Astrum es meus Oyster, a Warhammer 40,000 fanfic (unserious)
Posted: 2005-11-16 01:53am
Astrum es meus Oyster
Featuring all manner of denizens from the depths of Stardestroyer.net!
Factum Unus: The woes of those in the trading business
Chapter the First
In the Imperium, there is a series of laws designed specifically around limiting the moral pollution caused by contact with alien cultures. Millennia ago, the Adeptus Terra completely outlawed trade and dealings beyond the worlds of the Imperium. In this way they sought to keep Humanity free from the heresies that are inherent in aliens and strange Human colonies that seem to believe in bizarre concepts like ‘democracy’ or whom experiment with ‘freedom of speech’. Everyone knows that these sorts of things are dangerous for the ordinary citizen, best that they never encounter it.
However, some bright spark went ahead and completely undid all this fine work with the simple concept of Warrants of Trade, a piece of paper that can enable a man or woman to go out into the great unknown and meet alien species and regressed human societies, explore planets not yet claimed by the Imperium and, yes, trade with everyone. These are the Rogue Traders.
The concept is sound enough; the Rogue Traders go out, do their thing and come back and sell their wares. Imperial society does not encounter that hideous concept of cultural pollution, and instead gets their overpriced alien junk from another Imperial with a heart of gold. The only problem is that Rogue Traders are themselves a form of cultural pollution, carrying accents and tongues that are definitely not some obscure dialect of Gothic, speaking of such wonders/horrors of the universe and giving the ordinary citizen ideas. And ideas have never been good; everyone knows that’s how the Heresy got started (or they don’t know that the Heresy happened at all, but for those that do know there was a giant civil war, they also know that ideas started it).
As such, Rogue Traders often cause more harm than good, and that’s when they’re not psychopaths with Cyclonic Torpedoes and bombardment cannons.
*
Bars, or pubs as they are sometimes known, are generally of two types. One is the kind where gentlemen hunters come down to after taking shots at ambulls/forest hounds/mutants with their old hunting rifles, to drink ale, eat meals and chortle about that days action, and to say ‘wot’ a lot. The other kind is more common, dark, seedy and filled with malcontents. It was in this type of bar, or pub, that Kuja Aluxtros brooded.
He was good at brooding, and as an albino, the dark suited him well. He liked to think of himself as some sort of lone wolf kind of person, but in actuality he wasn’t, though it might have had something to do with him having a travelling companion, Danest Jek, some Necromundan he’d met on the trip to here, wherever ‘here’ was. While there wasn’t really anything wrong with Danest, he was a nice enough guy though he moaned in his sleep occasionally, it was hard to brood and attract women when you had him around. Kuja’s brooding, handsome lone wolf image wasn’t exactly hard to cramp, and Danest managed amicably.
So instead Kuja drank what he assumed was beer, but what might have been dirty water. Whatever it was, it was cheap, and that was all that really mattered to him. Kuja and Danest were, in the surest sense of the word, dirt poor. There was no work around for an unskilled labourer and an unaccredited scholar; this planet had an amazingly low unemployment rate, so instead they tried pick-pocketing. At least Kuja did, Danest had very large hands and was unable to pick pockets very well. They made very little money doing this of course, perhaps a few Imperials a day. Danest kept on saying that if they went about it in a more business like fashion they could be off planet within three or four years.
The problem was that Kuja found this place, so hideously depressing that all he ever wanted to do after a day’s pick-pocketing was try and get drunk and/or pick up some girl. Every night he failed however, either because he didn’t have the money to buy enough beer, or because Danest kept turning the girls off. Kuja didn’t believe that it had anything to do with his choice of venue, or perhaps because he was a photosensitive weirdo, but it was better that way.
That night was destined to be different however, that night, Kuja and Danest’s lives were about to change completely. In just about seconds, something would happen that would make up for everything that had ever happened in the past to them both. No, the blonde girl sitting across the room is not going to acknowledge Kuja’s existence, rather the door is going to be kicked off its hinges, right about now.
