Green Means Go, Red Means Go Fasta, Blue Means Stop

When Lieutenant Mozt of the Cadian 144th returned to the outpost with a platoon wounded and weary from war, his first thought was that it had been overrun by the enemy. He could smell the fungal reek of the foe everywhere, their scrap littered the ground within the walls, and then an explosion blew out an upper floor of the inner northwest bastion. He was on the verge of ordering his men forwards to the attack, but was checked by the fact that the walls were manned by his fellow guardsmen who also rushed back and forth within them.
“Lieutenant Vergis!” he called, spotting someone he recognised. “What’s all this?”
“That’s the Doctor’s doing,” she replied, raising her helmet to wipe sweat from her violet eyes.
“The Doctor? Doctor who?”
“You’ve been out for a couple of weeks, haven’t you?” she said, and sighed. “I’d better show you up, she’ll want to debrief you anyway.” Bemused, Mozt turned to his bedraggled troops.
“1st, 2nd and 3rd squads, reinforce the walls. The rest of you, three hours R&R then relieve,” he ordered, before following Vergis towards the northwest bastion, smoke still trailing from the broken window. “So, this Doctor…” he began as they stepped through the doors and had their identities checked by the guardsman inside, waving down the salutes of his comrades as they stood from their game of cards.
“She showed up last week, pulled my platoon out of the fire and got us back here. We wouldn’t have made it if not for her.”
“Showed up?”
“Literally, out of nowhere. Distracted the Orks and gave us time to fall back.”
They hesitated as they approached the 3rd level of the bastion, hearing raised voices, and a moment later the stairs above them were occupied by the dread figure of Commissar Walkuf, who barely gave them a glance as he stormed past them, visibly fuming.
“What’s eating him?” Mozt whispered.
“Ah, that’s the reason we wouldn’t have made it.” Vergis replied just as softly. “He was going to execute me for leading my unit into an Ork ambush, but the Doctor stopped him.”
“How?” Mozt exclaimed in incredulity, then blinked as they entered the catastrophic mess of the Doctor’s laboratory, and a dark-skinned and further soot-blackened woman rushed excitedly over to them. She was wearing a long semi-burned blue laboratory coat and sturdy goggles, but around her neck was… Mozt’s mind turned bleary, and for a moment he thought he saw no more than a slip of paper in a plastic film, but then his mind cleared and he registered the unmistakeable stylised letter I. “Inquisitor…” he managed.
“Doctor will do, I don’t have time to remember more than one name,” the woman snapped, words rattling off like slugs from an Ork Shoota. “You’re one of the ones just returned, yes? Fascinating, simply fascinating! Tell me, have you located the point of psychic confluence?”
“What-“
“Psychic confluence! You are aware of the low-lying psychic field this species gives off aren’t you? You must be, you’ve been fighting them here for months. I noticed it the moment I arrived, makes my liver itch.”
“I don’t-“
“Oh good grief, what happened to ‘know your enemy’? For that matter, do you even know yourself? Sun Tzu would be so disappointed, good thing I’ll never tell him. Or maybe I will, that’d get him back for cheating at poker with me and Oda Nobunaga. Anyway, re-education time, take a look at this.” She rummaged around in the scattered detritus and produced a huge scrap-metal pistol, with a mouth wider than a human eye socket. “You’re a soldier, right?” she asked as she handed it to him. “So, tell me what is wrong with this.” Mozt peered at the weapon, but it was his hands that gave him the relevant information about it. His skin crawled at contact with the xenos weapon, and its weight was considerable, but his experienced hands checked the weapon’s status as smoothly as they would his own laspistol. He noticed the problem within seconds.
“You’ve already started dismantling this,” he said. The Doctor grinned.
“No I haven’t.”
“You must have done,” he protested, “the firing pin is missing.”
“There wasn’t one to begin with,” the Doctor whispered dramatically. “Fascinating, isn’t it? Now, would you be so good as to try to shoot that beaker over there please?” Shrugging at what he saw as a farce, Mozt aimed, prayed silently to the God-Emperor to keep his soul untainted from using an alien weapon, and pulled the heavy trigger. As he’d expected, nothing happened.
