No one else than Jae could have, in so little time, changed a debriefing to a proper gossip session. Twenty minutes in, we were already eating salted caba nuts and sipping a dry alcohol that, apparently, someone was distilling with great success (and a good supply of botanical ingredients smuggled from Janus) on my ship. But Jae knew how to do business and, despite the fact that I had undone a few buttons of my tunic while she sat with her feet propped on my desk, we first went quite seriously over her finds on the Aeldari wrecks. After that, however, she gave me one of her sunniest smiles and wagged her finger at me.

'Shereen,' she said. 'You should be ashamed of yourself. I believed the flower of Rogue Traders took better care of her retinue than you do.'

I quickly went over the last few days. This couldn't be about Yrliet: we had already spoken about her. Cassia, maybe? She had gotten hurt last time we sparred and, although she pretended the purple bruise on her forearm was nothing, I had still felt bad about it. The men I dismissed: Pasqal was happy in his binharic world, Abelard was a force of nature whose emotions were as easily wounded as a mountain's, and Heinrix was Heinrix. I couldn't hurt his feelings if I rose at dawn and set a battery of Earth-shakers to them.

'Come on, Jae, what do you mean? Do you need another dress to prance around the superior officers?' I drank some more. 'Not that I'd begrudge you one as it's extremely fun to watch them get all flustered and not dare to make a move because of your status. And your fashion sense is good for ship morale. Emperor knows I have little enough of that on my own.'

She waved a glittering augmetic arm in disdain. 'No,' she protested. 'There is value in the familiarity of outfits. I love people being able to guess where my cleavage will be, and then be surprised when it's hidden behind a shawl. I am thinking of our — your — petulant Inquisition man. These days, he looks like a puppy you would have kicked.'

'Please.' I bent to grab some more caba nuts. 'I couldn't hurt his feelings if I rose at dawn and set a battery of Earth-shakers to them.' It was too good a line, after all, to keep it to myself. 'He only has himself to blame for whatever makes him unhappy.'

Now, Jae didn't know everything. I had failed to mention, in our discussions, those two times Heinrix and I had been intimate, but she was clever and a woman of the galaxy. It would've been an insult to her intelligence to pretend she hadn't guessed but, officially, Heinrix was my regicide partner and that was it. I did pride myself, at the time, at being able to keep a cool, indifferent, demeanour when he suddenly walked across the bridge in those tight pants of his that one could glimpse behind the cape.

'Oh, he does,' said Jae. 'A man tall and proud and all lean muscle as he is,' and she flexed her own shoulders with a serious frown that made me snigger, 'doesn't sulk without good reason. What has he done to you lately?'

'Nothing!' My protest fell flat. 'Last time we properly spoke was on Footfall, and he's avoided me since.'

With a sigh, Jae poured herself another drink. 'Katov,' she said. 'You know I am your friend; a bosom companion, if unworthy of your majesty. I would do anything for you short of treason against the Emperor, and so I will tell you something, in truth, that comes from a place of care for your dear, maddening soul.'

Giving myself a countenance by chewing a mouthful of caba nuts, I gestured for her to go on. Jae's flowery speech could be over the top; I suspected it was an affectation pushed too far, but the cheerful energy she put in it removed all impression of falsehood.

'Master Heinrix van Calox, Interrogator of the Ordo Xenos and acolyte to Lord Inquisitor Xavier Calcazar,' she began dramatically, 'may have a little crush on you, blue bird of the Koronus Expanse.'

Trying to laugh with a mouth full of appetisers is a dangerous endeavour that, once more, resulted in my desk getting peppered with crumbs. I swallowed hard, washed everything down with whatever was left in my glass (and did it burn on its way down!), wiped my lips with the back of my hand and said: 'Fuck no, he doesn't Jae. Have you missed the part where he doesn't even dine in the mess hall anymore? He avoids me like some plague that would put boils on his backside.'

Jae reclined a bit more on her seat; tilting back her head, she ran her hands through her dark locks and complained loudly. 'Shereen, my sugar plum! Heinrix avoids you because he doesn't want to catch feelings for someone the holy Inquisition has a professional interest in.'

'Then he can't be unhappy that I haven't ordered him at gunpoint to present his sorry ass to a regicide match,' I countered, nearly messing up the many double negatives.

'Would you do that?' Jae's liquid eyes sparkled with a worrying je-ne-sais-quoi.

Affecting a pious tone, I replied that I certainly wouldn't want to constrain the Lord Inquisitor's pet's freedom to ignore me.

