It was not unlike dancing, dancing with a very unskilled very irritating partner. I followed Hadrian’s moves easily enough, anticipating his attempts to pull me too and fro, but I just didn’t have the mass or the strength to push him off balance. At one point I tried to kick him and he shoved me over onto my ass.
“Don’t try that until we have shown you how,” he advised as I climbed to my feet, “you don’t have the strength or the leverage to make it count.”
I elbowed him in the kidney and he flinched back slightly. I followed it up with another elbow aimed at his throat but he managed to get his hands infront of that one and spin me away, grabbing me from behind. I lunged forward with what momentum I had and twisted hard, driving him into a bulkhead though not hard enough to make him loosen his grip.
“Good,” he approved and let me go, “always try to use your enemies strength to make your attack. We continued sparring for another two hours, by the end of which I was thoroughly done with the exercise to the point that even the fact that it might save my life seemed too small a comfort.
“Enough for today, let’s hit the showers,” Hadrian suggested. “Then I have a surprise for you.”
Somewhat to my disappointment the surprise did not involve the showers but that was not to say it was impressive. The armory on the Caledonian, one of several I was later to learn, was immense. It reeked of gunoil, burnished metal, propellant powder and more exotic scents I couldn't name. Urien was a collector of sorts, a trophy taker might have been a better term and Hadrian’s personal collection was also extensive. The sheer variety of implements of death was a little overwhelming. Some weapons, like the las carbines and flamers, were familiar enough from imperial service. Others I thought I recognized from tales and texts, like the bejeweled Aeldari shuriken catapult. Others were so alien that their very relationship to violence was alien to me.
“Don’t bother with the xenos stuff,” Hadrian advised when he saw me looking at a strange glove like thing that might have been a gun and might have been a whip. I arched an eyebrow in surprise. We were the inquisition weren’t we? Didn’t that allow us to use the tools of the enemy? Or did they just not trust me not to shoot myself in the foot.
“Heretical xenos tech?” I asked skeptically. Hadrian shook his head and chuckled.
“Well yes, but mostly its because we don’t have alot of ammunition for them, it isn’t as though I can whistle up a corrupted Aldeari and ask for a few extra magazines of ammunition for yon splinter rifle,” he told me, making a gesture which might have been aimed at anyone of a dozen bizarre looking weapons. I had no idea what a splinter rifle might be. Well that wasn’t strictly true. Presumably it was a rifle and it either fired splinters, or made things splinter when it was fired at them. Emmaline Von Morganstern, ace Inquisitorial Operative, blinding powers of deduction.
“Oh,” I said lamely and continued through the collection into a more recognisabley imperial section.
“Might I suggest a sling shot, low risk to the rest of us,” Lazarus sniped as he followed in our wake.
I ignored him and picked up a gold and chrome hand gun with a black rubberized grip. The slide had been engraved with various images of St Sabat and with tiny curleques of text that seemed to be a variation on the Prayer for Accuracy. A half dozen magazines lay beside it, loaded with fat blunt ended rounds. I placed it on an arming tray and added the magazines beside it, then took a standard magistratum issue riot gun and a bandolier of reloads.
“I have fired a pistol before,” I declared loftily, glossing over the fact that it had been a las derringer designed to be pushed up against the target before being triggered, effective at scarring off unwelcome attention from men or their irate wives. I wondered what had happened to it, presumably the hotel I had been abducted from had taken it as collateral to my unpaid fees.
“What about a melee weapon?” Hadrian mused, turning his head to make it clear he was asking Lazarus. The Skitarii made a series of clicks.
“In all honesty, I would consider lending her your force staff, she cant cut her fingers off with it and her instinct is going to be to rely on her psychic powers if things go wrong. Which, if she gets into hand to hand combat, they most certainly have.”
I shuffled my cards and shifting my watching the two Eclisarchs in my hand and waying the odds that Hadrian or Urien had anything better. Lazarus, whose card playing was a brutally logical as his Skitarii training had already folded. I tapped the table with a knuckle to check the bet. The hour was late and the haze of lo-smoke from Urien’s pipe hung in the air like burned spices. They food had been cleared away hours ago by servitors, as had the bodies of most of his senior officers who, unlike us, had no inhibitions about drinking to excess. Hadrian gave me a suspicious look and tossed a card into the maelstrom, face up so he could draw two fresh ones. The sour look he gave when he did so might or might not have been a sign they were poor replacements. The Cannoness he discarded suggested he wasn’t trying to build the Church or the Four Pillars. Urien picked up the Cannoness and raised the bet, tossing a card face down into the maelstrom. His play was more erratic than Hadrian’s, sometimes brilliant, sometimes baffling. I suspect he was fishing, though he pushed a few more chips into the pot to stay in the game for the blind draw.
