“Let’s pack up and go solve this little issue,” I said, cpping my hands as if to dust it off as I turned away from the test Watch Station I had just ambushed. It was named Bellom because it floated in the Bellom system, around the pnet Bellom. Creative, I know. It had probably been plopped down there to keep an eye out for the gigantic space-whale-thingy that was sleeping in the system’s star — which was also named Bellom, because of course it was — but I didn’t worry about that.

  The guy had been perfectly sentient and capable of conversing with me telepathically. Though he was a bit annoyed that I poked him until he woke up to talk.

  He was back to sleeping now. Apparently, the current ‘taint’ in the void didn’t sit right with him, so he’d sleep away the aeons until it went away. Space whales weren’t the most proactive creatures around.

  The Deathwatch Marines I’d all put to sleep, which was good practice for appropriately moderating the strength of my telepathic assaults to the tenacity of any given mind on the fly. There was a tiny gap between not quite knocking someone out and causing permanent brain damage that I had to aim for if I wanted to put them to sleep without harming them.

  Regur humans were a bit less rigid, but an Astartes' mind would rather break than bend when hammered into by a massive psychic sledgehammer. Honestly, it seemed like less of a design fw and more of a feature, considering the designer totally wanted them to die before betraying him. Sure, you could erode the minds and twist them up into a pretzel, but it would be so much more work than doing it to a human would be, like trying to make a spearhead out of obsidian, always afraid you’d break off a too rge shard and ruin it all with the next hit.

  “Why are you collecting them?” Amberley questioned, looking rather perturbed as she cast her gaze across the now hundreds of Astartes all id out on the floor of one of my great hangars aboard the Sovereign.

  “Why not?” I shrugged. “And besides, they kill aliens. I have no problem with that; the vast majority of the alien species that survived the Great Crusade are absolute assholes. It's just that I don’t want Deathwatch in my backyard, but they could be useful as pest exterminators elsewhere. I’ll package them up real nice, tie them up with a ribbon and throw them through that Warp Gate once I get it under control. They can do whatever then, besides coming back, of course.”

  I’d have made a ‘get off my fucking wn’ joke, but unfortunately, Selene was off meditating, and only she would have gotten it.

  “They won’t be happy,” she noted. “Astartes are called the Emperor’s Angels of Death, and for good reason. They are superhuman, and that goes to their egos as well, something you have just wounded with this irrevocably.”

  “Sucks to be them,” I said, snorting. “They’ll deal with it … or come back to try again, but I won’t be so nice then. Doing unasked-for pest-control in my new backyard is one thing; attacking me with the intent to kill is another thing entirely.”

  A reluctant nod was my answer to that, which I decided was good enough. Honestly, I felt I was already far more merciful than was standard in this shithole of a gaxy.

  *****

  A frown made its way onto my face as soon as we entered the system, and my aura swept across the pnet of Spite. I had to admit, the name was … apt.

  Why? Because it was an entire world shaped by a single man’s spite and paranoia? Yes, there was that too, but to me what stood out was that the world’s very presence in the Warp had the fvour of spite. The amalgam of a billion souls, their emotions all melding together into a grand ball of hate, anger and resentment. It was one angry ball of rock, to be sure.

  “And it’s all aimed at me,” I mused aloud, a mean smirk tugging at the edge of my lips. “Troublesome.”

  Wiping the floor with the Astartes and the Sororitas forces holed up on the pnet would be easy enough … doing the same to the billions of angry, spiteful civilians already organising into armed militias wouldn’t be all that much of an undertaking either.

  However, they were my citizens, technically … well, citizens in open rebellion who likely would rather spit in my face than accept being belled my citizens. Hmmm. How do I solve this?

  Maybe if I had got here sooner, before the Astartes or other troublemakers roused the people into a pnetwide insurgency, I could have stopped it without bloodshed. I think I could have induced apathy in the hearts of regur humans across the pnet if I tried. I could have made them simply not care about the fate of their world … but they were in a fervour. Even if I managed to pour a metaphorical bucket of cold water over that, it’d be obvious. They’d know there was some fuckery about, and besides, one ounce of prevention was worth a pound of medicine even when it came to telepathic emotion manipution. It was much easier to make them numb and prevent a reaction than to snuff out an intense emotion once it’s already entrenched in the victim’s mind.

