Perfecting the Art of One Sided Murder-Suicide Pacts (Warhammer 40k/Waifu Catalog)
AN: Bit of an update -- I got my wisdom teeth removed, and while I'm not back at 100%, we will be back on Monday. I wrote this mostly to distract myself when I couldn't move of my jaw for about three days because of how sore I was. So, it might be a little rougher than usual.
...
“No! You don't call something the Waifu Catalog and expect me to pick anything other than waifus!”
…
A hiss of pressurized air woke me up, mostly because it sounded like someone had cracked open a can of soda right by my ear. Peeling back my eyelids took Herculean effort, my head feeling like it was full of cotton and fog. Blinking through the haze, there was a vague feeling of bewilderment when I saw a glass sliding door move up. When the haze cleared, I was greeted by darkness tinged with the red glow of emergency lights. I wasn’t in my apartment. This wasn’t my bed.
Alarm cut through the haze like a knife. Lurching forward, I only realized too late that my legs felt like they belonged to someone else, and I collapsed on the floor with a grunt. The floor was cold metal. Pushing myself up, I felt something like fabric under one hand- “Fuuu…” I flinched back, seeing the withered husk of a corpse next to me, dried out skin pulled back like a mask. Shuffling away, I realized we were wearing the same outfit. A skin-tight black onepiece that ended at the base of my skull.
It looked like they had fallen as I had. I couldn’t even tell if they were a man or a woman. Still, the shock was enough to shake off whatever lingering grogginess. My confusion only heightened when I looked around for a clue what was going on, only to find that the pod I fell out of was one of five. The other three were occupied, but they were in the same state as the first corpse.
That got my legs underneath me, even if they wobbled a bit. Looking at them brought my gaze to my own pod and the lone difference between them. Well, beyond the fact that there wasn’t a corpse in them. There was a soft blue light from a panel on the side with a status readout:
Emergency activation.
Cause: Power Failure.
Stasis Activated: 374.27M.
Time Since Activation: 14,526 standard Sol years.
Occupant: Odysseus von Ulysses Priority: Prime
“Huh,” I worked my jaw for a moment, the reality of the situation washing over me. Denials were ruthlessly crushed under my heel. This didn’t feel like a dream. Why I was thirty eight thousand years in the future was a question I had. Why I spent about fourteen and a half thousand of them in a stasis pod was another. I wasn’t going to find those answers in a cramped room barely big enough for me to lay down in.
However, I did find one answer.
“Odysseus von Ulysses?” I read out the name by Occupant. No idea what the abbreviated letters could stand for, but my name was Odysseus? That felt…
I didn’t feel any connection to the name. However, when I searched my memories, I realized I didn’t have anything to compare it to. It seemed not all of me had made the trip to the distant future. That was something I might have begun to panic about, but there was greater reason to.
Distant bangs shattered the oppressive silence of… wherever I was. My gaze snapped to a bulkhead door, hearing the bangs travel through it even if they weren’t on the door itself. Next to the doors were five lockers that I rushed to, not entirely sure what I was looking for initially, but I sure found it when I opened the one with my name on it.
A gun. Or something that looked like a gun. It was distinctly futuristic, worringly lightweight, and I couldn’t find the bullets. All the same, when I grabbed hold of it, the grip molded to my hand, and a little light turned green. Hopefully, green meaning good hadn’t changed over the past forty thousand years. There were scraps of a uniform inside, but it hadn’t managed to survive more than ten thousand years hanging in place. What did, however, was a sword - a cutlass, I think.
Feeling far more comfortable with weapons, I walked to the door and pressed my ear to it. The bangs had a sort of rhythm to them. ‘Burst fire,’ I deduced. Someone was shooting at something, and from the sounds of it, that something was shooting back.
There was a flickering temptation to ride it out. Wait until the bullets stopped flying before sticking my head out in an active combat zone. I didn’t know if anyone beyond the door would be friendly. But I’d rather make the wrong choice than not make a choice at all.
Grabbing the emergency handle on the bulkhead door, I yanked it down and the lock on the doors released. When they slid open, the same emergency lights dyed a sterile hallway with a red hue, but the sound of gunfire grew much louder. Peeking out from the doorframe, I saw the source of some of the gunfire.
