This is a story I've been working on for a while - while I was inspired by Battlefleet Koronous, it is not set in the Koronous Sector, nor is directly about a Rogue Trader, though they figure into it quite a deal in the middle and near the end.
I'll post a few bits, and see if anyone wants me to continue!
Without further adieu...
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In the Shadow of the Euclidean Gap
It is the 41 st Millennium.
The Imperium of Man spans the galaxy – the last bulwark against the mutant, the alien and the heretic.
The first – and often last – line of defense from the enemy is the Imperial Navy.
The empty void of space has become a battlefield.
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Part 1: Sailing
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Chapter One
Vyn
TO: Commander Vyn, hon. master of Pax Imperalis
FROM: Lieutenant-Admiral Lisael Hernadia
It is my pleasure to assign you to the Flotilla Castigarum Lupis, in the formation Wolfpack 1, which will be assembling in the star system Tchernobog – the capital system of the Tempestros Sub-Sector. An orkish raiding fleet has shown up there and I believe that you could make a world of difference considering your last encounter with the greenskin savages. The Pax has served with distinction, and you are due a chance at real promotion, Vyn, and I hope that you take advantage of this little spot of bother. Pray do pass a personal missive to Lord-Commander Byrce, will you? He is related to my family via some third cousin, and I am dreadfully interested in whether not his skills in the field are born of diligence and duty, or of his bridge-crew being handpicked by his grandfather.
Oh, and one last note: The Wardens of the Emperor will be fielding two battle barges in support of the Imperial Navy. Under no circumstances are you to ever address one in any but the most perfect High Gothic. I know that you will take care to touch up on your studies while on route, for we cannot go about offending his Holy Majesty’s Angels of Death, now can we?
Good luck, good hunting, L.
-Transmitted 432.M41
Received by Astropath Krern
TO: Lieutenant-Admiral Lisael Hernadia, hon. leader of the Flotilla Gerhund
FROM: Commander Vyn
Good to hear from you, L. We shall make sail in 2 weeks. Put my Lt. Cmd. Victor Janus on watch for promotion to his own command. God-Emperor speed you on your way.
V.
-Transmitted 433.M41
Received by Astropath Choir 44.31.Aplharus (assigned to Fleet Command Obscura)
Commander Vyn shivered as hoarfrost gathered around the pitted and ancient stone statues that loomed out of the shadows of the Astropathic chambers. The chambers themselves, Vyn thought, were entirely unpleasant to anyone not blessed with the Astropath’s unique stigmata…as only the blind would find such a place anything but distressing. The walls were all not quite uniform in shape, nor did they connect in any way that seemed reasonable, forming a jagged, uneven polygon that obscured rather than accentuated the lines of the ship that were obvious in every other chamber in the Pax Imperialis .
Tucked into half a dozen nooks and crannies were statues – almost all of them skull faced angels of death, their skeletal hands holding out various cards of the Emperor’s Tarot, their symbols carved into stone rather than printed on cheap, underhive faux leather as Vyn was most used seeing them. In the chill and the quiet and the damp of the room, the normally bright and colorful cards seemed more ominous than a gathering warp-storm, promising an unholy future and a grim time of trials and troubles. As she watched, the frost gathered and obscured one of the cards completely – and in the silence of the room…Vyn could hear the crack, crack and pop of its expansion.
She looked back to the center of the chamber, where Astropath Krern floated in a comforting embrace of her own psychic powers. The supernatural chill there was thick enough that the air itself turned into fog, drifting to the ground in a billowing cloak. Other than that, Krern’s blindfolded face was a mask of intense concentration, and the rest of her body was unnaturally still, twisted into a slightly uncomfortable posture despite her lack of movement – her shoulders scrunched backwards, her arms twisted at ever so slightly the wrong angle.
The only part of her that really moved was her fingers, her left hand having been replaced at the age of seventeen with a collection of scribe-tines. The long, blade-like quills scratched and clicked as they scribed the new missive onto a scroll of parchment that had aged so much that it had become almost as yellowed as a bilgeman’s teeth. Finally, the note was finished and Krern gasped, her back almost snapping as she twisted her body in a final spasm. She fell to the ground, to be caught at the very last second by three white robed acolytes – their tongues had been removed, and so the only noises they made were their breathing, their footfalls, and the occasional soft, nonsense babble that came from them despite their willing mutilations.
Once the astropath had been righted and stood on her own two feet, the robed ones darted back into the eerie shadows of the place. Vyn, for the moment, envied them. Despite the fact that her eyes had been seared from her head almost fifty years ago, Krern looked as if she could see every expression on Vyn’s face, and she moved without hesitation through the room, stepping across the uneven floor to hand the parchment to Vyn.
