Day 24


The Sisters of Battle and their servants had marched on, leaving behind a token defense of PDF troops to guard the split in the tunnel and to deal with the remains, both those buried beneath the rubble and not. As far as Praxiah and the rest knew, that would be through copious amounts of flames, with even their own deceased allies receiving the cleansing purification.

Tide was… reluctant to simply fulfill those orders. Almost twenty regiments, close to ten million soldiers, were buried beneath the scrap and detritus of the collapsed tunnel. Such numbers were difficult to pass up.

But he was also unsure if taking the corpses would be possible. He was unsure if he could really even trust the biomass of those puppets that had been 'killed' by the poxwalkers rather through more blunt methods rather than viral ones. He was certain they were cleansed by his antingles of any daemons, but Chaos corruption was not as easily removed.

He might be immune to it or at least able to combat it if it tried to worm its way into him. He had been able to crush Vra'kzil with ease and erase any trace of the daemon save the power that gave it existence. He had yet to suffer any ill effects from destroying the daemon, at least as far as he could tell, but he couldn't be sure that simply banishing the microscopic Nurgle daemons would be enough to erase their influence as well. He wasn't certain if the biomass had been tainted or not.

Could he be certain of anything? His conversation with Vidriov was throwing him off, he could recognize that at least. The man was a zealot, but that didn't mean he was wrong either. Perhaps there was an all-powerful Machine God or something close to it, perhaps not. If there was and Tide was some kind of agent working to repair the universe, as Vidriov believed, then he doubted Chaos corruption, at least of such a minor amount as was in even a few million poxwalkers, would cause him much harm if any.

But he didn't know for sure and he couldn't take chances.

His puppets began the work, systematically clearing the debris. The tech-priests of the Sisters had provided a number of specially blessed flamers before they'd departed. It was with these that puppets cleansed the poxwalkers first, reducing whole piles of them to ash, along with any of the puppets that had come into physical contact with the bodies even if only to move them. He could replace the loss of biomass easily enough, particularly since he had been spread through almost all of Deimos thanks to Vidriov and his secret cabal of tech-priests.

Since the bombs had prioritized range over maintaining spore density, he already had hundreds of millions infected within the city, but relatively few who were fully Altered. It would take a week before the rest of the city had been made like Malum and he could begin gathering the dead without issue in the Underhive to create a third Gravemind to accompany the one in Malum and the one that had grown from the ample nutrients within the space hulk far above.

With luck, the other Imperial cities could be made the same within another week after that, based off the speeds Vidriov and his teams were now moving to craft further bombs, the construction methods of which Tide had gleefully taken for himself and begun to tinker with in the Underhive.

While tech-priests of high enough rank treated the ban on invention as something more like a suggestion than a guideline, they still were forced to operate mostly on their own or with small team of trusted individuals and with resources that would not be missed. Tide was not so limited. He could have hundreds of experiments being conducted simultaneously across the underhive, drawing upon the manufacturing capabilities he had made for himself there.

His initial results with his experimentation was… less than successful. Most likely because his first attempt had been to add every single possible improvement he could conceive of to the bomb other than simply adding to its explosive power. Greater spore density, greater range, utilizing Flood biomass as a replacement for almost every part that could be swapped out for an organic equivalent, and much more.

That experiment had failed, though not explosively so. Even that could have been considered a sort of success. No, his first bomb had simply failed to detonate.

His second one detonated with too much heat and ended up incinerating its payload. A failure, yes, though an interesting one since he didn't have napalm. Not that he'd consider using such weapons against live targets. Except Chaos. And Tyranids. And Dark Eldar. And maybe Orks.

Come to think of it, beyond just the 'PURGE! CLEANSE! KILL!' shtick of the Sisters, he could understand their heavy usage of flamers and the wider Imperium's in general. Fire killed a lot of things.

He'd keep working at it, though he'd move more slowly now. Instead of adding dozens of new features to each bomb, he'd add one or two, test those repeatedly, then move on to the next modification.

It would take time and a lot of resources, but he was sure the result would be worth it. If he could create a few hundred of them with sufficient spread, he could carpet bomb genestealer-infected hives. However, beyond just having a better bomb, there was also the fact that he was gaining practical experience, learning to not just copy but create technology, test it, and make it better. Something that would be invaluable in the journey he had ahead of him.

