CHAPTER TWO: The Seventeen (1.4)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
"We may have a solution," Em said, quietly. "We've recovered a cogitator core - an ancient piece of technology, part of a long lost human starship. We believe it had a close encounter with Lu'Nasad. It's possible that by combining the core with your records, we might have a better idea of where this craftworld is, yes?"
Callie looked ludicrously smug, standing and placing her palms on the edge of the table.
Her palms, unfortunately, rested on a parchment, which slipped along the smooth surface and caused her to fall, belly first, forward onto the table, her face forming an absurd little mask of surprise.
Serradon sighed and put his palm over his face.
"For certain definitions of the word well, yeah," Ryia said. "Not sure how great I feel about the fact that we're going to be fighting this over our homeworld - and a world with hundreds of thousands of people who lived on a Eldar maiden world..." She pursed her lips. "Think that might have something to do with that ritual that they were talking about. Bad guys like to reap souls. We've got a lot of very special ones." She leaned back in her sear. "And I bet that if the Inquisition takes a close look at why Purgatorio makes a good target, they'll want to take all our colonists for, you know, lots of bullshit."
"Thus far, the good doctor seems to agree with my assessment," Em said, watching the work below with his hands clasped behind his back. Tine stepped over to stand beside him, holding up some magnifiers to her eyes with her free hand.
Ryia grumbled something under her breath. Something deeply uncomplimentary about the nature of His Majesty's Divine Inquisition and their relationship to their own mothers. Em chuckled - but Tine then cut off all conversation by sucking almost all the oxygen out of the room with a gasp. She pressed the magnifiers against the glass.
"What? What is it!?" Ryia sprang to her feet, running over.
"Look! Look! Look!" Tine pointed as Em scrambled for his magnifiers. He swung around - seeing voidsmen at work tying off guidelines, gesturing to their fellows as the gearing systems were revved up to provide motive powers, others flitting about with cold-gas guns as they collected up detritus that was created by the industrial process. He saw Elysians, as comfortable in their combat voidsuits as if they had been born in them, assisting with the more delicate tasks, the ones that took better maneuvering than you could get by tethers and gas guns. He saw...an Eldar in a voidsuit sitting beside a voidsman, their helmet pressed together, the both of them clearly quaking with mith - the little shake of the shoulders that came from giggling uncontrollably in a void suit.
"Who is that?" Em muttered.
"It's Callie, I knew it!" Tine hissed.
"Knew what?" Ryia asked.
"That's Voidsman Noceda or I'll sell my own cogitator implant!" Tine said, lowering her magnifiers, beaming.
"I dunno, that suit's a bit new for a voidsman, it might be an Elysian..." Ryia said, adjusting her magnifiers. She drew her head away, smirking. "Might be Xoti."
"Xoti? No," Tine said, shaking her head. "It has to be Noceda, they were so cute when they met."
Em lowered his manifers, his brow knitting as Ryia clicked her tongue and shook her head. "Tine, you absolute romantic fool. That? That was awkward bumbling. Xoti is a Sapphic ambush predator."
Xoti's a what? Em thought as Tine snorted.
"Yeah, and you think that an innocent eldar baby like Callie would be swayed by Xoti's preferred method of blunt force seduction?" she said, as Ryia scoffed.
"That baby is three hundred years old..."
"Yeah, and that is a baby for an Eldar!" Tine and Ryia were now facing one another. Em put his magnifiers to his eyes and then smirked as he saw a third suited figure swing down to lurk with the other two in the shadow of the cogitator core. Their helmets all met together, and the new arrival started to make spacer's hand signs, to add to the private communication. He lowered his magnifiers and stepped away with a wry little grin on his face.
"What do you think, Em?" Tine asked.
"Oh, I'm sure it'll all shake out fine in the end..."
This had all been the calculations before she had set foot on the Argent Scourge and realized just what a good decision she had made. Never before in her thirty two years of subjective life had she ever had the chance to work with machines this ancient and techno-sorcery this potent. The machine spirits of the Scourge were like eager, delighted little canids, trained to a precision and reactivity she had never seen before.
And so, while the rest of the crew were being distracted by the sight of the cogitation core being shifted over, Desna was sitting in the auspex pit and doing arithmancy.
