Rogue Trader

by Andy Hoare

  ‘Good, good,’ said Lucian, smiling at the thought of the irascible old admiral voicing such an opinion over an oversized glass of after-dinner liquor. With an effort, he pushed the problem of Brielle to the back of his mind, and continued with his immediate concern.

  ‘I think that Sarik and I see eye to eye,’ Lucian went on. The White Scars Space Marine hailed from the world on which his daughter had been raised, and that might provide some common link that could grow to a more solid alliance. ‘Rumann I’m not so sure of, he’s a hard one to read.’

  ‘As are all his Chapter,’ the General replied, ‘they have something of the machine about them, if you catch my meaning.’

  ‘I do. The same goes for Jaakho, though he appears more disposed to our point of view in council recently.’

  The general nodded by way of reply, before Lucian continued, ‘And the Navis Nobilite, Sedicae?’

  ‘Very hard to say,’ Gauge replied, before Korvane interrupted.

  ‘Father, might I speak?’

  ‘Of course, Korvane,’ Lucian said, mildly unsettled that his son should feel the need to ask permission to speak his mind. Of course Korvane should speak, Lucian thought, for he had been raised in the Court of Nankirk, studied at his mother’s side the myriad intrigues of its nobles, and his guidance had true meaning.

  ‘I believe the logistician general, Stempf, to be a lost cause. He has sought patronage since the outset, and found it in the cardinal. He has voted in favour of Gurney’s motions on twelve major issues, abstained only once, and never voted against. I believe he is entirely beholden to Gurney, and will not be drawn away unless the cardinal is thoroughly defeated. Then, he will seek an immediate alliance with the stronger faction.’

  ‘True enough, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Lucian nodded in agreement with his son’s assessment. ‘What of the Praefect Maximus?’

  ‘Skissor has no loyalty and no great intellect. He is a man of high birth, but the youngest of many siblings and therefore the least likely to benefit from his connections and resources. He is from Kar Duniash, where the youngest born sons are sent to the planetary levy, for the commissions are less dear than those already purchased for the older sons. The fact that he is not serving in the defence force suggests to me that he somehow side-stepped that duty, probably by luck, but possibly through dishonest means.’

  ‘So, he’s out on a limb?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, yes, father. He certainly occupies a precarious position, despite his airs. I believe he would be amenable to supporting us, but only if we could prove, pre-emptively, that we are the stronger faction, and the one most likely to perpetuate his own, personal, status quo.’

  ‘So,’ said Lucian, thinking aloud. ‘Me, you, the admiral and Sarik. That’s four of us against Gurney, the inquisitor and Stempf. We can talk to Rumann and Jaakho, possibly Sedicae, but Skissor is unlikely. That puts us ahead, by my reckoning.’

  ‘Yes, father,’ Korvane hesitated.

  ‘What? Out with it, Korvane.’

  ‘It’s Brielle, father,’ Korvane continued. ‘If she is implicated in this attack on Grand, there is no way the council could support you. The general and the admiral are generous in their support.’ Gauge bowed his head to Korvane at the comment. ‘But Grand need only invoke the power of his Inquisitorial Seal. The council might be disbanded. It would certainly be torn apart.’

  ‘You are right, of course,’ Lucian replied, inwardly cursing his daughter for any part she might have played in this mess. ‘Whatever happens, he must not be pushed to do so. I’m sure only a higher authority than the inquisitor stays his hand, a superior with an agenda we are not yet aware of.’

  ‘What will you do, father?’

  ‘Well, my son, I’ve been in tighter corners, but not by much.’ Lucian grinned. ‘We find Brielle, and I face the council. This reminds me of the time I had to meet the prince of the Steel Eye Reavers, having earlier that evening stumbled upon his daughter and her maidservants engaged in an act that I’m quite sure no human had ever witnessed. I got through that, and I’ll get through this.’

