Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

172 – Mokey Business

“If it works, it works,” I said, staring at my newest creation. “I guess?”

They only had a few hours, a day and some change to be a touch more specific, to be put together. For anyone else, expecting even just a half-working prototype in a little over a day for a new research or experiment would be outrageous. 

But what can I say, I was outrageous in many ways, most of them good. I think.

Anyway! The fact of the matter was that I had managed to get something useful out of the Hrud-cum-Khrave experiments. When I began, I had high expectations. Sure, the Khrave were cowardly cunts who only fought those they thought weaker than them, and thrived when the galaxy was in chaos without anyone having the leeway to do pest control. They were ageless though, and like the messed up parodies of vampires that they were, they grew more and more powerful as they aged.

Eldar gene templates and especially my new soulbones, were pretty good psychic conduits, but I had a slight hunch that the Old Ones — the controlling frog-cunts that they were — didn’t build either with maximum power and effectiveness in mind. They just had to be ‘good enough’ and not strong enough to prove to be a problem. The Aeldari were weapons after all.

The Khrave were not. They had been one of the first species to walk the stars along with the Old Ones back when the C’Tan were still just floating clouds of gas nibbling on stars like some overgrown amoeba. So I had hoped that with their templates in hand, I could make myself some psychic conduits at least rivalling soulbone in potency.

Why would I need that? Because soulbone was an absolute bitch to make and devoured my soul energy like a black hole. Sure I had some leeway now with me being able to slurp up some warp juice whenever I was back on my new moon, but my bio-energy stores were near limitless in comparison. So I wanted an alternative.

The only problem was that any Khrave I built was like a newborn, barely stronger than a kitten and just about as good of a psyker as one too. That’s where the Hrud and their freaky aging aura came in.

The concept was simple, and I had high hopes for it working. Alas, it did not. For whatever reason, the Khrave clones and replicated samples took badly to being artificially aged up by my Hrud drones. Meanwhile, the Hrud drones were doing their absolute best to speedrun dying from a thousand different types of cancer at once while their gene strains were constantly trying to disentangle into a mess of absolute chaos. 

Still, I had managed to get some results. Not by being smart or innovative, just by brute forcing it, really. Having a few thousand mind-cores working at ten times the speed regular humans thought all working together on a problem had a way of solving most problems that can be solved by brute-forcing the ‘throw shit at the wall and see what sticks’ method.

I had a few other sub-brains to help guide them in their attempts so they were a bit more forward-thinking than just doing random shit until something worked, but that didn’t really change the core principle.

So that was how I now had chunks of fossilised Khrave … stuff. 

They were largely spherical with bits and pieces jutting out of them, largely coloured in gradients of greys and brown and felt largely like granite to the touch. More importantly, they were pretty conductive for soul energy, almost as much as regular soulbone was but still had nothing on my lovely staff.

Unfortunately, that was where the positives ended. Even with all the optimisation and work my mind-cores had done, these things still had a maximum lifetime of about an hour or two when in use and an estimated month when left alone. They would also deteriorate when in use, slowly losing their conductivity with every bit of soul energy channelled through them.

It wasn’t exactly anything like what I had initially wanted, but it was something.

I’m thinking about this the wrong way. I mused, throwing the macabre ball up into the air and catching it as it came down. It was just a bit larger than an apple, so I could comfortably hold it in one hand. I have soulbone for the important stuff. Primary drones can get orbs or wands made of it and I’ll be able to channel much more soul energy through them. This stuff though, I can give a ball like this to a million combat drones with how cheap they are and each would be able to shoot off a single devastating psychic attack much stronger than their bodies would have been able to handle before turning to ash or exploding.

Cheap was relative of course, it was pretty expensive to make these things and age them up. But the cost was not in the ballpark of something astronomical like soulbone which made my heart ache just by thinking about making it. It also used up only bio-energy. If I was running low on that, I just had to make a few more heat-mining spikes and drive them into the cores of a planet. 

Getting my claws on the whole star system in which Vallia sat was also on my to-do list for the next few months. Once I had all the Tau booted, I could get started on building a Dyson swarm around the system’s star and strip-mining the asteroid belt. 

I really should start quantifying my stores, expenses and what everything costs. I sighed, shaking my head at just how confusing it all was getting. I had a vague idea of what everything cost in comparison to other stuff, but maybe some numbers would be good to see it all clearly. Maybe some graphs too. I just had to reinvent excel sheets, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to use whatever deranged data-keeping software the Mechanicus used. Later. Much later. That’s going to be super boring … and I have other toys to check, anyway.

Pushing that particular task down to the bottom of my to-do list which was ever-expanding, I snatched up the improved upon pulse rifle. It was an ugly, blocky thing with a handle and trigger strapped onto it and a hole at the other end for the bolt to leave through. Imperial lasrifles weren’t much better, honestly, those were even blockier, but those at least had some minor artistry woven into their design. The Tau-made weapons, in contrast, were all every bit utility-over-form and the little monkey that had upgraded this particular one didn’t really change that.

While about the size of an Imperial Lasgun, the Pulse Rifle was far more powerful. It fired a plasma pulse, which was generated when an induction field accelerated a particle which breaks down as it left the barrel. The small circular device near the end of the barrel — Gun Stabiliser — was housing for a gyroscope that was part of an aim-stabilization system that allowed the rifle to remain steady on target and angled for optimal firing at a distance, regardless of factors like shaking hands. This gave pulse rifles a greater effective range than many other infantry weapons.

