Wherein I Attempt to Write 40K Fanfic!

[MaltonNecromancer]

This has been knocking around in my head for a while. It's not quite done yet.

Part 1: Judgement Afternoon.

"Please, come in."

Uncomfortably, Jane stepped into the office. Caught between the awkward choice to either stand attention, or else sit on a chair (currently occupied by a small pile of leatherbound books of the sort that could reasonably only be referred to as "tomes"), she elected instead to display her frustration by shuffling loudly from one foot to the other, picking at a loose thread at the hem of her doctor's robes as she did.

She hated agents.

"Now, according to your file…" began the slightly balding middle-aged man sat behind the desk in front of her. His gravely voice immediately betrayed a desire to be taken seriously, and an obvious life-long addiction to cheap alcohol, and cheaper tobacco. Jane instinctively found herself thinking that it would be maybe another ten years before a carnival of terminal illness set up shop in at least twelve of his body's more essential organs. By now, she was ignoring his voice – really, what did an agent have to tell her that was worth listening to? – and focusing instead on his remarkable face. It couldn't just be described as wrinkled, worn, or leathery. It was like a tire print in wet mud. It was so craggy, it gave the impression of having been carved from a petrified tree with a slightly dull hatchet. In her youth, she might have been impressed by him and his little red uniform. In her middle age, she might have found him passably attractive; maybe good for a quickie in the labyrinthine shelves of the supply cavity. Now, he was simply an annoyance; another petty bloody distraction from the business of finding the world and everything in it intensely tiresome and without merit of any sort.

"Excuse me sir…" She hit the word "sir" with just the right amount of sneering sarcasm. She hoped it conveyed her sincerest feelings - that she had as much use for him as rectal prolapse, and significantly less time. "I understand that there is some… drama going on. But do I really need to be a part of it? My work in medical really is quite important."

He looked up from her file, and seemed to actually notice her for the first time. He clearly wasn't used to being spoken back to, especially not by women. Even more especially by old women who had already borne fresh soldiers for the endless meat grinder of war, and were therefore of no further use. Most especially by angry, hateful old women who seemed to be kept alive by little more than a hate for all life, and a spiteful refusal to die a moment before she had expressed as much of that hate as she could, with "all life" in this case, meaning the agent.

He eyeballed her with all the intensity of a man used to being obeyed without question.

She hated agents.

"Yes." he replied in an authoritative tone. Not a bureaucrat then. Bureaucrats hated to be given any show of defiance at all; this one was a professional. "Yes. You do need to be here Doctor Nichols."

Jane kept quiet, opting to convey her total distaste for him by quietly scratching her armpit as she looked through him.

"Yes Doctor Nichols, you are needed, and for a mission of the most urgent secrecy. "

There it was: "a mission". The magic word that made little boys of men, as they ran off to pretend they were soldiers and agents and Throne knows what else. They were always completely unaware of how their facile behaviours made them look less like the heroes they imagined they wanted to be, and more like the insecure little idiots playing dress up that they actually were. Why they couldn't just call it a frakking job and be done with it was beyond her. "Urgent secrecy" was obviously intended to make it seem even more special and exciting; back in the day, she'd probably have jumped at those words. Now, she recognised "a mission of the most urgent secrecy" as code for "a pointless, thankless, clusterfrak of a job, with a probability of death so high that to call it a suicide mission suggests too high a chance of success".

She began to imagine the agent, lying in bed 137C-2 (the one they secretly saved for those patients prone to the bouts of uncontrollable haemohyperemesis that were all too common onboard the ship), dying slowly of at least three of the twelve illnesses. If he noticed the slight curl of a smile at the corner of her lip, he said nothing.

"Why me?"

"Excuse me?" that had actually shocked him. Not used to having orders questioned, then. A professional, but one who hadn't seen much field service.

"I said, why me? There are plenty of apothecaries aboard. Why me? I'm just a doctor."

He stood, and walked around the desk, towering over her in his red robe and leather uniform.

Jane smiled the least sincere smile she felt capable of mustering. He closed into her space, and when he spoke, it was in a quiet, voice clearly designed to demonstrate his barely restrained anger with maximal efficiency. In this, it was about as effective as demonstrating barely restrained anger to a particularly bored brick (one that was having quite a dull day to start with).

So, thought Jane, he's trying to show me he's in charge. Definitely not done much field service.

"Doctor. Nichols. You are needed for a mission of urgent secrecy. The reason for your presence is currently only on a need-to-know basis. If you need to know the reason, rest assured, I will inform you. Currently, you do not need to know. Instead, you need to go to the munitiorum and get prepared for extravehicular activity."

Jane had progressed from imagining three diseases to five, and had now also begun fantasising a fictional wife, who cried over the agent's rigid, twitching, yet still painfully alive body.

In a toneless, flat voice designed to reveal exactly how little she cared, and simultaneously exactly how little she thought of him, Jane simple stated: "I'll go and get ready then, sir."

