I needed that. I sighed, taking care not to wake the little beauty snoring with her cheek on my shoulder and legs intertwined with mine. She thoroughly exhausted herself, and while some bio-energy would have given her a second wind, I decided that some sleep would do her good.
I only now realised she might not have taken being beaten, kidnapped, and drugged as well as she’d shown. Some peaceful rest was more than deserved. Not that I disliked her soft skin, almost melding with mine under the blanket.
It was bliss. Not as much as what came before *cough*, but it was like a calming balm to my aching soul and mind. Having her so close made me feel more like myself and less like some alien eldritch horror.
Her presence and closeness were the magic keeping me myself. And she was magical in more ways than one.
Despite myself, I felt my cheeks flushing as my rebellious thoughts pulled up memory after memory of what we’d done. It was different from any experience I had before, this wasn’t sex, that was too base a descriptor for it.
It was … it was something else I had trouble grasping. It made any previous experience I had back on earth feel bland and grey, lifeless. Those were, at most, flings, acts of pleasure.
What we had done involved our minds and souls just as much as our flesh and blood bodies. I could feel her mind brush against my own, her emotions, feelings, and sensations twisting and twirling around my mind and sinking into it as if I was the one feeling them and it wasn’t a one-way thing. For a moment, we might have just become one with the other. It was … nice.
Enough about that, I decided as my body started tingling again. Selene was sleeping. Stupid horny aliens had to be well-behaved and stay still to not wake her up. Especially the one she was using as a body pillow.
The pragmatic part of me was a touch embarrassed at having ‘wasted’ almost two hours, but that part of me was stupid and I’d beat it up if it had any thoughts like that again.
Still, the fact remained that I now only had at most a day until the big blue man touched down. A while ago I felt layers upon layers of veil-thin psychic shielding go up all around the building we were in, so at least Dante and his lackeys shouldn’t be bothering us until then.
They weren’t the problem. What I needed to know going forward was what was the stance of the fleet, what they planned to do here, and what they knew about me. Dante and Mephiston were clearly ordered to keep me alive and safe. Even if they went about it in a heavy-handed way, the fact remained that the ‘Regent’ — Guilliman — ordered them to keep me alive and protect me even from the Shadowkeeper.
Why? What does he know? I mused. Did he meet with Eldrad before coming here? Valenith’s nosey master was someone I knew he worked with at times. If my memory wasn’t playing tricks on me, Guilliman should even have his personal Farseer onboard as a courtesy from Eldrad.
Maybe that fucker saw something in the currents, or maybe the Shadowkeeper worked together with them before going rogue. I had to know what motivations were at play, and what goals the big blue man had concerning me to even come up with a viable new game plan.
That meant doing some reconnaissance and information gathering. For once, luck was on my side. The drone I sent out to scout the fleet was still chilling in the inner asteroid belt which the fleet should have just passed through not too long ago.
If I had it burn bio-energy on overdrive for a bit, it’d quickly catch up with the fleet. Blinking was out of the question for now, especially on a drone that was damned far away. My poor mind needed to be left to rest and recover if I wanted myself to be in top condition if needed tomorrow.
Some Illusions and such were in the pack, but nothing batshit crazy like the stuff I was favouring nowadays, such as giant explosions, psychic fireballs, or anything similar. Just some harmless Illusions.
In the meantime, I had most of my mind cores work on Selene’s and my own upgraded Forms. She wanted to be a human-sized female Custodian basically, with the ability to continue using psychics woven in between physical attacks and I just wanted to upgrade everything I could with Custodian organs without messing with my monstrous psychic conductivity.
With the drone busy swimming through the void of space, paddling at space itself to catch up with the fleet, I let my conscious mind wander. I had the template of a Custodian. A Custodian.
The way I unlocked it still felt strange. It was as if an echo of it lingered somewhere deep within, and when I absorbed the droplets of his blood, that echo solidified into a true memory. Or, well, a template.
The one problem was that it was just the template of this single Custodian, and since each of them was unique, I felt somehow constrained by that fact. If I was a painter, it was as if I could perfectly replicate a single painting, say, the Mona Lisa, but nothing else.
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I had the end product of a long-winded artistic journey and laborious research, but not the way there. Knowing how to replicate this single unique Custodian — because each of them was a unique masterpiece of bioengineering — didn’t give me the ability to make a bunch of them.
It was strange. I could create a dozen drones with the template, but I felt that somehow they would all come out the same. What that meant, I didn’t know, neither did I know whether replicating a part of the brain or nervous system was safe.
From what I knew, I might just make a drone with genetically coded Emperor fanaticism connected right to my soul. There were a hundred ways being careless could go wrong, which was why I took the time to let my mind cores carefully pick apart each gene sequence and maybe understand how they work.
Even if they didn’t, I hoped they could find which parts would give us problems in the long run. Be it from brainwashing or from that strange psychic stabilising effect Custodes had.
I’d have to have a drone made of that stuff ready, or a Form I could use if time allowed me to make one. It could come in more than handy if a Daemon or Sorcerer decided to be a pain.
A Blank would work better, but it would have to do until I got my hands on one. Preferably, one that didn’t seriously mess with my soul thread like the black skull the Shadowkeeper lugged around.
Compromises, compromises. The Custodes-derived Form would be a good one.
Hopefully, my lazy mind cores could come up with good templates before the fleet arrived. I took Selene’s idea to heart, and converted the lingering biomass in my little realm into extra brain power, easily multiplying the number of mind cores under my control. That ought to speed up the process, even if the information being sent back and forth between my Avatar and the bio-server in the realm somewhat limited the speed.
