Take as Prize Ch. 05

The other armsmen in the cutter breathed out streams of fog, their red painted armor dulled by capes and cloaks. They checked their weapons. Among the Vedics, that was a mixture of shotcannon and a throwing disc called a chakrum – something Vynn was eager to see in action. For the Cadic and Imperial mongrel crew, they had a mixture of short-cut lascarbines, shotguns, pistols, sabers, hammers, hooks, nets, and other short ranged weapons. The cutter was crammed full of near fifty men. Against the Freedom's compliment, it seemed spare little.

"May I ask something," Jon spoke up, drawing Vynn's attention to him.

"Ask away, Jon, but quietly," she said.

Jon adjusted his spectacles. "Could we not be playing Ode to the Emperor's Light in here and not alert a man?"

Vynn chuckled. "Not if they bounce laser light off the hull and read the vibrations. And so. Quiet." She leaned forward. "Tell on."

Jon nodded, then whispered. "Why, exactly, are we on this shuttle?"

"Cutter," she corrected him with instinctive speed. "This is going to be a fast mission, my dear, and when it comes to speed, I want the best shots. We have the finest Vedics, some Shook, and the best armsmen among the other breeds in our little menagerie." She spoke that a mite louder than others and saw the smiles and nods rippling through those who had heard, and rippling further on as they whispered to their mates. But quieter still, she said: "And simple: If an officer isn't there, then it don't count for the prize money. And I don't want to send the mids and Nestor said it was all rank foolishness."

"I believe he said 'aye aye, Captain," Jon said, wry.

"Tis in the tone of the thing." Vynn said, tapping her nose.

"Ah."

"Cap," Killick hissed, ducking back from the forward piloting nub. His bristly face was half swaddled under a scarf to keep himself warm, and fog blew up from his mouth to mist his goggles, which he wiped with a gloved hand. "Cap, the flyboy says we're right under that great whale of a waste of thrones."

"Good," Vynn nodded. "All right lads. Remember, keep the gunfire at a minimum. Hand weapons, speed, quiet." She smiled. "And breathers on."

She hefted hers. In hard void, it'd do little, as it did not fully enclose the head. But if the quarters they were in were vented, they would breathe just fine through the spare air stored between the breather's bladders. She tugged it on as the rest of the armsmen did the like. The faint pops that could be felt and heard through the hull was the maneuvering thrustsers, cold gas jets spewing into space, spinning the cutter about. Vynn wanted to be near the door more than a window, and so she could not see the stars wheel and spin, nor the great bulk of the Freedom overhead. She had to but imagine as the cutter drifted closer...closer...closer...

A sound not unlike a drum being struck by a car rumbled out and the seal-lock hissed open to show spare and empty deck plating. The gravity on the cutter shifted as its gravi-plates warred with the gravi-plates of the Freedom and the Freedom won out. The crew, readied and braced for it, made not a noise as two burly Shook with laser cutters stepped up and began to slice through. By working in opposite – one going widdershins, the other deisel – they cut through fast as winking. The armored hull fell in with a hiss, cherry red edges tracing in the air, and Vynn saw a gaping, confused looking voidsman in Severin Dominate colors and a straw cap looking down at them. She sprang up, plunged her sword into his chest and lifted him bodily off his feet and laying him on the ground. There were none else in the corridor, and she jerked her blade free, gesturing silently. The rest of the boarding crew came and she told off the two Shook with the cutters to begin setting up for a short stay. Set up they did, planting down a pair of heavy stubbers ripped harness and all from a lander's pintles.

With twenty men at her back and the rest remaining behind, Vynn started forward, Jon at her side. He had his pistol free, and checked every corner, ducked past every door. They moved with purpose, following Vynn's sense of the schema of this place. She came to a crossing, told off two men to stay, to keep the route back open, and then gestured five men forward. They were nearing their first target, and she made sure each had their chakrum. The doors to the torpedo bay opened and Vynn counted nearly a hundred men within, but only thirteen close enough to stop them.

She gestured with one hand.

The Vedics took pace into the torpedo hall, and the crew who saw them looked more confused than frightened. They were as mongrel a mix as Vynn had expected, culled from every world of the Severin Dominate's nascent stellar civilization. The cloaks and paint concealed the Hegemony's colors until it was too late. No two Vedics split their fire, and a rain of glinting, monoedged chakrum fell upon the nearest. They were cut down, several struck in the chest, some decapitated whole sale. One managed to scream as his hand was cut from the V of his fingers up to his forearm, blood and bone shining with the edge. Then his scream ended as his head was bisected along the upper corner. But that scream did not bring the whole crew boiling down on them, for the torpedo bay was a noisy place – shouts, calls, clattering chains, groaning weight. IT was nosier than an Imperial ship would be as the great beasly torpedoes were hung low on the belly of the ship, rather than contained internally, and great, humming void shield emitters kept the air in and the good Lady Void out.

