Shroud (Grey Goo game Shroud SI / Warhammer 40k)

[Drich]

3.2

+++

Singleton named the baby 'Timaeus'.

He was a powerful little tyke, having taken only two days to reach stage two in Symbiosis.

It would have been quicker, but the relationship between his body and soul had slowed it. Adaptation had been careful, and the Symbiont's growth slowed in response. Still, even so, it was far faster than any other.

Normally, I left when they hit stage two. Pulled my bodies away, on account of their Symbionts. Grown, the Symbionts provided all the protection and assistance that a host would need.

Normally. Not with this one. Knowing what he was, I felt that he was a little too important to just leave alone.

Not that he'd be alone, of course. Singleton was there for him, and given Singleton's close connection with the other members of the council, most of them would be there for him, too.

He was in good hands. I just felt like I should maintain a greater presence.

Heh. Not like a body was much of a 'greater presence'. Kid put out enough energy for an army, and here I was with just a single body.

Ah well.

Nothing to do but wait, now.

+++

Time passed quickly. Some things changed.

Some things didn't.

+++

My Silence grew strong. I wasn't willing to just play around, anymore. Not with that baby here. When the night came and no Daemons arrived, even at the peak of the Daemontide... People had been enthused.

Resourcing efforts started the very next day. Stone Drones, designed with the latest of anti-Warp technologies, were deployed en masse to the uninhabited and mountainous northern part of the island.

Three weeks later, Collector Drones had stripped it flat. In the place of mountains and hills was a silver sheet, the beginnings of a megafactory that would be the center of the future efforts for Project Moth.

By the end of the second month, Geomanipulator Devices had rent the ground asunder. The mantle had been breached, forcing the molten blood of the world to the surface, where scores of refining machines drank it in and spat out containers full of pure atomic elements. They were supported by banks of Nucleo-Synthesizers, taking in the useless materials and transforming even that into a steady supply of productive materials.

It wasn't Iron Technology. There were no great Mechnivores, with the strength to rip continents from planets and the power to absorb the raw data of aetherial space-time. It wasn't the most powerful of Federation Technology, either. No weapons systems that could rearrange local reality, flick things through the cracks in time to ensure a set of relational circumstances.

This planet had been a fairly normal world, all considered. This technology was civilian-scale, at most.

But it was intact. The ideas behind it were intact. The STC, though civilian-grade had never been corrupted, thanks to me.

And perhaps even more importantly, the people were scientifically inclined and intelligent enough to transform mere civilian technology into greater tools.

+++

It could have started earlier. Resources had never been the reason; neither in acquiring them or putting them to use. Technology had never been the reason; not in a civilization that spent its spare time developing ever more ways to say 'Fuck the Warp'. Even population hadn't really been a reason; autocubators could produce incredible amounts of Humans more or less on command.

The reason was will.

Because where would that leave them? Who would they be, if they did that?

Having lost everything, not knowing if anyone was out there, and still reeling from a pair of catastrophes, focus had turned inwards. Establishing the self, preserving millennia of morals, ethics, culture, and more aside.

And that was fair.

It wasn't enough to win. Or, rather, it wasn't enough to just win.

You had to win, and stay yourself. Winning, but in the process discarding what made them the people they are?

That was anathema.

So they didn't. They held what they valued close. Built the walls that kept them safe, guarded against the depravations of the outside, and in the meantime... Population grew naturally, not with abandon through their greatest technologies. Cultures stayed, were passed from parent to child. Ethics and morals were codified, carefully taught. Hell's invasion hadn't broken them, despite the evil unleashed. They refused to be twisted like that. They'd die before they broke.

It was a refusal that would kill anyone else.

Among all the people of the galaxy, their luxury was they had me. I was the foundation they could stand on, when they planted their feet and spat in Chaos' eye. I was the shield that kept them safe for long enough for them to build their armours to keep themselves safe. Truth was, if I were to vanish tomorrow, then things would get worse, but they would survive it.

I too would survive, if they were to suddenly vanish tomorrow. But much like them, things would get worse for me. Without them, without what they gave me, I wouldn't be much more than a parasite, wandering a dangerous galaxy in search of food. I'd find it, fighting for my life to do so, doubtlessly. Perhaps I could limit myself to just Chaos, devour nothing but the energies of the Warp, but that would leave me in the same position, afterwards.

Hungry.

And, perhaps even worse, alone. I'd been born a social creature, and I still was one, despite everything. I needed it less, now, yes, but I still needed companionship on some level. Lest...

I didn't want to know what time, hunger, and loneliness could twist me into.

That was a life without devoid of greater purpose. When the only reason to survive and grow was survival and growth itself. Utterly meaningless.

So I helped them. Protected them. And eventually, started Symbiosis with them. I gave them strength, they gave me food.

I gave them protection, they gave me direction. A reason to fight, a reason to refine my shapes further and further, a reason to exist for the sake of something more than existence itself.

They gave me people to care about.

We were much stronger together than we were alone. We could accomplish so much more.

The Warp Storm kept us physically contained, but that was a prison with rusted bars.

It was will that was the true chain.

But the moment we wanted to get out... The moment that chain broke?

The Warp Storm could not keep us forever.

 

[Drich]

3.3

+++

A year since the day, and Timaeus looked closer to six. He was fit and tall, his body just beginning to show the signs of the physique he would gain as he grew older.

He was smart, too. Gifted with incredible intelligence, a brain closer to a supercomputer than something of mere flesh. Every subject that was thrown his way, he mastered quickly.

Singleton ensured he possessed something even more important.

Wisdom.

At ten thousand years old, Singleton had seen Humanity at its best and worst. His lessons were careful, conveying the experience he himself had picked up. He passed on his views, the careful attitude, and the creed he lived by. He made sure he was diligent in his teachings, drawing forth the best of the boy's abilities.

The first word Timaeus had spoken was 'dad'. If I hadn't known Singleton as well as I did, I don't think I would have picked up just how happy he was about it.

The second had been 'aunt'. Lucy had been over the moon in her delight.

Then he gave me a hug and I'd been over the moon in mine.

+++

A year, and Sanctuary was experiencing a baby boom. It was going to be like that for a good long while. The preparations to handle it had been made, preparations which had proven adequate.

Preparations that had then been pushed to the limit when certain breakthroughs had occurred. I'd mentioned it before, but to repeat, the people of Sanctuary had been running a genetic engineering program. It had been going fairly steadily, progress iteratively marching forwards, expected to return full results in a few decades.

'Had' being the keyword, because nobody accounted for the presence of what was basically a psychic demigod in the form of Timaeus.

'Inspired' was a bit of a weak word, when it came to the attitudes of Sanctuary's scientists.

They had not been able to replicate his full augmentations, but frankly, that wasn't a mark against them.

The program leaped forwards decades in months, Humanity's genetic code optimized over and over and over again with fervour, all in the purpose of producing an even better Human. Stronger, faster, smarter, tougher, more powerful Psykers, yet still maintaining the emotional and mental stability that current augmentations possessed. That was then coupled with nano-scale cybernetic augmentation, producing an even greater result.

The program as it had existed beforehand had been extensive. As it was now?

It was ridiculous.

It took years to test, to refine. Working out all the little kinks was a careful task, done with hawk-eyed precision. It couldn't do too much on the psychic side of things for the current generation, but the future generation was more powerful still, near universally Psykers. The average Warp Connection would be five times more powerful.

But when it was finished, implemented? Estimates had to be revised. Fifty billion to sustain my larger bodies dropped to ten. Two hundred and fifty years dropped to just two hundred.

The final, perfected augmentations received a name. 'Man of Platinum'.

It was only the beginning.

+++

By the time Timaeus was two, he looked ten. He was a little charmer, really, with easy charisma and a skill at talking to people that was just quite incredible.

