Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==“Mimic,” official kill count 2102, estimated kill count 6201==
{{Topquote|Subject has experienced liquefaction from the mid-stomach upwards. Assessment: prototype necrocyte round is overkill. Recommendation: immediate deployment.|"Mimic"}}

If Lord Sector Quintus, Lord Fabricator Beraxos, and Lady Inquisitrix Lerica have all the power, and Lords Walsh and Zutash have the money, Lord Halwart has the secret weapon. The Vindicare Assassin codenamed Mimic is the single deadliest person in the Sector, on a scale that would even give Oscar Havermann pause. Mimic has been killing enemies of the High Lords, sometimes whole families of them, for over forty years. He has spent much of that time in hypno- or cryo-sleep, and his neural cybernetics have been pumping him full of technical data and mission profiles the whole time. He has killed a Black Apostle of the Word Bearers, a Necron Praetorian, and most recently and impressively, the rogue Inquisitor Xavien in the nearby Drumnos Sector. Now, he has set his sights squarely on the Ork who leads the army that is assaulting Oglith, and there is nothing they can do to stop him.

If anything, Mimic’s total kill count is actually too low. He has stopped counting the security guards and other, similar trash that litter the path he crosses to reach his targets. If he did, the number would be well over five thousand. Halwart has even asked him – with exceptional care – if advertising his presence would shore up the morale of the troops a bit, but Mimic knows that he is externally no different from any other Vindicare, so it would mean little.

Mimic’s youth was wasted, as he would admit if he could remember it through the haze of memory conditioning. He was swept into a Guard scum tithe on Primiza Station in the Centauri Cluster, and earmarked for Officio Assassinorum training after he was found to possess a specific combination of alleles for intelligence and strength. His training progressed at a rate that left his supervisors impressed. However, there was little to suggest that his talents were particularly above average until he began target training with the practice rifles. Thus, he was one of the very few Vindicare Temple assassins who did not rise up to the Officio as a result of Schola Progenum training.

Within a month of practice, Mimic was breaking records that had lasted thousands of years. His accuracy was near-perfect, of course, as all Vindicare’s scores need to be, but his ability to rapidly re-target and re-focus his weapon between shots was so fast that some of his instructors wondered among themselves that he had a cybernetic augmentation. Mimic, then using the callsign ‘Regrets,’ first deployed against a cabal of daemon-worshipping Heretics in the Scarus Sector. He polished them off by perching on the maintenance catwalk under an illuminated billboard, camouflaged by the contrast of light. Mimic eradicated the entire cabal within an hour by using a combination of motion-sensitive sensor pods and his Exitus weapons.

Mimic proceeded through the path of his career as a member of the Emperor’s marksmen, distinguished but never quite pulling to the head of the pack in the eyes of the Officio Assassinorum. It was only after his seventeenth mission that he catapulted to the very highest ranks of the Vindicare Temple and formally took on his new title.

The Officio had sent him on a mission on behalf of the Senate of the High Lords to assassinate the rebel General Clodsdan, a notorious opponent of Imperial expansion into the previously neutral zones between the Ixiniad and Lorcam Sectors. However, Clodsdan had enacted an orbital web protocol that meant that every ship that didn’t have his own personal approval couldn’t land on the surface of the planet where he had planted his flag. Mimic was able to get to the system in question, and a stealthed shuttle meant that it would be impossible for the General to know precisely where he touched down, but the heat flare of a descending shuttle is impossible to mask completely. Thus, when Mimic touched down, the General had known he was coming long enough to hide successfully. Clodsdan settled into a bunker complex that had no unobserved exits, and there he stayed.

