Dan Abnett - First and Only

'A passenger,' Lekulanzi said, shuddering at the direct sound of the captain's seldom-heard voice.

Grasticus brushed the correction aside as he always did. He wasn't used to carrying humans. Compared to the beloved God-Machines it was his given task to convey, they seemed insignificant. But the humans had liberated Fortis Binary, and the Tech-Priests had sent him and his ship to assist them. It was a kind of gratitude, he supposed.

Grasticus disliked Lekulanzi. The whelp had been transferred to his command three months earlier on the orders of the Adeptus after Grasticus's acting warrant officer was killed during a Warp-storm. He doubted the man's ability. He loathed his spare, fragile build.

'Admit him,' Grasticus said, diverted by the unusual event. It would make a change to speak to people. To use his mouth. To see a body and smell its warm, fleshy breath.

Colonel Zoren entered the strategium flanked by two navy troopers with shotguns. The man's face was marked by a bruise and a dressed cut.

'Speak,' said Grasticus.

'Lord captain,' the soldier began, uttering in the delicious accent-tones of a far-worlder. Grasticus hooded his eyes and smiled. The noise delighted him.

'Colonel Zoren, Vitrian Dragoons. We have the privilege of transport on your great vessel. However, I wish to complain strongly about the lack of inter-barrack security. Feuding has :v?gun with those uncouth barbarians the Tanith. Their commanding officer struck me when I approached him to complain about several brawling incidents.'

Through his data-conduits, Grasticus felt the waft of the psychic' ^jth-fields that layered and screened his strategium. The man was speaking honestly; the Tanith commander – a… Gaunt? – had indeed struck him. There were lower levels of inconsistency and falsehood registered by the fields, but Grasticus put that down to the man's nervousness about approaching him directly.

This is a matter for my security aide, the warrant officer here. Shipboard manners and protocol are his domain. Do not trouble me with such irrelevancies.'

Zoren cast a look at the agitated Lekulanzi, who dearly wished to be elsewhere.

Before either could speak, a new figure marched directly into the strategium, a tall man in the long coat and cap of an Imperial Commissar. The troopers turned their weapons on him reflexively but he did not even blink.

'Lekulanzi is a fop. He is unable to perform his duties, let alone command peace on this ship. You must deal with it.'

The newcomer was astonishingly bold and direct. No formal address, no humble approach. Grasticus was impressed – and wrong-footed.

'I am Gaunt,' the newcomer said. 'My Tanith barracks have been raided and attempts have been made on my own life. Three of my men are dead, another critical and another missing. I mistook Zoren and his men as the culprits, hence my assault on him. The guilty party is in fact the Jantine Regiment. I ask you now, directly, to confine them land put their commanding officers on report.'

Again, Grasticus felt a hint of deceit in the flow of the astropathic truth-fields, but once more he put this down to the disarming awe of being in his presence. Essentially, this Gaunt was reading as utterly truthful and shamelessly direct.

'You have men dead?' Grasticus asked, almost alarmed.

Three. More urgently, I require your authorisation to admit my medical officer to the stores of the Munitorium to obtain medical commodities to save my injured soldier.'

This insect is shaming me! In my own strategium! Grasticus thought with sudden revulsion.

His mind whirled and he shut out sixty percent of the dataflow entering his skull so he could concentrate. This was the first time in a dozen years he had to deal with a problem involvinghis cargo. Passengers! Passengers, that was what Lekulanzi had called them. Grasticus writhed gently in his throne. This was unseemly. This was insulting. This matter j should have been contained long before now, before cargo was damaged, died, before complaints were brought to his I feet.

He raised his facilitator wand and flicked it at a hovering plate. He would not lose face before these walking flesh worms. He would show he was the captain, the lord captain, I and that they all owed their safety and lives to him.

'I have given your medical officer authority. He has my for— I mal mark to expedite his access to the stores.'

Gaunt smiled That's a start. Now confine the Jantine and punish their officers.'

Grasticus was amazed. He raised himself up on his ham-like elbows to study Gaunt, hefting his upper body free of the leather for the first time in fifteen months. There was a squeak of sweat-wet leather and a scent of stale filth wafted into the air of the strategium.

'I will not brook such insubordination,' Grasticus hissed, his cotton-soft words spitting from the loose folds of spare flesh that surrounded his small, glistening mouth like curtains on a proscenium arch. 'No one demands of me.'

'That's not good enough. Don't belabour us with threats. We require action!'This from Zoren now, stood side by side with the hawk-faced Gaunt. Grasticus reacted in surprise. He had thought the Vitrian more subdued, more deferential, but now he too challenged directly. 'Contain the Jantine and curtail dieir feuding or you'll have an uprising on your hands! Thousands of trained troopers, hungry for blood! More than your trooper details can handle!' Zoren cast a contemptuous glance at the navy escort.

'Do you threaten me?' Grasticus almost gasped. The very thought of it. 'I will see you in chains for such a remark!'

'Is that how you deal with things you don't want to hear?' Gaunt snapped, pushing aside a trooper to approach Grasticus's throne. The trooper grappled with the larger commissar but Gaunt sent him sprawling with a deft swing of his arm.

'Are you the commander of this vessel, or a weak, fat nothing who hides at its heart?'

Lekulanzi fell back against the wall of the strategium, aghast ;»»•'*■hyperventilating. No one spoke to the lord captain like that! No one—

Grasticus writhed ever-upwards from his bed-throne, sweeping the hovering plates aside with his hands so that they parted and cowered at the edges of the chamber behind him. He glared down at the Guard officers, rage rippling through his vast mass.

'Well?' Gaunt said.

Grasticus began to bellow, raising his thick, swollen voice for the first time in years.

Zoren cast a nervous glance at Gaunt. Weren't they pushing the lord captain too hard? Something in Gaunt's calm reassured him. He remembered the elements of their plan and started to send his own jibes at the captain in tune with Gaunt's.

Gaunt grinned inwardly. Now they had Grasticus's entire attention.

Outside the strategium, on the lower levels of the high-roofed, cool-aired bridge vault, the senior helm officers looked up from their dark, oiled gears and levers, and exchanged wondering glances. The basso after-echo of their captain rolled out of the armoured dome. The lord captain was clearly so angry he had diverted his attention from most of the systems temporarily. This was unheard of, unprecedented.

A detachment of ship troopers milled cautiously outside the door-arch of the strategium. 'Do we enter?' rasped one through his helmet intercom. None of them felt like confronting the lord captain's wrath. They pitied the idiot Guard officers who had created this commotion.

Gaunt did not care. This was exactly what he had been after.

FOURTEEN

Chief Medic Dorden led his party in through the armoured hatchway of the Munitorium depot deck. Flanking him, Caffran, Brin Milo and Bragg formed a motley honour guard of uneven height for the elderly medico.

They entered a wide bay that smelled of antiseptic and ioni-sation filters. The grey deck was dusted with clean sand. Dorden consulted his chronometer.