That he also had a tendency towards exuberance, and physical overreaction for the sheer amusement of it...

Well, everybody had their quirks.

By that point, he'd gone through and absorbed a significant portion of Sanctuary's technological knowledge. Mikah took him to the scientific sectors, showing him firsthand the research that was always underway. A month later, and Timaeus had been submitting a fairly constant stream of upgrades and optimisations to various technologies, whatever had caught his interests lately.

Singleton started teaching him battle, after that. Tactics, strategy, how to fight, how to use his body to greatest advantage.

To no surprise, he was great at it.

Lucy, around the same time, had started taking him to meetings, letting him learn the governance side of things.

To no surprise, he was great at that, too.

As for me...

Well...

+++

I raised my arm, light and energy gathering. It was slow, careful, the wave of scintillating power as perfect a shot as possible.

The breaker-wave hit a rock, and shattered it, marring the surface with cracks and weakness.

I gestured forwards.

Timaeus nodded, then held his arm up with his hand splayed. He breathed in.

A beam of power lanced out, punching through the rock in front of him.

And the rock behind that.

And the wall behind that.

And the Void Shield behind that.

And the Void Shield generator behind that.

Slowly, I turned, facing my Clasher-self to him. He held still, for a moment, before his entire demeanour changed into happiness. He flicked his arm up, splaying his hand in a ridiculously over-exaggerated 'what can you do' gesture, closing his eyes as he turned his head to the side.

"A little too much power." He said, smiling magnificently. It might have worked, except I could feel his burning embarrassment.

+++

We practiced above ground, after that. Lucy's unimpressed and yet also unsurprised stare had made even him shift.

It took a surprisingly long time for him to figure out how to scale down the amount of energy he could draw to something that wasn't so... Let's be generous and call it focused.

On the other hand, I got a few new shapes out of it, so that was nice.

+++

Seven years, and he was a young adult, larger than everybody around him, though still not quite done growing. His eyes had settled into a bright blue, just on the edge of natural colours. He was handsome, now, previous boyish cuteness having given way to a manly attractiveness.

He joined the military, where he quickly distinguished himself. Better than all of his peers, he earned the opportunity to join the top group, the Alpha Program.

Formed entirely of particularly powerful Psykers, he distinguished himself there, too. He and his Symbiont were simply on another level entirely.

He graduated faster than any other in history, going through a training program that normally took five years in just six months, which brought him to the trial by fire.

He, alongside the rest of the graduates, were sent to the mainland, away from the Silence, on the night of the Daemontide.

Their task?

Kill every Daemon they saw. Bring upon them the same suffering they had brought upon Humanity. If they reached at least a hundred kills, they were Alphas. If they didn't, they did it again next month, and the one after that, until they'd reached a hundred.

The batch this year had been particularly promising. Timaeus, of course, had been the head of the class. More surprising had been Juliana, who took second. She'd grown finely, a young woman now, who had started angling herself towards the Alpha program the moment she knew it existed, enticed by the prospect of being able to give back to Sanctuary while also being put in a position where she would get to kill Daemons. She'd worked very hard to make it happen.

Four others, too, all of them among the most powerful of the current generation.

That had been such a fun day. I remembered it so well...

 

[Drich]

3.4

+++

The silver, sleek transport glided through the air with nary a sound. It was a smooth ride, lacking any jostling from winds.

Most of Sanctuary's aircraft was like that; soft as silk even if the outside was a hurricane.

"You're all in luck." Redgrave said, arms spreading wide. "You six are going to the plateau."

The plateau. As far as the Alphas' training grounds go, it was exactly what the name suggested.

A plateau.

That was it. It was just like a normal plateau. There wasn't anything special about it, save the fact that the Alphas used it as training grounds. It was big, it was flat, it was high. Simple and straightforward.

All the other training grounds had a gimmick. The lake was wet, the desert was sandy, the forest was full of trees, the ruins were full of ruins, blah blah blah. They were just environments to fight in. It let the Alphas get experience with those places.

The plateau was just a big, flat piece of ground.

That also meant there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

The air in the room was, despite that, full of anticipation. The graduates all appeared calm, professionalism ensuring that, but I knew them inside and out.

They were eager. The reasons varied; two wished to prove themselves, fully. Two wished to kill Daemons, pay back the source of their suffering. One was simply happy to finally be where they felt they could be doing the most good for Sanctuary.

And Timaeus wanted to come face to face with what he knew as an enemy to all that was good. Curiosity was his sin, the desire to see for himself, with his own eyes, the world as it was. Singleton had tempered this with caution, and so he waited until he felt that the full preparations had been made.

Naturally, I was also here, though much like Redgrave, I'd be an observer.

"You all know the drill." Redgrave continued. "Kill every Warp Entity you find. You get points for the type that you kill. Minor Entities-" Minor Daemons, mostly unaligned. "-count for one, Beasts-" Daemon Beasts. "-for three, Moderates-" Actual Lesser Daemons, though also including Daemonic Steeds. "-for five, Majors-" Heralds. "-for ten."

Left unsaid were the Extremes- Greater Daemons, of which killing one was an automatic hundred.

Assuming they got to it before Redgrave himself did, that is. The man was about the most powerful Psyker in Sanctuary, and stood at the top of Alphas because of it. Skill, practice, and an unspeakably vast hatred of Daemons kept him there despite the attempts to dethrone him.

"How you go about this is up to you." Redgrave continued. "However, since Timaeus here has a soul as strong as it is, he's going to be prime bait, so if you want any action, I'd suggest going with him."

"Oh, there'll be no problem with that." Kia said, eyeing him up and down with a sultry tone.

Timaeus offered a smirk, playing along as shifting his body- and letting the form-hugging armour he wore ripple alongside his muscles.

The thing with Alphas? They're all pretty powerful Psykers. And, in turn, they've all got pretty powerful Symbionts, too. This, combined with the bleeding edge genetic and cybernetic augmentations they received, made for particularly strong, tough, and agile people. All of them could expect to take a tank shell to the face and walk away from it without a whole lot of trouble.

Which had a small problem. Armour that was strong enough to be useful to them was also heavy and thick enough to impede their agility, something that was good enough that it actually meant they took more hits, because they couldn't dodge properly.

Most of the protection from Alpha-class Armour was therefore offered by energy fields, combining Conversion Fields, Refraction Fields, Reductor Fields, and Void Shields together into a layered system that was designed to not impede their physical mobility at all. What little shots actually hit them had to punch through all four, and then their native durability and Symbiont protection on top of that.

And then pressure had to be kept up because they all regenerated with extreme speed, too.

Being an Alpha on the battlefield was an exercise in being as much of a disruptive asshole as possible. Suggestions for dealing with them typically only had two answers; deploy another Alpha, or nuke the entire area.

The rest of their armour was devoted mostly to expanding their awareness of the battlefield. By design, it impeded mobility as little as possible- Which made for form-fitting armour.

It wasn't indecent, or anything. On most, it wasn't even that noticeable.

But, on Timaeus' physique...

Eye Candy wasn't too bad a descriptor.

The others chuckled, spirits buoyed by the interplay. Even Redgrave smirked, though you wouldn't be able to see it underneath that armour.

He did the reaction more for amusement than anything else. So had Kia, really, more interested in fucking with people than actually interested in them. Over the months, the two had formed something of a routine.

The craft began to slow, the plateau visible from the holowindows. It came closer with considerable speed.

"Alright." Redgrave nodded. "Serious faces for the moment, people, I want you all to remember something."

He reached up, pressing at his neck. The seals of his suit came undone, and he pulled his helmet off, slowly.

The graduates blinked, startling briefly.

Redgrave's face was a portrait of scars. Old, yet still pronounced.

"I got these from a Daemon." He said, holding a hand just in front of his face. "Happened when I was a young kid. My tribe was just living life, and then the Daemontide happened and ruined everything. One of the big ones came after me."

