AN: I am bacc.
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Unsurprisingly, the Drukhari ships had no anti-teleportation countermeasures, which meant they were presently suffering from a sudden case of having a hundred murder-happy orkz teleported onboard. Maybe it was mean, but I had Cain and his stinky shadow join one of the groups, and despite the near-tangible air of ‘woe-is-me’ hanging about him, he was quickly earning the dubious respect of the orkz that were following in his wake by tearing through the ‘spiky onez’ at a pace befitting a mini Custodian. Honestly, I was pretty sure he had some minor psykic fuckery going on because his instincts — both for combat and in general — continued to border on the supernatural.
He had also, somehow, managed to convince himself that the safest place to be was leading the charge against the Dark Eldar instead of hanging back and letting the Orks do their thing, or split off from them. I was curious about the logic behind that, but I didn’t want to muck about in his head to find out. Especially with that Pariah standing next to him.
Speaking of the Dark Eldar, the Orkish name — “those spikey gitz” — for them proved to be surprisingly apt. Their design philosophy for ships, and architecture in general, seemed to be the polar opposite of the Tau’s gentle curves and soft colours. Everything was black, every angle was sharp enough to cut through steel, and it seemed like the designer decided to see just how many spikes they could fit onto a single ship just for the shits and giggles because some of those ships looked like hedgehogs.
Okay, that was a bit of an exaggeration; they looked largely sleek and almost elegant in that super edgy, dark way they had about them, but still. So many spikes!
“You trust orks to fight for you?” Amberley couldn’t help but ask after about ten minutes of standing next to me, watching the video-feeds of the boarding actions with barely concealed trepidation.
“Trust,” I said the word slowly, like I was tasting its meaning, then snorted in amusement. “I trust them to murder the things I throw them at, I trust them to fight and die for my goals, though they wouldn’t see it that way, and I trust myself to handle it when they inevitably try to turn on me. Besides, they are amusing. That’s the answer for why I bother with them when I don’t need to, by the way.”
“I see,” she said, though she clearly did not and thought I had one too many screws loose. Which, fair. Orks grew more powerful the more they fought, so it was simple logic that it was only a matter of time until one grew strong enough to give me trouble.
Except, it would never get to that. The Ork Warboss that gave the Emperor trouble — supposedly, I was still convinced he’d been sandbagging to let Horus save him to fondle the bald cunt’s ego — had an empire spanning scores, if not hundreds of star systems. My orks would never be allowed to grow to dominate even a single world.
Cathrine was distinctly absent, having been sent off to do some very important ‘chores’ that had her be away from the bridge, and the screens showing the lowest of the low sentient creatures could sink to.
Coldstone just hung back and watched, content to become one with the scenery and observe events as they unfolded. He was just there, ready to act as his role demanded and answer my questions or facilitate talks between his Sept and me, but otherwise he seemed more than happy to just absorb everything he saw like a sponge. He was probably analysing everything, and trying to remake his worldview, after I’d so callously shattered it into a million pieces.
Kaylith was similar, though more eager to prove her worth, and to show me that she was delivering on her part of the deal. She looked stoic enough, but I could sense her emotions still, tight and taut as a drawn bow. It probably had something to do with the fact that I had effortlessly knocked that one belligerent Aspect Warrior out cold when he tried to cause a ruckus, then proceeded to stuff him in the freezer, aka, I put him into a state of suspended animation with my Biomancy. That spooked the rest into behaving themselves.
I mean, they had a stretch of rooms the size of a mid-sized hotel all for themselves to do as they wished — unless what they wished for was breaking out. I would let them go … once Val had his talk with them, and after I got back to the Warp Gate. Or maybe I’d dump them in one of the Webway Gates. Whatever. That didn’t matter yet. Most of them were more than happy to stick around and help, primarily because I was promising to resurrect some Eldar for them, but also because they had almost unanimously decided that giving a black eye to the Necrons was an endeavour worthy of their full support.
Maybe I’ll have the Aspect Warriors fight. Watching the Drukhari do battle is giving me some good inspiration for refining my fighting style, but the Asuryani were probably less suicidal about it. Hmmm.
