GARDENS OF TYCHO
Dan Abnett
A Magos Drusher story

THE NATURE OF Master Dellac's line of business had never come up in conversation, and Valentin Drusher was in no position to ask impertinent questions. Certainly, Master Dellac was a successful man, one of the most conspicuously wealthy citizens on that dusty stretch of the Bone Coast. Drusher had an idea or two, but decided it was probably safer not to know. He just did what he was told. Two visits a week, after hours, to Master Dellac's mansion up in the hills, providing his specialist services on a private basis, in return for an agreed wage. And no questions asked, either way.
Sometimes, Master Dellac would supplement Drusher's payment with a gift: a smoked ham, a packet of expensive, dainty biscuits, perhaps even a bottle of imported wine. Drusher knew he could get good prices selling these items on later, but he always kept them for himself. It wasn't that he was greedy, or some kind of epicure (although, Throne knows, it had been a long, long time since Valentin Drusher had known any luxury in his life). It was simply because there was a line Drusher wasn't prepared to cross. So many aspects of his life, his respectability, and his good character, had been eroded over the years, he held on tight to those he still had.
Besides, he was a meek man, and he was too afraid of getting caught.
Late one Lauday evening, Drusher was making the return journey from Dellac's house to Kaloster. Drusher went to and from the mansion on foot, a solid journey of an hour each way. Dellac never offered him transport, even though he had a driver. Drusher tried to consider the bi-weekly trips the sort of decent exercise a man of his age ought to be getting, but by the time he returned to his habitat on Amon Street, he was always weary.
The sun had gone, leaving the sky over the small coastal town stained like pink marble. A night wind was picking up, sifting white dust from the dunes across the town road, and Kaloster itself seemed shuttered and dark.
There was no nightlife, no remission from the frugal, small-town quiet. But in addition to the payment in his coat pocket, Drusher carried a piece of good brisket in his satchel. He would eat well for the next few nights at least.
Amon Street was a tenement slope running down from Aquila Square to the rusty wharfs and the condemned fishworks. The buildings were drab brown with age and neglect, and their roofs were in need of repair. The air in the street stank because of the lime burners just across the way. Drusher rented rooms on the fourth floor of number seventy.
A large black transporter with big chrome headlamps was parked just down the street. Drusher noticed it as he was fumbling for his key, but paid it little heed. He went up the narrow wooden staircase to his door.
It was only when he stepped into his little room, that he realised someone was already there.
The man was robust and rather ugly. Heavy-browed with a shock of thick, dark hair and a shapeless, asymmetric face, he wore a thick, high-buttoned suit of black serge and a heavy leather stormcoat, also black. He was seated, casually, on the wooden pole-back chair behind the door, waiting.
'What are you-' Drusher began, his voice coming out thin and reedy.
'You Drusher?' the man asked.
'Yes. Why? What are you doing here? This is my-'
'Valentin Drusher?' the man pressed, glancing at a small data-slate in his left hand. 'Magos biologis? Says here you're forty-seven. Is that right? You look older.'
'I am Valentin Drusher,' Drusher replied, too scared to be offended. 'What is this about? Who are you?'
'Sit down, magos. Over there, please. Put your satchel on the table.'
Drusher did as he was told. His pulse was thumping, and his skin had become clammy. He had an awful feeling he knew what this was about.
'I'm Falken,' the man said, and briefly flashed an identity warrant at him. Drusher swallowed as he glimpsed the silver seal of the Magistratum, attached to which was a small orange ribbon that denoted the Martial Order Division. 'How long have you been here on Gershom?'
'Ah, fourteen years. Fourteen years this winter.'
'And here in Kaloster?'
'Just eighteen months.'
The man looked at his data-slate again. 'According to Central Records, you are employed by the Administratum to teach Natural History at the local scholam.'
'That's correct. My papers are in order.'
'But you're a magos biologis, not a teacher.'
'Employment prospects on this world are not great for a man of my calling. I take what work I can. The teaching stipend offered by the Administratum keeps a roof over my head.'
The man pursed his lips. 'If the employment prospects for your kind are thin on the ground, magos, it begs the question why you came to Gershom in the first place. Let alone why you chose to stay here for fourteen years.'
Despite his fear, Drusher felt piqued. This was the old injustice again, back to haunt him. 'When I came to this world, sir, I was gainfully employed. The Lord Governor himself was my patron. He commissioned me to produce a complete taxonomy of the planet's fauna. The work took seven years, but at the end of it, complications arose-'
'Complications?'
'A legal matter. I was forced to stay on for another two years, as a witness. All the money I had earned from the commission ran out. By the time the case was settled, I could no longer afford passage to another world. I have been here ever since, making a living as best I can.'
The man, Falken, didn't seem very interested. In Drusher's experience, no one ever was. On a downtrodden outworld like Gershom, everyone had their own sob story.
'You keep glancing at your satchel, magos,' Falken remarked suddenly. 'Why is that?'
Drusher swallowed hard again. He had never been any good at lying. 'Sir,' he said quietly, 'could you tell me... I mean, would things go better for me if I made a full confession now?'
Falken blinked, as if surprised, then smiled. 'That's a good idea,' he said, sitting down to face Drusher across the low table where the satchel sat. 'Why don't you do just that?'
'I'm not proud of this,' said Drusher. 'I mean, it was stupid. I knew the Magistratum would find out eventually. It's just... things have been so tight.'
'Go on.'
'The Administratum pays me a stipend for my services, along with certain ration benefits as per the Martial Order. This is of course contingent on me not... on me not supplementing my earnings.'
'Naturally,' nodded Falken. 'If you break the terms, there is a penalty. It can be severe.'
Drusher sighed, and showed Falken the contents of his satchel. 'There is a man, a local businessman, who employs me, two evenings a week. It is a private arrangement. He pays me in cash, no questions asked.'
'How much?'
'Two crowns per evening. He has a daughter. For her, he retains my services...' Falken looked at the things Drusher was showing him. 'You do this with his daughter?'
'Yes. Sometimes he watches.'
Falken got up. 'I see. This is a pretty picture, isn't it?' For some reason, Falken seemed to be stifling a smile, as if something amused him terribly.
'Am I in serious trouble?' Drusher asked.
'You'll have to come with me,' Falken said. 'To Tycho.'
'To Tycho?'
'The Marshal wants to speak with you.'
'Oh, Throne!' Drusher gasped. 'I thought perhaps a fine...'
'Pack your things, magos. All of them. I'll give you five minutes.'
Drusher had very few belongings. They fitted into two small bags. Falken didn't offer to carry either of them down to the transporter.
It was dark now, fully night. When the transporter's engine turned over, the glare of the headlights filled the depths of Amon Street.
Drusher sat up front, beside the Magistratum officer. They drove up through the town, onto the coast highway, and turned south.

