In the Shadow of the Euclidean Gap

By Zoombie, in Fan Fiction

This is a story I've been working on for a while - while I was inspired by Battlefleet Koronous, it is not set in the Koronous Sector, nor is directly about a Rogue Trader, though they figure into it quite a deal in the middle and near the end.

I'll post a few bits, and see if anyone wants me to continue!

Without further adieu...

###

In the Shadow of the Euclidean Gap

It is the 41 st Millennium.

The Imperium of Man spans the galaxy – the last bulwark against the mutant, the alien and the heretic.

The first – and often last – line of defense from the enemy is the Imperial Navy.

The empty void of space has become a battlefield.

###

Part 1: Sailing

###

Chapter One

Vyn

TO: Commander Vyn, hon. master of Pax Imperalis

FROM: Lieutenant-Admiral Lisael Hernadia

It is my pleasure to assign you to the Flotilla Castigarum Lupis, in the formation Wolfpack 1, which will be assembling in the star system Tchernobog – the capital system of the Tempestros Sub-Sector. An orkish raiding fleet has shown up there and I believe that you could make a world of difference considering your last encounter with the greenskin savages. The Pax has served with distinction, and you are due a chance at real promotion, Vyn, and I hope that you take advantage of this little spot of bother. Pray do pass a personal missive to Lord-Commander Byrce, will you? He is related to my family via some third cousin, and I am dreadfully interested in whether not his skills in the field are born of diligence and duty, or of his bridge-crew being handpicked by his grandfather.

Oh, and one last note: The Wardens of the Emperor will be fielding two battle barges in support of the Imperial Navy. Under no circumstances are you to ever address one in any but the most perfect High Gothic. I know that you will take care to touch up on your studies while on route, for we cannot go about offending his Holy Majesty’s Angels of Death, now can we?

Good luck, good hunting, L.

-Transmitted 432.M41

Received by Astropath Krern

TO: Lieutenant-Admiral Lisael Hernadia, hon. leader of the Flotilla Gerhund

FROM: Commander Vyn

Good to hear from you, L. We shall make sail in 2 weeks. Put my Lt. Cmd. Victor Janus on watch for promotion to his own command. God-Emperor speed you on your way.

V.

-Transmitted 433.M41

Received by Astropath Choir 44.31.Aplharus (assigned to Fleet Command Obscura)

Commander Vyn shivered as hoarfrost gathered around the pitted and ancient stone statues that loomed out of the shadows of the Astropathic chambers. The chambers themselves, Vyn thought, were entirely unpleasant to anyone not blessed with the Astropath’s unique stigmata…as only the blind would find such a place anything but distressing. The walls were all not quite uniform in shape, nor did they connect in any way that seemed reasonable, forming a jagged, uneven polygon that obscured rather than accentuated the lines of the ship that were obvious in every other chamber in the Pax Imperialis .

Tucked into half a dozen nooks and crannies were statues – almost all of them skull faced angels of death, their skeletal hands holding out various cards of the Emperor’s Tarot, their symbols carved into stone rather than printed on cheap, underhive faux leather as Vyn was most used seeing them. In the chill and the quiet and the damp of the room, the normally bright and colorful cards seemed more ominous than a gathering warp-storm, promising an unholy future and a grim time of trials and troubles. As she watched, the frost gathered and obscured one of the cards completely – and in the silence of the room…Vyn could hear the crack, crack and pop of its expansion.

She looked back to the center of the chamber, where Astropath Krern floated in a comforting embrace of her own psychic powers. The supernatural chill there was thick enough that the air itself turned into fog, drifting to the ground in a billowing cloak. Other than that, Krern’s blindfolded face was a mask of intense concentration, and the rest of her body was unnaturally still, twisted into a slightly uncomfortable posture despite her lack of movement – her shoulders scrunched backwards, her arms twisted at ever so slightly the wrong angle.

The only part of her that really moved was her fingers, her left hand having been replaced at the age of seventeen with a collection of scribe-tines. The long, blade-like quills scratched and clicked as they scribed the new missive onto a scroll of parchment that had aged so much that it had become almost as yellowed as a bilgeman’s teeth. Finally, the note was finished and Krern gasped, her back almost snapping as she twisted her body in a final spasm. She fell to the ground, to be caught at the very last second by three white robed acolytes – their tongues had been removed, and so the only noises they made were their breathing, their footfalls, and the occasional soft, nonsense babble that came from them despite their willing mutilations.

Once the astropath had been righted and stood on her own two feet, the robed ones darted back into the eerie shadows of the place. Vyn, for the moment, envied them. Despite the fact that her eyes had been seared from her head almost fifty years ago, Krern looked as if she could see every expression on Vyn’s face, and she moved without hesitation through the room, stepping across the uneven floor to hand the parchment to Vyn.

“The latest from the Admiralty, ma’am.”

Vyn nodded, taking the parchment. She glanced around – then chided herself for her vanity, seeing as how she was in a room containing a blind woman and three of her acolytes (who would never tell.) She reached into the deep blue pocket of her equally blue jacket – naval issue, and one that she rather appreciated for the extra padding about the shoulders and arms, which made it more useful for turning a blade than one might expect – and pulled out a pair of small spectacles. She settled them on her nose and peered at the note, muttering to herself as she read the contents.

Slowly, she nodded. “Thank you, Miss Krern…do you think you could send a message back?”

Krern nodded, then said – a tad reluctantly, clearly not wanting to be a complainer: “I can, ma’am, though…I could use some time to rest. The nearness of the Gap and the Screaming Cairn are making sending’s…” She paused, the search for the proper word clear on her face. “…problematic.”

###

Vyn frowned as she sat down at her desk, the Astropath’s words echoing in her mind without even the use of any psychic powers. Problematic. She pushed her seat backwards and spun it on a creaking socket to face the window that dominated her office’s port wall. Through it, she saw first the signs of her crew’s industry – heavy lighters and a small skiff had been launched and were tethered around a huge, hab-sized hunk of ice. Void-suit clad men and women scrambled around on the outside of the iceteroid, their plasma cutters releasing vast gouts of vaporized water into the void, and the huge hunks that they cut away were hauled to the scuttlebutt for storage and use later.

But, dominating space beyond them, was what Vyn was really looking for: The roiling, purple mass that was the Screaming Cairn – and, maybe fifty degrees to port, the even larger, violet and blue vortex that was the Euclidean Gap. Both warp storms marked the near boundaries of the Sector Jokasta, and made sailing between Jokasta and the neighboring sector impossible for all but the depraved, the insane and the desperate – save, of course, for a narrow, fifty light year band between the two storms, called the Corridor of the Doomed.

Vyn snorted. “We really shouldn't let voidmen name these things…” She muttered to herself.

Problematic. There were many things in her life that were problematic right now. The first and most glaring would have to be the prospect of taking a ship with a full complement of thirty thousand souls through the Corridor of the Doomed and into what would surely be a raging battlefield by the time she arrived. Just contemplating it made her almost wish she hadn’t responded to Lisael so rapidly and promptly. Almost, but not quite.

The second problem, of course, was the fact that – of those thirty thousand souls, most of a quarter were new recruits, freshly pressganged from Hive Secundos Orphalus’ bulging prisons. They had been rounded up under the Emperor’s remit; their jailors paid a handful of thrones for the blood-cost of ferreting them out of their cavernous warrens, and then shoved into lighters and lifted into the bowls of the Pax Imperialis . The ship was a better prison than any earthly one, though this was simply because there were so few places to escape to – if one preferred breathing air as opposed to vacuum.

That didn’t mean it made Vyn entirely comfortable to have six and a half thousand men and women who had spent years – if not decades – learning how best to survive in underhive prisons serving the gun decks and the bilge-crews. She had had reports of two dozen boatswains being knocked over the head in the dog watches, and had to space close to a hundred of the worst offenders. That had put the fear of the God-Emperor into the ratings, but she didn’t want a crew that was held together simply out of fear of the officer’s guns…

The navy had too many ships lost to munity for no better reason than the officers preferred to whip problems to the bone rather than ensuring the problems never rotted to the point where a whipping would be required.

The third problem…

The third problem was the most delicate of all, for it had nothing to do with her abilities and everything to do with her career and standing in the Flotilla once she arrived. A ship could be handled, even through storms and etheric reefs. A crew could be given a common enemy and forged into a proper tool. But years in the service of a Rogue Trader and years more in the Navy as a commissioned officer had only taught Vyn one thing about politics and genteel negotiation.

She was inept at both.

A chime came from the door to her office – a treble warbling that sounded a little like a watch-officer calling a shift in positions at the bridge – and jerked her from her reverie. Her large, scarred and tattooed hand knocked the ink bottle over and spilled a spreading, black mass over the parchment she had been scribing her return letter to the Admiral on. Frowning, she stood and grabbed up a handkerchief to blot out the offending ink, righting the well before any more could escape, then called to the door: “Enter!”

It was an even bet as to what scared Sub-Ensign First Class Drexler Hue more: The tone of Vyn’s voice, or the simple fact that he was still serving as adjunct to her. Right now, though, there may have been a third reason to put the barely controlled fear in his eyes: He was holding a gilded envelope with a jade-wax sigil keeping it closed. Internally, where it didn’t show, Vyn groaned. Politics had come looking for her.

The paper – as opposed to the rough parchment and data-slates that littered Vyn’s massive mahogany desk – was of the highest quality and gleamed in the yellow glow of the luminators, white with gold highlights, the edges painted a delicate red. Hue looked at the envelope as if afraid it would bite his hand off, and held it out to Vyn in trembling hands.

“From the Navigator, Cap…Commander…” He stammered. She snatched the envelope from

his hands, using a fingernail to pick away at the wax until it broke – glowing brightly under the pressure, piezoelectric impulses shimmering through it, activating cleverly encoded techno-sorcery embedded within the envelope. Rather than having to be unfolded by anything as crude as a human hand, the envelope unfolded itself, coiling, curling and even tearing with a soft, almost musical noise, until Vyn found herself holding a hexagonal sheet of paper, covered with flowery High Gothic letterings.

Vyn scowled, then glared at Hue – who started.

“Get Doctor Balthezar. Now.”

Hue vanished with speed that would have been commendable if he had used it to run towards enemies rather than away from his commanding officers. Still, Vyn knew that it would take him at least twenty minutes to drag the Chirgion from his books and dissections, and so she busied herself by finding a musty tome in her own personal library – itself mostly dominated by travelogues, charts, and copies of To Serve the Emperor. When she finally did find the Librie Gothique Texinomicon, she was irritated to find that silverfish had been at the pages, and the Z section had been almost entirely eaten.

Vyn slammed the tome onto her desk – making her data-slates jump – and growled: “It’s just one thing after another today, isn’t it?”

The chime came as she finished struggling her way through the first sentence of the missive – glad that none of the word had started with a Z – and with her command, Hue gestured in the gangly chirgon.

“You’ve gotten yourself in quite a temper, Vyn, to be so angry at a mere book…” Balthezar said – made easy by his civilian status and long association. If his casual manner with her had ever caused offense, Vyn could have easily broken the man in half. He was as tall as she – rare among most non-Death Worlders that she had met – but where she was broad and covered with thick, almost slab-like muscle, he was reed slender and had an overall arched and hawkish demeanor and expression, with an impressively hooked nose and gray eyes – the color of her homeworld’s skies. Something seemed off about him, though…

“Well, to be fair, I never did like dictionaries…can you make heads or tails out of this?” Vyn asked, trying to focus on the parchment – one did not simply ignore a letter from the Navigators, even if they were being obnoxiously ostentatious. “The honored Navigator sent it, and I couldn’t well be bothered to actually read this…”

Balthezar had already pulled on his own reading glasses and was peering through the bifocals. He nodded, making a few soft, humming noises.

