Day 8
Tide could have saved him. He could have saved almost all of the people he'd be letting die. Whether it was disease, organ failure, or even just lethal accidents, he could save them. Only the ones who would be too heavily damaged in accidents, the ones whose heads were crushed or shot in gang wars were beyond his abilities. He could have given them another year or a hundred if he wished. Repairing their failing organs, replacing the broken ones, simply fixing them would be so incredibly easy.
But he wouldn't.
Jace had been ready to die. He'd wanted it and only his belief in the God-Emperor, in the idea that he had to work his hardest in order to gain that eternal reward in the afterlife, had kept him from ending his own life. Living longer than his wife, his children, even his grandchildren had left him… hollow. Broken.
But Tide would be lying if he claimed that was his reasoning for letting the man die. It certainly wasn't the reason why he'd be letting so many others join him in death either.
It wasn't a decision he'd made out of some belief regarding death being a necessary part of life or some other philosophical ideal. It wasn't because he believed the God-Emperor had some paradise for those loyalists who perished, though he desperately hoped for the sake of the humans he'd refused to save. It was a decision he'd made out of a desire for his own survival.
If he kept these people alive, extended their lifespans beyond what was natural for the planet, he'd only draw attention to the places where he dwelled. At best, perhaps they would see it as some blessing from the Emperor, at worst the work of the vilest of heresies. Neither was acceptable as both would warrant further investigations.
There was also the fact that their deaths would directly benefit him as he could add their biomass to his own, taking control of their corpses and guiding them down to add to his growing Proto-Gravemind. It was a gruesome method of increasing his size and intelligence, but he had few other options open to him that weren't objectively worse. His spread throughout the Underhive was too slow for the little amount of biomass it awarded him with.
So… he would let them die. Let them pass beyond the veil into whatever awaited their souls after death. That was an aspect of lore he wasn't familiar with in Warhammer 40k. In Warhammer Fantasy, he knew that many gods, both of Order and Chaos, had afterlives for their worshippers. Perhaps that would be the case here as well. He hoped so, as the alternative was that the dead were consigned to the tender mercies of the monstrosities that dwelled in the Warp.
He tried to convince himself that the Legions of the Damned and the Living Saints proved that the Emperor had some kind of system in place to protect those who died, but he knew it was only a pretty lie he used to comfort himself.
He'd made Jace as comfortable as he dared. The man didn't feel the pain that should have been wracking his body, didn't cry or sob. He just found that he couldn't get out of bed. Tide could influence the man's mind to a degree, so he turned the man's thoughts towards happier moments in his life, rare as they were.
When Jace finally slipped away, he had done so with a warm smile on his wrinkled face.
For a long time, Tide had done nothing. His combat forms, his Proto-Gravemind, even his Infector Pods, paused. He felt… dirty. He could understand that what he was doing, letting others die for his own benefit, was a horrible act, a monstrous one, but that was not why he felt so disgusted with himself, as much as that in and of itself was an awful thing to realize. What was it then? He'd comforted a dying man, was that wrong? Was it wrong that he'd turned the man's thoughts towards happier moments in life as he passed, rather than let him leave with his mind fully his own?
Tide couldn't say for sure. Perhaps, perhaps not.
In the end, Jace's body had risen from his deathbed. Where once he was shaking and close to falling over, now he stood with the strength of false youth. The dead man left the closet-sized space he called a hab-block and journeyed down to the lower levels. Those Altered that saw him found their gazes turn elsewhere, finding something else to catch their interest. None would see him again.
Tide made himself experience everything from Jace's memories, not just the happy moments or those useful to him. All the horror, the rage, the joy, the hope. He did not discard a single memory, despite the Flood part of him saying that many of the experiences and sensations of the man were redundant or unimportant.
He would make sure the same was true for every person who became a part of him in the future. Even if he refused to save them, the least he could do was remember them, preserve their existence in some way.
