Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

136 – Reservations

I almost planted my face into the hard gravel ground as my consciousness split in two, the second half racing back to my soul and out on another cord of psychic power into my once again active secondary avatar.

My hands shot out just in time to stop my fall, then to push me back on my feet with a heave. I huffed as I dusted off my poor white robes.

“Greetings, we meet again.”

I turned to the tall metallic skeleton standing a few minutes off to the side, gazing out across the grey wastelands.

Blinking, I took in my surroundings for the first time. Dark grey gravel covered the ground and the rolling hills as far as I could see, which wasn’t much with the same coloured dust-storm twisting around us and bolting out the sun.

“Hi, Trazyn,” I said, rolling my shoulders and checking over my vitals with a quick burst of bio-energy. “I wasn’t expecting to be meeting you again so soon.”

Everything is in order. He didn’t poke at my avatar while it was in stasis. I concluded. The only problem is going to be with the bio-energy stores of this body. I’m basically in power saving mode until I can get some biomass. 

“I assure you, I have not been expecting to be placed in a situation where I would be needing your services either,” he said, sounding slightly sour at the notion of getting pushed this far. “Alas, it is an opportunity for another meeting either way. As such, I am not too angry with these … rats.”

“Well, happy little coincidences are what make life worth living,” I hummed. I’m quite far from my other avatar, almost a quarter way across the galaxy … this should be around … fuck. “Where exactly are we, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“In the belly of the beast,” he said, amusement clear in his artificial voice. “Or rather, we would have been if I wasn’t forced to flee. Alas, it seems those Terrans are a bit too cagey still. Which puts us in the Vulcanis System, just a short way away from the beating heart of the Imperium of Man.”

“Oh,” Stupid skeleton, if he took me out on Terra I might as well have blown myself up. Fuck. We’d have been swarmed by Shadowkeepers within minutes. “Thank fuck. Please, if there is one place I never want to step foot on, it’s Terra. Leave me in your Labyrinth wherever you go there, if possible.”

“Very well,” he said, though sounded confused and curious. “How come? Bad memories?”

“More like a pack of angry dogs sniffing me out if I come too close to their warren,” I said, shaking my head in amusement. “Too much risk. Too little to gain.”

“Inquisition?” he asked. “No, I doubt they would cause you much trouble. What else could it be?”

“Shadowkeepers,” I said, not too concerned about sharing that little factoid.

“Ah, I see.” He nodded. “A despicable lot. They hid so many wonders of the bygone ages in their dusty old crypts … have you perhaps come into possession of one of their misplaced artifacts? I cannot imagine anything else would cause them to act.”

“Supposedly … I ate one,” I shrugged. 

“That’s a bit wasteful, isn’t it?” 

“I can recreate it whenever I want,” I said offhandedly. “Or I believe I can, I wasn’t really in the right mind space at the time to record how exactly it worked before it merged with me.”

“Ah, hunger,” he nodded. “A dreadful affliction, some wretched members of my kind also suffer from it. Alas, you at least have a way to quench it … do you not?”

“I do,” I said. “But since biomass fuels me, I need a constant supply of it. Like right now, if you want my help with anything more than fighting off some rabble. My reserves are running low.”

“Any sort of biomass would work, I presume?”

“The more genetic potential and complexity there is to the source, the better. Tyranid is the best, then Eldar and Ork come in tied for second place with the rest lagging somewhere far behind.”

“How well would a Space Marine work?” he asked, looking thoughtful. “And could you take on its form afterwards? I believe that is something you should be capable of.”

“Why would you believe that?” I tilted my head.

“Are you not?” 

I snorted, not quite sure whether he was just bluffing to fish for information or if he really knew something. But, oh well. Whatever. It wasn’t like I was planning to hide some shapeshifting from him if we ever worked together like this.

“I don’t need a new Space Marine for that, I’ve already taken more than enough samples of them to replicate their bodies with some level of accuracy,” I said, slowly starting to morph. A Space Marine’s body barely took a thousandth of the bio-energy to make that even this early version of my Psyker Form did. “Would this work for whatever you have planned?”

