Part 1: The Starveling System
Chapter 1
A lurch, as if your stomach has decided to hurl itself out of your body through your bowels, a faint flicker of pain just behind the eyes, as if you've been staring at the sun, and then finally a breath-halting sensation of being washed clean by being dunked head first in an ice bath.
The fleet drops out of the warp.
There is a moment's pause in the Armsmen's Mess, the anticipation that always came with this moment, and then the Hosanna's of the All Clear sing out across the vox-systems and all present relax. You can feel the tension leaving the room. The chatter that preceded the escape from the Immaterium restarts, just a hint louder and more boisterous than before.
Seven ships travel together, a small colony fleet, mostly transports. Their Flagship is the Yolenna Symphony, an Enforcer class light carrier cruiser, bearing the Imperial Aquila but with markings of a privateer along her side.
Tens of thousands of souls aboard her, but for now let us consider just four, gathered in the Armsmen's Mess. A stranger collection of friends might not be found anywhere else aboard the Symphony. They are laughing and drinking together easily, despite the discomforting journey the ship has just emerged Armsmen's Mess is one of the few cheerful places aboard a ship during warp travel, and made more so by the presence of grog and sailor's stories.
Observe the first, our hero, Jak Velasquez, son of Lord-Admiral Oberon Velazquez, the Imperial hero, retired naval officer, Lord-Captain of the Yolenna Symphony and commander of the colony fleet. Physically, the young Velasquez stands out. Taller than most, with thickset arms and an arrogant sweep to his broad shoulders as he sprawls at ease. He is surely nowhere near as comfortable as he appears, given that he sits at the small rounded, plasmetal chairs that mould to the table, designed (like everything else on board the ship), to withstand the rigours of battle rather than to provide comfort.
He has a dark complexion that years of the travelling the void have paled to a burnished brown. His long dark hair curls lazily, like waves on a faraway paradise world, but his beard is close cropped and neatly trimmed; this is a man who has embraced the freedom of leaving the navy without having lost too much of its discipline.
His heavy brow, thickset jaw and broken nose might give the impression of a bruiser, if not offset by his sharp brown eyes, a crooked grin and a high, booming laugh. It is the kind of laugh that invites everyone around to lean closer and join in, and at this point in time is directed at a long and rambling joke his friend is telling about a supposed run-in on some distant battlefield with a member of the Adepta Sororitas.
On the left of Jak is his mentor and senior officer, the ship's Master-at-Arms, Garian Sykarin. An angular man, wrung thin by age and bloody experience, with one mechanical eye shining out from the ragged mess of burn scars that cover the right side of his face. He holds himself in close, hands clasped together at the table, slightly tense, as if always waiting for the next enemy. When he laughs his mouth is dragged into a grim approximation of a smile by those few facial muscles that still work.
To Jak's right is a fellow sergeant-at-arms, a great slab of a man named Borjean: fat and hearty, with moustaches like a walrus. These neatly groomed moustaches, along with the slicked-back care given to his pale white hair denote a vanity that might be appropriate on a much younger man, but certainly not one whose face is split by the red lines of too much heavy drinking, whose belly strains against the buttons of his vest, and whose hands fumble at, and knock over, his mug as he tells his dirty and likely apocryphal story about his run in with the Sisters of Battle. He wears the faded great overcoat of an ex-officer of the Imperial Guard; many of the armsmen aboard the Yolenna Symphony have been Imperial Guardsman once. This helps to reduce fraternising with the common sailors, who they may one day need to gun down if the dreaded threat of mutiny or madness should raise its head.
Finally, across from Jak sits by far the strangest of the group. Jestross, a living blasphemy, a xenos, the kind of creature that only great men or criminals can get away with counting amongst their crew, and even then only with the most exceptional dispensations. His great hunched frame, four multi-jointed upper limbs, trisected jaw and shaggy, matted fur might give the impression of a lumbering, shambolic monster, until you see one arm uncurl like a whip crack to catch Borjean's cup before it hits the ground, and realise that this monster is lightning fast. He laughs along with the others, in a staccato, clacking noise, always a second or two behind as he never truly understands their jokes; he simply appreciates the company. He is rarely allowed to fraternise, being the lowest of the low amongst the crew despite his captain's favour. However, he has proven himself in battle enough times that Jak, Garian and Borjean consider him a friend. After all the strangeness they have seen in the galaxy, the heresy of this friendship does not even cross their minds.
Such were the sort of unlikely compatriots that a man such a Jak Velasquez draws to him. A young man, great in ambition if not yet in renown. This is his story.
