I felt dirty, miserable, and so furious it circled right back around to being calm. I had scavenged through the minds of hundreds of those wretched Drukhari to get an accurate grasp of what they knew about the nearby Webway tunnels. Kaylith’s knowledge could only go so far, considering she’d never set foot in this settlement or the specific path we had to take to reach the point where the Dark Eldar occasionally encountered Necron forces. All she knew was hearsay, and she couldn’t even accurately guess which specific portal or tunnel led to the path we needed, just that it existed.
I exercised my telepathy on my own mind afterwards to lock away most of the fragmented memories I’d dug out of Drukhari minds. I only kept the cold, factual data that I needed, discarding the rest just like I had the hundreds of catatonic Dark Eldar produced throughout my information-gathering. I didn’t care to be careful when extracting what I wanted from their minds, nor did it bother me that they didn’t survive the process. I didn’t go out of my way to be cruel, since I had to make a choice between focusing on gathering as much information in as intact of a state as possible, or on making them suffer.
It was a good thing that even if I focused on the information, the process was still effectively horrid torture, so it was a best-of-both-worlds type of scenario.
“This is the one,” I hummed as we gathered before one of those mirage-portals. We stood on a high terrace hanging between three spiky skyscrapers, the center of which was the spatial anomaly. I tried to smile, but knew it came out wooden based on the emotions I was sensing from my peanut gallery. “Is everyone ready for a field trip?”
Since Cathrine had remained behind on the Sovereign, and Coldstone took me up on my offer to stay behind on the shuttle, it was only me, Selene, Kaylith, and the Cain trio going out to stretch our legs. Considering he’d asked me to ‘thaw out’ the Tau ex-slaves I had rescued from the Drukhari, he wasn’t going to just twiddle his thumbs either while the rest of us were away. I also made sure he — and the rescued Tau — had enough food, water and breathable air for years so I wouldn’t run into the same issue I did while infiltrating the Hollow Sun.
“The frak is a field trip?” I heard Jurgen mumble under his breath, but I studiously ignored it and turned my gaze back upon the spatial distortion. It was less a purposefully designed intersection and more like a … bug. No, not a bug, more like a feature used in a way it wasn’t supposed to. Two Webway tunnels were intersecting right before my eyes when they shouldn’t have.
As for why it showed up like a weird sphere of distorted space? Well, because the two tunnels existed in entirely different dimensions. Both had their own three spatial dimensions, and what I was looking at was two three-dimensional spaces intersecting. It was fascinating, and I would have loved to spend a few days poking and prodding at the thing to understand it better any other time.
I wasn’t in the mood at the moment though, but I put a pin on that thought and made sure to make a mental note about it. I’d get back to it when I had some downtime.
Speaking of moods, what I was in the mood for was some recreational murder. I was so mad at the Dark Eldar that I couldn’t even savour beating them down properly. I just rolled up in my ship and … won, basically.
I stepped into the distortion, my aura having flowed through already to explore the other side ahead of time, and also to make sure traversing the thing was actually safe. In this galaxy, you never knew what you got with teleportation. Portals were good, but Imperial teleportariums and Orkish teleport-guns? — ‘Tellyportas’ was the proper Orkish term, my mind-cores dutifully informed me — Those easily kicked the Star Trek teleporter down to second place on the most horrid ways to travel list.
The tunnel on this side was strange, even more so than the previous unnaturally wide cavern. A tiled stone floor stretched in front of me, snaking into the distance. It was cracked, visibly ancient, and covered in dust. It was also the only thing inside, surrounded only by a tunnel made of ever-shifting colours. It was an interesting sight, especially because the tunnel was roughly twenty meters in diameter at the widest and the walkway a mere quarter of that and floating in mid-air roughly at the center of it.
I poked my head back over the other side and called my minions — plus Selene — over, which they warily did, eying their new surroundings with an air of suspicion and wariness. As if a Drukhari assassin might be spat out by the ever-shifting walls at any moment. Only Kaylith looked some measure of relaxed, and even she was prepared for an ambush, or for something to go horribly wrong at any moment, which was probably why she lived so long as a lone Pathfinder making her own way in this hellish death-trap of a galaxy.
“A few of them took this path to escape,” Kaylith noted, her gem-like eyes flickering across the serpentine pathway’s numerous stone tiles. “Three groups, one numbering scores, the other two small squads of less than a dozen.”
I was curious how she figured all that out without cheating her ass off like me by using copious amounts of processing power to analyse the placement of every last dust particle scattered about the place. She wasn’t a Pathfinder for nothing, I suppose.
We followed the path, mostly in silence. Selene and I walked ahead, with Kaylith deciding to stick with us instead of fourth-wheeling the Imperial contingent, keeping pace a few meters behind us.
“Ask,” I said, speaking up casually and making the Eldar twitch ever so slightly. I had felt tension build up in her body over the course of long, silent minutes. She had something she dearly wanted to know, but didn’t dare give voice to it. I gave her a look out of the corner of my eye. “What is it? I promise I won’t bite your head off, no matter what it is.”
She gave me a wary, measuring glance, pausing just before the ‘it is nothing’ could slip off the tip of her tongue. Whatever she saw, she hesitated, and then spoke.
“What manner of a creature are you?” Kaylith asked, staring at me intently and looking ready to bow and apologise for the ‘rude’ question at the first sign of any offence showing on my face. “You wield the powers of the Empyrean, but it’s different. I’ve never felt anything quite like it. It’s almost as if your version is … untainted.”
