WARHAMMER 40,000: ROGUE TRADER: FALLEN SUNS (40k roleplaying on the farthest frontiers)

"I don't like this," Mr. Khanne grumped as he stood beside the auspex pit, glaring out at the closed vista plate shutters as if they owed him drinking money. He was a short, squat, powerfully built spacedog, the kind of voidsman that made up the life's blood of any well run ship. Lacking the two most deadly flaws in a voidsman - imagination and fear - Mr. Khanne had calmly and placidly accepted everything from orks to the casual brutality on hard-run ships, and thus had seen himself up the ratings list to the august and demanding position of Ship's Master. During warp transits, his duty was to communicate the broad spectrum commands and orders from the bridge (which, themselves, were handed down by the Navigatrix herself) into the minute adjustment of sail and rigging that led to the ship going north-by-northwest and not north-by-damned-to-the-pit.

That was the only joke Mr. Khanne had ever told in his two centuries of life, and he was not going to abandon it.

"You don't like a lot of things," Lt. Desna said, not looking up from her auspex apparatus.

Mr. Khanne's face crumpled up into an even more prune-like shape.

"Eldar trickery new fangled nonsense useless bring the Warps by the bloody skin of dead martyrs trumped up ensigns don't know what they're talking about..." his voice dropped to a lower register, a bassy rumble that Lt. Desna ignored with long practice.

Which was impressive, considering she had only served with Mr. Khanne for the past few months - both being pillaged from different ships.

The scrying pulses that Desna kept sending into the webway were giving back results that made her purse her lips and frown. She was used to getting nothing but the most deranged orthographic divination for scry-pulses in the Warp. That was to be expected. But she had been informed that the webway was a much more rationalized, efficient means of travel - by listening in on a whispered conversation between the Captain and the Eldar pirate that had become an annoying fixture on her bridge. And yet, when she sent out a scry-pulse, the information that the machine spirit of the thaumographic imager and her pyresense telescopy sprites told her that the temperature indexes beyond the Geller Field were -981.1 degrees C and, simultaneously, 59,110,988,101,234,511 degrees C.

Those two temperatures were not only impossible - considering one was several hundred degrees below the decreed upon absolute minimum of thaumodynamic temperatures by the Omnisiah himself, and the other was several orders of magnitude brighter and hotter than the Speaking, the instant the universe herself was spoken into being by the Emperor.

Desna pursed her lips and then ran the numbers again. To her upmost relief, the scry-pulses got back equally irrational digits...but they were, at the very least, different digits.

"Good," she said.

"What's good about it?" Mr. Khanne asked.

"Oh, just the auspexes are not functioning properly," Desna said, her voice dry. "I would be loath to try and understand out what the webway is like beyond our ship if the instrumentality of our systems could be trusted."

Mr. Khanne harrumphed.

"I don't like this," he said.

For the majority of the crew, the passage was actually a time for relaxation and several desperately needed repairs. Without the constant pressures of the warp's dangers and the need for rigging out a new set of plasma-cabling for every other day's evasion of diresome dangers, the crew were free to work on several things that had been left in a constant limbo of being 'half fixed.' The guns on the starboard deck of the Revenge were, at last, coaxed out of their housings and then oiled properly, so that the crews would not have to work twice as hard to swing them to track enemies as opposed to the port guns. The torpedoes on the Tachyon's Demise were taken from their housings and given the semi-yearly processional through the ship so their machine spirits could be placated with flowers and supplication. And, most onerously, Dr. Ventris managed to track down and give all the mids their innoculations, which produced more misery concentrated in a three day period than the worst excesses of the most deranged and censured heterodox Inquisitor could in their black box torture-chambers.

Tine, of course, immediately began to bring the mids soup and tucked them into their cots as they shivered and trembled and, in poor Mr. Ted's case, vomited and hallucinated as the inoculations forced their immune systems to do battle with a dizzying range of possible infections and plagues that Dr. Ventris had decided was most likely to threaten them. This caused a near mutiny when Dr. Ventris made it known how much she disapproved of this 'overeager babying of servants of the Emperor' and 'any halfwit would know that soup-feeding would keep these mids clutching to their mother's skirts till they were thirty and grown' and Tine, of course, made it clear that she wouldn't take this kind of disapproval, no matter how much Dr. Ventris huffed about and muttered things like 'my medica bay, my doctors, my nurses, my burners, bah!'