Vynn gestured the bombers forward and they rushed forward, carrying every bit of dredged together munitions the Hegemony had. No melta's, she. Only gunpowder and steel canisters Turantawix had been good enough to rig with detonation caps, and an unscrewed macrocannon shell, and a plasma power core too spent to be recharged. Canisters of prometheum covered in red paint and marked with pictograms of fire and smoking hazards. As motley collection of artillery Vynn had never seen, and her bombers were glad to set them down throughout the torpedo bay.

And then-

The roar of shotcannons could not be disguised by clattering deck life, nor the blare of alarms. The noise had come from the escape route, and Vynn called to her bombers: "Fire them! Fire them now!"

A single voidsman with theatric calm lit a match-stick, tossed it down, and sprinted for the door before falling to the ground, caught and pinned to the wall by a half dozen las bolts. He left a smear of blood on the wall, and behind him, a funeral pyre already had begun, the promethum going up in gouts of white flames. Smoke poured out and the rushing Severins were pushed back in horror. The flames would not set off the munitions – they had been designed to withstand greater heat. They were there to keep the Severins from disarming Vynn's present. More las bolts followed on the first volley as the Severin armsmen knelt down and supressed Vynn's party. Jon snapped off shot after shot with his las, but did so while moving back to the door. Vynn waited till the last of her crew were gone, then slammed the bulkhead shut. Jon stepped up and fired his las pistol at full charge into the join of wheel and lock, and the metal heated, then fused, and was stuck ever more.

"Good lad!" Vynn said, then ran forward. Her sword at the ready, her pistol drawn, she was ready for the melee that filled the corridor beyond. Severin by the dozens were coming down corridors, leaping over the mangled bodies of the luckless first who had found the way blocked by fire and shot and fury. The shotcannoners were reloading their ungainly weapons, and before they could, the Severin were upon them. Sword met sword, furious bellows of 'For the Emperor!" and "For Liberty!" rang out in the narrow confines of the ship. Vynn found herself matching blades with an officer, with plumed hat and purple painted Cadian pattern flack vest.

The officer twisted his balde, then brought a parrying dagger to her side. Vynn caught his arm, smashed head with head, then pierced him through the neck as he lay insensate. To her left, Jon fired twice, and twice took eyes and sent men sprawling to the ground, twitching as their bodies did not yet realize they were dead. To Vynn's great irritation, her crew had forgotten their mission and had started to fight, as if they would win. She shouted: "Killick! Tevery! Ally Steel Leg! All of you, stay by me! The rest, to the ship! To the cutter! To the cutter damn you, we have but five minutes!"

"They run! At them!" An officer shouted.

Severins in striped shirts, bearing nothing more than their wrenches and their pipes, came in a tight press. Crew, thrown into a fire to crush it out with bodies. Jon fired as fast as the trigger could be pulled while Vynn joined him. Dozens fell, but their bodies were ground down, the Severin screaming in animal fury, without caring if they lived or died, in that horrible way that came on men and women who knew there was no turning back, that one could only go forward and die and die and die. Beside her, Killick sank with a groan, shot through the neck. Jon sprang forward and threw down a device. Flames and smoke and flash sent men who would have charged forward stumbling, their legs unable to carry them anymore.

Vynn tossed Killick over her shoulder and she and Jon ran for the ship. They ran past heavy stubbers and stern looking Shook. The Shook remained calm and steadfast until the Severin came around the corner. Then bullets tore into men and women alike. Arms were ripped, while legs splintered, spines shattered. It was more than flesh could bare, more than spirit could endure. Without the faith of the Emperor, the Severin drew back sullenly, and left them. Vynn slapped a Shook on the shoulder, laughed, and said: "Good men! Good m-"

Then the munitions went up.

The whole Freedom pitched and a howling screech filled the air. Metal and fire alike ripped through the corridor and peppered against Vynn's vest. She stumbled back, fell into the hole, and found herself holding the severed head of the Shook in question – his eyes unblinking, his mouth forming words no lungs would breath for. Then the cutter tore away, seal-lock snapping shut. Vynn thrust the head away, looked about herself, saw Jon beside her with smoking hair and wicked cut along his jaw, showing to the bone. She shook herself, sprang up, and thrust her face to the tiny window.

Behind her, the Freedom burned.

"Burn! Burn! Burn damn you! Crush every bone, we can heal them, just burn!" she boomed, bellowed, screamed. The thrusters on the cutter kicked to the highest order and she felt herself mashed backwards. Through every window, a scant short time later, she saw the brilliant whiteness of a flash, a flash that could be seen from other systems in the years to come. A flash that signaled that the fire, rushing through every corridor, guided by lack of redundant armor, hastened by limited surviving crew to fight it, a fire that was born of gunpowder and plasma alike, reaching the magazine. In a single moment, every one of the Freedom's thousands of tons of munitions had gone off, and the plasma reactor had breached.

