Lucian watched with increasing horror, his neck prickling. Karaldi’s expression slowly transformed, until his face was a mask of terror. The astropath’s mouth slowly opened as if he screamed the lonely wail of the eternally damned, though Lucian heard not a sound issue forth from his throat.
Lucian’s horror mounted still further as he looked on. Karaldi’s body tensed, every muscle pulled taut. Although the astropath’s movements appeared impossibly slow, his face blurred as if in rapid movement. He screamed his silent scream as the shadows all around closed in still further.
Then Lucian caught, at the very edge of hearing, a sound that filled him with primal dread. The cold chill of the void filled his veins, the ashen stink of oblivion cloying at his nostrils. Yet still, he forced himself to look on, though he felt the claws of the warp tug and grasp at his very sanity.
The sound increased in volume as if its source grew nearer all the while. Lucian knew that it came from the astropath’s still screaming mouth, as if it were the entrance to a tunnel along which something from a nightmare thundered ever closer. Karaldi’s mouth filled Lucian’s vision as the cacophonous wail grew louder and louder.
Then, the scream exploded from Karaldi’s mouth and the shadows leapt back. The astropath’s movements ceased their leaden blur, his body released as if he had been struggling against invisible bindings now suddenly released.
Lucian came forward as Karaldi collapsed to the deck, catching the man by the shoulders before he dashed his head against the steel plating. The astropath looked up at him with empty eye sockets, a crimson track running from each. What have I done, Lucian thought, cradling the man in his arms. He rejected the thought as quickly as it formed. I did what I had to, he told himself, for the sake of the fleet.
Lucian bellowed for a medicae servitor to attend the astropath. Blood pooled in Lucian’s hands and spread in a wide pool across the deck.
“Can he speak?” Lucian asked, sitting beside Adept Karaldi’s recumbent form. As he did so he looked around at the medicae bay. Odd memories of the place surfaced in his mind: memories of his grandfather lying mortally wounded in the very bed in which the astropath now lay; memories of countless others hurt in the course of their duties to the line of Arcadius.
The bay was stark white, a dozen medicae servitors permanently engaged in the simple task of scrubbing its every surface with caustic, sharp smelling antiseptic. Each bed along the bay’s rectangular length was crowded with a halo of arcane equipment, the operation of many known only to the tiny staff that maintained them. That staff now clustered around the bed at which Lucian sat.
Adept Estaban, personal physician to Lucian, as he had been to an unspecified number of previous generations of Arcadius, stood at the head of the bed. Estaban was an enigma to Lucian, but he trusted him, quite literally, with his life. The chirurgeon had administered three courses of life-preserving rejuve, already having prolonged Lucian’s life way past the span of a normal man’s. The chirurgeon wore his white rubber smock, smeared with the blood of his patient, and a mask obscured his face. Various analytic probes and sensors were mounted around his head, through which he studied his patient intently. Estaban’s staff clustered around him: three female medicae assistants, each adorned in a similar manner to their master, and each smeared in a quantity of blood. A medicae servitor stood beside each assistant, grossly pumping clear tubes and cables snaking from its body, directly into the patient’s veins.
Estaban looked up at Lucian’s arrival, his bloodshot left eye magnified grotesquely as it focused on him.
Realising that the chirurgeon had been so intent upon the astropath that he had not heard the question, Lucian repeated himself.
“Karaldi, can he speak?”
“Oh,” Estaban said, lifting the glass from his eye. “The patient is conscious my master, though in some state of delirium, I fear.” The chirurgeon reached out a black rubber clad hand and touched the astropath’s cranium. “Quite what goes on in the mind of one such as he…”
Lucian took his gaze from Estaban, mildly repulsed, as he always was, by the surgeon’s peculiar manner. He looked at Master Karaldi’s face, stunned at how old the astropath suddenly appeared to be.
“Adept,” Lucian said softly, but insistently, gently squeezing Karaldi’s wrist. There was no response.
