Despite me saying that we were late, I did take a minute to think this through. I know, what the fuck are you talking about, Echidna? Think it through. When have you ever done that before?
And unfortunately, my only answer to that question would be 'never'.
Not a good look for someone who is arguably one of the mentally strongest people in the galaxy, if you don't count eldritch fuckers like Tzeentch. The problem is that 'mental strength' like what I have with me being able to think both fast and a lot with creating hundreds of Mind-Cores with thousands of threads of thought going on in each of them like the biological computers they are is entirely not the same thing as being smart. Smart, which arguably, I am not.
Just thinking that somehow hurt.
Case in point, I could have eaten the splinter fleet with no problem if I just used all my cards right. Even that idea of using my eldritch flesh as ammo or even just chucking biomass filled with condensed bio-energy never came to my mind. I was focused on what I already knew I could do.
Space Magic, healing, drones, and swords. In a way, I went for a full INT build without any points placed into my WIS stat.
I knew those sleepless nights playing DnD were worth it.
So with all that in mind. Was turning into a big-ass bio-ship and throwing myself onto Baal, through the Tyranid blockade the right choice to make here, or was it a moronic idea? I remembered quite a bit about the Devastation of Baal. It was a cool story after all, but if you asked me who died where and what stages the whole invasion had, then I'd come up empty-handed. I knew Ka'Bandha and his demons came in and wrecked havoc on Baal Prime sometime and that the Knights of Blood did an epic last stand against him as they fully gave in to the black rage but not much else aside from how Dante killed the Swarmlord at the end just before the reborn Primarch descended onto the planet.
Not much to work with, but enough for me. I wanted the Swarmlord's DNA, and I wanted the Primarch's DNA. To be honest, I'd count this excursion a win if I got a bunch of bio-energy and the first of those two, but a girl could dream, couldn't she? No, you need to aim high to win. I'll get a lock of hair from Girlyman for sure and do the same with a Custodes if I come across any.
"What are the downsides of turning into a bio-ship to break through the Tyranid blockade?" I mused to myself.
"Getting blown up by the PDF's air defense turrets?" Selene tried.
"They'll have more important things to worry about than a weirdly small bio-ship landing on that wasteland," I countered.
"Won't it be a problem if they see you?" Val asked, and I had to take a second look to make sure it was him, but I'd be rather surprised if a random human managed to sneak up on me. He still had similar features but his androgynous face turned more ragged and masculine, a few scars dotted his skin along with a well-cared-for beard and hair, which while the same inky black as before was now lined with streaks of graying hair.
"Nice," I nodded. He perfectly nailed that retired military general look, "and maybe?" I tilted my head, "I don't know how occupied they would be at the time, so it depends, but it would be a problem if they realized I came out of a bio-ship."
"I can read battle reports in real-time," Zedev interjected, one of the blue windows floating around him flew up to me and I saw a barrage of reports from deployment orders to requests for artillery shelling and so much more just fly by as they were taken over by dozens of new entries, "we could time our entry to be at a time when nobody would have the leisure to note a single bio-ship."
"And you could just put an Illusion around the ship," Val crossed his arms, looking ready to shout at some new recruits on hell week, "you could sustain an Illusion that large, no?"
"I could," I shrugged. "I could also make a fireball the size of a moon, but it'd be a tremendous waste of energy."
"Waste...of...energy?" Val looked at me in befuddlement.
"Think whatever you will," I clicked my tongue, oops? Should I not have said that? "I will not do it if it is not a must. Hiding between the Tyranids might be much easier and I could make do with more...efficient camouflage."
I didn't need to use space magic to solve every problem. I had the gene template of a Lictor, who said I couldn't put its carapace on a bio-ship and make it go invisible?
"How far are we from Baal?" I turned to Zedev.
"4 AU."
"To be honest, I have no idea how fast I could go, so that didn't help much," I said as I stared up at the stars dotting the night sky.
I think Zedev looked at me with a fair bit of befuddlement, but he quickly went back to going over whatever data streams he was interested in.
"Anyway," I clapped, "we should head over there. We can't time our heroic arrival from this far away."
"How are we going to get to space?" Selene frowned. "bio-ships shouldn't be able to land on planets without crashing."
"Hmmm," I stopped to think for a moment. I could easily build a small bio-ship the size of a landing craft here and lift it into orbit with my TK but would that be the most efficient way of doing it? I've been extremely wasteful with my soul energy as of late, despite my needing to literally connect my soul to hell to refill it. So...is there a better way of doing it?
I could try that teleport trick I managed to get from the Crotalid and try to re-enter realspace in orbit or even on Baal but as I've previously discussed, I have no idea how to aim it so that idea was out until I learned how to glimpse into realspace with my soul. Next would be the budget version of that idea, which would be the next level of the trick Val taught me. I called it Blink and it would allow me to slip into that in-between and travel a 'short' distance. 'Short' I snorted in my mind. Only in Warhammer could people refer to an ability that could hop planets as a short-distance teleport. Well, with my power flowing into it, it 'should' be able to do that.
Unfortunately, my blinks were... unpredictable. More training required. Let's leave it at that.
That left me only with the... biological solutions. My only problem was that none of the Tyranid landing crafts were designed to leave after they made planetfall and the same went for bio-ships. The Tyranids got their biomass off of a planet with these bigass towers and the bio-ships could connect to their ends and suck the biomass up through these towers as if they were straws.
I could maybe put together something that could go faster than escape velocity, but the reason I wasn't TK-ing us up there in the first place was efficiency.
Maybe I'd have to go with the initial plan and just make a large bubble filled with air and just TK us up there.
