Deep inside the sprawling fortress-city referred to by all but the most pedantic of Inquisitors inhabiting it as "Sector Headquarters", No-Longer-Acting-Inquisitor Greg Sargent straightened his orange jumpsuit as the holding room door he'd spent the better part of seven hours staring at finally creaked open. The two Inquisitorial Stormtroopers flanking the door, who'd been stuck standing reflexively at attention for the entire time, breathed a little sigh of relief and hastily led the way into the courtroom on the far side. The four other Stormtroopers in the room relaxed as well as the impromptu poker tournament that'd been occupying the rest of the squad ended without further bloodshed and Aimy, as winner, put Doc and Tink in charge of collecting Twitch. While the two of them extracted the demolitions trooper from the pile of furniture he'd squirreled himself away in, Nubby collected the cards he'd "borrowed" and scooted the chair he'd subsequently been cuffed to over to the borrow-ee, who grudgingly uncuffed him. The Stormtrooper blinked in confusion as the little trooper sidled off after his companions without returning the cards, or the cuffs for that matter; he shared a pained look with the other Stormtroopers as they followed the guardsmen into the courtroom. By unanimous silent agreement, the unholy mess that'd once been the court's tastefully-decorated holding room was left for the janitorial staff to discover for themselves.

The Inquisitor's expression brightened as he opened the folio. "I see... " he looked back up to the Adept. "So all this is just-" he gestured at the teetering pile of documents. The Adept shrugged. "Like I said, idiots." "Hmmm, quite." The Inquisitor sat up, straightened his wig, and cleared his throat for a third time. "Greg Sargent, as servants of a Rogue Inquisitor you and your men are hereby sentenced to-" "Wait!", interrupted Tink, "You can't just sentence us! What about our trial?" Nubby stepped forward as well. "Yeah, you didn' even ask if we was guilty or not!" The Inquisitor raised an eyebrow. "Are you saying you're NOT part of Inquisitor Quercus' criminally oversized retinue?" "Yes!" Tink paused, "I mean no, but we definitely didn't do any of that other stuff." "An' if we did, we 'ad orders." added Nubby, completely ignoring the boot repeatedly slamming into one of his augmetic shins. The Inquisitor raised his other eyebrow. "Ah, I see. So you're saying your Inquisitor ordered you to," he looked down at one of the binders, "Assault, Abduct, and otherwise Obstruct a Traffic Officer in the Performance of Their Duties?" "Well, he might have..." Tink trailed off as he finally registered the glares of his comrades. "An' we definitely 'ad orders for the stuff wit the Zoan- OW!" Nubby doubled over as Sarge stepped forward. 'Yes sir." Sarge cleared his throat. "Those, uh, traffic offenses were committed in the performance of our duties. All of them." The Inquisitor turned his gaze to the noncom, who stared not-quite-back with the blankly fixed expression employed by soldiers receiving discipline since time immemorial. After several seconds the man shook his head, shot an annoyed glance at the massive pile of files and the Adept behind them, and sighed. "Noted. Greg Sargent, as servants of a Rogue Inquisitor you and your men are hereby sentenced to Stasis Imprisonment until such a time as the matter of your Inquisitor's loyalty has-"

So no shit, there we were, being hauled off to die the Penal Legions, just like our old Commissar always said would happen. Honestly, it really shouldn't have come as a surprise, especially given Oak's little comment about arranging for us to get a "shorter sentence". After all, the average life expectancy of a Penal Legionnaire is probably somewhere between one and zero battles. Needless to say, we weren't exactly thrilled with our oh-so-clever Inquisitor, though none of us could quite reach Aimy's level of simmering rage. It'd taken three Stormtroopers with shock batons to end our markswoman's little fit; she only started to calm down once she got a chance to read the letter that the Adept handed her as she was dragged out. We honestly thought the part where her mom said she understood it was all Inquisitorial political bullshit, wasn't her fault, and would always love her were all very touching. Less so the bit about how she didn't have to worry about disgracing the Von Humpeding name, because they'd already arranged to have her posthumously disinherited and struck from all family records if she died before the charges were cleared. Aimy took some comfort in it at least; said it was proof her mother actually wrote the letter herself. Sarge got an envelope from the Adept as well, but it turned out to just a wad of official paperwork and transfer orders. Given the way the sarcastic old bat had choreographed the whole farce we'd sort of expected something more, you know, secret orders-y? Maybe a little note explaining just where this top secret evidence-storage facility Oak wanted us to infiltrate was, and how in the Emperor's name we were supposed to accomplish this while stuck in a bloody Penal Legion? The only even remotely relevant thing Doc and Tink found in there was a bit saying we had ten days to claim our property out of evidence before it was all incinerated. We somehow doubted we'd be given a day off from penal-legioning to do so.

Our grim speculation was interrupted by the arrival of one of those cadet-commissar squads, led by a particularly unpleasant looking real one carrying a whip. The Commissar, a weasel-faced bastard somewhere between 60 and 600 depending on how much juvenant they'd pumped into him, angrily informed the Stormtroopers that they were late. After a bit of confusion about the transfer orders and why in the Emperor's name they'd given them to us, he ordered his minions to just chain us all together and get us in formation; he'd process us and send back the uniforms later. The Legion had almost finished forming up in a platoon-wise grid by this point. We were led to an empty spot at the near corner, where Sarge was instructed to stand out as far as the ankle-chain would allow and the rest of us lined up behind him. Satisfied that we were capable of standing at parade rest without any motivational whipping, the old Commissar told us not to move or say anything, and stalked off to stand at the head of our column. The reason for the parade became clear when a Scribe with a dataslate and an especially fancy Commissar (who we assumed was the base Commander) arrived and announced that the Inquisition was looking for volunteers. To our surprise, they actually got them, at least at first. At the back of our line, Twitch claimed that this was a clear sign that they were drugging the rations. Doc, who was in the spot ahead of him, actually took him seriously enough to look around and check for signs in the other Legionnaires, and got reminded of the "no moving" rule by the old Commissar and his whip. We watched as three whole platoons of chumps stepped forward were loaded up into transports, followed by two more that were more traditionally "volunteered" by the Commissars, and then Scribe announced that the rest of what his Inquisitor needed were specialists, starting with a demolitions expert. The old Commissar checked the papers we'd given him and stepped forward.

The message was passed back down the line to the platoon sergeant, who went bug eyed, but didn't manage to get an actual reply out before the Scribe, just a few platoons away, announced that the last man he needed was someone with a bit of command authority. As the Scribe asked the Commander had anyone properly Sergeanty, Twitch abruptly got the point, and passed the message to "JUST PUNCH SARGE DAMN IT!" back up the line, where it once again stalled at Nubby and Tink, who both took one look at the watching Commissar and his whip, and then nominated eachother to do the actual punching. The ensuing argument over whether Nubby or Tink would make the less suitable Sarge-assaulter was interrupted by a string of curses and Aimy charging past them at Sarge's back. One spot farther back in line, Doc looked down at the chain connecting his ankles to Aimy's just in time to see his feet fly out from under him. Nubby and Tink watched as the markswoman slammed face-first into the mud next to them, blinked, and then immediately resumed their argument, paying absolutely no attention to the approaching Commissar. Fortunately for the pair, before the actual whipping could start, attention was taken off them by the sudden arrival of the dark-skinned Legionnaire, who's flying tackle hit Sarge hard enough to pull both the arguing troopers down as well. Twitch, as the only guardsman left standing, watched with a certain amount of satisfaction as the Sarge pulled the Legionnaire off him and did his level best to kill the man until the fight finally broken up by several cadets armed with shock-batons. In the silence that followed the exciting round of noncom mud wrestling, the Clerk asked if the Commander if he'd been drugging the rations again.

One bomb-collaring and servo-skull shave-job later (the part where they'd tattoo our foreheads would apparently wait until deployment), we were standing around wondering just what the hell had happened and if we should've done, well, anything about it. Our discussion on the subject was interrupted by someone behind us asking the exact same question. We turned around to find a group of four Legionnaires staring at us, Sarge began to say something, and then paused and stared back for a few confused seconds trying to place why the four bald guardsmen we were looking at seemed so familiar, until Twitch and one of the Legionnaires both pointed at eachother and shouted "It's YOU!" and the rest of us (sans Tink) abruptly recognized all four of them as former Trainees from our brief stint as Inquisitorial drill-sergeants. It was hard to say who was more surprised, we all just stared at eachother for a few seconds, and then the leader of the group, one of the ex-PDF troopers, laughed, saluted Sarge, and said he never dreamed Oak would send *us* to get them out and we'd better talk to the Interrogator right away. At least, as soon as they found him; he'd snuck off during the muster to do something or other at our end of the parade grounds. According to them, he looked sort of like Sarge but bigger, grumpier, and blacker... Had we seen him by any chance?

Once we'd been officially inducted into the platoon (with Sarge as lead), issued proper Guard fatigues and some disappointingly power-packless lasguns out of a stash behind the Commissar's chair, the trainees brought us up to speed. As it turned out, the four of them (one PDF trooper, scribe, cleric, and no-longer-ex-con), hadn't been scooped up as part of the whole Oak thing, they'd actually been enjoying Inquisitorial hospitality since before everything hit the fan. Their team had done alright on their first few missions after graduation, as had the other trainees as far as they knew, but a few months back they'd run into trouble. The PDF trooper explained that it'd all been because of our training, you see, while our advice about just shooting anyone stupid enough to mess with the blatantly evil eldritch artifacts had served them well, we probably hadn't meant that rule to include Interrogators. At least not when there were witnesses around… The good news was that thanks to that decision they'd mostly survived that encounter, and the Inquisition investigators had actually agreed with their decision. The bad news was that grunts shooting their superior officers is generally frowned upon, regardless of what organization your in, hence the penal legion. They'd been in there for the better part of two months, and since regiments were shipped out ever two or three months, that actually made them some of the camp's most senior inmates. They'd arrived at the arrangement with their pet Commissar and had been trying to figure out if there was a way to get themselves "forgotten" when the regiment shipped out, and then the Interrogator had turned up and started talking about how Oak wanted to help them escape. Not being chumps, they hadn't believed a word of it and told him as much, until the man finally admitted he needed their help for something and would arrange for one of Oak's allies to extract them all together afterwards.

After a few seconds of dismayed staring at the proffered tools, Tink huffed, snatched them up and went to work. The rest of us watched as the techie began scraping the blunt screwdriver around the seams of his collar in search of something or other, and alternated between cursing at his tools (as well as whichever cogboy had written the manual), and flipping between three different technical diagrams. After nearly a minute of this, the former cleric suggested he worry about the collar later: the Interrogator had been trying for days and hadn't even managed to get his collar's cover off. Tink assured him that it was because the man was a technological idiot who didn't know a diode from a donut, whereas he could read a circuit diagram with both eyes closed and had spent the last year studying technology so advanced it made the mechanicus' simple little toys look like, um, simple little toys. The trainee nodded and agreed, and suggested that it might also have something to do with the fact that the manual was for a completely different model of collar than the ones we were all actually wearing. One without the special anti-tamper feature, or so he'd heard. Tink paused, and then very slowly pulled his tools away from his neck and suggested that it might be better if he started with someone else's collar first. Everyone in the room took a step backwards, except for Twitch, who suggested that maybe this sort of thing should be left to the demolitions expert instead then grabbed the screwdriver and instructed Tink to hold still. Tink decided he'd rather not do this, and darted behind the comatose Commissar with Twitch close on his heels.

