Herald of the Stars: Chapter Ninety (Patreon)

A huge thank you to Rodney Maestrado, Eric, Mortlock, KrackenScat, Valderan, Viktor D victorious, and Jean Banninga. Your support encourages my personal discipline and without discipline, there would be no Herald of the Stars!

Over the next few months, I invite all my most senior officers for a chat at the promenade. I enjoy the endeavour and the more social setting allows for private complaints and queries that might have otherwise been left to fester. I hope to include officers from the other vessels, or those struggling on Marwolv at a later date, but these visits are more challenging to arrange and will take some time to get through.

It’s a different feel to the commendation feasts I put on once a week, as there, I host eleven people and they are usually from the lower ranks.

Everyone always wants something, or has some idea that they think will make for a big change, but production plans and facility designs are ponderous beasts that are slow to alter course and quick to crash from enthusiastic alterations that rarely have the full picture available, as the scale of mechanicus machines and the breadth of knowledge required is far beyond what an unenhanced mind can comprehend.

That doesn’t mean the information others try to impress me with is worthless though. The idea that exceptional work can get you a luxury meal and a chance to impress the big boss encourages people to work hard. The custom pins, displaying my pipe hammer that I forge myself and a monetary bonus are also popular.

Officers get a different prize, twelve hours of private tutoring. I only hand that out to one person a week though and it can only be given by me or first or second officers, whom I tutor anyway. The separate schemes and application methods help reduce the chance of stealing subordinates’ work because, as I now know, the threat of high casualty missions isn’t enough.

For a caste of workers whose education is mathematics heavy, tech-priests and heralds seem just as prone to optimistic bias, confirmation bias, and a false sense of control as human’s in M3.

As someone who doesn’t need to eat often, it feels rather decadent to consume so many feasts. It does keep me feeling human though, as well as impart a sense of success and positivity within myself.

I am quite weary of my eternal labours, no matter how interesting many of them might be. I miss Quaani’s youthful banter and Marwolv has turned from a brave new world to a mire of nightmare and drudgery. None of these are insurmountable problems and they lighten every day, but I wish to leave, even as my conscience keeps me tethered to my bitter-sweet works.

To alleviate my melancholy I have taken up a new hobby that I call, in my head where only E-SIM dares to tread, an audacious amble. I try to visit a part of Distant Sun I have not visited for years while thinking about all the things out there that might kill me and my fleet, so that I don’t get a big head and to come up with as many solutions to each problem as possible.

Most of the really big threats, like temporal displacement, vortex weaponry, and crazy black hole guns are vanishingly rare and unless I find someway to fire gellar fields or acquire a micro-warp drive for dodging such things, I’ll have to pray that I never encounter a necron or a paranoid inquisitor, or trigger happy space marine.

Good luck with that, future me.

Today, however, is a less ominous matter up for consideration. I exit onto the hull of Distant Sun near the navigator spire after a silent chat with a time frozen Quaani. Rather than stare out at the stars and dream, I jump from the ledge and float in the low gravity towards the prow of the vessel.

Beneath me, a company of heralds patrol the hull. Most are on foot, but a few race around on bikes, carefully weaving between CIWS emplacements, sensor spires, and gothic statuary. A squadron of mechanical stealth owls flit above them, keeping a hidden overwatch. There’s even a buggy racer team out testing a prototype.

There was a fair bit of laughter when I introduced these hull patrols after one of my ambles as there are few access points on the hull, and all of them are locked down and guarded. So I challenged the lot of them to a sim. Me vs the first watch.

I snuck up on an unpowered mechanical owl via the grav lift, hiding underneath a cargo container, then left at the last second, and boarded the hull. After that, I messed with dozens of external sensors, so that they’d think there might be another enemy vessel out there, and set explosives on a handful of the others.

After that, I burrowed through the hull, bypassing sensors as I descended. Once I was in, I continued to dig through the superstructure to the supercritical and hyper compressed water storage. After much trial and error, I tried my best to sabotage it but couldn’t manage it without killing myself. I left feeling immensely pleased.

