To my complete lack of surprise, the crew of the Jewel of the Void had had the time to mount one last attempt at defense around the entrance to the bridge by the time we got there. Our progress was much slower on that final length of our advance : after the ambush in the trophy room, Lieutenant Nathan wasn't about to take any chances, and ordered his people to advance cautiously, by fire and movement, the whole way. Which was fine by me, although I made sure to give the appearance of indulging the officer's caution out of respect for the troopers he'd lost, rather than because I was a coward who would much rather stay back and let everyone else charge into battle without me.
On our way, we received confirmation that the other strike team had successfully seized the ship's Enginarium. There had been some damage to the machines, and a lot more to the enforcers overseeing the work of the enslaved tech-priests and thralls maintaining the place, but for now, the Jewel was dead in the void, the orders from its bridge going unheeded. Once we captured the bridge, the ship would be fully under our control – save for the little detail of bringing its entire thousands-strong crew to heel, which would take days, if not weeks. Thankfully, that wouldn't be my problem, but I had more immediate concerns.
The moment the forward team poked their head into the long corridor leading to the bridge's blast doors, they were immediately fired upon, and quickly went back under cover. That brief moment had been enough for their armors' sensors to get a picture of the bridge's defenses, which were quickly forwarded to Nathan's and my helmet displays.
Looking at the enemy position with a tactical eye, I reckoned we could simply charge in, and rely on our armor and firepower to carry us through. That would have had a reasonable chance of success, and I still had enough troopers to hide behind that I was all but certain to reach the enemy and start cutting them down with my chainsword. But I didn't like the look of some of these heavy weapon emplacements, and it would only take one lucky shot to pierce my armor and kill me.
Malicia might have been able to dance between the defenders' lines of fire long enough to reach them and start butchering them in close quarters, to say nothing of the slaughter Akivasha could have effortlessly wrought upon them using her Vampiric abilities. But I had a healthy wariness of giving orders to either of them. Malicia was bound to obey my commands by Emeli's mark, but I'd still rather avoid provoking her if I could avoid it. As for Akivasha, after her display against the wyrds, I didn't want to anger her by presuming to command her – she had come onto this boarding party to keep me alive, something I was already more than grateful for, but she had joined our expedition as an ally, not a subordinate.
As always, there was also the matter of my image to consider. I didn't want the troops to start thinking I was reluctant to charge into deadly peril and wanted someone else to take all the risks, no matter how true that might be. Fortunately, there was someone else in my retinue whose obedience I could absolutely rely on to deal with this situation without risking my mask as Cain the Liberator.
"Jurgen, if you wouldn't mind ?" I asked, gesturing in the vague direction of the enemy.
I was still reluctant to have him use his psychic abilities, especially after the wyrds' wild use of theirs had presumably thinned the Veil and drawn the attention of the malevolent predators waiting on the other side, but on the whole I trusted his skills enough that the risk seemed worth it.
"Of course, sir," my aide replied, with the same tone of voice as if I had asked him to dispose of the day's laundry.
"Lieutenant," I told Nathan, "please cover Jurgen while he deals with this little problem for us."
"Yes, sir !" the officer replied with a sharp salute.
On Nathan's signal, a squad of troopers ran into the open, laying down suppressing fire and drawing the attention of the bridge's defenders while Jurgen, undistinguishable from the troopers in his armor, gathered his strength. It only took him a few seconds, during which the rest of the squad took enough damage to make me wince in sympathy for the borgs who would need to repair their wargear – but none of them fell.
Then Jurgen unleashed his might, and reminded me and everyone else of the reason why he was considered a Hero of the Liberation in his own right. On his own, Jurgen was far more powerful than the wyrds who had ambushed us in the trophy room : he'd just been a bad match-up to the telepath who had immobilized nearly our entire strike force at once, as his abilities were telekinetic in nature, while he lacked any talent for the reading and manipulation of minds – something for which I was immensely grateful, as the thought of being near someone who could read my thoughts filled me with abject terror.