The next day was busy enough that I didn't give much thought to my conversation with Jae: our departure from Tenebris Aquae had been delayed by the discovery of several other xenos ships. This time, they weren't aeldari — they were drukhari, and by then I had learned enough about the sun-stealers of Rykad Minoris to know it was better to blast them to oblivion without forewarning. Which we did, and I wondered if those had been the ships the Chorda corsairs had been truly after, instead of Yrliet's unfortunately stubborn kin.

When dinner-time came and I walked into the mess hall, who did I see but Heinrix waiting by the chair on the left of my mine. He was chatting cordially with Cassia about some author of moral tales, from what I caught in passing, and he was more reserved than her in his salute. Jae hovered around the room like a brilliant, buzzing, scarab. Abelard was his usual self.

We ate. On my right, Abelard replayed the recent battle with gusto for Argenta's benefit; she sat on his other side and, tonight, she would learn about three-dimensional tactics whether she wanted it or not. On my left, Heinrix continued his literary conversation with Cassia. In front of me was an empty space of maybe five meters before the tables set below the dais. What I had said to Abelard, that I wanted to dine with friends every day? Obviously, I hadn't thought that my friends could prefer to chat among themselves without including me.

I chewed, staring at nothing, for a few minutes, and fished out a data-slate from my pockets. Propping it against a wine bottle, I resolved to spend dinner reading the outrageous memoirs of a jewel thief; with any luck, the officers below would think I was catching up on work instead of being rude.

After several tasty dishes (the chef had grown quite adept at preparing my favourite), recaf was served — piping hot, with amasec to go with it. By then I had reached a gripping point in the story (the thief had discovered the jewel he had just stolen belonged to a heretical cult and was wondering how to keep the ruby, bring the cultists to justice, and not tip up the arbites while doing so) and, with a start, I realised Heinrix was talking to me. I had been in the process of raising my cup to take a sip; surprise shook my hand, and the scalding liquid splashed over my uniform. Brushing the worst of it away, I gave a side eye to the man responsible and said: 'Excuse me?'

Imperturbable, he handed me his own napkin and repeated: 'It has been long since you granted me the favour of an evening applied to the practice of regicide. Could I entreat you to spend the next few hours in this manner?'

Turning my head like a Svizran clock, I spotted Jae not far away, already recruiting people with more money than sense for her tarot game. 'Did she put you up to it?' I asked.

Heinrix gave a small, stiff bow of apology and replied that — no. I believe in this sort of coincidence like I believe Sanguinius brings gifts to well-behaved children and beheads the others, but I can go with a little white lie now and then. Before I could make up my mind, Cassia — who was leaving the table and passed by me — exclaimed that my colours were changing, and wondered why the sudden ray of silver gold. I pursed my lips, and she added, innocently: 'You, too, Master van Calox! There's a light piercing the swirls of grey gloom that have surrounded you of late!' He blushed, too.

I needed to get out of the mess hall — out of the sight of so many, and particularly Cassia's — and, without thinking more about it, agreed to Heinrix's proposition. He held out his arm; I rested my arm in the crook of his elbow and, before we walked, he briefly covered my hand with his own gloved one. My mouth had become dry; I should have drank more amasec. Leaving the mess hall, Heinrix made to turn right — to the observatorium. With a slight tug on his arm, I proposed that we play in my quarters instead. 'It would be more quiet,' I added.

His eyes, again, inscrutable, storm-grey, and the way he moistened his lips before speaking. I looked away, to my hand clutching his dark sleeve, to the rosette displayed on his chest. To a prayer seal on his pauldron, dark red wax over polished steel. I breathed out, carefully.

'It would,' he said.

'Let us go, then.'

My study hadn't been readied for guests. Piles of paper were strewn haphazardly over the desk. A dirty cup or two, remnants of the day's occupations, could be found without too much trouble. The fireplace was unlit, and in its absence the glow globes gave out a cooler tint.

'Will you have something to drink,' I offered, unsure.

'No, thank you, Katov.'

I took his cape and, having folded it, put it on the back of the sofa while he looked over the regicide board, taking off his gloves. 'Are you studying Tirsher's sequence?' he asked. 'It is fairly advanced.'

'Yes, and yes.' I pulled one of the regicide table chairs and sat, folding my legs underneath. 'But it's terribly elegant, isn't it? I still struggle with the correct way to bring it about without being too obvious, though.'

