Rogue Trader

by Andy Hoare

  Rayne turned her head to look down at Korvane, before replying, ‘They are beasts of nightmare.’ Her gaze became distant as she spoke, as if recalling sights she would rather not describe. ‘They take a million forms, from gargantuan, world-razing monstrosity to flesh-eating parasite. They are teeth, claw, tentacle and maw.’ The interrogator stopped there, and Korvane had little desire to learn more, though he knew he would.

  ‘How were they discovered?’ Korvane pressed.

  ‘Initially, when outlying worlds surveyed long ago by the Exploratus, fell silent.’

  Korvane nodded, reminded of the misfortunes that had overtaken the Clan Arcadius in recent years, as ancient hereditary trade routes to the galactic east had run dry, seemingly without cause. Worlds that generations of his dynasty had traded with had gone silent, the once ceaseless flow of exotic goods slowing to a mere trickle. The clan’s fortunes had suffered so badly that Lucian had pinned all of his hopes on the Damocles Gulf Crusade, aiming to establish exclusive trade deals with the tau once they had been put firmly in their place. Grand’s Exterminatus had threatened all of that, but Rayne’s news spoke of something far worse than a threat to a single world.

  ‘Having perceived a pattern in reports of worlds once catalogued as sustaining life being reduced to barren rocks, my Lord Kryptman received dispensation to investigate. At the Explorator base at Tyran Primus, he found evidence of a xenos abomination so virile and ravenous its organisms can strip an entire world of its biomass in days.’

  ‘To…’ Logistician-General Stempf stammered, ‘…to what end?’

  ‘That is under investigation,’ Rayne answered. ‘Certainly to feed, presumably to reproduce, but we do not yet understand why they need so much biomass or to what use they put it. But they descended on Thandros like a swarm of voracious locusts, like a beast rising from the depths of the ocean. Then it was Prandium.’

  ‘And after Prandium,’ said Jellaqua, ‘comes Macragge, fortress home world of the Ultramarines.’

  ‘Surely,’ said Tacticae-Primaris Kilindini, speaking for the first time at council, ‘an entire Chapter of Space Marines can hold this species at bay. To assault Macragge is suicide on a racial scale…’

  Interrogator Rayne studied the Tacticae for a moment, as if he were a curious morsel on a sample dish laid out before her. ‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘Let me make this quite clear.’

  ‘The tyranids are more than a species. They are a blight, a swarm. They are a storm of teeth and claws and chitin and saliva, and they hunger to consume us all. They are a billion billion ravening organisms bred for one purpose and one purpose alone: to kill. Each organism is but a single cell in a mass that is spread across light years of space. Where that mass travels, its thoughts drown out the light of the Astronomican and cast the warp itself into impassable turbulence. Astropaths caught in that ‘shadow in the warp’ would rather scratch their brains out than endure the chittering of a trillion voices that all speak as one.’

  ‘So no, Tacticae-Primaris. The Ultramarines alone cannot hold this foe at bay. It will take every Chapter, regiment, Legio and fleet on the Eastern Fringe to afford even the slightest chance of survival, yet alone victory.’

  There was a drawn-out pause, before Korvane spoke up. ‘How long.’

  ‘In truth,’ sighed Rayne, ‘we have no way of knowing. Every unit of every arm we can reach is being recalled to Macragge, whatever their status. We may have months, or just days, but should Macragge fall, nowhere will be safe.’

  ‘I have already briefed Interrogator Rayne as to our ground forces’ status,’ said General Gauge. ‘Most of our units are at or closing in on the Gel’bryn star port. The evacuation is already under way.’

  Now the temperature in the council chamber was dropping towards sub zero, and Rayne turned her gaze on Inquisitor Grand.

  ‘You have a statement to make, inquisitor?’ Rayne said haughtily. ‘An objection, perhaps?’

  Grand’s hold on the side of the marble tightened, his knuckles turning white. Frost crept up the glass drinking vessel in front of Korvane, and he knew that should he touch it his skin would adhere to its surface. Though little of Grand’s face was visible beneath his hood, his scarred mouth scowled as he answered.

