They had succeeded except for here.
“Cherrick” had been the name on the tags of the man lying on the floor in the middle of the room with the gunshot hole in his gut. The name was not one that had appeared in any of Calpurnia’s dossiers. There was a hellgun lying by his corpse, but when he had come in here to kill Varro’s family he had used a knife. She didn’t pretend to know why, but that seemed to be what had given Ksana Phrax the chance to draw and fire. She supposed she would never know exactly what had happened here.
Varro wept on and on, the sound with little rise or fall, the low, constant crying of a man whose spirit was broken. He had bent forward over their bodies, his face in his wife’s blood-stringed hair.
Calpurnia’s vox-tore buzzed, and when she stepped out into the corridor and keyed it open she heard Odamo’s voice from the Baron Mykal. She turned away, as much so the Gann-Luctis crew waiting outside in the corridor wouldn’t see her expression as for privacy of speech.
“Ma’am, you asked for surveillance of the ship.”
“Yes? What of it?” Even as she asked she felt a telltale rumble of power through the deck and the lights for an instant went dim.
“We’re picking up power to the drives, ma’am. They’re getting ready to move and there’s a signature that the auspex crew tells me is consistent with power to the warp coils. We think they’re going to try and jump out of the system from here.”
Impossible. That was her thought. She had seen the reports of the state the ship had been in when it came into Hydraphur. And now it was undercrewed, and did they even have a Navigator left after that last voyage?
She rounded on the crewmembers, who quailed under her look.
“Abort this manoeuvre instantly. Now. Get word to the bridge. This ship is not going into warp.”
“Master Phrax gave the order,” said the middle officer defiantly, a rangy man with a cascade of grey hair. “He gave the order as he was coming up here. He told us that we would break warp for Gunarvo, no matter what the consequences.”
“That’s insane,” snapped Calpurnia. “You of all people know that it’s not survivable. This far in-system? With this amount of damage? How could he give the order?”
“He gave it as he came to the stateroom,” the officer said again. “I think he knew what had happened even then.” The other two nodded agreement.
“Then you know he’s not of sound mind. Abort the order. Now.”
“Varro Phrax means more than just a new master to us, ma’am,” said the grey-haired officer with a lift of his chin. “He risked himself to fight a warp-daemon. He was our luck when we voyaged here. And now he carries a charter signed by the Emperor. We fought for him. We put our trust in him.” The other two nodded their agreement. Calpurnia stared at them for a moment, then strode back through the door and to the kneeling trader.
“Varro? Varro, listen to me. I know what you’re feeling. I know what you’ve been feeling since you did what you did in the courtroom.” He didn’t seem to notice her kneeling by his side or her hand on his shoulder. His face was hidden. The smell of blood was thick. The weeping went on and on.
“Varro, you don’t have the right to take this whole ship and everyone else on it to a terrible death. They somehow don’t believe it will happen, but it will. You owe a duty to the living, Varro. Listen to me!”
Then the ship rambled with power again, a rumble that rose in pitch as the warp engines struggled to work. Calpurnia’s tore buzzed and screeched and through the interference from the charging engines she could hear Odamo’s voice frantically calling her name.
It was a decision that she would hate herself for for a long time, but there was nothing else she could do. She stood up.
“Emperor walk with you, then, Varro, wherever you may end up.”
And she ran.
Varro Phrax did not hear the warp engines fire to their highest output, and his only reaction when one of the coils began to flicker and overload and send shudders down the length of the ship was to grip his murdered family tighter and tighter, terrified that the embrace might have to end. He wept, uncaringly, as the proximity alarms went off in response to the Baron Mykal passing insanely close to grapple in the saviour pod that Calpurnia had managed to reach before it blasted its way past on full engines and sped out of the danger zone. He wept, unhearing, as the main warp engines, weakened from the terrible strain of the storm, broke and overloaded. He wept, unseeing, as the hole in space opened, not sharp and bullet-precise but a great, ragged, spreading wound into which the ship slid like a reptile into a tarpit.
He kissed his wife’s cold cheek as the screams began from the crew, as the Geller field crumpled and the stuff of the hull began to ripple and fray; he stroked his son’s hair as the walls of the stateroom began to softly undulate as though they were curtains in a breeze. He did not see the colourless nothingness filling the Gann-Luctis’ corridors and rooms or the death-throes of the crew as curious, malicious fingers of ether began to pick at their flesh and their minds and finally whirled them out through the disintegrating hull. He heard the whispers at the corner of his mind that got louder and louder until it was a hammering in his skull and he felt the room spin and fade around him and his own flesh teased out into threads and clouds, but he accepted it and rocked his wife and his child. Maybe they would not reach Gunarvo, but maybe he had known this ever since he had seen the faces of the crew when he came off the shuttle with Calpurnia. Maybe he had always known they would never return to Gunarvo, and so all there was to do now was stay here and rock his wife and child until it didn’t matter any more.
