"W-wait… don't be hasty…!"
Vanessa's voice broke on the last word. The sound scraped out of her throat in a ragged whisper, half-strangled by fear and half-burned by the heat radiating from the gauntlet closed around her neck.
"I-I can tell you more…!"
Vanessa could not read Qin Mo's mind.
That was the worst part.
With most men, fear had a shape. Desire had a taste. Anger flared through the Warp like a torch in fog, crude and obvious, easy to follow if one knew where to look.
Even disciplined minds leaked something under enough pressure: doubt, hatred, panic, a memory, a name. Qin Mo gave her nothing. No surface thoughts. No emotional color she could twist. No psychic rhythm to match.
Only silence.
Which meant she had no idea what to say to make him stop.
Qin Mo remained motionless above her. His helm hid his face, but it did not hide intent. His gauntleted hand glowed with contained thermal output, heat shimmering through the air in wavering sheets.
The metal around his fingers did not burn red; it did not need to. The chamber itself reacted to him. Frost from the recycled air system retreated from nearby pipes. Dust curled away from his wrist. The restraint clamps on Vanessa's chair creaked as the temperature rose.
She understood, with terrible clarity, that he did not need to crush her throat.
He could boil the blood inside it.
"Genestealer… Patriarch…" she forced out. "Its psychic powers… I was the one who interfered…!"
It was not a confession she had planned to give. It was not even a good bargaining chip, not without proof. But it was all she had left, and desperation made gamblers of better people than her.
It worked.
Qin Mo's grip opened.
Vanessa dropped to the cold steel deck hard enough to bruise both knees. The impact rang through the chamber, sharp and humiliatingly loud. She caught herself with both hands, coughing violently as air dragged itself back into her lungs. Her throat burned where his fingers had been. Her eyes watered. For several seconds, all she could do was breathe.
Qin Mo looked down at her. Behind the black visor of his war helm, his expression remained impossible to read.
"You?" he asked.
The single word carried more skepticism than a shouted accusation.
Vanessa swallowed carefully. Pain tightened around the motion.
Qin Mo tilted his head slightly. "You interfered with a Genestealer Patriarch's psychic powers?"
He gave a short, humorless scoff, as if she had just claimed she could topple a Hive Tyrant with a laspistol and sufficient confidence.
A Genestealer Patriarch was not merely a large mutant hiding at the bottom of a cult. It was the living psychic heart of an infestation, the first infection made monstrous by age, worship, and the endless feedback of its brood. Its will bound hybrids, purestrains, and corrupted servants into one predatory organism.
Through it, generations of stolen human lives could be directed like limbs. Its mind pressed outward through the Warp, festering, patient, and hungry, bending loyalty into devotion and infection into faith.
Such a creature could enslave districts. Given time, it could rot a world from the inside.
And this woman claimed she had disrupted one.
But Qin Mo did not attack again.
That mattered.
It meant he was willing to listen.
Vanessa coughed once more, then forced herself upright. She did not stand. Standing too quickly might look like defiance, and she had spent enough time around dangerous men to know when posture became provocation. She remained on her knees, one hand at her throat, and made her voice as steady as she could.
"You and your Thunderborn executed the decapitation strike," she said. "You breached the Patriarch's lair faster than the brood could react. The hybrids were already in disarray, but the Patriarch was not helpless. It was preparing to strike through the broodmind."
Qin Mo said nothing.
Vanessa took that as permission to continue.
"I was nearby. Hidden. I had followed the psychic pressure for days. The cult's mind was too loud to miss once I knew what I was looking for." She drew a careful breath. "When you reached the inner chamber, I used my abilities to interfere with the Patriarch's focus. I could not overpower it. I could not control it. But I could pull at the timing, disturb its concentration, create enough distortion that it could not bring its full strength to bear against you."
Qin Mo remained silent. Still. Heavy.
So Vanessa gave him details.
She described the air inside the lair, thick with spores, incense, and the wet animal stink of the brood. She described the psychic pressure building in layers, the Patriarch's attention turning toward Qin Mo like a claw closing around a throat.
She described the exact moment Qin Mo advanced through the chamber, the way the broodmind shuddered as its living anchor tried to gather power, the brief jagged spike of pain when Vanessa forced her own mind against the edge of that alien will.
She described the killing blow.
Not as a soldier would have seen it, not in terms of blade angle, muzzle flash, or body mechanics, but in psychic consequence. The Patriarch's mind did not simply die. It tore.
The broodlink snapped outward in a thousand directions at once. Hybrids faltered. Purestrains shrieked without sound. A pressure that had filled the local Warp like a tumor suddenly collapsed, leaving behind a psychic aftertaste of panic, blood, and severed obedience.
