Twist of luck

[Namespace] of the Rose

A moment has passed and, somehow, she was not shot. Which, all things considered, was rather positive turn of events - then again, the spiritual progeny of Arabella the Liberator were cited to be among the more calculating, level-headed specimens of the Sororitas strain. Maybe this Celestian has been tranquil enough to process something that others would take as a foul sacrilege. Maybe she was just smart enough to have learned and admitted the truth beforehand.

Toros grabbed a fistful of plastic chips from the floor, glancing down from the broken window and recounting the facts. Every single hard fact dropped down heavily, like a chunk of plastic from the forge spire.

Tiefenbronn came to her, arranging a series of meetings between her and Draupnir magi.
Someone deployed a servitor on Ork chassis, outfitted it with a tinkered displacer field and a bolter.
Bolt shell managed to hit her - through a displacer field of her own, through her layers of defense.
Pinel sported new tech-secret, likely having given out something in return to unnamed third party.
Servitor made a point of stealing away her personal data cores.
Then it paid a visit to her laboratorium and made a mess.

Oh, and the Inquisition is looking for her, but those could wait. That exact chip got blasted by the wind gust back into the room.

Displacer fields and misplaced trust played a sad melody throughout those notes. How can it teleport? How far, how often, can it be tracked? How can a bolter shell bypass one? What was she doing before the death of her body? Was she wrong to confide after Tiefebronn's meetings? Unfortunately, there was only one person qualified to answer that.

Toros bit her lip harder, as she blink-typed a data-missive of two alike, yet deeply different questions.
"May I visit you? Do you want to see me?"

She paused a bit before sending the message to the Electromancer's dojo. Having decided that, frag it, let's go with the flow, she mashed the confirmation rune a bit too hard.

[Namespace] of the Rose

Toros stood against the broken vitrage of the room, her fingers caressing the plas-tek casings of what once had been her personal Omnissiah altar. What was the point of trying to cover-up the theft of data-cores specifically, covering it up behind stealing of the whole cogitator AND behind an assassination?..

It took her a good five seconds to process the question. Took another five to come up with an answer. She hated operating in meat-time.

"Allow an old woman to revisit one history lesson, Kota", protomaga turned around, her silhouette against the light of the broken window. "Long ago, there lived a woman who chose to protect her ruler and did a damn good job of doing exactly that. She fought rebels, crushed millions under her gilded heel right into some very fine phosphor-smelling ash. She fought my people, impressed even them with her loyalty and zeal - and, trust me, Sister, we are not easy to impress. She fought the Angels of Death themselves to a bloody standstill, their holy blood again flowing through the Throneworld. Nobody thought it to be possible for a backwater upstart to hold the ground against the Emperor's finest. She surprised them all, keeping through it all with her loyalty, her against the whole Galaxy."

Toros licked her suddenly dry lips, checking the armour status. She could take three bolts. The fourth would kill her. The first hit would throw her out of the window anyway, out of the line of fire - hopefully, Maglev coils still worked after all those years. Even more hopefully yet, Kota won't try anything stupid.

"One morning, her choice changed. She chose another way. She walked straight to the ruler, the same old man who trusted her completely, the man she swore to protect, the man who she had previously defended for decades, and then painted the wall with his brains.", Secunda shuddered, her eyes straying to the splatters along the bullet-riddled walls. "Nobody cared about her not being on 'equal ground' with the old man. Nobody dared to 'leverage' her old loyalties and broken oaths of allegiance against her. The only important thing was that her personal choice was seen as correct, and nobody really knows why she made that choice one morning."

The latter part was a lie. Someone knew. Someone cared for that one part to remain forgotten. Sorrowful golden shadows lurked through the footnotes of hagiographies and cyber-prophesies, charred lacunaes beginning shortly. Magina knew better than to acknowledge their existence. Some things were not to be researched deeper.

"We venerate her as well, you know.", Archmagos nodded to the moving holo-projection in one of the surviving panels of the temple. Armour-clad woman stepping through the blood, golden lighnings behind her back - Toros herself found solace in considering the life of the blessed. "Motive Force, at its simplest, is every single particle choosing to move in the same direction under the external field, just as we make our individual choices under Omnissiah's light - and, no matter what, his potential drives us into the right direction, no matter the prior resistance. Which is to say, make your choices and live with the consequences. Shouldn't be more difficult than becoming a saint after losing a war and shooting your boss in the face, right?"

