Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

“How do I look?” I asked, an excited little grin tugging at my lips as I gave a princess-ly spin, the hems of my white sundress flaring. When the spin was done, I struck a pose, hips cocked to the side, and chin lifted. 

Selene’s steel-grey eyes drank in the sight of me, her gaze having lingered on my legs while I spun, but now it flickered about, taking in the whole picture. My body was largely the same, looking almost entirely human aside from the gem-like green eyes and the slightly pointed ears, but the greatest and newest change was the pair of wings extending from my back.

They were flared now, spread wide to show off the luscious obsidian black feathers coating them. I wanted to look like a fallen angel, and dare I say I nailed the look quite well. The contrast between my pure white hair and pitch black wings was gorgeous, and the silver accents on my dress and in the scant few pieces of jewellery I wore made it all snap. 

“Gorgeous as always,” Selene said with a smile, though her voice held a distinctive appreciative note that made me preen like a peacock. “And I assume the wings aren’t just for show?”

Didn’t I tell her what I was planning … ? Eh, that was months ago, so maybe she forgot. I shrugged, which made the wings jolt, then fold themselves onto my back. “Of course not. For now, they hold a bunch of neat sensory organs; every feather is tuned to catch even the tiniest spatial, gravitational and atmospheric vibrations. But I also put my new bio-energy siphon and bio-energy to soul-energy converter organs into them.”

I was also working on an additional organ that would be able to skim warp energy from the Immaterium indirectly, without forcing me to connect my Realm to the Warp every damned time. It was a … work in progress — aka, I had no idea how to even get started on it — but if I could figure it out, I could have a permanent, slow warp energy tap going on with practically zero danger to myself. It would be awesome, but my current organs would have to do for now. At least I had the Neurothrope template to get started on my two new organ types, but I would have to build the warp-tap organ from the ground up myself.

Stagnation is death; if you don’t change, if you don’t adapt, you die. Progress, I must always strive to progress, to grow; I must never allow myself to grow complacent. I will never be the biggest fish in this ocean, but I can certainly strive for it.

Selene walked around me, her fingers gently brushing my new feathers, and I felt a ticklish tingle race through my new appendage. They were sensitive by design to serve as sensory organs, so there wasn’t much I could do about it, nor did I really want to. My lover clearly enjoyed the slight twitch in my expression if the vulpine smirk on her lips was anything to go by. 

“I like it,” Selene said, stepping away with a pleased smile. “So-“

Just then, a mental nudge reached me, a ping coming from a new courier ship that had just reached transmitting distance. The signal reached a buoy first, then jumped into one of the central processing terminals on Vallia Prime, from where it snapped over to my mind-core tasked with categorising and filtering incoming notifications. The fact that it had allowed this one through showed the message within must have been noteworthy or of some semblance of importance. 

I peered inside and digested the data within an instant, feeling a slow grin creeping onto my face. 

“One of my scout ships located a Webway Gate defended by a pair of Necron ships wearing Suhbekhar colours,” I said. Trazyn was still not quite done with his part, but he took the time to let me know that things were proceeding smoothly, even though there had been some hiccups along the way. He claimed it would be no more than another three or four months before the forces of his Dynasty were ready to wage war. 

It’s been a surprise that none of my surveillance drones caught even a single Necron. The paranoid part of me worried that just meant they were too good at hiding their tracks for me to notice an errant Necron wandering about, while the realist was relieved because this likely meant the metallic menaces were playing things slow or too busy chasing around my decoys to do any real harm. 

I had the breathing room to investigate as well. My new planets, especially the Hive Worlds, turned out to be easier to wrangle into obedience than I’d thought. Sure, there were cults I needed to have exterminated, and sure, there were some revolts, but they were surprisingly small compared to the planets’ total populations, and they petered out as the weeks went by. 

Turns out, those miserably sods living on Hive Worlds were really grateful for a steady, healthy diet and free food rations. Proper food rations at that. But when I terraformed those dreary worlds where the atmosphere was thick with toxic industrial fumes, where the earth was dead, and no flora or fauna existed … Well, let’s just say the number of idiots joining the cults worshipping me grew by several orders of magnitude. I even had to beat down a few, because they started fighting over what was ‘canonical’ to the worship of the ‘Silver Lady’. The ones trying to incorporate my worship into the Imperial Cult, where I took the place of a Saint acting out the God-Emperor’s will, clashed with those who rejected the Imperial Cult wholesale and worshipped me and me alone. 

The only reason I didn’t have a Monarchia moment was that I didn’t detect a single tiny change in my mind, soul or personality over the last few weeks. Still, I made a speech that would hopefully stop this stupidity from spreading too much. 

I was also painfully aware that if I rejected them wholesale, it risked driving them into the embrace of the Four Cunts, just like how the Emperor’s actions on Monarchia drove that pathetic wimp Lorgar to the worship of Chaos. I could understand that a normal human in this shithole of a galaxy would fervently cling to religion as it promised false safety and an even falser shield against the terrors, but a Primarch? Why would a Primarch cling to religion to the point where he could not bear to exist without having a God or Gods to serve?

Pathetic.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew belief had power here. That much was a fact. For example, there was that one Cain novella where a guardsman regiment famed for its members’ exceptional piety was all but immune to a Nurglite zombie virus. 

