Chapter 4

Rumble rumble, rata-tat-tat. The sound of the drums carried along every deck, every corridor, into every berth and nook and cranny. The officers in their quarters to the twists in the lower holds heard it, and went to their assigned posts with a will. That sound was to be obeyed, drill or not, and there was a crackling rumor that moved cross the Hegemony at a speed faster than even transtelepathic message: This was no drill. In the high gilded spires of the Navigator’s home, Regencia put her foot down with all the weight of the Adeptus Famulous’ ancient pedigree. Millennium of authority was behind her as she looked down at her ward and said, in clear High Gothic: “Absolutely not.”

Mary Belisarius, with the unassailable, bullheaded passion of a twelve year old, glared right back at her tutor and warden. She responded less with words and more with body language: Spine straight, chin up, forehead mounted cybernetic oculus glinting with purple fire. That alone was what might have prevented Regencina from simply bending Mary over one knee and spanking her as if she were a lowborn hivescummer. Mary was a member of the Navis Nobiline. Richer than Rogue Traders, more powerful than a psyker, and most importantly, rarer than starfire diamonds.

“Mary Belisarius,” Regencia said, her arms crossed over her black carapace chest piece and the flue-de-leys that was her sisterhood’s symbol. “You are the only navigator aboard. You cannot watch a battle. Not from the bridge, not from this spire, not from anywhere but the inner core shelters.”

“It’s my first battle. And Uncle Rementius said that he once slew a dozen frakking orks by himself!” Mary said, delighting in using a curse word. “With but one glare with his warpseye!”

“Your Uncle Rementius doesn’t know when to silence his tongue and wash out his mouth with soap!” Regencia hissed.

In the large glass windows of the spire, the enemy could be seen by the naked eye. Three plumes of billowing, orange flame that streaked across the stars, torches that marked the routes of three of the pirate xebecs that made up part of a flanking attack against the Hegemony. The other three plumes could have only been seen if the ceiling had been transparent rather than a full color recreation of St. Erasmus’ mural on Trevesalis II of His Majesty and his Sons. But if one could see through the muscular and astoundingly detailed oiled chest of the nearly nude Sanguinus (nude to represent his utter piety, St. Erasmus would claim to his dying day), one might have seen the trio of other plumes that represented two more pirate xebecs and the retrofitted Pilgrim class transport that made the waybreaker and pathfinder for the pirate flotilla.

Regencia decided to risk it. She snapped her fingers and Mary learned, with an unpleasant shock, that while she was the heir apparent of the House Belisarius, she was not actually in charge of the tall and powerfully built praetorian guard. They looped their arms underneath her slender shoulders and lifted the red robed and gold gilded twelve year old off her feet. She kicked her feet and hissed angrily, her sandal flying off and striking Regencia against her face. She walked on with a long suffering sigh.

She was sure she had the most difficult job on the ship.

In the gundecks, nearly two thousand sweating, panting, shirtless crewmen of every type labored to ready the five hundred and one main guns that filled the dorsal spine of the Hegemony. They were numbered by quadrant and labeled by snarled and labyrinthine system of the Administratum and the Naval Ordinance Board. There were 94 tonner gravitic carronades set beside multi-megawatt maser guns that were powered off a plasma core technology that had been long since lost to the distant mists of the past. Makeshifts were brought about by attaching multiple smaller cores together and feeding them into the gun’s power slots with massed teams of rubber suited men and women who surely wished they were dead in the sweltering heat. There were ‘ought fours – named not for their barrel length or size, but for the supposed millenium of their construction, which hadn’t changed since they were used to defend the battlements of Holy Mars herself. These were the oldest guns, and they had carried names from ship to ship as they were stripped off hulks and attached to fresh hulls over the centuries. A few had names scrawled on their sides in languages that not a man jack below the mizzen spoke. And so they earned new names that day. Names like Bloody Nuisence and Triple Damned Fucking Piece of Jackanapery, names bestowed by crews sweating blood and cursing mangled fingers as weighted machines slipped, ropes jerked, pulleys strained.

