Cold Trade
Andy Hoare


 	The Adeptus Astra Cartographica listed the world by the short form designator SK0402/78?, but the locals called it ‘Quag.’ It was an unpleasant little name for an unpleasant little world, but Brielle Gerrit, daughter of the infamous rogue trader Lucien Gerrit and next in line to inherit the Arcadius Warrant of Trade, had good reason to visit it. The corner of her mouth curling into a covetous grin, Brielle’s hand was subconsciously drawn to the hidden pocket in her uniform jacket and the small object nestled within. Her costume was similar to that worn by the highest ranked officers of the Imperial Navy fleet of a sector very, very far away, and she most certainly did not bear the commission that granted her the right to wear it. But that just made the wearing of the deep blue frock coat with its shining gold epaulettes and fancy braiding all the more fun.

 	‘Commencing final approach, mistress,’ the pilot announced from the cockpit, snapping Brielle’s attentions back to the here and now. She was seated in the astrodome of her Aquila-class shuttle, a small vessel configured as her personal transport and clad in the red and gold livery of the Arcadius clan of rogue traders. Really, she should have been strapped safely into her grav couch in the shuttle’s passenger compartment, but she had always preferred to witness atmospheric interface first hand rather than relayed through a pict-slate. Her pilot, Ganna, was a trusted retainer of the clan and he had given up objecting to his mistress’s habits years ago.

 	‘How long?’ Brielle said into her vox-pickup, the sound of Quag’s atmosphere fusion-blasting the shuttle’s outer skin making normal conversation impossible.

 	‘We’ll be through the upper cloud layer momentarily, mistress,’ Ganna replied, the faintly mechanical edge to his voice betraying the latest of the machine augmentations he had recently been fitted with, at his own instigation. ‘Stand by…’

 	Brielle gripped the handles beneath the armoured glass dome and raised herself upwards to look out. As she did so, the flames licking the shuttle’s outer skin wisped away, and the scene opened up before her. The surface of the world below lurched upwards as Ganna brought the shuttle onto a new heading, the landscape resolving itself from the swirling mists.

 	‘What a dump,’ Brielle sneered, flicking her head back sharply as a stray plait fell across her face. ‘Where’s the settlement?’

 	‘Just over the horizon, mistress,’ Ganna replied. ‘And if I might say so, I agree. It is a dump.’

 	‘Hmm,’ Brielle replied, settling in to watch the final approach, even if it was the final approach to an absolute festering boil of planet. As the shuttle gradually shed velocity and altitude, the landscape came into focus, not that Brielle paid it much attention. The surface of Quag was, as its name suggested, dominated by endless tracts of swamps, bogs, marshes and pretty much every variation on the theme of stinking, bubbling foulness. The planet’s shallow seas were only distinguishable from its landmasses by the relative lack of trees, and even on the so-called land, these were twisted, stunted things that resembled skeletal limbs grasping for the wan skies. It wasn’t pretty.

 	As the shuttle descended still lower, bucking sharply as it ploughed through the occasional pocket of atmospheric disturbance, Brielle caught sight of several small clusters of lights, out in the swamps and none closer to its neighbour than a hundred kilometres. The grin returned to Brielle’s lips as she regarded the lonely, twinkling pinpricks. She knew exactly what they represented, though she would save that information for later.

 	At the exact moment that a burst of machine chatter spewed through the vox-net, Brielle located the shuttle’s destination. Quagtown, some of the locals called it, while others preferred the settlement. Brielle’s word for it wasn’t fit to be expressed near those locals, though most would secretly agree with her general view of the badland town that even now was hoving into view. If the planet of Quag was a cesspit, then its only major settlement, below them, was the sump.

 	‘Three minutes, mistress,’ Ganna announced. ‘Transmitting key now.’

 	As machine code blurted harshly in the background, Brielle watched Quagtown grow nearer. The first thing she saw was the towering rock column on which it was perched, a natural formation that looked anything but. The column was the only feature of its type on the entire world, resembling a flat-topped stalagmite rearing a kilometre into the air. At the summit was clustered the settlement itself, its oldest quarters built on the cap and the later ones clinging precariously to its sides. From this distance, the town looked like so many layers of festering metallic junk piled randomly on top of one another, and to be honest, it didn’t look much different close up.

 	Both Brielle and Ganna remained silent as the machine chatter burbled away, and Brielle fancied she could discern the to and fro of electronic conversation in the atonal stream. After a minute or so, during which the shuttle continued its approach to the ramshackle town, the chatter ceased, to be replaced by a solid, grating tone.

 	‘Did they go for it?’ said Brielle, her gaze fixed on the command terminal before her. A small data-relay slate showed a line of text, but while Brielle was relatively conversant in such things, the code was unknown to her.

 	‘I believe they did, mistress,’ Ganna replied, his cranial feed allowing him to read the data faster than it could be deciphered and relayed through a command terminal. ‘Stand by… confirmed. Sector three nine zero high,’ he said, and Brielle saw him nod towards the rapidly closing settlement.

 	Following his directions and gesture, Brielle saw what her pilot was indicating, for the shuttle was now only a kilometre or so out from the top of the column and Ganna was bringing it around on a wide, lazy turn. A guttering fire had been lit at the summit of a thin, precarious-looking tower constructed from a jumble of metal stanchions from which protruded numerous aerials and revolving scanner dishes. As the distance closed still further, she could make out small figures clinging to the framework, many of which had scanning devices raised to their eyes. They were all clearly heavily armed.

 	As the shuttle banked, Brielle saw movement at the base of the tower, and just for a moment, the breath caught in her throat. What looked like a multi-launch missile system was tracking the shuttle as it approached, at least a dozen snub-nosed projectiles nestled in an oversized hopper just ready to shoot her down and really ruin her day.

 	But, Brielle realised, that was Ganna’s point. If the missile launcher was going to fire it would have done so by now. Letting out the breath she had been holding, she scanned the bulk of the ugly settlement as the shuttle completed its turn and fired its manoeuvring jets for landing. Close in, the details of its construction were revealed, and it was a miracle that had nothing to do with the God-Emperor of Mankind that the place stayed together at all. Quagtown was constructed from a bizarre mix of junk, much of it evidently scavenged from small spacecraft and surface vehicles to judge by by the haphazard surface detail. These disparate elements were supported and conjoined by a twisted mass of wood harvested from the trees in the swamps far below, and the whole lot was lashed together by what must have been hundreds of thousands of metres of vine, again gathered from the lands all around.

 	And atop this confused, impossible mess of uncivil engineering was a vaguely circular landing platform roughly fifty metres in diameter. The pitted, blast-scorched surface was made from hundreds of deck plates welded crudely together and held up by a forest of wood and metal struts. It was crossed by dozens of snaking feed conduits and fuel lines, and numerous cargo crates were piled haphazardly at its edges. Guidance lumens set into the surface flashed a seemingly random pattern, no two of them the same colour, and Ganna fine-tuned the shuttle’s approach, firing its landing jets as the vessel slowed to a halt above what Brielle assumed was its assigned berth.

 	From her vantage point in the astrodome Brielle was afforded a view of the entire landing platform, and she could see that three other vessels were already docked. One was a battered old Arvus lighter, and it was clear to Brielle’s practised eye that it had once belonged to the defence fleet of a system spinward of Quag. Its new owner had made a very amateur attempt at painting over the livery of the vessel he had no doubt acquired via less than legitimate channels, and the spectacle brought a wry grin to Brielle’s lips.

