NOVEL WEB 102 – Plundering Minds
The first line of defence for any voidship would have been the long-range sensors, which I seemingly managed to slip past by. Next would be the point defence turrets, though even those needed to somehow detect incoming projectiles, and seeing as nothing tried to fry my hide just yet, that layer proved ineffective too.
Third was the void shield. I had no idea how exactly these worked — something that would have to be rectified later, my lack of technological knowledge was starting to be a problem — but I knew from diving into the minds of some lower-ranked tech priests that they had one major weakness.
They only stopped objects travelling above a pre-set static speed limit. Meaning, that it would stop missiles and such, but not a slow-moving asteroid or my drone as I slowed my speed to only marginally be faster than the void ship’s velocity.
The shield itself was invisible to human eyesight, but my drone could see a much wider range of colours than the human eye on the electromagnetic spectrum. Still, it remained just a semi-translucent veil in the shape of an egg around the titanic ship.
I gingerly reached out with a clawed limb, flying only metres away from the shield, and touched it. I heaved a mental sigh as the limb passed through. When no missiles or lasers homed in on me as I kept my limb halfway through the shield, I promptly dove through the shield, making sure to go no faster than my arm had when it passed through.
The feeling of passing through the shield was a strange sensation, like an itch washing through every cell of my body in a wave. I resisted the urge to shiver, not out of fear, but discomfort. Let me tell you, the insides of your bones itching was an utterly revolting experience.
There were theories among the tech-priests about what exactly void shields did to intercepted objects from gravitational energies obliterating them to the object getting thrown right into the warp.
None of which was something I wanted to personally experience. Especially since if the drone was terminated, I’d lose my one chance of getting the upper hand. I needed to know what the fleet’s — and Guilliman’s — intentions were concerning me. I had to know.
The sensation passed as soon as I was through.
With no one the wiser, the drone dashed towards it and latched onto the hull.
It’s well past time I figure out what the hell is going on. I thought as I went to search for a place to burrow through the hull.
For now, I stayed away from the upper part of the ship with all the ostentatious cathedrals and gothic architecture, where the supposed higher-ups of the crew were located.
If some psyker or navigator in there noticed me now, I’d be in quite the pickle. It’d take only a few Thunderhawks and fighters coming out with a willingness to blow holes into the hull with stupidly powerful torpedoes.
Let’s see what you are made of. I thought as a clawed limb phased into the outer layer of the hull. The material was slightly pushing back against me, instead of the usual ease with which my body usually phased through things, it felt like I was pushing through a mire.
With a mental grimace, I ripped the limb back out, taking with it a handful of the material. Then, I tried absorbing it. Well, more like breaking it down into molecules and seeing what exactly this thing was.
The only things that managed to somewhat obstruct my phasing so far were all psychic in some manner, like the carapace of a Hive Tyrant, but I found even power armour had some slight pushback, though not anywhere close to a Hive Tyrant’s carapace.
As my mind cores worked on reverse engineering the material, I shifted the drone’s limb into my original eldritch material. The clawed black limb came apart at the seams, a thousand hair-thin white tendrils disentangling from each other before merging into a single whole that plunged back into the tiny hole I made before.
There was still some resistance there, but my eldritch flesh pushed through with ease. Just as I thought, that phasing thingy was some inherent ability of my original body, and the shapeshifted forms I took only gained a downgraded version of it.
The moment the tendril found a large enough open space on the other side, I pulled myself through with my oldest trick. The drone collapsed upon itself and the energy rushed into the tendril, quickly rebuilding a more compact Hunter Drone on the other side and pulling the remaining phased-out tendril back into itself.
Camouflage and Illusions activated, my mind quickly located the closest human mind, and the drone was off. The inside of the ship was disgustingly unprotected, especially this far down into the ship where, with the Warp-Core’s close proximity, only mutants and the fueling crew dared to venture.
A handful of unfortunate, mind-raped voiders later, I had a somewhat solid understanding of these lower layers of the ship. Making use of it, I quickly went up and up, continuing on with mind-diving into the minds of some sorry sod whenever I got lost.
For a moment I let myself wonder about what I was doing. The ease with which I decided to grab the first human I found and plunge into their mind, ravaging it for the information I needed and leaving them behind as drooling, mind-dead shells of their former selves.
This … was probably something immoral. The echo of my humanity told me it was disgusting, that I should be disgusted with myself for my actions. But … I didn’t care that much.
This was a matter of survival, of life and death. I needed knowledge and I was going to get it the quickest, easiest way possible. Afterwards, I could ruminate over the morality of my actions later, now it wasn’t time to worry about methods.
For now, I would make the most of these kills.
After telepathically going through their memories and storing them in some corner of my mind, I shifted one of my limbs into a large maw filled with serrated teeth and took a bite out of each dead human with it.
Before that flesh got transformed into bio-energy, the weird Space Marine organ thingy that somehow got memories out of bio-matter went to work on it. The results were less than stellar, sometimes earning me random fragments of memories not even correlating to anything important.
From others, I got the location of their homes, how many friends they had, if they were in gangs, where the bases of those gangs were and so on and so forth. It was intriguing as more often than not, the fragments of memories would be of immediate tactical use to me if I wanted to eradicate the groups these poor guys belonged to.
How in the nine hells that organ managed this was something I couldn’t fathom even after having watched it a dozen times, having felt it work and the memories seep into my mind.
The bites I took were nine times out of ten, not even from the brain, so how did this thing work? I was rather sure the feet of that one human did not store the memory of where he hid his secret stash of money.
