Daichi counted the heartbeats through the hull.
He pressed his palm to the hull and pushed a thread of sensory chakra through the metal. The hull was old, sheets of plasteel and ceramite welded over each other in patches, damage repaired over damage, and his chakra moved through the seams and the gaps and mapped what it found. Sixty-one signatures inside. Forty-three of them were clustered in a compartment two decks below the dorsal airlock, packed together tight enough that they were either there by choice or locked in. Eighteen more were spread across the surrounding corridors and junctions in ones and twos and threes, moving loose and unhurried.
The forty-three were small. Most of them. Women and children.
Daichi withdrew the thread and opened his eyes. The void stretched behind him, cold and black and full of stars, and the hull curved away beneath his feet in both directions. The chakra shell around his body held the vacuum at bay; Father had drilled the technique into them until it was as automatic as breathing. The ship was a repurposed bulk hauler, maybe four hundred meters bow to stern, with a command blister grafted onto the dorsal surface and weapon mounts bolted along the flanks without much thought to accuracy.
Yua appeared beside him on the hull with a quiet tap as she dropped her concealment. She wore dark grey over layered mesh, and her hair was pulled back and tied with a strip of cloth. Her face was still and her dark brown eyes moved across the hull and the weapon mounts and the airlock twenty meters ahead.
"Forty-three captives," Daichi said. "Two decks below dorsal, clustered in what looks like a cargo hold. Eighteen crew spread across the surrounding corridors."
Yua nodded. "Kei?"
A flicker of displaced space answered her, and Kei appeared on Daichi's other side in a crouch, one hand on the hull. His breathing was steady and a faint grin tugged at the corner of his mouth, the same grin he'd had since they were kids.
"Ventral hull's clear," Kei said. "The engine compartment has maybe six crew, all of them in the aft section near the reactor. There's a second group in what I think is the bridge, up in the command blister. Nine people, and at least three of them have spiritual energy dense enough to be augmented."
"Augmented how?" Daichi asked.
"Warp-touched. Not Psykers, not even close, but they're carrying something that baseline humans don't."
Daichi noted it. Warp-touched meant time near the Eye, and time near the Eye meant corruption, unpredictability, and possibly enough sensitivity to detect things normal humans couldn't.
"Can they sense us?" Yua said.
"No," Daichi said. "I threaded the hull with a suppression jutsu while I was scanning. To anyone inside, we're just static."
Kei's grin widened a fraction. "You're always so thorough."
"One of us has to be."
Yua looked at the airlock. "The captives. What condition are they in?"
"Alive," Daichi said. "Heart rates are elevated across the group, and several of the smaller signatures are weak. Children, probably malnourished or injured. I couldn't read restraints through the hull, but they seem free to move inside. They're penned, not chained."
"That's something, at least," Kei said.
Daichi took out a scroll. One of Father's designs; it could hold a hundred people for hours. He'd brought six. Two for the extraction, four as contingency.
"We go in through the dorsal airlock," Daichi said. "Yua takes the corridors between the airlock and the cargo hold. Clear the guards quietly and establish a perimeter. Kei, you enter from below through the ventral access and work up. Meet at the cargo hold. I'll handle the bridge crew and any Warp-touched who might raise an alarm."
Yua looked at him. "You're taking the bridge alone?"
"Nine people. Three augmented. It'll be faster if I don't have to coordinate."
Kei straightened from his crouch and stretched his arms overhead. "He's going to be fine. He's always fine."
"I know he's fine," Yua said. "I just want to make sure we're being careful."
"We're always careful," Daichi said. And then, because the old ritual mattered even now, he held out his right hand, palm up. Yua placed her hand on his, and Kei put his on top of hers, and for two seconds Daichi opened his chakra to them and felt the connection bloom.
Yua's steady warmth and the sharp focus beneath it. Kei's energy, bright and restless and eager, pressing outward. They felt each other–their minds and hearts opening, Ninshu.
The connection closed. They withdrew their hands.
"Two minutes," Daichi said. "Then we go."
Daichi pressed chakra into the airlock's lock and forced the bolts to disengage, and the seal broke with a soft hiss, and the inner door let him into the ship.
The corridor beyond was poorly lit and smelled of machine oil and rot. The walls were bare metal with wiring bundles running along the ceiling in uneven loops, and the floor plating was scuffed and stained and loose in places where the mounting bolts had corroded. The overhead lights flickered at irregular intervals, throwing the corridor into patches of yellow and shadow.
Daichi moved silently, his chakra absorbing each footfall before it could carry. He passed a junction and sensed two crew members in a compartment to his left, dull and slow with sleep, and continued past them. The bridge was ahead and above, through a vertical access tube that connected the main hull to the grafted command blister.
