The eldar elaborates. "A forceful awakening is possible, and might even be recommended regardless by our elders. Just like you, we do not want unforeseen psychic phenomena."
I don't trust them enough for that. It's almost a certainty that they'll try to form some kind of trap that would either weaken me or screw me over down the line. Most eldar are too sneaky and proud for their own good. "No thanks. We'll increase the materials we require instead."
Anesh and Flakey can help me train me later on, we'll be here enough for the two of them to receive a good bootcamp. The eldar gives the chest full of spirit stones a final look. "I will go discuss the trade with our elders."
The eldar leaves, the thicket of the jungle hiding him from view, leaving us and the four other eldar in an awkward silence. Thankfully it doesn't take long for their squad leader to come back. "We can train the two of them, your material requests are acceptable as well."
That's good, the most important part of this trip was getting Flakey some actual training on not exploding her head, getting some eldar tech on the side as well is just a bonus. "We'll continue to meet here for training and further negotiations. I'll give you the spirit stones in batches as we progress."
The eldar doesn't give me any further response, looks like giving them spirit stones only goes so far into removing that stick from their ass.
—
"ACM002, do you happen by any chance to have a spare psyker or two lying around?"
ACM002 shakes his head. "We do not stock individuals of psychic power."
Shame. We should've nabbed a couple from Kinja back when we could've, hindsight is a bitch.
—
With no real way to scout out for the treasure in the visions we're essentially forced to abandon the search. There's a whole planet where it could be hidden. Scanning the planet didn't reveal anything particularly interesting for the search, so we'll just wait until some hints show up.
"Take a deep breath."
Flakey follows as the eldar takes a deep breath. They stay still for a few seconds before the eldar continues. "Exhale."
They're trying to teach the twelve year old kid to meditate, so the first step is getting her to learn how to breathe, apparently. The next one is meditation. "Good. Now, you are going to close your eyes and keep breathing like that. Don't focus on anything else other than breathing."
Flakey closes her eyes and follows the instructions of the eldar. She takes a deep breath, waits for a few seconds before exhaling. She continues repeating this for a few minutes.
Her teacher, an eldar male named Sayian, watches her intently. He interrupts her once he is satisfied. "Good. I want you to do this every time you feel fear, anger, hate, jealousy, any negative emotion. Daemons can and will use your mental state against you, always remember that you are just a closed door to them, all that they want is to open the door and enter into the material world."
Flakey gives him a nod, not stopping herself from meditating. "Now, I will begin attempting to distract you. Make sure to keep yourself calm and steady, failing at this task in the middle of combat will kill you."
Sayian begins to poke the sitting Flakey with a wooden stick. At first each poke is light, no more than a slight touch. He slowly begins to become more aggressive and disruptive, transitioning from merely pushing her lightly with the stick to trying to raise her arm with it, which is when Flakey's breathing is disrupted.
Sayian pokes her head with the stick. "You're dead."
It's not that difficult for a psyker not to implode on themselves day to day, otherwise hiveworlds would simply collapse from the constant daemon incursions. The real difficult part apparently is keeping themselves stable during moments of intense emotion and distress.
Sayian motions for Flakey to rise up, which she hesitatingly does. The eldar leans down and picks up a small rock the size of a nail. "You have progressed adequately, it is time to enter the next phase of your training. I will throw rocks at you, you are to dodge while continuing to meditate. You fail if you either do not meditate or get hit."
Joline yawns, continuing to lean on my shoulder. "They're really going at it aren't they? I honestly expected them to hold back from training her and Anesh properly."
I watch as Flakey successfully dodges the first rock while meditating. "I'm pretty sure that it's a pride thing. Khaeyl did the same when we had her train Flakey, remember?"
Joline watches as Flakey gets hit in the forehead by a small rock. "Yeah. Undermining the training on purpose would probably make them feel the same way that Dol would if she purposefully ruined one of her inventions."
I glance at Dol, who is currently disassembling a shuriken catapult while grumbling. "Which fool thought it was a good idea to create a weapon that fires hundreds of rounds per second and then give it an ammo capacity of just a hundred rounds per magazine?"
Sadly for her, she's left to decipher the inner workings and questionable design choices of the aeldari on her lonesome. Anesh is currently being taught about eldar tech, hopefully that gets some momentum to Dol's experiments.
I'd honestly underestimated just how precious soul stones are to the eldar. Each stone is either the equivalent of one of their own or is literally the soul of one of their own. To a race facing their own extinction they are worth more than anything else.
—
It is like this that five months pass. The admech continue scouring the planet for their STC shard, slowly but surely exterminating the native population in their search for it. We continue to meet up with the exodite eldar, Flakey becomes more and more confident in herself as their training continues. Dol grows increasingly frustrated with the 'inferior design' of the eldar equipment that she is studying.
Our routine is interrupted by a development regarding the treasure down on the planet. One of the crew in the ship turned out to be a psyker, their impromptu awakening allowed us to create the same magical compasses we made back on Kinja.
The location of our loot is in the middle of the jungle, about a kilometer underground. Scans didn't reveal anything of note, so it's either shielded in some esoteric material or there's some warp-fuckery going on.
