Chapter 2

“I am afraid I do not quite follow. I know that navigators are queerly helpful aboard ships – they cannot seem to sail without them. Further, I know that the navigator families own quite a deal of wealth. Navis Nobiline, the saying goes, never a day without a golden throne for the pocket and for the loo. But, well, I don’t see the connection between them and your cruise and the sailing and such.” Jon paused in his conversation to move a piece on the Regicide board set between him and Vynn. Vynn shook her head, her normally cheery face drawn into lines of concentration and reflection more befitting a priest or a schola student or one suffering exceptionally from consumption.

“So, I suppose it falls on me to ask: Exactly what do navigators navigate?” Jon asked.

“My good man,” Vynn said. “I believe you moved that piece wrong.”

Jon picked up his spectacles – normally used to read the small, spidery writing so many apothecaries used for their physics and their chemical extracts and their pharmacological delights. He leaned forward and examined the Regicide board. “This is Spinward style, is it not?”

“Spinward style doesn’t allow for Astartes to jump Cardinals, move it back, be a good chap. The warp, by the way. It is the warp navigators navigate, and it is why we are becalmed, Jon, why my crew sits on their palms, why my new ‘ought fours and cannonades and blasted great megawattage microwave guns are going to rot out their power conduits before I take a single prize!” Vynn smashed her fist down on the table, causing it to leap and bounce.

There was something about having a Navigator that made a ship tick just slightly better. With Mary Belisarius firmly ensconced within her personal spire and her maidservants setting everything to her whims, the Magos Yelnets had taken it upon himself to be removed from office. Vynn didn’t know if it was her showing him up on the field of political assignments and distribution of resources or if it was some internal squabble within the Adeptus Mechanicus. All she knew was the new Magos in charge of the orbital foundries had taken up her position with a quick eye and a smooth, silver-plated smile.

Ought fours? Why. Commander Vynn, we can surely give you more firepower than that for the Hegemony, the Magos Su’Chen had said. And lo, within two days, great hauling craft had come from the foundries of Tempestus bearing the macrocannons that would push the Hegemony from being merely a lazy sloop to a proper man-o-war. Now rated as a 501, the addition of a ninety two guns had brought with it a desperate need for crew. Knocking a few dozen coves from chartist shipping that had chosen a poor fortuned time to stop in port had given the warm bodies for the ‘ought fours, whose design hadn’t changed since the Great Crusade, so any proper voidsman or space dog would know how to serve them. But the cannonades themselves were newfangled Voss technology, and the Voss forge worlds adored themselves gravitic trickery, leaving most the crew muddled as to how to fire the bloody things.

The masers – the five nine five megawatt microwave lasers, to be specific – were another pile of fish all together. They lacked the great focusing apertures that made them true lances. So too did they lack the power supply to allow them to fire the great cutting arcs that made lances so terrible when fixed to Firestorm frigates or to the great capital ships that filled Vynn’s nights with envious longing (when she was not, of course, dreaming of the fine Doctor Balthezar, but that was another matter entirely.) But while they were not properly class as lances, they could still cut through armor quick as winking, making them quite excellent for followup to a proper shield popping barrage.

Metal, then heat, that was the watchword of the long-gun Admirals who disdained fighter-craft and torpedoes. Vynn herself had little use for torpedoes, having never seen one in use properly, but fighter-craft were another issue entire. But she had little enough room on the Hegemony for her newly enlarged crew to run out boats and cutters, let alone stock bombers and interceptors. But that was also beside the point.

The point being that even with crew who could man the gravitic cannonades, and even with able hands to run to the great masers, and even with plasma conduits not like to explode when put under stress or pressure, the Hegemony remained trapped by the terrible weight of politics. According to Belisarius, oh, no, according to the Belisarius tutor, a hideous woman by the name of Regencia, the navigatrix was not yet ready to set sail.

“In other words,” Vynn said, eyeing the new move that Jon had made. It was entirely legal and still left her with few choices as to her own counter move. “She doesn’t wish to risk her tender hearted ward on anything less than a clearest shot. And in this part of space, so near the great Warp storms of the Expanse, there ain’t likely to be a perfectly clear day of sailing until the Emperor steps off his throne. So, we must either wait until I contrive to get a proper navigator, or until she grows up and that’s all there is to it.” She moved an Imperial Guardsman piece into a flanking position.

