My Stories

15th of Decembary, 5500 - Prologue

My going away party, that is what they called it. At the time I knew better than to voice the thought, but I found it disorienting how much it felt like just about any other party, sans the colorful pennants professing (insincere?) relief at my imminent departure.

I think everybody on some level understood that I was not going to stay. I had always felt like a foreign entity trespassing aboard the Old Baleful, perhaps even in ways bordering on ethnic, and I did not really ever make my ambitions of returning home secret. All the same, nobody was willing to let me slip out in the dead of night, which was my intention.

I was slinking through the vehicle bay towards my jetbike when a dazzling flash suddenly took from me the gift of sight, and then an inharmonious screech, later translated as “We will miss you, Cloud-Chaser,” took my hearing also. Lightning, and then thunder, I thought. It made me all but believe we were under attack.

When my sight returned, I saw Eight-Fingers Evan, a man who once gutted a trader for a crate of silverware, holding a tray of lukewarm nutrient paste “cupcakes.”

I had my slipknife at his throat before I realized there were streamers hanging from the vehicle cranes. He didn't even flinch. He just grinned, toothless, and terrifying. “She’s leaving, boys and girls! Chaser’s leaving without even saying goodbye to her family!” He bellowed, and my comrades, surrounding me from every angle of the vehicle bay, jeered in disapproval. My cheeks instantly turned scarlet.

A shame I ended up making a scene after all.

Around Jugust or so, it would have been my thirteenth year aboard the Old Baleful, an abomination of a gravship that was as foul and ancient as hatred itself and reeked of chemfuel so hard the ancestors could smell it in the far beyond. Its halls of greasy gray metal employed a rotating crew of twenty-five or so, the number varying with casualties and retirements. Everybody knew each other by name.

There were some that had spent many more years on the ship than I; Eight-Fingers Evan had been here years before I was born, as have been Jordy, Pyotr, Roadkill, Albina, Dunglicker, Vex, Calico and Fumble. The Captain herself commandeered the ship a few short years after the war, or so I’m told; which would make her far, far older than she looks. Which isn’t to say she looks young. Captain Sanghun is wrinklier and spottier than a peach left out on a summer day.

My hesitancy with socialization was not really much of an anomaly; it is not unheard of for somebody to “go bad” in order to scrape together the silver needed to pay back the Great White Fleet or whatever and then retire, and to more or less keep their head down and simply do the work their entire stay. What was anomalous though was the sheer length of *my* stay. A sort of mythos had began to swirl around me. Cloud-Chaser is one of the Deserters; A family member of Cloud-Chaser’s is up for ransom; Cloud-Chaser is deathly sick and needs to see a city healer.

I did not see much use in discussing my aims at length, so I kept the truth mostly to myself. Although the private conversations I have had, with the Captain for instance, have mostly ended with desperate pleas towards my reconsideration, and not only because I did a good job on the ship. Perhaps she thinks I’m stupid; that my efforts are for nothing? Perhaps, perhaps. At least such has been my read of her.

In my time aboard The Old Baleful, I’ve come to realize that Pirates have a fashion of bonding that one might charitably describe as unique.

An example: “Go drown” can both be a genuine expression of desire for harm, as well as a humorous response to something called a pun. It can also mean goodbye when a pirate considers themself above a sincere “I will miss you.” The only way you can tell which was meant is largely dependent on context clues, and if the pirate in question doesn’t find you becoming wrought with terror part of the joke, the tone. I was told to go drown many times that night.

But the most unique communicator would still have to have been my Captain Sanghun.

A statuesque, scar-brindled lioness of a woman, Captain Sanghun was a military officer long before she was a pirate. Only during peacetime did she pick this trade up, and only because there was no longer anyone willing to pay a woman whose only employable skill was ending human lives. She had those dark, intense eyes, ever shaded by a fringe of graying chestnut hair that made it so that she always seemed to frown.

I say Captain Sanghun was unique because she expressed her care, annoyance, distaste, and even disciplined people, by laying thunderous smacks across their faces.

I am a bit ashamed to admit that I was disappointed to not see the Captain at my going-away party. Despite my best efforts to remain disengaged, her approval was something I have come to very much crave. I didn’t want anyone to even know I was leaving! But why if everybody except the Captain came to see me off did it feel even worse than if nobody had come at all?

She didn’t really care for me all that much after all, was what I shamefully thought at the time. Shameful, shameful, oh, how shameful.

But when the crowd had dispersed, and I prepated to climb upon my jetbike, and I saw her strolling into the vehicle bay, running her hand through her greying locks, fury and tears and abject betrayal in her eyes - I knew I was going to get smacked.

“The bull’s stubborn hide, Cloud-Chaser!” Captain Sanghun spoke one of her strange Sophian expressions. From the contexts this one was usually employed in, I understood the Captain to be very upset. “What’s wrong with you? Sneaking off like a damn thief!”

I couldn’t bring myself to look up, but in the corner of my vision I could see her jerking her hand as though trying to shake the pain out of it. The strike must’ve hurt her more than it hurt me. Even though it nearly sent me flat onto the floor. She made a sort of distraught noise that didn’t really require of me to look up to know she was rubbing the bridge of her nose.