He heard Estaban mutter to one of his assistants. The woman, her face obscured behind a white face mask, adjusted a series of dials mounted upon the chest of the medicae servitor standing next to her. She nodded smartly as the liquid pumping through the cable from the servitor to the patient changed colour, from a sickly yellow to an actinic green.
“Who…” the patient stammered. A second medicae assistant reached across Lucian and made some adjustment to the catheter inserted into Karaldi’s bloody forearm.
“All better,” she said primly, smearing Karaldi’s blood from her hand across the front of her white rubber apron.
“Karaldi,” Lucian said, determined to garner some response from his astropath. He prayed the man’s sanity, or what was left of it, even before he had entered the trance, was not shot entirely. “You must concentrate. I need to know what you saw. What’s happened to the Ajax?”
“The Ajax?” Karaldi asked, some degree of lucidity returning as the intravenous fluid flowed from the servitor’s body to his. “My lord, nothing. Nothing has happened to the Ajax.”
Lucian looked to the chirurgeon, who shook his head slowly. One of the medical assistants leaned across and mopped Karaldi’s sweating brow, her eyes regarding him with curious and mildly disturbing intent. “Adept, please listen to me. Something has befallen the Ajax, and I need to know what, in case it”
“No, my lord,” the Astropath cut in, “it has not, not yet.”
The three medicae assistants shared knowing glances, and the chirurgeon shook his head yet again. They appeared to Lucian to have given up on the astropath, perhaps believing that Karaldi was in the grip of some fatal fever. Lucian, however, would not give up quite yet.
“What do you mean, adept? What do you mean ‘not yet’?”
Silence followed Lucian’s question, broken only by the low humming of the medicae bay’s equipment and the patient’s laboured breathing. A cold suspicion crept into Lucian’s mind.
“That’s it, my lord,” Karaldi said, his blank eye sockets boring straight at Lucian as if the astropath met his very gaze. “You have the truth of it. You know of what I speak.”
“No,” Lucian said, shaking his head in denial, refusing to accept what he was being told.
“Yes!” Karaldi spat back, the madness so often present in his tone coming entirely to the fore. “Nothing has happened to the Ajax, yet!”
Lucian stood, his seat toppling into a bank of medicae equipment as he staggered back. His mind reeled as he looked upon the profusely sweating astropath, yet more blood seeping from his blank eye sockets to run down his cheeks in vile, crimson rivulets. Karaldi described what all spacers dreaded, a warping of time, in which the ghosts of events yet to pass haunted the present.
“Sedate him, for the Emperor’s sake,” Lucian ordered. “Put him out, and keep him out until I say otherwise.”
Adept Estaban fussed around the equipment as he issued terse orders to his staff. Karaldi convulsed as a new concoction of drugs was pumped into his body, a powerful mixture that knocked him out in seconds.
“Better now,” one of the medicae assistants crooned as she wiped the astropath’s brow. “All better now.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Master on deck!” the crew chief bellowed as Korvane stepped from the bulkhead portal, passing from the lifter shaft into the very guts of the Rosetta.
He paused, appraising the rabble before him. The wide thoroughfare was lined with crewmen, each of whom stood to attention, right arm raised in a perfunctory salute. He had travelled to an area of the ship that was scruffy and ill-kept, unlike the stately corridors he was used to. Korvane saw immediately that these were n
ot the crisp uniformed officers of the upper decks, but the real crew of the rogue trader flotilla, the press-ganged scum, the indentured flotsam and jetsam of a thousand different ports. He hated them, and he was quite sure they hated him just as much.
Korvane cast a glance around the assembled men and women, crew members interrupted in the myriad tasks and toils they engaged upon each day, most of which Korvane had not the slightest knowledge of. Then, he noticed an unfamiliar element amongst the crewmen: tall, dusky skinned men and women, dressed in loose fitting, olive drab fatigues, dog tags clinking around their necks.
The chief had evidently followed his master’s gaze, for he straightened up and puffed out his chest. The huge man, his bulky frame evidence of muscle run to fat with the encroachment of years, advanced upon the nearest group of strangers. Korvane’s interest was piqued, leading him to follow silently behind the crew chief. He guessed what was coming.
