“Good morning, everyone,” I say.
“Good morning, Magos,” say my twelve students, slightly out of sync.
The students sit on plasteel chairs in a circle, their datapads on their laps. Candles and incense burn in a small, recessed shrine on the left wall and Mechanicus chants play in the background at a barely audible volume.
“Fenella can start today and we’ll go clockwise, that means you’re next, Diarmuid.”
A young man with short blond hair and slim muscles nods rapidly.
“OK, Fenella. What’s been troubling you this week?”
A thin, middle aged woman with long, curly hair frowns and closes her eyes.
After a minute, I say. “You can ask anything. Ask, even if you think its a dumb question. If you prefer, just voice your concerns.”
The woman smiles slightly, “You always say that, Magos.”
Getting a tutorial group going always feels like pulling teeth, but I am getting better at guiding the conversation.
I lean back, “Then I’ll ask you a question instead. What was the focus of your studies this week?”
“Everything! There is just so much to learn. It is overwhelming and hard to memorise so much data. New concepts, new ways of thinking. Even after four months, it is hard. Every time I begin a new class, it has new terms, terms I have to stop and look up, which leads me on a never ending torrent of knowledge. By the time I return to the class, I’ve lost track of what I was trying to achieve.”
“Do you all feel this way?”
Diarmuid raised his scarred hand and I nod to him.
“Could we have a project, a device we could learn to make together? These sciences are fascinating, but somewhat arbitrary. Being able to hold our progress in our hands would really help.”
“We can do that, sure. What did you have in mind?”
With that, the discussion is in full swing. The men decide they want to make an induction forge and the women want to make precision measuring tools.
“Those are both great ideas. I’m willing to let you skip a few steps and provide power and ore, but that’s it. I’m even going to disable the design tools and calculators on your dataslates, so you will have to do everything by hand, with paper and pencil. You will be able to look up information freely. Quade, outline the steps you think need to happen to complete an induction forge.”
A thirty-three year old, balding man scratches his nose and purses his lips, “We’re going to need a work space,” he glances at Fenella and Greer, a woman in her twenties with bony cheeks. “A bunch of precision measuring tools, oh this is already making my head spin. How do you make a proper divided ruler or compass without a laser to measure it?”
I grin, “That’s what you’re here to learn.”
“Yeah, which is why I’m asking,” Quade smirks.
“You can use a light source and a block of wood with a straight slit in it. That will give you the line you need to cut a ruler. To get a divided ruler, you mark consecutive dissections using a compass. So long as you can create a repeatable distance, it will give you your base unit.
“It doesn’t have to be exactly a centimetre to begin with, just one unit of distance. You can always convert the measurements later once you can use your tools to make better tools, neither do you have to work in centimetres to make an induction forge. You should also look into how perfectly flat surfaces are made.” E-SIM alerts me to the time. “It’s the end of class. Bring me your prototypes next week. The winning team will be allowed to accelerate their learning with the teaching engine.”
“Yes, Magos,” say my students. They pick up their data slates and exit.
Diarmuid’s idea was excellent, so I message all my students to come up with a project for their study group. I order them not to coordinate groups to encourage each group to discover their own solutions to similar problems, rather than copy each other’s work.
I expect that, like all tech-priests, they’ll be stealing from each other within the hour.
While my students run their experiments, I return to the Distant Sun and enter my private lab, a grand room with arched ceilings, stained glass windows, and fine cast, relief covered pillars.
Brian dutifully chirps his greeting and his fellow servo-skulls swarm me, all of them slamming me with a barrage of data containing their contempt towards their current task: breeding rabbits.
Blinking fabricators and flashing mechadendrites line the room, running multiple, automated experiments related to Marwolv’s biosphere.
I wave away the servo-skulls’ complaints and stride towards the vivarium, a one thousand cubic metre glass tank containing ten connecting layers of native habitat for Marwolv rabbits.
The creatures breed just as fast as their terran cousins and I finally have enough of the furry buggers to begin destructive testing. A hatch opens and Brian floats into the vivarium and tempts a black haired lagomorph to the exit with dried fruit. Within three minutes, the rabbit is asleep, the drugged food making it easy for me to snake a mechadendrite into the vivarium and snatch the black bunny.
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I pull it into my arms and pet it, the sensors in my power armour providing better feedback than my own skin.
The rabbit, I’ll call him Paul, has coarse hair and thick skin, similar to a boar. Both are laced with metallic compounds. Paul sleeps hot, at forty degrees celsius. Compared to the other rabbits, this is on the low end for his species.
I place Paul in a testing chamber and run the programmed sequence. Tools descend upon the bunny taking samples and striking it, simulating different types of damage.
The taser is shrugged off, not even burning the fur. A spring loaded spike, simulating a stubber round, fires and flattens against Paul’s skull, though the concussive damage would have stunned the rabbit if it was awake. The lasgun does not fare any better, its heat is dispersed by the fur and hide, and what little breaks through fails to melt the skull, though the bone does blister.
After the plasma gun, I retrieve a new rabbit, and immortalise him as Pompeii. Pompeii does not not survive the hell gun, but he isn’t vaporised like Paul was and I test a bolter round against him, then I order Brian to clean the testing chamber.
