Editing The Radical Inquisitor (section)

== Chapter 3 ==

Rillean rubbed his eyes of the dust that collected after so many hours being closed, constantly guiding the ''Vox Luna'' towards its destination. His third warp-eye was completely open, and had been for week-and-a-half of their journey through the warp, constantly scanning the swirling  depths of the maelstrom of the warp, with the Astronomicon as his only soldity. As a Navigator, he was the only one able to look out into the warp - the others in his chamber, his serfs who helped take care of him by bringing him food and drink or help him the other necessities of living, were all blind. It was a necessity, otherwise they would lose their minds if they ever looked out into the purified ocean of emotion and thought.

He hadn't seen any of his serfs for around an hour now, and he guessed that they would come back soon. They were supposed to be with him at all times, but he didn't mind - he liked being alone, doing the job he had been given since his birth.

At that point, his third eye spotted something in the midst of the madness; a somewhat stiller part of the warp, which was a rather solid area of colour. Curiosity drove him to peer at it, trying to focus on it, and it was then he realized that it was getting larger. At first, it was merely the size of his nail on his little finger - now, half a minute after spotting it, it was the size of his thumb print. Trying to ignore it, he continued to guide the ship through the warp, trying to forget the strange thing in the warp - he did for ten minutes.

When he remembered, he gave the anomaly a quick glance, and almost leaped out of his seat. in the space of ten minutes, the block of colour had grown to the size of a small ship, and he realized that it was coming alongside the ''Vox Luna''. With a curse, he pressed his finger into the keypad on the arm of his navigation throne, and said to the other person on the other end of the comms unit, "Get me the Captain."

----

Yret and Dres were nervous. That was not a commonality - most of the time they tinkered and built machinery with ease and gusto, but the object they had been tasked with looking over while it was cut open made them feel butterflies in their modified half-metal stomachs. The cut was reaching almost halfway down the sides of the sphere, and the radiation that they had found had been increasing since, though they did not feel any negative effects from exposure.

That by itself proved that something was wrong.

"Sister."

"Yes?"

"What happens if there is something in there that is a threat? What exactly would we do?"

Yret thought for a moment. If indeed there was something inside the object that was a danger to the ship and its crew, what could they do? They could stop now and toss the thing out into the void, leaving it in the endless expanses of the space between systems, but they could be quite literally throwing away an opportunity of a lifetime, even their own greatly extended lifetimes. But the the chance, however slim, that the object could be holding something dangerous and even life threatening, was present. Then she remembered the opportunities afforded to them from Quintus's involvement during the time they were branded hereteks, and decided. 

"If there is something present in the object that is dangerous, then the servitors may be able to hold it off for a few seconds. I wouldn't bet for much longer than that though - if someone trapped something in an almost indestructible prison, then whatever was caught must be inherently terrible indeed. The time afforded to us by the servitors will be used by us to open the air locks and vent this room, ejecting ourselves and the threat from the ship."

Dres's seven eyes looked at her for a moment, and then he smiled. "Sacrifice our lives for the one who saved them. If I was more of a philosopher there would be a moral in there somewhere. Well, we may as well try to get as much of our project as done as possible before we crack that thing open." And with that, he turned and walked off to the machine they had been working on, the mass of metal and cables looking as incomplete as ever.

Yret smiled to herself while her brother worked. He had thought of  the same plan as she had - maybe twins really are connected in mind. She followed her brother to the machine, servo- arms unfolding and tools warming up as she went to work in the Omnissiah's name.

----

"Calm down Navigator Rillean, and tell me what you see," Stronti said, some of the serfs watching and stopping their work before he glared at them, setting them back on their pace.

"There is an area of stillness approaching the ship. I'm not sure what it is, I haven"t been in service for many years and am still young, but my best guess is, well..."

"Spit it out lad, come on!" Urged Stronti. He hadn't become the Captain of an Inquisitor's ship from ignoring potential threats.

"A ship, sir," stammered the nervous Navigator. "I believe I see a ship approaching the ''Vox Luna'' in warp space."

Stronti was quiet for a second, then let out a breath, and then he entered his mindset when he was preparing for comabat.

