Octavian delivered on his promise of information about all the pyers of the Jericho Reach, with a focus on any of the more dangerous and secretive outposts of the Imperium in the sector. It was just about the only part of our agreement that he’d been able to deliver on so soon. Calling off the Achilus Crusade would either require a lengthy trip back to Terra or the use of the unreliable Astropathic communication network. Both of which could take years, considering an errant ripple in the Warp could dey both ships or Astropathic messages, and I trusted the Four Assholes to mess with whichever option Octavian chose.

  For now, I decided to keep the Custodian around as we went about our expansion. Lord Commander Ebongrave had been handed over to me to judge for ‘war crimes’ — that shit had me in tears from giggling so much, ‘war crimes’, in Warhammer 40k. Octavian had a sense of humour after all — in a btant attempt to appease me, and Octavian had strong-armed the man’s second in command to order the retreat of all military ships from the Greyhell front back to the Iron Halo. I still wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with the man, as I didn’t have any personal loathing for him, but maybe that’d change once I took a good looksie around the pnets he’d held under his sway. If they are disappointing enough, I might have him join the good Inquisitor Xander as a brain-in-a-jar. Or maybe I’ll just throw him to the civilians and see what happens.

  It was a start at least, and because it couldn’t hurt, the local Astropathic Choir had sent off a firm request, signed by both Octavian and Amberley, to call off the Crusade. I doubted it would amount to anything, even if it reached Terra in this decade, but it was something at least.

  Meanwhile, we had some work to do. Not everyone retreated from the Greyhell front, refusing the orders coming from a compromised commanding officer. Which, fair, but that was the equivalent of signing their death warrants.

  The Tau would wait out the pre-set deadline, but then they would advance and likely wipe the floor with the Imperial deserters/remnants in the systems. Meanwhile, I was focused on something else.

  The biggest ‘threats’ to me in the Reach, from the Imperium’s side — if I believed that there were no Shadowkeepers lurking about — was the Deathwatch. They had their own relics and nasty tricks, along with a vast number of secretive Watch-Fortresses scattered around the Reach.

  Aside from them, the nearest threats Octavian’s information packet noted was a pnet controlled by an AI overlord, but I doubted it would cause any trouble in the short-term, it’d stayed pnetbound despite controlling a pnetary economy more than capable of producing spacefaring vessels. As such, I was on my way to a trio of pnets that had been fending off vanguard elements of what Octavian and I recognised as Hive Fleet Dagon.

  Maybe going and stamping out the nearest Watch-Fortress now sitting smack-dab in the middle of my new holdings would have been smarter, but then I remembered the Lord of Change that wormed its way into my mind so easily. Hive Fleet Dagon was the Hive Mind’s answer to Daemons, and its synaptic nodes cast an enhanced Shadow into the Warp. I wanted that.

  My destination was Meskaile, a Death World much like Vallia itself, just without the weird gestalt hive mind thingy. It was a verdant world full of very murderous fauna. Along with Themiskon Point and Scansion Beta, it made up the triangle of pnets that the splinter fleet had paid a strangely oversized attention to for what they were, considering the other two pnets were Dead Worlds.

  “So! Anything you can tell me about our destination that wasn’t included in Octavian’s information packet?” I asked, gncing at my pet Inquisitor. Well, technically my second pet Inquisitor, but Xander wasn’t much of a conversationalist — what with being a brain in a jar — so I tended to forget about him.

  “Meskaile?” Amberley asked, and I nodded. She had an admittedly really attractive posh British accent that made listening to her talk something of a pleasure. Not that I’d ever make a note of that aloud, or Selene might start torturing me with the worst broken British accent she can manage for the foreseeable future. “It’s a mess, and it’s been long considered for Exterminatus in the Ordo Xenos. It has no human popution, and observations show that the Tyranids present on the pnet, fighting a frenzied war against the carnivorous flora and fauna, are going through a process of exaggerated hyper-evolution. Initial hopes of the war exhausting the splinter fleet’s energies have shown to be false, and I think the pnet would have been gssed in a year or two, before the predicted full conquest of the surface by the Tyranids.”

  “And the other two?” I asked.

  “They are … strange,” Amberley said, frowning. “Neither world holds any apparent source of biomass the Tyranids might be after, and yet Themiskon Point’s surface is stalked by a veritable swarm of Lictors. The Tyranids on Scansion Beta have been identified to be offshoots of the Tyranids swarming across Themiskon Point’s surface, even though no known Warp-route exists between the two pnets.”