But through it all, the gundecks readied themselves and the crew cheered as the last of the guns was marked as cleared to fire before the Hegemony came without long lance range of the enemy craft. Other crew had worked just as hard. Engine plasma had to be rerouted by hand, throwing levers and twisting valves to redirect the fearsome powers of the engineerium to the triple reinforced void shield emitters on fore, aft, zenith and nadir. Those emitters crackled and hummed to life and every crewman felt something few had in their whole careers: The buzz and twist of their hairs lifting on end, a prickling tingle as the shields came to full life.

Vynn stood aboard the bridge and surveyed this chaos with a censorious eye. Aboard the Victory – the ship she had served on for nearly five years before getting her step – she’d have been whipped silly and sent to her quarters in tears and a demotion if she had overseen a bridge like this. But the Hegemony had spent lazy decades under a lackadaisical captain patrolling a quiet trade route for nonexistent pirates, and so the hard discipline of a crew getting ready for battle was entirely missing. She shook her head as the last of the green lights flicked on and the pale blue wash of the shields filled the vistaplates. The blue faded a moment later, the shield becoming invisible against the inky black.

“Shields at a six hundreds, ma’am!”

“The forty five microwaves register as prepped and primed.”

“You there, mark time and check the chron!”

“Is the Navigator stowed?” That was Mr. Khan, his booming voice echoing loud and true.

“Forward bulks state aye,” another voice called back. “Seems the pipsqueak wanted-”

“Belay that, ensign,” Lt. Janus said. “Mark that man’s name down for insubordination.”

“Not now, Nestor,” Vynn growled low enough only she heard. But Janus had the right of it, and any naval inquiry board would read only the dry note of the ships logs, written in ink and punched into magnetic tape. No ink in the world could replicate the jovial laugh on Ensign Iz voice, the way he had smiled. But that was a worry for another day as Desna’s eagle sharp eye and deft hand with the auspex brought the word almost faster than the speed of light.

“The xebecs have opened fire, ma’am.”

The shells came a short time later. A rippling forest of mushroom shaped explosions, starting at the space above the prow, then painting along the spine. It was a mere thirteen hits, and Vynn measured the kilotonnage with the easy eye of a veteran spacer. She nodded slightly. “Rail-slings, loaded with solid duranium. Mr. Khan, you agree?”

“Like as not they’re firing rocks from that blast pattern, more weight-damage than shellfire. And we’re not seeing any secondary explosions from the misses.” He nodded at the vastness of empty space about them. If the enemy had fired actual shells, that space would be filled with the white flashes and expanding fury of detonating misses, and the shields would ripple and shudder with the impact of what little shrapnel reached them through the inky black.

Vynn nodded. The enemy were tossing rocks. Well then.

“Open fire,” she said, clasping her hands behind her back.

On the gundecks, the order was brought by runner and through what few voxes that still functioned to connect the deck to the guns. It was one of many things Vynn had not yet had time to fix, distracted by her many duties. For the moment, the runners brought the word swiftly enough that she did not need to frown for more than a few seconds. She might not have heard the bellow, but she would have been pleased at the complexity of the curse words used to compel the sweating gun-crews to lever their weapons and to...

“Let fly!”

The dorsal spine of the Hegemony burst with light and smoke. In the forward bulkheads, Mary Belisarius tossed a rat’s polished and skrimshaw decorated skull into a cup, gambling one of her fine broaches with a shoeless Vedic commoner. She noted the shellfire and glared at her tutor, as if daring Regencina to try and make her stop gambling. Regencina was doing no such thing – too distracted as she was by one of the other bulkhead’s passengers. Mary was not the only noble on the ship. Nor was she the only noble who would have preferred to watch. But the argument between Regencina and Damion LuPont was cut short by the sounds of the gundeck, drowning out everything even under armoplast and hardened bulkheads.

In space, the view was dramatic.

Beautiful, even.

And utterly infuriating. Smoke illuminated the glittering arc of the masers, and the shells detonated around the distant winking plumes that were the xebecs. But as they burst and hammered home, Vynn stepped over to the auspex pit, leaning over Desna and the other ensigns who were at work. She could see the readouts that displayed the enemy shield emissions – very visible on the auspex as glowing blue spheres. She counted the yellow flashes on the gridlike emissions under her breath, then roared in fury. Grabbing up the vox from one of the gun- control officers, she bellowed into it.

