ushernet 299 – Systems and Battles
299 – Systems and Battles
I don’t know why I’d gotten so worked up. I’d have been pretty surprised if a single politician from back home would have been able to tell me what a ‘base’ was ... in the chemical sense.
I think what rubbed me the wrong way was primarily the fact that the education system had somehow gotten worse. That was one of the first things I’d set up back on Vallia: a proper education system. Hell, having a basic level of education was a human right as per the constitution I’d set up.
Citizens could choose not to partake in it, but then they would lose their right to vote — or they would, once that part came into effect ten years from now. It was suspended for now, for obvious reasons: going through school took time. Although some of them have already passed parts of the exams, which would let them skip through the years. Of course they did. Their planet had been space-capable, if just barely, so they had an education system in place, even if the education on topics a 21st-century human like me would consider 'futuristic' was limited to those with an in with their government.
Still, the fact remained that I didn’t need idiots who couldn’t get through the equivalent of high school to be involved in deciding national policy, and I was planning to raise that bar even higher, even though that was going to be somewhat undemocratic. What did I care? I didn’t want to run the best democratic nation possible; I wanted to run an effective one.
And now I have two intimidated imperial idiots trying to act like statues behind me because I snapped at them. Aaaaaaaaah. Annoying.
I huffed, putting them out of my mind and focusing. This was a trap I was walking into, maybe not one made specifically for me, but more like a ‘whomever it may concern’ kind of trap that I had walked right into with a grin. The Hive Mind was devoting a colossal amount of resources to this endeavour, so it had to be important, and it surely had layers upon layers of protection. The daemonic invasions probably threw a wrench into at least some of those, but the rest? I’d have to break through those myself.
After all, it wasn’t like I could just turn around and leave. I couldn’t just let the Tyranids complete their weird mega-structure in my backyard, so the only option was to walk into the trap with my eyes wide open, ready for anything and crush whatever emerged to ruin my day.
The titanic mass of Tyranid bioships spread across the asteroid belt moved as one. What should have been closest to me advanced slowly while the two flanks raced ahead at full throttle. By the time we clashed, their formation would be like a crescent, two flanks curling around to bombard my ship from the sides and even from the back, while the main force came at me from straight ahead.
“You wouldn’t know what the hell this thing is supposed to be?” I asked, pulling the visuals up on the single largest Tyranid ship I’d ever seen.
Amberley quickly grabbed her fancy Inquisitorial tablet and, after some browsing, paled slightly. “It, or another ship like it, was encountered by Admiral Spire shortly after the 13th Black Crusade in the Menshiro Trench. They named it the Ancient One, and after it proved near impervious to anything they could throw at it, they instead just ... went past it. Apparently, it’s not the fastest and has no offensive capabilities not found on other bioships, so ignoring it is an option.”
“I see,” I hummed. “A mothership then? An oversized Hive Ship.”
I could have figured that out by myself, but it’d be silly not to make use of a resource such as Amberley and her limitless access to everything the Imperium knew about Xenos threats.
“Essentially,” Amberley said. “It can store more dropships, attack craft and destroyer-class bioships than five Hive Ships put together, if these reports are to be believed. It also has unusually long feeder-tentacles that can tear into even battleships if they get too close.”
That could be troublesome. Feeder tentacles had a dual purpose for Tyranid bioships: one to feed on the atmosphere of planets and another to inject boarding bioforms into ships that they could reach. I didn’t want to find out whether those tentacles would be able to feed on my ship directly. They probably could, even if they weren’t made for feeding on dense organic material.
We still had a few hours until we entered the extreme range of my long-range weaponry, so I decided to focus on the two planets and what the Tyranids were doing on them. My aura was spread out, hanging over the entire system, and the Shadow couldn’t do much against that. The first thing that caught my eye was the Swarm Lord, and I watched it tear through a Bloodthirster, then lay waste to a horde of Lesser Daemons in the span of just minutes. That guy was juiced to the hell up, that’s for sure.
Next, I noted the cohesion of the Tyranid forces. The entire swarm moved as one, with perfect unity of purpose; no bioform shot another by accident, and none of them stumbled or obstructed each other either. They usually didn’t, but the sheer harmony with which they moved was still beyond what I’d come to expect from the Tyranids.