Shouldn't be more difficult than coming to ZRK and figuring out what happens. Secunda twitched the corner of her mouth and killed the thought. She had more important business here. Definitely.

[Namespace] of the Rose

She read through the list, feeling bile building up in the back of her throat. There has been one pattern, a pattern too obvious to ignore.

"Draupnir." The word got spat out as a soft curse. Four meetings with Draupnir magi within a month could only be seen as some frenetic activity going behind the scenes. A singular meeting with ZRK-333... She would meet with her given any difficult choice - sometimes Motive Force is all you need if you can't pick a singular path. If Tiefenbronn persuaded her to lend more support to Draupnir, she would try and negotiate with the electromancer. ZRK would have try to talk it over.

She personally hated Draupnir for pure ideological reasons, most recent visits boiling down to heated theological debates behind the privacy-fielded doors. Explorator Corps had little ideological policing of their own, yet all of them enforced a singular thesis, a dictum ingrained in every adept, a half-worded thought screened in every applicant. "There is always a bigger wonder out there."

It was not an easy thought to maintain, not after throwing thrones, ammo and souls at the endless void expanse with little to show but a couple data-fragments. This was the crucible where the faithful were tempered. Nobody ever said that faith was cheap or easy. Explorator fleets were the main suppliers for the data-mills of Logis-temples with new nuggets of God-Machine, enhancing the sum of knowledge, bringing back the lost jewels of the Dark Age and refining them into Omnissiah service. They charted the new paths for the Imperium and Omnissiah knew that they all needed a new path with the shattered night-sky above.

Draupnir had secured themselves a wonder and denied themselves a thought of having a better one. Toros understood the pain of the unique structure being sacrificed for something as banal as war. It hurt, and she hated herself for pushing them to cave in to the merciless Martian quota demands. Still, the truth was plain and simple - war demands sacrifices and sacrifices hurt. She would love living in the world where sky is something other than a bleeding warp-wound and where the void doesn't throw a storm of myriad angry locusts at your scientific outposts. She was forced to live in reality. War was there. Victory was the only way through. Sacrifices were not optional. Entropy would have worn down their wonder anyway. This was the reality of their future, they could either perish fighting it or embrace it, let go of the past and go with the flow.

That being said, she couldn't help but acknowledge that Draupnir did have a point. This was a point that has been raised to her attention every decade or so. Every decade or so, ever since the sky opened up, some young Logis analyst begged a secret audience with Archmagos, bringing her "news of utmost urgency and importance". Every decade or so, after the mind-cleansed body has been carried out, she poured herself a special blend and read through another report. It did not take a genius to compile it. It did, however, take a lot of stupid bravery to dare compiling it in the first place (and some suicidal tendencies to bring it to her directly).

Every report told the exact same thing. Martian governance model has entered the death spiral phase - warp disturbance undermining the efficiency of communication, Martian appointees felt control slipping from their hands and tried doubling down on controlling sector forges. Operating on delayed data (quality of which has been barely sufficient in the better times), they managed to achieve negative micro-control, achieving less than they would have done if just leaving things be. With Mars itself facing a deep ideological fracture over that sordid Astartes tribunal, the requirement of control has been implicit, to ensure unity with the position of your lord. It did not take a genius to connect the dots. For every logister coming to her, two were coming to Magi and ten were smart enough to delete their data, never looking again. She never reported on that to Brackmann, for she was smart enough to know that the old beast gorging on Logis Prophets had seen the writing on the wall himself.

And, just like her, he would not have any room for maneuver if bluntly presented with something as treacherous as the truth. She hated herself for wasting good talent of her Logisters. She would hate to force the hand of the old beast. Omnissiah knew that for every fire she's been putting out on Isohedron, Brackmann was there quenching infernos. He trusted her enough not to ask. She respected him enough not to tell.

After all, she was sure that Draupnir's leadership had Logis as well, and looked through the same reports. Less Martian control required stronger local governance. Local governance in Houndclaw would be defined by Draupnir - or it would be defined by Hollzenstein's cog-whisperers fighting over the ruins with the locust hordes. Efficient local governance would be achieved through Draupnir being persuaded to take its collective cerebral power out of the waste-processing units. Persuading Draupnir meant being listened to. Being listened to required being useful. Being useful required helping them push back against Martian demands. Maintaining that delicate balance has been the single reason for the Archmagos of Isohedron to exist. An overzealous Magos Juris would already have built a case for Collegiate Extremis on that reasoning alone - and yet, Collegiate Extremis had little presence on Isohedron. She was not dumb enough to attribute that fact to negligence or sheer dumb luck. Brackmann has seen the same reports. He did not have a good answer to the problem, and yet, sometimes, it's not about having an answer yourself - it's about enabling those who try to find it. He respected her enough not to tell it explicitly. She trusted him enough not to ask without a good reason.

