Day 71
Tide finally allowed Aliciel to return to the Domain. Before the daemon had been captured, he had removed everyone from it, even a certain beastman-turned-chaos-spawn and insane assassin, though they'd been removed to a place with enough biomass to keep them occupied until it was clear again.
Upon entering the Domain, she felt his emotions as clearly as she heard his voice. There was elation, exhaustion, and small amusement. Yet, what stood out the most to her was a tenseness she'd expect before a battle, not after one.
"What's wrong?" She asked, dreading the answer. It surprised her, however.
Waiting.
"For what?"
Whoever's next.
She wanted to stare at him, though for the moment she just floated in the ocean. Perhaps to grant her unspoken request, he took the form of a wooden humanoid, like a mannequin that had been grown rather than carved.
"I… don't think there is anyone else?" She said. "Well, besides the Orks. Have you killed them?"
The mannequin tilted its head.
I… don't think I'm going to.
Her jaw dropped.
"You're… you're not serious," she said in sheer disbelief. "The assassins, I understand. Even the Space Marines, I suppose are possible. The Chaos Spawn was insane enough, but… Orks?"
I don't intend to try and convince them to change like the others. I don't know if that would even be possible.
"Then… why?"
They helped me. I made them a promise, to give them war everlasting. I will keep that promise. They shall stay here, in the Domain, and fight illusions I craft for them. They will never be left wanting for a greater opponent to challenge, nor will even their defeats truly end them. I believe this will content them.
"They're orks."
And yet, they have as much right to continue living as any human. So long as they are not a danger, what is the harm?
Aliciel let out a sigh that spoke of great labor. She shook her head, sucked in a deep breath, then turned back to him. "Alright. So, who else is left for us to fight on Monstrum? The Wendigos?"
They have shown no inclination towards leaving the Freezing Wastes. From what Ahsael and others know, that appears to be their territory I will set up outposts along its edges, but I see no reason to make further excursions if they have been happy enough to stay on that side of the planet for so many years.
"Then… who?"
I do not know. That is my point. Every time I feel as though I have a handle on my enemies and situation, there seems to be a new one suddenly popping up.
She blinked. "I'll admit these last two months have been… a lot."
Most of my existence in this universe has had me at war with someone. I recognize that there are further enemies to fight outside Monstrum, but I cannot shake the feeling that another will pop up here soon enough.
"Is it a sign?" She asked, before realizing how that sounded.
I doubt it. From what I can tell, something has changed in the Warp, but its consequences are far off yet. It may not even have to do with us. Perhaps Guilliman has been resurrected.
She blinked again at his words. "I'm sorry, Guilliman? As in… Primarch Guilliman?"
Yes. If I'm not mistaken, he should be up and about soon enough, operating on the other side of the Great Rift.
"A Primarch?"
Yes.
"Primarch Guilliman."
Yes.
"The Primar-."
Yes. Roboute Guilliman, Son of the Emperor, Primarch of the Ultramarines, and all that.
"I-," she began before stopping, starting again, and then stopping again. "You-... How know?"
Let's just say I've got a good source. I can't say if or how my presence has affected the wider galaxy at the moment, but I suspect it will not have changed his return.
She stared, though not at him, just looking in his direction as her mind raced. A Primarch. "One of the Nine Sons of the Emperor…"
Eighteen.
"What?"
There are eighteen sons of the Emperor. Well, twenty. Well, actually twenty-one, but that's beside the point.
Aliciel decided it was best she didn't ask any questions for a while until she'd already processed what Tide had told her. He seemed to know this.
Setting that aside…
The world shifted and Aliciel found herself floating as if in space, staring down at an ancient vessel of undeniably human design yet lacking the normal gothic architecture she associated with the Imperium's warships. She had seen the Embrace of Audacity as it was before Tide had ripped the daemon out of it, glowing with foul Warp corruption, yet now it had been completely cleansed, though he still infested its systems.
I will be having Vidriov and a few other Tech-Priests looking over it, to see what can be learned from its internals without breaking it apart.
"You plan to keep it intact for our own use?"
It is the only ship we currently possess that isn't fused to the rest of the space hulk, but that is not the only reason. Aside from the vessel's advanced nature, I think it would be rude to dissect someone's body.
"You've… lost me."
Her vision swam as if being drawn forward with rapid speed and suddenly she was inside the ship, in a large chamber whose outer shell was scarred, as though the metal had buckled and burst in places from something massive growing below the plating. Only the center of the room, where a large core floated, disconnected from the rest of the vessel. It resembled a mechanical eye, with an iris that glowed a soft blue.
They are quiet, but I know they're in there.
Aliciel tensed. "More daemons?"
No. An AI.
She felt a pit open in her stomach. "Abominable Intelligence."
No need to be rude, Aliciel.
