225 – UPGRADES PEOPLE, UPGRADES (AGAIN, CAUSE I RAN OUT OF TITLE IDEAS)

I got started on turning my hasty plans and half-formed ideas from the day before into reality the next morning. Why did I wait till the next morning? None of your business.

But if you must know, I was busy celebrating my victory with my lovely girlfriend. 

“How many of you little beauties can I make before it starts causing problems, I wonder?” I mused aloud, watching the latest heat-transforming satellite be spat out of my space factory. I gently guided the latest member of the Dyson Swarm surrounding the local star into its proper place, then sent it off on its orbit. “It wouldn’t do to shroud the star in so much junk that I start a new ice age on my two habitable planets.”

A quick prompt to my mind-cores sent me back an answer. Not a solid one, I didn’t dedicate enough processing power to the prompt to get that, but an answer nonetheless.

‘You don’t have enough bio-energy to have to worry about that.’ 

Rude, but helpful. So I could use all my stored bio-energy to spit out as many satellites as possible, and it still wouldn’t dim the star’s luminosity in any substantial way.

Good to know. Now that the Tau had their noses firmly stuck in someone else’s business and not my own, I could do away with the Dyson Swarm idea entirely and build a proper Dyson Sphere.

Alas, that would 100% kill every living thing in the System that needed light and heat to survive, which even included Orks. 

Furthermore, a Dyson Sphere might not even be the most efficient way to harvest bio-energy from a star. My satellites converted light and radiation at the moment, barely catching even the slightest fraction of the star’s heat from their high orbit.

Unfortunately, while I could make heat-converting spikes that could withstand the temperatures present near the molten mantle of Vallia Prime, a star’s surface temperature would melt them to worthless slag in moments.

Maybe that was a better avenue to pursue, trying to directly siphon away the very heat of the star. It would take some iterative experimenting to develop new prototype heat-harvester spikes that I could throw into the star. Newer and newer models could sink deeper, withstanding greater pressure and temperatures for more gains … though perhaps there was an upper limit on how much heat they could absorb, or how much bio-energy they could store.

It was worth a try either way. It wasn’t like setting a few dozen mind-cores on the task was that much of a hassle. Plus, they would produce blueprints with high resistance to extreme pressure and heat, which I could use in other designs even if this idea proved to be a dead end.

And I can always build a Dyson Sphere around a star in a neighbouring, uninhabited system. 

For now, the Swarm would do. The satellites I already had orbiting the sun had gathered quite a sizable sum in bio-energy over the past few weeks. Instead of taking that for myself for my other projects, I reinvested it all into kicking the Swarm production into next gear.

The result was the autonomous factory before me. It flew in a very high orbit, far enough from the sun to escape the majority of its heat and lessen the radiation to a manageable level. 

Sure, I covered the outsides in the same heat-absorbing carapace, but the insides were more vulnerable. It was, in essence, the brood mother of my organic swarm of satellites. I set up a system where every satellite would dump all bio-energy they’d gathered in the factory when they flew close. That way, the swarm would grow with minimal assistance from me. 

Just in case, I also left a smaller swarm of Drones meant for combat stuck to the dark side of the factory. Those should be enough to deal with errant asteroids, pirates or some adventurous void-born fauna.

Not that I felt anything of the sort in the System, but it was good practice to prepare for the future. Once I had more than a single System under my command, I couldn’t rely on my aura to keep track of everything. I would also get overwhelmed if I had to solve every problem myself.

There were a lot of kinks and problems with my plans that needed ironing out, but that was just life. For one, I would have to decide whether I relied on artificial minds I made and implanted into my version of the tyrannid synapse creatures, or if I was willing to give command over some of my drones to trustworthy people.

I could personally make sure of people’s trustworthiness at first, but it would spiral out of control. That was not a plan that I would be able to maintain as the Systems I needed to protect grew in number. 

So many problems. Everything had pros and cons, and no truly good options presented themselves. Drawbacks were everywhere.

Humans could be corrupted, bribed, swayed or threatened into blackmailing me. Drones with artificial minds, though, could be corrupted in an altogether different way.

Without souls, or souls so small that even I barely felt them, they would be unable to resist Daemonic subversion … Although Tau could hide from their attention with their flimsy soul, that wouldn’t be a viable option for me.

I had a hunch that Daemons would go out of their way to corrupt them if I went with that plan, even if it proved troublesome for them to track down a nearly soulless organic automaton. 

I could build backdoors for myself, implant a virus into humans in my service that would kill them when it came into contact with the taint of Chaos. But backdoors could be found by others and exploited, and the same went for the latter idea. Demons would just poke my people with a bit of taint, and they’d fall over dead.

