‘Captain Arqueba?’ Chetta called, activating the vox.

‘High lady?’

‘Vora is dead,’ Chetta said, ‘but I’m a jokaero if I can work out why. The warp isn’t exactly calm, but this wouldn’t have bent the mind of a green acolyte.’ She frowned, drumming her fingers on the throne’s arm. ‘You’ll have to cope without direction for a little while longer. Something took a swipe at us, and I’d like to know what it was.’

‘As you wish, high lady.’

Chetta gripped the armrests of the throne, gritted her teeth and concentrated.

The fact that the throne room only had a narrow field of vision was of no consequence. The warp was not the material universe, where light travelled in straight lines. There were very few rules that applied to it. A skilled Navigator could gaze out and perceive a threat that might affect the rear or underside of the craft, or something which could engulf it entirely. Distance and direction were subjective at best in the warp, as was time, and that was something Chetta could use.

She wrestled with the immaterium’s presentation into her mind, hardening her will into the psychic equivalent of an adamantium-tipped drill. In the same way as a warp-blind human might concentrate on focusing their eyes to see the finest detail at very close range, or their ears on detecting a single sound amidst others, Chetta chased down the thread of time in the white noise of images and sensations she was being barraged with, and followed it backwards.

There. A series of shock waves, ripping through the warp and buffeting the Solarox, lines of what she could only internally verbalise as a glistening dark brown against the shifting yellow background. She fought against the feeling of her skin itching on the inside, and clung on to the images in her head. That was no warp storm; it was like no natural phenomenon of the empyrean she’d ever witnessed, if ‘natural’ was a term that could even be applied to this place. The shock waves were radiating outwards from another event; something else had birthed them. But what?

She forced her third eye to follow the ripples back to their origin, rolling back her subjective notion of time through sheer bloody-mindedness coupled with long practice. It was like trying to get a grip on a bubble in a hurricane, but…

‘High lady, are you well? Your pulse is accelerating rapidly.’

‘Not now, Anja!’ Chetta snapped, trying not to lose the thread. Talking to someone in the present while peering into the past was not unlike trying to juggle with one hand while fencing with the other. She was nearly there; she could feel the shock waves converging on a single point.

They met, and formed a distinct image in Chetta’s mind, one of uncommon focus and clarity for someone used to wrestling with the warp’s abstracts. It was almost as though the trigger event didn’t exactly involve the warp at all…