Betancore changed the transponder codes of the gun-cutter as we left the Essene 's hold. We kept a number of alternative craft identifiers in the cod-ifier memory. For the past few months, and during the stop-over at Hubris, we had run as an official transport of the Inquisition, making no attempt to hide our nature.
Now we were a trade delegation from Sameter, specialising in gene-fixed cereal crops, hoping to interest Gudrun's noble estates in easy maintenance, pest-free crops now that the founding had drained their labour pool.
Betancore voxed Gudrun Control, identified us, and requested route and permission for landfall at Dorsay, the northern capital. They obliged us without hesitation. Another greedy trader in town for the festival.
We swept down through the vast elements of Battlefleet Scarus at high-anchor: rows of grotesque, swollen-bellied troop ships; massive destroyers
with jutting prow-rams and proud aquila emblems; the vast battleships of the line, cold, grey orthogonal giants of space, blistered with weapon emplacements; barbed frigates, long and lean and cruel as wood-wasps; schools of fighter craft, running the picket.
Post-orbital space was seething with transports, scudding tugs, resupply launches, merchant cutters, bulky service lifters and skeletal loading platforms. Away to starboard, the mixed echelons of the merchant ships, the bulk freighters, the sleek sprint traders, the super-massive guild ships, the hybrid rogues. The Essene was out there somewhere.
Winking buoy lights, describing the stacks and levels of the anchor stations, filled the night, another constellation blocking out the real starfield.
Betancore nursed us down through the traffic, down into the crystal bright ionosphere, down into the opalescent ranges of the high clouds. We were heading across the crossover from night to day as the planet turned, making for Dorsay, where dawn was coming up on another day of the Festival of Founding.
NINE
At Dorsay.
Market forces.
In pursuit of Tanokbrey.
Dorsay wasn't waking up. It had been awake all night. Vox-horns along the old streets, avenues and canals broadcast martial themes, and streamers and pennants flew from every available surface.
I had speed-read Aemos's summation of the planet: Gudrun, capital of the Helican sub-sector, Scarus Sector, Segmentum Obscurus. Boasting a human culture for three and a half thousand years, feudally governed by powerful noble houses, whose reach and power extended across three dozen other worlds in the Helican sub-sector. Thracian Primaris, that vast, bloated hub of industry and commerce, was the most populated and productive world in the region, but Gudrun was the cultural and administrative heart. And it was reckoned the combined wealth of the noble houses rivalled the commercial worth of the output of the Thracian hives.