Chamorus the Cat
Super-Earth
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2010
The Black Ship Obliterati pulled out of the Warp with a shudder. A pair of Emperor Class cruisers, Fury and Zeal, erupted from nowhere into the open void. Here, the Obliterati made an unusual stop, one it had not made in a century. The waiting ship, an amalgamation of blessed Human and accursed xeno technology, bore an Inquistorial seal on the fore and aft. It was less than one-tenth the Obliterati's size. Fury and Zeal were both armed with heavy cannons the size of Prodigal Son, but both feared what armaments the nimble craft could bear down with.
Vox channels exploded with binary and High Gothic chatter after the ships emerged from the warp. Inquisitor Valg's tech priest surveyed the multitudinous messages. Finally, Captain Micah of the Imperial Obliterati announced himself. "Valg," a stern, older voice said over the bridge's comms. "If that's you, you've got ten seconds to prove it."
Inquisitor Valg pulled the leather glove off of his right hand, placing it on the gene coder built into the captain's throne right arm for confirmation; a stately, feminine voice transmitted the 164-bit validation to the Obliterati's bridge. For a while, all was quiet on the vox channels. A crackle as comms reopened privately with Valg broke the silence. "Inquisitor. Make your approach. We have less than an hour."
One hour was not a terribly long time. Valg turned to his crew. "Proceed." Though he was in his second century of life serving the Emperor, Valg appeared closer to a natural age of sixty. A robust, hard-bodied sixty, but sixty nonetheless. The crew went to work immediately, pitching and yawing into position on the uppermost deck of the ship. As the great lift began to descend, bay doors closed and locked into place, shutting out the light of the nearby stars. In blackness, they rode down. The belly of the Black Ship opened for them and men of the Imperial Navy came out to greet them. Valg and his tech priest, who would guide the machine spirits in the grav-lift, stepped off of Prodigal Son's loading ramp and onto Obliterati.
Valg's cold blue stare was the only command the escort needed. They saluted sharply, making the eagle's wing over their left breast. Just as sharply, they turned as one, double-timing to the Black Cells. They passed hundreds and hundreds of gaunt psykers, each wearing a collar to dampen their warp powers. If Valg had to bet, he'd put down cold, hard gelt that their guards had to only point a device and collars in the path of the activator would detonate fatally.
Past the low-threat cells they ran, until they came to a cell where candles flickered in sconces in the wall, keeping a silent vigil. The man in charge of the escort quickly pressed his palm to a decoder on the wall. It beeped and the rune on the door flashed green. "The daemon is all yours, Inquisitor!" the man called out, saluting as he beat a hasty retreat with his group. The electronic locks began to whirr and click behind the shiny metal door. Valg noted intricate scrimshaw above the door's frame depicting an Emperor's angel slaying some sort of daemonic thing. Just above that read:
CAVEANT! MALLEUS EXTERMINATUS! CAVEANT!
The doors hissed as they came open. Cold mist poured out of the room. Silent alarms flashed red and turned the mists the color of fresh blood. The tickling of fear began to worry at Valg's throat as the mist thinned enough that he could see to progress. He stepped up to the glass cell and stared unbelieving at what was bound behind hexagrammatic warding.
Slend arms were bound above a head of bobbed white hair. Athletic muscles were stretched taut as she hung, suspended from the cylinder's cap. Her face was beautiful, smooth, with a black fleur de lis tattooed below her right eye. Her breasts were ample, each tipped with rosy nipples, hard from the cool air in the containment unit. Around her torso, acolytes had wrapped soul-binding writs on long, thin scrolls of parchment. Strangely, they'd wrapped them provocatively about her so that her breasts were uncovered, her midriff bare, along with her well-muscled, curvy thighs, between which was a long, thick cock. Around that, the writ wrapped around in a helix, once up and once down. A pair of balls hung below the shaft. The small patch of pubic hair they'd left her with was white as snow, just like her hair. The only startling thing about her, besides her good looks, was the deformity of her gender.