Greater Daemon, he meant. In this particular case, a Keeper of Secrets. The one that got away, a fact which still grind my metaphorical teeth.

"It turned my tribe on itself, ruined the minds and souls of my friends and family. It toyed with me, and everybody I knew. Only thing was, it was dumb enough to draw it out, to torment me, and it wasted enough time for the Shroud to come in and save everyone who was still sane. That day, I saw grown adults turned insane with a flick of a finger. I saw brother mutilate brother, sister slaughter sister, parents killing their own children. These scars, I kept as a reminder." He turned the helmet over, looking into the faceplate for a moment. "They're a cancer, on reality. They pervert sense, destroy sanity, obliterate all that is good. They are cruel, selfish, horrible creatures. When you kill them, you cut out a tumor, and save countless lives from the cruel fate they inflict. You make the galaxy a better place."

He put his helmet back on, and gestured to the door. On cue, it opened, ramp extending downwards. "But I'll tell you something I've learned from experience. They hate it when you disrespect them. So get out there and bring some peace and quiet."

+++

The first night, they'd done it professionally. They went through the horde that was summoned by Timaeus' presence like a knife through butter- or like a bunch of murderhobos through a survival gauntlet. Teamwork made the dream work, and they covered each other efficiently and with great effectiveness. They were a squad of killers, not one movement wasted, not one moment given up. They were a terrifying, quiet force.

They were done by dawn, earned their hundred points.

The second night, on the other hand... They had not. Professionalism gave way to... amusement.

+++

Juliana laughed uproariously as she swung a Daemon Beast left and right, using it as an oversized and unwieldy hammer.

Kia, behind her, repeatedly smashed her fist into a Bloodletter's face, which was helpless to fight back on account of missing both of its arms.

Louis, using said arms as improvised flails, was beating the crap out of another.

The other two, Jak and Yayu, were playing a game of Punt the Daemon. Jak was winning, on account of having punted a Warp Beast thirty centimeters longer than Yayu.

And as for Timaeus...

He walked slowly, calmly, great strides crossing distance with inevitable movement.

The Daemon he was walking towards tried to crawl away. Tried.

Timaeus reached it, and with one foot, kicked it over onto its back. It looked up, hate in its nine eyes.

Then Timaeus held up a small, wooden spoon, and it screamed in fear, having seen firsthand what he'd done to its cohort, and knowing without a shadow of doubt what was also going to happen to it.

+++

And that's not even mentioning the third.

The stains never did come out...

Still wasn't as bad as what the engineering corps got up to, though. Specialists got bored, designers got creative.

Good times.

 

[Drich]

3.5

+++

By ten, Timaeus was full grown. Giant in stature, gentle in personality, and gifted in mind. He was well known, well respected, a public figure, time split between his duties as an Alpha, and his general scientific endeavours. He still liked to poke fun at people, and still enjoyed their reactions at his antics, though.

After a decade, it was clear that estimates needed to be revised. The growth rate of the population had, by this point, ballooned to 4.3%, though it didn't seem like it would go too much higher. At that pace, it would shave two hundred years down to a hundred and forty.

Exponents were devilish things, like that. Starting slowly, but they curved up quick.

A decade in, and the population had risen from thirty five million to fifty.

Fun fact. Sanctuary had been designed to house one hundred million. It could support more, yes, that was just the housing capabilities. They'd planned ahead, when it had been built.

But population growth wasn't the only thing happening. Resourcing efforts had been hard at work the entire time. The megafactory had been completed by three years in, covering tens of kilometers, and it had started its work immediately, churning out hordes of Collection Drones that had stripped the rest of the island bare in short order, only to then immediately put down five additional core taps, all to fuel the resource demands of the megafactory.

All of that was stage one. The part where they merely gathered resources to turn into more industry. Stage two, when they actually began to test the designs thoroughly, physically instead of just theoretically?

That required even more.

Three plans had been debated between for Project Moth, see. All three called for fleets, but all three called for different types of fleets. The first plan had a large fleet of moderately sized vessels, with each one having a small portion of the population, the industry, and travel capacity. Eventually, it had been rejected, on account of efficiency issues, the problem that the population they held was simply not large enough.

Plan B had done the opposite; one really big design, to hold everything and everyone. That had also been rejected, again on account of efficiency issues, though this time because it meant that everything was in one basket and managing the logistical nightmare of what was basically going to end up as a small moon was... Undesirable.

Plan C mixed the two. A small fleet of large vessels, each one intended to hold two hundred and fifty million people, with the industrial capacity to match. Such a fleet would have been attended by scores of lesser Stone Ships, autovessels that would guard and retrieve resources for it as was necessary.

Plan C had won out. It was considered the right mix of factors to be the most efficient option with the highest chance of success. That it would also allow the fleet to split up as needed, while maintaining enough of a population that I could act with considerable freedom was a bonus.

These ships still required a lot of resources. Competent design and advanced enough technology let you fit a lot of people in a fairly small space, but two hundred and fifty million was a big number. And fitting two hundred and fifty million people comfortably required even more.

The main habitation modules ended up being an approximate cylinder thirty to forty kilometers long and ten kilometers wide, the entire volume utilized with clever design to fold a city in on itself while still create a still surprisingly spacious zone with plenty of area for the people in order to avert claustrophobia and over-concentrated population.

And that was just the habitation modules. The industry and science modules were significantly more dense, but still quite large. Then there was the ship itself, without the modules closer to a mobile, skeletal station; with reactors, Void Shield Generators, weapons bays, sensors, and a dozen other things that all combined to create an extremely well protected and well-armed vessel, sufficiently powerful to make any would-be attackers regret their decisions.

And then, there were the autovessels. All significantly smaller than the main one, but 'significantly smaller' still meant scores of ships that ran the gamut from escorts hundreds of meters long to battleships measuring at multi-kilometers.

The initial plan required two hundred of these civilization ships. The attendant fleets didn't need to be built with them, as the ships could build them afterwards, but they were still extensive.

The requirements to build all of this made one wonder how it was possible. Even with what among the most advanced technology ever created, it still seemed a stretch.

That?

That was the tyranny of scale.

That was the kind of resource expenditure that would need half the planet ripped apart in order to get the materials, if not for nucleosynthesis meaning they just needed the raw mass. Two hundred had further dropped to forty, with the completion of the Man of Platinum augmentations dropping the necessary population, but even then, we were still talking petatonnes of material.

Does it sound like it a lot? It's quite large, yes, but the thing is, this planet's mass was sufficient to build tens of billions of such ships.

And in space? Planets were small, compared to the true giants of systems; stars. Typical stars made up ninety nine plus percent of the mass of a system. Sure, we didn't have a star, but there was still more than enough.

It just took time to get to that point.

And again, exponents? Devilish things. Simple math; a single drone takes an hour to build another itself. How many are there, ten hours later? Over a thousand. Ten more hours, and those have multiplied into over a million. Another ten, and they're at a billion.

Reality complicates this, of course. For starters, Collector Drones don't self-replicate, being Stone Technology rather than Iron. There were several additional steps in the chain of production; Collector Drones are deployed by factories, go out into the environment, harvest matter, and bring it back to refineries. Refineries take the immediately useful elements, and the rest goes to Nucleo-Synthesizers for a much slower transformation into usable materials. Every step needed to be expanded at its own pace, drastically slowing the entire thing. Further, consuming available resources made it harder to get more resources, meaning that you eventually had to swap from Collector Drones to other sources- or expand the size of operations.

It slows the entire thing, yes.

Ten years was still more than enough time to get ready for stage two.

Again, testing. The designs existed, having been made when Project Moth was first suggested. They had not been tested, and even more importantly, they hadn't been made with more modern techniques in mind. When one was going to fling themselves out into space where a damned Warp Storm was waiting, that was especially important.

