4.2
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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.
