Warhammer, Emperor's Chosen

"Hello, Priestess Nono."

Noah was silent for a long moment before nodding slightly in greeting. But Abelard, standing beside him, couldn't contain his urgency and blurted out: "Your Excellency, this is no time for pleasantries. Please, open the door quickly! Lady Theodora is still waiting for our assistance!"

Priestess Nono's smile faded, and her cold, cerulean eyes swept over Abelard with an indifferent gaze, sending a chill down his spine.

She retrieved a divination instrument and directed it toward the center of the door, pretending to commune with the machine spirit.

But Noah could see through the act.

Nono herself was the machine spirit of this ship. If the door could be opened, she would know without needing any attempt at communication.

However, if Nono had a physical form, did that mean his other "wives" were here too?

After all, since they were his custom creations, their backstories were as grand as they could get. As a planetary governor at the start, his "wives" naturally had identities as illustrious as possible.

Take Nono, for example. He had made her the Great Sage of the Mechanicus... Although assigning someone of her status to serve as an engine prophet on a cruiser was arguably overkill. Still, when Noah was designing his "wives," such details didn't concern him.

Though most of his other "wives" weren't aboard the ship, he remembered that the Vox Master was also supposed to be one of them. The original Vox Master had been too unsightly for his taste, prompting Noah to create a more visually pleasing "wife" for the role.

But now the ship's Vox Master was still Vigdis. So, where was the "wife" he'd designed?

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The divination instrument began to hum with a hymn praising the machine spirit. The massive pistons on the wall let out hissing sounds like pressure valves, and the door began to open in a complex sequence—each door revealing another, opening at different angles.

The first slid sideways, the second tilted open, and the third moved vertically.

Inside, there was no breathing, no wailing cries of pain or pleas for help—only the quiet hum of machinery.

Ignoring standard tactical procedure, Abelard didn't take cover on either side of the door but instead led the deck enforcers in a desperate charge inside. Their footsteps shattered the eerie silence, and a barrage of lasers erupted from the darkness, accompanied by the crazed screams of cultists.

It was a relatively small-scale skirmish. With reinforcements from a large number of deck enforcers, the cultists were quickly forced to retreat.

Finally, silence returned.

The air reeked of blood so strong it was nauseating. The floor was littered with corpses, evidence of the carnage that had recently unfolded—scattered bodies of cultists lay around the observation platform, gunned down by the enforcers.

But more prominently, the corpses of servitors were piled at the center of the platform. Among them, Abelard spotted the broken body of the Rogue Trader.

Trembling, he approached Theodora, whose body was riddled with dozens of laser wounds. Her forehead bore the charred mark of a lasgun shot, blood trickling from the blackened hole. Her lifeless eyes still retained a hint of shock.

"Lady Theodora..."

Abelard's voice shook as he spoke, his trembling words betraying his realization of a painful truth:

The Rogue Trader was dead!

The lord-captain of this ship and the ruler of several planets under the von Valancius dynasty had fallen to cultist fire.

And it was all because he had failed to provide timely assistance.

"I am sorry."

Priestess Nono stepped forward, her massive power axe clanking against the floor. She calmly analyzed the situation: "Despite the servitors' efforts to protect their master, it seems the cultists gained the upper hand."

Abelard didn't respond. Instead, he silently counted the corpses strewn about.

Lady Theodora, her chief warrior, the Master of Whisperer Kunrad, and the young Edsaid—all lay dead in pools of blood.

Yet their causes of death were starkly different.

Theodora and her chief warrior had fallen to cultist gunfire, their bodies marred by numerous lasgun burns.

But Voigtvir and Edsaid seemed to have been torn apart by some sort of melee weapon. And these weapons weren't sharp—they had left their bodies mangled.

The only weapons on-site matching the injuries were the mechanical claws of the servitors.

A battle-hardened veteran, Abelard quickly reconstructed the scene in his mind:

Theodora had been surrounded by cultists, her chief warrior and the servitors fighting desperately to protect her. But the servitors' protective actions inadvertently obstructed her escape, ultimately resulting in all of them being gunned down.

