Herald of the Stars: Chapter One Hundred and Five (Patreon)

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After my date I review what the fleet has been doing in my absence. The noosphere capsule is rather comfortable but I get up anyway and visit the shipyard and connect to the vessel’s sensors to see what is going on.

My bodyguards leave my quarters alongside me. It is a little intrusive to have them in my personal quarters, but I am taking no chances after our gellar field was compressed so much. They did, at least, leave the room where Brigid and I were snuggling, but only after a thorough scan of the room.

That doesn’t mean I was unguarded. I can’t say I’m a fan of having sex while being watched by a pair of kataphrons. It’s not like the opaque cover for the noosphere pods is impervious to their sensors, or mine either, so I knew they were there the whole time.

From the vessel’s sensors, I detect that Iron Crane has unloaded the whole fleet. There is no debris either, so none of the helmsmen or women messed up. The vessels within don’t actually fire their main thrusters to get out, nor are they towed or launched. Instead, Iron Crane fires its retro-thrusters once the void ships within have detached from their docking clamps and the vessels slide out of Iron Crane. Once free, they fire their manoeuvring thrusters to slowly separate, before firing up their main drives and accelerating away.

Two Adder-Class flank Iron Crane. Distant Sun also has two Adder-Class escorts and all three vessels are accelerating away from Iron Crane, taking a path that will let them circle half the system in the time it will take Iron Crane to cut through the centre and reach the other side.

Ten Moth class vessels follow Distant Sun like little ducks and their planned trajectories will have them spread out as they get further into the system. They intend to skim samples from the atmosphere of all the planets and the sun as well as drop some probes and satellites. By the time we finish crossing the system in four weeks we’ll have an excellent idea of the system’s value. The probes and satellites will remain behind and continue to collect data.

I am pleased by the progress that’s occurred without me. It is rare that I have to hover over others these days as most personnel know what they are doing. Despite Brigid’s earlier comment, I am no longer the captain of any of my vessels. Instead, I have established a Fleet Command whom my captains defer to.

Our first action was to give the Fleet a proper name so we could give a name to those we encounter. Stellar Fleet was chosen to match Stellar Corps and our vessels’ prefix became ‘SF’. These initials amuse me every time I read them as I keep thinking of it as ‘SciFi vessel’ followed by the name of the void ship. Distant Sun is now SF Distant Sun, for example, in official correspondence, and the name on the vessel has been repainted to proclaim it.

Fleet Command has five members with two liaisons per member who assist us with day to day administration. The positions are occupied by Brigid, Eire, Thorfinn, Maeve, and I. Fleet Command will likely expand in the coming decades, once we have more vessels.

I am keeping the Machine Cult and Imperial Cult representatives from Fleet Command and intend to keep it that way. Unlike the civil administration for Marwolv, they have no place in making military decisions. Like my captains and their first officers, the two main religious representatives can still contact me directly and do not have to jump through administrative hoops to do so. At least until one of them is dumb enough to abuse the privilege.

Curious as to the chosen destination, I notice the order was signed off by Eire during my R&R. As always, there is a full report and I read it while simultaneously going over our available resources.

My best officers’ roles have not changed much, just the scope of what they do. Brigid is the Chief Finance Officer. Eire is High Factotum, an imperial fleet administrator, diplomat, and trade officer.

Thorfinn is Fleet Marshal and in charge of internal security. While this is a derivative of an arbites rank that I concocted, I don’t have arbites aboard my vessels as they are civilian enforcers and my fleet is a private military. I didn’t want to divide the roles when the civilians within it are subject to most of the same regulations and undergo the same compulsory safety and regulation courses.

Maeve Muire has been promoted from Commander to Herald Primarus. It’s a similar rank to a Adeptus Mechanicus Skitarii Legion’s, Legion Master.

A Skitarii Legion has four macroclades, equal to a brigade in the Imperial Guard or my Stellar Corps. Each macroclade has four cohorts, a regiment equivalent. A cohort has three maniples. A maniple is the equivalent of a battalion, and has multiple companies of varying size and number depending on their role.

