Chapter 557: Astartes-Flavoured
The pirate ship's bridge was far filthier and shabbier than the clean, orderly bridge of the Sword-class escort.
Trash lay everywhere on the bridge floor, and there were metal parts of unknown purpose jammed into the cracks.
The precious electronic consoles were caked with sticky grime, and the undersides of the control panels were crusted with dried raisins. Who knew how long it had been since anyone wiped them down.
Even more alarming, here and there you could see Chaos symbols smeared on the floor!
As for the senior officers on the bridge, most were ordinary humans, but a few were heavily deformed mutants! And some had Chaos symbols tattooed openly on their foreheads!
The pirate captain was a tall, burly man, 1.9 metres tall, with pale skin and eyes that looked faintly like a beast's!
He clearly wasn't entirely human. He'd probably been lightly touched by Chaos.
Human pirates like these lived on the knife's edge. They didn't care about humanity's future or their own. They lived for whatever good time they could get today.
So they weren't particularly opposed to Chaos taint, mutants, or xenos.
This pirate ship had raided all over, in and out of the Warp time and again. Who knew how many times everyone aboard had been tainted.
If someone showed heavy taint, they killed him. If it was light, they ignored it.
The pirate captain, the one with faint signs of corruption on him, kept his eyes fixed on the battle map on the screen in front of him.
He watched boarding torpedo after boarding torpedo streak toward the Sword-class escort, his infantry rapidly deploying onto the enemy ship, and his eyes were full of greed.
His beat-up little ship had been in service for who knew how many dozens of centuries. Years of hard use had left it riddled with problems.
He needed a new ride. A bigger, newer one!
As it happened, not long ago he'd received a tip. A Rogue Trader family he knew had deliberately leaked to him that there was a warship here.
Of course he knew they had their own reasons for telling him. But he didn't care. Once the meat was in his mouth, nobody was getting him to spit it out!
So he ignored the risk and went all in, bringing his beat-up little ship to board and seize this enemy warship!
Then the Greyhide pirates would have two warships, and their strength would skyrocket!
And he, Greyhide, would become one of the pirate overlords of this sector!!
The pirate captain called Greyhide was lost in his daydream when his first officer suddenly reported:
"Captain! Picking up an unusual signal. The enemy ship has fired something at us. It's a torpedo. A boarding torpedo!!"
Greyhide froze. I'm boarding you right now, and instead of concentrating your forces on defence, you fire a boarding torpedo at me? What's the play here? Are you crazy?
"How many torpedoes did they fire?"
"Just one!"
Greyhide froze again, then burst into roaring laughter.
"One? Just one? WAHAHAHAHA!!
"They don't really think they can take my pirate ship with a hundred soldiers, do they? WAHAHAHAHA!!"
He wiped the tears of laughter from his eyes and said:
"Blow that torpedo apart with point defence! Much as I'd like to play with them, having a torpedo punch through the hull is expensive to fix."
The first officer shook his head.
"Sir, that torpedo was too fast. It's already punched into our hull."
When the pirate captain Greyhide heard the boarding torpedo was already inside, he waved it off.
"Have the men near the torpedo kill them. One damn torpedo dares to board our ship? It's not like they sent over a hundred power-armoured elites, is it?
"Even if they did send a hundred power-armoured elites, I'll just throw a thousand men at them and drown them..."
But before he could finish, his first officer answered in a terrified, shaking voice:
"C-c-c-captain, th-th-they didn't send a hundred power-armoured elites, b-b-but they sent over an Astartes!!"
...
Inside the boarding torpedo, Kian felt a violent jolt. The torpedo stopped, and the boarding hatch opened automatically.
He jumped straight out in his heavy power armour. When his feet landed on the steel deck, he was inside the pirate ship's hull. He'd completed the first boarding action of his life.
Kian looked around. In front of him was a huge compartment, probably a macro-cannon gun deck.
In this fairly open space were several hundred pirates holding all kinds of weapons, staring at him in shock.
"A... an Angel!!"
Thud, thud!
A few pirates dropped their weapons and fell to their knees on the spot. But most of the pirates, after a moment's shock, roared and raised their weapons and opened fire on Kian!
When Kian heard what they called him, he froze for a second too, then realized what was going on.
In heavy power armour he was nearly two and a half metres tall. At a glance, he really did look a bit like an Astartes.
He saw several of the pirates in the crowd drop to their knees in terror. The Astartes' reputation preceded them, and that gave him an idea.
From now on, he could not only fly the Inquisitor's banner, he could apparently put on an Astartes disguise too!
He could pick a few of his taller men, build them suits of power armour that looked like Astartes armour, and have them cosplay Astartes to scare people. That'd work pretty well.
As he thought this, Kian raised both hands and opened fire on the pirates in front of him with the two modified lasrifles on his vambraces!
They were called guns, but the two lasrifles on his vambraces were practically laser cannons. The beams they fired were thick and red.
One beam slammed into a pirate's upper body, and the armoured pirate exploded with a pop like an egg in a microwave, scattering charred organs everywhere.
The Lumberer stubber over Kian's head, which had a machine spirit of its own, started acquiring targets automatically and spitting fire like mad!
Every round from the Lumberer tore apart two or three pirates, cutting them in half at the waist!
Kian's two lasrifles and one Lumberer put out more firepower than a whole company of infantry.
The deck was filled with dakka-dakka and zzzt-zzzt, and the pirates couldn't put up any resistance against heavy-weapons-level fire.
In an instant, the several hundred pirates on this gun deck were charred corpses all over the floor!
On the pirate ship's bridge, the pirate captain watched through the cameras as a towering suit of gleaming gold power armour slaughtered several hundred pirate soldiers on the macro-cannon deck in an instant, and he was stunned.
"By the Four, why is there an Astartes here?!!"
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