Take as Prize Ch. 02

Janus nodded and without a word but a touching of fingers to forelock headed in, the armsmen escorting him through the corridor towards his room. Vynn thought a great deal of unkind thoughts, for she had almost immediately recognized that look upon his face. She had to explain it, though, as if to a child, to a simpleton, to Jon when she met him in her quarters for dinner that evening. "Oh, I've seen it before, all those long-gun naval men, that is to say, those who have come from old naval families and such, they look down on someone whose from a world not like their own. So, they see me, with the tattoos and the hair and the like and they think I must have gotten this ship through rank piracy. I bet he's thinking right now of how he deserved her with his action against the 'nids, nice piece of work such as it was..." she trailed off. "Jon, are you quite all right?"

She had noticed, at last, that Jon was not regarding her, but rather looking intently at the other guests she had invited. It seemed only proper for their launch to bring up not only her new Enginseer Prime, this Turantawix fellow, but also the civilians who had purchased rooms. Both of them seemed to be quite at ease in the opulence of her quarters in a way that Turantawix simply was not and never could be.

Saffron Mayes was a rail thin woman with midnight black skin and hair dyed a brilliant white, which she had tied back behind her head in a severe top knot. Her gown and dress though were finest shimmerglass fabric, and flowed with her every motion as she picked up a decanter of amnesac to pour for herself, speaking languidly with Damion LuPont. Damion was as trim and handsome a young fellow that Vynn had ever seen - his build was on the same lines as Jon, but he lacked Jon's thin, almost sallow complexion. Damion instead was a hale, hearty, red cheeked, yellow haired man with the most arresting purple eyes. He dressed simply, in a black jerkin and white leggings, with only a red sash to denote his station in life - it bore the noble pins that indicated rank among Tempestus orbital nobility.

Jon shook his head, looking away from the guests. "What? Yes, yes, quite all right."

"Well, you look as if you've seen a ghost," Vynn said - and went into a discussion about the difference between strata in the navy that sailed in one of Jon's ears and out the other. For as Jon looked back to Saffron, her eyes met his and he could hear nothing but the pounding of his heart and a soft, sibilant voice that hissed from within his mind, a voice that rang in ears and memories alike.

Hello there, Slicer...

Saffron smiled.

And Jon adjusted his collar slightly, then went to take a seat as Vynn exclaimed: "Ah, and here it is, the suckling roast!" With such invitations, Jon had to sit next to Pyros, the most dangerous psyker he had ever met, and make polite small talk for an hour.

***

In the lowdecks of any ship, there are many subcultures that are mixed together by the broad club that is the press. There are luckless noblemen tossed in among the gutter rats and the void dogs and the mutants, and the wheat and the chaff are separated not by any gentle hand, but by the cold and pitiless pressure of the requirements of the service and the starting rods of boatswains. But for those who could learn to throw a lever when told and stood unflinching before a recoiling macrocannon, there was a place that could be found. A comfortable place, where food was simple, company was plentiful, and the future was assured.

Teshan Keets was one of these comfortable multiudes, irate at the derangement of all his carefully ordered life. As an able voidsman, he could do more than just flip a switch and heave a door. He was rated up to and including deep void operations and piton duty. He could don a voidskin faster than his old da back on Kurtok V could skin a hare, and he took no small pride in the three chits of valor pinned onto the brim of his aluminum hat. Once for knocking down a grox whose neural inhibitor had failed with a shunt-hook. Twice for handling mutineers, during the voyage of 602 and the voyage of 609.

And here he was, seated not with his fellows from his third shift, but rather in a mucky muck of newly pressed lubbers. There were three clueless louts who kept bleating about their families and their old home and how the gravity here felt odd and strange, and one of the other new fish went on and on and on about their old ship, the Heart of Souls, and how she wasn't as brutal and crude as this terrible naval ship.

"I hear," Lule the Welder said, cutting in over the moaning and groaning, his face twisted and scarred by many times spent kissing the void on skinhull duty. "I hear fish like you need to shut yer traps an' listen, rather than blarin' on and on like bleatin' groxkits." He took a seat between Teshan and one of the new fish, looming from the darkness of the corridor, lit only by guttering candles and the few luminators that still drew on the tech-sprites of the ship. The shadows cast a demented, bulging-eyed look to his face, his skin turning sallow and inhuman in the darkness. "Listen here, listen here, this here captain, with her starts and her tattoos, she's liable to drag us all out into the cold and gasping Lady's claws."

