“You are, master.” Lucian saw relief upon the astropath’s distorted face.
“And have you shared these fears with the other astropaths?”
“Not openly, my lord, though I believe we all share an understanding of the nature of the disturbance. Some of my peers know that to commune is dangerous, but cannot help but do so. Others, I sense, long for the crossing to continue, so that they might close with the source. They crave it, my lord, yet know it might harm them.”
“I see,” Lucian said as he leant back in the command throne, thinking. “I shall signal the fleet that astropathic communications should be kept to a minimum, unless absolutely vital. With luck, the effect will be limited to the Gulf. If not, we’ll find ourselves with no long-range communications and at war with an alien empire. That would not do. Thank you Adept Karaldi, you have served well.”
The astropath bowed deeply, his expression suddenly one of gratitude as opposed to the tension he had displayed on his arrival. Lucian sighed deeply and considered what Karaldi had told him. Something called to the astropaths as they communicated, adding its psychic signal to their own, even as the Navigators reported disturbances within the warp, ship’s crews were restive and sub-space was riven with abnormal and unidentifiable fields. Furthermore, the astropaths in some way craved the interference, perhaps being drawn by its call.
“Comms, open a channel to the flagship.” He would at least ensure that the other ships’ masters were aware of the threat, even if it transpired there was very little they could do to avert any impending disaster.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“All stop!” Lucian called. “Mains to idle. Station keeping please, Mister Raldi.”
The Oceanid gradually slowed to a standstill. Lucian stood from the command throne and crossed to the forward observation port. A bass growl passed through the vessel as the retro thrusters at the vessel’s prow coughed to life, the deck plates vibrating with the titanic forces at play. Lucian caught the signs of discord within the familiar tones, and he knew that drive number three was grumbling again. Perhaps once this was all over, he mused, he would be able to put the Oceanid into space dock for the renovation that was so long overdue.
His mind curiously distracted, Lucian scanned the view from the armoured port. Out here, in deep space, there were few stars, the blackness of the void immaculate. Yet he knew that the stillness was deceiving, for the region seethed with anomalous forces. Ahead, Lucian could just discern the faintest smudge of lurid turquoise, the dense stellar cluster within which, if all went according to plan, the crusade would encounter the alien empire of the tau.
“Astrographics,” Lucian said, turning to the officer at station ten, “give me local.”
The holograph projector powered up, its subsonic hum deepening beyond audible levels as the green, static laced representation of local space appeared above it. Lucian walked up to the three-dimensional projection slowly turning in the space before him, seeing the Oceanid’s icon at the dead centre. Once again, slowly undulating tendrils waved across the sphere, invisible to human eyes, but all too apparent to his vessel’s augurs.
Lucian scanned the projection for the other vessels of the crusade fleet. He found none.
“Increase scan range. Boost gain,” he ordered. The projection shifted as the sensors quested further outwards, Lucian seeking what he expected to see at any moment.
“Nothing, my lord,” said the officer sitting at the astro-graphics station. “We must be the first vessel to arrive on station.”
“Yes,” responded Lucian, thinking that he would have bet on that not having been the case. “Increase scan range. Bleed secondary feeds into the main arrays.”
“Aye, sir,” the officer replied, his hands working the many dials and slides clustered upon his console. Lucian watched with growing impatience as three, non-critical functions were almost entirely stripped of power to boost the augurs as they scanned the local region. The three-dimensional holographic map now displayed a region several hundred thousand kilometres across, though great swathes of it were left blank as the Oceanid’s mighty augur banks were pushed further and further out.
The astrographics officer turned to address his master. “I don’t think we’re going to…”
“There!” Lucian said. He walked around the globe of light, and pointed to a dimly glowing sensor return right at its edge. “Full power on these coordinates.”