The door ended its current existence as the thing that kept the cold air out and experienced the joys of flying, followed by the interesting feeling of breaking a man’s face. The low mumbling of those inside stopped and everyone turned to look at the now empty door frame. Stepping through were two men, one of above average height with purity seals stuck to his carapace armour, the other a veritable giant with an equally large pole, the round head crackling with electricity.
The man with the purity seals lowered his drum-fed boltgun and tracked it across the room, making people cower away. It was an awful lot of firepower he had in his hands, and was capable of turning everyone in the room into a thin red paste.
“On your feet maggots!” he shouted with a voice trained by years of service with the Imperial Guard “You’re being press-ganged!”
And it wasn’t just them. All around the spaceport heavily armed men were rounding up the able-bodied in their hundreds. Those that resisted were beaten up, then shot, just for good measure.
*
Commissar Fgalkin smoothed back his thick, dark hair again before at last placing his high peaked cap upon his head. He turned his body so that the artificial lighting would catch the burnished bronze Aquila and his polished silver skull-buttons and make them glimmer. His bolt pistol sat neatly in his newly oiled holster, the hilt of his fine power sword glittered with gold and expensive gems. He grinned.
“Yes comrade, you are designed to intimidate.” He said, turning about to face the captain clad in all his finery and expensive equipment.
“Are you ready yet Fgalkin?” asked the captain, his voice dripping with sarcasm “It isn’t as if you haven’t spent the last hour and a half getting ready.”
Fgalkin simply laughed dangerously and expansively “One must look as powerful as possible when meeting the new conscripts. This uniform was tailored to be as impressive as it is possible, as frightening as an uniform can be.” He tossed his hands apart “Besides, can’t a man look his best?” he brushed off one of his epaulets with short flicking movements of his fingers.
The captain, Duran Richarts removed his chin from his palm and rotated his head to look at the black coated ex-officer. He got out of his chair and rolled his shoulders experimentally. “Let’s go then.”
Gathering before the bloated bulk of Captain Richarts’ overly-armed guncutter were dozens, if not hundreds, of men and women, all driven into line by carapace armoured humans and an ogryn wearing a powerfist which looked like it had been taken from a Space Marine Dreadnaught. Not that he needed it of course; the abhuman had wrist thicker than most people thighs.
“Well, this is appropriate.” Danest said cheerily, bouncing from one foot to the other. Kuja sighed, gathering his cloaks about him more tightly. “To be press-ganged into service, this was just what we were after!”
“No Danest.” Kuja sighed again, affixing his goggles more comfortably on his face “We did not want to become conscripts. We wanted to get hired, so that we could get paid for service.” But Danest Jek was not listening, and was instead wringing his over-large hands in excitement. Kuja tugged at his bottom lip as a pair of important looking men approached, one practically marching, the other swaggering in a way that seemed vaguely familiar to him.
“Oh Throne, this is a Rogue Trader recruitment drive.” Kuja moaned, slapping his forehead.
“So, Sergeant Albrecht.” Said Fgalkin, addressing the armoured and scared man with a bionic leg, “How do these recruits look to you?”
“Emperor Forsaken, Comrade Fgalkin. Useless for the most part.”
The Commissar’s eye twitched imperceptibly and he nodded, hiking his hand up into the captain’s face before Richarts’ face before he could speak “This is fine. There are a lot of people here. I’m sure we can make use of at least a couple of them, and lobotomise the rest for Servitors.” Fgalkin crossed his arms and nodded, his eyes closed. He stepped forward, and his Schola Progenium trained voice roared “You are all prospective recruits for the good ship Integral. We’re looking to hire new blood into the company, and you’ve all been chosen for the selection process.”
Kuja looked up. It wasn’t just plain and ordinary conscription. There was more to it than that.