 	A second vessel was of a pattern Brielle had never actually seen in the flesh, though she had certainly seen it depicted in the Arcadius clan’s archives held at the Zealandia Hab. In form it resembled some massively oversized insect, its domed, multi-faceted eyes forming its cockpit. Its wings were currently swept back into a stowed position, but Brielle knew they were fitted with an anti-grav array that granted the small ship such agility and grace it was no wonder its type was highly sought after by all manner of unusual or downright dangerous characters. Whether this was owned by an underworld lord, a powerful bounty hunter or even another rogue trader like herself Brielle could not say, though she silently resolved to be watchful.

 	The third vessel sat upon the uneven surface of the landing deck was a squat, armoured brick of a shuttle, and it was being tended by an indentured service crew, who were themselves being closely watched by a gang of heavily augmented and no doubt combat-glanded thugs. This was evidence of two primary facts. The first was that it had only recently arrived at Quagtown, its owner having paid for an immediate, quick turnaround service to ensure it was ready for an expeditious departure. The second fact that presented itself to Brielle was that the individual who she had come to this festering dump of a town to meet with had arrived ahead of her, exactly as she had anticipated he would.

 	‘Set us down, Ganna,’ Brielle ordered, a thrill of danger and expectation fluttering through her belly. ‘Let’s do what we came here to do…’

 	The instant Brielle and Ganna climbed out of the Aquila and took a breath of the air, she halted.

 	‘Damn it,’ she cursed as the stale air filled her lungs. ‘Forgot my filtration plugs, this place stinks like an ork’s…’

 	‘Take my rebreather, mistress.’ Ganna interrupted her unladylike outburst, unhooking his breathing mask from about his neck and passing it to Brielle.

 	But Brielle was already walking away from the shuttle, waving the offer away dismissively. ‘Make sure the cargo’s unloaded,’ she called back as she stalked away across the deck.

 	Caught between his concern for his mistress and the need to fulfil her order, Ganna muttered beneath his breath as he turned hurriedly towards the open passenger compartment. At the head of the short ramp stood two burly figures, each as much metallic machine as biological flesh. The biomechanical, mind-scrubbed servitors carried between them a heavy, armoured chest, the expressions on their hybrid metal-flesh faces dead-eyed and blank.

 	‘Imperative meta-nine,’ Ganna barked at the servitors, the code phrase causing them to stir as they recognised and acknowledged the words of a duly authorised superior. ‘Heeding signal zero zero actual,’ he ordered, and stood aside as the mindless automatons marched down the short ramp in perfect lockstep and headed off after Brielle. With a final glance at the shuttle, Ganna punched a glowing rune plate mounted by the hatch, cycling the passenger bay to its sealed state, and followed after his mistress.

 	The metallic surface rang beneath the tread of Brielle’s heavy, knee-high boots, and it took Ganna only seconds to catch up with her. The air was hot in the vicinity of the idling shuttles and scented by a nauseous mixture of fuel, filth and sin. Knowing that if anything untoward happened to Brielle, her father would hunt him down and feed him to the sump-rats in his cruiser’s sub-decks, he determined to stay as close to her as it was possible to do, though he knew from experience that would really get on her nerves.

 	‘Hey there!’ Brielle called out to a cluster of ground crew struggling to affix a large feed-line to the intake on the armoured shuttle sharing the landing pad with her own Aquila. When the men seemed to ignore her, choosing instead to concentrate on their duty, she raised an eyebrow and planted her fists firmly on her hips.

 	Just as Ganna stepped up beside her, Brielle started forwards towards the ground crew, and at that very moment a pair of towering guards stepped in from nearby to bar her path. Obviously brothers, the pair were clearly in the employ of the local underworld, for they were heavily augmented as well as covered in the tattooed sigils that proclaimed the complex web of patronage commanding their loyalty. Brielle read it in a glance, and knew instantly that the pair belonged to one of the lowlife flesh brokers that dealt out of Quagtown.

 	Casting a seemingly casual glance over the bulk of the armoured shuttle the men were tending, Brielle craned her neck to look up into the face of the nearest thug. By the saints, they breed them homely around these parts, she thought to herself.

 	‘Listen, boys,’ she said sweetly, drawing a look of scepticism from both men. ‘I need my lander overwatched while I’m doing business in town. What’s the local scrip?’

 	Brielle knew full well what form of currency the locals would prefer, and how much of it they would demand, but she didn’t want to play that card, not yet at least. After a moment of thinking hard on the matter, one thug replied, ‘How much overwatch you need?’

 	‘All of it,’ Brielle replied on a whim, drawing a raised eyebrow from Ganna. In truth, it didn’t matter what and how much she laid out for local security, not in the big picture, but she needed to make an impression in the right quarters.

 	‘Half the crew’re busy on this job,’ the more talkative of the brothers replied, jerking the thumb of a mechanical hand towards the armoured shuttle.

 	‘I’ll pay double whatever they’re on,’ Brielle replied mischievously. ‘In clan-bonded deaths-heads.’

 	The two thugs glanced at one another with eyes alight with greed, seeming to reach an unspoken agreement within seconds.

 	‘Half now,’ she interjected before either could reply, producing a single coin worth more than both men would normally earn in a month and holding it up where both could see. ‘Half later, if you make me happy.’

 	‘Done,’ they said as one, clearly believing that Brielle had been.

 	‘Then I’ll leave it to you,’ Brielle said, dropping the coin into the open hand of the nearest of the pair. She watched the two heavies pull their fellows off of the duty they were on and muster them to guard her own vessel. As the pair walked away, the two servitors close behind, the landing deck rang to the sound of the local hired muscle spreading the word that a sweet job was in the offing. Knowing it was unseemly to mock the hard of thinking, Brielle suppressed a sly grin and set off into Quagtown.

 	‘Holy Terra,’ Brielle muttered as the four turned into what passed as the town’s main thoroughfare. ‘It actually looks more of a dump than they say…’

 	The thoroughfare couldn’t really be called a street, because it was more a valley between ramshackle buildings, and travel along it was not in a straight, flat line, but up and down across the numerous gantries, platforms, ledges and walkways that connected each building to the next. The buildings themselves were a tumbledown mess of sheet metals and unidentifiable machine components, with all manner of shipping containers providing the most desirable real estate. The numerous walkways were in many cases little more than parallel lengths of spar or rotted timber, with tread plate or mesh lashed crudely between with great lengths of dried vine.

 	But worst of all was the population. Every available space along the walkways and gantries was filled by the scum of Quagtown. Rag-clad beggars panhandled from the gutters while those afflicted by a variety of chemical addictions shivered and sweated in the shadows. Thieves and blaggers eyed Brielle and her party lasciviously, while meat-headed bullies and scarred mercs looked them over for hidden threats. The wealthy, a relative term in such frontier hellholes for the truly rich would pay to be anywhere else, promenaded along the gantries displaying what portable wealth their guards could be trusted to protect, while painted doxies fluttered their lashes from half-open doorways.

 	Brielle’s eyes narrowed as she saw a number of mutants in amongst the press, individuals whose bodies were twisted and malformed and whose faces were more akin to those of beasts. Several of them sported skin and hair of garish hues; though it was possible the effect was artificial, as numerous subcultures across the Imperium pursued the most outlandish of fashions. Several had additional limbs, an effect which only the wealthiest could, or indeed would, pay for, for it required the services of the most skilled of flesh-crafters to carry out well. Clearly, these were true mutants, born into their genetic heresy.

 	On many of the million and more worlds of the Imperium, such debased individuals would be ruthlessly controlled or even culled. They might be allowed to repent their sin of impurity by toiling their short, bitter lives away in the lathes and foundries of some brutal labour-prison, but rarely were they allowed to show their malformed faces in such a public manner. Only on or beyond the frontier was it possible for such creatures to walk about openly, unchallenged by the authorities.