"AI is among the greatest of tech-heresies," Aliciel said. Suddenly, uncertainty struck her. Tide wasn't exactly in line with Imperial doctrine either, but she was serving him. She had come to recognize that the doctrine was wrong about him, even if he could be frustrating in his desire to keep alive even enemies who would not think twice about killing them all. Could the doctrine be wrong about others as well? Perhaps not in the case of daemons, who Tide seemed just as opposed to as the Imperium itself was, if less willing to commits mass exterminations of those whose only crime could be surmised as 'being in the vicinity'. But… the mutant and the alien, and even Abominable Intelligence, perhaps they weren't all as bad as daemons?
She breathed in, then let it out as a sigh.
"Is it-, are they dangerous?"
Not here, but if they desire to inflict harm on others I do not know. I know they can hear and understand me in this place, but they have thus far refused to respond to my communications. They are afraid.
"Can... can a machine feel fear?"
This one can. Hardly a surprise that they aren't very trusting after spending so much time in the presence of a Keeper of Secrets.
"What is its name?"
I do not know yet. I have asked, to no answer, so I have stuck with calling them Embrace of Audacity.
"And while you're trying to communicate with it, Vidriov and Sathar will be analyzing everything they can get their mechadendrites on," Aliciel said.
Others more suited to the task will. Sathar has another task that I have taken him away from for too long already. Vidriov is focused entirely on his efforts in creating new kinds of power armor. Those that do arrive here for the studies will be careful, non-invasive. I don't wish our studies to register as an attack. They have set up an automated distress signal, one that had been suppressed by the daemon until its weakening, so I hope they are still intact and sane.
"What if it's a threat?"
Then it will never leave this place.
"Is that… all?"
Nothing else is required.
Sathar studied the myriad devices. Some were taken from the space hulk far above, repurposed devices drawn from Imperial vessels that could be put to use for his project. Others were donated by countless Mechanicus priests with their own private hoards of ancient technology. Still others were freshly built devices, crafted from the knowledge of every Tech-Priest on the planet filtered through by Tide for the necessary data. All devices dedicated to the study of higher dimensions, largely involved in Warp travel, divination, and cogitators.
And all of it was so, so useless.
And he was the one left with the daunting project of discovering an entirely new dimension, one that could be used to travel across the galaxy without reliance on the Warp. Far from simply designing new power armors or vehicles, this was physics of the highest order, an undiscovered field that even Tide's knowledge on was limited. Was it even possible? Tide seemed to think so, but while Vidriov was of the belief that Tide was virtually infallible, Sathar recognized Tide for what he was: a system, like any sentient being. A very complex and powerful system, a benevolent and beneficial system, but still with its own limitations. Tide could be wrong. Tide could fail.
Vidriov would disagree, of course. The pair of Tech-Priests had spent several days and nights discussing and philosophizing on the nature of Tide's existence and their own, arguing, debating, refining their own world views. Their newfound friendship had not halted their butting of heads even in the slightest. If anything, their new connection had resulted in further conflicts as new sources of disagreement were discovered and picked apart.
Vidriov could be infuriating at times. The obstinate, hard-headed Genetor saw Tide as the pinnacle of all lifeforms and was trying as hard to convince Tide of his own divinity as he was endeavoring to convince Sathar, with around equal levels of success. Sathar believed in the Machine God, of course, but the idea of the Omnissiah, an avatar of the Machine God given form, had always gnawed at him. He'd kept that to himself, of course, as such beliefs tended to land one at the top of a list of Cogitator servitor candidates.
That the Machine God, an all-powerful being, would need a direct servant and voice was odd. It operated the universe, it was the universe. Every spinning atom was its gears, every star its power cores, the sentients within its data-nodes. Tide was simply another aspect of the Great Work that was the Machine God's will and self. In a way, all things were, save Chaos, which was directly opposed to the Great Work, which was Order personified.
Similarly, the dimension of Slipspace, dubbed so by Tide, was also a part of the Great Work. If it existed, the Machine God would reveal it to him in time.
The devices could still be used for general studies, but Sathar wondered if he wasn't going at this from the wrong direction. Or, to better put it, from the wrong dimension. Tide's Domain, that most mysterious of realms, might be a better starting place…
Consider the Ork.
Ancient, powerful, populous, and quite possibly the most powerful species in the entire galaxy if fully united, beyond even the Imperium and the Tyranids and the Eldar. Yet, so fractious that they make even the Imperium seem organized and coherent, so dedicated to fighting that they make Khorne's berserkers seem fairly average, and so vicious that even the Drukhari…
Well, the Drukhari make almost anything look fairly tame and reasonable by comparison, so perhaps that isn't the best example.
The Orks, however, possess something else, something that ensures they are a cut above the rest. Their entire culture, the very fiber of their being, all of it is dedicated towards fighting. Not necessarily even winning, though ask any Ork and they will say Orks always win. Which, in a sense, is true, as just getting a fight at all is often the only needed victory condition for an Ork. The fight is worth everything to them.