The heavy weapon emplacements were ripped from the deck and slammed against the closest walls with enough strength to bend them and turn those unfortunate souls caught in their way into bloody paste. Then, before the shocked defenders could react, half of them turned to red mist, caught between two walls of kinetic energy that crackled with sparks of Warp energy, rendering them barely visible. Understandably, the survivors began to panic at this stage, but the blast doors leading to the bridge at their back were firmly sealed, leaving them nowhere to run but toward the USA troopers.
At least they didn't have to panic for long, as Jurgen raised his hands and pulled them off the deck. Over twenty men and women hovered in the air for a few seconds, before my aide slammed his gauntleted hands together and his helpless victims followed suit, with predictably gory results.
I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. I might have underestimated how ticked off my aide had really been at having been unable to assist me during the wyrds' ambush.
"Thank you, Jurgen," I said in the silence that had descended on the scene, as USA troopers gawked at the sight. Only a few of them had witnessed the Uprising over two decades ago, and seeing the real thing with their own eyes was quite different from hearing stories about it. "That was very well done."
"Thank you, sir," he replied, sounding very proud of himself. "Shall I open the door for you as well ?"
I reckoned he could probably manage it too, but by that point I judged he had been sufficiently mollified not to risk it – not when there were more mundane methods available to me.
"I think we can manage that on our own, can't we, Lieutenant ?"
Lieutenant Nathan snapped to attention, pulled out of his awe-induced stupor.
"Right ! Matthew, Carla, put some demo charges on that door !"
Just like I'd hoped, my addressing him directly had refocused his attention on the situation at hand, without me having to berate him for standing there with his jaw dropped like an ecclesiarch who had just seen one of the statues of the Saints come down from its pedestal to smite down the unholy while we were still in the middle of enemy territory. Not that he wouldn't have deserved it, but I wanted to maintain the illusion that I cared for the soldiers charged with keeping me safe, and being a disciplinary martinet would hurt that image.
A few minutes later, we all stepped back from the doors, and the explosives were set off. Immediately, the troopers rushed in, passing through the opening that had formed in the blockade – a tangled mess of sharp edges and burning metal. To my unspoken relief, Nathan was the first one through, moving before I could say anything that would force him to let me go first.
I heard las-fire on the other side, but it didn't last long. Within moments of the Lieutenant's squad going through, he called over the vox to indicate that resistance had been crushed and the bridge was secure. Knowing that I couldn't doubt Nathan's assessment without fatally undermining his credibility to the soldiers under his command, I forced myself to advance, accompanied by my retinue.
The bridge of the Jewel of the Void was very different from that of the Worldwounder, or any of the Protectorate vessels I had been aboard over the years. The overall structure was the same, of course : regardless of its current master, the ship had been built in an Imperial shipyard using techniques which had been laid down thousands of years ago. But where the Worldwounder's bridge was decorated with ancient trophies and the portraits of previous Rogue Traders and crew members who had distinguished themselves in their service, here, dessicated corpses in Imperial Guard and Navy uniforms hung from the ceiling on iron chains, while the floor was covered in a shining yellow metal plating I was almost certain was gold, in a staggering display of bad taste.
Furthermore, instead of the combination of the tech-priests and uniformed officers manning their stations around the captain's command throne, the Jewel of the Void was crewed by a gaggle of armed men and women, with far more stations being occupied by servitors than I suspected was standard protocol aboard a ship of the Imperial Navy. At first glance, there looked to be around a couple hundred crew members on the bridge, most of them cowering behind their stations and looking terrified. Only a handful of enforcers had remained : presumably most of them had been sent outside to defend the door, with only a small cadre left behind to keep the rest of the crew in line and keep the Chairman safe. Their smoking corpses laid where they had fallen, struck down by Nathan's squad without having been able to inflict any damage in response with their sidearms.
My attention, however, was soon drawn to the figure which sat at the highest tier of the bridge, directly facing the breached door on a command throne that had clearly been built specially for its occupant. I had known what to expect from Areelu's intelligence, but Jabbus' appearance still took me by surprise. The chairman of the Bloodied Crown looked like something straight out of the anti-Imperial caricatures depicting the typical Planetary Governor that were so popular on Slawkenberg. He was so grotesquely obese, I was certain Basileus-Zeta would have asked us to keep him alive if only so that he could study how in the Gods' names he was still alive.
