Junior Enginseer Jim had spent the last few days discussing the problem with Junior Enginseer Hannah. Neither of them had managed to think up any clever solutions and there was no one else to turn to. Asking the senior tech-priests for advice was right out, since they were half the problem anyway, and Ol' Bill just didn't understand the issue. In the end it was decided that their only option was to approach the problem directly. Which is to say Jim would approach the problem directly, Hannah refused to go anywhere near that section of the ship. During his next nightly "Seventy Five Minute Organic Recuperation Period" Jim visited the storage room across from the Gellar Field Generator. Remembering it was Tuesday and after 1800, he bypassed the first two doors and made his way to the third where the mechanical keypad he'd expected had been replaced by a dataslate and a piece of yellow paper. Jim tried to ignore the claymore mine mounted underneath the slate as he read the note, it was labeled "Prove You Are Not a Servitor (or Ork)." A second smaller note said "cAsE sEnSiTiVe." It took two tries to get the illegible series of hand-written letters entered into the slate, luckily the mine had only armed and the slate had instructed him not to move after the first mistake. Jim thought it was rather unfair to expect someone to be able to tell the difference between a lowercase and capital S. When the door finally opened the Enginseer made his way down a zig-zagging corridor of sandbags. As he walked he idly wondered where they'd managed to find sand on a voidship, then decided he was happier not knowing. When Jim came around the last bend he found three of the men he'd come to see piling up pieces of burnt meat and metal into a wheelbarrow. He ignored what looked like the remains of an unfortunate maintenance servitor and hesitantly asked if the Interrogator was present, or maybe even Doc.

Nubby came to Jim's rescue before long. He carefully pushed the plasma gun to the side and reminded Tink that Sarge had banned the "W Word". Furthermore, this was Jim, the bro-est of cogbros! He was definitely on the do-not-blow-in-half with a plasma gun list, and hadn't meant to insult Tink's favorite toy. There was undoubtedly a reason behind his request and if everyone would just settle down this could all be sorted out without Sarge yelling at anyone. Tink grumbled about it not being a toy. SHE was a DX-9F Exploratory Drone, configured for stealth operations and tech interfacing, and HER name was "Hannah Two-Point-Oh". Jim went blank as he processed this, then started sputtering in a mix of shock and revulsion. Nubby groaned and waved a hand at Twitch, who obliged by pegging the ranting trooper in the back of the head with a chunk of servitor. Both parties were hauled off and seated in front of one of the several whiteboards that had gone missing from the official briefing rooms. Jim boggled at the list on the board as the Nubby forced a surly Tink to read off the last six items on it. SARGE'S XENO-TECH RULES >1. Keep your stupid mouths shut. >2. If you want to use a weapon it MUST be disguised as a lasgun or something. THIS INCLUDES YOUR PLASMA HYBRID MONSTROSITY. >3. The drone is SECRET. It does not leave the barracks unless it's in its box or you can make it look like a servo-skull. >4. Sarge will be the judge of whether the drone ACTUALLY looks like a servo-skull. >5. The drone is NOT a she. >6. The drone does NOT have a gender at all. >7. The drone is NOT named Hannah or Fio'whatsit. >8. The drone is NOT named after ANYONE, regardless of if we've met them. >9. The drone is named Spot. It is a good name and is actually sort of witty. All complaints must be hand-written and submitted in person to Interrogator Sarge. >10. Anyone who violates these rules or actually submits a complaint will be made to suffer in ways they cannot possibly imagine.

Jim claimed these were the sort of guys who wouldn't just destroy a device they suspected of being xenos-made, they'd also convert anyone who'd ever used it into servitors, then push the servitors into a plasma reactor. Nubby suggested that this was a bit of an exaggeration, the Inquisition always got a fair bit of leniency on this stuff. Didn't that Interrogator with the big hat have a sword that whispered at anyone nearby about drinking their blood? What about sister what's-her-face who had a Sternguard Pattern Bolter that she'd looted from a dead marine? And no one commented on the fact that the guy running recruitment had actually purchased a medium-sized tropical island with the funds he'd been embezzling over the last few decades. Surely a little xeno-tech could be swept under the same rug those guys were using. Jim just shook his head and pointed out that all those were things that the Inquisition typically had jurisdiction over; believe it or not, hardcore orthodox tech-priests were a lot less forgiving. Jim suggested that as a baseline we imagine a three hundred year old Redemptionist preacher. Now combine that general cranky outlook with the fact that the orthodox tech-priests on the ship had been forced to accept that most of its critical engineering staff were not members of the machine cult. These guys were itching to put someone in their place; if ayone caught their attention with a clear case of tech-heresy, their lifespan would be measured in minutes. So Jim was asking, begging really, for us to give up or suicidal fascination with xeno-tech.

That upcoming mission was a bit of a mystery. Our little op on the Tau border worlds had gone relatively well: We'd foiled a rather convoluted plot to get neutral worlds in bed with the Tau empire and killed the raiders that'd been terrorizing the area. At least we'd thought that the Rogue Trader we'd doomed to an incredibly gruesome death was behind all the missing colonies and stations, turned out his band of pirates didn't quite fit the bill though. It's not like they hadn't had it coming, no one but Doc felt guilty about trapping those mercenary bastards in the warp with no Gellar Field, but according to our reports whoever was wiping out the locals didn't leave bodies. Not theirs, and not their victims either. That was pretty ominous, especially coupled with the fact that a few of the other Inquisitorial teams on our little expedition had been on those worlds. None of them had sent out any messages, they'd just vanished with the civies. Yeah, ominous. All those guys had been the same as us: small teams of underfunded, underinformed, and under-everything-else Inquisitorial agents sent out to look for trouble or do something for Oak. We were definitely the last people to suggest that they should have been able to stop some sort of colony-eradicating doom-thingy… But we'd have expected them to at least get SOMETHING out. Even if it was just an astropath message saying "Shit. Tyranids." or "I FEEL THE WARP OVERTAKING ME. IT IS A GOOD PAIN." They didn't though, which meant that whatever had gotten them was even weirder than usual. All we had to go on was the information the Occurrence Border's captain had scrounged for us when the teams had missed their pickups. He had a rough map of which systems had been wiped out for sure and a few notes from the one colony he'd personally inspected. That's how we knew he was worried, the Captain didn't like going down to planets. He said they were untidy.

It was eventually decided that the only way we'd get anything useful was by visiting one of these worlds and looking around ourselves, preferably after the mysterious people-disappearing thing had left. Until then all anyone could do was wildly speculate, so we did what any red-blooded guardsmen would do in that situation: we started a betting pool. At first it was the usual small wagers between us, everyone sticking to their pet theories and so on, but Nubby smelled profit and the thing quickly grew to ludicrous size. Within a few days both the other teams, the entire engineering department, and half of the ship's officers were in on it. There'd even been a runner from the Navigator's sanctum carrying bets from him and the Astropath, neither of whom had even been told about the pool. That'd sparked a lengthy debate about whether those guys could see the future and if that should invalidate their bets. In the end Nubby held that if they could, then they'd have been able to avoid being assigned to the Occurrence Border, so he took their money like everyone else's. There wound up being only three popular bets since various factors wound up disqualifying most of the candidates. No one was willing to put money on it being some human force, on account of how Oak would've known if there was a rogue Inquisition fleet out here, and Chaos warbands or cults were never this tidy. On the xenos side the Tau didn't fit, Necrons tended to stick to their tomb worlds, Tyranids either left planets barren or full of Tyranids, and even Twitch couldn't figure out how it could be Orks. That just left warpy stuff, Eldar, or some really obscure type of xenos.

Between the pool, Tink and Jim's project, and Sarge's scramble to prep for the mission, Doc was the only one with much free time. Of course that was primarily because he was stuck in a wheelchair until his leg and gut-wound finished healing. He spent most of that time in the medbay acting as a handi-capable nurse for his girlfriend, and despite Nubby's constant barrage of tasteless jokes, seemed to be coping with his temporary crippling fairly well. We mostly left him to it, since we risked death by either sap overdose or angry hospitaller every time we visited. Twitch nearly lost an ear to a thrown scalpel when we kidnapped the poor boy for a night of recreational drinking. While Doc wasn't too bothered about his injury, it was a constant source of worry for the rest of us. Not because we thought he wouldn't get better, but because the Captain had spotted a world in the right direction that had gone dark and was taking us there for a little reconnoitering. Our ETA was a few days, and Doc's recovery was going to be a matter of weeks or months, so it was looking like we'd be going into the field without a medic. Sarge and Jim tried to convince us that the medi-skull they'd requisitioned was just as good, but we weren't buying it. Those things are unsettling just to look at, they're a million times worse when you've just been shot and one's coming at you with a buzzsaw. Everyone was feeling a little nervous when we finally came out of the warp and confirmed that the nearby planet was emptier than a Munitorum agent's heart. Those of us who weren't creeped out by the prospect of nosing around on a freshly depopulated world were wondering if we were about to lose three weeks pay in the pool.

