A mechadendrite returns the hip flask to a small compartment on my servo harness. I re-engage my multiple thought streams and start going through the backlog of issues at maximum pace. With all ten at full speed, the world around me slows to a crawl, as if each breath takes me several minutes.
Within a handful of seconds, I’ve sorted everything and I let the world return to a more normal pace, though the other nine streams remain at full tilt, reading the data E-SIM is slowly pulling from the enclave’s cogitators and cataloguing the information and resources I have seized.
I find the process therapeutic. Nothing quite like counting loot to put one in a good mood and I’ll get to do this for weeks on end. The D-POT prospectors have also begun to return their finds.
So far, they’ve discovered enough of the rare elements I require to build and fuel my origami pattern mobile shipyard and they haven’t even scanned one percent of the Kuiper belt, let alone prospect the other planets, moons, or Oort cloud.
Marwolv is fast becoming a great boon. My main issue is I lack labour, so I focus my efforts on obtaining the resources I require to restart the production of my horribly expensive, warded servitors and the construction of orbital facilities, including a cloud-scoop over Marwolv’s hot Jupiter and a solar forge over its sun. Between these two stations, stations I intend to tow with me when I leave, I should be able to synthesise almost every material I require, so long as I have the energy, base elements, and time.
They are horribly complex facilities I acquired from my STC and I am unsure I will complete them before I leave. It is far cheaper and easier just to mine everything I need, but having been stranded on Mote and fled from Melbethe, I really want more independence for my resource income. Given enough time, I would like to adapt them into specialised vessels, but I have more pressing focuses for now, such as building a fleet that can protect such assets.
With that thought in mind, I gather the last of my reserves and begin the construction of the trading outpost and unload the equipment I need to construct a shipyard. I am happy to have an abundance of resources, as trying to build the origami using the luxnet from the Distant Sun and a few microfactories, like I would have done if Mote was a bit more viable, would have been a slow and inefficient process. Looking back at my initial decisions, I now know attempting it would have been an idiotic choice, one driven by my desire to hide from galactic horrors.
Building the docks will also let me uplift Marwolv and provide me with an industrial and cultural base of my own. There is so much to discover in the Koronus Expanse and I see no harm in getting a headstart on my rogue trader plans, even if I don’t have a writ yet.
Marwolv has been abandoned for over eight hundred years, the chances of someone barging in on my business and wrecking my cultural conquest is low.
I have a lot of earth moving equipment and considerable practice using it. Within four weeks, the spit of land I have been granted has been levelled out and reinforced. Drainage and other groundworks, including a network of underground shelters and cargo tracks, are underway and a ferrocrete slab has been cast at the end of the spit, establishing a basic spaceport.
Today, Thorfinn is visiting with his squad of grox riders and we are sitting on a partially completed sea wall, sheltered by a breakwater of interlocking, ferrocrete, caltrop-like shapes called stabits, or tetrapods.
The grox paw at the ferrocrete, unwilling to let the lizards work up a lethal grump, I end the small talk and say, “Do you have good news for me, Thorfinn?”
Thorfinn reaches into a satchel and passes me a vellum scroll, “This is the current offer.”
“That was fast.” I open the scroll and smile. They have accepted all my requests.
“Your demonstration of imperial arms and the speed of your construction have made it quite clear their political power exists only for so long as they agree to everything you say.”
“I was unsure if a democratic government would be so decisive.”
“You dropped a meteorite off the coast as an encore. The wave was just big enough to stop before their toes. No one is that stupid.”
“It took hours to calculate that. I’m glad it was appreciated.”
“That you can even do so is ridiculous.”
“I know. Such feats surprise me too.”
“Once the awe wears off and people get greedy and stupid. What will you do?”
“Inform you and let your internal security deal with it, though if someone really pushed their luck, I have plenty of uses for bodies.”
“Like those servitors of yours? Those things make me uneasy.”
“Exactly like those servitors. One of those designs, called a kataphron, requires the soul of a violent man, you can’t get that from cloned flesh.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“I’m not sure I do either, but it works and that’s good enough for now.”
Thorfinn looks over his shoulder, “I’d best be off. Will you be available to meet next week?”
“Sure, you choose the place and I’ll buy the drinks. It’s a bit bleak out here after all.”
We stand and shake hands, then say goodbye. I watch them leave and smile. Have I made a friend?
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A year passes and the trading post is completed. Three quarters of it is dedicated to industrial facilities, including micro factories and warehouses; I stacked hundreds of cargo containers together by dropping them from orbit with the gravity lift. It is ugly and efficient.
The last quarter, where the spit connects to the mainland, is filled with shops and offices. I’m employing hundreds of locals and have an excellent trade in industrial tools, agricultural vehicles, medicine, and books.
Now it is obvious I am here to stay and willing to teach, the ban on electronic goods will be lifted next month. Before that, I was selling a lot of manual precision tools and workshops were multiplying all over the country, but now I’m offering power tools, manual tools are going to hobbyists, rather than being snapped up by businesses.
Protective clothing is also a big seller, with mesh suits being my most popular item, though good personal protective equipment and tough work clothes have the greatest volume of sales as most people can’t afford a mesh suit. Mesh suit material, thermoplas, is expensive in time and materials.
I am using all the pearls I gather to purchase raw materials and feed momentum back into the economy as their currency is worthless to me. With my servitors and machines I can gather resources at a lower cost and greater scale than I buy them for, so I don’t actually make any money from any of my trades.
