Herald of the Stars: Chapter Ninety-One (Patreon)

Many thanks to Mehmet Aslan, Lord McDeath, NCwehe, Tilazt, Klatue, and Leendert Kortlever for your generous sponsorship. Writing would be much more difficult without you.

E-SIM has a lot of different personal shields available, including the displacer field that is supposed to randomly teleport the user up to a hundred metres just before they take a fatal blow.

That isn’t the module that catches my attention though. At the end of a rather long tech-tree, E-SIM has a weavefield projector. I don’t know what it is, but it’s placed in the same category as a hyper-deceleration field, which I have heard of. A peak at the weavefield projector’s statistics gets my organic heart racing.

A weavefield projector has a higher mitigation threshold than a conversion or refractor shield, the imperial standard for VIP personal protection. I.e. The maximum amount of energy it can neutralise in one strike, without overloading, within the same power, weight and size category for the device is approximately thirty percent higher, depending on the specific threat.

This is great, but not mind blowing. One can always use a more power hungry void shield, and hook it up to a power armour’s micro-fusion core, or take a bigger conversion shield.

Where it really shines is its comprehensive protection and sustainability, providing protection against even the most exotic of weaponry, like the ones favoured by assassins and sadistic aeldari, without having to banish everything into the warp at a huge energy cost. Not only that, it will mitigate a greater total quantity of energy over time compared to other shields in the same category.

A void shield would normally overload pretty quickly under the sustained fire that this weavefield projector is intended to mitigate, though void shields do have a more rapid cycle time. Void shields require big energy sinks and need time to dump or recycle the energy they’ve displaced, as opposed to refraction and conversion shields, which have a limited pool of energy they use to counter hostile energies. A weavefield projector is a mix of the two.

With this particular weavefield projector, I could cover an entire company of heralds in a protective dome, and weather the fire from a voidraven bomber’s void lances, mines, and exotic missiles, arguably the most dangerous weapons in the galaxy at this scale. I’d probably survive the rest of the bomber squadron too.

I don’t think a conversion or refractor shield would even stand up to dark lance, let alone a void lance, and a void shield would probably be saturated after a single strafing run.

How then, does this marvel of technology achieve such a feat? Human and xeno sacrifice, obviously, because it’s the forty second millennium and the primary currency of the great powers is souls.

More seriously, there are also some materials E-SIM can’t synthesise from nanites, like bones from psychic blanks and noctilith, also called blackstone. Both of these are required for this design. I actually do have some blank bones, thanks to Tzeech’s avatar killing so many of Marwolv’s citizens. Like void shields, psychic human ‘blanks’ have a limit on how much warp energy they can negate, depending on their personal strength, before it harms or kills them.

I may have raided several millenia’s worth of graves for blank bones as well. They are incredibly rare and a vital component of most anti demon and warp weaponry and armour. The inquisition and the grey knights usually get all of them and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to grab additional protections for myself and my personnel.

I don’t have any noctilith though as it’s the primary building material used in necron construction and they’ve scoured the whole galaxy of the stuff. If I want some, I’ll have to pry it from their dead, metallic hands or get really, really lucky while prospecting.

The weavefield projector itself doesn’t need such strange materials, but the weird heatsink for this design does. The projector is also at the end of the tech-tree as I will need a full bionic conversion, which so far I’ve been doing piecemeal, and a micro-fusion core, just to have the space and power to house this thing in my bulky frame. Apparently, my warp-tap isn’t the right type of powersource for energy shields.

At the end of it, I’ll end up with a pair of mechanical wings from which will hang a series of pipes, reminiscent of a church organ or wind chimes, that allow for the dissipation of heat and exotic energies, including excessive warp energy; these pipes are also a form of null rod, a rare type of psychic protection hoarded by the Grey Knights, the Imperiums super secret demon busting space marine chapter that, if anyone asks me, I have no idea exists.

To borrow a word from a long dead Japanese subculture, the whole design will make me look like a neo-gothic chunni cyber-angel. Not really a look a seventy year old man should wear with pride, but if it will stop me from being nuked from orbit every time I go for a stroll, I shall willingly wear the stupid thing, take all my naps in a hammock or zero-g, and name my flagship the Black Pearl because by that point, I might as well embrace a zero shame policy.

On the plus side, I’ll be able to fly with the heatsink wings, just like I already can with a jump pack or, you know, an aeroplane.

Praise be the machine god and his golden prophet.

First though, I need to aim for the full bionic conversion but I’m still busy with the navigator conversion module I picked up after stomping on the tau and Bad Penny. There’s also a long list of possible upgrades that I can get after spending my single crown on warp infrastructure so I think I’ll hold onto my bounty of skulls until I’ve cured Quaani. With Sod’s Law a stronger universal constant than time or space, the skulls are also guaranteed to be essential after that golden counter hits zero, so I might as well head off a disaster by hanging onto them.

I stand from my top-notch rest at Distant Sun’s prow and stomp over the hull of the vessel to the closest hatch, pass the security inspection, and enter. There are no pressing matters that require my physical presence. My many minds and accelerated thoughts keep my administration time fairly minimal and I can hold several meetings simultaneously when I need to.

I continue my routine and my days and months flash by. Progress is constant and, fingers crossed, I find myself with a rare reprieve. There are no invasions, raids, or accidental plagues and ill-thought, secret weapon experiments.

The celebrations for my thirtieth year on Marwolv creep up on me and all of a sudden I find myself as the guest commentator for this year’s dune buggy hull races, a high stakes event coinciding with the launch of Iron Crane, rather than wait for Sanguinala as we usually do.

