Space Marine minds were tough cookies, I found. Some I could crack open and fish around for information in, while others sorta … imploded when I pushed too quick or too hard. And being inside a mind while it collapsed around you, on top of you? That was not a fun experience, let me tell you. It was distinctly uncomfortable, like being stuck in a sandstorm where particles of sand kept flying into your eyes and ears. 

I suspected a lesser telepath would have had their minds crushed had they not been quick enough to vacate the mind in question, but my own mind wasn’t so weak as to break from just that. Though it was a good thing to learn in a reasonably safe environment.

I would not be going mind-diving into the mind of anyone I suspected to be on anywhere near an even playing field with me in mental warfare. I had some experience from our little games with Zedev, then some further from lessons under Val, but I was by no means an expert telepath. My mind was very much human at the moment, though it was backed up by thousands of subordinate minds that acted like bio-computers, giving that human mind crazy processing power.

That is to say, my primary strength in mental warfare came from the fact that my mind was saturated with soul energy to such a level that it was nearly impossible to damage. For anything short of a Greater Daemon, by my estimation. It also helped that my thoughts were fast as hell, and as such, I could send out telepathic probes and attacks faster than even Astartes could think. 

Then, of course, there was the fact that I could brute force it all most of the time, batter my way through mental defences standing in my way with little effort. Though that tended to damage whatever I was trying to find inside. 

Case in point, I only got fragments of information, little tiny nuggets of knowledge so far from all the Astartes minds I’ve plundered. I did feel a bit bad about doing it — which I wrote down as a noticeable improvement for my ability to emphasise with people I didn’t care about, by the way — but not all that bad. Astartes were brainwashed, one and all, and these Deathwatch Marines, in specific, all knew what they were up against, and still gleefully went along with it. 

They say mercy is the privilege of the strong, but I was of the mind that sparing someone who would obviously just try killing you again was a recipe for disaster. Giving mercy to your enemies is a spiral to destruction, or so another saying went, but that wasn’t quite right either. I didn’t like absolutes. The world wasn’t black and white — even if this galaxy was really fucking dark grey — there was no one size fits all answer to problems, no universal method to decide what to do in any situation. 

It’s all shades of grey. 

My own personal rule at the moment was that I wouldn’t spare people who I knew would just come back for another go at me, just more prepared, more knowledgeable of my weaknesses. My burgeoning empathy would not be the cause of any of the people I actually care about suffering, nor would my mercy be the cause of the citizens who rely on me to defend them suffering. 

This … rulership thing wasn’t really my thing. It was a means to an end, a way to achieve what I wanted, which was to have an actually nice society to live in. I didn’t like ruling, didn’t need a throne to be powerful either, but I did feel a tiny sense of duty. Still, it could be a damned pain with all the management work it took, even if most of it was taken care of by my mind-cores. In the end, I simply couldn’t bring myself to care all that much about the nameless, faceless people living in my Arcologies. Their pains didn’t pain me. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over losing them all, but I would do my best to avoid that from happening. 

My Daughters ended up being a godsend in that regard. I might not have cared about the people, but they did, and I suddenly did care when one of them came to one of my drones, teary-eyed, about some problem. All of a sudden, fixing the fountain in one of the Arcologies shot up to near the top of my to-do list. Why? Because some little kid came crying about being unable to play in the fountain to one of my Daughters, who then came complaining about it to me. 

I shook my head, banishing that line of thought for later and re-focused. I still had my new Tau … consultant? — Assistant? Pet? — in the room, but he occupied himself with going over the ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ I’d given him. It was the same information document I’d given to the Mayors of the Arcologies, by the way, not the sci-fi book written ages past. Alas, nobody besides me would get that reference, which was kinda sad.

Well, I suppose Sammy might … hmmm, it might be worth giving Selene a copy of my Earth memories too just so she’d get my references and jokes too. AAAAAAh, I am getting distracted again. Focus. You have important stuff to do, Echidna. Battles to win, brains to eat.

Speaking of eating brains, I unfortunately found out that using my Lictor brain-eating tendrils enhanced by the Space Marine ‘Omophagea’ — also more commonly called ‘the Remembrancer’, which allows Space Marines to ‘learn by eating’ — was the most effective way of harvesting the most amount of useful information out of uncooperative Space Marines. Especially dead ones. 

I could get much more useful stuff out of alive ones if I took my time and was careful enough, but that took time and effort in abundance. Neither of which I had all that much of at the moment. Also, I already knew everything the run-of-the-mill Astartes knew, and only had the higher-ranking Deathwatch member remaining, all of whom all tended to stubbornly get themselves killed instead of grievously injured and left behind by their fellows.

I could have just grabbed some of them, but I didn’t want to give away the game yet, or compromise my little Plot Armour experiment. The latter of which was inconclusive as of right now, nothing was apparent yet, but it might just be a matter of looking at the numbers. I had been kinda expecting something extreme, like one Marine rising above the rest in some utterly ridiculous way, but in all likelihood, the answer to my question would lie in statistics instead. 

