The Subsector Project

Caomer Subsector – Clydrome Proxima – 898.M41

  Sweep the floor. Her fingers caressed the haft of the old broom, imagining slamming it through the skull of the old hag who’d commanded her, imperiously, from the depths of an armchair in the 16-E sitting room. The old woman’s rank and position within the guild were immaterial, seemingly everyone was above Abrea’s station on Clydrome Proxima.
She could smell decay in the dust, decades of musty shoes dragging the filth of tens of worlds across the threshold to the 16-E archive room. She could feel the reeds brush across the flagstones, but knew that the task was a futile effort which would drain her life force down to nothing if she did it for more than five minutes.

Wash the dishes. She imagined smashing them into the wall adjacent to the sink. The cheerful cook nattered about this and that, the guilders’ families gathering for some relative of a relative’s anniversary. Everyone seemed related, as if the guild tower were an incestuous insect hive, rather than a seat of economic power.
The key, which Abrea filed away for later as she immersed her hands back into the steaming soap suds of the sink, was that it was both.

Turn out the barracks rooms. Walking the dozens of dark hallways deep in Sub-12-N gave her the sensation of being observed. She stuck close to the other not-servitors conducting the task, lest she be picked off by an unseen, unsensed foe.

The guild had forgotten about more rooms than she’d seen on the rogue trader’s ship, once the largest single structure she’d been able to explore. Perhaps more than she’d seen in her entire life.

Repair the 14-DT servo-lift. She stood, mystified next to the tittering cogsmith as it hummed and fussed over the machine spirit’s concerns, mechadendrites flashing to and fro. Likely not a two-person job, but she appreciated the hunched mechanoid’s soft, gentle, almost matronly tone as it ministered to the jumbled panel full of wires and gears.

Fold the- Abrea paused, holding the latest in a series of misshapen fabric pieces. She turned it this way and that, finding no evident function. Hesitantly, she sniffed it, but stopped short of tasting it in an effort to determine the reason for its existence. Fold the things. She settled, rather discontentedly.

The low, dim room smelled of laundry and lichen. It reminded her of the deep jungles of her homeworld, a veritable hunter’s cradle. Not that she was allowed to hunt yet.

Abrea continued to shirk her duties whenever possible. Each individually could have taken her whole day, consumed her time with mindless drudgery. She elected to slip away whenever possible, providing pretense of nebulous ‘other responsibilities’ to avoid the ire of her erstwhile masters. It wasn’t difficult, too many spears, too few groxhides, as her father used to say- and that was even with a swarming army of servants dedicated to getting the spire ready.

Ready?

It didn’t occur to her until she was halfway up the 13-9-F thoroughfare, heading upwards, that the full extent of the guild’s preparations became evident. Every task she’s been performing thus far had been moving towards a specific endpoint, a goal of making ready for a massive influx of guilders.

Abrea hurried to a terminal in an out of the way storeroom. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of similar cogitators gathered dust across the observatory spire. Their purpose and intent had been long forgotten, humming away to the audience of almost nobody, but she’d made it a point to identify them when she’d first begun mapping the endless corridors and hallways in her first few weeks. All potential avenues of interfacing with the internal vox network.

A conclave, a summons, a centralization of power. Guild members from every city on Clydrome Proxima were gathering to discuss ‘a new revolution in the business’, according to the bulletin available at her fingertips. It had been shielded from her view, but not so carefully hidden that she couldn’t have found it with the scrapcode the Inquisitor’s tech-adept had provided.

They’re already arriving. She fought down a low growl of rage at her own inadequacy, her own inability to complete the simple task the Inquisitor had assigned her. Infiltration is nothing for the hunter, yet she had been blindsided by such a monumental event, the fruits of which were filling the barracks which she herself had arranged hours before.

She felt the color rising in her neck, shame and embarrassment beyond her ability to control, failure. In an instant, she crumpled the cogitator before her with her mind, a storm in microcosm. The machine hissed and sparked as she stalked from the dust-bound room, blindly pushing through doors and hallways, out into a throng of other servants completing the thousands of tiny tasks which servitors should have been used to resolve. Each step became a negotiation with the sloping thoroughfare that spiraled up the spine of the spire, and the hustling movement of her fellow guild workers.

I need to get a message to- Her thought had scarcely begun to form before a matronly figure, bound in rich silk and gelatinous fat in equal measure, heaved herself into the passage as though summoned by her anger. The woman’s appearance ground the flow of humanity to a halt.