His gritted teeth as she left were, so far, the best part of her day. Of course, that was probably because the canteen had run out of scones that morning.

______________

If there was anything Jane hated more than agents, it was yappy bloody dogs. Something about their aggressive happiness and relentless slack-jawed idiocy brought out an almost pathological desire to do them harm with any sharp or blunt instrument within arm's reach. However, with that said, the Astartes came a very close second. Really, it was as though everything about them had been designed to specifically annoy her. The way they regally swanned about the place, putting on a tremendous show of their camaraderie; the way they were forever calling one another "brother; worst of all, they way they were endlessly mumbling oaths of the most insufferable piety… Literally, Jane felt, at this stage, the simple fact of their existence was nothing more than a calculated and highly personal insult inflicted by an uncaring universe. After six months on the ship in their company, they had started to resembled nothing so much as a group of poodles who thought that because they could walk on their hind legs, well, that made them people.

"Doctor Nichols?" one of them asked. He was massive to look at; maybe nine feet tall in the colossal suit of black, mechanised armour. Looking at him, Jane had the distinct impression that he was less a man, and more like an angry building that had, one day, simply had enough of not hitting things, and had gone off to find as wide a variety of people to choke to death as was possible. His face was ruggedly handsome, in an inhuman, acromegalic kind of way. However,despite the overwhelming aura of malevolent strength radiating from him like a halo, he looked down at her with kindly eyes of the most astonishing blueness.

What, does the yappy bloody poodle want me to tickle his frakking belly? thought Jane, now quiet fiercely beginning to resent the uncomfortable void-suit that was insistently and ferociously trying to work its way up into every available nook and crevice of her body. The only thing that distracted her from the discomfort of the suit was the worrying smell. She was now ninety per cent certain that this suit hadn't been washed since the last owner died in it. Probably of scrofula.

Jane hated space almost as much as agents.

"We're progressing to the infiltration point now. Have you everything you need, doctor?" asked the Astarte in a voice that conveyed an implacable calm, combined with quiet yet sincere concern for her well being.

Jane stared blankly, envisaging him begging for a chocolatey treat.

"I'm fine, thank you Sergeant Titus." she hoped her tone suitably camouflaged the utter contempt she felt for him and his fellows.

"If you would follow me, then."

On board the infiltration ship, surrounded by five nine-foot tall giants covered in groaning metallic plates, Jane found herself wishing that she had called in sick. She had planned to when her arthritic knee had kicked off last night. Unfortunately, she'd felt so much better in the morning, that to take the day off felt churlish. She wondered if she could spit on one of them without them noticing.

"What exactly is it we are going to do?"

"I am afraid my orders preclude me from elucidating any information on that topic."

Great, Jane found herself thinking. So that's how you talk. Like a total bloody idiot. And you're the one they give the guns to? Great. Just great. When she would recall this day in years to come, Jane would always remember that this was the point where she finally gave up on the human race.

"Ah, I see."

[Gotthammer]

Aside from a 73 word opening sentence (and some other run on sentences later) and a couple of minor punctuation errors, I found it well written. Good sense of character and atmosphere.

I loved the description of the Astartes, had me laughing out loud (for reals).

[MaltonNecromancer]

Continued!

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The infiltration craft would have been spacious if it were filled with people. As it was, the Astarte next to Jane was roughly the size of a garden shed, and he was clearly the runt of the team. His four fellows were clamped into standing positions, as immobile as granite collossi, and roughly as big.

There were a few others on the craft and, bored, Jane found herself more than usually inclined to start conversation with them. It was better than being alone with her own thoughts.

It was always better than being alone with her own thoughts.

There were two other humans – regular humans, not the freakish black-clad super soldiers – currently occupying the seating area. The first wore oil-stained green overalls, and bore the unmistakable signs of surgical modification that denoted a support servitor. His eyes (well, eye, Jane noticed) stared off glassily into the middle distance, his low, calm breathing a reminder that where the part of his brain that feelings used to be had been scooped out and replaced with half a kilogram of digital storage space and LEDS. Why anyone would want to fill a human skull with LEDS rather than the all-important feelings of happiness, love and overwhelming disappointment in humanity had always been a bit beyond Jane, but then, she had spent most of her surprisingly long life feeling that what happened around her was a bit beyond her. She assumed it made the little machine in the man's head happy, and that was all that mattered, really. It did mean that conversation would be a little hard to come by. Talking with servitors was somewhat like talking to an automatic door; they were rarely bothered to see you, and often in the middle of something.

That meant Jane's only real opportunity for conversation lay in the woman sat next to her; the one currently vomiting into the ironwork grill under their feet.

"Hello" said Jane.

