Chapter 3

Being away from her ship filled Vynn with an intense, animal excitement. It was not that she longed to be away from the Hegemony – far from it – rather, it was that she was taking part in a Captain’s tradition as old as the oldest heroes of the Age of Conquest. They were legends, whispered names: Fletcher, Church, Bordeaux, Genoveis, Sysko. And now she was joining their ranks, setting foot on an alien world, bearing the Imperial flag, backed by armsmen and a true natural scientist in the form of Doctor Jonathan Balthezar. What a time, what a glorious time, to be alive and to be Commander Vyn of his Imperial Navy.

“Why red?” Jon bellowed over the roar of the cutter’s engines and the rattling and clanking sound of the buckles and restraints that webbed them into their seats. He looked at the armsmen, who were checking their weapons over with a nervous, fidgety attitude. If they had ever gone planetside in this kind of operation, Vynn would have been quite surprised. They were dressed in flak vests that had been painted a lurid red, with black edging.

“It’s the same color as the ship, of course,” Vynn said, nodding.

The cutter broke through the upper atmosphere of the planet and through a thick layer of clouds. Peering through the windows, Vynn clucked her tongue at the riot of colors that flickered below her. It seemed that they were soaring over a jungle painted and colored by a collection of madmen. She saw flashes of green and red and blue and yellow and gold. She shook her head and looked at Jon, calling to him: “Jon, is there something wrong with this place?”

Jon, not looking up from his much dog-eared copy of On Hatred, frowned. He was reading through the lists of Xenos Bestrius Terribiles and making note of the Antillan Brainworms, which used a rudimentary form of psyker powers to fill their targets with terrifying nightmarish visions to freeze them in their boots, then implanted ravenous larvae in their brains. “No, no, like as not, it is an evolutionary quirk, pay it no mind.”

“This place is surely cursed,” one of the armsmen muttered.

“Quiet Killick,” one of his friends hissed, punching his shoulder.

The cutter’s hull sang with the caress of the wind and the pressure of suddenly being exposed to and shook about by an atmosphere. But its smooth lines and powerful engines were up to the tasks, and soon its wings had extended outwards like the arms of a butterfly feeling the breeze. With that additional stability, it found a clearing within visual sight of the ruins that the telescopes had picked up on the planet’s surface. It had been all a case of albedo, according to Doctor Balthazar. There had been a great big patch of reflective material, shining through the clouds and the jungles, which had become clearer and clearer with orbits and additional scans. And now...

And now the seal-lock to the cutter hissed open with a whistle and a groan, letting the air of an alien world mix with the air of the ship, and filling each who breathed it with their own complex melange of emotions. Fear and excitement, eagerness and wonder. Vynn breathed slowly in, her nose flaring.

And sneezed.

And sneezed again and again, then a third time. She coughed, spluttered, shook herself, and was barely able to see as she stumbled off the gangplank and away from the grasping arms of Doctor Balthezar. Her eyes swelled up, teared up, and she snuffled desperately for breath through a wall of mucus. She coughed and spat and drew her sword, nearly decapitating poor Killick as he moved to her side. She held the blade up and gargled: “I-” sneeze “-claim-” sneeze “-this-” sneeze “-world-” sneeze “-for-” sneeze “-humanity!”

Then she sneezed again.

Unaware of the men tiptoeing around her, trying to come close as she flailed about herself blindly and impressively with her blade, Vynn put on the stiffest of upper lips as she said to Jon: “I think we have a good world here! Verdant!” She tensed as Jon’s hand clasped her wrist and he stepped almost intimately close and slammed what would have been a killing blow with a knife into her throat. As it was a hypodermic spray containing a generalized contrahistamenic, Vynn breathed easily rather than her last and blinked tears from her eyes to see Jon glaring at her.

“Is this how all you blasted naval traditions end up, being nothing more than a way to get oneself killed in the most undignified, idiotic, stupid, bone headed, ignorant displays of bravado, not even putting up a screen for squitos and ticks and blasted face-clinging xenos beasts we never saw before?! Good God-Emperor, Vynn-” Vynn realized why Jon’s voice sounded so odd as she saw he was wearing a breather mask and further that his eyes had not become that of a mutated insect but rather that he was wearing thick protective goggles. “Rank foolishness! If I had my way, you’d be tossed in the brig, never seen anything so absurd in my life.”