“There was no way for it to fire,” he said, feeling slightly foolish. “I’m afraid I don’t see the point of this.”
“Logically, you are spot on,” the Doctor told him, snatching the weapon back and yanking the plastic cover off a nearby bench. “Now, let’s try a different volunteer.” Mozt’s pistol was in his hand within half a second of the Doctor pulling away the sheet. Lying there on the cold slab, was the unmistakeable corpse of an Ork.
“You brought one of those things into the compound!?” Mozt gasped, his aim unwavering. He saw that the underside of the sheet was already covered in fungoid growths from the corpse’s spores, in the moment before the Doctor dropped it into a vat of acid.
“You’ve confirmed that that gun there doesn’t work,” she said, ignoring his concern. “Now watch this.” She placed the gun in the Ork’s limp hand with its swollen green finger on the trigger. Then she moved round to its half-open head and covered it with a complex mechanical helmet, which she flicked a switch on to make it crackle with electricity. The Ork convulsed, its finger spasmed, and the gun let out a loud bang. Mozt and Vergis instinctively dove for cover as a crater the size of a human torso appeared in the wall.
“But – how?” Mozt stammered in incomprehension.
“Fascinating, right? The psychic field,” the Doctor began, her words speeding up again, “it is an integral part of everything they do. What they believe becomes real, and the more of them there are the more real it becomes. Their guns literally work because they believe they do. That’s how they were created, a species invented with inbuilt technological expertise and a group psychic field. But then why is everything they make such junk?” She looked around as if expecting an answer, and then snapped her fingers. “Ah! Group momentum, that’s the thing! Fascinating! They build and build and build and then boom! Massive explosion in population, individual physical and mental ability, technological advancement… I bet they could outstrip most everyone else in this galaxy when they hit a peak.”
“Hang on a moment, begging your pardon,” Vergis put in, struggling to keep up. “You said ‘created’, didn’t you?”
“Obviously, they’re a slave warrior species, though it looks like they’ve been let off the leash. Maybe their creators were destroyed or fled, but whatever happened, they’re stuck following genetic commands millions of years out of date. But now I have this!” And with that, she snatched the helmet from the once more inert corpse. “I’ve got the template for their psychic link, and I can use it to channel my mind into the link and change those commands, set them free from their need to war. I need to directly connect it to a hub though, a confluence of the Ork psychic consciousness, which brings me back to my original question – have you located the point of psychic confluence?” Mozt blinked, but he was a soldier, and he was used to not understanding the things his higher-ups said. He disregarded the technobabble and focused on key words and context.
“When my unit was retreating with our 2nd company, we heard about an Ork Psyker who took out 5th platoon. It’s probably based in their camp to the north. Does that help?” The Doctor stared at him, long enough to make him uncomfortable. Then, slowly, her mouth widened into a grin.
“Then what are we waiting for? Pass me that vox, it looks like this war’s found its next and hopefully final battleground.”

Mozt stretched in the cupola of the Chimera APC and glanced around at the dozen other such vehicles around him, shielding his eyes from the glare of the sunset. Vergis’s unit was from the 89th, a mechanised regiment, and they’d suffered more losses of troops than vehicles. Vergis herself was visible, her head raised just out of the hatch of the nearest Chimera. Commissar Wakluf was in the rearmost Chimera where he could keep an eye on the entire force, but behind him was another vehicle, a Sentinel walker with a power lifter carrying a strange object that looked like a blue wooden box with windows, a door and a light on top.
“So, do you have any idea what that thing is?” he voxed over to Vergis, nodding back at it when she turned her head.
“Not really,” she replied tinnily and distorted by static, “but I think it might be some kind of experimental drop pod for unaugmented humans. It just appeared out of nowhere and she came out of it, so I’m only guessing it was dropped from orbit, but it could have been teleported instead. She is an inquisitor, after all.”
“You know what’s fascinating about your eyes?” the Doctor broke in over the vox link, her voice far less distorted than theirs.
“You mean the violet, ma’am?” Vergis replied, a week or so apparently being long enough to grow accustomed to the Doctor’s peculiarities. “All Cadians have violet eyes, because of the Eye of Terror.”
