Editing Story:ROAD TRIP! (Warhammer High)/Part Three (section)

===Tomorrow, the Weather Will Be Different===

Alex stomped up the ramp to his father’s shuttle, the Invisible Hand.  The ship was a massively modified Imperial Navy transport, all lines, angles, planes, and gilding.  Alex hated the damn thing.

A figure at the top of the ramp greeted him.  The man was drawn, skinny, and always looked a bit confused, but he was also nearly the only person on Carlin’s crew that Alex liked.  “Heeeey, kid, how’s life treating you?” he asked, lazily flicking some ash off of his cigar.

“It’s been a wild vacation, Big Al,” Alex admitted, shaking the much shorter man’s hand.  “Yours?”

“Man, it’s hot as hell up here,” Big Al said, puffing on the cigar, which Alex suspected the diminutive Astropath rolled himself.  “Radio says it’s something like forty C at the spaceport…but who lives at the spaceport?”

“You’re in the spaceport, Big Al,” Alex said.

“Oh, hey.”  The psyker blinked.  “Didn’t know.”

Alex sighed, his dark mood lifting.  “Where’s the old guy?”

“Which?  There’s around eight in there,” Big Al said lazily.  “Oh!  The really old one is waiting for you in the bar.”

“Great.  Thanks.”  Alex walked past him onto a carpet that had to be two inches deep.  He grimaced at the opulence of his surroundings.  Tasteless artwork of his own family, other famous Imperials, and a few notable politicians decorated the bulkheads of the ship as he marched through it.  He knew for a fact that they could be slid behind panels and new ones rotated to replace them.

The rugby player, in his thermoreflective clothing and dusty boots, couldn’t have looked less like the man waiting for him at the bar two decks up from the hatch.  Where Alex was muscled and thick, the man in the Rogue Trader’s gilding and exotic purple cloak was thin and tall.  Where Alex’s hair was a dark brown and straight, his father’s was dirty blond and wavy.  Alex shaved his facial hair like it was a personal grudge, and his father had a luxurious, pointed beard.

Still, the resemblance did cover one thing: the voice.  Alex and his father sounded so alike they were mistaken for each other on the vox, something that horrified Alex and delighted his father.  Kimball-Carlin had made his fortune as a trader of pre-Crusade antiquities and treasures of artifice.  Not weapons or technology, but trinkets and household goods.  The O’Neill clock on Horus Lupercal’s desk was a purchase from Kimball-Carlin.  He had sold ancient artifacts that had been nothing more than junk when they had been made to collectors across the breadth and span of the galaxy, turning his own father’s Writ of Trade into a trading empire.

Alex came to a halt at the bar.  “Hello, Dad,” he said.

“Hello, Alex.  Good to see you, kid,” Joseph said.  “How’s your vacation been?”

“As of two days ago, awful,” Alex said coldly.

“Yeah?  What happened?”

“My friend, Jake, got mauled in a bar fight,” Alex replied, glaring at the bar in which he they were standing.

Joseph cocked an eyebrow, his rough voice at odds with his appearance.  “That a fact?  That sucks.  Is he gonna be alright?”

“Eventually.”  Alex looked back at his father, trying to find the embers of resentment Big Al had tried to extinguish.  He wondered bitterly if his father had had the psyker he knew Alex liked be the one to greet him on purpose.  “What’s this I hear about generator problems on the Star?”

“We found some Diaspora-era animals in cryo-suspension and were hauling them to a Mechanicus facility on Gaviox for gene-sequencing,” Joseph explained.  “One slipped its tank and tried to nest in the generator’s wiring.”

“Anyone hurt?” Alex asked.

“Just the critter.”  Joseph sighed.  “Kiddo, I can hear the resentment coming off of you.”

“Dad, I SPECIFICALLY asked you not to come find us while we were on the road trip!” Alex exploded.  “And here you are!”

Joseph straightened up and glared up at his son.  “I can’t help when my cargo attacks my ship’s wiring!”

“Dad…you could have just stayed in Clymene and asked me to come see you!  But instead you came to the city you KNEW I was in, and called me to let me KNOW that you had, not even giving me a choice!  For a change,” Alex added darkly.