Jon, as expected, took it with the Astartes.

She took the Astartes with her Inquisitor.

So, too, the Inquisitor was checked by Inquisitor.

And with that Vynn laughed, slapped her palm on her thigh, and exclaimed: “You’re dished, as slain as the Arch-Heretic! Ha ha!”

Jon frowned – but then Vynn moved her Emperor piece, and placed his Emperor within a cage created by the position not only of her pieces but of Jon’s own defense. Unable to escape, Jon regarded the board with sullen irritation before tipping his Emperor over. Sharing port over Vynn’s victory, Jon rubbed his chin and watched the vast orb of Tempestus turn below the window in her state room. His mind drifted from point to point. He thought of the game, the fine taste of his port, the fact that the ship’s character had already begun to faintly follow – ape, even – the character of her new captain. The fact that Vynn was a commander, and yet somehow by the magic of the military mind, she was referred to eternally as Captain whilst on the deck. But most of all, he considered this issue of their political becalming.

“She’s how old, eighteen, sixteen?” he asked, absently.

“And I said, oh, ah, the Navigatrix?” Vynn asked, her anecdote about stoats entirely lost for the moment. “Oh, twelve.”

“Twelve? Twelve terran years?” Jon exclaimed.

“Aye. And to think, I saved her great-grandfather, I believe it was her great-grandfather at the very least. The family Belisarius owes me a debt, much as the family Hall owed me a debt. And so, from one I get a navigator, the other this ship I suppose, ha ha!” She shook her head.

“I still have a hard time fathoming the chronology of your life, Vynn,” Jon said. “but that’s for another time, for another dinner. I believe I know how to cut your becalming red tape, Vynn. Is it much rudeness to go to a Navigator’s spire?”

“For a navy man, unthinkable!” Vynn exclaimed. “Why, to do the very thing is to doom a ship to wasting away without a navigator fit to serve for years and years, good heavens, no, you must not go to her.”

Jon pursed his lips.

In the end he did not go, but rather, sent a letter. Here, his long service with noble families of various levels (as well as other services he preferred to not think, lest the thoughts be overheard by some passing wyrd or wytch) gave him something of an idea of how best to approach even this most prickly of noble pride. He wrote a very charming letter in golden ink and embossed it as finely as he could, signing his full name and all his titles – physician, chirgeon, xenographer, and so on and so forth. When he sent it off, he took mind of the clear breach that sending a naval officer to the navigators would be, and so instead plied a servo skull from the engineerium.

And thus, he waited, but not for long.

Coming to the navigator spire, he was checked intimately by a pair of mute slaves, who patted him down for weapons and, presumably, to ensure his gender and species, considering how they palpated his organs through his skin. Feeling bruised in both ego and flesh, Jon walked through the door and took in the opulence and grandeur of the navigator’s spire. The ceiling was as high and vaulted as he had expected, but where as the decorations in the rest of the Hegemony tended towards simple stone and wood, here, gilt and gold gleamed from every crevasse and corner. He was met then by Regencia.

The tutor – and clearly a none-too-secret member of the Ordos Famulous - took both of his hands, beaming. “Oh, Jon, I did not know you were aboard this ship.”

And Jon felt as if he had suddenly stepped through a portal to another time and world. The smell of roses, the faint tang of oranges in his nostrils. The rumpling of a skirt, and the giggling laugh of a girl of the same age. Her firm, perky breasts had filled his waiting mouth and her giggles had become soft gasps, and whimpers, and moans, and that sweetest of sound: The soft, cooing moan of ohhh Jonnn. But the innocence and the delight of that teenage contact had been tinged with a pall. A sadness, that Jon was not sure had existed at the time or if it hung now over his past like a cloud of smog, projected backwards from his knowledge of how things would go. Of how Reggie had been torn from him, her engagement with Brock Thurner shattered by their quiet assignations. Of how she had been trundled away under the furious glare of parents, and he had run off.

But now...

Here she was. Not looking a day over thirty, her mousy attractiveness turned into warmth and compassion.

She smirked. “How time turns, how the Emperor guides us, oh Jon, it ... I had heard that a doctor was here, that his name was Jon, Jon Balthazar, but I didn’t know you were the same. But I had to know, and so ... here you are. Oh Jonny...” She stepped forward, taking his hands. “How are you?”

