Rogue Trader

by Andy Hoare

  The two vessels parted as the Oceanid’s drives swept across the tau starship’s prow, propelling them apart and inflicting hideous damage in the process. The smoke and flame obscuring the view ahead parted.

  What Lucian saw made him punch the arm of his command throne in celebration.

  The Imperial Navy’s battle line had followed Lucian in as he had drawn off the lead tau starship, which, even now, spun drunkenly away from the battle. Jellaqua’s cruisers were trading devastating volleys against the tau ships, who appeared hard-pressed to keep them at bay. The entire area of space ahead was lit blue with the discharge of the tau’s weapons, and fiery orange with the shells and torpedoes of the Imperial Navy’s. Ships burned and men and aliens alike died as the vessels of each fleet sought to wreak nothing less than bloody slaughter upon one another.

  ‘Comms on-line!’ Katona announced. Lucian saw that the man’s face was badly burned down his left side; evidently the man had refused to leave his station even while it burned, and he had restored the Oceanid’s communications system even while fighting the fire that had burned him. ‘Incoming transmission on fleet wide band.’

  ‘Thank you, Mister Katona,’ Lucian said, nodding to the man, determining to reward each of the bridge’s crew, assuming they all lived through this battle. ‘Patch it through.’

  ‘Imperial warships...’ Lucian smiled as he recognised the voice of Admiral Jellaqua. ‘The Oceanid’s unusual manoeuvre has taken the bastards by surprise! We have a new contact in amongst the escorts, and I am taking the Blade of Woe in to deal with it. Finish them off! In the name of the Emperor and the Imperium, give them hell!’

  The bridge crew cheered, and this time Lucian joined them. As the last of the Oceanid’s cogitation banks came back on-line, the holograph spluttered to life at the centre of the bridge. Lucian leaned forward to study the unfolding battle, and smiled.

  ‘Ordnance,’ he said, ‘I want every gun loaded and ready for firing. Shields, full power to frontal arc. Helm?

  ‘Helm standing by, my lord.’

  ‘We’re going in.’

  Brielle stood upon the observation deck of the tau vessel the Dal’yth Il’Fannor O’kray. The circular chamber was ringed with a single viewing window, and at its centre was projected a blue-tinged, three-dimensional representation of the battle unfolding around the nearby world. A dozen tau stood around the projection, conversing quietly and nodding as they watched events unfold.

  Her heart raced as she saw an Imperial Navy vessel, a light cruiser, possibly a Dauntless by its displacement and configuration, die violently, its overloaded plasma reactor creating a new sun for an instant, which rapidly died to leave nothing but atoms to mark the ship’s grave. The tau envoy she had met upon Dal’yth nodded to her at the ship’s passing, quietly marking the victory. She nodded back, yet she raged inside.

  The tau expected her to celebrate with them, but she could not.

  As she watched, the defence station that had wrought such havoc in the early stages of the battle was overwhelmed by the Imperium’s escort squadrons. Then, a senior tau of what they called the Air Caste, those responsible for the operation of the tau’s fleet, issued an order. A mighty vessel, called a warsphere, belonging, she was told, to a subject race of the tau called the kroot, emerged from behind the planet and ploughed right into the escorts’ formation. Though its weapons were close ranged, the warsphere took a fearsome toll amongst the far smaller escorts, before the Imperium’s largest warship, undoubtedly the Blade of Woe, circled back and destroyed it with relative ease.

  ‘They’re winning,’ she said, more to herself than to anyone around her. ‘The Imperium is winning.’

  ‘My lady,’ replied Naal, standing at her shoulder, ‘have no fear.’

  Brielle turned her back on the projection and looked out into the blackness of space. Although the battle was too distant to see in any detail, pinprick sparks blossomed amongst the stars, each no doubt marking the passing of a thousand needlessly expended lives. What if one of those tiny lights was the death of the Fairlight? What if it were the Oceanid or the Rosetta? Then she would truly be alone, set adrift from all that had made her what she was.

