Skyla Serermal was holding the baby to her chest when it started crying again. Babies were crying here all the time; now it was simply one that she was holding in her arms.
"She's cold," Skyla noted, rubbing the baby's cool hand with her not-at-all-warm fingers.
"Probably hungry too," Skyla thought, slightly pressing the baby's face against her bare chest.
Both the baby and the woman who was holding it were naked, Skyla used to have some rags that she looted, but now, when she held an infant in her arms, she didn't want to draw attention to herself; she had no way to run away or fight for her belongings.
Their ship had been struggling with technical problems for as long as Skyla could remember, and if she were to believe her grandmother's stories, things weren't ever any better. The Machine Spirits have been very angry for years. After the recent battles between the Dark Eldars and the black-clad Legionnaires, things only got worse, and the life support systems worked only by the grace of the Dark Gods. The temperature on the ship was not only below any healthy value but seemed to keep dropping, which was increasingly becoming a deadly threat for the people who weren't wearing many clothes to begin with. As a result, the inhabitants of the ship gathered here were constantly fighting for scraps of clothes. In the past few weeks, Skyla Serermal has already killed for panties, she also killed for an old torn t-shirt.
Preying on the weak came naturally to her; her ancestors came from Nostramo, after all.
When Konrad Curze ordered the bombardment of the planet's surface, some of the Night Lords panicked and tried to take at least some of the wealth from the doomed world.
Their own, or not necessarily...
Legionnaires who were recruited from local gangs often maintained contact with their mortal families on the planet, and when they sometimes came to collect tribute they were welcomed as nobility.
Which of course they were.
The legend of the Serermal family's origins said that when one such legionnaire packed valuables into the Thunderhawk, he also took a woman with him. The legend was unclear who this woman was to this legionnaire. Mortal sister? Mother? Another relative? Girlfriend? Or maybe the whore he just fucked?
Skyla personally, like her mother and grandmother, preferred to think that their progenitor fucked her way off the planet. Skyla also wanted to believe that she was a descendant not only of this assertive woman but also of the Night Lord himself.
How many generations separated Skyla from her legendary ancestor? The woman couldn't know that. Skyla met her own grandmother, and she said that she also once knew her own grandmother, who also knew her own grandmother, and none of these women were the ancestors from the legend.
"It must have been at least two or three hundred years ago, almost ten generations!" Skyla explained to herself.
"Or less if one of the crones lied," she added.
"Or longer, as some people said, hundreds or thousands of years." Skyla mentally rolled her eyes at this nonsense.
Regardless of which generation of Nostramen' descendants Skyla was actually a member of, the woman still retained the genetic legacy of the inhabitants of the destroyed planet: she was pale, albino-like, thin, and gaunt. She had no irises, and the visible part of her eyes consisted entirely of their pupils. Her family has managed to preserve not only the outward appearance but also the culture of the people who once lived on the destroyed planet, which was characterized by callousness, dark humor, and distrust.
Skyla was about thirty years old, maybe a little younger, and had spent her entire life on one ship, but even when she was a kid, the Nostramen like her were a minority on the decks where she lived.
These 'other' people, with different skin, hair, and eye colors, constituted the vast majority. They all served the Night Lords masters, of course, but they belonged to a slightly different culture. They also spoke a different language, a variant of Imperial Low Gothic.
And the things they said were just ridiculous!
For example, the 'others' were saying that thousands of years had passed since the destruction of Nostramo!
"More than ten thousand years, they say! madness! madness!"
Skyla didn't believe it, and neither did her mother.
"Lies, they lie; they make fun of us because we look different; we look sick to them; we are the minority and they are the majority, so they mock us because they can." Skyla rationalized to herself, just as her mother had taught her.
But her own grandmother, towards the end of her life, started to believe in this nonsense and even spread it herself.
The idea that their entire family had been born and died on the same ship for thousands of years, on the same few decks on which they were allowed to move, was too terrifying for Skyla to accept.
"Lies! The old crone betrayed our kin!"
This is why, as a teenager, Skyla killed her grandmother.
This wasn't Skyla's first murder; the girl had done it even before. But she had never felt so much... that it was necessary. Not one, but many voices encouraged her in her head.
She chopped off her grandmother's head with a shovel that her mother used at work. This helped, in part, to frame his own mother for the crime.
