124 – Getting Ready to Un-Ork a Ship

124 – Getting Ready to Un-Ork a Ship

“Isn’t this just so cool?”

“I suppose?” Selene eyed me strangely, having been dragged into my little warded off section of the ship. She wore a frown and had a slightly disapproving air about her.

What did I do now? I didn’t torture anyone to make this thing? I hummed, squinting at her frowning face to uncover the mysteries hidden beneath. My now fully metallic right arm came up to caress my chin.

What? I had some leftovers, and as such, my right arm was 100% necrodermis from the elbow down.

“Couldn’t you do everything that thing does already though?” She asked, strutting up and taking my gleaming hand in her own. She turned it over, poking at my palm and running her finger along the seamless metal of my wrist.

“I mean,” I averted my gaze. “Sort of? But this is free. And metal, and cool. ... Look!”

I shifted the hand, a minuscule bit of bio-energy flowing into it and from the wrist down it transformed into a sword.

“Impressive,” she said evenly, then shifted her own hand into a bone sword and cut my necrodermis blade in half with a half-hearted swing.

I stared at her sword-hand as it slowly morphed back, then up at her steely eyes. She raised an eyebrow.

“*Cough*”

I levitated the cut-off part and held it up to my cut stump, the two metal parts melded back together by themselves. With zero energy cost. I’d have needed to eat a newborn’s worth of bio-energy to heal a wound like that if it was made of regular flesh and blood.

“So you were saying?” Selene crossed her arms and stepped her feet, that challenging eyebrow still raised.

Unfortunately for her, she looked adorable while glaring up at me, looking unimpressed with a barely concealed smirk tugging at her lips. Not the time. She is angry ... for some reason. Annoyed, is a better word I guess, so whatever I did couldn’t have been too bad.

“It was free to repair though,” I said carefully. “Plus this will hopefully interact with other Necron tech we can decipher.”

“Mhhhmm,” she hummed.

“Didn’t know you could turn your hand into a sword,” I attempted to change the subject. Honestly, the main reason I did this was that I wanted something more in line with my sci-fi fantasies. Tendrils and birthing eldritch monsters were all nice, but having what were basically super-advanced nanites in my body just made me giddy.

I never liked Bio-punk much as a genre either, since it tended to be rather disgusting and gory.

“Really?” Selene gave me a smile. “Maybe you would have known if you as much as stuck your head out of this room in THE LAST TWO MONTHS.”

Oh. I blinked, mouth opening in surprise. I held myself back from face palming and ‘ahhh’-ing as the metaphorical lightbulb lit up above my head. So that’s where I fucked up.

“Sorry,” I said with a grimace, looking at my feet. My initial reaction might have been lacklustre — I mean, I just played with my new toy for a few weeks, what was there to be angry about? — but the more I thought about it, the worse I felt.

We are sort of dating and I just ghosted her for two entire months. That’s shitty.

“I-,” taking a deep breath, I forced myself to look up and meet her eyes. I almost averted my gaze instantly as I noticed the glimmer of hurt beneath her playful smirk. Don’t be a wimp. You beat back big bad Tyranids, you can look your girlfriend in the eye. “Sorry for ... well, how I’ve been acting. I- No, I guess there are no excuses for ignoring you for two months.”

I almost ended the apology with a flirt, ‘there are no excuses for ignoring my beautiful girlfriend for two months’ was right on the tip of my tongue before I reconsidered. That would be making light of her feelings, especially that hurt at being so easily forgotten.

Stupid one-track mind. Becoming an eldritch monster only made it worse. I thought inwardly, feeling angry at myself. Self-control was something I lacked, but I thought anger or a hunger for growth would be the only feelings I had to look out for, but it seemed curiosity could just as easily result in trouble.

I opened myself up to her, letting her nascent aura seep through my mental defences and taste my feelings.

Selene visibly deflated after holding my gaze for a painfully long five seconds. She let out a sigh and massaged the bridge of her nose as I continued fidgeting.

“You are so troublesome,” she sighed again, hands on her hips as she looked up at me. An imperceptible tension seemed to have drained out of her and her aura calmed considerably, but while the worry was gone, the annoyance remained. “Two months. I was thinking you just must be doing something extremely important to shut yourself away like this. I don’t know, planning a new scheme or working on enhancing this ship for the next stretch of the journey ... but you were just playing with your new toy.”

‘And forgot about me.’ Went unsaid, but I wasn’t entirely socially inept, despite what most of my actions up until now might suggest.

I put myself in her shoes. I imagined Selene ignoring me for months, shutting herself away without a word and then learning that she’d been twiddling her thumbs basically and forgot I existed.

