Rogue Trader

by Andy Hoare

Looking once more to the view out front, Lucian was forced to shield his eyes when two great, white beams of light stabbed forward through the darkness. As his eyes adjusted, he watched as the two beams began a wide sweep from port to starboard, crossing each other in the middle before resuming their quest of the all-enveloping darkness.

  As the Oceanid finally ground to a halt, Lucian saw the great beams settle upon the slab-like flanks of another vessel. As they tracked along its length, gothic lettering ten metres tall spelled out the ship’s name: Ajax. Not a single running light gave any sign of life, and every last porthole and viewing port loomed as dark as the rotten eye sockets of the corpse of some long dead leviathan.

  Lucian reclined in his command throne, a half empty glass of asuave in his hand. He brooded, his mood growing ever darker with each passing hour. The Ajax appeared, to the naked eye and to every augur trained upon her, to be dead in space. He seethed with frustration for he longed to assemble a boarding party, to cross the insignificantly miniscule distance between the two vessels and ascertain just what had transpired. But he could not do so, for the sub-space augurs warned that the ongoing disturbance in the fabric of the void made even the short hop to the Ajax too risky, unless no other course of action presented itself.

  Another reason Lucian brooded so was the effect that the Damocles Gulf appeared to be exerting upon his crew. The bridge officers were steady enough, and the servitors obviously entirely unaffected, but of the other stations and ranks he was far less certain. The crew chiefs reported a growing number of infractions, each of which was met with increasingly harsh punishment. Drunken brawls and petty thefts amongst the conscripted ranks were to be expected, but of late the nature of the crimes had escalated, culminating in a number of serious assaults upon low ranked officers. Lucian had ordered the chiefs to impose the very harshest of penalties, for he knew that it was only a matter of time before some rabble rouser got a mob together and went on the rampage. That had not occurred on the Oceanid in over a decade, and on that occasion Lucian had been forced to lead a charge into the enginarium that the mutineers had captured. Lucian had taken the thuggish leader on in hand-to-hand combat, executing him out of hand, as was his right as master of the vessel.

  But behind the ill discipline was quite understandable superstition. Lucian had no doubt that the Damocles Gulf was permeated with a tangible air of… something he could not quite put his finger on. It was a menace, but not in the sense of that experienced near the Eye of Terror. This was more a sensation of something… alien… permeating the very fabric of space, as if the region were not actually meant to exist at all.

  The galaxy was home to many zones where the laws of conventional physics broke down, or offered scant explanation for the phenomena at play within them, regions such as the Eye of Terror and the Maelstrom, where the very stuff of the immaterium leaked into the material universe through great seeping wounds many hundreds of light years across. Others were similar in nature, yet nowhere near as threatening, such as the Storm of the Emperor’s Wrath. Other features, such as the Wheel of Fire or Hangman’s Void were entirely unexplainable, yet had become familiar, for want of a better word, hazards of spacefaring.

  Lucian’s mind returned to the question of the Ajax. She showed no outward sign of physical damage, and so he was faced with the awful possibility that some tragedy had overtaken her within the warp, or at the point of her exit. If that proved likely, he would be foolish to lead a boarding party onto her, for fear of whatever taint might linger aboard. Lucian doubted that he could muster a boarding party willing to perform the task in any case, and all his experience and every ounce of Arcadius collective wisdom told him that such a course was sheer folly.

  Lucian took another sip of the thick liquor. He glowered at the slowly revolving holograph, his gaze moving from the pair of icons that represented the Oceanid and the Ajax, to the dark shadow beyond. It could only be a small, rogue planet, yet it appeared entirely impenetrable to the Oceanid’s augurs. The body barely even registered with the ship’s scanners, but its presence seemed to cast a dour shadow, even though it was invisible to the naked eye, entirely swallowed by the interstellar darkness of the Damocles Gulf.

  Lucian forced his train of thought back on to the here and now. The sensors appeared incapable of shedding any light on just what was going on, and there was no sign of any other vessel of the fleet arriving any time soon. He desperately needed to know what had befallen the Ajax, lest the same fate overtake his own vessel, or any other of the fleet. He had but one option.