And yet, having no Collegiate Extremis agents and painfully scarce Astynomia presence after the war, she had no independent, qualified investigators on hand. Meaning that now she had to deal with her own mur... timetheft? Grievous bodily harm? Enforced vacation?.. with the crime all by herself. If Toros was somehow perceived to have failed in maintaining the balance, it would be only logical to remove Archmagos from the picture to clear her mind. Even ZRK-333 would have done that. She wouldn't have killed Toros in such a crude impersonal way, but then again - this was not a murder scene. Especially if ZRK-333 believed Toros to be truly alive in the second body. Secunda Toros wanted her to.

Protomaga bit her lip, the metallic taste straightening her logic. She wanted some things a bit too much. Right now she should want answers.

"November-Yellow, could you kindly enhance the provided data for this lowly biotrash - who initiated which meeting?"

Draupnir Magi coming to her is one thing. Her coming to Draupnir Magi is another. There was a difference in dynamic. She needed to know that. November was keeping tabs on her - formally unsanctioned, but then again she has never seen a point to hide from November. Gestalt-commander took her duty as protector endearingly serious, even stepping onto the field to serve as a personal bodyguard - in spite of being told multiple times that Archmagos' frame needed no minder tagging along.

And there she was, proven wrong by skitarii. November would never let go of that, even after her re-confirming her status. Another little wound to her ego that someone would have to pay for.

As she waited for the reply, she knelt against the vandalized altar. Political assassination to clear her mind might have been a decent version of the events, yet it did not explain the data-theft. It might have been a red herring, yet, seriously, nobody would believe that you've plotted out a murder of an Archmagos to steal a cogitator core. With utmost care, she started examining the layout of the broken cogitators, searching for the signs of surviving spirits and probing the dataports through the armour datalink. She still remembered her default encryption and her favorite data-traps, and, being the least augmented clergy member in existence, she enjoyed relative immunity to some of the more advanced data-djinni. Still, she preferred to proceed with caution.

[Namespace] of the Rose

There has been a cathedral on Baraspine, straight at the terminator line of the tidally locked world, eternally in the twilight. For thousands of years, faithful had prayed there, pilgrims boarded the Chartist vessel to have a chance of glimpsing the famed golden lightning dancing in the spires during the sermon. One day, though, the doors of the cathedral were found closed and gunshots rang through its halls, the clergy throwing themselves at the assailants to prevent them from reaching the holy relic at the sanctum, the head of Saint Laurentius himself. They all died, of course, with the name of the Emperor on their lips.

As young Explorator Toros stepped over the bodies, barrels cooling down, she took pride in seeing something heathens never cared to notice all their lives. All their little cult built upon the singular mistake in its core, they never dared to question the core premises, rejected her diplomatic attempts to make things right and brought doom to both themselves and their flock. She threw away the gilded skull from the sanctum in pure disgust and reached the runes underneath it. For the first time in ten millennia, the cathedral rose up from its knees, faithful fleeing from the apocalyptic tremors of the God-Machine coming back to its senses, its roar ringing with all the pent-up rage of the long slumber.

Young Toros never cared to stop and consider what wretched thing exactly has brought the Titan to its knees. Young Toros knew better than to look for nuggets of truth, the legend of the old saint dying to ensure the containment of the old evil buried under the cathedral. Young Toros knew that she had a chance to revive a fallen Titan and would never allow herself to be distracted by such trivial superstitions. She was the only survivor deemed sufficiently clean. They had to glass a whole peninsula as a precaution. Techzorcism took a little over a century.

She learned her lesson well, never allowing herself to feel smart enough to be invincible, always mindful of dangerous assumptions informing her further actions. As she paced the room, running her fingers along the blasted walls and feeling the breeze from the shattered mosaic windows, she prayed to avoid the misguided faith into the wrong assumptions. She had to start from the very beginning. There has been an assumption that everyone would have made, something obvious and yet not axiomatic, something unchallenged.

