Rogue Trader: The Trial of Brother Aphesius for Arson in the Emperor’s Dockyards

In their most recent operations in the Acheron Sector, Rogue Trader House Frunze has had the exceptional misfortune of employing two missionaries from the Ecclesiarchy, and seeing both of them put on trial for various high crimes against both the Ecclesiarchy and the Adeptus Terra – one of them twice. This is a selection of transcripts and accounts from those trials, starting with the trial of Brother Aphesius for Arson in the Emperor's Dockyards.

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Entry from the Periplus Ultra Pars Akherontis:

Vestigium Hanini (O.Ac.U.5) Imperial navy outpost. Some small scale mining operations.

The station at Vestigium Hanini stands at the head of the Holy Gates as the first stop in Ultra Pars for voidfarers from the coreward sector, and serves as a transit hub and naval outpost. Two routes run from Vestigium Hanini to Babylonia Typhonis: the circuitus meridionalis to the galactic south, a longer route passing through the dead system of Fortunae Bellum; and the circuitus septentrionalis to the galactic north: a shorter route, but passing through the hazardous dentae typhonis, an unstable area before Auster Clementiae.

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Excerpt from Synopticon quarterly monitoring report from Vestigium Hanini, 1/944M41:

On Emperor's Day, the station was shockingly attacked by the foul xenos known as the Eldar. Station security, assisted by His Excellency the Rogue Trader Frunze and his retinue, drove the alien enemy from the station; in co-ordination with the Imperial Navy, His Excellency pursued the xenos to the Fortunae Bellum system and destroyed a suspected enemy facility there.

Even though the xenos were quickly vanquished, their treacherous attack had targeted the voidfarers' quarters on the station. Several plasma grenades were detonated in the dormitories, causing heavy casualties. In the aftermath, the remains of the dead xenos were collected and stored in the security compound. Inexplicably, several xenos artifacts went missing, and the matter is being investigated by the Ordo Xenos.

The mood on the station in the aftermath of the attacks was febrile. The system had been peaceful for so long that the sudden eruption of violence was shocking, and rumours and unrest were rampant.

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Report of Arbiter Nicola Haussmann, Vestigium Hanini, to Arbiter Primus Nurul Masud, Babylonia Typhonis:

Long live the Emperor!

On 5118944M41, late night station time, station security received a report of a disturbance in the residential section, followed shortly by a fire alarm. Security officers responding to the alarm found that forcible entry had been effected to the residence of [REDACTED], an actuary employed on the station, and a fire was observed inside the residence. Initial observations suggested that an incendiary weapon had been discharged inside the residence. [REDACTED] was not present at the residence and his wherebouts are currently unknown.

Concurrently with these events, station security was monitoring a disturbance in the station mezzanine, where an individual was addressing a large group of voidfarers and station residents. This individual was subsequently identified as Ecclesiarchical Missionary Brother Aphesius, in service to Rogue Trader House Frunze. Station security officers observed that Brother Aphesius was armed with an incendiary weapon typical to a clergyman of his station.

According to station security officers and multiple witnesses (statements appended), Brother Aphesius proceeded to incite the crowd with a series of false statements regarding station security. Brother Aphesius falsely accused station security of collaborating with and abetting the recent xenos assault on the station. Brother Aphesius further claimed that station security were responsible for the alleged disappearance of xenos artifacts taken into custody after said attack, and falsely alleged that station security continued to collaborate with the xenos. Brother Aphesius publicly accused station security of treason and apostasy, and incited the group of people he was addressing to join him in assaulting the security compound.

In view of the size of the crowd and the apparent success of Brother Aphesius's incitement, I ordered all station security personnel to withdraw to the security compound. I contacted the cruiser Aut Imperator Aut Nihil and requested assistance in the form of a shore party equipped for crowd control duties. The Master-at-Arms of the Aut Imperator Aut Nihil promptly dispatched a large party of armsmen to secure the compound.

Once the compound was secure, we received technical intelligence that Brother Aphesius was leading an assembly through the dock area toward the security compound. Having ensured the integrity of the compound, I led station security forces and the naval armsmen to the docks, where Brother Aphesius and the crowd he had incited were ordered to surrender. Brother Aphesius incited the crowd into resisting station security. He was arrested and the crowd was succesfully dispersed.