“I cannot decide between your stories, both worthy of za Saga!” Urine rumbled, taking another drink of the spiced carnworm mead that was his favorite, staining his whiskers with the sticky fluid before tactfully wiping it on his sleeve. As was the custom at these late watch gatherings Hadrian and Lazarus had been telling tall stories to thrill the table while we played. Hadrian had told a tale of a cult he had investigated with his old master in which children had been abducted every ten days. They had suspected the local Ecclesiarchy of being involved until the Children themself had reappeared one dark night, slaying their parents and priests in an orgy of blood letting. Lazarus for his part had told the tale of a Titan so old that upon learning the Emperor had ascended the Golden Throne, had laid waste to a city out of grief before being buried by the collapse of a cathedral spire.
“I have one,” I interjected, tossing a chip into the pot, then an additional chip into the side pot that Hadrian had created earlier in the hand. All two and a half men looked up in surprise. I didn’t customarily participate in the story telling, but then blanked their faces to mask reaction as I tossed a chip into the pot, then an additional chip into the maelstrom as a hedge against the Eye or the Flayed Man.
“This would have been… oh, three years before we met,” I began, lifting my amasec and taking a sip. It was rich and hot and smoky, a favorite vintage of mine Hadrian had whistled up from the God Emperor knew where.
“I was traveling on the Archlector Lord Cante, on old sword class frigate,” I explained. Watching the betting go around again, though interest had shifted from the cards to the story.
“And vat were you doing on this warship?” Urien asked with a slight scoff.
“I was the Captain’s…” I trailed off, casting a look at Hadrian, “friend.” Urien’s guffaw suggested that he took the meaning, and might have been about to say so if Lazarus hadn’t waved him to silence.
“We were out near Micar on the edge of the Orphidian Sub,” I continued.
“Micar as in the Massacre of Micar?” Hadrian interjected, more a student of history than either of the other players. I nodded somberly.
“Back in M38 there was a founding from Micar, half a million men headed for the Crusade in Angellus under Warmaster Kackston,” I confirmed. “The whole flower of her manhood.”
“Probably a fair amount of her gutter sweepings and derelicts too,” Lazarus put in. That was probably true, judging by the scale of the subsequent famine, pretty much every able bodied Micari male must have been given a las gun and packed into those transports. It was a common enough practice with foundings, though Micar had been a particularly egregious example of over tithing by sector lords who cared nothing for the welfare of individual worlds, especially those as poor and unimportant as Micar had been. I waved my had to regain control of the conversation. Pausing to slide both of my Ecclesiarchs under a face up Aegis of Faith.
“They were on their way to join the Crusade, in the Fifty Silver Ships, owing to the fact they plated their prows with silver to mark the honor of carrying Micar’s soldiers to the Warmaster. They wrote songs about it, the great triumph of Mother Micar sending her sons off to fight for their Emperor. Only they never made it,” I continued ominously. Hadrian discarded a Primarch, drew two more cards and then discarded one face down, sliding a coin to Urien in payment of the penalty for playing subterfuge. Urien scowled at him but his heart wasn’t in it.
“As they were preparing to jump into the Immaterium, three ships appeared from nowhere, three great cruisers all ivory and gold, marked with the wretched runes of the enemy. The took the Fifty Ships completely by surprise,” I declared. We all nodded somberly, each of us having seen those runes with our own eyes and feeling the aftershock of the soul deep twisting they induced.
“Surely there was an escort,” Urien interjected. I nodded somberly.
“There was, the heavy cruiser Sword of Saint Catherine,” I confirmed. Saint Catherine was a marshall saint whose fame had spread beyond the Angellus and Orphidian Subs. She was a patron saint of vigilance and watchfulness, often invoked by watchmen and the more religious elements of the Magistratum. Judging by the look on Hadrian’s face, her name was not unknown to certain, more puritanical elements of the inquisition, for whom eternal vigil was a watchword.