The megafactory, after having achieved its minimum required resource flow, was promptly turned to that purpose. Parts of the ship were built, tested one by one, at large and in minutiae. Damn near everybody with even a hint of engineering or architectural ability had been involved in it at one point or another; from simple artists to genius engineers to Stone Minds to Timaeus himself. The data the experimentation generated was pumped directly to purpose-built processor farms, where it was checked and worked on over and over again, the designs refined with the same relentless drive that they'd optimized their own genetic code with. Errors vanished, oversights were corrected, faults removed, perfection sought until ultimately...

What was left was flawless. Glorious and superb, an exquisite design worthy of the Age of Technology.

They called it the 'Lightchaser'.

Production of the skeleton was finished by twenty years. The industrial module was finished three months after that. The science module was complete by the fourth. The habitation module, which was responsible for nearly a third of the ship's mass, took longer, though only by another year.

The launch of the first vessel had been watched by almost everybody in Sanctuary, commemorated through cheer and sheer joy. Watching the silver-white ship rise into the sky had filled the world with enough emotion that I could literally taste it.

Moving everything over took even more time. Sanctuary, by the time that the Lightchaser was complete, had been host to some eighty six million people. By the time that the population transfer had finished, they were up to eighty eight.

Everybody had been pretty happy about it. All that extra space, the fact that they were no longer underground...

Then, there, they finally took a name. Became... more than a group of survivors, living in a bunker. They became, in a real and final way, an actual civilization again.

The name itself had been subject to a lot of back and forth, suggestions coming in from everyone. The ultimate winner, though, had been fairly simple.

Starseeker Compact. The Compact, for short.

Good for morale, that was for sure.

Of course, with all of that said, they weren't the only ones growing.

 

[Drich]

3.6

+++

My growth was... slower. Measured. Careful. In terms of actual numbers, I didn't grow much at all.

In terms of energy, though...

That was another matter entirely.

My income ticked up and up with every passing day. Even just Timaeus was a considerable increase, but with the rest of the next generation coming into play, optimized genetically for robust minds and great Psychic potential? Further strengthened by their own parents, already more powerful through their Symbiosis?

It was a lot. And it grew quickly.

The number of Entity-selves jumped up equally quickly, just to store it all. My refinement experiments began to speed up as I matched the income, generation after generation of shapes tested and tweaked into peak efficiency. Those done, I moved on to new shapes, and then more shapes, and then more...

It was just waiting, really, for the energy income to grow even more. Refinement passed the time, the years draining away as it happened. Groundside, I felt that I was quite complete, in terms of roles and shapes.

Spaceside, though... That was another story.

I had the shapes ready, of course. I'd thought them up shortly after I got my mind in order and realized where and where I was. I had never deployed them, however. Hadn't given them any refinement, other than the theoretical kind.

Shapes that large wouldn't need the kind of refinement I went through for my planetbound shapes, though. That much of my flesh and energy together would be able to change itself far more easily than anything lesser. Refinement would happen through the mere process of existing. I could have supplied the energy needs through planetary harvesting, but again, I was in no hurry.

How much did a few years, even a few dozen of them, matter in a plan that was going to last a hundred and thirty five, just for the setup? Nothing, really.

So I waited. Ten years passed, and then another ten after that. I slowed my refinement experiments as the day of the Lightchaser's completion came closer and closer, allocating more and more for storage. I ended them completely when it was finished, joining everybody else in watching the ship float into orbit, its gleaming silver-white form a bastion of sanity against the inanity of the sky.

The next day, I plunged the reserves gathered over the previous weeks into a single project. The largest thus far, but also the smallest of my true fleet-shapes.

The Harbinger Probe.

Six hours of growth, a significant chunk of my energy income tied up, and the Lightchaser had its first attendant. Far smaller than the massive city-ship, it had a completely different role; long-ranged operations.

Technically a scout, though it was a scout in roughly the same way that the Man of Iron would use the term. It was meant to be sent off to the frontier, more or less alone, but...

Well, most 'scouts' didn't eat a planet whole if you left them alone for a few months.

It was... certainly nice to have it, though. It was a rough shape, at first, draining significant amounts of energy just to keep it up, but a few months of self-refinement took care of that problem, dropping the sustainment cost down to a third of the original.

There was another component, too; more than just the physical capabilities of the body. As it grew and was refined, so too did my mind. Thoughts speeding, reach expanding...

No longer did I have to split myself apart to cross to the continent. Even just the single Harbinger-self allowed me to maintain full awareness and connection across a much wider range, a fact which I quickly put to good use by making two more.

All three together, and I could expand the Silence significantly.

Something the Compact with quick to take advantage of. We scanned the world repeatedly, looking for those last few survivors, though we didn't find any. Resourcing operations expanded significantly in the aftermath, even as the second Lightchaser began to be constructed...

That, for the most part, set the tone for the rest of the time we spent waiting.

At twenty years, the population of Sanctuary was at eighty million. They had one Lightchaser and I had three Harbingers.

Forty brought it to a hundred and eighty eight million. They still only had one Lightchaser, but now I had six Harbingers.

Sixty years brought their numbers to four hundred and thirty eight million. They had two Lightchasers, with the third nearing completion. I had thirteen Harbingers.

Eighty years had the population breach a billion. They had five inhabited with a sixth ready to go. I'd reached twenty Harbingers, less than I could have had, but only because I was beginning to experiment with even larger shapes. I had an idea, see, about the kinds of foes we might end up facing, and I'd decided that I'd need shapes to fill the equivalent roles. The Harbinger was a perfectly good general purpose scout, but...

Well, specialization had its upsides.

I didn't have that many, for the moment. One or two for each theoretical class. I had no experience in space combat, after all. Adaptation required exposure.

One hundred years brought the population to two point three billion, and a hundred and twenty took it to five and a half.

The plan was on track. The final fifteen years took the population to over ten billion. Forty six Lightchasers completed in that time, as well as scores of autovessels to go with them.

The full attendant fleet had not been created. Instead, the number was divided roughly between protective vessels and simple mass storage ships. Lightchasers had their own resource storages, yes, but they were outmatched by these dedicated vessels holding nothing but raw mass feedstock, capable of keeping the fleet going for millennia if they needed to.

A precautionary measure, of course. We did not actually expect to take a thousand years. We were expecting, at the absolute most, a few years.

But this was the Warp we were dealing with, and even with my presence, having a backup plan was always a good idea.

Nevertheless...

We were ready. They day had come. The plan reached the zenith; stage three.

Now it was just up to me to get us through it.

 

[Skippy]

He put them in that condition. He could have retired them, attempted to get them medical treatment.
Instead he had them killed.

Click to shrink...

They served their purpose, beyond that what use do they have?

Click to shrink...

please keep the itg to a dull roar
Less of this, please. I'm not going to start slapping out infractions for something this minor, but don't start justifying purging entire groups of people (or genetically modified supersoldiers) because they have no "use". Justify it in the context of an argument about how a character in the setting might view it, or there were no good solutions at the time or whatever, sure, go nuts, but please don't actually start going all Malcador Did Nothing Wrong. It's not a good look.

Oh also, @Arimai, I saw that funny rating you gave to @Leafy503's post. Giving "malicious" Funny ratings to another user's post is technically in violation of site policy, so I hope you genuinely found that funny. Please be more careful in future.

Thanks for you time.

 

[Drich]

Due to certain events in real life, I'll have to put this temporarily on hold. I will get back to it, though.


3.7

+++

I would like to say that I came up with a plan of sheer brilliance. That I, with a single fell swoop, banished the Warp Storm and opened the path into the greater galaxy.

I did not.

I would like to say that I came up with a plan as elegant as it was cunning. That I made short work of the great task ahead of me, and cut my way through the storm with graceful speed.

