Whatever the Firstcome might say, Coriolis station was widely recognized as the jewel of the Third Horizon. Cannibalized from the generation ship once known as the Zenith, the station hung in orbit over Kua like a false moon, a dagger-shaped satellite ten kilometres long and five kilometres wide at its ring. The Firebirds had docked their newly-bought armored yacht at Neoptra spaceport, in the donut-shaped Ring that surrounded the central column of the station. This central column, named the Shard, was about two kilometres wide and ten kilometres long, with the Ring forming a torus a kilometre in diameter that ran around the Shard about a quarter of the way down from its crown. The Ring held external docking functions for the largest ships in the Third Horizon, as well as a ring of smaller pressurized docking bays for ships like the Phoenix of Hamura, and as a result it also formed the bustling commercial center of the station. Transport tubes ran in a cross through the Shard and along the vast supporting beams that linked it to the Ring, connecting the Ring at the four compass points and opening into huge plazas. Other transport tubes looped through the center of the Ring, linking the plazas and all their peripheral businesses together in a thriving commercial hub that was the envy of the entire Horizon.

Millions of people called Coriolis home, and many of those residents had never left the station, even to visit the steaming jungles of the planet it orbited. An elite few lived in the upper levels of the Ring or the topmost levels of the Shard, which were known as the Spire; many more crowded into the layers of the shard near the Ring, the area called the Core; and beneath them in the lower levels of the Shard the teeming hordes of the poverty-stricken Cellar lived in cramped and over-crowded conditions, offering their day labor to the more fortunate merchants and professionals of the higher levels and maintaining the basic life support functions and power of the huge station. The station’s regular police force, the Guardians, patrolled these areas, but it was in the Cellar that the Syndicate was strongest, and the Guardians were well-known for their corrupt compliance with the demands of the Third Horizon’s most prolific organized crime group. Higher up the station, in the Core, the Ring and the Spire, the work of the Guardians was reinforced by the Judicators, an elite force of police and soldiers who were known to serve the interests of every other Faction but the Syndicate. Despite a century of complaining, the Syndicate still had no seat at the Council, where Faction business was officially discussed, but the Factions cared little for claims of injustice from disgruntled gangsters and their sycophants in the smaller businesses and labor unions of the Cellar.

Faction intrigue was as essential to life on Coriolis as trade, at least if you were rich or important. The Zenith arrived in the Third Horizon expecting empty planets ready for colonization, but instead found a star cluster colonized half an eon earlier by explorers who had discovered the Portals soon after the generation ship left the First Horizon. The residents of the Arkship had prepared themselves over countless generations of life in the emptiness of space for this moment, their crowning glory, the entire purpose of their civilization, only to find a thriving society had already been established hundreds of years earlier. With this discovery chaos and disillusionment set in among the colonists, and after a decade of wandering the Third Horizon seeking purpose the denizens of the Zenith rebelled. Many of its founding families fled to take up residence on the planet of Kua, while others decided to remain on the ship and repurpose it to become Coriolis station. The leading families that remained on the ship formed the Faction known as the Consortium, while those who rebelled and fled planetside became the Zenithian Hegemony. Other, much older and far more sinister Factions already thrived in the Third Horizon, however, religious and cultural organizations belonging to the Firstcome families, who had spread through the star cluster and survived war, ruin, collapse, isolation and recovery. Those Factions settled into uneasy and complex relationships with the people of the Zenith, and in the two centuries since its foundation at the heart of the Horizon, Coriolis became the focal point of those shifting alliances and cautious accomodations.

More prosaically, Coriolis station had also become the central point for the trade of weapons, ships, artifacts, drugs and people. Anything that could be traded, bought or sold was passed or smuggled through the station, and anyone who wanted to cross the Third Horizon inevitably passed through Coriolis. This meant that the Ring was thronging with hotels, hostels, capsule clusters, flophouses and lodgings of every kind, most especially in the seedy areas near the Spring Plaza, diametrically opposite the Spice Plaza on the Ring. It was to this plaza that the Firebirds headed, to find the Quiet Eunuch. They alighted from the tube and spilled out of its secondary entrance onto the Promenade, the canyon that loops through the middle of the Ring, following the same line as the tube, connecting the four plazas radially and linking every level of the Ring vertically. Criss-crossed with bridges and lined with walkways, the Promenade is almost a kilometre deep, a chasm lined with bustling humanity and business that connects every layer of the Ring to a wide central space of air and light.The promenade is a broad and beautiful thoroughfare, but as one descends its walls the beauty fades, first to functional and practical walkways lined with lawyers and computer businesses and recruiters and other practical, sensible but unromantic businesses; and then to a narrow, shabby and cramped line of dubious cut-rate opportunists. Down near where the arc of the promenade reaches its nadir at the base of the Ring the shops are small, grubby and sometimes indecent: barber shops, cheap masseurs, cyber doctors, flophouses, the occasional capsule apartment, brothels and pawnshops. Down here at the base of the Ring the two sides of the promenade are close enough to almost touch, or to jump across if one is desperate, criss-crossed frequently with bridges and festooned with cables and conduits and cast in deep shadow from the multitude of bridges, arches, walkways and banners hanging between the Promenade on its higher levels. Down here there is no tube station, and one must take public elevators up hundreds of metres to find an entrance to the lower tube, or walk up the thousands of interconnected stairways if one finds the elevators too grubby or too crowded. Outside the shops shifty-looking men lounge and argue, chewing kat and smoking cheap tabak to pass the time. In between these sections of bustling but despairing business the promenade falls into disrepair, the walkways dimly-lit and broken by dark, unpopulated stretches through which people hurry, looking around carefully as they hustle through the shadows.

