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

A huge thank you to Charles Urquhart, Milamber, and Daniel for sponsoring Herald of the Stars. I pictured your dedications on the macro-shells in the upcoming conflict as I wrote it: WWII bomber style, with handsome lads and buxom lasses!

I desperately pat my hand against a rubber mat as Odhran holds one arm behind my back and uses his knee to force my body flat against the ground.

“I yield!”

Odhran lets me up and I dust myself off.

“You have not fought much since your size increased,” says Odhran. “It takes time to learn to fight people so much smaller than you.”

I rub my twisted shoulder and grimace, “Melee combat is not my speciality. I caught you off guard the first time though, so I don’t think I’m that bad at it.”

Odhran scoffs, “Believe what you like.”

“Best of three?”

“Perhaps another day. Your reactions are far above mine while our strength, physical speed, and stamina is near equal. You do not have the experience to recognise feints and traps beyond one or two moves, nor can you move as fast as your mind would like you to. This disconnect between the mind and body imparts a slight judder to your movements that is common among heavily augmented individuals. You are adjusting your movement too frequently, giving away what you intend to do. It will take many spars before you beat me again, then there are different weapons and styles to consider.”

“Thank you for your advice.”

Odhran hums, “I will return to my quarters. I am supposed to be under house arrest, after all.”

“Good day, Sergeant.”

Odhran gives me a curt nod and strides off, this time moving without a sound. It is quite eerie, and an impressive demonstration of his control.

I leave the small arena and gawking tech-apprentices and return to my own work for a few hours, then spend the remainder of the day with Brigid. While my body and primary consciousness is sleeping, my nine other minds are whizzing full tilt. One of them slows its relative time and accepts a vox call from Thorfinn.

“Hi, Aldrich. I’m not interrupting anything am I?”

“I always have time to talk, at least for you anyway.”

“That’s pleasant to hear. I suppose I usually do too, since you stuck all those cogitators in my head. What I have to say is less pleasant. Our search parties are back, or rather one of them is. Maeve and I are watching the recordings.

“Three parties were easily detected; their cameleoine coated void armour did little to help them. The other three infiltrated their tombs and we immediately lost contact. Six hours later, one team made it out but only two of the six remained.”

It’s a shame I haven’t been able to figure out that neutrino vox yet, nor has anyone else. It would have been really handy for communicating underground. I am not happy to lose so many Heralds for such a small result, but it is somewhat expected, given the Necron’s tireless vigilance and superior technology.

“Alright. Award the two survivors with a cybernetic of their choice. What did they find?”

“I am almost certain it was deliberate: they listened in on a conversation between their tomb’s primary Cryptek and the five other tombs. The Necron Overlord perished in the time displacement event and they were arguing if they can risk turning on their emergency Dolmen Gate to make contact, though they didn’t say which tomb has the back-up gate.

“Until then, they’re cut off from their Phaeron and can’t ask who should take over and none of them trust each other. We also do not know if this Kinbriar system is the Kinbriar homeworld. During the conversation, one of them started screeching and accusing all the other Crypteks of unleashing a shackle breaker engram into their systems, freeing all the warriors under tomb systems’ controls. The warriors immediately rebelled and started shooting up the tomb, but don’t seem to be under any other Crypteks’ control.

“For now, Maeve and I are assuming the tomb our reconnaissance team escaped from is the guilty party and are hoping for our cooperation, or to at least not target them. We do not know their motives, nor are they likely to contact us if each tomb is watching the other so closely. Honestly, I find the whole thing a bit unbelievable. The only thing we know for certain is that stealth is useless, at least with the technology available to us right now.”

“What an absolute cluster-fuck; great for us, but certain to end in a big mess.”

Thorfinn chuckles, “That’s one way to put it, sure.”

“How does this affect our plans?”

“Give me a tick, I’ll put Maeve in on the call.”

I hear a brief click, “Aldrich. Good evening.”

“Hello Maeve. Thank you for the Stellar Corps’s hard work.”

“Tell me that when we win,” says Maeve. “We still have no idea of enemy plans or their reserves. We do not know which tomb is compromised, if at all. My one suggestion from our reconnaissance is that we alter our plans slightly and choose a single tomb and strike it with full force while merely watching the others to guard against flanking, rather than attack multiple tombs at once. There is a chance they will not come to each other's aid.”

