by Paul Kearney
‘One thing at a time, old man,’ Hester said. She punched some buttons and pulled back gently on the black yoke that rose from her console.
‘Give me power.’
The nearest servitor garbled in binaric. Morcault caught some elements of it, but he had forgotten more of the machine language than he had ever learned. He felt the ship shift and turn under his seat as the gravitics compensated for pitch and roll, and there was a faint pressure on his chest as they picked up speed.
‘Leaving it behind, and good riddance,’ Hester said quietly.
‘We were lucky to chance across it out here,’ Morcault told her.
‘Lucky you still like to investigate every piece of flotsam and jetsam you come across,’ Hester replied.
‘Old habits die hard.’
Hester’s one human eye narrowed. ‘Bad habits especially.’
‘I know. A symptom of age. Let me know the second the vox clears up. I’m going to have a word with the ship’s cook.’
‘He’s in his bunk doing his tortured soul act,’ Hester said irritably. ‘That means freeze-dried mush for dinner, I shouldn’t wonder.’ She paused. ‘Sometimes I feel that third eye of his, as though he is looking through all of us.’
‘That is the way of his kind, Hester.’
Another buzz on the ship’s comm. ‘Captain, this is Scurrios. Sick bay is all set to blow. Vent when you’re ready.’
‘Stand by,’ Morcault said. He looked at Hester, and nodded. She lifted a fail-safe cover and flipped one of a series of brass switches above her head. ‘There she blows. Repressurising in about four minutes,’ she said. ‘I hope Scurrios wasn’t in sick bay when he made that comm.’
‘Not even he is that absent-minded,’ Morcault told her, though they shared a look. Scurrios was brilliant, in his own way, but there were days when Morcault felt he shouldn’t be let out alone.
He left the bridge, easing down the metal stairs where once he would have slid down the handrails that bounded them. He knew Hester was watching him, and hated the thought she should see him so frail.
Ghent Morcault was eighty-one years old, and despite a small fortune spent on the best rejuvenating procedures the Imperium could boast, he felt it.
He could still get about, and his mind was as sharp as it had ever been, but he knew that his days were near an end. When his time came, his crew would consign his remains to the void, and Hester would be the new captain of the Mayfly. That much he had impressed upon her, though she refused to speak of his end. We’ll have to take you out and shoot you to get rid of you, she always said.
Arnhal was not answering his door. Morcault rapped harder with the bulbous end of the pitchthorn stick.
‘Jodi, open the damned door or I’ll get Gortyn to kick it in.’
There was a mumble, and the lock went green.
Arnhal’s stateroom stank of cheap grain alcohol – the Navigator’s poison of choice. The smell of it always brought back vague, brightly coloured memories to Morcault – he had given up alcohol himself some twenty years before, a battle that had taken a lot of winning.
‘Jodi, it stinks in here.’
The ship’s Navigator was on his bunk, a lean, cadaverous young man with the sunken black-flecked eyes of the psyker. They were red-rimmed as cherries. He wore a black bandana to conceal the third eye that was the mark of his calling. Beside him a data-slate blinked and flickered with the navigational information that the Mayfly updated every few seconds.
Arnhal always liked to know where he was. If there was one thing that terrified him, it was the thought of being lost. Once a Navigator lost his bearings, it was said the immaterium drew closer to him, and the barrier that separated this universe from the howling chaos of the other thinned. It was how so many of his kind went mad. They looked into the abyss, and found its invitation irresistible.
Some echo of that struggle, some… taint of the darkness hung around Arnhal, as it did about all of his kind. Morcault had always made an effort to treat the Navigator as just another member of his crew, but it was never easy. The sense of the other was always there. That darkness.
‘I hate it this far out,’ Arnhal said, throwing his forearm across his bruised-looking eyes. ‘The Astronomican is a faint gleam, no more. A silver note in the black.’
‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’
‘In the bottle. Pour me some more.’
‘You’ve had enough. I have to get a message to Ultramar quickly, and that may require a warp translation. The vox frequencies out here are as addled as a rotten egg.’
