‘But the thing about money is that once you have enough to live like royalty, the act of making more becomes almost unbearably tedious. I was earning vast profits in every corner of the Koalith system, but it just wasn’t enough. Not the money, you understand, I had plenty of that, but the challenge simply wasn’t there. I wanted to reach out beyond the Koalith system, to push the boundaries of what I could achieve, but there was one stumbling block in my path.’
‘You needed a Letter of Marque to operate with impunity beyond the system borders.’
Roboute stabbed his cigar at Kotov and said, ‘Correct. And the Adeptus Terra aren’t exactly handing them out like party favours around Bakka. The last one I know of that was granted, was to a family that could trace its origins back to the Age of Apostasy, or so they said, and that took three centuries of negotiations, fancy bureaucratic footwork and copious amounts of bribery. I didn’t have that long, so I arranged a meeting with Anohkin’s senior Administratum adept, a man for whom the word vulgar might well have been invented and who was the ultimate authority in granting such documentation around Bakka.
‘I invited this man over to one of my villas for a sumptuous dinner in order to show him certain spectacular pieces of xenos gemstones I’d kept back for just this sort of contingency. On similar occasions where I’d hoped to sell the eldar gemstones, I employed the services of a dear friend whom I’ll call Lorelei. Trust me, archmagos, if you or Tarkis here had any human desire left in you, you would both have fallen hopelessly in love with her immediately.’
‘You sought simply to buy a Letter of Marque?’ asked Kotov.
‘Nothing quite so crass,’ said Roboute, ‘but not too far off the mark. I seated Lorelei directly across the dining table from the adept, giving him eight courses to gape at the nova rubies and deep garden emeralds glistening in the candlelight against her body-sheer dinner dress. All the while, the adept’s “companion” for the evening, a parasitic woman who represented the very apex of poor taste, slurped her soup and mangled her meat beside him. With Lorelei always in view, the intended transference took place in the adept’s mind: upon purchasing the jewellery and adorning his lady, she would become as lovely as my lady.
‘Lorelei and I had run this psychological manipulation many times, and the illusion usually ended up further fattening my coffers and Lorelei’s investment portfolios. Not to mention that it would enhance the stature of the adept with his companion, while providing her with an impressive memento against which her next conquest would have to compete. Everyone would walk away happy. Usually.’
‘So what went wrong?’ asked Kotov, and Roboute saw he was hooked.
‘This particular adept had been snared by a vapid nymph encased in white satin that clung to her curves only slightly less tightly than she to his credit flow. By the time the meal was concluded, it was clear to me that Lorelei’s customary hypnotic spell had again trumped reason and that the deal would be sealed over drinks and fine cigars.
‘Ushered to a lush leather wingchair, the adept settled in while his companion curled up coyly at his feet. Again, the lovely Lorelei was carefully seated directly opposite to ensure the trance of her beauty would remain unbroken. I poured snifters of expensive amasec for everyone, the personal touch you understand, and subsequently held out an open humidor so that the adept might select a cigar from among the best in the subsector. While the adept’s position had allowed him to sample many exotic pleasures, he had not yet had occasion to experience the finest of cigars. He carefully watched me remove the band from my cigar and clip it with a sterling cutter. The adept, as any avid student would, followed suit, but, alas, tragedy soon struck.’
Roboute grinned, savouring the moment and relishing Blaylock’s obvious impatience. He had come here expecting Kotov to break Roboute on the wheel, but the initiative had slipped from his grip and Roboute wasn’t about to give it back.
‘Just as I dipped the head of my cigar in the amasec and struck a match, the trophy mistress at the adept’s feet rose to her knees, partially blocking his view of the dip-and-light process. Attempting to emulate what he thought he had seen, the hapless adept dipped the foot of his cigar deeply into the amasec and lit the saturated end. A mighty flame roared up, resolving itself in a huge clot of char. Fumbling helplessly for an ashtray the startled adept waved the maimed cigar in the air, dislodging the blackened blob of char, which plunged straight down the already plunging neckline of his companion. The lady wasn’t burned, but she was mightily outraged and shrieking obscenities that would have made a Munitorum overseer blush, fled into the night, profoundly vilifying her former true love and vowing never to come within a hundred metres of him again.’
