The hearing. That was their magic threshold, their event horizon. Just keep their heir-apparent alive until the hearing; whatever happened then would happen. Gait looked gloomily at the closed doors of the ready room. He felt the floating, fatalistic calm of someone who has made a terrible choice and is now waiting for the consequences, whatever they may be, to fall.
“How did we get to this?” murmured Behaya beside him, and neither Gait nor D’Leste had an answer.
Ready-room aboard the
flotilla flagship Bassaan,
En route to Galata, Hydraphur system
Atith was the only one who could speak as the seven of them stood around the white-shrouded bed. Phyron had fallen a place back as if what he was seeing had physically hit him, and Trichodi had put her face in her hands. Kohze, hands knotted behind his back, whooped for breath despite the smell that the perfume-mists couldn’t hide.
“Nils,” said Atith in a small, broken voice. “What have they done to you? Oh, Nils, what’s happened?”
“Not Nils; the twisted shape on the bed said. “Not Nils Petronas. Halfway right, though, halfway. Half-right, about a half-man. Hah! Half-man. Half-man, becoming half-something else, becom—” The figure suddenly doubled over with a burst of wet coughing, trying to expel something from its chest that its muscles were too weak to shift. A medical servitor, one metre high with mask and augmetics designed to make it look like a fat ground-bound cherub, slipped through the ring of officers and snaked a drainer into Petronas’ mouth. There was a short, grotesque sound and the drainer was withdrawn, slathered with something pink and translucent. The servitor shuffled back on its cloth-soled feet, awaiting the next fit.
“Petronas Phrax, that’s me,” said the wreck on the bed. “Haven’t told you yet, have they? Keeping me alive for the hearing, that’s what they’re doing. Heard them talking, heard them all the way down here.” One of Petronas’ stick-arms moved sluggishly up and pressed against his ear, then dragged itself across his temple and down over his stomach, it was impossible to tell what he was trying to point to.
“Petronas Phrax?” That was Kohze, who’d been one of Nils Petronas’ shooting-partners when they had visited worlds with huntable fauna. “Nils, my old friend, you can’t know what you’re talking about.” He looked around him. “He’s delirious from the taint. It’s a miracle he’s survived this long.” He took a reluctant step towards the bed. “Nils, do you know where you are? Do you know who we are?”
The eyes were suddenly on him, and Kohze found he could not look away from them. They were clouded with sickness but glittered with energy they danced with madness but stayed locked on his with a terrible focus that Petronas had forged by sharpening that very madness into a razor-keen, steel-cold obsession for survival.
“I know who you are, Kohze.” Suddenly it was the Petronas they all knew—all the snap and fire—lying in this bed and speaking through the wreck he was hiding in. “I know who you are. Atith, Phyron, Trichordi, get your paws down by your sides and look at me. Omali, you tikk-loving little milquetoast, stop backing away and be a man. I need all of you. I need the help of all of you.”
“Nils, what’s going on?” asked Atith. “They told us you’d been given some kind of command dispensation, and we were going to be your crew. They said you had asked for us and that we were to… to indulge you.” She dropped her voice a notch as she finished and shot a look at the servitor as though it were writing her words down. The others took the message and began glancing apprehensively around for spy-ears.
“Forget that,” spat the Petronas-thing. “They told you some stupid lie to make themselves think they are in control. You listen to me, now, all of you. You listen the way they are, the way they are all going to listen, the way we’re going to—” Suddenly the thin body jittered and went rigid for a moment, and droplets of thick yellow liquid ran from the cracked skin at the corners of its mouth.
“I don’t think I have a lot of time,” that mouth wheezed as the servitor dabbed the liquid away with a contraseptic pad, “and that means neither do you. Those shit-gobblers outside think they’re giving me a gift. I’m supposed to cry and say how glad I am to see you. I’m supposed to forget, forget all they—” Petronas spasmed and screamed reedily for nearly thirty seconds before he could ride out the pain and speak again. By that time there was a black stain seeping through the cloth beneath his legs and the gagging, sour stink of excrement filled the air.
