Feeling morose, I spend the evening in one of the medicae deck’s meditation chambers, considering all the resources I can use to track the tau.

It feels pleasant to have air against my skin for the first time in many weeks. Sitting on a rock in the centre of a stone garden in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt almost makes me feel like I’m back on Earth.

I need better sensors and more patrols.

More patrols are possible, but will reduce my resource collection rates. So long as I can stop the tau, that won’t be a problem, but if I need to bail from Marwolv, I will regret it. Establishing logistics chains and locating the correct mining locations is a time and luck intensive endeavour. I could spend a whole decade in another system and not find what I need to finish the Iron Crane if I bail too soon.

As for better sensors, E-SIM only has handheld gear available and I can’t afford it as a handful of sensors would be as pricey as navigator conversion, and the STC for the sensors requires an unknown resource.

There's also an entire company’s worth of gene-locked space marine gear, most of it fourth generation, as well as the encrypted manufacturing grade STC for some space marine and solar auxilia equipment.

The STC needs a captain’s badge and a gene seed sample to unlock. My advanced E-WAR suite couldn’t do it as I can’t bypass the gene-lock without dismantling the data pad, a dangerous task for a ruggedized device as I don’t know if the internals are full of glue or not, it distorts scans, and I can’t bypass the encryption with the gene-lock in place.

The Marwolv conclave must have had some way of accessing it, but I’ve never found the key in any of their data.

None of the vehicles are gene-locked, just all the hand held, pocketable items, weapons, and power armour.

I feel there are still a few holes in my logic. What is it that I am missing?

Well, I could use some of the vehicles. There are two more thunder hawks, six rhino APCs, jetbikes, two land speeders, four predator tanks, two hunter anti-air tanks, and a damocles command rhino. There’s other support vehicles and weapons platforms, but these aren’t relevant to my search for concealed tau.

Marwolv is big and the system is huge, but if I could use my current equipment to narrow down possible bases, then use the space marine vehicles to get an exact position, I might have a chance at finding the buggers.

I lean forward, rest my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands. While taking slow breaths, I close my eyes.

I’m still missing something.

Oh! The equipment can only be activated with a gene sample from a living space marine, but the STC requires a gene seed sample, which can come from a living or dead space marine, of which I have five.

If I take a drop of gene seed from sergeant Odhran, or one of his brothers, would that be enough to breach the encryption?

Should I destroy the body I take the sample from to hide my theft?

No, I should be OK, and Odhran was shredded. I can always claim the damage was done by the eldar.

I exit the meditation chamber and return to my quarters for my equipment, then go to the catacomb-like morgue beneath the auto-temple to gather my sample. The task isn’t too grizzly as I did my best to restore the space marines’ bodies before I interred them and my needle is sharp enough for frozen flesh.

With the sample safely stowed, I wipe the records of my visit and return to my quarters. I hunt down an adamantine safe and remove the datapad, slotting the tiny sample vial into the custom scanner built into the side of the pad.

I turn the pad on and pass the first step of the authentication. E-SIM connects and, after two hours of tense prayer to the Omnissiah, breaches the pad.

++Access acquired. Because of the hack, the data is read only and cannot be copied to another device. You’ll have to manually copy the designs from the screen and re-write all the firmware and operating systems.++

“Could be worse.”

++Additionally, the pad can no longer be charged and is emitting a scrambling field obstructing pict recorders. You have approximately two weeks, three hours, and fifty eight minutes before the datapad becomes inaccessible. ++

“Can it be done?” I take my helmet off.

++Don’t move, and don’t blink. I will flash through all the information as fast as I can.++

The pad immediately begins shredding through images and I notice that after each image, the data gets erased.

“Holy shit. E-SIM, hold up. Let me get comfortable, then lock my body. My eyes have a really high resolution and frame rate, so set the screen into four parts and have them scroll across the screen so I can see each image four times before it gets erased.

“I’ll stop the research module from tweaking the Marwolv lasgun and have it collate the information as we view it, that way it will get stored in two different ways. Oh, and stream all the data from my eyes to Aruna as well. We can’t afford to miss a single frame.”

++Your eyes have a higher refresh rate than the screen, so you should get twenty copies of each image if we do it like that.++

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“That’s even better.” I detach my servo harness and sink into a remarkably comfortable chair. The pad is fixed to a flexible arm and brought right up to my face, increasing the relative size of the images.

++Very well, it’s not like you lack storage up there.++

“You’re picking up Mr Cygnus’s conversation habits; are you praising your data capacity and modifications or insulting my lack of knowledge?”

++I hope you enjoy your sudden vacation, Aldrich.++

“That’s enough banter. Let’s work.”

“Acknowledged.”

Sitting like a rigid statue is an exceptionally unpleasant task, that, at the relative speed I have to think at to keep up, turning each second into two hundred seconds, turns fourteen days into seven point six seven years. I have four thought streams that focus on the data, allowing me to error check my own memory, while the other six help keep me sane as they don’t have to run at such a high speed, letting me interact with E-SIM and the crew through the noosphere.

Normally I don’t have to keep my primary consciousness working at this speed, but as I need to read data through my eyes, rather than through digital sources, I don’t have any other way to do it.

