“And that’s another one done,” I huffed, hands on my hips as I stared at the central neural computer of this system. It was an organic computer, housing the equivalent of a mind core, and it controlled all the other defensive constructs I’d made around the system. “Now to test it.”

  It was built around a Bckstone obelisk. I had some luck with replicating the fractal patterns based on the intricate scans I’d taken before, but the effectiveness of the Warp dampening aura was a mere fragment of a true Bckstone Pylon’s. I was still waiting on Trazyn for those lessons. Once I had those, I’d have to make another round and upgrade all of these pylons.

  But they worked well enough. All they needed to do, after all, was keep sorcerers and daemons from fucking with the central bio-computer. If a Nurgle daemon could just turn the entire defensive network against me with a spell, it wouldn’t be worth the energy I spent on making it all.

  I chucked a Biomancy spell at the thing, limiting the energy flowing into it to what I’d seen Greater Daemons throw around. The entire spell vanished into thin air centimetres away from the target, which I counted as a pass.

  I also had a few lesser brains that controlled arcologies or food-factories built around my new Warp-amplifier Bckstone chunks, infused with Smites. To test those, I’d have to grab a Greater Daemon. Thus far, I’d chucked a Lesser Daemon of all four Chaos Gods at a fist-sized ball of fming Bckstone, and while they didn't get permanently erased, they did get banished near instantly the moment the silvery fmes touched them.

  And on the note of food factories, the domestication of the conquered pnets’ poputions was going exceedingly well. Maybe I shouldn’t have worried; the Tau were old hands at this, and we also had Octavian and Amberley on hand to cow the more stubborn loyalist holdouts. However, more than anything, my efforts to give an actual healthy meal to every st human inside the Iron Colr had earned me more goodwill and compliance than the combined efforts of Amberley, Octavian and the Tau diplomatic cadres who specialised in exactly these sorts of things.

  Not that it was much of a surprise. These pnets were miserable to live on for the average citizen of the Imperium, and I was feeding them a healthy diet made up of three whole meals a day. A sizable fraction of them had never eaten anything other than a nutrition bar, which I knew from experience tasted like cardboard and regret. For fuck’s sake, some of them thought getting to eat a rotten fruit would be the highlight of their entire lives. I couldn’t help but feel pity for them, pity them, even though they tended to spout all the useless nonsense that irritates me so much. Human automatons, indoctrinated sves in all but name. They’d been well-trained, as in, free-thinking and opinions having been long bred out of them.

  I hoped the Tau and I would be able to reverse that, but I knew that it would take generations, maybe a lot of them, or some heavy-handed approaches, if they actively resisted changing in some misguided attempt at quiet resistance.

  Things were progressing … reasonably well. I’d made a thousand or so small Bckstone spheres per pnet, swapped them all to Warp-amplification state, then spped a Smite into each. I left those with the newly branded World Minds — the primary pnetary control nodes I’d just talked about previously — so they could make Draugr that were hopefully immune to Warp-fuckery, or at least able to burn any Daemons that tried to mess with them if those Smite-balls didn’t work out how I expected them to.

  On a side note, Catherine now sported an adorable choker with an amulet made from the same material. She’d also requested Wolverine’s cws, but made out of Smite-infused Bckstone, and I saw no reason to deny her. It was good to see that my daughter inherited my good taste. I kinda wanted burning wolverine cws too, but that was now her thing, and I wouldn’t steal that.

  I’m going to have to make warp-nullifying Bckstone jewellery for the rest of my daughters. Or maybe something … deeper. I could impnt a small chunk of Bckstone inside their skulls to at least protect their minds, or I could ce their bones with the stuff … heck, I could ce my bones with the Warp-amplifier Bckstone. I could weave the crystalline helix matrix that gives my Witchbde its power into my own soulbone skeleton. Hmmmm.

  I disliked the idea of putting Aeldari runes on or into my body. That would be akin to inviting a taint into my body, giving a vector for their bullshit to affect me. I didn’t want to tie myself too much to them. I didn’t want anyone to have undue influence over me. Except for Selene, she could influence me all she wanted. And my daughters, I guess. They were fine too. But nobody else! Especially not the guys who murder-fucked a Chaos God into existence.

