I’ve always held the philosophy that if your opponent can spot you and you don’t outrange them, you’re doing something wrong. Unfortunately, that isn’t always possible and option two is to stick your vulnerable assets in the most difficult to reach spot then fortify like crazy with as many redundancies as you can afford with your space, time, and resources.

Option two works even better if your opponent can’t siege you as it forces your opponent to come to you and this is what the tau have done; it’s the reason I’m riding a modified boarding torpedo, grinding beneath the sea floor towards their base while my small fleet of submarines and sea ships launch enough explosives at the tau underwater city they can’t stop my approach.

I’ve no illusions that my ground attack will take them by surprise as at every turn their stealth and sensors have been better than mine.

The torpedo is an armoured tube, sixty metres long and five wide with the front third filled with boring mechanisms. They’re usually fired from void ships, filled with psychotic battle servitors or elite boarding teams to crush morale or target essential systems.

These ones have had their rear propulsion removed to fit extra servitors and soldiers. Propulsion comes from twenty-four mechanical legs, a design I replicated from a trio of disassembled onager dune crawlers I found discarded in a private stash on the Distant Sun.

There are nine boarding torpedoes. Five contain seventy kataphrons each. The other three have eight squads for a total of one hundred and twenty heavy infantry and two special weapons teams with crew served weapons, split evenly between heavy bolters and las cannons. Each squad also has a heavy weapon each: a mix of flamers, grenade launchers, and plasma rifles, as well as a cyber mastiff.

My torpedo is a little different as I have a mix of forces: twenty kataphrons and four squads, and two special weapons teams.

Heavy bolters and las cannons are terrible weapons to fire in an enclosed, underwater space and the kataphrons with their plasma and grav weapons are even worse.

I check my forces with E-SIMs internal scanner and my dragon scale power armour’s auto-sense. They’re all remarkably steady and likely in a better mood than I am.

For when the worst inevitably happens, and the tau city floods, all the infantry are enclosed in custom pressure carapace armour, normally used in void boarding parties or toxic environments.

The custom carapace is made from the Marwolv organic alloy (MOA); the infantry call it bunny bones. MOA offers similar protection to carapace composite and it is thirty percent lighter. I used the liberated weight to add a variable power endoskeleton that negates the weight of the armour and any equipment my infantry are carrying.

The endoskeleton isn’t strong or fast enough to augment strikes in close quarters combat, though it can lock and assist in blocking hard strikes or minimise recoil. It runs off a potentia coil and can charge power packs. Even unpowered, the endoskeleton load bearing structure offers some aid and, unlike full power armour, the wearer won’t get locked up in their armour if it gets fried or hacked.

It’s also significantly cheaper and easier to maintain. It takes a week to learn the rites of repair for it, so most guardsmen can maintain their own armour as long as they have a fresh supply of tested components.

I’ve also clad my infantry in hyperweave undersuits, after I finally found the STC for the federation mesh suit and what it was really called after digging through the ‘Cargo Container’ STC looking for better ways to protect my construction teams.

Hyperweave undersuits offer the same full body protection as imperial thermoplas mesh suits, with the added benefit of being self-sealing and half the weight as well as a few other nifty features. They are not perfect though and are fifteen percent less damage resistant than an imperial mesh suit.

The commander, Mael Muire, voxes me, her voice is soft and pleasant.

“Magos, five minutes until we breach. Do you have a word for the troops?”

“Alright. Acknowledge vox override.”

“Vox override confirmed.”

I straighten my posture and focus my determination, “To all men and women serving in Operation Sea Mither. This is Magos Explorator, Aldrich Issengrund.

“For two years we have seethed and toiled beneath Dimpsy Rock, preparing for this day.

“When the tau fell, they sought peace, cooperation and understanding.

“They lied.

“While the tau smiled in friendship, they stole our people.

“We caught them and they butchered us for our defiance, for daring to live, to laugh, and love.

“We offered them a chance at a new world and they cleansed our kindness with our blood.

“We are done. I,” I pause, “am done.

“We shall return the fires of their disgust and rejection with the purity of the machine. Its cleansing illumination guides us; guides us to their fallacious abode; to scour its deceptions from our hearts and homes; to peace.

“May the brilliance of the Omnissiah shroud you from the Spectre of Defeat.

“The Emperor protects!”

My guardsmen salute and shout, “The Emperor protects!”

“Good fortune to you all.” With a thought, I end the vox override.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

I should thank the Emperor for my Concurrent Consciousness Cascade and Rapid Decision Engine or there would be no way to write a speech so fast, but no matter how awesome a second life is, I still haven’t forgiven him for dumping me in the grim darkness of the far future.

I feel terrible for spreading the Imperial and Machine Cults to all these men and women, they don’t deserve its burdens, but they deserve the cults’ intolerant gazes even less. I’m not going to take them all the way to the Imperium and deny shore leave either: I like being captain.

Hopefully showing the difference between my fleet and the Imperium will improve their loyalty when they see and hear the lives of hive citizens too.

The guardsmen go over their weapons one more time, checking that the backup power packs for their hellguns are seated properly and that their mercy pistols, with armour piercing phosphex rounds, are ready to draw at a moment’s notice.

My hellguns, or ‘hot-shot’ lasguns, are a modification of the lathe pattern lasrifle and the mark II hellgun. The lathe pattern lasrifle is used by the tech-priests of the Lathe worlds in the Calixis sector. They hook up to their internal potentia coils to the weapon to remove the need to reload. Mine are hooked into the MOA carapace armour’s potentia coil for their power and modified to hellgun specs and configured for range, rather than close range assaults like normal hellguns, to match the tau pulse rifles.

