Fresh From the Landing Fields

The battered mirror above the cleanser is laughing at me, the scars upon its metal face a mocking reflection of the ridges upon my own. Been a long time since I looked myself in the eyes, a long time away from mirrors. Not sure I like what I see now. Can't blame the Man for that, though Throne knows I want to. Emperor damn him.
So here I am, my reflection and I. Beaten down again by years and what the Man demanded from me. Still standing. Still got the job done. Still coming back to the City. I don't punch the mirror like I want to, like some kid would. Instead I splash the water on my face, turn on the heat unit. Make an effort. Damned if I know who for.

A View of the Abyss

Sibellus. City without end, layered hive of mankind, asylum for billions struck ignorant and mad by its walls. I've been gone a long time, to far, sickened places. Long enough for me to forget—if I had wanted to. Long enough for a generation of newborns to be crippled, struck dumb, made sinners. But the City has its hooks into me, just as it does them. So I remember everything.
It's been five years by my ticking clock, and twenty by the booming beat of the City. The Man sent me away, and now the Man brought me back. He thinks he is the one whose devices and secrets have the hold over me—but the City is a cruel moll, and she wields the sharpest implements of all. No man can ever forget Sibellus, not in his heart, no matter how much he wants to.
I look out upon the City from this dizzying mid-Spire vantage, lit lho-stick dangling half-dead and dying, swapped between lips and my clicking, metal off-hand. Those invisible hooks set firm in my flesh, unseen puppeteers tugging like the demented. My feet are upon the edge of the precipice, hard-shod in the Magistratum gray I have no right to wear, up against the buzz of the imagefield that cloaks this jutting landing platform. Beneath and beyond spreads the crying citytop, as far as can be seen, its artificial hills and valleys draped in chemical fog—a hopeful shroud for the massed mad wished dead, pierced only by towers and gigantic statues of forgotten paragons. From this height they look like beaten-down men, small and insignificant in a misted landscape. The sun struggles with the haze, a dull yellow glow somewhere near the horizon. Left and right, above and below, run the walls of the Spire, baroque with saints and gargoyles, their scowling faces and the Spire wall-plates that support them gilded in this half-light.

The imagefield denies the winds that would drag me to the same fate as awaits the lho-stick; I chew it over, look down. Long fall. Very long. Plenty of time on the way down to think about how it will end. I flick the lho-stick, the ash drifts slowly beyond the field - and is torn from sight in a heartbeat by the spire-gale beyond. A sudden end, unexpected, without warning. No chem-shroud for the spire. It isn't cold within the field, but I pull my plated shot-coat closed and hold it that way. Too many memories trapped down there in the asylum. Sibellus. I work at killing the lho-stick.

The Moll

The spire-moll is beside me, sudden, soundless. I lose the lho-stick, flip it outwards as a benediction to the city below. The moll is out of her high-caste gown and trail assemblage now, dressed instead like a joygirl murderess: sleek, gaudy, knife-edged, dangerous. Blades upon thighs and across her back. It fits her better. She walks away along the landing platform edge now that she has my attention, fingernails of one hand out over the abyss to brush ripples in the imagefield. Each careful step sliding her supple form in ways that cry out. I try not to notice, and fail. Think instead about the hooks the Man has in her, and what rots inside her heart in mirror to my own.

In a heartbeat, the moll turns, flickers. My metal hand in front of my face to catch what she threw before I'm past my own thoughts. Getting old, too easily distracted. It's a lho-stick, Moross Below sigil upon the yellowed paper. The bitter scent of it stops me, trigger to an ambush of memories; I realise my flesh hand is under my shot-coat, on the grip of my 17-Cal. I let it go. The moll half-smiles, a brief twist to the face of a fallen angel of the Emperor, perfectly poised upon the edge. I passed.

I fumble for my flamebox, light the Moross Below. Take three steps back from the abyss, turn my back on it. Ask the moll her name.

An Unwelcome Arrival

The lift-wing breaks from the sun-glow chem haze, floats into the landing. Noise of burning engines and hot wind breaking through the imagefield like a roaring wave. Wings shifting like it wants to clutch at empty air, red eyes of the machine-man pilot glowing bright behind the front glass. Another place, another landing wells up unbidden—a betrayal, the chug-crack of wing-cannon, a man burst in tumbling pieces. Memories. I tell myself they're just memories. Force my face to relax, my flesh hand to unclench.

Ve, a moll dressed for murder, stands on one leg and a light touch of the other foot, perfect hips tilted, balanced like the lift-wing downdraft is nothing. Doesn't move back. Makes red-eye dance the wings and set down where he didn't want to, closer to the edge. I decide to like that. The last wind-rush of landing kills my second Moross Below. I drop the smoking remnant, grind it under a heavy boot. A distraction to kill a few heartbeats, doubting I'll much like what comes next. The seal on the lift-wing cracks, the hatch and stepway peel out like an insect's opening shell. The fatman, Falis, emerges, damp and dead-faced in his creased, spire-wrought finery. I'm right. This I don't like.

"Callehan! How perfectly repulsive to see you again!" The fatman doesn't false smile to match the false cheer. His pallid, fleshy lips work the words like he's rehearsed them, and the skull-drone floating behind him clacks its pict-device as through possessed.

I feel the fatman's diseased presence, even twenty paces away in the engine backwash. Like a scar in the heart that itches to beat him bloody and dead. Maybe I'd give in and do it this time—if I didn't know he'd enjoy it. Would mean he'd won, he'd got to me. Instead I grunt, scowl, cover up what the fatman's presence does to everyone. Wrap the shot-coat tight against the hot wind, and head for the lift-wing. Might as well get this over with.

Five paces. The fatman works for the Man, sees things I can't imagine. His dead eyes watch me. Ten paces. I eye the moll sideways, once. She's hiding the urge well. But I can tell. She wants to gut the fatman, throw him into the abyss—and that idea's like hard drenn buzzing in my veins. I keep it circling another ten steps, grab the airframe at the hatch, haul myself into the velvet luxury inside. Smile at the fatman like I'm going to tear him limb from limb. Then there's nothing to do but sit back on cushions that are too soft and yielding for my taste, pour a double of amasec uninvited, and wait for the punchline.

A Long, Silent Flight

The moll and I had time to talk on the landing platform, before the lift-wing. Said her name was Ve, chose her words the way she chose her steps, each a right choice perfectly placed. She asked me my story. The Man, the City, I said. Shrugged. Tough guy act. She arched an eyebrow, not buying it. Didn't give me anything in return. So we sparred a while, word by word, telling each nothing. Classy dame.

