Stroud leaned on the edge of the battered card table and looked across it at the large man opposite him with the expression of soone enjoying themselves considerably.
The large man, whose face was a dense arrangent of heavy features and whose arms were covered in tattoos from wrist to shoulder, was staring at the cards in his hand as if sustained concentration might change what was printed on them. Sweat was running down the rough planes of his face in visible drops. His breathing had beco audible.
"Play your hand." Stroud tapped the table surface with one finger.
The man's jaw worked violently through two spasms. Then he produced a sound from sowhere low in his throat, slamd his remaining cards face-up onto the table with both hands, and said nothing.
The crowd that had been pressing in from every direction erupted in a wave of derisive noise.
Elias, who had been watching from beside the table, landed a hard congratulatory slap on Stroud's shoulder. "You absolute piece of work. Thirteen straight. You told you'd never played before."
"A simple ga with clear rules." Stroud pulled a dismissive expression and began dragging the considerable pile of chips in front of him across the table toward himself with both arms, the motion practiced to the point of being reflexive. "Anyone who can't pick it up on a first look isn't trying."
He stood, surveyed the pile, and looked at Elias. "Take these to the exchange. I need to find sowhere quieter for a mont, and I want to find out where the big man went."
Elias looked at him with mild confusion. "Leaving already?"
"Knowing when to stop is the first principle of gambling." Stroud waved a hand over his shoulder without looking back and moved toward the gap in the crowd surrounding the table.
They were in one of the Cold Quarter's underground gambling establishnts, a venue that had compressed most of the available vices into a single space below street level. The air was a mixture of cheap alcohol, lho-stick smoke, and perfu that had aspirations well above its price point. The music operating at a volu that bypassed the ears and communicated directly with the chest had produced a general state of heightened agitation across the floor, and the gamblers, gang mbers, and hired muscle crowding the tables had the flushed, slightly unfocused quality of people who had been inside it for too long.
Stroud worked his way out of the crowd and found the narrow passage at the back of the establishnt that opened into a secluded alley.
Out here the main floor's noise reduced to a manageable roar. A few unreliable overhead lights produced more shadow than illumination, and several dark birds were moving along the cornices above, making their two-note sounds into the cold air.
He had not been entirely honest with Elias about the evening's expectations. When the Cadian had first proposed the Cold Quarter excursion, Stroud had ford a fairly specific theory about the nature of the intended entertainnt. The reality had differed from the theory. He was prepared to acknowledge that the reality had also been satisfying in its own way.
Finn would never have co. That one spent his shore leave the sa way he spent everything else: with a prayer book in his hands and the particular atmosphere of a man who considered spiritual maintenance a military obligation. No use asking.
Kleist had been a firm refusal from the start. The forr armored commander had apparently arrived in this life with a complete set of opinions about what a gentleman officer was and was not prepared to do with an evening, and underground gambling establishnts fell on the wrong side of the line.
And the Commissar, well. He had a distinct impression that Duvette found this kind of environnt morally beneath his attention rather than tempting. Stroud suspected the Commissar had spent the evening walking the upper city streets at a asured pace with his hands behind his back, looking at Gothic architecture.
He was in the process of thinking about Anderson, who had spent approximately ten minutes watching him win cards before the noise and the press of bodies had apparently communicated sothing to the large man that translated as a firm preference for being sowhere else, when motion at the alley entrance caught his eye.
A figure. Hunched, moving with the particular quality of soone who has been doing things that benefit from not being observed. The figure scanned the alley entrance in both directions, appeared satisfied with the result, and turned into a darker side passage with a purposeful quickness.
Stroud's internal machinery, assembled across a career spent as a top-tier scout for the most dangerous infiltrations the 101st had run, registered the figure and the movent and produced an assessnt in approximately two seconds.
Whatever that was, it was interesting.
The smile that found its way onto his face had the quality of a man who has just been handed sothing he didn't know he was looking for.
He moved.
He did not think about whether he would be detected. In his professional assessnt, the individual who could catch him working at this level had not yet been born. He followed the hunched figure through the Cold Quarter's labyrinth of back passages, keeping his footfalls at zero, flowing through the shadows with the long-practiced ease of soone who had done this in conditions considerably more dangerous than a rear-echelon vice district.
The figure led him through several turns and eventually stopped outside a warehouse. Low profile, exterior walls covered in old markings, every appearance of having been decommissioned so ti ago. The figure worked a concealed panel beside the tal door, input a code, and slipped through the gap as the seals released.
Stroud did not approach the door. He spent a careful minute examining the building's exterior from his position in the shadows, and found what he was looking for: a ventilation port on the side wall, roughly three tres up, visibly rusted but with the particular quality of a seal that still functioned. The building's external profile told him the port connected to the main interior space.
He went up the wall using the brickwork projections, produced no sound in the process, removed the vent cover with his hands, and worked his way through the duct.
He ca out over the interior at the exhaust position near the roof.
The warehouse was considerably larger inside than outside. Most of the floor was covered by heavy utility sheeting, obscuring whatever was stored underneath. In the clear centre area, three figures in deep grey robes were receiving the hunched man, who was sweating even more freely than he had been outside.
Distance and the warehouse's echo broke up the conversation into fragnts.
"...seen...?"
"...supplies..plete..."
"...check...intact..."
Stroud pressed his ear against the vent cover's tal surface, committing completely to extracting as much as the acoustics would permit.
One of the robed figures produced an auspex array from inside their robes and ran a sweep of the space, including the direction of the ventilation port above them.
The auspex found nothing. The bald man in the ceiling, who was producing no heat signature and no electronic output and no physical signal that any scanner in standard use could detect, watched the sweep complete without visible tension and addressed a brief, private word of thanks to the Emperor.