Well, it wasn't exactly a plan per-se, more of a chore list. For starters, Sarge wanted to have a look at this Evidence building himself, so the trainees did some more fiddling on the napping Commissar's dataslate to get him included on the groundskeeping detail. While Sarge was out scouting, the rest of us were to put our heads together on the whole Collar problem. After a lot of inane argument, the technical side was assigned to Tink AND Twitch, and the pair were given firm instructions to start by actually reading the outdated manual instead of just looking at the pictures. They were going to need some proper tools of course, which was Nubby's job, along with the Ex-Con who said he already Knew Some Guys. Finally, since nobody present was willing to let Tink or Twitch fiddle with THEIR collars, Doc was asked to go to provide a corpse or seven. The Medic had objected, loudly asking why we expected him to just have a bunch of dead bodies lying around. Tink pointed out that A: He was an Imperial Guard Medic and B: this was a Penal Legion, the only real problem would be finding ones that still had their heads. Doc grumpily ceded the point and promised to go volunteer for the Legion's medical corps. The final chore involved the numbers from the notes, or to be more precise, the very similar ones Sarge vaguely remembered seeing on that little "Please Collect your Stuff" slip mixed in with our transfer orders… the ones that the old Commissar had walked off with. According to the trainees, they'd have been filed away in the Commissariat Command Post and none of us stood the slightest chance of getting anywhere near them. Luckily for us, we already had someone on the inside, all we had to do was figure out a way to make contact without raising any commissarial eyebrows. The trainees asked if we meant that Sister who'd come in with us, and were advised not to call Aimy that to her face if they valued their teeth.

According to one of the trainees, the four busses full of new arrivals were the Arbite's weekly delivery of fresh meat. See, there were two types of Legionnaires in the camp. Unlucky mudfeet and disgraced Inquisitorial agents only made up about a quarter of the Legion, the rest consisted of the hardened dregs of the planet's criminal underworld. Unlike us Guardsmen, who accepted our sorry lot fairly easily, the assorted gangers, assassins, heretics, and occasional outright lunatic chafed a little at their new strict military lifestyle, and apparently the more organized members harbored some downright lethal bad-blood for eachother. Anyway, as the busses unloaded, an entire platoon of Legionnaires jumped some of the new arrivals. Some of the Cadets moved in with their shock-sticks to settle things and one of them got a bit too cocky and wound up yanked into the melee, which was when their seniors stepped in and we got to see our fancy Discipline Collars in action. All at once, every collar in a large radius started beeping and almost everyone (including us) froze, but the melee's participants were a bit too wrapped in things and didn't stop until their collars went from beeping to an electrical buzzing and they all flopped over into the mud in a twitching heap. The Old Commissar strode out of the crowd followed closely by a pair of toadies as well an unarmed Cadet we belatedly recognized as a very stiff and unhappy looking Aimy. While a few Cadets pulled their comrade out from under the pile, the Old Commissar fiddled with a fancy dataslate like the one that was kept under our Commissar's chair, and very abruptly three of the Legionaries in the pile didn't have heads. Without a second glance, the man turned on his heel and walked off again, only pausing to instruct a squad to "clean that up" and shoot an unreadable glance at Aimy when she began to lag a little behind him. The Markswoman immediately sped up and didn't so much as glance in our direction.

During the periods of time when the Cadet overseeing the groundskeeping detail (the same morose-looking one that filled in for the Commissar during the morning) wasn't watching too closely, Sarge got a good look and the Mundane Evidence Building's layout and outer security. Nothing really interesting jumped out at him about the building proper, but his attention was grabbed by three smaller buildings sharing its end of the compound. The one directly adjacent the evidence building turned out to be a shipping and receiving depot, where the majority of the actual Evidence being stored came in and out. Judging by the sweating Inquisitorial Stormtroopers hauling load after load after load of boxes, it was the one menial job in the complex that hadn't been handed off to the Legionnaires. The second building spotted had an industrial look to it. The trainees said it was a plasma incinerator used for general trash burning and the disposal of the various evidence that the Inquisition was done with. When the Cadet commissar wasn't nearby, the PDF trooper quietly informed Sarge that the Legionnaire squad currently running it were a bunch of organized locals best not trifled with. More importantly, they were also the primary source of contraband in the camp. The final smaller building wasn't nearly as interesting, at least according to the trainees. They said it was just a laundry processing building, serving both the camp and other Headquarters staff in the area. The guys running it were rivals to the incinerator gang, but considerably less organized since two of their leaders had been executed that morning for stealing out of the bins.

The parade wound up visiting pretty much every building in the camp, with the notable exception of the Command Post, which the Commissar informed the pair was full of pissant busybodies unfit to choke on his massive… well, safe to say he wasn't on the best of terms with his nominal superiors. From what Tink and Twitch could gather from the little tidbits of sense mixed in with the incoherent ranting, the man had once had a pretty successful commissarial career with some fancy noble regiment. Medals, parades, beautiful women expressing their eternal gratitude to their planets noble saviors, and all that stuff; right up to the point where literally his entire regiment deserted (NOT the Tau Empire, Twitch checked). The man had just came back from a trip to planetary HQ with the regiment's other Commissar and they were gone, gear, armor, tents, camp followers and all; nothing left besides an excessively detailed note telling the campaign's senior brass where to stick it. Needless to say, said brass had been pissed. The Inquisition had gotten involved, things had gotten political, and here "they" were, assigned permanent duty to this shithole. Not to the legion mind, but the camp itself, everyone else got out eventually, one way or another, but not him or "that weasel-faced, self-righteous, ass-kissing, ladder-climbing, lying little shit". His once solace in life was that our "glorious" deaths would doubtlessly be long, horrible, and probably involve Orks with pointy sticks. Twitch wholeheartedly agreed. Anyway, after a final stop at the quartermasters for as much booze as the harried man running the stores would give him (plus a few extra bottles he commanded his minions to cram down their pants when the man's back was turned), Tink and Twitch were freed to do as much collar-tinkering as they could manage while the old man's increasingly slurred curses transitioned to snores. The Cadet never came back for the pallet.

Our shaky relations with the local underworld were only a minor concern compared with the looming 10-day time limit on them throwing all our stuff out. We weren't sure what Oak would do to us if his super-secret Conspiracy-foiling boxes got thrown in the incinerator, but we were pretty sure death would be a preferable alternative, so it was an incredible relief when we finally got our first real break on the sixth day. That morning, thanks to a downright heroic series of fuck-up by the locals during the live fire drill, nearly two dozen legionnaires landed themselves in the base hospital, while another ten skipped straight to the morgue. Doc's offer to handle the post-SNAFU cleanup, including the augmetic "recycling", was eagerly accepted by the overworked head medicae. That afternoon the drunken Commissar's escort was larger than usual, and a bag of tools was crammed under his chair. After the mandatory first stops to empty and refill the crotchey bastard, the parade paused at the morgue, where Tink and Twitch split off while Nubby and the ex-Con trainee stayed with the Commissar and kept an eye out for trouble. Inside the morgue, Doc had the seven legionnaires who'd died with their collars on laid out and ready, and watched over Tink's shoulder as the techie brought out his tools and announced his intention to start by isolating the primary control board. A few seconds of fiddling later, Tink had one of the collar's panels open, exposing a jumble of wires, circuits, shaped charges, and a little boxy-thing which he didn't recognize from the manual, which immediately started beeping. Tink managed to duck in time; Doc was covered with a light marinade of neck-bits. While Doc swore and attempted to fish the legionnaire's head out from the table it had rolled under, Twitch seized the tools from Tink and reminded the techie that he'd told him so: the first step HAD to be disconnecting the detonators. Doc swore again as a second head rolled past him.

Outside the morgue, Nubby noted that the trainee hadn't come back, and the commissarial posse the man had been so worried about seemed to be heading towards the hospital's entrance. After briefly debating finding somewhere else to be, the little trooper decided that what was probably needed was good old fashioned distraction. He eyed the composition of the oncoming group, and then chair-bound Commissar on the pallet next to him, who'd worked his way through half the bottle of Sacra they'd given him after breakfast to keep him quiet, and then grabbed the pallet's handles. As he pushed his cargo on an intercept-course for the posse, he leaned forwards: "Eh, uhh, sir? I was wonderin, what'cher 'pinion on... tech-priests?" The approaching group saw Nubby and his pallet coming; it was a bit hard to miss them, given that the drunken old man riding it was slurring at the top of his lungs about how if he had it his way all those smug metal bastards would be rounded up and shot like the heretics they were. His volume only grew as, at Nubby's prodding, he began expounding the various shortcomings of the martian priesthood, ranging from the moral, to the personal, to the sexual, and what he felt should be done about them. The group immediately began to curve around the obstacle, only to find Nubby and the Commissar turning to match them, and then turning again as they tried the opposite side. The demented game of anti-chicken continued until, at a range of around 15 meters, the ranting Commissar spotted the group's tech-priest, and loudly instructed his minion to push him closer. Nubby did as ordered.

When the Commissar and his posse finally entered the morgue, with their bolt-pistols drawn and a worried-looking Head Medicae bringing up the rear, they found a blood-spattered Doc standing over a similarly stained pile of clothing and augmetic body-parts. The Medic snapped to attention, attempted to salute, nearly brained himself with the severed metal arm he was holding, and (following the first rule of survival-oriented soldiers since time immemorial) Kept His Damn Mouth Shut. The Commissar eyed him for a second, and then swept his gaze around the morgue, taking in both the bloody mess and the complete lack of any other living legionnaires in the room. He motioned to the tech-priest, who waved around something that looked like a cross between a dataslate and an auspex, and then pointed at the pile next to Doc. At the Commissar's signal, Aimy moved forwards, dug around in the bloody mess, and after the slightest pause, extracted one of the detonated collars from it. The Commissar fixed Doc with an absolutely menacing gaze, and asked what in the Emperor's name he thought he was doing here. Doc didn't need to feign the panic in his voice as he began rattling off the Generian Regimental Regulations (5th Edition, of course) on the Post-Mortem Recovery of Wargear, Augmetics, and Personal Effects of Greater than Fifty Thrones Value. The Commissar's expression didn't change, but the cadets behind him shared a disbelieving look and the Head Medicae let out a pained groan. Aimy, catching on immediately, summoned every ounce of incredulous disgust she could muster as she asked if he was really stupid enough to try and salvage a live discipline collar. Doc just blinked at her, and claimed that it hadn't been THAT hard, at least not after he'd figured out you could skip the bonesaw if you set them off first by poking the "beepy-bit" with a scalpel.

