Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

159 – Raid the Raiders

Jed led his ragtag group of marauders through the dilapidated tunnels and stairways towards the hull breach. During it, he had caught some interesting information.

Apparently, the Void Shields went to shit and a dozen or two smaller asteroids smashed into the reinforced hulls of every ship as they cleared the last stretch of the asteroid field.

Annoying. Now he had to go and check whether there were any Orks or something hidden away on those asteroids and protect the few techies they had while they repaired the damages.

He took in a deep breath, a manic grin tugging at the edge of his parched lips as the pinkish fog emanating from a nearby hall invaded his nostrils.

Oh, how much more fun it would be if he could just stroll into that room and join his brothers and sisters in whatever they were doing. By the way his skin prickled and every tiny brush of air made itself feel on his overly sensitive skin, Jeb wagered they were doing something very fun. Either torturing some poor sod, each other, or just straight up having an orgy.

That specific sensitivity-enhancing drug had many such uses, none of which was alien to Jed.

Alas, he had a task. Grumbling to himself, he almost missed when some of his more idiotic minions tried to slink away and join the debauchery.

“Oh, no you fucking don’t!” Jed whirled around with a furious scowl on his face. “If I can’t go, neither can you fuckwits. Get them!”

That was all he had to say for the other marauders to grab the three adventurous fools and beat them within an inch of their lives. 

“Okay stop,” Jed said, an order which took a few seconds and smacked a few idiots lost in the thrill of inflicting pain. “Let’s go.”

The three were left behind, though Jed knew they had almost enjoyed the beating they had gotten. They were moaning and groaning like a bunch of wenches getting their brains fucked out.

Which was a distinctly disgusting sound coming from well-built, unwashed men like those three. In all honesty, Jed was expecting that whoever was going wild in that room would pull the three idiots in before torturing them to death.

It took them half an hour to reach the vicinity of the breach they had been told to check out and a chill ran down Jed’s spine.

The ship creaked around them, the old machinery and the mass of metal groaning in agony. Light flickered in the halls, but there was no sound of life coming from further ahead.

Jed frowned, sniffing like a bloodhound, and his frown turned into a scowl. Blood. Fresh blood. It wasn’t an alien scent and didn’t specifically mean anything out of the ordinary was going on, but this section of the ship was a crap pile.

No one would willingly be here without an explicit order. The blood likely wasn’t spilled by one of their own enjoying themselves in some hidden away fun.

No, Jed smelled something nastier. 

“Be alert,” Jed barked out, letting some of his goons take the front. “There could be something nasty that slipped onto the ship. Ready for combat.”

A few bends later, with the tension in the air growing so thick it was palpable, they found something. A woman giggled nearby and Jed had to suppress the urge to smack her into a wall as he stared down at the corpse lying at his feet.

Just by taking a single look at it, Jed knew it wasn’t done by one of his fellow worshippers. The corpse was too intact, the death too quick, and the expression frozen onto the dead woman’s face was not one of ecstatic rapture, but primal terror.

A single piercing weapon went in through the chest, leaving a gaping wound as wide as a fist. Someone had impaled the woman and crushed her heart before throwing her off their blade like a discarded piece of trash, which left her crumpled at the foot of a wall.

Jed tried to check for footprints, but it was for nought. The surrounding morons had long erased any such track with their incessant roaming.

“Something killed our sister,” Jed said, his voice grave and echoing in the creaking tunnel. “That something is down here, with us, hiding in one of these dark tunnels. FIND IT!”

Thankfully, the idiots Jed had collected to be his underlings were sane enough, so they didn’t just scatter in every possible direction with giggles and laughs. He had seen those sorts, and knew their like was more likely to throw themselves at the enemy to experience the joy of an agonising death than to actually think and do their damned jobs.

“AND KEEP THE COMS OPEN!” Jed shouted after them as they separated into squads with each one led by a goon that had a comm bead in their ears. Jed had a dozen of them still behind him and he waved them forward, “Let’s get going.”

He could hear the clangs of boots on the metallic floor echo through the tunnels even over the constant rumbling of some great machine resonating through the structure. 

“Jed!” The comm bead in his ears buzzed, and it took Jed a few moments to place the voice. It was one of his newer team leaders. “There is something in here! We found three corpses torn apart, limb by limb.”

“Stay there,” Jed said, his hand snapping up to his ear. “Where are you? I’m coming to check it o-“

“Boss!” Another comm-link buzzed to life in his ear, his oldest comrade Hog’s panicked voice coming through. “There is something here! It got one of the boys. One moment he was there, then he disappeared … all we found were claw marks on the metallic floor and blood.”

“WHERE?!” Jed shouted, but before he could hear the answer a feminine shriek coming from one of the drugged-up women in his own team reached his ears and sent a shiver down his spine.

Looking over, he saw it. A towering creature shimmered into reality, its carapace rippling like a mirage as its baleful pair of dark eyes stared at him.

It had the shrieking woman held in an enormous clawed hand with a talon impaling her through the stomach. As Jed watched, the beast squeezed and the screams of agony reached a higher octave before falling silent with a horrifying wet squelch.

Snapping out of his daze, Jed reached for the laspistol holstered at his hip, but by the time he pulled it up the beast was gone. Jed blinked. He was sure he had kept his eyes firmly on its horrid visage, staring at those mass of tendrils writhing at the base of its head like some vile mockery of a beard.

It was gone. 

“Shit,” Jed cursed. “WEAPONS UP FUCKWITS! Light up the tunnel! Shoot anything that moves!”

The comm-bead buzzed in his ear, but Jed couldn’t allow himself the distraction at the moment. He clutched his pistol, staring into the dark tunnels illuminated only by sparse, flickering light with bloodshot eyes.