And, just like that, the tension between us appeared to evaporate. The one and only time we had played on that board, the pieces had ended up scattered around because we had kissed over it. I had wanted to avoid repeating the setting like the plague but, instead of being embarrassing, it was familiar. In a good way. That night, I found out that, when we played in the observatorium, I had somehow held back — and him, too. We both swore like voidsmen when faced with surprises. We laughed at clever patterns. I still didn't play to his level, but studying alone hadn't been lost, after all, and we both relished the game. We played short, aggressive bouts, by the clock: a constraint on his usual well-thought strategy and an advantage to mine. Sometimes, I jotted down ideas in the little notepad I kept by the board for that very purpose. Twice, Heinrix nuked my approach, but on the third time I saw him come from a mile away and thwarted him. Soon, it was one o'clock and sleepiness overtook us, getting us both to commit silly mistakes.

'I should go,' repeated Heinrix for the second time; but the round had ended now, and he had no further reason to stay. Still, he showed no intent to move; he reclined slightly on the chair, resting his head on the high back, and all of a sudden I liked very much his relaxed half-smile.

'There's so many things we should do,' I replied, 'and not all of them reasonable. For example, I probably should make some clever double entendre pun right now, to keep up an image of wit… but I enjoyed the evening too much to risk souring the mood. I'm just glad we had a nice time.'

'And so you lay that responsibility on me? Some would call such a decision foolish.'

'Delegating tasks to those of their retinue is a Rogue Trader's prerogative.' I started to pick the regicide pieces, one by one, and carefully returned them to their starting position. I was weary from the long day. Heinrix picked the Knight that had been his and examined it with attention. The statuette filled his palm; he ran his thumb over the relief of its armour.

'But I am not just a member of your retinue,' he said. 'I am bound to a higher allegiance. Does this not… bother you?'

It wouldn't have, if he could have stopped bringing the subject to my attention whenever I felt us grow closer. However — perhaps thanks to the sluggish, good-natured, fatigue that slowed my brain enough for me to actually have time to think before opening my big mouth — and that was a feat of insight that felt like a lightning-bolt — he must be bothered by it, I realised. But he was waiting for my reply.

'It doesn't trouble me much.' The Knight was the last piece. I took it from him. 'Our interests align so far and, unless the Lord Inquisitor manifests himself in my rooms without warning, I can't see how this would impact our friendship. That is, if you consider me a friend at all.'

'I do.' Those two words left his mouth like bullets.

'You know what kind of dealings I've had with his sort. I cannot pretend to have much love for the institution you serve, but you are your own person. It would be unfair to you, Heinrix, to reduce you to an Inquisitor's lap dog.' With the Knight in place, the board was complete. I stifled a yawn, but Heinrix caught me in the act and rose to take his leave. I scrambled to my feet and went to get his cape. His gloves he neatly tucked in his belt before folding the cape over his arm.

'Thank you, Katov, for this lovely evening.'

I hold out my hand; he took it and, bowing, brushed his lips over my fingers.

Before he could rise again, I turned up my palm and cupped his cheek. I don't know what came over me; tiredness can only be blamed so far. It was for an instant only — just long enough to caress his cheekbone with my thumb, to graze his ear with my fingertips, to feel the angle of his jaw. When I removed my hand, I closed it into a loose fist so the warmth of his skin would linger longer on mine.

'Please,' I said very low, 'let us agree not to neglect one another anymore. I missed you, and I apologise for having kept you at arm's length before.'

In the dim light of the study, Heinrix's eyes were very wide and very dark. He pulled me in an embrace made awkward by the folded cape on his arm. I hugged him back, burying my face against his collar, and then he said: 'As long as my duty allows it, you have my promise.' His arms pressed tighter against my back as he whispered: 'I did not think you would note my absence. For that, you too have my apologies. Please believe me when I say that I… I have missed every aspect of our acquaintance.'

Heat pooled in my belly. Images ran wild inside my head, but I got a grip on myself and broke our embrace. That step back was a reluctant, but necessary one. It was too late at night; everything was so sudden; my mind was spinning, and I needed to brush my teeth. I saw Heinrix to the door without ridiculing myself; after one last smile he was gone and I headed straight to my bedroom. Sleep, I knew, would only come after seeking some release while thinking of him.

Some time later, as I was drifting in the half-dozing state that follows, a now familiar lurch pulled on my insides: under the ranking officer's command (which followed my orders to get under way as soon as possible), we had translated to the Immaterium on our continued quest for Kiava Gamma.