“If you have skills,” continued the Commissar, marching before them “Then we’ll hire you, and you will make an awful, awful lot of money. You will get the chance to travel the galaxy, meet interesting creatures, exploit the, then kill them. If you don’t, then we’ll simply use you as servitors.” As he spoke Richarts’ soldiers raised their weapons in a manner that suggested very probable pain. “So, does anyone have any useful skills?”
Even as his mouth was still moving, Kuja stuck his hand up and shouted “I’m a Psyker sir!”
Fgalkin looked over at the captain, who was chewing on one of his fingernails “We haven’t a Psyker for some time that wasn’t wired into the ship or cost us a lot of money. Take him away Mister Fgalkin.” In response he clicked his fingers and one of the soldiers stepped and grabbed Kuja, leading him forward towards what he assumed was the Integral.
“Right, well, I’m bored with this. Let’s just servitor them and be done with it.” Richarts yawned, tugging at his cuff “I have deals to make. Mister Fgalkin, you deal with the recruits.” With that he swept away, a cadre of armoured men falling into step, including the ogryn. Danest watched the captain walking away, and the soldiers rounding people up with prods from shock mauls. He began to panic; his brain was to good to be lobotomised, so he shouted out to Kuja:
“You just can’t leave me here! Help me!”
Kuja twisted in the iron grip of the man with the giant shock pole and looked back at the pitiful picture that Danest made. He faced the Commissar and frowned “Does he have to be made into a monotask?” he asked “He’s actually quite smart. Reads a lot of books.” The giant paused, let go of Kuja, and tapped his nose.
“Smart doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be useful as a grunt in a Rogue Trader’s company. Smart is for the staff.” Fgalkin turned away but the giant coughed and caught his attention again. He passed his staff to Kuja and made a series of hand gestures. Fgalkin rolled his eyes “Fine. Manesero, take the other one, if it pleases you.” The Commissar called out to one of the men controlling the sweating crowd of soon-to-be-servitors, and had them drag Danest over. He smiled at Kuja and Kuja replied simply with frown.
“You don’t know how much you owe me.” He muttered as Manesero dragged them towards the ship.
Featuring all manner of denizens from the depths of Stardestroyer.net!
Factum Unus: The woes of those in the trading business
Chapter the First
In the Imperium, there is a series of laws designed specifically around limiting the moral pollution caused by contact with alien cultures. Millennia ago, the Adeptus Terra completely outlawed trade and dealings beyond the worlds of the Imperium. In this way they sought to keep Humanity free from the heresies that are inherent in aliens and strange Human colonies that seem to believe in bizarre concepts like ‘democracy’ or whom experiment with ‘freedom of speech’. Everyone knows that these sorts of things are dangerous for the ordinary citizen, best that they never encounter it.
However, some bright spark went ahead and completely undid all this fine work with the simple concept of Warrants of Trade, a piece of paper that can enable a man or woman to go out into the great unknown and meet alien species and regressed human societies, explore planets not yet claimed by the Imperium and, yes, trade with everyone. These are the Rogue Traders.
The concept is sound enough; the Rogue Traders go out, do their thing and come back and sell their wares. Imperial society does not encounter that hideous concept of cultural pollution, and instead gets their overpriced alien junk from another Imperial with a heart of gold. The only problem is that Rogue Traders are themselves a form of cultural pollution, carrying accents and tongues that are definitely not some obscure dialect of Gothic, speaking of such wonders/horrors of the universe and giving the ordinary citizen ideas. And ideas have never been good; everyone knows that’s how the Heresy got started (or they don’t know that the Heresy happened at all, but for those that do know there was a giant civil war, they also know that ideas started it).
As such, Rogue Traders often cause more harm than good, and that’s when they’re not psychopaths with Cyclonic Torpedoes and bombardment cannons.
*
Bars, or pubs as they are sometimes known, are generally of two types. One is the kind where gentlemen hunters come down to after taking shots at ambulls/forest hounds/mutants with their old hunting rifles, to drink ale, eat meals and chortle about that days action, and to say ‘wot’ a lot. The other kind is more common, dark, seedy and filled with malcontents. It was in this type of bar, or pub, that Kuja Aluxtros brooded.
