The
Nomad
’s systems began to reawaken, the lectern screen flickering
to life, though it remained shot through with churning, grainy static. Though
too far distant to be seen with the naked eye, even that of a Space Marine, the
screen indicated the presence of a number of the crusade fleet’s supporting
vessels. Tenders stood by should a warship need repair or towing clear of the
battle. Tankers and mass haulers carried vast quantities of fuel and other
commodities. Transports carried the crusade’s ground troops, each of them home
to an entire regiment of Imperial Guard. Most of the ground troops belonged to
one of the Brimlock regiments, raised from the planet on which the crusade
against the expanding alien empire of the tau had first been preached. Right on
the edge of the readout was an icon representing the huge conveyance
Toil of
Digamma
, a vessel of the Adeptus Mechanicus that transported the Legio
Thanataris Titan Legion, known as the “Deathbringers”. The towering god-machines
carried in its cavernous bays would be crucial in the forthcoming planetary
assault.
As mighty as the crusade fleet was, Sarik was painfully aware that it lacked
sufficient carrier capacity. Scant few interceptors were available to defend the
larger warships against enemy fighter-bombers. These would be able to inflict a
terrible blow were they to get amongst the lumbering transports that followed
behind the main fleet.
Conversi Loccum spoke up. “Signal from fleet, brother-sergeant. The platforms
burn. It is done.”
Looking around him at his smoke-wreathed bridge, sparks still spitting from
wrecked consoles, Sarik shook his head. “It is far from done.”
“Addendum to signal,” the crewman said.
“Go on,” Sarik replied, a sense of foreboding rising inside him.
“All crusade council members are to gather aboard the
Blade of Woe
,
brother-sergeant. Immediately.”
“Reason?” Sarik said.
“None given, brother-sergeant, but the signal has the highest priority
level.”
“Better request
Blade
sends a cutter then,” Sarik sighed. “We’re going
nowhere fast in this state.”
“Aye, sir,” the conversi replied, opening a channel to the
Blade of Woe
to arrange for a naval runabout to collect Veteran Sergeant Sarik, and ferry him
to the hastily gathered council of the Damocles Gulf Crusade.
Sarik was the last to arrive at the majestic
Blade of Woe
, and he
noted straight away that the atmosphere aboard the flagship was unusually
strained. Ordinarily, following a victory such as that the crusade had just won,
the mood would be celebratory, but right now it was tense. The feeling had only
increased as Sarik had made his way from the main docking bay to the council
chamber. Now that he stood at the ornate chamber doors, he had a feeling he was
about to find out why.
The portal ground heavily aside, and the voice of the council’s convenor
announced, “Veteran Sergeant Sarik, of the Adeptus Astartes White Scars.” The
convenor’s iron shod staff of office slammed into the deck at his feet,
indicating formally that Sarik was recognised and welcomed.
The sergeant stepped through the portal, into the council chamber.
Though a large space, the chamber was lit in such a way that little more than
its huge, circular table was visible, illuminated by several dozen floating
servo-skulls, the crown of each surmounted with a flickering candle, runnels of
solidified wax covering their surfaces. The wan candlelight overlapped where the
servo-skulls converged, illuminating the table below, while others picked out
the councillors seated around it. Sarik saw immediately that four of the seats
were unoccupied. One seat was his, and the remaining three had belonged to
councillors lost in the crusade’s previous engagements.
Apart from the table, the only other thing visible was a large pict-slate
mounted on one wall. The slate’s surface showed the image of the three enemy
defence stations breaking up or burning to death under the fleet’s withering
bombardment. The scene had been slowed down and was being played in loop, as if
the suffering of each was being repeated over and over again, so as to reiterate
the Imperium’s glory. In truth, the stations had proved not nearly so well armed
and armoured as previous ones the crusade had encountered, a fact for which its
leaders should be grateful.
As Sarik crossed to his seat, one of the councillors stood, a dozen
candle-bearing servo-skulls converging on him from above. The position of
chairman of the council rotated with each sitting, and for this convocation,
Logistician-General Stempf of the Adeptus Terra fulfilled the role.
