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The Shapers of Scars – Marc Collins

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Rogue Trader’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

The Shapers of Scars

By Marc Collins

‘Three things shape a man’s scars: the foe, time, and the healer’s rites.’

- Fenrisian proverb

The old woman sits in the chill of the apothecarion, but she does not feel the bite of the cold. Long ago she passed beyond such things, in the way that only a life lived beneath slate-grey skies with the scent of salt and ice as constant companion can bless her with. She realises, on some soul-deep level, that she carries the world of her birth with her. Bound to her as surely as an oath. She sits, and she watches, and she waits. She is the eye of the storm, a rare ocean of calm, as others hustle and rush about her.

Before them a queen lies dying.

The old woman, the gothi, Bodil, spares her queen a look. A glance of recognition. A nod of respect. Her long pale fingers close around a bone tile, and she raises it to her face, pinning the fates in place, bound by rite. Worn gums draw back from her teeth, her pallid skin crinkles around scars and tattoos; she does not hide her age, nor the weight that this undertaking places upon her. Her blue eyes focus, pale as spring ice, as she reads the tile and curses.

‘Skitja!’

One of the medicae thralls lets his eyes drift to her, giving her an askance look. She laughs, and bares her teeth.

‘Oh, do I offend your sensibilities? If you have not the patience for me then get away from her! I would not trust half of you to calve a grox, let alone minister to our jarl!’ The thrall’s jaw flaps, noiselessly. Bodil snorts as she leans forward to look again at her queen.

At Katla Helvintr.

The jarl’s eyes, those sea-storm-blue eyes – a huntress’ eyes – are closed, locked so by the balms of the medicae and the venoms of the beast. Her auburn hair, like a crown of fire and glory, is matted with blood and sweat where it is not seared away by the acid’s bite. In her weakness, she has never looked more mighty. More deserving of ascension to the Allfather’s side.

She is called jarl, for she has carved out a hall and a hearth amidst the stars, as her line has for generations. She is called the Huntress Queen, for she has harried the enemies of the Allfather from their lairs, and made trophies of them. Here in the cold light of the apothecarion, Bodil thinks of such things with a wry smile. She cannot see the mighty void-ivory that adorns much of the ship, but knowing it is there is a comfort. And comfort is needed here today, as she casts the runes over the nicked thread of a valiant warrior.

‘If you die, my queen,’ the old woman says almost idly, ‘then the halls of the slain shall be the lesser for your lack. We each carry our red snow with us, for it is cold in the shadow of Morkai, is it not? Perhaps that is why they raised their mountain so high, the sky-warriors, that they might ever be in His light.’ She laughs, dry and cracked. Forced. She shakes her head. ‘But what would I know? I am only the gothi.’

Bodil checks the runes again, and scowls as she snaps up the tiles and drums them against the steel table she leans over. ‘It will be close, this thing,’ she whispers. ‘She is strong, but there are few stronger than the pull of their wyrd.’ She shakes her head. ‘The wyrm is her fate. It will cut her thread one day, perhaps not this day…’

Her eyes drift to the knife that sits beside the worn leather pouch of runes, gleaming alongside the long, thin needles of bone and the bowls of pigment. She does not reach for it. She will not countenance it as inevitable.

‘It will be the wyrm that ends her, but it is the hand of a loved one that will take her life. Not in betrayal, but with love.’

And through it all, Katla sleeps. She stirs fitfully, with the slow bite of pain. Venom and acid claw at her, gnawing at mind and muscle. She twitches, every breath forced from her through the iron ministrations of machines and the tubes which crowd her throat.

Katla suffers, and she dreams.

‘I want it found,’ Katla hisses. ‘The beast is near. I can all but smell it. Bring us about. Weapons readied. It cannot have got far.’ She sits upon the edge of her command throne, watching the silent void pass by as a tumble of rock and ice intrudes, but it does not dominate her attention. Her eyes are always in motion. Always seeking advantage against her enemies. She runs a hand through her hair, before checking again that she is still armed – that she is ready.

Twin axes are sheathed at her hips. Simple and direct. They have no names. Along the back of the throne lies her spear, its length gilded and marked with the runes of the world of Winter and War. It is called Fimbulgeir. It sits as a symbol of her authority, as a crystallisation of what it means to be jarl, to bear her Warrant of Trade. To stand as a queen.

Not of a ship, or a people, but as a symbol of something greater.

It has been many years since Katla claimed the rule of the Davamir Compact, ascended as queen amongst her peers in the other dynasties. It is a fleeting honour, and in time it will pass to another name. The dour and warlike Lamertines, perhaps. Or the addled ranks of the Radrexxus.

‘Spare me,’ she mutters, ‘from the joyless and the joy-curdled.’

‘Jarl?’ asks a voice from an augur-station, and she waves it off with a smile.

