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Getting Warhammered - [ 209 ]
🕑 Added 2025-04-30 16:01:28 +0000 UTCBuilding a fleet of spaceships was surprisingly easy. Making them match the Imperial Fleet in strength, was less so. They had Void-Shields, and I didn’t, the tyranids usually went with thick carapace and a swarm of fliers surrounding bigger ships to make hitting anything of real consequence practically impossible.
But that was lame. Swarm tactics were not cool, I wanted quality instead of just sheer quantity making up for the lack of any real quality.
I wanted my sleek and elegant gigantic spaceships that inspired shock and awe in people, damnit. Not dread and horror, that came after they realised the extent of the weaponry my babies carried.
I wanted my ships to be like me: Beautiful and deadly.
The problem was, the types of organic armour templates I had that I knew for sure would withstand sustained fire from some of the nastier weaponry Imperial Ships’ were packing were too damned costly. No matter how outrageously large my stores of bio-energy had grown from my Ork and Solar farming, I couldn’t cover kilometre-long ships in a dozen metre-thick Swarmlord carapace.
No, I would have to rely on lesser carapace and combine it with the bio-electric aura bio-ships could already emit. They only lessened the impact of energy weaponry, leaving the bio-armour to take the leftover damage, so I would also have to build in redundancies and automatic self-healing to make sure my ships didn’t fall apart.
Luckily, most of those were already done in the more advanced Bio-ships and I had some templates I found myself pleased with.
Does that bioelectric field even work against anything that’s not energy? It’d be embarrassing if they just spat a nuke at me and my fancy new ships all blew up.
Nukes were a thing of course, though they didn’t hold anywhere near the same ‘fear-factor’ as they did in my time on Earth. How could they, when virus bombs and things that made nukes look like kiddie fireworks were a thing?
Railguns too, would an electrostatic field disrupt a projectile launched by a railgun? Probably not. Yeah, those bio-electric organs were a half-measure, and I wasn’t satisfied with them.
Honestly, Void Shields mixed with bio-ship-grade carapace would have been the best. Void shields made missiles and small projectiles irrelevant, and only scatter-shot or bombarding type of attacks could get through them, which the carapace was perfect against.
Too bad I didn’t have the materials to even start working on mass-producing void-shield generators. My monkey-drone also proved to be annoyingly focused on miniaturisation, not perfecting ship-grade stuff. Sure, I had a void-shield generator I could hide in my back pocket, but I couldn’t use it to defend a ship with it when its range was just 5 metres around me, could I?
Stupid monkey.
I could try either the energy-field projectors I’d gotten from the Tau or up-scaling the refractor shields, but it would be too much work and I didn’t have the time, nor the rather unique materials both devices needed to build them. Not yet anyway.
Eh. Missiles should be my primary worry, as the Imperium doesn’t use railguns … now if I don’t want to use swarming fliers to deal with missiles, I’ll need point-defence turrets. Preferably lasers.
The end result would be the same, the lasers would lock onto approaching missiles and detonate them before they could do any harm. The tyranid flier swarms surrounding their fleets had the same purpose. But lasers were cooler, and more elegant, so I wanted lasers.
Unfortunately, while tyranids have a lot of variety to their energy weaponry — plasma, electricity, warp-lances, super-heated acid slugs — lasers aren’t one of them. Why am I fixated on lasers? Because lasers were light-speed projectile weapons in the void of space. They were the best option for point-defence turrets.
Fuck.
Did I have the time to make an organic prototype laser turret of my own that was reliable enough to shoot down missiles?
How the fuck do you make organic lasers, anyway? Supercharged bioluminescence mixed with some modified focusing iris made of pupils? Silicone crystals, maybe? With bio-energy giving it all an extra supernatural oomph, it might even work.
Without further ado, I decided to just get started and set a timer for myself. The fleet was still more than a week away from even the furthest fringes of the asteroid cloud surrounding the system. Four hours of experimenting on bio-lasers. If I couldn’t come up with a viable prototype in all that time despite my ridiculous processing power, I’d swallow my pride and go with swarming fliers instead.
Or just steal all their missiles. Shouldn’t be too hard with my drones infiltrating their ships.
*****
“It’ll do, I guess,” I hummed, not quite satisfied with the final prototype as my timer finally ticked down to zero.
Before me was a missile, though with its payload removed and replaced with scrap metal. Well, it used to be a missile, but it was rapidly turning into molten slag as a beam of white light bore into it.