Lastly, the structures. The titanic, not-Capillary Towers that stretched so far into the sky that they broke into what could be considered low-orbit were one thing. I could almost feel them reinforce the Shadow in the Warp; those were like radio towers, amplifying and transmitting the signal coming from nearby synaptic nodes.
But they weren’t the source, my gut instincts told me, even if I barely understood a tenth of the organic components built into the structure. I’d have to eat one and let my eldritch powers digest them to really learn their secrets.
Those wouldn’t be much of a problem. Tyranids had their souls in the Warp, like every other living creature, and so the Shadow, their Hive-Mind network, was also stuck in the Warp. My Realm was separate from it, so they couldn’t mess with it or stifle my power ... although trying to siphon energy from the Warp here might not be wise. Usually, nothing came of it, but with the Hive Mind being so present here? It might be able to pull something, maybe project the Shadow into my Realm if I gave it a vector through which it could reach it. That would suck. Being able to teleport out of here the moment things went truly tits-up, and I needed to make a tactical retreat, was a lifeline I wasn’t willing to risk giving up.
I noticed something else, too: the Tyranids were digging. There were two structures on Freya that weren’t being built upwards; rather, they were being built downwards. They were larger than all the orbital towers put together, and were located at the north and south poles, burrowing towards the planet’s molten core. Their psychic presence was muted by the innumerable powerful souls fighting on the planet’s surface, and even more so by the Shadow, but I caught a glimpse, and it was immense. As a hundred Norn Queens put together, and then fused with a thousand Neurotyrants, which were essentially focusing nodes for the Shadow and mobile command centres for the Hive Mind.
Those things needed to die yesterday. Whatever they were actually doing, I was absolutely certain they were the reason the Hive Mind could act so directly and with such immense multitasking ability. No, it wasn’t just multitasking. There was something more to it I couldn’t quite grasp yet, but I knew it wasn’t good for us.
The other inhabitants of my ship trickled in over the course of the next hour. Aun’Saal probably came for reasons similar to the two Imperials, while Cat and Selene seemed to treat the oncoming battle as a show or something. Well, better that than stressing over it like I was kind of doing.
When the missiles and plasma lances started firing, they at least turned suitably tense. I repeated the same trick as before, letting the bio-plasma lances fire beyond their extreme range so the plume expanded into a five-metre-wide blob of plasma by the time it reached the spore cloud surrounding the Tyranid fleet. The plasma scorched its way through the chaff but did little damage to the actual bioships. That task fell to the missiles following behind them ... though the majority of them struck only suicidal Harpies, the Tyranid attack-craft type bioforms. Still, I wasn’t hurting for bio-energy at the moment, so I didn’t let up. Even if one out of every thirty missiles struck home, those few that did land caused impressive damage.
I used the same type of torpedo templates I’d just stolen from them, filled with alkaline bases designed to melt through organic material. But I also threw in some pyro-acid, some bio-plasma, and some virus-bomb carrying missiles too, just to keep the Hive Mind on its toes.
A handful of ships went down in the first few minutes; some received severe wounds, but only to non-essential parts of their thick carapace. Those latter ones were already healing, and smaller destroyers and escorts gathered around them to stop missiles from reaching them. Then they opened fire too; the two flanks slowly overtaking the centre and starting to lay into the Sovereign from the sides.
A tendril of Eldritch flesh extended out of the Sovereign, and through it, I made a dozen smaller ships, just the size of Cruisers but outfitted with enough weapons batteries to arm a Battleship. They had the same template as my flagship, just as much smaller, and without any of the exotic materials like Blackstone or Soulbone. I teleported them over, above, and behind the Tyranid fleet from where they bore into the nearest bioships.
Sections of the enemy fleet broke off, and the smaller ships were quickly overwhelmed. Their point-defence turrets and carapace were not quite able to withstand the combined firepower of tens of bioships focused on them. When they became inoperable, I teleported them again, sending them crashing into Hive Ships before letting all that bio-energy making up their advanced organic forms convert back into pure energy and explode.