Green. Very green. Seven feet tall, built like a brick shithouse, and firing around the corner at someone with bullets large enough that the casings piling up at his feet were as large as my hand. In an instant, I understood what he was. There was no mistaking it. Not the clunky armor, the green skin, and the horrible cockney accent when he bellowed out, “It's jus wun 'umie! Wot are ya wait'n for?!"
The date on my pod. The alien before me. There was only one possible answer.
40k.
“...Fuck it,” I decided, taking aim with my pistol and pulling the trigger. A blood red beam of light flashed forward, striking the ork in the back. The armor glowed red hot while his leathery flesh was turned to ash on impact. More of him was turning to ash by the second, but he still managed to turn around to blind fire in my general direction. Bullets sparked down the hall, each one detonating like a hand grenade going off.
“We got annuver!” He cried out before ‘annuver’ laser struck him in the chest, and all that was left of him was slagged armor and a pile of ashes. The ork across the hall started firing at me while another pair were running down to confront the other human they were fighting. I didn’t even need to shoot one of them with one of them going down to friendly fire, but the splash of gore across the hall was enough to convince me that I really didn’t want to get shot. More than I already didn’t want to get shot.
The second one raised a massive chainsword that revved ominously, scraping the ceiling when he went in for a big swing. A laser struck him in the shoulder, breaking the arm off when it was turned to ash, but he still lunged at me with a frenzied bloodlust. Retreating back a half step into the room, I raised my pistol and pulled the trigger the moment the ork tried to erupt inside with a roar.
His top half collapsed in a plume of ash when he fell back, letting me move back up to cover but a sound reached me. A crackling of electricity that made every hair stand on end. Looking the other way, my stomach flipped when I saw another ork on the other side of the hall. Meaning that I was surrounded. It flipped again when the ork grabbed a snotling by his feet, shoving him into a swirling portal near the base of the gun before he pulled the trigger.
I thought I just died, but for a split second, nothing seemed to happen-
“BLARRGG!” Came an unholy screech from behind me, making me flinch. Pure instincts I didn’t realize I had saved me from the snotling. It lunged for me, teleporting into the room. I was just thankful it wasn’t teleported inside me. It was an ugly little creature with too wide features, three feet tall, and a mouth full of needle teeth. They were about as concerning as the rusty prison shank it wielded.
It lunged again with surprising speed and rabid intensity. My body almost felt like it didn’t belong to me when I met its lunge with the cutlass I found. Flesh and blood parted under the blade as if they weren’t even there, bisecting the snotling. The two halves hit the floor with a spray of blood, but the top half still tried to get me, crawling forth to gnaw on my ankle. Plunging the blade down, I skewered his head. And the floor a little bit.
A power sword.
With the snotling dead, I poked my head out of the doorframe once more to shoot at the ork that had the teleporting gun. He fell, reduced to a pile of ash, leaving the last ork across the hall. He tossed down his gun, seemingly out of ammo, and charged for me with a “Waaaaagh!”
A red bolt caught him in the chest, killing him instantly. Then there was silence in the wake of what had been a symphony of pure noise. Slowly, I left my room, double and triple checking nothing was coming from behind me as I made my way to the hallway intersection. A quick glance down the hall revealed it was covered in ork corpses. About a dozen of them.
Swallowing a lump in my throat, I broke it. “You friendly?”
A beat of silence. “Depends. Are you the corpo asshole that brought me here?” Corpo? That was a specific accusation to make. The voice was that of a woman with an accent I couldn’t quite place.
“No. I just woke up in a pod five minutes ago with no idea how I got in it,” I replied.
“... Same,” the woman replied. “So, are we good?”
“We’re good,” I agreed, hesitating only for a second to reveal myself. The woman returned the favor, wielding some kind of assault rifle. Just futuristic. She carried it well, stepping around bodies and gore. Her skin was a warm brown from a lifetime in the sun, her hair pulled up in dreads, while an old scar clipped her eyebrow. She wore the same matte black skinsuit I was. I could tell she was sizing me up as much as I was her. “Odysseus von Ulysses.”
Her eyebrows shot up, “That’s a name if I’ve ever heard one. Mine is Panam. Panam Palmer,” Panam introduced herself. Then she jerked her head at the corpses at our feet. “You know what these things are? I’ve just been calling them big and ugly.”
