Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

188 – Overprotective? Who? ME!? Never.

I was still thinking about how to not fuck up horribly at being a ‘mother’ when the time finally came to address my new citizens. I had a bit more than a thousand ‘daughters’, so it was almost impossible for me to form any manner of a personal bond with all of them. Maybe I could make a thousand drones, split my mind and control each personally and visit them each every so often. 

I had some alternatives in mind, things to make it all easier. Some pretty … questionable, like the idea of just fabricating memories and putting them in their minds — an idea I quickly discarded by the way, no need to get angry at me. While another I’d have to wait until they had fully formed souls to follow up on.

Their souls were still in the Warp and I wasn’t confident in being able to extract them without hurting them. Those souls were tiny, miniscule and impossibly fragile even compared to the flimsy souls the Tau had. That was the problem with all clones. 

When they fully mature, they might be able to withstand me dragging them up into my Realm. From there, I could pull their consciousnesses into the Immaterium and spend time with them there.

My soul had plenty of power to spare and all of it was just sitting there, doing nothing beyond keeping the whole Realm secured around it. Not that doing so exhausted any of it, that was just a byproduct of it.

So we wait. Until then, clones. My mind could certainly use the workout of trying to control that many drones at once … not that I need to visit them all at once. 

I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly and put on my game face. My spine went ramrod straight, emotions fell off my face and a hard edge entered my eyes. My comfy white clothes shifted, morphing into an elaborate robe lined with silver embellishments and my hair twisted around, each thread moving according to my command to coil into a professional up-do. I decided to go with having half my hair in a crown braid and letting the rest cascade down my shoulders in pretty little curls.

My mind reached out and twisted the wall behind me into the mimicry of a carved marble. With all that done, I slowly let my aura sweep out and spread over the globe like an invisible tsunami.

I connected my mind to every piece of technology, having built a telepathic relay — a nifty little piece of psychoactive flesh connected to sensors transforming bioelectric signals to a picture — into every monitor and every projector I’ve put into the arcologies. Above every square that housed my confused new citizens, I crafted a solid light projection with some Illusion Sorcery and let it hang above them. 

I stared into the floating point mid-air I’d set as the ‘camera’ for my broadcast and did my best to appear imperious. 

“With that, the three hours are up,” I said, pausing and making a show of snapping my fingers. In that moment, every lazy or rebellious fool left behind on the ship was dumped onto the squares and the portals hissed close. “Welcome to Vallia Prime, I applaud your bravery for accepting my invitation. I am Echidna, the owner of the moon you are currently standing on. For as long as you remain here, you will be my subjects, my citizens.”

I waited a few seconds, letting the slower ones digest my words and teleported latecomers I’d dumped a metre up into the air to scramble to their feet and rub their aching butts from the rough landing.

“Life on Vallia Prime will be different in some ways, while similar in others. For one, you will be living in these arcologies for the foreseeable future as I only have a single city on the moon constructed so far and it is far from spacious enough to house the fifty million of you that’ve come along,” I said. “If being locked inside overly bothers you, there will be opportunities for those who excel to earn or buy land in the Capital. Effort, ingenuity and creativity are something I’ll strive to reward, in one way or another.

“Now, onto a more serious subject.” I let a cruel smile slip onto my face. “Ground rules. Or the constitution of our fledgling nation, if you prefer it by that name. I will not overly intrude on domestic policy, letting you govern yourselves in whichever way you choose in that regard beyond these few simple rules. I have three crimes that will always earn a prompt and brutal death: rape, murder and crimes against children. Committing any of these crimes will earn a punishment from me directly and not your own police force, there will be no trials, no way to weasel your way out of punishment. If you commit these acts, I will know and you will die

I could feel the cloud of fear and indignation radiating off of them, millions of scared and angry humans. Well, the stick was important, and I had to beat that into them first. Now for the carrot.

“Next rule,” I continued, my smile losing its cruel edge. “Every single one of you now has some basic rights that will never be infringed upon unless you forfeit them by breaking any of my other rules: you have the right to live, the right for a home, and finally, the right for free water and food. You will never have to fear homelessness, starvation or the lack of water.”

“The carrot and the stick, as they say,” I said. “I am sure most of you would be happy with that, but those who’ve been more involved in your politics must have noticed I did not list the right of self-governance among your rights. That is because I will not be allowing you to learn to govern yourselves through decades of paid corruption, revolt, and the like. 

“My daughters, whom the more adventurous of you might have encountered already, will help you elect leaders among yourselves and create the foundations of your bureaucracy. The only things you are not allowed to do are to create a military or to explore the world beyond these protective walls. I have no need of your services as soldiers or that of your lives, but I also don’t need you to throw it away trying to explore the extremely dangerous wilderness of this moon.”

“Your first order of business should be learning where your provided residences are,” I said. “Search for the residential buildings and talk to the receptionists, they will assign you homes. Flowing water will be provided for you as for your food, you’ll have to walk over to the agricultural floors or work out a system to transport them to yourselves. I’m sure some enterprising soul will be hauling food up the floors by tomorrow to earn some quick money. That will be it for my announcement. You will still have millions of questions, some my daughters will be able to answer, some they will not. Those you can ask of me through elected representatives. I will be allowing a single elected ambassador of each of the fifty arcologies to be sent to me for that purpose. Now, get your home, take time to digest what you’ve learned and plan out your future. I wish you all luck.”

