[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy

by Matthew Farrer - (ebook by Undead)

  “Are we overseeing the Naval judicature, or Administratum, or the Monocrat and planetary authorities, or our own, ma’am? I’ve not studied the underpinnings of Letters of Marque in the Lex Imperia.”

  “Neither have I, Culann. Because we’re arbitrators, not Judges. It’s their job to know the cumulative effect of ten thousand years of Imperial decrees on the law we apply, and it’s our job to know the cumulative effect of a hundred-shell Executioner volley on a line of rioters.” She smiled at her own turn of phrase for a moment. “On the other hand, take my advice, Culann, pay attention to any opportunity you have to see how the other pillar of the Arbites works. I like to think I’m versed in both of them, but I get caught flatfooted more often than I’m pleased to admit. Having Judges on my staff doesn’t make up for everything.” She blinked. “Throne alone, listen to me ramble. I’ve been around Leandro too long. Where was I?”

  “Imperial letters of marque, ma’am.”

  “That’s right, and why this isn’t one. We’re dealing with something a little over and above the usual planetary governors’ marques or the Adeptus wildcat warrants. I’m talking about the true rogue trader charters, the old decrees for the captains who used to fly right clean out of Imperial space, often as not. They would go to places where they never knew what they would find or what they would have to do to survive, so they were given the power to do whatever they needed to.”

  “Whatever they…”

  “My home was on the Eastern Fringe, you understand. Wild space zones and the Imperial frontier were a lot closer than they are here. There were a lot of stories about the great old rogue traders in the histories of our segmentum. There was one who used his charter to lead a fleet into wild space and raid and strip two xenos factory ships that were mining its asteroids. Then his son used the wealth from that to return and outfit a whole flotilla of ships and return to those systems to drive the xenos out completely. Then his granddaughter used the charter to recruit colonists from half a dozen Imperial worlds and found a permanent fleet of her own in this system they’d taken. There was another one who struck a pact with the Ecclesiarchy to transport a missionary taskforce out beyond the Imperial border—the accounts said they loaded an entire prefabricated temple into the hold of his largest ship to deposit whole onto the first habitable world they found, if you can believe that. He went out beyond the border and his grandson came back into Imperial space a hundred and eighty years later with a giant pilgrim fleet in tow. They had found two human worlds lost to the light for more than a thousand years, and turned them into an Emperor-fearing part of the Imperium. That’d be something to be remembered for, wouldn’t it?”

  They passed out of the tunnel, and Culann blinked at the sudden light. The car rattled up through the high reaches of the spinal concourse of a barrack level; beneath them Arbites bustled in and out of dormitory entrances.

  “So these are the rogue traders. The real ones, the grand old ones, the ones that these little pissants with a decommissioned Munitorio hauler and a life warrant from a local governor want to be mistaken for when they boast they’re a rogue trader.”

  “And so this man, this Hoyyon Phrax…”

  “Not Hoyyon Phrax, not any more. His age caught up with him somewhere out past the Anseelie Drift toward the Segmentum Solar.” She stretched and winced. “There was a riddle in the margin of one of the dossiers that some old clerk apparently thought was funny. ‘Rogue Trader Phrax never arrives at Hydraphur, but uncounted Rogue Trader Phraxes have left.’ ”

  “I think I follow it, ma’am.”

  “Well, do some of the talking then. I’m tired.”

  “Well, if each new Rogue Trader Phrax receives the charter of trade at Hydraphur, it means that none of them arrive here with that title. And if they all die away from Hydraphur it means they never return here, the charter does, without them.”

  “Well done, although I don’t see what’s so witty about it myself.”

  “It’s related to the way the hereditary charter works. There seems to be a different principle in operation to the usual Imperial laws of heredity.”

  Calpurnia, who had been leaning against a seat back with her eyes half-closed, fixed Culann with a cool, slightly amused stare.

  “You anticipated my advice, then, you’ve been studying already. Carry on then, proctor. Explain to me how it’s different.” Culann managed to catch himself a split-second before he audibly gulped.

