Dayyānu took a last, long, drag on her lo-stick, before accepting the downpour had rendered it so damp as to extinguish any joy one could take in the pull. Dropping it to the grimy alleyway floor and crushing out its last embers, she couldn’t help but laugh at the irony of it all. Standing here in this rain sodden ditch in the arse-end of nowhere was a privilege of rank, something that most people she worked with could only dream of. Well, they would if the bastards had the wit to dream of anything beyond stabbing whoever looks at them funny, that is.

She looked up, shielding her eyes against the pounding rain. Behind her, indeed surrounding her, were huge buildings reaching far into the sky, mostly windowless and solid. The hive was not constructed with people who like to take in the view in mind. So far as anything punctuated the darkness it was only the illumination cast by the neon lights she stood under; but whatever inspirational message they were meant to project onto the hive walls was rendered impossible to read by their garish glare. Try as she might, Dayyānu couldn’t see the stars through the thin sliver of sky the alleyway afforded. She’d commanded a void ship once, before her “promotion” into this role. How’d it come to this?

But Dayyānu didn’t have the time to feel sorry for herself right now; her first appointment was only two hours away and it’d take most of that just to reach her precinct's sub-level. So she reentered the hive structure through a nondescript little door built into the wall, flashed her credentials to the warriors manning the barricade checkpoint, and stood on the transit platform, waiting for the downbound tram.

The transit hall was cavernous and poorly lit. The vast tramway tunnel whose overhead rail would take her to the lower hives loomed beneath her feet. Everything conspired to gave the wire-mesh platform an eerie feeling of hovering over a void, at any moment quite capable of finally losing its long war against rust and sending Dayyānu falling into an infinite nothingness. The effect was not improved by the fact that the supposedly sealed hive in fact had a breeze, and the wind’s whistles and moans echoed throughout the tunnel system, giving the inky blackness below a distinctively hungry sounding voice. Still, as disconcerting as all this was, this would no doubt be the last time she had any non-trivial space to herself for months on end now. Dayyānu savoured the emptiness.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and late though it was the rickety grey box that dared call itself a “train” eventually made its way down the rail to arrive at Dayyānu’s station. It too was empty, operated as it was by a simple machine spirit. Complex enough, though, to detect Dayyānu’s presence, and as she stepped on board a weedy light gasped on, and a recorded message started playing, in the crisp eager tones of some junior logistician:

“Good morning and welcome to the Ashnan Intra-Hive Transit System. This automated train is provided for the security and convenience of the Mighty warriors of the Sherden Pact. Unaccompanied wardum hearing this message please be aware that you will be eviscerated upon discovery. The time is…”

Dayyānu tutted and zoned the message out. Every bloody time she made the journey back from topside she had to listen to this rot. She was tired of it; tired of the janky technology, tired of the faux chipper bleatings of that unnamed logistician — tired of this damn city, tired of herself.

Twenty minutes later they had travelled down far enough that the tram was starting to pass through inhabited layers, beneath the impenetrable layer of rockrete separating the upper from lower hives of Ashnan. Dayyānu’s stare was fixed at some indistinguishable point in the middle distance beyond the tram window, so she found her eyes disinterestedly passing over the sights beyond. At first the tram passed through an open cavern in which was a marketplace teeming with humans and xenos, with all their noise and stench immediately penetarting the tram - then a layer of bare unexcavated rock. After that came a brief view of a hall filled with vitae blessing pools as far as she could see, and above each pool, scurrying along walkways, were goremages mumbling invocations to Khorne over the vast vats - then a layer of rockrete. Shortly after which the tram tunnel once more gave way to an open space, but this time filled with a malevolent energies that somehow dampened the light and obscured the view, so the only thing one could really make out were the braying of daemonic monstrosities somewhere in the distance. Then more rockrete. Dayyānu barely noticed any of it.

After what felt like a geological age the tram finally found its way to her sparsely populated stop, reserved as it was for high ranking military personnel. Dayyānu cursed to see that her equerry was waiting for her at platform edge, looking eager in that simpering fashion of his. Before she’d even fully stepped out of the tram he had crisply made the sign of the mighty to her, his right fist resting neatly in his left palm, exactly centred on his upper torso.

“Dayyānu Arnogaur, eightfold blessings on your return. We must hurry back to the precinct-office; there’s been an unlicensed murder.”

Dayyānu sighed. She hated this job.

to be continued