Working in interstellar transport without danger allowance
If you have the rare “luck” of developing psychic powers, various paths are open to you:
- You are found by a black ship and sanctioned to continue living under strict control.
- You are found without sanction and deemed a heretic unworthy of life.
- Or the Emperor needs you as a little snack for his battery and you are simply sacrificed.
If you belong to the first group, you have drawn the good lot, but there is a catch. Because there is a high likelihood that you will be trained as an Astropath, mighty psychics with a very special task.
Astropaths are the human radios of the Imperium. They send and receive messages through the warp by being grouped with hundreds of other Astropaths under the guidance of a “conductor” in a choir. Imagine that like the pods from The Matrix…
In the DLC Void Shadows of Rogue Trader you can see an Astropathic choir:
While you are in the choir in relative safety and have one of the definitely better jobs in the Imperium, your likely end is worse than that of most. Because the weaker-willed Astropaths are susceptible to warp influences.
When sending and receiving messages through the warp, a chaos component must always be taken into account, which, at best, turns the message into incoherent gibberish, and at worst, corrupts the mind. This usually ends with you being executed by some kind of emergency termination – or your soul is directly devoured by a demon.
