92 – Fight or Flight?

92 – Fight or Flight?Octavian Gaius

“Brother Octavian.”

Octavian snapped out of his thought in a moment, gaze focusing on the usually silent and forever stoic Flavius of the Aquilian Shield-host. Octavian heard the man speak only a handful of times, and all of those instances were of utmost importance.

The man didn’t even make a sound when the Lord Regent ordered the in-system Warp-Jump, despite the large probability of mankind's largest fleet since the Emperor walked the stars being annihilated if anything went wrong.

Octavian himself was ... he didn’t know how to feel. The Regent endangered the entire fleet based on an Eldar’s visions. He wouldn’t go against the Emperor’s chosen son, but his trust in the Xeno was something Octavian found a touch concerning.

Still, Octavian knew he only had pieces of this puzzle and he wasn’t going to bother searching for the ones needed to understand when it didn’t concern his mission. The Regent was a smart man with a strategic mind, if he ordered the Warp-Jump with the present dangers of it in mind, he had to have had a solid reason to do so.

14 days of travel saved. Two more remained, and then they would finally touch down on the homeworld of the Blood Angles.

“Yes, Brother Octavian?” He gave Flavius his undivided attention.

“The Shadowkeeper is gone.”

Even with his superhuman mind turning at speeds incomprehensible to the normal human and with a fluidity none but the ten thousand can imagine, that took a moment to sink in.

“Gone.” He said, not asking, but reaffirming that he indeed heard it right. They were on a voidship after all. Being ‘gone’ meant the Shadowkeeper — who never gave them his real name — had a way of crossing the darkness of space faster than one of the finest ships mankind ever built.

Octavian held no doubt in his heart that if the Shadowkeeper was gone, he’d have to be on Baal already. Octavian told both him and Flavius about his certainty that their target — whoever or whatever they may be — was on Baal.

A part of him wanted to believe that the reason his elevated Brother raced ahead of them was to secure the safe completion of their mission, but he was blessed with a mind that hardly ever fell to delusion. This wasn't one of those. He knew why the Shadowkeeper was gone.

Octavian let out a mournful sigh, from now on he could forget a perfectly executed mission, it went from unlikely to an impossibility.

He had another mission it seems, one contradicting my own. Octavian thought he knew the Lockwarden was opposed to the consensus they reached, but the Captain-General himself gave his blessing to the decision to think the Lockwarden would go against his authority was ... sad.

It would be brother against brother now, and Octavian knew that even if it meant striking his respected elder brother down, he would accomplish his Emperor given task. The Shadowkeeper would act the same, mission before emotions. Mission above all else.

“You are the more experienced combatant of the two of us, Brother Flavius,” Octavian glanced at the stoic man. “What do you think? Is it possible to accomplish our mission without shedding our brother’s blood?”

“No,” Flavius spoke simply. “I fear the two of us won’t be enough to keep a Shadowkeeper from his target.”

Octavian nodded. Those were his thoughts exactly, but it was good to have it reaffirmed by an Aquilian Shield. If need be, Octavian knew the two of them would give their lives to accomplish the mission, but he also knew that the two of them dying could just as much mean total failure. It would leave their target unprotected, and the Shadowkeeper would hardly have mercy.

They couldn’t die. Dying meant failing the Emperor. It was inexcusable.

Octavian backtracked. The first step would be reaching the planet as fast as possible, whatever ancient technology dug out from the dark cells the Shadowkeeper used to transport himself from the ship to the planet, the two of them had no way of doing the same.

Despite his sourness of the fact, all they could do was wait until the fleet reached the planet. They might be able to shave off a few hours by taking a smaller vessel and running its engine on overdrive to cross the last leg of the journey.

Next came the problem of actually stopping a Shadowkeeper. The black-clad custodian might be of the same stock as the two of them, but only the most elite and most proficient of the ten thousand ever managed to become a Shadowkeeper.

Even then, he wasn’t counting the forbidden weapons and technology they were allowed to use.

That was where the true power of the Shadowkeepers’ lied. They wielded weapons and tools forgotten by history and forbidden to use by the Emperor himself. These were his personal tools, weapons or research material that he didn’t trust anyone, but the most elite among even his most favoured creations.

For all Octavian knew, the Shadowkeeper might just have a weapon he’d used to send the entire planet into a black hole if he doubted his own ability to accomplish his mission otherwise. There was no way of knowing what outrageous, mind-bending technology he was hiding in his power-armour.