Em was able to sooth it all over by taking Tine aside and explaining to her that Dr. Ventris had primacy when she was on the medica bay and that she shouldn't undercut her authority like this - so Tine, of course, went to Dr. Ventris' head nurse and conspired with the Hospitalliar to ensure Ventris was in her cabins, with Aquiline, whenever Tine showed up to comfort the mids in the throws of their delirium.

Such events were, of course, made the centerpiece of the week's dinner.

"And then Dr. Ventris comes at me and says 'I'm a doctor, woman! not the manager of a hotel for simpering noble twits!'" Tine said, waving her slightly overfull goblet in the air, her voice - despite her current state of inebriation - did a remarkable impersonation of Dr. Ventris. The entire table burst into laughter. Callie, who was sitting next to Noceda, elbowed the young officer and whispered in her ear and Noceda hurriedly shushed her and whispered back in her ear - likely to tell her that only the Captain was allowed to begin conversations at the table. Em smiled to himself as subtly as he could - Noceda, Ted and Danzing had won the rite to eat at the captain's table for this week, and other than the fact Danzing kept using his soup spoon to eat the mashed pitatties and had concealed a chunk of half-chewed fat in his pocket, they were doing fairly well by themselves.

Desh was helping himself to another serving of the quite excellent carving of void squid that the cooks had brazed and garnished with garlic and Valhallan ice cloves. As he sat back, he said: "So, do such conflicts between your overlapping magisteria...I mean...are they quite common?" He laughed, shaking his head. "Seems to me you humans would end up fighting one another almost as much as your enemies."

Tine smiled, then tapped her nose, leaning in close. "There is a secret, you know. How we do not fight humans all the time. I mean." She said, very seriously.

"Oh?" Desh asked, honestly curious.

Tine looked very serious. She sat up. She held up her hand, then said: "Simplicity itself!" She closed her eyes. "We don't!" She burst out laughing, then drank more from her goblet. If everyone had been slightly less in their cups, the jest might have gotten some smiles - but with the general cheer of the evening meal, it provoked uproarious laughter. Callie choked on her wine, while Ryia cackled and Em allowed himself the smallest of smiles. Desh shook his head in wonderment.

"You are an insane species," he said.

"Thank you!" Tine laughed, and even more laughter filled the room.

After the dinner, Tine burrowed against her sister and husband and was escorted away, while Desh was led back to his room by both Callie and Ensign Noceda - the other mids sneaking furtively off to gamble on the razorback fights in the lower decks. Desh walked in companionable silence...and Ensign Noceda flicked a glance from Desh to Callie to Desh again. She had been noticing, over the past few dinners, that every time they escorted Desh back to his rooms, Callie would get awfully somber and quiet. Noceda resolved to ask about it this time, even as they came to Desh's room.

"My thanks, you two," Desh said, bowing, then waving as the door shut. "Goodnight!"

Callie sighed, softly, then turned to look at Noceda. Noceda opened her mouth to ask about Desh.

"Well anyway, uh, bye!" Callie said, then fled.

Noceda managed to get a word out that might have been Low Gothic - but also might have just been "zuhbahhh." Then she was alone in the corridor, shaking her head.

She'd ask next time!

The passage wore on. The webway's dangers were not the warp's dangers - the danger was not in that you might blunder into an area full of daemons and be set upon. Or at least, that was what Callie said, because Callie knew that if they got THAT far off course, they were doomed either way, so why worry about it? At least, that was the excuse she stuck to. The real danger for this section of the webway was in getting lost. And so, the fleet had to stop many times, throwing out luffing jibs to bring their relative motion within the shimmering nexus of thread-like connections between place and place and place to a stop. There, the Farseers put their heads together, teasing out maps and foretellings of the future. They only had to turn back six times, which Callie kept referring to as 'a good number! Not too bad! Fairly low, all things considered!'

These reversals were always never-wracking for the fleet, as the slowest ships had to wait for the larger, forward most ships to swing their prows about, then thread gently between their formation. By the third time, though, it had become well practiced and the crews had even established some assistants to make it easier and faster: Grapnel lines, fired by the passing capital ships into the subline ships, to help skew them around without the subline ships needing to go through the onerous task of throwing out rigging for an in-place spin burn.

But, at last, after a month and a half of creeping through the webway, they emerged into realspace in a quiet Imperial system called Tygress.

"Ah, well, that makes it easier," Em said as he looked through the vistaplate at the three pilgrim freighters that were hastily trying to bring themselves into some semblance of fighting order. The green-blue orb of Tygress V turned right under them, and the fleet was moving into a proper High Orbit, the kind that would give them an exceptional advantage in case any fight happened...not that Em intended to open fire on a set of transports flying the Imperial Flag. "Bring up a vox to their station, request victualing and watering, put forward our credit and check on our temporal sheering if you'd be so kind."