Attired with a breather and goggles, Vynn walked through the rainbow hued forest, armsmen hacking at the bushes of blue and green and violet. She ducked under a low hanging vine that transpired to be a segmented insect that scuttled away from her shock of blond hair, and then asked Jon: “What is the meaning of the jungle’s color? Is it some kind of ... taint?” she asked, shying around the word she had been about to use. Mutation. There were accepted mutants within the Imperium, but few that any liked to see up close and personal, and less who were given actual authority. Jon shook his head, distractedly kneeling down to take a note of a plant and its number of fronds.

“No, no, this world is many millions of years younger than Terra or other similar worlds,” he said. “The plants here are still in competition, guided by the God-Emperor, to see which will soak up the celestial rays all plants subsist upon. On Terra, the color of green was the one that won out. Not the most creative of choices, but efficacious...” He stood and looked at his friend, smiling slightly, though that could not be seen behind the breather mask. “Here, it is up to Him on Earth. Come! Come! The ruins are this way!”

An hour later, they arrived at the foot of the ruins, emerging from the jungle and leaving behind a path beaten flat and submissive below them. Several trees had been felled by volleys of lasgun fire and Killick on the flamer had roasted away large nests of instincts that had barred the way with iridescent wing flared wide and hissing, meaning several parts of the path were more black than rainbow colored. But now, Vynn whistled as she looked out and up at the ruin. To her, it brought to mind the immense spires and towers of a hive city, though at a smaller scale and caved in stone and white sand rather than in plasteel and adamantine. The structure’s center was a large, rectangular pyramid that rose in jagged steps, no one step exactly the same height or width as the others, giving it a somewhat headache inducing sense of wrongness. At the top was a polished brass cap that had been weathered by time and wind into a dull collection of scrap. Surrounding it were several dozen plinths of white stone, carved with symbols in a jagged and unfamiliar tongue. All of it was built to the subtly wrong scale and proportion and design of the alien mind, and filled Vynn with excitement.

“Doctor, Doctor, this is quite a find, is it not?” she asked, her voice breathless.

“Oh, aye, it is,” Jon said, sounding distracted. “I’ll need teams of men to dig away at those plinths, to see if any of their treasure remains...” He was already sketching plans in his notebook. “Yes, yes, uh, send for a lighter and maybe ... five hundred men?”

Vynn cackled. Her mind filled with images of the thrones one could bring, quietly tucking the safer trinkets and curious of a dead xenos race – whether the race was dead now or would be shortly once she found their homeland. She could see the golden circlets and the gemstones and the strange art pieces that would fill a nobleman’s house and oh, oh, what fun, they would be the ones raked over the coals if some Monodominantionist got their hands on them. She could have almost skipped. And best of all, as it wasn’t a ship’s prize or head money, and so she’d get the full share, ah! Then she checked herself. No, no, it was not good for a captain to gloat over such things. And besides, she could put in for may a lasburner or a few extra bunkrooms, better stores, something the crew might enjoy. Yes, that would do quite nicely.

The issue, of course, was not the crew – nothing the pressed men and voidsmen liked more than a chance to earn an extra tot of grog for doing some work groundside – but rather, the dour and unsmiling face of Janus and his Ultamarian stick-spined way of looking at naval regulations. He read them out like quoting from Lex Divinicus and finished off with: “Further, Captain, every day we spend here is another day in delay in smiting the enemies of mankind.” Which was nonsense, as all knew that at the rate and speed of naval warfare in the 41st millennium, a week could go by without one even noticing the lack.

And so, Vynn made stern show of it and said: “That’s an order, Lieutenant Janus. The Doctor has intimated to me that this is some kind of xenos weapon, and it must be destroyed as quick as we can wink it out, hear?”

Vynn salved her somewhat twinging conscience by recalling that, in utter fairness, Jon had intimated that the xenos artifacts were, well, xenos and artifacts. And if one could read into the monosyllabic grunt he would emit when pressed while he was reading hieroglyphs, one could say that they were definitely concerned grunts. The kind of grunts one would use when one was studying a highly dangerous and likely incredibly advanced xenos weapon that needed to be destroyed for the good of mankind.

“And the good of my coffers,” Vynn murmured to herself.

