296 – Well, this is getting interesting
After enlightening Cathrine about the intricacies of the internet and why I was running around, looking like the fetishised version of a Succubus, and thereby thoroughly traumatising her with far too much information about my love life as was my right as a parent, I returned to my previous task.
The massive Tyranid swarm spread out across five whole star systems showed no sign of having taken notice of the Sovereign thus far. I wasn’t sure how long that would last. Sure, I was confident that it was the stealthiest thing on this side of the Warp, but it hasn’t been stress-tested yet in an active warzone, and there surely were some kinks to work out still before it could be considered perfected.
Teleportation was not an option if I wanted to continue on with my stealthy approach, considering Val still called my attempts at making my teleports sneaky ‘crude and entirely ineffective’. Sure, I wasn’t releasing more energy on arrival than a hundred normal Psykers used in a lifetime anymore, but that didn’t mean I was especially sneaky either. All it did was make the spell more efficient, but with Lords of Change lurking about, they’d notice me skipping across the Veil in a blink.
I even removed every Whitestone part of the ship, sending them into my Realm for safekeeping. I didn’t need my psychic power magnified; I needed my psychic presence erased. With only Blackstone woven into and under the hull, our passive psychic presences should be nonexistent when viewed from the Warp. Thus, maybe we could manage to slip under the notice of any Greater Daemons long enough to figure out what the hell was actually going on around these parts.
I quickly did as I promised, connecting Amberley’s datapad to one of the organic wireless ports I made to interact with the Noosphere those Imperials love so much. I dumped the promised file onto it, bypassing the flimsy firewall it used with laughable ease. Zedev’s own firewall was much more robust and a dozen times fiercer, and even that had nothing on the monstrosities my new Cryptek teacher threw together to test me against. Even now, one of them was teaching me how to interface with ‘Lesser Technologies’ through Necron tech. I managed to improve my organic wireless ports enough to be able to handle some of the tricks I learned, but the best stuff still required me to pull out my Cryptek Spyder.
I hope that gives Amberley a headache. Even your fancy Inquisitorial dataslate with the best firewall your limitless authority can get you isn’t nearly enough to keep me out.
We drifted closer and closer to the nearest star system, but it was extremely slow-going since I decided to only go half-throttle on the Gravity Engines. I wasn’t sure whether Tyranid Narwhals could sense the small gravitational ripples spread by it, but I could sense them with my improved gravitational sensors, so it wasn’t out of the question that the Hive Mind would also pick up on it.
My best bet was hoping those ripples would spread far enough that backtracing them to the origin would be impossible, or that they’d get lost in the background ‘white noise’ that constantly rippled through the fabric of spacetime. Just a harmless asteroid here, nothing to worry about.
It took days at the positively glacial pace the Sovereign was going — a mere twenty times the speed of light — but we finally entered the outer asteroid cloud surrounding the star system. I kept watch through it all, keeping my Avatar stationed up on the observation deck with my dozen Navigator eyes peering into the warp for any sign of trouble, while a large part of my mental processing power was devoted to analysing the sensor readings coming back from the Sovereign's sensor arrays. As far as I could tell, we went unnoticed … for now.
My eyes narrowed, taking in the unnaturally dense asteroid cloud surrounding the Freya system. From what I knew, the Oort cloud that surrounded the Sol System was much sparser, and the norm, with thousands of kilometres, sometimes millions even, between each asteroid. Here? The largest gaps were at most fifty kilometres wide, and that wasn’t even the worst part.
The Shadow in the Warp was dense; the thick fog that shrouded the system had a nearly tar-like consistency, making it damned near impossible to peer inside. The only thing I could see was the massive Warp Rift near the third planet from the local star. Peering through that gap was possible, and I managed to catch some glimpses of the world around it.
That’s a lot of Tyranids. I mused, seeing the gigantic swarm descending on the horde of Khornite demons pouring out of the Rift. Not just the regular chaff either, I saw Hierophant Bio Titans towering above the battlefield by the dozens, and the swarm was filled with advanced bioforms like Carnifexes, Tyranid Warriors, Hive Tyrants and other nasty beast- Oh dear, hello there. It’s been a while, Swarmlord.
Yes, the Hive Mind really didn’t want to lose this planet for some reason if it bothered deploying the Swarmlord. I focused on the structures I could see, on the colossal organic towers piercing the dark grey clouds far above the battlefield. They dominated the landscape, towering over everything and making even the Swarmlord and the Bloodthirster battling with it look like ants in comparison. They also looked nothing like the Capillary Towers I’d become distinctly familiar with after devouring a few hundred of them on my way here.