Qin Mo listened.
Some of the details were too precise. Too strange. Too useless for a liar to invent unless she already understood what he had felt without knowing how to name it.
Even he would not have recalled every fluctuation so clearly. The battle had been violent, compressed, and filled with immediate threats. Vanessa spoke as if she had watched it from a different angle entirely.
Which meant she had either been there…
Or she had seen it through psychic means.
That was possible. Certain psykers possessed clairvoyant abilities. Sanctioned Imperial diviners, bound and trained by the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, were used across the Imperium to interpret visions, predict enemy movements, and guide campaigns when ordinary intelligence failed.
Most of their visions were unreliable. Some were lethal. A few were useful enough that generals tolerated the risk of listening to them.
But Vanessa was no sanctioned psyker.
Qin Mo turned his head toward the outer wall. Beyond the fortress, armored silhouettes waited in the courtyard under floodlights and drifting ash.
"There are ten Leman Russ tanks parked outside," he said. "Crush them with your mind, and I'll believe you."
Vanessa did not even glance in that direction. She shook her head once.
"My powers are not tools I can pick up and swing whenever I want."
"Convenient."
"True."
Qin Mo folded his arms. The servos in his armor gave a soft, controlled growl. "Fine. Let's assume you really did help me that day."
His voice cooled.
"You are still a psyker. Have you been registered with the Imperium? Have you been sanctioned? Do you even understand how dangerous you are?"
Vanessa's eyes flicked toward the chamber door. Two guards waited outside, close enough to hear voices but not words. She looked back at Qin Mo.
"I understand more than most."
"That is not an answer."
"No," she admitted. "It isn't."
Qin Mo stepped closer. "At minimum, your classification would be Zeta-level or higher. Maybe more, depending on the range and stability of your abilities. What happens when you lose control?"
His voice carried no sympathy.
Years ago, Qin Mo himself had been accused of being a psyker. A collar had been locked around his neck. A number had been attached to his life. Men had looked at him as if he were a bomb that had learned to walk.
And yet he had never developed easy sympathy for psykers.
Because the fear was not baseless.
Psykers were not merely soldiers with unusual weapons. They were breaches waiting for pressure. A moment of panic, grief, pain, pride, or exhaustion could turn a mind into a flare bright enough for things in the Warp to notice.
A psyker who lost control could kill a room, a regiment, or a district. Worse, they could become an invitation. A door. A wound in reality through which daemons clawed their way into the world wearing laughter, hunger, and impossible hatred.
If Vanessa lost control inside the fortress, she might not simply kill the people around her.
She could doom Tyrone Hive.
If the disaster spread before anyone understood what had happened, perhaps the entire system would pay for the decision not to kill her now.
Vanessa met his gaze without flinching. That steadiness was either courage or a practiced survival mechanism. Qin Mo had not yet decided which.
"I can help you fight the rebels," she said.
"No."
The answer came immediately.
Vanessa's jaw tightened. "You haven't even heard what I can do."
"I heard enough when you said you cannot control it at will." Qin Mo's tone turned flat. "I would rather you sit still and do nothing. What if you lose control on the battlefield?"
"Then kill me."
The words came without hesitation.
Vanessa reached forward, seized Qin Mo's gauntleted hand, and pressed the armored fingers against her own throat. The gesture was reckless. The guards outside shifted at the sudden movement, weapons scraping softly against armor, but Qin Mo did not call them in.
Her pulse beat beneath his metal fingers. Fast, but not frantic.
"Let's assume you are facing a bomb," Vanessa said. "Would you destroy it immediately and hope it does not detonate in your face? Or would you delay the explosion long enough to use it?"
Qin Mo stared down at her.
For a few seconds, neither of them moved.
He understood the argument. He disliked that he understood it.
If he tried to kill her and failed to do it instantly, what then? If pain or terror cracked her control in her final moments, would he be preventing catastrophe or triggering it? The cleanest Imperial solution would be simple: hand her over to the Black Ships. Let trained psyker-handlers, nulls, wardens, and executioners decide whether she was useful, sanctionable, or fuel for the Golden Throne.
But that answer belonged to a functioning Imperium with time, routes, authority, and ships that answered when summoned.
Where in the Throne's name was he supposed to find a Black Ship in the middle of this war?
Finally, Qin Mo sighed.
"I would put the bomb inside a stasis field," he said. "Then I would study it until I found a way to disarm it."
Vanessa blinked.
Qin Mo withdrew his hand from her throat. "That way, the next time I encounter the same type of bomb, I know exactly how to neutralize it."
