“Do you ever wonder about all of this, Angus?” Derrida punctuated his question with a drink. He pulled a sour face and put the battle back on the bar. He crooked a finger towards Mo, the slack-faced man who had tended bar at the Haus of Delite for as long as Derrida could remember. “It’s skunked,” the soldier said, jabbing a finger at the bottle.

  “Right, sorry ‘bout that,” said Mo. He reached into a cooler and tugged out a fresh bottle of suds. The bottle gave a pleasant pop! as Mo released the vacuum seal. Derrida accepted it gratefully.

  “Wonder about what, Tom?” Angus Holler asked. The squat man withdrew a compact leather bundle from his officer’s jacket. He unrolled the bundle on the bar, then set about using the contents to roll a burner. His thick, brutish hands trembled slightly as they performed the task, still feeling the effects of the morning, it seemed.

  “This,” said Derrida, tracing a circle in the air with the top of his beer. Glancing up from his task, Angus followed the movement with his gaze. He grinned hollowly. “I try to avoid thinking about this shithole as much as I can, Tom.”

  It was a sensible opinion. The Haus of Delite, a seedy establishment even by hive-city standards, had allegedly been a brother once. Enforcers had shut the operation down and Mo had bought the place and turned it into a bar. It was anyone’s guess which business had seen more fluids spilled. As things were, the place reeked of stale alcohol and even staler burner fumes.

  Angus jammed his roll-up between his sallow lips. He fished a packet of matches out from his pants and struck one. It crackled, oozing a strong phosphorus stench. “Mo—be a good man and get me some rocket fuel, yeah?” Mo nodded and shuffled off to find a bottle of the pungent local spirit. Angus blew smoke from his nostrils and poked his commander in the arm. “You want to know your problem?”

  “Not really.”

  “You’re always thinking about things. Here we are, gentlemen in the Ducal Guard, top of the kregging world, ass-hairs freshly singed—and you want to talk philosophy. Fine, then, let’s talk philosophy. Life is good, that’s my philosophy.”

  “Is it?” Derrida straightened on the barstool, tugging at the hem of his jacket. “How long have we been hunting him?” Ducal orders forbid them from mentioning the Space Marine in public. “Three months, at least? Every time we tighten the net, he slips through.”

  “Good for him. Hope he enjoys life in the undercity.” Angus coughed, choking briefly on smoke. “Anyway, it’s a matter of time. We got a whole pack of the kreggers today, didn’t we? We’ll get him eventually. I’m looking forward to the day. Curious to see what his grace will do to him.”

  Derrida frowned, staring down at his beer. The label, a woman smiling brashly in the buff, had started to peel away. He wedged a fingernail underneath the curling corner and pulled it back. An older label for a cheaper brand stared up at him. He sighed. “You know, there’s an old story, an offworld one, about a frog—”

  Angus squinted. “What the kreg is a frog?”

  Derrida blinked. “What? I don’t know. I think it’s a type of shimmer eel, maybe.”

  “Never heard of it. Taste any good?”

  “That’s not important. The story goes that if you put a frog in boiling water, it’ll fly right out. But if you put it in a tepid pot and slowly raise the heat, it won’t fight it. The change happens so gradually that it never notices something is wrong until it’s too late.”

  Angus breathed out another cloud of smoke and ashed his burner on the faded surface on the bar. “So it must taste pretty good. Never liked boiled food, though. Can you fry it?”

  Derrida rolled his eyes. “That’s not the point.”

  “Four gods, man, but you are dull. I get the idea. You think that the Space Marine—don’t give me that, everyone knows—you think that the Space Marine is boiling us slowly or something. Well, let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a man who tried to boil fifty-seven billion froks in water. Only, the froks kept pissing everywhere and eventually the man swallowed so much that he drowned in it. The end.”

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  “I think it’s pronounced frog. With a jee.”

  Angus shook his head. “No, see, in my story you pronounce it that way because you’ve got a mouthful of piss.” He turned to look at a woman who had just entered the bar. Heavy bags hung beneath her jaundiced eyes. She looked around and adjusted her top to reveal a bit more of her cleavage. “You know, you can get all the tang you need at the palace these days, from those things Marius keeps around. But there’s something about the real thing.”