"All right! Battle stations, Battle stations!" he roared, setting the serfs running around at an even faster pace, while servitors currently offline suddenly started to rapidly tap on the keys in front of the, with metal tines, powering up the shields and causing alarms all over the vessel to suddenly start blaring, waking up the crewmen and gangs who lived and worked in the belly of the ship, who then ran around to their stations all over the ship, whether it be manning the cannons or getting ready to keep the ship running in case of damage.

"Prepare to exit warp space! I don't know who or what is following us, but they haven't contacted us and they are approaching. I don't know if they're fools or are insane, but their is no way I'm letting this ship be boarded when it is in the actual stuff of nightmares!"

Serfs were yelling at each other while they ran around, some of them manning the few consoles without servitors while others talked rapidly into vox-units to other crewmen all over the ship. Almost growling in his seat, Stronti pushed a rune on the arm of his throne.

"Inquisitor?" he said into the vox built into his seat with a deep growl behind his voice.

"Yes, captain? Also, why can I hear alarms?" came the reply, with a note of confusion as to the tone of his subordinate.

"Sorry for the tone, but I believe we may be coming under attack soon," he said, and immediately the tone of Quintus changed.

"I was wondering why they were blaring. Any idea as to who the opposition is or their strength?"

"No, m'lord," replied Stronti. "All we know is that they are nearing us in warp space."

"What! Are they insane? Who the hell would risk complete exposure to the warp?"

"No idea, but that's what they are doing. I'm bringing us out of the warp in order to keep us alive should they get through the hull."

"Good idea captain. As soon as we are out of the warp, prepare the warp drives. I want to get back in so we can try to avoid them and put a gap between us."

"Yes, m'lord. I would suggest to prepare for defending the ship though."

"Naturally, captain. I'll see you on the bridge soon."

"Yes, m'lord."

The transmission cut off, and Stronti was left biting his knuckle while the serfs scrambled around the bridge. He then yelled for a drink, and waited for the Inquisitor to arrive.

----

"WHY THE FUCK IS SHIT NOT HAPPENING!" whispered the Angry Marine, casually venting his frustration on another marine by smacking him in the face with his power bat. The other marine then yelled and they were suddenly in an all-out brawl with one another, power feet kicking between legs, slaps going across faceplates, the usual.

"HOLD UP FUCKSHITS I'VE GOT THIS, JUST CHILL THE FUCK OUT YOU CUNTDICKS!" responded the Techmarine piloting the Angry Marine battle barge, the ''FUCKNUTTER''. Somewhere ahead of them was the Inquisitorial vessel, powering ahead in the warp while the battle barge slowly caught up. Then, they would drag it out of the warp and board it, along with their allies also on board their ship. Some of them were actually in the bridge of the ''FUCKNUTTER'' with the angry marines, their armour painted in the dull grey metal of ship hulls to camouflage them. They didn't necessarily get along with the Angry Marines (by which one group hated working with the other, while the other completely hates the original group to the core) but they worked together for this very important mission.

"Ah, Temperus, good to see you well. How goes the mission?" said Zakis Randi, Chapter Master of the Knights Inductor. He wore his artificer armour in the same camouflage as his men, and he carried his pair of master crafted shock-mauls over his shoulders and on his back. On his thigh was his bolter, loaded with special non-lethal flash rounds to disorient the enemy so they can get in reach with their shock-weaponry to capture the enemy forces. He had other equipment on his person, including a cloaking device and scramblers to make it even more difficult for e enemy to locate him and his men.

Contrastingly, Temperus Maximus, Chapter Master of the Angry Marines, wore his distinctive yellow and red Artificer Terminator armour, with a chai fist on each arm, and an assault cannon on each individual chainfist, making him more of a fortress than some Terminator squads. He had his distinctive adamantium cigar clenched in his teeth, still smoking even after days of smoking without stopping. Everyone on the ship knew however, that the most dangerous part of the Chapter Master wasn't his equipment, oh no.

It was the untold amounts of sheer, pure rage which he could barely control on a good day.

"THE PLANS TAKING FUCKING FOREVER YOU WHIMSY SHITBAG," said the Chapter Master, turning to the view screen which had the positions of the two vessels - the stylised 'I' of the Inquisition marking out the ship they were pursuing, while an angry face marked out their current position.

