Tink and Aimy were off on one side, enjoying their usual pastime of antagonizing each other. The subject this time was the Tau vids Tink had acquired, specifically the ones that'd been based on our exploits on the buffer worlds, and were supposedly earning us all sorts of royalties. Aimy was loudly explaining that they were stupid, heretical, and concrete proof of Tink's perversion. Tink was holding that all of this was untrue, and that Aimy was just jealous that she hadn't been included in the vids on account of being stuck on an island with a crazy Magos at the time. Doc was slumped over the table in the middle of the room. The medic had been on duty for nearly twenty hours before he'd been concussed and half crushed, and when he'd gotten back to the ship he hadn't been allowed to take a break. He wound up spending ANOTHER twenty hours hopped up on stimms, helping get Gravis stowed away and treating all the armsen who'd been injured during the defense of the ship. Doc was completely out of it, and Nubby had taken the opportunity to draw some comical facial hair on him. The little trooper was augmenting his doodles with a pyramid of furniture balanced on and around Doc, and was gleefully egging Tink and Aimy on. Twitch had taped up what he claimed was the only accurate map of the Occurrence Border's tainted sections along one wall. I say claimed, because none of us could read the damned thing, and looking at it for any length of time made our heads hurt. Twitch was alternately sticking pins in the map, and talking to a servo-skull with a detpack strapped to it. Supposedly the Cogitator Adept was watching the skull's vid feed and answering Twitch's question via combead, but none of us could really be sure. Finally, Fumbles was sitting in a corner of the room, grimacing at a small Tau drone with a block of white material strapped to it. Fio was sitting on the far side of what was definitely a blast shield, excitedly taking notes.

Sarge digested the three reports for a few seconds, and then poked Doc awake again. In an almost gentle voice, he asked the medic if he knew how Gravis' other half was doing, because Sister Valerie said she couldn't find the freezer-crate with the Space Marine's legs anywhere. Doc's tired brain kicked into overdrive, and dredged up an image of a dented and bullet-pocked crate being pulled off of him and tossed to the side. He swore, attempted to leap to his feet, and was buried as the pile of chairs around him collapsed. Tink, exhibiting all the tact and self-preservation instinct of a socially-retarded lemming, burst into laughter. Sarge's attention immediately shifted to Tink. He opened the crate he'd carried in, took out the manifest taped to its lid, and skipped down to the section labeled Miscellaneous. His false grin completely gone, Sarge asked Tink if he knew where 1x Dataslate (Fecundia-pattern), 1x Astartes Grav Chute and Grapnel Harness, 2x Single-Shot Grav-Flares, and 1x Mark VII Power Armor Helmet could be found. Tink's poker face lasted until the helmet was mentioned and he involuntarily glanced towards where Spot was sitting. He looked back to find that Sarge had somehow teleported across the room and was now practically nose-to-nose with him. Then the shouting started.

The theory was that the Astropaths' lies would catch the attention of the Inquisition pretty quickly, and they'd send out a team to investigate what had happened on the Station. Unless Paths managed to purge all records of our visit, which would probably require killing pretty much everyone in the Administratum from the Prefect on down, it'd be relatively easy for the Inquisition to identify us based on vid records of Sarge and our ship, and determine that the Astropaths were full of shit. Then, after a judicious amount of purging, they'd send out a follow-up sector-wide message to clear our names. The nearest Inquisition outpost was five days away from the Station; so call it a week to hear about the problem and travel to the Station, another week to sort things out and send the all-clear, and a third week just to be safe. The Captain had mapped a route that wouldn't be too far off course, and would take us to a nice, developed Imperial system with an Inquisitorial outpost of its own (just in case) in about three weeks. We'd dewarp REALLY far out, so if the Zoanthrope did it's head-explodey thing again it probably wouldn't kill anyone, and then discretely venture into comm range of the planet to make sure everything was okay before attempting to dock. It was a nice, sensible plan, and all we had to do was keep the Zoanthrope contained and Gravis alive for three weeks of warp travel. Everyone, except Twitch, accepted that it was the best option available, and we all went off to make our last preparations. Two hours later the Gellar field kicked into gear, the Warp Drive tore a bloody hole in the fabric of reality, and what we fervently hoped was our second-to-last warp journey with our stupid psychic bug began. All-in-all, taking everything into account, and relatively speaking, the trip went well. Y'know by Occurrence Border standards. Especially if you ignore all that ominous stuff with the ghost-tyranids.

The Diplomacy Adept found teaching Sarge to be rather difficult, mostly because our fearless leader was so set in his ways. In Sarge's book Deception and Disguise were accomplished using stuff like helmets on sticks, camo paint, and smoke grenades; Inquiry and Intimidation shared a definition, and involved little, if any, talking on his part; and the pages that covered Blather and Charm had been removed to make more space for the chapter that covered Command. Regardless of the difficulty involved in reversing a lifetime's worth of sergeanty preconceptions though, the two of them did make some progress as we travelled. Admittedly it was very slow progress, and involved an awful lot of yelling, but progress none-the-less. For their part, Tink and his fellow xeno-culturists made some progress of their own during the voyage. The wonder-team of Fio, Jim, and Tink were in charge of Zoanthrope Containment, with occasional assistance from the Xenologist Adept and Hannah (if she was hiding from her problem-prone tech-acolytes in the Cells). They'd refurbished everything in record time before we entered the warp, and afterwards things had gone surprisingly smoothly. Thanks to all the parts Nubby had acquired, the Psi-Suppressors, Shielding, and Warp Shroud had all been repaired and improved to the point where they were very nearly within the minimum recommended strength for containing a Delta level psyker during warp travel, and the Stasis Field was working perfectly for a change. All that had to be done in the Cells was a bit of daily inspection and maintenance, which was always carried out quickly, because the Zoanthrope had acquired an unsettling presence ever since Sarge's partially-slagged shield had gotten wrapped around its head. It was hard to shake the feeling that, despite the stasis field, the eyes under the metal were watching you. Of course, the reduced maintenance requirements of the cells meant the nerds were able to spend time on other things.

When he found about about the project, Sarge briefly considered yelling at Tink for scavenging more of the Emperor's Scythes' stuff, but decided it did technically count as repairing the shuttle, and we were already up to our eyes in xeno-tech heresy anyway. Also, there was a chance we'd get a working stealth shuttle out of it. For their part, Jim and Hannah just ignored all mention of the Shuttle, and added the its bay to the list of places their tech-acolytes weren't allowed to go. The rest of us didn't have any input on the subject, because we were either busy with Gravis or dealing with the increasing level of warp-activity in the Occurrence Border's tainted areas. The initial high volume of anomalies and incursions had been expected. The things that usually discorporated after finding the tainted sections devoid of anything living had swarmed the trapped boarders and grown strong. Several varieties of warp beasts, minor daemons, reanimated corpses, and what Nubby would tell anyone who'd listen was a Bloodthirster (despite it's lack of height, axe, or wings) had tried to claw their way into the more habitable sections of the ship during the first few days of transit. Thanks to the fact that we'd known the general location of the boarders, the unholy horrors had come through to find numerous traps, swarms of detpack-armed suicide skulls, the hardened priests and armsmen that made up the Ship's Watch, and a few well-armed guardsmen waiting for them. Even with prepared positions and numerical superiority though, tackling warp creatures can be tricky. Over the three days it took the last of the boarders to expire, the daemons and the anomalies that manifested around them took a small but significant toll on the defenders. Some men were torn apart, others went insane, an unlucky few ran afoul of the Occurrence Border's chronic mechanical problems, and one or two forgot to check what was on the other side of a door before stepping through it.