  She was a child of the Arcadius dynasty. She was born to explore and to conquer the dark regions that lay beyond the borders of the Imperium. She was not, she saw with sudden clarity, born to be some turncoat ambassador, and she would not act out such a role for the tau or for anyone else.

  ‘My lady?’ Naal asked, his voice low and urgent. ‘The envoys, my lady. They wish that you should witness the fleet pull back before the next phase is implemented. And when you have, they will wish to have an answer to their proposal.’

  Rage welled up inside her, but she beat it down savagely before turning to face the gathered tau. Let them gloat over their small victory, she thought. It can’t possibly last. That would be her answer to their damned proposal.

  Lucian sat alone in his stateroom, the lights down, a glass of strong liquor in his hand. They had won, he brooded, but at a terrible cost: four cruisers lost in a single battle. The names would be entered into the rolls of honour, but Lucian knew the Regent Lakshimbal, the Centaur, the Niobe and the Lord Cedalion would be missed grievously in the coming battles. The Niobe at least had been afforded the unusual luxury in space combat of its crew having time to escape, for the damage done to her had not been initially fatal. It was only three hours later, once the tau had finally disengaged, that the vessel’s damaged plasma relays had lost containment and Captain Joachim had ordered his ship abandoned. Another hour later and the Niobe’s reactor had gone critical, engulfing her and those crew who had not escaped in roiling plasma. Lucian had not been surprised to learn that Captain Joachim had survived the death of his cruiser; he had not expected the man to be the last off of his vessel.

  In addition to the four capital ships, the fleet had lost fourteen escorts, with another two almost certainly damaged beyond the fleet’s capacity to repair them in space. The battle had been a victory, Jellaqua had announced, but it was obvious the Imperium could scarcely afford another such win.

  Lucian could not guess how many lives had been lost, and this was only the first engagement in the crusade’s mission. Downing the contents of his glass in one gulp, Lucian cursed the cardinal and his faction to the depths of the warp. If only the council had not been swayed by Gurney’s rantings.

  A chime sounded at the door to Lucian’s chambers.

  ‘Enter,’ he growled.

  The wheel at the door’s centre spun, before it swung inward on creaking joints. A junior officer stepped through and saluted smartly.

  ‘Report,’ Lucian ordered.

  ‘The pathfinder wing, sir…’ Lucian slammed his glass down on the table beside his chair. ‘We have them on the rangers.’

  The holograph revolved slowly before Lucian. The augurs had picked up three returns, which even now were speeding towards the fleet at high speed. Both the Oceanid and the Blade of Woe had been hailing the three small scout vessels continuously for thirty minutes, but their long-range communications systems must have been down, for no signal was received back.

  ‘Coming into range now, my lord,’ announced Katona. ‘Hailing on all short range channels.’

  Lucian nodded, his heart pounding. If only three scout vessels of the elite pathfinders had returned from their mission, they must have run into serious trouble, for they were trained and equipped to escape enemy contact, not to seek it out. The thought that he might have lost a second child was too awful to consider, and so Lucian offered up a silent prayer that Korvane would be returned safely to him.

  ‘Pict signal on screen now,’ Katona said.

  The main screen above the forward portal came to life. At first the signal was little more than static, but after a minute, the picture became more distinct. It was the small, cramped bridge of the lead scout vessel. The ship must have
suffered terrible damage, for the small cockpit was wreathed in smoke, the figure sitting at the command station barely visible.

  Then, the smoke parted as that figure waved his arm to clear it. Lucian knew blessed relief as he saw that it was Korvane.

  ‘Son!’ Lucian said. ‘Thank the Emperor. What happened?’

  ‘Father?’ Korvane replied, his voice hoarse; the effects of the smoke, Lucian supposed. ‘Father, it’s you.’

  ‘What is it, Korvane? Come aboard immediately.’

  ‘No, father, wait.’ Korvane reached across to his console and flipped a switch.

  ‘We’re on fleet wide,’ Katona announced. Lucian knew that what Korvane was about to say would be heard upon the bridge of every vessel in the crusade fleet.

