The rich and powerful of New Helsinki: wealthy cartel merchants, elite mercenaries, tape stars and the best engineers all lived in the upper sections of the vertical city. They saw sunlight every day without having to visit hatch-parks. The streets between their mansions were wide enough to be crossed with luxurious ground-cars, the only place in the city where one might still see them. But few knew that the most powerful man in the city did not live among them, his towering mansion a front inhabited by distant relatives, servants and illegal androids.

  Conrad von Raschenburg, Trade Lord of the Nordrun Cartel, lived deep beneath the waves, in a stronghold dug into the seafloor. One had to enter a secret code in one of the many secluded elevators of the city, after which they’d be taken to a large chamber within the very core of the city, just above the giant metal stem that held the city above the sea. In the middle of this chamber, they would see another elevator, illuminated by red lights, secretly built to move up and down the center of the stem itself. That is, if one was expected. Otherwise, the elevator stayed in the depths, moving up and down only on orders from below.

  The elevator itself was shaped like a solid steel tube over twenty meters across. Security cameras, operated by elite security personnel handpicked by the trade lord himself, kept a constant eye on the inside. If anyone unexpected was unlucky enough to stumble inside, the doors would seal shut, and the steel roof of the elevator would slowly lower, until it was pressed firmly against the ground, anyone and anything in between crushed under tens of thousands of tons of force.

  Collinn Vares, however, was expected, for the first time in his life. The elevator doors finally opened to the trade lord’s fortress for the young secretary.

  He was greeted by three men armed with assault rifles, covered from head to toe in black combat armor. The secretary slowly raised his arms, feeling the sweat trickle down his brow, mixed with the salt water spray in his hair. As one of the guards stepped forward to pat him down, a droplet soaked through his thin eyebrow under large angular glasses, burning one of his hooded brown eyes. But Collinn dared not blink, dared not move more than the absolute bare minimum.

  “Clear,” the guard said. The other guards lowered their guns and let him walk out the elevator into a large security room. Collinn had seen a computer or two at the office, but this room was full of them, perhaps connected to the security systems of the complex. He supposed there was less risk of dust nanites taking them over this deep under the water.

  “Which way is-” he said. One of the guards nodded towards a large door before he could finish. The largest of three if one did not count the massive gates of the elevator itself.

  “End of the hallway. Don’t stray. We’ll be watching.”

  The steel doors opened to a wide marble corridor. On both sides, a pattern emerged: a painting, followed by an oaken door, followed by another painting. A dozen doors on each side. The paintings themselves were varied: landscapes and portraits, from baroque to impressionistic to abstract. Each one older than the Storm, and each one, Collinn figured, was worth more than he would make in a year.

  A red carpet over the checkered floor pattern led the way towards the final door at the end of the corridor. A final portrait hung above this one, of Conrad von Raschenburg himself. Broad-shouldered, his back straight, wearing a black overcoat over a blue suit. He held a sheathed rapier with a golden guard in his hand. Sharp gray eyes above an angular aquiline nose staring off into the distance. He was bald, but he had a well-kept beard that made his prominent chin even sharper.

  Collinn looked up at the painting before he knocked on the door. He wondered how much the trade lord still resembled the figure depicted, given the fact Conrad von Raschenburg was now over two hundred years old.

  Collinn waited three seconds, then knocked again. Finally, the door opened on its own to the clicking of mechanical hinges, in stark contrast to its wooden old world frame. What Collinn saw on the other side nearly made his heart stop. The secretary took a single step inside, feeling the sweat trickle down the back of his neck, dampening his white shirt.

  The room was like an office, a bedroom and a hospital unit all in one. The same checkered pattern as the corridor, but not hidden under a carpet. And Conrad von Raschenburg himself sat on a wheelchair behind an oaken desk, under the glow of white fluorescent lights.

  Behind him was a grand bookshelf, reaching all the way to the top of the high ceiling. The shelf was flanked by two large machines, which Collinn assumed must have been servers, digital libraries they used in the old world before the dust took over most computer systems, small red lights blinking on their sheer white surfaces.

  A large mahogany bed lay on the left side of the room, the bedframe decorated with intricate baroque carvings: the faces of angels and devils, framed by a pattern of vines and leaves. The sheets were a deep blue, embroidered with a golden raven: the emblem of the Nordrun cartel and the ancient coat of arms of the von Raschenburg family. The bed itself was surrounded by hospital equipment: IV stands, an ECG machine and other devices Collinn could not identify.

  And the right side of the room was reserved for a woman. Or at least, the body of one.

  Naked, suspended in a large tube filled with some sort of thick green liquid, motionless and still. Her head was shaved and her face was chiseled and suspended in a permanent look of pure despair. Collinn might have thought the woman dead, if he hadn’t noticed her eyes following him as he entered the room. And he wished he hadn’t.

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  “Apologies, young man…” the master said from behind his desk, his voice like a loud whistle, no doubt amplified by the implants in his throat. “My wife has not been herself for a while… Sometimes I forget she is still there, but it would not be the same without her, no… You are the replacement for Lorne, yes?”