The scopes on the starboard side of the ship were tracking six hundred and seventy nine objects. Each object had its own albedo, which varied according to a light curve. The majority of them had been charted in a single busy afternoon when they had arrived in the system. Their light curves were steady, slow, and wildly irregular. This meant that their surfaces were equally irregular and not the smooth shininess of something that had been worked or forged for a specific purpose. All these albedos told her, and the machine spirits that had tagged them, that she was looking at nothing but rocks. It was not required, but she had been spending her evening of duty shift pinging each with a lase-pulse to get back a result, while also running spectrographic haruspexi to divine their compositions. The ship itself had a hololithic recording device - a kind of hovering abacus that she could input datum into.
She was, of course, inputting the datum into that...
...and also writing down a backup with her auto-quill and parchment, which she was carefully putting into the ship's log. Before she had been put in charge of it, the Ship's Log had been a sorry shamble - just noting things like sighting sails and habitable worlds. But Desna's clockwork mind saw the world as it was: Eventually, this system would be colonized by humanity. And thus, in that distant year, someone would want to find and track these asteroids, to know their content, and to crack them, smelt them, forge them into ships, habs, weapons, everything that humanity would need to continue to bring their divine light elsewhere.
Thus?
She noted down: Asteroid-1119, mineral content: 12% silicates, 24-
She stopped, her brow furrowing, her lips pursing slightly.
The most efficient workflow she had worked out was to have the lase-ping and spectrograph run on the asteroid after the one she was currently notating down, so that the information would be ready for her once she had both scribed out the previous and stretched her wrist (Densa had never had an issue with scribe's disease, and she planned to never experience it in her life.) The only issue was that the lase-ping on Asteroid-1120 was coming back with a strange error signal, the kind that usually meant the lase-array was misaligned, or the machine spirit was balky, or the omens were wrong, or a black cat had stepped by at the wrong time. Most voidsmen, from the aged salts that ran the decks of clumsy merchant ships to the eager whippersnappers that filled out the ranks of the Imperial Navy, would have re-run the lase-ping without even thinking.
Ensign Desna, though, was not most voidsmen.
"Display full error scry," she said, calmly and clearly. The hololithic abacus shifted and flowed as the near miraculous localizer sprites adjusted their position and turned into a three dimensional display. The lase-array had sent the ping, but from everything she was seeing here, the ping had returned at a wild tangent - far enough that the ship hadn't even detected it at all and was merely hypothesizing which direction the lase-pulse had come back from. Desna rapped her fingers on the counter of the auspex pit.
"Look at that!" A hand called from the vista-plate. "They're growing bloody tentacles from the spaceport!"
Desna spoke again: "Ping beam, half strength, ultraviolet register only, point five, point six, point seven and point eight heading off the larboard prow-spire."
The cogitators flashed green, then in a second, a series of crunching chimes came from the auspex pit as she absently lit an incesense stick, watching the results.
Identical.
She picked up her vox, dialed in. "Captain," she said.
"Who is this?" Captain Vendigroth's voice sounded guarded.
"Ensign Desna, auspex, an Eldar heavy cruiser is approaching the station on a docking vector."
"...I'll be right there."
Em, Tine, Ryia and Badb Ra all turned to look at her. Callie, her hands brushing along her robes, hurried forward, her cheeks blazing. "So, uh, what's this all about?" She asked. "Your, uh...what do you call it? Fox?"
"Vox," Em said.
"Vox! Right! What a name," Callie said, shaking her head. "Anyway, your vox just said to come to the bridge. ...wait, should i have brought bodyguards?"
"I can serve in that role, Farseer Callie," Badb Ra said, his voice lilting and quite ironic. The irony sailed over Callie's head - which, admittedly, was not hard, considering how short she was. She walked over to the hololith - then choked.
"Isha's tits!" she exclaimed, before clapping her hands over her mouth, mortified beyond belief to have used such a profanity. But her excitement overcame her mortification as she looked at the shimmering hololith. "Do you know what that ship is?"
"No, that's why we asked you to come in, Callie," Tine said, smiling gently at her. "We were hoping you could tell us."