Valg touched the comm bead implanted under his jaw on the side of his neck. "Micah," he hailed. "What is the meaning of this? The woman is barely a mutant! If you expect to betray me after-"
"No need for that, Inquisitor, I assure you. All will be made clear to you soon." Valg wanted to argue, it was clear, but he didn't have the time.
"Alright. Get her aboard," he told the tech priest. As the grav-lift docked with the glass-and-metal prison, the woman startled awake from the loud, echoing noises. Separated from its power source, the tube's glass melted away like ice in the path of a twin-linked flamer.
Valg and the heretek had little time to appreciate the Golden Age tech - Valg was leading ahead of the grav-lifter. When they rounded into the hallway of the Black Cells, a cry went up. Princess! As they hurried down the corridor, skeletal hands were grabbing at the bars and faces were leering from the shadows beyond the bars. PRINCESS PRINCESS PRINCESS PRINCESS PRINCESS.
Everywhere was the dull thump and splash of precisely-tuned explosive collars turning brain stems into jelly. The lane they traveled on was soon a path of blood and viscera, like some sort of red carpet rolling out to welcome nobility. Valg hesitated. He glanced back. His daemon host was crying, her eyes closed as she tried to scream over the voices, to drown them out. "Stop it! Stop calling me that!" she yelled, but none of them would listen.
Valg worried he'd made an awful choice. They pushed down the kilometer-long tunnel. The river of red had stopped, but so had the woman's screams. He gave a worried backwards glance, but she appeared to be unconscious. He'd never seen a daemon host so untainted. Her abnormality, if she had not mutated recently, would have only gotten her gelded. Valg should have devoted more time to research.
Up the ramp and into the innards of Prodigal Son, Valg felt safe only after the loading ramp had closed airtight. "Store her away, enginseer; where we're going, Slaanesh plays fickle." Valg turned to his navigator, a female xeno from one of the disjointed Eldar factions. She wore a mesh bodyglove that left nothing to the imagination. "Prep us for the Webway - we must go as soon as-"
Captain Micah was standing on the Son's bridge. "-as soon as possible to escape this deathtrap?" the visibly older captain finished for him. He was tall, with gaunt, angular features. His hair was black but gray at the roots. "Because we do not have long," he explained. He pressed his throat and binary gibberish left his open mouth. A floating servo skull chittered back. "You see, the prisoners have escaped and will soon overrun the bridge. However, Captain Micah Orvus was a true servant of the Emperor, willing to sacrifice his life in order to keep Obliterati out of the hands of witches sworn to Chaos." Micah swished the amasec in his glass while smiling like the smug bastard he was. Valg began to piece together Micah's story as Inquisitorial ships ripped through the Aether and into the real void. The cloaked Prodigal Son left realspace in a whisper, jumping lightyears away through the Webway.
Elsewhere...
Nitch strolled across the plush red carpet that lead to the bridge. When the collars had fallen off of him and the others, a sea of witches flowed out of cells that had been psyked open. They fell upon their oppressors, some feasting, some raping. Nitch had swayed them with his words and lead his fellow witches towards the bridge. After that, he promised, they'd eat like kings and fuck and settle a planet just for themselves. A trio of knockers, some of the psykers who made the doors of their cells open, sat near the thick door barring entrance to the bridge.
"Almost got it, they has," the fat, pointy-toothed pyro told him. He was chewing a seared haunch of meat that Nitch hoped had come from the galley. Pig had made himself Nitch's right-hand man; Pig could smell opportunity, even if he had no nose. Or eyebrows. Or ears, or hair. Pyromancers usually had good sense of fire's dangers. Pig didn't have that, either.
The heavy locks hidden within the door were squealing in protests. A knocker groaned and fainted. Then another. The last one was quiet. Where the others had been hammering ath the locks, this one was looking for weaknesses. Nitch could see him locking up gears somehow, to work a little further without fear of undoing his progress. "Got it," the knocker announced.
