Well, it started with one of our contacts going missing. He had urgently contacted us, saying he needed to meet about something he had found out. He never made the meeting, and we later found out that he had been killed by a thug from a local gang. We tracked them down, only to discover that almost all of them had been killed by a bomb planted in what was supposed to have been their payment. We grilled the survivor, who gave us them name of the arms dealer who had hired them to kill our contact. We tracked him down, but, after taking a stub revolver round directly to the face (as in the barrel was pressed dead center to his unprotected forehead when it was fired, during some aggressive interrogation) and surviving, he escaped.

We rifled through some of the stuff he left behind and discovered that he had been making deliveries to a warehouse in an especially run down part of the hive that practically screamed "secret clubhouse for heretical shenanigans." Turns out we were pretty close, it was part of a smuggling ring for xeno technology. And by xenotech, I mean the really good stuff, highly advanced, and probably partially sapient in its own right. I'm not sure, our tech priest never told me the whole truth, but I think we found, among other things, several pieces of wraithbone tech, one of which was capable of FTL communication. Of course, these were petty thugs, criminals, gunrunners, etc. so how they got their hands on such advanced xenotech was a mystery to us at that point.

After raiding the warehouse, smashing through most of the thugs there, and looting a ton of stuff, we discovered that the warehouse was nothing more than a tiny part of a much, much bigger operation. And the thugs there had called for backup, lots of backup. We started to high tail it out of there, and I went to go get the tech priest. I found him jacked in to some sort of central computer (run by a disembodied brain in a jar). I told him we needed to go. He didn't respond to me, but carried on with a conversation with the brain. It just said that the tech priest "wouldn't understand even if it told him." He responded "Enlighten me." The GM smiled, took the tech priest aside for a minute, and they came back with the tech priest sporting 28 more insanity points than he had left with. He then promptly shot the brain full of holes.

Now, we botched our get away, the arbitrator stood around fighting for way, way too long and the enemy backup was able to set up a pair of heavy stubbers with firing lines that would absolutely massacre us if we tried to escape. The leader of the backup, an oddly reasonable fellow all things considered, gave us a chance to surrender. Seeing our predicament, when took it, hoping that we might have a better opportunity later. They pretty much just kept us around at gunpoint until someone would show up to take us away, even chatted with us a bit. Apparently there was a serious divide between the thugs we had killed and their backup, with the backup considering themselves superior to the thugs. We played on that, and managed to convince the leader to let us talk to their boss.

When their boss showed up in a damn gun-cutter, we started thinking that might not have been the wisest move. There were two of them, plus a couple of guys in carapace with hellguns. One of the two was a guy, also in carapace, but apparently unarmed. The other was a woman in a big, heavy coat and wearing a face concealing gas mask that included a voice distorter. The guy in carapace gave us the rundown. Going through our gear, he had pieced together who we were working for (exactly how, I'm not sure, at that point I didn't even know exactly who we were working for, just a pseudonym that happened to pay us for finding the skeletons in everyone's closets), and he wanted us to not report what we had found at the warehouse. He would even pay us, significantly more than we were being paid to investigate this sort of thing, to keep things quite, and to feed our original employer some bogus line about the warehouse being an isolated smuggling ring for more mundane contraband that we took care of ourselves. He would even set the warehouse up to look that way.

Guess no one's reading this. Oh well, I've written it, so I suppose I might as well.

The arbitrator, who unfortunately for the rest of us had not died in the fight, took this moment to completely spill the beans. We were acolytes for the God Emperor's Holy Inquisition, and would never stoop to making deals with heretical scum like him. The rest of us collectively face palmed, and mentally prepared ourselves for having to create new characters. The man in carapace, however, just smiled, and showed us his Inquisitorial Rosette. He also flashed some heavier duty paper work, only some of which I caught. Apparently he was an Ordo Xenos inquisitor. He reiterated his deal, commending us for our loyalty but saying that we were caught up in affairs significantly above our pay grade. I quietly resolved to change this, and apparently so did several other members of the group. Our scum, the usual talker of the group, told him we would honor his request. We got half of the money he promised us, with the rest to be given when he was sure we had honored our end of the deal, though at the time we were mainly just trying to GTFO without getting shot.

So there we were, heading back to our safe house, conflicted. Some more than others. The arbitrator was kinda hung up on the idea that two inquisitors were at odds with each other, having apparently thought of them as a single, unified organization working for the good of the imperium, though he was leaning toward giving our original inquisitor the full story. The scum was weighing his options to see what would both make him the most money and have the lowest chance of getting him killed. I was worried that no matter what we did, we would end up pissing off someone with a lot of power, and was kinda on the fence. The tech priest… he didn't really give us any hint as to which way he was leaning at the time. Which in retrospect I probably should have realized was a sign that something was horribly, heretically wrong.

that the rest of us really should have picked up on. He came back from making the report, and when pressed just said that he had included everything that needed to be said and left it at that. We continued another investigation we had going, the local PDF garrison was acting suspicious. We eventually discovered that the garrison had turned into a blood cult, and were involved in a bitter turf war with a massive army of hive rabble from farther down, most of whom had fallen under the sway of an one of a group of seven orators who were converting large swathes of the lower hive to Nurgle.

