“Oh yes, clerk.” Petronas snarled. His eyes and teeth shone in the ruddy foundry-light. “Don’t think you can do a damn thing to stop this. If you do I’ll kill you myself and tell your oily little boss that someone down in the slums had a pistol we didn’t expect.”
Ahead of them one of the women was caught, crying out as she kicked armoured shins and bit gauntleted hands. Petronas regained his feet and walked towards her, and the light was bright enough for her to recognise him. Mitrani heard her scream “Nils! Nils for pity’s sake, you of all of them—” and then there was the snap of a las-round and her voice cut off. The troopers, finally starting to be disturbed by the work they were about, let her body slide to the alley floor as the second woman was dragged back.
The trooper who had her in a brutal hammerlock was also a woman, her face grim under the uniform bandanna and ash-goggles as the concubine talked quietly and urgently to her. Finally, when they were alone in a clear spot of mud together and the trooper still had not answered, the prisoner spat full into her face.
“Look at me,” Petronas told her as he walked up to them. Neither woman moved. “Look at me, Aralye.” Petronas said again, and when she still refused, walked around behind her, put the hellpistol to her head and pulled the trigger. Then he stepped away, faced the alley wall, and stood there for a moment shuddering so violently that the muzzle of the pistol chattered against the gemstone edging of his holster when he tried to put it away. He pulled two heavy plastic parcels from a satchel at his hip, fumbled with them for a moment trying to open them, and then let them drop from his shaking hands and made a curt gesture for the troopers to pick them up and unfurl them.
“Corpse-sacks,” he said to Mitrani. “Flotilla custom says they have to be burned onboard ship, so we need them easy to carry. Get on with it, we gave you orders!” The last was a bark at the troopers, who were standing and staring at him; after a moment, two of them drew serrated combat knives and knelt down by the first corpse.
“One of them knew you.” Mitrani whispered. “I heard it in her voice, there was no mistaking it.”
“We knew… each other. She was a friend… of my mother’s.” Petronas’ voice was dry; he had to gulp and lick his lips before he finished each sentence.
“Then why?” Mitrani was almost screaming, all thoughts of service and diplomacy forgotten. He had never, never seen anything like this. “Why did you kill them? Why hack them limb from limb? Nobody would have known! Why didn’t you help them?”
Suddenly Mitrani was half-sitting on the warm ash-slurry, blinking at the way his mouth suddenly felt wet and stung. He had never been punched before. Petronas stood over him for a moment, then crouched down to glare into the shaking clerk’s eyes.
“Because the third of the women to walk into that chamber aboard the Bassaan was my mother. Do you understand that? My mother. Walking in there with her head high. And there was nothing I could have ever done to help her. So if I have to lose my mother because that old bastard saw fit to finally die, well then no one else, no one else is going to go running away from their duty. Do you understand?”
He stood up and turned away, shouting at the troopers again, and Mitrani rolled over, scrabbled away on hands and knees and vomited again and again as from behind him came the sound of knives sawing into flesh.
The Flotilla of Rogue Trader Phrax,
Docking orbit, Shexia
“Do you think he’ll do it?” Gait asked D’Leste as they walked away from the meeting room. They both understood what the question was. Gait was asking if their subject would manage the deception. The question of whether he would decide to co-operate with them would have puzzled both men. What the subject thought he might decide to do was irrelevant. But D’Leste was not going to be drawn.
“It’s something to try,” he said, as he always said when he was unsure of whether the thing to be tried was going to succeed. The look they exchanged said all that was needed: a select circle of pragmatic people had considered their position and taken the only option they felt they had. What else to say?
