The Origins of Vereesa
"We have to leave NOW!"
The guard's voice was tense as he called to Governor Morgan.
"I know" Morgan replied "come along now, Ver. Time to go now, and follow mum to the stars."
Morgan took the ten year old girls hand and led her towards the door of the office.
The planet Meridian was doomed. That much was certain. A small fleet of voracious space borne super organisms known as Tyranids was approaching the world fast; void swimming monstrosities that strip all life from their prey worlds, leaving nought but bare rock.
Only being an agricultural planet, Meridian was being evacuated before the oncoming storm.
Belonging to Culverinia, a breakaway faction of the galaxy spanning Imperium of Man, the main fleet was engaged about Culverinia itself, fighting off an Imperial attack orchestrated by space Marines, so there was nothing of real note that could be spared to help this beleaguered little world several light years away.
Now, Governor Morgan and his daughter, Vereesa are being swept along the broad corridors of their country mansion towards the lawn, where a squat, powerful shuttle awaits to take them to orbit.
A squad of veteran Culverinian troopers in the traditional dark red armour and grey fatigues surrounds the precious VIPs.
"Alpha team, please report your status. Are the house staff away?" the sergeant tersely asked into his comn link.
No response.
"Alpha team, report!" he barked, but still nothing on the communication net.
Something was wrong, and troopers unshouldered laser rifles and formed a protective barrier about the Governor, who held tightly onto Vereesa.
A trooper scouted ahead, opening doors along the corridor and sweeping the rooms with his torch mounted like a bayonet.
Towards the end of the hallway, near the doors, he gives a cry followed by the crack of his lasgun firing on full automatic into the shadowy room.
Powerful claws lashed from the doorway, going all the way through the trooper with arcs of crimson splashing over the walls.
Another blow decapitated the unfortunate guardsman, and a hulking half humanoid form stoops through the door, howling its challenge. A monstrous Broodlord, leader of Tyranids spawned with parts of human DNA.
The Culverinians sprang into action, and opened fire. Las bolts pelted the monster and took chunks from the walls and doorframe. The needle lasers seemed to patter off of the Broodlord's thick chitinous armour.
"Bring it down!" the sergeant cried, beckoning the special weapon trooper forwards.
Hefting the unwieldy plasma gun he was carrying, the specialist sent a flurry of plasma into the door, splashing the monstrosity and the Genestealer brood behind with ravening goblets of blue/white plasma.
The monsters shrieked and toppled to the floor as the plasma burned their innards to ash in a heartbeat.
With the path now clear, the soldiers urged Morgan and Vereesa forwards at a run, leaving the gory remains of their fallen comrade and the burning forms of the Tyranids.
Clambering down the steps of the mansion to the lawns, the howls and shrieks of Tyranids could be heard on the still night air outside. The coughing bark of heavy bolters started, mounted on drone sentry guns beyond the perimeter walls.
This spurred the small group of Culverinians onward and lent wings to their feet, and the rear ramp of the shuttle dropped with the flight engineer leaning out of the back calling encouragement.
The ground heaved and off to the side a group of three Raveners burst from the ground in a flurry of clawed limbs. With lower bodies and tails of snakes and upper bodies of totally alien killing machines, the creatures moved surprisingly fast, trying to intercept the Governor and his escort.
With no time to stop and fight, the men just ran for their lives, trying to get to the relative safety of the shuttle.
Having seen the Raveners, the flight engineer called the pilot to ready for take off while he heaved a pintle mounted heavy bolter from its stowed position in the wall of the back of the cabin.
The twin turbojets of the shuttle powered up, noise rising to a scream over the commotion outside.
The heavy weapon at the back of the small ship spoke, spitting streams of high calibre shells towards the approaching trio of Raveners.
Explosions stitched in a line across the monsters as the explosive bolts found their mark. One of the snake like monstrosities toppled with its chitinous chest torn open and ruptured in half a dozen huge craters.
The second, next to it was felled by a single bolt smashing through the thick plates in the front of its skull and exploding within, decapitating the beast.
As the squad of humans scrambled desperately up the ramp of the shuttle through the whirlwind of the engines, the last Tyranid hissed, spitting a number of projectiles towards the shuttle.
Two of these hit one of the troopers and he stumbled with holed ripped straight through him.
Vereesa screamed as she was splashed with bright warm blood from the impacts.
