Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

163 – Skewed Perspective

“A. Few. Hundred?” I asked slowly, trying not to sound like I was ready to smack Val into the nearest sun if I didn’t like his next few words.

I felt a hint of hypocrisy in getting mad over him, calling the death of a few hundred civilians as a ‘tiny’ collateral damage. I had destroyed voidships with tens of thousands on board, but there was one distinct difference between the two instances.

The voidships were manned by soldiers and their loyal servants. The civilians Val had condemned to death by his negligence were civilians. That might not have mattered to some people, but it mattered to me. 

And he did condemn them. I knew how powerful he was, and I had a good estimation of how dangerous this Daemon Prince would have been at its prime. A moment’s thought was all I needed to replay the recording of his battle with the daemon, as captured by the eyes serving as cameras on the outside of my ship. I let the recording play out in my mind, sped up so it’d fit within a single nanosecond as I dissected it with my enhanced cognitive speed. 

I’d seen cats that played less with their food. He could have disabled the daemon in moments, without incurring a single casualty. It might have been hypocritical, sure, but I did feel angry — though maybe annoyed or frustrated would better describe the mild levels of anger I felt — on behalf of those who died. 

“Yes … ?” Val said his centuries of experience likely alerting him that my reception to his report was much less enthusiastic than he’d first expected. “It is an exceedingly low number of casualties considering I fought a Daemon Prince in a population centre. By all metrics, anything less than the city being wiped off the map is an above-average result when taking into account prior Aeldari assaults on Daemon Princes of the Dark Prince.”

I closed my eyes and calmed myself with an effort of will. Instead of snapping back at Val, I reached out to Selene with a mental nudge.

I was gentle, and felt her smile through our Bond as she stopped what she’d been doing on the other end of the ship. I took a peek and found her … painting? Huh,

‘Hey?’ Selene asked. ‘What’s up?’

‘I am in dire need of my favourite moral compass,’ I said, putting some exaggerated cheer into my voice to mask the frustration I felt underneath. Hundreds of people had died in an absolutely preventable manner. I had the right to be angry … or had I? ‘My own might need some re-calibration.’

With an atrocious tearing sound that made me wince, Selene appeared before me with Blink. I already had a smile on my face by then. She was practising, and it seems she’d spent her time working towards making her teleports quicker and not more … fluid. 

I was sure if any Eldar other than Val saw her, they’d have called it a barbaric working of Sorcery with how she just banged her head against reality until it gave way. 

“Hi?” Selene asked, taking a moment to spin around and take in the room. Her gaze lingering on the scorched blood on the floor where our erstwhile daemon prince had been and on Val’s kicked-puppy expression before she turned to me with a raised eyebrow. “How can I help?”

‘Val here seems to think he was justified in causing the deaths of hundreds of civilians unaffected by Chaos taint just because it all ended in him taking down the daemon prince.’ I sent her. ‘While I’m of the mind that if he didn’t feel the need to gloat and play with his enemy, he could have achieved the same results without a single casualty. I didn’t tell him that though, because it feels hypocritical as hell with how many humans I’d killed in the last few days without a second thought.’

‘I’m honestly surprised he only killed a few hundred.’ Selene said with a little sigh as a frown creased her brows. ‘You can say whatever you want, he’s still an Eldar and they barely consider most humans to be better than the wild animals roaming their maiden worlds. Would you care if a thousand flies died in return for your most hated foe losing a favoured minion?’

‘I wouldn’t,’ I said with a frown of my own.’But it matters little. I’m asking whether I should drop the whole thing, in your opinion. I know dismissing the existence of humans is practically in his genes.’

“Did you even tell him why you’re annoyed with him?” Selene asked aloud, though there was a gentle tone in her voice. “He’ll never know what exactly upset you if you don’t tell him.”

“But … " What if my idiotic choice of minimising needless deaths comes back to bite me in the ass someday? What if when Val had a choice to do something important or save lives, he goes with obeying my orders instead of doing the sensible thing.  “Okay. Fuck it. Val, the fact that you playing around with your enemy killed hundreds of humans needlessly when you could have been done with the daemon prince in seconds is what’s upsetting me. Sure, killing the thing had been the most important part of the task I’d given you, but it doesn’t mean you can’t put in minimising needless casualties as a secondary priority.”

