Alpha Plus Psyker
Chapter 1D
On the whole human beings have negligible psychic powers, but only on the whole. In every generation a few are born who are a little bit different, determined solely by the cold soulless mathematics of probability.
While most of these psykers born have only limited powers that require effort and concentration to use, in the vastness of the galaxy the sheer trillions of people create big enough numbers for mathematical chance to demand that a true monster be born.
Once in every 100 trillion human births an Alpha Plus is born...
...
"Egg" Sevenson was just another 11 year old mutant girl in the multitudes of the lost and the damned. She loved playing with dolls, adored her siblings and hated doing maths homework. Her name had been chosen by the chaos slave woman who raised her, because of the fact that she had literally hatched from a mutant egg. The woman was no relation to Egg but had raised her from birth and Egg considered the slave to be her mother.
Every morning her mother would brush her mutant feathers that she had in place of hair, her big brother Augusta would tickle her in epic sibling tickle wars, and her sister Mandy would play dolls with her in the crude plastic doll house they had made in the 3D printer.
Life was good on the whole except for one thing: Egg wasn't like other girls at all!
The chaos gods had cursed Egg with a terrible gift, a curse that consistently endangered everyone she cared about and caused her nothing but misery.
Egg had not asked for this "gift" the gods had given her and she didn't want it. She didn't want to keep killing people by accident, she didn't want to keep making her family homeless by accidentally destroying the entire space ship they were on at the time! And she most DEFINITELY did not want any more wars fought over her to acquire her as a weapon!
At present her current "Owners" were a faction of the Iron Warriors Legion called "the Steel Brethren". She had originally been the "property" of a faction of the Night Lords Legion called "the Royal family", but the Iron Warriors had stolen her and some of her family a few months ago.
At present Egg was being held on board the Iron Warrior's Despoiler class Battleship "the Bakal", fleeing the Daemon World of Aumaom with the outraged Night Lords fleet in hot pursuit. Egg didn't know where they were headed and didn't really like to think about it too much.
Egg ignored the pounding of the Night Lords ordinance fire on the armoured hull of the Bakal, this stupid game of naval cat and mouse had been going on for months and Egg was used to it by now.
This was all just part of life when you had the misfortune of being born an Alpha Plus psyker in the forces of chaos.
Egg had been born with psychic powers so extreme that she exceeded even the lofty heights of the rare and terrible Alpha level psykers. "The Assignment" that characterised every individual with a Greek letter to show their psychic power levels had no classification for psykers like Egg, she was completely off the scale and was labeled as simply being Alpha Plus meaning "above Alpha". She could (and accidentally had once) snap an Emperor class battleship in half with minimal psychic effort and had so far been responsible for the accidental damage and/or destruction of at least 6 friendly chaos warships.
She was a living super weapon able to obliterate everything in her path, the warp just flowed through her so effortlessly that she was a living warp conduit of godlike power. The problem was not destroying things, the problem was making the destruction STOP!
To protect everyone she cared about Egg was forced to forever wear a high tech helmet when not in battle. The "psychic nullifying helmet" generated a constant small Gellar field around her head, cutting off her brain from access to the warp. As long as she had the helmet securely padlocked around her head she was just a harmless little girl, unable to even beat her older brother in their daily tickle wars much less destroy a warship!
Powerful as she was, the various chaos factions had no trouble whatsoever in controlling her. She dearly loved her family and the space marines knew this. All they had to do was keep some of the people Egg loved hostage at gun point on other ships out of range of her powers and Egg would do anything they asked of her to spare their lives. Family was EVERYTHING to Egg!
Egg squirmed as her mum fussed over her messy feathers where they protruded from under her helmet, Egg was anxious to play with the other children but mum was still brushing and putting ribbons in her feathers. Mum tutted and Egg reluctantly held still so she could finish.
"Absolutely perfect, you now look so cute!" Mum said happily in her village dialect, admiring her work with the ribbons.
Egg gave her mum an affectionate cuddle and ran off to play with her siblings.
