Take as Prize Ch. 03

"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.

Vynn sighed as she turned, discarding her coat and hanging it up. Her memory drifted back to Anton. She had first met him when she had been twelve years of age. He had come to her village and her tribe and her world with one goal: To make a profit. And a profit he had made, in gigatons of whale blubber. But making the deal had put him betwixt her brother and her father. Her father had welcomed the return of the Emprium, as her tribe recalled it. He was a worshiper of the Sun-Father. Her brother had been taken in by the sect of the Water Witches, and had staged a coup. Both had thought young Vynn, without her woman's tattoos, without a spear...hell...without tits to speak of, was a nonentity in the struggle. But when the ambush came off and Anton's bodyguard had been brought down by toxdarts and Anton himself had been netted by her brother, Vynn had taken up her fallen father's spear, tranfixed her brother to the wall, and was immediately offered the job of Anton's Arch-Militant, a position recently vacated.

It had taken very little to convince her to sign on as such: In totality, her pay had been a bead of glass she had later found to be worthless and the former Arch-Militant's tricorn hat, which Anton had plucked from the still cooling corpse and offered to the twelve year old Vynn with a flourish. The next six years had been a wild haze of adventure. Anton navigated not by the quiet calculus of capital expenditure and supply lines that most chartist captains operated under. Nor did he go seeking for enemies, like a naval captain. Instead, he had tossed a knife onto a cloth map right where it said Here thyre be Dragons and said: We go.

And they had gone. Aboard The Lucky Chance, his crew of misfits and madmen had cut through the warp and pirates alike. She had swung through rope vines into the royal throne rooms of despot priest kings on forgotten worlds, a knife between her teeth, and held men to ransom while surrounded by teeming throngs of spear wielding savages. She had watched Anton talk Eldar corsairs into a smile while his crew quietly stole treasure from their holds. She had been there when Anton had bellowed: Damn the spikes! Full speed ahead! And rammed the Chance into a cruiser twice her size. Six years and every day seemed to be a new adventure. She sighed, quietly, her body tingling with the memories of it.

Was it any wonder that, the instant she had come of age, Anton had come to his chambers to find her waiting in them.

"Vynn?" And in remembering that moment, that husky, confused voice, Vynn was not merely remembering. She was reliving the memories.

Vynn stepped forward from the shadows. The luminators in the room cast sharp ones, edged in blackness and giving only a faint shape of what was beyond their lights. The light was just as stark. The curve of her tattoos – earned in battles and explorations alike – slipped along muscular arms that had started to come into their own with the enhanced diet of an officer and the hard labor of an arch-militant. Her hair had grown long and wild, untamed and untouched by barber or surgeon, bundling along her shoulders and dripping to the heart shaped swell of her buttocks. Her hips, wide and childbearing, swept and dived down into long, athletic legs. The wildness extended further, to the thick thatch of bright blond hair that tangled and curled above her puffy, dripping sex. She locked her eyes on Aron and stepped forward – the Rogue Trader rendered speechless and motionless for perhaps the first and last time in his career. But could one blame him: He had seen her at twelve and might not have imagined that the body concealed by her thick coat and carapace armor and jaunty tricorn hat had transitioned from girl to woman.

But his hands knew the answer. They cupped and squeezed her breasts, finding the rosy pink of her diamond hard nipples, tweaking, twisting, tugging. Vynn responded to the rough treatment with a tiger-purr and her own hands had started to tug and twist and tease on their own. But while Aron's palms caressed skin and flesh, Vynn's had only one target, and their aim was destruction. Iron-hard muscle bunched and flexed beneath shockingly smooth skin and cloth that cost more than some of her weapons tore into shreds and strands of useless twin. Gold baubles hit the carpet with the thudding impact of dropped fruit, and soon, Aron's member had sprung free. Shot away in a long distant boarding action, the finest artisans of the Magos Biologis had worked to sculpt something new from cloned tissue and the ruined remains of what was left behind. The end result had more in common with the realms of equestrian husbandry than a human.

Not that a single mate of his had complained.

Vynn certainly was not the first to broach any. Instead, as she drew her tongue from his lips, panting and gasping and marveling at the way the luminator's light caught the strands of spittle connecting tongue to tongue, mouth to mouth, body to body, soul to soul, she crooned. Her hand, inexperienced and clumsy, stroked from tip to base, marveling at length and thickness, feeling the heat and the steel and the silk all in one that made maleness such a delight for an eager young woman. And woman she was, for her mouth started to water as she kissed at Aron's neck. Her voice was husky as she whispered: "Captain, my Captain..."

