[OW] Die Hards: Eleventh Hour

[Mazer Rackham]

Stimms:

 

Jupine looks at you, almost taken aback.  He searches your face for a moment before slapping his knee, an inane grin playing about his lips.  "Very good!  No, no, dear me.  Be a good batman and stick your head out of the hatch eh?  Don't want to get mine shot off by lousy Greenskins!"

 

Noting your hesitation, he leans forward and cups your shoulder with a comradely hand and a conspiratorial wink.  "Just pop your head out and tell them 'Sovreign Gambit.'

 

Something clatters to the floor from Jupine's right sleeve where he flung his arm out in grandiose dismissal of your proposal.

 

Its shape is hidden in the darkness of the chimera floor, but he doesn't go to retrieve it.

[Beren]

Something's wrong. Every instinct in his brain is screaming it. Something about this officer is too jovial, and the item in the corner...

 

It reminds him of himself.

 

Still, he doesn't have many options at the moment.

 

He attempts to mask his fears, giving a half-eager nod, before hesitantly sticking his head out the hatch. He tries to keep his words calm and measured, self assured.

 

"Sovreign Gambit."

[Mazer Rackham]

Stimms:

 

The Sergeant peering up at you stares for a long time, searching your face.  After three heartbeats that might feel like thirty, he just nods.  Once.  He says nothing, but waves to Wide-eyes to drive onwards, to a motor pool where several Chimeras have been collected.  Maybe a defeatist would say abandoned.

 

As you trundle past them they walk away, weapons slung, a steady pace breaking into a jog to a tent with no guards outside within earshot.

 

Wide-eyes pulls up with an interesting military discipline, parking the chimera in perfect distance from it's fellows.

 

Jupine stands up, ignoring your discomfiture.  Perhaps it is his way.   He plucked the object from the ground with a gentle rasp of steel against steel.  All of his earlier graceless tumbling and the way he awkwardly sat in the commander's throne is now gone.  He joins you, poking his head up out of the hatch, still smiling, still utterly friendly.

 

"A fine old jaunt, what?" he claps you on the shoulder, and nods in the direction of a landing field with a wallowing, merchantman-junker on it.  "That ship is the last civilian transport out of this stinky old place."

 

His face hardens suddenly, a cloud passing over the sun, but it is momentary.  "Be on it good fellows!  The Imperium thanks you for your service and rewards you."  Jupine nods at you and then Wide-eyes. "I believe this is yours...Mr Jonas, the travelling doctor."

 

He hands you an object.  It's a scalpel.

 

Your scalpel.

 

"The Emperor does indeed watch over us," he smiles, but this time it is genuine, sincere.  Then with a deft slap on the upper hull and a lithe slither, he is gone, into the milling crowd of military uniforms, all similar to his own.  Your eyes try to track him, but he has vanished.

 

The civilian transport is firing it's engines for lift-off, as a nuclear-bright explosion blooms in the distance, signalling the end of this moon, and everything on it.

Edited December 17, 2021 by Mazer Rackham

[Beren]

A chill runs up Stimms' spine. 

 

He doesn't often meet people who are as good at lying at he is. He goes out of his wya to avoid him. He has the feeling he's just met someone better, and infinitely more dangerous. Behind the bufoonery, just for a moment, then stranger - it certainly wasn't Commander Ivan Jupine - had let something show. Not through error, just deliberately showing the edge to his blade, something cold and hard. Something with the authority to have guardsmen stand aside at a word.

 

Something that somehow allowed him to have a scalpel he had handed off to a girl who had run into the jungle in the middle of an Ork attack, and that he had no belief, intention or particular interest in ever seeing alive again. He watches the crowd for a few moments more, his mask gone, his face pale, before he slides back into the Chimera. 

"Wide-eyes, move, now! Our ride's about to leave!"
 

Without waiting, he scrambles out of the vehicle and breaks into an unsteady jog towards the landing craft.

[Mazer Rackham]

Stimms:

 

The queue of pressing fugitives give you at least elbow room, some whispering that you just came out of a tank with a high-rank official.  It takes twenty minutes for the crew to catalogue your false identities along with the final complement of survivors.  More blasts and boiling heat blister in the sky, making the mountains and swamplands behind nothing but a heat mirage.  Above, the giants in the sky hammered the ground with laser and macro-weaponry designed to bring death to equally armoured ships of war hundreds if not thousands of kilometres away.

 

At this, knife-fight range, nothing stands a chance.