“Ah, that is … a unique viewpoint, Mistress.” Val said, frowning and looking thoughtful. I could practically see his opinion of me lessen by a fraction. “Though if I may be so pretentious as to ask for a clarification?”

I raised an eyebrow and nodded, motioning for him to go ahead. 

“What species deserve the considerations you’ve given to these humans?” Val asked, eyes narrowing. “Would you spare Orks? Necrons? … Eldar?”

“No, no, yes.” I fired off my answers, crossing my arms. “I’d only spare an ork of it to either join my army, or was fun to fight. Necrons are out of the question, unless it's one of the few of them you can actually negotiate with. As for the Eldar … “

I levelled an impassive gaze at him, squinting at his carefully sculpted mask of stoicism. Those pair of amethyst eyes watched every micro-expression on my face.

“Drukhari get killed to the last, no questions asked and I don’t care what they say.” My face darkened at the thought of them. There would come a time when I’d have to meet with those wretches, but I considered every day I could go without having to do so, a blessing. I also wasn't sure I could maintain my sanity if my passive empathy was blasted by the collective agony of Comorragh’s slave population. “On the contrary, I’d only kill an Aeldari if they’d given me a reason to. Self-defence, being an asshole and killing humans before me qualifies as a reason.”

I came up with those answers on the spot, but they seemed to have a weird effect on our resident Eldar. Val seemed to be deep in thought, like I’d just said something incredibly profound. It was weird, but I guess that’s just him being Val. Though, maybe all Eldar were weird like that.

“I’ll have to meditate on your answers, Mistress.” Val bowed his head. “Internalising your value system as my own will take considerable time and effort. May I take my leave?”

I briefly considered rewriting his genes and changing his body like I’d done so with my own Eldar template to remove that inherent dislike they had for anything less blessed with psychic might than them, but Val had those built into himself his whole life. For all I knew, removing those would be like kicking a foundational pillar out from underneath his psyche and sending him collapsing in on himself. 

It was much better if he just went ahead with whatever internalising he was talking of, and acted in accordance with what I’d told him today. Even if it meant, deep down, he’d still feel like he was having to take into consideration the lives of flies. 

“You can go,” I said, waving him away. “Aside from my gripes, you have done well. The task is done.”

“Thank you,” he said, then Blinked out of the room with a thoughtful look still worn on his face.

“And now, please make sure no one is listening in,” Selene asked, turning to me with a serious look. When I did so, she let a small smile show through. “Sit. I am going to beat some basic leadership skills into your head. I learned this when I was twelve, but punishing one of your underlings for doing what you had told them to do and getting angry at them for not being able to read your mind is just about the most horrible thing a leader can do.”

I made a couch behind me, and a comfy armchair behind Selene. Collapsing atop my own seat, I took out a notebook and pen before putting on my best dutiful student expression.

Selene giggled, then elegantly lowered herself into the armchair and crossed her legs. Folding her hands atop her knee, she gave me a playful smile.

“I’m glad you’re willing to learn,” she said. “Power by itself won’t be enough to build you an empire, if that’s really what you want. Not if you don’t want it to be made up of quadrillions of mind-controlled slaves anyway. You’ll need to learn how to lead and inspire loyalty in billions. I can’t really help you with that, but I’ve spent a good portion of my life leading people, squads, platoons or even a whole ship’s worth of them. I’m confident I can help you take the first few stumbling steps down that path and catch you when you eventually fall face first into the dirt … like with Valenith.”

I grimaced, willing myself to not get defensive. That’d get me nowhere and I could see where she was coming from. I had expected Val to have the same values as me, despite knowing how Eldar are. Hell, nobody would have values like me, with how messed up and convoluted they are, mixing 21st-century earth values, with more than a hint of jaded realism and knowledge of how shit this whole galaxy was.

“Can you tell me where exactly it went wrong?” Selene asked me gently.

“I didn’t explicitly tell him how to go about the task I’d given him,” I said. “I … trusted his judgement would be sound?”

“No,” Selene said. “Your problem was that you jumped right over the first few dozen steps. Let’s set that as an eventual goal: you want to be able to give vague orders to your lieutenants without having to worry about them doing anything wrong.”

“Sounds good … ?” I said.

“It does, doesn’t it?” Selene said, shaking her head. “That’s the end goal. Having people who can work as extensions of yourself around you, additional arms and legs to do what you want in your stead.”

