Serpents of Ardemis - Mike Brooks Read online

  But then there had been that unpleasantness with the rogue House Goliath pit fighter on Necromunda, and the life-voyage of Azariel, Novator of Navigator House Brobantis, had been abruptly and quite dramatically truncated, courtesy of an extremely large edged weapon. Chetta actually missed him a little, despite the fact that she’d orchestrated the whole thing. She’d had to kill the fighter concerned to ensure her involvement didn’t come to light, but no one seemed to doubt that she’d opened her warp eye and blasted his mind into fragments in self-defence.

  Well, it had been self-defence, after a fashion. There was no question that Chetta would have died, if he’d been allowed to live and had suffered from loose lips.

  The Solarox bucked again, and Chetta frowned. The Navigator for this segment of the voyage was Vora, a scion of one of the minor branches of House Brobantis. He wasn’t scintillating conversation, but he was highly competent at the business of guiding starships through the screaming, roiling mass of malignant energy that constituted the warp, else he’d have never been selected to pilot his Novator’s personal ship. For the Solarox to be acting like this either meant that Vora had steered them extremely carelessly into a warp storm an order of magnitude worse than any Chetta had ever experienced first-hand, or…

  She keyed her bedside vox-set. ‘Captain Arqueba.’

  There was nothing but the faintest of crackles of an open line for a few seconds, and then Anja Arqueba’s voice replied.

  ‘Lady Chettamandey.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Chetta demanded bluntly. ‘I haven’t been tossed around this badly since taking fire from an ork cruiser in Tennyson’s Reach.’

  ‘We’re… not certain, my lady.’ Anja’s voice was as clipped and professional as always, but Chetta had known her for over a decade, and could hear the tension in it. ‘We’re still in the warp, and the Geller field is holding, but we’ve lost all communication with Lord Vora. We’re steering blind.’

  Chetta swore, and rolled out of bed. ‘Have you got a reading on his vitals?’

  ‘No, my lady. As I said, we’ve lost all communication.’

  ‘Either that, or the links are working just fine, and he’s dead.’ Chetta sighed, running through the possible scenarios in her mind. The ravages of the empyrean could scour a Navigator’s skull clean of sanity, but one of her kind actually dropping dead mid-voyage was less common, although not unheard of. Heart failure, perhaps? Or possibly a fit, or some other madness that had caused him to tear himself from his throne and the machines that monitored him? ‘I’m heading up there. Prepare a team.’

  There was of course one other possibility: that something unholy had manifested out of the shifting currents of the warp and was even now eating Vora’s soul. It was unlikely, but possible. However, leaving the ship blind in the immaterium was as good as a death sentence for everyone on board anyway. Chetta had calculated the mathematics of risk in her head and come to the same conclusion that she had so many times in the past.

  If you wanted something done right, it was best to do it yourself.

  ‘Yes, my lady,’ Anja acknowledged her, and that was an end to the conversation. Chetta shrugged her way into a heavy robe and belted it securely, then eased on the diamond-encrusted slippers Azariel had gifted her for their tenth wedding anniversary.

  The Solarox rocked again, and spilled Chetta sideways into her dressing table. She steadied herself on it, wincing at the jolt to her knee and ankle joints, and made a mental note to dispose of it as soon as she could get away with doing so. Collecting relics linked to the aeldari had been one of her husband’s few real vices, and the damned things made her decidedly uncomfortable.

  The next jolt nearly sent Chetta tumbling backwards onto her bed again. She gritted her teeth, and took up her cane of blackened tachydon ivory from its resting place. She needed it some days more than others, but she’d be damned if she was going to try to make her way through a warp-tossed starship without it.

  ‘I cannot,’ she muttered, stumping towards her cabin door, ‘be having with this foolishness.’

  The Solarox was not a large ship by the standards of the Imperial Navy vessels Chetta had served on, but nor was it a tug. Even using the express elevators, it took her several minutes to get to the forecastle, by which point her joints were protesting bitterly and her mood had worsened significantly. She’d been met along the way by the team Captain Arqueba had assembled at her instruction: a dozen Brobantis armsmen and women in midnight carapace, armed with suppression shields and combat shotguns. Thus flanked, Chetta approached the Navigator’s chamber: a heavily shielded, ingrowing barnacle in the ship’s structure, its external walls encrusted with pipes and power cables, and dotted here and there with readouts attended to by the Solarox’s crimson-robed tech-adepts. One of them looked up at the tap-tap-tapping of Chetta’s steel-shod cane on the deck.

  ‘High lady,’ the adept buzzed in greeting through the voice-synth that had replaced their vocal cords. It was an alteration most likely made by choice rather than necessity, but Chetta didn’t regard the Adeptus Mechanicus’ habit of replacing their body parts with machines with the same distrust or disgust as many humans did. There were many days when she’d have given her right hand for artificial hips, knees and ankles, but for the moment she was still stubbornly determined to stick with her natural body, despite her regular disagreements with it.

  Besides, Chetta knew well what it was like to be regarded as a disgusting aberration. Navigators might be essential to the functioning of the Imperium, but that didn’t prevent the ill-informed and overly superstitious from regarding her and her kin as heretical mutants, rather than the finely tuned results of countless centuries of jealously guarded gene-lore.

  ‘What is the Navigator’s status?’ she asked, eyeing the chamber warily. The walls weren’t coated in frost, which was something – the very worst manifestations of the warp tended to drop the local temperature to something approaching a Valhallan summer.