For once, Vanessa seemed to have no immediate answer.
Qin Mo turned and strode toward the exit. The door opened before him with a hydraulic hiss. The guards outside snapped to attention, their faces tight with the uncomfortable awareness that they had been standing within earshot of a conversation no sane soldier wanted to be part of.
Qin Mo glanced at them.
"Restrain her with psychic inhibitors."
One guard straightened. "Lord Commander?"
"All of them," Qin Mo said. "Every inhibitor we have left. Put them on her."
The guards exchanged quick looks. One of them had the sense not to question the order. The other was either braver or more worried.
"Are you sure, Lord Commander?"
"Yes." Qin Mo looked back at Vanessa. "Until I find a way to defuse the bomb, this is what we have to do."
"Understood."
The guards entered the chamber. One carried restraint manacles. The other carried a sealed case marked with warning sigils, ward-stamps, and the crude maintenance markings of a fortress that had learned to treat anti-psyker equipment as more precious than ammunition.
Vanessa watched them approach. Her expression tightened, but she did not resist.
One guard, younger than the other, tried to make his voice gentle. It came out awkward instead.
"The Lord Commander is always right," he said, as if repeating a lesson that comforted him more than her. "This is for your safety, ma'am."
Vanessa gave a small, humorless laugh.
"Of course it is."
The first inhibitor locked around her wrist with a metallic click.
....
Qin Mo did consider studying Vanessa to develop a stronger psychic nullifier.
It was not a passing thought. It remained in the back of his mind as a problem to be solved: how to suppress Warp interaction with tools designed by someone whose own power did not touch the Warp at all. He could analyze gravity, matter, heat, energy flow, molecular bonds, and the mechanical weakness of steel by instinct. Psychic energy was different. It did not behave like a force. It behaved like meaning given teeth.
C'tan-derived technology did not naturally interact with the Warp. That was both advantage and limitation. His power ignored many psychic countermeasures, but it also gave him no easy bridge into psionic research. Every anti-psyker device he had built so far was an extension of existing Imperial work: collars, dampeners, warded emitters, and field suppressors scavenged from Tyrone Hive's crude but surprisingly practical stockpiles.
His current inhibitor systems were not elegant. They were enhanced versions of Imperial psi-restraint technology, improved through better materials, cleaner energy regulation, and a great deal of contempt for the original manufacturing tolerances.
They worked well enough to restrain Vanessa.
They were not enough to satisfy him.
But the nullifier project would take time, and time was the one resource war never stopped stealing. The Genestealer problem could not wait.
So Qin Mo returned to his bioweapon.
And at last, he perfected it.
The final form was liquid-based.
That sounded unimpressive, which was useful. Soldiers understood sprays, canisters, pressure tanks, and contaminated surfaces. They did not need to understand the microscopic rules being rewritten beneath the skin of anything the liquid touched.
The application method was simple.
Spray it anywhere Genestealers might be hiding. Coat tunnel entrances, brood-nest walls, drainage channels, ventilation ducts, suspected lairs, corpse piles, cult shrines, abandoned habs, and any surface a purestrain or hybrid might brush against.
Any Genestealer organism that came into contact with it would begin to dissolve.
Not instantly. Instant death had its uses, but it also warned the rest. Qin Mo wanted spread. He wanted contact. He wanted the brood to carry its own death through its tunnels before it understood the danger.
Within one to two weeks, the infected xenos tissue would liquefy entirely. Muscle, chitin, organ mass, and corrupted cellular structures would lose cohesion, breaking down into a viscous organic slurry indistinguishable from corpse runoff in the sump. A dead hybrid would look like rot. A dying purestrain would look like disease. The cult would waste precious time inventing rituals, explanations, and lies while the weapon moved through them.
And it did move.
That was the true achievement.
Qin Mo had rewritten the rules of biological transmission. Ordinary contagions depended on proximity, environment, vectors, fluids, heat, humidity, exposure time, and all the fragile accidents that made plague both powerful and unreliable. This weapon did not. Its target was not merely the individual body. It was lineage. It recognized the genetic and psychic-biological signature of a Genestealer strain and carried the dissolution command through that connection as if infection had become an instruction written into ancestry itself.
A single contaminated brood-kin could become the beginning of the end.
Imagine a Genestealer hybrid born in the filth of Tyrone Hive, one that somehow escaped the purge, hid aboard a freighter, and reached a distant system believing itself beyond him. Thousands of light-years away, one of its brood-siblings might brush against a treated wall and begin to soften from within. Days later, the escaped hybrid would feel its own flesh losing structure, its stolen human form turning to sludge no matter where it ran.