But no-one's talking in the lift-wing. Only the crackle-hum from red-eye up front to compete with the muffled engine-noise. The City whips by, a million stacked lives come and gone in a heartbeat. To the left, corroding structures built into an impossible hill, to the right a vast statue of a forgotten saint. The flyer cants, banks about a lesser spire where machine-men crawl and build. That's outside. Pretty and ugly by turns.

Inside, now, it's a tomb waiting to happen, a plush wake with overstuffed finery—two real people and one sweating animal pretending to the role. The fatman's eyes are all over Ve, close as her joygirl bodysuit, never missing a movement. The skull-drone clicks off another pict any time we breathe deep. Easy wager that the moll's dreamed up ten ways of cutting up the fatman before he knows it, laying it out in her head, move by move. Maybe the fatman thinks she's crazy enough to do it, and that's why the silent treatment. Never turn your back on a dame with a blade.

I think about all of that while the amasec warmth spreads out a way from my gut, liking the vision. Putting off thinking about where we're going. The Pit.

The Gauntlet

I took the key to the Pit from the lift-wing just like I took the fatman's amasec; it was there, and I could. The difference: the pledge key was intended for the moll and I. But the fatman wasn't going to offer it. Drop us in the Court without a key, then a dead-face pretence of amusement amidst plush finery, watching in ascent while the gauntlet shredded us to blood and tatters. The end, curtain closes, fade to black. A way out, a way to damn the Man. But I took the key, a device-box and saint's pict, prayers on parchment ribbons. The fatman said nothing, stroked his damp, fleshy fingers, kept his empty eyes on Ve.

Landed and hatch open, roar of thrusters deafening again, and out into the chem-laden night air. Like a bad lho-stick, alchemical, harsh on the back of the throat. I put some space between my hands and the fatman's murder-itch, the moll doing likewise beside me, blade-laden and beautiful. The lift-wing roars as it ascends, thruster heat whipping my shot-coat, the moll's jet hair, making the prayer-pennons of the key dance. Scribed by a dead man, telling me how to live a good life, lashing at my arms and chest. There was a kid a long time ago, a cold stone bench in a City shrine. He listened to the catechisms, but didn't hear them. Throne knows it's too late for that good life now.

Instead this: the Court, the landing zone, the gauntlet. Myself, the moll, and a hundred weapons pointed at us, enough to shred the landing deck and every last living thing on it. Stab-lights, bunkers, glowing markers, the waiting squad backlit at the yellow paintline, the machine-men turned into weapons, crawling and clinging on tall stone cathedral ruins. The saints in ancient lumen-alcoves, chem-worn faceless, accusing stares without eyes.

"Been here before?" I ask the moll. A prelude to a warning. She gives me the look, the one that says I'm just a dumb enforcer, a walking muscle, I know nothing about how it really is. An array of small, dark Magistratum rooms, a parade of joygirls across the table from me. The look from each of them. Memories. I shrug it off, tell myself it doesn't matter. Let the moll keep her secrets, and I keep to myself whatever I was going to say. We go to meet the real walking muscles, squinting against the roving stab-lights.

The squad is black on black, masked faceless as the saints above, armored. Every weapon pointing at Ve. I hazard a guess that she has been here before, that it wasn't pretty. Might as well be a walk on the avenue, a common crowd, for all she shows. I hold up the key for the head faceless, but it's not for him. He just needs to see it - the machines in his head need to see it. He makes a sign and they frisk us: a bad joke, a rebellion.

They don't care about us, they're not even men. To be a man needs choices, thoughts the machines can't hear. They're cogs in the Black Legion, each looking for a way to be something that isn't a cog for a few heartbeats. So they frisk us, and take their time with the moll, hoping that makes them men. So one tries to keep my flamebox: iridium, sigils, and a gift from someone worth a hundred cogs, far away and gone now. I close my metal hand over his glove and flesh. Squeeze, just enough to get two hellgun snouts pressed right up close against my chest, and a kick-rush in the blood like bad drenn. I look at the head faceless, ask him if he knows what happens to guard-raques that bite the wrong gangers in the low City. Thin lectoknife, behind the left ear, stir things up, makes the raque settle right down. That needles him. Faceplate up, a scarred snarl and white surgery lines. I get punched in the gut, go down hard. The cogs get to feel like men, I get the flamebox back. Everyone wins. I get up, pained. No big deal. I've had worse.

The machines in their heads tell them to let us go, to feed us to the gate into the Pit. The marker-lights glow on the path, and Ve is already walking, lithe and ready like it was nothing. I follow, and enjoy the view while I can, while the blood's still buzzing.

The Smoker

Under the citytop now, and into the stone vaults of the upper City, inside the canker of the Man that spreads from the Tricorn spires. I light up, lho-smoke to take off the edge I'm running from the cogs, the edge from the chem-haze. The hard echo of my boots rings from time-blackened, dead pictwalls, drowning the click-click of Ve's joygirl steps. The hanging lumens are dim and old, failing for centuries, trailing insect-threads. An old place, a dead place between guardians. Left unkempt, unwatched.

"Kaja," says the moll, low-strata Voltis slang, and a poverty accent that wasn't there on the spirewall. "Was here before." Shoots me a glance, eyes lingering on mine a heartbeat. I watch her walk, remind myself about dames and blades, for all the good it does. Not the place for small talk.

Ahead looms the gateway to the Pit, imposing and arched in the darkness, owned by men ridden by machines. Machine-cant noise bursts in staccato, and the first machine-man emerges from the gloom, a hunched form swathed in red and a halo of twining metal vines. A sick-sweet mix of obscura and oil from metals beneath his stained, heavy robe. Familiar scents. I recall a man, laced lho-stick dangling from the corner of his mouth, younger then, a giggling addict. I recall the machines that consumed him, made him what he is now. A tendril of iron flexes forward to take the lit Moross Below from my metal hand, conveys it to the shadows beneath the man-machine's hood. The ember-end glows. A vox-static blurt that might be a laugh. More twisting dendrites claim the key, writhing over it like rusted serpents. Another arches and points, its unblinking eye watching Ve.