“Captain Ravus told me the story,” I explained, “told me that there was a legend that the watch officer on the Catherine had fallen asleep and so by the time the alarm was raised it was too late.” Urien made another growl, among his people falling asleep on watch was one of the few unforgivable sins.
“The Captain of the Sword of Saint Catherine was Junia Daysun, as hard bitten a void warrior as ever wore the uniform,” I continued, taking my turn in another round of betting and reordering of cards.
“They say she had the watch officer’s eyes put out and had him nailed to his chair so he would be on duty for the battle. The Catherine was no match for the raiders and because they had failed to raise the alarm it was too late for the Fifty Ships to flee. Junia went for it anyway, and the last anyone saw of the Catherine she was being hit from two sides with lance fire as her port magazines went up,” I continued grimly.
“Massacre,” I declared, flipping up my two Ecclesiarchs and putting my Prior and Flagellant down beside them to make The Mission. Everyone grumbled as I raked in my chips, though Hadrian took the side pot he had been running against Urien. Lazarus shuffled the cards but didn’t re-deal, clearly eager to here the rest of my story.
“The songs say that not one of the Fifty Ships escaped. A half a million men burned and frozen to death in silvered coffins,” I went on, sipping at my drink. “I suppose there must have been some survivors, but not many. The agricultural economy of Micar had collapsed for lack of man power and millions died of starvation and subsequent plague. They say Warmaster Kackston died of apoplexy when he got the news.”
“Anyway, but the time I got there this was ancient history, though there is a band of wrecks called the Silver Reef where the battle took place. Ravus said that every so often they have to chase salvagers away who think they are going to lift the silver from the prows,” I told the company.
“We were escorting troop ships out of Micar, only a couple of regiments, but the first guard they had tithed since the Massacre. I don’t mind telling you that Bridge crew was jumpy that day, too jumpy to escort a bored civilian off the command deck anyway. As we approached the Silver Reef, our scanners lit up. Three enemy cruisers had been playing possum in the reef. It was just the Lord Cante and a pair of clapped out destroyers the Spiritus Santus and The Proclamation of Ayende. We weren’t a match for one cruiser let alone three,” I told them, my voice low and somber as though I were performing a funerary rite.
“As we came to general quarters Ravus gave the order for the convoy to scatter, then brought Lord Cante and her escorts around to buy what time he could for the transports to run, though I could tell he had no hope for us and only a little more for the convoy,” I explained. Chaos tainted warships were notoriously difficult to slip in the Immaterium, and could certainly be relied upon to outmaneuver old clunkers leased to the Astra Militarum for troop transport.
“We were just about in weapons range when it happened,” I continued, glancing around the table at the rapt attention of my fellow players.
“A signal lit up in the Reef. At first we thought it was just another raider but the vector was all wrong, then we thought it might be the Fleet though that hope was forlorn. We couldn’t get any response from her, but her void shields were up and glowing red. It was cruiser size at least, though it was hard to tell because the Lord Cante couldn’t get a proper fix on her. Even our Astopath couldn’t make heads or tails of her,” I shivered with a frisson of remembered dread then lifted my tumblr only to find it was empty. I sat the glass down beside my unviewed cards.
“I remember the crew cheering as she swung out to meet the heretics. I’m no naval expert, but I’ve never seen a ship fight like that. She was outgunned, she was outnumbered, but she plunged into the enemy formation like a spear. Lance batteries burning like the sun as the battle rent the ether. I have some dim recollection of Captain Ravus ordering a torpedo salvo, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. Those lances burned so bright they hurt to look at even through the filters, and the red flash of her shields was searing not just to the eyes but to the soul. As quickly as it started it was over, the chaos fleet was shattered and the stranger had won. Three new wrecks falling burning into the silver reef,” I told them. Hadrian, whose appreciation for naval combat was better than mine, and I suspect Urien’s had a slightly skeptical look on his face, though he held his silence.
“She hove in beside us and then she dropped those horrible red shields to reveal an Imperial heavy cruiser, her hull plated entirely in silver. We were all silent and filled with a dread we couldn’t explain. Then she rolled over and we saw that the entire port side had been ripped away. There must have been twenty holes clean through her, and we knew that when it happened every soul on board had died. The only structure left intact between the ram and the engine housing was the statue of St Catherine, a hundred feet high and without a mark on her for all the pitting and damage to the plinth. Then the ship began to fade as we cowered on the bridge afraid. First her hull, then the bulkheads, until we all saw the bones of the Sword of St Catherine’s crew heaped where they had fallen, then they too began to fade. The last thing we saw was the skeleton of a single crewman, his crumbling bones nailed to the sensor station.”