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From: Office of Director Elizabeth Draken, Imperial penitentiary, Babylonia Typhonis 3

To: Arbiter Primus Nurul Masud, Babylonia Typhonis

Re: Prisoner Aphesius

The prisoner Aphesius, processing number 22817/944 (clergy), is being transferred to Babylonia Typhonis station per your directive. Be advised that the prisoner was involved in a violent affray while confined, and has received administrative discipline; documentation appended. The prisoner is considered dangerous (security class 2BeV) and is being transported under restraint.

Long live the Emperor!

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List of Charges

In the Name of the Emperor of Mankind, we the Office of the Imperial Prosecutor, Ultra Pars Akherontis Sectio, indict Brother Aphesius, late of Dementia Praeger, late of Erasinos, in service with House Frunze, of the following crimes against the Emperor's Justice:

 Resisting the Adeptus Terra

 Incitement to treason against the Emperor of Mankind

 Treason against the Emperor of Mankind

We further indict the same Brother Aphesius of the following crimes against local law:

 Disturbing the Imperial Peace

 Willful destruction of Imperial property

 Willful and reckless endangerment of life support systems on an Imperial facility

 Arson in the Emperor’s dockyards

We further append a report from the Imperial Penitentiary where said Brother Aphesius was confined, indicting him of the following crime:

 Violent affray in an Imperial penitentiary

We further note that proceedings are underway in the Doom-Capitol of Saint Isabella the Just of Acheron to determine whether the said Brother Aphesius should be indicted of the ecclesiastical crime of heresy.

We respectfully submit these charges to Her Excellency, Procurator Natasha Maya, for further action. May the Emperor's justice be done! He is the Law.

Compiled by assistant prosecutor Ayana Rufius.

Long live the Emperor!

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Office of the Procurator Ultra Pars, 4232944M41

Her Excellency Procurator Natasha Maya,

 in the case of the prisoner Brother Aphesius, in service of Rogue Trader House Frunze,

 having received the list of charges prepared by the Office of the Prosecutor in this matter,

 having noted the decision of the Doom-Capitol of St. Isabella the Just of Acheron to defer judgement until the conclusion of this investigation,

 having consulted with His Excellency, the Rogue Trader Laurenz Frunze,

 rules that the said Brother Aphesius be sentenced in the following counts:

for Resisting the Adeptus Terra - to death

for Incitement to treason against the Emperor of Mankind - to death

for Treason against the Emperor of Mankind - to death

for Disturbing the Imperial Peace, willful destruction of Imperial property, willful and reckless endangerment of life support systems on an Imperial facility, and violent affray in an Imperial penitentiary  - to death

for Arson in the Emperor’s dockyards - to death

 this penalty being suspended, and said Brother Aphesius being sentenced to exile in perpetuity, under pain of this penalty being executed on his return to Imperial space.

For the execution of this penalty of exile, said Brother Aphesius is hereby released into the custody of His Excellency the Rogue Trader Laurenz Frunze.

The Emperor is the Law. Long live the Emperor!

Let's Read Tolkien 82: Vae Victis 1-2

Is there a sight more beautiful than a desert sunset, when the sun, as if ashamed of its whitish daytime fierceness, lavishes a bounty of unimaginably pure soft colors on its guests?

Last summer, I finished my series of blog posts on the Lord of the Rings; my Let's Read Tolkien series took 81 posts to cover the Hobbit and the three volumes of the Lord of the Rings. Obviously I started thinking about what to do when it was done. Having a regular monthly blog post has been a fun thing to do, and doing a sort of leisurely close reading of books I know and love was just a pleasure. Now, though, I decided it was time for something completely different.

That's right: I'll be reading Kirill Yeskov's The Last Ringbearer, the unofficial sequel or retelling of the Lord of the Rings, denied official publication in English by the Tolkien estate but nevertheless released unto the world in 1999. I have to say that it's completely beyond me why the grandchildren of a man who died in 1973 are allowed to exercise this kind of control over creative works by other people, but here we are. As I don't read nearly enough Russian to be able to tackle the original, I'll be working with the second edition of the English translation by Yisroel Markov.

The essential background reading is Yeskov's essay in Salon, "Why I reimagined "LOTR" from Mordor's perspective". It's kinda charming, and at this point, I was completely sold:

Plus Middle Earth surely has PR and info wars (how else?); perhaps it even has its own Professor Fomenko to claim, in all seriousness, that there was no Second Age, Angbad is nothing but Mordor, and Fingon, Isildur and Aragorn were the same person…

A Middle-Earth Fomenko! That's it, I'm definitely reading this.