"This is not a murder scene.", Secunda stopped in the center of the room, looking at the Omnissiah altar.

"I knew full well that I was not dying here, merely sent to this body. Which the killer, as of today, knew where to find.", she approached the altar, trying and failing to intone an infra-sound prayer with the organic vocal cords. "So, either they had prior knowledge of the location that they decided to act upon today... or they had managed to find it in the matter of weeks, during the general chaos of decapitation."

Her steps locked into a Fibonacci rhythm, straighening her thoughts and allowing her to look at the underlying facts. She turned right, and, step by step, started walking back to the center of the room tracing a Golden Spiral on the floor.

"They used a bolter, not a det-pack - selective killing, relatively minimized collateral to the laboratory. They killed the third and the fourth body of mine, the ones that were never truly intended to be active anyway, contaminated by the sin of gaining consciousness outside of proper protocol. They approached me and then they were notified, by the way of the bolter-fire, that someone else was there." she leaned to the side while making a bend. "They did not sacrifice their puppet to kill me, even though they could have. Fear, as they have been suddenly attacked? It's a puppet, likely piloted by someone organically incapable of feeling fear. Concern, as they did not want to lose an asset or leave evidence? Only someone painfully stupid would not install a dead-man switch detonator somewhere into the body, and I don't like the thought of having been murdered by someone painfully stupid..."

She reached the center again, just as the assumption came. Small rituals like this one have helped her. Stoll loved this one as well. Perhaps, with enough following, this little dance would be mandatory in three centuries. And in five more they would add censers and psychoactive smoke.

"Or they never wanted to kill me in the first place. They figured out someone else in the laboratory, which ensured that I would be released and not fade away in a clone vat. With mission accomplished, they had no reason to hang around and, hence, extracted.", having returned to the center of the room, Secunda massaged her temples. "If they did not want to take my life... they just wanted to take some of my time, some of my memories and some of the cogitator cores."

This question surfaced in her mind again. What the hell was she getting into before getting shot in the head?

She cleared her throat before sending a polite comm to November, double-signing it with Sororitas armour spirit and her own old Explorator cognomen.

"This bio-trash happens to know that the grand late Archmagos Toros has never been a very predictable boss. This bio-trash has reasons to suspect that, being very statistically-minded for logistics purposes, you have managed to figure out some method to the madness, approximating the baseline of the grand late Archmagos Toros behaviour. This bio-trash politely inquires whether the grand late Archmagos Toros had significantly deviated from the expected behaviour in the days preceing the termination of her bodily functions?

P.S This bio-trash politely informs you that Astra Militarum command happens to be looking for a missing package of lasgun chargepacks. As a keeper of order on Isohedron, you shall, doubtlessly, return those. It should be noted, however, that the current Olympia-pattern quotas mention Isohedron obligation to supply the charge-packs themselves - packs being charged at that point is something we do solely out of our commitment to the Imperial cause. As such, no crime would be committed if the shipment arrives in time."

Finally, Secunda has done the thing she was dreading to do all this time. She looked at the chrono-stamp. Memories were something forming her personality - even mindscars of the purged ones dwelled deep inside you, making you who you are. She was herself, even in spite of jumping bodies. She was herself, regardless of how many days, months, years, or decades of memories she irrevocably lost with this transfer. At least she hoped so.

[Namespace] of the Rose

Vergil Hawr enigma still eluded her. Secunda made a mental mark to return to that question at some later point. Even her own cog-damned terminal was not harmless, it was time for protomaga to join the club. Fortunately, the bioaugmentation capsule was nearby.

Unfortunately, Secunda had serious doubts that she had enough Motive Force blessed giga-jolts to make the complex autosurgeon work and bless her with her usual level of firepower. Besides, given the complex situation at hand, she was somehow unsure that spending another six weeks incapacitated would be something she could afford. Toros twitched the corner of her mouth as she paced the laboratorium, precisely controlling her pacing to step over the bodies without breaking her stride. She was denied a way forward, and rational approaches were unlikely to help out.

Fortunately for her, she was not a completely rational beast and build herself a career through using the things of the past when being denied the future. She held onto a trace of sentimentality, an old memento still preserved in a stasis chamber to remind her of older, brighter, stupider days. She approached it with a pained smile of a deadbeat father returning home after two decades of running a trivial logistic operation to see how much has changed. Secunda pressed the desactivation rune, and, after three seconds of whirring, performed several field rites of percussive maintenance until the lock finally gave in.

