The Ëchüha Incident: Part 4

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Fhá Vngví - Hàkétzü DZ-C_060041386

Part 4

A Truly Sensational Experience

The VirtuCast ended abruptly, ejecting Fhá out of Hvórþ’s body. Neural shock propelled her back into her seat, muscles spasming. In a panic, she grabbed the headset and flung it off her head. The device clattered onto her desk, the sound like magazines falling onto hard surfaces. Fhá flinched and recoiled with a yelp, heart pounding even harder than it was before.

Nothing could have prepared her for what she’d just experienced. Not the games she and her boyfriend played almost nightly, and certainly none of the CineCasts they got from the Net. There was always a distance, a dulling of the feed, intentional choices that walked the ever-so-fine line between verisimilitude and full-force, raw neurostimulus. Only the most cooked VR Junkies would willingly jack into a raw memarq unprotected. The hapless basket cases would, provided some catastrophic malfunction didn’t fry what was left of their brain, walk away with someone else’s unfiltered memories etched directly onto their neurons, leaving imprints of another’s persona perpetually dancing between their synapses like some kind of metaphysical STD.

Katzali had made no editorial decisions. In actual fact, he hadn’t even bothered to dignify the classified subarchive with the slightest hint of warning. Then again, he was an Inquisitor. His expectations must have been loftier than anything the Imperium could ever have provided. Fhá imagined the man, sitting in his comfy, leather chair, twirling his waxed moustache whilst swirling single-malt whisky worth more than Fhá would make in a lifetime, that his report would be viewed only by other Inquisitors, or, barring that, wouldn’t be audited by the third lowest rank on the totem pole of Imperial Bureaucratic hierarchies. Hells, she was so low, if the totem pole was a real thing, she’d be at least a dozen metres in the dirt, six stations below anyone with a hope of seeing the light of day.

Given how meticulous Katzali had been, Fhá couldn’t help but figure it wasn’t a Katzali problem, but Ngèza’s idea of a funny practical joke. She imagined someone somewhere had developed some kind of VCaster that wouldn’t fry raw neuromesh data indelibly onto someone else’s brain.

Fhá sighed angrily. Clearly she should have known better. Pressing play on a .meme file in an Inquisitor’s Classified Archive!? Obvious risk should have been obvious! How could she have been so stupid! Everyone point and laugh at the big dumb dummy!

Not that foreknowledge would have helped any. Auditing the archive wasn’t an option. Getting rawdogged by unfiltered memarqs, like a great many other indignities, was in her contract. Somewhere.

Reaching into her desk drawer, Fhá grabbed her favourite wickerball, attempting to calm her nerves and racing heart. Hvórþ’s memories had, undeniably, imprinted themselves onto her, and they were taking her for the ride of her life. Unlike Captain Kickass, Fhá wasn’t a special forces operator. She had no training, no experience, no preparation for what she’d just, unwittingly, jacked herself into. As she squeezed the ball, the scene of that creature, that gods awful creature, appearing in the darkness, killing Nobuo and Kàng, Hvórþ’s sheer, all-consuming terror, and that buzzing, that infernal buzzing, it kept playing over and over. All the while a single question, as much Hvórþ’s as her own, cycled like a broken audio clip.

What was that…that…thing?

None of the documents she’d reviewed prior to beginning her review of the Inquisition’s Inquiry Report indicated its existence. None of the local wildlife in the Ecologist’s Report showed anything any more hostile than what would be present on an Engineered world. Sure there were predators, and they wouldn’t turn down human if it meant an easy meal, but they weren’t hostile like very nearly every native lifeform on The Rimworld’s UltraMax Penal World, Embers of Exile. Whatever that wispy, shrieking, wraithlike creature was, its demeanour was beyond hostile. It was like it was compelled by wrath so insatiable it could even have eclipsed Ngèza’s after a night of heavy drinking.

Fhá couldn’t describe why, but she felt it, even through the VirtuCast, even disconnected from it, and by so much time and so many parsecs. It was there. The creature’s hatred. It exuded it like an aura. Burning with intensity, the wraith harboured hate for all life that Fhá could neither explain nor ignore. It was unnatural—uncanny, even—as if made by humans. Not so much by their own handiwork or device—though great witches were known to have manifested creatures even they themselves could not control—but awakened…

No…

It had been birthed. Birthed from the condensed weight of humanity’s negligence, greed, and pollution. Its womb, the cradle of its inception, were pools of filth and industrial waste so caustic a single drop would melt the flesh off one’s bones. Swimming, growing in that concentrated cesspit of reckless exploitation, it became consumed with hate. Unfettered wrath, as hot as it burned for all life, humanity made of it a greater conflagration of impassioned antipathy than a department overseer could muster upon receipt of a finalised Imperial Province Tax Audit lacking the requisite three stamps of Interdepartmental Review as outlined in IMA Librarian Manual Chapter 231 Section 94(d)-17.

The wraith, and Fhá knew that as its name, though should could not explain why, it was the incarnate wrath of nature. Compelled by insatiable hunger to scour clean the face of worlds, it would not—no, could not—stop until the last of humanity had fallen at its feet, drained, exsanguinated, the last dram of life drawn even from the bacterium fermenting the last, half completed turd in their lower intestines.