Inside, the free men stumbled upon a massacre. Four servitors whirled on the opening door. clickclickclickclickclickclickclick They had expended their belt-fed ammunition for their autoguns and had no further programming to work from. Pig kicked them over easily enough, roasting a few of them with his fires. One continued to screech in binary as it spasmed on the floor. The knocker watched it while Nitch and others searched through the corpses.
"The fuck happened here?" someone asked as Nitch lifted a data slate from one of the dead officers.
"Dunno. Think it has anything to do with this one counting backwards?" the knocker asked, pointing at the servitor with spasms. Pig laughed nervously but looked around for Nitch who would have an answers. Nitch wasn't around. When everyone finally realized the world of hurt they were in and started to run, it was too late. The explosion hurled pieces of the bridge, the officers, and the psykers into space.
For Nitch, though, the world moved at a snail's pace. He outran the blast waves and heat the explosion gave off. His body ached as he continued to run as the detonation ebbed. He ran until people were beginning to understand the sound they'd just heard. He ran until he was safely inside the officer's escape vessel. As the world began to run at its normal pace, Nitch's escape vessel launched out into the void, away from the splintering Black Ship. Nitch wiped his nose to mop up the blood that had poured out of it; he'd not been able to go fast in years, but it still made him bleed when he did.
He lifted the data slate for a closer look. The last transmitted message had a very familiar face on it, one that he knew was not on the bridge because he had seen this face, this man, heading in the direction the Inquisitor and his lackey had gone with that cylindrical thing. Nitch hit the rune to play the message.
"This is Captain Micah Orvus, of the Imperial Black Ship Obliterati; we are beset by the Emperor's tithed witches that have escaped. I am resolved in my faith and my duty; these blashphemers will not use Obliterati against the Imperium of Man. Should the guard fail us, I have set explosive counter measures that-"
Elsewhere...
The Prodigal Son slipped back into realspace. Valg had himself a second glass of amasec. "You came too late, is all, Inquisitor. Their warp signatures showed they were very close. Had I been caught, why, I do not know how long they might interrogate me, but at some point, I would have given them your name," Micah taunted. Inquisitor Valg Zek drew his bolt pistol and leveled it on his one-time ally who'd made himself an incredible burden to a radical-minded Inquisitor.
"Cross me again, Micah, and I'll make it easier for you to convince our pursuers that you did die on Obliterati."
Vox channels exploded with binary and High Gothic chatter after the ships emerged from the warp. Inquisitor Valg's tech priest surveyed the multitudinous messages. Finally, Captain Micah of the Imperial Obliterati announced himself. "Valg," a stern, older voice said over the bridge's comms. "If that's you, you've got ten seconds to prove it."
Inquisitor Valg pulled the leather glove off of his right hand, placing it on the gene coder built into the captain's throne right arm for confirmation; a stately, feminine voice transmitted the 164-bit validation to the Obliterati's bridge. For a while, all was quiet on the vox channels. A crackle as comms reopened privately with Valg broke the silence. "Inquisitor. Make your approach. We have less than an hour."
One hour was not a terribly long time. Valg turned to his crew. "Proceed." Though he was in his second century of life serving the Emperor, Valg appeared closer to a natural age of sixty. A robust, hard-bodied sixty, but sixty nonetheless. The crew went to work immediately, pitching and yawing into position on the uppermost deck of the ship. As the great lift began to descend, bay doors closed and locked into place, shutting out the light of the nearby stars. In blackness, they rode down. The belly of the Black Ship opened for them and men of the Imperial Navy came out to greet them. Valg and his tech priest, who would guide the machine spirits in the grav-lift, stepped off of Prodigal Son's loading ramp and onto Obliterati.
Valg's cold blue stare was the only command the escort needed. They saluted sharply, making the eagle's wing over their left breast. Just as sharply, they turned as one, double-timing to the Black Cells. They passed hundreds and hundreds of gaunt psykers, each wearing a collar to dampen their warp powers. If Valg had to bet, he'd put down cold, hard gelt that their guards had to only point a device and collars in the path of the activator would detonate fatally.