Last time Aimy, Twitch, Nubby, and Fumbles had tracked the problem down to an infestation of what had appeared to be tyranids. It turned out that they weren't proper nids though, since shortly after they'd been killed, the bugs' remains had started reforming in a distinctly warpy fashion, and then they'd just sort of vanished when we finally dewarped. We'd decided that the whole thing had just been some sort of warp phenomena caused by the psychic containment in the Cells failing, and the Zoanthrope sort of passively screwing with reality. This explanation was ruined by the fact that, despite the Cells being all fixed up, the warpy-nids had come back. Or maybe they hadn't, it was all a bit of a mess. The problem was that, this time, the tyranid-shaped creatures that Nubby drew out with his damsel-in-dis-dress routine were different: they had an appearance and behavior that could best be described as ghostlike. Not ghostlike as in "sneaky", but ghostlike as in "like a ghost". Literally. Now, the Occurrence Border was practically littered with warp-ghosts, but human ones. For the most part they just wandered around re-enacting their lives and deaths, with the occasional bout of unsettling whispering or screaming thrown in. They were harmless by and large (and even provided decent entertainment on slow days), but that could change if someone or something managed to get their attention and drag them into sync with what passed for reality. Anyway, the tyranids we found literally haunting the fringes of the tainted areas displayed all the signs of being warp ghosts, except y'know, tyranid ones. They sort of milled around in the shadows, drifting through walls, making clicking noises at each other, and gnawing at stuff that wasn't there, until we got too close or had Fumbles poke 'em. Then every ghost-nid in the area would swarm in around the agitated one, and become an awful lot more solid until a few bolts of plasma blew them into black and green smoke.

The number of ghost-tyranid sightings quickly rose, as did the number of attacks. We'd tried to nip the problem in the bud, of course: a busy two days had been spent antagonizing ethereal hormagaunts into solidity, and then shooting them. Unfortunately, they didn't stay dead, even when we got the Confessor himself to come down and wave his censor around after we shot them. It'd take a few hours, but eventually a bug that Fumbles claimed was same one would drift back to the spot where we'd killed it, and resume its seemingly-random wandering. An expedition into the tainted areas to see where they were coming from was proposed, but after some careful thought, we decided that we didn't actually want to die horribly in a twisted nightmare of non-euclidian geometry and bug-shaped warp monstrosities. We might have really considered it if the ghost-tyranids had seemed interested in launching attacks on the rest of the ship, but as far as we could tell they were content to just sort of hang out. Over time, the steadily increasing number of ghost-bugs would result in them wandering deeper into the ship, but otherwise they stayed put unless someone got near them. Lacking any viable solution, or the motivation to take a real risk to find one, the Captain agreed with our decision to just set up a killzone around the tainted areas and contain the apathetic ghost-tyranid menace. The containment strategy wasn't sustainable in the long run, since the number of bugs was inexorably increasing, and they were able to expand in three dimensions as well as through walls too. But we were pretty sure that if we gave a little ground when the numbers got to high, it'd work long enough for us to reach our next resupply point. Also, if things got really bad, we could always dewarp and sort things out at the expense of a few days of travel time. So since there wasn't any immediate crisis, we settled into a slightly more stressful than usual routine, and got on with our lives.

As has been mentioned, the rest of us had other things to do, and the ghost-nid situation really didn't change that. I mean, if you stop work every time an army of warp-spawned insectoid spirits lays siege to your ship, you'll never get anything done. So we all just sort of muddled along, trying to hold everything together, as the trip continued and things got progressively worse. In the case of Doc's treatment of Sergeant Gravis, "got progressively worse" is a perfect summary. The Space Marine's condition went steadily downhill, and not in the ways Doc or Valerie had been prepared for. There were seemingly random seizures, spikes in neural activity that indicated horrible nightmares, inexplicable changes in the behavior of the bio-toxin, and even a few spontaneous mechanical failures in the life support machinery. It got to the point where Gravis-watching was a 24-hour, no-distractions duty, because the second he was left alone something would invariably go wrong. Doc, not being born yesterday, blamed all these problems on the warp in general and the Zoanthrope in particular, but he couldn't figure out the why or how, and had no idea what to do about it. Lacking any proactive treatment ideas, aside from exiting the warp or killing the Zoanthrope, Doc dedicated increasingly large portions of his time to Gravis-watching, and developed a rather disturbing tendency to talk to the comatose Space Marine. Tasteless jokes about Valerie getting jealous aside, we began to worry about him, but we were getting near the end of the trip by the time things got really worrying, and he seemed to recover a bit after his theory about the Zoanthrope being the cause was confirmed.

So yeah, it was a pretty unpleasant experience, especially since it was actually a minor failure compared to the some of the stuff that had broken during our last trip, and therefore raised all sorts of questions about the Zoanthrope's powers. Not that we had much time for pondering though, because the following three days were absolutely exhausting. Most of the problems caused by the failure were dealt with immediately: The suppressors were repaired without the Zoanthrope breaking out of stasis and trying to killing everyone. Doc actually had a fire extinguisher ready, put Gravis out before the eldritch flames did any real damage, and handled everything else that went spontaneously wrong during the brief loss of suppression. Nubby managed to restrain Fumbles before he clawed out his own eyes, got the psyker to safety, and was even able to scrounge up another pair of extra-large welding goggles (which may or may not have had "Bill's DO NOT STEAL" written on them). Lastly, thanks to a general retreat order by Aimy and the Captain, plus Twitch's suspiciously well-placed fallback points, relatively few men died to the temporarily empowered ghost-nids. Unfortunately, even though the ghost-nids lost focus and weakened again after the psi-suppressors were back online, the increase in their numbers was permanent. Containment became significantly more difficult, especially since, in some places, the defense had been pushed back to rooms that Ol' Bill said were important to the running of the ship. It wasn't a good situation, but then again, it could've been worse: both ammo and food were plentiful, it wasn't snowing or raining aside from the occasional drizzle of supernatural blood, and there weren't any Commissars. On the Official Imperial Guard Scale of Horrible Meatgrinder Defenses it was only about a 3. Of course, anything that even shows up on that scale isn't something you want to deal with while travelling through the warp...

