Ravenor Returned Page 21

  ‘If we do exit in a hurry,’ Zeph asked, ‘any idea where we might go?’

  ‘Contact Doctor Belknap. He might be able to help.’

  Zeph paused, as if reluctant to leave the room.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘What about the others? Kys, Nayl and Kara? With Frauka on, they’re cut loose and on their own.’

  ‘That’s just how it’s going to have to be,’ I said.

  Now in her fifth hour as a dispatcher, Kara was going numb. Her back ached thanks to the spartan stool she was obliged to perch on, and her fingers were slowly going dead from processing the cylinders, sorting them, emptying them, loading them, sending them on their way. Worse than that, her mind was weary: the constant din of the pneumatic tube despatch hall, the poor lighting, the remorseless pace of work, the rattle-rattle-rattle of the multigraphing pool next door. Documents arrived coded or labelled with numerals she had to struggle to read before she could assign them. She felt almost overwhelmed, moving back and forth between repetitive physical action and lines of meaningless digits.

  And they really were meaningless. In the first hour or so of the shift, Kara had assumed the sheaves of data she was being given to route were incomprehensible because she was new, and didn’t understand the complex workings of Administry filing and language. But that wasn’t true, she was sure of that now. Every file coming in or going out was just nonsense.

  A gatherer arrived at her station with the latest load. He didn’t speak, didn’t even look at her as he dropped the bundle of brown-sleeved files into her processing basket. She picked up the top one, read the department code off the cover, then sneaked a quick peek inside.

  Just like before. The files and documents had a sort code for identification purposes, usually a marker that meant they had to be sent from an anagramist department to a cipherist hall or vice versa. But the actual document was gibberish. No text that could be read, no headings or paragraphs or tables of contents, no graphs or results or minutes of discussion, no punctuation or syntax. Just oddly spaced columns of letters or numerals, sometimes one or the other, sometimes a mix of both. It wasn’t even as if they were written in a language she didn’t know. She was processing raw data in discrete chunks.

  Just looking at it made her giddy.

  A clatter beside her made her jump and she closed the file quickly. A servitor had just dropped a load of empty cylinders into the cage that sat at her feet like an ammunition hopper full of heavy stub-shells. She hooked one out, packed the file inside, and fired it on its way up the appropriate tube.

  Kara knew she’d be feeling better about things if Ravenor had been looking through her eyes and scrutinising things too. But he’d suddenly gone quiet almost an hour earlier, and she hadn’t heard a thing since.

  ‘Boss?’ Nayl whispered into his sleeve, pretending to cough. Still nothing. That was the worst thing about having a little voice in your head: you missed it when it was gone.

  He was pushing his laden cart down one of the main hallways, just another gatherer in the dense bustle of two-way traffic, following the signs to his next delivery point. No one spoke, but there was a constant noise: footsteps, squeaking wheels, rattling servitors, popping tubes, the occasional buzzer or call-chime. It felt like being buried deep in the workings of a giant clock, the springs and screws and gears moving all around.

  Except, Nayl thought, there would be some regulated order to a clock, no matter how complex its design. The systems and motions and processes of this place felt more like the inner guts of some baffling engine, designed by insanity or genius or both, labouring away towards some final, unguessable, esoteric product.

  You’re getting jumpy, Harlon, he told himself.

  His current destination was a processing hall on level nineteen. When he got there, he had to join the end of a queue of gatherers waiting to enter. He took a rest, leaning on the handle of his cart as the line slowly edged forward.

  ‘Long day, huh?’ he said to the gatherer waiting in front of him. The man stared at him blankly then looked away.

  Nayl shrugged and turned to regard the flow of workers passing by down the corridor. Other gatherers rolled up to join the queue behind him. He turned to face his cart, and idly reached down and opened the crinkled, rubber-stamped cover of the uppermost document. Inside, another stack of printout pages, covered in columns of characters and numerals that made no sense. Every document he’d managed to sneak a look at that day had been the same.

