“Throne damn it all!” A woman screamed, slamming her fists on the table before her. It cracked under the impact, the wood bowing slightly as her powered armour crashed into the oak.
The sound echoed around the room, bouncing across the ruined consoles and the inert servitors.
Her guards remained silent with their lasrifles held at ease. In all honesty, it had been expected.
The woman in question was Inquisitor Lyra Kane, a ruthless warrior renowned for her temper. She’d been on the hunt for a heretic techpriest for the past few decades, and this was the closest she’d gotten: the Realm of Despair.
It was Magos Tyren’s flagship, a small cruiser that had put up an impressive fight before the Imperial forces were able to overcome it. She had personally stormed it with a small contingent of troops, expecting resistance. Instead, all they found was a deserted craft; all data scrubbed from its banks.
“Warp take each and every one of those damned cogheads!” She snarled, her violet eyes flashing dangerously in the light. She punched the table again, this time breaking it into two pieces. “Were it not for that bureaucratic mess, we would have him by now!”
She grit her teeth, seething. The local Adeptus Mechanicus drones had impeded her at every step of her journey, claiming their works were beyond her jurisdiction. In the end, she’d been allowed access to Tyren’s old logs by politely informing them that while viewing their data might be beyond her reach, destroying their planet was not.
Unfortunately, she’d been less than subtle in her request, and rumor had spread through the lines, including the troops she’d requisitioned.
Said two Guardsmen looked a little uneasily at each other as she swiveled to face them. They weren’t her usual detail: the henchmen were off on another mission. Instead, they were on loan from a local garrison, which made them completely expendable. No doubt they were reflecting on just how important their lives were to her.
Lyra noticed their tension and calmed herself slightly, reminding herself that such a display was not fit for the common men to see. At best, it would damage morale. At worst… She’d burned planets before. Theirs was no different than any that she’d condemned, though she’d rather not have to sentence it for a lapse of her own. She’d need to rein in her temper, let them still think of inquisitors as something more than human.
“Guardsman Trenko.” She said at length. “Send a vox to the Starlight’s Fury. Tell them that the Magos has eluded our grasp, and that we require extraction.” She frowned to herself, hating that she’d be returning empty-handed.
“Roger that, ma’am.” The man snapped to attention, no doubt glad to have something to take his mind off of their current situation.
The inquisitor had sent them in without any evacuation plans or any indication that reinforcement would be en route. Needless to say, it left her loaned troops more than a little uneasy. They were used to acting as a platoon. Divided into two-man teams, they felt weak and vulnerable.
The other trooper made the sign of the aquila on his breastplate, his face stern. “Milady, might I express an opinion?”
Lyra grit her teeth, expecting some snarky response from the man. “Should it be appropriate for your station, Sergeant Yost.”
The man nodded, hefting his rifle. “It’s just… It’s only been an hour since we arrived. I realize your scanners didn’t pick up much life here, but… Shouldn’t we do a full sweep before offering this cogboy a ticket out of here?”
Lyra’s glare hardened. “You dare to suggest that he is capable of overpowering you? Of defeating me? Such a statement could be likened to cowardice, Sergeant. And I will not have cowardice in my ranks.” She unfastened her inferno pistol as she spoke.
The sergeant likely had no idea of its destructive capabilities, but he recognized the threat sure enough. “Now, I’d never besmirch the reputation of His Majesty’s glorious Imperial Guard. All I was suggesting was a little operational prudence.”
Lyra nodded, letting her hand fall from the holster. “Understood. And ignored.” She walked over to the craft’s main terminals, pursing her lips.
At length, she spoke. “Our sensors have already determined that this craft is empty. We’ve run twenty-seven consecutive sweeps, and there is nothing alive here save these inert servitors. That is why I need my shuttle. Perhaps some of the technology there can exert a confession from one of these machines.”
Sergeant Yost shivered slightly, looking again at one of the braindead automatons.
Lyra watched him from the corner of her eye, wondering what he was thinking of. It was likely regarding the process to make one of the machines. Even though they were criminals in a past life, it seemed utterly inhumane to lobotomize a man to make him ‘useful’. They could be programmed, reconstructed, and even enhanced.
But there was always the worry that servitors could retain their original minds. It was what made the punishment such an effective threat. Lyra could imagine nothing worse than being trapped in a body not your own. But they were a necessary evil, much like the Inquisition itself.
“Milady!” Guardsman Trenko looked up from his vox-pack, saluting as he spoke. “I’ve done as you wished.”
