Aun’Saal was beginning to get a sixth sense for impending headaches, though it was quite expected this time. There was no way the high command of the T’au fleet in the system didn’t see the ‘battle’ that had just taken pce.
His room aboard the Sovereign was filled with Tau technology, and he had a top-of-the-line communicator among them. He was in constant contact with his fgship, and its sensor readings had already been sent over to him the instant they were made.
The conclusion the analysts came to? ‘We have no idea what this is; it doesn’t make sense, but it reminds us of other instances in which nothing made sense!’
The foe Echidna had fought had been identified as a member of a species of violent and malicious aliens the Imperium called ‘daemons’. It was not a rge leap of faith; lesser specimens of that enigmatic species had been spotted fighting side-by-side with the Stigmartus down on the pnet’s surface, but the anomalous readings on the sensor this test one caused were by far the most intense of any specimen of their kind, even recorded in the databases.
“With all due respect, Honourable Aun,” the Air Caste Admiral on the other end of his ongoing call asked, his voice holding forced respect and barely contained … Was that panic? Fear perhaps? Maybe frustration? Perhaps a bit of both. It was hard to tell over the low-quality hologram. “Could you please shed some light on what I am looking at? Because it seems to me like … I don’t even know, just thinking it makes me feel foolish. I’d have admitted myself for a psychological evaluation long ago if every single person I’d asked hadn’t correted what I’d seen with my own two eyes. They are likewise rather stressed, so any crity you could grant us upon this situation would be mightily appreciated, considering you know this ‘ally’ of ours best.”
What the hell was he supposed to say to that? What he knew before and what he had seen py out with his own eyes just hours ago were two very different things. It was obvious Echidna wasn’t entirely forthcoming with the extent of her capabilities, but for her to show a mere drop in the ocean … that was outside his wildest specutions.
She was a one-woman army. No, if what little the sensors could tell about those beams of condensed energy she’d let loose was anything to go by, she was a one-woman fleet, with the firepower of several capital ships combined.
And to think that daemon creature survived such bombardment … Aun’Saal felt his worldview shift, which was becoming concerningly common as of te. He could bme only his new host, and rightly so. She seemed to make a sport of poking holes in his worldview.
“It depends,” Aun’saal answered after a few moments of silence, giving just a hint of a helpless smile. “Our ally has kept the majority of her cards very close to her chest, but considering how much she’d shown, her foe must have been truly dangerous. I am of the mind that her reason for hiding her power was primarily just so she could avoid causing the type of terror now running across the upper echelons of this battle group in her allies. Establish trust first, then slowly unveil the extent of her power once we are less likely to panic and … overreact.”
“The primary conclusion of earlier analysis was that she had devastated the Imperium’s 1st Fleet by guile, cunning and slipping copious amounts of explosives through their shields.” The Admiral recounted, his face twitching in annoyance. “Which might still be correct, but now we know she likely went with that pn for expediency’s sake, and not because she couldn’t devastate the enemy fleet outright herself. We measured those anomalous beams and their energy output; she could destroy half our fleet with a single well-pced beam, even if our shields were up and running in battlefield configurations.”
“And yet, she’s done nothing of the sort,” Aun’saal reiterated.
“Yet.” A new voice cut in, and only decades of experience with politics managed to stop Aun’saal’s brow from twitching in irritation at the familiar voice.
“Yet,” Aun’saal affirmed, though his voice turned a hint colder. He had no love for the nosy Aun, who wasn’t even a proper part of this offence, especially when his bullheaded traditionalism, or rather, paranoia — or should he call it xenophobia? — might just unmake the alliance that could catapult their Sept into a new age. “So let’s calm down, pull our fingers away from the big red buttons, and let’s not give her a reason to panic by lighting her up with targeting arrays, yes? She is no doubt rather jumpy after a fight of that magnitude. She is a reasonable person; she’s given us no reason to think she’d turn her powers against us … if we do not give her a reason to.”
Aun’saal would not have these paranoid idiots commit suicide by Echidna, while at the same time alienating a woman of her power from the Greater Good. The Cause needed her. Clearly, this show of force only cemented the fact that she should be treated as an equal partner in this alliance, like an entire Sept unto herself. The things they could achieve with someone of her calibre championing their cause were the stuff of dreams, the sort of dreams even he never dared to hope would ever become reality. He was salivating at the very thought of just how high the Sept-, no, the Tau Empire could rise with her help.
