166 – Cain, the Hero?

166 – Cain, the Hero?

I stood with my arms crossed, not quite tapping my feet, but having to suppress the urge as I stared down at my conversation partner.

“Are you ... apologising?” Valenith looked at me dubiously, a hint of disbelief hanging off his every word.

Am I? I thought, scrunching up my nose at him for a moment. I was supposed to be some dignified divine entity to him, I think, would he really take it well if I just apologised straight up? Practically admitting I was fallible?

Well, I was.

“I suppose,” I said grudgingly. “My expectations are still skewered and it was unrealistic of me to expect you to behave how I wanted you to. Especially without express orders to do so.”

“ ... understood?” Val said after a long moment, managing to keep his face and voice steady, but I could tell his emotions were in disarray. That his control slipped far enough for me to feel it with just my passive empathy, he must have truly been deeply disturbed by my apology. “I will endeavour to act according to your expectations going forward.”

“Yes, well ... we’ll see.” I nodded slowly. “We will have to establish priorities with every task in the future. But I think we can make it work. I don’t want you to jeopardise the success of a mission to save lives, only to save lives when success is certain.”

*****

Experiments. There were just so many things to experiment with. I had been keeping to doing only the fun ones with likely immediate benefits at the end of them myself lately, while unloading the tedious ones to my mind-cores and the ones requiring a more experienced touch to Zedev.

Just about every single thing I did with bio-energy could be done better. Less energy wasted, more streamlined forms, more cohesively put together structure and so on and so forth. The list was infinite.

For example, my mind-cores were still working hard on making some of the most costly bio-materials less expensive to make while Zedev was working on cranking up the efficiency of my heat converters. Already, he had come up with a design that pushed the energy production up by 5% and I barely dropped the project on his table a week ago.

It wasn’t surprising that the Ambull didn’t have a genetically perfect design to serve as my heat converters, but the speed at which Zedev improved upon it was still both enviable and praiseworthy.

I didn’t know what manner of gifts a Magos Biologist liked, but I should probably think about it. He deserved something nice for all his excellent work.

Reluctant as I was, I kept myself from letting my thoughts linger for another moment. I had work to do, cultists to stop and daemons to banish. I only allowed myself a quick update to check up on my still-running experiments, to make sure none of them were about to derail catastrophically.

The monkey was taking apart a rail gun and was attempting to shove the energy battery of a whole-ass weapons battery into it, but that was the worst of it. I let the little fellow play with his toys and just reinforced the wall around him to withstand the explosive failure of that endeavour, should it come down to it?

I had already sent a good thousand drones, shaped into a vaguely humanoid form but made up of entirely tyranid parts to the surface. To a regular human, they will hopefully look like humans in sleek white body armour instead of the monstrous space-bugs that they really are.

They were running off of the still, ehm, rudimentary combat algorithm I’d loaded into their heads with my mind-cores running oversight. I myself was running oversight over those mind-cores.

Still, he was not winning a shootout against three vans full of psychos with just his humble laspistol.

“Wouldn’t be hiding a firearm under your clothes, by any chance?” Cain asked, glancing over at the woman. “Would you?”

“Uuhm.” She scrambled to open up her handbag, then pulled out what Cain had almost mistaken for a grenade in a moment of hopefulness. “I’ve got pepper spray? ... and a knife!”

With that, she snatched up a kitchen knife as long as her forearm, made of stainless steel.

“Better than nothing,” he said, an encouraging grin practised over his centuries of service slipping onto his face effortlessly. It had saved him more times than even the laspistol in his arm, convincing troopers to put themselves between him and death on numerous occasions. “When they enter through the door, throw that pepper spray at them. I will shoot it, and hopefully whatever happens keeps them off our backs for a bit.”

The woman gave a jerky nod, her lips in a thin line. She was holding herself together admirably well for someone who’d supposedly never had to fight anything more dangerous than a rat in her life. That was good. She might be useful.

Of the few people who had been unfortunate enough to be in the cafe at the time, the server was huddling behind the counter, while the young couple were hiding away in a corner. All three quivering in terror.

Cain took a quick glance outside, and saw one van, the one with the blasted windshield come to a screeching halt just outside while the other two split off to the left and right, heading somewhere down those streets to cause havoc.

That suddenly made surviving this much more doable, with two-thirds of them gone. Cain checked his comm-bead again, but of course, the jammer seemed to be on the van parked just outside.

“Get ready,” he whispered, fingers clenched around his laspistol and keeping track of the woman next to him out of the corner of his eyes. He heard them exiting the van, then cackling as they strutted up to the front door. “Throw NOW.”

The woman lobbed it with an underhanded throw that would have made some troopers in the Guard jealous. Cain leaned out from behind the cover, laspistol aimed just as the first trio of cultists saw the pepper spray a metre away from their faces.

He fired and blasted a fist-sized hole through one of the cultists neck. That would have been a pretty good hit, had he been aiming for that. His second bolt struck his actual target, and the compressed energy bolt ignited the gas inside the pepper spray in a fiery ball of death that exploded outwards.

The idiot whose neck he had blown out had been blasted back out the open door, likely dead as his flowy royal purple robes caught fire. The other two stumbled back, screaming and clawing at their faces as flames licked at their clothes.

One of them was a woman, barely wearing anything, only a few bands of cloth that kept her from exposing everything to the world. That meant there was nothing keeping the flames from searing her flesh.

The other was a man, dressed in flowing robes similar to the first and he likewise went up in flames like he had doused his clothes in alcohol just to be extra flammable.

His eyes quickly roved the corpses for weapons, but found only knives, short swords and a single slug thrower. Someone had returned his lasbolts before with some kind of energy weapon of their own, someone still waiting outside.

Probably sitting right on top of the jammer he would have to get rid of if he wanted to survive this day.