Life As A Chaos Mum
Chapter 1(CM)
Deep in the magenta glow of the Maelstrom, onboard a badly shot up chaos battle ship, all was relatively calm as the constant fighting between rival war bands briefly lulled to a short lived an uneasy peace. The bodies of dead chaos space marines and cultists lay mingled together in maggoty piles, and the chaos spawns were having a feast.
The ship was a perpetual war zone, but like so many other war zones, civilians were unhappily forced to live here. Women, children, old ladies, all of these people could be found cowering among the blood and filth of the shot up ship corridors. The lights flickered terribly, the walls had bolter fire impact craters disfiguring their surface, and the sanitation was a nightmare, but people still lived here.
In among this gore and ruin, a young mutant woman fussed over her mutant toddler son, trying to keep a hold of him to stop him wandering out of her protective reach. The toddler clearly had other ideas, and slipped his hand from her grip, toddling off towards the interesting colours of a dead chaos space marine's power armour.
"Patrick! Patrick come back to Mummy! That cadaver is not a toy!" The young woman called urgently after the toddler in a strangely birdlike voice.
The toddler ignored his mother, and the young woman ran after him and picked him up before he could touch the dead body, tutting at the toddler as she did so.
The toddler cheeped at his mother like a baby bird, wanting to be put down to play with the colourful power armour, but his mother was unfazed by his tantrum and did not let go of him.
The mother ran a hand through the bright blue feathers she had in place of hair, and tapped one of the taloned toes of her birdlike feet on the metal deck floor with an impatient sigh as her toddler had a tantrum. The mother was very young, only a teenager herself, not even 16 years old, far too young to be a mother.
The mother was a tall and slender girl, dressed in a bright pink sun dress of all things, and quite attractive even with her mutations. She was a mixed race girl, a blend of Middle Eastern and European ethnicities for sure, the exact specific ethnic groups more uncertain, but had a strong hint of Persian in her pale blue tinged face. She had some very noticeable mutations, in the form of the razor clawed talons of a bird of prey in place of normal human feet, long blue feathers in place of hair, and a faint blue tinge to her white skin.
The mother was barefoot, tapping her bird clawed toes on the floor as she fussed over her toddler. The toddler himself had short blue feather plumage for hair, and had a tiny pair of little bird feet like his mother had. The toddler was slightly less than 3 years old, near the end of his "terrible twos" and was currently having a cheeping tantrum in his mother's arms.
The toddler pointed frantically at the pale blue power armour of the decomposing dead chaos space marine, clearly wanting to explore it up close.
"Look from here Patrick, you mustn't touch it. It's dirty," the mother told her toddler.
The toddler wiggled about having a tantrum, but the mother didn't let go of him. The toddler eventually cheeped himself out and calmed as his mother soothed him.
"Spez mane," the toddler said in a birdlike baby voice, pointing at the pale blue power armour.
"Yes honey, a space marine, that's right. This one is a Violator. They are very very bad men, you mustn't ever go near them." The mother told her son.
"Bad?" The toddler asked.
"Yes honey, very very bad," the mother repeated.
"Why bad?" The toddler pressed.
The mother got a pained look on her face, clearly not wanting to explain to her toddler that the Violators war band were Slaanesh worshippers who raped kids. The mother seemed to be considering if she could find a way to gently explain the danger without frightening her child but then apparently gave up and just repeated that Violators were bad.
The toddler huddled fearfully against his mother, now afraid of the colourful corpse, and his mother quickly relocated to a new area of shot up deck space.
The mother and child passed many women and children, both mutants and normal humans, shambling past fearfully in the flickering light. Like most war zones this ship was completely infested with innocent civilians, just helpless women and kids who didn't want to be here. The mother and child saw many women and children, but no men except for the cadavers. Men usually died young in the fighting in this place, leaving the women to fend for themselves.
The toddler's father was dead. Most of the men were dead after all. Most of the children had dead fathers, and the male life expectancy was just too low for the majority of fathers to survive long enough to see their children grow up. It was just a desperate situation, but such was life in the forces of chaos.
The mother relocated to another corridor junction, and cautiously set the toddler down. He was just too heavy to carry all day long, she needed a rest.
