NOVEL NEXT 146 – Blue Nuisances
‘Mistress, the Tau are asking to come aboard and for us to provide them with your expedition’s camp down on the planet.’ I heard Valenith’s rather irritated voice buzz through the telepathic link the moment it connected to my mind. ‘What do you want me to do with them?’
‘Please notify the good Captain … whatever his name is, that he is neither my superior nor does he have any authority over me.’ I sent back, my face twitching slightly at the gall of that blue-faced moron. He likely wanted the achievement of getting his hands on a human artifact to be on his file and not on his superior’s. ‘While you are at it, do notify the Commander of this Sector that the Captain is obstructing us. That fellow was quite pragmatic, and with a Magister on its way, he’ll likely leave us be until the Ethereal handles the situation. Also, tell the Captain of all of this once you’re done.’
‘Understood, Mistress.’ He said, his voice still tense. ‘I’ll do as you command.’
‘Don’t doubt that you will.’ I said, smiling. He probably wanted to pull the Tau’s spine out through his asshole, but had to hold himself back. ‘I trust that you will handle this diplomatically, yes?’
‘Of course, Mistress.’ He said, sounding mollified by my trust in him.
With that, the link went dead and for a bit I watched on as he did my bidding. I had eyes on the walls inside the Tau Captain’s ship of course, so I could watch how he went red in real time and how he gritted his teeth once Val gave his exemplary performance.
Hell, even I almost believed he was truly feeling dreadfully sorry for not being able to help the captain, and I could feel his loathing for the lesser alien radiating from him.
Still, it seemed my diplomatic muscles were still in the baby phase and would need some time to grow into something dependable. I watched as the Tau Captain debated with himself, trying to decide whether to pull back and play it safe or to risk his superior’s wrath for some fancy entries on his record.
Just as he was tilting dangerously towards taking the gamble, I reached out with an infinitesimal soul energy and gave him a tiny nudge. I was careful, treating his flimsy mind like it was more fragile than a thin sheet of ice. I didn’t even give him any thoughts, didn’t implant anything new, I didn’t do anything other than dampening his bravery just a tiny bit and making his cautions nature flare up.
“Pull back,” he ordered after a moment, leaning back into his command chair as he narrowed his eyes at the screen before him. “Keep the ship in orbit for now and look for the expeditionary camp on the planet. Also, prime weaponry in case that human vessel turns its weapons on us, but do not engage.”
I smiled as I pulled my mind away from my little fly on the walls of his command deck and snapped back into my avatar. Standing up, I cracked my neck and tasted the air again. “Sufficiently not deadly for the next phase!”
A few extremophile species I had were already happily ambling around the planet, but I’d found one major problem. Water. We barely had any damned water on this dead ball of rock. I’d dug up every single clump of ice under the surface, but it was still barely enough to fill up a sea the size of the Caspian Sea.
That was not enough, not nearly enough for the ecosystem I was planning to foster here. Slowly, the many gene-edited plants were working on creating oxygen and hydrogen, along with nitrogen and a whole lot of their useful gasses and minerals. A few even made water straight up, but that would take time.
Meaning, I had to rely on fauna that didn’t care overly much about getting to drink all that often. My first choice was, of course, Ambulls. Those things could live in deserts, glaciers, and jungles. Hell, I’d only know whether they’d survive getting thrown into the sun once I tried it. My mind-cores gave back a 0.000000000001% chance of them surviving, but I mean, that’s not zero, right?
After that, I went about looking for species that fit the bill in my template library that also wouldn’t be too troubled about living in a forest. Scorpions, millipedes and a slew of insects were the easiest answer, so I had a number of them made. Of course, most of them were of the gigantic variant, with scorpions tall enough that their stingers would work as spear tips.
Next came some reptiles, iguana-like things, and others that looked more like Komodo dragons. Then, of course, I made a few of my newly yoinked dragons into the mix too. I made vast cavern and tunnel systems already, so it wasn’t much trouble to make an expansive network of magma-filled world just for my little beauties.
Though these are the smaller variants of dragons … hmmmm, they’ll need a name to differentiate them from the huge fire-breathing variant. I mused, watching as the first couple dozen dove right into lakes of magma kilometres beneath the surface. I guess I could go with ‘Drakes’ for the small ones and ‘Dragons’ for the big ones that spit flames. Sounds good.
So, now that the Drakes were having fun, I also made a handful of the Dragon variants and placed them all around the planet. These things were hardy animals, having survived in the non-breathable and highly sulfuric atmosphere of Vulcanis so I wasn’t too worried about them.They just needed scorching heat and some rocks to chew on and they were happy as fiddles.
“Magos Zedev,” I said, catching a flicker of the mechanical man’s attention. “How goes the work with those new templates I asked for?”
“Some of the requested gene-templates are within optimal parameters.” Zedev spoke, and I just knew it was his not-AI I was speaking to and not the man himself. Rolling my eyes that he let a subroutine of his mind deal with me while he poked at the dirt, I magnanimously forgave him. He had goodies to give after all. “Not all items on the list are within those parameters yet though. Do you wish to request the data of the completed ones transferred over, or of all prototypes?”
“Just give me what you feel is good enough,” I said, shrugging. I could always rather swiftly replace outdated materials if my whole base was really going to be almost entirely organic.