The Firebirds found the Quiet Eunuch at the edge of one of these patches of blank steel wall, a boarding house with a narrow door and a single reception room looking out over the promenade through a grubby window. They ventured inside to find a small reception at the foot of stairs leading up to two floors of narrow rooms. The receptionist was unhelpful until they flashed some birr, then gestured them up to a room on the third floor. They took the stairs carefully, listening at doors and checking for trouble. Finally they found Lavim Tamm’s room, and knocked on its flimsy door.

They heard nothing, so Adam knocked again, harder. From behind the door they heard a faint shuffling, and after a few moments of cautious scuttling sounds the small viewing slot on the door slid open. Two dark eyes surrounded by gold-brown skin looked out at them, long dark lashes blinking nervously.

“Who are you?” The person asked, a small, tremulous man’s voice.

“Visitors,” Adam grunted in reply. “Open up!”

Al Hamra pushed the big soldier aside and took his place, smiling gently for the man behind the door. “Lavim Tamm?” He asked, pouring saccharine into his voice. “We want to help you, if you’ll let us.”

“Who are you?” The man asked again, and the viewing slot began to slide shut. The beautiful eyes darted left and right, trying to take in as much of the hallway as possible, suspicious and restless. “How’d you find me?”

“We are friends of Jasina at the White Tugur,” Delecta told him, leaning down and over Al Hamra’s shoulder. “We brought you a token of good-will.” She produced a bottle of Miran Fire Kohol and waved it where he could see it. “She told us you don’t have much money, and might be needing this.”

Tamm’s eyes went still, focused on the bottle, and then flicked up to Delecta’s smiling, reassuring face. She waved the bottle slightly, smiled again, and added, “No one’s here to hurt you Lavim, we’re here to help. There’s good money involved.”

The man sighed and slid the viewing slot shut, and a moment later the door slid open to let them in. They filed into a narrow room that was barely large enough to contain them all, furnished with just a bed, a screen and a tiny shower booth. Lavim stood twitching in the middle of the room, a small, slender man looking worn and tired in a grubby hotel gown. He was obviously sick, his eyes deepset and shadow and his skin sallow and almost jaundiced. As he dragged out some plastic cups for them to pour Fire Kohol into, Saqr noticed that he had bundled up a worker’s uniform of some kind and thrown it onto the floor of the shower room, but from the door she could see burn marks and bloodstains on the cloth. With Tamm’s back turned to her to pour the drinks she nudged Al Hamra, gesturing to the shower room with her head. He stepped a little closer and peered in, moving quietly and carefully, but Tamm did not seem to notice.

“Lavim,” Al Hamra spoke quietly and seriously, and Adam stepped back to block the door when he saw the blood on the clothes. Delecta crowded back with him, leaving Saqr, Al Hamra and Siladan standing between the skinny, pallid man and the bathroom. “Whose clothes are those in your bathroom?”

“Mine,” Tamm told him, turning around, his eyes widening as he saw how everyone had arranged themselves. He was holding a Kohol cup in each hand, already sipping from one. “What?” He asked. “What… you don’t think I…?” He took another sip, left the question hanging.

“Well,” Delecta said, “It’s obviously not your blood.”

Al Hamra reached out and gently took one of the cups from the man, who stood looking at them with wide eyes. A single tear ran down his left cheek, though whether from grief or Fire Kohol withdrawal or whatever illness ailed him, they could not tell.

“Whose blood is it Lavim?” he asked gently.

“My colleagues,” the man replied with a blank, flat tone in his voice. “Mostly Jezra. Maybe some of … of …” And with that he sank onto the bed, still holding his precious Kohol cup in one hand as he pressed the other across his dark, tear-filled eyes.

Delecta pushed between them and sat down awkwardly on the bed next to him, where she towered over him. “What happened, Lavim?” She asked. “How did their blood get on your clothes?”

“Monsters!” He hissed. “It was monsters! Monsters in the dark!”