His Will Be Done Part 11

 I finally got power back after Hurricane Maria rolled through.

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A retinue. She was getting a retinue.

Will  rolled the word around in her head, trying to get used to it. Retinues  were a thing people had. They were like ship escorts, but for people.  And they weren’t for just any regular person, but the important ones,  like how important ships had their own escorts to guard them. The kind  of people to have retinues were those upon whom the fates of millions if  not billions depended upon, and whose deaths would have far reaching  consequences for all beneath them.

But  Will was a ship, even if she was just shaped like a person at the  moment. She had thought that she didn’t need an escort. Ships of her  class generally didn’t need them when acting alone, the reason being  that anything that drew close enough to threaten her was well within  range of her powerful Lance batteries, which were more than capable of  destroying all but the most stubborn of targets with single broadsides.  It was typically only in great battlefleets when she had companion  ships, which she could support from afar with pinpoint strikes from her  Lances. In that way, an Apocalypse’s existence was lonely.

Will  wiggled further into the plush sofa of her quarters, the feelings of  apprehensiveness ever persistent. Despite being a ship, she was shaped  like a person now though. And as hard as it was to get used to, being  human was something she now simply was. She was important now it seemed,  important enough to draw the attention of a Lord Inquisitor, and  important people like Inquisitors kept retinues. All of her past  Admirals and Captains had often had them, bodyguards and crewmen whose  duties varied from serving their lord to protecting them with their  lives. Her Admiral probably had one, handpicked personnel he chose to  watch his back, ready to lay down their lives for him.

She  took a deep breath, trying to still the butterflies in her stomach. Her  Fairies had reported no avian creatures wandering her storage  compartments despite her insistence otherwise, although they had  reported that there was far too much empty space in said compartments  and that they would need further resupply. So why was she so nervous?  Perhaps it was the sheer novelty of it all. Being alive and human, when  scarcely a day ago she had been... neither. It probably wasn’t going to  be all bad, was it?

A knock  on the double doors to her quarters caused the apparently nonexistent  butterflies in her stomach to jump. “C-come in,” she called out.

Commander Matoi strode in through the open door, closing it behind her. Will recognized her as being one of the Legacy’s  middle-ranking officers, although Will wasn’t quite sure where her  duties lay. “Greetings, my lady,” the woman said to her with a bow. “How  are you?”

“I… am well, I suppose,” Will answered. “Although I’m a little unsettled.”

“That’s  completely understandable I think, after being interrogated by an  Inquisitor.” The Commander strode over to Will, sitting opposite of her  on the wraparound sofa. “So, what have you been doing for the last few  hours?”

“Not much,” Will shook her head. “I’ve been too nervous to even think straight. Just wondering what’s going to happen.”

“To you?”

Will nodded.

“Well,  you aren’t being arrested for heresy or treason, so you probably don’t  have anything to worry about,” Matoi replied. “Well anyways, onto the  important matters.” Matoi said with a smile as she placed the pair of  dataslates she had been carrying onto the holotable, setting them side  by side and pushing them across the table to Will. “As the first order  of business, the Lord Admiral wants you to provide your current combat  readiness. His words, not mine. Not quite sure why you need all these  forms though, to be honest.”

Will  picked up the slate nearest to her. It made sense to Will, for the  Captain of a new addition to a fleet to apprise their superiors of the  state of their vessel. It’s crew complement, fuel levels, amounts of  supplies like water and victuals and the like. Of course that role would  fall upon her, considering her current states of her own being. Will  noted the requisite forms presented on the display in crisp clarity, The  model of dataslate clearly superior to the ones her own officers were  familiar with. It lacked the wide bezel and integral keyboard, so the  device was presumably a new model, or at least a model unique to the  sector.

She tapped the  screen and was pleasantly surprised by the responsiveness and  intuitiveness of the display. With a swipe of her finger, the form  disappeared and another replaced it. She repeated the motion, showing  more and more forms in new pages of the display. Will looked over to the  other slate, and it dawned on her just how much paperwork she had on  her hands. The Departmento Munitorum was still fond of forms and  paperwork it seemed, whether they took the form of paper, fennel or  dataslate.

“This is a lot,” Will finally said.

“Yeah,  I just sort of brought everything. A lot of those forms probably won’t  apply to you, since it doesn’t seem you’ve got a command or a ship of  your own.” A beat passed in silence. “Unless you do?”

Will set the slate back down on the table. “What has the Lord Admiral told you about me?” She asked.

“The  Vice Admiral actually, and the basics,” she replied. “Before von Saeger  foisted me upon you, all I knew was that you’re some kind of specialist  with some sort of archeotech gear that let you somehow attack the Planet Killer head on.”

“Archeotech?”

Matoi  sighed. “I’m starting to suspect my earlier assumptions were poor. The  Vice Admiral wasn’t exactly forthcoming with details when he delegated  this to me.”

Will nodded. Might as well get this out of the way, she decided. “Well, I’m a battleship.”

Matoi blinked. “Pardon?”

