The communicator board next to the Magos lit up and chimed. Ally patched it through. "Rose sends Aeronautica," came the somewhat garbled transmission. "Classify?" The techpriestess looked somewhat warily at Garen for a moment before she replied. "No. No need." A low rumble reverberated through the deck plating, and suddenly the lights flickered, and then came back up, although they were noticeably dimmer than before. "What's going on, Ma'am?"

A hololith display lit up, showing the face of a young woman, with dark features and long, snow white hair. "I'm on the bridge with the Captain. It seems our Gellar field almost collapsed, but engineering managed to salvage most of the ship." Garen paled visibly at that news, for the Gellar field was the only thing keeping the horrors of the warp from seeping onto a ship while it was in the warp. "The problem was that about a third of the ship was exposed to the warp." The woman on the screen shrugged, as if this was only a minor inconvenience. "Exposure was randomized throughout the ship. I wanted to see if you were all right." She turned to Garen and smiled wickedly. "Who's the boyfriend?"

The Magos blanched and made an extremely human gesture, sticking her tongue out in disgust. She ignored the woman, much to Garen's relief. "This is Flight Lieutenant Garen Danar. We were having... discussions... about the hangar bay doors."

"They didn't depressurize, did they?"

Ally shrugged. "Wouldn't know. I just put a diamond control modulator into the fusion reactor."

"Ah, Frak," came the response. "We need one on the bridge for Astrogation. We're still stuck in the warp, and we need to get out post haste." She grimaced slightly. "Normally I'd just ask you to sit tight, Magos, but I need you to bring one up to the bridge as soon as you can."

The woman in the mechanicus robes sighed. "All right. My communicator's working, so you can keep in contact. I'll see you in a bit, Inquisitor." She thumbed off the hololith and stood up, dusting herself down.

Garen was still struck dumb by the incongruity of the youthful, gentle face and the terrifying power she represented on the hololith when he felt a tug on his sleeve.

"Are you coming?" Ally asked. "It'd be a pity for me to leave you here to die."

For some reason, as they left the control room, Garen Danar found that quite comforting.

***

Ally Terenas wondered why she had brought the meatbag along with her.

It wasn't as if she felt like he was a bad person, or that he didn't have some knowledge worthy of the Grace of the Omnissiah, but a Magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus was a respected being throughout the Imperium, and as skilled a pilot the premier shuttle pilot of one of his Divine Majesty's ships might be, there were many such men who could claim such skill.

In short, he wasn't so special, and as a meatbag, distressingly prone to dying.

And she wasn't planning on using him as a human shield, either; the thought was rather anathema to her. Even before meeting her incongruous mistress, who had a merciful edge so completely out of kilter with her job and duties, Ally knew she had a rather wide view of the power of the Omnissiah's grace. Perhaps it was a weakness of the flesh, but when she saw her fellow humans suffer, especially the ones without her armoured skeleton, she always felt a pang of sadness at the loss of knowledge in the Omnissiah's grace. And while some of her colleagues argued quite reasonably that the total loss of Knowledge would be less in those who died younger than her, a Magos in service for many hundreds of years, something in Ally mourned for the fact that the young could never know more than a tiny grasp of the Glory of Knowledge, and that they could have discovered more. She was loathe to force any human to sacrifice their chance to find Knowledge over her own, and doing anything but giving him a lasgun and telling him to stay put would very likely lead to his death.

But then, in the current circumstances, she wasn't even so sure she could survive.

Her internal cogitators worked out an appropriate plan of attack. In her mind's eye, one of her cogitators brought up the internal schematics of the ship from its memory, and judging from what the inquisitor had said, each individual room had been either protected by the Gellar field, or open to the warp. Each room would be untainted; or tainted. The logic was simple- she would traverse as few rooms as possible, hoping that probability would work her way and that she would run into as few roaming Chaos monstrosities as possible.

She began to turn toward the connecting hallways going to the main trunk passageways through the ship, but she registered the pilot's hand grip ever so slightly harder on her shoulder. She could have ignored it completely, but there was something about the urgency with which he did so that made her turn around.

"That passageway's been modified," The pilot said to her. "It leads to a dead end." he shrugged. "It's been like that for about three years. The last census we had was about five years ago."

It was at that point that Ally revised her plan. Clearly, on a ship as old as the Swift Justice, not even a ten year old schematic would be anything but woefully inaccurate. Now she had no idea whatsoever how to get to the Bridge.

He gently steered her toward a different set of halls and bulkheads. "I've been working around here for most of my life," he said. "Lucky, too, that I'm an officer, or I wouldn't know topside that well either if I was just a rating." Then he turned to her, and there was a slightly incredulous look on his face. "Wait... aren't you a Magos?" The full ramifications hit him. "Don't you know???"

Ally looked askance at him, ignoring the question, but a sour note crept into her normally sweet voice. "Can you guide me to the Bridge?"

The pilot frowned slightly. "I can." He fidgeted slightly with his uniform collar as the sheer oddness of the situation spread over him. He, a mere human, telling a representative of the divine manifestation of Knowledge herself, how to get somewhere. "You know," he said, "that's probably more excitement I've had in the past five minutes than I've had in nearly twenty years of service." He tilted his head. "And you know, I really have a lot more questions to ask, but I'm sure there are more important things to worry about."

