He dimly heard shouts. There were others he had meant to see to, weren’t there? The sound of flesh being struck. It sounded good. He could feel his body slumping, hurting, as his tissues rejected once and for all the genetic disguise that Dyobann’s brutal experiments had tried to stamp onto them, as his cells blew out and broke down, as his flesh sloughed away. He looked at the doctor’s face. He wondered if it still counted as revenge, even though he was the one that this one had hurt and not his mother, and while he was wondering that, he died.
“Gone feet-up,” Behaya had said. “No heir at all, now.”
“If we can get the charter onto the ship,” Gait had muttered, “we might still have a chance. Get Trazelli.”
So Zanti had left them in the courtroom and hurried out through the doors, their closing swing drowning out the screeching as Petronas finished whatever he was doing to D’Leste. Incompetent idiot. They should never have trusted him to look after Petronas after Dyobann disappeared.
“You.” She snapped her fingers at one of the armoured figures in the corridor. “Get a message to the boat from the Callyac’s Promise. The message is—”
“Arbiter Senioris Calpurnia commands us,” the arbitrator told her bluntly. “Not you.”
“Arbiter Sen—” Anger would not let her finish the sentence, and there were things to do. Red with humiliation, she hurried on until she thought she was in range of the hangar, then keyed the vox in her wrist-amulet. “Trazelli. We’re going to be leaving with the charter soon but things are bad. Has Kyorg reached you yet?”
“I saw him on the dock level,” came Trazelli’s voice in her ear, “but he didn’t come here. Not yet.”
Zanti squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and forced clear thoughts through the anger. Waited for connections to click, for data to—
“Bastard! Trazelli, four men to meet me at the first set of steps in the courtroom hallway. Now.”
Trazelli knew better than to try and ask why.
Atith was sobbing as she and Kohze and Trichodi led the charge. They had hidden magazines full of low-density undetectable rounds for their ceremonial rifles, but there was no time to load them as they closed in on the flotilla masters, the people who had betrayed Nils, Nils who was the rogue trader now. Mutiny. Revenge.
Her long dagger was in her hand and red-bearded Halpander was in front of her. He batted her first thrust away with a swipe that laid the back of his hand open along the dagger’s edge, bellowed and flicked the sleeves of his coat a certain way. Two shining flaps of micromesh chainmail dropped out, set with odd ridges of metal; then Halpander made fists and the ridges snapped into rows of spines along his now-armoured knuckles.
Next to him, little long-faced Gait flipped up the end of his staff and there was a shimmer in the air as a micron-thin carbon blade took the head off the man next to her. Then Halpander’s fist crashed into her mouth and she was on her back. Phyron stepped over her, yelling and swinging his empty gun in an arc that smashed Halpander’s collarbone before the microblade in Gait’s staff took his arm off.
Sobbing and spitting blood, Atith scrambled back. She wanted to call out to Nils, tell him that they were fighting as he had told them to, but he was limp on his bed. Then she was in a crouch and powering forward and her dagger punched through the flakcloth layers under Halpander’s coat, sending him over backwards to sit and gape at the hilt jutting from his sternum.
There was a rapid cracking from behind her: Trichodi had taken the time to find her magazine, load and empty it into Gait’s face. That was enough for the Arbites: they had been moving in to break the brawl up with fists and boots and shotgun butts, but after Gait went over without a sound Calpurnia shouted an order as she vaulted the pulpit rail and the arbitrators took aim. Trichodi was knocked three ways at once by blasts of shot—she pirouetted and fell. An Executioner shell smacked into the side of Kohze’s head as he tried to load up to get a shot at the fleeing Behaya. Atith scrambled to cover under Nils’ bed, and thought she might be about to make it before there were more shots and two bodies collapsed onto her, pinning her to the ground. When she shook them off and stood up again there was an arbitor on the other side of the bed aiming point blank at her and she opened her mouth to say—
Trazelli came down out of the boat from the Callyac’s Promise at the head of two dozen armsmen, pounding through the portals along the route that the charter had taken to the courtroom, leaving four armsmen and nine arbitrators lying dead in the boat and on the hangar floor.
