The Warmaster

One: Corpse

Human ship. Imperial human ship. Cold thing from which life-heat has bled. Nothing-thing. Corpse-wreck, broken, inert, adrift…

How long has it been dead? How long had it been alive? How long had it been brave? When and how had that bravery ended? Had the souls within it served their puppet-fool-god dutifully? Had they taken our blood before the void took them?

If they had been worthless fools, then this patch of space was their boneyard. If they had been heroes to their kind, then this blackness was their sepulchre.

Just a hulk now, a sun-charred lump of chambered metal, rotating slowly through an airless darkness. At the current distance, it is visible only by auspex and sensoreflection. Drive core cold, like a perished star. ­Organics nil, just the trace residue of decomposition. But there are grave goods to be retrieved. Salvage potential is determined from the gathering metadata. Good plating for reuse, hull panels, ceramite composites, fuel cells for trading, cabling, weapons systems – perhaps commodity loads too: promethium, small-arms, explosives, even food-packs…

Sixty thousand kilometres. Range and intercept is locked. The signal is given. Amber, the challenge screens blink awake like opening reptile eyes, bathing the command bridge with golden light. Ordnance automates from dormancy, rattling autoloaders and charging cells. Boarding arrays power up and extend, sliding hull-claws, mooring anchors and assault bridges from shuttered silos. The drives come up: a vibration and a hum, and the advance begins.

Forty thousand kilometres. The swarms assemble, tools and weapons poised, filling the ready-stations and the companionways behind the assault bridge hatches.

Twenty thousand kilometres. The corpse-ship becomes visible. A ­tumbling mass of metal, trailing debris clouds. A halo of immaterial energies shimmers around it, blood from the wound that spat the wreck out of the empyrean and into real space. Benedictions are murmured to ward against any daemonia or warp spawn that might have been left clinging to the dead thing’s hull.

Ten thousand kilometres. The corpse-ship’s name becomes ­legible, etched across the buckled steeple of its prow.

Highness Ser Armaduke.