Snivelling Workbot
NoVA
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This is the first part of a short story I'm writing about an Imperial naval operation, occurring in the background of a major anti-Chaos campaign in Segmentum Pacificus.
It's the first piece of 40K fiction I've ever written, so I'm very interested in comments and criticisms of all kinds. Based on your criticisms, the earlier segments will be edited as each new part is appended.
Prologue
Death is ever close at hand in the void between worlds. Experienced spacers can pass an hour or more merely listing the ways in which it can come, and even the lowliest crewmen, conscripted from some prison colony scarce months before, can count off the likeliest dangers on what fingers remain to them. A never-ending avalanche of tawdry vid-play adventures and romance novels to the contrary, pirate attack is not one of the commoner ones.
However, disruption of warp-exit by gravitational tide is, so Captain Arzamo breathed a well-practiced sigh of relief as soon as Mass Conveyance Vela had managed to successfully haul the last of her mountainous bulk into the relative safety of real space. Behind the ship, the bruise-purple wound in reality from which she had emerged knitted back together to leave only star-dusted blackness. A tinny recording of a bell rang out all through Vela’s stubby, ridged hull, signaling to the 2700 men who called her home that the transition was complete.
They knew even without the familiar tolling of the bell, of course, and gave it no heed. A few moments before, when the falling, ill sensation that rewarded the ship’s flagrant violation of physical law had come and gone, when the additional low hum of the Gellar field that protected an interstellar vessel from the horrors beyond had quieted; that was when they had looked up from their tasks to make the sign of the Aquila and utter silent prayers of thanks. Now the crew returned to their routines, looking forward to a week of high-station leave while Vela’s cavernous cargo containers were swapped.
Arzamo leaned back in his worn command chair and checked the repeater vis-plates to either side of him. They’d made decent time, spending only a day in Warp transit since a stop to reorient themselves in Solnar system. The accuracy was excellent for a calculated jump: only 50,000 kilometers off, less than half the safety room they’d left between their calculated exit and the distance at which their destination’s gravity would destabilize a warp transition. Now it was just a matter of a few days leisurely thrusting their way down to geosynchronous orbit.
“Suppose I owe you that bottle, Sergio” he called out across the dim semicircular bridge.
The old astrogator turned from the pale light of his plotting console, grinning at the captain from under twinkling blue eyes. You ought to know better by now; I’m beginning to feel like a spaceport hustler.”
“Maybe he just knows old voidmen like their liquor,” the ship’s new sensor officer said, not looking away from the bank of instruments before him.
Arzamo stiffened up, glowering darkly at the young man. “And where, precisely, did you get the idea that junior officers may speak without being spoken to?!” he roared, the curled points of his moustache twitching violently. The bridge grew quiet as the target of his outburst shrank fearfully; looking very much as though he might try to crawl through one of the screens at his station.
The captain managed to hold his impressive glare for only a few moments before he broke down in heaving guffaws, soon joined by the rest of the bridge crew. The sensor officer looked confused for a moment, but then caught on – he’d been waiting for his official “welcome” since coming aboard. Chuckling, he turned back to tend his suddenly beeping console. The color suddenly drained from his face.
“Lad, he wasn’t serious,” Sergio consoled him, “it was just–”
“Hostile contacts!” the young man shouted, his face knotted in disbelief. “Shared warp terminus. No Imperial codes. I have two signatures moving together… range is 3.1 megameters, bearing 127 by 29; thrusting to intercept us at two decigees.”
The captain leapt up from his chair, stalking to the man’s station as the rest of the crew shared confused expressions. “You must be mistaken, boy; they’re Imperial escorts,” he grumbled and leaned over gaunt young man, fiddling with various settings. Bringing up the much-magnified view of the interlopers showed not the familiar lines of Imperial destroyers, but the sharp hatchet-prows of the raider vessels typically designated as “Iconoclasts.” His moustache drooped. “Emperor’s grace, you’re right!”
The bridge erupted in pandemonium.
The helmsman’s eyes were wide. “They’ll send a monitor to save us; they’ve got to!”
“They can’t be pirates, not over a forge-world!” the communications officer maintained.
“Silence!” the astrogator shouted down his terrified comrades. “Captain?”
Arzamo sagged in on himself, shaking his head sadly. “No, no, it’s ten hours at least before a monitor can reach us, and we can’t get away at barely a twentieth their acceleration. They’re already within weapons range. How could they have been so lucky, to come out practically on top of us?”
“Then we’ll have to make a fight of it, Arkady,” Sergio looked pointedly at his captain, the blue eyes cold with worry and resolve.
The captain swallowed and nodded. Slinking back to his chair, he sat down and pressed a button. A klaxon sang out through the PA system, bringing all activities throughout the ship to a sudden and confused halt. Taking a deep breath he keyed the voice link and ordered “Action stations, action stations. Ignite void shield and… prepare to repel boarders.”
Vela’s crew was used to the safety of their well-patrolled shipping lane, and had only infrequently practiced the skills their lives now depended on. Bulkhead hatches were dogged shut, and at each important junction of her passageways men crouched, nervously fingering shotguns in the intermittent yellow-tinged illumination of spinning alert lights. It took nearly eight minutes before the bridge indicators for her paltry broadside of a dozen macro cannons switched from red to green. Arzamo could only hope the neglected weapons, and the cogitators that guided their fire, would function.
The situation on the bridge was much calmed now. The communications officer stared blankly at his panel, as he had since the local defense commander had confirmed his nearest ships to be in geosynchronous orbit – over fifteen hours away. Those who had anything to do were focusing on their tasks with the sincere desire to forget what was coming for them. They had all heard stories about what happened to the crew of a ship taken by pirates.
