‘Good,’ Chetta said. She mentally gritted her teeth. ‘You have my thanks.’

‘I am not doing this for you,’ Morandia snorted. ‘I simply do not suffer from sufficient hubris to risk the safety of an entire planet over an insult from a grasping, duplicitous harridan.’

‘Then that makes two of us,’ Chetta replied, baring her teeth in what anyone could take as a smile, if they so chose. Morandia and Jalamar clearly didn’t, but Chetta couldn’t give a grox’s left testicle for either of them. ‘Lady Vass, shall we–’

The door to the annex flew open to reveal the same vox-operator that had alerted Chetta to the Jo’Sin’s imminent arrival. She hesitated as every eye turned on her, and began to visibly wilt.

‘I am not exaggerating,’ Chetta said deliberately, ‘when I say that this had better be good.’

‘It’s… not good, my lady,’ the woman stammered. ‘It’s…’ She trailed off, eyeing Morandia and Jalamar uneasily.

‘Out with it!’ Chetta snapped.

‘Forgive me, my lady,’ the vox-operator said miserably. ‘Some of our… interests… have come under attack.’

Chetta stared at her, not comprehending. ‘Attack? What do you mean, precisely?’

‘Armed troops, my lady,’ the woman said, looking as though she wanted the floor to swallow her up. ‘It’s an open offensive.’

‘What?’ Chetta strode towards her, and the woman hastily backed out of the doorway before she got trampled. ‘Whose troops? What’s going on? An open offensive? They’re not acting covertly? We’ve seen insignia?’

‘Yes, my lady,’ the woman said. ‘It’s… they’re Dukarr’s, my lady.’

The Novator Cortex

The Novator Cortex

Chetta stared in horror at the screens in front of her. Grainy images, taken by security picters and, now, by surveillance servo-skulls that her people had scrambled into the air, showed violence erupting in no less than five places across Vorlese’s capital city. The pleasure house where Alexun van Sennit had been compromised was already in flames, and a group of warehouses on the north side of Delta Block was under attack: even as Chetta watched, a transport flyer tried to take off but was hosed down with autocannon fire, and pitched sideways to dis­appear out of view into the Smog Deeps. One of the manufactorums in which House Brobantis had a controlling interest was coming under fire too, although the workers stuck on the overnight shift on this ­holiest of days had reacted badly to such aggression and had managed to close the distance on their attackers, fighting back with lascutters and oversized wrenches. A chem refinery in Gamma Block, which Chetta was quite frankly amazed that Dukarr had managed to track back to her house, had already been bombed out. They were also shooting up a strip of bars a few levels below, which was actually nothing to do with Brobantis, but this failure on her enemy’s part did little to comfort her.