This time there was no invitation, request or demand, but an order. Navy pilots would come aboard with data-plaques and vox-links to guide the flotilla through the maze of minefields, sentry gates, gravitic tides and patrol squadrons that would, it was made very clear, wipe out every one of the Phrax ships if they tried to fly into Hydraphur on their own. Flag-Captain Traze boarded the Bassaan himself, and the first thing he did was walk onto the bridge and up to the captain, and send the man sprawling on the deck beside his own command pulpit, his lips split and bleeding from the swipe of Traze’s pistol barrel.
The Navy, as a rule, did not like rogue traders much.
The Flagship Bassaan,
Flotilla of Hoyyon Phrax, Hydraphur
And the feeling was mutual.
“Interfering grox-loving…” growled Zand. She stood with Kyorg on a catwalk before a great circular window, looking out at the great flank of Traze’s flagship Diarmid’s Redemption. A runner had brought them news of the orders and of the indignity the Navy man had inflicted on their poor captain. “I don’t understand why we’re letting them do this. The charter means what it says. We should be able to sail through their lines and be damned to the lot of them. You people lack spine.”
The flotilla masters had conducted a brief but heated meeting when the Navy squadron had closed in. Zanti, who had been listening carefully to Dyobann’s reports on Petronas’ health, had wanted to speed straight to Hydraphur and demand the charter. She was none too pleased at being outvoted, and less so at getting one of Kyorg’s lectures about diplomatic realities. Zanti was a woman who lived by the letter of the law, and the human complications that surrounded it were things she had never mastered.
“On the contrary.” Kyorg told her, “I have a spine. And guts, too, which was the other thing you said I didn’t have any of. Oh, and brains, you made remarks about those. I have brains.”
“Pah.”
“I also have bones, eyes, lungs, muscles and even toenails, and I’m fond of all of them, and that’s why I wanted us to co-operate with the Navy and not try to bluff any outrageous behaviour with a charter that they resent having to honour in the first place. I’d rather that all those parts of me stay parts of me, and not end up floating around Hydraphur in a cloud of vapour.”
“I told you,” snapped Zanti, “the charter’s passive protection is considered to apply to the flotilla even when a trader is not present to wield it. The codicils referring to—”
“Yes, but do the Navy agree with that interpretation? You admitted yourself, that particular boundary of the charter has never been tested.”
“It doesn’t matter,” snapped Zanti. “Our interpretation is right. The whole point of having the charter in the first place is so that the tikks can’t boss us around.”
“I don’t even understand why you’re impatient.” Kyorg told her. “Explain to me where there’s a hurry. We’re here now, we’re at Hydraphur. We’ll be shaking hands with the arbitor before you know it.”
“I know this full well, thank you.” Zanti was suddenly trying to understand why she had allowed herself to be drawn into conversation with a man she so detested.
“And has anyone told you that the real heir is still labouring through warp storms off Santo Pevrelyi? Storms bad enough to send out ripples that even made our own astropaths nervous.” Zanti glared at him. The flotilla’s astropaths were one of her responsibilities.
“They’re going to be ages yet, Zanti. Think of all that time we’ll get to work on the Arbites. I’m sure we’ll come up with some way to lay the groundwork in our favour.”
“You’re the Master of Envoys, Kyorg, you’re supposed to have plans to lay the groundwork now. And backups and contingency plans. What preparation have you done, exactly, to make the most of the time?”
“There’s plenty of time yet.” Kyorg told her loftily, sauntering away.
He had done nothing, then, as usual. She wondered if he understood how precarious his position in the flotilla was, and how he seemed to be wilfully making it worse.
She shook the thought off, made an irritated flap of her hand at the giant warship outside the window and stamped off in the opposite direction. If he wanted to make such a poor bed for himself, let him; after he was gone the role of Master of Envoys would sit neatly within her own portfolio. She just didn’t see why people had to be so stupid all the time, that was all.
