swung wild. His withering close-range shots punched right through a flak-board wall partition and blew the guts and thighs out of Machinesmith Vidor, who had been waiting to spring out from behind it.
Nessa came out of cover under some loose sacking and slammed the rock-knife into the back of the Zoican’s neck. She held on, screaming and yanking at the blood-slick knife-grip as the trooper bucked convulsively. By the time he dropped, his head was nearly sawn off.
Gol hurried forward, picking Nessa up and pulling her off the corpse. She handed the bloody rock knife to him, shaking.
“Keep it,” he mouthed. She nodded. Eardrums ruptured by a close shell on the seventh day, she would never hear again without expensive up-hive surgery and implants— which meant simply she would never hear again. She was a trainee medic from the outer habs. Not the lowest of the low, but way, way down in the hive class system.
“You did good,” Gol signed. She smiled, but the fear in her eyes and the blood on her face diffused the power of the expression and diluted the beauty of the young woman.
“Not so easy,” she signed back. She’d learned to sign her remarks early on. Captain Fencer, the Emperor save his soul, had trained her well and explained how she could not modulate the volume of her own voice now she was deaf.
Gol looked round. Haller and the other members of Gol’s team had recovered four working lasguns, two laspistols and a bunch of ammunition webs from the dead by then.
“Go! Move!” Gol ordered, emphasising his words with expressive sign-gestures for the deaf. Of his company of nine, six were without hearing. He took a last look at Vidor’s corpse and nodded a moment of respect. He had liked Vidor. He wished the brave machinesmith had found the chance to fight. Then he followed his company out.
They moved out of the workshop, circuiting back around through a side alley and into a burned-out Ecclesiarchy chapel. The bodies of the Ministorum brothers lay all around, venting swarms of flies. They had not abandoned their holy place, even when the shells began to fall.
Haller crossed to the altar, straightened the slightly skewed Imperial eagle and knelt in observance. Tears dripped down his face, but he still remembered to sign his anguish and his prayer to the Emperor rather than speak it. Gol noticed this, and was touched and impressed by the soldier’s dual devotion to the Emperor and to their continued safety.
Gol got his company into the chapel, spreading them out to cover the openings and find the obvious escape routes.
The ground shook as tank rounds took out the workshop where they had sprung their trap.
In the cover of the explosions, he dared to speak, signing at the same time. “Let’s find the next ones to kill,” he said.
“A squad of six, moving in from the west,” hissed loom-girl Banda, setting down her lasgun and peering out of a half-broken lancet window.
“Drill form as before,” Gol Kolea signed to his company, “Form on me. Let’s set the next snare.”
Lord Heymlik Chass sent his servitors and bodyguard away. The chief of the guard, Rudrec, his weapon dutifully shrouded, tried to refuse, but Chass was not in the mood for argument.
Alone in the cool, gloomy family chapel of House Chass, high up in the Main Spine upper sectors, the lord prayed diligently to the soul of the undying Emperor. The ghosts of his ancestors welled up around him, immortalised in statuary. Heymlik Chass believed in ghosts.
They spoke to him.
He unlocked the casket by the high altar between the family stasis-crypts with a geno-key that had been in his family for generations. He raised the velvet-padded lid, hearing the moan of ancient suspensor fields, and lifted out Heironymo’s Amulet.
“What are you doing, father?” Merity Chass asked. His daughter’s voice startled him and almost made him drop the precious thing.
“Merity! You shouldn’t be here!” he murmured.
“What are you doing?” she asked again, striding forward under the flaming sconces of the chapel, her green velvet dress whispering as she moved.
“Is that…” Her voice trailed away. She could not utter the words.
“Yes. Given to our house by Great Heironymo himself.”
“You’re not thinking of using it! Father!”
He stared down into her pained, beautiful face.
“Go away, my daughter. This is not for your eyes.”
“No!” she barked. She so reminded him of her mother when she turned angry that way. “I am grown, I am the heir, female though I may be. Tell me what you are doing!”
Chass sighed and let the weight of the amulet play in his hands. “What I must, what is good for the hive. There was a reason Old Heironymo bequeathed this to my father. Salvadore Sondar is a maniac. He will kill us all.”
“You have raised me to be respectful of the High House, father,” she said, a slight smile escaping her frown. That was her mother again, Heymlik noticed.
“It amounts to treason,” his daughter whispered.
He nodded and his head sank. “I know what it amounts to. But we are on the very brink now. Heironymo always foretold this moment.”
He hugged her. She felt the weight of the amulet in his hands against her back.
“You must do what you must, father,” Merity said.
Like a slow, pollen-gathering insect, a vox drone hummed lazily in the chapel and crossed to the embracing figures. It bleeped insistently. Chass pulled away from his daughter, savouring the sweet smell of her hair.
“A vote is being taken in the Upper Legislature. I must go.”
Bumbling like a moth, the drone hovered in front of the Noble Lord, leading him out of the chamber.
“Father?”
Heymlik looked back at his beloved child, hunched and frightened by the cold, marble familial crypt.
“I will support you in whatever you do, but you must tell me what you decide. Don’t keep me in the dark.”
“I promise,” he said.
The Privy Council was a circular theatre set on the Spine- floor above the spectacular main hall of the Legislature, and it was reserved for the noble houses only. The domed roof was a painted frieze of the Emperor and the god-machines of Mars hovering in radiant clouds. Columns of warm, yellow light stabbed down from the edges of the circular ceiling and lit the velvet thrones of the high houses. Apart from Chass, they were all there: Gavunda, Yetch, Rodyn, Anko, Croe, Piidestro, Nompherenti and Vwik.
Marshal Croe stood by his brother, the old, wizened Lord Croe, in deep conference. Vice Marshal Anko, beaming and obsequious, was introducing General Sturm to his