‘Nothing,’ she says, and stands. She stretches, muscles flexing with the need of the hunt. It is primal, this urge. It has kept mankind fed and safe, and standing between the teeming masses and the hungry dark. Where there have been beasts, there have been hunters. That is the lesson of Fenris. The wisdom her ancestors carried to the stars, and enshrined in the iron bones of her vessel, the Wyrmslayer Queen.

‘No auspex returns,’ the voice says again. This time she looks at the master of the auspex station. He is young. Eager. He is called Svend. She knows every man and woman upon her bridge. She knows, and understands, and judges. ‘They said it would be here. One last hive ship wounded and alone. Damn the Navy, and their–’

‘Peace, Svend,’ she laughs. ‘They will not have robbed us of glory. Its spoor is on the wind. It will give itself away before ever we have to search for it.’

‘How can you be sure, jarl?’ He asks the question innocently. She wonders if she was ever so starved for knowledge and experience, in her father’s time of rule.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘How often have we hunted together, Svend? I have led the wild hunt across the Allfather’s dominions for decades without rest, before ever you came into my service.’

The man bows his head, and looks away. She does not mean to shame him, but it is unavoidable. As certain as bloodshed.

‘I want my prize,’ she says, to a chorus of affirmations.

They will not fail her. The very thought of it is poison.

She looks away, just in time to see something flicker in the darkness of the abyss. Something moves amidst the ice and rock, its movements slow and languid in one moment – before it springs to sudden, writhing life.

A monstrous thing of chitin and muscle, and animal rage. The Imperial Navy had fought it, harried it from its fellows, wounded it. Yet now the beast returns, its fury kindled.

‘There it is,’ she says, and grins. ‘Did I not tell you? The void speaks to me. It speaks to all of the blood Helvintr. The Emperor’s hunters.’ She laughs. ‘Bring us around. Show it our teeth.’

The engines strain against the darkness and the cold, burning hot as the blood of worlds. Below them the gun-crews are about their work – readying the vessel’s great killing implements. Shells slide home and the macrocannons seal and arm with peals of vast thunder. Lance batteries crackle with bound fury. Great void-harpoons ratchet into place, they bare them like fangs. The older, bestial name for such implements has been long lost to them, but the claws will find their mark regardless.

‘Fire!’ she roars. The guns cut across the void with light and a fury that echoes her own as the blackness is streaked by sudden flame. Red against the darkness. For a moment they can see every detail of the creature – its ice-rimed hide and questing tendrils. Maws glimmering wetly, edged with razor teeth. Detonations blossom from its skin as it forges on, plunging, diving, jaws yawning in the eternal silence of the night.

The first boarding spores are already racing towards the ship, behind the questing nest of feeder tendrils. The thing has the audacity to think itself a predator.

But beneath the eye of the Wyrmslayer Queen it can be nothing more than prey.

Katla bucks and writhes upon the table as phantom pain racks her. Her ship was violated, then her flesh, and she remembers. She relives it, moment by moment, even as Bodil watches and the surgeons pore over their charge. There are more tubes now, and the relentless motion of knives. They are opening her, as surely as any action of the enemy. Bodil leans closer, sniffs the air.

‘She cannot be allowed to die,’ she whispers. The medicae do not look to her, set upon their task. ‘It is more than her body that must be healed, it is her spirit. She must be braced in her soul, rune-marked and warded.’ She reaches for the first needle, testing its weight as though judging its soul. ‘They will claw at you, my queen, these wights of the Underverse. They wish to pull you down beneath the thick ice, amongst the dead ships and drowned men. Yet even spirits may be made to fear.’

She takes the needle, and gently dips it into the first of the pigments, smearing its end black. She moves, and the medicae flinch away from her. They see her as a spectre in her own right, something ghoulish that has no place in a realm of healing.

She ignores them all as she brings the needle to skin, and begins to tap the ink into her queen’s wounded skin. Katla bucks and shudders, her body convulsing at the violation. Bodil places one gnarled hand on Katla’s shoulder, forcing her down against the table.

‘This is not where you die, my queen,’ she whispers. The medicae work faster at her words, spurred on to test their magic against hers. ‘I will ensure that you are strong.’

There are so many. She has long since lost count. The auspex dings and whirls with their onslaught. Pods, missiles, spores that bear living ruin and plasmic destruction.

She laughs from her high seat, and thinks her hall inviolate. The ship rings, sings, sighs, screams with alarm and siren. ‘Örlendr!’ someone cries. Alien! Their iron skin has been ruptured and breached, the minions of the enemy swarm upon them and within them. Somewhere, someone has sent up the signal, or the ship’s own bellicose machine-spirit has scented their spoor.

‘Spears!’ she cries. The ship responds. The crew move at their stations, swift as prowling beasts. The Queen comes about, shows the monster her flank, and fires.

