Herald of the Stars: Chapter Eight (Patreon)

I gear up, grab my nanite sprayer, and unlock the barricade. It takes twenty minutes to reach the drop off. A lot of noise is coming from the red-marked room.

“Where’s da ‘umie, grot? We be waitin’ here for two days. Boss wants a word.”

“Dat’s ‘cause yer missin’ two fingers, an’ a few other things as well, I bet.”

There’s a thump and a scream and Bola tumbles out the half-open door, clutching a bicorn hat to his head.

Where the hell did he find that thing?

“‘Ello, Rusty. Nice ‘o you ta drop by.”

I ready my weapon. “Spike a few too many palms with my loot did you?”

“Is my loot. I can do what I like wiv it.”

“Not anymore is my guess. Who’s the boy with the big feet?”

“Wot? We call ‘im Nubbinz.”

“Right, and what does he call himself?”

Bola shrugs, “Who cares?”

“Do you have my stuff?”

“Kinda. Ya see, da Boss wants his share o’ shinies, an he ain’t payin’, cause he’s da Boss, and you're a squishy.”

“I’ll worry about your Boss later. What do you mean by kinda?”

“It’s in da room.” Bola thumbs over his shoulder at the door. “Nubbinz planted ‘is ass on it.”

“Anyone else in there?”

A nasty grin creeps over Bola’s face and he stares at my weapon, “Nope. Da other boyz came and left. Shame dey arrived early.”

I stomp towards the door and shoulder it open. Within, Nubbinz jumps to his feet and points at me. He opens his mouth and that’s as far as he gets. I spray him with nanites, and step back around the door.

Nubbinz stumbles out, choking. He swings his fists and I keep my distance, it takes about twenty seconds to disable him, and a couple minutes for the Ork to die. I really need a faster weapon.

“Dat’s nasty. Boss will be hoppin’. Good job.”

“He’ll get his fight, but in my time, not his.”

“You'z gettin’ bettah at dis, ‘umie.”

I scoff, “You’re just happy I’m fighting your battles for you. Don’t show off so much next time. You’re a grot. Be sneaky.”

“Wot’s da point in havin’ shinies if yer can’t wave ‘em an’ shout?”

“You can’t spend teef when you're dead.”

“Dats a good point, if yer a squishy. I’m orky. I breathe da shiny. My bed is da loot.”

“Then you’ll need to have the biggest shootah.”

“Now yer gettin’ it. Let’s choose a few new rooms. Da last one can be da bait. You trap it an’ a few others. Den we choose one for da switch an’ move it about.”

“I still have the biggest gun right now, don’t go getting any ideas about giving me orders.”

“‘Umie, you’z gonna do as I say ‘cause I ‘ave da goods an’ it’s a propah idea. Gunz got nuffink to do wiv it.”

My shoulders slump a little, “Yeah, guess I am.”

Bola sniggers, “Dat’s da spirit. Chin up, Rusty.” He points at another door, “Yer leave my dakka in dat one. Two handfuls ‘o days.”

I shake my head, “Six handfuls. I have to set up my workshop. No idea how long it will take, or if the stuff you bought will even work. I’ll leave a note in three handfuls to keep you updated.”

“Dat’s twice as long as yer said, ‘humie,” Bola growls.

“Well, you got caught, and I’m the one with the gun.”

“Dat’s dirty ‘humie.”

“So is trapping rooms,” I shrug. “It's your plan, Bola. What’s it gonna be?”

“Urgh, fine ‘umie. You win dis one.”

“Tell your Boss, Nubbinz got greedy and killed me, then ran into the tyranids with his new gun and got eaten.”

“Dat will do, fer now.” Bola sniggers, “Enjoy haulin’, dat tin huggin’ yah looks right ‘eavy.” The grot swaggers off, chuckling.

“Hey, Bola!”

The gretchin looks back over his shoulder.

“Wot?”

“Nice hat.”

Bola snorts and resumes his swagger, though it almost looks like he’s skipping.

My pallet truck has returned to me with a few ‘improvements’. Several red spikes have been welded on at random points and an ork skull and crossbones have been nailed to a board and hung on the back. The oddest thing about the truck is that the wheels no longer stick and actually travel in the direction I want them too, despite being the same wheels as last time. I am able to move my new tools back with only minor swearing, unable to believe the orks actually managed to not only improve something somehow, but return it too.

I choose a new room for my workshop, a few doors down from my bedroom. It’s filled with dud stasis chambers and withered bodies. I don’t want to have to look at them while I work; I box up the bones, take the data from their lanyards, and move the remains to another stasis room.

Unsurprisingly, all of the ork tools work on duct tape and wishes, which is no good to me. I disassemble absolutely everything: a pillar drill, metal saw, lathe, and electric smelter, then with the help of E-SIM and further scavenging from the crew cabins, rebuild the tools into something equally janky as before, but actually functional, all powered with those nutty 1MW batteries I can charge at the canteen.

Next, I create a series of bins and fill them with scrap and nanites, which separate out the materials into feedstock, which I use to cast crude blocks of plasteel for milling into parts. The waste material goes back in the scrap bins.

The nantites, being miniscule machines, are rather slow and take an hour to sort each one hundred litre bin, but I’m not stamping out tens of lasguns every second, I’m building a slugga, an oversized pistol, for Bola, and a shotgun for myself.