He was good at brooding, and as an albino, the dark suited him well. He liked to think of himself as some sort of lone wolf kind of person, but in actuality he wasn’t, though it might have had something to do with him having a travelling companion, Danest Jek, some Necromundan he’d met on the trip to here, wherever ‘here’ was. While there wasn’t really anything wrong with Danest, he was a nice enough guy though he moaned in his sleep occasionally, it was hard to brood and attract women when you had him around. Kuja’s brooding, handsome lone wolf image wasn’t exactly hard to cramp, and Danest managed amicably.
So instead Kuja drank what he assumed was beer, but what might have been dirty water. Whatever it was, it was cheap, and that was all that really mattered to him. Kuja and Danest were, in the surest sense of the word, dirt poor. There was no work around for an unskilled labourer and an unaccredited scholar; this planet had an amazingly low unemployment rate, so instead they tried pick-pocketing. At least Kuja did, Danest had very large hands and was unable to pick pockets very well. They made very little money doing this of course, perhaps a few Imperials a day. Danest kept on saying that if they went about it in a more business like fashion they could be off planet within three or four years.
The problem was that Kuja found this place, so hideously depressing that all he ever wanted to do after a day’s pick-pocketing was try and get drunk and/or pick up some girl. Every night he failed however, either because he didn’t have the money to buy enough beer, or because Danest kept turning the girls off. Kuja didn’t believe that it had anything to do with his choice of venue, or perhaps because he was a photosensitive weirdo, but it was better that way.
That night was destined to be different however, that night, Kuja and Danest’s lives were about to change completely. In just about seconds, something would happen that would make up for everything that had ever happened in the past to them both. No, the blonde girl sitting across the room is not going to acknowledge Kuja’s existence, rather the door is going to be kicked off its hinges, right about now.
The door ended its current existence as the thing that kept the cold air out and experienced the joys of flying, followed by the interesting feeling of breaking a man’s face. The low mumbling of those inside stopped and everyone turned to look at the now empty door frame. Stepping through were two men, one of above average height with purity seals stuck to his carapace armour, the other a veritable giant with an equally large pole, the round head crackling with electricity.
The man with the purity seals lowered his drum-fed boltgun and tracked it across the room, making people cower away. It was an awful lot of firepower he had in his hands, and was capable of turning everyone in the room into a thin red paste.
“On your feet maggots!” he shouted with a voice trained by years of service with the Imperial Guard “You’re being press-ganged!”
And it wasn’t just them. All around the spaceport heavily armed men were rounding up the able-bodied in their hundreds. Those that resisted were beaten up, then shot, just for good measure.
*
Commissar Fgalkin smoothed back his thick, dark hair again before at last placing his high peaked cap upon his head. He turned his body so that the artificial lighting would catch the burnished bronze Aquila and his polished silver skull-buttons and make them glimmer. His bolt pistol sat neatly in his newly oiled holster, the hilt of his fine power sword glittered with gold and expensive gems. He grinned.
“Yes comrade, you are designed to intimidate.” He said, turning about to face the captain clad in all his finery and expensive equipment.
“Are you ready yet Fgalkin?” asked the captain, his voice dripping with sarcasm “It isn’t as if you haven’t spent the last hour and a half getting ready.”
Fgalkin simply laughed dangerously and expansively “One must look as powerful as possible when meeting the new conscripts. This uniform was tailored to be as impressive as it is possible, as frightening as an uniform can be.” He tossed his hands apart “Besides, can’t a man look his best?” he brushed off one of his epaulets with short flicking movements of his fingers.
The captain, Duran Richarts removed his chin from his palm and rotated his head to look at the black coated ex-officer. He got out of his chair and rolled his shoulders experimentally. “Let’s go then.”
