\\ INITIALIZING
"Skak."
Wincing slightly, I cracked open my left eye, blinking against the candlelight to try and focus on... Sergeant Umma…? "What?"
"You look like you took a stroll through the warp without a ship," the large man said without preamble.
"And you look like an ork that got hit with an ugly stick a few extra times, so, y'know," I gave a little shrug, a little strained grin on my face, "You look how you did before all this mess started, which I guess is a good thing."
There was a giggle from somewhere off beside the guardsman even as Umma beamed at me, "Well you can't be feeling too bad if you're cracking jokes like that cog-head."
"Au contraire," I countered quietly, letting my eye close and sinking back onto the metal bench, carefully holding the bag of coolant to my forehead with my scribe-tines, "I feel even worse than I look."
"That's impressive," a feminine voice said from the same general area as Umma, getting closer, "You look pretty bad."
"Not actually that bad off," I admittedly quietly, trying to place the voice. I know I'd heard it just recently, "Just feel like skak."
"How'd it happen?" Umma asked, "I thought you were in the damn Knight the whole time."
Condensation ran down my head from the coolant pack, "Sorcerer skipped the armor, tried to blow my head off from the inside."
The feminine voice let out a strangled little noise, and after a moment of silence the sergeant muttered, "… well skak. How do you still have a head?"
"My eye and eardrums popped, venting the pressure." I gestured at my head limply with my bandaged hand. The magos genetor had cleaned me up, cleaning the blood from my ears and eye, and had delicately if disconcertingly removed what was left of my right eye after applying local anesthetic, that didn't do much for the burst blood vessels beneath my skin or such, "So, please… don't get too loud?"
"Skak, at least you blew the bastard up."
A smile quite determinedly found itself on my face, not that I disagreed with its presence too much, "Yes, yes I did."
There was some more shifting around me, sounding like they were sitting down.
I was in a holding cell, laid flat out on my back across one of the metal benches. Okay, it wasn't a holding cell, it looked to be a room for holding servitors that were going haywire, with benches for laying them down on to work on. So it wasn't really a holding cell, but it was a holding cell.
My robes had been removed so they could check me over, though they'd left me my shirt, boots, and pants, I'd rolled up my shirt to use as a pillow rather than just laying on the slab.
The room usually was pretty dark, only lit by the door, but they'd set up a few candles in here as well. The general sense I got was a mix of irritation for the disruption, respect at what I'd done, and a resigned diligence at the investigation. I hadn't been treated badly, but not exactly gently either, little more than a check-up and cleaning to make sure there was no obvious signs of chaos contamination or life-threatening damage.
A soft finger pokes my head lightly and I wince, the finger immediately pulling away, "Sorry! Sorry…" Cracking open an… my eye, I look up into the candlelight to find the felinid from the squad standing over me, hand still up from being withdrawn quickly, "Sorry, just… I didn't realize they shaved your head in the mechanicus…"
"They don't, usually. But they shaved mine to give me my implants," I gestured with my bandaged right hand again, this time at the base of my skull where there were a few disparate plates of metal instead of skin, as well as the Mind Interface Unit jack, "I've just kept it up since I'm going to get a few more in time."
My hand dropped back to my chest, and I could hear the felinid– Oconnel! That's what her name was! I could hear Oconnel take a seat on the bench beside me. Another poke, this time at my side, though I only knew because I could feel the slight push against the exposed metal that encompassed where my floating ribs had been as well as a small portion of my sides, "I thought tech-priests were supposed to be mostly machine…?"
"By the Throne Oconnel, will you stop poking the cog head?"
The felinid actually growled at the sergeant, but I waved it off, "S'alright, not bothered. And I'm pretty low rank, still don't have that much stuff yet."
A new voice spoke up, one with a surprisingly thick accept, one roughly comparable to Russian, "You are ov low rank?"
Tilting my head carefully, it almost felt like my brain was sloshing around in there as I did, I looked at the owner of the voice, now actually seeing that most of the squad were in the holding room with me. The only exception being the ogryn and the sharpshooter that had ran. Most had taken seats on the other benches, with only Oconnel sitting on the bench I was laid out on, and sergeant Umma was leaning against the wall next to the door.
"Yeah…? Why do you think I was polishing Ordnatus?" That wasn't an exaggeration really, my master had set me to the task of routine maintenance on the Knight, something considered too precious by the Adeptus Mechanicus to put servitors or menials to. Not that I could blame them, even without the religious nature of the thing, it was something that required at least moderately skilled labor to be done safely.
Now, I wasn't exactly privy to the tech involved, but I was a reasonably smart cookie, and my master knew that, it was why he'd volunteered me for the job in the first place.
He'd volunteered me for the fifth time in a row because I was a snarky little shit, but it was in good fun.
"You just seemed to know vat you were doing," the guardsman shrugged, a dark skinned man with a reedy voice, not much larger than my own small stature.
"That was luck," I admitted freely as Oconnel continued to curiously poke and prod at the junction of my flesh and the metal. The felinid's skin was a gray-ish color, and the light dusting of fur was a dark blue-gray, instead of human ears, she had the classic cat-girl ears, if in place of human ears rather than atop her head.