So far, we had been extremely lucky in our travels: despite the ongoing instability, we had suffered little to no Warp shenanigans. Some collective nightmares on the lower decks, least protected against those evils; once, an embryo of a weird cult, all members of which came back to their senses when we translated back to realspace, with no memory of the previous days… But, on the third day of our journey, reports that contact had been lost with a whole deck section reached the bridge — and whatever had caused it was spreading. Ever since my first journey aboard the Emperor's Mercy, I had never put in question the regulation that requires for officers to be armed at all times during Warp travel, but then I was extremely happy of it. In the bowels of the ship, that we reached after trudging through increasingly deserted corridors and stairwells, where silence was occasionally torn by a bone-chilling scream of agony, we found horror. Errant voidsmen and women, struck with a blight, huddled to die in the shadows; suppurating pustules and ulcers oozing with unnatural ichor filled the air with the sweet, putrid stench of death. At the heart of the corruption, however, the sick yet moved — attacked us, even, prodded by demons of plague and contagion. I was glad that Cassia's duties had kept her tied in the Sanctum Navis, and it took us a bit of work to defeat the Plaguebearers and their thralls before a purifying fire could be unleashed over the deck. Even Argenta, immune as she should be to the less savoury aspects of war against the Ruinous Powers, wrinkled her nose in disgust by the time we left. So as not to bring back any seed of unholy disease to the rest of the ship, we stripped down naked and were doused in sanctified counterseptics. It was done in the frank camaraderie such ceremonials require for fear of being awkward, and we all rushed in clean bathrobes as soon as possible while our other gear was taken away for, I think, steam-pressure cleaning.

Cassia's first test as a fighting member of my retinue came later, when we translated to an empty system that wasn't Cranach, but where a Mechanicus voidship nonetheless drifted. Its engines appeared undamaged, making the fact that it was dead in the void very strange indeed, and the augurs computed from its position that it had probably been so for a few weeks, on the kind of trajectory that began with the inertial push of translation from the Warp at, well, our current position. The ship was silent, though, but Vigdis's efforts uncovered a registration number as well as a port of call on Kiava Gamma. Now I was intrigued, Pascal's mechadendrites were hovering with curiosity, Heinrix was bursting with inquisitorial theories, and all that was left to do was for the shuttle to get ready once we reached the wreck. I remembered those refugees on Footfall; perhaps their voidship hadn't been the only one to leave orbit successfully after the strange (I dared not say heretic yet) attack they had suffered. I also embarked Argenta and her heavy bolter, and of course Abelard couldn't be pried from his lord-captain's side with a crowbar. All of us would be quite the honour guard for Cassia's first field expedition, and in any case what kind of threat could that voidship hold?

Well, a Chaos threat, as it turned out. As soon as we set foot on the wreck, I could feel the Veil was thin, terribly thin; I may have a teapot's sensitivity to the Immaterium, but that gross feeling of a thick, oily air, on the edge of unbreathable, and the cold! Not the good, healthy cold of a winter's day in the mountains, nor the metallic one of air conditioning — a cold that was a stillness to be, as if it were the state where the living's realm ended and the one of death, ghosts and madness began. It brought me back to Rykad Minoris, but then the fight for our lives had taken over everything, and here in the confines of empty corridors the uneasiness stuck in my throat. Here and there, sigils had been inscribed on the walls; they looked to have been carved by human nails. We kept our eyes away from them, as they appeared to shimmer in an unhealthily way that awoke nausea. The ship was dark, gloomy, only a few weak luminators turned on — as if on emergency mode — and in the corner of my eyes, I thought purple shadows pooled.

Pasqal's goal was to find the central cogitator's room, which we did, but it was behind powerless, locked, giant doors not even Abelard on a rampage could have dented, so he directed us to find an emergency generator. We had, so far, kept to the main parts of the ship, but Pasqal bust an access hatch open and we all followed him in a claustrophobic passage defiled by another set of heretical symbols. Yes, sometimes I am that stupid. In my defence, however, we really wanted to know what had happened.

If the passage was creepy, it was nothing compared to what we found afterwards. Stepping into the engineering parts of the ship — areas that would have once been forbidden to the lay — we found the techpriests. They didn't appear to notice us and went about their day with a servitor's automated efficiency. They were silent, and Pasqal confided that they failed to respond to his binharic greetings sent through the noosphere just like they failed to respond to our more mundane salutations. At first glance they looked otherwise normal, but there was a sickness to their flesh (or what we could glimpse of it underneath their red cowls). The Veil thinned again; at times, I thought I glimpsed piles of gutted bodies, spilling their glistening entrails in pools of blood, where nothing was. And I could feel Cassia's growing uneasiness, too: although she put a brave front, the control she kept over her emotions slipped ever so little. My palms became sweaty, my mouth dry, until I gently took hold of her arm and pulled her to me.

'Terrible things have befallen this crew,' she whispered. 'The ashen grey of their souls still clings to the ship, like cobwebs.'

