Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

304 – Space Skellies Malding

“Motherfucker.” I groaned, turning away from the observation window to massage the bridge of my nose. I was in the process of helping the last of the five systems’ last Tyranid-infested planet identify as a lifeless rock. And what did I sense just as I began bombardment and the Hive Mind went into its usual pattern of attacks with its superstructures? “Fucking Necrons, can’t wait for your own turn.”

At least they came after I was done yoinking the genetic blueprint of those Tyranid superstructures. Still, it was probably going to take a hell of a lot of work to make them usable and tuned to me instead of the Hive Mind. What was immediately obvious was that these structures weren’t amplifiers, but focusing mediums that gathered and channelled the Hive Mind’s immense Warp power into the Materium.

Connecting some fucky superstructure directly to my Realm was out of the question, so I’d have to make it use my Avatar as a go-between. Even then, it wasn’t going to be anywhere as powerful as it was for the Tyranids. After all, my power was already gathered and focused; it didn’t need to be pulled in from across several galaxies’ worth of Warp space. Annoying, but I was sure I could make a proper psychic focusing weapon to mount on the Sovereign out of it in time.

A Necron armada twice the size of the one that had ambushed me a week ago, which in turn was thrice as large as the one before it and so on and so forth. This was the fifth time these wannabe space terminators had jumped me while I was going about my business that had absolutely nothing to do with staging an attack on their Throne World. None at all.

“What is it, honey?” Selene asked, gently placing her feet on the ground as she stopped her floaty lotus-pose meditation thingy. I was half convinced she just did it like that, and within my line of sight, because she caught some of my thoughts about how cool she looked while doing it.

“Necrons. Again.” I grumbled, pulling her into a hug while faking a sob. “They are bullying me!”

“Oh, you poor thing,” Selene cooed, playing along without hesitation. I loved how she always matched my energy, no matter what weird thing I did. My self-confidence wasn’t fragile enough that I couldn’t enjoy some head-pats and babying. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Ruin their days, of course,” I said, letting out a satisfied throaty purr as Selene’s fingers started massaging my scalp in all the ways she knew I loved, making me melt into her embrace. “They had to jump out of their freaky pocket space thingy at the edge of the system’s gravity well, and they haven’t deployed their spacetime-smoothing tech either, so it either has a range limit on it or it doesn’t work outside of deep space.”

“So you have hours to finish dealing with the Tyranids,” Selene hummed. “How many of them are there?”

“Nearly thirty ships, one of which is a Tomb Ship,” I said, which sent a slight shudder down Selene’s spine. Yeah, those things were fifteen kilometres across and could fold Imperial Battleships in half with little to no effort. “It seems like I’ve spooked the Regent because that thing must be the flagship of the Dynasty’s Phareon.”

According to Amberley, only seven sightings of a Necron Tomb ship have ever been recorded by Imperial archives, none of which ended with the destruction of said ships. Which meant they were either extremely rare or didn’t tend to leave survivors when they appeared. Both options were equally likely, and I suspected the truth was a mix of the two.

“If what you know about the state of this Dynasty is correct, this armada must be the majority of the ships this Regent has available to him,” Selene said thoughtfully.

“True,” I said, eyes narrowing in thought. Each ship, each individual Necron, had to be freed of their madness one by one and made obedient to Regent Ahhotekh, because while he nominally held command over the Dynasty, the maddened Phareon still held the command codes within his deteriorated cranium.

I had already destroyed six of his ships, and that’s with the attacking force being on a hair-trigger with their phase-away retreat bullshit. They popped out of nowhere, unleashed their weapons on me and the moment I survived and struck back, they ran. It was immensely frustrating.