Skyla Serermal did not have low intelligence; she did not have any intellectual defects; she was simply a person completely addicted to... 'experiences'. Somewhere subconsciously, she understood that her life was mean and pointless, and that was probably why she was so terrified by the possibility that her family had actually been living and dying on this ship for 10,000 years. In her anger, Skyla killed her own grandmother because of this. Fear gave birth to anger, anger to hate. And when the act was done, fear appeared again—fear of the consequences.
So out of that fear, Skyla framed her mother for it.
The woman had never had any special bonds with her relatives, but still... sometimes when she was completely alone, when she wasn't experiencing any rush of emotions, excitement, intensity of sex, or pain, then the guilt was devouring her insides.
But it was also an offering to Him, her God.
Skyla had... vices... vices that she couldn't resist or control.
It started with small acts of childish cruelty. Back then, Skyla probably didn't think about the fact that she was bullying the weaker; she just did what someone once did to her. It wasn't revenge; Skyla was just curious what it felt like to do it to someone as opposed to taking it herself. It was just curiosity, and when the younger child died, Skyla was terrified.
But the fear was great, as was the guilt, these feelings consumed her soul, they were so... expressive.
However, young Skyla quickly lost interest in mutilating others when she was sexually initiated. In fact, from then on, sex became her main source of emotions, and all other forms were only substitutes or complements. Her erotic life quickly escalated, from spankings and light choking or degrading words to more and more severe forms. Over time, the appetite grew, and the vices pushed the girl into really dangerous situations. She was still only a child when she was tortured, beaten, and raped at the same time by the greatest degenerates that could be encountered in the darkest alleys of the lowest decks of the ship, males or females, sometimes twice her age. And sometimes even older.
Several times she was kidnapped by some freaks, kept locked up, and used as fuckmeat. Each time, she thought she was going to die after spending the rest of her life like this. But there was always some miracle, some 'Little Mercies', and the girl got out of the situation unscathed.
And when she recovered, she looked for sensations again, often in exactly the same dangerous places. Uncertainty, fear, suffering, and pain aroused Skyla. There was nothing she could do about it. She didn't care about misery; all that mattered was these experiences, and she was a slave to their darkness.
Skyla was a seeker of experiences, which was a dangerous life choice for an already rather dangerous life for an inhabitant of the lower decks of the voidship.
A Chaos voidship belonging to the Night Lord legion.
She could have died many times before she could even be called an adult woman.
Skyla really wasn't stupid, even when she was still very young. She lived on a vast ship that sailed through endless nights thanks to the power of the Machine Spirits. The girl grew up on a Chaos ship. She knew about the Gods and, at some point in her life, had prayed to them all. However, over time, one particular of the Four Powers absorbed her more and more, and it was Him that she thought about most often. Over time, only about Him.
It was Him she thought about when He pushed her into the worst, most dangerous situations, it was Him she prayed to, and it was Him she thanked for the 'Little Mercies'
Because He watched her actions and listened to her prayers, there was no other logical explanation for the fact that even though Skyla was often beaten very brutally, somehow she was never disfigured; the only bones she ever had broken were her ribs, the only teeth she lost were the ones in the back, and the scars she had were small and never in visible places like her face. Skyla lived among the poorest, most forgotten inhabitants of the ship, who performed the hardest physical labor, and yet she was never seriously injured. Even though she miscarried probably a dozen times, she never bled to death or had any obvious complications, even though she never had access to any medical care. Despite her endless intercourses with the usually filthy and often visibly sick dwellers of the lower decks, no particular physical illness plagued Skyla. Yes, occasional venereal diseases were causing her pain and suffering from awhile, but after some time, she always just 'got over it'
Skyla was young at the time she became homeless and alone, but it wasn't very difficult to find someone who liked young girls enough to share food or a place to sleep with them. Despite her peculiar Nostraman appearance, despite her irisesless, pitch-black eyes and pale, emaciated body, the petite Skyla was not seen as a threat, only as a victim to be exploited, which more often than not meant being fucked.
This was Skyla Serermal's life, which passed so quickly that the woman didn't even notice when she was no longer attractive to pedophiles.
She was a drifter, and although she wasn't stupid, she couldn't hold down any job or relationship for long. Not even a pimp could keep up with her antics, as she always had to somehow bring about something that would bring upon her someone's wrath.
