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CHAPTER ONE

The bisected man

It was raining the day that I met her.

I pulled up my Ceseen-Avrostar groundcar halfway across the Redway. Behind me, Nearsteel’s habclaves huddled in the downpour. Ahead, the proud tooth of the Steelmound knifed the black morning sky.

I stepped out into the kind of soul-soaking deluge that plagues Nearsteel this time of year. Rain drummed on the brim of my hat. I like a wide brim: good for the sun and the rain both, though it wasn’t much use just then. I turned up the collar on my coat. That didn’t help either. Rivulets of cold water, gritty with desert dust, ran down my neck. Winter was on its way. Soon the mountains would be turning dirty white.

Barriers walled off our side of the red line separating sovereign Alecto territory from the Mechanicus enclave. Lights flashed through the rain, bouncing off armoured sanctioners and making them leap in and out of view. The barriers were a sorry boundary, not much of an obstacle at all. I held up my holo-seal to the nearest sanctioner. He took it from me. The rain messed with the projection and he peered at it for an age. He could tell I was a probator. We have a look. No uniformity to garb or weapons, but the eyeshine from our retinal implant marks us out as officers of the Lex, and there’s a certain physicality besides.

‘Probator Noctis?’ he said finally and loudly, competing with the roar of a ship coming into the Steelmound voidport halfway up the spire. Although it was thousands of feet in the air, its engines were louder than a hundred manufactories working full pelt.

‘Yeah,’ I said. The ship was a long black shape ablaze with lights. I wondered where it had been, and where it would go next. Somewhere better than Varangantua, I thought. ‘Still bringing ships down, even in this,’ I said. The wind was getting up. It would be blowing a gale up there.

‘What?’ the sanctioner shouted over the screaming engines.

‘Nothing.’

He handed back my holo-seal. I put the wallet inside my coat, and got a pocket full of water. It was freezing. I should have worn a thicker shirt.

‘That way!’ he said, pointing. Wind ripped at his storm cloak. Rain blew hard and cold into the backs of my legs.

I hate this time of year.

I tugged the brim of my hat. He needn’t have told me where the action was. The localis sceleris was blindingly obvious, even to a sanctioner. There was a crowd of ours on one side, a line of theirs on the other, lights flashing around them all, a lot of guns on display. A face-off between Mechanicus personnel and Alectian enforcers would have been remarkable anywhere, but it was taking place in the exclusion zone, and that made it dangerous. Nobody ever goes out in the zone, not ever. I had set foot that deep into the Redway twice in my entire life, and I’m one of the few people who can go into it without being shot.

Water bounced off the plaza. I couldn’t see the red line that marked the divide, but it was close. I was feeling the tingle I get when I know I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be.

I moved past groups of sanctioners. Rain rattled off their armour. I don’t envy them their kit; it’s heavy, hot and not much protection against a good weapon, but they were a damn sight drier than me.

Our men were scattered about. The Adeptus Mechanicus’ lot were in ranks. They had the shape of men, but they weren’t, not any more. I couldn’t see a single organic limb among them. The slit visors of their sallets glowed with blue light. They’re cyborgs, all of them, Adeptus Mechanicus soldiers. If you took the helmets off them all, you’d be hard-pressed to find a human face. They made me uncomfortable. As well as the departmento iris, my own right arm and shoulder are replacements, a memento of a case that went bad a few years back. When I see the Martian machine men, I remember I’m not as human as I was, and I don’t like that. They say the flesh is weak, but if you replace it all with machines there’s nothing human left. To be human is to be weak. The Mechanicus have forgotten that.

Focus on the job, I told myself. Get out of the damn rain.

It took me a moment to find who I was looking for.

Hondus’ broad shoulders were hunched against the downpour, a Fumario he couldn’t ever hope to light jammed between his lips. His hands were thrust deep into pockets that must have been filling like ponds. His eye glinted as he accessed the dataveil. This was a murder of a most unusual kind, worthy of deep-scan, the reason we were all out there in that filthy weather in the first place.

I went over. Hondus is more than my boss, he’s my friend, so he doesn’t get my usual level of insouciant charm. Insolence, the higher-ups call it. I prefer wit.

‘Probator-senioris,’ I said.