As the ships began to vibrate with the power of the plasma coils and vox-hails flew from ship to ship and from ship to dock, they went to their posts. Halpander stood on a platinum pedestal surrounded by a holo-sheet of green crystal on which fiscal and logistical algorithms flashed and swam butterfly-quick—it was traditional for the Master of Logistics to begin every voyage surrounded by the signs of his post. Zand’s spindly frame settled into a deep-cushioned linkage niche as the ports on her skull spoke to the ship’s logisters and sent transmissions sleeting through her skull like chilly white lightning. D’Leste, no longer needed on the household decks of the Callyac’s Promise, retreated to his chamber and began planning his letter to Magos Dyobann. He knew that the Mechanicus cabal would be on the flotilla’s side, but the magos would be insulted were he to simply assume it. Certain formalities had to be followed.
Gait was left on the Promise, the only one of the conspirators with no traditional or required place to be, but there was one thing he thought it fitting he should do. And so he walked down the ramp from the speaking room, weaving slightly every so often or adjusting his gait without conscious thought as the ship’s gravity didn’t quite cancel out the ship’s manoeuvres. As the flotilla powered away from Shexia and out to where they would break warp, Gait walked down the long promenade that ran down the spine of the ship, connecting the base of each of its spires with a tunnel of crystal-clear armour-glass reinforced with rows of carved rockrete arches like ribs.
In the heart of the tallest spire he sat on a stool of pink and grey marble while thrumming augmetic drones analysed his scent, gene-print, walk, breathing patterns, brainwaves. When they were satisfied they flew ahead of him down a hall of chilly, unadorned steel and spat the blood and breath samples they had taken into the eyes and mouth of an intricate gargoyle embedded in the hall’s far wall. The trial was passed, the terrible devices in the walls spared Gait’s life. There was a hiss as parts machined to near-miraculous tolerances slid over one another and then one of the steel walls was gone.
Gait walked forward to stand on a little square of black steel on a floor polished to mirror-brightness. In a steady voice he began reciting each of the oaths of loyalty he had taken to the line of Phrax, begun on his tenth birthday and added to in each of the twelve decades since then. He found himself wondering, as he spoke each ritualised line, whether his doubts were showing in his voice, whether the listening machines were capable of deciding that what they were planning to do would trample on those oaths. But if there was anything to show in his voice, the machines did not hear or did not understand. The automata at the far end of the room, patterned after great men and women of the First Crusade whose names no one now remembered, bowed in unison and said his name in flat voices. There was a crack of power as the void-shield lowered and then the final wall parted like a curtain. And after so many trials and barriers the space beyond it was comically simple: a little metal nook with a table sitting under a bank of polished glass.
Gait knew the stories and the rumours, and knew they were stupid. No dire curse-runes, no pages of human skin or ridiculous incantations to appease dead spirits. It was a small, plain parcel of cloth cover and creamy paper, the writing across each page the regular, even hand of a competent scribe. What ornamentation imaginable by a human mind could go a hundredth of the way to doing justice to what was inside?
The book was held in a neutral gas formulated to prevent the material from ever decaying; the stasis field that filled the room whenever there were no visitors made sure of it. It had acquired scuffs and creases in its days as a working document, but it would acquire no more. Fine wires rested between the pages and in theory the machine could turn the book to whatever clause a reader needed to look at. Gait could not remember it ever being used. The flotilla had plenty of transcripts and copies to use day to day, the masters knew the whole document to the letter. There was only one thing worth coming into the ch
amber to see. Gait crouched down and looked at the last page of the book, the expanse of stiff paper untouched but for three marks.
At the top of the page, in an antiquated hand that made the letters barely recognisable, the signature of Beleusa Phrax. And below it…
…below it, a single letter, written down the dead centre of the page with five beautiful, elegant strokes of a nib: a cross-slashed letter “I”.
And below that, a little mark, a smudge, a dot on the page. Looking at it, as always, Gait seemed to feel the air shudder around him, growing close and thick as though before a storm.
