Tyranids "R" Us [40k Tyranid Hivemind SI]

657 M05
The first thing people noticed was that every partner in the solar system looked up and started growling, which worried a lot of people, and caused them to spend considerably more time than usual going over the local scan results.

“Command, I have 14 confirmed, make that 15 confirmed FTL transits, and a further 142 suspected emergence points. Sending tracking data now, over.”

“Copy that, Lagrange-one. We have the tracking data. Signatures unrecognized, but in line with projections for codename Eldar. Attempting hailing on all channels. Planetary defense force, Planetary militia, Damascus home defense fleet, Damascus orbitals, full readiness levels, this is not a drill, over. All civilian orbital traffic in the Damascus system, be prepared to execute operation Scatter within thirty minutes. If no further commands are forthcoming, execute in one hour, mark. Damascus Black Weasel vessels, be prepared to launch within fifteen minutes, authorizing full data dump, mark. Civilian air traffic control, please direct all air traffic to land at the nearest black-rated emergency shelter, and all upcoming flights are to be grounded, I repeat grounded, over. Civilian emergency response crews, please direct everyone not combat-certified to the nearest black-rated emergency shelter, and all combat-certified reservists are hereby activated, over-”

And so it continued

“Command, all 157 alien vessels grouping up and burning for Damascus. We’re receiving what appears to be a first contact package, broad spectrum broadcast. Patching it through.”

“Greetings, Mon-keigh. Today you will have the pleasure of serving Irildras to your final breath. Do me a favor and resist extra hard, okay? Mmmmmmwwwwaaah!”

There was silence for a beat, before a human voice spoke over the command channel again. “You heard the elf, all Damascus home fleet vessels and orbital defense platforms, switch weapons to hot. Today will not be a day of peace. We outnumber them and out-mass them, let’s hope that’s enough.”

“Lagrange-one to all points, there are three distinct vessel signatures. One vessel, 5 klicks long, designated Center appears to be the command vessel, it’s in the middle and the only vessel of its type. Twelve vessels, 4 clicks long, designated Large, appear to be important for coordination in some manner, as they each have bursts of chatter to and from both other vessel types. Third vessel type, 2 clicks long, designated Small, appear to be screening elements, and are only exchanging chatter with Large vessels. Unless otherwise indicated, fire priority is Center, then Large, then Small. I repeat, target priority is Center, then Large, then Small.”

“Damascus orbitals, on my mark, launch one salvo of KKV-1’s, and begin charging long range-rail capacitors. Fire in twenty seconds, mark. Let’s see what they’re made of, over.”

Nearly a hundred needle shaped missiles, each more than a hundred meters long, lanced out from massive orbital defense platforms, angling towards their intended targets, before giant plumes of directed antimatter annihilation caused the missiles to scream towards their targets at insane, and ever climbing speeds. As they neared their targets, the isolated and gyro-stabilized long range rails fired, sending more than two hundred multi-ton tungsten penetrator slugs silently into the night sky. Missiles and slugs converged with admirable timing on the enemy fleet.

Seven of the missiles and twelve of the slugs that appeared to be slightly off-course were fired upon by stuttering lances of light that ate through the projectiles in a fraction of a second.

All the rest of the projectiles seemingly sailed right through their targets.

“They’ve got cloaking of some kind up. Orbitals, save your fire until they’re danger-close. We’re going to need saturation fire if we want any hope of hitting them. Lagrange Stations, do anything you can to get a proper read on them short of melting the dishes.”

A tense few minutes passed as the ships slowly neared the planet, before the largest enemy vessel opened fire on Lagrange-one, slicing huge chunks off the fifty kilometer wide station with its lances of strobing light, and making every human and partner in the solar system wince as they felt the wave of deaths.

“Black Weasel one, launch, I repeat, launch. All orbitals fire now. Home defense fleet, supporting fire where you can, but don’t get within range of those beams. They’d cut through you in a moment. If they’re going to sit still for us, we’ll use the time Lagrange-one is buying us to take them out.”

Even as the order went out though, the Eldar ships dove and juked in unnatural displays of evasion. Lasers, disruptors, railguns, and missiles streamed through the space around the vessels in a dense and continuous cloud. Lightning fast pulses of light swatted many projectiles out of the sky, and shimmering barriers appeared in the way of some of the energy weapons, but even still, some hits got through. Even as damage was accruing though, the smaller vessels were firing at the orbital platforms, taking a platform out with each shot.

The main vessel switched targets from Lagrange-one to the surrounding human fleet, zipping forward to cleave through a few vessels before streaking away before any retaliation could muster the density needed to actually damage it. Unfortunately, the damage being done to the enemy was purely on the smaller vessels, which had interposed themselves between particularly dense streams of projectiles and the larger vessels. A dozen were only cosmetic damage, and four appeared to be disabled, but the rest were entirely unharmed by the time the incoming fire was down to the occasional secondary laser blast, which were being ignored entirely. One larger enemy vessel had taken a cosmetic scar while stepping between an orbital laser and the central enemy vessel, but that was it.