The ramp clanged shut and the ship shuddered as it took off. The flight engineer tended to the fallen trooper, but there was nothing that could be done. He spluttered blood for a few minutes then expired, his body covered by a fire blanket.
The orbital space about Meridian was chaos. A ramshackle fleet of freighters, tugs and liners were flying in dense shoals about the only orbital dock. The last waves of refugees were coming up from the planet large armoured and armed dropships usually reserved for full scale military landings.
A few hundred thousand miles away, the token Culverinian defence fleet oversaw the proceedings. Consisting of only half a dozen destroyers and a single cruiser, there was nothing the warships could do except for give time for the civilian ships to break orbit and initiate their warp drives.
Even so, the naval vessels were still formidable. Although the ship classes dated back to the Horus Heresy, their systems were extensively refitted by the best technology produced by the forge world of Culverinia I and its orbital dry-docks.
The cruiser, CNS Tenacious, a Slaughter class vessel, sat in a high orbit, navigational lights and portholes forming a three kilometre long constellation of stars on the colossal warship.
A squadron of three Iconoclast Destroyers kept formation with the venerable cruiser, dominated by the massive warship, although still over 1,000 metres long themselves.
Aboard the bridge of the Tenacious, Captain Harralander watched on a plas-screen the tiny form of the Governor's shuttle making the final manoeuvring adjustments into one of the bays along the cruiser's hull.
Harralander did not like moving so far away from the civilian ships. Although his ship with its powerful engines could be back at the space dock within ten minutes, there had already been half a dozen Tyranid space organisms already engaged. Although they had been duly annihilated, upon falling to the planet's surface the vile Tyranids poured from the killed ships.
Still, the shuttle had only very limited spacefaring capacity, and could not perform major course corrections without running out of fuel, so exceptions had to be made.
Soon, Governor Morgan was safely aboard. First he left Vereesa in the quarters reserved for the Governor with a servant to keep the child company, before making his way to the armoured fortress at the peak of the mighty vessel that contained the Tenacious' bridge.
"Is my wife spaceborne?" Morgan demanded.
"Yes. She transferred to a destroyer from the docks fifteen minutes ago. Aboard the Invincible, I believe. A good ship." Harralander replied diplomatically. "the evacuation of the station is almost complete. The civilian vessels and the Invincible will leave the system via conventional shiftless Warp Drive. I estimate that we will remain here for a maximum of ten to twenty minutes before leaving ourselves." The captain continued.
"Excellent. It's a shame that we have to abandon the planet, but I know there's nothing we can do." Morgan said, his voice laden with resignation.
A young ensign in the crisp blue/grey with red lined uniform of the Culverinian fleet hurried over to Captain Harralander.
"Sir, we're receiving an urgent call from one of the perimeter scouts on the battle net." She said, an edge of urgency in her voice.
"Put the net on speakers." Harralander ordered.
A short tone sounded across the bridge as the battle net activated on the large bridge of the Slaughter class vessel. Almost immediately frantic voices started shouting over the speakers.
"They're coming from the asteroid belt! There's dozens of frigate sized monsters out there!"
"We've sighted a small group come out from behind the moon. The bastards were using it to evade our sensors!"
"They're heading for the refugee fleet!"
"This can't be happening…"
Captain Harralander barked for quiet, and the other ship commanders stayed silent as their leading officer organised the situation.
"OK, give me a sit-rep. What's happening out in the asteroid fields?" He ordered.
"There's about a dozen or so smaller Tyranid ships breaking off from the main field just out of planetary orbit. They're chasing me, taking hits."
"Get out of harm's way. Try to draw them away from the civilians." Harralander said.
Studying the readings from the scanners, Harralander swore, then started giving orders to the fleet.
"All ships move towards the orbital dock. Put yourselves between the Tyranids and them. Give the refugees time to escape. You're ordered to die protecting them if you have to. Helm, make a course correction of 40 degrees to get us between the station and the bugs. Engineering, divert all power to the engines-take it from critical systems if you have to. All Ahead Full!"
Harralander sat down in his command throne in the centre of the bridge, watching his officers scuttle about their business and waited for the battle to unfold.
Small thrusters dotted across the Tenacious fired, turning the massive vessel towards the station. Ahead of her in the distance the civilian ships were milling about in panic, with collision alerts everywhere as people disengaged from the crowded docking arms.