The planet was sort of shitty and probably had a population of only five or six million before it got wiped out. Battleaxe called dibs on what passed for the local center of government and Sword-guy wanted to take his team to the largest commercial shuttleport. Sarge carefully considered the remaining options, then ignored the pointed suggestions that he inspect the planet's only military base in favor of the smallest shuttleport on the planet. Sarge carefully deflected their questions about his choice with vague comments about hunches and feelings, he managed to hold out until the Captain got annoyed and forced the discussion move along. It was agreed that the Occurrence Border would hang in stationary orbit and handle communications while each team was given their own shuttle. The emergency support options consisted of the remaining two shuttles loaded with all the armsmen the Captain thought he could reasonably spare and the ship's lances. Everyone was reminded that the last time those lances were used at that range they'd missed by seventeen kilometers and had to be walked, while still firing at full power and jiggling a lot, to their target. The Captain recommended not asking for any precision strikes then called an end to the meeting. Sarge gathered us up in the shuttlebay for a final briefing before we went down. The ground team consisted of everyone except the adepts, who would be hanging out in the Comm room and analyzing whatever we sent to them, and Doc who was only in there to wish us luck before he went to get the medbay ready for whoever got shot this time. Hannah and Ol' Bill were there too, mostly to remind us that Jim was considered essential to the smooth-ish running of the ship. It would go poorly for us if he came back in anything less than factory-fresh condition.

Aside from the brief excitement provided by Sarge chewing out the techies, the ride down was fairly boring, even the view out the window was dull. The top half of the planet was white with snow, the bottom half was mostly water or clouds, and even Nubby couldn't find any obscene looking continents. Twitch tried to liven things up by speculating on what type of xenos horrors had abducted everyone and what unspeakable things were being done to them, but stopped when Fumbles looked like he was going to start crying. Our first look at the shuttleport confirmed Sarge's genius: the place was obviously built as some sort of vacation resort for rich merchants. A quick flyover turned up a complete lack of people, vehicles, or xenos monstrosities and an environment scan revealed nothing more dangerous than a chance of sunburn, so we set down right on there on the beach. There was a final comm check and reiteration of the ground rules, then everyone went off to enjoy themselves. Now, you may be getting the impression that we weren't taking our mission as seriously as it warranted, and anyone from the other teams would've certainly said so. There's a difference between not being serious and not being effective though, and we fully intended to complete the objectives we'd set for ourselves. Since in our eyes our main job was to be ready to save the other teams' bacon, everyone stayed within sprinting distance of the shuttle and Jim kept its engines warmed up. In deference to the fact that this was potentially hostile territory everyone outside the shuttle stuck in groups and Twitch worked with Jim to set up a rudimentary perimeter around the LZ. Finally, Spot the wonder-drone was feeding everything it saw to our adepts and we were definitely keeping our eyes open as we strolled around the beach and inspected all the bungalows. Admittedly Nubby was the one doing most of the inspecting, but it's not like anyone expected us to find anything anyway.

Despite the amount of shit the rest of us gave Twitch over his paranoia, we all trusted his spotting skills with our lives. Within seconds Sarge and Tink landed in the trench next to him and overhead the drone engaged its stealth field. On the far side of the shuttle Nubby and Fumbles dropped their loot and got ready to either flank or sprint to safety. The only person who didn't respond immediately was Jim, who poked his head out the shuttle's door to see what the fuss was about. Sarge screamed at the cogboy to get back into cover and drove the point home by chucking a nearby entrenching tool at the open hatch. The shovel barely missed Jim's head and he scrambled back with a little yelp while the rest of us tried to spot whatever Twitch had seen. When nothing happened over the next few minutes Sarge started ordering Tink, Jim, and Fumbles to scan the area. Before he managed to finish the order a buzzing voice cut in and told us to "Remain in your current position and cease communication. Your vessel will be yielded to our service." Everyone pegged the voice as a tech-priest of some variety. Anyone else with an augmetic voicebox would've at least tried to make it sound normal, this guy sounded like a cross between a garbage disposal and an opera singer. Everyone was still processing this development when Tink's kneejerk response kicked in and he screamed "JAM IT UP YOUR METAL ASS TECNHOFACIST" into his combead.

While being tackled by a heavily armed and moderately attractive woman is surprising in its own right, what really caught us off guard was the fact that she was crying. See, we knew this guardswoman, both as a fellow passenger from the Occurrence Border, and as one of the few survivors of a rather unsuccessful mission to purge some genestealers. She was originally from some nobby regiment and had one of those thirty syllable names, but we all called her Aimy. Now, if any of us had been asked to describe Aimy we'd have used words like Solid, Professional, and Dangerous. Never hysterical or weepy or inclined-to-hug-random-noncoms. I mean, it was a commonly held belief that she'd saluted her own mother every night before bed. Which sort of made sense when you remembered that her mother was a Lord General. Anyway the point is that her breakdown was terrifying more than anything. Sarge disentangled himself and, as politely as possible, asked Aimy why the hell she was here. Last any of us heard her team had been farther towards Tau space and had been one of the ones to go MIA. Nubby chimed in and pointed out that everyone had thought she was dead. Twitch suggested that maybe she was, and asked Fumbles to check if she was a ghost. This triggered another round of hysterical giggling and got Twitch a hug of his own, which terrified the demolitions trooper. The reunion was brought to a halt when the tech-priest rolled over to us with his servitor posse. In typical high-ranking cogboy fashion he commanded everyone to shut up and take him to the shuttle. Our presence was not ideal, but could be made to serve the Omnissiah. This triggered another shift from hysterical to furious in Aimy.

Employing the entirety of his acting talent, Sarge announced that some fresh air might calm everyone down. Nubby took the hint and grabbed Aimy while Sarge tried to chivy the Magos out of the shop, when that didn't work he just got behind the tech-priest and started pushing until he got the point. Twitch, trying to keep his head from swivelling like a nervous pidgeon's, set his eyes on a sturdy looking garage and led the way Twitch casually gave a hand signal as he walked. Tink correctly interpreted this as an order to send out his stealthed drone and Fumbles got the point after Nubby kicked him in the shin. The psyker swayed a little and tripped over a curb, but when we hauled him to his feet he shook his head and muttered about everything looking clear. At the back of the group the shouting match continued, even though Aimy's heart obviously wasn't in it anymore. She'd picked up on what was happening and everyone could tell she was trying to hide the fact that she was terrified. The only people that were oblivious to the change in the atmosphere were the tech-priests. The Magos had really started picking up steam now that Aimy was distracted; he was loudly badmouthing just about everyone and made it very hard to concentrate on looking casual. We'd reached the edge of the garage when Tink made a sort of high pitched wheezing sound and went pale. Everyone took the hint and started power-walking towards the opening. Well, almost everyone. At the back of the group the Magos and his servitors had come to a halt and the tech-priest was in full monologue mode. He stood there, stock still and surrounded by his herd of servitors, and loudly declared his genius, devotion, and general craziness to the rest of the world. As he entered the safety of the garage Sarge glanced back at the Magos then at Tink, who shook his head violently. Sarge sighed, grabbed a smoke grenade, and chucked it at the Magos' feet at the exact same moment the sniper fired.

It was officially time to either shit or get off the pot, at the current rate the Magos was going to be dead before we had all the snipers localized. The more pragmatic members of the squad pointed out that this wasn't such a bad thing and suggested that we just run for the shuttle while he drew fire, but Sarge vetoed this perfectly valid plan. At his order everyone popped smoke and split out in two teams. Sarge, Aimy, and Twitch pushed out and started laying suppressive fire and grenades onto the two rough locations Tink had given them. Tink, Nubby, and Fumbles went out the back to try and flank the sniper between us and the shuttle. Meanwhile, Jim ordered his three skulls to help the drone search the area, warmed up the shuttle's perimeter defences, and relayed the situation to the ship. Everything started out so well. The two snipers immediately stopped firing, Tink managed to spot a third and put a plasma-bolt through the bastard's cover, and our flankers were almost in position. It was really looking like we were going to be able to neutralize the hostile or at least get to the Magos and start a nice, orderly retreat. Then two things happened and everything went to shit. At first we thought the snipers had popped smokes of their own and were falling back. The buildings they were holed up in went sort of hazy and vague, but the fog didn't drift and a second later the snipers resumed firing from inside the cloud. Another servitor went down and Twitch's grenade detonated in mid-arc. Fumbles screamed "PSYKER" at the exact same moment the lascannon fired. Lascannon really isn't the right world, but damned if we could think of a better one. A lascannon typically fires a large, powerful beam, and brief beam. This thing was barely larger than a multi-laser and walked in a brief arc across the battlefield. It just sliced through everything it touched: walls, lampposts, the car Sarge was hiding behind, servitors, and tech-priests.

The flanking team was having better luck all things considered. Jim's skulls were hounding the sniper Tink had flushed out and Fumbles had a rough bead on the enemy psyker. Tink sent his drone to get the exact position and charged up his plasma-gun while Nubby and Fumbles poured las-fire and psychic shrieks into the clouds concealing the two active snipers. Their accuracy was abysmal, but the angle of their attack and sheer volume of fire was enough to force the hostiles to rebase. None of them realized how bad the situation had gotten until they heard Twitch's warning get cut off by the second lascannon strike. In an uncharacteristic act of bravery Nubby led the charge back towards the garage, taking Fumbles with him and leaving Tink on overwatch. Jim diverted his medi-skull to follow them, then sent the rest of his minions to find the lascannon before it could fire again. They found the building teetering alarmingly, but still upright and with Sarge standing in the middle, barking at the other two troopers to get back on their feet. Back in the garage Sarge was dealing with a minor mutiny. He was of the opinion that Magos was still alive and a pickup needed to be made, Twitch and Aimy disagreed. Nubby got to the door just in time to hear the noncom shout that the Magos was still moving and could be saved if they hurried. Aimy countered this argument by hefting her long-las and putting a hot-shot through the head of the twitching tech-priest. Further debate was delayed by the roof caving in.