* * *

THE CITIES OF the Southern Peninsula, Tycho amongst them, had been the arena of a savage civil war that had raged for over ten years. The popular separatist movement had finally been defeated by government forces two years earlier, but by then the war had critically weakened Gershom's already-ailing economy. Strict, Imperial martial order had been imposed throughout the Peninsula and right up through the Bone Coast into the Eastern Provinces.
The civil war had stained the air with smoke, and poisoned the coastal waters, killing off the fishing industry. The cities of the Peninsula were urban ruins where the Martial Order Division worked to re-establish Imperium law and support the impoverished civilian population.
Falken drove for two hours without speaking. The vox-set under his dashboard, turned down, crackled with Magistratum traffic as if it was talking in its sleep. Drusher stared out of the window at the darkness and the occasional black ruin that loomed out of it. This was it, he felt. Gershom was his nemesis. It had lured him in, a bright young man with an equally bright future before him, and it had trapped him like a fettle fly in amber. It had drained him dry, throttled his spirit, made him destitute.
And now this, after all his efforts to earn a crust to live, let alone a ticket off-world, was going to destroy him. Disgrace. Shame. Perhaps a custodial sentence.
'I don't deserve this,' he murmured.
'What's that?' asked Falken at the wheel.
'Nothing.'
They began to pass through armoured roadblocks where Magistratum troopers wearing the orange ribbon of the Martial Order Division waved Falken through. They were entering the Peninsula proper now, the real war-zone. Ghost cities, tumbled and forlorn, drifted past, lit by searchlights and military beacons. The dark landscape outside the transporter became a phosphorescent waste of fragile walls and empty habs.
Tycho was the principal city of the Peninsula region, and when they drove in through its empty streets, four hours after leaving Kaloster, Drusher saw a miserable calamity of twisted girders, piled rubble and smoke-blackened buildings. His face, half-lit by the luminous dials of the dashboard, reflected back to him off the window, superimposed on the ruins. Pale, thin, bespectacled, the hair thin and grey. Drusher wasn't sure if he resembled the wastes of Tycho, or if they resembled him.
They pulled up outside a mouldering ouslite monolith in the city centre.
'Leave your bags,' Falken said, getting out. 'I'll have them brought in.'
Drusher followed him in through the towering entrance. Magistratum officers hurried to and fro in the echoing atrium, and limp Imperium flags hung from the roof. There was a smell of antiseptic.
'This way,' Falken said.
He led Drusher to a room on the fifth floor. The elevators were out and they had to use the stairs. Falken made him wait outside the heavy double doors.
The hallway was cold, and night air seeped in through the cracked windowpanes at the far end. Drusher paced up and down. He could hear the rattle and clack of cogitators in nearby rooms, and an occasional shout from down below. Then he heard laughter from behind the double doors.
Falken emerged. He was still chuckling. 'You can go in now,' he said.
Drusher walked in, the doors closing behind him. The office was large and grim, a single metal desk planted on a threadbare rug. Half a dozen wire-basket carts heavily laden with dog-eared dossiers and files. A cogitator, whirring to itself. Faded spaces on the walls where pictures had once hung.
'Throne. I wouldn't have recognised you, magos,' said a voice.
She was standing by the deep windows, silhouetted against the night-time city outside. He knew the voice at once.
'Macks?'
Germaine Macks stepped forward to meet him, a smile on her lips. Her hair was still short, her face still lean, the old, tiny zigzag scar above the left-hand side of her mouth still visible. The other, newer scar on her forehead was half hidden under her fringe.
'Hello, Valentin,' she said. 'What's it been now? Five years?'
He nodded. 'Deputy Macks...'
She shook her head. 'It's Magistratum Marshal Macks now. Chief of Martial Order, Tycho city.'
He stiffened. 'Mamzel, I can explain everything. I hope the fact that you know me of old might mitigate the-'
'Falken was playing with you, magos.'
'Excuse me, what?'
Macks sat down behind her desk. 'I sent Falken up the coast to get you. Throne knows why you started confessing things to him. Guilty conscience, Valentin?'
'I...' Drusher stammered.
'Falken was beside himself. He told me he didn't think he could keep a straight face on the journey down here. Did you think you were in trouble?'
'He... that is... I...'
'Teaching the daughter of some small-time racketeer the art of watercolour painting? To supplement the pittance Admin pays you? Come on, Valentin! I'd hardly spare a chief investigator to go all that way to bring you in. You criminal mastermind, you.'
Drusher felt a little giddy. 'May I sit down?' he asked.
She nodded, still chuckling, and reached into a desk drawer for a bottle of amasec and two shot glasses.
'Get this inside you, you filthy recidivist,' she grinned, handing one glass to him.
'I really don't understand what's going on...' Drusher said.
'Neither do I,' she said. 'That's why I want some help. Some expert help. I said you weren't in trouble, and I was lying. You're not in personal trouble, but there is trouble here. And I'm about to drop you right in it.'
'Oh,' he said.
'Drink up,' Macks said. 'You'll need it where we're going.'

