Let me tell you a strange and cautionary tale my friends. As you will know from my previous scribblings in this weathered journal, Tuco Ramirez has always been a man preoccupied by the search for material wealth. That hunger for the ‘great haul’, which has driven me relentlessly since my earliest childhood memories. Perhaps it was growing up on Luther McIntyre that made me this way? Grinding poverty and the ever present fear of a sudden, violent death are strong motivators to forge a better life. The promise of eternal ease, comfort and pleasure offered by owning a vast fortune must truly wield a powerful influence over a man. Just imagine, a dirt poor peasant like old Tuco living like a king in some big mansion someplace with servants and flunkies and the like!!! I’ve come close to that big score once or twice. Hell, it’s been tantalisingly close but just as my fingers close in on the coins, my dreams have been snatched away again only to leave me as broke and in trouble as before. I’m not deterred though. I know I’ll be sauntering along Easy Street one of these days. No more seedy flop houses, noisy barrack rooms and stinking jail cells for Tuco. I’ll be a high roller then, you’ll see!!!
Errr...anyway, where was I? Oh yes, my strange and cautionary tale. Well OK, we’d just captured the Dire Wolf and were preparing to take her back to the Varrick system for refitting. She was a fine prize I’ll grant you that but had taken a real battering when we boarded her. It might take years to bring her back to her former glory but she’d be the pride of any Rogue Trader’s fleet if we could pull it off. Even a marine outfit would covet a ship of that size that boasted both a Nova canon and a teleportarium. One of the problems we had though was that the Wolf’s crew weren’t exactly happy about the change in management. Having said that, they weren’t over the moon with their previous employer but they’d just taken a beating, were seriously under strength and weren’t sure where they next pay check, Hell, even their next meal was coming from. So naturally, they were a little on the tense side. After the smoke had settled from the battle, we could properly assess the situation and we reckoned the ship was maybe as many as 30,000 crewmen light. They’d not only been overworked trying to keep the old girl flying but also hadn’t been paid for months. Vandire was desperate and running on empty, which was why he was willing to take such a big risk to gain possession of the Varrick system. We needed to make sure the Wolf was as secure as possible for the flight by minimising the risk of mutiny, so I spent quite some time assessing troop requirements in order to hold key parts of the ship in case things did take a turn for the worse.
During my assessments Malachai, our chief grease monkey, sidled up to me to say that we weren’t going to be going anywhere because someone had taken the car keys. He kept calling them the control rod, which made no sense to me whatsoever, but when I asked him to explain what he was blathering on about in plain Low Gothic he managed to put across to me that what he was actually talking about were car keys. ‘No keys, ship engine no start!’ Ah, OK well we better talk to the man that no doubt had them last; Vandire. He was languishing in our brig, probably contemplating what a poor decision it had been to try throwing his weight around when he was as skinny as a bean stalk, when we arrived to interrogate him. He was pretty quick to tell us that he’d destroyed the keys he had in his possession but that there were a back up set somewhere in his quarters. All we had to do were follow his instructions and we’d be able to find them and fire up the engines. Well, let me tell you my friends, old Tuco hasn’t got this far in life without smelling a rat when it’s trying to crawl up his trouser leg! This had trap written all over it so I decided that it would be best if Malachai went over to the Wolf while I stayed on the Vengeance and threatened to shoot Vandire in the face with a bolt pistol if he’d left any booby traps. Malachai in turn thought it would be best if we picked another member of the crew to actually search Vandire’s quarters while he supervised the operation from a safe distance. After a brief perusal of the Vengeance’s HR files we managed to find a shipmate by the name of Lothar, who seemed to have ‘expendable’ as the most salient point on his CV. After searching the former captain’s cabin Lothar came across a key to a vault in the cargo hold. Vandire told us that was what we should be looking for and it was now a matter of going down to the hold and grabbing the control rod. Again both Malachai and I felt that this was a task best performed by our trusty shipmate Lothar, who was fully insured against an agonising death by being of very little us in any other way. He went into the hold and seemed to be gone for a very long while. This put Malachai on edge and I must admit I came very close to keeping my promise to ventilate Vandire’s head with a bolter round. However, Lothar did eventually reappear with said car keys so all was well. While he was in the hold he told Malachai, he saw what he thought was a tomb, or mausoleum of some sort. Stop press!!! I told everyone to stay exactly where they were until I got over there on the next cutter!
There is nothing, and I do mean nothing, in this world that Tuco Ramirez loves more than tomb robbing! I’ve robbed pyramids, barrow mounds, mausoleums, big tombs, little tombs, shallow graves, unburied coffins and even the still warm dead! You can’t take it with you, that’s what I say and it’s just plain stupid to try while I’m around! Some of my best hauls have come out of tombs. It really is quite amazing what people will bury with their loved ones. Why, I once turned over some big shot’s last resting place and found out that they buried him in a fine silk dressing gown with gold thread. Lovely fit it was too. I wore it for years to play poker in until I had to leave all my belongings in a boarding house on Repton IV rather hurriedly and unexpectedly after a misunderstanding with the local law enforcement agencies. I still wonder who ended up with that? Anyways, tombs are always a rich source of loot and I certainly wasn’t going to miss out on this opportunity. Malachai had sent his floating skull in to the hold to take some shots of the thing while we radioed back to the Vengeance to see if Vandire had any information about the history of the mausoleum. He told us that one of his ancestors had brought the thing on board over a hundred years ago with strict instructions that it should never be opened. It’s cursed or something. Bless the Emperor’s Eyes this just keeps getting better and better! It’s not been opened! The God damned thing could be a bank vault for all they knew! Perfect cover if these fools were too frightened to open it. Well, old Tuco’s not scared off by some crazy superstition. The dead can’t hurt anyone. They’re dead you see. It’s as simple as that. Well, unless they’re Necrons of course, in which case you are in serious trouble. Hell, I’ve even handled them in my time though. No grave robbing job is too big for Tuco to pull off!!