“Maker… Black Weasels two and three, launch, I repeat launch. This information has to get out. Planetary defense forces, prepare for orbital bombardment or enemy landings, we’ve got nothing left on the sunward side of the planet, and orbitals coming into view just aren’t going to have the fire density required. Lagrange-two through Lagrange-five, scatter. Load everyone you can and scatter. There’s nothing more you can do for us now.”

“Negative, command. We can still provide sensor readings and record what we can. This is our best chance at getting any intel on their capabilities.”

“You stay alive, hear? I want you to evacuate down to a skeleton crew. No reason you all need to die today.”

And so the trend continued, as the main enemy vessel would occasionally take a pot-shot at something, and the supporting vessels would retaliate to any fire, but nothing more.

Finally, though, the main enemy vessel seemed to tire of firing at random towns and military bases, and it launched shuttle-craft towards every major city on the planet. As a frontier world, there were only a billion souls on the planet, but there were still enough targets that it looked like flies swarming a carcass as the shuttle craft landed.

It seemed the invasion had begun.

 

661 M05
Four years ago, Longfell was a sleepy colony of three billion souls. These days, it was a kicked ant-hive of activity, with more than ten billion, and more people were arriving every day from all over the Coalition. As the closest colony to Damascus with a larger than average star, it was chosen as the location to fortify and move all the evidence of the attack that had seared itself into humanity’s consciousness, in order to investigate everything that happened, and to ensure it wouldn’t happen again.

Everybody with a partner bond within a thousand lightyears at the time of the attack would always remember the final, panicked transmission, broadcast along the partner bond network to anyone and everyone who would listen, using the very lives of thousands of humans, synths, and partners to fuel the broadcast out of sheer desperation. The event that had gained the name “last burst” was the first warning many humans would receive that they were no longer alone with the peaceful and the simple. There was war among the stars, and humanity was resolved to make sure it would not be their last.

Desmona and her partner Gill were standing in the custom built warehouse that held the largest shard of wraithbone recovered from the battle. It was more than a kilometer long, and it had been preserved in a psychoreactively-neutral enclosure since it had been recovered. Desmona and Gill were the most experienced wraithbone readers to have arrived on Longfell so far. Bone-reading was an unusual skill, and not often called for, but it could be invaluable for situations like these, where there weren’t any reliable witnesses to call upon to find out specific information. Anyone with a passing familiarity with wraithbone knew it was a psychoreactive material; that was how it was grown and shaped, after all. What fewer realized is that it was a psychometric conductor as well, meaning it stored faint impressions of significant events and strong emotions that occurred around it, especially when those stories impacted the wraithbone itself.

Desmona finally finished her read, and also finally lost her personal struggle.

“Blaaargh”

She cleared her mouth of vomit, and Gill rubbed against her leg consolingly, even as she turned to her superior.

“So?” He asked, polite enough to ignore her loss of composure.

She shook her head to refocus. “Other than the fact that the elves are psychotic fuckers, but we already knew that, I can absolutely one hundred percent confirm the suspicion that the smaller ships were unmanned drones. Huge and advanced ones, to be sure, but they had no crew or guiding intelligence smarter than a sophisticated flowchart. If we had managed to break off any of the larger ships to check, I'd put money on there only being the one manned vessel.”

“Maker damn it. So we really managed to inflict zero losses despite the cost in lives to defend Damascus.” Her bosses’ expression was stormy, and she was inclined to agree with the sentiment.

“Well, I know we still need to complete a more thorough investigation of the groundside conflict, but I can certify that’s the case for the space conflict. Any news on the groundside progress yet?” He wasn’t technically supposed to tell her, but humanity was not impartial when it came to the first major loss of life they had suffered in thousands of years.

“Not yet. It’s slow going because they glassed Damascus when they left. Some multi-stage psychically boosted runaway fusion reaction that interacts with planetary atmospheres from what we can tell. Probably a bomb of some sort. The only reason there were more than a hundred survivors is there were two ongoing mining operations that were deep enough to shelter from the heat at the surface. It was a near thing finding them and safely boring through the glass before they ran out of supplies.”

“Damn it” She echoed her bosses’ earlier statement. “Alright, well, I’ll write up the specifics of my findings tonight and get them to you tomorrow. Just let me know if there’s any other sites you need me at.”

He gave her a solemn nod. “I’d appreciate it. We have some probable synth remains that were fused into the refractory wraithbone of an autofoundry. We don’t know if you’ll be able to pull anything from them, and I know it will be rough, but-”

She just waved him off. “Nah, I get it. All hands on deck. We each do what we must. But if someone could pull the records on the synths in that town from the recovered data dump, it would be a big help. Personal history psychometric impressions are a lot harder to read. I’m going to need all the starting info I can get to be able to latch onto a personal song. Probably take me a few days at a minimum. I just hope it was an old synth. The longer the personal history, the easier it is to find the edges.”

