Cryptos

“The alien is an all consuming destroyer, a whisperer of tempting lies that wishes to dominate and subjugate mankind utterly---such dull platitudes are those of the dutiful simpleton. The truth is worse by far.”
—Inquisitor Augustine Mordecai, address to the Hilician Symposium
The strange and sinister xenos race known to the
Inquisition as the Cryptos comes from the cold
darkness of the interstellar void where it can scarcely
be conceived that anything could live. Without solid physical
form, they appear as strange gaseous clouds tinted with an eerie
greenish glow and filled with maddening, half-formed shapes.
They are able to pass through solid matter and even through
the hulls of star vessels, and far more dangerously, they have
the power to take living human bodies as hosts in order to
fulfil their inscrutable aims. They are a cold and mysterious race
whose desires and thoughts remain hidden from others and
possess an implacable and patient intelligence.
Masked in human flesh, they walk amongst mankind
and secretly infest communities, twisting them until they are
completely under their dominion. They treat humans with
utter disdain and a callous disregard, for these seemly immortal
creatures carry themselves as fallen gods fleeing something
greater and more terrible yet, and mankind is to them no more
than cattle to be used and disposed of at will. The Cryptos are
a rare and utterly insidious threat, and though no cities have
burned in their name nor have they raised armies against the
dominion of the God-Emperor, they are the manifestation of
why the alien is loathed and mistrusted in all of its forms.
==Motivations and Infiltrations==
The Cryptos dominate and control humans, using them with
a callousness that is as cold as the void from whence they
came. They have no lust for dominion over the weak and
fleshy realm of mankind; instead their infiltration of human
communities offers them protection. None can guess at the
terror from which they flee and perhaps even they can no
longer recall its nature (except for a crawling dread imbedded
in their racial memory), but to this end secrecy and security
are their overriding goals.
Regardless of the cause of their fear, the fundamental
motivation of the Cryptos has remained unknown to the
Inquisition, though some subtle-minded savants serving more
Radical masters have begun to conjecture along the correct
lines. Once they have taken human hosts, the Cryptos need to
guard against mankind itself and keep their presence utterly
secret, as they know full well the lengths that the Inquisition
will go to in order to root them out if discovered. Simply
appearing to be the people they have taken as hosts does not
suffice, and though they can mimic the knowledge, reactions
and personalities of their hosts to an almost perfect degree,
their need for safety drives them to build sanctuaries in isolated
corners of human society for their long-term protection.
The Cryptos are not a numerous race and operate in
small groups ranging from a handful to perhaps as many as
20 individuals. When taking hosts, they seek to migrate to
obscure and overlooked locations where any side effects of
their infiltration will be easiest to control and where they
can exert influence over normal humans by taking influential
members of the community as hosts. Overseers, preachers,
merchants and those in official positions are usually those
taken by the Cryptos in the first stage of infiltration, as they
are the keys to dominating the humans around them. Thus the
Cryptos make their sanctuary more secure and their presence
more difficult to detect. Small, self-contained communities
are ideal for their purpose, particularly if physically isolated,
although they have a distinct aversion to very primitive
societies and dislike operating in space aboard vessels longer
than they have to.
After finding and infiltrating such a location, the Cryptos
may migrate from body to body several times, leaving dead or
damaged hosts along the way. They may spend several human
generations acting as covert rulers and conducting culls to
weed out any potential dissent or threat to them, before
moving on once more if endangered or due to the urgings of
their own inscrutable time table.
While they are in control, the Cryptos will attempt to make
the communities they hide in as stable and secure as possible
so that no undue attention is directed towards them. Over
time, the Cryptos are able to seed a psychic influence over
those who are close to them. This influence gradually builds
until the humans who have ignorantly dwelt with the Cryptos
can be made to obey almost any command. This controlling
effect is no literal puppetry but rather a power of suggestion
that the Cryptos can wield to deadly effect in their defense
or to carry out their wishes. The Cryptos also use the human
predilection for hierarchy and authority to further secure
their control by creating guilds and fraternities that gradually
become more and more important to the community that
they are part of. The control of such organizations extends
and crystallizes the Cryptos’ dominion of their “sanctuary
community” and allows them to create a network of spies and
servants to enact their will.
Such secretly dominated communities can exist for
generations with the Cryptos passing to suitable new hosts
when the flesh of the previous ones fail. Should their carefully
constructed sanctuary be threatened or draw Inquisitional
attention, the Cryptos will move to eliminate the threat using
all available resources and then, once the threat has been
eliminated, restore their human community to its “normal”
state as if the threat had never existed.
==The Origins and Nature of the Cryptos==
The Cryptos exist physically as an etheric, pseudo-plasmic,
gas-like substance bound by an esoteric energy field that to
the human eye appears as a hazy cloud of green tinted vapor.
In their natural state, the Cryptos drift in the great dark voids
of the galaxy in small groups who commune via psychic means
and are (unless destroyed by violence) effectively immortal.
Usually these drifting groups are small, rarely numbering
more than a dozen. The utterly alien preoccupations of
the Cryptos prior to their contact with mankind are not
open to the human understanding. Born in the deep void
between star systems, they do not possess intelligence or
emotions as humans understand them. However, they know
and understand the human mind with an alien objectiveness
gleaned from the minds of those they have possessed over
the years.
