There was no intelligence indicating what had happened in the slums of the Kymellian Clan.
Gronov Rutov and his squad then searched many rooms barely large enough for them to turn around in, as well as rooms they could not squeeze into at all. Without exception, they found civilian corpses with their internal organs removed. The tiny drones they had sent out had yet to detect any life signs from surviving humanoids. There were no breathing humanoids left in this vast mountain of garbage and moldy heaven built from alien metal and bioplastic.
But that was not the only strange thing.
Apart from the chaos and violent outbursts caused by the long-standing lawlessness of the lower levels, they found no signs of recent violence. There were no wounds from energy weapons or ballistic weapons on either the buildings or the bodies, at least none that were recent. Judging by the freshness of the corpses, the massacre could not have taken place more than two days ago. It was as if these people had lain on operating tables and calmly welcomed death. The killers who slaughtered the poor and took their organs had used no weapons. That left only sorcery as a possibility, since scalpels alone could not have killed over a thousand people here.
Following the encrypted emblem signal left behind by the Praetorian Guard, the squad passed through layer upon layer of shacks that could barely be called a settlement. They climbed upward along the haphazardly constructed, swaying supports of the shantytown until they reached the source of the signal. It was the highest point of the garbage mountain. The nearby slums resembled another garbage mountain rising out of the darkness—and smelled like one too. There seemed to be survivors there, at least until a crazed man howled and