Moral Hazards 3

The "Cold Trade", as any student of Imperial trans-sector law will tell you, refers to the illegal trade of aliens and their technology, whole or in part, living or dead. While the term originated in the Calixis Sector and has since been obfuscated by hundreds of other terms to throw off Imperial authorities, it nevertheless spread quickly and became the de-facto manner in which the pirates, smugglers, and black-marketeers who operate such trade describe their work.

It was a market Merlina Kesh was intimately aware of. She had spent the bulk of her career working the Cold Trade for her masters on the Forge World of Stygies VIII, combing riotous underworld markets for knew specimens of interest to the Xenarites who dominated Stygies tech-synod. It had been a thankless role, one only given to those Techpriests the synod deemed disposable enough they could be cut loose in an instant should they fall foul of the Arbites or, worse, the dreaded Inquisition.

But then, Merlina thought bitterly, that described her perfectly. She sat in Antimedes' cavernous primary docking bay, perched daintily on the edge of an ancient dust-covered transit crate, staring at the elegant silver-and-brass augmetic which replaced her right arm. The techpriestess slowly clenched and unclenched her fist, watching the tiny, delicate servos in her palm spin and buzz in the silence.

She hated it.

She hated how human it looked.

If there was one unifying philosophy which bound the Omnissiah's squabbling children together it was their dedication towards abandonment of the flesh; to rebuild themselves, set by step, free from the weakness and inefficiency of their organic bodies. The most holy of their number had all but abandoned the human form altogether, transforming themselves into towering demigods of steel and iron, striding forth on brutal piston-driven limbs, their faces hidden behind skull-shaped rebreathers, defended by implanted weapons of terrible power and swathed in cloaks of lashing mechadendrites.

Such was the ultimate goal of all who walked in the Machine God's shadow, and such had been forever denied to her. Her creator had seen to that.

There was a crackle in her ear. Merlina jumped and shook her head, pushing away the last few dour thoughts as Jeanna's voice hissed over the vox.

"That's confirmation from the Orano's Blessing, they're on final approach. Their shuttle should be ready to dock in ten. Is everything ready down there?"

The spidery clusters of revolving lenses which had replaced Merlina's eyes clicked and span, shifting rapidly through different wavelengths and magnification levels. Info-readouts spooled down the left side of her peripheral vision, feeding her with an unfolding list of data harvested from her surroundings. A dozen servitors clattered around the deck. Some prepared fuel lines and magnoclamps, or stood ready with cargo pallets. Others trained implanted bolters and flamers on the single landing pad which Merlina had cleared in the centre of the chamber. Beyond them cracked and cobwebbed hazard lights began to flash and spin, painting the immense, rust-clad airlock doors with strobes of vivid orange.

"As we'll ever be. Give them the approach codes."

There was a moment of silence before Jeanna spoke again. "Done. They're incoming now, I can see the shuttle on our exterior augers."

Merlina hopped down from her crate and walked over to the landing pad, crossing her hands neatly behind her back. She could sense Jeanna working in the command centre, slowly waking the station's ancient Machine Spirits. They were stubborn and resentful things, bitter at long decades of abandonment and misuse, and the techpriestess soon felt them pressing angrily around the edges of her noospheric link. Unperturbed she began to sing a prayer, her soft voice filling the hollow chamber even as her thought-engrams and placating datapulses quelled one unquiet spirit after another.

Soon the last of them relented, abandoning its interrogations and sinking back into dormancy. Merlina allowed herself a little pride at that. No matter who - no matter what she was, she remained as skilled a techno-savant as any to come from Stygies' shadowed halls.

The airlock doors ground open with a squeal of tortured metal. Through them came the squat, pug-nosed form of an Arvus lighter, its stubby manoeuvring fins twitching as it wallowed into the landing bay. A flight of servo-skulls flocked around the shuttle like crows, trailing lamps and detection-streamers as they guided it down towards the landing pad. Merlina stepped elegantly backwards, her hood blowing down and short, nearly clipped black hair whirling around her head from the engine backdraught as it lumbered around and finally clunked heavily onto the deck.

