NOVEL WEB 60 – Ad Astra
I felt the outer armor incinerate as we gained more and more velocity, with the two joining in I could cut back on my own supply of soul energy and we were still going a bit faster than required to escape orbit. My focus went into keeping the outer layer healthy as fixing tears was much less energy-intensive than remaking the armor if parts of it flaked off.
It was supposed to protect Hive-Ships from damned cyclone torpedos which could decimate continents so of course the armor didn't need much healing to stay together, the integrity of it was questionable with my application of it but what can you do?
I'm such a moron sometimes, I wanted to slap my forehead but instead, I forced down my embarrassment and integrated a layer of Ambull carapace under the outermost layer. The heat didn't die down, it got sucked into the Ambull biomass and with the modifications my diligent Mind-Crores came up with it all started to turn into bio-energy.
It was much slower than eating stuff but as large as this sphere was at around half a kilometer across, it was like I absorbed a whole human every minute. I could barely feel the extra energy coming in from the radiation compared to the heat, it was such a small amount but hopefully, it'd be much greater in deep space where nothing could shield me from it.
A rocket back when I was alive on Earth needed a bit more than eight minutes to reach low-earth orbit, aka LEO. This was around a thousand kilometers from the surface. We reached it in two and I already felt the atmospheric drag lessen and our velocity jump as a result.
The burning also abated a bit and along with it went my steady stream of bio-energy and the annoying pain I put myself through for some damned reason.
A tendril burst through the underside of the sphere and quickly split into a dozen before thickening up to be tens of meters thick and many more in length. Then I started paddling for a lack of a better word. Using these Tyranid tentacles to propel myself forward was like trying to swim through air in zero gravity but it still somehow gave us a boost in propulsion so cool I guess?
These things were rather delicate compared to the armored shell, so they'd have been incinerated by atmospheric friction if I used them closer to the surface but with my healing it should be alright from now on.
My body was squished into the seat by now and I let out a smile. This was very much like sitting in a muscle car and while I didn't have many opportunities to do so in my previous life this was a cool feeling. Fortunately, my companions weren't usual humans from the 21st century as I'm sure the Gs I was putting them under would have knocked them out, at least if not given them a serious brain hemorrhage.
"How do you all feel?" I asked with a steady voice, not letting the sadistic pressure on my body impede me.
"This is a brutish way of travel," Val noted calmly, looking as composed as can be.
"Operational."
"This is not how take off," Selene heaved, "should feel."
"Beggars can't be choosers," I smiled, satisfied that everyone was doing well.
Fifteen minutes later we reached what would be GSO, aka Geostationary Orbit which would be where the space stations orbited the planet if there were any but as far as I saw with some eyes made on the surface of the sphere there weren't.
"This should be far enough," I said to myself as bio-energy started flooding into the tendrils connected to me still and the outer shell of the sphere started morphing. It lengthened and flesh, organs, nerves and many alien bio-matter started forming between our 'sphere', which would be the control center and the outer armor.
From a sphere, it turned into an elongated cylinder with long tentacles coming out of its end but from far away it'd seem almost like a nail with how slim it was. Still, to anyone in the know it'd unmistakeably look like a small Tyranid ship and those who knew their bio-forms, it'd be clear that it was a Narwhal, the bio-form that let Tyranids travel at FTL speeds.
I didn't do that yet, it relied on gravitational pull and we were still well within the gravitational well of the planet behind us. Using it at all will be a risk as the method could cause natural disasters on the planet the Narwhal pulled itself toward but I might not have much of a choice if I don't want to be late to the party. Still, it will be a last resort if I sense a giant fleet entering the system.
Guilliman would come at the head of the Indomitus Crusade, the question was how long did I have until then? Regular Narwhal's could sense the gravitational and Psychic waves given off by inhabited planets from fucking sectors away so it shouldn't be too hard to notice the fleet before they noticed me.
Tyranid organs finished forming around the ship, making pathways and intricate patterns with their grand tapestry and I felt the pressure on my body lessen to a gentle pull towards my chair, no different from standing on a metro.
"What?" Selene asked in surprise.
"Interesting," I murmured. Did this use something similar to the Crotalids? I knew the organs were damn important and so was their placement, as it was coded into the genetics of both ships with no less than fifty redundancies. One of my future goals was to uncover the secrets of Enuncia and all similar powers, so this was a welcome surprise. Who wouldn't like powers that were free? Enouncia was a language that literally bent the rules of reality, and even a simple human could speak it.
"Inertia dampeners?" I could feel the surprise in Zedev's voice despite it being as static as ever, "How?"
"Later," I waved him off, "We shouldn't have much of a problem with pressure any longer."
"Good," Val sighed as he fixed the creases in his robe after standing up, "How long do you think it'll take?"
"Hmm," I focused on the Narwhal's senses and quickly found a giant gravitational well at the center of the system, the Star of the system. After I managed to disregard that, I found the next largest, which was a bit larger than the one we were currently in so it should be Baal as there were no other planetoid-sized wells. From there it was a quick calculation which was done a blink after I made the query, "We should be there in three days at this speed."
Val nodded and sat down to meditate. Selene remained in her seat and Zedev was absently staring at the ceiling, probably trying to figure out how the ship worked.
With silence seeming to remain for a while, I sank into my thoughts. My main dilemma at the moment was what to do with the large bio-mass stored in my Soul Puddle, yes I'm calling it that. Of course, the easiest answer would be to just teleport it out of there now that I was in space. It could hardly get lost or teleported into the planet out here but...