He reached the access tube and looked up. The tube was a cylinder of welded metal three meters across, with rungs bolted to the interior wall in a ladder that climbed fifteen meters to the blister's lower hatch. Light leaked through the hatch's seams.
Daichi walked up the wall.
He ascended at a steady pace, the rungs passing his shoulders, and at the top pressed his palm to the hatch and felt what was on the other side.
Nine signatures. Three were Warp-touched, and one of those three was significantly stronger, a dense core of corrupted energy pulsing at a slow rhythm. The leader, probably. The remaining six were baseline, at what looked like duty stations.
Daichi opened the hatch.
The bridge was cramped and ugly, consoles arranged in a semicircle facing a forward viewport that showed the starfield and the distant glow of a nebula. The lighting was better here, overhead strips that cast the room in a flat white and made everything look tired. The consoles were Imperial surplus, stripped of their aquilas and repainted in dark colours, and the displays showed navigation data and a tactical overlay tracking two other vessels in loose formation.
The nine crew members were exactly where his scan had placed them. Six at stations, hunched over consoles or leaning back in chairs, bored. Two of the three Warp-touched stood flanking the viewport, arms folded, watching the starfield. And the third, the strong one, sat in a command chair at the room's centre.
The commander was a woman, tall and lean, her shaved head covered in tattoo work that ran down her neck and under the collar of a stolen Navy officer's coat. Someone had ripped the insignia off and replaced them with symbols Daichi recognized from Father's lessons. Eightfold stars and spiraling patterns. Chaos Undivided. Her spiritual energy coiled around her in visible loops, dark and sluggish threads that sank into her skin and tracked her breathing.
She turned her head toward the hatch.
Her eyes found the open hatch and the empty space where Daichi stood, and her brow creased. Daichi was already inside the room, behind the nearest console operator, and his concealment held, and the woman's frown deepened.
"Garev," she said. "Did you leave the access hatch open?"
The man at the nearest console looked up. "No, captain."
The woman stood from her chair. The energy around her tightened, and her hand moved to the laspistol at her hip. "Check it."
Daichi moved.
He struck the two baseline crew nearest the hatch first, palms to the backs of their necks with a pulse of chakra, and they slumped forward onto their consoles without a sound. The third operator turned at the noise of a body hitting keys and Daichi was already there, his hand over the man's mouth and two fingers under the jaw, and the man went limp.
Three down in two seconds, and the room was just beginning to react.
The commander drew her laspistol and fired in the same motion, the beam crossing the space where Daichi had been standing a fraction of a second before he moved. The shot scored the ceiling and blew out an overhead light strip in a shower of sparks. The two Warp-touched at the viewport separated and dropped into combat stances, their corrupted spiritual energy flaring outward.
Daichi let them feel him.
He released the concealment and let his chakra bloom into the room. Both of them flinched.
The one on the left recovered faster and lunged with a combat knife that crackled with Warp energy. Daichi sidestepped the thrust and caught the man's wrist and rotated it inward, and the knife fell, and Daichi's other hand drove two fingers into the man's solar plexus with a burst of chakra. The man's legs buckled and he dropped.
The second Warp-touched opened his mouth and the air in front of him thickened as a psychic shout built in his throat.
Daichi's hand seal was faster. A single seal, and a root burst from the floor plating between the man's feet and wrapped his torso from hip to shoulder. The root squeezed and the air left his lungs and the shout died in his chest, and the man sagged and went still.
The remaining three baseline crew had scattered. One dove behind a console and stayed there. Another tried to run for a side hatch and Daichi was there first, and a palm strike to the sternum sat him down on the deck. The third raised his hands, palms out, and didn't move.
That left the commander.
She stood at the centre of the bridge with the laspistol aimed at him. The tattoos on her scalp seemed to shift in the flickering light. Her stance was braced and Daichi's gut told him she was going to fire again.
She fired. The beam struck a wall of wood that grew from the floor, the las-bolt boring a smoking hole through the first two centimeters and stopping dead in the third. Daichi stepped around the barrier and closed the distance and took the laspistol from her hand and sent it clattering across the deck. She threw a punch and he caught it and held her fist in his palm and looked at her.
"It's over," Daichi said.
The commander's face twisted and she surged against his grip, corruption flooding her muscles. Daichi held. She tried to headbutt him and he tilted his head and pressed two fingers to her forehead. Her eyes went blank and her body went slack and he caught her before she hit the deck.
The bridge was quiet. Seven unconscious crew, one restrained, one cowering behind a console with his hands raised.
Daichi looked at the man behind the console. "Stay there."
The man nodded quickly and pressed himself flatter against the deck.