Doc's "No" was cut off by Aimy's "Yes", after a slight pause, in which the Commissar gave Aimy a very piercing look, the markswoman explained that they'd just arrived in camp together. The Commissar stared at her some more, and then shrugged and announced that she wouldn't have any problem handling his discipline them. Aimy, without even the slightest hesitation, turned and popped Doc in the jaw hard enough to knock the medic across the nearest table. The Commissar just sighed, shook his head, and held out his whip to her as his Cadets dragged Doc outside towards the parade-ground. When Sarge returned from his groundskeeping detail, he was less than thrilled to find Doc lying on his stomach with a pile of inexpertly-applied bandages on his back, Nubby with a similar set around his burned neck, and Tink and Twitch arguing with each other about who'd been wronger. The only real bright side of the whole thing, aside from nobody actually getting killed, was that Doc managed to get in a brief word with Aimy as she cut him down from the whipping post. He was able to direct the markswoman towards the camp chapel, and that evening the ex-Cleric managed to finally catch her alone long enough to relay our urgent request for our mislaid transfer paperwork. At Tink's request the trainee also asked if she could get us one of those fancy collar-removing dataslates, but Aimy said that wasn't going to happen: while they had her dressed up like a red-coat, they sure as shit didn't trust her like one. Not only did the old Commissar have his minions following her and snitching on her every action when she was out of his sight, she wasn't even allowed to have a weapon and he personally frisked her every time they left the command building. Honestly that last bit surprised the hell out of us, not because it didn't make sense, but because none of us ever imagined Aimy had the self control not to at least try to kill the unpleasant old bastard on the spot.

So we needed a bunch of uniforms we didn't know how to get, and to remove a bunch of collars we didn't know how to remove, and that was still before we even got in the door. Once inside and passed the manned checkpoint that was the main barrier to entry, Tink and the ex-Scribe were fairly certain we'd be able to move through the majority of the facility using the security badges everyone who went in there seemed to be wearing. We just had to get one, somehow, and use the card-reading datalsate that'd been in the interrogator's stash to copy it onto a few other cards, also acquired "somehow". The incredibly vague plan after that was to walk around, potentially kidnap some clerk and force him to disgorge some directions, and eventually find wherever they'd shoved our gear and Oak's boxes. The one actual firm part of the whole thing was that since that was the day they'd be throwing our stuff out, nobody should blink when we showed up and grabbed it. Now, what they'd think when we rolled up to Oak's evidence-locker… Anyway, skipping over the question of how we'd get access to the evidence for what seemed to be the biggest case in the sub-sector, at least the Interrogator's notes had some reassuring bits in them about security screamer-tags only being applied to the contents of evidence boxes. Theoretically, we would be able to go in and swap Oak's boxes with some of the containers in his locker, and leave with the leftover empties without setting off any alarms. Then it would just be a matter of taking all of our stuff out the shipping entrance under the guise of incineration, and then just cheesing it back to… somewhere. So, yeah, safe to say were a bit dubious. Still, though, if Oak had told the truth about them putting everything we'd had on the Arbite vessel into storage, once we got to our locker we'd have weapons, grenades, and three entire crates of high-explosives to work with... and in our experience that could "handle" pretty much anything.

Laundry duty involved a disappointingly high amount of actual duty, largely due to the Commissar that'd previously managed the detail sticking around to make sure we didn't burn the place down or anything. The man actually seemed pretty impressed by our well-honed stain-scrubbing and underpants-starching skills and willingly turned command over to the morose cadet officially overseeing us at the end of the shift. Still though the way he was looking over our shoulders while we worked was enough to discourage us from trying to pocket anything. It wasn't a total waste though, we were at least able to ascertain that suitable numbers of HQ Stormtrooper uniforms came through for us to borrow a few, and we did indeed spot one with an ID badge carelessly left still-attached. That specific uniform wound up mis-filed back into the "IN" pile. Upon our return to base, we received even more good news: during their medically-mandated light Commissar-sitting duty, Doc and Nubby had come up with an actual non-suicidal idea for dealing with the collars. Well, actually it was Nubby's idea mostly, but that didn't NECESSARILY rule it out. While sitting around, watching the old Commissar work his way through the fourth bottle of the day, Doc had regaled Nubby with an in-depth, profanity filled, account of Tink and Twitch's decapacitation experimentation. At the point where everyone except the unfortunate medic had hidden in the bin, Nubby raised the question whether we REALLY needed anything better than the scan-proof fabric. After all, if the stuff could block that tech-priest's scanner, wouldn't it also block the Commissars' data-slates and whatever they used to watch for escapees? Doc's excitement over this novel new idea soured somewhat when he was nominated to be the test-subject while Nubby played mad-scientist with the old Commissar's dataslate.

Once again, we were stunned by just how suicidally stupid these guys were. It wasn't just that they showed up at our door to try and intimidate us with what was, at best, roughly equal strength, they also had the absolute gall to demand not only the hand-over of laundry-detail, but the old Commissar as well. Sarge did actually TRY to talk them out of it (even if it was mostly just to buy time). He began to say something along the lines of "just give us three more days to enact our secret Inquisitorial mission and it's all yours", but managed to catch himself in time and converted it to a vague request to work the job until all the old laundry crew was healed. This, coupled with some alcoholic reparations, the return of most of Tink and Twitch's tools, and the Owing of a One, seemed like a more than reasonable offer to us. Even the laundry-boss seemed to think so, judging by the way his expression fell and he started backing up when the big thug rejected it. Sarge's expression, on the other hand, didn't even change as his sucker-punch hit the idiot in the jaw. Surprisingly, the lead thug didn't fall down, at least not until one of the full liquor bottles the rest of us had been collecting for the bribe hit him square in the nose with every ounce of force Doc's throwing arm could muster. That shot was followed by two more bottles courtesy of Tink and Nubby, which hit the nearest two flunkies in the stomach and groin respectively. Twitch's bottle had a little flaming rag stuffed in the mouth and all things considered, it was probably a good thing that it just bounced off his target's head with comical thunk as opposed to shattering like he'd intended. Those thugs remaining upright immediately drew a combination of shivs, pipes, and clubs and started to advance, only to scatter backwards as Sarge kicked their leader down the short stairs like an especially ugly bowling ball. The arrival of the four trainees on both their flanks was a bit redundant.

The goons obviously could take a hint too, because when we got to training field, we encountered a pair of Cadets splitting incoming legionnaires up into new squads for morning drills. When the two baby Commissars spotted us, they immediately began homing in and started to bark off what sounded like carefully memorized group assignments, only to pause as none of us moved and they belatedly registered the snoring old Commissar we'd decided to bring with us. Sarge casually informed them that we had orders to stay as a unit, and asked if they wanted to have a word with our Commissar about changing that. The two cadets blanched, shared a look, and then left without saying anything more. The downside of bringing the Commissar with us was having to literally carry him, the chair, and the pallet through a full morning of drills, which made us a bit of a sitting duck. Aside from the occasional barrage of rocks or mud and unsuccessful attempts to sic other Commissars on us, the chief hazard was periodic attempts to sneak up and snatch or shank someone, which is a bit hard to pull off in an open-bloody-field, especially when one of the targets is a professional paranoid. Still though, had to give them points for persistence, most folks would quit after seeing a comrade lose BOTH eyes to crazed, fork-wielding demolitions trooper… There was a brief lull during lunch, followed by one last attack by a lone legionnaire who attempted to grab Sarge in the chow line. At least, we assumed it was an attack, just, like, a really half-assed one… fortunately the guy only received a little tap to the nose and a light round of kicking before the trainees pointed out that he wasn't affiliated with any known crime family, and mostly just ran messages for people. After some awkward sorries, a few bandaids, and some apology-booze from under the Commissar's chair, we received a note from Aimy directing us to meet her the following evening and collect our orders.

The following day went well, suspiciously so in Twitch's opinion; the rest of us were just glad not to have any new crises crop up on the day before our mission. The drunken old Commissar was brought along to drills again, but aside from a few Legionnaires obviously keeping tabs on us, there was no sign of the opposing force and things went smoothly. Or at least as smoothly as a round of field exercises performed while carrying a belligerent, hungover old man with the power to administer shocks directly to your spine COULD go. The real good news was when we managed to turn up two more badges in the incoming laundry, one of them belonging to a Stormtrooper Sergeant who we'd seen on duty at the Evidence building. Counting the one in the Interrogator's stash that brought us up to six, enough to get all of us (plus Aimy or one of the Trainees) past the automated portion of the building's security. Well, at least if Tink was right about the card-slate's ability to, as he put it "clone the creds", otherwise the majority of our little strike force would probably be facing some pointed questions about why someone whose badge granted them access as a Nutrition Technician was trying to enter an evidence storage building. There was also the slight issue of the names and pictures physically printed on the cards, but having done our share of gate-guard duty, we were fairly certain that nobody ACTUALLY looked at those. Probably. In any case, we had enough cards, and while we had our Cadet overseer distracted (see: napping for half the shift), an entire hopper-load of Stormtrooper uniforms (complete with helmets and assorted neckwear) was crammed behind a dryer. With the scan-proof scarfs Tink and Twitch had made, a little pouch of supplies made from the last scraps of the fabric, and a set of vaguely official-looking orders drawn up by Doc and the ex-Scribe, the physical prep was done. All that was left to do was meet up with Aimy and hope like hell she had our intel.

The small-ish Guard-issue prefab storage shed was, well, a Guard-issue prefab storage shed. It had a floor, walls, boxes, shelves, and (because this WAS a penal legion after all) a bunch of locking metal grates that completely failed to deter anyone armed with a screwdriver, thin piece of metal, or sufficiently strong stick. The sign next to the door sporting the words "Thieves Will Be Disemboweled With An Entrenching Tool" was presumably a more effective deterrent. Even the table bolted in the middle of the floor was Guard-issue, as were the little folding chairs around it, and the two goons flanking the entrance, and especially their freshly-sharpened entrenching tools. The at-least-half-Ogryn guarding the far door was starting the push it though, and while Aimy was technically the definition of Guard-issue, the small dapper man sitting at the table with her, sporting a striped suit and a silenced autopistol, most definitely wasn't. The Mob Boss, because there was no imaginable way the man could be anything else, gave Sarge a look that would've been intimidating if A: Sarge hadn't spent the last few years in Inquisitorial service, and B: the man had a chin. Like, at all. It was just a steady, regular slope from his little mustache to his abnormally large Adam's-apple. It was amazing. The only thing harder than not staring was not laughing, neither of which are smart when the other guy has a gun and you don't. So, in a quiet sort of desperation, Sarge dropped the man from his awareness, and plopped into the free chair across the table from Aimy. In a tone of forced chattiness, he asked how the Markswoman's day was going, Aimy rolled her eyes. >"Oh, you know, sitting around, being the bait in this half-assed trap, because some stupid ass dipshit couldn't bother to tell me they'd started a fucking gang war with the chinless wonder over here."

In an attempt at a tone of smug authority, the Mob Boss announced that he was deeply interested in Sarge's answer as well. What possible reason could there be for a washed up ex-guardsman to be secretly meeting with Commissar Sourface's favorite pet? Sarge ignored the question, but raised an eyebrow at the word "pet". Aimy didn't actually respond, but her expression clearly conveyed her complete lack of desire to pursue the subject; instead she asked whether it was true that Twitch had tried to stab her messenger to death with a plastic spoon. Sarge began to explain that it was actually a fork, at which point the Mob Boss's patience finally ran out and he screamed at both of them to JUST SHUT UP. After a few seconds of hyperventilating, the chinless Mob Boss made a visible effort to reclaim his whole suave villain persona. He announced that if we weren't willing to talk, then they'd better just have a look and see what was so important about the papers Aimy had been carrying. Lacking a suitably big and swivelly chair in which to lean back and menacingly tent his fingers, the mob boss settled for tilting his folding chair as far as it would go. He gestured at his goons with one hand, while using the other (the one with the LOADED GUN in it) to steady himself against the table. There was a brief pause while the assorted goons waited to see if their boss was going to accidentally shoot someone, and then a second pause as the Big Dumb Goon drew out a rather grimy wad of papers and visibly balked at the sheer amount of words on them. With a deeply furrowed uni-brow and one finger moving along the page, the big goon began laboriously reading off the four page standard Administratum boilerplate at the head of our transfer orders. The Mob Boss sighed, started to raise his palm to his face, nearly tilted over backwards, and grudgingly yelled at the goon to skip ahead to the part where it said WHY we'd been transferred to the penal legion.

