Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

121 – Cypt-robbing?

They detected them almost as soon as the fighters entered within twenty kilometres of the ship. I mused. The second wave had five fighters, all armed with bio-ship grade plasma cannons, not the tiny ones ground artillery units had.

Three of them got off a shot before arcs of electricity snapped at them and fried them from the inside out. 

The three bolts of plasma themselves impacted the ship. That’s when the previously imperceptible Quantum Shields coating the hull phased into reality for just long enough to deflect the attack.

After that, they were gone without a trace. Well, I could still faintly sense that something fucky was going on with space around the ship, but only because I knew to look for it. Otherwise, it would have been almost impossible to detect.

Necron tech really was more magical than real space magic sometimes. But it seems it can’t pierce my Illusion … and those fighters only had the Tyranid Camouflage to hide them. We should be safe for now. Still, let’s make a few decoys just in case.

Our ship split in two, both parts quickly repairing themselves before the one we weren’t sitting in — the decoy — continued splitting and multiplying until there were half a dozen of them.

All of these had the psycho-active Tyranid skeletal structure with Eldar bone as the core to allow me some leeway for channelling some psychic powers through them.

I need to get much more effective with my energy usage … I waste so much of it; it strains my vessels far too much. That was something Val made crystal clear throughout our continued spars and training sessions. I was getting better, but most of my spells were still 80% brute force and only 20% finesse.

If my spells could cost half as much energy, I could channel twice as powerful ones through the weaker conduit drones.

Well, through my Avatar too, but it wasn’t really lacking in the power department at the moment. I would need much more versatility and control in the near future.

Anyway, I slowly pulled our command ship a good fifty kilometres away and settled it to be just ‘above’ the Necron ship while the rest fanned out to surround the ship. This way they would have more trouble tracing back the origin of the fighters.

Let’s hide that I can channel psychic power through the fighters for now. Necrons supposedly loathe psykers, right? I wasn’t sure if that was right, but I remembered reading about a certain grumpy diviner swearing up a storm about how the Imperium’s psychic bullshit fucked up all of his predictions.

Necrons used the energies of the universe, somehow tapping into a hidden web of incredible power that had zero connection to the warp. The best diviners could use that web to construct something similar to Laplace’s Demon which could predict the future with unerring accuracy — that is, if psykers don’t spit into the equation. 

My presence by itself probably threw a sizable wrench into that machine. Oh well, I enjoyed being annoying. Especially when the ones being annoyed were stuck-up demigods and prickly techno liches.

Back to work. Stupid overactive brain, stop wandering. I gave my cheeks a mental slap and forced my focus back onto our test subj- *cough* unfortunate opponent.

That silly phase shield — the Quantum Shield, Val called it in his memo — could apparently be overwhelmed by sufficient firepower or by a sustained barrage. Though most Necrons would retreat long before their shields were even close to faltering, each ship lost was a monumental loss to the Necrons, so they protected them fiercely.

What else could we do though? Punch through it too quickly for them to react? Maybe some sort of spatial attack? … could I finally try whether I can tear space apart a bit?

[Don’t.]

I rolled my eyes. Killjoy mind-cores. If only their reasons for trampling on my fun weren’t so … reasonable.

I went through my rather limited options — who would have thought Tyranids weren’t really built for space combat — Bio-plasma, pyro-acid, spore cysts, bio-cannons, venom cannons, and warp-screamers.

Most of those names were self-explanatory, aside from the last, which disrupted enemy systems and sent a wave of dread through the crew.

The second effect is worthless … though the first might still work, worth a try. Especially if I combine it with a heavy salvo.

The decoy ships rapidly consumed some of the stored bio-energy and produced a new wave of fighters. These also shared some enhanced psychic conductivity and were loaded up with one of my available weapons. 

Next came a slew of warp-screamers, but with even more enhanced psychic conductivity so I could sneak them closer to the tombship under the cover of an illusion.

The fighters fanned out into three groups, each targeting a different section of the ship, then waited. The warp-screamers dashed in, now several layers of illusions joining their camouflage in hiding them.

I held my breath as they crossed the twenty thousand metre mark. They zipped past and raced towards the inert ship, scrying tendrils of energy sliding off of the fighters.

I grinned, then refocused as one of the searching energy threads a fighter brushed against paused and split. It expanded from the point of contact with a dozen new questing threads.