  Later that evening, Lucian stood alone in an observation blister atop one of the Oceanid’s dorsal sensor pylons. The view from his vantage point was nothing short of stunning, even to such a seasoned spacefarer. The heavy cruiser stretched below, hundreds of metres fore and aft, from her armoured prow section to the clustered drives astern. The Oceanid was tethered to the tau station, the wounds of the first space battle still evident on the alien structure’s flanks. The fleet tender, Harlot, was pulling away from Lucian’s vessel, slow and gravid with her terrible cargo. Lucian recalled with distaste the replenishment of his warp drive, and was thankful such an operation need only be undertaken very rarely. It would take weeks for the stink of cooked flesh to be scrubbed from his ship’s atmosphere, he thought, resenting the mechanicus and their practices, but knowing he had no choice in the matter.

  Further out still, Lucian could see the various ships of the fleet: a dozen capital vessels, most of equivalent displacement to the Oceanid, some even heavier, some smaller. The Blade of Woe, Admiral Jellaqua’s flagship lay at anchor three kilometres to the port. Her mighty armoured prow gleamed white in the light of the local star, for the irascible and eccentric Jellaqua had ordered a fresh coat of paint applied before the crossing of the Gulf, and press-ganged work crews had laboured triple shifts to carry out his order in time.

  A number of escort squadrons were stationed around the fleet, each deployed to screen the larger, more valuable ships from surprise attack at what was perhaps the crusade’s most vulnerable point. Each squadron consisted of three, sometimes four, vessels, whose role was to intercept any enemy attempting to close on one of the battle cruisers, and each captain knew that his ship and crew were entirely expendable so long as his task was done and his charge protected. Such was the tradition in the Imperial Navy, and it made Lucian glad he operated outside of its command.

  Schools of smaller vessels, service craft and tenders of all classes, were clustered around each ship or moved to and fro between them. Last minute supplies were delivered, vital maintenance performed, and high-ranking officers ferried back and forth for last minute briefings and consultations.

  In all, the sight was one to stir the heart of any ship’s master, but for Lucian, it was overshadowed.

  The crusade stood on the brink of crossing the Damocles Gulf, but Lucian could only ponder his daughter’s fate. She had disappeared, and he had been forced to disown her to the council. The cardinal had ranted and raved, calling for the perpetrator of the attack to be hunted down and brought to justice, and Lucian had no choice but to agree with him. The cardinal had stopped short of naming Lucian’s offspring as the attacker, but had noted her disappearance, and commented upon it in council. Whilst the inquisitor lay in the medicae centre, recovering from his wounds, Gurney would not press his case, and Lucian remained in good standing. But Lucian knew that things might soon shift dramatically.

  In the meantime, the crusade would penetrate the dark region that was the Damocles Gulf. What lay within, or beyond, he had scarcely a clue, but a part of him, the scion of one of the greatest rogue trader dynasties ever to take the High Lords’ charter, revelled in the adventure. Another part of him mourned, for he had, in all likelihood, lost his daughter, whatever had become of her.

  Lucian crossed to the access hatch set in the deck. He had a ship to captain, fleet to usurp and an empire to conquer. Perhaps things weren’t quite so bad, after all.

  Chapter Six

  Lucian’s gaze was fixed on the chronograph’s hands as they counted down to the moment when the Oceanid would exit the warp. He could not say how long he had sat in his command throne and stared at the clock face; he had lost track of the passage of time, as it was so easy to do while traversing the depths of the Immaterium.

  He blinked, shook his head and tore
his eyes away from the slowly moving hands. It was just a trick of the warp, he told himself. He had only briefly glanced towards the chronometer despite what his mind was telling him.

  ‘Mister Raldi.’ Lucian addressed his helmsman. He got no answer.

  ‘Mister Raldi, are you with us?’ He caught a number of the bridge crew shaking themselves as if from a trance, looking around in mild confusion, before exchanging nervous glances. They feared the wrath of their master, expecting it to materialise at any moment.

  ‘Mister Raldi!’ Lucian called louder. The helmsman slowly turned to look at Lucian. Raldi’s eyes were blank and unfocused, his head lolling slightly to one side. Lucian stood from his command throne and crossed the bridge. Facing his helmsman, he saw what his own face must have looked like only an instant earlier. But where he, and the other bridge crew, had shaken loose the fugue, Helmsman Raldi appeared entirely trapped. Saliva dripped down Raldi’s chin. Lucian determined to take drastic action.

