At first I assumed some kind of industrial lubricant had splashed on me and I felt a flash of irritation that the moment had been sullied. Then Hadrian collapsed to the ground and my eyes flicked upwards to the smoking muzzle of an autogun. The shooter was dressed in matte black body armor and was suspended from a catwalk like an ugly spider by tactical cord. Cold terror knifed through my body, making my skin tingle and my guts clench.


“No!” I shouted, instinctively jamming all my fear for Hadrian into the word. My psychic grasp slid of the assassin's mind as though I was gripping at oiled glass. Some kind of mental shielding had been grafted onto his mind. I could feel the edges of it, like a steel plate which has been bolted down over a hull breach. The shooter lifted his rifle intent on finishing the job.

“NO!” I screamed and abandoned the mental manipulation. Oil droplets and soot smears flew into the air, gathering before my outstretched fingers like a prismatic tornado which all but obscured vision. Gears and mechanisms screamed as long ribbons of lubricant were stripped away by my desperate psychic need. Surfaces that had been tread with grease for generations were stripped to a shining metallic cleanliness that would have impressed a medicae. All of the dirt and grime of the manufactorum gathered infront of me in a vast accretion disc that whirled around my palm The gun crashed again but this time the bullet pinged off the walkway two feet to Hadrian’s side, the gunman was shielded but he couldn’t fire blind through the shimmering mirror of oil and filth. 


I could hear shouts and the crackle of comms, but they were drowned out by the pounding in my ears and the scream of mechanisms seizing. Sparks fountained out a gearbox the size of a groundcar to my left filling the air with the stink of burned metal and shorting electronics. Somewhere a steam whistle was screaming as a boiler vented over pressure into an emergency conduit with a concussive crash of high pressure steam. I couldn't see him in a conventional sense, but I could sense the glossy mind presence of the assassin attempting to flee, scrambling up his cable. My mind pulsed with white hot rage and fear and I hurled my improvised shield at him. The spinning disc struck him like a waterspout reaching up from the surface of a primordial ocean. The torrent of oil and grease ripped him from his attempt to climb onto the overhead gangway buffeting him this way and that like bait being torn up in a rough sea. I could feel it forcing its way into his nostrils, down his throat, clogging the areola of his lungs.


Someone was shouting in my face. A tendril of oil whipped away from the main tempest to confront the new threat. I heard a woman scream as the torrent of psycically charged oil battered her away from Hadrian, driving her choking to her knees.

“Emma! Emma for thrones sake!” someone was shouting but it was all very far away. Something hit me hard in the pit of my stomach and I drew two fresh tendrils to obliterate the new threat, then felt an odd tap on the nose. The same insulting tap Clara always delivered when she got the upper hand in sparing practice. I felt a surge of uncertainty and my psykana fell away. Oil droplets fell like tropical rain, coating everything in a fifty yard radius in a film of lubricant. My eyes blinked into focus and I took things in. The assassin hung from his spider line, dripping oil like an over basted turkey. Clara had me by the shoulders and was saying something I couldn’t hear for the buzz in my ears. Selenica was on her hands and knees beside Hadrian, her face and upper body covered with oil, one hand swabbing filth from her eyes as her other worked on the bloody wound in Hadrian’s chest. Neither the inquisitor or I had been touched by the oil, protected instinctively by my psykana. All around us machinery smoked and stuttered, great mechanisms seized beyond repair as unlubricated bearings and driveshafts cooked and fused in their housings. Lazarus was picking his way along the gangway, the expression on his face an odd mixture of emotions. Doubtless the destruction of so many machine spirits was waring with his concern for Hadrian. 


“Is he going to… going to…” I stumbled, my brain unable to quite form the words.

“He is going to need surgery immediately,” Selenica said grimly, her gloved hand soaked to the wrist with gore. 


“Dirtside, I don’t think we can risk lifting him to the Caledonia,” she said as she shot an injector full of something into one of Hadrian’s veins. 


“We have an aircar enroute,” Clara interjected, dropping her hand from where it had been pressing her vox unit into her ear. Lazarus was in the process of cutting the assassin down.


“Have the body taken to the Hotel Imperial,” I ordered, the daze beginning to lift from my mind.


“I can have a verispex team…” Ortega began as he came up the walkway towards us. My eyes swiveled to fix the Arbite with a hard gaze.

“Take him,” I ordered. Selenica gasped in panic but one of the Caledonia’s grabbed the Arbite by the arm, perhaps too primitive to understand that he was laying hands upon one of the Emperor’s judges. Ortega shrugged the arm away and opened his mouth to snarl. Clara jammed a shock rod under his armpit and discharged it with an actinic snap. The big man arched backwards in a tectonic convulsion and then crashed to the ground.


“I hope you know what you are doing Emma,” Clara said as she knelt down and began to secure Ortega with some heavy duty binders from her pouch.