Approaching a fatigue-clad figure leaning against a bulkhead, the crew chief raised himself to his full height. Eye to eye with the other man, the petty officer spoke so quietly that Korvane could barely hear him, though he followed close behind.
“When I says ‘master on deck’,” the chief growled, “I actually means, ‘bow down before he who on this ship is second only to the Emperor, praise be his name, you worthless Guard scum.’ Does I make myself clear?”
Silence descended. The Imperial Guard trooper, for it was obvious the strange figures were from one of Gauge’s regiments being transported on the Rosetta, straightened, meeting the chief eye to eye.
Korvane felt the threat of imminent physical violence. He fingered his holster, reassuring himself that his las-pistol was close at hand. If the Guardsmen would not be cowed, he knew he would have to defend himself, and though he was well tutored in such matters, it was for the non-commissioned ranks, not for him, to impose discipline upon the crew. He knew that his father would have waded in and distributed summary justice the instant someone spoke out of line, but Korvane, to his own estimation at least, had been raised better than that. He knew his place, and considered it only correct that others should too.
The stand-off continued, the chief evidently allowing the trooper a moment or two to consider his predicament. The man’s eyes darted from side to side, judging, Korvane guessed, the odds of his small group of warriors prevailing against the chief and the crowd of press-ganged scum that edged in upon the scene. A bead of sweat ran from the man’s brow, yet the chief did not even blink. The trooper’s eyes darted around once more, before meeting Korvane’s. He held the trooper’s gaze, before the man looked back to the chief.
“I didn’t…” the trooper began to utter, before the chief unloaded a piston of a right-handed upper cut to his chin. The trooper was slammed back against the metal bulkhead, knocked unconscious by the impact. The man’s form slid to the floor as a number of dislodged teeth clattered across the deck. The chief did not even look at his victim, his gaze locked upon the trooper’s compatriots.
“I will deal with this, my lord,” the chief said to Korvane, not turning around. “A little bit of discipline needs dishing out.”
“Very well,” Korvane replied, looking upon the mess the chiefs punch had made of the trooper’s face, “carry on.”
Korvane passed from this area into one far more crowded, yet thankfully far less unsavoury. The vast, central cargo areas of the Rosetta had been turned over to a number of Imperial Guard units, amounting, so General Gauge had informed him, to something in the region of five thousand combatants and a similar number of support personnel. A wide companionway ran the length of the vessel’s spine, passing the vast bays in which the troopers were housed. The huge interlocking blast doors had been raised and the entire area was a hive of unfamiliar activity. Korvane saw one cargo bay given over entirely to rows of sleeping mats, so many that they stretched off into the distance along the entire length of the vast space. He had passed another bay in which the troopers practiced unarmed combat, several thousand warriors paired up, sparring with one another, all with blood-streaked faces and swollen lips. Assorted hangers-on, the regimental train as Gauge had called it, were to be found at every turn. Every regiment of the Imperial Guard relied on them as much as they did upon the Officio Munitorum. Lay armourers offered to service faulty weapons or patch up worn armour, cooks and peddlers plied their unsavoury wares, and sultry women offered other, vital services to the trooper keen to divest himself of what little funds he held.
Korvane was at once intrigued and repulsed by the spectacle of the Imperial Guard having taken over several decks of his vessel. Intrigued, for they had brought with them an almost entirely self-sustaining economy, complete with its unique cultural and societal mores. Repulsed, for he saw that outside of the disinterested and detached officer cadre, thugs and hoodlums ran this micro-society, with no regard for birth or rank. Korvane himself had been raised in the most rarefied of atmospheres, at the Court of Nankirk, where he had studied under the most refined of tutors. To him, these men and women inspired revulsion, and he would not be able to rest until they were off his ship.
Feeling his gorge rise, Korvane closed his fist over the small package he carried in his coat pocket. Pain shot the length of his arm, the lingering effects of the injuries he had sustained in battle against the tau at Arrikis Epsilon. He need only bear it a little longer, he told himself, striding on through the crowded decks as crewmen halted to stand to attention in his wake.
