After finishing my discussion with Aileen I return to my primary shipyard, a hollowed out asteroid Erudition’s Howl dragged into orbit, and meet with each major fabricator to answer their questions and aid their studies. Lower ranked members receive calls on their datapads, or through their implants, fielded by my multiple thought-streams.

Sadako is settled and configured, its thousand glass and wire cranes follow me about the half constructed halls of the Iron Crane, constantly pestering me with questions, mostly about private interactions it has observed between the crew.

The machine-spirit is rather excitable and impatient, eager to assist wherever it can and often gets in the way of people doing their jobs, retasking servitors to do things it believes are more important and disrupting the schedule.

Eventually, I task a thought-stream to be in constant contact with it, going over each of its decisions in real time to help it make better choices. It is exceptionally powerful, and if it wasn’t for my advanced E-WAR systems, I suspect Sadako could pilot my body like a meat puppet through my implants. Not out of malicious intent, but sheer curiosity.

Fortunately no one else has sufficient cybernetics to be vulnerable to such intrusions and I spool up my research module and link it to my E-WAR suite to go over each of imperial cybernetics for subversion vulnerabilities while examining different scenarios with Sadako so it has a better understanding of personal boundaries and how to use its own hardware.

Technically, Sadako is an original Federation data guardian, the predecessors to machine-spirits from before the AI war that turned Terra into a desert and brought mankind close to extinction.

Much like E-SIM, it has all the sensible restrictions that I can think of and even more that I did not, so I have absolutely no idea how or why the men of iron rebelled if they were in any way similar to Sadako.

I had hoped that by using the data guardian intended as the vessel’s controlling intelligence it would mean it was less eccentric as it’s the right machine-spirit for the hardware, which is rarely the case with more advanced imperial hardware. My small sample suggests it is more a matter of cogitator capacity, as Aruna and Lord Beryllium are equally odd and if I, say, took one of the taciturn data guardians from a D-POT my results might be just as mixed. It isn’t something I care to test though.

I return to my own projects and a year passes. As I tinker with a captured pulse rifle in my quarters aboard the Distant Sun, I consider the fleets progress.

Sadako learns quickly and no longer requires my constant supervision, giving me the time I need to work on my infantry’s equipment as well as work on my personal combat skills.

The simulators have proved incredibly helpful and massively accelerated training for myself and others. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter how skilled my forces are if we can’t find the tau.

The tau have stripped and abandoned their underwater city. They continue to conduct terror attacks and rituals on Marwolv’s population. While we intercept a third of them, it hasn’t been enough and the warp is becoming increasingly violent, pushing our time table up as we need to get out of the system before a warp storm traps us for Emperor knows how many decades or centuries.

Fortunately I have filled out my crew for the Distant Sun, all twenty-eight thousand of them, supplemented by forty-two thousand servitors. This is a little higher than the original crew complement of twenty-five thousand humans and thirty-five thousand servitors.

I need the extra labour as the Distant Sun functions as a training ship and as a hub for all my activity on Marwolv.

All of my human crew have received at least two years of accelerated learning, via implants, sims, teaching engines and personalised learning using machine-spirits. I would liken each crew member to having at least a masters degree in one science alongside practical training for at least two different crew roles.

They aren’t tech-priests, nor are they traditional voidsmen, which is why I often refer to them as tech-adepts, tech-priests who are still undergoing structured learning, but have enough skills and knowledge to perform well at their given role.

Out of those twenty-five thousand crew, roughly eight thousand count as full tech-priests, individuals who have passed a doctorate equivalent in one subject and have specialised as enginseers, artisans, logis, and other recognisable imperial roles to further their learning.

I don’t actually expect all of my crew to become tech-priests, as that level of dedication requires exceptional drive and interest. Most will likely remain as tech-adepts, my own brand of elite voidsmen, perhaps picking up necessary knowledge and earning their tech-priest qualifications on the job over a much longer period of time, say twenty years or so.

My moth class ships, of which I now have four, are fully crewed at four thousand humans and six thousand servitors. Erudition’s Howl is at a two thirds complement with ten thousand crew, of which six thousand are servitors.

The Iron Crane, however, is lacking. Not only does it require one-hundred and twenty thousand crew to handle the vessel, the significant manufacturing core, even with the highly automated micro-factories, needs another eighty thousand bodies for the roster, putting it at double the crew requirement of an imperial void ship of the same mass.

Stolen novel; please report.

The asteroid shipyard has the crew for the Iron Crane’s internal shipyard and most of them will be transferring when it finishes, though some intend to remain on Marwolv. Like all my other ships, I will substitute sixty percent of the Iron Crane’s crew for servitors.

My servitors have come a long way in the twenty odd years I’ve been developing them and there is little point in having a tech-adept perform menial labour. Why would I stop now?

I refuse to enslave people or use drudges, the lowest class of the mechanicus, as perpetuating misery is not only morally questionable, it introduces disruptive elements and inspires sub-standard work. Yes, the servitors are more expensive than low level labour, but they do a good job when properly supervised, minimise injuries for more highly trained personnel, and don’t damage vital machinery after one too many beatings.