The highly mobile and agile Aeldari combat styles suited me better than anything the Imperium had; that’s for sure. It was all good, useful data, which was another reason why I didn’t just rain bio-plasma down on my foes and instead went ahead with the boarding actions.
Unfortunately, the Orks were a bit too good at what they did, and in just an hour all the Dark Eldar ships were dead in space, with the onboard Orks doing their best to absolutely wreck the place. I let them enjoy themselves for a bit while I sent out a few squads of harvester drones to absorb and analyse anything organic, then teleported them back to the deck I’d set apart for them. Cain reappeared too, looking like he was questioning all his life choices once more, and then we were off, streaking towards the Drukhari outpost just a few hours away at sub-light cruising speed.
I spent that time going through my gains, the list of which turned out to be surprisingly extensive and more than that, there were some games scattered about on that list too. Though in hindsight, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. The Exodites were primitive naturalists, and the Craftworld Eldar were radical fringe groups that had basically self-exiled themselves before the Fall. The Drukhari, though? They were the worst, the meanest, the most depraved of the old Aeldari Empire’s high society. They were certainly the faction that had retained most of their technology and other tricks from the time of the Empire’s golden age, and they had no taboo against using Old One technology like the Asuryani did either.
I got so many interesting templates for a wide variety of stims, drugs, or other bio-scientific stuff. Without a doubt, the Drukhari Haemonculi were right up there in the same league as Fabius Bile and Illuminor Szerasz when it came to the organic sciences and the dubious art of flesh-sculpting. As repulsive as they were, I made sure to capture any I came across to slowly and meticulously extract everything I could from their minds. Hopefully, there would be at least one in the outpost, but I didn’t hold out much hope. Haemonculi were part of their Elites, so I wasn’t sure one would be out here slumming it in a raiding outpost.
Another wave of smaller ships took off before we arrived, hastily scrambling to stop us and was joined by a bunch of smaller fighters that looked distinctly similar to Jabba’s ship from the Return of the Jedi. I made sure to grab one intact to add to my collection as I tore the haphazard fleet — if the twenty-odd tiny voidships that would barely qualify as light cruisers by the Imperial classifications could be considered a fleet — and then we were there, hanging above the Drukhari outpost like a spectre of death as they once more scrambled to activate their handful of AA turrets.
Not that they lasted long once I satisfied my curiosity by letting a few of them hit my shuttle. They had the standard laser weaponry, scaled up to anti-air grade, and while it was more powerful, more efficient, more stable and had a higher rate of fire than the Imperial equivalent, it wasn’t all that much of a surprise. It wasn’t the only type of weaponry they fielded though, as the fascinating weapon that Kay had identified as a Doomweaver easily captured my interest.
Why? Because it was utterly nonsensical and over the top. What it did was launch a wide net made of monofilament wire that, like monofilament wires, diced up all that had the misfortune of existing within its trajectory. My mind was whirling with ideas on how I would make a weapon like that, and even my mind-cores were rather stumped at trying to figure out how to stuff a monofilament wire net into something that could launch it properly. Anything I could come up with on short notice was extremely finicky and liable to misfire or clam up, so it wouldn't fire at all.
Unfortunately, as devastating as that net-caster would have been against an actual bio-ship, my shuttle was coated in Swarmlord-grade psychoactive carapace. It was horribly expensive — even with my shuttle just a little larger than a light freighter from Star Wars, like the Millennium Falcon — but it was worth it, since it meant my entire ship was basically wearing the organic equivalent of low-grade Power Armour. Which meant a film-thin force field covered the hull, down at the sub-molecular level. So the net flopped against the outer hull, failed to penetrate it at all, then slid down as a sad, wet sock chucked at a wall.
Maybe if the force field was the same chaotic, fluctuating mess that Space Marine Power Armour used, then it might have slipped past in some weaker points, but it wasn’t. It failed to find purchase, just like anything else they tried to throw at the shuttle, and that’s when I had my curiosity satisfied. Which meant the battle began in earnest, and they no longer had any chance at victory at all.
