Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Thank you for clicking on my thread. I hope you enjoy what is to follow, but first there are a couple things I feel you should know:

-This is in no way connected to any actual fluff what-so-ever. It is only loosely connected to WH40K in the first place. I originally wrote this piece for my senior year of high school as a story for a suspense project. Upon finding it a couple days ago I decided to convert it into a WH40K fiction by adding bits and changing the names of some thing. Keeping in mind that this story transformed post-writing, try to say "That's never been mentioned in fluff before" and "This guy is stretching the boundaries of 40K too far; it doesn't even fit!" in your head too many times. I meshed it as well as I could.

-This is here simply for your enjoyment. I have no intentions of expounding upon the story or its characters, nor am I looking for opinions on edits. I simply found this in my files and wanted to share it with the Dakka community.

Thank you once again, and let the "show" begin!

-----The Barkium-----
The ship drifted along in space; its lights flickered lazily amongst the backdrop of the stars almost as if they were trying to imitate the cosmos, but couldn’t quite maintain it’s inherent beauty for any length of time. The ship looked normal enough the only clue to its distressing situation being the large stream of fuel weeping from the holes in the starboard line.

“Now that IS a problem.” Elias muttered to himself. He checked his chrono and cursed inwardly. Five minutes until it was time to head back in, just five minutes! According to company policy he couldn’t pass by a derelict vessel no matter how close it was to docking time. It looked like this shift was going to be a bit longer.
At least overtime pays well.” Elias thought aloud.

Being a Void Wrecker, or “Wrecker” as the men called themselves, was actually just about as much fun as the title didn’t suggest. To put it bluntly he was the “Space Garbage Man” for derelict vessels. There would be a horrific accident, a ship would be crippled and begin to drift alone in space, dead, and it was his job to find out why then take anything of value back to sector headquarters where the Wrecker Guild would either sell it back to the company the ship belonged to, or add it to the junk yard in the hopes someone would come along and pay out their asses for it.

Most of the time it was pretty obvious why the ship lost its ability to function. For instance if a ship had an asteroid smashed through the bridge, then it was a simple assumption as to why it was drifting. Not this time though. So, as luck would have it, company policy and local laws regarding drifting piles of valuables dictated that any salvage must also come with a detailed report concerning why the vessel was adrift according to any visual damage, if possible what happened to the crew, and what of worth was found there-in. This meant that if the reason for the ship’s ceased functionality wasn’t horribly apparent from the outside then it was up to the discovering Wrecker to go into the vessel and find out why.

“A long shift indeed.” Elias mumbled again as he got up from his skiff’s pilot chair. He walked the well-worn passage from the command chair to the exit ramp at the rear of the skiff grabbing his helmet, arc light, and tool belt from the hooks on the wall just behind the chair on the way. The design of the ship was spartan at best. When describing the ship to ignorant civilians in the taverns back at dock he would liken the design to a very straight snake with a tumor about midway along the left side, the head being the piloting blister, the tumor the sleeper hab, and the tail being the exiting ramp and docking clamp used to secure the skiff to any ship Elias might be working on or in. Docking with the ship was a much preferable way of getting inside as opposed to free floating his way to it, however that was not always possible. This was one of those times due to the fact that the afflicted area of the vessel was not even remotely near a flat surface. He strapped on the Low Gravity Exploration Apparatus, basically an over-complicated jetpack, as the outer lock door ground open, revealing a panorama that would have taken his breath away were this not the thousandth time he had seen it. Now it was just another facet of the job. He thumbed the jetpack’s activator stud firing the jets and drifted deftly towards the nearest access port on the lonely ship.

When he reached it, Elias took his plasma cutter from its harness on his tool belt and activated his arc light, strapping it to the shoulder mount on his jumpsuit so as to create a bit of light, and began the process of cutting himself an entrance into yet another steel tomb. It would be nice if every ship had an external data port near every entrance which Elias could use to splice into the ship’s computers and download the codes needed to open the access ports, but something about companies losing ships and not wanting others to steal said ship’s goods made the companies disinclined to make a Wrecker’s job easy. Thus cutting was just another unnecessary and lengthy part of the job.

According to his scans this ship was dubbed The Barkium. It belonged to the Alliance Mining Corporation and was supposed to be attached to the nearby Largoth Asteroid mining out the ores trapped within. When the crew didn’t comply with standard communication procedures by failing to check in with their mining logs for the last month, the company finally began to wonder why. They had sent out a small scout group to check on the ship only to find that it wasn’t there. The report in Elias’s wrecker log continued on to say that there was only an abandoned bio-dome with blood splattered over the walls. Not entirely unusual as this region of space was known as “The Pit” because if you were here, it was only because you had nowhere else to go. With the pirates and otherwise no-good scoundrels this region of space seemed to attract there was no guessing necessary to see where it had gotten its name.

There had only been one clue as to the ships where a bouts. In the bio-dome’s computer log there was a non-descript video message. On it the captain of the watch had stated that there had been an unexpected discovery after an accident involving one of the drills being used within the asteroid and that something had “awakened” as he had described it. He was scant on the details. To be completely honest he did little more than shake and stutter as he tried in vain to convey the “enormous danger” he said he and his crew were in. The communication had abruptly cut off but not before the captain had said he was getting himself and his crew “off this fragging rock.”

