“I—”
“Do you understand me, Political Officer Langana?”
Langana hesitated. “I will have to call House Command for these requirements.”
“Do so!” barked Curth. Dorden looked on. He liked her already.
“Use my hive caste-code: 678/cu. Got it? That will give you the authority to process my request. And do it now, Langana!”
The commissar saluted briefly and then marched away out of the chamber. He had to push through the smirking Tanith orderlies to exit.
Dorden turned to the woman. “My thanks, Surgeon Curth. The Tanith are in your debt.”
“Just do your job and we’ll get on fine,” she replied bluntly. “I have more wounded refugees in my hall now than I can deal with. I don’t want your overspill submerging me when the fighting starts.”
“Of course you don’t. I am grateful, surgeon.”
Dorden fixed her with an honest smile. She seemed about to soften and smile back, but she turned and led her team away out of the door. “We’ll return in two days to help you set up.”
“Surgeon?”
She stopped, turning back.
“How overrun are you? With the wounded, I mean?”
She sighed. “To breaking point.”
“Could you use six more trained staff?” Dorden asked. He waved casually at his fellow medics and waiting orderlies. “We have no wounded yet to treat, Emperor watch us. Until we have, we would be happy to assist.”
Curth glanced at her chief orderly. “Thank you. Your offer is appreciated. Follow us, please.”
Varl supervised the store detail, carrying more than his share thanks to the power of his artificial arm. With a team of thirty, he ordered the stacking and layout of the Tanith supplies. There was plenty of stuff in the barn already, well marked and identified by the triplicate manifest data-slates, but there was still more than enough room for the supplies and munitions they had brought with them.
Another truck backed up to the doorway, lights winking, and Domor, Cocoer and Brostin helped to shift the crates of perishables to their appointed stacks. Varl allocated another area for the munitions he had been told would arrive later.
Caffran looked up as the sergeant called to him. “Sweep the back,” Varl ordered. “Make sure the rear of the barn is secure.”
Caffran nodded, pulling his jacket and camo-cape from a nearby crate-pile and putting them back on. He was still sweat-hot from the work.
Lifting his lasgun, he paced round the rear of the supply stacks, moving through the darkness and shadows, checking the rotting rear wall of the hangar for holes.
Something scurried in the dark.
He swung his gun round. Rodents?
There was no further movement. Caffran edged forward and noticed the edge of a crate that had been chewed away. The plastic-wrapped packets of dried biscuit inside had been invaded. Definitely rodents. There was a trail of crumbs and shreds of plastic seal. They’d have to set traps—and poison too probably.
He paused. The hole in the crate’s side was far too high to be the work of rodents. Unless they bred something the size of a hound in the sewers of this place. That wouldn’t surprise him, given the giant scale of everything else here in Vervunhive.
He armed his lasgun and slid around the edge of the next stack.
Something scurried again.
He hastened forward, gun raised, looking for a target. Feth, maybe the local vermin would be good eating. They’d had precious little fresh meat in the last forty days.
There was a movement to his left and he dropped to one knee, taking aim. Beyond the supply stacks, there was a pale, green slice of light, a jagged hole in the back of the barn through which the glow of the Shield high above leaked in.
Caffran shuffled forward.
A noise to the right.
He spun around. Nothing. He saw how several more crates had been clawed into.
Something flickered past the slice of light, something moving through it quickly, blocking out the glow.
Caffran ran forward, pulling himself sideways through the gap in the rotten fibre-planks of the hangar’s rear wall and out into the tangled waste of debris and rubble behind the storage barn.
He crawled out, got down, raised his gun…
And saw the boy. A small boy, eight or nine years old it seemed to Caffran, scampering up a mound of nibble with a wrap of biscuits in his hand.
The boy reached the summit and another figure loomed out of the dark. A girl, older, in her late teens, clad in vulgar rags and decorated with piercings. She took the wrap from the boy and hugged him tightly.
Caffran got up, lowering his gun. “Hey!” he called.
The child and the girl looked round at him sharply, like animals caught in a huntsman’s light.
Caffran saw for just a moment the strong, fierce, beautiful face of the girl before the children ducked out of sight and vanished into the wasteland.
He ran up the slope after them, but they were gone.
In a foxhole a hundred metres away from the back of the storage barns, Tona Criid hugged Dalin to her and willed him to be quiet.
“Good boy, good boy,” she murmured. She took out the biscuits and tore the wrap open so he could have one.
Dalin wolfed it down. He was hungry. They were all hungry out here.
Nutrient clouds pumped into the Iron Tank fed the dreaming High Master of Vervunhive. He rolled in his oily fluid womb, pulling at his link feeds, feet and hands twitching like a dreaming dog. He dreamed of the Trade War, before his birth. The images of his dream were informed by the pict-library he had studied in his youth. He dreamed of his illustrious predecessor, the great Heironymo, haughtily spurning the rivalry with Ferrozoica, arming for war. How wrong, how very foolish! Such a grossly physical stubbornness! And the hive held him in such esteem for his heroic leadership! Fools! Cattle! Unthinking chaff!
Commerce is always war. But the war of commerce may be fought in such subtle, exquisite ways. To raise arms, to mobilise bodies, to turn beautiful hive profits into war machines and guns, rations and ammunition…
What a pathetic mind, Heironymo! How blind of you to miss the real avenues of victory! House Clatch would have bowed to mercantile embargoes long before the brave boys of Vervun Primary had overturned the walls of Zoica! A concession here, a bargain there, a stifling of funds or supplies, a blockade…
Salvador Sondar floated upwards, his dreams now machine-language landscapes of autoledgers, contoured ziggurats of mounted interest values, rivers of exchange rates, terraces of production value outputs.
The mathematical vistas of mercantile triumph he adored more than any other place in the universe.