102 – Plundering Minds
The first line of defence for any voidship would have been the long-range sensors, which I seemingly managed to slip past by. Next would be the point defence turrets, though even those needed to sohow detect incoming projectiles, and seeing as nothing tried to fry my hide just yet, that layer proved ineffective too.
Third was the void shield. I had no idea how exactly these worked — sothing that would have to be rectified later, my lack of technological knowledge was starting to be a problem — but I knew from diving into the minds of so lower-ranked tech priests that they had one major weakness.
They only stopped objects travelling above a pre-set static speed limit. aning, that it would stop missiles and such, but not a slow-moving asteroid or my drone as I slowed my speed to only marginally be faster than the void ship’s velocity.
The shield itself was invisible to human eyesight, but my drone could see a much wider range of colours than the human eye on the electromagnetic spectrum. Still, it remained just a semi-translucent veil in the shape of an egg around the titanic ship.
I gingerly reached out with a clawed limb, flying only tres away from the shield, and touched it. I heaved a ntal sigh as the limb passed through. When no missiles or lasers hod in on as I kept my limb halfway through the shield, I promptly dove through the shield, making sure to go no faster than my arm had when it passed through.
The feeling of passing through the shield was a strange sensation, like an itch washing through every cell of my body in a wave. I resisted the urge to shiver, not out of fear, but discomfort. Let tell you, the insides of your bones itching was an utterly revolting experience.
There were theories among the tech-priests about what exactly void shields did to intercepted objects from gravitational energies obliterating them to the object getting thrown right into the warp.
None of which was sothing I wanted to personally experience. Especially since if the drone was terminated, I’d lose my one chance of getting the upper hand. I needed to know what the fleet’s — and Guilliman’s — intentions were concerning . I had to know.
The sensation passed as soon as I was through.
With no one the wiser, the drone dashed towards it and latched onto the hull.
It’s well past ti I figure out what the hell is going on. I thought as I went to search for a place to burrow through the hull.
For now, I stayed away from the upper part of the ship with all the ostentatious cathedrals and gothic architecture, where the supposed higher-ups of the crew were located.
If so psyker or navigator in there noticed now, I’d be in quite the pickle. It’d take only a few Thunderhawks and fighters coming out with a willingness to blow holes into the hull with stupidly powerful torpedoes.
Let’s see what you are made of. I thought as a clawed limb phased into the outer layer of the hull. The material was slightly pushing back against , instead of the usual ease with which my body usually phased through things, it felt like I was pushing through a mire.
With a ntal grimace, I ripped the limb back out, taking with it a handful of the material. Then, I tried absorbing it. Well, more like breaking it down into molecules and seeing what exactly this thing was.
The only things that managed to sowhat obstruct my phasing so far were all psychic in so manner, like the carapace of a Hive Tyrant, but I found even power armour had so slight pushback, though not anywhere close to a Hive Tyrant’s carapace.
As my mind cores worked on reverse engineering the material, I shifted the drone’s limb into my original eldritch material. The clawed black limb ca apart at the seams, a thousand hair-thin white tendrils disentangling from each other before rging into a single whole that plunged back into the tiny hole I made before.
There was still so resistance there, but my eldritch flesh pushed through with ease. Just as I thought, that phasing thingy was so inherent ability of my original body, and the shapeshifted forms I took only gained a downgraded version of it.
The mont the tendril found a large enough open space on the other side, I pulled myself through with my oldest trick. The drone collapsed upon itself and the energy rushed into the tendril, quickly rebuilding a more compact Hunter Drone on the other side and pulling the remaining phased-out tendril back into itself.
Camouflage and Illusions activated, my mind quickly located the closest human mind, and the drone was off. The inside of the ship was disgustingly unprotected, especially this far down into the ship where, with the Warp-Core’s close proximity, only mutants and the fueling crew dared to venture.
A handful of unfortunate, mind-raped voiders later, I had a sowhat solid understanding of these lower layers of the ship. Making use of it, I quickly went up and up, continuing on with mind-diving into the minds of so sorry sod whenever I got lost.
For a mont I let myself wonder about what I was doing. The ease with which I decided to grab the first human I found and plunge into their mind, ravaging it for the information I needed and leaving them behind as drooling, mind-dead shells of their forr selves.
This … was probably sothing immoral. The echo of my humanity told it was disgusting, that I should be disgusted with myself for my actions. But … I didn’t care that much.
This was a matter of survival, of life and death. I needed knowledge and I was going to get it the quickest, easiest way possible. Afterwards, I could ruminate over the morality of my actions later, now it wasn’t ti to worry about thods.
For now, I would make the most of these kills.
After telepathically going through their mories and storing them in so corner of my mind, I shifted one of my limbs into a large maw filled with serrated teeth and took a bite out of each dead human with it.
Before that flesh got transford into bio-energy, the weird Space Marine organ thingy that sohow got mories out of bio-matter went to work on it. The results were less than stellar, sotis earning random fragnts of mories not even correlating to anything important.
From others, I got the location of their hos, how many friends they had, if they were in gangs, where the bases of those gangs were and so on and so forth. It was intriguing as more often than not, the fragnts of mories would be of imdiate tactical use to if I wanted to eradicate the groups these poor guys belonged to.
How in the nine hells that organ managed this was sothing I couldn’t fathom even after having watched it a dozen tis, having felt it work and the mories seep into my mind.
The bites I took were nine tis out of ten, not even from the brain, so how did this thing work? I was rather sure the feet of that one human did not store the mory of where he hid his secret stash of money.
