Void Krakens were fascinating creatures. The interesting part began with the fact that ‘Void Kraken’ didn’t refer to a single species; it was merely a catch-all term the Imperium used for any and all colossal void fauna that acted in a simir way. They all had common traits, for example, they were the size of small moons, they were all silicon-based creatures, without blood, true bone, or fluid to keep them alive, and they were all specuted to sustain themselves on the space debris they so closely resemble.

  According to the Explorer lexicons and Zedev’s knowledge download, Kraken appear to be solitary, asexual creatures that reproduce by dividing themselves, much in the same fashion as amoebas or single-celled organisms.

  Kraken tore off a piece of itself and flung it at a world — ideally airless and devoid of life — to create a hatchling which then burrowed into the surface of the pnetoid, feeding off the rock for sor decades or even Terran centuries before emerging as a fledgling Kraken and flinging itself into space to hunt — another reason for choosing small asteroids or rocks with little gravity to overcome for the young.

  There was specution that Kraken might mate, and some process of fertilisation was required for these hatchlings, but so far there has been no proof, or conceivable way to tell a male Kraken from a female Kraken, if such things did even exist.

  Void Kraken fed off minerals found in rock, which expined their interest in voidships. The hulls of most void-worthy vessels presented a Kraken with a concentrated collection of metals, ores, and silicates for it to feed on, a tempting and tasty morsel for the beast.

  They were dumb beasts, near suicidal in their hunger, when they caught sight of a voidship. They attempt to tch onto voidships, sometimes several times their own size, then they go about breaking them down and digesting them ponderously, over the course of months. They were true space horrors in that way, as they didn’t see any need to kill the crew of the ship once they had wrapped themselves around it like a limpet.

  The only way to beat them back for most voidships was to notice them early and obliterate them from afar with broadsides or nce batteries as they tried to close in.

  Sometimes, the crew would venture out to the hull, try to cut off the tentacles or set up explosive charges to blow them off, but the Kraken tended to react violently to any such efforts, deploying smaller fanged tentacles to eviscerate any such ‘parasites’ crawling around on its hide. Sometimes, it would even decline to fully feed on a ship, dragging the empty carcass after itself to its haunt, usually an uninhabited system. This habit usually meant that when they found an empty system full of space hulks, they should expect a Void Kraken to be lurking about, or on its way back from a hunt.

  Knowing all that made watching Selene dance around the eldritch space horror like a tiny silver butterfly even more amusing. She flitted about, chasing the retreating Void Kraken and sent silver crescents of psychic energy the size of smaller spaceships after it with flourished swings of her sword.

  The beast had no reason to fight; our spaceship was far away, and tiny too, so it was running from the persistent silver gnat trying to carve it up into colossal sashimi.

  She seemed a bit annoyed at its cowardice, so being the supportive girlfriend that I was, I Blinked in its path of retreat and built around myself a fake spaceship as bait, hoping it was too stupid to run a proper cost-benefit analysis. Sure, there was this annoying little thing cutting its tentacles off, but that was one big spaceship. Much food, Kraken happy.

  I nudged it a little too, giving its primitive emotions a psychic tug to push it over the edge and make it disregard its survival instincts. It wasn’t hard either; it had lost a lot of body-mass, so its hunger and need to repce it through feeding was at an all-time high.

  Right as pnned, the Void Kraken smmed into the empty bait-ship fashioned after an Imperial Battleship and wrapped its dozen colossal tentacles around it.

  I Blinked back outside to watch the show, letting Selene have her fun. The way she could go from touchy-feely, cuddling into my side while snacking on popcorn to ughing like a deranged lunatic while carving up a space monster the size of a small moon was something that sometimes threw me for a loop, but it was really damned attractive.

  Is this what the nerds call ‘Gap Moe’? But neither side of her was truly that different, if you understood the woman. She just embraced her desires, and I’d never met a person so in tune with their wants in my previous life. She loved fighting, and she loved me. That was that.

  The Void Kraken sted another ten minutes, and only because Selene was starting to fg, her body began to feel the strain of channelling so much psychic energy. The Kraken was essentially made of hardened rock interwoven with veins of metal, and cutting through a dozen meters of that took some serious power.

  When she returned to me, she still had a wide grin on her lips, even though she was breathing heavily and had a sheen of sweat coating her skin. I gently touched her biceps and sent a soothing wave of energy through her body. It took care of the physical strain of channelling so much power, but being a Psyker was not solely a physical exercise; her soul still needed some rest to recover.

  “You are the best,” Selene said, sighing in relief with her wild grin morphing into an affectionate smile. Then, a hungry glint entered her eyes, and I felt a shiver run down my spine, knowing what it promised.

  I smiled back, having watched her tear apart that Kraken had been hot, and she was always so wonderfully pent-up after getting her blood pumping with a good fight. Before I knew it, our clothes were on the floor and we were reduced to a tangle of sweaty limbs on the sofa.

  *****

  “Hmmmm, something is not quite right with this,” I mused, but still popped the small fried ball of batter into my mouth. I’d messed something up along the way, but it was close enough. It probably had something to do with the fact that the closest thing to an octopus I had was some 30-metre monstrosity living not in the deep ocean, but in the bogs of Vallia. “Still good though.”