Blearily, the woman looked up, and Jane was immediately struck by two things. Firstly, the overpowering smell of curdled digestive juices mixed with an unmistakable undercurrent of sweat and grease. Secondly, by the woman's youth. Judging from the rank badges on the arm of her void-suit, she was a highly placed chapter serf. But her face… She couldn't have been older than twenty-two. Her hair was a messily cropped blonde, and looked like it had been styled by someone who had once had hairdressing described to them, and was certain this meant they had knowledge enough to set up professionally.

The woman cracked a brief smile, then cheerfully returned to her retching.

"New to space travel then?" asked Jane. The tone of her voice revealed that despite the fact she'd asked the question, she obviously cared a lot less than her words might have suggested.

In between dry hoiking noises, the woman muttered a few words.

"What?"

"I said 'No'." replied the woman, wiping the last brown fragments from the corner of her mouth. "I've been in space all my life."

"Really?" asked Jane nonchalantly.

"Yeah" said the woman, a mild look of shame flashing across her face. "My father was Captain Lemuel Liddell of the Aglopholis."

"The rogue trader?" asked Jane in sudden surprise. The conversation had taken a distracting turn into interesting territory.

"That's the one" said Liddell. "I didn't set foot on a planet until my fifteenth birthday. Dad'd been promising me he'd take me to one for years."

There was a brief silence as Jane realised she didn't have anything to add. Conversation had been one of those things she'd always been meaning to learn how to do for years. Sadly, the complexity and demanding job, combined with her particularly brutish misanthropy, had combined to ensure she had never quite found the time.

"How did you find it?" she finally asked.

Liddell's face lit with a cheerful grin. "I got to ride on a pony." Liddell enthused; the conversation was clearly perking her up.

"A what?"

"It’s like a… it's kind of like this... kind of animal with four legs. They used to have them on Terra. Some planets, you know, the older ones, they still have them. They're kind of intimidating."

"Predatory, you mean?" Jane always found talk of new animals interesting.Despite the tedium of years of painfully studying biology, her enthusiasm had not dimmed. Liddell however, looked a little confused.

"Predatory? Not really. Only if you're an apple, I suppose."

Another pause. Jane didn't want to ask what an "apple" was for fear of looking unsophisticated; it was clear this woman came from money, and as a lifelong member of the working-class (and a good ol' salt-of-the-Cadia girl to boot) Jane hated it when money looked down on her. For now, she would assume it was one of the many species of harmless yet annoying rodents that seemed to infest every corner of occupied space. She resolved to research it later. She prodded the dying embers of the conversation, in the hopes of finding out a little more. Lemuel Liddell had been quite the news story back in the day.

"So how was it? Riding the pony, I mean."

"Oh fine, fine." Liddell looked away, and the smile faded. "After I'd finished, the servants forgot to tie it up, and it wandered into a minefield. Looking for more apples, I suppose. First we knew of it was the bang. And when its head smashed onto my birthday cake."

Liddell looked down at the floor. Jane didn't know what to say. She decided to pretend empathy; it worked when she had to deliver terrible news to a patient. No reason it shouldn't work here.

"I'm sorry to hear that" she said, with all the practised sincerity her decades of resentful insincerity had taught her.

"Oh no, it's okay." replied Liddell. "Dad was already quite drunk and threatening to show my progenium friends his elephant impression, so it made a nice distraction."

Jane had, by this stage, decided upon three things. Firstly, that no matter how much she wanted to know about the great Captain Lemuel Liddell, hero of the third fleet, she in no way wanted to probe any further, and therefore risk discovering exactly what his "elephant impression" might have been. Secondly, that the conversation had become terribly strange, and that the young woman she was speaking to was quite clearly mad. Finally, that the next time her arthritis played up, she would take full advantage of it, and just stay in. This whole "giving a damn" thing was far more trouble than it was worth. She then realised that taking the time to think all this had meant she had stayed quiet a lot longer than was usually socially acceptable, so without thinking she threw out the first comment that occurred to her.

"Did you manage to get any of the scones from the canteen?"

"No. No, I'm not a fan of them."

There followed a long and uncomfortable silence of the kind created when two people who don't really know each other, and who have nothing in common, realise they have nothing left to say.

In the end, it was Liddell who broke the silence.

"So how long have you been a doctor?" her face was sincere, and interested. She smiled, and for the briefest moment, Jane was reminded of a similar moment quite a long time ago, and forgot she was having such a bloody awful day.

"Thirty seven years, six months, and three days."

"Wow." said Liddell, impressed. "What's it like? I mean, I've never really needed to go to medical. I mean, the only time I went down was this one time, I mean, one of my boyfriends and I had been in our bunk, and we'd had a bit to drink, and there was this vacuum servitor, and he said wouldn't it be fun if we um… Ah…" and she suddenly realised that she was about to say something she would regret forever, which made her stumble over the next few words, "Ah… Ah… So what's it like?" her smiling mouth did nothing to hide the embarrassment in her eyes.