"L-Lady?" one of the new fish, a brown skinned woman who was still dressed in some party finery, mixed with the crew rags that she had been given.

"Lady Void, she is," Lule the Welder rumbled, his fists clenching. The dancing light cast across those knuckles, and between each gnarled root of a finger, there bore a letter, spelling out, plain as day: HOLD FAST. "Lady Void wants to suck the marrow from yer bones and quench yer very last breath. And mark my words, new fish n' old, the new captain's got a head on her shoulders that'll take us all as fast as Horus' wink."

Delivering such a pronouncement, Lule left the small knot to continue on his rounds.

Teshan shook his head and knocked back another cup of grog.

###

The day had come and Vynn stood at her bridge with a smile on her face and the breeze of Aquios in her memory, so vivid and clear that she almost felt her hair stirring and could nearly smell the sea-salt in her nose. The bustle and hum of the bridge crew moving about her had become somewhat more settled since her first abortive flight at the helm of the Hegemony - they had had near a week as the Hegemony crawled at sublight speeds towards the edge of the system, far from the gravitational forces of the binary stars that prevented any ship from engaging their warp drive. A bell tolled, once, twice, three times, and a piping voice - a young ensign who had only just reached her new position and not yet gotten over the giddy authority of it - called out: "Sub-Heliosphere in mark five, six gravities!"

"Six gravities, put that in the book, don't sleep on deck you fucking child," the gruff sound of Ship Master's Khan snarled out over the bustle, and the midshipman who had been tasked with keeping the log up to date started to scribble the notes.

Vynn looked down from her position in the center of the bridge to her first. Janus had not impressed her over the week. Slow to enforce orders given, balky in coming up with his own initiatives, and this perpetual air of 'should-a-beens' made him a decidedly odious presence on her bridge. The only saving grace she had of him was that his thick Ultimarian brogue and his standoffishness had transmitted to the rest of the crew that he was not one likely to stay, and so his distaste for the captain of his ship hadn't infected them. All well and good for an easy cruse without a single battle or cutting out expedition, but nothing for a fighting man-o-war. Vynn chewed on how to deal with that as the serving voidsmen on the bridge were sent forward to pull on the great chains at the front of the bridge. Rattling vista-plate shields started to move up, inch by laborious inch, to cover the view of the starry void.

A soft cough drew Vynn's attention. She saw that Jon had come onto the bridge with a somewhat pallid, nervous expression on his face. He clasped his hands together, opened his mouth, then became obscenely distracted by some mundane facet of naval minutia. It made speaking to him feel akin to speaking to an invalid who had been stricken of all memory, an amnesiac, taken aback and shocked by the sun rising or apples falling to the earth.

"What is the meaning of those plates? To protect from energy discharge or...or..."

"No, no," Vynn said, chuckling. "We're to set sail into the warp, Doctor. Those plates are to protect us from viewing the Warp. Bad luck, you know."

Jon looked grim. "Not exactly bad luck, Vynn, warp shock will kill a less hardy man."

Vynn shrugged. "It's bad luck to be killed, no? What brings you to the bridge?"

"I wished to speak of you, about, ah, one of the passengers," Jon said. "I've been trying to, well, work up the courage."

The truth was considerably less prosaic and quite a bit more coarse. After the dinner party and the uncomfortable time spent between Saffron Mayes and one of the other passengers (his name having completely escaped Jon's memory and attention), Jon had retreated to his quarters. There, he had checked the focusing aperture on his pistol, sharpened his knife, and planned to steal into the passenger deck. Clearly, he had not been as guarded with his thoughts as he had hoped, as when he was about to snap the charge pack home to his pistol, there had come a knock at the door and the tinkling, chortling laugh of Pyros, the true woman underneath the nom-de-guerre of Saffron Mayes.

Jon could not have reproached himself. There were tricks that mundanes could use to dissuade the psyker, the witch, the wyrd. Nursery rhymes, sung round and around and around in the mind were one simple method. Doing complex algebraic equations, another. The more extreme methods involved lobotomies and surgical augmentations. Becoming half a machine would rend apart the neural architecture normally read by a psyker, but it was not a mode that fancied itself to Jon, not in the slightest. But even that, it was rumored, was not entirely efficacious. No. In the end, there were but two sure and simple ways to protect oneself from the psyker.

