“Hmm.” Calpurnia was brooding as she took a message chit from a runner who had shuffled in and was looking nervously at the tech-priest and his retinue.
“If I may be so bold as to wonder, Arbitor Calpurnia, I can’t help noticing that no similar problem to this appears in the Mechanicus’ own archives on the Phrax succession, although I confirmed that we assisted in verifying the genes of contesting heirs. Now although I don’t wish to be less than tactful…”
“No offence taken, magos. As I said, the precedents are for hearings at the Wall, and holding the hearing there is one area of tradition that I want to get away from. There are already signs of possible foul play and I want this hearing somewhere we control absolutely, not where both parties can play hide-and-go-backstab through the Augustaeum for days before and afterwards. I found out the hard way how much potential there is to be mucked around by all sorts of interests when you’re sitting in the middle of Bosporian Hive, no matter how safe you think you are.”
Sanja, who had been caught up first-hand in Calpurnia’s experience of the Bosporian’s brutal intrigues, bowed agreement.
“And I got caught out,” she went on. “Had I thought about complications like this I might’ve stayed there.” She grimaced. “Actually, no I wouldn’t. But I wouldn’t have had you fly a third of the way across the planet on an errand that turned out to be a non-starter, magos, and for that you shall have a written apology over my seal. I had no business being that careless.”
Sanja waved the words away. “Fault attaches to me, too, since I should certainly have made sure before my departure that you understood everything that the Mechanicus would require of you.” They were moving towards a narrow hall door; the arbitrators standing guard there presented arms as they passed through.
“And I am sure that the problems need not be fatal to the endeavour, in any event,” said Sanja as they turned into the passage outside. It was narrow enough that only the four little servitors could comfortably walk two abreast. “There are a number of ceremonies of diagnosis that I could perform in the fortress as it stands. They will not have the ceremonial weight of the Helispex, whose formal stamp I accept is a traditional part of the succession. However, if you are after simple genetic confirmation so that you can move on to legalities, I should be able to meet your requirements. Who are these two again?”
“One a son by his late wife, one a son by a concubine on board the flotilla itself, according to our information.”
“Well, I can guarantee that given a day or two with their samples I can—arbitor?”
Calpurnia had come to a halt in the middle of the corridor and was reading the chit under one of the brighter ceiling lamps. As she finished her arm twitched as if she wanted to throw the thing away down the passageway.
“I don’t believe this. What does the idiot think this is, some kind of bloody carnival? What the hell is he doing all the way out here?” She set off again, at a pace that Sanja found difficult to match with dignity. “Why isn’t he back where I told him to be?”
“Arbitor, may I ask who you’re talking about?”
“Simova! That pompous, gawping Reverend Simova.”
The Gyga VII, In the flotilla of Hoyyon Phrax,
Batrista midsystem docks
Someone had told him they were in-system again, one last stop at Batrista, as much a regrouping stop as anything, before the ride down a cascading warp current to Hydraphur. Nils Petronas, no longer ensign but rogue trader-apparent Nils Petronas, didn’t care. He had almost forgotten there was a flotilla, a system, an Imperium out there. His world had narrowed to the vaulted ward-chamber on the Gyga VII, and the wide four-poster bed on the dais in the centre of it, directly beneath the tall dome in the ceiling, and his own body, and pain.
He tried to tell himself every so often that not truly knowing what was happening to him before had made it worse, that now he knew what was wracking his body he could deal with whatever else might happen. But there were times when it got so bad that this didn’t help at all, when the pain got worse and he lost the ability to think clearly enough to tell himself anything. They would not help him through the pain, either. Your system must grow into its changes, they had told him. If we numb you even a little your body may lose the ability to govern the changes, they had told him. We will not risk you, they had told him.
Maybe that was it, and maybe it wasn’t. Petronas thought it wasn’t all of it. The magos didn’t seem to care, but Petronas had seen D’Leste’s eyes light up and his tongue creep into the corner of his mouth while he watched the spasms light Petronas’ nerves up like a sun-flare.
