Editing Nobledark Imperium Writing (section)

== Lynn Mywin Goes on Holiday ==

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This one time me and my friends got sent down to this prospecting site on some desolate rock, didn't even have goddamn name 'cept for the AdMech number code; AF-743 and then some long voxcall number of a designation. Locals were calling it Goodig or Gooddig or Godig or some shit. Exact name depended on whose low-gothic language you filtered it through and whose alphabet you tried to stamp it out in. Not that it mattered none, this was an unofficial name for a settlement classed as provincial at best. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of money to be made in planetary prospecting. The problem is there's a lot of risk because you're so far from anywhere that matters by the time anyone's realized somethings wrong it's already over bar the after incident investigation. That's where me and my friends came in. We were, on the official records at least, working for Inquisitor Abernaky. Not that we ever met him more than once in our time in his employ, he was just the name we sent the reports to and received orders and pay from.

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So anyway me and my friends, four of us besides myself, Henders, Jeffer, Toburt and Cooper. I think. Pretty sure Cooper was there. It was either Cooper or Carter. They were both Kriegers I worked with and they both had no names when we met but I'm pretty sure it was Cooper. Either way Carter didn't much like me for obvious reasons. Cooper, sorry. Both of them in fact didn't like eldar but it was Cooper on this mission.

So anyway we land the shuttle on an uncovered granite slab that did as the small craft landing platform for the settlement with the com-hub, on the subject of which we'd been given the silent treatment since we landed in the system bar the automated blips and pings. Toburt and the servitor piolet Ethan, one of the high class ones made from a brain damaged child, were told to stay with the boat. First rule when you work for the fucking Inquisition; always make sure you can run away when shit goes wrong. And it will always go wrong eventually. To cover ground we split up into two teams Henders and Cooper go to check out the communications tower and men and Jeffers head out to the Admin-bunker. Splitting up is risky but what ever had taken out an entire settlement of burley armed miners wouldn't have been stopped by four laser rifles, we needed speed and we needed quiet and then we needed to leave and we all knew it. Why only a five soldiers and a servitor you might ask? Because the Inquisition was spread pretty thin in that sub-sector and we genuinely couldn't spare anyone else for such an unimportant anomaly, HQ were still holding out hope that the astropath had had a heart attack and the warp-weather was just causing shipping delays. It was on the road into town that we saw our first body. We hadn't found any corpses in the starport itself. Blood stains aplenty but no actual bodily remains beyond that. Or at least we found half a body, someone's space suited ass and legs in the middle of the road, call us dense for going in but it was our job and we were payed very well.

Anyway we get to the walls of the settlement and it's as you'd expect, all ramshackle shit made from old cargo crates and air-cyclers rigged from old space suits. Atmospheric pressure wasn't a problem on Godig but it wasn't something you'd like to suck on. It was a fucking slaughterhouse, never saw a complete body in all the time we were there and by the looks of it they'd been taken apart by claws and teeth of something big and powerful. We've all got cameras on our helmets and are sending this all back to the boat to be stored in the blackbox as per protocol, no use in the data being lost if we were to die. I thought I'd seen something in the corner of my eye a few times but chalked it up to nerves until Toburt and Ethen confirmed that they were getting it over the pict-feed as well. There was something here with us that had a hell of a turn of speed.

Me and Jeffers make it to the Admin building. Only building in the settlement that looked like it had been built rather than thrown together. We find some shotguns near the door and a lot of blood, the weapons are loaded and there are expended cases on the floor, someone put up a fight here and it did them no good. Jeffers starts scavving their shells because he's an underhiver and that's what they do when Toburt tells us he's been going through the pict-recordings trying to figure out what the fuck that thing was but it was moving so fast and was so far way that "pretty fucking big, probably quadruped and pink" is about the best he can do.

Henders and Cooper by this point have gotten to the com-tower and then their cameras go blank, this wasn't immediately obvious because the tower was without power so it was pretty dark in there anyway and Toburt wouldn't have spotted it but for Ethan looking over his shoulder, he was too busy going through the pict record looking for the mystery creature and only had one set of eyeballs.

We're wandering into the entry hall of the Admin site whose lights still are on, thank the gods, with Jeffers walking backwards to make sure we aren't followed. Needless to say we've both got out weapons drawn and ready. It was pretty fucking obvious at this point that we weren't here to rescue survivors, now we just had to get the record box and com-logs, stick a quarantine marker in orbit and wait for a real inspection and cleaning effort at some undisclosed point in the future.

Cooper's camera has come back on and he claims to be fine. He says that he and Toburt fell through a weak part of the floor into the cellar and he can't find Toburt. His voice sounded oddly flat but a combination of the place freaking us out a little and Cooper being a Krieger and therefore always sounding a little like that and I wasn't paying as much attention to it as maybe I should. Fuck off, you weren't there. Toburt tells us that Cooper is moving again and it wasn't until days late wen I was looking through the records that the bleeding glaring oddness in terms of gait and camera height were evident. I'm inclined to cut Toburt some slack on not picking up on it as he'd just heard something land on the Boat roof and the external cameras had just gone down. I order him not to open the door unless he's got visual confirmation that it's one of us.

