Silverman’s conversation with Fae, which to my knowledge transpired without his knowing of my eavesdropping, informed me of two things. The obvious and explicit one being that, as expected, I was about to be hunted down. The second and unspoken information was that this hunt was going to be carried out by Silverman himself and whatever comprised the ‘System Purge’ Teams they possessed. Notably, that did not seem to imply the activity of a Maletek Stalker. I wager their Stalker was not present within this facility due to its connection with the Warp; I do not imagine their facility would damage the Stalker itself, but, perhaps, the Stalker’s presence may damage the Pariah-induced ‘tunnel’ they were using for their nefarious designs. Whatever the case, by Silverman’s implications, I believed I had one saving grace in not needing to face such a foe in such a state.

I clawed my way out from the torture room Silverman had intended for me, relying on my augmetic to do so, even if it was without its usual armament. I emerged into what I assumed was a medicae facility, albeit lacking the typical Imperial decorum. The walls were smooth and white, devoid of faithful architecture and classical designs. Panels of reinforced glass slid from room to room, each being thrust to a closed position as the facility’s lockdown initiated. A pre-recorded voice—whose owner I did not recognize—reminded me of the lockdown, aided by the dimming of brighter white lights and the engaging of darker red ones. This facility, it occurred to me, was far more advanced than the backwater hamlet I had first explored on Amnes Minoris. I wondered where, exactly, we were.

I did not have the time to sit and dwell on that matter; instead, I snuck into another nearby room—filled with torturous medicae equipment, as mine had been—bringing with me Silverman’s screwdriver and power dagger he had mistakenly brought with him to our reunion. Why he thought bringing a Pyrran Commissar in such proximity to a blade was a good idea was beyond me, but it was mine now. I stalked from one medicae room to another, putting distance from my original location, but trying to cover my tracks as best I could while staying away from open hallways. As I did so, I also dwelled on the nature of my psychic abilities’ interaction with the suppressing Pariah-extract likely lined throughout the facility. I already knew I could not feel far with my mind, and yet I was able to follow Silverman’s departure from one mortal coil to his arrival in another. My mind was not turned off here, so to speak, it was just being pushed against. As Silverman said, the Pariah gene did not destroy the Warp, but repress it. I wagered, then, that I could probably still utilize low-range but high-yield psykana, perhaps not managing to pop the minds of others but maybe able to at least shield my physical form.

With my psychic senses repressed, I heard the approach of the Phaenonites’ goons before anything else. I took cover along a wall of a medicae room adjacent to the hallway of their approach, careful not to stand against glass, from where my shadow may be visible. Instead, I heard them march past and viewed their own shadows gloss across the reinforced glass of my room. Fight or hide? I knew in an instant I could not let such foes get behind me, and that my detection was inevitable. In a manner that would have made Bliss proud, I snuck out from the medicae room behind the trio of grunts that were marching down the hall, and in a flash I slashed open the neck of one with the power dagger—not then engaged, as its power would create a humming noise—and buried the screwdriver in another’s faceplate. The third suffered a slower fate, having their faceplate crushed by an augmetic fist before finally having their neck broken in an augmetic chokehold.

I then fell onto my front as autogun fire wracked the reinforced glass of the medicae across the one I had emerged from. I fell among the bodies I had just slain, landing in a puddle of their own blood, but when the shooting paused I rose with one of those bodies’ own autoguns, and returned fire. I downed one foe in my counterattack, but the others took cover in the medicae room. Again, I knew I could not let them flank me, so rather than run in flight, I instead took the fight to them, rolling over two corpses and pulling the power dagger out of the face of one of them. I whipped said dagger into the hand of one of my two remaining assailants, making him spring out of cover, where he was shredded by my autogun. The other thought to seize the opportunity of that distraction, but was met with my autogun itself being thrown his way. He had to duck under it, and in the process met a knee to the face as I tackled him to the ground. We tussled for a moment before I wrestled his shotgun from his grasp and blew his chest wide open at point-blank range.

I panted and gathered my breath for a few moments, which may have saved my life. Before I rose to my feet, a dual lascannon swept across the room, vaporizing everything in sight at chest level. I, again, hit the deck, hiding under the torrent of relentless lasfire. After a few deafening moments of the crimson superheated fury, the lascannon whirred to an overheated stop. It was then that my familiar foe called out to me. “You dead yet?” Silverman shouted as bits and pieces of a half dozen medicaes fell and collapsed.