  Maybe they do mean nothing, he thought. Maybe there is no more data in the Imperium to be processed, so the Administratum is just circulating random material through its systems in order to justify its continued existence. In a place as soulless and unending as this, he could well believe it.

  A hand reached in and firmly pressed the file cover shut. Nayl looked up and found himself eye-to-eye with a frowning ordinate.

  ‘This is not reading material, gatherer,’ the ordinate said in a reedy voice. Instead of replying, Nayl took a cue from the gatherer in front of him and simply stared back blankly.

  ‘Deliver. Collect. Never tamper,’ the ordinate said, and moved on down the line.

  Nayl’s part of the queue finally moved into the processing hall. It was the largest one he’d seen yet, the size of a mass conveyance’s main hold. It was impossible to guess how many scribes and processors manned the long rows of chattering data engines and arithmometers. The dry air was filled with the constant tympani of their fingers. There was the usual activity in the aisles: gatherers distributing or collecting, supervising ordinates, despatch runners, the occasional drifting servo-skull.

  One dipped down and hovered towards him. Lights in its sockets glowed dull green, and small manipulator limbs equipped with quills dangled either side of its vox grille like the mandibles of a beetle. The drone extended a quick, bright bar of hard light and read Nayl’s slate.

  ‘Aisle forty-two,’ it told him in a buzzing voice that was entirely synthesised. Nayl rolled his cart towards the forty-second aisle and then proceeded down it between the lines of typing scribes at their stations until he found the first cogitator that matched his transfer codes. He put the file into the scribe’s basket. The scribe didn’t look up. Bathed in the screen glow, the man’s bloodshot, unblinking eyes reflected back the steadily scrolling digitised display.

  Nayl continued down the line, distributing the folders into pending trays. Overhead, a tannoy announcement blared out, extolling the virtues of a fast, fluid work rate.

  Nayl’s cart was almost empty. As soon as he’d finished, a drone or an ordinate would direct him to another aisle for collection.

  He heard a sharp, sudden cry and looked up. Three aisles away, thirty metres or so from where he stood, the scribe at one particular cogitator had rocked back from his screen and was beginning to convulse. A fierce seizure gripped the man’s body, shaking him so hard several of his spinal data-plugs tore out.

  Instinct told Nayl to go and help the man, but he stayed where he was. Not a single scribe in the room had even looked up, and most of the gatherers were simply carrying on with their rounds. A few, like Nayl, had paused to look up with vague, canine curiosity.

  Two ordinates shuffled down the aisle and reached the stricken scribe just before he gave a final, violent spasm and slumped head first against his screen. There was an audible crack. The man’s pale forehead had butted the screen with enough force to craze the glass. The ordinates rolled him back. Even from where he was standing, Nayl could tell the man was dead. Blood dribbled from the dent on his brow.

  One of the ordinates turned to the nearest gatherers, Nayl included. ‘You. Assistance here.’

  Nayl and two other men pushed forward obediently, and helped lift the dead scribe out of his seat. Nayl could smell sour sweat, blood and a corrupted odour that suggested the man had developed sores from too many hours in his seat. Such gross physical ailments were common amongst the Administry workers.

  A junior clerk arrived, pushing a m
etal trolley. Nayl expected to move the scribe’s body onto it, but the gatherers put the corpse on the floor. The trolley was for the cogitator.

  The ordinates uncoupled the machine’s data trunks and cables, unscrewed the floor brace and then had the gatherers lift the unit onto the trolley. It was quickly wheeled away.

  ‘Resume your tasks,’ one of the ordinates told the gatherers.

  Five minutes later, as Nayl was reaching the end of his aisle, he saw a small team of tech adepts arriving to connect up a new cogitator.

  Twenty minutes after that, as he made his way out of the hall with a reloaded cart, Nayl saw that the cogitator was now in operation, a replacement scribe at its seat.

  The body of the dead scribe still lay in the aisle, ignored, awaiting collection.

  Patience Kys blinked. She thought for a moment that she had actually been asleep, but her fingers were still striking the keys and the bright screen display was still scrolling.

