“To wrest human souls from the grip of the Daemon; to defeat the temptation within our own hearts and minds... There is a grace and a grandeur to the work of the Malleus and Hereticus. But the Ordo Xenos? It has no more gravitas than hacking away weeds in one’s garden.”
“By all means pursue your grace, grandeur, and gravitas then, sir. And in your prayers tonight, ask that your temptation to those things be lifted from your weak and sinning mind, so that you might feel some humility in the presence of those who ensure your garden remains safe to parade all your fine qualities in.”
–Apocryphal exchange between Inquisitors Byphon and Merrinus
The foes of the Ordo Xenos come in all the bewildering variety that a galactic diversity of ecosystems can provide, from strange artefacts and bestial infestations to entire civilisations of inhuman sophistication and malevolence. To battle them, an Ordo Xenos Inquisitor must command an equally bewildering array of lore, skills, and disciplines. He must be ready to put seemingly unconnected fields of knowledge to use and improvise weapons and defences against creatures whose technology or biology are utterly alien to the last enemy he faced, or indeed to anything the Imperium has encountered before. The particular nature of its foes and this work has led the Ordo Xenos to evolve in distinctive ways.
The unbreakable will of a Daemonhunter makes no difference to an enemy that is biological, not supernatural, while the unshakable faith of a Witch Hunter cannot cower an alien. Even the cultural and political power of the Ordos might be of little use in some far-flung world of inhuman monsters. To anOrdo Malleus Inquisitor, defeating his enemy is a profound trial of personal willpower; to an Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor, it is an exercise in moral righteousness and faith. To an Ordo Xenos Inquisitor, it can often be an effort in biology, logistics, and tactics, however esoterically they might have to be applied. His armoury is his skills, wits, and knowledge more than simply his iron fortitude.
The word Inquisitor tends to evoke two images in the popular imagination of the Imperium’s citizenry. There is the grand and terrifying incarnation of the Emperor’s merciless authority, enthroned above a column of Acolytes and soldiers while the flamers roar and the execution pyres blaze. There is also the silent, all-seeing eye in the shadows, whose gaze sees every wrong and marks sinners for punishment. Like his colleagues, every Ordo Xenos Inquisitor must be prepared to work as covertly or overtly as his mission requires.
Leading in the Light
The Imperium’s favoured way to greet a xenos species is at the point of a gun, and Inquisitors of the Ordo Xenos often find themselves at the spearhead of the mighty Imperial military machine, in a war they instigated or one whose balance their skills are helping to tip. Any Imperial army on an alien front might find at least one Ordo Xenos Inquisitor attached to its command; where the war is against an unusual or unfamiliar species it could even be an entire conclave, with definite ideas about military priorities and objectives as well as useful knowledge and advice.
Within Imperial borders, the Ordo Xenos takes command of the constant purges and cleansings of alien enemies infiltrating and infesting the body of the Imperium. One of the most infamous of such foes are the Genestealers, who bring a contamination that passes down through generations and endangers the populations of worlds. Such infestations are such a deadly threat because these aliens work actively and cunningly to hide it, spread it, and defend it. Once such a contamination has a foothold, the Ordo Xenos is sure to be at the head of the Imperium’s response, marshalling and arming the untainted forces of the planet and purging the threat with as much ferocity as any of their Ordo Hereticus comrades.
Less sophisticated foes can be no less pernicious if not met with force of arms. The Ordo Xenos may find itself battling swarming predators that run wild over an Imperial world unless they are stamped out, plagues or parasites carried back from frontier settlements into populous centres unprepared to handle them, or seemingly non-sentient beasts taken as trophies or livestock that are far more than they appear. Confrontations such as these are reminders that the calling of the Inquisition requires its followers to be all things, taking on a martial role as well as carrying out investigation and judgement. While not every Inquisitor has the martial prowess to stand on the front line when battle is joined, every Inquisitor must ensure that he and his Acolytes can protect themselves when inevitably the battle comes to them.
The ultimate expression of the Ordo Xenos’ martial work comes not from its Inquisitors but in the post-human form of the Deathwatch, the secret Chapter drawn from across the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes. The Deathwatch’s oaths of founding bind it specifically to the battle against the alien, and its warriors are some of the deadliest specialists the human race is able to field. They come to the Deathwatch skilled and hardened from experience in their own Chapter, and their Kill-teams combine that expertise with potent and specialised weaponry and marry it to the
combined knowledge of the Inquisition. The insistence of ambitious Inquisitors notwithstanding, the Deathwatch are allies of the Inquisition rather than its servants. They have their own orders and oaths to fulfil, their own fortresses to garrison while watching for potential incursions, and their own masters to answer to. But they are the Ordo Xenos’ last sanction before Exterminatus itself, the most potent military weapon that its Inquisitors can wield. The sombre black livery of the Deathwatch by an Inquisitor’s side is a chilling sign of the magnitude of the threat that has arisen, and of what is at stake when battle is joined.
Moving in the Shadows
It is a mournful fact that not all adversaries in the battle against the alien are aliens themselves. Misguided or actively treacherous humans provide plenty of work for the Ordo: whether acting from ignorance, delusion, or malice, their deeds must be brought to light and cut down. The simplest misstep to take is the handling of xenos artefacts, whether referred to as “Faceless Trading,” “the Void Market,” or any other nickname that tries to sweeten the reality. Whether it is a loyal trooper ripping an odd-shaped souvenir from an enemy corpse, a scholar bringing home a carving from some long-dead city, or a smuggler sneaking a crate of incomprehensible alien devices back from the frontier to sell to rich collectors, one of the banes of the Ordo Xenos’s work is the endless ignorant masses who are drawn to, rather than repulsed by, the works of inhuman hands. Worse still, there is no reliable way to know which of these artefacts is a harmless trinket and which can doom a world by its
mere presence.
