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

A huge thank you to christian Mordal Anderson, Althaelus, Vincent Locatelli, and Sebastian for giving up your time and money for Herald of the Stars. You definitely get some free bets for this race!

I am on holiday this week and will not be replying to comments and messages for approximately seven days. Releases will continue as normal.

Thorfinn keeps a close eye on all the holofeeds as four buggies navigate to the warp antennae.

A warp antenna is a risky and essential device for any imperial vessel traversing the edges of the galaxy. Not only does it massively boost detection of the astronomicon, but it also lets you detect powerful warp entities. Like most high powered sensors, this, in turn, can enable warp entities to detect you as well.

I’ve little doubt this double-edged detection is what led to such a catastrophic breach of the Distant Sun’s double gellar field when it crashed into the Federation space station remnant. Without the antenna, Distant Sun likely would have had fewer demons surrounding it, waiting to breach. Pairing it with a Belecane-pattern 90.r gellar field, that is prone to flicking, is honestly a little suicidal.

Having the back up warpsbane hull fail for a moment during the collision at the same time as a flicker event  for the primary gellar field was more than just bad luck. Given they crashed into an intact STC library at the same time, likely breaching the station’s gellar field for a short moment as well, it is no wonder I found nothing within.

Totally a Tzeentch plot for sure, not even the eldar can take credit for that one. Whether the library was destroyed or stolen, I will never know. I can’t even be sure my speculation is true.

“What are the other four remaining teams doing, Thorfinn?”

“Well, they’ve bagged two thirds of the points for the auspex challenge. Three of the teams are packing up and getting ready to run the gauntlet by the main thrusters, no doubt hoping to grab all the easy points from the final challenge.

“The eight wheeled buggy team, team Arachnid, are staying on, no doubt trying to make use of their extra hands and minds to solve the more rewarding problems before they continue the race.”

As three auspex solving teams depart, the first buggy arrives at the warp antenna. Five passengers disembark while the driver circles the antenna, a fifty metre tower surrounded by a faint purple haze and covered in unnatural frost. The tower consists of multiple rods, similar to force weapons used by psykers, that are slightly separated from each other.

There shouldn’t be a need for the buggy driver to patrol as the intercept teams aren’t supposed to attack at a challenge location, but clearly this team is wary of subtle cheating after the brutal ambush they just survived.

The five passengers approach the antenna with little caution, and immediately plug into its systems. As they query the machine-spirit, the servitors’ wards flair and burn bright. There’s nothing on the holos, but the readouts I have of the servitors are beeping harsh warnings.

In their rush to fix things, the team ignores the warnings and the servitors begin to fail, the intense discharge of sorcerous power eroding the servitors’ flesh and disabling their implants as their expensive protections oppose the corrupting energies of the warp.

Two minutes after their contact with the tower, the servitors perish.

“Oh dear,” I say. “That was terribly foolish. Good job we’re using servitors this year.”

The lone driver departs, passing three buggies as he goes. His only chance now is to complete the race first and hope it gives him enough points.

“I can’t tell what went wrong there, Magos. I’ve never seen servitors drop like that.”

“Oh, it was very much by design. The how and why is classified, I’m afraid.”

Not even a demon would Nurgle be able to manipulate a corpse that putrefied and saturated with supercharged sacred blood. While demons could take advantage of such a pyrrhic defence and wipe out my servitors en masse, it would cost vast amounts of power. Not even Tzeench’s avatar’s breach of realspace was enough to trigger such a reaction among my servitors.

It would be cheaper for chaos forces to manifest demons and fight against my servitors than overload their wards and sacred blood. As the forces of chaos are inherently selfish and wary of their fractious alliances, they never spend more power than they have to, which means I should always get a chance to fight back.

“What should they have done?”

“The same thing you’re supposed to do with any high voltage installation. Turn it off before you approach. I know some people mess with live wires, thinking themselves sufficiently insulated, but why take the risk to save a few minutes of time when it might kill you? They’re here to win a race, not a Darwin award. You can look that reference up in your own time.”