Or so the faint memories my mind-cores managed to dig up about them said, but most of those claims I could confirm with a quick application of my aura to scan the weapon while matching the bits to my basic understanding of technology. The knowledge dump I had gotten from Zedev wasn’t really all that good, or helpful with this, but it gave me a rather solid foundation in the advanced scientific theories that were entirely alien to my 21st-century brain.

The Warhammer fandom liked to clown on the Mechanicus for their rather silly weapons designs and their unwillingness to innovate, but I felt it was rather unfair. Especially now. If what was now in my brain was what a regular tech adept was expected to know, they were all exceptional scientists. I had stuff in here that made the tiny snippets of quantum physics I had learned from videos back on Earth seem like child’s play.

Still, it was just barely enough to understand the basics of how this humble pulse rifle worked. Though it was a bit easier on an unmodified one, in which every compartment was ten times as large and as such, much easier to make out. The monkey had gone wild on minimising what was already in there and adding a few new bits that I could only guess the purpose of.

One I thought was supposed to compress the plasma bolt, while another gave it a … resonance? A frequency? Why though? There were simpler bits too that I could understand at least. A switch which allowed the shooter to swap between firing big fuckoff bolts of plasma and smaller pew-pew bolts while another just compensated for the kickback.

Fancy stuff. Finding that monkey in Inquisitor Thrace’s vaults might have used up all the luck I had collected in my life. It was going to pay major dividends. The little fellow had already upgraded a railgun too and was now busy fiddling with a mobile shield generator the Tau mostly used on some of their heavy tank-equivalents.

Before jumping into testing, I took a moment to have a second, more thorough check of all the updates I had received from my mind-cores on surveillance duty controlling drones down on the planet. The people were going wild down there, riots were in full blow and some settlements were just petering on the edge of absolute anarchy. Some were calmly terrified, but I didn’t care much about those for now.

I quickly authorised some non-lethal force in a few towns, while also allowing another few hundred sneaky drones to excrete a calming cloud of invisible pheromones. The latter could take care of most riots, turning them into peaceful protests and complaining, while the prior took care of the few asshats who thought this was their shot at turning themselves into warlords or some variant of that. I would be having none of that, not until I had officially made this whole planet the Tau’s problem.

Thankfully, it seemed religion was a much smaller part of their life than I’d feared. I loathed zealots with a burning passion, and I couldn’t ever really understand how their strange minds worked.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

I shook my head at the thought. That was one part of why I didn’t want there to be an organised religion centred around me. If I had to deal with what Guilliman had to go through every day for being ‘The Demigod Son of the God-Emperor of Mankind™’ I was going to murder someone. Probably a lot of someones.

Fae was tolerable because she wasn’t too vocal about her fawning and such, but it was still weird. I had more important stuff to do than to brood over that stuff though, like testing my new toys for example. 

With a thought, I grew a slew of various Tyranids at the other end of the room. Rippers, Termagants, Canifexes, Lictor and a pair of Hive Tyrants and Genestealer Patriarch, then I shouldered the original pulse rifle, aimed it at a ripper and pulled the trigger.

Its stock slammed into my shoulder with a satisfying kickback as the bolt of plasma sped forth with a distinctive hiss and smashed into the bulldog-sized tyranid. Its carapace didn’t even fracture, it just had a fist-sized hole seared into it, as did the creature’s flesh and bone. The bolt had gone right through, burning a matching exit hole on the other end and stopped only once it burned a finger-deep hole into the back wall. With that having been made of a plasteel-like biomaterial, that was actually more impressive than it having gone straight through a ripper.

With a shrug, I pulled the rifle back up and aimed it at the next target. Pulled the trigger, and watched it fall over with a hole through its chest. Well, Gaunts weren’t that tough, anyway. The Carnifex, the next target in the queue, held up better. Its carapace fractured, and the bolt pierced through, but it robbed the bolt of most of its power and it petered out after just searing the surface of its flesh. It took another three bolts fired at the exact same spot for me to reach what went for the creature’s heart. 

The Lictor fell quicker, though that was to be expected. It was an ambush predator and the plasma bolt went right through its tentacle-clad face and scrambled its brain. The last two foes, though, proved to be too tough a nut to crack. Neither the Hive Tyrants nor the Patriarchs had any wound on them that could be even remotely called lethal, not even after I emptied out the powercell — which had enough power in it for fifty bolts.

I threw the rifle away after that, letting my Telekinesis carry it back to its place while I snatched up the improved-upon pulse rifle and marvelled at its much sleeker design. It was about the same size as the previous one, but the boxy look was gone and in its place was a … still weird gun, by my Earth sensibilities at least. It had only a few sharp edges, with most of its outline being drawn by softly curving lines. Well, I had wanted a futuristic-looking gun, and I got it I guess.

I shouldered it and skipped over the first two targets, aiming the barrel right at the second still Carnifex. I pulled the trigger and smiled as I barely even felt the weapon’s kick. It fired with a deep hum, the bolt somehow denser and thicker than before as it sped forth at maybe one and half the speed it had previously.

The Carnifex’s carapace fractured instantly, its flesh beneath seared as the bolt burrowed in deep and it continued to burn even then. I hopped on over and peered into the hole while I scanned it with my aura, grinning as I saw more and more of the creature’s flesh burn and melt. It didn’t quite reach the centre of its chest where its heart, lungs and other important organs were, but it was a near thing. In the end, the glob of plasma didn’t quite kill the Carnifex, but it sure as hell would have caused it some serious trouble had this been an actual combat encounter.

Grinning to myself, I turned my gaze on the railgun. Those things were powerful enough to be placed on the Tau’s APCs — Armoured Personnel Carriers — and their larger cousins were even used on their spaceships. 

I wonder how much the little monkey managed to enhance that thing.