Sometimes they promised her death, and sometimes they actually tried to kill her. But then the 'Little Mercies' always saved her. So it either ended with a beating from which the woman miraculously escaped unscathed or with torture that did not leave any major scars.
Of course, there was almost always some form of rape, but that was a given.
At some point, the ship passed into the hands of another faction within the Night Lords legion, but the only thing noticed by the inhabitants of the lower decks was that the crewmen, depleted by the fighting, were replaced by even more foreigners. And Skyla became probably one of the last Nostramen around.
Skyla's life went on the same as it always had, working only as much as she had to, only when she had to, always trying to get out of the hardest jobs, always trying to bribe someone with her body. Sometimes it worked; sometimes she was fucked, but she was still forced to work and was beaten; sometimes she was kidnapped and raped for days; and sometimes some psycho tried to kill her.
This was her life.
And then their ship, her universe, was invaded by the Dark Eldars
Of course, Skyla had heard about the terrifying Dark Eldar, and no matter what she thought about her own experiences, it still seemed to her that xenos represented something worse—inhuman after all. The woman was concealing herself in the darkest cracks; she hid from certain death many times and knew some of the best hiding places. That said, the seeker of experiences, driven by her addiction, decided to follow the screams and observe the practices of the Dark Eldar. Skyla Serermal, a multiple victim of beatings, torture, attempted murders, and brutal gang rapes, also as a minor, had never experienced such dread before; the pounding of her own heart made her ears almost bleed from the pain. The woman just couldn't hold back her own screams of terror that escaped her lips while watching the Dark Eldars' acts; she should have been caught then, but miraculously the xenos caught someone other than her earlier, thus allowing the woman to escape.
"Little Mercies"
The days of the xenos occupation were an endless festival of fear. And the ship's terrified, hiding inhabitants were increasingly losing their humanity as they struggled to survive. A hungry Skyla watched a desperate, starving man too weak to move anymore decide to cut off his own foot to eat it. However, he was unable to do so because Skyla stole his foot and greedily devoured it herself.
But then came the day when it was the Dark Eldars that became the hunted.
"Xenos! We have come for you!" Skyla heard a bass voice distorted and amplified by a vocalizer that could only belong to one possible being.
"The Legionnaires have arrived!" the woman realized.
Skyla then began to hear the inhumanly melodic screams of the xenos rising to the highest octaves of pain and terror as the Angels of Death burned them with fire and tore them to shreds with bullets, serrated blades, and armored hands. Compared to the sophisticated methods of the Dark Eldars, the death dealt by the Marines was almost instantaneous. Even cutting the xeno into pieces or burning them alive was a short agony compared to what the Dark Eldars had done before to the crew.
Within a few hours of cat-and-mouse aboard their ship, the legionnaires neutralized most of the xenos. That didn't mean the Marines were done, far from it.
Skyla had enough self-preservation to avoid the unfamiliar black-armored Astartes with as much care as she would avoid the xenos or any other threat.
Hell, Skyla would have avoided the Night Lords she belonged to in exactly the same way, and since these black-clad legionnaires definitely belonged to another warband or maybe even were servants of the Corpse Emperor, Skyla had reasonable reasons to expect only the worst from them.
Instantly, after all the opposition in the form of xenos had been neutralized, the plundering would begin.
Normally, the lower decks, the parts of the ship on which Skyla spent her entire life, were of no value (at least in the woman's opinion) to someone like the Angels of Death; there were no interesting loot or even slaves who could be useful for anything other than hard physical labor. However, ever since the xenos took control of the ship, there were no longer any restrictions on how the crew could move between decks, and soon lots of people ran in search of the best hiding spot. As a result, the more luxurious parts of the ship fell prey not only to the xenos' invaders themselves but also to the poorer inhabitants. Everyone, of course, was looking for things such as food, weapons, and warm clothes (or, in the case of the poorest, any clothes), but people, driven by their impulses, also simply stole valuables completely at random. So in the end, the black-clad marines spent more hours looting than they did neutralizing the Dark Eldars, as they often had to search completely random corners of the ship for things or people that interested them.
Already on that first day, when the bodies of the xenos were still warm, the legionnaires took the most shapely-looking slaves (mainly young women) laden with numerous loot. Skyla thanked the gods for the 'Little Mercies' that she hadn't been taken away. The woman, like every member of the crew, was afraid of the Legionnaires, and although it seemed to her that she was more afraid of the Dark Eldar, the fact remained that the xenos had just been massacred by these black-clad transhumans.
