Fever Conclusion

Vast fungal towers reach up towards your shuttle as you return once more to Fever, its roiling, spore-choked atmosphere embracing you like an old companion as you descend. From above you can see the ruin the previous expedition left in its wake - a cruel gouge, mile after mile in length, tears through the dense mycelic networks and greasy neural swamps, already being swarmed over by thousands of native xenos. For a moment it almost seems like another battle awaits, but the creatures part respectfully as you disembark. Others kneel or bow, folding their spindly limbs in supplication, or offering strange floral gewgaws like worshippers before a saint.

Evidently, speech is not the only thing Fever has learned from its Imperial visitors.

You are guided gently down towards the great rift in the planet's mind, already healing before your eyes. At its peak you see dozens - no, hundreds - of bloated birthing-sacs growing in ripe clusters, each cradling a slumbering anthropolyp visible beneath its pinkish skin. Some have already risen, taller and stronger than the half-breed creature you found in the alien lair, gliding atop curtains of writhing tentacles as they oversee their planet's wounded mind.

One turns to meet you. It's a strange feeling, to talk with a planet, but nevertheless it thanks you for all you have done. Foundstone's destruction is a sad thing, it says. It bore the colonists no ill-will, and would have happily sheltered them if circumstances had been different. But their deaths are a small price to pay for the return of its sanity. In return, it offers two things. The first is a soft, sac-like plant the size of your fist. Fever claims it grew from such a root, long, long ago, and that if planted on another world will eventually create another like it. The process takes millennia, however, and in the sort term it will provide an abundance of food to anyone willing to nurture it. The second, more nebulous and offered to Tarriel alone, is simply an offer of 'communion'.

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After several days of effort, your Astropath is able to send a message to your Mechanicus allies on Licis informing them of the events that have transpired, the ships in need of rescue and the new planet which awaits them. The nature of psychic communication means you're unlikely to receive a reply, at least not for some time, but you know the message has been dispatched. The adepts of Stygies are nothing if not curious, however, and you feel confident they will descend upon Fever with their typical enthusiasm. One only hopes they leave the knives at home.

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The Ghorvast orb, despite your best efforts, refuses to surrender anything but the least of its secrets. Confronted with the prospect of a powerful psychic device of largely unknown capability, you drag the thing into the centre of Foundstone's ruins and bury it as deep as you can. The orb offers no resistance, and sinks silently into the earth as your excavators pile ton after ton of dirt and rubble atop of hated thing.

Their other artefacts prove less obstinate. As many of the Ghorvast's howler rifles are collected as possible, and Nicephoras leads a detachment of Stygian adepts to Fever's surface to study the remains of their war machines. The findings are universally horrifying - each vehicle is operated by an Abominable Intelligence, and their gristly tools of harvest and dissection speak of only more horrifying things to come. But as you have aptly demonstrated, they are far from invincible, and you take heart at that.

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Returning to the Esperanza brings its own challenges. The Martian adepts rescued from Foundstone are, initially, horrified - not just by the idea of taking subordinate positions to their treacherous Stygian peers, but by the aliens, abhumans, and pirates simultaneously welcomed aboard from the Morabito. They lobby you constantly for almost a full week, quoting scripture dredged from the holy books of the Omnissiah and Emperor alike, offering promises and threats in equal measure, before sullenly accepting their situation. The Stygians, for their part, regard the situation with as much amusement as they are capable of cogitating, and seem to take a perverse pleasure in assigning the Martians to positions designed to subtly insult their ranks and prior occupations.

The Morabito's crew are similarly uncomfortable at first. Unused to the discipline and routine of life aboard an Imperial starship, a plague of brawls quickly erupts before being ruthlessly quelled both by your own Armsmen and their own leaders, keen not to be thrown out an airlock days after being rescued. Jeanna and Merlina settle in well, at least, claiming quarters close to a series of empty storage halls some distance from the rest of the crew. There they begin the laborious process of installing a containment and breeding centre for their remaining Hormagaunts, eager to prove the worth of their bizarre experiments.

Finally, the peasants rescued from Foundstone. They're simple folk, even more so than the mining community you collected on Sultarn. Many of them find the concept of space flight terrifying, and an unfortunate sighting of Uraess results in a three-day-long bout of hysteria which leaves almost a score of them dead. Still, they adapt as best they can, huddling down in the cramped crew berths as they await passage to their new home.

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And thus, it is done. The Esperanza lights its engines once more and powers out of Fever's orbit, plunging into the void in search of its next objective: the corpse-world of Ghast.