A landing ramp descended, followed by half a dozen rough men clad in patched voidsuits, armoured with savaged flakboard and chainweave mail and carrying brutish naval shotguns. They eyed the gun-servitors warily as the lobotomised cyborgs tracked their movements, falling into a rough semi-circle around a seventh figure who descended after them. Hunched and wizened with age, his wargear emblazoned with a jade death's-head emblem, he peered suspiciously around himself as Merlina approached.

"You Kesh?" He asked. Merlina nodded.

"I am. You have the wares we spoke of?"

"We do. Thought there was another one of yer?"

Merlina's smile was bland and carefully composed, betraying nothing. "She is currently indisposed. This station is old, as you can tell, and it requires a great deal of monitoring to remain functional. You will deal exclusively with me."

She made no mention of Jeanna's anxieties; that after nearly a decade of isolation the xenoarchivist had baulked at coming face to face with a squad of heavily armed pirates and chosen to remain sequestered in the command centre. Servo-skulls flitted though the shadows, as if Jeanna sought to remind her she was still watching from afar.

The pirate captain's name was Kalides. After her long stint in stasis, Merlina had discovered most of her old contacts were dead, either from old age, internecine fighting, or the heavy hand of Imperial justice. Few of them had been anything like friends, but they had been reliable and trustworthy. With their passing one of her few tangible connections to the rest of humanity had been cut, and she had been forced to reach out towards less scrupulous captains in search of supplies.

Kalides' gaze lingered on the techpriestess for a moment. Merlina stood still, her skin crawling as the man's watery eyes swept along her elegant figure, lingering on the small, pleasant curves of her hip and bust, before flicking away as he met the woman's lens-clusters.

More figures emerged from the shuttle at his curt gesture, dragging a clutch of strange, arachnid creatures behind them. Each was muzzled and bound in heavy iron shackles, half again the size of man, armoured with mottled brown carapace and sporting truncated stubs where their wings had been torn away. Jagged proboscises flexed and their eight round, black eyes glittered miserably under the bay's harsh lumins.

"Q'orl?" Jeanna's voice buzzed excitedly in her ear. "No, wait. Only their warbeasts, not the principle creatures themselves. Unfortunate. Still, they'll do for our causes."

The pirates eyed Merlina suspiciously as she swept past them, examining the spindly aliens. Their carapace was blackened from where shock-mauls had been used to keep them in line and brittle from malnourishment, but otherwise the creatures seemed in good health. Though hardly the prize she had been promised, Merlina was quite sure Jeanna would find all manner of interesting things to do with them. Her taste for the strange and inhuman had only deepened in the short time she had known her.

Kalides himself, unfortunately, was infinitely less interesting and unsurprisingly tiresome to deal with. Though her habitual bland smile didn't waver for a moment throughout the negotiations, Merlina felt her remaining skin crawl under the dirty little man's watery eyes. Only once did he meet the revolving lens-clusters which studded her augmetic features; beyond that his gaze flitted nervously here and there, drawn to the slim curves beneath her robes only to be repulsed in turn by the eerie sleekness of her bionics. His men were much the same, muttering crudely to one another in the background.

Wondering if she still had 'the important bits'. Wondering if she could still feel anything. Wondering where her augmetics had come from.

As if she couldn't hear.

By the time they were done she felt somehow dirty, as soiled by their lascivious whispers as she was by their unease over her augmetics. The feeling had grown, second by second and minute by minute, throughout the negotiations, until her chest was tight and heavy with disgust and self-loathing. In the end they took a dozen newly-laid hormagaunt eggs in exchange for four of the Q'orl and two months worth of Militarum ration packs, leaving Merlina alone in the hanger once more.

She wanted to scream.

She wanted tear at herself, to mar her artificially-whitened flesh and smash her ornate bionics until she was as stunted and scarred and ugly as they had been.

