I awoke on a familiar medicae unit. Again. Mirena was not atop me this time, though I did not doubt she helped me get there. Castecael, Penitent, and Silas surrounded me, Castecael actively working on hooking up medicae equipment to me. “Welcome back, sir,” Silas greeted me with a solemn nod.
“I’m fine, you can stop with all of this fanfare,” I grumbled, waving them away, and tried to sit up. The three of them kept that from happening.
“You are not fine, sir,” Castecael shot back. “You have endured tremendous trauma these past few weeks—psychological like the rest of us, now, but also a great measure of physical injury. You just went into shock. You must stop, Cal. Take a moment, recover. You never let yourself recover from your first bout of torment, instead engaging in vigorous combat training as soon as you could, and then pushing yourself into a warzone immediately thereafter.”
“Because it is required!” I shouted, garnering no looks of sympathy from those around me. I hissed in and out through clenched teeth for a few moments, then rammed a fist into a wall of the Bird. “Time is the heretic’s vehicle to freedom. I have delegated requisite time for operational security, but more than that cannot be given to the enemy. Silas, you under—”
“Don’t do that, sir,” Silas recoiled, shaking his head. “You, me, Penitent, yes—we three have had the same manner of training. The same teachings. But you do not get to use us to excuse your fervor for pushing yourself beyond your own limits. Limits which you have, and that you need to acknowledge lest you destroy yourself. You will not find an ally in me in this discussion, sir.”
I seethed a bit more, then, staring at him. He stared back, for once without his helmet. Indeed, I would gain no ground with him here. I glanced to Penitent. “Even you?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” she replied, shaking her head. “Rest, Cal. You need rest.”
“To put it plainly, sir,” Castecael began. I looked back to her. “If you continue like this, if you endure another event like this, you will die. The raw injuries you’ve already sustained should have killed you three times over, but the ramifications that they have had on you have lasting effects. And those effects will be your end if you allow them to be.”
“My life, and my death, are of little consequence,” I replied. “But the eradication of heresy—that matters greatly. The absence of my duty is unthinkable.”
“If that is the case, Cal, why have you not ordered the bombardment of this world to annihilation?” Penitent asked me. “You could. You could have done it when we found Scayn had been killed. You said you were already considering it, then. The only thing that prevented you from giving that order, according to you, was that you believed your peers in the Inquisition would have had your head for it. So to some degree, even you recognize that your life matters.”
I heard her words, and could not help but to sigh in response to them. She raised a good point. “Your argumentative skills are yet another reason for the Imperium to praise the pursuit of ignorance, Penitent,” I grumbled, garnering a slight blush from her, but not more than that. “I could have you all shot for disobeying a superior officer,” I warned them.
“An ordinary commissar could, yes,” Penitent nodded. “But you can’t. Don’t make a threat unless you have the heart to see it through, Cal. Your heart is much too strong for such brutality—we know it, and you know it.”
“Again with the ability to argue well,” I sighed. “How long?”
“How long what?” Silas asked.
“How long am I to ‘rest’ for?” I hissed.
They looked to Castecael. “A week?” she suggested with a shrug.
“No.”
“A day, then. Can I get that much out of you, sir, please?” she insisted.
“Fine,” I shrugged, sighing again. “Do as you must.”
“Thank you, sir,” Castecael replied, and continued with attending to me.
Silas nodded to me, then looked at Penitent. “Keep him company. Keep him here. You’re the only frigging person on this aircraft that can get him to listen to reason,” he told her.
“I’m well aware,” she nodded, placing a hand atop the backside of my right. “Shall I read to you this time?”
“I was not aware you had books of your own in your repentance,” I replied.
“Hm, indeed not. With our roles swapped, I suppose it’d be recital, not reading,” she replied, admitting to having committed her scriptures to memory.
I chuckled a bit, then nodded. “Yes, Penitent, I think I would like that.”