Me and Jeffers head slowly and quietly to the Admin Overseer's office. The building was pretty typical of it's kind. Coat room and entry way, big open hall for meetings and posh dinners, two ground floor wings left and right, swooping broad stair case pair on either side of the main hall up to a balcony, upper wings left and right, kitchens ground floor between the stair cases main office above the kitchens on the upper floor between the stair cases, under the stair cases two less impressive stairways to the cellar storage rooms. It's a basic design copied thousands of times without variation from one end of the galaxy to the other with the only variation being building material. It's probably the AdAdmin trying to make some statement about everywhere being equally part of the Imperium or some shit. In any case it made finding the records, the settlement blackbox was predictably under the Overseer's desk. About 40kg of lead-lined solid state storage crystal in a box designed to survive everything up to direct nuclear strike. It was also bright orange with blue stripes so why the fuck everyone calls this thing a blackbox is a fucking mystery to me. Anyway Jeffers crouches behind the desk with his weapon lined up with the door ready to blat anything more unexpected than dost motes between the eyes whist I root around under the desk trying to pull this bastard thing out of the recess in the floor, empty some of my gear into Jeffers's bag and somehow fit a size five brick into a size four hole.

It was that this point with us both crouched behind the Overseer's desk that we hear a tinkling sound from the main hall. We'd both seen the big chandelier on the way in, far too big for a building this size and fuck knows how something that should be in an opera house ended up in a provincial mining settlement but when your on the job it's not time to offer criticisms of interior decorating. In any case we can both see part of the Chandelier from the doorway and what we can see is moving as if it had just been pushed or moved by something heavy. In retrospect, because retrospect is a merciless bastard with no eyelids, we should have looked up a bit more when we came in.

I've got the fucking thing in my pack by now and fuck the rest of the shit we're leaving behind, just nutri-bars for the most part and it really is time to leave. Cooper isn't moving according to Toburt and Henders hasn't been seen or made contact with again yet. I try contacting Cooper with the com-bead asking him what's going on and he tells me that he's watching. I ask him what he's watching and there's no answer. With Cooper that could mean he's being quiet because he thinks he's being watched, he hasn't heard, he doesn't have an answer or he's deliberately being an ignorant little cunt. I order him to get back to the boat because it's time to get the fuck out and still nothing. Toburt tells me that his camera is still pointed over the settlement from the watch tower but is completely still which either means that he's stopped breathing or he's propped his helmet in a window and left it there. I ask him what he's doing again and he tells me again that he's watching. That when the oddness starts to get past a certain threshold and I know it's not just Cooper being Cooper. The phrasing and enunciation of each word was absolutely the same, parroted as if by a recording. I switched off the comm-bead and told as much to Jeffers and hoped to high heavens that Toburt was paying attention when I told him not to open the boat door without seeing us first.

I make a decision that probably save out lives. We aren't going out through the front door. There's something in the main hall waiting for us and Cooper either isn't Cooper or has been compromised somehow. As quietly as we can we drop out of the back window onto the sloped kitchen roof, Jeffers going first and me watching the door before following him. Just as I was climbing through I would swear that I heard the chandelier tinkle again.

We slip down the roof of the kitchen into a narrow gap between the Admin building and some sort of hab-block seemingly assembled by accident and very quickly but as quiet as we can quickly manage get back to the street and start weaving our way back to the borders of town along a street plan that seemed without a plan. We were going in the right direction, I think, but had to abruptly stop. I'd just seen something big and pink briefly on the roof of one of the buildings ahead of us, a glint of eye and then vanishing back under the lip of the roof.

Jeffers had apparently also seen it as he was already hiding behind a refuse bin without prompting. I don't know if it saw us but I did know we weren't going that way, not on foot at least. We decided that if these things, whatever the fuck they were, were stalking the settlement we would be found eventually and almost certainly had been discovered already given that one was waiting for us in the Admin building. They must have at least some degree of intelligence as they had encountered weapons before and were possibly wary of us because we were armed. If anything they were keeping their distance until an opportune moment presented itself.

We hadn't fully appreciated that they were a damn site more clever than that and we hadn't stopped to ask how they had gotten here in the first place, there wasn't any native life on this planet when the prospectors arrived and never had been. Point is that they weren't stalking us so much as herding us I think.

We zigzagged through the many winding back allies of the settlement, fearful to entre open streets and fearful to enter enclosed buildings. The track to the starport landing area was rutted with the marks of large transport vehicles the prospectors used to move their mined goods for transport off-world, we figured that getting one of those and getting the fuck out was the greatest likelihood of survival considering that because of the shitty atmosphere they would have an enclosed cab and the big stretch of open ground between town and the landing site.