Floating in the hololith was a near perfect imago of the approaching Eldar heavy cruiser. She had a sleek, curved head that came to a narrow point with several fluted pulse lances thrusting from her, like the tongue from a dragon's snout. Her wings were a quartet of sweeping sails, and despite their tattered edges, they seemed to be mostly intact. But what was most striking was her color: Pure, midnight black, without any highlighting colors or designs. The only sign of anything other than that blackness was a gray-white scar along her prow, that looked as if it had been made with a glancing lance strike. It rotated in slow, stately motion, to give everyone a full view of it. Callie breathed out a wondering sigh.
"She's the Whisper," she said.
"Knew it," Ryia said, and Tine subtly passed her some thrones.
"It's the Anaris' Whisper," Callie said, which caused Em to lift his head, slightly.
"Like the Farseer?" he asked.
"Well, the legends say it carried his soulstone away from Lu'Nasad - her crew all dead, all still working their stations, despite having lost their lives in the battle with the Craftworld, when she fell to Chaos." She shook her head. "I have no idea how Anaris got separated from the Whisper, but this has to be what he was referring to!"
"It's going to dock to the station in approximately an hour," Em said. "According to Lieutenant Desna, and I see no reason to dispute her exemplary work."
"Can we see the soulstone?" Tine asked. "I want to see if Anaris has something to say about this."
"Oh, sure! I'll get it and bring it right back!" Callie said, then turned and walked into the wall with a loud whump. She stepped backwards, rubbed her nose, then said. "...ow."
"Are you okay?" Em asked, stepping to her side.
"Forgot that your walls aren't alive," she whispered, rubbing her nose more.
"But they have to talk to him!" Callie said, throwing out her arm and knocking over a vase of shimmerflowers that Serradon hurriedly grabbed onto before it fell off the table. "S-Sorry!"
"If they want to talk to Anaris, they can come here and talk to him!" Serradon snapped.
"BUT!" Callie stopped. Blinked. Considered. "...oh right! They can do that, c-can't they."
Serradon sighed, set the vase to rights, and watched as Callie hurried from the room.
"Her mother must be laughing at me from the Infinity Circuit," he said, aloud. "Watch after my daughter once I'm gone, it'll be easy, Serradon, you'll love it, Serradon..."
"Well, we're more than happy to add this ship to our fleet-" Em started.
"No," Anaris said, quietly. "The ship cannot be a part of the fleet. Your fleet cannot come. Not...at first."
"Why the hell not?" Ryia asked. "Do you know how much money and effort we spent on that fleet!?"
"No," Anaris said, his voice blunt. "However, I am aware of the terrible nature of Lu'Nasad. The Infinity Circuit herself has been driven mad by Chaos, filled with not only the vile, debased souls of dead Eldar, but also with daemons and creatures...specifically, of a breed you know as the Krell."
Em shook his head. "I've never heard of these creatures," he said.
"I have," Tine said. "They're psychic slavemasters, also called Enslavers and Dominators - entities that live in the Warp and seek to physically bond with a psyker, then use the pskyer to open a portal to the warp. Nasty creatures."
"Worse than you know - more numerous and more intelligent as well. The Krell have bonded with the Infinity Circuit of the Craftworld in the same way they would bond with a mon'keign or Eldar psyker, and like then, they have adapted it to their uses. They are able to open space between the Warp and the Material world and broadcast their psychic call on a strength unlike anything ever seen before. If focused upon a world, it will drive everyone mad - or worse, simply slay them with the psychic backlash."
"Chondra's Folly!" Tine exclaimed.
"Hm?" Anaris asked.
"The world of Chondra's Folly - there was a hundred kilometer wide circle around the colony where all life had died, the only survivors were the colonists in the main dome - and they killed themselves, insanity!" Tine said. "What would happen if this was aimed at the fleet?"
"Your ships would become charnel houses," Anaris said, his voice growing soft and distant, as if he was seeing the nightmare. "At best, floating mausoleums, crewed by corpses. At worst, asylums, trapping their doomed souls until the last light goes out and the air becomes stale and cold." He sighed. "But aboard the Whisper, with my focus and the focus of Callie and Serradon, all channeled into the Whisper's hull, we could protect fifty souls and minds from the grasp of Lu'Nasad. Maybe...maybe more."
