I arrive at the new Tau Xeno-Habitat facility. It is a single, white tower, surrounded by parkland that’s growing flora from T’au, the Tau homeworld. The air is dry and the biome reminds me of ancient Africa’s savannas.
The outside of the tower is guarded by Heralds and the inside is patrolled by the few Fire Warriors I permit the Tau to maintain. It helps them police themselves, especially as all internal altercations are overshadowed by the threat of my intervention, which will inevitably be worse than theirs if I have to waste my time or resources.
I pass through the security checkpoint to the lobby. Twenty Servitors are plugged into the wall on one side and on the other is an unoccupied reception desk. This is pretty typical passive aggressive Tau bullshit as, since Lynu died, the desk is always unoccupied whenever any member of Fleet Command comes to visit their Xeno-Habitat.
Rather than go searching for Overseer Ya’Va Vsum I take the lift to the top of the tower. He will be informed and be forced to come and find me. On a whim, I scan each floor as I go, checking that the work I commissioned is up to standard.
Much to my irritation, the walls hide a multitude of sins and shortcuts that will kill a lot of Tau, and anyone who is stationed here, if there is a hull breach, warp incursion, or Iron Crane is boarded. In some places I even spot missing back-up components. Going through the records I note that they were signed as present, but were never ordered or paid for and the discrepancy was repeatedly overruled by the committee in charge of constructing the Xenos-Habitat.
I immediately assign all overseers for this work with a class two sentence, and all workers with a class one, then trigger an investigation, survey, and reconstruction. After that, I go over my calendar and assign time to personally walk up and down every corridor on Iron Crane to look for any other shoddy work. I hope I won’t find any, as there is no excuse for poor workmanship or oversight when you have to specifically override Servitor to do a bad job, let alone find a way to bypass Sadako, Iron Crane’s primary Machine-Spirit.
There’s a small shopping centre at the top of the tower. A couple of Tau kids are running about, giggling, with a tired father trailing behind them. One group of teens are checking out the different shops, selling everyday items and a small handful of luxuries. The two adults staffing all the stores have little life in them, shuffling through the motions as they realign already straight bottles and refold neat piles of clothes.
The young Tau don’t notice, but this place, despite the bright and clean environment, is dreary and oppressive. For a moment, I wonder if it would have been a kindness to fire on their refugee shuttles and spare them this slow death. Perhaps that my twenty-first century principles have achieved nothing but prolonging their suffering, suffering that I was trying to avoid. I quickly dismiss this defeatist thinking and focus on the upcoming meeting, one that might address these problems.
I take a private booth at the promenade’s single cafe. No one comes to serve me and I pay the slight no heed. I could help myself, but even if I paid, it would still look like I was stealing.
While I am waiting, I receive an alert from Sadako. Ylien is confronting Orodor in Orodor’s quarters. Neither the Tau or Eldar have any privacy whatsoever. While there might not be any pict-recorders, providing the illusion of a personal space, the plethora of environmental sensors in every part of the vessel make it reasonably easy to reconstruct whatever is going on in any room in fine detail. Even the ones that we do have throughout all the public areas of Iron Crane are more like functional decoys than useful security.
Within one of my minds, a black and white composite image, formed from thousands of tiny white dots, creates a 3D representation of Orodor’s office. It is a spartan space with several crates, a desk, and one chair.
Ylien stands in the doorway with a disgusting smile on his face. While Orodor sits stiff and upright in his chair. I rewind the data and recover their conversation.
“Good afternoon, Prisoner,” says Ylien.
Orodor’s face is absolutely blank and his voice lacks all intonation, “Why are you here, Warlock?”
“Nothing too strenuous. The Magos is being all hush-hush, but I finally extracted the secret behind the mass scanning of voidborne Monkeigh after your petty tribe’s little stunt. I came here to tell you, as I just know it will make your day!”
That sneaky shit-stirer. I know exactly what he’s talking about. Why is Ylien creating trouble now of all times?
Orodor stares at Ylien.