“Spatial rift, extradimensional, sentient. Gaze into the abyss and the abyss gazes into you, and the eyes are the windows of the soul – ah! That’s it! Your eyes aren’t normal windows, they’re like those one-way mirrors, an evolutionary trait to protect yourselves from things that would enter your mind. Just fascinating!”
“If you are finished, Inquisitor,” Wakluf cut in, his voice dripping disdain, “We have xenos incoming.”

The convoy's turrets swivelled towards the oncoming Orks, of whom the first sight emerged from the dark dust cloud. Ramshackle, scrapyard vehicles roared forwards, their exhausts belching oily smog and their crews howling with aggression.
"Steel your hearts, men and women of Cadia!" Wakluf bellowed, jerking the pintle-mounted heavy stubber beside him around and opening fire as the foe came into range, the turret mounted heavy bolters and multilasers of the convoy joining the fusillade. The Orks themselves had started firing long before their weapons were in range, and even as they drew closer the vast majority of their shots went wide while the disciplined Imperial fire tore their frontrunners to shreds, metal tearing and shattering, a few detonating in foul dark fireballs while others simply ground to a halt with their surviving crew loudly sounding their disappointment at their early retirement from the battle. For the Orks however, quantity was a quality all of its own. Crude but sturdy trukks and battlewagons smashed their wrecked companions out of the way while fire-trailing bikes screamed forwards, dodging and weaving through the debris. The sheer weight of firepower compensated for the lack of accuracy to hammer against the Chimeras’ hulls like iron hail. Above it all, the warcry of the Orks projected towards the humans like a hammer of sound.
"WAAAGH!"
“We can’t afford to be caught in a prolonged battle,” the Doctor reminded them. “We’ve got a schedule to keep, and if we’re not in position to assault the camp in time, the diversionary forces coming at it from the other directions will be massacred, and I won’t let that happen.” There was a strange buzzing sound that Mozt dismissed as vox distortion, and then the thump of someone hitting a computer console. “That’s got it. Right, head northwest, we’ll lose them in the valley, at this speed they won’t be able to catch up to us before then.”
“Other than the bikes.” Wakluf snapped, his bolt pistol blowing out the skull of a biker dangerously close to proving his point. A couple of them were tailing the Doctor’s Sentinel, their fang-headed prows making them look almost like hounds chasing down an ostrich.
“Mozt, I’m taking control of your turret,” the Doctor said, her voice accompanied by that buzzing sound again, and before the puzzled lieutenant could reply he had to grab hold of the hatch to steady himself as the turret swiftly traversed to point, it seemed, directly at the Sentinel. His jaw almost dropped when the Doctor swung her upper body down out of the cockpit to aim some kind of glowing device between the walker’s legs. The multilaser before him fired twice in quick succession, the beams passing less than a foot below the Doctor’s head and striking the two bikes on their front wheels, melting them in an instant and sending the bikes skidding to a ruptured halt. The first question to enter his reeling mind was how she had managed to keep the sentinel moving in that position, but Vergis’s words over the vox pushed all of that out of his mind.
“Entering the valley, Ork presence spotted.” This was accompanied by the distinct crack of lasguns as the troopers within the tanks fired broadsides from the sockets in the hull.
“All vehicles, report status,” Mozt ordered, and positive responses filtered in from each tank in turn. They were interrupted by a mighty roar as an Ork trukk slammed into the back of Wakluf’s Chimera. Mozt could dimly make out that the Orks had seized one of the Gretchin slaves and dashed it against the vehicle’s flanks, crudely dying them a deep crimson with its blood.
“Fascinating,” the Doctor muttered to herself without realising the vox link was still open, “psychic field works better with simpler, clearer, easily identifiable beliefs, colour having meaning, red ones go faster.”
