Take as Prize Ch. 05

"Good man!"

The minor battle between the crew of the Hegemony was later enshrined in the gas miner's memories. It was quite fun, for those who served as joygirls and happyboys for visiting voidships – a protected, nearly religious class among the miners. They watched from their cushions and pillows and drank sacramental wines as the half-naked Vedics and Cadics that made up their clientele were dragged from the cloth and silk bedecked chambers that made up the red light district. The Shook, a religious sect among the religiously pluralistic Vedics, were quite happy to use their clubs and shock-prods to get the less pious crew away from welcoming arms and legs. Meanwhile, the crew who were there to have a good time fought back, often with makeshift weapons. Chair-legs, chairs themselves, mugs of ceramoplast, bottles of beer, and in one case, an improbably long sexual aide swung with more vigor and accuracy than a chainsword wielded by a Space Marine. But despite their valiant efforts, every last void dog was at their work station with nothing more than a few bruises, a lingering hangover, and memories of pleasant, soft skinned companions. The Shook were given, by a somewhat poorly educated boatswain, an extra tot of grog for their hard work and spent the afternoon seriously contemplating the casks delivered them before deciding to sell them on to the very crew members they had so violently clashed with. They then spent their extra thrones on incense and devotional beads, while the surly crew comforted themselves in grog.

And thus, all was well as ended well and the Hegemony plunged once more into the warp.

Emerging from it a scant week later in the Sisk system, the Hegemony was hailed via direct laser traffic from an orbiting station bearing the aquilla and skull markings of an Imperial station. Vynn, irritable by a string of minor disasters in the engineering bay that prevented Wix from visiting her stateroom for more than a few minutes and by Jon's continual obliviousness to her interest and her own personal recalcitrance to risk a friendship. Turantawix, despite his good looks and amusing shyness, was still kept at arms length by their difference in class and duties. A fling with him might not damage something Vynn found had become, over this cruise, as dear as the breath in her lungs and the treasure to her name.

And so, she glared with waspish irritation at the greenish, grainy video coming from the Imperial station in orbit about Sisk. A feudal world whose most advanced techno-sorcery was the ability to smelt iron into steel, Sisk was observed by and tithed with a system of orbiting stations. Their warriors were trained to use modern mono-blades and chainswords and sent into thick and deadly street fighting – a reason why the planet was kept at its feudal level, and why quiet Imperial whispers often set one feudal lord to war with another. A blade had to be honed and all that. But if the fat, balding face that filled the screen had been honed, Vynn thought, it'd have to have been by cloth and not a whetstone.

"Where the bloody hells were you! We were attacked four days ago!"

Vynn pursed her lips.

The story was told over a series of messages that flickered back and forth over the course of two days as the Hegemony made her way through realspace from the edge of the system to the orbit of Sisk itself. The light-lag delay between signals became shorter and shorter, and so Vynn had less and less time to calm down before responding to Imperial Sub-Governor Thurias Sprunt as he barraged her with endless quibbling questions. Where was the Navy, if the Spinward Front was supposed to be vital, oh didn't he know that they were siphoning funds from his defense fleet, he just knew that resupply was being deliberately delayed, did she knew he had Enemies within the Administratum and that they were just waiting, and oh, oh, how he loved to enumerate to any who would listen just what torments he would unleash once he was no longer assigned to this dreary backwoods post.

Between the vox messages and the crawling delay of light lag, it took Vynn coming to the station and practicing the great guns on a few pieces of orbital detritus before she was allowed into the Sub-Governor's office. He was quite polite – having watched the honed skill and accuracy of the ship's guns as they had pulverized a junked SDF ship waiting for towing to the local star for disposal. Witnessing a heavily armored monitor curmpling into so much burbling slag had that impact on most people, and Vynn only wished she could do similar things to other people. It would spare her many a vexing headache.

The office of the Sub-Governor was as finely appointed as her own, but rather than using a scratch piece of paper and some condiments, he had a fully functioning holodisplay, which he used to show the Sisken sphere and his stations and two SDF monitors. Here, now, the truth of the headwoman's claims were made manifest and Vynn whistled between her teeth. The Severin Dominate ship was not quite a frigate and not quite a cruiser. It bore the hallmarks of an Ambition. Not a true class by any means, an Ambition – or a Folly, as it often turned out – was what happened when a corporate interest or a Rogue Trader with more thrones than sense decided that they might have the skill of a shipwight.

