Rogue Trader

by Andy Hoare

  As Grand’s little finger folded back, Korvane felt an icy flare of pain in the centre of his chest. As the ring finger curled around, the ice crept into his heart. When the middle finger folded inwards, a dozen icy daggers speared into Korvane’s heart.

  Grand paused, bringing his thumb and index finger together slowly. Korvane felt his heart falter, his pulse becoming weak. The strength was rapidly draining from his muscles as ice spread through his veins. Blackness pressed in at the edges of his vision, and he tore his eyes from his leering executioner so that the last sight he saw might be that of the serene world for which he had given his life.

  His vision swimming, Korvane struggled to focus on the scene beyond the hangar bay portal. The turquoise orb of Dal’yth Prime was suddenly white and angular and entirely out of focus. With the last of his strength, Korvane struggled to resolve the scene, which made no sense to his oxygen starved brain.

  Then, the view beyond the hangar portal swam into focus, and Korvane’s lips formed into a weak grin.

  The serene globe of Dal’yth Prime was all but obscured by the sight of a Thunderhawk gunship rising on flaring manoeuvring jets, veering slightly as its pilot brought it in towards the void-sealed portal.

  Inquisitor Grand spun where he stood, turning to face the gunship. The instant his attention was turned elsewhere, Grand’s icy hold was relinquished. Korvane dropped to the hardpan, his limbs screaming with the pain of frostbite. Gasping for breath, he rolled onto his side as Inquisitor Grand stalked around to the opposite side of the torpedo, the inquisitor watching calmly as the gunship pierced the void-seal and set down nearby on screaming retros.

  With a last burst of gas, the gunship settled on flexing landing struts. Even before it was fully down, the hatch at its blunt prow lowered on hissing hydraulics, and slammed to the deck with a resounding clang. A group of figures tramped down the assault ramp. Korvane’s eyes struggled to bring them into focus.

  The first of the figures to set foot on the hardpan was a Space Marine, his formerly pristine white power armour scorched black and smeared with gore. A flowing topknot capped the Space Marine’s head, and his face was traced with an intricate pattern of honour scars. Veteran Sergeant Sarik of the White Scars.

  When Korvane saw the next figure, his heart leaped. It was his father, resplendent in his heirloom power armour that was almost as battered and dirty as Sarik’s. Lucian wore his hair in a style not unlike the sergeant’s, a hint at the fact that the Clan Arcadius had long-established links to the Chapter’s home world of Chogoris. The Space Marine and the rogue trader both drew their blades as one, spreading out as they approached the waiting inquisitor.

  As the two parted, a third figure was revealed behind. It was a woman, ragged strips of silver fabric flowing around her body and long, plaited hair streaming madly behind.

  ‘No…’ Korvane gasped. ‘You bitch…’

  A rasping chuckle echoed through the cold air of the hangar, audible even over the sound of the gunship’s engines powering down. Korvane realised the sound was coming from inside his own head, and the voice was Grand’s.

  Korvane’s joy at the arrival of his father was dispelled in an instant by the sight of his stepsister, still alive, and at Lucian’s side. Bitterness and hatred welled inside his heart, causing stabs of pain far worse than those inflicted by Inquisitor Grand. She had tried to kill him months before, but Korvane had thought her dead, as had everyone else. Now she was back, and it would all start again.

  But not if Inquisitor Grand killed her, Korvane thought as he slumped backwards on the deck, allowing the pain of the psychic assault to wash over him, to carry him away on the waves of a bitter, cold ocean of hatred.

  Sarik drew his chainsword as he stepped onto the deck of the hangar bay, his gaze settling on the wizened form of Inquisitor Grand. The floor all around the inquisitor was slick with ice, and beyond it lay the barely conscious form of Lucian’s son, Korvane.

  Behind the traitor, for that was what Grand surely was, waited the unmistakable form of the Exterminatus torpedo, sleek and black and held in place by the claws of its launch cradle.

  Sarik moved to the right as Lucian stepped to the left, aiming to encircle the calmly waiting inquisitor. Lucian’s daughter came behind, and beyond her at the head of the gunship’s assault ramp came Major Subad and Sergeant-Major Havil of the Rakarshan Rifles.