Ahead of him. That was something he'd not thought about much. Sure, he had an idea of what he wanted to do, but 'defeating Chaos/Tyranids/Orks/Dark Eldar/anyone else who wanted some' and 'fixing the universe' were rather… vague. Ever since he'd got here he'd mostly been reacting instead of acting, rolling with the punches, just trying to survive.

He didn't have a way off of Monstrum. Yes, he could teleport through Neural Phsyics, but while his range was technically unlimited, his accuracy was 'less than stellar', so to speak. Not to mention the fact that, even if he could teleport with enough accuracy to even the nearest inhabited star system, he didn't have any idea where that was, let alone the planet within it. The Imperium's star charts weren't exactly accurate to the physical plain as much as they were to the Immaterium. They were vague guesses based off how quick journeys between certain worlds combined.

Space was big. Infuriatingly so.

Though, to be more accurate, he did have one possible way to leave. Or, rather, several hundred possible ways to leave, all clumped together in a wreck the size of a small moon floating in orbit. If he excavated and repaired one of the ships of the space hulk, he'd have the capability, if not the knowledge, to send out a ship.

There were a number of issues with that idea. The most immediate was what surrounded the star system he'd found himself in. Even with a warp-capable ship, he'd have to be insane to attempt to traverse the Warp during a storm. From the memories of the orks, they'd fought armies of daemons in transit before being spat out again, something Tide was not inclined towards experiencing for himself.

There was also the problem that Tide wasn't a sailor of any stripe, let alone a navigator. Nor were any of the literally tens of billions of people in Malum or anyone else he'd infected thus far. The tech-priests had knowledge regarding starships and their functions, but it was fragmentary at best and actively contradictory at worst. None of it was helpful in actually piloting a craft through the Warp. Nor was he sure he could even repair a ship to adequate functionality to survive transit. Gellar Fields were not in his techbase at the moment.

He'd spent a while thinking about this. His best and, relatively, safest bet for gaining some ability to traverse the Warp would be to wait for the warp storm to abate and for an Imperial ship to come to Monstrum. Ellen had been expecting transports to arrive for weeks before the storm had descended. With any luck, whatever mission there was to Ervak would not have been cancelled by the Lord-Inquisitor and the ships would not have been lost and reach Monstrum intact, where he could infect the crew and perhaps even the whole Crusade fleet being gathered.

Astartes DNA sounded delicious.

However, that relied rather heavily on the storm ending any time soon and the ships being able to reach him. There was no telling how long such a thing could last. It could end tomorrow as easily as it could in a thousand years. And, if this was following the Fall of Cadia and the opening of the Cicatrix Maledictum, he was almost certainly on the side of Imperium Nihilus, completely cut-off from the light of the Astronomican, which made predicting how this storm would act even more difficult, not to mention navigation in general.

There was… another possibility. A very tantalizing possibility for the myriad of benefits it would bring him, even as impossible it seemed to him.

Slipspace.

Tide's memories of the extra-dimensional method of interstellar transit were relatively… sparse. His past life's memories were not even close to enough to design a working slipspace drive. There was also the possibility that it didn't even exist in this reality.

But the idea kept popping up in his mind. Slipspace would be… insanely useful to him in countless ways. Even just having a faster-than-light method of travel that didn't require travel through hell and was reliable would be of immense value to him, not to mention the fact that the more advanced slipspace drives used by the forerunners had been able to blink across thousands of light years in less than an hour.

If he could gain access to slipspace, even a drive slower than the average speed of Warp travel would still be incredibly useful, in addition to the possibility for advancement. It would solve an incredible number of problems he had.

However, he had very little idea of where to start. How did one test for higher dimensions, let alone one that could be used for FTL travel? From what he recalled of the lore, there were such things, the necrons were supposed to use them for a number of different purposes, but no tech-priests he'd gained access to had anything beyond the faintest idea of such realms.

Tide could have chuckled. He was a being of a higher dimension, but he had no idea how to interact with the ones beyond depth, width, height, and time. He could manipulate such dimensions in his Domain, but realspace was a different story.

Neural Physics should have given him an idea of where to start. It was power over the fabric of the universe, not just the four lowest dimensions after all. However, information regarding it was scarce among the fragments of knowledge he had obtained even after growing so large. Just how much biomass would he need to unravel the greater secrets of the power of the Precursors? Would becoming a Keymind be sufficient? Or was there some point beyond that he needed to reach first?