‘How’s the knee?’ he asked, not taking his eyes off the corpse. Or, I should say, off the top half of it, because the body had been neatly cut in two. Everything from the waist up was on our side, everything from waist down was on theirs, the bottom half hidden behind the Mechanicus grunts. Whoever had done it had left the pieces about eight feet apart on either side of the red line.

‘Still twinging,’ I said. I’d got pretty busted up chasing a suspect a couple of weeks before, one inadvisable jump and an encounter with our less-enlightened sanctioner brethren. ‘Thanks for asking.’

‘This is a Throne-damned mess,’ he said. The light in his eye went out.

‘Very neat,’ I said, looking over the torso. All the organs were sliced right through, and part cooked. ‘What have we got?’

He sighed so deeply it came out of his mouth like a deathbed complaint.

‘A world of shit, my friend. A world of shit.’ He gave a meaningful glance to the rank of cyborgs standing in the rain.

His smoke stick broke and fell, scattering crumbs of tabac down his front.

‘You’re never going to be able to smoke that in this weather, you know?’ I said.

He gave me a doleful look. His eyes were pouched, more with disillusionment than with exhaustion, though that had a hand in the sagging of his face. ‘Don’t start, Symeon,’ he said.

He took his left hand out of his pocket, and shook it in irritation. Water sprayed from his fingers.

‘Victim was found at four of the clock,’ he said. ‘Dead of night. Top half here.’ He pointed at the upper torso. The victim was on his back, skin washed fish white by the rain. The mouth was open in surprise at this unexpected turn of events, and filled with water. ‘The other half is behind those metallic freaks.’ He jabbed a finger towards the cyborgs.

Hondus stepped close to the red line, but was very careful not to cross it. ‘No vid-feeds. The whole surveillance grid on our side went out before it happened. Came back on some time after, when of course it was spotted right away. There’s a ten-minute gap.’

‘The containment systems, sentry guns?’

‘Nothing. All deactivated.’

‘What about theirs?’ I said, nodding at the motionless AdMech contingent.

‘What do you think? They’ve offered nothing,’ he snorted at me.

‘Right. Witnesses?’

‘None yet,’ said Hondus. He looked behind me to the blocks and claves. Though the commercia beyond the Redway is the busiest part of Nearsteel, there are very few windows facing the Steelmound. ‘And I bet if there are, they won’t have seen anything.’

‘No blood,’ I said. I got down in a crouch. ‘Not done here, or has the rain washed it away?’

‘I don’t think the cut killed him. It’s too neat – you’d be struggling if they did that to you, no way you’d get so straight a line,’ said Hondus. ‘The wound’s burned, a lascutter.’

I was inclined to agree. Las cuts clean. There was a lot of heat to whatever did the job, but a plasma torch or melta would have vaporised most of the corpse’s torso.

‘I think, anyway,’ Hondus went on. ‘High-power, short-length beam, probably industrial, not military.’

‘It’s a guess,’ I said. He was probably right. I peered into the man’s guts. The digestive system was cut clean in two, the fluids from it long gone down the drain.

‘The verispexes aren’t here yet,’ he said. He sniffed. ‘Throne damn it, I wish they’d get a move on. I’m coming down with something.’

‘I’ll say a prayer for you next time I’m in church.’

‘Don’t start, I said. You’re starting.’ He sniffed again. ‘Anyway, it’s not just a guess, it’s a good guess. This bloody rain makes it hard to see if it was done here or not. No time of death yet. None of that. He was rich, though.’

‘He had money,’ I corrected, moving position around the torso. ‘But he wasn’t rich. Not properly rich. He’s no gilded.’

‘How so?’ Hondus said.

‘These clothes are gaudy, recent season but not the latest. Rich man wouldn’t be seen dead in last year’s gown. No pun intended.’ I reached out and flipped his broad lapel back. There was a golden vox-stud wired into it. ‘This isn’t high class either. Looks it, but it’s too vulgar. Too obvious.’

‘Hey!’ Hondus said. ‘I just told you the verispexes weren’t here yet. You’ll contaminate the scene.’

‘Hondus, this guy’s just taken the longest pulse-shower of his life. They’re going to find nothing. He’s rinsed clean,’ I said. Alecto’s rain is often acid, especially where we are, far to the south.

He shrugged. ‘Protocol is all, you know what they say.’ He looked back down at the dead man. ‘Trust you to know a rich man,’ he said. None of them can resist taking a dig at my family connections, not even Hondus, and he’s one of the good ones.