“They think I’ve forgotten everything they’ve done. Think it’s all gone the way I’m supposed to be. Hah! Hah!” The laughter made him cough again. “Supposed to be gone but still here. Supposed to be treated and changed, treating and changed to a tumour instead. Tumour-worm, that’s me. Hah! If I can go wrong in one way I can go wrong in others. Wrong plan all over. Shouldn’t have been born to a whore, but even if she was a whore my revenge is still for her.”
Petronas’ voice had drifted, as though he were talking to himself, and a frightening, slow-tongued slur had started to creep into his words, drifting in and out again.
“Nils, what revenge? Please, tell us what’s happened to you!” Atith’s voice was breaking. “Who is this ‘they’? What do you want us to do?” She flinched as Petronas’ eyes snapped onto her.
“Ah, little Atith. Never wanted to flirt with me, did you, even in my better days.” Petronas managed to force his face into a smile at her. Five of his teeth were missing; two of the sockets still bled. “Nice to see you doing what you’re told now, though, little girl. Alright now, no more time for pleasantries. Draw in, all of you, draw in, little children. It is time for Daddy Phrax to start explaining what he needs of you.”
And the figure on the bed bayed laughter as the junior officers, the survivors of a circle that had once considered themselves the friends and colleagues of Nils Petronas, shuffled forward to listen.
Ready-room atrium aboard the
flotilla flagship Bassaan,
En route to Galata, Hydraphur system
“Where the hell are you going?” snapped Behaya, and D’Leste cursed himself for his guilty start. He had told himself over and over that he had nothing to feel guilty about. The treatments had been experimental to put it mildly, they had all known that, and they had been Dyobann’s doing anyway. How was anyone to know that the damn cogboy would see fit to disappear right at the point when the flotilla— the flotilla masters, anyway, same thing—needed him around to keep their heir stable?
He turned to face her.
“They’re either going to gawp at our wonder boy and be in there an age,” he said, “or they’re going to be disgusted by him and come running out of there in a minute. Either way, the three of us standing about out here is stupid. Things haven’t gone wrong enough yet for the rogue trader’s chief apothecary to wait on a bunch of spotty junior officers like some damn valet. I’ve got things to see to before we arrive, and I suggest you might look at yourselves waiting on those people’s beck and call and consider the dignity of your offices likewise.” It was hard to tell from their expressions, but he thought he’d scored a point. When in doubt, attack, attack.
And anyway, he really did have some business to transact. He had thought of something. If Dyobann was out of the picture, and D’Leste had reluctantly accepted that he probably was, then their gamble with the extra-modified blood probably hadn’t worked. But with audacity and subtlety, he thought, there might be a way to smooth that mistake out.
The Sanctioned Liner
Gann-Luctis, in transit
Death had come to the Gann-Luctis late in the voyage, as the ship tried in vain to force its way through a great thunderhead of force towards a momentary break of calm Yimora thought he glimpsed somewhere ahead. There had been pressure, crashing pressure that had made the ship’s astropaths howl and claw at their clothes and skin, begging for sedation and crying out prayers. Domasa Dorel had felt it in her warp eye, like a finger jabbing into her forehead, and she had covered her brow with a phylactery containi
ng hexagrammic inscriptions by House soothsayers on Terra, written in tattoo-ink on strips of her own cloned and cured skin. It usually helped. It didn’t now.
Death came in as the ship burst free of the thunder-head and catapulted into the space beyond, not a calmer passage as it had seemed but a tight corkscrew of energy spinning through dimensions that no human sensibility could comprehend. The ship began to tumble as Yimora desperately looked for a way through and the Geller field rippled as the riptide struck it, closed on it, seemed to bite at it. It bowed further and further inwards and then, for less than a hundredth of a second which set off klaxons and bells throughout the Gann-Luctis’ besieged hull, it flickered out.