The great harpoons cross the gap, almost faster than the eye can follow but thrown with a hunter’s precision, driving themselves into the beast’s great thorax. Ichor stains the void in great boiling gouts. Kaleidoscopic bursts of alien chemicals, spurting into the war-scarred void. It struggles and squirms, suddenly and brutally aware of its own wounding, of its binding. Tight as any bond from story or legend, a chain made of the impossible. To cage abominations, and leave them readied for the killing blow.

It lashes out, and a great feeder tendril scours its way across the Queen’s rune-marked hull. Air rushes from it like blood, and the entire ship shakes. Katla grasps at her throne, cursing even through her savage grin.

This is what it means to be a queen.

They are locked together. Ship and kraken, man and beast. The harpoons wind on their chains, drawing it ever closer. Still they wrack it with fire, carving into it as though it were already dead. Merely meat. Yet it struggles, and thrashes. Prey never truly comprehends its fate. There is always the dream of escape; even the lowest of beasts understands that. If they can merely fight, or chew through a limb, then there is hope.

Hope is the first casualty of the hunt. It is what must be stripped from the prey.

Fire whips across the beast’s flanks again, sending it into another fit of savage convulsions. Parasite vanguard organisms stir across its plates, close enough now that they can hurl themselves at the iron ramparts of the ship. Countless of them are annihilated against the void shields, or burst apart under the attentions of point defence cannons.

Some make it through, some always make it through. That is the allure of warfare, the song that has kept mankind sharp as spear points down the long millennia of its rule.

‘With me!’ she cries, and the crew look to her with fearful longing. Her huscarls peel from the chamber’s edges, flowing into place around her – as smoothly as armour clicking into place. ‘There are beasts below!’ she insists, a heady grin upon her face. Her joy is infectious. Her second, Eirik, smiles back.

‘They are no match for us, jarl!’

‘Let us hope not,’ she laughs. ‘We have yet to find a beast or monster that is a match for the Helvintr!’

She pauses at the great doorway of the bridge, and turns to regard her warriors and her crew.

‘My friends, we have hunted the length and breadth of the Imperium, chasing the rumours of sailors and the reports of the Navy. We ride where others dare not, and fight those things that lesser men would shirk from facing, do we not?’ They cheer with her. Fists pound at console casings, upon breastplates, against shields. ‘You are my chosen! The Allfather’s favoured! Always seeking the most glorious of prey! The most deadly of hunts! All for these moments, when victory lies upon the blade’s edge!’

Beyond the viewscreens, the beast struggles in their grasp, lashing out with all the wounded fury it can muster. If they do not act soon, though, it will be the poison in their veins that undoes them.

‘With me!’ she cries, and they share her savage joy. They almost rush to outpace her, but she turns them back with a grin and the flat of the spear – reminding them of place and primacy. There can be no mistakes in facing an enemy such as this.

A tide of snapping, screeching bodies. The rushing puppet-horde of the hive mind. To test themselves against such an army, to best them on the field of battle – even if that field was bounded by iron, and the uncaring void…

She thinks of these things, and they do not slow her. If anything, her progress into the deeps of the ship is all the quicker, all the more yearning.

The work is intricate, delicate. Bodil marks her queen again and again, blood and ink running down the ruin that has become half of her face. She smooths away the layers of fluid, revealing the work beneath as the needle taps and probes and shapes. Others may come after, with their clever knotwork and steadier hands – but it is she who has marked her queen, and made her. She works runes into the art, signs of binding and deliverance. Marks of aversion, and assurances of oaths.

‘When they see you, they will think that you are a talisman come to life to be so rune-marked.’ The old woman laughs as she speaks.

The medicae give her such looks. This is, after all, their domain, and she is an intruder. They understand, but they fear. A gothi is a figure of the spirits, and the whisper of the Underverse, and perhaps they are afraid that she is here to see their jarl’s spirit off. Perhaps it is because she speaks, even if her charge cannot hear her.

‘And perhaps you are, my queen, perhaps you are a talisman. Symbols are stronger than men, and they cut sharper than a blade.’

The slumbering jarl does not stir. The drugs and unguents of the healers are strong, just as the one they must subdue. The work of the medicae is thorough and methodical, stemming her bleeding and bracing bones. Paring away the skin that is too ravaged to save. She is a ruin, and they are restoring her as ably as any shipwright would restore a vessel. Surgery is a battlefield all its own, where there are inevitably casualties.

‘Sleep, my queen,’ Bodil whispers. ‘Sleep, and dream of the glory that you have won, and of the glories yet to come. There is an Imperium waiting for you, beyond your bed of blood and memories.’

