"Commissar! Commissar! There's news from the astropaths—they've contacted the Imperium!"
"Excellent! Put me through to the astropaths!" Commissar Yarrick beamed. This was the only good news he had heard in days.
On the large screen appeared a frail woman with her eyes covered and her head completely shaved. She wore a black robe covered in wax seals bearing the sacred scriptures of The Emperor and runes of purity.
Astropaths
These astropaths were psykers responsible for all Warp communications within the Imperium. Their psychic gift for communication connected every corner of the Imperium. They cast their thoughts deep into the Warp and used its chaotic space and time to contact their counterparts elsewhere in the galaxy.
Decades of rigorous training and soul-binding rituals hardened their wills, allowing them to endure the horrors of the Warp without losing their minds or becoming possessed by daemons.
Yet astropaths still had their limitations. Messages sent from beyond distant stars felt more like uneasy dreams or hallucinations to their recipients.
Sometimes an astropath could see a complete image. Other times, all they saw was faint smoke, seas of blood, and combinations of symbols with unclear meanings.
Thus, they required vast amounts of time for analysis and decryption, to ensure that the information received would not be severely distorted.
Another problem was that, compared to the sheer scale of the Imperium, there were simply far too few astropaths to meet the needs of every planet.
Some worlds would never see a single astropath before their destruction, relying instead on the most basic interstellar travel to exchange information.
Terra could not respond to these worlds in time. Thus, on the fringes of the Imperium, or on worlds that were not important enough, the Imperium was a very distant concept.
"For The Emperor. Greetings, Miss Ando. Has any