Ravenor Omnibus by Dan Abnett

Author:Dan Abnett
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-22T09:02:23.526586+00:00

PART TWO

Interior Cases

ONE

A TIDE OF trudging people, millions strong, flowed into the inner formals of Petropolis. From the air, they created a steady-rushing river delta in the surface level streets, a web of tributaries and streams feeding main estuaries. The tide sobbed out from rail terminals and transit stops, or welled up from lower sink levels like dark water from secret underground springs. In the open streets, the tide moved under a skin of nodding gamps and parasols. In the covered walkways; it ran like ink.

Few people spoke. There was no clamour of voices. Just the tramp of feet, the hollow booming of tannoy announcements, the cries of gampers and food-vendors touting for business.

Pale-faced, this was a multitude starved of sunlight and drained of expression. Dark eyes, tinted goggles, suits and robes of emerald, black or grey, the regulation colours of the clerical workforce. Ocular

augmetics here and there, skin-plugs and neuro-link spinal ports, mechanical braces perched like brass spiders on hands deformed and crooked by carpal tunnel syndrome. Ear-jacks for transcribers and stenographers, vox-grafts in the mouths or throats of dictators and transcriptors.

Wheezing quadrupedal walking frames, their stilt-legs folded, for the archivists and filing officers who worked amid the towering shelves of the index vaults. Almost four hundred thousand allergies to paper, dust, ink, or all three. Nearly two thousand undiagnosed malignan-cies to face, brain or throat from excessive exposure to screen radiation.

All of them moving in the same direction, into the vast towers of the Administry.

And I was watching just three of them.

THE CARRIAGES JOLTED to a halt and the automated doors rattled open, disgorging another cohort of Administry workers to swell the tramping tide. As soon as it was empty, the rail transit would close its doors and clatter off into the airless ducts of the sink levels to pick up workers of the Administry night shift, who were currently leaking out of the tower's basement exits in equal numbers to the day workers flowing in on the surface. The various departments of the Administry never slept. The cogitators ran all day and all night, chattering and processing.

There was Patience, in the midst of the crowd, moving with the flow. I saw her glance at her own reflection in the windows of the carriage, and felt her distaste. Her hair pinned up, no make-up except for some shadowing around the eyes to give her a hollow, sleep-deprived look, a unisex suit of cheap, black linen and an emerald jacket. Just another scribe, another clerk, another Administry drone.

The swollen crowd pushed out along a dank rock-crete concourse, past black iron railings and down a wide flight of stone steps out of the transit station. The lips of the stone steps had been smoothed and worn down by decades of footsteps, so they looked soft and indented like unplumped pillows. Through the station arch, under the copper eagle suspended from the glass roof, into the street, into the main flowing bustle. Patience was nudged several times by the press. If

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