  ‘Summon Astropath Karaldi,’ Lucian ordered the nearest bridge officer, ‘and get me another drink.’

  It was three hours before the Oceanid’s astropath appeared on the bridge in response to Lucian’s summons. Having waited thirty minutes, Lucian had dispatched a junior officer to escort Adept Karaldi, but had been informed that the man was otherwise engaged. ‘Astropathicus business,’ the officer had reported. Lucian had waited, but had seethed all the while. He was in no mood for Karaldi’s eccentricities.

  ‘My lord,’ the astropath said, bowing deeply as he entered the bridge, ‘please forgive my tardiness. I was performing certain rites, my lord. I could not…’

  ‘Well enough, adept. You are here now.’ Lucian walked to the forward observation port and looked out at the Ajax. The mighty spotlights still swept her cliff-like flanks, blindingly bright where they crossed.

  ‘Yes, my lord.’ The astropath appeared uncomfortable, though that in itself was not entirely unusual for the man. ‘How might I serve you?’

  ‘Come here, adept.’

  Karaldi approached the viewing port, wringing his hands in obvious nervousness. He regarded Lucian, before following his gaze.

  ‘The Ajax,’ Lucian said.

  ‘Yes, my lord’, Karaldi replied.

  ‘We can’t communicate with her.’

  ‘No, my lord,’ the astropath murmured, almost too quietly for Lucian to hear. But Lucian was close enough, so close that he could smell the liquor on Karaldi’s breath.

  ‘Yes,’ Lucian said, his tone flat, yet entirely unequivocal.

  ‘I cannot, my master.’ Karaldi’s eyes were wide as he pleaded. ‘Please, do not ask me to…’

  ‘To do your duty?’ Lucian replied, his voice now icy cold. ‘If I cannot call upon you to do this thing, what use are you to me? Why should I not petition the guild for a replacement, for one who can do his duty?’

  Karaldi nodded, and looked out of the view port once more. Lucian caught the look of dread on the astropath’s face as he squinted blindly at the Ajax. Karaldi lifted a golden aquila hanging from a chain around his scrawny neck, and cupped it in both hands. He bowed once more to his master.

  ‘Might I have an hour to prepare?’ Adept Karaldi asked.

  ‘One hour,’ Lucian replied, ‘no more.’

  Lucian had ordered the bridge crew to vacate their stations, all bar the servitor at the communications console, which monitored the still open, howling channel for any sign of life aboard the Ajax. Lucian stood in the centre of the darkened bridge, looking down upon the cross-legged astropath.

  ‘My lord, you have witnessed an astropathic trance, but I must warn you that what I am about to undertake is something different from that. Remote prognostication is not…’

  ‘I do not need to know the details, adept. Just tell me if I need do anything, and I shall do it.’

  Karaldi sighed, his shoulders sagging. ‘No, my lord, you need only watch. Though if you would…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you would pray for me, my lord. And if it is not me who speaks to you…’

  ‘I know what to do, adept, have no doubt.’ Lucian unconsciously patted the holster of his plasma pistol. Although he had but an inkling of what awaited the adept, he knew there were risks in what he had asked Karaldi to do.

  The astropath did not answer, for he had
already begun the rite. Lucian fought against the urge to prowl around the all-but empty bridge, forcing himself to stand still and look on whilst the astropath entered his trance. Lucian recalled the times he had witnessed Karaldi undertake an astropathic communion, and briefly wondered how different this might seem to those uneducated, though not entirely ignorant, in the ways of the psyker. His abiding perception in past instances had been of a sudden and dramatic drop in temperature. Would the remote prognostication be the same? he wondered.

  In a moment, he had his answer.

  The shadows of the darkened bridge suddenly closed in upon the astropath, flowing as liquid over the deck to engulf his body. Lost in a trance, Karaldi appeared not to notice, though Lucian could barely discern his features amidst the well of inky shadow that surrounded him. Then, the astropath’s body began to sway gently from side to side, and Lucian saw that there was something odd in his movements. The swaying increased as Lucian looked on, Karaldi’s motions becoming slow and languid, impossibly slow, in fact, as if viewed on a pict-slate with the playback set at one tenth the normal speed.