Death came in through that tiny gap, while Varro Phrax stood in the doorway of his stateroom and watched his wife hold down their yelling, thrashing son. Even the most ignorant ship’s labourer knew in a basic way that the immaterium somehow resonated with emotions: drawn by them, feeding off them, feeding them in turn. Varro and Ksana had been ready for the warp dreams, knowing what was waiting for them when they slept, and they had said the right prayers and hung the purity seals at the corners of their bed. But Dreyder must not have been paying attention when he said his prayers and allowed his words to wander, and some time after they had closed the drapes on his bed he had pitched away the little pewter aquila they had given him as a charm, playfully, absent-mindedly or in some transient pique. Warp-dreams were bad, but Varro remembered from his days on the flotilla that for a young mind they were worse. For a young mind that did not understand to expect them they must be far worse still. He remembered how blasé he had been back on Gunarvo, saying, “He’ll get a few bad nights and then he’ll be used to them,” and felt sick.
“Go.” Ksana told him. “I’ll take care of him. He’s awake now, but the dream got him so frightened he doesn’t know it yet. I have him. You go on.” Varro closed the door.
Rikah was waiting in the passageway, leaning against one of the mosaics of capering nymphs and cherubs that lined it. He was twiddling the end of one of his implanted vox-vanes, his usual sign of nerves. That was when the klaxons went off again and both men flinched at the sudden clangour.
Death found itself born inside the Gann-Luctis, inside the re-established Geller field that cut it off from the beautiful warm fluidity of the immaterium outside. It had found itself born through no conscious effort of its own: in the moment the field had flickered, its essence earthed itself quickly and painlessly into a mind inside like a spark jumping across a circuit-gap and then it was in a dry, cold, glaring straightjacket of a universe, surrounded by minds imprisoned in meat that jabbered and flapped.
It didn’t like the way the meat behaved, so it did certain things that its instincts suggested and the meat took on new shapes and patterned itself through this horribly constricting cell of dimensions differently and then there was no more behaviour. It did not like the way that there were ways in which it could not move, but it found it could do things to change the little physical universe it found itself in. It could unravel things and part things, and it found that rending and breaking was far more delicious here than manipulating the soft stuff of the warp. And so it went looking for more meat to break, meat whose little droplets of spirit would puff so exhilaratingly into nothing when it pushed on them.
The noise of the klaxons barely registered with it, but they terrified Varro and Rikah. Varro was three steps down the corridor before the horrifying thought hit his mind’s eye and he doubled back. But inside their room his family were still alive and unpossessed: Dreyder now crying steadily instead of screaming, Ksana cradling him. Rikah touched his shoulder.
“We need to arm, Varro. Ship’s drill. We’re able-bodied personnel.”
“What about getting our own—”
“Best to use what’s in one of the lockers,” said Rikah, glancing around them. “Let’s not show our hand yet. If we don’t think we’re going to get through this otherwise, then maybe. For now, just come on.” Varro followed him away. Twice he broke his promise to himself and looked back at the stateroom door.
Adeptus Arbites precinct
fortress of Selena Secundus,
Galata, Hydraphur system
“ ‘The heir,’ ” Culann announced from the message chit he held, “ ‘is unwell, and will not leave the Bassaan until the opening of the hearing. He will not be able to remain in the courthouse for longer than a certain time.’ What a strange way of putting it. What ‘certain time’ do you suppose they mean?”
“I don’t know,” replied Shira Calpurnia, “and I don’t care. What it means is that the heir will be out of our hair… Stop that, Culann, it was a slip of the tongue, not a joke. I’m not in a joking mood.”
