From the moment Qin Mo issued the order to the moment Grey and Grot returned, the entire operation took less than an hour.
That included a detour to the coordinates Duncan had transmitted. Grey and Grot deposited Albert's mangled, lifeless body there without ceremony, because there was no ceremony left to give. The corpse was laid where Duncan's men could find it, a broken reminder that the war against the xenos cult demanded payment from everyone, even commanders who had already spent their courage to the bone.
Then they brought Qin Mo his prize.
The psyker was not taken to an ordinary cell. Qin Mo had her confined in a reinforced chamber buried inside the fortress's lower levels, behind two armored bulkheads and a corridor swept clean of unnecessary personnel. The room itself was a square box of layered adamantium and pressure-treated plasteel, its walls threaded with anti-psyker emitters, null-field stabilizers, and crude but effective suppression wards scavenged from older Imperial devices.
Nothing in the chamber was decorative. Nothing was soft. The floor could be washed clean. The vents could be sealed. The observation slit was too narrow for a hand to pass through, and the door had been built thick enough to make a breach team regret its profession.
....
"Let me out!"
"I'll kill you all!"
"Uuuuhhh... uuuuhhh..."
The captured psyker slammed herself against the wall hard enough to split the skin over one shoulder. The impact left a dark smear on the metal. She staggered back, panting, then hurled herself forward again with the frantic stubbornness of a trapped animal that could no longer understand why the bars did not break.
Her eyes glowed faintly with residual warp-light, but no power answered her rage. The emitters embedded in the walls hummed in overlapping pulses, disrupting the psychic pathways before she could shape them into anything useful. Every time she tried to reach outward, the field closed around her thoughts like iron fingers.
Cut off from the Genestealer Cult's psychic synapse web, severed from the Broodmind that had filled the spaces where her own will should have been, she was left with emptiness. No guiding voice. No warm alien certainty. No sacred purpose whispering through the blood. Only pain, confusion, and the sudden realization that she was alone inside her own skull.
Grey stood beside Qin Mo at the doorway, helmet tucked under one arm, bolter mag-locked across his chest. His expression was hard, but his eyes did not leave the prisoner. He had fought mutants, cultists, and things that no longer deserved human names. He had killed them without hesitation. This was different. This one was not charging with claws or a bomb. This one was shivering on the floor and still somehow more dangerous than a squad of armed men.
Qin Mo watched her with cold attention, his hands folded behind his back. Not anger. Not pity. Assessment.
After a long silence, Grey asked, "What use is she?"
"Considerable use." Qin Mo's mouth curved in a tight, humorless smile. "Through her, I can locate the xenos leader."
Grey turned slightly. "Didn't you say you were already building a device for that?"
"I did." Qin Mo's gaze remained on the psyker. "But a live psychic node connected to the cult's network will accelerate the process. It will also make the result far more precise."
Grey looked back into the chamber. The psyker had curled into the corner, arms wrapped around herself, lips moving in soundless pleas or curses. His gauntleted fingers flexed once against his helmet.
"Do we need to extract her brain?"
"No."
"Then how do we make her comply without killing her?"
Qin Mo did not answer immediately. He watched the psyker until she lifted her head and met his eyes through the observation slit. The hate in her face was still there, but it flickered now. Beneath it was fear. Beneath the fear was the first outline of doubt.
"Every living mind has a breaking point," Qin Mo said at last. "Past that point, the old self can no longer maintain its shape."
Grey said nothing.
He understood breaking points. He had stood near his own when the 44th Regiment was torn apart around him, when discipline, prayer, and hatred were the only things left between him and collapse. He had endured because he was a soldier of the Imperium, and because there had been no one else to endure in his place.
But endurance was not universal. Men broke. Officers broke. Regiments broke. Worlds broke. The Imperium built its entire existence on that truth and then pretended faith alone could make it false.
He still did not understand how that answered the question.
Qin Mo continued in the same steady tone. "I will break her. Shatter the structure the cult built inside her. Then I will rebuild what remains into something obedient enough to use."
Grey's jaw tightened. "That sounds less like interrogation and more like making a servitor out of a living person."
"A servitor obeys because machinery has replaced choice. This will be messier." Qin Mo finally turned toward him. "Pay attention. One day you may need information from an enemy more efficiently than a battlefield allows."
Grey hesitated. "Is this necessary?"
Qin Mo gave a quiet chuckle and shook his head. "Necessary? No. I could strap her into a machine right now and rip the relevant patterns out of her neurons until her brain boiled."
Grey's eyes narrowed. "Then why do this?"
"Because this is a lesson."
....
Two Days Later
For two days, Qin Mo and Grey worked on the psyker.
