Prologue - Bjorn Fellrider

General Summary

Most Rogue Traders can trace their illustrious lineages back through the ages, untold thousands of years in some cases, to some of the first people to slip the surly bonds of Terra and take to the stars. But this is not always the case. Sometimes the need is great and the opportunity gotten through sheer chance, graced by the emperor of being in the right place at the right time. This is how you came to be the newest captain of the first lineage in over a half century, recognized by the High Lords of Terra. You have much to prove to the holy throne, your crew and even yourself. Your diplomatic latitude is great but so is your responsibility. Chief among your responsibilities are your orders to find new systems with valuable relics and resources. Be these raw materials, previously lost archeotech, xeno artifacts or something else entirely it is your duty to return them to the employ of the emperor of mankind and his inexhaustible armies.   While most of the galaxy view Rogue Traders as a necessary evil you and your crew are in truth one of the last glimmers of hope in an eternity of war. Mankind is beset on all sides by forces that would oppose them, not only because they are malign in many, or even most cases, but because of the intractable dogma that is the Imperial Creed. Rogue Traders have no need for any such fanaticism and as was mentioned have certain inalienable rights that are unique to their station. As long as you continue, to quite literally bring home the goods, then you are free to accept or ignore whatever parts of the imperial creed that you don't happen to agree with at that moment. Because of this, diplomacy and compromise can be employed with other empires and even other races. The search for knowledge or the rediscovery thereof can take precedent over prejudices, and traveling the void can be about more than just moving on to the next fight against a universe hellbent on your destruction.
As stated before, you came into your Writ of Trade quite by happenstance. You were a engineering crew member on the vessel Unquenchable Fire a battleship of the line in the imperial navy's Battlefleet Lunar on a routine purge mission of the embattled planet of Protasia. When you departed from the forge rings orbiting around the sector capital, Scintilla, your ship was in excellent condition and the sound of the great engines down in the bowels of the ship churned with a life that the captain had not witnessed in some years, praising the handful of tech priests that worked aboard the ship for their consecration of the great war machine. No such praise was given to the small army of mechanics that toiled below in the crushing heat, choking smoke and acrid smell of burning sacred oils. The Battlefleet locked in their coordinates and made final preparations for transition into the immaterium. The Captain in his jubilation wanted to open the ship's engines up and see if he could beet the rest of the Battlefleet to orbit around Protasia by a day or two, expecting no resistance in orbit when he arrived. The blessing rituals commenced as your ship opened a rift into the warp. The great mechanical beast you rode rumbled with anticipation and the rumbling grew more intense as you moved closer to the event horizon. Gauge readings jumped and twisted around sporadically and pressure releases hissed and sprayed all around you. The steam obscured your vision and crew members around you dodged the super heated spray as the valves began to fail and burst. Everything was proceeding normally for a long transition through warp space when just before you reached the gate a boulder sized pressure gauge that burst went flying past you and smashed into one of the hexagramic wards which protect the ship from the immaterial leaking in. You and others which noticed the damage yelled out for a full stop and emergency shut down but as you shouted out the prow of the great warship reached the warp gate. With a great sucking sound followed by abject silence the battleship disappeared into the warp.
The next 3 weeks of your life can only be described as a sleepless nightmare as opportunistic warp creatures slipped into the ship, some obvious others unnoticed. They decimated the crew sometimes one at a time, others in great swaths. When the crew thought that the hexagramic ward was sealed they would discover another had been destroyed. The ship was ensnared on it's mad flight through pure insanity given form in warp. Tens of thousands died during the transition. The lower decks were lost within days of the initial onset of the jump. A tactical retreat was called as the exterior corridors of the ship were slowly lost, failing inward and upward towards the command bridge like acid eating through a soluble material. Finally you had no where left to retreat to and the last few hundred crew including yourself were charged with defending the command deck. The Astropathicum had been overrun and it was assumed that whatever course you originally set out on was now being directed by the forces of chaos.
The blast doors onto the command deck were being besieged by the great enemy when your free fall through the howling madness outside your ship came to a sudden and violent stop. Everyone was thrown violently from their feet some into walls, floors and ceilings with sickening cracks and squelches. You were thrown lengthwise down a long corridor about a football field in length and you slammed into a rack of flack jackets that were being distributed to the remaining crew. The impact slightly blunted the bone crushing force of the inertia and you were lucky enough to only crack a few ribs. Damage and crew reports flew as the dead were left where they fell and broken men crawled back to posts in order to try and stem the tide of chaos about to flood through the bulkhead. 'Too little, too late' was what you thought to yourself as you dragged your beaten body to your feet. You proceeded down the hall to the makeshift trauma center that had been set up the day before.
As you reached the trauma station and grabbed some gauze to wrap your cracked ribs with when you heard the screech of sheering metal and demonic rage as crew mates down the hall yelled and screamed and the all too familiar sound of lasgun fire ripped loose on an intractable enemy. Closing your eyes to the approaching death behind, you moved on, past the trauma station and onto the main bridge. What waited for you there was the cementing of hopelessness. The view screen, cracked in spiderwebs in a few places from people sized impacts, gave a clear view of the abject failure of your mission. Broken hulls of the battle fleet you were traveling with drifted lazily through the void, spilling their contents of crew and materials like a child's box of construction toys. The chronometer showed that you arrived a week behind your intended target and the space around the planet was not without hostiles.