All of this was to say, the Orks currently within Tide's Domain were having a blast.
For a time, they'd just fought each other, beating each other senseless, blowing one another into bits, and just generally committing things that would be considered heinous war crimes in any other culture, but for them was the equivalent of slapstick. After a time, they'd begun to wish to construct vehicles and, lo and behold, many skrap-built battle wagons were constructed after just a few moments. Then they'd wanted an even larger slugging match, so every Ork had suddenly found themselves piloting a Gargant and things had only escalated from there.
Of course, Tide wasn't a sadist, so the Orks didn't actually feel anything beyond phantasms of pain even when they 'died', with even death only resulting in them being transferred to a different part of the battlefield. If they noticed any of this or the strangeness of their situation, he hadn't been able to tell as, without infecting them, his insight into the inner machinations of their minds was relatively limited.
Granted, even the Orks he had infected weren't exactly easy to understand. Orks made leaps of logic like they were playing the floor is lava. To a degree, even daemons were easier to understand, as they were just made up of composite emotions and fractured thoughts and beliefs, bound together. A daemon could not truly change, could not deny its purpose for existence, any more than a human could deny breathing. Even Vra'kzil, the tiny daemon bird that served the so-called 'Changer of Ways', was incapable of altering its own existence in the way an actual person could. In that regard, Tide actually felt some pity for the things. They committed evil by fact of their existence, not any choices of their own. They had no choices at all.
He'd still destroy them at the first opportunity, of course. Just because he pitied them didn't mean he thought he could try and help them as he was helping people. Despite what Aliciel believed, he wasn't that crazy.
Probably.
In a way, Orks were similar to daemons in that regard. They needed to fight to live or they would literally begin to decay. However, while that made them dangerous, it did not necessarily mean they were malevolent like daemons. That he had virtually final say on all things within his Domain, including whether even the hearts of the beings within it could continue to beat while present even without infecting them, was another reason he had for not fearing at least these Orks.
However, his reasons for keeping them were not wholly because he felt they deserved the chance to live. If that were the case, he'd have infected them after they had served their purpose aboard the space hulk. Nor was his reasoning for keeping them uninfected wholly because of the future possibility that he might need to use Ork Tek again in the future and his infection seemed to cut them off from the gestalt mind all Orks shared.
His main reason was that very gestalt mind. Specifically, it was the fact that it now existed within his Domain, alongside all the Orks, invisible to their organic senses, but not to his own now that he was looking for it.
While the most common sight in the Warp, the sight that he could always see no matter where in the Warp he moved his 'looking glass' to, were the Ruinous Powers taking the form of great islands in the Warp and surrounding a dark storm that cut through the heart of the galaxy, they were not the only major players. Gork and Mork, the Ork gods, were not always present to his sight, but if he began to look for them they were easy enough to find.
They had no standard shape, changing into something new almost every time he looked at them. Sometimes they were two colossal Orks, the size of galaxies both, clashing against one another with enough force to buffet any nearby daemons and scatter them like scared fish. Other times, they were endless armies of Orks of all sizes, wielding all manner of weapons from wooden clubs to space-rending cannons, often slaughtering any daemons that got caught in between battles of such scale that the galaxy itself would have suffered to contain them. The daemons weren't truly dead, not like Vra'kzil and the Master were, simply reforming elsewhere, but it was telling that he had seen even leviathan greater daemons be swallowed under an endless horde of green.
And now, Tide had a small fraction of that power within his Domain. It was entirely cut off from the wider gestalt mind from what he could tell, but it was very much present.
And it was hungry.
There wasn't really a better way to describe it. Tide had noticed the gestalt mind's 'desire' the moment it had entered his Domain. It had attempted, fruitlessly, to harness the remnant Warp energies he had floating around, the 'corpses' of his daemon guests. He had stopped that, but even that small interaction had told him much.
From what he could tell, the Warp was empowered by the thoughts and beliefs of the living, at least for the most part. The souls of the dead passed into it, usually being devoured by daemons for further power, though Tide was operating under the assumption that that wasn't the natural process of the Sea of Souls, but the result of the War in Heaven messing everything up. The Ork gestalt had made no attempt to fuel itself off the souls of the dead that Tide had contained within his Domain, instead just going for the raw Warp energy. Presumably, that was a feature of the creators of the Orks, the Old Ones.
In an experimental mood, he had fed the gestalt a bit of the Warp energy he possessed. There was no clear change in the actions of the Orks, but Tide's senses were far more expansive within the Domain. He noticed that every single Ork, Squig, and Grot grew in size. Just a little, but undeniably becoming larger and stronger.
He didn't know entirely what to make of that. Could he turn this to his advantage? He wasn't sure. Fortunately, he had an expert in these kinds of Warp-related phenomena, one who happened to be rather bored now that she didn't have much to do around Monstrum. He found her and, with a mental tap on the shoulder, asked:
Want to consider the Ork with me?
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