The officer worked his console once more, and three-quarters of the holographic projection lapsed into an indistinct blur as power was bled from three arrays and shunted into the remaining one. The quadrant grew in relative size as the augurs scanned it, the return becoming more distinct all the while. Reams of text scrolled next to the icon representing the return, the Oceanid’s logister banks analysing its nature, comparing it to stored data.
“It’s the Ajax, my lord,” The astrographics officer called, “and there’s something…”
“I see it,” Lucian replied. “Boost output to maximum.”
Once more, the projection zeroed in on a single region, the return that was the Ajax shifting to the centre of the globe whilst the region beyond her became the object of the augur’s attentions. A second return resolved itself, but Lucian could see, had already guessed, that this was no starship.
“It looks like some kind of stellar body, my lord,” said the officer, his eyes fixed on the data wildly scrolling across his pict screens. “And I’m picking up what must be false returns too, either that or there’re a whole lot of dead vessels out there. It’s as if there’re a hundred other ships out there one moment, and none the next.”
Lucian’s mind reeled. He dismissed the false returns, but the chances of encountering a stellar body, light years from any star, were so remote it was simply not worth calculating.
“Something’s not right here,” Lucian said under his breath.
“Sir?” the astrographics officer said, unsure whether Lucian addressed him or was simply muttering to himself.
Lucian got a grip on himself. “Helm, set course for the Ajax, but keep it steady and be ready for a change of orders.”
“Aye, sir,” the helmsman replied, working the Oceanid’s great wheel as he brought the vessel round on her new heading.
“Comms,” Lucian said, addressing the servitor at station three. “Hail the Ajax. Bridge,” Lucian continued, addressing all of his officers as one, “I want every one of you to keep a weather eye out. Comms, where’s that channel?”
The bridge was filled with the sound of the open channel to the Ajax. Only static came back.
As the Oceanid had closed on the Ajax, Lucian had listened intently for any sign of a response to the continuing hailing signal. He had ordered the channel to be kept open, and endured the wailing and static lest he miss the smallest hint that the Ajax was alive. He had no reason to suspect anything more serious than a disabled transmitter, but somehow, he knew that would not be the case.
Lucian stood at the forward viewing port, leaning against the brass bulkhead. The Ajax would come into view any moment.
“Range?” Lucian asked, not taking his eyes from the view before him.
Silence.
He turned his head towards his helmsman.
“Range to target, Mister Raldi, now.”
The helmsman turned slowly to face Lucian, his eyes unfocused as if the man had drifted off into a waking dream.
“Helm!” Lucian bellowed, his patience growing thin. This region was playing havoc with his and everyone else’s nerves, affecting each man differently.
“Sir,” Helmsman Raldi replied, his eyes clearing as his attention was forced back to the here and now. “Please sir, I’m… I’m sorry. Range? Um… three kilometres, sir.”
“Are you sure?” Lucian replied, his irritation subsiding as fast as it had appeared. “Check your readings, Raldi. I have no visual.”
Lucian watched for a moment as the helmsman adjusted myriad dials and knobs around the helm, turning his atte
ntion back to the view outside. This far from a star, visual ranges were extremely short, but a capital vessel was generally lit up like a…
“All stop!” Lucian bellowed.
Raldi heaved on the mighty lever beside the helm, bracing his legs for a better purchase on the steel deck. Lucian felt the Oceanid’s main drives die as their titanic output was routed through emergency vents in their flanks. The force of that alone squeezed the drives in towards each other, causing the vessel’s vast metal skeleton to shriek in sudden anguish. An instant later and the banks of retro thrasters at the Oceanid’s prow coughed into life, their force forestalling the vessel’s forward motion with a titanic juddering.
Fighting to remain upright, Lucian called, “Bow arcs, full beam ahead.”
Looking once more to the view out front, Lucian was forced to shield his eyes when two great, white beams of light stabbed forward through the darkness. As his eyes adjusted, he watched as the two beams began a wide sweep from port to starboard, crossing each other in the middle before resuming their quest of the all-enveloping darkness.
