I was still going over my haul from the battle while letting the Orks clean up the remaining Imperial holdouts when some of my buoys at the System’s borders, outfitted with gravitational sensors, started going off. It was not the violent gravitational tsunami ships jumping out of the Warp sent, more like steady ripples. 

Not Imperial or Eldar then, which left Tyranids and the Tau as the most likely culprits, but I quickly eliminated the former since I saw no approaching Shadow in the Warp. Plus, the Narwhals’ spatial tunnelling didn’t make ripples like this.

Tau it is. And by the signs I’m getting, not an entire fleet, but just a single ship, maybe two. Curious. Did the ones who fled come back, or maybe they sent back an envoy to greet the supposedly victorious Imperials and parlay with them? Maybe scouts?

There was little use in thinking more about it when I could just go and check for myself even if that meant leaving behind my latest flight of fancy: a gene-editing virus that would target only a group of humans possessing a very specific sequence of genes, to bring about an even more specific list of mutations. 

That was a lot of words to say I got my hands on a few Felinids from the lower decks of the Imperial ships, feline abhumans, and that they were so goddamn ugly I instantly went about making a virus that would mutate all of them into a much more pleasing to the eye state. That is, into proper cat-girls and boys. 

Really, baseline felinids looked like someone took a shaved cat and an ugly human, threw them in a blender along with a handful of shit, then took the result and gave it life. Safe to say, they were ugly as sin and disgusting, which was a travesty to my catgirl-loving sensibilities.

Changing how a single one looked would be simple enough, but the perfectionist in me couldn’t let go of the idea of making a virus that would do the same for all felinids it infected on a galactic scale. 

And once I had the gene editing virus for that, it would be simplicity itself to use it as a baseline for other stuff. I could use it to spread beneficial gene-therapy among my citizens, eliminating genetic defects and other issues stemming from genetic issues. Hell, I could probably use it to spread a mutation that would extend their lifespans to a few thousand years with a little time investment. 

But that would be work — unlike making proper catgirls, which was distinctly in the fun category — and I had more important things to work on in my ‘work hours’. 

Work-life balance is important.

First of which was, as of now, checking out who the hell was bothering me now. My experiments and other work could wait; nothing was especially pressing, and all my surviving test subjects were in a deep, medically induced coma, including the handfuls of Deathwatch Astartes I had grabbed along with the few surviving Pariahs I managed to capture. 

That one fucker the teleporting Kill Team had been dragging around in a coffin had been a damned pain to keep alive, but I had kinda managed it … for now. I couldn’t check on his soul — duh, it was the centre of the most powerful Null-field I had ever seen — so that only left me with non-Psychic options, which were dreadfully inadequate for healing the kind of soul damage I suspected the guy to be suffering from. 

Still, while he lasted, it would be good training to try and maintain my telepathic links closer and closer to the source. 

Anyway, back to my newest set of interlopers. Selene was off handling the ‘Senate’ and handing out salvage rights to the Arcologies for some of the Imperial Ships we had captured. Not all, since I wanted to keep some and leave some as bargaining chips for my Tau friends. As for why I even gave salvage rights to my Arcologies? Well, partly to give the rookie scientists something to do and, more importantly, to drive home the fact that the Imperium was real. Nothing quite like a massive Imperial battle cruiser to banish all doubts about that, and the truthfulness of my previous claims about protecting them from this threat. Of course, I had grabbed everything too dangerous from them all, including all the big no-no weaponry and Warp-drives, plus the Gellar-Field generators. 

There were still a bunch of technologies my new little scientists could gnaw upon, though, so they shouldn’t be too unhappy to only be getting the ‘scraps’.

I shot off a message to my partner about my intention, then, when she gave me a telekinetic shrug, I chain-Blinked over to the approaching ship. This was no invading fleet, and nor did it prove much of a threat with it being a Tau ship, so I didn’t feel the need to kick up a fuss about it like I had with the Imperial fleet.

Which proved prudent as I recognised the ship the moment I appeared about a million kilometres away from it — just to be safe — and had it within range of my organic visual sensors. That is, my eyes, if it wasn’t obvious. Though they only resembled a pair of human eyeballs visually, with every last cell making up the organs having gone through thorough upgrades. Which was why I could see the ship from this far away in real-time — as in, without having to wait for the sluggish light reflected off its hull to crawl its way over to me, which would take all of three to four seconds at this distance — and with crystal clear clarity. 