Even further afield flickering, temporary stars could be seen as the destroyer scouting sent salvoes of heavy shells howling into the void, attempting to knock out at least one of its pursuers, which chased like unholy clawed phantoms, occasionally firing a shell of burning caustic acid after the retreating vessel.
The Tenacious became a beacon of swirling energy emissions as its mighty stellar drives powered up. High energy plasma streamed from vast engine ports at the ship's rear, driving the long form headlong towards the chaos at a blistering speed.
The escorts fired their own engines, and the small battle fleet roared away, looking from behind like the corona of a vengeful star roaring into the wilderness of space.
Lieutenant Boras mopped sweat from his brow as he watched the edges of the asteroid field sweep past on the magnified view superimposed on the screen at the front of the control room aboard the Iconoclast destroyer Vigilant.
He didn't know how the aliens managed it, but was grudgingly impressed the way they picked their way through the field towards the distant space dock. They seemed to make almost impossible manoeuvres around asteroids tens of kilometres long at speeds that were almost unbelievable.
Boras didn't dare take his destroyer into the field. Although each asteroid was thousands of miles apart, taking a ship a kilometre long moving at millions of miles an hour, the chances of a collision are uncomfortably high.
Movement caught his eye. A heat signature formed on the far fringe of the belt where the destroyer started making its turn around in a wide turn.
What the hell? Thought boras. That's another Tyranid! And it's huge!"
Two kilometres of rock-like chitin and clawed appendages sailed from the silent rock formations towards the destroyer in a leisurely intercept course.
Giant claws held underneath the Tyranid Cruiser's body flexed and extended in anticipation of a kill, shaking off the layers of ice accumulated from years of space travel.
At its prow, powerful muscles convulsed along several tubes, spitting out genetically engineered projectiles towards the distant escort at incredible velocity.
Vigilant rocked from stern to bow as the pyro-acid rounds slammed into the port amidships. Having to track such a small target moving at high speed, most of the projectiles sailed harmlessly into the void, but there was such sheer numbers that there would be a few lucky hits.
On the escort, most of the crew staggered, losing balance momentarily as the ship rocked. From multiple impacts. Thankfully the shields just managed to repel the worst of the attack, only having superficial burns across thick armour plating from the acid.
However, the debris of the shot fired at them coupled with the eddying radiation emitted from the shields blinded all of the targeting sensors to the portside.
Even so, the large cannons studding the port side started tracking the closing cruiser and returned fire, gun decks shuddered from the recoil of dozens of cannons of varying sizes. The destroyer's port side was lit up by the brilliant flashes form the muzzles of its guns, shooting stars of the shells tracers whistling away into the night.
Through the confusion of the radiation and debris a number of the weapons did hit the Tyranid monstrosity. Unfortunately the shells were either detonated by a thick cloud of spores around the cruiser or exploded harmlessly on the reinforced chitin of the creature's prow.
Boras watched the cruiser get closer on the screen. The claws held his attention; two titanic crushing mandibles that would tear his ship asunder effortlessly.
Boras opened a channel to the point defence system commander from his command chair.
"Kolm, see the claws on that thing? Look where they join its thorax. They look fairly flimsy. When it gets right on us if you could coordinate the turrets to fire at that point and the batteries open up, we might just have a chance of knocking that monstrosity out before it does the same to us."
The gunnery sergeant grunted. "I'll do my best, but I think you're asking for a miracle here."
"Well, you've got plenty of time to be a sceptic when you're dead. Just concentrate on your job for the time being."
That sharpened Kolm's resolve. He signalled all of the turret defences and weapon batteries, relaying the plan and watching the distance count down between the Vigilant and the terror.
Tense minutes passed, seeming to stretch into eternity as the Tyranid loomed near in the port vision ports. The claws which held everyone's rapt attention reached out towards the speeding escort with a sense of unstoppable force.
"NOW!" Kolm screamed into the microphone, and the guns sprang into action.
The point defences opened up first, fast tracking turrets spraying thousands upon thousands of high velocity shells in unending streams, appearing like gleaming fiery ropes springing from the Vigilant to strike the leviathan bearing down upon them.
Craters and holes appeared all over the base of the beast's left claw, and spurts of ichor exploded from exposed gaps between the heavy armour plating, the lifeblood freezing instantly in the vacuum.
