Take as Prize Ch. 02

"I, uh, what?" Jon asked.

Ah, yes, I saw it true, Vynn said, misreading his expression entirely. "Damion and I merely played Regicide after dinner, nothing more, no matter what the wags in the mess might say. He's a charming lad, once you look past him being a noble. But that the whole distance we have gone." She nodded. Jon looked shame faced. He opened his mouth, closed it, then nodded quietly.

"Well, I..." he coughed. "I merely, ah, worried. You know. Rakes and rogues and such. Noble brats. Such and such."

Vynn slapped Jon's shoulder with a cheerful bellow of 'here here!' and then turned to the fore of the ship. The vista-plates were fully covered and the crew were in their positions. Several prayed, but most sat with the casual air of voidborn salts. They had seen such a transition a thousand times, and would see it a thousand times more before they were shunted into the embrace of the void, sewn up in their own hammocks. Jon too had seen this transition, but never from the bridge. He felt his hairs prickle and rise as the sub-harmonic hum of the Geller Field came to life around the ship, wreathing the whole Hegemony in a golden aura of crackling lightning. The nose of the ship flashed with energies both arcane and technological, and a swirling portal into the depths of the warp opened and swallowed the ship whole. The sensation was not unlike being beaten about the head with a mallet and dunked in salt water while ones organs turned inside out. It passed quick as blinking, though, leaving only an impression of a memory.

And then the Hegemony was under sail.

The vastness of the warp could be understood by the mundane and the sightless only in the most vague terms. A chaotic sea of potentiality, a conduit for magic and mystery. A place of danger and damnation. It was all these things and far more. The home of Gods and powers beyond mortal ken, the warp was the key to interstellar travel and the seed of every man's eternal damnation, from the arch-heretic Horus onward. For the families of the Navis Nobilite, it was a place they knew in pieces. Ancient charts and star-paths, encoded in secretive ciphers and hidden away in radio-engrams between the stars.

For Mary Belisarius, ensconced upon the throne, her eyes covered by a wrap of cloth, her third eye opened wide and streaming with purple fire and eldrich energies, the knowledge of her responsibility weighed like a cloak of lead. Though she bore in her hand one of the charts bequeathed her by her family, a chart that unfolded in her mind like a three dimensional puzzle box of sensations and thoughts and feelings...she felt deeply alone as she peered into the warp ahead of the Hegemony. She sighted and scented the dangers shrouding and dogging the ship from moment one. Half formed malicious spirits moved and sang along the wake of the ship, scrabbling along the crackling Geller Field, seeking their way inside. But she remembered what she had been taught and looked not to them, but rather, to the Astronomicon.

There.

There, she had it.

In the distance, a blazing pillar of light stretching from the ancestral homeworld of humanity, spreading outwards across the galaxy. It provided a single, stable anchor point to navigate the warp from. From that point, she could compare to her charts and feel...

And there. There. There. Her fingers twitched and nerve-induction pulses caught her thoughts and transmitted them through the complex cogitation systems that filled the Hegemony's spine. They brought the thoughts in the form of coded flashes and signals that filled the helmsmaster's console. The officer positioned there called out the flashes, translating them with the ease of long practice, to the ensigns and voidsmen who handled the helm cogitators.

"Burn port-ventral, five marks, two gravities!" The helm master frowned, pursing her lips. "Burn, zenith, counterspin, six marks, three gravities!"

The orders transmitted. Crews sprinted from their resting places, started and bellowed along by boatswains. "Come on ya lard asses! Get the lead out! Move! Move! Move! Move you fucking lubbers!" The whip cracked and pressed men and women alike reached their assigned components in time enough to make the maneuvers. Plasma was redirected via a complex and jerry-rigged array of magnetic induction coils, tube-shifters, vent-fanes and other pieces of arcana. The whole of the Hegemony started to twist and turn.

Vynn smiled broadly as she felt the ship under her feet shudder and catch just so. She could feel the currents of the warp pushing her ship along. Her palms caressed the bronze railing surrounding her plynth and she laughed with the sheer joy of the movement and grace that seemed to fill the ship stem to stern. She laughed again and turned to Jon.

"You feel that?" she asked. "We have to be making ripping good time. Ensign Mayweather!" She turned to one of the auspex officers. "Cast a measure line, I want to see how many Strelovs we're pulling!"

"Aye aye, captain!" Ensign Mayweather saluted, then turned. He worked a few toggles and switches.

"Stelovs?" Jon asked.

"A measurement of speed at warp," Vynn murmured. "The only way to tell is measuring relatives to relatives. We cast out a physical object with a vox-beacon, and we count the distances."

Jon nodded.

"Thirty five kilometers, ma'am!" Ensign Mayweather sounded as joyful as Vynn felt.

She slapped her palms on the bronze with a whoop. "That's eleven ought five Strelovs!" she laughed. "By the God-Emperor's skull, that's better than I had any expectations of. I'll need to get the charts, we may be able to skip layover at Voidsman's Grave..."