  No, I wasn’t paranoid, thank you very much for asking. As everybody knows, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you, and half the goddamned gaxy was out to get me.

  Which was why my primary Avatar was busily working on the twin projects of upgrading the Sovereign with psychoactive Bckstone and on reverse engineering the Storm Wards I’d learned of from my new Astartes guests. One would protect my fgship from Daemonic fuckery and give it a bit of an extra bite, while the other would serve me well the next time I had to fight a Greater Daemon as tricky as that chicken. Work, work, work.

  At least the Kroot optimisation refineries I’d made were paying dividends, massively reducing the processing power I had to devote to optimising temptes. This allowed me to reassign the freed-up processing power to developing workable orbital defences, star fortresses, and autonomous system defence fleets. My bio-energy stores were swiftly depleting, but I’d have enough to build up the fortifications on every Fortress World within the Iron Colr, and to do the same to the space corridor connecting it to the Tau Velk’Han Sept’s territories.

  I wanted to work on figuring out how to personalise the Witchbde’s psychic helix matrix and the Aeldari runes to my own purposes, and I also wanted to work more on studying the Psilencer — it was an utterly fascinating piece of Xenotechnology — but these were more important in the short term. Consolidate what I have, then build up defences so it would stay mine, and only then work on the new offensive toys I’ve got. That was the pn, at least.

  A Tau Messenger ship reached me just as I was doing the final survey run around the Karck system, making sure everything would keep working autonomously even after I’d left. It’d been the principal seat of the Achilus Crusade, the seat of Solomon Tetrarchus’ power, so it was the most heavily fortified of all the worlds within the Reach.

  Which was probably why the Imperial forces couldn’t take everything with them when they left. I was now the happy owner of a pair of Ramilles Star Forts and a bunch of orbital stations. Neat stuff, but integrating it all with the newly created World Mind and its subsystems had been a bit of a pain in the ass.

  But back to the matter at hand: an Imperial Bck Ship and an Astartes Battle Barge had emerged from the Warp near the Ravacene System, and according to the Tau, they’d just kept hanging out on the borders of the system. Good thing too, because I’d have been pretty mad if they gssed the pnet right after I’d fixed its temperamental volcanoes.

  “They demand an audience with me?” I asked, looking down at the frazzled Water Caste diplomat who’d come to deliver the message. I gnced over at Aun’Saal and then at Selene. “Thoughts? We are going, that’s not up for debate, but I’d like to know what I’m walking into.”

  “Do we have names?” Aun’saal asked thoughtfully.

  “Yes, indeed, we do, honourable Aun,” the diplomat said. “Inquisitor Lord Abraxas and Watch Commander Mordigael of Erioch. I hope that the tter title means more to you than to us; we found no records of a pce called ‘Erioch’.”

  “It’s the primary Watch Fortress of the Deathwatch station in the Jericho Reach,” I said, tapping my chin in thought. “Its location is obscured by some peculiar Warp phenomena that make it nearly impossible to find. The Fortress itself predates Imperial records, and has a vast vault of a bunch of random stuff that occasionally opens up to spit out whatever the Deathwatch needs the most at the moment.”

  “Could they have gotten something to counter you?” Selene asked.

  “Maybe.” I shrugged. “We will see. I’m somewhat more worried about the Bck Ship; those are supposed to have Sisters of Silence onboard, and an Inquisitor Lord would surely have a bunch of tricks up his sleeve, too. I’ll have to quiz Amberley about this Abraxas fellow.”

  There was an entry about the man in Octavian’s info packet, but it offered little in the way of a description of his personality. All I knew was that the man belonged to a moderate faction of the Inquisition, keeping himself from swinging to either puritan or radical extremes. The few records of his missions that I had avaible portrayed him as rational, practical, and results-oriented. But never to the point of becoming a radical, so no pocked Daemonhosts or cosmic horrors.

  Which was good. A radical Ordo Xenos Inquisitor Lord might have had both the resources and willingness to throw a Halo Artefact at me and see what happens, or something simirly deranged.

  I left Jeff behind to wander the Iron Colr as he wished, though when I remade him I included all the since-then improved temptes and also wove a Warp-dampening Bckstone around his neural network, and doubly so around his primary nodes — he didn’t have a single brain, I’d gone with a dozen lesser neural nodes instead, with a bunch of redundancy built in — and as for offence, I’d made him a pair of tendrils the size of smaller Voidships, each of which ended in a Smite-infused Bckstone spike of the Warp-amplifying kind.