Octavian had no way of counteracting such a weapon himself. Usually, he’d just disregard the possibility of his foe having such a weapon since he couldn’t do anything even if they did, ... but there might be a way under the circumstances he found himself in.

It could also solve the issue of the two of them not being able to go toe to toe with a Shadowkeeper.

It hurt his pride and more importantly, his honour, but honour had no place in his heart when the mission’s success was at stake.

He would have to cheat.

He just hoped whoever their target was would still be alive by the time they got there.

I stared at the frozen image; it was slightly distorted, the drone’s avian eyes not capable of perfectly recording the transhuman at the speeds it was probably moving.

[Subsequent targets are always the closest drones containing eldritch flesh.]

[Conclusion: The ‘Shadowkeeper’ can only track the closest instance of eldritch flesh to himself.]

I rubbed my chin. So he has something like a compass that points at my nearest tendril as if it was the north pole?

Conjuring up another holographic representation of Baal, I started from when it — He, I should call it ‘he’ — killed the first ever drone. I went over it again, drawing red lines between his targets.

“Weird,” I mused.

“Can you enlighten me?” asked Selene with a touch of irritation in her voice. Oops.

“You see this?” I gestured at the planet with red lines criss-crossing it. I held the image frozen somewhere midway through.

It was a frozen image the moment one of the drones died. I drew a dotted red line towards the nearest silver mark already, which would be his next target. What was interesting though, made itself evident when I marked our current position on the hologram.

We were closer to his last target than the one he would go for.

“Yes,” she said. I gave her a few seconds to take in the map.

“He didn’t come for us,” I said. “Even though all his previous targets show that he is targeting the closest signal of eldritch flesh. He either ignored the signal coming from here, or he couldn’t sense it.”

“I suppose the Marines would have some psychic shielding that could disrupt whatever he is using to track those things.” Selene said thoughtfully.

“I doubt anything they have could stand up to arcanotech the Shadowkeeper pulled out of his ass,” I shook my head. “Though ... Mephiston might have something. Hmmmm, I didn’t feel it though.”

“What ... is this ‘arcanotech’ you are talking about?”

“Arcane Technology, it was the Thing during the latter parts of the ‘Dark age of Technology’ as far as I know.” I said with a roll of my eye that threatened to send my eyeballs rolling out of their sockets.

I always thought it was stupid, but almost everything was stupid in Warhammer. The whole setting was an over-exaggerated satire.

[Satire: the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.]

Thank you. Budget store Google. I rolled my eyes, but sure, they were correct. And the Dark age of Technology obviously made fun of people’s irrational fear of AI taking over the world that ran rampant for decades by the time I died.

It was part of why I felt so damned alone and alienated in this world. It was like everyone was just some poor mirror held up to reflect humanity’s idiocy back at them. Some people here were the personified representations of the worst parts of humanity.

“And he has something like that?” Selene asked, a frown marring her face as she stared at the frozen frame showing the dark giant.

“Oh, of course he does,” I smiled despite myself. “I would be surprised if he isn’t loaded up to his neck in technology the Inquisition would have a stroke just hearing the name of. Shadowkeepers are allowed to use some weapons that sent humanity back into the Age of Strife. Probably one of those is a personal teleporter, which should be how he is moving around so quickly.”

“Should we run?” Selene asked, and I whirled on her with eyes wide. “What?” she asked defensively.

“... I didn’t think of that,” I admitted, then frowned. “It never even crossed my mind.”

“Ah,” she blinked. “I see? Well ... if there is one thing you should run from, it’s that thing.”

“Hmmm,” I thought it over. “You are right ... but to run would be wrong.”

“You are growing stronger by the day, Echidna,” she said as she shuffled up next to me. “Custodians don’t grow stronger, that Shadowkeeper might learn some new skills, but I bet he is only marginally stronger than he was a century or two ago.”

“A strategic retreat, is it?” I mused. “We will see.”

I narrowed my eyes as I felt another drone flicker and die, the last image it captured showing the Shadowkeeper lunging to impale it. That primal side of me was protesting at the very idea of running. There it was, an honest to Emperor Custodian in full glory, carrying the biggest no-no tech in existence.

To turn and run would be to give up on all that, to give up on seeing how I measure up to one of the deadliest warriors in the galaxy, to give up on the power I could gain just from getting a bite out of him.

Running would be the rational thing to do, the smart thing to do even. Maybe I was stupid, or my monstrous nature had finally caught up to me, but I just had to try and see whether I could actually beat that man before I could decide to retreat.

“We will see.”