The first, preferred by many in the Imperium's upper echelons and by its shadowy depths who were both beyond reproach and control, was to have a pet psyker to block and stymie the efforts of your enemies.

The second, preferred by the great masses of humanity who lacked either writ or endless coffers, was far simpler.

Kill the psyker.

But now, Jon found himself standing before the door, looking down into Pyros' pale green eyes. She was dressed in a form hugging skinsuit, the type worn by acrobaths and workers in a dangerous manufactorum. And assassins. The fact the clothing clung to every fold of her tight, compact body was surely not lost on her. She had undone the top knot and curled her hair outwards, so that it cascaded along the elegant curve of her shoulders. She looked like divinity itself, taken form and placed before Jon. She smiled at him, then crooked her finger. The knife tucked under Jon's sleeve yanked free and slapped into her palm.

"Jonny..." She had chortled.

Then she had kissed him on his lips and Jon found all logic and reason leave him and there was only the physicality of the moment. The swift, darting, rapier thrust of her tongue. The eager questing hands, which sought out his member, stroking him through his leggings. The finger that touched the close-rune on his door, sealing the two of them into his chambers, which felt close and tight and dark. His heart had hammered in his ears, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps as Pyros broke the kiss, her voice husky.

"Lets make up for time lost, shall we?" she purred.

Her hands had moved, but this did not mean Jon had been idle. For he knew that he was damned. His hand had gone to the collar of her skinsuit, finding the seal, popping it, tugging, pushing, pulling. It peeled aside, as if she had been skinned, and underneath, rather than red viscera and gleaming bone, there was nothing but dusky beauty and the most astounding pair of breasts that Jon had ever seen. His hands had cradled both, finding her puffy, excited nipples. She had chained the two together by a thin line of gold links and a pair of white silver rings, which glinted in the cabin's light and jangled. Her voice became husky as Jon tugged on that chain, making her breasts stand to attention.

"Jon..." she had breathed.

His mouth and hers met again. Again, her tongue darted into his mouth with the fierceness, the desperate eagerness of a knife thrust to the heart of a hated enemy. His hands went from her breasts to her ass, feeling the silky smoothness of her skin. He lifted one hand up, and found the puckered scars of the psy-spars. His finger looped around one of the thrusting, bronze-hued augmetic plugs and the moaning gasp that escaped from between their kiss drove him wild. He had put those augmetics into her. He knew the way they interfaced with the spine, the way a touch here, a caress there would send sparks through her pleasure centers. She hissed and bit his lower lip, her mind speaking in his.

Slicer...

Jon bit her neck, fierce. Hard. Then, drawing back, he growled. "I'm not Slicer anymore."

"Oh, but you like it when I use that name, don't you?" she purred. Then, pushing him back and to the side, she walked to the bed. Stalked, really, like a hunting feline. Her taut, black ass jiggled with every step, her hips rolling from side to side as she crawled onto the firm mattress of his bed. She arched her back...and with a seductive purr and lolling, beaconing motion of her tongue, she extended the psy-spars. The six nozzles on her back hissed and sparked as the half meter long steel rods emerged, giving her the appearance of a burned technocaustic angel. Her eyes glowed and psychic fire tingled along her body and back as she caressed Jon's mind.

And pleasure.

Intense, soul aching, heart bursting pleasure. It ripped through him, from toes to nose, and he gave himself utterly to the moment. But when the pleasure faded, he found that it had left no temporal scars on his body. His pants were not soiled. In fact, his member still ached with the eager arousal of the moment, his balls still hungered to spill their fullness into Pyros. And she was there, right there, and he scrambled forward. His leggings hit the ground and he grabbed Pyros by the throat. Rough. Harsh. He pressed her against the wall, making her psy-spars bend outwards, fanning like wings. He knew the pressure and strain would mix pleasure and pain through her body, the tightness of his hand around her throat would drive her wild. And wildness flickered through her eyes as she bit her lower lip.

Slicer... she moaned in his mind.