As he moved forward, somehow placing himself in front of his companion (How... oddly protective?) Ally knew why she had brought the meatbag along.

He might be the only one who could save them all.

***

Garen had led the two of them across three untainted rooms when she started to notice it.

"Can you hear that?" she asked him.

"Yes," he said, almost matter of factly, but a worried frown creased his brow. "The ship's not breathing."

Ally nodded. She knew exactly what he meant, for the Mechanicus and Men who lived on ships knew that the hulking monstrosities were not simply inert machines- ships were alive, and filled with the reassuring sounds of life, be they pumping of air exchanges, the happy blinking of cogitator warning lights, or the soft sounds of spoken conversation.

She couldn't hear anything. Not footsteps on deck plating; not mice scurrying through crevices, not even the slight ozone twang of electronics at work.

All around them was silence.

"She's never done that in my life," Garen said, and the Magos saw his adam's apple bobble in anxiety.

The two strained for a few moments longer, listening for anything other than the sound of their voices and their breathing. A few random clicks emanated from her, but that was the sound of her cogitators working, not the ship around them.

Ally heard a loud splash. She whipped her head around to the source of the noise, her hands now suddenly a mass of mechandrites.

Nothing.

Just a small pool of some dark liquid, near one of the bulkheads. Another pool suddenly appeared with another loud splash, about a foot away from the other.

And then another, a foot away from the second one. The trail of little puddles moved in a straight line, from one bulkhead to the other parallel to it. As they appeared, the puddles eventually formed into imprints.

Imprints of human feet.

Then Ally caught the metallic tang of iron in the air, and realised the liquid was a dark, lurid red.

The trail of bloody footprints seemed to ignore them as they splashed across the corridor, only to end a foot away from another bulkhead.

Ally suddenly sensed something she at least knew about- the human pheromone for unrelenting terror, and looked around at her guide. He would have looked vaguely impassive to the ordinary human, but she noticed his dilated pupils, the raised hair, and the immediate twelve percent efficiency boost to his respiratory system as fear and adrenaline coursed through his veins.

The Magos nodded toward the door. The man stood there, stock still, as if frozen.

Then Ally gently took his hand in hers, now transformed back into hands, and she felt him physically relax, as his heightened awareness clambered down from its more feral instincts to something akin to that which had been trained into him by two decades in his Divine Majesty's service.

When she reached the door at the end of the corridor and punched her access codes in to let it move aside for her, the man beside her spoke up.

"I'm sorry," he croaked, his voice shaky. "by the Emperor, I've never, ever seen..."

And then Ally said something she had thought she would never say to a meatbag.

"It's all right. I haven't either."

She almost smiled in reflex when she saw his mouth quirk up in spite of his fear at her joke.

"This is rather odd," Garen suddenly said, and pointed his head at some small fragments of debris on the ground near the door. There was an exposed space in the bulkhead, leaving open wiring and piping that ran inside the ship's wall. The space was a neat square, about the size of an access hatch, and shards of what appeared to be plastic lay scattered around the exposed wiring. She stooped down to look at the pieces of rubbish, brushing her robes closer to her body. One of her cogitators picked up a slight change in composition in the air, and she set one of her computers onto its analysis.

With a sudden rush of amusement, her cogitator spat out a heightened pheromone count in her companion, associated with human sexual mating rituals. She'd known that scent many a time, even from the most rarefied of her male colleagues. It never seemed to be voluntary; always seemed to arise at the strangest of situations; discussing experimental results, loading servitors onto cargo barges, even when she was performing repairs on herself.

Men. She smiled at their simplicity.

The fragment in her hand was a simple carbon polymer, probably some sort of panelling that had been shattered by the rigours of warp travel. It was about half an inch long and only a sliver wide. It was bent into right angles about two thirds along its length. The bending did not appear to be caused by whatever had caused the panelling to shatter, however, but that was only what a quick overview with her artificial eye told her. She'd probably need the services of a proper lab to be able to determine the exact forces upon the shard. Her brow creased, though, when she took in the rest of the shards around her feet.

They all were bent in at right angles.

The probability of a random explosion causing that was vanishingly small, but anything could happen in the warp. Ally simply supposed it was one of those things that happened in a place where the laws of physics and probability quite simply broke down.

She did stay squatting there, however, performing a more thorough check of all the shards, making sure they were all bent... somewhat unnecessarily, for she was luxuriating guiltily in the hormones her companion behind her was now venting profusely into the air as he gazed at her form from behind. Her mouth quivered slightly upwards... why on Mars did she want a Baseline to look at her like that? She hadn't been attracted to one in...

Decades, one of her cogitators informed her. And of all the places to start feeling like a Baseline again! her mind chided her.

She informed herself that significantly stressful situations brought out strange emotional reactions in even the Mechanicus.

Get Up, she told herself. If only for the poor Meatbag's sake.

No, she said, smiling now.

She was broken from her reverie when she heard the sound of screaming.