'IN YOUR EXPERT opinion,' she said, 'what did that?' Drusher took a long, slow look, then excused himself. Coming up, the amasec was a lot hotter and more acid than it had felt going down. 'All right?' she said.
He wiped his mouth, and nodded reluctantly. Macks took a little pot out of her uniform pocket and smeared what looked like grease under her nose. She reached out and did the same to Drusher. The fierce camphor smell of osscil filled his sinuses.
'Should have done that before I took you in,' Macks apologised. 'Old medicae mortus trick. It masks the stench of decay.'
She led him back into the morgue. The place was chilly, and tiled with mauve enamel squares. There were brass plugholes every few metres across the floor, and in the distance, Drusher could hear water pattering from a leaky scrub-hose. High-gain glow-strips, sharp and white, filled the chamber with a light like frost.
The cadaver lay on a steel gurney beside an autopsy unit. Other shapes, tagged and covered in red sheets, lurked nearby on other trolleys.
'All right to take another look?' Macks asked.
Drusher nodded.
She folded the red shroud back.
The man was naked, his body as white and swollen as cooked seafood. His hands, feet and genitals seemed shrivelled with cold, and the fingernails stood proud and dark. The hairs on his chest and pubis were black and looked like insect legs.
He must have been about one-eighty in life, Drusher figured, fighting back another wave of nausea. Heavy-set. Bruises of lividity marked his lumbar region, and there were other darker blue bruises around his ribs.
The front of his face, and most of his throat, had been bitten away. Parts of the skull structure had gone along with the soft tissue. Cleanly severed, like industrial shears had...
Drusher gagged, and looked aside.
'Animal, right?' Macks said.
Drusher mumbled something.
'Was that a yes?'
'It would appear to be a bite,' Drusher said, his voice very tiny. 'Very deep and strong. And then... the suggestion of some feeding. Around the face and neck.'
'Animal, right?' she repeated.
'I suppose. Nothing human could have... bitten like that.'
'I measured the bite radius. Just like you taught me. Remember, in Outer Udar? I measured it.'
'That's good.'
'Twenty centimetres. And I checked too. No tooth fragments. This was clean. I mean, it just bit his face right off.'
Drusher turned slowly. 'Macks? What am I doing here?'
'Helping my investigation,' she said. 'I thought we'd covered that. I'm in charge down here in this neck of the woods, with plenty enough problems to contend with, I can tell you... and then this crap happens. I look for an expert, and lo and behold I find Magos Biologis Valentin Drusher, my old pal, working as a teacher in Kaloster. So I thought, Macks, that's perfect. We worked together so well before, and this clearly needs a biologis expert.'
'That's great...'
Valentin, cheer up. 'There's money in this. I'll bill your hours out to the Magistratum, and you'll get three times what the Administratum was paying you. Expert witness and all.'
'You're running the Martial Order programme here in Tycho and you pull strings like that to get me to consider one case?'
'No,' said Macks. 'I should have explained that too, I guess. This isn't the only victim.'
'How many others?' he asked.
Macks made a vague gesture that encompassed all the other gurneys in the chamber. Twenty-five, thirty, maybe more.
'You're joking?'
'I wish I was. Something is chomping its way through the population.'
Drusher steeled himself and turned back to the exposed corpse, switching his standard glasses for his reading pair. 'A fluorescing lamp, please. And a close glass.'
She handed him the glass from the autopsy cart and held the lamp up, bathing the dead man's devastated skull with blue light.
Drusher picked up a steel probe and gently excised the lip of one of the revealed bone edges. He fought to keep his gorge down.
'No tooth fragments.'
'I told you.'
'I mean nothing,' he said. 'Not even the bacillus residue one would expect from the wound mark of a predator. This wasn't an animal. It's not a bite.'
'What?'
'It's too clean. I'd say you were looking for a man with a chainsword.'
Macks shook her head. 'No.'
'Why no?'
'Because if there was a maniac with a chainsword running around downtown Tycho, I'd know about it. This is animal, Valentin.'
'How can you be so sure?' he asked.
'Come on,' she said. 'I'll show you.'

THE HEADLAMPS OF her transporter picked out the sign over the wrought-iron gateway. The Gardens of Tycho.
'Well-stocked before the civil war,' she said, pulling on the wheel. 'The biggest xenozoological exhibit on the planet. The local governor had a thing about exotic animals.'
'And?'
'And, Valentin, it was bombed during the war. Some animals were killed, but many more escaped. I think something from here is roaming the ruins of Tycho, hungry, neglected, killing people.'
'And that's why...' he began.
'That's why I need a magos biologis,' she finished.
They pulled up and got out. The gardens were dark and quiet. It was still two hours before dawn. There was an awful damp reek in the air, emanating from the empty cages and the dank rockcrete pens.
Macks had given Drusher a stablight, and carried one of her own. They walked together, their footsteps gritty and crisp on the ground, playing the beams around.
The Gardens of Tycho had not been a sophisticated collection. Drusher remembered the spectacular xeno-fauna halls of Thracian Primaris that he had visited as a young man. There, the pens and enclosures had been encoded to create perfect habitats for the precious specimens, often with their own atmospheres, their own gravities even.
Such expertise - and the money to realise it - had not been available on Tycho. These were simple cages and, in places, armoured holding tanks, where exotic creatures from the far-flung corners of the Imperium had lived out their days on Gershom in miserable confinement.
Drusher knew exactly how they felt.
'If it's been caged like this, Macks, it will perhaps have become psychotic,' he said.
'The animal?'
'The animal. It's common in poor conditions such as these. Animals held in crude cages often develop behavioural problems. They become unpredictable. Violent.'
'But if it's a predator anyway...' she began.
'Even predators have patterns. The need to hunt, to breed, to territorialise. Limit those things, and you break the pattern.'
'That's important why?' she asked.
'If this animal is a carnivore, and I would suspect as much, it isn't feeding on its kills. Well, only minimally. It is killing simply to kill.'
'Like the hill beast?' she murmured, thinking back to that haunted winter in Outer Udar.
'No,' he said. 'That beast was different. Killing was its behaviour. Here we have aberration.'
As they walked further, Drusher began to see the awful damage done in the course of the war. Bomb-shattered pens, mounds of rubble, plasteel cages shorn from their mounting blocks.
And bones.
There were corpses in the intact pens too. Limp sacks of dried flesh, scattered vertebrae, the lingering stench of dung and decay. A row of wire domes that had once held rare birds was now littered with bright feathers. Tufts of down caked the wire mesh, evidence of frantic, starving attempts to be free. They reminded Drusher of Baron Karne's poultry stoops.
'We thought everything had died,' Macks said. 'The stink when we first came down here. I mean, nothing had been fed or cleaned out in months. Everything in a sealed cage was dead, except some kind of emaciated dromedary horse, which had been living off its own fat deposits, and even that died a few days after we freed it. And everything in the bombed cages we figured was wiped out, although there are some finch-monkeys loose in the Lower Bowery, freaking little things, and Falken swears he saw a grazer on Lemand Street one night, though I say he was drunk.'
'So if something's loose, it came from the bomb-damaged cages?' Drusher said.
She shrugged. 'Unless some well-intentioned citizen came along during the war, and let something out and then locked the cage again. Some of them seem to be empty, though the collection's manifest doesn't say if they were just unstocked pens. It's years out of date.'
'You have a manifest?'
Macks nodded and produced a data-slate from her coat. 'I've highlighted any item that was caged in the bombed area, and also anything connected to an empty cage. Throne, Valentin, I haven't the first clue what half of them are. So glad to have an expert on board.'
He started to look at the list. 'So it could be anything highlighted, or anything at all, given the fact that the stock might have been changed or rotated after this list was made?'
She was about to reply when her vox-link chimed. The sharp little note made Drusher jump. Macks took the call.
'We have to go,' she said, turning to head back to the exit. 'I've been called in. Some drunken idiots brawling in a tavern after curfew.'
'Do I have to come?' he said.
She turned back and shone her stablight in his face. 'No. Why, would you like to stay here?'
Drusher glanced around.
'Not really,' he said.

