The
Echo of Apotheosis is breaking up in a far orbit over Devna Secundus, many pieces still aflame with the remnants of the fires that killed her. They'll need to be salvaged later lest some of the larger debris crash into the planet.
But that's a matter for later. You place a call to W, half-expecting to not get an answer. She's managing a planetary reconquest at the moment, so you're not sure she'll have time to talk to you. Still, the call connects, and moments later you're staring at her dark-skinned face. She looks more haggard than she did when you last talked, but the spark of hope in her eyes is stronger.
"Congratulations on your victory," she says, speaking quickly and looking off-camera for a moment to wave somebody away. "Are you able to provide close support? There are some strongholds that could use an orbital strike."
You shake your head. "I was going to go out to Aetherion and try to recapture the manufactories there. I don't want to give the cultists with access to that much manufacturing capacity time to come up with anything clever. I also want to be
damn sure those ships are on lockdown. The last thing we need is for them to escape. But do you need us?"
Her gaze grows calculated as she thinks for a second, then jerks her head in a sharp shake. "Help here would save lives, but we're going to win. Having those manufactories might be the difference between Denva surviving the next century or not. The Crucibles need the fuel from the refineries..." she trails off and waves a hand as if to dismiss all the other reasons this is a good idea. "It's the right choice. You don't need the fighters or bombers?" The Denvan fighters that ascended to aid you in the battle against the
Echo of Apotheosis are already beginning to return to the planet.
"No, I don't. I don't see anything that can threaten me out there. But if we give them time that'll change."
"Go." She is already turning away as the connection closes.
You snort at the empty screen and start the course that'll take you towards the gas giant and the massive manufactory platform around it. Luckily, it's not far, but it'll still be nearly a full day before you arrive. Enough time for your enemies to plan, but not enough for them to pull off anything crazy, or build much in the way of weapons or bombs.
Unless they turn the reactors on all of those stations into bombs. But that's pretty darn hard to do, and I don't know if they have the expertise for it.
You check in with your crew, letting them know what your plan is. None disagree with it as you'd feared they might. They were all born on Denva, but they're not going to be overly emotional about ensuring every possible Denvan life is saved. Especially when the arguments for going to Aetherion
are sound, and it's the more important target in the long run.
But it has been an intense several hours for everybody, so they crash out during the approach, leaving you with nobody to talk to as you watch the gas giant grow slowly larger before you. It's times like this that you envy the human need for sleep. You're fully alert and aware despite the intensity of the fight against the
Echo of Apotheosis, but the tension of waiting for the last battle puts you on edge. You wish you could close your eyes and be there. But you can't.
Well, you could turn down your clock speed. But the chance you miss something important is too high. You can't spare the slowed reaction speed. So instead you plan. You don't expect much in the form of void defenses, but it's going to be important to board the manufacturing platforms and refineries fast and hard to prevent them from getting any clever ideas.
Furthermore, while the cultists destroyed the shipyards in orbit of Denva, they built new ones out here and they're in the middle of constructing two cruisers, four frigates, and a dozen destroyers. From here it looks like they've mostly gotten done putting down the hulls and are about to start filling them. That's far enough along that they're pretty valuable to have, but they're not going to be relevant militarily.
You spend the remaining time of the journey plotting out a plan that delivers every one of your remaining 2266 combat bots to the stations as quickly as possible in a distribution that
should be enough to take total control. But it'll be tight, and the plan hinges on what defenses they have aboard those platforms. It shouldn't be
much, but a few hundred heavy infantry would really mess up your plans right now.
Still, from the report W gave you the Forsaken Chorus were being careful to only send cultists to Aetherion, keeping their infantry concentrated on Denva Secundus and Klyssar's nest.
Which is going to be its own headache to sort out.
Your crew wakes up with a few hours left and you give them a rundown of the details that you came up with. It's more to kill time than anything else and they recommend a few changes, but nothing significant.
Then, finally, it's go-time. You're approaching the gas giant system with all the grace of a bull in a china shop because there's nothing that can stand up to you.