“By the good God-Emperor, could you try hitting a target, you blaggardy-”

The sound was lost then as the xebecs fired their second salvo. This time, the shields did not take a mere dozen or so impacts. Instead, it seemed as if a whole forest of devastation bloomed to life across the shields. Kinetic feedback shorted through the aging power systems of the ship and armor plating started to groan under the stress as the shields rippled and became tattered and then patchy, letting fragments – most often heated to a brilliant white heat – slip in and crash home. When the light had faded, Vynn saw a few venting holes and tumbling bodies.

“Damnation...”

The xebecs had them in as pretty a box as one might wish, and the transport that made the pirates’ flagship had started to turn and bank, seeking to rake the Hegemony from stem to stern. With their shields disrupted and slow in their reconstitution, they could switch from penetrating shot to frangible, if they had the like. Shells that would not merely rend the hull, but would then break into pieces that would ricochet through the Hegemony and turn her crew into so much torn meat. Vynn bellowed out her order.

“Heel hard to port and kick us to six gravities! Load the masers as quick as winking, we’ll take the fight to their flag then.” She nodded, looking to Janus. “Get the crew ready to repel boarders and ready the boats. I want you-” she pointed at Janus. “To take five, six hundred armsmen and cut one of those xebecs out. I don’t care if you need to drill into the bridge and vent the whole bloody ship, get them to strike their fucking colors!”

Janus, at least, did not balk. He turned and stalked off, already speaking into a vox. Vynn watched as the ship heeled, the starboard thrusters kicked on. The bridge groaned under her feet, but the ship turned and slewed faster than the Victory ever had. The difference between a sprightly sloop of nearly eight thousand souls and a battlecruiser with a hundred thousand, all told in that moment. But as the turn completed, so too did the reloading and rearming of the guns. They fired and luck or skill won out. One of the plumes that darted about them flashed with the white glow of a shield snapping – not merely being torn asunder – and then a short moment later, a secondary flash sprang out.

“A xebec has been destroyed, Commander Vynn!” the sensor officer called out. The whole bridge let out a quick huzzay! and then went right back to their duties. Vynn breathed a faint sigh of relief.

The next two hours of battle followed a slow grinding pattern that left Vynn feeling as if she had been chewing glass. The Hegemony didn’t match the same accuracy again – luck, it was, and luck it would remain – but the crews did make the guns speak in a staggered pattern. From time to time, a hit was scored on the xebecs or their flag, but none of them went up in that bright white flash that she wished to see. But so too, the enemy never quite managed to rake or land similar spates of fire on them. The constant turning and twisting of each ship to try and bring the others into the right position for true devastation put their crews to a straining hurry. And here, the Hegemony proved her mettle. Her gunnery may have slacked, but she was a damn fine sailor by this point. Gone were the days of accidental slews, gone were the crew’s kakhandedness. In their place was a vent-system that sent them twisting and turning on cue, stopping on a dime, burning retros and accelerating ahead at full speed to keep them in the right arcs, the best positions.

But they were outnumbered and Vynn listened with a frown as Turantawix called up from the engineerium to report that several of the secondary systems were beginning to show dangerous levels of fatigue. If they pushed the ship this hard, for too long, then they would carry away her main engines and the whole battle would be lost.

Then-

“Ma’am!”

The call drew Vynn’s eyes up and she saw one of the xebecs had stopped slewing and turning. Instead, its engines flared bright and hot and it accelerated towards a third xebec like a torpedo. A few glinting specs flew away from it and Vynn laughed, a loud, eager laugh. Janus’ cutting away expedition hadn’t reported in for two hours – and she had not expected anything to come of it. But he had seen an opportunity ... but rather than merely making the xebec strike its colors, he had contrived to burn her up. And burn her he managed. The xebec’s ally only realized that it was in danger moments before the blunt, poorly sculpted prow of the crude ship smashed home against its side. The two smaller craft folded around one another and tumbled off in a spurting ball of smoke, debris and corpses.

Another huzzay came from the bridge – a trio of them.

“By the Emperor, that’s voidsmanship,” Mr. Khan said.

“Let us mark it,” Vynn said. “Bring us about and burn hard for that transport!”

