noveltune 303 – Friendly Wager
303 – Friendly Wager
“Any takers on betting at how many Catachan Jungle Frogs I need to throw at this planet before its atmosphere combusts?” I hummed, a good two hours after I started harvesting biomass over this side of the planet, staying clear of the Daemonic armies steadily overtaking the Tyranids on the other side. There had been a few massive volcanoes exploding here and there, but by my estimation, the three super-volcanoes rapidly growing under the surface would take another hour before they blew almost simultaneously.
“What’s the bet?” Selene asked, a teasing tone in her lovely voice as she tilted her face up to meet my amused eyes.
“For you?” I whispered. “Anything.”
A shudder ran down her spine, and I grinned.
“One,” Jurgen said, much to the surprise of ... well, everyone. I blinked and looked up. “I need something to keep up with the Commissar if I win. I can’t keep up with a Custodian.”
He sounded almost like a kicked dog abandoned by his owner as he said that, and I decided to take pity on him only because of that. Even if his wish was far out of the bounds of a simple, stupid bet.
“I’m not even sure I was going to accept her offer yet, Jurgen,” Cain said, sounding mildly constipated.
His aide just shrugged. “Some improvements wouldn’t hurt anyway.”
“Fine by me, but only because it was technically Jurgen who helped me before with that Psychic Scream, even if it was Cain who threw him at me. I consider that minor favour repaid with this.” I shrugged slightly. “The rest of you only get to make innocuous bets. I’m taking pity on him.”
While we were fucking around, the Sovereign was raining hell down on the South Pole structure while the Hive Mind raged and wailed. I think destroying that previous structure may have sent it into a murderous frenzy. Oops?
I could have min-maxed my bio-energy intake a bit more, kept harvesting up until the last moment, but I didn’t want to get greedy and fuck up somehow. My adventures in the star system had made it abundantly clear that my enemies could, would, and did find out about my primary weakness, and that the Lord of Change’s mind-fuckery attempt had not been a fluke. He’d just been the swiftest one to act on new information, or the quickest to deduce the primary chink in my armour.
Stupid passive empathy and the human mind. I’d have loved to turn the prior toggleable, but I was very much unwilling to give up my mind. What was the point of becoming all-powerful if it came at the price of losing myself? The me that I considered myself to be would die, and that was unacceptable. My whole thing was not dying. I would not commit ego suicide just to get more power, just as I would not accept the mantle of divinity for the same reason. I liked being me.
Which meant I’d have to learn to work around these weaknesses, and more than that, make exploiting them as hard as possible. This Blackstone Pylon trick was a good first step for that. It could block my passive empathy. I could use that.
“Two frogs,” Cain said, raising a hand. “And ... a new variety of alcohol? For the lounge?”
Amberley gave him a deadpan look that the retired Commissar was studiously ignoring while I nodded with a grin.
“Three frogs, I guess,” Selene mumbled into my shoulders. “And you know what I want.”
If I hadn’t, she made it abundantly clear when her hand slipped below my waist and gave my hip a squeeze.
“I don’t think you need to win a wager for that, my dear,” I hummed, rolling my eyes.
“It’s more fun that way,” Selene said cheerfully, snuggling up to me again.
“I suppose that leaves you at four frogs, Inquisitor,” I said, raising an eyebrow at the woman. This entire situation was so stupid and ridiculous, which was exactly why I was enjoying it so much. I was going to drag this stupid galaxy into the nobledark theme kicking and screaming if I had to. “What will your wager be?”
“Suggestions on how to negotiate with the AI you mentioned?” Amberley said with a bit of uncertainty, relaxing when I nodded easily.
I threw a frog, a big, fat thing that looked like a bullfrog on steroids. It was taller sitting on its ass than a regular man standing upright. It flew down into the atmosphere, lasting four whole seconds until its stress levels rose to the appropriate level and the dumb thing triggered its internal nuclear fission bomb. It detonated a second later, kilometres off the surface and ... I grinned, feeling the fission reverberate across the globe as a nuclear chain reaction rippled through the atmosphere of the entire planet in the span of seconds. The shockwave even reached the Sovereign, but the Barriers held up to it.
