You'll kill me, you idiot!'
'Hold it still!'
With a metallic rasping, it was chewing down the blade and the handle towards my hand.
Tutrone came in from behind me and together we wrestled the powerful, coiling thing onto a plinth. She activated a bone-saw on her augmetic hand and sliced down through its neck with a shrill scream of spinning blades.
The body continued to thrash. She grabbed it and dropped it into an acid trough usually reserved for bio-waste. The hissing head and the knife it was still chewing away at quickly followed it.
The four of us gazed down at the thrashing remains as they disintegrated.
I looked round at Mortress Tutrone and Fischig.
'I know which one of you I'd rather have around in a fight/1 muttered.
Tutrone laughed. Fischig didn't.
'What was it?' Aemos asked me as we raced in Fischig's landspeeder through the streets to the Arbites' headquarters.
'You guessed more than I know/ I replied. A gift from his masters, certainly/
'What manner of masters make a thing like that?'
'Powerful ones, Aemos. The worst kind/
Our meeting at the Arbites' grim chambers was brief. At my request, Fischig had summoned Magus Palastemes, the head of the cryogenerator technomagi.
He took one look at the casket in the evidence room and said, 'I have no idea what it is/
Thank you. That will be all/ I told him. I turned to Fischig. 'Have this sent immediately to my vessel/
'It is state's evidence-' he began.
'Who do you work for, Fischig?'
The Emperor/
"Then pretend I'm him and you won't be far wrong. Do it/
* * *
Hadam Bonz was waiting for us in the interrogation room. He had been stripped naked, but Fischig assured me nothing of import had been found in his clothes.
Bonz was the gunman I had laid out in the cryogenerator chamber, the only one of Eyclone's men to have survived the night. His mouth was swollen from my blow. He had admitted nothing except his name.
Fischig, Aemos and I entered the room, a dull stone box. Bonz was shackled to a metal chair and looked terrified.
So should he, I thought.
Tell me about Murdin Eyclone/ I said.
Who?' The darkness had gone from his eyes now, Eyclone's spell broken. He was bewildered and confused.
Then tell me the last thing you remember.'
'I was on Thracian Primaris. That was my home. I was a stevedore in the docks. I remember going to a bar with a friend. That is all/
The friend?'
'A dock master called Wyn Eddon. We got drunk, I think/
'Did Eddon mention an Eyclone?'
'No. Look, where am I? These bastards won't say. What I am supposed to have done?'