Her guess had been right. A crew could be wrongfooted and stunned by a sudden reversal, and to go from five remaining xebecs to three in a single swoop had made the pirate’s ship go wavering. And the Hegemony leaping at her like a hungry canid on the hunt? That was enough to make the retrofitted transport swing herself about with burning vents and blazing streamers of smoke. She showed her stern and burned to five gravities. Vynn matched to six, and then set to sitting back and watching the other ship drew closer. Every twenty to forty minutes, on cue, the crew sent forward all the guns they could.

They might lack for accuracy, but practice in battle was honing their time down. And after an hour of chasing, the transport realized it could not reach the stable edges of the system before their stern was shot into oblivion. They cut their plasma engines, dropped their shields and struck their colors. The xebecs did likewise, lest they face a slow and painful starvation. Vynn sat back in her command throne with the largest of smiles on her lips as the crew hollered themselves hoarse. When Janus returned with his four hundred and eighty nine men – several had died while cutting into a hostile bridge, as to be expected – she clasped his hand in hers and pumped it fiercely.

“My god, what a show, what a show!”

For a horrible moment, Vynn was sure that Janus would respond with that stiff Ultamarrian mode of his. But then she saw a mask slip and his dour expression lifted as he shook back, nodded slightly, and she knew that they might at last be shipmates.

Jon wiped clean his tools and sighed with contentment. The dead and the dying had been assisted – he was no Lazarus, to bring the dead back to life, but there had been more than a few who had been kissed by the void and hauled back in by crew who had been faster to get a breather on. He had impressed their fellows by returning them to life with oxypills and shocks – it was a common belief that even a few moments of exposure to the void would kill instantly, despite the fact that these men and women served their whole lives a few meters separated from it. The rest had been a series of fragmentation wounds caused by secondary blasts and detonations, as well as a few tech-sprite burns. On the whole, he would be happy to tell Vynn her butcher bill was fairly light – a mere half dozen dead, fifty wounded.

When he looked to the entrance to his operation hall, though, he saw not Vynn, but rather Regencina and a rather embarrassed looking Damion DuPont. Jon faintly remembered the noble passenger from the dinner that he and Vynn had shared, but the sight of him with a neck cloth tied around a slice along his forearm made him laugh.

“Did you seek to man a gun, Sir DuPont?” Jon asked.

DuPont looked miserable. “Nay. I am just an idiot.”

Regencina sniffed and nodded. “Going out and about was quite an idiotic thing to do.”

Behind her came a red robed child who looked about herself with wide eyes and a clear eagerness. She was chased after by a pair of men in red armor whose muscles held more to the vats than to their hard work. She evaded their grasps by following Regencina, oohing as she looked at a wounded voidswoman whose burned arm was covered by bandages and yellowish tar that aided in the healing. Then Jon spotted the oculus on young Mary Belisarius’ face and recognized her for who she was. He spluttered.

Regencina saw her a moment later. “Mary! I said to go to the spire.”

“The battle’s over-” Mary whined.

“Just, ah, stich this up, and don’t ask too many questions, be a good chum,” DuPont said, cheerily offering his arm. “Say, do I recognize your accent from somewhere?”

“-and thus, I am in no danger!”

“Mary!”

“And please, don’t mention it to Vynn.”

“Everyone!” Jon said, his laughter hard to hold back. “One at a time. Show me the wound – ah, that’s a rapier wound. Decided to fence with someone while a battle raged?” his eyes darted to DuPont’s hip. A rapier hung there, and he was sure he saw a tiny drop of blood on the blade. Regencina was unarmed, but she stood in the casual stance of a warrior. Jon made a few inferences and tried to suppress his laugh. As he bound up the wound, he noticed Regencina looking at him out of the corner of her eye. Jon felt the flurries and blows of a storm of guilt. It struck him deeper than he had expected, and he felt himself choking back an apology. Then he needed one in truth as he drew the binding tight enough to bring a yelp of pain from DuPont.

“You haven’t come to visit in some time, Jon,” Reggie – in that tone of voice, she could be clad in power armor and still be Reggie to him – put her hands on her hips and made her lips as prim as they could be, drawing them into a fine line. Jon shook his head. He choked on the feeling of Pyros’ sex. Then he was saved by the grox in a china shop disruption to life that came from Vynn entering into his orbit. The jovial face, the sweat shining on her brow, the excited tone of voice all battered against Jon’s senses and he caught but a word in five as Vynn exclaimed them at him. He caught prisoner, ransom, all the gems of Nocturne, and something about needing someone with a deft hand at the laser scalpel. He shook his head slightly and said. “Please. You need to say again, Vynn.”