As we reached the top of the shuttle's loading ramp Twitch asked if anyone knew what had happened to the lascannon. Right on cue a section of bulkhead started glowing then the damned beam punched through with a spray of molten metal. Jim didn't bother waiting for an order, the engines roared to life and our big, ungainly shuttle started to wallow upwards. As the rear ramp began to close the lascannon fired again and neatly burned through its hydraulics. Everyone resisted the urge to go poke their heads out the broken door and see what was shooting those beams at us. At this point Tink, who'd been rather focused on not getting shot like the rest of us, realized that someone was missing. He yanked the drone controller off his harness and started screaming at Jim to slow down. Jim correctly interpreted this as a terrible idea and ignored it. Everyone who wasn't collapsing from blood loss or stimm aftereffects watched as the techie frantically slammed at the drone's controls and screamed curses. The show was briefly interrupted when the lascannon burned through the floor about a meter in front of Tink's feet, but resumed after a few evasive maneuvers slammed us around like pinballs. It didn't take a savant to see that Tink was losing his race. Spot the wonder-drone was great at stealth and recon, but it just wasn't built for this sort of speed. Nubby clomped over and put a hand on techie's shoulder. He suggested that maybe Tink should park the drone somewhere, we'd probably be able to come back and get it in a few years. Tink whirled around and had his drone controller raised like a club when the lascannon fired again. The shuttle pitched forward as the tail of the vessel exploded in a fireball.

Between all the sweating, bleeding people, the Magos' severed head, and Nubby's uniquely indescribable odor that cockpit was getting pretty manky by the time we reached the Occurrence Border. As soon as the bay was pressurized we piled out and collapsed on the first available surface. The ship's air, which always smelled faintly of burnt cabbage, had never tasted so sweet. The Hospitaller and her minions were waiting for us in the docking bay along with a disconcertingly high number of tech-priests. Thinking fast, if not hard, Tink jammed the techno-heretical drone up the front of his shirt, which made him look pregnant and caused a fair bit of amusement among the orderlies. None of the cogboys seemed to notice, and after they'd taken possession of the Magos' head, for Data Extraction they'd said, all of them left without incident. Sarge tried to follow them, but only got a few meters before the Hospitaller neatly tripped him onto a gurney. The incredibly fluffy pillow defeated any further attempts to refuse treatment. While the burns Aimy had received when her long-las exploded got the most attention, all of us wound up getting hauled to the medbay by Doc's valkyrian girlfriend. Well, except for Jim, who tagged along with the other tech-priests to keep an eye on his… sample? trophy? rescuee? Whatever you called the head your medi-skull had sawed off the still-warm body of its patient. Seriously, that right there is why no one trusts those things.

We found Tink with the drone between his legs, but thankfully his pants were on. He was trying to pop out an impressive dent in the front of Spot's chassis. When asked how it'd happened he reminded us of the enemy psyker he'd taken out. It'd used some sort of shield to deflect his plasma bolt and looked like it was about to launch its own attack. So he'd had Spot ram the bastard, it's hard to cast spells when fifty kilos of angry drone is bashing your head in. Turns out the psyker had one hell of a helmet though, hence the dent. Still, it'd convinced the warpy bastard that it was time to fall back, so he was calling it a win. Doc, who'd been eyeing the large lens next to the dent, cut into the story at this point and asked if that meant he had a clear picture of the attackers. Tink shrugged and admitted that he probably did, but so did the adepts who'd been watching the feed. They'd get around to telling us tell us who it was eventually and he was the only one who could fix this dent, so his priorities were clear. The rest of us were a little more curious so Nubby yanked the spanner out of Tink's hands and refused to give it back until he pulled up the vid of the ramming. After a little fast-forwarding he found it and everyone crowded around the data-slate. We were treated to a view of a small room with a blurry figure standing in the middle of it and gesturing. As we watched the blur was replaced by a large circular shield and the screen went blindingly bright. When the flash faded there was a tall robed figure with a sword and egg-shaped helmet standing there panting. He raised his sword, gathered some sort of lighting around it, and then the drone hit him right in the back of his stupid hat.

In Sarge's opinion the other two Interrogators were putting way too much effort into trying to understand the Eldar's motives. They'd gone through the vids from Tink's drone and Jim's skulls frame by frame and determined that there'd been a Warlock, three rangers, and some sort of heavy weapon team operating a brightlance. There was a little debate on the last point, since all of Jim's drones had been shot before they could get a good picture. Neither of the other teams had run into any hostiles, and they hadn't spotted anything when they'd done a flyby of the island, so it looked like that was it for their ground assets. Sword-guy halfheartedly suggested that the Eldar could be behind the disappearances, they were xenos with access to warp powers and archeotech after all. He didn't press the issue when Sarge grumpily asked why they hadn't used their creepy-silhouette-leaving people-disappearer instead of shooting at us with fancy lasguns. Battleaxe claimed that the small size of their force suggested they were an assassination team. Given their attack pattern, location, and the fact that no one else of importance was nearby, their target must have been the Magos. From his spot at the end of the table Sarge grumbled that he'd told everyone the xenos had been trying to kill the tech-priest an hour ago. Battleaxe ignored him and pointed out that the real question was whether this was connected to the disappearances and if it was because Magos had known something. Rather annoyed at having been ignored, Sarge sarcastically suggested that they ask the Magos that question. To his considerable surprise everyone took this seriously, with Sword-guy even asking his psyker if he was capable of leading a seance. The debate over whether the ritual was more likely to result in useful information or a daemon manifestation was still raging when the tech-priests arrived.

When Sarge finally staggered back into the medbay he looked bloody exhausted. He pretty much collapsed in the first available bed and at his request we stopped the continuous loop of the Warlock getting his head stuck in the wall. Doc gave him some overdue medical treatment he filled us in on the situation. To start with, he gave us the official word that we'd been shot full of holes by an Eldar hit-squad. Nubby fistpumped and loudly started calculating what his and Fumbles' share of the pool was. Sarge immediately crushed this happy speculation with the news that the Eldar weren't the cause of the attacks, and had only been there for the Magos unless Aimy could tell us otherwise. No one would be collecting on the pool anytime soon and, unless there was a second group of Eldar, Nubby's odds weren't looking good. While Nubby whined to himself the discussion shifted to the Magos, his decapitation, and the tech-priests. According to Sarge all of them, even Jim, had a gear up their ass about something they'd gotten out of the Magos' head. It'd been like pulling teeth to get anything out of them, they kept falling back on the whole "We technically only have to answer to the Inquisitor so get an order from him" arguement. In end all they were willing to part with was that the Magos had been chasing a piece of archeotech and had tracked it into the xeno territory. He'd intercepted some reports that confirmed that nature of the archeotech and the heresies the xenos had committed on it. He'd then sent a report to the PROPER AUTHORITIES and was still tracking the archeotech when he was killed by the vile Eldar. Finally, the nature of the tech was not for us to know, but it would not cause the sort of disappearances we'd seen; we should turn our investigations elsewhere. The priests had refused to say anything more. The PROPER AUTHORITIES had been notified and the matter should be left to them. Further probing into the Mechanicus' holy secrets would be unwise.

The Captain was in favor getting reinforcements and wanted us to chart a course to the largest Imperial world along the border. Battleaxe and Sword-guy thought too much damage would be done before a response was mustered. She wanted us to try and jump ahead to a refueling way station that looked like it might be in the right direction; he wanted to head towards a nearby Imperial world with a rather untrusted governor that might be either be a target or buyer. Sarge, who was barely awake enough to follow what was going on, wound up being the tie-breaker. When all three of his adepts had just shrugged, Sarge had fallen back on his noncom instincts. He'd stood straight, squared his shoulders, and stabbed his finger at the middle option on the chart. Sarge'd loudly declared that it was the only real choice, then retreated back up to the medbay before anyone realized he'd just randomly picked one. None of us saw any problem with this decision making process. In the morning, or whatever you call it when the ship's lights jump from ten percent to max power and the Captain blares reveille over the comm system, Sarge got around to debriefing Aimy. She told a fairly unpleasant tale of wandering around the ass-end of the sector as the Magos did his thing. Aimy and her team had been treated like mushrooms, that is to say kept in the dark and fed horseshit. They'd never learned anything about their mission aside from the fact that archotech was involved, and had mostly spent their time getting shot at by over a dozen different groups ranging from gangers to planetary police forces. It wasn't some sort of giant conspiracy though, the Magos just didn't give a shit; If there was something in the way he'd throw bodies at it all day long if it meant getting through quicker. He wasn't too particular about where those bodies came from either, if his team couldn't handle a problem he'd improvise. Aimy claimed she'd never look at servitors the same way again.