It was not a standard interrogation. There were no formal questions about troop deployments, cult rituals, hidden tunnels, or the Patriarch's location. There was no shouted demand followed by punishment when she refused to answer. If Grey had not been standing there for every session, he might have assumed Qin Mo was wasting time.
Instead, Qin Mo asked nonsense.
Inane questions. Contradictory questions. Questions with no correct answer. Questions that changed meaning halfway through. Questions that were repeated until the psyker began to answer before she understood what had been asked.
At first, she resisted with everything left to her. She screamed. She spat. She cursed Qin Mo, Grey, the Emperor, the fortress, and the species that had birthed her. She slammed her head against the wall until blood ran down her face. She clawed at her own throat, trying to tear away a psychic connection that was no longer there.
By the second day, the fury had thinned.
Now she sat in the corner with her knees drawn to her chest, eyes unfocused, lips cracked from thirst and screaming. She still hated them. Grey could see it sometimes, a flash of life beneath the exhaustion. But the hate no longer moved her. It came and went like a dying lumen strip.
Qin Mo sat on a metal stool opposite her, perfectly calm. Grey stood beside the door, one hand near his combat blade. Two enforcers waited outside with shock-mauls and blank expressions. Everyone in the room knew the pattern by now.
"What flavor of starch do you like?" Qin Mo asked. His tone was light, almost conversational.
The psyker flinched as if struck. She looked at him, then at Grey, then at the floor. Her voice emerged thin and dry. "Starch has no flavor, sir..."
"Answer me."
Her shoulders shook. "But... but it really has no flavor."
"Really?" Qin Mo tilted his head, feigning disappointment. "I don't believe you."
The psyker's eyes darted across the room, searching for an escape she knew did not exist. Her breathing quickened. Sweat shone on her upper lip. Grey could almost see the calculation collapsing inside her: truth had not saved her, lies would not save her, silence would not save her, and obedience did not guarantee mercy.
After a long moment, she whispered, "It really has no flavor."
Qin Mo stood. "Very well."
He walked out without looking back.
The moment the door sealed behind him, the waiting guards entered. Their shock-mauls crackled blue-white in the dim light. A heartbeat later, the psyker's screams echoed down the corridor, sharp at first, then ragged, then broken by sobbing.
Grey followed Qin Mo in silence.
This had been the routine for two days. Qin Mo would ask his meaningless questions. The psyker would answer, fail to answer, or answer too slowly. Then the enforcers would enter.
Grey understood physical punishment. He understood coercion. He understood fear as a tool. What he did not understand was why Qin Mo seemed more interested in damaging the prisoner's certainty than extracting anything from her.
....
Days Later
The chamber stank of antiseptic, old blood, and burnt copper. Scorch marks dotted the walls where shock-mauls had struck too close to metal. The floor had been cleaned repeatedly, but cleaning only spread the smell into the seams. Somewhere behind the panels, the anti-psyker emitters continued their steady hum, indifferent to suffering and obedience alike.
Qin Mo's method had not softened. If anything, it had become more precise. The questions came in relentless sequence, each one absurd enough to deny the psyker any stable pattern.
"What color is silence?" he asked.
The psyker huddled in the corner. Her scalp had been shaved to prevent her from hiding anything in her hair, and the skin was crusted where she had battered it against the wall during earlier sessions. Her once-bright eyes were dull now, their light buried beneath exhaustion.
"S-silver," she whispered. "Like st-stars."
"Incorrect."
Qin Mo nodded once.
An enforcer stepped forward from the shadows. He was a heavy man in reinforced armor, his face hidden behind a visor, his shock-maul already spitting current.
The psyker screamed before the first blow landed.
Grey leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. His bolt pistol felt heavier than usual at his hip. "This is a waste of time."
Qin Mo did not look up from the dataslate in his hand. "Is it?"
"Plug her into your machine and be done with it. If this is meant to teach me, I am willing to learn. But right now all I see is a prisoner being ground down after she may already know what we need."
Qin Mo made a small adjustment on the dataslate. "A machine can extract data. Data without context is dangerous. Data acquired from a resisting mind is worse. Memory lies. Trauma distorts. Alien influence corrupts the structure. The Broodmind may have left traps inside her thoughts. I need compliance before contact."
He gestured toward the psyker, who had folded over herself on the floor and was sobbing into her knees.
"This ensures she will not fight the process at the critical moment. No lies. No resistance. No desperate attempt to warn the thing at the center of the network. Only the reflex to obey."
Grey's expression darkened. "And the nonsense?"
"The nonsense is the point."
Before Grey could respond, Qin Mo turned back to the prisoner. "What tastes like sorrow?"
The psyker flinched. She swallowed twice before speaking. "R-rust. Rot. The Emperor's mercy."
Qin Mo studied her for several seconds. "Adequate."
He left the chamber.