Yet for all his ridiculous appearance, there was no hiding the glint of cold-blooded intellect in his eyes, even though they were almost lost under flabs of overstretched skin. I reminded myself that this man had forged one of the mightiest shadow cartels in the Torredon Gap, achieving a position of incredible power within the Torredon Gap, not through the chance of birth as the Giorbas and so many Imperial nobles had, but through an absolute willingness to do whatever was necessary to achieve his ends, no matter how cruel or depraved.
A pair of pale, androgynous youths stood next to Jabbus' anti-gravitic chair – the only way the poor piece of furniture could possibly withstand his weight. While the rest of the bridge crew were cowering in fright, they stared at us with impassive eyes, and I shivered despite myself. I had seen servitors with more emotion in their gaze than these two creatures.
The strike force fanned out around me, while the three members of my retinue stayed close at hand, ready to intervene should any danger to my person reveal itself.
"Chairman Jabbus," I called out, using my armor's vox-speaker to amplify my voice and make sure it reached across the bridge, so that even the crew hiding behind their console stations near the occulus could hear me clearly – a cheap bit of theatre, but I didn't want any of them do something stupid. "I am Ciaphas Cain, here on behalf of the Liberation Council of Slawkenberg and the greater Protectorate. I am prepared to accept your surrender."
I paused briefly, just long enough to let my words sink in, then added :
"It would be in your best interests to take that offer."
"Cain," Jabbus repeated my name. Reading his expression under all the fat was difficult, but I could tell he wasn't happy with the situation. Well, tough luck : if he didn't want a bunch of people armed with big guns to storm his bridge, he shouldn't have gotten into piracy to begin with. "I should have known Auric's freaks wouldn't be able to stop you."
"Yes, you should have," I said, glossing over the fact that they had come far too close to doing precisely that for my peace of mind. "But you are fortunate, Chairman Jabbus. Much as you and your activities disgust me, I am more concerned with this whole psyker trafficking the Bloodied Crown has involved itself with. You will tell us everything you know about Auric's operations."
"And if I don't ?" he asked, raising a flabby eyebrow in challenge.
Perhaps he expected me to threaten him with the wrath of the Dark Gods, or lose my temper at this defiance of my authority like so many petty tyrants, used to being surrounded by toadies who couldn't tell a sentence in plain Gothic if their lives depended on it, would have done.
"Malicia," I asked softly, and the Drukhari Wych stepped forward to my side. I forced myself to ignore the alien fluidity of her movement, and suppressed the reflex to strike at her with my chainsword, with an ease born of long practice, and asked her : "Tell me, how long did it take you and Krystabel to convince Smile to cooperate again ?"
"Only a few minutes before he started begging to talk," my bloodward replied, her wicked grin audible despite the translator she wore. "And a couple of hours to make sure he was sincere."
"Thank you," I told her with a nod, before returning my gaze to Jabbus, who looked significantly paler than before. "Now, you were saying ?"
He hesitated, weighing his options. As the leader of a shadow cartel, he doubtlessly knew more about xenos than the typical Imperial citizen, and in the years since Vileheart's raid on Slawkenberg, I had learned that Malicia's dark kin were infamous for their depredations among the void-born. Being taken alive by the Drukhari wasn't quite as terrifying to these superstitious sailors of the stars as being claimed by the daemons of the Warp, but it was a close thing.
"I don't know much," he admitted after a few tense seconds. "Auric is very paranoid about keeping his operations concealed from everybody, including the rest of the directorate. I tried to find out more, of course, but he's very good at hiding his tracks, and with how useful his work has been to the cartel by giving us our own star-speakers, I was wary of provoking him."
'Star-speakers' was another term for astropaths, I knew. That explained how the Bloodied Crown had been able to prepare an ambush for us in Sanguia : back on Cassandron, my paranoia had pushed me to ask the magi to investigate, but I'd been as surprised as everyone else when they'd confirmed my paranoid imaginings. I had assumed the shadow cartel had made use of captured Imperial astropaths, forced to assist their captors under threat of death or worse : I knew just enough about astropathy to understand that it was a much more complex matter than the simplistic, brutish use of power used by the wyrds Hektor had faced on the Murderous Jest. Still, however unreliable such bootleg astropaths might be, they had to be faster than sending messenger ships through the Warp, especially in this storm-wracked Subsector.