A rush of thrill and expectation ran through me. No Imperial armada has ever destroyed a Tomb Ship; hell, the largest Necron ship they had managed to destroy was a Scythe Class Harvest ship. Every Tomb Ship had at least three of those as escorts, and this one had five while the rest of the armada was made up of other smaller Necron ships like those they had used in previous ambushes. I must have managed to royally piss them off with my antics if they were willing to pull out the big guns against a single ship that hadn’t even attacked them yet. I’m just exterminating bugs here, nothing nefarious is going on here, no sir! Establishing a staging point to wage war against their Dynasty? Who? Me? Pfff. I’d never! Slander, slander I say!

I guided the Sovereign to pull away from the planet, only sending down a final missile as I left to handle the cleanup. Since the first system, I had massively enhanced and optimised my methods and tools. My two-phase cyclonic torpedoes were nearly as good as the best Mechanicus designs in both dependability and yield. The virus bombs have been enhanced, spreading through the atmosphere faster and burning a hundred times hotter when ignited, and I had also taken the time to design a proper organic nuclear orbital missile, so I wouldn’t have to keep throwing frogs at planets to ignite them.

The world behind me transformed into a ball of fire as the atmosphere didn’t merely ignite, but combusted. Sadly, I didn’t have the time to harvest the biomass left behind down to the last insect, but I’d be happy with having foiled the Hive Mind’s plans. Once the Psychic Scream died down, I reached out with a psychic touch and sped up the cyclonic torpedo’s efforts to destabilise the planetary core. Instead of full-scale destruction coming in a day, it would arrive in an hour. I didn’t need an enemy at my back with a Necron fleet of this size in front of me. A fleet led by a ship so powerful it likely had no equals in the 41st Millennium other than another Tomb Ship, or maybe one of the Imperium’s treasured Gloriana Class Battleships.

The Necron fleet slid across space, silent as death and thrumming with an inner energy that felt potent to my senses even from this far away. Inertialess drives propelled them onwards without something as base as a plasma exhaust. Infrared and UV sensors were just about the best things for detecting distant starships in the dark, cold void of space, but Necron ships barely showed on either. If they radiated any heat, their energy shields kept it contained. Still, they did release their own type of exotic energy which could be sensed even from this far away ... but I suspected they just hadn’t bothered to hide it in this case, even though they surely could have.

Confident, were they? No, it was arrogance. They had been testing me for weeks now, prodding my defences with ambushes. They should have known better. Or maybe it would be my confidence which would turn out to be unfounded. We’d see soon enough. I had an hour or two before we clashed with their pace, so I could make some preparations to show them how very welcome they were.

*****

Ahhotekh would have thought his current circumstances were yet another of the Star Gods’ cruel jokes had he not seen them be cut down and enslaved with his own eyes. Every Necron who retained their ability to think dreamed of usurping their Phareon, of becoming one of the monarchs at the head of Necron society.

Here he was, a Phareon in all but name in one of the most infamous and powerful Dynasties, but with the most cruel twist to it he could have ever imagined. Phareon Ahmontekh, the living legend whom even the Storm Lord would have had to respect, had gone mad. Worse, he was not yet dead, and Ahhotekh had little to no idea how to remedy the situation. Mad as he may be, the Crimson Scythe was not a foe the Regent's paltry forces could defeat in their current state, or perhaps ever.

The mad Phareon still held the Dynasty’s command codes, and should he ever be freed, he would be able to turn the majority of the sleeping Necrons to his side. In his current state, the Crimson Scythe would care little that he would be frying their core matrices by waking them so, nor that he had already torn apart the World Mind of the Hollow Sun.

In a single moment of freedom, the mad Phareon had crippled the once mighty Suhbekhar Dynasty almost beyond repair. The few trustworthy Crypteks Ahhotekh had on hand said repairing all the damage and manually subduing the raging Necron warriors wreaking havoc across the Throne World would take centuries, if not millennia.

If there was a silver lining to it all, then it was precious moments like these. Ahhotekh sat upon the command throne of the Star Reaper, the infamous flagship of the Crimson Scythe. Its name was almost as well-known and dreaded by the enemies of the Eternal Empire as the Storm Lord’s Inevitable Conqueror, or the Crimson Scythe himself. This was the ship that once carried the Phareon into war during the War in Heaven, the ship that broke the mighty fleets of the Old Ones.