The turrets wouldn't be enough, but the exploding ammunition gave a bright beacon for the gun batteries' targeting arrays to lock on to. The energy emissions glowed like a supernova, and at the range of a few hundred miles and closing the guns couldn't possibly miss.
They spoke as one, hurling high velocity armour piercing shells and bolts of searing plasma into the monster.
At such close range and speeds, the spore clouds could do little to halt the rain spraying from the destroyer.
Explosions blossomed like delicate flowers all over the bottom of the Cruiser's extended claw. Chitinous armour was flayed away like ferrocrete dust being blown into space, exposing the vulnerable join connecting the weapon to the beast's body.
The portside Macro Cannon on the Vigilant fired, slamming a forty tonne shell into the join.
A crude atomic bomb tore the shell apart, and starting a colossal plasma warhead to ignite.
With a blinding flash, the claw tore away from the cruiser, spiralling outwards and smashing the end of one of the beast's steering vane like talons.
Bright ichor flooded into the void, accompanied by burning streaks of ignited bio plasma.
Impossibly, the violent force of this changed the cruiser's direction slightly, and the second claw did not make a good contact with the Vigilant. However, the bottom of the claw did swipe across the proud vessel's back.
Within the ship, the screams of tortured metal reverberated around the hull as the claw ploughed through the top decks of the escorts' amidships, just behind the command tower.
Great hunks of twisted wreckage spilled out into space from the collision, and hundreds of crewmen and women died in a matter of heartbeats as entire compartments were crumpled up or decompression sucked everything out into the unforgiving void.
Alarm klaxons engaged seemingly everywhere as emergency bulkheads rumbled down to prevent the entire ship venting atmosphere.
Power and fuel lines were severed, causing numerous fires to spill from the mangled parts of the destroyer. The blow knocked the small ship off course, sending it into a barely controlled corkscrew into deep space with only one of its half a dozen engines under control.
With the smashed lines, conduits from the main reactors were helplessly damaged and the engineers fought to shut down all bar one of the Vigilant's mighty reactors before they exploded from backsurges of power.
The bridge was in chaos. The main and emergency lighting had failed, leaving the room in complete darkness apart from the erratic light emitted from a myriad of malfunctioning screens. The main screen had stopped working and shut down, its delicate relays burned out by a major power surge from the rupturing power lines across the vessel. The gravity plating had failed, so the senior bridge crew tried to move around the room like ungainly insects, sharing the space with floating pieces of debris.
Boras knew his ships part in the battle was over, and signalled the Tenacious that his ship was going to disengage from the fight, making a sudden change of course then powering down to drift out of the combat zone while the repair teams worked feverishly to repair the ship enough to limp into Shiftless Warp to get home.
While the Vigilant was being pursued by the Tyranid cruiser, the Tenacious had put itself between the asteroid belt and the approaching frigates.
Astern, an escort squadron identical to that surrounding the capital ship duelled with the smaller numbers approaching from the moon.
Shot and shell lashed out at the alien invaders, focusing on one terrible beast at a time, destroying it utterly then moving to another target.
Invincible linked her targeting computers up with the other three ships in the squadron to engage a pair of Kraken that were getting close to getting in amongst the civilian transports.
Weapon fire slashed from the monsters like deadly rain, reducing them to dismembered clouds of chitinous debris, ichor and gas in a torrent of explosions.
The crew on board the escorts cheer as the first few civilian ships activate their Shiftless Warp and rocket off at several times light speed.
The kilometre long warships turned to align out of the combat zone and lay in their own courses for their warp travel.
As she was getting up to speed, pyro acid bolts smashed into the Invincible in the engineering section.
Acid burned and melted through the engineering sections, cutting power from half of the engines and causing the sheep to veer dangerously out of alignment with its warp course. The bridge made frantic calls to main engineering to cut power to the Shiftless Drive, but main engineering had been eaten away by acid and everyone within had died screaming, trying to do that very thing.
The commander of the Invincible had no choice but to issue a general abandon ship order to try and get as many people off of the ship as possible before the warp drive engaged.
Vereesa's mother, Governess of Meridian was led down the cramped corridors of the emergency access areas in the outer hull of the Invincible. A young rating had taken her from her cabin to the nearest escape pod after hearing the abandon ship order.
He knew he had scant minutes to get clear of the vessel before the drives were fully powered and engaged.
He breathed a huge sigh of relief as they came across a door recessed into the wall of the corridor, leading to an escape pod. They were going to make it!