  “Most offices where the Imperium gives a decree of heredity transfer instantly when the previous holder dies. I know that there’s often a ceremony or something to cement the transition in, but not like the one that’s going to happen here.”

  “Go on.” Calpurnia had leaned forward, and the light made the scar-lines in her face look livid.

  “It’s a quality of those charters, the grand old charters you mentioned, ma’am. No two of them are alike. We police the way governors issue charters far more strictly now, so they never contain anything too outrageous, and the wildcat warrants the Administratum gives out are churned out by a hundred servo-scribes at a time according to templates laid down by the Adeptus, with a space for a name at the top and a stamped-on seal at the bottom. But the old ones, well, they were tailor-made for whatever circumstances led to a rogue trader being necessary at the time. So there were some that gave the traders power to raise troops and make pacts with the Astartes—”

  “Well observed. There are at least two famous families who have parted with Astartes Chapters.”

  “—and some that appointed them as de facto officers of the Ecclesiarchy, like the missionary you described.”

  “Not entirely the same thing, but parallel, I suppose.” Calpurnia said. “I keep interrupting. Go on.”

  “And there were some that bound the charters, their bearers I should say, to particular areas of space.” Culann went on, feeling a little more sure of himself. “Possibly to make sure the new rogue trader remained in the area where his influence and skills were needed, or so one might think. And those clauses in the charters have never been amended or repealed, or at least not in most cases, because the charters were originally drawn up by the warmasters, or sometimes by primarchs or members of the Emperor’s court or His crusades. So there’s no one senior enough to repeal or amend them, and they don’t expire on the bearer’s death like most of the new ones do.”

  “Hence all the rather disreputable folklore on the subject.” Calpurnia said, “stories of rogue trader charters being stolen, or sold, or forged, or gambled with, which is a disgusting thought. When a charter can be… but I’m interrupting you again.”

  “All I was going to add was that the intent of the succession clause was that this charter can only ever be legally transferred in a ceremony conducted within the boundaries of the Hydraphur system. So no matter where else in the Imperium their interests take them, every generation, the Phrax family have to come back to Hydraphur so that a new rogue trader can be appointed.”

  “So they do. Don’t feel slighted by this, Culann, but I had Praetor Minoris Zbela search some of the oldest records we have in the Wall as well as your own briefings, tracing the Phrax Charter as far back as it would go. That’s a long way, too. This charter is for all intents and purposes an Imperial decree and the Arbites oversaw the actual drafting of it, from what sense I’ve been able to make of the records. Hydraphur was on the very edge of Imperial space back then, and apparently the intention was to use rogue traders to push forward towards the Rim so that the Crusade itself could travel on to Caliban. That was when the line of Phrax was granted its eternal rogue trader charter, bound to Hydraphur. I suppose that the plan was for a few generations of Phraxes—Phraxae?—to have civilised the fringe domains through trade by the time the Crusade returned ready to take them into the Imperium itself.”

  “A Crusade-era document.” Culann said. “I had seen accounts that mentioned its age, but I didn’t think about what that meant until now. Ten thousand years. Imagine what the document w
ill be like to look at! Imagine what it would have been like to be there when it was signed! To see, who? Ma’am, do we have a record of whose hand the charter is signed in? One of the Crusading Saints, or the original Lords Militant? Maybe Lord Marshal Wiertalla, they say he was one of the very founders of the whole order of Arbites!”

  “Guess again.”

  “Ma’am, I’m not sure I know of too many other names. The stories that survive of those times are so broken up anyway, and I remember even at the schola halls they said there was so much myth mixed in that we can’t, I mean, guess…”

  “This actually isn’t a hard one. I doubted the first accounts I read, for exactly the same reasons you just described. But all the later references to the charter in all the old data-arks that Zbela dug up seemed to point to confirmation, so I’m taking it as true. And who are we to question the received word of our predecessors and betters?”

  “I don’t follow, ma’am.”