  Simirly, it was harder to put someone to sleep when they were acting like a honey badger in human skin. Still, maybe that’d be for the best. Exert myself a little, put the militia to sleep, then sughter the Astartes and the Sisters of Battle.

  That’s so much wasted energy, though … maybe I should just jump to step two right from the start and hope it breaks their spirit.

  Even if it only made two-thirds of them back down from openly defying me, it would make my job of subduing the remaining rebels all that much easier.

  Maybe a biological solution would be better than a psychic one. I had no shortage of bio-energy after all, so I could spend it more freely and without feeling like I was wasting it frivolously.

  How hard could it be to concoct a pgue that made people too lethargic to fight, maybe y them out for a day or two? Nothing serious, or anything doing permanent harm, just something to put regur people out of the fight.

  No, that’s a horrible idea with Grandpa Nurgle around. Making a super-pgue that spreads over the globe in the span of days, even if it’s effectively harmless … I might as well send him a personal invitation to come fuck up my newest pnet.

  Although what if it wasn’t a pgue, just something that acted like it? The idea was sound; I just had to alter the execution, so Nurgle couldn’t shit all over my pns so easily.

  So if not a proper pgue, what could it be? Bacterial or virus-based infections were both out, but what about fungal? I could just use bio-energy to make a fuck-ton of spores and then spread them all over the pce. If it didn’t actually spread by itself, if the fungus was unable to procreate … maybe I could sidestep the Nurgle problem. Sure, the fuckhead had fungi and spore-based stuff too, but he’d need to fuck with my stuff much more if he wanted to make a fungus spread when I specifically made it with the intention for it to be unable to do so.

  So, fungal spores that put people to sleep drifted through the air and somehow reached their targets even if they were hiding underground, beneath a kilometre of concrete hallways, fortifications, tunnels and whatnot. Easy peasy. Finally, my tendency to collect Death World flora wherever I could came in handy as I had more than a hundred different examples of predatory fungi to draw inspiration from. More than two dozen of which hunted by releasing spores when a prey was nearby, though only a handful had spores that actually did anything harmful to the victim, and didn’t just use them as a way to travel further away from the parent mushroom.

  One of them was an honest-to-God zombie fungus, reminding me of the no-zombies from Resident Evil. I didn’t use that; instead, starting with the one that knocked its prey out instantly, leaving them numb and comatose as the building-sized parent mushroom slowly spread its mycelium roots up through the soil to devour them while still alive. It was pretty easy to repurpose it for a lighter effect, turning a coma into a day-long nap instead. Without a parent-mushroom around to actually eat the victims, it was entirely survivable. The spore even had a whole slew of different functions to actually keep the affected victims alive for as long as possible, which was pretty neat.

  Spreading the spores across the surface was easy enough, but very few people lived on the surface, especially now that an invading force was all but assured to gain orbital supremacy in the near future.

  As for spreading them through the myriads of twisting tunnels and underground buildings, I decided to cheat. I made a new drone tempte. It looked like a hummingbird, but it was filled with an absolute fuckload of compressed spores that it could sorta fart out non-stop. I snagged a nifty property from another aerial spore tempte, making the released spores spread out as if each individual spore magnetically repelled all others near it. This way, they filled out whatever open space they were in and crept into rooms and other pces, even if my drones didn’t specifically go in there.

  As I watched through a million small, avian eyes as they zipped about, spreading my sleeping pgue to more and more unfortunate victims, I wondered just how many war crimes I’d just committed by Earth standards. I had a feeling the Geneva Convention’s ban list would look more like a checklist if I went through it.

  They fell, people slumping over each other, falling asleep where they stood. Millions, billions, all over Spite, no matter how angry or defiant they were. They were just regur humans, and they couldn’t resist once a spore got into their system. Even mere skin contact was enough; they didn’t even have to breathe it in. Hell, the spores could even go through the worst-quality cloth most people wore after I incorporated another nifty little bit of biology from yet another fungus.

  Of course, it didn’t get to all of them. Some bunkers were air sealed, and some fortresses too, while others had some other way to take down my drones from afar and keep the resulting explosion of spores at bay. Psykers in some pces, or more exotic weaponry in others. I’d seen repurposed shield generators used to keep the spores out of areas rge enough to fit football stadiums in them.