"It's like swimming through thirty seven and a half years of blood, vomit, and other people's problems, all the time being held to impossible standards by superiors who don't give even the slightest damn, desperately clinging to the notion that your life had meaning, when you know in your heart it doesn't and never will."

"Oh." said Liddell, "So it's fun?"

Jane looked her square in the eye. Liddell looked back, quietly sincere.

"Yeah." replied Jane "It's pretty great." What was the point in trying to explain her frustrations with a misspent life to a girl whose best childhood memory involved the head of a dead animal wrecking a cake? "So. You're a chapter serf then?"

"Yeah." replied Liddell, looking sheepishly at the floor. "But I'm not very good at it."

Who is surprised? thought Jane.

"Really?" she heard herself say, surprising even herself with the earnestness of her tone. She really was good at lying.

"Yeah. My dad got me the job after I graduated from the progenium. I wasn't cut out for Storm Trooper service, and I didn't have the aptitude to join the Machine Cult or Administratum, and the Ecclesiarchy wouldn't take me. Not after the time dad did his elephant impression to the archdeacon. So that pretty much just left the Astartes. I've been with them for the last four years, but they don't let me do much. I dropped a few things that turned out to have some toxic stuff or other in. How was I to know that a skull and crossbones meant dangerous? Half the things they wear are covered in skulls!"

Jane had to agree that the Astartes did seem to like skulls quite a lot more than might perhaps be considered healthy. Still, she now had the sneaking suspicion that Liddell, in addition to being mad, might also be quite profoundly stupid. She consoled herself with the thought that there was no way Liddell could be as stupid as the Astartes.

There was a sound like a mountain screaming, and the whole craft shuddered. The Astartes remained silent and still.

"Bloody hell!" muttered Jane, shocked by the ferocity of the vibrations.

"Whee!" cheered Liddell, smiling merrily.

Jane's suspicion was turning with inexorably momentum, into a rock solid conclusion.

After a minute or so of hellish grinding noises and ferocious wracking movements, the craft eventually came to a complete halt. There was a single moment of total silence, followed by the brutal clatter of the harnesses holding the Astartes in place clanking open.

"Helmets on please, ladies" requested Sergeant Titus, his voice buzzing electronically from inside the skull-faced helm he now wore. "We've arrived."

Looking from Titus to Liddell and back, Jane began to wonder if a tactical complaint about her arthritis might get her out of this whole mess.

_______________________________

[DarkLink]

I like it, overall it's well done with good but not too over the top humor.

I will say, though, that I don't find Jane to be very sympathetic. Her only currently defined character traits are 'I don't like agents/Marines/whoever's talking to me at the moment' and 'I don't care'. It's not a problem so long as there's a bit more to her, and you've got a good start considering that she's pretty jaded from serving as a doctor, but it's just something to keep in mind for the long term.

Secondly, and it can tie in with the point above, is to make sure that the secondary characters don't meet Jane's expectations of idiocy and dullness, at least not all the time for every character. Again, you've got it started with Titus seeming to be pretty friendly and professional, but in the long run I would make sure that some of the characters surprise Jane with their depth. She might expect all agents to be egomaniacs and all Marines to be angry steroid junkies, and some of them certainly may be, but if you let some of the characters have some unexpected motivations and character traits (and Jane notices and reacts to them) that adds much more depth to the story.

Of course, it's really too early to offer any real criticism considering that it's pretty well written, so those are just things to keep in mind.

[DrLove42]

he was less a man, and more like an angry building that had, one day, simply had enough of not hitting things, and had gone off to find as wide a variety of people to choke to death as was possible

Best. Description. Ever

[MaltonNecromancer]

Continued!

_______________________________

Part 2: The Birthday Girl

Today wasn't really going that well, thought Liddell to herself, as she picked her way carefully through the wrecked bowels of the hulk. It had all seemed to be going so well at first. That nice boy from engineering had come by and dropped off the books that the Librarian had been chasing her about. What made it even more exciting, was that she'd almost managed to summon the courage to say hello to him this time. Only about three more visits, and Liddell was confident that not only would she manage to say hello, but she might even manage to have worked her name into the conversation.

Unfortunately, the day had taken a turn for the worse quite quickly. First, Sergeant Titus had come by and asked if she wanted to join him for breakfast in the canteen. It wasn't that she didn't like the sergeant; it was more that there was just something a little funny about his eyebrows. They reminded her of two small caterpillars arguing over who got the right to eat the leaf they were both sat on. Whenever he spoke to her, she just couldn't help but look right at them. After a while it had gotten to the point that they made her feel a little funny in her toes, and so she just sort of looked anywhere else but at his face whenever he came to find her.

Anyway, he'd come in, she'd looked away, and he'd begun talking in that bizarre way the Astartes did: faith this, Throne that, something about a rematerialised deep-space battle cruiser returned after ten thousand years lost in some place called the Immaterium… and before she knew it she was so bored that she found herself accidentally looking him right in the eyebrow. This turned out to be a critical error, as they were moving so much more than usual that not only her toes, but this time her tummy as well began to feel a bit funny, and she just had to sit down.