Still, as you get close a flight of shuttles undocks from the stations and starts beelining towards you. They're not boarding craft or even assault shuttles. They're simple cargo ships. They can certainly
carry troops, but there's no way for them to get aboard. And their courses don't look like they're intended for boarding. They look like they're on a direct intercept course, and are accelerating somewhat sluggishly despite having their engines on full burn.
Like missles. Big, slow, expensive missiles. They're probably loaded with ore or something.
You don't
want to blow up the shuttles. They're an important part of the manufacturing setup here. But it looks like you're not going to have a choice. Still, they're burning straight for you, and judging by their mass have sacrificed quite a lot of maneuverability. It's possible that you can maneuver out of the way. Even if you don't, you'll be able to shoot them down with your point defense far short of the hull.
You try to juke out of the way but the shuttles readjust more than you thought they'd be able to. They aren't as heavily loaded as you thought, and you spin up the point defense reluctantly to blow them away. But there's a strong warp signature when you do blow up the first shuttle, a psychic
shriek grates across your shields.
The attack takes you by surprise, and you delay shooting down the other craft for a moment while you try to figure out what just happened. Then you decide that doing nothing is probably the worst action and resume firing the point defense, launching fighters to take out all of the shuttles as quickly as possible.
As you suspected the closer to you the shuttles are when they're destroyed the harsher the shriek, and the more damage is done to your shields. You're not sure what that would do to an unshielded ship, but you're just as glad you're not going to find out.
-93 outer hull psychic HP
Aetherion void combat - rolled 33. Poor success.
Still, that leaves your outer hull psychic shields hanging by a thread. They're still active enough to detect warp signatures but they're not going to be able to block many more attacks. You make sure that everybody's behind a secondary shield, even Cia. She's suited up in her armor, but you're not expecting her to see combat.
It's too likely that they blow up the stations I board, and I don't anticipate anything that can seriously challenge my bots. No need to risk Cia like that.
No more surprises are forthcoming as you swing into orbit and start spitting out shuttles carrying your own troops. Your ships aren't boarding craft either but most of the platforms out there are built to your specifications, or at least the docking ports are, so you're able to get your bots aboard without too much trouble.
There's resistance to be certain, with dozens of cultists in black robes aboard each platform opening fire with weapons of familiar design. They take your toll on your bots, especially with how you're prioritizing speed over efficency. But you blow through them before they can mount much of a defense, capturing a few. More importantly, you capture most of the platforms quickly and without much difficulty.
Aboard the shipyards and the refineries, you do run into several hundred machine-spirit combat bots in defensive positions. They're identical to the design that you gave the Denvans before you left, and you try and hack them but get only a corrupted buzz in response that vaguely reminds you of scrapcode.
That approach doesn't work, but they're still run by machine spirits. The jamming equipment doesn't work quite as well as it should, but the specialized gear your bots carry is enough that massed wave tactics work to push through the defensive points and capture the key areas of the larger installations. It's only taken a couple of hours and while you're sure there are hold-outs scattered through the network of platforms and refineries, you're in control of all of them.
Aetherion "ground" combat - rolled 70. Good success!
-812 Specter Light Infiltration Bots
-368 Heavy Machine-spirit humanized Infantry Bots with Machine Spirit Jammers
-650 Heavy Machine-spirit Infantry Bots
The lack of defenders is puzzling - there's lodging for thousands more cultists than you find, and the shipyards in particular appear to have a large crew. It's only when you hack into some of the surveillance footage does it make sense - apparently most of the ambulatory workers boarded the shuttles before they made their suicide runs on you. You don't know what was aboard the shuttles, but whatever generated those psychic screams was powered by mass death.
Lovely.
The word "ambulatory" is also important because there are hundreds of people plugged into the control systems for each manufactory, often directly strapped to the central cogitator with crude leads running from their cracked-open skulls into the devices. They're each and every one of them Denvan engineers, scientists, or tech-priests with OMC implants who've been lobotomized and converted to crude interfaces to allow un-augmented cultists to run your manufactories.