  “As I said, Culann, it isn’t a hard one. Come at it this way. Think back to all the legends and scriptures and gospels and sagas and paintings and pageants you’ve ever seen or heard about the Great Crusade. Who’s the constant, Culann? If the Crusade was resting in Hydraphur at the time that the very first Rogue Trader Phrax was appointed, then who is the one person we can say for absolute certain would have been there to put their hand out to sign it?”

  It only took Culann a moment to think of the name, but that moment another dozen times over to realise that she wasn’t joking. He felt the colour drain from his face, and the skin on his shoulders and palms start to tingle.

  The change on his face must have been visible.

  “That’s right, Culann,” Shira Calpurnia said. “Him.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Shexia System

  At Shexia, the flotilla of Hoyyon Phrax came into port to take on certain supplies, make certain arrangements, purge the old trader’s possessions and ceremonially kill his concubines.

  Disposing of Hoyyon’s not especially large harem was a matter of routine for the flotilla and its acting masters. It had been flotilla custom since time well out of mind to greet a new heir with none of their predecessor-parent’s possessions of significance. It had been the custom for almost as long for the Phraxes to take concubines—the first that the flotilla histories officially recorded had founded her harem late in the thirty-second millennium—and if the whole flotilla could be considered to be essentially the personal transport, homestead and entourage of the current Rogue Trader Phrax, as the wording of the charter indicated, then it seemed logical that the members of the flotilla who entered the harem of the trader should go one step further, become literal possessions, and be disposed of as such as part of the funerary routine.

  So the thinking went, at any rate, and only the occasional malcontent saw any problems with it. Of course, the practice was seen rather differently by the Imperial citizenry at large, whom the flotilla people referred to as “tikks” (the origins of that term had been lost to memory, the contemptuous way in which the flotilla people used it had not). The fact that almost every tikk who heard of the custom reacted with shock or disgust irritated the flotilla no end. It was the job of tikks to go about the business of being tikks: having things to buy, or things to sell that other tikks wanted to buy, or coming on board to perform the rare piece of maintenance or repair that the flotilla’s considerable resources could not manage. It was not their job to pry into the Phrax family, whose job it was to pursue whatever the charter allowed them to pursue, which was, within a few token limitations that the flotilla observed out of tradition, almost anything. The Emperor Himself had said so, had he not?

  While the tikks saw the Emperor as some kind of distant but demanding god, the people of the flotilla tended to view Him as a benevolent former patron, the source of a very valuable signature on a document. That was another little fact that it seemed best to keep to themselves: new inductees to the flotilla’s petty-officer class were shown bulkheads near the bridge of the Bassaan, the flotilla’s flagship, where bolt-shell craters had been left unrepaired as a reminder that one of the few things the Phrax Charter did not grant immunity from was the Imperial Inquisition. Folklore had it that whenever the Bassaan broke into the immaterium the fifteen-hundred-year-old bloodstains from that terrible affair would for just a moment become fresh and visible again, but then few such communities are without a story of that sort.

  So as they flew among the dust clouds and barely-big-enough-to-be-called-planets that made up most of the Shexia system, the Bassaan and its little formation-mate the Callyac’s Promise manoeuvred up side by side. Bassaan was the more powerful ship, home to commanders, officers, brokers and fiduciars, a sleek and elegant ram-prowed cruiser. The Promise was nothing more or less than a floating palace pushed through space on a tail of plasma, a fat-nosed little block of hull sporting a coxcomb of steeples down its back. To some it looked like a claw, to others a small mammal arching its back and bristling its fur. It had been the private estate of successive Phraxes since the thirty-seventh millennium when Olendro Phrax had decided that sharing any of his other ships with pilgrims (even the fabulously wealthy, ostentatiously pious pilgrims he was doing rather well out of transporting) was beneath him.

