Take as Prize Ch. 01

The buzzing at the door reached Vynn as she rubbed lotion through her hair and let warm water cascade down her back, ancient memories of her aquatic homeworld tingling through her mind as she considered her hangover, the thrice damned state of her uniform and finances, her hangover, the lack of promotion, the near run duel, her hangover and more. She lifted her head and pursed her lips and went for the door without a scrap of clothes and dripping. Old instincts. Little batted an eye at a naked, two meter tall woman with a shock of blond hair walking about in the archipelagos of Aquios, and the hammering of her head left little room to remember she was two decades of subjective lifetime away from those dangerous shores.

The door opened and the phlegmatic, staring eye of the hovering servo skull that had been searching for her the past four bells greeted her. Vynn's brow furrowed as the skull chirruped, its voice coming from a crude voxcoder attached to where the lower jaw should have been.

"Lieutenant. Vynn. Of. The. Victory?"

"Yes," Vynn said, repressing a faint supernatural dread of the thing.

"Message. Delivered." The skull opened the tiny claws someone had bolted to its temples. A scroll of parchment almost fell to Vynn's feet and she snatched it up quick before it struck ground. She saw, with a thrill of horror, that the Admiralty's seal was stamped on the parchment. Disrespecting the Admiralty's symbol was a flogging offense, after all. She broke it - and wondered why breaking such a fine design was not disrespect, and yet dropping the bloody thing was - and unfurled the parchment, her lips moving with the words as she forced her pounding, aching head to understand what was read.

To: Cmd. Vynn

From: V. Admiral Toshen Belle

Sent: Astropathic Choir 4981 - Received: Astropathic Choir 89-Omega.

Cipher Code: Sigmarus Antideluvian Aquias Ages

COMMANDER VYN, you are hereby, for valorous conduct and bravery in the Angevin Crusade in addition to stalwart defense of the FAMILUS BELISARIUS, promoted to the rank and position of Master and Commander of the starship Hegemony, a 409 sloop being refitted in Forge World Tempestus. WITHOUT A SINGLE MOMENT OF DELAY, you are to take the Hegemony to sub-sectors X409.Y08.Z98 and begin to CRUISE. Vessels of xenos origins to be purged on sight. Vessels of the perfidious rebels known as the SEVERAN DOMINATE you are to burnt, vent or take as prize.

Failure to accomplish the Objectives hereto described will be rewarded with Death.

Glory be to his Holy Majesty

-Vice Admiral Belle

And so it was that Jon returned from his walk to find a completely naked Vyn, her tattoos shining, her eyes closed, her lips twisted in a broad smile, her hands clasping the iron and brass claws of a straining servo-skull, dancing. Dancing and laughing and singing to herself as the skull tried desperately to return to its duties.

"What the devil is going on here?" Jon asked. "Who do you think you are, Vynn? Dancing like this!"

"A captain!" Vynn laughed, letting the skull go so that she might take Jon by the hand, shaking it with enough force to turn a lesser man's bones to powder (or so it felt to Jon.) "A captain, Jon! A captain!"

Jon laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. Before he could begin to ask Vynn to sit down and let him check her humors for dangerous mental imbalances, Vynn had released him and hurried over. Careless of her nudity and the still damp state of her skin, she threw on her undershirt, buttoned it, tossed on her jacket, and began to tug up her pants. She turned to face Jon, rattling off an excited sentence that never seemed to quite end, nor settle on a final purpose. "So, I'm sure - of course, yes, I'll need to check her guns, a 409, that's barely above the minimum for a sloop, I'll need to add another century or two, maybe get her to six hundred, six hundred is workable, if her spine's anywhere close to properly laid, I wonder her age, can't be more than two millennium of age with a name like Harbinger - at least she's not named after the keelwright's wife, like that abominable Sophie, whoever heard of a ship called the Sophie, oh, and I'll need a chief doctor, and you need to travel before you drop dead of age, yes Jon?"

Jon, who had only caught his name in that meander masquerading as communication, stammered. "I beg pardon?"

"A doctor," Vynn said. "On these long cruises, even on a small ship like a sloop, you need a good doctor. Keeps the crew from getting sick and bemoaning the rations. It's all rubbish, of course, but nothing is as good for morale as getting seen to by someone who can spout out learned High Gothic quick as winking."

"Ah, a placebo," Jon muttered.

