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Getting Warhammered - [ 208 ]
🕑 Added 2025-04-26 16:51:32 +0000 UTC“What a disgusting, paranoid little man,” I murmured to myself, holding the whimpering mind of Solomon Tetrarchus in my hand. “Well, I still have some use for you yet.”
I might have broken his mind just a tiny bit, but I made sure to make a snapshot of it beforehand. I’d used the time we spent chatting — he spent it trying to shoot me and then himself while I was the one making small talk, but it still counted as chatting in my books — to map his mind, and to record it in detail. I made an artificial replica of it too, back in my Realm where my soul had a much greater control over the psychic energy it wielded.
Every day that went by, mx Avatar seemed more and more limited. Or maybe my Soul was just growing stronger at an increasing pace, both in power and control.
Not that it mattered all that much. My Avatar was the conduit, and it limited my power in realspace more than my Soul ever would. It would stay that way too, realspace rejected beings of the Immaterium. There was a reason no Chaos God or any creature of the Warp greater than a Greater Daemon ever manifested.
So I rebuilt his mangled, broken mind. I plucked bits from the artificial mind I’d made to fix spots I couldn’t mend, or couldn’t rebuild with my Avatar’s lesser control. It was good practice, one I needed if I wanted to help the cute little Shaman Queen wandering around in my Realm.
Taking a glance, I giggled as I watched the de-aged Mara play with a horde of fluffy friends. A manifestation of myself watched over her, currently in the form of a large white Maine coon with green eyes.
I talked with her through it, making sure she had someone to speak with and made her stuff so she wouldn’t grow bored. She was very … simple for now, delighted to just be cuddling her ‘fluffy friends’ all day long.
It probably had something to do with how the majority of her mind was a fragmented mess, locked away behind powerful psychic seals so the dreadful memories they held didn’t haunt her in every waking hour of her life.
But her mind was growing, slowly, but growing. Not mending, but the seed I had left her with was lazily starting to bloom once more. Without a snapshot of what her mind had been before that asshole got to her, I couldn't do much else. I could make her a fake mind, but what good would that do?
She would be fully Mara this way, even if she had to regrow from the mental equivalent of a cut trunk. Grafting an artificial branch on top to make it look vaguely like what the original tree might have appeared would just be a fake in the end. This way, it might grow to be a bit different with the change in environment, but the ‘roots’ would be the same.
Ah, fuck migraine-inducing metaphors. I have stuff to do … Imperials to brain-fuck, a Tau captain in the process of a meltdown to talk to, citizens to inform, an assembly to talk to and some Orks to prepare for war … hmmm.
I looked out over the fleet, it wasn’t massive numerically — Warhammer was silly like that sometimes — but in tonnage? In mass? Every thirty of the approaching ships were the size of cities and probably had more people living in them than Tokyo’s metropolitan area did in my time. The rest of the ships were smaller, corvettes and escort vessels, but they were still hundreds of metres in all dimensions.
It would be such a damned shame to just ignore them and teleport the Orks on board. I squinted at them, getting to thinking as I let Solomon’s newly repaired mind — purged of his memories of our encounter — snap back into his body. He wouldn’t notice a thing … besides maybe that fact that his new ‘Machine Spirit’ was a bit more snarky and probably much better at aiming.
What he also wouldn’t notice was that it would coincidentally mess up shots that would be too inconvenient for me. Heh.
Or the sneaky two-metre-tall alien monstrosity standing behind his command chair, hidden beneath more layers of stealth than he knew existed. My drone had infiltrated the command deck with laughable ease. The only one who even proved mildly annoying besides the Deathwatch Marines was the Machine Spirit.
The original Machine Spirit, that is. The one I plucked out of the ship with a single soul-tendril hooked into its spirit. Machine Spirits were disembodied spirits, free game, basically and had little in the way of spirit-to-spirit defences against anyone even marginally more powerful than them. Their defences began and ended at being tough enough not to care about damage or corruption.
It didn’t usually work.
Anyway, if dear old Solomon’s memories were to be believed, I had no secret logic-bending weapon to fear … but then again, he had almost two hundred Deathwatch Astartes spread out between his ships and those guys weren’t known for sharing their plans or whatever nasty trick they had up their sleeves with boring little humans. Tetrarchus being in the dark about their plans was only expected.