We drifted inside, and it felt like I was trying to peer through a thick fog, seeing no further than a few dozen kilometres in each direction even while using my Navigator eyes. Well, at least my actual Psyker powers would remain undiminished, considering I drew power directly from my own Realm, which remained entirely unaffected by the Shadow.
Unfortunately, Khornite daemons cared the least about that. With the Rift wide open — somehow, probably a powerful Lord of Change having torn it open while sacrificing a few million cultists to tear through the Shadow — they didn’t need to worry about how the Shadow made it harder for them to be summoned, or materialise. They just walked through the rifts in space. Wonderful. I just knew Doombreed would come flying out of that Rift the moment I made my presence known.
That fucker was either a really sore loser, a massive masochist or just loved fighting someone who could actually fight back and even defeat him. Probably a mix of all three, to be honest. It wasn’t like he talked; he always came swinging the moment I dragged his ass into the Materium, and the only noise he ever made was roars.
The Sovereign slipped into a larger gap between a cluster of asteroids while I kept focused, devouring every nugget of information coming my way, and my mind-cores dissected every last point of data across the colossal amounts of sensor feedback flowing in every second.
Nothing was out of place. They really were just asteroids. I had to wonder how this even came to be. Did another star system collide with this one, and the asteroid field was made up of the fragments of shattered planets? Even that didn’t make sense. This was far too much mass for even that, nearly fifty planets’ worth just within range of my regular sensors. Then h-
An asteroid shifted, defying its established vector. The anomalous movement was noted by a mind-core the very nanosecond it happened, and an alert was kicked up the chain until it blared in my ears and my attention snapped to the offending chunk of space debris half a nanosecond later.
I focused on it, creating dozens of new organic sensors, each with a different template, all aimed at the suspicious space rock. We drifted closer to it, and I experimentally let a small tendril of my aura extend from where I had the rest coiled up around me tightly. It snaked forth, and I was as sneaky with it as I possibly could be, trying to impress the concept of stealth into my aura to make it harder to notice.
Then it brushed up against the asteroid and- Well, shit. It was … weird. Almost organic, yet not. Alive, yet not having any actual signs of life. I’ve felt something like this before: A Void Kraken.
But that made no fucking sense at all. Void Krakens didn’t really migrate, and I knew there hadn’t been one in this section of space, in any of the nearby systems. Which left only one conclusion.
Did the Tyranids eat a Void Kraken? Is this some new monstrosity crafted from what they learned from devouring its corpse?
My own attempts to reverse-engineer Void Kraken biology were not really going all that well. Mostly because they didn’t really do biology in a way I understood it, and my Eldritch Flesh was not totally compatible with whatever alternate biology they had. My results came out as pseudo-organic meta-materials, like stuff that meshed organic chitin with inorganic metals or crystalline latices.
Some of my earlier templates required me to use my Eldritch flesh and bio-energy in tandem to keep the resulting material intact, lest it crumble into dust as the failing molecular bonds between the two incompatible materials finally dissolved. I managed to work out those kinks, but I could still only make the pseudo-organic materials themselves and not whatever went for organs for Void Krakens, much less their ‘stomachs’ that digested solid matter. But I still needed to add the inorganic materials from somewhere else, unable to recreate them with bioenergy, as I could for everything even vaguely organic.
Which made little sense, by the way. I could make pure oxygen and even enriched air, which had nothing organic about it, technically. But I could do it. Same with how I could make iron, salt, and other seemingly inorganic substances the body needed. My current theory was that I had a mental block, or that the fact that I’d been a human before was limiting my capabilities in some way. It was confusing as hell, but then again, it was me trying to understand the intricacies of an Eldritch power, so I guess fuck me then.
So you can probably understand why my first reaction to seeing the Tyranids seemingly achieve what I’ve been having trouble doing was to frown, feeling slightly offended … only to grin shamelessly a moment later. Well, fuck you, Hive Mind. I’m stealing your homework.
The probably-a-Tyranid masquerading as an asteroid didn’t seem to react to my stealthy scan; then again, Void Krakens didn’t have a nervous system as far as I knew. Nor a brain. Or organs. I had no idea how these damned things functioned. They were almost like machines, but even those at least had the decency of having Machine Spirits. Maybe it was like a golem? Some sort of ancient artificial self-replicating superweapon that was robbed of actual sentience? I knew sentience and sapience were important for forming a soul, since none of my drones had souls until I gave them free will and minds of their own modelled after a human’s or an animal's.
