The look in Esau's eyes told me all that I needed to know.
"You saw the vision." It was not a question.
"I did." I nodded.
"You're worried."
"I am concerned, yes."
"How much did you see?"
"I saw the Ork Warlord attack a ship called a 'Craftworld', then escape said ship, accidentally get flung into the warp, where he fought off a group of creatures called daemons before he landed on this planet." That was a lot, less than I had seen, but it was a lot. I sighed.
"I saw more than that. Orks, as I have found out, do not dwell on their memories often. Still, I saw a lot. I saw how Ork culture, such as it is, functions. I saw the machines they built and the miracles that they have managed over a dozen worlds. I saw some of their enemies as well, and what I saw has me worried." I looked over at where Kov and Kha were on the floor, just outside the door, staring up at me. "Are they alright?"
I walked towards them and saw him calm down in the corner of my eye. Had he thought that I would attack him or them?
"They are alright. I made sure of it." He said as he helped me pull them off the floor. I looked them over, he wasn't lying. Despite having been moved across the room at high speed, they were relatively unharmed. They would have bruises - painful ones- but they would be alright.
"Thank you for helping me out." I said, as soon as I got them up."And I'm sorry I put you all in danger. It was selfish of me to insist on the enhancements without taking more time to look at every possibility."
"No problem. There is no need to be sorry." Kov said. The transfer of knowledge had Kov knowing English but his grasp on the spoken language was still a bit shaky. His grammar was perfect but he had accents on the wrong syllables. It reminded me of when Esau first learnt English in fact. "Helping you get strong helps sachem, and helps all of us."
"It gives us more options to work with in case of emergency." Kha said. "The Great One has warned us of the coming greenskins. Having more than one powerful member of this house will allow us to live longer. A few bruises is a small price to pay for increased security."
"On that note," She said as she took my hand into hers. "Let us see what the changes have wrought."
The holes in her eye sockets that had once housed her eyes started to glow. Instead of the usual blue ethereal glow, the light was a hazy green. She was obviously seeing something, as her facial expression changed. She went from her usual serene demeanour to an almost hunched over stance as her face scrunched up and her bottom jaw suddenly pronounced. It was as if she had become an Ork herself. Her abilities still creeped me out but I couldn't debate the usefulness of them. As long as she wasn't trying to draw from the 'Great Ocean' as she had when we met her though, I figured that there was no point in trying to stop her.
She convulsed, still standing, as she let go of me, signalling the end of her vision. This had been a heavy one. Over the last ten days, I had the dubious pleasure of seeing her abilities being used at various intensities. The work of helping me build the garden had been barely taxing for her. Looking over the essence collected from the Drukhari-Ork battlefield was intense, with some driving her to the floor at a mere touch.
She had an advanced form of psychometry. While her previous connection to the 'Great Ocean' was unusable, her psychometry was at a new height. Just a single touch and she could tell details about an object and its history. The more complete an object, and the older the object, the more she could tell. Apparently much of the essence Esau collected was Human life essence along with various alien races none of us could name. Literal years of life, collected during or after bouts of torture by the Drukhari.
Every time you thought that the Drukhari couldn't possibly be worse, they proved you wrong.
As she stopped convulsing and came back to lucidity, the glow lessened and then disappeared. I let her relax as she came down. Over the few times I had seen her have visions, I had learnt that it was best to let her process them before she spoke about what she had seen. So I waited.
It still felt like a huge ethical violation to use the life essence, much less life essence collected so painfully. But I had a feeling, an instinct, that told me that it would work. Esau's DNA had a supernatural element to it, and so did the DNA of the Drukhari, I couldn't decipher the supernatural element of the DNA with the time and equipment I had available to me, so I had to make a few educated guesses to fill in that gap. The closest thing I had access to was the essence collected by the Drukhari. It was still a gamble, because I couldn't possibly have deciphered everything about the essence. Here, Kha was a godsend. Without her, I would have chosen any number of essences that could have resulted in my death or worse.
She started speaking. Over the last few days, I had learnt that immediately following a vision, it was best to let her speak her mind. If we didn't, the memories of the vision would pass and we would be back at square one.
