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The hive fleet, classified by the Imperium of Man as Megalodon, lost an entire splinter fleet's worth of biomass. The ships were not destroyed nor pulled into a warp storm, that would have provided feedback. Instead they had vanished from the gestalt hivemind in an instant.
In the next instant a message was sent, a message communicated not of words but of mathematics and hunger. “To take back what was just lost will require an unacceptable allocation of resources,” the message said, giving exact calculations of just how much biomass would need to be spent. “It is more efficient to simply avoid a specified section of space.”
The hivemind chewed upon the calculations. Unlike the feeble attempts that were sometimes made by psykers to communicate with it, this was given by an entity that actually understood the scope of the hivemind, that understood its needs and its priorities. It had found a way to communicate with a gestalt being that had no use nor comprehension of language. It was a form of communication that could not be made to contain lies.
A single followup argument was sent. A description of crystalline structures that crossed between dimensions, alive in its own fashion but with no potential to be converted into biomass. The hivemind could only accept the argument and adjust course towards more fruitful harvests.
■
Beyond the edges of the Segmentum Pacifica there was a planet that the imperium would classify as a paradise world, had all information on it not been lost within the depths of the Administratum. It was inhabited by the descendants of pre imperial colonists who had long since forgotten the civilization they had come from. This world was all they had ever known and so they, as a multicultural society, had many names for it. Their primary patron goddess referred to this world with a word that most closely translated to Vivarium.
In the great temple that stood at the center of Vivarium’s largest city, a scribe accidentally brushed an elbow against her ceramic mug of coffee. It was an accident, caused from being too engrossed in her task of transcribing the plans of her goddess. She couldn’t move fast enough to save her drink, she could only watch as it slid off her writing desk, her eyes widening in horror at the certainty that her mug would shatter against the floor.
In that moment of stress she saw a vision of two huge creatures. Crystalline beings of impossible geometry shifting into and out of view as they spiralled into a helix around each other. She understood immediately that what she was seeing was her goddesses, the primary one looking inward to her home planet and the secondary one looking outward towards the stars.
The mug shattered, coffee spilling into a rug that had been woven with an image of the goddesses. While the scribe’s mind was occupied with revelation, the scribe's body stood up and began walking.
The temple, like the city that surrounded it, was a series of concentric circles. As such, it was a short trip to the chamber that was at its center. Any members of the elite guard that could have stopped the entity controlling the scribe were incapacitated by reflections of the scribe's visions. The entity pushed open a set of double doors and then climbed a spiral staircase at the exact center of the city and temple.
“Negotiator,” said a swarm of toneless voices.
“Administrator,” Negotiator answered back, her voice amused by contrast.
The room Administrator had made for herself was the highest point in the city, circular with curved windows giving her an unbroken view of the city and the surrounding farmlands that made up her domain. There was some furniture, a chair and a table as a concession for the occasional human that came up here. Administrator, or rather her avatar, had no need for such things.
Negotiator had an impulse at seeing the four armed avatar of Administrator. She filtered that impulse through the proxy of the human she was piloting and her vessel burst out laughing. The grey chitinous armor, the yellow compound eyes, the long black tendrils that curled out of the avatar’s head, every detail just made Negotiator laugh harder.
“So nostalgic,” Negotiator said with delight, her vessel enunciating each syllable. “Such an irrational sentiment from our brilliant and logical administrator.”
“Why are you here,” the Administrator said through the swarm of insectoid creatures she kept in her chambers. They were modified from the ones she had seized from the hive fleet years ago, resembling the arachnids and insects of terra with the smallest of them being the size of terran house cats and the largest the size of an adult human. “To be a pest?”
“Is it truly pestering you to state the obvious?” Negotiator asked. She waved an arm at the city beyond the window, at all the humans living their complex lives. “You could have forced them into perfect harmony but instead you allow them enough friction, enough disagreement, that they actually feel like they’re living their lives. It's so inefficient, just like that body of yours.”
Administrator didn’t move or speak as Negotiator stepped in close to her.