What the fuck? Fhá thought, realising where her mind had gone.

She was Rewinding. Hvórþ’s internal monologue on the dropship playing back in her own mind, reworded, reconstructed, but the same tone, same euphuistic fustian. Grand overtures to dead worlds in language the local poet’s society would use to describe an oddly misshapen rubbish bin or the unpleasant surprise of drunkenly going down on one’s girlfriend on her period.

Pitch and Pennies, Fhá mused, closing her eyes.

Her boyfriend had lovingly immortalised that particularly embarrassing episode in verse. Free wine, good company, and erotic poetry, the only three things she needed to demand a double helping of hot salsa—cramps and tampons be damned. The thought of that night almost gave her headache a headache.

Fhá leaned over, attempting to rub her temples for some relief, only for images of Hvórþ and Co.’s blind panic and terror to flash behind her eyelids.

“Fuck,” she swore, under her breath.

Fhá gripped her favourite wickerball, clenching the hard, fibre ball until her knuckles went white and—

“Hey, Fhá!” someone exclaimed, startling her.

The ball exploded in her hand, shards of hardened fibres splintering into her skin. In a blind panic, she grabbed a stapler from her desk and hurled it at the voice, while the contents of her bladder violently vacated themselves.

“Ah! What the hell!” Hvang yelped, as the stapler flew past his head and smashed into the cubicle wall behind him, splintering into a hundred pieces.

Cheap Imperial manufacturing…

“Emperor’s Dingleberries, Hvang!” She snapped, leaping out of her chair. “Fuck!”

They both ducked out of the way as Fhá’s neighbour across the aisle returned fire with her own stapler.

“By the Crone, what do they have you on?” Hvang reacted, as bits of stapler exploded against a nearby support column.

“Fuck you!” Fhá snapped. “Son of a bitch! Ruined my best skirt!”

“Fhá! Language!” Ngèza barked from the front of the room.

Rage surged through Fhá as she, without thinking, shouted to the boss she loathed with more passion than Bvrák Fànfheí poured into his music, “Stuff it, Ngèza!”

Pushing past Hvang, Fhá rushed to the bathroom, fighting back tears. Practically at a sprint, she reached the corner at the end of the cluster just as her vision began to blur. She rounded the corner and felt her foot slip in the sole of her stiletto, still slick with sweat. A lance of pain shot into her ankle as her foot rolled over. Careening over, Fhá slammed into a stack of boxes, likely containing last lune’s unprocessed Collective Farm Yield Reports. The low-quality, overloaded cardboard file boxes, barely kept together with packing tape and all the prayers of the Imperial Church, immediately exploded, sending papers flying in every direction like confetti at the Emperor’s birthday parade, and Fhá to the floor. What boxes hadn’t exploded on impact buried her under a deluge of pointless bureaucratic inefficiencies.

As she lay dazed on the floor, Fhá felt dampness spreading over her blouse and blazer. The smell of stale coffee reached her nose as she realised one of the ancient greybeards, whose seniority had given him the choicest seat—at the end of the cluster, as far from Ngèza as possible—had been using the stack of boxes as an improvised waste receptacle for half-finished cups of coffee. Obviously suffering from late stage clerical dementia, the quantity of stale, cold, and malodorous liquid, had soaked her to the bone in what must have been an entire lune’s worth of laziness, apathy, and memory loss.

Today, it seemed, had very much turned into her day of judgement. It was as if she’d died in her sleep and this was the hell she was condemned to inhabit. Complete with every measure of divine wrath from all the emperors she had spent so long silently cursing as she processed endless reams of stupid, all being dispensed upon her in a series of magnanimous acts of omnibenevolent pettiness. Anything that had previously been spared her urinary catastrophe was no more undefiled. Her entire outfit was either soaked with piss or equally as saturated with low-quality, bureaucrat-grade scarabica—a fate so slightly less unpleasant as to be debatable at best.

Covered in liquid filth and the weight of equal parts triplicate forms, crippling shame, and the despair only working for the Imperium could bring, Fhá attempted to exhume herself from the pileup of now equally sodden paperwork and file boxes. All of this to the rapt attention, boundless amusement, and persistent verbal abuse of her peers, who never once missed an opportunity to unload their suppressed self-loathing onto whomever their supervisor wouldn’t issue them an HR-78(c) Harassment Report for.

“Watch your step, fuckhead!” one greybeard heckled, as Fhá wobbled back to her feet.

Ngèza, never one to miss an opportunity at verbally abusing her inferiors, parroted the invective, “Yeah! Watch it, fuckhead!”

Encouraged by their boss, the remaining greybeards escalated their streams of expletive laced, yet somehow entirely witless, abuse.

Crass bastards.

Eyes burning, Fhá sprinted away, passing the elevators just as the staplers started flying. She slammed her shoulder into the bathroom door, flinging it open. The door struck the wall with a loud bang, startling her and incurring a second wrathful issuance from her bladder. Fresh urine trickled down her legs as she rushed to the last stall and pushed open the door. She threw herself inside and slammed the door shut, before curling on the floor, tears flowing down her cheeks.

For a moment, she sat there, knees to her chest, mind as blank as her gaze into a distant nowhere—if nowhere was a banal, off-blue, plastic stall door covered in graffiti and a large penis she just knew was Ngèza’s handiwork.