‘Then it would seem that your plan had failed, Mister Surcouf,’ said Kotov.
‘Not at all,’ said Roboute. ‘The adept was inordinately pleased to be rid of this particularly troublesome and expensive wench, and went to great lengths to expedite the passage of my Letter of Marque. With his assistance, I was easily able to penetrate the impenetrable walls of red tape and obtain copies of the Administratum hololithic imprints necessary for the fabrication of such a document. All that he asked was that I destroy them afterwards.’
‘And did you?’
‘Of course, I am a man of my word, after all.’
‘I do not see the purpose of this irrelevant story,’ said Blaylock. ‘It has no bearing on your flouting of Imperial and Mechanicus laws.’
‘That’s because you have no soul, Tarkis. You don’t feel the need to mark any moment with an emotional reminder of why things happen the way they do.’
He held the smoking cigar out to Kotov and said, ‘This brand of cigar was the one that went up in flames and hence secured me my Letter of Marque. The day before I left Anohkin, I bought a single cigar from the stall in the commercia, and I’ve kept it ever since.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘I knew it was only a matter of time until someone figured out my Marque had been faked, especially on an expedition like this, so as the beginning of my career as a rogue trader was marked by such a cigar, so too would be its ending.’
Kotov nodded, as though understanding the significance of Roboute’s tale.
‘A colourful tale to embroider the beginnings of your career as a rogue trader, Mister Surcouf,’ said Kotov. ‘Comical details that add a level of verisimilitude I suspect you hope will lessen my anger towards your ongoing deception.’
Roboute said, ‘For what it’s worth, the story’s true, but did it have the required effect?’
‘The effect was unnecessary,’ said Kotov. ‘I already knew your Letter of Marque was fake.’
The silence between Kotov’s words and Blaylock’s disbelieving outburst was seconds at most, but felt like a geological epoch.
‘You knew, archmagos? You knew and you allowed him to lead us beyond the galaxy anyway?’
‘Of course I knew, Tarkis,’ said Kotov. ‘Did you think I would not examine every detail of this man’s life before taking him at his word that he had a relic of Telok’s lost fleet? I may have lost my forge worlds, but I have not lost my capacity for reason and due diligence. I knew all about Mister Surcouf’s encounter with the eldar and his subsequent dealings and exploitation of the Adeptus Terra’s representative at Bakka. The precise details of how you acquired your Letter of Marque were a mystery to me, but I confess to being greatly amused by your tale.’
‘Archmagos,’ protested Blaylock. ‘This man has grossly misrepresented himself. How can we take anything he has said or presented to us at face value? Every aspect of the Mechanicus’s dealings with him must be called into question. Every scrap of data and every word out of his mouth is tainted by deceit and falsehood. That he acquired a Letter of Marque under such circumstances should, at the very least, see everything he owns be impounded by the Mechanicus. His ship, his wealth, his crew, his–’
‘Leave
my crew out of this, Tarkis,’ warned Roboute. ‘They knew nothing of this. As far as they were aware, the Renard was a legitimately licensed vessel. I won’t let you punish them for what I’ve done, do you understand me?’
Kotov held up a hand of machined silver and said, ‘Mister Surcouf, be at peace. No-one is being punished, what would be the point? We are far beyond Imperial space and that you were able to facilitate the fabrication of so complex a document speaks volumes to your ingenuity and tenacity. I, for one, would far rather have such a man leading me into the unknown than some foppish, inbred fool who earned his Marque by virtue of hereditary inheritance.’
‘You cannot let this deception go unpunished, archmagos!’ said Blaylock.
‘What deception, Tarkis?’ said Kotov, gesturing to the holographic veils of light hanging between the titanic columns supporting the dome. Roboute followed Kotov’s gesture and saw a series of elliptical hexamathic proofs vanish, to be replaced by an entry in the Registrati Imperialis.