How long the Cryptos have existed is completely unknown,
but what can be guessed at is when the Cryptos first began
to infiltrate mankind. This moment can only have taken place
during the ages in which man has moved amongst the stars,
as the remote existence of the Cryptos beyond the warmth
of suns would have kept them away from the planet-bound
beginnings of humanity. Dwelling in the lightless margins
of star systems or in the deep void, the Cryptos must have
met with mankind and learned its weaknesses, its flesh-bound
desires, its fears, and its ignorance. They must have seen a
possibility in the fleshy race they could so easily possess, the
possibility of domination and concealment, because for all
their utterly alien nature the Cryptos have one thing that
can at least be approximated to a human emotion---fear.
The unknown object of their fear may even have driven the
Cryptos into their bodiless existence, hiding in the emptiness,
perhaps drifting away from some ancient enemy or star
now long dead. However, it seems to them that the human
Imperium represents their greatest chance of successfully
hiding from whatever it is they flee.
How long ago the process of infiltration and control began
and how many Cryptos there are can not be estimated with
any accuracy. However, infestations have been uncovered
on scattered Imperial worlds in the Segmentums Obscurus
and Pacificus ever since the race was formally identified and
confirmed as “Diabolous” in the 35th Millennium. It has
been noted by some in the Ordo Xenos that the number of
instances of Cryptos infestation may extend far further into
the past, but such instances may have been mistakenly treated
as instances of witchery or daemonic influence.
==The Incident at Fall Narrow==
The Calixis Sector has had only a single formally identified
instance of a Cryptos infiltration being discovered and destroyed
since its foundation, although several more are suspected. This
single verified infestation occurred at the mining community of
Fall Narrow on 88 Tanstar nearly two centuries ago.
Numbering under a thousand inhabitants, the settlement of
Fall Narrow was relatively efficient and quite unremarkable; it
met its quotas, people were born, worked, and died without
unusual incident, and various officials passing through did not
find any cause for concern. So things might have continued
were it not for a mining accident that was witnessed by a
travelling Administratum scribe detailed to carry out a local
census. Dozens died during this mishap, and the scribe, to his
horror, saw the settlement overseer impaled by a fallen joist. As
he died, the overseer’s body thrashed about and a green cloud
billowed out of his eyes and mouth. The scribe recorded the
unwholesome sight on his ocular augmetic before fleeing. In
response, the panicking regional governor deployed enforcer
units that attempted to storm the settlement and conduct an
investigation.
The assault turned into a massacre as the ordinary men
and women of the settlement resisted fiercely. The violence
quickly and dramatically escalated with the miners attacking
the enforcers with makeshift demolition charges and industrial
machines and the enforcers responding with heavy assault units
(the locals seemed to be under the delusion that they were being
attacked by corsairs and outlaws). Captured prisoners showed
signs of psychic suggestion and mental tampering, and it was
clear something alien and malign was at work. This became
particularly evident when the enforcers’ own encoded vox-net
was compromised and an entire strike-force was led into a trap
and destroyed.
At some point during the assault, the central explosives
store detonated, (although whether deliberately or by a stray
round remains unknown). In the explosions and fires that
followed, the settlement and almost all of its inhabitants and
many of its besiegers were killed. When the Inquisition arrived
shortly afterwards, it found that in a demonstration of either
compounded incompetence or xenos conspiracy no records
were kept of surviving inhabitants (if any) or the names of
surviving enforcers involved in the incident. Given the ability
of the Cryptos to possess victims, their evident intelligence,
and their skill at evasion, the xenos threat was likely merely
displaced to another quiet and unassuming backwater. Despite
a full Inquisitorial investigation, no further trace of the Cryptos
colony was ever found.
==Knowledge and Ignorance==
Little is known of the Cryptos, and what is known is often
confused with information about other races. Presented here are
guidelines on what different groups know about the Cryptos
and their activities outside of academia and Imperial history.
The Void Born and Ship Dwellers: There are many void
born myths that relate to unexplained incidents and strange
phenomena that may have the Cryptos as their true source.
Particular references to small ships going missing only to be
later discovered lifeless, deactivated, and sometimes concealed
within asteroid belts and gas giants in outlying colony systems
may have something to do with the Cryptos’ activities. Likewise,
tales of “ghost lights” haunting ships when visiting distant and
empty star systems or crewmen acting in an uncharacteristic
manner may perhaps relate to the Cryptos.
The Ordo Xenos: The race has been declared Xenos Diabolus and is to be destroyed whenever found. Various
factions within the Ordo Xenos have differing ideas as to the
severity and danger of the threat. Some Radicals even believe
that some effort should be made to capture and preserve a
specimen to unlock its potentially ageless knowledge.
==Inquisitorial Threat Briefing==
Within the Calixis Sector, the current threat posed by the
Cryptos is unknown. There have been no recent indications of
existing populations. On such evidence, there can be only one conclusion by
the Ordo Xenos: the threat is most severe. The few instances
of Cryptos activity within the sector indicates that this region
of space is not unknown to them. Silence can only mean that
out amongst the scattered worlds of the sector there lurk what
seem to be men and women, who work, talk, and eat, blending
in with their fellows, but inside them is nothing but a cold
intelligence, born of the void and driven by terror.