In the end though, we made it. A few hours before our original scheduled dewarp time, but not a second too soon, we arrived at that bastion of Imperial civilization widely known as: "That system with two planets and an Inquisition base that's pretty much on the way. No not that one, the one with the BLUE star." As the Occurrence Border left the warp, the massive swarm of ghostly tyranids just faded away. It was actually sort of awkward for those of us on the line, and sheer paranoia kept everyone at their posts for nearly an hour before victory was declared and we all went off to get some sleep. The only people left awake were those who'd been augmented past the need for the pathetic meatbag concept of sleep, and the poor bastards in charge. Sarge hiked his way up to the bridge to verify that we were in the correct system and that no stellar disasters, xenos invasions, or heretical uprisings were occurring in it, and to send a message to the Inquisition base. Unfortunately, that last part proved unexpectedly difficult. Due to our recent problem with head-exploding waves of psychic energy, we came out of warp way out on the edge of the system. Of course the universe despises all rational planning, so the Zoanthrope stayed completely quiet during the transition, and all our careful precaution accomplished nothing aside from leaving us several days of normal space travel away from our destination. In fact we were so far out that our sensors could barely even pick out the largest ships and stations around the planets, and it'd be days before we got into vox range. This annoyed Sarge, who wanted to get started on the whole process of proving our identity and requesting aid so he could stop worrying. The Captain sympathized with him, and rather sarcastically asked Sarge if he wanted to try to make a micro-warp to get closer to the planets. Sarge told him to go fornicate with a waterfowl, and then wandered off to try and nap away his paranoia.

A few hours later, the Cogitator Adept delivered a dataslate containing what Twitch and Ol' Bill assured us was a map marking four locations in the Occurrence Border's various tainted areas. The rest of us took their words for it, and Twitch was put in charge of deciphering it into three-dimensional directions. Sarge chose the location in the lower-aft tainted section as our first target, on account of how it was near the other thing he wanted to sort out with the expedition, and we set out with Ol' Bill and his gaggle of Engineers and tech-acolytes in tow. Now, we called it an expedition, and went in heavily armed, but outside of the Warp the tainted areas weren't THAT dangerous. Yes, they were still contaminated with warp energy which manifested as all sorts of phenomena, but they were generally minor things, like whispers, winds, flashes of movement, and the non-insectoid variety of ghost. The krootoids and other vermin which wandered into the area and wound up horribly mutated, and occasionally possessed, were only a minor inconvenience, and warp-entities which can survive in normal space without some kind of host are rare. Really, it was just a matter of carefully avoiding mechanical hazards and the occasional persistent anomaly, such as the time loop on on sub-deck U-3, the room stuck at five degrees kelvin, the time loop on sub-deck U-3, the perpetually bouncing ball, and the time loop on sub-deck U-3. We reached the area that the Cogitator Adept had calculated as the center of the ghost-nid infestation without any incidents more serious than a tech-acolyte getting slightly electrocuted and Nubby getting stuck during an attempt to bypass a leaking plasma conduit via air shaft. Unfortunately, when we got there we didn't find any daemonic portals, eldritch devices, Tyranid hives, or anything else we could cover with detpacks.

By the time we got back from our expedition the distance between us and the three approaching ships had closed to the bare edge of our vox system's broadcast range. Now that they were closer, our sensors had identified the ships as a Navy frigate and a pair of smaller SDF ships, so Sarge, the Captain, and the Adepts decided not to mess around with subtlety, and announce our identity and intentions off the bat. Remembering his recent lessons on the importance of stance, dress, and overall first impressions, Sarge scrounged together a replacement for the Inquisitorial costume and evil goon uniform which had been rather gleefully abandoned in men's room garbage bin. After he'd more or less ripped Doc's evil goon uniform in half during his attempt to make it fit, he settled for wearing one of the Captain's spare uniforms and hung his Interrogator's Rosette in clear view. Suitably outfitted, Sarge then spent nearly two hours with the old Diplomacy Adept, recording a two-minute vid which primarily consisted of his name and rank, a request that his message be forwarded to the local Inquisition base, and the digital authorization code from his rosette. This arduous task completed he joined the rest of us for a few games of cards while the message crawled across the system at the annoyingly-slow speed of light. Four hours and several thrones lost to Nubby and Fumbles later, it occurred to us that we really should've gotten a response by then, and we all trooped up to the bridge to see if something interesting was happening. We arrived just in time to hear one of the sensor techs report that all three approaching ships had increased their acceleration, and four more had left orbit. Twitch informed everyone that he had a REALLY bad feeling about this.

Since it was unimaginable that the Inquisition hadn't noticed a sector-wide astropathic message to kill someone, much less a whole ship of people who were in their records as Inquisitorial agents, we felt sure that an investigation into the incident on the Station had at least been started. There was of course the remote possibility that whoever they'd sent to investigate had completely botched things and either swallowed the Choir-Master's obvious lies or been offed by the locals, but that seemed unlikely. Despite our personal experiences, the Inquisition on the whole is rather notorious for its incredulity and competence. Doc suggested that the investigator's ship could've been lost in the warp, or that other warp-travel related shenanigans had occurred, such as our own warp-journey taking only a few hours of real time as opposed to the three weeks we'd experience. The Captain shot down that last explanation, claiming to be absolutely certain for some technical reason that three and a half weeks of real time had passed, but allowed that Doc had a point about the dangers of warp-travel delaying the investigation. The Diplomacy Adept also raised a valid point, which was that, given the time it would take to investigate the Station and our direct route, no Inquisitorial couriers would've reached the system before us. This meant that any "No, these Astropath-exploding people are not heretics, don't kill them" order from the Inquisition would've been sent out via Astropath, so there was a very real possibility that a few things got… lost in translation, for instance the No, Not, and Don't. Both of those explanations sounded good enough for us, but they didn't account for why the local Inquisition base wasn't doing anything, and that was a more pressing concern at present.

The tall and cadaverous man stalked in, probably attracted by all the shouting just a few rooms away from his sanctum, and informed us that we were all blunt-minded idiots. No one but Aimy took much offense at this, in our experience the was just the Navigator's way of saying hello, and we all waited to hear why we were bunch of borderline-retards. It turned out that what was happening was OBVIOUS, and he could've told us it would've happened if we'd thought to ask him (that statement right there is a classic example of why no one likes Navigators). Our ship had just popped out of the warp at an odd location, positively reeked with warp-taint, and had a powerful unrestrained tyranid psychic signature emanating from it; the Occurrence Border was a text-book example of a genestealer-infested ship looking to infiltrate a system. There was a short argument between the Navigator and Tink about whether the Zoanthrope was unrestrained or not. Tink ultimately lost, because if the bug was properly restrained we wouldn't have been up to our asses in ghost-tyranids for the last few weeks, but the Navigator did eventually amend his statement to "partially-restrained by bunch of incompetents, heretics, and xenos". Anyway, the rest of us acknowledged that this was as good an explanation as any, since excessive paranoia seemed a bit more likely than plain incompetence where the Inquisition was concerned, and asked of the Navigator had any ideas how to deal with such a situation. He suggested that we get the hell out of the system before we were all killed, and make sure our next stop was a somewhere where we personally knew people in power who could smooth things out for us. This suggestion did not go over well with Doc, Tink, or anyone else really.