“You know, Prisoner, I overheard all your chats with the courageous Aspect Warriors as they raided the North Tomb.” Ylien taps the side of his head with an index finger, “Every scream. Every cry for help. It brought back every fond memory I have of my time among our indolent cousins. Commorragh, that rotting hole in the Webway, was my lowest point. No fellow Eldar slaves dared talk to one as exalted as I. None dared to share the burden of the Drukhari’s thirst save a short lived Monkeigh. A nice woman. What was left of her. She admired my hair.” Ylien wiggles his eyebrows.
“Have you come to kill me with prattle?”
“All are equal under the whip, Prisoner. It came as a great surprise to me that one as prideful as yourself would willingly swap their own chains for another’s, light as the Magos’ touch may be.” Ylien snarls, “I was drowned in the offal of those who dared share a spark of kindness to one so broken as I, yet despite the poor treatment, other Monkeigh, other Humans persisted in supporting my miserable existence. None of my own kind did, too desperate to cling on to their immortal lives. A Human knows when to die. A terrible lesson, that.”
“Your mockery is as inane as your bathing habits, Warlock.”
“Now, now. Don’t be too hasty to judge. I’ve come to repay the favour, to light the spark of a fellow prisoner.”
“Then tell me and begone.”
“So fierce! Do you know what they found inside the brain of the leader of the Striking Scorpions?”
Orodor stops breathing entirely, becoming unnaturally still.
“You’ve figured it out, haven’t you? I can see it in your eyes, scrabbling at the edge of your mind. The despair as you realise if it wasn’t for your blind dismissal of a helping hand, your fear of mercy, that the Yme-Loc Eldar would not have been led astray so easily. Another two hundred thousand Eldar dead. Led to the slaughter by their own commanders, believing themselves beyond the kindness of the Monkeigh. The Yngir slaves played you, feeding your prejudices with a handful of Mindshackle Scarabs. A shameful, avoidable loss.”
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“Get out!” Orodor slams his hand into the table. A pen falls to the floor, rattling across the floor, and cutting through the silence with mundane obliviousness.
“I shall do no such thing, Prisoner. I will have no more Eldar deaths birthed by your foolishness. You laid that wreath at the altar of the Human’s decaying god at your lowest moment. Yet what do I pick up from your mind as we hurtle through the void, your thoughts so strong I can hear them from the other end of the vessel? Plans renegade on your agreement.
“The Magos is not skilled enough to pick up on it, but I can see your squirming mind cowering from the scouring gaze of a brighter soul and it will get you killed. It won’t be offal. The Magos is nice like that. He’ll just shoot you, the last of your Guardians, then recycle the lot and consume your flesh in little white cubes. Did you not promise to return your Guardians home at any cost? Well? This is it. Any cost. All you have to do is stick to your word. Why, even a Monkeigh can do it!” Ylien claps his hands together, an extreme expression of joy upon his face.
“You talk of sedition? How could you betray your own people like that? We cannot give the Monkeigh more tools to burn us with! If our knowledge and lives must be lost to preserve what is left, then we shall take them, and take them on our own terms.”
Ylien’s face fills with sorrow. “It’s not the answer you know. Feeding your soul to She-Who-Thirsts as punishment for your stupidity is like building a tower on sand. Death is not winning, and worse, for us, it is not the end either. You have to live, Orodor. That’s victory. You're their leader. Lead all the Guardian’s to victory.”
“I hate you.”
“Your words are as potent as your actions. Like wind.” Ylien turns around and dashes from the room, slamming the door shut behind him and cutting off Orodor’s rebuttal. As soon as Ylien leaves the cargo container he finds a room full of rolls of plasteel and sobs into his hands.
Orodor moves to chase after him then stops halfway to the door. He smoothly lowers himself to the floor and sits cross legged, staring at the door, his expression dull and empty.
Wow, Orodor, that selfish little shit, was going to try and orchestrate suicide by Military Police for over two thousand people, just because he couldn’t take that he fucked up.
“E-SIM, I’m going to send Ylien back with the Yme-Loc Eldar. While his teaching is invaluable, and I and our psykers have learned much from him, having such an unstable individual on-board is not worth the risk.”
