Chapter 111: Miss Carpé, a Pleasure Doing Business
Negotiation was an art form, and the threat was its finest instrument.
Duvette understood this considerably better now than he once had. Looking at the dynasty heir across from him in the dim detention room, he was prepared to acknowledge that several extended interactions with Lord Inquisitor Juno Karol had been an education worth having.
The white light overhead threw hard shadows down onto both of them. On the floor between them, the man with the broken legs was still producing sounds.
"To be direct." Duvette shifted his weight back slightly, adjusting his own posture in a way that communicated a retreat from the pressure of the previous exchange. "I am not going to hand that creature over to you easily. A Rogue Trader heir who colluded with Chaos dying in my camp is not something I want attached to my name."
"I can handle him somewhere else." Venus's ice-blue eyes had moved from Tarik on the floor and were now fixed on Duvette with the quality of a person assessing a problem.
"That is not quite what I mean." He raised one hand. "What I mean is that concealing something of this magnitude, something that would ordinarily draw the Inquisition's full attention, carries significant personal risk. If this surfaces later and I am found to have known, the Colonel-Commissar who received a medal from the Chapter Master of the Ultramarines loses his rank and his freedom in the same moment. Possibly worse."
He met her gaze evenly. "So as an exchange for taking that risk, I want something substantive in return."
"What." The word was flat. "Supply stocks. Thrones. Profit Factor. Name your number."
She had been expecting the specific figure. It would have been straightforward. Duvette shook his head.
"None of those."
"No." He let a quiet sound that was not quite a laugh accompany it. "Large and unusual transactions on a hub world where an entire crusade force is assembling would attract exactly the attention we are both trying to avoid. I am not interested in anything traceable right now."
He looked at her directly. "What I want is a working relationship. With the Carpé family. And with you. This man can be delivered to you as a gift to establish that relationship. No initial payment required."
Venus pressed her lips together. Her brow moved slightly.
She had been raised inside a commercial empire built on centuries of exactly this kind of transaction. She understood the structure she was looking at. The ones who asked for money or goods directly were simple to manage. They had a ceiling and a calculable value. The ones who asked for relationships and goodwill, those were the genuinely dangerous operators, because the ceiling was entirely undefined and the obligation had no fixed expiry.
"You don't operate like a commissar, Mister Duvette."
"I have had some unusual influences." He shrugged without visible concern and raised one finger. "There are two distinct transactions here. First: between me and the Carpé dynasty."
"During the crusade that is coming, I will need access to supply categories that standard Munitorum channels cannot or will not provide. At certain critical points, I may also need orbital support from a private fleet. In exchange, the 112th will conduct operations that standard Astra Militarum units cannot complete, and some that would require Astartes involvement under other circumstances. Mutual benefit. Nothing unreasonable asked of either side."
He gestured toward the corridor beyond the door. "Your dynasty loses nothing and gains a significant military asset. We survive engagements that would otherwise cost us everything. That is the first transaction."
Venus was quiet for a moment. Something moved in her eyes that was measuring rather than hostile.
"You are not concerned about Munitorum and Arbites oversight? An Astra Militarum commander entering a private arrangement with a Rogue Trader dynasty is classified as a military warlord building unauthorized forces. If that determination is made, military internal security conducts a private tribunal. The conclusion is a firing squad."
Duvette smiled.
He stepped to her side and spoke at a volume that the door would not carry beyond.
"Miss Carpé. A Colonel-Commissar who just returned from the front line mobilized three thousand fully armed heavy infantry in an unsanctioned military operation in a major hub city, and the Adeptus Arbites and the Munitorum said nothing about it and thanked him for his service. You think that happened because I have a large personality?"
Her pupils contracted visibly.
"Do not measure me against standard Munitorum regulations. I have arrangements in place."
He returned to his position and let that settle.
"The second transaction." He looked at her. "Specifically with you, Miss Carpé."
"Dynasty successions are competitive by definition. Your brother took his risk with the Chaos heretics specifically to position himself for your father's seat. If you return to your father with a complete resolution, the crisis neutralized, the family's reputation intact, no Inquisitorial trail leading anywhere near the family's core, the impression you leave will be decisive and lasting."
He paused.
"I can work with you. Help you clear the remaining obstacles. Help you win."
Venus stared at him. The man in front of her shared almost nothing with any Imperial officer she had encountered in the course of her family's extensive dealings with the military establishment. He had walked into the most dangerous legal territory available on this planet and had come out of it with the Adeptus Arbites thanking him. He was now calmly proposing to make illegal arrangements with an ancient trading dynasty and to interfere in a succession fight.
"You aren't concerned I'll betray you?"
He laughed quietly. "Miss Carpé, in this galaxy, no one understands the management of betrayal better than a commissar. It is the professional specialty." His voice carried something that was neither a threat nor a reassurance but functioned as both. "Beyond that, this arrangement benefits you and the Carpé dynasty in ways that make betrayal the less rational option. I think you can see that."
The detention room was quiet for a moment. Then the door opened, and Venus walked out.
In her hands, wrapped tightly in a piece of heavy canvas, was something she had not been carrying when she came in.
Duvette followed her into the corridor. His expression had settled into something calm and satisfied.
"A pleasure doing business, Miss Carpé."
She did not turn around. She gave a single nod and walked away through the camp's darkness, two 112th soldiers falling in behind her as escort, until the tall cold line of her back had disappeared into the night.
Duvette watched her go.
He turned to Evan, who had been standing at his post beside the door with the expression of someone who has been following events with focused attention and has several questions he has decided not to ask yet.
"Find promethium. Clean the room. Nothing left."
Evan came to attention. He turned to go.
"One moment." Duvette's voice stopped him. "The physical evidence of his Chaos dealings. The recorded confessions. The hololithic footage. All of it has been backed up and secured?"
Evan turned back and nodded with the gravity of someone who had taken this particular instruction very seriously.
"Every piece. Fully backed up, sir. No gaps."
"Good."
He stood alone in the corridor after Evan left, and then walked out of the billet into the open ground at the camp's edge.
The wind off the cold side of Klassya moved through his greatcoat. The camp was quiet except for the rotation of the watch. The rest of the regiment was somewhere in the Warm District's night markets, using the hours of leave they had managed to salvage from the evening.
He stood in the dark and thought about what he had just done.
It was a dangerous move. Rogue Trader dynasties had accumulated centuries of resources and operating capability, and working with one against the direction of the Imperium's institutional machinery was the kind of gamble that ended careers and lives when it went wrong. The Carpé family had teeth, and the nature of the arrangement he had just proposed meant those teeth were close.
But the alternative calculation was also clear.
In the coming crusade, with private supply lines and fleet assets in place, the kind of support that no Munitorum allocation would ever provide in the quantities and configurations actually required, the 112th's survival odds changed materially. The Sabbat Worlds Crusade had no soft edges. Every regiment that entered it without every advantage it could find would discover what the galaxy's indifference looked like from the inside.
In this galaxy, there was no such thing as absolute safety. There was only an endless series of wars, each one asking for more than the last.
Duvette raised his head and looked at Pyrite's dark and distant sky.
Every step forward in this galaxy was a tightrope walk over nothing. He had no intention of falling.
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