slates, but there was still more than enough room for the supplies and munitions they had brought with them.
Another truck backed up to the doorway, lights winking, and Domor, Cocoer and Brostin helped to shift the crates of perishables to their appointed stacks. Varl allocated another area for the munitions he had been told would arrive later.
Caffran looked up as the sergeant called to him. “Sweep the back,” Varl ordered. “Make sure the rear of the barn is secure.”
Caffran nodded, pulling his jacket and camo-cape from a nearby crate-pile and putting them back on. He was still sweat-hot from the work.
Lifting his lasgun, he paced round the rear of the supply stacks, moving through the darkness and shadows, checking the rotting rear wall of the hangar for holes.
Something scurried in the dark.
He swung his gun round. Rodents?
There was no further movement. Caffran edged forward and noticed the edge of a crate that had been chewed away. The plastic-wrapped packets of dried biscuit inside had been invaded. Definitely rodents. There was a trail of crumbs and shreds of plastic seal. They’d have to set traps —and poison too probably.
He paused. The hole in the crate’s side was far too high to be the work of rodents. Unless they bred something the size of a hound in the sewers of this place. That wouldn’t surprise him, given the giant scale of everything else here in Vervunhive.
He armed his lasgun and slid around the edge of the next stack.
Something scurried again.
He hastened forward, gun raised, looking for a target. Feth, maybe the local vermin would be good eating. They’d had precious little fresh meat in the last forty days.
There was a movement to his left and he dropped to one knee, taking aim. Beyond the supply stacks, there was a pale, green slice of light, a jagged hole in the back of the barn through which the glow of the Shield high above leaked in.
Caffran shuffled forward.
A noise to the right.
He spun around. Nothing. He saw how several more crates had been clawed into.
Something flickered past the slice of light, something moving through it quickly, blocking out the glow.
Caffran ran forward, pulling himself sideways through the gap in the rotten fibre-planks of the hangar’s rear wall and out into the tangled waste of debris and rubble behind the storage barn.
He crawled out, got down, raised his gun…
And saw the boy. A small boy, eight or nine years old it seemed to Caffran, scampering up a mound of nibble with a wrap of biscuits in his hand.
The boy reached the summit and another figure loomed out of the dark. A girl, older, in her late teens, clad in vulgar rags and decorated with piercings. She took the wrap from the boy and hugged him tightly.
Caffran got up, lowering his gun. “Hey!” he called.
The child and the girl looked round at him sharply, like animals caught in a huntsman’s light.
Caffran saw for just a moment the strong, fierce, beautiful face of the girl before the children ducked out of sight and vanished into the wasteland.
He ran up the slope after them, but they were gone.
In a foxhole a hundred metres away from the back of the storage barns, Tona Criid hugged Dalin to her and willed him to be quiet.
“Good boy, good boy,” she murmured. She took out the biscuits and tore the wrap open so he could have one.
Dalin wolfed it down. He was hungry. They were all hungry out here.
Nutrient clouds pumped into the Iron Tank fed the dreaming High Master of Vervunhive. He rolled in his oily fluid womb, pulling at his link feeds, feet and hands twitching like a dreaming dog. He dreamed of the Trade War, before his birth. The images of his dream were informed by the pict-library he had studied in his youth. He dreamed of his illustrious predecessor, the great Heironymo, haughtily spurning the rivalry with Ferrozoica, arming for war. How wrong, how very foolish! Such a grossly physical stubbornness! And the hive held him in such esteem for his heroic leadership! Fools! Cattle! Unthinking chaff!
Commerce is always war. But the war of commerce may be fought in such subtle, exquisite ways. To raise arms, to mobilise bodies, to turn beautiful hive profits into war machines and guns, rations and ammunition…
What a pathetic mind, Heironymo! How blind of you to miss the real avenues of victory! House Clatch would have bowed to mercantile embargoes long before the brave boys of Vervun Primary had overturned the walls of Zoica! A concession here, a bargain there, a stifling of funds or supplies, a blockade…
Salvador Sondar floated upwards, his dreams now machine- language landscapes of autoledgers, contoured ziggurats of mounted interest values, rivers of exchange rates, terraces of production value outputs.
The mathematical vistas of mercantile triumph he adored more than any other place in the universe.
He twitched again in the warm soup, iridescent bubbles coating his shrunken limbs and fluttering to the roof of the Iron Tank. He was pleased now that he had killed the old man. Heironymo had ruled too long! A hundred and twenty years old, beloved by the stupid, vapid public, still unwilling to make way for his twenty year-old nephew and obvious successor! It had been a merciful act, Salvador dreamed to himself, though the guilt of it had plagued him for the last fifty years. His sleeping features winced.
Yes, it had been merciful… for the good of the hive and for the further prosperity of House Sondar, noble line! Had output not tripled during his reign? And now Gnide and Croe and Chass and the other weaklings told him that mercantile war was no longer an option! Fools!
Gnide…
Now… he was dead, wasn’t he?
And Slaydo too? The great warmaster, dead of poison. No, that wasn’t right. Stabbed on the carpet of the audience hall… no… no…
Why were his dreams so confused? It was the chatter. That was it. The chatter. He wished it would cease. It was a hindrance to reason. He was High Master of Vervunhive and he wanted his dream-mind dean and unpolluted so he could command his vast community to victory once more.
The chatter was lisping something.
Salvador Sondar’s dreams were suddenly as suspended as the dreamer for a moment. Fugue state snarled his dream-mind. He floated in the tank as if dead.
Then the dreams resumed in a rush. To poison the servitor taster, that had been a stroke of genius! No one had ever suspected! And to use a neural toxin that left no trace. A