“Orks,” I answered, though I felt uncertain as I gave the answer. The date and the orks all pointed to Warhammer 40k. That made it all the more curious why someone from Cyberpunk 2077 was here with me?
“Orks?” Panam echoed, a frown in her voice. “Eh, I can see it. Less Tolkien and more… whatever they are. Works for me.” Then she shrugged, “You have any clue what’s going on here? I… was in the middle of a job in Night City when I woke up in a pod down the hall with one of these guys breathing over me. Found a gun, found more of them, then found you.”
I was already shaking my head, “You’re asking the wrong person. There are holes in my memory -- I had to learn my name from my pod.” That earned a flicker of concern from Panam, but I waved it off. “Was there anyone else with you?”
“None. Just a couple of dozen bodies in pods,” Pananm answered. That told me we emerged from different kinds of stasis rooms. Mine was barely large enough to fit the five pods in it, and I certainly didn’t see anything like an assault rifle in my locker. Hers sounded more like a barracks?
The sound of metal screeching suddenly echoed off the halls, making both of us snap to the source. Likely from the direction the orks came from.
Panam hefted her assault rifle, but I was already shaking my head, earning a sharp look from her. “We can take them,” she said with absolute confidence.
“Where there is one ork, there are tens of thousands at least. We need to go,” I replied, already backing off away from the noise. Panam wavered for the briefest of seconds, shooting a glance down the hall as if weighing her options. She obviously didn’t like her odds because she followed after me a second later.
“Fine. What is the plan then if there is an army of these things?” That was an excellent question. I wished I had an answer to it. Instead, I was left grasping at everything I knew about orks, and what I knew painted an extremely bleak picture. What I didn’t know was just how bleak.
“We need information. If we can find a command deck or control room, we might be able to find someone or something to explain what is going on,” I reasoned. The issue with that, of course, was I had absolutely no idea where to find a command anything. Especially when orks were on the prowl.
Based on the dry laugh she gave, Panam had the same thought I did. “Maybe we will get lucky and find a map?”
“If we were lucky, I doubt either of us would be stuck in this mess,” I replied, tension rising in my gut as we passed the pile of ash and the teleportation gun. What I didn’t expect when I glanced down one of the halls was a solid wall. Only it wasn’t a natural dead end. The wall was made out of an almost white material, a very far cry from the dull dark metal of everything else. It was like someone had-
My eyes narrowed slightly as a thought struck me, but I kept it to myself, simply joining Panam as she went the other way. I had no idea where we were going, but the further away we were the better.
“The lights,” Panam suddenly spoke up as we crossed an intersection. For a moment, I had no idea what she was talking about until she jerked her head to the side. It clicked when I saw that the lights in another hall weren’t blinking. They shone with a steady light. “Someone is leading us somewhere.”
“It beats wandering in the dark,” I admitted. Deciding to follow the blinking lights, I found that I trusted them less than I trusted the silence. It took conscious effort not to grip my weapons too tightly, wary of every shadow around us. The lights led us to a bulkhead door that slid open for us, revealing a lift. Panam stepped inside it first, but as soon as I did the same, the door closed behind me, and the lift began to rise.
Panam and I had the same idea: taking cover and raising our weapons towards the door. When we arrived at our stop, however, the doors opened to the same darkness and blinking emergency lights. Swallowing a lump in my throat, we continued to follow the trail.
“How big is this place?” Panam wondered with a frown. Her gaze flickered to doors that were sealed shut and wide empty halls. The answer was huge. We were walking in the same direction, even if we did detour down a hall for one reason or another, and we had to have walked at least half a mile in fifteen minutes.
“I’m more concerned that we haven’t seen anyone else yet,” I admitted. If I were alone in this place, I’m not sure I would have had it in me to leave my room.
The blinking lights led us to a bulkhead door, but this one was different. Larger for starters, topping at about fifteen feet tall. It was ornately decorated with gold and brass, with a cog in the center of each door. With an agonizing low groan that echoed out, the doors slid open at our hesitant approach, revealing…
Panam let out a low whistle, her gaze going up to the ceiling a hundred feet above us. The floor before us was multi-layered -- a long path leading directly forward, but six floors surrounded it. Three at the bottom and three above, all framed around what my gaze landed on. It sat at the top of a dozen steps framed by statues. A throne.