With plan one down the drain, I stole a dataslate and recorded the biometrics of a resting crew member. With some modifications I pilfered his credentials and mimicked his biometrics, adding his permissions to my own. I only had a few hours to use the permissions before the dataslate was reported stolen, or an identity appeared in two places at once and I was locked out.

By this time, we were eighteen hours into the sim and all my officers were terribly unnerved at there being no sign of me whatsoever, so I triggered my sensor hacks and explosives, sending them into a whirlwind of activity as they chased down the mystery signature and swept through the vessel.

As they ran about, I waltzed through the service corridors to administration, where I used my stolen credentials to register myself as a crew transfer from Erudion’s Howl which was conveniently out in the Kuiper belt and would take hours to confirm the data. Meanwhile, I had a temporary pass I could use and I spent my last minutes with the stolen identity assigning myself to the next watch in the genetorium.

Once inside, I slipped away from the work crew I had infiltrated and tried to sabotage the reactor. Again, I couldn’t do it, which is great, but not really the lesson I was trying to impart and I was running out of time. Instead, I severed all the fuel lines with my nanites, disabling the reactor. The crew tried to apprehend me, but I gutted dozens of squads with my exotic weaponry and escaped.

Despite disabling the primary reactor, there was enough redundancy that, had there been another ship out there, Distant Sun could have done an emergency shut down of non-essential facilities, like the manufactory, at great cost and damage, and fought on unimpeded.

Knowing I could do more, I kept up the cat and mouse game for another ten hours. I turned a hangar into a sea of fire with some careful sabotage of the fire systems and a stolen D-POT, then pretended to escape on the orbital transport and went back in for another go.

The officers quickly twigged I wasn’t dead as the sim didn’t end, but that didn’t stop me from killing an officer, impersonating them, and walking up to Eire, who was distracted trying to make sense of all the auspex data. I shot her in the head, ending the sim.

No one laughed about hull patrol a second time and there is a second sim planned where I will lead a small group of infiltrators against the new protocols that Thorfinn has devised.

Seems only prudent to continue to test ourselves against unusual threats with all those eldar lurking out there.

Were someone to try and copy my infiltration for real, they’d likely fail the moment they set foot inside the vessel as Aruna would catch them. The whole point of the exercise though was to win without the omniscient aid of the vessel’s primary machine spirit. Relying solely on its aid is just begging to be busted by an inside job, or some weird, air jumping scrap code beamed at the ship from a pervy ritual in the oort cloud.

I don’t use any imperial codes either, and replaced all the old security with proprietary hardware, so there will be no inquisitor overrides or assassins sneaking onto my ship without a significant effort on their part.

I finish floating over the hull and land at the blunt prow of the vessel, my armoured boots adhering to the hull with a hefty clunk. It gives me an odd sense of vertigo to peer over the edge, as it looks like a half kilometre drop into an infinite sea of silver and black. In truth, without my harness, if I fell and was not rescued, I’d float about until I re-entered Marwolv with a fiery splash. Knowing the truth doesn’t rewire my monkeigh and mechanicus egos in the slightest though, so I sit down and dangle my legs over the edge. It feels much more secure.

Placing my arms slightly behind me, I lean back. The unfettered view of the accretion belt of the massive blue giant that Marwolv orbits is spectacular. The zoom on my armour is good enough I can pick out one of the airless moons and my two minor shipyards.

Everything is muffled out here and my breathing seems oddly loud, despite its usual, almost imperceptible volume. Here, I am reminded that I am small and the galaxy is lousy with eldritch horrors and thirsting blue bloods.

I raise my middle finger at the cosmos and contemplate today’s topic: teleportation.

One of my greatest fears is that the next enemy I encounter won’t try to steal my ship, or eat my crew, but teleport a MOAB onboard instead of troops and blow us all up without a chance to fight back.

