Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

197 – Headaches of an Ethereal

Aun’Saal watched the human woman pout … yes, that’s what that expression was called for their kind, he recalled. 

Echidna was an enigma. She had been rather simple to read at first, and looked every bit like the military leader suddenly finding themselves with political responsibilities and trying to employ their previous experiences in the field of diplomacy to little success. 

She had grown, and grown so fast Aun’Saal almost suspected she’d been switched out for someone else. 

He’d just been thinking that it was only surface deep when he saw how her act unravelled when the exhaustion hit her following her use of her powers. He’d found her poise dissipating into the wind as the weariness hit a bit disappointing, true masters of the art would have used even that to their advantage.

Like he had, in the face of death, and with the very real possibility of him having to use up his extremely pricy translocator beacon, he put on an act and tried to use it to make the woman show some of her cards. 

And she had, only to whirl around and start insulting him! 

He only realised she had been playing the same game as he moments before he did something regrettable.

Willing as he was to give his life for the cause and fervent as he was in the belief that even his death at the hands of this woman would benefit the Empire, revealing to them her untrustworthy nature and the dire risk she posed, he also believed that he could work to benefit the Empire much more if he was alive and remained that way for a while more. 

Which was why he had a top of the line translocator in his back pocket, linked to the security system of his shuttle’s onboard AI and to the numerous implants keeping track of his bodily functions.

If he was injured, if the shuttle’s hall was severely damaged, if he felt intense fright or even if he just clenched a pair of muscles to manually trigger it, he would have found himself in the medbay of his personal battleship in orbit with some of the best doctors in the Sector ready to heal him. 

He didn’t think it was an ironclad defence though, not at all. Teleportation was finicky and extremely expensive. Also little understood. 

The Earth caste might not have found a countermeasure yet for it beyond knowing that energy fields disrupted it, but the Imperium of Man had been using such technology for longer than the Tau Empire existed. 

He was sure countermeasures existed, and the best way to prevent Echidna from seeking them out, or employing them, was if she didn’t know he had such technology on hand. Secrecy was the strongest defence.

And he almost forfeited that defence so she wouldn’t look down on him with that infuriatingly patronising look in her eyes. Almost. 

She had felt his weakness, his emotional turmoil following his relief at not having to leave his most trusted men behind to unknown fates and struck like a viper. 

He almost couldn’t believe this was the same woman whom he’d considered easy to see through not so long ago. Who he had thought would be simple enough to tease as much information out of as he needed. 

Arrogance. I was arrogant, it blinded me and almost cost me. Aun’Saal mused, giving a level look to the woman who clicked her tongue like a child who’s prank had been derailed prematurely. 

He squinted and saw in her eyes hints of grudging respect hidden under the petulant scowl she was no doubt exaggerating once more in an attempt to have him underestimate her once more. 

Not that he would. Not again. Aun’Saal learned from his own mistakes as much as he did from the mistakes of his forebears. 

That respect was good. She was not treating him as a mere tool, or a lesser being like her kind so often did, but as a … rival? No. But there was some respect there. Aun’Saal could work with that. He could build on that foundation and make something worthwhile out of it.

“You have asked me once how I managed to get the Orks under control once, I recall?” Echidna said mildly, and Aun’Saal was treated to the sight of a nasty smirk playing across her lips. She looked to be darkly amused at some joke, a joke that was played on him, if his intuition could be trusted. 

“It was one of the primary goals of my cooperation with you, yes,” Aun’Saal said, nodding as if he had not noticed a thing. “Why?”

“Well, I believe words here would not be enough to drive my point home,” Echidna said. “No, I think I’ll have to … demonstrate how to do politics with the Greenskins. It just so happens that we happen to have a group of hostile Orks right on hand who need to be taught the error of their ways. I cannot have them acting against foreign dignitaries on my planet. That just. Won’t. Do. Not at all.”

“So those missiles were not launched on your orders?” Aun’Saal asked mildly, though he was watching the woman like a hawk. 

His intuition told him ‘No’, but he had almost been fooled by her once today. With her sudden proficiency in the arts of deception and politicking, he couldn’t rule it out. 

Having a group of insurgents who are only tangentially related to you — thus granting you plausible deniability — attack a guest, only for you to swoop in and save their lives, was a crude but tried-and-true method of ingratiating yourself to said guest. It was free goodwill, and perhaps even a free favour or too.

Why wouldn’t she trade the lives of some Orks for buying my goodwill and growing my trust in her? Aun’Saal thought, unable to find a single reason. It was a risky play, but Echidna never struck him as risk-averse. If anything, she was reckless and willful. 

A normal person would not have gone to war with another planet over some raiding ships. They would have brought the matter up to the Water Caste, who would then send a flotilla to either protect the attacked world or eliminate the threat. 

Echidna went and destroyed the threat herself without even considering the alternatives or notifying anyone. Considering that, maybe it wasn’t the best of ideas to try to get information out of her by being so antagonistic, but Aun’Saal was sure she’d see how doing anything to him would be the end of her relationship with the Tau Empire. She’d be an outcast in both her own home and in the Tau’s, she’d have nowhere to go, leaving her alone amid the stars. 