I did not.

My plan was simple, straightforwards, and about as subtle as a meteor screaming through the sky surrounded by an aura of fire and the roar of thunder.

See, there was one thing about the 'drill a hole' plan that made it... questionable.

Our Warp Storm?

It was big. It covered a significant sector of space. More, in fact, than a single star system. It covered about sixty three light years, as far as we were able to tell.

The 'drill a hole' plan called for me to basically tunnel through the Warp Storm. Now, to do this at less than light speed?

That'd take a long time.

We'd be there for centuries, at best.

But that was the thing. 'Do it at less than light speed'.

Why was it necessary to do that?

Because I couldn't use my FTL to get out. My FTL method relied on wormholes, pinching and folding space until I created a gaping hole that led to somewhere else in the universe. I could do it fairly easily, honestly; even a single Harbinger could rip a wormhole that was dozens of kilometers across with relative ease. It was surprisingly efficient; enough that most Alphas could rip a fairly short-ranged wormhole by themselves. Timaeus could get anywhere on the planet if he wanted, and while he was quite exceptional, it didn't take that many people to match his raw energy output.

Problem was? Outside of our little bubble of calm, there was functionally no difference between realspace and Warpspace. Opening up a wormhole from the inside to anywhere inside was fine, because it was all normal space. It was sensible and followed rules and logic. Opening a Wormhole that crossed outside, where space stopped being normal and instead became inimically opposed to me?

Didn't work.

Which meant that I had to explore some other options.

FTL, in this universe, was not that easy.

And the details changed all the time, considering that Warhammer 40k was about as inconsistent and prone to retcons as superhero comic books.

Warp Drives were about the easiest way to do it, and were the primary, and pretty much only, way that Humanity got around before now.

That said, there were other ways. Necrons, depending on the edition, had access to even more advanced technology, and could either tunnel into the Webway, the Eldar's primary FTL method, access another extradimensional space that connected a plethora of gates together, the Pharos devices, or had Inertialess Drives, which basically just gave the finger to light speed limits and kept accelerating long after physics should have told them to stop.

I had no idea which one was actually true.

But, more than that, I had no idea how any of those worked. No Human in Sanctuary was even aware of their existence, and while Singleton might know something related, he doesn't like to talk about his past. Thus, any hints of the science behind those methods may as well have not existed to me.

The Tau, again depending on the edition, had other methods. The first had been a Warp Drive but worse, since it didn't actually get you into the Warp, just into the void between realspace and the Warp. That was called the Ether Drive, though occasionally also the Gravitic Drive.

Later editions had never mentioned it again.

What did get mentioned was the ZFR Horizon Accelerator Engine, which, as it turns out, is actually just near-light engine technology, and not actually FTL in its own right.

They did, however, get another FTL engine in the eighth edition, the AL-38 Slipstream Module. Which is basically a Warp Drive, except without Gellar Fields, and activating too many at once causes plot to happen by sending people into the Warp unprotected. Given the former, it was a hilariously awful idea for anybody other than the Tau.

Given the latter, it was probably actually a Warp Drive that the Tau don't realize is a proper Warp Drive.

Not useful, in other words, given how the Warp and I were in a love-hate relationship.

The Orks actually had another. Some sort of galactic-scale teleportation system that could move moons, if needed.

Unfortunately, it shows up all of once, and only when the Orks are beginning to verge on Krorks, when the Beast has become and thing.

Even more unfortunately, I had no idea how they did that, and with no clues to how it might work, it was basically pointless to me.

There was, however, another type of FTL.

The Tyranid's version. A gravitational-based spatial compression that locks on to the gravity of distant star systems and enables their Hive Fleets to reach them with something approaching reasonable speed, even if it was basically useless once you were inside the system. It was, furthermore, quite recent in the editions, at only fifth and not having been replaced.

Now, that?

That was interesting to me.

Because I?

I pointed and laughed at gravity. A Siren could pluck a plane right out of the sky. A Tether Spike could crush them outright. A Dirge could fling a singularity like a softball. My fleet-shapes?

They could do so much more than all of that.

And that was before I learned more about space, time, gravity, and energy from my Symbiont hosts.

So if something like that was possible?

And if those bugs could do it, with their much lesser capabilities?

Then so could I.

I had spent decades lingering on that. Testing, refining, searching for the way...

Ironically, the first things I actually came across were things that would have been extremely useful... If we weren't in the Warp Storm.

I figured out the Tyranid's actual method pretty easily. The thing about it was, as I said, that it required 'locking on' to the target's gravity, utilizing it to help scrunch up space between you and the destination. The process messed with the target's gravity, resulting in weird things happening. My tests used the moon as the subject, and by the end... I'd like to say that it was even more messed up, but I took a few bites out of all the Warp Energy inundating it, so it was probably actually more stable, not less.

Did that help us get out?

Not a chance. There was nothing to lock on to, thanks to the Warp Storm. And space wasn't particularly consistent, regardless.

After that came inspiration from the Tau. I'd open a rift, but wouldn't go completely into the Warp, just the void between the Warp and realspace-

And it had failed there because there was no gap in the middle of the Warp Storm. I completed it anyway, because it was useful enough for getting around inside of a system, but in getting through the Storm, it wasn't going to help.

What I needed was bigger than all of that. I needed to punch my way through. I needed to be able to cross light years while just forcing my way through the storm, smashing aside all that Warp Energy.

Eventually, I succeeded.

It caused a bit of a stir, though. Humanity learned almost as much from my experimentation as I did, and while they couldn't quite replicate my wormholes technologically, the other methods could be achieved.

Retrofitting had taken a while.

Regardless, now we take that knowledge, and come back to the 'drill a hole' plan to apply it.

How was I going to get us out of here in a reasonable amount of time?

Simple. Take the fleet. Get it as close together as possible. Let their Gellar Fields and other anti-Warp technologies overlap and synergize, providing stability even in the walls of the Warp Storm itself. Wrap it in the Silence for further safety. Have my Harbinger selves, by now more than a hundred strong, form a loose spherical grid around the fleet. Leave the rest of my fleet-selves to intermingle with the rest of the Compact fleet, strengthening the core of the Silence.

And, at the front and the back of the entire cluster, have a pair of particularly special fleet-shapes. Larger things than most anything else, rivalling even the Lightchasers in size.

Go forwards, slowly, to the edge of the Storm. Drink in the energies of the Warp, let my stomach and reserves fill...

And then, put those two two fleet-shapes to use. They form a bubble of energy, a loose polyhedron of uneven faces around the entire fleet, glowing brightly and 'locking' the fleet into physical position, keeping them stationary relative to each other.

The next three steps are simultaneous. The one at the front grips space-time ahead and shrinks it, compressing it. The one at the back grips space-time behind and expands it. The entirety of my fleet-selves then create an inertial wave, just to get us going.

The solution? Alcubierre that bitch.

The planet vanishes in less time than it takes to blink. My energy reserves plummet from full to almost nothing in eight seconds flat.

The unsubtly shows here; travelling through the Warp Storm like this has approximately the same effect as a plough through snow.

It goes everywhere. Warp Energy, previously just sort of swirling around chaotically, was violently shoved outwards in an expanding wave of raw power, sufficient enough to slap away even the faces staring at the things they couldn't see. What's left behind is empty and sensical space. For about ten seconds, the trail we've left is visible, and the planet is a long distant speck, but the Warp Storm is quick to fill the emptiness.

For the brief period that it's visible, I can calculate the distance we've travelled. Slightly more than eight light hours in about as many seconds.

Was it effective? Yes. I'd forced my way through the Warp Storm, crossed a significant amount of distance with ease. I had, even more importantly, actually cleared the space, separating Warp from reality and thus making our bubble a new anchor point.

