Chetta cleared her throat and kept her voice low. ‘Keep this to yourselves for now. I don’t want word to spread among the crew, because the crew will talk when we get back to Vorlese. Which, incidentally, I want us back in the warp and heading for as soon as this conversation is over. I’ll handle the translation here, but then I’ll need whoever is next on the duty rota to take the rest of the journey.’

DeShelle and Arqueba both nodded dutifully.

‘This was no accident, or random warp storm,’ Chetta said simply, nodding in the direction of the absent planet. ‘From what I can see, someone intended to drag Gallimo Prime into the warp.

‘And they found a way to do just that.’

Children of the Serpent

Children of the Serpent

Even among the mighty windscrapers of Ascension City, the Navigator halls stood tall and proud. The mighty edifices, each stretched over multiple city blocks, were built of ferrocrete for structural strength, but clad in square miles of the finest marble and punctuated with windows of glassaic that would have taken up the entire sides of buildings on lesser worlds. Sentinel-sized gargoyles clung to cornices and leered over precipitous ledges. Gold leaf and filigree had settled on surfaces like great colonies of roosting insects. House sigils were picked out in platinum and precious stones, and subtly illuminated so that they blazed out into the night of Vorlese’s twenty-seven-hour rotation. As a planet on one of the main warp routes to Holy Terra, and a proud survivor of the Despoiler’s assault during the Thirteenth Black Crusade, Vorlese was the seat of power for several of the largest Navigator houses, and they advertised that power.

Despite their appearance, however, the halls were not mere ostentatious frippery. They stood independent of the webwork of enclosed gantries and procession ways that linked the other buildings around them, and any flyer not broadcasting approved security codes would be shot down in short order if they approached too closely. At ground level, razor wire and other, less obvious deterrents prevented the curious or malicious from drawing near. Even the most desperate denizens of the Smog Deeps knew better than to approach a Navigator hall, even if they had no concept of what one actually was, or who dwelled within. Navigators were paranoid, and as mutants in an Imperium that widely reviled and hunted mutants, they were wise to be so.

All these things would pose a severe obstacle to most people who intended to harm a Navigator, but Radimir Niklau was not most people. He could get inside every one of these heavily defended palaces should he choose to, but such a venture was not without risk, and Niklau had not gained the favour of his patrons – his true patrons – by being careless. There were easier measures that could be taken for now. Later, when the prey became more cautious, he could utilise his more esoteric skills.