"Thank you for escorting me yourself," I said with a sideways glance.
"That is the least I could do," said Selene with a shake of her head, "though I don't quite understand why you'd want to go to the observatory."
"To see it," I said as the reinforced and gene-locked door clicked open without Selene having to do anything and with a glance I felt happiness radiate off of the machine spirit in the door, like a puppy that is happy to see its owner again, "that damned planet has so much smog that I never saw the stars from down there and I didn't have much time in the shuttle."
I stride in first with the Captain following behind me, the observatory is reserved for high-ranking officers and this one in particular only opens for the Captain. Apparently, it should do so for others too but the Machine Spirit is being a bit of an ass.
The whole room is designed like some sort of park or a greenhouse with four quarters of the circular room being made up of greenery and peculiar plants that I never saw before. We make it to the middle where there are a handful of lounge chairs that would let us lie down as we stared upwards through the translucent dome.
I laid down in one and Selene followed soon after me in the one on my right. I restricted my sight to the 'visible' light spectrum only and the cavalcade of iridescent colors subsided, revealing the majestic Milkyway galaxy and the eternal darkness of space behind it.
It reminded me of the time when I spent a night camping out and saw a similar skyline without any light polluting it. The vastness of space was mystifying and I always felt an inexplicable pull towards it.
"That is not how I remembered our galaxy looking," I said jokingly, running my gaze over the giant purplish pink tear rending the white galaxy in two. It was a gaping wound in reality itself and the reason why we were cut off from the light of the Astronomican: the Great Rift, or Cicatrix Maledictum as the people of this era liked to call it.
"An astute observation, Inquisitor," said Selene in a voice dryer than the seas of Terra.
"Mhm, that is my job, isn't it? Making astute observations," I nodded, not taking my eyes off the bleeding wound of the galaxy.
"I have to ask," the woman started in a flat tone, as serious as she could be, "do you intend to do some of that work to the detriment of my ship and crew?"
"How bold of you to ask that," I turned my head to stare into her gray eyes, seeing glimpses of my reflection in the metallic color, "It would be rather counterproductive to do so with you being my only way to get off of the Tyranid's plate, don't you think?"
"That never stopped other Inquisitors before."
"And now you are comparing me to my peers? Judging me? Or is it suspicion I sense?"
"You never even confirmed your identity with a genetic database," her gaze was now boring into me rather heavily, "and you've been here for weeks already."
"An astute observation Captain," I said coldly, "though it is rather foolish to make it with only the two of us here, isn't it?"
"Answer," she said with gritted teeth.
"What do you want me to answer, dear captain?" I laid back, returning my attention to the Rift, "Why do I value my life more than my job? I didn't want the job but I can't say it's not useful sometimes."
"What do you mean?"
"Half-dead Inquisitors have a tendency to name anyone they view as competent and faithful enough as their successors. The one that named me was a touch too delirious from blood loss and missing intestines to make an educated decision and his adepts were far too dead to be a choice."
"And the gene testing?" she was grasping at straws, I could tell, she wanted to trust me but her doubts were eating at her like lecherous little parasites.
"Remember when I said that I last reported in 350?" I tilted my head at her, and when she nodded I continued, "under that, I actually meant the time when the delirious Inquisitor named me his successor."
"So you never once done your job for 750 years?" her tone turned accusatory but unlike what I'd expect from any of my 'peers' or a more zealous member of the Imperium, she wasn't drawing weapons and was instead relaxing back into her chair.
"I was occupied with not dying," I shrugged, "that involved killing enemies of humanity in spades but yes, you are right."
"Great," she muttered, "will I get executed for housing a pretender Inquisitor?"
"You could just report me once we get back to the Imperium," I glanced at her.
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"I wouldn't live long enough to do so," she glared at me with little fire behind it.
"You might," I shrugged again, feeling like I'm shrugging an awful lot nowadays, "not that it'd mean anything, I doubt anyone could catch me without large divinatory rituals."
As I said that my face morphed, my hair shortened and turned pitch black and my eyes gained a metallic color.
"I might not be too good at being an Inquisitor but I am good at staying alive," my voice was a perfect mimicry of Selene's, though she'd never speak with the melodious intonation I tend to use.
"That is very fucking disturbing," she said, looking at her own face smirking back at her with a fair bit of distaste on her face but I sensed intrigue beneath. My aura senses were getting better by the day, at first I even mistook the alien feelings for my mind going weird again but I soon realized it was a side-effect of being a psyker.
My range was far less for this empathy field than usual psykers as my soul was separated from the warp and rather far away from even the closest souls but it worked still, it was most likely some sort of resonance between souls or something else that didn't need the warp energy as an intermediary to transmit in the Immaterium.
"Now whenever someone tells you to 'go fuck yourself' you know where to come," I smirked as she choked on her tongue.
