Remember how I said that Dakinor wasn’t a pnet being actively contested between the Tau Empire and the Imperium of Mankind? Well, let’s just say that ‘actively’ right there was carrying a hefty weight on its shoulders.

  Meaning, the Tau were doing what my 21st-century self could only call, maybe not-so-generously, funding terrorist organisations. And giving them Kroot mercenaries, intelligence, and training in secret.

  It was something I would have expected from the Cold War era CIA, not the cuddly blue space commies.

  As it was, they had a massive amount of military intelligence about everything in the Dakinor system.

  I wasn’t delusional enough to cim I still had the moral sensibilities I had in my life before this one; that would be a straight-up lie. Much of the me from before has eroded, perhaps by the eldritch body I’d come to inhabit, perhaps by dying or perhaps just out of sheer necessity. More realistically, it was a combination of all those factors and beyond.

  Still, I could safely say that I was still wholeheartedly disgusted by the very idea of terrorism. Targeting civilians, innocents and using tactics that incited fear, and well, terror in them was … bad. Worthy of earning a prompt death from me, for sure.

  These tools the Tau used and funded here in Dakinor would need to go asap, especially since they were fanatical Emperor worshipers in the worst possible way. They thought granting people's death in service to the Emperor was a gift, and that those who didn’t wish to die horribly in his service deserved an expedient delivery to the Golden Throne for posthaste judgment and damnation.

  The Gilded Torment, as they were called, would need to be eliminated. The same fate obviously awaited the local forces of the Astra Militarum, too, because I very much doubted they’d be willing to just put down arms and let me have all the nice things they were protecting. It just so happened that those two groups together made up very nearly the entirety of the Dakinor system’s popution. How? Well, the Gilded Torment was apparently very persuasive, and had had a long while to spread, which resulted in its having almost entirely absorbed the civilian popution present in the mining facilities and space stations. I wasn’t sure how that was possible; civilians who got bombed, had their neighbours kidnapped and killed, etc., usually didn’t go and join up with the terrorists who did those damned things! I suspected some Warp fuckery was abound. Or maybe someone was just really good at propaganda. Or maybe the civilians had been religious zealots and made the terrorists’ job of turning them into fanatical zealots a walk in the park.

  Is that how it works? I don’t get religious people.

  Nonetheless, it was convenient. Very convenient. Radical, fanatical terrorists and Astra Militarum soldiers. Neither of which I had any moral trouble with sughtering to the st. The rest, if any remained, could either be sent back to Vallia Prime or thrown back at the nearest Imperial world.

  The tter was a death sentence, though, so it would be kinder to just separate them and spread them out across the arcologies so they can be absorbed into society without trying to kick up a fuss or infecting it with their Imperial ideology.

  I Blinked ahead alone, far outside any sensors they could have in the system, with all the Tau intelligence reports I’d need tucked away safely in my mind. If I didn’t want them to destroy my soon-to-be infrastructure, I couldn’t roll up in my space-monstrosity of a ship and scare the collective shit out of them all. I needed to strike fast and hard before they realised the threat of me even existed.

  Properly hidden by my ever-growing list of stealth ticks, I made a beeline for the promethium mining facility. Well, it wasn’t actual mining, more like siphoning away a minuscule amount of the gaseous upper atmosphere of the gas giant and filtering out the promethium from the garbage.

  If I didn’t know where to look for it and didn’t have the coordinates for it, I might have missed it. Turns out, it was deep enough in the enormous pnet’s orbit that the gaseous atmosphere was hiding it from sight.

  One or two careful Blinks ter, I was floating above it, my aura gingerly seeping into the facility to look for security systems and sensors while a telekinetic field protected me from the stormy winds trying to pulverise me into dust.

  Finding nothing especially complicated, another Blink brought me inside, and from there, it was as good as done. I didn’t fear any regur humans noticing me, and I would have sensed any psykers from halfway across the system. I reached out, my mental tendrils prodding every mind inside the facility almost gently.

  Quick, clean, instant death. They didn’t even feel it, or have so much as a blink to feel dread at their impending end. One moment they lived, the next their fragile little minds were snuffed out of existence.

  Humans were fragile. I’d need to make sure my daughters are a bit less fragile, especially in the mental department. That had been scary easy.