Desna got to work, while Tine sighed and stretched. "Do we really need to victual?" she asked. "We still have months of stores, don't we?"

"Never-"

The doors to the bridge banged open. They turned and saw a most unexpected sight - the white robed, masked figure of their Astropathic Choirmaster. The spindly astropath was moving with remarkable speed, clinging to their staff as they wobbled forward. Only then did Em see the blood, dripping from around the mask. He ran forward, as did Tine, and they both took hold of the old astropath. Their head lolled forward and they wheezed out a single choked word.

"Choir...a scream..."

Then they were limp - boneless, the final sag of the dead.

"Medicae!" Em shouted - but was grimly determined that it was too late. Dr. Ventris and her nurse Aquiline arrived. They pronounced the head astropath dead - and then, when they came to the astropathic chamber, the report was equally grim. Every astropath in the Argent Scourge was dead - and the astropaths across the fleet were all suffering similarly. Half of them were dead with the variation being spread unevenly throughout the ships. Some ships had only one loss, while others (like the Scourge) had lost their entire choir. From the survivors, ragged reports were coming in: A scream of transmissions, powerful enough to punch through the warp storms that bordered the Calxius Sector - aimed right at them.

At Em's office, Tine explained.

"Whoever sent this psyker attack didn't know where we were...the...only possible answer is that..." She bit her lip. "That they got their hands on a House Scourge astropath, who knows our code-ciphers, and had the psychic talent to unweave it."

"How...on a scale from one to ten, how hard is that to do?" Em asked.

"Ten," Tine said, immediately. "It would take a psyker of incredible power and skill to do it. Or a lot of lesser psykers working together. B-but either way, they used the cipher...not as a way to listen in, but to target our astropaths."

"They want us deaf and mute," Ryia said, stalking back and forth in the back of the room.

Em frowned, leaning back in his seat. "And according to Desna, we've had more temporal sheer than the Eldar thought. The peril of the webway..." He shook his head. "And it's the most mundane thing that gets us."

"Huh?" Ryia asked. "What do you mean? How bad is it?"

Em shook his head. "Farseer Serradon and Callie both say that the temporal warding on the webway paths we walked must have failed - we were looking at standard warp deviation. It's the year 828."

"Shit," Ryia muttered. "The full date?"

"02.303.828," Em said. Then, his lips quirking up. "M41, though."

"Ah, well, fantastic, we've lost a year and change!" Ryia said. "Do we even know how the rest of our fleet is doing - or Purgatorio?"

"Fortunately, the scrying's been done - we can head to Purgatorio with a shot at a five to twenty day transfer. Worst of that sheerage means we get there in early 829, but our Navigator has charts from here to there and is confident she can get us there a week before Emperor's Day." He said, referring to the final day of the standard year, 365, where celebrations were held across the Imperium commemorating the glory of the Emperor. Usually, gifts were exchanged.

A commotion came at the door - the guards shouting indistinctly. Em stood - but then the door opened and the two guards glared at Callie, who was panting and stammering. "Sorry! Sorry!" she said, holding up her hands.

"Let her in!" Em said, gesturing his hand.

Callie ducked past the glaring Kreigers, then let it all come out in a hurry. "He's not here yet!"

"He and here being...?" Ryia asked, her voice edged.

"Vall! The Sector!" Callie said. "I did a scry - the runes are clear. He's on the far side of the Maw!" Her ears were quivering with excitement, the points twitching up in time with her breathing. "N-Now, uh, I think he may be close to the Maw. But he's not in the Calixus Sector!"

"Yet," Ryia muttered. "The Maw's a five day passage - at worst, that means he's in the sector before the thirties."

Em nodded, slowly, rubbing his chin.

---
You are horribly bereft of Astropaths - you can only send and receive a few messages at a time...and these are all risks. You don't know how well or how closely Vall is listening. Where do you send messages? Pick one!
[ ] Check in on the Pax Imperialis
[ ] Check in on the Acheron
[ ] Send a message to Port Wander to warn them
[ ] Remain silent - do not risk tipping Vall off to what you do and don't know.

Set Course for...?
[ ] Purgatorio - it's your homeworld and Vall's destination. You need as much time as possible to protect it.
[ ] Port Wander - it's possible you can add your strength to their defenses when Vall arrives.
[ ] Write In