Jon could think of a great many things to say, but few seemed relevant or particularly safe. And so, with a detachment bordering on coolness, he said: “Very well. I, ah, came to see about your Navigatrix-”

“Ah, the Navigatrix is indisposed,” she said, her voice soft.

“Well, Vynn, ah, the Commander, ah, the Captain,” Jon said, catching himself not once, but twice. “She has told me that the ship is becalmed.”

Reggie – it was always Reggie, it would always be Reggie now, oh how it had to be Reggie – nodded. “That is a matter of some delicacy.”

“She’s not shy, is she?” Jon asked, his brow furrowing. “An imbalance of the humors?”

“No, no, no.”

“Is it an issue of the oculus? I’ve heard navigators have three-”

“Of a sorts, but, no, the physicians of House Belisarius are working on it.” Reggie looked drawn, focused. “But ... hmm ... wait here.”

She turned and with that particularly focused walk of hers, she left the room and left Jon reeling. He had fled high born society to escape the wound their parting had left in him. But he had never let ire or anger fall upon her. It had been the carelessness of youth, an eager tumble in her own bed rather than out in the verdant wilderness that surrounded Paradiso. His member had been buried in her slick moistness up to the hilt, his balls resting against the smooth curve of her ass, when a maid servant had stumbled in bearing laundry. For a moment, the arrogant youth he had been was as fresh in Jon’s mind as his thoughts on the nature of navigator households: He could remember his assurance that he could fix the moment.

But bribery – and even a vain jab at seduction – had failed, and the servant had brought Reggie’s mother and father and the house guard. Only a short fight with rapier and a shattered window had gotten Jon away before he had been shot. From there, his family had moved to defend him, and Reggie’s family had moved to attack, and it had all played out – as it so often did betwixt noble families. Her, whisked away to the Adeptus Sororitas, where she would learn the art of bolter and flamer and forget all but the Emperor. Or ... so was the plan.

For when she returned, he could see that glittering ember within her brown eyes and he knew he longed for her as intensely as he longed for Vynn. Jon put both thoughts aside though to focus on the moment as Reggie said: “I believe I have convinced the family doctors to let you examine the issue. If you can fix it, surely, we can sail by the night.”

Jon nodded.

It took him five minutes of examination to determine the issue, despite a total lack of technological grounding in the device that seemed to form the centerpiece of the Navigator’s art. The young Mary Belisarius looked quite put out, glaring at the throne that she was clearly meant to sit on, while the house doctors were standing nearby, speaking to one another, gesturing with long scribe-tines and extended cyber-digits that had been used to augment and expand their fingers and hands. They were pointing at a hanging connection port that dangled from the ceiling that the throne was built into. Jon stepped forward, taking the hanging connection cable, tugged it down as low as it could go, then looked at the others.

A few moments later, the Navigator was seated on the throne, the doctors moving to hook her up, looking quite chagrined.

Reggie stepped over, her face a mask of confusion. “I’m afraid I don’t follow, have you seen a navigator’s throne before?”

“Oh, me, no, never,” Jon said, pointing. “But I take it that there, the hanging connection cable? From the irked expression on the Navigatrix and the length it had been drawn too, I saw at once they thought it a way to snap home to the oculus, for some arcane means.”

Reggie nodded. “They said there was an issue involving the oculus port.”

“The solution is simple,” Jon said, taking Reggie’s arm – the doctors gestures were getting more and more pointed. Together, the two of them left the room behind as Mary Belisarius squeaked audibly. “I have seen such a device in a dozen different places, used in a dozen different ways, but the basic design, the form itself, leaves no question. That was a catheter.”

Vynn took the news with a cheer and a laugh and a wave of a parchment she was reading at the time. Jon, trying to read the parchment, was almost clouted across the chin and jaw with the news even as Vynn poured out a voluble stream: “We’re getting our first lieutenant, and with that, we can set sail, oh joy, oh what a great story. And you’ll never guess who: Janus! Nestor Janus, who did that pretty piece of work against the ‘nids. Oh, it’s an astounding bit of voidswork, you have to have heard. Oh, ‘nids? Short for Tyrannids, yes, those blighters. Now, see here, Janus was the third lieutenant on one of those great Emperor class battleships, the ones with the long millenniums. No, not a length of service, a long millennium refers to the lances, it refers to their wattage. So, yes, see...” She started to use a salt shaker and a fountain pen to indicate the positioning of the battleship and the Tyrannid hive ships – but before she could launch into the full story, Jon lifted his hand.