The destination Sarge had chosen, which turned out to be the way station, was a solid week of warp travel away. After about the second day everyone was tired of sitting around the medbay with Doc and his ladyfriend, so we moved back to our nice Gellar Field Generator adjacent quarters. Doc complained a little that our treatments, especially Aimy's, weren't finished, but we figured that coming down and making a few housecalls would be good for him. He'd been getting soft being in that chair all day, some exercise would do him good. Sarge spent most of the next week putting together reports and contingency plans with the adepts and Interrogators, but he spared some thought for Jim and Hannah. He'd interpreted the junior tech-priests' behavior as a sign that their bosses were acting crazier than usual over this whole thing, and made a note to keep an eye on them. Intimidating impressionable young tech-priests was OUR shtick. Since sending Nubby, Twitch, or Tink to watch them was likely to do more harm than good, some words were had with Ol' Bill and the Captain. The duty roster was shuffled and several unintrusive armsmen and engineers were assigned to the same shifts as our cogbros. It might have been a bit of a paranoid over-precaution, but that's sort of what being a guardsmen in the Inquisition is all about. Nubby and his partner in petty-crime wandered around the ship a lot during our transit. Anyone with enough brains to pour water out of a boot could tell they were planning to sabotage the betting pool in some way before their inevitable loss, but it wasn't worth doing anything about. As long as Nubby didn't egg Fumbles into changing someone mind for them again, it was about as harmless a pastime as they were likely to find.

Tink and Twitch's lives over the week generally revolved around our new barracks-mate. Tink, who seemed a little lonely now the Jim wasn't there to argue with him, had fixed Spot's chassis and replaced it's servo-grox-skull disguise before the end of the second day. After that he went back to work on the xenos pulse rifle camouflage project and seized on Aimy as a guinea pig. She was in the market for a new weapon after all, and it was so much easier to cram a pulse rifle into a long-las' chassis than a regular lasgun's. They spent quite a while blowing holes in various objects and badmouthing tech-priests. Twitch was just glad to have an actual reason to distrust the servitors and turned the barracks' defences up from 11 to about 13. Sarge called for a slight de-escalation when he started putting small remote charges on every servitor he encountered, just in case they turned en masse. Apparently Jim and Hannah were the ones who had to find and defuse them. On the seventh day Sarge and the other Interrogators put everyone on an hour alert and prepped the shuttles for immediate launch. The jury was still out on what we were likely to find when we came out of the warp, but if the target was docked at the way station we wanted to neutralize it before it moved again. Also before it attracted a bunch of angry xenos, daemons, or cogboys. The Occurrence Border came out of the warp at the coordinates where Way Station Alumentum Octavus was supposed to be and found the station to be missing. In its place there was a pitched space battle being fought between an Imperial vessel and an unidentifiable xenos ship.

The Captain had stubbornly refused to get any closer to either the station or the fighting ships than necessary. The Occurrence Border was positioned at nearly the maximum distance from the station its shuttles could travel and sat there with its engines and warp-drive spun up. In the Captains words, "If anyone even looks at me funny, I'm leaving all you stupid bastards to die." With those encouraging words ringing in our ears everyone boarded their shuttles and went to see what was so special about the Way Station Alumentum Octavus. It says something about how distracted everyone was that we were cruising for about a quarter of an hour before we realized Jim was the one flying and Hannah was the co-pilot. The reunion was sort of spoiled by the little note taped to the cockpit door saying "The shuttle is monitored, talk and move as little as possible, wait for us to give the word." After long and awkward wait Jim finally came back and announced that he'd looped something or other and we could talk. Hannah refused to leave the cockpit, even though we promised Tink wouldn't do anything weird. Aimy opened the conversation with a polite "What the hell is going on here you metal bastard?" but relented when Sarge vouched for Jim as the broest of cogbros. The explanation that followed was quick, obviously well rehearsed, and fairly terrifying. The gist of it was that the ship's tech-priests weren't just ansty, they were on the edge of mutiny.

Sarge loudly announced to the other teams that he intended to do visual inspection of the station, y'know for space... stuff. The other Interrogators agreed it was a good idea, but none of us thought of it as anything more than an excuse not to get marooned on a rapidly falling chunk of metal by crazy cogboys. So it was quite a surprise when we cleared a corner and saw the Heretek shuttle already docked to the station. We managed to call in the sighting just in time to keep the other teams from blundering into a bunch of heavily armed servitors and a tentically tech-priest. According to Battleaxe and Sword-guy the heretek seemed to be searching for something, stopping and doing creepy stuff to every cogitator or comm terminal he encountered. They decided that following the search party and seeing what it turned up was the best use of their time, and switched their teams to stealth mode. We wished them luck and continued our inspection. Now this is where some less imaginative people would've blown up the docked shuttle, but we were suspicious bastards. Sure enough a little more searching turned up nearly a dozen more shuttles, all of them heavily armed but dormant for now. In our professional opinions twelve to three wasn't good odds, even without factoring in how much better armed they were than us; so Sarge decided to let sleeping shuttles lie and called in a warning to the ground teams, advising them not to engage. Battleaxe interrupted and asked him to repeat the message, it was hard to hear over all the shooting.

Jim hastily leaned out and tapped his "You are being monitored" sign before Tink finished pulling off Spot's skulls. There was an awkward sort of pantomimed argument, in which Jim managed to convey that he couldn't turn the cameras off again and Tink managed to convey that Jim was a colossal metal asshole. In the end Tink wound up putting on his void helmet and stepping out the lock with his drone before pulling off its disguise. Since no one had anything better to do, we all clustered around the little airlock window and tried to watch over Tink's shoulder. It wasn't very interesting, all we could see was him poking at his xenos dataslate and muttering to himself. The real action was happening down below us, where the drone engaged its stealth field and started taking some very close looks at the station and shuttles. Whether it was due to Tink having a bit of experience looking for Eldar with his drone, or pure dumb luck, or because Tau drone tech was really just that good, he found a shuttle that was not like the others in just under five minutes. This did not please the Jim, who had to endure Tink making faces at him through the cockpit window as he relayed the drone's data. What appeared to be a fairly standard, if gruesomely decorated, Imperial-style shuttle to our eyes, looked like a bat winged xenos craft to Spot the Wonder Drone. It had sharp, forward swept wings with odd chunks missing and these weird mandible-looking wings under the cockpit, but that wasn’t what really caught our attention. What really caught our attention was the two massive lascannons slung under it, this thing didn’t just have our shuttle’s little wing turrets outclassed, it had us completely out-schooled. Tink very carefully parked his drone above the xenos shuttle, and a quick debate over what to do about it was held. It says something about how shaken we were by Jim’s little warning that we went with Nubby’s idea.

Twitch provided some cutting charges, which were carefully placed using the drone’s little servo arm. When everything was in place Jim, who’d eventually stopped trying to convince us to do something saner, flew us as close as he could without alarming any hostile shuttles. A trio of his little skulls were deployed and leashed like sled dogs, then he departed and us drifting in space above the holographically disguised shuttle. All things considered, it was a very good thing that Twitch was up to date on his meds and Fumbles wasn’t feeling particularly nervous. The skulls hauled us across the gap as, just outside of our line of sight, the charges went off and the shuttle’s bay depressurized. As the last breath of air leaked out our five man, one woman team zipped in. We crossed into the grav field and landed inside the shuttle with weapons ready, just like the trained professionals we supposedly were. Well, at least five of us did. Whether it was due to her injured hand or because she wasn’t used to performing these sorts of shenanigans, Aimy missed her mark and wound of caroming off the hull. Everyone turned to watch as she spun off into space, swearing a blue streak as the skulls raced out to catch her. All of us were so distracted that we were nearly pushed out after her when a gust of wind suddenly hit us in the back. Our squad turned around expecting to see, then shoot, some effeminate xenos. Instead, a pair of big scarecrow-lookin things with fish-shaped heads were standing there staring at us. At least we thought they were staring at us, the damned things didn’t have eyes. Their weapons were certainly pointed our way though, which was what really mattered.

Now, not being a psyker, I can't properly say whether it was a matter of the shout building up inside his helmet until something gave, or if it just punched through his faceplate on the way out towards its target. Either way though, we all felt a wave of panic roll over us as the shriek was cut off by what sounded like a burst of wind. A helmet's worth of air and a hail of plastic slammed into the two xenos monstrosities along with the psychic attack, where their combined force did exactly jack shit. Fumbles landed on his ass, frantically clawing at his ruined helmet and radiating pants-wetting terror to the entire squad. Unlike our past experienced with the psyker's aura, this wasn't distracting, annoying, or disturbing: this was incapacitating. By all rights we should have died there, stumbling around in an attempt to escape a source-less fear, but two things saved us. The first thing was Twitch, who shrugged off the aura of fear like it was nothing. He sprinted across the room to Fumbles, pulling off his explosives-filled pack on the way. He jammed the bag over the psyker's head and pulled its drawstrings, causing the bag to inflate like an incredibly dangerous balloon. The aura of terror reduced in intensity as Fumbles' inability to draw a breath was replaced by claustrophobic darkness and the fact that someone was partially strangling him. The second thing was that the fish-headed xenos were some sort of retarded. One of them fired a shot at Twitch as the trooper sprinted across the bay and missed by a scarily small margin. The other casually walked up the open hole in the bay and just sort of vacantly stared out of it. It didn't stop to shoot anyone on the way, or even try to step on Nubby who was lying half a meter from where it stopped. It was definitely one of the more bizarre thing we'd seen on a battlefield, or it would've been if we'd been in any condition to see anything.