Daichi crossed to the command console and studied the tactical display. The two escort vessels were still in formation. He disabled the ship's communications. The crew in the lower decks wouldn't hear a thing.
A faint and rhythmic vibration reached him through the floor. Kei, working his way up from the ventral access, probably forcing a bulkhead open.
Daichi allowed himself a small exhale and headed for the access tube.
He found Yua in the corridor outside the cargo hold, her back to the wall. Four crew members lay on the deck around her, unconscious, their weapons scattered. A fifth was pinned to the wall by roots, spread-eagle, his mouth covered.
"The corridor's clear from the airlock to here," Yua said. "Fourteen crew, all neutralized. I left them breathing."
The cargo hold's door was ahead of them, sealed from the outside with a locking bar.
"Locked from outside," Yua said. "The captives can't open it from within."
Daichi lifted the bar from the brackets and set it on the floor. He put his hand on the door and felt what was on the other side.
Forty-three people. Clustered in groups, most of them sitting or lying on the deck. Heart rates elevated. Several of the smaller signatures were very weak.
He pulled the door open.
The smell hit first. Body odor and waste and recycled air that had gone sour. The cargo hold was maybe thirty meters deep, bare metal walls and a ceiling low enough to feel oppressive. The floor was covered in thin bedding pads and scattered personal belongings and containers that had held food and water, most of them empty.
The people inside flinched when the light from the corridor fell across them.
The women wore civilian clothes, dresses and work suits and coveralls, all dirty and rumpled. The youngest child was an infant held in a woman's arms near the back wall, and the oldest looked to be about thirteen, a girl with short dark hair standing between the door and a cluster of smaller children, holding a length of metal pipe in both hands.
The girl raised the pipe when she saw Daichi in the doorway.
Daichi stopped walking and held his hands up.
"We're here to get you out," he said.
The girl's grip tightened on the pipe. Her knuckles were white and her arms were shaking and her jaw was set, and Daichi recognized the look because he'd worn it himself.
Yua stepped past Daichi and into the hold. She moved slowly, her hands visible, and knelt in front of the girl.
"Hey," Yua said. "What's your name?"
The girl stared at her. The pipe didn't lower.
"My name's Yua. The quiet one in the door is Daichi, and you're going to hear a loud one named Kei in about thirty seconds, but he's with us too. We came from outside."
"From where?" the girl said. Her voice was steady.
"From the Webway. We're taking you home."
The girl's eyes moved from Yua to Daichi and back. The pipe dropped to the deck with a clang.
"There are more of them in the lower decks," the girl said. "Guards. They rotate every four hours."
"We've handled the guards," Daichi said. "All of them."
A woman near the middle of the hold stood up. She was thin and exhausted and her face was gaunt and she held herself upright through visible effort.
"How?" the woman said. "There are dozens of them. They have guns and armor and..."
She trailed off and looked at them.
"We have our own way of doing things," Yua said. She rose and raised her voice. "We're going to move you somewhere safe. The process is going to seem strange, but I promise it won't hurt and you'll be out the other side in a few hours. I need you to trust me."
Kei arrived behind Daichi, slightly out of breath and grinning, and his eyes swept the hold and the grin dropped.
"They're in rough shape," Kei said, low enough that only Daichi heard.
"I know."
Daichi drew two scrolls from his pouch and unrolled them on the deck. The sealing formulae glowed faintly as he activated them, gold characters crawling along the surface in slow circuits. Father's work, refined across decades. The arrays could hold a hundred people each.
Forty-three faces watched him, some frightened and some cautious and some too exhausted to feel anything at all. The infant in the back of the hold was crying in thin and hitching sounds.
Yua was already moving among them, touching shoulders and speaking quietly and helping people to their feet. She pressed her palm to a woman's forehead and the woman's tight and frightened expression softened, and Daichi felt the brush of Ninshu pass between them. The woman took a breath and nodded and let Yua guide her toward the scrolls.
Kei knelt beside a boy of about five who was sitting alone against the wall with his knees drawn up and his face hidden. Kei said something that Daichi couldn't hear, and after a few seconds the boy looked up, and Kei held out his hand, and the boy took it.
The girl with the pipe was watching him. She'd picked it up again.
"You're really not with them," the girl said.
"No."
The girl looked at the scroll and the gold light. "What is that?"
"It's a seal. It'll hold you in a kind of sleep while we transport you. You won't feel the time pass, and when you come out you'll be somewhere safe."
"How do I know that?"
Daichi looked at her. He held out his hand, palm up.
"You’re just gonna have to trust me.”
"Okay," she said. "Okay. I believe you."
"Let's bring them home," Daichi said.
As they left, Yua activated the seals that would destroy the vessel, explosive seals upon the core.