She wanted to be normal.

The Q'orl clicked and shivered as they were marched away by the servitors. Merlina could hear Jeanna talking excitedly at her over the vox, already discussing her plans for where the aliens were to be housed and what treatments would quickly bring them back to full health.

After a moment, the xenoarchivist trailed off. "Mer?" she asked, her concern audible even over the hissing voxbead. "Mer, are you okay?"

Merlina's eyes clicked and cycled. Her smile was resolute and utterly hollow.

"Of course, Jeanna. I'll see the new specimens to their cells then rejoin you shortly."

She glanced down into her palm again, then disconnected the voxbead and returned to her duties in silence.

---

Merlina remained quiet and withdrawn for the rest of the day. She avoided her friend wherever possible, and once the Q'orl were settled vanished into Antimedes' crumbling lower decks. There she lost herself for some time in the comforting routine of repairs and upgrades she had suggested, harvesting components from the Lux Astra Aeterna's floating corpse and using them to turn the station's wealth of empty chambers into workable spaces. Already the station boasted new laboratories, vivisectorums, and hydroponics facilities, each transplanted piece by piece from her dead ship into her new home.

But by the time Antimides' chronologs registered the beginning of a new rest cycle, her unhappiness had returned. She shared dinner with Jeanna, concealing her simmering unease as the two women ate, then departed to the small living quarters she had claimed for herself. There she had lain on her pallet bed, tossing and turning as the day's events wormed insidiously through her mind like toxic scrapcode.

Meditation did little to clear her thoughts. Binharic prayer failed likewise, as did...less wholesome methods of distraction. Finally, tense and frustrated and desperate for some sense of companionship, Merlina rose from her cot and began to pace Antimedes' cold, silent halls. For a time she was content to wander, searching for anything to occupy her mind, until she came at last to a small cell. It was a temporary housing unit used to contain xenoforms as their primary enclosures were cleaned and maintained, though it often found double duty as a playroom where she and Jeanna could indulge their particular tastes.

This one, she knew, contained one of the station's two male hormagaunts. She drummed her fingers on the metal door, as if to muster her courage, then keyed it open and slipped inside like a ghost.

She and Jeanna had done this often enough before. The old precautions which had once complicated their indulgences had, in the long run, proven unnecessary. No gun-servitors took up station inside, no auto-turrets glared down from above as she shrugged off her black robes and sent a noospheric pulse to the lumins, awakening them to half-strength. Dim light flooded the near side of the chamber, illuminating bare, silver-scrubbed metal and a battered divan salvaged from the Lux piled invitingly along the wall.

Merlina paused for a moment, there in the dark. Kalides swam back into her thoughts; his drooping face, the ugly beard which clung to his chin like fungus, the revulsion and lust warring in his eyes. It was the same expression she had seen a thousand times on a thousand different faces before, whether worn openly or concealed behind a mask of thin courtesy.

She was beautiful, yes, but it was a false, sterile beauty, the product of a mind which thought art could be rendered down into a series of precise ratios and equations. Her features were too delicate and finely-boned, her figure too tall and elegant to be wholly natural. It gave her the countenance of a porcelain doll or an artist's figurine, something only reinforced by her artificially whitened skin and dyed red lips.

Merlina Kesh had not been born; she had been grown. Extensively gene-edited and modified in her nutrient-womb, her first waking memories were of being hacked apart and fitted with her augmentations. But even those were wrong; where most Imperial cybernetics were brutal things which exalted the holy form of the machine, hers were slim, proportionate, almost alien. She was neither one thing nor another, a perfect, flawless freak, and her master had discarded her as such when his artistic pretensions drew nothing but scorn.

A soft rattle echoed from somewhere deeper within the cell, shaking the techpriestess from her morose thoughts. Merlina answered it in kind, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth and smiling mirthlessly as the alien within began to stir. Its compatriot was elsewhere; Jeanna had put the second creature out to stud with the female earlier, so they might have another batch of eggs for sale.

