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variation in auditory assault. But the crowd clapped and roared approval. The naked girl with the grinning stomach began rotating her

hips the other way.

'I have a feeling I should be leaving this to you,' I whispered to my companion.

'You're doing fine.'

'"Don't get fret, twist…". for God-Emperor's sake… where did you learn to talk like that?'

'You never hung with twists?'

'Not like this…'

'So I'm guessin' you don't s'love that genejack pound beat, twist?'

'Stop it or I'll shoot you.'

Harlon Nayl grinned and blinked with all his sixteen eyes in mock offence.

'Sup up, twist. If that ain't Phant Mastik, I'll poke my eyes out.'

'Oh, let me,' I hissed, and slugged back my shot. 'Raise 'em and sink 'em and let's have another!' I grimaced to myself as the burning

spirit scalded down my oesophagus, and then scooped two more drinks from the tray of the porcupine girl as she sashayed past.

Phant Mastik sat with his cronies in a side booth. Generations of rad-storm mutation had made him an obese thing with wrinkled flesh

and enlarged features. His ears were frayed fan-like swathes of veiny skin and his nose was a drooping proboscis. An incongruous tuft

of thick red hair decorated his neanderthal brow.

His eyes were deep-set and black.

And sad, I thought. Tremendously sad.

He was drinking from a big tankard by snorting the alcohol up through his dangling nose. His mouth, distorted by tusk-like jags of

tooth, was useless. A twist whore, with an unnecessary number of arms, was sipping her drink, smoking an obscura stick, retouching

her makeup and doing something to Phant under the table that he was clearly enjoying.

We approached.

Phant's minders got up immediately to block us. A homed brute and a twist whose entire head was a wrinkled skin hood for an

outsized eye. They both reached into their robes.

'How you tonight, twists?' puffed Horn-brute.

'We fine. No fret, just s'gotta talk to the Phant,' said Nayl.

'Ain't not gonna happen,' said Big-eye, his voice muffled by his clothing. God-Emperor knew where his mouth was.

'I s'think so, when we have us such a scalding black score, him to enjoy.' Nayl didn't shrink back.

++Let them through++ Phant said, his voice conveyed by an augmetic carry-sound unit. A vox-implant. Few twists had the money for

that. Phant was certainly a player.

The minders stepped aside and allowed us into the booth. We sat.

++Go on++

'Twist, I s'tell ya, we be in the market for section-alpha brainjobs. We s'hear you got one for the begging.'

++Hear? Where?++

'Round and around,' said Nayl.

++Uh huh. And you are?++

'Just two twists s'gonna earn us a deal,' I said.

++That right?++

We sat in silence for a moment as Phant called for more drinks. The girl was now combing and fixing her hair and doing her make-up.

One of her many hands was on my knee under the table.

She winked at me.

With an eye growing from the end of her tongue.

++What I got, ain't no section-alpha, twists. S'section-alpha-plus++

'That is s'why we came to you, Phant! S'why! No upper limit for our buy!'

++How U gonna pay?++

Nayl dropped one of the ingots onto the table.

'Pure mellow-yellow. And we got the bars. Much as it takes. So…? S'when-where?'

++I gotta talk to some people++

'Kay.'

++Where can I reach U?++

'The Twist and Sleep.'

++You sleep tight. Maybe I call you++

THE AUDIENCE WAS over. We took a table of our own near the raised stage and stayed for a couple more rounds, making a show of

appreciating the indecent writhings of the girl with the belly mouth.

After an hour or so, we saw Phant and his retinue leave by a side door. 'Let's go,' I said. We finished our drinks and rose. Nayl gave

porcupine girl a handful of coins and patted her bottom. Her quills bristled, but she smiled.

The minder didn't spare us a look with either of his heads as we left. Out of sight, round the corner of the dreary barstoop, I handed

Nayl one of a pair of brass stimm-injectors and we detoxed quickly to rid our bodies of the alcohol dulling our systems.

It was the dead of night, but there was little darkness. The great curve of Eechan's ring systems glowed with reflecting sunlight and

shone like bands of diamond-crusted platinum.

The main street of the shanty was a rutted, water-logged morass, and flaking boardwalk pavements edged the rows of slumping, dingy

buildings. Glowing signs and the few street lamps reflected in the street puddles.