“The brother-sergeant has arrived,” Stempf announced, the tau defence
stations reliving their death throes behind him. “And so we can begin.”
As Sarik seated himself, he cast a glance to the man to his left. Lucian
Gerrit, the rogue trader, met his eye and shrugged. Gerrit was in many ways the
archetypal rogue trader, a privateer and something of a scoundrel, though Sarik
found him far less vainglorious than most men of his class. Like Sarik, Lucian
lived his life according to a strictly defined sense of honour, which, also like
Sarik, was at times at odds with the machinations of the galaxy and of the
fates. Lucian was a large man, his head shaved except for the extravagant
topknot sprouting from his crown, a style not unlike that worn by Sarik and his
Chogoran brothers. He wore a dress coat resembling that of the high-ranking
officers of the Imperial Navy, but festooned with more gold braid than even the
most decorated of admirals would dare display. Sarik had learned to see past the
affectation, knowing it was part of the role that the rogue trader played and
that, if anything, it was a ruse designed to hide the man’s true self and
confound the weak and the stupid.
Sarik looked back at Stempf, a man he had grown to strongly dislike over the
previous months. The Logistician-General cultivated what he hoped was an ascetic
air. Yet Sarik, gifted with the superhuman senses of the Adeptus Astartes, could
not help but detect the cloying reek of illicit narcotics that permeated his
adept’s robes.
In common with the bulk of the crusade’s Space Marine contingent, Sarik
preferred to remain aloof from men like Stempf and from the incessant
politicking that bedevilled its command council. The leaders had become
increasingly factionalised, splitting into two opposed power blocs. No doubt the
situation would get worse before it was resolved.
“Gentlemen,” Stempf continued, warming to his role as chairman of the crusade
council. “We have this hour received an astropathic communiqu� of such import
that I have convened this session of the council.” The other councillors
exchanged glances. Stempf had not shared the details of the communication with
any others, even with the leaders of the bloc to which he was aligned, the
firebrand Cardinal Esau Gurney and the dark person of Inquisitor Grand.
The Logistician-General nodded to the council’s convenor, who struck his
staff of office against the decking again, the metallic thud resounding around
the chamber. From the still open portal, a hunched, robed figure emerged, and
made his way to stand beside Stempf.
“Master Karzello,” Stempf said as he stepped to one side, allowing the man to
stand before the council.
Master Karzello was the crusade’s senior astropath, the head of the choir
whose psychic mind-voice allowed them to communicate across the interstellar
voids with the distant Imperium of Man. Such distances made communications by
conventional means impossible, but the most powerful of astropaths could receive
and send messages across many hundreds of light-years of space. The seething
aetheric energies and unknowable stellar phenomena that afflicted the region
made even this means of communication unreliable at best, and next to impossible
at worst. Nonetheless, Master Karzello was one of the most skilled astropaths in
the entire segmentum, so his appearance before the council was greatly
portentous.
A dozen candle-bearing servo-skulls swung away from the Logistician-General,
to cluster around the master astropath, throwing his wizened features into
flickering relief. The man was ancient, kept alive long past his natural span of
years by repeated applications of the rejuvenat treatment available only to the
most senior and valued of the Imperium’s servants. The treatment was slowly
poisoning the master astropath, even if it was keeping him alive. He was so thin
that his skin looked like a paper-thin layer of crumbling parchment, barely
covering his bones. He had no eyes, for as an astropath his sensory organs had
been blasted away by the process that had created him. His body was only kept
upright by an arrangement of clanking brass callipers and leather braces that
bore his frame and animated his limbs. Furthermore, his robes, though crafted of
the finest deep-green void-silk, were encrusted with filth, filling the council
chamber with the acrid reek of bodily fluids.
When Master Karzello spoke his physical voice was no more than a whisper. His
words were heard not by the ear but by the mind, for despite his bodily frailty,
the astropath was gifted with one of the most powerful minds in the region.
“Honoured counsellors,” Karzello began, his psychic voice resounding with
such vitality that it drowned out his real one. “I bear a message. A message
from the Inquisition.”