Two enforcers entered behind him, shock-mauls raised. The door sealed, muffling the screams into something dull and distant.
Grey followed Qin Mo into the corridor. The walls there were cleaner, the air colder, the lighting harsh enough to make every face look carved from bone.
"Do you enjoy this?" Grey asked.
Qin Mo stopped.
For a moment, the only sound was the faint vibration of machinery behind the walls and the prisoner's broken voice leaking through the sealed door.
"No," Qin Mo said.
Grey stared back at the interrogation chamber. The psyker's whimpers rose, broke into jagged laughter, and collapsed again.
He wondered whether she had already told them everything she could, and whether they had simply failed to hear it because the answer had not come in the form Qin Mo wanted.
"Do you understand now?" Qin Mo asked.
"No." Grey shook his head. "I understand what you are doing to her. I do not understand why you think I should watch."
"Because command is not only weapons, armor, and speeches." Qin Mo resumed walking. "Sometimes it is knowing exactly how much pressure a mind can take before it becomes useless. Sometimes it is deciding whether an enemy's suffering is worth the lives saved by the information you extract."
Grey's mouth tightened.
Qin Mo glanced at him. "I will explain the theory in detail when time allows. Or I can install a cortical infolink and upload the information directly into your brain."
"Pass."
"I thought so."
Qin Mo's tone was dry, but there was no humor in his eyes.
He knew how his methods looked to Grey. Cruel. Cold. Monstrous, perhaps. But cruelty was not rare in this universe. It was the background radiation of the Imperium, the language of its laws, its prisons, its armies, and its wars. The only difference was whether cruelty served panic, habit, pride, or a purpose.
Qin Mo had once entered this reality unprepared for that distinction.
That ignorance had ended with shackles around his wrists, a suppression collar around his throat, and a number where his name should have been. He had been thrown into the Underhive like refuse and expected to die beneath a city that did not care enough to remember him.
He had sworn never to be that helpless again.
"I have already ordered every regiment expanded to ten thousand troops," Qin Mo said after a while. "They need weapons, armor, replacement parts, reserves, and enough supplies to operate without collapsing the moment the counteroffensive begins. The fabrication network requires at least two more days before deployment."
Grey looked at him. "So this is how you spend the delay?"
"We could train. We could refine equipment. We could rest the mortal troops so they do not fall over inside their new armor." Qin Mo's mouth twitched. "Or we could hold a banquet."
Grey's lip curled. "You would waste hours on feasting?"
"No." Qin Mo's gaze did not waver. "I waste hours on you. The machines do not sleep. The war does not pause. But soldiers are not machines, and neither are commanders. They require instruction, rhythm, and reasons to keep moving."
Grey glanced back toward the sealed chamber. "That is an ugly lesson."
"Most useful ones are."
....
Three Days Later
Qin Mo's work yielded results.
Now it was time to test the creation.
Grey escorted the psyker from her holding cell to the deeper levels of the underground bunker. She was no longer bound at the wrists. She did not need to be. A psyk-inhibitor collar still encircled her throat, its dull metal surface marked by warning sigils, restraint runes, and the practical scratches left by repeated attempts to claw it off.
She did not try anymore.
They passed through three armored bulkheads, each reinforced with adamantium plating and layered field emitters. Servos groaned as the doors opened. Pressure seals hissed shut behind them one by one, cutting off the outer fortress until the bunker felt less like a military installation and more like a sealed vault inside the planet's bones.
At the center of the lowest chamber stood the machine.
It was spherical, squat, and ugly in the way Qin Mo's early devices often were before refinement replaced necessity. Thick cables ran from its base into the floor. Stabilizer vanes curved around the outer shell. A restraint chair sat within the opened frame, surrounded by induction coils, neural-interface needles, auspex receivers, and a helmet connected to the main core by a bundle of armored conduits.
Five warriors in Thunderborn-pattern power armor waited around it. Their silhouettes filled the room with armored menace: reinforced plates, sealed helms, volkite carbines, graviton hammers, and shield projectors humming in standby.
Among them stood Qin Mo.
"Come here," he said.
The psyker hesitated. Her bare feet scraped against the cold floor. She trembled like a starving animal brought too close to a butcher's hook.
Qin Mo crossed the distance, seized her by the throat, and forced her to face the machine. His grip was firm enough to command, not tight enough to choke.
"See that device?" he asked. "Step inside. Put on the helmet. Sit down. Relax."
"Y-yes," she whispered. Her voice was small, flat, and emptied of the defiance that had once filled the chamber with threats. "Yes, sir."
Qin Mo released her. With a casual motion, he unlocked the psyk-inhibitor collar and removed it from her neck.