Sanctuary, at last. In the one most holy and sacred place, there could be peace.

Then everything hit her again.

Like a freight train, the last hour body slammed her with the force of a First Marine jumping from the rafters. A freight train’s worth of emotions blindsided her, dragging her at a breakneck pace back to destination fucked. Shame, terror, humiliation, rage, grief, indignation, a white noise tornado. She couldn’t even keep track. She felt like bits and pieces of her mind were breaking off in piecemeal fragments, bouncing over ties and scattered ballast, dragged behind the Embarrassment Express on a runaway pace for Warzone Central Station.

The dropship, the landing, the ruins, the room, the creature, Nobuo, the chase, Kàng, Lìngbi, the rage, the terror, the grief, the horror, the frame slam expulsion, the office, the humiliation, over and over on replay at quadruple speed, accelerating with each run around the loop. It was too much. It was all too much.

Fhá gritted her teeth and clutched at the sides of her head, squeezing her eyes even more tightly shut. She screamed until she ran out of breath. She pounded against the wall, cracking a few of the tiles before losing her footing again, falling hard and half into the toilet.

Extracting herself, she kicked off her heels, whimpering and grunting as she thumped the balls of her hands against her temples, trying to derail the train in her brain. She squatted into a tighter ball, squeezing her eyes shut, clutching at her head with both hands. No matter how tightly she tried, she couldn’t stop seeing the VirtuCast replaying. When she opened them, the blank, stainless steel stall walls reflected the sequence again. She tried looking at the tiles, but their white, shiny surfaces only served as a clearer canvas.

“Go away!” she shrieked, smashing a fist into the toilet roll dispenser, smashing through the cheap plastic.

Pain lanced through her hand, already stinging from shards of the wicker ball she’d forgotten about. Blood welled up around big chunks of plastic embedded in her skin. Bright red streaks ran down her arms and into the sleeve of her blazer, still soaked with stale, weeks old coffee.

Damp and cool now, Fhá felt the moist, clingy fabric sticking to her like a cocoon, like she was being wrapped in the deathly embrace of that foul wraith of wrath. Its face flashed across her vision again, and she felt something snap.

Without even realising what she was doing, Fhá tore at her blouse, ripping the once fine, now irrevocably stained fabric to shreds before flinging whatever tattered remnants were left away from her. Gripping her tank top with both hands, she tore it off, splitting it from the middle of the V-neck. She flung it and her skirt away, tearing her panties apart at the hips. It didn’t matter how, she needed it all off, all away, all of it. She kicked and shoved her torn and soiled garments away with her feet before retreating into the back corner of the stall, cramming herself into the space between the toilet and the corner—the only place that felt some level of safe.

For a brief moment, like before, she felt relief. The sensation of being wrapped in that creature’s skin, moist and oozing with foul, viscous fluid was gone. She closed her eyes as a moment of serenity passed over her, only to see the men the creature had killed be killed again. The violence of their death throes flashed across her eyes again and a tsunami of nausea smashed into her.

Leaning over the toilet, Fhá gripped the seat with both hands as her stomach heaved with the violence of an Imperial Arbiter. A stream of bile and half-digested breakfast smoothie poured into the bowl, the taste of bile as strong in her mouth as it was in Hvórþ’s as he watched Lingbi fall to the wraith. That thought constricted her stomach even more, the feeling like her entire GI tract had joined the party and committed to tangling itself into ever more convoluted knots, forcing every last drop of stomach acid and unprocessed digestive slurry out of her. Streams of burning acid seared through her throat before scouring her mouth, pouring even out of her nose. When there was nothing left to offer unto the porcelain throne, her stomach continued dry heaving, finding new, abstract geometries to contort itself into, all while she coughed and wheezed and struggled to clear her sinuses. Each attempt to clear her nose felt like equal parts a heel kick to the solar plexus and inhaling a mouthful of hot, industrial dust blowing about the desert wastelands surrounding an Imperial Manufactory Hive.

When her stomach had finally settled again, she was too exhausted and out of breath to flush. Fhá oozed back into the corner. Burying her face into her knees, she began to sob uncontrollably. It was too much. It was all too much. As she sobbed and wailed, she felt herself dissociating more and more.

The world faded into the distance around her.

Time slipped.

Sensation of the real world…

...retreated into the distance.

Her discomfort wedged into the space between the toilet and the wall and the chill seeping into her bones dissipated into ever thickening mist.

Sounds of her whimpering and crying became echoes.

Echoes in a cathedral strange and yet altogether too familiar.

Past resurgent, the bathroom faded entirely, she was no longer there.

Stood before the altar and dressed in black, the robe ill-fitting—a last-minute compromise for a precocious girl. There in that hallowed place, an urn of synthetic porcelain rested on a scarlet pillow. She gathered its weight in small arms, what remained of her mother weighing somehow more than the ashes and the vessel that contained them. As if the memory of her lineage had settled both upon it and her shoulders in the rituals of passing. The last of her kin—a weight of responsibility she was entirely unprepared for, barely of an age to comprehend the gravity of it.

