First and Only (22 page)

Such damage… such a barbarian… Gartell had mused as he had begun work, cleaning and healing. He disliked using his skill on animals like this, but clearly his noble regiment had shown mercy to some raiding rival scum and were going to heal his wounds and send him off as a gesture of their benign superiority to the deck rats they were bunked with. The voice that made him turn was that of Colonel Flense. ‘Is he alive, doctor?’

‘Just. I don’t know why I should be saving a wretch like this, wasting valuable medical commodities.’

Flense hushed him and moved into the infirmary. A tall hooded figure followed him.

Gartell took a step back. The figure was well over two metres tall and there was a suggestion of smoke around him that fluctuated and masked his presence.

Who is this? Gartell wondered. And the shadow-cloak – only a formidable scion of the Imperium would have such a device.

‘What do you need?’ Flense asked, addressing the figure. It hovered forward, past Gartell and looked down at the patient.

‘Cranial clamps, a neural probe, perhaps some long, single-edged scalpels,’ it said in a hollow voice.

‘What?’ Gartell stammered. ‘What in the name of the Emperor are you about to do?’

‘Teach this thing. Teach it well,’ the figure replied, reaching out a huge, twisted hand to stroke the Ghost’s brow. The fingernails were hooked and brown, like claws.

Gartell felt anger rise. ‘I am chief medical officer here! No one performs any procedure in this infirmary without my–’

The hooded figure flicked its arm.

Galen Gartell suddenly found himself staring at his booted toes. It took the rest of his life for him to realise that something was wrong. Only when his headless body fell onto the deck next to him he realised that… his head… cut… bastard… no.

‘F
LENSE
? C
LEAR THAT
up, would you?’ Inquisitor Heldane asked, gesturing to the corpse at his feet with a swish of the blood-wet, long-bladed scalpel in his hands. He turned back to the patient.

‘Hello, Major Rawne,’ he crooned softly. ‘Let me show you your heart’s desire.’

* * *

Thirteen

R
ECLINING IN HIS
leather upholstered command throne, Lord Captain Itumade Grasticus, commander of the Adeptus Mechanicus Mass Conveyance
Absalom
, raised his facilitator wand in a huge, baby-fat hand and gestured gently at one of the many hololithic plates which hovered around him on suspensor fields, bobbing gently like a cluster of buoys in an ebb-tide.

The matt, dark surface of the chosen plate blinked, and a slow swirl of amber runes played across it. Grasticus carefully noted the current warp-displacement of his vast ship, and then selected another plate to appraise himself of the engine tolerances.

Through reinforced metal cables that grew from the deck plates under his throne and clung like thick growths of creeper to the back of his chair, Grasticus felt his ship. The data-cables, many of them tagged with paper labels bearing codes or prayers, spilled over the headrest of his throne and entered his cranium, neck, spine and puffy cheeks through sutured bio-sockets. They fed him the sum total of the ship’s being, the structural integrity, the atmospheric levels, the very mood of the great spacecraft. Through them, he experienced the actions of every linked crewman and servitor aboard, and the distant rhythm of the engines set the pace of his own pulse.

Grasticus was immense. Three hundred kilos of loose meat hung from his great frame. He seldom left his throne, seldom ventured outside the quiet peace of his private strategium, an armoured dome at the heart of the busy bridge vault, set high on the command spire at the rear of the
Absalom
.

One hundred and thirty standard years before, when he had inherited this vessel from the late Lord Captain Ulbenid, he had been a tall, lean man. Indolence, and the addictive sympathy with the ship, had made him throne-bound. His body, as if sensing he was now one with such a vast machine, had slowed his metabolism and increased his mass, as if it wanted him to echo the swollen bulk of the
Absalom
. The conveyance vessels of the Adeptus Mechanicus were not like ships of the Imperial Navy. Immeasurably older and often much larger, they had been made to carry the engines of war from Mars to wherever they were needed. Their captains were more like the Princeps of great walking Titans, hardwired into the living machines through mind-impulse links. They were living ships.

Grasticus wanded another screen which allowed him direct observation of his beloved navigators, husks of men wired into their shrine, set in an alcove a few marble steps down from the main bridge. Their chanting voices sung him the Immaterium co-ordinates and their progress, forming them into a data-plainsong which resonated a pale harmony through his mind. He listened, understood, was reassured.