When there was no pain at all he would sleep as much as he could; indeed, those times he often dropped straight down into exhausted unconsciousness, or at least into a blissful drowsiness in which he wanted no troubling thoughts at all. It was when there was just enough pain to run along his nerves like a whetstone and make his thoughts cool and sharp that Petronas closed his eyes gently and worked on his plans.
Once his treatment was complete, he would succeed to the charter and become the new Rogue Trader Phrax, On that he believed them. The guests at that fateful dinner had not been selected to help the flotilla bond—as Gensh the (dead) idiot had told them all—it had been a way to get all the promising subjects that D’Leste and Behaya had identified between them, a way to administer the first stage of the serum.
Nobody in the flotilla knew if the gene-treatments Dyobann had designed had been tried before, anywhere, ever. The magos had based them on scriptures he had found in the wreckage of an explorator ship that had been studying a mercenary xenos breed, combined with treatises on the transformative gene-seed of the Astartes that no one outside the bio-forges of Mars was supposed to own any more. But the treatments themselves were an unknown quantity and they had needed an inconspicuous way of exposing their candidates to the trigger-serum.
And Petronas was the one who’d survived, although D’Leste had told him in a less guarded moment that they had clawed him back from the edge more than once. He was the one they had been the most confident of, the one that they had actually been hoping to work with: the fact that he looked more than a little like the young Hoyyon Phrax was a bonus.
“Does that mean I’m really Hoyyon’s son?” Petronas had asked hesitantly when he had heard this. There had been a bundle of serum tubes running into his mouth at the time, making him careful as he shaped his words. But D’Leste and Trazelli, who had been watching over him at the time, had both burst out laughing.
“No, you cheeky little…, you’re not the child of the trader,” Trazelli had told him. “Didn’t you know that his whores were allowed to roam a little in the old man’s later years? He was never very randy in the first place. I’ve heard tell in some quarters that Gait even needed to proggle him along a little to make sure there was any kind of heir at all, although if he’d known then what we all know now I suppose he wouldn’t have bothered.”
They had all fallen silent for a little while as one of Dyobann’s servitor-aides detached the tubes from Petronas’ gullet. When the coughing had died down and the water he swilled and spat no longer had any red in it, Petronas had dabbed at his eyes and cautiously asked what Trazelli had meant. They told him amiably enough—by now they didn’t seem to care what he learned. What threat could this sweating, gulping little creature in its thicket of medicae devices be? And that was fine.
“Varro Phrax, you’ve probably heard his name,” said D’Leste. “He’s the target here, or at least his claim to the charter is. It’s a claim that has to be knocked over, for the sake of the charter and the Phrax name and the flotilla. Harsh decision, maybe, but our first loyalty is to the line of Phrax as we see it. Varro is unacceptable. An overindulged little playboy who has not done a thing to earn a claim on the charter other than have some Phrax genes sloshing around in him. And if a succession is so weakly constructed as to be based on that rather than true worthiness, well then we can challenge in the same way.” The loo
k on the apothecary’s face had been just a little too carefully composed, and as he had listened to him Petronas had realised that D’Leste was forcing himself to believe in what he was saying. Since that moment Petronas had no doubt: this was a power-grab, nothing more. And that was fine too.
“Anyway,” said Trazelli, “if there were no other direct heirs this’d be a lot easier. The key is blood proximity, do you see? You’re a reasonably bright boy. Now I don’t know much about this—well, I know about drawing blood, but not playing with it, ha—but the idea is that if we show blood proximity then we’re all but there.”
Blood proximity. It was a good term. Petronas had remembered it and held onto it as he lay in the four-poster now and watched Dyobann’s servitors, with their spidery limbs and inlays of pearl ivory and ruby. They glided between biotic vats and sample-vials, centrifuges and arrays of pipes and dishes. Occasionally one would extrude a worm from a limb or face and slide it into one aperture or another in the banked lecterns that housed the cogitator engines. Petronas understood that then they were talking to the engines beneath their fingertips, and maybe more elsewhere on the ship, although he didn’t fully understand how. Dyobann’s pulpit was behind his head, although the bed and his own weakened body meant that he had not been able to twist around to see it. The magos stood there when he was overseeing the servitors and some kind of machine-witchery allowed him to see from their eyes and control them without any commands that Petronas could hear.
