Cael was crouched on a service gantry twelve metres above a loading bay, watching two crews try very hard to kill each other, and thinking that peaceful was probably a strong word for it.
He fixed his goggles and readjusted the resolution of the inbuilt binoculars which was a handy tool, expensive, but worth it. Cael then put on his respirator, a second hand model but was modified with a good sum of Dennies to make it usable.
Thought it would help him against the effects of the corruption of the Hollow, its mainly to filter the bad air from the desert of the outer rim and some of the damaged debris of the buildings in the hollow.
The loading bay had been a freight depot once, back before the hollow boundary shifted and swallowed the eastern access road.
Now it was one of those in-between spaces the outer ring accumulated over time: technically within city limits, practically beyond anyone's jurisdiction, and therefore useful to exactly the kind of people who needed somewhere nobody was going to ask questions.
Both crews had apparently arrived at the same conclusion about its usefulness, at the same time, with the same objective in mind, and now sixteen people were sorting out the resulting disagreement with a combination of Attributes, improvised weapons, and a volume of shouting that suggested neither side had ever seriously considered negotiation.
He knew them, vaguely.
The crew on the left, in the mismatched grey gear with the yellow tape markings on their shoulder rigs, were the Kettlemen. Mid-tier hollow raiders, mostly working Districts 10 and 11, with a reputation for brute-force runs that got results but burned through personnel at a rate that made professional contractors wince.
The crew on the right, in the black-and-red with the matching face wraps, were Sable Column. Better organised, more selective about jobs, and possessed of the kind of territorial pride that made sharing a loading bay an existential offence.
Neither of them had seen him yet, which was how he preferred it.
'This is not your problem,' he reminded himself. 'You have a commission. You have a window. The access point is forty metres past that loading bay and you are burning time.'
He looked at the access point. He looked at the fight. He looked at the six Sable Column members forming a push line toward the bay's eastern exit, which happened to be the route he needed.
Of course it does.
He dropped from the gantry on the Kettlemen's blind side, landed on the roof of a stacked cargo container, and paused there for exactly one second to let the noise of the brawl swallow the sound of his landing. Nobody looked up. They rarely did. People in a fight were focused forward, which was one of the first useful things four years of this work had taught him.
The second useful thing was that the fastest way through a brawl was not around it.
He came down off the container on the Sable Column flank, moving low and quick through the gap between two fighters who were too busy with each other to register a third option, and crossed seven metres of open ground before anyone processed that he wasn't with either crew.
A Kettleman with a crackling electric baton swung wide on a Sable Column fighter and caught nothing but air; Cael ducked under the backswing, kept moving, and was four metres further along before the man even rebalanced.
Someone from Sable Column did notice. A woman with a Molotov cocktail threw a glass that would have taken his knee sideways if he hadn't already been shifting right, reading the stance before the throw. It grazed his boots and skittered across the concrete.
"Hey! Who the hell are you?!"
He didn't answer.
He kept moving, weaving between the edge of the melee and the bay wall, using the chaos the same way the hollow had taught him to use tight corridors: not as a problem, but as cover.
He was almost clear. The eastern exit was ten metres away. Nine. Eight.
A Kettlemen enforcer with a machine gun stepped into his path, not deliberately but accidentally, turning from one target and colliding with Cael at mid-stride. The man was big, a head taller and built for it, and the collision stopped Cael cold. The enforcer looked down at him with the expression of someone who had not expected an obstacle and was now processing whether it was a threat.
Cael hit him twice, very fast, in the floating ribs with the heel of his palm, and stepped around him while he was still deciding. The man folded but didn't fall. That was fine. He wasn't trying to put anyone down, he was trying to get through.
Six metres. Four. Two.
He was through.
***
The access point dropped Cael off near a maintenance hatch set into the boundary wall, the kind that showed up on HMB maps as a sensor relay station and on everyone else's maps as a way in. It had been cracked open by the previous holder of this commission, which was either thoughtful or a sign that they had planned to come back out, one or the other.
He pulled the hatch and went in.
The hollow hit him the way it always did, like stepping through a door into a room where the laws of the previous room no longer applied. The air thickened. The light changed quality, becoming flat and sourceless, the particular grey-gold of hollows that had been stable long enough to develop their own ambient glow.
