NOVEL WEB 103 – Macragge’s Honour
I went and plundered minds one after the other, jumping from ship to ship without being noticed, at least as far as I know. I’ve been shot at a few times, but I reasoned that those were more paranoid super soldiers jumping at shadows — shadows that hid my invisible form, to be fair — and not because I was discovered.
Quick memory wipes promptly dissuaded them from raising the alarm and I didn’t think my touch would be noticed on them anytime soon. Space Marine minds were strangely resilient, not only in resisting manipulation but working after a part of their mind shut down after my violent intrusion into their mental sanctum.
The damned things could function with a quarter of their brains missing, a little missing memory carefully hidden would hardly be what brought their minds crashing down. Where a human mind was a castle of cards more often than not, an Astartes’ was a solid structure that stood even with pieces of it missing.
They would most likely heal before anyone noticed. Even normal human minds could heal, given the opportunity and a steady sense of self to marshal their mind around.
Enough of that though. I quickly confirmed that there was indeed some fuckery going on with the speed of the fleet’s movement: They Warp-Jumped, in-system. I’ve been told that’s on top of the ‘things not to do’ list for the Imperial Navy, and even with Guilliman ordering it, some were dubious of his decision.
Not the Astartes though, they didn’t have a single unloyal cell in their silly bio-engineered bodies. The blue man said ‘jump’ and so they jumped like the fanatics they were.
That didn’t manage to dampen my mood though as I hummed a tune in my head, approaching the biggest ship around. The scale of the metal monstrosity was hard to put into words as even the smallest ships of the fleet made me appear like a tiny, insignificant speck by comparison.
This one though, this one was a giant among giants. Some of the smallest ships around here, the frigates, were still more than one and a half kilometres long while the larger ones were three times that, but even they paled in comparison to the colossal Macragge’s Honour.
If my senses weren’t malfunctioning, and I know they weren’t, this thing was more than twenty kilometres from prow to thruster.
There was a point where stupidly oversized ships stopped being silly, the threshold beyond which it was more awe-inspiring than snicker-worthy. This ship was well beyond that threshold. It was a moving city, probably housing more humans than even the most populous cities back on earth, since the colossal length combined with both width and depth.
Though, it was more an anthill with little regard for the comfort of its inhabitants than any city I knew of. This was a machine made for war, not for comfort.
I didn’t doubt for a second that inside its cavernous tunnels; it held weapons that could evaporate even my toughest drone designs. I wasn’t sure what defences it had, but this thing faithfully defended the Imperium for ten thousand years, if it was easy to crack open, it would have been made into scrap metal long ago.
I wasn’t confident in bringing this metal beast to heel if it came down to it in a girl vs ship fight. A single stupidly destructive missile was all it would take for them to destroy my drone.
Luckily, they would have to hit me for that to work, and before that, realise that there was something to be hit in the first place. So far, I’ve remained undetected, as far as I know. I wasn’t sure how long that would hold, but once I was inside, the drones’ job would be accomplished.
From then on, I could go with whatever method I wished. Maybe I’d keep sneaking around or maybe I’d make a ruckus big enough that it’d require one of the big guns to come to me. If said big gun wasn’t a Custodian, that would just promptly deliver an information depository right into my hands in the form of their minds.
Oh well, I wanted to remain cordial until I knew for sure that Guilliman was the asshat who sent the Shadowkeeper after me. There might still be some chance that the arrogant fucker ignored the Primarch’s authority.
Understandable, really, Custodes didn’t accept any authority that wasn’t their fancy golden rotting corpse of an Emperor. To them, Guilliman was just some tool and a faulty one that failed to protect their lord from the fate that befell him.
As I closed in on the thing, the size stopped mattering before long. All I saw was metal, twisting and turning, sometimes protruding from the hull and at others caving in to reveal dents in the hull that could fit a dozen family houses into them.
There. I allowed myself a grin as I found a hatch. It was tiny, only as wide as a human head, and would hardly allow anyone to crawl through it. Well, anyone who couldn’t turn into a semi-liquid.