Other machine-men move in the shadows, twist-shaped slaves to forge-metal mysteries. The entryway glimmers in purple, hums like a choir of generators, and my metal fingers bend unbidden, as though wanting to pull me into that dark servitude. My skin crawls. Hidden machines and invisible touches, nerve-twinges as they probe for secrets. But this is the door to the Pit: the machine-men let the damned in, secrets or not. I grimace, watch the smoker work upon my Moross Below. Make like this is nothing, keep the tough guy face as the lie, a racing heart and punch-bruised ribs as the secret.

The moll whisper-exclaims a bad word from Voltis Low I haven't heard in a decade. Not cut from whitestone after all. Looming from the upper gate, a witch-monitor emerges from shadow; a withered machine-man lost amidst blades and humming engines, forge-metal and paltry flesh circled round the urge to kill. Like a master come unexpected amongst errant servants, it surveys us with reddened eyes, finds us unworthy, and retreats into the gloom. Machine-cant noise, and machine-men move to tend to their charge. I let out my breath, unclench my hands. The gate passes us.

More machine-speak, like voices rusted away to mere static. A sliding rust-tendril returns the dying stub of my Moross Below. It stinks, an extra layer of stained, rune-marked paper wrapped around it. I put it to my lips anyway, suck it up. The smoker and the secret passed. Just like old times.

The Pit beckons.

Sanctum

The narrow halls are ancient stone, mismatched and eroded blocks once crushed amidst pagan ruins in the City depths. Vaulting ribs the walls and ceilings like the throat of a beast, and the lumens are too far apart. Pooled shadows for dangerous watchers, but I know there are no eyes and waiting hands here. Too close to the gate and the machine-men. Suits me. Ve is impatient, but I need to think, need to nurse my ribs a little while. There's the thing about a hit to the gut: you can hold it in a good long time, but sooner or later you have sit down, let it go.

"Tsa!" the moll says to herself again, but really to me. Flick of the hand. More low-Voltis manners, ganger twitches. I know, lady, I know. Give me a count. Only the arm is metal, and the rest hurts. But I don't say anything, just lean back. Been here before, this little alcove and bench. Perhaps it was a shrine, but there's no statue or Aquila now. Still, a sanctum. An unnoticed place to let the minutes drag between one gauntlet and the next; a man learns to value the quiet moments—learns to push down that nagging urge to light up another lho-stick and start walking again. I think about explaining that to the carefully pacing moll, decide against it. She twitches a glance in my direction.

She knows as well as I what's next: the long walk from the gate, the watchers and the masters. Then the life-warrant marking you as the Pit's own—but better that than the chase of grinning, lusting watchers, freed to murder any left untainted. We have no warrant, only the key to the Pit, and there are watchers who lurk between the gate and the pledge masters. My bruised gut says Ve has the blade-itch, the taste of what she'd do to them. I think that over; it wouldn't bother me if I heard about it secondhand and far away, but we're going to take the long path to the pledge vaults. Ways where the watchers don't expect new faces.

Upon the Circle Balcony

Yet the will Pit have its welcome—it won't be denied. It has its own voice and needs, a presence that is more than the sum of the lost and the damned within. Nothing so simple as choosing the empty ways from gate to masters could keep the Pit's true face hidden.

So here and now, the stepped circle-chamber where hunched scribes sometimes scurry, like raques scared by City-noise they cannot understand. The six clustered around the bloody seventh on the tiled floor, blades drawn and black-wet, looking up at the two of us on the balcony. Another intrigue come to its inevitable end. They think their stare tells us that this is none of our business, but that's not what it is. The Pit looks at us through their dead eyes. Welcome. Stay a while.

Time slows, each breath an age of detail. We circle the balcony, eyes on dead eyes, Ve stepping like a hungry felid. One hand on the holstered large-cal. My shot-coat creaks, boots crunch on something old. There are mud-streaks on the balcony pillars. Mix of stone dust and trickling condensate, the centuries-sweat of the city. I picture the ways this will fall to shreds and chaos, how a clip of 17-cal slugs will break the bodies packed below. Which way the moll will leap. Whether they hide their own pistols. Whether there are others I cannot see, where the shadows are too deep. Where I'd cover to reload. A dozen cold preludes to gunfire crashing from memory into the here and now, a locker stuffed too full of lessons, burst open to spill its distractions. Do this, no, do that. Remember your training, no, remember what happened with Alde in Ward 12. This is how it burns you in the end, why you get slow, why you get dead. Just listen to what your muscles tell you. Be like the moll.

And, that urgent voice in the back of my mind, I know that watchers will be coming soon, drawn by murder, jealous that it was not their doing. I want to be gone, gone from here through the far arch on the balcony. Emperor make it that the way is clear, and watchers far!

But the Pit lets us go. None of the six draw, or move. We fade into the shadowed hall; no-one dies, no company for the lonely murder. My heart thinks about slowing its sudden pounding. Another unwanted memory, sealed by the rush of buzzing blood. The Pit's gift.

The Watcher

Vaults, passages, and stairways pass in watchful, wary silence. From deserted halls where fungus hangs from City stone in place of carved angels, we come to the populated back ways. The hurrying of a scribe avoiding something better left unsaid. Chains hang against the walls, guides for blinded serfs, the least of the Pit's own. Rejected even by the Man, their eyes taken by the machine-men, they serve. Then a crossway, a spiral stair, and a huddled knot of hard men in meshwork Legion armor, jarred by our intrusion into their whispered conference. One holds up a life-warrant as a ward, thinking us watchers. Who else walks between the lumens?

We follow a line of serfs bowed beneath parchment bundles, upon their way to a master's scribe pen, hand over hand upon their wall-chain. Our boots on stone and duct-plate bother them not – as though they simply hear by our footfall what the Legion-men could not see. The rusting plates where their eyes used to be drip runnels of sweat, glistening under each dim lumen. A whitestone statue of the Man watches our quiet procession from its alcove. Armored, judgmental. Staring.

I should say something to the moll. Ve. The Magistratum itch, it sees a new face from another ward, won't lie still. Wants to be talking, find out who it is you're going to be back to back with one day soon, taking on a room of knives while the vox is dead static. But the moment doesn't come, and something won't let me chase it. So silence, and now ten steps behind serfs who can do nothing but listen. A reminder of what awaits when the Man has wrung the last from his tools.

The back ways open onto an avenue, pillared and tall, lumen-sconces hung from every baroque carving. We are suddenly amidst hurried messengers and slow-stepping machine-men, each bearing secrets and avoiding every gaze. And there, archways and the first of the scribe pens. A master's domain—the least of them, one who deigns to look upon the damned and send them to their fates.

