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Summary: Samira and Felix meet again in the Hortus Node amidst greenery and lumen globes. Clearly the Tetrarch of all people will know how to speak to a Serf in his employ, wouldn't he? Also, Cominus suspects there is more to this meeting than his lord is letting on. And poor Daelus is getting pulled into this as well!
Word Count: Around 5k words (I'm getting better at this, I swear!!)
Chapter 6
“Samira.”
She started as she heard his voice cut through the din of the tiny slice of hydroponic paradise hidden aboard the strike cruiser.
Once she had overcome her surprise, she noticed that her name sounded different in his voice.
Until now it had only ever belonged to herself, to the silence of her own mind, or to the clipped acknowledgement of quartermasters and scribes who used it only to direct her from one duty to the next. In Lord Felix’s mouth it emerged low and measured, each syllable given its due weight, as if he was naming something he sought to handle carefully lest it break.
Samira lowered her gaze at once, clutching the docket harder against her chest.
“My lord.”
The words came out breathier than she intended. The garden was too bright; the air was too warm. The soft murmur of water through the narrow hydroponic channels and the faint rustle of leaves under lumen-suns made the whole place feel like a dream someone had hidden inside the ribs of a warship. And in the middle of it stood the Tetrarch of Vespator, vast and composed and unhelmed, his grey eyes on her in a way that made her feel seen far more keenly than she wished.
Felix stepped fully into the chamber and let the door sigh shut behind him, sealing them within the quiet green pulse of the Hortus Node.
For a moment neither of them seemed certain what ought to be spoken next and by whom. And so, they stood, Felix staring at the smaller form of the serf and Samira intently studying the way her feet looked against the flooring of the garden.
Samira was the first to break beneath the strain of it, as she dipped her head further down into a bow,
“I was ordered to report here, my lord,” she said, as if he could possibly be unaware of that fact. “At third bell.”
“Yes,” Felix replied.
They fell into another silent pause. It was not an unfriendly silence, even if it felt heavy, the kind that gathered when two people were aware of standing on the edge of something neither had prepared words for.
Felix cleared his throat, the sound low and almost unnecessary. “Your reassignment was confirmed,” he said. “Effective immediately. You will henceforth be attached to the Tetrarchal office.”
Samira blinked and looked up before she could stop herself.
“To the… Tetrarch’s office?”
Felix gave a single nod. “Yes.”
Her fingers tightened on the docket cover. “My lord, I… I do not understand.”
“That is evident,” he said, then seemed to realize how cold the words sounded. His expression altered by a degree so slight most people might have missed it. “You will be assigned to the personal archival department attached to the annex. The records there require care, discretion, and someone with a reliable memory.”
Samira now stared openly, her mouth slightly agape.
Assignment to the Tetrarch’s personal archival department wasn’t the worst of occupations one could find themselves in. Far from it, there would be serfs who would kill to be placed in such a cushy role. And to hear her assignment be declared aloud by the man who governed this vessel made it feel even stranger, more intimate, as if she had been told she was to be entrusted with a very important reliquary and she must accept it with open arms. Not that she had much of a say in the matter.
Her voice dropped.
“Why me?”
There it was.
Small, anxious, and entirely sincere.
Felix, who could discuss troop movements across three systems without once searching for a word, found himself stilled by a question asked in almost a whisper.
Why her indeed? Some voice inside him ventured the reason, if only to himself.
‘Because you remembered a thing I had not realized I needed remembered.’
‘Because you set figs and candied ginger by my table and yet, never once asked for notice.’
‘Because your name lodged itself somewhere behind my discipline and refuses to leave with the dignity required of it.’
He smothered that little voice with an iron hand, and instead, stood there like a man who had been handed the wrong weapon in the middle of a battlefield.
Samira watched him, alarm beginning to gather in her eyes, as if she thought perhaps, she had overstepped merely by asking.
As he saw her panic, Felix chose the first answer that presented itself and despised it even before it fully left his mouth.
“You were in the right place at the right time.”
The moment the sentence existed between them, it became obvious for the flimsy thing it was.
Samira’s brows drew together slightly, looking not particularly offended nor especially reassured. She looked merely puzzled, in that earnest way of hers that Felix felt more acutely than any accusation she could level at him.