A small group of navy personnel were already inside and running last second checks before sealing the hatch and jettisoning from their doomed ship.
The rating helped the Governess over the docking ring into the pod. Before he could join the others, he felt a surge of wind come howling down the corridor.
He looked back to see a white wall of flames rushing towards him from the aft of the ship.
Nobody felt a thing as their bodies were taken apart at the atomic level and forced through the shattered pod's hull at the speed of light.
Where the Invincible had drifted off of alignment, the warp core still was attempting to follow its original course, so when the Shiftless Drive had activated, the warp core smashed itself against the armoured bulkhead before it at several times the speed of light, in an explosion the ripped apart the Invincible from in inside out in under a second.
Ten thousand people died in the kilometre long ship, and those escape pods that launched were destroyed in the explosion radiating out from the ship.
Morgan fell to his knees on the deck of the Tenacious as he watched the vessel with his wife aboard explode, helpless before the events unfolding before his eyes.
He wished then that he was on the ship with her, so that he would not have to endure the long lonely years alone.
But then he remembered little Vereesa in the cabin a few decks down, and steeled himself. Such ideas are not the example he should give to his daughter!
Harralander was not stricken by the loss of the ship. His orders were to protect the civilians evacuating from the planet, and everything else, including his personal survival, were a bonus.
As such, he was immensely satisfied when the fleet of tugs, freighters and liners warped away, heading out of the system and into safe space.
Now was time to wreak vengeance on the Tyranids. If they were going to claim the world, they were going to pay dearly in blood.
The escorts about the Slaughter class vessel turned with the megalithic vessel to present broadsides towards the aliens rapidly closing from the direction of the asteroids.
The smaller destroyers opened fire, salvoes swatting the Tyranid escorts from the stars in considerable numbers.
The Tyranid cruiser had come about and was steaming at full speed towards the knot of defending ships, wanting nothing else but to visit some revenge on these beings that destroyed its claw.
The Tenacious' many artillery turrets across its broadside moved as one to track the oncoming cruiser, and started firing as one. Pulses of light strobed from the Culverinian cruiser from the heavier guns, with countless smaller points of light forming from the many hundreds of smaller guns dotted all over its hull.
In the gun decks, auto loaders whined, carrying huge shells to the breeches of the guns. The vast galleries were a hive of activity, gunnery stations lining up their weapons with the ships sensors to target the monstrous creature, still hundreds of thousands of miles away, before the guns fire with a deafening blast.
Airlocks at the end of each barrel hissed and groaned, preventing the entire gun deck depressurising as the breech of each cannon opened to reload.
This blistering hail of fire stripped away the protective clouds around the Tyranid monster in an instant, and great chunks of the creature's prow were torn away by huge explosions. Vital fluids gushed into space, freezing instantly, and the prow batteries of bio-acid were shredded by the bombardment.
The creature knew it was badly wounded, and put on an extra burst of speed in the hope of ramming its tormentor before finally succumbing to its wounds.
The pair of gigantic turrets amongst the smaller weapon batteries on the flanks of the Tenacious turned, myriad smaller guns clustered on them adding what weight they could to the salvoes.
Now the main guns on the turrets fired.
Colossal beams of energy erupted from the cannons, reaching out to the Tyranid cruiser almost instantly.
Tearing into the already smashed prow, the lance beams tore right through the monstrous organism.
With a blinding flash, the creature exploded, its core bio plasma erupting in a violent blast.
The expanding cloud of fire and chitin shards enveloped several of the smaller alien escorts, smashing them like tissue paper.
Deciding that now was the best time to withdraw, Harralander ordered his surviving escorts to engage their own Shiftless Drives and meet up with the evacuation flotilla at the pre set coordinates.
They obliged, firing up their engines and hurtling away before any more Tyranid nastiness could kill them.
A low whine built in strength on the bridge of the Tenacious as the Shiftless Warp Drive powered up. All of a sudden, the vessel rocked, and the engines started powering down again.
"Report!" Captain Harralander roared. "What the hell just happened?"
"We just got hit in our engineering section- large spines sir. Pair of Kraken somehow snuck up on us sir."
Point defences chattered, streaming glowing tracers at the tough alien escort that was swimming around the big cruiser.
Reeling from the multiple impacts, the beast skulked off to lick its wounds, although point defences would do little harm to such an armoured monster.
