27 – Irradiated Banquette

27 – Irradiated Banquette"I'll take that as a compliment," I smiled at the confused Navigator, "I'm Inquisitor Echidna of the Ordo Xenos, a pleasure to meet you, Aaron." He frowned at my casual way of calling him, stuck up as Navigators get, but then the cogs in his head turned ever so slowly as the Inquisitor part of my introduction clicked in his mind. "Ah, my apologies Lady Inquisitor," he bowed his head, "I'm Aaron Follanx, Navigator assigned to this ship." "We'll be relying on you to get off this rock once the repairs are done," I said as I turned tails and walked out of the room with a wave, "I'm going to check out the Astropath too, see you around." After a few quick orders, Selene followed me and one of her shadows ran off, fetching people to take care of Aaron as he recovered. His momentary high will wear off in a bit as I already saw the whisps of warp energy that have engraved themselves into his body eating away at the excess energy. My mere presence burned away some of that warp energy but the effect of my soul was much less in the material universe and I had no idea how to manifest it here, if such a thing was even possible. I was a bit absent-minded as I threw open the doors leading into the personal room of the Transcendent Astropath, her soul was flickering like a disco ball of brilliant gold light getting swarmed by tendrils of dark Warp energy that didn't let her radiance through. Not sure if I can do anything about it, and neither am I sure I want to. If Aaron was a candle she was a roaring bonfire. Even if her light flickered like the bonfire in a drizzle it still shone brightly. I knew I'd fooled the Navigator, he easily accepted the 'She's an Inquisitor' answer to all of his questions but I wasn't so sure a Soul-Bound Astropath would too. She was laid out, pale as snow but her cheeks still had some flesh to them, unlike Aaron who looked more like a skeleton who decided to wear skin. The Astropath was a woman looking around thirty with blonde hair cut right above her shoulders and a fit build. I pushed my human emotions to the back that were insisting that I couldn't leave a beautiful woman like that suffering from the Warp like that. I wasn't a human anymore, survival was my primary goal and it wouldn't be obstructed by anything. "I don't think I can save her," I looked at the woman mournfully, "She is too far gone." "I see," Selene whispered, probably actually mournful unlike me. If I used my soul and powers I could burn out the Warp energy that has flooded her body, it was rampaging around her as her soul tried to subdue it but she was losing. It wouldn't be quick either but it was clear to me that she wouldn't last more than another week or two. If I was a human I'd have been disgusted by my choice to let her die, but she'd be an inconvenience to me in the future, an obstruction, a threat, a danger to my life. Unforgivable. I felt any sympathy fade as I thought of it like that and all I wanted was to kill her right here and now to make sure she wouldn't stay alive by some miracle. She stood between me and my certain survival and safety, nobody else could alert the Imperium at large about me on this ship if things turned sour but she could. I blinked as I snapped out of my reverie, I found soul energy already streaming through the thread connecting me to my soul and I sent it right back. The Soul Flame that was brief moments away from materializing on my fingers never appeared. I quickly engraved every bit of feeling and thought that ran through my head in the previous minute for later consideration, this was the first real way my alienness manifested itself and after a brief consideration, I shook my head a little. This wasn't too different from before, any human would do the most heinous of things if their lives depended on it, my line was just much more clear. That's a positive, no regrets, no death because I was reluctant to kill who needed to be killed. "I will go hunt down some mutants now," I said and Selene just nodded. She was sitting in a chair next to the Astropath, holding the unconscious woman's hand as she talked to her in whispers. Reassuring her that it'd be alright, but it would most certainly not be alright. She didn't even look at me as I left the room. Despite my clear decision on what needed to be done a sour taste was left in my mouth, it wasn't like I wouldn't kill the woman in cold blood but I wouldn't enjoy it either. It was distasteful, maybe it was my leftover humanity feeling that way but it was still me. Both the monster that'd murdered her in cold blood and the one that pitied her for it. I would pity her but I'd not regret doing it. What an interesting monster I'm becoming. I decided to wash away the sour aftertaste with some mutant corpses. The best mouth-water around on the ship for sure. I waved off some voidsmen and they directed me towards the Reactors, I went down, down and down. In some places, elevators took me a few floors down on others I had to take twisting and turning tunnels that sloped downwards. The lower gravity here made traveling much easier as it barely took any effort on my part and a good hour or two later I was getting close to the Warp Drive and the voidsmen were showing signs of slight mutations here. I continued on, these were still workable crewmen and not dispensable mutants but soon I found those too. Pale men and women some of whom shone with bioluminescence as they walked through the eternally dark tunnels with a hunch. Generations of working in a close-to-zero light environment while being exposed to the warp gave them some interesting changes. I absorbed one here and there to get a good handle on their mutant genome, with a larger pool comparing it to normal humans I could easily spice the useful bits later. I made sure to only absorb those that were close to dying or already dead, my thin tendrils went unnoticed in the dark and even if some noticed them their minds were wiped of it soon after. Selene had a humongous ship, I knew it was large but even as a sci-fi fan, ships this large were a rarity. I didn't know how large it was exactly and neither did I remember the Imperial designations of the different classes of ships. Whatever, that I could travel tens of floors and wasn't even at the reactor yet reflected its size well. Warp-mutants or Warp-Touched as they were called were spread rather evenly, one appearing here and there on every floor since halfway here but I only now started eating them too. The proximity with the Warp-Drive combined with the getting evicted from the higher floors pushed the dregs of them down here. The hallways were dark and damp, the smell of rust and mold were a constant just as was the pervasive smell of human waste. Light was a luxury, corpse starch a delicacy. Humans hated the different, the lesser they deemed parasites and even more so when these parasites were warped by the antithesis of their God Emperor. As such mutants, even if some were useful, were pushed toward the ‘slums’ of the ship. I thought myself rather resistant to radiation up until I absorbed a mutant that was actually able to eat radioactive waste and turn it into nutrition for itself. Its cells caught the decaying atoms and used that as fuel to multiply and feed the body and this was in addition to my previous resistance getting much stronger. Previously I wouldn't have had to bother about a planet not having an ozone layer or anything protecting it from a sun's rays but now I could walk around a town that got a cobalt Bomb dropped on it a week before. Then there were some moronic ones that decided that hitting on me was a good idea, they were some sort of celebrities down here as they fought in some gladiatorial pit-fights and that managed to rouse my interest enough to eat all five of the dudes that were surrounding me. To my disappointment, the half-living Rad-Mutant gave me a much stronger radiation resistance than them and they only provided me with tougher skin that could stop radiation from going further into the body. Useful stuff but I didn't want to look like Leatherface if I could help it, maybe with a bit of testing I could give my own normal skin this property though. The pale Gloomkin were a nice meal but not too useful in the end as I only got night vision and bioluminescence from them. The Warp-Touched were rather varied but few of them had useful mutations and even those that did paled in comparison to any of my Tyranid templates. Rad-Mutants were interesting but once I had the near immunity to radiation they had I didn't have much other use for them, just like with those Rad-Warriors that hit on me. Each type had a bunch of them down here, separated into their own little communities but still mostly working together to keep the ship functioning. From then on I continued toward the Warp Drive, eating non-functional mutants on the side even if only for the energy the action provided me. Soon there were only Rad-Mutants as I was getting very close to the Reactor and I had to start using my bio-energy to keep the cancerous mutations at bay, by then not even the Rad-Mutants were wandering around, leaving the dark and unkept tunnels of the ship empty. It's time to head back, tomorrow I should check out other parts of the ship. Announcementdiv>Two Advanced chapters over on my Patreon with the 1$ Sub: 227