“Do you want a literal translation, or something more direct?” He asked, looking over his glasses at Vyn, who was leaning forward on her hands, regarding him curiously. She grinned and he snorted. “The gist is simple: The Navigator wants to discuss the course that he will be charting, in his residences, and he requests you come as soon as can be arranged.”

Vyn sighed, rubbing her chin.

“Well, it is not as if you are needed on the bridge…” Balthezar started, reaching up to adjust his necktie. That clicked in what was odd.

“You’re all over blood!” Vyn exclaimed. She was rather used to blood herself, and the cultural assumption of her world – that if someone was bleeding and standing, they weren’t hurt enough to be worth bothering over until the hunting party had returned to the village – sometimes skewed her perceptions next to the average Imperial citizen.

“What? Oh…” Balthezar sighed. “I’m tending to a Mr. Digby, he…”

“Digby,” Vyn said, musing. She started. “Digger Digby, one of the men I had flogged yesterday? Balthezar, he’s a bilgeman and not likely to last the voyage. Why waste time and-“

Balthezar frowned and shrugged, brushing a bit of dried blood from his cheek. “I did not use morphia or any augmetics on him. Bandages and grog are cheap enough that the ship stores won’t miss the thimble I used for Digby, and I see no reason that we should let an Emperor fearing man suffer because-“

“He associated with malingerers and murderers!” Vyn snapped. “Balthezar, you cannot coddle a man who is hurt if he is suffering for the good of all mankind.”

“Mankind is not served by gangrene setting in after a man has been whipped twenty times for sharing bread with a friend,” Balthezar’s voice remained calm, but she saw the roiling stormclouds in his eyes. He could be so **** stubborn. Vyn opened her mouth to reprimand him more, but then clenched her jaw, glancing aside before she said something hot. Still, such insubordination could not be born, even from a civilian doctor with a wealthy family.

“Balthezar, you cannot be seen countering my discipline, on a ship already quarter-staffed by recidivists.” Vyn tried to make her voice sound very formal, very official.

The chirgion simply sighed, then said: “He will be dead by morning, Vyn. I did as faith commanded, and gave him some measure of comfort.”

“If you had asked the Chaplin, I’m sure he would have given the man the Emperor’s Mercy.”

Balthezar snorted. Normally, his denominational differences with the Church of the God-Emperor were non-issues: As a chirgon and medical practitioner, he was expected to save lives and ease suffering, and the Order of St. Hallise was a recognized cult by the Ecclesiarchy. But there were times where his ***** ideas of mercy and justice…butted heads with expediency and common sense. But, as much as Vyn wished to upbraid the man more, she knew it would do no good.

“Did any of the voidsmen see your...” Vyn revised her sentence before finishing. “Compassion?”

Balthezar shook his head.

“Good.” Vyn paused, then remembered she had more to deal with than an over-merciful doctor and dying men. She turned, glanced out the window, and took note that the iceteroid was almost half disassembled. The scuttlebutt would be filled within three hours. Lt. Cmd. Janus could remain in command on the bridge. So, she could bash out the rest of the letter to Lisael and then deliver it to the Astropathic chambers on her way to the Navigator. She smiled, thinly, and nodded to Balthezar. “Dismissed.”

Once he was gone, she set herself to trying to write out a letter. It was remarkably hard to put anything of substance down – the naturally flowing sentences that Lisael could spin for her came out stilted and unnatural, and any attempt to add detail seemed forced. Vyn could not find the words within herself to accurately sketch out everything that had happened to the Pax in the past few months since her last letter to the admiral – let alone do so interestingly.

So, in the end, she settled for short, declarative sentences, and ended up with less of a letter and more of a post-note that one might leave on the side of a cooling box. Still frowning, Vyn stood when she heard the faint chiming of the quarter hour bells.

She would be late if she didn’t get to work.

###

Striding through the narrow corridors of the Pax , Vyn nodded to the officers and sub-officers who showed their respect as she passed – those that had caps touched their brims, but most simply made vague gestures to their foreheads, enough to show that they hadn’t stopped recognizing her station and status. She nodded to most, not wanting any to think she hadn’t noticed – sometimes, younger sub-officers got into the habit of assuming the Commander couldn’t notice them when they were among crowds – more so if they went without their best jackets and aped common voidmen – and she didn’t like the thought of letting officers reach adulthood with a lack of proper respect for the chain of command.

It took a mere single elevator ride up to the spine of the ship – where the corridors were taller and broader and less well traveled. From there, Vyn took the stairs to the Astropathic chambers. She was barred entrance by a robed woman, whose lack of a tongue made any questions impossible…but she seemed to know already what it was that Vyn was there for, and simply held her hand out for the letter. Vyn gave it, then beat a hasty retreat before the psyker got to their supernatural work.

The letter delivered, Vyn veered towards the spinal corridors once more, striding along until she came to a clear point of demarcation. The walls here were marked, and quite abruptly, with the sigils of the Navis Nobilite and bedecked in gold gilt that was so uniform that she wasn’t entirely sure if there was anything underneath the solid gleam. Two guards in the red and gold livery that matched the noble family living in this part of the ship stood, flanking the corridor. Both of them held large, elaborately decorated weapons that Vyn was fairly sure were mostly for show.

Both of them let her pass. She was one of the only members of the ship’s naval compliment who was allowed within the Navis Nobilite chambers. Ancient compacts between the Navigator Houses and the Imperial Navy secured the services of navigators to ships, for without them, the Imperial Navy would shudder to a stop as perfectly as if they had all been System Defense monitors and not the voidships that they had been built as. That…utter dependency always made Vyn’s hackles raise and her teeth want to bare. If she had had claws…

She came to the main chambers that Navigator Chellis owned. The area had once been a storage chamber – she recognized the underlying construction from her tours in the lower decks of the Pax - but the interior decorators had done their best to disguise this with endless busts of previous House Chellis members, paintings and portraits of famous Navigators, and a single mural made of solid ebony, amethyst and diamonds that spread along the far wall. The mural showed – in elegantly carved and socketed pieces – the main warp routes of the Segmentum Obscura, with the diamonds representing solar systems, and the lines of purple gemstones representing connections in the Warp. Etched into white-painted relief were words in High Gothic, warning of dragons and beasts.

The middle of the room, though, held the navigator himself…and, more importantly, his life support system. That was all that Vyn saw at first: hissing, steaming pipes, burbling fluids contained within solid glass beakers and vials, and other devices of entirely arcane origins that sparked and crackled with a strong stink of ozone. This mantle of techno-sorcery was wrapped around a large green tinted hunk of plexdiamond almost a foot thick, the translucent material bending light almost as much as the thick liquid that filled it. And in the center of that liquid, surrounded by tubes and wires and connection ports that socketed into augmetic pipelines that were almost squashed amid folds of obese, cancerous flesh…was the Navigator.

Vyn suppressed a shudder of revulsion.

The life support hissed, and then a part of it writhed and broke away with a series of sharp, percussive pops , tubes wriggling and then sliding back into recesses that dotted the back of the humanoid figure that lurched away from the pile of theomachinery. The creature was a servitor of a make and design that Vyn had never seen before: Desiccated flesh studded with polished brass and intricate gear-work that was run by glowing tubes of glass and crackling lines of cable. Steam rose from the death’s head mask that had been bolted onto the paper thin skull that hunched almost to the middle of the servitor’s chest, the thick clouds pouring from the empty eye sockets and grotesquely wide grin that had been carved into the mask.

The steam faded and a cultured, elegant voice came from somewhere behind the mask: “Welcome, Commander Vyn. May I serve you some nutwine or amnesac while you are here?”

Vyn shook her head – tearing her eyes from the servitor and to Navigator Chellis. From what she could tell, the Navigator’s eyes were closed.

“Ah, do, look at my puppet.”

Vyn looked back. For a moment, a thick, superstitious dread welled up from the dark recesses of her mind. She had served on voidships since she had been fourteen years old, and she had seen servitors aplenty. But she never could quite forget the first time she had seen them: Lurching from the darkness of a cavernous cargo-bay, possessed by a demonic virus unleashed by a heretek named Fibonacci. The resemblance between those corrupted forms and her tribe’s stories of drowners and rotfiends were too close for her to ever feel comfortable around them.

It was with a concentrated effort – a mental recounting of her own tours of duty, a reminder of her place as a master and commander of a starship – to make her stare down the meat-puppet.

“You wished to speak with me about the course…my lord?” She tacked on the proper title only after a hesitation, her unease all too visible, obvious even a deaf and dumb courtier.

“Correct.” Chellis spoke through the puppet, making it walk towards the large chart at the back of the room. Vyn followed it, her hands clasped behind her back – fists clenched so tight that her knuckles showed white under her naval issued gloves. The puppet gestured with a fingertip worn to yellowing bone, and as he pointed, some trick of techno-sorcery made the gemstones that marked the warp routes that led to the Corridor of the Doomed glow and flicker with an internal light. “This route? I must advise against it, Commander. The storms are unusually fierce at this time…I can feel the ripples in the Immaterium even from here.”

Vyn sighed. “What’s the alternative course, then?” She asked, looking at the meat-puppet. The death’s head mask looked back at her, sightless eyesockets trickling steam for a moment. Then, breathing a sigh so human that it only made the creation’s inhumanity more grotesquely apparent, the meat puppet gestured to a different warp route, which glowed and flared.

“That would take us round the Gap to Terminus!” Vyn exclaimed. The Terminus system winked at her from the black map, mockingly.

“Better to take an extra year sailing than to never arrive…” The Navigator chided her.

Vyn frowned. She couldn’t simply order the Navigator to do as she wished – his house held too much power. Instead, she plied herself to diplomacy the best way she knew how.

Bluntly.

“My Lord, there is an orkish warfleet currently rampaging through one of the most populated sub-sectors in this part of the Segmentum. Even one ship can turn the tide of battle there, and the Flotilla will need us as soon as we can be spared.”

The puppet clicked softly – some arcane mechanism within the skull turning over and considering as the Navigator hesitated, thought.

The steam stopped, then puffed out again in a short, sharp cloud that billowed into the ceiling, vanishing out of the dim light of the luminators that shone along the walls.

“If we set sail in three days, there may be an empyerial squall that we can take advantage of. Sometimes, the warp engines can catch and ride such a wave. I suggest spending the three days in an earnest attempt to bless and consecrated the ship, all of it.” The puppet gestured around the room.

Vyn nodded, then smiled. “Thank you, My Lord.”

The puppet shook its head, slowly, and then turned, heading back to the life support systems that normally supported it when the Navigator’s attention wasn’t turned to the room around him. Tubes reached for it, slithering out of the darkened recesses of the theomachinery like the tentacles of some foul, unthinking xenos, dripping with greenish connective fluids – drooling in eagerness to touch connector to socket. As the puppet turned back to face Vyn and then lean backwards into the tubes, the Navigator spoke once more.

“Pray, only…that we reach the battle at all. Commander.”

TO BE CONTINUED

I have more written! Should I post it up?

I have more written! Should I post it up?

Sure

All right!

One moment, formatting issue

And fixed!

