OK, I got to replay the DLC part where Einrich tries to have a party in a train with you to write the next part of the fic. Lots of questions remain, specifically what was the purpose of causing mayhem and crashing the elevators in the first place.
He could very easily become our friend and / or lover to get close enough to recruit us, especially if we are bleeding heart iconoclast. Also, he clearly believes that he is fighting for some sort of norwegian socialist utopia, if I remember the dialogue pieces right (maybe I don't).
Perhaps there are various factions within the genestealers and his faction lost the internal politics war. Bolshevik genestealer uprising, ahah.
If you have the Apex of Brilliance background trait or whatever it's called, there's a bit of narration about the elevator crashing plan that clarifies that their plan was to cause chaos to make you try to flee from the bridge to the officer's deck (because the life support failed on the bridge), and then the genestealers cut the elevator cables and safety systems so that you crash down to the lower decks, and if the fall didn't kill you then Einrich and his train full of genestealers were supposed to do it.
Which makes it really interesting, given that Einrich's role in this plan was to kill you, that he literally has a gun trained on you and then...shoots the death cult assassin next to you and leaves the other genestealers to finish you off while he runs off. Which, yeah, sets him up for the final talk at the end, but also implies he couldn't bring himself to personally finish you off.
My headcanon on this is that Einrich is a genuinely good person, as is his family (you can talk to them while investigating the decks in previous acts). You literally walk away from them wanting to be a part of their group. And genestealers in general are, I understand, ignorant about what will happen to them after the ascension. They think they are building a better future through ascension and merging with the emperor. Shooting you, especially if you are iconoclast and improved lower deckers' lives, is not something good or just in Einrich's eyes. He knows this is wrong, but probably gets pressed by the Sire initially, so he goes for it, but then the reason and self-trust win over Sire's authority.
Genestealer cults DO believe that they are forming a better world but that's just programming to keep them working. The actual purpose of the gscs is to soften up a planets defenses before the tyranids get there so the harvest of biomass will proceed more smoothly.
And AFAIK there hasn't been a case in the books where the world HASNT been run by absolute scum who treat the workforce terribly and who actively crush any attempt to get better conditions, but I imagine it would turn out similarly just bc the gscs don't have a real choice.
Like if the planets rulers are dead set on crushing unions and terrorizing the populace into submission then its that much easier for gscs to spread and get more of the non hybrid populace to join in an armed rebellion that takes out the planetary defense forces and world communications. So obviously that works out fine for the tyranids. If the nobility actually did go 'okay let's talk i didn't realize things were that bad here's more food clean water and all the ppe you need' then the gscs still have to do the armed rebellion. They can't just NOT do that.
Its vague but there's some sort of critical mass thing that happens when there are enough gscs relative to humans that triggers The Endgame and the planning and networking turns into action and a tyranid swarm comes over to feast, and what's confusing to me is that the one single voidship is almost certainly not worth the effort. I think our ship has like 20k people on it, so not even a mouthful for a fleet. It would really only be useful in the way it had already been useful: spreading cult starters to lots of planets.
So I'm thinking the trigger couldn't have gone off, this must be an attempt by the gscs to maintain their ability to spread? Which might mean killing the rt and officers who know too much after that bloodspun web stunt and possibly even taking over the ship and flying where they want.
Einrich is definitely a good person as far as he's able to be, but the nature of the gsc genes is that he HAS to comply with his programming. He'd find any way to justify it as for the betterment of people because that's who he is as a person. He'd probably have that same thought control trick that evangelicals and some other usian fundamentalists have where they firmly believe that anyone trying to improve things is the devil or just doing it in order to gain trust for a future betrayal. In which case he'd think that killing the rt would be fully the right thing to do.
If I remember correctly he does outright tell you that they weren’t planning to rise up for several more generations (i.e. when the Hive Fleet comes) but they’ve had to accelerate things since you and the Bloodspun Web are onto them.
So I think their current justification is effectively self-defense, the Sire has hit the big pre-programmed “REVOLT NOW” button so that it can have the upper hand rather than being hunted down by the Web. I suspect they did intend to take control of the ship and continue using it to get around.
I definitely do believe Einrich would kill us if it were just him and the RT in a corridor or something, but the fact that he doesn’t take his most obvious opportunity to do it + he says multiple times that he wishes he could’ve converted us instead + he apologizes and tells us he has to do this so his people can live (arguably true) DOES suggest to me that this is something that, as an individual, he finds upsetting. Unfortunately for him there’s no way the individual part of his brain is going to win out here.
He’s justifying it to himself for sure, but he definitely also wishes this weren’t happening.
