It was only recently in our marriage that my lovably gigantic wife would not force me into an exhausted slumber directly after sex. It had taken me some decades to adapt to Lucene’s vigor—and, notably, her size—in that regard, but adapt I had. Some nights after giving my retinue their marching orders, I laid in bed beneath my love, my head barely poking out over her left shoulder while she gathered her breath, sprawled atop me. I found myself tracing a rough outline of the Sign of the Aquila on her lower backside, where I knew she had possessed such a tattoo. Despite how physically exhausting and emotionally enthralling our love had been, I was lost in thoughts of war and of our possibly dire futures.
“Thirteen decades now, and still I wonder what goes on in that head of yours,” Lucene murmured to my left, then shuffled a bit atop me to move her mouth to the side of my head and kiss my temple. “Cal?”
“Hm?” I grunted, snapping out of my thoughts and glancing to her.
“You OK in there? What’s weighing on you?” she asked, pressing herself more tightly against me at the mention of ‘weighing.’
I grinned at the doubled meaning and, likewise, pulled her closer still to me. “Why, the most amazing and larger-than-life Sister whom I’ve come to treasure dearly, of course!” I answered, pecking her lips with my own. She returned the gesture with more apparent vigor remaining than I could yet muster at the time.
When her lips did finally part mine, she noted, correctly, “That sounds like you’re covering for an arrogantly inaccurate thought again.”
“You know me so well,” I sighed.
“Do tell,” she chuckled, kissing one of my cheeks.
“Why, so you can add another victory to your tally of arguments?”
“Of course!” she laughed, as did I.
My Aquila-tracing hand settled down to hold her lower back while my augmetic hand cradled her head gently, letting her rest a cheek within my grasp. I took a moment to enjoy our embrace, then explained, “Some years ago, after Absalom, in discussing our immortality you suggested you were comfortable with a soulless death so long as it occurred at my side. Do you still feel that way?”
“Yes. Is that all?” she smiled.
“I guess so,” I sighed, shrugging. “I just…we’re likely near to facing our deaths. And I would hate to have spent my life denying you your worthy, faithful eternity in the afterlife. I—” I began to continue, but Lucene interrupted me, putting a finger to my lips.
“I, I, I, it’s not all about you, Cal,” she told me, smiling. “Gosh, you’re so annoying sometimes. You don’t have to perfect the lives of everyone around you. I do adore you because you try to, but holding yourself to that standard is setting yourself up for failure. Cal, I am enjoying the best eternity I could ever ask for right here, right now, with you. I really do not need more than this, even for my faith,” she explained, and then kissed my cheek again.
“Even if it ends?” I asked.
“Even if it ends,” she nodded to me, and then pulled herself over me, looking down upon me instead of toward me from aside. “What I think needs to end is your incessant worrying about the future. And you know, I think I know just the salve for that.”
“Oh?” I asked, not quite understanding then. But when she descended upon me for the second time that night, I understood, and she proved correct once more: I indeed did not possess the stamina to last two rounds with her. My worrying stopped, if because my consciousness also stepped out for the evening.
When I awoke in the morning, I found I had far greater mobility to my person than I had fallen asleep with. Lucene was no longer atop me. I took the opportunity to stretch out a bit and un-tighten my joints and neck. In the process, I found Lucene standing next to me, arms crossed, while wearing the skinsuit bodyglove she wore to interface with her power armor. “What?” I asked her, as she herself seemed stuck in thought for a time. “Good morning, by the way.”
“Good morning, Cal,” she nodded, but did not change her expression or posture.
I yawned for a moment, stretching out further, then again asked, “What?”
“You’ve been hiding something from me.”
“Have I?” I sighed. It was in the nature of my role as Inquisitor to hide things from virtually everyone, her included. She never questioned that. That she did so now made me a bit curious about what she could have been referring to.
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“Since Absalom.” Oh. Well, shit.
“I’ve hidden a lot from you since Absalom,” I admitted, though I knew what she referred to, even if she did not. Ouranos. Her fate, or lack thereof, that the bastard had insisted on showing me.
“Yes. But this one is different. It’s personal. It has affected your judgment and interactions with me over the decades. Tell me,” she insisted.
“It’s not for you to know,” I tried.
“It’s not an Inquisition secret,” she asserted. While word of Ouranos was, in fact, an Inquisition secret, it was not so classified that I could not explain it to my retinue if I had wanted to.
I just hadn’t wanted to.
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes I do,” she insisted. “We’ve been married for more than a century, you and I. I can tell the difference.”
“Let me have this one,” I grumbled, unamused.
Lucene sighed, shook her head, then turned around and simply sat on my chest, pinning me to our bed beneath her while she nearly crushed all the air out of my lungs.
“Lucene,” I gasped, struggling beneath her.
“Cal.”
“Can’t…breathe,” I told her, lying.