  “Octavian’s information did say that both worlds were home to advanced alien civilisations and a lush natural ecosystem,” Selene said from my other side, having decided to use the armrest of my ‘throne’ as her seat. “I think I also saw reports stating that the substrata of the surface are rich in organic fuels. Could the Tyranids have learned how to convert that into biomass?”

  “That would be extremely concerning,” Amberley noted, sending a side gnce at my lover like she couldn’t quite figure out what to make of her. “The standing theory in the Ordo was that they likely sensed some form of subterranean life on the pnet. However, taking this new information into account, the possibility of those pre-Great Crusade aliens surviving deep beneath the surface in some form or another cannot be ruled out either.”

  “Now that would be interesting,” I hummed, then shook my head. “But first, we need to deal with this mess we have before us; the mystery can wait. I wonder what bioforms the Tyranids managed to cook up after years of this hyper-evolution.”

  “Do you … not intend to just gss the pnet from orbit?” Amberley asked with some wariness.

  Cain was also on the ship, but the poor man was still sleeping off the stress of the negotiations, so it was just Amberley and the two of us on the bridge. I could see why she’d feel jumpy around me; hell, I’d feel jumpy around me. I was terrifying.

  “Where is the fun in that?” Selene asked with a grin, and I wondered whether I was what some would consider a ‘bad influence’ on her if she got so much enjoyment out of needling an Inquisitor. Nah. Common sense is for losers; she feels much happier now than before.

  I could feel it quite clearly, so it wasn’t just me making guesses or consoling myself.

  “‘Fun’?” Amberley asked with a daintily raised eyebrow, staring at my girlfriend like she had grown a second head, then gnced at me, saw the small smirk tugging at the edge of my lips, and frowned. “You treat this as a game.”

  “Accurate,” I said with a careless shrug. “With great power comes … freedom. In this case, from societal expectations and danger. No amount of tyranids could ever be a threat to me, nor could some overeager wildlife.”

  Not unless I did something incredibly stupid, like leaving a chunk of my Eldritch flesh behind for some tyranids to nibble on. That would suck, and I might have to consider this entire gaxy as a write-off if that happened.

  “There is too much suffering in this gaxy for me not to enjoy myself whenever I can, so yes, it is a game,” I said. “One that you can join if you want, I wouldn’t want you to feel left out.”

  “Eh?” Amberley made a startled noise, staring at me with wide eyes, and I sent a wave of smugness through our Bond to Selene, who I felt roll her eyes behind me. I got the unfppable Inquisitor to blue screen first, despite her having been hard at work on the task for more than an hour now. “Join? As in, go down and help you fight tyranids? … there are less roundabout ways to get me without taking the bme, I’m sure.”

  “I’d give you a handmade power armour for the fight.” I waved her off. “It’d take some talent and atrocious luck to get yourself killed while wearing that.”

  I could give her the same type of armour I’d given Selene before she accepted my upgrades. I’d even iterated on the design since, though I’d have to dumb it down a little and make some adjustments to make them survivable for a baseline human. Limit muscle strength and such, so that she wouldn’t exceed the G-cap of her body, and slow the movements so nothing got torn apart in her body from a rapid movement.

  *****

  Ciaphas Cain couldn’t quite wrap his head around what was going on exactly. He was still processing — as in, freaking out over — the things he’d heard during that negotiation, and then Amberley, smart, beautiful, Amberley, decided it was a good idea to follow the clearly crazy Psyker and her even crazier maybe-lover down to the tyranid-infested surface of a Death World.

  Now, Ciaphas could understand the reasons she gave. Gathering information, ingratiating herself with the Psyker, garnering trust and maybe even some respect by fighting side by side. It made sense.

  But doing so against an entire world full of Tyranids? Madness. Utter madness.

  And yet, here he was, standing in the drop pod, clutching onto the handrails with enough force that his cybernetic grip left behind a handprint.

  He was just a single retired Commissar, still coasting by only on the tales of his valour and heroism. If he let Amberley go alone to die against the horde, that reputation would evaporate faster than a snowball thrown into a star. He’d be shot in the face before he could even protest if he went back to the Imperium after that. Either by one of Amberley’s vengeful colleagues, a disillusioned Guardsman, maybe a member of Amberley’s entourage, or worse, it could earn him a hefty load of Lord Octavian’s personal displeasure.