"What troubles you, Liddell?" he'd asked in that singularly peculiar voice of his, it's mix of deep calm and gentle empathy both soothing and soporific. She replied that everything was fine, and that she'd just had some bad chicken the night before. He and his dancing brow accepted this as truth, and the next thing she knew, she was out of her nice warm room, and walking here, in this scary, ruined catacomb of a ship, stumbling across downed power cables and through puddles of leaking lubricants, further into the belly of a ship whose better days probably weren't all that good to start with.

The strange lady she'd met earlier was walking next to her. Liddell had discovered several things about her new companion. Firstly, she was old. That much was obvious from her wrinkles, and her short temper. In that, the woman reminded Liddell of her long-dead grandfather, Lietenant-Colonel Cave "Black Rage" Liddell, the hero of Ursar, who would sleep with a loaded rifle under his pillow, ostensibly "in case they come to try and steal my teeth in the night". Liddell had never really been able to establish who "they" were, or why they would want his teeth, so she had assumed it was just because in addition to being the hero of Ursar, grandad was also as mad as a porridge-knife. Now she thought about it, she had never really liked or trusted him; not after the time he had accused her of trying to steal his teeth and taken a few hyper-velocity pot shots in her direction.

That had been a pretty bad birthday too, now she thought about it.

So, in many ways, the old lady reminded Liddell of her grandfather. There had been no random shootings yet, but the way the woman carried herself, Liddell had a sneaking suspicion that it was only a matter of time.

The old lady also seemed to have a little bit wrong with her brain, as she was evidently scared of absolutely nothing. There was one particularly scary Astartes, Brother Castiel (who seemed to be wearing a dirty bedsheet over his armour for some reason. When she'd asked him, he'd told her it was "a habit"; when she had suggested that he should give it up then, he had shot her a look that left her in no doubt that it was a habit he enjoyed, and that she should let the matter rest. She had done so, quietly convinced that he might do her harm if she pressed the issue). He had been complaining to Sergeant Titus about "having to bring pair of untrained civilians" with them, and the old lady had just gone right up to him, and said a whole lot of angry words quite fiercely. He taken a step back. Liddell hadn't really understood what was said, but evidently Brother Castiel had. In fact, he had gotten quite cross (to the point where he had started to pull out a rather worryingly large sword) and had to be calmed by the sergeant, who, for some reason Liddell couldn't quite fathom, was giggling quite a bit.

The whole affair was a little peculiar, and she had come away with the impression that Sergeant Titus quite liked the old woman, for reasons that were unclear to Liddell.

She had also discovered that the woman was a doctor, so that was quite unusual. Liddell had never met a female doctor before. She had assumed that being a doctor was another of those things only men could do, like being an Astartes, or baking bread. It was quite the revelation that women could work in the hospitals, so in that regard at least, today had provided some small positive experience.

Not everything today was quite so positive. Giant bas reliefs and carvings of fanged mouths eating planets were pasted all over the walls of this derelict, Liddell was convinced with the sole purpose of unsettling her, an act in which they were currently being quite spectacularly successful. She had no idea why or how anyone might get a whole planet into their mouth, or why there needed to be so many spikes on everything, but there were many things about space travel that Liddell didn't really understand. Maybe helped it fly? She wanted to ask the old lady, but she wasn't quite sure if they were friends yet or not.

There was a sudden bang behind Liddell, so she made a little squeaky noise in the back of her throat, and surprised herself by wishing hard that she could be somewhere baking bread. The sudden flash of shame she felt at her forbidden desires also caused her to suddenly realise she was clinging onto her ancient companion with maybe just a touch too much vigour.

"Sorry", said Liddell, sheepishly, disengaging a bear hug of quite remarkable intensity.

"It's okay" inhaled Jane, wearing a look that surprised Liddell, because it actually looked like it was okay.

Liddell turned around to where the noise had come from, and where the Astartes were now gathering. It seemed to be a pile of machinery that was sparking quite ferociously and seemed really quite intent on setting itself on fire. After a few seconds, it seemed to realise the futility of the attempt, and with an indignant puff of smoke, put itself out.

After taking a moment to confirm that the dead cable posed no further risk, the Astartes lowered their weapons and continued forwards into the claustrophobic belly of the vessel. As he passed her by, Liddell was reassured to hear Titus say "Nothing to worry about." as he placed a hand on her shoulder with remarkable tenderness. She could hear that behind his armoured mask, he was smiling. It was nice that you could always hear it in Titus' voice when he smiled. It made the horrible skull-like mask, well, not friendly, but perhaps marginally less horrible.

"Are you okay?", asked the doctor when Titus had moved away. Her voice was somehow more benevolent than before. Behind the transparent glass of her gas mask, her eyes looked kinder than they had as well.

