295 – I am … Inevitable
Over the next few minutes, I modified the Sovereign using an alternative template I’d developed. It didn’t touch any of its core structure, including the Blackstone parts, but it remade the hull in its entirety. The default version I used was made for a void-based slugging match. It was made to take a nuclear warhead or a cyclonic torpedo to the face and come out of it intact. The new version had none of that; even the majority of the point defence turrets and weapons batteries were pulled into the ship.
The new hull was a sleek thing that curved and flowed over the ship’s skeletal structure, appearing, for all intents and purposes, as if it were carved from a single titanic chunk of abyssal rock that swallowed up the light.
I hummed in appreciation; the initial tests came back as all positive. I’d tested it on a smaller scale before, but not on the Sovereign. This organic metamaterial that threw off all regular sensors and auspex readings aimed at it was the result of combining a genetic template apparently originating from a supremely sneaky beetle, then blending it with Void Kraken DNA before running the resulting patchwork monstrosity through my Kroot optimisation chain until something actually usable came out of it.
But it was only the first layer. My Storm Ward had been a massive success, so I, of course, never stopped further experimenting with it when I had some free time. I had some success with it, learning how to make other Amulets that I could anchor other types of spells to. So far, I only managed Barriers, static Illusions, and some niche spells for Telekinesis and Pyromancy.
I didn’t know what I was going to use my new telekinetic mace for. The one that dragged nearby objects towards its head when swung, but it was a neat little toy. Even if mostly useless.
But no, my greatest success was with Illusions and upscaling. The end result of this was my new stealth hull, which was practically a single massive anchor for a specific Illusion spell: Invisibility.
I drew on my soul energy, enjoying the way it surged into my body, eager to serve. I went about casting the Invisibility spell, but went the extra mile, focusing deeply as I infused the writhing energy gathering within my grasp with the concept of Invisibility. Or at least how I understood it.
To me, Invisibility wasn’t just not being able to be seen. It was going unnoticed; it was unable to be sensed. Not just by the naked eye, but by every other organic sense or artificial sensor in existence. It wasn’t the first time I had done this, far from it, so it came easily.
I didn’t simply unleash the spell, but instead I spread it out, guiding it to wrap around the ship and sink into its hull … then grinned when I felt the Wards I’d built into it all but latch onto the spell. Usually, when I was hiding a ship with Invisibility, it felt like trying to keep a writhing chicken wrapped up in a blanket while a hurricane was trying to blow both the chicken and the blanket away.
Now the blanket was nailed to the chicken with a million bolts. Okay, horrible metaphor aside, this was amazing! I didn’t even have to do anything to keep the Invisibility spell in place besides keep fueling it with more energy. My more finicky mind-cores detected some fluctuations, some unevenly spread energy that made small spots where the spell was thinner, weaker, but I ignored that for now. I could take even those out when needed, but for now, I was happy with the success.
With this, I was confident enough to sail into whatever nasty surprise the Hive Mind had cooked up, because I was certain that nothing they had could find my ship now if I didn’t want them to.
“Let’s see what you are hiding,” I hummed to myself, eyes narrowed and focused, all six pairs of them. Did I need that many? No. Did I enjoy looking like an eldritch horror out of someone’s nightmares? Hell yeah.
Only a single pair was my regular eyes, or as regular as they could be after all the improvements I'd done on them, but the rest were Navigator eye fit only for peering into the Warp. A pair on my forehead, a pair on my cheeks, a pair under my ears and some more on my arms, with the final pair being on my palms.
It was rather impractical — really fucking impractical — but it freaked Cain out something fierce, and so it was worth the little bit of extra effort to make it actually work. I could cheat with my Eldritch flesh and bio-energy to keep bodies that really shouldn’t work physically, biologically, and in any other way in working order, but it was fun to actually try to make these nonsensical designs I came up with work properly.
The first thing I noticed was a lot of daemons in this section of the Warp, like, it seemed like all five star systems had at least a single, near-permanent Warp Rift open that was spewing out an unending wave of murderous daemons. Primarily Khornite ones, but one system was under assault from a Nurglite horde and another from a Slaaneshi one. The only ones missing were the Tzeentchian daemons, but with a clusterfuck this huge, I was gonna eat my hat if there weren’t one or two Lords of Change skulking about to make things more … interesting.
“So this wasn’t a trap,” I mused. “For me at least.”