She could be the answer to so many problems they’d had in the previous Spheres of Expansion. Even the Imperium, famed for its outrageously anomalous champions, didn’t have anyone of her calibre, as per the test report. Their Emperor had accodes of simir scope, but nearly all analysts agreed it was primarily propaganda, and thousands of years of mysticism coming together. Perhaps there had once existed a man beneath the title, perhaps he had done something simir to what the stories cimed, but more than likely, the tales of his exploits had grown rger-than-life millennia ago, and only continued to grow under the careful ministrations of the Imperium’s vast propaganda machine.
No, they had something unrivalled in the entire gaxy — as far as they were aware — in Echidna. An opportunity unlike any other. A spearhead in their expansion that no shield could halt. An unstoppable force to push the next Sphere of Expansion further than ever before.
It. Could. Not. Be. Wasted.
For the Greater Good. With that thought in mind, Aun’saal firmed his resolve and got to work.
*****
I was done; the pnet was cleansed of the lunatics and the daemons that had been infesting it. It felt good; a few things helped me rex quite like some good, old-fashioned combat, especially when it included brutally sughtering subhuman scum that disgusted me on a fundamental level.
Chaos worshippers. Urgh. I hated zealots, idiots who blindly believed in something because they couldn’t think for themselves. I don’t know why, but I had always loathed them, even in The Before. They made no sense to me; they weren’t logical. They couldn’t live with their own decisions, weren’t smart, or brave enough to make decisions, so they followed a code written by some cunt centuries, or millennia ago. It was disgusting.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate religious people. Hell, grandma had been a fervent catholic, but she’d always taught me that the Bible was a guideline, that the stories within were written to teach important lessons. I could stomach that, like it, even. Learning from the mistakes of those who came before and or inheriting their wisdom through stories handed down through the ages was how society advanced, how civilisation learned and grew.
Where were Chaos worshippers on that scale? At the very bottom. These were utter morons who were completely willing to entirely give up on their capacity to think. They outsourced their decision-making to Warp parasites that embodied everything wrong with this shitheap of a gaxy.
Every single one I killed made the gaxy just a slightly better pce, and raised the average IQ of humanity ever so slightly. It was a satisfying process, in more ways than one. I enjoyed both the act of it and the consequences of the act. It was a double win.
But sadly, I ran out of said Chaos worshippers; there was no one else in need of some quick rectal injection of my sword. I even took a quick dip into the Warp, just poking it with a single colossal tendril that I formed into the metaphorical equivalent of a cw. I scooped up a good chunk of the horde, more than a hundred times the amount of daemons I had killed on the pnet and ground them up until they turned into warp energy. It was much easier on my nerves to slurp up mindless, but still malicious energy rather than somewhat cognizant daemons that might still figure out a way to fuck me over while I wasn’t paying attention. It was easier to ‘digest’ daemons when they were already dead and weren’t trying to cw their way out of your ‘stomach’, who would have thought?
That was a sizable leap towards recovering my lost soul energy, though I calcuted I’d still need to take three or four deep gulps of Warp-energy before I was done, but that could be done once I was back in Vallia.
But for now, politics. I was already getting a headache and the urge to strangle some smug blue prick. Somehow, I just knew one of them would try their luck and do something stupid. Something stupid that I would have to ignore if I didn’t want my efforts thus far to go to waste. Sunk cost falcy, and all that.
I’d still give them super-cancer. They might be able to cure it. Tau medical science was likely good enough for that, but at least it would hopefully get the annoying twat in question away from the fleet I’d be accompanying for the foreseeable future.
A Blink carried me up to the Sovereign, and I quickly triple checked my fgship once more for any lingering taint, then flushed it out because of course there was some. The entire System was a bit … Warpy, for ck of a better word. No less than three Greater Daemons, of three different Chaos Gods, had manifested in the system, and that kind of thing had consequences that couldn’t be ignored. The veil of reality was thin, fraying at the edges, and perilously spotty. It would heal in time, if given the chance, but for now the taint of the warp lingered, and any reasonably determined daemon suicidal enough to risk sticking around to mess with my stuff could do just that.
I found a trio of Bloodletters and a good thirty Tzeentchian lesser daemons, a mix of pink- and blue horrors, running around and causing a ruckus in the lower decks where I held my Orks.
Many more were already dead, but they had left their taint behind, as they were meant to do, and I had to drag my ass all the way over there to purge the warp-tainted flesh of my ship, just in case. I wouldn’t want to make the daemons’ job easy for them, for the life of me.