THEY DROVE THROUGH streets that were deserted but for burned-out vehicles and the occasional Magistratum transport rushing off on a response. He sat in the passenger seat, studying the slate, rocked by the jolts of the uneven roadway. Relief was beginning to seep into him, relief that he wasn't bound for disgrace and a custodial sentence after all. A little part of him hated Falken for his trick, but a greater part despised himself for being so foolish. Gershom wasn't his nemesis. Valentin Drusher was his own worst enemy, and his ruined life was testament to the way he had studiously taken every wrong turn destiny had ever offered him.
'Your hair's gone grey,' Macks said, her eyes on the road.
He looked up. 'I stopped dyeing it.'
'You dyed your hair?' she asked. He didn't reply.
'So you've matured out of that vanity, then, Valentin?' she smirked.
'No. I just couldn't afford the treatment any more.'
She laughed, but he was sure he detected some sympathy in her tone.
'I like it,' she said after a while. 'It's distinguished.'
'You haven't changed at all,' he said.
She pulled the vehicle to a halt outside a battered townhouse where Magistratum officers were attempting to restrain nine or ten brawling men. There was blood on the pavement, and the air was lit by the blinking lamps of the armoured patrol vehicles.
Macks got out. 'Stay here,' she said. She peered back at him through the open door. 'So, is that a good thing?'
'What?' he asked.
'The fact that I haven't changed?'
'I never thought you needed much improvement,' he replied, immediately appalled that he'd made such a bold remark out loud.
Macks laughed, then slammed the door.
In the sealed quiet of the transporter, Drusher watched for a while as she waded in with her riot baton and brought order to the scene. Then he turned his attention back to the data-slate.
Time passed.
The driver's door opened, and the transporter rocked on its springs as she clambered back in.
'I think we're looking for a carnodon,' he said.
'Yeah?' she said, gunning the engine and throwing the vehicle forwards in a rapid acceleration.
'Yes. I mean, working from the details here. I could be wrong if the specimens were changed after this list was made up, but it's a simple process of elimination.'
'Is it?' she asked, throwing them round a street corner so fast the tyres squealed.
'There were only four predators listed in the bombed-out pens. Discount the Mirepoix treecreeper because it's an injector, not a biter.'
'A what?'
'It injects its prey with a long proboscis and dissolves the internal organs, sucking them out.'
'Enough.'
'I mean, it doesn't have a mouth.'
'All right, all right.'
'So, no bite wounds.'
'Right.'
'Right, so the saurapt from Brontotaph is off the list as well.'
Macks changed down and raced them along another empty boulevard. 'Because?'
'Because it's the size of a hab block. Falken wouldn't have had to be drunk to spot it already.'
She grinned.
'And the pouncer here, from Lamsarotte, we can cross that off too. It's a felid, but far too slight to cause the wounds you showed me. Besides, I doubt it would have lasted long in this climate outside a heated pen.'
'So we're left with the, what did you call it?' she asked.
'Carnodon. From Gudrun. Throne, there shouldn't have been one in captivity here. They're virtually extinct, and listed on the Administratum's prohibition order. It's a felid too, but big, and from temperate habitats.'
'How big?'
'Five or six metres, maybe eight hundred kilos. Quite capable of biting off a man's face.'
'So, magos biologis, how do we catch a carnodon?' she asked, heaving on the wheel.
Drusher looked up. 'We're... we're going rather fast, Macks,' he said. 'Another call?'
'Yes,' she replied.
'Another breach of curfew?' he asked.
Macks shook her head. 'Question stands, Valentin. How do we catch a carnodon?'

THE HABS WERE clustered together at the northern extremity of the town, gathered in tight, conspiratorial knots. Acres of wasteland surrounded each stack, littered with the flotsam of war and poverty. Much of the intense fighting during the civil war had taken place in this shell-damaged suburb.
Macks slowed the transporter and guided it in between piles of shattered bricks. They were approaching one of the most ramshackle towers. Ahead, the lamps picked out a pair of Magistratum transporters, parked near the stack's loading dock. A heavy morgue carrier was pulled up beside them, its rear hatch gaping.
'Come on,' Macks said.
Drusher got out into the cold, pre-dawn air. The rectangular habs stood stark against a sky slowly paling into a gold sheen. He smelled the sweet rot of garbage, and the unpleasant odour of wet rockcrete.
'Bring your stablight,' she said, making off across the rough ground to the group of Magistratum officers waiting by the stack entrance. She spoke to a couple of them, then signalled Drusher to follow her.
They entered the wide doorway and began to climb the crude stairwell.
'They've held off so you can get the first look at the scene,' she said.
Drusher took a deep breath. They climbed to the fifth floor.
'Hurry up,' she called back to him.
'Hang on,' he said. Drusher stooped to examine the rough wall, touching a dark patch amongst the lichen with his fingertips, then sniffing them.
'You'll catch something,' Macks said, coming back down the stairs to join him.
'I thought that's why you hired me,' he said. 'Smell this. Ammonia, very strong. Other natural chemicals, pheromones. This is a territorial mark. The animal spranted here.'
'What?'
'It scent-marked the wall with urine.'
'And you wanted me to sniff it?'
Drusher looked up at her. 'It's textbook felid behaviour. The stain suggests quantity, so we're looking at something large.'
'Carnodon?'
'It fits.'
'See if this fits too,' she said.