He stayed there for nearly an hour, crouched before the case that held the Phrax Charter, staring with meditative intensity at the page and the twofold mark that signed it: the “I” of Imperator and the single pressed-in drop of blood.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Phrax Manor,
Asterine Lock, Gunarvo
Varro Phrax didn’t seem to want to talk about business, but Domasa Dorel found that less irritating than she had expected. That morning she had risen early and taken an hour longer than she usually did to go through her physical and mental exercises. And if all else failed she had brought a little flask of sweet-perfumed liqueur concealed in the fold of her mantle, a sip of which she knew would relax her if she needed it. But she had been lucky: the visit to Varro’s estates had been exactly the diversion she needed after nineteen dolorous months as a junior Navigator with an Adeptus Ministorum pilgrim fleet, surrounded by pious mutant-haters who refused all contact with her whenever they could and kept staring at the bulge on her forehead and making the sign of the aquila when they couldn’t. Varro seemed barely to have given her genes a second thought, and his home offered far more diversion than the cramped cell aboard the Song of Righteousness.
The giant enclosed garden they were strolling through now, fully half again the size of the manor itself, was a case in point, even if some of its diversions were more than a little unnerving to a spacefarer unused to wildlife.
“Now this.” Varro said, “this is the sort of thing that the charter will be very handy for indeed. Take a look here.”
“I see a very interesting stretch of churned earth between two large, rather dull trees.” Domasa replied. She was confident enough now to make wisecracks; something about Varro tended to put people at their ease. He laughed delightedly and pushed a hank of hair out of his eyes.
“Just earth now, Domasa. But here’s the thing. The Emerald tripleaf—that’s those two plants on either side of it—they’re very social plants. They try to co-operate when they sense another growing nearby. They produce waste as a result of metabolising their prey—you remember the picts I showed you of them in their native system?—and they pump that away through their roots. Careful!” Cherrick, one of Domasa’s entourage, had stepped closer to look at the tripleaf. “See how the leaves are quivering? That’s how the higher-order mammals on Stavron know to back off. You saw the way they lunge on the picts.” Domasa shook a playful finger at Cherrick, and he went red under his visor and made fists as Varro waved at the empty ground. “So they’ve spotted the empty ground and they’re pumping out the exhausted haematic fluids they can’t use, and guess what the Tygranese pufferfruit uses?”
“Uses as in eats? Hmm, could it be the kinds of, er, things found in exhausted haematic fluid from the, er…”
“Emerald tripleaf?”
“Of course, there’s no way I could have guessed that.”
Varro was laughing again.
“The pufferfruit are amazing. I’ve only seen one myself apart from in picts, a tiny little one in a glass bell in a botanical exhibition on Lynia three years ago. Then last month I paid through the nose for an original copy of Euseby Riva’s book on Tygranese plant life, and you should see the size they can grow to. There are all sorts of edicts about what flora you can transport to where, of course, and the Imperial mercantile controls are pretty strict. One of my best agents in the Kozya sub has told me that he won’t be able to send me specimens any more, because the whole quarter has been closed off by some kind of quarantine. But with the family charter, you see, well, what’s the limit on what I can do?” He grinned at Domasa and clapped his hands.
“Almost ready!” called Rikah from behind them, making Domasa jump. Rikah was one of Varro’s close retainers, tending to the same sort of uncritical jolly humour as his master. The sides of his head had been implanted with vox-receivers, the receptor vanes incorporated into ornamental frills that ran from his face around to the nape of his neck. Domasa thought them tacky beyond words, but Rikah was obviously tremendously proud of them—he had confided to her that when Varro had the charter he was hoping someone on the flotilla would put in augmetic muscles that would let him flex the frills up and down. Domasa had smiled politely while she doubled over with laughter inside.
“Hear that? We really should get going. Do you all have your cards? Have you all given your picks in? Everyone?” Varro looked past Domasa to her retinue, who were unused to being directly involved with their mistress’ conversations and shuffled nervously. “Dreyder’s been after me to organise another of these for months, we can’t let it start late. All ready to go up to the gallery? Rikah, let them know to bring some more drinks to the gallery, will you? Kolentin knows what we like.”