“One frog,” I said. “And Freya is gone. Wonderful. If Cain accepts his enhancements, you're getting an Astartes-grade upgrade, Jurgen.”
“Thank you, Miss,” Jurgen said glibly, giving me a nod with the bare minimum of respect. I shrugged.
“And now, onwards to greener pastures ... or rather, to the other four similar systems we need to go through,” I said. “After I’ve harvested all the biomass these nice Tyranids have left behind in the asteroid belt and on the Ice World nearby.”
*****
Things were going well; the Freya system had been left barren, harvested for every drop of biomass I could sense, and I used everything I’d learned there when assaulting the two neighbouring systems. One didn’t have any of the Tyranid superstructures, only the massive skyward towers that I was assuming enhanced the Hive Mind’s ability to micromanage its armies. The other had a planet that was a mirror image of Freya, but now that I knew what to expect, the Psychic Scream was met head-on by a fractal arrangement of Blackstone Pylons around my command deck. It was annoying, but I could deal with it, and the planet ended up the same way as Freya in the end. I had to beat back Doombreed and cut his ugly head off, again, but we’d come out of the battle unscathed in the end.
In the meantime, Cain had gone ahead and graciously — at Amberley’s repeated prompting — accepted my offer to turn him into the closest thing to a mini-Custodes known to Mankind, and I’d also upgraded Jurgen with a custom gene-seed I threw together. Salamander and Dark Angel, the latter derived from The Lion’s own genes. That left him as a good all-rounder with a penchant for pyromania, so there wasn’t much of a difference there. I’d also made sure he looked the same. I’d tried to treat his extensive collection of skin diseases, but they came back a few minutes later in some freakish case of spontaneous mutation. He ended up a bit less powerful than I’d been intending to make him, but his Pariah Genes weren’t being very cooperative, so I had to work around them.
So yes, things were going surprisingly well, so I was getting antsy, expecting the Hive Mind to come up with something nasty and prepare a trap with it in the next system we were about to raid. What I was not expecting was a fleet of Necron warships to slip out of a fold in space — or was it a sub-dimension? Pocket space? More research was required to reach a definitive conclusion — and open fire on the Sovereign while it was mid-transit in interstellar space.
Reality hitched, and the fabric of space evened out, the wave of gravitational phenomena my Gravity Engine was making vanished from one moment to the next, and I was sent reeling as I quickly had to shut it down before the violent feedback blew the Engine to kingdom come. Note to self: make sure all my highly explosive tech has an emergency shutdown process, and that it has ways to mitigate excess power inflow during a sudden shutdown. Some tertiary back-up generators and engines wouldn’t be amiss either if the primary got slagged, and I couldn’t repair them instantly for some reason.
Long, eerie green tendrils made of entropic energy slammed into my Barriers, crawling around on the surface and questing for weak spots. I’d managed to close them just in time before one could tear through a weapons battery and barrel into the ship’s more vulnerable interior.
The Barriers shuddered under the combined onslaught, but they held in the end. The enemy fleet wasn’t a large one as far as the standards of most other species went, but it was a Necron fleet. It didn’t need to be large to be absolutely devastating. I’d rather face a thousand Ork warships than a single Necron Cruiser. On that note, they had a single ship that looked like a Scourge Class Grand Cruiser escorted by three Khophesh Class Light Cruisers and two Shroud Class Light Cruisers as well.
Doom Scythes swarmed out of the Grand Cruiser by the dozens, and I recalled that it was primarily a carrier-type ship. I recalled what I knew of these ships and their armaments: all of them used Lightning Arc turrets as their primary weapons batteries, but the Khopesh also had Particle Whips, and of course, I’d have to deal with the Attack Craft released by the Scourge. Those had Tesla Destructors, and the imaginatively named Death rays, which combined could turn a hive city to slag in an hour.
I reached out with my aura, teasing the fabric of space for any purchase but found that whatever the Necrons were using to make it so smooth would probably interfere with any teleportation ... unless I was willing to brute force it with an inordinate amount of soul energy. Which I wasn’t. Not quite yet, anyway.