In our swap room, I leave a crude drawing of Bola dancing and firing his new slugga into the air with a big smiley face above six splayed hands.

It takes significant practice and testing to get everything right, as does collecting and assembling the tools and materials I need for the ammo. The research matrix and the lanyard’s collective eclectic technical library are a great help.

Occasionally, I take breaks to gather data, watch TV, and charge E-SIM. There are no more fights, but that doesn’t stop me from being cautious and retreating to the canteen when the warp tap is deployed. Now I have the skelly printer to assemble behind my barricade and viewable entertainment, I feel less need to take risks.

Four weeks later I am done with the weapons and I start practising with my shotgun and making traps. E-SIM has returned to low power and the information I need is shoved into my head and left for me to sort out, rather than have it taught to me. Progress on the bio-printer slows to a crawl.

Two days before the new hand-off, I start trapping the bait rooms, setting up a bunch of claymores, buried beneath rags and other soft junk. The wires are clear as glass and just the right height to trip an ork boy or bigger, but a gretchin could walk under it with little problem.

I paint each trapped room door in red, so I don’t forget which rooms I’ve sabotaged. Sure, it’s kinda obvious, but as our first room was marked in red too, it should be a nice distraction.

With the traps in place, I leave Bola a slugga, two clips and a tin of one-hundred rounds. I wait a day, then return. There’s a handful of imperial data slates on the table and a picture, scratched into its surface, of a chunky microchip next to an arrow pointing at a choppa, two tins of ammo, and half a dozen clips.

After adding an extra hand to his scratches and a smiley face, I take the slates and return to my section of the station. It takes two days to make the new wargear, most of it is getting the axehead shiny enough for the grot to admire his hooked nose in and sitting at the bullet press.

Until the hand-off, I spend the remaining time re-watching my family, charging E-SIM, gathering data, and boxing up the dead from all the other stasis rooms. There’s a thousand of them in this section of the station and it will take a while to get through them all.

The messages from the dead are fantastical and varied. Some individuals received tens of thousands of messages, whereas others only had dossiers of their family history, rather than personal accounts.

I count seventeen disasters that nearly wipe out humanity between M3, and the great exodus of M15. Everything from raging storms, war, disease, and famine to perhaps the weirdest one when the planet runs out of oxygen because we drank all the oceans and the phytoplankton mostly died off, forcing everyone into nascent hive cities while great fleets of tankers were sent to the asteroid fields, and even as far as the Oort cloud, to gather ice.

Billions of people were placed into stasis because there was no air for them to breathe, or food for them to eat.

It was during these crises that people would upload important data to their iced relatives, from the genetic data of their favourite plants, pet dog, or even themselves, to environmental systems, terraforming research, rebreathers, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there were multiple copies of different oceanic organisms, such as kelp, krill, and phytoplankton.

Some joker even uploaded the data for a fucking panda, of all things. At least it came with something useful: an entire genetic library of bamboo.

Keen to see what my relatives had left me, I ran a search on their files and got one hit from the last person to ever leave me a message, Joanna Isengrund.

Sitting in the canteen, I watch her life.

It is a rather sweet series of messages, starting from a child who discovered she had a frozen grandpa, to a frustrated, career driven adult, and at last, an old woman, with no children. A journey of over 800 years.

I click on the last message.

An old, elegant lady with long white hair stood alone on a beach, the sun setting over the water. I wondered if it was a fake background, another planet, or some marvellous feat of planetary engineering.

“Hi Aldrich. It’s me, Joanna. I’m not really sure what to say in this one. Speaking with you has been fun. You’re a link to both my past, and I hope, my future. This, this will be the last message. I actually visited your body once. It was strange, tapping at the glass of a man who lived sixteen thousand years before me.

“I’ve no idea why you’re still frozen. You could have been resurrected after the first couple hundred years of your long sleep, yet there you still lay; a man out of time, and perhaps, out of luck.

“Those of us who knew about you often tried to get you back, yet circumstances never seemed to allow it. Strange lawyers and odd laws, always prepared years in advance of any attempt to recover you, stymied our efforts.

“Others family argued it was best just to let you sleep. The future is not a nice place, a cage of our own making, policed by omniscient AI and tireless, ever so helpful androids. We want for nothing, lack for nothing, and achieve nothing.

“Most are happy with this. Why work if you don’t have to, right? However, we didn’t get this far as a species without dreaming, without chasing the star on the horizon, and I’m one of those people. It’s not glamorous, but it’s my life’s work, mine and many, many others.

“I hope you like it.”

Joanna smiles and the camera cuts out.

“Thank you, Joanna. That was a lovely message.”

The attached file is massive. By far the largest amount of data I’ve found. Golden text unfurls in my mind, accompanied with colourful fireworks and a fanfare. I smile at the silliness of it all then bolt upright.

Standard Template Construct.

Yes!

To think I spent weeks searching the burned out library, only to find the data hanging around my neck.

This could fix everything that’s wrong in this blighted galaxy or crazed xenos, machine worshipping lunatics, and reality warping gods.

What marvels of the future might I witness these plans? I read the entry.

‘Cargo Container’

“Fuck!”