Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

Exploring a one-of-a-kind space station the size of a planet, hidden inside a star, built by super-advanced aliens sixty million years ago, sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Or maybe if not exciting, then thrilling? Horrifying? One of those. 

In practice, it was atrociously boring. The whole thing was empty once I got a few hundred meters away from the defensive installation outside the bulkhead. Just empty corridors, lifeless chambers, barren architecture that all got so damn repetitive after a while, I would have wondered whether I was just going around in circles if I didn’t know better. 

I knew for a fact that there were Tomb Worlds that could do exactly that, confuse your senses, overwrite them slowly over time as you advance into the depths until you start confusing left with right, up with down, and even worse things. Fortunately, while my aura couldn’t penetrate far, my other senses were good enough to orient myself and always know where I was relative to the north and south poles, for example. 

I’d have been bored to death had I not taken the risk to maintain the telepathic link with Selene ever since she’d come out of deep meditation. We’d spent the last five days chatting or doing mental watch-alongs of old movies I managed to reconstruct. Watching movies by having them projected into your mind was a bit weird, but it was more fun than the alternative. 

If I were by myself, it would have taken years, if not centuries, to map the entire Hollow Sun, but I made a buttload of stealth drones based on the final design I was using for my current Avatar and sent them out to explore after the end of the first day. I hunkered down, just absorbing the data the drones gave me whenever they returned from longer and longer exploration missions. Once I had this section of the place fully mapped, and by section I meant a 3D region the size of Africa if you spun the continent on its axis, I’d move to another section. By my calculations, I’d have every part of the place not restricted from access mapped out by then.

Speaking of restricted sections, there were a few of them I’d stumbled upon, either just storage spaces sealed shut millions of years ago or, if my suspicion was correct, proper tombs holding still-slumbering Necrons of all kinds. 

I kept my activities on the down-low, not wanting to give the Necrons any reason to believe I was anything but dead. I was pretty sure I’d given a good show of going out in a blaze of glory, and that the absolute butt-load of exotic radiation I’d made sure my final explosive gift to them was enough to make even their sensors short out. Even if it didn’t fully, all it needed to achieve was to make them dismiss any artefacts they found in the sensor logs as a result of the explosion. 

I didn’t use any soul energy, just the bare minimum to keep chatting with Selene, and even that connection was maintained primarily by my Soul, and not my Avatar. Both my Avatar and Selene were just nodes linking up to the server housed in my Realm, so to speak. 

But that still left most of my immense processing power unoccupied, so I kept myself busy iterating and optimising drone and other bio-tech designs that were swimming around in my head. I focused primarily on the stealth stuff, making the ones used in my current Avatar more streamlined was easy, making them all work together in harmony, in a way that made them work together flawlessly to produce a better effect than any one of them could on their own was a challenge. 

There were always seemingly unconnected parts that somehow still managed to interfere with each other if you just threw them together into a patchwork prototype design. Then there were ones that were outright interfering with each other. It was a mess, but one I had both the time and willingness to solve. Facing the Necrons on their home turf had been a bit of a wakeup call. I mean, sure, I wasn’t using my most powerful or destructive tools — because I kinda wanted the super cool Hollow Sun for myself — but I still didn’t think I’d get dogged on like that. They sent me into timeout, then did much worse than that. 

An army that I could have used to conquer an Imperial Hive City with, that I could have used to tear through a continent-sized Tyranid horde, would have failed to break through a single Necron defensive stronghold if I didn’t cheat my ass off. Their Gauss weaponry was already annoying enough with how easily it could negate all my organic defences, and that was their weakest type of weaponry. 

Using the same trick, I even contacted Val and Fae to get updates on how things were going back at Vallia. I don’t know how it never occurred to me before to do this, sure, I couldn’t just teleport all over the place as I wished; I needed something solid to anchor my destination point, and even then, it took me singing that resonant choir to be able to teleport stuff into or out of my realm. But telepathy was simple. It didn’t transfer anything substantial; soul energy was already flowing to and from each and every one of those people who had their souls in my Realm. Tacking on telepathy on top of that connection was simple enough, since I could offload the psychic strain of maintaining it to my Soul, which barely even felt it.