I mentally raised my evaluation of Auric's threat level another notch. If he could create false astropaths good enough to coordinate the activities of the Bloodied Crown, then he was even crazier and more dangerous than I'd thought.
"The psykers who attacked us," I said. "Where did they come from ?"
"They arrived in the system a couple of weeks ago," Jabbus replied. "Auric had told me about them over our pseudo-astropathic network. They were supposed to deal with you if you escaped our ambush by attempting to board my ship."
"I thought he was being overly cautious," he sighed and shook his head, the motion sending spittle and sweat flying as well as making the flabs of his neck giggle in a nauseating manner. "Then you smashed our trap as if it were nothing, killed Balor, and tore you way through my ship. I really underestimated you, didn't I ?"
"Yes, you did," I replied. "What happened to the ship that brought them here ?"
"It's somewhere inside one of our hangar bays," he told me. "No idea which one, but it should be in the cogitators if your hereteks look for it. They barely made it to Sanguia before the wretched mutant thing they used instead of a Navigator died, and we'd to tow them inside."
"I see. Thank you for your cooperation, Jabbus. Now, you will be brought to our flagship, and detained until I decide what to do with you."
Which would probably be killing him sooner or later, I knew, although I would probably make it quick, if only so that the other Protectorate leaders wouldn't think it was acceptable to torture surrendering enemies. I didn't want any of them to start developing that kind of habit if I could help it.
"I don't think so," the Chairman of the Bloodied Crown said, surprising me with his sudden vehemence. "I have been an outlaw for decades, Cain. I knew full well what fate awaited me if I was ever captured by the Imperium, or fell into the hands of one of my rivals, for that matter. I've told you everything I know about Auric out of respect for beating me, and because I find the notion of dragging the smug bastard down with me amusing, but I'm not going to let you give me to your xenos pet, or whatever else you intend for me." Jabbus didn't so much straighten up on his resting platform as raised his head, lifting his innumerable chins with what must have been considerable effort, before adding loudly : "Execute protocol seventeen-delta."
The two emotionless youths suddenly sprung into action. Moving with a speed that belied their previous immobility, they drew blades from their sleeves – but, instead of jumping on me, they leapt on their master's grav-chair and, with eerie synchronicity, stabbed their weapons deep into his eye sockets. The long, thin blades pierced through the eyes and into the Chairman's brain instantly, fast enough that he wouldn't have had time to feel anything before death.
Before anyone could react – except maybe Akivasha and Malicia, but the former didn't bother, and the latter was too interested in watching the spectacle – the two killers drew their weapons out and turned them on themselves, cutting their own throat with the same utter lack of emotion they had shown the entire time.
I sighed dramatically, trying to mask my shock, and opened a vox-link to the bridge of the Worldwounder.
"Areelu ? This is Cain. Tell Hektor to be careful with his prisoner : Jabbus took the easy way out, so Sieur Pelton is going to be our main source of intel on the shadow cartel's operations."
"Understood, Warmaster," came the Rogue Trader's reply.
A couple of hours later, I was back on the Worldwounder, sitting inside a conference room with the rest of the war council around me, either in person or by hololithic projection. With the capture of the Jewel of the Void, the rest of the void battle had ended quickly, with the remaining pirate ships breaking off and fleeing for the Mandeville Point. Not many had managed to escape the guns of the Worldwounder or the bombing runs of our fighter wings, and the void was littered with the burning hulks of pirate vessels as well as many escape pods, which were even now in the process of being collected by our people, their occupants given the choice between captivity and death by suffocation or starvation.
All in all, the whole operation had gone about as well as I could have hoped for. Considering we had run face-first into an ambush and then had to deal with a party of powerful wyrds, I counted myself lucky to have survived, let alone won what everyone around me considered a great victory for the Protectorate.
"Now that the welcoming party is over," I declared, drawing a series of dutifully sycophantic chuckles, "it's time to address the rest of the situation here. Lady Van Yastobaal, if you would ?"
