One of the most interesting things most of us noticed about the building we were using as a base of operations was the amount of effort that Interrogator Jarod put into making it a veritable fortress. Once Tink and Twitch had set up most of our perimeter defenses Sarge had taken the opportunity to go check out the living arrangements that Jarod had set up for himself and his own retinue, with Doc and Twitch following him. Nubby wanted to come too but the rest of us convinced him that it was probably a bad idea. While we weren't necessarily against stealing from the other interrogator, it'd make a poor first impression.

We were surprised to find that they were almost as extensive as ours, with the only major difference being the lack of tripwires. Immediately Twitch began ranting on the lack of said tripwires, right up until we ran into Jarod himself, who seemed to be grinning.

Twitch asked why he was so smug, and why he hadn't put up any tripwires. Jarod explained that while our group and himself were accustomed to stepping over tripwires, the pair of guardsmen he'd brought were not. And he doubted the space marine would be at all amused to have to step over such devices anyway.

That seemed to satisfy Twitch somewhat, surprising the rest of us. Despite his own views on the matter, Twitch admitted that soldiers unused to such defensive tactics were at a higher risk of injury and that Jarod wasn't wrong in setting up his base the way he had. Once we'd gotten over the fact that the new interrogator had managed to reason with Twitch somehow, we asked him what his plans for the near future were.

We didn't get much in the way of instructions from Karev, other than the fact that there was supposed to be a genestealer cult on the planet somewhere. Jarod clapped his hands and grinned, a gesture that in hindsight, we should have dreaded.

He explained that he had been working with Karev for a while and that even though he wasn't technically an Inquisitor, he about had the power of one. He explained that yes, there was a genestealer cult on the planet, but it was secondary to another objective. Apparently, there was a legend on the planet that they had once been visited by the Grey Knights. He paused, and while we assumed that was supposed to mean something at the time, we didn't find out till much later.

Anyway, at the time Jarod seemed surprised at our lack of reaction, before slapping his forehead, muttering something about "Stupid secret space marine chapters…"

He went on to explain that the Grey Knights were a top-secret branch of the Ordo Malleus, and were exclusives focused on dealing with daemons. The fact that this planet had legends about them meant that whenever they had come here, something had to have gone horribly wrong for them to not bother with their usual form of secrecy.

Doc asked what their normal brand of secrecy was. Jarod told him that it usually involved either sterilizing the planet's population or Exterminatus.

Sufficiently convinced that we were now dealing with something beyond the norm - if 'normal' was even a valid concept for us anymore - we asked what this had to do with our own mission. Jarod explained that it was going to be our job to act as a distraction. That's why we'd been told about the Genestealers in advance because that was what we were going to be dealing with in the meantime.

Meanwhile, Jarod and his retinue were going to try and find what kind of link this planet held to the Grey Knights, and what had happened to keep them from wiping out the planet's population. Sarge asked why he was telling us all this if it was top secret information. He responded with a smirk that made us all feel admittedly uneasy.

"Because I'm pretty sure you're all sick of not needing to know this kind of information." He said.

While we didn't disagree, most of us went a little stiff as he talked. We'd been in the same building for less than a day and he was already he was picking apart our likes and dislikes. Leaving the thought for another day, Sarge asked him how he and the Inquisitor wanted us to deal with the genestealer cults in the meantime.

Jarod explained that there were a few cities that had been influenced by the genestealers, the one we were all currently in being the likeliest one. He said it was up to us how to handle finding out where the cultists were hiding, and how to deal with them. He explained that, again, the genestealers were a secondary objective, and that while it was important in its own right, he'd rather us not deal with the cults immediately, at least not until he had found some good enough evidence to support the grey knights visiting the planet.

To sarge, that translated to; "Handle it, but take your time."

Which sounded like a pretty good deal to the rest of us.

[-]

The first place we decided to investigate was one of the bars. Sarge, Nubby and Doc were the ones that went to go mingle with the patrons while the rest of us worked on other, more conspicuous parts of our work. Tink made sure to run his drone over the city, trying to keep an eye on anyone suspicious coming into or leaving the bar. The main giveaways would have been robes, third arms, or fangs. We weren't altogether convinced Tink would find anything, but it never hurt to try.

Twitch was who we had assigned to keep an eye Tink, though he mostly just kept pointing out suspiciously Orky looking Patrons and demanding they be followed. He never found anything though, as most of them turned out to just be especially gruff construction workers.