This is rather different to how the Stellar Corps is arranged with ten companies to a battalion, ten battalions to a regiment, and so on from brigade, to division, to corps. A full corps would have thirty three point six million heralds, so I’m not sure we’ll ever live up to the name. Maybe one day! Probably not before someone cries heresy for using a ten, rather than twelve to organise everything though.

For now, we have nine battalions on Distant Sun, twelve companies between the four Adder-Class vessels, and one company on each of the ten Moth-Class vessels. Iron Crane holds three regiments. We have a total of four regiments, one battalion, and two companies, or one hundred and thirty-eight thousand, four hundred and thirty-two Heralds.

The Aeronautica has twenty squadrons of strike craft and four flights of torpedo bombers on the Adders. There are ten squadrons of strike-craft on Distant Sun, though these are not available for rapid launch like those on the Adders. The same caveat applies to Iron Crane, which has forty squadrons of strike craft across four hangers, two in the Cathedral superstructure, and two in the Castellan superstructure on the opposite side. Iron Crane also holds two flights of torpedo bombers.

Not including the D-POTs reserved for the Stellar Corps, who have their own hangars and strike-craft, we have seventy squadrons of D-POT strike craft and six flights, or two squadrons, of class three D-POT torpedo bombers across the fleet. A total of one thousand and eighty craft.

We arrive at the shipyard. I stand at an observation window and stare, for no matter how many times I visit, I can never dismiss the awe I feel. The shipyard is a colossal space one point two kilometres wide and five kilometres long. It’s also shrinking as Iron Crane folds in on itself and accelerates to two point five gravities, now that it’s no longer hauling so many vessels.

The space is filled by millions of lights, hundreds of gantries and dozens of cranes. Massive mechadendrites, tubes, and cables lie slack, hanging from thick, plasteel beams. A hundred thousand tech-adepts, priests, and apprentices work in this space and the expandable manufactorums on the port and starboard sides of the vessel.

They are aided in their labours by four hundred and fifty thousand servitors and millions of machine-spirits. The whole space is filled with the little holographic buggers and, to me, the shipyard looks more like a metal jungle filled with flitting birds and bugs. Troops of Simian-Class machine-spirits hunch atop over-sized tools, screeching at anyone unqualified who comes too close and colossal lampreys lie in wait, wrapped around folded docking rings.

To everyone else, the shipyard is a cold, forbidding place, often open to the void and littered with sharp tools and crushing mechanisms. It is also a place of technological marvels, where one can observe the titanic assembly of city sized vessels. Coordinated, almost dance-like labours of hundreds of thousands of machines, move with dizzying purpose, building the tools we use to howl defiance at callus nightmares and alien wills. It is beautiful, disturbing and reassuring all at once, the grandeur of the space imparting oneself with a touch of the divine.

I shake my head, clearing the intense emotions I feel in this space and continue to Overseer Kai Ballantyne’s office. I intend to follow up on Brigid’s advice and start him on thruster improvements as well as review the Icarus-Class project and the D-POT reworks.

Rather than wait to get my hands on proper fury interceptor, or starhawk bombers, patterns, one of the projects Kai has already been given is to rework the armed shuttles into slimmer designs, reducing the height of their cross section. They don’t need all that space if all they’re being used for is strike-craft and there will still be plenty of room left to massively increase their mobility, armour, and firepower. There was no need to do so before because the shuttle capacity was preferable with my proximity to Marwolv. I’m hoping the lower heights will let me double stack the strike-craft variants in the hangars as well.

I don’t have an answer to copying shark attack boats yet and we are restricted to landing on enemy hulls and flight decks, rather than cutting through the hull of the vessel like shark attack boats do. Traditional boarding torpedoes are also unavailable as I’ve removed all the torpedo bays from my fleet.

Thanks to their long wings, D-POTs have superb roll capabilities in space and can rapidly jink away from enemy fire, though their pitch and yaw is a little lacking. Their acceleration can hit a spectacular twenty G’s if they really need to. They might be shuttles and be fairly ungainly in atmosphere, but they’re really good spacecraft. I have high hopes for the project.

