by William King
He had been fortunate that the senior partners at Sansom & Sansom had recognised his talent. They had been grateful to him for saving their go-downs and their property, and they had found it a great advantage to have the hero of the Siege of Crowe's Town in their employ. Promotion had come thick and fast, and with it wealth. He had enjoyed the money and what it could buy, but he had enjoyed command more.
It had not been too long before he had convinced the merchant princes to give him command of a trading ship and a force of mercenaries. They had underwritten his application for a rogue trader's charter and the cost of his first voyage, that long glorious sweep through the Draconic Arm, and he had repaid their investment ten times over in trade goods and monopoly treaties with the rulers of the worlds he had found. Ten new worlds he had brought into the Imperium of Man on that voyage, and every one of them had made him a pretty penny too.
His Navigator on that voyage as on all his subsequent voyages had been Simon Belisarius, that quiet, strange, driven man. He had impressed Belisarius enough that the young Navigator had become his business partner. Janus had made enough money from that one voyage to pay for his share in the purchase of the Star of Venam. Simon had raised the rest of the money from his House. Janus could still remember the interviews with the House representatives. If he concentrated he could almost smell the odd musky smell in the chamber, and those three wizened oldsters with scarves wrapped around their third pineal eye, the one they only opened to look upon the great void. They had been dour, cynical, crabbed old men and their interrogation had been long and thorough.
They must have been impressed enough by tales of the voyage and his previous battles for they had loaned Simon the money without demur. Perhaps it had not really been a loan, perhaps he had simply acquired a silent partner in House Belisarius. Even after all these years he was still unsure exactly of the relationship between his Navigator and his House. The politics of the Navis Nobilitae were complex beyond belief, as he supposed was only to be expected from a trading clan with its roots back in the legendary times before even the Imperium was founded.
Then had come the good years, the years in which everything he touched turned to gold. He had set about recruiting and equipping the best force of mercenaries money could buy and they had rewarded his investment a hundredfold. Darke's Company had become a legend in this part of the Segmentum Obscura—a force almost as feared and respected as the Space Marines, some said.
He had left his name on a string of unbroken victories right across the sector. He had helped put down the rebellion on Winterhome IX, staining the snows red with blood, and nearly losing a hand to frostbite. He had rescued the freighters of the grand fleet from an attack by Dorian corsairs, and then accepted a commission from the Imperium to wipe out the pirates who had attacked them. He had scoured that massive asteroid belt with measured ruthlessness, recruiting and taming the best of the reavers, forcing the others out through the airlocks without the benefit of a spacesuit.
He had undertaken another great voyage through the great blank areas on the edge of the star chart, discovering the migration route along which the ork hulks drifted into the sector and destroying three wrecks full of greenskins. He had planted the banner of the Imperium on Dykastra, and brought the long lost people of that benighted world back into the fold of civilisation. Honours had been heaped on him. Merchants had clamoured to fund his next voyage. Even the Inquisition had regarded him with a healthy measure of respect.
The money had flowed in, and flowed out again. He had built a palace here on Medusa and stocked it with the treasures of a hundred worlds. He had sampled all the pleasures Freeport had to offer, and thus met Justina and her coterie. His company had become a regiment. His single ship had grown into a fleet. By the time he was thirty he had become a merchant prince as great as any who held the reins in the millennia old house of Sansom & Sansom. Ships bearing his name had slid smoothly out from Medusa to all the worlds of the Segmentum Obscura. He had underwritten his voyages of exploration, picking likely men from his crews and sponsoring them as rogue traders. At one time he had controlled a fleet as great as the governor's, and a force of warriors who made up for what they lacked in numbers by sheer skill, ferocity and the quality of their equipment.
Perhaps, he thought, that was when it had all started to go wrong. Money and power always attracted envy and resentment. Looking back now, he could see that he had been too filled with pride, too armoured by his own arrogance, to see the signs of what was to come. Perhaps even then the taint had gnawed away at him from within, and the spores of madness had lodged in his brain.
He had made many enemies during his rise. Men he had mocked for their timidity when they would not sponsor his voyages. Men he had pushed aside in his endless quest for profit, grinding their businesses under his heel, secure in the knowledge that they would never be able to take vengeance on him. Men who had tried to betray him and who he had crushed for their folly. Oh, he had made enemies all right, but what man did not who rose from the gutters of Crowe's Town to a palace on the Avenue of the Emperor and a fortune counted in tens of millions of ducats?
He had thought himself secure, walled around by his fortress palace, guarded by eight hundred loyal soldiers who used his name as a battle cry, shielded by his alliance with one of the oldest and greatest of the Navigator Houses. He had dined with governors, the leaders of Space Marine Chapters and admirals of Imperial fleets. He had been consulted for the depths of his knowledge in obscure areas on the star charts. He had thought himself invulnerable as only a man of thirty-two, who has risen by his own efforts to the heights of power, could feel. He had been certain of his own genius, and his own shrewd judgement. He had remained certain as it all started to crumble.