After a bit of poking around for any explosive surprises hidden around the small hatch or other sensors, I carefully pried the thing open. My drone’s senses detected nothing dangerous, not even the Danger Sense that saved my hide a fair number of times in the short time I had it, so I promptly shifted my form into eldritch tendrils and flowed into the tight tunnel.
I felt some bio-energy slowly trickling in as I absorbed some bio-matter left on the tunnel’s walls almost subconsciously. Was there some space mushroom that could Iive even here, so close to the void of space? Some algae perhaps?
Curious, I pulled on the information, my alien mind already having analysed the material instinctually. I shouldn’t have. If I still had normal human scent receptors — a nose — I’d have known already that the quaint little tunnel I was crawling through, like some vagrant, was used to dispose of unneeded waste. That waste being mostly human waste.
I was sewer-diving, swimming in shit, if you will. The one saving grace was that the proximity of the chilly void of space dried it all of any humidity, leaving the excrement caked onto the walls and only marginally less solid than the metal beneath it.
Better not think about it. Here I was, on my grand mission impossible, infiltrating one of the most dangerous battleships of the Imperium. It should have been cool, not … this.
With a mental sigh, I put some urgency into my movement, my tendrils picking up pace as they lashed forward, latched onto crevices, and pulled me onward, one after the other. It was all so natural, so easy to wield a hundred different limbs, that I could hardly imagine how it proved difficult back when I first woke up in this galaxy.
Despite that not much time has passed — from the galaxies or the Imperium’s perspective — I went from a bottom-feeder preying on random mutants and almost dying by going toe to toe with a Shadowkeeper. My rise was meteoric. Now I just had to make sure my flame wasn’t the sort that burned bright and quick. My flame would endure.
Finally, finally, I reached the end of the tunnel and smashed through whatever hatch or whatever they had at the end in a shower of screaming metal and rockcrete, but I could hardly make myself care. I was out of the sewers. That was what mattered. I wanted to kill something, but calmed myself with a mental breath. Stealth. I promised myself I’d try stealth.
With the outer hatch having smashed close right after I passed, there was still some air remaining in the room I found myself in. Whatever the room was supposed to function as, was long lost to time as it was nothing, but a dark hollow space with stuff dried on its walls that could be counted as an archaeological find based on my analysis of the matter.
Whoever the shit came out of, died thousands of years ago. Great. I’m out of here.
With a jump, I launched myself up and latched onto the wall before phasing through it. I repeated that up until the darkness was illuminated by a flickering light beyond a few bends of the twisting tunnel I found myself in.
Thankfully, all that covered this one’s sides was mould and dust, so I decided I put enough distance between myself and the archaic sewer system. If there was light, there were humans nearby. At least I hoped so.
My form shifted, tendrils twisting and merging as the Hunter Drone’s form quickly reassembled itself. Illusions and camouflage deployed, I dashed off, searching for the nearest unfortunate human to rip a map of the place out of their head.
My assumption soon proved to be wrong. One would think that they wouldn’t waste energy on powering the lights in this section of the ship if they weren’t needed for maintenance or whatnot, but assuming an Imperial had common sense was a recipe for disaster. Something I kept forgetting, despite the constant reminders.
I gingerly let my aura spread over the nearby levels, having pulled it in tight around my drone’s body lest some adventurous Psyker ambling through the lower decks noticed me, but I didn’t want to waste too much time. The clock was ticking. I couldn’t keep wandering aimlessly until I stumbled upon someone.
From this close, it was hard to pinpoint the location of souls I could see with my third eye. I knew there were a fair number of them onboard and that most of them were well above me, but that was about it.
I refrained from even staring overlong at the single radiant golden soul easily visible, making even the powerful other souls swimming around it look like kittens next to a lion. One soul was certainly an Eldar, I was more than familiar with how their souls tasted for lack of a better word and most of the rest had a similar aura as the Shadowkeeper.
Custodes? Probably. Not that it mattered, not if they didn’t have another dozen of those black skulls at the ready. If they as much as touched one of those mind-melting spears, I was going to abandon the drone with a last explosive gift to the assholes.
My aura brushed against a sickly, tainted human soul. I let the matter of the Custodes get pushed to the back of my mind for now, and rushed off to the human I detected, only slowing down once I rounded the last corner and laid eyes on my unknowing victim.
