Dead Reckoning

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Before the Obroa-skai Strike...

Becalmed. An archaic word, the use of which made little sense. In the lost millenia of Mankind's past, to times that seemed more mythical than real, the word descended from when Man did not command, but rather strove instead to harness the simplest, meanest forces of nature. Wind. Seen again and again and again across a hundred worlds—a thousand, truly—whose regression during the heart-breaking time of Old Night, Man on ancient Terra—called Earth, then, for the memories of the Nobilite were long—had not the might of smelted helium, the hum-tick regularity of uranium, the passive exultation of the sun nor even the crude apparati of heated water. They had but the strength of their own arms and the means to move, in synchronic surrender, with the whims of Terra. They followed the flow of the waters and they caught the breath of the sky and let it bear them where it willed, for they had little say in those matters then.

Becalmed. It meant the times when the winds failed and the seas grew still and the old boats of wood and cloth could only sit and wait. Maybe then the crew would pray to their long-lost gods and beg for mercy or a little help. They must have. Man was not the master then, just the victim to capricious and uncaring nature.

Then greater secrets came and Man laughed at the wind, Man jeered at the current, Man crossed oceans at will and beat the skies into submission and then looked past them all and forced gravity to heel, until Man made the laws and Man shaped the world, and that shape served Man.

So and on and up Man climbed, until one final Law remained inviolate. Man boxed in the wind, Man trammeled the seas, Man harnessed the Stars, browbeat Gravity—but one final stair remained untrod.

The Law of Light. There: Man fell grasping, short; denied.

Homo Sapiens failed. Homo navigo did not.

The final Law was bent and put away, to give Mankind mastery of all the universe, should they be willing to grasp it. Now, nothing lay beyond Man's reach. No worlds were too far. No stars too remote.

And by laughing cosmic irony, as Mankind ascended past that final plateau—from Man's own murky, forgotten past, came that word as fierce reminder: becalmed.

How strange, how poetic, how terribly and truly unbelievable to stand at the peak of human evolution—human technology—human will—and yet, at the core of it all, bear the same perils and pitfalls of rickety wooden vessels, trembling before the storm.

For the 4711th was becalmed. Thirty-thousand years of technology and knowledge and perilous advancement and Likentrix twiddled her thumbs and peered out at squalls and reefs and black, unknown waters with the same trepidatious curiosity as a feral-world tribal in a canoe.

It was…enervating.

Her eyes were closed; her eye was open. The Warp spread out in all direction, more directions than cardinal, in the myriad angles that her kind could intuit. Up, down. Left, right. Forward, back. Within, without. Eboracum sat at the center of an eddy. The Warp circled, a stream caught in a switch-back bend, making cotton-soft whirls of gentle ripples. She believed this eddy was the fault of the 4711th. If the Republic spoke truth and the Empyrean was unknown to the greater galaxy—and she was liable to believe it—then the immaterial winds were unused to such a nexus of supracognitive beings. Though many of her handmaidens perished in the yowl of Veridia and many of the Astropathic choirs burnt from within as Warp by-blows scampered the halls of Macragge's Honour, the 4711th remained perhaps the greatest conjunction of psykery this galaxy had yet seen.

The boy, Rubio, agreed. The Librarium, what few remained, leant their differing expertise to unraveling the mysteries of the Empyrean.

In her centuries, Keres Likentrix had guided warships across the known galaxy and back again. From Terra to Ultramar, to Ullanor and Baal. There were two truths to the life of a Navigator. The Astronomican was their North Star. The Warp, ever, was hostile. Ancient maps were priceless, yet could be made worthless in an instant. Stable routes as sure as the rising sun would collapse in a blink. Horrific, blinding storms would collapse into gentle passages, only to explode into Gellar-shattering fury at the most inopportune time.

The Warp loathed the passage of Man's ships. It heaved and groaned and begrudged every second its realm was penetrated.

This was the certainty of the Navis Nobilite. This was what Keres was schooled in, from her earliest memories. Her unblinking third eye peered out and marveled, marveled at the unpredictable predictability of the gentle Empyrean that ebbed and flowed in the infinite distance and just beneath her skin. In her long centuries, Keres had not faced a challenge like those of her ancient forebears who first plied the ways from Sol.

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That boy, Rubio, must have warned the Jedi child. Keres smiled to see the slender girl wearing a thick and long coat, wooly and dyed blue. Borrowed, no doubt, from one of the Excertus. Ushered in by footmen sworn to House Likentrix, Eryl Besa appeared a blend of excitement and trepidation. She swam in her loaned greatcoat, freckled face popping out of the thick cowl. Her hands did not even escape the voluminous sleeves. Keres smiled through a pang of mild envy, eying the girl. Her hair was short, cut close to the scalp at the sides and tousled atop, flaming and red, starkly contrasting her milk-pale skin and emerald eyes.