Was it elegant? Hardly. It was the equivalent of using a bomb to drive a nail through a particularly stubborn piece of wood. In fact, it was worse, because I wasn't anywhere near done. I needed to set off a lot more bombs.

Was it efficient? No. No no no.

Definitely not. That much energy lost that quickly couldn't possibly be called such a thing. Admittedly, the cost was mostly in pushing away all that Warp Energy, as travel otherwise was fairly efficient, most of it being in the start-up, but going through the Warp Storm?

Drained me of pretty much everything.

But that was the catch.

WARP STORM. Who cares about how much energy I'm using?

So long as I'm in here, it takes about thirty seconds to go back to full.

MUM, in the meantime, runs a check on all systems. She reports back that there is no damage to anything, to everybody's enthusiasm.

The moment I'm back to full, I start the process again. Space warps, and then we shoot forwards again, setting off another shockwave of Warp Energies as we smash through it. The faces flee.

I do it again.

And then again.

And then again.

And then again.

+++

A day passes. By then, mathematics says we've covered approximately two light years. Could be more, could be less, given the Warp Storm, but what I can definitely say is that the ambient energy level does drop. Slowly. And that probably means we've gotten closer to the edge.

So I continue. One day becomes two. Two becomes four. Four becomes eight. Eight becomes sixteen. The ambient levels drop more and more and more and more.

Sixteen days and fourteen hours later, we break through the edge.

It's easy to tell the exact moment. The utter inanity of Warp colours gives way to deep, sensible black. An instant later, and I'm collapsing the spatial warps, reacting as fast as I can. The universe snaps back into a normal view, and...

The sky is not just one big light, but countless tiny ones, massive and far distant. The song of gravity fills my ears, the taste of energy brushes against my tongue. The cosmos is open. Wide.

Free.

The fleet cheers. I am on every ship, one body standing in ever bridge. The sheer roar creates vibrations that echo throughout all of them, drowning out all other noise. The joy of it colours reality.

It takes a bit to die down.

Lucy leans back in her chair, flanked by Singleton to her left and Timaeus to her right, with myself a little behind her. The latter is smiling, and though the former lacks a face to express it with, there's no denying the joyful air surrounding him in the same way it does everybody else.

"So..." Timaeus says, looking at the screen. "These are stars."

"I was just a little girl the last time I saw them." Lucy says. Her voice is... steady. But there's no denying the underlying feelings, there. "I remember that I used love staring at them, looking through my scope. I never thought that one day, they'd be taken away from us."

She looked to the side for a moment, before turning, her chair spinning to face me. She stood up, and in a single, fluid motion, wrapped her arms around me.

"Thank you." She said, lowly, filled with raw emotion.

I hug back, patting her back a few times. She lets go, after a few seconds, a smile on her face. She just about falls into her chair, spinning around slowly.

The smile doesn't fade.

"What do you think, Timaeus?" She asks. "Now that you can finally see them in something more than a record."

"It's like looking at a billion glittering jewels." He doesn't take his eyes away. "More wondrous than I dared imagine."

Lucy chuckles.

Then, she waves a hand. MUM responds immediately, projecting a hologram of the fleet, formation beginning to collapse even now. It zooms out, after a moment, distance marked with a grid of faint lines.

A mass of red marks the Warp Storm. We're still sitting pretty much just on the edge of it, in cosmic terms, and the borders of it are a bit vague, as the sensor arrays can't get an exact positioning on it, but that's fine.

We're not looking to go back in there.

A small point of light appears on the holomap, quickly followed by more. After a few seconds, information begins to stream next to them, telling details about the stars in question.

Lucy looks over them, taking in the information. She raises a hand, and then pauses.

"Timaeus." She says, catching the Primarch's attention. "The whole reason this effort got started in the first place is because of you. I think you deserve first pick."

"The closest." He answers immediately.

Closest, huh. It's... a small one. A red dwarf, I'd say.

MUM zooms in on the target. And, yep, a long stream of numbers given to an unnamed star, M-Class, two point three light years away, and just another of the countless multitudes.

Still, even that's a bounty. It's a lot more than what we've had before.

"Closest it is." Lucy leans back, her seat turning so she can direct a look at me. "Are we going the fast way?"

I'm a bit low on energy... We'd punched out about six seconds through a jump, and that had left me low. Really low, honestly. I'll probably eat afterwards, but I have enough.

It takes basically no effort to send an affirmation. Lucy's connection with me is quite strong.

She nods. I move a Harbinger-self forward.

"This is Admiral Tak to all ships." She speaks, her voice strong. "We're preparing to cross. Get ready to make the transition."

A chorus of agreements makes its way back, the various captains giving their affirmations.

I gather what remains of my reserves. The star is there, in my senses. Gravity draws the line for me to follow, offering the path I need...

I concentrate. Energy flows together, condensing into a single point. The singularity forms in a moment, eating light and warping space. I give it a vector, and then I shift my energy into the negatives, forcing it into physically anomalous and naturally impossible patterns, thus creating a concentration of something that should be self-repulsive. It's a paradox that's impossible and something that should never be able to happen.

A sane and logical universe does not like paradoxes. It tries to resolve it, and, by design, there is a way for it to be resolved.

The singularity inverts. A spatially singular point transforms into a path, a connection between here and somewhere else. The vector determines direction, the energy contained within determines distance, and so, I puncture space itself, opening the portal to the intended destination.

It's a wormhole. Simple, direct, and very useful. On the other side, I can taste the energy of the star, suddenly within reach. It's small, but I can fix that, focusing more energy and forcing it a bit wider, creating a storm of power surrounding it. My aim had been good, so I open it wider, stretching a hole that had started as a tiny, insignificant thing into something that spans hundreds of kilometers.

Plasma engines ignite, propelling the Lightchasers and their attendants forwards. I follow, leisurely.

Ah... Freedom is sweet.

 

[Drich]

4.1

+++

"We have experienced significant temporal dilation." MUM reports, not too long after we arrive.

"Yeah?" Lucy asks, scrolling through reports sent back by the Stone Ship attendant fleet.

"I have analyzed all visible stars within range. Cross-referencing with pre-existing star maps shows a significant drift. We were inside of the Warp Storm for approximately five thousand years."

Lucy paused. "What."

"As far as I can tell, the current year is approximately in the late stages of the thirtieth millennium, somewhere between the sixth and ninth century."

Mmm. That was... certainly something.

"We lost five thousand years?" Lucy asked, before sighing and shaking her head. "No- doesn't matter. The Empyrean does as the Empyrean does. We're out, and that's that."

Fucking Warp.

"Got any good news for me?" She asked.

"Empyreal sensor arrays indicate that the galaxy has calmed down significantly since the beginning of the Strife." MUM offers. "The number and severity of Warp Storms have depleted significantly compared to what records indicate. However, the core of Aeldari Empire territories appears to have been consumed by a particularly large Warp Storm, spanning over twenty thousand light years."

She blinked. "Huh." She leaned back. "So much for their vaunted superiority, I guess."

"A shame." Singleton said, his voice making it perfectly clear that he didn't think it was a shame at all.

"What about Earth?" Lucy asked.

Over there, judging by that bright ass light shining through the Warp.

"The Sol system is located three thousand and two light years away." MUM reports. "It is free of Warp Storms. Additionally, a Warp Beacon of considerable power has been activated. No further information is available."

"Somebody is there." She smiled. "How quickly could we get there, if we just went straight to it?"

"Boundary Drives would require approximately twenty five years of continuous travel in order to reach Sol. Grav-Tether FTL would require fourteen years. Wormhole travel, circumstances permitting, could require anywhere up to a week."

Probably a lot less than a week. Barring Warp Storms or other similar reality-rending contrivances, there wasn't much that could stop me. Powerful gravitational disturbances could slow me, but not much else.

