Penny

At The Edge of The World

"The Emperor?" Emmaline asked with a slightly puzzled frown. Despite Beren's best efforts and the limited protection of her broad brimmed hat she was getting a soaking. The Protosate was dripping, but he seemed indifferent to the trouble. Emmaline wondered how well the crossbow string would hold up in the wet, even sealed with wax there were limits.

"Empress Casavara retired to Contemplate the Mysteries in the Spring. Her nephew ,Haradatus the Second, is now on the throne. With new leadership come new priorities," their guide, whose name they still hadn't learned, replied easily. Contemplate the Mysteries might mean anything from a genuine retirement to scholarly life, to taking a knife to the kidneys at her nephew's order. Such was the way with Basilean's. Their might be half a dozen coups and counter coups before they settled on a final sovereign, whose early elimination of rivals made for a long reign after the initial blood letting. If this Haradatus was already sending out colonies, he must be confident indeed, or else these troops were too undependable to be anywhere close to the Imperial City.

"Well Long and Strong to him," Emmaline replied, using a Basilean colloquialism to invoke good luck on the Emperors reign. It had a few different meanings depending on how it was used but it made their guide smile. They crossed a second ditch and entered the camp proper. As expected tents and more permanent structures were laid out on grids. Stumps of trees scattered around the stony expanse of ground, their trunks pilled up and stripped of branches at a makeshift lumber mill towards the rear of the camp. The center was an old stone structure that clearly predated the colonists, probably it had been little more than a tumble down pile of moss covered stones when they arrived, but the industrious Legionaries had already restored it as best they could, replacing fallen stonework with timber and an impressive roof of split shingle.

"Welcome to Fort Serpentus," the guide declared grandly.

Pax Astra

Sabatine swirled her own beer and took another pull. It was a potent brew, though she knew Tiber ruminations had more to do with the fact that he had seen a workshop he had sunk months into trashed. She thought of her fruit trees and her dam and washed the sour taste out of her mouth with the malty brew.

"I'm from Caledon," she said after a minute. "My ancestors came out from Rome three generations back and we have been their ever since." Caledon was a prosperous, if low tech world on the edge of settled space. Roman civilization coexisted uneasily with a barbarian people of earlier waves of settlement, known as the Pact, and with pirates and cut throats who made the sector their base for constant raiding. Sabatine had cut her teeth dropping assault teams onto pirate held worlds or asteroids.

"When Mercedes convinced old Grundark to march on Earth, we all pulled up stumps and went, three entire legions. Pact must have swarmed all over the place soon as we left. Three generations of work gone," she mused sourly, gazing out at her orchards. She wondered if the same thing were about to happen here in microcosm. Not for the first time she wondered if she should have just bowed her neck and paid, but that was foolish. Ketcharch Grom had systematically ground the people of the province into poverty, save for a few favorites who competed for his table scraps.

"Maybe I'm just fighting because that is what I know," she continued, finishing the bottle in a long pull. "Which I suppose is as good a reason as any." She tossed the bottle overhand so that it bounced off a plastic partition and into a bin for washing and later reuse.

"You should rack out, I'll take first watch."

____________________

Morning came bright and early. Sabatine rose before dawn and went through her usual routine of watering plants, washing and packing Opal fruit and carefully adding lime to the soil to keep the alkalinity in balance. After a breakfast of nut bread and opal fruit preserve along with coffee imported from one of the Earth-likes at considerable expense, they lifted the assault boat and brought it down in the woods to the rear of the property, covering it as best the could with an old roll of cam film that was still in one of the storage lockers. The martime smell had faded significantly, but had been replaced with the tang of bleach to an unpleasant extent. The air filters badly needed replacement and Sabatine didn't dare run them out for the sake of getting rid of a bad smell and a slight stinging in the eyes. That task completed they hiked along the river to the damn, then up to the house.

"This isn't exactly subtle," Tiber said as they climbed onto the atv that had belonged to the now deceased goons. Tiber who, evidently, had experience driving such vehicles sat in the front while Sabatine sat behind him, obliged to grip his waist to avoid falling off as they bumped down the rough track she had cut to the local road. A couple of piles of gravel, taller than two men sat by the road, waiting to be spread across the dirt path as the first step to making it a bit more traversable.

"I doubt we are going to do too much that is subtle today," Sabatine called over the wine of the electric engine as they joined the main road. This was a true Roman road, set into the ground and sealed with plasticizer. Despite being over sixty years old, the light traffic meant it looked almost new after the recent reigns.

