Tales Of The Raging Murderstorm

[Jake]

Not totally happy with this yet, but if I don't get the damn thing posted it's never going to go anywhere, so here goes.

Prologue: Hangovers and Revelations

You know you've had one hell of a graduation party, Derek reflected wryly, when finding a naked girl tied to your bed and covered in bruises is the good news.
He took another deep draught of black coffee and attempted to marshal the string of hazy and disconnected images from last night into something that deserved to be called memory. There'd been a pub crawl, he remembered that much, and then Emma had got a call from her dad and there'd been another row... about him, Derek recalled with a twinge of guilt. She'd gone and bought several shots of Old Panther Sweat, after which she rallied magnificently and dragged him off to a casino. After that, it was all a bit of a blur; his last clear recollection was of running into Old McCavity the import-export guy in a bar somewhere and sitting down for a few beers with him. They'd talked about a lot of things; his increasing dissatisfaction with his job prospects on Lave, Emma's issues with her parents.
Following that, there was a very vague, disjointed memory of an advert outside the used spaceship dealer's. Something about 170,000CR and one careful owner. When he first awoke, fearsomely hung over and in an unfamiliar bedroom with a half-drunk can of lager still dangling from one hand, he thought he'd dreamed it. Then he'd got up in search of multiple gallons of black coffee and somewhere he could take a slash, and realised the bedroom was a cabin.

Things had deteriorated rather quickly from there.

They were on a spaceship, in witchspace transit... somewhere. Derek had absolutely no recollection of where or how they'd obtained it, but since there were no passenger berths and no other crew present he could only presume they were its new owners. He hadn't dared investigate the cargo manifest yet.
As far as he could tell, the ship was an old Python mid-bulk transport. It was not in wonderful condition, to put it mildly. The witchspace drive made a variety of alarming groans and rattling noises, and about half the interior lights were either non-functional or so flickery as to be nearly useless. The interior upholstery reeked of stale nicotine and industrial lubricants. The head and galley didn't appear to have been cleaned in several years. The bulkheads were covered in greenish-yellow hessian wallpaper, and the decks with carpet that had probably been a matching shade when it was originally laid down, several decades ago by the look of it.
The ship's most obvious redeeming feature was a programmable automated coffee maker that could dispense fifty different blends from all across the Known Worlds in a matter of seconds, at whatever strength you preferred. None of the current selection were particularly good blends, but the end product was hot and strong enough to give you a good boot where you needed it first thing in the morning, and was going a considerable way towards easing the painful throbbing in his head.
The ship's computer had some horribly non-standard interface from an open source repositry he'd never worked with before, additionally complicated by all the menus and icons being labelled in Swedish, but once he'd figured out the somewhat idiosyncratic GUI and found the language settings it was easy enough to dig out the ship's log. Most of its entries were also in Swedish, but Derek was able to discern that the ship had entered the inventory of the closest thing to a reputable secondhand dealership on the Lave Station. That had been two years ago, and the transfer-of-ownership entry had stated the ship had been sold at a hefty discount due to being "in need of some restoration". "That's a bloody understatement," he said to himself, knocking back the last of his coffee.
Idly, he wondered if Emma was awake yet. Unlikely; she had a rather annoying habit of dealing with hangovers by simply staying asleep until about four in the afternoon and then waking up totally unaffected. This was fine by him today, however, as it meant more time to figure out where the hell they were going and what they were supposed to do when they got there.
And, come to think of it, what cargo they might be carrying. He started leafing through a cheap manilla envelope marked "Ship's Papers" which he'd found in an overhead locker. Somewhere in here there should be a receipt, invoice, something... Bingo. A contract with Lloyd & Weber Import-Export Ltd, the name being a certain Qutirian expat's idea of a joke, for the delivery of eighty tons of Leestian-made farm machinery to a wholesaler on Xeeranre. Hell of a long way to ship it, especially given the place was only two jumps from the biggest trade hub in Sector 1; must be something new and specialist. The remaining cargo space was taken up with ten tons each of grain and Lavese bacon to be sold on the open market. You wouldn't get rich off that kind of cargo, but it'd keep you in fuel and victuals on a long delivery run.
Hmmm. Speaking of victuals...

Emma awoke to the sound of Derek clattering around in the kitchen, sounding extremely vexed.
"Oh, for the love of Armok... How can we not have anything to eat besides instant noodles, Spam and baked beans? I mean, beans, for crying out loud! That's going to make the next couple of days a right laugh!" A cupboard door slammed violently, then a hinge creaked as he opened another one. "Aha! Long-life milk, cornflakes, breakfast!"
Emma snorted softly, and stretched as far as the thick leather cuffs at her wrists and ankles would permit. She tugged gently on them, testing the magnets holding them in place; strong enough that she could probably break loose if she needed to but couldn't tear free by accident. One of the many advantages to having a dom with an engineering degree...
Said dom entered the cabin a moment later with a tray, looking thoroughly domestic. "Ah, the sleeper awakens. The bad news is, we have a spaceship that I don't remember acquiring. The good news is, there's coffee."
Emma sat up so violently that she whacked her head on the lockers above the bunk, and swore wholeheartedly. "We actually went through with it?" she groaned.
"You don't honestly think I'd rent us a hotel room that looked like this, do you? Anyway, it could be a lot worse. This thing's not in the best of nick but she's more or less spaceworthy, and McCavity set us up with a delivery contract."
"You agreed to deliver cargo for that crooked old moggy?" Emma pinched the bridge of her nose. "This just gets better by the bloody minute!"
"Come off it," Derek laughed. "Mac doesn't trust me enough to haul contraband for him when I'm sober."
Emma gave him a long, skeptical look, but shrugged. "Oh, well, nothing to be done about it 'til we land anyway. Where are we headed, anyway?"
"Zaonce, probably. Got about twelve hours to go."
"Mmmm, plenty of time then." She lay back on the bunk and stretched languidly. "No neighbours to make a fuss about the noise either..."
"Heh heh heh. I knew this was a good idea."

By the time they got around to actually eating the cornflakes, they'd gone rather soggy.

[Kasero]

Interesting start I would say!

[Rese249er]

Hohohooo boy. An interesting start indeed.