‘No…’ said Blaylock, instantly processing what took Roboute a moment to understand.
‘As soon as I saw that Captain Surcouf’s Marque was a forgery, I knew I had to ratify it immediately,’ said Kotov. ‘The expedition’s manifest was to be entered in Martian Records, and the Montes Analyticae would spot the discrepancy long before the fleet was ready to depart.’
‘You falsified the records,’ said Blaylock.
‘I amended them,’ corrected Kotov. ‘Mister Surcouf’s physical Letter of Marque may be counterfeit, but so far as Imperial records are concerned, he is a legitimate rogue trader, and has been since his arrival on Anohkin.’
‘This is outrageous,’ spluttered Blaylock. ‘You cannot do this.’
‘I am an archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ said Kotov. ‘I can do whatever I want.’
From the descending orbital spiral of the Renard’s shuttle, the surface of Hypatia appeared as rust brown smudges interspersed with upthrust masses of titanic mountain ranges and rapidly swelling oceanic bodies. Atmospheric seed-augurs revealed the atmosphere to be breathable, if only comfortably so for short periods of time, and the geological core to be in a state of ongoing flux. The surface was tectonically active, but stable enough to sustain the industrial harvest fleet descending to replenish the Speranza’s virtually exhausted supply of raw materials.
Linya kept a background inload from the shuttle’s pilot compartment filtering through her field of vision as she made her way to the giant cargo shuttle’s loading hold. The internal crew spaces of the trans-atmospheric ship were cramped, as one would expect of a vessel that was little more than a pilot’s compartment mag-locked and bolted to a heat-shielded warehouse. They were clean and well-maintained, each junction of corridors clearly marked and efficiently laid out. Here and there, in alcoves that appeared like shared secrets, she found curiously random trinkets in subtly lit display cases: a folded flag from Espandor, a Mechanicus commendation, a Cadian medal and other fleeting glimpses into the character of the crew.
It was a personal touch on a working vessel she found quaintly archaic, yet wonderfully human.
The Renard’s shuttle was a mid-sized carrier, capable of carrying tens of thousands of metric tonnes of cargo and was clearly kept in a well above average state of repair. Linya expected no less from a man like Roboute Surcouf, and she smiled as she remembered his clumsy overtures in the wake of the dinner in the Cadian officers’ mess.
She did not regret what she had said to him, after all she had not lied. Baseline humans without cognitive augmentation were almost transparent in the interest they held for members of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Artificially evolved thought processes made it next to impossible for many tech-priests to relate to the petty concerns and levels of importance humanity placed on meaningless ritual and unnecessary social intercourse.
Linya had fought to hold onto the core essence of her birth species as she rose through the Cult Mechanicus, but with every implant, every sacrifice of an organic organ or limb, it became a more and more difficult task. She knew that many in the Martian priesthood considered her an aberration, a throwback to the earliest days of transhumanism, where even the slightest alteration to the human body-plan or cybernetic addition to cognition was viewed with technophobic horror.
She read a change in attitude of the shuttle and brought her inloads to the fore of her visual field, reading the planet’s mass, rotational period, perihelion, aphelion, equatorial diameter, axial tilt and atmospheric composition.
Volcanic activity on Hypatia’s closest moon, the erratically orbiting Isidore, was forcing a course correction, something Emil Nader was managing with only the smallest expenditure of fuel. Bloated refinery tenders hung in geostationary orbit around Isidore, their deep-core siphon rigs draining a dozen underground caverns of their vast lakes of promethium.
The second moon, Synesius, traced an elliptical orbit at the farthest edge of the planet’s gravitational envelope, an inert ball of rock without any rotation of its own. A hundred Mechanicus scarifiers had landed on its surface, tearing claws the size of hab-towers breaking its lithosphere open for the Land Leviathans to strip its upper mantle of usable materials.