  ‘The Writ of Exterminatus has been cast upon this place called in the base tongue of the xenos Dal’yth Prime,’ the inquisitor growled, his disgust at using the tau’s name for their world plain to read. ‘I have pronounced my sentence upon the xenos of the world below, and that sentence shall be enacted.’

  Interrogator Rayne tipped her regal head back and looked down her nose at the inquisitor. For one of her rank to display such open contempt for a superior would ordinarily have provoked the most lethal form of censure. But Rayne was speaking with the authority of an inquisitor lord, and all present in the chamber knew it.

  Inquisitor Grand knew it.

  ‘The Writ of Exterminatus is hereby revoked,’ said Rayne, her eyes boring into the shadows within Grand’s hood. ‘By authority of my Lord Inquisitor Kryptman.’

  A sharp groaning echoed through the chamber, the sound of metal and wood distorted by the cold.

  Something dropped suddenly from the shadows above the conference table, smashing to a thousand shards and causing all except Grand and Rayne to pull back sharply and several to utter curses and exclamations. Korvane’s heart thundered as he saw that the icy table surface was now covered in bony splinters. One of the servo skulls had frozen solid and plummeted from the air, ­shattering on impact with the cold, hard marble.

  ‘To leave an enemy at our backs is–’ Grand began.

  ‘Entirely the point,’ interjected Rayne, her tone low and as cold as the air in the chamber.

  ‘It is decided,’ said General Gauge. ‘On Kryptman’s authority.’ At a nod from the interrogator, Gauge went on. ‘If these tyranids are the threat they appear, then the tau are more use to us alive than exterminated.’

  ‘Blasphemy!’ Cardinal Gurney spat. Rayne shot him another dark glance, and he looked to the inquisitor at his side, but said no more.

  ‘I think I see it,’ Korvane spoke up. ‘If the incursion is dire enough to imperil the entire segmentum, then the tau will likely have to face it too. It is not unheard of for humanity to stand side by side with xenos against a mutual foe. Have our forces not taken to the field alongside the eldar, against the arch-enemy?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Rayne. ‘And if the tau will not cooperate in this, they will face the tyranid swarm alone. Either way,’ she reiterated Gauge’s words, ‘they are more use to us alive.’

  ‘As a backstop,’ said the Tacticae-Primaris, nodding. ‘Better the invaders expend their energies against the tau’s worlds than against our own.’

  Interrogator Rayne looked around the table to each of the councillors, allowing her words to sink in. She ended her sweep on Inquisitor Grand, her gaze lingering on him along with that of every other councillor present.

  Slowly, the inquisitor rose to his feet. He turned without a word, and stalked from the council chamber, frost billowing in the air behind him.

  Leaning back in the seat in the passenger bay of his Rhino, Sergeant Sarik exhaled slowly. The pict-feed showed the council breaking up. The councillors each had a myriad of tasks to undertake, for the crusade fleet would be disengaging as soon as practicable. Sarik and the rogue trader had watched the proceedings in grim silence, barely able to conceive of the scale of the xenos incursion the interrogator had described. With a flick of a control rune Sarik deactivated the command terminal, the pict screen fading to grainy static.

  ‘Well?’ said Lucian.

  ‘Any misgivings I had about evacuating are now entirely assuaged, friend Lucian,’ Sarik replied. ‘The storm rises, and soon worlds shall burn, of that I am sure. Honour demands the Astartes answer the call to war.’

  ‘And Dal’yth Prime?’ pressed Lucian.
>
  ‘Honour is satisfied,’ said Sarik. ‘You are troubled?’

  Lucian paused before answering, then nodded. ‘Sarik, you are a mighty warrior, and a noble man…’

  ‘But?’ said Sarik, a hint of amusement glinting in his eye.

  Lucian smiled, though his own eyes showed no amusement at all. ‘But, your battles are fought in the open, against foes you can see and understand and kill.’

  ‘And yours are not,’ said Sarik.

  ‘Aye,’ Lucian sighed. ‘They are not.’

  ‘How then must you win your own battle?’ Sarik said. ‘Tell me this, and I offer you what aid I may provide.’

  ‘This is not over,’ said Lucian flatly.

  ‘Explain, please,’ said Sarik, judging that Lucian referred to something more than the crusade and its battles against the tau.