Zakis sighed - working with the Angry Marines, brother chapter or not, was tiring in the extreme, and even his great patience and diplomatic skills weeper being out to their limit.

"I see we are catching up to our quarry," he said, trying to start some kind of conversation with the hulking pot of fury next to him.

"I CAN SEE THAT DIPSHIT," he responded, without even glancing at the man he was working with.

Zakis sighed again - it was going to be another long day.

"TECHFAG, WHATS UP WITH THE SHIT - WHEN DO WE PULL THESE DICKS OUT OF THIS SHITSTORM TO WHERE WE CAN SMACK THE FUCKS UPSIDE THEIR FUCKING HEADS?"

"CHILL FUCKTARD - IT TAKES TIME TO SORT OUT SCIENCE SHIT, SO QUIT YOUR BITCHING AND LET ME WORK," came the reply from the tech marine, who was currently waist deep in a console, swearing profusely and slapping something fleshy off the sides of the workings of the machine.

"WAIT - WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?" said the techmarine, looking at the view screen. The stylised 'I' was gone.

"WHERE THE FUCK DID THEY GO?"

----

The ''Vox Luna'' played a game of cat and mouse with their pursuers, who they still did not know the identity of, in order to try and reach Imperial forces in time and to buy more time for the techpriests working on the object they found. Every time the Angry Marines ship caught up to them in warp space, they slipped out of the Immaterium in the endless expanses of the darkness around the thousands of systems that littered the Galaxy, setting up a new heading and re-entering the warp just when the Angry Marines entered realspace, a process which they found extremely frustrating and caused them to bash up their battle barge a fair bit, an occurrence which abruptly ended when their Techmarines demanded that the pissed off soldiers 'QUIT THEIR SHIT', and leave the ship alone.

The presence of the Knights Inductor however, meant that plans were quickly produced and put into effect, which would come into play very shortly and should, eloquently put by an Angry Marine during the debriefing, allow them to 'CATCH THE FUCKS'.

----

The plasma-cutters were almost completely through the metallic surface of the object, a prospect which frightened and excited Dres and Yret. It excited them as they would finally be able to see what was inside the thing that had burst into realspace, but it frightened them as their imaginations had time to come up with various possible scenarios. There was only a few millimetres of metal let for the plasma-cutters to go through, yet the metal still refused to budge.

It had taken maybe three weeks for them to reach that point, and they were tired and so very desperate and nervous to see what lay inside the metal sphere.

Suddenly, with a creak and then a clatter, the four quarters of the sphere fell off the object, falling to the deck floor. They stood stock still, and then slowly the truth dawned on them like an ugly snake rearing its head and lashing out.

The object had several layers of the tough metal surrounding it.

"Well, at least the radiation has gone," said Dres, who had looked over at the sensor. The readout had indeed stopped going crazy, and it had died down to the same content green as the rest of the panels readouts.

"I wonder why," Yret said, then wandered over to the metal quarters on the floor. She noticed a pattern on the inner side of the surface - a crazy connection of tiny crystalline wires and bits of metal, each one connected to another. She noticed how they were sheared through entirely by the plasma-cutters, and that they were tiny orbs of glass nestled amongst the wiring, and she had an idea. She got one of the sections of metal and brought it to a worktable. She then connected several power cables to some of the crystal wires, and passed a current through them. The glass orbs lit up, and the sensor started spiking again, red figures appearing again.

Her hunch was right - the workings on the inner side of the objects surface produced some sort of fake radiation, a kind of deterrent to stop people from cutting into the object. Whoever made the object wanted it to contain whatever it held for as long as possible.

With a grin, she looked over to her brother, who was holding a section of metal in his hands .

"Dres!" she yelled, and at his name her brother turned to her. "Whatever is inside was meant to remain there by whoever made the object. Let's kick this up a notch, shall we?"

Her brother returned the grin, and said "All right. But we need something new, don't we?"