Chapter Two

Cellice

Cellice Digby chanted, under her breath. It was not a prayer that her tutors at the schola would have recognized, and it was not an invocation that she had heard any member of the Imperial Cult use. It was not even a simple pleading for intervention. Her chant was a curse. A condemnation. A two word phrase that damned her, her husband, her planet, her planetary governor, her Imperium, and her God.

“Three days. Three days. Three days. Three days.”

The two syllables – broken almost into three by her thick underhive accent which stretched the long e sound into a mockery of what standard Low Gothic put it at – marked the time for her arms as she moved the bilge pump up, then down, up, then down. Up. Then down. Up. Down. The squealing sound of metal badly in need of oiling mixed with the faint slosh of the water that oozed around her ankles and her calves, sometimes brushing up to caress along the back of her knees. She had no shoes – for which she was grateful, as she had seen one man with shoes have his feet swell from rotfoot so much that the boatswain had put him down with the Emperor’s Mercy. She had no gloves to protect her palms and her knuckles from the protruding lumps of masonry and metal that made up her part of the bilge pumps.

All she had was her chant and what scant warmth one could wring from manual labor.

“Three. Days. Three. Days.”

“Give it a rest, Digby!” The man to her left – stripped to his skins despite the chill of the air and the darkness of the bilge. His eyes were wide in the gloom, and his skin as pale as the moon had been back on Orphalus, and just as pockmarked with scars – bullet wounds badly patched, knife wounds badly stitched, deliberate scarification that made relief images depicting saints and holy wars that Cellice was fairly sure that he couldn’t name if a boltgun was held to his head. His post had, until yesterday, been held by Digger.

“Three. Days.” Cellice panted, shoving down on the bar, then dragging up. Dragging up was the worst part, every time. The bar got heavier and heavier as it dragged up and pushed out more water from the bilges. Cellice didn’t know why a voidship would be leaking – there was no ocean around it to let in water, no rushing sea to hold back. The walls were tight enough to keep the all-consuming fury of space itself away from the insides. So why did a hundred men and women labor at the pumps, every shift, every bell, every second of every day?

Cellice didn’t know why…

The bell rang. The blessed bell, the glorious bell, the bell that often didn’t ring for an eternity and a half. Out stepped the boatswain, who was less blessed – for unlike the bell, who lacked a human face that could sneer and spit, a human hand who could hold and use a lash, a human mind that could be filled with nothing but hate and spite and malice, the boatswain had all of those accoutrements of misery and more. Out he stepped and out he bellowed: “Out! Out! Out!”

The bilge crew hurried through water and muck, their feet sloshing and splashing, getting some of the vile liquid on their chests or onto their friend’s backs. Some shoved others aside in their desperation to get to the dry corridors that ran into the bilge rooms. Some, every day, yelped as they gashed their palms on the walls that led to that corridor…here, Cellice slowed – painful as it was. She knew that hurrying to dryness and rest could very well lay her down with a blood infection. Here, the corridor that she and her fellow wretches floundered towards and the floor they floundered over met…but at an odd angle.

The corridor was canted up a few degrees. The circle that connected the corridor to the room was jagged, as if it had been badly cut rather than smoothly joined. The transition struck Cellice more as a place where a hivequake had crashed down some habitat sections and a sloppy patch by the techwright guilds had smashed things together, rather than the delicate perfection of the Priesthood of Mars. She didn’t know if the same thing had happened to the ship…she couldn’t imagine anything that could do damage to a voidship the same way a hivequake could wreck the habs she had lived in all her life…

She stepped over the jagged connections, keeping her arms high. She avoided cutting herself.

Shivering, she stood, and watched as the rest of the wretches came out. Those who had cut themselves were already binding themselves with the scraps of their clothes, while others who had managed – somehow – to keep energy and spirit alive jostled with one another, chatting and talking. They were the burly sort that she had once disdained even being in the same slideway with: Huge, overmuscled toughs with glowing electro tattoos that made them shine even in dark places.

The man who pushed the pump next to her leaned against the wall next to her. He glanced at her a second time – clearly taking a second judgment of her in the brighter light of the corridor that led out of the bilge deck. Before he could say anything, Old Killiok stepped from the bilge deck. He was always last, for he was the eldest among the lot of them, his skin wrinkled and his hair going gray on white, his face sporting a fearsome beard that was now spotted with flecked bits of filth and water. Once he was on dry land, he knelt to the ground…not out of exhaustion though. No. He knelt to pray.

“Praise the Emperor!”

Cellice smirked. The work detail she was a part of, she judged, praised Killok more than the Emperor. Every time his feet touched dry deck, he would kneel and praise the Emperor. And the boatswain, normally quick to bellow at dawdlers, was as pious as most and did not wish to interrupt someone who was praying and supplicating themselves. The Imperial Creed stated that every man’s life was to be given over to worship of He On Earth, and so…how could someone complain and hurry along one who was doing just that.

But Killok’s prayer did not last overlong. As he stood, the boatswain bellowed at the whole shift: “COME ON YOU LAZY FRAKERS, GET MOVING! NOW!”

The bilge crew started to shuffle down the corridor. After standing for so long and pumping for so long, Cellice felt as if each step required her more effort than she had in her. Still, she moved – fear gave her strength more than anything else. Fear of the lashing she’d get. Fear of being trampled by those behind her. Fear of being left alone in the lower decks of this hellship. In the dark.

She repressed a shudder, and her mouth formed the familiar words: “Three days.”

“Okay, what does that mean?” The man to her left asked, sounding exasperated and tired and scared. Cellice brought one arm up to rub her shoulder – making a pathetic show at massage to try and sooth the cramping pain that had stated to shoot through her body, even before she had a chance to rest and lock up.

“Three days…” Cellice said. Before the other man could say anything more, she sighed and continued. “That…was how long the Arbiters said. Digger and I would be in the detention center for three days. Three days for public debauchery and blasphemy…” She snorted. “It was Emperor’s Day and we had gotten a bit too much rotwine in us…”

“Debauchery and blasphemy?” The man laughed – somehow able to get the energy to throw his head back while he did it. “Two of my favorite things.”

Cellice shook her head. The bilge crew had emerged from the slanting corridor to one that was more flat in respects to the rest of the ship. They had walked past a filing line of other men and women – as desperately thin, as desperately tired, as desperately…desperate as they had been. The other shift, the bilge crew’s endless shift. She remembered what the man with the speaking trumpet had said, bellowing out at the huge mass of prisoners that had been shoved bodily onto lifters and landers and lighters and shuttles and dumped into the hellship.

He had shouted over the crowds: “Work will make you free! At the end of the voyage, if you survive, you will earn a share equal to your place on the ship. The lowest among us can expect to earn five thousand thrones by the time they’re done, so stop your caterwauling and remember. Work. Will. Make. You. Free.”

Cellice made a face at the memory.

###

The pressganged members of the Pax Imperialis’ crew shuffled into their berths. A lucky few had candles made of human fat rendered into tallow and wax. Most had to make do with what lights still operated in the berths: Guttering torches and the occasional luminator kept functioning only by continual supplication and prayer. For Cellice, her berth was strung between the feet of an ancient statue – a tiny area for most of them, but easily fit into by someone with her frame. She coiled up on her hammock, and groaned in relief as her muscles knotted and unknotted, the weight slipping from her feet and letting them ache dully rather than gather new pain for the morrow.

Killok – who had taken the hard floor rather than trying to find a place to string his hammock in the insane mish-mash of corridors, rooms and open topped cubicles that made up this section of the ship – knelt to the ground, and raised his hands to the ceiling.

“Oh All mighty Emperor, He On Terra, give us wretched members of your body such succor as you can spare!”

A few other men and women grumbled. Cellice didn’t grumble – her throat was rubbed raw by her own oaths, and she was too tired to do anything but lay there and look at the nightmarish wash of people that walked by – scarred and pockmarked by their crimes and their labor, their faces drawn and sometimes even marred even worse than those poor wretches who were picked to help handle the rad-piles by the cogboys. The shifting, leaping shadows and pools of light only made the view worse, and the sounds that echoed from rooms – screams and laughter both – intermingled to make Cellice feel as if she had been dropped into the pits of hell itself.

Killok’s voice broke through the sound, clear and strong: “We give endless thanks for the bounties that you have seen fit to deliver to us. Safety from enemies. Labor to succor our souls. Food to fill our bellies…”

Cellice’s guts growled and knotted. Before she could really reflect on how utterly pitiful prayer seemed next to the pain in her body and the emptiness in her belly, a bowl was proffered before her. She blinked, looking at it crosseyed. The porridge that was slopped into it looked watery and filmy, and she saw a sudden rush of weaves squirming out of the liquidy mush as she took it. She made a face, sitting up and looking down at the man who had taken Digger’s place in the pumps.

In the dim light, all she could make out was his eyes and his wry smile as he said: “Come on, eat up.”

“Why do you care?” Cellice rasped as she used her finger to skim the squirming vermin off her porridge. She flicked it to the ground with a wet slap and shook her head, before using her fingers to pick up what chunks of porridge were solid and cram them into her mouth, keeping the bowl within an inch of her lips to keep from losing even a droplet of (hopefully) potable water.

“Better you live and stay at your post than some gunslinger or knife fighter who’ll slide a blade between my ribs because I annoyed them some day.” The man grinned, and chuckled.

Cellice snorted. “And you think I won’t slit your throat while you sleep?”

“You might. But then again, you might not. A better chance than someone who will do it every chance you give.”

Killock held the bowl over his head – the porridge glowed in the reflected light. For a moment, Cellice just stared. Then she laughed, a short sharp chuckle that made her face twist with pain as she pointed with her food fingers – gleaming as she had licked them clean.

“A regular miracle!” She said.

Killock lowered the blow, muttering something in a quick, slangy version of High Gothic that sounded as similar to the phrases that Ecclesiarchs used while blessing their congregation as Cellice’s underhive cant sounded to the Low Gothic she had learned in the schola. But it seemed to satisfy him, as he started to eat, his slender fingers shoving the porridge into his mouth.

The man who had handed her the bowl looked at her, and the question was written in his eyes and the tilt of his head.

Cellice leaned in, whispering: “Killock’s porridge doesn’t have weavles.”

The man snorted. Then, smiling, he said: “Helgastram. You?”

“Married.” Cellice grinned. “Cellice Digby, goodwife of Digger Digby.”

Helgastram smirked. “And where is the good Mr. Digger?”

Cellice opened her mouth, then looked aside. She had thought she was beyond tears, but they still tried to come. She forced them down, closing her eyes. But then, they came back, flowing freely, sparked not by memories of her husband…but by a smell. Wafting, illusive and evil as a spirit in a hab-block, the scent came to her nose again. It was the musty spice of an Ecclesiarchal censor, the kind that priests would swing during parades to fill the air with holy smoke. She opened her eyes and crooked her still half eaten porridge against her chest, her other hand wiping at her eyes with her palm.

When they were clear, she saw a pure, bright light coming through the door. It was followed by a young man, wearing the pale white and gold and red robes of a member of the Ecclesiarchy, though not nearly as grand as the Confessors and Arch-Decons that she had seen in her cathedral every Restday’s mass. This man also lacked the jowls and waddles that tended to form in older priests, and rather seemed a more gaunt and steadfast man – tall rather than broad, with pale blue eyes and jet black skin that showed a stark contrast with his pale robes, which had a hood drawn up and over his bald head. A golden Aquila had been tattooed over his left eye, and two penitent pins had been pushed into his forehead – the small, roughly hewn beads designed to itch and irritate the skin, which had already started to turn cracked and calloused.