The lesser beasts die in their droves, hewn apart by gunfire and blade. Katla strides into the heart of it, her spear tearing through chitin with every swing and thrust. They are everywhere, in such numbers that there is no need to aim. They are a crimson wave of motion – hooves and bladed limbs stamp and stab at the decking, jaws thrash with needle fangs or flailing nests of tendrils.

She does not care about their monstrous variety. They are prey!

‘Into them!’ she screams, and her warriors charge. Every battle is a vindication. Pride in her men, in her culture, in her rule. It is not a soulless pursuit as the Lamertines might have it. Nor the pretentious flailing of a Radrexxus war effort. It is beautiful – war as it should be, sanctified in the Allfather’s sight. Men throw themselves forward, mail clinking over their void-armour. Axes and swords clatter against shields, even as blasts from laslocks cut across the corridor. The first wave of monstrosities goes down in a rush of ichor and fragments of bursting plate. The lesser monstrosities are easy prey, no real challenge for her warriors.

They have fought such things before. In the void and upon savage worlds beyond count. The hive fleet’s spoor are amongst their favourite prey, but they have fought the savage greenskins and the duplicitous aeldari, and a dozen joyless human cultures with the same bladed enthusiasm as they bring to this battle.

Katla casts Fimbulgeir across the field of battle, and watches as it impales a brain-bloated psyker beast. The thing’s whipping tail flails in the air, and the deck rimes itself with ice as it loses control of its power. Fire bleeds along the wound, and the thing bursts with a shriek of resonant psy-feedback. Katla cheers, and her men bellow their approval.

‘The spear is cast!’ she howls, drawing her axes. The weight of them is reassuring, their black blades grinning like old friends. She hacks at whatever gaunts dare to come near, their charge already rendered erratic without the guiding light of their synapse beast.

The snapping creatures throw themselves against the shields, only to be beaten down. Axe blades open skulls, puncture throats, gouge out eyes. They are cast down like the chaff they are. Slowly, the line of men pushes onwards. One of the beasts turns, a warrior-form, and fires. Acid and writhing maggot-like projectiles slap heavily against the face of one of her huscarls, and the man falls. Screaming, clawing at his face. She spits to one side. It is no fate for a warrior. She holsters an axe, and draws her sidearm – her glory. Wrathspitter. It is ancient, a relic of a bygone age. Even as a pistol, a volkite is potent. One of the greatest instruments of destruction ever constructed by mankind’s forgotten weaponsmiths. She fires, and the warrior ceases to be. It detonates, caught for a moment in the deflagrating power of the beam.

Her warriors surge forward, eager for their own revenge. Claws meet blades, or bury themselves in shields. She takes up her axes again, swinging one in each hand as she fights her way towards her spear with a flurry of strikes. Replacing the axes with the spear, once more, thrusting through another screeching maw in a burst of ichor.

She is complete. The huntress queen.

The decking shakes, as though to challenge the legend they are crafting. The source of the noise surges, faster than it has any right to move, through the ranks of lesser beings. They bristle, muscles bunching more readily, focus colouring their glaring dead eyes. It is vast, a king of monsters – a thing bred as a living siege engine. Its plate is thick. Its weapons mighty. Vents upon its back spew toxic vapours, and acid oozes from swollen cyst-nodes. It shudders, and gouts a great stream of acid into their ranks.

Katla dives to one side. Others are not as swift. She hears screams, and scents the chemically cooking flesh. She roars her hate at the monster before her. She hurls herself into the fray.

‘Hold her!’ Bodil screams, and the medicae obey without thinking, rushing to their jarl’s aid. When a spirit-talker commands, you listen. Their hands hold Katla to the steel of the table, even as the needle bites her skin once more. Bodil draws back, sucking her breath in through her teeth, her focus absolute. ‘Her spirit is strong. See how she fights? She will fight forever, that one. When they try to cut her thread, she will fight and they will wish they had never made the attempt.’ She reaches for the bag of runes once more, picks it up, and shakes it experimentally.

Everything stinks of blood and cauterised flesh. She casts the runes to the table with a clatter, and allows herself to move from her queen’s side. ‘Hmm…’ she whispers; her fingers gnarl around one of the tiles, and she allows herself the faintest of smiles. ‘That’s better.’

It lumbers forward, and she moves to meet it. It is slow, and she is swift. A great scythe of bone sweeps over her head, so close that she can feel the rush of displaced air. She thrusts her spear up, the powered blade gouging into the thing’s flank. She laughs at it, almost face to face with the alien monstrosity.

Las-fire and solid shot impacts along its armoured bulk, and it writhes in the rain of ordnance. Another great weapon-limb shudders, spasms, and vomits liquid death into their ranks. Her huscarls try to hide behind their shields, or raise their weapons in meek acts of aversion. It does nothing. Their skin bubbles, boils, sloughs away. They cease to be men, reduced to mere pools of flesh and shattered bones.