Often, they were wrong.

From the gleaming green hololith that Vynn paced about, she could see that the Freedom was every bit a warship designed by those who sat behind a desk and imaged themselves as geniuses. It had two heavy long lances, a dorsal spine bristling with long forty-ho-hos that would fling armor piercing shells nearly a full astronomic unit's distance before losing in accuracy. And slung along the belly was a preposterous pair of torpedo railings that jutted out underneath the prow like teeth. The torpedoes were shielded by twin shield emitters but not a single shred of armor. Vynn shook her head and then looked at Janus.

"Dear God, it's a flying powder keg!" he exclaimed.

"It destroyed both of my monitors without losing a single inch of shielding!" Sprunt spluttered.

Vynn did her best to not roll her eyes. Any ship designed had to take a beating and dish a beating out. But this was a ship for a bully – a man who would throw the first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth punch without ever once imagining that one might punch back.

"Surviving until their shields pop, that's the trick," she said, quietly. "You think we can, Nestor?"

Nestor smirked at her. "Can an Imperial glass a planet?"

"Good man!" Vynn exclaimed. "Do you know the way it sailed?"

"Do I look like a witch or a mutant?" Sprunt scoffed.

###

"Find a ship?" Mary brightened. "Oh of course I can find a ship!"

"Are you sure that it's safe to go after this thing?" Reggie asked, causing her young ward's hair to almost burst into flames of pique and rage and frustration. "Monitors are heavily armored and armed, more so than a sloop, aren't they?"

"Not quite," Vynn said, her hands on her hips as Mary grabbed onto Reggie's sleeve and tried to bend her tutor's ear with her own thoughts on the subject. Reggie ignored her with years of long practice, something that Vynn rather admired her for, as she would have a hard time ignoring Mary after seeing even a tiny fraction of the navigator's powers. "You see, a monitor lacks a warp drive, like a xebec. Unlike a xebec, they're built entirely for defense and thus, have no engine to speak of. The Freedom would dance about them and blow them to kingdom come. We're a touch more sprightly. And we're Imperial Navy, not some SDF scrapings."

"Need I remind you of the Darius Incident, the Battle of Freehold, the Treaxian Siege, the Vantoosh Uprising, or the Adumbrial Campaign?" Reggie said, pursing her lips. As each battle had been a victory on the ground it was as far removed from Vynn's mind as proper rearing and breeding of pastel colored show equines. She looked on blankly and Reggie sighed. "Each was a notable battle where, beset by enemies, the PDF on said prospective planet fought back the enemy and was victorious without the Imperial Guard saving their behinds." She paused. "W-Well, the Valhallans assisted in the last, but still."

Entrenched prejudice assisted Vynn in ignoring the tyranids on Freehold, the orks on Darius, and the forces of Chaos on Adumbrial, and she dismissed them all with: "Yes, well, against a real enemy, you want the proper Imperial Navy. Or, I suppose, the Guards, if you must."

Reggie seemed less than sanguine – but as the needs of the service demanded it, she relented as Mary began to cast about with her mind. Vynn beat a hasty retreat...but she need not have bothered. The Navigator did not open her warps eye, nor did she incant or cast down strange magicks. All she did was close her eye and feel the impressions that the warp left on the material plane. Those perturbations were quite clear, as the Freedom lacked any navigator of their own, and so it left a juddering pattern of vortex portals, like a stone skipping through space. She laughed, clapped her hands, and almost ran to the bridge itself, before being forced to send a properly written letter for Reggie had decided she need practice her calligraphy.

Vynn squinted at the High Gothic, cocked her head, mumbled a few words, then finally, called Jon onto the bridge on the pretext of discussing their dinner that night, then quietly made sure he stood with line of sight on the letter. After a few minutes, he saw it and became aware that it had words, and shortly after, he had read them. With a sly innocence, Vynn remarked: "Quite a flair for High Gothic, our little pipsqueak."

"Well, she forgot the participial here," Jon admitted, adjusting his spectacles. "But on the whole, yes, it's quite a piece."

"What do you think she meant to say?" Vynn asked, nodding studiously.

"If she meant to say that the enemy vessel headed halowards on the route DZ-982.Skull, then she should have-"

"Prep for sailing!" Vynn called out.