“Please, forgive me, Vynn, but I need a rest. It was ... hard work,” he lied, thinking only of retiring to his books, to forget Reggie and the memories she had dredged up.

“Oh, of course, you look terribly hipped. I suppose dealing with navigators for a civilian who ain’t used to them has to be an issue. Never fear, the nightmares rarely last,” Vynn said, nodding with experience. But while worrying about Jon did take some of the shine off the thought of Nestor Janus’ arrival, it didn’t take the smile from Vynn’s face as she contemplated the other notes she had arrived. It seemed being delayed in port had some advantages, as here were three letters that perked her right up that she would have never gotten if they had sailed the instant the Navigator was ready and damn the lack of a lieutenant – who wasn’t entirely required on a 600 rate, let alone a 501.

But here, she had a letter from one Damion LuPont, a member of a local noble family who wished to arrive at Kulth and was willing to put a delicious amount of gold into her personal coffers for the pleasure. Then there was one Saffron Mayes, who needed a trip to Port Wander, which she was where any and all prizes she took would be going. But most interesting was the request for transfer from one Enginseer Turantawix. She managed to read the first few lines, squinting to decipher them.

Dear Cmd. Vynn

I know such a request is somewhat improper, but I have heard rumors that your engine has been recently redesigned and rebuilt with connections and, oh, I realized that I am rambling, let me start again.

These lines were then crossed out by broad black strokes which was what had made them so trying for Vynn to read.

I know such a request is somewhat improper, but I have heard your fine ship, your marvelous ship, it has recently gotten new plasma vents, and I have studied the interaction between such vents and the plasma engines of Martian manufacture, and so, would make for a

This line had been crossed out as well. Vynn narrowed her eyes, leaning forward to read the final line, which itself was not crossed out.

I know such a request is somewhat improper, but I believe I will be best for tending to your engines, and if you wish to request me, contact Aetheric Conduit Master Fiorie, for he will immediately transfer me without a single moment of delay.

Your obd. servant Turantawix

Vynn, of course, sent the letter within moments. She had never liked the Enginseer that the Adeptus Mechanicus had given her, and the thought of a new one eager to serve on a fighting ship was a thought to keep her warm as she waited in her best uniform before the seal-lock that led from the berth to the bridge. The lock doors opened and she, Khan, and an honor guard of armsmen and mids stood too, ready to welcome aboard the new Lieutenant. Nestor Janus was a stern and humorless figure, and one that dampened some of Vynn’s eagerness the instant that he stepped over the seal-lock door.

He was nearly as tall as she, though half as wide, with a ghostly pallor to his face and purple rings under his eyes. Well, his eye, as his right had been removed and replaced with a somewhat fearsome looking augmetic that glowed bilious yellow and purple, the hues shifting in a queasy way that made Vynn feel as if she were once more back aboard her family raft on the wind tossed seas of Aquios. The puckering that surrounded the augmetic was odd to boot, with a series of metal rivits that poked up through the skin, as if the augmetic piece hooked into his socket rather than simply smoothly joining with it. He bowed his head curtly to her, but there was such a look of disdain upon his lips, communicated by a faint crease in the brow, a quiet sniff from his wide nose, that it set Vynn’s spine straight and her own lips forming into a disapproving, almost savage scowl.

She mastered herself and offered her hand. “Welcome aboard, Lieutenant Janus.”

“Mm, yes, thank you marm,” he rumbled, his voice thickly accented by the Ultamarian burr she had expected.

“I shall have one of my armsmen show you to your quarters. Once there and settled, I want you to come to my offices – we shall be making way by the evening and I need watch cycles readied. And more, this is to be a fighting man-o-war, not merely a plodding caravan chaser, so be ready to speak lively when you see crew lax and laying about. Understood?”