Penny's Pencils

Lilaethan

The Pavonis Campaign - Warhammer 40000

Zeb opened his eyes to find himself laying in a busy medicae unit. All around were wounded soldiers and medicae personnel, some guard, others clearly civilians pressed into service. Men were laid out in rows, bags of fluid, healing incense and the other tools of the Emperors aid hung above them. Somewhere a Ministorum preacher was droning the last rites, though that seemed to be in another room, perhaps reserved for the more seriously wounded. The whole place smelled powerfully of counterseptic.

"You are finally awake," Rikkard's familiar voice came from nearby. Zeb turned his head to see the voxman sitting in a chair beside him. Bloody gauze was wrapped around his chest, though he seemed to be mobile.

"What happened," Zeb asked, his voice parched and croaking.

"You don't remember?" Rikkard asked, then grunted. "Things got a bit hairy after you got hit."

Six Hours Earlier.

Katia strained with all her might to lift Zeb, hauling him up into a fireman's carry by force of will more than muscle. It could only be moments before the end. Orks were closing from all directions now the ATV's had been cut off and every ork the guardsmen cut down was replaced by three more, often times hacking at each other to get at the Imperials. Katia was trying to think of something inspiring to say before she went to the golden throne, when her vox bead suddenly crackled to life.

"...repeat, Commissar, if you can hear me, get all your people to the Imperial side of the dyke now!" Katia struggled for a moment to make sense of the message and then heard the distant roar of turbo fans closing at astonishing speed.

"Other side of the dyke!" she screamed, turning to lurch up over the small hill, ignoring the ork bolts that plucked at her coat.

"Move! Move! Danger Close!" she yelled. The ork side of the dyke two hundred feet away exploded in sprays of blood and gravel. The blasts raked along the dyke like the Emperor's own sowing machine as an Imperial thunderbolts screamed overthem, so ear splitting loud that even the ork's warcries were blotted out. Katia stumbled on something and then rolled over the top of the dyke with Zeb. Behind her munitions went off in the wake of the strafing run, rocking the world. Bits of gravel and ork rained down into the flooded field beyond like rain. Katia rolled on top of Zeb and pressed him down, though there seemed no chance of the sergeant trying to push himself to his feet. A second thunderbolt went over after the first, its huge autocannons hosing a line of death that swept the greenskins from the far side of the dyke, then a third. Katia's bones felt like jelly from the continual impacts of the stacked aircraft as they carved a bloody shield to stop the orks from closing. Even the Greenskins seemed stunned, though perhaps they were just appreciating the sheer amount of dakka on display. The comm bead in Katia's ear was buzzing, but she couldn't understand the words. Strong hands gripped her and hauled her to her feet. Rikkard and another trooper were pointing towards a vehicle speeding across the flooded field. It was some kind of hovercraft, air cushioned skirts riding the muddy water. She hauled the unconscious Zeb to his feet and dragged him to the waters edge. The air stank of fioslene and corite as well as the rank mushroom smell of burned ork. Another thunderbolt went over, so low Katia actually felt its down draught. Something touched off on the far side of the dyke, lifting a fireball a hundred feet into the air.

"On you get," Rikkard encouraged, heaving Zeb over the side of the hovercraft like a sack of grain. Katia followed him, half pulled by his weight. Rikkard grinned and took a step up when blood exploded from his shoulder throwing him forward. Katia grabbed him and pulled him over the side. A half dozen orks had crested the dyke, somehow fighting their way through the wall of fire the flyboys were laying down. She lifted her hand only to discover she had lost her pistol somewhere in the battle. A trooper whose name plate read 'Edwin' but had been scratched out to read Ed, appeared beside her. He rested a foot on the side of the vehicle and lifted a massive shotgun that certainly hadn't been issued by the munitorum. It roared like an artillery piece and blasted one ork back over the dyke. He racked the slide and fired again, then again, sweeping the monsters back as heavy shell casings clattered to the deck. The hovercraft was turning now and racing back towards the Imperial lines. Two more thunderbolts went over and fire bloosmed into the sky as they dropped their payloads of jellied promethum, turning the night into a brief bloody day. Katia slumped down and looked at Rikkard and Zeb, both battered and bloodied from their wounds.

"Medic!" she tried to call, and then slipped into unconsciousness.

Pax Astra

By the time Tiber returned Sabatine had a pair of venison steaks sizzling on a plate. She tossed some vegetables in a pan beside it, keeping them constantly in motion. She didn't often cook for company but it wasn't as though her limited repitore required a great deal of culinary skill.

"Would you eat exotic space quisine?" she hummed.
"Would you eat exotic space quisine?"
"Powdered eggs and wafer bar, nameless stew and murdered char."
"You can eat exotic space quisine."

