294 – Bugs Be Plottin’
It seemed like Amberley had some mixed feelings about my goth Thiefling getup, but oh well. I even changed my skin tone back to the usual instead of keeping it crimson so as to keep myself from being associated with Khornite daemons. Even my horns were the same emerald green as my eyes instead of black. Everyone is a critic.
Selene certainly wasn’t complaining about my new additions, though, quite the opposite, and no one else's opinion really mattered.
I should alter my Avatar more often. I can change how my body looks on a dime, so it’s practically just … clothes. Hmmm.
I just knew I’d be confusing the hell out of everyone, but I couldn’t help it. My Eldritch powers were practically tailor-made for cosplaying, so it was my duty to see that hidden potential flourish and shine. What should I do next, though? Maybe Twi’lek from Star Wars? Ooooh! Asari! Niiiice. I’ll have to work on making versions of my Avatar that look like those two. It couldn’t be any harder to make those weird hair-tendrils work properly than it was to make my Thiefling tail function as it should.
Said tail was swishing behind me at a languid pace, swaying back and forth in a manner that Selene called almost hypnotic.
“So?” I repeat my question, raising an eyebrow at the three humans staring at me like I suddenly grew another head … or horns and a tail. “How is it going?”
“We are … alive,” Amberley answers dryly.
“Of course you are.” I nod. “It’d take the Swarmlord or a Norn Emissary shoving up to kill you guys with those armours on … or maybe taking a dip in one of those nasty digestion pools. Anyway! I didn’t get an alert, so I’m gonna assume nothing like that showed up. Right?”
“The worst thing we fought was a Hive Tyrant,” Cain said, looking mildly traumatised … which was expected. That was his default expression these days.
“And you killed it?” I asked, my eyes widening slightly when he nodded. “Impressive.”
They had the war-gear I made for them to even the scales, but even then, Hive Tyrants were powerful. Hmm. The Hive Mind was still reeling, but I could feel it slowly reasserting its control. What they fought was probably not a Hive Tyrant on the top of its game, but neither was it a feral beast. Still impressive though.
“Didn’t feel impressive with these things,” Cain said, absently patting the bone-sword hanging from his hip. Then he brightened up with forced cheer. “I take it whatever you were occupied with is accomplished and we can leave now, is that why you came for us My Lady?”
“Oh, yeah!” I said. “I terrorised some Night Lords and ate the local Tyranid Fleet. All that remains of the enemies in the system are those down on the planet. The only voidship in the star system is the Sovereign.”
“So the Chaos Fleet … is gone too?” Amberley asked, the initial deadpan look she aimed my way having given way to one of barely concealed astonishment.
What? Did she think all I did while they were fighting their way through the Underhive was laze about and get laid? … I mean, yes, I did do both of those, but I did my homework first! Humpf.
“I may or may not have accidentally detonated their Warp Drive.” I shrugged while giving Amberley the stink eye. “A Warp Rift gobbled them all up before they could activate their Gellar Fields, though I deep-fried all the Astartes before that happened, so the Daemons only got to nibble on the mortals. So, let me quickly check the kill count- Huh?”
[Selene: 4172]
[Amberley: 873]
[Jurgen: 458]
[Cain: 5981]
“The fuck-“ I started, staring at Cain in bewilderment. Like, how? I dived into my mind-cores’ records, retrieving the sensor feed of his armour to figure out just what he did to get those numbers … he managed to collapse a running tunnel under the city, a tunnel which then collapsed on top of and squashed a massive Ripper nest. A Ripper nest that had thousands of incubating eggs just days away from being fully grown. “Well, alright then. Sure, why not? It seems like … Cain won that little wager, even if due to dumb luck. Did you know that you collapsed a Ripper nest filled with nearly five thousand incubating eggs in it?”
And also because Selene spent the last few hours doing something that had very little to do with killing Tyranids. They had time to catch up. Still, a bet’s a bet.
Cain just stared at me blankly, visibly unable to process. “ … what wager?”