For a moment, I let my mind wander. The place stank of mould and rot, easily mixing with the stale air left behind by a failed air circulatory system. The metal hallway, with pipes twisting along its damp walls, sometimes carrying distant clangs and screeches, echoing from somewhere far away.
Then there was the human, if it can be called that. It was a mutant, a disgusting thing with its flesh withered by the taint of the Warp, leaving its skin sticking close to its skeletal frame as its feral eyes surveyed the end of the hallway under the flickering light in which I stood — invisible — with what I thought was a frown.
If I saw this thing in the British Museum in a sarcophagus with a plaque telling me it was a four-thousand-year-old mummy, I’d have believed it. There was still the problem of it moving around, but I would be solving that promptly.
Still, this could have been such an excellent setting for some horror story. Unfortunately for the space mummy, it wasn’t the alpha monster, and unfortunately for me, it couldn’t appreciate the atmosphere.
Before its bleary black eyes could even widen in surprise, my drone’s clawed arm went through its chest and out its back, crushing ribs and spine alike and finding little resistance. To be honest, I would have been greatly disappointed if it had any trouble slaughtering a measly mutant.
Before its flimsy mind could fade along with its soul, my mental grasp latched onto it like a hawk and didn’t let go. This was the best I could come up with, the closest to post-mortem mind-reading. It required me to grab the dissolving mind of the departed and hold it together myself before it crumbled upon itself, but it was doable.
As for the ‘how’, I didn’t really understand it myself. The mental gymnastics required came half-instinctually when I knew what exactly I wanted and it was hard to explain. I knew from Selene she had to do everything like this the hard way, so I assumed it had something to do with me being weird.
I browsed through the memories making up the mutant’s mind, discarding them one after the other and recording only information concerning locations down here and that got me a rudimentary map of the place.
The fellow seemingly lived for quite a while, more than a century already, which made me reconsider whether it was actually some undead, but I discarded the idea. Undead weren’t a thing and I could clearly feel the vitality in it, twisted as it was.
The clawed arm flicked to the side, sending the corpse smashing against the wall, where it collapsed into a pile of … crushed bones and dust. Okay. Weird. Back to business.
Following the map, I raced upwards. Hunting down further mutants and later isolated humans for information, leaving the latter mostly alive, if dazed. By that time, I would reach the command deck. The corpses left behind would alert the more observant Psykers around with the coalescing aura of death.
Well, that was my fear, at least. For all I knew, the number of them I’d have killed would be lost in the number of work-related deaths on the ship and no one would notice, but I was a careful hunter. Careful hunters didn’t rely on ‘maybes’.
Soon enough, my foes went from mutants to malnourished humans to well-armed humans and finally, I laid eyes on a ten-foot-tall transhuman clad in cerulean armour from head to toe. My goal was close by and I still had a handful of hours before they reached orbit.
My heart uselessly thundered in my chest in a rare show of nervousness.
Up on that deck was a force that could dismember my strongest Form with little effort, armed probably with the same weapons that almost shattered my flimsy mind. If I wasn’t so unwilling to let go of all the effort and work, I went to facilitate a somewhat cordial meeting with the Blue demigod. I would be half a system away already and never looking back.
Unfortunately, time was not on my side, my ‘future sight’ was rather limited and if I wanted to make the most of my lore knowledge, I had to make some sort of deal with Guilliman, the man who would value that knowledge the most in this shithole of a galaxy.
There was too much to lose, too much at stake for me to just run away, risk-free, and consolidate my power.
With a calming breath taken with my main body and with Selene’s soft snores caressing my ears, I was ready. Ready to see whether fate hated my guts.
It was time to see the Lord Regent for myself and maybe meet with him. Who knew, maybe I could even become friends with the only person in the Imperium who had some semblance of a common sense.
Yeah right. What next? Dark Eldar become pacifists and the Necrons remove the stick that had been stuck up their collective arses for sixty million years?
I smiled ruefully as I stalked past an oblivious Astartes. Well, in any case, it couldn’t hurt to be a bit optimistic if I stayed careful. Hope for the best, plan for the worst, or so they say.