The bladed limb swings around again, catching her hard across her armoured chestplate. She spits blood, and reaches for her axes. The spear is lodged in the monster’s side. She grits her teeth, lashes out again. Her blades find one of the heaving, tumorous poison sacs, hooking at it, slashing until it bursts. The beast rears back, screeching in alien agony. The rush of acid and ichorous blood washes over her, drowning her left side in the searing wrath of the monster. The vengeance of the monster is calculated, a trap for her hunter’s ways. She drove for the heart, and that heart has proven to be bitter between her teeth. She drops the axe in her left hand, fingers opening and closing as the agony washes over her.

Other spears find it now, cast from amongst the ranks of her faithful. It whips around to face them, screaming even as her remaining axe slams into its side. Again, and again. Bullets and spears transfix it, but the last thing it will know – what she will carve upon its very flesh – is that it was the jarl of Helvintr who will end it.

She is still striking, still clawing at it, when it tumbles to the ground, and consciousness finally fails her, and bears her down with it.

The first breath that returns to her is a long, gasping one. Katla practically throws herself up from the steel bench on which she reclines. Her fingers claw at the metal, and she writhes like a pinned beast. Her eyes are wild, and she feels pain radiate through every facet of her being. The medicae bay is almost empty, devoid of the practitioners of the art of healing.

She flinches.

‘Ah, my queen.’ The voice is weary, tired and worn down by constant effort, and by worry. The old gothi looks at her, reverent and adoring. ‘They did not think that you would survive, but they are merely priests of the flesh. What do they know of such things?’

‘I live?’ Katla asks unsteadily, and the old woman simply laughs.

‘Of course you live, my queen! This would be a poor Underverse, the merest echo of the eternal. A fine ship, but a poor hall in which to dwell.’

‘My men?’

‘Many were lost to the ravages of the wyrm, but our strength endures. Eirik lives. He is strong, that one, you ought to take heed of that more. You are not alone, in all this.’

‘No,’ Katla says, with a small smile. Even that motion is full of pain. ‘I have you.’

‘Always, my queen.’ Bodil nods. ‘They have worked upon your flesh, while I girded your soul.’ She reaches out, picks up the gleaming glass of a mirror. ‘Would you like to see, my queen, what you have become?’

Katla takes the glass. Most of her auburn hair is gone. Her left side is a pitted, scarred ruin. Counterseptics and alkali still streaks her, along with the ink and blood of her remaking. She has become, under Bodil’s art, and healer’s rites. The ink flows and dances across the scarring, the left side of her face rendered into the snarl of a lupine skull. It is beautiful work, etched with love, and all the skill that desperation’s fugue can impart. It is void-black, and yet riven through with gold and ochre. Bronze glimmers upon her skin as intricate and sacred as any electoo of the Iron Priesthoods. The winding knotwork covers the scars – drowning them in the bestial half-mask of Bodil’s devotion. There are runes etched there. Oaths, too. The eye of the wolf, the lightning of the Allfather’s unity. They are marked into her very skin. Burned into her soul.

She has become a promise.

‘Well?’ Bodil asks. She bows her head, and does not look at her queen, her jarl.

Katla stares at the mirror, letting her eyes drift across every detail of her rebirth. Many others would shirk from such a thing. It would drive a lesser man mad. Katla does not wish to howl, or beat at the walls. She will not break upon fate’s anvil. She will shape it, as she is shaped by it, and so she takes the only course left to her. The only thing she can do.

Katla Helvintr smiles.

About the Author

Marc Collins is a speculative fiction author living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. He is the writer of the Warhammer 40,000 short story ‘Ghosts of Iron’ and when not dreaming of the far future he works in Pathology with the NHS.

An extract from Rogue Trader.

‘Helm, seven degrees pitch to starboard! Number three’s misbehaving again. Deal with it.’

Lucian Gerrit, rogue trader, turned his back on Raldi, his helmsman and resumed his vigil at the bridge viewing port. His vessel, the heavy cruiser Oceanid, felt cold to him. The after-effect, he knew, of so long a voyage through the empyrean to reach this far-flung system at the very border of the Emperor’s domains.

A jarring shudder ran through the deck plate, felt in the bones more than heard.

‘If you can’t compensate for a grizzling plasma drive, Mister Raldi, I can always disconnect one of the waste ingestion servitors and see if it’s capable of making a better show of it than you appear to be. Do I make myself clear?’

If the helmsman answered, Lucian wasn’t in the mood to hear. Though a ship to be proud of, the Oceanid was long past her prime. Even in a space-faring culture in which vessels remained in service for centuries, even millennia, she was old. Her homeport, Ariadne Halo, had fallen to alien attack in Lucian’s great, great grandfather’s time. All her sister ships were distant memories. She was the last of a long line. Much like Lucian himself, in fact.