You consider trying to save them, but there's nothing left to save. All of these people have had significant chunks of their brains destroyed, and what was left is pulsing with faint warp signatures that you're pretty sure indicate some level of Chaos corruption. Many of them bear grotesque mutations. There's only one thing to do, and you do it without thinking overly hard about the situation. What was done to them is horrific beyond words, so you're not going to try and find words for it.
Instead, you retreat into cold logic, reasoning that you'll spend your effort salvaging what you can from this whole mess. That will give their relatives and fellow Denvans the best chance of surviving the galaxy that delivered the victims to this fate.
The answer of what you can salvage is better than you'd feared, but not as good as you'd hoped. The entire control interface from every single factory and shipyard needs to be removed. It's all laced with the remnants of the technology that slaved the husks of the operators to the machines, and there's a faint warp signature you don't understand coming off many of the components. You're not sure if it's some kind of psytech, if there's something daemonic going on here or if the vague signals are merely the traces of suffering from the operators, but it doesn't matter. You rip it all out and dump it out the airlocks, making sure to give everything a hearty push towards the gas giant. It'll fall into the core and be crushed and melted.
But means that you'll need to rebuild the control systems for everything but the refineries if you want to use them. And replace the shuttles that were destroyed in the suicide charge.
Aetherion Industrial Complexes aquired! It consists of a Large Shipyard and 130 Orbital Manufactories.
They require repairs before they can be used, equal to 30% of the cost. You can repair the orbital manufactories to normal manufactories for 75 bp apiece or to machine-spirit versions for 100 bp apiece. The Large Shipyard will cost 3,000 bp and must be repaired before you can continue work on the ship hulls.
Ship hulls acquired:
2x Light Cruisers (1800 BP size)
4x Frigate (900 BP size)
12x Destroyers (450 BP size)
These are empty hulls. To use them spend RP to design ships of these sizes, and you won't have to pay for the base hull, just everything you stick into those hulls.
Vote below on what to do with these. They can be given to Denva for a boon or kept, but it's a package deal since the ships can't leave the shipyards. You'll be able to give them the repaired facilities later for another boon.
The refineries are essentially in full operating condition. They were originally built by the Imperium and are operable by unaugmented humans. That's been mostly left alone by the cultists, who just continued to operate them to provide fuel for all of their operations. Though as you examine the refineries you notice something off. They're falling into the gas giant.
Sometime since you arrived the onboard cultists intentionally sent the refineries into an uncontrolled fall into the gas giants. The giant siphons that are used to pull up gas for extraction are dragging far more than they should, and the orbits of each of the refineries is unstable. They're already far past the point where you could recover them with the onboard systems.
It's time to get creative. You start by having fighters dive down and destroy the dragging siphons. They won't be difficult to rebuild, especially not compared to the gigantic refineries themselves. Then you send every single shuttle, bomber, and fighter you have to "dock" with the refineries, wedging themselves into the gantry framing each refinery. Then they open up their thrusters to maximum. The paint scratches and a few wings buckle. But it's all repairable and you're able to exert a massive amount of force upon the refineries, saving them from certain doom in the gullet of Aetherion.
The last spiteful move of the Aetherion cultists - rolled 95. Critical success!
You save all of the refineries without issue.
With that, Aetherion is secure and stable, and you call back to Denva to see how W's doing.
The face that greets you is even more tired than the last time, but there's a more upbeat air to her posture. "Victory?" she asks with a slightly raised eyebrow. It looks as if she's too tired to be properly inquisitive.
"Yes," you say with a tired smile of your own. "I've swept the cultists from Aetherion. The platforms need some repairs but I was able to capture their ships too. They tried to sink the refineries into the gas giant but I pulled them back out." You can't help but let a little pride leak into your voice at the end there. "
W nods, her eyes drooping slightly. She covers her mouth as she yawns. "Good. I'll send all of the crucibles your way. They're not able to do much without fuel, but
with fuel, they'll be able to help you fix things up, and they've got people who know how to run those refineries."