"Oh," Jon said, trying to disguise his disappointment. Vynn and he had gone over the charts for their cruise. There had been some hope in his breast that they would need to stop at the system known as Voidsman's Grave. There was rumored to be a rogue planet there, captured some centuries back by the cold red star's gravity well, with exotic life-forms only just now emerging from long hibernation by exposure to the sun's radiant light. Seeing the look on his face, Vynn laughed. "Never fear. The first part of the sub-sector's cruise is going to be in, ah, what was it, DS-908.98.B5..." she said, nodding. "That system's never been seen before."

She did not mention that it, most likely, would be full of rocks. Most were. If there were less rocks and more worlds bearing life, she supposed that those worlds that could wouldn't have been fought over so viciously.

But where would the fun be in that, eh?

###

The exit of a ship from warp space to real space was, aboard ship, a cause for fanfare and excitement and trumpets wailing and singing of psalms and the clapping of hands. The irony and irritation was that the same effect was pronounced upon the sensors and auspexes of most enemies and allies within a solar system, rendering attempts to emerge from warp without being noticed a roll of dumb luck. Worse, as the chances were higher than not that the enemies were looking at the furthest edges of the system for the tell tail flash of exotic particles and swirling energies that marked a warp portal opening and snapping shut.

So, it was with some small relief that Vynn dropped from the warp in a system that had never been seen by human eyes. Not total, though. She knew it was unlikely that alien eyes or treasonous eyes or merely unfriendly humans who had never mentioned their existence to the Imperium of Man had taken up roost in this unnamed spec of cosmic dust. But it was not impossible. And so, she gave her second order of the day: "Mark position and parallax."

"Marking position and parallax, aye ma'am," the auxpis officer called out. The chime-chime of the bell's watch telling time rang out over the soft muttering as the ensigns and midshipment who were given the tedious and yet vital task of sweeping telescopic views across the solar system and picking out any winking, moving shapes relative to the local star (or stars, as was often the case.) The first order, though, had just completed as Vynn finished her second cup of tea. She had been offered the stuff by a servant and drank it down without realizing it wasn't the harsher tangier recaff she preferred. But since decorating the deck with a mouthful of greenish fluid that tasted not too dissimilar from sugar dipped liberally in salt water and let to molder for a week under a heat lamp was often viewed as undignified by a captain, she had been stolidly and without a single iota of enjoyment been drinking her tea, jaw as set and resolute as a member of the Death Korps of Kreig. The officer who came to her was a youngish woman with raven black hair that matched her recaff dark complexion and a startlingly garish yellow sun-burst tattoo on her forehead. She was dressed in a uniform that would have done well on parade grounds, let alone on the bridge of a ship after a week at warp.

"Captain Vynn," she said, her voice colder than some icebergs.

"Ensign, ah..."

"Desna, ma'am," the woman said, holding out a log book that required two hands to be grasped and a third to be read properly. "Chronological check complete, as requested."

"Ah, very good," Vynn said, uncertain if she was being acted upon. On every ship she had served, from her first, The Lucky Chance, to the Victory, had checked the chron in the same way. Some luckless mid or ensign went in, made a note of the date as viewed by the ship time, checked local pulsars through the long ranged auspex, did a tedious great amount of math to try and determine the temporal skew between real space and warp space, then entered it into the log. Then said luckless teenager would, often, see such work be glanced at, get a 'very good, so and so' and then have to cram it into the carto-artifex chamber that everyone else ignored. And thus, another glorious morning in his Imperial Majesty's navy would be devoured.

But under those piercing eyes, Vynn felt herself obscurely judged, as if Desna expected her to dignify the work she had done with more than a quick glance. Bridling under her collar and huffing, Vynn pulled out a pair of small spectacles and set the logbook on the rim of the railing of her command plinth. She opened it to the most recent page, coughing at some dust that came free, and leaned forward to look at the spider fine scribbling. Desna wrote like she was a cogitator herself, in fine print, rather than looping cursive or illuminating text. Vynn frowned slowly as she mouthed out the cosigns and signs and tangents and variables and gravitational constants and transwarp equations and slowly looked up from the book to Desna.

"You...ah...didn't use the Twelve By rule?" she asked.

Desna managed, through the tiniest of a frown and a slight crinkle of her forehead, to look as if Vynn had insulted her, her ancestors, her familial totem, and her sacred grox.

"It's inaccurate, Captain Vynn," she said.

Vynn blinked slowly. Then she nodded and looked back. The arithmancy looked right, but she had been calculating chronological drift using the Twelve By rule since she had been fourteen, subjectively. She mumbled a few more numbers under her breath to force her still sleepy mind to do the last of the calculations, then nodded.

"Well, very good, Ensign Desna," Vynn said. "Though, ha, ha, I'd ask how you did it so accurate without having a single realspace reading, as I'd have taken all last night to do this, ha."

