ushernet 178 – [A very interesting and eyecatching title]
178 – [A very interesting and eyecatching title]
178 – [A very interesting and eyecatching title]
“Alright,” I said, rubbing my hands together as I looked the man up and down. My eyes saw much more than any regular eyes would have, I dissected him, down to the cellular level in just a few seconds and compared everything I saw to my standard human templates. I looked into his eyes- erm, eye(?) and smiled. “Do you want to keep your metal bits?”
“What?” He asked dumbly, visibly putoff by my intensity. Or maybe he was just slow. He looked askance at the Inquisitor, likely not even knowing that it’d been me they had been told to shoot if the order came. To him, I was just a very weird woman who’d just asked whether he wanted to keep his prosthetics.
“Answer her question,” Amberley ordered in a tone that brokered no argument.
“Do I want to keep my ‘metallic bits’?” He repeated, not even looking back at me. “Sorry ma’am, but I think I do. It’d be hard to shoot with my hand missing.”
“How did you lose the hand anyway?” I asked musingly, not really hoping for an answer. Not a verbal one anyway. The musculature and the state his joints and organic organs were in, I dubbed the man as a sniper and a few lingering burn scars and a few microscopic metal shrapnels still lodged deep near the end of his organic hand told me enough. “Did you check what happens if you hold a live grenade in your hand or something? I can’t see how else a marksman got his hands blown off ... though I guess shit happens in real combat. Hmmm. The visual sensor is better than your organic eye, though not by much, you really should stop staring at porno-slates in the dark, it’s not good for your eyesight.”
The flabbergasted expression he had as I finished my monologue was everything I wanted and more. Really, messing with people was just way too fun, especially when I knew there would be no consequences to me either way.
“What?” The man asked, sounding entirely confounded by my words. Then, he once again looked at his boss for help, which was starting to mildly annoy me. I was speaking to him, and he had the gall to ignore me.
“Did I use some big words your little brain couldn’t grasp?” I asked in a mock cooing tone. “I asked you a very simple question your Inquisitor mistress ordered you to answer: do you want your metallic bets replaced with original organic ones? Yes or no.”
“You-“ he started, expression morphing into one of anger at my obvious mockery, but his jaws snapped shut a moment later and he sent a fearful glance at the Inquisitor and the Commissar sitting next to her. They didn’t interrupt, or chide me, though Amberley looked to be dissecting every word I spoke and every twitch of muscle I made. Seeing that they weren’t acting, the man got the message and swallowed his indignation with some visible effort. “Yes, yes, I would like to have my ‘organic bits’ back.”
I ignored his brusque answer and smiled. That was good enough for me, I wouldn’t just start re-shaping the body of an unwilling subject, but he had agreed. Kind of, anyway, but that was good enough.
“Perfect,” I hummed, turning my gaze back on the Inquisitor. “I’ll fix this one up to tip-top condition, but only as a demonstration. To do the same to the rest will cost you.”
She just nodded, which I took as my cue to get to work. Not that it was much of one. First, I numbed the man’s nervous system with a flick of biomancy, which also had the added benefit of making him dazed as hell.
He staggered left and right, barely managing to keep himself standing as his eyes glazed over and his mouth opened into a slurring question of something I didn’t bother deciphering.
I stepped up to him, a white glove of eldritch flesh grew over my hands and covered them, which I then placed on his neck and the other on his shoulder to steady him.
Not being that tall of a woman, I probably made a strange sight as I effortlessly held the bulky trooper’s body up with one hand.
Wasting no time, I extended hair-thin tendrils from my gloves that passed through his skin and flesh beneath without messing with everything. It phased through much of it, leaving the man’s body in its path unchanged. For now.
I grew a wide network of tendrils through his body in all of five seconds, with every single cell getting at least a brush-up if not a whole forking tendril for themselves. I ate his genes up, deciphered them using my vast library of human genes and then ran a quick re-build and optimisation of it through my mind-cores.
From there, remaking the template of his body at its prime was the work of a second. I’d have struggled with any other species of organism, but with how many human samples I had, I understood their gene strains.
“Esteban,” Amberley said with forced calmness. “Speak to me. What’s your diagnosis?”
“Diagnosis?” Esteban asked, whirling on her as a slightly deranged chuckle escaped his lips. “My diagnosis is that I have never in my life seen anyone as healthy as that thing. Not a single scar, not a single infection, not even the dormant diseases I know Sebastian had before that creature worked her abominable sorcery on him. If- ... If ... I didn’t know better,” he swallowed, then made the sign of the Aquilla over his chest. “May the Emperor forgive me for saying this ... but if I didn’t know any better, I’d have suspected him to be a Living Saint. His body is, to all my sensors and even to my instincts, as perfect as a human body can be.”