Given that the numbers of those who were infected had tripled in just a single day, from six million to eighteen, with those fully altered changing to twelve thousand, he suspected that he would be experiencing many memories and sooner rather than later. Even if he just took from those who died naturally or from external factors he had no control over, he'd soon be experiencing the memories of tens of thousands of dead every day soon enough, and that was just from the single spire the bulk of his spread was contained within.
The spire he resided in, one dedicated to the manufacturing of basic appliances and other household goods, housed over one point five billion people alone. There were twenty spires in all of Malum and there were twelve hives across the entire planet of Monstrum he had learned, some with even larger populations than Malum. He'd learned much from spying on the minds of select individuals, mostly the other Arbites he'd begun to infect as his 'inside man' returned to their headquarters.
Strangely, he was amused by the fact that the enforcers of Imperial law had done more to spread his spores across nearby spires and particularly throughout the upper levels than any other beings he'd infected thus far, further accelerating the exponential growth.
He'd learned much more from them and their co-workers as well than from any of the regular citizenry, whose knowledge of even life outside their level of the spire was shockingly low.
For example, he'd discovered that Monstrum was a tidally locked world, meaning one side of it was constantly facing the sun throughout the entire year. However, it was a strange one.
Normally, he'd have thought it would be extremely hot on one side of the planet and completely freezing on the other, with only a very thin strip of habitable land along the edge. Instead, large portions of the planet facing the sun were habitable thanks to the thick clouds of smog produced by the twelve hive cities, with the main exception being a massive, scorching hot desert that was virtually impassible without special vehicles. Exactly how they had built the hive cities before the smog was there, why there was a massive spot left uninhabitable, and several other questions this knowledge had raised were left unanswered as no one he'd found seemed to know or even care really.
There were three paths connecting the northern and southern hemispheres, massive underground tunnels that travelled deep under the superheated ground, each connecting to one of three hive cities on both sides. Malum was in the middle of the southern hemisphere and connected by just such a tunnel to its northern counterpart, which was named Moros (because that sounds like a fine name for a city. The people who colonized this world clearly had a theme in mind). Additionally, a network of other, smaller tunnels connected many of the cities in their respective hemispheres and were the main method of transportation and trade throughout the planet.
What this meant for him was that he was in a prime location to start spreading across the entire planet. The southern hemisphere was not as populated or as wealthy as the north, where the planet's capital of Deimos (which sounded dangerously close to daemons in Tide's honest opinion) was located. However, it was still a center of trade for the lower half of the planet and had easy access to the north.
Of course, he would need to reach the spires with access to those tunnels before he could reach the other hive cities. Travel between cities was a rare thing for the vast majority of the populace and his spores had yet to travel high enough in the spires to actually infect anyone with the wealth or status to move about like that. Even the Arbites rarely interacted with that sort in person.
There was much more that he'd learned, but one of the more interesting things was that they were suffering the effects of a sudden Warp Storm, a recent one, having arrived just a few weeks prior.
Tide wasn't sure when exactly he had come to this reality, his memories of the time before becoming a Proto-Gravemind were… hazy, at best. He didn't like the emotions that built up inside of him when he recalled that instinctive bloodlust, that rush for growth and to consume. When he'd looked at human beings… and only seen food.
That Flood Spores could hibernate for millions of years meant that even the memories of those he'd consumed couldn't be trusted. While the factory workers remembered the strange mutations of the first worker to be infected, Crees his name had been, had appeared a week after the Warp Storm descended, that didn't prove anything except that the first time he'd infected someone had been relatively recent.
Regardless, while interesting, there was little he could do about a Warp Storm at this point. In fact, the presence of the storm could be quite valuable to him, as it disrupted communications to the rest of the Imperium. If he was discovered by the locals he'd at least have some time to respond in some way before they could alert the wider galaxy to his existence. He wasn't sure exactly how he'd respond, but he'd at least have some time and likely wouldn't have to worry about anyone calling down an exterminatus on the planet they were all on… Probably. He should probably build a few nuclear bunkers at some point.
There was… one other thing that concerned him about the Warp Storm. And that was the date.