He kissed her again, feeling decades drop away, becoming that teenager again. The one picked up by Inquisitor Tynard. The one called likely by that old bastard. He remembered the first time he had done this to Pyros. Then, she had been the dominant one. She had sat upon his face and did not let him sit up until he had given her every inch of what she desired. Now? Now, he kissed her and kissed her again, caressing and squeezing her breasts, tugging on those nipple rings, twisting them. He used her, abused her, and knew she loved it.

Panting, she rasped out, unable to focus enough to speak mind to mind: "Slicer, fuck me."

"Beg," he growled, his mouth sucking on her nipple, tasting the metal of her ring.

"Please-" she whimpered as he hooked ring with teeth and tugged. Gently. But not too gently. "Oh God-Emperor, please."

She couldn't be taken on her back. Even if the spars hadn't been extended, even if she had been as smooth as a virgin from shoulders to rump, Jon wouldn't have taken her thus. He didn't want to look into her face. To remember. He wanted to lose himself in her tightness, her moist sex, her welcoming body. And so, he placed her hands on the headboard of his bed and slotted his cock against the cleft of her ass. He felt her quiver and moan as he ground against her, then slipped his cock down. He felt the moistness of her sex and he leaned forward, nibbling on her ear. Softly, oh so softly, Pyros whispered.

"I can be her..."

Jon shivered. Then. Softly. "Please."

Pyros closed her eyes and crooned. The low, desperate moan became a song, and when Jon blinked, it was not Pyros underneath him like a bitch in heat. It was Regencia. And not the Regencia who even now slept near her mistress in the navigator spire. It was the Regencia of Jon's memories. Untouched, unblemished by years of distance and lifetimes of worry and care. She was still soft and unscarred, her sex framed by a wild, flame red bush, her hair wild. Her freckles glinted as she whispered.

"Make love to me, Jon..."

Jon closed his eyes and shuddered as his hands clenched on Reggie's shoulders. He thrust into her and she was as virginal as he remembered. Tight and welcoming, but with that edge of resistance that made him almost break into tears. He bit his lower lip and thrust, and thrust, and thrust, his balls slapping Reggie's thighs and belly. She twined her pale fingers through his pillows and bit down on the soft, downy comforter of the bed, to keep herself muffled and silent. She shuddered and climaxed - easier than in real life. But unlike in his tender years, Jon knew far more about the movements of men and women. He did not merely thrust, but played: His hand and his fingers worked, finding her clitty, rubbing it in slow, eager circles, drawing forth gasps and mewling moans and whimpers of his name.

In that voice. That sweet voice.

Then, at last, his own will broke and Jon himself was brought low. He buried his face in Reggie's red hair, breathing in the scents of the garden and the rose-bushes of their youth as she wailed into the pillow. A beautiful sound. Plaintive.

And Jon spent himself. His balls clenched and his cum filled her, brimming around her pert and perfect pussy lips, escaping past his member. It streaked along her thighs, dripped onto the bed. Pattering softly, it became the only noise as both held their breath. Then Jon shoved himself away. He jerked from Pyros - the illusion shattered as completely as if it had never been. A few singed spots tingled along his ribs and his shoulder, from where he had come into close contact with the psy-spars. Smoke tingled in his nose, ozone smoke from the augmetics doing their duty and shunting the psychic overflow away from the two of them.

"Mmmmm," Pyros purred, satisfied. She arched her back. Tossed her hair. Smirked at him.

"Get out," Jon rasped.

"I'll be back."

And she was gone - between blinks.

And to Jon's eternal shame, she had come back. And again, and again, he had lost himself in her. She could not only be Regencia. She could be any woman that crossed his fancy. The Eldar Raider they had matched wits with in 598, with her raven black hair and liquid, alien eyes. That chaos witch whose dark cell had been put to the torch in 591, whose body had been as richly welcoming and curvaceously appealing as her heart had been black. And, of course, the beautiful Commander Vynn had welcomed him in that bed, her body as muscular and skillful as he imagined.

Thus, Jon had kept his tongue, torn between what he knew his duty was and what his body begged for.

Until now.

Vynn frowned slightly, watching Jon. She decided to head this unpleasant business off at the pass and so, quite unwittingly, torpedoed Jon's will to do right. She stepped up to him and murmured, in a soft and confidential tone: "This isn't about Damion, is it?"