  ‘You named us traitors,’ Sarik called out, shouting to be heard over the Thunderhawk’s whining jets. ‘I name you traitor, Inquisitor Grand, and you will face my judgement.’

  Inquisitor Grand simply smiled grotesquely, and raised his wiry arms to his sides. The air temperature plummeted and a patina of ice crept across the decking towards Sarik’s armoured boots. He gunned his chainsword, but held his ground. Grand was no fighter, Sarik judged, but would be deadly nonetheless.

  ‘It is not within your power to judge me, Astartes,’ Grand sneered, his rasping whisper carried over the powering-down jets and directly into the minds of all those present.

  ‘I issue you this one, simple warning,’ Grand continued. ‘Depart this place now, before I freeze your blood in your veins.’ Glancing towards Brielle, Grand added, ‘But she shall stay, and face punishment for her assault on my person and her consorting with xenos.’

  Sarik growled, a curse forming on his lips. Lucian swore, but before either could intervene, Brielle had stepped forwards and was pointing directly towards the traitor.

  ‘You remember this, gak for brains?’ she spat.

  Grand froze, staring at Brielle’s outstretched hand.

  ‘Yes you do,’ Brielle sneered. ‘Now shut the hell up.’

  A sheet of liquid fuel surged out from the miniature flamer unit disguised as a ring on Brielle’s index finger. The jet speared through the cold air and ploughed into Grand’s chest, but truly the fates mocked Brielle as the chemical failed to ignite.

  The inquisitor grinned cruelly as he took a step towards Brielle, his arms rising to unleash a lethal blast of psionic force.

  As Brielle backed away from Grand, terror writ large on her face, Sarik drew his bolt pistol. He fired, the bolt plunging into Grand’s form and finally igniting the flamer’s fuel.

  In an instant, the inquisitor was completely engulfed in flames, the promethium fuel clinging to his body as it burned through his flesh. The robes were seared away, their remains smouldering on the deck at his feet. Grand had become a naked torch, his limbs wreathed in dancing fire, yet somehow, he was still alive.

  The human torch spun towards Sarik and threw a flame-licked arm out in a violent gesture. The bolt pistol was struck from Sarik’s grip by an invisible force and sent spinning across the deck.

  ‘Abomination!’ Sarik cursed, bringing his chainsword up to the guard position. Others moved in around him, Lucian from the inquisitor’s rear, Subad and Havil not far behind.

  Seeing Lucian drawing his plasma pistol, Sarik bellowed ‘No!’, but too late; Grand spun the other way and with another gesture sent a piledriver of invisible psyker-force into Lucian’s chest. The armour buckled as Lucian was propelled backwards. Brielle dashed towards her father’s prone form, and Grand tracked her, girding his flaming, twisted body to leap forwards with supernatural force.

  A figure appeared between the inquisitor and Lucian’s daughter, a power cutlass raised high. It was Major Subad. He moved with the lightning speed of years of training with his blade. Subad darted in, delivering a vicious slash to Grand’s stomach that should have spilled his guts across the deck. By sheer force of will, Grand was defying death even as the raging flames consumed his flesh.

  Sarik took advantage of the distraction Major Subad was providing, working his way around behind Inquisitor Grand. Subad dodged aside as Grand lashed out with flaming claws, searing a smoking wound across the Rakarshan’s right arm.

  Subad tossed the blade to his other hand without breaki
ng stride, and lunged forwards again.

  The curved sword scythed towards Grand’s head, but the inquisitor moved left, a tail of flame and roiling embers trailing behind him like a ragged cloak. He swept around the torpedo, moving in towards the launch cradle’s command terminal hanging down on a sheaf of cables.

  Sarik saw what Grand intended and moved in, his chainsword screaming. Rounding the launch cradle, Sarik closed on Grand, and saw that his body was disintegrating in the heart of the conflagration that still engulfed him. Slivers of smoking, charred meat were sloughing from his bones with his every step, yet still, his bitter, indomitable will drove him on well beyond the point of death.