Bio-plasma rained down on the AA weapons platforms, on the hovertanks and on the few remaining half-repaired ships which were desperately scrambling to take off or were already fleeing. The outpost was a strange sight to behold, a mass of sharp structures, covered in spikes and made of an oily black material that filled the cavern. Buildings jutted out from the floor, the walls, and some even hung from the ceiling in a way that made it nearly impossible to tell which way was down just by looking at it.
Then there were the side-tunnels. Some were real cave entrances on the faux stone, while others looked like mirages, with the air fizzling and indistinct shapes shifting in and out of focus. Those small sections, usually spanning five meters across, seemed distinctly weird to my senses. It was as if two separate ‘spaces’ were superimposed over each other; they both existed in the same space, but they were also in constant conflict, as if they were wrestling to see which one would come out on top.
I watched a group of Drukhari race into one on speeder bikes and disappear the moment they crossed the spatial phenomenon’s boundary. One moment they were there, the next they weren’t. That same scene was taking place at every other entrance to what I guessed were minor Webway paths and tunnels.
The Webway was like a circulatory system, a network of arteries and capillaries stretching across the entirety of the Milky Way Galaxy. If I had to guess, we were in one of the ‘arteries’ at the moment, and those smaller portals and tunnels led to ‘capillaries’.
I let the orks loose on the outpost, all of them, while also dispatching a few squads of fast and agile drones to gather everything interesting that caught my eye. I wanted at least two intact examples of each type of weapon they used, and also of all their tools, stims, medicine and the like. I also sent out a handful of stealth drones which went around mercy killing the captured ‘pain slaves’ as Kay had called them, at least the ones that I knew couldn’t be saved.
The Drukhari had a system for them. They took their time breaking their slaves, exacting every iota of suffering, agony and misery they could from each one. Waste not, want not, and all that. But once a slave broke and could no longer even process what they were going through? That’s when they became furniture, or a wall decoration, or something to that effect. I could sense their souls, and it was a horrid sight that reinforced my disgust of these animals. What torture did a mortal creature have to go through for their souls to break? For them to die in every way that mattered aside from biologically?
The more … ‘intact’ slaves and prisoners, the ones I thought might not be beyond saving, I teleported back onto the shuttle and put into a dreamless sleep. I doubted they would have appreciated any dreams their subconscious minds conjured up after what they’d gone through. With that, the number of unconscious rescuees I had on board swelled to the low four digits, most of them humans, though there were both Tau and what I assumed were Asuryani and Exodite Eldar too, in their hundreds. Which meant I had to make a handful of extra shuttles to carry them all because the one we flew in on certainly couldn’t fit them all.
“What would drive a sentient being to commit such a thing?” Coldstone couldn’t help but blurt out, his eyes wide, composure utterly shattered as he stared at the video-feeds of the door-to-door battle and the one I was getting from my drones. He looked several shades paler than usual, had his hands clenched, and for the first time his mental shields were in absolute shambles.
I felt his turbulent emotions: the sympathetic misery at the sight of so many beings violated to such a horrid degree, the pity, the outrage, the righteous anger. I could already tell that he had just firmly shoved the Drukhari into that tiny mental box all Tau had for groups and species incompatible with the Greater Good.
“All surviving factions of Eldar have a method through which they can protect their souls,” I said, not taking my eyes off of the dozens of illusory screens hovering in front of us. With my hands clasped behind my back, spine straight and face void of emotion, I probably looked like a stoic statue, but that was to keep myself from doing something stupid. Every Drukhari that died had a fate far worse than mere death waiting for them, I told myself. There was no need to go out of my way to attempt to make it worse. That would just- … Doing something bad enough to achieve that would just taint my soul, perhaps even quite literally.
I breathed a soft sigh and continued, “Slaanesh has a claim on all of their souls by default, on account of having been birthed by the sheer depraved Excess the old Aeldari Empire embodied. The Craftworlders use their Paths as a psychic shield, and they keep their use of the Warp to a minimum. They have their spirit stones to trap their own souls if they were to die, before Slaanesh can steal them. Exodites have something similar, their World Spirits act as a spiritual net to trap every Eldar soul that dies on their planets. The Drukhari, however, went with a different option.”