Every man in the room, even the Mob Boss still balancing his stupid chair, stopped and stared in sympathetic horror as the unfortunate part-Ogryn swayed with every slight movement of the markswoman's hand. The tableau lasted a good ten seconds before Aimy delivered a final viscous twist and the giant goon toppled over like a slow-motion video of a tree falling… which gave Aimy just enough time to let out a panicked squeak as several hundred kilos of goon landed directly on top her. The shocked pause continued, now punctuated by sobbing moans from the part-ogryn and muffled curses from underneath him, until something finally gave; specifically, the bolts holding the table's top to its base. Physics being physics, the slightly-bent metal tabletop flew off with enough force to, well, shear metal bolts. The good news for the chinless Mob Boss was that said force was in the opposite direction from him. The bad news for the two goons behind Sarge was that he still had all five augmetic digits firmly embedded in the table's surface, and was pivoting with every ounce of force and weight his beefy noncom frame could muster. The whirring square of metal wasn't razor edged, but it still had more than enough sheer mass to crumple the chest of the goon who didn't duck in time, and seriously concuss the one who nearly did. According to Sarge's vaguely-defined plan, the bloody tabletop of justice should've continued its arc and smashed into the Mob Boss right where his chin wasn't, literally decapitating the whole criminal organization in a single blow. Unfortunately tables aren't exactly known for being high precision weapons, and neither was Sarge for that matter. Outside, Doc, Tink, the trainees, and a score of assorted goons all flinched as the shed's door blew off its hinges and a ballistic table wobbled overhead like a badly thrown frisbee. There was a pause, followed by a screech of "Waste 'em!" and the sound of someone panic-firing a silenced autopistol.

The inside portion of the brawl was, if possible, even less organized. While Sarge's opener had done a number on the entrenching-tool armed goons behind him, it not only failed to remove the Mob Boss' autopistol from the equation, it hadn't even upset the man's balance. On the bright side, it's rather hard to simultaneously balance a chair on two legs, accurately fire a gun, and scream in terror as an enraged noncom throws himself towards you. This meant Sarge only took two of the four shots sent his way as he closed to melee range, and he managed to dodge two more through the masterful strategy of tripping over one of the concussed goon's feebly twitching legs and falling flat on his face. Sarge still managed to make a grab for the autopistol on his way down, and almost certainly would've snagged the weapon if the Mob Boss hadn't chosen that exact moment to finally teeter over backwards. So on one side of the room there was Aimy still struggling to claw her way out from under the moaning Goon-gryn. On the other, one door guard was busy coughing blood while his companion stared vaguely around the room and tried to remember how his legs worked. So with both Sarge and the Mob Boss lying on the floor, that meant the only person in the room still standing was the Big Dumb Goon. Fortunately, the man lived up to his name, and didn't immediately sprint over and start stomping on Sarge's head. Instead he took a few seconds to cram the transfer orders in a pocket and grab one of the fallen entrenching tools, before slowly swaggering his way across the room while thumping the tool in his hand and doing the best evil-goon-laugh he could manage with a broken nose. He was rather surprised when Sarge decided not to just lie there waiting for his skull to be caved in, and grabbed the nearest available weapon: the Mob Boss' folding chair.

Outside, the fight had stalled out again. The Mob Boss' shouted command and Twitch and Nubby's surprise attack had briefly escalated things, but without any real leadership present (on either side) everyone's self preservation instincts had taken over. The good news was that our little force had managed to steadily creep towards the door over the course of the brawl, and Doc was able to take a peek at the mess inside and relay the situation while the rest of us covered his back. Mind you, the angle of the door meant that Doc couldn't see the wall where Aimy and the Mob Boss had landed, or even as far as where Sarge was desperately trying to remain on his feet for that matter, so from the rest of our perspectives what followed was a bit confusing. First someone yelled "FREEZE", then someone else yelled "DEY WHACKED DA BOSS!", and then there'd been a long pause as everyone looked at the Big Dumb Goon. Doc described, for all present, a dawning expression of "uh, sort of like one of those little smashed faced bug eyed dogs slowly realizing it's been left unattended next to a steak dinner and trying to figure out what to do next." Further commentary was cut off as the Big Dumb Boss pointed a finger and began to yell something, only to be interrupted himself by an ear-ringing, window-rattling, parade-ground bellow of: >"COMMISSAR DOWN! PRISONER RIOT IN THE STORAGE SHEDS!"

Inside, Sarge looked around fruitlessly for any more readily weaponizable furniture, and then swore and threw himself into a downright impressive dive for the fleeing Boss. His subsequent combat roll under three out of four wildly swinging entrenching tools and smashing through two pairs of legs would've been more impressive if the leg's hadn't belonged to Aimy's chair… The resulting confused half-chair half-noncom wrecking ball smashed into the wall next to the door and slid to the floor, where it alternated between bleeding, swearing, and trying to bludgeon the ankles of the four confused reinforcement goons. Aimy missed all this, on account of the half-Ogryn trying to rip her head off. Well, more determinedly waddling towards her with his knees held tightly together, but there was no questioning the murderous rage in those piggy little eyes. So the markswoman dropped the Mob Boss' corpse, took aim, and placed an autopistol round directly into the half-Ogryn's forehead. Her expression when the bullet bounced off with a little hollow bonk and weee-owwww sound would've been amusing if anyone had the attention to spare. In panicked reflex, Aimy flipped the fire selector to auto and tried again. Two of the six sub-sonic rounds wound up in the ceiling, one hit the dead mob-boss, and the remaining three just stopped, firmly embedded in the half-Ogryn's forehead as the big guy kept coming. There was another moment of panic as Aimy realized she had somewhere between 1 and 3 bullets left, and (if she crawled fast) about 10 seconds in which to use them. Fortunately the Markswoman's training kicked in before she ran out of either, and she belatedly shifted her aim downwards. The half-Ogryn's eyes widened and he clapped both his hands over his groin, only to keel over to the side as Aimy shot out his left knee with her last two bullets instead. She then swore as the big bastard just started crawling towards her.

The pointy-hats arrived in two distinct groups. The first one consisted of the old sour-faced bastard, backed up by his entire retinue of Cadets, and with the Big Dumb Boss nervously lurking right behind him, you know, just to make things obvious. Or he was lurking, until he crossed the invisible 50-meter radius around our Commissar's dataslate and abruptly flopped over into the mud like the rest of us. Sour-Face actually stopped for him, or at least to give him a few kicks, before grumpily taking out his own dataslate and tapping in an override command. We all enjoyed a brief second of blessed relief, and then the collars reactivated as the drunk old bastard mashed his thumb back down on the panic button while stubbornly glaring at his counterpart. Nobody except Aimy was in any condition to appreciate the ensuing pissing match. She described it as "a struggle of wills worthy of story and fucking song" and gleefully recounted Sour-Face's expression when he finally stomped across the field to wrest the dataslate away… just in time for the second group of Commissars to arrive and ask what in the Emperor's name he was doing. The second Commissariat relief force was led by our two depressed Cadets, who had the familiar look of people desperately hoping that whatever was going on wasn't their fault. Rather more importantly, it was also commanded by the Commandant, who, since Aimy had apparently scheduled our meeting during some big distracting brass-brief, had brought along a nice big audience of senior officers for the good ol' public reaming that followed.

Our Drunk Old Commissar's attention was seized via a dose of stimm and the offer of a fresh bottle. We got his gaze focussed on the general vicinity of Aimy, who was actually TRYING to look like a grateful rescue-ee, and then a very edited version of the last several minutes was "remembered" to him. We weren't sure how much really sank in, but the idea that he might have done something heroic definitely seemed to have been established, and he seemed nearly coherent by the time the ex-Cleric unsubtly asked how much it would annoy Sourface if Aimy were to become one of HIS Cadets. Eventually, the raging Commandant brought us all back to "THE PRESENT SERIES OF TOTALLY FORESEEABLE, EASILY PREVENTABLE, COMPLETELY SELF-INFLICTED FRACK-UPS." On cue, Aimy stepped forward again to give her report, and then surprised the shit out of us with this sudden spiel of High Gothic in this weird sort of bossy nasal drawling accent. It honestly sounded nothing like her, well, not the bossy part, more the baked-in tone of aristocratic arrogance... that and the lack of profanity. In any case, whatever Aimy had just said, at least half of the commissars present understood it, judging by the expression of dawning horror as they all looked from her to our nearly-coherent Commissar. To our amazement, the man actually SAT UP, and then slurred… something. In the best traditions of overly-competent subordinates and evil royal advisers, the Cleric translated an acceptance of Aimy's "life debt", as well as a request that the Commandant allow him to take over her training. The Commandant just stared, his eyes bugging out slightly and mouth hanging open, until the old Commissar broke the silence. >"Caush she's got nishe tits!" Aimy maintained her pokerface, and nodded in agreement with this sage wisdom.

After a few seconds of croggled silence, the Commandant just nodded at Aimy, and then we seized our chance and made a tactical withdrawal under cover of Sour-face's attempt to snap-graduate eleven of his Cadets into full Commissars, and the Commandant's enraged response. A miserable-looking Cadet "Sniffy" started to come with us, but Aimy's cheerful (yes CHEERFUL) insistence that she wouldn't have any trouble taking care of the Commissar by herself cheered him up immensely and he buggered off. The old Commissar was also cheered by Aimy's declaration, and insisted she ride up on the pallet with him where he could "keep an eye on her". She handed him a fresh bottle instead, which he accepted as a decent substitute. After a short detour to the medical tents to Commissarialy requisition some supplies, we returned to our barracks for our traditional post-battle "discuss what the hell just happened while Doc removes foreign objects from Sarge". Aimy was introduced to the trainees without any hair-related acrimony, the Commissar was tucked away into a corner with a fresh night-cap, and a round of drinks was brought out while we caught our prodigal markswoman up on events. For her part, Aimy didn't volunteer any details about her time in the Commissariat, and nobody aside from Nubby was dumb enough ask.

The camp was quiet, primarily populated by the few other life-long soldiers in the legion nervously whispering to each other about the unexpected break in routine. There was a small crowd gathering at the mess tent, but aside from that the only visible activity was around the command building and commissars' barracks. On closer inspection this activity seemed to involve a lot of boxes being taken out to the shuttlepad, and the realization of the only likely explanation hit us all at once: the Penal Legion was being deployed. Aimy was immediately sent in along with the still-snoring Commissar (for moral support), and returned a short time later with Cadet Sniffy in tow. The morose cadet seemed to have reached a whole new level of despair, and mostly just whined about how everyone except him, Aimy, and the two old Commissars would be moving out. Aimy and the trainees tried to prod him for more details, specifically details about the daily details and if they'd still be happening. They weren't having much luck until Sarge stepped forward, pulled the Commissar's dataslate out of his chair, and handed it to the ex-Scribe with directions to just transfer the little turd. Sniffy sniffed, and pointed out that he wasn't an idiot and had tried that on his first day: the Commissar's dataslate didn't have permissions to do anything more than a cadet's, for obvious reasons. Still though, this show of good faith won some grudging cooperation from the Cadet. His remaining reluctance evaporated completely when Sarge and the ex-PDF trooper pulled the young man aside, and pointed out that Aimy wasn't the sort of noble scion to forget a favor, and neither was her mother. A decidedly un-subtle hint that if Sniffy helped us with our little "laundry run" he might get his longed for transfer sooner, perhaps even today, was enough to win him over completely.