She was immediately ambushed by her big brother Augusta as soon as she left the room and she giggled as he chased her trying to tickle her. This game was part of their daily rituals, had been for as long as Egg could remember.
Egg squealed with laughter as Augusta caught her and squeezed her belly till she just about died from how bad it tickled! Augusta gave the most KILLER tickles, worse even than Mandy, and he always won the tickle wars!
Egg ran off again giggling as Augusta deliberately released her so he could chase her again and the game began again! It was a constant game of cat and mouse, constant giggles and laughter.
It ended like it usually did, with Egg eventually wetting herself and mum exasperatedly having to wash her and change her clothes. With the tickle war temporarily on ceasefire (lest mum have a fit if Egg wet herself again!), Egg and Augusta ran happily to find the rest of their crèche of chaos children.
They found Mandy and Liling doing homework in the study room Mum had set up for them, and Augusta and Egg dutifully distracted them by blowing fart noises with their mouths until the two girls were in a fit of giggles! All 4 children/teenagers dissolved into riotous laughter as they horsed around until mum got cross.
Among the chaos worshipping so called "lost and the damned" stable home life for children was a rare and valued commodity (chaos space marines and blood mad cultists were not exactly known for their parenting skills), so chaos children from different biological parents tended to be lumped together in crèches under the care of those few adults who were sane and stable enough to be trusted to raise children.
Egg's own crèche currently consisted of 6 children/teenagers: Egg, Augusta, Mandy, Liling, Violet, and Violet's rape baby Patrick. The Iron Warriors had stolen as much of Egg's crèche as they could from the Night Lords in order to control her but the Night Lords still held Violet and Patrick, which meant that Egg flatly refused to use her powers against the Night Lord ships for fear of harming her 2 crèche members.
Without being able to deploy Egg against the Night Lords fleet, the Iron Warriors fleet had instead had to rely on conventional methods of naval conflicts against the superior firepower of the Night Lords fleet and they were losing the war and forced into constant retreat. It made very little difference to Egg which chaos faction controlled her so long as the people she loved were well treated.
The crèche was under the care of mum, an insanely beautiful Slaanesh worshipping sex slave named Octavia who loved kids and retained enough sanity to raise them. Mum had once been a favourite concubine of the Night Lords Chaos Lord Luke Sevenson and had borne the Lord a son "Augusta" who was part of the crèche. Egg herself was also a biological child of this chaos lord, as were thousands of other children, the chaos lord had had absolute sexual rights to every slave and chaos cultist in the Night Lord fleet and had fathered astonishing numbers of offspring.
Mum was technically the wife of the chaos lord's lesbian sister, the chaos champion of Slaanesh Wendy Sevenson, but they had been estranged even before the Iron Warriors abducted mum and had been considering getting divorced. Poor mum could only tolerate so much unfaithfulness (even by Slaanesh worshippers generous standards of relationship faithfulness!) before enough was enough!
The entire crèche was sick of the way Wendy had broken Mum's heart, you fuck with a sex slave's BODY not her HEART! Just because Wendy technically had the "right" to treat the low ranking sex slave like dirt didn't make the crèche accept seeing their mother in tears! Egg just hoped that Mum didn't go crawling back to Wendy again when the Night Lords inevitably stole them all back again.
The crèche was a very diverse bunch, some related to each other and some not. Regardless of biology, every member of the crèche considered every other member (except Patrick) to be their brother or sister.
The physically biggest was Augusta. He was a favoured bastard son of the Night Lords Chaos Lord by his former favourite concubine, so he had been given the rare privilege of becoming a chaos space marine. At almost 15 he was still a neophyte halfway through his gene seed organ induced transformation and he was already physically larger than most natural human full grown men!
The eldest member of the crèche was Augusta's 15 year old non-mutant human wife Liling, who wasn't genetically related to any of them but had by marrying into the crèche become a sister-in-law to the rest of the crèche. The pair had married young, but they had been childhood friends and sweethearts ever since the then 4 year old Augusta found the homeless little girl living in a maintenance crawl space and brought her home to the dismayed but sympathetic Mum. Liling had had nowhere else to go so she had been raised alongside the rest of the crèche.