"Fifty one, hm?" Em murmured, softly.
"Hmm?" Anaris sounded confused.
"Nothing, just thinking," Em said.
"What good would fifty one people and a single heavy cruiser be against a Craftworld?" Ryia asked. Then she closed her eyes. "We sneak aboard, disable the Infinity Circuit, and thus, render it approachable for the fleet."
"Yes, actually," Anaris said. "That was my plan."
Em rubbed his chin. "Do you have maps of the craftworld?"
"Yes!" Callie said. "With all the defenses, and the shield emitter locations - they're usually pretty standardized since-mmphmm!" she blinked as Serradon clapped her hand over her mouth.
"No," Serradon said, flatly. "We'll follow the Farseer's plan - and you will follow his directions."
---
What say you, Rogue Trader?
[ ] Load the Cogitator on the Whisper and set out.
[ ] Argue that you should all work together on a plan - it's not as if the Imperium could use these maps, considering how fast Craftworlds are and how thin stretched the Navy is
[ ] Write In
If you set out on the whisper, what orders give you to the fleet?
[ ] Make for Purgatorio. We'll meet there, the hammer to your anvil.
[ ] Is it possible for our fleet to pace the Whisper, to keep a safe distance away, and be ready to pounce?
[ ] write in
Callie looked ludicrously smug, standing and placing her palms on the edge of the table.
Her palms, unfortunately, rested on a parchment, which slipped along the smooth surface and caused her to fall, belly first, forward onto the table, her face forming an absurd little mask of surprise.
Serradon sighed and put his palm over his face.
***
"Well, that went well!" Tine said, pouring herself a glass from the amnesic cabinet in the dining room of the Scourge manor, while through the immense glass windows, the view of the cogitator core being shifted from the hold to the space station dominated the space below them. From this distance, the voidsmen and eldar who were at cautious work to bring the cogitator core from the interior of the ship to the space station looked rather like ants. Technically, it was the cogitator core and the technica apparatus that Phi had deemed required for the entire process. It seemed, according to him, that there were not just devices for the translation of Imperial cogitator spiritual patterns to the debased Eldar machine spirits, but there were also the far more important devices, which would create a buffering between the two cogitation pantheons. Without that buffering, this kind of inter-species communication could have, to quote, 'dire side effects.'
"For certain definitions of the word well, yeah," Ryia said. "Not sure how great I feel about the fact that we're going to be fighting this over our homeworld - and a world with hundreds of thousands of people who lived on a Eldar maiden world..." She pursed her lips. "Think that might have something to do with that ritual that they were talking about. Bad guys like to reap souls. We've got a lot of very special ones." She leaned back in her sear. "And I bet that if the Inquisition takes a close look at why Purgatorio makes a good target, they'll want to take all our colonists for, you know, lots of bullshit."
"Thus far, the good doctor seems to agree with my assessment," Em said, watching the work below with his hands clasped behind his back. Tine stepped over to stand beside him, holding up some magnifiers to her eyes with her free hand.
Ryia grumbled something under her breath. Something deeply uncomplimentary about the nature of His Majesty's Divine Inquisition and their relationship to their own mothers. Em chuckled - but Tine then cut off all conversation by sucking almost all the oxygen out of the room with a gasp. She pressed the magnifiers against the glass.
"What? What is it!?" Ryia sprang to her feet, running over.
"Look! Look! Look!" Tine pointed as Em scrambled for his magnifiers. He swung around - seeing voidsmen at work tying off guidelines, gesturing to their fellows as the gearing systems were revved up to provide motive powers, others flitting about with cold-gas guns as they collected up detritus that was created by the industrial process. He saw Elysians, as comfortable in their combat voidsuits as if they had been born in them, assisting with the more delicate tasks, the ones that took better maneuvering than you could get by tethers and gas guns. He saw...an Eldar in a voidsuit sitting beside a voidsman, their helmet pressed together, the both of them clearly quaking with mith - the little shake of the shoulders that came from giggling uncontrollably in a void suit.
"Who is that?" Em muttered.
"It's Callie, I knew it!" Tine hissed.
"Knew what?" Ryia asked.
"That's Voidsman Noceda or I'll sell my own cogitator implant!" Tine said, lowering her magnifiers, beaming.