The Gyga VII, Flotilla of
Hoyyon Phrax, Hydraphur
D’Leste watched the shape under the veil uneasily. Petronas’ eyes seemed to be getting more sensitive, and he had demanded veils to keep the light on the bed dim. D’Leste was rather grateful for that now. Dyobann’s retro-genetic treatments were taking a toll on the boy—he was barely recognisable as the arrogant young ensign they had looked at in the speaking-chamber’s holographic display.
“He’s stable,” came Dyobann’s voice as a tickle in D’Leste’s ear. They had taken to using microbeads around the bed, especially when they were discussing their patient’s condition. “If you obey my teachings, allow my servitors to do their work and stay vigilant, then he will remain stable.”
“For how long?” D’Leste asked. He was not looking forward to this. Something he would not have admitted to anyone was that he was frightened by the idea of being in charge. He had become used to the magos’ sure touch and preternatural calm. The idea of having no one to take a problem to was bothering him.
“For long enough. Until I return.” Dyobann informed him coldly. “You will not need to initiate any new stages of treatment. Should I be delayed, we have in fact brought our subject to the point where his tissue will at the very least be able to contend as a Phrax relative. We shall not know specifically what this Arbiter Calpurnia will require until we reach the moment of her decision.”
“We’re trying to find out what that will be,” said D’Leste, although he didn’t hold out much hope. Kyorg’s handling of it so far had involved delegating a clerk whom D’Leste was pretty sure was his mistress to send a message ahead. He wasn’t even sure if the message had gone.
“If she does require a live tissue-draw then I leave it to yourselves to improvise a solution,” said the magos. “I, however, shall do my best to lay the groundwork for it. This is why it is best I go. I trust myself more than I trust Kyorg.”
“Don’t we all.”
“That is not my affair,” said Dyobann. “I am no envoy, but I am best placed for this errand. Genetor-Magos Sanja is the one who will conduct the rites of analysis and he will be flattered by the fact that I have made a point of bringing him a sample in advance. The fact that I only need to alter a small sample rather than a full living being allows me to make more comprehensive alterations on the specimen I shall bring before him—” he held up a metal flask in one gleaming hand, “—but should my additional work be insufficient to convince him, I am also best placed to make the case for the flotilla’s continued ownership of the charter. The relationship between this flotilla and the Mechanicus has been most constructive for us both and Magos Sanja will realise the new heir cannot be trusted to let that continue.” D’Leste felt proud to hear that. Nobody had any idea what Varro would make of Dyobann’s status in the flotilla, but he had told the magos that Varro was known for antipathy to the Mechanicus and apparently he had been convincing. He pointed to the bed again.
“Gait will not be delayed any longer, I understand?”
“He won’t,” D’Leste confirmed. “Navy protocols will mean a delay of quite a few days travelling into Hydraphur, perhaps more, and Gait says he needs all of that time to make sure Petronas can comport himself like a proper trader-in-waiting. He’s more than a little angry that he’s had to wait as long as he has. That’s why I need your word that Petronas will be fit.” He glanced at the bed. “Will he be fit to deal with people? Learn things? He’s no use to Gait if he’s in a haze all the time.”
“The subject,” said Dyobann, starting to move towards the door, “is lucid a
nd in control. I have had him perform certain verbal, physical and logical exercises, and used pain relief to provide small rewards. You may convey to Gait that he should need no concessions to any supposed diminution of our subject’s capacity.”
D’Leste grunted. He hadn’t known about the exercises.
The double doors swung wide for Dyobann, and the magos marched away from D’Leste with two servitors behind him. The apothecary didn’t know what clout Dyobann had had to use to commission a dromon system-ship to carry him ahead of the flotilla, but he was glad of it even as he was nervous about the wrecked man behind him being left in his care. It meant something was happening, at last.
