/ he said.
Then I think you know my mind/
'I think I do, Gregor/ he said, rising to his feet and reaching into the pocket of his green robe. And therefore I'm fully prepared for the fact that you're going to curse me when I give you this/
He held out a small data-slate, an encrypted message-tile whose contents had been received and stored by the astropaths.
The official seal of the Inquisition was stamped across its front.
THREE
Capital world.
The Ocean House.
Intruders, past and present.
Thracian Primaris, capital world of the Helican sub-sector, seat of government, Helican sub-sector, Scams sector, Segmentum Obscurus. You can read that description in any one of a hundred thousand guidebooks, geographies, Imperial histories, pilgrimage primers, industrial ledgers, trade directories, star maps. It sounds impressive, authoritarian, powerful.
It does no justice at all to the monster it describes.
I have known hellholes and death-planets that from space look serene and wondrous: the watercolours of their atmospheres, the glittering moons and belts they wear like bangles and jewels, the natural wonders that belie the dangers they contain.
Thracian Primaris is no such dissembler. From space, it glowers like an oozing, cataracted eye. It is corpulent, swollen, sheened in grey veils of atmospheric soot through which the billion billion lights of the city hives glimmer like rotting stars. It glares balefully at all ships that approach.
And, oh! But they approach! Shoals of ships, flocks of them, countless craft, drawn to this bloated cesspit by the lure of its vast industrial wealth and mercantile vigour.
It has no moons, no natural moons anyway. Five Ramilies-class star-forts hang above its atmosphere, their crenellated towers and buttressed gun-stations guarding the approaches to and from the capital world. A dedicated guild of forty thousand skilled pilots exists simply to guide traffic in and out of the jostling, crowded high-anchor reaches. It has a
planetary defence force, a standing army of eight million men. It has a population of twenty-two billion, plus another billion temporary residents and visitors. Seven-tenths of its surface are now covered by hive structures, including great sections of the world's original oceans. City-sprawl fdls and covers the seas, and the waters roll in darkness far beneath.
I loathe the place. I loathe the lightless streets, the noise, the press of bodies. I loathe the stink of its re-circulated air. I loathe its airborne grease-filth adhering to my clothes and skin.
But fate and duty bring me back there, time and again.
The encrypted Inquisitorial missive had been quite clear: I, and a great number of my peers, was summoned to Thracian Primaris to attend the Holy Novena, and wait upon the pleasure of the Lord Grandmaster Inquisitor Ubertino Orsini. Orsini was the most senior officer of the Inquisition in the entire Helican sub-sector, a status that made him equal in rank and power to any cardinal palatine.
I was not about to decline.
The voyage from Lethe Eleven took a month, and I brought my entire entourage back with me. We arrived just four days shy of the start of the Novena. As a tiny pilot boat led my ship in to anchor through the massed ranks of orbiting starships, I saw the dark formations of Battlefleet Scarus, suckling at a starfort as if they were its young. This was their heroic homecoming. There was a taste of victory in the air. An Imperial triumph on this scale was something to be savoured, something the Ministorum could use to boost the morale of the common citizenry.
Tour itinerary has been prepared/ said Alain von Baigg, a junior interrogator who served as my secretary. We were aboard the gun-cutter, dropping towards the planet.
'Oh, by whom?'
He paused. Von Baigg was a diffident and lustreless young man who I doubted would ever make the rank of inquisitor. I'd accepted him to my staff in the hope that service alongside Ravenor might inspire him. It had not.
'I would have presumed that the preparation of my itinerary might have included my own choices.'
Von Baigg stammered something. I took the data-slate he was holding. The list of appointments was not his handiwork, I saw. It was an official document, processed by the Ministoram's nunciature in collaboration with the Office of the Inquisition. My timetable for all nine days of the Holy Novena was filled with audiences, acts of worship, feasts, presentation ceremonies, unveilings and Ministorum rites. All nine days, plus the days before and after.
I was here, damn it! I had responded to the summons. I would not allow myself to be subjected to this round of junkets too. I took a stylus and
quickly marked the events I was prepared to attend: the formal rites, the Inquisitorial audience, the Grand Bestowment. 'That's it/ I said, tossing it back to him. The rest I'm skipping.' Von Baigg looked uncomfortable. 'You are expected at the Post-Apostolic Conclave immediately on arrival.' 'Immediately on arrival/ I told him sternly, I'm going home.'
Home, for me, was the Ocean House, a private residence I leased in the most select quarter of Hive Seventy. On many hive worlds, the rich and privileged dwell in districts high up in the top- most city spires, divorced as far as possible from the dirt and crowding of the mid and low-hab levels. But no matter how high you climbed on Thracian Primaris, there was nothing to find but smog and pollution.
Instead, the exclusive habitats were on the underside of the hive portions that extended out over and into the hidden seas. There was at least a tranquillity here.
Medea Betancore plew the gun-cutter down through the traffic-thick atmosphere, threaded her way between the tawdry domes, dingy towers, rusting masts and crumbling spires, and laced into the seething lanes of air vehicles entering a vast feeder tunnel which gave access to the hives' arterial transit network.
Bars of blue-white light set into the walls of the huge tunnel strobed by the ports. In under an hour we had reached a great transit hub, three kilometres down in the city-crust, where she set the cutter down on a massive elevator platform that sedately lowered us and a dozen other craft into the sub-levels of Hive Seventy. The cutter was then berthed in a private lifter-drome and we transferred to a tuberail for the final stretch to the maritime habitats.
I was already weary of Thracian Primaris by the time I reached the Ocean
