>>96383405
>Salafié fell to her knees in stunned wonderment and took up the document as reverently as if it had been writ by the Emperor's own hand, not merely signed in his name. Of course, it may as well have been signed "in the name of throne-gelt," so vast and infamous was the campaign of bribery that had purchased this unassuming scroll. But the Priestess needn't know this, nor indeed did she need to know that the Rogue Trader had spent this fortune only to legitimize his claim to the cruiser she had seized from the forces of Chaos.
>If she had the least suspicion on either account, she showed no sign of it, nor would she have cared. Here was a thing she had never dared to hope for, offered, it seemed, freely and without condition! No more hiding along the fringes of civilized space. No more pseudonyms and false titles. No more desperate massacres when her secret was uncovered.
>Yet the Priestess had scarcely begun to consider the implications of what had transpired when the Rogue Trader whisked her from the chamber and conducted her under heavy guard to the station's docking bay, where the massive bulk of the dynasty's flagship lay just beyond the atmospheric forcefields, cargo shuttles darting to-and-fro in the cavernous hall. For so certain was he that Salafié would inevitably commit some new outrage and earn back her damnation that Cassius had ordered his fleet to be prepped for immediate departure some days earlier, and now that the hour was at hand, not a moment was to be wasted in removing the Priestess from the prying eyes of that strange official from Holy Terra.
>And so it was that not an hour after receiving news of her impending pardon, Salafié was on the bridge of her own captured cruiser, Navigatrix Mira sprawled alluringly at her feet, as the dynasty's fleet slipped its moorings and embarked on the journey to come...