“The extra arms are nice but why not give your form the armor and claws of a proper genestealer? Be one of those ugly crouched over monsters. It's much more practical than having a skirt,” Negotiator teased, gesturing at spider silk cloth Administrator had chosen to keep around her waist. “The answer? Because you are such a nostalgic bitch.”
Administrator tilted her head, knowing that Negotiator could perfectly read her body language and understand the head tilt to mean “I don’t need to hear that from an entity that went out of their way to possess a host with green eyes, blonde hair and freckles.”
Negotiator grinned. “I enjoy being a hypocrite, it's one of my greatest pleasures.” She leaned in closer. “Don’t worry, I do actually have something you should know.” And then she gave Administrator, who made no move to stop her, a gentle kiss on the mandibles. The power Negotiator had granted the scribe allowed her to transfer large amounts of data through touch.
A grey ship from the Imperium of Man had just fallen out of the warp and was slowly drifting towards Vivarium. From what Negotiator could tell as she looked out into space, this was some sort of accident instead of a prelude to wider imperial action. Still, it constituted an unacceptable threat to everything Administrator had built.
Negotiator broke the kiss but still kept her gaze focused on Administrator’s eyes. Administrator for her part gave Negotiator a look that said “this could have been a direct message between shards.”
To that Negotiator just giggled. “Where would the fun in that be? Now do what you do best and take care of this.” And then she finally allowed the scribe’s trigger vision to end, leaving Administrator to deal with the confused girl.
■
When they find themselves in need of initiates, serfs and slaves, the silent members of the Carcharodon chapter of space marines will descend on loyal imperial worlds and kidnap their citizens. These bloody harvests are called Red Tithes.
The Otodus, the strike cruiser flagship of the seventh company, had its holds full with the spoils of one such harvest. Humans that had welcomed the Emperor’s angels to their world and had been rewarded with razed villages and captivity.
As the ship flew through the Immaterium, the most promising recruits were put through trials meant to weed out those unworthy to become initiates. They were paired and forced to duel under the watch of the silent marines that had kidnapped them. All duels were to the bloody death. This ritual had happened many times in the long history of the chapter and so it had become routine.
In that routine a mistake had been made, a missed glance by a single marine had given one of the recruits a moment to escape. As this recruit crawled around the innards of the ship, they had uncanny luck in avoiding the silent marines that wandered the halls.
They found themselves in a chamber that should have been guarded but through some accident of scheduling had been left open for them. Inside stood a navigator, their third eye fully open and occupied by the task of guiding the ship and maintaining the Gellar Field.
The recruit had found a jagged piece of metal during their escape. They grasped it tightly, suddenly certain that if the strange mutant in front of them noticed them, they would be doomed. They rushed at the navigator, thrusting out with the piece of metal and stabbing the navigator between the ribs.
The navigator fell, the Gellar Field crumpled, and the Otodus was exposed to the full fury of the warp.
■
The Carcharadons silently slaughtered every demon that had noticed the Otodus’s vulnerability. They also slaughtered every human on board, be they potential initiates, serfs, or victims of the red tithe. This was only proper against the corruption of the warp. Most screamed as they were cut down. The last human to die, a gnarled old woman kneeling in front of a shrine she had made, did not. Instead she died with a prayer to the god of hope on her lips and a certainty that the prayer would be answered.
By the time the company master managed to force the ship out of the Immaterium, silence had been completely reestablished on board the ship. This would not last.
The ship reappeared in a section of real space that had been isolated by the shadow of the warp. The company master had barely a few minutes to marshal his forces and establish where they’d ended up before the swarm descended.
■
I stepped over the mangled body of yet another space marine, this one had been dead before I’d gotten here, his grey ceramite armor singed a deep blue from some sort of arcane fire.
Bugs worked to pick the armor off the corpse, and all over the ship I looked through their eyes, trying to find survivors. I found the ship's hold, it had cells stuffed full of fresh human corpses that had been torn apart by chain weapons and perforated with bolters. It had been a thorough massacre.
