Herman Kieffer watched Dark Section with a pensive look. The pipeline cut all the way under the field, from years ago when this place was an oil farm. They pumped it out to the old space-liners, on to Arga. There was an old runway some miles south, with the husk of an albino dreadnaught. He knew the spicers ran their goods through here and burned their trail on dreyfyll logs. The fires had a peculiar effect on the spicers. Word got round, like it always did. And this cursed place became a drug farm.

Dark Section’s voices were faintly garbled, tortured into noise by the scrambler on their helmets. The closer they got, the more Kieffer was inclined to drag his heels. Or to leave them to it. The less he knew the better, far as he was concerned. And far as he was concerned, he was a day from retirement. He should leave them. They had their brief after all. But what if it went wrong? The thought of months of hearings and testimony in front of a select committee answering questions he didn’t know the answer to was almost worse than dying.

He was tired.

One of the black-clad troopers summoned him and Kieffer was snapped from that insipid future. The pipeline pushed through to a grate overlooking some swampland. Or that’s what the maps said. Kieffer ordered them to set the charge. A moment later, he felt the dead wind bluster through his helmet and the grating sheared from its hinges into the light of day. One-by-one, they slipped down into the swamp at the foot of the keep’s mound.

The sun poured down from behind the turrets, and the castle walls were struck in silhouette. Kieffer scanned all sides, but they were alone. The limp gunfire of the battle at large was on the other side of the castle and they remained entirely anonymous. One of his colleagues asked for instruction but the Leger waved him away as he eyed a path upwards, zig-zagging up the hillside towards a back gate. Surrounding the castle on all sides were the castle gardens. Peculiar, eccentric as it was. Plants were sheared into odd shapes that seemed to tangle around each other. But if the shapes meant anything, it escaped Kieffer.

‘We don’t take any of the main entrances,’ he said at last, filing the straps of his suit. ‘The gardens give good cover, and the staff will be inside. If you see a target, enemy, staff or otherwise, you terminate. There’s a concealed entrance on the south-east corner. Our contact will admit us at the arranged time.’

‘Sir?’ one of his half-dozen said.

‘No witnesses, Hestha,’ Kieffer iterated. Did they need the logic of the matter spelling out? Could they not just do it? ‘No problems, Captain?’

‘None, Sir.’

Kieffer snapped his pistol and stuffed it to his hip. ‘If you have any sense, make it look like a machine, or suicide. Just don’t make a mess of the bodies. I’ve got enough to clean up with the Cardac.’

He could sense it. They judged his unprofessionalism. His frivolous tongue. But why did he care. He just prayed to the old gods it never came to that. That the staff were away, that the Icks were on the north side and the only things stalking the gardens were Patent puppets.

Captain Hestha plucked a blade from across his back and cut away at the first hedge. Kieffer found himself studying every facet of the Captain’s movements. The way he held the blade, the tension of his grip, the angle he sliced at the stalks. It was something the Leger could not turn off.

‘Lead on, Captain,’ Kieffer said with scorn.

Hestha bowed and did as he was told. He extended a pistol in one arm, balanced across his blade held in the other. The hedgerows weaved left and right, circling back on itself in a maze. But the gradient of the mound was enough to guide them. The slope led in a spiral, inwards and upwards. Flowers sprouted on the brazen hedges with splashes of absurd colour.

The castle loomed in Kieffer’s eyeline and his legs cried. The closer they got, the worse it got. He was too old, he supposed, fair enough, but the bastards couldn’t be trusted to do it themselves.

‘Signal, thirty metres,’ Hestha said then.

‘Machine?’ another, Ells, asked.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

‘Too far to tell. There’s multiple.’

‘Alika?’

‘Too small. It’s coming towards us.’

Ells looked back. ‘Leger?’

‘Twenty metres.’

‘Sir?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘Can you make it out, Hestha?’

‘Still too far, machines mimic organic heat signals.’

‘Do you have a line of sight through the hedge?’

‘Negative.’

‘Leger!’

Kieffer tilted his head. ‘Hold your ground. Let it pass,’ he said calmly.

‘Five metres.’

They clutched at their breaths, backed into the wall of leaves. The pad of footsteps bounced through his helmet but Kieffer held his ground as he instructed them. Negligible damages, they had said.

‘Ten metres… fifteen,’ Hestha announced, and relief buzzed in the Leger’s ears.