Elias had managed to stumble on the ship out of pure luck. His company would be happy seeing as they would make all the profits off of the pawning of the Barkium’s valuables, but as far as Elias was concerned, this ship could rot in the void so long as he could just go home. He missed his girl and was getting antsy for some company and a good hot meal. It never seemed to work out his way though.

The bit of the access port fell noiselessly into the interior of the ship and the plasma cutters lack of resistance brought Elias out of his reverie. As far as he could tell, Elias was somewhere on the second deck around mid-ship. He was probably in an access tunnel. That was good, he thought; it would give him easy entry to the engine compartments that housed the computer logs designated to the portion of the ship where the starboard fuel line was. If there were any clue to the occurrence of the holes in that line, then it would be in those logs. Hell he may even be able haul off the ships remaining good engine with the skiff’s docking clamp and all from the same terminal.

Just about the time that Elias floated his way into the ship was when he realized this wasn’t just another job. He glimpsed the body. That in itself was nothing special. He had been on plenty of wrecks and corpses were nothing new. This one however had three arms. Not to mention it was naked and its chest was covered in eyes. Though the body seemed lifeless the eyes continued to roll in their sockets. They turned themselves on him. Elias shuddered. He pulled out his laspistol and blasted the eyes to rags. Wiping the gristle from his faceplate he looked around the tunnel. It was covered in runes and ancient scripts. Looking at them made his head hurt.
He shut his eyes and shook his head. “Lets just get this over with okay Elias?” He mumbled to himself. He focused on the night he would have with his girl and the wonderful steaming pot of stew she would make him when he finally got back to dock.

He grabbed onto a nearby pipe and began pulling himself towards the back of the ship, towards the engines. According to his data slate it would take him past the crew quarters. If that last body was any indication, that area was bound to be extremely ‘interesting’.

It was. After roughly fifteen minutes of grappling his way down the access tunnel’s overhead pipes he floated past the first few bunkrooms. Elias noticed the carvings on the walls becoming more and more frenzied. Some looked even as if they had been carved with fingernails, as there was blood dried into the recesses of the deeper runes.
“What could possibly drive people to do this crap?” Elias wondered aloud as he floated past the open doors to the bunks. He intentionally didn’t look inside.

As he continued his trip deeper into the bowels of the ship, he began to feel as if the space around him was changing. His hair began to stand on end, and that odd scratchy sensation in his spine was driving him crazy. It was as if thousands of ants had found their way beneath his skin and then decided they wanted back out. Just as he had that thought he glanced down. Where his left foot used to be there was a whip made of flesh. It had writhing mouths that drooled green spittle along its length and jerked of its own accord.

Elias screamed. It didn’t matter though. He was alone, and even if he weren’t, the Wrecker’s Guild was far too cheap to put a voice transmitter into their suits, so his scream would just be drowned in the void.

As he clawed at his leg, the whip began to tear itself from his leg. The pain forced him to squint his eyes and he nearly blacked out. When he opened his eyes again, his foot was fine. He slid his fingers down to his foot and felt nothing unusual at all. There was no evidence that anything had been wrong what so ever.

“Just the ship. My mind is playing games. I am fine. I’m sure the guys just put more nitrogen in my tank again.” Elias hoped he was right. The itch in his spine though couldn’t help but make him know otherwise.

He managed to get to the engine room in a little under an hour. He encountered nothing else too odd, though a few times it felt like he was being watched. He found the engine management computer and began hacking into it to release the aft engines.

Just then he felt a large vibration roll through the deck. If it weren’t for the fact that sound couldn’t exist in a vacuum he would have heard a distinct bang. Just because he couln’t hear it though didn’t mean Elias didn’t know what the vibration meant. He had been working in space too long for amateur oversights like that. Something was behind him.

“What the…” Elias blurted as he whirled around. He pulled his arc light up and flicked it from left to right. Nothing. It had felt as if something had slammed into the entrance hatch. He drifted over to inspect it. There was a large dent and amid the grime and dust were long scratch marks. He couldn’t remember if they had been there on the way in.

“Okay, fug this.” Elias garbled. He drifted quickly over to the computer. “I’ll just release the engines and get the heck out of here. If the boss has a problem with that he can come get the rest of the valuables himself,” he thought.

He began to retype the codes.

Once he finished the right engine loosed itself and began to drift away from the ship. “Now to head back to the skiff,” he thought. “Time to get the heck out of here. Finally.”

As he passed the exit, the vent on the top right of the tunnel exploded open. A creature from the depths of hell burst forth. Its skin shifted with hues of purple and blue, and claws slid from the ends of its arms as it landed with no sound.

Elias stood in mute horror, his eyes refusing to accept the monster before them. The creature just smiled and stabbed with its claws. The motion was almost to fast for recognition much less reaction. Elias’s only indication that the creature had moved at all was the creeping cold in his gut.

As his life-blood flew freely from his body, and his appendages began to freeze from the void seeping into his suit, the creature leaned close. It took Elias’s access card from his tool belt and bounded off into the corridor no doubt headed for Elias’s skiff. From there who knew where it would go? There was no doubting its intentions though. Not after what it did to the crew of the Barkium.

Elias however, would see none of it. He would bleed out, alone and in the dark. His eyes rolled back into his head and he slipped into oblivion.

-----the end-----

Well you stayed! You made it all the way through my piece. Thank you and I hope it wasn't too disappointing. Please post a comment letting me know what you thought.

*1st edit to re-word "disclaimers"; 2nd edit to fix text color issue.

Hey, this is cool. I really like the idea of a "wrecker" service. Good job. i liked this