After we examined the map and determined that no one helpful was within our four-day travel range, the Captain raised some less-savory options. The discussion turned to what was or wasn't piracy, and whether any of the nearby systems were too small to have naval defenses or astropaths, but developed enough to have a supply of fuel. Sarge began to zone out as he imagined just how unpleasant his post-mission interview with the Inquisitor was going to be, and then he overheard Tink pestering the Navigator. Tink asked if it was possible to "coast" in the warp like fuel-conscious ships did in normal space, and thereby extend our range enough to reach the nearest guaranteed-friendly system (which was unfortunately the one inhabited by Nubby's "guy"). The Navigator made some sneering remarks about a blunt's inability to truly understand the shifting nature of the warp, and admitted that yes, you could trade time for fuel up to a certain point. As the rest of us checked whether this would allow us to reach anyone who hadn't been described as "like a Planetary Guv'ner, but wifout da actual planet, and maybe a lil bi' more slavery", Sarge thought back to our original travel plans. He asked the Navigator whether we could stretch four days of fuel to reach a destination a week and a half away, specifically the Ordos Xenos Research Facility that had ordered the Zoanthrope. He got a flat "No". That would've been the end of it right there, and things might have turned out VERY differently, but the Cogitator Adept was listening in, and simultaneously responded with a "Maybe". That sparked a heated argument, which included a lot of talk about warp currents and something about problems with shortest paths. None of us really followed it, except maybe Tink, but the "No" and "Maybe" slowly turned into "Probably, assuming fuel efficiency is static, the currents are where the map says they are, there are no storms, and we can survive three more weeks of Warp travel".

Doc made his way down to the Psyker Containment Cells, but thankfully didn't go with his first idea, which had been to just kill the Zoanthrope and hope Oak and his research buddy would be in a good mood when they found out. Instead, he poked his nose into the small, currently-unused side rooms that'd originally been used to hold captive psyker children, and checked if any of the undersized stasis-beds had been left over after Tink and Fio had combined a few into one big enough to hold the Zoanthrope. He had a moment of panic when all the cells, except for the one packed with debris, were empty, but when he asked Fio what had happened, the little xenos explained that they'd pulled them all out during the project and the leftovers were just in a closet somewhere. Doc knew the inevitable fate of expensive pieces of equipment that got left in unmonitored closets, so he skipped the scavenger hunt and just commed Nubby to ask which one of his stashes the stasis beds had wound up in. Nubby wasn't keen to part with his loot, but eventually came around to Doc's way of thinking when the Medic started explaining all the horrible things that would happen to him if Gravis died. One of the five leftover stasis beds was hauled up to the medbay, where Doc and Valerie spent several minutes trying to figure out how to fit the upper half of a three-meter tall killing machine into a stasis bed sized for children ages 3-12. It was obvious from the start that Gravis' armor and life support machinery wouldn't fit, but it was quickly established that even without those, he was still far too large. In the end Doc was forced to admit that the only way it would work was if they removed Gravis' arms, shoulders, and a good portion of one of his sides; Sister Valerie did NOT approve of this course of action.

All you could really say for the first few days of that warp journey, was that they went better than the last few of our previous one. For a starter, our worst-case scenario (for conservative values of "worst") hadn't come true: the ghost-nids hadn't just popped back into existence in the same places they'd been when we'd dewarped. Our brief stint in normal space had reset their counter or whatever, and the bugs were only appearing in the tainted areas, though at a rate significantly higher than they had before. Spawn rate aside though, our defensive situation was MUCH better than it had been, and the Cells were in pretty good condition too. Thanks to the heroic repair efforts of Tink, Jim, and Fio, the psi-suppressors took the strain of entering the warp without failing, and the devices seemed to be functioning better than they had before. There were some concerns about their power output though, since as mentioned, the ghost-nid spawn rate was higher than it had been, and there were also more minor phenomena occurring throughout the ship as well as an increase in the number of IGPs (Inexplicable Gravis Problems). This bothered Tink immensely, since his readings said everything in the Cells was working fine (at least for now), and there wasn't any psychic leakage around the Cells either. Admittedly Fio and Jim's psi-detectors consisted of the Wraithbone block on a stick and a creepy ornate servo-skull that had to be periodically fed live rats, but they seemed pretty confident in their readings. Anyway, Tink and the other techies didn't get to ponder the ghost-nids for long. Even though the normal-space repairs had bought them some breathing room, the lack of replacement parts meant every fix they made was a horrible time-consuming kludge, and Doc made sure that every minute of their free time was dedicated to putting together Gravis' stasis field.

By the sixth day it was becoming apparent that holding out for two more weeks would be close to impossible. The unexpected increase in the ghost-nids' strength and their new penchant for the occasional focussed attack forced our lines back days ahead of schedule, and the initial ship-wide increase in phenomena we'd seen was getting worse. It was actually beginning to feel like the Gellar field was failing, except Ol' Bill was certain it wasn't, and the usual whispers and blood-seepage had been replaced with far-off chittering sounds and tyranid-ichor. It was obvious the Zoanthrope was responsible, but it was still a mystery how, and we couldn't think of anything to do about it besides killing the bug or dewarping. Mind you, dewarping wasn't the same sort of emergency option it'd been before. This was because the warp-drive took a whole lot of energy to function, so we didn't actually have enough fuel to get back into the warp of we exited, much less go anywhere or dewarp again afterwards. So if we wanted to bail out of the warp, we were going to need to do it near a system that could provide fuel, and handle all the risks that came with that. Still, the situation with the ghost-nids was getting bad enough that Sarge was really considering calling for a detour, though the only chance coming up to do so was at least another three days of warp-current coasting away. So the situation was bad, but there was at least one bright spot: thanks to the time freed up by a lucky streak of only minor malfunctions in the Cells, Tink and Fio had nearly completed Gravis' stasis field. In fact they were down to just the last little part, dealing with the power-distribution, and it was proving rather tricky. Since they didn't want to waste time doing it all from scratch, the two of them went down to the Cells to take a hard look at how they'd done it last time. That turned out to be a VERY good decision.

So no shit, there we were, in the middle of the warp, too low on fuel to even consider stopping, when we realized our captive ghost-summoning insectoid xenos psyker, was actually a ghost-summoning insectoid xenos DAEMONHOST. I mean… what the hell? Seriously. Just how in the name of the Emperor are you supposed to respond to something like that? There's bad situations, and then there's comically bad situations… Anyway, it actually took us a little while to figure out that the Zoanthrope was possessed. None of the techies knew much about daemons, and of the three of them, only Jim had been on the Occurrence Border during its maiden voyage as an Inquisitorial vessel and he hadn't actually encountered the daemon that had eventually possessed the Cogtain. So the three of them gawked at the Zoanthropes miniature smoky wings for a while, debated whether it was something that could be ignored, and eventually commed the rest of us to ask if we had any ideas what was going on. According to the armsmen fighting alongside Sarge, his swears were so vitriolic that they actually turned into little insectoid creatures as they left his mouth, and had to be swatted out of the air as they tried to bite people. Given how warpy his section of the line had gotten by that point, none of us questioned this. Doc burst into hysterical laughter when he heard. This caused a little bit concern among the medical staff, especially the two nurses who'd seen him melting people with Tyranid biotoxin. Sister Valerie carefully relieved him of his scalpel, dosed him with something relaxing but not incapacitating, and took over Gravis watch while he giggled his way down to the Cells to see the wings for himself. After a brief period of mindless panic, Nubby denied all responsibility for what had happened, and then had to explain to those of us who hadn't been there what exactly wasn't his fault. Twitch just screamed "I TOLD YOU IT WAS DAEMONIDS" into his combead until Tink muted him.