“The right place…” she repeated softly.
Felix folded his hands behind his back, if only to hide the slight tremor that had set into his digits. “Yes.”
“And the right time.”
“Yes.”
Samira hesitated, then ventured with all the innocence of a woman placing her hand in the mouth of something huge because she had not yet realized it could bite, “Was the Tetrarch kind enough to induct every one of his serfs personally, my lord?”
Felix stared at her. Was that a witty quip? From the woman who dared not stare at him too long?
No… There was no mockery in her voice. No slyness. No attempt at boldness. She truly seemed to be asking.
That, somehow, made it worse.
A flicker of something bristled through him. Not anger exactly. His temper did not ignite so cheaply. It was more akin to the sharp discomfort of having a private absurdity held up to the light by the one person from whom he most wished to hide it.
“No,” he said, a shade too quickly. And the word landed with far greater severity than he strove for.
Samira’s eyes widened at once. “Forgive me, my lord. I did not mean to presume.”
“You did not presume.” Felix exhaled once through his nose, steadying himself. “You asked a question.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Her gaze fell again. She seemed prepared to disappear into the floor if propriety permitted it.
Felix looked at her for a long second.
She stood with her shawl wrapped close, the docket held like a shield, and there was something almost unbearable in the care with which she tried to occupy as little space as possible in a chamber built for growth. The leaves trembled faintly in the conditioned air around them, the water whispered through the channels. Somewhere above them the lumen globes cast a false gold over green things that had never seen a real sky, and Samira, against all reason, looked as though she belonged among them more than he did.
He should have corrected the course of this interaction at once. He should have kept it clipped and administrative, finished the formalities, and left her to her duties.
Instead, he heard himself say, quieter, “Your memory is useful. Your conduct has been consistent. You have shown care with small things.”
Only after the words left him did he feel the weight hidden in them.
Samira looked up again, startled.
Small things.
The phrase stirred some faint understanding in her face, though she did not seem to know what to do with it. Her lips parted, then closed. A blush, very slight and very human, touched her cheeks before vanishing again beneath caution and propriety.
“I only did what anyone should do, my lord.” she said.
Felix almost answered, ‘Then why is it so rare?’
He did not. The discipline of the years held much to his confused disappointment.
“You will find,” he said instead, “that what anyone should do and what anyone actually does are not always the same matter.”
Samira absorbed that in silence, unsure how to react.
A tiny insect droned past one of the planter rows. She tracked it for half a heartbeat, perhaps grateful for the interruption, and then looked back toward him with a nervousness that had not entirely settled.
“And what,” she asked carefully, “would my duties be, my lord?”
A practical question. Blessedly practical.
Felix inclined his head toward the deeper reaches of the node, where the garden pathways curved around planters and vanished toward a set of recessed doors half-hidden behind trailing vine and latticework. “The archival rooms lie beyond the inner beds,” he said. “You will assist with indexing, retrieval, cross-referencing, and preservation. Personal correspondence, campaign annotations, logistics supplements, local records from compliance worlds, requisition histories, sealed memoranda requiring physical organization. Materials of varying sensitivity.”
Samira blinked several times.
It was almost comical, the way each new duty seemed to settle on her one by one like birds choosing a branch already burdened beyond reason.
“That is a great deal, my lord.”
“It is,” Felix said.
Her grip shifted on the docket. “And… if I err?”
“You will be corrected.”
The answer came at once, firm and clean. Yet perhaps because he saw her shoulders draw tight at it, he added after a beat, “Preferably before the error becomes catastrophic. And gently.”
To his surprise, the corner of her mouth twitched.
It was a tiny, reluctant thing, gone almost before it existed. And Felix felt the absurd urge to preserve it like a line from a valuable text.
He was about to continue when the claxons began.
The sound tore through the garden with brutal suddenness.
Gone was the illusion of sanctuary. In its place came the hard metallic shriek of alarm, reverberating through the bulkheads, through the water channels, through bone. Samira jumped as though struck. The docket slipped in her fingers. Her breath caught sharply, and for one flashing instant her face emptied into the pure startled panic of someone whose body remembered danger faster than thought.
Felix moved before deciding to.
His hand came down on her shoulder, broad and steady, instinct driving the gesture with the clean immediacy of battlefield reflex.
