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

Oakenbear, HenryMorgan, Dirk Gent Lee, Daniel batt, and rat; thank you for sponsoring this race on Herald of the Stars.

I am on holiday for the next week and will not be replying to comments for approximately ten days. Chapter releases will continue as normal.

I cycle through thousands of pict-feeds. Over half of my personnel are watching the event. Many are crammed into bars, or have hired a meeting room with their comrades for a private event. More still watch from within fantastical noosphere lobbies as they rest within their capsule beds in their quarters.

Fifth watch, the training watch, are the poor buggers missing out, keeping an eye on the solar system, running patrols, and monitoring the great mechanical edifices that sustain us.

Thorfinn gives a countdown and the buggies shoot off, driving over the edge of the prow and down the front of Distant Sun. The largest, heaviest buggy, an eight wheeled monstrosity, accelerates too hard and loses contact with the hull. Small thrusters fire to get it back into position. By the time it manages to land, the other racers have already reached keelside and have split up into two groups, and are dashing between CWIS systems, sensors, and imperial iconography.

The starboard keel group gets hit first.

“Wow, team pyroclast has burned their entire weapons budget on a fixed inferno cannon,” says Thorfinn, “and they’ve blown it. All four buggies picked up on its excessive radiant heat and dodged. I bet they're cursing their calculators right now.”

“That’s a rather powerful weapon,” I say. “You usually find them on titans or hellhound chimeras. I really didn’t expect to see one in this race.”

“I don’t think the racers did either. They’re really putting on the speed to try and get out of its range.”

The inferno cannon continues to spray an excessive quantity of specially formulated promethium absolutely everywhere, cutting off routes and turning the ferrocrete beneath into lava. The ferrocrete struggles to radiate heat into the void and molten blobs rise from the surface, floating in the microgravity of the vessel.

One of the buggies breaks hard and takes a perpendicular route to the incoming fire, while the other three race through the gaps.

“A little too hasty there with your condemnation, Thorfinn, looks like one of the drivers has -.”

A searing light erupts beneath an open topped, four wheeled buggy. The buggy is the smallest of the four starboard racers and has no visible weapons.

“The interception teams look like they want to go for the weakest link,” I say.

Around the endangered buggy, a sphere of light flickers into action as a conversion field repels the high energy melta mines, converting it into light, negating the trap entirely.

“A double bluff!” shouts Thorfinn, “from both sides no less.”

The largest buggy sees the flames as it lumbers beneath the prow and arrives keelside. It changes course, taking a central route, slowly catching up the detachee from the starboard keel group.

The port keel group of five buggies splits up, each taking a slightly different route between damaged sections of the hull where my luxnet was ripped free. The damage occurred when I had to accelerate hard because of the sudden rok attack.

A lux net usually takes ten hours to retract and is a combined solar array and series of maintenance gantries. It was originally intended to provide power for my asteroid mining equipment and cloud scoops when the vessel was at rest, or accelerating below zero point two gravities. With the Iron Crane completed, I don’t need its repair capacity any more. I’ve long since replaced the mining and cloud scoop facilities too after I got the shipyards up and running and built the moth class ships.

I was using the power elsewhere, having repurposed the power for my microfactories, stripping out their self-powered modules for additional manufacturing space, so reconfiguring the microfactories after I lost the lux net was a particularly frustrating waste of resources.

It should be worth it though as I hope to replace the luxnet with hecatonchire missile launchers, great long range counterfire for enemy strike craft and torpedoes. When combined with my strike craft, they should saturate enemy CIWS capabilities, and help me destroy them. In theory, this should create enough vulnerabilities that I can send in the class three D-POTs and pound a vessel to scrap with almost point blank torpedoes without ever putting my vessel within the practical range of enemy fire.

My attention is brought back to the race when half a dozen heavy stubbers, hidden in the shadows of the statuary, fire streams of hardened steel at a single buggy. Normally, this would be pretty ineffective against imperial armour, but they’re firing a larger calibre of the phosphor rounds used in the herald’s back up pistols. The weapons are incredibly cheap, but the ammunition they’re using is not.

The buggy jinks left and right, slipping behind buttresses and torn up sections of luxnet. Its single turret glows bright as it dashes from cover and launches great spheres of blue-white light at the enemy positions in a carefully calculated salvo from the buggy’s plasma culverin.

Six shots rise and fall, splashing over the heavy stubber gun emplacements. Two immediately cease fire, while another is crushed by a falling gargoyle. I’m not too happy about the damage to Distant Sun but it’s minor compared to the size of the vessel and does make the race more exciting for everyone else.

Three of the emplacements survive the bombardment and their rounds cut into the buggy before it can start jinking again after its steady attack run. The armour piercing rounds punch through the thin armour and ignite, burning control systems and disabling two motors. The buggy’s acceleration drops, but it gets behind cover just as supporting fire from the other four portside keel racers obliterate the emplacements.