It took some doing, but we eventually destroyed the servi-knarlo-titan, pitched the Cogtain into the bridge-lift's shaft, and cranked the gravity up as high as it would go. That'd done for the Cogtain, and between reducing its host to a greasy crater and our subsequent exit from the warp, we'd assumed that was last we'd seen of the smoke-winged daemon as well. The fact that the Cogtain's crater could never be repaired, even by replacing entire sections of floor and wall, and the way it screamed at people in binary probably should've tipped us off. So we'd dismissed the glowing, screaming crater as just another Occurrence Border thing (trust me, it doesn't sound stupid after you've been on the ship for a while), and got on with our lives. It didn't come to our attention again until we began refurbishing the Cells in preparation for the Zoanthrope, and had discovered that there was some sort of daemonic portal linking the cell that'd held the daemon's first host to the crater. Once again we dismissed it as just another phenomena, and pretty much forgot about it. In retrospect, even without the daemonic involvement, it should've occurred to us that having some sort of warp-portal INSIDE of all the psi-shielding and warp-presence shrouding was a very bad thing. Not being daemonologists, we had no idea whether the daemon had been lurking in the cell or crater all this time, or if it had actually returned from the warp via the places it had tainted. Either way, the presence of a restrained and frequently unconscious psychic being, with no Emperor or Hive Mind to protect it, must have looked incredibly tasty to it. The daemon had probably been slowly corrupting the Zoanthrope ever since we caught it (How does that work with a giant bug anyway? Does the daemon tempt it promises of sugar or something?), but we felt fairly certain that the that Sarge knocking the Zoanthrope out consciousness and into the tainted cell had been the final straw.

Of course the "just blow up the daemonic portal" plan didn't work, but y'know it MIGHT have, and it would've been really silly not to check. So, after establishing that all we'd managed to do was severely damage the shrine surrounding the Cogtain's crater and scare the shit out of a bunch of tech-acolytes working on the bridge-lift, we moved on to our next low-effort solution. We took one of our three spare pieces of psi-shielding, crammed it into the doorway to the tainted cell, and then slapped a few dozen prayer seals on it. When that didn't work we added the two other pieces of shielding, and when THAT didn't work, we finally allowed Fumbles to take a look. That was a nervous ten minutes, let me tell you. Despite our very well-founded concerns, letting the accident-prone psyker poke at the daemonic warp-portal worked out fine. Mostly because the psi-suppressors kept him from doing anything when he eventually spazzed out. Afterwards, once Fumbles had been woken up, and Twitch had stopped abjuring him and throwing holy water around, the psyker blearily reported that nothing we were doing actually had any effect on the flow of daemonic energy between the tainted cell and the Daemonthrope. However, he was reasonably sure that increasing the distance between to two would at least reduce the flow a bit. Since moving the warp-portal wasn't an option, the only way to accomplish this was by moving the Daemonthrope, plus the various pieces of technology which kept it from killing us all. The task of figuring out how to more or less relocate the entirety of the Cells fell to Tink, who immediately declared it to be impossible. This didn't stop him from calling a council of the nerds, including Ol' Bill and Hannah, to figure out exactly how impossible it was though.

The psi-shielding and the Shroud were much trickier problems, and a fair bit of time was spent lamenting that the whole mess at the Station had ruined our original plans to requisition enough materials to completely rebuild the Cells. After a few hours of trying to figure out how to pull everything out and set it back up before a tide of ghost-nids killed everyone, the ludicrous proposal of cutting a massive hole through the ship, and moving the Cells (minus the warpy bit) as one big-ol' thingy was put forward. Luckily Ol’ Bill saved us all from that retarded plan when he decided to take a second look at the list of parts that'd need to moved. Consummate scrounger that he was, Ol' Bill could typically suggest five different alternatives for any missing critical part, and he was better than a savant when it came to keeping track of what had be used where and whether it would be missed. His abilities had let him down a little bit when it came to the highly-specialized systems in the Cells, but they came to our rescue in a big way when he asked whether a psi-shield panel was anything like a psi-focussing panel. After some debate, Tink pointed out that it was all moot, since there weren't any psi-focussing panels in the inventory; Ol' Bill asked whether anyone thought our headless astropath still needed the ones lining his sanctum. One quick check of the dried-brains-splattered sanctum later, it was established the panels which focussed incoming astropathic messages on the chair in the middle of the sanctum could indeed be repurposed as shields. Fio, who'd become the resident expert on the underlying theory of most of the systems in the Cells, claimed it was just a matter of tweaking the machinery that aligned the crystal matrices in each panel, and began estimating how long it would take to move them all the bay that'd been picked for the new Cells. Tink asked why the hell we should bother moving them.

When Tink said everything was ready, all of us plus Fio, and Gravis' mobile medical monstrosity gathered in the cells. During the prior few days we'd managed to hold off ghost-nids and keep the Space Marine alive despite a steady increase in the Daemonthrope's power over the ship and the irreparable failure of one of the psi-suppressors. During the little free time we'd had, a route had been plotted from the Cells, up through the lower decks to the bridge-lift, and finally to the Sanctum. The corridors were cleared of impediments, all the armsmen that could be spared from the main lines were stationed at checkpoints along the route, and the new stasis unit had been mounted on a motorized cargo pallet. When the last of the preparations were finished, Sarge alerted the Captain, who sent out a ship-wide warning, and we got ready for the most hectic prisoner transfer of our lives. The first step of transfer was moving the Daemonthrope from its old stasis unit to the new mobile one. There's probably a whole chapter on this sort of thing in whatever the Inquisitorial equivalent of the Uplifting Primer is. You're probably supposed to use all sorts of seals, powerful psykers, and some of that special Tyranid tranquilizer the Scythes had. We made do with a few ropes, a ramp made out of a wall-panel that no one would miss, and a cargo net. Tink lined up his long-distance manipulation tool (see: poking stick) on the Stasis Unit's Off-Button, then jabbed it and dove for cover. As the stasis field vanished, a pair of deep-red spots appeared on the Daemonthrope's metal-covered face, and its stubby little smoke-wings suddenly expanded to a full meter in length. A horrible soundless screech echoed through the Cells, thousands of insects began pouring out of every crack and crevice, and a corona of black-edged green lighting formed around Daemonthrope. Then the cargo net yanked it off its grav plates, and dragged it face-first down the corrugated metal ramp.

When all the suppressors were fastened down and connected to the large battery array mounted on the front of the pallet, and Gravis was safe-ish in the Daemonthrope's old Stasis Unit (we were pretty sure that his expression of pain and horror wasn't anything to worry about), we readied our weapons and got ready for the hard part. Sarge sent a final warning to the Captain, and counted down. As Sarge reached zero, Spot 2.0 opened the outer door to the Cells, and all across the ship the tyranid warp-ghosts paused in their pursuit of re-positioning armsmen, turned to focus on us, and solidified. We came out of the Cells at a dead sprint, or at least those of us on foot did. Fio was perched in a semi-clear spot on the Pallet behind the Daemonthrope, gibbering at his drones in Tau-speak and doing his best to keep everything from spontaneously exploding. Tink had a similar spot on battery-pack, and was splitting his attention between steering the Pallet and scouting ahead with Spot. Twitch and Sarge were on point, pulling ahead to cover each corner and doorway. Aimy and Doc were keeping an eye on our flanks from the middle of the group. Finally Nubby was squeezed into a crevice at the back of the Pallet, where he was simultaneously able to cover our rear and avoid doing any running. To our immense relief, we made it to the end of the corridor without the Daemonthrope doing anything warpy or a swarm of ghost-nids just appearing around us. Tink and Fio had said that leaving the Cells wouldn't suddenly grant the Daemonthrope more power, but the rest of us hadn't been so sure. Anyway, after that first straightaway we began winding through the area around the Cells in a manner that could be described as "drunken". Despite all appearances though, it really was the fastest route available.