“Steady.”
The word was low, almost swallowed by the alarm.
Samira froze beneath his touch.
So did he.
Her shoulder under his palm felt slight, warm through the rough cloth of her shawl. Real. Entirely too real. The contact lasted no more than a heartbeat, perhaps two, yet in that sliver of time the shrieking claxons seemed to recede behind the far more dangerous awareness that he had laid a hand on her as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
Samira lifted her eyes to him.
Shock moved through them first. Then confusion. Then something softer and more undefended that neither of them had any business witnessing.
Felix withdrew his hand at once.
The absence of it felt immediate.
“It is likely a drill,” he said, though his voice had gone more formal than before. “Or a transit warning from a neighbouring deck. There is no cause for alarm.”
Which, he realized, was an absurd sentence to utter while alarms screamed around them like tortured souls seeking release.
Samira swallowed. “No, my lord. There isn’t.”
Felix knew instinctively that she was lying for his sake, or perhaps for her own dignity. Her fingers were trembling where they held the docket, now more precariously than before. Felix noticed because it seemed of late, he was becoming very observant, almost offensively aware of every movement she made.
The claxons continued for a few moments longer, then shifted tone, settling into a lower repeating cadence that sounded less like imminent catastrophe and more like procedural warning.
Felix seized upon structure with visible relief.
“This way,” he said.
He turned, then paused just enough to be certain she followed.
Samira did, though not before stealing one tiny, bewildered glance at the shoulder he had touched, as if she could still feel the imprint of that impossible steadiness there.
They moved along the stone-lined path between the planters. The claxons rang at intervals now, distant enough to feel less vicious, though Samira still startled faintly each time the sound rolled through the chamber.
Felix noticed that too.
“The inner archive is climate-controlled,” he said, giving her facts because he wanted to fill the silence with something other than the claxon clangs. “Some of the materials stored there predate my current appointment. Others are active records. You will be shown the seal protocols. Access beyond your clearance will remain restricted unless otherwise authorized.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“There are handling rites for certain parchment stocks. Some inks react poorly to excess heat. Some bindings are older than the men who guard them. You will not rush.”
“No, my lord.”
“And you will ask when uncertain.”
That made her glance up again. “I may ask?”
The question struck him almost harder than the earlier one.
Felix looked forward as they walked, because looking directly at her while answering felt unwise. “You may ask when the matter concerns your duties.”
A brief silence.
“That seems fair,” Samira said.
There was such earnest acceptance in it that something in him nearly gave way into laughter, or despair, or some hybrid of the two.
At the far side of the garden the recessed doors came fully into view, framed by climbing ivy that had been coaxed with impossible patience around iron supports. A pair of discreet sigils marked the entrance. Beside the doors stood a narrow cogitator column, its surface lit by waiting runes.
Felix stopped beside it and keyed a code into the plate.
As the lock disengaged, he spoke without looking at her.
“You will carry on from here.”
Samira stood very still. The alarms had faded further now, leaving only the hush of water and the ever-present hum of the ship beneath everything.
“My lord,” she said, hesitant.
Felix turned slightly.
Her eyes were lowered again, though not entirely. There was still confusion in them, and caution, and something gentler he did not dare name.
“Thank you,” she said. “For… showing me.”
The archive doors slid open with a quiet mechanical sigh.
Felix held her gaze for one fraction too long, then inclined his head with all the restraint he could gather around himself like armour.
“It is an induction,” he said. “Nothing more.”
Samira nodded, though something in her expression suggested she did not wholly believe him. Then, clutching her docket and her composure with equal care, she stepped past him into the archival rooms beyond, while behind them the impossible garden continued to breathe in the heart of a warship, and Decimus Felix remained standing at the threshold like a man who had just crossed one of his own.
When the archive doors sealed behind Samira, Decimus Felix remained where he stood for one heartbeat longer than necessary.
Then another.
The garden breathed quietly around him, the gentle murmur of the hydroponic channels the more immediate ambient sound now. The claxons had dulled now into the lower, procedural cadence of a vessel correcting its own pulse. Nothing in the chamber suggested disorder, or that anything had occurred beyond the induction of a reassigned serf into her new duties.
