I lay flat on my belly atop a stack of just three containers as I spotted them approaching. A group of five beastmen, actually men this time. Stalked out of the container maze and towards my location carefully scanning the area. They were led by a tall and heavyset figure with horns, standing a full head and shoulders taller than the others, all of them had pale white fur.

 

They carried spears and had nets, rope and other pieces of equipment slung over their shoulders. I spotted a crowbar on one while another had what looked to be a drill and a flashlight tied around his neck. When they spotted the assorted crates I had been searching scattered about they pointed and began to speak quietly amongst themselves before the horned one waved his hand in a circle and the others fanned out to search the area.

 

I shifted away from the edge of the container for a bit to hide. There was little doubt that the Palefurs had dominion over this area of the Rotunda and had won, or had at least not lost, the battle they were engaged in yesterday. I had not noticed any obvious wounds on them at the very least.

 

They were distinctly cloven, but not quite ‘goatlike’ digitigrade legs ending in hooves and the fur covering their bodies giving the impression of deer, stags, but not quite. I heard the sounds of boxes being opened and moved about so I shuffled forwards to peak over the edge of the container again and found two of the beastmen had moved to the wall and were watching both approaches while the leader and the remaining two were sorting though the container I had left open, the one bound for Ossuar.

 

The call of loot was stronger than a desire to search for what had made the noises that had drawn them here in the first palace. Perhaps they had assumed that the person opening the container had fled upon hearing the horn. I watched as the leader beastman ordered one of the smaller, hornless underlings to stand up while he loaded several crates in his arms. The overloaded minion then had to waddle away carefully to keep the crates balanced. 

 

The other four were loaded up one after the other and the leader took crates under each arm himself before ordering them to begin walking forward, the leader following behind them and keeping his head on a swivel. I let out a sigh of relief as the Beastmen left. 

 

I did not wait long, quickly clambering down the stack of containers, careful not to drop anything or make too much noise. I then hobbled away from the area. I did not return to my little ‘safe’ haven just yet. I was still hungry and needed supplies after all so I kept moving along the edge of the Rotunda. 

 

After a while of careful limping I found myself directly under one of the Rotunda’s massive cranes. The door at the ground level was sealed shut just like before but I noted that a container stack closeby was just high enough and situated close enough to one of the many walkways to allow a resourceful person to simply step across. I just had to climb the containers, easy enough to do when every single one of them had innumerable handholds and crossbars to stand on.

 

I set aside my more bulky equipment (glorified rubbish) and began to climb the side of the container stack with little more than a shiv and the dataslate carefully tied to my flat chest with rags. The climb went fine, at first, until after having clambered up the first half a dozen containers I glanced around and suddenly felt a wave of vertigo hit me.

 

It was a strange feeling, while I was not immune from heights in the slightest I was sure I had not been this... susceptible to them. 

 

I felt my hands growing sweaty and my body beginning to shake before I quickly activated the System and made a quick purchase. 

 

(Purchased:

Willpower: Grants +5 to the Willpower Characteristic.

Willpower Characteristic 26+5=31

Willpower aptitude gained

15 XP remaining)

 

It was near instantaneous. Or I was experiencing the mother of all placebos. I tightened my grip and continued the climb, paying no heed to the very real risk of a minor accident resulting in a rather inglorious end. While I was musing on how exactly I was going to save up for the last Aptitude purchase I suddenly found myself at the top of the stack. I scurried onto the topmost container and looked out over the Rotunda.

 

There were indeed still dozens of smoke plumes drifting up from the maze of containers. I did not have a perfect viewpoint but from here I could see the other side of the Rotunda. It was a large round room. Colossal and it was very difficult for me to judge the actual distance. Sadly climbing all the way up here had not given me any good landmarks to commit to memory so after some time spent looking around for angry beastmen pointing at me I turned to the walkway.

 

The walkway that looked a bit farther away now then it had when I was on the ground. My screaming muscles and rumbling stomach made climbing back down now unthinkable so without giving myself much of a chance to think about it I made my way to the edge of the container, turned about then ran and jumped to the catwalk smacking my face against the metal bars with a whimper as I wrapped my arms around the handrails and clinged on for dear life. I carefully hurled myself over the railings and onto the walkway before I noticed my face was bleeding somehow. I simply let out a huff of frustration before getting up and looking about.

 

There were walkways going to a higher level and several that led to a catwalk that hugged the outside edge of the Rotunda where several doors were nestled into place and I almost jumped for joy when I noticed one of them had been propped open! 

 

Lucky me! Striding towards the door leading to the upper levels of rooms that surrounded the Rotunda I found that this door was being propped open by someone much less lucky then I was. The rotting corpse of someone who looked to have been trying to escape onto the catwalk before falling dead. There were several holes in his back that I assume meant he died from bullet or Las wounds but I did not want to get too close, forging inspection was perfectly fine.