“You have keen senses, that’s exactly it,” I said. “Whatever the cause, I am able to scrub the inherent corruption from Warp energy when it comes near my soul. The energy I use is probably closer to what the entire Warp used to be like back when it was still the Sea of Souls, back before the War in Heaven. Does that answer your question?”
“My curiosity is sufficiently satiated, thank you for indulging me,” she said with a level of politeness bordering on being uncomfortable. What the heck. Eldar were supposed to be arrogant snobs unable to speak two words without a foot ending up lodged in their mouths. Either theirs or someone else’s.
I considered asking a question of my own, if only to fill the empty silence, but then my aura finally flowed over something curious up ahead. Another spatial distortion. This one was smaller, just two meters across, and instead of intersecting with the walkable footpath snaking through the air in the middle of the tunnel, it was at the edge of the tunnel, floating in mid-air meters away from the tiled walkway.
Unlike the one we’d gone through, this one looked entirely accidental, since there was no way anyone could use it without flight or very strong leg muscles. It also looked a bit wobbly — or ‘unstable’ if you want to be boring and scientific about it — around the edges, as if some strong invisible wind was trying to blow it away. It was messy, too, the space fluctuating wildly enough to disrupt my aura when I attempted to push it through.
I could have forced it, but I wasn’t sure the phenomenon wouldn’t collapse if I got forceful. So instead, I decided to test how safe it was by making a small stealth drone — one of my new avian designs that looked like a white crow — and sending it ahead while we continued walking at an unhurried pace. All the while, I recorded every bit of data about the small smudges, scratches, the footprints and every other blemish on the stone tiles. So far, I’d found distinct signs of twelve different combat engagements that have taken place on the path we’d taken, spread out across the last two years if erosion and other natural processes worked the same as they did back out in the normal world. For all I knew, the Webway’s pavement repaired itself, and those signs were just scars from aeons ago.
If what I’d gathered was correct, only one of the Dark Eldar groups got desperate enough to jump through the portal, which didn’t bode well for its usefulness. Wouldn’t more of them have used the obvious side-path to throw pursuers off their trail if it was reliable?
My answer presented itself when the avian crow-drone flew through the spatial distortion, and promptly returned a second later in what I called ‘emergency retreat mode’. The small thing was pretty good at running away, or rather, flying away from danger, since what use would a surveillance drone be for me if it couldn’t actually run from anything dangerous it noticed to report it to me?
The moment the drone came back through the portal, it re-established our telepathic link and dumped the recording of what it saw. Not a moment too soon either as a very familiar green beam nicked one of its wings a moment later, causing the small thing to disintegrate.
“We found our Necrons,” I mused, eyes narrowing slightly as I dissected the telepathic report. A squad of twenty Necron Warriors were watching the portal from the other side intently. “Or at least some Necrons.”
That the drone went in and came back mostly unharmed also meant the unstable nature of the portal wasn’t inherently harmful. Or at least not in the short term.
I cast my senses in the other direction, down the length of the path we were on in search of the Dark Eldar that had escaped this way. I didn’t need to kill them, but I wanted to. They were scum. Besides, I still had no real opportunity to let loose for a good long while. Not that these Drukhari were going to give me an opportunity to do so in any case, they weren’t all that powerful in combat. These suckers sent out to squat in this small outpost in the ass end of nowhere certainly had no access to any of the Old One technology the upper crust of their kind might have had stashed away for a rainy day.
With an internal, suppressed sigh, I let it go. I came for the Necrons. It was much more important than hunting them down and earning some minor gratification, doubly so because they had all left this Webway path behind already. Finding them would have been a chore and a half.
I sent a small squad of drones ahead, a trio of Draugr — general combat drones — and three specialised assassin drones to back them up. Everyone took the six new bodies just melting out of my own before rushing off in a stride, though the Imperial contingent tensed, knowing it was likely a prelude to trouble, while Kaylith looked like she’d seen a ghost even if the emotion never made it onto her face, only lingering as a glint in her gem-like eyes.
Just in case, I gave these drones a minor makeover, making them look different from the ones I’d used on the Hollow Sun and basing them on a much older design. Instead of being covered in pure white carapace, these new drones looked like they’d all be the favoured pets of a Drukhari Archon. They were all-black, mean-looking, and could actually function as living creatures over the long term, making it believable that they came from a Haemonculi’s workshop and not from me. Gone were the shiny carapace and in came the manta-black fur, with distinctly canine heads also coming to replace the insect-like heads that I’d sourced from the Tyranids so long ago. I wasn’t sure whether any Necron would buy it, but it was worth the single microsecond of effort put into it. They should also be more than enough to handle a dozen baseline Necron Warriors.
Then I would have to decide just how I wanted to go about this thing. I had the squad gathered up, but they sure as hell weren’t coming with me if I was about to tussle with Necrons again. Let it not be said that I couldn’t learn from my mistakes … after making them a few times. Yeah, I could at least try to play this smart.
Also, what if this group of Necrons wasn’t even the same as the ones I’d faced before? With how the Webway worked, these could be from a Dynasty on the other end of the galaxy for all I knew. I had to be careful. Really careful. I’d already started something similar to a blood feud with one dynasty, I didn’t need another one gunning for me.