“An interesting display, but I’m afraid not.” Trazyn hummed, taking a glowing bluish cube out from somewhere with thousands of tiny glowing circuits flashing around and inside it. Then, with a dim burst of light a form appeared between the two of us just as I shifted back into my original Psyker Form. 

“I see,” I stared down at the Marine as he took less than a moment to come to his senses now that he was out of Trazyn’s Tesseract Labyrinth.

He jumped back, twisting away like a wounded beast even covered in full power armour and lowered into a sumo-pose as his helmet shifted to look between me and the Librarian. 

“What have you done to me, Xeno Scum?” He growled in a deep, bassy voice that would have made my bones tremble if they weren’t made of soulbone. 

I was confused for a bit, then realised with a start that this iteration of my Psyker Form had Aeldari ears and their more lanky build. Oh, well. It wasn’t like I overly enjoyed being mistaken for a regular human when I didn’t want to be. 

“You see the issue?” Trazyn asked, not at all bothered by the superhuman warrior twitching in alertness mere metres away from us. 

“I do,” I said, running my gaze over the predominantly green power armour and its golden highlights. “Salamander, is it not? Vulcan’s progeny is the easiest to distinguish from the rest. I suppose you want me to play spy and infiltrate some sort of a base of theirs?”

“Indeed I do,” Trazyn nodded with some glee. “Do you need assistance with defeating him?”

“I’m not quite that weakened just yet,” I huffed, turning my attention back at the Salamander. He was a moment away from either pouncing on us or bolting for the distance. I could see how he’d think he could lose us in the thick dust-storms, the poor thing. I’d be more guilty about killing him if I didn’t know he’d bathe me in melta-fire without batting an eye just because the ears I wore at the moment were pointed. 

In the blink of an eye I shifted into the closest replica of my Combat Form I could make with the bio-energy on hand and then pounced. I was behind him faster than he could twitch and a clawed finger burst through between the chest plate and the helmet, easily breaking the neck joint before exiting out the front.

Under Trazyn’s fascinated gaze, I let a dozen tendrils burst forth from the finger inside him and devoured every drop of bio-mass to be had. Then, I re-absorbed my combat form and flowed into the armour, quickly taking on the Marine’s form as I did so.

“Done,” I said, my voice a perfect mimicry of the now-dead Salamander. “Do you know how this power armour works? There are a bunch of connectors and ports in here I don’t know what to do with.”

“Do you need them to move?” he asked.

“Not really,” I shrugged, then tried out my range of motion inside the thing. It was fucking heavy, and I needed to constantly expend some bio-energy to over-charge my Marine-grade muscles to move it. Whatever inner mechanism worked them before for the Salamander, they weren’t working anymore. Or, more likely, I just didn’t know how to use them. “But it’s annoying. I’ll remake some of this form. Give me a minute.”

“That is agreeable, but do hurry,” said Trazyn. “We need to be swift.”

“Alright.”

*****

“It’s so surreal to watch you butcher a Space Marine like that,” Selene said, looking a bit dazed as she popped a handful of pop-corn in her mouth. “When you, or I for that matter, do something so outrageous, I just get some sort of a whiplash. I went my whole life thinking Space Marines were near-unbeatable angels of death … and you slaughtered that one like he was some helpless child.”

“It is what it is,” I hummed, laying on Selene’s lap with my primary avatar as I opened my mouth. She, being the cutie-pie that she is, dropped some popcorn into it with a roll of her eyes. “You’ll get used to it with time, we aren’t getting any weaker going forward, so it’s best you get comfortable with your new place on the food-chain.”

“What do you think that … Trazyn wants you to do?” she asked, staring at the holographic window streaming the view of my other avatar’s surroundings. 

“Seeing as he wants me to masquerade as a Salamander, I’d guess he is gunning for one of Vulcan’s Artefacts.”

“And you are just going to help him?” she asked, her fingers moving over to play with my hair. “What do you even get out of this?”

“Samples,” I said. “Fancy, varied and ancient samples. Some that would be an absolute pain to get my claws on otherwise. Plus, it’ll be fun. I’m going to play spy and fuck with some space marines.”