It was Aun’Saal’s ship, who was the Ethereal I had been negotiating with just a few weeks ago about my relationship with his empire and its nature. It seemed like he had turned back somewhere along the way to his destination because I was rather sure Tau ships couldn’t do an entire back-and-forth between Vallia and their regional capital of Tsua’Malor in this short of a timeframe. 

Again, the Tau ship that I’d sent away when the Imperial Fleet arrived came to mind, and I wondered whether the two ships had somehow met. But no, the latter had to have caught up with the Ethereal’s Flagship, which was a dubious proposition at best, so Coldstone must he turned the vessel around for one reason or another. 

I debated Blinking back and continuing to play pretend with him, downplaying my abilities, but in the end, I just shrugged and decided not to go through with it. There was no point to it. The other Tau ship had seen me teleport onto the bridge and would doubtlessly report my capabilities to the Ethereals at the first opportunity; furthermore, I’d have to come up with an excuse for how exactly I managed to decimate an entire Imperial fleet all on my lonesome, beyond the borders of my System. 

There would be questions, and a lot of them. The timeline wouldn’t match up at all if I continued to hide my teleporting capabilities. They would think I had a fleet hidden in the asteroid field at best, ready to meet the invading fleet, and at worst, they’d come up with some outrageous tale which would cause them to break contact with me, if my usual luck held out.

Honestly, with my luck being what it tended to be, I found myself lucky that no Greater Daemons took the Imperial Fleet’s invasion as an open invitation to party. Throughout this debacle, a part of me had been expecting to see some asshole tear realspace apart to crawl out and make a nuisance of themselves. 

I doubted Ka’Bundha took the result of our fight particularly well, for instance. 

The fact that no Daemons appeared all this time was worrying by itself. Was my makeshift Shadow in the Warp that good, or were they just lulling me into a false sense of safety before striking when I least expected it?

Gork and Mork teleported the Imperial fleet on the border of the System, beyond the reach of the Shadow I had made. That has to mean something … I doubt it was out of care or some messed-up sense of propriety.

As things stood, my abilities would get out one way or the other, and it was much better to own them than scurry about and hide. The latter would make the Ethereal think I feared discovery, that I had something to fear from him, which wasn’t the image I wanted to project. 

I had a more cohesive idea of the war and the geopolitics of the Jericho Sector now that I had gone mind-diving into a few higher-ranked Imperial officers, especially Solomon. The Tau Sept that Aun’Saal represented was isolated and near autonomous, governed entirely separately from the Tau Empire itself. 

Meaning, they didn’t have the massive backing of resources, manpower and such that I had initially assumed they did. 

I had thought I could at best show myself to be ‘useful’ to the Tau Empire … but if this Sept was truly as isolated as I had been led to believe, I could be crucial to their success in this region. I could go from ‘useful but disposable and risky to keep around’ to ‘a crucial part of our war effort’. 

With both the First Fleet and the supreme commander of the entire Achilus Crusade now gone, the Tau could advance and finally advance the Greyhell front. If they agreed to my … Well, let’s call them what they are: demands, then I’d make sure they not only advanced but pushed the Imperium out of the Reach entirely. 

If we could capture the Warp Gate they used to travel here, then the Reach was as good as ours. Ignoring the other slumbering problems scattered across the region of ours, problems which my mind-reading of the few Deathwatch members I managed to break the mind of made me distressingly aware of. 

Before all that, though, I had to make sure there even was an ‘Us’ and not just a ‘me and them’. I’d prefer to keep cordial with the Tau, but it still wasn’t a must, especially now that I knew that their resources were less than I had first assumed, the same with the danger they posed.

Well then, all that was left was to go ahead with this plan, if it could even be called that. A show of force first, then some cordiality to show that said force won’t be used against them … unprovoked, at least. I didn’t want my would-be allies to panic and do something regrettable.

I Blinked closer to the ship, floating in the depthless, endless void of the space between star systems. The lone vessel before me was the closest piece of solid matter, aside from a few dust particles here and there and the thin cloud of lesser atoms floating invisibly around me. The Tau ship and I, alone in the interstellar space, with the closest other object being a fist-sized chunk of some ancient asteroid about two light-seconds behind me. Space was empty. Even with all the life, wonders and horrors I knew to inhabit it, space was empty and lifeless to the extreme, when measured by sheer volume. 