Once, so long ago she barely remembered it, Keres had locks as vibrant as the girl's.

There was little point receiving the girl in her scarcely-used personal chambers, but Keres could not countenance allowing an outsider into the oubliette proper. A happy medium was struck, selecting one of the minor antechambers arrayed around the central oubliette. Pleasantly, this antechamber featured a gravity couch, sufficient to rest her brittle bones.

The Jedi girl cleared her throat and clumsily bowed.

'Mamzel, I'm Eryl Besa, Jedi Knight.'

Keres tutted, amused.

'Our pleasure, Jedi Besa.' In the spirit offered, Keres held out her hand - as pale as the girl, but with veins bulging blue and visible. Eryl Besa knelt, brushing lips against the Likentrix signet ring. 'We greet you in the name of the House Likentrix.'

Eryl Besa did not enjoy the pleasures of a microgravity couch, instead being offered a firm mat of the sort the youngest and rawest Navigators learned well from. The Jedi arranged herself crosslegged, almost lost in the depths of her coat.

Keres studied the girl as they exchanged words. Jedi Besa, as properly titled, spilled over with enthusiasm and clear-eyed interest. Young Rubio, who had watched these 'Jedi' from afar through the summit, declared them to be evidently untouched by the Warp. They were not psykers, by the Codicier's learned estimation, but something other that he had no name for. Keres… was less certain. Though a Navigator, and thusly were her gifts narrow in scope, she learned many tricks over her long, long years of service. Foremost of her House, raised in adoration and sculpted to the honored task of guiding the Emperor's most profligate of endeavours—such towering arrogance the Nobilite had never seen, but matched by incomparable vision—she had been trained on all manners empyreal and material.

Jedi Besa, demonstrating her command of the 'Force', elevated herself a few handspans above her woven mat, returning to rest with what seemed to be the most minimal of exertion. Honed by experience, sensitive to a fault, Likentrix's old bones felt not a twinge of warp-chill. For a psyker to match even that parlour-trick would feather the boundary.

At the same time, when she requested the Jedi girl repeat the feat, which she did with gusto, Keres noticed…something else.

Not the tugging of immaterial energies such as with a psyker, but rather persistent tickling. The word failed to encompass the feeling, for it was neither physical nor truly mental.

Jedi Besa, leaning forward with her hands on her knees, bombarded Keres with endless questions about the functionality of not just Navigation, but the enterprise of warp-travel entire. She was no Magos or Engineseer, and had to admit only cursory understanding of the arcane tech-science that breached the empyreal boundary proper. As she explained the principles of Navigation, she examined that tickle.

She was contrasting the utility of chartist ships opposed to those guided by the Nobilite when she pounced on the feeling.

'Excuse my digression, but would you demonstrate your Force one further time?'

'Oh—sure! Here, let me try this," the girl instead furrowed her brow, staying resolutely placed on the mat and Keres glanced about the room from beneath her long, silver lashes. No other device nor ornament shifted without cause—

Her arthritic aches, so present, so ingrained into her very being Keres scarcely considered them at all, throbbed once painfully and then settled. Not gone but lessened, like a dose of a Biologis' finest concoction injected into each and every joint. Those particular treatments had ceased effect decades ago.

'My word,' she marveled. 'What is this, girl?'

Besa hastened to explain, assuring her that it wasn't anything intrusive, just some alleviation of symptoms, that she only wanted to show the Force wasn't just for parlor tricks, that she only had a little knowledge in the arts of healing, that…

Biomancy, telekinesis, some manner of Navigational sense. Telepathy was known to be a talent of the Jedi, and here was proof that in them manifested not merely one domain of this 'Force', but perhaps all of them. A psyker would be well-pressed to match this omnibus talent, and the girl Besa was still young and newly Knighted.

She bade the Jedi demonstrate her powers again, in different ways, and the strange tickle grew more and more distinct. Keres closed her eyes, allowing her warp-sense to unfold the clearer, though her third eye remained shuttered.

She inhaled sharply.

Besa asked if anything was amiss.

Like some detritus floating in the aqueous humor, some particle that could not be ignored, Eryl Besa was…there…in the warp. All beings were, save those gold-clad null-maidens of the Emperor, but something about Besa's presence stood outside easy classification.

'Continue, if you please.'

'Well, okay. Should I - uhm, what do you want me to do?'

'The footman beyond the door. Tell me his thoughts.'

Jedi Besa hummed under her breath, concentrating—there!

