I took a delicate sip of the strange, pink tea I’ve been served and couldn’t help but humm in appreciation at the sweet, floral taste that spread through my mouth. It was almost like spring distilled into liquid and poured out into a cup, quite refreshing. 

“You have been hiding much of your strength, it seems,” Aun’Saal said, direct but not accusatory. A mere statement of fact, and I nodded easily. “It’s not merely that artifact of yours that’s special about you, is it? Or perhaps do you have another ancient relic stashed away in a sleeve that allows for teleportation and survival in the void?”

“No,” I said, taking another slow sip. “It’s all me. I believe I’m what the Imperium would dub an Alpha Plus Psyker … though that term is much too reductive and vague to describe me fully. But it will have to for now. A girl had to have her secrets, even if some are forced into the light.”

“I’d say they still linger at the edge of shadows,” he said. “Would you care to push them fully into the light? Specify what exactly you have been hiding that you do not see a reason to anymore?”

“Beyond teleporting?” I asked, raising an eyebrow in amusement. “I’m sure you’d love the details, but I’ll give you a demonstration later and allow you to draw your conclusions from it. But that wasn’t why I came all the way here. You are not my first visitor, and the others weren’t so courteous in greeting me with a cup of tea. Not at all, and in their rudeness, they forced me to reveal more about myself than I had intended. These are things that I’m sure you would have discovered in time, as a result, if not instantly, when you entered the system. Thus, I see no reason to hide them anymore, as I said before.”

“Visitors?” Aun’Saal asked, his facade of calm amiability falling away to reveal what lay beneath. His face warped into a picture of seriousness, eyes glinting with something grim. 

“That’s why you turned back, isn’t it?” I mused, my supernaturally sped-up mind connecting the dots between heartbeats. “You heard of their departure on your way back to Tsua’Malor.”

His usual impregnable fortress of a mind cracked ever so slightly, letting a sliver of panic escape through it before he clamped down on it and repaired the flaw. 

“You have come across Imperial vessels, have you not?” He asked seriously. “That’s too fast … even with their Warp-Drives, it should have taken them months to reach here. A scouting squadron, perhaps, sent ahead of the main Fleet?”

It was obvious he was merely thinking aloud, a rare lapse of control for the usually composed Ethereal. Did the coming of the Imperial Fleet truly disturb him that much? Well, I suppose a single Fleet under that cunt Ebongrave had been holding the line against the Tau for centuries single handedly. 

There was a real cause for worry.

“I doubt they expected to arrive early,” I said, watching him with a hint of gleeful fascination. It was a bit sadistic of me, taking amusement in his stress and near panicking, but I never claimed to be perfect. “All their Navigators practically combusted on arrival, quickly followed by nearly all of their Psykers having a collective meltdown which ended with the Lord Militant purging them to the last.”

Now that caught his attention, and I could almost feel all the various thoughts scrambling around in his head, vying for attention, reorienting like a pack of starving dogs smelling fresh meat. 

“How do you know that?” He asked, half-suspicion, half disbelief. Was I lying? Was I telling the truth? How could I know that, if I were? How did I survive learning it? One does not merely stroll into the flagship of an Imperial fleet and ask for a status report. 

I could see it in his eyes when the surprise gave way, and he started leaning towards doubt. There was no way a single Psyker, no matter how powerful, could win against a fleet, right? He would also know how hard it would be to infiltrate a flagship on high alert. 

“I think it is time for my demonstration,” I said, my lips curling into a smile. “Your Slip-Drive, or whatever you’re calling it, is dreadfully slow. Let me speed it up a bit.”

“Wait, wha-“ he didn’t get to finish the sentence as I wrapped my power around the ship and Blinked it in its entirety right onto the border of the Vallia System. It also just happened that I had put it down just so it got a direct line of sight on the now dead Imperial fleet floating listlessly in the void. “Urgh. What have you done?”

He wobbled in his seat, swallowing thickly as he stumbled to his feet despite the transition having gone off without a hitch. It was practically seamless, but apparently I still had ways to go. 

Maybe being able to teleport a handful of people at once without making them feel sick had made my head big. Maybe the next step shouldn’t have been attempting to do the same with a whole ass ship with thousands of people onboard. 

Oh well. They could handle it.

I just smiled mysteriously, but as he opened his mouth to respond, likely with another demand for answers, the door burst open and a harried looking Tau spacer stumbled in. 

“Honourable Aun,” the man gasped, swaying unsteadily at his feet. Whoops, I may have thrown their sense of balance for a spin, the inner ear was so damned sensitive. “We’ve been … moved near our destination. Sensors detect upwards of 70 Imperial Void-Ships in our vicinity. Your counsel is direly needed!”

Aun’Saal turned to me, suspicion and a rising sense of betrayal in his eyes. 

“Dead ships,” I said, correcting the Tau who probably ran off to get the Ethereal before even a full sensor reading could be made. “Spacehulks and metal carcasses. It’s a graveyard for ships, not a threat to you, not anymore.”

The Tau just stared at me for a long moment, which prompted me to sigh and rise to my feet. I moved towards the door, gesturing for them to follow. 

“Come,” I said over my shoulder. “See it with your own eyes. Once you believe me, we can go from there. Now, where was that bridge again?”

I could have easily found my way, but the question startled the Tau spacer into action and rushed to lead the way. Aun’Saal rose to follow along, stepping beside me as we navigated the futuristic corridors of the Tau vessel. 

We stepped onto the bridge a minute later and were treated to a sight of organised chaos as the officers shouted the newest reports and sensor readings at the Captain, who held his composure admirably well despite having had his ship thrown through space by a whimsical eldritch horror.

“Their engines are dead, sir,” one Tau shouted. “The thrusters still carry heat, but it’s just lingering without being able to radiate it away. They haven’t had power for hours, if not days.”

