Thorfinn, eventually, forgives me for drugging him, I think. He does stop going on about it, which is good enough. Recruitment picks up and, after six months, marking the beginning of my third year on Marwolv, my first two dozen voidsman trainers are good enough I can begin to build out a proper crew and ground forces.
I teach these men and women personally, accelerating their learning with implants and the Distant Sun’s teaching engine, an imperial device that forcefully imparts knowledge, much like E-SIM did to me on the Federation station.
My knowledge comes from E-SIM, as well as my extensive research, learning, and practice I’ve put into understanding imperial and mechanicus military doctrine. It varies massively depending on where the regiments are founded and who they’ve fought over the centuries. I adopt a similar approach and create my own, with a focus on elite forces, mechanical support, and disposable servitors.
In theory, this should be perfect for a rogue or explorator fleet with limited transport capacity.
A lot of work is put into making my troops self-sufficient in basic repairs and first-aid. I will have to induct every member into the mechanicus for it to be legal to teach them mechanical skills. Hopefully the time and cost of training will be less than the resources it takes more valuable tech-priests to do the same, basic tasks.
Mechanicus induction makes fitting mind impulse units to everyone less objectionable to any imperial tech-priests I will encounter; it will also save me massive quantities of training resources as using implants and noosphere virtual reality for most training is much cheaper than replacing equipment damaged, lost, or expended by fumbling recruits. That’s before I consider the resources spent on healing or repairing training accidents too.
Troops can practise all day with dozens of scenarios at minimal cost to me with the occasional live exercise to keep them focused.
The teaching engine is time consuming to calibrate and imperfect in its transfer of knowledge. It cannot impart physical skills like E-SIM can, only knowledge, that must be revised and practised to retain. The voidsman trainers receive the same two implants as Thorfinn did, minimising the teaching engine’s foibles. Compressing two years teaching into six months.
My mechanicus trainees receive similar benefits, placing their knowledge closer to a decade of learning, than the two and a bit years they’ve actually received.
Four of my mechanicus trainees agree to cross train as officers and once they finish their own specialised twelve month course, they will select potential officers from the first batch of recruits.
Again, noosphere training is invaluable, with E-SIM providing much of the technical support and most of the simulations.
The mechanicus trainees are doing well and are now capable of mentoring students of their own. Each is assigned twelve students and practical work in the shipyard, or my other manufacturing facilities. I also continue my accelerated learning policies with the new mechanicus students batch.
Most of the new mechanicus students come from the administrative staff and labourers at my trading post who, having picked up a basic understanding of mechanical sciences, want to move to better paying work.
Five years pass without incident and it is now January 1st, 41026 AD, or X000026M42, and I have been on Marwolv for eight years.
The tau have been getting restless, sending small shuttles into space and testing my global response time to their incursions. This has been good practice for my crew and ground force, but it also wastes time and burns resources, as well as hints at our capabilities, like the number of shuttles I have, or how the chimera’s are armed.
Obviously, we’ve been sandbagging and furiously swapping out gear to falsify our order of battle. Aruna has been running the deception, stopping the machine-spirit from bothering me all the time and there has been a four percent decrease in servitor tasking errors while Aruna is directing them, so long as it gets to mess with the tau. If it was human, I’d say it was in an excellent mood.
While keeping Aruna paw deep in trouble is beneficial, the constant disruption is slowing down my acquisition of additional forces, which brings me to today's event.
A military fortress looms over a bay, four kilometres north of the trading post, crammed with active forces, getting ready for their first mass live training exercise.
Five squat towers shadow thick bastions and protruding casemates of grey ferrocrete, ceramite, and plasteel. Thousands of gun emplacements of all sizes cover every angle multiple times over. Even the earth is filled with extensive tunnels, traps, and defensive emplacements.
Trenches and other defensive earthworks cover a kilometre around the fortress with sea defences matching it on the other side.
The fortress, Dimpsy Rock, consumed two years of building material production and three of my manufacturing, not including the shipyard’s capacity.
On the horizon, over half my forces gather. Leman russ tanks, basilisk artillery, hydra anti-air, and over a hundred chimeras.