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“Yes!” I shouted back, knowing they would check for my body regardless. I may as well toy with Silverman while I had the opportunity. I crawled for the power dagger and engaged it at last before exiting back into the hallway I had conducted my first bout of slaughter. The goon whose neck I broke had been left leaning against the wall from our fight, which meant he was now missing the top half of his body due to the lascannon. I took his shotgun as well as taking, priming, and tossing one of his grenades in the general direction of the lascannon, though I did not expect—nor receive—a miracle in disabling it. Instead, I only sought to spread further disarray.

Two more goons intercepted me, and were blown open in kind, before Silverman made his re-reintroduction with the slice of an extended, bladed arm. It crashed through a plascrete wall and sent debris flying everywhere, which was the one hint of his appearance I had to go on to react in deflecting his attack with the power dagger. Rather than retracting his arm as he often had, Silverman instead came to me, keeping his arm locked against my dagger. A reasonable strategy, intended to pin me down. I did not let him have the focus of my attention, and pivoted to shoot a flanking minion of his all the same. Only then did I turn my attention to Silverman in full, pirouetting around a pair of slices from each of his arms in sharp, stunted motions of my own. But when the opportunity presented itself, I did as I had done to Gale Ryke long ago, and with a single slash of my dagger, spliced an eye from Silverman. As he recoiled from the blow, I rammed the dagger into his gut before lurching it up and out, splaying his insides unto the floor.

As he writhed upon the floor, he gurgled out, “I’ll see you soon, Blackgar.” He managed a laugh even as he was dying, and it was from that laugh that the thought hit me: I should leave him alive. I had intended to kneel down and finish the Phaenonite off, but this was the third time I was facing the damnable bastard, having killed him twice before. The old way of handling traitors was not working with him.

“Not as soon as you’d like,” I decided, and simply chose to walk away from him, letting him die a slow, undoubtedly painful, but nevertheless certain death. That would keep him from bothering me for a while. In realizing this, as I had, Silverman’s laughing was replaced by the cursing of my name. But that did about as little to impede my escape as he himself had managed.

***

My escape was not flawless, nor short. I was scraped and bruised, and even shot once, as I made my way through the facility the Phaenonites were calling their ‘Nest.’ A fitting name, given the circumstances. Thankfully much—but not all—of the facility was filled with medicae units, allowing me to apply some hasty self-care as needed, such as applying a haphazard patching to an autogun wound. I also had the pleasure of killing Silverman half a dozen more times throughout my journey. Each time, he came back more annoyed and more furious than before; I do not know if that implied lasting psychological damage and that I was making actual progress in downing him for good, or if he simply hated dying intentionally-slow, painful deaths.

I assumed the latter.

The things I witnessed in the Nest are too vile for this official report. I am reminded of my report of the nature of the factory of flesh in Hestia Majoris as I escaped from it. I regret being as forthcoming with what I had seen there, and while this facility was reminiscent of Sigird’s operation, it lacked the ‘strength’ of (Dark) Mechanicum influence as had been present on Hestia Majoris. The Phaenonite’s facility was more subtle, more conservative, more confined. Raised ceilings and open catwalks were replaced by narrow corridors and enclosed, adjacent rooms of horror, where beings—I could hardly call them human, but expected at least a few were Pariahs—were dissected and being reconstructed. Amnes Minoris, and the Nest within, were the end result, I assumed, of what Ryke and Silverman had been up to ninety years ago.

Eventually, I came to a large, reinforced-glass half-dome revealing the outside world to me at last. Sadly, this outside world was oceanic in nature—the Nest was underwater. By how much I could not say, but given that I could see light from the skies above at all implied we were not too deep down here. Then again, I knew not of the properties of Amnes Minoris’s water as compared to Terra’s standard metrics. Regardless, I had few other options.

I started ramming my augmetic fist into the reinforced glass. I no longer had the power dagger—I had lost it in the process of jamming Silverman’s impaled body into a fusion reactor, which had also darkened the facility in the process and at last disabled the damned lockdown notifications. I was, by then, without further armament. So I kept punching.

“You look desperate,” Silverman taunted me, strolling in from a recently-opened reinforced door I had not bothered investigating. A squad of his usual soldiers flanked him. “Running from something, Blackgar?”

“To, Silverman, to something. Not from you,” I panted, nearly out of breath.

“There’s nothing out there but death. Even if you open that pane before we kill you—which you won’t—and even if you make it to the surface—which you won’t—I think you have some idea by now of what’s waiting for you,” Silverman chuckled. “You put on a good show, though, Loyalist. Much better than Scayn.”

“My mentor’s death stopped goading me many decades ago, Traitor,” I replied, dismayed. “You need new material.”

“Yes, we’re both old dogs of war by now, aren’t we? Been at this too long. Good news, at least, is that one of us is at their end,” he offered.

“You are?” I asked with eager optimism, and rammed my fist into the glass one final time. Then things got very wet and cold, very fast.