He held the censor in one hand – more to keep the stench away from his nose than to bless the men and women around him – and a luminator in the other. He looked into the small chamber, at Helgstram, at Killok, at the other huddled forms who blinked in the dazzling light. Then, at last, he saw Cellice, and strode towards her, stepping past Killok to speak directly with her: “Goodwife Digby?”

Cellice nodded, her eyes glinting. A moment’s hope flared in her – the same hope that had come when a similarly dressed and equipped priest had come through the masses to her, to take Digby away from the cot she had lain him on.

But then the priest gave his hateful, cruel message – all the more painful for the kindness in his voice.

“Your husband’s wounds carried him to Terra last night. I’m sorry.”

And with that he turned to go.

Helgastram half stood, looking at Cellice, uncomprehending. Killok rumbled something that Cellice did not want to hear – something about how all had been ordained and predetermined by the Emperor ten thousand years ago. Something that held as little comfort as the stars above her world had – cold, distant white lights in the sky. Cellice choked and dropped her bowl, her eyes closing as a terrible scream threatened to tear from her throat. She clapped her hands over her mouth, sobbing and shuddering on her hammock.

Then, her hands slid from her mouth and she managed to speak, raggedly.

“He…shared bread…he…he gave them bread…and because they were eating his bread when the boatswains found them, he was whipped too. As a conspirator. He had never even met them before…and they whipped him. They flogged him like an ANIMAL!” Her voice was in tatters, cut into ribbons by rage. Not grief. Pure. Burning rage. Hatred that she had been taught from her birth to save for the alien and the heretic now focused, laser sharp, on the wicked, leering boatswains that kept the discipline among the pressganged crew.

Her hands shook. She clenched them.

“They’re going to pay…” She rasped. “Every last one of them is going to pay…”

Helgstram nodded…but it was Killok who spoke.

“The God-Emperor keeps an account, and has chosen those who will be spared his wrath when he ascended to the Golden Throne…” His voice spoke with the ritual intonations of someone quoting scripture. “Your husband, as good as he was, was left off this elected list, and sadly, burns in eternal hellfire.”

An inarticulate scream burst out of Cellice and she lunged at Killok, stopped only by Helgstram getting between her and him, holding her against him, whispering: “It’s not worth it!”

Cellice’ rage flickered away, her body’s energies vanishing as rapidly as they had been called to muster – there was nothing to draw on. No strength to stand, no stamina to move. And so, she hung limp as Helgstram set her back on the hammock, saying: “Come on, lay down. You’re not dead yet, and you better not die…”

Cellice closed her eyes and the tears flowed freely as Helgstram patted her hands onto her belly, pushing them there to tuck her more firmly into the hammock. The faint jostling of the ship caused the hammock to sway and Cellice felt the welcoming grasp of sleep tugging at her. Oblivion felt a kindness…

And Helgstram’s words echoed in her mind. You’d better not die.

I’d better not die, she thought.

I still need to make them pay.

###

The wearisome work of the pressganged crew continued, without notice or care that Digger was dead. Cellice found herself marveling at just how easy it had been to replace her husband – the man who had caught her eye in the manufactory, who had invited her to share breakfast with him at his father’s eatery, who had married her in the chapel in Hab-Block 33.B, who had tried to sire children with her in the small apartment duplex they shared with Estavi and Vaani, the other married couple who worked in 33.B. He had laughed every time the Confessor had almost tripped over his own robes, and he had always had something to say about the weather – such as it was within the hive. He had been a cook of surpassing skill, able to turn soylen vidrins into any number of dishes, which always seemed to harken to the meals that the nobility supped on in their up-hive towers.

They had lain together, on the small cot in their side of the shared bedroom, a small curtain drawn to shut out the conversation and sounds of Estavi and Vaani, and they had entwined their limbs just so, to make the space work despite how little they were suited to the narrow, short bunk. He had plucked at a hair on her head – tugging gently enough to draw her attention without making her feel pain, and had talked about his plans. All they needed…

All they had needed was just a little more Throne Gelt, a little more, and they could have bought a single room for themselves above his own eatery.

Cellice, her arms aching from pushing the pump up and down, bowed her head.

Digger was gone.

And he would not be missed. Helgstram and Killok surely did not even remember his name. The man who had flogged the flesh from his back with a lash made of thick leather, he surely did not even remember preforming the act. The Captain, the mysterious and mythical Vyn who ruled the ship with his iron hand, surely did not even know Digger’s name. And when Cellice had died, cold and alone, both of their names would be reduced to…to what?

A single line in some Administratum data-cleric’s shrine, encoded into a cogitator whose central function had long decayed into nothing but theomechanical gibberish. And, when some scrivener needed to make a new notation, and realized that the two Digby names took up space that could be used to record whatever it was that he wished to write down, he would blot it out with a swipe of a sorcerous wand and replace those names. And then, truly, the galaxy would have ground out every spark of what had been a promising future.

A life.

A love.

Cellice pushed the bar down and heard the faint gurgle and slush of water in the pump she worked on. She shook her head.

If they would not remember Digger for his cooking, or for his smile, or for the tooth that he had chipped while running down the slidewalk, or the tattoo he had gotten for his twenty fifth birthday – a tattoo that he had been flustered about ever since she had found it. If they would not remember his name and his life…they would remember Cellice. And she would…

“STOP YOUR DWADLING, THERE!” The bellowed voice snapped her out of the glorious reverie of carving his name into the chest of the boatswain’s chest with a carving knife. “You, you there!”

Sheepishly, Cellice realized that the thug wasn’t even calling to her. No, his ire had fallen on a worker several rows ahead of her, and soon the sound of the whip cracking and the faint cries of pain drove everyone around her to pump faster and harder, panting as they pushed themselves further than they really should have, if they were to keep up the punishing pace that the work required. With the new attention drawn to the movement of her arms and the shifting of her legs, thoughts of bloody revenge died away to be replaced with the curious blankness that sometimes stole over her when she was engrossed with a physical action – the repetition bleeding away thought and memory both like a knife to the guts.

The shift ended.

She lay in her hammock, listening to the dice games and the occasional fights, the snips of song, the sound of Killok’s prayers to the God-Emperor, and she tried to recapture her thoughts and her plans. Then Helgstram prodded her shoulder, breaking the almost mindless reverie of laying on her mat.

“Come on, get up.”

Cellice sat up, her hands pressing against the hammock, her eyes dazzled by the flickering lights of a nearby fire, swallowing Helgstram’s face in blackness. She frowned at him, but didn’t speak. Instead, she let him talk.

“You can’t stay in the hammock all off-shift.”

Staying in the hammock sounded somewhat reasonable to Cellice…but…slowly, she realized that Helgstram had a point. Staying in the hammock bled her of resolution, of drive, of focus. Maybe getting up, no matter how tired she was, would help her stay angry. She shifted out of the hammock with a groan, wincing as her feet touched the ground. The bone deep ache that filled them made standing seem a terrible mistake, but before she could say as much, Helgstram looped an arm around her waist and drew her on, past the kneeling Killock, past the guttering torches, and out into the hallway itself.

Edited by Zoombie

And there was more!

Chapter Three

Vyn

The transition to the Warp was carried off with the normal procedures required both by the tradition of the noble families of the Navis Nobilite and the just as long, just as vaunted traditions of the Imperial Navy – though the communiques that were sent to the bridge during the traditional sacrifices to He Who Lives On Earth and to the various saints of voidtravel showed that the Navigator and his extended family were not amused by the time that it took to complete the rites that were required by ten thousand years of tradition.

Personally, Vyn couldn’t care two whits. She had never seen the maelstrom – as those whose long lives in the service of the Emperor called witnessing the Warp without protection – but she still knew the healthy respect of what the Warp could do when unbound and unchained. Without the Geller Field that, even now, she heard humming in the background of all time aboard the Pax, the minds, bodies and souls of the crew would have been quickly forfeit. But, like all born on Death Worlds, Vyn had a certain…

Not lack of respect for techno-sorcery. No one who had seen a las-bolt blast through three unarmored men at a single shot could lack respect for techno-sorcery. No one who had seen a world aflame as orbital bombardment set off continent consuming wildfires could lack that respect. No one who had seen worlds cracked and burning from the fury of a system consuming battle – the aftershocks of warp cores overloading and vortex torpedoes fired with more desperation than tactical planning and proper arithmancy – could lack that respect.

But she did not rely on it as the red robed brotherhood of the Martian faith did. She lacked augments – though that was, as of yet, not a hindrance – and she preferred to keep as many barriers between her crew and the dangerous waters they swam in as they could.

And so, Vyn sanctioned the sacrifice of a lowing grox – its throat cut by two black robed priests from the gun deck cult of St. Quintus – and the swaying incense burners wielded by the harlequin Players of the aft-dec refectory, and the chanting song-prayers of the recently pressed men and women from the Hive World Sibillius. They called on the Emperor, and the saints, and – mayhap – on other lesser known powers and Vyn cared not a whit if the Chaplin complained until his face was blue.

Every bit might smooth their passage through the Corridor of the Doomed.

However, despite the Navigator’s histrionics and the pomp and circumstances of the prayer-rites, the passage was unusually calm and gentle. The bridge crew only reported a minor increase in headaches and nosebleeds, and only three were stricken badly enough to require rest and repair in the medicade offices. Among the pressed and signed crew, Balthezar reported a mere hundred who needed the same treatment, and of those affected, only four died from ruptured humors – their eyes bleeding and their mouths split by the ranting sound of madness.

All in all, an easy price for the entrance into the Fell Realms.

Vyn was distracted from her thoughts by a bridge runner – a young boy, roughly the age of twelve, with bare feet and rolled up dungarees contrasting fiercely against the gold and gilted dress uniform jacket that hung around his skinny, not yet fully developed knees. He held a data-slate in his hands, the slate wrapped in purity seals and stamped several times by the aquilla – an old slate, for carrying a very important message. Vyn smiled inside as she took the slate, saying to the boy: “Now, son, you’re…from the family Sempronius, aren’t you?”

At his mute nod, she frowned – though, within, she remained smiling – and said: “Noble blood requires shoes.”

“Aye, ma’am,” He said, his low gothic broadly accented. “But, this here deck makes for slippin a lot when I don’t have my feet bare up against the ground, where I can feel the grate and-“

Now Vyn’s frown bore more real heat. “Boy.”

He stopped up short.

“Don’t make excuses.”

He nodded, sketching a sloppy salute, and said: “Aye ma’am!”

And with that, he ran off, bare feet slapping on the deck, ducking around Lt. Commander Janus – who himself looked as if he had been very done in by the transition to the warp, with sallow bags under his eyes and a fresh coat of unshaven hair around his jowls. A recent leg injury had set him to gaining some weight, but he still wore it well: His uniform was finely made and professionally stitched, patched and fixed by some of the finest needlewrights in their last layover. Like his past few uniforms, it bore not just the Aquilla of the Imperial Navy, but also the curved U of the Ultimarian realm.

But it was not the gain in weight, or the symbol of lost Ultimar, which made Vyn smile at her second in command.

No, it was the two cups of steaming, fresh recaff that he carried.

“Little mot,” he said, looking back over his shoulder, then back to her. “Wonder who is teaching him among the crew. Under my watch, I wouldn’t let a noble’s son go barefoot.”

