Voyage

Chapter 2

Al Gedrun leaned into the low horizontal tunnel and shouted angrily, "Petty Officer Heimu!". A couple of dust covered red-overalled crew behind Al in the corridor junction were also awaiting Hayden Heimu's return. After several minutes of clambering noises and footsteps on metal ladder rungs a hazmat suit wearing Hayden Heimu emerged into the low tunnel from an adjoining narrow vertical pipe. Hayden's shaven head then popped into the junction followed by his slim body as he dragged himself up to full height. There was a loud bang as the oxygen tank on his back caught the lip of the tunnel as he did so.
"First Mate," Hayden said, out of breath from the climb and showing embarrassment from his clumsiness. His hazmat suit had visible traces of a brown sludge upon it. He saluted Al.
"I heard your team is behind schedule," said Al, getting straight down to the business of dressing down the Petty Officer while also backing away from the foul emanating from the Petty Officer's suit. Hayden kept a straight face but allowed his eyes to drift tellingly onto the two members of his maintenance team standing with them, indicating he didn't want them around.
"Air filters, Sir," Hayden said, "Gunked up again, need new panels for them. It's poisonous down there now."
"I see," said Al, "How do you expect to get back on schedule? I recall I hired you onto this ship, will you let me down?"
"No Sir! I seem to be a Tech short though Sir!" said Hayden, sounding mischievous.
"I see. If you can't manage your team we have no use for you on this crew."
"Don't worry Sir, I've got this!" said Hayden with clearly fake enthusiasm.
Al dismissed the two members of Hayden's team, then he and Hayden began walking slowly to the decontamination booth at the end of the hall, keeping several metres between them so as not to touch any slime on Hayden's suit.
"Where is Voidsman Ghez?" said Al, asking after Hayden's missing Tech. Hayden smiled at Al and made a gesture as though to give Al a hug. "Stay back!" joked Al, making a sign of the Aquila as if to protect himself. "Seriously though, Hayden."
"You stitched me up properly with Ghez. You know that, right? He was supposed to be doing the filter clean instead of me but didn't notice his oxygen tank was half empty. He came back up here looking like death, almost died before realising his mistake."
"So he's still alive then?"
"Yeah,"
"Shame."
"I sent him to the med bay to get some chems for the oxygen deprivation, but now I'm behind schedule."
"Sorry Hayden," said Al sincerely.
Hayden stepped into the decontamination chamber and the chemical sprays started coating his suit. "So!? Hayden shouted over the racket, "Why did you stick him with my team? Ghez is useless!"
"Honestly Hayden, I just need someone competent to keep an eye on him if he's a liability, this run is of the utmost importance. It has to go smoothly."
The sprays switched off and Hayden stepped into the adjoining air dryer, "That bad eh!?" he said.
"Yeah."
"Feck, well I figured you were just keeping tabs on Ghez because he's Wulf's new smuggling accomplice."
Al chuckled, "That really isn't why, but you know about that do you?"
"Yes I do," said Hayden coldly, as the dryers turned off and he slowly undid his suit.
"Wulf had Ghez assigned to clean the floors in the main engine room. Easy work right under his nose. It was obviously a reward for something." Hayen hurled the oxygen tank into a storage rack on the wall alongside five others and turned back to Al. "I don't know why you overrode him and left Ghez with me instead."
"That's an easy one," said Al, "Wulf spends all his time staring at the screens and doing the incantations needed for the engines to function; he doesn't pay attention to the crew. I figured Ghez might be dumb enough to fall into the Geller Field generator or something."
Hayden laughed hard, and long at the almost-but-not joke. "That's if we even need it. We are accelerating at half power to reach the jump point and already the plasma conduits are struggling, if we had another week we could deal with some of it."
"I'm sorry Hayden - literally no time for that this time, no time at all."
"I see. I have to go inspect cracks on the conduits running underneath the crew quarters next."
"Then at least we may die quickly, maybe even in our sleep if we are really lucky," joked Al. Both of them laughed for a moment.
Humour then faded from Hayden's face and was replaced by a grim expression, "Better than being eaten by Daemons in the Warp, I guess."
"I guess. Just do me a favour Hayden, keep Ghez in one piece, if he loses a limb we don't want to have to foot the bill for a bionic replacement, I doubt we can afford it right now."

"We are keeping to the express schedule Al," said Captain Janosch, visibly rather pleased, as his First Mate sat and linkedin to his modest seat on the Command Deck, just in front of the gothic arch styled throne the Captain was bodily wired to.
"Yes Captain," replied Al, "we have to eject some extra waste before the jump but in a few moments we should be ready, as long Wulf keeps his end of the bargain." Al would have been crossing his fingers and making the sign of the Aquila if he thought it wouldn't have worried the rest of the crew. The Warp engines on Dolphins Voyage were long past needing a full refit by the Adeptus Mechanicus, but even if they worked admirably a failure of the Geller Field, the shield that kept the twisted immaterium of Warp space away from their reality within the ship, would be equally disastrous.
Al held his breath a second as the neural connector in his seat bolted into the small round port at the base of his skull. It had taken some getting used to but at once Al could sense, feel, hear, and see the functioning of all of the ship's systems. He didn't have as much control or the overrides that the Captain had from his throne but it was still an enormous amount of information to filter through in order to make the small corrections and checks prior to their jump into the Warp. The Dolphins Voyage had a spirit of sorts, it was like a consciousness made up of the many small machinery nodes and junctions that formed the ship. Most people call this intelligence, this soul-like construct, a machine spirit, and an old vessel like Dolphins Voyage had a machine spirit that was unique with its own quirky personality.
Captain Janosch knew Dolphins Voyage well. Al could feel the Captain as though he were a giant spider commanding the web of Dolphins Voyage. Lower down in the web there was Wulf, plugged in in the Engine room, and Deveral in the Barracks where he had the ability to order the squads of Armsmen and crews of the giant Macrocannon Guns that arrayed the ships flanks. Then their own areas were the navigation crew. Most notably, off in a separate chamber a short distance from the Command Deck was the vessel's Navigator.
The Navigator was a potent Psyker, with a literal and figurative third eye, who was their only means of navigating in Warp space where normal navigation just didn't work. The Navigator's psychic speciality was using friendly focusses of potent psychic power to direct the ship using a mysterious form of dead reckoning known only to those Psykers trained in the art. By far the most notable of these psychic focusses was the beacon of radiant light from their divine Emperor's Golden Throne, called the Astronomicon, that shone through the Warp across half the galaxy.
"We are ready," said the Captain in a mechanical voice passed through the web, and the portholes on the ship were closed so as to prevent the crew from seeing the mind-boggling madness of the Warp with their own eyes. Al could see a timer start counting down to the jump and hear the engines ramming up their power output to form a Warp breach.
A jagged string of light erupted in front of Dolphins Voyage. It expanded to become a lightning-edged swirling black and red mist where the Warp and real space mixed fluidly, a temporary and tiny version of the Warp storms that plagued the galaxy. Dolphins Voyage accelerated into the breach.

Five minutes later Al uncrossed his toes. There had been no major faults, no overloads or burst fuel lines, and certainly no failure of the Geller Field so they were safe from attack from nightmarish entities.
"You may commence your rounds," uttered Captain Janosch quietly, too quietly to have been heard out loud, but spoken also through the link in the chair as a booming command to unhook from the vessel and begin post-jump checks. Al was happy to do so as the Captain's own unease at the decision to push for an accelerated arrival time was filtering through to him in waves.