But the Pit laughs at me yet, because there at the very archway I seek stands a watcher, a killer. The Pit's own blade. The symbol of the Man set upon his carapace, upon the cannon of a bolter he cradles like a child, and burned upon the flesh side of his face. He turns—and I know him. I know him, and I know his weaknesses. A hot relief after silent, darkened halls and the specter of watchers far more terrifying. Enough to burn away the last of what the black-clad cogs did to me. Ten paces and I am at the archway, privy to the clatter of cogitators, scribes, and keyslates beyond. The sounds of slow death by hunched wasting and decree of the Man—but my eyes are on the death in armor, close enough to touch.

"I know you," the watcher rumbles. Clavus Ommic. He should know me. A flash of memory, my hand on his throat, large-cal pressed right up against his jaw. The last I was in the Pit. The switch pins on the metal side of his face click. On, off, on. Levers pulling at the meat of his brain, ridden by the machine. I watch them, not his glowing eye. That's where I'll jam the barrel, pull the trigger, if it comes to that.

"We can go again, you and me." Tough guy face, slips on easy as the Magistratum boots used to. Easy when you know you can win, when you're sure you've already won. Metal fingers twitch, wanting in on what is next.

"I know you." But slow, and slurred. Slow and damned, like me, and I see it now. The machines have eaten what he was, left a shadow behind, a puppet. Just another cog in the Man's machinery. He steps back, a door-weight in human form, and the switch pins all click at once. I curse, bitter. There was a man, a long time back; jumpy, drew on a scutter-raque. We didn't let him live it down. What was he going to do, drag it back to the barracks in little raque-cuffs? Throw it into the cells, beat it into following City law? I push it away, shrug it off. Pretend I don't know the moll is watching, judging. Pretend to myself that I don't care.

The scribes look away, suddenly busy with their parchments, pretend to hear nothing. So we're all pretending now. The master's office is beyond the serried cogitators and autoquills, marked by pennons and symbols of the Man. It beckons. Come on in. Stay a while.

The Master of Pledges

It's not an office, it's a place where scribe-tools come to die. Or to be consumed by the many-limbed devices surrounding the master, the creature in the heart of its lair. The walls are lost behind racks and shelving, their contents half-spilled. Green cogitator display-light wars with a too-small lumen in the high corner. The master, ensconced within his scribe machinery, dangerous eyes in the sunken face of a man too old to be alive. Arms wrapped in engine-rods, so they can move at all. Two savants are making their case, for what I don't know. We didn't announce ourselves.

The moll slinks past me—all the grace I never had. The entry is narrowed by clutter piled high. Doesn't bother her; she doesn't touch me or the racked scrolls and rotting vox devices on the other side. A heartbeat and she's on the master's desk-enclosure; two and the savants are leapt up and gabbling like sqarals in the nest. I'm three steps in when the blade comes out. She stabs it sparking into the metal of the desk, and the autoquill dies with a sharp crack. Like lightning. Emperor! Magistratum habit rolls back in like a friend from years past—the one who stabbed you in the back, and here he is again with the same old expectations. Back it up to the hilt, whatever it is, and recriminations later.

So I watch the portal and the savants. One is crying. I'm trying not to think about what will be coming next—bolt-rounds from what used to be Clavus Ommic. Damned, all damned. Open up the shelves, the dead machines, everyone in here into wet splinters. The savants are watching my flesh hand like it's a pointer. I look down, see I'm holding the 17-cal. I don't remember drawing it. I catch flashes of the moll and the master, hissing at each other.

"Svalt! This time, not with the gothre-filth..."

"...listen well Veneth...assure you...unnecessary."

An agonizing number of heartbeats, and they come to some accommodation. Death does not burst in through the portal. The moll retrieves her glow-wreathed blade, uncoils from the desk-enclosure. Motions me over.

"And you?" the master asks, cold as chem-snow on the citytop. Eyes that would put a hole in armor plate, like every tutor who ever beat the low-scholam kid I was came back from the dead to stare.

Back it up to the hilt. "Whatever she said." I toss the pledge key onto his desk, amidst the parchments and clicking devices. Holster my large-cal, and watch as machine-arms pick at the key, turning it this way and that.

A pause, too many breaths. Listening to the quiet sobbing of the savant to the left, trying not to show it gnawing at me. The master's mind turns behind that cold stare; I see him weighing what he'd like versus what he can achieve. Weighing blades and a large-cal against words and consequences. Weighing the needs of the Pit.

"As you will, then. Welcome to the Dicasterium." There is no welcome in his voice, but a bitterness, a concealed hunger. All I hear is the Pit of Lies and Conspiracies, speaking to me through yet another mouth.

Arrayed, the Essentials

The firing hall is empty, the flagstones littered with uncleared casings, exactly as I remember it. A blinded serf curled on a pad in the corner the only human presence. Bolters would blow through the flakboard targets and the shot-traps behind, and the lumens burn bright over each fire-lane; no watchers here. Reminds me of a dozen barrack basements, a way to bleed away the taint of the Pit I'm carrying. But it's watching me. It's always watching.

I throw down the carry-case. Clothes, other loot from the issuance vault. Bodyjacket and leggings with shot-plate pockets. Cleanser packets. Legion-standard ration packs. Bad lho-sticks. A stack of plasteen-sealed scint coins. I pick a firing enclosure, empty out the metals from my shot coat. 17-cal in the middle. Solid shot clips on the left. Auger rounds with the white paint cross on the right. Won't be using those here; put a hole right through the back stonework and into whatever space lies behind it. Message coffers, old and marked with symbols of the Pit. Flamebox and the last Moross Below. The life-warrant. I turn it over in my hands. The microrunes on warrant metal coil and overlap, giving it the texture of raque skin. The puncture on my wrist where the warrant machine took measure of my blood throbs with the beating of my heart. Bound to the Pit.

I place the warrant face-down. Flick open the flamebox, light up the last decent lho-stick I'll see for a while. Breath it in, blow it out. Lho-smoke curls around the ammunition.

"Sir? Mistress?" The serf is up, making his way to his assigned post. He knows it's 'sir,' and he knows exactly where I'm standing—and knows enough not to show it. I let him have that; Throne knows he has little else. The scars radiate from his eye-plate like shatter-lines across an age-worn face and shaved pate. But that's the only touch of the machine upon him. I flex my metal hand, remembering things I'd rather leave dead and buried.

"Over here. Two clips, large-cal, second fire-lane from the left."

