Silas was right at home. For the first time in months,
everything was OK. Because for the first time in months, he was crawling on his
back, surrounded by wires, valves, and xenos and black run tech, working a
combitool and making a craft space worthy.
Damn how I missed the
smell of a void flyer without incense.
As Silas rolled onto his shoulder to check Barbosa’s
progress on the inner airlock hatch, his boot slid in a puddle of blood. Blood he
had spilled. He remembered the face of Beyor Black. How it had snapped back and
disappeared into a puff of pink mist.
Just like Jeb. Frak
me to hell, I’ve become one of them. I shot that man without a second thought, just
like the Imps do. But I had a reason didn’t I? He killed those kids, sent them
into hell’s jaws just to frak with our heads. He would have been too much
trouble as a prisoner. For frell’s sake, he was practically begging to die. So
why does it eat at me so? I never tore myself up over killing Scriptotus, never
bothered me killing to stay alive.
Silas shook the thought from his head as he went back to
scrounging under the main flight control yoke.
No he deserved to be
killed, that’s not the question. The question is whether I was the one who
deserved to kill him.
That rattled around in his skull for a moment, and then
Silas put it to bed.
Silas put his mind back in the now. Stopped wasting brain
cells on things he couldn’t change. As
he worked, he idly chatted with Cordoroy Jones, one of the stragglers they had
picked up (or rescued as the case seemed to be). He seemed like decent folk,
new his way around the Black the way he talked. That pink scarf threw Silas off
though. Not that he could really gripe about it, wearing his own shemagh for so
many years.
“So, Jonesy,” Silas started, speaking in the Runners Tongue
which he had missed using for so long since his…what was the word, recruitment?
Abduction? “How long you been Running?”
“can’t rightly say.” Jones replied “Long as I could walk I guess.”
“How did you end up here?”
“Got caught running some alien relics out of the Calyx. But
not by the Imps. Corvida Augustina is the one that grabbed me. She heads the
Mechareaver Clan you guys just pissed off. Her ship’s the one that tried to
bomb us.”
“I tried to get Beyor to tell me about that ship. He clammed
up. What can you tell me.”
“What the hell for? It’s got guns and a crew and it hasn’t
done the ‘verse the favor of falling out of the sky yet. Nothing else to know
if you want to destroy it.”
Silas pulled himself out from under the console to look
Jones in the eyes.
“I don’t want to destroy it. It’s the only ship in orbit for
the next 4 months and I have places I need to be at before then. I need that
ship to get there, and I need to know what her innards look like so I can take
her.”
Jones’s face went white as bleached paper.
“Listen friend, wait the 4 months. I ain’t blind. I know you
and yours are serious business, but you don’t want to be on that hulk. It’s
cursed. Damned. Evil wielded into a hull and keel.”
“All the more reason for us to storm it. Don’t worry about
what we can or can’t handle. We’re going up there no matter what you tell us,
but whether we come out alive on the other side may depend on what you tell me
about what we’ll be facing.”
Jones sighed, then, sitting in the copilot seat, began to
tell Silas about the Void’s Bitch
“She’s a xenos craft. Small, more along the lines of a frigate
than a cruiser. Built more for speed. Good engines, solid hull, but the inside….You
know those stories that go around on Runner ships? The ones about the Bleeding
Freighters, or the Ishimura? The stories that they tell kids at night then try
to assure them it’s not real?”
“Heard plenty of those kinds of stories. Seen a few of them
happen to.” Silas said, half to dismiss Jones’s fears and half to remind him
that he could handle it.
“You ain’t seen this. Hard money down, you can’t even
imagine it. The ship is run by Corvina, but she doesn’t have a real navigator.
So she’s got herself this warp dabbler, a sorcerer. Yeah I called him that, cuz
that’s what he is. He can’t navigate like the real thing, so he sacrifices
prisoners to some god or other. Prefers kids. Psyker kids. Kills them and
paints the decks and bulkheads with their guts.
“Then there are the Mechareavers themselves. There aren’t
many, the ship’s run by servitors for the most bit, but the reavers leave
trophies and corpses from their hunts all over the place, tacked up on walls,
pinned to tables like bugs, or just lying on the deck, loose as a port girl’s
skirt.
“They had me there on the bottom deck for days. And the
entire time, there was this screaming. Constant, echoing through the keel like
the entire ship had been screaming for eternity.”
Jones was shaking. Sweat poured from his forehead.
“To look at the two of them you’d think Black was more cracked
than Augustina, but don’t you buy it. What she has going on that ship…..it’s
not normal. It’s haunted.”
Silas thought over what he had heard.
“Well, I’ve never been inside a haunted xenos ship before.
Figure I ought to try it at least once, just so I can say I did.”