Mum's wife/owner Wendy had not been impressed by having the homeless waif join the already large crèche that already distracted Mum from her sexual "duties" and had forbidden Liling from becoming an official member of the crèche. Mum and the crèche children had fed and raised Liling anyway, and Augusta had gotten so sick of how much Wendy complained about paying for a free loader who wasn't part of the crèche that he had married Liling a few months ago to legitimise her into the family!
The third oldest was the almost 14 year old Mandy, another pure human with no mutations, she was the daughter of Wendy's former late wife who died before Wendy married Mum. As Wendy's step daughter, Mandy had simply been tacked onto the crèche. Her biological father had been killed by a deadly Tyranid naval boarding action on his chaos ship before she was born, and her biological mother had been murdered by her own slaves before Mandy's 1st birthday.
Almost the same age as Mandy was the slightly younger 13 year old Violet, a mutant like Egg who was Egg's half sister by a different father. Violet (like Egg) was the oldest biological daughter of the (arguably criminally insane) Tzeentch worshipping mutant sorceress turned Daemon Princess, the terrible TigerLily. TigerLily was bad news all through and so completely evil that raising children (without doing terrible things to them) was completely beyond her, so on the whole Egg and Violet were more than happy to be raised by a slave in a crèche away from that abusive tyrant!
Violet was a psyker like her mother, only less powerful than the terrible power of her Gamma level mother, a mere Iota level psyker. Violet was capable of little more besides basic telepathy, a mere flea compared to the abilities of Egg and TigerLily.
Physically Violet was a type of stable mutant abhuman sacred to Tzeentch, known colloquially as a "bird mutant". Like all bird mutants, Violet had razor clawed bird feet in place of human feet, laid eggs rather than normal human births, and like all bird mutants she had at least some level of psychic powers. In addition to these general mutations of all bird mutants, Violet had also inherited some of TigerLily's more useless chaos "gifts", namely blue feathers in place of hair on her head, blue body hair/eyebrows, and a mutant voice box that was great at making bird noises but struggled with human speech.
A while back a Slaanesh worshipping pedophile had brutally raped every girl in the crèche except Liling, and the then 12 year old Violet had gotten pregnant from the rape. TigerLily had killed the man who raped her daughter in a suitably gruesome fashion and Egg had spent days washing all the pedophile's blood out of her feathers afterwards! A few days after the rape Violet had agonisingly squeezed out a gigantic egg and had spent the next 9 months sitting on it like a hen before a little baby mutant boy hatched out, whom she named Patrick.
Violet was currently being cared for/abducted by the insane TigerLily in the Night Lords fleet, and Egg hoped that Violet and Patrick were ok.
Youngest of all in the crèche was Egg, 11 going on 12, cute as a button, and one of the most powerful psykers in the entire galaxy. Egg was physically very similar to Violet, with the same mutations (not counting her awesome psychic powers). Egg was TigerLily's second child, and the oldest legitimate child of the Night Lords Chaos Lord Luke Sevenson, a mass murdering colossal psychopath with the blood of millions on his hands.
TigerLily had originally been married to Violet's biological father and as the most powerful psyker in Chaos Lord Luke Sevenson's fleet she had naturally become his official chaos sorcerer to aid him with her powers. She had then seduced/manipulated the Chaos Lord into becoming infatuated with her, given Violet's biological father the flick like a piece of trash, and married the Chaos Lord becoming the first (and only) woman he had ever married. The marriage had been a complete train wreck right from day one but had lasted long enough to produce Egg and a number of other children.
TigerLily had then stabbed everyone in the back to ascend to Daemonhood, killing hundreds of billions of her fellow chaos worshippers on the Daemon world of Aumaom and ultimately causing the current war between the Night Lords and the Iron Warriors! She was only even still "allowed" onboard the Night Lords fleet because a Daemon Princess is a very hard stowaway to forcefully evict! Becoming a Daemon Princess clearly had not improved TigerLily's terrible lack of human decency and Egg wanted absolutely nothing to do with that evil bitch!