Beyond the shanty, to the west, the alpine slopes of the mainhive rose against the stars, like a dark mountain of trash decorated with a

million little lights. To the east were the stacked, grubby mushrooms of the mill-farms and the distilleries, venting brown steam and

yellow pollutants into the wind.

To the south, in the verdant farm lands, plains of thick, rubbery growth, we could see the running lights of several vast harvesters.

They were segmented juggernauts; beetle-like machines the size of small starships, chewing up the greenbelt with massive reaping

mandibles and digesting it through vast interior vats and worklines. Flues lined their backs like spines and spewed moisture waste and

atomised sap up high into the atmosphere, where it drifted and fell again like rain. Everything in the twist shanty was sticky with sapfall.

The rain was tacky and thick like syrup. The street puddles were viscous. Downpipes glugged and throbbed rather than pouring.

Everywhere, there was a stench of decomposing plantfibre and liquefied cellulose.

'Do you think he took the bait?' I asked.

Nayl nodded. 'You could see he was interested. Gold's rare on Eechan. His eyes lit when I showed him that ingot.'

'He'll want to check us, though.'

'Of course. He's a businessman.'

We walked along the street, hoods raised against the sticky rain. There were a few mutants around, all of them dressed in rancid

tatters. They shambled along, lurked in doorways around covered braziers, or shared obscura bottle-pipes out of the rain in dim

breezeways.

A squirt of sirens warbled down the main street and Nayl pulled me into an alley-end. A black armoured land speeder with blazing

grilled lamps crept past.

I saw the crest motif of the mainhive arbites on the side and an armoured officer sat in the top hatch manipulating a spotlight.

The beam played across us and passed along. Another flute of siren-noise sounded and we heard a vox-amplified voice demand,

'Idents and papers, you five. Now!'

Moaning and grumbling, a pack of twists moved out into the street, lit by the spot-beam, as the officers dismounted to shake them

down and run their gene-prints through the system.

Something we couldn't afford to let happen. Not if we wanted to maintain our position as anonymous mutants. One flash of my

credentials would speed us past any arbites red-tape. But it might also alert Lyko.

I'd insisted on full concealment for the mission. No one knew we were here, officially. Aemos had done some surreptitious checking,

and there was no official trace of Lyko either. But that was to be expected, and there was no telling how many mainhive officials he

might have back-handed to alert him of any Inquisitorial presence.

Nayl and I turned west at the next junction, and followed the maze of alleys and breezeways between the rents and mill-habs to reach

the Twist and Sleep by a circuitous route that would keep us off the main thoroughfares and away from arbites patrols.

And, as it turned out, bring us right into trouble.

IT DIDN'T LOOK like trouble at first. A short, flat-browed runt in rags stepped into our path, grinning like a salesman. He held his hands

open, as if he was going to curtsy. Twists, my twists, my friends… spare a few 'perials for a poor badgene down on his luck,' I heard

Nayl begin to say, 'Not tonight, twist. S'get you to one side.' But I had already tensed. How had this scabscum known to ask for

Imperial coins if he hadn't seen us at the bar and followed us on purpose?

His accomplices came out of the gloom and sap-rain behind us.

I rammed the word Evade! hard into Nayl's mind with a 'pathic surge and dropped.

A massive, spiked weapon sailed through the space our heads had just been occupying and connected with nothing but air.

The rant who had waylaid us uttered quite the most obscene series of curses I have ever, ever heard and dived on me. He had a doubleheaded

dagger with a nurled hand-guard.

I caught his upflung wrist as he made to gouge at me, broke his elbow and kicked him through a nearby fence while he was still

screaming in pain.

'Boss! Move!' I heard Nayl sing out and I rolled hard aside in the mud as the spiked weapon slammed down into the mire.

It was a thick length of timber with dozens of nails and knife blades hammered through it.

The friendly end of it was held by two amazingly large paws. The paws belonged to a hulk, a two hundred kilo monster covered with

blistered fish-scales and bony scutes. It wore only a pair of ragged blue trousers held in place around its midriff, almost comically, by

a pair of red braces.

It swung the spike-post at me again, and I had to dive and shoulder-roll to escape it.