An Imperial warship sailed with a dizzying array of possible light craft to go with it. Along with the shuttles and landers, there were comet-snagging bumboats and decadent grav-yachts for the officers, and that wasn’t even getting into areonautica and various variation of the Fury class interceptor. But nothing quite matched the furious, mile long streaks of fire and smoke that came when Bumbler class heavy cargo lifters shot through an upper atmosphere and burned their four arm mounted plasma engines as hard as they could to slow themselves down and settle on the ground. The advantage of their bulk and their hard thrust engines made itself clear in the jungle, as they landed not in a mass of trees, but rather in a glassy field that had been wiped clean of life.

The crew emerged from the landers with work songs and laughter only slightly muffled by their breathers and goggles. Almost to a man, it had been the Vedic crewmembers who had volunteered for the extra grog and the hard labor. Their turbans (as their head wraps were called) had been freshly washed and shone in the sunlight as they chatted with one another, beards squished by the breather units. One of the Vedics stepped away from the rest to salute Vynn as she stood and watched the whole enterprise with a beaming smile only slightly ruined by her breather.

“Mr. Khan!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t expect you here.”

“Of course, Captain,” Mr. Khan said, his voice shockingly jovial, considering how dour he could be on the bridge. “Nothing like a jungle to rouse my blood.”

“Your homeworld?” Vynn asked. She hadn’t heard much of Vedas, save for their curious traditions of the martial art and their unique spin on the worship of the Emperor. The former interested her more than the latter, as serving aboard a Rogue Trader’s ship from the time she was twelve years of age to eighteen had exposed her to more than her fair share ways of worship the Emperor – or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. She had seen volcano worshipers, sky worshipers, sun worshipers, even those cog rattlers of the Adeptus Mechanicus were supposed to be worshiping the Emperor in their own addled way. So, she found nothing to balk at in a thousand guises of the Emperor, saints who could punch through stone with their bare hands and fought with staffs weighing in at eight tons.

“Of course,” Mr. Khan said, looking away from her to the jungle. “Though this world is but a pale copy. It lacks the Tears of Sanguinius. A sacred river delta, emerging from the mountain of a thousand masks, where the Kalaripayattu carve their visions of He on Earth and practice the chakra.” He looked back to Vynn, then coughed. “Ah, I do go on.”

“No, no, it’s good to know your crew,” Vynn said. She, though, was somewhat distracted from Mr. Khan’s recollections by the alarming sight of Jon thrusting about with a stick he had cut from a tree, gesturing dozens of men and women about. One of the stone plinths were already being wrapped about by rope and cape. Men and women alike strained, their backs bare and sweating in the heat. They kept their breathers on, giving them a curiously mixed look.

“Phekne! Phekne! Now! Now!” A boatswain shouted, gesturing with his starting rod. The ropes tightened.

“Well, I should show you the chakra,” Mr. Khan said. “I have a feeling you will-” a pause for the crash. “-quite like it, though we have not gotten a chance to bloody them.”

“That chance is coming, doctor! Good doctor!” Vynn shouted. “Is that treasure there?”

“Oh, aye, that’s more like treasure...” Killick muttered to one of the other armsmen, his flamer resting on his shoulder. “Finer than the Leaky Sow in Gunmetal City, eh lads?” And that laughter drew Vynn over to look down at the uncovered cache. For a time, she didn’t quite know how to understand what she saw, and so stood there, unaware of how she looked entirely like a fish to the nearby crew. Those that weren’t also distracted by the cache. Jon had hopped down into the pit and was laughing as he poked around with his stick.

“Just as I thought! The symbols, the workmanship, the fact it can be seen from the Kupiter band, ha!” Jon laughed, then tossed up one of the brown hued bottles. Vynn caught it, then dashed it on the rocks nearby.

“Where the bloody hell is my xenos treasure!?” Vynn shouted.

“Whoever said xenos treasure laid here?” Jon asked.

“You!”

“Nay,” Jon said as he walked across cache of fine 38th millennium amnesac, carefully stored by the metric ton within the steel and armoplast container sunken underneath the crude plinth. “I said treasure. I never took to specify what kind. But the workmanship of the pyramid, the symbols on those plinths, it’s definitely the Trade Cant of the spinward cartels. This is a smuggler’s trade point.”