I’d be doubting my knowledge of human biology right about now if my eldritch consumption of humans did not come together with a rather detailed understanding of the subject. An understanding that correlated to what I knew beforehand, meaning, the feet were not made to house memories. What a shocker.
Stupid Warhammer science. Stupid galaxy. Nothing made sense. Nothing ever made sense.
There was some fuckery going on and I wasn’t even sure if it was Warp fuckery. Ah, well, who was I kidding? When in doubt, blame the Warp. Maybe the memories left some sort of a spiritual imprint on the flesh that my eldritch senses couldn’t catch due to their entirely physical nature?
Unfortunately, I was in a bit of a hurry, so I couldn’t stop to meditate over a corpse to check for any such imprint that did not make itself obvious to my casual inspection. If it was obvious, my aura sense would have caught it already.
I continued going up and up. Humans fell and slowly, my mental map of the ship started filling out. I was close to the space where officers lived and reaching the command deck should be only minutes away.
My ascent slowed a bit as I put a touch more care into keeping myself hidden. By now I knew this ship was manned entirely by regular humans — as regular as these void-mutated humans could be — and not by Space Marines, furthermore, no one I mind-dived had known of even a single Psyker being on the ship. That meant I could relax a bit.
I prowled the upper deck, sending only quick probes into the minds of passers-by to not rouse suspicion. I could have murdered a hundred mutants down in the belly of the ship and no one important would have noticed, but I suspected a single dead officer would get all of their panties in a twist.
The first officer whose mind I read even had some implant that would send a silent alert should he die, or fall unconscious and though the next handful didn’t have such an implant — or hid it too well for me to notice — I didn’t want to send the whole ship into some emergency lockdown or something.
This was but the first step. I needed to, no, I had to remain undetected.
I hummed in my mind, imagining myself to be a super spy as I crawled across the ceiling, unseen by the humans below. The command deck wasn’t far now, and the first target of the day — the Captain — should be inside.
My path is, of course, barred by shut doors and even a heavy bulkhead, the last of which is the last remaining thing between me and my quarry. The other doors, I could pry open easily enough and without even leaving visible marks of the doors being forced open with some careful application of telekinesis.
The regular doors did use biometric identification on these upper doors, but the mechanism that kept them locked was entirely mechanical and as such, could be bypassed with only telekinesis and no need for deeper technological knowledge.
That wasn’t the case for the final bulkhead. The thing was locked in place with a dozen electromagnetic locks and safeguards against tempering that were obvious even to my amateur eyes.
I’d have to blast through it if the only trick under my sleeve was telekinesis. Fortunately, it was not, and even more fortunately, the tech-priest on the other side of the bulkhead working as a glorified security guard didn’t have the mental protections Zedev had.
Well, fortunate for me and unfortunate for him. The bulkhead groaned and hissed, then it slowly parted in the middle and slid to the side with an anguished screech. Waiting a few moments for it to come to a stop, I stepped through and sent a second order to the poor priest to close the door behind me and keep it that way until told otherwise.
The mechanical part of his mind tried to fight since it was the part I couldn’t strong-arm quite so easily, but the mechanicus’ paranoia of the abominable intelligence taking over their minds proved to be his undoing as hundreds of shackles held his artificial mind from doing anything worthwhile.
The sight that greeted me was about what I expected, which only made it more amusing. A dozen lasguns and a handful of more exotic weaponry found themselves pointed at my invisible form, more because of the still screeching bulkhead behind me than due to them having somehow seen through both my illusion and camouflage.
The poor tech priest whose mind I hijacked already had a thick hand around his throat and curses flying at his unresponsive form while the remaining unarmed officers watched on with a mild mix of curiosity and apprehension.
Now, how to go about this? I could go with either the bombastic route or the stealthy mind-rapist route. The obvious choice would have been the first one any other time. I did have a nasty habit of gloating and playing with my enemies, but today would be different.
Without further ado, I plunged right into the Captain’s mind who looked down on the whole debacle with a bored, glazed-over gaze from his command throne. He was an ugly fucker with half his face replaced with brutish grey cybernetics and most of his skull replaced with those weird cable-hair thingies that connected him to the ceiling and the ship.
His mind was partially merged with the very machine spirit of the ship, so once again my finesse and dexterity with telepathy were put to the test, as the alien mind would have quickly noticed any of the brutish telepathic attacks I usually used.
I searched selectively, instead of just browsing through more than a few lifetime’s worth of memories — the man looked arguably fabulous for being over 300. In short order, I had what I was looking for, more or less. The prevalent paranoia in the Imperium meant even a Captain knew very little of the overarching tactical plans of the fleet, only being told what he had to do and informed of what the command thought was the bare minimum he had to know.
He didn’t know about me — of course, he didn’t — and neither did he know all too much about what would happen once the fleet reached Baal. What he did know was where exactly Guilliman’s ship was, which ships were manned by Astartes, which ships had skilled Psykers onboard, and other such information.
I grinned inwardly as I strode forward at the first part of my quest being a success, all that was left was the extraction part of it.
I strutted between the still confused humans, invisibility cloak still hiding me from their sight and walked up to the panorama window at the end of the deck. It was stupid, idiotic, and illogical to have the command deck on the top of a tower on top of the ship and with only reinforced glass separating the most important personnel from the void of space, but I just gave it a mental shrug as I gently phased through the glass.
I shot off into the darkness, manoeuvring myself to target the centre of the formation with the help of my new mental map. Let’s see what one of the Astartes Captains knows next.