I usually use the other thought streams at a fairly blistering pace, but only for brief bursts, otherwise they get stressed too.

This is the first time I’ve really put my implants through their paces. I do, at least, get plenty of time to study, advancing my knowledge of imperial wargear and other technologies as well as prototyping the firmware for the STC’s I’m copying. The original code is gradually deleting itself and I can’t view it. Fortunately the required maths are in the STC images, not just the firmware and software packages.

An idle moment leads me to calculate that if I’d run at full pace for the last twenty years, it would have been the equivalent of four millenia. I’d be as mad as the Emperor, no doubt, had I chosen to do so, nor would I have been able to apply the knowledge I could have gained in that time any faster than I already do.

For a moment, I wonder if this makes me OP, then I remember that until you can blow off a segmentum fleet with a backhanded slap you’re just small fry.

I sure as shit aint doing it with my mouth.

With my personal hell finally over, I requisition the navigator spire’s spa and a large feast for a few hours, then sit near a tree in the xeno arboretum, gradually recovering my sense of time.

At least I have all the data and the research module isn’t having any trouble turning it back into elegant flow diagrams and interactive blueprints. Configuring the designs for the micro-factories will take some time and I delegate the task to Enginseer Paorach who has become deft at such tasks.

I hope that, within three months, we can get the first prototypes out and trial the new firmware and software for the new citadel class auger arrays, scanning spires suitable for global overwatch that, with enough spires and cogitators, are sensitive enough to model air and gravity displaced by hidden objects as small as a fly, or the psychic emanations of an active mind.

Individually they are far less impressive, reducing their resource cost and manufacturing time. While this has its benefits, setting up and staffing a full network isn’t what I have in mind.

Instead, I intend to create a sparse network, tuned to pick up the grav drives the tau use to propel their stealthed vehicles. Fewer spires should also allow for faster iteration and roll out of updated firmware and software and reduce the amount of people who require retraining with each iteration.

Feeling a little more balanced, I invite Thorfinn to my private table for lunch and update him on what I’ve been up to and what additional assistance he can expect to expand his vigilance and when it will come online.

The captain’s table is a modest, private dining room with its own kitchen and storage. I redecorated the two hundred and fifty cubic metre room to mimic a viking feasting hall set in a boreal forest using Marwolv’s metallic timber and vid-screens for the shuttered windows at a high enough resolution to trick my enhanced eyes. I even have a few skulls from Marwolv’s engineered fauna hanging from the walls. Speakers and a personalised environmental sustainer complete the atmosphere.

No chance of mead though, moths are the primary pollinators on Marwolv, there are no bees.

After several minutes of chewing and scraping, Thorfinn puts down his cutlery, “Thanks for inviting me over, Aldrich. You always have the best food.”

“Well, I have so few meals, I really have to make them count.”

“You could eat more though, if you want though, right?”

“Yes, but it feels terribly wasteful, almost like throwing food away. I wasn’t always wealthy and consuming resources because I can, rather than because I need to makes me panic a little, taking away from the enjoyment of a good meal. Makes it kinda pointless, you know?”

“Yeah, I hear you. How are you recovering from your accelerated time ordeal?” Thorfinn frowns, “Still getting my head around it, personally. I understood your explanation but knowledge and understanding are different words for a reason, eh?”

I run my hand down my face and sigh, “Honestly, not great. I wasn’t completely isolated and could talk to people in the simulations just fine, or send messages. It was staring at the datapad for so long that was the rough bit. Performing the same task continuously for eight hours is enough of a challenge for me. Forcing myself to do so for over seven and a half years was straight up torture.”

“Shit, I’m sorry you had to go through all that. Was it worth it?”

“For the immediate future, absolutely not. In the long term, it had better be. As for if it will pay off soon enough to deal with the tau, it is promising, but that’s just a theory.”

“Aldrich?”

“Yes?”

“I have a plan.”

“Well you are my Master-at-Arms. I should hope so!”

“Not about the tau. I know you’re desperate since Quaani went on ice right before your” Thorfin pauses and hums, “labour of time, but it's all going to go to shit right now as between the two events, your driving everyone into a frenzy looking for ghosts on the sensors and dud deployments.

“It doesn’t matter how many times I explain to my officers the why of it, the guardsmen, who you really need to assign a proper name to by the way, are starting to lose confidence in command with all the false leads we’ve been chasing down since the tau scattered.”

I wince, then nod, “I’ll need a qualification about the name thing, but go on.”

“So I was thinking we need to do something to reunify everyone that’s more interesting than the Sanguinala military parade we’ve done the last two years. Yes, it is awe inspiring and promotes the ‘constant vigilance and unity’ culture we’ve been exhorting throughout the growing fleet and ground forces, but it soaks up a lot of resources and there’s no way for people to show off their personal skills at the moment, or do something beyond burn their bytes on booze, festival food, and religious trinkets.

“I want to arrange an event that requires teams to compete in something silly that’s also related to the challenge we face with tracking the tau so that our guardsmen and tech adepts don’t just know about the difficulties each respective role is facing, but have a chance to experience them too.”

“What do you have in mind?”