The Baron Mykal sped away from the unholy death of the Gann-Luctis with all engines open; it was an hour before its captain felt it safe to shed velocity and start to bring the ship about. No one had any illusions about finding survivors.
Shira Calpurnia went to the bridge and stood there in silence as they passed the spot where the rift had been. After they had passed it, and as Galata loomed large in the forward windows, she left and walked down to the ship’s chapel. She did not pray there, but sat in a pew before the golden aquila. She sat with her head bowed in silence, sat there for a very long time.
EPILOGUE
Nobody knows where the story started, nobody knows who is supposed to have seen the events unfold. Some versions tell of a crewman, some of a woman, one last survivor who looked out from a saviour pod and into the wound in reality as it closed. Some are stories of an astropath or a seer somewhere on Hydraphur, or even a nameless rating in an opticon deck aboard one of the ships was in pursuit. The story was rumoured to have been heard in a drinking-nook in the crowded decks of the Bescalion gate-stations, or told to a medicae team aboard the Ring, or whispered to a priest in a shrine somewhere in the Augustaeum, or screamed in desperation in an Arbites cell, or revealed in the Imperial tarot, or printed onto a thousand sheets of grubby paper and pasted onto walls or passed from hand to hand in the lightless alleys of Constanta Hive. The story came from everywhere and nowhere. But no matter who the witness is supposed to have been, when the embellishments of the various tellers are stripped away the story remains constant. It tells that as the gash in the stars closed, leering and bleeding colours that could corrode the mind, shadowy forms closed on the doomed Gann-Luctis as it came apart, closing like sharks on a swimmer, wolves on a traveller, nightmares on a child’s bed. They slid around and into the ship like oil flowing into cracks, as the stuff of the hull began to fray and come apart.
Some versions tell of giant talons tearing the Gann-Luctis to fragments, or that the edges of the rip sprouted teeth of purest darkness and macerated it like soft meat. There are versions that say that the ship’s death-throes were lit by bright hell-light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere on the other side of that rent in space, or that the ship disappeared into depthless, mindless patterns of living dark but that images of it still, somehow made their way out, as though the sight of the ship was arriving in the mind without passing t
hrough the eyes.
Every form of the story relates that something was left behind when the rip closed and writhed and left nothing but empty starlit space, something that simply passed through the sides of the rip as they closed, or whose presence seemed to push the rip away across space as it shrank. But most of the stories tell instead of a silent howl of pain that came bellowing out of the gap in space, as though some great animal of that other world had tried to grip white-hot metal in its fingers and felt its flesh being burnt away, and that it came hurtling as though its presence in the turmoil on the other side of the rip was unbearable, as though it were poison being spat from a great gullet.
The more restrained storytellers will leave the matter there, and refuse to be drawn on what it might have been that did not follow the Gann-Luctis into oblivion. But there are others who insist that that nameless observer saw something drifting past the window of the pod or across the lens of the opticon. They say it was a book, a plain book, cloth-bound, turning end over end in the vacuum. Some go as far as to say that it passed close enough for the watcher’s eyes to see the momentum spread the pages, and for light to spill from them, light that died as that observer looked on, as though the discharge from some powerful reaction was only just dying away, light that surrounded a tiny mark like a spot of blood on the final page.
Whether anything really escaped the destruction nobody knows. There are tales that the book flew towards Hydraphur’s sun and burns there still, or that it now coasts silently through the vacuum of interplanetary space. Some say that it was caught by a mysterious ship that disappeared like a ghost, or that it flew towards Hydraphur itself and now is locked away in a dark cell beneath the Cathedral, or the Wall, or the Inquisitorial fortress in the planet’s furthest land mass. There are stories among the survivors of the flotilla that say that the ghosts of Varro and Petronas Phrax roam the warp around Hydraphur and that one day they will meet and fight for their charter, tales that say that even the memory of the charter is cursed and that every living soul who voyaged with Hoyyon Phrax is doomed.
The last of the flotilla ships has been broken up now, the remnants of the crews imprisoned or dispersed. There is a small memorial garden to Ksana Phrax and her family on Gunarvo, erected by her brothers after the Gann-Luctis was lost. All records of the existence of Nils Petronas were erased when he became Petronas Phrax, and he is not now remembered.
The documents of the Phrax succession now lie in one of the archiving houses in a remote corner of the Wall, on a metal shelf in a rockcrete cell, waiting for a servitor to mark and store them. Maybe they will one day be stored, maybe not. Shira Calpurnia, Cynez Sanja, Essach Simova and the others might look back on the strife at Selena Secundus now and again, but there are new challenges, new concerns for all of them now, every day.
And so now the only monument to the ten-thousand-year Phrax succession is legend, the twisted, exaggerated, fanciful tales of heirs and rivals, daemons and poisoned mutants and cold puppeteers, traitors and victims, that travel from ear to ear across Hydraphur to this day. The line of Phrax is gone; this alone is their legacy.
Scanning and basic
proofing by Red Dwarf,
formatting and additional
proofing by Undead.
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 24