Arnhal sat up. ‘That’s impossible, captain. The currents of the immaterium are so strong here that–’
Morcault looked away from the psyker’s unsettling eyes. ‘Spare me, Jodi. I need you to do your job. We have to get back to Zalidar, and speed is of the essence.’
‘Then avoid the warp. We might get there in a matter of hours, or it could be months. Something has stirred it up of late. There has been movement here, Morcault. I sense the ripples of it all around.’
‘You can do this thing, Jodi. It’s what I pay you for, after all.’
‘Then respect my professional opinion. That ork scout ship was not here on a whim, nor was it brought by an errant bubble of the immaterium. There is a large presence out there in the black, beyond our augurs, and it has kicked up huge eddies in its wake.’
Morcault leaned on his stick, frowning. ‘A fleet?’
‘Perhaps.’
The old rogue trader swore under his breath. ‘You damned psykers, always coming up with hints and riddles. I want facts, Jodi.’
The young man shrugged his narrow shoulders. ‘Facts are a luxury few can afford out here on the edge of the Fringe. But I have other abilities beside Navigation. That is my curse. I will tell you what I know, Morcault. You’re the captain. But I would not enter the warp anywhere near here – and that is my last word on it.’
Morcault tapped the pitchthorn on the deck. ‘Very well.’ He stood lost in thought. Arnhal watched him with the bright, inhuman stare of a raptor staring into the sun. He swung his legs off the bunk.
‘Very well. What is this urgent message Ultramar must hear?’
‘That there is an ork presence in the system. That vox is stymied for an unusually long interval, even by the standards of the Fringe. You may add to that your own suspicions about this… this fleet, or whatever it is you have sensed. Taken together, the two things are disquieting.’
Arnhal nodded. ‘I hear them, Ghent. Like a vast host of babbling minds. They are incoherent, and yet focused.’ He waved a hand. ‘It comes and goes, but it is no chimera. There is something out there, sure as I sit here.’
Morcault believed him. A drunk Jodi Arnhal might be, but there was no doubting his abilities. He had steered the Mayfly through the warp times beyond count in the last eight years, and saved the ship and all their necks more than once.
‘Remember when the Chrisoni pirates jumped us last year, and you pulled off that warp entry right under their noses?’ Morcault asked him.
Arnhal took a slug from the neck of his bottle and wiped his mouth. ‘I try to forget it. We were right between the fire and the pan, and it was sheer luck we did not end up cast clear across the segmentum.’
‘Your instincts were sound then. So I believe you now. We will proceed under conventional burn. But the moment you think the currents have calmed enough for warp entry, you must let me know. A lot could depend on it, Jodi.’
‘You have my word, captain.’ Arnhal swirled the cheap alcohol around in the bottle, staring into the amber depths of it like an augur seeking clues to the future.
‘And lay off the booze. It won’t do you any good. Believe me, I know.’
The Navigator smiled thinly, showing yellow teeth. ‘It’s all that lets me sleep.’
‘Get some food in you –
it’ll do you good.’
‘I eat the darkness in my dreams, captain. I have not much of an appetite for anything else.’
Again, the inhuman stare. Morcault felt that to meet Jodi’s eyes for too long would be to send some part of his own soul on a journey from which there could be no return.
The Navigator smiled sourly, then saluted him, and Morcault left the foul-smelling stateroom with a grimace. The lock went red as soon as he was out of the door.
He wondered how much Jodi had left in him, how much longer the young man would be able to bear staring into the blackness. Navigators burned out fast, this far from civilisation.
Morcault set his palm on the closed door. The boy had such raw talent, and psychic abilities beyond those usually possessed by his calling, but he had never had much in the way of training. The techniques and conditioning that his kind learned on more sophisticated worlds would have saved him from this torment, or ameliorated it at least.