If someone set off in a straight line, for example, never correcting course, they might never hit anything at all within the bounds of the observable universe. Not in our galaxy, nor in any other. Though that calculation failed to take into account the dubious existence of ‘Fate’ and other more malign entities guiding anyone dumb enough to just set off on a lonely voyage through space. 

I doubted they would last more than a few years before some horror crawled out of the immaterium to nibble on their bones.

With that ‘happy’ thought in mind, I waited to be noticed, my aura draped over the minds of the Tau manning the spaceship’s bridge, listening for their surface thoughts. It took them a few seconds, nearly ten, before one of the sensor-operators pointed out my existence, though only after the poor girl cleared her eyes twice and made the sensor double-check the information. I guess some random person floating in interstellar space, supposedly alive by their heat signature, was rather unusual. 

I waited a whole minute, even moving around enough for their sensors to pick up to show that I was alive, just letting them get used to the idea of there being someone out here, alive and active, obviously present for them. Because why else would I be floating in the way of their ship with all this space around? 

They gathered themselves, woke the sleeping Captain, who took over from his second and even sent a runner to notify the Ethereal onboard in case this was a ‘first contact’ situation. 

Then, when I felt Aun’Saal closing in on the bridge, mere seconds away from stepping onto the command deck, I smiled disarmingly and Blinked there. One moment, I stood a thousand kilometres away, floating in the void; the second, I stood on the bridge of the Tau vessel, bypassing all of their rudimentary shields and protections with laughable ease. In truth, they didn’t even obstruct my teleportation at all, being entirely focused on stopping more physical threats, and not ones of the psychic nature. 

Of course, the pair of guards standing by the gate, guarding the entrance to the bridge, noticed me first and didn’t bother waiting before unloading a pair of crackling blue bolts of energy at me. I raised an eyebrow, humming in interest when they splattered across the Psychic shield floating a centimetre above my skin. Electric, instead of plasma or laser, and non-lethal bolts, too. Considerate.

In response, I raised my hands in a placating gesture, mirroring the universal sign of surrender with a smile on my face and spoke the words no human probably said to an alien in many millennia, “I come in peace.”

That earned me a few moments, calming the panic and chaos that was descending upon the rest of the bridge’s inhabitants, who were quickly scrambling to either get away from me or to line up their quickly drawn sidearms to fire at me. None did, though, and neither did any of them get to speak a word before the gate hissed open, revealing the regal Ethereal whom I hadn’t seen in some time striding in with his hands clasped behind his back.

He beheld the scene of chaos and looked at me a moment later. His gaze was evaluating, calculating and more than a bit wary, but he seemed to feel the thick tension hanging in the air and seemed to sigh, though it was merely a mental thing, as none of it showed on his composed features. 

“At ease,” Aun’Saal said calmly, gesturing with a wave of his hands for the guards to lower their weapons, which they did. The rest of the crew quickly followed suit, though the Air Caste were a bit slower to obey than the well-trained fire caste. Such close contact with a possible enemy probably unnerved them. “Just who we were coming to meet, though sooner and farther away from the site of our last meeting than expected. I heard your earlier words, and in favour of the sentiment, let us take this meeting to a more comfortable setting. Care for some tea?”

“That sounds splendid,” I said, unconsciously channelling my inner posh English lady as I spoke in a posh British accent. Not that it would look out of place. Almost everyone I’d met in the Imperium had a posh English accent, something I blamed on the fact that Games Workshop, the company that made Warhammer 40k, was very British. “Lead the way, my good sir. It seems my presence might have caused some stress on these poor fellows; let us take this matter elsewhere, then. I’m in the mood for some tea.”

That was probably too much. I mused inwardly, none of my inner cringing showing on my face, my smile still in place as I strutted after Aun’Saal, who had easily begun leading me away from the jumpy Tau and towards a nearby conference room. Oh well, at worst, Selene is laughing herself silly if she’s watching what I’m doing through our bond. Not the worst thing that could happen. Entertaining the not-yet-Wife is a goal I can get behind, even at the cost of suffering from cringe. 

If the faint traces of amusement leaking through our bond were anything to go by, I had succeeded, at least somewhat. Yey?