"Exactly," Vynn said, laughing. "And besides, you're wasted in port. I'd like a man who can shoot a hundred dead in a duel, even if it were not all at once."

"Are las pistols of much use in a naval battle?" Jon asked, his voice dry. "I was under the impression that the ranges were significantly farther than pistol shot."

"Oh, aye, you need a pistol. Boarding, for one," Vynn said, casually, adjusting her boots, tying them tight. "Mutineers, too. Orks answer remarkably well to pistol shot too. Not that it kills the blighters. They merely find it quite ripping good fun. They laugh their tusks off. Now, now, come, I need your answer so I might send a letter to the local commandant and ask for your commission."

Jon looked about himself at the room he had been forced to live for these past three years. He considered the time it would take to pack his belongings. Then, smiling, he said: "How can I refuse?"

"You can't," Vynn said, laughing without actually jesting. "Or I swear, I'll have you knocked about the head and pressed into service. Hah!"

###

Reaching the Hegemony was in and of itself a trial. While the surface of Tempestus had been given over to the Adeptus Mechanicus, who had laid it out based off their own ideas of orderly conduct and rationality. But the orbit was a terrifying muddle. In the third century of habitation, the moon of Tempestus had been colonized by a family of nobles who had earned themselves a chartered contract to buy and sell all the non-war necessary goods from the Forge World. They had begun to breed, as nobles did, and as there was a limited amount of land to parcel out along gavelkind lines, and so the seemingly infinite vastness of space had been parceled out. Eventually a spate of vicious shadow wars - fought by illegal psy-assassins and shadowy underhanded dealings - had transitioned the noble families of TEmpestus orbit into a more stable state of primogeniture.

But by then, the habit of giving out an orbit to every single one of each noble family's sons had left every possible orbital space lane owned by one noble or another. Each had their own taxation rates, their own shuttling service, and their own quiet feuds. The Tech Priests had long since vat-bred and hypno-conditioned savants who could deal with the complexity. The Navy normally just blustered, or simply used direct point to point transfers via taking brutal advantage of even a small cutter's vastly more powerful plasma engine.

Vynn had no such cutter and so had to negotiate the orbital lanes through a series of bribes, cajoleries and one outright fist fight. But in the end, she and the good Doctor - who himself was clutching both a suitcase with all his possessions and a warrant commissioning him as a Naval Chirgeion - arrived at the naval dockyards. They were a majestic sight, with several ships of the line moored in immense berths that swarmed with activity, as servitors and voidborn workers alike scurried about to refit, repair, rearm and repaint the ships.

"Where is our boat?" Jon asked, provoking a hideous shudder that ran from Vynn's Mohawk to her toes.

"Our ship," Vynn said, with emphasis that sailed entirely over Jon's head. "Is moored right there."

"The fat one?"

The shudder now had become a tightening of knuckles around the guard rail separating the passenger's platform from the harried looking crew who had been working under Vynn's censorious glare for the past three hours and hearing her ever none-too-quietly muttered complaints about half-inbred noble lackwit lubbery would be voidsmen who didn't know a proper plane change manuver from their asses.

"No, that's the a pilgrim transport. The one with the prow, Jon."

"The gold?"

"That's a Sword, my Emperor, my good man, we're sailing aboard a sloop of four hundred guns, not a Sword with near a thousand! It's the red one!"

"That rather tiny boat?" Jon lifted a pair of auspex-goggles to his eyes. "I can barely make it out."

Vynn's eyes were filled with as much hate for Jon as she normally showed for the direst enemies. "The Hegemony is more than large enough, thank you very much, Doctor."

When the shuttle did finally arrive at the berth where the Hegemony was berthed, the true scale of an Imperial warship - even one that Vynn had to privately admit was on the rather smaller end of the scale - impressed itself on both the newly minted Master and Commander. The Hegemony from her elegantly curved and flared prow, shaped rather like a groxcatcher on the front of a primeval locomotive, to the tips of the navigator spires on her forecastle, was nearly a kilometer long, and a quarter of a kilometer wide at her fins. Half a kilometer in height gave her a narrow, darting shape. The windows gleamed with an inner light while the sun of the local system gave a warm glow to her flying buttresses and gargoyle-ridden iconographic covering.