One that was occupied.
Hundreds of cables and wires connected the man to the throne, dozens of them flowing from his head, obscured by a faded purple robe. They plugged into his arms, his chest, his legs, with his jaw removed. The little flesh that he had was unnaturally pale, fusing to the throne that he gripped. Cables flowed into where his eyes would be, but I felt his gaze on us as we approached lowly, drinking in the sight of the empty command deck with dormant terminals.
+Ominous: Time is limited.+ The voice had a synthetic edge to it as it emerged from the intercoms nearby. Panam flinched, raising her weapon at the figure on the throne. +Urgent: Emergency power failures are cascading. Life support systems are failing. Command structure collapsed. Multiple hull breaches. T-Minus thirty Hestian days until total system failure.+
Well, that didn’t sound good.
“Who are you?” I asked, sharing a quick glance with Panam. She didn’t lower her gun.
+Factual: Adeptus Technologist Vigilius.+ Vigilius answered. +Urgent: Xenos species orks containment failure. Immediate action is required.+
“Not until we get some answers!” Panam snapped, her nostrils flaring with anger. “Why are we here? Who took us?!” For a split second, I thought she might shoot him.
+Factual: Unknown.+ Vigilius answered, his voice monotone and unwavering from it. + Factual: Planet Hestia suffered ecological failures. Frigate Last Light outfitted to make contact with known human worlds in search of aid. Crew suspended in stasis. Last Light failed given mission. Lost in Warp. Failure. Failure. Failurefailurefailure-+
Panam visibly recoiled, almost as if she had been smacked in the face. None of that made any sense to her. It did to me, however. We were on a spaceship. One that had been lost in the Warp for more than ten thousand years, and now there were orks onboard. I didn’t know how long a Hestian day was, just that we had a time limit to unfuck this clusterfuck.
I placed a hand on Panam’s shoulder, forestalling her questions. She visibly swallowed them down, and only because Vigilius wasn’t as put together as he initially seemed. “Can you give us a visual on the ship? The breaches? Our pods suffered power failures that woke us up- are there any others?”
+Factual: Lieutenant Ulysses access to privileged information denied. Reason: Insufficient rank.+ I was a Lieutenant? +Factual: Command structure collapse. Sufficient reason for promotion. Factual: Odysseus von Ulysses promoted to Lord Captain of the Last Light. Factual: Congratulations.+
I think I detected a trace of sarcasm in his monotone voice, but I paid it no mind when one of the displays came to life. Walking over to it, I saw the Last Light. It was a type of Sword-Class Frigate, but different. It had the same general structure as one -- a big ram at the end of a long, blade-like bridge that widened at the back where the thrusters were. However, someone had filled the empty spaces, giving it a sleeker design.
That was secondary in comparison to what else the displays revealed. “A Space Hulk?” I muttered, seeing that Last Light was a mile and a half long ship that was just a very small part of a massive conglomerate of ships that the display couldn’t fully reveal. Either because of limitations of the display, or because it simply hadn’t been mapped out.
“A Space Hulk? What is that?” Panam asked sharply, a slight waver in her voice as she looked down at the display. The implications were sinking in, but she knew it wasn’t the time to have a breakdown, so she swallowed it down. I appreciated it. If she broke down, then I would be right next to her, and we couldn’t afford that.
“It’s basically a hundred car pileup in space, except the cars fuse together,” I could answer that much. It was massive. Just eyeballing what was mapped compared to the Last Light, it had to be at least fifty miles worth of ships smashed together and left adrift in space. “I don’t know much more than that. Beyond that they’re supposed to be incredibly dangerous.”
Narrowing the scope of the display, I saw the points Vigilius wanted to show me. The readouts from the reactor room weren’t promising. There were about a thousand alerts requesting high-priority maintenance, and it was operating at less than a percent of full capacity. There were thousands more about the life support systems -- entire decks within the ship had been ventilated, air recyclers failing in others, contaminants in the water supply…
They all came secondary to the ork infestation in the ship. Something of a recent development based on the logs. So recent that it began three days ago.