As the Oceanid finally ground to a halt, Lucian saw the great beams settle upon the slab-like flanks of another vessel. As they tracked along its length, lettering ten metres tall spelled out the ship’s name: Ajax. Not a single running light gave any sign of life, and every last porthole and viewing port loomed as dark as the rotten eye sockets of the corpse of some long dead leviathan.
Lucian reclined in his command throne, a half empty glass of asuave in his hand. He brooded, his mood growing ever darker with each passing hour. The Ajax appeared, to the naked eye and to every augur trained upon her, to be dead in space. He seethed with frustration for he longed to assemble a boarding party, to cross the insignificantly miniscule distance between the two vessels and ascertain just what had transpired. But he could not do so, for the sub-space augurs warned that the ongoing disturbance in the fabric of the void made even the short hop to the Ajax too risky, unless no other course of action presented itself.
Another reason Lucian brooded so was the effect that the Damocles Gulf appeared to be exerting upon his crew. The bridge officers were steady enough, and the servitors obviously entirely unaffected, but of the other stations and ranks he was far less certain. The crew chiefs reported a growing number of infractions, each of which was met with increasingly harsh punishment. Drunken brawls and petty thefts amongst the conscripted ranks were to be expected, but of late the nature of the crimes had escalated, culminating in a number of serious assaults upon low ranked officers. Lucian had ordered the chiefs to impose the very harshest of penalties, for he knew that it was only a matter of time before some rabble rouser got a mob together and went on the rampage. That had not occurred on the Oceanid in over a decade, and on that occasion Lucian had been forced to lead a charge into the enginarium that the mutineers had captured. Lucian had taken the thuggish leader on in hand-to-hand combat, executing him out of hand, as was his right as master of the vessel.
But behind the ill discipline was quite understandable superstition. Lucian had no doubt that the Damocles Gulf was permeated with a tangible air of… something he could not quite put his finger on. It was a menace, but not in the sense of that experienced near the Eye of Terror. This was more a sensation of something… alien… permeating the very fabric of space, as if the region were not actually meant to exist at all.
The galaxy was home to many zones where the laws of conventional physics broke down, or offered scant explanation for the phenomena at play within them, regions such as the Eye of Terror and the Maelstrom, where the very stuff of the immaterium leaked into the material universe through great seeping wounds many hundreds of light years across. Others were similar in nature, yet nowhere near as threatening, such as the Storm of the Emperor’s Wrath. Other features, such as the Wheel of Fire or Hangman’s Void were entirely unexplainable, yet had become familiar, for want of a better word, hazards of spacefaring.
Lucian’s mind returned to the question of the Ajax. She showed no outward sign of physical damage, and so he was faced with the awful possibility that some tragedy had overtaken her within the warp, or at the point of her exit. If that proved likely, he would be foolish to lead a boarding party onto her, for fear of whatever taint might linger aboard. Lucian doubted that he could muster a boarding party willing to perform the task in any case, and all his experience and every ounce of Arcadius collective wisdom told him that such a course was sheer folly.
Lucian took another sip of the thick liquor. He glowered at the slowly revolving holograph, his gaze moving from the pair of icons that represented the Oceanid and the Ajax, to the dark shadow beyond. It could only be a small, rogue planet, yet it appeared entirely impenetrable to the Oceanid’s augurs. The body barely even registered with the ship’s scanners, but its presence seemed to cast a dour shadow, even though it was invisible to the naked eye, entirely swallowed by the interstellar darkness of the Damocles Gulf.
Lucian forced his train of thought back on to the here and now. The sensors appeared incapable of shedding any light on just what was going on, and there was no sign of any other vessel of the fleet arriving any time soon. He desperately needed to know what had befallen the Ajax, lest the same fate overtake his own vessel, or any other of the fleet. He had but one option.
“Summon Astropath Karaldi,” Lucian ordered the nearest bridge officer, “and get me another drink.”