I knew this woman was fun when I first saw her, shame she'd probably shoot me if I told her I was a flesh-eating alien. These stigmas are annoying, I want equality.
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"INQUISITOR WATCH OUT!" Despite the loud shout distracting a single thread of my mind I easily sidestepped the charge of the genestealer aiming to make a skewer out of me.
As it flew past me, even as it started to turn back at me mid-air and lash out with its clawed arm, soul energy burst out of my skin and sent the beast flying away from me. With the Telekinetic Blast having taken it off of my back I leveled the plasma pistol on it and fired, the sub-human beast crumbled as its insides sizzled along the head-sized hole burnt into its torso.
Before the overheating of the pistol could burn too much of my skin I threw it over the first line of genestealer duking it out with Orion's shadows. The pistol exhaled all of its excess heat, the superheated air got blasted toward the much too slow-to-react xenos and burnt many of them to ash. The disoriented but alive Xenos found themselves under concentrated fire from the Shadows, their rifles rained gas compressed into plasma at the foul aliens as their lasrifles fired without stopping.
With a single thought, the now cold pistol flew back into my hand and I placed it back into its holster. This little beauty was fun to use and I didn't doubt its ability to one-shot even a larger Tyranid but the overheating was a bit annoying. Well, you could say it was a feature instead of a bug but that didn't count for the not-so-small chance of it just exploding in my hand instead of waiting for me to throw it beforehand.
Arcs of electricity leapt over my head and vaporized a handful of genestealers in a line heading for me, I glanced back at Magos Dominus Zedev as his dozens of arms worked tirelessly to hack away at his enemies while some still managed to use his mounted Arc-Rifles to provide long-range support.
I didn't waste any more time and leapt back into action, diving right into the enemy lines and taking off some weight from the shoulders of the Shadows. They were good both at melee and shooting but I still found them lacking, still, I knew the reason for that was my rather skewed perception of strength.
I lashed out and bisected genestealers aiming to brutalize me in pairs or more, my sword made of the same material as a Lictor's Scythe turning out to be overkill for this chaff. Zedev said it could even measure up to some weaker powerswords, due to its close to mono-molecular edge.
They were all so slow, still if they hit me they could rend me apart easily. Or at least it appeared so as I only wore my trusty bodyglove of which I requisitioned a few dozen. My smidge of initial shame got crushed into dust as I got used to the freedom of movement it gave me, along with its cool property of not letting blood stain it. I'd give it 9/10 overall, I still wanted to try out whatever Custodians used for their bodysuits and stuff like that.
It was a slaughter, plain and simple but it and the previous three fights gave me the perfect opportunity to get used to fighting in my human form. Between my sword, Psychic powers and overall agility and cognitive speed I was a monster on the battlefield.
My hair whipped around like a billowing cape even though I tied it up in a ponytail, my superhuman speed keeping it afloat even without any wind moving. I keep my eyes narrowed as my gaze snaps between enemies, planning five seconds into the future and predicting where my foes will end up in that timeframe.
My sword rends chitinous armor and bio-engineered flesh, and the coppery taste of blood lingers in my nose as I blast a row of my foes with my plasmapistol before throwing it again. As the air gets turned into plasma around my thrown pistol and the weapon sails back into my hand I had already bisected ten more of the Xenos. Burnt flesh and ozone join the blood in a mixture that smells like war itself.
"That should be the last of them," I say out loud as I tear out my bio-sword from the corpse of the last gene-stealer. I feel the Shadow's aura cloud with fear, apprehension and pride with the last one overpowering the rest, to them I was a champion of the Emperor, part of his Holy Inquisition and me being a terrifying monster of a fighter was a good thing.
Zedev was far more complicated to read, the Magos probably figured out I'd cracked his binary encryption so since then we'd made up a game. He'd come up with new encryption methods and I broke through them, not sure if he enjoyed our game as much as I did though.
"Acknowledgement: This was the last location known to house significant Genestealer presence."
"Let's head back then," I stretched languidly as my bio-sword melted and my skin swallowed it up greedily.
"Acknowledged: Calling extraction."
I sat down with my back against a concrete pillar and watched the pair of Thunderhawks serving as our transport descend from the atmosphere and beeline towards this abandoned factory. My thoughts were plagued by uncertainty lately, part of me wanted to just wait for the splinter-fleet but another part of me knew that would condemn the tens of thousands of people working and living on The Wanderer.
Doesn't matter if the repairs don't finish in time, we won't have any other choice but to fight.
Huh, I said 'we'. I didn't know whether to sigh or giggle at that while decidedly ignoring a handful of corpses getting shoved into containers by servitors out of the sight of everyone else, it's not like some of my little bio-drones weren't out there boring through the insides of the fallen genestealers and transporting back the collected bio-energy.
What a weird fucking life.