Hmm. Yep. Let’s have a big fuckoff space battle. They can’t use their toys on me if my own fleet blows them to bits … I just have to somehow make Orks pilot my ships … eh, they can be stashed into boarding pods instead. Or missiles. Or fighters. Yep, that works.
For now, I sent my infiltrator drones still onboard to track and shadow the Astartes. So far, they were busy slaughtering the unfortunate psykers who may or may not have gotten a stroke as a final ‘fuck you’ from Gork and Mork.
Killing them was pretty much pointless; there were no daemons around to possess them, and even if there were, I could still feel Emps’ protection on them.
Some of them went a bit cuckoo from hearing the pair of twits laughing in their minds, but the vast majority of them who were getting slaughtered were just blacked out, brain-dead or scared shitless.
Oh well. Don’t stop your enemy when they are making a mistake and all that, I left them to it. Psykers could have proven troublesome if they combined their might into some suicidal ‘fuck you’ mental assault on me.
Just another day being a Sanctioned Psyker. Surprise, surprise, today’s menu is once again suffering and misery. Sucks to be them.
Okay, so my to-do list is basically:
Build a Fleet! (Match its strength to the opposing force, I don’t want a curb stomp)
Somehow make the Orks boiz feel useful onboard, maybe stash them into missiles and throw them at the enemy?
Tau Captain. He is having a meltdown. Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.
Citizens. Make a speech or something so they don’t feel like zoo animals held in an isolated enclosure.
Assembly. Gather the Mayors for a video call and involve them in a bit, make them feel useful and a part of things?
Zara.
Make sure the Astartes don’t get to do whatever they are planning. They don’t get to have fun. Ruin their day. Drown them in Orks or disposable drones maybe?
Test some new toys. Psycher powers, new drone models, other bullshit.
The last bullet point was important. I had named myself after the ‘Mother of Monsters’ and yet, the closest thing to true legendary monsters I had were my knockoff tyranids and budget-store dragons.
It was embarrassing. I seriously needed to up my game.
Why couldn’t I remake mythical monsters and throw them at the Imperial Fleet? It would be fun to see their reactions when among my own starships a monolithic serpent matching their colossal voidships in tonnage slithered towards them.
Jörmungandr, the World Serpent. It should make for a fun first attempt … or maybe I should go with Leviathan as the name and a more monstrous appearance? Hmm.
Why not both? Heh. Let’s do both, I had the bio-energy for it after all. I had little time, so the first prototypes would be pretty shit, but the ‘Holy Shit, is that thing fucking real?’ factor was more important.
I could make sure they lived up to their namesakes in later iterations.
Then I could work on recreating fantasy monsters and races … we have the Eldar and the Squats as the token elves and dwarves, but there is some fun stuff out there I could recreate.
There wasn’t much actual use in doing so, but I tended to get bored easily with my mind-cores handling most menial tasks. Bureaucracy was not something I had to bother with, and the same went for optimising blueprints and templates after I’d come up with a prototype.
Plus, wouldn’t it be fun to have werewolves stalking the forests of my world? Hmm, how to handle making them shift under the light of the full moon … moon. My world was a moon, that kinda messed the vibe up a bit, didn’t it? Okay, werewolves would be shelved for later. Merfolk?
I could make underwater arcologies and give citizens who wanted it a mutation to let them breathe, see and live in the bottom of the ocean and its massive water pressure.
Later, later. Got boring stuff to do first.
*****
“An assembly?” Kastor Dross asked, blinking and then raising an inquisitive eyebrow at the ‘Overseer’ — aka, his personal handler/shadow/watchdog — standing before his desk. “I was under the impression all the Arcologies were supposed to send an Ambassador to the Capital to attend it.”
“Indeed.” Overseer Talia, a dutiful young woman barely out of her teenage years by her looks, nodded primly. “There has been a … situation. The Lady decided that going with the original plan would take up too much time when we have so little of it. Arrangements have been made so you can attend a holo-projected conference yourself without having to leave the Arcology. The new conference room is already done and primed for use, it’s a five-minute ride away with the ‘tube’.”
