Chapter 290: The Spear (Patreon)

The Burning One drifted before the massed human fleet, the closest vessel being the heavy battlecruiser commanded by Admiral Quarren.

Quarren stood upon his command bridge, separated from the entity only by adamantium-reinforced voidglass. The Burning One hovered outside the bridge, and the two locked eyes, if the blazing fissures on its face could be called eyes.

“Someone is breaching our cogitator array! He’s almost through!”

Officers rose from their stations, shouting warnings toward Quarren.

〈“He has already succeeded.”〉 a voice echoed within the bridge.

Though the entity outside had not moved its mouth, assuming such a feature existed beneath that shifting mantle of stellar fire, Quarren knew the voice belonged to it.

〈“Before this unpleasant journey began, I believed the maddest being I had ever encountered was Tsara'noga, the Outsider. But you little ants… you are even more deranged than he is. You intend to destroy an enemy that outnumbers you twenty to one.”〉

Hearing this cold assessment, Quarren briefly wondered whether the Burning One sided with the Tyranids.

He was just about to order the gunnery crews to fire upon the flaming intruder when a massive tendril coiled around the Burning One and dragged it away.

A Tyranid Devourer organism attempted to swallow the entity whole. That act proved catastrophic, for it and its kin.

The tendril that seized the Burning One was a hundred times larger than its target. The creature engulfed the burning entity effortlessly.

One second later, fire blasted from the Devourer’s maw. Gouts of flame burst through its chitin as if from a ruptured star. In the void, impossible eldritch fire spread outward, consuming everything within a hundred-kilometre radius.

Astronomically tiny, yes, but enough to instantly incinerate the tightly clustered escort-bio-ships and the two Devourers nearest them. The flare distorted sensors across the fleet, momentarily overloading auspex arrays that were never designed to read something so fundamentally unnatural.

The Burning One flickered out from the heart of the firestorm and reappeared outside Quarren’s vessel, resuming the conversation as though nothing had occurred.

〈“Where did you get those torpedoes?”〉

Quarren stiffened at the demand.

The entity was here for the torpedoes. While purging Tyranids on Baal, it had sensed dimensional energies, energies that belonged to the Forger’s dimension. When that signature reappeared among the fleet, the Burning One had abandoned Baal and streaked into space in pursuit.

Uncertain whether this flaming intruder was ally or foe, Quarren held his tongue. The bridge fell into a taut silence, broken only by the thrum of the ship’s reactors.

At that moment, a Talon frigate translated into the orbital shipyard for repairs. The Burning One witnessed the transition directly, saw the vessel use dimensional technogie itself.

Though all ships in the nearby fleet were human in origin, the Talon vessels stood out with their distinct technological design.

The Burning One turned toward the Talon ships, swiftly locating the largest one. In an instant, it translated to the void outside Talon’s Wrath, the flagship of the Talon forces.

Its encrypted systems failed instantly. The flagship’s communication ciphers collapsed in less than a second, and the Burning One’s voice bled directly into Adam’s mind.

〈“Where did you obtain this technology?”〉

Adam frowned at the intruder’s question. Why did this creature care where Talon technology originated? If it were an Imperial Inquisitor, the interrogation might make sense… but this thing?

Given its unclear intent, Adam also chose silence. He ordered all weapons to lock onto the entity.

The Burning One could not comprehend why every human it encountered resisted the question. Even if humans were not the Forger’s creations or thralls, they must have received the Forger’s aid.

And this fleet clearly possessed engines that used his signature technogie.

Convinced that these humans knew of the Forger, the Burning One began to gather energy.

“Energy signature spiking! The reading is equivalent to… two hundred nuclear warheads!”

Adam heard his officer’s voice crack in disbelief. Fear rippled across the bridge, though none dared break formation.

And the Burning One accumulated still more power.

〈“Answer me or die. Two choices.”〉 That voice echoed again.

Adam remained silent.

While gathering its destructive charge, the Burning One casually annihilated any Tyranid bio-ship that drifted too near the Talon’s Wrath. Patience was not among its virtues, but some matters required at least a shred of restraint to avoid catastrophic mistakes; recklessness would jeopardize its pursuit of the Forger.

It wanted nothing more than to slaughter every human who insisted on speaking in riddles, but it restrained itself. After all, it did not seek vengeance upon the Forger.

The humans encountered earlier had not been the Forger’s servants, but these ones likely were.

There were rules among C’tan. A star-god should not kill another star-god’s thralls.

〈“Tell me how to kill these vermin quickly,”〉 the Burning One demanded.

Adam froze, unable to believe what he had just heard. “…What did you just say?”

〈“I want to help you kill the swarm.”〉 The Burning One resorted to a tactic that had never failed: give short-sighted creatures a taste of benefit. 〈“I considered tearing apart their bio-ships directly in the void, but there are as many in orbit as on the surface. Even I cannot slaughter them all without hundreds of stellar rotation cycles.”〉

〈“So… Tell me how to destroy them faster.”〉

Adam sensed a degree of goodwill in the creature, whatever its true purpose was. He still had no idea what the Being truly wanted, but cooperation, for the moment, posed no immediate danger.

The rest could be decided after he contacted Talon Prime and received the Lord of Talon’s orders.

“…Fine.” Adam pointed toward a distant cluster of living ships. “There. A large bio-ship retreating while escorted by countless others. Kill that.”

〈“What good will that do? Won’t they scatter like the ground-swarm?”〉

“I can’t be sure… but that’s what the database indicates.”

〈“Fine. If this doesn’t work, I’ll rip out your tongue.”〉

Half-convinced, the Burning One decided to try Adam’s advice. Instead of charging the target directly, it first drifted to a nearby Imperial escort.

Raising both hands, it tore the ship’s weapons from their mounts, disassembled the components with a gesture, and reforged them into a single massive spear.

Adam could only stare, baffled.

The spear floated toward the Burning One. It grasped the weapon one-handed and lifted it overhead.

Then, it hurled the spear toward the Tyranid hive-ship.

The spear streaked across the void like a rocket, a blazing tail erupting behind it. In a blink, it crossed thousands of kilometres.

It pierced a Kraken-escort organism in its path, then two Devourers sent to intercept it. Finally, it punched through the colossal hive-ship itself before vanishing into deep space beyond the system.

The spectacle was impressive, yet Adam had only one thought: "That’s it?"

A spear that could skewer multiple warships was remarkable, but the wounds it created were pinhole-small compared to the hulls.

Yet the bio-ships that had been pierced began to combust, then detonate. The hive-ship tore apart into blazing fragments.

With the Norn-Queen inside the hive-ship slain, the entire Tyranid swarm lost coordination. The swarm above Baal collapsed into feral disarray, just as the ground-swarm had when the Swarmlord had been slain.

The Burning One’s demonstration of power left Adam stunned. Having learned merely how to destroy the swarm quickly, it executed the tactic with force greater than the entire fleet could muster.

“Report this entity’s presence immediately,” Adam ordered. “If it bears hostility toward the sector, or if the Lord of Talon forbids it from entering, we cannot, under any circumstances, permit it passage. All hands, prepare for combat readiness."