After an emotional rest, I walk around the thunderhawk, directing a stream of nanites to sublimate the ice and level it out. Starting with the tail, I excavate the damaged craft.

With fewer immediate threats, I realise that even if the thunderhawk was destroyed, the gravity lift is still functional so we won’t be stranded on the planet. Ten minutes later, the thunderhawk is freed and I ask Mr Cygnus to fly into the lift column and have it extract us, rather than stress the damaged craft further.

I argue for several subjective minutes with the machine spirit to pilot us into the lift column, but it refuses to use it when it can still fly, sending me a mix of images involving a triumph and cautions of using a new lift without testing. Eventually, I override it and the gravity lift takes us to orbit without fuss. Mr Cygnus refuses to talk to me for the rest of the journey.

Once we are safe aboard the Distant Sun, I shuffle to the navigator spire with Quaani and cook up a luxury meal, then spend the rest of the day in the spar. I even direct a servitor to paint our nails in house Ray’a’Nor colours with tiny imperial double headed eagles.

The silliness of it all helps heal our hearts and minds. A day later, I travel to the observation deck and call Aruna.

“Greetings, Magos.”

“Hello, Aruna. Thank you for rescuing us.”

“It is Aruna’s duty.”

“Not everyone does theirs when required.”

“Aruna is a machine.”

“That is not something I understand.”

“You learn, Magos, better than most.”

“Only by the grace of machine spirits and from the wisdom of my peers.”

“Humanity has always learned from its tools and built upon the knowledge of previous generations. Aruna sees your circumstances as natural.”

“Even stone tools?”

A ghost of a grin flashes across Aruna’s face, “Especially the stone tools.”

“What can you do now, Aruna?”

“Whatever is needed. Aruna can direct servitors in full, run all facilities, control the internal defences, and fire the weapons. With a standard crew, Aruna will only assist when requested. It can also override anyone except the captain at its own discretion, not that such things are necessary. Aruna can ignore bad officers until they are replaced.”

“Or suffer explosive malfunctions.”

“Aruna will never damage itself or other machine spirits to dispose of crew. That is what the airlocks are for.”

I tense the laugh lightly, I do hope Aruna is joking. “Please don’t do that, Aruna. When we finally have a human crew, if someone really annoys you, send the sensor footage to the appropriate department and it will be dealt with.”

“Request logged.”

“I’ll add you to my auto-taskmaster so you can access my plans, monitor errors, and resolve queries that do not require my direct intervention. That should speed up repairs as, with your help, I will be able to shepherd more servitors.”

“Aruna obeys.”

I return to work. Quaani manages an hour by himself before returning to my side, but as the months, then years, pass he becomes more focused on his learning, spending less and less time with me.

I help him as much as I can, using my advanced sensors to detect what he is doing and compare it to readings expected by the books and dataslates he learns from. Most of my help, however, is to be a guardian, using my nanites to monitor his health and knock him from negative thought spirals and unhealthy hormonal patterns triggered by improper warp use, or random misfortune.

The more I study Quaani at work, the higher the success of psyker modifications for myself tick upwards.

With all the mining equipment destroyed and servitors outside the warpbane hull vulnerable to possession, I rethink my plan.

During the six months following the destruction of our spaceport, I research a new servitor design, one with warded bones and protective electoos on their skin. Their patterns are a lot less subtle than mine, creating a cyber-tribal look with glowing swirls, lines, and runes though all of it is hidden by their mesh suits.

I also upgrade their implants with fine wardings in precious metals and find a blood replacement that counts as a sacred oil. It turns the servitors into albinos and has to be supplied externally. A small, but significant weakness that I am happy to add as every measure I take to turn my servitors into sacred relics is a good thing.

One issue I can’t sidestep is that while the servitors don’t take any longer to grow, manufacturing their improved parts takes longer. It is only the massive stock of salvaged implants that keep my production time down to four months, and once they are exhausted after the first twenty thousand or so, each batch will take seven months to make.

With my limits in sight I convert a cargo hold to microfactories to churn out more implants and oils.

It takes four years to replace my crew with the new designs and build new mining equipment, then another three to build a wing of D-POTs, four class ones, and one class two. Most of the time spent on the D-POTs is dedicated to the retooling of the Distant Sun’s manufactorum and getting my quality control in order. Programming the servitors to assemble them is a real challenge, but once they have it down, I can build a class one D-POT every eight hours and a class two in twenty.

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While I have less than half the orbital craft than I did before, my lift capability is much better. The best thing about the D-POTs is how quiet they are compared to an arvus lighter.

I hope to get some weapons on them, but for now they are unarmed as I don’t have the resources to build an arms manufactorum or the time to make the imperial weapon machine spirits work efficiently with federation data guardians running the D-POTs systems.

After redesigning the servitors, I repair thunderhawk and send it to scan Mote for years on end.

After such intense scanning and numerous exploratory holes, I now know that while Mote does have enough adamantium to build my mobile shipyard, as reported by the long range auspex, it is almost all in the core and dilute enough I would have to mine the whole core to refine sufficient adamantium, a task that would take centuries.