  ‘Sorry old friend.’ He threw a thunderous punch at Raldi’s jaw, sending the man crashing face down to the deck in a heap. Lucian bent over the crumpled form, his hand on the helmsman’s shoulder. Without warning, Raldi’s body tensed, and he turned his head to look over his shoulder, almost eye to eye with Lucian. For an instant it was not Raldi behind those eyes, but as soon as the impression came, it fled once more. Lucian’s officer shook his head and spat a great gobbet of blood upon the deck, coughing violently as he struggled to his feet.

  ‘What?’ Raldi gasped through his bloodied mouth, ‘What happened, my lord?’

  ‘Just the empyrean having its way,’ Lucian replied, a cold shiver passing through him. ‘Just the warp calling us home.’ He shook his head again, knowing that he would not entirely rid himself of the feeling until they were safely out of the Sea of Souls, back in the material universe. The warp was home to all manner of evils, and few ever crossed it without feeling its effects. Whether nightmares, hallucinations or sudden mood changes, every spacefarer was afflicted in some manner.

  Lucian looked to the chronometer once more, seeing that its hands had turned quite some way. The Oceanid was due to break warp in scant minutes. Satisfied that Raldi was back at his station, Lucian crossed to his command throne and sat back in the familiar, worn leather seat. He consulted the data-slates arrayed to either side, his expert eye taking in a thousand tiny details in an instant. His vessel performed as she should, despite her age and the rough treatment to which generations of the Arcadius had subjected her. All was as ready as it would ever be for the translation from the warp, to realspace. He lifted a polished brass cover mounted on the command throne’s seat, an action only he could perform, for the cover was fitted with a genelock that responded only to his own touch. His finger hovered over the large stud beneath the cover plate, and after a moment he depressed it. The bridge lights flickered and died, to be replaced an instant later with the crimson light used when the vessel was at general quarters. With that simple action, Lucian had signalled to his Navigator, Adept Baru, who lay in his warp trance in his navigation blister high atop the Oceanid’s superstructure, that all was in readiness. Lucian hated the feeling of another having control over his vessel, but had no choice. Only a Navigator could take a vessel into the warp, pilot its capricious currents, and bring it home to safety at the other end. No mere human could hope to emulate such a feat, and to even try was to invite disaster and damnation as the ravenous beasts dwelling within the Sea of Souls tore the ship and its crew apart, body and soul. Lucian forced the notion from his mind. This voyage was affecting him more than any other had in quite some time, perhaps as much as his first run through the Wheel of Fire in fact, or his last journey to the borders of the Maelstrom.

  A final glance at the chronometer told Lucian that exit was imminent. He took a deep breath and forced himself to relax. He’d done this a thousand times before, so why was he so…

  Lucian’s mind suddenly expanded, his perceptions stretched atom thin as the Oceanid reared up through the shallows between the warp and the material universe. He felt his vessel caught upon the crashing surf of impossible energies, surging through from the depths to burst into realspace. In less time than it takes to form a single thought, his mind’s eye was presented with a swirling cascade of impossible images and impossible concepts: birth and death on a cosmic scale, and a million, billion futures rent from the fabric of time and space and re-knit into a new path. From one strand of fate were sown five, which were plaited back again into a single strand, the sum greater than the parts. A cosmic fate, orchestrated by ancient powers fleeing their inevitable…

  Then the wound in the skein of reality snapped shut behind the Oceanid as she burst from the warp. Lucian’s pulse thundered in his ears, and he forced his breathing back to a normal rhythm. He looked around the bridge, seeing that the crew had evidently been affected in a similar manner, except Raldi, it seemed, who stood at his station at the Oceanid’s mighty wheel, as he always did.

  ‘Mister Raldi, how’s my ship?’ Lucian called, noting with approval that the bridge returned quickly and efficiently to a normal routine, despite the trauma of the warp exit.

  ‘Number three’s grumbling a bit, my lord, but nothing I can’t contain.’