Inquisitor Lyra Kane opened her mouth to congratulate the man.
Then two things happened.
First, the bark of a gun clapped through the room, and Trenko had a brief second to look surprised before a massive crater opened in his chest.
Second, the servitor behind Sergeant Yost rose to its full height, a smoking gun clasped in its hand.
As the sergeant turned at the sound, he dropped his rifle. Lyra watched what seemed like an act of cowardice, seeing it as a mark of heroism just a moment later. Both of Yost’s hands flew to the grenades on his flak jacket.
He wrapped his fingers around their cool steel, planning to pull every pin at once. No doubt he realized that the shooter was too close to him for any other tactic. Lyra urged him on, hoping his last act wouldn’t be in vain. Then the servitor behind him sliced his head off.
Lyra glared as Yost’s neck let loose a torrent of blood. Not a single explosive had been primed. His body clattered to the ground in time with the dull thud of his helmet. But that wasn’t the source of her ire. No, that honor belonged to the abomination that had felled him.
Behind the corpse was a monster of a man, if it could be called that. It was augmented beyond belief, servos whirring to life even as it retracted a sawblade from a shoulder mount. The weapon still shone with the sergeant’s blood.
“Inquisitor Kane. A pleasure.” It spoke.
Though she didn’t recognize the body, she recognized its voice. Nothing else could have such an arrogant, condescending tone. She’d heard it time and time again, every time her quarry had evaded her grasp and left her a recorded reminder.
“Magos Tyren. We meet at last.” Lyra said simply. Then she launched herself at the Magos, her left hand outstretched before her. Her right trailed behind her body, and she triggered the mag-locks on her blade. It thumped into her waiting palm a moment later, at the same time as her left hand grabbed the heretic by his neck.
“How quaint.” Tyren said simply, the collection of lenses that served as his eyes whirring.
Lyra struck with all her force, bringing the blade in her right arm about to hammer down on the Magos’ head.
He raised the sawblade of his right arm to parry, revving it to life.
She triggered the power field on her sword and sliced through it like butter.
Her blade bit deep into his skull, and the Magos’s body twitched and shuddered as its life finally left it.
Three seconds. It had taken Lyra thirty-seven years to come to this moment, and she’d ended it in three seconds.
The inquisitor breathed a sigh of relief, deactivating her blade. “Goodbye, heretic.” She said with a self-satisfied smirk.
Then the Magos’s right arm speared forward, its palm unfolding to reveal an injector. It happened before Lyra could even react. One second, the man was a corpse. The next, he’d slammed something into her side and injected her with… something.
She shouted in pain and alarm, her iron-clad arm already working to pull back her sword for another swing. But her hands remained still, despite her best efforts.
“My my, you didn’t think it would be so easy, did you?” Tyren chided, his left hand twitching as it disarmed his foe. He’d hacked into her armour, deactivating it with a simple suggestion.
The techpriest took a step back from the inquisitor, his right hand whole once more as he removed his own head. “Honestly, I’m surprised you fell for this. Everyone always thinks to strike for the head. No doubt some primal instinct you have.” He tossed it aside, then pulled another from his coat.
She glared at him venomously, wishing she could muster some of the psychic force her master was capable of. But as it stood, she was as helpless as a caged animal, trapped in place by what once protected her.
Tyren fastened his new head in place, the ocular lenses whirring as they readjusted themselves. “There, much better.” He said, clapping his hands together. “Now, correct me if I’m wrong. But I believe that you still have no idea of the research I’ve been doing. Kept in the dark, as it were.”
He was right, unfortunately. She’d had many misgivings about this assignment, stemming with that she didn’t know why she was pursuing Tyren. The fact that he knew as much wasn’t comforting.
Lyra narrowed her eyes. “My masters have been less than forthcoming, that much is true.” She did her best to keep him talking. Maybe if he took long enough, she could somehow restart her armour—or at least disengage it.
“Such a shame; such a shame!” Tyren shook his head, the motion causing an audible whirring from his neck. “Then again, had you known, it might not be so simple a matter to show you.”
Lyra stopped her struggles, her heart sinking. “Show me?” She muttered, a glance down to her still-aching side. Now that she focused on it, she could feel something burning through her body. It felt like it was working at her extremities first: her hands and her toes felt swollen and achy.
“Why yes!” Tyren clapped his hands together again. “You no doubt are familiar with Xenos Horrificus class ‘Tyranid’, are you not?”
Lyra grit her teeth. She didn’t fear many things in the universe, but the Tyranids could be counted among them. They were an organic race, insectlike in appearance and armed with the most terrifying weapons she’d ever seen.