  Well, it wasn’t perfect, but nothing in life ever was. However, it was good enough. It had put 98% of the ‘militia’ to sleep, leaving only a few tens of thousands remaining standing. I decided to consider them active combatants from then on, and not silly citizens-to-be throwing a tantrum.

  I wouldn’t be holding back against anyone who still stood. Maybe it was cruel of me, but I knew I couldn’t be merciful to enemies who actively opposed me. It would be seen as a sign of weakness. It would make them grow bold. No, they had their chance to retreat, to get out of my new holdings without being harried, but instead they decided to make a nuisance of themselves.

  Fuck them. I thought, more annoyed than anything. Astartes and regur humans never really did give me much trouble, so I wouldn’t even be getting a good fight out of this. It’s just a chore. At least I got to make something novel. These spores are neat.

  ******

  Ward-master Lorgath Maclir, Chapter Master of the Storm Wardens and the elected head — though he was a mere figurehead at best — of all Astartes forces committed to the Achilus Crusade, prepared to make his final stand.

  There were times when a successful retreat, when living to fight another day, could be counted as a victory. Perhaps today was one of those days, and yet, he refused. Just thinking about this Crusade left a sour taste in his mouth; it held the familiar taste of ash, blood and defeat.

  He remembered the fateful campaign so many centuries ago that had resulted in him calling Lord Militant Tiber Achilus his friend. He remembered when the High Lords of Terra had summoned him and beseeched him to lend his forces to Achilus’ Crusade. He remembered agreeing wholeheartedly, pledging nearly his entire Chapter for the undertaking. He remembered helping refine the battle pns, helping with the preparations, and helping keep the Crusade and its goals secret until the time was right. He remembered visiting fellow Chapter Masters and asking them for their aid.

  Victory had been all but inevitable, or so he and everyone had thought. Those carefully concocted battle pns fell apart within weeks. The numerous worlds poputed by humans, whom they’d been counting on for support, spurned their efforts, spat in their face and decred the Imperium their enemies. Damned near all of them.

  Then came the Tyranids. Hive Fleet Behemoth struck the other side of the Warp Gate, and Dagon assaulted the Reach. Then came the myriad pawns of the Ruinous Powers. The Crusade didn’t quite fall apart, but it stalled as its forces became divided, and the original targets of the Crusade — the Tau — who seemed so easy to crush at first, suddenly managed to lock them into a stalemate.

  Centuries of gruelling, bloody warfare followed, and it soured every waking moment of Maclir’s life. By the time Warmaster Achilus died under mysterious circumstances — supposedly a Gelr Field failure — both he and the old Chapter Master had become so embittered that they could barely bear talking to their erstwhile friend.

  Still, even as Solomon Tetrarchus took over as Warmaster, Maclir fought on, and his Brothers fought along with him. They held the line, they bled, they fought, and they died for the Emperor and the Imperium. For the Achilus Crusade and the dream it once sought to make reality.

  “The new vessel had been identified as ‘The Sovereign,’” came the Magos’ static voice. "Parameters match prior Auspex scans. Organic signatures and a size eclipsing even Gloriana-css battleships. Unless there is another ship of this scale, it should be the one you’ve requested we keep an eye out for, Chapter Master.”

  “So she is here,” Maclir said, his voice a deep rumble, grim as a graveyard. The woman whose treachery had finally sent the entire edifice of this wretched Crusade crashing down. Her actions were merely the final nail in its coffin, he knew, and yet his loathing for her was without limit. She’d crushed his faint hope that maybe, just maybe, so many of his brother’s deaths would be worth something. That it hadn’t all been a tremendous waste. That their lives and devotion would mean something.

  He knew retreat would be the smart thing to do, the logical, strategic response. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t let go. He had vowed so long ago that he would see this accursed Crusade through, that he would either stand upon the surface of Tsua’Malor and see it razed to the ground or die trying.

  So here he was. Preparing to die, trying to give a st bck eye to the never sufficiently damned Tau.

  Spite, the world beneath his feet, was called. A fitting name, considering it was the emotion that had been the main driving force behind his every action for the st few centuries. He would die with spite in his heart and a roar of defiance on his lips. Preferably, with his trusty power spear buried in the chest of that treacherous, xeno-loving witch.

  P3t1