"Keep your secrets to yourself!" I muttered in a low voice, then pressed my hand on the big red button of my Fortress.

I had my own secrets to keep, and an overgrown mutated bird screaming in my head wasn't helping. Canis howled with his familiar golden voice, shielding the entire Crusade Fleet while our Immaterium beams ripped apart the Tzeench Great Daemon. The Keeper of Secrets went silent, probably too busy being torn up.

The Eternal Lament's beam glowed purple when fired by Sister Dessima, not black like my own, but when they intersected the volume occupied by the daemon, they acted like my new Torsion Cannons, twisting and ripping demonic Warp pseudo-matter and its cursed soul into screaming bits. Was it the different frequencies for our Immaterium beams? No one knew, and there was nobody around to ask. But my scheme worked, so maybe I was a bit smarter now.

Canis and Purity gulped in unision, devouring invisible soul fragments while Sister Stern flared her Demonifuge Aura to incinerate billions of Lesser Daemons with anathemic fire. For anyone else, it would be a tough job being outside the armored hull and Gellar Rampart protections, but the Demonifuge was flying around without a care, and looked resplendant doing so, covered in a glowing burning aura and carried by huge wings made of lightning and pure Faith.

In my tesseract, Librarian Menelau discarded his melted left arm, luckily the same bionic arm he obtained after testing an Ork boss in melee. In his other hand, he held our prize, the STC with all the psi tech ever discovered by the Terran Federation before their fall. Vulkan grabbed the STC cube with careful fingers, and set it down on his workdesk for analysis, while Anzion took charge of Menelau to replace the melted arm. Turns out, sticking your bionic arm into a daemonic Warp trap wasn't that safe, since only the real flesh arm was considered Blank. Live and learn.

Beside the new STC cube, we had the damaged cube I got from Klybo, as we were hoping a comparative analysis would reveal some more secrets from our Dark Age ancestors.

We were kinda lucky with our emergence into the Maelstrom, as a gigantic Mechanicus invasion kept the daemons occupied on a wide front, possibly searching for the same STC. We simply struck at speed at the back of the daemon lines, and absconded with the prize before the daemons could re-position. Now it was only a matter of getting out alive from the damned Warp Rift, and hopefully without losing all my ships to Warp spells and more Greater Daemons.

Librarian Valerian began his own techsorcist rituals to purify the STC cube from the Chaos touch and potential data-daemons, and his Gnostari Ancient Staff glowed with blue magic.

I only kept a vague eye on the tesseract, as the gigantic battle took most of my attention. Nova Mines and lance batteries had a minimal effect in this place, much like the last time inside the Garden of Nurgle. Damage was often ignored, or sometimes shattered Chaos Marines and corrupted Titans just changed from dead to alive again, but even more mutated.

I toned down the urge to climb into my Psi-Titan and kick ass in person. Yes, I would do a lot of real damage, but I would lose sight of the real battle. Getting out was more important.

Again, I slammed my hand on the red button, and swept the Immaterium beam over thousands of Rubrik Marines and various Daemon Engines. They popped like confetti into strands of blue tendrils and metal shards, and didn't reform again.

To my right, my Inquisitor wife leaned over the command console and tapped a few keys, and an Ares torpedo launched at near-light speed, then detonated into a Reality Bomb, making the Daemon World flicker and return for a second to an Eldar world filled with decayed silver spires.

My Crusade Fleet rode the Reality Bomb's shockwave like a cork popping out from champagne, leaving Sister Stern far behind like a beacon of light into a dark sea full of monsters.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"She can resurrect, right?" Lady Valeyne observed with a calm voice, just as Purity fell on her knees and began crying, while hugging Canis for dear life.

I frowned but didn't answer. We might have escaped the Maelstrom, but we ended up right inside the Galactic Core. Billions of stars and glowing nebulas lit the place like daylight, while to our left side, two alien species fought a large space battle with thousands of ships and many more voidfighters.

It was a bit interesting to observe these unknown xenos and their weapons in action, but sadly it didn't last. Forgetting their squabble the two fleets turned towards my fleet and sped up, somehow managing a pincer movement by simply avoiding each other.

"Hmmm. I think these guys see us as prey." I mused out loud, while searching the Kreg data-base for any hints of these potential new trade partners. Well, neither the Septeryx nor the Chrobdyr Ferrophagites were considered viable partners by the Kreg own data-base, which made me change my mind. Sometimes, violence is the only answer.

"Open fire! Both xenos fleets." I commanded while leaning in my Command Throne to rest a little.

One thing was certain, neither of these xenos had any idea about Nova Cannons and not bunching up. Our alpha strike of Nova Shells caught them by surprise, and made them lose half of their voidfighters, while the next Nova salvo hit deeper in the middle of their fleet and blew up a few thousands escorts.

Suddenly, the odds became far more even, as we matched their capital ships in numbers now. And soon after, our carriers launched our own screen of fighters and corvettes, closing the parity gap even more. And then, both the Septeryx and the Ferrophagites turned tail and fled in separate directions, much faster than our heavy ships could pursue.

I blessed each fleet with a hundred Nova Mines before they left my Tesseract's range, obliterating the rest of their void fighters, while capturing a larger ship from each specie in my inventory for future dissection and comparative analysis. Since I travelled with an Ordo Xenos Inquisitor, I had to keep her happy somehow.

"You could have told me what you intended, Lady Valeyne." I spoke in a gentle voice. Sister Stern would probably return from the Afterlife like she always did, but with a bit of warning, I could have prevented a lot of pain. Strong as she was, Stern was not yet invincible.

The Inquisitor just glared at me. "There wasn't enough time."

I sighed inward and left the matter drop. We weren't out of the frying pan yet, and we haven't even met the real Votann.

'Captain Lancefire, we have arrived in the Galactic Core. Permission to instantiate fully inside the Singularity's main cogitator core?' the Blade AI asked in her disturbing female voice.

Ah, yes. Another Speranza-type AI in the making. Even equipped with black hole weaponry as well. Would have been quite a menacing prospect even a year ago.

Today, with both my arms sporting dimensional and temporal devices and the C'tan hermetic cores active in my armpits, a mere hyper-advanced AI was not a real danger anymore.

'Allowed, for the Singularity. And only there. Don't make me scrub you off the rest of the fleet, we would both be disgusted by the results.' I sent with a mild threat in my tone. And locks released.

'I understand perfectly, Lord Captain. I have learned all about the Imperium's stance on thinking machines.' the Blade answered in a wider spectrum, as her abilities developed by orders of magnitude, simply from subsuming the Federation-grade data core I have created for the Glorianna-class battleship.