Vessel of Demise

[//graham_p/@thrones_arcane+]

[//@natedungeon+]

Rushing to their station, the two voidsmen find themselves in sudden, total darkness. A moment later, harsh pops of red and amber light lash across the passageway, casting the pair’s startled movements in staccato silhouette. Something has hit their freighter.

The curt, mournful whoop of the ship’s naval alarm is joined by the aggressive, rasping burps of the hull breach signal. The voidsmen flounder, failing to regain their footing as the anguished shriek of the hull floods their eardrums.

A tube light, flicking intermittently from the passage’s aft ward end, cuts through the sensory staccato and illuminates a vestibule. The void suits! 

The gleaming, rounded helms of the void-suits within betray no hint of alarm at the developing chaos beyond their plexiglass home. Unperturbed, the suits hang waiting for the men to reach them. 

[//@natedungeon+]

The ship begins to shake violently, bucking the pair up from the unyielding steel floor and down again like an adult jumping on a trampoline, playfully preventing fallen children from getting up. Eyes wide, they kick and crawl along the floor towards the light. One of the men thinks of his own children. He wonders if he will ever see them again. 

Sweating and clammy, he is fairly sure his left arm has been jarred badly, perhaps dislocated or broken, in the tumult. He crawls on, too petrified to fully acknowledge the pain, knowing that at any second the atmosphere could be sucked from his lungs and his chest crushed like the can of chilled recaff the men had bought from the vending machine on this deck. They’d had just enough credits for one can between them, shared and discarded only moments before the alarms had sounded.

+++

As more impacts wrack the ship's frame, an ominous, repetitive gong washes over the men. Bulkhead doors are slamming shut automatically throughout the vital pressure sarcophagus, and this tells them unequivocally that the void is now definitely getting inside. As the gong grows louder, faster, closes in on them from all directions, the need to reach the void-suits becomes exceptionally urgent. 

The din of alarms blare steadily over the intermittent screeches of the ship in torture. And then, another sound. The other man, slightly ahead, stops moving and begins to scream. Confused, the second man watches as the first curls up, a stain spreading across the lower half of his uniform. 

The second man hears it now.

Through the wall comes a worse sound still. The unmistakeable roar of sustained bolter fire. 

+++

The second man recognises he must now somehow clothe them both against the void, and he redoubles his struggle towards the flickering light. He is aided unexpectedly as the ship's gravity wells begin to fail. Since the attack began, the listless ship has been steadily pitching stern upward. No longer calculating adjustments for the vessel’s orientation, the grav-plates default and drag them both amidships. He slides the remaining distance down the corridor and drags himself up against the locker, before frantically tearing open its flimsy doors and falling in amongst its humanoid contents. He is too exhausted and pained to know what to do next, but with a moment and a breath amidst the strange embrace of the empty void-suits, he remembers his training. Mind remarkably clear, he clamps his teeth around a suit’s zip.

Despite the agony of his arm, the man suits up. Juggling the awkward, slippery sphere with his good hand, at last he manages to plunge a golden fishbowl helmet over his head and into joint with the suit’s connective seal.

The helmet slots home with a deeply reassuring thunk, sparking the suit’s hood and support systems into life with a cheerful chime. A motherly welcome from the operating system, before a diagnostics check sees to it that a glorious rush of pain relief is dumped into his system. The suit’s robust construction also dulls somewhat the brutal bass thudding of gunfire carrying through the walls, and the man takes a moment to feel very slightly better about his situation. Then, dragging the other void suit from its peg with his good arm, he collapses to the deck under the weight of it and his own, and starts struggling back uphill towards his friend.

All of a sudden, the alarms cease. The hazard lights cut too. 

Part of him greets the end of the sensory barrage with relief. A more conscious part, a fraction alter, begins to prays quietly that the silence is simply due to localised damage, and not some greater malfunction across the ship. The auxiliary units plugged intermittently along the passageway’s ceiling are all that now serve to light his way, bathing the space in undulating waves of soft, purple light. He feels calmer as he pushes on to his friend. Light-headed with pain and relief and stimms, he wonders if the colour was chosen deliberately, a kindness of some long-forgotten designer to ease the fears of doomed sailors at their ends.

+++

Before he can reach and clothe his companion, gravity fails completely and the two men drift slowly up from the floor. Detecting this change, the occupied void-suit autonomously engages the magplates in its boots, planting his feet as he rises. Briefly they become sluggish strangers to him. Under other circumstances he would have adjusted to this slight change with two or three more steps, but now he panics at the development. Unthinking, he pushes the other void suit desperately out ahead of himself towards his friend. The other man is catatonic. His salvation floats past him, empty and unimpeded into the gloom. He has stopped screaming at least. Instead, he only claws mindlessly at his own face in white-knuckled torment, mouth agape. The cacophony of fighting close at hand has also eased, and the injured man stands in this new atmosphere of relative calm exhausted and at a loss, his hapless friend floating ahead of him like a bubble. 