Aimy was being hauled back towards the shuttle by Jim's skulls and Spot, who she was riding like some sort of demented horse. As she neared the hole something big and rather confused looking launched out of it, causing her to swear and nearly fall off her mount. After she regained her composure she watched as the... thing tumbled into the void, slowly spinning at it drifted away. When it didn't do anything she dismissed it as "not her problem" and raised her new rifle as the shuttle's interior finally came into view Back inside the bay, the xenos had gotten tired of Sarge dangling off its weapon. It grabbed one of the struggling noncom's arms in a dinner-plate sized hand, and inexorably pried him of its weapon. Sarge found himself suspended in the air, or vacuum as it were, facing away from the angry xenos. He flailed as hard as he could in an attempt to break its grip and failed miserably. Sarge then grabbed his slung lasgun and tried to fire it over his shoulder, it was wrenched from his hand before he got more than a single burst off. Finally in desperation, he reached for his grenades, which were pretty high on the list of stupid weapons to use in a vacuum. Perhaps luckily, he wasn't able to grab one before his free arm was grabbed by the xenos' other hand. It raised him in the air then slowly, inexorably began to spread its arms, and by extension Sarge's, apart. The first thing Aimy saw as she rose over the edge of the hole was Fumbles, sitting there and clawing at the backpack full of high-explosives tied over his head. This was odd, but not an immediate problem. The second thing, or things, were three of her squadmates running around like idiots and screaming about not being able to get a clear shot. The third thing was her new boss being pulled apart like a wishbone by a three meter tall xenos. Aimy sighted her rifle, waited a beat for Sarge's legs to swing out of the way, then put a burst of plasma right through the monstrosity's shoulder.

While the more technical side of the team got the door open Jim's medi-skull floated in and took a look at Sarge. It sort of poked around in a confused manner, probably trying to figure out how to get at Sarge's shoulders. After a while its little machine-spirit must have reached a decision, because it deployed a syringe and tried to jab Sarge with it. The puncture-proof voidsuit turned out to be stronger than the skull expected: after a bit of straining it broke the needle and whacked into Sarge's shoulder, triggering an impressive amount of cursing. The medi-skull got even more agitated at this failure and deployed its little circular saw, the one we'd last seen it use to decapitate the Magos. None of us really knew if it had decided to harvest Sarge's head, or just wanted to cut through his void suit,while he was in a vacuum so it could deliver its painkiller shot. Either way, Nubby and Aimy fended the skull off with the butts of their weapons until the door was finally opened. Jim was very apologetic about the whole thing, but we still didn't let the skull follow us into the pressurized section of the shuttle. Once the door was closed and Twitch had carefully removed the bag full of explosives from Fumbles head, we looked around our new shuttle. The room where we'd fought the fish-heads had just been a moderately roomy troop compartment, nothing interesting in there; this room was definitely some sort of command center. It wasn't filled with vox units, cogitators, and random uninsulated wires like an Imperial command center, but the holo-thingy displaying a map of the station in the middle of the room was a dead giveaway.

After the little medical procedure was finished a quick council of war was held. Aimy reported that the other teams were just killing a lot of servitors, not making any real progress towards finding useful intel. Jim followed that up with a report that the tech-priests hadn't given any new orders, but claimed they were very interested in our shuttle. Based on all that, Sarge's vague plan was for us to call off the station part of the mission before anyone did something crazy and fly the Eldar shuttle back to the Occurrence Border. From there the adepts, and possibly the cogboys, could search it for clues or whatever. The only real problem with this plan was that compared to Imperial, or Tau systems for that matter, Eldar tech was almost impossible to understand. Tink was working hard, and kept claiming that he'd nearly figured it out, but so far he'd only managed to turn the lights on and off. While Tink tinkered and occasionally asked for advice from Jim and Ol' Bill, the rest of us kept busy. Aimy watched the perimeter with Twitch, Sarge poked at the holo-map, and Nubby and Fumbles were assigned prisoner duty, prisoner in this case meaning the severed xenos toso. They taped the thing to the wall and, at Twitches request, drew a face on its blank head so it didn't look so creepy. At Nubby's urging, Fumbles was adding some embellishments to their artwork, when a section of wall slid outwards and a tall, lithe, and familiar-looking xenos appeared out of thin air. The Eldar Warlock scanned the room then began to say something. He was immediately interrupted by Twitch shouting that a hostile had breached the perimeter and raising his lasgun. The xenos tried to resume speaking, only to be interrupted again as Twitch asked for permission to fire. Sarge, who'd nodded off, jerked awake just in time to hear the frustrated Eldar snap: >Foolish mon-keigh, you can't shoot me I'm a h- Then Twitch got tired of waiting and opened up on full auto.

The Eldar had probably intended to either use his moral superiority to get us to leave his ship, or cut some sort of deal with us. The problem was that he kept getting bogged down in pointless arguments, petty insults, and fits of frustrated anger. Everyone, even Fumbles, was doing something that might as well have been scientifically designed to outrage the prissy xenos. To start with, Tink didn't even try to hide the fact that he was stealing the Eldar's shuttle, and occasionally asked him what a specific button did. Aimy only spoke when she'd thought of something particularly scathing to say and while Twitch eventually stopped shooting the hologram, he'd occasionally interrupt the Warlock to insert his own rather unique theories into the conversation. Fumbles, who was admittedly acting on Nubby's orders, doodled on the captive fish-headed xenos. This caused a surprising amount of anger in the Warlock, despite how good the mustache and monocle he drew looked. All that was relatively minor compared to Nubby and Sarge though. Nubby, for reasons beyond all logic, had appointed himself as the Warlock's translator. He shouted down or shot the holographic xenos at the end of almost every sentence, then relayed his personal interpretation to Sarge. Our fearless leader took an evil delight in how much this annoyed the Eldar, and started only responding to Nubby's translations. It was childish, antagonistic, incredibly unprofessional, and all according to a plan so devious that none of us even realized we were part of it. Well, at least Sarge claimed it was his plan afterwards, and no one was in any position to argue with the results.

The incredulous Warlock asked if we were serious. Sensing that the time was right, Sarge told Nubby to shut up, and promised that he was super serious. We didn't want to use the archeotech, we didn't want to study the archeotech, and we certainly didn't want to fight Necrons, Emperor help us, for the archeotech. As far as any of us were concerned, the metal bastards could have the thing. The Eldar sputtered, then asked about fifteen different questions, most of which he answered himself. We were obviously too stupid to lie and we must have already known what the archeotech was, otherwise how'd we know to come to this system? Furthermore, despite our appearance and behavior, we were obviously the ones in charge of the mission. After all, our team was the one in his shuttle as opposed to fighting servitors on the station. No one correct these assumptions. The only real question the Eldar had for us was why we wanted the archeotech destroyed. According to him, the five other Inquisitors and Magi he'd encountered, then killed, had all lusted after the device like it was mankind's salvation. Sarge nonchalantly suggested that we were just smarter than them. The Warlock shot a pointed look at Nubby, who had a finger jammed up to the second joint in one of his nostrils, then back to Sarge. Our fearless leader shrugged and adjusted that to "less ambitious than them."

Twitch packed up his toys, Fumbles was given a less dangerous pack to use as a helmet, Tink was forcefully pulled out of the cockpit, and Nubby was told to empty his pockets. While everyone else packed up Sarge and Aimy debated the whole tech-priest problem, it was eventually decided that there was no way to really hide the archeotech's location from them. Luckily, Aimy was able to suggest a way to keep the cogboys on our side for the time being. Jim was called to pick us up, and over the monitored channel Sarge reported the location of the archeotech. He also warned everyone that a sizable Heretek fleet was being gathered to seize it before the mechanicus could confiscate it, so maybe we should try to get there and secure it first. It wasn't very subtle, but hey, neither were we, and the cogboys must've bought it, because everyone's shuttles picked them up without any arguing or ultimatums. Everyone was feeling pretty happy about how the mission had went as we left the Eldar shuttle. In a fit of goodwill Tink even pushed the fish-head's limbs into a neat pile and left a note saying which way second one had been drifting when we'd last seen it. As Jim and Hannah flew us back to the Occurrence Border, we looked back at the station we'd never gotten around to boarding. It was looking rather ragged, its interior probably hadn't been designed to survive pitched fights involving anti-armor energy weaponry, and the star behind it had gotten noticeably larger. We congratulated ourselves on not being stupid enough to board that deathtrap, and watched the station shrink behind us. Right as it was getting too small to see anymore, there was a neat little firework display. We couldn't be sure, but the explosions seemed to match the locations of all the heretek shuttles. That probably explained what the Eldar had been up to.

Sarge returned to our quarters hours later, looking like shit and still wearing his void-suit. Our first few tries to remove his suit resulted in a lot of yelling and Nubby getting punted across the room. In the end Tink wound up just cutting him out while Aimy held a bottle of liquor with a straw in it for him. The gist of the situation was that the Eldar ship had disengaged and vanished after the heretek shuttles had been destroyed. The heretek ship hadn't tried to chase us or catch up with the falling station, instead it had warped out shortly after the fight ended. The Captain couldn't be sure, but it didn't look like it was heading the same direction as us, and the scanners had been clear since we entered the warp ourselves. We were headed towards the coordinates the Eldar had given us, which had turned out to be the planet with the shifty governor Sword-guy had wanted us to go to. Sarge said the other Interrogator had been rather bitter over the whole thing, mostly on account of how he'd been shot in the gut twice during the station fight. Battleaxe wasn't in great shape either, they'd shed a lot of blood fighting off the servitors and capturing two hereteks for interrogation. Tensions were rather high due to the way the tech-priests had seized those hard-won prisoners and vivisected them. The cogboys were not very apologetic for this, but at least they'd shared their info on this particular group hereteks with the rest of us. The adepts were chewing through it and would be putting together some combat plans and stuff like that during the trip. The other info Sarge had relayed from the Warlock hadn't gone over well. To start with, everyone but the tech-priests had given Sarge grief for not getting the actual details of the archeotech from the Eldar. He'd very politely told them where they could shove their complaints, then moved on to the matter of who was probably purging planets.