It was three hours before the Oceanid’s astropath appeared on the bridge in response to Lucian’s summons. Having waited thirty minutes, Lucian had dispatched a junior officer to escort Adept Karaldi, but had been informed that the man was otherwise engaged. “Astropathicus business,” the officer had reported. Lucian had waited, but had seethed all the while. He was in no mood for Karaldi’s eccentricities.
“My lord,” the astropath said, bowing deeply as he entered the bridge, “please forgive my tardiness. I was performing certain rites, my lord. I could not…”
“Well enough, adept. You are here now.” Lucian walked to the forward observation port and looked out at the Ajax. The mighty spotlights still swept her cliff-like flanks, blindingly bright where they crossed.
“Yes, my lord.” The astropath appeared uncomfortable, though that in itself was not entirely unusual for the man. “How might I serve you?”
“Come here, adept.”
Karaldi approached the viewing port, wringing his hands in obvious nervousness. He regarded Lucian, before following his gaze.
“The Ajax,” Lucian said.
“Yes, my lord,” Karaldi replied.
“We can’t communicate with her.”
“No, my lord,” the astropath murmured, almost too quietly for Lucian to hear. But Lucian was close enough, so close that he could smell the liquor on Karaldi’s breath.
“Yes,” Lucian said, his tone flat, yet entirely unequivocal.
“I cannot, my master.” Karaldi’s eyes were wide as he pleaded. “Please, do not ask me to…”
“To do your duty?” Lucian replied, his voice now icy cold. “If I cannot call upon you to do this thing, what use are you to me? Why should I not petition the guild for a replacement, for one who can do his duty?”
Karaldi nodded, and looked out of the view port once more. Lucian caught the look of dread on the astropath’s face as he squinted blindly at the Ajax. Karaldi lifted a golden aquila hanging from a chain around his scrawny neck, and cupped it in both hands. He bowed once more to his master.
“Might I have an hour to prepare?” Adept Karaldi asked.
“One hour,” Lucian replied, “no more.”
Lucian had ordered the bridge crew to vacate their stations, all bar the servitor at the communications console, which monitored the still open, howling channel for any sign of life aboard the Ajax. Lucian stood in the centre of the darkened bridge, looking down upon the cross-legged astropath.
“My lord, you have witnessed an astropathic trance, but I must warn you that what I am about to un
dertake is something different from that. Remote prognostication is not…”
“I do not need to know the details, adept. Just tell me if I need do anything, and I shall do it.”
Karaldi sighed, his shoulders sagging. “No, my lord, you need only watch. Though if you would…”
“What?”
“If you would pray for me, my lord. And if it is not me who speaks to you…”
“I know what to do, adept, have no doubt.” Lucian unconsciously patted the holster of his plasma pistol. Although he had but an inkling of what awaited the adept, he knew there were risks in what he had asked Karaldi to do.
The astropath did not answer, for he had already begun the rite. Lucian fought against the urge to prowl around the ail-but empty bridge, forcing himself to stand still and look on whilst the astropath entered his trance.
Lucian recalled the times he had witnessed Karaldi undertake an astropathic communion, and briefly wondered how different this might seem to those uneducated, though not entirely ignorant, in the ways of the psyker. His abiding perception in past instances had been of a sudden and dramatic drop in temperature. Would the remote prognostication be the same, he wondered?
In a moment, he had his answer.
The shadows of the darkened bridge suddenly closed in upon the astropath, flowing as liquid over the deck to engulf his body. Lost in a trance, Karaldi appeared not to notice, though Lucian could barely discern his features amidst the well of inky shadow that surrounded him. Then, the astropath’s body began to sway gently from side to side, and Lucian saw that there was something odd in his movements. The swaying increased as Lucian looked on, Karaldi’s motions becoming slow and languid, impossibly slow, in fact, as if viewed on a pict-slate with the playback set at one tenth the normal speed.
[Rogue Trader 02] - Star of Damocles Page 11