While I have all the servitors I need for the Iron Crane, I am missing ninety thousand for the human crew. It wouldn’t be a problem, if I thought there was another seven years to finish the ship, but I don’t think we’re going to make it before the tau trap us here, so we’re focusing on finishing out the engines, getting the internal shipyard functional, and stockpiling all the resources we need to finish in case we have to flee.

I finish my modifications to the pulse rifle, as well as an unmodified one, and bring the two guns with me to the thunderhawk. An hour later I finally convince Mr Cygnus to let me take the xeno tech aboard its blessed hull and we go for a short flight after which I depressurise the hold and expel four shielded target drones into space.

Standing on the open ramp, I use my servo-harness and the mag-lock on my power armour’s boots to secure myself to the Thunderhawk in case Mr Cygnus acts up again.

The drones spread out evenly, the first at two hundred metres and the last at eight hundred. Gripping the unmodified pulse rifle in my hand, I shoulder the rifle and trigger the digital safety using my E-WAR suite, then squeeze the trigger.

A single, blue-white sphere is ejected from the front of the rifle and slams into the drone at two hundred metres, the maximum practical range of an unscoped, standard lasgun for an unaugmented human.

The second shot hits the four hundred metre mark without trouble, matching a scoped lasgun in the hands of a marksman, though the difference in power is significant as a lasgun won’t get a kill shot against light armour with a single hit if it hits one of the armour plates, where as a pulse rifle always penetrates.

My fourth shot hammers the six hundred metre drone, as my third one missed. The plasma also lost some cohesion. I fire another eight shots and if it wasn’t for my power armour I would have missed a couple more as the recoil is a significant challenge at this range. I calculate an average loss of five percent at this range.

I know from my other tests that a standard las gun, in atmosphere, is ineffective at this range, though it can still kill unarmoured targets.

Eight hundred metres sees a fifteen percent drop for the pulse rifle and I missed two of ten shots. It’s still enough to penetrate light armour, like hyperweave, flak and armourplas.

At any range, the MOA carapace armour should take one hit before it fails, two, if the armour has a chance to cool.

I knew tau technology was good, but it seems my initial comparisons for the Marwolv pattern lasgun were completely off as I was only able to boost the lasgun range to six-hundred metres for the mark one, though there is no recoil like the pulse rifle and the mark one does get killshots on light armour at six hundred metres like the pulse rifle, just not at eight hundred. Nor, as later tests confirmed, is it quite as good against fio’tak as I thought it was, taking three shots in quick succession, rather than two.

Wondering how I messed up so badly, I sit on the edge of the ramp and look at the blue gas giant for a few minutes going through my previous thoughts and I realise I had been using the warhammer rule books as my guide on weapon ranges and power, assuming a specific number of inches, or the roll of a die on a tabletop was equivalent to metres and kills in my reality.

Feeling like a bit of a twit, I resume my testing. The unmodified pulse rifle hits maximum effective range at approximately fifteen hundred metres though its accuracy sharply decreases beyond eight hundred metres.

My self modified pulse rifle manages a spectacular five kilometres, but burns out after thirty shots and I missed seventy percent of them. A longshot pulse rifle is likely less self destructive and significantly more accurate, but it gives me a good idea of what pulse technology can achieve for infantry scale weapons.

The pulse rifle has half the rate of fire as a standard lasgun at one hundred and twenty rounds per minute and a magazine good for thirty-six shots, rather than the sixty you get from a lasgun. It is longer and heavier too, the ferrous slugs pushing the pulse rifle to four point nine kilos, compared to the lighter, shorter lasgun at two point three kilos. There is no plug for a bayonet on a pulse rifle.

Having properly performed a light test of the tau’s main infantry weapon, I am beginning to see why the Imperium is a little dismissive of the weapon as while it has significant power and accuracy, it isn’t ideal for assaults, a hindrance in close combat, and requires a more complex logistics train placing it squarely in opposition to the imperial guard’s primary requirements.

A part of me wants to hiss in outrage. One should always pursue better tech and I intend to do so, but I need to rethink what I actually need for my Marwolv pattern lasgun to actually achieve, then integrate it into my forces holistically, rather than give them an awesome, out of context gun.

I recover the drones and fly the thunderhawk back to the Distant Sun, belatedly realising if I’d taken a D-POT I wouldn’t have had to spend so long arguing regulations with Mr Cygnus and his amusing mix of honks, interpretive dance, and highlighted text passages he uses to communicate.

On the other hand, he also gets pissy if the captain of the vessel uses any other aircraft than him to get around, so I’d probably lose either way, just the sort of situation the space marines like to apply to their enemies now that I think about it.

Feeling like I’ve solved at least one puzzle for the day, I relax in my seat, put on some music and enjoy the flight.

My vox chimes in my ear and I answer the call.

“Hi, Quaani. What’s up?”

There’s a short sniffle on the other end.

“Quaani?”

“Aldrich. I think. I think I’m really sick.”