Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

Solomon stared forward, his face set in a grim scowl as his mind surveyed the information the Machine Spirit was feeding him. 

First contact with the enemy was still far away, but he couldn’t be prepared enough. With the majority of his psykers out of commission or dead, the rest of his arsenal had to be in perfect shape. 

“The sensors are picking up something, heat signatures moving through the frozen asteroid cloud,” the auspex operator said, his voice rising in alarm and going almost shrill as he continued. A pathetic showing for one of the Astra Militarum’s high-ranking officers. He’d have to reconsider making someone more level-headed take over. “Sixty major heat signatures, reminiscent of Tyranid bio-ships and … two other unidentified things.”

“Get me eyes on these ‘things’,” Solomon ordered gruffly, glaring at the back of the young man’s head for using such unprofessional language in his presence. He’d have told him to fuck off and get a replacement, but every wasted second might cost him dearly in a combat situation, so he did not. However, he did query the Machine Spirit for confirmation on the sensor data. 

As he did, an image was projected into his mind and he reeled back with a gasp he hurried to suppress. He saw them, a great swarm of sleek white ships vaguely reminiscent of Tyranid Bio-ships swimming through space, but what caught his attention were the two ‘things’ — as the auspex operator so aptly put it — that swam with them.

One of them was a colossal fucking space snake. It was large enough to swallow some of the smaller bio-ships it swam with in a few bites. Obsidian black scales, a pair of eyes smouldering like coals and filled with hunger. He couldn’t see its end, the tail of the monolithic space beast. 

The other was stranger still, a head like that of a snapping turtle just stretched and connected to a mass of white tendrils of all sizes. It seemed to be swimming too, tendrils paddling against space itself like some octopus. Now this was large enough to eat one of his warships whole in a single bite.

What the fuck.

Also, since when was his ship’s Machine Spirit able to do that? Project images in his mind? He’d been expecting arcane auspex readings and maybe blurry splotches of crimson on a dark backdrop.

He heard a giggle in his head, a faint electronic noise as the very spirit of his ship seemed to want to calm him, tell him it would be there for him in the fight to come. The Spirit felt his conviction, and as all great servants of the Emperor, it decided to push itself to help accomplish his mission.

As it should, though … Since when did Machine Spirits giggle? Didn’t they talk in that strange chirping language of the Priesthood of Mars? Binary or whatever? 

Eh, it didn’t matter. If he could trust one single thing in the fleet to never betray him, it would be his flagship and its Spirit. It had served his family for a long time, going back so far as the Great Crusade if the decrepit ramblings of his drunkard grandfather were to hold any truth to them.

His blood ran cold as the octopus-like space monstrosity’s head shifted, a hundred gem-like emerald eyes of varying sizes scattered across its head all turning to stare right at him. 

He cut the connection, suppressing a shudder before righteous anger bubbled up in his heart. He had been right. This Psyker was clearly the threat his predecessor’s ghost had warned him about if she could tame such a beast and bend them to her will. It seemed like she even managed to somehow steal a fleet of Tyranid bio-ships for herself which she then modified through some dark sorcery. He’d recognise those monstrous designs anywhere, even with the white paint and polish. 

Biomancy was a subset of Psychic studies, mostly reserved for arcane healers in the Imperium or a few who were allowed to use it for combat. He queried the Machine Spirit again and looked through a list of well-known Biomantic abilities. He had to suppress another shudder the longer he read on, especially when he reached the classified segments that were only made available for his perusal because of his title of Lord Militant. 

Turning their skin to steel, enhancing their endurance, strength and reflexes. Sapping the very lifeforce of their enemies to bolster themselves. Draining that lifeforce until nothing but a husk remained to heal themselves, or empower themselves. Cause their enemies’ bodies to fail, organs shutting down, blood vessels bursting, tumors growing and exploding, pus-filled growths, their own bones turning to spikes to skewer them. 

Then came the extremely classified Inquisitorial reports. Plagues. Fleshcrafting. Regular people twisted into horrid abominations enslaved to their master’s will. 