Variations of that little scuffle were repeated a dozen times as we escorted the Daemonthrope towards the checkpoint at the start of the tilt-corridor. The ghost-nids were harder to kill than any we'd encountered during the previous weeks, they took just as much killing as real tyranids despite the way they poofed into smoke when they finally died. On the bright side, the bugs' new solidity seemed to have robbed them of their ability to move through walls, though they made up for it with a freakish ability to home in on us. Wave after wave of the bugs came up behind our little convoy, as well as through the vents on the walls and ceilings, and eventually from ahead of us as our course turned back towards the ghost-nid territory. The continuous attacks slowed us down a little, but didn't pose a serious threat: they were just Gaunts and Rippers after all, and we were bloody Imperial Guardsmen. Mowing down endless waves of under-armed xenos with superior firepower is what the Emperor made us for. Between Twitch's mines, the early warnings and target marking from Spot the Wonder Drone, and giant pile of pulse-ammo we'd brought along, we dropped most of the nids the second we saw them. Of course that's not to say that EVERYTHING went our way: either the Daemonthrope was exhibiting some serious power despite its stasis-ed state, or the Occurrence Border's warpy little machine-spirit had a really twisted sense of humor. On four occasions during our twisty run towards the checkpoint at the bottom of the tilt-corridor we ran into phenomena that seemed specifically designed to either slow us down or assist the ghost-nids in killing us.

We were crossing a storage bay that apparently held tanks of drinking water, headlight fluid, pressurized liquid chlorine, and toothpaste, when a pack of ghost-nids clawed a hole through a door on Aimy's flank. As she started picking the bugs off, a sort of howling spectral gale manifested in the corridor behind the bugs, and three of them were propelled through the hole like angry insectoid cannonballs. One gaunt was shot out of the air, another pancaked against the toothpaste tank, and the third landed on Aimy. Aimy's panicked snapshot missed the gaunt, passed a centimeter in front of Fio's face, and exploded one of the crystal-tipped suppression pylons mounted on the Daeomonthrope's pallet. The lights abruptly went out, frost began to form along the walls, and the bay's vox system began screaming at us in a mix of Jantine Battle-Cant and Hrud. All of us except Aimy, who was trying to keep the gaunt from eating her face, and Nubby, who helpfully shot it off her, activated our tac-lights and scanned the room for any sort of new warpy threat while Fio tried to repair the suppressor and Tink kept the pallet moving. Our rubbernecking was brought to an abrupt halt by three sudden realizations. Firstly, that the ghost-nid on top of Aimy was reforming instead of dissipating into smoke. Secondly, the screaming vox was just a leakage alarm as opposed to some sort of warp phenomena. And finally, that Aimy's shot had terminated in the pressurized chlorine tank. Aimy practically teleported out from under the reforming gaunt, which Nubby shot a few more times for good measure, and we bailed out of that bay so fast that we literally stampeded the nids coming at us from ahead. As we exited Doc attempted to close the bay behind us, only to find a little yellow note apologizing for scrounging the door's control panel. He settled for tossing a nade at the now-reformed gaunt and the other nids that were moving through the gas with impunity.

Now, those of you who haven't been aboard a ship as kludged together as the Occurrence Border might be wondering what "tilt-corridors" are. According to Ol' Bill, they were grav-lifts (shafts with angled grav-plates so you can just walk up them like a corridor instead of waiting for a lift) from back before his time when the Occurrence Border still had an organized ship-wide gravitic field. At some point during the transition to the current ad-hoc system, either some sort of titanic accident or the hard work of one of his predecessors had twisted all four shafts into massive ramps which paradoxically pulled upwards. The end result was that inside the tilt-corridors going up-ship (as we wanted to do) was downhill, and a pretty steep downhill at that. So picture a three hundred meter long slide with a six-person cargo-cart at the top. Now add six guardsmen, a Tau scientist, and a terrified tech-acolyte, and a Daemonthrope-laden pallet. Finally, put a cargo-bay and a ninety degree gravity shift at the bottom, and give the whole thing a push. It was pretty high on the list of the stupidest ways we'd ever travelled, or at the top if you lumped it in with "traversing the warp in a glorified space-hulk", but at least Spot was there to record the terrifying amount of air we got as we reached the bottom of the corridor and shot out into the bay. Now when I say "terrifying amount of air" I mean TERRIFYING. The only reason we didn't hit the 10-meter high ceiling of the cargo bay, was because of the cluster of ghostly gaunts we hit first. We exploded into the bay in a shower of chitin and ichor, sailed over a barricaded group of armsmen, passed just under a massive light fixture, came down on another cluster of ghost-nids, and skidded to a juicy halt in front of the armsmen protecting the doors to the aft cargo-lift. The armsmen stared at us, we stared back, and the elderly engineer fiddling with the doors yelled at everyone to keep it down while he worked.

The armsmen cheered as the ghost-nid advance slowed, and so did we when the engineer whacked the door control a few times with a spanner and it began to grind open. No one noticed when one of the tendrils of smoke rising from where the Daemonthrope's wings intersected the stasis field twisted towards the vox-system set in the bay's ceiling. At least not until the vox began screeching a high-pitched chittering sound. Now, an uneducated plebian might have had mistaken the sound coming from the vox for mindless tyranid chittering, but we immediately identified it as binary, and an attempt by the Daemonthrope to control any nearby servitors, servo-skulls, and cogboys. A Guardsman's senses are just that precise. Well, no, actually no they aren't, but it was sort of obvious after the tech-acolyte smashed the psi-suppressor Fio had just fixed. As usual, Twitch was the first to respond, even if he was actually operating under the assumption that the Mechanicus had been allied with the Daemonids, and possibly the Orks, all along, and this was just the first stage of their uprising against the divine light of the Emperor. Luckily, we sorted that out for him before we ran into Jim or Hannah again, and even more luckily (for the tech-acolyte at least) Twitch couldn't get line of sight past our panicking Tau scientist. So instead of blowing off the hapless tech-acolyte's head, Twitch opened fire on the engineer's two servo-skulls, taking them down before they could do any damage to the Pallet. The engineer responded by throwing his spanner at Twitch, but it only bounced off his helmet and the man apologized later, so there were no hard feelings. The rest of us took a little longer than Twitch to react, which meant the tech-acolyte had time to damage another psi-suppressor before Tink brained him with a battery. As the second suppressor failed, a ship-quake shook the bay, and the dead ghost-nids stopped dissipating and began to to flow together into large piles.