The energies of the empyrean shifted. Keres was not quite sure how. Ethereal gauzes and wisps that permeated the other-plane of the immaterium slithered and swirled, yet did not pass into nor through Besa, not to Keres' sight. And her soulstuff, the beacon of being the girl gave off as a flame, continued to confound.

'He's tired. I'm not that great at this, but I think he's wondering how much longer we'll be?'

'Very good, girl. You may stop.'

Keres opened her eyes again, the world returning through the thin and blurry film of cataracts.

'We will disappoint him, I think.'

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After Jedi Besa demonstrated her powers, confirming at the least her training as a Jedi, there was little else to do but to prove the validity of her claim. A day then, to rest and recover and make final preparations. Macragge's Honour would not do as a means to test the Jedi's mettle, for the Primarch had greater needs and the flagship greater purpose than playing in the empyrean. Samothrace was assigned the duty to shadow the coming infiltration of the Republic world 'Obroa-skai', and thus would be best suited to this experiment.

They rode to the battle-barge in the comfort of a House Likentrix lighter, far smoother and palatable than the utilitarian Thunderhawks of the Legio. It would be a several hour trip, out from Eboracum to where Samothrace ran her patrol of the deeper system. Young Eryl, whose gamely good cheer continued to grow on Keres, paced around the lighter for the short trip, face screwed up in thought and lips pursed.

'But I don't understand. If the warp is always changing, then how did your family ever make maps in the first place? Wouldn't they be wrong in just a few days?'

'The shape of the Immaterium shifts, it is true, but it follows patterns of pathos that can be signposts. By nature, there is order to the disorder. It may sound contradictory, but contradictions are what we Navigators rely upon. We may mark a path through reefs and through valleys, and those reefs may change in their temperament and sharpness, the valley may diminish or become a mountain-range, but the path retains its character. This is the map we make, not one of simple marks but one that is built of mythic cycles. Stories are told in the Warp, and we plot the curve of the narrative, such that our starships may slide along them.'

'So if I can tell you like, where point A is, and point B, then you can…find the story between them?'

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'That is it precisely, my girl. In days before my kind, to map the warp was to stumble through an unlit labyrinth, and by barked shins and bruised nose guess where one was. In this new galaxy, while we have the Sight, the Sight shows only the Empyrean. We would be as a chartist captain, requiring continual return to the materium to mark where paths take us. It would be a task of centuries, if not millenia, for how few of my kind are here.'

Content with the explanation, Besa ceased her pacing, appearing the more sure.

'I hope my sense still works in the Warp. It does in hyperspace, but…it's different.'

'Thus do we test,' Likentrix assured. 'There will be no blame should it not. Progress is not made by only those things we achieve, but also what we fall short of.'

Later, Samothrace welcomed them aboard, the lighter approved to dock just below the Navigator's Spire, where a proper and honorable welcome awaited them both. The girl Eryl's blush and shyness at the attention was endearing, though the assemblage of fifty footmen and Samothrace's chief Navigator, a spindly man of her house named Ulthes, was the barest minimum honor that Keres deserved.

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Ulthes, of Likentrix, carried the role of Primary for this sail. He ensconced himself into his primary oubliette, attended by his own consorts. Keres claimed a lesser chamber, one meant more for meditation and reflection, so that she might unveil her Eye without harm. Eryl was stationed just beyond, with an open, two-way vox to Keres within.

'This may become strange to you,' Keres warned. 'The Empyrean in this galaxy is a different creature to that which we know, but it remains the Empyrean. It relinquishes secrets fitfully and is ever hostile to those who peer into its depths. Inform me the moment there is anything amiss.'

Escorted by a single destroyer, the battle-barge came about, Shipmistress Altuzer an able hand at the helm. The immaterium opened more easily to the arcane engines of the warship, sighing apart the skin of reality to allow access. Mandeville points, Keres had found, were more plentiful, and deeper into the realm of a star's gravity than she knew. Samothrace nosed into the rift, destroyer following, and Keres felt the old pull of the warp in her—well, soul. A word disused, but one she could not put aside.

She sighed in relief and pleasure, drifting in null gravity, and unbound her silken blindfold from her forehead.

The girl outside was saying something, vox crackling away. Keres would answer in a moment.

Without the Astronomican, the warp felt alien. Keres, as befit her greater breeding, age, and experience, was not unmanned when the 4711th decanted over Eboracum. Some of her handmaidens had wailed and wept, clawing bloody tracks from their cheeks and scouring their bodies at the sudden loss of the golden light they'd known their whole lives.

Keres was older.