  She swallowed, recovering her wits, horrified to realise that she had zoned out for a moment. The repetitive function, the noise, the screen flicker had combined to swallow her into a sort of trance. She glanced around at the operators around her, saw their glazed eyes and slack expressions, and knew that, for a moment at least, she had been just like them.

  According to her chron, almost an hour had passed since she’d last looked at it.

  In that time, Ravenor had gone. She could no longer feel him. Something must have happened to make him–

  She suddenly realised she felt sick. Her head was throbbing and the glow of the screen was making her nauseous.

  She started to type again, but just glanced between her screen and the file she was meant to be transcribing made her gorge rise again. She put both hands to her mouth and closed her eyes.

  ‘Scribe Yevins, why has your process rate dropped to below twenty norm?’

  Kys looked up. A male ordinate, so old that the augmetic implants in his withered face were starting to rust, gazed down at her.

  ‘I feel… unwell,’ she murmured.

  The ordinate bent down at once, not to assist her but to inspect the information displayed on her screen. As he looked away from her, Kys desperately detached the plug-wire from the analyser Carl had given her and coiled it away into her jacket pocket before he noticed it.

  ‘Get up,’ the ordinate instructed her. He picked up the file she was working from, noted the page she was on, and tucked it under his arm. ‘Follow me.’

  She walked after him down the aisle, unsteady on legs tingling with cramp, nausea swilling through her again. Ahead of her, she heard the ordinate speak into a hand-vox. ‘G/F1. Suspected subliminal. Please attend.’

  The ordinate led her out of the department hall, along the busy corridor and through a heavy side door into what Kys thought looked like a holding cell. Bare metal walls, tiled floor, a ceiling covered with acoustic baffles. There was a simple wooden table with two chairs on one side and a stool on the other. The ordinate pointed to the stool and Kys sat down. It was hot. She took off her coat and folded it across her knees, fighting down the bilious feeling inside her.

  Two men entered the room. They wore robes similar to the ordinates, but Kys had no idea what rank or department they represented. She tried to focus.

  ‘Junior Scribe Merit Yevins, G/F1, station eighty-six. Work rate dropped, and she complained of feeling unwell.’

  The men sat down across the table from Kys. One had a data-slate, the other a fresh copy pad and a stylus. ‘This is the file she was working from,’ said the ordinate, passing it to the man with the pad and stylus. ‘I’ve marked the page.’

  The man studied the page. His companion activated the data-slate. ‘Transcript of her work,’ he said, and slid it to the man with the file. He went back and forth, checking the file off against the slate copy carefully.

  ‘No obvious component,’ he said at last. He looked up at Kys. ‘Can you remember any particular character, character group or file sequence that you were working on when you began to feel unwell?’

  ‘No,’ she said softly.

  ‘Then did a word, or a word-part or any phonetic structure or group of characters come into your mind at that time?’

  ‘No,’ she said again.

  ‘Think about it,’ the other man said. ‘Try to recall carefully.’

  ‘Is there a sound you can associate with your discomfort?’ asked the first. He slid the pad and stylus across the table towards her. ‘Perhaps you can write it down? Or say it aloud?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Kys said. The nausea bubbled through her again. She felt as if she was going to pass out.

  ‘Let us be open with you,’ said the first man. ‘We are trying to help you. The data you are processing is in a ciphered form. Your processing is one stage of the decryption. It is possible you have stumbled upon some meaning accidentally.’

  ‘I… I don’t–’

  ‘It happens from time to time,’ the other man said. ‘At this stage in the process, scribes occasionally and inadvertently recover some small unit of true meaning. A morpheme, a phoneme, nothing more.’

  ‘On rarer instances,’ said the first man, ‘innocuous text, such as this’ – he gestured to the file – ‘may generate a morpheme subliminally in a scribe’s mind. This generally causes feelings of sickness. We wish to recover that subliminal. Once we have done so, we can take steps to improve your well-being.’

  Kys blinked. She didn’t understand anything of what they were saying. It was just as much gibberish as the files she’d been staring at all day.