Sure, the void shield will stop that most of the time, but the problem is that void shields can and do get taken down in combat, leaving the vessel vulnerable to teleport strikes. Void shields aren’t infallible teleport blockers either, as I found out when I first arrived at Marwolv, as some teleportariums can punch through.

Space marines are fond of dropping terminators on bridges and gunnery decks, eldar love to steal and sabotage without anyone noticing, and if you give the mechanicus a chance they’ll sneak servo-skulls on board and try to drain all your data. The necrons are the worst though as they can micro-jump right next to you, teleport whole battalions onboard and jump away, waiting for the slaughter to finish.

I am hoping my cargo container STC has an answer.

This legendary macguffin of mine is stuffed with glittering seams of knowledge. If I want to know how to build a device or vehicle to transport any object from one location to another, it will teach me how to do so from scratch. Because of its high grade, it even tells me how and why it works, not just what to do.

It isn’t perfect though as there is very little arcanotech, and there are almost no weapons. It is clear from the designs that many are pet projects and thought experiments, like a sci-fi version of dumb shit people cobble together in their sheds and back yards for a good laugh with their mates.

All the designs come from the same science base, which is immensely helpful for improving my own knowledge, but there are only so many pterodactyl servitor delivery drone designs, or deep sea worm miners I can make use of. The suicide pigeon bombers are just mean. The stupid buggers even have mechanical cloaca for insulting your enemies with acidic explosives before you kill them with a brain dead bird.

Maybe I’ll try them on the first corrupt governor or over inflated bishop I run into.

While there is a teleporter design within the STC, it is, as far as I can tell, identical to an imperial teleporter, and not actually as good as the one I looted from the conjoined mechanicus twins. I do appreciate having the knowledge on how to build them though.

After several subjective hours of searching through the STC, I find a design on how to deter pesky kids and nosy neighbours from one’s private arcology dome with a ‘blink dog’, a teleporting cyberhound, and the defences you need in place so that the hounds don’t go walkies by themselves. It doesn’t even come under teleportation and instead is filed under pack animals, alongside mules, and other beasts of burden.

I raise my fist to the heavens and cry ‘why’ in the most dramatic fashion I can muster, then take a closer look at the design.

Converting my canine company to teleporting dog riders that all have the equivalent of a more controlled imperial displacer field would be hilarious for me and terrifying for everyone else. The dog isn’t that important though, the real genius lies in the ‘fence’ to corral them.

A quick skim of the data reveals it’s an integrant module. Like a ‘mezoa gellar void integrant’ void ship facility that links a void shield and the gellar field for better warp protection, this ‘displacer fencing’ combines a warded structure, like a warpsbane hull, with field bracing, a molecular reinforcement technology.

The ‘displacer fencing’ works by creating fake material in the warp, effectively blocking the ‘line of sight’ requirement on most teleportation technologies. For everyone but the necrons, a teleport has a maximum amount of material it can bypass, as well as a height and weight limit.

You can’t teleport from one side of a planet to another, for example, or rather, you really, really shouldn’t. Anything more than four metres tall and over three tonnes will usually destroy the teleporter and its passengers too.

The displacer fencing integrant technology has two flaws. The first it shares with the gellar void integrant, in that if either of two primary components is damaged, it ceases to function. While this is a prize winning statement from Captain Obvious, combining three separate facilities for a vital defence, is inherently unreliable and foolhardy. This is different to the gellar void integrant, as that is just an expensive boost, not the core of vital shielding.

It is, however, a quick and cheap fix that takes up little space or power to add and maintain, as well as an excellent place to start researching teleportation denial technology. I might even be able to link it to the void shields too and boost their anti-teleportation properties further.

The second flaw is that it is a metaphorical and literal fence. The displacer fence goes both ways. So long as it is running, I can’t teleport people and objects onto other vessels, stations, or planetary facilities. I still think it is worthwhile though and I can always risk depowering the displacer fence when the risk exceeds the pay off.

Content with my findings, I create the work orders and request a prototype. Feeling inspired, I dig into E-SIM’s modules to see if I can get a displacer field of my own.