"Engineering reports the Shiftless Drive is offline. A few of the spines hit power relays which shut the whole thing down. They expect it'll take a week outside of dry dock to fix it- all the other relays tried to compensate and burned out." One of the officers reported from his station to the side of the bridge.
"So, you're telling me we're a sitting duck in this system for a week? Unless we get a repair ship out here, which given the circumstances isn't going to happen." Harralander stated, irritated by this sudden failure.
"I suppose… It might just work… Ensign, get me the chief officer on-screen now." Harralander ordered.
Moments later, the main screen on the bridge was filled with the shining face of a hard pressed engineer.
"What is it, sir? As you can see behind me, that last hit did a lot of damage that I'm trying to repair." The engineer said, and behind him could bee seen a twisted gash in the bulkhead, with the end of a chitinous spike protruding from it. Sparks fell intermittently from the breach.
"I want you to put the Warp engines online." Harralander stated bluntly.
"Didn't I send you the report? They're shot. Those things." He nodded over his shoulder at the wreckage behind "Took care of that."
"I didn't say the Shiftless Drive, I said the Warp engines. The old ones."
The engineer paled.
"You're not serious? The Geller Field hasn't been calibrated in over five years! We could all be killed before we know what was happening! Even if we DID survive, where we'd end up is anyone's guess. As you're aware we don't have any Psycic Navigators in the whole of Culverinian space, let alone on board. Granted, the computer should be able to navigate using our warpspace beacons, but it's never been tested!" the engineer flustered.
"To hell with the Geller Field." Harralander stated. "If we don't get out of here while we can, there won't be a ship left for the Geller Field to protect! We all know help won't come; our entire fleet is engaged over Culverinia IV trying to keep orbit from the control of the damned Space Marines! Put us into an hour's warp jump, and we can make repairs wherever we end up."
"Give me two minutes." The engineer said, resigned. "Just prepare the ship."
With that the communication link cut off.
A deep, ominous alarm tone sounded throughout the ship, and all of the crew stiffened, knowing that they were about to make a warp jump, one of the most dangerous and unpredictable types of travel possible.
The warp jump involves the ship moving outside of the normal universe to a parallel plane known as the Warp.
The Warp is a roiling, seething mass of energy, and contains currents and eddies like a sea. The warp is intrinsically linked to humanity and several other major races, especially in the last few thousand years.
Forms coalesce in the Warp, the raw emotions of people given form, and looking unto the warp without powerful filters will drive any mortal human insane within moments from what they see there.
This is not the only danger, as beings reside in the Warp. Also made of pure energy, these daemonic entities crave accessing the material realm, and possessing people with psychic abilities is one method, but they also swarm aboard starships in warpspace, killing the people on board and consuming their souls.
Armoured sheets rolled down over all of the windows and portholes aboard the Tenacious, to protect the people within from the maddening effects of the warp.
A sheath of energy coated the vast ship and a pulsing tear in the fabric of reality opened around the bows of the cruiser. The great stellar drives powered up, nudging the great vessel through the portal into warpspace.
As soon as the ship was inside, the sickly purple portal closed, preventing anything else from following… Or escaping.
All eyes watched the forward screen. The normal starscape was replaced with a computerised image with streams representing warp flows, and bright points of light showing the positions of the Culverinian warp beacons.
The tension in the room was palatable.
The navigator studied the readouts at his console, and gave his report.
"Gentlemen, I do believe we've been incredibly lucky. We dropped into a tide heading towards Halo-delta-two. We should be able to reach it within the hour if we don't disengage the warp engines."
Everyone relaxed visibly, and a cheer went up. The bridge crew started congratulating each other on the results of their action and thanking their good fortune.
Harralander waved Morgan over to him.
"Well." The captain said "We made it. I'm sorry about your wife. There was nothing we could do. The navy has a strict code in evacuations that the greatest number of people must be saved, even if it means sacrificing VIPs in the process. Because the Invincible stayed to fight instead of running to safety, fifteen million people managed to get to safety."
Morgan's shoulders slumped. He was going to accuse the captain of not doing everything he could, but Harralander must have read his thoughts. The naval officer was right, Morgan felt in his heart of hearts.
"I know you couldn't do anything more, and you saved the people from my planet. You have my sincere thanks." The governor said, accepting the hand that fate had dealt him.