Grinning as he stored the data-packet in that small partition in one of his sub-brains designated for as my ‘pick-up-point’, I quickly snatched the data out of there.
It threw it at my mind-cores, letting them look it over and go over it just in case they somehow found something the centuries old Magos Biologist missed.
They actually made some small adjustments. Zedev was a master of getting things efficient and potent, but my mind-cores shared my intimate instinctual understanding of organic matter and managed to blend the jigsaw mix of genes a bit better into one continuous stream.
I think I’m going to hunt down a Jokaero when I get the chance … actually, can’t I just ask Trazyn to give me one? That miserly Necron still didn’t pay me for that last outing.
It wasn’t that I blamed him too much, my avatar practically melted and splattered across his metallic carapace from the exhaustion back there at the end. He was likely only going to take it back out of his Tesseract when he was back on Solemnace.
Not that a single techno monkey is going to be enough payment after all that bullshit I went through to get his toy.
I had every intention of wringing Trazyn out like a wet towel for every last gene-template he had up his back pocket.
Fulgrim Clone, a peak Aeldari Warrior, a Krork, a Khrave … maybe even a Watcher? Trazyn had a whole lot of goodies I still very much wanted.
By the way, how is that Emissary Bone Sword deciphering going?
‘Efficiency has been improved upon since the last query by: 120%’
While that still cost me more than terraforming five planets like I’d done with this moon, that was still quite good. With all the excess bio-energy I had, I could make an actual great sword out of the new material without bankrupting myself.
Plus, once the planet was up and running, my bio-energy stores would start going up again. Especially if I could somehow get away with building up a Dyson Swarm around the star of this System, but sadly I had no idea how to do that with an overeager Tau breathing down my neck.
My mind-cores pinged me with a note that said Zedev’s new templates were done being reviewed and streamlined. With a small smirk, I looked through the list.
So basically I have my organic equivalent of concrete, ferrocrete, plasteel and ceramite. I also have wood in various colours that’s as tough as the latter of those and a prototype metamaterial mesh as a replacement for Adamantium.
Adamantium was a weird metal, said to be ‘indestructible’ and supposedly a metre thick layer of it was all the armour plating Imperial warships needed to be ‘invincible’. Fact was though, Imperial ships blew up all the damned time and their armour was pierced like … by every other fart-gun aimed their way.
Could be because all those ships are like, ten thousand years old and every armour plating is just a haphazardly welded together mesh of scrap taken for previous ships. Or the Admech are being miserly and only use a coating of Adamantium?
Alternatively, it was also quite likely that the metal was far less impenetrable than it was rumoured to be. Still. I had something with apparently similar qualities to it thanks to Zedev.
The organic versions Zedev came up with were all slightly … off. Of course they were, it would have been too much to ask a single Magos to make a product rivalling something the entire Admech only got thanks to their STCs.
The chitin-like replacements for plasteel and ceramite were, for example, pretty expensive to make. Alternatively, they were practically free to maintain unlike the Tyranid chitin of a similar quality that would have taken exorbitant sums to keep working.
I was sure that if I had a Forge World at hand, it’d be leagues cheaper to just strip mine a few asteroids and make the Imperial standard materials and use them for my base and spaceships.
Alas, I wanted to be a special little snowflake with my own style, so that was a no-go. For my headquarters and main ships it was, anyway. Once I had to transfer over to a larger scale, efficiency would trump everything … but that was well into the far future.
For now, I had to worry about being able to keep this planet and not the logistics of my future galactic armada.
With a small huff, I jumped to my feet and floated up into the air. Damn did it feel good to be exercising my psychic muscles again without having to worry about running out of power.
I tried using some of the little tricks and techniques Val shared with me on our journey here, trying to minimise energy wastage. I’d asked him when we were so low on energy I didn’t even dare lift my mug of coffee with telekinesis lest we don’t have enough energy to Teleport the ship away in a bind.
He was all too happy to help me optimise my psychic powers a bit. I was still apparently quite wasteful with it, but I wasn’t in the horrendously bad category at least. When I was bothering to use those techniques, anyway.
I let them go now, just freely drinking in some of that power and letting it flow through me, energise me. It was awesome.
Rising into the air, I closed my eyes and sent my awareness out through the network of tendrils to every single living thing on the planet. I searched for a place, a right place to build something great.
Plains of swaying grasses, deep jungles, rolling hills covered in moderate forests, tundras up north, mountain ranges that would make the Himalayas blush. There was everything on this planet one could need.
Aside from oceans and a power grid, but anyway! Those would come with time.
I have these wood-like and chitinous materials, where would an absolute monstrosity of a building look good built out of those materials?
My sub-brains and mind-cores complained at that thought. The diplomatic sub-brain urged me to choose a place that could be the centre of an eventual city, my seat of power. The strategic mind of the warrior sub-brain instead urged me to select some place defensible, to make my fortress impregnable and care not for how it would look.
My mind-cores in turn sent me a list of places that fit both ideas and even took into consideration my preening need for my base to look awesome and picturesque.
Hmmmm. I hope I can finish this up in time. Would be cool to receive the Magister in a newly built base. Would go a long way to establish that I really ‘do have control over’ the ‘artifact’.
I was pretty sure even an Ethereal would be impressed by the whole planet’s ecosystem following my will.
