The boy tugged lightly at the white collar around his neck, trying to ease the discomfort caused by the terribly ill-fitting clothes.
His right hand was gripped tightly by a thin, bony hand. Though that pale hand looked as if it were little more than skin over bone, its grip was astonishingly strong, and the boy could feel a sharp ache in his fingers.
But he did not struggle.
Because right now, he was excited.
The owner of that hand, his mother, had bought him a new set of clothes.
Though they were nothing more than an ordinary white shirt and a pair of black trousers, and though they fit him terribly, the boy felt as if he looked like one of the nobles from those little picture books pasted over broken pipes.
This was only the second set of clothes he had ever worn in his life. They were nowhere near as comfortable as the rags he had before, but they gave him a sense of dignity he had never felt before.
What made him happiest of all was that the mother who usually frightened him was wearing a smile he almost never saw.
When Mother smiled, she was the most beautiful person in the world.
Thinking that, the boy looked up at the woman before him, her lips curled into a strange smile, only to realize that he could not make out her face clearly.
Finding that a little odd, he tilted his head, then turned to look at the people around him.
There were so many people.
There were always a lot of people here, but why were there even more than usual today?
The woman's gaunt frame suddenly exploded with unimaginable strength.
She shoved through the crowd blocking the way, tightly gripping the boy's small hand without caring about his pained cries, and forced her way all the way to the very front.
When the people at the front were pushed aside, a scene that the boy would never forget was reflected in his eyes.
Everyone he had ever seen before, along with a great many he had never seen, stood crowded on both sides of a path lined by strong sailors.
Countless gazes filled with different emotions were fixed on the far end of that road, a road whose old grime had clearly been deliberately scrubbed away.
The boy stood on tiptoe and stared as far as he could in the direction they were all looking, and then a magnificently dressed man came into view.
At that moment, two bony claws seized his shoulders, and a crazed, blurry smile appeared before him.
"My child, my child, my good child..."
"Go to that man. Run to him. Hug his leg and call him father as loudly as you can."
"Remember, from now on, your name is not Solomon. You are Mordecai..."
...
"Solomon, Solomon, stop sleeping there and wake up."
A loud voice rang out beside his ear, instantly pulling Solomon from sleep as drool ran down half his face.
Half-opening his eyes, he lifted the captain's hat that had been covering his face, put it back on his head, and squinted at Gaia, who was standing beside the captain's chair on the bridge.
"Hey, what's wrong with you? I'm dead tired."
Solomon shook his head, flinging away the chaotic remnants of the dream, and grumbled unhappily.
He had a reason for being so tired.
Before reaching the Mandeville Point, he had set aside a full day to make up for all the sleep he had lost during the previous period of high-intensity micromanaging while trying to keep the ship from crashing.
Then Gaia had suddenly pulled him into that shocking grand plan of hers.
After she left, Solomon could not sleep anymore. He had spent half the night writhing on the bed like a living maggot in excitement.
And after that, he had been sleep-deprived all the way until now.
At this moment, he was as tired as a man in an old action film from Ancient Terra whose wife had just turned out to be trouble, or a college student dragging themselves to an 8 a.m. class in winter.
But very quickly, he no longer felt sleepy at all.
"A large number of derelict ships have suddenly appeared near us."
The moment those words left Gaia's mouth, Solomon's eyes widened like bells. He flipped himself out of the captain's chair in one motion and rushed over to the augur display.
The large screen showed countless white dots appearing all around them.
They varied in size, but every single one represented a long-dead vessel drifting in silence.
A grave expression appeared on Solomon's face.
Space hulks. One of the most infamous blind boxes in the Warhammer universe. Their prize pool was rich and wide-ranging, and some of the things that might still be living inside them could bring endless surprises to whatever ship encountered them.
And space hulks in the Warp were even more dangerous than normal. These metal tombs drifting through the void were, by their very existence alone, a promise of disaster.
Solomon tried to find a path that would let them escape the hulk field, only to discover that there was a single route forward which would keep them at a safe distance from all the derelicts.
"Damn it. How did we end up in the middle of all these hulks?"
Annoyed enough to start biting his fingers, Solomon snapped the question at the crewman beside him.
"We don't know. They seemed to appear all at once..."
The crewman swallowed and answered truthfully.
Solomon frowned. Based on his past experience serving in the Navy, this kind of thing was not unheard of.
After all, inside the Warp, the material universe's rules of distance and time did not exist, and without precise star charts, strange situations like this were perfectly possible.
These hulks were very likely a nodal region of the Warp itself.
"What is Mitchell doing? Why didn't he warn us ahead of time?"
Gaia stared out beyond the prow at those silent derelicts, drifting like lonely moving graves, and asked in confusion.
"We already sent someone to the sanctum to ask, and the answer we got was this."
"The road and the light are both blocked by mist. The stench of strays spreads in every direction, while the true danger lurks in the shadows... What do you expect me to do? That massive black haze cuts off my long sight. Perhaps only by pressing forward can we find the faintest glimmer."
After the crewman repeated Mitchell's words, the faint sense of dread that had been lingering in Gaia's heart grew strong once more.
She turned toward Solomon and found him deep in thought.
Pressing forward rashly meant enormous danger. But as things stood, they were already surrounded by this field of space-borne graves.
And judging by all the stories that circulated aboard ships, these seemingly silent drifting ruins could contain horrors beyond despair.
Solomon looked at the path on the augur display, one that almost seemed to have been deliberately carved out for them, took a deep breath, and ordered:
"Activate active augur scans. Raise void shields to maximum output. Don't worry about fuel consumption. Full speed ahead. We need to get around this hulk cluster as fast as possible."
From the current situation, this was the only option.
Every crewman remained at their station in silence. Countless eyes were locked on the three-dimensional augur projection hovering in the center of the bridge.
On the command deck of the great Spear of Destiny, it was now quiet enough to hear a pin drop.
That state of intense tension lasted for who knew how long.
By the time even Gaia was starting to feel worn down, the augur display suddenly lit up with a mass of fast-moving red contacts rushing toward the Spear of Destiny from every direction.
"Enemy contact!"
(End of Chapter)
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