  Lucian watched with increasing horror, his neck prickling. Karaldi’s expression slowly transformed, until his face was a mask of terror. The astropath’s mouth slowly opened as if he screamed the lonely wail of the eternally damned, though Lucian heard not a sound issue forth from his throat.

  Lucian’s horror mounted still further as he looked on. Karaldi’s body tensed, every muscle pulled taut. Although the astropath’s movements appeared impossibly slow, his face blurred as if in rapid movement. He screamed his silent scream as the shadows all around closed in still further.

  Then Lucian caught, at the very edge of hearing, a sound that filled him with primal dread. The cold chill of the void filled his veins, the ashen stink of oblivion cloying at his nostrils. Yet still, he forced himself to look on, though he felt the claws of the warp tug and grasp at his very sanity.

  The sound increased in volume as if its source grew nearer all the while. Lucian knew that it came from the astropath’s still screaming mouth, as if it were the entrance to a tunnel along which something from a nightmare thundered ever closer. Karaldi’s mouth filled Lucian’s vision as the cacophonous wail grew louder and louder.

  Then, the scream exploded from Karaldi’s mouth and the shadows leapt back. The astropath’s movements ceased their leaden blur, his body released as if he had been struggling against invisible bindings now suddenly released.

  Lucian came forward as Karaldi collapsed to the deck, catching the man by the shoulders before he dashed his head against the steel plating. The astropath looked up at him with empty eye sockets, a crimson track running from each. What have I done? Lucian thought, cradling the man in his arms. He rejected the thought as quickly as it formed. I did what I had to, he told himself, for the sake of the fleet.

  Lucian bellowed for a medicae servitor to attend the astropath. Blood pooled in Lucian’s hands and spread in a wide pool across the deck.

  ‘Can he speak?’ Lucian asked, sitting beside Adept Karaldi’s recumbent form. As he did so he looked around at the medicae bay. Odd memories of the place surfaced in his mind: memories of his grandfather lying mortally wounded in the very bed in which the astropath now lay; memories of countless others hurt in the course of their duties to the line of Arcadius.

  The bay was stark white, a dozen medicae servitors permanently engaged in the simple task of scrubbing its every surface with caustic, sharp smelling antiseptic. Each bed along the bay’s rectangular length was crowded with a halo of arcane equipment, the operation of many known only to the tiny staff that maintained them. That staff now clustered around the bed at which Lucian sat.

  Adept Estaban, personal physician to Lucian, as he had been to an unspecified number of previous generations of Arcadius, stood at the head of the bed. Estaban was an enigma to Lucian, but he trusted him, quite literally, with his life. The chirurgeon had administered three courses of life-preserving rejuve, already having prolonged Lucian’s life way past the span of a normal man’s. The chirurgeon wore his white rubber smock, smeared with the blood of his patient, and a mask obscured his face. Various analytic probes and sensors were mounted around his head, through which he studied his patient intently. Estaban’s staff clustered around him: three female medicae assistants, each adorned in a similar manner to their master, and each smeared in a quantity of blood. A medicae servitor stood beside each assistant, grossly pumping clear tubes and cables snaking from its body, directly into the patient’s veins.

  Estaban looked up at Lucian’s arrival, his bloodshot left eye magnified grotesquely as it focused on him.

  Realising that the chirurgeon had been so intent upon the astropath that he had not heard the question, Lucian repeated himself.

  ‘Karaldi, can he speak?’

  ‘Oh,’ Estaban said, lifting the glass from his eye. ‘The patient is conscious my master, though in some state of delirium, I fear.’ The chirurgeon reached out a black rubber clad hand and touched the astropath’s cranium. ‘Quite what goes on in the mind of one such as he…’

  Lucian took his gaze from Estaban, mildly repulsed, as he always was, by the surgeon’s peculiar manner. He looked at Master Karaldi’s face, stunned at how old the astropath suddenly appeared to be.

  ‘Adept,’ Lucian said softly, but insistently, gently squeezing Karaldi’s wrist. There was no response.

  He heard Estaban mutter to one of his assistants. The woman, her face obscured behind a white face mask, adjusted a series of dials mounted upon the chest of the medicae servitor standing next to her. She nodded smartly as the liquid pumping through the cable from the servitor to the patient changed colour, from a sickly yellow to an actinic green.