  Grand was bent over the command terminal, and as Sarik approached he turned, his charred face a black coal in the heart of a furnace. His eyes, mouth and nostrils were lit from within, the fire so consuming him that he was no more than a hollow skeleton of blackened bone.

  The inquisitor brought his flaming, skeletal hand down and punched the command rune. A klaxon wail started up, low at first, but rising to the banshee dirge that announced the death of worlds. The illumination in the hangar suddenly changed to strobing red as the alert lumens flashed into life.

  Through the crackling of flames and the howling of sirens, Sarik heard distant, echoing laughter. Grand stumbled backwards, away from the launch cradle, as hydraulics engaged and white gases hissed from purge vents.

  Grand lurched, what was left of his body losing form and stability in spite of the staggering power of the mind that sustained it. As the traitor fell, Sarik charged in, his chainsword ready to deliver the killing blow.

  An arm looking more like the blackened branch of a lightning-struck tree was raised. The air rippled and an invisible hammer pounded into Sarik’s chest, driving the air from his lungs and cracking the plate wide open. He staggered back, fighting to remain standing as the rapidly failing systems in his war-ravaged power armour flooded his body with combat drugs and stimms. He rose on one knee, to see Sergeant-Major Havil appear behind the inquisitor, his massive ceremonial power axe raised in a double-handed grip.

  The sirens reached a deafening crescendo, and the torpedo’s plasma thruster ignited. The launch cradle lurched violently, and the cantilevered arms depending from above flexed and shivered as the thruster built power.

  Havil’s blade swept in across the horizontal, as sure and true as the executioner’s axe… then melted into splattering lava mere inches from Grand’s blazing form, orange gobbets scattering across the deck. Grand struggled to his feet as he turned fully to face the sergeant-major, who was joined a moment later by Major Subad.

  Sarik forced himself to his feet as the inquisitor raised both hands towards the two Rakarshans. The air twisted and distorted around him, the fabric of reality sucked into a swirling maelstrom centred on the inquisitor. Havil raised the haft of his ruined weapon before him, while Subad made ready for one final lunge with his curved blade. The air seethed and screamed, as if the universe were drawing breath, then exploded outwards in an unstoppable tsunami that propelled both Rakarshans backwards and out of Sarik’s line of sight.

  The torpedo’s thruster reached full power, and the launch cradle’s arms let it go. Instead of dropping, the torpedo hung in the mid-air for a moment. Like a predator scenting its prey, the torpedo blasted forwards, through the void-seal, and began its hell-dive towards Dal’yth Prime.

  Sarik was consumed by grief. He had failed.

  Grand’s back was still turned on the White Scar. Even through the pain and rage threatening to consume him, he saw his opening, and took it.

  Sarik drew the chainsword back over his shoulder, then swept it down hard. The whirring teeth shattered Grand’s hollow, ­flaming skull and cleaved downwards through his torso, shattered ribs exploding outwards along with a fireball of foul gas.

  The swirling psychic maelstrom still raging in the air exploded outwards, unleashed and unchannelled without the inquisitor’s fearsome will to focus its impossible energies. The air twisted around itself, turning reality inside out as dimensions converged and lines of psychic power burned through the aether.

  Sarik threw himself clear as the vortex expanded, rolling across the hard metal deck towards Brielle, who was kneeling over the barely conscious form of her father. He rose to his knees as the vortex buckled the deck panels behind him. He grabbed Lucian’s armour by its neck collar with one hand, and Brielle’s arm with the other and hauled them both backwards towards the inner hatch, the maelstrom chasing them all the way.

  At the last, Sarik pounded the hatch release, and the blast door crashed down behind him as the vortex engulfed the hangar. Witch-fire ravaged the bay, bolts of aetheric vomit splashing through the void-seal in a slow-moving fountain of impossible energies.

  The maelstrom churned outwards from the portal, spewing across the void in a rapidly expanding aetheric blast wave. The Blade of Woe slewed and listed slowly as the energies spat from her midsection, a thousand klaxons sounding as emergency retro thrusters coughed into life to correct the sudden and drastic course deviation. The very void of orbital space rippled and buckled, the globe of Dal’yth Prime appearing like a reflection in rippling water.