Hopefully, today’s display will discourage further trouble from the tau.
No fortress is unbeatable, but the cruiser grade void shield I copied from the Iron Crane does much to soothe my contingency mindset. A rogue trader would classify it as a castelan shield and, in contrast to the one on the Distant Sun, it’s like comparing a self-healing alloy to a ceramite plate.
I also gave the most important emplacements directional ion shields, the ones found on knights, too. Just in case.
Aruna has been pestering me for better void shields, along with the improved engines and light plasma macro cannons, but I can’t afford to refit the Distant Sun while it is our biggest deterrent.
As I look up at the sky, the bombardment begins. First, a smattering of range finders. These are live shells. The volley hits the shield and the oppressive explosions are absorbed by the shield like pebbles skipping on the sea.
The second volley is all light and volume. This time they’re training shells. Messages stream through my head as the command and control centre deep in the tower beneath my feet scrambles into action.
My total forces are minor on an imperial scale, with three thousand tech-priests, ten thousand heavy infantry and one thousand kataphrons. I also have eighty strike craft and twenty bombers. Seventy tanks, thirty artillery, forty anti-air, and ten missile launchers.
To move my infantry, I have two hundred chimeras that can transport about twenty-five percent of my infantry at any one time. I’ve begun the manufacture of ten crassus armoured transports: a larger, longer version of the chimera armoured personnel carrier with more guns and armour.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
I haven’t bothered with centaurs, a small, lightly armoured, tracked, utility vehicle. While convenient and a good way to free up more valuable chimeras, or atlas recovery tanks, centaurs are popular with the Death Corps of Krieg, which is colouring my impression of the vehicle: it’s not called the Death Corps for a laugh, or the casualties it inflicts on it’s enemies.
Crassus heavy APCs hold five squads, or sixty troopers and their equipment, rather than twelve. I can only lift them with the class three D-POTs with their quad-deck, variable height cargo hold.
From the top of the central tower, I have a good view of a class three D-POT sitting on the runway. It’s huge, at one hundred and twenty metres long, one hundred and fifty-six metres wide, and forty metres tall. It’s bigger than an imperial devourer drop ship, and can out lift a macro lander.
Unlike the class one and two, or the imperial macro landers, the class three D-POT can’t use VTOL when loaded.
It’s a reasonable compromise as at max capacity, the class three D-POT can hold seventy leman russ and nine thousand troops, or lift thirty-two thousand tonnes to orbit. If you’re keeping people in there for more than twelve hours, configuring for six thousand is more sensible.
They’re so big, that if you really wanted to, you could fit sixty warhound titans in one class three D-POT, probably more warhound titans than there are in the entire Koronus Expanse.
I can’t even fit a class three in the Distant Sun and have to station them in the shipyard.
I take a deep breath and grin. If I flex my pride any more, not even E-SIM’s life-support module will be able to keep my ego contained within my armoured skull.
Twenty percent of my forces are in the fortress, another twenty are spread over the planet, ready to react to the tau. The final sixty percent are advancing on the fortress. I’m not counting the one thousand kataphrons as they are a secret and don’t need training as they’re tracked as battle servitors, not people. I constructed them from death row criminals I purchased from the Gael Democracy.
Eternal twilight and great plumes of dust are no match for imperial auspex and the fortress commander, adept Diarmuid, orders return fire. Dummy shells fall upon the convoy as they advance at a breakneck, for armour, eighteen kilometres an hour.
The chimeras hiding behind the leman russ can manage three times that speed off road, but then they’d have no cover against the fortress's direct fire guns. I disagree with the approach as the only chance they have is to get under the void shield and they’re taking ‘casualties’ to indirect fire, which the leman russ can’t cover them from, the whole time they advance. Much better to get it done as fast as possible.
Normally you wouldn’t even approach Dimpsy Rock until you had pounded the shield to non-existence from orbit and then slagged all the defences with artillery, then, once the shield came back, you could walk under it with only rubble hugging infantry to oppose you.
Which is why, after scanning and repairing it, I reassembled the planetary cannon in my fortress.
Attempting to catch the fortress off guard with a direct assault is only done with overwhelming numbers and equipment I don’t have, or a bunch of infiltrators and a sinister plan.