The main hololith at the center of the table was displaying a three-dimensional map of Sanguia, the sole inhabited planet of the eponymous system. I had read the briefing on the planet on the way here, wanting to know everything I could in case this turned out to be another Cassandron. The records available on the Worldwounder's databanks had made for informative reading, if a tad depressing.
Due to its proximity to its star, Sanguia was a very hot planet, but not to the point of being a scorched desert. Instead, what would be tropical jungles on more temperate worlds covered nearly the entire planet. Imperial settlements dotted the emerald orb, the largest approaching the size of what would be a mid-sized township on Slawkenberg. Most of these settlements, however, were in various states of abandonment and disrepair.
By itself, Sanguia wasn't a death-world : the local fauna had some impressive predators, but nothing like the legendary horrors of dread Catachan. However, for some reason nobody knew (except maybe the Inquisition, but if so, they weren't sharing and nobody was stupid enough to ask), Sanguia had been plagued by Drukhari raids for hundreds of years. The xenos raiders would simply appear in system every few decades, smash aside or simply avoid any defense fleet present in the system, and hunt the people of Sanguia for sport for a few weeks before leaving with their holds full of slaves who would never be seen again, long before any Imperial response could arrive.
As a result of this, Sanguia's population was the kind of hardened men and women the Imperial Guard loved to recruit from. The planet needed every defender it could get, of course, but that hadn't stopped the Munitorum, and the Sanguian Commandos were reputed across the Damocles Gulf for their lethality as much as for their simmering rage at being taken away from their homeworld. Even I had heard of them back at the Schola, though for some reason my lessons hadn't included the history of their world and how stupidly short-sighted the whole thing was.
Between the Drukhari raids and the Imperial Tithe, Sanguia had been slowly bled dry of manpower for centuries, caught in a downward spiral as more and more settlements had to be abandoned with every generation, or were left empty of anything but tortured corpses by Dark Eldar raiders. In typical Administratum fashion, the Imperium's response to this situation had been to send new colonists to Sanguia every few years. Those pilgrims didn't live for long, with only the strongest or luckiest managing to survive the raids.
That spiral had seemingly been interrupted in recent years, as the xenos raids had stopped around two decades ago. The Sanguians, to whom paranoia had become a survival trait, hadn't relaxed their guard in that time : if anything, they had used every day to prepare for what they saw as the inevitable return of their ancient tormentors. Supplies had been stocked, weapon caches had been prepared, defenses had been built up, shelters had been dug out, and all the while, every man and woman of fighting age had continued to train.
These preparations had served them well when the Imperial Navy had abandoned the Subsector and the shadow cartels had been given free reign. For obvious reasons, Sanguia was a lot less dependant on interstellar trade than most Imperial worlds – few Chartist Captains were willing to risk being captured by a raiding Dark Eldar party, and when forced to cross the system by the Warp storms plaguing the Gap, most did all they could to make their stay in the system as short as possible.
After learning all this, a thought had taken root in my mind, and I had gone to Areelu for confirmation. As it had turned out, my theory had been correct : the Drukhari responsible for the Sanguians' misery had been none other than the Kabal of Murderous Death, those xenos slavers who had attacked Slawkenberg at around the same time the raids on the jungle-covered Imperial world had ceased. I didn't expect the people of Sanguia to be grateful, or to even believe us if we told them it was thank to us they had been saved, but it was still nice to know some good had come from these days of terror and bloodshed.
Areelu was just finishing recapping all of that for those in the audience who hadn't read the briefing materials on the way to the system, and moving on to the new intelligence we had obtained since arriving.
"When the Bloodied Crown arrived in the system after the Navy's withdrawal and demanded the planet's surrender, Governor Arnauld Schaefer told the Ripper General to go frak himself and activated Sanguia's anti-raid protocols," said the Rogue Trader. "The population evacuated the cities and scattered into the jungle, taking refuge into the shelters concealed there, while the PDF started a guerilla campaign against the pirates once they had landed. From the intelligence we have pulled from the cogitators of the Rossinante and Jewel of the Void, and what Sieur Pelton told us, the Sanguians gave as good as they got."