Looking up, to the vicar, who oversaw the Holy Sepulchre of the Imperium of her childhood, she saw his solemn expression turn. Behind her, the pews were empty. No family left to attend this memorial. Friends so-called too preoccupied with their own occupations, love, affection, or even the most minimal forms of sodality expressed only in sad bouquets of polymer passing as flowers, their attendant cards anodyne and without any substance as to identify whom they were for, except by name.

Alone.

She realised with sudden clarity she was entirely alone.

Looking into the vicar’s eyes, she could see something malevolent forming. No longer full of warmth or compassion, the last consolation faded and he grinned a smile of knives as he had so many a time before, but never so openly. He drew his robes about him, in that way he had before, a harbinger of unholy things to come. Fhá clutched the urn tighter to her chest. The bulge beneath his robes grew more pronounced as his grin reached eyes too large for his head.

A scream ripped through the cathedral.

She dropped the urn.

Synthporcelain shattered at her feet and from the ashes.

A misshapen hand with fingers too long burst forth, grabbing at her ankles.

A face like a skull with skin drawn taut over it burst forth. Fhá shrieked and kicked at it, freeing herself as it crawled fully out of the ashes.

“Fhá! Calm down! Relax! It’s just me!” the face exclaimed with Hvang’s voice.

In an instant, the nightmare was gone, and she saw Hvang fall backwards, collapsing against the stall door in a heap.

“By the gods, what’s gotten into you!” he swore, pushing himself back into a semi-upright position.

“Go away!” Fhá shrieked, trying to push the thin, lanky man away from her with her feet.

“No!” he defied, whacking her kicks away with one hand as he attempted to push himself to a seated position with the other.

“Ow! Fuck!” Hvang swore as she stubbed his finger on her heel while reaching for his glasses. “What’s going on!? Why are you naked!? What the fuck did Ngèza drag you into!?”

“GO AWAY!” Fhá screamed.

“NO!” Hvang roared, stunning her.

For a moment they both stared at each other. Fhá glared down the intruder, nothing short of murder blazing behind her eyes. Hvang, glasses in hand, eyes twitching as he struggled to focus, met her gaze as best he could. Being as myopic as a cave bat, he, nevertheless, was looking more into the toilet bowl still full of vomit, the automatic flusher having never been fixed from Ngèza’s last baked bean disastertastrophe three lunes ago. He slowly returned his glasses to his face, then immediately lurched forward, covering his mouth with a hand.

“Oh fuck...oh that’s...by the Emperor, Fhá, that’s disgusting,” Hvang groaned, reaching for the manual flush button.

Fhá turned her head slowly, maintaining a laser focus as Hvang’s finger slowly approached, and then pushed the button.

“What is going on, Fhá?” Hvang asked, as he retreated his hand. The toilet roared as it whisked Fhá’s offerings to the great god of the sewer—praise be—away. “You’re in a terrible way?”

“I-I-the-it,” Fhá stuttered, her eyes darting back and forth, looking for a way out.

“What? Talk to me? What’s going on?”

“The thing! That-it…” Fhá sputtered, burying her face in her hands, “it…I can’t! I can’t do it! I can’t! I can’t! I just can’t! Fuck fuck fuck!”

The tears came back and Fhá curled up even tighter, sobbing uncontrollably, a montage of fear and death and apocalyptic wastelands playing relentlessly in her mind.

Survival sandbox games were her boyfriend’s favourite, something they’d both found endless hours of fun in. VirtuSpace explorers, fighting off hordes of hostile mutants, zombies, and other monsters. Those worlds, those experiences, they’d joked about how if the zombie apocalypse ever came to town, they’d be more than prepped for it.

As if watered down VR Experiences could ever have done anything of the sort.

There wasn’t anything real to any of it. It was a game. They were all games. Just games! The stakes were nothing. Death could only wipe your save, force a hard restart, hours of progress and gameplay wasted. Pain was limited, at most a dulled discomfort, a lightweight alert system, enough to elicit a response but not to ruin the fun nor the fantasy. And that was all it ever was, ever could be, a fantasy. Fiction and lies whose extraneous components existed only in service to the player’s ambitions and the suspension of disbelief.

Experiencing a real, bona fide hellscape, as a real human being trapped in a real life or death situation, having to grapple with it, real people dying in front of her, she wasn’t prepared for that. She couldn’t have been. A videofeed, a CineCast, even a Spectacle she could have handled, but not this, never this.

She’d experienced everything Hvórþ had as he had. She hadn’t just watched Kàng, Nobuo, and Lìngbi die, but had lived it. Once she’d jacked in, Hvórþ’s experience became hers. She’d witnessed, first-hand, their deaths, felt every emotion, every sensation as Hvórþ had, as if, for that half-hour, she had become him. The VirtuCast spared nothing. No intimate detail was lost, all of it now imprinted onto her memory, into her mind. Hvórþ’s memories were hers now, as if she had been there in the flesh, and it was unbearable.

Fhá felt herself tearing up again. She buried her head back into her knees. Hvórþ’s imprint ravaged her with pain, grief, and anguish, the lines between the two of them irreparably broken.

“It’s okay,” Hvang said, draping something over her. “Whatever it is, you’re going to be fine. You’re safe. I’m here. I’ve got your back.”