“The one where you get to make a Wish of me, if you get the most kills,” I said, then clapped him on the shoulder. “Which you did. Make sure you think up something good, you don’t have to make it right now … and I reserve the right to boot your ass into the Warp if your Wish is too duckish. Anyway! This field trip is officially over, so head on through the portal, please! One after the other, no need to rush.”
They filed through the portal leading to the common room connected to their personal quarters, looking a bit dazed and unquestionably believing, though Cain’s stinky shadow just wrinkled his nose as he walked past me like he could smell the ‘heretic’ on me. My eyebrows twitched, and I had to once more resist the urge to introduce the dimwitted Blank to one of my favourite spells … the one called ‘these hands’.
The portal hissed shut, and I was left alone, still humming cheerfully under my breath despite the dreary corridor I found myself in. It stretched on for hundreds of metres, illuminated by hanging lightbulbs that just barely managed to cast the faintest of light upon the damp metallic floorboards. I took a deep breath, smelling the rust, the rot and the decay that suffused these deeper layers of the Hive City, and then started walking. Not even this horrid place could dull my good mood.
I’d considered leaving the planet as it was, allowing its defenders to achieve some victory over the attackers, but decided otherwise. They might have been able to eke out a win, maybe even a proper victory instead of a pyrrhic one, if they could leverage their defensive artillery and orbital defences against the attackers. Maybe I should have let them, considering the population of this planet was filled with diehard Imperial loyalists who remained fanatically loyal to that rotting Empire even after being abandoned and left to fend for themselves for millennia. When the Achilus Crusade came to ‘re-conquer’ them, they fell in line, joining the Crusaders with enough fervour to make Tiber Achilus think his moronic plan of conquering the Jericho Reach might actually work out.
Too bad for him, Castobel was the exception, not the rule, and his stupid plan relied on every single ex-Imperial world bending over backwards to accommodate him and give up everything they had to feed the gluttonous beast that was his Achilus Crusade.
Alas, I decided against being a prick just for pettiness’ sake. I was in a good mood after all; I might as well spread it around a bit to all these sorry sods who were unlucky enough to end up being split-roasted by Tyranids and the Night Lords war-band.
So I decided to take a stroll, humming all the while as Draugr after Draugr split off from me with each step. Some rushed ahead, racing towards the Tyranids Cain and co. were running away from, while some others I opened portals for, portals leading to other Hive Cities. All across the planet, within ten minutes, every single Tyranid synapse creature was being jumped by one or more of my Draugr, who pounced from portals ripped open from thin air.
The irony of it made my grin widen. Wasn’t this exactly how Tyranids fought with their Genestealers and Lictors? Sneaky ambushes made with warriors of overwhelming power. The only good kill was overkill, after all. And so I walked, tendrils of eerie whiteness burrowing out of my skin to plunge into corpses I passed, devouring them whole in moments. Compared to the organic Fleet in orbit, the amount of bio-energy I’d gain from this was but a snack, but bio-energy was bio-energy. Letting it all go to waste just because I was too lazy to gather it would have been stupid.
*****
This journey had been far more beneficial than I would have thought. Castobel had fallen in line, probably due to a combination of their planet being utterly wrecked and me siccing an inquisitor upon them. So even the most die-hard loyalists, willing to die a horrible death for the chance at spitting at the Big Bad Witch, fell in line.
I know they would cause problems later, but I’d deal with that when it came. For now, I left behind a bioship of my own making, outfitted with enough orbital weaponry to enact Exterminatus upon the planet if it somehow fell to Chaos or something similar while I was away. I didn’t have enough time, or the will, to establish proper defences around the planet, considering it would have been a waste anyway. I was pretty sure that if I left anything on the surface, it would have been blown up within a week of leaving the system. I’d have time to properly pacify them on the way back, or maybe I’d leave them as-is and just keep them from getting off planet. I was sure a good old blockade could get them to consider trading with vile heretics before long, and then it was just a matter of time until they were relying on me for survival. The Tau had that method perfected already, so I had all the consultants I’d ever need if I decided to go down that route.