Both teams are coming up on their first challenge, one of Distant Sun’s two auspex arrays, a R-50 auspex multi-band, a suite of sensors tuned to detect hidden celestial phenomena and ideal for exploration. It’s also pretty good at spotting stealthed vessels and the best system one can really hope for without stumbling across and installing a X470 ultimo array.

My other auspex is a series of W-240 passive detection arrays that let the Distant Sun navigate planetary systems and detect other vessels even when Distant Sun is proceeding in silent running mode. It is highly unlikely to spot other stealthed vessels, but as long as it doesn’t give my position away either, it’s good enough for most situations.

I spent the morning with the R-50 array, bargaining with the machine-spirit and detaching a few wires. It now returns only a low resolution scan of the system, or at least pretends to, and it’s up to the tech-adepts and priests to troubleshoot and fix the array.

There are three challenges to complete. Each buggy only has to participate in one challenge, but there are a limited number of points they can extract from each challenge, depending on how many things I broke. It’s up to the teams to decide how long they take fixing stuff as some problems are worth more than others, but take longer to fix.

There’s a few hidden objectives I’ve snuck in as well with bonus points for completing them, like bribing the machine-spirit to fix everything for you, or manually recalibrating the sensors to pick up a hidden item out in the system. No team knows what the other teams’ secret objective is and completing them is one of the most difficult and time consuming points sources, but also the highest scored objective.

Two buggies stop at the array, one each from the port and starboard keel groups. Both the largest buggy and the buggy that detached from the starboard keel group also stop at the array. Between four and six servitors disembark from the buggy, apart from the eight wheeled monster which has all twelve remote piloted bodies climb down and sprint over to the R-50 auspex multi-band array.

They all start by querying the machine-spirit to list what is wrong and it gives them a whole list of issues in no particular order or priority, most of which are junk complaints like paint scratches, or a zero point zero one percent evaporation of lubricants for one of its gear boxes. This isn’t the damn spirit playing along with a ruse, it is obstreperous on a good day, which is why I chose it for the challenge.

The teams quickly realise they aren’t going to get anywhere and start jacking into the data ports using the collars around their necks. This lets them navigate the machine-spirit’s logs manually with their own search programs and they quickly start identifying the problems, with each team grabbing one task at a time on a first come first basis and an agreement not to take another until they have fixed what they do have.

As these four teams wrestle with the R-50 auspex multi-band array, the other six race along the hull towards Distant Sun’s modified jovian pattern class three drive, our main thrusters, power plant, and heatsink facility that takes up twenty-five percent of the vessel.

There aren’t many paths here and the buggies are forced into a line formation along the portside edge of the stern. Two of the six buggies are attacked by special weapon teams, who fire on the buggies with lascannons, krak missiles, and heavy bolters.

The interceptors attempt a classic convoy ambush, targeting the front and back vehicles. Both buggies, two six wheeled models, one open topped, the other lightly armoured, are both shredded, splattering white hot debris all over the stern and into space.

Four surviving buggies engage their thrusters and jump over their fallen leader. The extra height makes it easy to spot their ambushers and, in an entirely unrealistic manoeuvre for a groudside race, they spin upside down, the passengers shooting Marwolv lasguns from their seats, or engaging their buggies fixed weapons.

Hundreds of rounds are exchanged over four seconds.

The surviving buggies mash the interception teams, destroying over half of them with mechanical precision.

“They had to have practised that,” I say. “What a novel tactic.”

“I agree,” says Thorfinn. “Those fire patterns were pre-programmed. I’m not impressed by their ordinance swatters though. They didn’t have a single one!”

I laugh, “Well, I think they were trying to save costs. Did you see them firing at the krak missiles with their lasguns? One passenger even scored a hit! Not the best choice though, there’s a reason why we use storm bolters to intercept enemy rockets rather than las weaponry.

“Bolter ammunition, despite its limited quantity, can be modified into shrapnel and saturate the path in front of the missile with enough heat and debris to trick proximity and impact triggers. Ideally an enemy missile will either destroy itself or be wrecked by the shrapnel. A lasgun has to burn through a missile’s shell and they’re far more hardy than they look. A multilaser would do it, but they’re rather bulky and hard to aim at the speed required for a short range intercept, and a laser defence grid can’t fit on a small vehicle.”

“Another impromptu lecture, Magos? This is a race, not a lecture hall!”

“Bah! You brought me on to analyse what the teams are doing for our fine viewers, don’t go complaining now.”

“Well how about a hint on the next challenge then?”

“Right, well the four remaining teams are nearing the warp antenna as they hop up the cathedral towards the navigator spire. A warp antenna is an arcanotech device used to more easily locate the astronomicon, our Emperor’s great beacon on Holy Terra that will help us navigate the Koronus Expanse. That’s not all there is to the device, but the rest is classified and the challenge the teams must complete is one of, if not the most likely error a high ranking tech-priest can be expected to tackle for an arcanotech device of this nature.”

“Is that truly wise, Magos?” says Thorfinn, a minor tremor in his voice.

“Oh, don’t worry about it, it’s just a simulation. They should be fine. I think.”