“Do all of this year’s challenges contain an educational lesson?” Thorfinn chuckles.

“Of course. They’re all stuff a tech-apprentice could do by following the manual. It makes failure all the more embarrassing, as it should be. Basic rituals and precautions are an important thing to follow, even when you are rushed.”

“The teams are going to hate the replays, aren’t they?”

I grin, “Absolutely despise them, I’m sure. Let’s see if these three slower teams can do a little better.”

As the teams request the machine-spirit to depower the antenna, my kill counter starts to creep up rapidly. I try not to worry about it too much as I should receive a message within the next few minutes and nothing is shooting at my void ships.

The three teams around the antenna successfully plug into its systems without killing themselves this time. While they dig into the problem, the three buggies who left the auspex challenge race split up and race around the main thrusters.

The remaining half of the intercept teams’ special weapon teams can’t cover so many points around the thrusters with their reduced numbers and try to redeploy. They spread out enough that all three buggies weather the gauntlet of heavy bolters and lascannons, though not without significant damage and four casualties among their passengers. The three racing teams do, however, reduce the intercept teams to a single special weapons team with their counter fire.

With great difficulty, the three buggies navigate along the spine of the vessel towards the void sunder lance turret. These lances are the most powerful and energy hungry weapon that an imperial vessel can wield. Such is their size that my light cruiser can only fit two lances, one beneath the prow, and one along the spine. They wouldn’t actually fit in a broadside slot, though a battleship, like an apocalypse class, can field whole batteries of them along their port and starboard weapon arrays.

The power these lances require is the main reason why I haven’t refitted my light cruiser with plasma macrocannons from the origami design. I have some plans to replace Distant Sun’s munitorum with auxiliary plasma banks.

The amount of rewiring to be done to pump that power to the possible plasma macrocannons above them however, will require at least a year of yard time and I can’t risk taking out my most powerful warship for that long. I can’t just swap them out in a month like I could if I, for example, swapped out the extended range of my lathe grav-culverin broadside for the armour piercing properties of a stygies-pattern macrocannon battery.

As the three buggies approach the void sunder lance, they encounter a minefield. They carefully engage their thrusters, hopping over the mines. Just as they reach the end, all the mines detonate and the buggies fly off into space.

“That’s quite brilliant,” says Thorfinn. “Were those filled with compressed gases?”

“I believe so. That six wheel buggy was likely hoping its mass would help it weather more damaging mines and now it doesn’t have strong enough thrusters to return it to Distant Sun. The recovery team will have to grab them.”

“Those lighter four wheeled ones, teams Silver Grox and ‘Crete Skipper, should recover. Looks like Silver Grox touched down first, though they’ve landed on top of the lance turret. Good job we’re in microgravity or they’d need a crane to get down from there.”

“There they go,” I say. “I think by the time they get to the access point, ‘Crete Skipper will have pulled up next to it.”

“Silver Grox and ‘Crete skipper are supposed to do one challenge per lap, but they’ve clearly decided to flout that rule and take the penalty, going for a second challenge while the Silver Grox driver tried to manoeuvre off the lance turret.”

“Team Arachnid have just left the auspex challenge, did they get the last points?”

Thorfinn checks his holoviewers, “Hmm, not quite, they missed one, but they got the big pointer for properly appeasing the machine-spirit.”

“Good,” I say. I walk over to look at Thorfinn’s data. “Oh, I see. They carefully altered the sensitivity of the auspex’s sensors so that all the pointlessly small errors won’t bother it unless it runs a full diagnostic. Though going to all that trouble fixing what they think was an over tuned machine is hilarious when they could have just spent a few seconds loosening the protective cap that’s stuck over the sensor that’s annoying it.”

“How did they miss that?”

“Well, there’s a big enough data set from the available sensors that, once they fixed all the simulated errors, the machine-spirit can maintain its maximum image quality anyway. Without manually checking each sensor, it will look like a false positive on the diagnostics as I messed with the sensor so that its protective cover always reads as open, even when it clearly isn’t.