Where once a deck crew of dozens had attended to their stations in the crew pit, now half of Lucian’s crew were hard-wired servitors, each mumbling an impenetrable catechism of the Machine-God. Vacant-eyed and drooling, each monitored a single aspect of the vessel’s running. Vessels such as the Oceanid relied on their like, for many tasks were beyond the abilities of a man to perform. Yet, over the years, the availability and quality of competent crewmen had diminished to such an extent that Lucian was forced to rely on servitors. Though essential in many roles, the hideous machine-corpse custodians were no substitute for a man when it came to obeying orders in a crisis. Each knew only its allotted purpose, and would remain tethered uncaring to its station even were it to burst into flames.

Raldi, one of the men of flesh and blood, rather than carrion and oil, onboard the Oceanid, called out. ‘Sir, we’re beginning our run on the rendezvous point. Provided we don’t pick up any ionisation we should be within hailing range.’

‘Well enough, helm. Keep her even.’

Once more, Lucian took in the view beyond the armoured port. The nameless star, recorded merely as QX-445-2 on the star charts, cast its wan light, barely illuminating a thick corona of misty stellar dust. Somewhere within that befogged region lay Lucian’s destination, the system’s only inhabited world: Mundus Chasmata.

Before making planetfall on that forgotten backwater of a port, however, Lucian had first to gather about him his flotilla. The cruisers Rosetta and Fairlight were due to enter range at any moment, but any number of fates could have befallen them whilst traversing the unreal dimension known as the warp. The least of such fates was delay; the worst was too terrible to ponder.

‘Surveyor return at three twenty by nine sir!’ called a junior rating.

Lucian strode to his command throne and sat, reclining in the worn leather seat from which generations of his predecessors had directed the fortunes of the dynasty.

‘Punch it up.’

A servitor, its eye sockets replaced by data ports from which bundles of cable snaked and writhed, bobbed its head once in response. Half its cranium was replaced by cybernetic implants, the right side of its brain, associated with creativity and emotion, having been cut away, deemed unnecessary by its creators. At an unheard command, the bridge lights dimmed and a revolving green globe of light, criss-crossed by motes of static, sprang into being before the command throne.

Grainy points of light resolved themselves into distinct features. At the hologram’s centre sat the Oceanid, all around her banks of pale green and jade stellar dust clouds. Deep within one such bank the position of Mundus Chasmata was indicated by a crosshair, her moons dancing around her. To the Oceanid’s stern, an indistinct smear indicated the distant return.

‘All engines to idle. Fore thrusters to best speed. Thirty-second burn on my mark.’

Lucian’s words were relayed through the deck crew to the entire ship. Within seconds, the omnipresent rumble of the Oceanid’s engines changed pitch, deepening to a subsonic drone as sweating engineering crews nursed them to idle.

‘Mark.’

A mournful siren pealed throughout the vessel, echoing down dark and dingy companionways. The mighty banks of retro thrusters mounted either side of the armoured prow coughed into life. The titanic force of the deceleration caused Lucian’s head to pitch forward. Raldi barely won his fight to remain standing.

‘Station nine! Why aren’t the compensators on line?’

The servitor at station nine, the position responsible for monitoring the Oceanid’s gravitic generators, opened its mouth and squealed a response in garbled machine language. The engine pitch deepened and the bridge lights flickered before Lucian felt the gravity field fluctuate, compensating for the deceleration.

‘Better,’ growled Lucian.

The retro thrusters ended their burn, and with the main plasma drives idling, the Oceanid was eerily quiet. Previously unheard, the groaning and creaking of the ship’s metal skeleton was now plainly audible.

‘Station keeping please, helm,’ ordered Lucian, and stood once more, hands clasped behind his back. Now the vessel was still, the hologram grew clearer. Where a single, garbled return had indicated the presence of another ship, or ships, that blob now resolved itself into five, then four, then two distinct points. Hard machine language yammered from the baroque grilles around the base of the projector, and in a moment, a stream of text flowed beside each of the two points. The noise ended at the same instant the text froze. The word ‘Rosetta’ flashed next to the lead return; ‘Fairlight’ next to the second.

Lucian released a breath that no one other than himself would have known he was holding. Though the last leg of their voyage had been upon a relatively safe course, warp travel between systems was rarely without incident. That both vessels had evidently arrived simultaneously was testament to the skills of their Navigators, for time within the warp bore little or no relation to that within the physical universe. Every mariner, from the most veteran of ships’ masters to the lowliest rating, was well versed in the tales of ships setting out, to arrive at their destination mere weeks later yet having aged decades. Other tales told of vessels that had arrived many centuries late, having spent mere days within the warp, while others still told of vessels arriving before having even set out. The life of a space mariner was one filled with superstition and ritual: they clung with nigh religious fervour to anything that might belay such bad luck.