As I near the office I continue reading Eire’s report. It holds an incredibly detailed appendix that goes through the calculations explaining why we need to cross the whole system, rather than just jump right back into the warp where we entered from. The appendix is mostly Aruna’s work as only a machine-spirit, or a highly experienced and enhanced astro-navigator, could hope to put together a report like this, especially in such a short time.

The Stellar Fleet’s destination is related to what a Mandeville Point actually is. Like most terms related to the Warp, it is both misleading and accurate. A Mandeville Point is not actually a point, but a line around the system where a vessel can enter the Warp safely. This line changes depending on the proximity and arrangement of the planets and the gravity of the central star.

Some mega-structures, like the Gate of Terra, can alter where the point is, bringing it further into the system, and busy systems may insist on specific arrival and departure points to prevent collisions. While these are specific points in space, it isn’t why a Mandeville Point is called a point and not a line.

While a ship can enter the Warp safely anywhere beyond the Mandeville Point, the point it chooses to do so matters because of the nebulous relationship the Warp has with space and time. One point in a system can be connected to an entirely different section of the Warp than another point, even when, on a galactic scale, the two Materium points are within touching distance of each other.

Taking advantage of this bizarre phenomenon is especially important when one is traversing the currents of the Warp if one requires fast travel and reliable navigation.

While one could wander the warp in any direction they wish, you’d have to have a strong and constant connection with the Astronomicon to avoid getting lost. The Astronomicon still only gives you your position in relation to Terra though. It doesn’t tell you where the planet you want to go actually is.

Following a current, however, is a reliable way of finding the planet you are looking for, at least until a current gets disrupted for all manner of reasons, like a Warp storm or deific sabotage.

Despite its limitations, the Astronomicon is important because it lets you know if the current you’re following is taking you closer to, or further from, your destination. This makes it possible to work out what current you need to take without having to test an infinite number of changing currents. This is why navigating near the edge of its fading influence is so tricky and why I was frustrated to lose its light so quickly when travelling from Marwolv.

We’ll likely spend years mapping our route as we hop between systems with seemingly no connection to each other in terms of distance in realspace but actually make sense within the Warp. Navigating the Warp won’t be the greatest time sink, however.

Perhaps the most hazardous and bizarre aspect of Warp travel though is not Warp entities, hazardous energies, or the lethal radiation emitted by a Warp drive’s fuel, but the Warp’s relationship with momentum. We exit the Warp at the same speed we enter it, regardless of how long we may have spent accelerating within the Warp itself.

This means we can’t enter the Warp too fast, otherwise when we exit, which is done blind, there is a risk that anything we hit could destroy the ship. Even an imperial vessel can’t shrug off high mass collisions at light speed. This leaves vessels vulnerable when they leave or enter the Warp as they are much easier hit when they’re almost stationary. The constant acceleration and deceleration consumes a lot of fuel and time. Zero point one C is the fastest I’d be willing to risk regularly, as that’s the speed of a macro-cannon shell and I know our shields can rebuff those.

None of these factors stop desperate or bold captains from flouting good practice when necessary though. There are a few scenarios I can think of when this continued momentum can be exploited, like vital courier work, or sneaking into a system with your thrusters off, coasting on preserved momentum. It also won’t stop me if I have to make an emergency Warp translation to escape from superior fire power either.

Much like a catastrophic failure of a Warp drive, there is no escaping certain death when high speed manoeuvres go wrong. I am not looking forward to finding out what might drive me to such extremes. To solve the last crisis I chose to be a navigator, something I swore I would never do. I doubt the next crisis I face will have a pleasant consequence.

I meet with Kai at his office. He is new to his post and rather enthusiastic about being given additional responsibilities so soon. He is also satisfied he can set his workers to building D-POT and void ship engine prototypes as it will be good training for everyone and provide rewarding labour. I’m not sure where he found the amasec, but it was a wonderful way to get to know someone.

Praise to the Machine-God for the lack of hangovers. It is moments and realisations like this when, for a brief moment, I actually like the forty-second Millenium. Kai even has a real wooden desk for me to knock my knuckles against.

I’m sure he’ll be in his post for a long time with preparations like these.