Past the low-threat cells they ran, until they came to a cell where candles flickered in sconces in the wall, keeping a silent vigil. The man in charge of the escort quickly pressed his palm to a decoder on the wall. It beeped and the rune on the door flashed green. "The daemon is all yours, Inquisitor!" the man called out, saluting as he beat a hasty retreat with his group. The electronic locks began to whirr and click behind the shiny metal door. Valg noted intricate scrimshaw above the door's frame depicting an Emperor's angel slaying some sort of daemonic thing. Just above that read:
CAVEANT! MALLEUS EXTERMINATUS! CAVEANT!
The doors hissed as they came open. Cold mist poured out of the room. Silent alarms flashed red and turned the mists the color of fresh blood. The tickling of fear began to worry at Valg's throat as the mist thinned enough that he could see to progress. He stepped up to the glass cell and stared unbelieving at what was bound behind hexagrammatic warding.
Slend arms were bound above a head of bobbed white hair. Athletic muscles were stretched taut as she hung, suspended from the cylinder's cap. Her face was beautiful, smooth, with a black fleur de lis tattooed below her right eye. Her breasts were ample, each tipped with rosy nipples, hard from the cool air in the containment unit. Around her torso, acolytes had wrapped soul-binding writs on long, thin scrolls of parchment. Strangely, they'd wrapped them provocatively about her so that her breasts were uncovered, her midriff bare, along with her well-muscled, curvy thighs, between which was a long, thick cock. Around that, the writ wrapped around in a helix, once up and once down. A pair of balls hung below the shaft. The small patch of pubic hair they'd left her with was white as snow, just like her hair. The only startling thing about her, besides her good looks, was the deformity of her gender.
Valg touched the comm bead implanted under his jaw on the side of his neck. "Micah," he hailed. "What is the meaning of this? The woman is barely a mutant! If you expect to betray me after-"
"No need for that, Inquisitor, I assure you. All will be made clear to you soon." Valg wanted to argue, it was clear, but he didn't have the time.
"Alright. Get her aboard," he told the tech priest. As the grav-lift docked with the glass-and-metal prison, the woman startled awake from the loud, echoing noises. Separated from its power source, the tube's glass melted away like ice in the path of a twin-linked flamer.
Valg and the heretek had little time to appreciate the Golden Age tech - Valg was leading ahead of the grav-lifter. When they rounded into the hallway of the Black Cells, a cry went up. Princess! As they hurried down the corridor, skeletal hands were grabbing at the bars and faces were leering from the shadows beyond the bars. PRINCESS PRINCESS PRINCESS PRINCESS PRINCESS.
Everywhere was the dull thump and splash of precisely-tuned explosive collars turning brain stems into jelly. The lane they traveled on was soon a path of blood and viscera, like some sort of red carpet rolling out to welcome nobility. Valg hesitated. He glanced back. His daemon host was crying, her eyes closed as she tried to scream over the voices, to drown them out. "Stop it! Stop calling me that!" she yelled, but none of them would listen.
Valg worried he'd made an awful choice. They pushed down the kilometer-long tunnel. The river of red had stopped, but so had the woman's screams. He gave a worried backwards glance, but she appeared to be unconscious. He'd never seen a daemon host so untainted. Her abnormality, if she had not mutated recently, would have only gotten her gelded. Valg should have devoted more time to research.
Up the ramp and into the innards of Prodigal Son, Valg felt safe only after the loading ramp had closed airtight. "Store her away, enginseer; where we're going, Slaanesh plays fickle." Valg turned to his navigator, a female xeno from one of the disjointed Eldar factions. She wore a mesh bodyglove that left nothing to the imagination. "Prep us for the Webway - we must go as soon as-"
Captain Micah was standing on the Son's bridge. "-as soon as possible to escape this deathtrap?" the visibly older captain finished for him. He was tall, with gaunt, angular features. His hair was black but gray at the roots. "Because we do not have long," he explained. He pressed his throat and binary gibberish left his open mouth. A floating servo skull chittered back. "You see, the prisoners have escaped and will soon overrun the bridge. However, Captain Micah Orvus was a true servant of the Emperor, willing to sacrifice his life in order to keep Obliterati out of the hands of witches sworn to Chaos." Micah swished the amasec in his glass while smiling like the smug bastard he was. Valg began to piece together Micah's story as Inquisitorial ships ripped through the Aether and into the real void. The cloaked Prodigal Son left realspace in a whisper, jumping lightyears away through the Webway.