We kept moving, Toburt said that he hadn't seen any movement from Cooper yet and repeated attempts to contact him had failed to get a response. We hadn't told Toburt or Ethan about Cooper, we couldn't be sure that what had taken his place couldn't use a com-bead and we had no intention of confirming for it that we knew he wasn't him.

We found the garages by following alleyways running parallel to the main through road, a less than pleasant task as the locals all knew where everything had been and saw no reason to invest in signposts. Jeffers went into the building first having arrived slightly before me thanks to the weight of the blackbox. The garage was just a big undercover area with a couple of big doors, a smaller door for pedestrians and a small brick shed at the other end built into the wall to a height of two floors, presumably housing a wash room and a cafeteria for the drivers topped by an office of some sort with a big glass window. There was movement in there, light and shadow against the ceiling inside the room but not looking out of the window. We scurried like frightened rats to the building, to get into the shadow of it as it was the only hope of getting close without being seen and we knew we had to get into that office, that's where the keys were kept and neither of us were confident we could hotwire one of these things without tripping a security measure.

As we climbed the narrow and somewhat rickety staircase up to the office we heard Toburt over the com try and contact Cooper for about the twentieth time, this time getting a response. He said that he was still watching from the tower but we heard the voice coming from behind the door to the office echoed with the briefest delay over the com. Jeffers had gone pretty pale and was raising his weapon, I could never tell if he was angry or afraid or if, Jeffers being Jeffers, there wasn't a difference. I raised my own, kicked the door so hard the frame came out of the wall and rolled as Jeffers sent a stream of ultraviolet laser fire hissing over my head into the creature that spoke with Cooper's voice. The scream it let out I swear made me feel like my ears and brain were bleeding and didn't stop until I'd sprayed it's head for a second with full-auto, draining an entire energy pack in the process.

Taking a closer look at them and they were ugly fuckers. Looked a bit like a hairless cat with a touch of lizard and a rat tail at least seven but probably closer to eight foot long nose to arse. I'd never seen anything like it before or since in my years in the Inquisition and I've seen plenty of weird and wonderful shit. It had been holding about half of Cooper's head and tapping the com-bead when it wanted to speak. I don't know how good it's grasp on High-Gothic was, couldn't tell you for sure if it know what it was saying or just parroting prey sounds to lure in food. I suspected the former as it seemed to have a grasp of technology above that of a mere clever animal. In either case we absolutely had to get the fuck out of the place and fast. I don't know how loud it screamed, if the pain was partly because of the volume or entirely due to frequency but I was pretty certain that others would be coming here and quickly. Jeffers grabbed a likely looking bunch of keys hanging on a hook near the door and darted down the stairs, he threw me the keys once we were on the main floor and went to slap the door button. As I was climbing into the drivers side door I heard a muffled scream and looked round to see Jeffers being held by one of the creatures, standing on it's hind legs, clawed hands digging into Jeffer's shoulder and under his left arm, lifting him up to its mouth time slowed by the horror of it Jeffers trying to reach his knife with his good arm, the creature licking the side of his head and grinning a mile full of needle teeth and I swear to the gods it was grinning. Jeffers couldn't reach his knife and he looked at me with pleading eyes filled with pain. My aim was dreadfully true, the first beam going through his head and the second and third and fourth going into the creatures. It fell to the floor pawing at it's ruined face and ruptured eye sockets, dropping the corpse of what had been a good friend I'd known for fifteen years.

The Truck went over the creature without stopping, and went through the doors leaving a trail of twisted metal. The truck was powerful but not the fastest accelerating construction of the AdMech I'd ever driven, designed to move heavy loads with efficiency rather than haste. The creatures followed me half way out of town and there was another figure there, humanoid and big watching with them from the windows of the comm-tower, my helmet cam recording every moment of it.

I did make it to the Boat and for a heart wrenching moment I feared that it had fallen as I stood out in the clear waiting for the door to open, vulnerable and alone. But the door did open and Toburt was standing on the ramp, carapaced up and holding a weapon. Ethan was already taking off before the ramp had started to close. I'm pretty sure that we were allowed to leave, that they could have stopped me somehow if they had chosen to. Cooper's helmet was still recording when we climbed back into orbit to await collection and was continuing to record right up until it impacted the ground when someone pushed it out of the window. As it tumbled It for a brief moment pointed upwards into the face of the humanoid in the tower, looking over the edge of the window.

The brass up at HQ went through all the recordings when we got back. The ugly bastard in the tower was identified as Dr. Bile, a name that means sweet fuck all to you but is pretty fucking infamous to us. Still no idea what those creatures were beyond probably his latest pets.

We nuked the place from orbit when the ship arrived but I'm almost certain we didn't get Dr Bile, cunning old bastard wouldn't have operated so openly if there was even a hint that he was in any real danger.

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