They then spent the next several hours digging around their workshop, putting together some kind of cutting decide with more oomph than the plasma-cutters, who had finally overheated from their three week long session of use. In the hurried hours of work, they created a new tool for cutting open extremely tough materials - like the object. What they made was essentially, a continuous melta gun. It generated a continuous blast of superheated air which covered an area of roughly a centimetre. While it was cooler than an ordinary meltagun, the constant heat meant that it was perfect for burning through substances. It was mounted on a mechanical arm, and the power supply came directly from the ship's plasma generators. It was a bit mish-mash, but it worked.

When they finished, they looked over the object. It was around two metres in diameter, and they had set it up in a kind of harness that left it hanging off the floor, so the melta tool could easily cut open a small circular section from one end of the object. There were probably several more layers of the dense material, and so it would be best if they could get the new tool working as soon as possible. With their plan laid out, they decided to create a powerful coolant system for the tool to keep it working for as long as possible, and when they had done that, they retired to their beds where they slept for around 18 hours - when they woke the started working while they ate, determines too open up whatever the object was.

----

The ship exited the warp for the fourteenth time, the stuff of the warp dissipating from the ship as reality flowed across the hull. They were in some sort of frontier system - the few planets were orbiting a red giant, the nearest planets burned clean of life. It appeared that there was a mining world near the edge of the system, a grey-green dwarf planet with two moons.

"Report," said Stronti, looking over the serfs and servitors on the bridge of the ship.

"Warp drives are overheating - it will take several hours for them to be ready for warp space," said one serf, reading off of a readout from a cogitator.

"The Gellar field generators are also overheated, and are in need of repairs - apparently the metal has begun to melt and some parts are bent out of shape," said another.

"Armaments are ready for combat - void shields are up and the cannon batteries are loaded and ready to be fired. Crewmen are in their battle stations and ready to defend the ''Vox Luna'' from boarding parties.

"Right, then get the warp drives and Gellar field generators up and running again - I want to keep moving towards our destination, even if we travel all across the bloody Imperium!"

Just then, several thousand miles away from the craft, another ship breached realspace from the warp - a yellow and red battle barge, who had been following the Inquisitor and his retinue for some time now. Several minutes after entering realspace, the battle barge lowed towards the ''Vox Luna'', Thunderhawks and Boarding Torpedoes being loaded up to board the smaller craft - among them were two Chapter Masters and veterans from two old Chapters, a kind of force rarely ever seen, and one that is a very dangerous threat to any opposition, who in this case was an Inquisitor and his ship, alone in some empty system with only a small mining colony to fall back to, in the case they even survived the initial assault.

----

"Inquisitor! Quintus, pick up damn it!" said Stronti through the Vox, abandoning formalities in the face of immediate and extreme danger. 

"Stronti!" replied Quintus. "What the hell is going on?"

"The enemy caught up with us. They are already approaching the ship, and the long-range scopes can see fighter bays open and ready to launch boarding craft."

"Damn it! Any idea who they are, captain?"

"From the looks of it, Astartes."

"What?"

"Space Marines, Inquisitor. We are being attacked by Space Marines, and not the Traitor kind either."

"That just doesn't make sense." Quintus paused for a moment. "They aren't the Blood Ravens, are they?"

"No, it seems to be an Angry Marine battle barge, Lord."

"Oh. I'd expect the Blood Ravens might attack to get the object we found, the magpies, but I wouldn't expect Angry Marines to be interested in something like that. Anyway, prepare for an extremely violent boarding action, and tell the Infirmary to prepare for wounded. If it's the Angry Marines, a lot of people will get hurt."

"Yes, sir," said Stronti, before he cut the transmission. Quintus left his quarters, bringing his weaponry with him. He was joined by Jannos and Veryn outside his room, both of them with their own equipment.

"Where we going, boss?" asked Veryn, who was to Quintus's right, not using proper formalities as usual, but Quintus had grown used to it, and to be honest, he liked having someone who was different from the general rabble of straight shirted and seemingly emotionless people who were very where in the upper levels of command or politics.

"To the bridge," Quintus responded, checking that his laspistol had a full charge, and then making sure that his sword was working as it should. "Are your men ready, Veryn?"

"Guns loaded and in position, boss," he replied, hefting his modified hot-shot lasgun over one shoulder, his helmet on his belt. Quintus noticed that he was wearing a large power pack on his back - Veryn usually carried extra las charges to make up for the increased energy consumoption of his weapon, but in cases where firepower was more important than mobility, he carried the power pack, and Quintus agreed that this was definitely a situation where firepower was more welcome.