“Well,” I grinned. “Once we reach Tau space, we’ll probably masquerade as Imperial deserters or mercenaries looking for hire. I thought getting into that Imperial mindset was in order. ... Especially since that ship doesn’t feel Necron-made.”

Why didn’t it feel Necron-made? Well, because it was positively glowing in the Warp. It was in a way much different than a Warp-Storm, but in others, it felt similar at the same time. An almost chaotic cascade of warp-energy coiled and twisted around it, bending the laws of realspace with its sheer intensity.

But unlike with warp storms, there was a purpose to that chaos. It was controlled, if only by the vaguest interpretation of the word.

“Orks,” Val said, his voice somehow tainted by both glee and disgust in equal measure. “Am I assuming correctly that you aim to ram that ship and board them?”

“You assume correctly,” I said with mock haughtiness. I should get better at this fancy speech most races prefer in this galaxy ... maybe. Eh, I’d rather not. Fuck them. “I bet you’re all bored to bits, sitting in this tiny ship for months. Let’s stretch our legs for a bit!”

Space is extremely vast though. How did we stumble upon a single shitty Ork ship?

[Answer: Course trajectory had been slightly altered to set the flight path on a collision course with the suspected Greenskin ship.]

When? Why? I frowned.

[Answer: Approximately 19 hours and 31 minutes ago.]

[Answer: Main consciousness had been wishing to test the new ‘Necrodermis Enhanced Human’ Prototype. Minor course alterations were deemed to be acceptable to please the Main Consciousness]

Well, count me pleased. I narrowed my eyes. And pissed. Whichever mind-core decided to go forward with those changes without asking for my permission is on template-deciphering duty for the next month. NEVER do anything affecting me without my express permission.

[Acknowledged. Mind-Core#6789 has been assigned to decipher the Tyranid ‘Norn Emissary’ gene sample.]

Good. I nodded to myself. Now, let’s get back to business.

“Any questions?” I asked, looking over the crew.

Bob nervously raised a hand and kept it up even as Fae elbowed him in the side.

“Yes, Bob?” I asked.

“Am I understanding it right when I assume you want all of us to board the Ork ship and fight them personally, uhm, My Lady?” He asked, his voice a touch strained as he tried not to wheeze. Little Fae was quite vicious, it seemed. I’d have to do something about that. I couldn’t have her discourage questions and free thinking.

“Yes,” I nodded. “Though you don’t have to if you don’t want to. This is mostly for the three of us, so the two of you can sit this one out.”

It seemed his form of address at least saved him from a second elbow to the kidneys. Lucky guy.

“No more questions?” I asked after a few seconds of silence, glancing at Selene and Val, but only finding varying degrees of eagerness on their faces. “Alright then. Let’s get- Oh, Fae, what is it?”

The Eldar girl — no, she’s a woman, hell, she’s probably a hundred times my age. Still, she gives me teenage girl vibes — sheepishly lowered her hand and cleared her throat before finally speaking up. “Could I also go? I- You gave me all this power, and I haven’t had the chance to test it yet in live combat.”

“Sure,” I nodded. “That is the main reason we’re having this little exercise, too. We all have new stuff to test out, and a conveniently placed Ork ship might as well be the unfortunate site of our test run.”

“I’d like to go too,” Bob spoke up, giving a glance at Fae. “If she goes, so do I.”

Awwww. I really have to do something about him looking like an old man. It would be much cuter if she didn’t look like his granddaughter.

With another line joining my ever-growing to-do list, I gave a final sweep of the crew before nodding. The gravity engines slowly dialled down and I could feel the moment the sub-space tunnel the bent space around us had created collapsed.

And now we are only going at relativistic speeds. The ship didn’t like it; it wasn’t made for these close-light-speed velocities, so I quickly slowed it further. Without the sub-space tunnel, the ship would have been torn apart in a few minutes by the force pushing it, or rather dragging it forward.

I reached out with my borrowed gravitational senses, located the Ork ship with the help of my third eye and perfected our trajectory. 10000 kilometres.

“We have about five minutes to prepare,” I said. “Get ready. I’ll ram into the side of that junk. We’re likely to be fighting a horde of the green bastard the moment we set foot on their ships, so prepare well.”

Fae and Bob both jumped and rushed about in a frenzy, while Val and Selene just stood beside me. I felt their auras join mine in surveying the enemy ship, though Selene’s felt a bit different.

She’s using my and Val’s aura to project her own that far out? Where my and Val’s auras were thick tendrils of psychic power, Selene’s was a tiny thread catching a ride on my aura and only expanding into a searching web once it reached the Ork ship. That’s smart. She’s really improving. I wonder what else she learned while I locked myself up.