There were a few seconds of wild panic, and then Tink and Fio got the wide-angle illuminators on their drones activated, and we realized a few things. Firstly, the sound of angry tyranids clawing at the shaft had vanished, as had the re-assuring background noise of our combeads and the humming buzz of the overloaded psi-suppressors, but not the annoying lift-music. Secondly, the shaft walls were bleeding, and it was human blood instead of tyranid ichor for a change, also the tormented-looking faces that occasionally pressed out of the gore then faded again didn't look insectoid either. Finally, and most worryingly to those of us who knew the Occurrence Border's foibles, the level we'd stalled at didn't have a big cargo-bay sized door, just an ordinary looking hatch. Oh and Doc's armsman was dead, but that probably had more to do with the cantaloupe-sized hole in his gut than anything eldritch. Fio, after verifying that the psi-suppressors were still functioning, just not being overloaded for a change, jumped at the chance to do some repairs, and completely ignored the totally-normal-door. The rest of us gathered around it, and held a completely silent debate, which ended with our fearless leader stepping forward to open it while we got ready to blow apart whatever horrors waited on the other side. As the door swung open, we all lowered our weapons. Twitch whimpered, Aimy and Doc swore, Tink set Spot to "record", Sarge facepalmed, and Nubby cheerily waved at the smoldering, bearded skeleton at the head of the poker table, who laughed and waved back.

On the list of sane things to do, arguing with a dead Scout Marine is pretty close to the bottom, but that didn't stop Doc; or Nubby and Tink for that matter. All three of them started throwing excuses, explanations, and insults at the impaled Scout, who expanded his list of grievances to include: being too cowardly or stupid to shoot down a flyrant, abandoning a shuttle full of his battle-brothers in a xenos-filled backwater, and getting him stuck in some shitty poker room for all eternity. Nubby responded by calling his Primarch fat. The bearded skeleton, who'd been snickering at the exchange and Sarge's pained reaction to it, fell over laughing at that remark, and the argument petered out. Once he'd regained his breath, the skeleton apologized for the new guy's complete lack of perspective, and then immediately went on to congratulate us for finally doing something about "Frank". Since he gestured towards our pallet when he said that, we assumed that he meant the Deamonthrope, and didn't ask why it had a name. Sarge adopted his best poker face, thanked the skeleton for his praise, suggested that it time we got moving again, and began to shut the door. The bearded skeleton held up a finger, and suggested we take the lift all the way up to level 39. Tink, ever the pedant, pointed out that the lift only went to level 26.5, which prompted yet another bout of knee slapping laughter from the skeleton. Acting as if we'd said the most hilariously stupid thing he'd ever heard, the bearded skeleton repeated Tink's statement to his three companions, two of which joined him in laughing. After a few seconds, the faceless guardsman gurgled something, which prompted the spokes-skeleton to make a "get a load of this guy" gesture at him, and ask us if we minded. Without even thinking, Sarge responded with shrug, then flinched backwards as the head-shot corpse suddenly appeared at the doorway, and began to lean out into the lift.

The last thing we saw before Sarge closed the door was the two skeletons levering the Scout up, and the head-shot guardsman sitting down at the bar next to a vague ghostly shape that hadn't been there earlier. We noted the absence of Doc's recently-expired armsman, and unanimously agreed to never speak of him again. When the door was firmly shut, we all stood around waiting to see if anything else was going to happen. After a few seconds, Nubby cheerily announced that "dat wen' awlrigh'", clomped over to the lift-control panel, and pressed the new button before anyone could think to stop him. All of us swore at the little trooper as the lift launched upwards like a booster rocket had been attached to it, and a sensation disturbingly similar to a bad warp-transit rolled over us. It took us about eight seconds for the lift to reach level 39. This was admittedly a great improvement over its usual speed, but that didn't quite make up for the general unpleasantness of the ascent, and the way we were all launched a meter into the air when it slammed to a stop. We staggered to our feet, attempted to look around, and realized that we were somehow unable to direct our gaze at anything but the floor and the wall a the front of the lift, which held yet another door that didn't belong in a lift-shaft. Nubby scampered towards the lift-control panel again, only to find himself suspended in the air by his collar. Sarge handed him to Aimy, walked over the panel, and briefly perused the options before giving up and just hitting the "open door" button. It slid open to reveal a short unlit hallway that was just large enough for the Pallet, and another door. Lacking any better ideas, we entered the hallway, and were totally unsurprised when the door slammed shut behind us. What DID surprise us was the words "OUTER AIRLOCK DOOR (for real this time)" stenciled on its inside. Tink spoke for all of us when he suggested getting through the inner door as fast as possible.

Now, despite occasional bouts of irrationality and insanity, we WERE a bunch of semi-professional badasses, so we didn't just stand around panicking over how screwed we were. Within five seconds of the suppression failure, we had four guns pouring pulse-fire into the indistinct forms crawling up the lift shaft, and Doc and Tink were seeing to Fio and the damaged Pallet. Doc immediately diagnosed Fio's injuries as non-life-threatening, administered a few bandages and Tau-safe painkillers, and then steered the little xenos over to where Tink was doing his best to keep anything else from exploding. The top priority was the stasis unit, which was making the telltale sound of an imminent flicker. Given that this unit didn't have an array of grav-plates to keep anything inside it from escaping, Tink was operating under the assumption that any flicker over a second long would result in an enraged xenos daemonhost flying into the air and tearing us all to bloody pieces. He and Fio, who was badly shaken but still able to help, set to work stabilizing, splicing, and other technical shit, while Doc ran over to join the rest of us in our delightful game of "shoot the horrible monster before it closes to melee range and kills you". "Horrible monster" was really the best description we could come up with for what was climbing the shaft around the rising lift platform. By the time Doc had arrived we'd killed at least six of them between us (that's three for Aimy, the showoff, and one each for everyone else), but we still had no idea what the hell the things were. We could see tyranid chitin and claws, but they were mixed in with tentacles and massive bulging eyes, and the whole mess seemed to be covered with clouds of obscuring smoke. Twitch would up triumphantly declaring them to be his long-predicted Daemonids; none of us bothered to argue with him.

It took an absolutely grueling three minutes for the lift to clank its way up to us, but we managed to hold off the Daemonids (or whatever) until it reached us. We piled aboard and switched to a much-less efficient omnidirectional defense of the edges of the platform, which we immediately realized was not going to be enough to keep them from catching us before we reached the bridge. Not liking the idea of fighting 3-meter tall monsters as they climbed over the edge of the platform and directly into melee range, Sarge ordered the deployment of our remaining grenades and as many of Twitch's detpacks as he could use without collapsing a wall. The wave of explosions that rolled down the shaft was like a miniature artillery barrage. It was immensely satisfying to watch bug after bug being knocked off the walls to plummet to the bottom of the shaft. The distant sound of their enraged howls ending in gooey, cracking crashes warmed our hearts, but not as much as what we saw when the smoke cleared: the massed concussive force and the impacts of their falling companions had dislodged almost every one of the climbing Daemonids. We began picking off the last stragglers, and for a few seconds actually thought we'd bought enough time to reach our destination unmolested. Then the tendrils of smoke drifting down from the Daemonthope twisted into the giant pile of ichor and limbs at the bottom of the shaft, and something freaking massive pulled itself together. It rose out of the goo, turned a horned head towards us, and spread wings that touched the edges of the shaft. The five of us looking over the edge swore, as what looked for all the world like a winged hive tyrant with extra eyes and tentacles launched itself upwards.