To Jon, she was quite a delightful ship. His eyes delighted in seeing the glowing windows, the faint signs of movement within exciting his deep curiosity. He had seen many civilian crews at work, but had yet to live among a crew of true naval men and women. Further, he could already imagine the strange worlds that this ship might go to. On a cruise, Vynn had said, a ship might not set in at port for months, years at a time. They would need to water in lonely asteroidal fields, catching ice comets and the like. They would need to fill their food with exotic animals and fruits from worlds that had not seen human eyes before.

It was a delight to one so endlessly fascinated by the Enemy Without - Jon's belongings included the infamous xenographer Deylin Wind's proscribed On Hatred: Xenobiological Underpinnings of the Enemies of Mankind.

Vynn, though, only had eyes for the Hegemony's scars.

Most distressing...

The fact she had none.

The seal-locks engaged and the two walked aboard the Hegemony's bridge in a roiling cloud of steam. Vynn breathed in the first gasp of a ship's air that was hers and hers alone. She kept her eyes closed, so she might savor that melange of scents. Machine oil, sweating humans, crackling ozone discharge, the undefinable musty smell of well tended servitors, and other flavors that she didn't quite recognize. A deeply spicy scent, something that made her wonder if it was a local cuisine, above and beyond the rations the crew normally got.

Then she opened her eyes and took a look on the bridge itself.

And in the rosy glow of her first command, Vynn's eyes managed to skip over a few faults here and there. She saw only the gleaming cogitators and the crew standing beside them, rather resplendent in blue and black, their backs ramrod stiff. She noticed a curious mixture of hues among her crew's skin tones. At least a quarter were pale as milk, like her, while others were of a considerably darker complexion. They had replaced the naval cap with wraps that looked quite handsome, if not what she was used too. The men of their type grew their hair out into rather fearsome looking beards, which Vynn appreciated.

But then her eyes swept over the forward auspix pits, where mids and young ensigns worked under the cold eyes of senior sensor officers, learning their arithmancy and astrographic skills. Said mids were looking at her with eyes as wide as saucers, their youth keeping them from knowing to never gawp at a captain.

And lastly, she looked at the gundeck communication board. That did cause her brow to furrow. A hideous hodgepodge, a collection of standard vox communications and what appeared to be brass speaking trumpets, intermixed and connected one and to the other with merry disregard for efficiency. More, standing beside the gundeck board were several young runners - they wore specific uniforms and patches and had the underfed, lean look of greyhound canids. Runners? To order gundeck firing patterns? The very idea made her rankle.

That, though, was not enough to shatter the illusion. She did not see the joyboys and happygirls who some enterprising lieutenants with more cheer than good sense had smuggled near their workstation. The prostitutes remained hidden, crouching behind a cogitator that normally handled the vista-plates, but one of the happygirls did giggle quietly at the sight of the Captain's hair. So too did Vynn's roving eye miss the grox that had followed a servant to the bridge two years before and refused to move ever since. Due to the curious restrictions of the crew on the handling of grox, the beast had been allowed to stay, with a mid given the task of taking the dung away and milking it when its time came. By now, the common ritual of being given fresh groxmilk with their morning coffee and tea was so ingrained that most of the crew could no more imagine moving Molly (as the grox was named) than they could imagine the ship flying backwards.

Vynn rubbed her hands together and nodded. "Well, then!" she said, walking forward. "Where is my ship's master?"

A bear of a man stepped forward. His beard was shot through with gray, and his piercing eyes were only somewhat marred by a meandering scar that made his left one droop and look off to the side. His head-wrap bobbed faintly as he jerked his head forward and down in a short bow that passed for a salute among the Hegemony's crew.

"Captain," he said, gruffly.

Jon watched all this with no small interest. Vynn ignored him.

"Captain Vynn, at your service," Vynn said, offering her hand. The master took her hand and squeezed. Vynn squeezed back. For a moment, deadlock. Then, with a faint smile, the master relented, released and nodded again.

"Ship's Master Adjuran Khan, at yours. Do you wish the tour, ma'am?"

"Yes, can you have one of the mids show our doctor - our fine physician - to his quarters, ensure they're quite nice," Vynn said, gesturing. Khan shot a glare at one of the midshipmen - a girl of twelve who, at that moment, had been surreptitiously picking at her nose. Said girl squeaked, saluted, then scrambled from the auspex pit to guide Jon off and off the bridge. Vynn smiled genially and followed Khan as the ship's master strode around the bridge. He rattled off positions and names as Vynn continued to take measure.