House Arnhal was a Nomadic House, Morcault knew, one of the Beggar Houses of the Navigator caste. Jodi never spoke of what had driven him this far from the civilised space lanes of the Imperium, this far from the comforting guidance of the Astronomican. He did his job, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes with a casual carelessness. But he had always come through for them. And it took a toll; navigating this far out on the Fringe was a taxing occupation.
As it was, Jodi needed a rest, a long one. Perhaps when they got back to Zalidar a place could be found for him in the planet’s Administratum, for a while at least. Fennick would no doubt leap at the chance to take on an experienced deep-space Navigator, no matter how damaged. It would mean no more warp translations for the Mayfly of course, until a replacement could be found. But Morcault doubted there was one with Jodi’s talent within a hundred light years.
‘Hang in there, you little drunk,’ he said quietly. And then he stepped back and began making his way aft, towards engineering.
Here, at least, he stood on firmer ground. Jon Gortyn and his servitors kept the Mayfly’s drives humming like a hive. Most of the time, anyway. The chief engineer looked up as Morcault clicked his way into the drive section, and finished replacing one of the ship’s precious vacuum suits on the wall-mounting.
Behind him, the drives reared up, two huge cylinders resting on their sides, each twice the height of a moderate hab and surrounded by a jungle of cables and wiring. They thrummed and vibrated so that all this section of the ship seemed to quiver with a life of its own. One was for real-space travel, and the other was for the warp.
The three servitors that helped maintain Engineering went about their business with the deliberate implacability of their kind. Morcault had obtained them twenty years before, by means mostly foul, and Hester had recoded them to work on the Mayfly – and had also obliterated all records of their previous service.
Morcault did not like to think about the risks they had taken back then – and even these days, were an agent of the Adeptus Mechanicus to examine the trio it would mean an instant death sentence for all on board. Grand theft of Imperial property, to say nothing of sacrilege. The Adeptus Mechanicus were sticklers for that kind of thing.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, there was a small shrine by the door of Engineering in which a tiny votive light flickered. Gortyn was not a follower of the Machine-God, the Omnissiah, but he did say the odd prayer, and sometimes, when they were about to career into an especially tight spot, he had been known to anoint the drives with holy oil and mutter a few incantations. Every little helped.
‘Hester tells me you want full burn all the way back to Zalidar,’ Gortyn said, tapping a few keys and grimacing at what the slate told him.
‘Could be. I want speed, at any rate, Jon.’
‘Jodi drunk again?’
‘Yes. But he has real concerns about the state of the warp in this part of the system. We may try a jump further in.’
Gortyn grunted. He was a huge man, black-haired and bearded, his back as hairy as his chest. He had always reminded Morcault of nothing so much as one of the irascible king-bears of the northern Zalidari forests. His hair was shot through with grey now, and his face was as lined as an empty waterskin, but he still had the arms of a longshoreman.
Despite this, his hands were deft and delicate in their movements. Morcault had seen him rewire an entire drive cogitator using nothing more than pliers, his teeth and the fifty years of expertise that resided in his thick head.
He could build almost anything, given a lot of spare parts and a little time, and he had an intuitive feeling for the operation of the warp drive that amounted almost to a kind of mysticism. Morcault wondered sometimes if his old friend had a little of the psyker in him. In any case, he and Jodi Arnhal made a fine team, though to all intents and purposes they despised each other. Many times, Morcault had had to separate the two when they seemed almost about to come to blows. The Navigator and the engineer.
In some ways, they were more similar than either would ever have admitted. Both saw their jobs as part of their very being. Both were touchy and needed careful handling. Both liked to drink more than was good for them.
‘You keep her at full power for more than a day or two, and we’ll end up dead in the air,’ Gortyn said. He waved at the massive bulk of the thrumming drives. ‘These things are the better part of two hundred years old, Ghent, held together by spit and solder and outright prayer. I won’t answer for them if you mean to push them like that.’
‘You’ll keep them together, Jon. You always do.’
‘What are we in such a hellfire hurry for anyways? It was one lost ork wreck, not a battleship. Like as not the muddle-headed swine just outran his fuel and was on the drift for who knows how long.’