  ‘Insufficient data to be certain,’ the adept replied simply.

  ‘Your best estimate?’ Chetta said. She’d learned long ago never to use the word ‘guess’ around the initiates of the Martian priesthood, since it tended to upset them.

  ‘There are no indications of abnormal atmospheric conditions within the chamber,’ the adept told her. ‘Readouts suggest a steady temperature of nineteen point two five degrees Celsius, with humidity at thirty-two per cent. However, we have no readings for pulse, respiration or brain activity. The probability of these monitoring mechanisms all failing at once while others are unaffected is approximately seven per cent. Ergo, I believe it is reasonable to assume that Lord Vora has expired.’

  ‘Marvellous,’ Chetta muttered. ‘The viewing shields?’

  ‘Still open, high lady.’

  ‘Whatever happened must have happened fast, then,’ Chetta said, more for the benefit of the others around her than anything else. She looked sideways at the sergeant and pointed at the outer blast door in front of them. It appeared ludicrously solid, but it wasn’t a Navigator’s frail frame that it was intended to contain. ‘Remain here, and shoot anything that comes out of that door unless you’re absolutely certain that it’s me.’

  ‘And if we think it’s Lord Vora, high lady?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘Shoot it anyway,’ Chetta grunted, walking forwards. ‘It’s the only way to be sure.’ That had happened once, on one of her first voyages. Old Scara had ridden them through a warp storm, then when the time came to hand over to the next shift and he’d emerged from the chamber, something – some thing – made of torn flesh and jagged bone spurs had started to claw its way free from his skin. Three ratings had died before someone had managed to turn a heavy bolter on it, and even then it had nearly got to Chetta to open her throat with its teeth before it had finally been brought down.

  She barely thought about it, these days. She’d seen far worse
inside the chamber.

  The first blast door slid aside and Chetta stepped through it, then gathered her robe around her as it slid shut behind her. She’d never yet had an item of clothing get caught, but it remained a tiny, irrational fear of hers, one that not even all her years of starfaring could shake.

  The blast door in front of her opened, and Chetta took a cautious step into the Navigator’s chamber.

  It wasn’t a large space, for a Navigator was required to do very little in there that involved any form of physical activity. It was dominated by the throne: an imposing seat of metal and animal leather, utilitarian yet menacing. Chetta absent-mindedly tugged her robe well clear of the closing second door and scanned the walls and ceiling. They were largely bare metal, and she could see nothing out of place there, no gibbering creature of malice and shadow waiting to spring the moment her attention was diverted. With that precaution taken, she stepped forwards cautiously to inspect the throne’s occupant.

  Vora Brobantis was slumped in the seat, and quite definitely dead, if the trails of blood leaking from his nose and ears were anything to go by. Chetta prodded him suspiciously with her cane, but he didn’t spring up and try to murder her while screaming warp-riddled heresy.

  ‘Thank the Emperor for small mercies,’ Chetta muttered. Vora was dead, sure enough, but at least it looked like he might stay dead. Such things were never entirely certain, when the warp was involved.

  With those details taken care of, Chetta turned to the side of the chamber she’d studiously been ignoring so far, and opened her third eye to gaze upon the warp.

  The warp; the immaterium; the empyrean – all names that humanity had conjured and tried to apply to the roiling, boiling, raw energy that lay over and under and around the material universe in which the flesh and blood and bone of their species existed. It was a lexical effort to apply order and definition where there was none, the notion that by naming something it could be understood, perhaps even tamed and mastered.

  The problem with that was that regular humans were blind and blunt, little more than mewling infants adrift in a hostile universe that would swallow them without mercy or compunction should they trail so much as a toe in the waters that bore them. Only Chetta and her three-eyed kin could look into the face of the warp and see anything of meaning; only a Navigator could hope to do such a thing and survive with their mind intact, and even then it wasn’t certain. The key to Chetta’s genetics lay many millennia in the dim and distant past, even further back than the rise of the Emperor and the formation of the Imperium itself. Perhaps, somewhere on Holy Terra in the most secure vaults of the Paternova, the most senior of her people, lay the true nature of the Navigators’ history. Then again, perhaps the knowledge was lost, along with so many other secrets.

  Chetta frowned at the warp, trying as ever to make sense of what she was experiencing. Colours without name exploded and whirled, then died in starbursts of melting hues. Sounds chased each other past the viewport, then returned to sink their claws into it. The shifting, kaleidoscopic light momentarily turned every shadow in the chamber into a face, familiar but unplaceable, screaming in agony. She winced as a stabbing pain assaulted her forehead, seeming to reach right through her third eye and into her brain, twisting at its substance with ephemeral claws.

  ‘All quiet, then,’ Chetta snorted. She reached behind her, and her grasping fingers encountered Vora: still dead, she was delighted to find. She hauled him out of the throne and onto the floor with a grunt of effort, then forced her knees to raise her up so she could take his position. The throne, recognising that it had a new and living occupant, subtly extended its biometric devices to begin monitoring her vital signs.

  ‘Captain Arqueba?’ Chetta called, activating the vox.

  ‘High lady?’

  ‘Vora is dead,’ Chetta said, ‘but I’m a jokaero if I can work out why. The warp isn’t exactly calm, but this wouldn’t have bent the mind of a green acolyte.’ She frowned, drumming her fingers on the throne’s arm. ‘You’ll have to cope without direction for a little while longer. Something took a swipe at us, and I’d like to know what it was.’

  ‘As you wish, high lady.’

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