That was technically the case on every Imperial planet, of course : there was a reason the titles of Imperial Governor and Commander were equivalent. According to my Schola tutors, however, in practice the Governor tended to focus on civilian affairs (which I had taken to mean plotted and schemed with the local nobility to maintain his power, while throwing a lot of parties), and the PDF's top officers ran the military on his behalf. At least that was the case on most worlds; but Sanguia was an exception. The planet's culture had been shaped by generations of xenos raids, and the meaningless concerns of the Imperial nobility had been cast aside in favor of the practicalities of survival.
Here, holding the title of Governor basically meant having a big target on one's back during the next Drukhari raid, as the xenos delighted in targeting the leaders of their victims, both for the pragmatic purpose of throwing them into disarray, and because, according to Areelu (and not denied by Malicia), they enjoyed putting those who believed themselves above their fellow down.
Human nature being what it was, there had never been a shortage of candidates anyway, but simple process of elimination had resulted in them becoming true military leaders of their people, and the current incumbent was supposedly the most dangerous one yet.
According to the Van Yastobaal archives, Arnauld Schaefer had apparently won the position due to the prestige he'd obtained by orchestrating an ambush during the last Drukhari raid that had wiped out an entire squad of the pain-feeding xenos, culminating in him decapitating their leader in single combat. I was sceptical that events had unfolded in precisely that manner, being all too aware of how quickly rumors and reputations could snowball, but the man certainly knew his stuff, given he'd held against the Bloodied Crown's occupation for months with a PDF that had been bled dry by repeated Guard tithes.
"What else has Sieur Pelton told us ?" I asked.
At the moment, Balor's renegade aide was enjoying the Worldwounder's hospitality. I had discreetly checked that this wasn't some kind of euphemism, and been relieved to learn that no, the man was actually being treated well, although obviously his comfortable guest suite was locked from the outside – there was a difference between being hospitable and being a fool, and Areelu was far from the latter.
"He confirmed our suspicions about Auric's activities," replied Areelu, looking preoccupied. "That madman isn't just kidnapping psykers and training them into killers or pseudo-astropaths and Navigators for the shadow cartel's use. He is actively making them, turning latent psykers into active ones. I don't need to tell you how impossible that is, yet Pelton was adamant that he knew some of the wyrds you faced aboard the Jewel of the Void before they were sent to Auric's facility, and none of them had shown any sign of psychic talent."
I blinked, and felt a pit form in my stomach as the implications dawned on me. Before I could descend into a gibbering panic, however, I was distracted by Jurgen tensing next to me, although this time he kept a tight leash on his powers and didn't disturb the meeting with a supernatural manifestation of his displeasure.
"Do we have any idea as to how he is doing this ?" I asked, looking between Areelu, Harold and Tesilon-Kappa. They all looked at one another, before the borg leader took the lead and replied :
"No, Lord Liberator. Our knowledge of such things is admittedly limited, but we've never heard of anything like it."
"It happens in the Eye of Terror sometimes," said Hektor, surprising us all. "Occasionally, people without psychic powers will develop them once they are exposed to its mutagenic touch. I have known humans and Astartes alike to develop such abilities, although whether they were latent psykers beforehand I have no idea."
"So," I said faintly, "our only theory is that a member of a shadow cartel figured out a way to replicate the effects of the Eye of Terror in a lab somewhere. Wonderful."
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, fighting my rising panic. Much as I wanted to turn back and return to Slawkenberg, leaving the Torredon Gap to its fate, I couldn't. Jurgen wouldn't forgive me, for one thing; for another, allowing such a threat to come to pass so close to where I lived (on a galactic scale, Torredon was just next door to Slawkenberg) was unacceptable.
"With the deaths of Jabbus and Balor, the Bloodied Crown is down to four Directors, none of whom hold the same influence as the previous Chairman," I said. "Without a clear line of succession, we shouldn't have to worry about any more coordinated ambushes like the one we just dealt with. Our current priorities, then, are twofold. Harold, Tesilon-Kappa, I want you to check the assassins' ship for clues. If Auric is as paranoid as I think, he will have made sure to wipe the cogitators, but maybe he forgot something, or you can use divination to trace back its path."