“Zanti, sir!”
“What?”
“I just saw Zanti, sir,” said the armsman, “heading into one of the cross-corridors!”
“Get after her,” Trazelli said, thinking of the last exchange over the vox. “And you and you and you. Make sure she’s alright. Get her into the boat and then wait for my orders.” The four armsmen peeled off and the rest of them ran on.
The hall sloped down into the guts of the fortress, then flattened and widened and rose up in half a dozen broad steps to the double doors of the courtroom. That was where the next garrison of Arbites were. They were just closing ranks across the corridor when the doors swung open and Behaya burst out between them, holding up her skirts and running as fast as her long legs would carry her, as from inside came a roaring chorus of shotgun fire.
“Halt—now!” bellowed an arbitrator in the centre of the line, gold rank-trim glittering as he held up a hand. But one look at Behaya’s face was enough to make Trazelli decide. He flung himself flat, high-bore autostubber already whining and clicking as the loader cycled up. Behind them Behaya gave a yell that distracted just enough of the arbitrators for just long enough—
“Kyorg!” In the narrow side-passage leading to the dromon docking-sockets, Kyorg jumped guiltily and spun around, his bald head catching the lights. Behind him, Domasa Dorel shuffled a couple more paces back toward the airlock where the Omicron’s Dart was docked, wishing she’d had the chance to bring the toxin needier with her. She had sent one of the guards ahead into the ship to get a transmission back to the Gann-Luctis on what to do with the hostages, and now she motioned for the other one to get between her and the confrontation.
Stamping toward them was a woman in the garb of a flotilla master, a black-haired old biddy with a hawk-beak nose and the shine of augmetic sockets visible under the edge of her hood. Domasa could see the terror of her in Kyorg’s eyes. She should probably leave them to it. She backed up a pace more.
“Oh, and didn’t I just know it would be you, Kyorg, you treacherous little tikk-fondling…” Zanti was spitting with fury, every word flying out like a bullet. “That’s how they knew to send a blood-sample of their own, that’s how they knew we were counter-claiming. You told them everything, didn’t you. Is that who that freak works for?”
“I was doing what I had to.” Kyorg squeaked, backing away from Zanti. “You think I didn’t know you people had it in for me? You think I didn’t know I had no future with the way you all joined against me? Bypassing me, talking about me?”
“You bypassed yourself, you incompetent little tikk! If you’d ever thought of doing your job instead of coasting on Hoyyon’s work…” She tailed off as four armsmen in white-grey-green livery came pelting up behind her. “Ah, good, I don’t have to handle all this on my own. I think what I’ll do, Kyorg, is drag you back to the Callyac’s Promise and fly you back with us so we can tell—”
The threat of humiliation before the flotilla did what the other threats had not. Kyorg pistoned out both hands in front of him and his ornate rings flared with energy. Zanti, wise about hidden weapons, backed and turned away in time, and the two hindmost armsmen were protected by their visors. The other two caught the full blast and staggered away, howling and clamping their hands to their faces. Another ring spat a needle-fine laser that lanced through the third man’s throat just below his helmet’s chin-strap and sent him reeling and choking against the walls.
As Domasa reached the ramp of the Omicron’s Da
rt her own guard shoved Kyorg aside and raised a snubby little shotcaster he had drawn from a pouch in the small of his back. His mistake was to pick the last armsman as the major threat: in me time that it took for him to aim and fire, Zanti pinched the front of her floor-length coat firmly in her fingers and flicked it out. The braids of memory-wire woven into the hem curled up for a moment and then whipped savagely back, trying to regain their original shape, and the metal weight in the hem cracked the guard’s kneecap. As he lurched and stumbled the second flick hit him between the eyes with more force that any movement that brief should have been able to muster, and the third connected solidly with Kyorg’s temple with a sound like an apple hitting concrete. As both men sagged to the floor, Zanti plucked the shotcaster from the guard’s limp hand, fired it into the guard’s face, checked the load, sighted on Kyorg’s head and emptied the rest of the magazine.