Her first assignment had been to clear a nest, and she could still remember one of her henchmen’s screams. He had been eaten alive by small worms that had fallen from the ceiling, digging through his helmet as though it was paper.
The inquisitor shook herself to attention, instead focusing on her aching hands. She would give anything to wrap them around the Magos’s throat. By some superhuman effort, she was able to keep the malice from her voice as she answered him. “Intimately so, yes.”
She had to keep him talking, had to find a way out. Even though with every passing second, it looked like her fate was sealed.
“Then I’m sure you’ll find this fascinating. No doubt already your hands have begun to ache, especially in your fingers?” Tyren spoke calmly, a light blinking by one of his rightmost eyes.
Lyra realized that she was being recorded, and she hissed at her tormenter. “I am not willing to give you the satisfaction of an answer.” She said levelly. Even so, she couldn’t deny that her hands felt increasingly odd. It was like her innermost fingers had gone numb entirely, while her thumbs and outer fingers were constrained within the metal of her gauntlets.
She flexed them, shivering as she heard a faint scraping of talon on metal. Lyra looked up to Tyren to find that he had been motionless. Then she looked back to her hands in alarm, realizing that the sound had come from inside her armour.
As if waiting for her attention, her fingers burst through her plate. Only they weren’t fingers anymore. They looked to be a set of three talons on each hand, shining silver in the artificial light of the cruiser. She could feel them as her own, twitch them as she attempted to move her digits.
Lyra screamed. She had no other response for what was happening. She’d seen those claws again and again in her worst nightmares, and now they were attached to her body. Worse yet, the rest of her hands had changes as well. Her skin had hardened to a thick carapace, blood-red against her metallic armour.
It looked like she had the hands of a Tyranid; of a genestealer. Her mind went blank as she looked back to the Magos. “That is not…” She swallowed nervously, groaning again as her arms began to ache.
The metal around them buckled and bent, stretched from within by her arms gaining horrific alien muscle, tearing through the adamantium plate.
“Not what?” Tyren’s face held no mouth, yet his voice spoke of a self-satisfied smirk. He watched on as Lyra’s arms burst free of her armour’s confines. They had changed entirely, becoming a pair of alien limbs that flailed about as Lyra struggled to understand what was happening.
Tyren pressed her, watching her transform. “Not possible?”
She wanted to agree with him, but knew it would give him the satisfaction of having guessed correctly. “That is not how genestealers work.” She swallowed nervously.
Hurriedly, Lyra began to review the facts. Genestealers were Tyranid shock troopers, meant to infiltrate and destroy a society from within. They could mutate humans, yes; but this happened over the course of generations, not over mere minutes!
Somehow, the Magos must have done work on the transmutative gene of the foul aliens, tweaking it to his own needs. Lyra could deny no longer that somehow she was becoming an alien, and she felt her heart sink. “It is not…” She mumbled, devastated.
Tyren laughed aloud, a mechanical clicking that echoed through the room. “It’s not, it’s not. But it is how mine work.”
As he spoke, two more arms burst from the sides of her body, growing to their full length in seconds. They were just like her upper pair: hard, blood-red chitin serving as an exoskeleton. Despite this, she could sense the air against them. It was an utterly alien sensation, like being able to feel her own clothing.
Lyra screamed in pain and horror. It felt like she’d been stabbed, only in reverse. Moreover, she could now feel these new appendages as if they were her own. Because they were her own, some distant pat of her mind chided.
She shut it down almost immediately. She had to remain in control, had to remain focused. This had to be a hallucinogenic; humans didn’t turn into aliens! Yes, that made perfect sense. Lyra chided herself for even believing that such a profane transformation was possible.
Yet even as the inquisitor’s mind fought to retain her sanity, her increasingly alien body also fought to rid herself of its confining armour.
Her sharp talons tore at her chestplate, cutting through it in seconds. She hadn’t realized how much pressure had built up in her back until this moment. Thick and ridged carapace had grown in along her spine, protecting her from attacks from behind. But this came at the cost of making her artisan armour incredibly uncomfortable.
A loud crack filled the air as her armour split, the bony plates of her back bursting through what her claws had weakened. Lyra let loose an involuntary hiss of pleasure as the pressure around her body abated, and she flicked her tongue out to taste at the air. A moment later, she recoiled in horror at what she’d just done.