And yet Felix stood at the threshold like a man who had just survived a skirmish no one else would ever think to name.
Her question had lodged itself under his armour with indecent precision.
Why me?
It had been asked with no artifice, no calculation, no hidden barb. That made it far more dangerous than accusation would have been. Accusation he could have answered. Suspicion he could have parried. But innocence, offered plainly into his hands and left there, demanded a kind of honesty for which he was not prepared. Not yet.
He exhaled once, slow and controlled, and turned away from the archive doors.
The path back through the Hortus Node seemed shorter than before. He passed beneath the false gold of the lumen-suns, through the orderly green of planters and trellised vines, past a narrow channel where the water caught the light and broke it into trembling lines across the stone. Somewhere overhead, a ventilation unit hissed and settled.
He strove to carry on his way, without once looking back.
The access door irised open at his approach. Beyond it, in the narrower corridor outside the annex junction, Cominus was waiting exactly where he had been ordered to wait.
He stood with Troncus and Cadmus flanking the corridor at measured distance, the three of them arranged with that effortless geometry Astartes seemed able to assume without discussion. As promised, they had not intruded, choosing instead to become a wall in transhuman form. They held the perimeter around their lord’s absurd administrative indulgence as if it were a battlefield objective.
Cominus’ helm was clipped to his belt. His face, as ever, looked as if it had been carved from some dour mountain range and had only occasionally been taught to smile.
His eyes flicked once past Felix’s shoulder toward the sealed door to the Hortus Node. Then back to Felix.
“My lord,” he said.
Felix adjusted one cuff of his glove. “Sergeant.”
A moment passed in silence, as Troncus and Cadmus had the sense to become scenery.
Cominus’ gaze remained steady, and maddeningly unreadable. “The alarm was a transit discrepancy on Deck Nine. Resolved. No threat to the annex.”
“I assumed as much.”
“I also assumed,” Cominus said, in the same flat tone, “that your important archival duty would require fewer minutes.”
Felix looked at him.
Cominus, to his credit, did not so much as twitch. Only the faintest roughening at the edge of his voice suggested he was allowing himself a degree of insolence strictly earned through years of brotherhood and loyal service.
“I had not known,” he continued, “that inducting new serfs into your employ had become a matter requiring such personal attention.”
Cadmus’ eyes fixed themselves very firmly on the opposite wall while Troncus developed an immediate and consuming interest in a lumen strip.
Felix gave Cominus a long, level look.
It was the sort of look that, from another commander, might have promised censure. But the many years of brotherhood between the two men made that look something with a much deeper meaning. A voiceless plea to not probe into it, if he can help it. The silence stretched on for a moment longer, acquiring the necessary weight it needed.
At last, Cominus inclined his head by a fraction, the barest acknowledgment that he had pressed as far as duty allowed and would go no further.
He was, after all, good at his work.
As Felix stepped past him, Cominus’ eyes moved once more to the sealed garden door. His expression did not alter, but his mind was plainly already turning over the necessary calculations. A reassigned serf had been brought into proximity with the Tetrarch. The serf had been personally met. The Tetrarch had taken longer than expected and emerged quieter than he had entered.
That was enough to become a matter of record.
Cominus touched two fingers to the vox-bead at his gorget, his voice dropping into the private register of command.
“Cadmus,” he said, without taking his eyes off the corridor ahead, “pull the personnel trail on the new archive reassignment. Full background. Prior stationing, disciplinary marks, surviving attachments, references, if any remain.”
Cadmus turned his head by a precise degree. “Name?”
Cominus’ mouth flattened. “Samira.”
There was no embellishment in the order. No implication, nor malice. It was simply the clean instinct of a warrior who had buried too many lords and brothers to leave coincidence unmeasured.
Felix heard every word, but he did not break stride.
If Cominus wished to know who had been allowed near the edges of his liege’s orbit, then Cominus would know. Such caution was as natural to him as breathing. Felix had neither the energy nor the authority of conscience to object to a man doing the duty for which he had been chosen.
Besides, part of him understood the instinct too well…that understanding did not make it any less disquieting.
They moved away from the annex junction together, the Honour Guard closing around him with practiced subtlety. The corridor lights shifted gradually from the warmer glow of the Hortus access passage to the colder lumen clarity of the command arteries. The ship’s hum strengthened underfoot. Crew moved at the edges of their path, flattening instinctively to the walls or bowing their heads as the Tetrarch and his chosen passed.
