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Perilously cold, horrifically toxic, and actively fought over by Winterscale and Chorda: Lucin’s Breath sounded like one of the least inviting planets in the Koronus Expanse, and if not for the invitation from the esteemed Kassard von Valancius (an Abelard-ism that had, tragically, become stuck in Lilith’s head) Lilith would happily have left it alone forever.
Instead she sighed around her lho-stick and decided she wasn’t going to get anything further out of reading the Siren Song’s archive entry on the planet. She thanked her cogitator’s dependable machine spirit, performed the rite of slumber, and — since no one else was around to see — tipped her chair back until she was balanced on the back legs, boots propped up on her desk. This trip was just one of the million obligations a Rogue Trader picked up along the way, so she would see it through.
A deep, metallic creak echoed through the bulkheads of her quarters. Not an uncommon sound during warp travel, but it meant Lilith was paying attention when the distant murmuring of machine spirits throughout the voidship changed its tone — more anxious chatter, messages sparking up and down the spine of the vessel, and concerning silences from the outermost machine spirits. She was already up and heading to the elevator when her servo-skull Felix, perched on her shoulder, started beeping error messages from the Navigator’s sanctum.
“I’m goin’, I’m goin’,” she told him, stubbing out her lho-stick.
Her vox spat out a burst of garbled noise that sounded like it had been from Vigdis originally. The ventilation system kicked on, blowing air at her that smelled like the filters were starting to get algae-clogged again, strong enough to put her hair in complete disarray. She clapped a hand to her head to keep her cap from being knocked off, but her fingers found only hair instead. The carpet shifted under her feet with a strange crunching noise, and she stubbornly took a few more steps before she felt gritty ground underfoot, no socks or boots at all, and it startled her enough into looking down, away from the elevator —
Vertigo hit in a moment of complete and utter disorientation. That was undeniably her own bare feet on an expanse of pale sand, all of it bright enough that she had to squint. Something shrieked right in her ear, and as she flinched backwards she caught a glimpse of the weight lifting off of her shoulder — a red-eyed seagull. It started flapping overhead, still shrieking occasionally.
It was hard to look at it. The sky above was a pure, cloudless blue, and the sunlight lanced into Lilith’s eyes from every side. This beach — it was obvious now that Lilith could see the water glimmering in the distance and smell the ocean — was dotted with people, alone or in small groups, though in the harsh sunlight they looked more like smudged shadows, the suggestion of distant crowds in a painting. It reminded her of the time she got lost and ended up on one of the beaches of Eirandi-whatsit, though with far fewer fishers.
The wind picked up, cutting through the sun’s baking heat, tugging at her hair again and brushing the hem of her dress against her knees — she was indeed wearing some stupid thing, a loose dress in an unfortunately familiar pale blue, that did not have a single pocket or holster to be found.
There was something she was forgetting — something she absolutely should be doing right now — but instead Lilith stood there for a long while, chewing on her lip and listening to the distant, uneven clamor of the crowds, before the answer finally presented itself. Before she remembered what she was doing.
Yrliet had been the one to bring all of them here, and now that Lilith was done and wanted to go home, she needed to gather up her scattered retinue and get out of here.
*
Lilith had been more or less aimlessly pushing through the crowds — and unfortunately it was pushing, since without any of her regalia she was reduced to barking at individual people to move or breaking out the elbows to avoid being overlooked — when she caught a glimpse of red hair and went off like a las shot toward it.
Thank the Emperor, it was Yrliet — sandwiched uncomfortably between a pair of tall Drukhari with unpleasant smiles. The Drukhari wore thin but fitted clothing that flared into spikes and showed old scars underneath, while Yrliet had on a short dress, halter-topped and patterned in a wave motif in the same teal as her armor, with a cutout for the spirit stone on her chest. Even though the dress looked like something a human would wear, it only served to accentuate her alien proportions. All three of them were holding pistol-sized metal-tipped darts, though Yrliet held hers pinched between two fingers like it was repulsive to her.
Standing a few paces away was their target, a scrawny guy — he reminded her most strongly of a PDF soldier who wouldn’t make the cut for the Guard — holding out an apple as far away from himself as possible.
As Lilith finally caught Yrliet’s eye, the one on Yrliet’s left threw his dart, hitting the apple with enough force to rip it out of his target’s hand and carve a red line across his palm with the tail. He crowed and elbowed Yrliet, who grimaced. “Now it is your turn, sister — do not hold back!”
The other Drukhari tossed their target another apple. “Place this one upon your head!”
He caught it in a still-bleeding hand and did so, though he couldn’t keep it from wobbling.
“Elantach,” Yrliet said, deeply relieved. “You should step back — you have suffered enough—”
“Yrliet, what the Throne are you doing listenin’ to these arseholes?”