“There,” Panam pointed at the display. “There’s another pod like ours,” she said, pointing to one end of the Last Light. Which brought my attention to a cluster of two. Which was on the opposite end of the ship. “That is something, at least. How big was the crew?”
+Factual: Total crew sum fifteen thousand, eight hundred and sixty three.+ Five out of that many? That was… +Factual: Failure. Failure. Failure. Attempted to separate Last Light from Space Hulk. Failure. Led xenos to Last Light. F̶̤̀ͅă̴̖i̵̗̊ḻ̶̟̔̿ü̵̙r̴̛̞̩̃e̷̥͆͝f̸͔̂a̸̭̓̈́i̶̩̬͘l̷̻̪̀̚ŭ̶͖̣̋ŕ̶̙͓e̴̩̻͗f̵̩̾̍a̵̛̟i̵̛͍͋ͅl̶̯͈̉͝u̶̮̟͗ṟ̵̡̈́̀e̴̯͊͝-+
“We find them before the orks do,” I interjected, attempting to stall the mental breakdown. “We find them, we regroup here, then we consider our options.” Which were slim. If the orks didn’t kill us, then life support failures would. We couldn’t count on a rescue, not when we had apparently gone unnoticed for just shy of fifteen thousand years, so we would have to rescue ourselves.
How were we going to do that? Well, that’s why I wanted to rescue the other three. Hopefully, they would have an idea.
“I’ll take the lone one. You pick up the other two,” Panam decided, and I tried not to swallow nervously. “Hey Vig! You can lead us to them, right?”
+Factual: Affirmative.+ Vigilius replied, his voice once more leveling out.
“Alright,” Panam decided, punching me in the shoulder. “We get them, then we get out. Simple and clean.” She didn’t sound like she believed it. Neither did I, honestly.
Still, it was a nice thought while it lasted.
[CENTER]
…
[/CENTER]
Walking through the halls of the Last Light alone was infinitely worse than walking through them with Panam. A knot of tension formed between my shoulder blades as I walked through the red tinted halls, following the same blinking lights. It was partly out of urgency that I moved so quickly, but it was mostly because being on a mostly abandoned ship with blood thirsty aliens that loved war more than life itself set my teeth on edge.
I half jogged through the halls, praying that behind every door, I would see the pair that Vigilius was attempting to lead to us-
+Announcement: Xeno corpses have been discovered. Increased Xeno presence.+ Vigilius warned through the earpiece of a helmet I was given. The quickest way to get to the pair was to travel through several depressurized zones.
“I hear you,” I said, picking up the pace. Something I almost regretted when another door opened, and I found my sense of gravity was completely thrown off. I wasn’t weightless beyond the door, but I felt several times lighter with my momentum carrying me forward. “How close am I?”
+Answer: Eight hundred feet. Warning: Survivors are uncooperative. Deviations from the path detected.+ That sounded like it could be a problem. +Urgent: New breaches in Last Light detected. Location of breaches near survivors.+
“Of course they are,” I hissed, swallowing the lump in my throat and passing through another doorway. I nearly fell flat on my face when gravity pulled me back down, but I managed to keep running. I barely had the time to realize it, but I was moving too fast. I had always been something of a gym rat, but cardio was my bane. Endurance running wasn’t that bad. It was just that I wasn’t much of a sprinter.
Yet, I raced down the halls at speeds that felt like they belonged to an Olympic athlete. Vigilius opened the doors for me in time, so they weren’t an obstacle. All the same, despite my newfound yet unexplained speed, I heard gunshots before I reached the pair.
My stomach was twisted into knots when the final door opened, revealing a cafeteria. A squad of orks erupted inside much like I did, a squad of six unloading in the direction of a pair of women. One with white hair shielded another smaller girl, but I didn’t see much more than that. Just bullets exploding around them, yet somehow not quite hitting them.
Adrenaline flooded my veins, and my body just knew what to do. I’d gotten a taste of it earlier. Now it was all the more apparent when I took aim, pulling the trigger to fell one of the orks. Strafing to the side, the orks immediately found me more entertaining prey. The women were forgotten as I found myself bombarded with a wall of gunfire. Using the darkness to my advantage, I killed another, reducing him to ash with a headshot.