‘Anyone could see it,’ I said. I pointed at the corpse’s jacket. The cut had sliced a thin strip of cloth from the bottom. ‘Good clothes, bad taste. The material’s novoplas, you can tell by the beading where it’s melted. And the dye’s beginning to run in the rain. This is a cheaper man than appears. A rich man wears natural fibres.’

I got up. The rain was chilling my augmetic arm. I keep thinking about getting it sheathed in synthskin again, but I don’t. For a start, it looks weird, not real – almost real, but definitely not and that puts people off, and by people I mean women. Banded metal is pretty intimidating, which is useful in our line of work. But just then I wished it was clad. My bones were beginning to hurt where the metal met them.

Hondus had his own gripes. His joints cracked like gunshots when he stood up.

‘Emperor save me, I’m getting too old for standing about in this piss-poor weather,’ he said.

‘I suppose they’ve not let you look at the bottom half yet,’ I said. I tried burrowing my head further into my jacket. It pressed the soaking cloth into my cheeks. ‘Miserable day,’ I added.

‘Uh-huh,’ he said, which covered off both my statement and my question.

The cyborgs were lined up right by the stripe, and I’d bet every one was exactly the same distance from the red tiles. Their long coats curled about metal legs. The cloth was too soaked to flap, Zhao-Arkhad grey gone black in the wet; it turned back and forth, like dead things in the surf.

Through the cyborgs’ legs I could see the gleam of bone and heat-blackened organs.

‘Are they going to let us reunite this poor soul with his legs?’ I asked.

‘Doubt it,’ he said.

‘Are we going to get to look at it?’

‘Doubt that too,’ he said.

‘So they’re not talking then? Can’t they give us the vid-feeds from their surveillance?’

‘They could, but when do the AdMech Astynomia ever talk with us?’

‘These aren’t Astynomia,’ I said. Astynomia are the Mechanicus enforcers. ‘These tinheads are part of the skitarii garrison. They’ve got their military out. Why?’

‘Big deal, this,’ said Hondus. He sniffed hard.

‘Maybe,’ I said. But people turn up dead in Nearsteel all the time. Nobody cares. Why all this fuss? My inner clarions were screaming. I shivered and looked up at the Steelmound. ‘What do they do in there anyway?’

‘They make stuff. Low-tech manufacture killed Nearsteel’s industry. But they make high-tech parts too. Lots of servitors, so I hear, for export.’

‘Perhaps we should go over the line and see, poke about a bit.’

Hondus gave me a hard look. ‘You know damn well that’s impossible, Symeon,’ he said.

‘All right, all right. We need to talk to them. There must be a way of setting up some kind of liaison here.’

Hondus gave me a sly look.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Seriously, what?’

A honking klaxon came up from behind. Hondus craned his neck to see over the sanctioners.

‘The verispexes. About damn time,’ Hondus said. He waved the sanctioners out of the way to let the vehicle through. It came to a stop, rain sluicing off its man-high tyres.

There was a sudden burst of activity that kept my mind off the cold. The verispexes came out of their meat wagon and set about scanning the ground. From the looks on their faces and the sorry noises their auspexes made I was right about the rain cleaning the scene. The forensic devices we have are pretty good, but a downpour like that… You get the picture.

The verispex chief wanted this done. I wasn’t surprised. Relations between Nearsteel and the Steelmound had been strained of late. Hondus and he set into an argument about the state of the localis sceleris pretty much straight away. Hondus was looking at me for support when my vox-bead began to sing. I checked the ident on my arm slate. I wear it on the right arm, the false one. It took three tries to activate the touchscreen in the pouring rain.

‘Shit,’ I said, when I finally had the name up on my cogitator screen.

‘Noctis,’ Hondus said, looking for support. ‘Come over here.’

‘Can’t,’ I said. ‘It’s Castellan Illios’ damn undersecretary. The rodent’s called me in for another dressing down.’

Hondus waved me off irritably and went back to arguing with the verispex.

I turned my back on the localis, and went back to the groundcar.

I got water all over my seats. I really do hate this time of year.

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WARHAMMER CRIME

A BLACK LIBRARY IMPRINT

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Amir Zand.

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ISBN: 978-1-78999-378-3

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