“Smugglers!” Vynn spluttered, seeing her personal wealth turning to so much shrapnel and plumes. Smuggler’s goods would go straight to the Arbites and any prize money would need to be peeled from their iron shod fucking fingers, something as easy as beating an ursine off of its prize or trying to drink a Space Wolf under the table. And even if prize money was to be had, since it was technically a prize of war – smugglers being enemies of mankind – the prize was to be shared among the crew. So, not a full share, not even slightly. Vynn shook her head and fumed as the second plinth came down and the crews (who were cheered immensely by this find) unveiled vac-sealed containers filled with even more obscure consumers goods. Not just amnesac, but figurines of imperial heroes, banned novels, pornographic data-slates, music recordings with the guild seals filed away, artisnal firearms from Gunmetal City stored in oil with gleaming gold ammunition stacked beside them, grenados filled with pleasure gas, dried happyvine in silver containers, a plethora of sex toys and, at last, a single signed copy of the sheet music for the Tau’s Demise, an opera popular along the western fringe of the galaxy but as of yet unknown here.

Seeing these delightful things tucked onto the lighter under the glaring eye of boatswains who knew how sticky a voidsman’s fingers were, Vynn went from fuming to considering. She worked out the mechanics of a smuggler’s craft, and pieced together what this pyramid implied. A low tech, continually functional signal that could draw a ship from the edge of the system here, which would appear to be nothing more than a primitive xenos relic from orbit and even close observation. She chewed her lower lip.

“Is that a kind of camouflaged insect in your pocket, or have one of the erotic assistants gone wandering?” Jon asked, his eyes affixed upon Vynn’s great coat.

“Jon,” Vynn said, unaware she had been sussed. “How old are those containers?”

“No more than a year, maybe two,” he said, rolling his shoulders. “The pyramid is older, but I have found the markers of its construction. Likely, they used cargo exoskeletons to make it easy, and las cutters to carve out the limestone...” He trailed off. “Ah, I think I see your thinking.” His eyes sparkled with eagerness.

“If one smuggles bootleg Ciaphas Cain figurines,” Vynn murmured, rubbing his chin. “How far is that to treason most foul, eh?”

“Yes, quite a logical progression,” Jon said.

“Any smuggler stopping here would be a prize worth snapping up ... and one paid out by the Admiralty.” Vynn nodded. “And Jon, you wanted weeks to study these jungles, no?”

“I’m glad to be of service in furnishing you with an excuse,” Jon said. Then, pausing, his gaiety faded as he looked at the work of loading the treasure onto the ship. “Vynn, I did wish to speak with you, about, uh, something of a delicate nature.”

Vynn colored, hand sliding to her pocket with a somewhat guilty air. “A woman has needs, Jon, it’s not hysteria, I’m sure. I’ve never had hysteria, never had an irrational day in my life, save when profit’s to hand, but profit’s nothing if not eminently rational, eminently!”

Jon shook his head, looking at her pocket, then at her face. “God-Emperor, no, what you do or don’t use in, the, ah, quarters, that’s nothing of a mind to me!” he said, mortification filling him. And an intense desire to take hold of that aide lurking in Vynn’s pocket and use it upon her. It made him ache with a kind of animal longing he usually associated with Regencia or Pyros. Or Pyros in the form of Regencia. And then his mind wondered how accurate the psyker’s recreation of Vynn’s muscular body was. While he had seen her nude once or twice, he had been distracted by propriety and hadn’t been memorizing her every curve with his lips.

Vynn laughed, shaking her head and setting her hand son her hips. “Well, then, there’s nothing more to talk about. Killick! Killick! You and your armsmen are to protect the Doctor with your life and limb, yes, your very souls to boot!”

“Oh, aye, we weren’t using them, we weren’t,” Killick muttered, taking dour pleasure in the fact he was surely being heard, and yet was not being loud enough to be easily understood. Vynn ignored him, turning to face Jon. Jon, feeling his courage failing once more, smiled at her. He could at least let himself get lost in the delights of exploring these jungles, studying the creatures, finding more signs of smuggling. It would be good. But, just as sex did nothing to solve the problems around it, it was only a temporary solution.

He would need to find true courage soon...

Or never.