THE DERELICT HAB stack had become home for vagrants, and it was rare for these dispossessed souls to have any contact with the Magistratum. But one of them had been scared enough to raise the alarm, having heard a commotion on the fifth floor.
The stack apartment was a four-room affair, a kitchen-diner, a bed vault, a lounge and a washroom cubicle. The place stank of mildew.
And another smell Drusher hadn't encountered since Outer Udar.
Blood.
The Magistratum crew had set up pole lamps to mark the scene, and it had been picted and recorded.
'Watch your step,' Macks said.
As they went in, the smell became more intense. The corpse was in the lounge area. Even Macks, hardened to the uglier aspects of life, had to turn aside for a moment.
The body was that of an older female. The legs, swathed in filthy hose and support stockings, were intact. The torso had been stripped down to the bones, and these had been broken open so that something feeding could get at the soft organs. There was no head, no arms.
'They tell me the head's in there,' Macks said, indicating the kitchen area.
Drusher peered in through the doorway, glimpsing a brown, cracked object that looked like a broken earthenware pot. Except that it still had a residue of grey hair.
'What's this?' Macks called. In the bedroom, her torch beam was illuminating a brown, fractured stick.
'Arm bone,' said Drusher. 'Broken open to get at the marrow.' He was remarkably composed. This was perhaps the most horrific sight that had ever greeted his eyes, but a professional detachment was masking his revulsion. The magos biologis in him was fascinated by the killing.
'I think she was already dead,' he said. 'This is scavenging. A decent post-mortem will be able to confirm it. The feeder was big, but it took its time. Leisurely feeding, reducing the cadaver piece by piece, going for the most nutritional areas first. There was no struggle, no kill, although the carnodon probably made quite a bit of noise as it rendered down the carcass.'
'Carnodon?' she said. 'You're sure?'
'I'd stake my professional credentials on it,' he replied. 'For what that's worth.'
'Okay.' Macks breathed heavily. 'Can we get them in to clear this?'
'Yes,' Drusher said.
'And can you work up something? I don't know - a library pict, maybe one of your dandy watercolour sketches, so we know what we're looking for?'
'Glad to,' he replied.
'Good,' Macks said. 'You look like you need sleep.' He shrugged. 'Where is the Magistratum putting me up?' he asked. Macks replied, 'We'll find somewhere.'

SOMEWHERE TURNED OUT to be a torn couch in the empty room next door to Macks's office. It appeared from the stale bedclothes that someone else had been sleeping there on a regular basis. Drusher was too tired to complain. Besides, as far as his relationship with the planet Gershom went, this was pretty much par for the course.
He fell asleep within minutes of lying down.
He woke with a start and found he'd only been sleeping for a couple of hours. It was barely dawn. As was often the case, rest had freed up his mind, and there was now an idea buzzing around in it so busily it had woken him. He felt strangely energised. After years of tedious dead-end employment, he was finally calling on his primary area of expertise again, using old skills that he had begun to believe had long since atrophied. He almost felt like a magos biologis.
Drusher got up, tucked in his shirt and put on his shoes. The building was quiet and dead. He went into the hallway and tapped on the door of Macks's office. When he got no reply, he let himself in and started to rummage amongst the dossiers piled on the wire carts.
He heard a metallic click behind him and turned. Macks, her hair tousled, stood behind the desk. The sidearm she had aimed at him was slowly lowering.
'It's you,' she grunted, her eyes puffy with sleep.
'Throne!' he said. 'Where were you?'
Rubbing her face, she gestured at the floor behind the desk, where Drusher could now see a few seat cushions and a crumpled blanket.
'You were sleeping on the floor under your desk?' he said.
She cleared her throat and holstered the sidearm in her belt pouch. She looked pissed off and weary. 'Well, you got my bed, didn't you?' she snapped.
'Oh,' he said.
Macks picked up her boots and shuffled across to the office door. She leaned out and yelled, 'Watch officer! Two caffeines before I shoot someone!' Then she sat down on the rug and started to pull on her footwear.
'What time is it?' she asked Drusher grumpily.
'Early yet. I'm sorry.'
'What were you doing?'
'I wanted to check the autopsy files. From the victims. There was something I wanted to look at.'
'That pile there,' Macks said. 'No, the other end.'
Drusher started to look through the files, wincing at some of the more grisly picts he encountered. Macks left the room, presumably to kill whoever it was that was being slow with the caffeine.
When she returned, he'd spread a dozen of the dossiers out on the rug, and was making notes with a slate and stylus he'd borrowed from her desk.
'Macks,' he began. 'There's something here that-'
'Get your jacket,' she said.