A telekinetic grasp latched onto the attack crafts, dragging them into a single clump, and then an Eldritch Blast slammed into them. The energy shields flared, faltered and popped one after the other as the beam of wrathful soul energy tore through them. The pierced ships didn’t explode, so I switched tracks, clenching my fists and increasing the telekinetic force, clattering them up a thousandfold. Once the energy shields were at their breaking point, a pulse of Technomancy swept over them, tearing into the Necrodermis hulls and peeling them apart with violent electromagnetic force.
I gave the Sovereign some distance by throwing the ship away with a bit of telekinesis, then swatted the questing tendrils of the Lightning Arcs aside. Now free of those pesky things, my weapons' batteries recharged and opened fire. At the same time, three bolts fired by the Particle Whips crashed into my Barriers with apocalyptic force, and for the first time since putting them to work, I felt some of the damage tear through them and damage the actual hull.
I spun the ship about with a wave of my hand, pointing the wounded side away from the Necron fleet while opening up with a full broadside volley from the other. Bio-energy surged through the ship, healing the building-sized craters and valleys left in the hull.
Bio-plasma and pyro-acid bolts struck the Necron ships by the hundreds, with hundreds more missing as the alien vessels moved swiftly through space in seemingly impossible, elusive manoeuvres. They had a full 360-degree range of motion, their inertialess drives allowing them to choose any vector in three-dimensional space, and they could switch directions on the drop of a hat. It was frustrating, made even more annoying by the fact that they weren’t especially large and that their energy shields were very advanced, weathering the assault they were being subjected to. Missiles? Those were swatted out of existence as they approached by the Lightning Arcs, tearing them apart on the molecular level.
They didn’t get off scot free, though. I could feel those energy shields quivering more and more as the assault intensified, and I felt the Necron pilots inside redistribute the energy flow and redirect a large stream of it into the shield generators. One of the Kopesh cruisers got the worst of it, with its primary generator overheating and the tertiary ones having to take up the slack while its Necrodermis shell mended itself.
Not on my watch. I hummed, grinning as a condensed beam of energy, carrying my annoyance, leapt from my fingers, materialising a few metres outside my Barriers, then slamming into the Kopesh Class Light Cruiser. The shield popped like an overblown balloon, and the Eldritch Blast blitzed its way through the ship, erasing the Necron ‘captain’ — or whatever it was called — commanding it from the waist up. It left a metre-wide hole going straight through the ancient warship.
That was one less Particle Whip I had to worry about. I could tell the Necrons were waiting for me to stop my barrage, preparing their weapons to lash out the moment I did, while they focused on evasion for now. The problem was, I wasn’t stopping. I had eaten enough biomass over the last few weeks to build a good dozen Earth-sized planets out of nothing but organic mass. I could keep up this barrage for weeks without even noticing the dip in my reserves. It’d be nothing more than a rounding error even then.
I grabbed Atiesh out of thin air and used it to focus my next Eldritch Blast, then infused a telekinetic spell into it, which made it emit a catastrophic shockwave sideways as it went. So when the condensed beam pierced the Scourge Class Grand Cruiser without resistance, it didn’t just go through it. The Blast tore through the ship, ripping and tearing with cataclysmic power as the telekinetic storm training in its wake sent shockwaves cascading through the entire ship.
The large, majestic ship that’d survived millions of years was left in a thousand smouldering chunks barrelling through the empty void of space.
Not a single nanosecond later, some manner of a failsafe must have triggered, or one of the Necrons commanding the other ships had both the authority and the quick wit to order immediate withdrawal. All the ships phased out of existence like they were nothing more than a mirage, even the one pierced ship now lacking a captain and the larger chunks of the Scourge Grand Cruiser too. All I was left with was a bunch of fist-sized chunks of necrodermis.
“Well, this is going to be really fucking annoying.” I huffed out a sigh, shaking my head. I just knew these fuckers would be back and bring even more of their friends the next time around. Somehow, I must have alerted the Necrons of my goals, or maybe they’d just taken umbrage at my gallivanting around in what they considered their territory. Whichever the case, they’d be back.