“Things like this are why we still do visual inspections and manual work, rather than just relying on auto-simulacra, that’s automated repair systems, and other diagnostics tools, because you never know if what your diagnostic tools are telling you is correct without taking a look for yourself and double checking with a second set of tools; in this case, the old mark one eyeball.”

“That’s pretty sneaky of you, Magos.”

“I admit I did have a lot of fun setting these challenges up, though it looks like I might have got a bit carried away with the warp antenna. I am rather zealous when it comes to proper warp protections and it appears that the simulated scrapcode I installed into the diagnostic sockets, with a hidden physical bypass device behind the panel, has taken out another team.”

“I didn’t realise that was possible.”

“A lot of people don’t because of the protective collars in the mesh suits. While they let the user view another device’s data in a virtual environment, reducing infection vectors into one’s MIU, they’re not infallible. It’s really important to check a socket for tampering before you jack in to any device, especially arcanotech, as when they get infected with scrap code, or other...things, it rarely behaves in a conventional manner. If it wasn’t simulated and stuffed with failsafes, that code might have killed the remote operators too. They’ll still be fixing their implants for weeks though. It will be a memorable lesson.”

“Is there any way to avoid that issue without having to dismantle every machine and scan it perfectly just to do a standard check?”

“Yes, scan the device first. You can have a machine-spirit compare auspex scans. If there’s nothing wrong, you will probably be fine, but there’s a reason why I issue everyone a dataslate as well as an MIU. If you plug that in first to test the digital waters, as it were, you can trick scrap code into running in an un-networked device and trap it, rather than risk your mesh suit collar.

“Yes, the collars are incredibly robust and more than ninety nine percent of the time you will be fine just plugging straight in without precautions; they are supposed to catch anything malicious, but plugging straight in on a device that you know has been tampered with and is incredibly dangerous is spectacularly dumb.”

Thorfinn laughs, “The surviving two are clearly more cautious though. Team Auramite haven’t even connected to any terminals yet and have done a proper visual inspection, before they even scan or jack in. Looks like they’ve already pushed a component back into alignment at the top of one of the antenna rods. Any other major traps these two surviving teams might encounter?”

“They’ve avoided the lethal ones. It’s a  fairly simple reflash and configuration they need to complete. The catch is that if they reinstall all the systems without manually recording the current settings, they’ll never have time to re-enter all the information before the race finishes when they could have done it in seconds with a simple script fed from their own memory.

“They have to manually record the antenna’s settings once they’ve removed the simulated scrap code generator from behind the panel. They really shouldn’t save the settings from the original install and carry it through to the new install, just in case there is scrap code they’ve missed. Saving settings in the default reinstall option, however, and if they do that they’ll have to try again, as there is a second batch of simulated scrap code that the machine-spirit will execute from its own data banks if they are lazy about a proper reset.”

My kill counter’s rapid ascent slows and I am five thousand higher than it was. I’m worried now as there aren’t that many tau or orks left on Marwolv, or at least there shouldn’t be, and I still haven’t received a call.

I begin to vox all my groundside commanders, but they haven’t noticed anything wrong either. I have them all go to amber alert and push for extra patrols. Whatever is having a go at my forces has clearly taken an epic beating, so I either won, or something is about to go horribly wrong. There isn’t much else I can do and I don’t want to call off these celebrations unless I have to.

“If they do it right, how long should a new cogitator installation take?”

“Five minutes, tops. A bit less than the time it should take to lap Distant Sun once, if you were driving in a straight line on a level surface and not leaping around imperial statues and getting shot at. I designed the challenges so that if twelve people were working on them, and knew exactly what they were doing, they could complete everything in about the time it takes to do one lap, which is also about twelve minutes, depending on the buggy. I like to think Mars’s denizens would approve of the precise timings.”

“Well, I’m enjoying myself,” says Thorfinn, “and I think our teams and viewers are too. There’s a lot of chat going on in the noosphere and someone has already dubbed a few clips with some music from Distant Sun’s new melodium.”

“Well, I hope it stays that way. Let’s check out the final challenge.”