The reports were mundane enough, Val whining about the Orkz acting up, and telling me about how he’d taken Zara — who I’d totally not forgotten about — under his wing to be trained as a proper psyker. Then there was Fae, who mostly just gushed about how awesome and great Bob was, which would have been pretty annoying had she not been one hundred percent right. That dude had apparently constructed every building I’d ordered him to build weeks ago and was now filling the vast swathes of leftover empty space with residential buildings in a hundred different styles. Somehow, he’d managed to make it all look harmonious despite there being stuff I could only call brutalist and cottage-core scattered around the place from what I’d seen in the memories Fae sent me.

Sadly, I couldn’t talk to Alpha or any of my other daughters this way. Last time I’d been back on Vallia Prime after conquering the Iron Halo, their souls were still far too small and fragile to withstand being yanked into my Realm. But there was growth there, and I had my fingers crossed that they’d continue to grow at an accelerated pace. At the current rate, they’d be ready in a year, plus or minus a few months, depending on whether any one of them matured faster or slower. 

Playing with Mara was also a nice distraction on top of everything else, so yeah, I somehow managed to stay sane during the following weeks as I slowly, methodically, came closer and closer to having a full map of the place. 

The ‘surface’ of the Hollow Sun was entirely inaccessible, and from what I had managed to figure out, a whole third of this artificial planet’s volume was taken up by a ‘shell’, maybe the equivalent of a planetary crust. Its purpose? Keep the rest of the planet safe, syphon energy from the stellar core around it, and stuff like that. How it kept back enough heat, mass and gravitational pressure to cause nuclear fusion in the part of the star surrounding that ‘shell’, I had no clue, but it did. The gravity was a comfortable 1.1 Earth Gs everywhere, and I could sense an astronomical amount of energy flowing through coils and arcane funnelling systems when I was close to that shell. It was ridiculous, and more than a bit terrifying. Even I could only just guide and aim the plasma flowing in a star, but the Hollow Sun were holding up the entire weight of a fucking star all the time, and not just that, it gained power from doing so, instead of needing energy to manage that ridiculous feat. 

Other than that discovery, there were three other sections of note. One was a large, heavily defended section that once more seemed designed to defend against something trying to break out, just like the anti-teleportation kill-zone. Another was the docking bays holding the Necron void-fleet, and last was what I dubbed the ‘living quarters’. That latter was the small section of the Hollow Sun currently in active use, centred on a colossal, always-open Dolmen Gate leading to some misbegotten section of the Webway. It was near the docking bay, and there was a … runway, for lack of a better word, leading to and from the docking bay, so the Folmen Gate was likely the primary tool they used to get in and out of this place. It wasn’t like they could just fly off like on a regular planet, after all.

There was a fourth section of note, a strange region in the very depths of the Hollow Sun near the core where … stuff got weird. I sent in some drones; some never returned; others returned with records of wandering through a labyrinth of empty corridors for centuries, and yet, from my perspective, they just disappeared beyond a bend, then appeared in the next instant. Some just disappeared, never to return, and lastly, there were even some I found at the other end of the Hollow Sun days after sending them out to explore, their records showing that they had just taken regular, simple turns in regular corridors, and they didn’t even notice being transported. For all intents and purposes, they never should have been more than a few hundred metres away from me. There was some timey-winey fuckery going on down there that I didn’t want to touch, so I made the objectively reasonable decision to stay the heck away from all that. So yeah, the fourth one didn’t really count, and I decided to treat it just like the Hadex Anomaly: Ignore it, pretend it doesn’t exist, go about my day. 