He was sure she was smart enough to see that. If she was not, then he’d likely die, or at least be forced to use his transponder and leave some of his most loyal guards’ fate up to her whims. Either way, it’d be the end for her. The start of a slow death as a vagrant in the void between stars, or perhaps the precursor to a very quick and explosive end when he turned his battleship’s artillery on her location and commanded an orbital bombardment. 

Psyker or not, he doubted she could end his life before he could activate the transponder. His men had faced rogue psykers before and came out victorious time and time again. That was why he’d chosen these specific ones. Their minds were iron fortresses, wills forged in the fires of war. There were no other soldiers he’d rather have at his side when facing a possibly very dangerous Psyker. 

He’d seen what she’d done to destroy the missiles. It seemed to exhaust her, but who knew? If she could conjure up a gigantic hand, maybe she could conjure up an entire body. Maybe she could even ride it around like a battle-suit, and with the size and strength its showed, she might be able to single-handedly beat one of those Imperial Knights in a wrestling match. 

She was dangerous. Though maybe not in the ways he’d initially feared. Psykers had a limited variety of powers, by his understanding. Some could conjure flames, but not much else. Others strengthened their bodies, healed themselves, and others could see things around them from a bird’s eye view, and some could read minds, influence them even. 

Before his first meeting with Echidna, he’d looked up some of the worst instances of a Psyker misusing their powers. There were the ones that just blew up a building for some unidentifiable reason, along with themselves. Others transformed into fiendish monsters. But one of the worst cases was when a psyker they called a ‘telepath’ managed to worm his way into the mind of an Ethereal governing a Sept world. 

That case was ugly, a horrible thing that he’d much rather forget, yet couldn’t. It had made Aun’Saal dread even the slightest possibility of meeting another telepath. The damage someone could do to the Empire if they had him under their thrall … 

That was the reason he had an implant in the base of his skull, constantly monitoring his brainwaves and neuron-activity for any anomalies, ready to activate his transponder beacon in the nanosecond his mind showed signs of being compromised. It was an entirely untested piece of technology, but it was the best he could get his hands on this far away from the Core.

It felt like a millennium had gone by as Echidna stared at him with that thin smile seemingly frozen onto her face, a pair of green eyes glittering like emeralds in the sun staring at him, holding no emotion in them. Those eyes were dead, there was nothing behind the pretty facade, no emotions, just a depthless hungering void yearning to swallow him whole and feast on his soul–

Aun’Saal blinked, stunned by where those impressions had come from. The silence stretched even more, the pregnant pause in their conversation making him nervous despite having used similar tactics on people with much more political sway than a mere mercenary captain. 

Then she tilted her head, blinked and light seemed to have returned to her eyes, though it was not the same playful glimmer that had been there before. Nor was it the simmering anger he’d seen in those green orbs when she first saw the missiles approaching the shuttle … thinking of, didn’t she notice them before his shuttle’s top-of-the-line sensors could? How was that possi-

“An interesting question,” Echidna said, her voice easygoing, her smile unchanging. Neither was reflected in her eyes, those held only some malicious amusement which clued him in that whatever she was planning, he was not going to like it. “How do you know I didn’t order those Orks to launch the missiles, just to save your fancy flying luxury coffin and earn myself your trust and favour? You can’t, and I have little in that way of disproving your notion beyond going down there and slaughtering those orks. Not that I think even that would fully banish that laughable notion from your mind.”

She stared at him; her gaze managed to unnerve him despite that deadness from it being gone. The look she gave him made him feel like a tiny animal shivering before an apex predator as it considered whether to bother tearing his throat out for daring to bother it. 

“No, I think there is no use in even trying,” Echidna continued, leaning back and putting on a show of visibly relaxing. “Nonetheless. Ork politics. I promised to demonstrate how they work, and so I shall, nothing to do about it. Could you ask your pilot to land somewhere around where those missiles were launched? I’ll protect the shuttle as we approach, so you have nothing to fear.”

From the Orks. Aun’Saal added in his mind. He doubted those missiles would have managed to breach the hull anyway, but there was something more dangerous already inside the shuttle, sitting right before him and daintily sipping on some herbal tea. No matter. If I survive, I’ll have learned something worthwhile either way. Now I know what one aspect of her strange powers is, and if I understood it correctly, she is about to show me even more of what she’s capable of.

He’d count that as a win. Knowledge was power, and it was worth earning some enmity if it didn’t go so far as to discourage the woman from working with him in the future. Not that he thought that’d ever happen.

Humans don’t take traitors well to their Imperium. She has no home to go back to. She’s either with us or alone. 

That meant he could push more, be a little more heavy-handed than he’d otherwise be with a woman of her powers. Still … why did a shiver go down his spine as he thought that? Why did every single one of his finely honed instincts scream at him to stop, to not push another inch? That he was playing with his life, dancing on a knife’s edge?

Try as he might to push those thoughts from his head, he couldn’t quite manage it. He’d logically examined the situation, thought things through, and found no errors in his previous decisions. So why? Why?

He didn’t know. But he’d learned to trust his intuition above his conscious mind, so Aun’Saal resolved to hold himself back for now. He decided to just sit back and watch. From how things stood, even that would earn him a show.