“They mean to tumble past us and come to a halt on the far side,” the captain absentmindedly told his crew as he watched the jagged pirate vessels maneuver in a display on his right. They were less than 1500 kilometers out, now, and had refrained from firing so far. Didn’t want to damage their prize, he surmised. The joke was on them, since he doubted a hundred million tons of foodstuffs bound for the workers of an Imperial forge-world were the paydirt they hoped for. Not that it would save his life, or that of his crew. “Commence firing, and may the Emperor be with us all,” he ordered at last.
Shells spat from the mouths of Vela’s starboard battery, accompanied by bursts of incandescent plasma that dissipated almost faster than the eye could follow. They sped along their way at five kilometers a second, but it would still be minutes before they reached their targets. In the meantime, the merchant crew struggled to reload their massive pieces with rusted hoists and creaking shell-trolleys.
Gun no. 3’s breech jammed in the open position, but the men tending it failed to heed its warning light and opened the breech-lock. The compartment started venting to space with a whistling roar and, had it not been for the quick thinking of a young ensign who slammed the lock shut while the men around him dumbly stared, they might all have been asphyxiated. The other crews did better, managing to get a second salvo off after only two minutes.
“Ten seconds to impact,” the sensor officer called out as the shell-tracks closed on that of the nearest pirate. He counted down from five, and everyone on the bridge held their breath as he waited to see the result on his scopes. Nine of the twelve shells missed. The proximity fuses of the remaining three blossomed into nuclear fire against the target’s void shield. The flashbulb bursts of light vanished in a tiny fraction of a second, leaving the shield radiating a brilliant rainbow of colors that descended the spectral scale to dull red before returning to transparency. “No effect,” the young officer choked out. The second salvo did little more.
The pirate contemptuously volleyed eighty shells in reply.
“Brace for impact!” Captain Arzamo shouted into the intercom as just seconds before the precisely targeted impacts shattered Vela’s shields and gouged great bites out of her flank. Her hull shuddered under the atomic hammerblows, and the smoldering remains of the gun crews tumbled out of their ruptured casemates. Within, compartments vented suddenly to open space and men hurriedly pulled on their helmets.
The enemy ships had reached the apex of their respective pirouettes, one above and one below, with their prows pointed towards the prey. They began to disgorge a motley collection of dozens of shuttles and small craft; small engines burning furiously first to kill the velocity inherited from their parent vessels and then to send them on their way to the stricken hauler. They congregated around airlocks and small-craft bays. They sealed themselves to the locks, blasted their way through bay doors, and in a few cases simply disgorged masses of space-suited figures daubed in hideous markings. Making their way in by various means, the real battle for the Vela began.
An hour later, Sergio the aged astrogator knelt before his station. He had hung a worn, brass Aquila from it, a keepsake from his first voyage. It had been a cheap little thing, all an impressed man could afford, but it had been with him through forty years of service and it had never ceased to bring comfort. As shotgun blasts roared in the corridor outside the bridge, he prayed quietly but resolutely to face his end as a true man of the Imperium. Arzamo sat in his chair, stroking an ornate las-pistol as tears rolled silently down his cheeks. Some of the others had left, to flee or to help fight. No one had returned. Their consoles had all gone dark half an hour before, as the advancing boarders had cut the command links and turned the ship back towards open space from the auxiliary control room.
He finished his prayer, and just in time from the sound of harsh shouts ringing down the hallway. Not low-Gothic, but the cruel tones of the Archenemy of man. He’d heard a few worlds in the tongue, spoken in hushed tones by a Navy man who’d been celebrating a little too hard with his back-pay. The fellow was on shore leave, growing into the augmetic arm he’d received courtesy of an Archenemy boarder.
Sergio thanked the Emperor for giving him the opportunity to strike at His foes, rather than die of old age in some bed. Truth be told, a heart attack in a space-station bordello after a romp with the grav-plates off would have been his real preference, but he accepted the fickleness of fate with equanimity. He racked his shotgun, shocking the sensor officer out of a nearly catatonic state. The young fellow looked up at him questioningly.
“Come, lad, die as the Emperor would have it.” He smiled. The sensor-man stood shakily and took hold of his weapon. “Take a position over there,” he said, pointing behind the deserted comms station, “you’ll be covered when they come through. Just keep firing and don’t pay any mind to what’s happening around you.” The boy nodded numbly and went where he had been directed.
Sergio had just taken cover when the door burst inwards with a deafening explosion. He blinked debris out of his eyes and opened fire on the dark portal. Over the ringing in his ears, he heard the crack of a laspistol overlaid with a wet sort of sound as the Captain commended his soul to the Emperor. Across the bridge to his left, the boy was firing like mad. Between them they dropped all four of the dark-clothed, helmeted figures who rushed the entrance.
A moment later, a belt of concussion grenades sailed through, landing in the middle of the compartment. Sergio saw the sensor officer leap for them, but too late. There was a sound louder than sound, and all he could see were the stars.
∞
The Adeptus Mechanicus system-defense ships, en-route to the location of the ambush, carefully recorded Bulk Conveyance Vela accelerate to a safe distance before dropping back into the Warp. She was escorted by a pair of pirate escorts whose drive characteristics and precise features were noted with interest. The monitors made a search of the debris field left by the short battle but found nothing of interest.
Their Forge World, Ardite III, sent formal notification of the event to sub-sector naval command, along with a pointed request for additional anti-piracy patrols. The strategic food reserve they maintained for such unforeseen occurrences would be used to cover the shortfall until the next shipment in two months. No change in the world’s production of vital materiel for the Priscus Cluster campaign was foreseen.
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