Chapter 6

"Out! Out! The sacred rituals of the Omnissiah must not be revealed to the uninitiated!" The techpriest ushered us away from the explosives, using all of his organic and mechanical arms to expedite a process I was all too happy to comply with.

"I got it, I got it, no need to get your I/O cables in a twist," the colonel snapped, as he was prodded in the back with a plasma torch. "Alright, Percy, Commissar, and the rest of you, where's that traitor? When I get a hold of him I am going to kill him. Then I'm going to murder him. The little bastard has nearly killed me twice today."

"Calm down, Colonel, we need him alive for questioning," I grinned, as anger seethed off of him. "And I'm afraid we still don't know. There are only so many places on this ship he could have hidden, and we're still searching."

"This was pretty much the last place to hide, and it was going to go off in pretty short order after we arrived. Don't suppose he'd try to take an escape pod off of here?"

I shook his head, going over the security protocol that the provosts had laid down during the chaos. "Possible. We're in range of the planet, after all, and most of the non-essential crew is pooled around the pods incase we need to abandon ship. The provosts are checking on them now, incase he tries to slip in."

"In range? Wait… are the hanger bays…?"

"All were secured. One was depressurized, though, but unless he had a pressure suit, he wouldn't be getting very far. Unless he had a suit…" As I said this, it struck me that, given everything else he had been able to pull off, a pressure suit might not have been the hardest thing to acquire. The colonel seemed to think this as well; we glanced at each other and yelled.

"BUGGER!"

As much as I would have liked to make hunting down a dangerous saboteur someone else's problem, it would have been problematic for my reputation if a Commissar of my status did not take action to apprehend the man. So, I found myself leading the colonel, the guardsman he had been strangling, and a loose collection of officers that had been with me in the briefing room accompanied me back out of the cargo bay and to the hangers

Now, by this point in my career, you would think that running though fire and smoke filled halls, with sirens blazing, in a ship that could collapse at any second, chasing after dangerous traitors with the protection of the Emperor as my only guide would be second nature to me by now, but I guess one never really gets used to that sort of thing no matter how many times it happens.

We arrived at the bays just in time to feel the signature trembling that occurred when a starfighter was launched. The provosts guarding the hanger bays stood about uselessly as the saboteur made his escape so it was up to us to take command of the situation.

"What's going on here?" I snapped. "Don't stand there, activate defenses! Shoot him down! Launch a fighter, do something!"

"We can't fly, and most of the weapons batteries are offline!" He replied.

"We can fly."

All eyes turned to the colonel and his hygienically challenged guardsman.

"But sir," the guardsman objected, "We've only flown shuttles!"

"Baldrick, Imperial tech is Imperial tech*. Now get me access to a damn fighter!"

Two Lightening fighters silently roared out of their hanger bay in pursuit of the saboteur, who had chosen a Lightening for himself as well. Though the Lightening was not a starfighter, it could be piloted by one man unlike the Fury Interceptor which required a crew of three – pilot, navigator, and gunner. On the up side, this meant that his craft was not more powerful. On the down side, he would be able to pilot and operate weapons instead of being forced to choose between one or the other.

"Evasive maneuvers!" Edmund shouted, as the enemy swung around and opened fire. "Balrick, cut him off! Keep him in range of the ship's weapons!"

"Understood, my lord," Baldrick replied banking right to avoid the burst of lasfire. He quickly brought the enemy fighter into his sighs and fired the autocannon, only to have the rounds miss by several dozen feet.

The enemy made a sharp dive and dropped in place behind Edmund's craft.

"I hate to be a pessimist, my lord, but it does seem that he knows what he is doing while we do not," Balrick commented, trying to bring the target back in his sights.

"Shup up and help me out!" Edmund screamed as a lasfire streaked past his cockpit. "Open fire!"

A volley of laser beams issued forth from Baldrick's fighter, several of which scored direct hits on Edmund.

"BALDRICK! IF YOU KILL ME I SWEAR I'LL MURDER YOU!" Edmund yelled as he pulled up. The next thing he knew, he was headed straight for….

"What in the thousand trickeries of Tzeentch is that?" Edmund stared, forgetting for a moment that he was in a dogfight. "Is that… a box?

A giant wooden box with a clock on one face went hurling past him. A box.

"No time for that, Edmund, pull yourself together and shoot the bastard down."

He quickly looped back to see that the enemy was now harassing Baldrick. Edmund angled the nose of his fighter down and lined the enemy craft up with his targeting reticule. The lasfire raked the top of the fighter, but a sudden brake by the target caused Edmund to overshoot. The enemy was now tailing him again.

"Do a barrel roll!" Baldrick warned, saving Edmund from a fiery death as the enemy pummeled him with lasbolts.

"This is getting EXTREMELY repetitive," Edmund yelled, as he kept dodging. "Someone do something!"

As if on cue, one of the ship's weapons batteries swerved in their direction and a graviton pulsar fired, cutting the enemy in half.

"Hope I didn't cut it too close," the commissar's voice came in over the radio. "It was frak getting the power back, but I think it worked out in the end. By the way, did anyone notice that box?"

*Most definitely not true. The one time I was forced to escape a hoard of angry Khorne Berserkers using an abandoned Land Speeder can best be described as a disaster. Fortunately, several White Scars noticed the rampaging Land Speeder and showed up to assist me in time.