"I saw a single green beast, engaged in violence, across the stars. This beast fought, and killed and stole. I saw it beat and subjugate other green beasts. I saw it order its fellows to bring down monuments once thought eternal, and I saw it roar in celebration over the bodies of man, woman and child alike. I saw the order for the creation of great machines of destruction. I saw it ride across the stars in a war with everyone and with everything. I saw it when it landed on this planet, most of its organs crushed by the impact. I saw it run at the Dark Ones, and I saw it die an ignoble death, felling a great beast of metal and flesh." She took a breath and she stared at me with her hollow, eyeless sockets.
"I see it now, as it watches me. I see you, dreadful one." Ah, shit. I saw Esau's hackles rise in the corner of my eye, as she returned to normal.
"What do you mean?" he asked her. "Do you mean that the essence of the beast has taken over my father's body?"
His tone was steady and calm, but to me, it might as well have been apoplectic. It was as the room had become ten degrees colder. She looked over at him.
"No, Great One. The beast is dead, but it's essence is not." she said.
"Explain." was all he said in reply.
"All creatures are connected to the Great Ocean. You, me, Kov and your father. Our connections differ, but they exist all the same. The greenskins similarly have a connection to the Great Ocean. Theirs however, does not exist in the same way we connect to the Great Ocean." At this point, she was getting visibly more animated.
"Instead of directly connecting to the Great Ocean itself, they connect to each other, then the group itself seems to connect to the Great Ocean. I need not tell you that the Great Ocean is a perilous place. To connect to it, you need the talent of the wytch and you need a mind like a fortress. I need not tell you that greenskins do not have minds like fortresses. This connection means that each greenskin draws from the Great Ocean through a connection more stable than any one person ever could."
"So all Orks are wytches?" Esau asked. "I do not see how this applies to my Father."
"I do not think that is correct." I said, stepping in. "In my vision, I saw Orks that specifically specialised in using magic. The Orks call them 'Weirdboyz'."
"Charming." Kov said, the first time he spoke since Kha's vision. I stifled a laugh. Kov did not speak often, but the kid had a very dry sense of humour.
"Your father is correct." Kha said, displeased. "The greenskins are all connected to the Great Ocean but not all of them are wytches. The greenskin 'Weirdboyz' are the only wytches equivalents that they have access to, though I hesitate to call anything they might do wytchcraft."
"I still do not see how this relates to my Father." Esau said.
"All greenskins are connected to the Great Ocean. The life essence that we used, contained the life essence of the leader of all of the greenskins that landed on this planet. The Great Ocean, when drawn from, affects reality. The greenskins work via a hierarchy whereby the biggest greenskin is the leader. Or is it that the leader is the biggest greenskin?" she said.
"The chicken or the egg." I said, seeing where she was going. Everyone turned to me.
"What?" Kha asked.
"The chicken or the egg, It's a popular thought experiment where I'm from. A chicken is a small flightless bird that lays eggs. The chicken lays eggs, but the chicken comes from one. So which came first, the chicken or the egg? It's used to describe similar situations to the one you're describing, where the origin of one thing must come, logically, from some other thing in an infinite cycle."
Kha seemed to be turning over the idea in his head.
"Yes. That works. The chicken or the egg. Was the leader large because it was the leader or was it the leader because it was large? The answer here is largely irrelevant. The point is that the greenskin's relationship to the Great Ocean means either or both could be true."
"Because their collective power would make it so." Esau said, the answer dawning on him.
"Yes." Kha said. "This means that either way, the leader of the greenskins had a high concentration of energy from the Great Ocean within him, filtered through greenskin consciousness when it died."
"Then he had his essence absorbed by the Drukhari." Esau said, looking at me.''Before we treated my father with it."
"Precisely." Kha said. "All this power, absorbed by your father. This changed him, or rather his connection with the Great Ocean. As far as the Great Ocean is concerned, your father is not human, he is a greenskin."
"What does that mean exactly?" I asked, before Esau could interject. "For me, I mean. Will I be turning into an Ork or something?"
"No, I do not think so. The Great Ocean has no limit, but the amount of energy you absorbed was limited. You have gained the presence of the greenskins in the Great Ocean, and the protections this provides, as far as I can tell. What else this may mean, I do not know." That was reassuring.
"Perhaps we can get a better look at the changes that this has had on your body through the MAM, Father?" Esau, suggested. I agreed. It was best to see if there were any unwanted changes as soon as possible.
I stood in the MAM scanning area for twenty minutes before I was called out. As soon as I left the scanning area, Esau motioned for me to look at one of the screens.
The screen showed the anatomy of three beings. One was Esau's, with the myriad of organs and implants he had. The second showed the general orkoid physical profile, built up from multiple scans of various Ork bodies found on the battlefield. The third showed my physique.
