[hider=Ghost Stories]
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.



[/hider]
[@POOHEAD189]