Beyond his feet, hanging over the door to the chamber, was a great pict-plate that showed a constantly rippling mosaic of images: elegant patterns of lines and circles etched in green light, strange greyish ovals and ellipses that seemed to move and swim, and strange strips of oscillating colours and spinning runes that Petronas couldn’t read. On Dyobann’s previous visit he had mustered the courage to ask what those images were and the magos had replied, “that is how I see your blood.” Something about that had disturbed Petronas so much that he had lain back with his eyes closed and not opened them again until he knew Dyobann had gone.
Had there been no direct heir, no son Varro, the flotilla could perhaps have escaped with little or no tampering and this whole exercise might not have been necessary at all. But contesting the succession in a court of the Adeptus meant they would have to produce not just a tissue sample but a challenger whose blood would show gene-traces of Hoyyon Phrax himself. He supposed, then, that it could be expected to hurt when artificial viruses and alchemic serums were working their way through his metabolism, twisting and rewriting his fundamental blood-print to show that he was the son of someone whose son he was not.
So he let Dyobann and D’Leste work on him. When they were satisfied, he was told, he would be moved to the Callyac’s Promise where Gait would work on him too, making sure he could talk about Hoyyon as a father, talk about the flotilla as his own, and never arouse suspicion even from one who really had spent his first ten years living with Phrax as a father. When it was over he would be the little merchant prince, decked out and properly primed, ready to dance on the flotilla masters’ strings while they got themselves a charter and to be their pretty figurehead after they had it.
And that was fine too. Really. All of it was fine.
Nils Petronas as-was, Petronas Phrax as-was-becoming, didn’t know if Dyobann could pull it off. He had taken in more through the pain and the occasional delirium than he had allowed them to see, and he knew the flotilla masters were taking a roll of the dice on whether his rewritten blood-prints would fool the Arbites and steal Hoyyon’s legacy away. But he had already decided that, whether they got away with it or not, whether they got the charter or not, he owed something for his mother and Rengill and Nimmond and Omya and all the others.
Petronas lay under the sheet and made his hands into fists. He could hold them, now, for a count of five hundred and he grinned as his nails sank into his palms and drew little red arcs of his strange, changing blood.
Nils Petronas would ride with the flotilla masters to Hydraphur. And at the end of the voyage—this he vowed to himself yet again—Petronas Phrax would kill them all.
Arbites Fortress of
Try an Tor, Hydraphur
Reverend Simova was standing on the sloping top of a tor at the edge of the interdiction zone, underneath the high grey walls and watchful gun-slits of one of the Arbites’ observation strongpoints. Beside him stood a herald from the Eparch’s Nunciate office, without much to do except hold up a scroll since Simova seemed to have decided to do most of his own talking. Behind the herald was arranged a single rank of white-armoured Adepta Sororitas, Sisters of the Order of the Sacred Rose that Simova must have drawn from the Cathedral garrison back in the Augustaeum, in full-face Croziat-pattem helms that hid their faces from the stiff sea-breeze.
Calpurnia leaned over the holographic pict-relay and watched the scene as it was captured by the sentry-post’s opticons, eyes narrowed with anger as the little holographic Simova jabbed a finger at the miniature arbitrator in front of him. There was a sound pickup at the post, but the wind on the tor and the natural noise of the transmission swamped the voices into incoherence.
“Do we have any idea what he actually wants?” she asked, and Arbiter Thesalka, the comms technician, shook his head.
“Our visitor is rather insistent on his protocol, ma’am, so once he was face to face with the senior officer of the post—Proctor Ammaz there—he went through a presentation of credentials and so on first. Full and formal. Now he’s demanding passage to the tor itself. Me says he’s got letters of errand from the Eparch. Ammaz told him no, but the priest didn’t look like he was gong to take that for an answer. Started talking about how his office was divine and wouldn’t stand for mortal sanction. Then Ammaz told him that if they flew into the interdiction zone without express grant of passage and an escort they’d be shot down before they’d gone two kilometres…”
“Good.”