Distance would not save it.
Silence would not save it.
The broodline itself would betray it.
Qin Mo named the weapon the Tyrone Extermination Spray.
He was aware the name lacked poetry. That was deliberate. Weapons did not need poetry. They needed clear labeling, reliable deployment, and soldiers who understood what not to drink.
The only drawback was obvious.
Qin Mo was the only one who could manufacture it.
The weapon required precision beyond any local manufactorum, purity beyond any Underhive chemical workshop, and principles that no Tech-priest in the sector could inspect without either fainting, declaring techno-heresy, or demanding exclusive custody of everything involved.
So Qin Mo began work on prototypes himself.
He refined the dissolution liquid in sealed containment vials. He optimized delivery pressure so the spray would cling to surfaces without aerosolizing dangerously around humans. He built dispersal canisters for infantry, larger tanks for corridor saturation, and sealed drone-mounted nozzles for tunnels too dangerous to enter. He adjusted the chemical markers so Imperial soldiers, civilians, and ordinary battlefield carrion would not be affected. He tested surface persistence against heat, sump-water, ash, promethium residue, and the corrosive chemical damp that seemed to seep from every wound in the Underhive.
By the time the first production batch was ready, the laboratory smelled of sterilizing agents, hot metal, and faint organic acid. Warning runes glowed across half the workbench. Several drones hovered nearby, refusing to approach the primary containment rack without direct authorization.
That, Qin Mo decided, was an encouraging sign.
....
"I read Grot's mind."
Qin Mo stopped adjusting the pressure regulator.
Vanessa stood behind him at the edge of the workshop, arms crossed, her posture arranged into something that wanted to look casual and failed because three separate inhibitor bands circled her wrists, a suppression collar rested at her throat, and two armed guards waited just outside the door. Her cerulean eyes fixed on the containment rack with sharp interest. Even through the inhibitors, her presence prickled faintly at the edge of awareness, like static against bare skin.
"I know you're developing a weapon against the Genestealers," she continued. "And this is what you came up with?"
Qin Mo slowly turned.
Vanessa tilted her head toward the canisters. "A weapon that sprays a special liquid onto Genestealers?"
He said nothing.
"Why not just build a flamethrower?"
Qin Mo stared at her for a long moment.
The psi-inhibitors were working. Otherwise, her presence would have triggered the deeper revulsion his nature reserved for Warp-touched minds. As it was, he felt only irritation.
That was not necessarily an improvement.
"Do you understand who you are speaking to about weaponry?" he asked.
Vanessa's expression remained unimpressed. "A man who just invented liquid flamethrowers."
"It is not a flamethrower."
"It sprays liquid."
"Many things spray liquid."
"Onto enemies."
"That does not make it a flamethrower."
"Does it set them on fire?"
"No."
"Then it is a disappointing flamethrower."
Qin Mo set the regulator down with deliberate care. "Fire has collateral damage. Poison has collateral damage. Radiation has collateral damage. Explosives have collateral damage. I needed something that kills only the targets I want dead."
Vanessa looked at the canisters again. "I still do not see how this is different from a flamethrower."
Qin Mo decided, for the sake of everyone nearby, not to explain the full mechanism.
The delivery method was irrelevant. It could have been vapor, gel, dust, injection, rain, or paint applied with a brush by an especially suicidal servitor. What mattered was the effect. Once deployed, the weapon would exterminate every Genestealer of the same strain. Permanently. Down to the last slithering abomination, the last hybrid hiding behind a human face, the last purestrain waiting in a drainage shaft with claws folded against its chest.
Vanessa watched him watch the canisters. Her tone softened, but only slightly.
"You might as well let me use my psychic abilities to help you."
"Try that," Qin Mo said, "and I will detonate the bomb manually."
She gave him a thin smile. "Still thinking of me that way?"
"You argued for the metaphor."
"I argued for usefulness."
"You argued for delayed detonation."
Vanessa opened her mouth, then closed it.
Qin Mo stepped forward, took her by the arm, and guided her toward the exit. He did not drag her hard enough to injure her, but he gave her no room to pretend she had been invited. The guards outside straightened immediately.
Vanessa looked between them and Qin Mo. "You know, treating me like a prisoner makes cooperation difficult."
Qin Mo released her arm. His voice turned cold enough to end the conversation.
"See that guard?"
Vanessa followed his gaze. The younger guard swallowed.
"Walk up to him," Qin Mo said, "and tell him you are a prisoner, not a guest."
Vanessa's face tightened.
Qin Mo pointed down the corridor.
"Then go where you belong."