Chapter 6
Beustunia was a beautiful world. Or at least, it had been, before Chaos arrived. Not a proper Hive World, it was still in its development stage. Verdant fields of greenery brushed up against the developing cities, vast, deep oceans teemed with life, imposing mountain ranges stretched into the sky; the life of the planet had yet to be choked out by the smog and pollution of the Imperial war machine.
From my many eyes in the sky, I could see it all. A green and blue ball so much like Earth. And Chaos had ruined it.
The sky, once blue and (mostly) clear, burned red and purple as the barrier between the firmament of reality and the madness of the Warp grew thin, centered over the largest concentrations of the Khornate ravagers. If I couldn't clean this mess up fast enough, Beustunia would become a Daemon World, consigning every soul on it to a fate far worse than death. Hell, the Inquisition would probably try and execute the populace to keep the existence of Chaos on the hush-hush even if the invasion was repelled. This entire universe as a whole was fucked to hell and back.
Needless to say, that wasn't happening while I still functioned.
My reclamation of the Imperial wrecks was progressing apace, but I had yet to grok the inner workings of Imperial spacecraft. I dedicated more fabbots to the cause to speed things up, though it would be rather pointless if I couldn't figure out a workaround for my lack of a Navigator. I didn't have any templates for an FTL drive, so escape into the vast reaches of space wasn't an option for me; for now anyway. At least I could evacuate the civilians to fortified zones on the other side of the planet I'd set up.
It was a trial in and of itself actually getting the Omnissiah-fearing locals onto the transports, but the sight of Imperial Guardsmen and PDF working alongside me in ushering civilians aboard helped smooth things along. I suppose it was all very frightening and awe-inspiring to see all the huge and heavily-armed machinery at work for the poor farmers and laborers. I'd yet to properly encounter a red-robed Machine Cultist, but it was only a matter of time before it happened. They'd either sprout a tech-boner, or cry 'HERESY!' Most likely both.
An idle thought about the human body had me spinning off a sub-process to design a human-sized bot. I wasn't a very creative person. So, I took inspiration from something whose design I was already quite intimately familiar with. The human body was a machine like any other, merely composed of flesh and blood as opposed to metal and circuitry. I knew the human body just as good as I knew my robotic one. Hell, I'd dissolved enough cultists in swarms of ravenous nanobots to know humans down to the cellular level.
I wasn't lucky enough for ROB to have given me a shipgirl body complete with tactile sensation like Ramble's, or have the right tech to create something from scratch like Fusou's. I'd have to make one of my own.
That is, not a shipgirl body, I mean. I still self-identified as male. I didn't need the issues that a surprise gender-bend would give me on top of literally everything else.
I used what I had, and what I had worked. The frame stood exactly six feet tall; its skeleton made of an alloy even stronger and lighter than titanium; its flesh was a flexible pseudo-plastic that could flawlessly mimic human skin in texture and coloration; ultra-thin stalks of opaque fibers served as my own blonde hair; a miniature reactor powered both it and the micro-fabber concealed in my left arm, while the right incorporated some new 40k tech, a stripped down hotshot lasgun.
Now if only I could find some of those fancy rings or a Jokaero so I could get some properly functioning laser eyes instead of these boring Mk. II eyeballs, that'd be great.
By most appearances, I looked human. A psyker would give the game away if he cared to look. Otherwise perfect for my needs as an infiltration unit/diplomatic face. Wasn't sure if they would take offense at my adoption of the human form—no, they definitely would take offense at that, at anything I did. Fuck 'em. I was human long before any of these chucklefucks were, save the Emperor, the Sensei, and the Perpetuals. How hipster of me. Besides, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.
I wasn't able to eliminate the uncanny valley effect, though. My own innate love of symmetry, matching parts, and order meant my bot was perfectly symmetrical. Nothing naturally human was perfectly symmetrical. My movements were too precise, too…perfect. Every motion was calculated and executed with all the efficiency of the machine mind controlling it. Drawing upon my past experience seeing people walk, it was more than a little unsettling, all told.
I could have done something about all of that. Spent more time in simulations fixing these design flaws. But I didn't like lying to myself, or to the people around me. I was a machine. And nothing short of literal divine intervention would change that. (And the last thing I wanted to do was consider the theological implications of my existence.)
I was a machine who once was human, but a machine was a machine was a machine. Not human.
Fuck this train of thought, man.
Point is, using one of these new bodies of mine, I was about to engage in my absolute least favorite form of conflict: social activity. I had enough problems talking to people when they weren't instinctively itching to fill me full of bolter shells, for god's sake. But, alas, Cook had insisted upon a meeting with his superiors. He would be here as well, but he was still needed in his Baneblade, taking advantage of my reinforcements to wipe out the remaining Chaos Engines. Leaving me to explain my presence, my actions, and my existence to a bunch of suspicious zealots like as not to declare me silica animus and attempt to purge me.
Life was just grand sometimes, wasn't it?
My Avatar body was a mile away from the firebase whose coordinates I was given. A low-flying dropship had dropped me off, leaving behind a modified Skitter to serve as my automobile.
I revved the engine a few times for theatricality's sake before zooming off along a paved road littered with craters and burnt out wrecks. Oddly enough, my fear of driving had been significantly reduced with the knowledge that no one would be hurt if I screwed up behind the wheel. Funny, that.
Gun emplacements swiveled to target my approaching form, but held their fire. Pseudo-muscles clenched in a nervous gulp, though I had no saliva to swallow.
Showtime.