Once again we were stuck travelling through the warp and hoping like hell we'd arrive before everything went ploin shaped. At least this time we had a better idea of what was currently happening at our destination: the planet had a branch of the Telepathica and our astropath was able to keep tabs on their situation. The adepts and other teams spent a lot of time sending messages back and forth, looking for clues about where the archeotech was and all that. We didn't trouble ourselves with any of that, someone would tell if they found something important, for the time being we had other stuff to do. Aside from the usual planning bullshit that Sarge had to put up with, we were able to dedicate our full efforts to some very important projects. Okay, well one important project, a less-important minor one, and a bit of "entrapaneering". The less-important one was replacing Sarge's lasgun. When the xenos, which the adepts had told us was called a Wraithguard not a fish-head, had disarmed him it'd bent his lasgun like a banana. Since fruit-shaped weapons tend not to work well and Aimy's pulse-rifle had performed so awesomely, Tink put all his effort into converting a Tau carbine for Sarge's use. Everyone else was moderately jealous. The other side project was, of course, Nubby's continual quest not to lose quite a lot of money in the betting pool. Fumbles revealed to the rest of us that during our last bit of travel time they'd tracked down the only three people who'd bet on the Necrons, then… persuaded them to retract those bets. All that was left to do was convince the ship's quartermaster, who was the one actually holding the money and tracking the bets, to allow the withdrawal. Once that was done there'd be no winning bets, and the money would surely default back to everyone. We left Nubby to his little plot, which seemed to revolve around getting some incriminating pictures of the quartermaster. We'd be getting our money back too after all.

Don't laugh, this wasn't a class on any of those sissy "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" Ethics. This was a class on Guardsmen Ethics, which tend to only go as far as "Do unto others," and Nubby knew those by heart. He and Doc, as what you might call the friendliest and most persuasive members of our little group, were assisted by the ever-loyal Fumbles in teaching Camaraderie 101 to Jim and Hannah. The two junior tech-priests were educated in: >Why it is Important to Stick With Your Mates >When and When Not to Follow the Rules and Regs >Why You Should Never Trust Anyone Over the Rank of Sergeant They also got a special bonus course on: >Why Killing Your Close Personal Friends Because a Crazy Priest Told You to is a Very Bad Thing By the end both enginseers were thinking like proper Guardsmen and gave us all the vital information we needed for the rest of our project. Specifically, how the tech-priests would probably monitor us, what sort of bomb they'd be giving us to plant, and where it and its detonator were being built. From there it was Twitch and Tink's show. Twitch was far, far too excited about his part of the plan. Not because he got to blow up people who annoyed him, Sarge had vetoed mining the priests' quarters on account of how we wanted to still have a ship after the mission, but because he got to play with the biggest bomb he'd ever seen. Now, when I say biggest I don't mean it's size, I mean its yield. The first time Twitch made his way through the vents to where the priests were putting the bomb together, he'd wound up needing a new pair of pants. They were giving us a backpack nuke.

When we finally came out of warp at the border world we felt ready for anything. Unfortunately it turned out that the other teams and adepts weren't nearly as awesome as us. Not only had they failed to pin down the location of the archeotech for us, they'd also been unable to confirm that it was even in the system. Sure, a quarter of them had died fighting on the station, and half the survivors were still being tended to by Doc and his girl, AND they'd only been able to do their research via discrete astropathic questioning and a few out of date field reports. Still though, we'd expected better of them. I mean a little professionalism and work ethic isn't much to ask is it? It was going to be so damned embarrassing if turned out that the Eldar had been lying to us. We sat on the ship for a few days, twiddling our thumbs and getting more and more worried while the other teams went down and made some discreet inquiries. Sarge and the adepts helped them out, but the rest of us pretty much stayed in orbit and waited for the word go. Luckily, from our perspective, they met with enough resistance from the local government and ad-mech priesthood to practically prove the archeotech was there somewhere. Probably the only reason that no one tried to kill our investigators was the constant stream of ships pouring into the system at our request for reinforcements. Most of them were little navigator-less armed merchantmen, but there were a few escort-class vessels, and the Captain said our odds in a naval battle were definitely looking up. Still though, from what we overheard, the locals were some seriously uncooperative people. No one would admit to anything, even when the Interrogators started flashing their junior-rosettes around. That changed abruptly when every astropath and navigator in the system reported a fleet approaching through the warp.

The planet's nobles sold out their governor and put their forces at Battleaxe's command. The basic story they gave us was that the Planetary Governor had purchased the piece of archeotech and a team of scientists from a Rogue Trader. The device itself wasn't being used for anything, and they didn't actually know what it was, but the technology being reverse engineered from it was supposed to turn their little SDF fleet into the most powerful space force this side of Battlefleet Ultima. They were patriots see, it had all been for the good of their world, and by extension the Imperium. The Governor had told them all that within five years they'd be completely secure against any Tau aggression or Tyranid splinter fleets. In ten their shipyards would be the envy of every forge-world. In twenty they'd personally control all space-shipping from there to the Damocles Gulf. And by the end of the century, the Administratum would need to make a whole new sector just to contain the worlds they'd use their fleet to colonize and take back from the Tau. Quite the statement, but every tech-priest and veteran voidsman they'd sent to look at thing had confirmed it. So they'd all signed on, even knowing that some xenos force was chasing the archeotech and would need to be fought off. They were confident in size of their defence forces, they said. All those other worlds that'd been wiped out were little undefended backwaters, they said. It was worth the gamble, they said. But now that they saw the size of the Heretek fleet and the Inquisition was at their door, they were singing a different tune.

Per our orders the PDF had stayed out of the semi-secret basement where the archeotech was located. They'd just swept the upper building, which had been defended by a few of the Governor's men and as well as a surprisingly large number of servitors. The servitors worried us at first, since the Hereteks weren't supposed to be anywhere near close enough to shuttle or teleport a force down. Thankfully, when Jim and Hannah came over to take a look they said the servitors didn't have any recognizable Heretek markings. That was a load off our minds, and we followed some PDF General over to the basement entrance. Surprisingly, Jim and Hannah both tagged along instead of returning to their shuttle. Sarge weighed the pros and cons of having two cogboys around when we went to blow up some piece of really cool tech, then decided to trust them. The Enginseers fell in behind Twitch, who was lugging a rather heavy backpack containing a large metal metal cylinder with an unnecessary amount of ornamentation on its surface. The bomb did not have any exterior controls, readouts, or anything aside from what Jim told us were etchings of holy scenes and prayers written in binary. It looked like a drum for storing holy water more than anything, it was about the right size and weight. We'd had to scrounge a grav plate and clamp it to the bottom for anyone but Sarge to be able to carry the thing. Presumably the whole reason for the bomb's odd design was that there were no exposed controls for us to muck around with and no way to see inside. It should've stopped anyone who wasn't entirely suicidal from trying to go in and rewire its detonator, but Twitch had the thing cut open within ten minutes of our shuttle's departure. Now the nuke's top was held on with duct-tape, its remote control was hooked up to a novelty noise-maker, and the only way to set it off was using the detonator Sarge was carrying.

Aside from a few traps which Twitch easily disarmed, the stairs down weren't defended by anyone. Either they'd all fought and died on the surface, or they'd fallen back the the big room at the bottom of the stairs. We all bet on the latter and formed up to breach the final door. The charge went off, flashes were tossed, and we all rushed in with weapons raised. Then we all sheepishly walked down the empty hallway to what was was ACTUALLY the final door, and did all that again. This time a hail of las fire poured at us as we scrambled to find cover in a very large room. Luckily, in addition to being very large, the room was littered with all sorts of conduits, machinery, and inexplicably chest-high walls. Through a combination of luck and skill we all managed to find something solid to hide behind and started trading fire with what looked to be five tech-priests. Originally we'd had some vague plan that Tink would find where in the room the archeotech was and Twitch would plant the bomb while the rest of us held off the defenders, but that didn't turn out to be necessary. For one thing, it was easy to see where the archeotech was, a MASSIVE opaque shield took up the rear half of the room. For another, the tech-priests didn't need to be held off, they were pathetic. These guys weren't anything like the sort of mechanical combat-monstrosities we'd expected, they were just relatively normal tech-priests with las-pistols. They holed up behind some ineffective cover and we picked them off one by one while Jim and Hannah made a half-hearted attempt to negotiate their surrender. There was just one of the tech-priests left, and we were arguing over whether to try and take him alive so he could deactivate the shield. Then we all heard a metal stomping sound and something that looked like a cross between a dreadnought, a necron, and a metal squid came around the edge of the shield.