First, silence. Then the unending devastation, the ringing end of the world, the cataclysm to eclipse all cataclysm. An obliteration of sound, a loss of self, a pressure that would go on and on and on. Through it all, those who were exposed to it had to scream and wad their ears up with cotton swabbing. Then silence came. Those lucky to have protective muffling around their ears or even advanced techno-sorcery that might shroud the head in a baffling field of noise-canceling impulses, they were the first up. And they bawled out the orders and directed the shaking bodies of those who had to trust in cotton and the Emperor to protect their hearing.

“To the guns! Fucking now, move, move, move! Lift! Drive! Hammer! Lift! Drive! Hammer!”

The sweating gun crews of the Hegemony rushed to their weapons as smoke roiled around their heads. The cannons vented into space, but there was always some blowback along improperly sealed lines and vents. This left the gundecks as foggy as an underhive after an acid rain, and the new hands had to be beaten into moving. They needed to learn to not think, to only move and act after that sound. Macroshells were heaved from storage and slammed into the base of the guns by levers and gravitic winches, while the masers near the far end of the gundeck had their focusing lenses doused in cooling liquids that were tossed by the bucket. Men and women swore to themselves as they touched burning hot metal and stumbled and tripped.

On the bridge, Vynn was no less active. She was calculating out trajectories and bellowing orders to the bridge crew as the Hegemony burned a vent here, a vent there. The broad plume of her plasma engine stretched behind her, a wake that marked their trajectory as clearly as if it had been displayed on a cogitator board. Vynn shook her head and grabbed up a mid who had dropped a pile of papers on the ground – papers holding the jotted down reports from the belly auspex riggers.

“If you can’t memorize it, Mr. Gavin, then at least don’t drop it!” Vynn shook the lad for a moment, then shoved him on. “Get to the gun-station and give them the firing solutions, now!”

The entire ship shuddered as the guns went bellowing. Vynn scowled at the sound. She shook her head and then turned to Mr. Khan, who was holding his chron open. “Twenty minutes,” he said, then snapped the chron shut with a chagrined expression. Lt. Janus hid his own view of the ship’s crew under a faint pursing of the lips. In other words, he hid it not at all, and Vynn wished sorely to beat him to death with her command throne. As such acts were frowned upon in the navy and physically impossible due to the size of the throne in question, she instead stalked to the forward auspex pits. The officer there – not Desna, as she wanted, but rather a mild mannered and utterly inoffensive and yet completely uninteresting and unremarkable mane named Tensig – looked up at her. But Vynn wasn’t there for him. Instead, she craned her head to look out with her own two eyes at their target.

“Can’t even hit a bloody moon!” she snarled.

It was both unfair to call the nameless, root shaped mass of rock that orbited the nameless sphere that played host to the smuggler’s cove a moon and to say that the Hegemony could not hit it. There was a single gouge taken from the moon’s lumpy polar region that had come from a glancing blow from one of the gravitic cannonades. There was also a great deal of shrapnel damage, caused by the rectangular box of explosions that saturated the space around the moon at the scale of a few hundred thousand kilometers. Imperial ships fired shells timed to explode, lest their weaponry simply sailed of into the wild blue yonder and destroyed one of their own worlds in some distant epoch.

That was widely frowned upon and considered highly embarrassing.

It was also how a ship could both bear enough guns and munitions to turn an entire planetary continent into burbling slag and yet could also fail to destroy a single enemy ship vastly smaller and less well armored than a standard hive city. Unlike a planetary surface, the void was an unforgiving place for misses. An explosion a kilometer off could do nothing at all if the shrapnel missed, and the odds of an odd chunk of steel or adamantine shell casing to do more dropped off exponentially with distance.

“All right, cease fire, call it off, belay the next barrage,” Vynn said, sourly. She had been doing a dour calculation for every volley. She’d need to take at least one prize to remain solvent after this cruise, and gunpowder and shells cost. But to go into battle without a lick of practice ... no. No. She shook her head. As she shook her head, she was unaware of the mutterings from some of the other officers, and the mutterings from the gundecks, though those came closer to shouting matches as the ringing in the ears faded but slowly.

“Mad starts, firing off at nothing at all...”

“We’re in uncharted space, the only ruin’s a xenos ruin, eh?”

“I hear there were gems the size of your fist there...”