“Well, from the size of the… probable remains, it was an adult, so that should be a better starting point than nothing. I’ll see what I can scrounge up for records. I’ll meet you at eight, at the main office, alright?”

“We’ll be there.”

 

664 M05
“So have they figured out any more details about the attack?” So far as I knew, this was earlier in the timeline than Eldar had interacted with humanity in canon, but that was hardly surprising, given the comparatively early use of FTL for colonization.

“Yes. The ground forces accounted well for themselves, given their relative inexperience. Partially because it was clear that the Eldar were acting as individuals, so penning tactics and sacrificial bait both worked better than they would have if they had acted with even the minimum of small unit tactics. Overall, it could have gone a lot worse for Humanity's first wake-up call. The necessity of such a thing is unfortunate, but such factors don’t change the ugly face of the galaxy.”

The Emperor was many things, but impractical was not one of them.

“Makes sense. It’s fortunate, as these things go, that the raiding party was what amounts to a princeling’s hunting party with friends. Even so, I’ve noticed the uptick in psychic throughput in the partner network. I take it humanity has decided to pursue more esoteric avenues to help with the next attack?”

“Yes. In addition to expanding the minimum settlement exclusionary zone from 200 to 250 lightyears around any detected Eldar worlds and fine-tuning the detection capabilities, we have been pursuing more active use of psychic powers in warfare; primarily for targeting and offense at the moment, as the low hanging fruit. We won’t know if the targeting can pierce their illusions until the next attack, but the augmented attacks are bearing dividends. I’ll send you the modified wraithbone formula that was devised for impacts against wraithbone targets, but it deals damage four or five times disproportionate to the comparable strikes with normal rounds. It’s being developed as a round casing for manufacturing expediency.”

I sent a vague sense of agreement. “I’ll see if I can tweak the formula any, given my differing perspective on wraithbone development.”

There was a lull in our discussion, as we both focused on our own projects for a while. Eventually though, with the last small piece of the puzzle for my personal focus falling into place, I spoke once again. “By the way, I finally finished the project of locating where the captives were taken to in the webway. For that matter, I finally found out where the webway itself is located.”

I got the Emperor’s immediate, focused attention with that. We had both been puzzling over the Eldar’s galaxy wide teleportation and pocket-dimension network for centuries now, with a comparative lack of results thanks to the limited capacity to test our hypothesis.

“You were correct that just following the partner-bond links would prove insufficient. I could tell they were moved somewhere warp-adjacent, but lost all traces beyond that point. That remained the case until I had a chance to send some test rigs connected directly to my network into the webway itself through a few of the allied Exodite worlds. I managed to use a combination of triangulation and measurement of relative bond strengths vs the interference patterns present to get a decent read on it. To my total lack of surprise, it’s another Old One megaproject that the Eldar co-opted. What did surprise me is that the webway is entirely within the warp.”

The Emperor allowed some of his own surprise to leak into our shared mental space. “Really? With the strict adherence to natural laws when within the webway itself that’s unlikely, to say the least.”

I sent an affirmation. “It’s not actually a perfect match to realspace conditions when you test some of the odd edge-case interactions. So far as I can tell, it just has the realspace characteristics near-perfectly described and enforced upon the local warp-space.”

“Did you manage to figure out how they maintained such a consistent set of laws within the warp?”

“I did. And it’s by far the most significant part of the discovery. The entire webway is functionally tunneled out of the warp, and then surrounded with a self-repairing multi-layered warp-construct barrier that’s the most effective warp-shield I’ve ever seen. The simulation of natural laws are then applied to the inside of the enclosed space afterwards. ‘Webway gates’ are literally just portals to the empyrean that open within the barrier at specific locations.”

The Emperor gave a mental head shake. “Amazing. Perhaps one day we will find the end of the Old One’s empyrean engineering capabilities, but I suspect it won’t be any time soon. Can the warp-construct barrier be applied to any of our designs?”

A negation. “Not as they stand. While fantastically resilient and functionally impermeable, they’re entirely static. You could never cover any realspace object with them, because realspace moves around relative to the empyrean, even for so-called ‘fixed’ points in space. Their exclusive purpose seems to be making safe, enclosed spaces within the warp itself.”

A minor moue of disappointment. “A shame. From your excitement you have other ideas to utilize such a barrier, though?”

I sent a nod. “Exactly. As you know, the partner-bond is currently protected from Chaos taint by being surrounded by a sheath of my own empyrean presence, but that represents a single, albeit sturdy, point of failure. What I’m suggesting is that we enclose the bond entirely with the new barrier type. It would still allow for growth and change among the bonds, so long as they retain the same symbolism of parity between bound souls, and new bonds would occupy the space without difficulty as well. The mechanism I propose would use the following warp-structure-”