I unload the 17-cal, break it open, work through the gun-rites. Work through the Moross Below as well. I don't have to think about the rites; all muscle memory now. Get interrupted though, it works a number on you. You lose your place, can't figure out where you were. Have to start over. You learn that one early, the hard way—don't interrupt the old man.

I think about Ve while my hands do Magistratum work. I don't know where she is, but I know where she'll be. Like blood from City stone, getting three words in a row from the moll after the coordinator's office. But she, I, and the smoker, in the cell warrens, that much she swore to. "Tsa! Yes. You and your machine-speaker. Later." she said. My eyes lingered on the sway of her body as she walked away into the shadows. We'll see.

The serf knows well enough to stay quiet, listening to the clack and rattle of gun-rites. I appreciate that. Have nothing to give him that isn't marked with the Pit's poisons—or words that aren't useless to a man bereft of eyes and all he once was. I set it aside, my bleeding heart. Ram a clip home, chamber the topmost, look downlane and think about the shot-pattern I'll put into the flakboard.

Walking the Cell Warrens

I pull out the same issuance lho-stick for the third time, put it away again. It has the stink of preservatives, like a fundament spill. Like the bad times in the low Sepat wards, the crumpled bodies left by gangers in waste-strewn shaft alleys. The same stench. More memories that I try to leave with the dead.

But I'm thinking about the moll as the cell warrens wrap their damp walls around me. She's easy on the eyes, too easy, and Emperor-damned hard on everything else. The sort of dame who pulls blades on a master of the Pit is the sort of dame will get a man dead. But done is done, and now there's the questions waiting. Questions and a meeting with the smoker.

The corridor narrows. Plasteen ration bottles lie crumpled beneath a pillar etched with manufactory devotionals—where the passage of blind hands hasn't worn it smooth. It smells like neglect, like bad air, like burned out fans in the fundament vents. I know where I'm going. I don't know where I am. The cell warrens are that way, a knot of maze-levels and stairs, and an armor for the lost. A way to hide from the watchers and the damned. Find a cell where the locks still work, push out the serfs who use it—another indignity to place atop all they've lost—and sleep like the dead. So I keep at it, wait for the memories to tell me where the ways cross. Chains for the blinded on the walls, and a symbol carved on each stair and junction; I'll find the ones I knew sooner or later.

I flick the flamebox lid in my shot-coat pocket, try to squash the lho-itch while thinking through the number Ve worked on the coordinator. He knew what happened in the master's vaults. Don't know how, but he knew. The drenn-tic in his eye like the moll was pulling on his puppet-threads, all the way from on high. Me, I ranked nothing, just another mark in the Man's ledger, but the coordinator would've clawed down the walls to get away from Ve. He kept it in and stone-straight, the twitch and the jerk, long enough to set an assignation, I'll give him that much.

Spend the years drenned to the hilt and it never leaves, always that last dreg feeding the fires. The chem-burn makes them jump and turn to its heartbeat, makes them crazy in the end, biting blood from their own arms to stop the screaming. The coordinator wore long sleeves, eye-covers to hide the hollows. Made it part of a look. He wasn't fooling anyone who matters—but he's still the one who'll tell the machine-men to take your eyes or send the watchers to break you. I remembered that while the drenn-sweat formed on his face, and the moll watched him like he was half a squashed raque, squirming.

We left with parchment and seals, issuance rights, told to step and fetch at the Pit's demand. An evaluation duty, thrown to the fresh meat to see how rotted it is under the skin. A dark joke, and no-one was laughing.

The Machine-Speaker

What do you say to a man you haven't seen in five years, twenty by his clock? But who you haven't really seen since the low City days, the schola, the bad times. Not his face, not the one you knew. First the obscura, then the machines. Then the Man.

"Long time, Orven," I say. Feels like I said nothing at all.

The smoker laughs through the grill that took his mouth. Machine noise, like nails on the nerves. "Long time, Callehan."

The small room is heady with obscura-scent, littered with the meager possessions of its displaced occupants. A single lumen, a prayer-mirror, a rusted cleanser. The smoker halfway reclined on the single stained sleep-pad, red cloak falling open to show me things I don't want to see. The raw junction of oiled machine and chem-treated skin. The roots of metal tendrils. They explore the room like blind worms, like they have minds of their own, turning over each new discovery. Makes me too aware of my metal hand. The nerve-tugs I try not to notice, the times I wonder who just moved my fingers. Different. Not my own.

There are stools, plasteen and flimsy. I kick one to where I can watch the door and the machine-man I once knew. Drop the carry case, take a seat, a little too heavy.

"Long time." the slumped machine-man grates, slowly. A flat machine-voice where there should be feeling, emphasis, anything. "What did you bring for me?"

"Go to hell, Orven." Too tired for the old back and forth. His poisons should have rotted him out from the inside long ago. The same each time, making like I'm fresh from an obscura den, weighed down and generous. The little mockery that's like a hopeful needle, jabbing at me. The Man sends you away, takes years from you, cuts out a part of you that you didn't know you had left. You fight your way back, only to find the rot, the things that wormed their way under your skin. All just waiting for you.

But I'm tired. So I cut to the chase. Ask him what the story is with the Pit. Meaning what's new, what's going to get a man killed. Whether working the coordinators for time on the outside is still good. Who's in, who's out. I want to build a foundation. Work up to understanding when I can expect the master and the coordinator to cut me short at the neck for standing too close to the moll.

The smoker coils his dendrites, gives me the glassy, silent treatment. That's fine. I'm not going anywhere. I get up, start knocking around the stow-shelves. Figure there's going to be something to drink in here somewhere. That'll make it easier all round.

"The tranq is under the cleanser." The smoker's words, like rust in dead lungs.

I look. A cerajar, dirty, and the contents smell bad. Acrid, but not as bad as the issuance lho-sticks. Suits my mood. Back to the stool, and I take a swig. Tastes like cleaning fluid, and burns going down before the numbness starts to kick in. Tranq's an old friend, smears out the pains and the need to sleep, makes them hard to see, like plasteen sheets wrapping through the body. I'll cut out a few scints from the stack later, leave it for the blind. For what it's worth. The eyes of the God-Emperor stare accusingly from the prayer-mirror.

So we catch up, the smoker and I, in our own way. Like digging at an old wound. Can't chase what's gone—Emperor knows a man has to live with what is.