A quick look showed me that nothing was wrong. The implants had integrated properly and were working as they should, but a more critical look at things showed me that there was more happening. The implants had not only started working as intended, they were working better than intended. I still wasn't at Esau's level, in terms of processing ability, though at my current processing speed, the difference was largely academic. My bones and muscles were also growing nicely. I was already twenty centimetres above where I was, at 1.9 metres tall. The problem was, my implants were working a bit too well.
"My muscle development is irregular." I said, I looked over the figures before me again. "And so is my mental development."
"But 'irregular' was what we were looking for, correct?" Kov said.
"Yes, but we were looking at 'irregular' as in, growth over the space over a few weeks, not over the span of a few hours." Esau responded. He pointed to a cross section of the Polymath Gland. "This implant is stimulating far more growth than expected, even with the Ork essence taken into account. In addition, the mass seems to appear from nowhere."
I racked my mind. In the visions, I would see Warlord Gritzz get bigger after fighting. Gritzz himself never cared about how he got bigger, he just enjoyed the fact that he could boss around smaller Orks because he was bigger than them.
"Pull up a scan of the Orks' endocrine system please, Esau." Esau pulled one up. The most readily available explanation for a sudden change in size among Orks is that the Orks believe that the biggest should be the leader, which in turn makes their leader bigger. However, another explanation was that the Orks also had an endocrine system that responded to long and sustained periods of violence by making the Ork in question bigger and stronger.
I looked over the endocrine system. I was right. Orks had multiple organs that seemed to respond to long periods of physical exertion or pressure by making them bigger.
"Pull up a scan of the Orks' nervous and lymphatic systems, too please." It seemed that long periods of violence would make them smarter and more resistant to disease as well. Christ.
"The Orks have multiple systems regulating their sizes, none of which are in the head." I pointed to the implant in my head. "And yet, this implant is mimicking Ork growth instead of Esau's growth. My muscles aren't forming the same way that Esau's are. The end result is the same in the end but somehow, my implant is producing modified orkoid hormones to allow for quick muscle growth and skeletal growth. In an Ork, the growth would be temporary unless under sustained pressure."
"But because the Regenerator and the structures of the implant that were copied from me stimulate permanent muscle growth, your growth is permanent." Esau continued. I nodded.
"Yes."
"That could be a problem."
"Potentially. Except, one of the structures I could decipher from you was a built in limiter to prevent overgrowth and the possibility of something like cancer from occuring. That should limit my growth after a certain point."
"But we don't know where that point is." Esau said in response, before something struck him.
"Actually, we do." he said, correcting himself. "It should be when your growth hits the theoretical limit of mine."
"That makes sense. Ork muscles have a far less efficient power to muscle ratio than you though, which would make my limit still quite a bit below yours." I scratched my chin, as I thought it through.
"Whatever," I said, eventually. "That would still put me far above any threat I could think of on a physical level. Still, we need to look at how the ork essence affected my other implants." Luckily, it seemed that the only implant that mutated, was the implant in my brain. When put that way it didn't seem lucky, but the mutation seemed to only increase the speed of my growth.
The speed of my growth roughly translated to the growth of an Ork that was being subjected to high amounts of physical trauma. This looked like the direct result of a mix of the Ork essence and the mutability formula along with my Forge granted physique. In a year or so, I would reach the limit of my growth, and I was ok with that. All I wanted to do was keep up with Esau, and now I could. By any ordinary merit, my achievement was immense. Apparently, the Forge agreed.
Action: Create and Implant Organs based off of the Genome of the II Legion Primarch.
Reward: Reverse Engineering (Worm)
I breathed out as the Forge connected and gave me a new skill. I now had an increased instinct for reverse engineering. I was already pretty capable due to my intellect, but now I could see that I had many mistakes in the process of reverse engineering Esau's organs. If I had this skill earlier, the result would likely have largely been the same but I would have arrived at this point faster, perhaps with more resources to draw from.
As it was, I was making connections between pieces of technology that I never thought to make. I could right now, at this very moment, with the resources available to me, recreate almost every piece of technology I had seen since I first got to this planet. I could build and mess with the build gun, the MAMs and most of the Drukhari technology that was available to me. I would have made the connections, given time, but with this new ability along with my increased processing speed, I was forming and dismissing hypotheses as quickly as this new technology came to me. As my mind ran through possibilities of the technologies that I had come into contact with, I came to one important conclusion.