There was a long silence at the card table during which no one spoke or seemed to draw breath. Then with a whoop that made everyone flinch Urien slapped his palm down on the table, making piles of chips and coins jump with a jangle.
“By the God Emperor!” he crowed, slapping Hadrien hard across the shoulder. “Dat is how you tell the story!”
“I do like a good story,” I confirmed, though I saw the slightest hint of a frown from Hadrian at the way my the neck of the bottle trembled against my cup as I poured myself another amasec.
Calliope felt a rush of lust as Neil departed. Her finger tips tingled and she felt an uncomfortable throb. It was always a risk to let her subconcious run free. Such lapses tended to end badly, stripped of her intellect her inner self tended to respond to base impulses which tended in one of two directions. She let out a sigh and tried to get her head on straight. Letting her innerself con the ship was likely to lead to a bloodbath or a... well a different scenario. She sat down and began brushing her hair, using an old techinque to bring herself into equilibrium, each of a hundred strokes to bring her mind to equilibrium.
She dressed herself carefully, adjusting the black fur cloak around herself. It would have been better to wear white she thought, but she just couldn't pull that off with her midnight black hair. Trying to appear pure always made her lookd fake something she couldn't afford at the current moment. The temptation to use her magic was strong. The spell she had worked with Neil had been powered by him, an enforced distance between his soul and his body. She imagined the watchers downstairs afraid she was a necromancer, then imagined the look of shock on thier faces as her magic began to rip them appart. She forced that thought down as well. The spellburn was fading but it would be days before she was up to her full potential. The battle at the party had stretched her well beyond her limits, she could feel that strength growing inside her. Maybe if she just looked at the book she could... No. She couldn't afford the temptation right now. Her hands strayed to the chalice and she lifted it up. She was looking forward to seeing what kind of show Neil and his shards of glass put on. Somehow she was prepared to be impressed.
“Perfect,” Calliope purred. She had slept for a time, though in her dream she had felt something malign stalking her. She recalled being in a great library in which every book was a copy of the one they had stolen, its binding infinitely scaled up and down but always exactly the same tome. She got out of bed, felt weak, and hated herself for it. She wanted meat but the last thing she needed was servants or the would be guards sticking their heads in at this point. They needed to find some supplies, the gown she had worn to the ball being a little worse for wear. Carefully she wrapped the mirror in one of the small table cloths and then punched her fist into the center of it. It disintegrated in a quiet cacophony of musical tinkles. Calliope paused and cocked her ear, making sure no one was coming to investigate the sound, then she carefully poured the shards into one of the soup bowls she had cleaned out for the purpose.
“You know I think they make you pay for that,” Neil put in sardonically. She ignored him, breaking up a few of the larger shards by hand, careful not to cut herself.
“I thought you still couldn’t do magic,” Neil interjected as she picked up one of the large shards and turned it over in her fingers.
“Me?” she asked innocently, “no. You? Yes.” She cut him across the forearm with the tip of the shard drawing three drops of blood. They ran silver.
Neil and Calliope stood on a wind blasted heath, so formless that it made the mind ache. Phantom wind whipped around them, disturbing their hair but not their clothing. In the distance strange and indistinct shaped humped and crawled like blind maggots, just hinted at in the murky air.
“Gods damn it woman!” Neil complained, glancing around them in shock. He looked down at himself and found he was two Neil’s, one whole, the other slightly translucent and an inch or so out of alignment.
“Ok spill,” he demanded, crossing his four arms awkwardly. Calliope smiled up at him and lifted the bowl of mirror shards. They flowed together into a single sheet of glass so perfect it might have been quicksilver. Inside the mirror a second naked Calliope was visible behind him, her arms draped over his shoulders, her red lips close to his neck.
“I’ve removed your soul from your body,” both Calliope’s said in eerie synchrony, the words oddly sibilant as they came at Neil from all directions and maybe none.
“Don’t worry…” the Calliope behind him said, extending her tongue to scrape along his neck, something he could see but not feel.
“It isn’t permanent,” the Calliope in front of him said.
“Just a trick,” the Calliope behind him said, her lips closing around his ear lobe and tugging playfully.
“Just a trick,” the Calliope in front of him agreed. She clapped her palms together on the disc of quick silver at the same instant the second Calliope’s hands began to stray down the front on Neil’s tunic.