Commissar Sour-Face practically radiated smugness as he strode into the room, one hand holding his dataslate while the other kept his bolt-pistol trained on Aimy. He was alone for a change, not that it seemed to bother him as he snidely reminded Aimy that Rule Number Three was "no weapons'' and gestured at her to disarm. For her part, the markswoman stood stock-still, glaring at the man with more hatred than any of us had ever seen before, not that we were in any condition to see it right then either. After several seconds of futile stalling, Aimy grudgingly parted with her newly-acquired laspistol and chainsword, earning her a rage-inducing "good girl" from the smug Commissar. Her dataslate came next, though it was already showing an "unauthorized user" message on its screen, and the whole lot was kicked out the door, which was kicked shut in turn. Surprisingly, he then holsted the pistol, swapping it for his damn dataslate and gloatingly holding his finger over the "execute" button as he surveyed the room full of twitching guardsmen. He snidely reminded Aimy that there was a reason the regulations forbade "fraternizing" with the rabble, not that he believed that's what we actually were. Then, to our collective amazement, the man started monologuing. It quickly became apparent that Sour-face wasn't any more hinged than our Commissar, at least judging by his rant about how Aimy was going to be his ticket out of there, one way or another. And we were in position to judge, because inside the laundry hamper Tink had fallen into when his collar activated, the techie had finally managed to wrangle the anti-scan bag around his collar. It was sheer luck more than anything else that he wasn't spotted as he poked his head up to survey the situation, and even luckier that the exact two tools he needed were right there next to him.

Amazingly, even getting doused in whatever cocktail Twitch put in those things wasn't enough to do more than slow the crazy old bastard. The Commissar reeled backwards, holding his breath and keeping his eyes closed until he was clear, and then abruptly turned and put his boot into the ex-Scribe's face mid-tackle. Nubby's own lunge fared a bit better thanks to his shock-proof augmetics, carrying him over the face-planted trainee and directly towards the Commissar's face, only for the man to snatch him by the collar mid-air, and hurl the little trooper across the room. It was when he realized that Nubby was holding his precious dataslate that the man started to panic. The Commissar immediately reached for both his pistol and chainsword, but didn't manage to draw either before Sarge's shoulder-check hit him in much the same way a Flyrant hits a dumb Scout Marine. The impact as the pair hit the industrial-scale laundry units was quite literally bone-shattering, and while Sarge managed to stagger upright on his third attempt, the crazy old bastard stayed down for the count. By the time Doc's group returned a convenient minute later, we'd retrieved everyone from their assorted hard landings, disarmed the apparently unconscious Commissar, and opened some windows before we all choked on weaponized cleaning agents. Our medic was not exactly thrilled to find himself dealing with yet another round of collar-burns, not to mention the ex-Scribes badly broken nose, Aimy's dislocated shoulder, and Sarge's self-inflicted concussion. On the bright side, the scouting mission had gone fine, and our acquisition of Commissar Sour-face's unrestricted control dataslate opened up some interesting opportunities, assuming Tink could get it to work for him that is.

Nubby was dispatched to find a mop while the rest of us got back to work on the mission prep and laundry, and Sarge did a mental wellness check on our hyperventilating markswoman. Which is to say, he asked Aimy if she was feeling better, got a "Yes", asked if she wanted to talk about it, got a "No", and then shrugged and yelled at her to clean her uniform. Aimy blushed. Once the load was done, our laundry hamper was prepped, and the Commissar's remains had been scraped into a laundry hamper of its own, Sarge gave the order to move out. The trainees went off to the freight entrance with the bin full of fresh-diced-Commissar and the man's dataslate, with directions to keep our exit open and make sure nothing important got accidentally incinerated mid-mission. The rest of us, still wearing our Penal Legion uniforms except for Aimy, formed up around our laundry trolley and the Commissar's pallet, and went right in the front door. The lobby of the Mundane Evidence Storage Building wasn't particularly impressive, consisting primarily of a drab little carpeted room with a few uncomfortable chairs and a recaff machine that had last been cleaned sometime during the Horus Heresy. The security checkpoint immediately past it was rather more impressive, what with all automated gun emplacements and cybermastiff kennels lining the airlock-esque scan room leading into the building proper. The terminally bored Inquisitorial Stormtroopers manning the checkpoint were equally impressive, at least until they registered our decidedly non-Inquisitorial appearances, and brought out the recaff mugs they'd stashed out of sight when the door opened. Rather than wait to be asked what in the Emperor's name we thought we were doing there, we rolled the cavalcade past the door sentries and into the scan room, where Aimy stepped forward and announced that she was there to "Get her shit".

Interestingly, all the goodwill our blatant bribery earned us was overshadowed by the Stormtroopers' response on hearing Aimy's name. The Sergeant did a double-take, and then buzzed someone on his desk's vox unit, before abruptly getting up and leaving through the door behind his desk. The two Stormtroopers on door duty just shrugged when we looked at them. After a short wait, during which Nubby managed to exchange a few pairs of socks for a round of hot drinks, the Sergeant returned accompanied by something so surprising that lesser men would've spat their recaff: a Stormtrooper Rupert. Not THE Rupert of course, rather the exact sort of painfully keen and woefully inexperienced junior officer that'd doomed more honest guardsmen than all the Traitor Marine legions combined, but in a Stormtrooper uniform. We all stared in shock, I mean, logically we knew that Stormtroopers had junior officers just like everyone else, but we'd always assumed they just started at Captain or something. Seeing a Stormtrooper with LT tabs was just wrong, and the experience was not helped by the way he boggled at Aimy like a recruit that'd just been issued his first porno slate. After a small prod from his Sergeant, the Stomtrooper Lieutenant stepped forward, and ascertained that Aimy was indeed here for her stuff, and yes it was urgent, because we were all deploying, and yes Aimy was really one of THOSE Von Humpedings. The obvious firmly stated, the LT retreated through the door along with the rather put-upon Sergeant, only to reappear at the room's observation window and press his face up against the decidedly two-way glass. Nubby and Tink snickered as a large foggy patch grew around the Storm-Rupert's face, but fell silent when Aimy reminded them who here had a chainsword.

This second checkpoint hadn't been on the Interrogator's plans, but that was understandable given it looked like it'd been set up within the last few days. It wasn't much, just a single Stormtrooper with a clipboard, and a senior looking scribe sitting at a desk covered with dormant servo-skulls. We watched as our scribe rolled forward and a sort of bureaucratic arm-wrestling match began, with a lot of arguing about the difference between a "release order" and a "disposal order", and why our request didn't violate some sort of "freeze". For his part, the Stormtrooper eyed us, and casually asked why we were all wearing scarves. There was a brief moment of panic, during which Sarge mentally ran through all of the vague excuses we'd come up with, before finally shrugging and just raising the edge of his scarf to expose the discipline collar, and announcing that we were wearing them because our Inquisitor was a massive asshole. The Stormtrooper winced in sympathy, but then frowned and pointed out that he only had authorization to let through active HQ troopers, and he would need to verify our credentials. Sarge began to proffer his doctored ID card, hoping like hell that Tink had done as good a job on them as he'd claimed, but the Stormtrooper waved him away and asked the pair of arguing scribes whether the psyker had come back from the bathroom yet.

As infiltrations of top-secret Inquisitorial facilities went, it was safe to say that we'd achieved the title of "Most Half-Assed". Honestly, we'd been grilled harder by stingy quartermasters, and Tau ones at that, but we weren't going to look a gift critter in the orifice, at least not without a good pair of gloves. That said, we did still try to pry some information out of the scribe as he and the servo-skull led us through the massive grid of corridors, but there was something about the place that seemed to discourage conversation. The walls just sort of drank in sound, making it hard to do more than nod along as the scribe nattered about how the recent servitor recall had made such a mess of things. In fact, according to the Scribe, the facility was so short on manpower they'd been trying to get the Penal Legion to assign a few details to help inside as well as outside, but they hadn't been able to get the security authorization. Doc broke in, and asked whether Aimy's assigned penal detachment could've come in with her under her security, and the rest of us groaned at the realization that we probably could've just walked in without any of the stupid disguise or laundry stuff. At least the helpful old Scribe was able to authorize the "return" of Aimy's legionnaires, actually printing out a little form from an augmetic in his chair, and handing it to Aimy with a cheerful suggestion that she just take it to the guards on the freight exit instead of bothering the main security office.

The scribe handed Aimy a battered data wand, hastily explaining the litanies of identification and deactivation, and stressing the importance of not removing or breaking the seal on any item that hadn't been deactivated first. With a friendly direction towards the nearest supply closet, where cutting implements and first-aid kits could be found, he rolled off. Tink grabbed the wand, and hesitantly poked the little electronic seal on one of the corners. A hologram of a MRE appeared, along with a brief description, ID code, access log, and a little menu which Tink carefully navigated. The rest of us watched with growing impatience as the techie confirmed that he was sure he wanted to access the item, that he had read and understood the legal ramifications of accessing it, that he wanted to remove the item, that he'd read and understood the legal ramifications of removing it, and that he didn't want to review all those documents again.Twitch summed up the general mood with series of dire curses on all bureaucrats. By the time Tink had the first few randomly selected items deactivated, and a pair of scissors had been fetched, broken, and abandoned in favor of Sarge's augmetic hand, it was obvious that this was going to take far longer than we had time for. Everyone but Tink (and the old Commissar, who'd been wedged under the racks at the far wall) began searching the racks and boxes for the real necessities. The room's small floorspace was ankle deep in vacuum sealed junk when Nubby, having climbed through the racks to the back of the room, triumphantly chucked out a distinctly lasgun shaped package. Not just any lasgun mind you, an oversized, blocky looking, totally-not-techno-heretical lasgun.

With the annoying voice of reason out of the way, Tink and Nubby extracted the techie's plasma gun, and the unpackaging process became significantly faster, if rather foul smelling. Admittedly, this completely violated all those directions the Scribe had given us, but when the first one didn't trigger any alarms, Tink had declared it all a bunch of horseshit. It wasn't until a light started flashing above the door that it occurred to either of the pair to check whether the room had a fire detector, but fortunately it appeared to just be some sort of minor warning which quickly shut itself off as the room's air circulation automatically activated. Unfortunately the old Commissar was less forgiving, coughing and grumbling in a distinctly non-tranqed, not to mention exceedingly annoying, fashion. After the third outburst, Tink announced that enough was enough, especially now that we'd gotten out of the collars, and directed Nubby to dig the old geezer out and take him somewhere less distracting, like one of the servitor-storage rooms just down the corner. Nubby began to argue about being ordered around, but decided a little walkabout would be nice, anything to get him out of the cramped little fume-filled room faster really.