Fhá heard him as he wedged himself into the narrow gap on the other side of the toilet, before feeling his hand drape over her shoulders, pulling the fabric of his suit jacket up over her. In that moment, it didn’t matter that Hvang was in the ladies’ room, or that he’d walked in on her buck naked in the middle of a crisis. She was just grateful he was there. That he cared. Her boyfriend would be furious, though…

* * *

Fhá had just finished tying her hair back into a loose pony tail when one of the Knotworx from the 3rd basement level showed up at her desk. Why the Ministry kept the treehuggers in the basement was beyond her, though she had overheard an Overseer muttering under his breath in the elevators about “keeping the freak show where it belongs.” This, of course, came only after he’d extracted his Quband display from his retinas long enough to realise he’d stepped into a “confined space with a fucking tree fucker”.

They were an odd bunch, the Herbalists, but the general disdain the Imperium had for them largely eluded her. Mayhaps it had something to do with being simultaneously essential to and largely outside of the governance of the Imperium. Though she couldn’t be sure, Occam’s razor gave her confidence in her conclusion’s odds. As the saying went, the two official spellings were Imperium Galacticum Káè-Tan and Xenophobia.

The Knotwox’s sudden appearance, had Fhá anything left in her bladder, would have caused her to soil herself for a third time. Not that her bladder didn’t make a collegiate try. It very much did. Several glorious spasms and her pelvic floor muscles had completed their animatedly angry phone call with Fhá BioSystems: Customer Concerns Hotline. To the great elation of the operators at the Complaint Desk-Trousers Division, rain was not in the forecast that day.

Sighing with relief, Fhá turned around to address the rota’s latest unwelcome intrusion.

She, the Knotworx, was a short petite woman. Athletic in build and graced with a magnificent mane of dark dreadlocks decorated with bits of carved wood and twisted wire that she let hang loose and unbound, the Knotworx was typically eesome. As was the way of her kin, she wore very little, only a thin band of fabric over her chest, and one covering her loins. Predictably, her backside was left entirely uncovered, reminding Fhá of perhaps the single-most obvious reason why the Ministry was perpetually nonplussed with their presence.

One could not, under the Mythic Treaty, order them to dress like a normal person. One could not even insist they dress themselves at all. To do so would incur the wrath of the local Mythic Sanctuary or, gods forbid, the Grove. Nobody, not even the most suicidal unpaid intern processing that Lune’s archival audits in B9, wanted a squad of Shift showing up to remind everyone that only by the grace and mercy of the Valkyries had they all not been atomised in an acts of most holy and glorious retribution for their crimes against the Mythica.

Wait...no, Fhá thought, realising she had mistaken the Imperial Codex Aribtraria’s sentencing guidelines for a ministerial agency who had hosted high nobility in a subpar manner. Demanding Mythics dress themselves in a manner that was anathema to them was a chastising offence.

Given what she knew she would have to handle tomorrow, Fhá briefly entertained the thought of caving the mostly naked woman’s skull in with a paperweight. After all, she couldn’t be forced to relive more of Hvórþ’s worst day if she was being held for murder in a Mythic Sanctuary.

Another sigh.

Life, unfortunately, had yet to lose the last of its lustre. That, and if she didn’t finish the job, some other poor, unfortunate sod would be assigned it. Then there was also the Duchess. Fhá couldn’t rule out the possibility that Tví had some fancy tech that would, by miracles unknown to science, drag her back from the great beyond to endure ten thousand indignities before being, after an impossibly extended lifetime of torment, at last allowed the sweet embrace of death.

Such was life in the service of Imperial nobility. One could not even cark it without being ordered to, and that order receiving authorisation from the Census Administration, an approval stamp from the Ministry of Health, a CX12-990(f) being filed with the Bureau of Imperial Collections, all of which needed to be delivered in Triplicate to the local Imperial Arbiter Garrison, Ministry of Provincial Administration, and Office of the Planetary Governor’s Secretary of Human Resource Administration, and served to the party on behalf the High Court of Justice of the Prefecturate following adjudication by the same. By the time the wheels of bureaucracy had finally finished grinding the death warrant’s way through all the interminable reams of wasted paper, the subject would, in all likelihood, have died three centuries ago, and the judgement would have to be passed onto their descendents. All of them.

There was a reason business was always booming for hitmen and barristers.

Thankfully, the Knotworx’s fashion statement—or lack thereof depending on perspective—was so subdued on her that Fhá barely even noticed her state of undress at all. They were rather curious that way, the Herbalists.

Fhá had once been so fortunate as to have seen an Orkidean on her way to the elevator banks. So enamoured with her grace and beauty and the regal mane of hair blue as lupines in full bloom and so well cared for it shimmered like silken strands of precious stones, she’d realised only several days later, upon recounting the tale to her boyfriend, that the strange and stately creature had been walking through the halls entirely naked.

Thinking back, she almost felt like they were all draped in layers of anticognizants, antithymestic wards, and dysophthalmic auras to some degree or other. What always drew most attention, it seemed, were qualities decidedly not the one that would have most obviously stuck out to lowly banals.

The Orkidean’s most memorable quality should have been the impromptu voyeur show she’d put on, but what Fhá recalled most was how she had the most magnificent hair. How that woman had the time for anything else but maintaining her majestic coiffure was beyond Fhá, but just the memory of it made her burn with envy. It fell down to her ankles like a waterfall curtain of the finest silk. Meanwhile Fhá couldn’t maintain anything longer than a chic bob to her shoulders without spending hours each day taming the dragon’s breath exploding out of her scalp. That Orkidean must have spent fortunes on hair products.

