144 – Vallia! Sort of …

144 – Vallia! Sort of ...

“This is it!” I said to the small crew up on the command deck. “We are finally here!”

We stood on the command deck, a large screen spreading from wall to wall before us showing the scenery as if we were standing on the nose of the ship. Out there, in the vast darkness of space stood a small green orb, glistening like an emerald under the rays of a nearby yellow star.

Vallia.

Alas, even though it was this close, it wasn't our first destination. The Tau commanding officer who’d been placed in charge of all Non-Tau auxiliaries had shot down my idea of building our headquarters on the Death World faster than an Imperial Commissar a deserter.

I rolled my eyes at the memory, at the agog look on his long face when I suggested he let us not only first set up a base somewhere in Tau space, but that he let us do so on a planet as lethal as Vallia.

Instead, he directed us towards ... that even tinier greyish thing in the vague shape of a ball orbiting Vallia itself. The moon was quite large honestly, the size of Earth itself if my memory wasn’t playing tricks on me, but it certainly looked droll when compared to the lush planet just below.

As for why I didn’t just ignore the order, built a fake base on the moon and then went down to the planet itself to build the real one? Well, being a dangerous world and all, combined with the fact that the entire damned sector was at war, there was a whole ass Battleship in Vallia’s orbit and another five rolling around the System’s edges, patrolling for incoming foes.

Considering that only with Alvash putting his own neck out for me did the commander even allow us to go and set up base before even making any contributions to their Greater Good, I was quite happy even with this setup. If there was one thing I could do, it was breathing life back into a barren chunk of space rock.

The only thing I couldn’t do just yet was making the planet dense enough to have the right gravity and to give it an atmosphere. Well, perhaps with Valenith’s extensive help I might throw together some gigantic ritual to accomplish it, but that would be an enormous waste of good soul energy when there were thousands upon thousands of planets fitting what I need just under the Tau Empire’s control, then a million more under the control of some other power.

“Let’s head down,” I said, grinning as I looked left and right. Selene, Val and the two lovebirds were up on the deck with me, as was Throgg and even Zedev. Apparently, what I had planned sounded thrilling to the old Magos, though he didn’t show it. “Who’s coming with?”

Alvash was over at the battleship orbiting Vallia, envoying with the Captain there and such, so we were blessedly free of his nosy oversight for the moment. Sure, the Envoy was interested in helping us, but I trusted him only as far as I could throw Khorne with anything ... touchy.

If he learned everything I could do, I’d have a whole bunch of Tau too coming after me and trying to lock me up in a lab. I mused, then shrugged. They were going to learn some of my abilities today either way. But I was going to play it off somehow.

Ideas were already springing into my head, diplomatic solutions coming along with more forceful military measures. My two new sub-brains were doing work. I wasn’t sure how long I was going to keep them, but for now the one with the Water Caste Tau template and the Fire Caste template based sub-brains were proving to be useful. They gave me internal second opinions, alternatives to doing things with either acute diplomatic solutions or with more thought out tactical stuff.

It was basic for now, since I had none of the education or experience either had, but the gene-edited instincts were there. That intuition was useful, and barely cost a dime in bio-energy.

I’d used the Earth Caste versions to study the knowledge I downloaded from Zedev’s sub-brain a while before, getting a more intimate understanding of it. The old Magos was not entirely willing to just ... give me all of his knowledge, but he did give me everything a generic Tech Priest would have known, along with some of his own generic tech knowledge.

Sharing his own personal experience and expansive biologist knowledge, though? That was a no-go from the Magos, which he conveyed by saying I’d have to pry it out of his cooling, dead grey matter if I wanted it. With how many encryptions and scrambling algorithms I saw activating in his head as he said that, I think he at least partially expected me to really go ahead and rip the knowledge out of his head.

I wasn’t a monster though, not that kind anyway, not to my crew.

“I’ll stay and keep order,” Val said, sounding like the moon’s overall droll state had more to do with his unwillingness to come with.

“I request my presence be permitted on the surface when you terraform the planetoid.”

“Granted,” I said easily, making Zedev’s unnerving dead gaze slide off of me and turn towards the small ball of rock. “Anyone else?”

With the atmosphere being as inhospitable as it was, that was inevitable. If I was anyone else, I’d have had to wait years, if not decades to find some very specific plant that could transform the atmosphere’s composition into breathable for both us and other plants.

I didn’t want to wait though, nor did I want to bother with that lengthy process. My mind-cores knew the answer the moment I stepped foot on the planet, they had the air analysed and had just the templates I needed ready.