I’d be doubting my knowledge of human biology right about now if my eldritch consumption of humans did not co together with a rather detailed understanding of the subject. An understanding that correlated to what I knew beforehand, aning, the feet were not made to house mories. What a shocker.
Stupid Warhamr science. Stupid galaxy. Nothing made sense. Nothing ever made sense.
There was so fuckery going on and I wasn’t even sure if it was Warp fuckery. Ah, well, who was I kidding? When in doubt, bla the Warp. Maybe the mories left so sort of a spiritual imprint on the flesh that my eldritch senses couldn’t catch due to their entirely physical nature?
Unfortunately, I was in a bit of a hurry, so I couldn’t stop to ditate over a corpse to check for any such imprint that did not make itself obvious to my casual inspection. If it was obvious, my aura sense would have caught it already.
I continued going up and up. Humans fell and slowly, my ntal map of the ship started filling out. I was close to the space where officers lived and reaching the command deck should be only minutes away.
My ascent slowed a bit as I put a touch more care into keeping myself hidden. By now I knew this ship was manned entirely by regular humans — as regular as these void-mutated humans could be — and not by Space Marines, furthermore, no one I mind-dived had known of even a single Psyker being on the ship. That ant I could relax a bit.
I prowled the upper deck, sending only quick probes into the minds of passers-by to not rouse suspicion. I could have murdered a hundred mutants down in the belly of the ship and no one important would have noticed, but I suspected a single dead officer would get all of their panties in a twist.
The first officer whose mind I read even had so implant that would send a silent alert should he die, or fall unconscious and though the next handful didn’t have such an implant — or hid it too well for to notice — I didn’t want to send the whole ship into so ergency lockdown or sothing.
This was but the first step. I needed to, no, I had to remain undetected.
I humd in my mind, imagining myself to be a super spy as I crawled across the ceiling, unseen by the humans below. The command deck wasn’t far now, and the first target of the day — the Captain — should be inside.
My path is, of course, barred by shut doors and even a heavy bulkhead, the last of which is the last remaining thing between and my quarry. The other doors, I could pry open easily enough and without even leaving visible marks of the doors being forced open with so careful application of telekinesis.
The regular doors did use biotric identification on these upper doors, but the chanism that kept them locked was entirely chanical and as such, could be bypassed with only telekinesis and no need for deeper technological knowledge.
That wasn’t the case for the final bulkhead. The thing was locked in place with a dozen electromagnetic locks and safeguards against tempering that were obvious even to my amateur eyes.
I’d have to blast through it if the only trick under my sleeve was telekinesis. Fortunately, it was not, and even more fortunately, the tech-priest on the other side of the bulkhead working as a glorified security guard didn’t have the ntal protections Zedev had.
Well, fortunate for and unfortunate for him. The bulkhead groaned and hissed, then it slowly parted in the middle and slid to the side with an anguished screech. Waiting a few monts for it to co to a stop, I stepped through and sent a second order to the poor priest to close the door behind and keep it that way until told otherwise.
The chanical part of his mind tried to fight since it was the part I couldn’t strong-arm quite so easily, but the chanicus’ paranoia of the abominable intelligence taking over their minds proved to be his undoing as hundreds of shackles held his artificial mind from doing anything worthwhile.
The sight that greeted was about what I expected, which only made it more amusing. A dozen lasguns and a handful of more exotic weaponry found themselves pointed at my invisible form, more because of the still screeching bulkhead behind than due to them having sohow seen through both my illusion and camouflage.
The poor tech priest whose mind I hijacked already had a thick hand around his throat and curses flying at his unresponsive form while the remaining unard officers watched on with a mild mix of curiosity and apprehension.
Now, how to go about this? I could go with either the bombastic route or the stealthy mind-rapist route. The obvious choice would have been the first one any other ti. I did have a nasty habit of gloating and playing with my enemies, but today would be different.
Without further ado, I plunged right into the Captain’s mind who looked down on the whole debacle with a bored, glazed-over gaze from his command throne. He was an ugly fucker with half his face replaced with brutish grey cybernetics and most of his skull replaced with those weird cable-hair thingies that connected him to the ceiling and the ship.
His mind was partially rged with the very machine spirit of the ship, so once again my finesse and dexterity with telepathy were put to the test, as the alien mind would have quickly noticed any of the brutish telepathic attacks I usually used.
I searched selectively, instead of just browsing through more than a few lifeti’s worth of mories — the man looked arguably fabulous for being over 300. In short order, I had what I was looking for, more or less. The prevalent paranoia in the Imperium ant even a Captain knew very little of the overarching tactical plans of the fleet, only being told what he had to do and inford of what the command thought was the bare minimum he had to know.
He didn’t know about — of course, he didn’t — and neither did he know all too much about what would happen once the fleet reached Baal. What he did know was where exactly Guilliman’s ship was, which ships were manned by Astartes, which ships had skilled Psykers onboard, and other such information.
I grinned inwardly as I strode forward at the first part of my quest being a success, all that was left was the extraction part of it.
I strutted between the still confused humans, invisibility cloak still hiding from their sight and walked up to the panorama window at the end of the deck. It was stupid, idiotic, and illogical to have the command deck on the top of a tower on top of the ship and with only reinforced glass separating the most important personnel from the void of space, but I just gave it a ntal shrug as I gently phased through the glass.
I shot off into the darkness, manoeuvring myself to target the centre of the formation with the help of my new ntal map. Let’s see what one of the Astartes Captains knows next.
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