"Jannos, how are your men doing?" asked Quintus, looking towards Jannos walking to his left. She had her high peaked cap and chainsword on, but she was wearing body armour rather than the usual plain uniform she wore.

"Ready to repel boarders, my lord," she responded, putting an emphasis on the 'my lord'. It was directed towards Veryn, who she thought would appear more professional if he used proper titles, but Quintus knew they were good friends, and that it was more of a joke between them than actual criticism.

"Good. Let's get to the bridge, and wait for the attack."

----

The bridge was quieter than usual, with the serfs only talking to one another rather than yelling and screaming to perform the tasks of running the ship. The air was full of tension, waiting for the enemy ship to launch some kind of offensive at them, waiting for an excuse to release the bunched up stress of running from the same enemies for several weeks in good, open combat. That was when the enemy ship let fly with a salvo of six Boarding Torpedoes and three Thunderhawk gunships.

"Open fire! Keep them off our hull!" roared Stronti, with the serfs bursting into action, speaking rapidly into vox units to others over the ship, relaying orders to the gun crews that were already aiming at the incoming craft.

The Thunderhawks were dangerous in that they could take out the small guns across the hull if they got past the Void shield, or they could land troops directly on the deck and crack the hull open, exposing areas of the vessel to the hard void. The Boarding Torpedoes, however, could burrow several decks into the ship, and disgorge a squad of Marines directly into the inner workings of the ''Vox Luna'', an event which would both endanger the crew and the ship at once.

The small guns opened fire, sending streams of munitions into empty space at the incoming craft. Most of it missed, but the few rounds that did connect merely spattered of the heavy armour of the spacecraft. The Boarding Torpedoes were much faster than the Thunderhawks, silently screaming towards the ship.

"Brace for impact!" a serf yelled, and a split second later six impacts rocked the ship, followed by a deep groan as the Torpedoes plowed through the ship.

The ''Vox Luna'', was now boarded by a force of Space Marines.

----

"THOSE FUCKWIT FAGTARDS!" yelled the Angry Marine sergeant looking through a porthole at the drop pods leaving the battle barge. "ILL RIP THEM A NEW ONE AND FUCK IT MYSELF, THOSE SHITBAG CUMJUNKIES!"

Those assholish Knights had done one of the many things to piss them off, but they had done one of the things which the angry Marines considered taboo - among these things was messing around with their tacos, cockblocking a playing battle brother, or similar things which could invoke the considerable wrath of a group of Angry Marines.

The Knights had deliberately sabotaged the Angry Marine Boarding Torpedoes and Thunderhawks, and they took the only functioning ones for themselves, stranding the Angry Marines on their battle barge while they got to do the boarding action. They had purposefully stopped the Angry Marines from assaulting their enemy, and we're doing it by themselves.

Needless to say, the Angry Marines were thoroughly pissed off at the Knights. But they knew the role they had to play, so they refrained from ramming the battle barge into the enemy ship. Instead, they prepared to give the Knights a light smacking upon their return to the ''FUCKNUTTER''. A smacking that would leave the Knights blue and bloody, with several gaping orifices over their body, but the Angry Marines were planning to hold back. It was their duty to complete their mission, and they would. But those fucktards definitely needed a smacking of some sorts - it was the price for denying the Angries a good scrap.

----

Zakis Randi got a chill down his spine that his plan would backfire horribly once it was completed - when he thought about it, he knew it was going to backfire, and when it did, it would probably involve the Angries beating the Knights and doing other (extremely bloody) things to them. He sighed, and tapped the rune by the portal of the Boarding Torpedo. The heavy door opened up, revealing the metal corridor the Torpedo stopped at. He dropped down onto the floor, his cloaking gear melding his form with the dark metal. He looked down both ends of the hallway as his honour guard dropped down beside him. They were all armed with shock-weaponry, and their bolters were loaded with the same kind of flash ammunition as their chapter master.

"Where too," asked one of them, his camo cloak billowing slightly in the faint wind flowing down the hallway.

"Bridge," he replied. "That's where the target probably is."