What I didn’t expect was for one of the ork’s guns to explode in his hands, taking out himself and another two, leaving a final ork that glanced over at his fellows with a downright mystified expression. An expression he died with when a red laser struck him in the chest.
“We need to go,” I didn’t give the women a second more than before pushing a pair of helmets in their hands. “Right now. There are more coming.”
“Who in the hell are you?!” The white-haired woman demanded, looking ready to start punching. It probably wasn’t the best time for it, but she was beautiful. Dark green eyes, snow-white hair, and the suit did little to hide her curves. That was the clue I needed to piece together who she was. I never would have thought of it unless I met Panam, but the black skintight body suit and white hair combo was very recognizable.
Black Cat. Or Felicia Hardy, from Marvel.
The brown-haired girl, however, wasn’t doing so good. She was on the younger side, maybe late teens at the high end. Something of a mousey face, but her skin was pale, and she was sweating from pure adrenaline. Her brown eyes were unfocused, and if it wasn’t for the white-haired woman propping her up, I doubt she would have the will to stand. I had no clue who she could be.
“We don’t have time-” I started, and as if to agree with me, more orks erupted into the cafeteria with a war cry. Only they emerged from the same door I used to enter. “Go! Put on the helmets and go!” I shoved them both forward towards another door.
“Amy, come on! Pick up your feet!” Felicia shouted, half-dragging the teenager towards the door while I provided covering fire. Amy managed to obey, but she was going into shock. Her run was uncoordinated. That, and I recognized a smoker's wheeze anywhere.
“'umiez! Wot are yer doing?! Stay for a krumping!” An ork bellowed after us, sparks flying where bullets struck near us.
I blind fired over my shoulder, the door opening for us as Vigilius came in clutch, but I had no idea if I hit anything. The girls slipped through the door first, followed by me. Slamming shut behind us, I heard a dull frustrated roar reverberate through the door, followed by impacts. They were trying to shoot through the door. And I think they were going to manage it.
“The helmets,” I repeated, all but yanking it out of Felicia’s hands to shove it on her head. “Half of the ship is depressurized. You will die if you don’t put it on.” That was all she needed, rolling up her hair and sliding it on. It meshed with the bodysuit, creating an airtight seam. Amy managed to put hers on with fumbling hands. “I know you have questions. You’ll get as many answers as I can give, but it’s a case of the blind leading the blind here. We have a… relatively safe place, but I need you to wait until we reach it, okay?”
“... Okay,” Felicia replied. Amy just curled into herself. “But before we follow you into the great unknown, do you have a name at least?”
“Odysseus,” I answered, not at all liking the thumps against the door that echoed out as we ran down the halls. “Nice to meet you.”
That earned a shadow of a laugh, “Classical. I like it.” With that, the silence lapsed between us while we made our way through the ship. We had to take a more winding path to get there, but the rest of the ship was empty. I just had to hope it wouldn’t start filling up with orks.
We made it to the command deck within twenty minutes, and despite the pure adrenaline that coursed through my body, I felt… steady. Maybe not calm, but the pure pants-shitting terror I should be feeling wasn’t weighing on the mental scales as much as it should. Taking off my helmet, my gaze snapped to the other new arrival, who was poking and prodding at Vigilius with unrestrained curiosity.
She noticed our arrival and her smile widened, “I!” She began with a boisterous laugh, “am Dr. Vegapunk Lilith! The most brilliant scientist in the world! Prostate yourselves and offer your funds for the sake of my research!”
“... What in the hell is going on?” Amy asked quietly, more to herself than anyone else. I answered all the same, unable to keep the pure relief out of my voice.
“We might be entirely fucked after all.”
…
Originally, this was going to be a companion piece to Greatest Stage, which I have been continuing in my own time, but it kinda became its own thing. Not a whole lot to say about this one, admittedly. The premise is that the MC, instead of metagaming the Waifu Catalog, just went all in on the waifus. The initial focus would be on Panam, Felicia, Amy, and Lilith for the intro arc covering the salvaging of the Last Light and exploring the Space Hulk. I'd call it around 5 chapters total before we venture into 40k proper.
Some waifus Odysseus will stumble across. Others will have made their own splash in the setting. Like Wonder Woman would have a few things to say about Chaos.
Let me know what you think.