  I spent the next hour or two cleaning up the pce and then breaking into the computers, or cogitators if you want to be fancy. I had to make sure there were no deadman switches or emergency data wipes. I knew the procedures and how the Mechanicus did things, and I’d had much more trouble breaking into Zedev’s mind during our py fights than anything here. I knew the risk was low, but it was better to check.

  I found nothing. There was a subroutine that, if unched, would have caused an explosive meltdown in the station’s generators, but that was manually activated, and the Magos it had been tied to was very dead.

  The facility was mine, and it was safe, which meant I could now think of exactly how I would keep my ability to just teleport myself across interstelr distances unnoticed from the Tau.

  Smoke and mirrors? I mused. Eh, enough smoke ought to do it. And by smoke, I mean explosions, of course!

  The rest of the space stations were … useful, I guess? Some mining facilities, Imperial docking stations for refuelling and packing up transport ships. Nothing I couldn’t remake better out of organic stuff. Meaning, I could just come in with my fleet and blow them to bits the traditional way and hopefully that’ll hide the fact that this facility didn’t even resist.

  I did just that, and, surprisingly enough, the conquest of the system went down without any hiccups. I rolled in with the heavy cavalry, drove my ship through the system and bsted apart military instaltions and the pitiful Imperial fleet present in the star system. It went so well, I suspected it was an olive branch from the Tau, to give me something nice now that I had shown just what I could do.

  Or maybe it was to distract me from whatever it was that they were doing over at the other end of the front on Veren.

  Both were equally likely in my opinion.

  Though my next ‘assignment’, which they had decided upon much more expediently than on the second one, promised to be a pain in the ass. Why? Because it was the world of D'Shas'Ka 4, which, besides being an absolute tongue-twister of a name, was a Tau colony world beset by what were, quite obviously to me, the forces of Chaos.

  The fact that the Imperium never made an effort to colonise the pnet before the Tau cimed it, despite it having near-perfect conditions for human habitation, was also quite telling. The only reason I could think of for that was that an Inquisitor went to investigate it and either decreed the world to have ‘bad vibes’ or got himself killed by a daemon on the surface. Both would suffice as a reason for avoiding colonisation when there were other, less iffy worlds avaible.

  “I bet a scalp massage on a Greater Daemon jumping me before we are done with this system,” I said, peering out at the distant dots across the void that were our destinations. We were still an hour or two away from the Oort-cloud equivalent asteroid field surrounding the system, so we had some time.

  “I don’t take losing bets,” Selene said with an amused huff. “I bet you get jumped in the first three hours by at least a Herald.”

  “Oh ye of little faith. I bet I can goad a Greater Daemon into attacking me within the hour of our arrival,” I said with a dramatic sigh.

  “It doesn’t count if you have to drag it out of the Immaterium yourself,” Selene countered, her eyes narrowing at me. To which I put on my best guileless, innocent smile.

  “Deal,” I said, grinning at her. She gave me a look, and I knew she was searching for a trap I may have set for her.

  There were no traps, just a win-win situation for Echidna. Either I get a nice massage from my lover’s skilful fingers, or I can make her melt into my arms with my own. She made the most adorable faces and noises when she had her scalp massaged.

  Maybe I should lose on purpose. That thought earned me a suspicious gre. Some echo of my thoughts, or perhaps just my emotions, must have traversed our Bond. I merely smiled back, which had my lover giving a faint huff, half amused and half affectionate. Win? I’m counting that as a win.

  I returned my gaze to the system, watching the twin suns at its centre circling each other like a pair of lovers. Or maybe I just had rose-tinted gsses on after the earlier conversation. Their constant circling could likewise be seen as a pair of predators gauging each other, looking for weaknesses before an inevitable confrontation.

  Creatively, the Tau named both the system and the pnets themselves after the binary stars. Twin-Suns, or in the Tau nguage: ‘D’shas’ka’. The pnets had numbers stuck at the end for convenience, but that was it.

  It was still better than the Imperial designation of the pnet, which was ‘Seraph 131’.

  Images of the pnet itself reminded me, for the most part, of the world of Dagobah from Star Wars. It was a wet, temperate swamp for the most part, humid enough that clouds of mosquitoes could be seen swimming through the sky in great swarms, blotting out the few rays of the sun that made it through the dense canopy of the gangly trees.