++A prudent course of action.++
“Perhaps he will find a new path among the Harlequins. I am not in a position to help him and my help would be unwelcome. His loyalty, tangled and wretched though it may be, deserves acknowledgement. He has likely saved us a lot of trouble.”
++A new experience for all of us, should it prove true.++
I grin, “Aye, it would be.”
++Overseer Ya’Va Vsum approaches.++
“Undying Light has to be the most pretentious Tau name in the Fleet.”
++His appellation has no bearing on his designation or competence. You should put the Eldar out of your mind and adjust your thoughts, Aldrich. You’ve been waiting for this opportunity for a long time.++
“Thank you for the reminder. Even second hand, the Eldar’s emotions are intense.”
Ya’Va Vsum is a stocky, blue skinned xeno with deep wrinkles around his eyes and upon his hands. His head is shaved except for two long bunches of black hair sprouting from the same spot on the centre rear of his skull. Both bunches are held together by clips fashioned from all six platinum group metals. He gives me a short bow, hangs a satchel off the back of a spare chair, then sits opposite me.
“Good day, Magos.”
“Thank you for arriving so promptly to our meeting, Overseer.” I give him a warm smile and hold out my hand.
A brief frown flashes across Ya’Va Vsum’s face and he gives my hand a brief, weak shake.
Ha! Hard to be rude and combative when people ignore your petty slights and remain polite, isn't it?
Arsehole.
“How are you settling into your new role? Envoy Lynu was a skilled woman.”
“Well enough, Magos.” Ya’va sits straight and holds his hands in his lap, rubbing the tips of his thumbs together. After a minute of silence, he sighs, and pulls a dataslate from his satchel.
“We have completed the mutant project.”
“Well done.”
“What is to become of us?”
“I will give you something new to do. Our agreement still stands, unless you wish to change it.”
I access the dataslate remotely and rapidly parse the information, reading the whole study while the Overseer is still inhaling to speak his reply.
The Tau have found a way to double the number of chromosomes in the Human genome. The original set acts as normal and the second as an extended library of useful mutations, compiled from the mess of genetic engineering hidden inside the mutants, the huge selection of genetic data I took from the Federation Station, and the ‘origin’ sample: my own DNA.
The notes mention that the Tau and their Human supervisors took inspiration from the myths of the Golden Men, from the Dark age of Technology, who supposedly stored all the knowledge of humanity in their DNA. While this extended library only contains genetic data, it is still an exceptional achievement.
Using the extended chromosome library, and some highly specialised drugs and custom virus treatments, one can swap out the mutations that they are currently using. Without these treatments, mutation and evolution is almost impossible. Anything that does not conform to the engineered data is purged.
There is a follow up proposal on how to have the body respond to environmental stresses and pick the required mutation itself, as well as another on how it might be possible to get an auto-sanguine or similar device to alter DNA, letting one pick and choose their evolution. These follow up studies are quite absurd and not something I can hand over to the Tau. I am not sure they are really necessary either as my cybernetics can do the same thing and they are arguably better.
For now, this treatment will enable the restoration of the fifty-seven mutants I discovered and stuffed into stasis decades ago. I don’t need their labour as much as I did at the time, but it will be good to lay this task to rest.
The adults are too far gone and will require a fully-cybernetic body after treatment, but the thirty kids will be OK with replacement cloned flesh and a dip in a nanite tank. Both are expensive treatments and there is no way the Imperium could afford to roll it out to everybody. I can see why they’ve never even bothered to research a solution for a heavily reviled sub-human.
However, the initial conversion where the library is tacked on is inheritable and, with the addition of the warding electoos everyone in my fleet uses, should massively increase the cost of the Ruinous Powers of Chaos to induce mutations, or blessings as they call them, in my fleet. It will also reduce the chance of messed up genetics should I take on crew from other ethnicities when they mix their DNA with the highly tuned heritage of Marwolv. Any mutations such offspring might have, that did not match the template of the parent with the additional chromosomes, would just get added to the library and remain inactive.
Ya’Va Vsum finally finishes sucking in Iron Crane’s precious air and says, “We would like to change our agreement.”
The curse of Interesting Times strikes again.
Why does it always have to happen on a Friday afternoon?