—
Our search for an entrance proved itself fruitful. Joline, Dol, Khaeyl, Anesh and I are all staring at a three meter tall thick steel door. There's a man-sized hole melted through the door, allowing the sun to shine inside and reveal a long, dark tunnel. Dol gives it a quick scan with a mechadendrite. "The steel was melted through by plasma weaponry. The lack of residual heat suggests this took place over five days ago."
I motion for everyone to clear my field of vision, before uncovering my third eye and scanning the tunnel. I cover my third eye after making sure that there's nothing that I missed. "The good news is that there's no signs of daemons inside. The bad news is that there's still some warp-fuckery about."
Dol uses a flashlight mechadendrite to light the way through the tunnel, allowing us to begin exploring. "The atmosphere is slightly different from the planetary standard. The most likely reason is the use of an air filtration system."
We find a door to our right. I slightly open it, allowing Dol to throw a reusable flash grenade. After it detonates we immediately rush into the room, finding it empty.
The only things present in the room are what appears to be an electricity panel and some mechanical tools. Dol scans the panel. "Tech level is congruent with the natives."
There's nothing else to examine in the room, so we continue going through the tunnel. The occasional room we go by is cleared much in the same manner, a flashband grenade goes first before we rush into the room.
It's in the sixth room that we finally encounter some of the natives. Rushing into the empty room reveals six of them screaming and rolling on the ground in pain. They're humanoid and about a meter tall, their skin is a dark grey and their eyes are pitch black, no iris or sclera are apparent. They still have mouths, so hopefully they can talk.
Their weapons look exactly like the ones that the admech displayed. A long plasma rifle with an eight pointed star inscribed onto the handle.
We restrain them while they are still incapacitated, allowing for an attempt at interrogation. "What are you here for?"
The alien's response is a series of clicks and weird sounds. I turn to Dol, who shakes her head. I turn to Khaeyl, she shrugs. "I didn't understand a word either. They're not one of the species present in Commorragh."
The imperium doesn't make any translators for random xeno-speech, what with the whole 'SUFFER NOT THE XENOS LIVE!' shtick that's beaten into everyone's heads. Dol interrupts me before I can ventilate the xeno's head. "Keep three of them alive for me. I wish to perform a vivisection to study their biology."
I shrug. "Allright. Do you have any preference on which ones to keep?"
She points at three different aliens, one after the other. "These three."
A pull of the trigger turns the head of the native in front of me into a corpse. "Take the ones you want outside, we'll take them with us back to the ship when we leave."
Dol gives me a nod and proceeds to take the prisoners outside of the tunnel. The rest of us wait patiently for her after executing the natives. After Dol arrives we continue exploring. We find multiple rooms on our way, some of them have sleeping natives inside, some don't. We don't find any awake natives. The final room that we encounter holds hundreds upon hundreds of restrained natives. Their gear is in a pile in an empty corner of the room. Revealing my third eye is enough to kill all of them.
At the end of the tunnel we find a large elevator. I turn to Dol. "Please tell me that this one won't take two hours."
Dol scans it, before nodding her head. "The elevator's max velocity is five point two three meters per second. The journey will be much quicker this time."
Another silver lining is that we actually comfortably fit inside this time. Upon reaching the bottom we are greeted by thousands of the natives hunkered down inside of a dark, underground cave. They are wearing tattered clothing, and going by the way that they desperately scramble away from us, are noncombatants.
Joline kills all of them by revealing her third eye. "Whatever the compass is pointing to isn't far away, let's see what we find."
Following the compass leads us to a small mound of assorted garbage, full of what appear to be rotting food scraps. Joline sighs. "Should've kept some of the idiots alive. Anesh, clear the way!"
Anesh simply sighs and follows her orders, she decides to use her wraithbone lasgun to clear the way instead of using her hands. A minute later and we're staring at a locked steel chest. Cutting it open with a power rapier is trivial, revealing the STC fragment inside. A small, steel sphere sits inside the otherwise empty chest.
Dol picks the metal sphere up with reverent hands. "It is ours. A glorious STC fragment!"
I sigh. "You do realise that we can't keep it, right?"
Dol freezes, before robotically turning towards me and looking at me as if I just took a steamy shit on her bed. "It's corrupted. The eight pointed star that's on each of the natives weapons leaves no room for argument. We'll sell it to the admech, they'll give us something of worth for it."
Dol turns her head to the STC fragment, before turning towards me again. I shake my head at her pleading look. "We're not taking the chaos corrupted STC."
Dol sighs, before reluctantly handing me the STC fragment. Joline pats her shoulder. "Don't worry, we'll get paid a fuckton for it."
There's a tale of two guardsmen who managed to find an STC fragment for a slightly more efficient combat knife. Both were awarded two planets and elevated to planetary governors as a reward. These things are priceless to the cogboys.
—
ACM002 stares dumbfounded at the STC fragment in my hand. I smile. "Are you open for trading?"
ACM002 continues staring at the STC fragment. It is only when I put the sphere back in my pocket that they break out of their stupor. "Two fully crewed battleships and five battalions of skitarii."
