Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

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.

The combat algorithm, for example, considered anyone doing anything even just vaguely appearing like an attack as a threat to be eliminated. The mind-cores could realise that a kid screaming as lunatic cultists were trying to gut his mother with a buttering knife, was probably not a sonic attack, but it was better to be safe than sorry. My mind-cores had a tendency to act with what might be called an overly practical mindset, meaning, they might just give the drone the go-ahead ‘just in case’ the bawling kid was in fact a camouflaged bomb disguised as a toddler.

Nothing like that happened yet, and I was left just remotely running every likely volatile decision through my head. I had to go over hundreds every second, but it was manageable. I had both the bio-energy and soul energy to spare. 

The only town I had left largely to fend for itself was the one Cain and my fake duplicate was in. I considered looking into where exactly his Inquisitor girlfriend was, but I didn’t want to make the little adventure I was preparing for myself to be ruined by spoilers. 

They couldn’t do anything to me, and I was pretty sure the Inquisitor chick was freaking out about some strange new type of xeno popping up all of a sudden. With that xeno being me and my legion of drones annihilating the cultist presence on my newly conquered planet. To make a point, I had only sent three of my lesser combat drones to each town, with the only exception being the capital which was teeming with the little shits and was five times the size of the second-largest settlement.

Try as they might, they couldn’t even scratch my drones with anything short of a melta or something similarly hard-hitting. Of which, they apparently only had a few of, making it pretty easy to avoid them hitting any of my drones.

With most things in order, I turned a fraction of my attention back to the drone I had left behind with Cain. I might not be there personally, but I could puppet it from a distance.

*****

Cain cursed as another lasbolt impacted the wall mere inches away from his head as he snapped out a few retaliatory bolts of his own. They didn’t land of course, but they shattered the windshield, temporarily blinding the driver and sending the car careering around for a bit as the one behind it smacked into its rear end.

His foes thusly slowed for a moment, and he beat a hasty retreat through the back door, finding himself in a storage room. The woman he had been drinking tea with not long ago was surprisingly the first one to follow after him, a frown of fearful worry on her face as she looked around the new room.

Cain’s thoughts were whirling, cogs clicking as he found one glaring problem with the room: it had no door leading outside. 

Windows? He checked quickly, and found only a small dropdown window that the white-haired woman might have managed to squeeze through, but he doubted he could even just get his head through it without getting stuck. 

I could use a melta right about now. Cain allowed himself a moment of surly cussing, imagining blowing a hole into the damned wall to get out. Damn it. He should have taken Jurgen with him. 

Sure, that might have alerted the unreasonably large number of spread-out lesser daemons and psyker cultists of a Blank’s presence on the planet, and would have gotten far too much attention on them than healthy, but he would have someone dependable with him at least.

Instead, all he had at hand now was his laspistol, and a bunch of civies scared out of their minds. Civies, who worshipped a blasted Chaos God like it was normal. He did not trust a single one of them to as much as cut his beard without slitting his throat. 

Still … they clearly wanted nothing to do with the proper cultists and he could always use more bodies between him and the enemy. The only problem was that he couldn’t even arm them with anything beyond kitchenware.

“Frak,” Cain whispered, trying to find an out as the roar of engines blared just outside, followed up by the maniacal laughter he’d come to associate with some of the more deranged Slaaneshi cultists. Well, there was nothing to it. 

He couldn’t kill all of them alone, but calling reinforcements was impossible with the cultists jamming his comm-bead. That made destroying the jammer a priority, only preceded by surviving long enough to actually be saved by the reinforcements. 

He could hope that Jurgen and the others back at the safe-house noticed the cultists and were already on their way, but Cain knew he couldn’t leave anything up to ‘hope’. That never worked out. 

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. 

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