“The latest from the Admiralty, ma’am.”
Vyn nodded, taking the parchment. She glanced around – then chided herself for her vanity, seeing as how she was in a room containing a blind woman and three of her acolytes (who would never tell.) She reached into the deep blue pocket of her equally blue jacket – naval issue, and one that she rather appreciated for the extra padding about the shoulders and arms, which made it more useful for turning a blade than one might expect – and pulled out a pair of small spectacles. She settled them on her nose and peered at the note, muttering to herself as she read the contents.
Slowly, she nodded. “Thank you, Miss Krern…do you think you could send a message back?”
Krern nodded, then said – a tad reluctantly, clearly not wanting to be a complainer: “I can, ma’am, though…I could use some time to rest. The nearness of the Gap and the Screaming Cairn are making sending’s…” She paused, the search for the proper word clear on her face. “…problematic.”
###
Vyn frowned as she sat down at her desk, the Astropath’s words echoing in her mind without even the use of any psychic powers. Problematic. She pushed her seat backwards and spun it on a creaking socket to face the window that dominated her office’s port wall. Through it, she saw first the signs of her crew’s industry – heavy lighters and a small skiff had been launched and were tethered around a huge, hab-sized hunk of ice. Void-suit clad men and women scrambled around on the outside of the iceteroid, their plasma cutters releasing vast gouts of vaporized water into the void, and the huge hunks that they cut away were hauled to the scuttlebutt for storage and use later.
But, dominating space beyond them, was what Vyn was really looking for: The roiling, purple mass that was the Screaming Cairn – and, maybe fifty degrees to port, the even larger, violet and blue vortex that was the Euclidean Gap. Both warp storms marked the near boundaries of the Sector Jokasta, and made sailing between Jokasta and the neighboring sector impossible for all but the depraved, the insane and the desperate – save, of course, for a narrow, fifty light year band between the two storms, called the Corridor of the Doomed.
Vyn snorted. “We really shouldn't let voidmen name these things…” She muttered to herself.
Problematic. There were many things in her life that were problematic right now. The first and most glaring would have to be the prospect of taking a ship with a full complement of thirty thousand souls through the Corridor of the Doomed and into what would surely be a raging battlefield by the time she arrived. Just contemplating it made her almost wish she hadn’t responded to Lisael so rapidly and promptly. Almost, but not quite.
The second problem, of course, was the fact that – of those thirty thousand souls, most of a quarter were new recruits, freshly pressganged from Hive Secundos Orphalus’ bulging prisons. They had been rounded up under the Emperor’s remit; their jailors paid a handful of thrones for the blood-cost of ferreting them out of their cavernous warrens, and then shoved into lighters and lifted into the bowls of the Pax Imperialis . The ship was a better prison than any earthly one, though this was simply because there were so few places to escape to – if one preferred breathing air as opposed to vacuum.
That didn’t mean it made Vyn entirely comfortable to have six and a half thousand men and women who had spent years – if not decades – learning how best to survive in underhive prisons serving the gun decks and the bilge-crews. She had had reports of two dozen boatswains being knocked over the head in the dog watches, and had to space close to a hundred of the worst offenders. That had put the fear of the God-Emperor into the ratings, but she didn’t want a crew that was held together simply out of fear of the officer’s guns…
The navy had too many ships lost to munity for no better reason than the officers preferred to whip problems to the bone rather than ensuring the problems never rotted to the point where a whipping would be required.
The third problem…
The third problem was the most delicate of all, for it had nothing to do with her abilities and everything to do with her career and standing in the Flotilla once she arrived. A ship could be handled, even through storms and etheric reefs. A crew could be given a common enemy and forged into a proper tool. But years in the service of a Rogue Trader and years more in the Navy as a commissioned officer had only taught Vyn one thing about politics and genteel negotiation.
She was inept at both.
A chime came from the door to her office – a treble warbling that sounded a little like a watch-officer calling a shift in positions at the bridge – and jerked her from her reverie. Her large, scarred and tattooed hand knocked the ink bottle over and spilled a spreading, black mass over the parchment she had been scribing her return letter to the Admiral on. Frowning, she stood and grabbed up a handkerchief to blot out the offending ink, righting the well before any more could escape, then called to the door: “Enter!”
It was an even bet as to what scared Sub-Ensign First Class Drexler Hue more: The tone of Vyn’s voice, or the simple fact that he was still serving as adjunct to her. Right now, though, there may have been a third reason to put the barely controlled fear in his eyes: He was holding a gilded envelope with a jade-wax sigil keeping it closed. Internally, where it didn’t show, Vyn groaned. Politics had come looking for her.