“Under your watch, you attempted to teach the children of pressed men their letters.” Vyn tapped at the data-slate, then blinked in mild surprise. “It seems we’ve been invited to a meal to be held by our lovely Commisar Holt.” She sighed, then rubbed at her temple with a pair of tattooed fingers.

“Voidmen need their letters,” Janus muttered under his breath.

“I don’t…” Vyn frowned. “That’s what officers are for.”

“I remember Balthezar telling me about you struggling with the High Gothic dictionary.”

“How did-“ Vyn frowned, then shook his head. Balthezar took it on himself to carry stories from time to time – it was never a bother for her, though some of the noble members of the crew, those with more blue in their blood, had sometimes thought to challenge him to a duel over the slight. Not bothering with such a useless emotion, Vyn instead said: “So, you know you’re invited as well.”

“I don’t want to eat with the Commissar,” Janus said.

Vyn smiled. “Too bad.” She shoved the data-slate back at him, and it pushed against his chest, disturbing the medals for valor and long service. He caught it with one elbow, still holding his recaff cup as Vyn took the other, and sipped from it. She made a face and glared at the recaff, then looked at Janus, her glare turning to the vindictive smirk of someone who got to say these three words - and in this case - relished them.

“It’s an order.”

###

Time in the Warp passed strangely, from time to time. On the way to the dinner, there were reports over the vox and com network, passed from channel to channel, from link to link, that certain parts of the ship’s hold were aging faster or slower than the chambers around them – this was tested by some enterprising voidsmen throwing young rat babes through the affected area and having them land on the far side, as full adults, one with silvery fur along their whiskers.

Other than ordering that any essential foods and materials in the affected areas to be shoved out of the way with a long metal pole – cautioning all who might be involved to not use their hands, lest they lose something to the mysterious ways of the Warp – Vyn had no way of using the odd incident as a way to prolong the distance between her bridge and the Commissar’s quarters.

Still, she grasped the seconds it took to push down the vox-receiver and the moments it took to speak the orders, as respite before she would have to speak to Commissar Holt.

Yvoenne Holt had been born in the service and born as an orphan, like all within the Schola Progenium. Vyn, personally, had no taste for the Schola and its teachings. For every stable, dedicated graduate she had met, she had met two who had been (to put it simply) too dogmatic and too focused on the letter of the regulations – the kind of officers that would execute their underlings over minor infractions, and then act shocked when their ships mutined or their troops shot them in the back during a battle. The dogmatism, however, did make them fantastic when they were in the role of shuffling data-slates a sub-sector away from any fighting – which was a role that the Adeptus Munitorium rarely allowed its Schola Progenium students to take. They were trained for willpower, for dogmatism, for faith, and then, to be shuffled into either the stormtroopers or into the Commissariat.

But Yvoenne Holt had been unique among those multitudes orphans in that she had known her father, and he too had been a Commissar. As both a famous figure and a popular one among the sector of space that she had been raised in, she had attempted to match and even best his legend by putting herself front and center in the warzones she had been assigned. But there had been a single, minor stumbling block in her path to glory: Her first regimental assignment had been to the 4531 st Vostroyan Void-Shrikes, an all-female regiment of marines, whose only action had been underneath the remit of the Navy, and thus, infrequent – the Navy being less inclined to use the Imperial Guard stationed on their ships than their own armsmen due to the fact that any ship taken by the Imperial Guard would by prize-rights go to the Adpetus Munitorium, rather than the Navy.

And there was no way, in all the fell passages of the Warp, the Admiralty would let a bunch of common blooded, mud stuck ground pounders play around with their voidships.

That had led to Holt’s continual attempts to reach the front lines through increasingly foolhardy means, which had then lead to her unfortunate current situation, a situation that was clearly stamped across her face and slightly asymmetrical body – a situation that Vyn could read as the door to the small banquet chambers opened and her and the other invitees to the dinner party were welcomed within.

Commissar Holt’s head had been smashed, and then put back together by one with more practical than aesthetic sense – no gold paid fleshsculptor or augmeticist had worked on her. No, Holt had been treated by the not-so-tender mercies of the Adeptus Mechanicus, whose logical minds had seen no reason to not remove a full quarter of her skull and replace it with bolted steel alloy, no reason to not add heat-venting tubes along her spine to facilitate the emissions of her vitae-capitator, which now provided sustenance for her vitals, rather than her heart, lungs and the bottom half of her stomach.

Her right arm had been amputated and replaced with a tendril mount – a rather simple, quick fix that she had never seen the need to change – and her legs were digigrade industrial units rather than the humano-form usually used by replacement limbs. In all, the effect left her appearing more similar to servitor than servant of the Emperor, and how she kept from going mad was entirely beyond Vyn’s comprehension – as, during her visits to the nobles of the galaxy as the bodyguard of a Rogue Trader, she had seen those who had taken augmetic limbs as choice rather than the requirement of survival, and those limbs had had the feeling of sensation and could even enjoy things that made life between battles worth living: The warmth of an unshrouded sun, the gentle rush of liquid, or the hand of a lover.

None of those things had a place in Holt’s ruined body, or in the warbling, electronic noise of her vox-patched voice. All that was left, and that was what made Vyn’s gooseflesh rise, was pure and undiluted hatred. But where that hatred was directed was never clear enough for the large deathworlder's comfort.

And yet…that hatred never stopped Commissar Holt from throwing these dinner parties.

Or maybe, that was just another twisted reflection of the bitter shell she had become…

And so, it was a rather great relief to Commander Vyn to have a sudden and shocking disturbance completely derail the dinner party before the first word could even be said. The entire ship slewed hard to port, the deck becoming slanted as the luminators flickered and flashed on and off in a winking pattern that flowed along the corridor like an eel wriggling through the water of Vyn’s homeworld. She grabbed the doorframe and shifted to the left as Commissar Holt’s mostly metallic body went flailing past her and crashed into the far side of the corridor. Over that sound and the crashing shattering noise of the entire banquet being flung to the floor, Vyn heard a low, ominous groan – almost an aquatic noise, like some deep sea bloat-whale – rumble through her ship.

“That’s the **** keel stressing!” Janus pushed himself up from where he had fallen and, by dint of luck rather than skill, found himself near a vox console. When he slammed his fist down on it to reach the bridge, he was greeted by the cold, clipped voice of Lt. Desna, sounding as if nothing more strange or disturbing than a minor power fluctuation had occurred. “What the hell is going on up there!”

“Sir, the ship appears to have floundered on an aeitheric reef.”

“By the bedsore ass of He Who Is On Earth, isn’t this why we have Navigators?” Janus said, more to the corridor and the other bridge officers who were picking themselves up than to Desna.

“Sir, even a Navigator can-“

“I was speaking metaphorically,” Janus snapped.

“Heresy! Blasphemy!” The whirring vox-voice of Commissar Holt cut through the groaning with a warbling, whining noise. “I want this man whipped! I want this man flogged! I want-“

“I want my ship to be upright, Commissar,” Vyn said, standing at the slant with the ease of a woman born to sailing ships, not these vast, void bound contraptions. “Come, we’re within walking distance of the Navigatrix Spire.”

“Do you think approaching is wise?” Janus asked as Vyn drew her hot-shot las pistol and checked the firing aperture. “Uh, why are you armed?”

“I was born on Aquious…” She said. “Nothing, and I repeat, nothing good lives on reefs.”

###

The luminators hadn’t recovered their full strength by the time the bridge officers – Janus, Doctor Balthezar, Commissar Holt and Vyn being at the lead – reached their first intersection. Under the flicking, winking lights, Vyn tracked her head back and forth, checking each corner cautiously, as distant calls and shouts from the other crew in the area – mostly the low, gruff voices of pressed men and the high string calls of midshipmen – warped and echoed oddly in the canted corridors.

“Ma’am!” Balthezar, his voice deadly serious, slapped Vyn’s shoulder. What was in a fellow officer’s undue familiarity could be forgiven, due to his civilian status, and even if Vyn had been willing to upbraid him, she didn’t have the time to feel anything but dread: His pointing finger singled out a nearby gargoyle, which was inset in the corner of the corridor, its hands pressed against the ceiling as if to hold it up.

The gargoyle was looking at her, its stone eyes seeming to hold some form of benighted intelligence.

“Line!” Vyn snapped, kneeling and cupping her las pistol with two hands. The other officers – and Balthezar, who had his elegant dueling pistol at the ready before anyone else – moved to form a ragged firing line, aiming at the gargoyle.

The beaked mouth of the stygian figure opened and a deep, impossible blackness lurked at the base of its throat. From that blackness came a skittering, crawling noise.

“Fire,” Vyn said, her voice tightly controlled. Las bolts flashed from their pistols, and the volley of impacts struck the stone – some native rock, hewn from a long forgotten planet, not the reinforced, synthetic rockcrete that most buildings in the Imperium were rafted from – and filled the corner of the intersection with smoke and debris. When the firing stopped, the cloud cleared, leaving a jagged, blasted out wreck where the statuary had been.

“Warpcraft,” Holt announced.

“We guessed that, thank you Commisar…” Vyn stood. “We need to make our-“

The ship groaned and then, just as suddenly as it had canted, it righted. As the entire lot of them had been braced for the canted angle at that moment, the change to normality was as jarring as the first crashing had been. Vyn was thrown to the ground, her shoulder bruising against the ground, while Janus slammed back first into the wall. This time, Holt managed to stand, while Balthezar dropped to the ground and his pistol went skittering away from him.

Vyn groaned and pushed herself to her feet, looking over her shoulder. “Is everyone all right?”

“Fine, ma’am!” Janus said, while Holt just glared.

Vyn nodded, then advanced down the corridor, past the ruined gargoyle, and to the first vox station. This one had been installed a few centuries after the previous – possibly due to some ancient repair, or simply due to the whims of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Either way, it was of a different STC pattern, and the entire right half had been recently patched with a jerry-rigged brass contraption that partially covered the activation rune, requiring Vyn to work her rather larger than human norm finger against the hard, unpolished and unsmoothed edge to reach in and press the **** button. When she did , she keyed in the bridge.

“Desna, report,” she said.

“Not good, ma’am. We are freed from the reef, but our course appears to be entirely uncharted. Based off the readings I am currently auguring, we are on a course straight for the edge of the Corridor of the Doomed and heading straight for a warp storm.”

“Why, oh why, did we let voidmen name the **** thing?” Vyn slammed her knuckle down on the end vox button, and started to run down the corridor. She came around the corner and ducked before she even realized that she was being fired on. The las bolt punched into the wall over her head and she came up to her knees, whipping her pistol around to aim at a pair of young midshipmen, one of them holding her familial pistol – it matched the noble crest that was pinned to her otherwise regulation uniform.

“Sorry, ma’am!” The midshipmen said, her face ashen, making her freckles stand out clearly on her pale cheeks. “The ship’s gone barmy!”

“It’s fin-“ Vyn saw movement out of the corner of her eye and stood, her shoulder slamming into the tendril arm of Commissar Holt before she blew the fourteen year old’s brains against the wall with her own pistol.

“Stand DOWN, Commissar!”

“She fired on a superior officer, that is an executable offense.”

“Heat of the moment. She wasn’t firing on an officer, she was firing at an unknown enemy in a potentially dangerous situation. HOWEVER!” Vyn cut off Holt’s voice before it even began, rounding on the underofficer. “I expect you will take five lashes, and remember to never fire without a clear target identification again, will you?” She frowned down at the freckled youth.