“Their ‘belief’ is nothing compared to faith in the God-Emperor!” Wakluf sermonised, and as the Orks began swarming over the front of their vehicle to assault the Imperial tank, one of them falling under the trukk’s wheels down the gap between them in the process, he clambered out of the hatch to face them. His long black greatcoat and red sash streamed in the buffeting air rushing against his back, but he kept his balance and drew his chainsword, activating it with a shriek of accelerating blades. An Ork hand clasped the hull near his foot and he severed it. Unable to kick the rest of it away without losing his balance as it howled and waved its blood-gushing stump, he settled for shooting it in the head. He emptied the rest of the clip into the remaining Orks, massive shells detonating inside green flesh. Three came at him at the same time, all with wounds that would have killed a human, and though he decapitated one he could not prevent the others from boarding. He parried the massive cleaver of the one on his left, though the impact threatened to cause him to lose both his sword and his footing. He turned the fall into a risky sidestep and smashed the bottom of his pistol’s empty magazine into the other Ork’s open mouth. It staggered and he ejected the magazine, which remained jutting from its maw as it gnashed its broken teeth, before he helped it on its way with a heavy smash to the temple that knocked it back into the few remaining Orks on the front of the trukk. He let go of his pistol which dangled from a chain from his lapel and ducked under the return swing of the Ork on his left, lashing out with the chainsword at the same time to carve through its legs at the ankles, swinging back to shred the top of its head on the return cut. One of the Orks, with more presence of mind than the others, grabbed hold of the heavy gun mounted in the trukk’s passenger seat. Suddenly the Doctor’s sentinel was alongside them, and she leaned out of the side-hatch, aiming at the weapon with the small buzzing and glowing device she’d used before. Its bearings came loose as if unscrewed, the sudden weight pulling the Ork forwards out of the empty window. Simultaneously, Wakluf removed and primed a grenade from his belt, dropping it so that it fell neatly into the trukk’s passenger seat even as the Ork fell forwards out of it. With some effort, he clawed his way to the Chimera’s hatch and hauled himself down. He slammed it closed behind him an instant before the grenade detonated, followed swiftly by the trukk itself, fire washing over the Chimera’s hull. Mozt and Vergis had been forced within the safety of their armoured hatches too, as the air was now a storm of gunfire in all directions. Peering from the periscope, Mozt could see dozens of Orks firing down from what looked like a mining facility built into the valley wall. Many of them were standing in the huge apertures that would normally be pouring the stone waste from the drilling work into huge conveyors that would take it to be reused in building work, but which were now empty and silent, and most of the conveyors it seemed were now part of the group pursuing them, having been looted and ‘upgraded’ by the alien invaders. It seemed like the Doctor had led them into a deathtrap. There was a sudden flare from up ahead, as the heavy flamer on Vergis’s tank incinerated the crude barricade some Orks had been constructing, along with the enterprising builders themselves.
“What now?” Wakluf demanded breathlessly as his tank and the Doctor’s walker passed the last of the outflow pipes, the Ork force scant metres behind them and closing.
“Oh, I’ve already done it,” the Doctor replied, and Mozt realised that he was feeling a vibration stronger than the normal juddering of the tank. The ground was shaking. There was a sound like a titan clearing its throat, and then thousands of gallons of liquid stone began gushing from the pipes behind them.
“You remotely activated the facility?” Vergis said with awe. “How in the Emperor’s name did you do that?”
“Didn’t I mention?” laughed the Doctor in response. “I’m a genius.” If the Orks had kept their heads a sizeable chunk of their force might have gotten through, but in their surprise they panicked, and crammed into a narrow valley they inevitably collided. The sounds of their destruction stayed with the group even once they had left the valley behind and begun the final approach to their destination.

The deafening drumbeat of artillery was but a distant thunder as they arrived outside the camp’s south gate, a spiked and glyph-covered mass of scrap that would nonetheless deter any disorganised assault. As night fell, they eased their way out of cover towards the gate as stealthily as was possible in a dozen tanks. They’d only get one chance at surprise. An Ork sentry, bored and disgruntled at missing out on the fighting going on to the northwest and east, glanced out beyond the walls and thought it saw something move. It peered closer, and saw an Imperial Sentinel walker with someone leaning out of the window and aiming some sort of light. Before it could shout an alarm, seven multilasers slaved to a single command struck the gate at the same point in the same moment. The metal didn’t so much melt as evaporate, and the assault force went from sidle to full speed. They smashed what little of the gate remained aside and drove into the camp like a serrated dagger, lasers, bolters and flamers firing at will. The Doctor was shouting over the vox, ordering the other forces to go from diversionary bombardment to full assault. They lost their first Chimera a few minutes later as the Orks finally recovered from the shock assault. A rokkit screamed in from a rooftop to blow out the vehicle’s starboard tracks. The squad inside disembarked with speed and discipline, but that discipline wavered when they saw the lumbering clusters of Orks pounding towards them from all directions, and seconds later the vehicle they had just vacated was struck by a bolt of plasma that incinerated the driver’s compartment.