“…and so now he’s back to trying to talk his way in again. He’s saying that he is here to follow up business with you and that you’re going to punish the crap out of Ammaz when you find out he kept the priest waiting.”
“Good work Proctor Ammaz, and more fool the priest. Are you passing instructions back to him while he’s out there?”
“Yes ma’am,” said Thesalka. “His tore is active but he’s got a helmet pickup that the priest can’t hear too.”
“Good,” said Calpurnia, straightening up. “Tell him he is not to give any ground. Literally. Not a millimetre. If they try to force their way forward then he’s to react exactly as he told them he would. No arbitor ever makes an idle threat.” Her left hand rose uncertainly, moving to touch the scars over her eye, then her expression firmed and the hand dropped to rest on the hilt of her power-maul. “Culann? Have the transport flier we came in prepared for departure, please, and notify our respected guest Magos Sanja that he should make similar preparations. Have one of the patrol fliers prepared too, for a trip out to that sentry post. You’ll be flying in that one, by the way, so you might want to take your pick of the hangar in person. The Reverend Simova didn’t appear to take a point I made to him when we last met. I think I’m going to have to add a little emphasis.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Coronet Triatic MRA-47, Imperial Navy sentry gate,
Outlying Hydraphur system
The first person to see the flotilla break warp on the outskirts of Hydraphur was an opticon rating named Jarto, who saw the tiny, distant pinprick of light as the ships came spilling through the gap in reality, surfing their momentum and setting their prows toward Hydraphur’s bright sun.
Jarto dutifully slid the bronze measuring rods into place and charted the co-ordinates of the sighting, called them up the speaker-tube to the Opticon Intendant’s control cabin high above him, and punched them into a grey card that was sucked into the slotted mouth of a gargoyle on his viewing-deck’s central pillar and carried smoothly to the gate’s archive stacks. He never thought any
more about it, as he never thought any more about any of the tiny warp-flares he recorded. Everyone knew Hydraphur was too well fortified and too deep in the Imperium for hostile traffic—Jarto’s priority was earning enough commendations for a transfer off this crowded, Emperor-forsaken little pocket of tedium and back to one of the big planetside bases, where the fortifications went deep under the crust and there were warm rooms, and women, and forgotten little passageways where a man could ran a still.
So if the first man to see the arriving flotilla did not, perhaps, accord it the importance its masters would want, that would not last for long. The astropath in the top spire of the gate’s slender metal spindle sent a hail to the flotilla which was courteously returned, and then a message by both astropathy and vox to the naval squadron of Captain Irian Traze, the nearest node in the complex web of warship patrols that prowled all through Hydraphur.
The Navy’s goodwill toward the Phrax flotilla tarnished quickly. Despite an invitation, then a request, then a demand that it halt one hundred and fifty kilometres out from Coronet Triatic MRA-47 to await escort, the flotilla grudgingly dropped its velocity to a little under cruising speed and set a course that would take them between Hydraphur’s two ecliptics, around the star and toward the planet itself. Offended by the flotilla’s rudeness and unimpressed by the repeated and unsubtle references in its communiqués to the privileges the charter granted it, Traze took the opportunity to give his squadron a little live close-manoeuvring drill.
So the observers on the flotilla decks were startled to see the high, crenellated prows of half a dozen Battlefleet Pacificus warships bearing down on them, fast enough for some of the more nervous flotilla commanders to issue orders to brace for collision. The Navy formation speared into the side of the Phrax flotilla and then, in a beautiful display of piloting and discipline, the powerful warships wheeled around onto the flotilla’s course, effortlessly matching speeds. The flotilla crews, used to looking out of their viewports to the comforting sight of other flotilla ships blazing with light, now looked out at the pitted grey hulls of the battlefleet vessels, their arched gunports and the venomous, hulking shapes of lance turrets.
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 12