It only was Fhá’s own present discomfort at her current condition which made the Knotworx’s state of undress memorable. Otherwise, like all the Knotworx she’d encountered before, all that triviality about threads or the lack thereof would have slid out of her brain like jelly off a hot car hood.

Despite that Herbalists had an almost enviable nonchalance with displaying their bodies without any shame or inhibitions—being deprived of such emotions entirely it seemed—Fhá was not endowed with such a carefree attitude to being caught in less than acceptable dress. The embarrassment of Hvang seeing her naked in a bathroom stall with a toilet bowl full of vomit was still fresh on her mind, and though he had graciously offered her the shirt and joggers he had intended to wear to the gym after work, and while they fit her quite well, not lacking in any essential areas, she could not help but feel great discomfort at being seen in such attire at the office. It was patently disgraceful.

The Knotworx drew her gaze into piercing, violently emerald eyes through which she communicated far more in a glance than what ten thousand words could convey, and, in them, Fhá could tell her whole train of thought had been flawlessly transmitted. Fhá felt her cheeks flush and she glanced away, her stomach constricting with yet another heap of embarrassment.

“The Duchess would like to speak with you,” the Knotworx said, in a rich, deep voice, thick with the accent of some exotic place.

The Herbalist’s tone seemed relaxed and entirely aloof to Fhá’s obvious gawping. Either she was used to it, didn’t care, or some combination of both.

“Oh bollocks!” Fhá swore, realising she’d neglected to call back that evening.

“If you would.”

The Knotworx gestured at Fhá’s VirtuSync Headset. A knot formed in Fhá’s stomach as soon as she saw it. She reached out with a shaking hand, stopping just short of touching it.

Come on! Just a VR Call! By the Nine Bloody Hells!

Grabbing it, Fhá jammed it over her head, hitting the power button before she could stop herself.

She felt the Knotworx place a hand on the headset and the VirtuSync’s Nerve Lance jacked into the port at the base of her neck. A flicker of light flashed in her eyes and the neurolink synchronised. The strange, indescribable sensation of being pulled into a VScape followed before Fhá’s vision resolved and she found herself in a virtual meeting room.

To her surprise, it was the same, stock-standard VScape Conference Room used by the Ministry. Simple and white, the square room had no doors, no windows, and no fancy designs or other such distractions. It was as bland as every milquetoast suit sitting behind a Tygea desk made of condensed fibre board and glued together with the last afterthoughts of a midlife crisis receding in the rearview mirror of a life more boring than a tunnelling machine. Two chairs and, between them, a table sat in the middle of the room. In the far chair sat a woman dressed resplendently in the finest imperial raiment, fanning herself with an ornately hand-decorated Jálüng Bàdzè. Her hair, in the fashion of the day, was unstyled and let to grow from brow to nape unfettered, neither bangs nor sideburns nor any other fibre seen to by the barber’s blade. This silken mane of the Duchess Premiere hung down to the floor like a sheet of black silk where it was pooled on the long and elaborate train of her opulently embroidered robes.

This style was one Fhá had seen once before. The Provincial Duke and Duchess had visited her office several anno ago as part of their regular circuit. According to one of the visiting Duchess’s handmaids, the style was called Yanlë Dáfvzé. Made possible only by Court Sonorians trained in fleshcrafting, it symbolised the wealth and prestige of a Duchess. The longer their Yanlë Dáfvzé could be grown and maintained, the more favour and renown a court noblewoman could curry.

The Duchess of Fhá’s province, Ébúhi Yátsè Shü, had hers grown out to a train of nearly sixty centimetres. Duchess Tví’s Yanlë Dáfvzé, on the other hand, was so long as to rival only the Empress’, and one would be wise to not insult Her Supreme Majesty The Highest with garish displays of greater opulence than that of Her Supreme Majesty The Highest’s. Twenty metres could be tolerated, but one did not exceed that limit. Her Supreme Majesty the Highest’s was twenty-five, and only the Crown Princess, Her Holiness, Scion of Humanity, was permitted twenty-one. Indeed, what manner of haughty quean thought herself so high and mighty as to even approach the prestige of Her Supreme Majesty the Highest’s throne with the audacity—nay, the hubris—with such a display of ostentatious impracticality!? Off with her head! Such an insult simply could not stand!

Fhá bowed low to the Duchess, having insulted a noblewoman in perhaps the most unforgivable way—keeping her waiting. Being late to Her Highness’ beckon call was, after all, an offence the punishment for which was a nine-day death sentence by gradual immersion in a vat of corpse reprocessing solution, as well as a summary kick to the groin. Glory to the Imperial Arbiters!

“Sit, sit,” Duchess Tví said, as though the requisite genuflections irritated her, “enough with the formalities.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” Fhá replied, sitting down.

“Please, if you must, m’lady is fine,” Tví insisted.

“Yes, m’lady,” Fhá responded.

“What have you discovered?” Tví asked.

“There…” Fhá began, but found herself stopped. The VirtuCast playing back in her head had gummed her voice with quiet. She closed her eyes and forced the words out. “I’ve made it about twenty percent through the file.”