‘Station three, open a channel to Rosetta.’

The servitor at the communications station croaked a vaguely human-sounding response, and angry static flooded the bridge address system. Machine noise broke through the static, a random staccato that would establish a secure communications channel synchronised with the systems of the other vessel. A second series of harsh bleeps cut in, the two streams flooding the bridge with arrhythmic machine nonsense. The servitor at station three turned a brass dial, and the two code streams converged until they burbled and gargled in synchronisation.

‘…id. Repeat, this is Rosetta hailing Oceanid. Holding station at primary rendezvous point, awaiting your response. Repeat, this is–’

‘Glad you could make it, Korvane,’ Lucian addressed his son, the master of the Rosetta, ‘I trust your journey was a pleasant one?’

A moment’s delay hinted at the still vast distance between the ships, before Korvane’s voice broke through the static.

‘Yes, Father. No major problems to report. The new loading crew gave us some trouble as we translated, but once they realised they weren’t going home, they relented. Otherwise, a very smooth journey.’

‘Good. You know how much is hanging on this mission. Any more problems, you know what to do, out.’

‘Station three. Give me a channel to Fairlight.’

The connection established; a new voice cut through the ever-present static and whine of the long-range communication channel. It was that of Brielle, Lucian’s daughter, and captain of the Fairlight.

‘Fairlight, receiving. Go ahead, Father.’

‘Anything to report, Brielle?’

There was a pause as the transmission beamed across a million kilometres of space, and then the simple reply, ‘No, Father. The voyage was pleasantly uneventful.’

‘Good.’ Addressing both ships, Lucian said, ‘You both know how important the coming negotiations are, so I want this to go without a hitch. We begin our final approach as planned. Form up in echelon to starboard, fifty kilometres separation for the run, down to one on my mark as we close. We have to make this look good. Brielle, follow your brother in as we practised. Do you both understand?’

His son replied immediately in the affirmative, but Lucian felt his daughter’s terse reply took longer than the communications lag would account for.

The channel closed, Lucian left Raldi with orders to proceed on their course inbound to Mundus Chasmata. Leaving the bridge, he made for his cabin. He passed down ill-lit passageways that had once shone with light reflected from polished brass fittings. In his youth, smartly attired junior officers had hurried along these very companionways, eager to fulfil the captain’s orders; but all that had changed.

For millennia, the Arcadius Dynasty, of which Lucian was the latest scion, had penetrated the darkness of the Eastern Rim. His ancestor, the great Lord Arcadius Maxim Gerrit, had earned the favour of none other than the High Lords of the Administratum. His leadership during the Easthead Nebula Crusade was rewarded with a charter to explore and exploit the black spaces on the star charts, to bring the light of the Emperor to the benighted worlds beyond the borders of the Imperium. It was well known that the charter was intended to remove the Lord Arcadius from the circles of power that orbited the High Lords of Terra, lest his successes afford him ambitions incompatible with those of the Administratum, but Maxim was ever a pragmatic man, and established a dynasty that would flourish for the next three thousand years.

The dynasty had hit hard times. Its traditional area of operation beyond the eastern spiral arm had rapidly become untenable. Lucian was in the business of trading, of exploitation, yet where once virgin worlds awaited his vessels, only barren, lifeless planets were to be found. Something was out there, feeding on regions that the Arcadius Dynasty depended upon for its very future.

Reaching his cabin, Lucian heaved open the heavy bulkhead door that would have been attended by a young rating, once. He entered and crossed to an ornately carved, wooden cabinet. Opening its exquisite hatch, he withdrew a small glass and a bottle of thick, golden liquid. He poured himself a shot and knocked it back in one motion. Lucian had little time for the affectations of high society, amongst which amasec was the drink of the so-called connoisseur. Rogue traders, being a unique breed, followed their own heading, and the Arcadius suffered pretension poorly. The coming negotiations would test Lucian’s skills and, he knew, his patience, to the limit.

After pouring a second shot of asuave, Lucian crossed to his wardrobe. The coming talks would call not only for diplomatic and trading skills, but also for a display of status. At his approach, a hunch-backed and calliper-limbed servitor glided silently from the shadows, and a baroque-framed mirror as tall as Lucian rose from its hidden recess in the deck. Lucian shrugged off his outer jacket and lifted his chin. The servitor lifted a polished, deep crimson gorget edged with burnished gold, fitting it around Lucian’s neck and fastening it across his back. Next, a heavy breastplate was attached, followed by the accompanying back armour. With the addition of similarly burnished leg, arm and shoulder guards, Lucian soon stood arrayed in his ancestral finery.