But then how did the Tyranids replicate it? If it’s just an inorganic chunk of rocks operated by some primitive AI? Still makes no damned sense. Tyranids can’t gain sustenance from- or create anything inorganic.
The mystery revealed itself the moment my survey-tendril poked into the asteroid, pressing through the outer shell. It wasn’t an actual Void Kraken; it just wore a material similar to what the bodies of Void Krakens were made of, like a shell. It was more like a turtle, no, like a hermit crab. Just entirely encased in the thick, sturdy shell that probably made it look like a regular asteroid to even top-tier auspex systems. Hell, even my own sensor arrays would have missed it entirely had it not shifted its direction. Asteroids had no propulsion or drive thrusters, so of course they just drifted along, flying through a trajectory determined by the gravitational forces acting upon them.
Why did it shift then? I checked its new trajectory, calculating its future vector based on its speed … and realised it was going to bounce off another asteroid and drift close enough to the Sovereign afterwards that it might even brush up against the hull. If I maintained my current speed and took the safest and quickest route through the asteroid field. Which meant it had sensed me. Somehow. Wonderful. Interesting. There was a gap in my concealment, one which I would have to find and then seal.
Maybe there were gravitational sensors hidden on the asteroids nearby that sensed the passage of my ship? Could the route I took have been prepared to bait all incoming vessels into it, so that those sensitive sensors only had to be placed in a few locations instead of all around the asteroid field?
Such forethought and cunning probably meant the Hive Mind was actually trying and had enough presence in the system to set up more elaborate plans like this. Which was already evident when I saw the Swarmlord. Idiot, it only summons that when it needs something pretty close to an actual Avatar on the battlefield to enact its will. It’s probably micromanaging everything.
All the same, the only thing that mattered was the fact that I’d been noticed. Maybe they didn't yet know where exactly I was, but noticed all the same, and this wasn’t like a video game where all the NPCs suffered from a severe case of both short- and long-term amnesia while also being half-blind and fully deaf. My magnificent stealth run of this mission was a bust … and I just so happened to have a fascinating specimen to take all my annoyance out on. How fortunate!
My aura lashes out, flowing into the thin thread of it I already had extended and burrowed inside the sneaky Tyranid. It thickens instantly, and I can see the hiding Tyranid react, probably to my killing intent being surgically implanted right into its body. Through my aura, I grasp its fleshy insides and twist. Roughly.
Organs burst, flesh turns to mulch, bones shatter, and tendons snap. Then I wrap the whole thing up in a blanket of soul energy before teleporting it back over to my Avatar, where my Thiefling tail turns into a tendril of Eldritch flesh and plunges into the corpse, phasing through the hard shell and slurping up the organic mush inside. By the time I pulled it back, all that was left of the Tyranid was a hollow rocky shell made of that weird pseudo-organic material.
The genetic template I gained from it was novel, but nothing truly outstanding. It was probably a new prototype bioform the Hive Mind was experimenting with. What was its purpose? It had no Tyranids inside of it, just a single bioform, so it wasn’t a boarding pod equivalent. It also only had a sharp beak-like thing in the way of offence, which wouldn’t have been enough to truly harm an Imperial vessel. This thing was barely a dozen metres across, and the smallest Imperial ships were still ten to twenty times that. Although its synaptic node was rather robust, so that was probably it. It was a relay node.
What was interesting was the lack of any sensory organs which would have been able to detect a ship hidden under the level of concealment I’d stacked on top of the Sovereign. Which probably meant there was another type of sneaky Tyranid skulking about, probably still pretending to be an asteroid, which would be the actual dedicated sensor bioform. This ugly thing I just ate just received the warning and acted on it.
My aura uncoils like a great beast, sweeping out and across the surroundings like a tsunami of supernatural perception. Luckily, it’s on the Materium’s side of the Veil and expanding out from my Avatar, so it’s unaffected by the Shadow in the Warp, just as most of my other abilities.
It barely takes a second to locate the first Tyranid who decided to self-identify as an asteroid. Notice how I said ‘the first’? Yeah, funny that … I found another, then another, a third, a fourth-
I groaned, shutting off the alarms and instead conjuring a 3D map of my surroundings with a small replica of the Sovereign floating in the centre. It’s surrounded by a veritable avalanche of bluish dots representing asteroids, at least a third of which swap to an alarming red, more and more joining their numbers further out as my aura continues to expand. All the crimson dots blink, then start moving as one, nearly all of their trajectory taking them right towards my prized ship.
The ones that don’t? They collapse upon the open corridor in the asteroid field I’d taken, essentially forcing me to go through them.
“Well, this is getting interesting.”