The calendar used by the Imperium was, in fact, utter horseshit. There were at least three that were commonly used by most of the hive-dwellers and a dozen more that smaller groups held to, with even those few administrators in the lower levels that he had infected utilizing different dates. Most of those dates meant nothing to him, but one of the more common ones had caught his attention.
001.M42
If that was the real date, it meant… well, it meant a lot. The main thing it meant was that Cadia had fallen. And, if Cadia had fallen, then the descent of this Warp Storm was no coincidence, but the result of the galaxy-rending tear in reality known as the Cicatrix Maledictum.
Which meant all kinds of shit for him.
Daemon Primarchs coming out of their exiles, Guilliman's resurrection, the Lion waking up. And that was just the stuff he remembered offhand.
However, there was, in a way, a hidden blessing of this. And that was his location.
He'd found that he was on the northern edge of the Ultima Segmentum, well into Imperium Nihilus if he recalled correctly. At the very least, he didn't have to worry about the entire Imperium coming knocking any time soon.
Oddly, the region he was in wasn't a part of an official sector of Imperial space, only having a few sub-sector sized regions. Apparently, it wasn't well-populated for whatever reason, likely being so far on the rim of the galaxy. The region he was in, of course, had a name as equally edgy as all the other names here had been so far. It also wasn't a part of the 40k galaxy he'd been overly familiar with in his past life.
The Ghoul Stars.
The bald-headed one moved throughout the crowd. Where the hivers had their eyes down, broken and trodden upon, his were alert, scanning.
Many of these people were coughing. A possible disease spreading throughout the population? Weaker drones were not ideal, but the purity of infection would clear away any such weaknesses.
He had not infected anyone since arriving in Malum, travelling deeper into the spires before beginning his task. Better to not leave hints of which city they were based in should that Inquisitor in Deimos come looking.
Someone near him coughed and, oddly, he flinched back. Why had he done that? No mere disease could defeat Genestealer immune systems, let alone one of the nigh-perfect fourth generation.
This planet was a strange one, the Broodmind had learned. The warp storm's interruption of their connection to the God-Mind was disturbing, but not unexpected. It had only reinforced the need to take things slowly, carefully.
The bald-headed one paused, feeling something… strange. Like a cold sweat running down his back.
Somehow, he knew what had happened, despite never having felt such a thing before. Something had infested him.
He stumbled into a nearby alleyway, ignored by the passing crowds, before all but collapsing, sliding down a wall, leaving behind a slick trail of sweat. There, he rested, breathing heavily.
Minutes passed. Then hours.
All the while, a war was waged within him. Immune systems fought with viciousness against the invaders, even as the parasitic cells that had infested him slew and harvested pieces of biomass, unknowingly reinforced with every breath the man took as the air grew thicker and thicker with the infecting spores produced by so many others.
His body grew hotter and hotter, yet still he sat motionless, a look of deep concern and concentration on his face. He could no longer move, despite what little individuality he possessed attempting to exert itself, as his body demanded more and more energy from him to fight off the invader.
The pause did not go unnoticed and as it went on, more and more of the Broodmind's limited attention turned to what was happening within this hybrid form. Yet, nothing could be done until, and it seemed the fate of this Genestealer would be to perish, too much of its energy consumed too quickly to try and fight off this foe.
And then, it was felt.
'It' was a strange, yet familiar thing. A mind, so frighteningly similar to themselves, to the God-Mind, and yet terrifyingly different in so many ways.
They brushed up against it, almost by accident, and it noticed.
With but a thought, its entire focus was turned against them. They could feel only a few minds that made up its forms, yet there was so much more behind that tiny amount. Like some great eye that was looking through a tiny crevice, scratching away steadily to widen that gap. And, horrifyingly, with what little insight they had into that being, they could feel no end to it.
For the first time since losing the connection to the God-Mind, the Brood felt fear. Because, when that great eye turned upon them, they understood the two emotions it had felt.
Recognition, followed swiftly by overwhelming rage.
