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

A huge thank you to John Angelidis, Gonzalo León, Apollo Above, J A.D, Daft Wully, Aggammenonn, Hello 1939539es, Chai Chang, and Lucas Gossett. I really appreciate you acknowledging the worth of my labours.

It has been two weeks since my transformation. Carefully monitoring my third eye during this time suggests it will take at least three years to grow and then I will need to master it well enough to operate on Quaani. Ylien and Aileen, my two new tutors in the psychic arts, have no idea how long it will take to learn to use my eye as neither of them have any knowledge of it. E-SIM, however, can aid in learning the skills I have purchased and will be able to help me with my eye when it matures.

The sheer incredulity on Ylien’s face when I so happened to became a navigator, and he realised I may have tricked him into teaching me personally was epic. Pulling the wool over the eyes of an eldar was fantastic. I’m still grinning like a loon every few hours when I think about it.

Ylien is teaching me how to safely use my powers and Alieen is teaching me his biomancy. For now, everything is academic studies, meditation and other mental exercises. This will likely continue for some months before either deems me fit to actually channel the warp.

I am still not used to the extra height and energy the transformation has brought me and have changed the location of my audacious ambles to the mountains and hills of Marwolv. Feeling the wind and rain on my face and listening to the streams tumble into the dells helps ground me. If I’d undergone the process in the depths of space, I think I would have gone quite mad. Even cranking up the realism of noosphere sims can’t cure my restlessness, though it does help.

I spend the hours between my tutelage preparing Marwolv for my long absence. For that, I must assemble a team to oversee my domain. I have chosen a team of nine individuals.

Today, I am at the construction site of Marwolv’s first hive spire, waiting for the new team to arrive for our first meeting. We are starting with the agri-hive and, once it is complete, we will build the first heavy manufacturing spire, and the research and higher studies spire, simultaneously.

Standing on a hill over the construction site I watch dozens of mechanical wyrms, each two hundred and fifty metres in length and ten metres wide, as they chomp through the earth. These are the giant scavenger wyrms from my STC and they are currently configured to sort and compact powdered minerals into dense bricks and store liquids and gases in their internal bladders.

Swarms of smaller wyrms, each eight metres long and three metres wide, swarm around the larger worms taking away the compressed bricks, or latching onto the scavenger wyrms to drain them of their fluid resources, and transport everything to one of two macro-crawlers.

Once the crawlers are loaded, they travel to a twenty five kilometre square industrial complex and space port, fifteen kilometres away from the centre of the building site. There, the excavated materials are processed and turned into the parts required for the spire, or stored for later use. Additional resources, mostly adamantium, cogitators, and plasteel, are shipped in by class three D-POTs from orbit. Then, the macro-crawlers return with the manufactured parts to the building site.

Three more crawlers are constantly on site, one acts as central administration, storage, and light manufacturing for tools and fixings, while the other two are accommodation and hospitality for the workers. Each macro-crawler is as long as an early M3 container ship, and almost twice as wide and as tall as they would be without cargo stacked on the deck.

Watching all the machines, workers, and tens of thousands of servitors bustle about the five hundred and seventy-six square kilometre site is rather overwhelming and I can’t help but wonder if I am too ambitious, then I remember the ridiculous galaxy I am in and toss my concerns out the air-lock. Seeing dozens of adepts stomp around in cargo loaders makes me smile too. They are rather fun to use.

One of these spires will be built on each continent and act as the central core of a hive city, each spire will be, from sea level, one hundred and ninety-two kilometres tall and twenty four kilometres wide, a slenderness ratio of one to eight; pretty chunky as skyscrapers go. They will be tall enough to act as ports for void ships or act as the anchor points for an orbital manufacturing ring, should we ever need one. Later spires will likely be much shorter.

I could have chosen a slimmer design, but I am treating each spire as if it were a self-sufficient battleship or void station, then quadrupling the armour, doubling the shields, and giving it enough PDF lasers and internal defences to take out a fleet or army.  I really want to try and build hive cities that don’t obliterate the biosphere.

As for how I’ll be powering all of that without beggaring myself, I’ll be relying on Marwolv’s highly active, molten core that is kept extra hot by the constant squeezing it undergoes from the system’s planetary bodies. The plans also contain spaces for dozens of secondary fusion reactors, and a similar number of high temperature tertiary fission reactors as well. The fission reactors are an efficient way of splitting water into fuel and air if, for some reason, the heat in the mantle can’t be accessed for a while and I need a back up. They generate decent power and medical atomics too.

As such, the most interesting part of the spire isn’t above ground or the tip thrusting up through the thermosphere, but what will be buried beneath them. Right now, the wyrms are still levelling out the site. Once that is complete, the foundations will be cast with specialised ferrocrete into grand floats which will stop the tower from sinking into the mantle.

The foundations will then be slowly lowered as the earth is excavated and the tower will be forty kilometres tall, or deep, before it even reaches above sea level, let alone above the ground level of the site. The really nifty part about the whole thing though are the great spheres that will be hung from the ferrocrete foundation floats.

These spheres will be filled with tanks of water, or mineral salts, to absorb the heat of the mantle and generate heat for power, homes, and industrial processes while also acting as a way of adjusting the buoyancy of the spire. Once it’s built, the whole tower will bob up and down, possibly as much as two hundred metres, as its weight is carefully managed.

We won’t actually know the exact calculations until it is built as simulations and partial data from other hives aren’t enough to know exactly how everything will work out with our circumstances; they are only sufficient to let us safely design and construct the spire. Everything is calculated to withstand worst case scenarios with an additional fifteen percent error rate.