The Sharp Edge

The moll makes her entrance like she owns the room, all two scints of it and its waste. The smoker's rust-serpents rise up sharply, rearing from their drugged coils. The only part of him that moves like it's alive. Interested or threatened? The tranq is bad, fluid dregs from a power cell, but numbs me enough not to care one way or another. Half left now, was making it last.

"Clean was too much, no?" Ve surveys the walls and cluttered floor, flares her nostrils at the scent of it—at the oil-obscura odor of the smoker. Lips thin, tone clipped. A tutored spirebase accent, like she shrugged off every last trace of the joygirl in the cleanser. She's a guilder's escort-guard now, sheen-slick armorgown heavy with plates and a ceremony blade across her back. High priced, beautiful. The gown slits at the thigh, and the tranq isn't enough to keep my eyes away.

"No ears, no watchers. That's clean enough." I proffer the cerajar, indicate a stool. "Have a seat...Veneth. Join the party. Tell me why we're not both dead." The tranq drags me straight to the point, paints on an edge of frustration, just like always.

"Vecca. Mistress Vecca. But Ve keeps it simple." Her clear eyes locked on mine. "So people don't slip up." Each word slotted precisely in its place, the emphasis on "people." Real subtle. Not scoring any points.

The moll eyes the plasteen stool like it's dirt, chooses the cleanser edge for a throne instead. Where she can see the door, and where she's a half-step from standing. One heel against the cleanser's rust-streaked side, long leg bent at the knee and naked outside the armorgown. She ignores the offered tranq. Her loss. So I take a swig and watch her. Like a hundred bare rooms, a hundred faces across the table, a hundred questions, a hundred murders. Put on the Magistratum mask and don't speak a word. The City hates silence; they always talked.

But the moll says nothing. Makes it a contest.

The smoker's voxgrill grinds out a broken non-word, an attention-getter. "A thought. The master has an uncertainty. Whether watchers can kill you before you find out." Ve glares down at him, and his dendrites recoil as though burned, curling back onto the stained mattress. One metal leg twitches beneath the disheveled robe.

A pause. "He fears you kill him first, regardless of after." The same obscura-slow pacing of flat, machine-made words.

I shake my head. He lets me think he's rusted to nothing, then shows there's a little of the old left in there somewhere. Buried under the rust and the mind-poisons. God-Emperor damn him for it.

Back to word-sparring, then. "Let's say that's right. A dangerous game you're playing—winning by not caring about winning."

"It is my game to play," counters the moll, sharp and certain.

"No. It's our game now, two names on the same pledge. You dragged me into your wager, and I backed you up anyway." The tranq makes me sound angrier than I want. Throne knows this isn't the first time I've said this. It's just been a while.

The new face in the barracks, then right beside you out in the City, both of you looking at the same sins and knowing nothing about the other. You feel out the edges of the bargain, find out how to get along, how get the job done. That's the way it was, and that's the way it is, nothing to get heated over. But she loathes being challenged, I see that lumen-bright in her perfect face and the tension of her stance. Is that her, or is it like the joygirl sway, painted on thin? Damned if I can tell. The door's right there and she isn't walking yet—that has to count for something.

"You made the choice," she tells me, biting down hard on that last word. "What is it that you want?" The perfect line of her from ankle to neck under the armorgown. The blade-hilt past her shoulder.

What do I want. That's a start; I can work with that.

The Downward Spiral

Broad greystone stairs slope down into thrumming blackness past the last functioning lumen. Rounded and pitted, the steps are slabs laid an age ago in some deep ward, dragged from their resting places to bring slow stone-rot to the Citytop. Condensate drips from fundament ducts overhead, set too low for comfort. The fan-pumps within rattle and wheeze, left to die in their own time by the machine-men—too small, too insignificant. Or too near to our destination: a prison for the madmen that the Pit calls correlators.

Madness and an asylum...needles digging too close to the bone. And the damp here brings out the old ache, where the metal of my arm meets flesh. Another thing to pretend I don't feel.

The moll, two steps down and half the City away for all I can read of her. She flicks her head to look me in the eye again; I guess the pace is too slow for her liking. The hollowed stone eyes of the Man stare at me from a shallow alcove above her shoulder. Heavy thoughts and fresh-issued boots drag a man down, rack up the count between each step.

We came to an understanding while the smoker watched, the moll and I, bitter and sharp by turns. A snapping lho-itch and acrid tranq fumes made into a negotiation. Then an uneasy, dulled sleep in the cell warrens while the Pit breathed, waiting. Waking up to stare into the rust-streaked mirror of a stolen cleanser, a tranq-bitten head and the past day's bruises stiff. Cover it all in an issuance bodyjacket, throw on the shot-coat, rig the holster and 17-cal. Make as though you're still as fit as ten years past.

But right about now I'd say the past night's exchange has settled to a bad taste in the moll's mouth. She wants this all done one way or another; spit it out or wash it down. She's still thinking that choice over, turning it round, looking at the angles. But what needles her isn't the taste of my Magistratum habits—no, it's that the Pit has her between two walls, the hooks in her flesh tugged by worthless hands. Taken by the Man and then thrown amidst waste. Damned, just like me.

I tell myself that when she gives me the look. Eyes narrow, face set. No joygirl parted-lip ambiguity now. This one I can sometimes read, sometimes not, and Throne damn me if I know whether I'm right for any of it. She bleeds the danger-signs, though. Like an aspid—venomous and angry, waiting for the boot to tread too close. No less a beauty for it, sleek and curved to catch the eye while she's two stairs ahead.

She looks, so I call her on it. "You got something to say, say it."

A pause. "You owe me a lho-stick."

The spire platform, a catch. Maybe I do. Good cover. "That it?"

"For now."

The Pit seeps into every soul, and no-one speaks straight. Maybe that's her, maybe that's this place and the Man. I pull out an issuance pack, a quarter gone already. Low-City taint-sticks, chem-soaked and vile. I proffer them.

"Take what you want. They're as bad as they look." That wins a twist of a half-smile on the lips, nothing in the eyes. I try not to care.

She pulls out three lho-sticks one-handed, flicks them up into her armorgown sleeve-cuff. All one move of the hand, just as quick as I'm slow to put the pack away. Pretty trick.

"You practice that?"

The moll snorts. Derision.

The Correlator

The gate room to the correlation vault stands empty, its rusted metal floor a stepped funnel leading down to a heavy grate-sealed portal. The layered stink of promethium and rotting wastes hangs heavy in the slow-moving air—few working pumps here. The sole dim lumen flickers on, then off, then on again in a slow pattern. Perhaps deliberate, perhaps not. More likely the machine-men never come to this metal oubliette. A place for the secret, the damaged, and the mad.

