Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

152 – Zara

Zara groaned, wakefulness brushing against the edges of her mind and starting to creep in as the gentle rays of the sun warmed her cheeks. She stayed like that for a few short moments, just wishing for another second of this comfortable rest, but then she remembered … she remembered.

She shouldn’t be this comfortable, her metallic collar as thick as a man’s wrist never allowed her to lay so comfortably. Worse, she remembered the feeling of her mind going numb, feeling her grasp on her thoughts and reality slip as the vile drugs flowed into her veins.

Zara sat up with a start, her eyes wide open and skittering across her surroundings as her fingertips brushed against her bare neck where there should have been at least a scabbed wound from the syringes poking through her skin. There was nothing, but the world around her made her frenzied thoughts ground to a halt.

Her fingers registered the silky grass underneath her, brushing against her skin gently while her eyes stared at how blue they were. Zara had rarely seen nature before — having grown up in a Hive City and then shipped off to the Schola Psykana at an early age before being dumped into Inquisitor Thrace’s lap — but she knew grass largely tended to be green.

Her gaze roamed over her surroundings, over the little valley between two grass-covered hills and the forest covering them from halfway up. The rustle of their leaves in the gentle breeze caressed her ears with the softness of the grass underneath her. Still, everything was some eye-catching vibrant colour, only the sky had the decency to be blue while trees had their crowns in the colour of the rainbow from pink to yellow to even purple.

“What do you think?” an ethereal voice, like a whisper on the wind brushed against her ears. “I think I’ve done quite well in decorating the place … but maybe the colours are a bit much?”

Zara jumped up, whirling around to catch sight of the interloper and surprised even herself when her powers reached out to feel for any nearby minds almost instinctively. Only then, did it fully register to her that there was no collar on her neck and no psychic hood around her head. Even the connections, the ports were gone and her body was reduced to its fully organic state without a single bit of Mechanicus additions.

“W-what have you done to me?” Zara asked, her voice quivering as she thought of the only conclusion she could come to: She’d been drugged up to the gills and was currently having the largest hallucinogen-induced trip of her life.

Likely, her real body was currently drooling with a vacant expression on her face as Thrace shackled it to his operating table. The thought made her tremble, and she looked around at her colourful surroundings with a hint of suspicion.

She knew hallucinations, at least she thought she did, but they shouldn’t have felt this real. No, she shouldn’t have been lucid enough to think about doubting them. That put her in a bit of a slump, until the voice answered her panicked question, “I just cleared the nasty things out of your body. No drugs, collars or metallic additions to cloud your thoughts. Ain’t that nice?”

“Why?” Zara asked, trying her damndest to recall what’d happened before she’d gone under, but all she could dredge up were fragments. The pain in her neck, hope, terror, glee and a pair of predatory green eyes holding her in their grasp.

“To talk,” the voice said, and then Zara stumbled back as those very same pair of green eyes appeared inches away from her face. She saw the smile on her peripheral vision, but those emerald orbs didn’t allow her to move her gaze even as she tried to scramble away. “I have questions, so many questions and you’ll have to answer them if you don’t want to die.”

Zara swallowed the lump forming in her throat, finally managing to tear her gaze away from the eyes of the being in front of her and let it wander down her body. She looked human, eerily so. Is she? She could be … I heard the Tau have some humans who betrayed the Imperium serving under them, but to have a Psyker as strong as her … 

“W-why?” Zara asked, the question coming to her unbidden, demanding to be answered.

“Why what?” The strange woman asked, quirking a snow-white eyebrow. 

“Why am I alive?” Zara asked, a hint of irritation seeping into her voice as she remembered the woman plucking her name right out of her mind with the casual ease of someone picking a flower. There was no way she didn’t know what Zara’s question was.