"I'm fine" said Liddell, a little embarrassed by all this disquiet over her. She held herself and looked at the dirty brass flooring.

"Well, you stick close to me.", replied the doctor, her tone containing something that might have been fear, but which Liddell quickly decided was more probably contempt, "I don't trust these boys to get us out of her alive."

"Why not?" asked Liddell, realising with surprise that she wanted quite badly to be holding the old lady's hand for reassurance, and wondering why that was.

"They're the Astartes." came the reply. "The greatest defenders humanity has ever known; each a one man army, capable of taking on many times his own in combat, honour-bound to seek out and stand against the worst the universe has to throw at them. They are sworn to know no fear."

"Isn't that a good thing?" asked Liddell, tentatively.

"Didn't you hear a word I just said?" asked the doctor, "They're clearly idiots."

Liddell found this reply to be quite confusing, but decided not to press the issue.

__________________________________________________ __

[MaltonNecromancer]

Continued!

__________________________________________________ __

Part 3: Two-fisted action!


It had been an hour of slowly tramping through damp corridors now, and Jane had now officially had enough. They had reached a door which seemed to be of some significance to the Astartes – she kept hearing muttered snatches of conversation referring to "legions" and "traitors" – but frankly, it just looked like a door to her.

A door made of the bones of a hundred human corpses nailed with brass bolts, but still, just a door.

Liddell, poor girl, had obviously been the one to find it. At the sight of it, she had, in order, screamed, urinated, defecated, screamed, defecated, and then passed out. The void-suits auto systems had taken care of most of that, but Jane's communicator bead was now slightly on the blink. Evidently, Liddell's scream was not something it had been designed to accommodate. Now, every three minutes or so, it elected to play a mildly annoying, low-frequency whine that made Jane's fillings vibrate. It was not the first time today she had been thankful for her growing deafness.

"Whu…Whe…"

As she started to come round, Jane eased her slowly up.

"Don't worry, Liddell. You're fine. You're with me." Jane hoped to Throne that her voice would be enough to keep Liddell calm. She could well do without another round of shrieking.

"Where are we? Are we still on…?" her eyes were wide as saucers with undisguised panic.

"Yes. We're still on the ship. You're only been unconscious for a few minutes."

This revelation prompted exactly the scream Jane had been hoping to avoid. It continued unabated, until Jane decided she'd had enough, pulled a small plastic cylinder with a smiley face on the side out of her medical bag, and jammed it into Liddell's void-suit's auto-systems. Almost immediately Liddell's screaming warped into something halfway between a yawn and a warble, slowly dying away as the opium took effect.

"Feeling better?" asked Jane.

Liddell's face cracked into a mildly goofy smile. She slowly raised both thumbs to indicate in the affirmative.

"Good. Come on then." and Jane pulled the woman to her feet.

Evidently, they were just in time. The Astartes looked up, having finally managed to operate the ossified door's ancient mechanism, an act which was greeted by a sudden series of loud clicking noises, followed by a great iron clanging. If hell had church bells, though Jane, then that's exactly the sort of noise they'd make. Apparently the Astartes felt the same as her, readying their weapons with machine-like alacrity. The door slowly opened, filling the door with the dull orange glow of an industrial furnace.

Well that can't be good, thought Jane.

The group made its way into the chamber.

Void-suits are hermetically sealed against extremely low temperatures, able to resist the ferocious cold of deep space without breaking a sweat. However, they are somewhat less effective against heat – a fact that Jane had had cause to lament in the past, and at no time more significantly than now. The heat was brutal; a wild, gnawing beast of a thing, almost palpably pressing its way into her skin. She pulled her hand up to wipe her forehead, bonked it on her visor and swore. After sixty-odd years of this, she thought, you'd think I'd finally be bloody well able to remember I'm wearing a helmet.

It was at this point that the monster entered the room.

The armour worn by the Astartes is the result of many hundreds of years of development, and offers some of the best protection for combat personnel that humanity has ever been able to devise. Layer upon layer of laminate carbon fibre and synthetic metals, weaved together at the molecular level for unprecedented levels of flexibility, durability, and power. Coupled with the essentially religious fundamentalist viewpoint of a group of moderately insane genetically-enhanced super warriors, it makes the wearer what could (and should) be considered a serious threat to life and limb. When then coupled with a mindset that argues that bigger firearms are better, and the best firearms are those that most closely resemble a drainpipe with a magazine of bullets attached to the side, and one can see why the organisation is so widely and rightly feared across every planet where it's been heard of.

Sadly for the Astartes in the room, "some of the best protection" wasn't quite the same as "the best protection".

Which is what the monster was wearing.

Jane had only moments to take it in. It was colossal. A red-armoured leviathan that seemed, from her point of view, to fill the entire world. Its armoured greaves left depressions in the blackened floor, yet it moved with such speed that Jane was not entirely sure that the principles of mass and inertia had been properly explained to it. Its face was a brazen mask of burning fire, and its hands were horrendous mechanical pistons, ending in blades so ludicrously massive that they looked like they could cut through conversation.