  ‘Well enough, keep an eye on it. I don’t want us to be the first to call in the support vessels, at least not this soon.’

  ‘Also, my lord…’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘The sub-etheric veins are detecting a localised field of some sort. There’s some disturbance to station keeping, but again, nothing I can’t compensate for.’

  ‘Station nine,’ Lucian said, addressing the servitor at the gravimetrics station, ‘perform a primary scan as per Mister Raldi’s parameters.’

  ‘Astrographics,’ Lucian continued.

  ‘Yes sir,’ the officer at station ten replied.

  ‘Patch your readings through to the holo.’

  The holo-plinth on the bridge deck before Lucian’s command throne came to life, a green, spheroid representation of local space projected in three dimensions. The Oceanid sat at the dead centre of the projection, and the entire scene was shot through with gently waving tendrils of what appeared to be some gaseous liquid form.

  Lucian looked to the bridge viewing ports on either side, but saw no such phenomenon. Evidently the weird, twisting forms were entirely invisible to the naked eye, though the Oceanid’s various augurs could detect them, and Raldi could feel their effects upon the helm.

  Reams of data scrolled across the projection, and across the pict screens surrounding the command throne. The Oceanid’s logister banks sought to identify the source of the phenomenon, comparing the readings flooding across the screens to records held within the huge crystal memory-stacks. Lucian watched, seeing that the logisters would fail to identify the effect.

  Turning a dial upon the command throne’s arm, Lucian expanded the view of local space, the symbol representing the Oceanid at the centre shrinking as the view zoomed out. He saw, as he had hoped to, a number of augur returns, all within a quarter of a million kilometres, and all holding station. The returns resolved as the augurs locked upon them, Lucian seeing that they represented four capital vessels and an indefinable number of smaller ships, probably two or three escort squadrons. Lucian determined to congratulate his Navigator upon the accuracy of his warp jump, and ordered the ship-to-ship comms channels open.

  Hours later, the Oceanid was within communications range of the fleet, and Lucian stood at the centre of his bridge, a cluster of pict screens arrayed around him. Each had been lowered from overhead upon thick cables, and upon each static-laced screen were the head and shoulders of a master of one of the other vessels of the fleet to have reached the first rendezvous point.

  There were four of them: Master Florian of the Iron Hands Strike Cruiser Fist of Light, Natalia of the Duchess McIntyre, Captain Jephanim of the Honour of Daml
ass, and Commodore Ebrahim of the Ajax. According to their initial communications, each had arrived at the muster point within the last three days, an impressive feat of navigation, and one that belied the great skill of the Navigators selected to negotiate the unknown regions of the Damocles Gulf.

  Master Florian was completing his report to the other four ships’ masters.

  ‘I can therefore conclude that intra-ship transfers are unwise, given the nature of the disturbance. I shall manoeuvre the Fist of Light to a position from which our superior augurs can cover the widest arc, though to be frank, I do not anticipate any contact with enemy forces.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Lucian replied. Although the four vessels and their tiny escort were undoubtedly exposed and vulnerable, the chances of any enemy locating and engaging them in deep space were microscopically small. Mind you, he thought, Lady Issobellis Gerrit had believed the same prior to the Battle of the Hydra, and look what that attitude had gained her.

  ‘My readings confirm your own. There’s something deeply anomalous about this region, as we all knew there would be. But still, there’s something I can’t quite…’

  ‘You feel it too, Gerrit?’ Natalia interrupted Lucian. Though her image upon the pict-slate was grainy and blurred, he could see in it an unsettling hesitancy nonetheless. It was in her voice, too, he thought, a lingering dread that all was not as it should be in the Damocles Gulf.

  ‘I do, Natalia,’ Lucian replied, ‘and it’s not just the local sub-etheric. It’s the immaterium itself.’

  ‘You are correct, Gerrit.’ Lucian scanned the slates, seeing that it was Captain Ebrahim of the Ajax that had spoken. He had not met the man in person, though he had heard that Ebrahim was a well-regarded officer of the line. ‘My Navigator was afflicted by some form of convulsion as we exited the warp. We very nearly didn’t make it out. It was the closest I’ve ever come to…’