149 – Dark Grey, Very Dark Grey

149 – Dark Grey, Very Dark Grey

“Interesting,” I murmured, my aura reaching out over the final stretch of space to spread over the ongoing battlefield. “Our blue friends seem to be winning, but ... there might be something interesting here after all.”

I grinned at Selene raising an eyebrow and with a flick of my hand sent up an illusory hologram of the peculiar Imperial voidship I’d felt.

“Look at this,” I said, an edge of excitement seeping into my voice. The image grew, the long, full-black ship extended and expanded. “Could this be a Black Ship?”

“No.” Zedev ruthlessly crushed my hopes in one swoop, but then reignited them. “Nondescript, military-grade voidships of that make are a popular choice among the Inquisition.”

“Oooh?” I smiled, my aura surging forward and spreading out through the ship. “Really now? I’m feeling two Psykers and at least a score of Space Marines onboard. You might just be right.”

“I merely infer the most likely circumstance based on statistics and data.”

“I know you do,” I said, glancing over at my two Psyker friends Val and Selene. “I want to go out and play with them a bit, want to come honey?”

“Sure,” Selene shrugged, trying to stifle the ferocious grin on her face. “Will you be keeping watch over the rest of the battle from afar?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Shouldn’t be too hard, the Tau are already winning with both numbers and firepower being on their side. However, I think it couldn’t hurt if Val jumped in to fry some of the other ships’ command decks. You’ve been wanting to test yourself against Void Shields, right?”

“That I have,” the Eldar said, hands clasped behind his back as his amethyst eyes narrowed. I felt his own aura, spread much thinner than mine, survey the battlefield along with mine. “This will be a splendid opportunity. Still, what are our primary objectives, Mistress?”

“Break the Imperial Voidship Squadron,” I said, taking in a deep breath as I warmed myself up. A buzz ran through me, bio-energy and soul energy pouring into my body like a tidal wave and mixing to enhance me. “Secondary goal, protect the Tau ships, below that, we destroy the mining sites on the planet. Optionally, we just capture them, but that’s a pipedream.”

“Why?” Little Fae asked, sounding like she’d been working up her courage to ask a question for the last hour and severely regretted opening her mouth halfway through.

“Because those are Promethium mines, likely manned by suicidally fanatical Imperials,” I explained, smiling at her. “I doubt we could capture any one of them without far too much trouble than they are worth without blowing the whole thing up, or making the Imperials blow it up to deny us the Promethium.”

“Do we need Promethium?” Her little boy-toy was the one to ask this time, just as uncertain about his right to be asking questions as Fae was.

“We don’t.” I shrugged. “But I bet I could make something fun out of it. Not a huge loss if we don’t get any though.”

“Should I gather da Boys, Boss?” Throgg asked, looking at the still spinning hologram of the Imperial ship like it was the juiciest steak he’s ever laid his eyes on.

“You do that,” I said, jumping to my feet as I made some adjustments to the mind-cores’ directives, the ones that were going to be commanding the ship and its defences in my stead with minimal telepathic oversight from my part.

Then I sent a surge of bio-energy into the ship and two lines of chambers opened up on one side of the ship. The boarding shuttles were less shuttles and more explosion-propelled spikes that could fit Orks inside of them, but they’d do. I didn’t bother to make any more intricate templates for the purpose, seeing as Orks were hardy enough to survive the battering and I had my Portals and Blinks for any personal boarding manoeuvres.

I just have to pierce through their Void Shields. I thought, my grin widening. I’d been training how to do just that with Val for months now, on and off again. I was confident in at least piercing through it with my psychic power, even if I couldn’t circumvent it like Val could just yet. Then I can see how well I fare against whatever a possible Inquisitor can throw at me ... should I start with the skill-set I had when boarding the Ork ship and ramp it up from there if I stumble across something dangerous?

That sounded like a fun challenge, so I decided to go with it. It wasn’t like two human psykers and a few Marines were going to put up much of a fight otherwise.

The man couldn’t bring himself to speak her name, if he knew it at all, and even when he said ‘witch’ it sounded like a curse word. Zara bit her lip, but then just nodded, her face stiller than the surface of a frozen lake.

Ignoring her as he strode down the winding hallways, past rushing stormtroopers and the blaring alarms flashing red light above, the man spoke into his comm-bead.

