[M36.246.03]
The coup had been a startling success. Not bloodless. You could never have a bloodless one; tens of thousands died, but in the grand scheme of things, that was a paltry number. There had been no outright war, which I took for a win in and of itself.
Part of that was the speed at which we moved. With all our planning, we had everything wrapped up in a bow in less than an hour, leaving no chance for any holdout to react. By the time they knew there was a problem, we were already in control.
It was also the ruthlessness. Morwenna and the gang went after their rivals or enemies with multiple noble houses eradicated right down to the roots, forever purging them. Others were sufficiently stripped down, their power and forces stripped from them.
Dozens more were captured and forced into compliance.
By the time the dust settled, it was a very different solar system from the one before. And one under the gang's full control. Even with everything in place, I kept expecting things to go wrong, but nothing did, which I took as a good sign of our planning rather than that we had missed something massive.
I made sure I was involved in the takeover, but as things calmed down, I took a step back. I had no interest in attending the dozens of meetings that seemed to be on constantly. Peggi would tell me if there was anything important I needed to know.
When the hive world came under our control, the other settlements in the solar system fell into line. The only risk had been the Knights and Arbites, but we'd moved faster enough for them not to be a problem.
The Mechanicus had more or less ignored the changing of leadership, as I had suspected. They couldn’t care less in most cases. A few needed to have some accidents, those with close ties to some Houses. Alongside these, I also took the opportunity to remove some of my more vocal naysayers.
They were tragically caught and killed in the fighting.
I had brought in 2 elderly adepts on Lysa's recommendation and were trialling them out for the new role. I had also brought in Magos Thyrix who I thought might be a good fit for me. He had adapted to the new norm quick enough at least.
I wanted to start early to make sure they were suitable, i.e. willing to do as they are told. I hadn't tested them thoroughly yet but so far they had performed admirably. Some of that might have been the bribe I gave them with my regen treatment and bionics.
They might not have many organic parts left, but the parts they did have were slowing down and my bionics were just better than anything they could access.
With the three of them they would hopefully balance each other out. That, along with the copious number of fail-safes I had installed should keep them under control in the short term.
I was just getting started on my next tasks when I got a notification through the noosphere. My first letters from Tyr and Solvexa.
I had to laugh at Tyr, the jammy so and so. Not that I begrudged him at all, but he had tripped from success to success. First, by becoming a Forge Master and then going even higher to manage multiple forge temples. An incredible honour and a significant position of power. Particularly one so young.
Although reading between the lines he was only nominally put in charge of the temples.
That, combined with his menteeship with Solvexa, and he was now somehow one of the more powerful people within the forge world.
Apart from catching up, he did ask if there was anything I could do to help him. I was already putting something together. It would need Solvexa for her access to the search engine, as it would pull heavily from that. But once in place should increase the efficiency of all the temples under him, as well as give him a live update of the status of all his machines, servitors and so on.
All without the adepts needing to report that data.
How much help it would give him, I didn’t know, but without physically going there, there wasn’t much more I could do. I did suggest he send me some of the logs from the machines to see if I could recommend any rites.
Apart from that, most of his messages were about the disciples he had taken on.
Solvexa's messages were similar. Mostly an update on how she was doing, which unsurprisingly, was very well. She had mostly shored up her position and built a solid logistical machine behind her army. She too asked for some support. She didn’t need help per se, and it was worded rather carefully, but she wanted more of my alternate designs.
She hadn't worded it that way, as that would be heretical, but a few of my designs for her over the years had been incredibly effective, and she was pragmatic and logical if nothing else. A 13% increase in effectiveness was hard to argue with.
I was more than happy to design some, firstly because she was a good ally to keep, but also, some of the designs were intriguing. For example, creating a new template or modification for a heavy landing craft or gunship that fit her specifications.
They meshed very well with what I wanted to create for the gang, which was to design special equipment for them. From armour to vehicles. The works.
That would be years in the making, not least for where to build them, but it was percolating in the back of my mind.