She dusted the steaks with salt and pepper and then flipped them to cook the other side, enjoying the way the the meat popped and hissed on the hot metal. Not for the first time she felt a surge of frustration at the grasping local thugs who were interupting her life. She had hunted this game herself, grown these vegetables. Giving up the small bit of piece she had found for herself cut deep but it was that or bend the knee to the kind of grasping assholes who were never satisfied till they sat atop a pile of corpses.

"In the cupboard," she said, making a vauge guesture with a spatula. Tiber opened one cupboard, finding dehydrated vegetables in jars, then opened the right one and took two more beers from the cabinet. It was her own brew, grown with hops and opal sugar from her trees. It was just a hobby, something to do in the winter seasons when there was little other work to occupy her. The earthenware bottles were one of the items she bought in her infrequent trips to town. They were reusable with rubber corks attached by wire cages, a few credits spent that would last a lifetime.

Sabatine flipped the steaks off the plate and onto the serving platters, then added the vegetables and killed the heat to her simple cooking unit. She carried the plates across to the kitchen table and set them down taking a seat.

"Well if we can give the Ketcharch something else to focus on, we might have time to do a proper refit, assuming we can find parts somewhere. They might have some of the components on ground to orbit relays."

The Pavonis Campaign - Warhammer 40000

The ATV engines were whisper quiet compared to the background noise of engines, guns, and artillery fire. Katia clung on to the running boards, black coat fluttering in the warm night wind. They had the dykes mapped and rolled along them keeping slightly off to one side to avoid being siloutted. Star flares popped at irregular intervals, throwing the shadows on the far side of the dike into sharp relief. Periodically tracer fire skipped over the top of the dykes, kicking up sparkling gravel in sprays. Katia found herself in the strange situation of worrying that her own side was going to shoot her. That was a fate that befell many Commissars of course, the iron hand of the Emperor was not always well admistered or much appreciated, but in her case it would legitamately be an accident. Rikkard was in the back of the atv, head covered by a tarp which had been rigged as an improvised light shield, fiddling frantically with the vox. So far the only sounds coming through was the weird warbling of empty vox waves, intercut occasionally with snatches of chatter, and something that sounded like a weather report.

As the dyke began to curve towards the Imperial lines, ork fires began to appear. For the most part these were looted promethum drums, the dregs of which were mixed with gravel. The orks were feasting and in a couple of horrifying cases, singing. Some of them glanced towards the vehicles but for the moment they seemed to be assuming the ATVs were their own buggies.

"I've nearly got it," Rikkard said, his voice a little too loud with his excitement. A trio of dark small objects popped up beside the road, dropping a human arm they had been gnawing on. Their large eyes all but glowed yellow in the dark, the blood dripping from their fangs oily black.

"Humies!" one of them shrilled, so loud it literally hurt Katia's ear drums.

"Go!" she yelled and the ATVs leaped forward, throwing rooster tails of gravel out over the fields where they fell like rain drop amidst the patties. Katia tried to bring her borrowed las pistol to bear on the gretchen but they were all ready lost in the darkness. The vehicles bumped up onto the top of the dykes and roared forward at something like their top speed.

"Frak! FRAK!" Rikkard was screaming, but that scream was rapidly drowned by the mighty 'WAAAAAAAAGHHH!' that came up from the greenskins who, moments ago, had been feasting. Violence errupted everywhere all at once but at first, not much of it was directed at the Imperials. One mob of orks charged into another, choppers biting into each other. One crashed into a fire barrel and turned it over in a spray of embers. The ork rose, crude clothing burning, and continued his attack without paying the slightest attention to the flames. Gunfire spread like a ripple from a dropped stone, dozens of gun battles breaking out within a few heartbeats. The Imperial forces joined the fray immediately, las fire cracking blindly into the night. Katia heard the whump whump of distant mortars lofting illumination flares a moment before they burst overhead, painting the night in merciless white light. The orks could see them clearly now and hail of random bolter fire began blasting divots out of the dyke and sparkling of the thin armor of the ATVs.

"Open fire!" Katia shouted, suiting words to action and blazing away with her las pistol. The others followed suit, firing indiscriminately into the mob. An ork with a rocket launcher stepped onto the dyke and aimed directly down the throat of the onrushing ATVs. Katia stared in horror at his massive learing grin, mirrored in the cartoonish painting on the rocket's warhead. The ork lost cohesion in the blinding beam of a las cannon blast a moment before the ATVs hit him. The crumped over the legs with a satisfying crunch. Grimdal gave a savage cheer. Katia didn't join, the las blast had been aimed at the vehicles, but she saw no need to damp the guardsman's enthusiasm.