Her expression went from startled to determined. “Enough!” she snapped. She threw the dart at one Drukhari — the metal tip embedded itself deeply in his shoulder — and whipped around to take the other’s dart and hold it up menacingly.
The two Drukhari and their unfortunate target wasted no time scattering, disappearing quickly into the crowds, leaving just Yrliet and Lilith.
Lilith held up a hand, forestalling Yrliet’s next comment. “I don’t care about apologies or stickin’ blame anywhere, I just care about getting out of here. Got it?”
“As clear and glad as the rising sun, Elantach,” Yrliet said, the tiniest hint of a smile on her face as she fell in behind Lilith.
*
A bright voice cut through the raucous crowd: “Praise the Emperor!”
It caught Lilith’s attention, and immediately she began squeezing her way through the dense knot of people toward it. Everyone was jostling to keep a good view of some sort of conflict: two groups (one human, one Drukhari) gathered on either side of a raised net, hitting a ball back and forth with their hands.
Dimly, Lilith recognized the ancient Terran sport of “volleyball”. One of her drill abbots had never shut up about the elegance and nobility of the sport — not that that was on display here.
“Sister Argenta!” Lilith called once she reached the edge of the arena.
“Rogue Trader!” Argenta said, pleasantly surprised. She joined Lilith but still kept one eye on the match.
Argenta, of course, looked perfectly suited to even these strange circumstances, in a very flattering black swimsuit, the top cupped with the Sororitas fleur-de-lis. From the obvious strength in her shoulders and her toned body, Lilith was reminded that Argenta spent much of her time carrying a heavy bolter looking for heretics to purge.
Lilith jerked her thumb over her shoulder at Yrliet. “We gotta get out of here.”
Argenta shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t abandon these righteous servants of the God-Emperor,” she said. “They need my assistance.”
Lilith patted at her absent pockets, then swore under her breath. “You’re just tryin’ to win a match?”
“Yes, but—” Behind her, one of her teammates missed a pass, falling face-first in the sand. The crowd cheered. “As you can tell, they’re struggling. But… I’m sure that with your help, we will prevail!”
Lilith swallowed her grimace. “Fine,” she said, running a hand through her hair. She missed her cap just to keep it and the sun’s glare out of her eyes.
Argenta’s eyes glimmered with renewed fervor. She called to her team, “The Emperor’s chosen has joined us!” and got a ragged cheer in response.
Lilith took her spot in the churned-up sand. A seagull swooped down and perched on one of the net posts, watching the match intently. (She caught a glimpse of familiar sideburns and glared daggers at Iako Sotniy, standing a few paces down from her, until he blanched and hid behind one of the other players.)
A Drukhari served the ball and it went back and forth a few times before coming towards Lilith. She dove and got to the ball before it hit the sand and nearly yelped. Where it touched her arms it burned — a line of fire that fizzled slightly at the edges — but when she looked, her arms were uninjured. Belatedly, she recognized the feeling as a glancing hexrifle shot.
She understood the trick now, and it explained the shoddy follow-through she’d seen on her teammates’ part. It wasn’t going to stop her.
The match was a painful slog. The ball kept conjuring up new kinds of phantom pain, from the skittering points of monofilament wire wrapped around her hand, to the ragged tear of a Khymera’s claws, to a grinding sensation inside her nose that she didn’t want to think about at all.
They had a few things going for them: their Drukhari opponents were happy to distract each other with infighting, the seagull — still perched on the net post — squawked whenever the ball came Lilith’s way, and Argenta was actually quite good at the sport and fearless in the face of pain.
In the end, though, it came down to luck. Argenta was the one to score the final point, in an impressive leap and spike. The crowd reacted with confusion and a bit of scattered booing, and then started to disperse. Most of their teammates crowded around Lilith, giving her profuse thanks and signs of the Aquila, before also filtering away, and Lilith, Argenta, and Yrliet were abruptly alone beside the abandoned court.
*
Lilith followed the noospheric sound of a somber binharic melody to find Pasqal sitting in the sand, looking down at his outstretched leg. Instead of his usual heavy sparkproof robes, he wore a thinner red robe akin to a dressing gown, open in the front to reveal more pallid skin and intricate augmetics than he usually allowed laypeople to see.
He had the knee joint opened up like he was performing maintenance rites on it, but he had none of the tools she would expect to see — only his fingers and the hem of his robe as a makeshift brush. His mechadendrites lay limply at his back, and his censer sat unused on the sand.
“Pasqal!”
He looked up stiffly at her. “The Omnissiah knows all, comprehends all, Lilith. Even in this abundance of ignorance.”
