Port Wander.
The edge of the Imperium.
The final, glittering star before the endless, yawning darkness of the Halo Stars.
A city in space - a circular plate almost twenty kilometers wide, with vast spars that thrust from every edge like a titanic wheel in the inverse. From those spokes were docked Imperial ships, ranging from wallowing Chartist transport ships that were plying their narrow, cautious routes from home to here to home again to slender frigates and destroyers from the Imperial Navy, resupplying after hard raids into pirate territories or the continual, low level fury of the Spinward Crusade. There was even a recent capture from the Severan Dominate - her hull still rent and her proud red and gold colors only slowly being replaced with proper blacks and blue painting to signal their return to a most just, most honorable service.
Port Wander.
Another name for her? Here and now, in the year of the Emperor 827, in the 41st millennium since humanity first's agreed upon date?
Pandemonium.
"We need five hundred thousand shells delivered to Longshore A.B-901!" Foreman-Subjunct Able Cain snapped, walking down the corridor of the subdeck rastling next to his underlings. "I want you to gather up shoremen with bloody whips if you have to."
"The guilders are going to complain, Cain," one of those underlings, Fiddious Bright, said.
"I don't care if they call me Horus himself, I want those shoremen ready to shift shells! We'll shunt them to the exterior and do it in null-G and kissing the Lady Void if we have too!" Cain turned to glower directly at Bright, who quailed and nodded hurriedly, holding his hands up, his augmetic fingers clicking.
"Aye, sir!" he said, then turned and bustled away down the subdeck's second junction. Cain turned back to the others. He pointed at the tall, willowy women. "Verity, can you get the null-rats in your asteroid contacts on this? Their expertise is going to be needed if we do end up moving them through the void."
Verity sighed and shook her head. "The null-rats hate actually working, Able, and I don't want to give the percentage it'd take to get them moving."
"Give them a half percent, it'll be enough," Able said.
"A half percent?" Verity arched one of her thin, golden eyebrows. Her augmetic eye hissed a thin jet of steam along the skin-duct that she had cut to let it vent properly and over her head.
"Show them the damn contract!" Able snapped. "You haven't seen the number of damn zeroes these madlads are throwing around!"
"Null-rats can't read," Verity said.
"Do I pay you to tell me why you can't do shit?" Able growled. Verity shrugged, then muttered into her vac-suit collar - words that she kept just low enough and just far enough away from Low Gothic that Able didn't have to pretend that he understood them. As she stalked off, Able pointed at the last two.
"Binar and Binree, what's the word from the coggies?"
The two tech-wrights chittered nervously at one another in their debased Binary - Able had once heard an actual coggy referring to their language as 'a slurrious mess of half baked cogitatory with half a dozen Gothic loan words' and he had to admit, he could hear the difference. But whether Binar and Binree spoke the Omnisiah's most perfect Binary or not, they were able to cover more conversation in thirty seconds than Able could in ten minutes. Once they had finished chittering, Binar said: "They are willing to do checksums on the automatory anima of the first hundred crates of macroshells."
"And the second hundred?" Able growled.
The two tech-wrights exchanged nervous looks over the grilles that covered their faces. Binree won the invisible coin toss for the bad news.
"For that, they are requesting...two years service, free of charge, no questions," Binree said.
Able groaned.
"You two tell those Cog-boys that they might be wearing Red Robes, but
nothing on this station moves without
my lads hefting it and if they want to bring in servitors, then they can bring in servitors, they won't make
us servitors, get those bloody checksums! Now!"
The two tech-wrights quailed before him, then bowed and fled.
Able shook his head, slightly.
In the quiet of the sub-section of the station, lit only by the glittering of torches and observed only by long forgotten, untended to pict-captors concealed in the skull mountings that were perched every five meters in the flying buttresses that supported the cold, dank, metal corridor...Able muttered to himself.
"What the frak even
is a checksum?"
Three levels up, in the Court of the Dead, pandemonium reigned as well. Men in the colors of House Scourge marched in ranked file behind a tall, thin, willowy woman with a narrow, angular face and a cold, cold, cold look to her eyes. This woman did not bear any weapon...save for the single most devastating tool in the Imperium of Man. With this tool, she could slaughter worlds, destroy fleets, ruin lives. She kept it close to her chest as she ducked into the vaunted chamber of Amberly Greiss's boutique armory. her cold gaze swept about herself as she looked at the racks of hand-crafted lasguns and las pistols, rows upon rows of them. Greiss herself stood behind the counter, her smile slowly fading as she watched the men racking up behind the cold eyed woman.
Greiss' throat bobbed as she gulped. "How may...I...help you?"
"You have six hundred M38 pattern Heckate class lasguns?" the cold eyed woman asked.
"Aye, all...handmade...do you want to buy them?" Greiss asked, growing a bit less worried.
"Yes," the cold eyed woman said, then gestured. Men started to walk forward and push large paniers on wheels forward. They started to take not merely the guns...but the
whole shelves. They wrenched them free from the wall and slatted them into the paniers, while the cold eyed woman unlimbered her deadliest weapon. "We'll be buying all of them."
And Tabitha Von Strauss held out the data-slate with House Scourge's seal emblazoned on the base.
Griess looked down at the money that the data-slate promised.
"...I...I think I'll...be closing early then," Amberly Greiss said.