“I could make drones to do that for me,” I said, challenging her line of thought. 

“Do you know how many officers there are in the whole of the Astra Militarum?” Selene asked. “Spread far and wide across the Imperium and beyond?”

“Millions?” I asked, seeing the direction she was leading this in. “I have limits, I can’t control a whole military force on par with the Imperial Guard even if I syphon power from hundreds of star systems at once, is that what you’re saying? That I need to learn how to delegate?”

“You are already delegating,” Selene said. “Zedev is constantly working on gene templates for you, isn’t he? While Bob is back on the moon building up your city.”

“If I still had a human brain, it would be starting to ache right about now.” I massaged my temples with a mock glare. “Don’t dance around it, please. What are you saying?”

“There is no simple way of summarising it,” Selene said. “I’m trying to teach you a lesson, so please play along. What were you expecting from Zedev when you delegated to him, and what were you expecting from Bob when you’d given him his task?”

“Likely some minor success from Zedev,” I said honestly. “I didn’t really appreciate just how limited by his tech level his mind was, so he over delivered from my perspective. Bob … Well, I gave him those sub-brains loaded up with a whole lot of knowledge, so I think I’d be expecting some buildings from him that are above average?”

“You just gave it to him and decided to see what’d happen, didn’t you?” Selene asked. 

“Kinda.” I shrugged. “I can fix it in moments if he fucks something up.”

“What if Zedev fucks something up?”

“Then I’m just back to ground zero, I lost nothing?” I said.

“But not when Val fucked something up,” Selene said. “Because dead people can’t just be fixed.”

“No, they can’t.” I nodded, trying to guess where she was going with this. Did I need to manage my expectations better?

“So let’s get back to Zedev,” Selene said. “He is a Magos specialising in biologism. He would be an Arch Magos if he wanted to be, he is the pinnacle of knowledge in the Imperium when it comes to biology and genetics. That means something. It does to me, at least, but I’m not sure you appreciate how much of a savant one had to be to achieve that if you expected just some minor successes from him.”

“Then there is Bob,” Selene continued. “The random human you didn’t know what to do with. The one who’d spent his last few centuries as a vagrant trying to heal his lover. Why do you expect him to be able to build anything worthwhile even if he got your super upgrades? He’s never done anything of the sort.”

“I mean,” I mused. “I loaded enough knowledge into those brains for him to build just about anything he sets his mind on.”

“I might be wrong with this one,” Selene said softly, frowning at me. “But I think you should set your expectations with him much lower. Even if your sub-brain upgrades work perfectly, he never used anything of the sort before, I’d expect him to stumble around at the start as he gets used to them.”

“Right,” I said, processing still. 

“To set your expectations, you need to know the person you are giving the task to,“ Selene said. “And you need general knowledge to give it context. So, that brings us to why you expected an Eldar to give two fucks about a few human lives.”

“Hundreds of lives aren’t ‘a few’,” I said with a frown.

“Context,” Selene retorted. “With the quadrillions of humans in the galaxy, a couple hundred are truly not a ‘few’ deaths. It’s miniscule. Nothing. Billions die every day in service to the Imperium, or starving in some hole. A good fraction of those deaths is caused by daemons, or their mortal servants. I know and understand why you’re mad at Val, but a few hundred deaths, statistically, are an extremely low price for putting an end to a Daemon Prince. It’s not a perfect score, but you can’t ever expect perfection in war. That’s a recipe for being constantly let down and disappointed. It also severely diminishes morale if the commanding officer is always disappointed, no matter how good of a result the troops achieve. I can tell you now that Val likely came in proud and glad of his accomplishments, and rightly so, because he completed your assigned task perfectly and only got beaten down. That’s not how you build loyalty or maintain morale. His failure was your fault. You gave him his orders and failed to properly put into words what you were expecting of him.”

“I see,” I mumbled, thoughts swirling and trying to right themselves. A part of me wanted to get defensive and ignore her words just out of pride. But I at least understood how little I knew of actually being a leader. 

“Which brings us to setting realistic expectations, because this all crumbles if you set those sky high,” Selene said, leaning forward with a serious look on her face. “You know how this galaxy works, intellectually, but you don’t seem to understand it. You never truly accepted this not being the same peaceful Earth you’ve spoken of, have you?”

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