She cares about me, was the realization that very loudly announced itself in my mind. Captain Sanghun took me onto her ship when I was a mere slip of a girl, and now she was seeing me leave on a road I have many times personally said was leading me to my death.

How can anyone not feel in the least upset that a child they made into who they are was going away to die? Did she fault herself for not teaching me better? For not talking me out of my monomaniacal ambition?

What a cruel, selfish thing I was to have told her anything at all.

“I have to go, Captain. You’ve known that since the day you took me aboard.” I could taste the metallic tang of blood from where my teeth had caught my lip when she hit me. Finally, I was able to meet her scowl with my own, every bit as unshakable as hers. “You always knew.”

“Stupid idiot child, don’t you dare put that on me!” She hissed through her teeth, “I knew you talked like that. Didn’t mean I thought you’d be stupid enough to up and do it! You’ve got a bunk, you’ve got work, you’re fed, no one here’s trying to gut you in your sleep! Most of us would knife a man for you, if anything! And you throw it away for what? Ruins? Dust and bones. Who taught you to stick your nose in business that isn't yours? Because it sure could not have been me! You're just spitting on it all, Cloud-Chaser, everything you have.”

“I did not ask for a home,” I said. “Nor am I spitting on anything. I am-...”

“Running headlong into a grave!” The lioness roared, the shadow cast by her herculean frame swallowing me and my jetbike both. “Say it plain, girl. Don’t dress it up like it’s something finer.”

“If I don’t go, it won’t just be me in that grave.”

“Mm-hm? And you’re the only one in all the wide, rotten world who can do something about it, is that it?”

“No.” I hesitated, swallowed, then forced it out, more determined than ever. “But I’m one of many who knows. That makes it mine too.”

Silence stretched between us.

“The bull’s stubborn hide,” the Captain said again. She ran a hand through her silver mane, looking away entirely. “Is there really nothing I can say to you to make you reconsider, Cloud-Chaser?”

“I must go.”

“Yes. Yes, I was afraid of that.”

She began to pace, as though the vehicle bay was an enclosure much too small. She stopped, ran her hand through her hair one more time, then reached into the heavy, oil-stained folds of her greatcoat. She pulled out a segmented length of matte-black steel that seemed to coil like a serpent in her grip. It was Sophian tech. A whipblade, I realized, its hilt etched with the faded sigil of a rank she no longer held.

“Take it,” She commanded, and shoved the thing into my chest.

“What? No, I... I can’t take such a gift, Captain,” I wsaid.

“Gift? Bwaahaha! Gift!!!” Captain Sanghun laughed and laughed until it descended into a cough. “Gift, she says! You’re as dense as a lead hull, Chaser. That’s a standard-issue Imperial Officer’s sidearm. It’s expensive, it’s temperamental, and it is not yours.”

She gripped my shoulder hard enough to leave a mark tomorrow.

“That is a loan. Do you hear me, girl? I don't give things away for free. I expect that blade back in my hand. In a year, in ten, I don’t care. When you’re done with whatever idiocy you’ve planned, you bring my property back into my hand.”

A task I'd have to be alive for.

The alternative was, most probably, hunting me down in the far beyond to smack the afterlife out of me.

d

1st of Aprimay, 5500 - Eternal Return

So here I was, riding away into the sunset...

A childish way of putting it. The sun was not setting (it was rising), and my conversation with the Captain had made me a little sheepish about calling what I was riding towards an "ending." No good dying with unfulfilled debts.

Still, the phrase insisted upon itself.

The scalding winds of the dunes tore at my clothes and hair as I rode my steed of iron through the sacred sands of Mahaşim.

It was good to be planetside again.

I arrived at the location just as the sun was beginning to kiss the zenith. I stopped my jetbike, quieting the growl of its heart, and gave my surroundings a cursory once-over. I couldn't help but notice that the place looked like just about anywhere else for the past few kilometres. In some places even more profoundly barren than that; a jewel-necked monitor lizard crossed my path a few leagues past, for instance. A good omen, perhaps, or simply a fellow traveler seeking shade.

I retrieved my digipal, tapping my forehead a couple times with the stylus. It's a nervous habit of mine, which my grandmother would've surely had a few colorful things to say about. In every which direction, there was little else than bleached crags; the broken jaw of the father of all wolves worrying at the shifting sands, and the occasional cactus. Between them lay carcasses - rusted over war-walkers, troop carriers, weapons platforms. Useless, mostly; the desert's two-legged vultures are very thorough. And in any case, I was looking for something far more ancient.

Sighing, I leaned against my jetbike. Reflecting, contemplating. And as I allowed the silence of the wastes to flood into my ears once more, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand, and I found myself reaching for my whipblade before my mind had even named the fear. I twisted towards one of the limestone crags.

I have become inadequate. Not until I stopped making noise myself did I realize I was the only thing in leagues making any sound at all. Before the Baleful, a silence of this sort, without even the sounds of an insect, meant predator. Either there was something predatory near, or the land itself was the predator. The wolf in my marrow growled.

I needed to show whatever it was my teeth.

As I rounded the corner of the crag, my breath all of a sudden caught.