Thick, age-crusted data conduits are restrained against the walls by chains, clamps, and seals set as though wards against what flows within. Secrets only the Man knows. Secrets I wish I'd never learned. Above the conduits, shadowed vents from which burning promethium will spill—when the Man decides that the mad within the vault have suffered enough, or that some dark knowledge must be extinguished even from the Pit. I try not to think about that; push it down. Push it away. Too many sepulchers left open, too much best forgotten.

Neither Ve nor I have spoken since the stairs. Darkened greystone corridors, close walls, decay. There was sobbing, somewhere in the dark beyond the grate-door, ceased with my first loud footfall on the metal flooring. A bad place, this. A sump for the Pit's damnation. I don't need the sick feel in my gut to tell me that.

The control levers for the portal are weld-sealed, buried under metal runnels. What might have been a vox-speaker is torn away, gone. I rap the back of my machine hand against the grating; metal on metal, three times. Step back, taste of bile in my mouth from the stench.

I've done this once before, years past. A different vault...but the same open promethium vents overhead, and skin crawling with echoes of the screaming in the collapse-edge of the Sarvass stonefire. Memories. What the flames left, afterwards. But this is worse, the reek rising from the dark like a sickness, like something from the deepest wards. Poverty alleys without medicae, corpses lying where they were murdered. Rot and raque-meat.

The lumen flickers out. Sudden hiss, a body spread against the grate. Throne! I'm two steps back without thinking. Sudden thump of the heart, loud in my ears. Hand on the 17-cal. A crackle and white glow, left. I glance. Ve hasn't moved, but her blade is out. Long, field-wreathed.

"Out," the body groans. More than one now, sliding against the portal grating. The stink of festering sores and unwashed flesh adds to the rank air. Crawling, some, fingers poking through the lowest gaps to scratch at the metal flooring. Moaning "let us go."

Shouting starts somewhere far beyond the pleading, mind-burned bodies fumbling at the portal. Indistinct barked phrases. I don't want to hear it well enough to understand, but the flat promethium taste hangs in the air like a shroud over this madness, wrapping me away from drawing the 17-cal, from taking the only sane action.

The moll breaks the moment, steps forward. Touches her blade tip to a finger, to the metal bars. A screech, burned hair, ozone. A rush away from the grate.

"The tower of Saint Orithiel," she commands. A sudden bronze medallion voice, something to kick new faces into barracks-shape. And just how many faces hide behind her perfect features?

But silence. The lumen flickers once, remains dead, the only light the white blade coruscations.

A scuffle from the darkness, then a croaking incoherence, a voice unused. A glow-lit, pallid hand behind the grating, a single eye peering from a gap between crossed bars. A whisper, suddenly hopeful: "The tower...my request. You have the datum?"

"No," the moll replies.

The lumen flickers on abruptly. A moan arises from the black shadows behind the grill bars, the eye and hand gone. "Why? Why?" the hidden voice croaks, broken.

Ve quiets her powerblade, one fluid motion to arc it over her shoulder and sheath it. Without thought to it, a practiced act of murderous hands.

"Enough to satisfy the coordinator," she says, a scornful emphasis upon "satisfy." Words for me, or for the savant broken by what he was forced to learn?

I don't ask, say nothing as we leave the gate room. Footsteps on metal, then flagstones. Faint, disturbing sounds from the vault behind us, and I look back—but nothing, all just as it was. The moll keeps walking.

The Way It Is

The eyes of the Pit gather in their furtive clusters beneath cross-passage lumens. Whispering, watching. Pretending to know my black thoughts, and making a poor job of hiding their own. The lowest scribes in stained robes, plotting archive treachery. The machine-man standing like a statue, counting. Missive-bearers passing secrets to one another, and no-one to say which master they're betraying.

I think about talking to Ve, two steps to the left. Tell her how it all fits together in my head, what comes after this ugly here and now of doing the coordinator's waste-work. This acting like a cog, a puppet dragged through the Pit's leavings. Maybe cut short the way she looks at me.

It's like this: you walk the low alleys in Magistratum blue and silver, listen to the curses and the screams, step over the drugged and the dead—but not because it has any worth. It makes no difference to the misery and the filth whether the barracks makes itself known, whether you knock heads together, whether you send the thieves and the killers before a magister. The City will be the City. She was cruel when you were a kid, she'll be hard-lipped and sneering when you're gone.

No. You do what doesn't matter because it's a path to the few moments that do. That the three of you took shock mauls and hammered a scar-ganger to a bloody, burned smear on stone before he could kill another decent priest. That you found the woman who stole children for meat, put a round through her gut and dragged her back to the barracks. Threw her into an empty cell to bleed out, took your Emperor-damned time to let the commander know.

You walk amongst the lost and the vile, pretend you're one of them if you have to, and wait for the few times that will let you live with yourself later. Throne knows if there's any other way for the likes of me. It's been a long time now since I lost the chance at a better life, and maybe it was never there to begin with.

But the moll isn't a confessor. Break the fundament pipe open, watch the words fall like waste-water—that makes a man look weak. Enough chances at that in this place without making more of my own. Either she gets it already, or there's nothing I can say that'll make a difference. I tell myself that, and maybe it's true. I shrug, but inside, where none of these prying eyes can see. Emperor damn them.

One way or another, it's precious little small-talk on the back-ways and close, pillared avenues leading to the librarium. Ve has her thoughts, and I have mine. I turn the angles over in my head, still looking for the key to work the coordinator given all the moll's said and done. Figure a way out. Even marked as the Pit's own and under the Man's eyes, a way out is a way out—to some far district where the stain isn't painted so black. Where I can pretend for a little while that the hooks and lines don't exist, that the past years never happened.

The Door to Knowledge

There are two watchers by the bronzed doors, set on the side-way that splits from this demi-paved avenue. Shaved heads and carapace plate, hanging back at the edge of the lumen-light. Big, ugly bolters, slung Legion-fashion. That's what catches my eye—hard cases in armor, not the High Gothic scripting on the vaults or the scrollwork engravings, marks of the librarium exterior. Old habits from walking the poverty wards, attention paid to what will keep a man breathing that much longer. But Throne! The tightness in my gut says there are damned few reasons watchers would be here. None of them good.

"Keep walking straight," I tell Ve.