We crossed a sort of command chapel, as well as a room that reminded me of the Electrodynamic Cenobium: a forest of luminous coils filled the space, buzzing like mad, sometimes shooting out a small lighting bolt of static discharge. The acrid smell of ozone made me wish for a rebreather. More visions of violence. More corridors; my portable auspex, mapping our progress, suggested we had come nearly full circle. The emergency generator's room had been flooded with some toxic gas, probably on accident, and getting the vents to work again to us some precious time. The whole place was insufferable; every minute spent there felt like wading through a mire of corruption. We wouldn't be able to get out of there soon enough for my liking.

With the green haze of gas removed, we got our first good view of the generator. This time, it was no hallucination: bodies had been empaled on it, members twitched in the agony of their atrocious death. Implants and augmetics had been torn from their flesh, while they had been still alive, judging from the amount of blood and the way one dead man still clasped at his open shoulder.

'Emperor.' Argenta's voice had the empty tone of one who sees her worst fear confirmed. 'And this ship came from Kiava Gamma. I shall pray to the Elevated One this hasn't spread to the whole planet.'

'As I will, sister,' replied Heinrix, 'although we shouldn't hope too much. Magos, can you fix that thing as it is, or shall we need to clean it first?'

It would have been an act of charity to remove the bodies from their grotesque positions, but I couldn't bring myself to it and I was glad when Pasqal, after tinkering with a control panel (its hallowed seals had been broken before), announced that he could restore power without us touching anything else. Approaching Heinrix to ask if he knew what kind of unholy ritual had taken place here, I stepped in a warm aura of reassurance — aimed at Cassia, it seemed. She had already seen cadavers, of course, but I couldn't fault her for finding the scene jarring. I consider myself fairly jaded, having seen objectively horrifying things in the course of my life, and I was unsettled all the same.

'Don't you ever wish the young could be spared such sights, Katov?' murmured Heinrix for my benefit.

'I do. But the Galaxy is a savage place — and she was so proud to come with us.' It was then, I believe, that I first had the thought that this precise bit of Galaxy belonged to me and that I had the power to make it better. 'You and I,' I added, 'although we work in different ways, isn't it our goal?'

A loud whirr covered Heinrix's answer: under Pasqal's ministrations, the generator had come back to what he called full functionality. The room grew brighter as some new luminators flickered awake.

If we thought that we could get back to the closed door without difficulty, we were sorely disappointed. The return of the Motive Force in the voidship's veins had done something to the tech-priests: not only did they notice us now, but they weren't happy about our presence and made it known in the way of attempted murder. We had to fight our way back, every inch of the way, servo-skulls blaring some cursed code that gave the priests a terrible edge over us. Pasqal called it scrap code, and likened it to the way a good officer directs their troops and their strengths. I was privately sure it also provided some healing to their mechanical parts, although how I of course had no idea, because once we took a servo-skull down the enemies in their vicinity became so much easier to kill. Room after room, it was slow going and, when we emerged from the passageway again, I ordered us to rest for a while — and offered Cassia the possibility to go back to the Emperor's Mercy, as she had sustained a few broken ribs. A combat servitor had punched her down, leaving her winded and stunned for several minutes.

'I thank you for your concern, Katov,' she politely declined. 'But I feel quite all right now. The green spots of worry that surround you are unwarranted. I would very much like to accompany you to the end of this adventure, whatever it may be, and have my own tale to tell about it.'

Abelard touted a few words of congratulations on her grit and determination that made her blush and smile. She was made of sterner stuff than what could have been anticipated, then, but I still smiled when Heinrix said to my ear he would have sent her back without a choice.

'Let her make her own choices,' I replied. 'We shouldn't coddle her, as much as we want to protect her. She's been deprived of freedom her whole life.'

That word — spoken with a brash stare into his eyes — chosen with the same care as an arrow — hit home. He licked his lips and pursed them. We had resumed our regicide evenings, and if they were cordial and lively nothing more had happened. I couldn't say if it made me happy or wistful, and I still hadn't found a way to flirt with him that didn't involve an exchange of verbal blows, so the jury was still out as to what our relationship really was. I hoped it was back on tracks, wherever those tracks lead, because the truth of it was I had been properly miserable when he removed himself from my vicinity.

After twenty minutes of sitting, injecting a few painkillers Abelard had stashed away, eating soylens viridian and washing down its tasteless texture with water, we were good to go. The door to the central cogitator's room swung open under Pasqal's hands and we stepped in a smothering Warp-tinted gloom. A tech-priest — a full Magos, if I read his attire right — was bound to the cogitator by an array of winding cables. Binharic prayers spilled from his vox implant in an endless stream of teeth-gritting sounds. His one eye fell onto us, and madness was in it.