“Then how are you speaking?” she suggested, grinning. “Tell me what you’re hiding from me. I’m not moving until you do,” she demanded, crossing her legs while keeping her arms folded over her chest. I continued trying to wrestle her off me, though I knew that was a largely futile endeavor, short of any way that would have hurt her, which I would not do.
“You don’t want to know,” I said, indeed able to breathe beneath her, but only just.
“I do want to know, and not only because you so keenly want to keep it from me, though that does help the curiosity,” she laughed. “The secret is eating at you. It’s changing you. It’s placing you under duress.”
“It’s not the only thing placing me under duress,” I growled, to which she laughed again. Her laughter was cut off by the blaring of red alert sirens throughout the Dawnshadow, our room included. We locked eyes for a moment, and it became clear to me that even then, she would not get off me and let me respond to whatever emergency had arisen. “You’d obstruct an Inquisitor over this?”
“For your sake, I’d obstruct you over this, yes,” she replied, sirens still blaring.
I sighed, rolled my eyes, and at last confessed, “It concerns Ouranos.” She had been in a room with Absalom for a discussion of Ouranos already, so the name, even if non-descriptive, was already familiar to her. “He is responsible for giving me visions, including that of the cabin that has plagued me over the years. I will tell you more of this when we are not under threat of siege, deal?”
Lucene stared at me a moment more, then barely nodded before gently lifting herself off me. While I heaved in a breath of air, she departed from my side in silence and began suiting up in her power armor. I rose to my feet, tossed on some clothes, and did the same, albeit with the addition of muttering, “Fanatical zealot.”
“Worry wart,” she returned in a partially-robotic voice, her tone augmented by her helmet. She then stepped up to me, already armored, and began assisting me with my own power armor. “I love you, Cal.”
“I love you too, Lucene,” I grinned. “If today is the day, good luck. You’ll need it.”
“As will you,” she nodded to me. “I intend to join you in the command center, along with two of my Sisters. I won’t trust your personal defense to Bliss alone. The rest will serve just beyond the room, if that is satisfactory.”
“It is, thank you, Lucene,” I agreed, at last donning my helmet, the final piece of my power armor. “We should get moving.”
***
“Nice of you to join us, Blackgar,” Lord Inquisitor Lycia noted as I entered the command center at last, flanked by Lucene and her Sisters. I glanced around to take in the sights, and saw that both Zha and Bliss were already in the room, as was Varnus. Zha was aiding Lord Caliman in pouring over a tactical sensorium display while Varnus was adjusting the bionics of some of his own Skitarii security forces. Bliss, meanwhile, was off to a darker side of the room, trying to keep a low profile, albeit joined by her sister, Emile. She nodded to me when I looked to her, assuring me she was keeping an eye on things.
“Alas, there was an obstruction along my path,” I answered Lycia. “What’s the situation?”
“Two Viper-class warships entered the system thirty-eight-point-six minutes ago, Inquisitor Blackgar,” Varnus reported to me from a short distance away. “They stayed for six minutes before departing. We were unable to make positive identification within that time.”
“They were scouting,” I asserted.
“We believe so, yes,” Lord Inquisitor Kanin confirmed, also a short distance from me, albeit in the opposite direction from Varnus. The two were clearly keeping their distance from one another. “Stands to reason you’re correct about their intended activity, at least so far; they’ll have seen the defenses we have in play and will match them appropriately.”
“Now we just have to pray we’re better at holding our ground than they think we are,” I offered, stepping up to the sensorium display with Zha and Caliman. Lucene and her Sisters followed after me, but gave me a wide berth as opposed to looming over my shoulder in perpetuity. “Ms. Trantos, Caliman. Good morning.”
“Good morning, Mr. Blackgar,” Zha replied without interrupting the work she was already doing.
“Morning,” Caliman said simply. He, likewise, did not interrupt his own plotting, and if not for returning my greeting, did nothing else to acknowledge my presence. As Bliss had once said, once Caliman put his mind to a task, he finished it before anything else. Could hardly fault him for that.
I was not sure what Zha and Caliman were working on, but I took a quick assessment of the warships we presently had at our defense. There were not many, by design. The Dawnfang, a Gothic-class Cruiser that always accompanied the Dawnshadow (hence its name), as well as Shatterwrath, a Lunar-class Cruiser that belonged to Lord Inquisitor van der Skar and was his personal flagship. Much more modest than my own fleet of vessels, but deadly in its own right, and van der Skar only rarely left the Dawnshadow as it was. Both were stationed very near to the Dawnshadow.
There were a few minutes of tense silence more before anything changed. But the only thing that could have possibly changed was for a war to begin. And indeed, nearly an hour after our sighting of the scout ships, a number of Warp rifts opened across the horizon of Quintus on the Dawnshadow’s East Quadrant.