The idea of going back to a plan I already disregarded left a sour taste in my mouth, but at least I did take the time to go through my options and didn't just choose the easiest one without thought, so I guess that is something.
"I'm planning to just grab us with Telekinesis along with a large bubble of air and lift us into space," I got a few concerned gazes at that, "I am open to other ideas though."
"I don't have sufficient data on your capabilities to calculate an optimal plan of action."
"Then assume," I shrugged, "I'm not going to give you a list of my strengths and weaknesses."
"I'd have said that if your main concern is efficiency, then you should use a focus for your Psychic powers like my staff," Val said as his Aeldari staff slipped out from under his illusion as he waved it around, "but somehow you break these foci."
"I can't help it if they are so fragile," I shrugged, all of your dumb foci were made of Warp-based Wraithbone, of course, they turned into dust in my hands when they got purified, "Is that all?"
"Couldn't the three of us pool our powers together to lessen the load on you?" asked Selene with a glance at Val and then me.
"Hmmm," I tilted my head in thought as I poked my cheek with a finger, "Maybe? But I'm not that starved for energy to put you in danger of being possessed."
"All the power I can supply lessens the load on you," she said with a shrug, "and I think Valenith could help much more than me."
"What do you think?" I looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
"I am willing to try," he said, "though to be safe I'd recommend that you handle the protective measures so we don't lose our air if I fail to maintain the power supply and the two of us only help with increasing the velocity."
By 'the two of us', he meant him and Selene. That could work honestly. My primary concern with this was that if either of them failed, somehow all of them would die, but like this, I'd just have to supplement some velocity.
"Alright," I nodded, "I don't think we should wait much more." I looked around and got a round of nods. "Let's go then."
A spherical barrier quickly covered us and a large chunk of the ziggurat's side we were standing on. Soul Energy flowed into it, making layers upon layers of barriers to strengthen it further. I pointed upwards with a smirk, more for dramatics than anything, as my TK took hold of the large sphere and tore it out.
I felt the ground move beneath my feet as thousands of cubic meters of damned Wraithbone that the whole damned Zigurrat was made of floated upwards. First, it was slow, but I started increasing the speed with time as I also started working on the start of the Bio-ship. White tendrils crawled along the floor and rushed out toward the sides of the barrier and I let them pass through.
Out of those tendrils burst a modified carapace, it flowed over the outside of the barriers and quickly coated it in layers upon layers of alien armor meant to shield bio-ships from other void-ships. On the inside grew moss that glowed in a warm yellow color, I couldn't find much use for most floral templates but that glowing moss from the Webway was at least good for lighting as with the armor covering the whole sphere from the outside no sunlight made its way inside.
Selene quickly sat down into a meditative pose and not long after I felt the velocity of our makeshift transport vessel increase, it wasn't much compared to what I already gave it, but it put a smile on my face. A few seconds later, the whole thing rocked as its speed increased by a third when Valenith joined in with his staff glowing in eldritch light as his face was pulled into a focused frown.
All this almost distracted me from when the Zigurrat below us suddenly... disappeared. I frowned and let a chunk of the armor drop from the underside of the sphere. On the way down the hair-thin white tendril I pushed into that chunk, transformed it into a modified Sky-slasher and connected to me telepathically. I saw through its eyes and heard through its ears.
There was nothing there aside from grey rocks and absolutely no sign of life. Still, I ordered the drone to fly downward as the armored sphere sped up into the atmosphere. A strange feeling crawled through my connection with the drone and controlling it grew challenging. It was like it didn't want to go there despite having zero self-awareness or even capability for fear.
The grand mind palace I constructed in my mindscape instantly detected the mental manipulation, trying to push its way inside as it helplessly splattered against my outermost shields. I frowned as I wiped every bit of consciousness out of the drone and manually controlled it to fly down. One second passed and the mental intrusion continued to uselessly crash against my shields, but in the second, my drone broke through something.
No, breaking through wasn't the right word. It passed through a veil and the annoying mental influence immediately stopped and through its eyes; I saw the ziggurat with the Gate at the top of it and a sizeable chunk of its side missing.
"Curious." now I know how an Aeldari temple survived this close to the home world of a Primarch.
With my curiosity satisfied the white tendril inside the drone transformed, irreversibly turning into a part of the drone before I cut contact with it. Now it'd crash down to the ground and splatter against the stone with not even the best Xenobiologist being able to tell that it was any different from a normal Tyranid Sky-slasher.
A sharp hiss left my lips as I recollected myself, I put pain receptors into the topmost layer of armor covering the sphere and I just now felt it starting to burn.
"We are leaving the atmosphere," I said, my voice carrying over the whole space inside, "prepare for turbulence, I am securing you all to your places now."
The white tendrils pulsed once and four of them branched off, one branch rushing for each of us and morphing into a chair.
I fell back into mine and let the tendrils secure my body into it as I focused on whether any port of the sphere grew too damaged to remain functional and keep the air inside.
"Eeeep," Selene yelped as my tendrils crawled across her body and secured her into a similar chair but she quickly returned her focus to the task at hand, if with a slight blush on her face. The other two remained silent as they were secured with Zedev's red eye flashing repeatedly as he snapped his head around to record everything that happened while he waved around a mechadendrite with an Auspex at the end of it. He is like a kid in a candy store.
Space...
My lips curled into a smile. Despite getting reincarnated into this shitty universe, I couldn't say it was all that bad.
Cute women... spaceships... eldritch powers... sci-fi toys...
Life was good.
If only I had a good meal, to make it even better.