  ‘I can see,’ he said, before pausing to cough violently. ‘I can see that a great victory has been won here this day, though not without a price, I judge.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lucian replied. ‘The action cost us dear, but the tau are beaten back.’

  ‘No,’ Korvane answered, coughing once more, ‘they are not beaten back. They have regrouped. The fourth body in this system is a major centre of population. We fought a small patrol and trailed the survivors home. We monitored their comms traffic. We couldn’t translate anything, but we measured the signals and their sources.’

  Lucian’s blood ran cold. ‘Go on.’

  ‘As I said, the fourth body is a major world, as populous and as well defended as any sector capital. And it’s not the only one. By the comms traffic we intercepted, this entire region is swarming with activity. Father, these tau are not some insignificant little race limited to one or two systems. There are millions of them, spread across the whole cluster. Whatever you faced here today is only the smallest part of their forces. And…’ Korvane broke into another fit of violent coughing.

  ‘And,’ he continued, ‘they are converging on the fourth body. It seems their entire fleet is converging on the fourth body of this star system.’

  Lucian stood, looking up at the image of his son upon the main pict screen. The fleet wide channel broke out in chaos as those masters who had listened in demanded a million answers to a million questions, all at once. Lucian saw then that the crusade council had made a terrible error in underestimating the tau as it had. The council had decreed that the crusade would be sufficient to conquer the tau. Lucian had to admit that even he had believed the aliens would sue for peace rather than face the might of the crusade, somehow having convinced himself that no sane foe would risk the utter devastation the fleet could wreak upon any world it encountered.

  Lucian saw then that the crusade might soon have to fight, not for conquest, but for its very existence. He doubted the dominant faction, led by Cardinal Gurney, would view the matter in quite the same way, however. Lucian knew that the crusade would continue blundering on into tau space until it ran out of momentum entirely and the tau unleashed the inevitable counter-attack.

  Sitting once more, Lucian pondered further. Perhaps, he thought, the crusade might in the long run benefit from taking such a thrashing. Perhaps it might facilitate a seismic shift in the balance of power. Perhaps, he thought, warming to the idea, a sound defeat under the leadership of that bastard priest might cause the council to reject that leadership entirely.

  Then, Lucian grinned savagely, he would step forward. He would fill the power vacuum left in the wake of Gurney’s passing, and the rise of the Arcadius would be ensured.

  Ambition Knows No Bounds

  ‘Give me a reading, Joachim,’ Brielle Gerrit shouted against the raging wind. ‘I can’t see a damn thing!’

  ‘Augur says two-fifty, ma’am,’ Brielle’s companion and advisor called back, his voice barely cutting through the howling cacophony of the storm. ‘We should have visual any–’

  ‘There,’ Brielle called, and halted, craning her neck to look upwards. Against the churning, dark, purple clouds there was revealed an even darker form. She attempted to gauge its height, but her senses were confounded and unable to decipher its alien geometry. The rearing, slab-sided structure could have been standing scant metres in front of Brielle, or it could lie many kilometres distant.

  ‘Two-fifty.’ Brielle repeated her advisor’s estimate of the range to their destination. Even as she looked upon the structure’s form, its cliff-like planes appeared to shift, as if new surfaces and angles were revealed by the slightest change in perspective. ‘If you’re sure. Is everyone ready?’

  Brielle turned to inspect her small party, its members appearing from the all-enveloping shroud of the storm. She lifted the visor of her armoured survival suit, the cold air rushing in to sting her exposed cheeks. Squinting against the wind, she noted with satisfaction the deployment of the dozen armsmen that accompanied her from her vessel, the Fairlight, which waited in high orbit above this dead world to which she had come in search of riches for her rogue trader clan. Each was heavily armed, and appointed in rugged armour, their faces obscured by heavy rebreather units. Their leader, the taciturn Santos Quin, stepped forwards, shadowed by the far smaller form of Adept Seth, her senior astropath.

  ‘All is ready, my lady,’ Quin answered, his tattooed face just visible through his own suit’s visor. ‘But the storm rises,’ he added, casting a glance upwards at the churning skies.