Felix acknowledged none of it beyond the minimum required by awareness. His mind had already turned inward, retreating into the one place on the vessel where it could become an adversary. Around that one question.
Why me?
‘Because you remembered figs.’
The thought came unbidden, absurd and immediate.
‘Because you left ginger on a table with no expectation of thanks.’
‘Because there was kindness in you that no system had ordered, and therefore no system had accounted for.’
He crushed that particular line of thought before it could gather shape.
By the time he reached the bridge of the Lord of Vespator, his face had resumed the full stillness expected of him. The command sanctum opened before him in tiers of lumen, slate-glow, and disciplined motion. Officers bent over tactical hololiths. Vox-adepts murmured to their stations. Servo-skulls traced preassigned patrol arcs between data lecterns. The vast forward displays gleamed with the ship’s vital readings, even as it cut through the empyrean with decisive precision.
This was the proper shape of his world.
Numbers. Vectors. Reports. Munitions inventories. Atmospheric recycling ratios. Planetary correspondences from Vespator awaiting his review in tidy stacks of urgency.
Here, no one asked why me? without meaning something strategic by it.
Felix crossed to the command lectern and placed both hands lightly on its edge. Instantly the nearest attendant activated his queue. Slate after slate lit to life. Current orbital harmonics. Fleet spacing. Readiness indices from subordinate captains. Vespatorian infrastructure summaries awaiting cross-reference against prior quarter reports.
He began issuing orders with the calm efficiency of long practice.
“Patch Captain Lyras through on secured channel three.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“I want updated assessments from the Master of Vox and the chief logisticians before fourth bell.”
“At once, my lord.”
“Deck Nine’s transit discrepancy. Cause?”
A lieutenant turned from his station. “Failed lumen regulator during post-translation stabilization. Minor panic in adjacent hab corridor. No lasting damage.”
“Record it and have Daelus inspect the chain personally. If one regulator failed, others may follow.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Duty flowed over him like cold water. Briefly, it worked. Each instruction placed a stone atop the turbulence within, building structure where for a moment before, there had been none. Minutes passed in useful sequence as the bridge bent itself around his command and the ship answered, great and obedient.
Yet even as Felix spoke of patrol dispersals and civic assessments, a corner of his mind remained fixed in a garden under false sunlight, hearing a soft voice ask a question he could neither accept nor dismiss.
Why me?
‘Because I saw you.’
That answer was worse now, and it almost made him wince.
Felix straightened imperceptibly, as if posture alone might force the thought back into silence.
He had built a life from discipline. He had survived war, crusade, rupture, and millennia of a galaxy intent on collapse, and it was mostly because he understood the necessity of order. The self was a thing to be governed no less firmly than a world.
And yet he had smeared ink for her.
He had altered a docket trail with his own hand.
He had laid a palm upon her shoulder without thought.
This was no longer a passing irregularity. It was the beginning of something that might one day demand speech.
That was what unsettled him most.
Not the feeling itself, though that was trouble enough. It was the growing suspicion that, in time, she would ask again. And if she asked again with those grave, earnest eyes fixed on him, he might be required to answer truthfully.
The thought made his jaw tighten by a degree so slight only a brother of long familiarity would have caught it.
Which was precisely why the amused voice at the sanctum entry said, “Well then. I see the bridge has not yet exploded. A personal disappointment, I admit. I was hoping for a more theatrical welcome.”
Felix did not need to turn to know who it was.
Daelus strode in with the easy self-possession of a man who belonged equally in a reactor chamber, a shrine of machine rites, or the sanctum of high command, provided he was permitted to complain in all three. Sacred oils clung faintly to him beneath the metal tang of the ship. One servo-arm shifted behind his shoulder with insect precision before settling again. His expression, as usual, wore irreverence like a ceremonial cloak.
He offered Felix a shallow bow that somehow managed to be both respectful and faintly mocking.
“My lord Tetrarch,” he said. “Ship systems remain intact. Against all odds and several of the crewmen’s best efforts.”
Felix accepted the report with dry gravity. “You disappoint me. I had been promised catastrophe.”