Once more, the Hegemony plunged. Once more, she cut the void and the warp beyond, and once more, her captain pushed her to the breaking point, eager to see every Strelov fall behind, eager to see the lights of a new star and more than a star, the plume of an enemy ship, the plume of the Freedom and the promise of the five million thrones that would come with the head money of her captain, crew, and reactor. The warp, though, had other plans. Two days into the voyage between Sisk and the nameless system Vynn hoped would hold her prize, the maelstrom of souls and chaos that was the Warp roiled into a fierce storm. The aetheric winds blew along the entire Hegemony, and Vynn was informed of this by rolling from her bed and smashing to the ground. She skidded and fetched up into the side of the chambers – her ears filled with the clink and rattle of every affixed piece of furniture straining against the restraints that kept it in place. One drawer, imperfectly sealed, sprang open and she was pelted by undergarments and boots as they fell from the opened drawer. Vyn scrambled to her feet, hearing the groan and creak and scream of her beloved ship.

"We're heeling," she gasped.

Getting to the bridge took a braced scramble, moving almost slant-wise along the wall and floor alike. When she came, she found the bridge was as confused and thrown as she. Men clung to consoles, while orders were bellowed over the bass-deep rumble of the ship. Janus, his hat askew, his augmetic eye glaring, screamed out.

"I don't care what the damned cogitator says, we're dragging!"

"It may be an aetheric wind," Desna called out.

Janus turned to face Vynn and, despite the fact he had a leg braced against the railing of the command throne and clung to the side of the chair itself to keep himself upright in the madly slewing deck, he still managed to doff his cap and say: "Captain!"

"What is all this about, Nestor?" Vynn roared over the din.

"The ship's slewing hard – I think a ventral plasma engine has been carried away and we're still chained by Geller and cable alike!" Janus shouted back – sparks flew from a cogitator whose machine spirit had been stressed beyond the limit and had vacated its domains in a fit of pique. The poor ensign who was huddled against said console was pitched to the ground, messily dead with jagged metal thrust from his eyes. His shipmate started to sob, all decorum forgot. Vynn shook her head and looked back to Janus. She nodded to him.

"Send the order to find the anchor and cut it!"

"All right lads," Able Voidsman Teshan Keets shouted – his hands gripping onto the brass relief that decorated the starboard wall of the sleeping niche he and his fellow shipmates shared. "Captain's given us an order! Lets show the Voidhound what we can do!"

The roar of assent was lost in the devilish, hammering cacophony of the Hegemony's bones straining against the weight. Her gravitic field was being distorted wildly, the graviplates confused and left completely ahoo by the sudden change of slant and direction. Teshan beat forward with the practice of a born voidsman. Floor or ceiling didn't matter to him, and he led his crew to the location the bridge had directed them to. Hopping over bulkheads that yawned open over corridors turned into vast pits, Teshan had the fierce, set expression of a man knowing death was near certain, but to do other was to remove the near entire.

With a shriek, one of the new bloods – though she had served her gun well during the fight with the xebecs and that blasted pirate cove – missed her step and tumbled through a hatch. She skidded along a pit corridor and struck something far out of sight with a crack and another scream. Teshan paused only to kneel beside the hole and shout down. "Yally ho, Ally?"

"Go on!" Ally shouted back up. "Mere a bloody hip-stuck through! Go on, Teshan! Go on! The sawbones...ah!" She gasped. "Fix me up right proper!"

"Good lad!" Teshan nodded – there had been a day where that Alison Yeats would have bleated endlessly about being nothing more than a tailor and that she should not have been struck about the head and bundled off. But prize money promised her and a single battle had set her straight in a way that endless discipline never could. Teshan continued on with the crew and came to the place. He could hear the screaming, the howling, the hissing, the popping, the snapping.

He knew the bridge was right then.

The side of the ship yawned open and Teshan found himself looking into the warp itself.

Grimly, Teshan tied his bandana about his eyes, held his hand back, and said: "Hand me the gaffer and the cutter and stay you back, you dogs. I don't want to have to share the commendation. Jig?" He laughed – and laughed to hide fear of his immortal soul. He looped a cable about his waist, then tossed it back. And then he went around the bend, gaffer ahead of him. With his eyes covered, he could see nothing, but he could hear an inhuman roar and a crackling, snapping, groaning sound. Experienced ears and a keen knowledge of storms – though the Hegemony had not seen battle, it had seen storms – told him that there was a great rent in the ship, and that cabling chained the thing torn free to the main hull.