"And then she says to me, 'If it was any bigger they'd call you the Eviscerator'!"
Borjean reached the punch line of his story with a great roar, pounding his fist on the table. The others had heard it a hundred times before, but laughed all the same. All across the mess, armsmen were laughing and sitting at ease in their small groups, relaxing now that the ship had left the Warp.
Jak was one of the few on board who took little notice of the disquieting nature of warp travel. He had been born aboard a ship much like the Yolenna Symphony, and had travelled the Immaterium more times than he could count, witnessing all the horrors of Warp travel first hand. Some were scarred by these experiences, but others were made by them. For Jak, they no longer held too much terror. He knew that others, his father included, would put this down to arrogance or ignorance but he did not mind.
Jak's eyes were on a little priestess, a young acolyte of the ship's Confessor, who had been drawn to the warmth and laughter of the armsmen's mess as protection against the fears of the Warp. Despite the rough crowd, and the heresy of a xenos crewmember, she had found comfort for a time here. Now that the ship had translated into real space however, she stood up to leave.
Jak knew and liked the priestess, although her name had escaped him at this precise moment. Despite his highborn family, Jak found it easy to get along with most of the ship's crew, whether it be the cloistered and stern members of the ecclesiasty, the rough and ready voidfarers of the lower decks, the great clannish families of the guns decks, the awkward, Omnissiah-worshipping machine priests of the ship's Enginarium or the genial killers of the armsmens' quarters.
It helped that Jak had never shown any reluctance or hesitation when it came to jumping into battle, ever since his father had demoted him to a lowly armsman. Indeed, he had demonstrated a reckless daring in enough battles to suggest that he was never happiest than when the lasguns were firing and ordnance exploding all around. This made him easy to like; the armsmen respected nothing more than bravery and it demonstrated Jak's willingness to serve the ship beyond just the cursory tasks typically set for the children of an Admiral.
Leaving his friends to their stories, Jak stood and pursued the priestess as she departed. He stopped her just outside the mess, blocking the walkway with his large body.
"Priestess," he grinned. "Where are you going so quickly?" She looked at him, annoyance crossing her face.
"I am going to find my congregation," she answered primly. "My lector will be wanting me for the rituals of return."
"Will you not join us for a drink?"
She shot him an arch look "I don't like the company you keep Mr Velasquez, and I don't feel like drinking with you today."
"You're the only company I want to keep Priestess. If you don't like the mess, we could go back to my bunk."
"I think not." She went to move past him but he darted back, surprisingly nimble, blocking her way again. "I have a duty."
"And I have a destiny," he answered playfully. She raised an eyebrow.
"Oh? Is Destiny the name you've given your pistol?"
Jak couldn't help but laugh. "I'm serious priestess, I'm a very important person on this ship. You might not have heard, but I'm the captain's son."
"Yes, you've only told me about a hundred times. And everyone knows the captain demoted his son to armsman, aboard a ship that has left its owner deeply in debt, and that even if there is any profit from this voyage you are sixth in the line of inheritance, and that the Letter of Marque your father possesses is not hereditary so will not pass onto to any of his family after he dies. So tell me, please, because I'm very curious, what exactly you are destined for Mr Velasquez?"
Some men would have been shocked by the withering appraisal, or angered by it. Jak simply smiled.
"The same thing we all are Priestess. The stars."
She snorted and pushed past him, hurrying away to her duties. Jak thought for a moment about pursuing her, but then he heard the noise from inside the mess, and curiosity drew him back inside.
Borjean, half-drunk despite the supposed rationing of ship's grog, was peering through unfocused eyes at a figure in the corner. It was hooded and in shadow, the shape of a crewman, but indistinct, almost blurred. Borjean blew out a breath of consternation that ruffled his great hanging moustache. His years of finely honed military senses were telling him that something was wrong with this picture. Finally, he realised what it was.
"That man," he declared, standing and pointing one suddenly steady finger, "That man doesn't have a drink!"
The declaration made every head turn. It was true, the shadowed figure had no drink in front of him, and no companions near him. Borjean was already reaching for his pistol, but Garian was the faster man to the trigger. Both stepped forward to accost the stranger in their midst, pistols raised.
The hooded shadow did not respond as any man would. Instead it seemed to ripple and lengthen, flattening out against the walls and floor. Its midsection exploded into a great, dark hole that seemed to open up the mess into very depths of the void itself. From the darkness, a dozen writing tentacles or tongues burst forth, purple, barbed and slavering.