Janus nodded and without a word but a touching of fingers to forelock headed in, the armsmen escorting him through the corridor towards his room. Vynn thought a great deal of unkind thoughts, for she had almost immediately recognized that look upon his face. She had to explain it, though, as if to a child, to a simpleton, to Jon when she met him in her quarters for dinner that evening. “Oh, I’ve seen it before, all those long-gun naval men, that is to say, those who have come from old naval families and such, they look down on someone whose from a world not like their own. So, they see me, with the tattoos and the hair and the like and they think I must have gotten this ship through rank piracy. I bet he’s thinking right now of how he deserved her with his action against the ‘nids, nice piece of work such as it was...” she trailed off. “Jon, are you quite all right?”

She had noticed, at last, that Jon was not regarding her, but rather looking intently at the other guests she had invited. It seemed only proper for their launch to bring up not only her new Enginseer Prime, this Turantawix fellow, but also the civilians who had purchased rooms. Both of them seemed to be quite at ease in the opulence of her quarters in a way that Turantawix simply was not and never could be.

Saffron Mayes was a rail thin woman with midnight black skin and hair dyed a brilliant white, which she had tied back behind her head in a severe top knot. Her gown and dress though were finest shimmerglass fabric, and flowed with her every motion as she picked up a decanter of amnesac to pour for herself, speaking languidly with Damion LuPont. Damion was as trim and handsome a young fellow that Vynn had ever seen – his build was on the same lines as Jon, but he lacked Jon’s thin, almost sallow complexion. Damion instead was a hale, hearty, red cheeked, yellow haired man with the most arresting purple eyes. He dressed simply, in a black jerkin and white leggings, with only a red sash to denote his station in life – it bore the noble pins that indicated rank among Tempestus orbital nobility.

Jon shook his head, looking away from the guests. “What? Yes, yes, quite all right.”

“Well, you look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” Vynn said – and went into a discussion about the difference between strata in the navy that sailed in one of Jon’s ears and out the other. For as Jon looked back to Saffron, her eyes met his and he could hear nothing but the pounding of his heart and a soft, sibilant voice that hissed from within his mind, a voice that rang in ears and memories alike.

Hello there, Slicer...

Saffron smiled.

And Jon adjusted his collar slightly, then went to take a seat as Vynn exclaimed: “Ah, and here it is, the suckling roast!” With such invitations, Jon had to sit next to Pyros, the most dangerous psyker he had ever met, and make polite small talk for an hour.

In the lowdecks of any ship, there are many subcultures that are mixed together by the broad club that is the press. There are luckless noblemen tossed in among the gutter rats and the void dogs and the mutants, and the wheat and the chaff are separated not by any gentle hand, but by the cold and pitiless pressure of the requirements of the service and the starting rods of boatswains. But for those who could learn to throw a lever when told and stood unflinching before a recoiling macrocannon, there was a place that could be found. A comfortable place, where food was simple, company was plentiful, and the future was assured.

Teshan Keets was one of these comfortable multiudes, irate at the derangement of all his carefully ordered life. As an able voidsman, he could do more than just flip a switch and heave a door. He was rated up to and including deep void operations and piton duty. He could don a voidskin faster than his old da back on Kurtok V could skin a hare, and he took no small pride in the three chits of valor pinned onto the brim of his aluminum hat. Once for knocking down a grox whose neural inhibitor had failed with a shunt-hook. Twice for handling mutineers, during the voyage of 602 and the voyage of 609.

And here he was, seated not with his fellows from his third shift, but rather in a mucky muck of newly pressed lubbers. There were three clueless louts who kept bleating about their families and their old home and how the gravity here felt odd and strange, and one of the other new fish went on and on and on about their old ship, the Heart of Souls, and how she wasn’t as brutal and crude as this terrible naval ship.

“I hear,” Lule the Welder said, cutting in over the moaning and groaning, his face twisted and scarred by many times spent kissing the void on skinhull duty. “I hear fish like you need to shut yer traps an’ listen, rather than blarin’ on and on like bleatin’ groxkits.” He took a seat between Teshan and one of the new fish, looming from the darkness of the corridor, lit only by guttering candles and the few luminators that still drew on the tech-sprites of the ship. The shadows cast a demented, bulging-eyed look to his face, his skin turning sallow and inhuman in the darkness. “Listen here, listen here, this here captain, with her starts and her tattoos, she’s liable to drag us all out into the cold and gasping Lady’s claws.”

“L-Lady?” one of the new fish, a brown skinned woman who was still dressed in some party finery, mixed with the crew rags that she had been given.

