By the time they reached the funicular railway depot, Guilder Worlin was crying with rage. The bodyguard thought it was for fear of his life, but Worlin was despairing for purely mercantile reasons. Guild Worlin had no holdings in weaponshops, medical supplies, or food sources. War was on them and they had no suitable holdings to exploit.
They entered the carriage station, but the place was deserted. A few abandoned possessions—purse-bags, pict-slates and the like—were scattered on the platform. The transit indicator plate overhead was blank.
“I want,” Worlin hissed through clenched teeth, “to return to the Main Spine now. I want to be in the family house, to be inside the Spine hull. Now!”
Troor looked down the monotrack and turned back. “I see lights, sir. A transit approaches.”
The carriage train pulled into the station and stopped on automatic for a moment. The twin cars were packed full of Low—and Mid-Spine citizens.
“Let me in!” Worlin banged on the nearest door-hatch. Terrified faces looked out at him silently.
Shells walloped into the Commercia behind him. Worlin pulled out his needle pistol and opened fire through the glass. The passengers, trapped like rats in a cage, screamed as they were slaughtered.
After a brief hesitation, Worlin’s bodyguard joined him, slaughtering twenty or more with their unshrouded guns. Others fled the carriage, screaming. Pulling out bodies, the guards hauled Worlin into the carriage, just as the automatic rest period finished and the transit resumed. It engaged on the cog-track and slowly began to crank up into the hull of the main Spine.
“House Sondar, deliver us from evil,” hissed Worlin, sitting down on a gilt bench seat and rearranging his robes. Menx and Troor stood nearby, uneasy and unnerved.
Worlin gazed out of the window of the rising transit, apparently not seeing the smoke blooms and fireballs rising across the city below—just as he didn’t seem to see the pools of blood that washed around his shoes.
Volleys of shells and long-range missiles pounded into the southern face of the Main Spine. Despite the thick adamantine and ceramite sheath, some even punctured the skin of the great structure. A glassmaker’s showrooms on the Mid-Spine Promenade took a direct hit and blew out, filling the air with whizzing splinters of lead-crystal and ceramite wall debris. Fifty house ordinary nobles and their retainers were shredded or burnt as they hurried in panic down the plush walkways.
Just a few steps beyond the glassmaker’s, shielded from the out-blast by a row of pillars, Merity Chass continued to stride on, her weeping maids huddled behind her.
“This is not happening,” Merity Chass told herself. “This is not happening.”
Multiple shell hits lit up the Curtain Wall around Hass West. An antiaircraft post, the one that had been slow rising from its pit, was blown away and its ignited munitions tore a bite out of the wall.
Captain Daur traversed his guns and looked for an enemy. The grasslands were blank. Long-range weapons were reaching them, utterly beyond their power to resist.
If they even had the authority.
“Captain Daur to Marshal Gnide! Give us permission to arm! Give the order! Marshal, I’m begging you!”
In the dull quiet of the audience chamber, Gnide’s corpse was lifted away from the carpet by the slack puppets. The desperate voice of Daur and hundreds of other field commanders bayed unheard from his vox-plug.
Three shells hit Hass West Fort in series. The first ignited the battery munitions. The second vaporised Corporal Bendace and sixteen other troopers. The third, a crippling Shockwave, splintered the tower top and caused a vast chunk of rampart to slump away in a torrent of stone, dust and fire. Captain Daur fell with it, caught in the avalanche of rockcrete and ceramite. Fie had still not received the order to arm from the House Command.
In the Iron Tank, Salvador Sondar, High Master of Vervunhive, drifted and dreamed. The satisfaction he had gained from asserting his mastery over that fool Gnide was ebbing. There was something akin to pain creeping into him across the mind-impulse links that hooked his cortex into the data-tides and production autoledgers of the hive. He rolled over in the warm suspension fluid and accessed the information currents of the Legislature and the guilds. The hive was… under attack.