  The men carried on talking. She thought about the files, the meaningless jumble of characters floating up the cogitator screen, the way they’d made her zone out.

  She knew that Ravenor wouldn’t have abandoned her without a good reason, but she needed him now. With what concentration she could muster, she reached out with her mind, hoping to find the strength to call to him.

  ‘Are you listening, scribe?’ one of the men was saying. She touched his mind, felt his determination. He was convinced she had something in her head, something valuable that he would recover no matter how long it took.

  ‘Help us to help you,’ said the other man. ‘As soon as we have the subliminal, we can quickly ease your discomfort.’ She touched his mind now, saw a quick, brittle flash of what he meant by ‘ease your discomfort’. The man waiting just outside the room. The secretist in the sober suit, a gun in his pocket, waiting to be called in to put a round through the base of her skull.

  Desperation seized her, but the nausea swept in more fiercely than before. Off balance, she half-rose, half-fell off the stool. She tried to get up, the ordinate trying to help her. But she was too dizzy. Then she threw up violently on the floor under the table and rolled onto her side, consciousness fading.

  The last thing she heard, as if from the other end of an echo chamber, was the ordinate saying, ‘What is this?’

  The last thing she saw, as if through the wrong end of a telescope, was the ordinate clutching her green jacket and holding up the analyser Carl had given her.

  Five

  Three and a half hours after Jader Trice authorised their use, the psykers unleashed by the secretists were called off. The five of them, exhausted from the huge strain of their search efforts, fled back to the flesh forms they had left floating in dank lead holding tanks in the basement levels of the governor’s palace, and rested there, moaning and whimpering.

  It was late afternoon in Petropolis, the sky a dirty scumble of grey clouds and vapour. The moment the psykers ebbed away, a fierce thunderstorm broke out over the hive.

  Revoke knew keeping the psykers active any longer would have been unwise. Quite apart from the fact that the psykers had come close to draining their energy reserves and he had no wish to burn out such a valuable resource, Revoke was aware of the civil issue. Though invisible and intangible to all but the most gifted or sensitive persons in Petropolis, such overt, proactive psy activity woul
d unsettle the general population. As it was, the data reports were busy with stories of panic attacks, freak weather effects, unprovoked domestic violence, numerous suicides and reputed sightings of the manifesting dead. Formal complaints had been made by the Astropathic Guild, the Navis Nobilite and several other august Imperial institutions that utilised psy-adepts by legal covenant.

  Trice had the Ministry issue polite responses, suggesting that another grave incident like the one at the diplomatic palace had taken place, but was now under control. Months of careful political manipulation and other more devious machinations meant that virtually all agencies and organisations in Petropolis were directly or indirectly under the control of Jader Trice, including the Astrotelepathicus and the Officio Inquisitorus Planetia. But most of them didn’t realise that fact, so it paid to be circumspect.

  There was another reason the psykers had been put back in their boxes.

  ‘We’ve found him,’ said Boneheart, one of the senior lieutenants of the Secretists as Revoke entered the Counsel Room.

  ‘Show me,’ Revoke replied. He had brought Monicker with him and, like a heat-haze shimmer, she hovered at Revoke’s elbow as he examined the print outs Boneheart was unfolding.

  ‘Plenty of hits, as you can see,’ Boneheart said. He was a tall man with a craggy face pitted by old acne scars, his hair an oily, hard-combed shelf of grey. ‘Hive like this is a target-rich environment. Over nine thousand potentials, but you can rule out all the ones I’ve put a cross through. Low-level sensitives or latents who don’t even know what they’ve got. That leaves about two hundred higher grade returns, true actives. Most of them will be hucksters, faith healers, backroom clairvoyants, spiritualists, maybe even the odd sub-cult member. Some of them are interesting, and we should pass the locations to the Magistratum.’

  ‘But none powerful enough?’ Revoke asked.

  Boneheart shook his head. ‘You said our guy’s major grade, didn’t you?’

  ‘From the briefs I’ve read, dangerously powerful,’ Revoke replied.