The Long Night Part One: Embers in the Dusk: A Planetary Governor Quest (43k) Complete Sequel Up

Omakes for the omake god! Posts for the thread Throne!

Tranth's Troubles

Unsurprisingly, the battle stations that had avoided detection until they absolutely annihilated Garkill's fleet were very difficult to detect or gather much in the way of useful information about. Unsurprisingly to Archmagos Explorator Tranth at least, and while he figured it would be obvious to everyone else, he had also long since given up on predicting the new and original stupidities people would convince themselves of. He was a genius at machines, not at people. Privately, he figured that even those who were actually geniuses at people couldn't reliably figure that sort of thing out from first principles. There was a reason that engineers like Fabricator-General Scott, whose mindsets tended to fixing things and designing them to be tolerant to a certain level of imperfection, did better in leadership positions within the Mechanicus than scientists like himself, whose approaches tended to be far more focused on how things worked in theory. He suspected that the issue got even worse outside of the Mechanicus, but again, that was mainly a theoretical prediction than a data-based observation on his part.


Fortunately, he had been given more or less unlimited resources and authority to try to figure out what he could about them. Naturally, the first thing he had done was insist that every single piece of data from anything that could so much as produce diagnostic reports, let alone dedicated sensors, be gathered and collated. The Mechanicus was already stirred up like a kicked anthill, so it wasn't like they were going to do anything else productive. Plus, while he did have some hope that he'd be able to figure out a way to detect the stations when they weren't active, he was willing to bet a very sizable chunk of his current lab assets and research budget that further recordings of the defense stations while they were active would be exceedingly rare. Missing even the tiniest fragment of data from them could very well set back their understanding of the stations by centuries. And it wasn't like their facilities lacked the cognitators upon which to store and analyze the data, even if it would take an absurd amount of time to run a free-form correlative regression model on a database of that size...


At least there were some places that he could also get some real data more or less for sure from the recordings. While he had little hope that the sensors pointed at the defense stations themselves would be able to get much of a read through their active scrambling, the sensors pointed at the Orkish fleet should be able to pick up high-quality data about the effects of their weapons, including useful tidbits like the excitation spectrum of the armor caused by the hits and a good reading on any backwash radiation. Such data would be invaluable for determining what principles the weapons worked upon, or at least ruling out certain energy types and exotic particles. It should also set a reasonable bottom line for just how powerful the defense stations were, although that was much more the military's job than his.


Plus, while he was reasonably sure that the jamming, stealth, and scrambling effects the defense stations had would largely prevent gathering useful data about the function of the defense stations themselves, it should provide quite a bit of data about the specific jamming, stealth, and scrambling functions said stations have. While not particularly useful in and of itself, such data would be invaluable for determining what sorts of sensors would and would not have a chance of piercing them to any degree. With luck, it might be possible to tune or construct a sensor or sensor net capable of detecting the stations in whatever stealth mode they rested in, or of being able to at least partially pierce the jamming or scrambling effects if and when they activated in the future. Of course, the latter would require said stations to enter active mode, and Tranth had no real desire to try to instigate or otherwise hurry that day up, even if it came with very good data.


Also, if he could use the ship and orbital sensor data to identify where the defense stations rested spatially when inactive, he could also construct a laboratory with very high-grade and fine-grade sensors there. While the advanced orbital sensors had manifestly failed at being able to detect them in inactive mode, even the highest-gain and finest-grain of those sensors were many orders of magnitude less sensitive than laboratory devices at point-blank range. Of course, it would depend on said defense stations being willing to stay still and let him examine them, something that was relatively rare in inactive human ruins, and he doubted it would be much better with active Old One defense stations. Just a hunch, really.


On that note, he really ought to see if his authority and resources to get to the bottom of this actually applied outside of the Mechanicus. While Ridcully being surprised by it was proof positive that it was warded to hell and back against Divination, now that he actually knew where to look it was possible he'd manage to pull off another miracle and provide enough insight to crack the issue wide open. Or avoid it exploding him due to poking the wrong bit—he wasn't picky. Frankly, the more he thought about it the better getting Astra Telepathica assistance sounded. Old One tech was notoriously Warp-based, at least to the extent that it was notoriously anything other than advanced and complicated, and at least one of the local psykers had been compared favorably to himself when it came to brilliance and a solid theoretical understanding of her field. Frankly, at this point he would welcome almost any help in getting an understanding of these defense stations—while piecing together the fragmented bits of information they had on the stations would certainly be fascinating, he had no doubts that he would need quite a bit of luck, help, and further information to get more than the barest of outlines of the full picture. Hopefully everyone else was aware of the sheer magnitude of the task he'd been assigned and weren't expecting him to pull another Miracle of the Omnissiah or five out of his ass. He doubted they would, but humans were prone to distressingly erratic behavior...


Poor Tranth. Good at machines, bad at people. And now they're telling him to examine a Xenotech techno-sorcerous orbital fortress that's so much more advanced than the stuff he has that they weren't even able to detect it before it decided to fuck up an entire Orkish war fleet. In fifteen minutes.