The paper – as opposed to the rough parchment and data-slates that littered Vyn’s massive mahogany desk – was of the highest quality and gleamed in the yellow glow of the luminators, white with gold highlights, the edges painted a delicate red. Hue looked at the envelope as if afraid it would bite his hand off, and held it out to Vyn in trembling hands.
“From the Navigator, Cap…Commander…” He stammered. She snatched the envelope from
his hands, using a fingernail to pick away at the wax until it broke – glowing brightly under the pressure, piezoelectric impulses shimmering through it, activating cleverly encoded techno-sorcery embedded within the envelope. Rather than having to be unfolded by anything as crude as a human hand, the envelope unfolded itself, coiling, curling and even tearing with a soft, almost musical noise, until Vyn found herself holding a hexagonal sheet of paper, covered with flowery High Gothic letterings.
Vyn scowled, then glared at Hue – who started.
“Get Doctor Balthezar. Now.”
Hue vanished with speed that would have been commendable if he had used it to run towards enemies rather than away from his commanding officers. Still, Vyn knew that it would take him at least twenty minutes to drag the Chirgion from his books and dissections, and so she busied herself by finding a musty tome in her own personal library – itself mostly dominated by travelogues, charts, and copies of To Serve the Emperor. When she finally did find the Librie Gothique Texinomicon, she was irritated to find that silverfish had been at the pages, and the Z section had been almost entirely eaten.
Vyn slammed the tome onto her desk – making her data-slates jump – and growled: “It’s just one thing after another today, isn’t it?”
The chime came as she finished struggling her way through the first sentence of the missive – glad that none of the word had started with a Z – and with her command, Hue gestured in the gangly chirgon.
“You’ve gotten yourself in quite a temper, Vyn, to be so angry at a mere book…” Balthezar said – made easy by his civilian status and long association. If his casual manner with her had ever caused offense, Vyn could have easily broken the man in half. He was as tall as she – rare among most non-Death Worlders that she had met – but where she was broad and covered with thick, almost slab-like muscle, he was reed slender and had an overall arched and hawkish demeanor and expression, with an impressively hooked nose and gray eyes – the color of her homeworld’s skies. Something seemed off about him, though…
“Well, to be fair, I never did like dictionaries…can you make heads or tails out of this?” Vyn asked, trying to focus on the parchment – one did not simply ignore a letter from the Navigators, even if they were being obnoxiously ostentatious. “The honored Navigator sent it, and I couldn’t well be bothered to actually read this…”
Balthezar had already pulled on his own reading glasses and was peering through the bifocals. He nodded, making a few soft, humming noises.
“Do you want a literal translation, or something more direct?” He asked, looking over his glasses at Vyn, who was leaning forward on her hands, regarding him curiously. She grinned and he snorted. “The gist is simple: The Navigator wants to discuss the course that he will be charting, in his residences, and he requests you come as soon as can be arranged.”
Vyn sighed, rubbing her chin.
“Well, it is not as if you are needed on the bridge…” Balthezar started, reaching up to adjust his necktie. That clicked in what was odd.
“You’re all over blood!” Vyn exclaimed. She was rather used to blood herself, and the cultural assumption of her world – that if someone was bleeding and standing, they weren’t hurt enough to be worth bothering over until the hunting party had returned to the village – sometimes skewed her perceptions next to the average Imperial citizen.
“What? Oh…” Balthezar sighed. “I’m tending to a Mr. Digby, he…”
“Digby,” Vyn said, musing. She started. “Digger Digby, one of the men I had flogged yesterday? Balthezar, he’s a bilgeman and not likely to last the voyage. Why waste time and-“
Balthezar frowned and shrugged, brushing a bit of dried blood from his cheek. “I did not use morphia or any augmetics on him. Bandages and grog are cheap enough that the ship stores won’t miss the thimble I used for Digby, and I see no reason that we should let an Emperor fearing man suffer because-“
“He associated with malingerers and murderers!” Vyn snapped. “Balthezar, you cannot coddle a man who is hurt if he is suffering for the good of all mankind.”
“Mankind is not served by gangrene setting in after a man has been whipped twenty times for sharing bread with a friend,” Balthezar’s voice remained calm, but she saw the roiling stormclouds in his eyes. He could be so **** stubborn. Vyn opened her mouth to reprimand him more, but then clenched her jaw, glancing aside before she said something hot. Still, such insubordination could not be born, even from a civilian doctor with a wealthy family.
“Balthezar, you cannot be seen countering my discipline, on a ship already quarter-staffed by recidivists.” Vyn tried to make her voice sound very formal, very official.