The twisting skyways that ran this way and that through Varro Phrax’s rambling garden of horrors were not directly reachable from the ground, and they had to wait for one of the little platforms to come rattling down on its silver chains before they could be winched up to the nearest one. Gripping the railing to steady herself, Domasa finally took an opportunity to talk business.
“Varro, we’re going to need to talk about the charter at some point.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” he cut in. “I know it probably looks like I’ve been dodging my responsibilities here, you know. When I lived on the flotilla they made sure I knew every day that I was going to grow up to be Rogue Trader Varro Phrax.”
“Good. But—”
“I don’t take it lightly. But don’t you think I deserved a breathing space before I take it up? I think it will make me a better trader, don’t you? Living in that weird flotilla, I can’t see how that makes you a rounded person. Wealth for its own sake, I mean, it’s stupid. I think I should use those resources for something. Do you have a garden, Domasa?” She shook her head and went on quickly before he could start up again.
“I know you’re excited about the possibilities it gives you for all this,” and she swept a hand out over the garden, “but I’m worried that you’re making too many plans too soon. I’ll be honest with you, Varro, you’re going to have to give some more serious thought to your succession.” This was the kind of conversation she was used to having in sealed rooms that had been swept for auspexes and spy-flies, wrapped in privacy fields with an astropathic choir drowning them out to any scrying or spellcraft. But she was proud of her adaptability.
“The trip to Hydraphur, do you mean? I don’t believe there will be any problem with getting there in time. Anyway, the ceremony can’t start without me, can it?” Varro stepped onto the elevated gallery-path that snaked through the garden and held out his hand. After a moment’s surprise she took it and was impressed when he didn’t flinch: like most of the Navis Nobilite her physique was skewed in more ways than just the warp eye in her forehead—her hands had only three long fingers each. It was the only oddity of her appearance she was really self-conscious about the others were all invisible under her gowns and robes, and most other Navigators didn’t care about them.
“No, the trip wasn’t what I meant,” she said, looking around. Like all of Gunarvo’s trading gentry, Varro kept a manor embedded in the ravine wall over the Asterine Lock and it loomed over them now. But his garden ran on over kilometres of canal-bank, an ungainly range of arboretae and ribbed domes on the outside, a lush mass of plant life on the inside, all of it hostile. Further on there were domes of elaborately engineered
climates for dangerous flora from the more exotic worlds which she was hoping to avoid seeing; walking the elevated paths over the predatory greenery in the main gardens was more than enough for her.
Now some of the plants below were starting to quiver as the gardeners began to stimulate their attack responses with scent-puffs, electromagnetic shadows, tiny patterns of vibration on the ground. The tripleaf thicket they had walked past was shivering, the edges of the plate-sized leaves hitting against each other with a faint chinking sound.
“The laws, then? I don’t imagine that dealing with the Arbites will be a problem. Nobody told me it would. Rikah, is everyone ready? Is Dreyder ready?”
“He’s bounding about like a puppy, Varro. He’s been sprinting in and out of the garden for the last two hours. He’s told everyone he’s scouting for the runners, he’s been taking them little tips and reports. They’re playing along. He’s fine.”
“You let him ran in and out of the garden like that?” Domasa asked, curiosity getting the better of her annoyance. The dynamics of Navigator families were very different to those of mainstream humanity, and sentimentality towards children was something she didn’t begin to understand, but she found it interesting nevertheless.
“Dreyder’s seven.” Varro told her, “and that’s more than old enough to know his way around the south wing. The plants there are all passive hunters, so he’s in no danger if he keeps clear of them. The gardeners won’t let him anywhere he might be in over his head. He’ll own this garden one day, remember. He needs to start young! I was twenty before I discovered predator-plants.”
“Speaking of inheriting, though, Varro…”
“Yes, the Arbites. I looked at the last succession when father got the charter. There was some kind of ceremony with a general.”
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 6