“What happened to you?” There was no danger apparent, just the same endless stretch of sunny beach, but her heart was in her throat nonetheless.
“Microsilicate contaminants have infiltrated my augmetics. I cannot continue while this impurity remains within my True Flesh — its mobility factor has been reduced to non-viable levels, and moreover it would be a failure of the Catechism of Maintenance and Operation to continue to use them in this state.” He looked back down at his knee with an air of deep resignation and removed a cover, revealing yet more sand.
“At least let me help you, then!”
Pasqal considered this for a moment. With an unpleasant grinding noise, one of his mechadendrites tried to wriggle toward his knee and then fell back again. “This request is granted,” he said eventually, and shifted to give her access.
Lilith needed no further prompting to sit in the sand beside him and take a look at the problem. It was obvious and pervasive: the mechanism of his knee was absolutely choked with sand — it had worked its way between almost every component and whenever he moved it just ground deeper into the metal. She could see places where it had already scored the more delicate components.
Together, they took Pasqal’s knees apart — Pasqal knew how to disassemble them, and Lilith had the dexterity to do it. Her hands, arms, and dress all ended up being used to wipe the sand out, and she didn’t give even the slightest of a shit that she got sacred unguent and machine oil on herself in the process.
“I thought your True Flesh was built to withstand this sort of muck,” Lilith said, shaking sand out of a piston.
“This statement is true,” Pasqal said. “And yet, it is evident that the seals and filters have failed. I will complete a full litany of maintenance once we return to the Siren Song, and perform penance for allowing my True Flesh to reach this state of disrepair.”
“I don’t think it’s your fault. There’s somethin’ weird about this beach.”
A seagull perched on Pasqal’s potentia coil and looked at Lilith with red eyes, so bright that they almost looked like they were lit from within.
“Irrelevant,” Pasqal said. “I am a servant of the Omnissiah and I am responsible for all of the technology entrusted to me.” He sighed. “Your assistance has been logged and categorized as: effective.”
“Acknowledged,” she said, pleased.
Lilith thought it had been more than an hour by the time they had Pasqal’s augmetics cleaned up enough to be usable; the sun had dropped from its zenith to something more like midafternoon.
In the soft sand, it took both Lilith and Argenta planting their feet and heaving to get Pasqal vertical once more. The seagull took off with an affronted squawk, but stayed fairly close overhead.
Lilith nodded. “Just Heinrix and Cassia now, and we can get the hell out of here.” Her satisfaction at getting at least one thing done right was tarnished only slightly as she patted her hip and swore under her breath.
*
The less said about Cassia’s rescue (human-sized inflatable ball, strong wind, rocky sand), the better.
*
In retrospect, Lilith wasn’t sure why she wandered off.
Argenta had found, along with a rough circle of collapsible chairs, an abandoned cooler full of a surprisingly wide variety of booze and snacks, so Lilith had called for a rest. Pasqal had deemed the food free from poisons or impurities, and everyone else had wasted no time digging in. (Cassia, once she had finished freaking out about the impropriety of her lacy lavender swimsuit, was also greatly enjoying herself throwing bits of food at a seagull and trying to get it to do tricks.)
Perhaps she simply had no stomach anymore for the bickering that inevitably followed; perhaps she was just being contrary. But the sand had formed a little dune closer to the water’s edge which looked like it would have a better view of the ocean, so off she went.
At the top of the dune, though, she spied a small mound of sand close to the water’s edge with a head sticking out of it. She’d recognize that short brown hair anywhere — an outsized jolt of panic went through her and she scrambled down the other side of the dune and ran over to him.
“Heinrix!” she called, uncomfortably aware of how close he was trapped to the water, close enough that she could hear the waves crashing right there.
Heinrix looked up at her as she knelt on the sand next to him. “Lilith,” he said, deeply relieved. “Some assistance would be appreciated.”
“How did you even—”
“I could tell you the story, but I hardly believe it myself.” He frowned and the sand entombing him shifted very slightly. “Regardless, if you would release me…”
“Right, right.” Lilith started digging, letting that nervous energy carry her forward. She uncovered his bare shoulders quickly enough, but progress slowed down after that as the depth of the hole increased.
Her fingers ached, sand jammed up under every nail. For a second she thought she could see the seafoam swirling around her feet, ready to drown him, but when she blinked it disappeared.
She paused her digging as he managed to slip his arms free, leery of collapsing more sand into the pit. His hand was clammy and sand-covered as he took hers; she squeezed it, and then they both got back to digging.
(Lilith wasn’t sure how to feel when she found that he was wearing swim trunks after all.)
Quite a bit of excavation later, Heinrix was able to pull his legs out of the sand entirely, and he wasted no time climbing up out of the pit they’d dug.