After just a moment though, I sighed, biting the bullet and asking, "So… okay, level with me. Why are you guys in here? It can't be to keep an eye on me, I'm about as threatening as a grumpy, wet kitten right now."
A wide range of emotions swept across the squad, discomfort, anger, fear, Occonel making a sour face even as Umma shrugged basically nonchalantly, "We fought chaos forces head on, they want to inspect us for corruption, and purity of faith."
"That's…"I had to pause to process that through the ache in my head, that and to find the right word to describe that bullshit, "Harsh."
"Isn't that what's happening to you?"
"I stole a religious relic that I had no right to pilot and then got into combat with those same chaos forces, coming under direct fire from a chaos sorcerer. Y'all just shot at them a bit. It's a slightly different scale." I started to shift onto my side to talk to them a bit more comfortably, but the movement sent pain rumbling through my skull and I rather hastily aborted the action with a little cringe. Regardless, I had to admit, "It feels more than a bit unfair to you guys really."
Umma gave me a funny, contemplating look at that, eyes narrowed briefly, but Oconnel just smiled, almost serenely, "We've committed no heresy, they'll see that easily. They just need to be sure."
I glance at her, before sharing a glance with Umma. Even if things went well, that was a bit optimistic.
"So we're stuck here until they decide to get on with this stupid investigation," Umma said, the large man's shoulders shrugging slightly.
"Welcome to Iacroaria," one of the guardsmen noted dryly, "Thanks for stopping the great enemy, here's your t-shirt and your cell."
"But wait," I couldn't help but interject in a dramatic voice, "If you act now we'll even throw in a special accusation of heresy and a side order of death for the low, low price of your dignity and name!"
There were more than a few snickers from the squad at that, and the young vox-specialist, Rook I think Umma had called him, just let his head fall into his hands, groaning, "Nooo… there's two of them now…"
"Hey, Oscar," Umma spoke up, "Did you manage to bring in your dice?"
"Yeah, lemme get them out, what are we playin' with? We don't have any ration bars or stuff."
With a little grunt, I shifted in place, "I can keep track of straight points if you want. You'll just have to explain the game to me and tell me when things change hands and such."
"How?"
Raising an eyebrow at the speaker in askance, I deliberately uncoiled my scribe-tine, it was a mass of six tentacle-style, small mechadendrites attached to where my elbow used to be. One of the dendrites ended in an uncoiling scroll, another in a reservoir-fed 'auto-quill', another in a small knife, and the remaining three in small manipulator claws, one with a basic connection port. I tended to keep the scroll where my forearm would be as a brace, then wrapped the rest of the dendrites around it in a strange parody of a forearm before twining the remaining five dendrites into a rough hand-like shape.
There were a few blinks, "… oh. Yeah, that'd work."
[center]-oOo-[/center]
"Wait," I held up my bandaged hand to pause the ongoing game, "You all came from different planets?"
While one of my manipulator dendrites had stayed coiled up atop the pack of coolant I was using as an icepack, keeping it in place atop my head, the other five were working on keeping score of the ongoing dice game the squad was playing.
The squad shared a glance, most of them gathered in a rough circle in the center of the holding cell, sitting or hunched over the dice game they'd been playing. Belle still sat on the edge of the slab I lay on, and Felix sat off in the corner in penitence, but overall it'd turned into a dice-game to pass the time. More than a few grins appearing even as the dark-skinned Felix notes, "Yes, d'at is correct. Our regiment is quite the… how you say… hodgepodge?"
"Cogheads would probably call it a scrapheap."
"Bella came from Carlos McConnel like most felinids," Rook noted, the young vox specialist looking almost native american with his complexion and dark hair. He continued to tick off, "Lug is from some hive or another, no one's really sure since Lug can't remember and the guard usually doesn't keep track of individual ogryn that much. Felix is from some holy world–"
"Rasputin's Tomb." Felix interjected, his pseudo-russian accent noticeably thick, "It was site of great battle, the forces of the church taking many with them, it deserves its name."
"Yeah yeah," Umma waved it off, the small mountain of a man just rolling his eyes, "You keep telling us. We get it."
"It's not even all that special," Bella said, brushing her short hair back, "I mean, Novianna's from Prudence."
I actually half choked at that, and if my brains hadn't been sloshing about in my skull I'd have looked at the young woman rapidly, "Say what?"
Prudence was the 'local' paradise world. If Iacroaria was the 'local' forgeworld of the sector, Prudence was the thing whispered about in hopeful terms, it was where governors and nobles and navigator houses went to retire. Coming from there was a big deal, because even the slaves on that world would likely have lifestyles miles ahead of that of being a guardsman. It was a world whispered of with dreamlike relevance by the menials, serving on that world was treated with the same wistful impossibility of winning the lotto had been in my old home.
The aforementioned woman, who if I remembered correctly had been carrying a heavy las weapon, daintily waved off my befuddled look. She was barely my height, but she was built like a fucking tank, even with her uniform buttoned up crisply, her muscles had obviously strained within the fabric. The diamond piercing in her nose glittering in the holding-cell's candlelight as she said, "I didn't want to be just given an officers position because of my rank. I joined the guard to make a difference, not flout my families name."