This is the third time we’ve held the event and Thorfinn still runs it. The first event was a mess, the safety protocols were rather anaemic and there were three serious injuries. Thorfinn had yet to come to terms with losing his sister, Thurid, and his two nieces. He still hasn’t, and I don’t expect him to either, but he talks about them less and his work has long since returned to his usual high standard.

Today, at least, as we stand on the hull together, halfway up the cathedral superstructure with a one-eyed eagle towering over us, Thorfinn is content. He rapidly chatters into the vox. A bank of holoviewers at his feet projects the racers as they all line up at the start around on top of the void ship’s prow, ready for the leap of faith.

This is the first of two races and there are ten buggies of different sizes and shapes, varying between four and eight wheels. The buggies have a five tonne limit and a sixty thousand byte budget. Sixty thousand bytes would get them a large, well armoured vehicle, but no weapons. The smaller the buggy, the more weapons and less armour it has. Teams receive thirty thousand bytes to build their weapons for opposing buggies when they’re participating in the interception half of the game.

Sixty thousand bytes would also let me sustain six and a half people in space for one year or hire a single enginseer. Comparing it to another vehicle, an unarmed leman russ tank, with no extras, costs me twelve times that to manufacture from raw materials. That doesn’t include the cost of transporting materials from within the system either, an added cost that is quite literally astronomical.

Even at one gravity per second, per second, the usual speed my vessels travel at, it takes a vast amount of energy to move tens of thousands of megatonnes. Imperial vessels are incredibly heavy, and if it wasn’t for my advanced data gathering systems and cogitators, cargo weight, for a warship, is almost a rounding error. This is why I usually tow asteroids into orbit and turn them into factories, rather than ship mined ore around the system, as it saves billions of bytes per tonne in transport costs.

The energy I saved from having three ork roks deliver raw materials right to me, rather than having to prospect and gather them myself, saved me many more times the energy cost it has taken me to retrain, repair, and replace all the personnel and material I expended in destroying the aggressive green bastards.

Even after all my expenses, the savings from my loot were great enough that I could build an imperial light cruiser for free if I really wanted to, or repair and complete the Iron Crane at no cost, which is what I actually did. It is a mind boggling amount of wealth, yet on the galactic scale I work at, about as relevant as the cosmic dust floating around interstellar space.

Thorfinn slaps me on the back, “Quit moping!”

“Gah! How can you even tell, I’m in power armour?”

“You hug yourself and hunch your shoulders.”

“Damn, I’ve never noticed.”

“Well, you may love to reflect, but you sure don’t use a mirror to do it.”

“I can hear the smile in your voice, you cheeky bastard.”

“And I in yours. Feeling better?”

“Yes, thank you. I believe I am.”

“Good, now focus on the race and say something pithy. We’re going to start the pre-race discussion in thirty seconds.”

“I am ready.”

A countdown appears in my vision. I take a few calming breaths, link my fingers and stretch them out in front of me.

The countdown finishes and Thorfinn says, “Welcome ladies, gentlemen, heroes, and heralds to our third hull race. I am Thorfinn Ursus, Master-at-Arms for the Distant Sun and head of internal security across our fleet. This year, joining me in the nattering booth is Lord Captain Magos Explorator Aldrich Issengrund, ready to commentate on the high speed carnage.”

Thorfinn gestures towards me and I continue the introduction.

“Thank you, Thorfinn. We have six returning teams and forteen new ones whose bold designs passed muster. The format is the same as before, with two competing heats with teams vying for the fastest times and best technical challenge scores. There are twelve people in each team. Ten teams will be racing and teaming up to reach the check points, while ten teams will be cooperating to sabotage the other racers. After that, they will swap and run the race again.”

I glance at Thorfinn.

Thorfinn gives me a thumbs up and says, “There are three laps of the hull and no set routes. Only the size and nimbleness of the buggy determines what path you take. There are, however, set challenges that must be located and completed. Unlike the first year, where we had human drivers and a limited live weapon selection, or the second, where weapon fire was simulated and we had human drivers, this year everyone is piloting identical servitors. We have live weapons with the whole arsenal of the Distant Sun’s databanks available, so long as they had the budget and were built by the teams. Don’t be too alarmed if you spot a severed arm or two.”

I clasp my hands behind my back and zoom in on the waiting buggies. “We live in violent times. From sharpened stone to forged adamantium, it is our tools and cooperation that has taken us from chimpanzees picking fleas from each other’s backs to grand megastructures illuminated by captured stars.

“Our achievements do not come without effort, however, and it is innovation, imagination, and perhaps most importantly competition that has rocketed us to such heights, enabling us to push back the nightmares that seek to claim our efforts for their own. This race is a reflection of our past and an omen of our future. With that in mind, it only seems right there is a prize for the winners to pluck from the backs of their opponents. Thorfinn, tell the crowd what these daring innovators are competing for.”

“Yes, Magos. This year's first prize is one master-crafted implant from the Magos’s personal reserves for each team member. A research budget of up to sixty million bytes, to be split between all members, is also up for grabs. This will be split between any projects that they have, depending on subject approval by the usual oversight board.

“Usually the second prize between competing species is death, but Magos Issengrund is more generous and has agreed to gifting the runners up with a second chance: a custom weapon for each team member from the Distant Sun’s forges and five hours tutoring from Magos Issengrund in any technology, so long as it is not proscribed. That’s it, there is no third place, for the odds are never in our favour!”