He supposed he couldn't just wander his way into gaining a reliable method of FTL, nor was he willing to just… wait for it. Acquiring slipspace could very well ensure his survival and that of the galaxy and universe as well. He could not rely entirely on the possibility of unlocking its secrets at some unspecified future date, not when so much was at stake.

He could not start researching slipspace because he lacked knowledge of higher dimensions. He could not start researching higher dimensions because he lacked knowledge of the foundation of physics needed to conceptualize such things. So, he would start there.

A thousand puppets, a factory to provide the necessary tools, and the total knowledge of every tech-priest whose memories he'd acquired. Tide had never been much of a scientist in his past life… But this wasn't his past life anymore.

Experiment, Observe, Analyze, Repeat.

Of course, it was never going to be that simple.

Uirus sighed internally as the mad beast that was Kalak Bronze-Blood stomped towards him, showing not even an ounce of the deference or respect that the space marine was due. As far as mortal warriors went, Kalak was one of the best Uirus had ever seen, but that meant little since no mortal warrior could hope to match one who had gone beyond that frail state of existence, as Uirus had. That, and Uirus understood the gifts that had been bestowed upon Kalak and their weaknesses.

This seemed to be one of the beastman's rarer lucid moments, which usually only came about in the presence of Ahsael. Uirus doubted it was because Kalak feared the lieutenant as much as the master. More likely the simple beast's brain needed a while to reset before the next explosion of violence.

"The enemy approaches!" Kalak snarls, his fingers clenching and uncurling in excitement, hands never hovering far from the hilts of the chainaxes he duel-wielded. He came to a halt at the foot of the stairs leading up to Uirus' throne that he had claimed for himself from the governor in Janus.

Said governor stepped forward from beside Uirus, his flesh looking like it was stretched tightly across his skull. His mouth opened, but his lips did not move and the words weren't his own.

"They come to their deaths, then, slave-beast," The governor hissed with the voice of a serpent, his eyes utterly vacant. "You bother us with needless reports!"

"The creature is correct, Kalak," Uirus said, knowing this was the beginning of an argument that, while not long, would likely bring on an imbalance in his humors. "I know of our foe's position. They are still a day away from our gates."

"We should ride out and meet them!" Kalak almost shouted, flecks of spittle flung from between gnashing teeth. He did not seem upset so much at Uirus as he was excited at the idea of the approaching bloodshed.

"Our foe is cunning," Uirus reminded him and Kalak spat at the word as though the very thought sickened him to his core. "They defeated Ferrik handedly. We cannot rush into things." Much as he would like to send Kalak and all his berserkers out to a hopeless battle, the servants of Khorne were too valuable to expend so carelessly. They did make excellent shock fodder after all.

"FERRIK WAS WEAK!" Kalak shouted suddenly, his hands clenching into fists as a mad glint entering his eyes. Uirus could see the battle-rage coming on and he tensed, preparing for action. "HE DESERVED HIS DEATH! WE SHALL SPILL BLOOD!"

"You shall, you shall," Uirus said, almost as though he were reassuring a mortal child. "And it shall be glorious, but you can spill much more blood for Khorne by doing things my way."

"THE DISHONORABLE WAY!" Kalak was roaring now and he took a step forward, his cloven hoof clacking against the marble of the first step towards Uirus' throne as his hands wrapped around the hilts of his chainaxes. "TO HIDE BEHIND WALLS AND USE THE WEAPONS OF COWARDS! TO USE VILE SORCERY! THERE WILL BE BLOOD! AND SKULLS!"

"Kalak! Control yourself!" Uirus rose to his feet, drawing his khopesh. However, the singing of the blade as it erupted from its scabbard drove Kalak beyond the edge and the beastman leapt forwards and up, chainaxes shrieking with the screams of countless victims.

Uirus was already moving, sidestepping as Kalak's axes descended upon his throne, the biting axeheads scratching deep rivets into its black marble surface, ruining the mastercraft work of art. Uirus' one hand brought up the khopesh in front of himself in a guard, his other hand reaching out to shove the governor backwards and away. That was all he had time to do before Kalak's next attack was already coming, the beastman ripping his chainaxes free into a sideways swing that would have torn through Uirus' armor and ripped open his guts.

