Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]
220 – Charade

I never felt comfortable giving autonomy to my creations, especially the powerful combat-capable ones … though I suppose the fact that they are 100% organic gives me something of an ultimate backdoor to them, should their autonomy turn them against me. 

I was the natural predator of all things organic and corrupt, after all, though less so in the latter case. It was more like I was a natural enemy to the forces of Chaos, while I was truly an apex predator when it came to organic life forms.

Whatever made my soul purify nearby soul energy, and remain resistant to taint itself, was less impressive than the Eldritch qualities of my physical body, if I thought about it like that.

“I never took you for a control freak,” Selene said, arms crossed as she watched me fuss over the next iteration of my autonomous void-fighter drones. “I know that thing isn’t sentient, but … really? Was building in three different fail-safes necessary?”

“I don’t want to know what the forces of Chaos, or the Tyranids could do with these if they got their grubby little paws on them,” I said distractedly, one of my arms unravelling into a mass of white tendrils which phased through the pitch black carapace covering my creation to modify its interior. “I am winning the organic arms race for now, but it only takes a single top-tier drone of mine getting captured or subverted, and then we’ll have to deal with a new Hive Fleet outfitted with them, or Abbadon using my little monsters as his attack dogs. I’m no control freak. I let my daughters be free and do as they wish, don’t I?”

The first and second waves of fighter-drones I had sent at my floaty Marine guests had been dispatched rather easily. That Techmarine was an absolute menace, packing more firepower than a dozen tanks from my time put together, and that’s just talking about the firepower.

I had learned that it could damned near catch anything sneaking up on it, if they were close enough. I wasn’t sure how he was doing it, but even when I made the chitin absorb all EM- waves and appear invisible to the eyes, along with every other form of non-Psychic stealth I had on hand, he still caught the drones when they came within a dozen metres of him.

That wasn’t the part I was checking, though, but the sacks filled with extremely fast-acting and brutal gene-virus I had lying dormant within the drone’s body. The moment the creature’s heart beat its last, or when a body part no longer received a periodic pulse of fresh blood, the virus would activate and scramble the genes of the drone beyond repair. 

That was one failsafe. Another was making the drone from the ground up to be as short-lived as a mayfly. It had enough energy to function for half an hour and no way to replenish it. But if it somehow did? Well, then the dormant cancerous tumour near its heart will start to rapidly grow and send cascading organ failure through its body within another few minutes. 

It was cruel, but this was nothing more than an organic machine. I had made absolutely sure of that. It had no emotions or thoughts of its own. It was … technically kinda like a servitor, if I was being honest. Though one where instead of grabbing some poor sod’s brain to rewire for my purposes, I made my own artificial grey matter and turned it into a bio-processor. 

The Mechanicus had some fuck-ups, and hiccups, but they were really good at turning human brains into bio-computers devoid of emotion or thoughts. Most of the time. Zedev had shared the ways of making Servitors and Servo Skulls with me once upon a time, and while I found the original design abhorrent, it was a good baseline when I didn’t have to source the brains from living humans, but could make them myself.

Really, if only that cunt Fabius Bile didn’t go traitor, he could have introduced cloning into the Imperium and all brains needed for the Mechanicus’ machines could be vat-grown.

Not that those toaster-loving idiots would have accepted it. ‘Innovation’ was a word they didn’t even dare to speak, since doing so was grounds for having one decried as a heretek. 

“I suppose you did,” Selene said, watching me work from the other end of the room. “I suppose if I make myself think of it as espionage countermeasures, it looks less like some horror beyond imagination made by a deranged Magos of the Dark Mechanicum. Maybe.”

“I can promise you a Magos would have put in at least twelve fail-safes and countermeasures, whereas I feel mostly satisfied with three,” I said, taking a step back to run my gaze over my creation with my fists on my hips. “Should I make them look like machines from the outside to make them more palatable to your noble palate, your highness?”

“I’ve seen you in your true, tentacle-y glory.” Selene rolled her eyes. “That thing is a bit of an eyesore, but not a problem … though I guess watching you warp flesh like clay, and knowing just what you put into that thing, what you could just put into anyone … is a touch unnerving. Especially when I remember that those abilities of yours come from just a single artifact hidden away under the Imperial Palace, one of hundreds, maybe thousands.”

“So body horror and existential dread mixed together into a fun little smoothie?” I mused. “Understandable … though you could do things just as horrid now that you’ve been learning to harness your Psychic powers better. Are you just playing Devil’s Advocate for the fun of it?”

“Not just for the fun of it,” Selene said, putting on an expression that, while not quite a pout, was close enough to count as one in my mind. “Some of your harebrained ideas could benefit greatly from some refinement, I’m just acting as a whetstone for those ideas of yours. In this case, do you really need all those fail-safes when fighting in the void of space, away from all those who could grow stronger from getting their hands on your creations? Do those fail-safes not limit the power and effectiveness of your ‘drones’ beyond what’s reasonable?”

“Maybe?” I hummed thoughtfully, taking a step back and letting my aura suffuse my newest drone as I thought Selene’s words through. 

My goal was not merely to kill those Space Marines, but to get their artefacts without damaging them for further study … and while I’m at it, I decided to also hone my drone blueprints and make a prototype Void-Fighter that I could later use in space battles to counter enemy fighters. 