His marauders skulked forward, jittery as they snapped their lasguns around and jumped at shadows. Then Jed heard a quick gasp from behind him, but by the time he turned all he saw was one of his men cut in half with his intestines spilling onto the floor.

Of the monster, there was no trace. 

The next ten minutes were perhaps the most terrifying time Jed had ever spent alive, with his comm-bead constantly buzzing with frantic reports of his team leaders of their men getting slaughtered one after the other by unseen monsters with either brutal savagery or lethal precision while he himself had to watch his own group grow thin until he stood alone amidst the corpses of his comrades.

Then the comm-links started going dead. Sometimes he caught mutters of ‘they are all gone’ or cut-off screams before the link died, but more often than not, there was just static. 

Then came silence.

Only the dreadful creaking of the old ship’s metallic skeleton and the low rumble of distant machinery kept him company as he waved his laspistol around, letting loose shots at shadows that grew and died with the flickering lights.

He saw movement, a shadowy form darting between doors under the cover of darkness. Jed screamed in terror, his finger clamping down on the trigger and his weapon spitting out lasbolts that emitted a dim red glow as they raced down the hallway. 

They struck nothing, only the telltale sound of the lasbolts splattering against metal reaching his ears from the distance. Another shadow moved, right on the periphery of his vision and Jed whirled around, his pistol coming up to fire … but no lasbolt came no matter how hard he squeezed.

His hand shook, and his eyes widened in terror. The form moved, darting closer and disappearing into a service room mere dozen metres away from Jed who threw himself at the closest corpse, his hands already reaching for the lasrifle his dead comrade still held in a death grip.

Jed tried to rip it out of the dead man’s large mitts, but found his strength lacking. His heart thundered in his chest, his teeth gritted so hard he felt they might crack, but he didn’t care. He tore the lasgun out of the corpse’s clutches, whirling around as he brought the rifle up to his shoulder and flicked the safety into full-auto.

The monster stood before him, towering over Jed. It was still as death, its dark eyes conveying a malicious amusement at his terror.

Jed squeezed the trigger, but before he saw what happened the front half of his lasgun was just gone. A moment later, pain blossomed in Jed’s gut and he looked down to find a gleaming blade impaling him. He stared at it dumbly, in utter disbelief.

He was going to die.

Before that realization could fully sink in, another blade went through Jed’s head and snuffed out his pathetic, brief life. Before his body even hit the floor where it would join his comrades in death, the monster was gone.

Off to find more prey. Off to gather intelligence and slaughter whatever living creature it came across for its Mistress.

*****

“Nasty,” I mused, my voice coming out more amused than anything. “A Daemon Princ … -ess? Huh. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, are we? The others sent their stronger Greater Daemons and the God of degenerates just sent me a newly-ascended Daemon Princeling. One that’s throwing her shitty worshippers my way instead of showing up herself.”

“What are you going to do?” Selene asked.

“Same as I was planning,” I said, terminating the links to my drones still onboard the ships below with a final self-destruct command. “I know they have nothing I have to be afraid of onboard, so a few bio-ships will handle them. Unless either of you want to let loose?”

“I’m good,” Selene said, having watched the first few minutes of my Lictor drones roaming the ship’s insides and apparently gotten more understanding of what Slaaneshi cultists did for fun than she ever wanted.

“As much as it would please me,” Val said. “I’d not want to waste your precious energy, Mistress. I’m sure I’ll get the chance to indulge myself soon, when a proper opponent shows their face.”

“Suit yourselves,” I said, shrugging. I was more than happy to be done with this rabble sooner rather than later. It was time to take out the trash. With little fanfare, I sent out … five globules of writhing eldritch flesh which I moulded into bio-ships outfitted with about as much of my strongest plasma-cannons as I could reasonably fit on them. 

The passive Void Shields were up, but no active combat shields were activated despite five enemy ships appearing just a few thousand kilometres away. It seemed my drones exploding on the command decks or inside the captain’s rooms of each ship had torpedoed their capabilities for a quick response.

Might as well make the most out of it. 

With a flex of my will, soul energy flooded my body and the five bio-ships disappeared, jumping through space and snapping back into existence right under the enemy flotilla with their cannons already aimed at the underbelly of the enemy ships. 

The cannons went off, and for a moment it seemed a new sun was born in the endless darkness of space, a bright supernova that flickered into a fleeting life, disappearing a second later. 

Three of the opposing ships remained in a state to still look vaguely intact, the rest had their shields torn to shreds and blasted into oblivion. Their remains now floating through space like melted slag, quickly cooling in the chilling coldness of space.

The next barrage took care of the three remaining ships with little fuss, their shields having already been breached and disabled by the previous salvo. 

“Well, that’s that,” I said, theatrically dusting my palms off as I commanded the bio-ships to gather up the remaining scrap metal and absorb whatever organic matter remained, just in case some of it was reusable. “Done. Wanna go back?”

“Won’t you retaliate?” Selene asked. “Track down where they came from and strike back at the source?”

“Nah,” I said, shrugging. “No use. It’d be a waste of both time and energy to get there, beat them up, then come back. These are just humans, worse, they are cultists. They have nothing I really want.”

“You could free the slaves?” Selene tried, her voice sounding uncertain, but it made me think. 

They had slaves on the ships too … but I had felt their minds. Zara had been in a better state of mind after years of abuse at the asshole Inquisitor’s hand than some of those slaves. 

Death had been a mercy to them, since I couldn’t heal their minds, but maybe if there was a whole planet controlled by these degenerate cultists … 

“Hmmmm.” I thought. “I suppose that would be one way to get my first round of citizens, wouldn’t it? Why not? Let’s go bust some cults and free some slaves!”