Left unsaid is the question of
who all of that belongs to. You're going to give up the refineries because you don't really need them, but the shipyards and manufacturing platforms are currently in your possession, and it doesn't sound like W is going to demand them from you.
She yawns again. "Throne knows that we'll be busy repairing everything down here, but your old base is untouched and it's got the ability."
"How did everything on the ground go?" You ask delicately.
Her expression turns dour. "The fuckers were dug in better than we thought they were. They turned one of the monasteries into a stronghold full of artillery and we only
just dug them out. Bloody, even with bots on the frontline. Shelling cities will do that."
She shakes her head and sighs. "But the fighting is just about done. It's a mess and I
know there are thousands of collaborators unaccounted for. We'll need to find them." Her serious tone is cracked by another yawn. "I have people working on it. My best people." She snorts. "Aside from Victan. But he seems to be doing alright with you."
Denvan house-cleaning - rolled 37. Barely a success.
Then she jerks slightly as if remembering something important. "But we should be figuring out Klyssar's Nest. I don't want to leave them too long. Our troops are exhausted, but once they're ready if you can carry them there..." She seems to lose her train of thought and stare into space for a second.
You interrupt her gently. "I think you need to sleep. Klyssar's Nest will be there when we're done. I think it'll be a tough nut to crack, but if we work together we'll get it, and then the system will be secure again."
She nods at you. "Wiser words. I'm gonna rest."
"Goodnight," you reply, even though you're pretty sure it's daytime where W is.
The connection closes, and you're left with the conundrum of what to do next.
Vote below on how to spend your Denva boons.
Command Points 1,740/12,500
Flagship:
Spark of the Ancients, 1700 CP cost
Suffering from 125 bp of structure damage.
Ground Build Capacity: 0
Lift Capacity: 500 (converts between ground and void BP)
Void Build Capacity: 600
Research Capacity: 200
Psychic Shielding: Outer Hull 7/240 HP, Vita Core 135 HP, Crew Quarters (3/500) 135 HP,
Basic Psychic Experimentation Lab 135 HP, Bongo Oubliette 510/540 HP, Secondary Vault 50 HP, Captive Holding cells (52/500) 50 HP, (repair for 5 BP/point, can be repaired by repair bay)
Bongo Psychic Energy = 9/??? Represented as approximate damage potential.
Juvenat usage: 3/50 people's worth (cannot be stockpiled)
Shipbuilding capacity: 0 ship construction slots (treat it as capacity. You can only be building ships that fit within your construction slots)
Available ships:
none, beyond your flagship.
Available ground forces:
86
Specter Light infiltration bots (20 CP)
350 Heavy Machine-spirit Infantry Bots (20 CP)
CP costs for infantry bots work as breakpoints in increments of 1000. So 50 or 500 or 1000 bots all cost 20 CP, and 1001 costs 40 CP. Abstraction, y'all.
Misc assets:
A Void Abacus, Psytech Samples, A Navigator Fetus, A Scrapcode generator named Bongo. Dark Eldar Weaponry, A few Dark Eldar bodies, Dark Eldar Boarding Craft. Khornish Cultist corpses & artifacts. The Hand of Saint Agatha. A sector-governor's ransom in wealth. A dozen ancient metallic bots (pending vote). A chunk of auramite supposedly from the Emperor's armor. 40 surrendered Chaos Cultists.
Avatars:
Original Avatar, young human woman with green hair
Female tech priest with some augmentations.
Current Installations:
none
Military:
none
In progress construction:
none
In-progress research:
Abacus Manufacturing (50/100 RP)
Intelligence Coding (170/400 RP)
[] [Free] Poke around some more in the databases, looking for anything in particular. Don't do this just because it's free. Do it if you want to know something. Writing those sections delays the updates. If you want Vita to get more done, don't ask for this.
[] Orders: Command existing units in a given theater of operations.
[] Travel/Explore: Pick a system on the Map to travel to/explore.
Currently, you may travel 1 system as part of an explore action, or 3 systems if you don't explore. You can explore a place you've already explored, or focus your exploration on a specific feature of a place you've already explored. Or explore two systems next turn and then the turn after go back for specific POIs without costing an action. Jumping a single system over as part of an exploration action is free, a number which will increase with better navigation.