 	If the presence of the mutants was a rare sight on a human world, that of the creature stalking along the uppermost gantry was an outright spectacle. A spindly being, its body vaguely humanoid but its overlong, stilt-like arms employed as an additional pair of legs, was progressing with something akin to grace from one building to the next. Its skin was dusty grey with mottled, darker patches down its back, and instead of clothing it wore what could only be a combat rig, a form of webbing with numerous pouches and packs attached all over. Its head was long and aquiline, sporting three pairs of eyes along its sides, while its mouth was a tiny, leechlike opening at the end of its proboscis snout. Brielle was fascinated, for she had never before encountered its species nor read of it in all of her education.

 	A crude, grunting shout from another walkway made Brielle instantly aware of another type of alien, and one that she had encountered on numerous worlds. Indeed, the barbarous, green-skinned orks plagued the known galaxy, their anarchic empires forming great lesions of war and disturbance that meant that no Imperial sector was ever safe from their incessant invasions and migrations. A group of the hulking xenos was making its way along a walkway clinging precariously to the side of a building constructed from a huge, cylindrical fuel transport, shouldering people aside and growling at passers-by. Brielle’s lip curled in disgust, for these beasts truly were the scum of the universe, and it was rare for them to be tolerated even in such recidivist sumps as Quagtown. The place got even lower in her estimation.

 	Brielle halted at a relatively open gallery, standing aside as a party of drunken lay-techs staggered by, and scanned the buildings and walkways before her. Reaching into a pocket, she drew out a small data-slate, aware of the numerous eyes amongst the passers-by that followed the motion while trying to look as if they weren’t. With a flick of an activation rune, she awoke the slumbering machine, a rough schematic of the town appearing on its green-glowing surface.

 	As she studied the map, Brielle’s brow furrowed. She’d paid a lot for it yet now, in the field, it seemed suddenly to bear scant resemblance to reality. The data had been purchased from an indentured sprint-skipper who supposedly knew the local wilderness zones better than anyone in the region, and the man had staked his reputation it was as accurate and up to date as it was possible to be. Brielle had made sure she had dirt on the skipper though, and knew exactly which interzone scum-ports he liked to haunt when off duty. If anything happened, he would be tracked down and shown the error of his ways in terminal fashion; she had made the arrangements before leaving.

 	But, despite the schematic’s inconsistencies, Brielle was finally able to make some sense of it, and it soon became evident that part of the cause of the inaccuracies was the constant rebuilding of the ramshackle junk town. With nothing more sturdy than flotsam and jetsam to build their town from, the locals were forced to replace sections as they fell apart or came away from their precarious perch. A kind of pattern gradually formed, and Brielle was able to get her bearings. The building she was looking for was less than fifty metres distant, though it was not yet visible in the confused jumble of structures. To reach it she would have to wend her way up, down and across a crazy mess of walkways and galleries, passing through the mass of scrofulous locals. With a sense of cold dread, she saw that the path would almost certainly cause her to intersect with the group of orks, and with a weary resignation, she just knew they were going to be trouble…

 	Having climbed the winding stairs and walkways, the locals muttering with surly bitterness at the need to stand aside as the lumbering servitors marched through the crowd without any hint of concern for those forced to clear the way, Brielle’s small party came face to face with the orks as both stepped on to a narrow gantry high above the thoroughfare.

 	Brielle halted as she stepped on to the walkway and looking downwards realised that she could see through the mesh under her feet to the crowded thoroughfare twenty metres or so below. Looking back up, she saw that the lead ork had also stopped, and was grunting some orky quip to its three mates, who laughed uproariously at the unheard comment.

 	‘Something funny?’ Brielle called out, knowing from experience that orks were a demonstrative species that respected action and attitude far more than words and thought. The biggest ork looked her over dismissively, and Brielle took the opportunity to appraise it in turn.

 	Like most of its species, the ork was massive, taller than an average human and at least three times the bulk. Its short legs were bowed and muscular, its torso hunchbacked and top-heavy. Its burly arms were almost long enough to touch the ground and its impressively ugly head sat so low between its shoulders it appeared to have no neck. It was carrying an array of weaponry, from pistols to cleavers, all stowed for now inside the bright red cummerbund wrapped about its middle. The barbarous creature’s attire was a bizarre mixture of crudely stitched scraps and elements clearly intended to ape human modes of fashion. It wore a long, ragged frock coat, its hem frayed and dirty. On its head was perched a bicorn hat, and one of its beady, pig-like eyes was covered by a patch.

 	Brielle grinned ever so slightly as she saw the details of the row of medals and other adornments crudely attached to its chest. Each was a roughly stamped icon that served to identify the bearer, to one who knew how to read them.

 	‘Move,’ the creature growled, its voice a low, threatening rumble. Ganna cast a wary glance at his mistress, but Brielle remained exactly where she was, folding her arms across her chest and nodding smugly to herself.

 	‘You speak well,’ she said, and she meant it. The fact that the ork had used even a single word in the Gothic of the Imperium marked it out as a uniquely gifted individual. ‘For one of Skarkill’s boys, anyway.’

 	From the ork’s reaction to her statement, Brielle saw that she had read its glyph-medals correctly. It was indeed a member of the same clan as the ork warlord she had named. The ork folded its arms in apparent imitation of Brielle’s posture, the simple act serving to corroborate Brielle’s suspicions. By aping human modes of dress and language, by copying her stance, and by its very presence in a human-dominated settlement, the ork revealed itself to be a member of the Blood Axe clan. That meant it was almost certainly an associate of the warlord Skarkill, a being that Brielle’s family had encountered several times in this region of space.

 	‘Who you?’ it grunted, its single, leering red eye looking Brielle up and down. ‘You Admiral wossname? Vonigut the turd?’

 	‘No,’ Brielle said dryly. ‘I am not Lord Admiral Alasandre Vonicurt the Third.’ The officer in question was a man of two centuries’ service, Brielle knew, and well known for his exceptional girth and prodigious facial hair. Orks weren’t the most observant of aliens, but still…

 	‘I am Brielle Gerrit,’ she said archly, suppressing her annoyance with an effort of will. ‘Of the Rogue Trader Clan Arcadius.’

 	The ork seemed to think hard on that, for it evidently recognised the name despite its inability to tell one human from another. Brielle’s fingers tapped against her arm and she flicked Ganna a glance that spoke volumes of her opinion of the greenskin’s mental skills. She became aware that much of the noise and general hubbub of the thoroughfare had quietened down and that scores of upturned faces were watching the confrontation eagerly. What happened here might affect her entire visit to Quag, she realised. At length, the beast rumbled deep in its barrel chest, and it squinted its eye at Brielle.

 	‘Hired Skarkill’s mob?’ the ork said. ‘Big fight on church planet?’

 	‘There we go,’ said Brielle, relieved that the ork was indeed of the clan she thought it was, and an underling of the warlord Skarkill. ‘The Arcadius had need of your clan’s services on Briganta Regis. Skarkill’s army took the city and hardly looted it at all. Everyone came away with a profit, and Skarkill said some nice words to my father. You remember those words?’

 	Now the entire thoroughfare went quiet as hundreds of the locals waited to see how things would play out. Brielle had no doubt that the greenskin mercenary would have terrorised many of these people, and that a fair few of them would be eager to see it put in its place. Others might have a vested interest in her being the one to come off the worse, though…

 	‘He said,’ the ork slurred, the effort to recall its lord’s words clearly taxing its tiny mind. ‘Ever you need something done, you just got to ask.’

 	‘That he did,’ said Brielle, moving towards the make or break point of the conversation. ‘Now, I need something done, understood?’

 	‘You want something killed?’ the alien mercenary said, suddenly animated as it believed itself back on more familiar territory.