I could have just taken the Tyranid swarm’s equivalents of such things and gone with that, but I wanted quality over quantity … even if that very choice was one of the reasons why I worried so much about my enemies getting their hands on my creations.

The easiest solution would be to go with the Tyranid mentality of quantity having a quality of its own, and mixing it with swarm tactics. But that would mean giving up on using my greatest advantage to the limit. 

It was quite the conundrum, a balancing act.

“Better safe than sorry,” I said decisively, and Selene just shrugged and smiled at me. I gave her an appreciative smile of my own in return. 

Returning my eyes to my creation, I hummed as I took a step back and examined the finished prototype. It had a sleek design covered in curving, pitch black carapace. It had a long torso ending in a scorpion-like tail instead of legs, a pair of lanky arms each outfitted with wicked scythes and a ‘head’ shaped like a dome, filled with more sensory organs than any natural creature I’ve met till now.

Inside, it had a neural network purpose-made for quick reaction time and a neural node fit for making complex manoeuvres in three dimensions. 

The first two versions missed any form of ranged weaponry, but these had the ability to launch spikes with mono-molecular edges from the tips of their tail. With bio-energy, they could regenerate ammunition fast enough to fire five spikes per second, though doing so would cost them ten seconds of their lifetime. 

Of course, they also had all the first and second iterations’ stealth capabilities, so the lack of any more heavy-duty artillery on them was on purpose, and not a mistake. These things were supposed to soften up their targets from beneath the shroud of stealth, then tear them apart up close and personal.  

I also had more balanced designs, bomber-fighters and interceptors made for pure speed in my mind, but those weren’t even in the prototyping phase as of now.

“You could just kill them from a distance, you know?” Selene said. “Pepper them with those spikes to compromise their Power Armour’s integrity, then flood the place with some super-toxin. You took all their virus-bombs and torpedoes, might as well use them, no? That way those relics you want won’t even be harmed.”

“I could,” I said, trailing off as a frown made its way onto my face. Was I just playing with my ‘food’ for the fun of it? Was I giving in to some cruel, base desire of my Eldritch body? Or … was I just dancing on the strings of ‘Fate’? Was the driving force behind my actions my own arrogance, or some sort of Plot Armour protecting the stranded Marines, making me act that way? “I’ll give this version its test run, then we can do that if they survive. Tormenting them overly much before killing them would be a bit too cruel, wouldn’t it? Though I heard the pathogen in the virus bombs makes for a horribly agonising death … hmm, might as well modify it a bit.”

Which is exactly what I set out to do, just after I replicated my ‘Void-Fighter Drone Prototype v3’. A dozen holes opened up across the hull of my ship, the cloaking field covering it flickering ever so slightly, and inside, Eldritch flesh gave birth to twelve replicas of my newest creation. 

I set their priorities. Six had retrieved the relics as their primary objective, with killing the Astartes as secondary, while the other six had the opposite. A mind-core piloted each, with a sliver of my primary consciousness serving as the commander of the fighter squadron. Utterly silent and nearly imperceptible to all senses, they shot off into the void, racing towards my foes.

Now then. How does one make one of the most horrid bio-weapons in the Imperium’s arsenal somewhat ethical? 

My answer was to add in an extra effect, to weave a neurotoxin with analgesic properties — as in: pain numbing, a type of a neurotoxin that interferes with the pain receptors of the body — into the base pathogen. In addition, I might as well make those afflicted pass out first so they don’t even have to see their bodies dissolve, which can be done with adding what was basically extremely potent tranquilliser into the mix.

Of course, I had to make all that able to affect Space Marines, or it wouldn’t be worth anything. If their superhuman immune system fought off the tranquilizer and the numbing toxin, then all that was left was the basic Virus, and yes, it deserved the capital V with how damned nasty and potent it was.

This was the thing that decimated the three loyalist Legions on the planet of Isstvan III, the weapon of mass destruction that was the opening salvo of the Horus Heresy eleven thousand years ago. The losses incurred there would cripple those three Legions for the rest of the Heresy. 

And I was using that same thing to make doubly sure a handful of pesky Space Marines died. Hopefully, they would be killed so quickly they wouldn’t even have time to destroy their artefacts out of spite. 

A sliver of my mind directed the drones, all of them crossing the boundary of the Null-field more than a thousand kilometres away from the Pariah locked in its metallic coffin. My telepathic link held for a while more, holding strong as the nullifying power of the Pariah grew in power exponentially as the distance between it and the drones continued to shrink. 

Halfway to their destination, my telepathic link was overpowered and snapped all at once, leaving me only with the rudimentary organic communications system I’d managed to scrape together. It was an organic replica of Imperial communication technology, making use of tight-beams of nearly imperceptible lasers going between the drones and my cloaked flagship. 

It was slow, to me at least — the tight-beam had to send the incoming sensory information back to the ship, then my responses to them back to the drones — so I left the autonomous artificial brains and their imprinted combat algorithms in charge of controlling the drones. I merely received the sensory input of the drones while they did their work. 

It was time I was done with this charade. First, these Space Marines, then the invading Fleet, currently occupied by my own fleet and the Orks making a mess of their ships’ interiors.