“A battleship,” she repeated.

“As in the spacefaring kind?”

“That was what one of the Inquisitors said too.”

“I… What?”

“Commander,  I am honestly as confused by all of this as you are,” Will said with a  shake of her head. “Yesterday, I kind of just woke up, out there in the  void.” she gestured off to the side, past a wall of the quarters and  towards the outside of the ship. “One moment I was awake, aware, alive,  and the next I was being bombarded by the Despoiler’s flagship.”

Matoi was briefly lost in thought for a second. “Okay,” she said flatly. “So you’re a spaceship.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re also a person.”

Will nodded.

“Are you insane?”

“One of the Inquisitors thought I might be,” Will replied with a shake of her head. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think I am.”

Matoi  opened her mouth, only to close it a moment later. “Right,” she said.  “This is by far the strangest interaction I’ve had in my service career  so far, and I’m stationed at the Cadian Gate, the largest weirdness  magnet in the segmentum.”

Will  opened her mouth but quickly closed it, not sure how to reply, or to  prove she was speaking the truth. She thought about deploying her  rigging like she had done earlier before the conclave, but she didn’t  want to damage her quarters if she bumped into something. But she did  have another idea. “I can show you one of my crew if you don’t believe  me,” she said.

“Crew? What do you mean?”

“I have a crew,” Will said. “Well, of a sort. They’re not people, but they seem to fill the role my crew used to.”

“I see,” Matoi spoke. “Can you show me?”

“Certainly.”  One of her Bridge officers took that as their cue to disembark, and she  felt it pushing at the edge of her jacket. She unbuttoned her topmost  button, reaching into her blouse to deftly extract the Fairy from her  cleavage before unbuttoning her coat. There in her palm stood one of her  officers, looking up with its beady eyes to meet her downward gaze.  “Hey,” it spoke.

“Hey  there.” Will set the creature down, its assignment regarding her forms  already given by her Captain Fairy. “So, will you need a moment,  Commander?” She asked.

Will  had expected the same shocked expression that had adorned her Admiral's  face, but the Commander’s reaction seemed… nonplussed? At least she  seemed to be handling it better than her Admiral and the Vice Admiral  had.

“He’s cute,” Matoi suddenly said to Will’s surprise, the other woman leaning down to pat the creature on its head.

“Hey! Hey!”

“Oh, sorry,” Matoi pulled her hand back at the Fairy's shouts of alarm. “Apologies, of course you’d technically outrank me.”

“Commander?” Will asked. “Wait, you can understand it?”

“Oh?”  Matoi looked up at her, away from the glaring Officer Fairy. “Oh, no  no, I just saw its insignia,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Respect  and etiquette and all that.”

“Oh, okay. But yeah, he’s one of my Fairies. Like I said, they act as my crew it seems.”

“Dare I ask how many of them do you have?”

“Lots, actually,” Will said. “About as many as a battleship of my class.”

“And how many is that?”

“Hey! Hey!”

“Well according to him, about two hundred thousand give or take?”

The  other woman only nodded silently. “Well, those forms are starting to  make a little more sense.” She watched the Fairly clamber its way onto  one of the dataslates, the tiny creature studying the strange device  beneath its feet. “Well, I’ll try to provide any help that I can,  although I suspect your Second Officer might be more aware of your  situation report.”

“Thank you. And yeah, I might need some help. Although, I would like some company as well.”

“Certainly.  My orders for the moment are to basically help you fill out paperwork.  Not a fan of the stuff, but it gets me off the Bridge at least.”

“Oh. Are you in trouble?”

“I  don’t think so,” Matoi spoke with a dismissive wave of her hand.  “Although Kevil is going to have the Vice Admiral breathing down his  neck for the foreseeable future.”

“I see.”

“Yeah.  Anyways,” Matoi started, reclining on the sofa, “Since you’ve delegated  some responsibility there,” she gestured to the Fairy on the table,  “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

Will nodded. “I suppose the Lord Admiral wants to know that too?”

“What do you think?” She answered with a smile.

“Yeah,” Will sighed. “Well, I’m not sure where to begin.”

“The start is always a good place.”

The start. Her earliest memories were… dim.  Yeah, dim was the right word. Formless colors and shapes, that quickly  sharpened to clarity as her form and being came into, well, being.  Her first clear memories were of a shipyard, high above the surface of  Mars in the Ring of Iron. A battleship identical to herself in a  berthing next to hers, just one of her two identical sisters. On her  opposite side, an even larger and more ornate vessel than herself was  being laid down. Over her time in the yard, that ship would resolve  itself into the resplendent golden battle barge that would come to serve  as her Emperor’s own flagship, the Bucephalus. And if she thought about it, hers as well.

“I was laid down in the Ring of Iron,” Will began. “I was there for a while. There were others like me too.”

A  beat as the other woman seemed to process her words. “Others like you?”  The woman asked with a raised eyebrow, seemingly perplexed.