‘Do helmetless Space Marines survive longer than their helmet-wearing kin?’ was one of the primary questions I sought answers to, and was in the process of doing so by recording how long each Deathwatch member survived against the Orks, how much opposition they faced, how many Orks they killed and etcetera. 

Back to eating brains, though, and through that, finally getting a proper lay of the land, so to speak. I wasn’t interested in the various Chapter secrets or other such things, though I happily noted down each interesting relic I saw in a memory fragment. No, I was interested in what the Deathwatch knew of the Jericho Reach, and they knew a lot, the paranoid assholes that they were.

I knew Watch Fortress locations, dangerous Chaos Worlds, where ancient relics too dangerous to be collected were located, which section of the Sector was ruled by Chaos Lords, what sections were taken over by Tyranids, Orks or other Xeno empires. Secret by secret, the interstellar map of the sector started clearing up in my mind. Borders cleared up, frontlines grew crisper, and I had a reasonably firm understanding of where the main dangers lay in my galactic neighbourhood.

Useful stuff.

I also collected a bunch of Power Armour, Power Weapons and other Imperial weapons from the fallen for later study. They were not a priority though, as I could replicate most of their effects through eldritch flesh-weaving. Regular technology was more of a curiosity, and a way to get sub-optimal weapons without depleting my bio-energy reserves. Though I was curious about how the molecular disruption fields of Power Weapons worked, or how exactly the ceramite the Astartes-grade Power Armour was made from was, well, made. That said, I did focus on grabbing all the planet-killer grade torpedoes they had, like virus bombs and cyclonic torpedoes, so that even if they managed to knock me out for a while, they wouldn’t have an easy way to ruin my new citizens’ lives.

Anyway, I was just about to teleport the good departed Watch-Captain’s corpse over to myself from under Throgg’s fat bum for a bit of brain-nibbling when it happened. It was a peculiar sensation, feeling something latch onto my teleport, latching onto my Psychic weave like an emotionally starved koala and refusing to let go, sinking its insidious claws deep into the weave.

My mind kicked into overdrive instantly, a safety mechanism I implemented long ago to deal with ambushes, and my thought processing sped up to the point where I felt the world crawl to a sudden stop around me. All non-essential mind-cores got reabsorbed into my primary thought stream, and I could feel my mind swell with power and potential. Bio-energy and soul energy flooded my body and my mind in tandem, making me feel reasonably secure, which in return let me finally think of a solution.

In reality, not even a nanosecond has elapsed, but I have already come up with a reasonably good way out of this situation, one which negates the majority of the risk. The teleport wasn’t instantaneous, and it was still ‘in transit’, so to say … so it wasn’t impossible to reroute it. Or as it was, extend the jump and redirect it to somewhere far away from me.

All that remained to decide was whether I wanted to throw whatever this was into the nearest star and wipe my hands of it … or reroute my uninvited guests to somewhere else to deal with, and hopefully snatch whatever artefact allowed them to accomplish this from their soon-to-be cold, dead hands. 

Safe option, or the greedy option. 

Oh, what the hell, I knew the answer already. It would be a waste to literally throw this opportunity into a star when I could use it to grow stronger, and hopefully patch up whatever weakness of mine these Space Marines — because who else would it be trying to catch a ride on my teleports like this? — hoped to exploit. Better them than a dedicated Custodes strike team doing the same. Plus, artefacts. I needed to know how they were doing this teleport-free-riding and, hopefully, learn how to make my teleports immune to it and other similar ways of attack. It would only be a single step up from this to restrict my ability to teleport, and if they had a relic for that then I could end up neck deep in shit all too quickly for my liking. 

I readied a few pre-written messages to be sent out about what I was intending to do and where, because I might go out of contact for a bit if they made use of Nulls for this assassination attempt. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell them myself, because doing so would require me to either slow myself back down to near-human levels of thought processing, which would end up with my guests jumping me before I could get a word out, or to speed someone else up to my level, which only Val might survive. And maybe, maybe Selene with her newly improved mind, but I doubted it. 

Ahhh … I’m being an idiot. No need to join my uninvited guests instantly. I can be fashionably late to our impromptu meeting soooooo I’ll just send them ahead and have them wait for me. They should have scheduled a meeting if they wanted me to be there on time after all. Where do I drop them though? 

My options at the moments were: Vallia, on some asteroid, in deep space, on top of one of my bio-ships. 

Each had its own pros and cons, but I quickly ruled out Vallia. No need to be nice about this and give them a fighting ground with the privileges of gravity and an atmosphere when I didn’t need either. The asteroid would similarly give them a foothold, but it’d also give me stuff to hide behind or to throw at them if they had some fucky soul-killing weapons like that one Shadowkeeper. The bio-ship idea had the same benefits and downsides, with the added benefit of allowing me to make use of the rest of my fleet to soften them up with some bombardment. 