The broadcast shut off with my final smile freezing onto millions of screens for a long second before they all went dark. 

With an effort of will, I twisted my aura, and instead of linking myself to technology, I spoke into the minds of all of my … daughters.

It was hard to think of them that way, even if I accepted that acting as their mother would be the right thing to do. I just … I suppose there was a lack of intent, and attachment. I didn’t feel them grow within me over the span of months and I had no motherly instincts to speak of. 

Maybe time will solve that issue, dragging up those slumbering instincts to the surface. Maybe it won’t. I’d manage either way.

‘You all heard my speech,’ I started, my voice reverberating in a thousand minds at once. I felt such naked joy in most of them at just me taking the time to talk to them. ‘I’ll be relying on you all to get this slumbering wheel of civilization rolling. I think I’ve given you all you’ll need, but if anything comes up you can reach me through Alpha. For anything less urgent … I am planning to visit each of you personally in the following month. We can talk then. Good luck children, and take care.’

Joy, expectation and resolve radiated from their minds, like little kids wanting to do their best to please their absentee mother. There was also dread, fear of failing in the duties I’ve entrusted to them and anxiety. 

I sent off a quick message to Alpha, asking her to organise work hours for them properly and some recreational activities. Even if I couldn’t … wouldn’t

I need to give them some protection too, I mused, frowning as I imagined angry mobs lashing out at them in an attempt to do … something. They had no reason to want to hurt me, not if they weren’t serial rapists or chaos fanatics, but humans did dumb things under pressure. My daughters already have superhuman perception, reaction time and cognition. What could I add in to help them ward off idiots?

Pheromone glands of some kind, calming or paralysing, would be best for mobs and crowds. Something more lethal for persistent idiots was a must, fast acting neurotoxin injected through tiny spikes in their fingertips maybe? That could work. 

They had to get some defences too, maybe reactively hardening subdermal armour? I could do that, and in a way that would not restrict their mobility and range of movement either. 

It wouldn’t stop plasma fire or bolter rounds, but it’d make small arms and regular melee weapons effectively harmless. Which should be more than enough, since I never intended to allow my citizens to own anything bigger than a laspistol. 

Still, some last line of defences, or contingencies would be smart to have. I didn’t make my daughters to fight any serious opponents; they had to manage and mingle with regular unarmed humans. But I couldn't say with certainty they’d never find themselves on the wrong end of a boltgun. This was that sort of galaxy, far too many people found themselves up against malicious entities far out of their league. 

Escape teleport, some turtle-shell type of thing … or maybe a black box? 

The teleport would have been my first choice, but it was unfeasible, not with their souls being so pitifully weak and in the Warp. They would never be able to power anything close to a teleport, their souls would shatter if they even tried to channel that much power.

The turtle shell idea was a bit better, though not my favourite. It would just prolong their suffering. I could probably put in an extra organ without any adverse effects that would grow a thick carapace shell around their bodies when they felt immensely threatened, but anything that could do that to them would likely be able to overcome that. 

That left the black box idea. Which wouldn’t protect them as such by itself, but would mitigate the damage instead. My mind worked restlessly, wheels turning a thousand times a second as I came up with blueprints, optimised them, reviewed their feasibility and then discarded them, taking only the useful bits for the next iteration.

The black box would be a tiny bead of condensed neural tissue, able to store centuries’ worth of memories. It would be surrounded by a near-indestructible shell. If I had my way, that shell would also disguise itself as regular flesh for a while after the body surrounding it died. 

That way if any one of my daughters managed to get themselves killed before I could get their souls secured in my Realm, I could just revive them with all their memories intact using that ‘black box’. Their souls would die and the person that came back would be a copy, but that was the best I could do with how fragile their souls were. At least I knew for sure their souls would dissipate into the Warp near instantly upon death, almost painlessly. There were worse things that could happen to you after death, far worse. 

All my previous ideas were easy to implement, though to allow them to produce more pheromones and neurotoxins in their bodies, I had to modify their digestive tracts. I needed a pair of tiny extra organs to extract the needed chemicals from their consumed food, a few extra channels to deliver them to the sacks to contain them, and, of course, I had to strengthen their entire digestive system so the new nasty stuff they’d have to eat to get the materials wouldn’t affect them. 

Finally, I had to modify their taste. That was the trickiest bit. Humans had it coded into them to yearn for foods containing things their bodies desperately needed. Water when dehydrated, food containing iron when they had iron deficiency and so on and so forth. 

I had to change the neurotoxin a bit in the end. I doubted my daughters could find it in themselves to keep the nasty slugs that naturally secreted the toxin through their skins as pets. It was even harder to imagine them licking the disgusting things for a few minutes every day.

No, I’d much rather rework the organ concocting the toxin to make it from some much more palatable raw materials.

It took me a while, but I finally had something I was reasonably happy with. They wouldn’t be super-soldier material in this day and age, but they would have been back on 21st century Earth. 

They should be safe enough with that … though I think I’ll make a gene-locked sidearm for them too. Something like a Phaser from Star Trek, maybe? So they can swap between lethal and non-lethal shots. Yeah. That will do. That will do just fine.