Octavian Gaius, Custodian Guard of the Emperor of Mankind, stepped into the dingy little bar hidden away in a back alley. He barely graced the two patrons with a gnce, making sure they were inconsequential. The barkeep looked up, his eyes widening before he gnced towards the stairs leading up to the second floor.

  Octavian nodded and swept by, making his way up the stairs, each step creaking dangerously under his weight. Up top was only a single door, wide and dark. He stepped up to it and knocked.

  “Come in,” the voice came from the other side, gruff and serious.

  Octavian opened the door, then shut it gingerly behind him. A man rose from behind a desk, a man who could look him in the eye without trouble, a man whose face was a tale of a thousand battles, set in a grim line with only the slightest hint of familiarity shining through.

  “It’s been a long time since I’d met one of our kind,” the man said, stepping around the desk to stand before Octavian. He wore regur clothes, but they did a poor job of concealing the organic machine of war hidden beneath. “What brings you here, brother?”

  “I’m on a mission, sanctioned by the Captain-General,” Octavian said. “We believe the Emperor wills us to establish contact with a powerful rogue psyker. It so happens that she allied herself with the local Tau and slew the Lord Militant. It is of utmost importance that we establish contact and make preparations for future cooperation.”

  “I see,” the man said, nodding easily. His eyes turned to the side, a calcuting glint shining in them. “How may I help you? The Eyes of the Emperor exist to serve our Lord and assist the Ten Thousand in their tasks, whichever way we can. Ask what you need of me, and it shall be done.”

  “Thank you,” Octavian said, nodding with a sigh of relief running through him. The Eyes of the Emperor, old veteran Custodes who had shown some minuscule decrease in combat efficiency after centuries of active service. They might not be up to the extremely stringent standards of the Adeptus Custodes, but they still served in whatever way they could. “I will need to know what to expect. Threats, power bances, and personalities of anyone who matters. I will need to know who pulls what strings in the Jericho Reach. What they want, and what weaknesses they have, bckmail material too, if possible. As per the majority agreement, the cooperation of the Psyker known as Echidna is more important to us than the entirety of the Jericho Reach. If that is what it takes, I need to be ready to give it to her on a silver ptter.”

  Anyone else would have baulked at the idea, called him mad, or a traitor to the Imperium. The thing was, he had never been beholden to the Imperium; the Adeptus Custodes served only the Emperor, and nobody else.

  Which was why the old ex-Custodes across from him merely nodded and gestured for Octavian to follow. To the two of them, the Imperium didn’t matter; to them, even humanity as a whole didn’t hold much weight. They lived to serve the Emperor. They were the architects of his design, the only ones who still followed his direct guidance in these dark times, and He had made his will clear.

  ******

  “Tell them to eat a bag of dicks,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Politely. I was there talking with them, but they didn’t deign to so much as give me their names. I’m not some errand girl they can belittle, then summon the next day and expect me to come running like a lost puppy, happy to answer their questions. I don’t know what gave them that impression, but it is woefully wrong. Think you can beat that into their empty skulls, Cat?”

  “Sure, Mom!” Cat said, grinning at me with a vicious glint in her feline eyes. Something told me she was going to get more than a kick out of passively aggressively annoying the Tau Ethereals who’d been rude to me to death. The girl was a sweetheart most of the time, but she had a mean streak buried under that fluffy exterior.

  “Have fun,” I said, smiling at her as I scratched behind her ears. Her eyes went half-lidded, and her ears drooped in pleasure. It was adorable. She even pushed her head into my palm like a love-starved kitten.

  Maybe because she was just that. I faltered at that thought, then pulled the girl into a hug, squeezing her tight and enveloping her in a warm deluge of positive emotions. She melted into the hug, radiating happiness as she returned it.

  “Feel free to tell them that I’ll hang them by their intestines if they are too rude to you, okay?” I whispered. “Shitty stuck-up Tau aren’t allowed to bully my daughter.”

  Her arms tightened around me, and I felt her aura settle, some of the edges even out and the undercurrents of doubt and insecurity fade away. She was good at hiding them, maybe even from herself, but not from me. I gave her another pat and then pulled away.

  “Anyhow, I have a Void Kraken to hunt and a grumpy girlfriend to soothe,” I said. “See you ter!”

  I Blinked away before her adorable puppy eyes could draw me into an hours-long head-patting session. The girl was dangerously cute, and she knew it.

  “Ready?” Selene asked as I arrived, practically vibrating in pce and wearing a wild grin on her lips. That grin did things to me, but that could wait for ter. I returned it with a smirk of my own and nodded. “You said you found one nearby?”

  “Yep,” I said. “It was a lucky find, really. It had a very strange presence in the Warp and so I teleported over a drone and found it munching on a spaceship.”

  I’d never seen a bestial soul that massive and rigid before. They were usually impossible to find when you were looking for them from the Warp side, and even I usually only found the souls of animals in the Warp when they were standing before me and I could follow that link back to the Warp.

  But the Kraken was fucking massive, like a shadow in the Warp stretching far and wide. I’d almost mistaken it for the entire ecosystem of a pnet, but it had been too homogeneous and rigid, nothing like how an entire pnet’s worth of animal souls tended to look.

  It sat in the asteroid field of an uninhabited system, taking refuge in the thickest cluster of asteroids. This star system was a bit unique that way. Most asteroid fields were sparse, with kilometres of empty void separating every single stelr object from the next, but this one was dense. It was much more like how these things were depicted in sci-fi movies than in reality.

  Again, it seemed nonsensical, but I could shoot lightning out of my eyes if I gred hard enough, so it wasn’t the strangest thing about this gaxy I’d found myself in by far. Astrophysicists would throw a fit, but what could you do? It was right here, and all those famous scientists were less than dust, buried under almost 40,000 years' worth of dirt.