“Wakluf, go and pick them up!” the Doctor shouted.
“They’re already dead,” the Commissar returned.
“That’s an order!”
“Yes, Inquisitor.” Venom dripped from Wakluf’s words but he brought his Chimera to a halt and lowered the rear ramp, his squad filling the opening and firing crisp volleys at the Orks that even now were cutting them off from their comrades. The stranded squad charged the intervening Orks, bayonets stabbing and lasguns flashing, but only two made it through. One of the others turned back, cut off and panicking, and Wakluf’s bolt pistol ended his fear. The Chimera started moving again, but had to swerve aside as a massive buzz-saw blade shrieked towards them from a side street, and an Ork Deff Dread walker stomped out to face them. It raised a pincer claw and a third arm, a drill, but suddenly the Doctor was there, her sentinel knocking the larger machine aside, the strange blue box it held seeming to warble in distress at being used as a ram. The Ork machine turned at this new threat and thrust the drill forwards. It struck the blue box and scraped off harmlessly, the Ork hesitating in puzzlement. In that moment, the Doctor leapt from the sentinel’s cockpit and onto that of the Deff Dread. It tried to claw her off, but she aimed her strange device at the arm and at the last moment it deviated and instead sheared into the walker’s own power source. It sparked, sputtered and died. The hatch wheel spun and then slammed open as the pilot rushed furious and roaring from the stinking compartment, and the Doctor met it calmly with a swift knuckle punch to the throat that left it impotently paralysed. The nearby Orks backed away, fearful of a foe who could take down a Deff-Dread with such ease, enabling the Doctor to jump back to her own vehicle and take off after the rest of her force before they regained their nerve.
“Why did you kill him?” she angrily voxed to Wakluf, slightly breathless but clearly outraged.
“He was fleeing, showing cowardice and disobeying your orders,” Wakluf replied forcefully. “I did not challenge you when you intervened on Vergis’s behalf for allowing her force to be ambushed as it was, but my duty has been passed down from the Emperor himself, and not even the Inquisition has the right to change that.”

They suffered more losses before they disembarked at the centre of the camp, the remaining Chimeras forming a barricade across filth-strewn streets to guard their rear and flanks with with a couple of squads led by Wakluf, and the sounds of their stubborn resistance were a constant background as the remaining squads advanced cautiously. Before them was the central building in the camp. It had once been the administratum centre of the township, but now a ragged banner bearing the symbol of a malevolent red sun with a fanged face hung across its facade, the rotting corpses of human prisoners dangling from chains on the balcony above it.
“Why aren’t they defending this place?” Mozt wondered, and indeed, the only life in the plaza was the occasional fleeing Gretchin.
“The diversionary attacks were successful,” Wakluf snapped confidently over the vox, punctuated by hard bangs from his pistol. “The green filth have abandoned any pretence of defence.”
“It was certainly easier to get here than I was expecting,” Vergis said. “Almost too-“ A blast of green lightning cut her sentence and existence short in an instant of blinding emerald brilliance that left a fused and charred lump of flesh and armour smouldering where the young woman had been standing. The Ork psyker had revealed itself.