"Rikkard!" she yelled, "If you don't get us on comms..." The guardsman popped up from beneath his tarp, the need for light discipline long since passed. He shoved the bakerlite handset at her.

"General push!" he shouted as she snatched it from his hands.

"All units this is Regiment S1, Commissar Lubydenko, approaching vehicles are Imperial, say again vehicles approaching across the dyke are Imperial! All units fire to..." before she could finish the words a massive shape stood up from behind the dyke. THere was a sudden roar as a massive rotary blade engaged and smoke belched from behind it in clouds. The xenos machine, a profane mockery of a dreadnaught, stood and swung its blade down. The weapon bit into the rear of the ATV, clearly severing the rear fender of the vehicle. The blow knocked them off course sending them careening down into the mass of orks.

Pax Astra

Sabatine caught the bottle of bleach in her off hand, her master hand across the grip of her gladius, her face set. It was the same expression soldiers throughout the millenia had made when the saw a comrade witnessing loss. She felt a stab of guilt, wondering if these thugs had come here because of her. Maybe Tiber would have provided a gift and wouldn't be in this situation if it weren't for her forcing his hand.

"Well, we can imdemnify ourselves with the good Ketcharch for the behaviour of his employees," Sabatine suggested. It was possible this was the work of common bandits, but the odds were too low to bother considering. It was something of a silver lining that alot of Tiber's more valuable tools had been on the grasshopper and thus escaped theft or destruction.

"I have beer," Sabatine offered.

_______

It was getting dark by the time they set down at Sabatine's farmstead. To her guilty relief it was much as she had left it. She had visions of her opal fruit trees cut down and her gardens ripped up and destroyed. The assault boat had its own fusion plant bottle, but Sabatine took it off line and hooked it to her house unit. No point in letting a twenty year old bottle go critical and take out the assault ship after they had gone through so much trouble to recover it. Then they hooked up her pump and sluiced the interior of the assault boat with clean river water. Tiber was able to rig one of her fungicide sprayers to apply the bleach and water and Sabatine used an ultrasonic broom to dislodge the sand and desicatted sea life. They ripped out any left over gear that was rotted by the sea water. They would need to replace the control couches in the cockpits at some point as the padding in the seats was ruined.

"Hey check it out," Sabatine called as she managed to open the arms locker. Stale air rushed out to mingle with the bleach smell of the cleaned interior. The seals that protected the locker had held, just as many of the seals to internal electonics had. Sabatine reached in and pulled out a gladius, a generation older than hers and engaged the capacitor. The charge lights lit up, blinked a three quater charge, then went out so they wouldn't give a soldiers positon away in darkness.

"Hermes, God of Thieves and Liars, Bless the lowest bidders," she prayed. The locker had a dozen rifles and various small arms as well as a suit of legion lorica segmentum, overlapping plates of balistic weave and ceramic armor. There were even a few boxes of grenades of various kinds.

"May they be right a hundred percent of the time at least fifty percent of the time," Tiber amplifed. "I believe there was some mention of beer?"

They crossed the lawn passing three new garden beds each about six feet long and haphazardly planted with carrots.

"Subtle," Tiber joked as they passed the fresh grades and stepped into the house. It was cool and dry inside, with tiled floors and a large kitchen hung with braided garlic and dried onions. A bowl of glistening opal fruit sat on a table of polished wood. Sabatine crossed to a large industrial fridge and pulled it open. Inside were several pounds of meat, vegetables, and a few luxuries, as well as dozens of bottles of cider and ale. She pulled two earthenware bottles from the fridge and then struck the caps from them with short sharp blows against the stone tabletop. The caps clinked on the ground as she passed one to Tiber.

Pax Astra

"I'll never talk shit about Martian Engineering again," Sabatine said as the assault boat settled onto the beach. It was one thing to know that an assault boat should be ok after decades under salt water, it was another thing to see it rise from the ocean and settle onto the beach as though it were fresh out of graving dock. Well not quite. Sea creatures had colonized the hull, coral and barnacles encrusted the lower portion of the hull, most of it was dead now, killed by the waters as they boiled beneath the plasma jets. It gave off a nauseating scent of burnt lime and boiled shellfish.

Sabatine waited a few seconds for the landing site to cool then walked over into the shade of the landed assault boat. It was boxy twenty five meters from nose to tail and almost as broad across its down swept wings. Three of the four ordanace pods were still attached, the body of an eel flopping lifelessy from one of them. That was good, though Sabatine wouldn't want to risk firing them without a full survey of the munitions. She conducted a quick inspection of the external fittings. She wouldn't have certified the bird as air worthy no matter how much the deck officer was willing to pay in chits or booze. Still, she didn't have to take it up into the void, just had to get it 400 clicks back home.