“I contained it in the spirit of professionalism,” Daelus replied. “The enginseers are offended but functioning. Plasma balance is steady. Deck Nine’s regulator failure was isolated. I’ve assigned a maintenance rite and two lectures. One technical, one spiritual. The second generally frightens them into better habits.”
A few nearby officers suppressed smiles without daring to show teeth.
Felix allowed the slightest inclination of his head. “Good.”
Daelus’ gaze, sharp beneath all the humour, lingered on him half a second too long.
Then drifted, almost lazily, to Cominus.
Cominus stood to the side of the lectern in full command stillness, which was to say he looked exactly as he always did except perhaps for the microscopic stiffness that came when he was refusing the temptation to be entertained.
Daelus lifted his brows in silent inquiry.
What has happened?
Cominus’ face remained a masterpiece of disciplined vacancy. If marble could have chosen disapproval as a vocation, it might have resembled him in that moment. He did not answer the look. He did not so much as blink differently. The only concession was the faintest narrowing of one eye, which in another man might have meant nothing and in Cominus meant, with exquisite precision, Everything and nothing. Ask me later if you truly wish to know.
Daelus’ mouth twitched.
And Felix saw it.
His two battle brothers conducted mischief the way other warriors conducted a weapons drill, with fluency born of practice and the irritating confidence that they were more subtle than they actually were.
He set down the slate in his hand with exact care.
“Techmarine,” he said.
Daelus straightened at once, though his eyes still glimmered with barely concealed amusement. “My lord Tetrarch?”
“You have delivered your report.”
“I have.”
“Excellent. Then continue your duties.”
Daelus’ expression became one of injured innocence. “You wound me with the thought that I would do otherwise.”
Felix turned his gaze to Cominus without moving his head. “And you, Sergeant, will refrain from communicating by expression in the middle of my command sanctum like a schola child avoiding a proctor.”
A pause.
Then, because even discipline could not wholly strangle it, one of the bridge attendants coughed suspiciously into his sleeve.
Cominus bowed his head. “As you command, my lord.”
Daelus, to his credit, did not laugh aloud. The effort of not doing so made his face briefly resemble a man swallowing a live electrical component.
Felix let the silence sit long enough for the both of them to understand that the matter was closed.
Then he reached for the next slate and activated the planetary report stack. “I will now be catching up on the current status of Vespator,” he said, his tone making clear that this was both statement and dismissal. “Captain Lyras will have my response within the quarter cycle. The rest of you will spare me creative interpretations of my schedule.”
“Yes, my lord,” Cominus said.
“Gladly, my lord,” said Daelus, which was plainly untrue.
Neither of them moved immediately. They knew evasion when they heard it. They also knew better than to press him while he wrapped himself back into office and obligation.
Cominus was the first to yield. He inclined his head once, then turned to resume his station with the grave patience of a man filing questions away for later retrieval.
Daelus lingered only long enough to give Felix one last measuring glance. There was humour in it still, but beneath the humour lived perception, old and annoyingly kind. Then he, too, withdrew, leaving behind the faint scent of oil, iron, and withheld commentary.
The bridge settled around Felix once more.
Reports unfurled once more in ordered streams across the lectern. Vespator’s grain tallies. Manufactorum output. militia readiness. labour fluctuations in the lower districts. Weather control deviations in the northern habitations. All useful things, measurable… containable things.
He bent over them as if the whole weight of the world could be borne in figures and directives.
Yet somewhere beneath the orderly avalanche of duty, the question remained.
Why me?
Felix read the first line of Vespator’s current civic assessment and did not see it.
He saw instead a small woman in a false garden, clutching a docket to her chest, looking up at him as if he might say something that made sense of the world.
And for the first time since he had taken up the burden of command, Decimus Felix found himself fearing not the weight of an answer, but the day he would have to voice it out loud.
Aaaaand there we have it! I'm sure Daelus and Cominus are going to stage an intervention soon enough! But imagine Daelus' surprise when he puts two and two together and has the quintessential light bulb above his noggin go off! Oooooh Felix, you'll never hear the end of it, bud!!
As always, thank you so much for taking the time to read this! And I hope to see you all in the next one! Until then, I love you and may you all have an amazing Friday/weekend ahead!