This one, then, was hers alone. Merlina prayed silently to the Omnissiah that it would be enough. She sat daintily on the edge of the divaan, her pale thighs spread, her lips already flushed and glimmering where she had struggled to distract herself earlier. Jeanna, perhaps, could have helped; the other woman was a clumsy if enthusiastic lover, but Merlina decided it would have been cruel to wake her. Not when Antimedes provided a wealth of alternatives.

As if called by that very thought, the hormagaunt slunk out of the darkness, its hooves clicking on the bare metal with every step.

The sight of it never failed to take Merlina's breath away. Amidst all the creatures in Jeanna's collection, she understood perfectly why the hormagaunts were her favourites. It was a whiplike thing of lean, sinewy elegance, its movements utterly inhuman and filled with predatory intent. Old scars and bullet wounds marred its waxy red carapace, and its chitinous black body glistened wetly as it approached. A long tail dragged behind, swishing lazily too and fro as the beast shook off the last vestiges of sleep.

It was beautiful, Merlina thought. It was everything she was not - something pure and whole, flawlessly created to fulfil its allotted tasks, incapable of doubt or shame or self-pity. That it was a feral, near-mindless alien was irrelevant. It was perfect, and the sight of it crouched before her was enough to set her heart racing and rekindle her dim sparks of arousal into something far more potent. The hormagaunt took a cautious step forwards, its scent-pits trembling in curiosity. Further back, beneath its coiled hind legs, Merlina spied the tip of its dripping phallus beginning to emerge.

Once, when Jeanna had first began her indulgences with the captive tyranids, she had been forced to use vials of breeding pheromones to excite their interest. Neither she nor Merlina had anticipated the simple-minded aliens would eventually learn to identify their scents as that of breeding partners and broodmates. The xenoarchivist had already written several essays theorising ways in which tyranid organisms could be controlled or manipulated if bonded to human partners, but for Merlina, the implication was far more intimate.

The techpriestess let out a soft groan and reached down, running steel fingers over her sex. She was wet - she was so wet, so desperate, stringy beads of arousal clinging to her pale lips and dripping in long strings from her probing digits. Her legs parted wider, her fingers dipped deeper into her heat, reaching upwards and stroking indulgently along her most sensitive places, finally rewarding her with a soft curl of pleasure as she noticed the beast's cock was almost fully engorged.

"That's it," she whispered, "that's right. I'm ready for you."

The beast accepted her. It didn't love, or care, but neither did it judge or fear her. That was the joy of it - the blind acceptance it offered, and the sweet oblivion she found in its hooked, razor-clawed embrace.

The hormagaunt sat for a few moments longer, its dead, void-black eyes watching her with alien hunger. Then, with a sibilant hiss, it pounced.

Merlina let out a brief yelp of surprise as the hormagaunt leapt forwards, its clawed limbs flailing as it sought to anchor itself for mating. Talons whickered through the air, screeching and sparking against the metal walls, before the alien hooked them around the back of the divan and dragged itself into position. The techpriestess' cry of alarm melted into a deep, lusty moan as she felt the alien's body grinding atop her own, its lithe, muscular weight bearing her down into the ragged couch beneath them.

As practised as she and Jeanna were, the harsh reality was that neither she nor the hormagaunt were designed for mating with one another. The beast's phallus throbbed against her stomach, already leaking precome, painting her smooth belly with a warm, slick sheen as it struggled to find her entrance. It was a torment she and Jeanna had experienced before - the xenoarchivist even coyly referred to the familiar struggle as 'dancing' - but on this night Merlina found she had no patience for it.

The techpriestess moaned again and dragged her body further up the divan, spreading her legs all the wider in the hopes of giving the beast an easier target. Pleasure crashed through her as the hormagaunt's rough, chitin-sheathed ribs dragged across her tender nipples, raw and bright, sweeping the pale spasms her fingers had brought forth away like ash from a hot forge.