This movement will make creating transport links between any possible adjacent spires a fascinating engineering challenge, one that I haven’t quite got my head around yet. Fortunately, this one spire can hold Marwolv’s entire thirty million people multiple times over and it will be centuries before any of the planned three spires will require connected twins. I have plenty of time to visit other hive cities and see how they manage it, or have my own teams work through the problem.

While each spire is a icositetragon, or a twenty-four sided polygon, rather than being a perfect rectangle, I can still use those less accurate numbers to estimate the ludicrous scale of a single spire. If each main floor is one hundred metres tall, I will have approximately two thousand, three hundred and forty floors above and below ground. Each floor could hold thirty million people at a density of nineteen point two metres squared per person, for a total of seventy billion, two hundred million people per spire.

It won’t be anything like that, as I need space to manufacture and grow the resources all these people require. Even if I assign a more reasonable one thousand square metres per person, which is over six point six times more space per person, including servitors, on Distant Sun, I could still house one billion, three hundred forty-seven million, eight hundred forty thousand people, before splitting each major  floor into its subfloors sub floors. Six spires would hold the entire population of Earth during my first life at one thousand square metres per person. I find the whole project quite ridiculous.

As it is, the planned construction time for this one spire is two hundred to two hundred and fifteen years and I’ve done more than enough construction to know that estimates are always way off, no matter how hard one tries, especially the first time you try and build something. Even then, ground conditions vary massively between sites, so each spire will require special considerations.

The new governor, Callen Gunn, and Commander MacCrane are the first to arrive at the meeting, flying in on a class one D-POT from Dimpsy Fortress. I get some odd looks at my new size, but neither are brave enough to ask questions. We exchange greetings and small talk and, over the next fifteen minutes, more D-POTs drop off the rest of the group.

Erin Oglivie, Distant Sun’s chief bosun, Chaplain Broin’s protege, Eochaid Ó Buadhaigh, and Aileen Nan Sop all arrive together. They are followed a minute later by a newly appointed commodore, Domelch de Búrca, the administrator for Goibhniu Yards Luan Moggach, Uurad Selkirk, a Machine Cult priest, and logistics specialist, Ronnat Caird.

“Hello everyone, thank you for coming.”

“No worries, Boss,” says Erin. “Never been one to turn down a promotion.” Erin has picked up a few scars since I last saw him. He dips his head and scratches the back of his close cut black hair, an awkward grin on his face.

I smile and pat Erin’s arm, “Looking fierce there, Erin.”

Erin smirks, “Well, cosmetic alteration is part of my work and it’s important to practise what I preach, Ain’t that right Chaplain Ó Buadhaigh.”

Eochaid chuckles, “It is a tenant of the faith.” Eochaid is shorter than most Marwolv citizens, at one metre sixty-seven. With my new height I absolutely tower over him, with his face the same height as my belly. His civilian uniform is different to the armoured waistcoat and jacket of my officers.

Instead he wears a loose, light green jacket and trousers with gold trim and horizontal cloth ties, with a white shirt beneath. Purser Brigid has clearly been diving through old earth cultures for inspiration as it reminds me of a tai chi outfit. I rather like it and put in an order for one to wear the next time I meet Brigid on the promenade.

“Well, I did pick you all for your proactive attitude,” I say. “Please introduce yourselves to everyone. We’ll start on my left and go in a clockwise circle.”

“I am governor Callen Gunn, formally of the Gael Democracy. My role is to oversee all civilian work and social engineering on Marwolv. My primary responsibility is to oversee the construction of the agri-spire. I look forward to working with you all for the,” he chuckles, “brief twenty years I will be at my post.”

Callen is a typical Marwolv citizen, at one metre eighty-two with red hair, and a slim, fit build. He has the same style of outfit as Eochaid, though it is a much darker green with elaborate, silver embroidery.

“You never know, Callen,” says Aileen, “You might live long enough for a second running.”

“I do hope so. I am fond of my work.”

“Well, I am next up. I am Aileen Nan Sop. Most know me as headmaster of the Marwolv Psy-Errants. I am to be Magos Aldrich Issengrund’s representative while he is away. I will also be continuing my role as the headmaster while I train a replacement. My new official designation is Overseer Prime, or Prime Sop when there is a need to keep things brief.” Aileen gestures to Erin.

“Thanks, Prime Sop. I am Erin Oglivie. I’ve been the chief bosun on Distant Sun for eight years now and I am to take up the role of Marshal for the Adeptus Arbites. I will be responsible for civilian law enforcement on Marwolv and throughout the system. Fair warning, while we will be adopting the same sentencing structure as the Magos’s fleet and its simplified code of laws, imperial justice is brutal with a focus on labour extraction and fear. Try to keep your noses clean, eh?”

No one laughs.

“I suppose that ominous message makes for a good segway,” says Eochaid. “I am, or rather was, Chaplain Eochaid Ó Buadhaigh. It is my job to prevent people from straying into Marshal Oglivie’s merciful shock maul as well as put their hearts and minds back together after a heavy blow. I will be accepting the position of Arch-Deacon of the Adeptus Ministorum and guiding the Imperial Cult to guard Marwolv citizens against the predations of the Great Enemy. One we have come to know and loathe after the tumultuous events of the past few years.” Eochaid grins at me, “In my weaker moments, I wonder if the Magos is cursed with interesting times.”

Everyone chuckles and I struggle to keep the scowl on my face.

“Then let us hope you remain a bastion of strength, Eochaid,” I say.

“As do I, Magos.”