“Anything noteworthy?”

“It looks like...well...environmental degradation was encouraged,” Fhá continued.

“For the sake of increased profits, I presume,” Tví said. “Please, speak plainly. We’re not at court.”

“Yes, m’lady,” Fhá acceded, “it very much appears that the environment was pushed to the point of collapse.”

“Of course,” Tví muttered, compressing an immensity of her disappointment and disdain for her son into those two words. “I assume the bulk of the file is post-collapse investigation.”

“Indeed,” Fhá confirmed.

“Oh, Katzali, you beautiful zealot,” Tví sighed.

“You….” Fhá began.

“I…sent him to that sector,” Tví explained, with some hesitation, as though choosing her words with utmost care, “this was his speciality, he would have been assigned the Inquiry.”

“Of course,” Fhá replied.

“Apologies, it has been a trying day,” Tví added, “I should not have interrupted. That was impolite of me. Please continue.”

“Details become somewhat fuzzy after about the sixty-third anno of His Highness’ Governance,” Fhá continued, “what records were recovered from Katzali seem to indicate a rapid decline in sociopolitical stability following an event described as ‘The Evaporation’.”

“Were you able to determine what The Evaporation was, exactly?” Tví asked.

“Not exactly,” Fhá explained, “from what Katzali found, it seems a number of influential politicians and businessmen disappeared. I presume The Evaporation refers to the manner of their disappearance, but there’s really not a lot between anno 63 and anno 91 that survived the subsequent events. After 91, everything goes dark for about a hundred anno until the IMI launched their inquiry. Somewhere in there a massive war broke out.”

“Was my son among the dead?”

“It’s hard to be certain, but from what was there, it does not appear so. You did say he had reached out a docade ago, did you not?”

“Indeed,” Duchess Tví said, “imprecise language, I’m afraid. It was a letter written some centuries ago, but was detained with its courier.”

“I think I heard this story,” Fhá recalled.

“Smuggling contraband in a Post Barge,” Duchess Tví sighed, leaning back in her chair, “I apologise for the confusion. Please, continue.”

“I managed to get through all of the preliminaries, the dispatch order, inquiry assignment, and Katzali’s initial assessments and probes,” Fhá continued, “it’s not looking great. From what he was able to gather from orbit, he was able to confirm the planet is…well, kaput. Descriptions varied, but both Katzali and his ex-military muscle agreed that the aftermath was indicative of a civil war, but the destruction profile was Rimworlds-scale annihilation.”

“That….hmm…” Duchess Tví cogitated, her brow furrowed in thought, “Katzali was meticulous. To a fault, even. He was as loathed by his acolytes as he was loathe to delegate anything to them. A zealous inquisitor. Too much for his own good. I presume he left a preponderance of raw Memarqs.”

“He…” Fhá stumbled.

“He did,” Duchess Tví said, her tone shifting ever so slightly displeased, “Ngèza did not, then, provide the appropriate NeuroSync for that assessment.”

“I’m sorry, m’lady,” Fhá replied, “I don’t believe I received that requisitions order.”

“Oh you poor dear,” Duchess Tví reacted, “rest assured, I will see to it this oversight is corrected.”

“Shall I prepare a 6514(e)-99 Incident Report, m’lady?” Fhá asked, her voice cracking.

“No,” Duchess Tví said, firmly, “Leave this matter to me. I will attend to it personally.”

“Should I continue with the Memarqs?”

“Yes, please,” Duchess Tví replied.

“Most of them were just Katzali’s—” Fhá began, before choking up.

“It’s okay,” Duchess Tví encouraged, “you’re fine. Take your time.”

“I’m sorry, m’lady,” Fhá apologised, clearing her throat.

“You’ve nothing to apologise for,” Duchess Tví dismissed.

“Most of the Memarqs I was able to review were Katzali’s personal notes,” Fhá continued, “there were about four hours of them, including their attendant documents.”

“Anything of note?”

“Besides assessments of the general state of the planet, only one thing stood out,” Fhá answered. “Katzali suspected three different classifications of Apocalypse. He’d determined it was a Class A 23-13.”

“By Édzulì,” Duchess Tví gasped.

“His IIR had narrowed down the scenario to three suspect classes. Surface probe missions—that dataset I’ve yet to analyse—ruled out a 66-99, leaving a strong 66-12 with a weak 66-40.”

“He sent a live team down, didn’t he?” Tví asked, nervously.

“He did,” Fhá confirmed. “A team of former special operators known under their call sign Dropkick Daemons. Their squad commander’s Memarq was the only one recovered. Katzali sealed it in a classified Archive.”

“The appropriate authorisations were sent to your desk,” Duchess Tví said, expectantly.

“They were, and…well…what they show is…” Fhá started, before the words caught in her throat again. “Sod! It was…”

“They encountered something, didn’t they?” Duchess Tví prodded.

“Yes,” Fhá answered.

“An anomalous entity?” Duchess Tví pressed.

“Yes,” Fhá answered.

“Extremely hostile?”

Fhá nodded.

“If you can, could you describe it to me?”