He could not even say where and how it had all started to go wrong, and considering how much he spent on a network of spies, that was alarming. His enemies appeared to be well organised and well-funded. It seemed that he was not the only one with powerful allies back on distant Terra. One by one, the captains of his fleet had vanished. Rogue traders disappeared into the vast blank spots on the maps, never to return. Pirates took his merchant captains, striking with uncanny foreknowledge of all precautions he took to trap them.
It seemed that his luck had turned. A man who could do no wrong could now do no right. Now instead of turning to gold, everything he touched turned to dust. His golden reputation drained away, his aura of invincibility became tarnished. Allies and clients deserted him, starting with those toadies who had only followed his lead because he was the darling of the hour, but eventually encompassing those he had thought staunch at his side. Too late did he learn that the merchants of Medusa valued present success more than past triumphs. No matter how many ducats you had put in their coffers, it was never as important as the treasure they thought you might put there tomorrow.
As his wealth and his allies had deserted him, the vultures gathered. Creditors who once had been only too pleased to wait his pleasure for payment now demanded their money up front, bailiffs dunned him. Men who would never have dared speak out against him before began to decry his name in public. And then, he had at long last opened the forbidden book. He cursed himself for his folly and the fury drove him to lengthen his stride and try to forget.
He continued along the bridge, pausing to look into the windows of the shop houses built into its walls. His personal devil brought him to halt in an arch beneath the legs of the conquering hero Xanderius and made him glance into the windows of a bookseller. The book, he thought, it always came back to that accursed book.
Strange how he had paid it no attention for more than a decade. It had simply been part of a treasure cache he had found on an ork hulk and had been unable to dispose of. It was a logbook from an old starship, written in what appeared to be gibberish, until he had eventually pried open the cover and set himself to breaking the code. It had been desperation and the need for distraction that had made him do so as his empire crumbled, but once he ha
d cracked it, triumph filled him, and he was certain that he had found a way to renew his fortunes.
The old book was a rutter, a journey log left by one of the ancient Navigators. It told of a long voyage through the dark places on the star charts, of the way to a world where an ancient temple contained one of the great grails all rogue traders sought, a Standard Template Construct, a legacy of the ancient dark age when men had first mastered the secrets of the universe, and built their galaxy spanning civilisation. These things were almost literally priceless; to any man who found one the Imperium offered a bounty which was enough to buy an entire planet. He could still remember the sense of astonished gratitude that had filled him. He had chosen to ignore the warnings.
He studied the musty leather bound tomes, their covers embossed in the scripts of a dozen different worlds. How many of those could he read? Five score or was it six? Not that it mattered greatly. Forced memory learning had given him that skill. His brain was stacked with vocabularies for languages that he might never use, but which nonetheless were there in case of need. In his youth he had paid a small fortune for the training. A servant of the Imperium might be able to spend his whole career speaking nothing but High and Vernacular Gothic, but Janus could communicate in the speech of every major starport he was ever likely to do business in.
And yet, when he first heard the liquid speech of those eldar strangers this evening he had been so drunk he had not even recognised it, and he should have been able to. He had heard it before: it was as different from human speech as the grunting of orks. He recalled traders he had encountered on the Far Worlds, representatives of some craftworld bargaining for statues, worthless junk or so it seemed to Janus, and yet which was of great significance to them.
Eldar, he thought, and shivered. Aliens. Xenogens. Creatures of the darkness to be shunned by all true followers of the Emperor of Man lest their deviance rub off and spread like a plague. Was it really possible that Auric and Athenys were eldar, or was this all simply another figment of his drug-tortured, hallucination blasted mind? Was he simply spinning something out that he wanted to believe? Yet he had held the dreamstone. That was real, wasn't it? It had certainly felt so.
The phaeton of one of the nobility drifted past the coachman steering it carelessly as it drifted over the heads of the crowd. Its running lights sent probing beams out into the mist. Inside its passengers huddled in their cloaks of spun silver, safe from the poisons in the air. The coachman mounted in the open cockpit had no such pressurised protection. Instead a filter mask obscured his face and turned him into something resembling a giant humanoid insect.
Justina would know what to do with the gem. A strange woman, was the owner of the Palace of Pleasures, as cold and beautiful as the snows of Winterhome and possessed of an odd predatory intelligence. How she had come about her vast store of strange knowledge he did not know, although she had made some hints and he had made some guesses, all of which led in a direction that made further speculation uncomfortable.
Nonetheless, she would be able to dispose of the jewel for him at a good price. He was not entirely sure why she had picked him out of all the men who came to the palace to take a personal interest in, and he was not entirely sure he was glad of it, but he was certain that in this she would not cheat him. And with the money, he could settle old debts.
First things first though. It was time to start organising, and that would mean getting a crew back together—if anybody would trust him after the Typhon business. It was time to find his old crew before they left Medusa for good, signed on with some other captain, or just plain drifted down into the degeneration that afflicted so many on this frontier world.