  ‘Grand won’t let it end like this,’ said Lucian. ‘Since the earliest days of the crusade council’s formation, I’ve suspected that he had something more than conquest in mind. The fact that he concealed his possession of an Exterminatus device suggests to me he never intended to suppress the tau, or to conquer them, or to contain them on this side of the Gulf.’

  ‘Lucian,’ sighed Sarik. ‘The fact that an inquisitor demands the extermination of a xenos species is hardly outside of his remit.’

  ‘True, but he was prepared to sacrifice the ground forces, including your own, in the execution of his Exterminatus. He’s a radical, Sarik, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘The internal politics of the Inquisition are no concern of mine, Lucian,’ said Sarik. ‘But I believe you are correct. Whatever his agenda, it is clearly a danger to us all. What do you think he will do next?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lucian, his expression pained. ‘But I need to be there, to stop him.’

  Sarik nodded slowly, weighing up the consequences, for his Chapter as well as himself, of what he was about to say.

  ‘Then I too must be there,’ he said solemnly. ‘Your Warrant of Trade is a powerful totem, Lucian, but so too is the Inquisitorial rosette. You will not face Grand alone, on that I swear.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Korvane pressed his back against the cold, iron bulkhead, listening intently to the sound of Grand’s footsteps receding further down the shadowed, red-lit passageway. The metal of the bulkhead was cold because Grand was exuding billowing clouds of frost in his wake as he prowled further from the council chamber. As Korvane readied himself to move on again, the frost under his hand turned to liquid as normal temperature returned, thin, oily runnels streaking down the walls.

  When the inquisitor’s footsteps were almost too distant to hear, Korvane pressed on again. His heart pounded with barely suppressed terror as he considered for the hundredth time turning back. This was insane, he told himself. In going after the inquisitor, he was putting himself in mortal danger, for Grand was known to be a powerful psyker and as well an accomplished torturer.

  Nonetheless, this had to be done, Korvane thought as he felt the now familiar weight of the ring his father had given him. The gift was far more than an object, far more even than the contents of the stasis tomb it would unlock. It had given Korvane strength and courage, even as it had loaded him with the responsibility of the heir of Clan Arcadius. That was why he was trailing an insane inquisitor through the bowels of an Imperial warship.

  Because he had to, because honour and duty demanded nothing less. Korvane had always assumed that being at or near the head of a rogue trader dynasty should remove one from the action, with legions of underlings to get the dirty work done. He now understood that the reverse was true. He could understand exactly why his father had desired to participate in the ground war, and it was nothing so prosaic as ego.

  Some things you just had to do yourself.

  With the Blade of Woe preparing to take thousands of passengers on board and getting ready to make warp, the subsidiary passageways through which Korvane passed were virtually empty. Every available crewman was at his station, attending to the myriad tasks required of him prior to departure. Korvane wished he were back in the command throne of his own vessel, the Rosetta, pursuing the fortunes of the Clan Arcadius, not engaged in internecine political wars with parties who should count one another allies against a common foe.

  Inquisitor Grand.

  Korvane tried to keep his footfalls as silent as possible as he stalked the passageway, knowing that such sounds had a habit of reverberating in odd, unpredictable ways in the bowels of a starship as large and venerable as the Blade of Woe. Even with the ever-present throb of plasma conduits and the distant whine of the drive banks cycling to idle, his footsteps might betray him to the inquisitor.

  More likely, however, Korvane’s own thoughts would betray him. Grand was a psyker of prodigious power, and while Korvane did not know if the inquisitor was an empath, he must assume that he was. He had to keep his distance, in case Inquisitor Grand heard not just his footsteps but his mind.

  Korvane realised that the air was getting colder, meaning Grand must have slowed or come to a halt. He glanced around to get his bearings, but the red illumination of ship’s night cast the entire scene in stark shadows. He followed a conduit feeding into a purge manifold, and squinted to read the text stencilled on its corroded outer casing. Sub-deck delta twelve, sector D.

