Ravenor 2 - Returned by Warhammer

Author:Warhammer [Warhammer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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street, into the main flowing bustle. Patience was nudged several times by the press. If I stop

walking, she thought, the pressure of bodies will lift me off my feet and carry me along like

driftwood.

The street was covered by an ironwork rain-shield, but she could smell the raw acid wetness in

the air outside. Overhead, tannoy horns were crackling out inspirational mottos. There was an

unappetising odour of cooked onions and fatty meat coming from the barrow ovens of the curbside

vendors. The massive ouslite tower of Administry Hall Three rose up ahead like a ziggurat, dim and

hazy in the morning smog.

Patience eventually reached the mouth of the entrance hall, a yawning maw ten metres high, like

the door of an ancient tomb. The graven visage of the God-Emperor glared down at the workers

from the overmantle. No one looked up, but every worker raised his or her hands to make the sign of

the aquila as they passed beneath.

Inside the stone hallway, the massed footsteps echoed like rain. The flow of workers began to

subdivide into the warren of side corridors and passages, heading for their appointed stations and

departments. More instructions rang from the ceiling speakers. Patience saw PDF guards watching

over various junctions, weapons slung, but they were not checking papers. Wall-mounted optic

scanners at each doorway or hall-mouth read every worker permit that passed through, marking each

one with a flashbulb flicker and a tonal ping, logging them into the system.

Patience saw the brief flash as her own permit was read. She began following the indicator signs

for D:G/F1.

The tide began to thin out. The hallways had once been carpeted, but the pile had been eroded

back to frayed matting like the bed of a dry stream. The air smelled of dry dust and static, and the

photovoltaic lamps cast everything in a tobacco-coloured stain. She passed by the doorways of large

cogitation chambers, glimpsed the endless rows of clerks at stations, heard the seamless clattering

sound of ten thousand fingers striking keys.

In the hallway, quill servitors scuttled past, copy boys ran through carrying despatch boxes,

gaggles of scribes hurried to meetings with transliterators and cipherists, gatherers pushed their

heavily-laden basket trolleys, tech adepts shuffled along, hefting tool crates, heading for the latest

repair. The walls were lined with the twisting branching tubes of the pneumatic despatch system.

Every few seconds, there was a burp of air as another message cylinder rushed past inside one of the

tubes.

Patience arrived at the entrance to department G/F1. The optic scanner flash-pinged her again as

she entered, and a hololithic sign lit up with the words WAIT HERE.

She waited. Beyond the doorway, she could see the huge chamber, high-ceilinged, gloomy, lit

by the enormous hololithic display screen at the far end, swirling with green data-forms, and by the

rows of individual desk lights on the scribe stations. There were at least a dozen rows, an aisle

between each, and Patience counted something in the order of a hundred stations in each.

There was a cacophony of rattling keys. Copy boys and gatherers moved up and down the aisles,

delivering and collecting files. Servo-skulls drifted down the aisles like bees hunting pollen.

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