IN DAYLIGHT (THOUGH daylight was a loose term) Tycho didn't look any better. From the side window of the speeding transporter, Drusher could now starkly see what had been merely spectral ruins the night before. There had been a melancholy air to the place in the darkness. Now everything was blunt and crass: the scars of fire, the pitting of assault weapons, the water-filled cavities of craters, the shock-fractures on slabs of rockcrete. Weeds furred the city ruins, thick and unlovely, reclaiming the wasteground between tenements and stacks. The Gardens of Tycho were everywhere now, Drusher thought. The wild was reclaiming the city.
They drove in convoy with two other Magistratum vehicles, rattling down the empty thoroughfares.
'Fresh kill,' was all Macks would say. 'In the Commission of Works.'
Falken was already on site, with four armed troopers in tow. Drusher wouldn't have been able to tell that the building before him was the Commission of Works. Penetrator shells had caved in the facade and chewed curiously geometric shapes out of the roof. The rear of the building was a dark cave-system of intact rooms.
'In here,' said Falken, shouldering his riot-gun and leading them into the mangled ruins. 'Routine sweep picked it up about thirty minutes ago.'
They clambered over fallen beams, disturbing the thick white dust. The body lay in a nest of broken floorboards.
'Civilian volunteer,' Falken said. 'He was on a registered night watch here. He had a weapon, but it doesn't seem like he got the chance to use it.'
The man lay on his side, facing them as they approached with a face that was no longer there. Something had severed his skull laterally in a line from the point of the chin to the apex of the skull. It looked to Drusher like an anatomical crosscut pict from a surgery text manual.
Drusher knelt down beside the body. The linear precision of the bite was baffling.
'Did you sweep?' Macks was asking Falken.
'A brief look. Rimbaud thinks he heard something.'
Macks looked at the trooper. 'Really?'
'Up at back, ma'am,' Rimbaud said. 'There was definitely something moving around. I think it's still here.'
'Is that likely?' Macks asked Drusher.
He shrugged. 'If it was disturbed before it could feed... I suppose so.'
'Let's go,' she ordered. She and Falken moved ahead, weapons lowered. 'Valentin, you're up,' she called back. 'Stick with Edvin. The rest of you cover the front. Rimbaud, show us where.'
They moved into the dark, crumbling hulk of the ruin, every footstep kicking up dust. Falken, Rimbaud and Macks made their way up a staircase that was hanging off the remains of a supporting wall. Edging forwards with the trooper named Edvin, Drusher could hear the others walking about on the floor above, creaking the distressed floor, sifting dust down at them in hourglass trickles. Drusher could also hear Edvin's vox, turned low.
'To your left now.' That was Falken.
'Don't get too far ahead,' Macks replied.
'Something! No, false alarm.'
Edvin glanced nervously at Drusher. 'Okay there, sir?' he asked.
Drusher nodded.
'Some kind of cat?' the trooper asked.
'Some kind,' Drusher replied. He was becoming very aware of the beat of his own heart.
When it happened, it happened with such ferocity and speed, Drusher barely had time to react. There was a fantastic, booming detonation - in hindsight, presumably Falken's riot-gun discharging - swiftly followed by a series of pistol shots on auto. At the same time, the vox went mad with strangulated calls. The floor above Drusher shook with a violent frenzy. There was an impact, a crash. A scream. Two more blasts from a riot-gun.
'What the Throne-' Edvin began, raising his weapon and looking up.
The floor above them caved in. Drusher and Edvin were knocked flat and almost buried in a cascade of broken joists, planks and falling bricks. Mortar dust filled the atmosphere like a fog, choking and stifling. Another gunshot.
Drusher struggled to his feet, pushing the broken floorboards off his legs. He could barely breathe. Edvin was on his face, unconscious. Something heavy had come straight down through the floor and landed on him, half-crushing him.
Drusher blinked. 'No!' he cried.
The something heavy was the body of a Magistratum trooper, faceless, blood jetting forcibly from severed arteries. The blood sprayed up the walls, gleaming like rubies in the dust.
'Macks!' he cried. 'Macks!'
He tried to reach her, though he knew it was far too late. Then something else came down through the hole in the floor. Something fast and dark and feral. It was the animal, the killer, trying to find an escape route.
It slammed Drusher over hard with one flailing limb and he crashed into a plasterboard wall that shattered like old marzipan icing.
For a moment, just a fleeting second before he passed out, he glimpsed it. The shape.
The shape.

HE CAME ROUND staring up at Falken's face. 'He's all right,' Falken spat and turned away wiping dust off his face.
Drusher sat up fast, his head pounding. 'Macks? Macks?'
'What?' she asked.
Drusher saw her, crouched in the rubble in front of him. Falken was getting the dazed Edvin back on his feet.
'Macks?'
She was leaning over the body. Drusher got up, and could see now the mutilated corpse was Rimbaud.
'It got away,' Macks murmured. 'It got Rimbaud and then it got away.' Falken was shouting for the other troopers to sweep the rear of the building.
'What happened?' Drusher asked.
'I didn't see it,' Macks said. 'Falken saw something move and fired. Then it all went to hell.'
'It came down this way. After it had...' Drusher paused. 'It followed Rimbaud's body down.'
'You see it?'
'I didn't get a proper look,' Drusher said.
Macks cursed and walked away. Drusher crouched down beside the trooper's body and turned it slightly so he could look at the wound. The same clean, ghastly cut right across the face. But this time, a second one, abortive, made behind the line of the excising blow, as if the predator had been in a frenzy - alarmed, perhaps - and had made a first hasty strike before following it up. Even so the first strike, deep and into the side of the neck and head, would have killed Rimbaud outright.
But even in haste, so clean. So straight.
'A cat? A cat did that?' Drusher looked round. Edvin, blood dribbling from a cut above his left eye, was staring at his friend's body.
'That's what the experts say,' Drusher replied.

THEY DROVE BACK to the Magistratum HQ in silence. The sweep had picked up nothing. The killer had melted into the ruins beyond the Commission of Works as fast as frost in summertime.
'You thought it was me, didn't you?' Macks asked finally.
'What?'
'The body. I heard you cry out. You thought it had got me.'
Drusher nodded. He felt they might be about to have a moment, something honest that approximated intimacy. He was prepared to admit how much he would care if anything happened to her.
'If you can't tell the difference between me and a hairy-arsed male trooper,' she said, 'I'm not holding out much hope for your observational expertise.'
He looked over at her. 'Screw you too, Macks.'