The mirror exploded silently. It fell into the bowl in a sound so similar to its original shattering that a musical savant could have found no difference, despite being having apparently been broken in a completely different fashion and falling rather than simply being contained by cloth. Neil thought he glimpsed himself in the mirror shards even though they weren’t oriented to reflect him, but it was only for an instant. She handed him the bowl then tucked the large shard with a drop of his blood on the tip away.
“Take a shard and focus on it, imagine what you want it to show,” she explained.
Camilla rode atop Cydric's shoulders with a sense of glee, ducking under low branches and issuing Imperial commands as though she were riding a great warhorse. The Dwarves grumbled in their own tongue, complaining about humans, women, and human women in particular. The hill grew closer but it seemed to Camilla that the trees grew thicker even as the ground began to become rocky. A worrying light had began to appear on the eastern horizon as the sun began to rise.
“Ve need to harry,” she insisted, her accent thickening unconsciously as her unease grew.
“Probably easier if the big ox weren’t carrying your behind,” Thor grunted, though his heart wasn’t in the insult. Before Camilla could respond the sun peaked over the tips of the distant World’s Edge mountains and the hill infront of them flared into sharp relief, the black smudgy shadows of foliage turning emerald as the morning sun struck it. The trees exploded into motion, seeming to surge up the hill like a frozen wave suddenly unthawed. They struck something and recoiled, a low fence of stones that sparked and flashed.
“A rune fence,” Thor muttered in quiet awe. Beyond the fence the hilltop was bare, tree stumps littered it, obviously harvested by whatever dwarves had settled there, either to provide timber or to clear a defensive perimeter, or both. The sun continued to rise and the chaos continued to spread.
“Myrmidia’s tits,” Camilla cursed/prayed. There was no way in hell that they were going to break through to the minehead through that wall of rending thrashing timber. Worse, some at the rear of the group had turned and she saw glowing green eyes regarding them.
“Run!” Camilla shouted, “Run for the grove! We have to stay in the shadows as long as we can!”
The timing of the explosion was perfect. A half dozen more of the would be rocketeers had been just about to launch. Instead they were flung into the air, their packs exploding or igniting wildly throwing them in all directions. One went off in mid air like a firecracker, raining bits of detritus down over an acre of ocean. The barge wallowed and began to slow, though it was still undercontrol, someone was at the helm and was edging it over towards their would be victim. As soon as they were in jetpack range there was a coordinated abandon ship. Six figures rose on the smoke trails of their jetpacks in a phalanx.
“Some guys,” Jocasta complained, “just don’t know when to take a hint.” She cut the power to the port nacelle by 90 percent and upped the drive as high as it would go. Their port side dropped into the water like a router blade, spraying a wall of foam thirty feet into the air. It crashed into the oncoming attackers, sending every one of them splashing down into the ocean where they could fight to get out of their gear before it dragged them down.
“Down, down and drowned, down and drowned and never found,” Jocasta hummed as she brought the power back up. The barge wallowed and stabalized, the enemy boat slowing down and emitting an unhealthy looking plume of black smoke. Where the jet skis had gone she had no idea. Probably decided to spend their hard earned vacation days as far from the barge as possible. Jocasta ease the throttle back and out of the red, correcting their course for the main docks on the edge of the crater ocean. She was soaked from head to toe and red water from the stabbed merc was sloshing around. The white gauzy dress she had been wearing clung to her body leaving little the the imagination. Something wriggled beneath the wet fabric and a dragon fly drone popped up from between her breasts. It shook its wings irritably, making an electronic buzzing sound.
“Hey, take it up with your travel agent sister! I was team hotub,” Jocasta scolded.
The bag stubbornly resisted my attempts to pummel it into submission. The padding deforming around my fists as I circled and punched.
“Good, keep your hands up,” Hadrian encouraged. After an hour of practice my body was glistening with sweat, I was not normally one for intense physical activity, in this realm at least, but I found the idea of being ripped appart by the God Emperor knew what concentrated my mind.
“She appears thirty seven percent more focused than yesterday,” Lazarus commented, having joined us at some point during the training session.
“Bio signs suggest increased endorphin production as well as serotonin and dopamine secretion which combined with decreased cortisol suggests…”
“Enough Lazarus,” Hadrian put in quickly before the Skitarii came to the right conclusion. Lazarus made a clicking noise and cocked his head towards Hadrian but fell silent.