The first detpack pegged the Flyrant on the tip of its pointy head, and knocked it half a meter downwards when it detonated, but didn't do more than blacken and crack then thing's chitinous armor. Before those cracks could heal though, a second pack exploded in the air just behind it, damaging it further and temporarily disrupting the solidity of its wings. Now, if Twitch hadn't been running low on munitions (it sounds impossible, I know, but several weeks of constant fighting was enough to run down even his stockpiles), this renewed explosive assault might have been enough to stop the Flyrant. Unfortunately, he and Nubby ran out of detpacks far before the giant daemonic bug ran out of whatever kept it alive. That didn't mean Twitch was out of explosives though, just ones that could easily be used against a moving target: when the Flyrant came through the ninth detpack explosion looking as pissed as ever, he instructed Nubby to grab a few parts from Tink or Fio, and began messing with the mixed assortment of mines he had left. Of course the rest of us weren't just standing around while this went on, we kept putting fire into the Flyrant's head and shoulders, we just had no idea if it was actually accomplishing anything. By our reckoning we'd done far more damage than it'd taken to kill the non-daemonic Flyrant that'd bisected Sergeant Gravis, but even the gaping holes left by Tink's weapon seemed to be filling in almost as fast as we inflicted them. Nubby quickly acquired the parts Twitch wanted, and then ran around collecting everyone's leftover flash and smoke grenades. Mind you, he didn't bother to ask us for them, the little klepto just sort of drifted by like a rancid breeze and they were gone. Anyway, everything even vaguely explosive was loaded into Twitch's pack, the makeshift detonator was rigged, and the improvised bomb was placed at the edge of the lift, where Tink threw a sizable wrench into the plan by refusing to attach it to Spot.

Despite the bomb-bag not being positioned in what Twitch had deemed the "sweet spot", the explosion still laminated the Flyrant across three of the shaft's walls. It was a HIGHLY satisfying result, and we would've paused for a second to congratulate ourselves, except for the fact that the entire shaft was making ominous creaking noises, and the thick layer of ichor and chunky bits was writhing and bubbling. Within seconds the whole mess had erupted into those hand-sized bugs that the Daemonthrope liked to summon from time to time, and the last portion of our trip up the lift was spent frantically shooting and stomping the onrushing swarm. It wasn't as serious a threat as anything else the Daemonthrope had thrown at us, but that final attack was enough to keep us busy until we reached the top of the shaft, and lent us all sorts of motivation to keep moving after we'd reached the bridge. We sprinted through the Occurrence Border's bridge with a ravenous tide of insects behind us, and hundreds more crawling out of every niche and shadow in the room. The bridge officers and their armsmen, who'd apparently been too busy doing naval things to help us with the daemonic Flyrant, ran around screaming and shooting, while we weaved through them and towards the door to the Astropathic Sanctum. Perhaps sensing that it was running out of time, the Daemonthrope began emitting a constant stream of inconveniencing phenomena. We skidded across patches of ice, were buffeted by blasts of wind, suffered dozens of painful electrical shocks, and endured the most godawful psychic racket, until we finally reached the door Jim was holding open for us.

We wound up camped in the Daemonthopic Sanctum for a few days, just keeping an eye on the thing, but it stayed put and didn't do anything warpy, even when the non-technomagical psi-suppressors were deactivated for installation. The Daemonthrope was still creepy looking mind you, with the metal-covered face, glowing eyes, and smoky wings, and all that, but it wasn't creepy FEELING anymore. When coupled with the fact that the Cogtain's crater no longer screamed at people (though it still couldn't be repaired), we took that as a clear sign that Fio's wraithbone-thingy had done the trick, and the Daemon was being held in check. After our paranoia had abated, we descended into the ship to see how bad the damage looked. The final tally was nearly a sixth of the crew dead, and half again as many wounded, which meant that the second Doc showed his face downstairs, he was hauled off to the medbay to lend a hand, and didn't reappear for several days. On the mechanical side the damage was considerably lighter: the ghost-nids hadn't bothered to vandalize anything, so it was mostly a matter of unmaintained systems having problems, and battle damage, most of which had been caused by us. 'Ol Bill was especially cross about this being the second time we'd nearly destroyed the bridge-lift's shaft, and the fact that the aft cargo-lift's platform was just GONE. Anyway, no critical systems were damaged, and our meager fuel reserves were still intact, which meant that there was no mechanical reason not to continue our trip to the Ordos Xenos research facility.

Finally, two weeks later, we came out of the warp in a single planet system. The fuel situation was such that, even with a minimum-distance dewarp, it still took us the better part of a day to coast our way into vox range of the small station orbiting the planet. It really says something about just how low you are when you wind up using your shuttles to push the ship the few million kilometers. As we got into vox range, Sarge dressed up and transmitted his credentials and the contact information he'd been given as part of his mission briefing, and held his breath, but thankfully this time the response came immediately. The Occurrence Border was cleared to refuel at the station, though docking was out of the question given that it was smaller than our ship. Sarge was instructed not to wait for the refueling, and deliver his cargo to the research facility (which was the only thing on the desert planet) as soon as he entered shuttle range. The relief that went through EVERYONE one the ship at hearing all this was massive. Doc actually cried when he heard them confirm that they had a medical facility capable of treating tyranid bio contamination. The rest of us were more restrained, merely cheering and holding a wild party, before blearily dressing ourselves in our best uniforms and moving Gravis and the Daemonthrope into the shuttle. The loading of the Daemonthrope was uneventful, except for the harrowing trip down the the make-shift lift, which involved a lot more swinging back and forth than seemed reasonable. It was crammed into the shuttle along with the usual cluster of psi-suppressors, and a mobile version of the wraithbone-device that Fio had devised. The little Tau would not be coming down to the planet with us, this being and Inquisitorial facility that experimented on xenos and all, but he begged us to bring the wraithbone back after the Daemonthrope was delivered, which is why his device had been mounted on the grox-skull encased Spot.

The Inquisitor accepted Sarge's introduction with a nod, and took a long look at the Daemonthrope's pallet. The web of cables hooked up to the wraithbone device obscured the wings from a cursory examination, but the man's eyes obviously lingered on the half-melted metal, and the general tau-ishness of pretty much every piece of tech on the pallet. Thankfully he didn't start jumping up and down screaming about heretical xenotech, and we all let out a breath of a relief as he turned away from the Pallet to face his two non-superhuman flunkies. That relief abruptly evaporated as he ordered them to take the Zoanthrope, and "store it in the live-sample holding cells with the rest of the evidence." Before any of us had managed to absorb the implications of that last word, the Inquisitor turned back to Sarge, and announced that he, his men, and his ship, were all under arrest by the joint orders of the Ordos Hereticus and Ordos Xenos. Fumbles and Jim both let out little whimpers, and Twitch and Nubby both immediately started to go for their sidearms, but paused as the Space Marines instantly raised their bolters. The rest of us stood there, slack-jawed, until Sarge managed to ask just what in the Emperor's name we were under arrest FOR. The Inquisitor's face went absolutely blank, and in a voice that seemed almost mechanical, but made Fumbles shake like a leaf, he replied: >What for? Well most recently, disregarding an order to cease all operations and return to headquarters, the murder of two squads of Space Marines, the attack of an Imperial Space Station, and the transport of a live xenos psyker for purposes of heretical experimentation. But the charge at the top of the list will almost certainly be aiding and abetting the Rogue Inquisitor colloquially known as "Oak". Well… Shit.