My peanut gallery remained silent, but I merely frowned. Four Hive Ships were gone just like that, and before that, six more bioships of varying sizes were destroyed. They had nothing to counter my teleportation. What was the plan here? Attrition? The Hive Mind should know it couldn’t win a battle of attrition against me; then again, maybe it was willing to sacrifice a lot to gain even just portions of my own designs.
Was that arrogant? To think the Tyranids wanted my scraps? Or maybe it was after a higher prize? Did it think it could overwhelm me with pure numbers? If so, I just had to be careful ... but it might be just trying to buy itself time. For all I knew, it could launch a massive psychic attack with those freaky structures and needed a few hours to charge them up, which it was buying by sacrificing this fleet.
I’d feel the psychic buildup ... or would I? The Shadow would hide most of it. I decided to keep a few mind-cores looking out for any psychic buildup in the system, just in case. Paranoia keeps you alive.
The minutes continued to pass by, my Barrier withstanding the majority of the incoming fire with ease, and what it couldn’t, I quickly countered manually. Some acid missiles and pyro-acid torpedoes struck exposed weapons batteries, but I just cut the affected sections off and rebuilt them in seconds. I also continued to mass-produce expendable, smaller destroyers, using them to draw fire and attention away from myself while also thinning the fleet bit by bit. It was costly, but I had the largest feast I’d ever had just waiting for me to beat it into submission.
It felt like hours, but a quick check with a time-keeping mind-core informed me only forty minutes had passed by the time I’d cut the oncoming horde down to the low double digits. Only the Ancient One and three more Hive Ships remained, with a dozen more cruisers and destroyers. That massive ship sure was tough; its shell was a map of scars from a thousand battles, but it still stood strong, continuing its inexorable advance while laying into the Sovereign. Even now, it was releasing new waves of Harpies made up of hundreds of thousands of bioforms, all of which screamed through the void towards my ship.
We were within ramming distance now, and by the looks of it, that was exactly what the Ancient One was preparing to do. Its feeder tendrils stretched on for kilometres, all curled back, preparing to snap forth and burrow into my ship the moment it was within reach, and then that massive bioship would latch onto it like an eldritch octopus.
A part of me was curious about whether it had an actual trick up its sleeve or if this was just some final Hail Mary attempt to grab a bite out of the Sovereign. I didn’t give it that chance. As conservative as I tried to be with my soul energy, I drew on it deeply then and lashed out. My telekinetic grasp latched onto those mile-long tendrils and tore them all out, then threw them into the void.
But that barely used a tenth of the power I had drawn into my body, and I was loath to send the eagerly vibrating energy back into my Realm. I reached out, aura focusing on two separate points in space separated by millions of kilometres. One was in the heart of the Ancient One, where the Norn Queens sat deep within their nests. The other? In the heart of Freya’s Sun. With a nifty little trick, I made it so both sides of the portal were traversable, so instead of one plume of plasma blooming to life in the face of those Norn Queens, it was two, each heading in opposite ways.
Holding open a portal stretching such a large distance while a colossal amount of energy was pouring through it with the wrath of the fucking Sun was ... just a teeny tiny bit challenging. That is to say, I had to put my entire focus into it, or the sheer raw force of it would tear the portal to shreds and snap it shut before that overgrown bug died. I had to reinforce it, both with a sizable stream of soul energy and with my own willpower, willing the portal to hold.
The condensed plasma burst to life, and I watched it all in slow motion through my aura, watched as it burned alive the Norn Queens, their elite guards, the millions of germinating pods and eggs. It was a bit wasteful; I couldn’t eat ash, but I’d rather be sure it died before it could pull a trick than be blindsided. I couldn’t be too greedy with an enemy like the Tyranid Hive Mind.
The Ancient One continued drifting, but the beast itself was dead, even if some of the bioforms acting as its weapon batteries still continued to spit their hatred at me. I let it drift past the Sovereign, coasting past the massive ship and then spent the next five minutes finishing up the remaining — now exposed — Hive Ship after decimating their remaining escorts. I gathered up the massive swarms of Harpies and spores with telekinesis, their lesser mass and toughness making it rather cost-effective, and they became the appetisers for my ensuing feast. I felt like I should make sure my reserves of bio-energy were as high as possible before setting foot on Freya itself.