Abrea shrank away from the woman, cursing internally. It was the Vice-Guilder’s Househead, a woman of unbridled rage and disruption for the gossipers and slackers of the help. She’d never bothered to learn the woman’s name, as to afford her any modicum of respect would be an affront to her honor. The woman drew herself up to her full height, observing the crowd around her, seeming to pause on anyone whose arms were not actively filled with- Abrea paused again, trying to discern the fabrics and yarns around her –things.

“You, you, you, you, and you-” The Househead gestured to a series of servants, including Abrea. “Come with me.” Another of the indentured, a thin man with a pressed tunic and an evident sense of superiority began to protest, to insist his import to another piece of the household’s work.

“Rising stars, mistress, but I simply cannot…” The Househead fixed him with a glare until his voice trailed off into nothingness.

Abrea felt a sudden pressure on her mind, powerful and predatory. While she’d suspected psyker presence on the Vice-Guilder’s staff, she had yet to encounter anyone who used their gifts so apparently. She silently thanked the confluence of humanity present around her, and the thickness of the spire’s walls preventing her momentary outburst of rage at the cogitator from being noticed.

“Obedience is the essence of value to the Vice-Guilder.” The Househead hissed at the man, who quailed before her rage. “And the Vice-Guilder’s designs are unto the Emperor’s to the likes of you.” He seemed to shrink in stature, meekly falling in line behind the Househead as she turned on her heel, not bothering to check if the rest of us were following.

Abrea briefly considered slinking back into the doorway, or melding in with the throng of peasants who flowed around her, but elected against it. The Househead was notorious for her poor humor, and had spent a not insignificant amount of time brutalizing nonconforming servants. And she has felt the shape of my mind. Abrea considered this to be the most impactful of practicalities- a powerful psyker becoming interested in her would certainly spell disaster for her infiltration.

Abrea instead drooped her shoulders, the picture of an indentured worker called away from her slovenliness. Which was true, in a way.

///

  The Househead did not bother to inform Abrea and her erstwhile companions of the precise task for which they had been recruited. The thin man seemed particularly morose at being called away from his other duties. Abrea could practically smell his mealy discontent, a sickening display of devotion to the masters tormenting him. It made her crave the hunt, the sensation of confounding lesser foes like him.

The group spiraled slowly upwards, minute blending into each other until almost an hour had elapsed. Servants parted like a sea before the Househead, seeking to avoid her ire. The crowd thinned steadily, along with the width of the corridor, until they were forced to walk single-file in their hextet. The floor was worn in places, evidently a legacy of servants in the centuries before. Several of the other servants were huffing by the time they came to a door at the apex of the spire.

Abrea’s mouth was a thin line, there was only one thing this door could represent, the servant’s entrance to the observatory at the peak of every Clydrome Proximan merchant’s home. Within, she’d been told by the Inquisitor, was the very person she’d been tasked to investigate, the ruler of the household, the richest man on Clydrome Proxima, Vice-Guilder Bannyun.

“You have been carefully hand-selected for a very important task in service of the Vice-Guilder.” The Househead’s tone was hushed as she ushered the group into a small antichamber. Across the room, the exits to a trio of servo-lifts were readily apparent. We could’ve just ridden up in half the time. Abrea groused annoyed despite herself.

“But, didn’t you choose us at random?” The thin man again voiced his concerns. Perhaps a mid-level bureaucratic servant, the man seemed to lack any sense of self-preservation. Their other companions, two shabby-looking washerwomen, and a grey-haired tech-adept of some sort, shuffled nervously as the Househead fixed their companion with a glare.

“Hand-selected.” She emphasized. “Nothing is random in the eyes of the Vice-Guilder.” Suddenly, her face cracked. It was clearly intended to be a smile, perhaps a welcoming visage of encouragement, but the effect for someone with such significant frown lines was disquieting. “And he welcomes you to his personal sanctuary.” She gestured towards a large, gilded set of double doors bedecked with a careful rendition of the night’s sky, in rivers of ruby and gold.

Abrea fought the urge to cringe away from the woman, or to laugh, and averted her eyes. The Househead was clearly unused to welcoming anyone anywhere. As the servants approached the doors, they slid slowly open, hissing gently on well-maintained tracks, and revealing the red velvet carpet of the inner sanctuary, and bounty of astronomical equipment within.

The sky was all around them, a dome of crystek revealed the sweeping heavens which had so entranced the wealthy of the world. Abrea had to admit, the effect was stunning. Light pollution had been severely limited by the planetary governor, a puppet for the Guild’s wealth, and craft at high anchor were limited to the polar regions to avoid interfering with the stargazers’ view. Dozens of macroscopes (strange, outdated pieces of light-focusing equipment intended to allow the user to view the skies in greater detail) lined the room, peering out at points of interest, amidst clusters of red velvet couches and chairs intended to allow ‘gazers to remain indefinitely staring into the light of the nebulae surrounding Clydrome Proxima.