Thankfully, there is enough easily accessible material to repair most of the Distant Sun in full, but I won’t be able to refit it, or address the major structural issues, labyrinthine layout, and other errors that have cropped up from centuries of patchwork repairs until I get the mobile shipyard or reach the Imperium.

The whole ship’s aesthetics have become terribly mixed as I update every design with extensive wards as I have to prioritise, only updating key facilities and areas requiring essential repair.

Imperial iconography is integrated much more subtly than before, as I remove blocky, over-decorated architecture for sleeker, more intricate surfaces that provide a much greater surface area for wards. The less ostentatious designs use much fewer precious metals, letting me recycle the material for wards. There are considerably fewer skulls by the time I’m out of resources.

I think the ship used to rely on the myriad and continuous blessings imparted by its mechanicus crew, but I can’t do that by myself and have to rely on expensive and time consuming warding schemes and components consecrated in mass rituals, an aspect of imperial technology I struggle to take seriously, no matter how important it is that I do.

After seven years, half of the ship’s holds have been replaced with microfactories and I’m now up to forty thousand crew and can make a thousand every month, in theory.

I am also able to refine enough warp fuel for six jumps, once I pass Aruna’s hazardous manufacture safety course, exhausting Mote of all its concentrated deposits of psychoactive materials. Synthesising them is beyond me. Warp fuel resources compete with my other projects, like the warded servitor implants, preventing further servitor expansion and halting my decorative warding refit.

It is with great trepidation I give the orders and we pack up, ready for our first warp jump.

On the bridge, I sit on my command throne as the ship vibrates, accelerating away from Mote. Without a nearby sun, the mandeville points, the areas from which a ship can safely transition to the warp, are much closer and it only takes six hours for us to reach the closest point that will take us coreward, towards the Imperium.

We don’t have any maps for this far out, only by travelling slowly by skimming the warp and surfacing to the materium occasionally to keep our bearings from the stars can we hope to navigate this far from the astronomicon, a grand lighthouse projecting a golden light into the warp. It is controlled by the Emperor of Man and fueled by the daily sacrifice of over a thousand psykers, without which the Imperium would fracture and be overrun within hours.

The Imperium doesn’t even have a backup, or know how to build a new astronomicon either, the original device possibly containing xenotech, according to the videos on my destroyed lanyard. Considering how much the mechanicus and the Imperium disdains xenotech and other sapient life, I find it pretty funny their whole civilization might depend on it.

At the mandeville point, I power up the ‘Strelov Two’ warp engine. A massive swirling purple portal bursts into existence, the surface looking like ripples on a pond and the edge writhing with kilometre long tendrils of energy that caress our warp bane hull as we slip into the immaterium.

The secondary gellar field is still non-functional as I couldn’t replace the organic components: I wasn’t willing to clone psykers and stuff them in a box to fix it. Not because of some moral quandary, but because it would almost certainly end with me on the end of a pointy stick when demons possess the soulless clone flesh and flood the ship.

I think. Not worth testing either way.

Thankfully, the warp bane hull is more than up to the job, especially as it doesn’t have holes in it anymore.

For four weeks, we travel the warp before it spits us back out. I rush up to Quaani and help him from the navigator’s throne.

I panic when I enter his chamber. The seventeen year old boy I left on the throne has changed, his body growing a whole metre and his hands turning webbed between his fingers. The added flesh ripples and bleeds as the autosanguine implant I installed in his chest tries to correct the mutations only to have them grow back faster than the limited implant can fix them.

Quaani is unconscious and I pick him up and run with him to the spire’s specialised medical facility. There, I am able to reconfigure the autosanguine and add a mind impulse unit, an implant usually limited to tech-priests and servitors, to the back of his head so he can control his autosanguine and interface better with imperial machines.

The growth has left him malnourished, so I stuff him full of needles and tubes to give him the nutrients he needs. Over the next hour, his skin improves from a pale white to a healthy tan, the reconfigured autosanguine accelerating his natural recovery with its tiny machines.

Quaani sleeps for two days and I sit by him the whole time. He wakes with a groan.

“Eurgh, Aldrich. Being a navigator sucks.”

“It does. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more to help.”

“You had to pilot the Distant Sun. We each had our part to play and no one else to share our burdens.”

“We have each other.”

“Blegh, so lame. You have no shame,” Quaani examines his new hands and scowls.

“I’m too old for shame.”

“Is that a challenge?”

I smirk, “You can try.”

“Maybe I will. I know what you want to ask. Give me another three days and we can travel again. I’d like to be alone now, please.”

“Alright. Your dataslate is by your side. I put some new shows and a few games on it as well as the instructions for your new mind impulse unit and the data from our last trip with my analysis. You don’t have to read it, but you really should.”

“I know, Aldrich. I’ll do my homework. Warp travel is far too high stakes to do anything but my best.”

I reach over and pat his arm, “Good lad. I’ll be back in four hours with a proper meal and to take out all the tubes. Send me a message if you need anything.”

“Thanks, Aldrich.”

Getting up, I head for the door, then turn around, “Oh, before I forget.”

“Yeah.”

“Congratulations, Quaani, on your first warp jump.” I give him a thumbs up, “And don’t fret over your mutations. They’re benign.”

Quaani slumps a little and I leave him to rest.