As Vect's influence grew ever greater, the Archons of the newly-formed Kabals sought audience in his court. Their petty schemes and veiled doublespeak bored him greatly.
Even the famous beauty and barbed wit of the latest Archon to enter Vect's throne room, Lady Aurelia Malys, stirred him not at all. Eventually Vect summoned all those who sought his favour to his throne room and set them an impossible task.
The loss of a human world's population was of little import to the star- spanning empire of Man; humans bred like insects and were easily replaced. Vect's challenge was not to destroy a single world or star system, but to poison the entire Imperium and return with proof of the deed.
Vect had set his challenge purely to thin the resources of those Kabals who had wasted his precious time. He did not expect any of these so-called Archons to achieve the task set out before them, and if some of them met their demise in the attempt, then so much the better. As Vect's task was laid down, the Archon known as Lady Malys allowed herself a slight smile. Outwitting the lesser races was child's play to her, and as large as the Imperium was, it was still only human.
Gathering to her side the entirety of her Kabal, the Poisoned Tongue, Malys mobilised her fleet and made haste into realspace. Through her connections with the Harlequins of the webway she had knowledge of an Imperial forge world that had suddenly become far more heavily defended than any of its neighbouring planets - the entire system had concentrated its military strength upon a single world, leaving the others lightly garrisoned and extremely vulnerable.
The industrial planet of Verdigris IX, settled deep in the heart of Segmentum Obscurus, now literally bristled with defence batteries and interceptor cannon. Its Hives were thronged to the point of claustrophobia with regiment after regiment of Imperial Guard and the armies of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and the God-Machines of the Titan Legions loomed through the polluted air of the wastes around the Hives' borders.
Evidently something extremely valuable existed upon Verdigris, and Malys alone knew its nature. Her spies had informed her that archaeo-technologists had unearthed a rare and vital relic from when the Imperium was at its height - a 'standard template construct' that could act as a blueprint for large-scale advancement across the galaxy. Every STC is of inestimable value to the Imperium of Man, but this particular construct, a medical miracle codenamed the Panacea, could save billions of human lives from death by poison and disease.
A conventional assault was out of the question. The High Fabricator of the planet had fortified his macrocomplex to such an extent that he could fill the skies with burning metal in an instant, an inverse rain of bullets and blasts that would shred a Dark Eldar strike force in a matter of moments.
Malys intended to retrieve the prize herself, but she could not do it alone. A blunt instrument was needed, and a big one at that. The fleet of the Poisoned Tongue entered realspace through the Ophidian Gulf, emerging right on the tail of an immense Ork fleet. The flotilla of ramshackle spacecraft stretched off in all directions, a roving scrapyard of gunned-up junk with a single vast space hulk at its heart.
Malys commanded her captains to disable their night shields and fire at will. Her order was met with raised eyebrows at best, for the Ork ships outnumbered them fifty to one and many of the greenskin craft were already changing heading to an intercept course.
Scowling, Malys led by example, personally manning her flagship's void cannon and blasting apart three Ork ships one after the other.
Chastened, her captains quickly took up the fight, dispatching squadrons of sleek fighters to make hit-and- run attacks on the largest Ork ships.
Anarchy reigned as the Ork armada attempted to change course and intercept the alien fleet harrying its rear like metallic sharks ripping at the flukes of a void whale. Suddenly, as one, the Dark Eldar fleet retreated at speed. The Orks, spoiling for a fight, mounted a hasty pursuit. The ensuing running battle lasted a dozen hours, the Dark Eldar ships staying tantalisingly out of reach before Verdigris appeared on the greenskin fleet's screens. Gathering a deadly momentum, the single-minded Orks pursued the Dark Eldar at speed, careening straight towards the High Fabricator's beloved macrocomplex.
Then, just as Verdigris' autodefences illuminated the night sky with myriad ruby stabs of laser fire, the Dark Eldar simply vanished. The Ork ships ploughed into the world of Verdigris like a mailed fist into an unprotected face. Hundreds were reduced to ruin by defence laser fire, but such was their sheer bulk that on they came, megatonnes of burning wreckage slamming into the defence networks of the macrocomplex.