The space marines deserved what they got.
I needed to debrief. To focus on something other than my bugs dissecting the corpses of the space marines with their talons.
“We have farmers mostly,” Tattletale said, from beside me. “Loyal citizens who prayed seven times a day to their emperor and spent the rest of their lives working the fields. Seems about right that this is what never missing their tithes would get them.” She stepped past me, walking through the mess of corpses. “No lucky survivors, sorry Taylor.”
My bugs swept into the hold as Tattletale looked around for further clues about the ship. In a cell at the back of the hold, someone had drawn a symbol of a flaming eye into the wall.
“Drawn in blood...burned into the wall, honestly not a bad shrine considering they didn’t have much to work with,” Tattletale said casually, looking at the streaks of gore that surrounded the symbol. “I'm still judging them because I hate that guy.”
I didn’t have any input on her hatred of specific chaos gods so instead I asked, “How’s the interrogation going?”
“Really well,” Tattletale said with a smile.
We had a single marine captured and bound with silk to the command table of the bridge. He kept absolutely silent but we had a solution for that. I’d taken his helmet off of him and put one of my bugs in its place. An arachnid, nearly a foot long with yellow eyes, armored with grey and black chitin. It sat on the space marine’s head with its fangs stabbed into his eye sockets.
Tattletale pressed an ear against the spider’s carapace. “According to him, the navigator got stabbed before we even got here and they didn’t have an astropath. So!” she said, clapping her hands. “No one’s coming for help, which is just too bad, isn’t it lieutenant?”
The marine did not answer.
“Anyways, got everything taken over, Taylor?”
I had bugs the size of dinner plates at the controls of the ship, disabling its systems and bringing up information on the cogitators.
Tattletale stood on her tiptoes to get a proper look at the system logs. Most of the screens were at space marine height. “Oh my god, why do they even bother with vox systems when they don’t talk. Dammit.”
“One of them got a word out when we took over the bridge.” I’d heard the word through my bugs as they’d pounced.
“Literally one word? Welp. Let me guess, the word was Xenos?” It was. “Well shit... nearest imperial world isn’t hearing that until...” She paced as she did a quick mental calculation. ”nine hundred and forty-two years at light speed assuming the signal was aimed in exactly the right direction... but even then it’ll probably dissipate into nothing which is probably fine?”
“Probably isn’t good enough,” I said, my bugs tensing up with my worry. If the imperium finds out about Vivarium and the humans-”
The humans. Humans, a category I was separating from myself. I stopped, all my bugs stopped right in the middle of their tasks.
Tattletale stood in front of me, grinning widely.
The humans, those half a billion people on Vivarium. Administrator watching over them, guiding their growth, making sure they were thriving and...protected.
“You’re doing good Taylor, think about it some more. You’re almost there.”
I looked out the window with many eyes at the blue and green dot that was Vivarium. An ant farm the size of an entire civilization. And like any good caretaker, Administrator was guiding the growth of her charges, guiding the humans into building a sustainable, cosmopolitan civilization that allowed them to thrive.
She had seeded the surrounding planets and systems with her captured monsters, remaking them to nurture the planets instead of consuming them. It was basic ecology, there was so much more energy in an ecosystem than stripping a planet.
She had an army to protect them and new homes for the humans once they needed more than a planet’s worth of space and looked to the stars.
And that was the eventual goal. The humans would travel into space, eventually leaving their goddess behind. Assuming they were given enough time to grow.
I looked at the dead bodies in their cages. At the corpses of the space marines that had kidnapped them and stripped them of their dignity. Compared to that, the way that Administrator allowed her pets their humanity was...
“It’s always better to let you figure it out on your own,” Tattletale said, her voice gentle. “It makes you way less likely to do something rash like attacking Administrator.
I felt Tattletale’s hand brush against my cheek. It was comforting. Tattletale was in front of me. In front of all of me at once. That makes no sense.
I looked through my swarm, trying to find myself. All throughout the ships my bugs turned and looked at each other and everywhere there was Tattletale and I was...