I quickly realised how dumb my initial idea of using bioluminescent material was as my light source, and just used a contained glob of super-heated bio-plasma instead. It was held in a heat-proof sphere covered on all sides by mirror-like surfaces, with only a single facet of the orb-like object open. That facet was then covered in a lot of focusing lenses, all of which I had warped with Biomancy and had bio-energy running through them.
It wasn’t purely organic, but that just made it better. The psyker bullshit that was Biomancy allowed me to make all light going through the focusing irises burn, and all without losing the light-speed velocity of lasers.
I really was starting to get a handle on this psyker stuff. Warping space and bending the laws of physics over my knee like a bitch. It was fun.
If I could miniaturise this … could I stick these balls into someone’s eye socket? Laser eyes. I want a pet Kryptonian … okay, ‘pet Kryptonian’ is going onto my ‘Mother of Monsters’ project list.
“Okay, live test and then I gotta go,” I said, clicking my tongue in annoyance as I sent a wishful glance towards the ever distant but approaching fleet.
With a thought, I grabbed another borrowed missile — some poor tech adept was probably having a really bad day for ‘misplacing’ a dozen missiles — and Blinked it a few hundred kilometres away, then armed it and aimed it at myself before letting it loose.
The point defence turret, or PDT for short, whirled to life as power surged into its focusing matrix. The glob of plasma glowed brighter and brighter, the turret ever so minutely adjusting its aim as the missile flew at us, and then it spat out a beam of intense white light.
There was no sound in the void of space, my voice only worked because I could physics to get bent with a bit of soul energy, so the laser was silent but I could feel the thrum of power from it. The heat on my skin, the power of the sun condensed into a lance of light no thicker than my thigh.
It crossed the few hundred kilometres in no time, literally, making the missile explode in an instant as its front half melted and its charge triggered. With its job done, it immediately stopped firing, whirling down with what almost sounded like reluctance.
I really fucking hoped it wasn’t, because if my new baby somehow got infected by a machine spirit I was throwing it into the nearest star. I didn’t need my weapons to grow egos and have ideas about how they could decide where to shoot better than I.
None of that shit in my Empire.
A bit hypocritical with what happened with my daughters, but whatever. They were not a part of my army. I couldn’t allow some of the weapons I was going to make to not be mindless and absolutely loyal, not when some of them could inconvenience me in ways none of my daughters ever could.
There was a very large difference between a cute girl with very venomous nails throwing a tantrum and a Death Star equivalent throwing a hissy fit.
One was cute, the other left me with a dead planet. Very not cute.
Some would say that ‘maybe you shouldn’t make a Death Star then? It’s not like it worked out for Palps’ but they can kiss my ass. I had the power to make a Death Star, maybe not now, but in the future. So I would.
It was right there on my to-do list, right under converting the local star into a Dyson Sphere. It was a long-term project that is in the ‘cool idea I wanna do’ phase.
Anyway. Turret works. Awesome. Gotta go bully a Tau captain into not being a moron. Teleport or not to teleport? Eh … the Tau will figure out I can teleport after this shit is over anyway if they aren’t completely incompetent.
With a thought, I disappeared from the outer edge of the System and popped into existence at the Tau warship’s command deck.
“Hi!” I said cheerfully, hands on my hips as guards whirled and pulse rifles came up while less combat-oriented Tau squeaked in surprise. A particularly jumpy female one even fell out of her chair. “So we have a bit of a- Hey! That was rude.”
I glared at the idiot Tau Captain who had shot me, the bolt of plasma aimed at burning a hole through my skull flicked upwards to melt a small bit of the ceiling instead.
“You-“ he starts, but before he can pull the trigger again, I yank the sidearm out of his hand and levitate it between us. Then I slowly scrunch it into a ball of scrap, the energy pack explodes, but I just scrunch it down along with the rest and let the finished ball of cooling slag drop on the floor with a metallic clang. “Shoot her!”
“How did someone who can’t handle stress get assigned command over a warship?” I drawled, sending a curious glance at the guards, suspiciously not shooting me. “Sounds like a clusterfuck waiting to happen. Seeing as you are not attempting to shoot me, I take it there is someone here with a bit more brains and a similar level of authority as him?”
When no one deigned to step forward, I rolled my eyes, continuing to ignore the tightly wound bundle of nerves on the precipice of a mental breakdown and fixed an unimpressed look at one of the fully armoured guards hanging a bit further back.
The woman, an old Fire Caste warrior assigned to watch over this nepo-baby of a Captain by the brief glimpse I took into her mind, held my gaze through her visor for a moment before she seemed to sigh. Stepping forward, she waved a hand, and the rifles went down; the guards obeying her unspoken order without hesitation.