  Then the leading edge of the maelstrom overtook the Exterminatus device as it plummeted downwards, hungry to consume the cells of every living thing of an entire world. The torpedo quivered, its shark-form length elongating as if caught at the event horizon of a black hole. Black ripples passed along its length, and then it detonated, a million shards of metal streaking through the heavens trailing searing white contrails behind.

  A trillion murder-cells died in the furnace of re-entry, seared from existence by the elemental nucleonic fires.

  On the surface of Dal’yth Prime, a new sun appeared briefly in the jade skies, then winked out of existence once more, its passing marked by a slowly descending shower of meteors.

  Epilogue

  ‘Questions?’ said Lucian, slowly scanning the crowded council chamber.

  The crusade council had convened for one last session, but such a weight of business lay before it that the conference had ground on throughout the night. A million details had to be thrashed out, from the embarkation of thousands of ground troops to the distribution of millions of tons of capital munitions. Several hundred motions had been proposed, debated and passed in an effort to tie up every possible loose end. The treacherous, insane Inquisitor Grand had been replaced on the council by a Munitorum Plenipotentiary Delegatus by the name of Captain Palmatus. Lucian had never met Palmatus before, but found him capable and shrewd, and the council’s business had been conducted with a speed and efficiency not seen throughout the entire crusade.

  With all of the council seats occupied for the first time in what seemed like months, the chamber had filled with other officials, many of whom had a statement or request to make. Master Karzello, the crusade fleet’s senior astropath, came before the council and told of the alien snarls and screeches resounding through the minds of the astropathic choirs, driving some insane and others to take their own lives. Interrogator Rayne confirmed the phenomenon as the gestalt echo of a trillion xenos minds, howling their hunger into the void. Pator Ottavi, the Navigator Korvane had brought into the council, described the shadow that had settled over the warp, even blocking out the light of the sacred Astronomican which shone from distant Terra and guided the Imperium’s vessels through the benighted void.

  Others too had spoken. The Ultramarines sergeant Arcan had told of his urgent need to return to his home world, and requested the aid of his brother Chapters. Arcan was scarcely recovered from the wounds inflicted on his body when his Rhino had been struck by fusion blaster fire, and both of his legs had been replaced by heavy augmetics. Despite his injuries, the Ultramarine’s words had stirred the hearts of those present, and all who had the authority to do so had pledged their aid in the defence of Ultramar.

  Then,
the tau had come before the council. Few of those crowded into the council chamber had even laid eyes on their foe; in fact most had never before confronted any type of sentient alien. When Aura and his fire caste honour guard had entered the chamber, utter silence had descended. The Space Marines had watched impassively, not acknowledging the aliens’ presence but at least refraining from pumping a magazine full of mass-reactive explosive rounds into their heads. The Adeptus Astartes had far larger concerns than the tau, Sarik had told Lucian before the session, concerns that made these comparatively benign aliens pale into utter insignificance.

  The initial discussions had been stilted and difficult, with the tau envoy making all manner of veiled threats. Yet, Lucian had brought into play every ounce of his diplomatic skill, drawing on a lifetime’s experience of trading with all manner of societies and races the length and breadth of the Imperium. With Rayne’s blessing, Lucian had imparted something of the coming tyranid swarm, though he had twisted the truth to suggest that the tau were actually in more danger than the Imperium. It was hoped that in doing so the tau would allow the Imperium to depart unopposed while they fortified their worlds against the coming storm, and cause them to focus all of their efforts against the tyranids. Whether or not the envoy had entirely believed him, Lucian could not be sure; but regardless, face was saved and honour maintained, and the tau had not only agreed to allow the fleet to disengage, but the seeds of future cooperation had been sown.

  Most importantly, from Lucian’s own perspective, he had forged a number of highly lucrative, exclusive contact treaties with the tau, securing the fortunes of the Clan Arcadius for decades to come. His mind had wandered as the council session had dragged on into the early morning, Lucian calculating the profit his dynasty stood to make. Perhaps he would rebuild the family manse in Zealandia Hab on Terra, or purchase a paradisiacal garden world for the same outlay.