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Opportunity Cost – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Opportunity Cost

Jonathan D Beer

The explorator ship Peregrinus slides through the void in the unfamiliar guise of a predator.

Its adepts work in silence. This is normal; those who share the noospheric bond that bridges mind with mind have little need for words.

But this is not a normal silence, filled by the efficient hush of cogitators whirring and valves clicking, of robes moving softly over flesh and steel. This is a silence born of tension, of anticipation. Adepts and thralls do not clank about the grated deck plating. They key their stations’ controls with careful motions. Even the noosphere is quiet, all extraneous thoughts caged within minds that are focused on a single goal.

<Reduce engine output to one-tenth. Manoeuvre for close proximity.>

<By your will, ductrix.>

Explorator Talin Sherax, ductrix of the Peregrinus, is as tense as her crew. And while her attention is split across a dozen partitions, directing the operations of her ship, the greatest portion of her cognition is fixed upon the object of its crew’s attention.

A vessel lies broken before her, shrouded in the cosmic dust of the Tenebrian Nebula. The rents in its hull issue a siren call to the Machine God’s adepts who stare with undisguised lust across the vacuum.

This is no Imperial vessel, no bulk transport or warship fallen from the immaterium. Its great hull is as thick as the explorator ship is long, curving around into a hollow cylinder wide enough to swallow a city, capped at one end by a profusion of tantalisingly complex apparatus. Modules stud its outer surface, enormous blocks of a metal alloy the Peregrinus’ sensors have never before tasted. Though it conforms to no Imperial design template, and thus can never be considered noble, there is a grandeur to the broken ship. The undeniable mass of its hull, illuminated by the crackle of ion storms within the nebula, commands Sherax’s respect, and that of every adept aboard her ship.

The vessel’s majesty is spoilt by the ruin that has been visited upon its body. Its great circular hull is cracked along its entire length, a rift hundreds of yards wide and ragged with shorn spars and fractured armour plating. Sherax’s knowledge of the weapons of the galaxy is encyclopaedic, but she has trouble envisaging what could have caused such devastation to so mighty a craft.

And mighty it is. For this, she knows, is a vessel of the Leagues of Votann.

<We have achieved proximity, ductrix,> Sansom Grentin, magister of astrogation, sends across the noosphere from his station on the far side of the command deck. <Target is five thousand and thirty miles abeam of our sinistral flank.>

<Station-keeping,> orders Sherax.

The faintest tremor of thrusters firing shivers through the deck.

<Station-keeping achieved, ductrix.> The red hull of the Peregrinus now lies in the great ship’s shadow, mirroring its drift, matching its aimless passage through the swirl of stellar matter.

The Leagues are an enigma to the Mechanicus. Debate has raged for millennia on whether to classify their species as abhuman or xenos. The question goes far beyond mere taxonomy. If the squat, secretive race that exists amid the crushing mass of the galactic core-worlds are siblings of humanity, albeit far removed from the genomic baseline, then there could be a place for them in the Imperium of Man. If not, if their striking similarities in feature and speech are simply an accident of evolution, then they must be purged from existence as an aberration – the ultimate fate of all aliens.

The Kin, as they call themselves, have steadfastly refused to aid the Imperial and Mechanicus authorities in their debate. The Leagues have the strength and the technology to meet the delegates of Terra and Mars as equals, and have displayed no inclination either to unite beneath the Omnissiah’s banner or to declare themselves His enemy.

They have thus remained unclassified, falling into an uncomfortable liminal space in the codices of the Imperium. When they choose to make contact on their terms, the Leagues have been willing to engage with human authorities, and have even gone to war alongside them when the fight has been with orks and other predatory species of the galaxy. But they resist all offers of cultural or technological exchange, to the point that any fragment of Kin lore is highly coveted by the overlords of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

The stricken ship hangs in the void. Its immensity promises much, if Sherax and her crew can but claim it.

<Magnificent,> breathes Thess Rahn-Bo, the Peregrinus’ chief datamancer. As is her habit, she stands beside Sherax’s throne, one augmetic hand lightly resting on a railing. Her oculars are filmed by the screeds of data that race across her sight.

A noospheric sending is not simply a statement of text, mere speech rendered into code. It is a complex expression of data interwoven with intent and will, coloured by emotional signifiers. It is among the purest forms of expression the Mechanicus possess, and the most potent. In Rahn-Bo’s message is need, open and intoxicating. To her, the Kin ship is a wonder – a trove of technology, of secrets the Adeptus Mechanicus has dreamt of possessing for millennia. That need travels through the noosphere at the speed of thought, reaching every adept party to its shared mindscape, spurring their own hunger.

Sherax is not afforded the luxury to indulge in simple desire. For the ductrix, the vessel before them is a threat, first and foremost. Its bulk is festooned with weapon systems that she knows from archival recall would eviscerate the Peregrinus. Everything that makes it a grand prize for the Mechanicus makes it an existential threat to her ship, even if it is apparently dead in space.

But she feels Rahn-Bo’s need just as fervently. How could she not? Sherax is an explorator. To solve the great question of the Leagues – abhuman or xenos? Wayward branch of humankind, or aberrant abomination? – would be a material advancement of the Quest for Knowledge. An achievement so profound that none could ever again question her ability, or her right to the throne of the Peregrinus.

<Delay is an inefficiency we can ill afford, ductrix.>

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