More bio-energy flowed through my tendrils, revitalising all the wilting plants in a blink and making minute modifications to how they photosynthesized or whatever other method each of the specific types of flora used to feed. Mosses, mushrooms and other, stranger plants grew by the hundreds across the slowly spreading influence of my tendrils.

Each plant had a function, a purpose. The stranger ones fed on the more toxic elements in the atmosphere, and exhaled useful ones or at least transformed them to benign ones. The process still would have been needlessly slow if I’d left it at that, but I supercharged every single little thing from the smallest blade of grass to the towering mushroom-tree that rivalled the empire state building in height.

Bio-energy made the already vibrant green forest nearly glow with power. I could feel the hum of it in the air, the little arcs of energy zapping between the leaves and energising every molecule of organic matter. Just like with how it made my own body more powerful, resilient, durable, it did the same to the flora.

My forest covered the tenth of the moon in less than ten minutes, in another ten I had nearly a third covered and by the half an hour mark I had two-thirds of it. The rate of growth was exponential as my tendrils grew in length, size and number, the intricate web they made covering every square metre of the planet in forty minutes from start to finish.

I waited then, plopping down on a newly moss-covered rock and kept my mind focused. The plants were fighting, wrestling with the dreadful conditions of the planet. There was no nutrition in the soil, no helpful gases in the air and the rays of the sun were blocked out by the ever-present dust storms more often than not.

“This might take a while,” I said, my voice transmitting into the inner ears of both of my companions easily. “It’ll be quite boring for a while, since I’m just waiting for the atmosphere to become breathable for the next phase.”

Selene nodded, having settled down into a lotus position in the centre of a little meadow I made for her. Zedev just stayed still, his head swinging from side to side. His mechadendrites were more active though, and he had one poking at the nearest tree, one at a fern and a third burrowed into the ground.

His aura was a mixture of wonder and amazement, mixed with a fair bit of ... professional horror. I guess I’m going about this in some horrendously inefficient or straight up wrong way again. He didn’t bother including the information on how to terraform planets, so he’ll have to suffer through my amateurish brute force method.

In the meantime, I went about fixing the ‘dead soil’ problem. The web of tendrils that mostly kept to the surface till now created new branches and those burrowed into the rocky ground. I broke up the rocks, created some strange, fertile mash of soil from bio-energy that my mind-cores swore — it was supposedly a mix of crushed plants, ash and various types of manure I had the templates to for some reason — by and filled the cracks and even covered the surface in the new soil-replacement.

Hours flowed by, and the composition of the atmosphere slowly changed. The plants were putting in good work, inhaling bad stuff and exhaling good stuff like they’d just ran a marathon and were trying to catch their breaths. Meanwhile, I burrowed deeper and deeper into the crust.

Caves were scarce, but I’d found several mineral deposits on the way down along with even a few chunks of ice here and there. Not that iron, copper and the other regular metals would be of much use to me. Not yet.

I held out hope for maybe a hidden piece of Adamantium deep beneath the surface that the survey ships the Imperium sent here accidentally missed, or deemed too small to bother extracting, but I had no such luck. Instead, I at least found some of the rarer minerals that I knew would be at least mildly useful.

Tungsten, titanium, aluminium and just about every metal was in there even if only in small chunks. It would have been a nightmare to mine these veins the old-fashioned way, or even with modern — 21st century Earth technology — but I could cheat with my tendrils.

Being bored out of my mind with the waiting and the repetitive task of keeping my planet-sized forest alive as it wrestled the atmosphere under control, I started digging up those minerals one after the other.

While I was at it, I also burrowed several thick tendrils deep into the deepest part of the crust I dare to go. The temperature was scalding hot down there, threatening to melt my tendrils if I went any further.

So, of course, I covered my tendrils in Ambull carapace and pushed even further. I thinned the tendrils, turning them into thousands of spikes covered in the heat-absorbing carapace. Almost instantly, the drain on my own bio-energy reserves to keep the forest alive lessened as the scorching heat of the molten crust of the planet got transformed into more bio-energy by the peculiar biology of the Ambulls.

It wasn’t enough to maintain the entire forest just yet, but it would be in another few hours when the very air wasn’t trying to melt their leaves off.

Progress.

Once the atmosphere was done, I’d go onto building up the fortress I had in mind as my headquarters for the near future and then I’d have to go about populating the empty forests with life. Insects, rodents and the lot. That’ll be fun, and once that’s done I can sneak by that nosy Tau ship and check out what that ‘malicious collective intelligence’ they say controls the planet’s biosphere actually is.