"The Orks were artificially made." The suddenness of the exclamation surprised both Kov and Kha, but Esau caught on almost immediately.
"The Forge?" he asked. I nodded. Both Kov and Kha had been informed of the Forge and how I had been gaining abilities so after some more time explaining what the ability I had gotten was, they understood why I had changed subjects so quickly.
"So what do you mean, they were artificially made?" Esau asked, reminding me of my exclamation.
"I mean that all their traits, when put together make no sense from an evolutionary standpoint. In the case of the Orks, they reproduce in large numbers asexually extremely quickly, have a natural inclination for violence, are connected to the Great Ocean," I nodded to Kha. "They reproduce very fast and can build up technology that takes humans decades to develop in a matter of a few years."
"They don't just modify existing technology?" Esau asked, derailing my train of thought. "I saw a variety of conflicting designs in the Ork technology we got our hands on."
"They do." I conceded. "And Ork 'Mekboyz' also come up with technology wholesale and modify technology in ways you or I would be hard pressed to achieve. I don't know if it's because of their connection to the Great Ocean, but they can come up with breathtaking examples of technology, if the technology doesn't explode first. I've seen it, and so has Kha."
Kha nodded in agreement and Esau beckoned me to continue.
"In addition, Orks don't teach each other anything. A bigger Ork tells a smaller Ork what to do and the smaller Ork does it, no questions asked. Usually. In any other culture, this would result in permanent stagnation, but somehow, there are enough Orks in the galaxy that Gritzz met at least two independent spacefaring Ork communities. Some of these traits, like their quick reproduction would be something I could see a species developing after years of evolution but everything all together at once tells me that the Orks were made artificially."
Esau scratched his ear, his face arrayed in what I had come to know as his thinking face.
"Why would someone want to engineer something as destructive as the Orks?" Kov asked.
"I would wager that the Orks were created as a weapon in the first place. If thought about that way, everything makes sense. All you would need is a single spore and in time you would have a planet filled with rabid creatures that want nothing more than to inflict violence."
"And their lack of intelligence would make them easy to control." Kha said, in agreement.
"Would it?" Esau said, disagreeing. "It seems to me that having unintelligent subordinates as your fighters seems idiotic. If a fighter cannot think and plan, there is no point in them being a fighter, because they will always lose."
"That's just it, Esau. Orks aren't dumb." That got me three looks of doubt. Fair enough. Kov had almost no actual contact with orkoid culture and even he could see that the average Ork was an idiot from all the evidence created. " That's fair, but what if I told you that in addition to getting stronger as a result of outside pressures, Orks get smarter as well?"
I brought up various scans of orkoid nerve clusters and endocrine systems.
"These are organs that respond to trauma by releasing hormones that cause muscle growth. These very same organs also release hormones that encourage mental development. The more stressed an Ork is, the smarter it gets. This makes an Ork the perfect weapon."
"That is a disturbing thought." Esau admitted. We all nodded in agreement.
"So we have these creatures surrounding us?" Kov asked.
"Most likely." I admitted.
"Then don't we need to prepare?" Kov asked. We did. Now that we had confirmed that I was okay, the next thing to do was to shore up our defences. Before that though, it was best to improve our technologies.
First things first, I improved the build gun. I scanned it using the MAM so that we could fabricate more build guns. I then improved its scanning abilities by adding onto it using scanning technology taken from Drukhari technologies, allowing for the build guns to scan machinery and resources from distances up to a kilometre in any direction.
While Esau and I were not able to make heads or tails of the dimensional storage technology in the build gun, even with my newest ability, we were able to expand what it could build somewhat. Instead of buildings in general, and some miscellaneous items, we were able to expand it to include vehicles, armour and weapons, as long as they had been scanned by a MAM.
Quite a few items were destroyed by the crash and the subsequent fight that the Drukhari had had with the Orks, and more that I considered biological risks, but we still had tons of options to choose from. I gave Esau an improved build gun and let him and Kov go to work, shoring up our defences, while Kha and I worked to fix broken weapons and scan workable ones for use by Esau as weapons options.