But my point was that the power in belief did not stem from some higher power; those Tallarn guardsmen were no more protected by their God-Emperor from the virus than their comrades from other regiments. But they wholeheartedly believed they were, with their entire being, and that mattered. It was the same concept by which Rogal Dorn was all but immune to the depredations of the Warp because he disbelieved the existence of the supernatural so hard that his indomitable will made it so in a small area around him.

The power of belief came from within, not without, except in some extremely rare instances where the Emperor worked to bring about an actual miracle, but I was talking about it in general. Religion was a crutch for the fainthearted who had neither the will nor the belief in themselves to function without said crutch.

*****

Just a few days later I was floating in space, my wings out for little more than aesthetic effect — and because having them still felt novel enough that I wanted to have them out all the time — while coated in my best concealment barriers and techniques. Far into the distance, my eyes picked out the distinctly crescent moon-shaped ships of the Necrons, but I only noticed the Webway Gate because I knew what to search for. It was built into the side of an asteroid the size of New Zealand, and only parts of it were left uncovered by the rocks. Where the circular portal itself would open, now stood nothing but a not-too-deep crater. 

I was alone. As much as I would have appreciated the company, I wasn’t about to drag Selene and my other usual minions into another extremely dangerous — even for me — excursion. So it was just little old me. 

I wasn’t planning to do anything other than scout around a bit. I wasn’t sure whether the Necrons knew how to cut off or close off parts of the Webway, but I didn’t want to give them cause to trim off this section before I could make use of it in an actually meaningful way. It’d taken months to find it, damn it! 

Well, they know how to close and open the Gates themselves at least, so caution’s probably warranted. I mused to myself as I floated closer, employing every trick I knew of to fool the sensor arrays on those Necron warships. 

I was pretty sure Trazyn hadn’t been entirely forthcoming that one time when I asked him how I could hide from Necron ships more effectively, but he had given me a few pointers that I’d made use of. They were probably meant to make me stop bothering him; he obviously wouldn’t tell me everything there was to know about sensor arrays on Necron warships, but the tips still proved useful. Who knew you could track the hyper-dimensional ripples generated by creatures with souls?

It was supposedly a niche sensor that was barely used, since there were much more effective and efficient sensors, but the fact that they existed was still incredible. Or rather, incredibly annoying. 

I floated around for a few days, relying on passive sensors to keep an eye on things, and I even tamped down my psychic links. Selene or Val could yank on theirs to get my attention in case of an emergency, but that was all. You couldn’t be too careful with Necrons; the more I learned of them and their capabilities, the more true that started to feel.

It was on the tenth day that I felt the Webway Gate come alive. A jolt of energy that sent ripples through space coursed through the ring-shaped structure, and then it thrummed once. I felt it in my ribcage, in my bones, and then space bent inwards. The portal shimmered into existence, spitting out a squadron of Doomscythes, but I didn’t dare waste this opportunity, and I darted through the Gate, concerned they’d close it the moment the last ship was through. 

They didn’t, but by then I was floating above a smaller Necron pyramid on the other side. The Necron Webway had a distinctly … Necron feel to it, a bit too artificial, a bit too lifeless and a bit too orderly in comparison to the parts of the Labyrinth Dimension I’d seen before. My eyes flickered to the anti-air weapons platforms scattered around the Necron stronghold, noting their placement on my mental map before dismissing them. A third of them were on hovering Monoliths that slowly orbited the central pyramid, so recording where they were at any given time was pretty much pointless. 

They were numerous, and perfectly capable of utterly eviscerating any warship I knew of that was small enough to fly through this specific Webway Gate. Not mine — if I went balls to the walls on turning a ship into the closest approximation of a turtle that a Void Ship could be — but Imperial, Tau and Aeldari? Certainly.

With a last glance at the defensive fortifications, I shot off into the distance, zipping down the eerily straight tunnel. Each wall, and both the ceiling and the floor, were the same size; if someone took the cross-section of the tunnel, they’d get a perfect square. The material was a rock-like stone of some sort, nearly the same metallic grey as polished necrodermis, but it was clearly not that, just a halfhearted replica. The Necrons might have had no need for it, but pillars stood at equal distances from each other, glowing with that eerie green light the Necrons so adored and casting the tunnel into a permanent twilight. 

I spied some Canoptek constructs scuttling about on every surface, unbothered by such measly things as gravity, but other than them the tunnel was empty of any active Necron presence. Still, I remained careful, the memories of the Canoptek Wraith’s blade going through my brain and my short jaunt into the Ghostwind by the way of a Tomb Sentinel’s Exile Cannon were still fresh in my mind. I wasn’t sure whether the upgrades I’ve done to my more invasive, active sensory organs would have been able to detect phased-out foes, but my passive ones couldn’t, so for all I knew there were thousands more lying in wait, so it paid to be extra careful.

Just a few kilometres away I reached an intersection of sorts, though it reminded me more of those massive vertical ventilation shafts from Coruscant in the Star Wars Prequels. It was a large, wide-open space — though smaller than the ones on Coruscant by a few orders of magnitude — from which dozens of tunnels of varying sizes opened up. 

Well … mapping this place out is going to take a while. But on the bright side, it looks like they connected a good number of Webway tunnels here, so I should be able to find more Webway Gates if I play things smart.