  “I like it,” Selene said, smiling happily. She looked radiant, even with her hair stuck to her sweaty cheeks, and all dishevelled. The impossibly satisfied smirk constantly pying at the edge of her lips lit up her face, even if she looked like a hot mess. “You said street vendors sold this thing on sticks?”

  “Yep,” I said. I probably looked the same as her, if not worse, and I saw no reason to clean myself up or erase the many marks of her love on my body. Selene really was ravenous when she got her blood pumping. “The Japanese had a bunch of really tasty street food. Do you think there could be any original Earth animals around? Terra is a ruined wreck, but surely some of the early colonists took some animals with them as cattle, or maybe there were some Zoos on other pnets ter on, showing Earth fauna?”

  “Oh, I’m sure there are some,” Selene said with a snort. “I’ve been to some private Zoos of Nobles; there is always something they cim is an authentic animal originating from Ancient Terra. Though I can’t tell whether those are really that, or just fakes.”

  “I doubt Trazyn kept any animals,” I said, shaking my head wistfully. “But I guess that might be my best bet, or hoping one of our cattle animals becomes a successful invasive species on another pnet and is still thriving. Rabbits, maybe? They made a mess of Australia’s ecosystem when early colonists imported them.”

  “You want to recreate other dishes from home?” Selene asked gently, and I nodded back. “Well, I know a handful of noble houses who have private zoos with supposed Terran animals in their exhibitions, we could check them out whenever you want.”

  “It’s a date then.” I grinned, and she had the gall to snort at me. “What?”

  “Ah, I just-,” she hummed, thinking over her words before meeting my eyes and smiling. “You are adorable, and I love you.”

  I blinked, my cheeks heating up a little despite myself, and despite the things we’d been doing to each other just a few minutes ago.

  “I love you too,” I said, smiling at her a bit shyly.

  It was another hour ter that we finally managed to work up the willpower to get back to work. This had been a nice, and much needed little break. Very enjoyable too, but we had a crusade to get back to.

  To cut down on the travel time, instead of taking the atmospheric route on the way back too, I just absorbed our mini-voidship and teleported both of us back onto the Sovereign.

  The first thing I did was sync up my memories with the drone I’d left behind, essentially adding whatever it’d experienced into my own pool of experiences. I took a moment to look through it for anything worthwhile and raised my eyebrows at what I found.

  “Oh! Hey, Mom!” Cat said, hopping off the armchair she’d draped herself over. “You’re back! That’s good. The Tau are starting to get a bit pushy, but it wasn’t an emergency, so I told them to pound sand, and I didn’t want to bother you, but-“

  “You did well,” I said, ruffling her hair. “I absorbed the drone’s memories. What’s this ‘peace negotiation’ I’d heard about?”

  I frowned as I said the word; it sounded like a joke. Or the prelude to something horrible. The Imperium of Man did not negotiate with Xenos, not if they didn’t have a problem that was so great they couldn’t deal with it, if they had a bunch of Tau nibbling on their heels the moment they turned their attention away from them.

  The only time I knew of where the Tau and the Imperium negotiated a peace and formed a temporary alliance was when there was a huge fuckoff Tyranid splinter fleet coming to eat them all, and that was only managed under the careful guidance of one Ciaphas Cain. A man who had the near-mythical ability of common sense, a rarity beyond even Alpha Plus-level Psykers in this setting.

  “The request for beginning peace negotiations was sent to the Tau forward fleet,” Cat said. “They reyed it to us and to the other fleets. I don’t know what decision the Ethereals had come to, or what they are debating about, but they’d requested your input. Errr, rather insistently ‘requested’, that is.”

  “Well,” I said. "Things'd just gotten either much more interesting or troublesome. Let’s go see what our least favourite stuck-up blueys are doing.”

  It’s either a trap, or they managed to wake some ancient horror that’s currently fucking them in the ass real hard. I wasn’t sure which option I liked less. The trap could be annoying. Since the Tau were gullible idiots, you waved the possibility of peace before their eyes, and they were swooning already. On the other hand, it beat having to fight some eldritch horror that crawled out of the Ghoul Stars.

  Alternatively, it might just be Hive Fleet Dagon coming around to take a nibble out of the Imperium. Or maybe the local Necron Dynasty was waking prematurely. Or maybe the Pgue Wars began, and Guilliman cancelled the Achilles Crusade to bolster the resources he had to beat back Mortarion.

  I dismissed the possibility of this being a true peace negotiation. It was just straight-up impossible. With Solomon Tetrarchus dead, the Lord Commanders of the different Salients would be autonomous, since I doubted they would accept any new Lord Militant named by the Generals and Admirals back in the Iron Halo, whom they knew Tetrarchus distrusted.

  Also, I had copied Tetrarchus’ memories; I knew just who the Lord Commander of the Canis Salient was. I knew exactly the type of man Sebasticor Ebongrave was. There was not even a snowball’s chance in hell that he would ever even consider peace with the Tau. The only possibility I could see was that he was thinking of himself as a cunning strategist by using the possibility of peace to bait the Tau into a trap before he ran out of supplies.

  But even that was iffy. The Ebongrave that Tetrarchus’ memories showed would have retched at the mere idea of breathing the same air as a Tau, much less to invite them to negotiate.

  No, it was probably something else. Something dangerous enough to force his hand.

  I really hoped it wasn’t some eldritch abomination that the Imperium managed to wake up. That was about the only option I had no idea how to handle, and the only one that truly worried me: the unknown.

  P3t1