He tasted no bite of the void and supposed that the Geller field must have kept the atmosphere within the ship. Well enough, had it not, the bulkheads would have shut and he'd never have gotten here. He used the gaffer to feel out a cable – and felt it jar and shake in his hand. The cables twisted and shook. He grunted, then drove the gaffer forward, singing under his breath.

Lape Dog girls ain't got no combs

haul away, haul away

They brush their hair with modfish bones

and we're bound for Scintila

His song became more and more ragged as, over the screech and scrape of metal and hissing of furious tech-sprites, he could hear it. Whispering. Sibilant singing songs, buzzing into his head. He clenched his jaws and belted out, louder.

Rolly rolly ride oh!

We served this self same gun, quarter deck de-vis-on!

Hissing voices held his name. He brought the cutter forward and down. Jarring impact, the ringing in time with his singing. Swinging blind with his hands sweating on the long metal pole. He felt the misses, felt the jangling deck plate under his feet.

Come young bold and thoughtless men! A warning take by me!

And never leave your happy homes!

Down again, down again, his singing now was more akin to a scream and he felt the voices growing louder, and so louder and louder he sang out. Through that cutter, over the screamed out words 'Oh Lucky Jack, Row, Row, Oh Lucky Jack, Row!' he could feel the parting cables, the rubber shod heft of the pole he held keeping him safe from the tech-sprites bite. And then with a jarring slam, he felt himself pitched forward into emptiness, catapulted forward. He tumbled, and Teshan screamed – only to be yanked backwards by the cable. He hit deck, skidded, and lay there as the voices faded, and were replaced by six thousand souls, singing out in unison, all of their voices ringing through the ship.

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty! The King of Creation!

O my soul, praise Him who lives on Earth, our holy home!

Teshan tugged off his bandana and saw not but smiling faces above him and he laughed, laughed as Vynn laughed on the bridge – the ship righted, the groaning sound of her spine silenced, the whispering Warp sliding smoothly on as they left the tumbling wreck of the Ventral Plasma Thruster 398b and the twelve souls aboard. Like as not, all were already dead when they were cut away and left to tumble through squall and screaming torment. But among the crew, a quiet whisper came, a muttering of their fates. A muttering few wished to hear as the Hegemony sailed smoothly on.

A day later, she dropped from the Warp to the sight of two stars and a wicked grin from Vynn.

"There we have her," she said, lifting her head from the telescope. "The Freedom. Our prize, lads."

###

It was a truth in the ancient days of the Great Crusade that being stealthy in space was an impossibility for human voidships. Plying the lanes of space required such immense power that the only way to prevent the crew from cooking in their own juices was to vent said heat out of immense radiators that rimed the edges of Imperial ships like tiger stripes. Discoveries of ancient STC devices – thermal shunts and plasma recycles – that have remained a mainstay for ten millennium and change – removed the radiators, but left the difference between the killing chill of space and the balmy warmth required by fragile humans.

But as time passed, auspexes were worn away, chipped and sanded off by the slow, grinding forgetting of ages. Designs were lost, ways of use forgotten, and a widely accepted truism replaced the old: We do not know what we once did. A Tech Priest could, if pressed, describe the wonders of archeotechnology, but never actually rebuild them without a working blueprint, without something corrupted by the march of ten thousand years. Every second, a bit was lost. Every breath, a letter changed. And so, by slow mutation and deliberate mutilation by enemy and friend alike, the modern auspex bore little resemblance to the elegant auger arrays that could once have seen a thrust plume from another star.

This, Vynn reminded herself of many times as she lounged in comfortable silence in the rear of a cutter that tumbled, nose to nose, tail to tail, through space. Painted in dark, unreflective colors and emitting barely enough heat to keep her crew alive, the cutter would look to the Freedom like so much debris, cast away from a ship that had come through a bad storm. The Hegemony was making a great show of venting wastes out of the rent torn in her side, and she had directed them to flutter their plasma thrust in a gouting, wasteful, lubberly way. Even now, the Freedom was creeping towards them from the life-bearing planet it had stopped at to revictual.