“Shields are offline,” another said. “They are dead in the water. No shields, no thrusters. Just hunks of metal.”

“Search for life signs,” the Captain commanded. “Without their shields, we should be able to scan the ships in full.”

“There is barely anything, sir!” A Tau piped up a moment later. “Only a few dozen per ship, and most of them don’t seem fully human. Mutants, perhaps?”

“That would be correct,” I said, not loud enough for the bridge crew to hear but within earshot of Aun’Saal. “The life support systems are offline,e and the atmosphere has been vented into space. You won’t find anything on them aside from a few mutants hiding in the depths of the lower decks that are surviving even with the lack of air. Not that they’ll last long without food or water.”

Though now that I was scanning the ships more thoroughly, focusing on the few surviving mutants, I could see pockets of air lingering in the archaic lower decks where vents and corridors had been welded shut long ago. 

“You’ve done this?” Aun’Saal asked, disbelieving but with much less doubt in his voice than before. The evidence was right before his eyes, after all. 

“Not by myself,” I said, my lips curling into a smirk. “And not under my own power, but yes. It was done under my command.”

Technically, it was done by my Fleets and drones, which I would continue to claim were made by the Artifact I had fused with the moon of Vallia Prime and my own body. 

It wasn’t even a lie, if you squint really hard. It was more believable than the truth at least, which was the purpose.

The Ethereal stood there, silent, thoughtful. He listened to the shouted reports, his eyes fixed on the dead fleet of the Imperium spread out before him. Then he nodded, seemingly to himself and turned his gaze upon me.

“Why?” He asked, and I tilted my head. Why indeed? Such a loaded question packed into a single word. He knew the how, or at least thought he did, but not the why.

If I could do this, why play diplomacy with him? Why pretend? Why come to him? Why teleport his ship? 

Perhaps he even wondered why I’d let him live, where almost any other human with my power would have killed him and his men, then taken from them what they wanted. 

Why didn’t I? What were my intentions? What game was I playing?

I could taste the confusion, the swirling thoughts rolling around in the chaos of his head, the crashing waves of his thoughts causing ripples upon the surface of his mind.

“Because even with all this power, being alone in this wide, dangerous galaxy is not a good place to be,” I said, shrugging. “I need allies. Even with the Lord Militant dead, the first Fleet gone and the Achilus Crusade likely in disarray, I can’t capitalise on it. Not really. But you can.”

“An alliance,” Aun’Saal tasted the word thoughtfully. Previously, we had been talking about me becoming a vassal of the Tau Empire, or a mercenary auxiliary at best. An alliance was different, though, leaning more towards a bond of equals. “And what would you want out of this alliance?”

“Information, resources, knowledge,” I said easily. “And military cooperation. I can hit hard and fast, but I don’t have the manpower to hold any planets I might conquer. I’m having my hands full with a single moon. I wouldn’t bother capitalising on the Imperium’s confusion in the Reach by myself, but if this alliance goes through, we can push them out of the region and claim their Warp Gate for our own.”

“I’m certain we can work something out that will be mutually beneficial to both of our sides,” Aun’Saal said, maybe just a little too quickly not to seem desperate. His tone was level and his face placid, but he already implicitly agreed to the alliance I proposed without a word. “This will change things. Can you … project power further away from your moon?”

“I could,” I said. “The bio-ships making up my fleet are tied to me, not the moon itself. Wherever I go, they can follow. But leaving my moon would place it in danger, so it couldn’t be done on a whim, or for long. There are already sharks circling, sniffing for any trace of blood in the water, and I refuse to give them an opening.”

He gave me a strange glance, not understanding my implications, but let it go and nodded. If the Tau turned out to truly go along with this alliance, and the spirit of it too, I would have to educate them a bit.

Of the Imperium, the Warp, Daemons, Chaos and the rest. I can’t have my allies be a bunch of ignorant bumpkins floundering their way through every conflict, not understanding what they face. 

But not yet. Aun’Saal would likely make a provisional agreement with me, but he was an envoy at best. I doubted he could make the sort of deal I wanted to make with the Velk’Han Sept. 

For one, I wanted the Vallia System. All of it, not just the single measly moon they gave me. But that was just the start. 

There were many more specific details of our alliance that would have to be ironed out. I wanted Earth Caste scientists on my moon, working on projects I gave them. I wanted access to Tau technology, and not just the scraps they gave me. I also wanted a share of the spoils from the wars to come, in one form or the other.  

Aun’Saal was only all too happy to agree with the majority of my demands, only pushing back on the specifics. Numbers, shares, that sort of thing. And of course, he wanted the ability to call on me basically on demand for his Sept.

I told him I could agree to being called on every so often. Once per five years, for example. He whined and pulled his leg, but agreed in the end when I said that didn’t mean I wouldn’t go along with their plans more, just that they had to convince me any other time on a case-by-case basis.

By the time he turned his ship around, heading back to convey what happened here to the other Ethereals at Tsua’Malor, I had it confirmed that the entire Vallia System was now officially mine. No more babysitters, nosy Tau captains making a nuisance of themselves in my backyard, and no more need to sneak about when I wanted to explore Vallia itself.

Now it was time to finally beat that strange spirit governing every living being on Vallia into submission and kick my other projects into next gear. Without the need to fly under the Tau’s radar, I could turn my Dyson Swarm into a true swarm from the few hundred satellites it was at the moment. Same with my Fleet, listening stations, sensor buoys and my mining operations in the asteroid fields. 

I wasn’t sure whether I’d keep Vallia as the centre of my power base forever, but it was the first System I ruled over, so it would always have a special place in my heart. And it was finally time to begin turning into something worth being proud of, a jewel of my Empire-to-be.