  We weren’t taking the Sovereign; my fgship was staying behind to look imposing and pretty. I’d done my first round of upgrades on it, pouring a ridiculous amount of bio-energy and processing power into the task, but now it was done. Well, the first prototype was, but it would have to do. Every material the ship had been made of had been hybridised with Custodes gene temptes, and all of them had shown resistance to warp corruption, though nowhere near the level of the tests I’d run on original complete Custodes clones. It was a work in progress, but a good start nonetheless.

  I also left behind a drone, and while the telepathic link would be thin as all hell, it would hold since we weren’t going very far away. It wouldn’t be able to send much back to me, but if shit hit the fan, it could alert me, and I could teleport back at the drop of a hat.

  The ship we used was tiny, basically just a living room set up in the vibe of old sci-fi spaceship interiors, inspired by the Millennium Falcon. It was cosy, and it made me feel like we were going on a family-friendly adventure. For a moment, it almost made me forget about the horrible gaxy I’d ended up in. Which was why we weren’t just teleporting over; this was an adventure, not just another bullet point in need of getting crossed out in the shortest time possible.

  I settled down on a couch, growing a small organic object out of my palm as I started to work on testing the prototype for a new tool we were going to need if we were really doing this. I kept half an eye on Selene vibrating in pce, then went over testing her arsenal; she even sharpened the self-sharpening bonesword I’d made her, though it looked like the action was done more for her own comfort than for the bde’s benefit. I didn’t know Imperials even knew how to sharpen a proper sword, considering they all seemed to love those stupid chain-swords so much. Then again, they probably didn’t teach children swordsmanship with chainswords, but with regur prop swords.

  “What are you doing?” Selene spoke up, having settled down next to me. Her chin came to rest on my shoulder as she peered down at the thing in my hands with apparent curiosity.

  I smiled, holding the small cylinder-shaped object between my fingers. “I’ve been thinking about how to make spacesuits from what I have, and this little thing is going to be the first prototype of my re-breather for that. Preferably, I’ll be able to come up with something that can rapidly turn the carbon dioxide humans breathe out back into regur oxygen. With some luck and effort, I should be able to make something that can keep the air inside an airlocked helmet breathable indefinitely. This one here can’t do that yet, but it can tie down carbon dioxide and will slowly release oxygen into the air over the course of hours. It should keep the air inside your helmet breathable for four or five hours.”

  Selene listened attentively, humming thoughtfully and nodding when appropriate. I rolled my eyes, having felt that she would have been about as interested in what I was talking about as watching paint dry had I not been the one to be saying it. She just wanted to hear me talk. I kissed her on the cheek, then pulled her into a hug, which she returned with a giggle. Silly girl should just ask me when she wants attention.

  It struck me how free she looked, unconcerned and rexed in a way that the woman I’d met months ago on that deserted Hive City never could have been. She seemed to have grown a decade younger, not that she’d ever looked physically a day over twenty-five, but those bags under her eyes and world-weary expression had made her feel a decade older.

  Now, I could have mistaken her for a girl only a few years into adulthood. It warmed my heart to see her so carefree.

  “Do you think Void Krakens are edible?” I mused, dragging my lover into my p. “It’s been forever since I had some octopus.”

  “I don’t think so,” Selene said, wrinkling her nose. “They are supposedly made of metal and rocks; some people say they are more like sentient bundles of asteroids than real animals. They eat metal too, that’s why they prey on spaceships, not for what little human flesh or stored foodstuff is hidden inside them.”

  “Shame,” I said distractedly. “I’m craving some octopus. Is takoyaki a thing here, or anywhere, really? I’ve had some once in a Japanese restaurant, and the talk of giant space octopuses brought the memory back.”

  “Japan?” Selene asked.

  “An isnd country back on old Terra,” I said, flicking up an illusory globe with the continents and countries marked as I knew them in my previous life. Japan shone a bit brighter, drawing Selene’s eyes to it. “They had some of the best seafood-based culinary culture, though I never quite got comfortable with sushi. My western brain couldn’t handle eating raw fish meat after growing up being told I’d get all sorts of sick if I did.”

  “I think there is something simir on one of the ocean worlds back home,” Selene said. “The raw fish thing, not sure about the other one. How do you even eat an octopus? I’ve only seen one in aquariums, not as food.”

  I conjured up an illusion before us. I’d watched the chef make it, see him pour the batter, drop in the little octopus bits and then turn the little octopus balls with a pair of chopsticks.

  We continued chatting about innocuous things, a bit about random Earth trivia I knew, a bit about what it was like growing up as the daughter of a noble house ruling an entire star system and everything else that came to mind, but nothing serious.

  “Feeling better now?” Selene asked, her lips curving into a gentle smile.

  I blinked, then tilted my head. “ … yes?”

  She huffed in response. “You’ve been so high-strung after the fight with that daemon, like the slightest scare would send you into a frenzy. I didn’t make it any better with my silly pouting, did I? I’m sorry about that; it’s … it’s hard to remember that even you aren’t invincible with all the wondrous things you do with casual ease. It was immature, how I acted, and I want to apologise.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, hugging her close as a warm feeling filled my chest. “No harm done.”

  “I’ll do better,” Selene promised, then wiggled around in my arm and pced a gentle kiss on my lips. “Think you can start up a holo-vid here?”

  “Sure,” I said, and we settled in on the couch, cuddling and enjoying each other's warmth as my mind-cores dug up my fading memories of some old movie. “Popcorn?”

  “Yes, please.”

  P3t1