“I disagree,” I say. “Choose two tombs. The Eldar ground forces and Stellar Corps will attack one each and probe the tombs. We’ll break into them gradually, taking care not to commit too much force and lose them all to a trap, like structural sabotage, until we have a route to their power sources, like we planned. Then I will take a rapid force and destroy it. After that we’ll retreat from the tomb, blowing up the passages. Our aim is to delay the Necrons, not get in a war of attrition with them.”

“You’re both overlooking the obvious,” says Thorfinn. “Once we’ve mapped a tomb enough to find the generators,  send in the scavenger wyrms and build tunnels directly to where you want to go. It will be much safer to control our own tunnels than use the enemy’s. Also, we should be aiming for the second Dolmen Gate.”

“Why so?” I say.

“There are two reasons,” Thorfinn says. “If the Necron’s get reinforcements, even if it’s just armour and infantry, I don’t think we’ll be able to hold the surface, even with orbital superiority. Second, for all we know, they could bring or already have artefacts at their disposal that could easily wipe us out. They had a fleet before, so they might not have a fleet killer in their vaults, but I wouldn’t bet against possible reinforcements bringing one along once they know they need it. That isn’t something we can risk, so the gate has to go.”

“That’s a good point,” I say. “Let’s not inform the Eldar though. I still want them to bring me blackstone, we could collect some necrodermis as well. The first has anti-warp properties, and the other may prove useful in improving our blessed autocimulacra: our vehicles and vessels self-repair systems.”

“Wouldn’t telling the Eldar encourage them to fight?” says Thorfinn.

“Aldrich is right,” says Maeve. “It’s not a good idea. We don’t need to make them fight. The Necrons will do that. What we need is cooperation, and for that, we need incentive.”

“Which is the path off the planet, and the exact thing I just said we need to destroy.” Thorfinn groans, then says, “I’m going to retire and tackle this tomorrow.”

“I am too unsettled from the recording to focus on a proper plan as well,” says Maeve. “Goodnight all.”

“Goodnight,” say Thorfinn and I.

The transmission ceases and I return to planning, while another mind watches the recording.

I wince. We’re going to need a lot of flamers, or maybe volkite cannons.

Scarab swarms are a horrible way to die.

Our preparations remain on schedule and seven days after we arrive in orbit, I join Maeve, Thorfinn, Eire, and some of our other commanders in the Stellar Corps’s primary operations facility in Iron Crane’s castellan super-structure.

The room is like a reverse amphitheatre, with the higher centre hosting a large holo-caster where the commanders gather and the three, increasingly large lower levels hold the communications officers in spacious, sunken pits filled with pict-casters, vox gear, and cogitators.

Lining the pits, room, and ceiling are noise absorbing structures that stop the constant communications from becoming an indecipherable roar. There is no main lighting, only the diffused lighting from guiding white strips, highlight steps and paths, and the bright spotlights that illuminate the individual work pits.

The combined lighting, acoustics, and architecture creates a sombre, focused atmosphere that prevents officers from being distracted by each other's tasks and emotions, while still being able to look up and listen to get an overall view of what is going on. If they’re good enough, which they really should be, this lets the pit staff anticipate what they might be called on to do, or understand why they’re getting a specific order without having to be told. It also lets the commanding officers keep an eye on everyone.

Sure, we could just send out rapid data bursts to people locked in tiny cubicles, but training hundreds of natural problem solvers and rapid thinkers so that they can perform their required tasks, then demanding they never ask questions because there isn’t time to explain everything, is begging for discontent among the ranks, no matter their discipline or understanding. Making the pit staff feel like they could be included in the decision making, and can ask for clarifications when absolutely necessary, even when they rarely are or do, really helps cohesion and morale.

There is a different room for smaller, more clandestine deployments where secrecy is paramount. It’s usually staffed with more paranoid and antisocial officers too,  though there is some overlap among the most senior officers.

On the central holoviewer is a top down view of the Polar North Tomb. Distant Sun is in low orbit, one hundred kilometres from the tomb and directly above our base. We didn’t use the Eldar’s space port in the end, despite the eleven percent losses we took in strike craft to get through the North Tomb’s defences. Distant Sun also requires repairs.