I really need to come up with hybridising the incorruptible nature of Custodes with most of my other biomaterials. The Sovereign is more vulnerable than anything else against daemons as it is. It can’t stand.
Powerful as I was, I couldn’t win wars by myself. Well, I could, tiny little wars that spanned a handful of systems. But a war for the fate of the gaxy? Against behemoths like the Imperium of Man, the Necron Dynasties or Chaos? Hell nah. I needed a way to delegate, a way to project power far and wide, which would be impossible if I had to keep all of my organic constructs near me in fear of some daemon turning them into a pnet-size flesh-suit before going on an interstelr murder spree.
Handing over such a perfect tool to my greatest enemies was not something I could risk if I wanted to survive my forays into the Great Game. If something could go wrong, it would, sooner rather than ter, and it wouldn’t even be just the Law of Big Numbers, but because Tzeentch just couldn’t help himself if I gave the twat such a stelr opportunity to fuck with me.
Then I took a deep breath, prepared myself for the worst possible future — I could only ever be pleasantly surprised that way — and Blinked over to Aun’saal’s room. He was my contact with the Tau; after all, it only made sense that he’d share in my misery. If I didn’t get his character totally wrong, he’d see our alliance falling through because of this as a cataclysmic blunder, and a personal offence.
The man was a dreamer for sure, and he thought I could make his dream come true. If that all wasn’t some eborate act, I was sure he’d side with me even if he was secretly terrified out of his mind. There were few things as dangerous as a dreamer with a vision, especially one who could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
“Lady Echidna,” Aun’saal greeted me, his nod of respect maybe just a little deeper, bordering on a bow. I raised an eyebrow at that, then nodded back. “I was just about to join the conference call of the fleet in the system. Myself My fellow Aun and the captains, are about to speak about how recent happenings will change how we’ll wage war from now on. Would you care to join me and perhaps shed some light on some much-needed issues? I’m afraid some are still a bit skittish at your show of force, despite my best attempts to calm them, but knowledge might chase away the fearful mystique you are currently shrouded in.”
“That’s agreeable,” I said with a magnanimous nod, while repressing a sigh. This was better than I thought it was going to go, but then again, I’d been super pessimistic about it on purpose.
On the other hand, Aun’saal had been working to calm them already, so the chance that some uppity blue twat was about to scream at me for expnations was much reduced.
In seconds, his hologram system burst to life, and a miniature replica of a massive auditorium snapped into existence. More than a hundred separate Tau were represented, but three of them much more so than the rest, as a trio of massive floating heads above the miniature. Under them spread out five other tau, floating heads, with the one in the centre being the one to actually address us.
“Honourable Aun, it pleases us to see you attend,” the unnamed Tau — who I nonetheless knew from some sneaky snooping around was the Air caste tau in charge of the Tau fleet — said, nodding respectfully, then his eyes swam over to me. How that worked with holograms, I had no clue, but I saw his eyes widen before he hastily washed his expression off his features. When he continued, it was in a much more differential tone than the one I’d heard him speak about me behind closed doors less than a day ago. “Am I correct to assume your guest is our honoured ally, the Lady Echidna?”
“That would be me, yes,” I said, smiling blithely. Yes, that was a bit of a faux pas from their perspective, but so was not speaking to me and introducing himself from my perspective. If nothing else, I could let myself be discourteous after that show of force when it was in response to a perceived slight. Let them scramble to somehow fit a lowly Gua’, whom they had to treat with more respect than the run-of-the-mill Ethereal, into their silly system of etiquette. “I’m sure you have questions after that little show I’d been forced to put on. I am here to answer some of them.”
“Very well, it is much appreciated," the Admiral said, though the three floating heads above him still continued their best attempts at acting like statues. Despite the fact that a brick wall probably showed more emotion than their wrinkled faces, I still got the impression they beheld me with mild distaste and perhaps, some wariness. Those were the Triumvirs, if my guess was right, the trio of high-ranking Aun entrusted with leading this offensive, the ones Ay’ur probably wished he was counted among, but fell pitifully short of. “First of all, we would appreciate any information you could share with us about the creature you were fighting. Is it a threat we need to be concerned with? Is it the only one of its kind? Where did it come from?”
Well, I guess I am giving a lecture on Daemons. I thought, the edge of my lips tugging up as I ran my gaze over the gathered group of tau, all attentively listening to every exchanged word. Let’s see how many of them I can traumatise before this is over.
P3t1