“Before the Fall, both the Craftworlders and the Exodites distanced themselves from the depravity of the greater Aeldari society that had become the norm, that’s how they escaped having their souls devoured when Slaanesh was born,” I said. “The Drukhari of Commoragh were the worst of the worst, and yet they escaped the fate they deserved on account of living in the Webway, where the Chaos God’s reach was limited. Despite that, their souls didn't escape unharmed; Slaanesh’s touch is upon them, and so, like the snivelling cowards they were, they decided to give her tribute, to please the monster they helped create, and what better tribute to give to the Excess than pain? The pain of others, to be specific. With every scream, every tear, every slave that suffers at their hand, Slaanesh loosens her grip on their souls. Never fully, just a tiny bit, just enough so they know they have just brought themselves another day to live at the price of some random schmuck dying in horrible agony at their hand.”
“Is that why Slaaneshi cultists like to give those spirit stones as tribute?” Amberley asked a bit distractedly, her gaze far off as if trying to recall an old memory. “I knew Eldar believed those stones held their souls after death … but-“
“Yes,” I said, maybe a bit more harshly than I should have because her jaw snapped shut so hard I heard her teeth clatter. I winced inwardly, but it swiftly got lost under the storm of sympathetic misery I was feeling just by being so close to the Drukhari outpost. “Eldar have the most consistently potent souls in the galaxy, as far as I am aware, and yes, those spirit stones do exactly as they say. They house a soul to keep it safe-ish. A small handful of them is like the most decadent, luxurious meal to any Daemon, on top of being a huge source of power. Devouring just a hundred Aeldari souls is the equivalent of eating an entire Hive City’s worth of human souls to them.”
Cain had escaped into the safe embrace of willful disbelief and doubt, while Coldstone was quickly recovering from his lapse in composure, hastily gathering his focus to fortify his mind. Amberley was considerably less affected, as expected of an Inquisitor who had likely been forced to deal with Drukhari before. Meanwhile, Kay was silent and morose, but not at all surprised at what she was seeing. Funny how the Tau had the most ‘human’ reaction to the atrocity we were witnessing.
As stupid and stubbornly ignorant as the Tau could get, they were still … naive in some ways, I suppose. Like me, maybe. I knew what Drukhari were, what they did, but standing there and feeling the psychic aura of this outpost was another thing entirely. I wasn’t sure I could bear to sense Commoragh itself without going mad, or trying to raze the entire damned thing to the ground. Damn my psychic empathy. It would have been so much easier to just not feel all this, or not feel emotions at all.
Selene stood next to me and grabbed my hand, giving it a soft squeeze while doing her best to muffle my emotions with her own calm, with a bit of telepathy. It didn’t really work; she was trying to dry the ocean floor with a mop, but the effort was appreciated and … nice. A tiny bit of stubborn warmth in this storm of misery and suffering.
I breathed a deep sigh, then snapped my fingers and had all the screens vanish. With another thought, all the orks and drones still battling down on the surface were teleported back onto the ship.
“What are you planning?” Selene asked softly.
“I’m going to raze this place to the ground,” I said with finality, opening my eyes. My gaze flickered between the handful of smaller Webway tunnel entrances, my sight unimpeded by the mass of oily black stone between me and my targets. I quickly calculated a firing solution that would leave the structures near those portals largely unaffected. Sure, the Webway wasn’t supposed to be affected by me demolishing some buildings mortals had built into it, but you couldn’t be sure with these things.
The damned thing hadn’t seen maintenance in the last sixty million years, after all, it wouldn’t be a surprise if it wasn’t in tip-top shape anymore. Only silence greeted me on the bridge, none of them wanting to object, apparently. Selene gave my hand another soft squeeze, and I felt a sense of reassurance and vindictive glee from her at my decision. So without a word, I gave the order to fire and watched the outpost that had once housed tens of thousands disappear in a flaming inferno as hundreds of bio-plasma cannons opened fire as one.