“Because I haven’t decided whether to kill you yet,” the woman said, huffing in mock indignation. “So, first question. Do you think this much colour in the fauna is a bit much? I was thinking of dialling it back down a bit.“

“Eh?” Zara took a moment to roll the woman’s question around in her mind, then did so again to make sure she hadn’t missed something crucial. Maybe another meaning hidden just beneath a metaphor, a veiled threat, or perhaps a test of some kind? Well, if it was the first, she was missing it and if it was the last, she was failing at it utterly. With a defeated sigh, she shrugged and looked around before warily glancing at the woman to try and get a grip on her personality. Even if she was just asking about the eye-strainingly colourful plants, Zara had to decide whether the woman wanted ass-kissing with that question or an honest opinion. After a moment, she decided to go with that latter on a hunch. “The colours are a bit much … almost straining on the eye.”

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The woman nodded, rubbing at her chin as she turned to watch the line of trees expanding just beyond the grassy blue hill. Zara blinked, not believing her own eyes as the scenery before her shifted, its entire colour palette changing.

“Is that an illusion?” Zara mumbled, too awestruck for a moment to keep her tongue in check. Life with Thrace had taught her not to let her honest thoughts show, or even a hint of emotion, but she now felt so … free. The woman next to her absolutely slaughtered Thrace, playing with him like he was a mere child. Zara had no hope of escaping, no hope of running or surviving with the woman around. 

That utter helplessness calmed her, like it always did. There was nothing she could do.

“No,” the woman said, a slight smile in her voice. “This is an illusion.”

Before Zara knew what was happening, she was weightless, floating in the zero gravity of space with stars and nebulae floating around her in the vast dark void. She gasped, but unlike how she’d expected, air rushed into her lungs and then she was back on the colourful hill, fingers clutching at the tufts of blue grass like a lifeline.

When she glanced up next, the whole world seemed to have taken on an orange-ish tinge, like every leaf was just a sun-dried illustration of itself drawn onto aged parchment. It sent Zara for another spin, but her instincts told her this wasn’t an illusion. Which only made it all the weirder.

“No, I’m not feeling this one.” The utterly incomprehensible woman said with a pout in her voice as she snapped her fingers and this time, the change was slow enough for Zara to watch it happen. Colour seeped into the bark first, like some celestial painter dipped their ink onto its parchments and then it slowly spread to leaves. Last was the grass, the blue leaves of the undergrowth rustling as they turned green, a blessedly familiar sight. “Natural is best after all, hmmm. Now, where were we? … I think you were just about to tell me how you ended up with that shitstain of an Inquisitor, no?”

“ … I was ordered to join his retinue,” Zara said, saying each word only after careful deliberation and with utmost care. She did not want to come off as demeaning in her answer, even if she thought the question made little sense. Psykers weren’t asked where they wanted to be deployed or assigned, they were told. That was common sense, general knowledge to anyone even faintly acquainted with how the Imperium treated their Psykers. Which she’d thought this woman was, up until now. Or maybe this was just another test, Zara really couldn’t tell.

“Fair enough.” The woman shrugged, then turned to gaze into Zara’s eyes with an intensity that had her freeze. “Tell you what, for every answer you answer honestly, I’ll answer one of your own questions. Just to spice things up, or this conversation would get dreadfully boring real quick. What do you say?”

“Okay?” Zara said, gulping as the woman gave a nod of apparent self-satisfaction. 

“It’s your turn,” she said, then plopped down into a chair of vines and roots that grew out of the soil as she fell. “Ask away.”

“Who are you?” Zara asked the most obvious and maybe the dumbest question she could ask. Still, she wanted to know at least the name of the woman who was going to kill her, if she really was going to die here.

“My name’s Echidna as of late,” the strange woman — Echidna — said, leaning back in her chair and kicking one leg over the other. “Saying any more than that would be … un-fun. Next question: What was your role as a member of Inquisitor Thrace’s retinue?”

“Whatever he needed of me,” Zara said with a self-deprecating shrug. “I’m mainly specialised in Telepathy, so that meant interrogation and sometimes active combat. … where are we?”