Gathering before the bloated bulk of Captain Richarts’ overly-armed guncutter were dozens, if not hundreds, of men and women, all driven into line by carapace armoured humans and an ogryn wearing a powerfist which looked like it had been taken from a Space Marine Dreadnaught. Not that he needed it of course; the abhuman had wrist thicker than most people thighs.
“Well, this is appropriate.” Danest said cheerily, bouncing from one foot to the other. Kuja sighed, gathering his cloaks about him more tightly. “To be press-ganged into service, this was just what we were after!”
“No Danest.” Kuja sighed again, affixing his goggles more comfortably on his face “We did not want to become conscripts. We wanted to get hired, so that we could get paid for service.” But Danest Jek was not listening, and was instead wringing his over-large hands in excitement. Kuja tugged at his bottom lip as a pair of important looking men approached, one practically marching, the other swaggering in a way that seemed vaguely familiar to him.
“Oh Throne, this is a Rogue Trader recruitment drive.” Kuja moaned, slapping his forehead.
“So, Sergeant Albrecht.” Said Fgalkin, addressing the armoured and scared man with a bionic leg, “How do these recruits look to you?”
“Emperor Forsaken, Comrade Fgalkin. Useless for the most part.”
The Commissar’s eye twitched imperceptibly and he nodded, hiking his hand up into the captain’s face before Richarts’ face before he could speak “This is fine. There are a lot of people here. I’m sure we can make use of at least a couple of them, and lobotomise the rest for Servitors.” Fgalkin crossed his arms and nodded, his eyes closed. He stepped forward, and his Schola Progenium trained voice roared “You are all prospective recruits for the good ship Integral. We’re looking to hire new blood into the company, and you’ve all been chosen for the selection process.”
Kuja looked up. It wasn’t just plain and ordinary conscription. There was more to it than that.
“If you have skills,” continued the Commissar, marching before them “Then we’ll hire you, and you will make an awful, awful lot of money. You will get the chance to travel the galaxy, meet interesting creatures, exploit the, then kill them. If you don’t, then we’ll simply use you as servitors.” As he spoke Richarts’ soldiers raised their weapons in a manner that suggested very probable pain. “So, does anyone have any useful skills?”
Even as his mouth was still moving, Kuja stuck his hand up and shouted “I’m a Psyker sir!”
Fgalkin looked over at the captain, who was chewing on one of his fingernails “We haven’t a Psyker for some time that wasn’t wired into the ship or cost us a lot of money. Take him away Mister Fgalkin.” In response he clicked his fingers and one of the soldiers stepped and grabbed Kuja, leading him forward towards what he assumed was the Integral.
“Right, well, I’m bored with this. Let’s just servitor them and be done with it.” Richarts yawned, tugging at his cuff “I have deals to make. Mister Fgalkin, you deal with the recruits.” With that he swept away, a cadre of armoured men falling into step, including the ogryn. Danest watched the captain walking away, and the soldiers rounding people up with prods from shock mauls. He began to panic; his brain was to good to be lobotomised, so he shouted out to Kuja:
“You just can’t leave me here! Help me!”
Kuja twisted in the iron grip of the man with the giant shock pole and looked back at the pitiful picture that Danest made. He faced the Commissar and frowned “Does he have to be made into a monotask?” he asked “He’s actually quite smart. Reads a lot of books.” The giant paused, let go of Kuja, and tapped his nose.
“Smart doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be useful as a grunt in a Rogue Trader’s company. Smart is for the staff.” Fgalkin turned away but the giant coughed and caught his attention again. He passed his staff to Kuja and made a series of hand gestures. Fgalkin rolled his eyes “Fine. Manesero, take the other one, if it pleases you.” The Commissar called out to one of the men controlling the sweating crowd of soon-to-be-servitors, and had them drag Danest over. He smiled at Kuja and Kuja replied simply with frown.
“You don’t know how much you owe me.” He muttered as Manesero dragged them towards the ship.
).