None of us were in position to see what happened, but Aimy screamed like a stuck grox and flooded the comm channel with an incredible stream of curses. We took that as a sign that she'd live, and concentrated on the fight. Not having fancy targeting toys, Nubby and Tink had to find gaps in the smoke to make their attacks through. Nubby hung back and put some well aimed las-shots into the dreadnought, causing it to stomp towards him, while Twitch darted forward with a detpack. Sarge groaned when he saw Twitch sprint out of the smoke with the Nuke still strapped to his back, then nearly had a heart attack when one of the dreadnought's weapons swivelled towards the demolitions trooper. Thinking quickly, he activated his auxiliary grenade launcher and fired a Tau flash grenade between Twitch and the dreadnought. The dreadnought's beam missed Twitch's nuclear backpack by centimeters, and the blinded trooper slammed helmet-first into one of its legs. Now stunned as well as blind, Twitch staggered around for a second, then suddenly disappeared as Fumbles stuck his head out of the smoke. The dreadnought stomped around for a second trying to find Twitch, but quickly gave up and returned to chasing Nubby as another hail of las-shots hit it. Sarge confirmed that Twitch was still alive, then ran off into the smoke to emulate Nubby's hit-and-run harassment. While everyone else was running and shooting, Tink sat still and waited for his plasma gun to recharge. As he waited, he noticed Sarge wasn't marking the target anymore and sent Spot out to keep an eye on things. Thanks to the drone's vid feed, he was the first of us to notice that the dreadnought was slowing down a little. Initially he put it down to some sort of battle damage, but then he spotted the familiar-looking skulls flying above the smoke. As he watched one of them darted down and attached itself next to two others on the dreadnought's back, causing it to slow down a little more.

Given that the Warlock was there in person and had a pair of wraithguards with him, we were much more polite this time. Sarge made an attempt at diplomatic small talk while the rest of us formed up and took stock. Mostly we were just bruised, exhausted, and low on ammo, Aimy was the only one of us who'd taken an actual hit. When Jim and Hannah helped her through the smoke conversation stopped for a second as everyone stared. Her hair, and helmet, had been given you might call a reverse-mohawk, the necron-beam had been a millimeter from taking the top of her head off. Everyone quickly found something else to look at, specifically the other figures coming through the smoke. The Warlock's rangers were practically dragging two short figures. One we all recognized as a Tau Earth-Caste, but the other looked like a monkey that someone had been testing augmetics on. The Tau was frantic, and when he saw us he started babbling at us in gothic. He'd been kidnapped, which was illegal, then enslaved, which was doubly illegal, then forced to work with all sorts of mentally unstable people, and now he was kidnapped again and he just wanted to go home. Sarge digested this for a second, then shot a confused look at the Warlock. He said the Tau was the last of the archeotech science team, and ordered him to deactivate the shield. We all followed the Tau scientist to a cogitator station, listening to a steady list of complaints way. The monkey remained silent, but tried to bite the Ranger holding it a few times. Once at the station the Tau pressed a few buttons and asked Sarge to flip a heavy looking lever. The shield vanished with a loud crack and revealed the archeotech that'd caused all this trouble. Jim and Hannah fell to their knees in awe while everyone else stared. Then Nubby swore loudly, Twitch started laughing, and Sarge facepalmed. Tink peeked out from the back of the group and turned to Aimy. >Huh, looks like a necron ship. Wonder how the hell they got that.

The lecture ended with a wail of "Do you know how much time and life you've wasted with your stupidity?" Which Sarge sourly countered with "Oh shut up, we're guardsmen. Wasting time and life is practically our job description." While the Warlock searched for more words to express his outrage Sarge ordered the rest of us to secure the ship and asked the Warlock what his plan for sorting all this out was. Sarge and the Eldar argued over whether the Hereteks and Necrons would leave the system if we just blew the ship up. While they did this the rest of us took the Tau prisoner inspected the ship. It had changed a lot since we'd last seen it: the place was practically filled with things that looked like a hybrid of Tau and Imperial tech. Jim and Hannah snapped out of the religious daze they'd been in and, after a bit of outrage about how heretical everything was, started asking the terrified scientist questions. Playing tour guide seemed to calm the Tau down immensely. He led the tech-priests around the ship with Tink tagging along and asking annoying questions. They were given a completely incomprehensible summary of how the scientist had merged Tau, Imperial, and Jokaero tech into something that could interface with Necron systems. Supposedly that let them reverse engineer pieces of the tech and make their own versions or something, it was pretty much impossible to follow. While the nerds babbled about how this was the greatest scientific advancement in centuries Twitch and Nubby went to find a place to plant the Nuke and blow it all up. There's probably something deep and philosophical you could say about that, but we were guardsmen. We had a really big bomb, and damned if we weren't going to use it. Twitch slid the actual go-boom part of the bomb out of its decorative cylinder and crammed it into an out of the way crevice. He was literally vibrating with excitement as he taped the thing into place and armed it.

The Warlock promised that if we crewed the ship with the Tau scientist, his vessel would follow us at maximum teleportation range. The jammer would go down, we'd arm the mines, and then we'd port out and he'd carry us to safety on the only ship in system fast and stealthy enough to survive the ensuing melee. For trust reasons the nuke's detonator would be left in our hands, but also put on a timer in case something went wrong. Sarge eventually agreed. Everyone sprang into action. The nerdier members of the team went back aboard with the Tau scientist to prep the ship for its last flight. The Warlock ordered his men to rig their own charges in the lab then, the second the Tau scientist was out of sight and without the slightest hesitation, decapitated the captive augmetic-monkey. Aimey put in a courtesy call to the PDF upstairs, who were surprisingly still alive, telling them to bug out if they could. Finally Sarge called the Captain and other Interrogators to fill them in on the plan. The tech-priests must have been listening in too, because the little noise-maker we had their remote nuke detonator hooked up to went off halfway through the conversation. Sarge called the cogboys assholes and promised everyone else it would work out. He then got a final sitrep from the rest of us and walked over to where the Eldar was cleaning his sword. Sarge gave the xenos his best parade ground salute, then thanked him for agreeing to teleport us out of the ship. The burly noncom held out his hand and, after an awkward pause, the Warlock sheathed his sword and took it. Looking Sarge right in the eyes and saying it was the least he could do, the xenos shook his hand. Inside that stupid helmet he was probably grinning ear-to-ear about how clever he was and how the annoying guardsmen would finally be getting what they had coming. Imagine how the xenos bastard's expression must have changed when Sarge's grip tightened and dragged him forward.

So no shit, there we were, on a Necron ship being piloted by a terrified Tau scientist, flying out to start a fight between a Heretek fleet and a Necron extermination force, with our only chance of survival resting on an Eldar Warlock who we'd taken hostage by gluing a detpack to his spirit gem. Gotta say this for life in the Inquisition: it may be absolutely insane, but it makes for some great stories. Our flight up to orbit was less interesting that you'd think, we didn't have any windows to see the massive swarm of necron scarabs we were flying through. Mostly we ran around placing all of Twitch's detpacks and helping the Tau keep all the jury-rigged systems running. The little guy was terrified to the point of gibbering by the situation, and Fumbles was put on duty behind him, pumping a constant stream of positive mental energy or whatever. Sarge took the detonator from Nubby and hung out with Aimy and the Warlock and ironed out the last little pieces of the plan, like when the Imperial fleet would disengage and how the teleporting would actually work. The Eldar seemed to have accepted that all he had to do to get out of the situation in one piece was not be a dick. This was probably very hard for him, dickishness being in the nature of Eldar and all, but aside from being a little surly he was coping. In fact spirits were high all around after Fumbles calmed the Tau down, the only people who seemed to be unsure about the plan were Jim, Hannah, and Tink. The techies were all rather torn by the way we were about to destroy a technomagical marvel and the fact that the Eldar flatly refused to allow the Tau to live. The Warlock held that the fact that we felt sorry for him was immaterial. He would have to stay and keep flying evasively while we ported out, a mine would be placed on his seat to ensure he didn't fall into enemy hands. Sarge pointedly ignored the mutinous looks and whispering this statement generated.

Keeping the balance between the two incoming fleets was tricky, but the Tau scientist and his assistants managed it. As they closed it got harder and harder to dodge incoming fire and the shield started soaking shots and we all watched the timer until both the Hereteks were in teleportation range carefully. Everyone had their own little nervous reactions as the enemy closed, ranging from Aimy repeatedly checking her weapon to Jim and Hannah praying. Sarge took special note of the way Tink was hugging his drone like a teddy-bear and how Twitch kept fiddling with the empty Nuke-case which he was keeping for "sentimental reasons". The Warlock signalled it was time to fall back to the teleporter and personally placed the mine on the back of the Tau's seat. As he did it he leaned in and told the poor sucker to be careful to stay in his seat so the Eldar ship's teleporter could lock onto him. Seriously, Eldar are dicks. Everyone slowly filed out after the Eldar to where the actual teleportation would be happening. Tink, Twitch, and Fumbles brought up the rear, the techie was crying and Fumbles was radiating waves of misery as well. Sarge carefully ignored them, but the Warlock spared a second to tell them that they were pathetic and to ask Fumbles to control his aura, it was making it hard for him to focus his own powers. Fumbles flipped him off. When the timer hit zero, Twitch activated his timed detonators and Jim did something. The entire ship immediately filled with crackling electricity and a wave of pressure that nearly deafened us. What ported in was horrific. The dreadnought thing we'd fought down in the lab had nothing on these guys, they were like the skitarii that accompany the titan legions crossed with daemons. There was metal, and flesh, and guns, and claws, and way more tentacles than anyone should ever have to see in one place. We all froze for a second, then before we could fire the second wave arrived.