"Over to you, ma'am." Mozt shouted as he flung himself behind cover. The psyker - 'Weirdboy' as the Orks called such beings - stood on the balcony. The Doctor began fiddling with the dials and switches on the helmet as she raised it delicately onto her head, silently chilled by Mozt's lack of reaction to the brutal death of his comrade and friend. More bolts of lightning were searing down from the Ork and from the sky above it, which now roiled and churned like a stormy sea. Anyone touched by the lightning was killed instantly, and as it raged across the plaza it became clear that this was the trap they had been lured into. Trusting her own genius, she leapt out of cover, closing her eyes as the jade lightning leapt once more from the Ork's hand, reaching into her pocket and activating her sonic screwdriver. Her helmet ticked, inaudible against the crack of the lightning, until that crack, and the lightning itself, vanished. She opened her eyes. The Weirdboy was motionless, its blackened split-nailed hand still outstretched, drool from its frozen snarl mingling with the fluid that oozed from its permanently-split skull.
"Right then," she said, her voice oddly deep and distant. "Time to begin."

When Wakluf found them, the Doctor was sat opposite the now-slumped form of the weirdboy, Mozt covering the Greenskin with his pistol. A green nimbus surrounded the helmet on her head and that placed on the Ork.
"What warpcraft is this?" he spat, drawing his pistol in an instant.
"She neutralised the Ork psyker by connecting herself to its psychic wavelength, or something," Mozt explained without confidence. "Now she's connecting to the... the Ork group psychic consciousness, I think she called it."
"Why?" Wakluf demanded. Before Mozt could answer, the Doctor opened her eyes, and both of them recoiled as they saw the shining neon-green orbs those eyes had become.
"So much aggression..." she whispered, barely seeming to be aware of them. "It is all they have known for such a long time. Millions, perhaps even billions of years. I taste the fear their creators felt that drove them to make something like this as a last desperate attempt at survival. And I can fix it. I can save them!”
“Save them?” Wakluf spat. His hand was trembling around the grip of his pistol. “The only good Ork is a dead and incinerated Ork. They are a plague, a filthy disease upon the galaxy that must be cleansed! This is heresy of the highest order.” His eyes snapped up and narrowed. “I see it now. You are a psyker, that is how you are able to do this. An abominable warp-touched xeno-lover.” He blinked, trying to clear his vision. Since their first meeting, he’d felt his eyes could not be trusted around her, but could not identify the problem. Now, his fierce hatred sharpened his senses and will, and guided by his suspicion, overwrote the glamour affecting his perception.
“Psyker. Heretic.” He raised his pistol, aiming it at the Doctor. “You are no Inquisitor, just a witch casting an illusion over a blank piece of paper.”
“Wakluf, please, doing this would save them and help to save humanity as well. Imagine a galaxy where you don’t have to live in fear of Ork invasions darkening your skies! Imagine peace!”
“I do, every time I kneel in prayer to the God-Emperor, and every night when I rest,” he said solemnly. “I pray for and dream of a day when every stinking Ork has been wiped from the universe. Every Ork. Every traitor. Every psyker. Right now, you look to me like all three, and I wonder, if your ‘connection’ to them allows you to affect their minds, what would your death do to them?”
“Please,” the Doctor pleaded one last time. Wakluf pulled the trigger.

Witnesses later assumed that the golden fire that had poured from the windows of the building had merely been the epicentre of the psychic shockwave that simultaneously killed every Ork on the planet. They were reluctant to enter, and as the building had taken severe damage, with the lower floors still engulfed in flame, felt justified waiting to assemble a proper search and rescue attempt. Thus, no-one witnessed the Doctor sitting up in the charred ruin of the upper floor. He stood slowly, unsteady. Long black hair fell in front of his face, and he brushed it out of the way irritably, noting how pale his hand was. A cough made him turn, and he hurried over to where Mozt was slumped. The Guardsman was in a terrible state, proximity to the regeneration energy leaving him with fatal burns, but he still clung to life.
“Stay still, Mozt,” the Doctor soothed, scanning him with his sonic screwdriver and closing his eyes at the result he had already predicted.
“Is… is that you, Commissar?” Mozt stammered. His eye sockets were seared and empty pits.
“Yes,” the Doctor lied, feeling it not to be a good situation to get into the subject of regeneration.
“What happened to the Doctor? To the Orks?”
“They’re all dead, Mozt. The link killed every Ork on this planet, and probably a lot of them in orbit too.” Mozt’s blackened lips weakly lifted into a smile.
