---o---
In the opulent room, Zhou Ye gave the document a brief scan and dropped it directly into the waste bin.
One had to admire, in a sideways sense, a universe built on the literary traditions of a particular seafaring culture. The people here had a very specific approach to negotiation.
"You should understand that a monopoly is the most profitable arrangement possible. But if you prefer not to cooperate, your fruit supply could be..."
"Go ahead and try planting them. Do not imagine for a moment that I have not locked the genetics."
Zhou Ye said it with a flat eye-roll.
The seed locks he had implemented were considerably more sophisticated than anything modern agricultural corporations had managed. Every fruit that left his hands was genetically sterile in the next generation in ways that could not be worked around by conventional means. He had not merely applied a standard gene-lock. The seeds carried a small additional modification derived from his own particular style of intuitive tinkering, rewriting the relevant genetic sequences in ways that would defy even a Magos Biologis of genuine seniority.
No one who bought his fruit was ever going to plant their way out of his monopoly.
"You..."
"Monopoly is the most profitable arrangement possible."
Zhou Ye said it pleasantly. He was already in possession of several worlds, none of them developed, all of them located well beyond any stable Mandeville Point. Without the Star Rail network there was no way to reach any of them. He was counting on fruit and the Imperium's appetite for luxury goods as a long-term trade foundation.
He understood monopoly perfectly well. He had been working very hard at integrating himself into this unreasonable civilization, and while he sometimes felt he would never fully manage it, the commercial instincts had developed naturally enough.
"It appears we have nothing further to discuss. Good day."
He smiled at the furious man across the table and took his leave.
What Sokk Oliveira was thinking, only Sokk Oliveira and Zhou Ye knew.
The contract was irrelevant now. His merchant vessel had already been tagged and tracked. The Oliveira Dynasty fleet had mobilized in its entirety, dozens of ships closing in around Zhou Ye's position in a very deliberate encirclement. Their hired soldiers, combat-capable at the level of a competent Astra Militarum regiment, were fully armed and standing by for a boarding action. They had committed to this. They were going to take the planet and its resources regardless of what happened next.
They had already expended enormous resources to reach this point. If this deal failed, the losses to the Dynasty would be difficult to recover from. They had quietly stepped back from competition with the major core-sector Dynasties for years, apparently for reasons they would not disclose. This was their opportunity to break out of that constraint. The calculation had been made.
Zhou Ye was already fully aware of this.
Thirty-three Terminator squads were standing by on the Hyperion.
He was going to conduct simultaneous boarding strikes against the entire merchant fleet at once. He did feel, abstractly, that sending Terminators against commercial vessels was somewhat disproportionate. But it was what it was. If any ships were too badly damaged to recover, he would collect the hulks and repair them. The Rogue Trader Warrant documentation was the only thing that genuinely mattered.
He stepped past the man's expression of cold anger without acknowledging it, climbed into his transport, and left the Quintus Hive behind.
On the Hyperion's deck a short time later, he settled into his seat and observed the Hive World below and the ships that were gradually adjusting their trajectories toward him, while rotating a wine bottle in his hand with unhurried contentment.
"Ai-chan. Current count?"
"More than ten vessels. However, the Machine Spirits on those merchant ships are highly active. They can resist the erosion approach even with your Authority channeled through me. Direct personal application would be required to crack them."
"Does not matter. I will just destroy all of them if it comes to that."
He was entirely unbothered by this.
Machine Spirits were not something to underestimate. Those constructs could manifest ammunition from places that defied straightforward explanation, pulling from what appeared to be Warp-adjacent sources. Machine Spirits were one of the genuinely mysterious elements of this universe, something that existed at the intersection of faith, technology, and the Immaterium in ways that resisted clean analysis. He had given Ai-chan the Authority to resist their influence defensively, primarily to guard against tech-heresy attacks on the ship's systems. On offense, against an active and resistant Machine Spirit, the Authority alone was not sufficient without his personal involvement.
He had given Ai-chan those capabilities specifically to protect against hostile machine-code intrusions and to insulate the ship from Warp contamination effects. Offensive hacking of a combat-alert Machine Spirit was a different problem entirely.
In a more ordinary universe, such systems could be breached without excessive difficulty. This was Warhammer. Machine Spirits were their own category of strange, and he had learned not to dismiss them.
None of which changed the fundamental situation.
"Do not head for the Mandeville Point directly. Begin pulling away slowly, as though trying to be cautious."
He could feel the concentrated hostility behind him like a physical pressure. The open-space distance from the Quintus Hive would resolve the political complication. Nobody cared about a commercial dispute between two merchants out in the void. The Warrant documentation was the objective. Everything else could be worked out afterward.
"Let everything proceed according to plan. Get that Warrant document secured quickly. I genuinely do not want to stumble into another extremely unusual Grand Free-for-All. This wretched universe."
"Captain?"
"What."
"I keep getting the feeling you are covered in flags."
"Emmm..."
Zhou Ye rolled his eyes without hesitation.
The universe was certainly full of surprises. But he had consistently managed to accomplish what he actually set out to do, even when the journey felt like it was dragging him through something deeply aggravating. That counted for something.
---o---
Elsewhere, Inquisitor Chris and Victrix Guard veteran Metaurus were standing in the command center.
"We are currently unable to contact the outside. Our Navigator reports the Warp is in an extremely violent state. The disturbance may be the direct result of a Chaos God intervening personally in the material realm. So..."
Chris looked toward Metaurus. The veteran was visibly tense.
He had seen the edited footage provided by the Space Wolves. He understood that the Star of Trailblaze's composition was extraordinarily complex. And what frightened him more than the footage itself was the personnel list.