We were assembling our evidence, getting ready to report the whole mess and hopefully get the rest of the PDF to come down and clean things up, when we found there was a third side, a Tzeentchian cabal, playing the other two against each other. We were going to report them too, when we were contacted by an agent of the Ordo Xenos inquisitor. He wanted us to leave out the part about the Tzeentchian cabal, and was willing to pay us a pretty hefty wage if we were to just keep quite about select things when he requested it.

The arbitrator objected at this point, strongly. He pretty much demanded to see the Ordo Xenos inquisitor, saying that he wouldn't agree unless he had a chance to talk with him face to face. The inquisitor, however, was either too smart or just too busy to go for it, and sent the woman with the gas mask instead. She hadn't really spoken much the first time we all saw her, and we quickly learned why. While the inquisitor had been polite and actually pretty reasonable, the woman in the gas mask was a complete bitch. The arbitrator, however, was not in a talking mood and made it pretty obvious that he was never going to go along with her or the inquisitor and that this was just a chance to confront them about their heresy. The tech priest and I were there with him, and I was a little frustrated that the arbitrator was pretty much doing this unilaterally, and pulling the rest of us along with him.That was soon forgotten.

The arbitrator was done with talking, tried to grab for the woman's gas mask, she kicked him away, and he pulled his shotgun. Which promptly exploded. It wasn't until a while later that I discovered that the tech priest had planted bombs in some of the items that we were carrying that he could trigger remotely. The woman then pretty quickly took down the arbitrator, while the tech priest held me back. I really shouldn't have been as surprised as I was to learn that the tech priest had been in frequent contact with the woman, and, judging by the tone with which they talked, were quite friendly with each other. He had gone along with the radical inquisitor's plans as part of a deal to get his hands on some of that juicy xenotech that he had seen, along with some training in both its operation and its manufacturing. He also "politely requested" that we go along with the radical's plan. I wasn't exactly in a position to refuse.

We reported to both the puritan and radical inquisitors from that point on, though we drifted more and more toward the radical's camp. It was at first mostly because we were being strong armed, and then later because the assignments he was offering both paid better and were somewhat easier thanks to some of the support from his other agents. Of course, some of those agents were not exactly shining examples of mankind's best. Some of them weren't even human. The woman in the gas mask was a damn harlequin. The witch who headed up the Tzeentchian cabal also turned out to be one of his on again off again allies, and had a seat at the giant legion of doom style table that they occasionally got together around. Another one we ended up dealing with a lot was a Hrud saboteur, and damn, I swear that guy must have had the entire hive rigged with explosives. Saved our asses more than once.

Now, you're probably wondering why fine, upstanding acolytes of the inquisition (and one heretek) would willingly consort with such people, well the answer is actually rather simple. They paid well. And I mean ridiculously, fabulously well. By last meet we were raking a massive amount of thrones on a regular basis and we were decked out in top of the line equipment. The tech priest was also amassing a collection of xenotech, among which included a shimmershield that the harlequin had quietly given to him with a note that just said "Stay safe." There was probably something going on there, though with all the other heretical things he was up to it would just be par for the course.

Things came to a head when we figured out exactly what the radical inquisitor was up to. Their little heretical legion of doom was working together to prevent an utterly disastrous future event, something that not neither the Laughing God, nor Tzeentch, nor the inquisitor wanted to see happen. Apparently someone vital to said future would be born on the hive world we were on a few hundred years down the line, but they didn't know exactly who. So their solution was simple, blow up the whole planet right now, prevent the person from ever being born, and thus avert catastrophe. The radical inquisitor had already tried to just order up an exterminatus, but the puritan who we had originally been working for had managed to prevent it at the last second and now the radical was on the run, and forced to resort to plan b. Which was the xenotech he was smuggling in that we had inadvertently stubbled on a ways back.

At this point the scum was getting a serious case of cold feet. He realized that we were in far deeper than he had originally intended, and he wanted out. He tried to sell the radical's location out to a crime lord as a ticket in to that bunch, but made the mistake of putting way to much trust in a guy who obviously never intended to honor any sort of bargain. After giving away all the info he had, the scum got gunned down. The tech priest saved him, though he at least partially suspected the scum's treachery and included an explosive collar in the fix up job.

At the end of the meet before last, the scum tried to sell the radical out again, this time to the puritanical inquisitor that had originally employed us, hoping that he would be able to talk someone with good tech use in to getting the collar off later. That didn't work so well either, which was probably to be expected consider we were up to our eyeballs in heresy by that point. We got caught in a bloody shootout with the PDF, including a Vulture and a pair of Valkyries, which is where we picked up for the last meet. I thought we were going to end up going out like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

To my surprise, we won after a long and brutal fight, though we were pretty badly messed up by the end of it, the tech priest in particular. The scum took the opportunity to put a pair of bolt pistol shells in the back of the tech priest's skull. However, the explosive collar had been modified with a deadman switch, and it blew the scum's head off when the tech priest died. So there I was, surrounded by three wrecked gunships, the corpses of countless PDF troopers, and both of the other members of the group, who had just killed each other right in front of me.

I had seen this movie. Reservoir Dogs. I was Mr. Pink, and it was time to take the diamonds and GTFO. I looted them of their money and what (non-heretical) gear I could take and bribed my way on to the soonest ship heading out.

The GM was somewhat disappointed that he hadn't gotten a full TPK.