  I wanted to give him some passive EMP-field effect too, but it was finicky, and experimenting to make it viable was still a work in progress. He’d be fine, though. I pitied whatever moronic Chaos war-band stuck their heads out of the Great Rift to try their luck, because Jeff was still rather pissed off about how easily he’d been taken down the st time he fought, and he was going to make it the problem of whoever poked my new holdings’ defences.

  Maybe my recent successes in empowering myself had made me a bit overconfident, but I felt like I could handle whatever they threw at me between the chunk of Warp-amplifying Bckstone — I really needed to come up with a separate name for that stuff, it was a mouthful — now sitting inside my Avatar’s torso, my Eldritch Bst improvements from the Psilencer and my new Witchbde all combined with the prototype Storm Ward I had hanging from my neck like an amulet, I liked to think I had reason enough to be confident.

  So we set off, though I decided not to waste soul energy on speeding up our travels with some interstelr teleportation. It took nearly a week to arrive, but we did.

  “Cat? Would you please handle arranging a meeting?” I asked, mostly because the girl just loved acting as my ‘assistant’ for some inexplicable reason. I didn’t want to take away her job by projecting my message into the Inquisitor’s head.

  “Sure, My Lady,” she said with a grin, straightening up. “Are there any specific requirements for the meeting you want?”

  “I’m not going aboard their ships, and they can only take a single Pariah along with them,” I said. “I’d prefer it if the meeting happened on an orbital station I made, but I guess the pnet’s surface would do as well.”

  “Understood!” Cat said, snapping into an adorably serious salute, ears perked up, and tail swishing behind her. She managed to pull her lips into a serious frown, but her eyes were still grinning. “By your leave?”

  “Sure, run along,” I said, and she pouted at me for not pying along, then spun on her heels and marched off. “I’ll go get Amberley and Octavian; their presence should prevent them from trying anything untoward.”

  Luckily, both of them were still onboard the Sovereign, along with Cain and now his trusty aide, Jurgen. The tter of whom couldn’t quite get the fact that the walls literally had ears into his thick skull. I was tempted to chuck him into the nearest star, but held myself back for Cain’s sake. He, at least, was a bit better at hiding his extreme discomfort at the idea of humans who didn’t worship the Emperor existing near him, and him not being allowed to shoot them.

  Only a few hours ter, Cat came strutting back in with a pleased, but slightly annoyed air about her.

  “So?” I asked. “What’s got your tail in a twist?”

  “They unequivocally agreed to all your demands without fuss,” Cat said, her tail swishing behind her in agitation. “They didn’t even negotiate, just sent back their acceptance. They agreed to a meeting in an hour down on the surface, even though I picked one of your bio-fortresses as the location.”

  I raised an eyebrow, my paranoia buzzing in the back of my mind. That was rather uncharacteristic of an Imperial delegation, doubly so for one including such high-profile people.

  “That’s highly suspicious,” I said thoughtfully. “Thanks, Cat. I’ll handle it from here, just send over the details of the arrangements you’ve made.”

  The girl nodded dutifully, then left.

  “No Inquisitor Lord would have lived as long as this Abraxas fellow if they went about trying to assassinate powerful Xenos this way,” Selene said. “It’s a bit too suspicious, it feels sloppy … or I suppose it could also be simple desperation.”

  “What could make an Inquisitor Lord and a veteran Deathwatch Commander desperate enough to practically throw themselves at the mercy of someone who they think had sughtered so many of their Brothers?” I asked.

  “We’ll find it out soon enough,” Selene said, sighing softly as she hopped to her feet. “Can I get one of those Amulets too? I want to come along.”

  “Sure.” I nodded easily, smiling at her. “I’m working on a protective Amulet that would be a mix of a Smite-infused psychoactive Bckstone and a Storm Ward. I was waiting to be done with that until I gave it to you, seeing as your soul is as safe as it can be with it in my realm.”

  “Oh? That sounds … perfect,” Selene said, grinning now. “Thank you, I can wait.”

  P3t1