Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

It took a little over a week to fully map out this network of tunnels, but it would take considerably longer to pin down the exit point of every Webway Gate connected to it. Nearly all of them were turned off at the moment, so I only managed to slip through a quarter of them at best, but even that was a prize worth all the time and effort I’d put into this endeavour. I mean, I now had nearly twenty entry points through which we could later infiltrate the Hollow Sun, and yes, I did indeed find a tunnel leading to the Dolmen Gate, deep within the bowels of the Suhbekhar Crownworld. 

I also found a bunch of sealed tunnels and closed bulkheads that my senses could barely penetrate, but from what I could glean, there were just more empty tunnels behind them. I decided to avoid poking those until I had full control of the place.

The place was well defended, especially those large vertical shafts where tunnels intersected. They were thick with anti-air weapons platforms, and on the floor stood a fortress not unlike the one at the site of my battle with Ozkan. If that wasn’t enough, a trio of Necron Light Cruisers hung from the ceiling, ready to leap into battle. 

Nothing in the lore suggested Necrons had this level of mastery over the Webway; at best, I would have thought they could breach into it and maybe subvert small parts, not unlike how the Emperor had with his secret Human Webway project. But maybe it was just the Suhbekhar? Those other Necrons I’d run into in the Webway tunnels showed no sign of making them their own to this level. It would make sense; this Dynasty was supposedly at the cutting edge of Necron technological innovation … or at least it used to be back before its Phaeron went batshit insane.

I made a pair of my best stealth drones for every Webway Gate; one would stay in place and serve as backup in case the other one was discovered, while the other’s task would be to slip through the Gate if it ever opens, record what’s on the other side and hopefully locate it by way of a glance at the local skyscape, then slip back through. 

The backup drone would then receive the data but stay in place as the other drones would speed off and attempt to make their way to the central ventilation shaft where I could pick them up at a later date. If they were ever discovered and destroyed, I’d still have the backup drones carrying another copy of the data. I’d just have to put in a bit more legwork. 

Without making overt use of telepathy or other psychic signals, this was the best plan I could come up with. It wasn’t only that I was worried my use of warpcraft would be discovered, but that a third of the Canoptek constructs carried Gloom Prisms that could generate something akin to a weak, artificial Null Field. They were hardly insurmountable, but bothersome all the same, and I couldn’t dismiss the idea of them being able to sense when warp-fuckery was going on near them.

Then I retreated, which by itself was a time-consuming task considering I had to wait for one of the Gates closer to the Jericho Reach to open up. It took a few hours, but then I was free! … and then it took one and a half weeks to get back to my new Dominion. Back to my worshippers.

A shudder of disgust raced down my spine, and my face twitched into a grimace at the mere thought, but it would be a barefaced lie to say their existence didn’t help tremendously with the consolidation of my power, and with the re-organisation of human society. The Tau were against it, of course, wanting to spread their Greater Good bullshit, but the humans of the Jericho Reach had a generational hatred for anything even mildly associated with the Tau thanks to the Achilus Crusade’s widespread propaganda and fearmongering campaigns. 

Every simulation and model of the future I ran suggested that, in the short term, making use of the rapidly spreading cults worshipping me would be the most efficient way forward. All the alternatives came with revolts and bloodbaths; even the Tau’s way of social engineering would require purges and more than that, it would take several generations to take effect. 

I was still vocal about my dislike of being worshipped, but that hardly slowed them down. There was a lot of ‘the one who demands not to be worshipped but acts like a divine should, is the one most worthy of worship’ going on. They worked their mental gymnastics to make their newfound faith work, driven by an almost desperate need. They even took the fact that I hadn’t persecuted or executed preachers or public worshippers as a sign of silent support.

It would fade. The fervour would die down. My gifts would go from something miraculous to the norm within a few decades, then to being expected within a few generations. 

I was ageless, so I wasn’t against slower methods on principle, but I knew that the events of the Dark Imperium series began 13 years after the Indomitus Crusade left Terra. I didn’t have centuries to manipulate society; I needed some semblance of stability in the span of a decade at most. I would have another Avatar by the time I had to leave, but still my focus would be elsewhere, and I could hardly let the Tau freely manipulate my new citizens. 

I’d make my Astral Dominion a secular society in time, but that I could wait on. I could take it slow, taking medieval European society’s transition to modern 21st-century Earth as the inspiration. Maybe with fewer wars of faith, but it seemed like a good starting point. People would be led to care less about religion over centuries and generations. 

Modern society as I knew it wasn’t strictly secular, but religion was in the background for the most part, entirely separate from the state. Sure, that might come with some idiots trying to reduce my ‘constitutional’ power once it wasn’t ‘divinely mandated’ anymore or whatever, but it wasn’t like I would let them. 21st century Earth was not an ideal society by any metric, and I wouldn’t let my own domain fall into the same traps. There would be aspects I liked taken from democracy, capitalism, socialism and every other form of government I could study and saw something useful in, but only to an extent and always secondary to my own absolute autocratic power. 

Was it tyranny? Maybe. But I hardly cared. Mankind had been left to its own devices in this galaxy for thousands of years, and look where that led them. Unlike the innumerable dictators of history, my power didn’t come from the people, nor from populism, or from having the loyalty of a military force. It came entirely from within, from me. Everything else was just to make me have to exercise my power less. Besides, while stability was the primary goal short-term, my long-term goal would always be to prove to this wretched galaxy that something nice could exist in it. That I could build a nation with a better quality of life than any other. The end goal was, after all, to build a society, a nation, in which I and those I cared for could live.

*******

Vallia. Not the moon — which was called Vallia Prime — that held my arcologies, dragon enclosure and Orkish clans, but the planet itself. I’d been there once with Selene, mapped out the place and done some hands-on research on the planet’s bizarre ecosystem. 