Egg had all but disowned her biological mother, and she wasn't particularly impressed by her mass murdering biological father either to be honest. Her father absolutely adored her, partially because she was his first born legitimate heir, but mostly because she was an Alpha Plus psychic super weapon who could destroy his enemies for him!
The Chaos Space Marine Lord had been absent almost her entire life, content to leave her in the care of slaves and his emotionally damaged sister Wendy as he and TigerLily fought in terrible wars. It was only after a decade later, only after the news reached him that one of his offspring was an Alpha Plus, only THEN did he suddenly decide to travel halfway across the galaxy to suddenly become a part of her life!
Well maybe this wasn't entirely fair, he had lost astropathic contact with their ship before Egg hatched under Mum's care and had not known where they were until ten years later. But Egg was inclined to be unfairly biased against the old villain.
As far as Egg was concerned, "family" had absolutely NOTHING to do with biology, family were the people who were actually a part of your life without any ulterior motives, family were the people who loved you just for being you whether you were an Alpha Plus or not!
People who feared her and sucked up to her were not family, people who tried to intimidate her into obeying them were not her family, anybody who saw her as an Alpha Plus rather than a person was not her family. No matter what their blood none of these people were TRUE family.
No, family was the sisters who set up her innocent dolls in unflattering positions when she wasn't looking to make her that wonderful combination of giggly and cross. Family was the big brother who fearlessly gave her his patented "atomic death tickles" till she wet herself, completely unafraid of playfully tormenting one of the most powerful psykers in the galaxy. And most especially, family was a lowly slave woman who absolutely loved her to death and saw only her daughter when she looked at her.
...
Inquisitor Horatio Hoffman of the Ordo Hereticus sipped a cup of coffee as he read through his thick fat folder of intel on his target "Egg Sevenson". He liked his coffee to be like his heart, black as night in the bitterness of responsibility and strong as adamantium in faith to the Immortal God Emperor. The potent strong coffee gave him focus, kept his uncompromising mind razor sharp.
For 7 long years Inquisitor Hoffman had been hunting this dangerous mutant psyker. His prey was just a naive little girl, but the traitor legions who carried and harboured her were cunning as foxes and had kept her from his reach. They were very wise to keep her from him, for he would kill her on the spot if he ever got hold of her.
Inquisitor Horatio Hoffman had dedicated his entire career to tracking down and destroying Alpha Plus psykers with extreme prejudice. He had destroyed scores of the dangerous living super weapons during his centuries long life, and would destroy scores more until no Alpha Plus ever drew breath again.
Egg Sevenson was by far the most dangerous Alpha Plus currently alive today. She wasn't the most able of the 32 currently documented Alpha Pluses alive at this exact moment, in fact she had some of the worst ability to safely control her own powers he had ever seen in an Alpha Plus. Neither was she the most powerful of the 32 (a soon to be assassinated toddler in the Segmentum Solar currently held that honour). What made Egg Sevenson so dangerous was the fact that the traitor legions had acquired her!
The fallen space marines had contained her powers safely behind a helmet mounted Gellar field to make her safe to keep on their ships and for the past almost year now they had been training her to control her powers. A decade from now her training would be completely mastered and she would be one of the most unstoppable killing machines the forces of chaos had ever possessed!
The elimination of Egg Sevenson was now one of the highest priorities in the upper echelons of the Ordo Hereticus, the Officio Assassinorum, the Chamber Militant, and was even a growing concern for the High Lords of Terra themselves. If this psyker was not killed before she was fully trained then she would kill billions of imperial soldiers and be a catastrophic threat to the entire Imperium of Mankind!
Horatio took another sip of coffee, a deep mouthful this time, and studied the intel as though it were a lover's body, intensely focused on every single word and what it meant.
For 7 years he had studied this little girl in intimate exhaustive detail, he KNEW her, knew her as deeply as if she was his own daughter. Her every action and movement was reported by an army of spies and informants in the chaos fleets, she could hardly so much as go to the toilet without Inquisitor Hoffman knowing about it! To defeat your foe you must KNOW your foe, and Horatio knew Egg Sevenson better than she knew herself.