"Still hasn't told us what it is. I've got a dozen Thrones on her having been a favored slave."
"I've got twenty on her being some daughter of the sector governor!" Bella, or Isabella Oconnel to be precise, beamed, getting an eyeroll from the topic of discussion.
Rook grinned even as Oscar snatched the dice out of his hand, "You want in?"
"Not really," I admitted sadly, still grinning in slight disbelief, my throbbing headache was still there, but this was worth the attention, "I don't have the money to wager on stuff like that, and I don't know her well enough to bet anyways."
"Thank you for not betting on my family life," Novianna said with a smile, a glitter of amusement in her green eyes, "I get quite enough of that from this bunch."
"Spoilsports," Oscar muttered, the tall, lanky man shaking his dice over the little circle most of the squad had made in the center of the room.
"Anyways, the sergeant comes from some primitive, backwater death world, he used to be a chieftan there before the guard picked him up."
"We seriously think that if they'd found him earlier, he'd have been made into a Space Marine."
Umma rolled his eyes even as I raised my eyebrows, 'cause that was a pretty impressive claim.
But Rook apparently had a good idea what I was thinking and continued, "No, seriously, my uncle says that if they'd found him and his world early enough for the geneseed, they'd have jumped all over him."
I blinked my eye a few times before looking at him curiously, "Your uncle?"
"Yeah! Well, great-uncle, he's a space marine." Rook beamed, his young face practically bursting with pride, "It's actually super cool."
"Can we get back to the skakking game?" Oscar grumbled.
"Right, right, roll already."
[center]-oOo-[/center]
"Do you have any idea why the great enemy was here?" Bella asked, fiddling with my spare manipulator dendrite as the others continued their game.
"Honestly no clue…" I said, chewing my lip and trying to ignore the ache in my head. The coolant pack was starting to warm up unfortunately, "Something like that, a rift big enough for a warhound to come through, that would've taken some serious set up, that's not something you can do on the fly without some enormous number of sacrifices, which we didn't see, or some powerful warp artifact which, again, we didn't see. Something powerful enough for that would've been obvious, we'd either be going crazy or mutated or something else weird… that's… actually not good."
Rook looked up from the game, "Why?"
"It means there was a chaos cult on the planet for a significant amount of time that only recently made a major move, or something like that." I frowned, trying to order my thoughts, knowing that sounded stupid, "Like, they had some serious local and political power, enough to secretly set up the Redwood to be an entrance or rift or whatever without me taking any sort of notice, and I was there basically every other day. And this ignores the whole part where the Redwood is a point of worship and pilgrimage and study for quite a few genetors."
"And none of the skakkers picked up on it," Umma noted, picking up on my scrambled brainwave.
"Or they were all heretics," Felix said sourly.
"That'd assume that even people like myself were heretics. Either that, or what they did was so subtle that we couldn't pick it out…" I trailed off, stifling my loose lips. I didn't think that was likely either really given all the study it was put through, someone would've picked up on any mutations or unauthorized efforts with the Redwood… but it didn't make sense really, that warhound had spouted the classic Khornate litany, but there were sorcerers, and that was very much a Tzeenchian style plot coming to fruition… something wasn't adding up, at least not in a way I liked.
I didn't voice it though, because I'd realized I'd already voiced more information than a lexmechanic should've known.
But Novianna's green eyes bore into me, "You think someone higher up ordered it."
A brief cringe flitted across my face, "Yeah… that's my suspicion."
There was a moment of dead silence from the squad at that before Umma said, "That's skakked up."
"I would happen to agree sergeant," everyone in the room jumped at the new voice, after hours of being in here by ourselves, the door had opened silently to the darkness of the forge in which stood a woman, "It is, as you put it, 'skakked up'."
Umma grunted, "And who are you?"
I made a motion with my hand at Bella, getting her attention and then help sitting up in spite of the ache in my head.
The woman strode into the room confidently, she had on a set of opened mechanicus robes, and beneath was a double-breasted red suit with gold buttons. She was tall, able to look Umma in the eye comfortably, the sergeant and newcomer both tall, tan, blond haired and blue eyed, but whereas Umma had rugged features and a suspicious scowl, the woman somehow remained feminine, possessing an almost Mona-Lisa like not-smile on her face.
"Sergeant Umma, it's good to see you're doing quite well," she noted unhurriedly, "Losing someone of your caliber and results would be quite a loss to the Imperium."
I had a very distinct feeling, my eye searching her form for a moment before I found a glimmer of what I was looking for.
"Yeah, that's nice, but that doesn't explain who you are."
With Bella supporting me, I gave a little bow, closing my eye as I murmured, "Lady Inquisitor."
The silence that fell over the squad was deafening, and I could feel Bella go ramrod straight beside me, her skin going cold and clammy underneath my arm.
"… well skak."
A.N. - simply Eric, you might've seen this story on sites like Spacebattles under my name, but if it's somewhere else not under my name, please tell me. I don't know if this is similar to another story or not, I haven't done the deep dives to check. If it is, I'd also like to know because it'd be neat to read those.