  Derrida wrinkled his face in disgust. “How can you think like that?”

  Angus turned back to his captain, his face red with anger. “That’s just the thing, isn’t it? It’s not a thought, Tom. It’s a feeling. That’s what the Duke wants from us, to feel something. But for all your piety and high company, you don’t feel. You’re not so different from that sodding Space Marine.”

  Derrida bristled. “I feel things.”

  “Yeah? Good for you.”

  “I do, I—” Derrida’s vox badge chimed. Frowning, he clicked it on. “This is the Captain, go ahead.”

  A crisp, professional voice spoke over the vox. “There’s a problem at the Electric Heart, Captain. Better get down here.”

  Derrida’s heart sank. The Electric Heart was the local name for Substation Alpha-GX9, the largest generator station in the Gamma Quadrant. If something had gone wrong there, it would have ripple effects. “On my way. Come on, Angus.” The man downed the rocket fuel Mo brought him and rolled up his burner bundle. Then they slipped off the stools and walked out.

  Moments after they left, Mo made his way to the backroom. The space was a tangle of bottles, crates, and piles of old tax papers. An old cogitator rested in the back corner. Stepping up this this, Mo pounded out a terse message on the keypad: BIG EEL AND SMOKEY GONE. MOVING TO ELECTRIC HEART. That done, the bartender slunk back out to the serving room. He’d done his part. It was up to the Children to get out of there now.

  Thirty-two minutes later, Derrida’s Arvus touched down outside the substation. A thick haze hovered in the air here just as it had inside the Haus of Delite. As Derrida and his personal team disembarked, a smartly dressed young soldier strode forward and saluted him. “At ease, Sergeant. What’s going on here?”

  “Yes, sir. Overseers reported system malfunctions earlier, sir, and suspected some kind of sabotage. No sign of any Children, though, sir.” He shuffled nervously. “I’m sorry to have dragged you out here, Captain.”

  Angus raised a pair of magnoculars to his eyes. He studied the surrounding builders, checking the windows and balconies. “Nothing, sir.” He said. His relaxed attitude replaced by rigid military discipline. A rugged soldier, yes, but still a soldier.

  Inspecting the facility took more time than Derrida would have liked. He was tired. The Children had raided a fyceline quarry that morning and his head still ached from the fumes. The day before, the rebels had stolen a civilian lighter from a local shipping company, and their efforts to track it down had turned into a wild shimmer eel chase. Such events were growing increasingly common. The guard was running itself ragged trying to respond to them all.

  Focus, Derrida chided himself. The young soldier who walked beside him was saying something. “—systems went offline roughly an hour ago and remained offline for exactly three standard minutes. Then, just as quickly as they went down, they started back up.”

  “A system malfunction, then?” asked the commander. The idea annoyed him. Had he really been called down here after duty hours to review a simple technical problem?

  The young man shrugged. “Very possibly, sir, but it doesn’t match anything the technicians have encountered before.”

  “Tor said that, did he?” Derrida knew the factory’s chief overseer well. In fact, he was surprised that the man had not come down to greet him personally.

  “Tor, sir?” The man twitched. It was a subtle movement, hardly unusual. “Oh, yes. He did.”

  Years of soldiering taught a man to trust his gut. And right now Derrida’s gut told him that something was very, very wrong. He looked around the facility. Planetary guardsmen were stationed all around the place. They were the initial response team, presumably, as well as the station’s usual security team. Technicians moved back and forth between the system’s whirring machinery. They all seemed engrossed in their work. That in itself was not unusual, technicians were not typically gregarious or extroverted. What Derrida found surprising was that none of them so much as glanced at the newcomers. They studiously avoided doing so, in fact.

  The skin on the back of his neck tingled. “What did you say your name was, soldier?”

  “Absalom, sir,” the young man responded calmly. So calmly, in fact, that Derrida never noticed him drawing the laspistol.