Rabbit three, Shampoo, gets an equally messy death and is anesthetised and vivisected. A sulking Brian floats over to the pieces and prods at them, only to shoot back and start chattering at me. Shampoo has an unnatural arrangement of hair follicles in its tail, that translate into a QR detailing a specific string of DNA.
Stuffing a sample into a sequencer, I stare at the small white box. A tiny rat-class machine spirit dances atop the sequencer like a drugged out ork shaman. The rat’s eyes light up and beams of white light shoot into the air then it disappears in a puff of smoke and E-SIM brings up a message in my vision.
++Thank you for choosing Wild Hunt EugenicsTM. We hope you are satisfied with our Sporting ChanceTM line of adaptive lagomorphs. For further details on how to manage your game reserve, please decode the following sequences: 5’3’...++
“That answers so many questions.”
++Hypothesis: Marwolv was a game reserve, populated with hardened terrestrial wildlife for the purpose of entertainment, during the Age of Expansion. With technology kept to a minimum for an ‘authentic’ experience, Marwolv lost its technology during the Age of Strife until it was rediscovered during an undocumented expedition to the Koronus Expanse, only to be lost again in the millennia that followed.++
“We’ll have to get more samples and check the inhabitants too. There’s likely a bounty of genetic information available if the whole environment is completely artificial. What can you tell me about the rabbits.”
++The information available within the DNA has degraded significantly. Sufficient samples may allow a recompiling of data. So far, all I can tell you is that the properties of the bimetallic alloy present in the hair, skin, and bones changes depending on the diet of the rabbit. They are highly resistant to heavy metal poisoning and their teeth and claws possess some unusual structures that allow them to dig and consume ore.
++There is a small variation in the trauma resistance between the three deceased samples that might back up the variable resistance claim. More data is required. The alloy is roughly analogous to a mix of plasteel and ceramite, though much lighter and with a lower melting point, but with better heat dispersal. So long as the threshold is not breached, the alloy will quickly return to ambient temperature.++
“Are you telling me these rabbits are better armoured than an imperial guardsman.”
++I am.++
“No wonder the Mechanicus try to only deal with data. I just can’t order my emotions enough to express the myriad feelings I have about that.”
++Emotional state logged.++
“Of course it is,” I sigh. “I’ll have the sample collection efforts stepped up. For now, bring up the submarine options from the ‘Cargo Container’ STC. I want to see what the tau are really up to; I bet some bright spark slipped a narco-sub into the database.”
++There are thirteen different designs with seventy-two variants for the term ‘narco-sub’.++
I rub my hands together, “Excellent.”
The tau have excellent sensors and I am uncertain any stealth field I might wield is good enough to hide from them, neither is it something I can test without stealing their equipment.
Instead, I choose an organic submersible. While imperial vox tech is excellent, remote piloting an animal servitor nine hundred metres under water isn’t going to work without relays and each additional device or signal is another chance for the tau to detect me, so I need to go myself. Going inside a meat puppet is grim, but having a right whale, the most populous whale on Marwolv, floating around their base isn’t going to raise much suspicion.
Two months later, I enter a submarine dock beneath my trading post and approach a sixteen metre, grey-skinned whale floating in the water, then crawl inside its mouth and down the hatch to its stomach. Reclining in the fleshy pilot seat is like lying against a gel filled bean bag. I turn down my armour’s touch simulation to minimum.
Mechadendrites slither from the chair and plug into my helmet. I trigger the start-up sequence and weight falls away from me as I become the giant mammal. Over the next twenty minutes, I adjust to the sensation, gently moving my altered limbs and practising with shallow dives and other manoeuvres.
Once I am comfortable, I trigger the underwater hatch, wait a minute, then dive and swim into the ocean. Training continues for another two hours then I set off towards the tau vessel.
The whale servitor has a week of operational time, all of which can be under water, but I mimic it’s natural behaviour, cruising at a sedate nine kilometres per hour and staying near the surface, breach frequently, and slap my tail.
A grin spreads across my face and I do not notice the hours pass as I meander to my destination.
During my final dive I receive an alert and groan, filling the water with a gentle wail. I should have chosen a sperm whale, as a normal right whale maxes out at one hundred and eighty-four metres and I need to dive nine hundred. The servitor will be fine at that depth, but if the tau have been studying the wildlife, they might notice the discrepancy.
Unwilling to back out and spend months growing an even bigger servitor, I continue down. There is no light to see and the servitors passive auspex and other sensors are pumped into my implants and compiled into video feed to imitate my natural vision.
Ninety minutes later, I detect tiny lights in the distance and an increasing amount of EM activity. All their communication is encrypted, so I record everything and swim on.
At last, their sunken base is revealed. Where I expected to find a patched, hammerhead shaped hull under a kilometre in length, instead I discover fourteen circular domes attached to a central tube, with seven domes either side.
Dozens of craft trundle across the seabed, attached to guiding monorails, that drag them above the ocean floor and out into the silted gloom.
I am unsurprised Envoy Lynu has been lying and it is clear the tau never expected to return home. I can’t fault them for making the smart choice but that still leaves me with a mystery.
Why are they kidnapping people and what social experiment are they trying to run with psykers?