  The world is said to be extremely verdant, with an abundance of flora and fauna still waiting to be discovered that four subsequent generations of Tau xenobiologists have failed to even make a dent in. Kroot auxiliaries were numerous, as they had been on Ravacene and were thriving on the verdant world, while the Tau sheltered in reinforced facilities and were having a rather hard time.

  It didn’t help that the world was beset by the ravening legions of The Stigmartus. A chaos-cult of lunatics wearing the brand of their unholy masters on their flesh, hence the name. Criminals, renegades, mutants, madmen and rogue psykers, all bound to strict military discipline and formations that were like a dark mirror to the Imperial Guard regiments.

  That was as much as I could find out just by reading between the lines in the Tau intelligence reports I’d been given, examining the pictures and using my general knowledge of the Warhammer lore to connect the dots. I had never heard of this bunch of lunatics before. They were a cult of nobodies operating in the ass end of nowhere, achieving little besides being a pain in the ass to the few worlds calling this section of the gaxy their home. Still, I recognised the mark of Chaos, and while the Tau called their psykers stupid shit like ‘renegade Imperial mind-scientists’, I knew better.

  I had to be prepared for grade A Chaos and Warp fuckery, because I severely doubted the four twats would let me have this world without trying to get back at me for previous slights. Or without trying either to erase me from existence for the crime of obliterating a Daemon, or to give an honest go at trying to corrupt me for the same reason.

  Even I could see that if any of the Four got their nasty little paws on me, it would be game over for the Great Game.

  Already, I could see the murky waters of the Warp below my argent realm bubbling over and frothing as angry ripples spread over its surface. A legion of daemons, small and rge, Lesser and Greater, battled down there for some ephemeral cause. I spied Nurglings of the Grandfather, Bloodletters of Khorne, the various Horrors of Tzeentch and the disgusting things that were Saneshi daemons too. Demonettes, I think? Crab-like limbs for arms, a sunken face not even a mother could love, a maw filled with spiky pitch bck teeth and white eyes without pupils or irises.

  I squinted at the hordes, noting a handful of Heralds of each of the Four here and there, but seeing no Greater Daemon.

  Well. I frowned. That’s suspicious. But I guess even these hordes will be a pain in the ass if the cultists rip open the veil and let them through to ravage the world. This might just be the Four’s way of saying, “Don’t think we’ve forgotten you, but we can’t be bothered to send anything more, so fuck you, here is a daemon horde for you to deal with”.

  That was petty and spiteful, but that’d be right up their alley. It would also be up Tzeentch’s alley to have a Changer of Ways hidden away somewhere nearby that’d pop out at the least opportune moment and mess up my day.

  At least I could be sure Khorne wasn’t pnning anything. If he were, Ka’Bandha would have been banging at my doors already for a rematch without any care for subterfuge.

  I tapped my fingers on my chin, looking out at the twin suns that were mine to cim with a thoughtful hum. Well, if they wanted to ruin my day, I’d just have to ruin theirs right back. My experiments with Pariah samples have started to show some results tely, now that I have two distinct samples to mix and match. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, since apparently it took time to grow the beginnings of a soul in an artificial body, and it was the negative qualities of a Pariah’s soul that produced that famous effect of theirs.

  I’d managed to impnt rudimentary bestial mind-constructs into projectiles made of Pariah flesh, which showed the slightest smidge of an effect. The soul was almost negligible, and it was utterly annihited whenever it came in contact with my overwhelmingly powerful psychic aura, but that wouldn’t be the case for lesser daemons.

  It was likely that I’d have to set up farms for these things, letting the bestial Pariah souls grow and infuse their flesh with their essence before harvesting it. I knew, for example, that the Imperium’s most secretive organisations used the ground-down remains and ashes of martyrs and Pariahs to make their newer psyk-out weaponry. So the base idea was solid, if maybe made more likely to fail since I refused to stick a mind with a human-level of sentience and sapience into a body I was going to hold in a prison, then sughter.

  I wasn’t willing to push this idea to the extreme. I still had lines I would not cross, and creating sentient life with the sole purpose of using it as a crafting material was firmly on the other side of it. It’s just a step above the ‘everything the Nightlords would do’ entry on my list of taboos.

  Still, even if it wouldn’t work out. I might be able to, at the very least mass mass-produce low-grade Null-ammunition that would pop Lesser Daemons with a single grazing hit. But first, I had to test the prototype.

  Good thing I have a whole horde of willing and eager test subjects vying for my attention. So helpful.

  P3t1