She's seen the muscle, cuts to the chase. "You think it'll be different"—hard on that word—"if we talk about it first?"

Meaning she figures oil and water, then straight to the bad place whatever's done. There's the itch that says to take that personally, but what's on my mind is that talking it out now means I won't be cut short between two bolters and a powerblade when the moll loses patience.

I don't say that. Wouldn't help. Instead: "Talking can't hurt. We've got time."

She goes along with it. For now.

The Hard Case

They're flanking the librarium portal as Ve and I approach, footsteps suddenly loud in the vaulted side-way. Scarface on the close side, redbeard on the far. Heavy-shelled in polished armor, and eyeing us, somewhere between confident, bored, and predatory.

"Coming through," I call. Get the ball rolling. Be the tough guy, disinterested.

They consider this for a few heartbeats. Scarface steps forward, hand resting on the slung bolter. "No. Not through here, you're not." Voice like a box full of broken stonework, half his mouth twisted into the scar-mass that runs from the armor-collar to where his ear used to be.

Redbeard casually unslings the weight of his weapon. I act like that doesn't make my metal hand twitch, doesn't send red burning lines through the nerves. Muzzle wide as my wrist, still pointing at the floor. Like that much matters.

"The master says otherwise."

Say it like you mean it, and it might as well be true. That's what you learn in the barracks. How to give orders to a madman, lies to a preacher, and leave them both pleased with it.

Up close now, close enough to the watchers to talk like we're civilized. Civilized. The thought makes me twitch half a cynic's smile.

But scarface doesn't give, stands in place like a wall of muscle and armor. "This," he says, rapping the Pit's sigil on his chestplate. "This says you're nothing, and I don't hear you."

Real friendly. The moll gives him the look, like he's fungus crawled down from the filth collected in the vault corners. Every tight nerve feels what my gut knows is coming, poised to fall in and bury me. Bolters in a narrow vaulted way. Knowing just what that looks like afterwards.

"You're hearing me now." Lean on the Magistratum bronze voice, eye to eye with scarface. "You're looking at new issuance and thinking we're dirt. You're wrong. I was here before you were tall enough to hold up that cannon. I was here when Clavus Ommic could string more than two words together."

It's the eyes and tone that matter, just him, me, and the dropped name. Redbeard will fold if scarface backs down. The moll will get us all dead if words aren't enough, damning me for thinking they were.

"We're coming through, like I said, and because I liked Ommic"—flash of memory, hand clenched on a windpipe, snarling—"I'm playing nice with you. Do the right thing, and we're all friends here."

Scarface twitches, blinks. Didn't expect the dirt to stand up and bite.

The Librarium Outskirts

Shelves surround us, dividers for a maze built within vast, joined halls, each split a hundred ways into avenues and hidden spaces by lined stacks. Secrets, polemics, and lies set side by side—the currencies of the Man, spilled across parchment and ciphered into datavaults. Whitestone saints dressed as scribes lean outward from high alcoves, others peer from faded murals upon the vault above. Looking down at us. Watching.

The blood's still running hot in my veins, a drenn-buzz from pushing past the watchers. It'll fade, but I'll ride it while it's there; one more time I've walked through a crush-fall waiting to happen. The moll may as well be stone, not a word from her. Alabaster legs beneath the armorgown, long strides to keep pace with mine, perfect face composed. Emperor knows she'd be the same if she'd cut the watchers at the gate dead in steaming pieces.

The librarium is beyond the easy reach of the masters, for all two scints of what that's worth. But it still has its slaves, just as damned as those of the Pit. They dress like records clerks, fresh from hidden rooms where machines pick over their minds. Arrayed eyeglasses screwed to devices that protrude from surgery-scars on shaven pates, heads weighed beneath the machines that ride them. Hands replaced by spreading tines and hooks. Focused, unblinking stares, fixated on what awaits when red-cloaked machine-men decide a living brain is too febrile for its assigned task.

Their remains stand at intersections, dead flesh contorted within metal frames to become bowed catalogues and guide-pointers. What's left when the machines are done with men and women. The clerks who can still walk and speak whisper to one another when we pass—unwelcome intruders into their world of tomes and dataslates, the moll and I. For my part, I try not to see what the machine-men have wrought here. The end of a path I don't want to stand on.

This place kicks my lho-itch, fingers turning over a crumpling issuance pack in the body-jacket pocket. Flicking open the flamebox and lighting up feels like giving in, but it smoothes out the jagged slide back down from being face to face with bolters and muscle. Damned if I want the moll to see my flesh hand shaking.

So I take the first hit of hot chem-tainted lho-smoke, blow it out...and see the moll has an issuance stick balanced between two long fingers. Perfect nails, painted to match the armorgown.

"Light me," she says.

I touch the end of my smoke to hers, look her in the eye. Watch her set the tip glowing bright. Acrid grey curls lazily falling from her lips when she breathes out slow.

"You're right. These are bad."

I look away, shrug. "Better than nothing." I was right—about the lho-sticks, and about the hard cases at the door. But she won't say that.

Machine-ridden clerks stare at us like we're ferals. Gangers from the worst City depths. Savages. To hell with them, a little lho-smoke won't hurt their sanctum.

"You can't...do that here,” says one. Her folded tines click against one another like anxious metal fingers.

"Beg to differ," I tell her.

The Harridan

We walk and smoke, the moll and I, passing between stacked folios and carefully disordered shelving. Looking like hard cases next to the scurrying clerks, like hired murder drifted out of place. That's the game, let you think you're the biggest raque in sight—but the machine-men in hidden rooms behind these walls never sleep. Push a clerk once, no-one cares. Do worse, and ten kinds of death await, silent and patient. I've heard the stories. Throne, I've told a few. Corpses wrapped in rust and weapons, like the glowing killer at the gate to the Pit.

"We're not trouble. Not in here," I tell Ve.

She says nothing. Gives me the silent look, flicks the ash from her smoke.

We reach the center of it all. A circle-hall: shelves and flooring high above in ones and twos, hung from wires winding up into a darkness. Stairs like floating slab-paths, and lumens atop curved poles. The floor-maze of stacked and overflowing storage racks is rife with wary clerks, machine hands picking at disarray—and worried stares when we pass.

Yay Op, very good effort.

I've put an archival request just for you.

Bumping, by the grace of the Emperor.

Frankly this should be mandatory reading for DH GMs. (along with the notes from the PDF version: http://www.principiainfecta.com/ )