  ‘Understood,’ Brielle replied, nodding, before looking to the astropath. ‘And you, adept, have you anything to report?’

  The astropath stepped forwards, bowing his helmeted head to his mistress. Through his visor, the adept’s face was visible as a gruesome mass of scar tissue; his eyes were hollow pits and his nose and mouth were barely discernible. The soul binding, the ritual by which the astropath had been exposed to, and sanctified by, the Emperor’s Grace, had blasted his body such that the man was in constant pain. Yet, although the normal range of human senses was denied to him, Adept Seth was possessed of far greater perception than any ordinary man.

  +This place is dead to me, mistress,++ the astropath replied. His voice was little more than a guttural rasp, so ravaged was his throat, yet Brielle heard the man’s words clearly for he spoke with his mind, directly into her own. ++Dead, yet I hear echoes, reverberations of ancient thoughts, or the hint of a sleeper’s dreams. I cannot tell which.++

  Brielle caught the sneer that crossed the face of Santos Quin at the astropath’s words, and knew that the man’s feral world origins made him distrustful of Seth and his powers. Yet, she knew what the astropath referred to, for she imagined that she too had discerned the very faintest of echoes, distant thoughts carried on the unquiet winds. She knew not what alien mind might have given rise to such thoughts, but she believed, hoped, relied upon the fact that they were mere echoes of some ancient and long-dead power.

  ‘Well enough,’ Brielle said, lowering her visor. ‘We continue, with caution.’

  Brielle stood before the pitted, black wall of the vast alien structure. Although the surface was but an arm’s length in front of her, she felt compelled to reach out and lay a palm upon it, just to be certain. Even through the tough glove of her survival suit, Brielle felt the cold radiating from the stone-like material, a cold that touched not only her skin, but her soul too.

  ‘Mistress.’ Brielle withdrew her hand at the sound of the astropath’s voice. ‘Please, try not to–’

  ‘I know, Seth,’ Brielle replied. ‘I know.’ She looked around, and addressed Quin. ‘We need to find a way in. Have your men spread out.’

  The warrior nodded silently, and moved away to speak to the armsmen. In a moment, they, as well as Brielle’s advisor Joachim Hep, had departed, all bar Quin himself having moved out in search of a means of entering the vast structure. Brielle saw Quin test the mechanism on his boltgun, before lowering his sensor goggles to scan the depths of the storm. He would stand vigil over his mistress, no matter what.

  Brielle resumed her study of the alien form.
She craned her neck upwards, noting that either the storm clouds had lowered or the ever-shifting planes of the structure had elongated, for now the top appeared to be lost to the storm above. She pondered, not for the first time, the risk inherent in this expedition, but knew that vast riches were to be claimed on such worlds as this. As next in line to sovereignty of the mighty Clan Arcadius, it fell to Brielle to carve her name across the galaxy, to pierce the darkness in the name of the Emperor, to face whatever might lurk in the depths of the void and to overcome it, for the sake of humanity. And, she mused, smiling coyly behind her visor, to amass untold wealth and undreamed-of glory along the way.

  It was Brielle’s hope, and that of her clan, that this unnamed world, far out in the void between spiral arms, might yield such riches. The galaxy was strewn with the ruins of civilisations far older than the Imperium of Man, and planets such as this were home to dusty tombs sealed before mankind even looked to the skies above ancient Terra. Such tombs, when discovered, had been known to contain relics of long-dead alien races, artefacts of wonder for which the pampered nobility of the Imperium’s ruling classes would pay a staggering price just to possess. The vast majority of these items were considered curiosities or art, having no discernible function. Others could be studied, their functions and exotic abilities unlocked. Brielle knew that dilettante collectors and self-proclaimed experts in the proscribed field of xenology would give their all for such items.

  Yet, Brielle was struck with a cold sense of dread, an unutterable feeling that something was terribly amiss with this dead planet.

  ‘Something stirs, my lady,’ Adept Seth warned, as if giving voice to an unnamed fear gnawing at the periphery of Brielle’s consciousness.