And it was his. All his. Just like the Hollow Sun and the Suhbekhar Dynasty as a whole. All of it was his, even if his maddened Phareon was trying to ruin it all. Maybe that was why he had taken this opportunity to sail out and meet this annoyance himself. He wanted to feel the power of the Star Reaper move under his command; he wanted to see with his own eyes what devastation this mighty marvel of technology could wreak upon his foes.

Like the Hollow Sun, the Star Reaper was another of the Crimson Scythe’s technological marvels, a league above what the rest of the Dynasties could build. Few of them had Ahmontekh’s vision, and none had his military genius; not even the Storm Lord was his equal, nor the famous Nemesor Zandrekh.

When the reports first came in that the Hollow Sun’s sensor arrays detected unusual gravitational anomalies near the borders of Suhbekhar territory, he had been slightly curious and dispatched one of the better survey ships to examine the situation. Said ship followed the cause of the gravitational anomaly: a sizable starship of an unfamiliar design.

That wasn’t what worried him. The concern came when he was made aware that the strange ship had weaponry capable of planetary destruction thorough enough to threaten buried Necron Tombs. His Chronomancers also spoke of celestial signs pointing to the ships, which posed a great danger to the Suhbekhar Dynasty. That was all the reason he needed to send a small squad of ships to eliminate the threat ... then the fleet came back. One ship lost its captain and had a hole punched straight through it, and the mothership was in literal pieces. Barely salvageable. He had lost some of his precious Crypteks and a good number of Death Scythes in addition to the mothership.

To a lesser species a million times younger than the Necrons. It was a humiliation, one the Crimson Scythe never would have suffered. Without the World Mind, he couldn’t hear the whispers, but he knew they were there. He had barely been Regent for a few decades, and all he had to his name was a single humiliating loss. It couldn’t stand. He would be Phareon. This humiliation had to be erased.

Then another loss, then another and yet another, one after the other. Six ships lost, and so he was here. Even with the bitterness of it all, he still took joy in taking the Star Reaper into battle. No one would ever think victory here was due to his military genius with such a massive force arrayed against a single ship, but it didn’t matter. The humiliation was too much; it could cost him everything if he let it stand and allowed the wound upon his name to fester. It would never be forgotten that his reign began with such a mortifying disgrace, but it would be a thing of the past once the ship that caused it was erased from existence.

He couldn’t allow it to live and escape, to become a living embodiment of his failure as Regent. It had to be destroyed with utmost haste and as thoroughly as possible. Even if such a deployment stretched his resources to the very limit and pushed him to the limit of his capabilities. He could feel it; his core matrices were stretched and under heavy strain, trying to keep up with his similarly strained Crypteks as they operated his armada. He barely had enough of them for a skeleton crew; some would say he didn’t have enough, but they would make do. It was to be a short deployment. The strain would be ... manageable.

Just a few hours now, less if he deemed the matter urgent and engaged the Star Reaper’s advanced gravitational technology and upped his approach velocity to FTL speeds. But he needn’t expend the energy; a slow, relentless march would do. If the ship he came to personally erase from existence decided to run, foolishly thinking it could escape, he’d just have to engage the Spacetime Dampener. No one was allowed to mess with space, gravity and time within reach of the Star Reaper. It was what made the ship so feared. Not even the Old Ones had been able to flee through the Empyrean when the Star Reaper advanced upon them. Whatever jumped-up lesser creatures infested that ship would have no hope. There was no escape when the Suhbekhar Dynasty came for you; only hopeless resistance and an ignoble death awaited their enemies.

It was time to show that not even sixty million years had changed that immutable fact. The Eternal Empire ruled the stars, all the lesser species were slaves at best, and only spared annihilation when they begged for their miserable lives ... and even then, only at a whim.