Mimic made his way two hundred kilometers overland and hid outside the bunker. He knew Clodsdan would never be tricked into exiting the bunker, so instead he mapped out the local routes of nearby aircraft. Once he found an appropriate aircraft flying in his general direction, he waited until the right moment to strike, and then shot the engines of the aircraft. The plane tumbled out of control and slammed into the bunker, collapsing several levels. Clodsdan panicked and sent out every guard he had to flush the area, and none reported contact. Only then did he leave the bunker to evacuate, and as soon as he stepped into the daylight, Mimic shot him through a two-inch gap in the shieldwall his guards had erected around the exit. He escaped into the night and flew back to Terra, mission complete.

That was enough to seal Mimic’s reputation as the best. Mimic’s subsequent assignments were the sort that the Officio only acted on because the Senate asked them to, or the sort that would normally require an entire Imperial Guard regiment. Mimic’s reputation within the Temple grew as he shot the drivers of tanks through quarter inch Lexan sheets while moving, blasted engine blocks out of trucks moving a hundred miles an hour, and in one notable incident, shot a Chaos-tainted crystal out of the chest of a mutating daemonhost, driving the fiend back into the Warp. Eventually, the Master of Vindicare selected Mimic to test several new ammunition types, including the prototype Necrocyte round, which was designed to kill Genestealer Patriarchs and other large Tyranid organisms with one bullet. The Master is even pondering Mimic as his own successor, although Mimic’s eye for talent in others appears to be unremarkable at best.

Mimic has been crisscrossing the Imperium, killing its enemies, for so long that he no longer views it as a particular challenge. His focus hasn’t waned, but he no longer feels like he has much to do with himself. In the eyes of the Officio Assassinorum, dispatching both him and Civil to solve one Ork problem is a bit of overkill, but it is their hope that once he is present and working, he may be able to help with their other problem: the disappearance of Lixivim Dill. Ironically, they do not actually know where she is, while Lord Inquisitor Stoldst is a few weeks from figuring it out first.

Mimic has long abandoned the practice of formally tracking his kills. He has killed so many guards, body doubles, seconds-in-command, and other rabble on the way to his targets that he doesn’t particularly care to count them. If pressed, he would estimate his true kill count to be around six thousand, but his count of named targets is two thousand, one hundred two. The death of Big Chief Squiggothrider will bring his true count up one, and perhaps more if the Officio or Lord General Halwart bring him new names for his list on the Senate’s authority.

Like most Vindicares, he carries an Exitus Rifle, an Exitus Pistol, his standard uniform and mask, and a set of simple survival tools. However, Mimic carries far more ammunition than most Vindicares. As the Master of Vindicare has entrusted him with the responsibility of testing new ammunition types, he carries a variety of odd rounds. In addition to the usual ammo types of the Vindicare Temple, he carries prototype necrocyte ammunition, which dissolves tissues around impact by lysing cell membranes, and lumenshock ammunition, which emits a blinding light upon impact. He also carries Hawk rounds, which move below sonic speeds for most of flight, then abruptly speed up when near the target, to bypass some forms of energy shield that turn away supersonic objects. As these rounds are prototypical, he only carries a few, and reports to the Officio on their efficacy after each use. Thanks to his hard work, necrocyte rounds will probably enter Deathwatch service within twenty years. The Officio usually keeps its technology to itself, but as they are privy to the secrets of much of the Senate, the Officio knows how far the Imperium is out of its depth against the Tyranids. Thus, they are begrudgingly willing to share the technology with the Deathwatch, to augment or replace Hellfire rounds in use against Patriarchs or Zoanthropes.

Regarding his Cloudburst assignment, Mimic is the quintessential big fish in a small pond. An Assassin of his caliber simply does not visit a place as small and poor as Cloudburst very often. Cloudburst’s defenses and assets are minuscule compared to even those of its immediate neighbors, and its economy and colony networks are a fraction of the scale of Naxos, and especially Drumnos. The character of the threats present in the region is no more complex or potent than any he has faced in his extensive career of silent murder, and far less than most. Still, he is only one man, and while he is more than a match for any one foe he could face in Cloudburst, he is not fool enough to confront any such a target alone, any more than a Vindicare should be.