  The old man no longer looked like a person, more like a doll crafted by some alien creature using a vague reference of what a human was supposed to look like. His arms and legs no longer carried any meat on their bones, the joints reinforced with hydraulic engines. His skin had almost entirely been replaced by some peach-colored artificial material that looked almost like a smooth, soft plastic.

  Collinn suspected this was because his natural skin would have been paper-thin at this point, as evidenced by the tiniest patches of it that remained under his milky-gray eyes. They were thin enough that he could see a single blue blood vessel beneath, twitching with blood from the black artificial pump sticking out of his chest. An engine powering his eighth heart transplant.

  The only part underneath his plastic skin that still visibly held any flesh was his stomach, distending past his knees as the trade lord rolled himself out from behind his desk. He still wore the same blue uniform pants as his painting, or at least a facsimile more in line with his current stature. His feet, however, were not visible under his pant legs, already lost to time like so many other parts of the old man.

  “I am…” Collinn said, snapping out of his daze. He wasn’t sure how long he stared at the creature before him, the creature that had controlled every aspect of his life since his birth, the lives of everyone in the territories controlled by the Nordrun Cartel. But he was sure it was beyond what was proper. “I’m afraid it’s bad news sir. One of our scouting parties found the wreck of the Siegfried in Riga.”

  The old man’s face did not change, apart from a slight narrowing of his white eyes. His steel elbow came to rest on the arm of his wheelchair to the whining sound of his mechanical joints, a slender pink hand dangling from a skinny wrist. “Sabotage, I suspect? So Zindler has made her move…”

  “Yes, sir…” Collinn said, curious how the von Raschenburg already knew, “There was an independent duster on the flight log-”

  “Wasik, yes? Mirko Wasik?”

  “Yes… may I ask how you knew, sir?” Collinn said.

  “An open secret among us, yes,” von Raschenburg said, wheezing a pitch lower, “If he survived, you might meet him. He works for Zindler today, perhaps us tomorrow. So it goes with men like him and men like us.”

  “We didn’t find his body,” Collinn continued, reciting the report he spent all morning memorizing, “The body of the actress Anna Cloude is also missing. Everyone else, at least everyone of note, has been accounted for. Over half died in the explosion, the rest were killed by those who went slayer from dust exposure. Or turned slayer themselves.”

  “Pity… The actress would have been a fine asset,” the trade lord said, “So. Do you think this means it’s time for war?”

  The question was clearly a test. The old man had no reason to care for Collinn’s opinion, apart from figuring out what kind of man his new secretary was. “No. There’s enough deniability that Zindler can claim it was an accident. We’d be down a freighter. And the people wouldn’t support a war over some dead office drones.”

  Collinn paused for a second, glancing at the old man. It was impossible to read any approval on his face. “That said, they’re probing our defenses, want to paint us as the aggressor. Gives us a year, two, three at most, before escalation becomes inevitable. So, we should use that time to dig in, rebuild our fleet, sow mistrust among Zindler’s allies.”

  “Wise, wise…” the old man said, his plastic mouth opening slightly, flashing a row of fake teeth in the closest thing to a smile the lord could summon. The trade lord rolled a little closer, his near-blind eyes looking up at the young man. “Your last name… Estonian, if I’m not mistaken?”

  “Yes,” Collinn said, “On my father’s side. My mother is Irish and Korean.” All old world labels that held little meaning today, at least in cartel cities like New Helsinki.

  “A strange question, you think?” von Raschenburg said and let out a high-pitched wheezing sound that Collinn assumed was meant to substitute a laugh. “Did you know that they were among the last pagan savages in Europe? It’s true… the first von Raschenburg received his title bringing them the word of God. And now you are here, a priest…”

  “A… priest? I’m not sure I understand, sir?”

  The plastic corners of the old man’s mouth rose just a hint, a smile that would have been wider if he were capable of it. “You see, that is what we do… me and now you, men like us. We are priests. Because it is the priests who hold the real power. The God whose faith the first von Raschenburg spread across the Baltic… a fantasy, pure and simple. But it did not matter… what mattered was that he brought civility, purpose. A bridge, perhaps not for them, but for their descendants, men like you, to rise to enlightenment. God does not matter. Those who speak for him do.”

  He swiveled around in his wheelchair, staring at the bookcase behind him, records of the old world. Pride in his voice. “My father wished to change that, you know? Create a real God. The result? Dust and chaos… He had not figured out what I just told you.”

  “And… what is God for you, sir?” Collinn asked.

  “What he has always been, my young friend,” von Raschenburg said, “Power. That has never changed. To the Christians, it was the promise of eternal life, to the capitalist, it was wealth, to the communist, the state. To my father, the artificial mind of his own making. But in truth, it is entirely irrelevant.”

  A deep, guttural sigh slipped Raschenburg’s artificial lips, head tilted back to look at the ceiling. “Our age is, in that sense, the most honest. Our God is power in a literal sense. The energy that powers the facsimile of society we’ve built in New Helsinki and the other cartel cities. Take it away and everything will collapse. Control it… and you control all.”

  He turned back around, painfully slowly. “We start with the Silk Road.”