That'd been the first teleportation any of us were part of, and honestly it wasn't nearly as bad as everyone made it out to be. There was no muss, no fuss, and no screaming daemonic voices accompanied by lightning bolts. Just one second here, next second there. That was probably because it was a xenos teleporter though. Anyway, the first thing we noticed upon arrival was that the maelstrom of violence had been replaced by an equally unsettling army of Eldar. The boss-cron looked around for a second, obviously didn't like the odds, then vanished in another flash of green, leaving behind a few dozen scarabs. We very carefully shot these, making sure not to raise our weapons high enough to threaten any of our nice, new hosts. The Warlock breathed a sigh of relief and barked some orders in pointy-ear speak. He then turned back and asked us to hand over the detonator and remain on the pad until we reached teleportation range of an Imperial vessel. Sarge kept his grip on the detonator and suggested that our arrival had damaged the teleporter, possibly in such a way that it would port us all into the void instead of a vessel. All-in-all he'd prefer to hand over the detonator after a shuttle ride to the Occurrence Border. The Eldar muttered something that sounded like "lucky guess", waved the soldiers away and started leading us through the fancy-but-confusing corridors of his ship. We rode back on a very familiar looking shuttle, and spent the majority of the voyage trying to stare down the wraithguards and rangers we'd ditched in the lab. Thankfully Sarge was able to keep things to a low simmer, keeping Nubby from saying anything at all, and covering for Tink and Fumbles who were in some sort of depressive feedback loop.

The first thing we noticed after being escorted to our quarters was the large amount of dead servitors. Then the fairly severe structural damage to the hallway. Finally the note from Ol' Bill saying that we were going to have to clean and repair it ourselves, no one in the engineering department was willing to even walk down this corridor much less touch anything. They'd even cut a new entry point to the Gellar Field Generator from a side corridor. Twitch surveyed the carnage with pride, especially the part where the doors to our quarters were still sealed despite the damage. He supervised the careful opening of one of the doors by while our senior tech-priest and servitor escort stayed at the end of hallway and glared at everyone. Once it was open we all piled in, Fumbles and the Enginseers included, then sealed the door behind us. After a quick sweep to check for any sort of bugs, the techies confirmed the room was clean and Twitch dropped the nuke-case he'd still been carrying. To Sarge's complete lack of surprise, when the lid was popped off a nearly asphyxiated Tau scientist flopped onto the floor, followed by Tink's drone controller. After the little guy had a minute to breath and get his bearings he was incredibly grateful. In what Sarge thought was an incredibly annoying voice, he thanked us for the rescue then asked what he could do to repay us and when we'd return him to the Tau Empire. Everyone kept quiet on that last part, but Tink butted forward. He announced that for a start, the scientist could help him build a new drone, Spot had DIED for him after all. Then the techie started crying again, which set Fumbles off in turn. Nubby led the psyker away to look at pictures of happy puppies or something while everyone else went to find something less awkward to do, like talk to Jim and Hannah about their complex crisis of faith.

Battleaxe had successfully captured the Planetary Governor and galvanized the PDF into a moderately competent defence against the scarab swarms. Several smaller cities and numerous towns had been de-peopled by the evil little bugs, leaving the silhouettes we'd seen on the dead world, but all the major population centers had been defended. After the Necrons had been engaged by the Hereteks the swarms had stopped porting in, so currently she was just keeping everything stable while the space battle worked itself out. Up in space Sword-guy was mostly keeping everyone from doing anything stupid while the xenos and Hereteks mauled each other. Astropathic communication was still down but the reinforcements that were trickling in brought news of some sort of major fleet force being gathered near the sector capital. If neither hostile fleet disengaged soon, it was looking like reinforcements would arrive in time. Finally, the Captain said tech-priests were still sitting tight and waiting for Juris, who was on the way but had no ETA. Since it seemed like he'd be deciding our fate, we asked Jim and Hannah exactly who Juris was. Unfortunately they went full tech-priest on us and only said that he was holy and not something we should ask questions about. We left it at that, things were crowded enough in our quarters without starting any fights.

So it wasn't hard to put two and two together and see that this holy Juris guy was probably the reason there was a Mechanicus fleet here now. Sure enough, word came down that the system was now under his… jurisdiction. Everyone was to sit tight while he investigated reports of tech-heresy and took corrective measures. This sounded ominous, but since the person who said it had a bloody Ark at his command, we all sat tight. After two more days of stewing, stuff started happening. Some fancy looking tech-priests we didn't recognize came and asked for Jim and Hannah. Tink and Twitch were in favor of shooting them, or at least telling them to bugger off, but the Enginseers said it was okay: these guys were from the Ordos Juris. We were all sort of torn as Jim and Hannah were led off, they were our mates and we were worried for them, but on the other hand the cheeky buggers had let us think that "Juris" was just some guys name for something like two weeks. Anyway, our cogboy and cog-girl were returned without any signs of damage and the tech-heresy investigation continued without touching on us again. The priests never came down to ask us any questions and they never searched our quarters for Tau scientists or disguised pulse-weapons. It was rather worrying at first, since good luck like this tends to be followed by some even-larger dose of bad, but Jim and Hannah said it made sense. They started to explain that it was some sort of treaty between the Ordos and the Inquisition, then stopped when they realized no one but the Tau scientist and Fumbles was actually listening. Speaking of the Tau scientist, we were beginning to regret rescuing him. Quite aside from the risk of being correctively measured by the Ordos Juris, he was incredibly annoying.

Our sorta-imprisonment finally ended just before any of us got frustrated enough to kill each other. Doc, finally out of the wheelchair, led the relief force with the Captain, other Interrogators, and adepts at his back. They informed us of our freedom and invited us up to the main conference room for a final debriefing. We were hesitant to leave at first, but Jim sent a skull and confirmed that the combat servitors that had been watching our doors for the last dozen days were actually gone. When we got to the briefing room it was occupied by a single ordinary looking tech-priest and some guy who looked like a diplomat. Jim and Hannah practically fell over themselves bowing and scraping when they saw the priest, so we figured he was the head Magos Juris or whatever you called it. The Magos responded by screeching something in binary, prompting the two Enginseers to look embarrassed then sit down and shut up. That was the only thing the Magos ever said, everything else came from his diplomat helper. To start with, there was a presentation of legal documents stating that the entire system was more or less Mechanicus property until they were sure no Necron or Heretek fleets would be returning. Battleaxe and Sword-guy were invited to stay on as official Inquisitorial observers to the transition of government. Neither Interrogator acted surprised and both accepted, so it was probably fixed beforehand.

With that final little announcement the Magos Juris left with the other Interrogators in tow and the Captain went to see to his ship. This left just our team and the stunned Enginseers with the translator guy. To our surprise he came over and introduced himself as a Magos as well, despite his apparent lack of metal bits. As he got closer and we all started getting uneasy. It go to the point where something sprang loose in Twitch's head and Sarge had to grab his laspistol before he shot the guy. Now that we saw him up close he was definitely a tech-priest, there's normal looking, then there's aggressively normal looking. The guy looked like someone had sculpted every inch of his body to exactly average human specifications, it was amazingly creepy. Anyway, the creepy diplo-Magos went to where Jim and Hannah were still silently freaking out and assured them they'd do fine, the Inquisition was the perfect place for them. Both of them should embrace it and take the chance to watch, learn, and grow; because they'd need every scrap of experience. See, when their service to the Inquisition ended, they weren't going to sit in some manufactorum for the rest of their days. Jim and Hannah had been marked for something greater, they'd be joining the Ordos Juris. This news did absolutely nothing to reduce the two Enginseers' panic levels, and the diplo-Magus let out a very unsettling laugh as he turned to the rest of us.

Smiling that creepy smile, the diplo-Magos told us unless we were incredibly unlucky, we'd never encounter him or the Ordos Juris again, but they'd be watching us with great interest. On that unsettling note, he wished us good luck and good… hunting, then left. Twitch muttered something about the Mechanicus being full of weirdos; the rest of us, including Jim and Hannah, agreed. Nubby suggested that this was probably a good time to go get a drink, possibly in the mess-hall where the betting pool was scheduled to finally be concluded in about twenty minutes. No one questioned how he managed to know this despite being locked in the same quarters as the rest of us. The mess was, of course, packed. Nearly everyone had been in on the pool, and even if they hadn't won, they wanted to see who did or if their stake would be refunded. Fumbles, the Adepts, and the tech-priests took one look at the press of bodies and decided it wasn't worth it, but us doughty guardsmen couldn't be deterred so easily and made heavy use of our feet and elbows to carve a path. Nubby and, surprisingly, Aimy were the most viscous about it, and managed to get all the way to the table the Quartermaster was standing on. Surprisingly he was backed up by the Captain and some heavily armed armsmen.

As the party erupted around us and Aimy and Nubby screamed at each other and the poor Quartermaster, Sarge finally got around to reading Oak's message. Unsurprisingly it was a new assignment to be performed before returning. He read the orders, swore, then flagged down the Captain, who swore even harder. Both men decided they needed somewhere more quiet to think things over and headed up to the bridge. As they left, Doc, flagged them down and asked what was going on. He was shown the first line of Oak's orders, which read: >The Emperor's Scythes Space Marine Chapter has agreed to undertake the capture of a living Tyranid Zoanthrope for study. You are to assist them in this mission in any way possible, and handle the transport of the creature to my laboratories.