She still remembered the great lighting of the Astronomican. Seeing the unlit tracts of the warp here brought back old, old memories, nostalgic as they were bitter.

Filling her sight was the abject madness of the warp. It ached to look on it, it ached like pleasure, it burned like passion, it stung like love. No sane being would ever wish to see such sights, but she was not sane. Keres was a Navigator, and this was what she lived for. Each of her kindred saw the warp in their own unique way. Every metaphor held truth, and none were incorrect. There was a challenge in language to bridge experiential divide and forge common terms. A lexicon shaped by ancient mariners was most common: reefs, shoals, sounds and currents, eddies and whirlpools and maelstroms.

That lexicon was most convenient to share with those without Sight. All could understand, even if they had not seen, an ocean. Some of her kind even saw the warp in such ways. Ulthes was one. He spoke in colorful ways, painting images of benthic depths and leviathan shapes, of shelves shaped of mud and towering corals that scraped at the very boundaries of sanity. It sounded wondrous.

To Keres' eye, the warp was light. All colors of light, prismatic, mixing and blending and glaring. Kaleidoscopic, revolving, blending and mixing and eye-searingly beautiful. Rich indigos swelled into blossoming petals, veined through with shocking emerald. Fuschia rained in zagging lines, entwining into deep incarnadines. Keres allowed herself to sink into the view, the spectacle, the wonder for several minutes.

Samothrace held motionless, impellers quiet and at standby. Adrift, as best termed.

She pulled her focus back into her fleshy, fallible, mortal body. The rainbow of the warp still surrounded her, but she felt the chill of her oubliette, pucking goosflesh along her silk-swaddled limbs.

'-mamzel? Can you hear me? Are you okay?'

'Calm yourself, girl. We are observing the warp.'

'Oh, whew. I was worried. They said it was normal…I didn't want to try and sense you. With the Force, I mean.'

Alarm rang through Keres.

'You must not!'

She'd not considered such a thing. What might be the fate of a telepath who saw, or felt, even by step removed, the raw warp? Surely it would burn them from within. The girl did not deserve that fate.

'Oh, I won't, don't worry.'

In her oubliette, her breath of relief was a mist of ice crystals.

'Tell me—do you feel our location?'

'That's what I was trying to tell you! I can! We're still near Eboracum. I mean. Of course we are, but—I can feel it!'

'Then your ability functions even within the warp. We are fortunate indeed.'

'So what's next?'

An Eye though it was named, but unlike a mortal eye, a flesh-eye, Keres could see all about her, both before and beside, through the fragile meat of her skull. All angles, all dimensions - another facet of Sight that no mortal being could apprehend.

There was the Jedi girl. In fact, she had been visible from the moment Keres unveiled her Eye. How had this passed her notice? All the warp was color, riotous and infinite, and Eryl Besa…stood out. She was no color at all, while containing all of them. A spot of white, against an infinite field of black. A dot of the deepest black, in an endless blizzard of white. Tiny, minute, infinitesimal in the scale and scope of all the Warp, but once Keres saw her—she could never forget.

Something in her gut told Keres that no matter where in the galaxy Eryl went, or Keres sailed, that the oddity of the Jedi's presence would remain. A speck in the eye, a fragment of a splinter in skin, not uncomfortable but felt, an itch at the small of the back.

How wonderfully, fantastically, impossibly strange.

Yet, unimportant. The greater task demanded.

'Now, Shipmistress Altuzer shall sail us. You will narrate. I will direct, in conjunction with Navigator Ulthes. Be precise, girl, and quick to relay.'

'I will, I promise.'

Samothrace's impellers came to bear, enacting the great comedy of warp-travel. In the realm of dreams, the most fundamental and material of methods still compelled the grand battle-barge to sail. Fusion engines consumed and spat out exhaust. Fire, the oldest tool of man, yoked as oars in the sea-storm empyrean.

'Oh. Oh wow. That's so strange. We're moving! But we're - it's not straight. Oh, that's so weird!'

The girl's voice was delighted. Amazed, even.

'I can feel it! We left Eboracum behind but then we kind of went—sideways? Sideways, I think. How are we doing that!'

'The winds of the warp catch sails in angles unexpected, girl.' Keres chided, reminding the Jedi or the lessons imparted not long ago.

'I get why it's so hard to map things out,' Besa hummed under her breath. 'Okay, so—are we going straight? I mean, to you, does it—'

'To mine eyes, we travel as an arrow.'

'So weird!'

Indeed, Samothrace soared along a ribbon if twisting violet, shot through with humming bolts of sunshine-yellow. Their attending destroyer nosed along Samothrace's flank, separated by kilometers and aeons. As best Keres could see, there was no deviation of angle. They sailed true.