Amberley took a moment to digest that, so the woman — if she was even that, and the skin she wore wasn’t just some bio-mantic golem wrapped around its true form to imitate the human form — wasn’t lying. Not entirely anyway. Dozens of plans got thrown out the window as she constructed new ones and reconsidered her options and priorities.
Sure, the primary objective of her mission to this fringe-dwelling dirt-ball was to capture the artifact with the alternative of destroying it if the primary objective proved unfeasible. But its destruction was also an entirely acceptable result. What she couldn’t accept, would be the artifact falling into enemy hands, she- No, the Imperium, couldn’t risk even the possibility of any force completing the puzzle.
In a way, destroying the artifact, which was supposedly the only one of its kind still in existence, would ensure no one would ever complete the whole thing. If she was honest with herself, Amberley actually preferred it that way. The Inquisition’s vaults were secure, but every now and again, some things just up and disappeared from them. The ones responsible were usually radical Inquisitors who thought they knew better than everyone else and thought they would be able to resist the temptation of using the artifacts in their hands responsible.
Usually, they thought wrong.
Not once had it been her own mission to track down rogue Inquisitors on megalomaniacal power-trips who got their hands on dangerous artifacts and eliminate them. Putting this artifact into one of those vaults would just be giving her future self more work.
What she still wasn’t sure of was whether destroying the artifact now, before that biomancer could examine it, and risking her wrath was worth it. Quite possibly, she and everyone withing her camp would die a horrible death if she just pulled out her sidearm and bathed the gilded gem in plasma fire. But it could be worth it if it meant an enemy of Mankind was robbed of dangerous knowledge.
She took a quick glance at Ciaphas, the man she’d dragged out of retirement again to come with her all the way over to this backwater. She would destroy the artifact even if it killed every single one of them ... but she wanted to know for absolutely sure that it would be the correct choice to make. Ciaphas and many of her other men and women did not deserve whatever horrid ends a biomancer could come up with and she was determined to spare them off that end if she could.
“So he is healed,” Amberley reiterated questioningly, reasserting her focus over her slipping thoughts. “And his apparent youth is not just skin deep? The regrown parts aren’t just some facsimile?”
“No,” Esteban said, the few seconds of silence she’d given him apparently having been enough to calm himself. “He is in perfect physical condition and I’d have no reason to doubt the fact that his body appears to be around 25 to 28 Terran years old. It lacks even the lingering signs that even the best rejuvenation treatments known to Man all have. This is ... a twisted miracle. A Blasphemy of the highest order. That creature can’t be allowed to live.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Amberley said coldly, gesturing for the man to sod off, which he thankfully did in short order. Though not before throwing a malicious look towards Sebastian. “Rakel, your turn. Tell me what you think.”
Her Sanctioned Psyker shivered at the order, meekly standing from the small wooden box she’d been sitting at in the corner of the tent. Amberley frowned, eyeing the woman for a moment. Rakel had always been ... not quite there in the head, but whenever something terrified her, it was usually with very good reason. Except insects, which terrified the woman no matter how small or harmless they were.
Thinking of it, Rakel had been acting strange, stranger than usual anyway, ever since that ‘Emilia’ woman had been in the camp. After a second of going over her memories, Amberley realised the Psyker had never once shared space with their enigmatic visitor and the only reason she was in her tent right now was because she’d been ordered to be there by Amberley herself.
She should have noticed sooner. She should have, but in her defence, she had been rather preoccupied by the powerful biomancer in her camp, and her entire months-long mission starting to unravel at the seams before her eyes.
“Rakel,” Amberley said in a tone she’d perfected over the years, it was half authoritative and half gentle, just the right mixture to startle Rakel into a state of mind fit for receiving and completing her orders. “I want you to tell me what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling.”
“The breeze has ears,” the woman muttered, looking around the tent like a scared rabbit hearing a pack of howling wolves closing in on her. “She knows. She knows everything, hears everything. She is in the wind and the earth. I can’t hide, not even in my head. There is nowhere to hide.”
“Who is ‘she’?” Amberley asked, though she knew it was a rather worthless question with an obvious answer.
“The Silver Lady,” Rakel said, visibly shivering as the words left her mouth. “Her light is so bright. It’s everywhere, hiding. It’s murky, but I can see some of it, the bits she lets me see. She knows I can see her. It’s terrifying.”