They were standing in one of the V-shaped defensive buttresses of the Arbites fortresses on Galata, Hydraphur’s moon. This was Calpurnia’s second attempt at a place for the hearing, after ornithopters and air-sleds with Ecclesiarchal markers had started circling Trylan Tor just beyond where Arbites flyers were authorised to engage them. Then sea-platforms carrying squads of Sororitas had begun to appear around the tors at the borders of the interdict zone, and nervous proctors at the sentry posts had started to ask for extra squads and ammunition. Then Arbites informants in the portion of the Ring orbiting above the tor reported that more Sororitas had begun commandeering launch bays and hardpoints, and were clashing with the Ring’s military crews over control of two of the giant barrage-cannon barbettes.
Calpurnia’s initial, furious thought had been to simply shoot down every last one of them and haul Simova and a couple of random clerics into cells until they told her who had given the order, and she’d stepped on the urge. That the Cathedral thought itself able to make such openly threatening moves against the Adeptus Arbites showed a need for correction that Calpurnia fully intended to deliver. Later. Now, she had another duty to perform, so something else was called for.
“Guilliman could circle like a mountain-cat as well as spring like one,” was an Ultramar proverb that was supposed to date from the holy primarch’s conquests that unified his domain. It meant there was no shame in manoeuvring. If head-on confrontation would cost you more, then where was the shame in marshalling and directing your strength another way? Calpurnia had muttered it just before she sent orders to the tor to batten itself as though for an attack, for the picket and sentry forces to be visibly enlarged from whoever was stationed at the tor and could put on carapace, and for the flyers to get as aggressive as they could in their flying, doing their best to unnerve the pilots the Ecclesiarchy bad roped in.
Meanwhile, in one quiet shuttle-hop, she had arrived at the great adamantium tower that the Arbites kept on Galata. It jutted out of the silver dust of the surface and drove down deep into the cold bedrock, the winged gauntlet of the Arbites glittering from the slab-roof out into space. While Simova, or whoever was running the Ecclesiarchy’s bid for the charter, was busily trying to intimidate a non-existent hearing at Trylan Tor, Shira Calpurnia would sit in judgement at Galata and the charter would leave in the hands of the rightful heir.
Everything about the Ecclesiarchy’s campaign for the charter made her angry. She believed in the law, the holy Lex Imperia, not in the idea that the tools and processes of the law were there for a flawed case—for so she knew it to be - on behalf of personal ambition rather than any belief in a right cause—for so she strongly suspected it to be. It unsettled and angered her. It wasn’t just the in-principle objection to legal games, either.
She dreaded the practical implications of such a case if it got under way. Flawed or not, there would be enough points of order, enough contradictions between religious and temporal laws, enough overlaps and grey areas of authority between the two Adeptus, enough odd precedents and historical incidents to illustrate anything that one wished to have illustrated, so a mind as cunning as Simova’s could keep proceedings running indefinitely until the Eparch or someone working for him thought of something else to try.
&nb
sp; The street justice of the arbitrators was bent on brutal control and swift consequences, but the long, slow work of the Judges focused on enacting the most insignificant letter of the least of every law, as decreed by the High Lords in the name of the Emperor. Every arbitor knew the sight of the great camps stretching away from the gates of a precinct fortress, where supplicants lived out the months or years it took a Judge there or on some more distant world to decide their case. Some went into the decades as books of precedent and case histories had been shipped in from a thousand other worlds to make sure the verdict stood foursquare on the rock of Imperial law. Calpurnia had even heard of Judges and advocates who had had been given leave to raise a new Arbites on a case so successive generations could take over the arguments when their originators had died: mere mortality would not slow the great engine of Imperial justice.
Had the Ecclesiarchy a stronger case, Calpurnia would have heard it. The idea of overriding valid law for her own convenience would have revolted her, had she taken a moment to entertain it. But after Simova had been shipped back to his Cathedral he had sent an envoy straight back with a written copy of his claim, which had gone to Calpurnia’s chambers and then to the great complexes of archivists and lex-savants in the Wall’s second bastion. Her initial appraisal of it had been that there was no case, and every fresh examination by savants and Judges reinforced it.
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 17