"I dunno, that suit's a bit new for a voidsman, it might be an Elysian..." Ryia said, adjusting her magnifiers. She drew her head away, smirking. "Might be Xoti."
"Xoti? No," Tine said, shaking her head. "It has to be Noceda, they were so cute when they met."
Em lowered his manifers, his brow knitting as Ryia clicked her tongue and shook her head. "Tine, you absolute romantic fool. That? That was awkward bumbling. Xoti is a Sapphic ambush predator."
Xoti's a what? Em thought as Tine snorted.
"Yeah, and you think that an innocent eldar baby like Callie would be swayed by Xoti's preferred method of blunt force seduction?" she said, as Ryia scoffed.
"That baby is three hundred years old..."
"Yeah, and that is a baby for an Eldar!" Tine and Ryia were now facing one another. Em put his magnifiers to his eyes and then smirked as he saw a third suited figure swing down to lurk with the other two in the shadow of the cogitator core. Their helmets all met together, and the new arrival started to make spacer's hand signs, to add to the private communication. He lowered his magnifiers and stepped away with a wry little grin on his face.
"What do you think, Em?" Tine asked.
"Oh, I'm sure it'll all shake out fine in the end..."
***
Ensign Desna had been pillaged - and when it happened, she had imagined that being on a Rogue Trader ship would be worth it. For five years, she had served on the naval sloop Sophia's Temptation as an Master of Etherics - a non-commissioned officer in charge of handling the auspex and scrying systems for the old, creaky ship, and she had been quite good at it. It was the closets thing to what others might call an emotion in her cold, calculating mind: She had taken pride in her skill, and in the skill of her fellows. But the offer to be made a Ensign, with an officer's share and the commensurate authority, was too tempting for her to pass up. Once she had finished this cruise with the Scourge Dynasty, if she wished, she could transfer back into the navy with her officer's rank and be that much closer to getting a ship of her own. She might even leave with a Lieutenancy, or more!
This had all been the calculations before she had set foot on the Argent Scourge and realized just what a good decision she had made. Never before in her thirty two years of subjective life had she ever had the chance to work with machines this ancient and techno-sorcery this potent. The machine spirits of the Scourge were like eager, delighted little canids, trained to a precision and reactivity she had never seen before.
And so, while the rest of the crew were being distracted by the sight of the cogitation core being shifted over, Desna was sitting in the auspex pit and doing arithmancy.
The scopes on the starboard side of the ship were tracking six hundred and seventy nine objects. Each object had its own albedo, which varied according to a light curve. The majority of them had been charted in a single busy afternoon when they had arrived in the system. Their light curves were steady, slow, and wildly irregular. This meant that their surfaces were equally irregular and not the smooth shininess of something that had been worked or forged for a specific purpose. All these albedos told her, and the machine spirits that had tagged them, that she was looking at nothing but rocks. It was not required, but she had been spending her evening of duty shift pinging each with a lase-pulse to get back a result, while also running spectrographic haruspexi to divine their compositions. The ship itself had a hololithic recording device - a kind of hovering abacus that she could input datum into.
She was, of course, inputting the datum into that...
...and also writing down a backup with her auto-quill and parchment, which she was carefully putting into the ship's log. Before she had been put in charge of it, the Ship's Log had been a sorry shamble - just noting things like sighting sails and habitable worlds. But Desna's clockwork mind saw the world as it was: Eventually, this system would be colonized by humanity. And thus, in that distant year, someone would want to find and track these asteroids, to know their content, and to crack them, smelt them, forge them into ships, habs, weapons, everything that humanity would need to continue to bring their divine light elsewhere.
Thus?
She noted down: Asteroid-1119, mineral content: 12% silicates, 24-
She stopped, her brow furrowing, her lips pursing slightly.
The most efficient workflow she had worked out was to have the lase-ping and spectrograph run on the asteroid after the one she was currently notating down, so that the information would be ready for her once she had both scribed out the previous and stretched her wrist (Densa had never had an issue with scribe's disease, and she planned to never experience it in her life.) The only issue was that the lase-ping on Asteroid-1120 was coming back with a strange error signal, the kind that usually meant the lase-array was misaligned, or the machine spirit was balky, or the omens were wrong, or a black cat had stepped by at the wrong time. Most voidsmen, from the aged salts that ran the decks of clumsy merchant ships to the eager whippersnappers that filled out the ranks of the Imperial Navy, would have re-run the lase-ping without even thinking.