"Now, your daughter is waiting for you" Harralander said "I'm sure she was very frightened during that scrape. Go to her. And perhaps later the two of you could come to my quarters for-"
The ship suddenly rocked violently, throwing most of the officers on the bridge to the floor.
The navigator watched his screens with disbelief. The main veiwscreen was going insane, vortices of colour whirling round and round, as if the view was that of a leaf in a whirlwind.
"We've been hit by a massive warp-surge!" The navigator screamed "We're out of control! I can't find any of the Culverinian beacons, and the Astronomicon is whirling around, and its getting dimmer every second. This is impossible! We're travelling faster than anything recorded before!"
Harralander grimaced, and watched the viewer intently. All three kilometres of Tenacious shuddered and rocked as it was tossed around in the savage warpspace current like a child's plaything.
Drawn out moans could be heard throughout the vessel as it buckled under the forces that were threatening to tear it apart.
There was no way the Tenacious could disengage its warp engines under such conditions. It would be impossible to find a thin area of the warp that the ship could punch through into reality, and even if it did, at those speeds it would tear a great bleeding hole in the very fabric of reality thousands of light years across and the ship would be torn apart with it.
Gradually, the ship came to a halt and the flows of the warp became normal again, although sluggish.
"Where are we?" Harralander croaked.
"I… I don't know, sir." The navigator said "There are no beacons, not even the Astronomicon. All I can tell is that there are people here. The warp is fuelled by emotion, and if we were in wilderness space the warp would be completely calm, apart from around our ship. But its strange, its much quieter than any recorded levels, as if the people here aren't so closely linked to the warp…"
"At least we're somewhere. Set the warp drives to get us back to reality as soon as possible." Harralander ordered. "As soon as we find out where we are we can get the Shiftless Drive working again and try to get home."
At that moment, the main lighting was supplemented by red pulsing lights, and a deep alarm sounded, with similar events occurring throughout the ship.
The chief engineer's face came up on the screen. He looked terrified.
"The Geller field is collapsing! It was always in a bad way, but that violent movement was too much. We've got perhaps a minute before there are breaches and daemons start swarming aboard. The ship's trying to get out of warp, but there's no guarantee of when that's going to be."
There was silence on the bridge.
Harralander walked over to a communication panel on a wall, and set to broadcast throughout the ship.
"All crew, prepare to be boarded. All crew are to take up arms. Only people who are exempt are those carrying out tasks that if not carried out will lead to the destruction of the ship. I repeat, all hands prepare to be boarded."
As he spoke, the bridge crew moved to narrow strips of bare wall that were sliding out, revealing racks of flachette shotguns and pistols.
"Well, friend," Harralander said to Morgan "Time to fight or die." He said, tossing a shotgun to the governor.
Morgan hurried to his quarters, passing groups of sailors and soldiers forming barricades in the corridors of the ship. Taking a squad of the ship's guards with him, Morgan barricaded himself in the quarters.
Vereesa couldn't quite understand what her father was saying to her, and was unnerved by all the screaming and shouting coming through the soldiers' radios.
But she was glad that her father was with her, and felt that he would protect her from anything.
Sounds of fighting echoed down from the corridor, and plaster fell from the ceiling as a grenade exploded somewhere nearby.
Morgan led Vereesa over to a big wooden wardrobe, and put her inside.
"Stay here." He said. "Whatever you hear outside, don't come out. Just stay here and stay quiet, you understand?"
Vereesa nodded, and hid in the cupboard.
With the door shut, only a thin sliver of light came into the wardrobe.
Vereesa sat in a corner, hugging her knees as she heard the door to the apartment break.
Red light steamed in through the small gap, bathing Vereesa in a blood-light.
From outside came the sounds of shotguns and pistols being fired repeatedly, and inhuman screams rending the air.
With awful tearing sounds, one by one the sounds of the firearms stopped, accompanied by heavy thuds of bodies hitting the floor.
In the sudden quiet, Vereesa could hear footsteps coming towards her hiding place, accompanied with the heavy breathing of some unspeakable monster.
The light coming into the wardrobe was blotted out by whatever was outside, and there was a scratching of something crawling over the handle.
The ship suddenly lurched, and the creatures outside cried out in despair.
The red light disappeared, leaving the normal sliver of white light in the wardrobe, and there was nothing but silence and the sound of the ship slowly ticking over.
The little girl curled up tightly, crying, and eventually fell asleep.