There was a slight course adjustment which he relayed to the senior helm officers. The Menazoid Clasp was now just two day-cycles away. The ether showed no signs of storm fronts or warp-pools, and the signal from the Astronomi-con beacon, whose psychic light guided all ships through the Empyrean, was clear and clean. Blessed are the songs of the Navis Nobilite, murmured Grasticus in his thick voice, pronouncing part of the Navis Blessing Creed, for from them shines the Ray of Hope that lights our Golden Path.

Grasticus frowned suddenly. There was an uproar outside his hardwired womb. Human voices raised in urgent conference. His flesh-heavy brow furrowed like sand-dunes slipping, and he wanded his throne to revolve to face the arched opening to the strategium.

‘Warrant Officer Lekulanzi,’ he said into his intercom horn, hanging on taut brass wires from the vaulted roof, ‘enter and explain this disturbance.’

He dropped the storm shield guarding the entry arch with a flick of his wand and Lekulanzi hurried in, looking alarmed. The warrant officer gazed up at the obese bulk in the hammock-like throne above him and toyed with compulsive agitation at the hem of his uniform and his own facilitator wand. He seldom saw the captain face to face.

‘Lord captain, a senior officer of the Imperial Guard petitions for audience with you. He wishes to make a formal complaint.’

‘An item of cargo wishes to complain?’ Grasticus said with slow wonder.

‘A passenger,’ Lekulanzi said, shuddering at the direct sound of the captain’s seldom-heard voice.

Grasticus brushed the correction aside as he always did. He wasn’t used to carrying humans. Compared to the beloved God-Machines it was his given task to convey, they seemed insignificant. But the humans had liberated Fortis Binary, and the Tech-Priests had sent him and his ship to assist them. It was a kind of gratitude, he supposed.

Grasticus disliked Lekulanzi. The whelp had been transferred to his command three months earlier on the orders of the Adeptus after Grasticus’s acting warrant officer was killed during a warp-storm. He doubted the man’s ability. He loathed his spare, fragile build.

‘Admit him,’ Grasticus said, diverted by the unusual event. It would make a change to speak to people. To use his mouth. To see a body and smell its warm, fleshy breath.

Colonel Zoren entered the strategium flanked by two Navy troopers with shotguns. The man’s face was marked by a bruise and a dressed cut.

‘Speak,’ said Grasticus.

‘Lord captain,’ the soldier began, uttering in the delicious accent-tones of a far-worlder. Grasticus hooded his eyes and smiled. The noise delighted him.

‘Colonel Zoren, Vitrian Dragoons. We have the privilege of transport on your great vessel. However, I wish to complain strongly about the lack of inter-barrack security. Feuding has begun with those uncouth barbarians, the Tanith. Their commanding officer struck me when I approached him to complain about several brawling incidents.’

Through his data-conduits, Grasticus felt the waft of the psychic truth-fields that layered and screened his strategium. The man was speaking honestly; the Tanith commander – a… Gaunt? – had indeed struck him. There were lower levels of inconsistency and falsehood registered by the fields, but Grasticus put that down to the man’s nervousness about approaching him directly.

‘This is a matter for my security aide, the warrant officer here. Shipboard manners and protocol are his domain. Do not trouble me with such irrelevancies.’

Zoren cast a look at the agitated Lekulanzi, who dearly wished to be elsewhere.

Before either could speak, a new figure marched directly into the strategium, a tall man in the long coat and cap of an Imperial commissar. The troopers turned their weapons on him reflexively but he did not even blink.

‘Lekulanzi is a fop. He is unable to perform his duties, let alone command peace on this ship. You must deal with it.’

The newcomer was astonishingly bold and direct. No formal address, no humble approach. Grasticus was impressed – and wrong-footed.

‘I am Gaunt,’ the newcomer said. ‘My Tanith barracks have been raided and attempts have been made on my own life. Three of my men are dead, another critical and another missing. I mistook Zoren and his men as the culprits, hence my assault on him. The guilty party is in fact the Jantine Regiment. I ask you now, directly, to confine them and put their commanding officers on report.’

Again, Grasticus felt a hint of deceit in the flow of the astropathic truth-fields, but once more he put this down to the disarming awe of being in his presence. Essentially, this Gaunt was reading as utterly truthful and shamelessly direct.