Every armored warrior in the room tensed. Hammers shifted. Carbines rose by a few degrees. Grey's new arm hummed as the built-in suppression system prepared to discharge if the psyker so much as twitched wrong.
Nothing happened.
The psyker did not attack. She did not scream. She did not reach for the Warp. She barely seemed to notice that the collar was gone. She simply stepped into the machine, sat in the restraint chair, and lifted the interface helm with shaking hands.
Submission. Obedience. Reflexive compliance.
The final phase was complete.
Grey exhaled slowly. He had doubted Qin Mo's methods from the beginning. He still hated them. But the proof now sat before him, strapping herself into the device without a command having to be repeated.
The psyker placed the helm over her head. The restraints closed around her wrists, ankles, waist, and throat with a sequence of metallic clicks. The machine came alive around her, its coils warming from dull gray to faint blue. Data began crawling across the nearest hololithic display.
For a few seconds, there was only the hum of power.
Then her consciousness touched the Genestealer psychic network.
Resistance flared instantly.
Her body went rigid. Her back arched against the restraints. Her eyes opened wide beneath the helm, pupils dilating until the irises nearly vanished.
Voices flooded the connection.
〈"Where are you, sister?"〉
〈"Do not surrender."〉
〈"Hold fast."〉
〈"For the Great Devourer."〉
〈"We are always with you."〉
〈"Stay strong."〉
〈"..."〉
The Broodmind surged toward the missing node with hunger, alarm, and alien intimacy. It did not speak like a human choir. It pressed against thought with instincts wearing words, with kinship made from infection, with love twisted into ownership.
For the first time in days, the psyker's old self surfaced. Her hands strained against the restraints. She tried to tear off the helm. Her mouth opened in a raw scream.
"No! No, no, no—"
The machine responded faster than any guard could have.
Additional clamps snapped into place around her forearms and skull. A controlled pulse surged through the neural interface, overloading the rebellious pathways before they could become action. Her scream cut off. Her body jerked once, then sagged against the chair.
Qin Mo studied the display without visible concern. Data poured in faster than the bunker cogitators could have processed without his direct intervention. Psychic vectors. Signal intensity. Subconscious location markers. Emotional pressure. Patterns of recognition moving through the Broodmind like ripples through black water.
"The hive mind's bond is touching," Qin Mo muttered. "Disgusting, invasive, and useful."
Grey looked from the machine to the display. "Are we getting anything?"
"More than expected."
Qin Mo filtered the incoming flood with a thought, discarding noise, false trails, defensive reflexes, and the psychic static thrown up by lesser cult nodes. He had expected fragments. Instead, the entire network had reacted.
Deep beneath Tyrone Hive, the Patriarch had noticed that an important psychic node had vanished. The moment that node reconnected, the Broodmind instinctively swept outward to identify where it had been taken, what had touched it, and whether the threat could spread.
That sweep should have found the psyker.
Instead, Qin Mo intercepted it. He watched the trace stabilize.
"Three hundred and forty kilometers due north," he read aloud. "Two thousand meters underground."
The chamber went very still.
At that exact location, far beneath the hive's rusted arteries, a massive Tyranid bioform opened its eyes.
For two seconds, it stared into darkness with alien patience.
Then it closed its eyes again and issued a command through the Broodmind.
The war entered its next phase.
....
Back in the bunker, the psyker in the machine went brain-dead.
The monitors registered the collapse with clinical indifference. Neural activity spiked once, stuttered, and fell into a flat pattern too low to recover. The body in the chair remained breathing for several seconds because the machine had not yet decided whether respiration mattered. Then the restraints loosened, and her head lolled forward beneath the helm.
Grey stared at her.
He did not know what he felt. Not pity, exactly. Not guilt. She had been an enemy, a cult weapon, a living conduit for the thing trying to devour them all from beneath the hive. If she had remained free, thousands more might have died.
Still, the empty body in the chair looked smaller than the threat she had represented.
Qin Mo turned away first.
His power armor stood waiting nearby, opened along the spine and chest like a mechanical shell. Servos extended. Locking clamps disengaged. The suit accepted him piece by piece, plates closing over his limbs with heavy precision. The helm remained under one arm for the moment, leaving his face visible in the cold bunker light.
Around him, the Thunderborn warriors checked weapons and seals. Grey did the same by reflex, his mind already moving ahead to distance, tunnels, enemy density, and the impossible fact that the target was no longer a theory hidden somewhere in the Underhive.
Qin Mo lifted his helm.
"When the full-scale offensive begins," he said, "I will lead the strike team personally."
The helm locked into place with a pressurized hiss. His voice emerged through the armor's vox-grille, colder and heavier.
"We have a mission that will turn the tide of this war."
He looked toward the tactical display, where the Patriarch's location burned in red beneath the map of Tyrone Hive.
"We are going to end this war."