In terms of melee weapons, almost all the knives, spears and chains were already scanned so I worked on the melee weapons that held machinery. One of which was a clawed gauntlet, with syringes above where the knuckles were, that held a variety of painful drugs that would mutate anyone they were injected to. I decided to store the designs and then devise countermeasures, in case we ever had to come into contact with any living Drukhari. In terms of ranged weapons, we only really had access to two designs we could reverse engineer. One was a pistol that used compressed air to shoot a variety of acids and poisons at a target. The other was a set of guns that all seemed to be focused around shooting crystals at speeds exceeding Mach one along an electromagnetic rail.
These crystals were filled with a variety of deadly toxins which would kill most living creatures over a long period of time, leaving them in excruciating pain in the process. In other words, they were poison railguns in a variety of configurations, including a pistol and a rifle. There were more configurations but those were destroyed in battle with the Orks. We also made a gun that when shot at a living being, would age the living being to dust. We made this weapon as effective as we could, making it as human as possible, but this would likely be a painful process for whoever was shot.
These weapons, Esau rigged up as turrets lining the twenty five metre tall walls he was devising, pointing down at our potential enemies.
In terms of armour, we only had one usable design, made out of a strong enough material. The carapace like armour on the creatures that had felled the Ork warboss. We had to reconfigure it somewhat for the material to fit on a humanoid figure but eventually we did it. Neither Kha or I were craftsmen so we fell far short of the most optimal design, but in the end, we came up with chainmail armour that used the carapace to protect the more vital areas of the human body. For helmets, we modified the strange cone shaped helmets that some Drukhari wore into something sturdier, with some material to cushion the head.
We also had only one working vehicle to reverse engineer, a hoverbike of some kind. That didn't take much effort to work on, with the real boon being the hover tech and power supplies, which were stupidly efficient, allowing the bike to float and move at speeds upwards of 150 kilometres per hour.
Soon we were done, after a day working on and off, on the technology before I decided to take another look at Ork technology. I immediately regretted it. Some technology was workable but those were pretty much ordinary pistols and flamethrowers which Esau incorporated into the walls. The rest was infuriating. Most technology didn't work at all or had a worrying propensity to destroy itself, while some technology only worked in my hands, likely due to my connection to the Ork equivalent of the Great Ocean.
After two days banging my head against the technology, I decided to work on deciphering the Ork genome.
The Orks clearly had some sort of genetic memory, and I was going to unlock it. Even if some of this technology only worked in Ork hands or had strange methods of operation, unlocking even a small portion of it would be a great boon. It took two more days of working on this before I realised that the MAM scans simply wouldn't cut it. I needed more samples, and better scans of them, before I could decipher anything of note.
In that time, Esau had finished the wall, a twenty-five metre tall grey monstrosity adorned with turrets at various heights up the wall. Esau had also done the courtesy of planting a series of mines surrounding the wall at locations that the turrets couldn't properly swivel to. In addition to this, Esau and Kov had worked on a series of maintenance drones that would fix any failing machinery while refilling its ammunition.
Seeing what I was working on, and agreeing that it would be a huge boon, Esau suggested that we look for Drukhari technology to upgrade our scanners further in the crashed ship. I couldn't argue with that logic, so I made preparations to make the trip. Technically, I didn't need to make the physical trip at all. But since there were the bodies of three humans to bury, and Esau was done with the wall, I figured that it was time to bring them here, where they would be properly buried.
I got my new carapace armour ready, along with a splinter pistol, a build gun and my omnitool. I would be accompanied on the trip by ten of Esau's drones, while Esau himself stayed to guard the monstrosity we called a wall.
Despite my lingering paranoia that I would be attacked by a random Ork on the way, no attack came and I made it to the Drukhari ship in an uneventful trip. I made my way through the winding corridors of the ship, until I came upon the room we had found Kha and Kov in. I walked in and saw something that made my breath hitch.
The bodies were gone.
8.1. Perk(s) earned this chapter:Domain: Knowledge: Reverse Engineering - Reverse Engineering (Worm) (400CP): While you still possess an amount of scientific knowledge beyond the curve of modern society, your base technical knowledge is far less than other Tinkers. This is however because your power lets you reverse engineer the principles and workings of anything you can get your hands on, and then apply that knowledge and understanding to your own work. Just seeing a device and watching it function gives you a vague idea as to how it works, and examining something means you can derive the hows and whys as to its functions. This requires time and effort on your part, in addition to the time and resources it'll take to actually implement this new knowledge, but as long as you put in the necessary investment you can always understand virtually any new technology. Your Tinker abilities will continue to expand as you gain access to new technology and knowledge, with potentially no upper limit as long as you can keep gaining samples to work with.