The fact they crackled with lightning seemed, in Jane's opinion, to be perhaps over-egging the cake a little.

At this point, the Astartes had evidently decided their moment had come, and that now was the time to demonstrate why they were regarded as the premier combat force in existence. They opened fire. Their weapons' roar sounded like the challenge of an angry bear. For all the good they were doing, they might as well have been throwing daffodils.

Jane turned for the door and tried to run, but tripped and stumbled over Liddell, who was still jovially grinning the smile of a person with chemically induced happiness. The two of them fell to the floor, whereupon Jane started trying to get up, while Liddell started giggling uncontrollably.

In her efforts, Jane rolled over, and watched the fight with horror. The beast bestrode the room, swinging its wrecking-ball-sized talons in coruscating arcs. One of them connected with one of the Astartes Jane hadn't bothered to get to know. There was a single crack, a sharp snap, like breaking polystyrene, and a puff of red dust as the Astarte's insides became his outsides.

Shrieking with rage, another of them ran for the fiend, swinging a sword wildly. He ducked and weaved; the rational part of Jane's brain noted the skill and cleverness of his tactics. Sadly, the monster's tactics largely involved being a thousand times stronger than him. A single strike ably demonstrated that a blow to the head from one of the horror's hands was an extinction level event for brain matter, and the ruined corpse of the poor man fell to the floor, thick blood gloppily puddling around the titan's feet.

A backhand swipe from those terrible claws pulped another Astarte, and as it did, the nightmare finally caught sight of her. It was a moment until Jane realised the rasping metallic sound coming from inside the helmet was laughter. Slowly, ineluctably, it strode toward her, ignoring the remaining Astartes as a man might ignore picnicking children.

It was at this point Jane realised she was going to die.

The standard issue Kantreal pattern DEW laser pistol sidearm is a masterpiece of engineering. It uses a seventy gram lithuim fuel cell to power a 50-kilowatt ray of light through seventeen separate focative planes, projecting a directed energy beam up to a range of almost fifty metres in a continuous wave. It is solid and reliable; a workman's weapon. The most widespread and successful of all of the galaxy's weapons, amongst the fighting infantry of armed forces, its ubiquity has, unsurprisingly, earned the firearm a wide variety of nicknames.

The chief amongst these is "the flashlight".

This is because, despite ammunition being plentiful, the weapon being reliable, and the technical genius behind it undeniable, it remains, to all intents and purposes, functionally useless as a weapon. The amount of energy needed to power a laser beam to melt through modern armour plating was so outrageously high, that a laser weapon would require its own power station to be effective. By comparison, a seventy gram lithium battery supplies just enough power to warm a bowl of soup. Which was, in all honesty, the reason Jane had one on her; she hated to carry a thermos.

Therefore, it came as something of a surprise to see Liddell lifting it up and aiming it at the demonic monster now walking towards them. Jane found herself thinking that Liddell might as well be a candle trying to fight a hurricane; she knew that the girl stood no chance of penetrating the dreadfully shielded malefactor now towering over them like a two-legged apocalypse.

It was a good job, then, that Liddell was an astonishingly good shot.

Smiling genially, she squeezed the trigger and a red beam of light flashed out of the barrel and into a reinforced glass viewing hole.

As happens sometimes, a moment settled. Everything was calm, and still. The only sound was Liddell, quietly giggling.

With the inevitability of sunset, the monster fell down, and lay still.

__________________________________________________ ___

[heretic marine]

what you should do is make it into one folder/file thingy. then post it all online like on Scribd or something like that or make a website for it.

[MaltonNecromancer]

Continued!

_____________________________________
Part 4: Final Round.

Jane wasn't entirely sure what was going on. It was completely black. She was having trouble breathing. The air was still uncomfortably warm, but now there was such silence, she began to wonder whether or not she hadn't just imagined the whole thing. Maybe she was actually just back in her bunk like always, her favourite book of erotica sat on her face like a mask, quietly drooling into the pages. That usually happened about once a week, now she thought of it, so it wasn't that far fetched.

Liddell's giggling brought her back to reality. Jane became aware that the reason everything was black and breathing was proving troublesome was because somehow Liddell was on top of her. She wasn't sure how that'd happened, but then, it had just been a stressful few minutes, and she felt it was perfectly acceptable to not be entirely sure of what was going on at this stage, and simply leave it at that.

With a careful heave, she pushed the giggling serf off her chest, and sat painfully upright. Not for the first time today, she thanked the Throne that her void-suit's waste recycling systems were working well. They really had been some very stressful minutes and the suit's waste bag now had the proof.