One Psyker caused an entire city to mutate around them into abhumans. Another just puppeteered the bodies of people around them without even touching their minds, leaving them trapped in their bodies. Another yet crafted an entire town’s population into a hulking abomination that had to be taken down by an Imperial Knight, then bombed from orbit to fully kill. There was also a mention of Bioweapons, and the order that if anyone even just suspected a Biomantic Psyker of above Delta-rank existing anywhere to immediately inform the Inquisition. 

Well. He didn’t have any Inquisitors on hand, with the last one having been murdered by the very Psyker he was coming to kill. He did have the Deathwatch though, and they probably sent some message to their comrades about the situation, anyway. 

Great. So a Psyker capable of Biomancy powerful enough to enslave Tyranids and whatever the fuck those two space monstrosities were to her will, and add in the ability to teleport vast distances and through Void Shields. 

Fucking hell, he’d have to make sure that she didn’t teleport some bio-plague into his ship. This was going to be a pain, but she would die anyway. Even if he had to then drive his entire fleet into the nearest star as they all rotted away from the inside out. 

He would not allow the Plague Daemons to twist any of his men into monsters. This must be one of their ploys. The Psyker was probably in cahoots with them, those bastards always loved dangling an end to the pain of diseases before dying men and women. He’d have to be on the lookout for them coming to sniff around too. 

The enemy was still horribly far away and well out of the range of any of their weapons, only the cold, dark backdrop of space allowed their sensors to pick them out so soon. Sensors, more than anything, won wars in his opinion. Knowing where your enemy was, preferably before they knew where you were, got you halfway to victory already. Even an idiot could blunder their way into victory with an advantage like that if the opposing sides were vaguely equal otherwise.

“Gravitational sensors are going wild, sir!” The other auspex operator said, his voice rising though not as embarrassingly shrill as the other’s. “Gravitational anomaly inbound, it resembles a-“

Before he could finish his words, the faux-tyrannid fleet … blurred for the lack of a better word. Each bio-ship turned into a streak of alabaster light that raced towards his fleet, looking like some celestial painter knocked over a bottle of white ink on the jet black canvas of space. They approached at a visible pace, and while incredulous at the utter impossibility of what he was seeing, Solomon understood the gist of it. His foes were coming to him, and they were coming fast. Faster-Than-Light fast. The enemy’s ETA was shrinking rapidly, the 8 day estimation going down by an hour every second. 

“-Tyranid spatial folding.” The operator finished a bit absently.

“All hands on deck!” Solomon ordered calmly, knowing to show even a hint of fear as the supreme commander of this fleet would send all the wrong messages. Even if his decades of experience taught him to have a healthy fear of the unknown, the Emperor couldn’t be there to protect everyone, especially those foolish enough who commit assisted suicide through some foolish belief that the Emperor will spend his precious power to protect their worthless selves. “Raise the Void-Shields to full throttle, prepare for battle!”

He could almost feel the sheer chaos that spread over the ship, everyone rushing about to get to their stations, arm themselves and do final check-ups on their tech. He imagined the entire fleet was like that, not quite scrambling — his people were too well-trained for that — but something not all too dissimilar to it. 

He glared at the approaching splotches of whiteness, fingers gripping his armrest as he subconsciously leaned forward. The first clash would happen sooner than expected, but that was fine by him.

He took stock of his enemy, mentally preparing contingencies and strategies to best handle them. Tyranid-esque bio-ships and a pair of gigantic space monsters. This would not be his first clash with the alien menaces that sought to devour the galaxy, though it had been decades since he last took active command in a battle against them, but he thought he had a reasonable idea of how to combat them. 

Now, the space monsters? He browsed his memories and pulled up the database on the enemies of the imperium and the recommended methods of purging them from the face of the Emperor’s galaxy.

Void Whales were the most common, but they were described to be docile beasts with the behavioral patterns of gigantic herbivores. They attacked only if given no other option … though apparently some other Xeno menaces liked to convert the beasts’ carcasses into pseudo bio-ships. Killing them was apparently merely an effort of getting through their chitinous armour with sustained fire from lance batteries. 