“Ah, yes, ears ringing from a battle, all too common,” Vynn said, shaking her head. “Come. Let us show you. And Regencina, you may come with, if your little hellion is not causing too much of a- Good Emperor!” Vynn sprang back and away from Mary Belisarius, who had crept up behind her and was tugging on her coat-tails. Mary spoke in the most imperious tone she could manage.

“I wish to come with.”

“Well, I first boarded a hostile ship when I was but thirteen years of age,” Vynn started, course corrected at the sight of Reggie’s glare – a glare that held within the unlimbering of weaponry and the marshaling of forces the like had not been seen in the galaxy since the Great Crusade had left spiral arms burning in its wake – and finished with: “But of course, it cannot be done, as you are no mere twelve year old, you’re the most important person on this entire ship! More so than me, or her, or the good doctor, or this man!” She gestured to a voidsman who was recovering from an amputation and chose to not hear the ‘I think I’m quite important enough, you daft tattooed bint’ that only slipped from Voidman Masley’s mouth because of the three and a half injections of painkilling ampules.

Mary remained stubbornly unconvinced and demonstrated that fact by winking out of existence with a soft pop – a sound so similar to the sound of champagne being uncorked that a half dozen lucky men and women looked around to see who had come to congratulate them.

“Dear God,” Vynn said. “Navigators can do that?”

“Children can do it as well without a warp’s eye or spark of psyker’s talent,” Regencina said, sounding tired and put upon. She pulled out a piece of techno-obscura that seemed to be somewhere between an auspex and a vox. She adjusted a dial upon it and pursed her lips. “If this is correct, I believe that she has gone left.”

Jon wiped his hands clean, then smiled. “Just like old times,” he muttered – but not as quietly as he had hoped, for Reggie looked at him and cocked an eyebrow.

“You remember our trysts very differently, Jonny.” Spoken with the casual disregard for her old station that only a decade in the Adeptus Sororitas – who, being wed to the Emperor, saw little shame in the act between men made in his image – the single sentence brought forth a blush to match and even exceed the fireworks that had presaged the destruction of the Hegemony’s shields but a few short hours before. With that flush, the lot of them set off for the corridor, with Reggie in the lead, followed by Vynn, then Jon, then a curious DuPont. Reggie held up her auspex and Vynn laughed to see it.

“Ah, you slipped a tracking device in the squeaker?” she asked, jovially. Reggie looked aghast.

“Of course not,” she said. “This merely detects the disruption to the Materium caused by the innate abilities of someone with navis genus...” she paused, her lower lip dimpling beneath a pair of perfectly white teeth. “She has set for the port seal locks. Those are what affixed this ship to the enemy?”

“Aye,” Vynn said.

Reggie sighed. “Impetuous girl.”

“Should I worry?” Vynn asked – already dreading a long, creeping trip home, a trip made by casting the ship into the warp, then emerging again a mere few light hours away from the entry point. That was how the first ships had left the Holy Terran system, and while she may have admired the explorers and heroic figures that stood tall and imposing through the mists of antiquity, she did not want to emulate that trick. At least she would have a Geller Field, unlike the luckless sods who had first cast their craft through the Warp, heedless of the terrors awaiting within. She shuddered at the thought – experience in the warp was mercifully vauge as to the details of what happened to ships whose Geller Fields failed. Black rumors of eyeless orgies of violence, ripping and tearing monstrosities, mass possession...

The haunting image was scattered by Reggie snorting. “Of course not. But whilst that twelve year old could easily slaughter the entire crew of the enemy ship without blinking, that does not lead one to the conclusion that she should.”

“It doesn’t?” Vynn asked, rubbing her hair in perplexity.

“It’s widely considered to be a failing of moral instruction when your ward murders several thousand surrendered men,” Jon put in. Reggie shot him a smile, and Vynn looked on with more incomprehension.

“But they’re pirates, they’re going to dance a jig out an open lock, you know.”

“It’s the principle of the thing!” Reggie snapped.