  Once the two were flying close enough for the crewmembers clustered at the high-arched windows to wave to one another, the shuttles launched, crossing the tiny distance between the hulls quickly and cleanly, avoiding the usual bravado and fancy flying as a mark of respect, their doomed passengers wrapped in shrouds woven with refractor-wires that created fuzzy shadows over each stooped form and painted face. They had all known Phrax was dying—the man’s final coma had lasted for more than a year—and most were resigned. Only a few were weeping, and only one needed to be physically helped out of the shuttle and down the corridors into the funeral chamber. The air was quiet and solemn as for any unpleasant but serious duty—similar, perhaps, to Marking Day, when all the babies who had been born in the flotilla over the past year were rounded up to be presented to the trader and receive a ritual brand across their stomach.

  The armsmen stationed in the hall and chamber made sure that the whole business went quietly enough. The elaborate and gruesome ceremonies of earlier generations had been dispensed with, and the concubines knew their role. None fought, in the end, and after their ashes were fired into space they formed for a while a faint haze over the Bassaan before vacuum and momentum dispersed them. And so it was finished.

  Or so it was thought at the time. It was not until the flotilla was in orbit over Shexia itself that one of the watch officers of the Bassaan realised that the concubine inventory was not correctly notarised by his counterpart on the Callyac’s Promise, and it took the two of them together more than an hour to realise the document had been doctored rather than just sloppily prepared. Two concubines were unaccounted for, and over a dozen shuttles had travelled between the flotilla ships and down to the planet’s spaceport already. Already working out excuses to their superiors in their heads, they began organising a search while the word went up to the flotilla masters that the purging had been botched.

  It was not unheard of, of course. Concubines recruited from outside the flotilla had a particular tendency to flout tradition and try to ran, although most of the flotilla people did not understand it. Concubines, no matter the gender no matter the age, were always given plenty of time to prepare themselves. Fighting or fleeing seemed ungrateful, not to mention graceless and unprofessional. The flotilla had even dispensed with the old rites of live spacing or slow incineration: the concubines had been sent after their owner with a slender needle of instant-acting neurotoxin, as a mark of compassion. It wasn’t as if the flotilla were savages, after all.

  Foundry Level,

  Shexia City, Shexia

  “As a mark of compassion?” Karmine Mitrani was finding it hard to believe his ears.

  “Oh yes.” The young man pacing the catwalk beside him took a deep breath. “Compa
red to the old ways, which I think we can both be glad we don’t have to think about too much, it’s remarkably compassionate. That was what everyone kept saying.” He swallowed hard.

  Mitrani didn’t say anything more, but walked alongside the man, his features downcast. There was something odd about Flag Ensign Nils Petronas’ manner that made Mitrani think that more obvious sympathy or horror might be misplaced.

  Karmine Mitrani was an orbit-clerk in the service of the Shexia Dockmasters’ Guild, and he was good at his job. He should have been—selective augmetics, deep hypnotic therapy and conditioning for fifteen of his most formative years, and repeated physical and chemical surgery to carefully selected areas of his brain, had hardwired and super-sensitised his social reactions. His sense of mood and nuance was uncanny, his ability to grasp and understand odd customs and adopt them seamlessly was confounding. He could keep up hours of the dry, borderline-abusive banter that the farmship syndicates from the Novanjide sub used to test anyone they planned even the smallest commercial dealings with, or remember every tiniest detail of the family affairs of a fiduciary courier who had last come to the system five years ago, and ask after them in the man’s own planetary and continental accent, reproduced so perfectly as to bring his guest to tears of homesickness. He could count on one hand the number of times he had had to deal with people whose ways he truly did not understand.

  He was having a little trouble with this.

  “That’s why we’re down here, you see. Two of the damned little dollies ran away. Spat in the face of the rest of the flotilla. Pissed all over the respect the rest of us were showing for the funeral rites for old Hoyyon. So now we have to grub around here to make sure they get what we promised them.” Petronas stepped to the edge of the catwalk and peered over it.

  Back when this had been a foundry first and a spaceport second, great mazes of gantries and pipes had spread out from the railheads, becoming higher, denser and more intricate over the centuries until now the whole outlying city was a rat-warren of metal lattices rising high above the basalt, endless jungles of pipes and ladder-shafts and walkways in constant vibration from the pounding of the furnace sublevels and the craft passing overhead.