Vex Chronicles 3: Hunt

Skittering in the walls

Aes Cognis, bowels

"How are we?" Officer Gram Havelstone Sr. prayed that the communication would finally hold.

"Horrible," came chief engineer Mollitana's voice through heavy static. "Just barely audible, even with the comm relay."

It was just impossible to communicate between the upper and lower section of the Aes Cognis. Something in the belly of the heavy frigate created a constant interference. Mollitana believed that it was an effect of the disarray in the Aes Cognis' lower energy grid.

Mollitana had tried to bounce the vox signal off of a comm relay attached to the hull of the ship. She had instructed the other tech priests to cobbled together such device. Well, not really tech priests... With the lack of such, Mollitana had just declared a few surviving tech adepts into full tech priests – including the newly joined adept Alaftus. Alaftus had joined into Vex's service along with the eredian drop troopers.

Despite Mollitana's workload she had still found the time to do the final test personally. The relay was now in place. But both Havelstone teams had barely set a foot into the midsection of the Aes Cognis and it was already nearly impossible to communicate.

Havelstone Sr. looked at her daughter and the same nodded. "We have no time to waste. We'll follow the captain's order, communication or not."

Havelstone Sr. agreed and pressed the micro-bead connected to his suit's inbuilt vox. "Chief engineer, we are ready."

"Good that all true tech priests are dead...," tech officer Humbol Ticasey mused. "They would haunt us forever for what we are about to do."

Ticasey was both a blessing and a bane. He was a newer addition to the security team. Before he had been with the tech crew. And only because Havelstone had pressured the now deceased captain Hanson, he had gotten some tech apt crew into his security teams. Officer Ticasey was as much a well educated technician as he was a wimp.

The tech officer hoicked the heavy industry tool up. It was as if the power cutter screamed with the ship's protest against the tech heresy. With a final stutter the tool died down and the door lock was cut open.

"We're though," Havelstone Sr. sent.

"Don't touch anything!" Mollitana's voice carried a sharp warning. "And be ready for anything."

"Let's go." Havelstone Sr. nodded towards the darkness behind the door. "Mollitana, inform Vex and captain Feh that operation retake is underway."

One decks of the Aes Cognis was entirely dedicated to the deadly arc decimator weapon of the unique heavy frigate. Like a barrier it separated upper from lower decks. Only a few shafts lead through the section. And this one was a maintenance one.

Steps led the officers down into the cannon deck. The room was empty except a few dark cogitators. Dark openings in the walls lead into narrow maintenance crawl-ways. Havelstone shone his gun-mounted flashlight into them and the light cone fell onto massive arrays of coolant units. They looked important. Important enough that Havelstone would stay away from those crawl-ways.

"A tech priest has to look at this," Havelstone Sr. said. "We'll go further down."

They stepped further down and left the cannon deck behind. The air was stale. All the officer could see was twilight, broken only by the dim lights of what appeared to be power relays. Many looked charred from overheating. And some had completely burnt out. A symptom of whatever plagued the Aes Cognis' entire power grid.

"Let's split." Havelstone Sr. nodded towards his daughter. "Stay careful. There might still be xenos beasts aboard."

Madeira Havelstone nodded and the teams separated. Havelstone Sr. would have liked to send all three security teams out. But his son was still in a bad state. Half of Jeofrey's body was nearly paralyzed by whatever the lizard mutant had done to him. Inquisitor Vex had assured him that it was the after-effect of burning the infection out of Jeofrey. But Havelstone Sr. could only see the wreck his son had turned into. The officer balled his fists. Why had Vex even allowed a mutant psyker to rummage around in his son's head?