He turned back to the white curtain and put his face up to it, but all he could see was a faint hint of sluggish movement in the bed. He supposed he should go and notify Gait that his pupil was ready. Petronas would have to appear before the Arbites soon, after all, and Gait had promised he would have him acting the part.
From inside the curtain, Petronas Phrax watched the burly doctor walk away. He lay half in and half out of the covers: his lower body had developed regular, painless spasms that were continually dislodging the bedclothes. Even through the curtain the light was unpleasant for his eyes, which had become almost black, tinged with yellow, but he made himself stare after D’Leste until the doors had closed behind him.
Something had happened to his hearing, and words often seemed to pick up an odd, metallic, double-echo, but he had made out the conversation well enough. D’Leste’s part of it, anyway—the man hadn’t got the hang of subvocalising into the microbead link.
Soon he would be out and among the other officers. Soon he would be back with his brothers and sisters in uniform. Odd, discoloured tears seeped out of Petronas’ eyes at the thought, staining the pillow beneath him. He did not doubt that he would be able to make his plans and his needs clear to them. He did not doubt that they would side with him, not Gait.
He did not doubt that they would help him have his revenge.
The Sanctioned Liner Gann-Luctis,
Docking orbit, Santo Pevrelyi
Domasa Dorel, normally chilly of emotion and tightly controlled of gesture, wanted to throw back her head and howl.
She clutched the communiqué from Hydraphur in one malformed fist, written out onto flimsy ricepaper in the same coded syllables the astropath had fielded it in. The cipher was a custom one, designed for this particular informant; learning it from the file her Navis Nobilite backers had provided her with had kept Domasa from fretting during the turbulent warp-passage it had taken them to get here.
The news was bad enough that Domasa had suppressed the urge to shred the paper in her fingers out of spite—she wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t need to show it to Varro at some point. If he wasn’t yet convinced of the voyage’s urgency, this would do nicely.
So where the hell was Varro? Domasa had spent half an hour prowling the upper passenger decks under bitter mental protest: a minnow she might be in the world of the Navigators, but she was not accustomed to having to run errands like this. She had rousted Cherrick and his squadmates out of bed and set them to checking the lower hab-decks and the utility levels, and haranguing them over their private vox-link helped her mood a little. But too much was starting to go awry, and she hated the feeling that her assignment was going off the rails in ways that she seemed to be powerless to stop.
She tried to keep from pointless fretting, but as she passed like a robed shadow down the arched passageway to the formal dining hall, she found her thoughts returning to the problems like a tongue to loose teeth, like fingernails to a scab.
The warp storms were the greatest and least of her problems. She did not take lightly the fact that turbulence between Santo Pevrelyi and Hydraphur was building into a tempest of a kind she had never had to navigate anywhere near before. She trusted old Auchudo Yimora. He was a good Navigator. But no matter how good the man was, Domasa thought darkly as she stood in the shadowy forechamber of the dining hall, there came a point when even the keenest warp eye was useless except to set its owner to soiling himself with fear at what his ship had caught itself in. No matter how skilled the Navigator, he could no more steer them through a truly lethal storm by sheer skill than an athlete could learn to run through a brick wall by agility alone.
She thought she heard a movement behind her where the long passageway stretched off into the gloom, but when she turned it was empty. Domasa gritted her teeth and gave herself a mental kick—this was no time to let her nerves get the better of her.
It didn’t help that she knew better than most of the other passengers on the ship what sort of shape they had finished the last leg of their voyage in. Domasa had felt the great surges and rips of anti-reality that the ship had tried to ride with and push through, which had sent it swooping back and forth, on and off its course, sudden churns that had tried to twist the ship apart like a crepe-paper party-favour, blunt surges of power that had pushed the Geller field in almost to the hull and caused the warp engines to stutter and yelp in protest. Yimora’s skill had been breathtaking, the skills of the pilots in obeying him barely less so: they had turned the ship to surf the most powerful swell, spun it back to drive through the slightest gap of calmer passage in the walls of storm, ridden out every swirl in the energy flows that had seemed sure to tear the ship in two. But Domasa had sat in her cabin, hands clutching fistfuls of her robe in tense double handfuls, trying to remember prayers and charms that she had not used since childhood. It was what nearly every Navigator had experienced and what few non-Navigators were ever privileged to hear about: the sensation that you had looked out into the heart of the deadliest storm-cells out there in the immaterium—and something had looked back at you.