 	‘No,’ said Brielle, eliciting visible disappointment from the ork. Lowering her voice so that only those on the walkway could hear her, she said, ‘I need you to step aside and let me pass.’

 	The crowds below had not heard Brielle’s demand, perceiving only a protracted silence during which the woman in the frock coat with the elaborate eye makeup and outlandishly plaited hair seemed to face down an alien warrior several times her bulk, and which had refused to give way to a single one of them all the time it had been in Quagtown. A ripple of excitement passed through the crowd and someone started issuing odds. Soon, bets were being placed and money was furtively changing hands, and then, the confrontation reached its conclusion.

 	The massive, green-skinned brute nodded at the woman and grunted at its companions. Now utterly silent, the crowd was clearly expecting an explosive and highly entertaining outburst of violence.

 	But then, the ork stepped aside so that the walkway was clear for Brielle and her party to proceed across. The crowd exclaimed in shock and outrage, while several ruined bookkeepers made a sudden dash for the nearest side alley.

 	‘Thank you,’ Brielle said to the ork quietly and not without relief as she walked past, fighting hard to keep her voice steady so wildly was her heart pounding. ‘Skarkill and my father will both be very pleased with your service, and I’m sure you’ll be paid well.’

 	A moment later Brielle and Ganna were across, the two servitors stomping along after them, and the orks had continued on their way. ‘Mistress,’ Ganna hissed once he was sure that no one would overhear. ‘If your father ever hears that I allowed you to do what you just did, he’d…’

 	‘I know,’ said Brielle, dismissing her pilot’s complaint with a wave of a hand. ‘He’d be furious at you. He’d be even more furious at me, though…’

 	Realising that his mistress was talking about more than he had knowledge of, Ganna slowed his pace and fixed Brielle with a dark stare. ‘Might I ask why, mistress?’

 	‘Because it wasn’t him that hired the Blood Axes at Briganta Regis,’ she said. ‘It was the rebels. We were on the other side.’

 	Now Ganna halted entirely and rounded on Brielle as the colour drained from his face. ‘What if he’d…’

 	‘Remembered that little detail?’ Brielle interjected. ‘I was counting on him not being able to tell one human from another, as he proved when he mistook me for that pig Admiral Vonicurt. He had a choice between risking his warlord’s wrath or losing face in front of a few humans. Luckily, he decided he cared more what his boss thought of him than us.’

 	Brielle’s audacity was too blatant for Ganna to reply, so she fished the data-slate from her pocket and looked around for the building that was their destination. ‘There it is,’ she said, setting off again. ‘Are you coming?’

 	‘I think I’d better, mistress,’ Ganna mumbled towards Brielle’s retreating back. ‘I think I’d better…’

 	‘Hold it right there, miss,’ demanded the stubjack guarding the door to the nondescript building. ‘What’s in the crate?’

 	Brielle looked the man up and down, determining in less than two seconds that he was wearing armour concealed beneath his scruffy overalls and padded jacket, and armed with at least one hidden pistol weapon. She could take him if she needed, she judged, but there were three others of his type loitering nearby, thinking they were acting casual but clearly in on the action.

 	‘Nothing that should worry you,’ she said, not feeling a tenth of the cockiness she put into her voice. ‘Let me pass and we’ll all have a far nicer day, is that clear?’

 	The stubjack cast what he obviously thought was a furtive glance at the nearby group, and Brielle knew for sure that they were guarding the place as well. ‘I said, what’s in the crate?’ the man repeated as his fellows ambled over, his voice lower and more threatening than the first time.

 	‘And I said, nothing that should worry you,’ Brielle replied. ‘Looks like we’re stuck, doesn’t it?’

 	‘Not really,’ the stubjack said as his three fellow, equally heavily armed and armoured guards appeared at Brielle and Ganna’s back. The pair were surrounded by men much bigger than them, but still she refused to be cowed.

 	‘Listen,’ said Brielle, lowering her voice so that the guards were forced to lean in and concentrate to hear her clearly. It was a trick she’d learned from a particularly sadistic tutor growing up on Chogoris, and it forced the listener to concentrate on the speaker. ‘I’ve already faced down a bunch of orks today, and they were far bigger than you. Let. Me. Pass,’ she growled.

 	The man blinked as he held Brielle’s gaze. Word had clearly spread quickly throughout the small town; hardly surprising, she thought, given the nature of its inhabitants. He glanced towards the crate held securely between the two servitors, evidently weighing up his desire to know what was inside it against his sense of self-preservation. Though he might try to hide behind the need to ensure that nothing dangerous was permitted inside the building he was employed to protect, Brielle knew that in reality, he was hoping it contained something he could take a cut of. Well, it most certainly didn’t.

 	Swallowing hard, the man reached a decision. He nodded to his fellows and, with far more reluctance than the ork on the walkway, stepped aside to allow Brielle and her companions to pass. Grinning with theatrical sweetness, Brielle moved past him; allowing Ganna to push open the battered door, which appeared to be made from the rear hatch of a Chimera armoured carrier, for her to enter the darkness waiting inside.

 	Beyond the hatch, Brielle was plunged into shadow, which became pitch blackness the moment the guard slammed the portal shut after the servitors had passed through. Her heart pounding, she took a deep breath and straightened her back, before stepping forwards into the unknown with one hand held lightly out before her. She soon found the floor to be littered with small fragments of debris, though she couldn’t tell, and didn’t really want to know, exactly what she was treading on.

 	A moment later, she became aware of a muted, but rowdy noise from somewhere up ahead, and stepped forwards until her hand brushed against what felt like a metallic surface. The sound was definitely coming from the other side of what she guessed to be a second hatchway, and even as she listened she became aware of voices and wild strains of half-heard melody.

 	‘Ready?’ she said, as much to herself as to her loyal retainer. Without waiting for an answer, she pushed on the hatchway, and saw for the first time the interior of the place where she had come to earn herself a small fortune.

 	The space was far larger than seemed possible from the outside, for what seemed like a random jumble of shipping containers and tumbledown shanties was in fact a cunningly wrought building, housing an establishment known, amongst certain circles at least, across the entire region. It had no official name, though those in the know often called it ‘Quagtown Palace’ and a variety of similar titles, all of them deliberately and sarcastically investing the place with an entirely undeserved grandiloquence.

 	The crowded interior was in essence a huge, shabby theatre, dominated by a stage at the far end that was framed by great swirls of crudely but ambitiously made baroque detailing. The stage blazed with light made hazy by the banks of acrid smoke drifting through the air, and as she stepped through Brielle found she could make out very little of whatever spectacle was being enacted on that stage, though it was clear that the crowd seated before it most certainly could. Row upon row of tattered, mismatched velvet and leather seating, much of it scavenged from a wide variety of vehicles, accommodated an audience of several hundred. Every one of them was shrieking, whooping and clapping at whatever was happening on the distant, smoke-obscured stage.

 	The sounds Brielle had dimly heard through the hatch were suddenly so loud they made her wince. An anarchic cacophony of raucous crowd noise and skirling, wild cadences produced by some unseen band competed with the hubbub of conversation, merriment and clinking drinking vessels.

 	Moving forwards to afford Ganna space to pass through the inner hatch, Brielle took in more of her surroundings. The walls were lined with shadowed nooks and counters that sold all manner of wares, most of them alcoholic and probably decidedly unhealthy to imbibe without a large dose of counter-tox taken beforehand.

 	Seated around the bar area, Brielle saw a variety of underworld scum. She recognised the types from a hundred frontier star ports and way stations: out of work crew, surly press gangers, harried looking lay-techs and in amongst them all, the dark-eyed, tight-lipped ship’s masters and other higher-ranked crew. Serving staff shimmied through the smoky scene carrying trays of refreshments and soliciting the richer-looking patrons for whatever further services they might desire. The sight made Brielle’s lip curl in disgust, but a part of her found the whole sordid spectacle somehow alluring, despite her upbringing in the tenets of the Imperial Creed.