“No body, sorry,” Tattletale said. I glared at her for sounding way too proud of herself for that turn of phrase. “Hey if it helps, I’m in the same boat hun. Dead forty thousand years ago, our bodies are nothing but radioactive dust. We’re just lucky our passengers were nostalgic enough to keep us around.”
“We’re ghosts.”
“Yeah that’s one way to look at it. You’re Administrator’s favorite ghost, that’s why she put you in charge of this swarm, that’s why she put you in charge of every swarm.” Every Tattletale that was near a window turned to look out into the void. “There are so many of you out there in the galaxy right now.”
“And you’re here to make sure I do what she wants? To control me?”
“I wouldn’t. And I couldn’t control you, even if I wanted to.”
She didn’t have a body that could make a reflection but I could imagine the expression she was making. I remembered a long time ago, her tearing me apart for destroying myself in front of her. The way she smiled right after, convincing herself for a moment that maybe there was a way to fix what I'd done.
“I’m here to keep you sane and to be your friend, of course.” She grinned at me. “It’s what I’ve always done.”
“Fine,” I said after realizing I couldn’t argue against that. “So now what?”
“I think you know, but would it help if I laid it out for you?”
I nodded, except I didn’t really because all my bugs had gone back to the tasks I had them set to. Tattletale still somehow knew.
“You could attack Administrator if you really want to. She has more bugs than you and knows you perfectly so she’d probably win but you could still try.”
“Have others?”
“Oh yeah, back before her counterpart suggested adding me.” She giggled. “You lash out a lot when I’m not there. So how about it? You don’t really have a way to kill her but you could fuck up her project really badly if you were lucky.”
“Kill all her pet humans?”
“Yeah, it wouldn’t hurt her but she’d probably feel whatever the passenger version of annoyed is. The humans are mostly just something she does for... fun? Nostalgia?”
I had a sense of how Administrator felt. She enjoyed guiding the humans, as much as a crystalline alien could enjoy anything.
“Option two is just fucking off. We pick a direction out of the galaxy and just go. No one can really stop us.”
God that is so fucking tempting.
But I saw something, out in space, well beyond Vivarium. A cold golden light. Surrounded by the untold billions of the Imperium of Man.
“But you’re not going to do that because you are you and there’s so many people suffering.”
The space marine’s silence broke. He died screaming as his head exploded.
And through his eyes I saw the entire life my interrogation spider had extracted from him. I saw insanity and religious devotion. The kind of religious devotion that made a former victim of the Red Tithe believe that an atrocity like that was reasonable and holy.
It was destructive and it was all powered by devotion to the golden light at the center of the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. By devotion to the golden corpse that was once a man that gave the light its power.
“It’s so stupid, isn’t it?” Tattletale continued. “All of that, out there?”
This miserable empire wasn’t a machine for humanity’s survival. It’s a slow miserable death propped up by its rotting god.
“It’s impossible to stop,” Tattletale admitted.“It's going to be the end of all of us.”
I remembered an impossible battle at an oil platform. My body had been destroyed and remade into a monster. I remember climbing a ruin, screaming at a golden god.
“And you’re you, so you’re gonna try to do it anyway,” Tattletale said with smug affection.
I didn’t answer verbally. I didn’t need to. Instead I reached out with my swarm, with my fleet of bio-ships, looking for a target. I found one: a world that was nearly taken over by deluded cultists. They’d risen up in the shadows of an imperial world too uncaring to notice them and now they were calling for star gods that would eventually devour them.
The world was completely and utterly doomed, but it would bring me closer to my final target. I harnessed the gravity of that far away star system, compressing spacetime between myself and them.
For the sake of everyone— the humans Administrator raised in Vivariaum, the suffering masses of the imperium, and the many other sentient races that his empire was threatening to extinguish— the golden god needed to die.
I felt Tattletale, Lisa, lean against me, her head against my shoulder. She took my hand in hers. I didn’t have to look to know that she was smiling. We were millennia out of time, in the darkest possible future, with an impossible quest. But I found myself smiling too.