  So with certain death behind him, and a very likely, gruesome death at the cws of a lucky tyranid ahead of him, he chose to walk right ahead … and perhaps his decision was also helped along by the fact that if he had to die, he’d much rather do it next to Amberley. Perhaps he could even keep her alive long enough for the crazed Psyker to call for an extraction and allow them to escape this deathtrap they were walking into. It was a long shot, a faint hope, but it was hope, and he tched onto it with his entire being.

  He wished he’d insisted on taking Jürgen along, no matter what offences his presence would have caused. He’d have felt much safer rushing into a tyranid swarm with his trusty aid at his side to watch his back with a heavy fmer. His peculiar ability’s debilitating effect on the tyranids that came under its effect would have also come in handy. As, it was not to be.

  “One minute until atmospheric reentry,” the crazy Psyker — if she was even that at all, Cain had certainly never heard of any that could shapeshift into anyone whose genetic material they’d consumed — said, turning around from where she’d been having a hushed conversation with the other outwardly human woman. Both of them were gorgeous, though Cain couldn’t find it in himself to do more than note the fact in some detached part of his mind. “That means it’s time to armour up!”

  Right, she’d promised to give them power armour that’d help them survive the fighting, ones that would totally not eat them by the time all this was over. Yeah, those. Well, it wasn’t like he liked his chances against an entire tyranid horde on his lonesome without the freaky bio-power armour.

  “Here.” That was the only warning he got before the woman flicked a small glob of white something the size of a walnut at him. It struck his chest and exploded outwards into a dozen tendrils reaching across his torso, spreading, connecting, swallowing him up in a tide of white alien flesh. He heard a strangled yelp from Amberley, but he was far too occupied with being utterly terrified of being eaten alive by some freaky tentacle monster.

  He struggled, though he couldn’t see, but it was for nought. The thing covering him hardened, turning impervious to his writhing limbs, trying to pry it off in a panic.

  “Connecting.” A toneless, feminine voice rang in his ears, and a moment ter, sensation exploded across his mind. He was not locked inside the ‘armour’, he became it. He could see again, feel the carapace covering his skin, sense the muscles tensing right under it, assisting the frail human muscles hidden underneath that. He still couldn’t move, though.

  “Calibrating.” The same voice spoke again, and Ciaphas was in a good enough mental state to notice that it was eerily simir to the Psyker’s voice, just cking any emotion. “Bio-Armour has been synchronised and calibrated to the organic limitations of the wearer. Enabling motion … now.”

  The first thing Cain did the moment he regained control of his body was to leap away … and sm into the wall of the drop pod, bouncing off of it and nding face-first on the floor. He groaned, though none of it hurt; he barely even felt the impact. Still, he rolled back to his feet, arm reaching for the trusty chainsword on his belt that just wasn’t there. It still freaked him out at times, even months after taking Echidna’s rejuvenation pill, how the aches that’d been pguing his joins for the st century were just gone, and how the youthful vigour he’d forgotten ever having filled him with more stamina than he knew what to do with on most days.

  “Someone’s jumpy,” the same voice spoke again, now filled with arrogant amusement, and fvoured with a slight accent Cain couldn’t pce. “As I said, armour. Now I recommend you grab something, because reentry is still a rocky ride despite the kinetic absorbers I’d built into this thing.”

  Right, the armour … well, he didn’t feel like it was actively eating him, but he knew there were more than a few nasty beasts around that numbed the parts of you they were nibbling on so you wouldn’t notice.

  He gnced around, his eyes of course freezing as his gaze nded on what he first thought was a strange tyranid. Then the gears turned in his head, noticing the strangely humanoid — and very feminine — contour of the white creature standing just an inch taller than Amberley usually did. The way she stood, hips cocked to the side, head slightly tilted, and arms crossed under her bust, was all familiar enough that he let go of his ‘kill it with fire’ instinct. The head was eerie, a bnk, oval facepte of pure white without even a hint of human features. That threw him off, but the rest screamed Amberley, so he decided to assume it was her. That made sense … which meant he probably looked just the same, just with fewer distracting curves.

  Well, this was just great. At least the armour gave him some enhanced strength and durability. Not that it was a worthwhile trade when the downside was that he couldn’t take it off, and that it was maybe eating him, bit by bit.

  At least this would hopefully let him survive a bit longer. Perhaps even until the crazy woman decided to retreat from her four-person crusade against an entire Death World. He could worry about how to get out of his death-suit after that. Yes. That sounded like a pn, better than some other pns that he’d had over the years, in fact. It was a simple pn, which was a good pn. Those were less likely to disintegrate wholly upon first contact with the enemy.

  P3t1