‘You have men dead?’ Grasticus asked, almost alarmed.

‘Three. More urgently, I require your authorisation to admit my medical officer to the stores of the Munitorium to obtain medical commodities to save my injured soldier.’

This insect is shaming me! In my own strategium! Grasticus thought with sudden revulsion.

His mind whirled and he shut out sixty percent of the data-flow entering his skull so he could concentrate. This was the first time in a dozen years he had to deal with a problem involving his cargo. Passengers! Passengers, that was what Lekulanzi had called them. Grasticus writhed gently in his throne. This was unseemly. This was insulting. This matter should have been contained long before now, before cargo was damaged, died, before complaints were brought to his feet.

He raised his facilitator wand and flicked it at a hovering plate. He would not lose face before these walking flesh-worms. He would show he was the captain, the lord captain, and that they all owed their safety and lives to him.

‘I have given your medical officer authority. He has my formal mark to expedite his access to the stores.’

Gaunt smiled ‘That’s a start. Now confine the Jantine and punish their officers.’

Grasticus was amazed. He raised himself up on his ham-like elbows to study Gaunt, hefting his upper body free of the leather for the first time in fifteen months. There was a squeak of sweat-wet leather and a scent of stale filth wafted into the air of the strategium.

‘I will not brook such insubordination,’ Grasticus hissed, his cotton-soft words spitting from the loose folds of spare flesh that surrounded his small, glistening mouth like curtains on a proscenium arch. ‘No one demands of me.’

‘That’s not good enough. Don’t belabour us with threats. We require action!’ This from Zoren now, stood side by side with the hawk-faced Gaunt. Grasticus reacted in surprise. He had thought the Vitrian more subdued, more deferential, but now he too challenged directly. ‘Contain the Jantine and curtail their feuding or you’ll have an uprising on your hands! Thousands of trained troopers, hungry for blood! More than your trooper details can handle!’ Zoren cast a contemptuous glance at the Navy escort.

‘Do you threaten me?’ Grasticus almost gasped. The very thought of it. ‘I will see you in chains for such a remark!’

‘Is that how you deal with things you don’t want to hear?’ Gaunt snapped, pushing aside a trooper to approach Grasticus’s throne. The trooper grappled with the larger commissar but Gaunt sent him sprawling with a deft swing of his arm.

‘Are you the commander of this vessel, or a weak, fat nothing who hides at its heart?’

Lekulanzi fell back against the wall of the strategium, aghast and hyperventilating. No one spoke to the lord captain like that! No one–

Grasticus writhed ever-upwards from his bed-throne, sweeping the hovering plates aside with his hands so that they parted and cowered at the edges of the chamber behind him. He glared down at the Guard officers, rage rippling through his vast mass.

‘Well?’ Gaunt said.

Grasticus began to bellow, raising his thick, swollen voice for the first time in years.

Zoren cast a nervous glance at Gaunt. Weren’t they pushing the lord captain too hard? Something in Gaunt’s calm reassured him. He remembered the elements of their plan and started to send his own jibes at the captain in tune with Gaunt’s.

Gaunt grinned inwardly. Now they had Grasticus’s entire attention.

Outside the strategium, on the lower levels of the high-roofed, cool-aired bridge vault, the senior helm officers looked up from their dark, oiled gears and levers, and exchanged wondering glances. The basso after-echo of their captain rolled out of the armoured dome. The lord captain was clearly so angry he had diverted his attention from most of the systems temporarily. This was unheard of, unprecedented.

A detachment of ship troopers milled cautiously outside the door-arch of the strategium. ‘Do we enter?’ rasped one through his helmet intercom. None of them felt like confronting the lord captain’s wrath.

They pitied the idiot Guard officers who had created this commotion.

Gaunt did not care. This was exactly what he had been after.

* * *

Fourteen

C
HIEF
M
EDIC
D
ORDEN
led his party in through the armoured hatchway of the Munitorium depot deck. Flanking him, Caffran, Brin Milo and Bragg formed a motley honour guard of uneven height for the elderly medico.

They entered a wide bay that smelled of antiseptic and ionisation filters. The grey deck was dusted with clean sand. Dorden consulted his chronometer.