Explorator fleets were not a place of abundance - far away from home, you had to do with what you had at hand, everyone had to pull their weight, and nobody had the luxury of having any luxury. "Themis-pattern" explorator armour has been a grim embodiment of that doctrine. Every single explorator adept is handed out a damaged standard-issue Militarum flak armour, usually with some splatters of the previous owner here and there. Your survival was your own responsibility from that point - there would be no replacements, no quartermaster check-ups, no maintenance, and no oversight. There has been an expectation that either the owner changes the armour into something better or the armour finds itself a better owner. No two sets looked quite alike after two decades. This one has seen her through a much longer service.

Secunda exhaled as she allowed the robe to slip off her. She had not donned her suit for a better part of a century - Archmagos had to maintain her status with something more... imposing... than a flak jacket reforged a dozen times. Couldn't quite get rid of the old beast, they had a long story together - story of patching the holes, begging artisans for their help, scrounging for supplies, stealing secrets, replacing parts and praying that it would fit together. Instead, Toros stuffed it here, unsure what to do. Protomaga ran her fingers between the scarred crimson argent-alloy plates and felt the xeno-mesh cells hardening below, tickling her with the static counter-charge. She missed this feeling.

Armour spirit, a dumb little beast, flashed green on all checks - verification, chems, ammunition, explosives, servomotors. Injector needles bit right where she remembered them to. Even the little trinket from Pathos Gamma was still purring its infra-song from the corner of the gorget. Secunda half-closed her eyes. She felt good. And she planned to feel even better after she blasts someone's ork puppet limb from limb.

[Namespace] of the Rose

There is no counter-memetic coven.

Secunda spent a good second, trying to process this random thought that somehow flashed in her cortex as she listened to Sororitas sudden soliloquy. The emotional ties of that story assaulted her perception with empathic counter-links, rerouting her neuron-paths around the sudden void in her conscience, the numbing void in the rapidly expanded blindspot of her memory.

Archmagos Toros was afraid of nobody. Nobody once told her that it's a technique of triage, something to flush out the meat-space data-predators baked into some of the old encoding, those lethal cyphers of the Long Night. Nobody's eyes were definitely not pale grey and that's all she could - dared to - remember of them.

"You speak of her in the past tense. You are here alone. What happened to her?", Secunda's voice was suddenly hoarse, her brain milking the glands for every nanogram of the emotional chems, trying to block out the earworm of Vergil Hawr's name from ringing through her skull. "Speak more of her."

Protomaga tried pacing her breath. Sororitas story was the emotional grounding, the lifeline tethering her to sanity. Secunda knew how to filter the signal from the uncoiling data-worm, almost as she had done it before, almost as she was recollecting the steps instead of learning them. Vergil Hawr was something she allowed on this terminal.

What the hell she was getting into before getting shot in the head?

[Namespace] of the Rose

Secunda let out an irritated grunt. She's been summoned before the left hand of judgment, yet, it would appear, that judgment was missing its left brain capability to give her cog-damned directions.

Way to go, Polla. Never change.

Toros sighed and started parsing through the rest of the messages. Who the hell is Vergil Hawr?.. It took her a couple of seconds to process Sororitas questions. Painfully slow, but then again, she was operating in the meat-time again, no neuro-boosted cogitator co-processing links.

"A friend, Kota? Been a long time since I've operated in the circles where we can afford ones. Do tell me more.", she glanced above the data-terminal screen. "As for the equipment, I'll pack myself up once we figure out where we are going. Should be some decent carapace around. Speaking of "where we are going", "being a test subject" and "heavy lifting"... Ever wondered how would you fare against an Astartes in hand-to-hand? We just might visit one of my... colleagues."

Toros would have never dared to call ZRK-333 a "friend", even in her prime. It was not a question of being personally squeamish, like in Stoll's case - quite the opposite, in fact. As far as Secunda could remember, ZRK-333 and Toros enjoyed a connection rather close - Archmagos trying to figure out the koans of Motive Force and the whole "go with the flow, Omnissiah will see you on the other side" thing, Electromancer trying to compherend the deeper layers of God-Machine dogmates and the half-light world of searching for new ideas in places irrational. Toros kept her memory of ZRK active as she strode through the minefield, clutching the gifted displacer field.