But the weeks that followed heralded a dark future. This new warband obviously wanted to keep the ship, even repair it, but their methods...
In the end, the conquerors herded every crew member into the control points they had set up. That is every crew member who was not old or sick, because those were immediately killed. All minors, who clearly could not be mistaken for adults, were taken off the ship in the first days, and no one heard from them again. At this stage, women who had infants were allowed to keep them. Most of the people who survived the Dark Eldars were low- or nonskilled slaves, so they were assigned to clean the ship of damage, bodies, and minor renovation works.
There couldn't have been more than a few Astartes left on the ship, but the fact was that these Angels of Death were lurking somewhere in the darkness and could appear literally anywhere at any time. This guaranteed that no matter how dramatic the situation of the ship's inhabitants became, no one thought about any rebellion.
And the situation was dramatic; there was a shortage of not only food but also clothes. In the past, the cold wasn't really a problem on the ship; if anything, it was too hot rather than too cold, but with the recent damage, the life support systems were really failing. So people fought among themselves for every scrap of food or clothing.
The Legionnaires didn't intervene for such reasons; they just killed someone randomly every now and then, just to remind everyone who was in charge.
All the inhabitants especially feared one of those Astartes, whom they simply called 'Pulper' among themselves.
'Pulper' sometimes came out of the shadow when no one expected it. Legionnaire was wrapping his powerfist around his victim's head and just pulping it. Not a day passed without someone finding a headless body somewhere—a body that obviously had to be cleaned up.
Another astarte, a giant warpsmith, was taking away several crewmembers every day. Sometimes he took those who worked the best, sometimes those who were lagging or fainted—his choice seemed to have no rule.
What was certain, however, was that the next day these slaves were returning, but as servitors.
"Over time, he will turn us all into the servitors that don't need to sleep, that can work more efficiently, and that don't require life support systems, so it will be possible to cope with crew shortages." Skyla realized, as did many others. They were an unskilled workforce, but that didn't mean there weren't intelligent people among them. Skyla herself wasn't stupid either.
"Does...does it hurt...? becoming a servitor?" Skyla began to wonder more and more often, knowing that she wouldn't be able to endure eighteen-hour shifts for long. There were fewer and fewer people; everyone was too tired and too scared. Skyla's old ways of avoiding work weren't working anymore.
"If my job or 'Pulper' doesn't kill me, maybe becoming a servitor isn't such a bad option? Maybe it would be a little mercy for me?" Skyla thought as she fell to the ground from exhaustion after another day, feeling that she definitely wouldn't have the strength to work tomorrow.
And then she heard an announcement from the loudspeakers:
"Every woman with an infant is to report to one of the checkpoints tomorrow; attendance is mandatory. Food will be provided."
Skyla sighed in relief and began to cry with happiness.
There was just one problem: Skyla didn't have a baby herself.
The woman already knew what she had to do, she prayed to her God for strength and set out in search of her victim.
So now Skyla Serermal, along with a dozen other women with small children, were led away by red-robed tech-acolytes. The worshipers of the Machine God shocked Sykal's senses with a mixture of mechanical grease, sweat, and rot.
The women were taken to the deck, where the warpsmith set up a workshop. There, Skyla saw scores of lobotomized male and female bodies in the process of transformation into servitors. The mothers beside her nervously hugged their children tighter. They soon started to scream as the red-clad tech-adepts began to take infants. The more hysterical women were brutally knocked out.
Of course, Skyla Serermal wasn't going to fight for a child that wasn't hers, she was too tired and hungry to receive a senseless beating. So, the woman stood by calmly as the warpsmith examined the infants, with the red-robed cyber-thralls assisting him.
"Very good..." said the warpsmith in a mechanically distorted bass voice through the vocalizer on his beaky helmet, and then he looked at the group of women.
"These will be some really neat cherubs," Astarte praised.
A few women howled at the mention, but most, including Skyla, didn't understand what was going on. Some even smiled dully with hope.
Then the warpsmith glanced up at the small cyborg levitating above their heads.
Then all the women started screaming.
All except Skyla, who was still hoping she would get something to eat soon.