Uirus evaded again, silent and observant in contrast to Kalak's loud and incoherent.

"BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!" Kalak howled madly as he attacked again, his chainaxes both descending once more in an overhead chop, but they still could not touch the space marine. "SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!"

Again and again, Kalak struck and lashed out, his chainaxes a blur to mortal eyes. However, not once did Uirus' blade meet the axes. Instead, the giant moved with the grace of a dancer, evading strike after strike, biting teeth only ever slashing through air and never through armor, flesh, or bone.

The constant frustration only fueling his rage, Kalak's attacks came faster and faster, the heavy axeheads he wielded seeming almost to meld with his arms, becoming like writhing serpents. The beastman did not tire, did not slow, nor did his rage seem to diminish, despite Uirus' evasions. In comparison, the space marine moved even faster and with utter ease, slowly descending the staircase that led up to his newly scarred throne, though his blade never once left its guard position before him.

At the bottom of the steps, Uirus suddenly leapt back, much farther than necessary to dodge the throat-slashing chop of one of Kalak's axes, before sheathing his khopesh. Upon seeing this, the beastman, even in his maddened state, seemed to understand it was being insulted somehow, and bellowed a challenge, before once more leaping forward, arms raised in preparation for a killing strike.

With a burst of speed, Uirus rushed forward to meet him, catching the beastman's wrists in powered gauntlets and holding them with enough force to pop bone. In the same motion, the space marine used the beastman's own momentum, carrying the frothing-mouthed berserker over his head and slamming the servant of Khorne bodily into the marbled floor with enough force that it cracked the stone beneath him and sent his chainaxes sliding across the floor, sputtering to a halt, their roars dying.

Uirus raised his boot and stomped it down onto Kalak's chest, pinning him there as heard the crack of ribs but stopping short of actually crushing anything vital. Despite losing his weapons and mobility, Kalak's rage was not dissuaded and his arms and legs flailed and lashed, slamming with blows that could have shattered bone and ruptured organs but were futile against power armor.

Uirus held him there for a long time. It was a testament to the value Kalak had as a warrior that he wasn't simply crushed underfoot by the genecrafted super soldier after the first minute had passed, a greater amount of time than the fight itself had taken.

Eventually, mercifully, the blows began to slow, their power began to weaken. Kalak's wounds and exhaustion began to catch up with him, his unholy might beginning to leave him. Perhaps Khorne had finally realized Uirus wasn't going to spill this one's blood today and had moved his attention elsewhere. Or maybe it was simply the fact that he was suffocating between the broken ribs, Uirus' boot, and the marble floor all pressing on his lungs.

When Kalak's eyes finally lost their glassy look and had some semblance of the coherence they had more than five minutes prior, Uirus spoke once more. "You are lucky I do not gift you to Janiel's tender cares, beast."

Threats did little good against Khorne worshippers, but Uirus cared little. When Kalak's face was starting to lose its red bluster and beginning to turn blue with air deprivation Uirus finally removed himself, gazing down upon the form of the beastman.

Other than the ribs, his wounds were mostly self-inflicted, the result of striking ceramite full force. He doubted any of the Khorne worshippers were smart enough to take advantage of the opportunity for gaining the leadership of their cult by challenging Kalak even as he was now. Even if they were, he suspected Kalak would still make quite a fight of it.

"Get out," Uirus said, returning to his throne, not bothering to look back at the beastman as Kalak struggled to his hooves. "Go lick your wounds until I call for your cult. I will tell you when there is blood to spill."

"Y-ye-!" Kalak's half-breathed words were cut off as he spat up a lungful of blood. "Yes…"

No, 'my lord' then. He wasn't sure how Ahsael had secured even the tenuous respect the beastman had for him, but as long as he received the same obedience it didn't matter.

The governor, after Uirus' shove, had crumpled to the floor like a corpse and drew no breath. "Get up, you wretch," Uirus spat as he took his seat, while Kalak was still hobbling out the door.

The governor's head snapped over to him unnaturally fast and fixed the space marine with a malevolent glare, one that Uirus held steadfast. The governor rose with stilted motions, like his joints could not fully bend properly and instead were being snapped into place.

He thought, for a moment, that it might speak, might hiss some reply, but it said nothing. No great shame there, Uirus decided.