She now began to see some of the rosy haze lift. The signs were subtle in some cases, gross in others. But she knew, by the time Khan began to pace her along the Hegemony's spinal corridor that she knew the story that the logbooks would tell her. She kept this story to herself as she was shown the dorsal gun decks. The 409 guns were mostly of the same caliber, firing hab-sized shells made of nearly solid duranium and steel. Most of the guns themselves were magnetic impellers, which meant the ship saved on accelerant for the projectiles...but cost extra in the wear and tear on the magnetic coils, something that Vynn was sure would end up having the same impact as simply using gunpowder.

"How many men to a gun?" Vynn asked.

"Between five to a ten," Khan said. "A good fifty percent of the crew, ma'am."

Vynn pursed her lips slightly. "Sloops of this size usually ship with, what, ten thousand?"

"The Hegemony has never shipped with more than six, ma'am."

Vynn pursed her lips harder, but said no more.

The tour of the crew quarters passed in near silence from Vynn's perspective - Khan's words flowed in one ear and out the other as she noted that while the gundecks were sparsely populated, the crew quarters had a homey, comfortable air to them. The spicy scent grew stronger, and she found that it came from the vast cooking pits that were run by the cooks. They slathered great hunks of meat with spices that made her nose burn and her mouth water. Here, she had no complaints. That was saved for when Khan took her on a meandering tour of the bilge decks and the engineering sanctum. Vynn had been born a backwood savage, but she did not need to be versed in the esoterica of plasma and electricity to smell the ozone. To hear the unhealthy whine of the plasma vents that had been patched, patched, and patched again.

The head tech-priest, who she met at that time, did not fill her with confidence.

"And the plasma generatoria?" Vynn asked.

"Sufficient protocols have been put in place to ensure safety," the dead-eyed priest, ancient and withered ,said without a single hint of irony, as on the catwalk that Vynn could see on the far side of the engineering gantry, a man was currently on fire and being beaten about his head and shoulders by a pair of hysterical coworkers.

"I still think, as we are in port, we should ensure those vents don't blow. If we make any major maneuvers, they will blow, I've seen what happens to a damaged ship..." Vynn trailed off.

"That," the priest said. "Must be taken up with Magos Yelnets."

###

"The Adeptus Mechanicus' position with the Imperial Navy is spelled out quite clearly in the charter signed between Forge World Tempetsus and Battlefleet Calixus," Magos Yelnets said. The august individual was hard to distinguish from his desk to Vynn, who sat uncomfortably on a chair a size or two too small for her muscular body. "And that is clear, a ship will be repaired if damaged, refitted if needed, rearmed when required. Your ship has ammunition, yes?"

Vynn nodded, opening her mouth.

"It has all functioning components, yes?"

Vynn opened her mouth again. This time, she spoke out: "But, you-"

"Then the contract is fulfilled. I am a highly busy man," Magos Yelnets said, his manifold ocular implants whirring as they looked down at the vast spread of data-slates and paperwork on his desk. "It has been a pleasure to serve you."

Vynn heard those words, ringing in her ears, as she stood on the bridge of the Hegemony a day later. The ship had been fueled and her orders were in her pocket, but they still lacked a Navigator. The old Navigator, it seemed had died of an embolism, Jon had confided this fact to her over the dinner. He had been politely asking the Navis Nobiline family doctor to see the body over the past several hours, and despite having reached triple digits in entreaties, he remained frustrated.

"Jon, do not offend the Navigators, please," had been all Vynn had said of the affair over that dinner, her mind thinking of nothing but the many times patched plasma vents. So too, her mind ranged through the logbook she had read while laying in her cabin's decadently large bed. A logbook that was full of the same report, day in day out.

04:00: Morning Watch Began. Bosun Thuris broke 4 for drunkenness. Sighted auspex signature, chose to remain to convoy.

08:00: Forenoon Watch began. All lays well.

12:00: Afternoon Watch began. All lays well.

And so on on and on and on and on. Five years of logbooks, and not a prize taken, not a shot fired in anger. The Hegemony had been quietly puttering on a dull and uninteresting patrol route for years and years and the captain and crew hadn't seen a single iota of initiative in the whole time and it simply made Vynn's blood boil. And so, standing on the bridge, she nodded to the crew.