Liddell was giggling quite uncontrollably, a thin curl of super-heated steam still reaching its tenuous way out of the muzzle of her gun. The Astartes however, had gathered round the fallen colossus, and were taking no chances. From the buckled metallic holes in its legs, Jane quickly realised they had taken the precaution of kneecapping it nineteen or twenty times. She'd have gone for the head herself, but as a qualified doctor with an extensive knowledge of anatomy as well the most effective ways to make a human being go from living to dead with maximum efficiency, really, what did she know?

Sergeant Titus holstered his gun cautiously, and with Castiel covering him, moved towards the monstrous brazen head, the flames thankfully extinguished now. Jane watched, half in interest, half in slightly more worried interest, as Titus tapped a small button, camouflaged under a carved image of a fanged, demonic mouth. Really, thought Jane, what is it with this ship and fanged mouths? Had there been a two for one sale on them or something?

There was a hissing sound, followed by the crack of metal plates shearing, and the terrible helm fell away from the armour to reveal… a man. Nothing more, nothing less. He had the same strange features as the Astartes; the slightly too-pronounced brow, the deep-set eyes, the thin face and protruding cheeks. Aside from that, though, he was a young-looking, passably handsome man. Maybe thirty two, though Jane absently. His right eye was a neat, smoking black hole, with crisp, blackened edges. It didn't look like a wound. It looked more like he simply had a circle of black card covering it, and all it would take would be to gently lift it off and reveal the eye underneath. Jane had never liked laser wounds. There was something just a little too precise about them.

It certainly came as a great surprise to everyone when the man coughed. Brother Castiel seemed to jump the most. He clearly took the cough as a sign of possible resistance, and made a point of shooting off a few more rounds into the man's shattered knees. For his part, the man seemed hardly to notice. He opened his good eye and looked around, and when he caught sight of Sergeant Titus, his face broke into a warm and genuine smile.

"Brother…" he said, and his voice was not the voice Jane had expected, a voice made of razorblades and hatred. It was a voice of the most profound relief. His eyes, she noticed, wee beginning to brim with tears.

"Brother," he continued, "Please… Tell me I am not too late." his voice was weak, and laboured.

"Too late for what?" asked Titus, his voice curiously warm, inviting confidence without demanding it.

"To warn the Emperor." the man's eyes were suddenly sad and afraid in equal measure.

"To warn him of what?"

"Horus. Horus is on the move. He… he plans a revolt. A great revolt against the Emperor. I am Sergeant Erastes of the World Eaters Legion, tenth maniple. My brothers and I, we… we have proof. We have fled our Legion, and are trying to make our way to Terra, but… the Gellar field has failed. Please, there is not much time, and my brothers have gone mad; they have been stalking me for days now; if they find you, they will kill you. Leave me here; I am too weak to go on. You must carry my words for me now. Horus plans to make his move within the year. Already he has almost our entire Legion on his side. My brothers and I have remained loyal, but they may have followed us. Please, get warning to Terra. Take it to the Emperor. Let him know of the coming betrayal… Do not let my brothers' lives have been spent for nothing…"

The young man's voice trailed off, and he made no further sound. His remaining eye simply stared through Titus, bright, beautiful, but unmoving.

Titus and Castiel stood, silent and still.

There was a sudden flash of laser fire, burning a second smoking hole through the man's forehead.

"Better safe than sorry, eh?" said Liddell, a cheerful grin on her face, which she followed up with the conspiratorially-mumbled, "By the way, I don't like how those goldfish are looking at you..."

Everyone looked at Liddell, who was now pointing her her gun at the air around Jane's head and muttering about "water-breathing bast...". Jane noticed Castiel begin to lift up the muzzle of his weapon, but Titus calmly rested a hand upon his forearm before he could bring it to bear. The sergeant then gently took the gun from a noticably disappointed Liddell, who groaned like a progenium girl and pouted.

"What now Sergeant?" asked Jane. His eyes looked painful, like the pain from an old lover's leaving had come across him. She wasn't sure if the Astartes had lovers, but still, she found herself surprised by the genuine note of concern she felt for him. She quietly made a mental note to ignore it if it ever happened again.

"Now we just go back. There was only the one life sign we needed to investigate, and it we have done our duty in that regard." his voice was quiet, and close to cracking.

Jane watched as he walked back to the young man, and after deft manipulation of a quite ridiculous number of buttons, levers, switches and clips, extracted him from his hideous armour.

"What are you doing?" she asked. Her curiousity almost overpowering her manners.

"Sergeant Erastes died in the line of duty, trying to save lives. He was hero, and no-one knows. That is not good enough. He will return with us, and I shall see him buried with the all honours he deserves." and with that, Titus lifted the body of the dead man up onto his shoulders as gently as a mother might carry a child. "Brother Castiel, lead the way."

Jane waited until the two Astartes had moved past before going over to Liddell. "Come on, I think we're off."

"What do you suppose is eating those two?" asked Liddell, a look of drunken concern on her face.

Jane had to confess, she had no idea.