The Slinnar Drift sat in a nook within the curve of the Cicatrix Maledictum. Was the Hive Mind experimenting with something to halt its advance? That didn’t really make sense; Tyranids usually avoided fighting daemons due to them not having any biomass. Then again, the Great Rift was rather recent here, so it probably made the Hive Mind panic and attempt to solve this new problem the only way it could: by throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
The details were still foggy; I was still too far away to see anything more than those obnoxious yawning wounds in Reality and sense the flavour of festering pus leaking out of them. Whatever the Tyranids were building, it was making the Shadow thicker than I thought, even more so than it was evident from the outside. It was fascinating, but I wasn’t in a hurry to figure it out. I had Blackstone Pylons now, and even at this very moment, one of my clones was listening to a lecture on Solemnace, memorising and dissecting every word the wordy Cryptek that Trazyn pulled out of some coffin was saying.
I’d like to get my claws on whatever new monstrosity the Tyranids cooked up here, but it wasn’t crucial anymore. I wasn’t desperate for it anymore. Which was nice, because it could have been bait prepared specifically for me if the Hive Mind was smart enough to figure out exactly why I had millions of its synapse creatures tied up and scattered around the Vallia system. Unfortunately, I could never really predict the Hive Mind. It was unfathomably cunning in some aspects, but incredibly dumb in others. It was perhaps the most alien foe I had to deal with, maybe even more so than the Chaos Gods. Those Four Twats were somewhat predictable in always acting in accordance with their fundamental natures.
A knock on the door leading to the observation deck snapped me out of my thoughts, making me blink and glance back at the entryway.
“Yes?” I called out, then took a glance at the other side through my aura, projecting my voice into the ears of my visitor. “Come in, Cat. What can I help you with?”
The doors hissed open, and my adorable feline daughter stepped inside, looking all serious in her full secretary attire. Pencil skirt, high heels, a nice blouse, and even her hair worn in a no-nonsense bun. All finished off by that dutiful frown worn on her lips, the effect only ruined by the fact that I could feel the silly girl’s emotions. It seemed like she inherited my love for dressing up, or even cosplaying … though I wasn’t sure how that worked. She wasn’t biologically my daughter after all. Oh well, it was cute, so it was fine.
“My Lady,” she said, coming to a stop before my floating form, chest puffed out as she fixed her glasses. Glasses, which she didn’t need. I wasn’t a bitch, so of course none of my daughters would ever have trouble with their eyesight. Still, it looked cute on her. “Inquisitor Veil has requested an audience with you. She wishes to discuss the Wish you promised Mr Cain with you in his stead.”
“Huh, they finally figured out what they want?” I mused. It’s been a month, and I was sure Cain would have kept procrastinating on doing anything with that Wish until he dropped dead from old age had Amberley not whooped his ass. In the end, it seemed like he decided to do the smart thing and let her handle it. My threatening to throw him into the nearest sun if his Wish upset me surely had nothing to do with his indecision. “Alright then, let’s see what they managed to come up with.”
A portal opened up before me, leading to the room a certain Inquisitor was staying in. I could have set a date for the meeting and stuff, but they’d already made me wait a month. After a few seconds, Amberley warily stepped through, and I dismissed the spell with a thought, tilting my head at the blonde woman in that eerie, bird-like manner that always managed to unnerve her.
“So?” I asked as I floated there, legs crossed, elbows on my knees, and chin leaning on my interlocked fingers. “What is your Wish? I’ll overlook the fact that it wasn’t you who earned, if only so that we can be over and done with this already.”
I saw her hesitate for a moment, her wary gaze taking in my unimpressed look and impatient demeanour, reading me in a glance. Amberley steadied herself, her resolve shining through, and her iron discipline quelling her lingering hesitation.
Whatever Wish she’d come up with, it must have been carefully crafted over weeks of deliberation, tailor-made to gain the greatest possible rewards without overreaching and causing me to chuck them into a star for trying to exploit a playful wager. I wasn’t some fey creature that had to abide by her words as if they were law. My pride made me hate the idea of not honouring my words … but if they first dishonoured themselves by asking for something outrageous, then it was on them.
It was like winning a drunken bet over an Uno game and then demanding your equally drunken friend’s car with the earned ‘anything goes’ favour. But by what emotions I felt whiffling off of the Inquisitor, she must have been confident in having read me well enough to know just how far she could push this.
“Noctilith,” Amberley said, carefully eyeing my expression for a reaction.
“I do believe your Imperium has more than enough of that already, no?” I tilted my head. “A million worlds, there must be entire mountains’ worth of the stuff just lying about in forgotten storage rooms.”