"Yes, lord," responded the Knight, he then looked down onto a data slate in his hand. "Down that way, lord," he said, gesturing towards one of the ends of the hallway they were in.

"Right - move out," Zakis said, and he started towards the junction ahead, his honour guard following.

They reached the junction, and immediately fell under hot-shot lasgun fire, red streaks flying through the air and sizzling against the armour of the Knights, burning off the camouflage and putting holes in their camo cloaks.

"Open fire!" Zakis voxed to his honour guard. "Confuse the foe! Blind them! Light up the night!" He roared, and as one they let fly with salvoes of the flash bolts, each one detonating in the air around the troopers, setting them yelling and firing everywhere. When they were suitably disoriented, Zakis mag-locked his bolter to his thigh, and charged, disconnecting his shock mauls. When he reached them, he began gently tapping and jabbing the troopers, sending them to the ground with nerve jerking jolts of electricity. When the troopers were completely subdued, arms tied behinds their backs to make sure they won't come after them when they woke up, they continued on their way.

They met several more groups of troopers, and they dealt with them in the same way, sudueing and handicapping them. Eventually, they reached a particularly dense force of troopers, behind makeshift barricades, pumping out fusillades of the hot red streaks towards them as they turned a corner. The troopers had set up in a wider hallway, with three other corridors entering into it. One of the halls had another force of Knights, pinned down as they took cover behind the bend in the hallway, occasionally sending out bursts of blinding flashes, but not enough to subdue the troopers there.

"Brothers, prepare for an assault," Zakis voxed to both his honour guard and the pinned Space Marines. He unhooked an object from his belt - a small canister with a pin on one end. It was a thing the Techmarines had been developing for some time - a new kind of grenade. Well, Zakis thought as he pulled the pin and tossed it into the midst of the troopers, here seems like a good place to test it.

What happened could have been described as magnificent.

The grenade had landed behind the second of the three rows of barricades, maybe a bit off to the left of where he would have wanted it. Nothing happened for a few seconds, but then the timer ran out and the grenade detonated. The canister blew up, sending small orbs across the barricades as well as producing a thick cloud of smoke. Then the orbs detonated, and released bright flashes and incredibly loud cracks and snaps across the defence opposing the Knights force. The resuit was that anyone caught in the blast radius of the grenade was faced with smoke so thick they couldn't see their hands in front of their face, bright flashes bursting out of the smoke abruptly and without warning, and the loud noises absolutely shredding their sense of balance. In addition to all that, the smoke also had a mix of various gases - among them was a numbing agent, a powerful knock-out gas, and a gas that temporarily blinds anyone who comes into contact with it. The effect was almost immediate - the fire smacking against the metal walls rapidly stopped, and the sounds of bodies hitting the floor resounded around the hallways and corridors.

"Well, that was effective," said a Knight through the Vox.

"Give my regards to the Techmarines," replied Zakis, who then stepped out from the corridor and walked towards the barricades. The troopers were lying everywhere, unconscious and harmless. The Knights then tied the troopers up, and then they went in front of the heavy blast doors behind the barricades.

"The bridge is behind this door?" Zakis asked to the Knight with the data slate.

"Yes, lord," responded the Space Marine.

"Let us breach, then" Zakis said, and the Space Marines attached a pair of melta bombs onto the door. They took cover behind some of the barricades, and a few seconds later a large ''whoosh-krump'' resounded around the room, and the blast doors and has been turned to rapidly calling slag, the thick metal sagging and bending out of shape.

"Light up the night!" roared Zakis, and the battle cry was taken up by his soldiers as they charged through the blisteringly hot portal produced by the melta bombs, bolters sending cracking bolts of light and shock weaponry fizzing in the air as they charged towards the soldiers arrayed before them on the deck of the bridge.

----

"Fire!"yelled Veryn, a pointless order as his men were already letting fly with their hot-shot lasguns, sending scorching lasers towards the enemy charging through the blast door breach.

The blast doors had melted away a few seconds earlier, and the enemy Space Marines had poured out of the breach just after, roaring battle cries. They fired strange rounds which went off in the midst of the soldiers in great bright flashes and cracks, sending the troopers reeling and hitting the floor as the world swirled around them. Quintus, Veryn, Jannos and Stronti were currently behing the barricade around Stronti's command seat, watching the first few rows of soldiers disappear amidst the flashes of light. They were firing their own weapons at the intruders, all except for Jannos, who waited patiently with her chainsword, named by her as ''His Teeth''.