The girl, who had clearly never been spanked, let along flogged, paled, gulped, and nodded. “Y-Y-Y-Yes ma’am.”

“Now, take charge of this corridor and wait for the word.” Vyn patted her shoulder, turned, and hurried down the corridor, Holt thumping after her, her stride a lumbering, monstrous one that made Vyn’s teeth itch.

“Weak! You are weak. I should-“

“You should shut up,” Vyn whispered as they came to a flight of stairs. “And wait here.”

Holt’s cold, cold eyes looking at the stairs, and slowly, she nodded.

Divested of the Commissar, the bridge crew made a faster pace up the stairs, taking the flights as quickly as they could. Janus drew even to his Commander, murmuring so that only she might hear over the rattle of boots and the clank of metal railings.

“I believe you are fixing for a summary execution, ma’am.”

Vyn snorted. “Do you really think that I can’t find a way out of a las pistol to my head, Janus? Come now, let us focus on the matter at hand.”

At the top of the first flight, they took a moment to check the corridor that was adjacent to it – the door opening with a smooth, powered hiss, revealing normally lit corridors and crew working diligently to set their areas of the ship aright. With this assurance, Vyn made a faster progress up the second flight, and here, found the corridor door to be the ornate golden mockery of a bulkhead that the Navis Nobilite favored for their areas. She pressed her thumb to the gene-coded lock, and a moment later, the door’s machine spirit acquiesced to let her and her crew in, the lot of them emerging into a darkened corridor.

The Navigator’s chambers had taken the brunt of the damage, due to their strange construction and to being higher up the ship than the lower decks – meaning any tilting along the keel would give the gravi-plates that much more of a disruption than those of lower decks. But that was not the only reason why the lights flickered, some luminators shattered and flecking the red carpeted floor below them with shards that glinted in the hand-held luminator that Janus whipped from one of his many voluminous pockets.

No, something far stranger had happened here. It took Vyn a moment and five or so paces forward to understand.

The statuary was missing .

As the statues in the Navigator’s chambers had been considerably understated – being mostly the relatives of the Navigator’s extended family, rather than the perpetual parade of Imperial Saints and protective gargoyles that lined the other corridors – Vyn almost had missed it, until her well-honed eye spotted the clear tracks of several heavy foot prints and the movement of clumsy elbows – a dented bit of plush carpeting here, a slightly askew potted plant there.

“Ready weapons,” she whispered.

They continued forward, their pistols and sabers at the ready, Vyn flicking her thumb along the edge of her power swords hilt. The consecrated techno-sorcery within the handle flared to life, and for a moment, a crackling blue haze of light surrounded the blade, then faded into nothingness to conserve energy and conceal their position.

They checked corners as they advanced, speaking softly to one another as they did so – calls of ‘clear’ were replaced with muffled whispering and hand signals. The oppressive silence of the place was starting to unnerve even Vyn – who was used to omnipresent noise. If it wasn’t the comforting crash of waves and the cawing of flying fish from her homeworld, it was the groaning and shifting of the deck, the hum of the luminators, the whirring of distant vitae-sustainers, the gurgle of pipes, and – when in transit – the whispering, sibilant hisses of the Warp’s unknown, unnamable horrors.

But even that was…

Missing.

Vyn swept her gaze back, in time to see one of her torpedo officers – invited to the dinner party for his blue blood and his five years of service – being grabbed about the head by a stone fist of an equally stone Navigator – the robes that had been carved into the statue moved with unnatural, flowing motions, as if they were rock and not marble. The white fist clenched down and became red as the torpedo’s officer turned into gory ruin.

“Let fly!” Vyn called out, leveling her pistol and firing. A marble shoulder exploded into chunks. The statue dropped the corpse, advancing towards her, the hood filled with a chittering, insectoid crawling noise. She swung her pistol around and took the head off with a blast to the center of the head. The las bolt blew the marble into several large hunks and the statue…well, continued towards her. At the last second, she dodged down, turning so that her shoulder met the marble chest that bore down on her. While the carved robes moved like fabric, it felt like shoulder checking a statue, and Vyn staggered back…but, still, she was low enough that the possessed statue’s fist slammed into the wall, cracking golden filigree and denting armor plate under stone knuckles, which did obligingly crumple. Vyn stood under the statue’s guard, her power sword cutting a smooth arc. The power field filled the statue and surrounded it, shattering it into dust with a loud CRACK!

Other calls of alarm and strobing las bolts filled the air. Turning, she saw that a dozen statues were converging on her bridge crew. To her pleasure, Janus and the others were accrediting themselves well, laying down fire on the statues, reducing three to piles of rubble before they reached their line.

“Back up!” Janus said.

“But the commander-“ one of the other officers started.

Before he could speak, Vyn charged to where the line of statues separated her from the rest of the crew, slashing and cutting with her power sword. The power field was pleasingly effective at reducing the possessed statuary to rubble, and soon, she had cleared a path, the crew firing now that she was among them and not so easily struck. She turned and joined them, their blasts reducing more statues.

“They are more dangerous in surprise, I think,” Vyn said, frowning a tad as she focused on rate of fire – the statues were so tightly compacted that they could not help but be struck if she fired.

Before Janus could respond, a tube of power cabling dropped from a suddenly open ceiling pane. It coiled and sparked, but moved like a grasping eel, rather than a randomly twitching conduit for tech-sprites. It wrapped around Janus’ neck and started to drag up. Vyn cut it in twain and he dropped back down.

The statues were mostly destroyed, and a quick glance about showed that whatever animating force controlled them was not dispersed with their destruction. Rather, it leaped – like a horrible, spreading contagion – from statue to wall fixture, from wall fixture to wriggling, massing carpet. And the silence, broken by shouts and las-fire, was now underscored by a growing, skittering noise.

“We must press on!” Vyn called, waving one hand, thrusting her power sword ahead of her. “For the Emperor, and the Pax Imperialis!”

The bridge crew advanced, cutting themselves free of constraints. One, however, stepped too close to a seemingly inactive vox console. The console exploded with a spray of plasticrete and a surge of vengeful, furious tech-sprites, the infection causing them to flare with reddish brown light rather than the pure white that Vyn was used to. The shards peppered the woman’s face and chest, blood spreading through her dress uniform, her arms scorched to red and black ruin. Balthezar stooped to tend to her and Vyn swore.

Then, salvation.

Round the bend in the corridor, near what appeared to be the entrance of a small ballroom reserved for the Navigator and his local family, there were a brace of Navigator House Guards. Their armor were battered, but their halberds appeared to have some form of power field built into their staves, and so, when they swung and cut down statues, or beat back wriggling carpet, they did so with the efficiency of Vyn’s sword. But in their midst was a young woman, her red robes voluminous, her forehead bared: Sitting above her eyes, in the middle of her brow, was an augmetic iris, likely implanted at or near birth. It was open, and from it poured a shimmering purple light, which flowed into the air and created a swirling sphere of influence around her. The creatures that attempted to enter into the field fell back, repulsed.

“Navigatrix!” Vyn shouted. “Join us! We must get to your uncle!”

The young woman glanced at her, and mutely nodded – her face was ashen, her bald head gleaming with sweat.

Together, the joined party of the navy-men and Navigator guard made a formidable phalanx for the young Navigator, who looked rather cross and put out to be so shielded – she was a young woman, and had all the headstrong ways of the oldest nobility paired with the raised chin and formidable glare of a Navigator, blessed as they were by position and powers both of the material and immaterial realms. But Vyn had stared down the predators of her homeworld and the various enemies that beset the Imperium and not flinched – she was not about to give way to a glare from a sixteen year old, even if said glare had the ability to scorch a brain and immolate a body.

Instead, Vyn took the lead, flanked by guards and bridge officers. Together, they made their way for the center of the navigator’s spire. As they came close, the whispering howls of the distant Warp seemed not so distant. In fact, the screaming of the damned seemed close enough that Vyn wished for ear protection, and one of the Navigator guards collapsed, blood and maggots frothing from his mouth in an impossible stream that struck two of her officers so dumb with shock that she had to bark orders to get them to even more – let alone keep guard. Still, they pressed on, the Navigator frowning deeply, her bald forehead glistening with sweat.

At last, they came upon the golden and brass doors of the navigator chamber itself. Here, the Navigator pressed her shoulder against one bridge officer, shoving her way to the fore, and said – in tones that brooked no argument: “I must lead the way. Unless you believe yourself immune to warp shock, Commander-“ She stressed the word, as if to underline the differences in station between the two of them. “-you would do well to stay back and allow me to shield us.”

“Very well,” Vyn stepped not back, but rather, to the side, gesturing with one hand so that the Navigator might take a place beside her. Mantling at this, the Navigator did so, then pointedly turned so that only her back was visible. Vyn, being closer to her than others, heard the faint whirr and click of the Navigator’s forehead augmetics opening, revealing to the door her deadly, impossibly valuable third eye. Thus bared, she pressed her palm against the door’s handle – her fingers long and bending oddly against the curve of brass, her palm nestled firmly against a snarling lion’s head, which made for a knob. The lion’s eyes glowed and the door swung open to reveal a scene quite nearly from the worst paintings of sin and damnation itself.

The front of the navigator’s spire had been cracked inwards, a tear in not only the hull, but in reality itself splitting the inlaid map of the Segmentum that made for that wall’s decoration completely in half. From that rent came the daemons – small, skittering imps whose forms were colored the bright red and purple hue of the Warp, whose backsides sprouted tails and barbed wings. Their claws dripped with blood and they made a fierce, sing-song noise as they rushed in around a taller, more powerfully built creature.

It looked, rather, like a man’s shadow, given three dimensions and stood up – all without changing the actual proportions or perspective of a shadow cast along the ground. This gave it obscenely long arms, terribly lengthened legs, and a torso squashed into a bare quarter of the proper size. Its head, though, was clearly and completely inhuman: Swept back, with a broad ridge of flesh supported by three horned ridges that flared backwards, the tips of each horn curving forward. Its mouth was bestial, and it opened its mouth to reveal sharp teeth and drooling, acidic salvia.

In one hand, it held what was left of the ship’s Navigator: His bloated form had been rent apart by claws, and partially devoured by teeth, teeth in an impossible being that needed no sustenance – Vyn saw in its eyes a cold intellect and a clear, gleeful will to do evil, pure, unspeakable evil.

“Uncle!” The younger Navigator – the ship’s only Navigator, now – cried out and then surged forward, Vyn wishing to move and protect her, but…she found she was unable to twitch a muscle: A pure and complete terror, deeper and farther reaching than any she had ever born before, a fear that went beyond the simple, direct, visceral fear of death, and into something deeper and more essential. To die now, with the swirling impossibility of the Warp beyond, with the imps cackling and calling, their claws raised to the ceiling, with that ghastly beast striding towards the young Navigator, claws outstretched, as if to hug her like a beloved child or long lost relation…to die now would mean not simply death, but the ruination of the eternal.

“You killed my Uncle!” The Navigator thrust her finger at the daemon, who laughed – it was a laugh that made no noise, and yet rang loudly in the room, the frescos and statues on the walls weeping blood at the sound.

And you, next, my sweet meats, the Daemon said, voice ringing in Vyn’s mind.