[] Diplomacy/Subversion: Talk to people. (Write-in goal & method)
[] Construction: Gain build points equal to your build capacity, write in what you spend them on.
Blueprints
[] Research: Gain research points equal to your research capacity, to be spent designing new blueprints or researching projects. Write in what you spend them on.
Blueprint design
Research
Anexa Ifina, Magos Errant, Master of Many Talents.
Level 16
-[] Anexa active Action: Research - assists a research action you take, granting +5xLevel RP to the action. Will level on a successful roll, scaled by the importance of the tech.
-[] Anexa passive action: Exploratory Research - Roll to discount a random tech from one of her specialties, a success will discount an amount similar to her +5xLevel RP bonus but modified with the roll. Will receive the specialty bonus, and a crit will result in a level-up and unlocking a new bonus technology, like what you get for a crit on a research action.
Specialties (3/4): Machine Spirits. The Warp, Cybernetics. Grants a +10 bonus when doing research rolls in the relevant category.
Has a staff of 0 tech-priests of the Cogitare Exploratium, which provide +20 CP each (0) & 1 RP each (0) per turn, with people beyond 50 providing 0.2 and people beyond 100 providing 0. For design, 20 can be assigned to a design task (and not contribute to research) to halve its RP cost.
Victan Thallos, Diplomat-Spy
Level 17
-[] Victan active action: Diplomat-Spy - assists any diplomacy action you take, granting +Level to the dice to the action. Will level on a successful roll, scaled by the significance of the action.
-[] Victan passive action: Counterespionage & Alliance-building - Defends against hostile covert action and improves relations with existing allies, as well as gathering information for making new allies. Will only level if something interesting happens.
Cia Steblin, Focused Pyromancer Psyker
Level 13
-[] Active Psyker improvement: Cia will actively attempt to practice her powers. Roll two d100s. Take the higher roll for determining level-up, but take the lower for perils of the warp. (DCs are unknown but context-dependent. They are currently favorable and will get less favorable as she levels)
-[] Passive Psyker improvement: Cia will take lower-risk actions to improve herself, including meditation, study and augmentation. A single level-up roll, with only a very low roll resulting in perils of the warp.
Focus: Combat. Cia is now armed with custom heavy armor and a large but crude two-handed force sword.
Abilities: Cia is able to use minor psytech without risk. She's learned the value of carrying around a few mundane ways to make fire for when she doesn't want to rely on her abilities, but is focusing on improving her pyromancy, which is currently ranked at Epsilon.
Denva Boons: 2
+1 for Destroying the
Echo of Apotheosis
+1 for saving the refineries necessary to keep the crucibles active
Denva Boons available: 4
+1 if you give them the Aetherion station.
+1 if you materially help them conquer Klyssar's nest. (Defined as building at least 500 BP of bots/equipment and spend a command action attacking the station. Up to you if you also ferry Denvan forces in.)
+1 if you transfer your new OMC/machine spirit technology to them.
+1 if you transfer corruption defenses, including all Psychic shielding, Cognition Filter & warp sensors. This will also mandate you to transfer basic cultist detection if you get it.
-[][Boon] One-time Manufacturing Capacity (banked: 1)
Grants +15,000 BP from Denvan manufacturing to a single construction action as you ask for material help. (Current usage limit 1/turn - you can pick this multiple times and they'll be banked for future use. The value will increase over time as Denva builds up.)
-[][Boon] Permanent Manufacturing capacity
Gives you a % of Denvan manufacturing every turn as you establish companies & manufacturing concerns within Denvan society. Currently would grant +1000 BP/turn. You can manage this BP with a free action. Picking it multiple times will increase the percentage, and you'll be able to leave them with a multi-turn project or a general direction if you leave. The value will increase over time as Denva builds up.
-[][Boon] Expanded Technology Focus/sharing (write-in two tech trees)
They're still researching the General design/various Industry focus you gave them before, and will share techs & designs from those trees occasionally. Pick two more tech trees for them to start investing in and they'll share techs from those trees when they get them. This isn't a zero-sum game. Invest into their research capabilities to get more out of this.