And for those few seconds, the unnamed system held two suns.

###

A single sun set on Freedom's End's beautiful, teal-green sea as Vynn watched several of the Vedics attempting to teach the Cadic members of the Hegemony how to play their baffling game of Der Ghan. It required riding mounts, grox, but as every grox on the Hegemony had a neural inhibiter, and Der Ghan required the mounts to be in their natural mental state, they replicated the method by riding atop willing voidsmen. The Vedics waved their mallets above their heads and the sweating men and women carrying them aloft panted and ran along the sand. The water was needed too, though from what Vynn had gathered, the 'Ghan' referred to one of the many sacred rivers. But an ocean sufficed, and the whole Cadic team let out a hideously mispronounced 'val toooooooooo!' as they landed their blue sphere in the far waters.

"Vynn, Vynn, Vynn!" Jon said, voice as excited as if he had stumbled on a new chunk of buried treasure. "Look at this, look, see."

He thrust his finger under her nose and it took some furrowing for Vynn to see that a six legged insect with a black carapace and snapping mandibles. It was so small that Vynn found an instinctive revulsion welling inside of her. Anything large was to be feared, as it could eat or tear her apart. But anything small was to be even more feared of, for they would be small and could get inside of an orifice or make one of their own.

"Ah, you have found some new horror, eh?" Vynn asked, pushing herself back as a Vedic nearly brained a Cadic man with an overenthusiastic swing of a mallet. Overset, his mount – a burly woman – toppled to the dunes with a bellow.

"It's an ant derivative," Jon said, brightly. "Directly related, no doubt, to the ant of Terra's past..."

"Well, this world do have those old bones on it," Vynn said, standing up. If she squinted, she could see the mountain-like hulk lifting from the waters of the ocean. Rusted through and through by millenia of salt air, a small team of tech-priests still diligently combed it for any treasures they might find. "Turantawix says it's from the third great wave of colonists."

"But think, Vynn, think," Jon said. "This here ant, brought here, must have been a stowaway aboard that ship. Carried, unwittingly, it survived trip through the Warp and an atmosphere. It came to an alien world, and did ti surrender? Nay. It thrived. And it's sacred form is scantly changed. To be like, evolution acts on a scale glacial even by Imperial standards, and so such immense changes are unlikely to be easily seen and yet, not only is it here, but it is still an ant. Is that not a marvelous thing to ponder on?"

Vynn laughed. "Only you can get so excited by a creeping, sneaking spider."

Jon scoffed. "It's no arachnid, ill educated Death Worlder..." He muttered darkly as he looked at the ant. His free hand went to the thin scar that marked his cheek – he had stitched himself as neatly as anyone Vynn had ever seen.

Vynn stood. "We should be restocked in a week. Fresh water, fresh food. Check everything we catch, Jon, I don't want some new plague coming free." She bit her lower lip, watching the stars come out overhead as the sky shaded to purple, then to black. A shooting star zipped by – but it was not a shooting star. It was a marker of her victory, the slowly expanding debris field of the Freedom tumbling down to the planet that now bore its name. She smirked slightly, then drew her sword. She thrust it, blade first, into the soft grass that threaded the top of the embarkment that looked over the sandy beach. "I am not a Rogue Trader, Jon...but I still name this world. By my deeds. I ask...can any other Imperial servant do that? A Space Marine's name is writ in their chapter, but may be lost to us lesser mortals. A saint's teaching may protect a thousand worlds, and their face may grace a thousand temples, but lest you're Sabbat, that won't signify. But me? A lowly Commander? I can destroy this world, if I wished..." she grinned.

"Is there a point to this foray into megalomania?" Jon asked, reclining back, holding his precious ant to his eyes.

"That ant of yours!" Vynn snapped her fingers, pointing one to her friend and boon companion. "It has traveled so far, survived so much, despite being small, for it is flexible and cunning. But who will know it, save for xenographers like you?" She shook her head. "No. I won't be an ant, nor will I be a mere servant. I wish to do something to draw my name across the stars...and if I can take the Freedom, if I can save Lord Kar'Toba, I can do it."

"Ah," Jon said.

"Jon..." Vynn rubbed her chin. "My cruise is all through this sub-sector. At the sub-sector's edge is a system – Karacilla. A system of gas giants and moons. It's one of the Severin Dominate's biggest hot beds. I want to go there and cut out one of their shipyards."

"With a sloop?" Jon asked, skeptically.

"With a sloop!" Vynn grabbed up her sword, then thrust it starwards.

TO BE CONTINUED