The geometry shifted: the maintenance corridor extended twenty metres on the outside of the boundary wall. Inside, it opened into a space that was three times that width and rising to a ceiling that hadn't existed on any blueprint.
This was the thing civilians never fully grasped about hollows. You couldn't describe them with the vocabulary of normal space because they didn't behave like normal space. The Ethereal matter that hollows were built from didn't have opinions about dimensions. It did what it did, and what it did, mostly, was make existing geometry into a suggestion.
Five years ago, before the Hollow Investigative Association had formalised its Carrot distribution network, going into a hollow without a map meant going in blind. Some contractors still did it. They were, statistically, the ones who didn't come back. These days a working raider sourced Carrots the same way they sourced everything else in the outer ring: through whatever channel was available and whatever it cost, because the alternative was worse.
Cael loaded the Carrot data his Fixer had supplied into the navigation unit on his wrist. The display sketched the hollow's current geometry in thin amber lines: corridors, voids, collapse zones marked in red. The commission target was two sectors in. He studied it for a count of ten, committed the route to memory, and started moving.
The hollow was quieter than he'd expected. Hollow creatures, the Ethereal constructs that accumulated in stable hollows the way mould accumulated in damp corners, had territories and rhythms. This hollow's rhythms, according to the Carrot data, had a fifteen-minute cycle. He was entering at the right point in the cycle to cross the first sector without drawing attention. The Fixer had specified this in her briefing, in the particular tone of someone who had done the math and expected it to be followed.
He followed it.
The first sector was a collapsed freight handling space, recognisable as such despite the hollowing: the ghost of a conveyor belt ran along one wall, translated by Ethereal matter into something that resembled a conveyor belt the way a dream resembles a memory. Boxes that might have held anything were stacked in configurations that ignored structural logic. Cael moved through it without touching anything, because touching things in hollows before you understood them was the kind of decision that ended commissions early.
The second sector was where the commission was.
He found it in what the Carrot map marked as a stable pocket: a circular space, roughly ten metres across, where the Ethereal accumulation had crystallised into something almost architectural. Hollow creatures used these as dens. The creature that had used this one was gone, or dormant, or patient. He didn't stop to determine which. The commission target was on the far side of the pocket, half-submerged in a crust of crystallised Ethereal matter: a data module, flat and matte, the size of his palm, and next to it a body that had been there long enough that the hollow had started to incorporate it at the edges.
He'd seen worse. He'd been doing this for four years.
He crouched beside the target, worked the data module free of the crust with careful, methodical pressure, and checked it. Intact. Sealed. The encryption on the casing was above his clearance to read, which was fine; reading it wasn't the job. He sealed it into his extraction case and stood.
The hollow made a sound that wasn't exactly a sound, more a shift in pressure, the way a room changes when someone opens a window somewhere else in the building. Cael went very still.
Cycle reset. Early.
He was moving before the first Ethereal construct rounded the corridor mouth, back the way he had come, Carrot map already updating with the geometry shift. The hollow was reshuffling. This happened. This was why the Fixer had given him a forty-eight hour window on data that would stop being reliable in far less. He'd been in here twenty-three minutes. He had a route out.
He used it.
The exit cost him a grazed shoulder from a wall that hadn't been there on the way in, an Ethereal construct that he redirected rather than fought by firing twice at the wall beside it and letting the ricochets turn it left instead of right, and four minutes of running that he would feel tomorrow. He came out through the maintenance hatch into the amber morning light of the outer ring boundary with the data module in his extraction case and every piece of himself more or less accounted for.
He sat on the wall for a moment, breathing, and looked out at New Eridu.
The city rose to the west: tier on tier of it, the outer ring low and dense and practical, the inner districts climbing, and somewhere in the far middle distance the glass-and-steel spire clusters of the neighbourhoods that didn't think much about what happened out here. Five years ago, the boundary had been a hundred metres further out. Hollows expanded, when they weren't being managed. The HMB managed them, and the outer ring lived with the results of how well that management worked on any given week, which was sometimes well and sometimes not.
He sealed his coat, picked up his kit, and went to make the handoff.