Doesn’t matter for now. I should focus on fortifying the Vallia System first, making sure my citizens are doing okay, take control of Vallia itself and prepare my fleet for war.

If Coldstone’s predictions were to be believed, he would return from Tsua’Malor with a fleet at his back, ready to break through the Greyhell front after centuries of stagnant warfare, and he wanted me by his side with the best fleet I could make at my command.

As per our agreement. If he could get the Ethereal Council of his Sept to agree to my demands, he would get it too. 

I made some final additions to the factory, an alabaster tendril extended from my hand and plunged into the massive structure. It was the size of a skyscraper, hundreds of house-sized satellites growing within at any one time. 

I considered giving it a core of eldritch flesh to speed up the production, but thought better of it. I wanted to leave as little of the miracle material that gave me my greatest strength just lying about as I could. 

The production didn’t need to be that fast either. Slow and steady would do for my purposes.

The space-factory’s surface rippled, the end of its morphing a bit as the structure upgraded to my latest, and hopefully finalised model. With this latest addition, it wouldn’t need me to calculate the satellites’ orbiting trajectory, and it could also handle launching them on said optimal trajectory itself. 

Automated, clean, efficient. 

With that handled, I jumped into handling the next bullet point on the top of my to-do list: upgrading security.

I had gravitational sensor buoys here and there, spread out across the System, with some larger ones in the asteroid cloud surrounding the system, but both their numbers and size was low due to the need for secrecy from before.

I didn’t remove any of the sneakier sensors; they would have their own purpose to serve as a second layer of defence in case someone managed to evade the more obvious sensor arrays I was about to build. 

The blueprint was ready, so I just had to implement it. In a way, these were almost simpler than the stealth buoys, since they housed regular-sized gravity sensors, not the miniature ones. Narwhals were slimmer than regular Tyrannid bio-ships, but they were still monolithic creatures, and the gravity sensors were their most intricate organs. 

I just took my slightly improved sensor design and put it in spheres of hardened carapace, which would both protect it and sustain it. I made two telepathic networks, threading the stealth buoys into one and the larger, new sensors into another, then thought better of it and split both networks into three separate ones. 

Redundancy and fragmentation would make subverting the network much harder, even if I wasn’t sure whether anyone in this galaxy could do so. 

Who was I kidding? There had to be. 

I also made them all connect to a slew of organic computers back in the Fortress on Vallia Prime, where Alpha could assign someone trustworthy to watch over them for any sign of an invader, even while I was off beating up Imperials with the Tau. 

In the end, I made 360 of my new sensor-spheres that I spread out across the outer asteroid field. Another 36 that I had orbiting the star in the smaller asteroid cloud between the third and fourth planets of the system. 

Aside from these, I had thousands of the smaller stealth buoys. 

That should be enough of an early warning system. With these, nothing should be able to approach the Vallia System without me knowing. 

Well, in a normal way at least. The Shadow in the Warp would make an approach from the Immaterium much harder, but I didn’t believe it made it impossible. I would be hard pressed to find anything I could confidently say was absolutely impossible in this mad galaxy. 

Nowhere would be truly safe, nothing was foolproof, and nobody was undefeatable. This was a galaxy where gods died by the dozens, and were enslaved by the very people whom they themselves had enslaved not long before. 

The best I could do was ‘good enough’. The most I could do was hope that it would be enough. 

“Well, that’s a depressing thought,” I murmured, suppressing a sigh. Honestly, if I wasn’t a fundamentally Psychic creature, I would have likely thrown my weight behind the Silent King’s Pariah Nexus project. Putting the entire galaxy under a powerful Null-field would make nearly all Psychic problems evaporate instantly, but it would also make my life a living hell, and leave the many predators of the Warp with only a single source of new prey: my shiny little Realm floating just out of their reach. 

Nope. That Pariah Nexus couldn’t be finished, and I had to make sure it never got completed. From what I remembered, it should be disrupted and fail — or something similar — but who knew whether I had butterflied that particular event in the wrong direction with my actions up until now?

After chasing the Imperium out of the Jericho Reach … or at least making sure that my Tau allies can curb-stop what remains of them. 

I had time. The Pariah Nexus was an event that happened after the Plague Wars. A few years at least. Though it would probably be smart to find a way of tapping into the news from the happenings of the wider Imperium.

Could I co-opt an Inquisitor to get access to their networks? Maybe one of the Watch Fortresses of the Deathwatch has access, and I could listen in on the ‘news’.