But the real prize was Hypatia itself. By her father’s reckoning, the planet was in the early stages of its development, the crust still malleable enough to permit the digging out of its precious mineral and chemical resources with relative ease. The entirety of the Speranza’s harvest fleet had been despatched to the surface of Hypatia and its two moons, as Archmagos Kotov wanted this resupply effort undertaken with maximum speed and minimum delay on their journey to Telok’s forge world.
With Moonchild and Wrathchild keeping station in high orbit and Mortis Voss assuming a rotating helical course around the three vessels, the Speranza anchored in low orbit, at an altitude Linya felt was dangerously close to the planet’s atmospheric boundary and fluctuating gravity envelope. Magos Saiixek was working his engine crews to the limits of endurance to keep the ship’s trajectory stable, but Magos Blaylock had calculated that the benefit to the bulk haulers’ turnaround speeds would more than compensate for the level of risk.
Linya matched what the shuttle’s active surveyor arrays were telling her of Hypatia with the data Galatea had exloaded from the Tomioka’s cogitators, finding only the acceptable level of discrepancies one might expect between readings taken thousands of years apart. Linya did not trust Galatea one iota, but the data had so far offered her no reason to doubt its claim of simply acting as a conduit for the vast reams of information. She shuddered as she remembered its manipulator arm tracing down her cheek, like an obscene parody of a lover’s touch. The machine intelligence claimed to be sentient and thus ‘alive’, so could that mean it harboured intentions towards her that might be considered unnatural?
She shook off the loathsome thought as the cramped, steel-panelled corridor opened into the vaulted immensity of the cargo hold. She read the noospheric data being shed by the shuttle’s systems, a curious blend of awe mixed with fearful reverence and smiled at their conflicted emissions.
The shuttle carried no cargo, but its hold was a bustling mass of activity nonetheless.
A hundred or more tech-priests bearing the canidae insignia of Legio Sirius clustered around the threatening mass of metal, ceramite and iron that stood shackled to the centre of the cargo deck like a dangerous wild animal in the hold of a big game hunter. Hostile binaric code burbled from its augmitters and Linya felt a thrill of danger at the sight of it.
Even chained to the deck for transit, Amarok was a magnificently lethal engine of war.
Princeps Vintras directed the work of a dozen tech-priests and servitors as they finished the repainting of the Warhound’s armoured topside. The damage the engine had suffered on Katen Venia was almost completely repaired, and Vintras made sure that all evidence of its wounding was erased.
The Titan’s warhorn bla
red, echoing through the cargo deck, and Linya adjusted her aural implants to filter out the most gruesome war-horrors embedded in its howl.
‘I take it the senior princeps have settled their differences?’ asked Vitali, approaching along a gantry perpendicular to the one she stood upon.
‘So it would appear,’ said Linya.
The Manifold had been alight for days following the altercation between Eryks Skálmöld and Arlo Luth, the fury of their confrontation bleeding into neighbouring cogitation networks and causing systems throughout the Speranza to fuse and spit with borrowed aggression. Whatever had driven them to conflict had apparently been resolved, as the renewed vigour with which the two princeps had coordinated the Legio’s ongoing training schedule was masterful.
‘I don’t know about you, daughter,’ said Vitali, clapping his hands with glee, ‘but I am looking forward to walking the surface of Hypatia in a god-machine.’
Linya’s father’s enthusiasm for their planned trip to the surface aboard Amarok was taking decades off him, making him sound more like an adept only into his second century. He put an arm around her shoulder and she felt the warm rush of his affection course through her floodstream. She remembered Roboute asking her if she loved her father and the faintly dismissive answer she had given him.
Of course she loved her father; at times like this his irrepressible enthusiasm for new things was a salutary reminder of what it meant to be human. She tried to hold to the feeling, but the toxic stream of wrathful binary from the secured Titan made it hard to hold onto any thoughts save those of conquest.
‘It’s going to be cramped in there,’ she reminded him. ‘A Warhound isn’t designed to carry passengers, and we will be expected to carry out the tasks of the crew members we are replacing.’
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 62