Such activity is mostly banal and easily policed, the points of vulnerability easily identified. The Ordo Xenos keeps watch over shipping routes and colony stations, and has eyes in the Departmento Munitorum, the Chartist Fleets, and the various academic, trading, or surveying guilds whose activities might expose them to temptation. Many Ordo Xenos Inquisitors retain networks of spies, informants, and data-thieves to ensure they receive word of anything suspicious, while others prefer to descend upon their suspects for very public sweeps, audits, and trials, providing forcible reminders of the consequences of over-familiarity with the alien.
More difficult and dangerous are those who fully understand their crime and its consequences, and actively work to hide it. Traders who pander to
misguided appetites for alien artefacts or specimens acquire immense profits. Such profits can be both in simple wealth and in influence and favours from those they supply, as these often noble personages dare not allow their illicit transactions to come to light. Rooting out and destroying such perverted enterprises is one of the most demanding and dangerous tasks of the Ordo Xenos. Simply grasping one thread of the operation can take months or years of work by dedicated undercover Acolytes and other agents who endanger their lives and take mortal risks as they impersonate wealthy buyers or unscrupulous collaborators. Once the extent of the operation is known, Inquisitors and their Acolytes can
move with lightning speed to end their investigation, using their own ruthless operatives and often drawing on the sector’s battlefleet and the Adeptus Arbites to ensure that none of their targets escape. Once the network has been purged, its treacherous agents either dead or yielding up their secrets to the Inquisition’s interrogators, the restless eye of the Ordo Xenos moves on.
Rarer, but more troubling to the right-thinking servants of the Ordo Xenos, are humans who directly traffic with aliens themselves. These are far further between, and usually easier to identify. There are relatively few places in the Imperium where sentient aliens directly interact with humans outside of battlefields in the first place, and the crudity of cross-species communication means that in most cases the terms of the transaction will be base and obvious so that there is no room for misunderstanding. The most common trade is some form of Imperial goods—raw materials, foodstuffs, fuel, or even weapons—bartered for services. Some overconfident planetary lords think they can enlist a Kroot hunting pack or Eldar Ranger to spy or skirmish for them, or even a mob of Ork Freebooterz to make war for them. Others think they can get away with bringing in xenos muscle for mines or farms, particularly aliens whose biology lets them work harder and longer in punishing environments. Then there are the cowards who think they can spare their part of space from war by placating a nearby alien enclave with trade or tribute, or ship captains who
buy off alien corsairs for safe passage. All are answerable to the merciless attention of the Ordo Xenos.
The most troubling of all human wrongdoing in the Ordo Xenos’ remit are xenophile cults and their heretical delusions. Simple material gain is no excuse to seek out alien contact, but it is a reason most Inquisitors can understand. But there is little understanding of what makes Emperor-fearing men and women seize on inhuman fantasy and elevate it above their fellow humans. The Ordo Xenos has stamped out cabals who thought they could follow the shadowy interstellar paths of some alien race on strange pilgrimages to transcendent knowledge, heretical cells that
had built their own religions around a fleeting brush with Eldar raiders, and feral tribes who fought for possession of a wrecked Necron head that they believed would return to life when held by the chosen prophet.
Illuminating the Truth
Detailed research on its foes is one of the most powerful weapons for the Ordo Xenos. These topics might range from knowing how to tweak a certain toxin to be especially deadly to one breed of alien but harmless to humans, to understanding the life-cycle of a xenos beast that might betray its presence in the teeming hive-city it has vanished into, to knowing how to play different tribes of marauding aliens off against one another, or even to something as simple as the weak point in an enemy’s anatomy that is especially vulnerable to a bolt shell. All are assets beyond price when human lives are at stake.
It is not unusual or shameful for Ordo Xenos Inquisitors to consider themselves researchers as much as detectives, spies, or combatants. Not only do they make full use of the formidable intelligence-gathering powers all Inquisitors wield, but they often go beyond them. They have sponsored the establishment of research stations dedicated to observation, vivisection, and psychometry of xenos specimens, and expeditions intended specifically to gather samples and data. Whole libraries of biological and xeno-anthropological data have been founded, packed with treatises and field reports, and pored over by adepts and savants looking for new weapons or insights. The ruins of dead civilisations are routinely sealed away from prying eyes so that Inquisitors can strip them of any insights or knowledge that might help them to doom yet more alien civilisations to oblivion in their own turn. The researches of the Ordo Xenos are by no means an exercise in gentle scholarship, however. Observations about how aliens fight—and how they kill—must be carefully verified if they are to be of use. Weapons intended to kill the alien in turn must be tested and proven before they can be trusted to work in the most dreaded and critical of battles.
On the Radical fringe there are Inquisitors who study the xenos by associating with them, willingly keeping their company, adopting their ways, and even becoming their students. Other Inquisitors would condemn such laxity, insistent that it can only lead to the softening of their determination to war upon the alien, and the intellectual drift into treachery against their own species. Such matters are maddeningly convoluted, and have opened deep schisms between Inquisitors within the Ordo Xenos itself.