I was supposed to be the Eldritch space horror in this dump, not some morphic red wart on the skin of reality that refused to be observed and was probably some extra-dimensional being poking his nose into this shithole from a higher dimension, or whatever the hell was squatting in some sixty-million-year-old metallic twat’s basement. I was totally fine with those things existing in my backyard, no nightmares or anxiety or anything, at all. Yep. It wasn’t like just looking at the massive gaping wound upon reality that was the Hadex Anomaly gave me a worse case of ‘the heebie jeebies’ — very scientific, thank you, I know — than taking a dip into the Warp or stargazing at the Great Rift ever could. 

So! Did I mention that I’d been shadowing fancy-looking Necrons in the residential areas for the last few days? Well, I did now, and it had finally borne fruit because sticking to the side of a wandering Lychguard returning from a patrol finally allowed me to slip through the ridiculously tight security into what I knew to be the ‘command centre’, or at least the Necrons’ closest approximation of it. The facility was the size of a large village, and the few scores of Necrons going about their lives inside it were all fancy-looking, full of non-standard modifications, golden attachments, capes, staves, artistic deathmasks, whatever went for jewellery and clothing in Necron high-society. 

And that’s how I ended up stuck to the ceiling like the sneaky little spider I was, right above the good Overlord-Regent Ahhotekh’s throne. I spent the last few hours watching as he went about his day, commanding his troops, primarily about fixing up the damage some ‘invading abomination’ had done to something called ‘Confinement Zone Defensive Installation 5’. 

Hmmm, I wonder who that could be. I mused to myself, having to physically hold myself back from letting out a giggle. 

All that was left to do was decide if I gave a damn about the consequences of vaporising this metallic twat. Like, his Crypteks were liable to just do whatever if he died, and who knew how the rest of them would decide who’d become the new Regent? Did they even have any Necron Lords or Overlords on hand? Would their entire society collapse as they ran around like headless chickens? Would they start a genocidal campaign against whoever to avenge him? Would whatever was keeping the Mad Phareon in semi-dormancy fail if I took him out? Hell, would the remaining Crypteks be able to maintain that stasis field I’d heard them speak about without that dude I vaporised?

Questions questions. So many questions and so few answers. It was troubling. I didn’t have all that long to decide either because by my calculations, Cain and co. would be running out of water and edible stuff in another week, tops, even if they had rationed the stuff I’d left in their pantry. 

Was a forced alliance or maybe a peace treaty on the table? Could I strongarm them into something like the deal I had with the Tau? I mean, the Necrons were a different beast entirely, and I was sure they’d be trying to lure me into a trap to shoot me with some War in Heaven era superweapon that atomised my soul or something to that effect by the second meeting. That was just how Necrons rolled. They weren’t exactly ally material, and I was only willing to take the risk of the Tau trying to double-cross me because they were practically harmless to me. The Necron, as proven by my very recent experiences with some of the weird shit they kept in their vaults, were very much not unable to harm me. They had shattered Star Gods, and I wasn’t quite arrogant enough to think myself the equal of an intact C’tan. 

I’ll need someone to maintain this place; I don’t know nearly enough about how Necron technology works to do so myself. What I’ve learned from Trazyn’s Crypteks is still just the basics, the Necron equivalent of high school stuff, maybe brushing on what might have been undergrad knowledge or its equivalent in their society. 

I’d just killed one of the foremost Crypteks, as I’d just learned from eavesdropping. Funny, how I only learned the name ‘Ozkan’ once I had already turned him into molten scrap. Maybe I could set up a deal with Trazyn; he was supposedly a powerful Overlord in his own right, even if most Necrons hated his guts. Even if he didn’t have enough Crypteks on Solemnace to maintain the Hollow Sun, he could get some from other Tomb Worlds in his Dynasty. Surely, they’d be happy to lay partial claim to the Hollow Sun. It was probably the Necron equivalent of holding Jerusalem or something. 

And Trazyn would likely convince them not to double-cross me needlessly. Not sure how viable that plan is, I’ll need to pick his brain about it. But at least it’s a plan.