 	‘Is this the right place?’ said Ganna as he appeared at Brielle’s side, the two servitors still waiting in the passageway. ‘It looks kind of…’

 	‘Fun,’ Brielle interrupted. ‘And yes, it is the right place. Shall we find a table?’

 	‘Drink, ma’am?’ said the waitress, who appeared at the table several minutes after Brielle and Ganna had found themselves somewhere to sit. It was far from ideal, Brielle knew, but if things played out right she’d be moving on pretty soon anyway. The servitors were stood immediately behind her, eliciting numerous furtive glances from those nearby. The glances told Brielle who was who and what they were here for. Many really wanted to know what was in the crate, while plenty more were keen to look anywhere else, deliberate in their efforts to blend into the crowd and not to draw attention to themselves. They were the dangerous ones, Brielle thought with a small, wry smile.

 	‘Hmm?’ Brielle replied, leaning back against the scruffy, padded seat and propping her elbows on its back as she looked around at the crowd one last time before addressing the waitress’s question. ‘I don’t suppose you stock Erisian Hors d’age?’ she said, knowing full well they didn’t.

 	The waitress looked blankly back at Brielle, and just for a moment she suspected the girl might have undergone some form of pre-frontal neurosurgery, though her forehead bore no obvious scars.

 	‘Ganymedian Marc?’ she pressed mischievously, her curiosity piqued by the waitress’s continued silence. Maybe she was under some form of xenos dominance, Brielle thought, like those priests on Briganta Regis…

 	‘Asuave?’ she said finally, realising she wasn’t going to get an entertaining reaction.

 	‘Certainly, ma’am,’ the waitress replied. ‘Terran vintage is it? Void-sealed to give that complex flavour…?’

 	Brielle’s eyes narrowed and Ganna coughed uncomfortably. ‘Two shots of whatever you’ve got,’ she said finally, slightly put out by the sudden feeling that it was she who had been made sport of. Before she could say anything more, the waitress had disappeared into the crowd, leaving Brielle and Ganna with a view of the large stage dominating the establishment.

 	‘Mistress,’ said Ganna. It was obvious he was about to chastise her as only a retainer as valued as he would ever dare. ‘Do we really want to draw so much attention to ourselves?’

 	Brielle grinned widely as she settled in for the wait for the drinks. ‘Yes, Ganna. That’s exactly what we want. Now will you relax?’

 	With that, Brielle set her feet upon the low table, crossing her heavy boots as she tried to work out what was happening on the gilded stage. Entertainment varied so wildly across the Imperium it was often damn near impossible to decipher what was going on, each style depending on so many different cultural idioms they made little or no sense to outsiders. Even amongst those cultures that weren’t rooted in a single location, the galaxy was such a huge place that what entertained one audience was utterly impenetrable to another. Nevertheless, Brielle had been raised in the uniquely free, wide-roaming culture of a rogue trader clan, and certainly considered herself open minded when it came to such things. What she saw unfolding on the stage before her however was quite some way from anything she had seen before.

 	The stage was obscured by banks of drifting smoke illuminated red, violet and purple by the array of lumen-bulbs mounted at its head, but as Brielle watched, the smoke drifted past, turning what was a hazy, half-seen blur into something shockingly solid. At the centre of the stage stood an impossibly tall, almost skeletally thin man wearing a bizarre costume that seemed to be made from a hundred different items of clothing thrown randomly together. On his head he wore a tall stovepipe hat and his eyes were made bug-like and bulging by a pair of heavy duty goggles inset with magnifying glass. He held in one hand an ancient brass vox-horn, while the other gesticulated towards the other dozen or so figures sharing the stage with him.

 	The stage show was clearly some form of exhibition, and the spectacle on display was a group of mutants whose bodies were so malformed by genetic deviation they would have been shot on sight on any civilised world, and most frontier or badland ones too. Brielle’s first reaction was to reach for the laspistol holstered in her belt, but she caught herself before her hand could close around the grip. Clearly, if the mutants were dangerous they wouldn’t be on show in such a way, she told herself, though in truth she was far from convinced that was the case.

 	The largest of the mutants was a hulking brute, and Brielle was only slightly relieved to see its ankles were clapped in irons, a long, heavy chain snaking off behind the striped curtain behind. It was at least as massive as an ogryn, one of the stable, largely tolerated mutant strains recognised by most of the Imperium as a sanctioned branch of the human family tree. But its size was the only thing the beast had in common with the ogryns. Its skin looked like pockmarked bark and its hands, which were clad in heavy metal straps, were long, serrated claws. Its face was barely visible off-centre in its chest, and consisted of a huge lower jaw, a massive brow and a pair of beady black eyes nestled in the folds between.

 	As if this hulking brute wasn’t unusual enough, the rest of the mutants clustered on the stage were just as extreme, though thankfully none were anywhere near so large. One had multiple-jointed arms three times the normal length, while another had three heads, none of which had any visible mouth. One mutant was little more than a head mounted in a bizarre mechanical ambulatory contraption, while another had no head at all, its facial features set instead in the centre of a grossly distended belly.

 	With a flourish that brought forth another wave of applause from the audience, the scarecrow-like impresario introduced the next act. The lights dimmed to be replaced by a single, harsh sodium beam, and as the applause died away a stir of movement from overhead drew Brielle’s attention.

 	To a flurry of wheezing, atonal music emanating from a pit out of sight in front of the stage, a garishly painted hoop descended from the rafters over the stage, and seated daintily upon it was a female figure that sent the crowd truly wild. Its legs were fused together into a shape resembling the body of a fish, but that was far from its strangest feature. Upon its shoulders sat two heads, each of which was dominated by hugely pouting, bright red lips. Neither face had any other features, yet the crowd clearly viewed the creature as the very pinnacle of female beauty. Even as Brielle watched, the figure stirred into motion, her hips writhing suggestively until the hoop in which she was perched began to swing back and forth, each pass taking her further out over the whooping crowd, who reached upwards with groping hands to get just a touch of the object of their devotion.

 	‘Enjoying the show?’ a voice said from behind Brielle, and she froze, determined not to betray the fact that she hadn’t heard the speaker approach. She had been entranced by the figure swinging in the hoop, hypnotised by the truly bizarre spectacle, but her attention, if not her gaze, was now entirely fixed on the man who had spoken.

 	‘Seen better,’ she said casually as Ganna turned around to look at the speaker directly. Brielle herself waited a few seconds more, then turned her head languidly to face him, praying as she did so that the front would work.

 	The speaker was, as she had guessed it would be, the man she had come to Quag to meet. His name was Baron Gussy, though Brielle had been unable to discover if either or both were titles, affectations or nicknames. While at first glance he appeared a tall, slender man of indeterminate age, that effect was only short-lived. He wore the outfit of some ancient princeling, consisting of a jerkin made of brightly shimmering material, puffed sleeves, garish hose and an improbably large codpiece that brought a dirty smirk to Brielle’s lips. But again, as outlandish as it was, it wasn’t his attire that made his appearance unusual. It was his features.

 	Baron Gussy was a patchwork man, in every sense of the word. Every one of his features had been bought, or more often simply taken, from someone else, and recombined into the form standing over Brielle right now. His face was a jigsaw puzzle, each small section grafted to the next. Brielle had no idea how he thought the effect looked anything like natural, for no two parts were exactly matched. Perhaps that was the point, she realised. Perhaps he sought to deliberately project an air of macabre eccentricity, the better to put those he dealt with at a disadvantage.