Calling Electromancer a "friend" would be an offending trivialization of their alliance and, arguably, an insulting hint at unprofessionalism. Toros has never seen ZRK-333 offended, and the prospect of offending the super-charged killing machine whose modus operandi was tied to self-reinforcing feedback loops supercharging her into action has always been estimated as "inadvisable for self-preservation reasons". Other reasons, if they existed, were not as important.

What was important is that someone was trying to set Electromancer up. Masquerading the combat servitor into something resembling Astartes, the whole displacer field thing... The obvious showmanship trying to pin the blame, enough to fool the grunts like November. Daring, of course, since even hinting that Astartes could perform an unauthorized assassination would sour the relationship with Eunicornus Kim of the First. Brackmann himself couldn't save you if the First decided to take offense. If the Angel of Death himself decided that her killer offended the honour of his Legion, they would have one extremely scary card in her thrumbo-fur linen sleeve.

What was also important was the fact that ZRK-333 spent two weeks integrating Archmagos' untimely death in her system of constants. Secunda was not sure how Electromancer would react or how she would process Electromancer's reaction herself. ZRK-333 would not have killed Toros through proxies. Secunda was about to see her in person.

Proto-maga shook her head. Meat-thoughts in the meat-time, as the Motive Force sparks struggle to fly through neurons, triggering fear of the unknown in place of healthy curiosity. Go with the flow and Omnissiah will see you on the other side

[Sorry, Thanqol, I want to read all the mentioned inbox before locking in where to go next]

[Namespace] of the Rose

It took Secunda a couple of seconds to process everything at once.

First of all, Inquisitrix seemed to leave no return route for the missives sent to the data terminal. Classic paranoia, using burner one-way-send-only disposable tech-djinnis, made Polla irritatingly hard to find. Which, Secunda assumed, was the whole point of being a paranoid trigger-happy spymaster - always maintaining an element of surprise even at a cost of convenience, courtesy, or simple common sense. Even the old comm-link got fried. Stupid insignia-wearing promethium-chugger, as somebody less rarified than a Magina might have called them, since Toros, of course, would not deign herself to acknowledge such trivial aspects of their existence.

Secondly, the lights are out for everyone. Everyone is fuming, running on fumes, feeling powerless, and imagining themselves some strange dangerous things scurrying in the dark. Technically, they were not even wrong for at least one thing has been doing exactly that. Secunda was planning to become another one on the shortest possible notice.

Thirdly, there was Kota who successfully resisted Secunda's attempts at parsing her affiliations or political angle. The trivial solution of "there is none" proved to be one assumption too dangerous to make so far. Secunda tilted her head to the side, glancing at Sororitas operative again.

"Soror, fighting orks and living to tell the tale is... pretty much expected level of excellence for your esteemed Order.", Magina fired up the data terminal again, poking at the runes, trying to second-guess her prior self. "Unfortunately for your lost colleagues, this one is not an ork. It's likely to be just an ork body, armed and puppeted by someone exceedingly smart and well-connected. An artisan-crafted combat servitor, if you will. I hypothesize the massacre of your sorority to have been its combat testing exercise, the dry run of its capabilities before deploying the accursed thing against me."

Secunda slowly considered finding the Inquisitrix regardless, but, in a flash of brilliance, decided that checking the Inquisitorial missive in the data-terminal would have been a wiser step. Might as well figure out who else wrote her during her temporary incapacitation.

[No spend so far, I have enough datapoints to poke at]

[Namespace] of the Rose

"Ork biosignature.", Secunda fixed her hair as she rose from the megascope, her finger still pressing down the mute rune. "And it shouldn't be a coincidence that we have Magos Pinel on the other side of the vox-call. The one Councillor capable of taking an ork frame and reconfiguring it into a combat-capable puppet. It's a good, durable body after all, relentlessly robust, ingeniously simple - just take one from Pinel, install decent controls, give a corrupted teleporter from ZRK-333, bolster with some servo-motored armour, give a good bolter... Maybe even run a bit of a live-fire drill against some armoured dangerous women other Magi would never care about... And you have yourself a weapon to kill most Magi. And a weapon to inconvenience me."

[Namespace] of the Rose

Secunda blessed Omnissiah for the switched-off vox-catcher as she waited for the blasted servoskull to shut its stupid mouth before coming into channel.

Everyone is guilty of something.