One or two arbitrators swung around to cover Behaya as she barrelled through the courtroom doors, but most of them were intent on Trazelli’s armsmen as they began exchanging fire. Behaya ripped off her heavy uniform medallion and hurled it away, hearing the crack as the casing fragmented then the hiss as the filaments from the xenos weapon they had captured long ago, the filaments it had cost the lives of two techs to extract from the teleporting warrior’s strange gun, popped clear.
They touched and tangled and, when the Arbites tried to brush them or pull them away, they cut and bit through armour and into flesh. The air in the hallway was suddenly filled with screams, scarlet droplets and the thick smell of blood.
But three armsmen had fallen to Executioner shells already, and as Behaya ran forward two more were punched off their feet. She raked a hand down the front of her coat, ripping off the ornamental buttons, and scattered them to one side as she ran: a couple were dummies, but more exploded in white heat. Two arbitrators died instantly, arms and faces incinerated and their bodies flash-cooked inside their carapaces; three more staggered and fell as the lethal heat sucked the oxygen out of their lungs. In a few seconds more the tiny incendiary pellets had burned out and Behaya ran on through the smoke and the cauterised blood on the floor.
There were still shapes moving in the thick haze behind her, and the armsmen began a steady suppressing volley. She tried to call to Trazelli, but her voice was lost in the gunshots, the hooting of a fire klaxon and the rumbling of shutters sealing the courtroom off, triggered by the heat and smoke.
“What? Get behind me and speak up, Beyaha.”
“I said everything in there is gone. Zanti and Kyorg are clear, that’s all, we have to—”
The first Executioner round came arcing through the smoke and caught her in the small of the back. The impact thrust Behaya’s hips forward, then the second round hit the base of her neck and sent her to the deck in an ungainly sprawl of dead limbs. Trazelli bawled a curse and banged off a burst of stubshots into the smoke, barely aware of how many of them were coming back past him in vicious ricochets. It seemed like an hour of firing, rolling, reloading before he realised that nothing in front of him was moving. He stood in the corridor and reloaded in the sudden silence with shaking hands, looking around him at his surviving men, trying to work out what to do. He had walked forward, slowly, picking his way over the corpses, when the courtroom door began to open again.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Courtroom, Adeptus Arbites fortress
of Selena Secundus, Galata
Varro Phrax had started for the door after the tall woman in the grey when the brawling changed to shooting. He veered off, hands over his ears, as the Arbites cut down every last one of the white-veiled guard who had inexplicably turned on their masters. Then he heard a clank behind him and looked around: the green-eyed arbitor had vaulted the edge of her pulpit, hung by one arm for a moment, and then slid down the almost-sheer side, hitting the floor and rolling. She disappeared out of sight for a moment behind the box Varro had stood in, and then she was there beside him. There was no malice in her stare, but little pity, either. Still looking at him, she motioned the other Arbites toward the courtroom doors, but as they began to move there was a chorus of shouts from outside, then a storm of gunfire and an odd thumping roar.
“Stand up.” Calpurnia said. He did. She was shorter than he, smaller than he had thought, the three scar-lines running up from her left eye flexing as she scowled. “You chose not to inherit,” she said. “Why?”
“I told you.” Varro said dully. “The things I’ve seen people do, the things I know people think. This can be a terrible universe, Arbitor Calpurnia. Why should I make it worse for myself and my family by putting myself in the middle of… of…” A wave of the hand toward the bed and the corpses summed it all up.
Calpurnia tilted her head as though she were considering another question, and made a statement instead.
“That Navigator wasn’t an ally.”
“No.”
“She was using you.”
“Yes.”
“How did you stop her? Stand up to her here?”
“I arranged it with my chief retainer before we came in. He’s gone back to the dromon. He has people working to protect my wife and son back on the ship.” Animation started to come back into Varro’s voice. “They’re the ones I need to get to. The Gann-Luctis was following us in more slowly, that’s where they are. They’re who I need to get to. Not this charter. We’ll go back to Gunarvo, to the house there. Away from this.”