-[][Boon] Specialized Crew (write-in who)
Pick this to get 100 highly-qualified crew of any kind. These could be OMC-operators, cogitare or not. The machine cult has been diluted and lost a lot of their unique culture, but there are still enough old cogitare members kicking about that you could recruit them if you want. Or you could get sociologists and economists for Victan's staff, or whatever.
-[][Boon] One-time Social Intervention (write-in what)
Do this to give Denvan culture & government a firm nudge in a direction you want them to go. This could be something like "Go uplift the Vellkar" or "hey, listen to this great religion I'm going to sell you." Whatever it is, it'll get in front of the eyes of everybody on the planet and probably convince the government if it's reasonable.
-[][Boon] Permanent Social intervention
Establish media companies, lobbyists & think tanks to guide Denvan society down a path you want. This will give you some measure of control over their long-term society, more the more boons you invest. It could be anything from encouraging people to study science to encourage a social ethic of xenophila. You'll give it a direction with a free action, and you can have it assist with your diplomacy actions in Denva for a +5 bonus, or a +10 if you invest two boons.
-[][Boon] Psykers
W evacuated the other monasteries to Aevon when shit went down, and they've even involved psykers in their military forces to some extent. Get your pick of Aevon psykers to join your crew. It's been almost 60 years since you last looked, so if any of the options from before are available they'll be very old. I'll probably just roll an entirely new set.
-[][Aetherion] Keep.
You can use the facilities for now, and finish the ships for yourself. If you give back the manufactories and shipyards later you'll receive a boon then.
-[][Aetherion] Give
Immediate +1 Denva boon. They'll repair them later.
You can save boons for a few turns, but they last about as long as a normal human lifetime. Once you spend them they're semi-permanent, so you can spend a boon on One-time Manufacturing Capacity then wait a hundred years to use it. It'll give you a lot
more BP in a hundred years than it does now. That's why you have a free boon that's worth 15,000 bp now when it would have been worth 500 when you left.
If you'd crit on the ground-combat portion of the takeover you wouldn't have lost as many bots and I'd let you help with Denva or try for Klyssar's next before we went back to normal turns. But without a modifier crits are hard to get, so now you have to do things the long way.
I know you're all going to ask if the ships are corrupted. Chill, they're basically metal frameworks at this point, and that's part of what Warp Sensors are meant to detect. The cultists would have put all of the eight-pointed stars on after
they put on the armor, and installed the sacrifical shrines once there was anywhere to put them.
You don't have a good use for the refineries, so you're giving them back automatically and getting a boon for it. Denva needs them to run the Crucibles anways.
Yes, you can use the one-time manufacturing your boon to aquire manufacturing capacity, then use that to repair the manufactories, then give them back later to recoup the boon.
Technology transfer is a free action, though it'll go better if it's a diplomaacy action. If you roll well you might get an extra boon to be spent next turn.
Denva is... not great but fine. Remember they have pretty much your full techbase (minus what you've researched in the last few turns) and a lot more manufacturing than you currently have out of Aevon. The best way for you to aid them right now is help them retake Klyssar station.
I was planning on featuring a general who ran the process of freeing Denva from Chaos, then was going to let you recruit them for a boon. But then Denva got a "meh" on the roll to kick Chaos off the planet. So it just turns out they don't have a great strategist and W had to kind of flub through a ground battle with instincts honed for covert action. So no general for you - yet.
For this turn and this turn only it's valid to use a command action to salvage the remnant pieces of the Echo of Apotheosis
, if you do I'll roll to see what salvage you find. It's likely to be more chaos artifacts, but it might be intel that's useful for the Klyssar raid or provides maps of the sector. If you don't do it Denva will, but they're more likely to just kick the salvage out into deep space or towards the sun.
I think I have time to write over the weekend, so let's do 16 hours of moratorium and 16 hours of voting. Let me know if you need more time and I'll consider extending one or both. 