The ‘tube’ as they called it, was the bastard child of a rollercoaster and an elevator, working on some anti-gravity tech stuff to move faster than anything made for transporting squishy humans ever should. Kastor barely managed to convince the contents of his stomach to remain in place the first time he made use of the devilish contraption.
Still, it was fast and undeniably useful. A five-minute ride could probably take him to the other end of the Arcology, despite it being miles away.
“A ‘situation’?” Kastor asked. “Should I be worried?”
“Not as such,” Talia said easily, entirely unconcerned. It would have given him some semblance of calm to see the young woman so unconcerned, but he knew better. Talia would have watched an ‘Ork’ deathmatch with the same bored look on her face. “The Lady had it handled, but she wishes to keep her subjects in the loop. If this Assembly takes place days from now, like initially planned, the best you would be getting would be an after-action report.”
“I see,” Kastor said, his eyes glancing back at his desk. Paperwork stood in piles, towering over him, and the worst offender, his personal ‘computer’ was blinking at him. He had so much damned work to do, this Arcology was undoubtedly well-made and a wonder, but … the society inhabiting it needed extensive work to get into even just a semblance of functionality. “Can’t I just get a written report? I doubt I or anyone here could be of much help to the ‘Lady’? What even is this situation you speak of?”
“ … your attendance is mandatory,” Talia said after a moment, making him sigh and run his fingers through his hair as he leaned back in his chair. “The ‘situation’ in question is the matter of an Imperial Fleet of at least fifty ships appearing near the System’s borders roughly an hour ago. An invasion is imminent, and the Lady wishes for all Arcologies to be prepared, or at least aware lest they be thrown into undue chaos if the fighting ever reaches all the way over here.”
Kastor’s blood ran cold. He had been given ‘homework’, files and documents to read through that seemed more like idle fantasies or some horrid scare tactic than anything real.
Just weeks ago, he knew nothing of the world beyond the planet he had been born on and expected to die on. The skies of that planet belonged to the Eternal Queen, her favoured servants manning the arcane machinery that watched her holdings from the skies.
He didn’t even know there were pirates in space. Would anyone blame him for being dubious about the legitimacy of his new over-lady’s information?
Imperium of Man. An empire of humans spanning a million worlds, ruled by a God-Emperor bound to his throne.
Aeldari. Some strange alien near-humans who lived in continent-sized ships and valued the life of a single Eldar above a billion humans.
Orks. Semi-sapient walking fungi addicted to combat and murder with reality-bending powers if enough of them got together.
Tyranids. Gigantic space-bugs that wanted to scour all life from the galaxy, devouring every last drop of organic matter.
Necrons. Soulless machine-people with a hatred for the living and technology so ridiculously advanced they would be ruling the galaxy already if they weren’t so busy squabbling among each other.
And the Tau. Strange, blue fish-people who his new over-lady had supposedly attached herself to as a vassal.
He had been certain it was all just baseless fear-mongering to keep the Lady’s new citizens in line. Protection wasn’t worth much when there was nothing you needed protecting from, after all.
Then he met an Ork, and later learned the planet he now lived on was downright teeming with the murderous green aliens.
Not that any of them could, or dared to, approach the Arcology. He had access to the sensors and had even been given a remote-controlled scouting aircraft on request. Something he had put to use, and as a result, he now had detailed reports of the Arcology’s surroundings.
Some of the things still seemed suspect and farfetched … but he couldn’t dismiss a single thing anymore, no matter how much he wanted to. Ignorance was bliss, and he had given up on the privilege to remain ignorant when he decided to serve his people as their representative.
“Fifty ships,” Kastor said, taking in a sharp breath as he tried to remember whether that was a small force or not. Fifty ships. Didn’t sound like much … then again, the Lady Echidna had transported millions of people on a single voidship. If fifty of those were coming … “Should I go say goodbye to my family and make peace? I recall the Imperium isn’t fond of the Lady, or the Tau who nominally own this system, is it? They are not here to make friends or trade with us, are they?”