“I don’t think you’ll be able to get away from this.” Calpurnia told him, “not now that you’re indisputably the only heir. There won’t be any getting away from that, not even if you formally renounce your succession. Too many people will want to make you change your mind.”
“Then what do I do?” Varro’s voice was low and hopeless.
Calpurnia looked at him for a moment, then stood up and walked across to the dais. Simova was standing over the charter, licking his lips, trying to muster the courage to reach out for it. Calpurnia drew her pistol and knocked him to one side with a sidearm hit to his temple, picked up the book without fuss and walked back.
There was only the faintest shake of her hands as she opened the book to its last page. Varro looked at the marks without really understanding them; Calpurnia stared at them for a long moment before she spoke in an unsteady voice.
“A long time ago, Varro Phrax, the God-Emperor walked across the galaxy choosing men and women to lay the foundations of His Imperium. He came to Hydraphur where there were great fleets ready to strike out into the unknown for Him and He looked at all the masters of spacecraft and who do you think He chose, Varro? He chose the line of Phrax to carry His word and His charter. I don’t pretend to know your life or your mind, sir, but I know about family legacies and I know about traditions. Don’t drop this burden in the dust. For good or ill, Varro, this is yours as it will be his. The legacy is his and yours and your father’s and the Emperor’s. Don’t betray that.” She looked at his expression. “Varro, you don’t want any part of your legacy to fall into the hands of people like that. Nor do I. I know about minds like that as much as you do. So take the charter. By the authority invested in me, I name you heir. Take the charter and keep it safe from the schemers and the thieves and the murderers. Take it.”
He stared at her for a long moment, another. Finally, his hand reached out, his fingers closed around the plain cloth of the charter cover. They rested there for a moment, then his grip firmed and he took the book from her hands.
“What ceremony do we need for this?” he asked.
“We’ve had it, I think.” Calpurnia replied. “You’re the Rogue Trader Varro Phrax now.” She stood up. “And my obligation is to see you safely to your ship and out of Hydraphur. Let’s get the flotilla organised and get your wife and child picked up. Get those doors unsealed, please, we’re going to the hangar. Sister Krovedd, your bodyguard still have their bolters unloaded? You may give them permission to reload. You Arbites, all of you, with me.” She keyed her vox-tore. “Cula
nn, vox a message that the escort ships for the Gann-Luctis are to stay on heightened watch. Have the Baron Mykal stand ready too, we’re going to— what? Say again.” She paused glowered again, swore. “Fine. Have a pinnace ready from the Mykal, and fast. We’re moving. Varro, come on. Now.”
The doors were opening. Calpurnia walked over to Sister Krovedd and saluted her.
“Let’s just abbreviate our whole disagreement, Sister. There is not the legal case that Simova thinks there is. The charter has been handed on. This is the Emperor’s will as laid down in His law. Will you help us honour it?”
The Sister Pronatus’ head bowed, and she murmured something that Varro didn’t catch. Calpurnia did, though, and gestured for him to open the book. The Sisters Militant stepped up behind Krovedd and all stared at the marks: the letter, the spot of blood. A single small tear slipped out of Krovedd’s eye and down her cheek.
“It’s enough,” she said in a small voice, and they turned to go.
The mood was broken an instant later. A moustached man dressed in a flotilla master’s uniform stood staring at them, the loader on his autostubber whirring.
Trazelli never pulled the trigger. A shell from one of the Sisters’ freshly reloaded bolters took him in the solar plexus, lifting him and carrying him backwards through the air and over the steps before it detonated inside him half a metre above the hallway floor.
“Let’s move,” said Shira Calpurnia.
Ecclesiarchal dromon the
Omicron’s Dart, Galata space
As the Omicron’s Dart closed its hatch on the gun-toting harridan outside and blew itself free from the docking socket, Domasa Dorel found her second guard lying dead outside the cockpit doors, next to the alcove that held controls for the dromon’s communications arrays. His helmet was askew and there was a single neat las-burn in his cheek, opening a cauterised tunnel up into his cranium. She had no doubt as to who was to blame. It had been Rikah, the metalheaded no-hoper, on behalf of his worthless, treacherous runt of an employer.
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 22