“My lord,” an officer called out as Korvane stepped on to the bridge. “My lord, I must bring to your attention a number of troubling reports.”
Korvane regarded the man with weary indifference. He was about to reply when the officer continued.
“It’s the Guard sir. We’ve been receiving some disturbing reports of ill-discipline and petty crime.” The man proffered him a data-slate, but Korvane pushed past.
“I don’t have time,” he sighed, weary of the endless disruptions to his vessel’s normally smooth running, weary, he realised, of the voyage across the Damocles Gulf.
“But sir,” the officer insisted, “these really are rather urgent. They say it’s the warp, sir, and they say it’s getting worse. The armsmen fear things might get out of hand if something is not…”
“I said”Korvane snapped as he rounded on the officer, “I don’t have time.” He felt an unfamiliar anger rise within him, one he knew his father would have had to fight hard against to suppress. His stepsister would not even have tried. Drawing on all the courtly etiquette with which he had been raised, Korvane steadied himself. The officer waited patiently, his face a mask of professional detachment.
“I shall review your reports presently,” Korvane replied. “Dismissed.”
With a click of polished boot heels, the officer departed, leaving Korvane to pass across his bridge to the day room at its rear. As he crossed the deck, he could not help but be reminded of the terrible conflagration that had engulfed it during the battle against the tau at Arrikis Epsilon. Large sections of bulkhead had been replaced, often for the first time since the vessel’s construction, the gleaming metal stark against the patina of a thousand years. Here and there, the metal had been melted by the intense heat of the battle, to blister and run like mercury across the deck. In places, these run-offs remained, set hard upon the bulkhead like solidified lava. The heat had inflicted a similar fate upon Korvane’s body, though thankfully his father’s chirurgeon had worked masterfully upon his scars, rendering all but the very worst invisible. He still felt his wounds though, deep inside, and he raged against the misfortune that had come so close to crippling him.
Passing in to his day room, Korvane sat heavily upon a padded and studded leather recliner, the peerless work, he dimly recalled, of the long extinct Dreyfuss artisan clan of New Valaxa. He slumped upon the recliner, vaguely aware that he should comport himself in a far more appropriate manner whilst sitting upon such a priceless artefact. Yet, he could not bring himself to care about the Drey
fuss, only about what was in the pocket of his jacket.
He withdraw his hand from his pocket, and opened it slowly. A small vial of clear liquid lay in his heavily scarred palm. The man in the enginarium had claimed that it was a potent analgesic, one that could reverse pain and transform it into something approaching pleasure.
Korvane sighed as he recalled the endless treatments he had subjected himself to in the aftermath of Arrikis Epsilon. Though each had lessened his outward scarring, they had in turn heaped upon him a concomitant pain deep within. At first he had taken standard pain killing drugs, then he had progressed to more potent metaopi-oids. Though he refused to fully acknowledge the fact, even to himself, he had developed a taste for the drugs, a taste far in excess of their medical efficacy.
As master of his vessel, not one of the medicae staff had dared refuse him access to the metaopioids. Yet, in time and with prolonged and ever-increasing use, the drugs’ effects had reduced and the pain had slowly returned, this time far worse then ever before. He had been driven into the depths of his vessel, to the company of the lowest of the low amongst the press-ganged murderers and rapists, to seek out a source of pain killing drugs. He had found one, discovering to his great distaste that the vast majority of the engine crew were addicted to the stuff. They needed, he had been told, to stave off the crippling pain inflicted by their continuous exposure to the unstable fields that flooded the plasma containment decks. He cared very little for the fate of the scum who worked those decks, yet he ensured that his contact was moved to a safer station in the enginarium, lest he succumb to the effects of the fields.
The new substance, referred to by the crew who used it as “d-sense”, had given back to Korvane some of the life he had enjoyed before. The pain went away each time he took the substance, and it did not even begin to return for days at a stretch. He hated it, yet, he knew, he needed the d-sense to function, for now at least.
[Rogue Trader 02] - Star of Damocles Page 12