Editing The Tales of the Emperasque: Part Eleven (section)

==9-081-001-M42==
In his cabin, Vulkan was tossing and turning on the mat he had placed on the floor. He had shed his armor and pulled the mattress and padding off the bedframe, since he could never had fit on them anyway. Now he was trying to wrest a few fitful hours of sleep before being called up to the bridge to replace He’Stan. It had bothered him somewhat that the entire crew of the ship had so willingly and completely bowed to his authority in the matter, but he resolved not to let that trouble him until later.<br>
Sleep, however, was slow in coming, fitful, and wracked with dreams. Almost as soon as he fell asleep, he started dreaming, in fact, as vividly as he ever had in his life. Blissful fantasies, horrid nightmares, all swirled together to create a bizarre mélange.<br>
He saw himself hand in hand with a putrid, shambling daemon wearing his brother Lorgar’s face, a beautiful young woman with his eyes embracing a man he didn’t recognize, an aged and scarred Tu’Shan cleaving an Ork clean in half while a Kommando crept up on him. He saw a Princeps walking his Titan into a volcano on Prometheus while his crew screamed at him to stop, a harem of terrified children dragged in chains onto a Salamanders battle barge by a giggling Dark Eldar. Most of all, he saw the girl, running and giggling with other girls her age, panting and writhing beneath the man from before, old and grey and surrounded by others. The visions swirled together, and they all seemed to be so real…
He awoke, gasping and sweating, his hand scrabbling at the deck next to him, unconsciously searching for the faithful iron chisel that had become his lifeline to sanity and defense on the unnamed Daemon World upon which he had been trapped for so long. He spotted it on the belt of his armor and sighed, his nerves calming.

His vox beeped and he nearly lunged at it, still tense as a bridge cable from the nightmares. He calmed himself and inserted it back into his ear. “Vulkan here.”
“My Lord, it’s Lieutenant Commander Wilcox, on the bridge,” the voice on the other side said. “Lord Ir’Shal wanted me to tell you that the end of the Warp stream is near.”<br>
“What?” Vulkan asked. He cleared his throat and asked another question before Ir’Shal could take offense. “How does he know?”
“I know because the Astropath says he can almost taste it, my Lord” Ir’Shal put in, having clearly been listening. “Please make your way back up to the bridge.”<br>
“Acknowledged, brother.” Vulkan sat on the mat collecting his thoughts for a moment before tiredly heaving himself back up and into his armor, which he blearily fastened on. That done, walked out to see the rest of the crew in frenzied preparation, most of them looking as out of sorts as he did.

As he stepped out on the bridge, he could see why the Astropath had said what he did: the ship’s sensors showed a definite end to the stream, and if they were close enough for the ship’s machine spirits to sense it, the Astropath could have seen it clearly. Ir’Shal turned his helmet slightly to acknowledge his Lord’s presence. “Just in time, my Lord. We will reach the end of the stream in…forty seconds.”<br>
“Excellent work, brother,” Vulkan said, making a quick sweep of the bridge. The Warp-worn crew was performing as well as they probably could under the circumstances, given that their actual Captain was cooling off in the morgue.<br>
“Departing the stream in…twenty seconds.” There wasn’t much else to say, really. Vulkan watched the sensor panels as the seconds ticked by…and then they were out. For nearly every soul aboard, the change was immediate. Every man on the bridge seemed to stand up a bit straighter, and a few flashed nervous grins at one another as the sense of pressure faded.<br>
“Stream is behind us. Lord Ir’Shal, Lord Vulkan, permission to exit the Warp?” Wilcox asked from the maneuvering station, just below the now-empty Navigator’s Quarters.<br>
“Take us out, Commander. Come what may,” Ir’Shal said grimly.<br>
“Aye aye. Opening rift…rift opened.” Wilcox’s augmetic limbs darted over the controls, pulling brass handles and pressing runic buttons. The ship’s hull shook for a bit, and Vulkan felt the familiar brief sense of nausea that always accompanied a Warp transition rile his stomach.

The arrival of a ship on the fringes of the system caused an immediate alert in its inhabitants. First, a tiny unmanned drone in the halo pinged the opening of a Warp rift, and registered its horrifying potency…far more than a ship that would normally visit the system could generate.<br>
That drone dipped into the Warp itself for a fraction of a second. It then reemerged mere thousands of kilometers from the populated moon that comprised the system’s capital. The drone then beamed the data it had collected to a massive antenna on the moon’s lovely temperate surface. The data vanished into a labyrinth of computers, which promptly spat it out onto the holographic screens of a group of started Early Warning Sensor Network operators.<br>
Those operators then passed the warning up the chain of command with the speed of Bad News, whereupon it was deposited on a single, smoothly-curved, almost organic-looking desk. After a few seconds delay, a massive blue hand reached down and casually flipped through the first few pages, before dropping it on the table. The messenger bowed low for a moment, and awaited the command he knew would come. “Shas’O? Your instruction?”<br>
“Assemble the Air Caste defensive units in orbit and arm the surface-to-space rail cannon,” Shas’O Kes’y Fap’tau ordered, his lopsided arms crossing in anticipation. “The Imperium wants a fight. I’ll give them one.”

Ir’Shal prodded the runes on the Captain’s control board until a holographic representation of the system popped into existence in the middle of the bridge. The Master of Ships looked it over quickly. “It’s…not an Imperial system. Star pattern does not match any known stellar system.”<br>
Vulkan heard Ir’Shal’s words, and his heart sank. It was foolish to expect that the Imperium would control the system, of course – less than 15% of the galaxy was Imperial – but he had still hoped. Despite his brother’s words, though, a sense of recognition tugged at his memory. The system wasn’t a human one, but it WAS familiar…somehow.<br>
“Master Ir’Shal, an object has been detected heading in our direction,” the officer at the sensor station reported. “It’s rated at interceptor size, moving under power. Approximately twenty four light seconds away, star-side.”<br>
“Acknowledged. Power down Gellar field and all external lights, activate void shields. Power them as high as you can, Lieutenant,” Ir’Shal said, his authoritative voice cutting though the crew’s nervousness. He knew the crew would need that if they went into combat straight out of hell. Vulkan nodded in silent approval, glad to see Ir’Shal reacting as if the unknown object was a threat.

“Gellar field powered down, my Lord, external lights extinguished. Shields to maximum. Sub-light engines are online, ready for course and bearing,” Wilcox reported from his own terminal. “My Lord, we await your order.”<br>
Vulkan tuned out the chatter on the bridge, the sense of recognition growing stronger by the minute. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously as he stared at the hologram of the system, focusing on the gas giants near the middle of the system’s orbits. One was orbited by what looked like three planetoids the size of Mars, easily, and nearly a hundred smaller bodies. Something about the planet was stirring memories he hadn’t thought of since…since before he left Nocturne.<br>
He’Stan and Tu’Shan were huddled over a pair of the bridge’s weapons control stations, looking ridiculously large compared to the terminals themselves. He’Stan glanced at Vulkan for a moment, then opened a private channel to him.<br>
“My Lord, was this anything like what you hoped you would find? Do you have any idea where we are?”<br>
“None, except…” Vulkan’s voice trailed off.<br>
He’Stan waited a moment before prompting. “Except what, Lord Vulkan?”<br>
“Except the oddest feeling of déjà vu, brother,” Vulkan said, still staring at the planet in the holofield.<br>
“Have you visited the system, Lord?” He’Stan asked.<br>
“Not that I can remember. But then, I’ve been out of the loop for a while,” Vulkan said with tight sarcasm.