The waves crashed again in her ears. She turned to see how close of a call it had been — but the water’s edge was still a few paces off, and the sand under her feet was only damp. She sat down heavily by the edge of the hole.
He looked like he was working his way up to saying something entirely too genuine, so she blurted, “Throne, you’re as red as a Kastelan!”
It was true — he had a truly unfortunate-looking sunburn all across his face and shoulders — and it completely derailed his train of thought as he looked down at himself. “Warp take me, I am,” he muttered, dismayed. To Lilith, he continued, “I can remedy it, but it will take a little while. Where is the rest of your retinue?”
*
By now the sun was growing close to the horizon, casting long shadows in golden light.
Lilith, at the head of her little platoon, turned to Yrliet. “You were the one who got us here, Yrliet. Get your ride and get us out of here.”
For a moment, Yrliet had a distant look, like she was trying to remember something almost entirely forgotten. Then she focused once more and said, “It will take time, elantach — the Arebennian will likely not be available before nightfall.”
“This is absurd,” Heinrix said with a venomous glare at Yrliet. “How much longer will we be playthings in the hands of damned xenos?”
“Will you two just shut up for once in your lives?” For the millionth void-damned time, Lilith went to grab her nonexistent lho-sticks and once again remembered that she didn’t have any. “Throne-forsaken beach—”
They were still staring at her, so she turned away and kicked a stone, which turned out to be not loose but still firmly attached to the rock underneath the sand, so it did fuck all other than giving her as bruised toe and something more substantial to curse out.
Pissed off and feeling rather stupid, Lilith stomped off — well, it was more of an energetic limp, but she had meant it as stomping off. She wished she had a drink, or something to do with her hands — cleaning Felix or her bolt pistol would really hit the spot right now, but she had neither.
Eventually she sat down at an abandoned fire pit and busied herself coaxing the smoldering remains of the fire back into burning. There was still plenty of wood at the cold edges; it had just been left for long enough to collapse and burn down to a few remaining coals. All it needed was some careful application of kindling to get it back to its former function.
Lilith was the proud owner of a fist-sized flame and was feeding some of the medium-sized sticks into it when Heinrix cleared his throat behind her.
She turned around and spent a moment admiring the view before taking the offered bottle: his no longer sunburned chest, broad and hairy and well-muscled, the sort of treat that deserved to be appreciated. Her eyes followed the line of muscle down his hips to the bit of hair peeking up from his swim trunks — black swim trunks with thick red stripes on the sides, adorned with the symbol of the Holy Inquisition that glimmered golden in the fire’s light. That tempered her enthusiasm slightly.
“Cheers,” she said finally, clinking her bottle to his own. She took a drink and discovered that it was some sort of ale, cold and slightly sweet and not particularly strong.
He sat beside her but did not move to interfere with the fire at all. She wondered where he’d gotten the towel that now draped over his shoulders, a far less imposing imitation of his usual cape. Requisitioned it, no doubt.
As the sun dipped close to the horizon, the sky took on ever more unearthly hues: red-orange dominated the sky closest to the sun, of course, but tendrils of golden yellow, jewel blue, deep purple, and acidic green churned across the sky as well. Shadows stretched across the sand and pooled in every footprint and wave-mark. The fire formed a little bubble of light, just large enough for the two of them.
Lilith finished her drink, and between its chill and the cool breeze tugging at her hair she found herself shivering. Her dress had been nice and light in the heat of the day, but now it was sorely lacking.
“Are you cold?” Heinrix asked, amused and a little incredulous.
“What? No,” she said immediately, suppressing an even bigger shiver.
Nevertheless, he draped his arm over her shoulders, the slightly damp towel brushing against her arms.
She huffed. “Can’t even listen right,” she muttered, leaning into the warm expanse of his chest. She felt rather than heard his laugh in response.
For a while the only sound was the breeze and the crash of the waves. It was a comfortable quiet — not an uncommon occurrence when Heinrix was feeling cagey, and Lilith had come around to them more than she’d originally expected.
“This isn’t how it happened,” she said eventually. That fact had been lurking under the surface this whole time, and she couldn’t ignore it any longer.
“Mm, no,” he agreed. “It’s been something of a farce.”
“It’s a shame” — she tugged his face closer to hers — “‘cause this part hasn’t been that bad.”
He did not need any more of a hint to lean down the rest of the way and kiss her.
The change happened in a disorienting instant — Lilith stood once more at the elevator terminal in her quarters. Sound assaulted her from every direction: the warp transition klaxons were the loudest by far, but there was also Felix’s continued error messages in her ear, the clatter of warp-shutters opening over the windows, and the timid query from the machine spirit of the elevator asking if she still wanted to go to the bridge.
All was normal, except for the line of sand still crusted under her fingernails.