+++ System: Seers Eye / Aboard the Quest's End +++
"Fighting aboard a void ship is a lot like fighting in an underhive: dark, messy, and a misplaced shot can hit a bloody plasma line and cook your whole squad."
Sergeant Martin "Crag Jaw" Dusk of the 3rd Hive Rats Regiment, M39
"2 minutes till the station," said a voidsman over the tram's intercom. Salvarius Ilsk gripped the handrails of the personnel tram as it careened around a corner, the driver pushing the machine well beyond its limits. Glow globes from the tunnel lit the interior of the vehicle sporadically, casting dark shadows on the hundred odd armsmen crouching in the tram's three cars. Salvarius and Le Monte were in the middle tram, listening over short range vox as a radio team relayed messages the bridge sent via capsule.
"We've lost lost contact with the armsmen holding the tram station, so expect a welcoming committee," called out a scraggly vox-officer. Grunts of unease sounded down the tram as men passed the news between cars.
"What's your procedure for this?" asked Salvarius as he armed himself with both his chainsword and bolt pistol. Le Monte pointed at the turret mounted on the front car.
"Fill the air with flechettes and storm the station," he said, referring to the personal and heavy scattergun his men and the tram possessed respectively. "Can't make it more complicated than that without something going awry."
"30 seconds!" sounded the pilot. Salvarius looked out the tram window as they were thrust into darkness: all the lights were out, save for piddly emergency strobes and the headlights of the tram itself. The vehicle suddenly lurched as its automatic brakes tried to engage before its on board batteries kicked in.
"We're close to the boarding pod," Salvarius murmured. He looked down the length of the tram car and saw the armsmen were making signs of the Aquila and rubbing personal mementos for good luck. He briefly considered giving a rallying speech but realized the armsmen knew well what was at stake. Quest's End was crewed by families that had lived on her for centuries or even millennia, and everyone with him knew that to fall here would put their kin at the mercy of the barbarous fiends that now prowled the corridors of their ancestral home. A violet-tinged explosion rocked the tram as it shot around the final corner, and the turret on the front car lit up. Sheets of razor shrapnel went downrange, and the gun's muzzle flashes lit up the tunnel. Salvarius leaned against the armored cabin wall as the tram's windows shattered under a barrage of fire. The air over the ducking armsmen was filled with the pulsing whine of alien shard carbines and the vicious crystals of obscene toxins they fired. The Inquisitor's eyes narrowed as a sphere shot into the cabin and began letting out an opaquely white gas. Salvarius darted forward and kicked the grenade out a window, holding his breath as the residual gas was swept away by the air that now roared through the car. The tram's brakes engaged in a screech, and the armsmen flicked on their head mounted stab-lights.
Assorted battle cries went out and the armsmen rushed out the trams with scatterguns blazing, Salvarius at their head. Salvarius rapidly took in his surroundings: the bloody metal floor was littered with human and Drukhari bodies, and at least twenty of the xenos were firing from behind cargo crates that littered the loading platform. Barely fifty feet separated the armsmen from the xenos.
"Suffer not the alien to live!" cried the Inquisitor. He recited the psalm of Supreme Arrogance as he charged for the heart of the xenos, hoping to grab their attention. The Drukhari opened fire on him, hoping to shatter the assault force's momentum, but his rosarius converted the streams of crystalized toxin they shot at him into staccato bursts of golden light. What did get through dug harmlessly into the plates of his carapace armor. The men around him were not so blessed, and Salvarius saw a score of them collapse screaming in the first five seconds of the attack, toxic shards puncturing their scant armor and delivering nerve-scorch toxins directly into their bloodstream. The Drukhari faired better, performing what Salvarius saw as a perfectly executed fighting retreat through the main blast door that led away from the tram station. Though the aliens weaved between cover like razor-edged minnows in a pond, they could not avoid the volume of fire that the ship's defender's put out. The Drukhari seemed to shiver in ecstasy when they were hit, a realization that filled Salvarius with disgust, but they went down all the same as they were shot full of metallic darts or blown clean through by bolts from Salvarius' pistol. A particularly daring and scantily clad xenos broke from cover and in a tenth of a second was just a pace from Salvarius.
Her hand flicked a weird, semi-organic whip at his left leg; he attempted to dodge, but the whip reached for him like a living thing and wrapped his leg in a barbed embrace, tearing away cloth to reveal the metal of his bionic limb. Salvarius was numb to the bio-pulses he knew the device, which he recognized as an agoniser, was putting out, and wrenched his prosthetic leg backwards. This threw the surprised Whych off her balance, and Salvarius swung his chainsword at her midriff. The xeno let go of the agoniser and backflipped away, a spur on her heel catching his sword hand and sending his weapon flying. That display of acrobatic ability cost the Whych her life, as Salvarius shot her twice in the gut as she spun in the air. The bolt detonations sent her bloody viscera flying after her dark kin. Salvarius caught his spinning chainsword and ran after the few Drukari still visible down the corridor, the armsmen who had seen the exchange sticking close to the Inquisitor like predators gathering around their pack leader.