Without the long barrel, these ‘Marwolv’ pattern hellguns don’t have the accuracy of a long-las, or the tau pulse rifles, but they can make the fire warriors keep their heads down, which is the point.

Even with the powerful hellguns, in our engagements, the phosphex rounds have proven to be the best counter to tau fire warrior armour, though mass las fire is still needed to get close enough for a killing blow without wasting weight on ammo and the hellguns do cause moderate casualties.

To make weathering tau pulse rifles viable, each guardsman also has a collapsible MOA composite combat shield they can deploy as extra cover, cargo sleds, or medivac stretchers.

The MOA combat shields are my equivalent to the tau shoulder armour. They are quite heavy, at four kilos, and not that helpful in a running battle or, ironically, close combat, as they are large and heavy.

The powered endoskeleton does minimise the strain, but it isn’t strong enough to negate the inertia of swinging a large weight about. I also had to make it usable when the armour is faulty or damaged, so I couldn’t add further armour to it.

It is possible to vary how folded the combat shields are to make it easier to move with them, but then you lose enough protection it’s, debatably, more efficient to put them away so you can run faster to cover. However, depending on the mission, the simulations run by the guardsmen show a twenty-five to forty percent increase in survival rates so no one is willing to give them up.

Instead, the guardsmen channel all their bitching at having to carry them into ‘improvised equipment use’ like riding them down steep slopes, or getting chimeras to pull them through muddy terrain.

Each squads’ large cyber mastiff holds extra gear, though I suspect I gain more from the morale the mastiffs provide than I do from their utility. The guardsmen also carry a variety of explosives, blades, medical supplies, and rations.

“Ready up!” voxes commander Muire.

The final wargear check ends and, with a grinding screech the torpedo bursts into a tau city dome.

Twenty kataphron breachers roar out of the breach, their heavy tracks carrying them over severed metals and live wires. Heavy arc rifles lash out with burning power, disintegrating xeno machinery and its controlling AI with ephemeral fury. There is no immediate response and the infantry follow, chased up by the command chimera, the only vehicle I brought.

Last, I step into the dome. Fine panelling and delicate machinery is splattered by blacked giblets and grisled soot. E-SIM translates and labels most objects. We’ve entered a high energy laboratory. It’s only the tau’s fantastic safety protocols that mean we weren’t immediately vaporised by burning capacitors and cracked plasma containment.

I direct the kataphrons away from the fatal devices and vox Mael.

“Commander Muire, high priority message, acknowledge.”

“Magos, this is commander Muire. Ready for message.”

“Warning: this is a high energy laboratory. Environmental conditions are set to lethal. Exit immediately. Acknowledge.”

“Lethal environment. Warning confirmed. Issuing rapid move order. Muire out.”

Two of my kataphons have torsion cannons, gravity shear weapons, and they repeatedly fire at the door. Whatever containment shielding the tau have on the room fails and the weapons tear an exit, the kataphron’s precise fire cuts a path for the chimera.

The other eighteen kataphrons accelerate into the opening, gunning down everything with their heavy arc rifles. The opposition is non-existent and the teams spread out and follow the rampaging kataphrons.

I spot a brown skinned arm and a claw from my servo harness reaches out and scoops a wrist mounted data terminal from the pulped remains. A mechadendrite slithers over the device, its end flashing between a handful of configurations every second as it tries to interface with the xenotech and fails.

It’s dead. I frown, then realise of course it is. The xeno was fried by a heavy arc rifle, which means no recoverable data. I pass up the request and two minutes later, Muire agrees and I update the engagement protocols for the kataphrons, they cease their fire and the infantry get close, using them as cover as they terminate the xenos.

After a few minutes, a shield, piled high with data terminals, is dragged over. I thank the guardswoman, gather the terminals with my many mechanical arms and return the shield. The woman salutes and returns to her squad.

“Message to Commander Muire. Nominal priority. Data retrieved. Would Commander Muire like to resume their primary assault role? Over.”

“Magos Issengrund. Resume kataphron primary assault on my mark. Acknowledge.”

“Resume kataphron assault on mark. Confirmed.”

“From mark, resume assault in ten seconds. Mark.”

“Mark confirmed. Issengrund out.”

I update the Kataphrons.

Even after all my practice, I still feel like I’m playing soldier. I know I’m not. This is serious and I am focused, yet as I traipse through alien viscera I can’t see myself as a combatant. Void ship combat is much more relatable.

I hand over the request to my armour and E-SIM and the two machine-spirits trawl through the data terminals, collating communications and location data. Thirty seconds later I have a detailed map of the research dome and a civilian map of the whole city.

The data is forwarded to command and E-SIM highlights points of interest, the genetics lab, servers, and specimen warehouse. Carelessly breaching a genetics lab sounds unwise and the servers offer an uncertain payoff.

We’ve twenty minutes remaining before extraction so I can only tackle one and storage usually has the lowest security and the biggest chance to see what the tau have been up to, rather than trying to hack their systems or hope scattered notes and alien experiments will reveal some shattering secret.

I forward my self-appointed objective to Mael and request a squad and two kataphron breachers. As the minutes tick by, I realise something has gone wrong with one of the three target domes and patch myself into the pict-feeds.

The second group mangled the primary tau hangar and are doing well.

Group three? Well, they’ve breached a smelter.