We retired to a nearby hilltop for the night. The locals kept to themselves, nervous and upset at what they had seen. I couldn’t blame them, though I suspected it would be worse in the morning. There was no practical way for us to bury so many bodies even if we had the desire. Havernos had no native avians, but there was a flying lizard that filled the evolutionary niche which ravens or buzzards did on other worlds. Judging by the yipping of the sea foxes, other scavengers had already found the unexpected bounty. 


The hilltop had been fortified at some point in the past, though you probably needed to have Lazarus’ enhancement to identify the gently sloping terrain as the remains of a ditch and berm. Given the lack of fresh water I thought the place was a likely have served as a seasonal cattle pen as a fortress, but despite my occasional use of the cover I’m not really a Magos Achaeologs. 


Lucius had returned after an hour or so, armor slick to his elbows in gore and his eyes wild. This had not gone over well with the locals, despite our somewhat unconvincing explanation that he was a gene engineered life ward with slaught glands. They constantly shot him nervous glances and muttered amongst themselves, for which I could hardly blame them. There was an aura of violence around him and it took me a good half an hour of gentle psychic effort to calm him, and even then it was a thin sheet of ice across a deep and powerful river. It was as though my months of work with him were coming unraveled after only a few hours of combat. That didn’t bode well for our ability to use him in the field on a protracted basis, though I gained some insight into how to improve on my previous work with him, enough at least to keep him from going berserk.


“Thoughts?” Hadrian asked as we sat around the campfire. Even at these tropical latitudes it was cold at night, the salty breeze enervating if you went above the shelter of the ancient earth walls. I was pleased to have my cover as a big shot aristocrat, which obviously excused me from having to take a turn at watch.


“Our agent is dead boss,” Selenica said bluntly, “The Emperor give her peace but that is an end of it.”


“The las guns are a troubling factor,” Lazarus rumbled, his concern for technology in the hands of savages obvious. I wondered how difficult it would be to track them back to their source. It seemed such ornate versions should be easy to follow, though the Emperor knew that there were many forge worlds, and even if, as seemed likely, Lazarus could narrow it down, there would be millions of functionaries who might be responsible for an illicit trade.


“What do you think Emm?” Hadrian asked, causing me to start having not been prepared to offer an opinion.


“The psychic work was powerful but crude, and done locally,” I explained.

“These were swamp tribesmen from the southern reaches of Lake Ska, Kator Talon’s and Son’s of the Fen, they are a long way further north than they should be. This is Blood Fox  territory, or was. Whatever this is, the epicenter is going to be in the southern swamps.”


There was stunned silence around the fire. I put my hands on my hips.

“What, you were all thinking I was just a pretty face? I researched, what were the rest of you doing on the voyage out?” I demanded sounding somewhat petulant even to my own ears.