“Watch Sergeant,” the man spoke and Zara barely kept her face from twitching again. The commander of the Deathwatch Space Marine squad accompanying the Inquisitor in this latest excursion was a ... hard man to be around, especially for Zara who the man treated like a faulty grenade liable to explode in his hand if he touched it. “I’m afraid I’ll be needing your men’s services, we have a force of one thousand Greenskin boarding my ship. I want them gone.”

After a few more words, during which Zara had to manually tamp down on her urge to reach out with her power and listen in — that’d be a quick way to sign herself up to being a splatter on the wall — the Inquisitor let his hand fall from his ear. With the conversation dead, they travelled in silence for the next minute.

In the Inquisitor’s personal quarters, a bunch of cog-heads, engine seers the most of them, were rushing about applying last-minute ointments to the prepared power armour and saying a last few prayers to their clockwork God.

Zara was left standing around, her squad of ‘protectors’ remaining by her side as the man quickly donned the armour. She noted the weapons on it, the lightning claw on one arm with a bolter strapped to the wrist of the gauntlet and the heavy flamer taking up the whole lower arm of the other. As far as she knew, that was the Inquisitor’s go-to Ork-slaughtering setup for his armour and it proved to be quite effective on more than one occasion.

Still, it didn’t protect his mind ... it would have been so easy to reach out with her powers and maul his mind beyond help. With her Psychic Hood acting as a booster, she might even manage to take out every single person in the room with a single Mind Screech.

Alas, that very same Psychic Hood would at best load her full of drugs and anti-psyker poison the moment her power flared up without explicit permission to do so.

At worst, her head would explode ... or even worse than that ...

Zara’s eyes swam over to the side of the opulent room, to the metallic cage built into the walls and at the drooling woman rocking back and forth with her knees hugged up to her chest.

She had been beautiful once, some Shaman Queen of one primitive planet the Inquisitor had stumbled upon and decided to pull back into the fold. Now, her curls of blonde hair stick to her face in grimy clumps, her cheeks sunken and her arms skeletal. Her eyes were empty, dead in the same way Zara’s predecessors had been.

Thrace had gone with a different method for her, deciding to see what he could achieve with drug therapy and purpose-made mind-numbing concoctions. Zara had been forced to watch, forced to assist even and give detailed feedback after every test on how the poor woman’s mind deteriorated from a proud queen to ... that.

She couldn’t bear looking at her overlong, still seeing faint mirages of her teary eyes and frantic pleas for help.

“This way, she might be of some use to the Emperor,” Thrace had said. “Pay attention Witch, this is the fate of those of your wretched kind who didn’t have the decency to turn themselves in.”

Zara remembered the urge to retort that the woman didn’t even know of the Imperium, and furthermore that she surrendered her people without a fight. It was a useless thought, and one that would have earned her no favours. There was no pity in Thrace’s deep, dark pit of a soul.

“Let out the Pet,” Thrace commanded and one stormtrooper walked over to open up the cage the shaman queen was in, making the sorry wretch scuttle back to the corner with a squeal of fright. Then Thrace tapped something on his armour, and the metallic collar around the woman’s neck housing half a dozen injectors activated, pumping two of their contents right into her bloodstream.

Zara averted her eyes, knowing what that dosage would do to her. It seemed Thrace was willing to ‘spend’ her to repel the Orks’ attack.

“Kill any Greenskin you see.” Thrace ordered, and the woman bounded out like some ghoul, shuddering at the mere sound of Thrace’s voice with something between dread and ecstasy. She hissed as she took in a deep gulp of air, then searched before scampering out of the room, likely having caught scent of the invaders.

Zara felt her mental presence brush up against hers, a hungry, desperate need for ... more drugs, an aching need for more of the blissful release those dreadful concoctions granted to her the only thing on the woman’s mind. If she can still be called that.

“Let’s follow that thing,” Thrace said, servos swirling and whining as his bulky power armour strode up to the door. “Ah, and little Witch, you will use your power for the Greenskin. If you kill any less than a hundred of them, I will make you my newest Pet. I’ll be in need of a replacement after that one expires.”

Zara didn’t say anything, the lack of even a nervous gulp or a shiver a testament to her will of iron forged under the various tortures the Schola subjected her to, then further sharpened by the years she spent under Thrace.