She was a very gentle, loyal and sweet natured girl. She had a goodness and an innocence about her that would make weaker men question the necessity of her death. This was no blood mad monster or evil minded manipulator like so many other chaos worshippers were. Egg Sevenson was just a normal little girl who wanted nothing more in life then playing with dolls, watching films and having the simple pleasures of fellowship with her loving close knit crèche.
If it had not been for her powers then even the uncompromising Inquisitor wasn't bloody minded enough to go significantly out of his way to kill such an inoffensive creature. She was a mutant, but the lost and the damned had billions of mutants, and as mutants went she was (if not for her powers) about as gentle and inoffensive as a mutant could be.
A lifetime of almost always having her mind cut off from the warp meant that no chaos god yet had a hold on her to corrupt her. Her soul was as pure now as the day she was born, at least as pure as a mutant could be. She had been raised to worship Slaanesh and cheerfully parroted the disgusting behaviour her depraved community taught her was normal, but the actions of worship had no spiritual effect beyond mere physical acts, and Slaanesh had so far been unable to touch her soul, forever frustrated by the Gellar field produced by her helmet.
Inquisitor Horatio Hoffman would certainly kill this gentle natured little girl, but he would take no pleasure in the act. In fact he would feel a sense of sadness, grief even. You can't study such a dear and inoffensive little thing in so much detail for 7 long years without feeling SOMETHING when you finally must end her life.
This was the grief of the Inquisitor, the pain that all Inquisitors felt. This was the terrible burden that comes with the power of the office of the Inquisitor, the sleepless nights where every person you have ever killed appears before you in your mind and asks, "why did I deserve to die?"
When Egg Sevenson was dead, the ghost of her memory would torment him with guilt, he knew this with certainty. "All I ever wanted was peace, why did you murder me?" she would say. And when that happened Horatio knew that he would weep, weep behind closed doors in the dark, weep over the ghost of Egg Sevenson.
Horatio had a small army of children ghosts that tormented him with guilt in the dark of the night. They haunted his dreams and often he would awake screaming with grief and remorse. It was the especial burden of an Alpha Plus hunter.
Alpha Plus psykers were so dangerous that the safest way to assassinate them was when they are as young as possible, preferably as babies and toddlers, before they gain enough wisdom and awareness to use their powers to protect themselves properly. Horatio had made it his duty to ensure that no Alpha Plus in the galaxy lived past the age of 5.
To this end Horatio had shot scores of extremely young children in the heads, almost every one of his victims was a child, just innocent little children who didn't understand what they were or why they had to die! And every single night the ghosts of their memories would look at him in silent judgement with gaping bullet holes in their foreheads, driving him mad with guilt.
He had studied Egg longer than most and knew her more intimately. Even worse, Horatio actually LIKED Egg Sevenson, she was just so intrinsically likeable as a person.
He had actually laughed out loud when he read the report about Egg stealing every single crate of food from the Chaos Lord's kitchen supply to feed to some starving chained up imperial prisoners in the Chaos Lord's grim dungeons! The Chaos Lord and his entire household had gone without breakfast that day and the Chaos Lord had tanned the little girl's hide for that! It was at once adorable, commendable and absolutely hilarious. This was just the sort of person Egg was.
Horatio had felt holy rage when Egg was molested repeatedly for many months by a slave man of the chaos lord's household who was a pedophile, a part of Horatio had actually wanted to be present to intervene, to shoot the vile pedophile himself! It was ridiculous of course but it just goes to show how well he had studied the girl that he could be so emotionally invested in her.
No matter how much it hurt him, he would one day have to put a hole in this little girl's head. The 7 years of study was ultimately for this purpose alone. He must know her as completely as possible, know her so well that he cried when she cried and cheered when she cheered, all to give him the maximum advantage in hunting her down and eventually killing her.
And when he did, Horatio had no doubt whatsoever that he would weep. He would weep as though he had just killed his own daughter...