The toddler immediately toddled off, forcing the mother to chase after him once more. If she lost sight of him then he would probably not survive, a chaos creature would eat him. Toddler and baby flesh was much softer and more succulent than the battle dead, and predators would not hesitate to eat an unattended infant this small.
"Patrick don't leave Mummy's side," the mother said telepathically in the toddler's mind, a magenta glow shimmering around her head as she did so.
The toddler produced a similar magenta glow of psychic energy around his own head to reply, and his mother scrambled to stop him accessing the warp before a warp predator could eat his soul.
"Bad boy! You KNOW that you mustn't use your psychic powers till you are older!" The mother chastised her son, gently spanking him to stop him using the warp.
The toddler bawled from the gentle spanking, and the mother sighed in relief as he stopped accessing the warp. The mother and child were both unsanctioned psyckers, and extremely vulnerable to suffering the perils of the warp, making their lives even more complicated.
"Home!" The toddler demanded after he stopped crying.
"Bad soldiers are in our home honey, we can't go home till they leave," the mother explained to her son.
"Home!" The toddler insisted, having another tantrum like the 2 year old he was. He was far too young to understand what it meant to live in an active war zone, and didn't comprehend why he and his mother had been evicted from their own home by armed men.
"The bad men will shoot Mummy if we go home now. Do you want the bad men to shoot Mummy?" The mother told her toddler.
"No! No shoe Mummy!" The toddler bawled, clutching at her fearfully.
The mother kissed her son's feathered head, and cuddled him until he calmed down. To be honest she had no real plan herself, and just hoped that the Khorne berserkers got bored of squatting in her home and went elsewhere. She had been lucky to escape with her son without being beheaded when the berserkers first kicked the door down, fleeing out a side door with only her son and the clothes she was wearing at the time.
The mother had been using her psychic powers ever since then to view the onboard apartment she called home, to see if it was safe to return, but the Khorne berserkers still hadn't left. The berserkers had annoyingly decided to convert her home into an ammo dump for their bolt pistol ammunition, and 8 of the frothing madmen were guarding the apartment at all times.
"Daddy?" The toddler asked hopefully, wanting to crash at the mother's ex boyfriend's place.
"Daddy broke up with Mummy to marry your Auntie Mandy. Daddy is not your daddy anymore," the mother reminded her son, with barely concealed bitterness in her voice.
"Auntie Manny?" The toddler asked, wanting to stay with the mother's unrelated adoptive sister Mandy.
"Auntie Mandy and former Daddy fled into the big armoured panic vault with former Daddy's Wong Family Mafia relatives. They locked us out. We can't reach them till the end of the wars," the mother said bitterly.
The mother didn't want to talk anymore about her Wong Family Mafia member ex boyfriend, it was just too painful to explain the grim reality to a two year old. The one that her son called "Daddy" wasn't the child's father, merely the mother's former boyfriend. The ex boyfriend was holed up with his mafia family in a giant armoured vault to wait out the current civil wars engulfing the ships of this chaos fleet. He would be no help to them.
"Grandpa?" The toddler suggested.
"Grandpa lives with us honey, he is homeless too. Grandpa wasn't at home when the bad men came, Mummy used telepathy to tell your Grandpa to stay away from the bad men. Grandpa is hiding in a dirty sewer till the bad men go away, we can't go to the sewer with Grandpa cause it's too dirty, you would get sick," the mother explained gently.
"Go Grandpa!" The toddler demanded, having yet another tantrum.
The mother sighed. She and her son had been wandering the decks for half the day. They were both tired and unhappy and just wanted to go home. The mother didn't even have any food or money, just the pink sun dress on her body and the toddler in her arms. There hadn't been time to grab a bag, she had been lucky to get out at all.
The mother didn't like the surroundings at all, but had at least chosen the cleanest bit of floor she could find to stop her toddler getting sick. This junction led to nowhere important or strategic, so lacked the usual piles of dead bodies and the chaos creatures such bodies attracted.
The decks then echoed once again with the sounds of distant gunfire, the temporary lull in the fighting now over far too soon. The mother and child huddled together fearfully at the sound, feeling deeply apprehensive. They just wanted peace.
***...
To be continued.