All eyes turned towards the black-robed and hooded Inquisitor Grand. Sarik’s
gorge rose as he considered what machinations the agent might have conspired in
order to gain total power over the Damocles Gulf Crusade. At Pra’yen, Grand had
used his rank to overrule the fleet’s command structure, but in so doing had
made himself more enemies than allies. Was this communiqu� a means of cementing
his power and taking total control of the crusade?
“Under what cipher?” the cold voice of Inquisitor Grand interjected. Sarik
exchanged a second glance with the rogue trader by his side, for here was a
mystery unfolding before them both.
The ancient astropath turned his skull-like face towards Grand, and replied,
“That of Lord Kryptman.”
All in the council chamber knew the name of Lord Inquisitor Kryptman, the
scourge of xenos the length of the Eastern Fringe. The rogue trader at Sarik’s
side nodded subtly across the table, and Sarik followed the gesture, seeing that
Grand and his arch-ally Gurney were engaged in hushed conversation.
“Please, Master Karzello,” Stempf pressed. “Continue.”
The astropath’s head turned back towards the table centre, the motion
accompanied by the whining of dozens of tiny motors. “Lord Inquisitor Kryptman
states that his most trusted emissary shall soon be joining the crusade.”
Grand looked up sharply at this, though his face was unreadable beneath the
black hood of his voluminous robes. It seemed to Sarik that the candle-bearing
servo-skulls were giving the inquisitor a wide berth. He could hardly blame
them.
“This emissary carries the seal, and her words are to be obeyed as those of
Lord Kryptman himself. That is all.”
As Stempf stood and the master astropath shuffled out of the chamber, every
counsellor began to speak as one. Taking advantage of the din, Sarik leaned
towards his neighbour and asked, “What do you make of this?”
“Ordinarily, I’d say the involvement of another inquisitor would seal Grand
and Gurney’s control of the crusade for good…”
“But?” Sarik pressed, frustrated with the need to involve himself in the
crusade’s politics, but knowing he might have to.
“But I’m not so sure. We both know Grand could just wave his Inquisitorial
rosette at the council, dismiss us all and take personal control of the whole
crusade.”
“Yet, he has not done so,” Sarik replied. The dealings of the Inquisition
were even more obscure than the council’s, and Sarik had even less desire to
become embroiled in them.
“Indeed,” Lucian said thoughtfully, his expression shifting before he changed
the subject. “How go the preparations for the drop?”
“General Gauge has decided to take advantage of the aliens’ delay in
reinforcing their world,” replied Sarik, relieved to talk of something other
than politics. “We move within hours.” Sarik grinned. “I for one look forward to
the feel of solid ground beneath my feet, and a weapon held in my own hands once
more.”
“The enemy fleet is moving in, my lady.”
Brielle Gerrit, daughter of the rogue trader Lucian, stood high up on a
tiered gallery, looking down on the busy, brightly-lit tau command centre. The
chamber could not have been more different than the equivalent on an Imperial
vessel. The lighting was bright and the air clean, the stark white, curved
structures pristine and devoid of the tracery and script applied to every
surface of most Imperial vessels. Alien tau attended to their stations with calm
efficiency, and not one of them was hard-wired into his terminal. Instead, the
operators’ hands worked effortlessly across banks of glowing readouts, utilising
machine-intelligent interfaces considered heretical across the Imperium.
Like her father, Brielle wore the distinctive garb of her class, a flowing
dress coat of the finest deep blue fabric lined with elaborate gold piping.
Brielle wore her hair in a mass of flowing plaits, the natural black tipped with
purple and violet streaks lending her an outlandish appearance entirely at odds
with her surroundings. Her eyes were dark and brooding, and lined with painted
swirls that further emphasised her exotic features.
Brielle’s grip on the railing tightened and her knuckles turned white, but
she made no response to the man who stood beside her. Naal, Brielle’s companion,
wore the dark grey, hooded robes of an Imperial scribe, but that was far from
what he truly was. His face bore a tattoo of an Imperial aquila, bearing witness
to a former life he had long ago abandoned in favour of service to the tau
empire.