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

A Nasty Surprise


The sound of Munstrum's cursing informed Zeno that his superior had discovered something of note in his latest rounds of Divination regarding the threat posed by the incoming Crusade fleet.


Those less familiar with Munstrum's peculiarities might have panicked, either assuming that his unflappable bearing even in the midst of combat meant that what he saw was truly terrible or that his status as a great Seer somehow granted him foreknowledge of what he would See—for he could think of no other reason many seemed to labor under the misconception that the lack of novelty he experienced in day to day conversation extended to things he had not yet forseen.


It said quite a bit that even those with only a passing familiarity with Munstrum Ridcully would not have found it at all strange that he expressed that surprise in extremely vulgar terms. Dignity and diplomacy were practically dirty words as far as Munstrum was concerned, and not even the fun kind he was using right now.


With a sigh Zeno set aside the organizational sheets he had been working on while Ridcully was in his trance and grabbed a blank Divinatory Report form. He had almost caught up with the reams of paperwork involved in keeping the University running properly, to the extent that such a dream was even possible, but it wasn't like he couldn't work on it later. Plus, there was a non-trivial chance that said Divination would require him to shift things around there—no point in doing the work only to need to redo it in twenty minute's time.


It was a good thing that Ridcully was self-aware enough not to try to 'help' with any administrative backlog acting as his assistant caused. Zeno was still finding and purging (with extreme prejudice) remnants of Ridcully's administrative practices. Just recently he'd managed to uncover a Report (it deserved the capital letter) that had been trapped in a loop between four departments for the last three decades. They hadn't even been able to mention it to anyone outside of the loop due to some truly bizarre security clearance requirements for disclosure—it had only been his luck in noticing a minor decline in productivity there combined with one of the members of the loop reaching high enough clearance to disclose its existence if asked that had let him sort it out, and he'd expected that it had ended up costing them multiple valuable person-years of work. When probed, Ridcully had rather sheepishly explained that he'd seen the thing three times and had wanted it gone, but had no idea that his resolution of the issue had trapped several others in his old position.


While Zeno's mind wandered, Ridcully's vulgar tirade slowly petered out and a familiar glint appeared in his unseeing eyes. Recognizing his cue, Zeno focused himself back on the present—there would be plenty of time to reminisce on poor administrative choices later.


Without even bothering to check if Zeno was ready, either with his mundane or more exotic senses, Ridcully began his explanation.


"Just got a good look at the capabilities of some of those daemon-infested battle barges coming knocking, and they're damn tough. Like, most of our shit won't even scratch their paint-job tough, and they know it. So, they can maul our naval forces pretty badly with them, and there's not much we can do about it."


His expression shifting into a fairly grim grin, he continued. "Thing is, they're also cocky about it. They're stacking them with leadership and elites on top of the traitor Astares they normally carry, as they know we like decapitation strikes, and they're going to be right out in the thick of any fighting they do."


"They don't know we've managed to finagle real improvements in our Spinal Accelerators, which was already really damn good against heavy armor. Still, not enough, not really—too little damage, too much armor. We'd need to be lucky in addition to everything else, need to accept a real pounding too and that's not something we want to risk."


"Banishment runes though—those would work well. Emperor-damned daemonships rely on their damned daemons for a lot of their effective armor, and a well-placed Banishment rune on the projectile would frak them up good. Still though, tricky, risky. Banishment runes in the Warp are a Bad Idea, no microjumps at all. No being near microjumps. Won't have many shots either, haven't made Banishment runes for Naval stuff yet either, cause it's damn risky."


"Still, might be worth it. Would fuck them up good if we managed to catch a few of their command ships with those. Might not wreck them, but it'd screw about half of their contingencies if those ships get frak'd up at all. Might make 'em too cautious too, worried we have more of that ammo even if we run dry."


"Whatever, not my call. Write it up, pass it on to the Governor. I'll give the details in person if he thinks it's worthwhile. Chop-chop!"


Shaking his head a bit, Zeno started filling out the paperwork for the idea. Which, he noted, included a whole hell of a lot more than a memo to the Governor. One to Sarnow so that he could take the possibility into account, another to the Warding Order to have them prepare a feasibility report and start laying the ground work for a crash production order (which would normally only occur after the feasibility report, but given that they had about three months before the invasion was due it was better to be inefficient than slow). A message to the Mechanicus to send a liaison to make sure they didn't accidentally make projectiles that wouldn't work with the existing machinery and to avoid stepping on any theological toes. One to Tamia to include a much more detailed list of Do's and Don'ts with Banishment munitions and see if she could help with the design work to scale the rune up a bit—it sounded like even a quick and dirty version would be effective, but quick and clean should be even more effective.


He idly wondered how much if the probability Ridcully had seen of the idea not working out was due to the baseline difficulty and how much was due to the the great amount of effort involved in even getting a test run of the runed projectiles out in time. Not that he really needed to worry about the military and technical aspects. His job was to clear out as many speed bumps for them that he could, and he trusted his fellow Avernites to do their job as well.