At Twitch's insistence, the scout patrol continued around the grid to the other side of the junction, turning up two more terminally-bored Stormtroopers, before arriving at the final connected corridor, where a pair of far more professional-looking Stormtroopers blocked the way. Before anyone could think to stop him, the demo trooper walked up to the pair, and asked if Oak's shit was through there. He got a silent nod. Twitch asked if "Inquisitor Big Hat" was still there, and got a snort from the second trooper to go along with another silent nod. Twitch turned to Sarge and Aimy with a triumphant finger-guns, and raised the question of what to do next. Sarge turned, trying to avoid faceplate-contact with the two guards, while poking his combead in an attempt to raise Tink. After a few seconds of frustrating silence, he pulled the headset off, checked its indicators (which were all green), and started checking the other channels to see if he could hear anything on any of them. He stopped on the main Stormtrooper band, listening to the calming chatter of patrol check-ins, and then shrugged and announced that Tink's combead must be on the fritz. He began to suggest that we just get on with things as planned, when the door abruptly opened to reveal one of those incredibly creepy flying "cherub" sevitors. One of the guards announced that the Inquisitor was ready for us, and motioned for us to follow the creepy thing. Tink and Aimy stared in shock, but Sarge just nodded and motioned for the pair to follow him into the hallway.

Back at said vault, Doc returned with penal-legion helpers in tow. The Stormtroopers working the freight bay had objected to him bringing in the trainees, but only because they'd been doing a great job of hauling stuff to the incinerator, and none of the troopers were keen on going back to doing it themselves. They'd bowed in the face of Doc's little printed form though, and reluctantly allowed their helpers to head inside, along with several empty pallets and one laundry hamper full of fresh-minced commissar. Bringing the group through the facility hadn't been a particular problem either, except for the part right at the end, where Doc encountered Nubby trying to jam the sleeping old Commissar into the tiny supply closet across the hall. Doc sent the trainees in to start helping Tink, and went off to supervise Nubby's drunk-commissar-storage project. The cretinous little trooper whined that he'd checked every door he had access to, and the small supply closet was the only one even remotely acceptable. Doc pointed out that, even if Nubby did manage to fit the Commissar into it, the massive pile of office supplies he'd emptied out of it were a bit of a give-away, not to mention what would happen if anyone else needed to come get an easily-broken pair of scissors. Nubby insisted that the other rooms he checked were actually worse, for some unspecified reason, but grudgingly grabbed the Commissar's pallet, and followed Doc down the hall to re-check those servitor storage and maintenance rooms.

Tink surveyed the room, with its tight rows of servitor-berths inexplicably filled with what looked like naked stormtroopers and a few scribes. After a few seconds of pondering, Tink pointed out there was still PLENTY of room if they just shoved 'em all up in a pile against the far wall. Doc explained that he'd already thought of that, and the problem was that only a few of them were actually dead. Wouldn't do to have them wake up and start asking questions about why people were shoving Commissars in there with them. Also, Nubby added, it would be super unhygienic and a lot of work. Tink nodded in reluctant agreement with their sound logic, and began to turn the pallet back around, only to abruptly stop part-way (nearly sliding its snoring cargo off) and ask what was wrong with the other room. Doc and Nubby both looked at eachother, obviously waiting for the other to explain, until Nubby finally made a little apathetic shrugging gesture. He walked up the door labeled Servitor Maintenance and Control Shrine 4 and knocked on it. Tink watched, slightly nonplussed, as an annoyed-looking man in robes opened the door and firmly stated that NO means NO, not even if they asked pretty please or promised he wouldn't wake up, not to mention throw up! Doc immediately apologized and began offering tips on cleaning bodily fluids out of clothing, but stopped as the man made a little gesture and touched the glowing crystals on the orante necklace he wore. Tink peeked behind the Psyker, surveying the impressive little cogitator array that had been wired into the building's main control and communication systems. He paused for a second, looking from the Cogitator, to the Psyker, to the closed Servitor Bay, and then back to Doc and Nubby.

In a room full of not-dead psykers, Sarge delivered an exceedingly precise report of the contents of Aimy's vault. To wit, parking tickets, guns, explosives, beer bottles, and more parking tickets. After nearly a minute of this, the Inquisitor held up a hand and clarified that he wanted to know what had happened and why Sarge was HERE. Sarge winced at the feedback in his combead, both from the irate Inquisitor and the poorly-disguised psyker muttering in the corner, then reached up and turned the stupid thing off. Ignoring the Inquisitor's raised eyebrow, Sarge truthfully reported that Cadet Commissar Von Humpedig arrived to collect her stuff, and… they'd… uh… come here. Because orders. Aimy and Twitch shared a look of growing alarm, but the Inquisitor only sighed and asked Sarge why he wasn't wearing a psi-shield. The answer, "Because we weren't issued any?", did not seem to please the man. He glared at Sarge, which didn't really have much effect given the face plate. The inquisitorial glowering was interrupted by a shrill beep from under Sarge's scarf, prompting further demands as to why he was wearing a scarf, why said scarf was beeping, AND where his psi-shield was. Sarge, still standing at a firm attention, got as far as "Because…" before the Inquisitor held up a hand and declared that he really did not care. In an exasperated tone, depressingly familiar to us from our previous missions, he directed Sarge to turn around, go back to Aimy's vault, and STAY there until the Interrogator shows up, as had been outlined in the mission briefing. And then to go get a damned psi-shield. Sarge, Aimy, and Tink, thanking the sweet merciful Emperor, saluted as the Inquisitor strode past them to reopen the door. Those thanks came to an abrupt halt as the door opened to reveal three familiar-looking stormtroopers, one of them with their hand raised to knock.

Actually, what the Savants were yelling was a bunch of gibberish "Throne-washes-Tallarns" stuff, but the intent was pretty clear as the three young scribes all sat bolt upright and turned to glare at us. The fact that they were psykers was also pretty clear, what with the nimbus of warpy energy forming around the one in the corner, and the one at the table levitating up into the air. The real clincher though was when the one over by the actual scribes abruptly turned into a daemonic horror the likes of which man was not meant to see; a towering flickering mass of mouths and all-seeing eyes, the sort of monstrosity that could not be fought, only fled in a futile attempt to postpone the inevitable grisy end. We shot it anyway though, because what else were we supposed to do? Whatever the psyker thought was going to happen, it wasn't three guardsmen panic firing xenotech plasma weapons in an enclosed area. When Sarge and Twitch ran out of ammo all that was left of the psyker (not to mention the chair, table, half a shelving unit, and one of the hypnotized scribes' arms) was a smoldering stain on the vault floor. The two remaining psykers and their Savant handlers all stared in utter shock, which was finally broken as Aimy realized she still had a few shots left, and promptly shot one of the Savants. The remaining old man drew a needle-pistol and leapt for cover, screaming more command-phrases and gesturing with the data-wand in his free hand. Sarge and Twitch both ducked as all three cherub servitors swarmed them, prodding at their faces and hands with miniature shock-mauls while screeching and laughing in a far more disturbing way than the faux-Daemon had managed.

Twitch, having finally succeeded in reloading, turned to take out the last cherub, only for his mind to go blank as well. Sarge, being gratifyingly quick on the uptake for a change, managed to grab the mind-puppeted demo trooper's weapon and yank the barrel upwards just in time. Twitch responded by repeatedly attempting to shank him with a sharpened fork, but didn't manage to penetrate the armor before his collar activated again and the psyker released him with a pained yelp. A good three meters above all this, Aimy's deathgrip on her weapon carried her over the top of one of the shelving units, as well as the rather-surprised Savant using it as cover. Rather than wait for the elderly man to shoot her like so much skeet, the markswoman twisted her body around and planted both feet against the side of a heavy-looking box and kicked off as hard as she could. The box, proving even heavier than it looked, barely even shifted, the shelving unit on the other hand… The Savant let out a little screech of terror and sprinted along the aisle, throwing himself to the ground as the shelves finally slammed into their neighbor, pushing it over as well and leaving him in a small gap full of falling clamshell casings. Aimy surveyed the carnage as a third set of shelves began to teeter, and found herself drifting off into a sort of peaceful doze. She didn't even realize she'd let go of her weapon until the strap caught her in the armpit, abruptly jerking her attention back to the present. Aimy twisted around to glare at the telepathic psyker by the vox unit, and after a brief survey of the available options, grabbed her stormtrooper helmet and hucked it at him.

In accordance with the laws of narrative causality, at precisely the moment when the Inquisitor had said "until the Interrogator shows up", a sallow-skinned young man and his two companions asked Nubby what he was doing standing in hallway with a pallet full of unconscious Commissars and odd-looking energy weapons. Corporal Nubby Nubbs, Inquisitorial Stormtrooper, saluted and proudly told the pale young man with the psyker-staff that he was keepin' watch while 'is mates Doc and Tink checked out da psyker closet. The Interrogator groaned, and motioned at one of his retainers to inspect the room. Doc and Tink looked up from the cogitator unit as the door opened, framing a dark, lithe blur sprinting towards them. The medic reacted first, fumbling for his carbine, only for a hand to yank it out of his grasp and pull him forwards into what felt like a power-hammer blow to the chest. Tink got to watch as Doc got kicked past him with enough force to break his weapon strap, and then his own weapon was yanked forwards, dragging him out of his seat face-first into the plasma gun's butt. A slightly nasal feminine voice complained: "He got himself shot in the damn face by these idiots, and I think this one with the fancy gun might be a frakkin officer." Doc and Tink tried. They really, really did. Despite the broken ribs, Doc managed to get back up and launch a tackle at the body-suited woman (who, to be fair, wasn't even looking at him), only for her to slap him in the face hard enough to shatter his faceplate and leave the stunned medic in a heap on the floor. Tink made a grab for his gun while she was busy, and got smashed in the face with its butt again for his trouble. Outside, the Interrogator casually reminded the woman not to kill anyone, while he focused on psychically examining Inquisitorial Stormtrooper Nubbs.

In the dead-psyker-closet, Tink and Doc had decided staying down was the better part of valor, especially since the woman had finally gotten tired of re-breaking Tink's nose with the plasma gun, and was now holding it trained on the pair. Both guardsmen weighed their severely limited options, and lacking anything better, settled in to wait and see what happened next. That turned out to be the distant krump of a grenade, followed by several runes flashing red on the fancy cogitator setup. The woman stared in confusion at the mysterious blinking lights; Doc and Tink, having spent enough time poking at the thing to know that it was hooked up to the building's alarm system, decided the time had come for one last try. Tink leapt at the woman, while Doc went for the cogitator. Realizing what was going on fairly quickly, she whipped the plasma gun towards Doc and pulled the trigger, and then stared in consternation as the gun emitted a short blue beam instead of a ball of plasma. Responding in the standard Imperial fashion for a warrior beset by unexpected weapon malfunctions, she raised her hand and gave the gun a good smack. Also responding in the standard Imperial fashion, the plasma-gun vented a blast of superheated gas directly into her face. Tink's tackle hit the woman roughly half a second later (his first successful hit of the fight), and while he didn't do more than stagger her, he did manage to get both hands on his beloved plasma gun. The blind leg-sweep she responded with hit his shins with considerably more force, as well with an unpleasant cracking sound. Doc ignored the fight going on behind him in favor of desperately searching for the cogitor for some sort of "Approve" button. Deciding it either had to be the yellow check-mark or the green circle, he simply mashed both of them, and was rewarded with the sound of every vox in the building simultaneously blaring the fire, weapons-discharge, and emergency-lockdown alarms.