The chirgion simply sighed, then said: “He will be dead by morning, Vyn. I did as faith commanded, and gave him some measure of comfort.”
“If you had asked the Chaplin, I’m sure he would have given the man the Emperor’s Mercy.”
Balthezar snorted. Normally, his denominational differences with the Church of the God-Emperor were non-issues: As a chirgon and medical practitioner, he was expected to save lives and ease suffering, and the Order of St. Hallise was a recognized cult by the Ecclesiarchy. But there were times where his ***** ideas of mercy and justice…butted heads with expediency and common sense. But, as much as Vyn wished to upbraid the man more, she knew it would do no good.
“Did any of the voidsmen see your...” Vyn revised her sentence before finishing. “Compassion?”
Balthezar shook his head.
“Good.” Vyn paused, then remembered she had more to deal with than an over-merciful doctor and dying men. She turned, glanced out the window, and took note that the iceteroid was almost half disassembled. The scuttlebutt would be filled within three hours. Lt. Cmd. Janus could remain in command on the bridge. So, she could bash out the rest of the letter to Lisael and then deliver it to the Astropathic chambers on her way to the Navigator. She smiled, thinly, and nodded to Balthezar. “Dismissed.”
Once he was gone, she set herself to trying to write out a letter. It was remarkably hard to put anything of substance down – the naturally flowing sentences that Lisael could spin for her came out stilted and unnatural, and any attempt to add detail seemed forced. Vyn could not find the words within herself to accurately sketch out everything that had happened to the Pax in the past few months since her last letter to the admiral – let alone do so interestingly.
So, in the end, she settled for short, declarative sentences, and ended up with less of a letter and more of a post-note that one might leave on the side of a cooling box. Still frowning, Vyn stood when she heard the faint chiming of the quarter hour bells.
She would be late if she didn’t get to work.
###
Striding through the narrow corridors of the Pax , Vyn nodded to the officers and sub-officers who showed their respect as she passed – those that had caps touched their brims, but most simply made vague gestures to their foreheads, enough to show that they hadn’t stopped recognizing her station and status. She nodded to most, not wanting any to think she hadn’t noticed – sometimes, younger sub-officers got into the habit of assuming the Commander couldn’t notice them when they were among crowds – more so if they went without their best jackets and aped common voidmen – and she didn’t like the thought of letting officers reach adulthood with a lack of proper respect for the chain of command.
It took a mere single elevator ride up to the spine of the ship – where the corridors were taller and broader and less well traveled. From there, Vyn took the stairs to the Astropathic chambers. She was barred entrance by a robed woman, whose lack of a tongue made any questions impossible…but she seemed to know already what it was that Vyn was there for, and simply held her hand out for the letter. Vyn gave it, then beat a hasty retreat before the psyker got to their supernatural work.
The letter delivered, Vyn veered towards the spinal corridors once more, striding along until she came to a clear point of demarcation. The walls here were marked, and quite abruptly, with the sigils of the Navis Nobilite and bedecked in gold gilt that was so uniform that she wasn’t entirely sure if there was anything underneath the solid gleam. Two guards in the red and gold livery that matched the noble family living in this part of the ship stood, flanking the corridor. Both of them held large, elaborately decorated weapons that Vyn was fairly sure were mostly for show.
Both of them let her pass. She was one of the only members of the ship’s naval compliment who was allowed within the Navis Nobilite chambers. Ancient compacts between the Navigator Houses and the Imperial Navy secured the services of navigators to ships, for without them, the Imperial Navy would shudder to a stop as perfectly as if they had all been System Defense monitors and not the voidships that they had been built as. That…utter dependency always made Vyn’s hackles raise and her teeth want to bare. If she had had claws…
She came to the main chambers that Navigator Chellis owned. The area had once been a storage chamber – she recognized the underlying construction from her tours in the lower decks of the Pax - but the interior decorators had done their best to disguise this with endless busts of previous House Chellis members, paintings and portraits of famous Navigators, and a single mural made of solid ebony, amethyst and diamonds that spread along the far wall. The mural showed – in elegantly carved and socketed pieces – the main warp routes of the Segmentum Obscura, with the diamonds representing solar systems, and the lines of purple gemstones representing connections in the Warp. Etched into white-painted relief were words in High Gothic, warning of dragons and beasts.