It would have taken at least forty days to travel between the spaceport and the North Pole because the Leman Russ tanks are horribly slow, and that’s assuming we could get them through the roadless terrain without trouble, or being intercepted by the much faster Necron skimmers and other hover vehicles. Going without the heavy armour would be suicide and forty days would give the Necrons far too much time to respond.

As our forces begin their final approach, Distant Sun opens fire. Eight macro-shells streak through the sky, the feeble atmosphere just thick enough to light up the shells. They slam into the earth and explode immediately, rather than penetrating into the ground.

The fire clears and I frown. There is a haze on our sensors that target the tomb, making it impossible to discern anything more than a metre across. While not ideal, it should at least show a few craters. Instead, the ground is almost untouched, save for a landslide seventeen kilometres from the blast.

“They have a shield,” says Maeve. “Not unexpected.”

“Doesn’t matter, so long as the bombardment keeps them in their holes.”

“It’s not that simple,” I huff, “like always. They use something called Quantum Shields that can adapt to specific weaponry and only exist at the moment of impact. It makes them almost impossible to detect in advance and, with each hit, they’ll tune it better towards the weapons being fired at it. We can continue the bombardment, but we’ll need to mix up the shells being fired, and their ratio, in each salvo.”

“Well that’s entirely unfair,” says Eire. “It’s a big facility and probably has more power than our weapons could hope to breach too.”

“Not quite,” I say. “Most of their equipment has been in stasis for sixty million years. It isn’t always as reliable as they believe it to be. There’s a small chance that, if we keep firing, we’ll get through. Even one shell would wreck enough emplacements to reduce our casualties. We should keep firing. We’re already mining the system and can always make more shells.”

“Alright,” says Eire. “A chance is better than nothing, but we should still do something with it. Try and find the outer limits of their shield.”

“Excellent idea,” I grin. “I’ve updated Distant Sun with our adjustments.”

We’ve deployed two mixed regiments, just over sixty-seven thousand Heralds, to this endeavour. The regiments are weighted towards Vanguard Armour companies, our light battlesuits, and super heavy infantry companies, the ones with the power armour wearing special weapon teams.

There is less artillery and anti-air than usual, but plenty of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, like Crassus Armoured Transports and Chimeras. Logistics Cyber Mastiffs have been deployed with their squads, but we aren’t using the mastiff or scouting companies this time.

Instead, we have Eldar screening forces to aid us, with one hundred and eighty Vyper Jetbikes, twenty four Falcon main battle tanks, and six Fire Prisms, a tank hunter variant of the Falcon. So far they’re doing a great job at picking out and destroying Necron sensors, hidden weapon emplacements, and Deathmarks: Necron snipers.

Perhaps the most unusual part of the deployment is the large number of Servitors, taking up half of the force. Hopefully they will do a good job of triggering all the traps and absorbing the worst of the fire once we get inside the tomb.

My Servitors have changed a lot over the years and they’re closer to brain-dead androids than brain-dead clones these days. This has drastically reduced their material upkeep and lowered the required quantity of rare, warp infused materials, in exchange for a higher manufacturing cost, and an increased ‘tech-burden’. Tech-burden is a catch all term I use to categorise the quantity and skill level of labour and high technology that is required to build and maintain a machine.

While the Servitors still look human on the outside, they’re much closer to Skitarii, Mechanicus cyborg troops, in their construction, and even more resilient to hacking and possession than before as you’d have to take them apart to do so, then replace most of the parts without the integrated safety components. At that point, you might as well build a new Servitor.

My Servitors are multi-purpose, not monotask like a Kataphron. They are built more for labour than battle, but that doesn’t stop them from using a gun, or fighting through more fire than a normal Herald could hope to achieve without an expensive, full cyborg conversion, a conversion even I am still working on for myself.

Over the next four hours, our force rumbles closer, both the Eldar and Heralds taking minor casualties. Then, at the twenty kilometre mark, we have to stop our orbital bombardment, or risk killing our own forces. The bombardment achieved little, not even one shell getting through. Judging from the quantity of fire that suddenly comes our way, the controlling Cryptek is eager to retaliate.

At last, the battle is fully underway.