"Magos Stoll, we have just witnessed Magos Pinel not only buying into the whole 'knowledge is power' aspect of the Creed, but fully indulging in an oft-forlorn 'guard it well' follow-up. This is a respectable level of dedication to her own position, don't you think?", Secunda was proud of a practiced smile her lips slithered into; apparently, her replicae protocol was sufficient to catch and copy even the most minuscule trained reflexes. The smile never quite reached her eyes as she scrolled the comm-terminal for the next call. "Speaking of guarding something well - could any of you, fine Magi, catch me up to speed on more... temporal aspects of Isohedron lately aside from my untimely reincarnation?.. Marshal reported of, and I quote, "scary, creepy things scurrying around" and "horrible wet rot in the walls". Not speaking of a most peculiar Motive Force configuration, depowering quite a few systems around here."

Everyone is guilty of something.

Pinel's murder servitor. ZRK-333's displacer field. Surely, she's bound to find connections to the rest of the Council - assets begged, borrowed, stolen, or sold for unique favours, like cloning the voice of one-in-a-trillion opera diva. Someone was muddying the waters. In prior, more cynical times, Toros would have tried making it less personal, pinning the blame on whoever was the easiest target. After all...

Everyone is guilty of something.

She was no exception herself. You don't survive in the upper ranks without stacking the deck in your favour, tirelessly manufacturing aces for your sleeve, bending most rules where you can afford, breaking some rules where you can dare. Everyone had skeletons in their closet - in fact, she, technically, had three literal skeletons just in this one - and everyone knew everyone dabbles in black projects, unauthorized resource allocations, forbidden lines of research, and trying to push their vision on top of Omnissiah creed. This was tolerated, to a degree. In fact, to a degree, it was encouraged. You never know your limits until you try pushing them. You never train up your purity if you never had to recoil from what you see beyond the light. There was a fine line between what was approved and what has seen you eternally condemned, and Toros was proud to excel in toeing that line.

She was moderately confident that this was the main reason Brackmann made her Archmagos over older, smarter, stronger Rosella much to the chagrin of the rest of the Council. Martian Magi were furious that Arch-Fabricator made the appointment without ever consulting Isohedron. The Draupnir faction was almost ballistic about being forced to report to the stranger from the strange land, fresh off the Explorator Ark. Rosella herself took it as an offense, being an insufferable thorn in Toros back with her attempts to claw back the approval of the powers-that-be with ever more drastic measures over Archmagos head. In a true self-fulfilling prophecy way, she proved Brackmann right when Angels of Death descended onto the world - running the purge on Toros personal orders, scorching the earth and silencing the witnesses before Collegiate Extremis or the Ordo Mechanum were able to build the case against the whole world. Toros was somehow sure that this was exactly the outcome Brackmann had in mind from the very start - quite literally, if her intel on several brilliant young Logis-Oracles disappearing was to be believed. The old beast at the heart of subsegmentum Cog-Church terrified her and, Toros was sure, revelled in it.

Everyone is guilty of something, but they were working together as long as this guilt was kept within the negotiated parameters, stability ensuring consistent results, predictable career paths, and safety from getting riddled with mass-reactive self-propelled shells. In fact, the squeaky-clean consciences and flawless dossiers were always seen as a dangerous anomaly, both by Toros and by the overseers from both sides, for, as one of them loved to quote.

Innocence Proves Nothing.

Secunda sighed as she finally found the contact. Inquisitrix Polla Iconium, the mad cog-dog from Houndclaw Conclave, whose gravitas was solely reliant on how much of a migraine for Toros her peers imagined her to be. Polla knew exactly how far she could press Toros before Archmagos would have the justification to push back. Sometimes she pushed further with good reasons. Sometimes she pushed further just because she was an Inquisitrix and loved reminding everyone of her theoretically unlimited authority. Toros had been compiling a long complaint to the Conclave Lord on Iconium's activities for the last three decades and had arranged at least two sleeper cells primed to take the Inquisitrix out. Well, technically, three, but she didn't like to remember how puzzled she was while investigating how the third one got unconsensually disappeared.

...all in all, Archmagos Toros had a lively, beneficial, almost criminally friendly relationship with her Ordo Mechanum watchdog based on mutual respect. Secunda hoped that Polla would take that into account. Or, at the very least, be sufficiently surprised by "the military attache of Adepta Sororitas" by her side to immediately start pushing in.