***
The day came and went without issue. Castecael saw to my recovery—as well as that of everyone else—without my interruption or difficulty. I prayed with Penitent as best I could, but my mind would not quiet. Rage swirled in a sea of despair under a rainstorm of hatred. Only occasionally would the sunlit peace of Penitent’s presence eke out amidst the tumult. But to her credit, there were likely few others in the Imperium that could have made such progress with me.
During my recovery, I did still get things done. I called Zha over to my medicae unit, and told her to hail Lord Captain Batos again to provide him with the strike targets. Most she already knew, having deduced the factory locations herself; two others, hidden away by Espirov (both physically speaking, and hidden within his mind) I had to help her deduce the exact coordinates for. Perhaps two hours after I gave Zha her orders, I heard the violent screeching of orbital strikes upon the planet, Batos obeying my Agent to the letter.
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“The precision. The accuracy. The loyalty. I give an order, I speak some words, and your world changes,” Vostroya’s voice echoed in my head, referring to his puppet. I spent just under five minutes talking with Zha. The result was the explosive eradication of dozens of square kilometers of urban warfare. Yes, I thought to myself, I see the weakness of your heresy now.
The Bird stayed airborne day and night. Mirena swapped out for Silas and Luther, who between them had some modicum of piloting experience that perhaps accounted for half of Mirena’s talents, albeit only within an atmosphere; Mirena was, by trade, a voidspace fighter pilot. Regardless, we were able to stay off the ground in perpetuity without sacrificing crew sustainability, provided we had the fuel. In the morning of the following day, when Silas and Luther swapped control of the Bird back over to Mirena, and after I negotiated my freedom from Castecael and Penitent, I joined Mirena in the cockpit. My visit was unannounced, and she glanced to me for a moment before looking back to the skies ahead.
After sitting with her for a few minutes, she finally broke the silence. “Sir?”
“What happened to ‘Cal?’” I asked.
“Hard times harden the soul,” she replied.
“Yeah,” I agreed. We sat together in relative silence for a few moments more, only the sounds of the Bird’s humming engines and the buffeting of winds against the hull disturbing the quiet. “What do you think it’s all for, Mirena?” I asked eventually.
“All of what, sir?” she asked.
“Everything. The heretics’ goals. The Imperium’s. And everyone in between,” I clarified.
She shrugged and shook her head. “I know not how to think on such a scale. And I do not wish to know the thoughts of our foes—I do not envy you that power,” she replied.
I mused—audibly—on that response for a moment, then admitted, “I envy you yours.” She grunted for me to explain. “Your powers. Your gifts. You are quite the pilot. And up here, among the clouds, everything below seems so small. Everything above seems so vast, and it’s yours to explore,” I explained. “What are your goals in life, Mirena?”
“Need I have any?” she shrugged.
“I should hope so. I did not think I had a servitor on my staff.”
She nodded, smiling, but paused to think on it for a moment. “My goal is to live, I suppose. And to live well, among loyal friends. I feel I’ve met that goal here, but here, we seem to keep finding people that want to threaten that goal. Maybe that’s the picture of the whole universe, hm? Close allies fighting for their lives and the lives of their friends, against those who seek to spread solitude and sorrow. Perhaps that is what has set the stars ablaze.”
“Perhaps,” I nodded.
“The Emperor gives us the gift of our lives. The adage says we should spend them wisely, but what if there’s more to it than that?” she suggested. “What if there’s a price to pay for the good things in our lives? What if those unwilling to pay it are those you and I hunt?”
I smiled and nodded again. “Yes. I think that’s it,” I agreed. “One day you and I will pay that price as well. Others will come to collect for it. Emperor willing, we will have more than enough to give.” I rummaged through my jacket, then, and pulled out a tan parchment before handing it over to her.
“What’s this?”
“Flight path. Steer us onto it, please,” I told her. “Keep the weapons ready. All of them.”
“Understood, Cal,” she nodded. “It’ll be a few hours—five maybe—to reach that destination, even at full throttle.”
“There’s my name,” I smiled, as did she. “And yes, I know. I’ll be here for the ride,” I told her. “We’re finishing this today. Either we’re paying our price, or the last of the heretics is. I know where my money is.”