“Limited muscle mass renders close combat an option of last resort,” he said instead. I paused in my assault on the Chaos tainted punching bag, breathing heavily.
“Not to worry, I plan on keeping the two of you between me and anything I might need to punch,” I assured him. With the best will in the world, two days wasn’t going to make me a combatant. Lazarus reached down and selected a training sword from the weapon rack, a bundle of wooden dowels weighted to mimic a standard naval cutlass.
“Try to defend yourself,” he instructed and then darted forward. I yelped and knocked his blade aside, backpedaling to avoid his follow up.
“Concentrate on your feet,” he instructed. The punching bag smacked into him from behind and knocked him off balance, its forty pound mass glistening with frost. I tapped him on the shoulder with the blade before he could regain his feet.
“A trick, in a fair fight you would have been killed,” he observed.
“Not alot of incentive for me to fight fairly I suppose,” I returned. He made a proforma salute and attacked again. I split myself into a half dozen copies of myself, the illusions all menacing him with their blades. It was convincing enough that he could have felt their touch, but he backed away, fending off thrusts and cuts as they came. A light in his cowl changed and he focused on the real me, lunging forward to tap my chest with the point of his blade. My doppelgangers all scowled with disappointment and then faded.
“Clever of you to invest the illusions with body temperature, however each of them was uniform without the normal variations induced by layering of fat and tissue,” he informed me.
“Well I can’t say I’ve had any complaints before,” I huffed, setting the sword down and taking up one of the water canteens, gulping greedily.
Calliope felt oddly nostalgic as they made small talk with the nobles. It reminded her of old times when she had entertained the Great and Good of Callaverde and they had all danced to her tune. Before they had all turned on her of course. Something primal rumbled in the back of her mind and for a moment she thought she smelled something like fire crackling over rock. Like all such moments it passed quickly and faded from her mind. Markus proved himself a man of hidden talents, though perhaps it should not have surprised her that so capable a swordsman found the less improvised footwork of the dance a natural fit. They shared a pair of dances, a slow waltz and a spritely sarabande before other partners drew them away. There was much talk of pirates and piracy, mostly of the ridiculous demands of one Markus Flintbrook whose vessel was currently prowling these waters. Did she know that they had captured a score of his men and planned to hang them on the morrow? Would she be attending? Did she want an escort to such a beastly business?
There was no formal feast, instead plates of food were circulated among the crowd by servants in party coloured livery. It was quite the display of culinary skill. Small ships made of mashed potato crusted with sharp cheese with little pennants of sauteed green onion. Elegant little roses made of slivers of beef or bacon. Little faux apples made from candied pork with gold leaf. Coiled and recooked noodles woven into patterns of trees with sauted meat for trunks and vegetables for leaves. Lime tart and custard pies, little mandalas made of nuts encased in brightly coloured sugars, butter short bread and almond crisp. Calliope wasn’t sure she had ever seen or tasted its equal. Drinks were served in a similar fashion and judging by the amount of wine circulating Calliope knew that many a noble cellar would need restocking in the morning. Claret and champagne flowed freely, as did crisp whites with an appley finish which was apparently a specialty of the islands. The drink was less to Calliope’s taste, her sensibilities having been eroded by the cask rum mixed with lime juice and gunpowder which was the sailors daily comfort. The apple brandy they served seemed a poor tipple in comparison, and she had to be careful not to toss it off to quickly lest she give herself away.
“May I have this dance Lady?” A nervous looking man with pinched cheeks and a receding hairline asked. Calliope extended her hand and took his.
“Callypsa Haukenbrook,” she introduced herself, performing a slight curtsey before lifting her fingertips to the proscribed position..
“Marcel D’amarlane,” he replied, touching his fingertips to her and beginning to circle as the orchestra took up the tune.
“I am not familiar with the Haukenbrooks, are you a local family?” he asked, making polite conversation. Calliope gave him the same vague account of overseas travel that she had given her other dance partners.
“Calypsa, its a strange name, have you ever been to Callaverde by any chance?” he asked.
“I’ve heard of it,” Calliope responded with understatement that didn’t amplify the statement. They curved and reversed direction, switching hands with easy grace.
“I had the pleasure of visiting there some years ago. I even attended a feast with the potentate there, Call… something was her name? A terrible sorceress, her own people rose up against her later that year, though I heard she escaped and cursed the city as she fled,” he pressed. Up until this point he seemed to be making conversation but something in her manner must have given him pause because he suddenly gave her a very appraising look.