"Open the bay!" she called to Tiber and a moment later was rewarded by a hideous groan of tortured hydraulics. Sabatine reached up and grasped a corroded release handle and pulled hard. The lever depressed with a crunch. The assault boat quivered then there were two sharp bangs as the clearing charges went off and the rear ramp crashed down. Sea water, silt, and sea life poured out in a sludgy wave that crashed onto the atol. Assault bolts were built to land troops and provide close air support. Explosive charges were built into the hatch linings to free them in case the hatch bound during combat damage. It seemed they worked just as well against decades of corrosion.

"Everything okay?" Tiber called in evident concern.

"Never cracked a boat under fire? Lucky, lucky," she called as she walked through the miasma of cordite smoke. The interior of bay was dark and lightless, hung with half rotted crash webbing and barnacle encrusted weapon racks. It smelled dank and fishy now, but it was really going to stink in a couple of days.

"How does it look?" Tiber asked, climbing out of the cockpit and sliding down to the ground beside her.

"I'm hoping you have bleach back at your place," she sighed.

Pax Astra

The grasshopper skittered greasily on the cables, the frame groaning as it took the stress. Sabatine fed more power to the turbines, the howling fans blowing a vast rooster tail of coral dust out into the western ocean. Her eyes flicked constantly from the instruments to the lagoon below. The blast from the turbofans hammered the surface into a chaos of ripples that robbed her of any visibility. She pulled the googles down over her eyes and engaged the milimetric radar, her vision swimming into a wireframe composite of the returns. The assault transport hadn't shifted, though judging from the return she had succeeded in kicking up a fair amount of silt.

"Hold on," she advised and banked over the lagon, gaining height as she took up the slack in the cales until they ran down in an extended triangle with the grasshopper at the apex. She began side slip left and right, brining each engine up to full power to conter the altitude lost. The blows resounded through the frame of the air craft as she rocked left and right, jerking the submerged shuttle in alternating directions. The engines were heating up fast under the strain and Sabatine would have been surprised if she wasn't inducing stress fractures in the grasshoppers airframe. The scream of the engines grew and grew, almost defeaning even through the sound baffles of the cockpit.

"Its not going to work!" Tiber called, but Sabatine wasn't listening. She thought she had felt the slightest give in the line and she increased her savage manuevering. With shocking suddeness the grasshoper lurched sideways as the suction of decades of silt broke. Sabatine shoved the throttle through the gates. She hurled on the yoke and began to bank slowly towards the shore. There was a sound of ripping metal but Sabatine was commited now. The shuttle below was lifting in a storm of silt and she hauled it sideways, moving at a torturously slow rate, only a few feet a second. The water below them boiled under the down draft and the scream of distressed metal grew worse.

"I can see it!" Tiber shouted and Sabatine risked cutting her radar enhanced optics. The ventral fin was breaking the water, a spike of gray metal encrusted with the beginings of coral growth. It was only twenty meters from the shore when there was a sudden bang and the high pitched whine of metal being thrown at high speed. THe grasshopper dropped suddenly, cables going slack as they lost altitude. THe port engine seized, boomed and then flamed out, spewing black smoke shot through with flame.

"Detatch cable," Sabatine shouted, flipping switches to free the aircraft from its burden. THere wre two explosive pings as the cables parted, falling away to splash into the water below. Sabatine fed power into the remainging engine even as she reached up and pulled the handle the port fire suppresion system. White foam exploded from the six suppression ports, smothering the flames and dripping gobbets suppressent gel into the lagoon. Tiber was gripping his seat, his face set in the neutral but determined expression of a combat soldier who has long accostmed himself to the possibility that a drop could go wrong and there was nothing he could do about it. Sabatine powered the remaining engine down, dropping them percipitously towards the beach. At the last moment she hammered the throttle open again and the engine screamed to full power, slowing their decent into something between a landing an a controlled crash. Sabatine felt the blow up her spine as the hit, but managed to hit the emergency shut off before the engine ripped itself appart. The sudden silence was shocking, broken only by the scream of sea birds and the ping of cooling metal.

"That didn't go so badly," Sabatine remarked, pulling off her goggles.

"If you say so," Tiber said, though it wasn't exactly agreement. Sabatine made a guesture to the lagon. The top half of the assault transport was visible above the waterline, resting in ten feet of water, its nose, central hull and ventral fin all visible. It was encrusted with coral and starfish, but the plastel armor beneath looked none the worse for wear.

"We really should take some footages, Equestrian Areospace should make a commercial," Sabatine observed.