Auric Gods

Chapter Six City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light

Gedd exchanged the heady aroma of human vitae for the sweaty bustle of the Vorganth down-trans, the main thoroughfare through the city that led to low-hive.

The moment she left the hab, a swarm of slow but determined bodies swallowed her up as she joined the mass of Imperial citizens going about their dreary business.

Gedd slipped on a rebreather, grateful for the advanced filtration unit built into the cup. Petro-chem and other pollutants gave the air of low-hive an ugly jaundiced tinge. Gedd heard coughing in the morass, the telltale sign of lung-rot. Most in low-hive, the ones who had no creds for a decent filter, died of lung-rot. Gedd had no time to pity them. In the Imperium, life was cheap if you were a bullet farmer or a wrench-hand… or a peacekeeper. She knew her place.

With a judicious amount of elbow jabbing, scowling and the occasional flash of her precinct-ident sigil, Gedd steadily fought through the crowds.

Above, the towering hive spires loomed like bulky minarets. The spires were well armoured with slabs of ferromite and gunned up to their crenellated teeth. She sometimes wondered if the auto-slaved cannons were for foreign invaders or to keep the burgeoning populace quiescent. Upper transit-ways threaded a false sky overhead, connecting the many districts. Mag-lifts rose and fell with agonising slowness, thronged with hundreds of bodies. The harsh sodium flares of solar traders competed with the furnace fires of the manufactora. A background hum, the heavy, brain-aching heartbeat of industry worried at the raw edges of Gedd’s nerves. For a moment the accreted misery of Vorganthian’s citizens threatened to crush her. This city hated humanity. Its contempt was palpable.

She took a breath, a heavily filtered and twice-cleansed breath, and carried on.

Taking a side street, one of several lesser arteries bleeding off the down-trans, Gedd found some relative peace. She activated the hidden vox-bead in her ear. She listened to three seconds of static, keeping watch on the alley mouth through which she had left the down-trans, and was rewarded for her patience by a man’s voice on the other end of the feed.

‘Utterance,’ he said plainly.

‘Throne ascendant,’ Gedd replied.

There was another short pause as her code was verified.

‘He wants to see you.’

‘Good,’ Gedd answered, though she stifled a tremor of unease. ‘Wait… what did you just say?’ He had never requested her presence before. ‘I have information.’

A further pause as this was relayed.

‘The lamplighter on Elserow.’

‘I know it.’

‘You have nine minutes.’

‘What? Damn it!’

The feed went dead, and Gedd killed the static as she broke into a run.

Elserow lay at the other end of the down-trans. On foot, even at a decent pace, it was probably a twelve-minute journey. Through the worker crowds… Add at least another fifteen.

As Gedd raced out of the alley, she drew her sidearm. A Verifier VII ‘auto-load’, it shone like a matt-black finger of judgement in her fist. Verifiers were known for accuracy. They also had a wide chamber for heavy ammunition. The trade-off was a low-load in the mag, hence the auto function. Upside, it made a hell of a mess and a damn fine noise.

Gedd fired two rounds into the rockcrete, bellowing.

‘Move! Peacekeeper!’

Her rebreather had a vox-amp function and she engaged it to boost her voice.

The crowd fled, dozens barrelling into the sprawl. There would be injuries.

Gedd had no time for guilt or regret. She’d deal with that later. So she ran.

‘Make way! Peacekeeper! Make way!’

A thin-faced man, tall with a studious expression, wandered into her path. Gedd knocked him aside, making the best use of her bulky armour and forward momentum. The man, who wore the long tan robes and carried the lectorum-bible of an uphive census-taker, was about to hurl some abuse Gedd’s way when he saw the gun and decided to keep his mouth shut.

Gedd barely spared him a glance.

A chrono-chime in her ear signalled a minute had lapsed. Panting hard, she accelerated, cursing the weight of her armour and the hefty Verifier, which pulled at her left arm like an anchor.

After another five minutes she left the down-trans and hit Elserow. A narrow concourse stretched before her, less densely populated than the down-trans but harder to navigate.

Elserow was a labyrinth. A part of down-hive, its streets overlapped and intersected, as if caught in the fever dream of some deranged hive-planner. There were switchbacks, bottle­necks, doglegs and dead ends aplenty. It had no scheme, no reason, having developed organically over many centuries. It was also extremely old. Here, ferrocrete gave way to actual stone mined from the planet’s core when there were still quarries. Buildings of brick and even wood lurched out of smoke-choked alleyways. They ran on for storey after ­storey, stacked one atop the other until the sheer mass of the buildings above began to displace and flatten the ones below. They leaned, lecherous and ugly, and the district reeked of dank and mildew.

But Gedd knew this place. She had mapped its bewildering expanse before, and so reached the Avenue of Lights where the lamplighters roamed with a few seconds to spare.

+Cutting it a little close, peacekeeper,+ said a voice in Gedd’s head. +I was about to take my leave.+