Unfortunately for them, the screamers were fast and well outside of their range by that point. Though I adjusted them to dodge the tendrils as much as possible.

The moment screamers reached within range, I felt the surface of the warp vibrate around them as their voices, drowned out by the void of space, struck at the ship as a single combined attack.

Not a second later, all the fighters opened fire. The quantum shields, probably somewhat affected by the screamers, were a moment too late to activate, and the vicious salvo tore into the Necron ship.

My mind-cores whirled into action, recording every smidgen of data the various sensors on my drones caught before documenting and analysing every single detail down to the tiniest thing. Which weapon did the most damage? How quickly did the shields come back up? Did the shield have the same strength as before? Could the ship mend the damage done, and if it could, how quickly?

Those questions and a hundred more popped up and were sent to the mind-cores as queries. A second of real time later, I had my answers. Well, the answers I was going to get from this quick test. 

Venom was almost useless, splattering against the reinforced necrodermis hull and doing little else. If there was air to make a sound, it would have been sizzling as it tried to eat through the meta-material, but as things were, it was a waste of bio-energy.

Spore cysts and bio-cannons joined the venom canisters in the garbage bin. The first did just a little better than the venom, but it was aimed at destroying organic material, not metal. The latter was just lacking compared to the last two, even if I loaded most of the cannons with explosive ammunition.

That left the pyro-acid, which was still busily eating through the enemy ship’s hull, and the bio-plasma I originally attacked with. Honestly, those two were about the same in terms of results. One fought off whatever automatic self-repair the ship had, while the other did more devastating instant damage and charred whatever tech stood in its way.

Those two will do. 

The ship was still burning in spots when the weapon systems on it lashed out. Death Rays burst from rotating cannons around the hull and opened fire. I realised then that the Necrons were far from taking the fight seriously up until now. They went for low-powered bursts that hit with unerring accuracy.

Now though, they fired wildly. Particle beams lit up the void of space as they swept across the apparent nothingness in a frantic attempt to hit something, anything. A hit they did. After only a second, only three of my fighters remained fully functional as the rest got caught.

They would have survived grazing hits, but then the tombships' larger weapons opened up and blasted them to smithereens. Arcs of lightning and artificial green beams snapped and punched like vipers.

Just when one of the stray rays hit one of my decoy ships, I launched the next wave, now letting loose a bit more. Fighters swarmed out of the ships in the dozens, reaching the triple digits in moments, and would have reached the thousand mark in a few more if the Necron ship didn’t retaliate just that moment. 

The gigantic green prism held by an even larger cannon vibrated with power before a beam of energy far larger than any of the measly Death Rays burst forth and swept across the swarm of approaching fighters.

The beam was targeted at the decoy ship; it was easy to tell that much, and while the hundreds of fighters in its way slowed it down for a fraction of a second, it was far from enough. The Particle Whip — for that was the only Necron Weapon I knew of that fit — decimated anything it came in contact with. The fighters it touched were gone, annihilated down to the last atom.

I pulled at the decoy, pushing its drive to fire up and evade. I even used its psychic conduits to pull it out of the beam’s way with some TK. The beam was faster. Almost instantaneous.

The decoy ship was there one moment and half of it was just gone the next. The remaining half followed suit as it imploded, turning into a nice little firework.

My face twitched for a second. That was a lot of bio-energy they sent into oblivion.

Still … those weapons are awesome. If I didn’t have firm control over my bodily functions, I might have drooled just a bit. Sure, I had bio-ships and stuff like that, but thatwasafuckingantimattercannon. Like holy shit. I want it. I want it so much.

The moment passed, and I calmed down, the whirling emotions dimming, but never disappearing. Intellectually, I knew the chance of getting my hands on any of those weapons was slim at best, but still … awesome. Who wanted to spit burning goop at their enemies when they could dematerialize them with an antimatter cannon? I sure as hell didn’t. Organic weapons were a bit icky, even if they were my greatest advantage. I wouldn’t ever not use them because of that … but if I had better alternatives.

I’d have to somehow disable the phase-tech or they would just easily run away … I have no idea how to do that. The warp-screamers might have had some middling success, but it just delayed the tech’s activation, not disabled it. It was a shame, but I probably wouldn’t be getting my hands on Necron weaponry today.

It would be worth a try though. Let’s overcharge some screamers and bombard these fuckers into oblivion. It’s not like I don’t have bio-energy to spare after Baal.