The Navigator focused, and her forehead glowed – visible even from behind her – a pale blue light searing out. It washed over the Daemon, and Vyn felt her bowel clutching terror vanishing, replaced by the normal fear of death and dismemberment, the fear she had conquered many a times before on her hoemworld, let alone in the Emperor’s service.

Nothing can stop me, not even your mutant powers- The Daemon started to speak, but the Navigator’s clear, loud voice cut off even the mental words.

“Commander Vyn!” She said. “I have been so kind as to make the Daemon mortal, capitalize on this if you please.”

What? The Daemon asked.

“Men!” Vyn said. “Present arms!”

The Daemon roared, leaping past the Navigator as it realized the danger it was in.

“FIRE!” Vyn shouted, her own pistol to hand.

The las bolts flew, scorching hot, past Vyn’s body, the ranked fire of her officers and the Navigator’s guards working together. A line of trained Imperial Guardsmen could place three rounds on a target, per man, at a hundred paces every five seconds. While they did so with lasguns – whose stocks and longer barrels made the las bolts fly further and faster – Vyn was fairly sure that most Guardsmen were less motivated. That was her primary explanation for why her ragged band – more used to command and to ceremonial guarding duties – placed five shots a piece on the Daemon, even as it reached their lines. It staggered backwards, thrown bodily to the ground by the impacts, its shadowy flesh rent asunder, steaming and smoking.

Its howl was cut, suddenly, when Vyn bounded forward and brought her power sword in a glittering arc, the crackling blue energy of the power field parting daemonic flesh as if it were hot butter. The creature’s head went flying and it, the imps, and the rent in the ship were sucked in on themselves, the rent closing and crashing shut with an ear aching BANG. Silence reigned, for a moment, the distant whispering of the Warp muted down. Then, it returned, growing louder each passing moment.

The Navigator sank to her knees, her head hanging forward. Vyn, sheathing her power sword, sprang forward, but what she took for an emotional swooning – being so close to a daemon and seeing a beloved Uncle slain in the most gruesome way was not in the ordinary for even a soldier, let alone a noble woman of proper breeding – was in fact sheer tiredness. Her shoulders slumped, her eyes were closed, her skin ashen – more so than even a Navigator’s normal paleness. But still, she spoke only of duty when Vyn helped her to her feat.

“To…the console…” She whispered. “I must guide us!”

Vyn nodded, then called orders: The Navigator Guards – those that lived – knew what to do far more than she or her crew. And they leaped to it with a will, despite the fact that Vyn had no proper place to order them to get tea, let alone operate advanced machinery and call on such complex and likely vengeful machine spirits. Vyn only realized she had ceased breathing when she resumed again half a minute later when, after a great deal of tubes being connected to augmetic ports that lined the woman’s spine and studded from the back of her neck, the Navigator said: “I am connected. All of you, leave this place.”

Vyn, the guards, and her bridge officers beat a hasty retreat, some clapping their hands around their ears due to the howling of the Warp, which had become louder and louder and louder. Then, in the corridor, Vyn tensed – ready for the impact of the Pax Imperials striking the edge of the Corridor of the Damned.

And then…

Blessed silence.

They had returned to real space.

So, I'm writing this for fun, but I do other writing that I have a Paetron for. Should I link my Paetron here, or would that be just the most presumptive thing ever?

Oh, also, another chapter.

Chater Four

Cellice

Cellice was playing the Emperor’s Tarot when the entire thrice damned ship went insane. She was playing by the light of human tallow candles for wont of proper luminators, and she was playing with Helgastram for wont of better companions: The unusual liberty afforded the bilge deck slaves of not working he bilge decks came once in a distant shift schedule, and usually was due to the cistern that they kept from leaking becoming emptied by the crew and the water supplies five corridors forward being used instead.

Such a restful time, sadly, was short lived: The vitae sustainers of the ship were able to, like the purification temples in run by the blessed Machine Cult in her home hive, to take even the most brackish, befouled waters and turn it into something remotely drinkable. The time between the cistern being empty and the return to the pumps that kept the ship from flooding could usually be counted as a day, maybe two.

However, in those days, the overseers and their whips were away, and the holds sealed, leaving Cellice and her fellow enslaved alone to make the time as they would. The lack of food and water weeded out those near to death, though by the third off days, the various pressed men had learned to preserve some porridge to eat later, usually having to reheat it over their few candles before it moved from inedibility to merely distasteful in the extreme.

Cellice looked at her hand – three Space Marines, two grinning Deaths Heads, and a single Golden Throne. It made no particular narrative – for that was the purpose of a game of the Tarot, to tell stories that bested the other players. The last hand, Helgastram had won via playing a hand that told the almost exact story of the Horus Heresy, from start to finish, with a mere five cards – albeit, leaving out the major details that Cellice remembered from her days in the schola. She hoped to cobble together something about the distant legends of the Tyrannic Wars, but something distracted her, repeatedly, every time she attempted to lay down her cards.

Her head…ached.

She was used to pains and aches, by now she was used to the feeling of welts on her back and blisters on her feet and the cold, terrible anger in her breast – the passing of time had done nothing to still the fires of vengeance she felt for her fate and for the fate of poor Digger – but the ache in her head was nothing alike. It came and went unexpectedly, flaring here and fading there, in time with the distant whispers of the daemons that scraped and scratched along the hull of the Pax Imperialis.

Unable to see a story, she laid her hand down and said: “I fold.”

Helgastram shrugged, taking the pot – a few buttons and bits of string, useful for patching holes in worn clothes and the rags that were their only shelter in the frigid bilge decks. Shuffling the deck, he hand it out to Cellice.

“Do you want to deal?”

“There’s nothing to bet,” she said, her voice and face sour.

“Gambling is the call of the Ruinous Powers, and will begat only damnation,” Killok said, his voice carrying from beyond the darkness of the candle light. “Better, to spend your time before your assured damnation attempting to beg clemency from the Emperor, so that when you are sent beyond his Grace into Hell, he might spare you the worst of the pit of fire.”

“The fact we’re all going to hell except for you kind of makes gambling seem more a prospect than less,” Helgastram pointed out, with easy good humor – humor he kept despite being enslaved, starved, and whipped. Killok snorted, loudly, and from what Cellice could tell, continued to mutter prayers to himself.

“The Elect,” Helgastram said, his voice soft and thick with disgust at the notion.

“What were you brought up as? Thorian?” Cellice asked, shuffling the deck herself – not that she did not trust Helgastram, but more because she was playing for time, hoping that her headache would fade before she had to play and deal cards once more.

“Reformed Thorian,” Helgastram said.

“I was…Third Church of Saint Celestine,” Cellice said.

“Raised by Hospitaliars?” Helgastram asked.

Cellice shook her head, smirking in the candlelight. “Merely supplicants to the Order of the Rose, I believe. They weren’t proper Sisters of Battle, as they never wore armor and tended to the poor. I hear that the Sisters that don’t go to war deal with nobles and the like.”

“I hear they soothsaying and do blood rites for the nobles,” Helgastram whispered.

“Oh bilge!” Cellice shook her head – she might hate the Imperial Navy, but to hear such disparagements and blasphemies about the Sisters of Battle went entirely beyond the pale.

“No, it’s true, they breed them, like proper hounds, they do…”

Cellice, to prevent herself from hearing more blasphemes, laid out her cards and then laid out Helgastram’s.

Helgastram frowned. “Are you sure you shuffled the deck proper?”

“Why?” Cellice asked. She looked at her cards and felt an intense chill run down her spine.

“Because, uh, Cellice,” Helgastram turned his hand around and showed her a mirror of her own hand: Each card a leering Death’s Head, the High Gothic script above and below the skull to give it the card’s proper name. Momento Mori .

Cellice turned her hand around as well.

And then the whole ship went insane.

The ground crashed to the side, and everyone went sprawling. The candle went out, and in the darkness, it was all a confusion of limbs and metal and hard surfaces. Once such surface struck the side of Cellice’s head, and she felt nothing and heard nothing for a time, only the intense ringing sound of a bell being struck. Then, dim and distant, she heard a voice calling her name – was it Digger, or Helgastram? She knew not.

Then, louder, she heard the roaring sound of water.

And, in a torrent as dark and black as pitch, she was caught up and carried away. Her mouth opened to scream and she felt the water pouring into her mouth and her lungs. She choked and struggled, then struck something hard, her thighs slamming against what felt to be a bulk head. She reached out, struggling, only to find her hand pressing against something cold and once-living, a mass of flesh and torn muscle. She jerked away, as fast and as quick as she could, and then continued to spin and twirl in a confused mass of cold, cold, cold water.

After what felt like an eternity, she burst from the water, only to strike her head hard on something. Closing her eyes, she sank beneath the waves once more, getting no more than a gasp of air.

Another blackness, another time without feeling and without thought. Then, coughing, she burst from the water, and found her hands cast on some grating that did not immediately wrench away from her. She dragged herself up, gasping and coughing, water streaming from her mouth as she vomited it all up, her eyes closed. She shuddered and shivered as the sheer, numbing coldness of the water that had washed over her reached her aching head. She opened her eyes…and saw nothing.

Blind as a bat.

No. She wasn’t blind, she was merely caught in a darkness, a darkness as deep as the Underhive, and many times as deadly – for an Underhive, at least, had gangers who might take one in, if one did not mind being made a slave. And, now, being a slave no longer held any fear for her. But in a voidship, who knew what monsters lurked in the darkness, in the areas of the ship unlit and unpatrolled by men or their machine spirits?

And, in response to her fear, light and heat and life bloomed. The light and the life came in the form of a small fire, a tiny, purple hole appearing before her, and the flame leaping through. It was a warm, comforting glow, and it burned cleanly, with the delightful smell that harkened back to some ancient, primeval instinct in Cellice’s mind – a scent she did not know, but what scholars and more primitive people both would call…woodsmoke. But the fire needed either fuel nor fanning. It floated between her outstretched palms, a small pearl of orange and white and gold and amber, the colors dancing and moving together, entrancing.

Cellice gasped as the flames grew broader and brighter, and she felt her body uncoil and become less numb – then completely free of numbness. Her skin felt alive with a dull aching bruise along her hip, and her head smarted fiercely, while blood dripped into one eye. She closed it, but still beheld the flame, which illuminated the corridor she had found herself within. The corridor was still within the bilge decks – for it was canted crazily, and had no working luminators, and the skulls that had been worked into the corridor piping and stonework leered from her, yellowy with age, their jawbones missing and their upper teeth worn away to nothing. Words, etched in their foreheads, were still clear.

REPENT. REPENT. REPENT.

She turned her gaze from the skulls glaring down at her, and gasped in horror, standing as she saw that the waters she was only partially removed from were thick with corpses, already stuffing the passage way: Nearly nude, their rags stripped away by that awful, torrential water. Bilge deck crew, washed and drowned like rats in a sewage purge. Shuddering, Cellice stood, the flame moving with her, drawing a fine line of smoke in the air as she turned her back on the grisly scene. Shakily, she stepped forward, past the leering skulls, holding up her light, as she heard a voice.

The voice was deep and sonorous, and spoke from the walls: “Little Psyker…little Witch…little Weirdling…you cannot escape me…I have slipped aboard your ship, little Wyrd, little Child…”

Cellice shuddered at the tone and the words both, and her mouth formed words despite the terror gnawing at the back of her mind: “I’m not…I’m not a-“

“Not a witch? Oh, oh, oh that just makes this more delicious,” the voice said, chuckling. It seemed to move through the walls, coiling and twisting from shadow to shadow, every closer. Cellice started to hurry along, her hands shaking as she felt the whispering, clawing presence of the Warp press around her no longer aching head – the pain of impact had faded, the pain of the headaches had faded with it. Instead, she felt a strange sense of being larger and farther beyond herself.