SHE LEFT HIM alone in her office, and let him get on with sorting the dossiers. A staffer brought him a cup of something over-brewed and over-sweetened late in the afternoon. By then, he was pinning things to the walls, and had switched to paper to make his notes. He accessed Macks's cogitator, and called up some city-plan maps.
Macks came back just as it was getting dark outside.
'I'm glad you're here,' he said. 'There's something I need to show you.'
She seemed cheerful, upbeat. 'Something I have to show you first,' she said.
Macks led him down to the morgue. A crowd of officers and uniformed staffers had gathered and there was almost a party atmosphere. Falken was passing round bottles of contraband amasec so everyone could take a slug.
'Here he is!' Falken cried. 'Magos Biologis Dresher!'
There was some clapping.
'Drusher,' Drusher said.
'Whatever,' Falken said, putting his arm around Drusher's shoulders. 'Couldn't have done it without you, friend! Really, you were on the money! Eh? What do you think? Is this a... a...'
'Carnodon,' Drusher said, painfully aware of how big Falken was beside him, squeezing him in the hug.
The felid had been laid across four gurneys, heavy and limp in death. Its tusked snout seemed to grimace, as if it, like Drusher, wished it was somewhere else. Small, dark punctures in its belly showed where Falken had shot it.
'May I?' Drusher asked, and Falken let him go over and examine the beast. The crowd turned back to toasting and laughing.
It had once been a wonderful thing, master of its world, afraid of nothing. An apex predator. Drusher smiled sadly as he thought of the phrase. A big specimen too, maybe five and a half metres body length, nine hundred kilos healthy body weight. But at the time of its miserable, hunted death, it had been less than six hundred kilos, emaciated, its ribs poking out like tent braces. It was old too, post-mature. The coat was raddled by sarcoptic mange and laden with lice, fungus and parasites. Drusher ran his hand along its flank anyway. So knotted, gristly, starved. He peeled back the black lips and examined the dentition.
'Where did you get it?' he called out to Falken.
'In the cellars under the Lexicon,' Falken said, coming over. 'We got a heads-up. We'd circulated your picture, you see. Thanks for that. I went in, saw it, and boom-boom.'
Drusher nodded.
'Truth be told,' Falken said, dropping his voice, 'it didn't put up much of a fight. But I wasn't taking any chances.'
'I understand.'
Falken turned back to the crowd. 'For Onnie Rimbaud, poor bastard!' he cried. 'This one's for you, son!'
Falken offered the nearest bottle to Drusher. Drusher shook his head. 'Thanks for your help, Dresher,' Falken said.
'Drusher.'
Macks came over.
'I want to thank you on behalf of the division, Valentin,' she said. 'You got us our result. I'll bill the Administratum for a whole week, fair enough? Go get your things together. Someone will drive you home this evening.'
Drusher nodded.

'I HAVE A transporter waiting,' Macks said. Drusher's bags were in a neat stack beside the office door. He was just closing the last of the dossiers and sliding them back onto her carts. 'Right,' he said.
'Well, it's been good to have you on board. Thanks. Like old times, right?'
'Like Outer Udar, Macks? I get the distinct impression you remember that more fondly than I do.'
'Things'll work out, Valentin,' she said.
'Before I go,' he said, 'I'd like you to look at something.'
'What?'
'Let's put it this way. I'd hate to have you come all the way up the coast to get me again.'
Macks frowned. 'What are you on about now?'
'The killer wasn't - isn't - that cat.'
Macks wiped her hand across her lips as if encouraging patience. 'Go on.'
'I said from the start it wasn't an animal.'
'You also told me to look for a carnodon.'
'Let me show you something,' Drusher said. He held up a data-slate. The compact screen showed a display of the city, overlaid with rune symbols. 'I've done some collating. See here? I've mapped all the sites where the victims were found. Thirty-two bodies.'
'I did that myself, on an ongoing basis. I saw nothing. No pattern, no discernible spread.'
'I agree,' said Drusher. 'I mean, there's a certain concentration of kill-sites here, in this crescent, but most of the others are too wayward, too random.'
'So?'
'That first body you showed me, in the morgue. So cleanly, so particularly cut. Minimal signs of feeding, if any at all. Just like the body today in the Commission of Works. And Rimbaud.'
'Right. The face bitten off.'
Drusher nodded. 'Yes, except I don't think it was bitten. Remember how clean I said it was? I mean almost sterile. None of the bacterial traces one would expect from an animal bite. Especially not from an old, diseased predator with gums receding from vitamin deficiency. Macks, I could wiggle that poor cat's teeth out with my fingers.'
Her face had gone hard. 'Keep going, Valentin,' she said.
'The body in the stacks we went to look at. That was the work of the carnodon. It had mauled and eaten the corpse away. I checked the autopsy files. Nine of the cases were just like that. Gnawed. The victims were all either dead already or helpless. Old, infirm. The carnodon had escaped from the zoological gardens, but it was weak and long past its hunting prime. It roamed the city, not preying, but scavenging. That was all it could do any more.'
'What are you telling me?' Macks asked quietly.
'Look at the map again. Here.' Drusher flipped a switch. 'Now I've taken away the bodies I can attribute to the cat. Cleans it up a bit, doesn't it?'
'Yes,' she admitted.
'The old carnodon was hungry and opportunistic. It had no pattern. It just roamed and fed where it could. What we're left with is a much more precise zone. Almost territorial. The killings here were like poor Rimbaud - swift, savage, clean. No feeding.'
'But it's still an odd crescent-shaped spread. How can we triangulate from that?'
'Look at the map, Macks. Territory is determined not just by hunter but also by prey. The crescent-shaped dispersal covers an area east of the Commission of Works. There are none to the west because that's an area interdicted by the Martial Order Division. It doesn't kill there, Macks, because there's no one there to kill.'
'Oh, Throne...' she murmured.
'And this is the good bit,' Drusher smiled. 'Look what happens when I mirror the dispersal, projecting it as if there was quarry in all directions. The crescent becomes...?'
'A circle.'
'Right, a circle. There's your focus. There's your bloody pattern. That's its territory. Right there.'

MACKS WAS DRIVING faster than ever. In the back seat sat Edvin and a trooper called Roderin. Both were checking their riot-gun loads.
'You're sure about this?' Macks hissed.
'I've very little left to stake on it,' Drusher replied, 'my professional credentials being long since used up.'
'Don't get smart,' she warned. 'You two ready?' she called over her shoulder.
Edvin and Roderin both replied in the affirmative. Edvin leaned forwards. 'I thought we'd got this thing, sir,' he said. 'I mean, I thought Falken had plugged it.'
'He got the cat,' Drusher said. 'But the cat wasn't it.'
Macks began to slow down, and it was lucky she did. A second Magistratum transporter swung out in front of them from a side street and ploughed ahead.
'Falken,' Macks whispered.

