A squirt of sirens warbled down the main street and Nayl pulled me into an alley-end. A black armoured land speeder with blazing grilled lamps crept past.
I saw the crest motif of the mainhive arbites on the side and an armoured officer sat in the top hatch manipulating a spotlight.
The beam played across us and passed along. Another flute of siren-noise sounded and we heard a vox-amplified voice demand, 'Idents and papers, you five. Now!'
Moaning and grumbling, a pack of twists moved out into the street, lit by the spot-beam, as the officers dismounted to shake them down and run their gene-prints through the system.
Something we couldn't afford to let happen. Not if we wanted to maintain our position as anonymous mutants. One flash of my credentials would speed us past any arbites red-tape. But it might also alert Lyko.
I'd insisted on full concealment for the mission. No one knew we were here, officially. Aemos had done some surreptitious checking, and there was no official trace of Lyko either. But that was to be expected, and there was no telling how many mainhive officials he might have back-handed to alert him of any Inquisitorial presence.
Nayl and I turned west at the next junction, and followed the maze of alleys and breezeways between the rents and mill-habs to reach the Twist and Sleep by a circuitous route that would keep us off the main thoroughfares and away from arbites patrols.
And, as it turned out, bring us right into trouble.
It didn't look like trouble at first. A short, flat-browed runt in rags stepped
into our path, grinning like a salesman. He held his hands open, as if he
was going to curtsy. Twists, my twists, my friends… spare a few 'perials for a poor badgene
down on his luck/ I heard Nayl begin to say, 'Not tonight, twist. S'get you to one side/ But I had already tensed. How had this scabscum known to ask for
Imperial coins if he hadn't seen us at the bar and followed us on purpose?
His accomplices came out of the gloom and sap-rain behind us.
I rammed the word Evade! hard into Nayl's mind with a 'pathic surge and dropped.
A massive, spiked weapon sailed through the space our heads had just been occupying and connected with nothing but air.
The rant who had waylaid us uttered quite the most obscene series of curses I have ever, ever heard and dived on me. He had a double-headed dagger with a nurled hand-guard.
I caught his upflung wrist as he made to gouge at me, broke his elbow and kicked him through a nearby fence while he was still screaming in pain.
'Boss! Move!' I heard Nayl sing out and I rolled hard aside in the mud as the spiked weapon slammed down into the mire.
It was a thick length of timber with dozens of nails and knife blades hammered through it.
The friendly end of it was held by two amazingly large paws. The paws belonged to a hulk, a two hundred kilo monster covered wim blistered fish-scales and bony scutes. It wore only a pair of ragged blue trousers held in place around its midriff, almost comically, by a pair of red braces.
It swung the spike-post at me again, and I had to dive and shoulder-roll to escape it.
Nayl was going toe-to-toe with two others: a snouted female in black leather whose mouth and nose were hideously combined into one drooling, snarling organ, and a tall, thin male with a face peculiarly distorted by bone and gristle.
The female had a reaping sickle in each hand, and the tall male was armed with a mace made out of a reinforced strut toothed with the rusting blades of two wood saws.
Nayl had drawn his serrated shortsword and duelling knife and was fending off thrusts and strikes from both of them.
A power sword, a boltgun, a lascarbine… they would all have finished this unnecessary encounter fast enough. But we had agreed to carry nothing that would mark us out from the twist population. Tech-levels were low in the shanty. A plasma gun might have ended this quickly, but stories would have got round.
The scaly giant was on me again, and I fell through the rotting flakboard of a fence in my efforts to evade his swing. I found myself lying amid the debris in the back yard of one of the loathsome hab-rents. A light went on in an upper window and abuse, stones and the contents of a chamber pot were hurled at me.
