214 – NEW WARS AND TOYS

Nulls, Blanks, Pariahs. Was that the extent of their tricks? Did the Deathwatch think that would be enough to kill me? 

Or were their ‘pocket-blanks’, as that one Marine called them, just the means they were using to hide their true ace in the hole from my sight? 

Well, if nothing else, the Orks were proving useful in drawing the Deathwatch out and making them play this game on my terms. Better yet, they did so without any risk to myself. Only a select few Orks, like Throgg, had a link to me through the eldritch implants I’d given them, but the others were not. Thus, they couldn’t be used as a vector of attack against me even by the cheatiest piece of bullshit MacGuffin. Maybe some psychic attack could ride the telepathic link I had to my infiltrator-drones, but without that, I was safe. 

That was why I kept the drones in question away from the Watch-Captain and only poked the other Kill Teams with them, seeing how they’d react. 

In the meantime I nabbed Zedev and had him start trying to slice his way into Deathwatch's private comm-network. He grumbled a bit about being forced away from his experiments which were obviously more important than whatever this was, but he still knew he’d sometimes have to do tasks like this for me if he wanted to continue freeloading and receiving an unlimited supply of samples and test subjects.

He knew how good he had it under me. I could duplicate unique samples and give him an infinite number of identical test subjects, rare samples, and other interesting stuff. The grumbling was just him being a grumpy toaster-lover forced away from his true love.

Anyway, that was a WIP and a side-objective besides. In the interim, the majority of the Navy marines — with the non-capital ‘m’ — and the Guardsman Regiments were getting their collective teeth kicked in and asses whooped by my Orkz high on the WAAAAAGH! thingy the two twits they had for gods unleashed on them. 

I set aside a number of my infiltrator-drones to go about retrieving stuff I wanted, because the Orks would not leave anything in a serviceable state by the time their current collective blood-rage was satiated. I just knew it.

So I was gathering whatever looked interesting like some kleptomaniac. Trazyn would have been proud, I’m sure. 

Lasrifles by the hundreds, grenades, pistols, holopads, missiles, shuttles, a few Psykers, a few dozen tech-priests of various ranks, some bits and pieces of a Navigator or two. You know, I might be able to make use of stuff that was lying about later, and nobody would notice it missing in all the chaos. 

I’d go through all the corpses after this battle was over and done with for all the Blanks, because the damned Deathwatch had annoyingly good instincts and the Null-fields disabled half the stealth techniques my infiltrator-drones used. I’d just have to scavenge; it was safer that way, anyway.

I was also getting a whole slew of different Astartes geneseed and samples. Like, how nice of the Deathwatch to gather Astartes from all the Chapters in one place, right? And then they come after me, practically offering themselves up on a silver platter, begging me to devour them. 

They were also a pretty good way to stress test my infiltrator-drones in active combat or ambush scenarios, and it’s fair to say I am not impressed … with the resistance the Deathwatch has put up. I mean, none of the Kill Squads that lacked a ‘pocket-blank’ managed to take down one of my drones. Most of them got slaughtered in a rather lopsided battle. 

Maybe the Hive Tyrant carapace, empowered by a hefty reserve of bio-energy and further enhanced by the ‘Iron Skin’ Biomantic ‘spell’ was just stacking the odds a bit too much in my drones’ favour. 

That latter didn’t help me personally much, my skin was tougher than something as measly as iron as a baseline, but it still reinforced the carapace a bit more thoroughly

than just running soul energy through it. Without direction, doing that gave an all-purpose enhancement, which came with inefficiencies and wastage. 

I did not need the energy to enhance the carapace’s shininess or conductivity, for example, nor did an increase to its elasticity serve me all that well. A simple, basic increase in toughness was better in this instance.

Ah, but that was me dissecting the tiniest bits of the micro-battle when I had a much more awesome macro battle on my hands. While the Orks were having the time of their fungal little lives onboard the enemy ships, clobbering poor guardsmen to death, I was embroiled in my first ever proper spaceship vs spaceship fight. 