There was a sudden jab of sound in her ear, and Domasa whirled and skittered two steps to the side, spinning around to stare into the darkness around her. But it was her vox-piece, and after a moment of spitting anger at how stupid she was being she got herself under control and keyed the link on.
“Cherrick here. Utility deck, nothing. Nothing in the corridors. Nothing in the compartments we could get into. Crew habs ditto. We haven’t tried to force our way into the flight sections or the enginarium, and we haven’t started going through the cabins. The whole ship’s on night-cycle, so if we search more thoroughly than we have done we’re going to start waking people up and that’s going to mean having to answer questions about what we’re up to.” She ignored the sourness in Cherrick’s voice. “So unless you want us up there to help you with whatever this is…”
“No,” snapped Domasa. “Fine. Forget it. You didn’t find him, forget it. Go back to whatever you were doing.”
Cherrick broke the link without further comment and the clunk of the severed connection sounded even louder in Domasa’s ear in the quiet of the deserted deck. She thought about pulling the vox-receiver out of her ear and stamping on it, stopped the thought and forced herself to get a grip again. This wasn’t over yet, and she was going to need all her wits about her.
Yimora had invited her into the Navigators’ perch that morning, and with the shutters safely sealed behind her she had stood beneath the armourglass bubble, carefully undone her hood and bandana and looked out towards Hydraphur. Looking into the immaterium from real space was more difficult than from a ship that had broken warp, and Domasa had only recently caught the trick of it. What she had seen from the Gann-Luctis’ observation port had turned her guts to ice.
Santo Pevrelyi stood in a relatively small disc of calm warp space: in some places the weight and movements of planets seemed to roil the immaterium on the other side of the membrane to them, in some places such as this the effect was the opposite. But to galactic north-north-west and forty-five degrees above the ecliptic was the storm they would have to ride through to Hydraphur.
Every Navigator, it was said, saw the immaterium in a different way: some as clouds, some as swirls of colour like bands of glowing ink floating in clear water. The grea
t Ayr Shodama had described it as a brilliantly lit room full of thick steam, swirling this way and that. Others “saw” it in ways that presented to their senses as patterns of sound or even music; others saw nothing at all when they unveiled their warp eyes, but were overwhelmed with tactile sensations and perceived the movements of the warp as breezes or cloth or fingers against their skin. For some the warp even manifested itself as an elaborate dream, their minds presenting what their warp eye saw as a detailed landscape of jungle, or city, a treacherous mountain range, or an underwater reef through whose bright coral a ship had to make its cautious way.
Domasa Dorel saw the warp as simple, depthless blackness when it was calm. Her visions of its depths and movements were subtle, and it had taken her time to learn to properly interpret them—her learning was incomplete even now. She saw eddies and currents in the immaterium as brief, slight swirls and flashes of light and colour, often hard to pick out against the dimness, gone almost before they were there; the kinds of patterns that anyone could see by closing their eyes and pressing against the lids with their fingers. She was used to navigation being difficult for her, taking care and concentration.
It took no care or concentration to see what was ahead of them now. Towering over her in Domasa’s warp-vision was a wall of sheer coalescent chaos, not the darkness of her normal warp-sight but a somehow living blackness, shot through with angry, opalescent discharges of light and power. Streaks and spots of red and green stuttered in her warp eye when she looked that way, and flares of strange non-colour seemed to give the thick, knitted darkness meat and movement. Even from here both Navigators could feel the power rippling out from it.
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 13