The middle of the room, though, held the navigator himself…and, more importantly, his life support system. That was all that Vyn saw at first: hissing, steaming pipes, burbling fluids contained within solid glass beakers and vials, and other devices of entirely arcane origins that sparked and crackled with a strong stink of ozone. This mantle of techno-sorcery was wrapped around a large green tinted hunk of plexdiamond almost a foot thick, the translucent material bending light almost as much as the thick liquid that filled it. And in the center of that liquid, surrounded by tubes and wires and connection ports that socketed into augmetic pipelines that were almost squashed amid folds of obese, cancerous flesh…was the Navigator.
Vyn suppressed a shudder of revulsion.
The life support hissed, and then a part of it writhed and broke away with a series of sharp, percussive pops , tubes wriggling and then sliding back into recesses that dotted the back of the humanoid figure that lurched away from the pile of theomachinery. The creature was a servitor of a make and design that Vyn had never seen before: Desiccated flesh studded with polished brass and intricate gear-work that was run by glowing tubes of glass and crackling lines of cable. Steam rose from the death’s head mask that had been bolted onto the paper thin skull that hunched almost to the middle of the servitor’s chest, the thick clouds pouring from the empty eye sockets and grotesquely wide grin that had been carved into the mask.
The steam faded and a cultured, elegant voice came from somewhere behind the mask: “Welcome, Commander Vyn. May I serve you some nutwine or amnesac while you are here?”
Vyn shook her head – tearing her eyes from the servitor and to Navigator Chellis. From what she could tell, the Navigator’s eyes were closed.
“Ah, do, look at my puppet.”
Vyn looked back. For a moment, a thick, superstitious dread welled up from the dark recesses of her mind. She had served on voidships since she had been fourteen years old, and she had seen servitors aplenty. But she never could quite forget the first time she had seen them: Lurching from the darkness of a cavernous cargo-bay, possessed by a demonic virus unleashed by a heretek named Fibonacci. The resemblance between those corrupted forms and her tribe’s stories of drowners and rotfiends were too close for her to ever feel comfortable around them.
It was with a concentrated effort – a mental recounting of her own tours of duty, a reminder of her place as a master and commander of a starship – to make her stare down the meat-puppet.
“You wished to speak with me about the course…my lord?” She tacked on the proper title only after a hesitation, her unease all too visible, obvious even a deaf and dumb courtier.
“Correct.” Chellis spoke through the puppet, making it walk towards the large chart at the back of the room. Vyn followed it, her hands clasped behind her back – fists clenched so tight that her knuckles showed white under her naval issued gloves. The puppet gestured with a fingertip worn to yellowing bone, and as he pointed, some trick of techno-sorcery made the gemstones that marked the warp routes that led to the Corridor of the Doomed glow and flicker with an internal light. “This route? I must advise against it, Commander. The storms are unusually fierce at this time…I can feel the ripples in the Immaterium even from here.”
Vyn sighed. “What’s the alternative course, then?” She asked, looking at the meat-puppet. The death’s head mask looked back at her, sightless eyesockets trickling steam for a moment. Then, breathing a sigh so human that it only made the creation’s inhumanity more grotesquely apparent, the meat puppet gestured to a different warp route, which glowed and flared.
“That would take us round the Gap to Terminus!” Vyn exclaimed. The Terminus system winked at her from the black map, mockingly.
“Better to take an extra year sailing than to never arrive…” The Navigator chided her.
Vyn frowned. She couldn’t simply order the Navigator to do as she wished – his house held too much power. Instead, she plied herself to diplomacy the best way she knew how.
Bluntly.
“My Lord, there is an orkish warfleet currently rampaging through one of the most populated sub-sectors in this part of the Segmentum. Even one ship can turn the tide of battle there, and the Flotilla will need us as soon as we can be spared.”
The puppet clicked softly – some arcane mechanism within the skull turning over and considering as the Navigator hesitated, thought.
The steam stopped, then puffed out again in a short, sharp cloud that billowed into the ceiling, vanishing out of the dim light of the luminators that shone along the walls.
“If we set sail in three days, there may be an empyerial squall that we can take advantage of. Sometimes, the warp engines can catch and ride such a wave. I suggest spending the three days in an earnest attempt to bless and consecrated the ship, all of it.” The puppet gestured around the room.
Vyn nodded, then smiled. “Thank you, My Lord.”
The puppet shook its head, slowly, and then turned, heading back to the life support systems that normally supported it when the Navigator’s attention wasn’t turned to the room around him. Tubes reached for it, slithering out of the darkened recesses of the theomachinery like the tentacles of some foul, unthinking xenos, dripping with greenish connective fluids – drooling in eagerness to touch connector to socket. As the puppet turned back to face Vyn and then lean backwards into the tubes, the Navigator spoke once more.
“Pray, only…that we reach the battle at all. Commander.”
TO BE CONTINUED