The Imperial Fleet was not deterred in the least by being boarded, raining down on my own fleet a hail of death the moment it was within range. The cruisers opened up with their massive macro cannons, firing gigantic explosive shells from their kilometre-long barrels. They tore sizable chunks out of my bio-ships, but the damages were skin deep and the few more important stuff they hit were backed up by two layers of redundancies.

“‘Tis but a scratch,” I mumbled to myself, giggling like … I would have likely looked like a lunatic to anyone who was watching. Fortunately, I was alone. 

As my ships swam closer, the lance batteries opened up too, and those were finally energy weapons, the type of weaponry my ships were built to handle. 

It showed as the absolute torrent of energy-bolts raining down on my ships barely managed to overpower the auto-repair systems, and even that was only due to the sheer amount of incoming fire my ships had to weather. 

My ships spat back retaliatory globs of bio-plasma and the like, massive spikes with mono-molecular tips and even a few more novel types of ammunition.

None of those in the latter group worked out particularly well, despite my having some hopes for the frog-bomb, for example. Maybe I could use that Catachan jungle frog with a worrying tendency to explode into an extremely violent cloud of death some other time.

Oh well, I had something else to distract myself with and help regain my cheer. 

“Give ‘em hell,” I said, grinning as I Blinked over to pat the five hundred metre wide cheek of my newest pet. “If you can take down a ship before biting the dust, I’ll give you something nice.”

The many-kilometre-long super space danger noodle purred, the noise reverberating in my chest as house-sized eyelids fell in a show of satisfaction at my petting. Jormungandr had an actual mind, backed up by a black-box similar to the one I used for my daughters, but built to handle getting hit point-blank with a nuclear warhead. Not a human mind though, but … an artificial patchwork psyche I’d cobble together from the neural maps of cats, dogs and snakes. Making sure it also had the ability to ‘purr’ only took about a tenth of an objective second.  

“On you go,” I said, my words resonating in the monolithic space serpent’s mind, my modifications making sure it understood my orders and would complete them to the best of its abilities. 

It surged forth with renewed vigour, and it reminded me of the terrier dog I had growing up when the dumb mutt caught sight of a rabbit on the horizon. The stress that stupid dog made me go through because it decided chasing a stupid rabbit through the countryside for a whole day was more important than giving half a shit about me was something that engraved the memory in my childish mind back then. 

As I watched the colossal beast charge at the enemy, a robust psychic shield keeping the worst of the incoming fire, I glanced over at my other Monster. Leviathan was … lesser. I didn’t have the time to focus on both prototypes enough to bring both to a ‘good’ level, so I chose the noodle.

That left the knock-off Void Kraken as little more than a gigantic meat puppet, a colossal drone, basically. It had neither the mind nor the mythology-inspired little surprises that my favourite noodle had.

It was more of an … Alpha version, a proof-of-concept prototype, while the Jormungandr was a proper Beta version, a serviceable actual prototype that was going to go through a test by fire in the coming minutes.

Vaguely, I felt another portal wink out of existence and glanced towards it, a brief frown fluttering across my face as my auric vision was clouded. A Blank. Piggybacking off of an infiltrator drone standing a few dozen metres away gave me eyes on the target, though, and what I saw made me humm consideringly.

The Watch-Captain watched the smouldering wreck of the boarding pod’s interior burn, and I fished the recording of the past ten minutes out of my drone’s brain. They had simply chucked a dozen plasma grenades into the pod, one after the other, until the Orks stopped coming through.

Since my portals were maintained by a ring of my Psy-orbs — those Hrud and Khrave psychic conducting foci — that was enough. Maybe I’ll add an armoured casing in the next version … though I don’t want to make their situation feel too hopeless for now, so I’ll leave the current pods as they are. 

