‘The door lock is gene-coded. Only my adjutant has a copy of the bio-key.’
‘Any door can be opened,’ said the woman.
‘This is not how I wanted to meet you,’ said the young man. He had blond hair, and his youth lent him a feminine aspect.
‘This is not how anyone wants to meet me,’ said Gaunt. ‘Who are you?’
‘This,’ said the lifeguard, indicating the slender boy, ‘is Meritous Felyx Chass, of House Chass, grandson of Lord Chass himself. His mother is heir to the House entire. He has come to honour your regiment by joining it as a junior commander.’
‘Really? Just like that?’ asked Gaunt.
‘He is part of the influx. The reinforcement effort provided by Great Vervunhive out of respect for you and your achievements.’
‘All of which I appreciate,’ said Gaunt. ‘I just don’t remember saying that highborns could just invite themselves into the command echelon.’
‘It reflects great honour on both House Chass and this regiment,’ said the lifeguard, ‘if the son of the House serves in the Crusade in this capacity.’
‘It won’t reflect anything at all if he gets killed in the sort of Emperor-forsaken hole the scion of a Royal Verghastite House should never be seen in,’ said Gaunt.
‘That’s why I’m here,’ said the lifeguard.
Gaunt hesitated. He looked at the boy.
‘Your mother. That would be Lady Merity Chass?’
‘Yes,’ said the boy. ‘She asked me to convey her warmest greetings to you.’
‘How old are you?’
‘I am seventeen effective,’ he said.
‘I was on Verghast in 769. That’s just twelve years ago. She had no children then. Even allowing for shift dilation–’
‘I said I was seventeen effective,’ replied Meritous Chass. ‘I am eleven standard actual.’
‘As is common with high status heirs and offspring on Verghast,’ said the lifeguard, ‘my charge’s development has been slightly accelerated through juvenat and bio-maturation techniques so that he achieves functional majority as swiftly as possible.’
‘So you were born just after the Vervunhive conflict?’ asked Gaunt.
‘Just after,’ nodded the boy.
Gaunt blinked, and then lowered his pistol.
‘Throne damn you,’ he said, ‘please don’t say what I think you’re about to say.’
‘Colonel-commissar,’ said the lifeguard, ‘Meritous Felyx Chass is your son.’
FIVE
Highness Ser Armaduke
At midnight, local time, a new star woke in the skies above Anzimar. The city’s population was hurrying to attend the day’s Sabbat Libera Nos service, which had been held in the temples of the Beati every midnight since the Crusade began, in the hope of vouchsafing a brighter tomorrow. Some of the hundreds of thousands of citizens bustling from their homes, or even their beds, or suspending their labour, at that time may have turned their eyes skywards, for since the very origin of the species, mankind has entertained the notion that some ineffable source of providence may look down upon us. The upward glances were vain, involuntary wishes to glimpse the face of salvation.
No one saw the star light up. The smog that night was as thick as rockcrete.
Ship bells rang. At high anchor at the edge of the mesopause, the Imperial Tempest-class frigate Highness Ser Armaduke lit its plasma engines. The drives ignited with a pulsing fibrillation before calming into a less intense, steady glow.
Below the ship lay the troposphere and the stratosphere. The shadow of the terminator lay heavily across Menazoid Sigma, and the smog atmospherics were so dense there were no visible light concentrations from the night-side hives. Part of the world was in sunlight. The foetid clouds, brown and cream, looked like infected brain tissue.
Small ships buzzed around the Armaduke like flies around a carcass. Fleet tenders nestled in close to its flanks. Launches, lighters, cargo boats and shuttles zipped in and out. The Armaduke’s hatches were all wide open, like the beaks of impatient hatchlings. Entire sections of the frigate’s densely armoured hull plate had been peeled back or retracted to permit access. The old ship, ancient and weathered, looked undignified, like a grandam mamzel caught with her skirts hoisted.
Above the ship lay the exosphere. The vacuum was like a clear but imperfect crystal, a window onto the hard blackness of out-system space and the distant glimmer of tiny, malicious stars.
The Highness Ser Armaduke was an old ship. It was an artefact of considerable size. All ships of the fleet were large. The Armaduke measured a kilometre and a half from prow to stern, and a third of that dimension abeam across the fins. Its realspace displacement was six point two megatonnes, and it carried thirty-two thousand, four hundred and eleven lives, including the entire Tanith First and its regimental retinue. It was like a slice cut from a hive, formed into a spearhead shape and mounted on engines.
It was built for close war. Its hull armour was pitted and scorched, and triple-thickness along the flanks and the prow. The prow cone was rutted with deep scars and healed damage. The Armaduke was of a dogged breed of Imperial ship that liked to get in tight with its foe, and was prepared to get hurt in order to kill an enemy.
To Ibram Gaunt, closing towards it aboard one of the last inbound launches, the ship had the character of a pit-fighter, or a fighting dog. Its scar-tissue was proud and deliberate.
Like the ritual marks of a blood-pacted soldier, he reflected.
The plasma engines pulsed again. Hold doors began to seal, and cantilevered armour sections extended back into position. Gaunt’s craft was one of the last to enter the central landing bay before the main space doors shut. The swarm of small ships dispersed, either into the Armaduke to share its voyage, or away to planetside or the nearest orbital fortress. Formations of Fury- and Faustus-class attack craft had been circling the ship at a radius of five hundred kilometres to provide protection while she was exposed and vulnerable. Now they formed up to provide escort. Buoy lights blinked. Lines detached. Fleet tenders disengaged and rolled lazily away, like spent suitors or weary concubines. The Armaduke began to move.
Initial acceleration was painfully slow, even at maximum plasma power. It was as though an attempt was being made to slide a building – a basilica, a temple hall – by getting an army of slaves to push it. The ship protested. Its hull plates groaned. Its decks settled and creaked. Its superstructure twitched under the application of vast motive power.
The other ships at high anchor unhooded their lamps to salute the departing ship. Some were true giants of the fleet, grand cruisers and battleships six or seven kilometres long. Their vast shadows fell across the Armaduke as it accelerated along the line of anchorage. To them, it was a battered old relic, an orphan of the fleet they would most likely never see again.
The Fury flight dropped in around the ship in escort formation. The plasma drives grew brighter, their flare reflecting off the noctilucent clouds below, creating a shimmering airglow. Mesospheric ionisation caused bowsprite lightning to dance and flicker along the Armaduke’s crenellated topside until the advancing ship passed into the exosphere and the wash of the magnetosphere’s currents swept the lightshow away.
Stepping out of the launch into the excursion hold as the ship ran out, Gaunt sampled the odour of the vessel’s atmosphere. Every ship had its own flavour. He’d travelled on enough of them to know that. Hundreds – or sometimes thousands – of years of recirculation and atmospheric processing allowed things to accumulate in a ship’s lungs. Some smelled oddly sweet, others metallic, others rancid. You always got used to it. A ten- or twelve-week haul on a shiftship could get you used to anything. The Armaduke smelled of scorched fat, like grease in a kitchen’s chimney.