Merlina's breathing grew ragged as she desperately squirmed beneath the alien, giving voice to a sob of anticipation as the two mismatched bodies fought to align themselves. Her sex pulsed as the hormagaunt's phallus slid wetly along her buttock before thrusting into the crook of her thigh, an aching, soul-deep throb of need so intense it was almost painful. Panting and feverish, Merlina hugged the alien close and whined soft pleas into its chorded neck. She guided it as best she could, trying to shift her hips as it stabbed left and right, hissing and rattling with a frustration seemingly even greater than her own.

Finally, beautifully, it struck true. The puckered phallus slithered over Merlina's sopping lips, glanced inwards and plunged smoothly into the writhing woman. Waves of ecstasy bloomed out between her legs as the hormagaunt drove itself deeper, the first, savage thrust so intense she felt ready to faint. The alien's tongue lolled out in mutual pleasure as the techpriestess' silky passage clenched tight, eagerly welcoming the gnarled, thickly-ridged shaft into her slender body.

There was a heartbeat's pause, barely long enough for Merlina to catch her breath. The hormagaunt's first thrust, for all its heady intensity, had been shallow; only half the alien's cock had made it inside her. It was an error it seemed all too eager to correct. Merlina stroked its face as it began fucking her in earnest, softly kissing the beast's forehead as its motions became faster and deeper, more frenzied and aggressive, each thrust feeding another inch of its rampant prick into Merlina's slender form.

Soon it was taking her down to the root, its rough, sandpapery hips slapping against Merlina's prone body as she moaned and cried out for more. The ridges which sheathed its organ rubbed across her walls, stretching and caressing her in ways no human could ever have done. The ocular lenses which clustered across her silver half-mask clicked and spun, focusing on the bucking, drooling alien atop her, bringing it into sharp relief even as her mind grew hazy and drunk with pleasure. She wanted to see everything - to feel everything, to delight in every muscular buck and obliviating shiver as she was mated.

The techpriestess had been with men before, of course; sometimes for pleasure, sometimes for duty. But such occurrences had been tainted things, ultimately unsatisfying and poisoned by the effect of her eerie, doll-like features upon her partners. But the hormagaunt showed no such squeamishness. It gave her no respite, fucking her all the harder as she shuddered and moaned beneath its whip-thin form, venting its feral lusts upon the slender, silver-clad creature it had taken as its broodmate. Its tongue ran along her neck and across her face, thick beads of saliva dripping from its bared fangs to soak deep into her black hair.

Merlina's only response was to give voice to a hitching laugh and wrap her legs around the alien's narrow hips, pale thighs locking tight and pulling it deeper into her core, shamelessly encouraging own impalement. It was better face-to-face, she thought. Despite every logical argument she found there was nothing quite like being able to see the creature she was mating with. It made the reality of what she was doing inescapable; forced her to own what she was doing, to look into the glassy, black eye of such a monstrous being and see nothing but her own lusts reflected back.

It completed her, she realised. Merlina had never believed her arrival on Antimedes was an accident. For years, she had served the tech-lords of Stygies VIII with quiet devotion, hiding her sense of isolation and anxiety behind the bland smile which had become as much a part of her face as the lens-clusters which replaced her eyes. But every sleep-cycle had been ended with a prayer to Omnissiah for something - anything - which would make her feel whole, and as far as the techpriestess was concerned, her deity had finally answered.
The hormagaunt's prick throbbed inside her, hot and hard between her slick folds. Its gnarled head rubbed incessantly against her deepest and most sensitive places, raging against the loving prison that held it tight. Merlina Kesh felt her climax growing, felt the slippery pulse as the feral alien poured its precome into her, and felt whole.

And so she took everything it offered and begged for more, even as the hormagaunt hooked its secondary limbs over her shoulders and dragged itself into a hideous parody of an embrace. Her hands - one flesh and blood, one steel and brass - roved over its lithe form, stroking the hard angles of its exoskeleton, tracing chitinous ribs and feeling the alien heartbeat raging beneath. Whisps of steam leaked from the heat-sinks implanted along her ribs. Her peak was close, ecstasy humming along her augmented nerves like pulses of divine feedback, and she reached for it like a seeker upon the edge of enlightenment.