Not like they needed to communicate that much, they just had to decide what problems to outsource to the new server.
I once again decided to shelve the damned mind-eating project for later. It took too long and showed no sign of progress, well, aside from my mind cores suggesting I start experimenting instead of letting the simulations run in circles with far too little information to accomplish anything.
I’d need to see how an ability like that worked in practice, which meant turning into a knock-off Space Marine and starting to chomp down on unfortunate corpses. Now, without my white tendrils, only using my teeth and letting the dumb Astartes physiology do its dubious sci-fi magic and pull memories out of dead flesh.
It made no sense, but it didn’t have to. Nothing had to make sense in this dumb galaxy, it was infuriating … but also freeing. My powers were constrained, but much less so than I first thought, or than I probably still realised.
There was much growing to do, in many different ways. I only had to stumble into those ways first, or well, have them smack me in the face as they tended to lately, like my rather panicked application of space warping back with the Shadowkeeper.
For once, I was going to make use of Illusions and stealth and throw some Telepathy on top, just to make sure. Guilliman and his presumed array of batshit overpowered weaponry and supernatural followers — like more Custodes — were not a problem I could solve by banging my head against it.
Some problems needed more than brute force, and despite my previous attempts at using the ‘softer’ applications of power, I was willing to learn. I had to learn if I ever wanted to be more than some brute with far too large a psychic potential to throw around.
Thankfully, the Imperial voidships were rather slow — compared to my drone or Warp-speed, anyway. So it barely took an hour for my little drone to catch up with them.
As soon as it sensed the ships, still astronomically far away, I engaged all of its stealth capabilities. Lictor carapace flowed over the outer shell and the camouflage quickly flickered on to hide the drone from any long-range … stuff. I just now realised I barely knew how scanners and radars worked in this galaxy, something else I would have to pry out of Zedev’s head.
No matter. Tyranids routinely managed to sneak up on Imperial ships, especially small crafts, and Lictors could sneak onboard voidships rather regularly — though I only remembered that being the case for civilian merchant vessels, and not battleships.
A veil of invisibility wrapped itself around the drone, hopefully tilting the odds in my favour. I designed it to cut off any electromagnetic radiation from the drone and to deflect any coming at it from the outside to the sides.
That should take care of the infrared heat radiation from the body … and hopefully, fool any active radars they have. I was running off of assumptions, assumptions of how futuristic sci-fi tech was imagined working back in the 21st century. I was a nerd back then, arguably I still was, and so I was somewhat familiar with a bit of the physics involved in such stuff.
If there was some bullshit pseudo-tech sensing the gravitational waves, my drone generated or other such technobabble bullshit that worked in this galaxy because of course it did, then I would be in a bit of a pickle.
I crossed my fingers as the drone gained ground, or well, space, slowly closing the remaining distance. The fleet went from an array of distant blackish dots gleaming in the dim light of the Baal system’s red sun to the colossal monstrosities that they were in reality.
No gunfire, missiles, or fighters came to intercept the drone, but I didn’t let my focus grow lax. Fooling the long-range sensors would be the easiest part of my impromptu mission.
I couldn’t help but gape a little as the drone finally caught up. As it slowly swam along between the titanic battleships, I just looked around. All around me — the drone to be exact, not that there was much of a difference — were these things that people decided could be called battleships.?
They were idiots. I knew the sizes of these things; I read the wiki at times, but god damn. When you saw a building extending on for almost two kilometres languidly float along with another thousand of its kind as the only backdrop in the darkness of space, that was very different from reading dimensions online.
The ships had no right to be as huge as they were. Somehow, I wasn’t this shocked by the size of the Tyranid Bioships, but the alien nature of those somehow desensitized me to their gigantic size. Or maybe it was the rush to kill them and get the battle over with back then.
I had time now, not all the time in the world, but more than enough to just take in these architectural marvels that also worked for galactic travel. The one to my side was mostly of a gleaming greyish colour, with a central brick-like shape ending in what could only be described as a … battering ram? It also somewhat reminded me of a cowcatcher that they used to mount on the front of a train to kick aside anything that shouldn’t be in the way of the train.
The fact the thing looked scraped and dented all around spoke of the dubious ramming tactics beloved by the Imperial Navy. I held back a grimace at the thought. They had missiles and artillery that could hit things further away than the human eye could see, why they so loved to get into melee in space was one of the great mysteries of this universe.
Oh well, that was hardly the weirdest part of the ship. The damned churches and gothic cathedrals lining both the top and bottom of the craft easily took that place. No, I won’t even bother going into the use of those, aside from looking mildly cool.
I gave it a mental shrug. Being cool was the point of most things existing in the setting. If I had a coin for each stupid, useless, nonsensical thing that existed in this galaxy, I’d have a planet-sized hoard before long.
I decided that my first target would be one of the ships further towards the centre of their formation, where I suspected the flagship would be. This close up it was hard to really take in the entire fleet, so I mostly just guessed.
The idea was that stronger ships would guard the perimeter and even stronger ones accompanied the flagship at the centre like some honour guard. Meaning, that the weakest ships with the shoddiest voidsmen and guards on them should be somewhere halfway between the two.
With no sign of anyone having noticed my drone, I navigated it between the ships until I found one that’d fit my needs. A little ship with an outwardly battered hull and some of the buildings on it broken off in places.
It would do.