Neither Nubby or the Interrogator waited for the flanking maneuver. The Interrogator staggered to his feet, gesturing at Nubby in appropriately psyker-y fashion, only to screech in surprise as the little trooper lunged out of cover, brandishing a silenced autopistol. Abandoning his psychic attack, the man scrambled around the pallet barely ahead of a series of "bangs", desperately trying to keep the bulk of writhing Commissar between him and his assailant, and shouting warnings and instructions at the aristo. For his part, the dapper man picked his way through the detritus of half-packed crates, and pointed out that Nubby's gun hadn't actually been loaded. A slightly panicked voice from the far side of the Commissar informed him that it was totally, definitely, 100% loaded, and was just silenced. The aristo asked why he'd been shouting "bang" then, and was rewarded with the little trooper poking out his autopsistol, and yelling "fwip" instead. The Interrogator sighed in embarrassment, and made another, uninterrupted psychic gesture. A short distance away, a very angry woman with plasma burns on her face stopped trying to dislodge the flailing, screaming Tink from the malfunctioning plasma gun, and just dropped both of them to the floor. Doc, knowing exactly what was coming next, scrambled away from the cogitator and tried to hide behind one of the servitor maintenance stations, only for a vice-like grip to close on his ankle and yank him out with enough force to fling the medic against the far wall. Her followup attack was interrupted as Tink switched the home-made fire-selector on his plasma gun from "cut" to "maximal", and shot her in the back.

The aristocratic inquisitorial agent, having successfully navigated the battle without getting shot at, and very proud of that fact, screamed in surprise as his superior's head detonated in a spray of flaming skull fragments and meaty bits. There was a brief pause as the aristo took in the abruptly changed combat situation and a confused Nubby picked up the fallen autopistol and tried to jam it back into the corpse's nerveless hand. Then the Commissar spotted him. The barrage of laspistol fire had more in the way of enthusiasm than accuracy, but it was enough to convince the Aristo that it was time to take some cover. A panicked scramble left him crouched down behind one of the half-empty boxes littering the hall, trying to draw a bead on the furiously cursing Commissar, but flinching back with every poorly-aimed las-shot. A little behind him, the door to Aimy's vault slid open and the confused face of a penal legionnaire poked out, jerked back in, and then leaned back out again, this time accompanied by four more faces, as well as five lasguns. After a few seconds of watching, and one uncomfortably close miss in their direction, the former PDF trooper cleared his throat, and asked what was going on here. The Aristo blinked, laughed nervously, and immediately held up his hands.

As it turned out, Tink was "it", since he was the one who finally got the combeads working. The techie's broken shins had been splinted, and he'd been given stimm from Doc's recently-recovered field aid kit, which was enough to get him propped upright at the dead psyker's cogitator. What really got Tink moving though, was the sight of a trainee unpacking Spot 3.0 (complete with Grox-skull disguise and a little cartoon daemonthope kill-marker etched next to the one of the bonked Eldar). Rather than sit and figure out the cogitator's functions like a sane person, Tink had, giggling, ripped out several datafeeds and hooked both the cogitator and Inquisitorial facility's security systems directly into his techno-heretical xenos toy. The mayhem was instantaneous. There were more alarms, of course (after so long aboard the Occurrence Border they barely registered anymore), but that was nothing compared to the deafening babble of every comm channel in the facility rebooting into full un-jammed and un-psykered functionality. This included the private channel used by the other Inquisition team as it turned out, which combined with the gunfire, explosions, and assorted security alerts coming from Oak's vault, was enough to throw pretty much the entire facility into confused chaos. Our comm channel, through the techno-magic of "live colonel patching", was re-routed through Spot the wonder drone. The fact that Sarge was actually glad to hear Tink's voice spoke volumes.

Our valiant Commissar (unironically, given the man's recent kill-count), was not only awake, but borderline coherent as well. A hurried, semi-factual explanation that we were here to collect Aimy's stuff, but had been ambushed by Inquisitorial traitors, was accepted readily enough. As was our insistence that it'd all been his idea, including the part where three of us were disguised as HQ Stormtroopers. The sticking point was the man's insistence on not only participating in, but leading some sort of sortie and "killin more of those fancy rosette-sucking bastards", as well as rescuing Aimy. And her nice tits. Also his refusal to give up either his laspistol or bottle. Combined with Tink's broken legs and insistence that he needed to stay at the cogitator, the decision was quickly reached to allow the Commissar his little adventure, if only to get his Commissarial dataslate in range of Sarge and Twitch. Doc had to go as well, as de facto commander, and Nubby was drafted to push the pallet and keep the Commissar under supervision, while the trainees were directed to stay put, keep our evac secure, and finish prepping our gear for extraction. The final member of the rescue team was Spot, now disconnected from the security system, and hovering invisibly ahead of the relief force, performing the usual scouting duties as well as acting as a door-opening guide-skull. In short order the Commissar's pallet was loaded with Oak's spooky boxes, an impressive supply of ammunition, and a sizable crate of grenades, detpacks, and mines for our poor, undersupplied demo-trooper. The Commissar, growing increasingly excited at the prospect of a valiant charge, didn't seem to notice that all these were placed in cover behind him, rather than the reverse, and eagerly bellowed at Nubby to push him faster, so he could hit the vile heretics with his (now empty) drink.

As every single hall, room, and closet door in the area abruptly locked open, the confusion level rose by several notches, especially for the four (presumably) Conspiracy agents holding the junction, who suddenly had a lot less cover to work with. They were so busy scrambling for cover from the no-longer-suppressed Stormtroopers that they didn't even notice Nubby and the Commissar until the first few poorly aimed laspistol shots hit the walls/floor/ceiling around them. Doc's shots, rather better aimed thanks to his stationary position (not to mention sobriety) and Spot's Tau marker-thingy, dropped a deformed young man dressed as a scribe. Combined with the wounded Stormtrooper's own covering fire and the fusilade coming from the side hall, the enemy barely managed to get a single volley of poorly-aimed shots off before the Commissar, Nubby, and the pallet full of high explosives and eldritch boxes reached them. Of course, since neither Nubby or the Commissar had put any thought into STOPPING the pallet, the fight literally didn't stop there. The (now only two) agents watched in stunned surprise as the pallet, with the Commissar flailing a bottle in one hand and a pistol in the other, and Nubby hunched up behind him wildly firing his pulse-carbine, barrelled right through the junction. The whole "stopping" problem was then solved by the more substantial barricade of boxes, along with a vox unit, the man in the big hat sitting on the floor and yelling into said vox unit, and the medicae patching said man's numerous frag wounds.

At Twitch's urgent insistence, Nubby abandoned the barricade to the somehow-still-unshot Commissar, and cracked open a good old fashioned big box of boom. Well, more of a big box of assorted thrown munitions, because the first two to pop over the barricade were flashes, followed by another pair of smokes and the Commissar's empty bottle. The bottle's owner, who hadn't caught the "flashes out", swore and continued firing undeterred. Under this cover, Sarge and Twitch put the last of their shots into the stunned idiot pretend-stormtroopers who'd neglected to actually wear their damn helmets' photo-visors. For all the damage they did though, it was Aimy that really convinced the rest of the hallway's occupants to get into cover and stay there. One eye closed and the other held directly to the xenotech scope on her beloved rifle, she leaned out into the hall and started picking off enemies through the billowing smoke as Spot the Wonder Drone marked them. Of course the enemy, being, you know, Inquisitorial Agents too (and presumably better trained ones at that), did not take this lying down. Our little dynamic entry had blown open their rear flank, and scattered the unprepared reserves and specialists, but they rapidly began laying down their own covering fire and coordinating a tactical advance. Worse, from the far end of the hall, where there seemed to be some sort of ongoing firefight with some security Stormtroopers, a gangly form that glowed FAR too brightly on Spot's thermal imaging turned from the fight. Aimy swore as the figure pointed an arm directly towards her and fired an Emperor-damn melta beam out of his hand.

With the civvies (not to mention witnesses) out of the way, and Nubby finished dispensing munitions, Sarge dropped back to help the little trooper haul Oak's boxes off the pallet and crouch-run them down to the main vault. The barricade being slightly collapsed and on fire, the noncom declined to try and worm his way through personally, and jammed Nubby and the boxes through one of the gaps, before voxing Tink to ask if he knew why the damn fire-suppression system wasn't working. He then swore as a sudden geyser of white powder began shooting out of every air vent in the hallway, along with even more alarms. More surprising, and considerably more distracting, was the sudden appearance of several conspiracy agents sprinting up the hall. Whether seizing the reduced vision as a chance to charge our position, or just withdraw from the besieged junction, the sudden rush was more than Twitch's indiscriminate barrage could handle alone, and both Sarge and Aimy hastily returned to firing down the hall. In between scanning the hallway for the next marker-lit form, coughing, and cursing his helmet's lack of a rebreather, Sarge bellowed at Nubby to swap Oak's boxes with the empty ones on the table and get back out here. He was less than happy to have a nasal little voice ask what to do with all the stuff in our boxes, because a lot of it was just traffic tickets, but some of it looked pretty valuable (specifically "all dese really fancy techy fingies"). Sarge, sparing an exasperated second to explain to Nubby that he'd been supposed to unload the boxes BEFORE bringing them (and no "a psyker made me do it" is STILL not a valid excuse for skiving out of one's duties), and to just dump them all in the other boxes, since we were bringing them back out with us. Nubby asked if that included the parking tickets, and was told to shut up and soldier, soldier, before Sarge came in there and gave him a demonstration.

Amazingly, despite this sudden onslaught, Aimy managed her sprint without taking a hit. Whether luck or Fate, she managed to duck or dodge every shot fired her way, ending in a final little hop onto turning pallet and taking up a firing position leaning around the Commissar's rotating chair. This heroic maneuver was subsequently spoiled by a spookily well-aimed lasbolt which would've nailed the markswoman in the face, if it hadn't had the bulk of the Commissar's leg to burn through on its way. Despite having an entire limb charred to uselessness, the Commissar didn't seem to notice this injury any more than his others, at least not until his effort to keep turning and firing led him to actually put his weight on the appendage. The Commissar's collapse more or less directly onto Aimy was followed by his augmetically-connected chair, which at least offered the pair some cover. Sarge and Twitch, who also had cover, not that it seemed to be doing anything, hurriedly crawled backwards out of the contested hallway as eerily curving lasbolts landed around them. Sarge made a little pained grunting sound as one of them found their mark in the general vicinity of his already-shot leg, and flopped prone halfway through the door. Fortunately Nubby, standing by exactly for such an occasion (as opposed to just, you know, standing by) was able to grab the big noncom's arm, and drag him the rest of the way into the junction and around the corner. Overhead, a translucent blur shot by, and the hallway's heavy security door slammed shut.