“Nothing too suspicious, or obvious I’m seeing,” I mused out loud once I Blinked back to the entirely unnecessary ‘command station’ I’d built an entire AU behind my fleet. “Think I’m being paranoid?”

My impromptu sounding board looked put-upon by my question, and his body language screamed tension and wariness. As it should, I did just grab him from halfway across the star system just to give me a second opinion on stuff while Selene and Val were busy making sure my human civilians didn’t do anything dumb. Or my Ork ones, for that matter. I caught wind of a few troublemakers thinking they could head into the henhouse for a free meal just because the rooster wasn’t home. 

Well, they tried to get inside, but most ended up serving as target practice for Val or quick stress relief for Selene. Which also showed off the two’s prowess to the nosy Mayors making use of their Arcologies’ sensors or camera systems. 

“There is a point beyond which paranoia becomes a shackle instead of a shield,” my unwilling conversation partner said slowly, peering out through the observation window at the distant specks of light that were the two fleets battling it out. “Space Marines are dangerous foes, but they can be killed, given you have the proper means … and you have more than enough means. I’d once again like to recommend striving for efficiently defeating the opposing fleet, there is no need to ‘play with your food’.”

I gave the rugged Tau standing next to me, arms clasped behind his back, and rugged countenance facing the window as he eyed me out of the corner of his eyes. 

Why did I care about his opinion in the first place? Well, because he impressed me, and because he was an elite Fire Caste commando and a veteran one at that. Fear the old man in a profession where men die young, and all that. That was doubly true for our galaxy. 

And this dude survived whatever the wilderness of my little moon could throw at him for days, taking down beasts and Orks that would take whole platoons of Guardsmen by himself like some blue Rambo, with nothing but bone knives and primitive spears. 

Of course, my interest was partially due to the fact that my common sense called ‘bullshit’ on that, suspecting I had found my first instance of observable Plot Armour in play. There was nothing strange about him, no mystical aura of grandeur or anything, but I didn’t let that smother my theory in the crib. 

If I hit the jackpot, he’d be the protagonist of that Tau video game. What was it called? Fire Caste? Tau Commando? Fuck me, I can’t remember a dingle thing about it besides the popular rumour that the protagonist was stupidly overpowered. Lore-breakingly so. Kinda like Malum Caedo from that one retro Space Marine FPS. 

I’m kinda curious. It’s established in Warhammer fandom that if a Space Marine takes off their helmet, they gain Plot Armour, and that if they name themselves, then it upgrades into A Tier Plot Armour. 

What would happen if I threw a — maybe — Plot Armour protected Tau commando at a regular Space Marine? What if I got that Marine to take off his helmet? If I made him do some super dramatic introduction like ‘I am Brother Thor Wolflover of the Space Furries Chapter, and I will kill you alien, in the name of the Emperor. If that’s the last thing I do! Rawr~’.

I have opportunities here that would go to waste if I went with pure efficiency … though I should make contingencies. All the contingencies. Yeah, that sounds reasonable. 

With that in mind, I went about designing a bio-nuke I could stick onto the Void Ships’ engines. One bio-nuke per engine, which makes a dozen or so per ship. They need to be powerful enough to cause a full meltdown, preferably a violent meltdown that ends up obliterating the ships in question. 

Hmmm. An up-scaled Vortext Bomb should do the trick, shouldn’t it? Maybe I could even work into some fancy stuff I had scraped out of the Weridboy’s head while he was taking a nap. I think I could replicate a pseudo Warp-Bomb that grabbed everything around it in a gravitational vortex, then dragged it into the black hole at the centre, which would actually be a temporal gateway right into the Warp. 

Might be dangerous. Poking holes into realspace tends to make it easier for the creepy uglies on the other side to poke their heads through to my side. … hmmmm, yeah, let’s not do that then. I’ll be satisfied with a regular oversized vortex bomb that makes a temporary singularity at its centre.