Talking about the back of my mind.
My attention was drawn back to the spark floating in my mind. Brushing against it, I got the feeling of changing fate. Very similar to one I received for 'saving' the forge world. It wasn’t conclusive, but with a second milestone for a similar thing… well, that might be a way of consistent fragments.
While not the most powerful spark I'd ever felt, it was more than enough to push Reverse Engineering up to tier 4.
As ever, there was no massive influx of knowledge, bits and pieces, but nothing major. Hopefully, it would show its worth when I got to the salvaged Drukhari tech.
---
I felt the final firewall within the ruin crumble, then vanish, finally allowing me to slip through its final defences. I had been working to breach the final protections for weeks, and it had been a lesson in patience. While the chip allowed me to get my foot in the door and gain access in the first place. That had been all.
Even so, I hadn't expected it to take me long to get through the final firewalls, but I'd been quickly humbled. Now that I was in I had full access to the ruins systems with administrator credentials, I could make full use of it. I'd been somewhat hesitant before this, as I didn’t know what might set it off.
I drifted closer to the burning sun that was the nexus of the ruin and was bombarded by a wave of information. Sensor demands, maintenance logs, error reports, old, and some new notifications. All screaming for attention. Before I dug through them, I reached into the mainframe and gave Lysa and Kellen the same access as me.
The powerful shields rippled like water on a pond and Lysa and Kellen's avatars floated through.
When they moved closer, I passed a critical eye over them before nodding, pleased.
They had come a long way from their original weak noosphere signals. They now blazed to my senses. Both of a similar intensity but with distinct feelings and looks. Unsurprisingly, Lysa's avatar looked far closer to what one might expect of a magos, while Kellen looked far more militaristic.
Regardless, their defences were rock solid, as they should be, and just out of sight, like it was sitting in their shadows, were a multitude of my Runescripts, coiled and snaking around them, like snakes waiting to strike.
We got to work without talking, slotting comfortably next to each other and set to work like we'd done countless times before. Our minds meshed into a smoothly run machine working in tandem. I could feel their emotions as we worked, distant but there. Not enough to distract each other, but the familiar feelings were like a warm blanket.
We divided the data without true communication, already knowing what each of us would focus on. Kellen moved for the defences and internal sensors, assessing their levels of readiness, coverage and degradation. Lysa moved to the huge backlog of error messages and rapidly started to sort them.
As for me, I focused on the critical systems, like the power or spatial manipulators.
We worked seamlessly, passing on information that the others might need if we came across it, or moving out of the way if they needed access to a certain data vault.
It was a pleasure to work on the systems. Even after who knows how long… well, actually, the system did. With a quick ping to the system, I had my answer. M22, that was a fair few years ago. Regardless, even after all that time, the software ran smoothly and intuitively, like it had been designed with thought melding to it in mind, which it likely had.
A cold shiver passed through my physical body as I swam through the generators and spatial data. If either were to fail…. Well, from my readings, there wouldn’t have been much of the planet left. And if we were particularly unlucky nor the solar system.
While the immediate danger was the generator, which would take out most of the planet, shattering it from within. It was the gravitation lenes which was what controlled the spatial fields that had the majority of my concern. Should they fail or malfunction, we could be in real trouble. They didn’t just shift the corridors to move about, but allowed the ruin to take up far less room than it should.
A full-on Tardis effect.
How many other forgotten technologies were out there, just waiting for a critical element to fail?
It was an unnerving thought but sparked an interest within me. One day, I would go looking for them. But not today.
Both systems were stable, chugging along as they had done for millennia.
In the back of my mind, Lysa's emotions twitched, her interest and curiosity spiking.
The sea of data around me swirled around me at my shift in focus as I spun to her. She'd moved from the power distribution systems and was digging deeper into workshop locations. She had started on the three I had found earlier.
One had already been ruled out, but in the second one, she found a large storage marked 'archive'.