“Not the material itself,” Amberley said. “But knowledge. You know how to manipulate it, how to reforge it and create functional Pylons.”
I never hid that from them, mostly because it wasn’t knowledge that could be used to hurt me. Plus, those pylons were pretty recognisable, and would have been targeted by saboteurs anyway, even if they didn’t know what they did. I trusted my security measures, though whichever idiot tried their luck at blowing up my pylons would end up donating their bodies to the digestion pools. Still, I was curious about this choice.
“You could ask me to improve you, give you strength, longevity and endurance like that of an Astartes or even a Custodes,” I said. I was currently cosplaying as a thrift-store demon after all. Might as well try my luck at this whole tempting mortals stuff. “I could take your soul into my Realm and make you immortal.”
“I don’t doubt you could,” Amberley said slowly, carefully choosing her words. “But … I doubt I would live long enough to enjoy any of those if I picked them. Knowledge of Xenotech is something an Order Xenos Inquisitor like myself is expected to deal with and gather when useful. Letting myself be changed, or my soul be claimed by someone other than the Emperor, would lead to censure the moment the news of my new capabilities reached my coworkers. I’d be declared a Rogue and a heretic.”
“So you want knowledge on how to construct Blackstone Pylons instead, and just that?” I said, an eyebrow raised questioningly, and she hesitated again, looking torn for a fraction of a second before she nodded. Good, she decided not to push. I would not have even entertained the idea of teaching the Imperium how to switch the polarity of Blackstone and create what I’d begun calling Whitestone in my head, even if it could technically be considered being included in her Wish by her wording of it. “I will compile a data packet on what I know about it and transfer it to you. Whether you can actually replicate the methods either I or the Necrons use will be up to you.”
The Necrons used freaky quantum tech to make Blackstone malleable, turning parts of it into the consistency of clay so they could realign its molecular structure with precision tools. My own method leaned a bit more towards brute force, but I still used my Crypt Spider for some parts of the task. I could brute-force some quick-and-dirty low-quality pylons, carve the needed resonant fractal arrays into them, but those would be much less effective than pylons with the same array engraved at the molecular level.
The Imperium, having better tools to fight back against Chaos, was a good thing. Both for the Galaxy overall, and for me personally, too. Those pylons could weaken me too somewhat, but much less than they could daemons, and anything throwing a wrench into the machinations of Chaos was worth it if all it came with was some minor side effects.
Besides, if this made some idiots overconfident enough to try me, I could claim self-defence while also doing the Imperium a favour by raising their average IQ score. After all, even standing on an entire planet’s worth of perfectly engraved Blackstone failed to rob me of my ability to use my psyker powers. A few shoddy pylons wouldn’t do shit.
“My thanks, Lady Echidna,” Amberley said, giving me a respectful bow while she did an admirable job of hiding her relief from showing on her face. “I won’t intrude any longer than. By your leave?”
“Be careful,” I said, opening a portal leading back to her room with a gesture. “Chaos will know what you have, and this knowledge you gained wouldn’t be the first game-changing discovery that got buried before it could bring about any significant change. You will be safe while on my ship, but I would expect a visit from a Lord of Change as soon as you are away from me.”
Amberley gave me a slightly shaky nod, her eyes glazing over as she sank into her thoughts, likely trying to come up with a scheme that would see her newly gained knowledge reach the hands it needed to reach. She stepped through the portal, which I dismissed a moment later, leaving me alone with Cat, who lingered nearby.
“Have something to ask?” I hummed, raising an eyebrow at Cat, who was making a visible effort to keep herself from fidgeting … and was failing at it quite handily. “I don’t bite.”
“What’s with the tail and horns?” Cat asked, her gaze snapping up to linger on my horns and then down at the spaded tail swishing behind me. “I know you fashioned my current form after Felinids, but … are you supposed to be some goat-type abhuman?”
I gave her a slow blink, then grinned. “Come ‘ere. I shoved some basic information about my life into all of your heads, but it seemed I must have missed some details. Let me show you something.”
Cat squeaked as I grabbed her with a telekinetic hand, then deposited her in my lap, arms wrapping around her waist as I put my chin on top of her head, between her pair of feline cat ears.
“Mo-om,” Cat whined, squirming a little, more out of embarrassment than discomfort.
“You are going to receive some much-needed physical affection, do not resist,” I said, grinning as she huffed and melted into the hug, her ears sagging happily atop her head. “Now, let me introduce you to the infernal cesspit that was internet culture in the first two decades of the 21st century …”