Tyren laughed again, that same odd clicking setting her nerves on end. “You’d be amazed at what you Imperials leave behind. Such magnificent technology; such glorious research! I am a scientist first and foremost, and advancing pursuits such as this is why I have chosen to defect.”
Lyra looked down in fear, beginning to hyperventilate as she gazed deeper up on her carapace-clad form. She had never been a particularly shapely woman, but at least she had been human. Now, her breasts had sank back into her chest, and her torso was covered in ridge-like plates. But at least the changes had left her face the same, she thought with a half-hysterical giggle.
She should have known better than to tempt fate. It started with her teeth; all of them feeling so odd in her mouth. Lyra’s mind denied that such changes were happening, and she leaned down to shred the armour confining her feet.
Seeing her red and insectoid feet was almost a small mercy: it helped detract from the changes to her head. But even as she flexed her toes, she could feel her nose flattening out on her face, leaving her with a pair of gaping slits.
Lyra looked up to the Magos, intending to shred him limb from limb. Instead, she came face to face with a live feed of the changes to her body. The bastard had relayed his ocular implant to the command consoles behind him, and it was showing her a full view of her transformation.
Faced with such a visual assault, the inquisitor began to break down. She watched numbly as her hair fell out in matted clumps. She shook her head as her nose and mouth pushed out into an alien muzzle, no longer fit for the graces of human speech. She cried as the whites of her eyes yellowed, and she felt a thin membrane form over her eyes.
Lyra hiccupped, the sound an alien hiss, as she felt her head begin to ache. Her bald skull jutted out to a ridged plate, and Lyra scraped her claws against it. The sound shrieked like fingernails on a chalkboard, and Lyra shivered to herself in horror.
Her tailbone pushed out into a small and stubbly tail, its triangular length waggling slightly. She looked back with apprehension, not noticing as she lowered herself into an awkward stoop; her hips and back creaking as they readjusted her stance.
Then Lyra looked up, realizing that those were the last of the changes to her body. She gave voice to a hunter’s shriek, her lips peeled back around her teeth as she lowered herself to pounce upon the Magos.
Yet no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t move. It was like she was paralyzed; her whole body had locked up around her and she was unable to do more than snap in the air.
“Of course, what sort of scientist would I be if I allowed my own creations to harm me?” The Magos tittered as he spoke, strolling around Lyra to look her up and down. “And my, my… What a gorgeos specimen you are.
Lyra shuddered at his gaze, yet crooned at his compliment. It was like something in her mind was changing, a new blank obedience settling in over her sharp mind. She still retained all of her mental capacity, yet it was like she desired to obey the techpriest more than anything else in the world.
Even more than serving the God-Emperor.
The thought was a shocking one, and heretical beyond belief. Yet the new genestealer could not deny what she knew was true. The Magos had remade her; given her a powerful gift. Who would she be to reject such an offering?
A hidden part of her brain railed against this, screaming in abject denial. Yet it was quickly shut down and devoured by the rest of Lyra’s new mind. She flexed all four of her inhuman arms, opening and closing the talons.
Satisfied with their response, she looked up to Tyren, awaiting instructions.
“Good girl, good girl.” He spoke arrogantly, a large smile on his lips.
He patted Lyra’s muzzle and she hissed, loving the wonderful reward. She leaned in closer, nuzzling his hand like a common animal.
“You are a prime genestealer of my own design. Far more deadly than the original; more cunning as well. And also more infectious.” He spoke with that same verbal smile, running his cold, steel fingers down her plated spine.
She couldn’t feel it in the traditional sense. While some part of her mind could tell exactly where his fingers were on her organic armour, it still felt incredibly numb against her back. That wasn’t to say it wasn’t pleasurable; it was just odd.
“You, my former pursuer, you are going to board your own shuttle with me. This ship has served its purpose, and I’ll need better facilities to further my research. It was not accident that you found my flagship, you realize. Your superiors find my work just as interesting as I do.”
Lyra realized the extent to which she’d been manipulated with a thrill of horror. This shock was enough to overwhelm what remained of her human mind, and she felt her mental defenses collapse; giving in.
Lyra’s body shuddered, then tilted its head curiously. Her long tongue snakes from her mouth, sampling the air, and she looked at her alpha curiously.
“Oh, was that all it took to break you? A pity; I thought you’d prove more of a challenge.” Tyren chuckled. “That said, I’m more than glad to find you… cooperative.”
He turned, heading to his cruiser’s airlock. “Come.”
Lyra padded after him obediently, preparing to rend and kill for her new master. And all the while, her human mind shrieked and pleaded for the torment to end.