THEY PULLED UP outside the Commission of Works. Falken had two troopers with him, Levy and Mantagne.
'What the hells is this about?' Falken asked belligerently. He was still half-drunk from the party in the morgue.
'We're onto a lead,' Macks said. 'Behave.'
Falken looked at Drusher. 'I got it, stone dead. Boom-boom. What is this crap now?'
'Something else,' Drusher said.
They spread out in a line, entering the weed-choked waste behind the Commission of Works.
'Macks?' Drusher called. She came over to him.
'I'd like a weapon.'
'In the old days, you-'
'I'd really like a weapon,' he repeated.
Macks nodded, and lowered her riot-gun in one hand as she pulled the handgun from her holster. She handed it to him.
'The safety's by-'
'I know how they work,' he snapped. They pushed on.
'So, this is all about territory, right?' she said. Drusher nodded. 'You saw the map. We're entering its territory now. Its hunting ground.'
'How can you be so sure?'
'Like I said, you saw the map. The thing is, we're not talking about animal instinct. Not territory as a predator would understand it. We're talking about orders.'
'What? Orders?'
'What is this place, Macks?'
'The Commission of Works.'
'And what's behind it?'
'Just rubble, Valentin.'
'Yeah, but what was it before it was rubble?'
'It was the main building of the Administratum here in Tycho. Before the tank shells levelled it.'
'Exactly. The Administratum centre. Dead centre of the spread pattern. During the civil war, something was ordered to guard that vital point, secure it, defend it.'
Macks glared at him. 'A man?'
Drusher shrugged. 'Something. Something that's still doing it. Macks, I glimpsed the killer in the Commission of Works, right after it killed Rimbaud. It was humanoid.'
Spread wide, the line of officers entered the ruins of the Administratum. Some parts of the ruin were two or three storeys tall, held up, crippled and crooked, by the ferrosteel bars stripped through the rockcrete.
There were weeds everywhere, flourishing. Tinsel-barb and frondwort, cabbage speculus and the limp foliage of climbing tracedy. The air was pungent with root-rot, stagnant water, mould.
Drusher slowly circled round. Macks was nearby, riot-gun raised. He glanced left and saw Falken bending in under a broken doorway. To his right, Edvin was aiming his weapon at the overhung, plant-swathed walls.
Levy raised his clucking auspex box. 'Getting something, very weak. It's coming from the west.'
Falken nodded and disappeared. Macks hurried onwards. Mantagne covered her, glancing nervously up at the blooming foliage. Weapon clenched high, Roderin shuffled round through a ruined archway.
'Getting hot now, getting really hot,' Levy called, lifting up his auspex, which was burring like a cicada.
'Throne, it must be right on us!'
Falken's gun went off. Once. Twice. Then another one echoed it. Macks started forwards, running, and Drusher followed. Levy was right behind them. Mantagne rushed around to the other side of the wall.
There was a scream. Two more shots. Three.
Mantagne was dead. He had been sliced open from the scalp to the sternum. Blood was still spitting from his opened body, high into the air.
'Throne!' Macks cried, turning round. She heard Falken fire again, then Edvin. 'Where is it? Where is it?'
Levy almost crashed into her from behind, following his auspex blindly. 'Right there! There!'
Macks aimed and fired, once, twice, grinding back the slide each time. She put a huge hole in the facing wall.
Shots again, distant, from Falken and Edvin. Macks and Levy followed the sound. Pistol raised, Drusher turned the other way.
This predator was smart. Very smart and very able. It knew all about misdirection. It could out-think any regular human and then split him open. It understood military tactics because that is what it dealt in. It had been programmed. It had been given orders.
Breathing hard, Drusher edged round another shattered arch, his weapon braced. His pulse was racing, but this felt entirely odd. This wasn't about his trained skills any more. This wasn't about an animal, whose habits and behaviours he had been schooled to understand. This was the opposite.
So he did the opposite. Facing any hungry predator, the last thing a magos biologis would want to do is step into the open. But he did so, turning a full circle, his pistol aimed in both hands.
On the rubbled floor before him, he saw Roderin. Roderin was dead, just like the others.
Drusher circled again, weapon tight.
The killer flew at him.
Drusher pulled the trigger and kept it pulled. Eight, nine, ten rounds, the full clip boomed out of Macks's borrowed sidearm and hit the killer head-on.
It fell, burst open, broken, puffed pink intestines spilling from its punctured torso. A man, but not a man. A product of the civil war. Augmetically strengthened, augmetically wired, its eyes a black visor, wires stapled into its flesh, its palsied hands curled over to expose the whirring chainblades sewn into its wrists.
The chainblades whined as they came together. Despite the rounds he had put into it, it got back up. And leapt at Drusher's face.
His gun clicked, dry.
'Down, Valentin!'
From behind him, Macks fired her riot-gun and the killer's head burst like a tomato. The impact knocked it sideways. When it landed, its chainblades were still whirring involuntarily.

'ALL RIGHT?' SHE asked Drusher. He nodded.
'You were right. As ever.'
'Glad to be of service.'
'Seriously,' she said, leading him out of the ruins as Falken and Edvin fired shot after shot into the killer to make sure it was dead. 'Seriously, Drusher, I owe you.'
'A week's pay, you said. I do what I do.' He began to walk away, picking his path through the rubble.
'Valentin, I could put it down as two weeks, no one would know.'
He shrugged. He looked back at her. 'What about a ticket off this rock?' he said, with a thin, sad smile.
'Can't afford that,' she said. 'Sorry. Budgets and all.'
'I had to ask,' said Drusher. He sat down on a chunk of bricks.
'Look,' said Macks. 'You've seen how stretched things are down here. The Martial Order Division can barely keep up. We can use all the help we can get, particularly sharp, educated minds with a thing for details. What do you think?'
'How would that work?' Drusher asked.
Macks shrugged. 'Not sure. I could probably second your services on a temporary basis using the emergency powers. It's not much, I know, but...'
Drusher frowned. 'My teaching post isn't much, but at least it's safe.' He handed her back the pistol.
'You sure?' she asked.
'Whenever I spend any time with you, Macks, it ends up getting exciting,' he said. 'Rather too exciting for a man of my disposition.'
'Hey,' she replied, as if hurt, 'I haven't got you killed so far.'
Drusher smiled. 'So far.'
Macks nodded. 'All right,' she said. She kissed him briefly on the cheek and turned to walk back to the transporters.
Every wrong turn destiny had ever offered him...
And which was this? Drusher sighed.
'Macks?' he called out.
'Yes?'
'Would I get my own desk?'
Turning back, she smirked. 'Valentin, you'll even get your own couch.'
Drusher got to his feet, and wandered down the path after her.