Then the robed figures began pulling back the sheeting.
What was beneath it made Stroud's pupils contract sharply.
Under the warehouse's dim overhead lights, rack after rack of carapace armour was laid out on purpose-built weapon fras, each piece new, each piece carrying the particular deep grey tal sheen of high-grade military manufacture rather than the dull finish of comrcial production.
Beside the armour: crates. Open ones. Hellguns, in quantities that spoke to organized distribution rather than personal acquisition.
And beside those: a second row of crates, this group handled with a degree of care that exceeded even the treatnt of the armour. The components inside were wrapped in shock-absorption material, nested individually, sized for large precision assemblies, and designed for sothing Stroud could not identify at a glance. Complex. Heavy. The kind of thing whose na he would not have been expected to know.
He had a working conclusion before he needed to think about it.
Smugglers. But not the ordinary kind. This was organized military arms trafficking at a scale that would move through official channels from a production source and end up changing the operational capacity of whoever received it. The kind of operation that did not stay invisible for long and generated serious institutional attention when it surfaced.
Below him, one of the figures spoke again. Slightly louder this ti.
"...first delivery...cooperation..."
"...we accept..."
"...Carpé...family...inheritance..."
One of the robed figures had been motionless and silent throughout the exchange. Now it raised its head.
The face pointed directly at the ventilation port.
In the warehouse's light, Stroud saw it clearly. A woman, scalp shaved, wearing a tal collar at her throat. Both eyes covered by a heavy band of white cloth, bound tight.
"Who's there?"
The sound that ca out of her was not a voice in the standard sense. It had the quality of sothing that skipped the air and arrived directly.
What in the warp.
Stroud was already moving. He reversed in the duct with the urgency of a man who has just had his entire professional self-assessnt revised, hands and feet working in perfect coordination, making for the exterior with every gram of speed the confined space permitted.
Behind and below him, the warehouse erupted.
"You said no one was watching!"
"There wasn't! The auspex was clean!"
"The auspex ans nothing if she says soone's there! We've been compromised!"
"After them!"
Stroud ca out of the vent, dropped to the ground, and moved at full sprint back through the Cold Quarter's passages toward the casino. He found Elias at the exchange counter.
"Where's Anderson?" Stroud grabbed the Cadian's arm, breathing hard, his face carrying an expression that had not been visible on it during thirteen consecutive card victories.
Elias registered the state of him and produced a startled look. "What happened? You look like soone's wife found you."
"Closer than you know." Stroud's eyes had already gone to the casino's main entrance, where several figures had just appeared in the doorway. The woman with the white-cloth blindfold was among them, one thin hand extended, pointing with a precision that suggested she was not limited to visual tracking.
Stroud had a specific internal assessnt of this developnt that he did not have ti to communicate in full.
He grabbed Elias by the arm and started pulling him toward the far end of the casino floor at the fastest pace that could still technically be described as not running.
"The winnings are gone. Move. I'm being hunted and I have approximately thirty seconds before this gets significantly worse."
"What? What did you do? I specifically said before we ca out here--"
"Running and talking, Elias! Now!"
The two of them drove through the gambling floor at maximum speed, the crowd compressing around them and then parting from the wake of two soldiers moving with the particular purpose of people whose professional lives had included situations considerably more serious than this. Behind them, the pursuit was generating its own chaos: tables knocked aside, chairs scattered, the ambient noise of the floor upgrading to sothing that included screaming.
The back corridor opened ahead of them. The rear exit was visible.
It was not unoccupied.
Several robed figures had reached the rear exit first and were positioned across the doorway.
Stroud stopped and ran a very fast calculation. "Brace for contact."
Elias's combat instincts, which had been assembled over a career that had started on Cadia and had not beco easier since, completed their takeover of the process of decision-making in approximately the ti it took him to register the statent. His hands were already moving.
Neither of them needed to do anything.
From behind the figures at the exit door, sothing very large stepped out of the darkness.
Anderson.
He was holding a bag that appeared to contain so form of street food from one of the Cold Quarter's more optimistic vendors. The bag had the look of sothing that had been recently and adequately filling.
He looked at the figures blocking the doorway. He looked at Stroud and Elias behind them. He looked back at the figures.
"Anderson!" Stroud's face went from tightly controlled to sothing considerably more positive in the space of a breath. "Enemies! All of them!"
The robed figures began to register the presence behind them and reached for whatever was under their cloaks.
Anderson put the bag down carefully on a nearby surface and addressed the situation.
One strike per figure. The sound of each impact was the only ceremony involved. All of them went down.
"Go!" Stroud grabbed Elias and they cleared the doorway over the bodies, Anderson falling in behind them with the unhurried directness of a large man who has settled a matter and is ready to move on to the next item.
The three of them ran.
The Cold Quarter's alleys took them in every direction Stroud's navigation instinct could find. The labyrinth of abandoned structures and unlit side passages that constituted most of the district below the heating line was exactly the kind of terrain he had been trained to exploit, and he pushed every advantage it offered.
It was not enough.
The woman with the white-cloth blindfold tracked them through every turn, through every deliberate change of direction, through every architectural dead end. She could not be shaken because she was not using any ans of tracking that the terrain could interrupt. The pursuit behind them grew rather than diminished with each passing block.
"Contact Evan!" Elias called, between breaths. "Get him to bring people!"
"Done! I already did!"
They rounded a corner, and Stroud's forward vision found two figures in the alley ahead.
His eyes registered them and produced an identification that hit with the force of genuine relief.
"Commissar!" Stroud's voice reached a volu that served no tactical purpose whatsoever and cared about that not at all. "Help!"
User Comments
0 comments from readers