But the thought of dropping them into deep space and leaving them floating there was just too good to pass up, and I could make covers for myself on the fly out of bio-energy, anyway. 

With my decision made, I slowed my perception of time back down to near-human levels and felt the teleport go through … and then rip my psychic weave apart on the other end. That was a powerful Null-field they got there, and it was a miracle they even managed to latch onto the teleport instead of outright disrupting it. The powers of a Blank should have disrupted any Psychic power near it, and for something Psychic to affect the Blank themselves? That was nearly unthinkable. Only the Emperor managed that, like, ever, as far as I knew. Curious and worth investigating, but not yet. It could wait.

Letting them stew, I called up — meaning: I established a telepathic link between the three of us and with the help of some Illusions, put us into a group call — Selene and then Val, the two whose opinion I mostly cared about when it came to tactical decisions like this. 

“You should have just thrown them into the Sun,” Selene said matter-of-factly, giving me a squint. “Your greed will bite you in the ass sooner or later. You should have grabbed that ‘relic’ the moment you found out where it was.”

“I tend to agree,” Val said. “But it is what it is, nothing can be done about it now, so we might as well discuss what can be done with the situation we now have on our hands. In my opinion, the optimal choice is to teleport a smaller flotilla of bio-ships outside the Null-field and let them loose on the stranded Space Marines. I doubt whatever protection they have can withstand a concentrated barrage from too many bio-plasma weapons batteries.”

“Before you say anything, I get it,” Selene said with a fond sigh. “I’d like to fight them too, you know I also enjoy a little bloodshed-“ understatement of the century right there “-but you said they might have weapons that can damage souls, so I won’t even consider it.”

“I wasn’t going to just walk up to them and challenge to them to a fistfight,” I said with an eye-roll, lying only just a tiniest bit, which Selene of course felt through our bond and gave me an unimpressed look. I would have just poked them with autonomous drones for a bit to see what toys they had, then maybe I would have tested my resistance to Null-fields with my Avatar after I made sure they didn’t have anything I couldn’t deal with. Blowing them to smithereens from a light-year away would be so … boring. “Boring is sometimes the best option I guess, isn’t it?”

“Boring is safe,” Selene said, looking at me through narrowed eyelids. The Bond didn’t quite let her read my mind when I wasn’t actively sharing my thoughts with her, but she could sense my surface thoughts even then, when she focused on it and I wasn’t doing anything to hide them. “I’m going with you.”

“Why?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at the Illusory hologram of my girlfriend. “Didn’t you just say you wouldn’t even consider fighting them?”

“And I won’t,” she said. “You’ll just plop me down on the command deck of a bio-ship and I’ll make sure we turn those Marines into space dust from a safe distance.”

“I’d also like to come along, if possible,” Valenith added after a moment. “If that Null-field is truly as powerful as you suspect, I’d like to test my own strength against its effects. However, I’ll stay out of your way as that field will likely negate my usefulness.”

“Fine,” I said, giving Selene a half-hearted glare at the extremely pleased smirk that crept onto her lips. 

Which is how the three of us ended up on the command deck of a newly made bio-ship, a massive one I had covered in all the protections I could, sparing no expense. I’d just reabsorb it in the end to recover nearly the entirety of the bio-energy spent making it once we were done here, anyway. The energy spent on making it function and powering it couldn’t be reclaimed, aside from the heat-sinks reabsorbing the heat generated by the organic machinery, but it would be a negligible loss in the grand scheme of things.

“I’ll be on my way then,” Val said, his smile a bit uncomfortable before he Blinked away. 

The reason for this was of course my beautiful girlfriend, or rather, the perch she’d chosen for herself.

“Why exactly are you sitting on me, if you don’t mind me asking?” I asked, mildly exasperated, though my arms snaked around her waist and held her warm body close. “Not that I’m complaining, but this is supposed to be a serious … thing.”

“So that you don’t get any stupid ideas,” Selene said smugly, and I had to resist the urge to wipe that smirk off her face by pinching her side. “We will both stay here in this nice seat while the ships wipe those Marines from the face of the galaxy.”

“Will you at least allow me to try and get my hands on their relics, princess?” I asked, whispering into her ear, which sent a shiver down her spine and earned me a half-hearted glare. It probably didn’t help that ‘princess’ was what I tended to call her in the bedroom.

“I’ll allow it,” Selene said in a haughty, theatrically dramatic tone, which she finished off with a haughty huff. “But only if you give me a shoulder massage while you do it, peasant.”

I snorted and did just that with a fond smile on my lips. As my fingers got started on working the knots out of Selene’s shoulders, rewarding me with pleased noises from the girl sitting in my lap, I wondered what faces the Space Marines would make if they knew this was what I was doing while preparing to fight them to the death.