In the time it took the overloaded pallet and small army of Scribes to traverse the facility, both Sarge and the Commissar were patched up to the point of functionality, and a few ideas about how to ditch our baggage and extract were floated. To nobody's surprise it was Doc's plan that Sarge ended up adopting: specifically the part where he suggested offloading both the Scribes and the Commissar together, leaving us free to get the hell out of there before the Inquisition got its shit together. Aimy was sent ahead, and greeted us at what was now the "dead-psyker-hallway" in her cadet-commissar uniform (though still holding her pulse rifle). In a feat of genuinely good acting, the markswoman congratulated the Commissar on his successful mission to rescue "the bureaucratic lifeblood of the Imperium", and reported that she and her penal legionnaires had secured the room full of unconscious naked guys as he'd instructed. The Commissar, who'd been brought nearly to the point of sobriety between the adrenaline and Doc's stimms, gave Aimy a slightly dubious look as she lauded his tactical genius and selfless bravery, but was smart enough to just shut up and roll with it.

Behind all this, several overloaded pallets were quietly lined up in the hallway, and five stormtroopers and five legionnaires became ten legionnaires, all ready to depart with Lady Von Humpeding's personal effects, if she was done here. We had a ship to catch after all. Catching the hint nicely, Commissar Kelly waved Aimy and the rest of us off, promising to stay here and keep the Scribes safe until the all-clear came. As we nonchalantly rounded the corner (and then immediately kicked it up to a full sprint), we could hear the familiar voice of "the good Scribe" (operating on a suggestion from one of the trainees), asking if it was true the two Commissars had stationed here under orders of the Ordos Chronos. The helpful old Scribe seemed very concerned about how long it'd been since anyone had reviewed the hold-pending order, and suggested there might be something that could be done to resolve the issue. He seemed rather shocked when the Commissar burst into tears. Our vague plan for changing back into our legionnaire uniforms and exiting inconspicuously via the freight bay hit a snag when the two squads of now-fully-armed-and-armored Stormtroopers stationed there immediately spotted us. Two of the stormtroopers made a beeline for us, causing a brief moment of panic, until we recognized the freshly cleaned chainsword (and bandaged fingers) on the Storm-Rupert, backed up by the bulky form of what was presumably the same Sergeant from the front desk.

We completed our exit without further violence, if only barely, and beat a restrained retreat back towards the camp. As we approached, it became obvious that embarkation was in full swing, and there wasn't much time before people started being marked AWOL. In fact, it was already past that point, according to the panicked-looking Cadet Commissar Sniffy, who ran up from where he'd been leaning outside the front gate (conveniently out of sight of any superior officers), and demanded to know where in the Emperor's name we'd been and Commissar Kelly still was. Cadet Sniffy's questions had been directed at the ex-Scribe trainee, presumably because of their working relationship managing the Commissar's paperwork, but seemed just as willing to accept an answer from fellow-cadet Aimy. Both of them just looked at Sarge though, and the noncom grudgingly hauled himself up from his comfortable spot lying face-down on one of the boxes. Once again going for brevity, Sarge announced that we'd gone to get Aimy's shit, Commissars Kelly and Sourface had gotten themselves involved in an internal Inquisition pissing match, again, and we'd left them to it in favor of catching our ride off this bloody rock. Cadet Sniffy's face was a study in anxiety as he processed this and desperately tried to figure out where the feces were going to fall, and how best to avoid getting any of it on him.

Aided and abetted by the increasingly optimistic Sniffy, we managed to walk our entire convoy straight onto one the massive troop-lifters nestled into the mud of the mustering field. There was a brief hiccup as a cogboy leapt into our path, nearly going down under the wheels of Twitch's pallet, but he only seemed to be interested in "re-santifying our collars' machine-spirits", that and all the mud. Once a servitor had hosed us off, it was just a matter of requisitioning a cargo unit for Commissar Von Humpeding's personal effects, and then settling into our assigned seats like good little Penal Legionnaires. It was a nerve-wrenching hour before our lifter sealed its hatches, but no Inquisitors, Stormtroopers, or Senior Commissars came looking for us. In fact, the chaos of what seemed to be a very rushed deployment was enough to keep anyone aside from the odd grimly-curious legionnaire from asking any questions, and it wasn't hard for Aimy to quash those. The transfer to the high-security munitorum troop-ship, already packed near-full with three other legions and their attendant Commissarial blocking units, was a bit trickier, involving dodging Senior Commissars, Munitorum bean-counters, and an overly inquisitive cyber-mastiff. Fortunately, a combination of lies, bribery, and Tink's continued infiltration of the Commissarial data net got all of us aboard, including the nervous Sniffy, who practically sobbed with relief when Sarge and Aimy finally said he could go. As the painfully-junior Commissar jogged off to catch his transfer shuttle, Aimy confided that she and Tink had found him a ground-logistics unit whose Commissarial berth had been left empty for the better part of two centuries. She hoped he liked long drives.

The question of why Nubby had a bunch of archeotech in his pocket was immediately raised by literally everyone present, though per tradition, Sarge was allowed to lead the interrogation. Nubby's expression rapidly shifted from "proudly proactive procurer" to "guy who didn do nuffin an nobody saw 'im anyways", as he explained that someone had installed fake bottoms in OUR spooky boxes like WE wouldn't notice. Even worse, they'd done it with OUR stuff, or at least he was pretty sure that both the cardboard and the faux-velvet lining came from his stash in that one closet just down the hall from the psyker containment cells back on the Occurrence Border. He'd been debating ripping it all out, it being his personal property and Sarge INSISTING that EVERYTHING was supposed to come out of our spooky boxes, but then they wouldn't have matched the inside of the boxes they were replacing. Which was all why he'd stuck to simply grabbing the "techy fing" that'd been hidden inside the last box's fake bottom. The said "techy fing" was, well, a techy thing. What it did or how it was supposed to be controlled was unclear, but parts of it were definitely recognizable as "ours". Tink identified several Tau-ish components as parts of Spot 2.0, along with a few others from one of the frequently-repaired psi-suppressors, and what he swore was a piece of our wraithbone. Just as recognizable, if much, much less "ours", was the fist-sized Necron cube wedged in the middle of the thing. The little yellow sticky note saying "THIS END TOWARDS THE DAEMON" was new though…

At least the presence of Lady General Von Humpeding, along with several regiments of loyal guardsmen and not-insignificant amount of naval firepower, explained why everyone had been practically bending over backwards for Aimy. She assured us she hadn't actually known herself though, not until she and Tink had looked through the local-system org-chart for somewhere to send Sniffy. The trainees, not having benefited from any of Aimy's highly-educational drunken 3AM rants about her mother, needed to be brought up to speed on Aimy's mom's rank and how Oak had used her to get us assigned to the penal legion. The rambling stories about Lady General Mom literally crushing the bones of her political rivals under the treads of her baneblade, Becky, and even letting an eight year old Aimy drive on one occasion, were left out. Aimy firmly asserted that her mother was "totally fucking in on all this Inquisitorial bullshit or she wouldn't be here" and would be able to get a message to Oak at the very least. The question of whether she could do the same with the device itself was answered for us as the thrum of the troop-ship's activating engines informed us that the embarkation had gone a lot faster than we'd expected. This was, for quite a few reasons, not a good thing. Tink, in a moment very reminiscent of our inglorious retreat from a certain Tau-ish PDF base, whipped out Sourface's dataslate and started taking dictation from Aimy and Sarge. While Doc kept Twitch and Nubby from "helping" and the trainees viewed the whole situation with bemused alarm, a very, very straightforward sitrep was written, encrypted, tagged with some code-words Aimy supplied, and sent off via the Commissariat's data-network as the highest-security communique the dataslate could send. Then, realizing we actually had a few hours before we left the range of the orbital comm network, Aimy grabbed the dataslate and wrote a rather more in-depth and better-spelled version.

The debarkation of the four penal legions was less rushed, the Nids' arrival time having been more firmly pinned down by some sort of techno-psykery. Our first inclination, to stay in our hidey-hole until the ship was mostly empty, and nobody who might recognize us and ask questions was around, was foiled as a munitorum clerk came down our hallway, opening bays for inventory and inspection. Twitch barely got his mines disarmed in time. We reluctantly put our penal legion uniforms back on as well as our collars (deactivated, of course), and formed up with all our gear in a convoy around a very Commissarial-looking Aimy. There were a few sketchy moments, especially when some familiar goon-ish looking legionnaires tried to route our little baggage train through the quartermaster's tents for "inventory". They desisted after Aimy shot one in the knee, but that led to some very curious looks from the assorted Commissars present, and a tactical withdrawal behind one of the landing craft was all that kept us from an encounter with the Commadant-cum-Commander. Somehow we made it to evening muster without things devolving into bloodshed, and tediously stoic-ed our way through an only slightly grimmer-than-usual pre-action speech from the brass. Things didn't get interesting until the Commissar Commander waved forward "the Inquisitor", and announced the need for "volunteers" for a vortex-bomb deep strike on the lead Tyranid elements. The Inquisitor, nestled in a suit of Guard-issue power armor, hadn't stood out from the other battlefield-brass milling around the command tent. Neither had his two psykers, at least not until one of them started bouncing up and down waving at us, until his senior firmly hushed him back into order. Following the young psyker's gaze, the Inquisitor stomped over, and loudly announced his need for a >"Right Sergeantly chap with a band of stout lads primed for a bit of derring-do and conspicuous valor in the face of the unholy, wot wot!"

As for us, we were not cordially drafted into The Rupert's inquisitorial retinue, as Oak still had shit for us to do. What specifically was a bit unclear though, since neither Jim and Fumbles, or the Rupert and Alfred had talked to the Inquisitor since he'd left to "turn himself in". Needless to say, THAT remark caught our undivided attention, but the four of them insisted that it was all part of some presumably brilliant plan, which involved him showing up for his trial while the better part of three-quarters of the Inquisitorial fleet was distracted. Nubby and Twitch smirked as they collected their winnings from those of us who hadn't believed Oak was both capable and crazy enough to try and exploit a Tyranid incursion for political benefit. Of course, bringing up the subject of the imminent Nids raised the question of what in the Emperor's name we were doing here. More specifically, we wanted to know why Jim was still flying us right into the splinter fleet's predicted emergence zone, and what that "vortex bomb" actually was, because we'd seen one before, and they typically don't have either Tau or wraithbone components. The Rupert waved these questions away as "not something to tickle your wigs over", and Jim's attention seemed fully focused on the shuttle's kludged-together nav system, but Fumbles cheerfully explained that the "bomb" was just a fancy psi-suppressor Fio put together to keep him and Alfred from exploding. The obvious question that remark raised went unasked as the vox unit blared an all-ships warning of imminent Tyranid emergence in sector seventeen. Jim shouted at everyone to get in their seats and activated the weird psi-suppressor.

Aboard the Occurrence Border, in what was apparently no longer the warp-fungus bay, a delegation consisting of a very relieved Sister Valerie and Hannah, backed up by their usual collection of medical and technical minions, welcomed us back. They were followed up by a considerably less welcoming delegation, consisting of an oversized servo-skull with the brain of an undeniably insane Magos Biologis wedged inside of it. The Magos, initially intent on getting an account of the recent psychic phenomena from the badly shaken Fumbles and Alfred abruptly stopped in mid air, whirled to face the Nubby-proof case full of archeotech handcuffed to Sarge's arm. The ear-numbing, distorted screech of "WHAT DID YOU IDIOTS DO?" was, well, exactly what we expected. Sarge sighed and relinquished the case, gathered up the Rupert and Alfred, and (after establishing the definite unavailability of Doc) grabbed Aimy for moral support as he headed up to the bridge for what was going to be a very, very long debriefing.