It was all on offline hardware. The same crystal wafers on which the STCs were found on. It piqued my interest too, excitement fluttering in my heart. If there was another cache…
We were both in agreement, we would explore it later. Turning back to my task, I finished looking through the generator. There was some maintenance I wanted to perform on it, mostly tests for some wear and tear in the components. There shouldn’t be any; the entire process was solid state so had no moving parts, working in ways that I didn’t yet fully understand.
It wouldn’t just be my workshop within the ruin; Lysa and Kellen would get one as well. They wanted different things, having different goals for it of course, but it should be possible to find something that would suit them. If not, I was sure I could make it.
I would need to think of a name rather than just referring to them as the 'Workshops'. That sparked a thought and I sent a query to the mainframe.
It turns out the ruin was called Valtorintek Research Industrial – Zone 99. Huh, Valtorin, I wonder if that is where Morwenna's family name came from?
Regardless, it was a fairly disappointing name. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I kind of wanted to call it something different. More dramatic. Maybe Vault or Halls of Prometheus? Hephaestus? No, Atlantis. Yes, that was perfect. It too was a forgotten and lost city from a previous civilisation.
Admittedly, the ocean was of poison and sludge since it was located on the same level as the sump but that was a technicality. I liked it.
---
The three of us stepped through the doorway, the lights plinking on overhead, illuminating the huge workshop. We were on the main workshop floor in one of the largest workshops we could find, and it was massive. Well over a kilometre long. Not to mention on multiple levels, with further rooms leading off of it.
Best of all, it hadn't been touched. Everything looked to be in pristine condition without even a layer of dust covering it. Workstations were scattered across the room, some cut into smaller sections in the walls, with others lining the walls or out on the main workshop floor.
It was less of a factory and more what I would call a high-end artisan workshop.
It had little in the way of automation, with the vast majority of it small, precise machines to make bespoke items. It of course, had multiple fabs, some small enough to create vehicle chassis, while others could create circuits the size of grains of sand.
But there were no conveyor belts, or any signs the workshop was kitted out to bulk produce items. Which was perfect for me, exactly what I wanted.
For heavy lifting, there were robotic limbs that hovered on the ceiling.
I didn’t want the place to produce a constant supply of items, no, it was to produce my bespoke items, prototypes and experiments. I was already imagining all the things I would be able to do with it. All completely safe from prying eyes.
The ruins' old purpose helped me too, with multiple heavily secured vaults which would allow me to expand on my experiments with glyphs and runes of the Immaterium and my Will. Something that I had been avoiding until now.
This was our third location we'd checked out, and I'd been losing hope somewhat. The first was a bust, having lost power millennia ago, and had since been occupied by animals. We had cleared them out, but the room was trashed and would take a long time to get in order.
The second just didn’t have what I wanted or needed, not to mention it had been stripped bare.
But third times the charm and all that.
We had checked on what we hoped was another STC cache but had been sadly let down. It might be useful but for now had little interest for me. It was records for the research team and company. Like patients records of work and money flow. That sort of thing.
It might point to some interesting finds but for now could be ignored.
We spread out, wandering the workshop.
Half an hour later and there was still so much to explore, but I had seen enough. It was my new workshop, and I couldn’t wait to move in. Especially because of some of the rooms I had found leading off from the workshop floor.
Many of them I had already mentally earmarked for certain tasks.
Some I hadn't seen before and only had references from my fragments. Others would let me jump ahead in my development. For example, in one room there was a specialised molecular manipulator which would allow me to produce some of the advanced alloys needed for the top-tier STCs I had locked up in my head.
Another one was a synthesiser which, unless I was very much mistaken, would allow me to produce adaptive metals and the early iterations of nanites. Both crucial to my long-term goal for my next bionics.
Then there were machines I didn’t even know I needed until I saw them. I almost jumped in joy when I connected the dots. They would let me produce some of the top-tier chemicals and biological compounds. It couldn’t be overstated how useful that would be.
I should be able to produce the advanced lubricant right away, rather than the extensive development cycle I was expecting to need.