A collection of ten-thousand-year Dreadnought Ancients.
He had been genuinely startled when he processed the full implications. The Chapter Master himself was not any kind of Astartes in the conventional sense. The physical dimensions were slightly shorter than expected, standing around three meters in armor, but the combat capability was terrifying. A Primarch. And every Ancient under his command was a ten-thousand-year veteran.
If this became widely known, Macragge was not going to have a quiet period.
The Imperial Fists Ancient alone would be sufficient to ignite a situation. The sons of Dorn were under enormous pressure at present and they would not receive this information calmly. Founding Chapters and their successors would be demanding explanations. And technically, the Ultramarines had already filed the claim that this was one of their successor Chapters.
That claim was genuine generosity on the Primarch's part. Accepting it was Macragge's decision to make.
But all of that was secondary, because the Warp storm was currently preventing any of these messages from being sent.
"The follow-up Inquisitorial team will arrive when they arrive. In the meantime we might as well continue the purge assessment here."
Chris said it with a slight headache. Hive World operations were never clean. A Hive World's stability was rarely a product of competent governance. More often it reflected a strange equilibrium between the four major Chaos cults, the Genestealer Cult presence, and various other factions, each one keeping the others from escalating to a point where the whole situation collapsed into something unmanageable.
The Slaaneshi cult had nearly completed a significant sacrifice here. A mysterious Astartes Chapter had eliminated it before it could. The planetary authority had no awareness of what had occurred at all.
Chris was not particularly troubled by the Chapter's methods. Astartes often appeared, eliminated a threat with overwhelming precision, left enough evidence for a competent investigator to understand what had happened, and departed to the next engagement. The pattern was recognizable.
What he was troubled by was his own manpower situation.
A single Victrix Guard squad was present. They were not under his authority. They would cooperate against Chaos, certainly. But the hive had a hundred billion people and his own Storm Troopers numbered around ten thousand. For a purge operation at this scale, that was inadequate.
The Warp storm was producing something else as well. Something was approaching through it. He had sent out an emergency request for any available Imperial forces in the vicinity, without much expectation of results.
Then, unexpectedly, his communication receiver activated.
"Lamenters Chapter receiving emergency signal. We are inbound to provide support."
Every person in the room paused for a moment.
"You should turn around immediately and leave this area."
Metaurus responded before Chris could form a thought. He knew the Lamenters' situation well enough. Calgar had offered them an Iron Halo commendation at one point and they had declined. He knew what their numbers looked like, knew what their luck consistently produced. He was not willing to be responsible for the last survivors of a Chapter getting destroyed because he needed bodies.
"We march for the billions in peril. If a hundred billion people face the darkness, we will spend our lives gladly before we look away."
Then the bright yellow-painted vessel emerged, moving with the precise no-Warp-trace signature that Zhou Ye had specifically configured into their navigation system.
They had been laying Star Rails, connected to this system from a different vector, and the Honkai-derived AI had detected both the Warp storm conditions and the emergency vox. They had arrived accordingly.
Zhou Ye had given them the tools to survive. They had already decided they would die to protect his secrets before they would reveal him.
A moment later, the Mandeville Point produced a violent surge.
A second group of ships came through the point, clearly in a hurry and clearly having had a difficult journey.
Then a new signal opened on the same channel.
"Flesh Tearers Chapter. Warp storm forced emergency translation. We are standing by."
The Victrix Guard veterans loaded their bolters almost simultaneously.
The reason was straightforward. The Flesh Tearers had not been formally declared Renegade. Doing so after already designating two Blood Angels successor Chapters as traitors would have created too large a political problem. But this was a Chapter that attacked civilians. A Chapter that had forced the Space Wolves themselves to reluctantly resume military police functions against them. Not formally designated, but not trusted either.
"We have not turned Renegade..."
The declaration transmitted with an edge of something familiar in it, and Chapter Master Decaes's voice followed immediately.
"Why are you here."
Chris pressed his fingers to his forehead.
The Flesh Tearers. He knew their history. They were marginally better than the Blood Raiders designation implied, but only marginally. Looking at their fleet strength, they had possibly committed their entire Chapter to this deployment, which told him something about the severity of what they were responding to.
And he had noted that the Lamenters were also a Blood Angels successor Chapter. If the two actually came to blows, all bets were off about whose side they would take.
"We received a divination from Chief Librarian Mephiston. We were en route to Baal when the Warp storm forced us out at this stable Mandeville Point."
"Remain in position. Wait for the storm to..."
Before he finished the sentence, the Mandeville Point flared again.
Two more vessels. One bore the Dark Angels iconography. The other the insignia of the Black Templars.
He had enough people now. He had more than enough to begin a proper cleanup operation on the Quintus Hive below.
Chris assessed the situation and found it adequate.
---o---
On the other side of the planet, Zhou Ye had not been paying attention to the Warp situation at all.
This was a heavily trafficked hub sector with a stable Mandeville Point. Traffic was constant. His attention was on the ships behind him, adjusting their courses to match his own heading as he moved away from the hive.
This transaction would conclude soon. The captured fleet would be converted into trade vessels. They would travel his Star Rail network, moving between connected worlds, building the web of commerce and contact that would eventually link everything together.
"All of them showed up then..."
He looked at the approaching ships without urgency, allowing the distance from the hive to grow, letting everything move at its own pace.
Everything was proceeding according to plan, steadily and without deviation.
Except that, at this moment, in the cargo vault of the Oliveira Dynasty flagship where the Warrant documents were stored, a black serpentine shadow was quietly and steadily expanding.
---o---