The surviving Orks that had bullied through the High Fabricator's firestorms hacked their way out of their burning craft and into the ranks of the defenders. In the dust wastes outside the Hive, the Legio Titanicus mobilised to intercept the greenskins, and the earth shook at their advance as they mercilessly hammered the Orks infesting the Hive. Then, with terrible inevitability, the space hulk Foot of Gork thundered out of the clouds. In a single earth-shaking instant, the God-machines were crushed flat. Almost half of the macrocomplex was blasted apart in the explosion, its autodefences crippled and its surviving defenders hurled to the ground.
It was then that the skies wrenched open. Through a storm of jade light came the pirate fleet of Lady Malys, its deadly elegance the absolute antithesis of the brutish Ork armada.
The Kabalites gunned down humans and Orks alike and fed upon their screams. Metal behemoths roared as Ork Battlewagons engaged the tank companies of the Imperial Guard, and still more Ork spacecraft smashed down into the city, the ground quaking with each new impact.
As buildings toppled around them, Dark Eldar skimmers soared into the heart of the macrocomplex, for Malys knew that her prize would be deep in the vaults. Packs of Incubi plunged into the midst of the deafened, disorientated Guardsmen milling in the breach, their tormentor fields sending out waves of black agony as their klaive-blades carved open into human flesh.
In the heart of the city, the dark feast was beginning in earnest. Malys and her handpicked elite slaughtered the Guardsmen and Adeptus Mechanicus Skitarii that guarded the palace of the High Fabricator. In their wake came hundreds of Kabalite Warriors, meeting each Imperial Guard counter-charge with punishing salvos of raw firepower.
Lady Malys stepped and twirled through the blood-mad brawl as if she were enjoying a pleasant walk instead of cutting her way through a war of her own design. She personally dismembered the armoured Stormtroopers at the heart of the macrocomplex and commanded her warriors to break open the inner chamber within which the STC was hidden. But the chamber was already open, its door a smoking wreck. Ork bullet casings covered the floor, and within the vault the High Fabricator lay in a pool of his own blood, his legs sheared off at the knees. The prize was gone.
Malys flew into a red rage, killing several of her attendants who she suspected of betraying her. Her plans lay in tatters. The macrocomplex, so efficiently plunged into total war, had now become irrelevant. Only the STC mattered. There was little chance of mustering the entire Kabal whilst they were at feast; the complex had degenerated into chaos and confusion abounded.
Malys gathered her court to her side, ordering her jetfighter squadrons to cease their punishment of the Imperial Guard and act as reconnaissance agents. In a matter of seconds Malys had news of a massive column of smoke- belching Ork vehicles trundling out of the city and heading back towards the space hulk that had crash-landed out in the dust wastes.
Lady Malys summoned her personal transport and took off in pursuit. The story of the battle between Lady Malys' airborne elite and the sprawling Ork convoy has become infamous in the upper echelons of High Commorragh.
A frontal attack would have been suicide, so Malys circled the gigantic Ork convoy from a distance, picking off its outriders unit by unit. When the Orks moved to intercept, the Dark Eldar withdrew into the clouds, arrowing downwards once more to strike at a different location.
Through the shattered skies Reavers duelled with clumsy, smoke-belching Ork flying machines and packs of Scourges methodically sniped the Stormboyz that careened through the skies to intercept Malys' force. Hour by gruelling hour, the Dark Eldar strike force whittled down the hurtling flotilla of Ork vehicles until a broken line of scrap metal and smouldering green corpses stretched all the way back to the outskirts of the macrocomplex.
Malys herself led the final assault, leaping down from her transport in a flurry of courtly robes onto the iron roof of the Ork Battle Fortress at the head of the vastly diminished column. Her warriors followed suit, and though the Orks fought with true fury, the Dark Eldar were high on pain and moved like quicksilver. Before long Malys had retrieved the lead-encased STC from the corpse of the Big Mek riding at the head of the Ork armoured column.
The Dark Eldar swiftly withdrew from the battlefield, leaving a raging war behind them. Upon her return to Commorragh, Lady Malys did not return straight to Vect's throne room, but instead headed with her prize into her inner chambers. Her bootheels clacked smartly on the polished obsidian floor of her trophy halls as she strode back to her throne, pausing only to place the stolen STC upon a stasis pedestal between the mummified head of a human technosavant and the gilded hands of Saint Cerulia the Just. Word of her success spread fast, for the tongues of Commorragh's gossips are never still. That evening Malys found herself the recipient of a personal invitation to dine with Vect at her convenience, for her unbridled success had impressed even him. So it was that Lady Aurelia Malys became one of the Supreme Overlord's inner circle.