“Anthropomorphic,” Fhá said, shakily, “emaciated, ghoulish. Its proportions were all wrong, everything was too big and too small in all the wrong ways. It had this horrible almost shrunken head-like look and its eyes were enormous and black and glassy. And it was all slimy, like coated in snail goo. Oh it was awful. Terrible. I...I can’t. I’m sorry. I just…”

“You’re fine,” Duchess Tví consoled, “I know this is hard, but I need to ask a few more questions.”

“Of course, m’lady,” Fhá nodded.

“Did the creature possess a discernible sex?” Duchess Tví asked.

“I… I don’t know,” Fhá floundered, “it… it might’ve been female… I couldn’t say. Its form was so distorted and wrong. It… it didn’t really have… ugh! I’m sorry, I just…”

“It’s okay,” Duchess Tví consoled, “you’ve been through an ordeal. I can only imagine how hard this is.”

“It’s… I… I’m sorry,” Fhá stumbled, racking her brains, “It… it was...androgynous, I think. It didn’t have a… a…”

“Penis?”

“Yes, I’m sorry, m’lady,” Fhá apologised.

“No, no,” Duchess Tví dismissed, “there were no obvious remnants of one having previously been attached either?”

“No, not that I recall,” Fhá answered, knowing better than to ask after the nature of this line of questioning. “Why is this important, exactly?”

“I promise that is the last of such...uncomfortable questions,” Duchess Tví assured, “I believe I should have enough to pass along to the appropriate agencies.”

“I’m sorry, m’lady,” Fhá added, realising she might’ve committed a major faux pas. Questioning a High Noble’s line of questioning? How dare she! “I shouldn’t be so caught up in myself with your son…”

“My son,” Duchess Tví interrupted, “deserves no pity, and certainly none of yours. Speaking plainly, and in confidence, his commission was an exile. For the actions that earned him it, the long arm of justice does not reach. Not in this Imperium. He is, or perhaps was, high nobility. I possess now, as I did centuries ago, only but lingering fondness for that worm, and only from having laboured for three days to bring him into this world, and to have cared for him as a mother ought. But even a mother’s love has its limits, Fhá. This, his last and greatest achievement, has trespassed even that, and by so far a margin I dare say I plumb the depths of antipathy for it.”

“Then, if m’lady does not mind my asking, why are you so keen to know the fate of His Highness?”

“It is not Ëchüha’s fate that I am keen to know,” Duchess Tví answered, “but the testimony of his last and greatest cruelty.”

“I… think I understand,” Fhá replied.

“Don’t trouble yourself over it,” Duchess Tví insisted, “I would be there myself, to sift through the aftermath, were it possible. Instead I must rely on you, and I am grateful, if nothing else, that this task found its way to the right hands.”

“I’m honoured, m’lady,” Fhá said, bowing her head.

“I’ve thought up another question,” Duchess Tví refocused, closing her Jálüng Bàdzè. “The creature, did a name come to you? Something that felt right, but perhaps you couldn’t explain?”

“Yes,” Fhá answered, “a wraith. A wraith of wrath.”

“Hmm…” Duchess Tví hummed, leaning back in her chair. Her brow creased as she pondered Fhá’s answered. After a long period of silence, the Duchess spoke up again.

“Thank you for this. I’ll reach out to some of my contacts. Until tomorrow, please, go home, take some rest.”

“Yes, m’lady.” Fhá replied.

“One more thing,” Duchess Tví remembered, “what did you say the commander’s name was?”

“I don’t think I did, m’lady,” Fhá answered, “it was Hvórþ.”

“Clanname?” Duchess Tví requested.

“Null entry,” Fhá said, “I’m sorry, m’lady.”

“Don’t be,” Duchess Tví dismissed, “it’s the Inquisition. I’d be more surprised if Katzali had included that information. Tell me about Hvang. Is he reliable? Or, dependable, I should say?”

“Come again?” Fhá reacted, taken by surprise.

“Your colleague in the neighbouring cubicle,” Duchess Tví clarified, “Hvang, I believe is his name. He is dependable, yes?”

“When he’s not asleep, m’lady,” Fhá answered, blushing. The Duchess must have been aware of her breakdown in the bathroom. “I suppose.”

“Good,” Duchess Tví said, “that will be all. Until tomorrow.”

“Yes, m’lady,” Fhá farewelled as she felt herself being drawn out of the VirtuScape.

The Nerve Lance disengaged, jacking Fhá out of VR. She took the headset off and threw it onto her desk before leaning over, resting her head in her hands, elbows on the cheap, Tygea polymer. Rubbing her temples with her thumbs, Fhá let out a long groan. There wasn’t enough Cloud-Forest wine and fine Fennos chocolate in the universe to get her through this in any semblance of okay. Princelings and their hedonistic excesses. Causing messes whole mobs of people had to clean up and pay for was seemingly the only thing they were good for. The insufferable, entitled, good-for-nothing fuck-ups! Even his own mother had no love for him! The things he must have done to accomplish that!

“Um…” the Knotworx spoke up, tapping Fhá on the shoulder.

“What do you want!?” she snapped. “Can’t you see I’m having a moment!?”

“Uh…” the Knotworx reacted, stepping away from her, hands raised, “I’ll… uh… I’ll just…”

Groaning, Fhá grabbed her bag and pushed past the Knotworx, making for the elevators before anyone else could fuck up her day any more than it already had been.