Next came Void Krakens, a much more useful entry as these beasts were predators that preyed on voidships. Ambush predators to be exact, usually hiding within thick asteroid fields but are suspected to be attracted to the emission fields of voidships. Immune to regular munitions, larger than Imperial Frigates and requiring sustained torpedo salvo and a lengthy barrage from lance batteries from a dozen ships to be taken down in the few recorded instances of that happening. 

The tentacled beast he had seen matched the description of a mutated Void Kraken … barely and the other serpentine beast might be a Void Whale? No, it didn’t look like it. Well, the answer should be similar enough anyway for it not to matter. It wasn’t like there were all that many ways to kill colossal space monstrosities. 

“Prepare the torpedoes for a sustained, delayed salvo,” Solomon ordered, leaning back in his command chair as he watched the ETA count down steadily. Mere seconds separated him from finally clashing with his fated enemy. “Power up the lance batteries. The tentacled beast will be our primary target.”

If the records he had just read were correct, it might be able to bite through Void Shields. It had to go down first. 

“Torpedoes will be our weapon against the swarms, we need to clear them out before we can destroy the bio-ships.” He took a moment to make sure the troopers and officers were preparing properly across the ship, then nodded in satisfaction when he saw that they were. “Send out the order to the fleet, they are to gather around my flagship in the standard anti-Tyranid formation as Imperial battle doctrine dictates.”

The seconds flowed by as he stared at the approaching fleet, his heart beating at a steady rhythm as he felt every second that goes by like an hour. He should have been beyond the pre-combat jitters, but it had been ages since he took part in active combat. Oh well, the rust would fall off soon enough.

The blurry white streaks slowly grew in size, then started morphing, detains clearing up. The enemy fleet reformed, or rather, dropped whatever spatial warping allowed them to so casually break the laws of physics. They slowed to sub-light speeds.

Solomon glanced at the sensors, a quick query confirming that the enemy was within torpedo-range but not close enough for much else. Just a bit above 100 kilometres, barely a blip in the endless void of space in truth. 

“Fire the torpedoes,” he ordered calmly, his eyebrows furrowing as he watched the enemy, waiting for the expected a swarm of fliers to be disgorged by the bio-ships. 

The serpentine space beast took point, swimming through space at the enemy armada with the alabaster Void Kraken close on its heels. The bio-ships themselves spread out into a large fan-formation and an old instinct made Solomon’s skin crawl. 

Tyranids stuck close together, always. They used swarms and organic debris to make hitting anything vital a challenge. 

This fleet was doing neither, and it made the hairs on the back of the old Lord Militant’s neck stand on end. This was something new, something strange and alien, and that was never good.

The torpedoes streaked forth, their trajectories making them avoid the two monolithic beasts and curve far around them. He zoomed in on the image as they closed in on the bio-ships, and then-

Beams of something pale white flashed, snapping into place between the bio-ships and the torpedoes in the blink of an eye. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of thin white beams of light targeting each and every torpedo. They disappeared less than a second after appearing, their bright light lingering in Solomon’s retinas and then his sight of the enemy force was blanketed by his torpedoes exploding dozens of kilometres short of reaching their targets. 

A massive, silent explosion covered the alabaster fleet for a few seconds, the impossibly bright light of the nuclear explosions made bearable by the pict-caster filtering out anything too hurtful for the human eye.

Then the flames died, snuffed out by the uncompromising void of space in a few seconds, and the alien fleet swam forth. Undamaged, not so much as a single torpedo having hit its target. 

With gritted teeth, Solomon glared at his fated foe. He should have expected she wouldn’t just roll over and die for him. 

Fine then. He snarled inwardly. A challenge. No matter, I will crush you and your little alien toys. Fight against your fate as much as you like, but it won’t change a thing!

He heard a faint, tittering laugh at the very edges of his perception. Blinking, he looked around, then queried the Machine Spirit for a quick check-up, knowing not to underestimate Psykers.

The query came back negative. Huh. He must have imagined it, the damned psyker was getting in his head even without him ever having laid eyes on her. I must get a grip on myself. The mission must be accomplished!