 

I stepped over the body, skinny enough to make it through the mostly closed door just fine and found myself in another hallway, with doors at regular intervals. Thankfully without the damn keypads this time! I checked a few and found that they were small single offices without anything approaching furnishing. Each had a desk with a terminal on it in the middle of the room, a rather uncomfortable looking chair and a filing cabinet tucked into the corner of the room.

 

A quick inspection of the terminal found it was still functional. Ignoring the siren call of looking for food I settled down at the terminal and looked for what I could find on the database.

 

As it turned out the terminal was currently unassigned, the office seemingly unused for who knows how long. But it was still connected to a general network and after a little bit of network troubleshooting I connected to the ‘public’ database. 

 

(Objective accomplished, Discover current location  +50XP) 

 

“Catacalixian Penance” a Universe Class Mass Conveyor. The very primitive terminal graphics displayed a side profile of the spaceship I was currently trapped on and everything came into focus. The series of clarifications on the scale of the damn thing did not do much to help me get my head around it. The ship was twelve kilometres long. I let out a little laugh as I explored the database. The shipwide database. At least the parts that did not require clearance. 

 

The Rotunda was a cargo hold. One of many, I reclined on my chair as I considered the sheer scale of the Penance. When nagging questions drove me to engage the terminal and begin to prompt the search software. Or perhaps spirit was a better term? For answers.

 

The Crew manifest was mostly public with only a few thousand names and positions on the ship requiring a greater level of clearance than none to access. But the number of the crew itself was public. The ship listed just over twenty thousand crew and the same number of ‘passengers’. I had no idea if passengers included the beastmen and the database did not enlighten me on that front. 

 

Twenty thousand sounded like a lot until I looked up more information about the Universe Class Mass Conveyor and found that twenty thousand was one third of the crew requirements for this class of ship. With the state of things and the Beastmen roaming around another question came to mind.

 

Just how many soldiers did this ship have? I accessed the crew manifest and sorted by occupation, thus began the slow drudgery as I shifted though thousands of names until I found an occupation that sounded about right.

 

Armsmen.

 

I then made my way back to the main system and searched for armsmen and was provided with several documents, one identifying the 1st Armsmen Company and another detailing the 2nd Armsmen Company. 

 

Was that it? How big was a company? It was not large, roughly two hundred to three hundred men if I remembered right. Did this ship honestly have only six hundred soldiers defending it at most? That can’t be right. There were tens of thousands of crewmen, surely they had to have more.

 

I supposed that in a pinch you would press the ratings into service, or even the ship slaves. Curious, I searched for the word company itself only to find a third company showing up in the database. A ‘1st Fury Interceptor Company’. That brought the number of possible dedicated combat personnel up to almost a thousand. There were also likely commissars and other officers on the ship capable of fighting. At least one thousand then. It still seemed like a truly tiny number for a ship over ten kilometres long! 

 

Still if the ship had one thousand armed soldiers hanging around a good question was, why had they not retaken the Warehouse Rotunda and the surrounding compartments? I had to estimate the numbers of beastmen tribes in the Rotunda itself and there can’t be many more hiding in the compartments around the Rotunda. There were two to three thousand at most and fewer every day if they kept up their tribal warfare. I had seen a scant few actual weapons too, mostly the beastmen were armed with clubs and spears. Any trained company with basic equipment should have been able to march though this compartment and restore control to the place.

 

But they had not, so there must be a good reason why simply marching in was not an option. Perhaps the chaos ritual on the other side of the barricades was part of it? If there was a greater uprising on other areas of the ship that had sapped the strength of the defending armsmen that would explain why they had not made a dedicated effort to retake the section. Doubly so if they needed to guard various vital systems such as the bridge, engines, geller fields and other important systems a ship this size likely had. 

 

It also recontextualized the battle around the chaos altar where I had woken up. If the ship command staff became aware of some chaos ritual happening but could not send armsmen to stop it then it made sense to arm slaves with knives and pipes to swarm the cultists. That was of course assuming that the battle was organised at all. It could have simply been the slaves deciding to put a stop to a chaos ritual themselves without oversight. 

 

On a whim I inputted my name, my new name, into the database and came away with nothing. I was not on the crew manifest and I could not find any passenger manifest. I could be one of the people who required more clearance to know about but considering that I had woken up in rags I highly doubted that.

 

What did that make me? A passenger? A ship slave? Where did I fit into this city flying though the void? I slumped back once more frustrated with more questions than answers and little idea of what else the Database could show me. 

 

Hunger drove me from the terminal and the little office and out into the hallway. I had to find food and searching containers with beastmen around was simply too dangerous. I would simply have to search this area and hope that any food had not been looted. Hopefully there was a safe way down to the ground floor if I could not find food or water up here.

 

I was making my way down the hallway when I froze. It was unmistakable, I could smell cooking, someone was cooking something close to me. I checked my rags for the concealed shiv before steeling myself and making my way towards the mouthwatering scent of cooking meat.