The point of the exercise, however, is to practise advancing while under fire and returning fire while on the move, while directing an unsubtle middle finger at the tau.
Without warning, the void shield shuts down.
“Is that supposed to happen?” I mutter. From over the horizon, hugging the water like an ekranoplan, an ancient ground-effect craft, fly thousands of missiles.
“Holy shit!”
Fortunately the men and women out in the bay, who are not taking part in today's exercise, are paying attention. Missile defences trigger and hundreds of lasers crack the air and the missiles start exploding.
Much of the defensive fire, however, is lost to the waves. Great plumes of water and steam obscure the incoming fire. I engage my optics and examine the missiles. Rather than be hindered by the water, these missiles are dipping beneath the water, then resurfacing, to protect themselves.
I had thought my defensive fire was missing; it’s not, instead it's absorbed to the point where most of the missiles, with their fio’tak shells, can shrug off the lasers.
With great reluctance, I avoid taking over remotely, and let the people I’ve trained do their jobs. I feel like I’m watching a train crash in slow motion, especially as my implants speed up my perception.
Half a kilometre out, Aruna strikes. A lance descends from the sky, boiling the ocean and scouring the heat deflecting paint from the fortress walls.
Somehow I feel both sick and numb. I just know my first casualties will forever have come from friendly fire.
I can’t even criticise Aruna. What is a few dead men and women against hundreds? I reach out to the Distant Sun to find out what is happening, only to be hit with never ending static.
Curse those xenos! For a moment, I rage.
++Operator instability detected. Administering emotional suppressants and neural overdrive stimulants.++
Ice floods my veins and clarity returns, my humanity denied and incompetence forbidden.
The Omnissiah is ever watchful.
I’m not even allowed to cry.
Diarmuid contacts me on the local network. Only a transcript gets through.
“Magos. I have spoken with Greer and we have ended the exercise. We have lost vox with our orbitals and are switching to laser communications.”
“Give me a status on the void shield.”
“Please wait a minute, Magos, I am compiling reports.”
“Acknowledged.” I pace up and down as my mind flashed through millions of cameras and sensors. Piece by piece, I discover what happened. Diarmuid and his team are just as fast.
“Magos. Now we’re looking for it, we have discovered five stealth suits in the fortress. They were taken out by a pair of kataphron breachers. Unfortunately, the kataphron’s were rather indiscriminate with their fire, a side effect of trying to target stealthed units while undirected by a tech-priest.
“Their arc rifles are particularly effective against machinery and fried the back-up capacitors of the void shield along with the tau, so when the tau were discovered, they shot up the armoured coverings during their running battle, then chucked over-sized EMPs into the void shield generator.
“With the back-up damaged by the kataphrons, the EMP’s forced the shield to shut down to reconfigure. The engineers are aiding the process and estimate eighty three seconds until the shield is restored. It will require extensive repair, but thanks to the redundancy protocols you’ve enforced across all our hardware, we won’t have to shut down the void shield to do them, nor is its capacity diminished.”
“Well, at least something worked,” I mumble. “Thank you for the report, Diarmuid. Carry on.”
“Yes, Magos.”
A mechanical cat appears in my vision, stalking along the walls like a spider as it saunters after an oblivious blue mouse.
“Hello, Aruna. I thought communications were still blocked.”
“Greetings, Magos. Aruna obscures the senses of all lesser machines. It is not hindered by its own cunning.”
I nod, “Thank you for the assist with the missiles.”
“Your appreciation is logged.”
“You wouldn’t fry every vox on the planet for nothing,” I point at the mouse swinging from its tail in Aruna’s paw. “What did the tau do this time?”
“That will have to wait, Magos.”
Dimpsy Rock’s auspex reports five, one-hundred and sixty metre surfacing submersibles twenty kilometres off the coast. From over the horizon, the tau launch thirty shells from their rail guns.
“Damn. How do they keep sneaking up on us?”
I can see the rounds adjusting their target in real time and they’re all aiming for the top of the central tower where I’m standing.
“Ah, smart munitions.”
There’s no chance of me surviving that many hits.
I jump.