“Calliope,” she supplied for him. “A very terrible woman I am given to understand.” Marcel missed a step but quickly recovered, though looking a little pale.
“My Lady I…” he began but she continued speaking over him.
“Can you imagine if she were here now,” she told him lightly, spinning through the dance step and coming in close for the stylized embrace.
“Walking here among us in secret?” she tittered as though this was the most wickedly entertaining thing she could imagine.
“Can you imagine what a woman like that might do if someone were to expose her like that? Why I bet she would flay a man alive! Perhaps burn his intestines alive. Maybe even rip his mind from his body entirely,” she tittered again, though judging by the now pasty white complexion of her dance partner, it wasn’t quite the light giggle it had started as. She blinked her eyes, her pupils suddenly slitted and serpentine, then, in the next heartbeat back to normal. Marcel made a choking sound and stumbled, colliding with a waiter who expertly kept his tray aloft while disentangling himself from the guest. Such accidents of drunken gracelessness were certainly common at this late hour. Marcel snatched a glass of brandy and downed it in a single gulp before casting her one more fearful glance. Calliope waved a gloved hand and waved with her fingers. He fled the dancefloor.
“What is wrong with that poor devil?” another woman asked as she took a glass of wine from the waiter.
“Always a mistake to attempt a dance you can't finish,” Calliope told her in a slightly disappointed tone.
The drones reported that the island was free of hostels, though they persisted in playfully labeling Dirk with a question mark. Jocasta tucked her long barreled pistol into its holster at her hip and followed the big armored man up onto the beach. The pristine stretch of sand was somewhat marred by the large surface effect air boat that had run up on the sand and grounded. It was easy to imagine the mercenaries leaping from its sides, yelling and brandishing weapons while the sunbathing tourists fled like panicked geese. Jocasta skipped over to one of the piles of detritus and picked up a bra that appeared to be made of little diamond shaped sapphires woven together with gold wire. She held it up to her chest and struck a pose.
“If you are quite finished?” Dirk asked. Jocasta stuck her tongue out and dropped the expensive piece into a pocket, despite the fact it seemed unlikely to do too much to conceal even assets more modest than her own.
“If lingerie and airboats don’t improve your mood I fear there is no hope for you,” Jocasta opined philosophically and hopped up onto the deck of the barge. It shifted slightly under her weight but was stuck fast in the sand. She was just about to ask Dirk how they should get it out onto the water when he planted both hands on the curve of the hull and heaved. For a long moment nothing happened save a whirring of servos in his armor, then the boat slid an inch, then two, then slid out into the water, Dirk jumping aboard just before the water reached the knee joint of his armor. Jocasta grabbed the controls, took a moment to orient herself and then fired up the big fan that drove the barge. The subsonic thrum made Jocasta’s belly tingle and her air streamed out towards the reversing fans as she backed them. She turned her hair golden blonde and shook it like a model in a commercial. No use wasting a good wind effect. As soon as the barge had come around enough, she jammed the throttle forward and the noise grew so intense that Jocasta’s comm deployed a cancelation wave to mute it. A great wave of white foam formed beneath the bow as they picked up speed and then the hull lifted and they were skimming the water at the head of a long wake. The barge wasn’t a pleasure craft, but it was designed to shift thousands of kilos of cargo quickly. That kind of power still translated to speed when it was empty. Jocasta let out a whoop and shoved the throttle to the gate. Almost immediately red carrots sprang up in her vision. Only one of her drones was aloft, flying a pattern high above, the others busily clinging to the surface of the barge and one gripping onto her hair for dear life. Fortunately the lone overwatcher was sufficient to provide warning. A large airboat much like their own was arrowing towards them on an intercept course. Within moments it hull was visible, laser fire licking out from it like a questing tongue. A quartet of what looked like high end jet skis were flanking it like outriders. The laser fire flecked harmlessly of the hull, powerless to do much damage to what was essentially just steel skirting without any mechanical components to damage, the engines buried under the deck. Dirk returned fire with much the same result. As they closed Jocasta saw a flash of smoke on the enemy deck. For a moment she thought Dirk had hit something but then a man rocketed into the air, leaping the distance on a tail of fire, his jet pack carrying him onto the deck infront of them with a crash.
shylarah
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