Yeskov's starting point, in brief, is that he loves Tolkien's world but isn't that crazy about the stories Tolkien set in it. So he's decided to rescue Middle-earth from Tolkien with a sort of counter-narrative to the Lord of the Rings. I'm definitely interested. A couple of points he made struck home, the most important of which echoes the observation made by the commenter to my earlier Tolkien blogs: Tolkien didn't really care about human geography. Yeskov has set out to fix this, and gleefully introduces his trick question to Tolkien scholars: when the hobbits drink beer at, say, the Prancing Pony, what kind of money do they use to pay for it?

It's a damn good question. I claim partial credit for having asked questions about the hobbit economy way back when I did Chapter 2, including what, exactly, the inherited Baggins wealth is and where it's held, including whether there's a hobbit bank somewhere. I've even run an entire Middle-earth Role-Playing campaign, where we just used the game's anodyne system of metal coins in denominations of ten, without ever giving the whole matter a second thought. But more to the point, I agree entirely that Tolkien managed the perhaps slightly strange trick of totally neglecting huge parts of his "sub-creation", while still making it compelling enough to make you want to fill in the blanks.

Other than that essay and a general awareness that The Last Ring-bearer exists, I don't really know anything about it, and I'm going to keep it that way. The book is divided into four parts, with lots and lots of chapters which look quite short, so I'll be tackling several of them in each blog post. Probably. Like I said, I don't really know what I'm getting into!

I'm doing it anyway. Here goes.

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After some Kipling and a short paean to deserts, we meet who I presume are our main characters trudging through one: Haladdin the Field Medic, and Sergeant Tzerlag of the Cirith Ungol Rangers. They're refugees from Mordor's South Army, defeated in the Morgul Vale, and Haladdin is severely wounded from an elven arrow to the leg ("poisoned, as usual"). They've had a harrowing escape, hiding out next to a gallows erected by the Western army and crossing by Cirith Ungol. It all sounds like a sort of reverse Shadow of War, and frankly, I'd play the hell out of that.

Haladdin tries to persuade Tzerlag to leave him behind and make for safety, but the Orocuen (i.e. "orc") won't have it: if the elves find him, they'll torture him and find out too much. They get water from what's called an adiabatic collector, apparently better known as an air well, or in other words, a pile of rocks that condenses moisture out of the air. It's unclear if these were ever actually used anywhere, but it's an interesting concept and works nicely here. They hide for the day in a dugout quickly prepared by Tzerlag, and Haladdin passes out to a hallucination where he's back in Barad-dûr. Therefore, it's time for exposition!

Gorgoroth has a long history as a prosperous oasis in the Mordor desert, where a whole bunch of Orocuen have settled down, while most of the others still lead nomadic lives in the desert. Caravans from Umbar make the long trek to trade here, especially for valuable metals mined from the Ash Mountains by the trolls, and all these people - who are throughout described as human - intermingle and -marry.

This, then, was the yeast on which Barad-dúr rose six centuries ago, that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle Earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic.

The diacritic in Barad-dûr is consistently wrong, by the way, and that's annoying. The impression we're being given here is of a sort of idealized secular Arabic-Islamic civilization, juxtaposed with the primitive West "picking lice in its log ‘castles’ to the monotonous chanting of scalds extolling the wonders of never-existing Númenor" - only a slightly caricatured rendition of early medieval Europe and what we now call the Middle East. Haladdin has fond memories of the streets of Barad-dûr, his time at the university and a certain trollish girl called Sonya.

Sadly, Haladdin's consciousness returns to the desert, and when night falls, the two get underway again. Tzerlag has explained to him how the desert, which seems barren and featureless, is divided between the various Orocuen clans, and how it contains much more life than the casual observer would think. Tzerlag also reminiscences on how he grew up as a nomad, became a traveling craftsman, and ended up in the army. He roundly curses the war and wonders who wanted it in the first place.

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And with that, the short second chapter ends. This has been an effective, if slightly cliche introduction, but hey, they're cliches because they work, right? We've met who I assume are our protagonists, but at least two characters, and we've been given a strong introduction to the "counter-story" to the Lord of the Rings that we're here to experience. The prose is a bit clunky, but its no-nonsense modernity and the expository focus on exactly the kind of human geography Tolkien cheerfully ignored, it's effective, and I'm curious to read more.

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Next time: ...climatology?