Five days after Rā's departure, the ship's crew watched the horizon with anxious anticipation.
At last, Rā returned—clad in bloodstained garments and looking gaunt. He carried in his arms a pale, bone-like chest taller than a person. Slowly, he hovered back up to the ship.
The crew's relief mingled with shock: shock at his battered condition, relief that he had come back alive. Their medical facilities were advanced; as long as he still breathed, they could try to heal him. Rā's own extraordinary regenerative and psychic reserves also improved his odds.
A few minutes later, after they had hurried him aboard, one crewman peered at his wounds and asked in bewilderment, "What happened down there? Was there some special monster on that planet?"
From the crewman's knowledge, even high-output personal weapons shouldn't be able to inflict such damage. (Of course, the Federation's Golden Age super-weapons—rifles that could blow up a star—were not under discussion here.)
Rā set the bone chest down and swallowed a green healing serum at a gulp. After the drug's effects spread through him and his breathing steadied, he answered, voice heavy with complexity:
"Monster? Maybe… if those four beings can be called monsters."
He spoke then of the corrupt knowledge the four Chaos Gods had given him. Even a cursory study had already revealed deep instabilities—vast obstacles on the road to stabilizing and commercializing those accursed lore. The gods had been "helpful," supplying not only information but also raw materials—rare substances that only exist in the Warp.
Those materials were dangerous by nature, and Rā had locked them away in the bone chest; he dared not handle them lightly.
As his thoughts returned to the names the gods had used—Slaanesh, Khârn-like Khorne's envoy (Terror), Nurgle, Tzeentch—his mind flickered to memory: the last time he had faced Orsaga millennia ago. The fragmentary exchanges from that encounter still puzzled him, and now, recalling them, his expression clouded.
—
On that blood-red world, the four Chaos Gods conversed.
Slaanesh—form ever-shifting to match each viewer's notion of beauty—spoke, unconcerned: "That one won't honor the promise."
Tzeentch corrected, matter-of-fact: "In truth, the probability he keeps his word is only about 3.6 percent."
Slaanesh blinked, surprised. "Then why give him so much?"
Khorne's envoy snorted with contempt. "If he doesn't keep it, you simply take it back." His tone carried the insolent confidence of a loan-shark who never feared default.
Even the taciturn Nurgle, looking at Slaanesh as one looks at a younger sibling, shrugged and added, "We want results. The process is irrelevant."
Given both parties' lack of good faith, the whole "deal" was a joke. The reason the four gods had met with Rā was not benevolence: they wanted a useful instrument—someone to produce obedient, powerful subordinates for them. The material conditions of the material universe limited the gods' power; they preferred to act through proxies. Thus, across countless cycles, they used Warp-demons and other agents to do their hands-on work, stepping in directly only when they intended wholesale remaking.
This time, however, the presence of an unpredictable outsider—Orsaga, who had hoarded legions and even dispatched avatar-like beings into the physical universe—had changed the calculus. The four gods decided to seed the material universe with agents free to act there; Rā was a prime candidate.
From the timelines they observed, Rā carried an unusual fate—one that could sway the future of the material cosmos. In past cycles those like him had been "anchors of the age," toys of the gods and decisive elements in their games. Usually they were manipulated, used to determine outcomes. But now, because of Orsaga's interference, the gods agreed to exploit Rā differently.
Rā's plan—to craft superlative artificial humans from himself as a template, beings who would surpass ordinary people in ability and character and serve as powerful instruments to restore human civilization—presented opportunity. With modest corruption, those artificials could be turned into reliable minions. Because they would be born and made in the material universe by Rā, they would be less affected by the dimensional restrictions that neuter Warp-born entities. That made them especially valuable to the four gods, enabling easier influence and better observation of Orsaga's activity.
Thus, despite the lack of trust on either side, the gods furnished him with knowledge and dangerous materials—knowing full well that the results would ultimately serve their own ends.
.....
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