Exposure to imperial technology, however, has inspired a massive drive for social mobility, letting me recruit enthusiastic students and maintain a workforce with a positive work ethic, which is worth much more to me than squandered cash.
I’m still stripping the enclave and, at this point, I’ve decided not to bother rebuilding it and keep my focus on the trading post and my orbital facilities. I did find enough mark four, great crusade era power armours to outfit a chapter of space marines, along with their supporting weapons, vehicles, and munitions.
Most importantly, it came with the manufacturing grade STCs and production gear for such devices, though E-SIM can’t crack the security on them. I also recovered the wargear and STCs for the Solar Auxilia, the precursor to the Imperial Guard, elite special forces more similar to the tempestus scions than the usual commissar fodder that makes up the bulk of imperial forces.
While all of this sounds awesome, this gear has a high ‘tech burden’, meaning you need expensive facilities, resources, highly skilled engineers and a lot of time to produce and maintain it, way beyond what most tech-priests are capable of, including me. The discovery of all this information makes it all the more apparent why the enclave was targeted by the eldar and how incredible Jund and Psi-Xi were.
While the finished wargear is valuable to collectors, the STCs aren’t quite as remarkable as I am sure the information still exists back on Mars and other major forge worlds. The Imperium moved away from elite forces to mass infantry and tanks for good reasons, even if it does cost them billions in casualties every year.
Even so, I am still delighted to have the data as there are very few things I could have traded to be granted military technology apart from my cargo container STC in full, and selling that in one go will probably get me assassinated and start a civil war.
There are still thousands of incredible items and machines on it that I have yet to consider.
The orbital facilities are far from complete, and I am half way through hollowing out the first dock inside an eighteen kilometre, iron rich asteroid I dragged into orbit with the Distant Sun during my second month at Marwolv.
There has been no progress on curing the mutants, though I did construct a stasis cargo container and put them in it.
As for the tau? Well. The tau are up to something. I don’t mean that metaphorically as I’m sitting on my command throne watching their fire teams abduct a small village through the eyes of Brian. This is the first time I’ve caught them at it, but it’s the fourth ‘animal attack’ that’s happened this year and they never made sense as there are never any remains.
If it wasn’t for Aruna noticing a concentration in particulates in the atmosphere that could only have come from a jet engine, I never would have found them.
I’ve no idea what they’re doing and I can’t decide how I want to respond as swooping in and blasting their fireteam before I have a way of striking their submerged voidship is a reckless idea, an idea that really appeals to me. Letting them complete their objective is worse than risking retaliation.
Grabbing the heavy arc rifle that was leaning against my throne, I rush down the steps to the exit and sprint for the thunderhawk while my forces muster. One, class two D-POT and four class ones, all stuffed with servitors and bristling with heavy weapons, gives me a battle group of five hundred and forty troops, four leman russ tanks, four anti-air tanks called hydras, and sixteen chimeras. This places two hundred and sixty-four servitors under armour with seventy-two as vehicle crew.
Feeling I’m putting too many eggs in one basket, I launch another identical flight of D-POTs, unloaded, as more manoeuvrable escorts.
The tau sensors are good, and the moment my escort flight launches, their battlegroup sprint for their vehicles, unleashing kroot hounds, tough, dog-like xeno beasts with spiny backs, on the unloaded prisoners.
I arrive at the hangar and board the thunderhawk, sliding into the pilot seat is a little awkward with a servo harness, but my power armour keeps me comfortable. The auto-pilot is engaged already and Mr Cygnus has the thunderhawk caught up with the escort flight before the transport flight finish launching.
The machine spirits take a sharp descent, heating the forward edges of the deltawing craft as they accelerate towards the tau. Six minutes later, we scream over the tau convoy, launching a barrage of hellstrike missiles at their hammerhead tanks, hovercraft like vehicles held aloft by anti-grav devices and propelled by blocky jet engines.
The devilfish transports in the middle of the convoy launch a salvo of smart missiles to intercept my hellstrikes. Machine-spirits and AI attempt to deceive each other with jamming devices, sensor burning lasers, erratic manoeuvres, and shedding phosphorus.
Tau counterfire is far better than I expected and intercepts almost every missile, then takes out the remainder with the rotary railguns hanging from the front of their craft.
Maintaining my speed so the massive rail guns mounted on the top of their hammerheads can’t get a lock, I continue to harass their convoy with missiles from below the horizon, using the Distant Sun’s sensors to assist the targeting.
Gathering into a circle, the tau maintain their defence, covering every angle while still advancing to the coast. They don’t go as fast at such angles, though the display of technology and discipline is daunting. Whatever weird jammer that hid them in the first place is still up, making it difficult to target them even with Brian tailing them and the Distant Sun overhead.
Brian finally gets a good count of their battlegroup, they have twenty vehicles: six hammerheads and twelve devilfish. Ninety fire warriors, tau infantry in blocky, sand coloured armour, cling to handles jutting from their transports, their pulse carbines, rapid fire plasma weapons, dangling in one hand.
My battlegroup assembles in their path as my escort flight runs out of missiles. Keeping low, I advance in a scattered line, firing a dozen twin-linked lascannons at the convoy.
With their speed and manoeuvrability limited, twenty energetic beams of coherent light punch through the tanks, destroying three hammerheads, grounding four devilfish, and crippling the guns on the three remaining hammerheads. The last two twin shots miss, sending up great gouts of earth and stone, peppering the convoy with hot, sharp rocks.
A gentle chime sounds in my ear. Envoy Lynu is calling.