Ensign Desna, though, was not most voidsmen.
"Display full error scry," she said, calmly and clearly. The hololithic abacus shifted and flowed as the near miraculous localizer sprites adjusted their position and turned into a three dimensional display. The lase-array had sent the ping, but from everything she was seeing here, the ping had returned at a wild tangent - far enough that the ship hadn't even detected it at all and was merely hypothesizing which direction the lase-pulse had come back from. Desna rapped her fingers on the counter of the auspex pit.
"Look at that!" A hand called from the vista-plate. "They're growing bloody tentacles from the spaceport!"
Desna spoke again: "Ping beam, half strength, ultraviolet register only, point five, point six, point seven and point eight heading off the larboard prow-spire."
The cogitators flashed green, then in a second, a series of crunching chimes came from the auspex pit as she absently lit an incesense stick, watching the results.
Identical.
She picked up her vox, dialed in. "Captain," she said.
"Who is this?" Captain Vendigroth's voice sounded guarded.
"Ensign Desna, auspex, an Eldar heavy cruiser is approaching the station on a docking vector."
"...I'll be right there."
***
"I didn't do anything!" Callie said as she came onto the human's bridge. "I mean, hello!"
Em, Tine, Ryia and Badb Ra all turned to look at her. Callie, her hands brushing along her robes, hurried forward, her cheeks blazing. "So, uh, what's this all about?" She asked. "Your, uh...what do you call it? Fox?"
"Vox," Em said.
"Vox! Right! What a name," Callie said, shaking her head. "Anyway, your vox just said to come to the bridge. ...wait, should i have brought bodyguards?"
"I can serve in that role, Farseer Callie," Badb Ra said, his voice lilting and quite ironic. The irony sailed over Callie's head - which, admittedly, was not hard, considering how short she was. She walked over to the hololith - then choked.
"Isha's tits!" she exclaimed, before clapping her hands over her mouth, mortified beyond belief to have used such a profanity. But her excitement overcame her mortification as she looked at the shimmering hololith. "Do you know what that ship is?"
"No, that's why we asked you to come in, Callie," Tine said, smiling gently at her. "We were hoping you could tell us."
Floating in the hololith was a near perfect imago of the approaching Eldar heavy cruiser. She had a sleek, curved head that came to a narrow point with several fluted pulse lances thrusting from her, like the tongue from a dragon's snout. Her wings were a quartet of sweeping sails, and despite their tattered edges, they seemed to be mostly intact. But what was most striking was her color: Pure, midnight black, without any highlighting colors or designs. The only sign of anything other than that blackness was a gray-white scar along her prow, that looked as if it had been made with a glancing lance strike. It rotated in slow, stately motion, to give everyone a full view of it. Callie breathed out a wondering sigh.
"She's the Whisper," she said.
"Knew it," Ryia said, and Tine subtly passed her some thrones.
"It's the Anaris' Whisper," Callie said, which caused Em to lift his head, slightly.
"Like the Farseer?" he asked.
"Well, the legends say it carried his soulstone away from Lu'Nasad - her crew all dead, all still working their stations, despite having lost their lives in the battle with the Craftworld, when she fell to Chaos." She shook her head. "I have no idea how Anaris got separated from the Whisper, but this has to be what he was referring to!"
"It's going to dock to the station in approximately an hour," Em said. "According to Lieutenant Desna, and I see no reason to dispute her exemplary work."
"Can we see the soulstone?" Tine asked. "I want to see if Anaris has something to say about this."
"Oh, sure! I'll get it and bring it right back!" Callie said, then turned and walked into the wall with a loud whump. She stepped backwards, rubbed her nose, then said. "...ow."
"Are you okay?" Em asked, stepping to her side.
"Forgot that your walls aren't alive," she whispered, rubbing her nose more.
***
"Absolutely not," Serradon growled.
"But they have to talk to him!" Callie said, throwing out her arm and knocking over a vase of shimmerflowers that Serradon hurriedly grabbed onto before it fell off the table. "S-Sorry!"