Quintus fired off the entire cartridge in his modified pistol, sending pinpoint lasers towards the enemy charging at them. The lasers pierced their armour and went deep into them, but they kept on charging, firing off salvoes of their blinding ammunition.

"Boss, we can't win this!" Veryn said, sending off a few more blasts towards the foe.

"I know that," Quintus responded, slamming home a new cartridge. Veryn looked at him, and then grinned. "Right! Come on lads, lets give these rat-bastards a show!" With that, his men cheered, and then roughly half of the remaining troopers holstered their guns on their backs and drew long, thin and very sharp knives, and some also carried laspistols. Those men then counter charged, screaming obscenities at the foe in maybe their final act of defiance.

"Jannos," Quintus barked, getting the attention of the woman with her chainblade. "Prepare for close quarters. And Good Luck."

"You too, Inquisitor." She responded with a smile, and then she revved ''His Teeth'' so that it growled in anticipation of the combat to be had. Quintus then unsheathed his sword, and called up on his powers, feeling the faint whispers of the Warp in his mind. He ignored them, and using the witch-powers he had been cursed with, he summoned up power and sent it through his blade. Crackling lightning arced across its surface, and the scrollwork on the blade faintly glowed as the warp energy coursed through it.

Quintus was a Psyker, an Epsilon level. He wasn't the strongest Psyker, not by half, but he had significant control over his powers, which had been drilled into him by the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, and then by his superiors and peers in the Inquisition. His powers were quite strange in that they were not the most subtle, but he also lacked the sheer raw power that other unsubtle Psykers usually possessed. No, his powers were quite strange in that rather than confuse the foe or tear them apart, he could create ''things'' to fight with.

For example, at that moment he used his powers to summon up a pool of black ichor, which fell to the floor and pooled in front of him. Then, it began to writhe and twist, until finally a dozen or so ropy tentacles burst from the pool towards those charging at them, lancing forward while twisting around the troopers in front and around Quintus, whose eyes were blazing with Psychic fire. The tentacles slammed into the colossal forms charging at them, knocking them to their feet. The tentacles coiled around the bodies and dragged them about the place, using them as wrecking balls against their own.

More tentacles were bursting from the fluid, when the Space Marines were among them, jabbing and lashing out with fizzing weaponry which sent troopers to the ground in short spasms. The tentacles retracted and started doing a wispy but savage dance, smacking and slashing at the Astartes around Quintus. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jannos go down, her chainsword cutting out as her fingers fell away from the trigger. Fury filling him, he summoned up more power, creating more tentacles to lash out at the intruders on his ship, while he simultaneously cut and parried with his force sword, and firing point blank with his modified laspistol. He would go down fighting if it was the last thing he did.

Then he noticed something which confused him. The Space Marines he could see were not Angry Marines - they wore camouflage instead of the bold yellow and red, a fact which made him reach the conclusion that these were Knights Inductor, a fact which gave him one, blaring question - why had they not given negotiations and had instead immediately attacked at their first chance, and why the hell were they using an Angry Marine battle-barge.

However, the questions and thoughts racign around in his mind caused him to lose focus, and suddenly an extreme shock went racking through his body from his lower back. Grimacing, Quintus fell onto all fours, dropping his weaponry around him while his nerves fired spasmodically with the electric charge that raced through him. Looking up, he saw a figure in obviously well-made power armour, the quality of its craft obvious despite the camouflaged paint. The figure carried two shock-mauls, and was looking down at him, a helmet with dark eye lenses staring at him directly in the eyes. Quintus felt his powers retreating as he lost consciousness, and he fought on, trying to carve a foothold against the blackness trying to consume him, trying to stay awake.

He would have if the figure hadn't gently tapped him with a shock-maul, sending a fresh wave of electricity through Quintus, who clenched his teeth and then fell to the floor, unconscious like the rest of the crew aboard the ''Vox Luna'', now completely at the mercy of those who had been seeking them for several weeks for some unknown purpose.