We are the last of the Voidship Xinthad. The Imperium declared us pirates, and that was true by virtue of our captain alone. Our ship was led by none other than the Rogue Trader himself. It was a routine job, pick up cargo by force and move it to a planet on the outer edge of the Screaming Vortex, just far enough away to avoid the nastier effects of it, but close enough to scare followers.
It started out easy enough, with just a few guards and machines set up to defend the plethora of riches inside. We forced our way into a clan's storehouse with a cargo ship flying in low altitude, guns aimed at the gates of the storehouse. I blew a hole in the wall from the gundeck of the cargo ship, paving a little path of destruction for the men below to follow to their goal. It seemed like we bit off more than we could chew though, as two other ships that didn't even show up on radar dropped in from orbit, Imperium ships, firing upon us with lascannons and missiles. The heat of the missiles hitting the ground swept my hair back into my face with a sickly heat, a heat that I now bitterly miss. The gundeck doors closed as lasers nearly grazed the ship, blinding me from the action below, but I knew what this meant. It meant we'd have to abandon them and return to the Rogue Trader empty-handed with no ground crew. It was a fate worse than death given the man the Rogue Trader was, but we all had our duties and debts to him. No amount of plotting or scheming could possibly do me any good, I'd be alone if I tried to act against the Rogue Trader.
Our ship moved into Warp while the Imperium ships were just clearing out the last of the ground forces, heading nearly headlong towards the Screaming Vortex. It was rough and the Navigator, the ugly bastard that she was, was handling it well. The ship shook like the mysterious gelatin dessert in the cafeteria, but the hull wasn't breaching despite the heading. The Imperium ships were still following us, but our sensors were nearly blinded from the warp distortions around the Vortex. All we could do was sleep and wait.
...But no one slept for the next couple days. Maybe it was the shaking, maybe it was something else. After hours of laying on my bed I heard her, like a small clawing at the back of your mind. The voice was coming from all around, perhaps he was saying something, or perhaps she wasn't. I simply shook my head, ignoring it as a horrible curiosity of the Vortex, unwanting to listen to the possible evidence that I had finally snapped. The voice, or rather the voices never stopped in my room, but it was silent outside in the halls. I asked a passerby into my room, hoping it was something real, but they said they couldn't hear that sweet calling voice and the plethora of echoes that seemed to chase the sound. Perhaps the Vortex is getting to me.
Perhaps I was sleeping, but it was more likely that I was awake. The owner of the voice came to me, his many voices whispered in secret her gentle words. The world seemed to warp around him, obscuring and changing her shape endlessly in a wonderous whimsy. She showed me the ship burning around me as I walked about what I assumed was my room. My arm tingled. It still tingles. Something was on my arm, burrowed into my shoulder and side, but calmly resting along my forearm. Something metal, something not. It was like a horrible fever-dream, and I didn't feel anything other than the tingle in my arm.
I came to in my bed, sweating horribly enough that my camisole stuck to my breasts. I made my way into the bathroom to wash my face, and maybe even shower. I stumbled as I made my way to the sink, feeling oddly numb after my long fever-dream. The water splashed my face, but I didn't feel it, my lips hung slightly loose and I moved my hand to feel the numb flesh. As I barely felt my proding finger I let out a scream, watching from the mirror as my nose started to drift to the side as my eyes seem to have an agenda of their own. I vomitted in confusion and disgust over and over. It was like the fever-dream hadn't ended. It wasn't real, it couldn't have been. I grabbed my laspistol from under the bed and fired it into the wall, pressing the still white-hot end onto the edge of my jaw, feeling only a tinge of pain as I let out a slight moan of discomfort as my smell of burning flesh filled my nostrils, but the pain never came.
The laspistol was held to my head as the tingle in my arm returned, assuring me that it was the fever-dream. I squeezed the trigger, hoping to awaken in my bed for real. It failed, the laspistol didn't go off. I looked at it and was about to slap the side of it as the echoing voices returned, the pistol was not a pistol anymore. The thing in my hand had metal in it, but it's tentacles writhed as I gazed upon it, digging deeply into my shoulder, which I barely felt. The voices called, they wanted me to land the ship. Yes it was the Screaming Vortex, but at this point I just wanted it to end, the dream never ended. Everyone tried to stop me, but in the end they couldn't. The voices told me as such, reassuring me as I made my way to the navigation tower. The further I walked, the more beautiful the thing on my arm was. I called her Tiffany, and together we pulled the ship out of warp as we tore apart the tower. The screams of the crew I once knew passed my jaded ears as Tiffany screamed back at them, exploding them left and right in a miraculous burst of red along each corridor of the navigation tower. Perhaps by sheer luck or maybe not.
We rode the carcass of a ship into the ground of the planet. What the voices wanted I still don't know, but we are blessed, and we will see it through.
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Topic: [Black Crusade] Life and times of a Chaos Warband. (Read 11455 times)