“Lady Void, she is,” Lule the Welder rumbled, his fists clenching. The dancing light cast across those knuckles, and between each gnarled root of a finger, there bore a letter, spelling out, plain as day: HOLD FAST. “Lady Void wants to suck the marrow from yer bones and quench yer very last breath. And mark my words, new fish n’ old, the new captain’s got a head on her shoulders that’ll take us all as fast as Horus’ wink.”

Delivering such a pronouncement, Lule left the small knot to continue on his rounds.

Teshan shook his head and knocked back another cup of grog.

The day had come and Vynn stood at her bridge with a smile on her face and the breeze of Aquios in her memory, so vivid and clear that she almost felt her hair stirring and could nearly smell the sea-salt in her nose. The bustle and hum of the bridge crew moving about her had become somewhat more settled since her first abortive flight at the helm of the Hegemony – they had had near a week as the Hegemony crawled at sublight speeds towards the edge of the system, far from the gravitational forces of the binary stars that prevented any ship from engaging their warp drive. A bell tolled, once, twice, three times, and a piping voice – a young ensign who had only just reached her new position and not yet gotten over the giddy authority of it – called out: “Sub-Heliosphere in mark five, six gravities!”

“Six gravities, put that in the book, don’t sleep on deck you fucking child,” the gruff sound of Ship Master’s Khan snarled out over the bustle, and the midshipman who had been tasked with keeping the log up to date started to scribble the notes.

Vynn looked down from her position in the center of the bridge to her first. Janus had not impressed her over the week. Slow to enforce orders given, balky in coming up with his own initiatives, and this perpetual air of ‘should-a-beens’ made him a decidedly odious presence on her bridge. The only saving grace she had of him was that his thick Ultimarian brogue and his standoffishness had transmitted to the rest of the crew that he was not one likely to stay, and so his distaste for the captain of his ship hadn’t infected them. All well and good for an easy cruse without a single battle or cutting out expedition, but nothing for a fighting man-o-war. Vynn chewed on how to deal with that as the serving voidsmen on the bridge were sent forward to pull on the great chains at the front of the bridge. Rattling vista-plate shields started to move up, inch by laborious inch, to cover the view of the starry void.

A soft cough drew Vynn’s attention. She saw that Jon had come onto the bridge with a somewhat pallid, nervous expression on his face. He clasped his hands together, opened his mouth, then became obscenely distracted by some mundane facet of naval minutia. It made speaking to him feel akin to speaking to an invalid who had been stricken of all memory, an amnesiac, taken aback and shocked by the sun rising or apples falling to the earth.

“What is the meaning of those plates? To protect from energy discharge or ... or...”

“No, no,” Vynn said, chuckling. “We’re to set sail into the warp, Doctor. Those plates are to protect us from viewing the Warp. Bad luck, you know.”

Jon looked grim. “Not exactly bad luck, Vynn, warp shock will kill a less hardy man.”

Vynn shrugged. “It’s bad luck to be killed, no? What brings you to the bridge?”

“I wished to speak of you, about, ah, one of the passengers,” Jon said. “I’ve been trying to, well, work up the courage.”

The truth was considerably less prosaic and quite a bit more coarse. After the dinner party and the uncomfortable time spent between Saffron Mayes and one of the other passengers (his name having completely escaped Jon’s memory and attention), Jon had retreated to his quarters. There, he had checked the focusing aperture on his pistol, sharpened his knife, and planned to steal into the passenger deck. Clearly, he had not been as guarded with his thoughts as he had hoped, as when he was about to snap the charge pack home to his pistol, there had come a knock at the door and the tinkling, chortling laugh of Pyros, the true woman underneath the nom-de-guerre of Saffron Mayes.

Jon could not have reproached himself. There were tricks that mundanes could use to dissuade the psyker, the witch, the wyrd. Nursery rhymes, sung round and around and around in the mind were one simple method. Doing complex algebraic equations, another. The more extreme methods involved lobotomies and surgical augmentations. Becoming half a machine would rend apart the neural architecture normally read by a psyker, but it was not a mode that fancied itself to Jon, not in the slightest. But even that, it was rumored, was not entirely efficacious. No. In the end, there were but two sure and simple ways to protect oneself from the psyker.