'Should I try and take us to Corsin? Or Comkin?'

Such confidence!

'If you believe you are able, lead us.'

'I…I think so. Okay. Okay. Let's do this. We're drifting coreward. Can you have us turn…starboard?'

Raised on a starship indeed, Keres smiled at the proper terminology. Could she turn the ship? Keres was a Navigator. Eryl Besa asked if she could breathe.

'Shipmistress,' Keres said, 'I have the helm.'

'Honored for you to guide us, Chief Navigatrix.'

Psi-reactive circuits within her oubliette lit, impinging on her focus. She allowed mneumonics to unspool, psychically-implanted engrams that reached out, biting into the control-wafers and and tying connections between her unconscious mind and the ship itself. The girl wished to 'turn to starboard'. By Keres' will, the battle-barge, all the heavy, adamantine-clad kilometers of it, eased into a gentle, arcing turn. The Geller field did not so much as flicker.

'There we go. Huh. That's the wrong way. But it should be right…' The girl groaned an endearing snarl of irritation. 'Warp stuff! Can you take us the other way?'

Keres had never directed so attentive a ship, or through such forgiving medium. Samothrace acted almost before her wishes were made conscious.

'How is that wrong too!'

'Allow me an experiment-'

Rather than follow Besa's test-cases, Keres instead judged the swirl of incandescent color around her. The ribbon of violet bend and curled, twisting inward to deeper dimensions - Keres followed it.

'That's it! We're going - wait, what did you do?'

'The warp does not have directions, not as you understand them. Perhaps it is best I guide, and you adjust, than the opposite.'

Keres could imagine other Navigators - greater fools - finding umbrage to heed the advice of so callow, so untested a youth. An unreformed youth too, though human, who stood outside the Imperium. To share secrets, too!

This Eryl Besa was a greater gift, a greater treasure than any STC the Men of Mars lusted for. She was a prize that entire noble Houses would slaughter for, would crawl over the corpses of their most prized Patriarch to claim.

The girl could have been a xenos and a witch-mind and it would have made no difference.

For the first time in her long, long life, Keres Likentrix found need to steadfastly enforce her mental stability, to remain calm. The Jedi's running commentary as Samothrace circled and plunged and tore out of trackless pools of sienna and danced down sun-beam rays of false gold threatened to compromise Keres' focus in ways truly dangerous.

Her years, decades, centuries dropped away in those moments. She felt as a child again, in her first, careful lessons, at the right hand of her father.

No Navigator ever experienced this. Keres Likentrix was the first, perhaps the only. To sail the ways of the Empyrean with land in sight. Her sails were full, her hand on the rudder and the sky clearest blue.

'Definitely going the right way—pulling a little bit to spinward, but that's—oh, you corrected, okay—'

For that blessed time, which to Keres passed timeless, she guided Samothrace as no other being had ever traversed the warp before, in two galaxies.

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Corsin's star was dim and so very distant. Samothrace and her escort emerged from the warp well beyond the comet shell, so far out that no sensor-nets might sniff them and any light-echoes would be faint, grainy and degraded when they reached peering eyes days later. Shipmistress Altuzer was wary of emergence, yet understood the necessity. Without returning to realspace to compare star-patterns to Republican charts, there was no certainty to the purported skill of Jedi Besa.

To neither the girl nor Keres' surprise, Shipmistress Altuzer's near breathless confirmation of their arrival beyond the solar boundary of Corsin arrived shortly after quitting the warp.

'I knew it! My gut's never wrong, that's what dad always said.'

On a scale galactic, from Eboracum to Corsin was minute. Parsecs, which the 'hyperdrive' capable Republic ships could cross in minutes. Samothrace sailed the distance in just under an hour. Straight. Through hitherto unmapped warp.

She wished the wealth of her family was at hand. She would rain riches on Eryl Besa, she would garb the girl in robes of Terran silk, she would elevate her to heights unimaginable in this galaxy. Her father, the great and wizened Patriarch would not gainsay this. Had Eryl Besa a partner? A marriage was simple. Her great grand-nephew was fair for one of the Navis, and only treble the girl's age. She could introduce them, once they returned to Eboracum. Whatever it took, whatever-

'What next?'

Keres peered back along the path they had taken. It stayed in her mind, caught tight in the lock-trap of her gene-bred eidetics. Ulthis too had watched, making his own memorization, dictating to scribbling chart-masters. A route laid now, from Eboracum to Corsin. Other ships would ply it, of course: perhaps their escorting destroyer. At least a dozen passages to confirm the stability of the path.

'Now we seek Obroa-skai,' Keres replied. 'And from thence: ever onward.'