“Space travel isn’t that fast, not when Warp-travel is unavailable,” Talia informed him calmly. “It will take then two or three weeks to get here, even if the Lady does nothing to stop them, and she will. If all goes well, you shouldn’t even notice a single sign of their presence until they are scoured from the stars.”
So … what? He didn’t have to do anything? Probably wouldn’t even see the consequences of this information?
Was his new sovereign just grandstanding, despite being hopelessly outmatched? Or were her claims based on facts, and she truly had the power to scour an entire fleet from the stars?
I can’t do anything about it either way. The Arcologies are bunkers themselves, we can’t be any more protected than we already are, and we are self-sufficient … so why the hell am I being told about this?
“I see,” Kastor said slowly, forcefully calming his racing heart. He was sure the Eternal Queen would have just let her own fleet of ships handle whatever incursion came her way, without letting her citizens know about it. For all he knew, her fleet had destroyed dozens of raiding pirates or none at all. He would never know. He didn’t need to know, it didn’t help him in running his city, so why was he being told about it? “What am I supposed to do with this information? Is there anything expected of me?”
Does the Lady want … ah, propaganda? ‘Hey look, I went and beat up some invading assholes, see how right you were to submit to me?’ Is that it?
Well, if she wanted propaganda and a metaphorical pat on the back for protecting them, he was happy to provide it. Even if the invading fleet was less real than Talia’s words implied.
The Arcology was in a dire need of something to unite around, or as it so happens, against. Some distant genocidal human empire coming to stomp out their new little paradise and getting beaten back by their new sovereign would go a long way towards turning this rag-tag patchwork society into something a bit more cohesive.
Nation building was hard work, but he was determined to help it along however he could. It was the least he could do.
Homelessness, starvation, diseases, sicknesses and crimes were just gone. The most pressing issues, ones he had never even dared of dreaming ever getting a solution, just weren’t a problem anymore.
It wasn’t perfect, nothing was, but this Arcology, his new Lady, granted them was the closest thing to paradise he could imagine really existing.
It was worth giving everything for, worth working to protect and make better wherever he could.
“When is this Assembly going to be held?”
Comments
paul coltrane
Its almost funny that the objectively best outcome is for Echidna do as little as possible, everyone else needs either experience or a show of force but her. Really I'd consider it intentional irony on the part of gork and mork that now she has to hold herself back just as she held back the orks.
JOHNNYBOY 117
Right now the only thing limiting her response to this fleet is the need to keep the Orks and their gods happy, otherwise they'd have so much chaos on board those ships you'd think a demon incursion was happening or someone was making another dead space game. And if she wants monsters just teleport some super gremlins onto some ships, they'd make a mess of it in no time.
Freddyz02
Ho... Hahahaha! The stuff she could make!
inkaral
I wonder what would happen if Echidna grabbed a Warp Drake and removed the chaos by adding her special sauce?
Marin Angelov
Thanks for the chapter! Can't wait to see all creatures she crates, keeping true to her chosen name!
ivyiblack
Giant living ships, serpentine leviathans, horrendous abominations clinging onto them like barnacles, ready to jump off and intercept fighters or missiles, burrowing through toughest hull plates, throwing up green tides of boarding crew, devouring smaller crafts whole, organic and psychic shielding tricking long-range sensors and disintegrating projectiles. The own machine spirit emitting cackling laughter over all decks, invisible assassin forms emerge in the shadows, navigators blind, the admec deaf, but a light more pure than even His soul casting away the horrors of the warp, offering salvation in damnation. Just accept the friendly offer and become a mermaid!
Mark
Yes, this is - at least as far as we know for now- just a minor nuisance for Echidna. Which brings up the usual problem with such insanely OP characters: how to create friction and suspense when the protagonist is only really threatened by utterly exceptional entities any more, in this case the various Warp gods and higher daemons, the God-Emperor, Necron lord's etc... I am really curious to see how the author will thread this always very difficult balance.
Eifer
I'd assume the same reason she isn't just crumbling the ships like cheap tin cans, she want a fight out of it and to learn.
Flippu
Why not take care of the astartes now since shes already so close to them...?
Duke of Coffee
The Imperials don't know that Echidna had made her moves and just using them for training.