That was nearly a month and a dozen more Tyranid-infested systems ago. I also managed to track Tyranid Splinter Fleets by the gravitational ripples their Narwhals caused while travelling at faster-than-light speeds. The range of it was only a few dozen light-years for now and required me to build a gravitational sensor half the size of the Sovereign, but it allowed me to ambush no less than five Splinter Fleets the same size as the one in the Castobel system while they were swimming through the interstellar void.
Of the actual star systems we passed by, six of them were going through what I called the ‘harvesting stage’. The final stage of a Tyranid invasion, where all resistance had been crushed, and all that was left to do was to convert everything organic on the planet into biomass, then funnel it all up to the Bioships hanging in low orbit through massive Capillary Towers.
Rippers swarmed across the planet, gorging themselves on corpses, plants, animals and anything organic before running back to the nearest digestion pool and diving inside. Many more bioforms developed specifically for the same tasks wandered around, bloated things with massive stomachs or monstrous floating bioforms with a mass of tentacles ending in mouths. Haruspexes, Psychophages, Pyrovores and, of course, a fuckload of Rippers to put names to those monstrosities.
As depressing as visiting those planets was, I was lucky to come upon them. After all, what were the odds that I’d come across another planet where I wouldn’t have the slightest moral gripes about leaving it an empty husk devoid of life otherwise?
Unfortunately, the deeper along the length of the Orpheus Salient we got, the rarer those types of systems became. Instead of worlds being harvested for biomass … all we found were worlds that had already been fully harvested, then left behind as empty husks devoid of life.
It was in that region of space where I ambushed four out of five Splinter Fleets mid-transit, though, so it wasn’t without gains either. However, seeing entire systems that I knew were home to billions of humans mere months ago, and yet now not a single blade of grass lived on either planet? The silence of those places was deafening, and the horror of so much death and horror left echoes in the Warp that I could taste on my tongue as I walked through those empty wastelands.
Tyranids truly were like locusts, just juiced up on grimdark space mojo and scaled up to the level of bullshit that was all too common in this Galaxy, so that instead of being a menace to a city or two, they ravaged entire Sectors if left alone.
I floated with my legs folded, hands resting on my knees, as my dozens of eyes spread out across my body peered into the dark void beyond the thin plane of reinforced glass. Eldritch power warped half of them, changing them into Navigator eyes, and I peered deeper, beneath the surface, and into the Warp. I cast my gaze as far away as I could, using what I learned from diving into the minds of Astropaths aboard the ships in Tetrarchus’ fleet.
I was looking for a Shadow, where my gaze grew clouded, and I could see no further. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, depending on who you ask, I found it. A gargantuan thing that drenched a stretch of space covering five star systems into darkness.
Beyond it lay the Slinnar Drift, the star cluster I’d come to investigate. But between me and my target lay something the Hive Mind was doing its absolute best to hide from me. It was thick enough that I would have to sail right into the damned fog to actually see anything in detail, to see anything of actual worth.
Was it deterrence? An ambush? Or maybe the byproduct of these five systems being the site of an … experiment. I vaguely recalled that it wouldn’t be the first time that Tyranids flipped their usual modus operandi and settled down to build stuff up instead of just tearing it down like the wandering locusts they were.
But that was … Hive Fleet Tiamet, I think? And I was dealing with Hive Fleet Dagon castoffs. Weird. Very weird. I didn’t like it. So much so that I almost convinced myself that it had to be some trick by the Necrons I’d come to invade, despite knowing exactly how different the Shadow in the Warp and the Blackstone Pylons’ effects felt in the Warp. No, this was a Shadow. If the Necrons didn’t mimic my trick of tying up a few million Tyranids and using them to shroud the five-star systems in a Shadow, then this was the work of the Hive Mind.
“But what the fuck is it planning?” I mused, then shook my head and got to work. It was time I made use of some of my experimental variant templates for the Sovereign, lest I get caught with my pants down by a prepared Tyranid fleet.