Elsewhere...
Nitch strolled across the plush red carpet that lead to the bridge. When the collars had fallen off of him and the others, a sea of witches flowed out of cells that had been psyked open. They fell upon their oppressors, some feasting, some raping. Nitch had swayed them with his words and lead his fellow witches towards the bridge. After that, he promised, they'd eat like kings and fuck and settle a planet just for themselves. A trio of knockers, some of the psykers who made the doors of their cells open, sat near the thick door barring entrance to the bridge.
"Almost got it, they has," the fat, pointy-toothed pyro told him. He was chewing a seared haunch of meat that Nitch hoped had come from the galley. Pig had made himself Nitch's right-hand man; Pig could smell opportunity, even if he had no nose. Or eyebrows. Or ears, or hair. Pyromancers usually had good sense of fire's dangers. Pig didn't have that, either.
The heavy locks hidden within the door were squealing in protests. A knocker groaned and fainted. Then another. The last one was quiet. Where the others had been hammering ath the locks, this one was looking for weaknesses. Nitch could see him locking up gears somehow, to work a little further without fear of undoing his progress. "Got it," the knocker announced.
Inside, the free men stumbled upon a massacre. Four servitors whirled on the opening door. clickclickclickclickclickclickclick They had expended their belt-fed ammunition for their autoguns and had no further programming to work from. Pig kicked them over easily enough, roasting a few of them with his fires. One continued to screech in binary as it spasmed on the floor. The knocker watched it while Nitch and others searched through the corpses.
"The fuck happened here?" someone asked as Nitch lifted a data slate from one of the dead officers.
"Dunno. Think it has anything to do with this one counting backwards?" the knocker asked, pointing at the servitor with spasms. Pig laughed nervously but looked around for Nitch who would have an answers. Nitch wasn't around. When everyone finally realized the world of hurt they were in and started to run, it was too late. The explosion hurled pieces of the bridge, the officers, and the psykers into space.
For Nitch, though, the world moved at a snail's pace. He outran the blast waves and heat the explosion gave off. His body ached as he continued to run as the detonation ebbed. He ran until people were beginning to understand the sound they'd just heard. He ran until he was safely inside the officer's escape vessel. As the world began to run at its normal pace, Nitch's escape vessel launched out into the void, away from the splintering Black Ship. Nitch wiped his nose to mop up the blood that had poured out of it; he'd not been able to go fast in years, but it still made him bleed when he did.
He lifted the data slate for a closer look. The last transmitted message had a very familiar face on it, one that he knew was not on the bridge because he had seen this face, this man, heading in the direction the Inquisitor and his lackey had gone with that cylindrical thing. Nitch hit the rune to play the message.
"This is Captain Micah Orvus, of the Imperial Black Ship Obliterati; we are beset by the Emperor's tithed witches that have escaped. I am resolved in my faith and my duty; these blashphemers will not use Obliterati against the Imperium of Man. Should the guard fail us, I have set explosive counter measures that-"
Elsewhere...
The Prodigal Son slipped back into realspace. Valg had himself a second glass of amasec. "You came too late, is all, Inquisitor. Their warp signatures showed they were very close. Had I been caught, why, I do not know how long they might interrogate me, but at some point, I would have given them your name," Micah taunted. Inquisitor Valg Zek drew his bolt pistol and leveled it on his one-time ally who'd made himself an incredible burden to a radical-minded Inquisitor.
"Cross me again, Micah, and I'll make it easier for you to convince our pursuers that you did die on Obliterati."