“Pirates treasure, aye.”

When Vynn retired to her chambers, it was in a foul mood. The tech-priests had gone to the moon to do some estimations of damages and come back with the troubling report that the first volley might have lowered a single shield array, but not even scratched a double. Vynn threw herself into her large bed and kicked off her boots and lay there in her coat and her uniform and stewed. She glared at the ceiling, thinking through expenditures and practice and the crew’s morale and the fact Jon was on the surface of an alien world like as not getting his guts ripped out and used as nest material by some insectoid monster. She chewed her lower lip and was so distracted by this grisly scenario that she barely was aware of the knocking at her door.

Vynn frowned. If it was not a passenger or an officer with the most direst of news, she would have the braggart flogged, see if she didn’t. She stood and thumped to the door, her feet falling with a heavy tread that might have filled the person waiting on her thinking of a member of the Adeptus Astartes, not a flesh and blood woman ... if said person waiting on her hadn’t been Enginseer Julian Turantawix. Vynn opened the door to find the red robed Tech Priest looking down at his various scrolls, papers and other bits of minutia, his eyes skimming back and forth as he read line after line after line. Vynn opened her mouth to ask what exactly her Enginseer was doing here at this time of night, but instead, she took a moment to look the young lad over.

When her last Enginseer had left, left in disgrace with the burnt out remains of the Hegemony’s first plasma vent network, she had accepted Turantawix merely because he had offered himself and she had as much sense of the Tech Priests as she did of high fashion on Scintilla Prime. She hadn’t had much to see of him since, save for his voice on the vox and written reports taken to her chambers. Now, she found herself taken aback by how much of him was there at all. His face had a few seams along the jaw-line and around the eyes, but rather than hard grills and unromantic armor plating and off putting leering ocular-spires, his augmetics were done in an almost tasteful, restrained style. His skin did seem smoother and hairless than was natural, and his eyes were whirring camera lenses rather than normal human ones, but at the very least, he had lips to smile with.

He was not smiling then. Rather, he looked somewhat distracted as he said: “Vynn, I wanted to speak to you about the cogitation units for the maser arrays on the, ah ... ah...” His eyes had lifted from one paper to her face and he had made the mistake of many men not raised on Aquios, who had not realized that looking into Vynn’s face as they were accustomed meant looking into her breasts, considering the height difference. And to Vynn’s complete and utter amusement, the tech-priest turned as red as his robes as he looked at the swell of her chest, straining against her blue coat and black shirt. She put her hands on her hips and did thrust out ever so slightly, enjoying the way he continued to gape like a fourteen year old virgin.

“Ahhh...” Turantawix stammered. “I ... I ... uh...”

“Yes?” Vynn asked, tolerantly amused. The relationship between Navy and Mechanicus aboard ship could be cordial, but it could also rapidly become quite cold and distant. Technically speaking, he was not her subordinate, nor she his superior. And yet, if they did not work together, the ship would die as surely as if the crew went to mutiny. It was that thought, helped along by his lean and youthful attractiveness, that made Vynn ponder doing more than teasing ... but only for a moment.

Or two.

Or three, for that matter. There was a reason she had absconded with one of Jon’s ‘archaeological finds’ after all. Turantawix looked down from her chest to his papers. He spoke quickly, his cheeks still as red as what remained of his flesh allowed. “I was thinking of integrating cogitation units with the auspexes to assist in aiming and firing. It would require shunting power along these routes, but I believe it will increase firing accuracy by fifteen percent.” He held a data-slate out to her, not using his human hands, but rather using a flexible steel and plastic tentacle that emerged from his back like a prehensile tail. Vynn took it, glanced at the incomprehensible technolingua that he had given her, and nodded.

“Make it so,” she said, firm and confident as if she knew exactly what she was speaking about. Turantawix nodded and scampered off, face still red. As he reached the far corner, Vynn toyed with asking him back ... but oh, no. If he was red at a glance at her clothed chest, the idea of him seeing her tattoos of womanhood – the ones earned for her first kill and for her first time mating with another tribesmember (though that had been one that she had gotten guilty, as she had technically not spent her first night as a woman with a fellow tribal, but rather, in the company of her employer and ward, the Rogue Trader Anton Tsvarias) – would have set him aflame.