I thought back to how that Necron flayer destroyed my body, if I didn't have a part of my eldritch flesh inside Selene's armor I'd have had to remain as her armor with no way of changing my body or just straight up abandon existing in realspace as I didn't have any way of replacing my body. Sure, I made some safeguards but I could always be caught with my pants down and have my body destroyed or captured inside a stasis field, that'd be a fucking dumb end to my short legend.
The biomass in my Soul Puddle was almost entirely eldritch flesh and as long as even a tiny little tendril of it remained under control I could always replenish my bio-energy and grow it as much as I wanted.
The decision was obvious. I'd have loved a giant pool of bio-energy inside my stores right now but having the assurance that I wouldn't lose all of my bio-shapeshifting abilities if I lost this body was also a giant weight off my chest. With the Crotalid stuff, I shouldn't even have to worry about losing my anchor to realspace as I could always just yeet out a small tendril filled with just enough bio-energy to recreate my body — avatar if I was being honest — and sustain it for a few months with the Warp Slip ability I got from those mutated crocs. With that I was basically a Perpetual on steroids or something similar but better, I wouldn't need ages to reconstruct my body and I wouldn't be unconscious while doing so.
So all the biomass stored safely inside my Soul Puddle was a lifeline, a second chance, a Health Point.
Still...just a bit couldn't hurt...I'd still have a whole lot...
No, I'm starting to sound like a druggie, I'll just go eat some fresh Tyranids instead.
'How much will this form take out of my bio-energy stores by the end of the travel?'
[You will have an estimated 1 week of full combat capability if you fail to reabsorb the bio-ship, with it reabsorbed it grows to a month.]
Damn, I thought as I took in the answer coming from my predictive Mind-Cores, ones I tasked with specialising in simulations and numerology, well, good thing it won't be hard to find food.
It almost took an hour, but we were out of the planet's pull and our velocity jumped even further, with nothing pulling us back we could now just build up momentum much more easily. It made the organs responsible for the inertia dampening work a bit harder, but it could negate the Gs generated by FTL travel so it was still in low power mode if it could be called that.
There was an experiment I wanted to try, and this three-day-long journey would be the perfect place to test it. Deep inside the sphere, far from where we were my tendrils curled around a large chunk of the ziggurat's remains, Wraithbone and started to resonate.
I focused, every sound, every tone, every sequence had to be perfect down to the nanosecond or I could tear my newly-made ship apart, I knew that by instinct. Just around that small chunk my tendrils sang with eerie synchrony and less than a second after the alien song began the tendrils collapsed into each other as the chunk disappeared from within their grasps along with chunks of the tendrils.
My attention was barely on those though as I quickly reached out with my soul towards the newly appeared greyish rock and pulled it towards me. The Wraithbone wasn't spreading any warp energy as it was as stable and static as warp energy could get but my soul's proximity already started corroding its outer layers.
I didn't panic but I hurried up and put my hand onto it and pushed despite my ethereal skin getting goosebumps and feeling like ants were running across it. With barely any force behind it, my hand phased into the Psychic material.
There was a thing about the Warp, the Immaterium and Psychic powers in general that while I knew in concept, I couldn't quite wrap my head around it and understand just yet. It wasn't logical. I knew that of course, the Warp was a place of souls, emotions and thoughts and not rigid laws, logic and rationale.
I knew Warp Sorcerers could turn people into bubbles if they so wanted, why could they do that? Because they wanted to and because they wanted it more than reality didn't want it to happen and so it was. I knew it but I couldn't just do it myself somehow, I still thought logically, seeking reason behind phenomena and cause behind effect even when there wasn't.
This was why I couldn't manage Valenith's Blink, it involved just 'willing' myself to be somewhere else, it didn't need me to calculate how and where to open wormholes or pierce spacetime to get to another location, the Warp handled all that by simply lightening the physical laws and making it so that I was there instead of here.
As my soul and the Wraithbone intersected for a single, fleeting, fraction of a second I felt like I understood a bit of it, I saw how all that the Warp was could be made real and solidified. I understood what Wraithbone was and I understood the Warp just a bit more but as they say...the more I know about the Warp the more I understand how little I know.
It was easy to just think of it as a large pool of energy that I could use to make fire, move stuff and throw lightning around with big bad demons swimming around in it but that was not just a rudimentary understanding of the warp but utterly wrong. Fire didn't come out of my hand because warp energy could make fire naturally but because I always imagined in detail how I wanted the energy to create fire.
It wasn't the Energy doing the work but me. There were no rules on it, no set schools of its applications, those were things me and Psykers in general put on it to comprehend the incomprehensible.
"Echidna?" Selene asked with a worried tone and I snapped my head at her.
"Yes?" I asked, my chest rising and falling rapidly as my mind supn a thousand miles a second and mental power flooded the floating Pyramids in my mind-scape.
"Are you alright?"
"Of course," I grinned, I wanted to jump around, I wanted to kick my legs back and forth like a schoolgirl in love as I realized I could do so much more than I thought, "I'm better than alright."
"Okay?" her brows were creased with worry and something else as she watched me happily dance around with my grin reaching up to my ears.
I disappeared, my body shifting closer to the Immaterium for but a blink and then I was where I wanted to be with barely any Soul energy loss to show for it, my will supplemented much of it.
I lifted Selene up like a mother would their child by the armpits and swung her around.
"Ehhhhh?" her eyes went wide as she stared into mine.
I really want to kiss you.