I felt I only used up about 5% of my entire stores in this fight so far. Baal had been kind to me, even if Guilliman made sure that little adventure ended on a sour note. The knowledge that I sort of maybe devoured 90% of the dead Tyranids on the planet and about half of the original ecosystem made it sting much less. So it was kind of whatever. I’d just have to track down the Lion. No biggie.

New screamers swarmed forth from the remaining decoy ships, now with the best Eldar bones used as psychic conduits in them. Which gave me some leeway.

A dozen screamers disappeared as my power surged through them, then popped back into reality, clinging to the ship’s hull. Then they screeched, the warp shuddered as if in revulsion, then the barrage coming from the fighters impacted the ship. 

Three hundred and thirty-seven bolts of bio-plasma smashed into the Necron ship with a vengeance and two hundred and forty-five globs of pyro-acid followed suit, ravenously tearing into the living metal.

The ship pulsed with energy, the same it used initially to send the close-by fighters scrambling back as wrecks. It did little to the plasma, as its job was long complete by that point, but it evaporated the burning acid before it could do too much damage. Plasma it is. 

Replacement fighters armed only with plasma cannons continued streaming out of the ships, rapidly burning through their bio-energy reserves.

I teleported dozens of screamers up to the ship every second, trying to keep their disruptive influence going even as wave after wave of them were shredded by the pulses of energy coming out of the Star Pulse Generator.

The Particle Whip struck out two more times, obliterating wide swathes of my swarm of fighters. That’s when I felt realspace weaken and bend around the ship. It was similar to the faint sensation I got when the Quantum Shields turned on, but it was a wildfire compared to the embers the shields generated. They were trying to phase out of reality. They were … running? Would a Necron really run? 

I focused in on the ship, and couldn’t help the grin that was forming. The plasma pierced through the hull at a single spot, revealing an inner room. Scraps of actual Necrons, warriors, or whatever else were scattered around before the plasma scrapped them. 

I let my power explode through my avatar for the first time in the fight and instantly felt the scrying tendrils — probably cryptech diviners or something working overtime — twitch toward me. They didn’t stop the phasing process though, and I let my screamers all let loose on them. They couldn’t attack.

Energy flooded out of me, flowing into psychic threads that wove themselves into the weave of reality. The space that was shuddering and bending to the Necron’s will, empowered by my power, resisted. It wasn’t enough to send the ship crashing back into realspace, but slowed them. 

They were still partially in realspace, still partially subservient to its will, even if their now overclocked Quantum Shielding shrugged off the frantic barrage of plasma my fighters were bombarding them with.

I felt them slipping, overpowering space, even through my efforts. 

Oh, no you don’t. I snarled inside as my avatar shuddered from the surge of energy flowing through it. I’m not letting you go without at least getting a trophy.

My entire attention zeroed in on a single cannon emplacement on the ship’s side and all of my collected energy instantly blasted forth in the single most devastating Eldritch Blast I’d ever cast. 

The Blast burrowed into the ship, tearing through necrodermis with only some middling effort. My will reasserted itself over the wild arcs of energy and bent them, guided them. Instead of attacking like wild animals, they all acted in tandem to accomplish my will.

I let out a grin as the cannon emplacement, along with a bit of the living metal hull, detached from the ship itself and floated off. The fighters stopped firing so as not to damage my prize, then the Necron ship was gone. 

I could faintly feel the wrinkle in realspace where the ship supposedly hid in some sub-dimension — or phased out of reality? I didn’t really understand phase tech yet — race off and disappear beyond the range of my perception in moments.

“Well. Hi gorgeous,” I giggled as a squad of fighters pulled the Death Ray up to my ship. Then I got smacked on the back of my head. “Ow.”

“Humph,” Selene snorted, though I could see the playful smirk on her lips. “Didn’t know you were into … cannons. I suppose I should have expected you to have … strange interests as whatever you are. Should I be worried?”

“Maybe.” I rubbed my chin thoughtfully, glancing at the floating cannon. “Look at those curves on that beauty, and those green crystals. Hmmmm.”

She giggled at that, feeling my amusement through our bond. Though that was in large part because I felt genuine doubt in her aura. She really thought for a moment I found that cannon sexually appealing. I couldn’t help but mirror her mirth. 

 Yep. Life was good.