Abrea had hated the lengths that the Proximan elite had gone to to allow their views to remain unobstructed. The strange construction of the city, the dimness of the lights at ground level, all of it rankled her. Yet seen at this scale, at this quality, beyond the reach of the fitful lights of the streets, the effect was stunning.

The nebula seemed to swirl around her, to beckon to her. Stars flickered and winked at her in a way they never had from the deck of the merchantman upon which the Inquisitor had arrived. They seemed playful, almost excited to see her- and they were seeing her. She shivered, feeling a hand clawing at her cognition, peeling at the layers of her mind, fogging her brain even as she attempted to reassert her psy-defenses.

The Inquisitor had been correct, something unsettling was at work here.

“Ah, at last, thank you for coming, my friends.” The doors hissed closed behind them, sealing away the Househead as a soft voice recalled their sightlines to the room around them. The washerwomen shivered and let out low groans, evidently also feeling the pressure on their minds with less understanding, their eyes broken away from the rapturous sights around them. A man stood amidst the couches in the center of the room, adjacent to the largest, most ornate macroscope available.

The Vice-Guilder did not look how Abrea had expected. Every report had indicated a fat, austere man, intent on his study of the stars as much as he was devoted to his business interests. The man before her, in contrast, was muscular and svelte, with a mop of dark hair over striking green eyes. He was more than common, he was attractive and younger than she’d anticipated.

“Please, sit, I’m sure the stairs have exhausted you- I begged Patryca to take you via the lifts, but she insisted upon the walk.” The man grinned ruefully, flashing bright white teeth at them, seemingly setting the thin man enough at ease that he actually smiled back. “You know how she is, never content to do things the easy way.” Abrea realized he had been talking about the Househead. She hesitantly sat a few seats away from the bureaucrat, as her fellow indentured followed suit. The man demanded attention, sharply-dressed and clearly used to having his requests fulfilled. The five of them waited, expectantly, veritably hanging on his words.

“I’ve asked you here to assist me with a very important job.” The Vice-Guilder gazed at them each in turn, his eyes bright and intense as he spoke. “You see, I think of myself as somewhat of an artist, yet I find myself at an impasse on my latest work.” His tone was rueful, but Abrea felt as though his vision was starting bone-deep into her even as he continued, a niggling voice of concern rising in the back of her head, the hunter’s instinct calling to her despite no evident source. “From this room, I can control the whole guild. Fleets of ships move at my every whim, chasing wealth, the fortune which allows us all to live and work in comfort. Yet despite my riches, I am losing the one thing that money cannot buy.” His smile became bitter. “Perspective.”

For a moment, the room lapsed into silence. Despite Bannyun’s friendly attitude Abrea could tell that her companions, save for the thin man, still seemed ill-at-ease.

“How might we assist you, lord?” The thin man again. Abrea ceased to consider him a member of their group. He clearly felt himself closer to the Vice-Guilder than to any of them, despite being plucked from the same crowd. Bannyun clapped his hands, beaming at the man.

The sound was oddly muted, and Abrea flinched instinctively. The hunter’s instinct was practically screaming at her, insistent on danger from some unknown vector, closing in on her. She fought it down, reluctant to risk a call to her brother or the Inquisitor, given that she assumed the loyal Househead was waiting directly outside. She needed to wait, to observe, to report via their normal channels, rather than jumping to an unsubstantiated concern.

“Very simply!” Bannyun motioned towards the macroscope at his side, its bulk easily twenty meters in length, bracketed through the transparent layer above them to give it direct access to the skies. “Just look, and draw what you see.” He fished a stylus and a rich roll of vellum from a nearby desktop, barely turning his torso to do so, and proffering them towards one of the washerwomen. “You, please, I would appreciate it if you did me the honor of going first.” His voice was honeyed and warm, encouraging the woman forward. Abrea almost grinned, seeing the thin man’s shoulders slump at not being honored with being the first to view the heavens for his master.

Hesitantly, the washerwoman rose, tucking mousey grey hair behind her ears, she took the vellum and stylus from the Vice-Guilder.

It was as she began to seat herself at the oculus of the macroscope, and Bannyun turned slightly to follow her, that Abrea suddenly realized what had been triggering her hunter sense. He’s not moving. She tried to rise to her feet, but found herself rooted in place, her austere clothing sticking to the velvet of the chair.

Bannyun smiled, and the screaming began.