“I don’t think this ball of rock has a name, probably just a randomly assigned number,” Echidna said, then with a flick of her wrist made a replica of her own chair grow under Zara, which she gingerly seated herself into after only a moment’s hesitation. “Vallia Prime would be my guess for the Imperial designation, the first moon of the death world of Vallia. My own little domain, which I’d been granted full access to by the blueys now that I blasted that little flotilla and the mines on the planet you were defending to bits. Next question: were you enjoying your job? Prying thoughts and secrets out of people’s minds, breaking their psyches, plundering their memories?”

Zara barely had enough time to think about the answer she’d gotten to her question before her thoughts ground to a halt. Echidna seemed easygoing still, her cheek propped up on a fist as she gazed lazily at her with her legs crossed, but there was an intensity in her stare that told her the wrong answer here would mean Zara wouldn’t get the chance to ask her own follow up question after answering. Being a bit too dead to do so, and all that.

Thankfully, it was an easy question … well, easy if the woman wanted to hear the answer Zara hoped she would. 

“No,” Zara said, her voice clear even as her grasp nervously tightened around the wooden armrest of her chair. At the woman’s suspicious squint, Zara hastily blurted out a clarification. “Not how Thrace had me do it! I’ve been taught to be unbiased and methodical as an interrogator … but he enjoyed it. He enjoyed watching me break people almost as much as he enjoyed watching how much doing so hurt me.”

After a few breathless moments, Echidna gave a slow nod with a complicated look on her eerily perfect face. “Your question?”

“What are you going to do to me?” Zara asked after a short few moments of thought, thinning her lips into a line to not show much emotion on her face. “If I survive this … test?”

“I don’t know yet,” Echidna shrugged with a carefree smile. “It all depends on your answers … the only thing I’m unwilling to do is to allow you to rush back to the Inquisition with what you’ve learned from me and of me. There are a bunch of pesky little bugs in your Imperium hellbent on making my life miserable and I just can’t have you giving them the edge they need. Optimally, you’d join my crew and forsake the Imperium.”

Zara had to consciously keep herself from reacting, her heartbeat speeding up at the mere suggestion. She’d been ready to die here. Hell, she’d been more than ready to die back on Thrace’s ship, especially if she got the chance to blast the bastard’s mind to bits before she went out … but this was a lifeline. It would also be treason, high treason at that and heresy on so many different levels Zara didn’t have enough fingers to count it.

If she’d been the same woman sitting on the shuttle, heading for Thrace’s ship for the first time, fresh out of the Schola and full of zeal, she wouldn’t have even thought twice about the suggestion. Disdain for heresy and treachery had been beaten into her in a thousand different ways, and ingrained into her mind in a way that still made parts of her rebel viciously against the mere thought of even entertaining the thought.

But that had been a lifetime ago. She’d seen humanity at its worst, she’d seen faith and zealotry be rewarded with a horrible death. Zara had learned; she had been taught anew by the harsh reality and knew the Emperor wouldn’t suddenly stand up from his golden throne and smite down the traitorous witch before her. He never did. He never protected anyone. Not from living foes or from the horrors of the Warp after one passed.

The woman before her had done just that, saving that poor tortured woman sent at her, embracing her tarnished soul and stealing it out of the maws of the Hellspawn. Saved her from the fate that was promised to every Psyker in existence, spared her from the end that had kept Zara from just killing herself in a suicidal attempt at murdering Inquisitor Thrace ages ago.

Would Echidna save her too if she managed to pass her tests? Would she?

Because if she did … that was well worth earning the wrath of the Inquisition.

Fuck … it's worth everything. I would give everything for that. What use is belief in an absent God when he can’t save anyone, when he can’t save me?

As Echidna’s lips parted to ask her next question, Zara resolved herself to do her absolute best. Her soul’s eternal salvation was at stake here. She just hoped she’d not be found wanting by the woman whose emerald eyes seemed to be able to peer into her mind and soul with casual ease. There was no use in pretending … she could only hope her sincerity would be enough. 

It had to be.