"Call me Aron, Vynn," he had rumbled, softly. Oh so softly.

And Vynn was his then in a way she hadn't been since she had first realized that the glass bead was worthless. Not since she had seen him leap to kick a grenado away from a cowering pressman for no reason more than he hated to see waste and raw animal courage. And so, her knees obligingly became water and she found her face mashed against his hard belly, feeling where augmetic plate and scar tissue and sheer human muscle combined to make something soft and yielding and comfortingly present. She breathed in the faint smell of machine oil mixed with salty, male musk and knew she would never again associate smell with the machine shop. Instead, to her nose, the scent of a machine shop or tech-priest sanctum would inevitably be linked to this moment. To red satin curtains. To a panting, gasping Aron – not the Captain, not the Rogue Trader, not even Lord Vendigroth, but her Aron – and the first sparkling taste of his pre on the tip of her tongue.

She swirled it around and around his cock, looking up at him, her eyes as soft and gentle as they had ever been. Aron's fingers clutched on the side of the bed and his hips bucked and, like an overeager stallion, he spurted something thicker than pre and thinner than seed down her throat. Vynn drank it as if it were ambrosia and pulled her mouth back to admire the dripping, gleaming glans, the strange curves that the Magos Biologis had pulled from their vat. She knew that he was not built like most men, but she sincerely did not care. And so, when she plunged forward again, it was with the hard-knock determination of a woman used to leading crews on the gundeck during a full broadside. She pushed forward, felt the reflex to gag, pushed forward still. Closed her eyes. Trembled. Kissed his hips. Withdrew and gasped and coughed and almost retched, but beamed up at Aron and the utterly shocked expression on his face.

From there, it was merely a matter of training. Training that Aron – even in his stunned, perpetually moaning and panting state – was more than eager to give to his Vynn. His hips drove forward and his balls slapped against her chin with a wet thump, and Vynn felt her body tingle with the excitement. Yes, she couldn't breathe, but she was no lubber, no landsman, was she? She was from Aquios and she had been able to hold her breath for five minutes before she had learned to walk. She bobbed her head in time with the movements of Aron's hips, while his hands marveled in the thickness of her hair. In the way that he could gather up great bunches of it between his fingers and use it to draw her against him with even more frantic force.

Vynn's throat bulged faintly with every thrust. Her lips pressed to the cock filling her mouth, drawn with it with every back thrust, and she reached between her legs with one hand. Her fingers found her waiting snatch and she buried them and crooked them and rubbed her center of pleasure, a place she had found years before, but had never quite experienced like this until this moment. Her thumb caressed the pearl that crested her sex, a pearl that she remembered being taught about by her old Gran. Gran had told stories, but Vynn had never really believed until now, with her cunt aching to be filled, with her jaw twinging with pain and her tongue buzzing with pleasure, that those stories would ever be true for her.

But they were, and her back arched as she came from her fingers and from Aron's cock. His balls surged, her other palm caressing them gently, and she tasted his seed as he let himself loose. His first blast filled her throat and belly, then is second filled her mouth. Then the third and fourth and fifth and the others that she lost count of painted her face. Warm, thick, delicious seed splashed along her cheek, coated her forehead. Some would have gotten into her eyes, had she had not closed them and simply reveled in the taste and the decadent tactility of the cum washing over her. It dripped onto her breasts, coated her shoulders. Some dribbled along her shoulders, tracing the curve of muscles. She swore she could feel her tattoos radiating with the shamanistic power she had long believed them to have...

And she wondered how the Sky-Father, the Emperor on Earth in truth as the cleric had taught her, would think, seeing her like this?

She hoped he'd enjoy the view. After all, defending the galaxy from the worst of evil and the most vilest of ruin would be a thankless job, were it not for humans singing his praise and devotions, and...maybe...getting a bit naughty from time to time. If it was for a good cause, could a single cleric raise an objection? Vynn thought not. Then she wiped the cum from her face, well, enough of the cum to let her see. And what she saw filled her with the eager tiger-purr of a huntress who knew that her conquest was far from over. For, whatever design specifications his member held, one was clearly present.