I shake my head. "A full combat fleet with a super-sized apocalypse class battle ship as the capital ship, for KH007 to be turned into a forgeworld for us, the critical personnel to run the forgeworld afterwards and fifty favors."
ACM002 instantly replies. "Done."
I should've asked for more.
—
With the STC now secured what follows is the complete extermination of the xeno population in preparation for colonization. Orbital bombardment is not used, the damage to the planet's crust would do more harm than good after we settle it, meaning that the genocide is enacted the old fashioned way, with heavy artillery.
Joline, Flakey and I watch via hologram as the native's capital city is turned into rubble. Each artillery shell turns a city block into rubble, killing all of the natives inside.
We don't personally join the war on the natives for a simple reason. They have plasma weapons, one of the few personal armaments that can actually penetrate our power armors.
Dol enters our living room, having apparently finished her last vivisection. "My hypothesis was correct. The xeno are nocturnal in nature, that is why most of them were sleeping upon our attack."
It doesn't take long for the mechanicus to bomb the city out of existence, it took them longer to build the makeshift heavy artillery and its munitions that it did to bomb the city. I shrug. "They were nocturnal. Now they're dead."
Another alien species bites the dust, crushed under the boot of the imperium. I turn to Dol. "Any progress with the eldar tech?"
She sighs. "Progress has been much quicker ever since I have stopped assuming every design decision to have a pre-meditated reasonable motive. Their technology appears to defy logical reason in design, putting more focus on style than function. Thankfully we have finished our work on a scalable version of the lasgun, producing wraithbone lascannons sized for vehicles all the way to battleships is now theoretically possible."
That's neat. Flakey points at one of the aliens leaving the rubble. "Look! That one's trying to escape!"
An artillery shell lands right next to said alien, blasting her into smithereens. Joline pats Flakey's shoulder. "Not anymore it's not!"
The hologram switches to a large, reinforced bunker, the permanently running scans reveal that it's chock full of armed xeno. The xeno are surrounded by skitarii, preventing them from escaping. Other than the occasional pot shot from their plasma rifles nothing of interest happens. The artillery isn't in range yet, so blowing them to high heavens isn't an option yet.
Their doom is spelled when one of them tries to take a pot shot, his rifle exploding in his hands instead. Thanks to them being crammed in the bunker like sardines the resulting explosion makes all of their plasma rifles go boom, killing all of them and leaving only a large crater behind.
Flakey points at the crater. "Why did the short guys go boom?"
Dol walks over to us and sits next to me on the couch. "Because plasma weaponry is inherently unstable, the lower the craftsmanship is the higher the instability will be. If the heat exchange fails the weapon will spontaneously explode. This can be offset by higher quality materials and craftsmanship, both of which are inaccessible to the xeno population."
Flakey turns to Joline, who pats her head. "Their guns aren't that good and went kaboom instead of going pew pew."
Flakey nods in understanding, before turning back to the hologram currently displaying the conflict.
—
The genocide doesn't take long, only three weeks are needed to kill the entirety of the xeno population. The first week killed 99% of them with artillery bombardments, the other two weeks were spent hunting down any remaining survivors.
With the natives eradicated we can begin the warp jump to KH009. I search through the available routes, discarding the stupid ones (one of them takes two hundred years ship time and five hundred real time) leaves three decent routes. Two of them will take us five and seven years ship time, so they are discarded in favor of the route taking a single year. I announce the route to the bridge via vox. "The journey will take one year in ship time and three years in real time. Sending our required angle now."
I give the ok to begin the warp jump once the ship is properly angled, allowing the mechanicus fleet to begin the journey towards KH009.
By the time that we arrive Flakey is already fourteen years old, my kids have become toddlers and Dol has finished several of her projects.
Joline and I spent the little amount of free time that we had reading books from our secret library. The topics covered are as diverse as they are esoteric. There's a series of five books that are singularly focused on the correct pronunciation of daemonic true names.
Some of the books are somewhat worrying, like the series covering the creation and subjugation of daemonhosts. What is even more concerning are the annotated notes that mother has left in them, as if she was following it step by step.
Halfway through the journey we decide to let Dol into the archeotech storage room, by now we've come to trust her with our lives, so her knowing our secrets does not worry us anymore. Most of the archeotech consists of armament and armor.
There's a bunch of power armor suits too, sadly Joline, Dol and I can't use them. Joline and I need custom made armor for our third eyes. Joline could wear one, my horns prevent me from doing so however. Dol's mechadendrites are incompatible with the archeotech power armors, modifying them into compatibility is apparently an exercise in futility.
The only ones able to wear them are ironically Khaeyl and Anesh. Flakey is still too small to fit into one, next year she should be tall enough however. Hopefully.
Our arrival onto KH009 is unremarkable. Joline and I spend the following two days resting, before going to the scheduled strategy meeting.
KH009 is a desert planet, the plant life is almost nonexistent and the natives consist of genetically modified terran lifeforms. There's a small population of tribal humans living on the planet, but that's not what attracts everyone's attention.
The hologram of the planet displays something that baffles the admech, but makes me extremely wary. A large, black pyramid towers over the sand dunes surrounding it, a cyclopean monument beyond time. This is a necron tombworld.