“Now then, I take it you have noticed the sizable fleet heading toward us?” I asked, tilting my head. “I’m not quite sure how good your sensors are, but we have detected a clustered Warp-jump of about fifty ships. ETA to Vallia is at three to four weeks at the moment if they don’t speed up or do something unwise like Warp-Jumping into the System.”
They won’t. It would be pretty hard to do with their Navigators now self-identifying as wall paint. Not that I had any right to know that with the sensors the Tau think I have, hell, I doubt anyone but the Eldar has stuff that could have felt whether a ship’s Navigator was alive from Lightyears away.
“Shas’vre T’Kora.” the gravelly voice of an older woman sounded out from the locked helmet as she stepped before me. “Our sensors detected the massive gravitational anomalies associated with Human FTL travel. My charge-“ she tilted her head towards the captain, who looked on in betrayal and rising rage. “-believes you have betrayed us and invited the Human assault force here to take the System for the Imperium of Mankind. His beliefs are … widely shared on the ship.”
“In a way, I suppose I did,” I snorted, making her narrow her eyes under her helmet. She didn’t have Coldstone’s mental defences, so I could read her quite well. She was a veteran, doubtful and untrusting but not willing to jump to dangerous conclusions either. “They came here to kill me after all and prevent your Empire from obtaining the power I represent.”
Or so little Sol believed. I think the Deathwatch are just sore fucking losers and couldn’t handle me killing the nasty Inquisitor they were charged with protecting.
“Is that so?” T’Kora asked, and I wasn’t sure whether to be glad the blue hag wasn’t jumping to conclusions or annoyed she would take minutes rolling every word I said around in her head before she came to any decisions.
“It’s not like there is anything worth sending an entire Fleet over in this System.” I rolled my eyes, snorting at some of the ridiculous plots she was considering. “Vallia is a shithole, and this is a single warship. They want me dead, or captured, I’d wager … not that I think they’ll risk going for the second. Anyway, I came over here to notify you that I will be handling our invaders myself and to make sure I don’t have to worry about him doing something stupid. Seems like I was only half-right to worry.”
“He will not make any foolhardy attempts on your life,” T’Kora said. “That much I can promise. Standard operating procedures would dictate that we evacuate as many of our allies as possible and retreat before an overwhelming invading force can reach us. Even if you and your ‘subjects’ are not officially vassals of the Tau Empire, we will offer up our ship for evacuation … but you are not planning on leaving, are you?”
“I appreciate the gesture,” I said with a soft smile, and I really did because I could tell she meant every word. She didn’t trust me, wasn’t sure I wasn’t in cahoots with the invaders, but she wasn’t willing to let all my citizens get slaughtered if she could help it. “But I will not leave. You will find me quite capable of fending off invaders. You may retreat if you want. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t have to worry about enemies behind my back.”
“That much, I can promise,” T’Kora said. “However, if you don’t plan to retreat … or plan on evacuating your subjects, I am afraid we will have to part ways. We will be pulling back and hoping to outrun the Imperial Fleet as soon as we can.”
“Suit yourselves.” I shrugged, then gave her an innocent smile. “But if a single missile or torpedo is launched at my moon or one of my ships for whatever reason from this warship, our alliance is off, and I am murdering you all. Alternatively, do send a scout ship back in a month, I should have this mess handled by then.”
Before they could answer, I Blinked away. Was threatening them the best option? Maybe not, but it sure did give plenty of incentive to T’Kora to keep her moronic captain on a very short leash. I knew she wasn’t the type to attack me anyway, just out of spite, and she should also be smart enough to realise I’d just teleported in and out of their most protected room without any effort.
Another bullet point crossed out. Nice going, me!
Comments
Marin Angelov
Thanks for the chapter! Hell yeah! That laser turret is cool! Can't wait for the other crazy inventions! I also feel Zedev will move his lab in the Death Star, claiming the whole thing as his base. That Blink was a nice flex!
agent squee
Thank you for the chapter.
JOHNNYBOY 117
Finally, time for a good old orkstyle zerg rush.
Duke of Coffee
Heh the Tau Captain is not used to this situation, no wonder they are portrayed as naive and such. Anyway ship build finalized I guess?
Atavatain
I like this old lady. Haven't seen much of her but she feels distinct so far. A good pragmatic balance to out our adorable but not so pragmatic or balanced mother of monsters.
Vanessa
Thanks for the chapter! Also lasers!
Prism
Tftc