It is into this strange, liminal moment of reprieve that the wall detonates. 

+++

[//@thrones_arcane+]

A kraken lunging from a molten sea, tongues of white-hot steel lash out and eviscerate the fear-stricken voidsman before he can scream again. The blast spreads his trashed remains liberally across the immediate surfaces and floods the passage with flecks of gore and glowing metal, held aloft in like infant stars born from some malevolent, blooded nebula. The magplates slip their phantom grip in the face of such violence, and the survivor is borne tumbling away up the passage, scrabbling at anything for purchase with feet and hand until he slams bodily into the vestibule once more with a vicious splash of shattered plexiglass. As quickly as it came, the explosion shrieks back through the new cavity, clawing at anything not firmly bolted down, dragging the air over hot, ragged edges of the breach in evacuant tempest. The screech thins quickly. Sounds empty into the void.

He is wrenched now upward by the vacuum to the ceiling, but the man’s boots find purchase against a crossbeam and a wall, and with his good arm he clings to the flimsy wreckage of the vestibule. The storm lessens, and he presses himself into his corner like a wounded spider, listening as the last of the atmosphere whispers away around him. The ship is no more. The life he led amongst its cramped decks and close-knit crew whistles away into the nothingness beyond, leaving only the pitiless grip of the void. 

He is not, however, alone. 

Where before his friend had drifted helplessly in terror, that terror now stands incarnate under the soft light. Impossibly large to unaccustomed eyes, an Astartes crowds the passageway with his bulk. A colossal weapon, held in both hands, is aimed toward the voidsman. He sees a flash of gold as another marine follows in through the breach, stopping briefly to converse with the first before vanishing onward into the dark, weapon raised, keening for further violence.

+++

The voidsman watches on, hoping against all odds that the mythical fiend aiming at him sees his broken arm hanging lifelessly and through it reads him as deceased. He can discern no colours across the titan’s dark silhouette, but he need not. He knows well what they are, why they have come. He has known since the stories he was told as a boy. He has prayed never to see those stories come to truth. 

The attention of the first marine does not sway from his target as the second passes by, and all remains still save for the gentle, balletic entrance through the breach of detritus from the battle that took place beyond. A severed hand appears, then a crewman’s crumpled helm, followed by numerous spent bolter shells. 

His curiosity seemingly sated, the marine suddenly tenses as if to brace his weapon and fire, but as he does, one of the empty shells knocks gently against his helm. 

Staying his hand, he steps back a touch and tilts his head to better regard the weightless cartridge, before reaching up a crimson gauntlet to grasp it. He peers at the brassy object for a long moment, as if examining a faded pict-slideglass against the light, entranced by some ancient, unknowable mystery. Then he turns, his weapon pointed down, and advances upon the injured man. The voidsman closes his eyes, resigning himself to the failure of his feigned demise – and the imminence of the real one.

Seconds pass, bleeding the searing anticipation of a violent death into renewed, uncertain hope. Hope, that is, until... contact.

He opens his eyes upon a dull lens of the Astartes’ helm at closer quarter than he can scarcely believe, the brow of the savage visage brought against that of his own void-suit. 

"You can hear me, Umathra." 

The sound is transmitted across the touching void-helms. 

"I know you hear me. I wonder if you understand."

The marine steps away, raises the spent shell into view and taps it testily against the man’s helmet. 

Despite the grimy residue of its spending, its surface gleams with intricate engraving. It is a language of which the man knows nothing. It is High Gothic, wrought across this vessel of demise with an artistry he has never seen. 

Few men were meant to.

Catching the man’s crippled arm, the marine pulls him closer, the growl of his voice rumbling through the jarring contact of their helms, oblivious to his captive’s agony.

“IN TE MIHI COMPLACUI. In You I Am Well Pleased. That is what this writing says to us, and yet…”

A pause, as someone might in reflection, upon noticing they are talking to themselves. 

“Some of my Brothers have come here for spoils, others for mere gratification. I have come in search of answers.”

[//@dark_isles+]

The marine again begins to tap the shell against the man’s helm.

“Can you tell me what these words mean, Umathra?”

 Tap.

“Please tell me.”

Tap.

“Tell me what it means Umathra. Stop screaming and speak.”

Tap.

“I want to know.”

+++

[//@thrones_arcane+]