Five kilometers spine-ward, and fifteen decks straight up, the pandemonium could be felt as well. If any such storm could be centered on a singular point, it was centered upon the man that sat across from the large mahogany desk that housed the individual who, until the door had opened and the man had entered, had been the most powerful man on Port Wander.
If Governor-Militant Larius Sans was discomforted by the chaos his station had been cast into by the arrival of a Repulsive, two Lunars, a Dauntless and half a dozen refurbished chartist ships, bearing literally hundreds of thousands of refugees and servants of the Rogue Trader Dynasty helmed by Emil Vendigroth-Scourge and the Lady Amaranthine Scourge...he didn't show it. Instead, he poured a cup of amnesac for the two and gave a curt nod.
"Quite a tale," he said. "Quite a tale."
"And only half of it's exaggerated!" the Lady Amaranthine said, cheerfully - which provoked, despite himself, a soft chuckle from the Governor-Militant.
Sans took a few moments to simply look over...legends. He had heard rumors and stories of these two. The Saviors of Damaris. The Conquerors of the Dread Pearl. And now, the Liberators of Inequity. Emil was a shockingly youthful twentysomething with a slender, angular set of features and the eyes of a Khanic despite his otherwise Cadic features - an odd mix, but not unheard of in the mongrel churn that was the Imperial Navy. His hair was long and dark and tied back into a long queue that he had tucked behind his head neatly. His uniform was faintly naval in character, but had the colors of House Scourge. At his hip was an elegant, well balanced power sword. His wife was a study in contrasts.
Her features were pure Scintillian, right down to the dusky complexion and eye-color, but where her husband was tall and thin, she was relatively short and...
Ample.
That was the word that Sans settled on as he regarded her. She definitely looked like the kind of wife you'd keep home, and not thrust into the peril and danger that her husband had dared show her too - and from the shimmering augmetic she had for one of her arms, some of that danger had came dangerously close to her. Worse? There were scars, just barely hidden by her dress that showed something had raked her from her collar bone to...who knows where. This settled Sans' opinions at a decidedly mixed level.
On the one hand, he and his officers had spent a solid week toasting Emil's name at every dinner for the
Light of Terra. She had spent three weeks at Port Wander before being sent on to the Lathes for her refitting and rebuilding - but oh what a wonderful three weeks. Each of them had found some excuse to walk her surviving corridors, to look upon the final remains of her captain, to feel the age and power of an Emperor class battleship for their own selves.
On the other hand...
Sans was not a man who appreciated a man who ignored his duty. And the first duty a man had was to his wife? The fact the Lady Amaranthine was here and not safely at their home struck him as a serious mark against an otherwise admirable man.
All of this passed through Sans' mind behind an impassive, iron mask of a face, and if Emil or the Lady Amaranthine noticed, they didn't show it.
"How long do you plan to be staying at Port Wander?" Sans asked.
"No more than a month or two," Emil said, sighing quietly as he did so. "We must ready the transports for shipping to Purgatorio - those civilians need to be put somewhere safe, and we need to repair and refit our ships. The...well, our newest ship has been in the service of the Dark Powers for far too long and we must put some of her to the torch before she's ready to sail. Not to mention settle on a new christening." He shook his head. "There are other purchases we'll be needing to manage..."
Sans breathed a subtle sigh of relief.
Good, he thought.
I will not need to lie or use force to...obey her.
"Then you have our station at your service," Sans said, and stood. He offered his hand. Emil shook it with a wry smile. When he took the Lady Amaranthine's hand, she giggled and leaned forward coquettishly to whisper in his ear.
"Don't worry," she breathed. "I'm tougher than I look."
Sans coughed and his entire face turned beat red.
***
"You enjoyed that too much," Emil said, shaking his head as he and his wife walked down the corridor away from the Governor-Militant's offices.
"Mayyyybe!" Tine said, in a sing song, giggling as she did so.
"Now," Emil said. "We've got the supplies squared away, the extra arms and armor for the 101st..." He frowned. "But a Craftworld and the Faceless Lord may take more than a refit and repair."
Tine nodded. "That's what Ryia's up too."
Emil nodded, then tapped his ear bead. His voice switched to the cant of House Scourge - that, plus the vox-ciphers that Von Strauss had set up, made it significantly safer than almost anything save for face to face communications. "
Ryia, darling, how are the Baronies?"
A faint sound of jeering and cheering filled the air. Ryia's voice came through, cheery. "Oh, they...
they are...they're quite something!" she laughed, switching to the Scourge cant after a few slurred words. "
They have this tradition about amesac and null-g, where you...uh, you put it into the air and have to drink it without a...drink bulb..." She hiccuped.
"I'm very good at it."
Tine pouted. "Why does
she get to get blasted drunk but we have to deal with the stiff necked prig?"
"
And the Baronies?" Em asked, his hand reaching down and squeezing Tine's rump as a way of responding to her pouting. This of course created the perverse incentive for her to pout even more.
"
They're all willing to take coin ahead of their priors," Ryia said, cheerfully. "
If we have the coin to spend."
---
Port Wander is your oyster. Anything can be bought - if it is here and you're willing to spend the coin. But before we unveil the list...first...what system will we be using?
[ ] Rogue Trader Classic: Keep going with RT rules!
[ ] Dark Heresy 2nd Edition Rebuild: Rebuild the characters with Dark Heresy 2nd edition rules!