“I have to agree with the Sister,” Damion DuPont said, leaning forward into the conversation. By that point, they had arrived at the seal-locks. Two rather bemused looking armsmen stood to either side of the opened lock, holding their naval shotcannons to their chests, their armor looking quite brilliantly red against the dull gunmetal gray of the walls. Even the yellow emergency lights couldn’t diminish the ineffable glow that suffused the armor of men and women who had just won a smashing battle. They saluted as Vynn strode up to them, then the woman on the right – a half Vedic by coloration, full Vedic by the red caste mark on her forehead and golden nose ring hooked to ear ring – said: “Captain, this child ran right by us, and when we told her to bar off, she ... she vanished!”

“Never fear,” Vynn said, nodding to them. “That was the honorable Navigator, out for a stroll.”

The two armsmen looked rather less sanguine about this than Vynn had hoped – the woman made the sign of the Aquilla with thumb and palm, resting her shotcannon on her shoulder to do it. The man simply looked down the seal-lock, as if expecting to see the Navigator coming back to ... well ... to do what, Vynn wasn’t sure. Different members of the Imperial Creed had different nightmares about what mutants might or mightn’t do. And to be brutally honest, she did not care one pfenning for their fears. Instead, she strode past and gestured them to come with her. Now the party numbered six – and a good half of it was growing visibly more concerned. Despite her lofty words, Reggie looked down at her auspex again and again.

The interior of the pirate’s ship – the rather impiously and ironically named Duty’s Reward – was much to Vynn’s liking. It wasn’t that she approved to see squalor and filth, anything the like, she just liked to see her own biases confirmed. She expected pirates to run a slovenly ship and to see the signs of want and neglect cheered her. It had also, surely, made it easier to take them. Despite being based off a transport, the Duty’s Reward had some internal changes that had made her a faster, better sailor, and her regulation systems for plasma transference required considerably less manpower than the Hegemony did. But where the pirates had had more free men, they had put them not to gunnery or to keeping things tidy, but to running what had replaced the cargo holds. Well, half of them.

This was where they found young Mary. She had come to the door that the boarding crews had sliced open and was gaping with undisguised shock at the lower levels of the cargo holds. Had she come to the upper levels, she would have seen something more fit for her eyes – the haphazard piles of gold and gems and trade goods that Duty’s Reward had captured from honest shipping, in a collection that even the most brash of dragons would appreciate. But instead, she came here. To the slave pens. The stink was intense, even through former bulkheads, and with the door down, the fetid smells came forth in a cloud so bilious that it was nearly visible. Beyond the door was a walkway that allowed the crew to stride above the roughly rectangular pens – which were sunk into the floor and built with cruel intention above massive cargo doors that could, with a flick of a switch, seal off a cell and dump the occupants into the harsh embrace of the Lady Void. There were roughly three dozen of those cells, and each had been crammed full with unwilling passengers.

Now, those passengers were being helped by the crew of the Hegemony, as best as they could be. An ensign who looked green to her cheeks was overseeing the passing out of ration kits and corpse starch, while grim faced voidsmen and pressed men alike tossed down bundled ropes and tied them off onto the catwalk. A vast prison break was coming – and Vynn walked up to stand beside Mary Belisarius. She had served with midshipmen, but knew that rebuking the young Navigator for tears would not do. Instead, she clasped her hand to the back of her head and let Mary wrap her arms around her midsection.

“There there, it is okay, lassie,” Vynn murmured. “We rescued them, see?”

Mary shoved off, so violently that an off balanced Vynn nearly pitched over the side of one of the railings and fell straight into one of the slave pits.

“Open our stores to them!” she said, with a tone that brooked no argument. Reggie nodded.

“As you wish, m’lady.”

And so it was that, within two hours, the noble stores of House Belisarius was laid before the dumbfounded slaves, who ate as they had never eaten before – and likely would never eat again. Stores that had been put aside to have Mary finish the cruise without ever once even smelling corpse starch or soylent viridans were parceled out and each rescuee ate their fill, carefully watched by a stern Doctor Balthazar, who was not above smacking a starving woman’s palms and telling her that if she wished to die now that she had at long last been rescued, she could go right ahead and eat more. But the fusion of this generous spirit and the sudden, heady realization that some of her orders might actually be obeyed, had awoken something far more dire within the young Navigator.