Both pistols fired but only one shot each before they were struck from Garian and Borjean's' hands by the whip-like tentacle/tongues of the creature.
"Flotsam!" yelled the officer of the mess from behind the bar, as he hit his vox broadcaster. "Flotsam in the armsmens' mess!"
A hundred hands reached for weapons, but Jestross was the first to reach the creature. He launched himself across a long table, ducking beneath Garian's arm and came up holding long knives in each of his four clawed hands. Ichor spraying as he sliced through one tentacle off and fended the razor-bladed swipe of another.
Jak was not far behind, drawing his shock-rapier as he sprinted across the mess to do battle with the horror. He leapt instinctively atop a table as the shadow creature grew in length. The darkness slid across the floor and walls, not truly part of this world but certainly able to carve a path of destruction through it. Borjean, Garian and Jestross joined him atop the table, fending off the barbed tentacles with their swords. The xenos' arms were a blur, knives slicing and parrying desperately at the whipping tentacles. For every one that was chopped, more seemed to grow from the horror's mouth.
The size of the creature seemed to stabilise, taking up a whole corner of the mess. The shadow was taking the form of a great mouth. One armsmen, a little drunker or less prepared for the unknown, was too slow on the uptake; the shadow slid beneath him and a tentacle wrapped around his ankle, dragging him into the unholy maw.
The armsman screamed and both Jak and Borjean reached down to grab him. Jak held his arm, while Borjean grabbed him beneath the shoulders, straining until his face was red to try to pull him free of the creature's grip. Jestross fended off the creature's tentacles as Borjean and Jak pulled desperately.
Only sergeants were allowed to carry guns in the mess, and those few present were firing their small arms directly into the shadow's great maw. Unlike its tongues (or tentacles, or legs, or whatever they were) the shadow seemed to absorb all fire. Still, an unearthly wailing could be heard from deep within it.
"It feels pain!" Cried Garian. "Double fire. Grenades, Krim!"
The mess officer quickly went to his shelves, looking through bottles of exotic liquor and off-world snacks before identifying the small box named 'Boom Treats' and hurriedly opening it up.
Jak was fast losing grip on the armsman; all of the shadow creature's energies now seemed intent on dragging him in, more tentacles wrapping around his legs and waist.
"Don't let go of me," the young man begged, as a surge of the creature's strength nearly jerked him free and Borjean grunted with the strain of holding on.
"We won't," Jak promised but he could already sense his strength waning. Whatever this monstrous force was, that had travelled with them from the Immaterium, it was draining his energy and his will. Borjean looked to Garian and shook his head, as the armsman slipped a little further out of their grip.
The mess officer threw a bandolier, slung with high-energy thermal grenades, to Garian. At the same time, the horror gave a great shriek, trying to close its barely-real shadow-mandibles around its prey. Jak felt his grip slacken, greasy with sweat, the young armsman's hand slipping through his. His lower body was starting to disappear into the shadow, drawn into the foul dimension that the shadow-creature was acting as a conduit for.
"Please," the armsman pleaded, his legs disappearing into the horror's mouth up to the knees. Garian knelt down, quickly looping the bandolier over the armsman's head and shoulder, and swiftly set all twenty grenades to a three second charge.
"Die well, sailor", Garian said quietly, as both Jak and Borjean let go at the same time. The creature's nails-on-the-chalkboard-of-the-soul shriek of triumph mixed with the plaintive wail of its victim as its shadow-jaws clamped shut. The fire from the assembled armsmen paused. The entire room seemed to hold it's breath as the strange and ancient evil digested its meal of innocent human and a thousand tons of explosives.
They heard the grenades go off, but as Garian had calculated from the absorption of the small arms fire, the blast did not extend through to the ship. Whatever the creature was, it was not truly of this world, but existed as a shadow of the hellish dimension that all ships must pass through to travel long interstellar voyages. Its gullet had swallowed the grenades back to this dimension to destroy the creature's true form.
There were always the chances of a few stowaways when a ship passed through the Warp, creatures of destruction and madness. A good crew was always prepared to fight for their lives, even in the mess.
With a rending scream the shadow folded in on itself, disappearing with a wet sucking noise, its tentacles falling to the scorched floor and twitching uselessly. Slowly, everyone exhaled.
Garian, the senior officer, was the first to interrupt the silence. "Right. Borjean, you old drunk, secure the site and call up the exorcists. Jak, you and I have got a meeting of the ward room to attend." He raised his voice to address the still quiet room. "The rest of you, play time is over! We're out of hell and back to work. Get to your watches or get to sleep, we don't rest until Starveling."