Desna shrugged. "It took me ten minutes, it was no trouble. I shall get back to my parallax checking, Captain Vynn." She saluted, crisp and mechanical, then turned and walked off, not a hair out of place. Vynn gaped after her.

I must promote that woman the instant she shows a shred of combat merit, Vynn thought. She needs to be in charge my auspex yesterday.

"Ma'am, parallax complete!" the officer in charge of the auspex pit called out. "No plume, no sail, no sign."

Vynn nodded, curtly.

"But we do have a goldie," the officer said, his face breaking into a huge smile.

"A goldie!" Vynn turned to face one of her runners. "Be a good lad, get to the doctor's quarters Blightly and fetch him out."

Blightly made a face and Vynn studiously did not hear the muttered 'bar tha', he's like as not stuck 'is prong in a xenos fruit like a common doxhund...' that the put upon runner said as he sprinted off. When he returned, it was with a blinking and sleepy looking Doctor Balthazar behind him, led along like a canid on the leash. Vynn clapped her hands together, rubbing them excitedly to try and bring the Doctor to a state of full wakefulness, something that seemed to be a tad unlikely. He looked at her with a dour expression.

"Please," he rasped. "Not as loud."

"Are you drunk?" Vynn asked, frowning.

"I fear that affliction has passed, vaccinating me to this new state," Jon said.

Vynn chewed on her lower lip. "Hair of the canid that chomped you, then? I find that clears a hangover nicely. Whatever in the good God-Emperor's name did you get drunk for, Jon?"

Jon did not mention the nightlong time spent thrusting upwards into Pyros tight cunt, nor the way that her dark breasts had bounced in concentric circles as her psy-spars moved in rippling, caterpillar patterns, flexing with every move of her lithe hips and her sensually curving back. Nor did he mention the fact that he had spent himself inside of that tight, forbidden pussy and been left panting quietly as Pyros stood off of him, slid a dark finger along his lips in a mockery of tenderness, then walked away to leave him soiled and filthy and longing for the next night. Most of all, he failed to mention the welcoming mouth of the amnesac bottle and how it let him sleep afterwards.

And so, he said: "Warp travel disagrees with me."

"Well, you picked a poor service," Vynn said, cheerily as her servant brought over tea, which Jon gulped with with every sign of relish. "But a good day. We've found a golide!"

"I beg your pardon?" Jon asked.

"Naval cant for a planet in the golden zone - not far as Mars, not near as Nocturn. Just right, so you know. For life, that is. Life as like we like, that is." She laughed. "Though, seems three times out of four, the life we like is not as like as we like to life!" She slapped Jon's back, ignoring his murderous glare. "Still, you can peek through the auspix at it."

Jon rubbed his hands along his face. "Why? We'll be in orbit soon, shant we?"

"Oh, good heavens, no," Vynn said. "This is a layover, give the Navigator time to rest herself, the engines time to recharge, and us a chance to stop rolling the dice against running into a psysqual or a vortex." She shook her head. "We'll be hanging here for a day or two, then back to the warp for us, on to the next system in the cruise."

Jon spluttered. "But but but-"

"Never you fret yourself, Doctor," the auspex officer said, walking over and patting the doctor gently on the arm, assuming the same tone most naval men and women used for groundlings, a tone somewhere between amusement and the slow, careful enunciation one must use on those who had a good portion of their brain removed. "We have as good a scope as anywhere in the system, ha ha ha."

Jon scowled and bent himself over the auspex console that he had been offered. The large sphere that could track and pan and scan the view settled against his palm and he leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the rubberized nozzle that reminded him uncomfortably of the gaping mouth of a flamer. He looked through the grainy green image, flickering with sparks of technomantic energies and the blurr caused by distance. He pursed his lips as he watched the bright orb of the world, bisected by its terminator. Two moons. He lost himself utterly in the minute details, and the wondering what could be there. New xenos races, beasts to catalog...to...

He drew his head back, then leaned forward. "Vynn, move the boat forward a few thousand kilometers, if you'd be so kind."

The bridge crew looked as if a painting of the Emperor had been set aflame. Vynn bit back a laugh, shook her head, then gave the order. She had been thinking of doing some new rigging, forcing the crew to try their hands at shunting plasma into different configurations. Stealth rigging, scanning rigging, shield rigging, all the different modes that cunning captains might use to give their ship an edge above and beyond the minutia of theotechnological specifications. It was what meant the difference betwixt life and death in the rage of battle. And so, she spoke the orders and watched as the crew went to their duty.

They were getting better, at least. Faster, but not smooth, and one shift crew forgot a burn-transfer that gave the Hegemony a yaw-spin that took the better part of an hour to correct. But once it had been settled, Jon stepped away form the auspex, looking like an ancient earth raccoon that had been caught in-flagrante-delicto. He was unaware of the smirks and chuckles as he walked to the bridge command plinth, looked up at Vynn, and said.

"There's civilization on that blue marble yonder."

TO BE CONTINUED