‘Enough, enough,’ Eurotas waved him into silence. ‘I will hear that a thousand times more once I venture down to the surface. Let us dispense with formality and cut to the meat of this.’ The baron gave Yosef and Daig a hard, measuring stare before he spoke again. ‘I will make my wishes clear, gentlemen. The situation on Iesta Veracrux is delicate, as it is on many worlds among the Taebian Stars. There is a storm coming. A war born of insurrection, and when it brushes these planets with the heat of its passage there will be fire and death. There will be.’ He blinked and paused. For a moment, a note of strange emotion crept into his words, but then he flattened it with a breath of air. ‘These… killings. They serve only to heap tension and fear upon a populace already in the grip of a slow terror. People will lash out when they are afraid, and that is bad for stability. Bad for business.’
Yosef gave a slow nod of agreement. It seemed the rogue trader understood the situation better than the reeve’s own commanders; and then he had a sudden, chilling thought. Was the same thing happening on other planets? Had Eurotas seen this chain of events elsewhere in the Taebian Sector?
‘I want this murderer found and brought to justice,’ Eurotas concluded. ‘This case is important, gentlemen. Complete it, and you will let your people know that we… that the Imperium… is still in power out here. Fail, and you open the gateway to anarchy.’ He began to turn away. ‘Hyssos will make available to you any facilities you may need.’
‘Sir?’ Daig took a step after the rogue trader. ‘My, uh, lord baron?’
Eurotas paused. When he looked back at the other reeve, he did so with a raised eyebrow and an arch expression. ‘You have a question?’
Daig blurted it out. ‘Why do you care? About Iesta Veracrux, I mean?’
The baron’s eyes flashed with a moment of annoyance, and Yosef heard Hyssos take a sharp breath. ‘Dagonet is falling, did you know that?’ Daig nodded and the baron went on. ‘And not only Dagonet. Kelsa Secundus. Bowman. New Mitama. All dark.’ Eurotas’s gaze crossed Yosef’s and for a moment the nobleman appeared old and tired. ‘Erno Sigg was one of my men. I bear a measure of responsibility for his conduct. But it is more than that. Much more.’ Yosef felt the rogue trader’s gaze pinning him in place. ‘We are alone out here, gentlemen. Alone against the storm.’
‘The Emperor protects,’ said Daig quietly.
Eurotas gave him an odd look. ‘So they tell me,’ he replied, at length; and then he was walking away, the audience at an end and Yosef’s thoughts clouded with more questions than answers.
When the gull wing hatch of the flyer opened, the first thing that Fon Tariel experienced was the riot of smells. Heady and potent floral scents flooded into the interior of the passenger compartment, buoyed on warm air. He blinked at the daylight streaking in, and with wary footsteps he followed Kell out and into… wherever this place was.
Unlike the Eversor, who had not been afraid to provide the group with the location of one of their Terran facilities, the Clade Venenum made it clear in no uncertain terms that the members of the Execution Force would not be free to come to them of their own accord. The Siress had been most emphatic; only two members of the group were granted passage to the complex, and both were required to be unarmed and unequipped.
Tariel was learning Kell’s manner by and by, and he could see that the Vindicare was ill at ease without a gun on him. The infocyte was sympathetic to the sniper; he too had been forced to leave his tools behind on board the Ultio, and he felt strangely naked without his cogitator gauntlet. Tariel’s hand kept straying to his bare forearm without his conscious awareness of it.
The journey aboard the unmarked Venenum flyer had done nothing to give them any more clue to the whereabouts of the complex called the Orchard. The passenger compartment had no windows, no way for them to reckon the direction of their flight. Tariel had been dismayed to learn that his chronometer and mag-compass implants were being suppressed, and now as he stepped out of the craft they both flickered back to life, giving him a moment of dizziness.
He glanced around; they stood on a landing pad at the top of a wide metal ziggurat, just shy of the canopies of tall trees with thick leaves that shone like dark jade. The jungle smells were stronger out here, and the olfactory processor nodes in his extended braincase worked furiously to sift through the sensoria. Tariel guessed that they were somewhere deep in the rich rainforests of Merica, but it was only a speculative deduction. There was no way to know for sure.
A man in a pale green kimono and a domino mask emerged from a recessed staircase on the side of the ziggurat and beckoned them to follow him. Tariel was content to let Kell lead the way, and the three of them descended. The sunshine attenuated as they dropped below the line of the upper canopy, becoming shafts of smoky yellow filled with motes of dust and the busy patterns of flying insects.
A pathway of circular grey stones awaited them on the jungle floor, and they picked their way along it, the man in the kimono surefooted and confident. Tariel was more cautious; his eyes were drawn this way and that by bright, colourful sprays of plants that grew from every square metre of ground. He saw small worker mechanicals moving among them; what seemed at first glance to be wild growth was actually some sort of carefully random garden. The robotics were ministering to the plants, harvesting others.
He paused, studying one odd spindly blossom he did not recognise emerging from the bark of a tall tree. He leaned closer.
‘I would not, Vanus.’ The man in the kimono placed a gentle hand on his shoulder and reeled him back. Before he could ask why, the man made an odd knocking noise with his lips and in response the blossom grew threadlike legs and wandered away, up the tree trunk. ‘Mimical spiders, from Beta Comea III. They adapt well to the climate here on Terra. Their venom causes a form of haemorrhagic fever in humans.’
Tariel recoiled and blinked. Looking again, he drew up data from his memory stacks, classifying the plant life. Castor, nightshade and oleander; Cerbera odollam, digitalis and Jerusalem cherry; hemlock and larkspur and dozens of others, all of them brimming with their own particular strains of poisons. He kept his hands to himself from then on, not wavering at all from the pathway until it deposited them in a clearing – although clearing was hardly the word, as the place was overgrown with vines and low greenery. In the middle of the area was an ancient house, doubtless thousands of years old; it too was swamped by the jungle’s tendrils, and Tariel noted that such coverage would serve well as a blind for orbital sensors and optical scopes.
‘Not what I expected,’ muttered Kell, as they followed the man in the kimono towards an ivy-covered doorway.
‘It appears to be a manse,’ said the infocyte. ‘I can only estimate when it was built. The rainforest has reclaimed it.’
Inside, Tariel expected the place to show the same level of disarray as the exterior, but he was mistaken. Within, the building had been sealed against the elements and wildlife, and care had been taken to return it to its original form. It was only the gloom inside, the weak and infrequent sunlight through the windows, that betrayed the reality. The Vanus and the Vindicare were taken to an anteroom where a servitor was waiting, and the helot used a bulbous sensing wand to scan them both, checking everything down to their sweat and exhalations for even the smallest trace of outside toxins. The man in the kimono explained that it was necessary in order to maintain the balance of poisons in the Orchard proper.
From the anteroom, they went to what had once been a lounge. Along the walls there were numerous cages made of thin glassaic, rank upon rank of them facing outward. Tariel’s skin crawled as he made out countless breeds of poisonous reptiles, ophidians and insects, each in their own pocket environment within the cases. The infocyte moved to the middle of the room, instinctively placing himself at the one point furthest from all the cage doors.