The boundary between hive and underhive was a fluid one. The deeper one moved into the bowels of Gravemire the greater the dilapidation became. Ortega believed that the underhive began where the Magistratum no longer maintained order, but an arbiter of his rank was far beyond such day to day concerns. As we moved lower we passed beyond places a patrolman could safely walk the streets. In these liminal spaces Sanctioners lurked in fortified bastions, making deals with local gangers to maintain the peace and striking out only to maintain the balance of power in their favor. These areas were marked with burned out ground cars and improvised barricades. Below this area, the true underhive began. 


I had elected to dress in the dark cloak of a charm woman. Part prostitute, part herbalist, part soothsayer, it was one of the few roles that allowed a woman to move in the underhive with relative safety, as well as explaining the presence of two physically imposing men. I had agreed to wear a prosthetic belly which simulated the late stages of pregnancy which gave us a place to stash equipment and a reason to turn away prospective johns. My right arm was the only flesh bare to the eye, and it had been covered with a temporary tattoo that gave the impression of scales.


As we stepped out of the elevator I tossed a few low denomination slates and a carb bar to the gangers who longued by the portal. The extracted similar tribute from others passing down from the higher levels on whatever business they had. My pose as a charm woman made this kind of transit believable as the profession was tolerated, at least unofficially, for several levels above the underhive proper. One of the gangers, a bald man whose scalp was entirely covered with overlapping gaudy tattoos, tried to reach out and touch my belly. Ortega swatted his arm away, to the laughter of his companions.


It took us nearly an hour to reach out first goal. The Wheel Market had once been a section of raised roadway. Now the burned out ground cars formed the basis of market stalls, their rusted metal caked with flaking paint in a variety of gaudy colors. Ribbons of grubby fabric linked stalls in makeshift awnings that fluttered in the intermittent breeze created by the air reclaimers. The ancient pilings that supported the place had also been painted with surprisingly artful designs, the the areas low enough to be easily reached were defaced by gang tags, and bullet holes marred the ferrocrete columns where paint cants couldn’t reach. A miasma of greasy smoke hung over the place from the cooking of unidentifiable meat over fires of what might have been hexamite but might also have been trash. Hawkers cried the merits of their wares, fried carb string, sauteed sump rat, and joylik whose diversion from poison would probably take a Magos Chemistrae to find. 


I frequently glanced at Hadrian. Like Selenica, I had grave reservations about him being on this mission so soon after his surgery. He had pointed out that Clara, while a formidable fighter, didn’t have the experience in subterfuge that he did, and that Lazarus was too obviously augmented to blend into such a tech poor environment as the underhive. Odds were very good he would have wound up sacrificed to the Machines within minutes of entering. Ortega had been good enough to spread the word that Hadrian had died during his surgery, hopefully giving our unseen opponents the notion that they were safe for the moment.


We wandered among the stalls for some hours, letting ourselves be seen and making such small purchases as were appropriate to a charm woman. I kept my psychic senses open, but it was impossible to pick up clear thoughts amidst the bustle of stinking, ragged, humanity. After an hour or so, we made our play. I approached they stall of a man selling what passed for electronics. The vendor was a skeletal man, worn looking and completely hairless. The malformation of his face and body, the legacy of stripped augmetics, declared louder than his filthy red robe that he had once been a Priest of Mars.


“What can I do for you sister?” he asked in a voice that rasped with years of lho smoke.


“I have tech to sell,” I told him, and then reached into my pocket to produce a small black box. His eyes widened briefly as he saw it, before narrowing with shrewd avarice. It a vox thief that Hadrian had been carrying when he had been shot. The unit was high grade, unmistakably ordo equipment to anyone who knew what they were looking at.


“Ten slate,” the vendor said dismissively. I scoffed and made to tuck the vox thief away.

“A hundred!” he whispered with sudden desperation. His eyes cut around, fearful that the other vendors, mostly selling machine parts and minor tech, might catch wind of what was going on.


“A thousand,” I replied, and held up a finger to forestall a counter offer, “if you haggle further it will be ten thousand.” His malformed mouth worked for a moment and then he reached into his robe, rummaging around for several seconds before clandestinely slipping a pouch of slate chips across to me. I opened it slightly with one finger, then nodded to Hadrian, who scooped it up and tucked it away in some hidden pocket. I slid the vox thief across to the vendor who all but ripped it out of my hands.


“A pleasure doing business with you.”




It took less time than I had imagined. We rented rooms on the top story of a cheap flop house which catered to transients. The proprietress, a sour faced woman with a lazy eye, warned me against practicing my business, making allusions to this and that gang which needed to be cut in to anything that made slate. I nodded my agreement and we retired to our rooms.


The gangers probably thought they were being stealthy as they crept down the hall towards the room we had rented. There were six of them, each carrying heavy powder and shot pistols and a variety of knives and clubs. The reached our door and one of them produced a small hand drill with a large circular cutting bit. It cut through the cheap flak-board like gelatin, emitting a stream of dust as it did so. The ganger behind him had produced a small drink can, packed with phosphorus and other combustibles, which he shoved through the hole, a sparking fuse sputtering as it did so. There was a crash and flash of light and then the gangers kicked the door from its hinges and rushed into the room after their improvised flash bang. The room was empty, just three filthy palettes with no sign of habitation beyond a few empty food pails and cups of recaf. It took them a surprisingly long time to accept this, a process that involved considerable shouting. No one came to investigate the shouting or the explosion. It was that kind of place.


“You are sure you can follow them?” Ortega asked when the gangers finally agreed we weren’t there and headed out. I nodded. I had plenty of time to identify their minds. We were watching from the empty room across the hall, using data slates and some simple but effective picters strategically pressed into the walls. The fiber optic transmission lines were passive so even a sophisticated sweep might have missed them, not that there was much chance of that in a place where the ambient level of tech rose above 'sharp stick' only by degrees. 


“Yes,” I told him, “now we just have to hope they lead us back to whoever hired them.” That was a pretty good bet, the vox thief, in addition to the audio of the assassination attempt on Hadrian, had been cunningly updated by Lazarus to contain snippets of other conversations that hinted at what we knew of the conspiracy. The Under Council was the logical market for the information the tech priest had no doubt gathered, and they would certainly want to know how a charm woman came to possess it.


“Let’s go,” Hadrian said, adjusting the hang of his weapon beneath his clothing.

“We don’t want them getting too far ahead.”