“My  sisters,” Will explained. “Might and Word, my sisters. There were  certainly older vessels in the Navy, but I was amongst the first laid  down specifically at the behest of the Emperor. We were the first ships  purpose built for his Navy.”

Matoi  was silent, and WIll took that as a cue to keep going. “After I was  completed, the Emperor himself came to inspect me and my sisters.”

“The Emperor? Really?”

“Yeah.”  Will remembered the day he had set foot upon her deck, surrounded by  his loyal Custodians and retainers. The Master of Mankind, her Emperor  had seemed lost in thought at first, having just come from visiting his  own flagship. No, distracted might have been a better word to  describe his state of being. But upon greeting her first Captain his  expression had warmed and focused. “He seemed proud of me, of my  sisters. We accomplished a lot, in those early years. And then I…” Will  trailed off, suddenly remembering a shameful portion of her past.

“Will?”

“I‘m fine,” she lied. “I just... remembered something that I wish I could forget.”

“I won’t pry.”

“Thank you.”

A beat passed in silence before either of them spoke. “What about after?” Matoi eventually asked.

“After?”

“After.”

“I’ve  spent most of my existence in the Solar System, above or near Holy  Terra. There were a few interesting moments, like the one time xenos  actually managed to reach Terra. That’s how my sister got her nickname,  from ramming one of their warships into the sun.” Will seemingly  remembered how Might and her crew had been proud of that particular  accomplishment, embracing the nickname ‘Sun-Diver’. “Once in a millennia  or so I’d be seconded to another fleet, if they needed additional  firepower or reinforcement. That’s how I wound up in the Armageddon  Sector. Their battlefleet had lost a lot of their ships to the Orks, and  so I was sent to plug holes in their defenses.”

“Interesting.”  The Commander opened her mouth to say something else, but was  interrupted by loud knocking on the door to the room.

Will made to get up, but Matoi beat her to it. “Don’t worry, I’ll get it Will.”

Will  nodded in acknowledgement, briefly shifting her focus to the Fairy  standing atop the glass of the dataslate. It looked down at the glass,  close enough to see the individual pixels of the screen. “Hey,” it said,  looking up at her.

“Yeah, they’ve come a long way since parchment and fennel.”

“Hey.”

“I  know you’ve got quite a lot to do, so you’ll probably need a few extra  hands.” On command, a few more of her bridge crew filed out of her coat  cuff, marching over to join their comrade in labor.

“Oh, my Lord, welcome!” Said Matoi over by the door. Will looked up just in time to see the newcomers file into the room.

There  were three of them, and WIll immediately recognized them all for what  they were. The first was adorned in crimson red robes patterned in the  style of the Mechanicus, their hood up and obscuring their face. but  judging from the buxom nature of the first’s chest, they were definitely female and almost as tall as she was.

The second was also clearly a woman, albeit shorter. She was a Sororitas, a Sister of Battle, and judging from the armor’s paintwork, a member of the same group of Sororitas underneath  the command of the Lady Inquisitor. She wore a suit of polished and  gleaming bone white power armor, a deep black cloak flowing behind her  as she walked with her helmet under her arm. If Will focused, she could  just barely make out the hiss of her armor as she walked. But the third  and final newcomer towering over the others…

Was an Astartes.  And from the power armor and snarling wolf head on the pauldron, a  Space Wolf like those before. He was massive, a huge slab of blue-gray  armor that flowed into the room on the hiss of servomotors and the  clanking of steel boots. Will’s gaze was drawn to his face, and the word  handsome instantly came to mind. A face that almost seemed polished and chiseled, framed by a mess of braided and fiery red hair.

Will  stood from her seat, resisting the urge to bow. Technically, weren’t  they supposed to bow? Did Astartes bow? She couldn’t quite recall at  that moment if they did. Instead she walked over to stand next to Matoi.  And after a brief moment, a “Hello,” was what she managed to finally  say.

“My lady,” the Sororitas spoke,  “It is an honor to stand here today. I am Sister Superior Emilia  Alrosa, of the Order of the Sacred Rose. Lady Strasbourg has gracefully  permitted me to accompany you.” The woman gave a curt bow as Will  considered her words. It was a fancy way of saying that the Lady  Inquisitor had sent the Battle Sister to keep an eye on her, but Will  kept that to herself. “I hope you permit me to accompany you.”

Before  she could respond to Emilia, the Techpriestess interjected. “And I am  Marcellia, one of Lady Sorrik’s attendants. She has assigned me to your  care, should you need me.”

Will gave a curt bow of her own two the two women. “Thank you. I feel it is I that is in your care though.”

“And  now that the lassies have had their say,” the Astartes spoke with a  grin and a voice filled with mirth, I’ll go ahead and introduce myself.”  He strode over to her, with every bit the swiftness that the Great Wolf  had shown, and before Will could properly react he had scooped one of  her gloved hands up with his own. “The name’s Lukas, my fair lady,” he  said, leaning down and bringing her hand up to plant a kiss on the back  of it. “And it is a pleasure to meet you.”

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