  Korvane processed the coordinates, comparing them to what he knew of the Blade of Woe and other vessels of its class. It was hard, for the vessel was ancient and had been added to, renovated, overhauled and rebuilt numerous times over the millennia. The stencil told him that he was amidships, eighty-three decks below the secondary mycoprotein vats that turned the crew’s waste solids into edible tack. He should have known that from the low-level stink that permeated the whole deck. Another half a kilometre fore of his position would be the vast cryo-chambers in which slain crewmen awaited reconstitution, and twenty more levels below him was the low deck sump in which entire communities of mutants lived without ever crossing paths with a crewman. Recalling what he could of the Blade’s impossibly complex internal arrangement, Korvane realised that there was a tertiary docking bay not far away. Could that be Grand’s destination?

  Slowing as he approached a junction, Korvane drew his las­pistol and loosened his power sword in its scabbard. All men and women of his background were required to master such weapons, but he had rarely had cause to use them in anger.

  Coming to the junction, Korvane peered around to the passageways beyond. Grand’s trail was unmistakable, the glistening skein of ice on the bulkheads marking his passing towards the hangar Korvane knew lay to the right. Perhaps the inquisitor was planning to escape by lander, Korvane thought, before dismissing the notion. Somehow, he knew that the truth would be far worse.

  ‘Indeed it is…’ a rasping voice whispered from the hangar portal.

  ‘…much worse.’

  ‘Come, scion of the Arcadius,’ said Inquisitor Grand. ‘And you shall reap what you have sown.’

  Every shred of Korvane’s being screamed at him to turn and flee; yet he could not. One leaden step at a time, he passed through the open hangar portal and into the cavernous launch bay. Though only a minor facility compared to the Blade of Woe’s main bays, the space was so large it rivalled the interior of a mighty Ecclesiarchy cathedral.

  The hangar was cast in the bright, turquoise light reflected from the surface of Dal’yth Prime. The world filled the view through the open hangar, the air held within by an invisible energy shield. Serene seas framed the arid continental masses, the scene so pristine it belied the devastation Inquisitor Grand had sought to work upon it. How quickly the glowing orb would have been transformed into a black, shrivelled wasteland if the inquisitor had not been countermanded by one of the few in the galaxy with the authority to do so…

  Korvane felt his legs stop moving as he reached the centre of the hangar. Before him, held firml
y in the cantilevered arms of a ceiling-mounted launch cradle, was a matt-black, elongated form five metres in length. It reminded Korvane of an ocean-borne predator, its prow blunt, with numerous angular fins protruding from its length. The object’s rear section was a compact plasma drive with a single thruster, ready to power it through the atmosphere on the hell-dive of Exterminatus that would spell its death, and that of every living organism on the world below.

  ‘You are correct, Arcadius,’ said Inquisitor Grand as he emerged from behind the torpedo. As he moved, he ran one hand along the torpedo’s flank, fingering each sharp fin as his wizened touch passed over it. Where that hand caressed the matt-black skin of the torpedo, the kiss of frost was left in its wake.

  Korvane’s heart thundered as he forced himself to stand erect before the traitor. He would die, of that he was sure. But he would do so on his feet, with his head held high, like a true son of the Arcadius.

  Inquisitor Grand reached his gnarled hands up to his hood, and lowered it, so that his face was visible. His entire head was a single, badly healed wound, with clumps of silver hair poking out between knots of scar tissue. His ears were mere stumps, his eyes lidless slits between folds of wizened, twisted skin. His nostrils were ragged flaps of skin above his mouth, which was all he normally allowed others to see. His lips were formed into a bitter, feral sneer.

  ‘You’re going to do it…’ said Korvane. ‘You’re going to defy Lord Kryptman…’

  Grand’s sneer twisted further as his hand came to the end of the torpedo, his touch lingering on the flared plasma thruster. ‘Please accept my apologies, Arcadius,’ Grand leered. ‘You really aren’t worthy of an extended valedictory diatribe. I think I’ll just kill you…

  ‘That,’ Grand added with a twisted grin, ‘will really piss your father off.’

  Grand brought his right hand up, the sleeve of his robe falling back to reveal yet more ravaged scar tissue. Korvane’s breath came in laboured gulps, and his limbs froze solid as wracking cramp gripped his muscles. Slowly, one gnarled finger bending back at a time, Grand made a fist.