Others produced exotic particles like dark matter or anti-gravitational muons that were used in the production of the gravity fields. A peak technology that I would be using on all the ships I designed if I could.
At an idling state it created an area of artificial gravity, which by itself wasn’t impressive. The Imperium had dozens of ways to perform the same thing. No, what made it impressive was when arrayed correctly and energised, it could create a field that maintained a gravitational constant inside.
Meaning viodships or any ship for that matter could be accelerated far above what the human body could withstand and those inside would not feel any of the Gs acting on them.
There also might be some clever ways to weaponise it as well as some other novel approaches.
I reached the main floor, coming from a room that almost gave me a heart attack. A disease testing lab, luckily correctly decontaminated, so I didn’t find some superbug that would dissolve me from the inside. But it would be excellent to create some viruses I wanted. For example, I could use the virus as a carrier for another bacterium. This could be used to attack but also spread a cure across a large population.
Some treatments actually needed it. The virus could affect every cell in the body equally.
The final room of note was the supercomputer, to brute force calculations and simulations. I didn’t touch it yet, wanting to run some scans first. It would require a gigantic amount of power, and I wanted to make sure nothing would blow a fuse if I ran it.
Or more to the point, sent the generator into meltdown.
Reaching the main floor, I saw Kellen in one of the cutout sections in the wall, fiddling with a machine that was for stress testing materials. As for Lysa, she was on the far side, but I could hear her giggling to herself all the way from where I was.
An energy field of some sort, that behaved very similar to soap bubbles. She span, trying to keep the shimmering shield aloft, her face lit up with joy. "Aleric, Aleric look at this." She said when she caught sight of me walking over.
I chuckled, shaking my head slightly. She never failed to amuse herself and those around her. I did quietly sigh to myself. I wondered if she checked the machine before she started playing with it; she had a nasty tendency to let her curiosity get the best of her.
Hopefully, my techniques would stop any consequences from that.
"Did you at least check it was safe?"
"Of course I did." She said, pouting. But I knew her and she wasn’t being fully truthful.
I raised a pointed eyebrow at her. "Kellen made you…"
"Well, maybe he reminded me. But I would have done that anyway!"
I reached and flicked her forehead. "Please be careful, we don’t want another workshop incident, do we?"
"Hey." Lysa said, scowling at me, rubbing where I had clicked, before blushing sheepishly. "I still claim that wasn’t my fault."
"Not your fault." Kellen snorted, having walked over to us. "You vaporised a workshop."
"It was the machine spirits. They were just enthusiastic. I stand by it would have been fine."
“Riiiight.” I said. “And I suppose the fissile materials we found at the heart of the explosion had nothing to do with it?”
“Shu’up.” She muttered, grinning.
"Anyway, your workshop is just down the next corridor right?" I asked.
"Yep! Follow me!" She said, spinning and dumping the controller for the bubble shield machine on the side. For how careless it looked, she still treated it delicately and then charged out the room. Only to see us not following her and came back, grabbed Kellen and my hands and dragged us out. "It's perfect. I found it yesterday."
We followed Lysa to look through her workshop. It was in essence, very similar to me, having many of the same machines. It was smaller, sure, but no less sophisticated. She didn’t need a huge amount of space; she spent most of her time managing her Minions, as she now liked to call them. I blame Peggi for that.
If she wasn’t doing that, she either helped me with my project or worked on small things, but never for very long. She bounced to whatever took her interest at any given time.
Even with large sections earmarked for us, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the rest of the space within Atlantis. There was still so much left unused. I didn’t plan to give the gang access, at least in the short term. But I didn’t think I would allow most of my faction in either.
I had manipulated the defences so the Tidefall would still happen, but only the outer damaged sections, and within the next few months it would start to repeat areas, with more and more frequency. My hope was that eventually, there would be nothing to loot, so people would lose interest in it.
Some of Kellen's most trusted subordinates were given access, mostly to help him clear out the monsters that inhabited sections. They'd also provide some added security, same for Lysa. Some of her most trusted subordinates would have access. Partly to help us and as a show of trust.
