Trazyn's metal arm, flickering with eerie green light, froze in midair, mere millimeters from the mysterious interface on the silent leviathan of a ship.
Lorgar's roar, laden with a Primarch's fury and psychic pressure, hit him like a bucket of ice water, wrenching him out of the ecstasy of impending success and back to reality.
His metal skull slowly turned. The green lights in his eye sockets flickered, reflecting Lorgar's murderous figure wreathed in gold.
Silence stretched and solidified in that moment of confrontation. Only the low hum of energy conduits and the faint noise of some force-field generator remained, an uneasy accompaniment to the struggle about to erupt.
"Lord Lorgar," Trazyn's dry, metallic rasp sounded again. This time, much of his forced "warmth" had faded, replaced by caution and the restrained dignity of an ancient noble attempting to reason with someone. "Surely... there must be some respect for who arrived first? That is the most fundamental... courtesy in the universe. Or, perhaps, order?"
He paused, his eerie green gaze sweeping over the fully armed warriors behind Lorgar and the enormous ship that haunted his dreams, searching for some legal foundation for his precarious "ownership."
"Last time, in the matter of the Superstar," he spread his skeletal hands in a somewhat helpless gesture, "well, I admit that the ship's coordinates at the time were indeed close to your territory in the Colchis System. From a... broad and less than rigorous interpretation of territorial boundaries, your claim, hmm, perhaps had some... contextual justification."
He phrased the act of robbery so delicately that it sounded like nothing more than an unfortunate overlap of jurisdictions.
"But here—" His voice rose abruptly. His hovering hand pointed lightly at the mirror-smooth floor beneath his feet, then at the grand yet deathly silent space around them