  ‘Who…’ the patient stammered. A second medicae assistant reached across Lucian and made some adjustment to the catheter inserted into Karaldi’s bloody forearm.

  ‘All better,’ she said primly, smearing Karaldi’s blood from her hand across the front of her white rubber apron.

  ‘Karaldi,’ Lucian said, determined to garner some response from his astropath. He prayed the man’s sanity, or what was left of it, even before he had entered the trance, was not shot entirely. ‘You must concentrate. I need to know what you saw. What’s happened to the Ajax?’

  ‘The Ajax?’ Karaldi asked, some degree of lucidity returning as the intravenous fluid flowed from the servitor’s body to his. ‘My lord, nothing. Nothing has happened to the Ajax.’

  Lucian looked to the chirurgeon, who shook his head slowly. One of the medical assistants leaned across and mopped Karaldi’s sweating brow, her eyes regarding him with curious and mildly disturbing intent. ‘Adept, please listen to me. Something has befallen the Ajax, and I need to know what, in case it–’

  ‘No, my lord,’ the Astropath cut in, ‘it has not, not yet.’

  The three medicae assistants shared knowing glances, and the chirurgeon shook his head yet again. They appeared to Lucian to have given up on the astropath, perhaps believing that Karaldi was in the grip of some fatal fever. Lucian, however, would not give up quite yet.

  ‘What do you mean, adept? What do you mean “not yet”?’

  Silence followed Lucian’s question, broken only by the low humming of the medicae bay’s equipment and the patient’s laboured breathing. A cold suspicion crept into Lucian’s mind.

  ‘That’s it, my lord,’ Karaldi said, his blank eye sockets boring straight at Lucian as if the astropath met his very gaze. ‘You have the truth of it. You know of what I speak.’

  ‘No,’ Lucian said, shaking his head in denial, refusing to accept what he was being told.

  ‘Yes!’ Karaldi spat back, the madness so often present in his tone coming entirely to the fore. ‘Nothing has happened to the Ajax, yet!’

  Lucian stood, his seat toppling into a bank of medicae equipment as he staggered back. His mind reeled as
he looked upon the profusely sweating astropath, yet more blood seeping from his blank eye sockets to run down his cheeks in vile, crimson rivulets. Karaldi described what all spacers dreaded, a warping of time, in which the ghosts of events yet to pass haunted the present.

  ‘Sedate him, for the Emperor’s sake,’ Lucian ordered. ‘Put him out, and keep him out until I say otherwise.’

  Adept Estaban fussed around the equipment as he issued terse orders to his staff. Karaldi convulsed as a new concoction of drugs was pumped into his body, a powerful mixture that knocked him out in seconds.

  ‘Better now,’ one of the medicae assistants crooned as she wiped the astropath’s brow. ‘All better now.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Master on deck!’ the crew chief bellowed as Korvane stepped from the bulkhead portal, passing from the lifter shaft into the very guts of the Rosetta.

  He paused, appraising the rabble before him. The wide thoroughfare was lined with crewmen, each of whom stood to attention, right arm raised in a perfunctory salute. He had travelled to an area of the ship that was scruffy and ill-kept, unlike the stately corridors he was used to. Korvane saw immediately that these were not the crisp uniformed officers of the upper decks, but the real crew of the rogue trader flotilla, the press-ganged scum, the indentured flotsam and jetsam of a thousand different ports. He hated them, and he was quite sure they hated him just as much.

  Korvane cast a glance around the assembled men and women, crew members interrupted in the myriad tasks and toils they engaged upon each day, most of which Korvane had not the slightest knowledge of. Then, he noticed an unfamiliar element amongst the crewmen: tall, dusky skinned men and women, dressed in loose fitting, olive drab fatigues, dog tags clinking around their necks.

  The chief had evidently followed his master’s gaze, for he straightened up and puffed out his chest. The huge man, his bulky frame evidence of muscle run to fat with the encroachment of years, advanced upon the nearest group of strangers. Korvane’s interest was piqued, leading him to follow silently behind the crew chief. He guessed what was coming.