Inside the bar itself, the rest of us were trying to work out among the Patrons just how we might find the cult. Nubby leaned toward the shadier parts of the bar, Doc kept trying to keep away from the glares many of the Patrons shot his way, while Sarge seemed more intent on interrogating anyone he thought might have any amount of information we might need.

Now, to Sarge's credit, he did manage to keep it quiet, with only four outbursts of pained screaming ringing out through the bar. Luckily there weren't any explosions.

We were there for about three hours before Sarge rounded everyone up and we headed back to the base and consolidate our information.

Tink and Twitch had been unable to verify any of the Patrons as Genestealers or cultists, so that wasn't really all that helpful. Doc had only gotten aggressive glares whenever he tried to talk to anyone, and Sarge's interrogation techniques, while admittedly good, hadn't revealed any information about where the cult might be located. He found out that it existed of course, as one of the people he interrogated was apparently thinking about joining but hadn't been able to find where they were located. Sarge's interrogation had thoroughly discouraged his inclination.

Nubby turned out to be the most successful in his information gathering. According to him, the Cult had been driving the majority of the major crime syndicates into the ground, more often than not acting as vigilantes. The large-scale crime was at an all-time low in the city thanks to the cult, who apparently used their reputation to gain members from the people who got screwed over by the law and its oversight.

If nothing else, it would make cutting them out hard to justify to the common citizen.

Nubby had gotten a location, fortunately enough. A warehouse on the opposite side of the city that had been abandoned for years had been showing signs of activity for a while now, and no one had been successful in trying to break in and find out what was going on. The rest of us tried to ignore how he knew no one had been able to break in.

With the moon high in the sky, we decided to take a break for the night. None of us had noted that Jarod and his crew were missing, and we really only noticed when the group came in at some ungodly hour of the morning waking everyone up. The first thing we noticed about was the haggard look of the guardsmen and the dried blood that covered everyone's armor, including the space marine. Most of us knew better than to ask questions. Tink wasn't most of us.

"What the hell happened to you?"

Jarod sent us a glare, before explaining that apparently word had gotten around that some guardsmen had been asking about the local genestealer cult. Apparently, Jarod and the guardsmen had been attacked by genestealers, and the only reason everyone had come back in one piece was thanks to Calivar hiding close by.

Tink was about to ask how he had managed to hide a space marine before he was smacked upside the head by Sarge.

Sarge apologized for the inconvenience, using what little of his diplomacy classes had actually stuck in his head. Fortunately for newly christened Interrogator, Jarod just waved him off and told him to be more careful. Walking over he handed Sarge a data-slate that he explained had been on the body of one of the cultists that had attacked him. From what little he had gleaned from the device himself, there was going to be a meeting later on in the week in order to recruit several new members.

After giving us that information, Doc asked how his own mission was going. He explained that it was moving slowly, primarily due to the fact that even if the Grey Knights didn't wipe all trace of their involvement from the system, then there still wouldn't be much information about them. And the fact that they had been jumped by a group of cultists hadn't helped matters.

Most of winced at the remark, but no one denied that we had probably screwed up. Looking back on it, we probably should have been more suspicious about why the other Interrogator had been so… nice to us. In the end, though it didn't really matter all that much. He had his job and we had ours, and it was easy enough for us to stay out of each other's way.

Once he and the other guardsmen went to sleep, we worked out a plan to deal with the incoming raid on the warehouse. The idea to not raid the place came up, but it was shot down almost immediately when Twitch pointed out that none of us were really good at subtlety. After a bit of arguing we decided to try and get the local PDF or Arbites to come out and help. If we couldn't convince them the good old fashioned way, Sarge could just wave his pretty Rossette around and we'd be golden.

The plan wasn't perfect, and we acknowledged the fact that we probably wouldn't be very popular if we put down one of the major peace-keeping organizations in the city, but they were also vigilantes that took the law into their own hands. They also worshipped giant evil space bugs, which, if we weren't careful, would come down and eat every single last speck of biomass on the planet.

Yeah, we were fairly sure we had the moral high ground on this one.

[-]

AN: Bleh, I suck at writing characters. On one hand I'm glad to have a bit more in the way of characters, and the Guardsmen do give me a certain amount of pleasure to write, but on the other… I have way too many ideas, and making them into a cohesive narrative really isn't feasible, so I've had to toss more than one in the bin. Here's hoping I can work out a way to make everything work.