They might even gain a small workshop if they impressed me.
Lanto, Selina and Peggi would of course have access, so they could retreat to it if nothing else. Finally, there would be the thousands of servitors, mostly industrial ones, to help with whatever was needed. But you could bet there would be some of my TNS (Totally Normal Servitors) mixed amongst them.
I might change my mind in the future on who had access, but I wouldn’t in the short term.
Not until I had someplace better, which seemed unlikely for a long time.
I was going to dedicate a section to a project I had been pushing. It had started small, but I was hoping it would keep expanding in time. Now that the solar system was under the gang's control, I had looked to the future, both its and mine. Therefore, I opened several small academies and schools to teach court members. There were only a few thousand right now, all of which had shown great promise, but in time, I hoped that number would increase and we could open it to more people.
I used all my knowledge I gained by teaching Kellen and Lysa, as well as my fragments to create an effective framework. I made sure to include anything Kellen and Lysa had learned while training those under them as well. I had structured it from my half-forgotten memories of higher education, with set modules and courses they could choose from and specialise in.
This would allow them to get ready and start working faster; they could always come back to learn new modules when they became relevant. For now, they were just helping the gang with various repairs or maintenance. But in time, I hoped they would be able to do more.
Ultimately, my objectives for them were two-fold. First was to have them join the Mechanicus so I could start to fill their ranks with people loyal to the gang and not quite so tied to the dogma of the Cult Mechanicus. It also would provide my budding faction a steady supply of recruits. Then I hoped they could work on projects only for the gang or ones I didn’t want the Mechanicus involved with.
That tied into some of the designs I had been producing for Solvexa. I hadn't sent anything back yet, I wasn’t happy with them for now. I also needed a way to disguise their origins so she could actually use them. This restricted me slightly to modifying already existing patterns.
It wasn’t the worst and was an interesting challenge, one I'd almost nailed. I hadn't produced any prototypes yet, but now I had the time and workshop that would change.
But I had also made designs that were clearly not from any STC, with completely different aesthetics, design philosophy and origin. I'd created an entirely new type of power armour that would be exclusively for the gang, well my faction might use it as well, but the idea was for the gang to produce and use it.
I based it off the Praevestora armour and had improved it as well as simplified sections to make it easier to mass-produce. I had no idea how many they would be able to make, but it should be enough for their elite squads and bodyguards.
I was pulled from my musings by Kellen asking a question. One I didn’t hear.
Kellen said his face a picture of concern. But I knew him.
I gave him my best confused look. "Who are you young man?" I said in my face old man voice, chuckling when he stuck his tongue out at me.
---
ANHello all. Sorry for the lack of chapter yesterday. I was traveling and it took longer than I expected so didn't get time to finish editing it and post it. Next weeks will be as normal.
I did have a question. For future events like this would people like a post. I did put a message on the discord. Thoughts?
Anyway hope you enjoy the chapter.
PointsImperium: Hive Cities Scavenger (Tier 2) - IIWarrior (Tier 4) - XImperium: Hive Cities Danger (Tier 2) - IIIHuman: Hand to hand (Tier 3) - VTerra Federation: Technician (Tier 3) - XTerra Federation: Software (Tier 4) - IXSharpshooter (Tier 4) - VIIISelf (Tier 4) - XVIIReverse Engineering (Tier 4) - IX > XImperium: Canine Handling (Tier 2) - IVAkashic Throne (Tier 1) - IBlade Mastery (Tier 4) - IXPhysics (Tier 2) - XXIIIGlyphcraft (Tier 3) - IIIBlueprints (Tier 3) - IIIActing (Tier 1) - IMathematics (Tier 2) - XIIBiology (Tier 1) - XTeaching (Tier 2) - IIMachine Spirit (Tier 3) - VIIChemistry (Tier 1) - VIIIEngineering (Tier 1) - VIIBionics (Tier 4) - XXIICrafting (Tier 4) - X