But the servitors couldn't be blamed.

Having had their cerebral lobes removed, they had no capacity for independent thought and simply followed their programmed instructions.

Yet why had Voigtvir and Edsaid been killed by the servitors?

Abelard could only think of two possibilities:

Either the servitors malfunctioned and killed Voigtvir in their confusion, or someone commanded the servitors to kill them.

The likely suspects for issuing such an order were Theodora and her chief warrior. But why would they want Voigtvir dead?

The answer seemed obvious:

They were traitors!

Although lacking concrete evidence, the situation was so apparent that Abelard nearly pieced together the entire truth while subconsciously ignoring certain details.

For instance, some servitors hadn't been killed by cultist gunfire but by the chief warrior's chainsword and Theodora's inferno pistol.

But even this could be reasonably explained:

The servitors' "protection" had hindered Theodora's escape, forcing her to kill two of them to carve out a path through the crowd. The chief warrior likely had done the same.

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Just then, a panicked voice came through their comms: "The bridge is under attack! Requesting immediate reinforcements! Repeat, the bridge is under attack!"

Even faced with such unexpected news, Noah worked hard to maintain his composure and suppress his grin: "Commander, now is not the time to grieve. We must head to the bridge immediately and get out of the Warp!"

Abelard clenched his fists but knew Noah was right. There was no time for mourning.

If the ship were lost in the Warp, everyone aboard would perish!

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Aboard the Stellar, the Bridge

What had once been an orderly command center had become a chaotic battlefield.

The heavy doors leading to the bridge had somehow been breached by cultists without a sound. When Noah and his team arrived, dozens of cultists had already seized most of the bridge, engaging in a fierce firefight with the officers and enforcers who had stayed behind.

Sister Argenta's bolt pistol fired the first shot, obliterating a cultist leader standing with his back to them.

A storm of lasgun fire followed, with Noah's team and the bridge enforcers attacking from both sides, slaughtering the unprepared cultists one by one.

"Where's the helmsman? Where is the helmsman?!" Noah shouted.

"My lord," a surviving officer replied, "Lord Ravor has already fallen during the cultist attack."

Abelard's face darkened. He rushed to the officer's side and confirmed the corpse on the floor—it was indeed Helmsman Ravor.

Noah furrowed his brow.

"Re-establish communication with the Navigator's sanctum immediately!"

Abelard glanced at Noah. Before joining this ship, Noah had been the planetary governor of a hive world—a position not easily attained. Ever since Theodora's death, Noah had naturally assumed command of the fleet. Abelard had no objections, as no one aboard was more qualified to inherit the von Valancius family's leadership than Noah.

Abelard hesitated for a moment before speaking:

"My lord, before meeting you, I had just come from the Navigator's sanctum."

After a brief pause, Abelard continued: "The Warp storm that struck the von Valancius fleet claimed the Navigator's life in the process."

In the Warp, only two kinds of individuals could safely guide the ship back to real space: Navigators and helmsmen.

The former handled navigation, while the latter piloted the vessel.

If the Navigator died, the helmsman could still operate the ship to exit the Warp, though potentially veering off course.

But if both were dead, the situation could be summed up in one word:

Doomed.

Other helmsmen could steer the ship, but they lacked the helmsman's expertise. Even if they exited the Warp, the likelihood of emerging in a hazardous location—such as a planet's gravity well—was significantly higher, risking catastrophic failure.

"I can pilot the ship," Priestess Nono suddenly declared.

Abelard froze for a moment, then broke into a relieved smile.

Though other helmsmen were available, when a Tech Priestess of the Mechanicus—or rather, the Adeptus Mechanicus—claimed she could handle it, she almost certainly could.

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6. I Need to Regroup the Fleet.

7. The Orders Pronatus.

8. The Young Lady Excels at Getting into Trouble at Lightspeed.

9. The Target, Macragge!

10. The Astral Claws.