Why was Medusa so corrupt, Janus wondered? It was a place where a man could get away with murder by slipping the Arbites a terce, where the nobility were said to be riddled by Chaos worship and the governor spent all day and all night in his harem smoking a hookah full of devilroot to give him potency for the coming pleasures. Justina hinted a man could gain entrance to all manner of exotic and proscribed cults with ease.
So why had he lived here so long? What had appealed to him? Once he had told himself it was simply the best place in this whole sector for a ruthless young merchant prince to do business; now he saw the shadow of other things. Perhaps the corruption here had called to the corruption within him.
It was a world, Janus was certain, that some time soon the Inquisition would come down on, and cut the very heart out of like a glutton scooping the innards out of a melon. It should have happened before now, and yet it had not.
Was it because they were so distant from the hub of Imperial government and so close to the Eye of Terror? Was there some sort of pestilential radiation emitted from that dreadful place that warped the minds of the locals? And what of the hints of bribery on a massive scale, a corruption that reached out from Medusa right into the vast web of the Imperial bureaucracy?
Long ago Janus had been to the Hall of Records on Terra, and knew how vast was the Imperium of Man. It would not take much effort to lose the records pertaining to Medusa, and the dockets that contained the reports of Imperial spies. Such things could be done for a price. Simon had hinted that House Belisarius did it, but indeed so did all of the other great Houses and trading concerns of the Imperium. It was all part of doing business. Perhaps the governor of Medusa, or whoever was behind him, had similar connections. Or perhaps he paid one of the great Houses to do it for him... maybe even House Belisarius. It was not impossible.
Such speculation was getting him nowhere. He needed to find Stiel, Kham Bell or one of the others and spread the word that they were back in business again, that he would settle all scores and pay off all back wages. Assuming of course that Kham Bell did not rip him limb from limb or Ruark did not brain him with a power spanner. He was not sure that they would forgive him for the last trip. Maybe they would. He had been a good employer and there was a time when they would have followed him into hell. Which was pretty much where he had led them, come to think of it.
And it would be good to get the old crew back together again. One thing was sure, no Imperial captain would be hiring them out, not with tickets blacked the way theirs were. The Star of Venam was not a ship to say you had served on these days. Only a smuggler or something worse would hire them, and he would say something for his crew, they were fairly choosy about things like that. No, he decided, chances were, if he paid them, they would forgive and forget, and they would be back in business again.
Although Janus was not exactly sure what that business was going to be. Once he got the Star out of impound, what was he going to do? He could not go back to work for Fat Roj or the syndics. He might need to start taking on basic cargoes, and he doubted he could find any of those profitable enough to cover his expenses, pay the crew and feed his habit. Well, it was something he would worry about when he got there. Right now, he just needed to take things one step at a time until the way was clear. First things first though, he needed to find his Navigator, and he had a fairly good idea of how he was going to do that.
Just as the thought passed through his mind, he heard the sudden scuff of boot on stone behind him. He turned swiftly, hand to pistol hilt, and saw two large, threatening men emerge from the mist behind him. With them was Weezel, looking very angry.
'There's the bastard,' he said. 'Blow him away!'
FIVE
SEVEN GOLDEN ARGOSIES
Simon Belisarius studied the pharaoh board intently. It was a difficult position even by the standards of the complex three-dimensional game. He rubbed the small pencil line moustache on his upper lip, touched his long delicate fingers to the patch that covered his third eye, then brought them back along his cheek to his moustache again. None of this helped him find a solution to his predicament. It looked like Alysia Nomikos had him well and truly trapped.
Surely not. He allowed a small amused smile to appear on his lips, as if he had suddenly thought of a good move. It would never do to let her think she
was getting the better of him. Navigators played pharaoh because mastering the complexities of its involved three-dimensional structure was supposed to be good practice for the treacherous task of guiding a ship through the immaterium. For many, admitting defeat at pharaoh was like admitting that someone was a better Navigator than they were. Not that Simon was so foolishly vain and petty; he just did not like losing.
'Give up, Simon,' said Alysia. 'There's no way out.'
She knew him too well, alas. They had played pharaoh every time they had met for the last six years. After a hundred games, he supposed his reactions must be a little predictable.
'My dear Alysia, surely you must know that there is always a way out. Did not your tutors teach this elementary truth? There is always a way out, through or under.' He was not entirely sure he believed this truism. He sometimes thought it was only an article of faith designed to give Navigators hope in untenable circumstances. The Emperor alone knew there were enough of those in a Navigator's life.
'We're both too old to believe that, Simon,' she said and laughed. She had a pleasant laugh and a pleasant smile. And she certainly looked good in her black dress uniform with the opened book emblem of House Nomikos on it. He liked her greatly. It was a pity their Houses were only hereditarily neutral, or he might have petitioned his father to arrange a marriage with her or one of her clan sisters. Not that his father would have listened. The wishes of children counted as nothing in such things. Only clan politics and the constant shift and tangle of alliances guided the calculations of the algebra of marriage. 'It's been ten years since I got my wings. Must be twice that for you.'
'I am offended,' he said. 'Surely I do not look so... ancient. I know my stay in this barbaric wilderness has aged me, but not by so much.'