"Yes, Lord Liberator," they replied in unison.
"While you are doing this, we need to clean up the mess here." My gaze swept the other faces at the conference. "The cartel fleet is broken, but there are still warbands on the planet, and the people of Sanguia have already suffered long enough without help. Lady Van Yastobaal, have you managed to contact the locals ?"
"I have," she replied. "While I never did business with them before, Worldwounder and the Van Yastobaal's name are known to them. As we discussed before, I haven't told them about my alliance with the Protectorate."
"Good. Ask them if they need any help : we might as well be polite about this. Once they agree, General Mahlone, I need you to coordinate with them and start seek-and-destroy operations against the remaining pirate forces planetside as soon as possible."
"It will be done, Warmaster !" the Khornate General saluted me.
Taking down a bunch of disorganized, leaderless pirates in the middle of a jungle wasn't exactly my idea of a good time, but after a Daemon Prince of Nurgle and a bunch of Warp-touched killers, it sounded positively restful.
And, to my surprise, it was. I didn't even have to set foot on the planet : as Sanguia had little to offer the Protectorate, I was able to convince the rest of the war council that it was in everyone's best interests to continue hiding the true allegiance of their rescuers and have us play the part of reinforcements the Lady Van Yastobaal had brought back to Torredon to help deal with the current situation. Rogue Traders were infamous for having private armies – you couldn't exactly conquer worlds beyond the Imperium's borders without one, after all – so the lie had gone down without issue.
Krystabel wasn't happy about missing out on an opportunity to spread her heretical beliefs to another world, but I persuaded her that we had more pressing concerns and couldn't spend the months or years it would take to 'illuminate' the locals easily enough.
After all, one of the reasons why we'd come to Torredon in the first place was to bring relief to the people the Imperium had abandoned. By ensuring they knew their salvation had come from Areelu, we could slowly tie them to the Protectorate, without any need for violence. Or so I claimed, at any rate : more likely, the entire Subsector would be reclaimed by the Imperium before long, as I couldn't believe the Sector authorities would just give up on an entire Subsector, even one as minor as the Torredon Gap.
As such, I spent the next week or so aboard the Worldwounder, processing paperwork, sparing with Malicia (I had forbidden her from joining the operations on Sanguia for obvious reasons), enjoying Areelu's extensive amasec collection and her even more agreeable company while everyone else worked hard for the cause of Liberation. While the cleansing of Sanguia proceeded, the borgs directed the repairs of our flotilla : we might have won the void battle handily, but our ships had still taken damage.
There were also the Rossinante and Jewel of the Void to take into account. Both were true warships, a rarity in our haphazard formation of retrofitted merchant vessels. Their crews had been enslaved by the Bloodied Crown, and while there were many among them who wanted nothing more than to get out of the ships and get back somewhere where they had proper ground under their feet and a sun overhead, the core of their population was made up of void-born who had never known any other life, and were just happy to no longer have to fear the depredations of their piratical overlords. With their help, the borgs were certain they could get the two ships ready to accompany us by the time operations in the system concluded, even if they wouldn't be back to full effectiveness.
Supplies were also shipped down to Sanguia from the fleet : food, medicine, and the technology needed to rebuild a functioning civilization. After making a show of reluctance, I had given Areelu my permission to establish a trade deal with the Sanguians. I wasn't so removed from my childhood in the underhive to not realize that giving them so much without asking for anything in return would rightly be considered suspicious : blind charity wasn't the Imperium's way, and neither was it that of any sane Rogue Trader. Especially since I had made sure that the Panacea would be shared as part of the process, and until Inquisitor Vail managed to spread it across the entire galaxy, that technology was priceless.
I was catching up on the latest reports from Sanguia (things were progressing well, and Mahlone was very impressed by the locals' talent for hit-and-run tactics and ambushes) when Harold and Tesilon-Kappa returned with the results of their joint investigation of the wyrds' ship. And, predictably, the news they brought immediately brought me back to my habitual level of paranoia-fuelled focus.
"You have managed to locate Auric's base ?" I asked for confirmation.