‘Continue,’ he said, and their party obeyed, keeping to the line of shadows from where the sun’s glare was blocked by the hedges.

The way ahead opened up into a sort of clearing. Water leapt from a marble fountain, entwined in a helix, then rained back down into a pod of white-crested river fish. A trellis ran the clearing’s edges, hemming nature in. Scorch marks ran the length of one side and Kieffer knelt to inspect it.

‘Eyes up. It’s still hot.’

‘Machines would show up on the tracker though,’ Ells said.

‘Depends on the machine.’

‘Fan out, search the area. Make sure our asses are covered. You see a witness. You drop them.’

‘Sir?’

‘I said what I said. Circle back to the south-east side in ten.’

What blessed relief, the Leger thought. They scattered like seeds on the wind and suddenly he was alone in that forsaken place. He patted his boots against the ground and strained to stretch the aches out of his back. Thank the old gods. He patrolled the clearing with a practiced menace, listened to the sounds of his colleagues. But he heard no struggles, no shots. Another frigate blipped out the atmosphere above him, and with it another crate of dreyfys. He wondered why it hadn’t been shot down. He could see the Sign’s warhorse above and beyond the castle, a flat cruiser whose shadow swallowed the scorched fields below. It was only a matter of time before the Patents’ surrendered this world. To them, its value was scarce trivial anymore. It was why their defence was limp as his old man’s manhood.

They had enough of the dreyfys to see if they could make anything of it. Kieffer’s inclination was they wouldn’t. He had been around the war long enough to know every avenue was a dead-end when it came to the next great weapon. Bodies and lasers. It always came down to the same thing.

He followed the clearing onwards and up to the walls of the castle. Low windows punctuated the perimeter, but he couldn’t see in from this side. Kieffer glanced at his wrist, saw that he was a few dozen feet from the agreed entrance. He tried to look back down the mound. Bar a glance of his own trooper, he saw nothing of note.

The high walls twisted one way than another at right angles, guarding the Leger by its brickwork crevices. Then his hand beeped and across the palm he saw the blip of two bodies, twenty metres hence. The Leger lowered himself, extended an arm to his holster and watched the dots move behind the castle wall.

He dropped to his knee, his shin lain against the grass, counted his breaths as the dots moved along the far wall. With a practiced hand, Kieffer slipped his sidearm from his thigh. Let ‘em pass, he thought, backing into a cul de sac. The pat of heavy footsteps came closer. He hoped they might go straight on, down into the grounds.

But no. Their shadows moved across him first. Then they stopped, the two of them, heads cocked like dogs. But they said nothing. They did nothing. Kieffer straightened his back, approached them that their visors were almost touching and held his weapon to the pit of the taller one’s stomach. They hung over him in pilgrims’ armour. To superiors, they were tame beasts. He could gun them down now without objection nor resistance.

Before Kieffer thought to do anything, there was a flash; the snap of a laser cracked the air. The smaller pilgrim was stripped from its feet. The taller made a move towards them but remembered its place. They knew who they were in the presence of. They knew what they were witness to, if only in part. And they knew the price for that.

Kieffer stepped out from the cul-de-sac and looked along the wall. Captain Hestha’s gun was still smoking. At the sight of his commander, his aim slackened, and his back tightened.

‘I have this, Captain,’ the Leger said. ‘Move on.’

‘Very good, Sir.’ The Captain continued his patrol, leaving his victims to the mercy of Kieffer. The smaller one convulsed on the ground, shook in a pitiful kind of way. Then his attention turned to the other one. Kieffer imagined its face might be begging beneath the obscurity of its visor.

He would be a hypocrite not to shoot the beast now, but why must he? Kieffer never cared for the pilgrims but supposed here, at the gates of his end, that the poor sod deserved the basest of mercies. No one else would give it anyway. Life in a pilgrim’s body was punishment enough, was it not. And what was the worst they could do if they found out, discharge him? He laughed; he was beyond caring for the Sign’s games.

For a moment, Kieffer stared hard, as if he expected to glimpse the pilgrim’s visor, then lowered his weapon and nodded for it to move on. The Leger looked back and saw the beast comfort its dying kin. For some reason, it brought the Leger reassurance. Of what though, he could not say.

As he reached the windowed entrance on the south-east corner for the rest of Dark Section, Kieffer felt briefly invigorated. He was misguided in his mercy, perhaps, but he had made a great many mistakes in his career after all. He just hoped that would be the last of them.