"You men stay with the wounded," ordered Le Monte to a hand-full of men as Salvarius and the remaining seventy armsmen charged down the hall. They had already lost twenty-four men to the horrific xenos weapons, and Le Monte knew that they had gotten off lightly. He hoped the other assault teams were faring as well.
IIIIIIIIIIIII
Salvarius' party was moving in force down a main passage way, following the readings of a dingy auspex that homed in on the energy signature of the enemy assault craft, when they heard a strange sound. Salvarius ducked behind a sturdy looking freight sentinel and the rest of his men followed suit. The Inquisitor waved over the auspex handler.
"Can you pick up bio-signatures with that?" he asked, nodding at the auspex. The bald-headed operator was about to shake his head when he squinted his eyes in thought and made adjusted a few dials on the device. He spoke a prayer of function to appease the device as its screen began to pop with static, and it resolved as a dark green display with colored blotches on it.
"The maintenance crews use this setting to detect electronics and pipes behind walls- the auspex's machine spirit will see anything puttin' off warmth. I never thought of it before, but I guess it'd work to find people to." Salvarius gave him a solid pat on the back.
"Good thinking armsman. Your making the emperor proud this day." He stepped back as the auspex handler gave a sweep of the surrounding walls. The man froze as his auspex reached the 11 O'clock position.
"I got something. Five, maybe six warm bodies, but they aint movin'.
"Breacher team, move in," commanded Salvarius. Five men moved up, and the rest followed in staggered waves, taking cover and aiming stablights and scatter guns down the corridors and chambers they passed. They hadn't run into any hostiles for ten minutes, and the Imperials were on edge. Le Monte took the door with the breacher team, and one of his men smacked the opening rune and peaked the doorway with a pocket mirror. Salvarius saw the armsman scrunch his eyebrows before his eyes went wide and his skin became pale as bone. That's when the smell hit Salvarius: the stinging smell of blood, like something from a corps starch refinery.
"A-a-all clear," breathed the armsman with the mirror, and the breacher team moved in. Salvarius followed, and almost ran into Le Monte's backside. He pushed one of the armsmen out of the way and his hard eyes saw the bodies. There were five of them, human beings so horribly disfigured they could not be called alive, save for the fact that they still writhed. They were all pinned wickedly with barbs and chains to the floor and walls, their blood-caked lips screaming silently as their exposed insides pulsed. One of the armsman's guns clattered to the ground as he stumbled towards one of them.
"Jr? Stubbs my boy, is that you?" the armsman mumbled in shock. He shakily moved to pull on one of the barbs holding a vivisected body in place. Salvarius tried to stop him, a dark epiphany striking like a bolt of lightning.
"Stop!" A flash, the feeling of being slammed backwards as an intense heat scalded his body. Salvarius entertained the feeling that he was flying in the air, his senses scattered like ash in the wind.
IIIIIIIIIIIII
Salvarius opened his eyes and for a moment thought he had been buried alive. He was suffocating; everything was black. He flailed his arms against the great mass on top of him, and terror's talons gripped Salvarius' heart. After struggling for what felt like minutes, he managed to wriggle out from under the mass of metal and cloth on top of him. It was pitch black; not even the emergency lights were on. Salvarius gripped his forehead and vomited onto the steel decking as a wave of nausea overcame him. He clicked open an armored container at his waist and pulled out a stim patch which he slapped onto his wrist. His head cleared rapidly, and he fumbled on the ground for a light source. The Inquisitor found the hilt of his bolt pistol, clasping it and thumbing the under-barrel flash light. The first thing he saw was the shape that had almost crushed him: It was Le Monte, or his body at any rate. His armored void suit's frontal plate was caved in and blackened, and his helmet's armaplas visor had melted onto his skull. Salvarius swung his pistol behind him and saw that the doorway to the room he had been in was a slagged ruin. A blackened char was all that remained inside.
"Emperor damn me for my incompetence. I should have known that charnel house was booby trapped," he whispered solemly. He looked back at the blackened body of the man who had taken the brunt of the explosion for him and made the sign of the Aquilla. "Thank you, Le Monte. Emperor keep you." It was then that Salvarius realized he was perfectly alone. He cast his light down the corridor he was standing in and saw splatters of gore and blood all over the walls and floor but scant few bodies. Those that lied in sight were an even distribution of alien and human. The Inquisitor supposed the xenos had attacked and overcome the armsmen when the explosive went off and carted off the tortured survivors to Emperor knows where.
He stayed deathly silent and looked around for his chainsword. Salvarius found it in pieces, its mechanisms and toothed belt spilt over the floor like an animal's intestines. He saw a disturbingly barbed, serpentine blade buried in a dead man's chest. He pulled it free, gave it a couple experimental swings: it was perfectly balanced, and Salvarius had no doubt it was sharper than a churgeon's scalpel. He took a few more minutes to find a satchel of demolition charges an armsman had been carrying and hefted it onto his aching shoulders. The Inquisitor's whole body throbbed with pain, and one of his ribs felt like it was broken, but he endured it. Salvarius had one more duty to perform, and a small shipquake shook the decking as if to drive home the point.
The Inquisitor would blow that damn boarding ship off the Quest's End if it was the last thing he did.