She pressed her foot down on a grating-

Drowning. She was drowning, struggling, clawing, reaching up for the dim illumination above her. No one reached down, and the darkness…the water…the water wasn’t all that crushed her, there was-

She jerked her foot back, gasping. The images that had boiled in her mind for a moment, so real that she could taste the liquid in her mouth and feel the choking, gagging sensation of drowning, vanished as if a candle had been blown out. Still holding her flames, Cellice looked ahead, not sure why she didn’t move.

“Oh, do you wait for me? Hmm? Wait for me to make my dinner, little Psyker,” the voice hissed in the sahdows. Cellice spun around, then back…and saw something.

The smoke, wafted by her motions, moved snake-like through the air towards the grating she had almost stepped on. But, before it could get more than a hand-span into the open air beyond the grating, it fell. The smoke fell straight down. Cellice frowned, her brow furrowing. She reached to the ground, her hand scrabbling around, while her other hand was thrust out, palm up, the flame dancing in that palm, warming and lighting the way. She closed her hand around a jarred loose skull, and looked down at the word it spoke, silently: REPENT.

She tossed the skull forward.

Rather than arcing, it flew straight down the instant it went more than two feet ahead, the termination of its fall a loud CRACK as it hit metal grating. The grating, clearly stressed to near the breaking point, broke away with a squealing splash – the sounds mixed due to the water that flowed just below the grate, in the corridor below the corridor. The grate sank faster than it had any right to, the water consuming it, and then remaining glassy still – no ripples, no waves, no frothing, bubbling foam.

Cellice frowned. If she did not miss her guess, the very force of gravity – normally, so dependable and normal – had become twisted ahead of her. She knew not if it was the nature of the Warp, or if it was some unholy facet of the voidship’s construction, but she knew that to step forward would bring her down – crushed, not merely by the weight of water, but by the incredible force of the gravity that swamped that area.

“Trapped…trapped betwixt fire and flood, betwixt a rock and a gravity well…” The voice, that damned voice continued. Cellice, starting to feel her heart race, stepped back and away from the gravity distortion, then turned, looking left and right. There might have been some passageway, some crawl space she had missed. She focused, and her lights flared brighter…but it was not the brightness that caused her to stop beside a pipe. Instead, it was a tingle along the back of her spine, a knowledge – certain despite her complete and total ignorance of where she was – that the pipe to her right was weakened and positioned before-

She kicked the pipe, and it gave way with a clatter and clang, loose screws and bolts flying, to reveal…

Digger’s rotten face. His leering, maggoty eyes. His bulging, bluish lips, opening as worms crawled from his mouth, and his voice – choked – spoke: “Cee…Cee…”

Cellice screamed and thrust her palm at the apparition. The flame that had saved her roared out, a spear of light and heat that consumed the head and roared down the small access passageway that the pipe had concealed. When the smoke cleared, there was naught by blackened metal and the chance for freedom. Cellice looked around, and heard that voice.

“Yesss…come to me, Cellice…join your Digger. Join your husband…”

Cellice shook her head, then knelt down and crawled into the tunnel. She knew her teachings – speak not unto a xenos, for their mouths are full of lies and damnation. Xenos were a mere step below daemons, were they not? She started to crawl forward, with a Hiver’s ease of movement, her free hand out stretched, the light filling the chamber. She knew that a fire in an enclosed space rapidly brought death, but…somehow, this did not occur. There was no shortening of breath, no dimming of the flame. The smoke continued to smell wonderfully homey and ancestral and familiar, despite her unfamiliarity with the scent, and she followed the flame as the tunnel of metal carried her on, into the darkness, the voice whispering snidely to her every inch of the way.

“Yes, keep crawling, little Psyker. Keep crawling to your doom…”

###

Celice found no doom in her crawling.

She found revenge.

The end of the crawlway opened into another corridor, this one as pipe ridden as the last, but with luminators that flickered and winked, with a floor that was not awash in water or corpses. She stood and clutched the fire to her breast, the voice having ceased its endless prattling and comments and whispers. She looked about herself, trying to decide on where to go next, on what to do next, when she heard a shout behind her.

“You there!”

She turned an found herself looking at one of the Overseers. He had his twisted, metal twine whip at his hip, and his shirt was completely gone, his chest bare – the massive, golden Aquilla tattoo that he sported gleaming in the luminator light. His scarred, furrowed forehead became more furrowed…and then a snarl of rage split his lips.

“You lousy little fraker! You-“ He started forward, about to upbraid her for attempting to escape her proper place. But then his eyes alighted on the flame she clutched to her chest, flickering against her clothes without burning them, hovering above her palm without any torch or lighter. The overseer’s eyes widened and his face paled as he staggered backwards. “W…Witch!”

Despite knowing, in a distant and abstract way, that what he said was true, Celice felt both outrage and disbelief. Her? A witch? No! She was a good wife, a good worshiper of the Emperor. She had done nothing wrong, nothing but survive and attempt to escape the terrible, endless water. But before she could open her mouth, before she could utter a single word, the overseer’s hand went not to his whip, but to his brutal, snub nosed las-pistol. The weapon had been used several times to quell uprisings in the pressed men – a single blast could go through several unarmored men at once, and leave them all dead without a mark beyond the neat hole in their bodies, their eyes bleeding from the sudden boiling of their blood.

Cellice reacted without thought: She lashed out with her hand, and a bolt of flame roared from her palm, striking the pistol. The pistol sagged, cheap metal turning red hot as the overseer screamed like a damned soul. He opened his hand, but the pistol fell from him in a stringy mass, red metal and flesh cooked together.

He felt to his knees, gasping, clutching his wrist.

And the voice returned: “Kill him…”

Cellice looked down at the sobbing, pitiful man. His hand was a ruined mess, blackened and reddened in equal measures, the metal cooling onto his cooked flesh. Into his cooked flesh. His other hand closed around his wrist and he whimpered, drawing in deep, ragged breaths, trying to deal with the pain – pain that was only a fraction of what he had inflicted on others, what he had brought onto others, what he had brought to her . To Digger. To her future, to her life. She pointed her finger at him, and the flames that she had husbanded and kept close to her flared and glowed around her hand, flicking and wisping in the air.

“Kill him,” the voice whispered. “Kill him.”

Cellice trembled. The man looked up at her – desperate.

“P-Please, miss, p-please,” he said, his voice desperate.

“Kill him! Do it, pysker. Feel the power of the warp. Power that I can offer to you,” the voice said, sounding eager, charged with energy. “Let me in, I’ll kill him for you, I’ll make it last, I’ll-“

“N-No…” Cellice whispered.

“Fool!” The daemon snarled. “Let me IN! LET ME IN!”

Cellice shook her head, drawing her hand away from the man. “No!” She clapped her hands over her eyes…and saw. She saw in the same murky half-vision that she had seen her previous almost doom. But rather than a coherent, straight series of events, what she saw were a half dozen flashes , flickering lights before her eyes like the frames of a pict-vid.

Her, in a black body suit, holding a sword in one hand, skull mask covering her face. Blood dripped from a goblet in one hand as she aimed the blade down at a man cowering before her, his hands reaching-

-up, she was going up, climbing up, her gloved hands clasped around a chain that hung from a gothic tower, the links looped about the broad shoulders and neck of a leering gargoyle. She was in uniform, the colors of her homeworld’s levy, a Sergeant’s chevrons on her shoulder. “Come on men, do you want-“

-to live forever?” She was in a fine dress, smiling to the elegant xeno across from her at the table. “It does sound a dreadful bore.” She reached forward, her finger sliding a black tile across the game-board. The tile was marked with a rune and she felt the resonance of it in her bones. She looked at the xeno, who shrugged and then spoke-

-to the demon, pointing her finger at it: “I name you…and by that name, I COMMAND you! By the changer of the Ways, by the Master of Fate, by the Plotting One, by the Formless Future, by Tzneetch himself, I COMMAND you to OBEY! And if you do NOT I will-“

-burn. She burned. She was tied to a stake, her skin peeling, her body awash in pain. Burning. She screamed and screamed: “THE MANY EYED DEVOURER COMES! IT COMES AND BURNING ME WON’T STOP IT!” But still she…

Burned. Her body was awash in flames. But not flames of the other moments – moments not of futures, but of possible presents, a ripple in a pond that she saw only fleetingly. Times that could have been. And might have been. And may be once again, when the infinite stretches of the universe collapsed and rebounded and…

And she screamed as the pure, endless torrents of the Warp poured into her body – and far more dangerously, her mind.

And in that moment, Cellice Digby, goodwife to Digger Digby, humble Imperial Citizen and impressed voidman, died. The flames went out, and the sobbing overseer scrambled back, his boots scraping along the metal floor as something that wore Cellice Digby’s skin chuckled, twisting her lips back into a cruel, cruel smile. Flames came, a pale green flame that soon became a bright, searing sphere of hellfire. The thing wearing Cellice’s skin stepped towards him.

“She’ll thank me. But, then again, I did devour her soul…so maybe not...”

The overseer managed to grab onto the wall with his good hand, his twisted and burned wreck pressed against his chest. He staggered back, skin gleaming with sweat in the near darkness of the corridor. He tried to pray, he tried to beg for forgiveness, he tried to find some safety, but none offered it, save delaying the inevitable. He stepped backwards as the thing that wore Cellice’s skin continued to advance.

And then the glowing hellfire light of green and black illuminated a stained glass window, set in the side of the corridor by some ancient artisan, half-forgotten and badly in need of dust. In it, the Emperor in golden power armor, with a halo about his raven black hair, a look of determination in his blue eyes, stood between the masses of humanity – done in the old style, all profile and no depth, clustered behind the hyper-realistic depiction of the Emperor to underline his perfection. His flaming sword was held out, and it caught the greenish hellfire light and reflected it back golden.

The thing wearing Cellice’s skin screamed, and Cellice screamed at the same time, hands thrown up as the golden light washed out. The light burned away the hellfire, and Cellice, taking control of her mouth once more, shouted: “GET OUT!”

The stained glass window shattered into a thousand pieces. The statuary of the corridor wept blood. The skulls that were worked into the walls of the decks above and below exploded out of their sockets, floating in the air, and then speaking in High Gothic. Ghostly crewmembers, dead from long forgotten battles, emerged from the deck-plating, their greenish forms reaching up, causing the living crew to run, screaming, desperately.

Cellice was thrown backwards half a meter, and where she had stood, a twisted, spiny blackness floated – as if the human circulatory system had been carved of obsidian and given license to walk about without muscle, or bone, or flesh. An unearthly screech sounded from it as Cellice pointed her finger at it, and spoke with a voice not entirely her own – with a voice that rang and echoed from the other lives, the other possible branches that life could have taken.

With the voice of an Inquisitor and the voice of a heretical Sorcerer, with the voice of a warrior and the voice of a mad prophet, Cellice Digby shouted: “BURN.”

Flames leaped into being, consuming the blackened shadow, who shrieked, then died – in so much as things like it could die.

The flames faded, leaving the stunned and baffled overseer sitting on the deck, eyes wide, mouth agape. By the time his eyes stopped smarting and winking with pain, Cellice had gone.