 	Brielle’s source had told her that the effect was not limited to the baron’s face, however, and that every organ in his body had been sourced from someone else’s; to create, so he told the loose-lipped doxies that kept him warm each night, the perfect example of mankind. Brielle couldn’t see it herself.

 	His mismatched lips twisted into an unctuous grin, the baron bowed slightly at the waist and with a flourish indicated a shadowed alcove guarded by several more stubjacks of the type she had confronted outside. As she stood, she couldn’t help but notice the covetous glance he cast towards the crate held between the two servitors.

 	‘Shall we retire to somewhere more private, Madam Gerrit?’ he said. Making her way past the baron, Brielle could not help but notice the furtive glances cast her way by many amongst the crowd. Many were appeared unhealthily curious, but the acid glares of a pair of richly dressed women nearby made her scowl with irritation, for clearly they thought her some morsel picked up for the baron’s entertainment.

 	‘Come on, Ganna,’ she snapped as the waitress returned with their Asuave, a nasty little glimmer in her otherwise blank eyes.

 	Accompanied by a trio of obviously glanded house stubjacks, Baron Gussy led Brielle and her party through the crowded establishment, the masses parting without complaint as they advanced. Brielle fought the urge to pat the pocket hidden in the breast of her frock coat, and forced herself to be calm. She knew what she was doing, she told herself. She was walking right into the jaws of a trap, that was what she was doing, but that was the entire point of this little expedition…

 	At length, the lead stubjack reached an archway decorated with some mad artisan’s idea of baroque finery, and turned to wait as the rest caught up. Brielle took the brief opportunity to study the scene, acutely aware that she might have need to exit it very quickly indeed if this all went wrong. The low arch led off to a private seating area, a low table set between plush, cushioned sofas. A low-hanging chandelier, its guttering flames blue from the gas that fed them, provided just enough light for clandestine business to be conducted comfortably in the shadowy nook.

 	‘Please,’ Baron Gussy demurred as he took position beside the arch, the stubjack looming behind him. ‘Make yourself comfortable. But first, Madam Gerrit, you will understand if I take a few… precautions.’

 	Brielle’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, but she remained silent until she had some idea what the baron was intimating. Eyes open, mouth shut; that was what her father had taught her, and he’d done all right for himself, she mused.

 	At a nod from the baron, the stubjack following on behind the group reached into the inside of his jacket, Brielle’s breath catching in her throat as she and Ganna exchanged a silent look. She doubted Gussy intended harm, not quite yet at least, yet she was still relieved when the stubjack pulled nothing more dangerous than a portable scanning device from his pocket.

 	Brielle swallowed hard, but kept her expression as uncaring as she could as the stubjack ambled up to her, the scanner’s main unit in one hand and its detectrix-wand in the other. She raised one eyebrow in mild surprise that the lump had the skills to operate the device. But then, she’d once seen a ptera-squirrel trained to serve drinks to the worthies of a minor Navigator House; only for the creature to enter the second stage of its life cycle, morph into a ravening beast of teeth and claws, and butcher half the family before the dessert course had even been fully served.

 	‘’scuse me, ma’am,’ the man slurred as he approached, gesturing with the wand for Brielle to raise her arms. She felt a flush of irritation and the intense desire to knee the meathead in the groin, and the feeling only got more intense as he wafted the wand up and down, tracing the contours of her body as the control unit bleeped and burbled. Even when the machine chimed to indicate no hidden weapons had been detected, the stubjack continued to play the wand over Brielle’s body, until a cough from his master caused him to step back, a sneer on his grox-ugly face.

 	‘She’s clear,’ the leering goon announced, and ambled up to Ganna with less enthusiasm than he had Brielle. ‘Up,’ he ordered, but before the pilot could raise his arms, Brielle interjected.

 	‘He’s heavily augmented. He’ll set that thing off even on its lowest threshold.’

 	The stubjack hesitated and looked to the baron for guidance.

 	‘Then he can wait out here,’ said Gussy, his tone sending a quiver of silent revulsion up Brielle’s spine. ‘He’ll be well looked after; you have my word on that. Now, Madam Gerrit, shall we?’

 	Brielle met Ganna’s eye, the pilot nodding slightly to assure her that he was fine with waiting outside, though he was obviously less than happy to allow her to enter the baron’s lair on her own. Telling herself it would all work out to plan, Brielle waved the two servitors forwards towards the arch.

 	‘That won’t be necessary, madam,’ Baron Gussy said, the faintest hint of triumph in his voice.

 	Brielle’s heart thundered in her chest, but she managed to keep her voice level as she replied, ‘Baron, the exchange?’

 	‘Has nothing to do with that crate, Brielle. I’ve been in this business for a while, you know, and can spot a decoy easily enough. I assume the item is secreted about your person, in some shielded pocket perhaps?’

 	Brielle afforded the smug bastard a shallow tip of the head and flashed him an ego-quenching smile. ‘Fair enough,’ she said, and gestured for the servitors to set the crate down out of the way, before stepping beneath the low archway and into the private alcove.

 	Without waiting to be invited, Brielle seated herself amongst the plush cushions, leaning back in an effort to appear entirely at ease with the situation despite what she felt inside. The air was sweet with incense, and not the sacred type burned in the shrines of the Ecclesiarchy. Despite its veneer of luxury, the place was cheap and dirty, soiled with a heady mix of sin and ennui.

 	‘Ah,’ said the baron, his voice dripping with what he evidently thought was sophistication and charm. Brielle had been patronised by far better men than he and she only ever tolerated it when there was a profit to be made. Now, sadly, was one of those times. ‘Make yourself comfortable, my dear, and we’ll begin.’

 	With a curt gesture, the baron despatched one of the stubjacks to stand in the archway, before seating himself opposite the low table from Brielle. The flickering gaslight cast by the low chandelier seemed to exaggerate the patchwork effect of his skin and highlight the fact that each of his eyes was a different colour and size. In fact, the way he was sitting, it appeared almost as if his legs were a different length, the joints somehow wrong.

 	‘I’m afraid we’re all out of Erisian Hors d’age,’ he said, a sly glint in his eye – the smaller, dark brown one. ‘Though I was once offered an early first century M.37 amasec from the equatorial foothills of San Leor.’

 	Always the amasec, Brielle thought to herself. With a million worlds in the Imperium you’d think these people would try something different…

 	‘I’m fine,’ Brielle replied, not actually wanting to risk drinking whatever might be set before her.

 	‘Quite sensible,’ said the baron. ‘Perhaps later, after we’ve done business, eh?’

 	Not on your life, Brielle thought sharply. ‘That would be nice,’ she said sweetly. ‘Speaking of which…?’

 	‘Indeed,’ said the baron, reclining back into the cushioned seating as he spoke. It was clear from the predatory glint in his eye that he was about to play all of his hand at once, as Brielle had been counting on him doing. ‘You have the item on your person. Please place it on the table where I can see it.’

 	Hesitating slightly for effect, Brielle smiled coyly. She reached up and slid her hand into the lining of her frock coat’s left breast, watching him follow the movement with his mismatched eyes. With a deft motion, she unsealed the hidden, null-weave lined pocket and withdrew an object the size and shape of a simple, unadorned ring.

 	Reaching forwards slowly, she placed the ring in the centre of the table, before leaning back to watch the baron’s reaction. By the gleam in his eye, the larger, blue one this time, she knew he was hooked.

 	‘What is its pedigree?’ he said, his gaze fixed with unwavering intensity on the small item.

 	‘It was retrieved from one of the rediscovered fane worlds spinward of the Ring of Fire,’ said Brielle, and as far as she knew it had been.