Merlina's body burned. It crackled. Each thrust brought her closer, each rattling hiss and lusty screech from her monstrous paramour feeding into her growing orgasm like prometheum upon a blaze. She whispered encouragement to the bladed horror as it rutted into her, wallowing in the sweet-sour alien stink and the clammy touch of its sweat and slime upon her limbs and chest, nursing the rampant beast closer to its orgasm even as she spiralled madly into her own.

It struck her like a blow from a forge-hammer, blasting the air from her lungs, the thoughts from her mind, hollowing her out and leaving nothing but ecstasy in its wake. Merlina gave one last passionate cry and hugged the alien close, silky walls clenching hard around the hormagaunt's prick as it began to spasm and jerk and come inside her. The tyranid let out a thin shriek as it found its own release, driving its shaft as deep into its mate's warmth as it could and flooding her with pulse after pulse of thick, sticky alien semen.

The techpriestess' legs shuddered around the hormagaunt's narrow hips, keeping it pinned helplessly in place as it emptied itself into her. Stinging notes of pleasure danced along her augmented nerves as it jerked back and forth, grinding in place and tormenting her aching nipples with its rough chest. It was only when Merlina was sure the very last drop had been poured into her flushed, sweat-slick body that she allowed herself to relax, falling slack and allowing the hormagaunt to wriggle free.

She lay there for some time, panting heavily, feeling the beast's seed drip slowly from her sex in long, burning strings with a drunken smile on her face. For a few precious moments, nothing mattered. Not the unnatural feel of her cyborg limbs, not the fading memories of the revulsion she had seen in the pirate's eyes. She felt whole. Complete. The hormagaunt had retreated back to the shadows, curling in upon itself and diligently licking itself clean, blissfully unconcerned of its partner's woes.

It almost seemed rude to leave the creature to it. Merlina slid from the couch in a boneless heap and crawled over to the prone alien, gently running her steel hand over its wiry thigh before reaching between its legs. The hormagaunt raised its head and let out a long hiss, but made no effort to dissuade the techpriestess from ducking closer and taking its cock gently between her lips. Her tongue played over its gnarled head as she slid down the shaft, nursing the beast back to full hardness as she cleaned away the sticky residue of their congress. One of its legs kicked haplessly at the air as she sucked, selflessly pleasuring the feral monster until it shook, tensed, and released another thick pulse of semen into Merlina's loving mouth.

Finally she withdrew, her soft lips caressing the hormagaunt's phallus one last time. Merlina wiped away a few stubborn drops of alien come from her lips, licked them clean and swallowed, briefly allowing her optics to blur out of focus as she savoured the mouthful of warm, glutinous come curling down into her belly. No, she thought distantly. Chasing after the sort of star-scum to come washing out of the great rift would do them no good. Even those who could stand to deal with her would always be unreliable - too prone to turning on them or selling the pair out to the Inquisition. But there were other traders out there she and Jeanna could deal with. Creatures less squeamish than most humans could ever be, with a record of clandestine trade with those Imperial forces willing to take their business.

She pulled herself to her feet with a satisfied groan, leaning against the battered divan until her legs were strong enough to stand. When the last of the shakes had faded, she slung her robes around her shoulders and limped wearily from the hormagaunt's cell. A thin trail of pearly fluid marked her way, dripping down her legs to lie upon Antimedes' rusting deck, unseen and ignored as the techpriestess' enhanced mind lit up with plans and possibilities.

Eldar. Stryxis. Sslyth. She thought for a moment about a snippet of proscribed work she had stumbled across, the remains of a centuries-old autopsy report buried deep within Antimedes' antique cogitator core.

I have touched the face of the divine, it had said. And it is not human.