“I heard Salamanders were … nice,” she said, somewhat reluctantly. “Don’t you have someone else to bully for fun?”

“‘Nice’,” I snorted. “There are no ‘nice’ space marines. They are all genetically engineered genocidal killing machines. The Salamanders just focus all of that on anyone who isn’t perfectly human.”

“That’s still better than most,” she said, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it anymore. Nor was it at the beginning, to be honest. “Pity.”

“It is what it is,” I shrugged. “Plus … I don’t want any new Primarchs popping up if I can help it. Not yet, and not in the near future. Hell, even just the two we have now in the Imperium are going to be a pain. If they get together and start another Great Crusade, we are all fucked.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“There is a prophecy,” I said, groaning as her dexterous little fingers massaged my scalp. “That when the sons of Vulcan recover the last of his Artefacts, the Promethean will live once more.”

“And you believe in that … prophecy?” she scrunched up her nose. 

“Meh,” I shrugged. “Prophecies don’t work when you depend on them to do, and they come true when you depend on them not to. I won’t take chances, if I can help it. This is a great opportunity to lock away one of those Artefacts in one of the Galaxy’s most secure vaults.”

“Solemnace?” 

“Yes,” I said. “The Primarch I want to meet the least is Vulcan. He fell into a globule of pure WAAAAGH! Energy when he was last seen. I doubt even a Primarch can come out of that entirely sane.”

“I see,” she said thoughtfully. “Thank you. For sharing your thoughts, it’s much easier to digest your rather … honestly chaotic and thoughtless looking actions.”

“Anytime,” I hummed. “Plus, being unpredictable is a good thing. If my enemies can’t predict my actions, they can’t set up countermeasures for them.”

“You make predictably whimsical decisions one after the other, dear,” she said, caressing my head gently. “You might want to become careful and methodical for a change if you really want to throw a wrench into your enemies’ plans. Maybe you could even try to be inconspicuous for a change? It doesn’t do you much good to ‘lay low’ in the Tau Empire if half a dozen systems know your name in a few weeks because your ‘army’ rolled right over a few planets and conquered them in weeks. Hmmm?”

“Urhhhh,” I groaned. There was certainly truth to her words, but restraining myself from acting could slow down my plans massively. 

“You are supposedly smart, Echidna,” she said, flicking my nose. “Use all that brainpower for planning for a change. You told me you had the brainpower equivalent of thousands of humans mashed together. What are you using all of that computational power?”

“Making my new sword?” I averted my gaze. “Deciphering samples? Trying to work out how the hell Blank genes work?”

“I’m sure you could spare a dozen minds to work on strategy, couldn’t you?”

“But they’ll just tell me to fake being weak,” I whined. Then let out a sigh. She was right, of course she was, Selene was always right. Except when she was not, but that was pretty rare. Anyway. “You sure that’s a good idea?”

“I am,” she said, amusement twinkling in her eyes. “I’m sure we can find ways to let out the steam even if you can’t just brutishly beat everything in your way into submission, hmmm?”

“I couldn’t imagine just what you might be thinking,” I hummed, leaning into her a bit more. 

“For once I was not thinking about that. Actually.”

“Yeah right,” I rolled my eyes. 

“Do you think there are Void Krakens in the Jericho Reach?” She asked, a dreamy smile on her face. “I really want to hunt one. Do you think I’m strong enough?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know much about them. So I couldn’t tell. But don’t those eat whole-ass military Cruisers like snacks?”

“They do,” she purred.

“And I’m the impulsive one,” I shook my head sadly. “At least I don’t have a thing for giant octopuses, or things with far too many tentacles.”

“Shut up, you!” She flicked my nose again. “It’d be fun. And the perfect way to let out some steam without news of our rampage spreading over the stars. Let’s hunt one, once we get there.”

“Alright,” I said. “Until then though, we have to make do with watching my avatar I guess. We still have a month or two of travel time till the Jericho Reach with all the stops we must make.”

“At least we are on our way already,” Selene said. “That pet Tau you got is proving to be quite useful. I think he halved our travel time by ignoring most of the bureaucratic procedures. Quite the catch, that one.”

“He better be, with how annoying he is to talk to.”