He regarded himself in the mirror. He was tall at over six feet, powerfully built and heavy set. His face showed age, but few ever guessed his years. As was ever the case with those who spent a lifetime traversing the space lanes, Lucian counted two ages. His objective age, that counted by the ever-constant universe was something approaching half a millennia. His subjective age, the years he actually noted the passing of, was one fifth that. Still, he appeared no older than half a century, for despite the downturn in his fortunes, he had access to surgical treatments about which the common subjects of the Imperium could only dream. Regular juvenat courses held back the years and maintained strength, ensuring that he would guide his dynasty through another century at least, so long as the Arcadius survived the next decade.

His familial armour donned, Lucian nodded as the servitor bowed and lifted before him a delicately carved, wooden case. Lucian would allow none other to handle the contents. Not even his children, until their inheritance granted them that right.

As he laid his hand upon the lid of the case, cunningly wrought gene locks confirmed his identity with a rapid pinprick. Had they detected the blood of anyone other than a son or daughter of his line, deadly poisons would, even now, be surging through his system, cutting synapses and paralysing nerves.

With the lifting of the lid, the stasis field within the case deactivated. He lifted the first of the contents: a medal in the form of a shining star, its surface inlaid with the rarest of precious metals. It was The Ward of Cadia; granted to his grandfather, in recognition of the aid he had leant halting an incursion through the Cadian Gate.

He affixed the gleaming medal to his breastplate and, reaching once more within the box, withdrew a green disc inlaid with golden filigree. The Order of Voss, awarded to his father by the tech-priests of that great forge world in thanks for his aiding their Titan Legions in defence against ork attack.

Next, was a medal of very different design and manufacture, presented to Lucian himself by the White Scars Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes, in recognition for his assistance in the purging of the xenos presence beneath the tunnel world of Arat. It was a hand-carved representation of a snarling, bestial face, a stylised lightning flash bisecting its features.

Half a dozen more gleaming tokens of mighty deeds followed, each afforded their place upon his armour with utmost honour and reverence until but one remained.

Lucian’s hand slowed as he reached once more into the case. Even he was given pause by the significance of the last item. Whispering a prayer, he reached within and brought out the pride of his dynasty. Only the Charter of Trade and the banner presented to the dynasty by the Senatorum Imperialis could equal this medal in worth. Awarded to Maxim Gerrit by the High Lords of Terra themselves, for his display of epic leadership as well as personal courage at the height of the Eastlight Nebula Crusade, Lucian lifted the winged medal of the Order of Ollanius Pius. Bearing the golden face of an angelic youth, laurel leaves arrayed across his noble brow, the medal represented the very highest honour a mortal man could earn in the service of the Imperium. Intricate scrollwork beneath the beatific visage bore an inscription:

‘Amid the weeping and the woe,
Accursed Daemon remain and rot,
I know thee filthy as thou art,
I know.’

The words sent a shiver up Lucian’s spine, for they spoke of things few men were allowed to know, but his position at the head of his dynasty granted him knowledge that the authorities had few means of barring from him. For most, daemons were the terrifying creatures of nightmares. Real, most certainly, but kept at bay by prayer and the eternal vigilance of the God-Emperor of Mankind. For the likes of Lucian Gerrit, they were the denizens of the empyrean, for vessels such as his must intrude into their realm when travelling between the stars.

The medals affixed to Lucian’s crowded breastplate, the servitor appeared once more. It bore a mighty cloak of luxurious fur. The snarling head of a beast of terrible aspect was mounted upon his right shoulder, its huge fore-claws draped across his back and over his left shoulder.

Lastly, he opened an armoured hatch upon the wall. He brought out an antique leather belt. Attached to it was a pair of ornate holsters. The first held a heavy, blunt-nosed pistol, a plasma weapon created for his line by the famed master artificer Ernst Heckler, impossibly intricate devotional text carved upon its every surface.

Lucian lifted the weapon, activating it with the press of a stud and savouring the rapidly rising, near ultrasonic whine that indicated that the weapon’s war spirit was content. The second weapon was of unknown manufacture, a pistol-sized device of pure crystal. Violet and blue lights danced within as he hefted it. He knew not who or what had constructed the bizarre weapon, but on many occasions had had cause to thank their skill. The weapon unleashed a blinding ray that interfered with its target’s brain functions, reducing him to a gibbering imbecile in seconds; very useful in some of the places Lucian had visited.

He then slid onto his fingers a series of rings, each a cunningly wrought, miniature laser weapon. With luck, such weapons would not be required, but few authorities in the galaxy, short of an Inquisitor Lord or Space Marine Chapter Master, would presume to demand a rogue trader divest himself of his arms. Given the dynasty’s standing, he would expect that even they would do so politely.

He regarded himself in the mirror one last time, before striding from the cabin. He would take to his command throne and guide the Oceanid, and with her, the Arcadius Dynasty, to a bright, new future.

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First published in Great Britain in 2020.
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