 	‘By whom?’ he demanded, his voice tinged with something akin to lust.

 	‘By a flesh-wright clan out of the fourth quadrant,’ she said, though that part of the tale was far from certain too.

 	‘And you came into possession of it how?’ he leered, his mask of sophistication and charm now almost entirely slipped. ‘Tell me how you found this… wonder.’

 	‘The flesh-wrights were contracted by a… competitor of the Arcadius,’ she said, more certain of this part of the story, for she had been present throughout much of it. ‘But they came off worse in a small war over trade rights with the Ultima Centauri annex. This,’ she waved languidly towards the ring, ‘was part of the settlement.’

 	‘Have you… tested it?’ the baron all but whispered.

 	You must be mad, Brielle thought. She knew full well what it was said to be capable of. The ring was said to be imbued with the power of some impossibly ancient and thankfully extinct xenos race that, when worn, reshaped the flesh of the bearer into new and extreme forms. It was said that it took a mind of great power to control the drastic process, but that the results were spectacular, or hideous, depending on the willpower of the wearer. Though Brielle herself was undecided on the veracity of the claims, she had little doubt that Baron Gussy was mad enough to believe them and to try to utilise the artefact’s power, hence the exchange.

 	Speaking of which, Brielle thought. ‘And you have the icon ready?’ she asked, making every effort to sound casual and relaxed despite her fluttering belly. If he’d just produce the icon and let her get on her way, she knew an eldar corsair prince who was prepared to cede a paradise world for possession of it.

 	But she knew it wasn’t going to be that simple.

 	Tearing his eyes from the small ring in the centre of the table, Baron Gussy leaned back in the sofa and as he did so, he reached up to his own collar, just as Brielle had minutes before. Undoing the first few buttons of his jerkin and the shirt beneath, he revealed far more than the patchwork skin of his chest. About his neck, secured by a simple leather thong, was a gleaming, bone-white pendant, a sacred icon a mad alien was prepared to pay an entire world to possess.

 	‘How much is this worth to you?’ said Gussy.

 	Here we go, thought Brielle. She knew he wouldn’t be able to resist it, though a small part of her had dared hope he might be reasonable.

 	‘How much are you worth?’ he continued.

 	‘Baron,’ she said, interrupting him in the hope that he might allow himself to be diverted, and to avoid the otherwise inevitable unpleasantness. ‘I’d far rather…’

 	‘I’d far rather you listen, my dear,’ he interjected. ‘Rather than interrupt. It’s so rude.’

 	Brielle nodded sullenly, allowing the fool his moment of vainglory.

 	‘I’ve decided I want to expand my operations. I think a spot of extortion is in order.’

 	Brielle sighed and cast her eyes to the ceiling in what she hoped was a display of nonchalant dismissal. ‘Go on then,’ she breathed. ‘Name it.’

 	The little display had the effect Brielle had hoped for, the baron’s expression changing instantly from haughty pseudo-sophistication to flushed annoyance. Strange, she thought, how each section of the flesh on his patchwork face went a slightly different colour.

 	‘You shall remain here,’ he said coldly, all pretence of civility gone. ‘Your father shall receive my demand when I’ve considered just what you might be worth.’

 	‘You can’t even pronounce how much I’m worth,’ Brielle replied, her voice low and dangerous. This idiot was really starting to annoy her now.

 	‘Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure,’ said Gussy. ‘I’m told the trade routes on the far eastern fringe have been drying up for a few years now. They say there’s a shadow out there, and that worlds are just falling silent, one system at a time.’

 	Brielle said nothing. Eyes open, mouth shut.

 	‘Remind me,’ said Gussy. ‘Where does the Arcadius derive most of its wealth…?’

 	‘You don’t know half what you think you do, baron,’ Brielle all but growled, though in truth it surprised her just how much knowledge of her family’s business he had. It was true that something was stirring out beyond the eastern fringe and that it was affecting the trade routes the Clan Arcadius had relied upon for generations, but that was far from the whole picture.

 	‘I know enough,’ he snapped. ‘Enough to know that your father might be keen to shed certain peripheral assets to have you returned safely to him.’

 	‘Peripheral assets?’ said Brielle. ‘What are you…’

 	‘I know the Arcadius owns half of Zealandia. How about that for an opening offer, hmm?’

 	Brielle was stunned. How this petty underworld crimelord thought he could get away with wresting ownership of a significant Terran conurbation was beyond her. Clearly, the man’s ego outmatched his ability by some degree.

 	‘Enough,’ she said, waving a hand dismissively and leaning back once more. With a sudden motion, she swung her legs up and planted her booted feet on the low table, sending the priceless xenos ring pattering across the stained carpet. Gussy tried as hard as he could to look unconcerned, but his mismatched eyes tracked the ring as it rolled to a halt, then they switched back to Brielle. ‘I’m offering you this one chance to play nice, Baron Gussy, then things get messy. Understood?’

 	The baron’s lips twisted into a mocking sneer. Messy it is then.

 	Flicking her head back in a gesture that some might have taken for arrogance, Brielle caused one of her intricately plaited braids of dark hair to drop down across her face. She made to reach up and hook the errant strand away, but as finger and thumb closed about the braid, she squeezed, triggering the small, Jokaero-built device secreted within.

 	‘This,’ she said to the baron, ‘is a ground to orbit transmitter.’

 	‘Nonsense,’ he replied, though he licked his lips with evident nervousness. ‘There’s no way you’d have got it through the scanner.’

 	‘Perhaps I wouldn’t have, if your goon had had his mind on his duty, and not my…’

 	‘You’re bluffing.’

 	‘My light cruiser is, right now, holding geosynchronous orbit overhead. My spies have passed on the locations of a number of your holdings out in the swamps, and even as we speak, several macro-scale bombardment batteries are trained on each. If I’m not back soon, with the icon, those holdings are getting bombed right back to the Dark Age.

 	‘Got it?’

 	‘You’re bluffing,’ he repeated, before standing as if to intimidate her.

 	Her gaze fixed unblinkingly on his, Brielle brought the lock of hair to her mouth, squeezed, and said, ‘Fairlight, target alpha, now.’

 	A bead of sweat appeared on one of the sections of flesh on Baron Gussy’s forehead and he flexed his velvet-gloved hands as he stood over the reclining Brielle. The moment stretched on for what seemed an age, and then a ghost of a smirk appeared at the baron’s lips as he evidently decided that Brielle was, as he had hoped, bluffing.

 	But she wasn’t. His smile vanished as a sound like distant thunder rolled over Quagtown, a low, growling tremor passing up through the rock, transmitted through the metal and timber construction and causing the flickering chandelier to shake ever so slightly, yet ominously.

 	Gussy was the first to break the impasse, and he turned sharply to the house stubjack standing in the archway. ‘Find out what that was, now!’

 	‘That was your safe house twenty kilometres due south taking a direct hit from an orbital bombardment,’ she said, not trying particularly hard not to smirk.

 	‘What…?’ he stammered. ‘How did you…?’

 	‘And that,’ she said as a second, far stronger rumble brought a wave of panicked shouts from the crowd in the main part of the palace, ‘was your secret clearing house on the ridgeline seventy east.’

 	‘You spoiled little harpy!’ the baron spat, his rage exploding as several of his guards pressed into the archway with concern and confusion writ large on their faces. Brielle simply smiled and remained outwardly nonchalant, though she knew the moment of truth was at hand.

 	‘Give me the icon,’ she said flatly, ‘and your little pleasure lodge on the coast doesn’t get flattened.’