The two were standing before me in the office Areelu had provided for my use. Harold looked absurdly pleased with himself, like a pupil who had outperformed his teacher's expectations, while Tesilon-Kappa was as unreadable as ever due to how much metal they had instead of a face.
"Yes," the borg confirmed. "While you were correct and an attempt was made to wipe the navigation data from the cogitators, it was performed by laypeople, not properly trained in the ways of the Machine. We managed to recover enough information for Sieur Harold to use as a basis for his rites, which were enough to recreate the route they took to reach Sanguia."
They plugged one of their mecha-dendrites into the small hololith projector built into the desk (yet another casual reminder of the obscene wealth of a Rogue Trader Dynasty, as anywhere else it would have been an ordinary cogitator screen), and a slowly rotating three-dimensional map of the Torredon Gap appeared in the air.
"We are here," Harold said, pointing out the dot labelled 'Sanguia'. "The wyrds' vessel came to Sanguia by following this Warp route, which is as troublesome as all such routes in the Subsector."
As he moved his finger along the lines linking the stars of the Gap (in what I knew to be a gross oversimplification of the many-dimensional pathways through the Empyrean they represented), Tesilon-Kappa helpfully turned them red to make it easier to follow.
The route passed through a number of uninhabited systems, eventually reaching Minos, before diverting from the main Warp routes and ending up in a system so utterly uninteresting it didn't even have a name, just an identification code : WUN-13.
"What do we know about this system ?" I asked.
"Nearly nothing," replied Harold, shrugging. "Which isn't surprising, given what we do know. The records we've date back to an exploration fleet in M28, and it doesn't look like anyone went there since."
"In other words, the perfect place for a renegade like Auric to hide in and conduct whatever foul experiments let him create psykers," I said.
"That was our conclusion as well," nodded Tesilon-Kappa.
"Then our course of action is clear," I said. "We must strike there as soon as possible."
My eagerness to rush into Auric's lair might strike you as uncharacteristic, but I had a few days to process Pelton's revelation of what exactly the mad Director was doing. From where I stood, Auric had already come far too close to killing me already. If he could truly create psykers somehow, then there was no doubt in my mind that he would eventually send more after me : I had declared myself as the enemy of the Bloodied Crown, and was linked to the death of no less than three of the shadow cartel's Directors.
Rather than wait for the next assassination attempt, I would much rather go on the offensive. Auric's base of operations couldn't be that well-defended : clearly he had relied on secrecy and isolation for protection over anything else. At best, I thought, his lair would be defended by more pirate scum the likes of which the USA had crushed underfoot during the boarding of the Rossinante and Jewel of the Void, and whatever psykers he had kept for his own use.
Which, admittedly, worried me, as there was a decent chance Auric had kept the most dangerous wyrds close to him, either for his own protection or because they were too dangerous to let loose. That would be insanely risky, of course, but if the man was willing to experiment on psykers to begin with, then he was clearly a few Emperors short of a Tarot deck. But there was nothing for it : if I was going to have to deal with this threat anyway, I might as well do so from a position of strength, and without giving my enemy more time to prepare.
For now, however, I had other duties to attend to, as a quick glance at the chronograph in the room reminded me. After thanking them again for their good work, I dismissed the two members of the Liberation Council and left for the chamber where a set of ansibles had been installed by the borgs, Jurgen and Malicia falling in behind me without a word.
It was time for my regularly scheduled talk with Zerayah back home. Now that we were out of the Warp, she would never forgive me if I missed one for anything less than a fight with a Daemon Prince of Nurgle or a visit from the Emperor Himself.
AN : This is mostly a transitional chapter, putting an end to the Liberator's misadventures in the Sanguia system. I suppose I could have had him meet Governor Not!Schwarzenegger in person, but that felt forced, especially with such a minor character I came up with in five minutes.
Things are going rather well for dear Ciaphas, aren't they ? I'm sure they will continue to do so for a long time, and that now that the leadership of the Bloodied Crown is broken, there is no other, far more dangerous threat waiting to pounce from the shadows.
As always, I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and look forward to your thoughts and theories.
Zahariel out.