"If they want to talk to Anaris, they can come here and talk to him!" Serradon snapped.
"BUT!" Callie stopped. Blinked. Considered. "...oh right! They can do that, c-can't they."
Serradon sighed, set the vase to rights, and watched as Callie hurried from the room.
"Her mother must be laughing at me from the Infinity Circuit," he said, aloud. "Watch after my daughter once I'm gone, it'll be easy, Serradon, you'll love it, Serradon..."
***
"The ship has come, to carry all of us to Lu'Nasad. Also, forgive me for my earlier incoherence. It takes an immense amount of energies to call upon such a distant ship - leaving me with very little to articulate myself. Now that she is closer, I find myself considerably more...focused," Anaris said as the important members of the Council of Seventeen were gathered around the table. "The crew of the Whisper are united with me in completing the task - so that we can bring Lu'Nasad's terror to an end."
"Well, we're more than happy to add this ship to our fleet-" Em started.
"No," Anaris said, quietly. "The ship cannot be a part of the fleet. Your fleet cannot come. Not...at first."
"Why the hell not?" Ryia asked. "Do you know how much money and effort we spent on that fleet!?"
"No," Anaris said, his voice blunt. "However, I am aware of the terrible nature of Lu'Nasad. The Infinity Circuit herself has been driven mad by Chaos, filled with not only the vile, debased souls of dead Eldar, but also with daemons and creatures...specifically, of a breed you know as the Krell."
Em shook his head. "I've never heard of these creatures," he said.
"I have," Tine said. "They're psychic slavemasters, also called Enslavers and Dominators - entities that live in the Warp and seek to physically bond with a psyker, then use the pskyer to open a portal to the warp. Nasty creatures."
"Worse than you know - more numerous and more intelligent as well. The Krell have bonded with the Infinity Circuit of the Craftworld in the same way they would bond with a mon'keign or Eldar psyker, and like then, they have adapted it to their uses. They are able to open space between the Warp and the Material world and broadcast their psychic call on a strength unlike anything ever seen before. If focused upon a world, it will drive everyone mad - or worse, simply slay them with the psychic backlash."
"Chondra's Folly!" Tine exclaimed.
"Hm?" Anaris asked.
"The world of Chondra's Folly - there was a hundred kilometer wide circle around the colony where all life had died, the only survivors were the colonists in the main dome - and they killed themselves, insanity!" Tine said. "What would happen if this was aimed at the fleet?"
"Your ships would become charnel houses," Anaris said, his voice growing soft and distant, as if he was seeing the nightmare. "At best, floating mausoleums, crewed by corpses. At worst, asylums, trapping their doomed souls until the last light goes out and the air becomes stale and cold." He sighed. "But aboard the Whisper, with my focus and the focus of Callie and Serradon, all channeled into the Whisper's hull, we could protect fifty souls and minds from the grasp of Lu'Nasad. Maybe...maybe more."
"Fifty one, hm?" Em murmured, softly.
"Hmm?" Anaris sounded confused.
"Nothing, just thinking," Em said.
"What good would fifty one people and a single heavy cruiser be against a Craftworld?" Ryia asked. Then she closed her eyes. "We sneak aboard, disable the Infinity Circuit, and thus, render it approachable for the fleet."
"Yes, actually," Anaris said. "That was my plan."
Em rubbed his chin. "Do you have maps of the craftworld?"
"Yes!" Callie said. "With all the defenses, and the shield emitter locations - they're usually pretty standardized since-mmphmm!" she blinked as Serradon clapped her hand over her mouth.
"No," Serradon said, flatly. "We'll follow the Farseer's plan - and you will follow his directions."
---
What say you, Rogue Trader?
[ ] Load the Cogitator on the Whisper and set out.
[ ] Argue that you should all work together on a plan - it's not as if the Imperium could use these maps, considering how fast Craftworlds are and how thin stretched the Navy is
[ ] Write In
If you set out on the whisper, what orders give you to the fleet?
[ ] Make for Purgatorio. We'll meet there, the hammer to your anvil.
[ ] Is it possible for our fleet to pace the Whisper, to keep a safe distance away, and be ready to pounce?
[ ] write in