Now those were plans for the near future. The Deathwatch had strongholds across the Reach, and they wouldn’t take the Achilus Crusade’s collapse, or the Imperium’s retreat from the region lying down.

Upgrading my mining operations came next. I had some autonomous drones harvesting and collecting valuable ores and minerals from asteroids, and I also had a few harvesting stations in low orbit around the fifth planet from the sun, a gas giant, gathering valuable rocket fuel. It wasn’t good quality, but it was promethium, the fuel the Imperium used for the vast majority of their vehicles and ships.

Though from what I knew of the stuff from Zedev’s info-dump, I knew ‘promethium’ did not refer to a single substance. It was a catch-all term the Imperium used for all combustible fuel, and they didn’t even differentiate it from the ‘promethium bombs’ that were basically just super napalm.

The Mechanicus itself had an internal classification system where they gave each variation of promethium a specific, extremely boring codename. 

The stuff I could make was mediocre at best, but barely even that. In the Imperium, it wouldn’t hold up to military standards and would only be used in civilian vessels and vehicles. Warships had to make the best choice when it came to the volume-to-power ratio of their fuel. 

Sadly, it wasn’t even my fault that it was so bad; the gas giant simply didn’t have the materials for any of the better promethium variants. 

Maybe in another System I’ll find a better source.

My mind-cores were still working on incorporating all the ideas I had about improving my fleet during the battle into a new design. It was an iterative process, like always, so it would take time to reach an optimal design I could proudly use in my fleet when I sailed out again. 

I checked on my citizens quickly, going through the Arcologies with my aura, and found they were fine, surprisingly enough. I had driven a pair of Imperial light cruisers into low orbit after all, then broke one of them apart and handed out the parts to every Arcology for examination. 

They could harvest them for materials, reverse engineer the technology or just put them in museums. I didn’t care overly much. I just wanted to give them tangible proof of my words. 

Speaking of tangible proof. I thought back to my latest passion project: de-uglifying the felinids, or ‘project catgirls’ as my sassy mind-core assistant dubbed it. 

I wasn’t sure what to do with my living prisoners, so I just sorta … put them on ice for now. The Astartes, Pysker and the Mechanicus prisoners could remain in their medically induced coma — I made sure their bodies wouldn’t decay or age, so I could keep them in that limbo for as long as I had the bio-energy to sustain it — but the Felinids?

They didn’t do anything to me; they didn’t even know the ships they had been living in were attacking me. Those mutants were born, raised and would have died in the bowels of those ancient ships. 

I could release them into the Arcologies, let them speak of their horrid lives to my sheltered human citizens. I thought, idly tapping my chin. 

But what to do with them? They were sterile at the moment, as I didn’t want them to have the ability to reproduce while their genes were such a Chaos-tainted mess. I had fixed that up over the process of my experiments, but … do I keep them sterile? Do I make them able to interbreed with regular humans? Do I make their genes so strong that if either parent of a child is a felinid, then the child too would be one, instead of a half-breed?

Half Breeds were not something I was willing to allow. The two alien genes mixing would not be able to fully meld, leaving the children more vulnerable to further mutations or worse, Chaos corruption. Chaos loved to seep into such gaps and force Chaos-based mutations.

Many mutant groups that had once been considered abhumans were now hunted by the Inquisition, and loath I am to agree with them on something, they had the right of it. 

I had a beastman among my prisoners, and his genes were 30% Chaos-infected Warp-stuff. 

Coin flip method then? 50/50 that the child will be either fully human or fully felinid when they interbreed? 

That might give rise to genetic deficiencies though, since the child would practically be a clone of the luckier parent. 

Maybe I could load more genetic information into their DNA? Give it an ancestral library it could draw from when a child is conceived?

Now that I hadn’t the faintest idea how to do. I frowned, but decided to postpone the problem for the future. For now, I would give the felinids back their fertility … but I would also make them incompatible with non-Felinids. 

I could split them apart between the Arcologies, but I only had a few hundred of them, barely enough to fill a tiny village. No, that would be cruel, especially since the majority of them had been living together on one of the ships in a tribalistic manner, surviving among the other mutant groups in the bowels of a voidship. 

I could also clone them and send a group to each Arcology to give my citizens much-needed perspective on what the Imperium from the inside … but that, too, I felt, would be cruel in a way. Sooner or later, the Arcologies would start to communicate, perhaps even travel between them would be established, and the felinids would figure out that every last one of them had fifty clones running around on the planet.

Plus, that might work against me. Clones might be doubted, and I wasn’t sure how my citizens would react to them. 

I’ll make an enclave for these felinids to live in, in one of the Arcologies. Alpha will find one that has a more open-minded population and would be best to settle them in.