 

The Orks now begin to rush the perimeter, not through aggression, but preservation alone, their strange courage reduced to superstition of something destroying them from above.  If they didn't believe in the Emperor before, his fear now seizes their savage breast into panic.  A green tide of guttural, braying beasts charges forward, with perimeter defences soaking up the first few waves.  The ground is tossed up in a roiling heave, the explosion pulling across the ground, the minefields around Sawtooth chewing the green menace into purple bruises of colour as the ordnance pastes them into inedible meat.

 

Then, even those sounds are drowned out by the servo-skull networked Tarantula heavy bolter emplacements.  The streams of glowing, exploding shells disappear into the miasma of flesh, blood and earth, a microcosm of the battle for this moon.  You see no more as the crowd moves inside, settling in the hold.  As the ship stirs around you, the grim and shuddering rattle begins to ebb and flow into the vertigo of lift-off.

 

A push in your back, tells you that you're away, and as the sense of lifting continues, the heat passing through the hull as the hulk bursts through the upper atmosphere, the people settle, and the hushed expectation of land-dwellers being cast into the aether gives way to nervous chatter, then mumbling becoming groups of people playing cards, dicing.  One of the refugees approaches you, a sly smirk on his face.

 

"A sawbones, eh?"

 

Looks like you might have a few satisfied customers...

 

As you reach into your bag, there's a scrap of paper, written in violet ink, all pretty feminine curves.

 

Soon.

 

Please feel free to add any narrative you want Beren, but you have managed to escape the destruction of Horon, and into freedom from the Guard.  Where you go or what you do is not now, within the bounds of this adventure, but it seems like another one may be around the corner...

Edited December 17, 2021 by Mazer Rackham

[Mazer Rackham]

Scarlet:

 

The squad of Naval Armsmen march in a step precise and clean, thunder of boots on the deck hidden by the electric whine of monumental power generators building with enough hum to make your teeth vibrate, before the punishing discharge of every weapon battery and lance array washes over you in electrostatic hiss.  You are taken to a waiting room as opulent and lush as any planetary governor's, but here in the middle there is an oak desk, black oak, heavy.

 

Perhaps it is loaded with the responsibility of who owns it, for this is obviously a senior officer's study.  The three of you are deposited here, but the Sejeant-at-Arms unbends a little.

 

"Please sit."

 

There are several benches to choose from, upholstered and hand-carved in the same relief.  As you position yourselves around the room, a deck officer comes in, his uniform pressed and tidy, but the stains of perspiration are evident.

 

"Commissar Vorgen."

 

It is not a request.  The Commissar slowly stands, his face flint against whatever fate awaits him, and he follows the officer out, flanked by two of the Armsmen.  An hour later, the process is repeated, but for Halbast.  His eyes slide across at you, a faint smile his only display of nerves, but he carries himself out with as much dignity as a ragged, middling blueblood reeking of Ork urine and Horon's foul swamp muck as he can.

 

The broad, armoured doors close behind him.

 

The room is calm, still.  Obviously insulated from the blitz outside.  The Serjeant's commbead crackles and he looks at you.  "On your feet, smartly now!"

 

Just as you stand, the doors barge open and an officer appears who strides inside with the confidence of familiarity.  He reeks of nobility, but his shape is tall, broad and his jaw is set in a grim, no-nonsense cast.  His blue eyes find you immediately, head swivelling in a loose white cravat tucked into the high collar of his Navy uniform.  It is bare, almost plain, in complete contrast to the room.  He ignores you from that moment until he seats himself behind the desk.

 

He holds a dataslate in his hand and an electroquill in the other.  He scribbles rapidly, at some length.  Seconds turn into minutes, into ten, then twenty.  Just as you are about to speak, he stops writing and puts the implements down.  You have the weight of his full attention.

 

"I have a report here," his voice is smooth, but it is cold, "that states the ridiculous.  Even though signed and witnessed by two competent officers, I should not believe it."

 

His long fingers drum the table.

 

"But I do.  My son tells me you saved his life several times.  I reward you - though you might not thank me.  As Grand Admiral I pardon you and swear you to my service,"  he stands, clasps his hands behind his back before stepping to a hololithic map and staring at it, "and now you will show me this world where men traded Imperial equipment for coin."

 

A mirthless grin shows as the Retribution class battleship lists to port, it's part in the grisly work completed and making for high orbit.

 

"And the Emperor will have his reckoning."

 

Please feel free to add any narrative you want Steel - but he is a Grand Admiral, so don't be too gobby and get put back in a Penal unit again...Scarlett's adventure is now over, and her future is set in a different story, but perhaps that will be on the cards...