‘I hope that’s true,’ Morcault said. He sat down on a metal stool, about as comfortable to his old bones as a rock.
‘But we can’t be taking chances, not with orks. They are not the solitary type. Where there is one, a host will follow. I feel it in my bones.’
‘Throne knows, your old bones pick up the oddest things.’ Gortyn sighed, rubbing his big knuckled hands together as if washing them. He turned to a bank of monitors and watched the scrolling numbers, reading them as easily as other men read a book. Then he tapped a few keypads and slid the throttle agitators upwards.
The tremble of the drives took on a keener note, and Morcault felt the Mayfly give a little jump under his feet, like a horse that has been kicked in the ribs. He stood up and peered at the dials near Gortyn’s console, translating their numbers into speed, trajectory and timings in his own head. Then he thumbed the ship’s internal vox.
‘Bridge, we are at eighty per cent main drive power. Increase velocity when ready.’
‘Already on it,’ Hester crackled back at him. ‘I’ll speed her up easy, Ghent. Don’t want to rattle this old girl apart.’
‘She’ll be just fine,’ Gortyn snapped. He did not like anyone, even Hester, mocking the ship. He was like a jealous husband when it came to the Mayfly.
They would have to close the bridge shutters now, and Morcault could hear the rasp and clank as Hester retracted the augur array. Even the smallest morsel of space debris could drill right through the more delicate parts of the ship’s anatomy at this speed. A fair-sized fragment might even puncture the hull.
Morcault had survived an emergency decompression once before, as a young man. Surviving something like that was as rare as living through a lightning strike.
And it was still safer than warp travel.
Morcault’s mind filled with a picture of the system and the worlds that wheeled within it, their places in orbit about the central star. It was not often he took the Mayfly out this far from Zalidar and he winced as he thought of the untold millions of miles that loomed black between his little ship and the planet that was their goal. Only Chrisos and its moons were farther out from Imperium space
than this. They were on the edge of the known galaxy, and in the great black beyond the known star lanes there were Throne knew what kind of xenos lurking.
The monsters in the dark.
He prayed to the Throne itself that Scurrios’ ork was a lone wanderer, nothing more.
Six
‘Here? He’s here, in the Fringe?’ Fennick asked, incredulous.
‘It came by priority bulletin not an hour ago,’ Boros said. ‘You were in Council. A vox transmission relayed from Iax, just letting us know as a courtesy. It means nothing, Lucius, not to us here on Zalidar. His ship will not be coming within a system of us. We are to proceed with normal security measures, and that’s all.’
Fennick bit his thumb. ‘Marneus Calgar himself. I’ll be damned. Boros, what’s his route – do we know?’
‘You think they’d let slip something like that over the vox? We do know that he’ll be visiting a couple of Guard garrisons in the Salem System, and probably the fortress-moon of Gascan. No other details.’
‘I wonder if we could…’ Fennick’s head snapped up. ‘Pherias!’
The young aide popped his head round the door. ‘Yes, my lord?’
‘Who is our best vox specialist?’
‘On the staff, sir?’
‘Yes, on the staff, damn it.’
Pherias’ forehead furrowed. ‘Why, it would be Lieutenant Yeager, sir. He’s–’
‘Get him to the main vox transmitter and await my orders.’
Pherias saluted, thoroughly confused, and left.
Boros began to laugh. ‘You’re not serious!’
‘Why not? We’ve just completed the space port, Boros. He wouldn’t be landing on some mud-covered waste like we used to. I could turn out the entire city for him – think, man – think what it would mean to those millions toiling down there in the manufactoria and the farm-plants – Marneus Calgar himself, here in Zalathras! It would be a coup to end all stories. Do not tell me you would not relish it.’
‘Relish it?’ Boros’ eyes flashed. ‘Think of what you are saying, Lucius. We live on a forgotten world, out here on the Fringe, mostly left to our own devices – and you think it would be a fine thing if the Adeptus Astartes came calling? No, Throne help me, I do not relish that prospect. The Angels of the Emperor are not to be lightly invoked.