I found myself back there after doing the rounds, making sure nothing required my immediate attention, but things were proceeding … if not well, then within an acceptable margin of error. Octavian’s network and the Tau got into something akin to a rivalry, both seemingly trying to prove to me that they were better at handling the type of social engineering I wanted, and needed in my domain. 

I let them. It made them work faster, and maybe it was foolish of me, but I felt like it pushed both sides to do things better, to avoid holding back in an effort to make themselves indispensable to me or something. After all, if one side played tricks, then the other would gleefully come to me to tattle on them. 

Now both groups were working on the planets assigned to them, but no one stopped their agents from infiltrating all planets. The Tau had a vast number of human agents, so it wasn’t like they were all that crippled by the racial differences. And while they worked, my surveillance drones watched them, recorded everything, and sent it back for analysis. Some of them got found and promptly self-destructed, but that was fine. They needed to be stress-tested in proper working conditions to refine their designs even further, and I wasn’t shy in admitting to either Coldstone or Octavian when they spoke about the exploding strange birds that they were mine. It was a given that I’d keep an eye on them and make sure they couldn’t just act freely without any supervision. I was neither that trusting, nor that foolish. 

It also made me decide to keep the older surveillance drone models, the ones that some of them had worked out methods to detect. After all, if they found a bird drone perched on a branch outside, they’d be less likely to look too hard for the next generation stealth drone hiding in the corner and eavesdropping on them. 

I knew I was an amateur when it came to this cloak-and-dagger stuff, but I was rapidly learning the trade secrets by watching professionals work. Hundreds, if not thousands of them at once. It was good data.

But I cast thoughts of all that aside for now and focused on what I’d come to Valia for. I’d been meaning to go further, much further, with my experiments on the planet but things just kept getting in the way, but no more. I had time, and more importantly, my mind-cores reminded me before I jumped into another experiment elsewhere. I was just about to jump into some extremely early-stage phase iron — a metallic substance which would have anti-Warp effects, using the Imperial Psyk-Out line of weaponry as inspiration but hopefully much more easily mass-producible — experiments, but Vallia came first.

The Jungle World’s main quirk was that everything, every single thing that was alive in any meaning of the word, was connected to what I’d dubbed the ‘World Mind’, but that name was a bit misleading. The planet didn’t have a mind of its own; it had no sapience, that’s for sure, and not even sentience despite numerous animals qualifying for the latter. It had, however, a base animal cunning and a hatred-slash-fear of anything living that wasn’t a part of it. It was a hivemind of sorts, one formed of every animal, plant, fungi and whatever else that inhabited the planet, but it was also more somehow. 

Plants like ferns, grasses and trees moved on their own to obstruct interlopers despite them having no physical way to facilitate movement. Grasses had no muscles or whatever; they weren’t supposed to move, and yet on Vallia, they did. 

That’s my current standing theory, at least based on what I’ve seen and sensed from the planet. I narrated internally, recording my thoughts to a mental journal of sorts. My memory might have been perfect, but it was nice to conjure up this illusory journal and read through my earlier thoughts either to refresh my memories, dig up whatever line of thought I’d had during an earlier experiment, or just to re-examine what had gotten me where I was.

I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do with the planet and the baby hivemind just yet, but I had ideas. I was curious whether I could make it smarter, or grant it a single unified soul, or maybe if I could make a creature that’d act like an admin terminal to control the rest of the hivemind. Could I make a mini Tyranid Hive-Mind of my own? Could it mimic the Shadow? Could it use Warp-energy if I made some synapse creatures? Could I somehow make it able to use Storm Wards to cast continent-size barriers when needed? Could it use those massive bio-structures the Hive-Mind had attempted to murder me with? 

It was a tantalising thought, and if this idea even partially worked out then the Vallia system would gain a defender unlike any other. I could go gallivanting all over the place without having to worry about the system falling to anything short of a full Hive Fleet, a new Black Crusade or an Imperial Crusader fleet rivalling the Indomitus Crusade’s. 

And if I study it enough, if I understand every single part of its workings, would I be able to reverse-engineer the entire thing to recreate it elsewhere? I mused to myself. It could be dangerous; this planet had many pre-existing souls, even if only paltry animalistic ones. Still, if they all came together to form a hivemind, then the resulting amalgam of souls would be something quite powerful even by my standards. It would be shoddy, a patchwork thing that might come apart when poked the wrong way, but I could worry about that if I ever got to that part. There were an endless number of points before that one where my plans might fall apart. 

So when I began, I started small, wanting to first understand what I was working with in exact, excruciating detail before I began meddling with it. I took samples from every species of plant and wildlife on the planet, analysed them down to the sub-atomic level for any otherness that might have explained the planet’s peculiar properties. Some things stood out, but nothing conclusive, just plausible theories for the moment in dire need of further examination and proof, or of being disproven. 

I tested them next, examining how the wildlife and nature reacted to a long list of stimuli I could think up. Then I compared it to beasts from other ecosystems, then I made clones of the local beasts, or replicas to be more accurate, since their bodies were the same age and had the same prior injuries as the local beasts. Why? Because I was curious whether the hivemind would accept them as one of its own — it didn’t, for some reason — and then compared the behaviour of those to the originals. Into the clones’ artificial minds I implanted the same memories their local counterparts had, so the only source of difference between their behaviours could only stem from the planetary hivemind. 

It was … relaxing. The experimenting, the way my focus was singular and all worries of the outside world fell away because every sliver of my mind that I paid active attention to was absorbed in this task. Nothing else existed for me, and just for that small time I didn’t have to carry the weight of the galaxy on my shoulders.