“Mine too,” she agreed. “Attention all crew, please strap in. We’ll be accelerating to mission-pace,” she voxxed to our friends. This vox was private within the Bird; not even Okustin knew its workings, which meant Vostroya did not either. She then glanced to me. “Prepare for combat?” she asked. I nodded. “Combat units,” she voxxed, “gear up for field operations.”
“Everything,” I voxxed to them. “Prepare for and bring everything. This all ends today.”
Mirena and I flew together in silence, again, then. There was not a word between us for four hours. Occasionally I responded to some activity on my vox from my crew, but that was it. Despite the day of physical rest I had had in Castecael’s medicae unit, I felt the first real, psychological rest in a good, long while riding at the helm of the Bird, feeling us race through the heavens of Hestia Majoris. “Get me out of this shithole, Cal, and I’ll fly you anywhere you want,” Mirena had said to me in her naval prison. I should really take her up on that offer more often.
The silence was broken by a single word, and for a moment, I thought I had merely thought of it and the speaker’s voice. “Pyrras,” the word came in over my vox. Mirena glanced to me, though I had no immediate response. Then Vostroya tried again. “Come in, Pyrras.”
“Can you feed my vox through the Bird?” I asked Mirena.
“Yes, I can. It’ll be two way—they’ll hear his broadcast and yours,” she explained.
“Good, do it,” I told her. She obliged, beginning to reconfigure the Bird’s vox to that of my personal one. She gave me a thumb’s up when she finished. “Pyrras receiving Vostroya.”
Vostroya paused in his reply, though I heard him breathe in and out a sigh that was half relief and half anxiety. “You and your crew are some damnably tough bastards to kill, Pyrras,” Vostroya replied eventually.
“You would know,” I said flatly.
“Hm. Right. You know, for the better part of two centuries I’ve been a Rogue Trader, but before that, I was a soldier, as I understand you were. A Lieutenant General, if you’d believe it. You and I may be on separate paths now, but there once was a time where our journey was comparable indeed. One does not hold my current position among the stars for nothing, after all,” he explained. “That our stars neighbor each other is, to me at least, an honor. I do not imagine you feel the same. Alas, our paths are not destined to cross. I imagine you’ve told the Navy above to shoot down any fleeing craft from the surface world, eh? You don’t need to answer that, I already know—money has a way of buying information and exit strategies.”
“And where has yours come from, and where has it gone, I wonder,” I grumbled.
“Oh, the captain of some frigate on one remote side of the world is where it’s gone,” Vostroya laughed. “You needn’t worry about handing out punishment for that; I’m quite sure the Lord Captain stationed here will mete that out well enough. As for my income, well, that’s the thing about being a Trader. You don’t much care for where the money arrives from, so long as it does.”
“And yours has ceased arriving,” I filled in.
“Shame, that,” Vostroya said, still chuckling. “Cost of doing business: it ends. The other shame is that only one of us knows the other’s name, and that we’ll never meet. That was by design, of course, but I confess, Callant Blackgar, you have been a most worthy adversary. That the stars would go out before you and I ever cross paths face-to-face—without a torture rack in the room, that is—is most anti-climactic. When my name stops meaning anything, the stars will remember me, but you will never have known.”
“Vostroya,” I started, and then sighed and shook my head.
“Yes, Pyrras?”
I paused, flustered, and shook my head again. “You really could not be more wrong. You and I have never been comparable, not in our pasts and certainly not now. It’s frankly impressive how much you think you know about the way of things, when you fail to grasp the most important notions of all.”
“Such as?”
“I am a Psyker. And I killed Holicar Espirov,” I reminded him, and paused a moment to let that sink in. “Gale Ryke may have failed to tease the fine details of my operation from my mind, but do you believe I replicated that failure with Espirov? No, Antonius Sigird, Rogue Trader of the Scorix Litany, I know well enough about you. And our paths will be crossing far sooner than you would like. No, Sigird, the stars will not remember you. Vostroya itself will burn your name in loathsome effigy that you would call it home. And the Imperium will forget you, for I will leave nothing left worthy to speak of. I’ll see you soon, heretic.”