“It was… worth it, then,” he managed, dark liquid oozing between his lips. Then his head slumped, and he was at peace. The Doctor stood, his hands and teeth clenched. This brave human soldier had accepted death as a result of his comrade’s actions because of the losses it caused the enemy. His eyes rose and met those of Commissar Wakluf. The black-clad political officer was just coming round, and the Doctor shouted at him not to move. His greatcoat was caught on a broken plank of wood, and below his feet was a jagged hole where the staircase had collapsed into the inferno that still raged below. The building had been home to a lot of parchment in its time as an administratum centre, and it seemed a lot of the Ork decorations and desecrations were highly flammable as well. Only this room was relatively free of such things, presumably because it was the abode or prison of the unstable Weirdboy.
“Who is that?” Wakluf demanded groggily. He quickly grasped his situation however and ceased his fidgeting.
“Just let me help you up,” the Doctor said, carefully making his way over towards the hole. This, however, gave Wakluf time for his eyes to refocus.
“Those clothes… you!” The confusion in his voice quickly gave way to bile and fury. “Is that your true form then, witch, or just another illusion? Or perhaps you are a shape-changer from the Warp itself?” He still had his pistol, dangling from its chain, and now he slowly raised it to aim at the Doctor again. The wood behind him gave a creak at the movement and he dropped an inch as his coat tore further.
“You’ll die if I don’t help you!” the Doctor yelled in frustration.
“Better to die than to be saved by a Daemon!” Wakluf hissed back, and pulled the trigger. The Doctor dived forwards at the same time, the shell passing over his head as the recoil dislodged the Commissar and he began to fall, only to be jolted violently as the doctor’s left hand closed around his. The Doctor grimaced in pain, splinters of wood penetrating his skin from the jagged lip of the hole as he tried to haul the larger man up.
“Please, no more death!” the Doctor screamed, tears threatening at the corners of his eyes. “Live, and find something good to live for!”
“I have my duty, and that is good enough to die for.” There was nothing but hatred in Wakluf’s eyes as he fired the pistol again. The Doctor jerked to the side to avoid it, but it was impossible to dodge while still holding the other man’s wrist. Instead of going through his head, the shell tore through his shoulder and its detonation obliterated his upper arm. Wakluf fell into the fire without a sound. The Doctor knelt by the edge, his arm already reforming from the regeneration energy that still coursed through him. Then, as the troops outside shouted enquiries regarding the shots they had heard and preparing to climb the walls in search of survivors, the Doctor fled.

+What is wrong, my dear Doctor?+
The voice came into his mind once again, unbidden, as he sat curled up in one corner of the T.A.R.D.I.S. control room. The musical, cold, arrogant voice.
“This can’t be humanity,” the Doctor whispered. “This can’t be the humanity I saved time and time again, the humanity I loved and cherished and that saved me almost as often.”
+Necessity, my friend. They live in a galaxy where constant war has become the only method of survival. It is all any of them have ever known, and were they to try to change it, they would die. Or worse.+
“You promised me beauty, Eldrad!” There was anger now, pushing down the sorrow, and the Doctor surged to his feet as if the Eldar seer was there with him to be confronted. “You promised me wonders of resilience and courage, ingenuity and achievement!”
+Do not deny that you found all such things, just not to your liking. I never promised they would be, nor did I promise you would find flexibility of thinking, inclusiveness or love.+
“There must be something else,” the Doctor whispered hoarsely. “There must be some light in this endless grim darkness. Some splendour and joy, otherwise what point would there be in their lives?” There was silence for a while, and then Eldrad’s voice returned, seemingly more amused than before.
+I think I know something that would suit. Follow these coordinates.+
The Doctor punched them in and clung on tightly as the T.A.R.D.I.S. shuddered into action.
“So what am I going to see?” he shouted over the vworping.
+A celebration of beauty and sacrifice, the gratitude of the living for the honour of the dead. The Sanguinalia, celebrated on every one of the more than a billion worlds in the Human empire. I suppose, to take an example from your memory, it could be equated to the old Earth Christmas.+ The colour drained from the Doctor’s already pale face.
“Oh dear.”