A great sense of resignation washed over you and you shoved a broken corpse off a command console in front of you. Targeting the lead ship of the enemy fleet you coaxed the long abandoned engines into service once again and made for a ramming maneuver. The command crew around you was either too broken or too dead to stop you and while the few members of the bridge that were able to shout, ordered you to disengage you could not be dissuaded from your chosen course. Taking heavy fire from the enemy fleet as the doomed vessel Unquenchable Fire heaved forward you stood at the navigation panel like a person possessed. Pieces of the battleship broke off, small explosions and electrical discharges were happening all around you as the demonic roars and screams of your crew mates echoed around you.
“Brace! Brace!, BRACE!” was the only order you could hear around you as the view screen filled with the bulk of the enemy battle ship. The emperor's battering ram manifest as the Unquenchable Fire slammed it's bulk into the side of the enemy command ship. You hope to never hear a sound like that again as the two hulks met with great speed. Metal buckled and twisted, screeched and bent, life support failed as did gravity control, more died around you as some popped like zits against the insides of the vessel, others were sucked out of cracks and breaches in the hull, sometimes smaller than the bodies that passed through them and the lights flickered and died.
You held on tight through it all and the void-shields sheltering you from the unending blackness managed to turn on before you too were disgorged from the bridge. The view screen in front of you showed only the pieces of the other ship that you had ripped through and dragged along with you and the planet approaching on your unstoppable plunge. You closed your eyes again and waited for the inevitable embrace of the emperor...
Apparently, the Emperor had other plans for you though. Before you hit atmosphere you heard a mechanical beeping. Opening your eyes and looking around you caught movement in the darkened bridge. You thought for a moment that some oddly misshapen demon had made it to the bridge finally when you focused on the broken form of the captain retrieving the ships central processing storage device. The living memory of the ship itself. He retrieved it and the crawled towards a featureless panel of the wall. Hauling himself to his feet he placed his hand on the wall and to your surprise, it opened. In side lights flickered on to reveal an escape pod. You immediately acted without thought. The captain didn't even notice as you came up behind him. You pulled his beaten and broken body to the side, pistol whipped him across the mouth and retrieved the ships memory from his hand. Shoving him backward away from the pod you shot him once in both legs and stepped aboard as he fell to the floor one final time, in agony, but still alive. You heard the vessel's bridge door being wrenched open by demons and the proximity alert sounding as the ship was pulled in by the planet's gravity. “The captain should go down with the ship” you say over your shoulder as you closed the escape pod door to the sound of wailing protest, the sound being cut off as the airlock closed behind you.
You jettisoned into space immediately and watched as the Unquenchable Fire hit the atmosphere and became a brilliant comet streaking across the sky and down onto the planet eventually meeting the ground hard enough with enough megatons of energy left to cause an explosion still perceptible from your vantage point in orbit. The enemy battleship also fell, not far behind, split in half from your mad charge through it's mid section. Your escape pod drifted along. The remaining enemy ships were unable to distinguish you from the other wreckage floating around in orbit and eventually retreated when more imperial navy ships appeared on the scene a couple of days later. After a thorough scan of the wreckage you were retrieved and brought aboard a cruiser charged with materials reclamation. Once on board you were quarantined and the Unquenchable Fire's memories confiscated from you. Not long after you were escorted back to Scintilla's orbit, eventually coming aboard the inquisitorial Citadel. You were brought into a chamber, sure that you were to be executed when very regal looking men appeared and spoke to you. They bore the insignia's of Terra and said that the ship's memory recorded you defending the ship for weak from demons and eventually inputting the command's to ram the enemy flagship. Beyond that the Unquenchable Fire was also responsible for crashing into the command site of the enemy forces on the ground. They congratulate you on your fearlessness and ingenuity in battle and reward you with a Writ of Trade for essentially reclaiming a front of an ongoing war by yourself.
Since it didn't come up in conversation, you decided to not mention shooting your captain and abandoning him to demons aboard your former vessel since the ship's memory core had been detached by that point it wasn't recorded. The inquisition had recently wrested a vessel from a space hulk that the imperial navy had blown apart because it was on a collision course with Scintilla, and they had some agent's looking to retire to a line of work that was no longer actively throwing them into impossible situations. They had to be reconditioned of course before but they had proven capable for the inquisition and since their lord was currently being detained on suspicion of heresy they had become free agents. And thus began the next chapter of your life, lifted up to one of the highest echelons of citizenship within and apart from the Imperium. As a Rogue Trader you are nobility in your own right and as such are encouraged to preserve your family line so that the inquisition can keep better track of your service to the imperium of man and the high lords don't need to issue further writ's of trade. The writ will be passed on generation to generation as long as you uphold your duties to the imperium.

Report Date

11 Jun 2021