 	His eyes wide with dumb horror, the baron reached up to the icon at this throat and grasped it in a fist. ‘You’re mad! I’m not giving you a…’

 	In the blink of an eye, Brielle was up off of the cushioned sofa, propelling herself through the air in a cat-like leap that brought her into contact with the stunned baron. The two went down in a confused tangle, and when they came up again, the guards pressing in with pistols raised, Brielle had Gussy by the neck. One hand was twisted about the thong on which the eldar icon hung, constricting his neck and cutting off his breathing. Even now, each segment of his patchwork face was going a different shade of purple. The other hand was reaching under the upturned table, retrieving something mislaid but a moment before.

 	‘Back, meatheads!’ Brielle shouted, putting as much authority as she could into the order. ‘Ganna! Are you there, Ganna?’ she shouted as the guards took a step back, clearly not knowing what the hell to do.

 	‘Here, mistress!’ the pilot’s strained voice sounded from somewhere behind the wall of hired muscle. ‘I’m a little…’

 	‘Let him go or your boss gets it,’ Brielle demanded, one hand twisting the thong still more and causing the baron to squeal in sudden panic while the other deposited a small object in a voluminous coat pocket.

 	‘Do it!’ he managed, his voice high-pitched and breathless. ‘Do as she says!’

 	There was a moment of tense, uncertain silence, before the guards lowered their pistols and started backing out of the alcove, though they moved slowly and were obviously ready to react to any sudden movement.

 	Brielle jerked on the thong and shoved Gussy forwards, using his stumbling body as a shield should any of the goons open fire. It was a somewhat hollow gesture, she knew, and one that relied on them being more concerned that their boss lived than that she died, but it seemed to be having the desired effect. Within seconds, the goons had all backed out of the alcove, revealing Ganna and the servitors, the former’s concern etched across his face, the latter as blank-eyed and vacant as ever.

 	‘Time we were leaving,’ said Brielle, moving backwards towards the entrance. Ganna voiced a word of command and he and the two servitors set off after her, the already spooked crowd scattering at the sight of so many drawn weapons.

 	Just then, one of the guards made the worst move of his career. Raising a knock-off Arbites-issue stubber, he shouted, ‘Let him go or I’ll shoot your damn head clean off your…’

 	The idiot never got to complete his sentence, a shockingly loud blast filling the air and turning his entire chest cavity into a smoking, ragged mess even as he looked down with incomprehension. A moment later, the guard crashed backwards to the deck, revealing Ganna, his concealed, forearm mounted bolt pistol ready to fire at anyone else that fancied early retirement.

 	‘Now it’s time we were leaving…’ said Brielle, dragging the squirming Baron Gussy by the neck as she reached the hatch.

 	The flight back to the landing pad took far longer than Brielle had planned, for the entire town was in uproar. It wasn’t the panic at the Quagtown Palace that Brielle had unleashed that had got the population so stirred up, but the continuous stream of fire lancing down through the murky clouds to strike death and destruction at seemingly random points out in the swamplands surrounding the settlement. Though the target of every bombardment was in fact one of Baron Gussy’s holdings, the rest of the criminal fraternity weren’t to know that. Every petty crime lord in the town thought he was the target of the attacks, and that they were being mounted by some bitter rival suddenly possessed of an overwhelming weight of orbital firepower.

 	At length however Brielle, her prisoner, who was by now being carried between the two servitors, and Ganna reached the head of the ramshackle iron stairway leading up to the landing pad. The deck was a riot of activity as the ground crew fought to get craft ready for a hasty departure, but Brielle’s shuttle was, fortunately, still present, and intact. The guards she had employed to watch over the shuttle, largely as a means of announcing her presence to the local crime scene, were milling nearby, more interested in the distant, blossoming explosions than doing their job.

 	Knowing her small party had but seconds before they were noticed, Brielle rounded on the baron and gripped the alien icon hung about his neck. ‘Mine, I think,’ she said, before tearing it free with a savage twist.

 	‘The shuttle!’ Brielle yelled to her pilot. ‘Run!’

 	Ganna and Brielle powered forwards, but the servitors were left behind, the struggling Baron Gussy still held firmly between them in their vice-like, biomechanical grip. In seconds, the pair had reached the shuttle and the access ramp was lowering on screaming hydraulics. The baron started raving at the guards to apprehend Brielle and her pilot.

 	The ramp seemed to Brielle to be lowering far slower than it ever had. The roar of a handgun split the air and a hard round spanged off the hull right by Brielle’s head, forcing her to duck down as Ganna tracked the firer with his concealed weapon.

 	A burst of stubber fire from off to the left told the pair that a stand-up fight wasn’t a great proposition, and an instant later the hull where Brielle had been standing just a moment before was peppered with rounds, sending up a riot of angry sparks.

 	Fortunately, the ramp was now lowered enough for Brielle to throw herself inside, and within seconds Ganna was in too, scrambling for the cockpit even as Brielle threw the hatch into reverse and hard rounds continued to ricochet from the hull.

 	At the sound of the engines powering up to full output, Brielle collapsed onto the deck, her head spinning with a potent mix of adrenaline and relief. Those, and something more, she thought as she collapsed in a fit of dirty giggles.

 	It took Baron Gussy’s minions almost an hour to prise the mind-locked servitors’ grip off of his arms, and by the time they had, he was beyond furious. Stalking back to the Quagtown Palace, his guards barging the panicked locals out of his path, he raged at this turn of events. He had sought to take advantage of a rumour that the fortunes of the Arcadius were on the wane thanks to a decline in trade from the eastern fringe, but he was lucky to have come away with his life. Lucien Gerrit’s daughter was a she-devil, he saw, but she had made one crucial mistake. She had left him alive, an enemy at her back. That thought fired him with a curious mix of dread and desire. How he longed to break the Arcadius, he thought, and how he’d like to…

 	Before he realised it, the baron was back at the palace, its main hall now empty of patrons and the floors strewn with the detritus of panic. Drinking vessels were scattered or smashed across the ground and tables and chairs were upturned. His mouth twisting into a nasty sneer, Gussy made for his alcove, determined at least to recover the ring Brielle had offered in exchange for the eldar icon.

 	It wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t, he thought. That harpy must have snatched it up in the confusion of her escape, and left him with nothing at all to show for his attempted double cross.

 	He could really use a drink, but it looked like the serving staff had all fled, along with the stampeding patrons. Resolving to fetch his own, he looked about for a discarded bottle, but instead, his eyes settled on the stasis crate Brielle’s two servitors had carried into the palace. They had set it down by the alcove, he realised as his eyes narrowed in suspicion, at her word…

 	‘No…’ he breathed as his eyes darted nervously about the dark, empty hall. Several of the stitched-together segments of skin on his forehead began to sweat, and one of his mismatched eyes started to twitch involuntarily. ‘No, no, no,’ he stammered as he closed on the box, his gaze fixating on the status panel on its side, a red tell-tale indicating that the stasis field had just deactivated. ‘There’s no way you…’

 	But she had. Three seconds after the blinking light turned solid, the overloaded core of the plasma charge that had been placed in stasis an instant before it went critical detonated. Baron Gussy saw his fate an instant before it overtook him, the second to last thing to enter his mind a curse on the Arcadius and all their daughters. The very last thing to enter his mind was the ravening nucleonic fires of the plasma charge as its core went into meltdown, the discreet blast wave expanding to neatly and utterly destroy the shabby interior of the Quagtown Palace whilst leaving its exterior with barely a scratch. To the denizens of Quagtown, the bass roar was yet more evidence of their impending doom, touching off a stampede as hundreds fled to be anywhere but in the centre of their tumbledown settlement.

 	For many months after, only the toughest of mutants would be able to survive the radiation within that ramshackle shell. By that time, Brielle Gerrit would be light years away, perhaps visiting the golden shores of a paradise world that had recently come into her possession…