I was fairly certain it wasn't a good idea, though. Just going straight to Terra, more or less directly into Big E. Not right now.

So I poke Lucy's mind, to get her attention. An idea floats across, and she nods.

She flicks her hands, bring the star map up again. "MUM, cross reference all stars with previous records. Can you identify former and likely colonies?"

MUM's avatar pulsed.

A moment later, several stars were highlighted, in four different colours. Blue, green, yellow, and red.

"Matches to former colonies are marked in blue." MUM stated. "Likely candidates for colonies are marked in green. Yellow indicates resource-rich systems that lack suitable worlds for terraformation, but are potential harvesting zones. Red highlights mark stars that were confirmed to have been swallowed by a Warp Storm at one point, or are marked as containment zones for uncooperative alien species. Given that the Federation no longer appears to exist as a polity, containment has likely been broken."

There was a startling large amount of reds. Blues, too. Greens were the rarest, even yellows vastly more common.

Mostly because Humanity hadn't spared any zone to expand into. Most of that which could have been green was instead blue.

Lucy blew out a breath, looking at them all. "Alright."

She went quiet, for a bit, looking at them all. Then, she sighed. "Call a council. It's time to discuss stage four."

+++

When you get down to it, we did not have a particularly large amount of people available to us. Oh, sure, ten billion people sounds like a lot, but split across forty six main ships and their attendant fleets, it really wasn't.

Not when you compared it to a galaxy of two hundred and fifty billion stars.

Project Moth was ambitious, like that. Sure, Humanity hadn't spread through the entire galaxy, and sure, even with advanced terraforming technologies, not every star held a viable colony, and sure, most colonies probably don't exist anymore thanks to the Men of Iron, Warp Incursions, Alien Assault, or the like, but...

That was still a lot.

Let's be pessimistic.

The Federation had laid claim to something like sixty percent of the galaxy. Let's go down to forty, just to narrow it down to space that was unconditionally theirs, no 'if's, 'and's, 'or's, or 'but's about it. Let's say that, of all that vast space, only about two percent of it has long term colonies that don't need constant maintenance to stay active. We'll simplify, and state that it's just one, per potential site. Let's further say that, between the Men of Iron, the Warp Storms, and Alien invasions, only zero point one percent of those survived.

Where does that leave us?

With about three million surviving colonies.

And that's the pessimistic estimate. In reality, the space claimed was bigger, the number of stars that held colonies that didn't need maintenance was closer to fourteen percent, and the number of colonies per star averaged at two point six.

The number of survivors was harder to guess. But again, let's keep that pessimistic one in a thousand guess.

The number of survivors has just jumped to fifty four million and six hundred thousand colonies.

It would take far, far, far too much time to go check up on all that with only a single fleet. Checking ten stars every day would take nearly eight hundred years.

And that's just checking the stars to see if we can find anything. If we did find things? Then even more time would have to be spent dealing with whatever it was. It could take anywhere from days to years depending on the issue.

And the worse part of it?

We still have it better than literally almost everyone in the galaxy when it comes to travel time. My wormholes were amazing for that. Reliable, effectively instantaneous, interstellar transportation whose only limit was energy availability?

Nobody had that. The Webway and Necron Pharos Devices were reliable and very quick, but both were limited to entrances and exits, not free-range like me. Warp Drives were free-range with limits mostly on safety of entrance and exit points, but it was the Warp and it obviously wasn't stable. Inertialess Drives and Narvhals were stable, but neither were instantaneous.

What did all of this mean?

Well, a few things. First, that we had an advantage that should be exploited as ruthlessly as possible. Second, that one big fleet was not an efficient usage of our manpower. And third, since we had now taken a look around, found no immediate problems, had a full stock of energy and matter, and had our options in front of us, that it was time to get moving.

Thus, Stage Four.

 

[Drich]

4.2

+++

The trouble with Stage Four of Project Moth is that it relied entirely on what we found outside the Warp Storm. The actions to take in response to finding a Federation remnant was completely different to the actions to take in response to finding a dead galaxy, and different again in finding a galaxy that was actively at war and on fire.

...

Being completely honest, I'd been expecting the latter. Warhammer 40k was not the kind of setting that was kind. This whole sequence of events had seemed to me to be leading up to a cruel punchline, because that was just what happened in 40k.

I had no intentions to surrender to that, of course. I'd fight back with everything I had, if I needed to.

I had just been expecting...

Something more immediately dangerous.

What we've got so far is an area of space that is roughly clear of Warp Storms, except the one we just left, with a beacon of light declaring to everybody around that there is a civilization on Earth.

We're three thousand light years away from Earth.

That was not a particularly big deal. Wormholes could get us across that distance easily. Even Warp Drives could reliably cross that distance in as little as a few months, if they got lucky. Even if they got unlucky and hit a bad current, it would still only be a year or two.

There was an implication that came with that, however. Three thousand light years away from Earth was basically Sol's backyard. That neither the Empyreal Sensor arrays of the Lightchaser Fleet or my own admittedly not-great ability to sense the Warp could see ships within our immediate vicinity indicated that Big E was still just starting the Great Crusade. Timaeus' age would apparently deny this, at a hundred and thirty five, but time was always a little bit funky when the Warp was involved.

As indicated by the fact that, to us, it had been about two hundred years since the fall of the Federation, a hundred and thirty five since Timaeus landed here, yet both of these events would have been thousands of years apart in realspace.

'Significant Time Dilation' indeed.

To be completely honest, we had probably time traveled outright at least once in all of this.

Where was I going with this?

Right, yes, Big E.

And being that it was still, apparently, in the early stages of the Great Crusade...

There was a possibility, there.

I'll make something clear.

I did not want to fight Big E.

To be honest, I didn't really feel like fighting much of anybody.

There were all of three types of beings around that I really have inimical problems with, and only one of those that I'd actively seek out.

Those three were Tyranids, Orks, and Chaos. Tyranids because they would eat every bit of biomass in the galaxy if they were allowed to, Orks because they would fight everything in the galaxy if they were allowed to, and Chaos because...

Well, Chaos.

That was, I hope, self-explanatory.

The Tyranids aren't even around at the moment, either. They're in 'nowhere-near-here' land. Ergo, they weren't really a problem, either.

As for everybody else...

Well... What about them, really?

Most minor species pose no real threat to us. In terms of the actual major players?

Eldar? The Exodites aren't a problem, Dark Eldar don't actually exist yet, the Corsairs are too small (and also don't really exist yet), and the things that make the Craftworlders truly dangerous also get hard-countered by presence. The Silence hid us just fine, and coupled with the constant energy being drained from the Warp through my Symbionts, we created disruption that prevented Warp-based precognition and detection, and without that, the Craftworlders were significantly easier to deal with. That I also hard-countered psychic phenomena in general was just icing on the cake, because that ruled out a lot of their more troublesome thing.

Necrons? Currently sleeping. But, even if they were awake, they're far from a unified empire, and... Frankly, they can't really grow faster than I can. Necrons had the most advanced technology in the galaxy, but they weren't invulnerable. Just like everybody else, hitting them with enough energy worked fine. There were two things to fear from them; the C'tan shards and the Crypteks. The former because of their power, the latter because of their knowledge.

Tau? Nonexistent at the moment. Or, rather, some minor species on some minor planet that was still banging rocks together to see what would happen. Even if this was the forty-first millennium, they would still be too small to matter.

Hrud? Not nearly big enough to be a true threat.

And who did that leave?

The Imperium.

Oh, sure, there were a thousand other empires and polities around the galaxy in this era. Some of them Human, some of them alien, some of them corrupted by Chaos, some of them bigger than others, but just about every single one of those polities had been overcome by the Imperium, in the end.

I did not fear the Imperium.

Or, at least, not its military.