So Malachai and I crept forward into the cargo bay with pistols drawn. I’d cast my bandit’s eye over the ground and worked out where we might take cover if someone tried to jump us. Quiet as a mouse. We entered the mausoleum to find the strangest sight you ever did see. Instead of a casket or a coffin we saw a man chained down to a stone slab and by the Emperor’s holy light, if he wasn’t alive and well and looking straight at us! That was a big surprise I can tell you! Straight away I realises something’s wrong because he’s wearing rags for a start. Who would bury a pauper in an upmarket place like this? He’s a weird, baldy looking fellow with tattoos all over him. Staring straight at us he was. All of a sudden Malachai comes over all funny and pipes up that it’s a beautiful tech priestess who’s chained to the slab and he set off to free her from her bondage. While he’s busy trying to loosen the chains of his grease monkey princess, I gets to thinking that he’s probably being manipulated by baldy and it might not be such a good idea if he’s let free after all these years. So, I steps up behind old Malachai and gives him a sharp tap across the back of the head with the butt of my bolt pistol. Out he goes like a light and I cuff him to make sure he doesn’t come round and get up to any more mischief. Turning my attention to the raggedy man, I drew my sword and prepared to stake him right through the heart. Don’t know why, just seemed appropriate in the circumstances. Just as I’m about to thrust down the guy blurts out that he knows where a mountain of loot is hidden. Someone once said, ‘Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness, except greed’. Well, let me tell you my friends that certainly put the brakes on my staking efforts for the moment. While keeping the blade firmly pressed over his heart and asked him to tell me a little more about the money. The next thing he’s talking about a whole treasure world he knows of, wondrous stories of rubies, diamonds emeralds and gold, sacks of gold. All I have to do is free him and he take me there himself.
At this point Malachai comes round. He’s still cuffed but seemed to have thrown off the illusion that this raggedy freak is a beautiful lady grease monkey. Talking of freaks I’d forgotten that these tech priests have metal tentacles growing out of their backs which can perform all sorts of functions such as cutting through handcuffs (note to self, next time you subdue a teach priest cut off, or otherwise incapacitate his tentacle things). The next moment he up and about in a right huff. To make matters worse, our friend on the slab just ups and admits he’s a bound demon by the name of Prosephone. Well, Malachai goes in to a fit of panic and tries to chop the demon’s head off with an axe. Well my friends, I’ve seen chaos up close and personal when I was captured aboard a Saynay slaughterhouse ship. Nobody knows better than me how evil those sick chaos worshipping bastards are. And if those are simply the monkeys, I can only imagine how bad one of the actual the organ grinders must be! Having said all that, one he might genuinely know where a shit load of cash is, and two how do we know that killing the body he’s in won’t simply free him from the shackles of the slab. I parried away a couple of Malachai’s axe blows and tried to reason with him but to no avail. The next moment he pulls out a grenade (apparently one he stole from me he told me later) and tried throwing that at the demon. I know he’s a tech priest, so isn’t used to such complicated weaponry but I thought that even his like would realise that lobbing grenades within a very confined space can be a dangerous pastime. So, I grapple with him and mange to throw it out of the tomb into the cargo bay. That would have looked real bad on my own tombstone, ‘killed wrestling a grease monkey for one of his own grenades’. We can hear Hell Boy laughing his raggedy ass off behind us. We must have looked a right pair. Humanity’s last, best hope of stopping the demon horde. Anyway, at this point I decide to try and salvage some of my dignity and let Malachai get on with beheading the demon. The corpse spewed out black smoke which seemed to dissipate soon after, so no immediate danger.
On leaving the cargo bay we noticed that the crewman we’d left looking after the ship’s car keys, Peter the big armed mutant (long story, don’t ask) had wondered off leaving the control rod on it’s own. Somewhat suspicious. We organised a search party and checked to see whether he left the Wolf on one of the cutters. No luck there. While we were both concerned with his disappearance, we knew that we’d have to get underway soon. We couldn’t wait around the Wyrding system forever and supplies were low. On the way back to the Varrick system Malachai and I had a debate as to whether we needed to inform young Darius of the unfortunate occurrences that had taken place. Although we both felt that the event had amounted to no more than a minor internal security issue, we thought that he might want to know what had in fact happened and to be reassured that we had thoroughly and satisfactorily dealt with the matter. We did decide to have an escape plan on standby though, as we know how temperamental the captain can be sometimes. In the event, while being a bit pissed off with us, he was satisfied we’d dealt with the problem effectively.
Just as we solve one problem though, another rears it ugly head! Back on Shard we were told that my old comrade Lukas had stolen a holy relic given to us by a space marine chapter for services rendered. It was a part of a power claw, no doubt used by some saint or other to fend off the forces of darkness. Mordenachai our newly joined navigator told us he’d seen Lukas on board the Wolf some months before they’d encountered us. He was on the ship with his Throne Agent master Gorian Debarii. They were seeking the claw as far back as then because they thought that it could lead them to a book they wanted. A disgraced inquisitor named Icor Harn had run off with it when the powers that be accused him of heresy. Apparently, he was thought to be hiding out somewhere in the Expanse. Did that mean that the whole elaborate meeting with Lukas was purely set up for my benefit, so he could get closer to the claw? Wow that’s sneaky even by Tuco’s standards! My hat is off to him if that’s was the case. It will be a real shame to have to kill him, which is what I’ll have to do when we catch up with him. We’ve some leads to the Aescapulon system which we are pursuing as I finish this journal entry.