Nayl was going toe-to-toe with two others: a snouted female in black leather whose mouth and nose were hideously combined into

one drooling, snarling organ, and a tall, thin male with a face peculiarly distorted by bone and gristle.

The female had a reaping sickle in each hand, and the tall male was armed with a mace made out of a reinforced strut toothed with the

rusting blades of two wood saws.

Nayl had drawn his serrated shortsword and duelling knife and was fending off thrusts and strikes from both of them.

A power sword, a boltgun, a lascarbine… they would all have finished this unnecessary encounter fast enough. But we had agreed to

carry nothing that would mark us out from the twist population. Tech-levels were low in the shanty. A plasma gun might have ended

this quickly, but stories would have got round.

The scaly giant was on me again, and I fell through the rotting flakboard of a fence in my efforts to evade his swing. I found myself

lying amid the debris in the back yard of one of the loathsome hab-rents. A light went on in an upper window and abuse, stones and

the contents of a chamber pot were hurled at me.

The giant came on, swinging his club from side to side. The nails and blades were darkly caked with dried blood.

He backed me towards the rear of the rent dwelling and made to swing again.

No! I commanded, using the will. He stopped dead. The rain of abuse and excrement from above stopped too.

It would take him a moment to reconfigure his mind and find his anger again. I moved right at him, punching a knuckle-curved fist at

the place where his nose should have been. There was a crack of bone and a spray of blood.

The giant went down hard on his back, his nasal bone slammed back into his brain.

Nayl seemed to be enjoying his uneven duel. He was jeering at his attackers, deflecting the sickles with his sword and blocking the

strenuous attacks of the mace with his knife. I saw him spin and belly-kick the male away, then turn to give the ghastly, snorting

female his full attention.

But more figures were emerging from the night.

Ugly, abhuman scum dressed in rags. Three, four of them.

I called a warning out to Nayl and pulled out my blackpowder pistol. It was a clumsy antique I'd acquired from the black market on

Front's Planet, but even so I'd dumbed it down to Eechan tech levels by replacing the engraved furniture with a shaped piece of

packet-wood.

The flintlock mechanism was in good order, though. It cracked loudly with a fizz and a flash, the recoil punishing my wrist, and the

ball went point-blank through the forehead of the nearest twist, exploding the rear of his cranium in a surprisingly messy fountain.

But it was a one-shot piece and there was no time for reloading.

Two of the remaining outlaws came right at me, the other turning to come in on Nayl's flank.

I broke the teeth of the first one to reach me with the rounded butt of the pistol, and ducked the second's poorly judged slice with a

rapier.

Backing away, I drew my own blade. Also a rapier. Shorter by a good ten centimetres than my opponent's but balanced and guarded

with a hand-net of articulated metal struts.

Our blades clashed. He was good, trained to his skill by a life of slaughter in the underhive. But I… I had me on my side.

I dazzled him with the ulsar and the uin ulsar, and then drove him back with a four-stroke combination of pel ighan and uin pel ihnarr

before ripping the blade out of his dazed fingers with a swift tahn asaf wyla.

Then the ewl caer. My blade transfixed his torso. He looked confused for a second and then fell down, sliding dead off my blade.

His broken-faced accomplice, blood spilling from my pistol whipping, flew at me and I span, decapitating him with the edge of my

blade. The Carthaens believe side-blade work is lazy, and stress the use of the point.

But what the hell.

Nayl had killed the third attacker with a bodypunch, and as I turned, he locked both of the female's sickles around his twisting knife

and ran her through with his main blade.

He turned to me and raised his bloody shortsword to his nose in a salute. I returned it with my rapier.

The siren of an arbites groundcar was wailing along the alley. 'Time to be gone,' I said to Nayl.

'I THOUGHT YOU were dead!' Bequin cursed as Nayl and I burst in to the room in the ''Twist and Sleep''.

'We had some fun on the way home,' Nayl said. 'Don't worry, Lizzie, I brought the boss back safe.'

I smiled and fixed myself a small amasec from the bureau. Bequin hated to be called ''Lizzie''. Only Nayl had the balls to do it.

Aemos was hovering by the window. Somehow, the rags of his twist disguise suited him.

'Most perturbatory… the arbites are coming this way.'

'What?'

Nayl moved to the window.