Grand armies and mighty fleets didn't matter very much when they had little ability to find me and less to catch me. The Imperium's FTL was just too woefully limited, in that regard, by time and distance and safety. Its production capacity, its industry... large, but incapable of matching my own growth rates.

Certainly, the Imperium had many brilliant admirals and generals. Sure, I was a beginner in space-combat, and I was likely to have my ass handed to me by whatever brilliant stratagems they could employ.

But there was a reason that professionals studied logistics.

How could a fleet be a threat when I could be gone before they arrived? When I needed at most a minute to go where they needed hours? Days? Potentially even weeks?

I was going to dictate 99.99% of engagements. And I was going to do so in a manner that forced the opponent to invest in heavy defenses, because my strikes could happen at any time, from any angle, with nobody else having the chance to react.

Forcing an engagement with me was no easy task.

It required threatening something that couldn't easily get away. That said, the only things I really cared about were the Lightchasers, and as one might note, they're far from defenceless, and so long as I'm nearby, everything that applied to me in terms of mobility also applied to them.

No. I did not fear the Imperium's military.

What was concerning was a much simpler fact, quick and obvious.

They were Human.

 

[Drich]

4.3

+++

Quick and obvious. Blatantly self-apparent.

And nonetheless, extraordinarily important.

The Compact had been founded on the ideal of reunion. Finding and reconnecting the scattered sparks of Humanity. Rebuilding the Federation, as the loftiest goal.

We had always expected- We had always known that not everybody would be on board with that idea.

But there was a difference between academic knowledge and true experience.

And there was another difference between fighting people who were corrupted by Chaos and fighting people who were entirely sensible and willing.

The Imperium of 30k and the Imperium of 40k were two entirely different beasts. The latter would have disgusted the Compact on almost every single level.

The former, though...

The former would not.

The Imperium of 30k is, for the most part, an expansionist power focused mostly on reuniting all the scattered Human polities in the galaxy.

So, you know, the exact same thing we were setting out to do.

The devil, of course, is in the details.

We were doing it to restore the Federation.

I should note, here, that despite the name, the Federation was... more of a decentralized network of alliances, smaller interstellar polities, and planets than a full government in its own right. Technically, the most direct control the Federation itself had was over the Man of Iron, and therefore the defense and service of Humanity as a whole.

That, and technology. The Federation required that scientific knowledge be regularly updated and uploaded to the Federation, for its usage to greater purposes. The Federation, in turn, distributed 'safe' knowledge, in the form of civilian-class STCs.

However, not every planet and polity had taken this offer. There were plenty of groups all over the place that had shaken off the yoke, freely pursuing technological and scientific endeavours. Those groups had, for the most part, been left alone, ultimately falling behind in their separation. The only exceptions had been particular circumstances where a group had developed something dangerous and, more importantly, was threatening to use it on other Federation members.

To us, therefore, a bunch of different groups, separate polities, and cultures all acting under a single aegis was the goal. Ideally, that would be all of Humanity, but isolated groups were fine so long as they weren't threatening other Human groups.

The Imperium was not like that. The Imperium's goal was total incorporation of all polities. No exceptions. More than that, however, the goal was to spread the Imperial Truth, and unite Humanity completely under the single aegis of it.

The Imperium would prefer peaceful integration. They would not, however, hesitate to wage war if the other party denied it.

And that was the key thing.

After all, that put us squarely in the target. For the simple reason that the Compact was Human...

Conflict was just this side of inevitable.

Any other species in the galaxy, and that wouldn't be a problem. But, fighting other Humans... Fighting completely uncorrupted Humans, driven by an ideology that wasn't all that different from our own...

That was the problem. That was what I was concerned about.

What would that do?

There was no easy answer. I can imagine many scenarios, good and bad, but knowing which one would come to pass... Not predictable.

The outcome I was hoping for was a simple one.

Stopping that conflict from ever happening in the first place.

But while the goal itself was simple, achieving it... was not.

There was more to the situation than both parties involved being merely Human, after all.

To start, the Imperial Truth held a philosophy of Human supremacy. It stated that Humanity was the species that was the 'purest' of form and purpose, that, after all the failed alien civilizations had collapsed, it was now Humanity's turn to rule the galaxy- and that Humanity was more worthy of this than any other.

Xenophobic? Yes.

Which, fine, wasn't surprising. Even the Compact didn't hold too much lost love for aliens. The older generations remembered full well how most of the Federations' so-called 'allies' had turned against it the moment the Man of Iron had gone out of control, taking opportunistic attacks that weakened the position of those trying to stop the Iron Tide. Most of those that had remained allies had eventually been wiped out by the Man of Iron, swallowed by Warp Storms, or were attacked by other parties.

Really, the only reason the Compact wasn't more Xenophobic was because I've been around. The Compact was mostly ambivalent on the subject of aliens, sorting on a case-by-case basis rather than in general.

One could not fault the Imperium for having gained its greater degree of xenophobia, though. Gaining absolute xenophobia was an entirely reasonable expectation when there were species that had been running around, stealing the stars of inhabited systems with little care as to the ultimate fate of its inhabitants. Or when there were species that ran around the galaxy, fighting everyone and everything they came across like a bunch of hooligans. Or when there were species that ate minds, or species that devoured bones, or species that were also absolutely xenophobic that were trying to wipe you out in turn.

No, the Imperium could not be faulted for that. The reaction and the reasons behind it were entirely understandable, and shared by a great deal many species in the galaxy.

What they could be faulted for was wiping out species that were truly no threat to the Imperium, out of convenience or simple phobia.

It was especially problematic because of me.

The Imperium, of course, with its ideals of Human supremacy, had problems with any Human faction that didn't also embrace that ideal. Those who cooperated with aliens, treating them as equals, or 'worse', superiors, would inevitably conflict with the Imperium.

My relationship with the Compact, our mutual symbiosis... Oh, that would be quite a big problem to the Imperium. And there was no doubt in my mind that they would try to attack us for it, given the chance.

It didn't end there, either. No, there were more reasons.

The third reason was technology.

The Imperium was not a monolith. It was composed of its own sub-groups. The Imperium was not a universally technical society like ours; all of their advanced technology was constructed and maintained by the Mechanicum.

The Mechanicum was a technology cult. They worshipped technology, coveted it, and the particular pieces that were the most important to them were the STCs. Mere fragments of those, singular patterns, were valuable enough to trade planets for. One of the Mechanicum's major goals was the recovery of a fully intact STC system.

Like the ones we had, for example. The Compact's Civilian-grade STCs were basically the holy grail to the Mechanicum, and there was very little they wouldn't do in order to acquire them.

That even tied with the fourth reason; reliable FTL.

Reliable FTL was the holy grail of any species that used the Warp.

Sure, the methods available to the Compact without me were all slower, but they were completely reliable.

The Wormholes, though? Oh, that was better in every way.

Why, then, was that a point against us?

Well, two reasons, actually. First, because it makes us a bigger threat. Second, because there's a group with a vested interest in keeping Warp FTL as the primary; the Navigator Houses.

The Navigators were, after all, under no illusions to what would happen to them if they became unnecessary. They'd do their best to sabotage any designs, any possibilities that might lead to it.

All of this... None of it was easy. What I hoped to come to pass seemed just this side of impossible, with all the reasons against it. That was why I was prepared for a much worse scenario.

But, there was still a possibility. A small one, but it still existed.

Big E... The Emperor.

He'd be the one to make it or break it.

The Imperium was ultimately beholden to him. He may have had his sons, his generals, his closest companions, Malcador, and that, but he was the one with the charisma, the will, and the authority to actually direct that change.

Nothing else would be able to achieve a peace.

But it wasn't just peace that was necessary

Had to stay ourselves, after all. Anything less would be an insult.

The real question is... can we convince him?

I sure hoped so.